Nobody hits like Matt Taibbi. And I haven't seen him miss yet. ka-BOOOM!

I personally believe these "retention" bonuses were a ruse cooked up by management to suck a few more dollars out of the company before it sank to the ocean bottom. So if DeSantis is "owed" these bonuses, it's only in the sense that someone up above agreed to cheat the shareholders by paying these bonuses when they weren't really necessary; they weren't "earned" in any real sense.

Gotta hurt, that.

According to this article in the New York Times.

Robert D. Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman
Sachs International, said the president "must
demonstrate to the world that he understands
that it's not just about saving ourselves."

And Mr. Obama must try to do all of that in the
middle of a global recession for which most of
the world blames the United States. "The U.S.
brand name has clearly suffered from this
crisis, and the rest of the world is no longer
willing to sit quietly and be lectured by the
United States on how they should conduct
economic policy," Mr. Rogoff said.

A crisis the the US precipitated by our past economic polices.
As is oft said to new comers to 12 step meeting, "Take the cotton
out of your ears and put it in your mouth and maybe you'll learn
something." Good advise for a new president.

C

Bearded New York Times op-ed columnist, and Princeton Nobel Prize winning economist, Paul Krugman has been traded by the Democrats to the Republican Party for Andrew Sullivan, David Brock, David Brooks, Kathleen Parker, and a minor league economist to be named later.

Krugman has been asking to be traded since winning his Nobel, claiming he wasn't getting the accolades and air time he deserved.  And, not it's about the money claims Krugman, "as an economist, who is always right, I have billions."

steve katz, a noted blogger in his own mind sees it differently, "Krugman's got the hots for Megyn Kelly, and can't wait to be a regular on Fox News."

Katz's dog, Murry sees it differently, "Krugman's has been bitter since not being named by President Obama as Secretary of the Treasury,  Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and  Chancellor of the Exchequer."  "But what do I know, I'm a dog."

Newsweek has the story on the cover, Obama's Nobel Headache. Krugman defends himself by hiding behind the, "L" word:

In his twice-a-week column and his blog, Conscience of a Liberal, he criticizes the Obamaites for trying to prop up a financial system that he regards as essentially a dead man walking. In conversation, he portrays Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and other top officials as, in effect, tools of Wall Street (a ridiculous charge, say Geithner defenders). These men and women have "no venality," Krugman hastened to say in an interview with NEWSWEEK. But they are suffering from "osmosis," from simply spending too much time around investment bankers and the like.

The writer of the piece, Evan Thomas, who appears frequently on, Fox News, kisses Krugman's ring:

If you are of the establishment persuasion (and I am), reading Krugman makes you uneasy. You hope he's wrong, and you sense he's being a little harsh (especially about Geithner), but you have a creeping feeling that he knows something that others cannot, or will not, see.

Thomas does reflect some of Krugman's sour grapes:

But the administration does not seek to cultivate him. Obama aides have invited commentators of all persuasions to the White House for some off-the-record stroking; in February, after Krugman's fellow Times op-ed columnist David Brooks wrote a critical column accusing Obama of overreaching, Brooks, a moderate Republican, was cajoled by three different aides and by the president himself, who just happened to drop by. But, says Krugman, "the White House has done very little by way of serious outreach. I've never met Obama. He pronounced my name wrong"--when, at a press conference, the president, with a slight note of irritation in his voice, invited Krugman (pronounced with an "oo," not an "uh" sound) to offer a better plan for fixing the banking system.

Krugman, through word and deed does tell Thomas how big his ego driven Obama vendetta really is:

Krugman is having his 15 minutes and enjoying it, although at moments, as I followed him around last week, he seemed a little overwhelmed. He is an unusual mix, at once nervous, shy, sweet and fiercely sure of himself. He enjoys his outsider's power: "No one has as big a megaphone as I have," he says. "Aside from the world going to hell, it's great." He is in much demand on the talk-show circuit: PBS's "The NewsHour" and "Charlie Rose" on Monday last week, ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos" this past Sunday. Someone has even cut a rock video on YouTube: "Hey, Paul Krugman, why aren't you in the administration?" A singer croons, "Hey, Paul Krugman, where the hell are you, man? We need you on the front lines, not just writing for The New York Times." (And the cruel chorus: "All we hear [from Geithner] is blah, blah, blah.")

(It should be noted that at no time does Thomas mention Megyn Kelly - sk)

Murry, the dog concludes, "Everyone is entitled to their opinion, even the idiot I have to walk three-time a day, but I say give Obama a chance, he earned it, and he's right."  "Next year, when the economy is back on track all Krugman will have to show for it is that Shiksa from Fox News."

Katz, who can't keep his mouth shut, chimes in, "I agree with the dog, Schadenfreude is a dish best served with with some fava beans and a nice chianti."  "Can we go for a walk, now?  Please..."

(If you are rightfully outraged by my Krugmanphobia (or not) please comment and recommend so others will have the chance to be equally pissed off)

Bill Moyers has done an exceptional job lately on the unfolding economic and social catastrophe. In particular I thought his interview with Mike Davis recently was exceptional. I don't think you'd ever see Mike Davis on Rachel Madow or the Hardball guy's show.

Moyers is a beacon of hope in this confounding world.

. . .The huge bonuses over the last decade or so skimmed off about 300 billion dollars into private pockets. Now what can those people do with that money? How many yachts can you own? How many homes can you own? How many planes can you own? It's that level of income which could, I think, make a contribution to class solidarity rather than be the cause of class hatred and social hatred, [and] Class warfare, eventually.
Dr. Zbiginiew Brzeznski, March 26, 2009

One day last week I woke up to a memorable bit of remarkable television--and it was on "Morning Joe", of all places. If, before I turned on the TV, Joe was his usual puffy-chested, when-I-was-in-congress blowhard, I missed it. If Mika was her usual schizo hand-wringing, sorry-for-even-existing, here-comes-tough-mommy self, I didn't see it. If Jim Cramer did a freaky voodoo dance (he was a guest that morning), I didn't see that, either.

What I saw was Dr. Zbiginiew Brzeznski--Mika's father--giving the clearest, harshest, most insightful lecture to the super rich I've ever even dreamed of witnessing. (Mika makes no bones about the fact that he is the most intimidating figure she's ever known. Yes, I could see that. But the thing is--he's on our side. I love that about him. Even though he'd scare me to death, too.)

The most amazing thing about the segment with Zbiginiew--among many amazing things--is that it went on for over 17 minutes with barely an interruption. He began by talking about Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan (interesting stuff there, too) and then, at about 7:26 on the video, Joe changed the subject by saying, "Dr. Brzeznski, you've talked about the danger of runaway populism. (Eds note: ???) Some mocked you. Over the past two weeks we've seen your predictions unfold, from Capitol Hill to Wall Street to Main Street."



That was it. Joe (yes, that Joe) shut up and let Dr. Brzeznski talk. (Remember when Zbig called Joe "stunningly superficial" a while back? That might have been why.)

"There is a growing anger in this country," Dr B said, "a growing sense of resentment. There is a feeling of fundamental unfairness. . .We saw a list of people who have made more than a billion dollars in one year. A billion is a thousand million. Can you imagine making more than a thousand million a year? And how were most of those funds made? They didn't make them by creating new jobs, building new factories, making new technological innovations which then cumulatively enriched America. They made it by complex financial transactions which few people understand. Which, in effect, just sort of swooshed off money into private pockets. . .It's almost like a huge national ponzi scheme."

Here I thought I heard some slight whimpers of protest, but the good doctor was on a roll:
"Now, what gets me really is in this situation of anger and resentment and the growing risk of class hatred, no one from the private sector has stepped forward and said 'Let's organize a national solidarity fund in which the people who made so much money. . .money which is difficult to understand and to even justify, [should] contribute, to help, to pull us together'. The taxpayers are contributing. The president has urged us to pull this together, and we're doing it. You're doing it, I'm doing it, and a lot of much poorer people than us are doing it. Where are the rich people who have made hundreds of millions, thousands of millions in some cases? Why don't they step forward? We have the names of some who are returning the bonuses; what about the others who are not? There should be social pressure and if some major figures from the public sector with great reputations who have made a lot of money but who are generous in philanthropy stood forward. . .maybe there would be a movement to do something about social rehabilitation, social reconciliation, social solidarity. I think this is very much needed."

(Did you see the CEOs coming out of the White House meeting yesterday? What was the one thing they all said they agreed on with the president? "We're all in this together." Something tells me either Zbigniew was in the room with them or the specter of Zbigniew was in the room.)

Finally, Jim Kramer spoke--softly, a little petulantly, with head down though not in full kowtow position. He said, " . . .These hedge fund managers who made money are- a lot of them grew up regular, normal people who grew up in America and managed to just win big. We don't want to discourage people from winning big who are from normal origins, who are not silver spoon people."

To which Dr B., refraining admirably from slapping the little wanker upside the head, said, "Well, that's fair but. . .there's also a limit to what 'win big' really means in a society in which there are still a lot of people who are very poor--who are not winning big but losing much. Do you really need billions of dollars to be happy? What can you do with them? At some point it seems to me that social responsibility comes to play. . ."

He talked almost non-stop on the subject, without commercial interruption, for over 10 minutes. He pointed out the obvious: "If you made 500 million dollars and you gave away 250, I think you would still be left with enough to enjoy. The point is, there has to be some demonstrable response to this sense of crisis today from the rich people, rather than have them hide, or hire security guards, or insist that they stay anonymous."

And then he said it again, in another way: "I would like to see some major figures, public figures, step forward on their own. Not mobilized by the president, or by you or by me, but out of a sense of moral obligation. They still will not suffer. If you have 500 million or even 50 million dollars in your pocket you can give up half of it and still be more than comfortable for the rest of your life.


Mike Barnicle came in then, and told a poignant story about the mill town in Massachusetts, where he grew up . He talked about the "big winners" who had "more or less raped that town and other towns like it. Made millions for themselves, and yet the factories that they bought and sold that enriched them are now closed. They didn't build any new factories. They didn't create any new jobs. They left behind the skeletal remains of a city that was once vibrant and they've moved on to their big billion dollar salaries and this, I think, is part of the Bunsen burner, the fuel that is igniting this incipient class warfare in America."

It wasn't because the town had gone bad or the workers didn't work. It wasn't because people didn't pray hard enough or sing loudly enough. It wasn't a case of "tried but failed". It was because those lousy SOBs rode into town with premeditated plunder on their minds. (This is not Barnicle talking. This is me interpreting what I saw on his face and heard in his voice.)

There was much more, of course. I've probably already violated some copyright law by transcribing almost word for word a large portion of this conversation. (I'm doing it mainly for those who still have slow dial-up. They can't watch those streaming videos without having to wander off for a fortnight or two until the damn things finally reach the end.)

When Dr. Brzeznski was finished, I thought the Morning Bunch was going to burst into "Hoo Rahs" and cheers. They did rise up from their seats a little and made muffled noises of assent, but of course they couldn't let themselves go that far, considering who they are and what they've either advocated or ignored in the past.

Mika, bless her heart, had the final word after those long minutes of having to huddle in the shadow of her father's brilliance: "In America we don't think about--actually, I'm sorry, but there is a certain way of thinking--greed--put it on credit. We just don't think of--I'm sorry, we just don't think this way."

Is that priceless? Could you, in all honesty, turn it off after that?

Yeah, me too.

Ramona

(Cross-posted at Ramona's Voices.) 

Sometimes I am asea. I know not what to write about. Whereas, most of the time, I hold myself back or write something and hide it for awhile. The last three days have been remarkable. I arise and come to my computer and there is homage to me, while I am working on an homage to TheraP. So I stare at that all day. Then the next day I wake up to one of the finest blogs anyone could read on the internet and it is Viper's (Ali) and he begins it with two words. My name. Now I am even more embarrassed. One thing about being unknown, everybody leaves you alone. If you make a mistake, who cares?

Grouch came to find me in my hermitage to ask if he could help me with my computer problems. If I knew any tech, I would explain it to him. But I will not leave him alone now.
I mean, I will get his advice. But he cannot help me with malais.

Today I wanted my name to slide into the nothingness. Like LarryH says, we only have 24 hours and we evaporate. But Anger is sometimes my favorite muse. It gets my blood churning as they say, my temperature burning and and my fingers turning on the keys.

In my state, the State of Minnesota we have had terrible people representing us in Congress and we have had saints.  One of the worst people, even over and above this Coleman fellow is Michele Bachmann. A real sicko.

"I'm a foreign correspondent on enemy lines and I try to let everyone back here in Minnesota know exactly the nefarious activities that are taking place in Washington."
or

"I would say there are probably 30 keepers of the flame over here...The main thing we can do right now is be foreign correspondents reporting to you from enemy lines."

On the issue of Obama's proposed cap-and-trade energy tax on Saturday's radio show, Representative Bachmann expanded on the war metaphor:

"I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back. Thomas Jefferson told us 'having a revolution every now and then is a good thing,' and the people - we the people - are going to have to fight back hard if we're not going to lose our country. And I think this has the potential of changing the dynamic of freedom forever in the United States."

This is one sick f&*^ as they say. 

This is the woman who alleged that there were people in Congress who were secretly conspiring to destroy our country during her campaign. SHE ALMOST LOST. Because of those statements. At any rate: here is an ode, to Medussa the many armed goddess who turned people to stone just by looking at her.

Michele, oh hell
These are words that
That blend together
Hell
My Michelle

You want to
You want to
You waaaant to
Lobby for the rich
You are sure the Bitch
I will say the only
Words I know that you
Understand
You're under arrest

You call for the
Armed resurrection
You seem to understand
That there is no command
By the forces that
Always seem to win
Worse than that Palin
My Michele


Michele, Oh hell
I sure do see you
As the real danger
A danger to all of us
You make me cuss
You're so worthless
That few understand
My Michele

I want you
I want you
I waaaaaant you
To really understand
The more you call
For violence
The less you
You seem to
Comprehend
The damage you can cause
My Michelle       

Michele oh hell
You're from Minnesota
Who could tell
My Michelle
The Land of the Humphrey
The Frazier
And McCarthy too
You give us only mush
You sound more like rush
Until you're gone
And the good have won
I will fight you all the way
Oh Michele

I remind you that

Paul Wellstone

Fought for everything

You deny

Oh Michelle

Smart Politics is the source for these quotes.

(Oh and if rush is a bastard, Michelle is a bitch)

The outing of one anonymous Alaska blogger (AK Muckraker)  - by a politician (Mike Doogan), using an official political newsletter, is an ominous sign of "big brother watching" and an outrageous offense against all of us who guard our privacy by using a self-chosen, anonymous moniker on the web.

After a 4-month effort to hunt down a blogger's identity, this Alaska state representative, without any provocation, except his view that no one should be allowed to speak out anonymously, published the blogger's name - using an official political e-newsletter, mailed out to many, many recipients.

Yet once again, a simple google search for anonymous free speech yields nearly 3 million links - and clear evidence of a constitutional right.  Including this:

In McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commn., 514 U.S. 334 (Supreme Court of the United States, 1995), a woman was fined in violation of the Ohio Elections Commission Code for composing, printing, and distributing anonymous campaign literature which expressed her views on a proposed school tax. The Supreme Court held:

 "Under our Constitution, anonymous pamphleteering is not a pernicious, fraudulent practice, but an honorable tradition of advocacy and of dissent. Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation -- and their ideas from suppression -- at the hand of an intolerant society."

It is not a good sign when an elected representative chooses to play judge and jury and to mete out a sentence (loss of privacy), simply for exercising the right to free speech and choosing to do so anonymously.  The man who did it is an elected Alaska state representative. Presumably he took an oath of some type. I wonder what that oath says. I wonder if he understands that as an elected representative he has a fiduciary duty to citizens. I wonder if he realizes that, in effect, he has indicted someone - without cause - simply for speaking out in a public blog. His explanation for "outing" the blogger seems to based on his belief that no one should be allowed to speak anonymously. And instead of inquiring if anonymous speech was prohibited by law, he instead made that assumption and took the law into his own hands. He presumed some type of "guilt". He decided on a punishment. And he meted that out - just like vigilantes do - in the absence of any judicial proceeding - simply for blogging anonymously.

I personally hope that AK Muckraker and family decide to pursue this. It is an infringement of the constitutional right to speak as one chooses to speak. An infringement of a federally guaranteed right - by an elected official of a state. Not a judge. Not a jury. There's been no investigation here by any duly authorized investigating body. But without consulting any judicial authority, this politician  took things into his own hands.   

There is a long history in the United States of anonymous political writing.  Dating back to pre-revolutionary days.  And specifically upheld in recent years by the Supreme Court.

This "outing" of a blogger's real name is an action which affects every citizen who chooses to post on the web. It is vital, in my view, that our constitutional rights be upheld and protected. And that when violated, those who disregard them should be held to whatever penalties the law may require. Something precious has been stolen from AK Muckraker. Something precious which can never be restored.

And I, for one, am appalled.  I am irate.  And I am ready to join in whatever can be done to bring justice to this matter.

You can read more about all of this at AK Muckraker's blog,  The Mudflats.  And you can follow links to the Mudflats' Forum or posts by other bloggers related to this issue as well as places where you can register your own concerns about this matter.

Update #1:

Elected representatives of the State of Alaska take an oath to both the Constitution of the United States and to the State of Alaska.  As we know, the US Constitution guarantees the right to free speech (and anonymous free speech has been part of our nation since before its inception).  Plus, the Alaska Constitution specifically guarantees the right to privacy (Article # 22, Declaration of Rights).

This legislator has violated his oath of office.

Once he knew the identity of the blogger, he would have known that divulging that identity would have had consequences.  (see below for a comment by SlappyOC)  I am not a lawyer, but it would appear that by this man's violation of his oath, his perfidious behavior may have had serious consequences, for which he may be held liable.  This is a dark time in America! 

I am deeply distressed.


Update #2:

There seems to be some confusion about the right to privacy and when it is possible for government to lawfully intrude on that:  only with a warrant or some evidence that the citizen is breaking the law.

From a comment of mine below:

Addendum:

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all who have respected my own need for some time away from blogging, which may yet continue or be lessened.  Your heartening comments are much appreciated, and I extend my thanks and best wishes to all who blog here.   I break my silence today only because this matter is so pressing and relates to anyone's need for privacy, yours and mine as well.  I am concerned about each of us personally, our community here at TPM Cafe, and the fate of our nation at this time of crisis.   And I will be posting something related to that in the near future, when the time is right.

In regard to the prosecution of torturers, Obama has stated that he is more interested in looking forward than looking backward.  What would be the point in prosecuting monsters that may have authorized the torturing of toddler's testicles?  Nobody but Jesus and the welfare mom with googluplets loves children anymore.

As to legalizing marijuana?  He's looking backward.  Why not continue to torture America with an ongoing war against pot that is built on at least as concrete a basis as the WMD lies Bush concocted?  Bush was even able to joke about finding those pesky WMD's under his desk at the same time our sons and daughters were under fire dying for his phantoms.  Obama makes a joke as misguided because the rest of us are definately not laughing.  There are a bazillion great pot comics he can borrow from if he wants to keep up this schtick.  In the meantime, people will continue to suffer and die for the sake of the big pot lies, while he clowns around....just like Bush did with the WMD's.

Until legalization, the neighborhood shall remain the terrorhood, but if your kids can make it out alive, they'll be a lot of great military positions in the upcoming border wars with Mexico!   The prison industry is always looking for a young hire to watch the stable of drug offenders working at their "for profit" prison industrial parks (Did they lo$$bby Obama harder than NORML?).  You can get some SWEET deals on office furniture from the Iowa folks.  Great middle American craftsmanship and hip enough to have a digital presence in the Webosphere!  Super bonus cool points to the first prison to set up a Twitter account......

The online community (aka reality-based) is rightly displeased with Obie right now (would he even be where he is without us?).  What makes this issue even more regrettable is that he has smoked pot.  He has firsthand experience and knows that the wild exaggerations about marijuana dangers are bogus.  Americans OVERWHELMINGLY support the decriminalization of marijuana.  Many are starting to examine the FISCAL aspects of the pharmaceutical, industrial. commercial and recreational businesses as well as the taxe$ generated by them 

Job loss in the prison industrial complex (and law enforcement) will be offset by myriad new PRODUCTIVE employment opportunities in the unshackled industries around hemp.  Accounting projections for the legal production and taxation of cannabis generate figures of the kind that get even Bernie Madoff all tingly in his nether regions.  Ginormous amounts of money and jobs (with the worst downside being a new tax of the variety you might now even mind paying).

What's upsetting to this netizen is that Obie is denying the truth of his very own experience.  Since he seems it a habit of 'looking around'  for a direction in which to move the country, might I suggest he look inside his own heart and soul?

Marijuana is the wonder drug that works wonders.  It cures whatever ails you, and if you're healthy it keeps you that way.   It is such a powerful gift from God that many religions make it's use a sacrament.

Winners smoke weed.

Mike and Obie know.

Enjoy.

After reading Josh's post and the Atlantic Monthly article, which I
highly recommend,  it is evident to me that one of the reasons for
the rise in the financial sector is the loss of the manufacturing
sector. Bot actually occurred at nearly the same time.  And it
was during this period that those businesses that produced
the consumer products were beginning to be run not by people
who knew anything about the products, but were only schooled
in and interested in one thing. How to make money and increase
profits - and to do it as rapidly as possible with as little outgo
as possible. Large short term profits became the byword.

Those who had started these corporations began to retire or die
or were forced out by stock holders with one and only one thing
in mind. Higher stock prices and bigger dividends. But the tactics
used to accomplish this would eventually destroy the company or nearly
so. To keep a company competitive requires putting money and
energy back into the company. It means being willing make the changes
necessary to remain viable.  But these new CEOs and corporate
heads would not and in many cases could not because their boards
would not allow it. And the minute it looked like the company involved
would not make the sort of profit that these boards deemed necessary,
the company was sold off and the stock holders just bagged the money.

It was a culture shift as in explained here.

 As more and more of the rich made their money in
finance, the cult of finance seeped into the
culture at large. Works like Barbarians at the
Gate, Wall Street, and Bonfire of the Vanities-all
intended as cautionary tales-served only to
increase Wall Street's mystique. Michael Lewis
noted in Portfolio last year that when he wrote
Liar's Poker, an insider's account of the
financial industry, in 1989, he had hoped the book
might provoke outrage at Wall Street's hubris and
excess. Instead, he found himself "knee-deep in
letters from students at Ohio State who wanted to
know if I had any other secrets to share.
...They'd read my book as a how-to manual." Even
Wall Street's criminals, like Michael Milken and
Ivan Boesky, became larger than life. In a society
that celebrates the idea of making money, it was
easy to infer that the interests of the financial
sector were the same as the interests of the
country-and that the winners in the financial
sector knew better what was good for America than
did the career civil servants in Washington. Faith
in free financial markets grew into conventional
wisdom-trumpeted on the editorial pages of The
Wall Street Journal and on the floor of Congress.

So the problem is not a financial one or even a political
one. The problem is a cultural one. A belief that the
only thing that matters is the money and how you get it
is of little consequence. And unfortunately it is a belief system
that is as old as this country itself. A cowboy - gold rush -
get it quick and then get out of town attitude that this country
needs to grow out of and grow up from. Or we will be no better
than some inconsequential Banana Republic with it's citizens
no better off.

C

Let me get right to it. This issue is too important for too many people to remain politicized, but that is, pretty much, all the public has been and is exposed to.

When we start dialoguing on thorny issues such as healthcare solutions, very quickly, America is bad, change your model of living, and other effects of never-ending waves of propaganda and disinformation start to dominate. It happens nearly 100% of the time.

I think I speak for a great number of people in America by saying that, for once, we would like to have public officials honestly address and debate the fact the US medical expenses are rising disproportionately, and:

1) what they propose that will simultaneously do no immediate or long-term harm; and

2) what is going to be done about the root causes of our rising costs

We need to avoid being foot soldiers of ideology and look beyond propaganda from the media and the social engineering crowd.  For example, the  model Canada has, the UK has, Switzerland has, is immaterial except as considerations around forming a solution/new framework, and, as such, should be known to us fully.  

When we look at cost, let's ask for honest, open dialogue on:

• the role of Washington regulation now and in the future,
• on lawyers and the ethics of what they are doing,
• on doctors abusing their professional freedom with unnecessary operations and diagnostic procedures;
• and what is the balance between the cost of developing successful phamaceuticals and abusive profiteering.

Before Washington winds itself up, we need to demand (because asking will not have the same effect) open dialogue in at least these areas.

GET OVER IT! Can't you surmise that your President is human? Well, in the immortal words of Steve Martin: "Well excuuuuuuuuse Meeee!!!" What do you want from the guy? I know people expect him to have a halo and shoot thunderbolts from his butt; however, walking on water must be reserved for saving the economy, and not for role modelism.

Read more »

This January, I had the great pleasure of watching all five seasons of the HBO show The Wire from start to finish.  The creator of the show, David Simon, was a reporter at the Baltimore Sun for 12 years before he began his television career.  Simon and his writing partner, Ed Burns, a former Baltimore homicide detective and schoolteacher, told the story of the American City from a different perspective each season: the street, the dying working class, city hall, the school system, and the city newspaper, in this case the Baltimore Sun.

"... We love you Mr. President, but you don't have it right yet. And we're going to bang on your door until you get it right." --William Greider

William Greider showed us how to criticize President Obama's economic team on Bill Moyers Friday night. There was no baggage or snide remarks that people (understandably) can't seem to let go regarding Paul Krugman and others. If TPM's blogs (Candide, I'm looking in your direction... =) ) and Newsweek's cover story is any indication, the left is having one hell of a brawl right now between Krugman & other liberal commentators/economists and the Obama Economic team led by Summers & Geithner. I like it, and I think this dissent will help President Obama be more progressive.

Greider simply says: President Obama [is] "trapped between the governing elites who decide things and the people who are governed."

The way to get POTUS unstuck, is to protest loudly and very publicly. If we reject what's "good for Wall Street" as good for America, he can use that power to begin to break up the oligarchy that has bought and pocketed our politics. Indeed, the NYTimes says their new currency is political power (since they've already got most of the actual money currency). President Obama needs us in the streets -- loud & angry, and NOW. (April 3 & 4 - National March on Wall St.)

CEO's and executives must get scared, or they'll never change.

P.S. - Bill Moyers has been on an absolute tear lately. This is really in his wheelhouse. Each of his shows for the past 4 weeks has been incredibly enlightening on the anger that we're all feeling, without being angry itself. Here are links to the other programs with a quick synopsis:

1. "Robert Johnson, former managing director of Soros Fund Management and an expert in emerging markets, believes the government's approach -- which he calls "drip intravenous capital injection" -- wastes taxpayer money and won't solve the financial crisis."

2. Parker Palmer -- "Would it be possible to re-image depression [both individual clinical depression and the Depression in our economy] as the hand of a friend trying to press you down to ground on which it's safe to stand?"

3. Mike Davis -- "We need more protests. We need more noise in the street. At the end of the day, political parties tend to legislate what social movements and social voices have already achieved in the factories or the streets or in the civil rights demonstration."

Please do Recommend this post if you liked these links -- would love to make sure more people see these Bill Moyers interviews...

We may be second rate

(to him)

he's such a big timer

but it took me a lifetime to get here.

Then he calls us probably a mistake

it was my heart

he played catch with.

 

I should break off for that

so he can choose me

Monday he suddenly found

 my love and faith are bound

(he said)

but me break up? nooo!

he apologized, so

I just got drunk

 Friday night

drove myself home

(my voice had died)

watermelon watermelon

 pineapple pineapple

(but not my feet, so I laughed)
 a jig's not a reel

he don't get it, fuggeit

my true love always will

(once)

when he feels me broken

(he called me a well-trained horse)

in the Great Unspoken

(but he explained it eight months later).

 

Josh has some telling graphs on display today that vividly illustrate the supersizing of the banking and securities industry since 1980.  He also links to their source article at the Atlantic, a searing indictment of our profligate oligarchy and its emerging-market ways by Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the IMF, that really puts the metastasizing of the financial services industry in a clear, convincing, finally unnerving global and macroeconomic perspective.

I have to admit, before I read "The Quiet Coup" I was concerned comparisons of our situation to that of Russia and Argentina in the 1990's might be too alarmist, and neglected the history of economic debacles (and their solution) in  our own country.  Now, however, I'm a true believer in the pungency and timeliness of the comparison.

Another fine blogger, Glenn Greenwald, has also called attention to the parallels between the dynamics and root causes of failing third-world economies and our own. Glenn links to a Washington Post article by Desmond Lachman, another former IMF official, that makes many of the same points as Mr. Johnson's.

When the acknowledged experts in international economic catastrophe tell you you're sick, you'd better at least listen to their diagnosis and consider their recommended treatments.

 

 

Obama's apparent strategy in Afghanistan confirms my impression that he is the lampedusian, "change everything, so that nothing changes" figure I have always suspected.

Pakistan, not Afghanistan is the real problem. A stable, un-threatened and prosperous Pakistan would act like a Valium on the whole region.

Stabilizing Pakistan should be the first priority and this does not seem to be the case... far from it.

If the globalized, world economy were doing well, perhaps stabilizing Pakistan would be "doable", but with emerging nations taking the worst hit in this crisis, such an "unlikely lad" as Pakistan is probably not going to make it... in most part due to American meddling... With absolutely catastrophic consequences.

I am afraid that the Obama policy in Afghanistan/Pakistan is not only incorrect, it is frivolous. Not because Obama himself is particularly frivolous, but because the system itself within which he operates is.

I think that because it is so painful, we are taking all of this much more seriously then it deserves to be.

I imagine that if I were a Martian observing this situation from the comfort of my flying saucer I would be peeing my space suit with laughter.

Lucky Martians!

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Quoted from the great "Agrarian Philosopher" Wendell Berry on NPR today. 

When I hear the stock market has fallen,
I say, "Long live gravity! Long live
stupidity, error and greed in the palaces
of fantasy capitalism!" I think
an economy should be based on thrift,
on taking care of things, not on theft,
usury, seduction, waste, and ruin.
My purpose is a language that can make us whole,
Though mortal, ignorant, and small.
The world is whole beyond human knowing.

Enjoy Spring everyone.  I can't wait to head out of the city in April to go hiking and get away from this economy!

 

I hear a lot of panic-infused grumblings from economic-savvy types about the imminent demise of the US treasury bond as China's the world's stable-investment of choice and how the heck are we going to afford our meager overly generous welfare state -- nevermind economic stimulus -- if the federal government can't even take out a loan.  Well, the 2-second panic in the foreign currency exchange markets the other day after *some* "journalist" paraphrased Mr. Geithner as supporting China's call for a new global currency spurred me to do a little unpaid research.  turns out, China's saber-ratting isn't all that fearsome.  Important part of china central bank's policy statement highlighted below:

III. The reform should be guided by a grand vision and begin with specific deliverables. It should be a gradual process that yields win-win results for all

 

The reestablishment of a new and widely accepted reserve currency with a stable valuation benchmark may take a long time. The creation of an international currency unit, based on the Keynesian proposal [to base a global currency on the value of 30 or so commodities], is a bold initiative that requires extraordinary political vision and courage. In the short run, the international community, particularly the IMF, should at least recognize and face up to the risks resulting from the existing system, conduct regular monitoring and assessment and issue timely early warnings.

 

Special consideration should be given to giving the SDR [this is special drawing rights for lesser developed countries from the IMF, and therefore currently doesn't have any substantial impact on the rest of the world] a greater role. The SDR has the features and potential to act as a super-sovereign reserve currency. Moreover, an increase in SDR allocation would help the Fund address its resources problem and the difficulties in the voice and representation reform. Therefore, efforts should be made to push forward a SDR allocation. This will require political cooperation among member countries. Specifically, the Fourth Amendment to the Articles of Agreement and relevant resolution on SDR allocation proposed in 1997 should be approved as soon as possible so that members joined the Fund after 1981 could also share the benefits of the SDR. On the basis of this, considerations could be given to further increase SDR allocation.

you can find the rest at: http://www.pbc.gov.cn/english//detail.asp?col=6500&ID=178

it's not that long, and honestly, not that crazy. 

There is an excellent article by Simon Johnson, formerly of the IMF, which I would recommend to everyone, if you haven't already read it:  The Quiet Coup - The Atlantic (May 2009).  Johnson provides an excellent analysis of the need to take real action to break down the control exerted by Wall Street.  It will add to the understanding of the current issues.  It also reflects similar thoughts to those expressed by William Greider last night on Bill Moyers Journal . Home | PBS   (it is the second story).

These articles encouraged me to suggest the following as guiding principles for our measures to reestablish order to our financial community.

1.  If an enterprise is too big to fail, it is also too big to exist.  This should be treated like an anti-trust action - break the enterprise into smaller entities with new management.  The managers of the enterprise should never think they will be rescued by the public in the event of catastrophe.

2.  Reestablish the separation between commercial and investment banks.  Simply put, reenact Glass-Steagall.  We had to go through pain before to understand that this was good -- now we have to go through it again.

3.  Require that all financial products be publicly traded in an established market.  No product can be sold before appropriate regulatory mechanisms have been established.  The need for new products is not mandatory to the success or failure of the financial world therefore waiting until we get the right framework won't bring the world down.  Regulations should also require that products not bear misleading labels like calling a product "credit default swaps" in place of "default insurance."  If it's insurance, call it insurance and make it work like insurance.

4.  Reestablish limits on usurious interest.  The high combination of interest and fees on much current lending certainly is usurious and should be curbed.  Certainly 18% total return is enough.  Perhaps a less attractive return will cause more care on the part of those like credit card and payday loan companies in offering loans and accounts that get people mired in debt traps.

5.  Make sure that originators of loans always retain some portion of the risk associated with their payment.  No more escaping bad underwriting by securitization.

6.  Rewrite the consumer portions of the 2005 bankruptcy bill to restore fairness and sensibility.

7.  Restore some muscle and will to the existing regulatory bodies.  Their mission is not to enhance the profits of the plunderers but to make the markets orderly, transparent, and fair.

Finally, one of the big problems is the outsized influence of Wall Street on the Congress.  While much of this is a result of cultural influences, much is related to the financial influence gained through campaign contributions.  To combat this and related evils, I propose the following rule:  Federal candidates can only accept campaign contributions from US citizens who are eligible to vote for them in primary or general elections.  This means no contributions from businesses, PACs, unions, non-citizens, and residents out of your district.  This has three good results.  First, campaigning will not be dominated by those who can give large amounts; second, our elected officials will have to pay attention to their constituents; and third, campaigns will cost a lot less and leave fewer and smaller obligations on the part of the winners.

Of course none of these are new suggestions, but I'm convinced that the sooner we can figure out a way to force our political leaders to take the suggested actions the sooner we'll be on the road to recovery.  I do hope that our leaders will respond to public pressure for these principles.

Enough politics, Cantor, and Krugman, it's time to celebrate the oddest book titles of the year.

The Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year, also known as the Diagram Prize, is a humorous literary award that is given to the book with the oddest title.

This years cheesy winner, of course, The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais.  The runner ups were no slouches; Baboon Metaphysics, Curbside Consultation of the Colon -- a medical manual, and a hobby tome, Strip and Knit With Style.

Previous runner ups include; How Green Were the Nazis?, D. Di Mascio's Delicious Ice Cream: D. Di Mascio of Coventry, an Ice Cream Company of Repute, with an Interesting and Varied Fleet of Ice Cream Vans, Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium, and who can forget, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence.

Below is a list of past winners.  What's on your bookshelf? 

Be sure to recommended, and vote at: http://www.thebookseller.com/

1978    Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice
1979    The Madam as Entrepreneur: Career Management in House Prostitution
1980    The Joy of Chickens
1981    Last Chance at Love - Terminal Romances
1982    Population and Other Problems: Family Planning, Housing 1,000 million, Labour Employment
1983    The Theory of Lengthwise Rolling
1984    The Book of Marmalade: Its Antecedents, Its History, and Its Role in the World Today
1985    Natural Bust Enlargement with Total Power: How to Increase the other 90% of Your Mind to Increase the Size of Your Breasts
1986    Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality
1987    No Award
1988    Versailles: The View From Sweden
1989    How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art
1990    Lesbian Sadomasochism Safety Manual
1991    No Award
1992    How to Avoid Huge Ships
1993    American Bottom Archaeology
1994    Highlights in the History of Concrete
1995    Reusing Old Graves: A Report on Popular British Attitudes
1996    Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers
1997    The Joy of Sex, the Pocket Edition
1998    Developments in Dairy Cow Breeding: New Opportunities to Widen the Use of Straw
1999    Weeds in a Changing World: British Crop Protection Council Symposium Proceedings No. 64
2000    High Performance Stiffened Structures
2001    Butterworths Corporate Manslaughter Service
2002    Living with Crazy Buttocks
2003    The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories
2004    Bombproof Your Horse
2005    People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It
2006    The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification
2007    If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start with Your Legs
2008    The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais

If you commend, please recommend.

Last night I had another irregular gettogether with some of my working class friends here in WV over a few beers.

Towards the end of our socializing (we rarely discuss politics), one of the more Neanderthal leaning DINOs (he is one of our WV voters responsible for turning WV from blue to red and   certainly did not vote for Obama-they all know that I had the biggest Obama sign in the state in my front yard ) sidled up to me and, in spite of the constant Repub brainwashing we endure,  said:

"Obama is not doing too bad. In fact, if he can do something like make healthcare available to everyone, I may never use the N-word again.   I too am listening."

President Obama, the people are listening, even here in WV. Keep it up!!  

  

This may be the first lesson we learn: The most elemental obligation of a parent, beyond feeding and clothing a child, is to teach and, when she or he gets older, send them to be taught by others. There is a lot to learn, more every day, and it seems to be a waste of valuable time for a child to have to discover, for instance, what wheels do or how pulleys work if someone else already did that.

For some reason, the same rule does not apply to government. Each generation is required to have a rendezvous with destiny, it seems, disregarding the lessons of their elders on the ground, which sounds right but is almost always wrong, that that was then and this now.

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Special Caveat: The Gregory Zappala in this article is NOT TPM's GregorZap

I have long been enraged by the idea of for-profit corrections facilities. It is just not a good idea to make locking people up (or detaining them) profitable. In a capitalist system such as the U.S., profit becomes king - ruling over all other consideration. This is something we have seen a lot of lately. However, a case in point is the Pennsylvania corruption case that has resulted in overturning hundreds of juvenile convictions.

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I think Howard Dean was great at pointing out how hypocritical Olbermann has been. 

Dean maybe was deliberately trying to embarrass Olbermann and prove his true colors?

Of all the shows for Dean to get on and say that we shouldn't be calling any of our Presidents a fascist, he chooses Olbermann!!  Olbermann is the one that for years has been calling Bush a fascist.

I love the irony!!


http://www.olbermannwatch.com/

More than ever, I see Barack Obama as a President of historic importance, with potential to outstrip even FDR, be in a league with Lincoln.  We sure need him.

 

Iraq was madness almost beyond description, but that doesn't mean that invading Afghanistan was a genius Bush move, either.  Imposing one's will on the latter is legendarily difficult, and most who tried left either in tears or questioning their decision to engage.  For us, the shrewd move would have been to eliminate Bin Laden, his networks and co-conspirators, while also removing antagonisms - not burrowing into bloody mountain combat against ageless warlords. Cut to 2009, and we have made a decision not to abandon those we propped up and led on.  Sad, but understandable.

 

If no success within, say, a year, I wish our President the wisdom to pivot and make decisions as to how get the hell out of the cauldron of blood.  And I don't envy him.

 

It is so awful that he was saddled by Bush with horrible deficits, a near second Great Depression, plus two unnecessary wars (one, an utterly insane misadventure), with spillout now into Pakistan.  What an onerous load it would be, even for the greatest of any nation!

 

And it is despicable, when the media chirps up with smiling idiocy that they heard, e.g., from misanthrope Limbaugh or crazed seditionist Bachmann, that Obama is on a permanent campaign and isn't that worrying?  Did they recklessly dump like that on FDR's fireside chats or did they give the leader the benefit of the doubt in the dark days?

  Just for those of you who may enjoy . . .

How about dropping your favorite links to something enchanting . . .


~OGD~

Didn't you always get a feeling of dirtbag from this guy? 

 

Not really politically relevant, but oddly satisfying in a dark way.  Like an ex-girlfriend who cheated on you getting HPV.  Now he beats on hookers, creepy. 

 

And maybe some of the regulars here can explain, what is up with an israeli becoming a scientologist?

 

Just weird stuff that desreves a litttle reflection. 

 

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2009/0327092sham1.html

This is clearly a complex social issue, made more so by the Mexican border control matter now at hand. 

Just about everyone concerned about the direction of our society would like this to go away, or at least stay out the sight of polite society.  Meanwhile polite society's children join right in; the poor even more so. 

The Parade of Horribles

Drug criminals flourish.  Hollywood, sports figures and everyone with money treats drugs as an affordable indulgence.  Flower children from the 60's don't seem to care and they are running our higher education system. Law enforcement tries as it can, the justice system equivocates on the law.  We work with other countries, we have quiet military operations.  We talk about pacifying Afghanistan when their principle domestic product is opium.  Libertarians, who have some dubious views as do other political factions, are all for it but not on radar.  And on it goes.

Now, we have Barbarians at the Gate of the Mexico border. There is no powerful political constituency for Washington to serve, and, with everything else that is going on, a general weariness in the public along with a great many who wonder why this was not fixed already.

Do We Want to Fight a War on Drugs?

There is no evidence of this being an issue which is taken seriously in Washington, across administrations.  That usually signals that the enlightened self-interest of the Congress is being served elsewhere, to be kind about it.

Since this is an international phenomenon involving wealthy, casually interested populations as well as banana republics and lawless places, the idea of doing anything more than impeding flows is unrealistic.

But where would be today if, like prohibition, drugs were legal and controlled?  By the word, controlled, I am referring to how liquor today is still sold out of state stores in several places.

What is your view?

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Big money needs another bubble in order to multiply fortunes on the way up.

We've had the dotcom bubble and the real estate bubble. 

What's next? Health care at 16% of GDP and growing might be a possibility?

On the liner notes of an early album the "then" wife of Van Morrison said:  He has an "essential core of aloneness."

Although I have no evidence that Mr. Morrison suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, I've never heard a better description of the essence of PTSD.  Those of us who DO have PTSD can relate completely to that phrase.

In this month's issue of VFW Magazine are some recent statistics involving troops returning from Afghanistan and Iraq:

                                              PTSD Rates Rising

Nearly 45% of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans who sought care with VA  through September, 2008 had been diagnosed with possible psychological disorders, according to a January, 2009 VA report.

Between fiscal years 2002 and 2008, VA reported that 400,304 Iraq and Afghanistan
vets  - or about 24% of the total troops who had served in those conflicts - had gone to VA for treatment.  Some 178,483 vets (45%) were diagnosed with possible mental disorders.

Of that total, 92,998 (23%) vets were diagnosed with PTSD, and 63,009 (16%) were found to have possible depressive disorders.

I've been blogging about this for over 3 years now and I absolutely HATE having been right.  It didn't take a rocket scientist to see this coming.  3, 4, sometimes 5 tours in a place and situation where every hour of every day troops didn't know where or when the next explosion might take an arm or leg or life. 

Combat situations where the mind numbing fear of crashing through a door expecting a stream of bullets or another booby trap to end their tour and cause that knock on the door of a mother that EVERY military family fears, only to find after firing away as his weapon sweeps the room that the dead are women and children.  How can anyone hold on to their sanity with such events and stress?

Those who have followed my PTSD blogs know how I felt about the previous White House inhabitants.  George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, et. al. bear complete responsibility for not only the 4261 who gave their lives in Iraq and the THOUSANDS more who left limbs, eyes and their innocence there but for those mentioned in the VFW article above who will bear the internal scars for the rest of their lives.

The numbers of those affected by this tragic misadventure which only had one benefit:  the enrichment of Bush/Cheney and the rest, will be exponentially increased as families, loved ones and friends of these returning veterans must deal with the psycological damage done by this unnecessary and horrible exploration of Cheney's "Dark Side."

It took me nearly 40 years to seek help.  I'm finally working on finding a way out of "my cave" where I took refuge from reality too many times for too long.  The VA is helping with the process.  My hope is: the numbers mentioned in the article above are the final count of PTSD affected vets from Bush's miscalculations.  But in my heart I know there are many like me who won't ask for help for years.  And many others who, like so many of my fellow Vietnam vets will end the suffering without seeking relief from the nightmares, flashbacks and survivor guilt by putting a gun in their mouth or in an "accident" where they inexplicably crash their vehicle or motorcycle into a freeway overpass.

If you know a veteran of these recent wars, please talk to them.  Not in a judgemental way but to let them know you want to help.  Please ask them to go to the nearest Vet Center (there are vet centers in or near almost every community) where they will find at least one fellow combat vet who is a counselor. 

There are groups at the Vet Centers and VA facilities which meet frequently.  Even though it is difficult, try to get them involved.  These groups contain other veterans who KNOW what they're going through and might be able to take away some of the guilt they feel for surviving while their comrades died.  Try to convince them that the feelings that they somehow lose their "macho" image by admitting these thoughts are affecting them are not valid.  I know how easy it is to somehow translate the feelings and emotions of PTSD  into feelings of low self esteem or "weakness."  Nothing could be farther from the truth!

If you're a veteran and you're suffering from these symptoms, thoughts or feelings, please feel free to contact me or your local Vet Center.  Talk to a buddy who was there with you.  Talk to ANYONE, just TALK.  Get help.  Please don't hide in that "Cave" for 40 years like so many of us have.  It only gets better when you deal with it. 

You probably never wondered how much an American soldier gets paid for active duty on a forward base in Afghanistan or Iraq, and I’m not going to try tell you, because the military pay scale is so complicated and variable between reservists and national guard and regular army of various ranks and seniorities that by the time we went through all the many qualifications, it wouldn’t make much sense anyway.

But there’s one element in the military pay scale that’s so simple anyone can understand it: “imminent danger pay,” a bonus only for soldiers exposed to enemy fire on a regular basis.

And how much of a bonus does the US government pay soldiers in some God-forsaken forward base in Afghanistan, exposed to sniper-fire 24/7, shitting in a hole in the hard ground, with no electricity or running water?

$225 per month.

And meanwhile back home the families of reservists are losing the little that they have when one income of a two-income family is reduced again and again to the Army pay-scale, for three or four tours of no-choice stop-loss duty in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Maybe one fine day Rush Limbaugh could take a few minutes off from explaining how so many CEO’s deserve their multi-hundred-million-dollar bonuses, and explain instead…

How many minutes would it take for the average executive at AIG to earn $225?

God damn them all!

Among all the media coverage this week, all the outrage over the AIG bailouts, all of the horse-race commentary on Obama's budget, the Republican counterattack, and the conservative Democrats flank of the president, something slipped through.  It was only a whisper compared to everything else but every once in awhile people in the media let it slip.

Everything that's going on now in the media may deal with vast sums of money and political shifts but it doesn't get to the heart of the problem.  We need to fix the financial system in this country. 

At one point, we had a bulwark of regulations, lessons learned from the Great Depression, that allowed us to prosper without severely overextending ourselves.  Sure, there were occasional setbacks, say the burst of the tech bubble, but that was a part of the moderate boom and bust cycles that we see in our capitalist economic system even today when we have financial institutions like the Federal Reserve who help stabilize currency.

 But through all of this, all of these 24 hour news cycle freak outs, we haven't really started  to do everything that needs to be done to correct the problem.  Deregulation led to companies that were too big to fail, financial products that no one really understood, and two of the biggest busts in our country's economic history.

Until we begin to regulate our economy, we're going to keep coming back to the same problem that we're experiencing now.  Call it the Savings and Loan crisis, call it the Depression of 2008, call it the Panic of 1873 or the Great Depression.  Until we fix the problem and our representatives in elected office subordinate the will of the financial sector to make a quick buck to the Main Street need for financial stability, we're going to keep coming back to this same problem.

Nobody can pretend to be surprised if there's another financial crisis in 10 years. If we don't do something, finally, now to fix the problem, then it's our own fault.

Americans clearly are capable of being outraged.  Missing, however, is a sustained, vibrant demand for deep reforms of our political and government system.  You hear a lot about populist rage these days, especially connected to the AIG bonus debacle.  But populist rage as a reflection of class conflict and anger about our economic meltdown does not necessarily make a political revolution.  The saddest thing about Obama winning the presidency was that his change message drained what might have been sufficient national energy for true revolutionary political reforms.

 

With the Bush-corrosion of our Constitution and collapse of the economic system after it had been exploited by the rich and corrupt, what better time for revolution?  Instead, we got a president with a glib tongue, a terrific smile and a deep commitment to the two-party plutocracy and corporate state.  Obama is no populist, not even close.  Nor is he a genuine reformer.  At best, he is a master exploiter of populism.

 

Obama was and still is a master of masquerading as just a regular guy.  Even now, after making more than $8 million from his books, and even before when his wife made a huge salary and he lived in a million dollar house, and he reaped the many benefits of an elite Harvard Law School ticket to success.  Totally consistent with his plutocratic and elitist background he has packed his administration with the same Harvard, elitist and Wall Street crowd that pumped many millions of dollars into his campaign and did nothing to stop the mortgage crisis and economic meltdown.

 

He has shown absolutely no courage or interest in standing up to the status quo, earmark-driven, and corrupt Democratic leaders in the House and Senate who, in large measure, share blame for the nation's economic crisis, especially its roots in the mortgage insanity and under-regulation of the financial sector that they nurtured.  Obama should have rejected the spending bill with tons of pork earmarks.  But in reality Obama has shown no taste for standing up for principles.  He had no problem with a Treasury Secretary that was a blatant tax dodger.  Almost on a daily basis there is news about decisions being made that resemble Bush policies.  Rather than shunning signing statements when Congress sends him bills, so abused by Bush, Obama immediately issued his own one.

 

The spending of the nation's debt-based wealth on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue with no end in sight, despite the painful economic meltdown and mind-boggling deficit spending.  When it comes to the wars and domestic problems, he seeks success through massive spending rather than through structural and systemic reforms.

 

Here is the problem: All the venom aimed at AIG and its bonus-receiving employees served more as a distraction than a viable political strategy to reform our government.  True, there has been terrible economic warfare by the rich and corrupt in government and the private sector that has savaged ordinary Americans.  Our corrupt and dysfunctional government did not protect us.  We need a Second American Revolution.  We need deep structural reforms to make our current MISrepresentatives obsolete and return our government to us.  For this to happen we must not let ourselves be deceived by lying politicians.  We must recognize that voting and elections have NOT worked effectively.  We must look to our Constitution for the legal path to revolution.

 

The Founders anticipated that Americans would eventually lose confidence in the federal government.  They created a never-used option in Article V.  Never used because Congress has refused to obey the Constitution and gotten away with violating it and their oath of office.  That option is an Article V convention of state delegates that has the constitutional power to propose constitutional amendments, only amendments, no wholesale rewriting of the Constitution.  The one and only requirement in Article V is that two-thirds of state legislatures must apply to Congress for a convention.  In fact, there have been over 700 such state applications from all 50 states.

 

Why no Article V convention?  Because Congress and virtually every politically powerful group on the left and right oppose and fear an Article V convention.  Why?  Because clearly such a convention which is outside the control of Congress, the President and the Supreme Court has the constitutional authority to discuss and propose amendments that could truly reform our government to remove corruption and make it much more equitable and effective for we the people.  Where is the public outrage over Congress disobeying and disrespecting the Constitution?  There is far less to fear from a convention than from maintaining the status quo two-party plutocracy.

 

If you believe in our Constitution, if you liked the change rhetoric of Obama, if you are furious about the economic meltdown, and if you see the need to seriously reform our government, then examine the materials at foavc.org and become a member of the nonpartisan Friends of the Article V Convention.  Help make Congress obey the Constitution and give us the convention we have a constitutional right to have.  If you see yourself as a patriot, dissident or activist, join our effort.

 

[Contact Joel S. Hirschhorn through www.delusionaldemocracy.com; he is a co-founder of Friends of the Article V Convention.]

I don't know about global warming but something is definately wrong with this stupid weather.

   Last week I was posting that it was 70 and 80 degrees here well today its 33 degrees and we're under a winter storm warning. It's been doing this all year. I don't think we've had a month yet that didn't have at least 1 day in the 60's. So something is definately wrong.

  Well I also wanted to tell all of you that I am really glad I happened on to this web site. When I feel down and can't think of anything good all I have to do is come here and dickday is sure to have something to make me laugh. Or LisB will have something to make me feel better. stillidealistic almost always says something good and cvilldem tries to keep me in line so I don't get in trouble here. Just thought I'd say I consider you all friends and coming from me that is a big compliment. I don't make friends easily. There are many others that I read and really like also but you 4 were the first to talk to me and strangly still do. Thank you.

    Well it just started snowing( we're suppose to get 6-12 inches today & tommarow)

Unbelievable

President Barack Obama laid out U.S. foreign policy for areas of the Middle East in a speech Friday morning. The transcript can be seen in its entirety on Swampland at Time Magazine, "Obama goes to war,"by Michael Scherer. HT Twitter. The speech will be analyzed in a dozen different languages all over the world. Here is my take in English from Texas:

Troop levels -- To train Afghan security forces, the U.S. will deploy 4,000 troops to Afghanistan. These forces will join the 17,000 additional troops sent to fight in the south and east earlier this year. Training the Afghan military and police forces will be "for the first time fully resourced." That is a relatively limited military build-up in the overall scope of our military presence in the region. To quote:

Every American unit in Afghanistan will be partnered with an Afghan unit, and we will seek additional trainers from our NATO allies to ensure that every Afghan unit has a coalition partner. We will accelerate our efforts to build an Afghan Army of 134,000 and a police force of 82,000 so that we can meet these goals by 2011 - and increases in Afghan forces may very well be needed as our plans to turn over security responsibility to the Afghans go forward.

Civilians on the ground -- The remainder of U.S. effort in Afghanistan will involve a substantial increase in the nonmilitary effort. It will include "agricultural specialists and educators; engineers and lawyers, to "develop an economy that isn't dominated by illicit drugs." Secretary Clinton will "seek support from partners and allies next week in the Hague." The President emphasized the primacy of a civilian effort, an investment in the future of the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan, explaining,

That is why my budget includes indispensable investments in our State Department and foreign assistance programs. These investments relieve the burden on our troops. They contribute directly to security. They make the American people safer. And they save us an enormous amount of money in the long run - because it is far cheaper to train a policeman to secure their village or to help a farmer seed a crop, than it is to send our troops to fight tour after tour of duty with no transition to Afghan responsibility.

The speech was comprehensive and wide ranging. Much of it was to explain why the strategies were chosen. It was, at its core, a speech for everyone laying out plans and expectations for all who will be participating. A variety of things that went wrong in the past were addressed: lack of accountability for spending, no-bid contracts, and wasteful reconstruction will be remedied with "increase[d] funding for a strong Inspector General at both the State Department and USAID, and include robust funding for the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction." Specifics to combat corruption in Afghanistan were mentioned, such as benchmarks that will insure that international assistance goes to the Afghan people. The President pledged to set metrics for our own government "to measure progress and hold ourselves accountable."

President Obama also discussed his ideas about the Taliban movement at some length, differentiating between those who are "irreconcilable" and those who are not. There was a plan for reconciliation that specified, as the President put it,

There is an uncompromising core of the Taliban. They must be met with force, and they must be defeated. But there are also those who have taken up arms because of coercion, or simply for a price. These Afghans must have the option to choose a different course. That is why we will work with local leaders, the Afghan government, and international partners to have a reconciliation process in every province. As their ranks dwindle, an enemy that has nothing to offer the Afghan people but terror and repression must be further isolated. And we will continue to support the basic human rights of all Afghans - including women and girls.

Nations all over the world will be asked to join the U.S. in the Afghanistan war against al Qaeda. That is how it is being billed. Major increases in nation building for both Afghanistan and Pakistan is an important aspect of the administration's strategy. Alliance building will be a major part of the U.S strategy. Other nations must see that their security interests are at stake unless there is a clearly concerted effort by any nation vulnerable to an attack from the border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan. To quote the President,

But this is not simply an American problem - far from it. It is, instead, an international security challenge of the highest order. Terrorist attacks in London and Bali were tied to al Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan, as were attacks in North Africa and the Middle East, in Islamabad and Kabul. If there is a major attack on an Asian, European, or African city, it - too - is likely to have ties to al Qaeda's leadership in Pakistan. The safety of people around the world is at stake.

When the President travels abroad next week he will be asking for specifics from other nations:

From our partners and NATO allies, we seek not simply troops, but rather clearly defined capabilities: supporting the Afghan elections, training Afghan Security Forces, and a greater civilian commitment to the Afghan people. For the United Nations, we seek greater progress for its mandate to coordinate international action and assistance, and to strengthen Afghan institutions.

And finally, together with the United Nations, we will forge a new Contact Group for Afghanistan and Pakistan that brings together all who should have a stake in the security of the region - our NATO allies and other partners, but also the Central Asian states, the Gulf nations and Iran; Russia, India and China. None of these nations benefit from a base for al Qaeda terrorists, and a region that descends into chaos. All have a stake in the promise of lasting peace and security and development.

The futures of both Pakistan and Afghanistan are clearly linked in the President's mind. Each is vulnerable to what goes wrong within its neighbor's borders, all having a shared responsibility for security. A "standing, trilateral dialog" with regular meetings among the United States, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Secretary Clinton and Secretary Gates will lead the effort that will be marked by "enhanced intelligence sharing and military cooperation along the border, while addressing issues of common concern like trade, energy, and economic development." The President emphasized over and over that solutions are not merely military. To quote:

To enhance the military, governance, and economic capacity of Afghanistan and Pakistan, we have to marshal international support. And to defeat an enemy that heeds no borders or laws of war, we must recognize the fundamental connection between the future of Afghanistan and Pakistan - which is why I've appointed Ambassador Richard Holbrooke to serve as Special Representative for both countries, and to work closely with General David Petraeus to integrate our civilian and military efforts.

Pakistan's needs for assistance have a very high priority with the President, who also expects the country to meet certain responsibilities. This is what he said, in no uncertain terms,

The terrorists within Pakistan's borders are not simply enemies of America or Afghanistan - they are a grave and urgent danger to the people of Pakistan. Make no mistake: al Qaeda and its extremist allies are a cancer that risks killing Pakistan from within. It is important for the American people to understand that Pakistan needs our help in going after al Qaeda.

. . . That is why we must focus our military assistance on the tools, training and support that Pakistan needs to root out the terrorists. And after years of mixed results, we will not provide a blank check. Pakistan must demonstrate its commitment to rooting out al Qaeda and the violent extremists within its borders. And we will insist that action be taken - one way or another - when we have intelligence about high-level terrorist targets.

President Obama then expressed support for Congressional action to assist Pakistan with "resources that will build schools, roads, and hospitals, and strengthen Pakistan's democracy." To quote further:

I am calling upon Congress to pass a bipartisan bill co-sponsored by John Kerry and Richard Lugar that authorizes $1.5 billion in direct support to the Pakistani people every year over the next five years . . . I'm also calling on Congress to pass a bipartisan bill co-sponsored by Maria Cantwell, Chris Van Hollen and Peter Hoekstra that creates opportunity zones in the border region to develop the economy and bring hope to places plagued by violence. And we will ask our friends and allies to do their part - including at the donors conference in Tokyo next month.

All in all it it is an impressive plan. It is a rather large departure from that of the previous administration. The key elements appear to be redirecting the policy from Iraq to Afghanistan/Pakistan, minimizing the number of additional troops committed to Afghanistan, changing the military-only strategy to diplomacy, nation building, development, and accountability. In the end the biggest thing is that the President fully intends to engage everyone around the world who is willing to help end the conflict, though there was no time line included. It is too bad that the incursion into Iraq, costing over 4000 U.S. military casualties, set us back all those years and dollars. Not to mention the thousands and thousands of Iraqi lives lost. President Obama's only alternative, it seems was to start over with a very different strategy.

See also Behind the Links.

Carol Gee - Online Universe is the all-in-one home page for all my websites.

Technorati tags: news foreign policy middle east afghanistan pakistan military diplomacy President Obama international

In principle, that is, with Tesla's new offering, the Model S. Priced at roughly half of the Roadster's six figures, the sedan can be charged in 45 minutes for 160 miles, or go 300 miles with the larger battery option. We're having trouble, some of us, remembering that batteries are not only those things in our cellphones; they also served to sink Nazi and Japanese shipping, powering our hybrid diesel-electric WW II submarines. And they can run trains just as easily.

But I would say we should still use liquid or gaseous fuels for most long-distance transport. These can be derived from several non-fossil sources: Ethanol of course, which should not be from edible corn but from trash cellulose; solar-derived hydrogen peroxide is a compact form of chemical energy, also used in WW II for submarines (Germany); hydrogen can be stored in metallic "sponge" for leak-free safety; and solar-derived hydrogen can be feedstock for methane made with CO2 captured from the atmosphere. Some algae yields 80% burnable oil by weight, and there is all that fast-food frying oil out there, for diesels.

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It's FRIDAY!!!!!  Yay!!!!!!

Friday, Friday
gotta love that day
Friday, Friday
sometimes you wait all freakin' day

For Friday laughter
Friday chatter
it's the very best day!

Hope to see you there, folks!!

The administration this week announced its program to help banks clear their balance sheets of so-called "toxic assets," bad investments that have tied up their capital and made it difficult for them to lend money.

Under the plan, the administration and private investors would take over up to $1 trillion in sour mortgage securities from banks. The goal is to free up money banks could then use for loans to businesses and consumers.  -- AP via Yahoo

The capital is not tied up, it's invested whether well or poorly.  The banks also have a fair amount of cash which they can lend out if they are solvent.   Goldman Sachs is reported to have $100B cash ready to "spend".  Others probably have less, but they do have TARP funds and they should have been busy on their own already improving their positions.

And let's note "sour mortgage securities" which is a rather generous umbrella, to put it politely.

The only way banks can improve their situation here is by getting people to pay them much more than the assets are worth as valued by the banks now.  Since the banks are generally over-valuing rather than under-valuing their own assets (as far as I can figure, data appreciated whether pro or con) selling off their toxic assets fairly will result in a loss not a gain.  That will raise some cash but will not help the balance sheet.

Some would suggest that banks are afraid to make new loans because of the uncertainty of the value of existing "assets".  The only way this makes sense is if the banks expect their assets to devalue naturally over time faster than their current models would have it, thus putting them in a squeeze should depositors start a run on the bank and put them under regulatory limits.  

Price discovery is a two-edged sword -- it could help or hurt a given asset, and thus the bank which holds the asset.  But inflating prices strikes me as criminal, and that's what the Geithner plan does, even absent outright scams.

The Geithner plan almost makes sense if the FDIC is selling/pricing assets it holds, such as after it takes over a bank.  Then the FDIC should try to get a high (inflated) price.  And then the FDIC would be lending money to asset purchasers to pay to the FDIC as part of the plan (one part private, one part public, and up to 10 parts loan).  The "loan" would be a bookkeeping trick, no money would go the buyer but the buyer would take on an obligation to pay interest and principal to the FDIC unless the asset tanked seriously.  And the public part would be the Feds putting their one part into the FDIC.

Mixing up price discovery with price inflation is just a bad idea.  It's an attempt to shift the burden from bank management, banks stock holders, and bank bond holders.  Why should we even think about doing this??

So I'm at TPM reading about Michelle Bachmann's latest safari to the far borders of sanity and reason, and I'm shaking my head, because while I have, for the most part, been extremely pleased with everything that's been happening under My Black President (as we affectionately refer to him here at Castle Anthrax), I am at a loss to figure out exactly which of the many, many, many vitally important yet, to my mind, largely inoffensive and uncontroversial measures he or his Administration have taken to cause Republicans and conservatives to so thoroughly and publicly lose their bottles.  As nearly all of them have, over the last two months, at one point of another.

What fantastic outrage is it that, perpetrated by the perfidious Obama Administration, has sparked this avalanche of fury from the far Right?  Exactly what is it that the Bam Man has done to inspire these primal screams, these titantic tantrums, these wild eyed fist waving fits, these shrieks of Marxism and Socialism, these insane accusations of fascism and Nazism, these defiant bellows hoping the President fails, these latest ululating trumpetings for 'orderly revolution'?

What, what, what in the name of Fred n' Wilma Flintstone, has The Coolest Chief Executive In History done to get all these wingnut panties in such a great big piss stained bunch?

So I put this to my wife, who is a wise wise woman, much much smarter than I am (other than in her choice of lifemate, where I somehow completely bamboozled her).  "Babe," I said, "the Republicans have always been bananas but now they have come completely unhinged.  And can it really be just because Our Black President raised taxes incrementally on the wealthiest fraction of Americans?  Is that truly the reason?  He's slightly increasing taxes on people who make a whole lot of money back to their Bill Clinton levels, and because of this, the entire conservative movement has gone completely round the frickin' bend?"

My wife looked at me pityingly, and responded pithily. "No, honey.  It's because they can't stop him.  He keeps getting stuff done.  They try to get in his way and they can't.  That's what's driving them nuts.  They just can't stop him."

And of course, she is correct.

It's not resetting the tax rate for those who make over $200,000 a year to post Reagan, pre Dubya levels. It's not increased CAFE standards.  It's not the stimulus bill, it's not Gitmo, it's not the release of classified documents embarrassing to the Bushies.  It's not his ambitious agenda regarding energy policy, climate change, overhauling the financial sector, or education.  It's not any of these things.

It's just that they can't stop him.

Or, apparently, deal with it.

At all.

I mean, this has always been the Republican strategy.  When you're in power, loot and pillage.   When you're not in power, obstruct, spin, and blame the other guy until you get back in power.  World without end, amen, amen.

Yet suddenly it's not working any more.  They're doing all the stuff they've always done... they're throwing red meat to the base, trying to whip up a populist outcry, screaming all the usual hate words on Fox News and the talk radio shows, working all that good Roberts Rules of Order bullshit in the Senate, filibustering everything that walks, limps, or crawls... obstruct, obstruct, obstruct, obstruct. 

And they're spinning, too, and trying to blame the other guy right, left and sideways... this is the Obama Recession.  It's all Nancy Pelosi's fault.  The Democrats are not sufficiently bi-partisan.  They're taxing.  They're spending.  They're putting our great grandchildren's future in hock.    It's European style socialism, it's modern day one party fascism, it's Marxism, it's a betrayal of everything America is all about.  

But a weird thing happened this time on the way to the polling booths... the Democrats seem to have got some game from somewhere.  The progressive party is suddenly all mojoed up.  The Republicans go the talk radio route, and the Dems use Rush Limbaugh to make them look ridiculous.  The Republicans scream that America is less safe under Obama, and the Democrats say "9/11 didn't happen on our watch, buddy boy, and Osama bin Laden didn't escape when we controlled Congress and the White House". 

It's like judo.  They do the usual flashy flying high kick nonsense that's always worked before, and Our Black President grabs them by the ankle and drops them on their head.

So they're obstructing... themselves.  They're spinning... their wheels.  They're blaming... everybody else, as usual.   And it's not working.

And it's driving them absolutely bonkers.

The Republican Party has become the Party of Fail... and the American people are saying, in a great big scary Darth Vader voice, "You have failed us for the last time."

They're lost.  They're clueless.  They don't know what to do, where to look, what to say, who to turn to.   Their best and brightest are busy bitching at each other because in the last Presidential campaign, nobody prayed enough.   Or standing up in front of America and saying, with a great big Pee Wee Herman sneer, "Well, you know all that stupid stuff I did?  Well... I meant to do that."

That's their whole plan.  That's all they got.

So to them, I say this, and I say it with all sincerity and enormous good will:

Welcome to the margins, guys.  Welcome to the side of the road.

Get comfie.

click here

An interesting question is whether those D Quislings who are coming out against the EFCA act in the Senate will allow it to come to a vote or will they support a filibuster?

Let's see if I can expose this metaphor as the tattered thing it is.

Emphasis added to the part I want to address:

" Dimon told CNBC after the meeting "we know mistakes were made" around executive compensation -- an issue which has spurred a wave of public fury across the United States, and Bank of America's Lewis said everyone understood the "golden age" of bank compensation was over. "

Oh. The Irony.

Let's see now:

A few nuggets from Wikipedia.

For the second link, the moneyquote is: "It is one of the coinage metals and formed the basis for the gold standard used before the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971."  Spelling it out: it was over longer ago than it lasted. Note also what party was in power during that time.

For the third, we can begin to compare the Golden Age of Compensation for bankers with what they don't tell us about the current Age of Compensation for bankers.

You could also check here:

http://www.thebulliondesk.com/

Or here:

http://www.metalmarkets.org.uk/metals/platinum/

The economic analysis of the current and continuing bailout is missing the critical point central to Paul Krugman's strong criticism. The bailout as is, the plan to repackage and resell the questionable sub-prime mortgage backed securities with is the an FDIC backing, is a stop loss mechanism to coax investors back to the table and restore a sense of normalcy but does not address the problem at hand but simply re-inflates the already burst bubble. 

Krugman is warning that the solution offered, as is, is simply the continued construction on the same foundation that brought on the current episode, and that the cost, both the massive increase in the debt as a portion of GDP and increased inflation, is not worth the gain. The plan builds upon the same untruth at the heart of this crisis. It has been left unchanged and the deflationary-depressionary menace has not disappeared, instead society has simply turned its head away from doom and have delayed, yet again, dealing with chronic institutional problems. 

His point is similar to that made by George Lukács. It is a call for an interpretive shift in the understanding of the capitalism system. The economy should be to the benefit of society at large not to the advantage of the few; a nation is not stomping ground of an individual but the collective work of group. Even Adam Smith realized that if the fruits of economic development were not shared, that the system was morally unsound and its stability threatened. 

Akin to how FDR declared a bank holiday, Wall Street needs to take a step back from the markets. The large investment institutions need to break out of the feedback loop they are sitting in; the total loss of the ability to hear reality above the screeching of the Dow Jones Index and the S&P 500 is prolonging the damage. A glimmer of hope can be seen if the markets reach a semblance of stability and are allowed to do so devoid of gimmicks. Allowing the larger correction to manifest itself is perhaps in the short-term more painful, it will mean coming to terms with ideological failings and the large political consequences thereof, but offers the long stability required for a healthy economy. We need to return to being a society that creates real wealth.

To do so, a re-evaluation and revolution of our system is needed. Because of the lack of a social welfare network the US is pushed to act quickly. This has allowed for some missed queues, e.g. statistically insignificant events such as the AIG bonuses to escalating into populist rage, that put a larger reformation at risk. Change will involve incorporating aspects of the European social democratic welfare model, as to provide a dampening effect of future crisis and also fix flaws that this crisis has exposed, like the education, income and healthcare gaps. The conservative voices deny this need, the recession is a psychological manifestation after all, and success results from evolutionary prowess; nature is emphasized and nurture forgotten. 

But, the security the EU feels as a result of its well planned and run welfare state is causing its leaders to delay action and forgo the use of political capital, which is as deadly as the partisan infighting now stalling the US democratic process. A tempered yet radical solution needs to be found. The State is mandated to foster the conditions for success of its citizens, by providing good education, solid infrastructure, and affordable healthcare. This does not imply coddling but the Founding Fathers did not intend a nation of sadists as the conservative wings seem to. If the state cannot provide a foundation for its citizens to build upon, then the promise of Life, Liberty and Happiness are left hallow. 

Walk with me if you will down memory lane.  Back to a time before everyone had achieved selective amnesia that allowed them to blame everyone's problems on a small group of people working to fix them.

The date is October 16, 2008.  From the office of the Attorney General of New York in a joint statement with AIG.

The meeting in the Attorney General's New York City Offices occurred one day after Attorney General Cuomo informed AIG that it must recover improper bonuses and other payments and perks from its former executives or Cuomo would do so pursuant to New York law....

....Attorney General Cuomo added, "These actions are not intended to jeopardize the hard-earned compensation of the vast majority of AIG's employees, including retention and severance arrangements, who are essential to rebuilding AIG and the economy of New York."

Now fast forward to today.  Considering these retention agreements were in place when this statement was made, what can we infer about the honesty of Mr. Cuomo's recent posturing? Can he really credibly say he didn't know and didn't approve of these agreements?  Shouldn't the AIG guys be angry at his new song?  Are they wrong to be so?

And where are the "journalists" who are supposed to have memories of events that last longer than the passing hysteria?  Like all politicians today, Cuomo is relying on the fact that "the media" can't remember what happened even last Tuesday and will accept whatever meme is handed to them on a silver platter.  And sadly, TPM did not disappoint.

No time for accuracy or nuance ... there's outrage to harnass and strawmen to burn.  New Media's finest moment, this is not.

UPDATE: Yesterday TPM told us about a letter written by an AIG insider.  They chose to excerpt a single sentence highlighting a specific AIG official.  The actual text of the letter is pretty interesting.  It can easily be construed to fit any number of popular mems rolling about; entitlement, extortion, victimization, etc.  Aside from that, there is one key assertion that pertains to Cuomo's amnesia that I found quite interesting:

1) On October 22nd 2008 (one month after bailout) Andrew Cuomo reaffirmed our right to payments under the retention plan.

2) On October 9th Bill Dooley, the head of financial services at AIG, restated that the treasury and AIG were committed to payments under the ERP.
.
.
6) AIG prepaid 30% of the ERP amount in December with their hearty thanks for a job well done. The treasury knew of and had to approve this.

Now one MAJOR caveat: this is an based on an anonymous letter (that TPM and other media outlets have chosen to accept as genuine).  But if this is indeed genuine, it indicates that not only did Cuomo know about AIG retention awards generally, he addressed the awards for AIGFP employees specifically about 2 weeks after the official joint statement.  Apparently at that point he had absolutely no problem with them.

So did the amount of these awards increase between October 2008 and March 2009?  If not, what's the deal?
.

So...what happens when you don't tell the truth under oath? You go to jail.

What happens when you don't tell the truth under oath to Congress? Generally speaking, the same thing HAS happened, in the past.

But what happens when you don't tell the truth under oath to Congress if you're an officer, appointee or nominee of the George W. Bush administration?

"Roberts didn't tell us the truth," Reid said. "At least [Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.] told us who he was, which made it different. But -- you know, we're stuck with those two young men, and we're going to try to change that by having some more moderates in the federal court system. As time goes on, I think that will happen."

If the Senate is led by Harry Reid, not a goddamned thing. Nothing. Zip. Ze-ro. The sun goes down and another day goes by; that's all. There are apparently a myriad of Bush crimes under the umbrella of Harry Reid's idea of what a 'nuclear option' contains.

Via Adam Green at Kos, David Gregory insists that populist rage at Wall Street is rooted in Americans' lack of understanding of the financial crisis. So we're just mad because we're stupid.

Gregory is right, of course, that the problems associated with the financial system are byzantine. I certainly don't understand all of the issues involved. But there's plenty of anger from guys with more Nobel Prizes under their belts than Gregory -- like Joe Stiglitz, for example, who says the Geithner plan amounts to "robbery of the American people." Yet Gregory can't seem to fathom that citizens might have a legitimate reason to be pissed off.

And that, indeed, is is one of the fundamental problems with the mainstream media. The grown-ups -- the Serious People -- are perceived to be the ones who think things are basically fine. Maybe some modest tweaking is required here and there, and maybe policymakers should incentivize this or that a little more. But there's nothing to get that worked up about.

By contrast, anyone who roundly rejects the conventional wisdom in DC -- whether it's about the Iraq invasion, Bush-era war crimes, or financial policy -- is something else entirely: the Shrill Person. And such a person is not to be taken seriously.

In Christianity there's a concept known as being "in the world but not of it." It means understanding that we operate in a fallen world yet trying to keep our mind on God's will rather than conforming to the world's fallenness. Journalists are supposed to have an analogous philosophy when it comes to covering politics. They're supposed to get close enough to the action to report on it intelligently but avoid internalizing the values of the establishment. Indeed, TPMDC has a slogan that nicely (if perhaps unintentionally) appropriates the Christian phrasing: "In it, but not of it."

At the big media outlets, however, that's simply not how it works. Major political reporters are as much a part of the DC establishment as the politicians are. That doesn't make them bad people. It just means they accept the same basic frame of reference as the people they cover. And that makes it impossible for them to see much of what's wrong with Washington, let alone report on it.

So maybe we are stupid, from Gregory's vantage point. We just can't understand how silly our "populist anger" really is.

This post first appeared at jesselava.com.

Oh.  Good.  GOD.

This could be the most disgusting attack ad I've ever seen.  It's set to be released today.

And you know the funniest part of it?  It didn't come from some whacko crazy 527 group.  It's directly from the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Where's Keith Olbermann when you need him?  Here's hoping he names the f**kers who made this ad the Worst People In The World.

Thanks to Ticia for her enduring faith in love.

From a response to Ticia's recent blog post Three Step Dance:

Celtic indeed. Here's a Celtic accompaniment back to you, and this one's special:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSrbwmEw2VU

May just have to put this one on a main posting. Wouldn't have looked for it unless you'd started this remembrance with your post about love.

The American meritocracy has deteriorated into a two-tiered society more akin to the feudal hierarchy of Medieval Europe than its own self-image as a land of opportunity.

The best of the brightest of the nation and more than one generation have been blinded by the temptation of greed and the loss of perspective, brainwashed by 90 hour weeks and paychecks often upwards of six digits. With hedonism unregulated guiding the financial collapse, the Nation has been brought to its knees to await the death-blow.

Standing in the background Henry Paulson and Goldman Sachs pull the strings of the greatest heist since the noble knights of the 4^th Crusade escaped Constantinople with the last treasures of Ancient Rome, redistributing the wealth of a nation to whom it deems fit, sticking the taxpayer with the bill, while letting the citizen sink into a pit of despair, out of work and ever poorer.

The banks were not asked to generate false assets transferring paper in an arbitrary manner from one pile to the next, whose success was tracked by some index bound to a nation's mood. Instead of the systematic shorting of their own country's industry, betting on failure, they were asked to facilitate the creation of generational and societal wealth with the relaxed rules and freer markets that were so desperately lobbied for.

The country has been fleeced and the thieves are demanding and receiving multi-million dollar paydays so to be retained and rewarded for the Great Robbery. The financial industry, at a minimum the administrators and executives of the collective group, should be facing a life in prison for reducing the coffers of the United States into nothing, in lieu of the luxury and expanded political influence rewarded following their financial failure.

Since the great egalitarian experiment has been destroyed and morphed into a dystopia of feudal lords and serfs, perhaps the antiquated notions of populist justice should be revived. Tar and Feather the bastards and drag them through the streets; start with Joe Cassano and Henry Paulson the architects of the damn rouse. Obama warns of governing out of anger, but I say one shouldn't be pleasant when being pissed on.

Our two and a half heroes proceeded toward the castle on the hill.  Sir Tristan noted that although it was growing dark, he could see the top most turret of the castle just above the horizon.

Elfin would have pointed it our first, but he was er...closer to the ground and the horizon for him was shorter in distance.

They reached the front gate of the fortress in the dead of night. I like to say 'dead of night'. But what does that mean? Is there a life of night? I mean, one as talented as myself would surely be the life of the party, as long as it was not the republican party. But 'dead of night' I think means that it is real dark and spooky like and eerie things may occur at any time. Kind of neat huh. I mean when you are safe in your apartment and everything.

I have an idea, Sir Quinn said. We shall go around to the side where they let the peasants in to clean up the manure and stuff. We shall park our steeds just over there and cover ourselves with the blankets. And Elfin will aid us in our disguise because when the guards see us they will immediately figure: How dangerous could this threesome be when they bring an elf with them?

Tristan thought and thought.  Good idea, but let us find some buckets on the way and carry them to further aide us in our ruse? And you Quinn must do the talking, I want you to go back to your old brogue and sound more the peasant.

They tied their two and half steeds and stole around the side of the structure. Pails all over the place. They carefully picked them up, each taking two and finally found the entry to the stables.

As predicted there were two ale swigging guards, deep into their cups as it were and the pair stumbled out to greet the trio.

WHAT'S ALL THIS THEN?

We have come for the pailing, like we always do at this time.

What pailing?

Oh good, after all these here years, we are finally free Jacob and Tom. Why these two mugs do not wish us to clean excess manure tonight. We shall go home and party early and....

WAIT, WAIT, WAIT.  All righty then. Uh..er...we were busy on other matters and forgot the crew. You must proceed. Now if this here is Jacob and that is Tom who art thou?

Why Shiteface you mole. Who else would it be?

Good, good, good then. Proceed.

Tristan and Quinn and Elfin tossed their blankets and their pails after they had meandered through the stables and found a back staircase and began to climb as surreptitiously as they could. They climbed and they climbed following Elfin who knew the way to the damsel's quarters.

And they climbed and they climbed and they climbed.  

God I am glad I quit smoking last month, gasped Quinn.

Tristan blessed himself. As they came to the entrance, the grand doorway to the quarters they heard some talking and stopped. Tristan peer in and saw Thera standing over the Bastard knight who was on his knees.

Somehow the movers and shakers of all stripes like yourself seem to forget the power of the truth and what it means to humanity.  Tyrants like yourself just tell 'all out' lies. Right and left, within days, sometimes even hours, you powerful folks have told lies, even to a compliant press, and think that you will never be exposed - by bloggers - often just by using the google.

I guess when you get to a really powerful position in government or finance, you've been able to fool or steamroll a lot of people along the way.  Maybe those under you or in thrall to your power have kowtowed and given you a sense of invincibility.  So maybe you delude yourself, thinking that you can do whatever you want or talk your way into or out of anything.  That no one will question you - ever - and that will be the end of it.  Maybe you get so powerful you think your words will trump actual reality.

What other explanation is there for this series of bluffs, threats, and lies conducted publicly by blaggarts like yourself (and others) - who are then exposed by bloggers (even comedians) digging into the facts?  Facts that newspapers apparently don't always check anymore.   Facts that are right there at your fingertips if you just use da google.  Or if not yet on the web, soon will be - as bloggers echo across the web demanding that the facts be made public.

Think about it.  Will you people not learn?  Have you not noticed that your torture was exposed?  Your lawyers try to make poorly reasoned torture memos, thinking you can cover up your sins.  But grand organizations like the Red Cross make secret reports public.  That if you lie to Dave Letterman, he's gonna expose you that very night?  That Jon Stewart can do investigative journalism with the best of them.  That telling lies about "the bridge to Camelot" and the fake "true story" about Katrina make  politicians like you  look like a dolt.  After all that, do they think we are not paying attention to this financial mess?

Have you really so convinced yourself that you - and only you - are the best and the brightest - and therefore entitled to pull the wool over the eyes of the rest of us?  And that we won't find you out?

And you wonder, you ask me why your nightmares will not cease. Why your heart burn will not go away even though you take the best of medicines for acid reflux disorder? And why you find your bed so wet every morning.

IT IS YOUR DISGRACEFUL CONDUCT THAT HAS DONE ALL OF THIS.

Running around torturing people. Beating the peasants. THAT'S NOT RIGHT. And being so unkind to your horses. THAT'S NOT RIGHT. And calling the greatest of kings, my King Arthur those terrible names. THAT'S JUST NOT RIGHT.

Please. Please. Enough. I give up. You are so right. I have been so wrong. Cried the Bastard Knight.

And do not think that you can hide behind that excuse that your parents never married either. And I have just begun so sit there...or kneel there...and listen up.

Look, I may not be a financial wizard but I sure as heck can spot a bunch of liars when they're doing it right in front of my face!   I'm beginning to think that some of these folks that work their way into the board rooms and the CEO offices and sometimes even the Treasury Dept or the Dept of Justice - and god knows even the presidency and the vice-presidency - are so drunk on the illusion of the power they wield, so intoxicated with their own ability to weave financial and judicial webs - that they simply haven't noticed the power of the web.  And the power that the web gives the people.

It would be laughable, if this were not so deadly serious.

The AIG fiasco is just one example.  Consider how many people, inside and outside that company, have tried to hide things - unsuccessfully.  First they thought they could hide their fraudulent financial fluff.  Then they wanted to hide where the bail-out money went.  Next they tried the bonus bamboozle.  And then it's "Dump on Dodd" day.   So they spread a story that Dodd did it, but within hours,  that's exposed as a lie too!

Remember the Bridge to Camelot?  And the person who told the lie about it over and over?  That lie got exposed right away - but the person kept right on telling it, even after admitting it was a lie, right on the tv!   And that was just one of her lies - that got exposed.   

Remember that hapless "rebuttal" to the State of the Union?   Bad enough that the speech became a running joke.  But why did you have to lie on top of giving a bad speech?  Naturally, in no time at all, his made-up story,  which he swore was true, was exposed as lie.

Ok.  We've got the picture.  Now why in the heck do you powerful people not get the picture?

Powerful folks, I'm gonna give you a piece of advice:

The bloggers are sitting in front of computers.  Right there, on their own screens, that are right in front of their eyes, they have all the tools to find out your lies.  They can google.  They can email people, asking for information.  They can phone people, even while looking at the computer.  They can share everything they find out - very quickly - over these same screens that are sitting right in front of them.  Comedians are making use of things like this now.  Congress is paying attention to the web.  And even the newspapers have been forced to attend to blogs.

    Message:   Tell the truth!   Or we will find out!


We are living through a huge transformation.  We on the web are part of it.  Therefore to us it's clear as day.  But it would appear that many in powerful places haven't yet realized how very exposed they are.  Honestly, I find it hard to believe!  But there it is....

Oh, I am so sorry, the Bastard Knight said with tears running down his ugly cheeks. They were all a part of it you know, it was not just me. All my knights kept quiet all these years. And the Bards and the Heralds all were complicit in what I tried to do. And should not all of this guilt be spread around. And please, oh please, keep those bloggers far away from me. I have never seen one of those there computers you keep talking about, I know they do no good to the likes of me. Oh please, I give up. I will change my ways.

Tristan looked at his two companions. What the f....is all this then? Q, have you ever seen anything like this? Who is this Letterman guy anyway?

Quinn responded: Thera has been to lands we have not seen and experienced things we shall never experience. Ours is not to wonder why, ours is to take advantage of this and rearrange some things in this castle.

With that the two heroes entered the room.

Thera, we are here to save you from this monster, the Bastard Knight and to do right. We are from the Court of King Arthur and I am Tristan and this is Sir Quinn.

ELFIN. There you are. Oh Elfin. You came to save me from a fate worse than, as it were. Come to me my precious.  And with that Elfin ran to Thera and she picked him up and hugged him.

And with that, the horrible Bastard Knight reformed.  He rearranged the castle. And he went out and found his parents and made them get married so he would not be a bastard anymore.

And Frederick the Great, his new name, proceeded through life without the lies-although always looking over his shoulder for those damn pc's and those dangerous bloggers.

And Frederick quit beating the peasants and the horses. And he developed a new way of spreading the wealth in his kingdom.

And he offered his fief and loyalty to King Arthur. And he joined the Democratic Party and fought injustice where ever he found it. And Thera stayed for awhile to help make these changes and to make sure that Frederick did not relapse.
Oh and Frederick quit wetting his bed and he was cured of his acid reflux disease and his lumbago went away also.

And everybody kind of lived happily ever after.

 

Clump awoke and spit out a few duck feathers. Sleeping with ducks has its discontents and Clump lived in an age before it was discovered that it was best to put the duck's feathers in a sack and thus invent the pillow rather than simply try sleeping with a living duck. He sat up in his pile of straw and squinted as a sunbeam shown through his roof and onto his thick eyebrow. "In spite of all I have again awoke" he scowled in a tone mocking the highly self-important oaths spoken by Liege Lords at public affairs. "And may the mule's rear that stares at me in my noble doorway symbolize my earnest dedication to my rank and duty" he continued. "Freely as a Freedman I sally forth" And with that Clump stood, slapped the mule's rump sending it bellowing out of the hut, and scratched his own buttocks. In such fashion did the ordinary man in the age of knights and chivalry begin his day.

Clump shifted his rough tunic from loose about his shoulders to more tightly bound with a single pull on a leather thong, this being the sum and substance of his morning toilette. He stepped out of his mud hut and into the commons, a circular clearing around which stood in humble slouches the similar abodes of his villein neighbors. In the center of the circle a fire burned and several men and women were warming themselves, fussing with a boiling pot of some kind of tea or just standing still, struggling to grapple with the awakening consciousness that is the lot of all peasants in all times. Clump grabbed a green onion and began to chew, hoping to replace the flavor of duck that currently inhabited his mouth.

"Morning Clump," one of the elders gummed, his teeth having fled long ago along with his youth.

"Morning Throd," Clump returned.

Several other "Ugh's" and "Morn's" rose from the assemblage, intoned in that guttural timbre of their shared Germanic mother tongue. Clump acknowledged in kind.

"Un Moor Balott Clump." someone said.

"Oh my god. Un Moor Balott" Clump thought to himself. Suddenly Clump longed to be back in his hut, laying in his straw and clutching the duck, dreaming of great mountains of potatoes and onions. "Un Moor Balott."

The mere sound of that phrase was like a dull pain in the knee or elbow, like the pain that comes with too many hours in the fields rooting and planting and otherwise tending the earth. Everyone in the village had this same reaction and so this phrase was never intoned except on the actual day of the ritual. In these times the ritual was being observed more and more frequently but still no one uttered the phrase except on the day itself.

It had not always been so. Clump remembered that his father's father had spoken of a "Balott" but it seemed as though the memory was of a happier ritual. And the father's father had described only one Great Balott, not the serial repetitions of the now times. Clump's father had spoken of three or four re-enactments of the Great Balott which in his father's time were called "Un Balott." These rituals were not as happy as the original but were unremarkable compared to the Great Balott and the details had been easily lost to memory. It was Clump's fate that observance of the ritual was becoming a commonplace, and thus the villeins called it "Un Moor Balott."

The contemporary ritual was not rigidly proscribed but its major elements were always the same. First the King would herald an upcoming Balott. The day of the observance was named in the herald. The place was always the same, the great open plain that stood before the King's fortress. The peasants were commanded to assemble on the plain at the hour of maximum discomfort, the high hour of the day. Of course the day's work had to be compressed into the few morning hours that were free before this convocation formed. So the crowd once assembled was already tired and shall I say acquiescent in mood thinking as much about an afternoon nap as about the goings on right in front of them.

First to emerge from the fortress were the well to do merchants and highborn relations of the real princes. Dressed in finery that glinted in the sunlight and rustled with soft sounds never heard in the village commons, they strode in a long procession before the assemblage. The crowd seemed to shrink in size as the shoulders of the peasants shrunk down and any stiffness in the back was replaced by the curved bow of some hapless supplicant.

Next came the knights with their shinning armaments. Sunbeams danced from their swords and dotted the crowd with speckles of yellow and white. Such a show of force of arms had the effect of shaping the crowd as if an invisible fence had been erected around it. The crowd was now still and in the shape of a trapezoid with smoothed sides.

Finally the King, flanked by the princes, emerged. They took up a line in front of the wellborn and the knights and, as the king stood in the center in silence, the princes began to speak, all at once. Their speaking intonation was soft, lacking the native guttural harshness. And the words were soft with endings that drifted off like "ience" and "ent" and "oise" and "illions." Some gestured as if to give a warning. Others showed open hands as if asking for help. Yet others wrung their hands with anxiety or gripped their foreheads as if in deep thought. Clump, like all the others in the crowd, could make no sense of the words but the message was clear, and the same as it always was with this ritual. Some great danger threatened the realm. It was very complicated and even mysterious. There was much cause for worry.

This display went on, as it always did in the ritual, for some time until the king stepped forward, raising his hand. The princes fell silent. Facing the princes and in a voice loud enough to be heard by all in the crowd, the king inquired "Un Moor Balott?" The princes responded in an affirmative tone "Un Moor Balott" The king then turned to the crowd and again asked "Un Moor Balott?" The crowd knew its part. As one they responded like the princes "Un Moor Balott." This call and response between the king and the mob was repeated three times. Then the king raised both hands and this time in his own affirmation said "Un Moor Balott." And it was over. The rulers disappeared into the fortress and the ruled turned and began their journey back home.

As he walked home, Clump wondered about this now oft repeated ritual. "What is the point?" he thought. If they want a "Balott" then have a "Balott," one big one and get it over with, as it had been with his father's father. Why serial "Balotts," and why always Un Moor Balott. "You are right" Clump heard someone behind him say. It seems Clump had been thinking out loud. He turned around and it was one of his fellow villagers, Krug. "There should be a great Balott like in the before times. The gods will not take kindly to being nagged repeatedly. The outcome of all these incantations may be very bad for us all."

Clump wasn't sure if Krug was right or the princes were right or the king was right but Clump was certain that his daily work would remain unchanged and that soon again there would be "Un Moor Balott." Such was the wisdom of the ordinary man in the age of knights and chivalry.

(A fable in the manner of another writer here at TPM, with respect.)

President Obama said this morning that the United States didn't "choose" to fight the war in Afghanistan.  I think we did.  It may have been the right choice.  I certainly thought so at the time.  But it was a choice.  No choice means no other reasonable options.  We had another reasonable option though.  We could have said, "We weren't attacked by Afghanistan, we were attacked by crminals operating under Afghanistan's protection."  Then we might have had a different response.  No matter, the choice was made.

And we're making choices now.

In the face of all our problems at home I'm having a tough time getting behind more money and more troops going to Afghanistan.  I was surprised this morning when Obama said that 2008 was the deadliest of the war for US soldiers.  I have to admit, when I supported the war back in 2001 I never thought it would lead to an occupation going into its 8th year.

Where's the exit strategy?

Beyond that, and probably more important -- we can't fix our economy if we continue to allow our military to dominate our budgets.  We can't trim military spending while leaving a huge force in Iraq and calling it a withdrawal and by increasing our military exposure to Afghanistan.  It's time to bring troops home and declare ourselves at peace with the rest of the world.  Our economy needs a peace dividend.   This occupation just isn't vital to our interests.

Haven't we heard this song before? It sure looks like the people who already control our healthcare system are framing the biggest issues of the present healthcare reform debate.

From the back rooms to the committee hearings to the White House summits to the front pages of the newspapers, the demands of the insurance industry are given enormous deference and accommodation.

Is it fear of Harry and Louise, the insurance campaign that some believe torpedoed the muddled Clinton health proposal? Is it the considerable influence of insurance industry contributions in the pockets of many legislators?

Or perhaps it's the caution or lack of will of some liberal groups to press for more fundamental reform--such as a single payer/expanded Medicare for all approach--that permits the industry and its conservative champions in Congress to dominate the terrain.

There's two major indications of this trend.

First,  who is in the room where the key decisions are being made. As Consumer Watchdog put it:

First we heard that consumer advocates had been left out of closed-door negotiations orchestrated by senate staffers to formulate health care reform legislation. Then, consumer advocates were left off the invite list to the White House summit on health care reform.  The third strike came when no consumer voices were heard at a U.S. Senate Heath, Education, Labor and Pensions committee round table discussion about insurance reforms in the forthcoming national health care reform effort.  Three of the seven panel members were from the insurance industry.  A forth panelist represents an insurer-friendly think tank.

The second key sign is what the chattering class defines as the contours of the debate.

In a telling piece earlier this week, the Washington Post's Ruth Marcus called the present moment "crunch time" in which only five major pieces remain to be resolved.

Piece One: Should there be a public insurance option?
Piece Two: How to pay for the program? Specifically, should employer-provided health insurance, no matter how generous, continue to be treated as tax-free income?
Piece Three: Should individuals be required to purchase insurance?
Piece Four: What mechanism should there be to control costs?
Piece Five: How much muscle should Democrats use to get health-care reform done? The temptation is to use special budget procedures known as reconciliation that would allow Senate Democrats to approve health reform with just 51 votes. House leaders, fed up with being held hostage by Senate gridlock, are pushing this approach.

On each of the policy points here, the insurance industry and its defenders are on the offensive. And on every point, major concessions that will appease the insurers, but do little to rein in skyrocketing costs or protect families, lurk.  

Imagine a scenario in which the bill that finally emerges includes a mandate that all individuals must buy private insurance, but there are no uniform standards, widely varying prices for coverage depending on where you live or your age, no real controls on what the insurance companies can charge in premiums, co-pays, deductibles and other out of pocket costs. If that sounds a lot like the badly flawed Massachusetts model, it should.

If you get health coverage at work, your benefits are now taxed, a clear incentive for your employer to reduce or drop coverage, pushing more people into the still poorly regulated cutthroat private market.

And even if proponents win on the much debated public plan option, don't expect it to solve the problem, as Physicians for a National Health Program leaders David Himmelstein and Steffi Woolhandler point out :

 1. It forgoes at least 84 percent of the administrative savings available through single payer. The public plan option would do nothing to streamline the administrative tasks (and costs) of hospitals, physicians offices, and nursing homes, which would still contend with multiple payers, and hence still need the complex cost tracking and billing apparatus that drives administrative costs. These unnecessary provider administrative costs account for the vast majority of bureaucratic waste. Hence, even if 95 percent of Americans who are currently privately insured were to join the public plan (and it had overhead costs at current Medicare levels), the savings on insurance overhead would amount to only 16 percent of the roughly $400 billion annually achievable through single payer -- not enough to make reform affordable.

2. A quarter century of experience with public/private competition in the Medicare program demonstrates that the private plans will not allow a level playing field. Despite strict regulation, private insurers have successfully cherry picked healthier seniors, and have exploited regional health spending differences to their advantage. They have progressively undermined the public plan -- which started as the single payer for seniors and has now become a funding mechanism for HMOs -- and a place to dump the unprofitably ill. A public plan option does not lead toward single payer, but toward the segregation of patients, with profitable ones in private plans and unprofitable ones in the public plan.

Yet only on the final piece identified by the Post's Marcus, process, does it look like the insurers and the right are being aggressively challenged. Perhaps what may be most telling is the gushing this week over the non-concession by the insurance industry that it will be willing to end its immoral practice of denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions if it gets everything else it wants. 

In his town meeting yesterday in which the public got to ask the questions,  President Obama was asked about single] payer, and while demurring that we have "a legacy, a set of institutions that aren't that easily transformed" showed that he understands a central tenet of what is clearly right about single payer.

"A lot of people think that in order to get universal health care, it means that you have to have what's called a single-payer system of some sort. And so Canada is the classic example: Basically, everybody pays a lot of taxes into the health care system, but if you're a Canadian, you're automatically covered. And so you go in -- England has a similar -- a variation on this same type of system. You go in and you just say, "I'm sick," and somebody treats you, and that's it."

The challenge to the rest of us is to show that legacy has collapsed and no longer works for the uninsured or the insured, and move the debate beyond what the insurers want to what the rest of us need.

Recently the GOP has been making lots of scary noise about Mr. Obama's recovery, budget, and health care initiatives.  They are throwing words like Socialism, Marxism, and Communism around like it was the second coming of Joe McCarthy.

 

We should not dismiss these warnings.  For we have already become much like the USSR.  We are fighting two wars based not on dire necessity, but on promoting our ideology.  Our current military spending currently exceeds that of the rest of the world combined.  The current economic crisis shows that we are on the verge of spending ourselves out of existence, and THAT is the way in which we are coming to mirror our cold war nemesis.

 

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President Obama announced that we would add 4,000 more troops to the 17,000  he already ordered to Afghanistan.

 

In his address to Congress, he also announced that he would restore honest and transparent budgeting to pay for our military commitments.  "This budget," Obama said,  ....  for the first time, includes the full cost of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. For seven years, we have been a nation at war. No longer will we hide its price."

 

Obama's declaration was a clear rejection of George Bush's supplemental off-budget appropriations designed to make it hard to oppose without being accused of abandoning the troops.  Given estimates that the Iraq war may ultimately become the most expensive in U.S. history, Bush's approach was fiscal irresponsibility wrapped in post-9/11 "yellow ribbon" patriotism. It saddled us with massive deficits and avoided the hard choices of balancing national priorities.

 

Even worse, the Bush wartime tax-cuts represented an outrageous exception in American history.  An Urban Institute analysis of war finance in U.S. history claimed Bush's tax cuts, while a nation at war, "constituted an extraordinary episode in the history of war finance."  Never before had we sent troops to battle without raising the revenues needed to fight that war.

 

Now with new leadership in the White House we have an opportunity to change how we go to war and how we pay for it.

 

Last July, a bipartisan commission led by former Secretaries of State James Baker and Warren Christopher called for a strengthening of the 1973 War Powers Act to give Congress greater legislative authority in the process of committing U.S. troops. The proposal would require the President consult with Congress before deploying U.S. troops into "significant armed conflict" lasting, or expected to last, more than a week.  Congress would have 30 days to approve or pass a joint resolution of disapproval.  The disapproval would have to withstand a presidential veto.  

 

The War Powers Act, passed over Richard Nixon's veto in response to the Vietnam War, has been largely ignored by presidents ever since.  The Commission's proposal would be the positive first step towards more restoring meaningful Congressional authority. But, unfortunately, the fear of being branded as soft on terrorism or not supporting our troops may make even this legislative power still too weak to matter in the face of a presidential veto.

 

Add that to the unbending Republican rejection of any tax increase, no matter how important the purpose or need, and we could be heading once again into a war we don't want without the money to fight it.

 

We need an entirely new approach of sending our troops to battle that ensures the wars we wage our truly in our national interest, that we actually have the resources we need and that taps into an enduring American tradition of shared sacrifice when needed and when asked.

 

We should simply modify the War Powers Act so that every commitment of 50,000 US troops or more would automatically - without legislative action - trigger a broad, progressively levied surtax to pay for the costs of war.  Taking this step acknowledges the needs of wars that are unanticipated (they all are,) costly (they all are) and have unpredictable paths (they all do.)     The tax would sunset when all costs are paid. 

 

An automatic War Surtax would ensure we have the resources to give our troops what they need to succeed and would guarantee that every American does their part, not just those that are being asked to sacrifice their lives on the battlefield.   

 

America has a long history of presidential leadership and congressional action to increase revenues in times of war.   Likewise, Americans have been repeatedly willing to a sacrifice for national interests. For example:

 

·         The Civil War was paid for by America's first income tax that generated $55 million during the war.  Paying income tax to support the war was viewed as an act of patriotism.

 

·         A federal excise tax on telephone was established in 1898 during the Spanish- American war. It was repealed after the war, but reestablished or raised during WWI, WWI, Korean War and the Vietnam War.

 

·         The War Revenue Act of 1917 imposed a progressive surtax on the incomes of most Americans.

 

·         The Excess Profits Tax, a predominantly wartime fiscal instrument, was designed primarily to capture wartime profits that exceeded normal peacetime profits.  These taxes were used extensively in WWI, WWI and the Korean War.   They were repealed after each war.

 

Not all of these taxes were met with wild enthusiasm but popular reluctance to higher taxes, and in some cases war tax resistance, was tempered by a sense of patriotic duty and shared sacrifice.  "It takes taxes to beat the Axis" declared the narrator to Donald Duck in a Disney short film produced during World War II.

Mere reluctance became Orwellian resistance in the Bush years.  "Nothing is more important in the face of war than cutting taxes," House Majority Leader Tom DeLay declared in March 2003 as we went to war.

The Iraq war would have ended a lot sooner - and might have never started - if we were all asked to pay a monthly surtax that brought the costs and impacts of war into our living rooms as regularly as it is in homes of families with sons and daughters at war.

 

Simply stated, it should never be easier for elected representatives to send American troops to battle than to tax Americans to pay for it. And it shouldn't be easy for any of us to ignore the sacrifices our troops and their families make every day while at war.

 

An automatic war-tax would insulate decisions to go to war from election cycle tax politics. It would commit and connect every American to our national purpose and guarantee we have the funds to support our troops on the ground. It would guarantee that we don't continue the post-Vietnam tradition of disgracefully neglecting the needs of veterans when they come home with the social and physical damage created by war.  It would mean that we wouldn't have to starve our schools, roads, health care and rob our future with crushing national debt. And it would cause us all to think a little harder about why and when we should go to a war. 

 

 

 

Your friends with their fancy persuasions won't admit that they're part of a scheme But I can't help but have my suspicions 'cause I ain't quite as dumb as I seem...

These corporate registrations raise some questions about how Bernie's business operated over the years.  

This week, Bernie's former messenger, William Nasi, told us that Bernie's father, Ralph, a former plumber, and his mother, Sylvia, got into the investment business in the '50s. Sylvia Madoff was cited by the SEC in 1964 for failing to renew her brokerage license. At the time she was doing business as Gibraltar Securities which does not appear to have been registered with New York Secretary of State. But two other corporate registrations raise the possibility she registered the company elsewhere.

Gibraltar Securities Co.(Inc.) was registered in New Jersey in 1968 and Gibraltar Securities of Florida Inc. was registered in Florida in 1970. Unfortunately, the names of the officers and directors are not available.

Saul Alpern, Ruth Madoff's father and an accountant, helped Bernie get the investment business started in the early '60s. After he moved to Florida, Alpern apparently continued in the investment business when, at the age of 80, he registered Onondaga Investment Co., Clinton Investment Co. and Sheraton Investment Corp. in 1984. His business partner  was Bruce M. Stiglitz, an L.A. tax attorney who specialized in the movie industry.  

Did Saul Alpern put the investment companies together or was he a front for Bernie or someone else?

Cohn, Delaire & Madoff, Inc. at 1 East 57th St., NYC,  was registered in New York State on 6/6/1986 and dissolved by proclamation on  6/24/1992.  The "Cohn" is almost certainly Maurice Jay Cohn, a long-time business associate of Bernie's who owns a piece of Cohmad Securities. Alvin Delaire is a long-time associate of both Cohn and Madoff who works for Cohmad.  

The date of the Cohn, Delaire & Madoff dissolution is significant because within three months of the dissolution, the SEC opened an official investigation into Avellino & Bienes for selling more than  $440 million in unregistered securities funneled to Bernie. At the same time, Steven Mendelow and Edward Glantz were also investigated for selling $88 million in unregistered securities funneled from their firm, Telfran Associates Ltd. to Bernie.

If Cohn, Delaire & Madoff was another feeder fund or in some other way linked to the investment scheme, it may have been shut down in anticipation of the SEC investigation. If that is true, Maurice Cohn and Alvin Delaire would appear to be more directly involved in the scheme than previously known.

On 12/4/2000, Bernard L. Madoff Securities LLC was registered in New York and Shana Madoff was listed as the contact. Previously, the company had been Bernard L. Madoff, a sole proprietorship. On 12/21/2000, Madoff Brokerage & Trading Technologies LLC was also registered and Peter Madoff was listed as the contact.  

At the same time, Bernie personally loaned $37 million to his London company, Madofff International Securities Ltd., moved to a bigger office and increased the staff to about 30 employees. A year later, he loaned another $25 million to MISL.

On paper, it looks like Bernie Madoff restructured and expanded the scope of his operations in late 2000, a theory that is reinforced by yesterday's news that the London company appears to be involved in the fraud.  

   

Originally posted at RACblog.

The Midwest seems like an unlikely place to set an example for peace in the Middle East, but that's exactly what the Omaha, Neb., faith community seeks to do. Tomorrow night, Omaha's Tri-Faith Initiative will host "Dinner in Abraham's Tent: Conversations on Peace," an interreligious event that will kick off plans to build a joint campus that will be home to three houses of worship - a synagogue, a church and a mosque. The entire event will be webcast live and will be available for viewing for the next 30 days.

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Nate Silver's got the exclusive (how does he do it) The Real Republican Road to Recovery (see map below). 

According to Nate, there are still some problems to be worked out such as which states to eliminate; North Dakota, Idaho, and Delaware are on the chopping block (I've heard that the more militant wing of the caucus are pushing the strategy to eliminate the entire North East, except for Wall Street, of course). 

If you have any further information on this brilliant but yet secret Republican plan please put them in your comment.

And, if you like what you see, please recommend me...

The violent drug war raging in Mexico has serious implications for the organized crime threat here in the United States.  From the drugs to weapons smuggling and trafficking, the Cartels involved in the fighting are operating in dozens of US cities and are involved in violent crime and even kidnapping.  These are troubling developments but the Obama administration is meeting it with a strong and sweeping response.  Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano testified before congress on Wednesday that more agents would be sent to the border and that further options (like national guard) were on the table for security purposes.  Furthermore, the State Department, DOJ and the Whitehouse have been heavily focused in recent weeks and are coordinating with the Mexican government on dealing with the main problems.  Our drug policies and also gun laws are under consideration for debate in the coming weeks which will be interesting and important.

On C-Span this week, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) agreed with a caller who said the country is descending into "fascism."  In response, Cantor said the public is "finally waking up" to this and that the GOP is trying to bring President Obama "back into the mainstream."  Funny, but earlier conservative leaders called Obama a socialist and a communist. Preceding Cantor were Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN),  Rep. Zach Wamp (R-TN) and the leader of the GOP, hate-talker Rush Limbaugh, tagged Obama as a devote of Marx and Lenin.

It seems our friends on the Right need a primer on the political spectrum and political nomenclature.

But first, let's dispense with some minor silliness.  Obama and his party won a crushing election victory, Obama maintains extremely high approval ratings among a strong majority of Americans; Cantor's party and candidate took an election beating and enjoy the approval of a very small minority:  By definition, Obama is in the mainstream and Cantor is not.

Now, for the labeling:  To make your attack-by-label effective, you really must have at least a middle school understanding of the words you're using.  You have to know, for instance, the difference between Karl Marx and Groucho Marx -- otherwise, you make yourself look stupid, impotent and callow, instead of just impotent and callow.  

Most 8th graders have access to a Mirriam-Webster dictionary, so let's use the definitions from there, just so we don't go over the heads of the folks in the GOP.

Fascism:

"a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition."

(Just for grins, here's a video from Encyclopedia Britannica that will illuminate for you which end of the American political spectrum is akin to fascism.)

You can tell that fascism is a wee bit different from socialism and communism by taking a little peek at the grand daddy of all fascists, Benito Mussolini.  Benny had a private army, called Blackshirts, that he used to attack, imprison and kill socialists and communists.  He helped his fellow fascist, Adolf Hitler (his was a race-based a fascism) both invade France and support the fascist "nationalist" side in the Spanish Civil War (which made him a new fascist friend, Generalissimo Franco).  Another hint:  In 1945, Benny and his mistress, Clara Petacci, were dragged out and lynched by the local communists.

But, in case the distinction isn't clear yet, let's go back to the dictionary.

Socialism:

1. any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods

2 a: a system of society or group living in which there is no private property b: a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state

3. a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done

Communism:

1 a: a theory advocating elimination of private property b: a system in which goods are owned in common and are available to all as needed 
2capitalized a: a doctrine based on revolutionary Marxian socialism and Marxism-Leninism that was the official ideology of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics b: a totalitarian system of government in which a single authoritarian party controls state-owned means of production c: a final stage of society in Marxist theory in which the state has withered away and economic goods are distributed equitably d: communist systems collectively

Now the political spectrum is a complex, layered and nuanced thing, but we won't burden you with all that just yet.  In the most simple left-right terms, communism is the far left, socialism is left, liberalism/progressivism is center-left, while conservatism is right and fascism and feudalism are far right.

See?  Obama can't be fascist, socialist and communist all at once.  (Perhaps next week we'll show how he's not any of them.)

While we're on the subject, the Right has also been equating Obama with Adolf Hitler and, with a twist of historical revision, claiming the Nazi's were on the Left.  (Here's Jon Stewart's hilarious video on the subject)  Right.  Next thing you know, they'll be telling us the Earth is only 6,000 years old.

The "Nazi's were Lefties" meme is based entirely on the words "socialist" and "worker's" in the Nazi name - the National Socialist German Worker's Party.  The American conservatives who push this line of thought seem to believe that Hitler wouldn't make up a name that was less than honest to draw in support from people who would otherwise oppose him.  I don't share that faith in Adolf.

In fact, as early as 1927, there were bloody confrontations between Nazis and communists in Berlin. By 1933, Hitler had taken office and begun restricting civil rights restrictions - a decidedly Rightwing goal (some econo-Lefties have also attacked civil liberties, such as in Cuba and China).  The Reichstag fire gave Hitler an great excuse to both suspend civil liberties and paint the communists, whom Hitler equated with the Jews of Europe, as dangerous. Hitler had the communist leaders arrested, and because the major communist leaders were in jail or under investigation, the Nazis were able to take control of the legislature and set the rules in their favor.  Dachau opened that year --  the first concentration camp built in Germany -- and the first people in it were mainly socialists and communists.

Kinda strange that these "Lefty" Nazis were so dead set against the commies and socialists, eh?

Not long after taking office, the Nazis replaced the labor leaders, imprisoning some, with Nazis.  They also controlled wages and forbade strikes.

Kinda funny how these "Lefty" Nazis were so hard on labor leaders, eh?

Hitler was equated with the divine, and complete, unquestioning obedience, was due Der Fuhrer.  The press was tightly controlled and banned books were the fuel of public burnings.  That fits pretty well with Rightwing forms of government, from monarchy to fascism (as in the definition above: "a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader").

On the "Night of the Long Knives," in 1934, the Nazis' purge targeted people who were associated more with socialism than with nationalism, because Hitler didn't want to lose the support of the conservative business community - which had supported his rise to power -- and conservative Army leadership.  Both the Army and the business leaders saw the socialists as a threat.

Industrialists who had provided the funds for the Nazi victory were unhappy with the socialism and homosexuality of Nazi party's militia commander Ernst Röhm, so they conspired against him and got him executed. Tell me again, which end of the political spectrum boasts of its homophobia?

The party always supported extreme nationalism, and racial and sexual discrimination, but by the mid-30s the Nazis abandoned all pretense of being socialist and began selling off public ownership of state-owned firms in steel, mining, banking, utilities, shipyards, ship lines and rail.  The delivery of some public services that were provided by the government prior to 1930 were transferred to the private sector.

Privatization?  Which party has been pushing that one?  Oh, right.  The Right.

The "proof" we most often hear from the American Right that the Nazis were Lefties is the assertion that the Nazis banned private gun ownership.  Skip over, for now, the historically inaccurate assumption that the Right is always pro-gun and consider what really happened with gun laws under the Nazis.

After World War I, the Weimar Republic required the surrender of all guns to the government.  In 1928, the German parliament replaced the gun ban with strict gun licensing.  By 1938, the Nazis had relaxed for "good" German citizens the gun laws that were in place in Germany at the time they seized power, but specifically banned Jews from possessing any dangerous weapons, including firearms.   In short: German nationalists could own guns, but Jews and communists ("enemies of the National Socialist state") could not.

Arming "us" and disarming "them" fits the definition of fascism ("and forcible suppression of opposition").

I'm hoping that helps the GOP leadership and their talking heads sort things out.  Maybe now they can find some more sensible ways to attack the president.  Or something.  

LINK TO FULL STORY AT GLOBEST

 

Sorry, didn't catch the errors the first time...my head is still spinning: 

I think I am having some kind of a bulemic attack today triggered by watching Morning Joe.

It started when Joe was waxing nostalgic about his honesty as a politcian when he was running for Congress while discussing how our Democratic Congressmen (and maybe a few Repubs) have taken campaign contributions from financial institutions. Great sympathy for Congressman because they need the money to run for office and no mention of how much Joe may have accepted in those days.   

 

Then David Gregory...need I say more....I thought I was going to pass out from puking when he said " Populist anger makes bad legislation"  (might be true in normal times, but populist anger is not a bad thing in light of the last eight years of BushCo).

 

Finally, I threw the commode at the TV when Peggy Noonan and the rest of the bunch blushed fawningly and jealously over the lack of a great conservative leader, like the guy at the EU, willing to stand up to our President and eloquently confront him with the now fully debunked supply side economics themes  (just what the hell have Cantor, Gingrich, Boehner, Rush and Hannity and the rest of them been doing ever since Obama was nominated anyway????) 

 

When are these people going to learn that most of us in America do not want to hear this crap anymore???  I thought the inherent point of media and journalism for the practitioner was to gain as large an audience for their output as possible.  

Update: TPM Muckraker is reporting there are new charges that Bernie's London operation, Madoff International Securities, Ltd., played a significant role in the fraud.   

Some news about Bernie Madoff you may have missed.

Fox News - The highlight of the week was watching  Fox News chase Bernie's former secretary, Annette Bongiorno, around the parking lot of her $1.2 million home in a "private" gated community in Boca Raton where she keeps a Bentley in her three-car garage. "Nan" was Bernie's secretary for for more than forty years and two other Madoff employees claim to have researched stock prices and generated phony trading tickets at Bongiorno's direction.  

New York Times - The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee returned $100,000 in contributions from Bernie to Irving Picard, the bankruptcy trustee. Senator Schumer previously returned more than $30,000 in Madoff contributions to his campaign to the trustee.

TPM Muckraker - A Nassau County judge froze the assets of Peter Madoff, Bernie's brother, in connection with a lawsuit filed by Madoff "casualty", 22-year-old Andrew Ross Samuels. According to the New York Post, Bernie  stole  Samuels' $460,000 trust fund which included a $20,000 gift from the Madoffs given at the time the trust fund was set up by his grandparents. The Wall Street Journal Legal Blog has additional information and links here.

 New York Post - Cindy Adams, famous gossip columnist, claims  Ruth Madoff was sighted shopping for junk jewelry in Boca's Via Mizner. This story follows the one about Ruth's attempt to go grocery shopping in an Upper East Side supermarket.

London Sunday Times - Earlier this week, William Nasi, Bernie's long-time personal messenger, provided some new information about Bernie the Boss including his penchant for vacuuming his office himself. The Times  interview includes new details about Bernie's father, Ralph the Plumber, who apparently believed everyone on Wall Street is a crook.

Daily Beast - A former Madoff IT employee anonymously provided  new information about the inner workings of Madoff's firm in an interview with Lucinda Franks.  The IT employee claims to have broken into a "secret" computer file accessible only to Madoff family members which contained sensitive financial information about the company.  

 

Dear Mr. Liddy:

It is with deep regret that I submit my resignation from AIG and its fine financial services division. Like Jake DeSantis, the author of the resignation letter recently published in the New York Times, I wish to offer some context as to the nature of my decision.

I am proud of everything I've done to help bring capitalism to the brink of collapse. But I want you to know I do not accept responsibility for the loss of trillions of dollars invested 401K plans and retirement accounts. Which isn't to say I was not to blame, but merely to say I accept no responsibility.

Nonetheless I feel betrayed by AIG, slandered by the media, and unfairly persecuted by government officials. I can no longer perform my duties in a dysfunctional environment where the odds of skimming a massive return off the savings of millions of hard-working Americans have dwindled to practically zero.

We've never met so I thought you should know a little bit about me. Mine is a truly an American success story. I was raised by carnies who worked the midway in a broken-down circus run by Russian mobsters. We lived on borscht and stale popcorn. On Christmas morning our big treat was being allowed to lick the inside of an empty bag of barbecued pork rinds.

Yet I persevered. Thanks to a summer job selling Everglades real estate and a scholarship from the Charles S. Ponzi foundation, I put myself through MIT, earning a degree in Applied Mathematics as it Relates to Improbable Investment Opportunities.

In 1998 I got a job on Wall Street. I spent years devising investment instruments based on algorithms so complicated even I don't understand how they work. All I remember is you take the national debt of Bolivia, fold in the accounts receivables from Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles franchises, divide by Pi, and collect 12.5 percent off the top in service fees.

I worked 10, 12, 14 hours a day, seven days a week, making AIG the economic powerhouse it is today. The sacrifices were enormous. Sometimes I went months without seeing my mistress.

Just as you did, Mr. Liddy, I agreed to take on the job of dismantling my division, working for a pitiable salary of just $1 a year and the promise of a multi-million-dollar payout at the end of my contract. After salting away $5 to $10 million a year for the past decade, you must admit that's quite a hefty pay cut.

I know that because of my hard work I have benefited more than most during the economic boom and that my family is unlikely to suffer devastating losses during the current bust. It's true that my suits cost more than the average monthly income of 87 percent of Americans and what I spend on lattes alone could feed a third-world nation. What can I say? It's great to be me.

As I feel I have done nothing wrong - certainly nothing that anyone else making money by the assload on Wall Street would consider to be wrong - I am not motivated to surrender my earnings. None of us should be cheated out of our payments any more than a plumber should be cheated after he has repaired the toilet only to find out that the other plumbers have stolen all the copper pipes and the electrician has gotten whacked after the general contractor found him screwing his wife. Wait, sorry, that was a Soprano's episode. I get these things confused sometimes.

However, my intent is to keep none of the money myself. Instead, I have decided to donate 100 percent of the effective after-tax proceeds to those who are suffering the most from the global economic downturn. I am speaking of course of the hard working girls at Madame Wong's House of Happy Endings, in whose company I have spent many happy hours in a state of extreme lubrication.

Hey, I didn't give jumbo mortgages to crack ho's and meth heads. I just built multi-billion dollar investment vehicles out of them. Don't blame me because your pension fund invested in it.

I wish you luck Mr. Liddy in your continuing efforts to return the money so generously extended by American taxpayers and in whittling our once proud company down to a nub. But after what's happened over the past two weeks I can no longer be a part of this effort.

I've already obtained a fake passport, had face-altering plastic surgery, and at this moment am jetting off to an undisclosed island with several million dollars in gold bullion and my man-servant Rudolfo. Catch me if you can, motherfuckers.

Sincerely,

Dan Tynan

The WitList

DickDay wrote a great blog awhile bag about his personal experience. His blog inspired me to do this one.

New Jack: Guarding Sing Sing By Ted Conover

A Ward of the State & What Makes A Leader
By Mr. Ron Huber

Hunger, alcoholism and neglect were constant factors in the life of young Ronnie Somerville and his brothers. Living in a poverty stricken area of Chicago, and spending most of his days at home alone on a cold and dirty floor was the existence he had come to know by the age of three. And then came the Covenant Children's Home. Swept away from his parent's home for reasons his small mind could not comprehend, Ronnie found himself flourishing at Covenant. But he was barely able to recover from rickets, before life got scrambled again.

As a ward of the state, Ron was shuffled from one house to the next, and greeted by couples that were ill equipped to accommodate the emotional needs of a child. Instead of doting on him and providing him with stability, they were all too willing to introduce the boy to grueling manual labor, and repeated physical and psychological abuse.

A Ward of the State chronicles the true experiences faced by Ron Huber, as a little boy growing up in the foster care system of Chicago, Illinois in the late 1940's. It speaks volumes about the tragic realities of a system that was supposed to be for the kids, but instead failed kids like Ron severely.

The story highlights Ron's own personal struggles with social acceptance, and an introverted personality borne from repeated criticism and harshness. But like any good Cinderella story, the triumph uproots the storm when the warmth of one particular family encompasses Ron, and teaches him what being loved is all about. And shows us all that the power of love can take us to heights that our beginnings never would have forecast.
Ron spent over 18 years researching. He was able to locate all of the state documentation written by social workers, foster parents, cottage parents and his own biological family. This story is based on facts.

I would rather go back to Viet Nan then "return to the scene" of my childhood. Anything would be a better deal then "returning to the scene" of my childhood. My childhood was merely something I survived. These things are not said to create drama or controversy for the sake of the draw or to garner attention. I have done that at times in my editorial efforts in the past. But it's important to understand how some people really feel about their childhoods. I too was raised A WARD OF THE STATE. WOTS.

Reading a book like A Ward of the State to a WOTS can be like a soldiers return to the scene of battle. Many thousands of WOTS's could easily consider their childhoods as battles and could also consider their childhoods as equivalent to that of a fight for survival. The book is still well worth reading and is remarkably informative in revealing the norms of being raised in this fashion and the effects it potentially has upon children.

My records show that I lived with thirteen different families during my career as a WOTS and one orphanage. You could say two orphanages but what actually happened is I just got returned to the orphanage one time. Shelter pets get brought back from time to time and so do WOTS's. I'm sure they don't call them orphanage's anymore. I studied my state records for a brief time right after I received them. My wife and children read them and since then they've been stored away.

You know I can remember very negative and bad things. Like my time with the Milsaps. I was around 3 years old. Mrs. Milsap beat me because I wet the bed. I don't know if it's possible in the mind of a young child but upon looking back and having reflected upon this from time to time; she beat me for pissing; I think I pissed because she beat me. I think I was learning to fight back even back then.

But I also remember the Sims. Thank God I ended up there right after my struggle with the Milsaps. Mrs. Sims was a Montessori teacher. Mrs. Sims taught me the alphabet and how to read. I was read to while being taught to do such. She would make me struggle with the National Geographic. She would tell me not to be afraid of the "big words". Big words meant the muti-syllable words. So the 1950's Dick and Jane books were not a challenge when I got to first grade. It surprised the teacher. When I experimented with matches and lit the curtains on fire; well I went on to my next home then. But I still will always love Mrs. Sims for teaching me to read and appreciate the "big words".

I've been married now for 24 years. My wife and I love and enjoy one another. We work together , under happy circumstances , in our home licensed Day Care business. We have three daughters and five grand-daughters. We have pets in our home that we have saved and we love them. We're still remarkably healthy at sixty and fifty four; me and her respectively , and we love our home , our life and our family. We feel very lucky.

My retirement is from Corrections. I worked at Stillwater Prison for fifteen years. It's a Level 3 facility and I retired at the age of 55. I worked with a team of Correctional Officers whose job was to deal with emergencies . Our counterpart job "on the street" would be a cop. Six of us. So I learned Corrections from the emergency point of view. I've had the stereotypical Correctional Officer prison experiences. I've had to do the physical thing while breaking up fights and the like. And I've taken dead people down from the results of having hung themselves. But the memory I will most carry with me is that of a dead 74 year old inmate lying in his bead just like he was sleeping. I know that he was in for something and may have lived the life of a perpetrator; but what a place to come and die with nobody on your side. It was so pitifully poignant. But the usual experiences of a Correctional Officer are very much more quiet and custodial then you think. Minnesota Corrections is very professional and the running of the facilities reflects that. It's not the bleak and unrewarding career you might think it would be.

My talk about Corrections is not to tell "war stories" and impress people. I don't have to do that. I was respected by my peer Correctional Officers and inmates at a acceptable level I think. It's to say something about a place where people go to lose. Where people go , not to die; but to just walk around after they've already died , in effect. This is what happens to many inmates who live the life of the institutionalized person. In and out again and again just like prison is some kind of summer camp to return to anytime you want to have fun. Some fun ah. Being a Corrections Officer is a job I'm glad I no longer have to do. When I was a Correctional Officer; what I was really looking at , while at work , was the potential that could have been me. It's perfectly clear to me that I was merely lucky to have "ended up on the right side of the bars". You see in many to most cases being raised a WOTS is just the training ground for the big leagues. And prison is the big leagues. WOTS's end up in prison in large numbers; I don't have to be a demographer to realize this. These guys didn't get to be eighteen and just say "hey I'm going to become a asshole and an inmate"; they had already lost their battle as a child.

I'll always be a WOTS. It has everything to do with who I am. I never bonded with a Mother or a Father. My upbringing was totally disruptive and very nomadic. I know what it feels like to be "a product". I'm still struggling with this , as are others. It takes a lot of effort to reconcile these types of things for people like us. I just embrace it , roll with it , and keep trying to deal with it. I make the effort every damn day to make sure that this never happens to any member of my family.

WOTS. I'm proud I survived it and it gave me the experience of a lifetime , literally. I would never really change a thing if I could. It's made me stronger but the price is; I'm different. I think we have the experiences of that of soldiers in wartime. You're uniquely glad you had them , wouldn't change a thing if you could , and wouldn't recommend them to your worst enemy.

My heart and support goes out to the Wards of the State.

Yesterday I blogged in this post about Josh Marshall's contention that (grosso modo) the EU President is a nut case for saying Obama's bailout plan is a road to hell. Mr. Marshall has a valid point even if I believe the question is more complex, and I said as much. The crux of the problem is that while Europeans generally support Obama's plan, European governments are more reluctant to launch its own trailblazing bailout scheme on a grand scale because it's very reticent to throw money at Eastern European former communist countries, whose economies are deep trouble and who have already taken billions of euros in EU aid.

But some found my posting to be elitist. TPM Reader blowagasket blows a gasket over this:

Correct me if I'm wrong: The EU expanded to include the Czech Republic for a reason, right? So, what was the reason?

Yet you and Josh Marshall both give the distinct impression that some Europeans are better than others. (Phrases like Mr. Topolanek is a symptom of a broader attitude and not simply a spoiled boorish politician who lacks even the most basic sense of tact and finesse and who most Europeans wish would simply disappear and Folks in Western Europe are really tired (that is to say, we've sort of had it) with bailing out folks in Eastern Europe and politicans like Topolanek, who are sitting in that strange no man's land between East and West give me that impression, anyway.)

It seems the member states should have foreseen such elitism and management problems before expansion.

This assertion does not address the substance of my posting nor of Mr. Marshall's remarks. Blowagasket assumes I'm disparaging my President who happens to come from one of "those" Eastern regions that aren't as European as me. But Europe is not a country. There is no real cultural and political entity called Europe-- the continent is a loose economic community much like the countries of NAFTA. It has to date no viable constitution, no enforcable laws that extend across all member countries (only regulations which are economic in nature) and its leaders (none of whom are elected by a European electorate, but are voted in by respective countries) like to play economic chess with its size.  No voters in France decided or didn't decide to admit the Czech Republic. This is decided by the European Council. My ire with Mr. Topolanek (and my explanation of the reticence to want to bailout other Eastern European countries) has nothing to do with his roots or his country of origin. So I contend there is nothing elitist in finding Mr. Topolanek does not speak for me and that his words were, at best, poorly chosen.

And I think it's worth noting that the EU President doesn't speak for Europeans in the same way Obama speaks for Americans. His remarks were the worst kind of populist pandering, both to other European member states, who remained nonplussed, and to Obama's political enemies, who seem only too delighted (and ignorant of what a flop Topolanek's remarks were here). Do Republicans know that Topolanek denied parts of his speech afterward? (this is possible because the speeches are translated and the more inflammatory comments were blamed on translation error). According to French translators (all of whom, it turns out, have the precisely the same linguistic fantasies), Topolanek said that the US would fund its bailout through  wordwide arms sales. This caused so much alarm that Topolanek had to immediately backpedal. It's also worth noting that he has made controversial statements about the holocaust, and doesn't hesitate to embarrass himself or his country for the sake of provocation.

In short, I think Americans should consider Europe as a continent with over 20 different languages and 27 sovereign governments, each with its own army and passport color. Obama's challenge will be to convince all these countries to pour money into an entity that, as of yet, cannot even ratify a constitution nor find a common language.

Hang loose . . . the pig is ready for take-off  ...


From : thehill.com/leading-the-news/hoyer-playing-health-reform-referee

Hoyer playing health reform referee

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) has taken on the role of mediator between the three powerful House committee chairmen tasked with writing a massive health reform bill.

This strategy by the House Democratic leadership demonstrates that they have internalized one of the lessons learned by the failure of the Clinton administration's health reform effort in the 1990s, when committee and subcommittee chairman squabbled over jurisdiction - and facilitated the demise of a major initiative and the end of Democratic control of Congress for 12 years.

Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) and Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.) will share responsibility for the package this year that would rearrange the entire healthcare system and could cost upwards of $1 trillion.

The chairmen have already shown signs that they are dedicated to cooperating and putting a health reform bill on the House floor before Congress recesses in August.

"I intend to spend a lot of time working with the various committees who have already made a determination they're going to work together," Hoyer told reporters Thursday, including convening meetings with the chairmen and the various health subcommittees' chairmen.

Hoyer stressed that the Democratic leadership would not take a firm hand with the chairmen over the content of the health reform bill, however. "I don't want to make those judgments. My role is to coordinate rather than impose my view," he said. "I'm not going to second-guess them."

Though legislation is months away, President Obama's proposal to create a new federally run health benefits program is already perhaps the foremost sticking point in his budget request.
Hoyer indicated that House Democrats are committed to including a public plan option in their bill. "We believe that a public option clearly is going to be necessary" to provide consumers with an alternative to private insurance and to spur competition within the insurance industry, Hoyer said.

Hoyer noted that Obama campaigned on the need for a public plan and said it had broad support among House Democrats.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) has also indicated support for creating a public plan, Hoyer said, but Baucus is trying to strike a deal on a bipartisan healthcare bill with committee ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who has rejected the idea.

"That's something that [Baucus] and Sen. Grassley will have to work out," Hoyer said.

The health insurance industries two leading trade groups, America's Health Insurance Plans and the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, reiterated their opposition to a public plan in a letter sent to senators Tuesday.

The insurance industry has made concessions on other points, such as agreeing to accept all consumers and not charge higher premiums to sicker people, if health reform includes a mandate that all people sign up for coverage.

Hoyer said the threat of a new government healthcare program prompted the insurers to change their position on those issues. "If the public plan weren't on the table, we wouldn't have gotten those expressions from the insurance companies," Hoyer said.

Republicans have also opposed the public plan, warning that Democratic leaders want a national single-payer healthcare system that would supplant private insurance, as many liberals favor. Hoyer rejected that charge.

"There is, of course, in the country and in our caucus, significant support for a single-payer system. Now, I don't think there's majority support for a single-payer system. The president is not talking about a single-payer system and I don't expect us to do a single-payer system," Hoyer said.

As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) did earlier Thursday, Hoyer defended the House's decision to include budget reconciliation in its budget.

"Reconciliation on healthcare is a fallback position. It is not the preferred option. The preferred option is creating a bipartisan consensus," Hoyer said.

Republicans howled in protest that reconciliation would enable Democrats to run roughshod over the minority in the Senate because the procedure allows legislation to pass with just 51 votes, unlike the 60 usually needed to move bills in the upper chamber.

Senate Democrats, including Baucus and Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) opposed adding reconciliation to the budget, though Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Thursday he supports having the option available when the House and Senate combine their budgets later this Spring.

Republicans argue that Democrats, by having reconciliation in their hip pocket, can pull out of any negotiations, whenever they want, making those talks potentially pointless for the GOP.

Hoyer said that if Democrats acted in that way, the Republicans would have a right to complain.

"If they are negotiating in good faith and then we pull the rug out from under them, I think that would be harmful to our objective of passage with a degree of bipartisan support and therefore credibility in the public," he said.

Still, the fact that reconciliation could be used should encourage Republicans to make a deal so their ideas are included in the bill, according to Hoyer. "I think that hopefully is an incentive, as well, to our friends on the other side of the aisle who want to get to an agreement," he said.

Hoyer also reiterated that Democrats want to do health reform under pay-as-you-go rules so that new spending does not add to the deficit. "The president and we want it to be deficit-neutral," he said. "People talk about a trillion dollars but also people talk about very, very large savings," Hoyer said.

~OGD~

Not being a racial specialist of any kind, I just want to throw something out there and see what people think, see if they might take a second look at an awkward moment and celebrate a victory for those who would prefer race not be a factor in American life.  This is somewhat like what I feel Obama did with the Reverent Rick Warren related to Warren's discriminatory stance against gays.  Obama brought Warren out onto the stage so that the people could discuss Warren's position.  In my humble opinion, Obama gave the country the opportunity to take the position apart and it was done enthusiastically across the board.  In general, the public took down the false-righteousness Warren had thought he genuinely held.  We are hearing nothing from him now.  He stuttered and stumbled and he's so last inauguration.  I think we won.  Now we have a similar moment.  Let's celebrate!!!

It is unknown what the intentions of Ann Compton were at the time when she asked if race was an issue in any way in Obama's relationships with his cabinet and other nations, but the answer ws superb.  Obama is a man with a great deal of poise and dignity so he did not say what I now believe he really, really, if he were being real, wanted to say.  And I am not saying he was not being real, or he is not real, but you will know what I mean.  What he really wanted to say was, "After Day 1, no one gives a sh*t!"

Is this not the victory we are seeking?

That being said, I do not see any reason to cease celebrating his achievement as an African-American, but I think this illustrates the achievement, once again, of what our country did.  Sure, there are some stragglers yearning for the good old days in the 50s, many of whom were barely old enough to read or write at the time, but that just means those people are delusional and no one should take them seriously.  Don't lose sight of them, keep track of what they are doing, but acknowledge, they are not in the mainstream, no matter how often they may declare that they are. Time marches on, with or without them.  There HAS been a change.  Our future together looks very bright.  Got Hope?  

For the past few months I've noticed that Dr. Dean has been invited to speak on many a cable news show and a certain topic always seems to come up.  The depressing (for conservatives) topic of fixing the evidently broken republican party is always addressed by the good Doctor with sound and reasonable suggestions.  Dean says that the GOP needs to analyze their failures, find out what caused them and take it from there to build solutions.  One thing he points out as obvious is that they need to expand their message beyond the radical conservative base that offers no chance at strong national standing toward something more broadly palatable.  The advice is actually reminiscent of a few of the steps I saw Dean propose after the 2004 elections to Dems who were downtrodden post-Kerry.  Of course we all know how successful the party has been since that time and that it had alot to do with Deans leadership on party-building and infrastructure.  All this to say that it is sad that conservatives don't see the gifts from Dr. Dean for what they are and will more than likely disregard and in alot of cases never even hear of his wisdom.  Too bad, I like competition and a good debate that they won't be offering anytime soon if that party stays on it's current course.

No other explanation.

No. Really.

That's it, sorry. It was a one-liner.

We'll never have a child

or perform an Irish reel onstage

nor have me dad walk down the aisle

or kiss above that leafy glade

(they cut it down).

 

But damn it, friend,

if we can't talk

of everything under the sun

and the sun,

I want us surely to break up

so one day we can meet again

and start our love

brand clean and new

(it's me heart you hold there

in your hands)

but would you choose

to dance again,

begin again, Finnegan?

 

I've got this professor -- the kind that's been retired for 20 years, was born a century ago, and rather than spending time at home with wife and family celebrating his lucrative job earning a ton of money helping big multinationals evade taxes legally such a long and successful career in order to pontificate on the virtues of laissez faire capitalism teach law students sadly ignorant of the basics of economics and finance  -- who's driving me nuts enough to vent online to strangers under cover of relative anonymity. 

Okay, I'm no huey L, and I've spend enough time in corporate america to at least listen to both sides.  Often I find myself in some strange netherworld where the liberals look at me like I'm something stuck on the bottom of their shoe when I, e.g., take five minutes to explain that a lot times, asbestos defendants *aren't* actually guilty in this day of age...but I get the "oh *wack*-o" stare from the biz friendly coworkers when I talk about how maybe drug legalization isn't a bad thing and how could we possibly think slavery's social reverberations have possible gone away forever.   But this old dude is KILLING ME.

He's got his panties in a twist for fear the obama administration's going to eliminate corporate tax deferral.  and then US multinationals will be "forced" to pay US tax rates on ALL their income and therefore they will not be competitive (this of course is given in absolute terms) and america will go down the toilet.  I mean, to the extent it hasn't already.  no offense, thailand. 

here's a primer (and I have said old guy to thank): US multinationals with subsidiaries (separate legal entities, but owned and controlled by US corporations) overseas don't generally pay tax on the income of the sub until the subsidiary issues dividends back to the US corporation.  this is called tax deferral. 

so basically treasury gives US multinationals an interest free loan in the amount of their tax liability on foreign income. But back in the 60s the kennedy administration was resolved to make sure they paid at least part of their fair share, and created Subpart F -- a fond nickname for an exception and a loophole to the exception and an exception to the loophole to the exception to tax deferral.  Basically, it's this: US multinationals have to pay US tax immediately on foreign income that can easily be moved around.  Ie, such income doesn't require, oh, an office with workers actually working or a factory actually making.  Real industry, not "I get paid for doing nothing" income.  You know, the kind that gets all those preferable tax rates.  But I digress.

So basically, passive income gets taxed right away--it doesn't get deferred til it comes on home through the form of corporate dividends.  This is designed, for example, so people dont move their trust fund to, oh, caymen or bermuda, solely to avoid income tax.  "real" honest to goodness business income located overseas because, uh, there's a market and workers there -- that still gets deferral.

So why is this cat so upset??? why the doom and gloom??? he drank the kool aid for 60 years, so I guess I forgive him, even though he calls me "sweetie."  still, when you're only response is: "Japan's the only other country in the world who taxes its citizens on their foreign income," well, that sounds a little like kindergarten-style deflection to me. 

And here's another question.  why does everyone worry about the corporations remaining competitive when *I* dont get tax breaks.  and isn't it *my* available cash that buys the crap at wal-mart that allows wal-mart to make money and be productive and create more jobs (somewhere, at least)???? since when does wal-mart make better use of a buck than I do??? (okay, I know I didn't *need* that second pair of red pumps, but the point still stands).

has anyone ever actually done a study on the effect of country x vs country y tax rates, along with the PLETHORA of other variables that determine where a business wants to locate (governance issues, access to capital markets, labor force, natural resources, etc) such that we should actually start taking the "my taxes...sniff...are too *high*" argument seriously?

Step 2: Documenting Bushvilles

Welcome to America in decline:

"They are tagging us because we are homeless," she said, staring at her orange wristband. "It feels like a concentration camp."

We need to set out to document these atrocities in as much detail as we can. Are there any places like this near you:

Bushville, Ontario, California:

"Is a campground the solution to the problem of homelessness? The California City of Ontario thinks so."

     More:

"Tent cities have sprung up outside Los Angeles as people lose their homes in the mortgage crisis."

More:

"Large, often confused, crowds formed ragged lines behind police barricades where officers handed out color-coded wristbands. Blue meant they were from Ontario and could remain. Orange indicated they had to provide more proof to avoid ejection, and white meant they had a week to leave.

Pattie Barnes, 47, who had her motor home towed away last week, shook with anger.

"They are tagging us because we are homeless," she said, staring at her orange wristband. "It feels like a concentration camp.""

Welcome to free market America:
"It feels like a concentration camp."

Bushville, Sacremento, California:

"Some 300 people call a tent city in Sacramento home, including Tracy Vaughan, who moved to the city with her husband six months ago.

Via the AP, No Job - No Home:


As many as 1200 homeless?
"Some nearby homeowners have reportedly complained about the tent cities, but Sacramento's new mayor, former NBA star Kevin Johnson, has suggested that the tent cities might provide a temporary solution to the lack of shelter. As many as 1,200 people may be living in these tent cities, according to the local ABC 7 News."

Bushville, Reno, Nevada:

"A few tents cropped up hard by the railroad tracks, pitched by men left with nowhere to go once the emergency winter shelter closed for the summer.

Then others appeared -- people who had lost their jobs to the ailing economy, or newcomers who had moved to Reno for work and discovered no one was hiring.

Within weeks, more than 150 people were living in tents big and small, barely a foot apart in a patch of dirt slated to be a parking lot for a campus of shelters Reno is building for its homeless population. Like many other cities, Reno has found itself with a "tent city" -- an encampment of people who had nowhere else to go.

From Seattle to Athens, Ga., homeless advocacy groups and city agencies are reporting the most visible rise in homeless encampments in a generation."

Bushville, Santa Barbara, California:

"The relatively tony city of Santa Barbara has given over a parking lot to people who sleep in cars and vans."

Bushville, Fresno, California:

"authorities in Fresno are trying to manage several proliferating tent cities, including an encampment where people have made shelters out of scrap wood."

America the Beautiful:
3rd world shantytowns.

Bushville, Athens, Georgia:

"Wayne Hill packed up his meager belongings last week and moved his home deeper into the woods.

Hill's red tent and neighboring homes had inched too close to the nearby highway, and police told him to move.

"We've asked them to move back off the road a little bit," Athens-Clarke police Maj. Carter Greene said. "It seemed they were encroaching on Lexington Road."

snip

But Tent City limits slowly crept downhill, so now people look up from Lexington Road and a perimeter off-ramp to see campsites and junk piles."

Can you just imagine the horror of having to actually see the homeless?

Bushville, Seattle, Washington:
(Note: there are several - 5 or 6 - of them in Seattle)

"Activists point to the annual One Night Count as evidence that not enough shelter beds exist. During the count of the homeless in Seattle and other parts of King County on Jan. 25, volunteers counted 2,631 people sleeping in cars and trucks, doorways and parks and under highways, or walking around or riding buses to stay warm in freezing temperatures. When comparing similar areas counted a year ago, the number of homeless increased 15 percent.

An additional 2,515 people spent the night in emergency shelters, with 3,293 more in transitional housing, for a total of 8,439 homeless people."

Bushville, Nashville, Tennessee:

"To its credit, Nashville recognizes that there is a problem with the "system" and, as the community slowly works towards correcting these problems, understands that there is at least a temporary need for the existence of homeless encampments.

To its discredit, Nashville is currently engaged in dismantling Tent City, the largest (the population fluctuates wildly at times, but is consistently around 50) and oldest (in existence since the mid 1980s) homeless camp in the area, which is slated to close June 1, 2009; sooner if outreach workers are able to find housing for the remaining residents."

Bushville, Chatanooga, Tennessee:

"The demolition of Tent City left many of Chattanooga's homeless without a place to live.

But not so for one lucky man.

For the first time in six years Richard Waldrep has a home to call his own.

Waldrep has spent the last several years on the streets, for the last few months he called "Tent City" home.

But, now that home has been destroyed.

Due to safety concerns and liability issues Norfolk Southern Railroad bulldozed the property leaving Waldrep and almost 30 others to find another place to live. "

Bushville, St. Petersburg, Florida:

"Police officers with box cutters showed up where St. Pete's tent city residents had moved and set up. The cops slashed their tents to the ground as residents watched in shock. Now one homeless group is moving to label St. Petersburg as the 'meanest city in the nation.' Video by Tina May."

The police destroying the few meager belongings left to these homeless people. Is that what the mandate of police officers is supposed to include today? What happened to serve and protect?

Do you know of any of these tent cities or Bushvilles near you that the media has yet to disclose of? If you do... Links, photos, and videos need to be added to our own archives in order to document the widespread disaster that is a very result of this failed Bush economy and the free-market run amok.

Arthur Delaney at the HuffPo is attempting to document these stories. We should all be doing our part to identify these places:

There are reports of tent cities popping up across the country as unemployment rises in a worsening economy. The biggest and highest-profile shantytown is in Sacramento, where hundreds of newly-homeless tent residents are cooking soup in old coffee cans.

We want to know where else this is happening.

HuffPost readers: Is there a tent city near you? Have you noticed a newly-formed community of people living together in improvised housing in a public space? Email us! Send any information you've got (or pictures) to submissions+homeless@huffingtonpost.com.

Sacramento's KCRA reported this week that city officials plan to shut the tent city down:

While this is a good idea - documenting where they exist is really only Step 2 because it is an idea without a real humane purpose.

Rather than just documenting these stories, perhaps we should try to solve the problems? In some of these Bushvilles there are already people working to help fix the problems as both short term and long term solutions are needed.

In Portland, Oregon, many in the community are providing the elbow grease to make their tent city, Dignity Village, more livable for the short term and more effective at helping the people get back to work:

Many more community's across the country, have looked to us for answers to help the homeless population that is growing bigger each year. When People come out to visit us , they are amazed at what we have set up and how we help the 50 to 60 homeless people that live here at any given time, a stepping stone effect that gives each person living here a chance to help themselves regain a new start to gain main stream living again.

All of this comes from donations from viewers and visitors that help to support our goals.

Dignity Village has been working this way since 2001 and long before Bushvilles started popping up. I imagine that they are probably experiencing a huge surge in people needing their help as the economy has collapsed over the last few months.

The right did not solve the problem of Hoovervilles, but the left did with the bold and visionary leadership of FDR. Many on the right would like nothing more than to ignore Bushvilles because it exposes the reality of their political ideology taken to extremes.

We can and will solve the problem of Bushvilles.

I am no community organizer, but I imagine that we need to take these steps first:

1. Identify the major problem - done

2. Identify where it exists - ?

3. Identify problems that are more local to each area - ?

4. Get to work solving the short term problems on a local area needs basis - ?

5. Get to work solving the long term problems on a local area needs basis - ?

Are any of you up to a real challenge?

Are any of you interested in beginning Step 2 and starting to document as many of these tent cities and Bushvilles as we can? Searching for links, getting out in the streets and photographing and videoing these places AND, more importantly, documenting the problems they face so we can try to find real solutions would be no small undertaking.

Previously posted at ePluribus Media, dKos and my own Blog... Some other info added from comments:


In Dallas the city keeps plowing the tent cities under with bulldozers. They have an estimated 10000 homeless and only 2000 beds available in the shelters.

In North Hollywood:

PSSSST! Do something...

One Jon Taplin said recently here in TPM that Paul Krugman had made two judgment errors in the recent past:

Is that all?



We can do that and still have time for a beer break and a very long nap...

GOP Rep Michele Bachmann, wants to know if Obama secretly is in favor of getting rid of the dollar and replacing it with a multi-national currency. If so, that would feed the wingnut speculation that Obama is the anti-christ or preparing the way for the anti-christ. 

Well the republicans have come out with their usual rehashed, 
regurgitated Reaganomics. All wrapped up in a shiny packet
containing......nothing new. Convinced as always that only the
private sector can do anything right.

Which is amazing since the private sector hasn't done anything
right for the last 8 years or more. In fact it has done damn near
everything wrong.

The GOP's approach to problems more resembles that of the
Three Stooges.

C

Josh Marshall recently wrote in this post about the strange case of Mirek Topolanek, currently the EU president who recently described Obama's bailout plan as a road to hell.

This prompted TPM reader artappraiser to admonish Mr. Marshall in this post, and to make the assertion that Mr. Topolanek is in fact somehow speaking, if not for Europeans, then for European governments, who aren't so keen on throwing money at the global recession in a Keynesian fit of action.

Well that got alot of people talking, some of whom rightly pointed out that Europeans already throw public money at their economies even when they're doing fine, and others who seemed to agree in some way or another with artappraiser's basic premise, namely that Europe is alarmed at this spending and that Mr. Topolanek is a symptom of a broader attitude and not simply a spoiled boorish politician who lacks even the most basic sense of tact and finesse and who most Europeans wish would simply disappear.

Neither artappraiser nor Mr. Marshall are wrong in a way, but there is a piece missing to this puzzle, namely basic awareness of the political landscape over here. The Czech Republic is on the frontier between Western Europe and Eastern (i.e. former communist) Europe. Folks in Western Europe are really tired (that is to say, we've sort of had it) with bailing out folks in Eastern Europe. Economies like say Latvia, have already received billions of euros in EU aid and just keep coming back for more. Now this isn't like California bailing out Alabama. Most Western Europeans haven't the slightest feeling of solidarity with these countries and only see them as foreign powers who show up in Brussels hat in hand and run back home without even a thank you, nor a promise, much less a plan, as to how to account for the money. I doubt many Americans would take kindly bailout money being shipped to places like Panama or Equador, even if the economies needed it, and watching it disappear without so much as projection or balance sheet blown our way.

So, politicans like Topolanek, who are sitting in that strange no man's land between East and West, and who are eager to show strength and solidarity with Western Europe, are only too eager to show how averse they are to bailout plans (and it doesn't hurt to court a few right wing American politicians while you're at it). But Josh Marshall is not wrong to point out that the EU president has way outstepped his reach. Obama's plan is widely thought to be necessary in France and in Germany and Sarkozy and Merkel are both trying to pledge support to Obama (which is a popular move) and find some way to pump money into the European economy without enraging a population that is already hurting and watching tax dollars flow away to nebulous propped up governments (now Americans can certainly understand that kind of rage right now I think)...

Sound like a strange inverted AIG scenario to anyone? It is very much like that, and it's on a continental scale...

Last weekend on a rightwing talk radio program Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) declared herself a foreign correspondent, behind enemy lines, hoping to keep her constituents "armed and dangerous" against the impending "energy tax," as she refers to the proposal of industrial cap-and-trade carbon emissions regulations. Clearly, as Bachmann's spokesperson explained, the Representative was speaking metaphorically. But there is a pattern of violent metaphor developing in the rhetoric of the minority party's leadership.

Last month, Sean Hannity's website featured a users' poll discussing the best ways to violently overthrow the government, given the choices of military coup, armed rebellion or war of secession. Now a reasonable interpretation is that this is all just fun and games. But if we stop to consider the size and tempramental diversity of their audiences, the proliferation of firearms and the passions animating the margins of our politcal discourse, it is not beyond the range of possibilities that individuals and/or groups will eventually act out these goofy fantasies with violence.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reports a rise in the organization of active hate groups in the United States from 888 in 2007 to 926 in 2008. Americans are no strangers to our own brand of modern terrorism, from the anti-government militias that produced Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh who slaughtered 168 people with a truck bomb at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, to racist pseudo-religions like the World Church of the Creator that produced Benjamin Smith who murdered Northwestern basketball coach Ricky Birdsong and shot up ten other people in a shooting spree from a north side Chicago Jewish neighborhood to rural Indiana.

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McAuliffe really is a cynical sort of fellow.  Either that, or he thinks Virginia Democrats are a bunch of silly hicks...

YouTube Link

I'm not the resident expert on the environment, climate change, carbon or coal...  Others are much more informed than I am.  But this is truly second-grade material, isn't it?  Is anyone that isn't in the pocket of industry seriously asserting that clean coal exists - or ever will?

Ugh.

I told you in my last post that I was concerned about what "Taliban" Bob McDonnell and his republican thug team would do to McAuliffe in the general. Briefly, I suggested that McAuliffe maybe vulnerable to charges of cronyism having to do with the current banking crisis.  As circumstantial evidence, I proffered an article by Matt Tiabbi that mentioned how Democrats of the nineties started playing the lobbying game...  that while McAuliffe was arranging White House sleep-overs and coffees for large donors, bankers had all of their legislative dreams fulfilled.  I wanted to know how much money Terry McAuliffe raised from AIG, BoA, Citigroup, Chase, Bear Stearns, GOldman Sachs and their executives.

I reached out to the campaign.

After promising to run a fully transparent and "open book" race, the McAuliffe camp ignored my questions.  I still haven't heard back.

Just as a matter of record:  it wasn't for lack of access.  I didn't leave a message with an intern that answered a campaign hotline.  No...  I actually did exchange emails with senior campaign staff.  I was told that they'd try to get back to me.  They never did.

So let's do some digging of our own.

Here's what McAuliffe was up to in the late 90's:

During the 1996 election cycle, he served as national finance chairman and then national co-chairman of the Clinton-Gore re-election committee. In 1997, he was chairman of the 53rd Presidential Inaugural Committee. In 1999, he was chairman of the White House Millennium Celebration. In 2000, McAuliffe chaired a tribute to outgoing President Bill Clinton, which set a fundraising record for a single event, raising $26.3 million. The same year, he chaired the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.

I'm going to start looking in to what records are available.  It'll be pretty interesting to examine who McAuliffe's "friends" were and what they received after making their "generous" donations.

One last thing before I go, from the WashPost:

Terry McAuliffe's ties to lobbyists go beyond the political friendships that prompted a group of supporters to host a fundraiser for him this week in the offices of the BGR Group, a prominent Washington lobbying firm. For nearly 10 years, McAuliffe was the managing partner of a law firm with its own thriving lobbying practice.

...

The details of McAuliffe Kelly Rafaelli's foreign lobbying are available under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires companies to disclose to the Department of Justice any advocacy they do on behalf of foreign governments. To read the disclosure forms, clink on the links below.</p>

• July 1990
• January 1991
• July 1991
• January 1992
• July 1992
• January 1993
• July 1993
• January 1994
• July 1994

Perhaps most controversial was the company's representation of Turkey at a time when that government was the subject of international scrutiny for alleged human rights abuses. The firm was criticized by name in a report called "The Torturers' Lobby" published in 1992 by the Center for Public Integrity.

Listen...

McAuliffe can avoid hard questions for now if he wants to.  But his time is growing short.  His background will catch up to him.  Virginian's best hope is that it happens during the primary process; if we leave it to "Taliban" Bob McDonnell...  well, he and his minions will feast on McCauliffe's political carcass for the entire election season.

Virginians:  it is our duty to vet our candidates.  And Terry McAuliffe is a HUGE job.  Let's get started.

Despite reports of voter registration barriers, voter intimidation, and non-compliance with voting rights law in recent elections, it appears that state legislatures and Congress are not actively focusing on the real issues in election administration. Considering the current economic state, almost the only attention that election reform is getting is through messy, partisan fueled debates to require photo voter ID on the state level--a fight that, just last week, quietly brought Utah to the list of eight other states that go beyond the Help America Vote Act in voter ID requirements. In recent Congressional hearings regarding voter registration and other election issues experienced in 2008, a number of groups have expressed their concerns with the current voting system and its impact on voters.

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