racetoinfinity

Age of Greed

2011-10-09T20:25:00.000-07:00

From "Counterpunch"

2011-09-14T00:57:00.000-07:00

From "Counterpunch" Vol18, no.15 - 20110901-15

The “Jobs” Speech
By Andrew Cockburn

There are plenty of reasons for
presuming that Obama’s “jobs
plan,” as outlined in his speech
last week, will prove as ineffectual as
his previous rhetorical assaults on the
economic depression, the most obvious
reason being the ranks of stony-faced
Republicans staring up at him in the
House chamber. More fundamentally,
however, the president gave no sign that
he understands, let alone is prepared to
address, the fundamental problems facing
the economy.

As is now generally accepted, the
global financial storm that blew up in
2007 and reached full fury the following
year was caused by banks speculating
on real estate property loans so wildly
with borrowed money that they went
bankrupt. Or, at least they should have
gone bankrupt but, with the exception of
Lehman Brothers, Goldman, J.P. Morgan,
Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, etc., were
saved by assistance from Washington – a
bailout mostly engineered in deep secrecy
lest citizens discover what was being
done in their name with their money. No
banks were restructured, nor were any
senior managements fired, still less
hauled away in handcuffs.
Thus we live today under the same system
that brought us to disaster four
years ago, with an identical team manning
the controls. The crash of 2007-08
was initiated when the bankers’ efforts
to conceal their losses on mortgage loans
(to poor people, at loan-shark rates) fell
apart. Though government assistance
apparently saved them, their appearance
of financial health was underpinned by
the pretence that billions of loans, still
on their books, were sound, generating
interest and profits. But they were
not. Some $500 billion have been written
off in worthless loans (i.e., those which
generated no income and would never be
repaid). But all indications are that a further
$500 billion lurk on the books in the
form of loans deemed “sound” by banks
and their complaisant accountants, but
which are far from that.

Overall, 11 million families are underwater
on their mortgages, with an average
of $65,000 in negative equity, and
millions of these have simply stopped
making their mortgage payments. But
this sad state of affairs is not reflected
in the banks’ books, where many of the
loans are carried as “current,” as there
was a feasible hope of repayment, because
to write them off would undermine
the banks’ own financial standing
– a policy essentially endorsed by the
Bush/Obama administrations, as exemplified
by Treasury Secretary Timothy
Geithner. Conscious of their real and
precarious situation, the banks hoard
their capital rather than extending credit
to worthy borrowers, who might actually
give someone a job. So, credit and
demand continue to contract, along with
employment.

Obama has advanced some feeble efforts
on behalf of the hapless debt-burdened
homeowner, HAMP, HARP, etc.,
but at no time has he or anyone else in
Washington shown the slightest desire to
grasp the nettle and wind up institutions
like Bank of America or Citibank, jailing
those who committed fraud, write off the
bad debts, institute a wholesale policy of
principal mortgage-loan reduction, and,
thus, relieve the crushing burden of debt
that inevitably stifles his own puny economic
initiatives. CP

Andrew Cockburn was co-producer of
the documentary, American Casino, on
the financial crash.

discussion

2011-07-04T13:53:00.001-07:00

Watch live streaming video from democracynow at livestream.com

The Plutocrats' Rise The Peoples' Decline

2011-03-03T22:58:00.000-08:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

t.e!

2010-12-31T21:44:00.001-08:00

Lyrics | - That’s Entertainment lyrics

Senator Sanders's great speech

2010-12-05T20:50:00.000-08:00

Check out this great MSN video: Fired up over tax cuts

2010-12-03T18:04:00.000-08:00

Check out this great MSN video: Fired up over tax cuts

PROSPERITY NOT AUSTERITY with J Stiglitz, D Baker &

2010-12-01T17:37:00.001-08:00

Watch live streaming video from prosperitynotausterity at livestream.com

Paul Street's prescription for Electoral & Congressional Reform

2010-11-23T16:41:00.000-08:00

"I support (We need) a Democracy Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to fundamentally overhaul American elections in ways that would permit third and fourth parties to become relevant political and policy players. Election reforms required include proportional representation, full public financing (all private money out of public elections), a significantly shortened election season, the end of paid campaign ads, a totally different debate structure, etc."

Buying America

2010-11-03T21:25:00.001-07:00

Paul Street's prescription for Electoral & Congressional Reform

2010-10-12T13:27:00.001-07:00

To quote Paul Street:

I support a Democracy Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to fundamentally overhaul American elections in ways that would permit third and fourth parties to become relevant political and policy players. Election reforms required include proportional representation, full public financing (all private money out of public elections), a significantly shortened election season, the end of paid campaign ads, a totally different debate structure, etc.

From interview at corrente

Paul Street at zpace

"shaggyct" of Huffpo commenters pool

2010-10-07T00:07:00.000-07:00

"shaggyct" writes on the current economy:

Those who are obsessed with government spending can't see the forest for the trees. Government spending didn't get us into the mess we're in. Neither did high taxes, since we have one of the most generous tax regimes in the industrialized world. Not even the property crash is to blame, since we've had those before and survived, although it was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Our problems are far deeper and more systemic than that, and if we are remain competitive in the 21st century, we have to think about our economy in entirely new ways, and rid ourselves of antiquated ideological notions that bear no relevance to a modern, highly competitive globalized economy.

First of all, we are no longer an agrarian society. Conservatives love to romanticize an imagined era of new frontier independence, but home schooling isn't going to get their kids far when they have to compete in the global workplace with an Indian counterpart who has two Masters degrees, speaks three languages, and since he isn't burdened with immense student debt like his American counterpart, he can afford to work for less. The high-paying jobs of the 21st century are knowledge-based, and can increasingly be performed by the best candidate anywhere on the planet.

In the past, we've been able to grow our way out of recession. This is why successive administrations, Republican and Democrat, have decided that deficits don't matter. Foreign investors and central banks have seen things the same way, which is why U.S. debt has generally been viewed as a sound investment regardless of our deficit. But this time, organic growth is not going to save us, especially since we're now a consumer based economy without consumers. And we certainly aren't going to grow our way out of it by slashing public sector spending, although both parties should aspire to reduce inefficient spending.

The overarching problem we have is that America is no longer competitive. Our workers are more expensive than their foreign counterparts and increasingly less qualified. We now rank 27th in the world in the percentage of students graduating with science and technology degrees, and 48th in the quality of mathematics and science education. Given that much of America's economic growth in the past fifty years has been directly attributable to our supremacy in science and technology, that should terrify everybody. Conservatives may like to think that rugged farmers and individualists built this country, but where would America be today had IBM, Microsoft, Google, HP, Lockheed-Martin and Boeing been founded in China rather than here? That scenario is becoming increasingly likely in this century, given that China has now surpassed us as the world's largest high-tech exporter.

While our public debate is consumed with trivia, ideological food-fights and social issues, the Chinese government is making enormous investments in biotechnology, infrastructure, medical research and alternative fuels, providing hundreds of billions of dollars in seed money to spawn the new industries of the 21st century. While we argue about tax cuts, our biggest corporations are making record profits. This allows them to hire more workers and expand, but this time they are doing it overseas. They are reinvesting in nations with superior telecommunication and transportation infrastructure, emerging economies with billions of new middle class consumers and ahighly skilled workers who can afford to work for less and still achieve a high standard of living. That is why we are not seeing any trickle-down effect in this country. Even if trickle-down ever worked in the past, it is an absurd notion in the 21st century.

The third problem we face is a collapse of economic mobility, which is the measure of how many children grow up to exceed their parents' economic standing. Other than the United Kingdom, America now has the lowest level of economic mobility in the industrialized world. It is no coincidence that the nations who rank highest in economic mobility, such as France, Germany, Denmark, Finland and Sweden have the most generous social safety nets, while the United States and United Kingdom have the highest concentration of wealth.

Before anybody screams "Class War", let me explain why wealth concentration is such a threat to capitalism itself, particularly in a consumer economy. It has been demonstrated conclusively that every dollar owned by somebody in the top 1% generates only $0.15 - $0.25 of economic activity (depending on which study you read), while every dollar owned by somebody in the bottom 20% generates $3-$4 of economic stimulus. And here is why. A middle class consumer spends a much larger proportion of their earnings on domestic goods and services. Much of this goes to small domestic businesses, who in turn can afford to hire more workers, grow their businesses and sometimes become the big corporations of the future. Meanwhile, a billionaire spends relatively little of their wealth on domestic goods and services. They may invest it, but typically in large corporations, who as I explained above, are increasingly expanding overseas in any case. That wealth is not trickling down to small businesses that aren't listed on the stock exchange.

In other words, wealth concentration stifles entrepreneurs, cripples small businesses and suffocates economic growth.

Somewhere in the past thirty years, we decided as a nation that we were going to transition from a manufacturing to a consumer based economy. Nearly all of the illusory economic growth since 1980 is the product of middle class consumer spending, which itself has only been made possible due to cheap credit, asset bubbles and consumer debt. But now the middle class has been stretched to breaking point by high cost of living, stratospheric student debt and healthcare premiums and outsourcing. Without a prosperous middle class, we cannot survive as a consumer based economy. And our middle class cannot be prosperous if economic mobility is being stifled by wealth concentration. Who in the middle class can afford to start a business today when they're struggling just to keep afloat?

So what is the answer? As I said at the beginning of this diatribe, we need to think in radical new ways if we are going to adjust to the new paradigm in which we find ourselves, and perhaps learn a lesson or two from those nations that are leaving us eating dust right now.

America is like a Windows operating system. The longer it keeps doing the same thing, the slower it gets, and eventually it will need to be rebooted.

Not everything that involves the private sector is good, and not everything that involves the government is bad. The world is much more complicated than that. But the private sector is not going to bail us out this time, which leaves the government as the only entity with the muscle to get us moving again. We need to invest in education, infrastructure, R&D. We need to encourage and help people to start small businesses. We need to ensure that money is no barrier to students seeking a college education. We need to reform education, and begin by slashing the ridiculously long schoolbreaks that made sense in an 18th century agrarian society, but serve no purpose today. We need to invest in our biggest asset, our people, making sure that they are not at risk of losing their homes if they seek retraining.

Every day, I get accused on this forum by so-called conservatives of being a socialist. But capitalism was designed as a means to promote economic mobility, not as an end in itself. Our obsession with the means rather than the end is actually destroying everything that capitalism was intended to achieve, and that is why by advocating for emergency government investment in our future, I consider myself a bigger capitalist than any of those well-intentioned folks who attend Tea Party rallies and call me a Marxist.

We have a choice this year. A vote for the GOP is a vote for regressive policies that will set us back for decades while the world passes us by. The Democrats may not be perfect, but they certainly understand these big picture concepts far more than the small minded nihilists in the Republican Party whose ideological fervor is the biggest threat that capitalism has ever faced.

END”

Interview with Michael Hirsh by Jonanthan Alter on his new book "Capital Offense"

2010-09-27T20:42:00.000-07:00

Amazon.com Review

Michael Hirsh and Jonathan Alter: One-on-One

Jonathan Alter: Your book starts by tracing three decades of Washington history from the Reagan era on. Why is understanding that history so important?

Michael Hirsh: You can’t understand what happened on Wall Street without first understanding what happened in Washington. Things of this magnitude—the worst financial crash and economic downturn since the Great Depression—don’t just occur because of a subprime mortgage bubble and a bunch of crazy traders in New York. It is only comprehensible as story of an entire era, a zeitgeist that defined the post-Cold War period. That’s my story. It began as the Reagan Revolution of 1981, which launched a deregulation movement that unmoored much of the economy from government oversight and antitrust laws, creating the wild age of finance with which we've all grown up. The failure was huge, systemic and bipartisan. The Clinton administration was as much to blame as the second Bush administration. For nearly 25 years, the facts on the ground seemed to bear out the idea that markets may overreach and go up and down, but they are always smarter than governments. The deregulatory '80s were a boom time. The '90s were better. The end of the Cold War turbo-charged the whole process. Free-market absolutism went from being a mocked, maverick ideology—something identified in the '60s and '70s with Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley—to a kind of national secular religion. It seized control of the national agenda and shifted the axis of the entire economic debate sharply rightward, turning ordinary Republicans into small-government zealots and liberal Democrats into "Eisenhower Republicans" (that's what Bill Clinton mockingly called himself.) It was only because of this environment – this all-conquering ideology-- that Wall Street and its lobby got away with as much as it did. Remember, the instruments that became notorious after the subprime collapse—collaterized debt obligations or CDOs—didn’t come out of nowhere either. They were allowed to flourish and develop, grow ever more complex, for two decades. Despite regular market blowups – LTCM! Enron! – the only change that occurred was even more deregulation. CDOs were only the latest, “improved” version of a model long in the making, the process of turning dubious or bad assets into better-seeming securities while the adults on the playground—the regulators and central bankers--weren’t watching.

Alter: Larry Summers is the president’s chief economic advisor, yet you argue that his performance both before and since the beginning of the Obama administration make him the wrong choice for the job. Why?

Hirsh: Summers is a fascinating figure in this narrative. He is unquestionably one of the greatest economists of his generation, and he did some of the most path-breaking work on the fallacy of rational markets. After the 1987 stock market crash, for example, Summers wrote that it was impossible to believe any longer that prices moved in rational response to fundamentals. He even advocated a tax on financial transactions. Yet Summers later abandoned these positions in favor of Greenspan’s view that markets will take care of themselves. How could such a powerful intellect continue to believe and advocate this view, despite the plentiful accumulating evidence that the “efficient market hypothesis” did not hold up (including his own work)? Mainly because the near-religious attachment to free-market absolutism had become such a ruling principle that no single senior official in Washington dared to contradict—especially if he was politically ambitious. Not surprisingly, as vested as he was in creating the old system, Summers has taken a minimalist approach to changing it in the current administration, and he argued, for example, for a smaller stimulus than others did.

Alter: Why are people like Summers and Geithner—creatures of the old system—in charge while those who were most prescient and accurate, like Born or Stiglitz or Raghu Rajan, standing on the outside of Washington and looking in?

Hirsh: Barack Obama was slow in understanding just how deep and systemic the problem was. That’s one reason why it took him so long to see that Paul Volcker, for example, might have been right in calling for banks to be banned from proprietary trading. “He didn’t run for president to fix derivatives,” said Michael Greenberger, Brooksley Born’s former deputy at the CFTC. “When he brought in Summers, Geithner and Gensler he just thought he was getting the best of the best. I don’t think he understood that within the Democratic Party there was a great split over regulatory philosophy.”

Alter: In your book women are generally the heroines and men are generally the villains. Moreover the women are generally punished for being heroines and the men are generally rewarded for being villains. How can that be?

There’s a lot to this idea, although some of the heroes of my story are also men, such as the economist Joseph Stiglitz and former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill. And occasionally a woman, like Wendy Gramm, must take some of the blame for the failed financial system. But it is true that women are often the gutsiest and most prescient figures in this saga. Women like Brooksley Born and Sheila Bair. Wall Street may be the most macho place on the planet. Brooksley Born, the former chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission who warned of the dangers of over-the-counter derivatives a decade ago, was seen by her male colleagues in Washington as an interloper—or a “lightweight wacko,” as they called her at the Fed. The free-market fervor of this era was so dominant, and so admired were its male champions like Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan, that it took a special kind of person to resist it. An individual of rare intellect, integrity and courage. Born was one of those unusual people. The thinking of the times was like a virus, and Born was one of those immune to it, to the idea that financial markets ought to be unregulated. And that had a lot to do with the sexism she had been battling her entire career. Fighting for derivatives regulation was, for her, just another way of breaking down the male monopoly.

Alter: You believe in capitalism and free markets, and yet you argue that many of your characters let the country down by failing to understand where rigorous supervision was necessary. Why didn’t they strike a better balance?

Hirsh: They let their faith in Wall Street betray them. During the free-market era, people forgot that financial markets behave differently than normal markets in goods and services. They are more prone to manias and panics; the ordinary rules of economics don’t apply. Financial markets simply have to be more regulated. In some ways no one is more culpable in this than Robert Rubin. Rubin was a good man. He always had a big heart and a gentle manner: He was a liberal Democrat who, as a young trader at Goldman Sachs, used to show up at New York community meetings on the inner-city poor. Later on he opposed Bill Clinton’s “workfare” reform -- a much-criticized compromise with the GOP -- as too harsh. But he could not bring himself to lay a restraining hand on his former colleagues from Wall Street. Brooksley Born later told me she blamed Rubin more than Greenspan in the end. Because he knew better that markets were imperfect, yet he had neither the vision nor the courage to act. It was Rubin who had inspired his adoring underlings to compile ten principles—which they later presented to him in a frame—they called “the Rubin Doctrine of International Finance,” the first of which was, “the only certainty in life is that nothing is ever certain,” and the second of which was: “Markets are good, but they are not the solution to all problems.” In one of his last acts as Treasury secretary, Rubin presided over a report of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets that hesitantly proposed, as a “potential additional step,” the “direct regulation of derivatives dealers.” Rubin himself would later insist that he’d always wanted leverage to be reduced too. But Rubin never did anything about these worries. The “potential additional step” was never taken.

Alter: I’m very intrigued by your portrayal of Milton Friedman as the father of the era in many ways. How relevant are the personal histories of these major economic figures in changing the fate of the country?

Hirsh:Extremely relevant. Friedman was the proud son of immigrants who romanticized the struggle of his mother as a young girl in a Lower East Side sweatshop in the late 1890s, when New York was crowded with European Jews. Friedman described it as a great place for an immigrant “to get started” because there was “no red tape.” Friedman himself had started out wanting to be an insurance actuary. He was tiny, bespectacled and balding. He would have looked more at home in an anonymous office cubicle somewhere-- an obscure worker bee in the vast hive of American capitalism-- than on the world stage. But that was just the point of his personal story. It embodied the American Dream that was the mainspring of all his economic thinking. He was the Nobody from Nowhere who on pure merit, left unencumbered by government meddling, becomes Somebody. Alan Greenspan was a nerdy “math junkie,” as he described himself, who was “groping for a frame of reference” until he met the libertarian writer Ayn Rand, as she herself later recalled. He was, in other words, something of an empty vessel, and Rand gave Greenspan his passion for the morality of capitalism. Joe Stiglitz developed an opposite passion—a deep skepticism about markets—while growing up in one of the grittiest industrial cities in America, Gary, Indiana. Observing the poverty and cyclical layoffs in the steel industry as a small boy, he began to ask questions about why markets didn’t work well. It was no accident that Stiglitz became in some ways the John Maynard Keynes of his era (Keynes himself was shaped by his searing experience of the Depression). Like Keynes, who was ignored when he warned after World War I that the draconian peace imposed on Germany would lead to disaster, Stiglitz stood almost alone against the “Washington Consensus” lorded over by Rubin, Greenspan and Summers.

Alter: What does your book tell us about the economy of today? What do we need to do to recover?

Hirsh:We need to go a lot farther than President Obama has. The book explains how Obama missed a golden opportunity to remake Wall Street, the American economy, and the global economy. Obama was seen by many as the second coming of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. After the 2008 election, Time magazine actually Photo shopped Obama’s face onto FDR’s in the famous Depression-era shot of Roosevelt grinning in his car, his cigarette holder tilted jauntily upward. But instead of “the New New Deal,” as Time called it, Obama faithfully channeled Larry Summers and Tim Geithner and their conservative approach to stimulus and reform. The president distracted himself with less pressing issues like health care and nuclear disarmament. He even flew to Oslo to get Chicago picked for the Olympics (he failed). Early on Obama’s Summers and Geithner argued down Christina Romer, the new chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisors, when her office suggested that the initial fiscal stimulus be as high as $1.2 trillion. They didn’t want to pile onto the deficit, or at least they didn’t want to face the political consequences of such an increase in government spending. With the recession still darkening the outlook, Summers and Geithner also didn’t want to tamper too much with what they still saw as the economy’s engine room, Wall Street. The president “explicitly decided not to break up all big financial institutions,” another top economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee, told me. Heeding the advice of Summers and Geithner, Obama decided that the cause of the crisis “wasn’t primarily about size.” As a result, little faith was restored in the system—an essential ingredient to full recovery. Not enough jobs were created. Now Obama’s economic team is disintegrating and he’s paying for his lack of dramatic action. More and more it looks like Obama will face grim growth and unemployment numbers going into 2012 -- much less the 2010 election. Distracting himself with health care and other issues, Obama may have politically maneuvered himself out of the only major remedy that could bring unemployment down and growth up enough to assure his reelection: another giant fiscal stimulus.

Obama's Labor Day Speech

2010-09-06T15:48:00.000-07:00

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new vid

2010-09-04T01:24:00.000-07:00

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.

Interesting comment to Frank Rich's Aug 28 column in NYT "The Billionaires Bankrolling The Tea Party"

2010-08-30T03:21:00.000-07:00

Link to column

Link to comments page 1

Christopher Bollas
London, England
August 29th, 2010
9:20 am

Mr. Rich reminds us that the far right is bank rolled by the wealthy, recalls that FDR and JFK confronted extremist challenges to their policies, and laments Obama's apparent passivity in the face of an onslaught of right wing cant.

But unlike the days of FDR and JFK the extreme right has now become a legitimate part of the American political scene. When JFK confronted the John Birch Society he tuned in to deep American anxieties about far right thinking. Those anxieties do not appear to be around.

Instead non-extremist members of the electorate seem curiously detached from what should be anxiety provoking.

There are many ways to look at the current situation but if we think of the issue as, in part, a social-psychological one, then we could begin to analyze why moderates are not confronting extremists. But is this true, that moderates are silent? Is it true that Obama has failed to confront the right?

I don't think so. He has been criticized for doing so on daily television talk shows or in his own TV broadcasts. He has been criticized for not rising above right wing cant.

What does one do, however, if the real world is subjected to a semi-dramatic rendering, turning it into a daily soap opera? Fox News or MSNBC are unconcealed reality TV "shows" that regularly invite politicians of all stripes into almost ironic self degeneration. Serious issues are made into amusing topics with John Stewart and others--real legit comics--competing with the regular pundits for the presentation of serious thought.

How do we understand this curious remove from real confrontation into an altered consciousness, one that portrays conflict but in another world: in the amusing realm of reality TV? We may understand this as a form of dissociation, a typical action of an individual or a group that is inside a truamatizing situation that renders the self or the group helpless. As the American right has become more extreme, as it has become seemingly more mainstream, moderate citizens have felt increasingly helpless in the face of this mass psychology. That is not so surprising. Obama has certainly tried to confront the right but he has simply become part of the "show". That is, if he says anything he cannot remove himself from showtime, from the collective defense against dealing with the reality of our world.

Although there is a long standing paranoid tradition in American politics, and although paranoids and the paranoid processes do paralyze non psychotic people, one solution to the problem is to create a discourse that examines the psychology of trauma. That would mean looking at the far right not as simply a group of loonies, but of understanding why so many people would develop such extreme views about being, for example, "over regulated by government." Why is this such an attractive idea? Why does the far right gain such currency with the fiction that we are the victims of a left wing conspiracy that aims to take away our freedom and turn us into something like the walking dead?

Paranoids project. The very claims they make about Obama or the so-called left are the parts of their own personalities that are active. The fear of over-regulation is dominant because the more disinhibited the right becomes, the less responsible or self-regulating it becomes, the more it projects the need for regulation into others. In this case the left.

But why the loss of self regulation? Why give in to rather nutty ideas? If a large part of the American population feel helpless and live close to the poverty line--and we know millions of Americans live such lives--then one is less in charge of one's own fate. The members of the Tea Party I know are middle income to lower income individuals who are genuinely anxious about surviving and as their anxiety increases they become less and less able to control their own anxieties, they become more angry, they become more paranoid. The fear of being over regulated is an unconscious wish for such regulation to arrive. The hatred of those who are imagined to be "socialists" is unconscious hate directed at the part of the self's loss of self-regulation and unconscious hunger for mass regulation and provision.

At any moment in time, people who feel helpless will join up with the paranoid process in American politics and indeed prove a challenge to anyone who would want to restore people to saner processes of thought. To do so is not impossible. But it does ask of the moderate electorate what we might think of as a psychological mindedness that sees in the extremist an ordinary person who needs a different type of engagement than vilification. To help ourselves through the dilemmas posed by psychotic processes operating on a national scale, we are going to have to become more willing to look into human psychology to develop a different form of political engagement than "showtime."

2010-08-23T15:19:00.001-07:00

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Glenn Greenwald & Jane Hamsher on The Dylan Ratigan Show

2010-08-11T18:58:00.000-07:00

Needless to say, I agree with (and admire) all three:

Jane Hamsher on legalizing pot

2010-07-30T22:07:00.001-07:00

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Shrinking Middle Class

2010-07-30T20:46:00.001-07:00

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Dispersant feared worse poison that oil alone

2010-07-30T20:23:00.000-07:00

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FinReg bill discussed on Dylan Ratigan

2010-07-15T15:25:00.000-07:00

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COREXIT dispersant is banned in Europe for a reason

2010-07-09T19:21:00.000-07:00

Interview on CNN 7/9/2010 (July 9) - @ 1440h CT

Rick Sanchez, CNN anchor interviews Susan Sanchez, marine toxicoligist:

SANCHEZ: Throughout this newscast here at RICK'S LIST we've done something unprecedented. We have been able to take you under water to do the very first live reports in the muck of the Gulf of Mexico, where the oil and the dispersant has combined to create a turbine effect. And this is the first time we've been able to actually experience this for you and file the reports as we were doing it.

But interestingly enough, someone I've been following now for the better part of a month is Susan Shaw. Susan Shaw is a marine toxicologist who you're about to hear from. She dove into the oily Gulf waters to see for herself what was going on under water. She was the first to do so.

And I read her columns, and I've been trying to get a hold of her. And every time we called her she was some place like Tokyo or Hong Kong or something, and we couldn't get a hold of her. So, finally, we got her, and what a perfect day to talk to her.

Because, Susan, I don't know if you know this, but we've had Philippe Cousteau and some of our people under water today showing us these murky waters that they say would normally be clear, but now they're not.

First of all, thank you for being with us.

Your impression of what is happening in the Gulf of Mexico, beneath the surface?

SUSAN SHAW, MARINE TOXICOLOGIST: Well, when you go into the water, you realize quickly what's going on. The oil from the surface is breaking up into smaller pieces, globules, and this is a dispersed oil that contains the COREXIT. So it's a combination of COREXIT and oil. And I think what people don't realize is how toxic that dispersed oil really is.

The COREXIT contains solvents, petroleum solvents. The oil contains hydrocarbons. And the combination is lethal to many, many organisms under the water. But when I was there, I could see. It looks exactly like plankton.

Plankton gets all mixed up in it, and it kills plankton right away. But all the fish and animals that eat plankton, like the small fish, they're going after this dispersed oil and taking that in. So that's another layer where you have an immediate lethal effect on part of the food (INAUDIBLE). And that's what we've been concerned about all along.

SANCHEZ: So that's interesting. I hadn't heard that before. What you just explained to the viewers is that the animals that generally eat plankton, sometimes large animals -- whale sharks eat plankton, interestingly enough, or take it in.

SHAW: Whale sharks. Right.

SANCHEZ: Yes. And they -- because it looks like plankton, they're eating it, but actually what they're eating is a combination of oil and dispersants?

SHAW: That's right. They're going through the -- these animals go through the water column with their mouths wide open. They're indiscriminately eating what they think is plankton.

And with all of this dispersed oil in the plumes, that is exactly what they're eating, is dispersed oil. And the reason this is so toxic is because of these solvents that penetrate the skin of anything that's going through the dispersed oil, takes the oil into the cells, takes the oil into the organs very quickly. And this stuff is toxic to every organ system in the body. So we've been really concerned.

SANCHEZ: Let me just ask you the obvious question that a lot of our viewers want to know and a lot of people have been asking. Would it have been different or worse or better to not use the dispersant and then just let the oil go into the Gulf of Mexico, or at least as the dispersant broke it up enough to help?

SHAW: Well, this was a tradeoff that was discussed, you know, and they made their decision to save the wetlands, the marshes from the thick oil by dispersing it into the ocean, thinking that that was the least of evils. But actually, it isn't the least of evils. We're starting to see a lot of death out there.

I just got off of a shrimping boat. I was out in an area of the Gulf that is -- it's definitely oiled. And I heard what is dead out there is just amazing.

All of the shrimp have died. All of the oysters. All of the crabs. All of the small fish.

I was out there for hours on this boat. We saw barely any birds. This is an area that is so rich in life, and now there is so much death out there.

There's no fish. The birds are starving. SANCHEZ: We just talked to a coral specialist --

SHAW: It's really bad.

SANCHEZ: -- who, by the way -- we just talked to a coral specialist, Susan, a little while ago, Dr. Shaw, who told us that 75 percent of the coral he had found had died in that area as well.

SHAW: Right.

SANCHEZ: OK. Before I let you go, long-term view here? As a scientist, as an expert in this particular field, what do you believe will be the long-term effect of that which we're seeing now, which we can't yet understand perhaps?

SHAW: Well, I think we've lost a lot. We've lost generations of fish. We've lost pieces of this food web that'll never come back.

You know, it's going to take decades and decades. And I think the dispersant, the whole plan around the dispersants has made the situation far worse than if we just sucked up the oil with some technology that works that would have been far better.

But now we're going to look at long-term effects throughout the food web and people. And if we -- I can tell you what happens -- because I was in the oil -- to people. I don't know if we have the time --

SANCHEZ: Go ahead. Finish up. You've piqued my curiosity.

SHAW: OK. So I got a very fiery sore throat after being in the water. I had covered myself, all of my skin, so it wasn't skin contact, but the fumes. But I talked to shrimpers today who were throwing their nets into the water. It's about a month ago when they were using the more toxic COREXIT, the 9527.

The water from the nets splashed on his skin and he got a headache that lasted for three weeks. He had heart palpitations. He had muscle spasms and bleeding in the -- bleeding from the rectum.

And that's what that COREXIT does. It ruptures red blood cells, causes internal bleeding, and liver and kidney damage.

So this stuff is so toxic, combined, it's not the oil alone, the dispersant alone. It's the dispersed oil that still contains this stuff. It's very, very toxic. It goes right through skin.

SANCHEZ: Dr. Susan Shaw is a marine toxicologist who we've been wanting to get on for quite a while, because we knew she had some information to share with the rest of us about -- firsthand information about what's going on in the Gulf of Mexico.

I'm glad we finally had a chance to get you on, Dr. Shaw. Thanks for being with us. We appreciate your time.

SHAW: Thank you.

If the oil gusher is unstoppable....

2010-06-19T02:05:00.000-07:00

Here are three links that are suggesting this might very well be an uncontrollable spew, an extremely alarming development, if true with a difficult to manage future, to say the least. I heard someone from an ocean-loving non-profit on The Dylan Ratigan Show say that if it's now just a hole with no casing spewing from the sea floor, the only solution would be a low-level nuclear detonation to turn the cracked areas of the sea floor to glass.

Here are the relevant links -

Is the BP Gusher Unstoppable? Mother Jones_

http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2010/06/worst-already-true-BP-well-now-unstoppable

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6593#comment-648967

http://www.aesopinstitute.org/

http://www.opednews.com/articles/B-P-Halliburton-and-Trans-by-Chris-Landau-100611-452.html

supertankers

2010-06-16T14:24:00.000-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Against and For Temporay Receivership of BP by The Federal Government

2010-06-05T16:47:00.000-07:00

Is It Political Lunacy for the President to Take Charge in the Gulf Or Political Lunacy for Him Not To? A Colloquy

Friday, June 4, 2010

I just came across this post from Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard whom I’ve never known to mince words.

I like Bob Reich and consider him a friend, but he is nuts. [She’s referring to my suggestion that the President put BP into temporary receivership.] There is a reason why the right, including Sarah Palin, is calling for Obama to “take charge” of the BP disaster, including fixing the leaking pipe. This is a problem that cannot be solved, and probably will not be for many months.
They want Obama to directly own it so they can reinforce their message that government does not work. Why should liberals, stupidly, be pushing for this? I cannot figure out what the left and many liberal pundits think they are doing in all this.

When a huge private corporation makes a mess and cannot fix it, it is sheer lunacy to take direct charge of that mess unless you can fix it right away.

Obama and the government can (a) hold BP accountable in criminal and financial terms; and (b) orchestrate the mitigation, restitution, and financial help for the regions affected. They are doing this and should be as visible as possible about steps in both areas. The last thing they should do is take charge of fixing the leak itself when they cannot.

My response:

I like Theda Skocpol and consider her a friend, but she’s got this one backwards. It’s not “political lunacy” for the president to take charge of this mess. It’s political lunacy for him not to.

Would Theda propose that if a military contractor accidentally fired off a missile, or the owner of a nuclear reactor accidentally allowed it to melt down, or a food processor accidentally sent off deadly bacteria into America’s food chain, that the President should not take control because he couldn’t “fix” these disasters right away? Or that he shouldn’t get involved because the political right might subsequently use his efforts to reinforce its message that the government doesn’t work?

What’s happening in the Gulf is the worst environmental disaster in American history. It defies common sense for the President to delegate most of its solution to the same corporation whose negligence in all likelihood created it.

The public deeply distrusts BP, with good reason. Its record to date has been cutting corners to make profits. Yes, BP’s expertise may be necessary now. But how can we believe BP is using all the resources at its disposal to stop the leak? (A petroleum engineer told me earlier this week that BP has some two dozen tankers in the Gulf that could be siphoning off the oil, and has shut down work on the second relief well in order to cannibalize parts from it for the primary kill effort.)

How can we trust that decisions BP continues to make – such as the use of toxic dispersants – properly weigh risks to the safety and health of Americans?

And as BP continues to pay out dividends to its shareholders, how can we trust it will have enough capital to pay all the costs of cleanup, not to mention the costs to businesses and individauls of the devastation it’s wrought?

For the President to stand apart from all this – to set up a commission to study how it happened and instruct the Justice Department to inquire into the possibility that civil and criminal fines may be appropriate – is both poliltically unwise and against the public’s interest. I fear Americans will come to see it as a dereliction of duty.

Robert Reich has the answers

2010-06-02T13:46:00.000-07:00

Putting BP Under Temporary Receivership: Some Qs and As

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Q: Is this realistic?

A: Not only realistic but it may become necessary — both operationally and politically. If the disaster continues to worsen, it’s untenable for a for-profit corporation to be in charge.

Q: But why should we expect government to do any better job than BP?

A: BP would still be at the job — and its expertise, equipment, and other assets would continue to be utilized. But the federal government would be in overall control of the operation — weighing public risks and benefits, deciding what resources are necessary, getting accurate information and disseminating it to the public.

Q: Why should we trust the government?

A: This isn’t an ideological contest about how little you trust a giant oil company versus the federal government. It’s a matter of accountability. BP’s primary responsibility is to its shareholders. And it will cut corners — as it has before — if that’s the best way to maximize the value of their shares. But only the government, through the President, is directly accountable to the American public, and responsible for protecting it.

Q: Under what legal authority could the President take control of BP’s North American operations?

A: Obama has implicit authority through laws and regulations dealing with offshore drilling, especially the Oil Pollution Act of 1990. By analogy, if a nuclear reactor were melting down, the President would use his regulatory authority over nuclear energy to take temporary control over the plant and the relevant parts of the corporation that ran it. President Truman seized the nation’s steel mills in 1952, arguing that the emergency of the Korean War necessitated it. (The Supreme Court ultimately blocked him but according to Justice Jackson, whose opinion was essentially the majority’s, that was because Truman had no statutory basis for the seizure, not even an implicit one. That isn’t the case here.)

Q: But BP is a British corporation. How can the U.S. government take control?

A: The nationality of a corporation’s shareholders has nothing to do with it. If it is operating within the jurisdiction of the United States and poses a serious and imminent threat to the health or safety of Americans, a president would take control of its operations and assets in the United States.

Q: Do you really think Obama would do this? Wouldn’t he prefer to stay away from this mess and keep the responsibility squarely on BP?

A: He may not have much of a choice. If the disaster worsens and Obama doesn’t take control he risks inheriting the mantle of Katrina.

Q: What will force his hand?

A: The White House is already inching toward control. BP’s new admission that it can’t stop the leak until August has shocked a public already deeply distrustful of it. As new evidence emerges of the scale of the disaster, the pressure on the Administration to take full and open control will only grow. Last Saturday Energy Secretary Chu asked BP to cease its so-called “top kill” effort to stop up the gush because he and his team of scientists had concluded it was too risky. Now the White House has to decide whether BP’s continued use of highly toxic dispersants poses more of a threat to the public and the environment than a help. When do these decisions tip over into control? Any time now.

Closing the Hole in the Gulf: A Petroleum Engineer Responds

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

A petroleum engineer who’s worked in the oil industry tells me BP is doing the minimum to clean up the oil and everything it can to protect its bottom line. According to the engineer, here’s what BP should be doing right now to mitigate the damage. If the President were to put BP into temporary receivership, he’d have the power to get BP to:

1. Stop releasing dispersants. So-called dispersants are toxic, and it’s crazy to add more poison to the Gulf. Dispersants do nothing to assist the environment in naturally cleaning the oil; their main use is PR. They reduce the number of ugly pictures of birds covered in pure black crude. Dispersants break the thick layer of crude into smaller globs, but that doesn’t help the Gulf and its wildlife. Most of the crude just mixes with the water to produce a goop that looks like chocolate ice cream but is highly poisonous.

2. Mobilize every possible tanker to siphon up crude from as close to the leak points as possible. Oil industry leaders as John Hofmeister (president of Shell Oil from 2005 until 2008) have recommended this, but inexplicably neither BP nor the federal government are talking about even trying this idea. BP currently has only one spot where they have inserted a tube into a riser, or pipe, that is leaking oil from the sea floor. The company is gathering the crude oil and siphoning it up to a drill ship for storage.

They should have at least a dozen collectors. BP has 24 tankers that are being used to make money for BP, not for clean-up duty. (President Obama should also use all necessary federal power — or money, and send BP the bill — to put as many tankers and refineries from other companies on the task.)

Mile-long pipes could be dangled down into the crude spewing from the wellhead and at each breach in the riser pipe, and the tankers could pump the crude mixed with water back into the tankers. They could then separate the crude and water in the tanker, and pump the water out on the spot. This should continue until each tanker is full of oil. The crude should then be taken to a refinery for processing, as other tankers take their place. Submersibles can be used to monitor the uptake into the dangling pipes, moving them as needed to keep them picking up as much crude as possible.

Even after some separation time in the tankers, the crude will be contaminated with water beyond the typical water contamination levels acceptable at refineries. This would drive up the price of gas in the short term. The president will need to go on TV and ask all Americans to cut their gasoline and energy usage in half, as an emergency response to the disaster in the Gulf, so that tankers and refineries can enact these far-from-perfect cleanup measures.

3. Restart work on the second pressure relief well. BP did start work on two relief wells as the government requested, but the second has been shut down to cannabalize parts from it for the primary well kill effort. The President must order BP to spend whatever money it takes to get another blow out preventer on site, to re-start work on the second pressure relief well. A recent blow-out off the coast of Australia required five pressure relief wells to successfully shut it down.

Two Oil Drilling Experts Illuminate BP's Incompetence and Impotence on The Dylan Ratigan Show and offer some better solutions

2010-05-26T14:57:00.000-07:00

Arianna Huffington: Financial Reform: A Win for Wall Street, A Cold Shoulder for Main Street

2010-05-26T10:21:00.000-07:00

It's mission accomplished for financial reform.

Unfortunately, it's more of a Bush 43 "mission accomplished" than an Apollo 13 "mission accomplished." That's because the financial reform bill passed by the Senate last week, like Bush's ship deck ceremony, is more notable for what it has left to still be done.

The Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010 will do no such thing. First, it doesn't do enough to rein in Wall Street. It doesn't end "too big to fail" banks, doesn't create a Glass-Steagall style firewall between commercial and investment banking, keeps taxpayers on the hook for future bailouts, and leaves open dangerous loopholes in the regulation of derivatives. And we can expect more loopholes to be inserted as the bill heads to conference committee. In D.C., crafting a bill without them would be like baking bread without yeast. Though you can't see them, they're what makes a Washington bill rise.

There's a reason a longtime investment banker, speaking to the New York Times, said of his colleagues' reaction to the new bill, "If you talk to anyone privately, there's a sigh of relief."

Don't expect a similar reaction on Main Street. Despite its name, this bill will not be restoring financial stability to the tens of millions of hardworking Americans whose lives have been turned upside down by the economic crisis.

On nearly every front in the real economy -- from jobs to consumer spending to foreclosures -- we've made virtually no progress at all. While Washington and the media have been consumed with the titanic debate over this reform bill, talk of the actual suffering by actual people in the actual economy is virtually a taboo subject, at least judging by how rarely it makes the front pages or leads the TV news.

But the data points are all around us. In a speech last week, Sandra Pianalto, president of the Cleveland Fed, surveyed the landscape and did not see a lot of financial stability, partly because of the huge loss of skills that is being suffered by the long-term unemployed. "Research... tells us that workers lose valuable skills during long spells of unemployment, and that some jobs simply don't return," she said. "Multiply this effect millions of times over, and it has the potential to dampen overall economic productivity for years."

Her conclusion: "Many people are now just aiming for 'financial security' as their American dream." In other words, the core idea of the American Dream -- work hard and advance up the ladder -- has been gutted. Now the American Dream is to try to not fall, or do all you can to slow your rate of decline.

And forget about having enough in the bank to give your kids a leg up on doing better than you've done. It's hard enough just to keep a job until you retire -- if that's even going to be an option. At a D.C. jobs fair for older workers this month, more than 3,000 job seekers showed up for the event, entitled "Promoting Yourself at 50+." Not surprising, given that the average jobless stint for those unemployed who are 55 and over was around 43 weeks, as of last month. (Quick note to struggling politicians out there: want a huge crowd at your campaign rally? Call it a "jobs fair," and you'll have lines of people around the corner.)

Their children and grandchildren who are just graduating from college aren't faring any better. According to Business Week, the 1.6 million about to hit the job market with their expensive degrees will be confronting a youth unemployment rate of almost 20 percent -- the highest rate since the Labor Department started tracking youth unemployment in 1948.

And, as Laura Bassett reported on HuffPost, many workers who have managed to hold onto their jobs are increasingly doing so only by accepting less pay and taking on a higher share of their health care costs. "My company didn't eliminate my job, they just eliminated my salary," wrote marketing director Mike Cheaure in an email. "I was back at work as a freelancer the next day working at 1/4 the pay and no benefits." The experience has made him very familiar with the new reality. "For us, the American Dream is gone," he said. "Now it's just getting by."

Adding insult to injury, a growing number of working mothers are having to give up their jobs and rely on welfare because states are cutting back on child care services that allowed them to keep working. And kids across the country are scrambling to find something to do this summer as a number of states make deep cuts to summer school programs.

And what about that recent surge in consumer spending that spawned talk of "green shoots" and "recovery?" Turns out, there was a surge in spending -- but almost exclusively by the rich. As the LA Times' Don Lee put it, the "little-noticed reality" behind the "encouraging numbers" was that "much of the new spending has come not from America's broad middle class but from a small slice of affluent people at the top." In fact, according to the Labor Department, the richest 20 percent of American households accounted for 40 percent of all spending.

As the Washington Post reported last week, "lavish fringe benefits" are back at the top end of corporate America, including "country club dues, chauffeured drivers, personal financial planning services, home security systems and parking." Of the 29 biggest public companies that took taxpayer money, around one in three decided to funnel some of it to its chief executive. As the Post's Tomoeh Murakami Tse dryly put it: "Those raises contrast with the belt-tightening that many Americans have experienced during the recession." Nell Minow, co-founder of the Corporate Library, put it more directly: "Marie Antoinette could fit into this crowd without missing a beat."

The latest news in consumer lending is similarly dismal -- especially among the banks that got the most help from taxpayers. According to the Treasury Department, from February to March, the largest banks cut lending by $9 billion -- yet more evidence of the schism between the two economies. Of course, the two economies aren't entirely separate -- the Wall Street economy is happy to accept massive transfusions of cash from the fading middle class.

This isn't to say that there were no provisions that would help Main Street considered as part of the Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010. There were plenty -- it's just that almost all of them were either voted down or taken out and never even put up for a vote. Even something as simple and sensible as putting a cap on credit card interest rates. Sheldon Whitehouse's amendment to do just that was voted down 60 to 35. So much for "financial stability." Though I suppose it depends on whose financial stability you care about -- the banks' or the taxpayers'.

Or how about payday lending -- the largely unregulated advances on a paycheck that can carry rates in the triple digits? In Missouri, for example, rates can top 600 percent. Yes, you read that right. Not exactly a recipe for "financial stability." North Carolina's Kay Hagan offered an amendment that would have clamped down on the $40 billion industry. It was killed without a vote because of Republican objections.

Objections that were, no doubt, the end product of the mother of all lobbying campaigns by every sector of the financial industry. Of course, the line between Senator, staffer and lobbyist is pretty blurry these days. A joint report released by SEIU, the Campaign for America's Future, and the Public Accountability Initiative found that the finance industry has 70 former members of Congress and 940 former federal employees on its lobbying payroll. This includes 33 chiefs of staff, 54 staffers of the House Financial Services Committee and Senate Banking Committee (or of a current member of those committees), and 28 legislative directors. Five of Senate Banking Committee chair Chris Dodd's former staffers are now working as banking lobbyists, as are eight former staffers for Banking Committee powerhouses Richard Shelby and Chuck Schumer.

And the revolving door spins both ways. As Arthur Delaney reported on HuffPost, 18 percent of current House Financial Services committee staffers used to work on K Street. All told, the financial industry has spent nearly $600 million on lobbying since the collapse of Bear Stearns in March of 2008 -- almost a million dollars a day.

A lot of money, sure, but if what you care about is the financial stability of the banks, it was money well spent. Take, for instance, the Merkley-Levin amendment that would have forced big banks to get rid of their speculative proprietary trading activities, a version of the Volcker rule. And you can take it, because the Senate won't be using it -- the amendment never even made it to a vote. This wasn't because it wouldn't have passed. On the contrary, since debate began on this issue, anger from those mired in the real economy has reached enough lawmakers that the amendment had a real shot. Which is why, as Simon Johnson put it, "the big banks were forced into overdrive to stop it."

Another reform completely left out of the bill was any reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This despite the fact that in just the last quarter Freddie -- one half of what the New York Times' Gretchen Morgenson calls "the elephant in the bailout" -- reported a loss of $6.7 billion.

Serious delinquencies on Freddie's single-family conventional loan portfolio are at 4.13 percent, up from 2.41 percent for the same period last year. And the number of foreclosed units Freddie controls stands at nearly 54,000, up from 29,145 at the end of March 2009.

"I don't understand why people are not talking about it," says Dean Baker, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "It seems to me the most fundamental question is, have they on an ongoing basis been paying too much for loans even since they went into conservatorship?"

And why would they do that? It's part of what Baker calls a "backdoor bailout" of the banks. In other words, an under-the-radar way to continue shoveling money from struggling taxpayers over to the richest Americans.

We've been told time and time again over the last two years that right after Washington deals with what's on its plate, "jobs is next." Well, it's been "next" for quite some time now, but it never seems to come to the floor. And now that a financial reform bill has passed, the talk on the Hill is that climate control or immigration will be tackled next. Or that members will just go off for the summer and campaign, flush with all the donations many of them just pocketed from the banks in this latest effort.

I often have a nightmare -- a common sort -- in which I'm stuck in a forest and I can't find my way out. I have a friend whose version is that her feet are stuck to the ground and she can't move. Not a bad description of our leaders' approach to the massive suffering that's going on across America.

A recent study by Duha Tore Altindag and Naci H. Mocan for the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the effects of unemployment can have troubling implications for a political system. The authors studied data from 130,000 people in 69 countries. Their conclusion: "We find that personal joblessness experience translates into negative opinions about the effectiveness of democracy."

No shock there. But it should frighten anyone genuinely concerned about our stability, financial and otherwise.

=============

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/financial-reform-a-win-fo_b_587728.html

60 minutes report worth watching again

2010-05-26T02:04:00.000-07:00

This details the errors especially with the gasket that no one is bringing up still:

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Dr. Reece Halter on the ecological devestation of the BP OIL DISASTER

2010-05-13T17:35:00.000-07:00

Dr. Reece Halter, conservation biologist at Calf. Lutheran U. talks to Ed Schultz about the soon-to-be ecological devastation of the oil-and-chemcial toxic brew flooding the Gulf now:

He's interviewed from @ 9:28 to the end of this clip:

He's mad as hell, and that's entirely appropriate!

Reece Halter's blog

Big Brother Luntz

2010-03-29T22:47:00.000-07:00

From Paul Krugman's column "Punks and Plutocrats" - NYT - 032810 -

"Back in January, Frank Luntz, the G.O.P. strategist, circulated a memo on how to oppose financial reform. His key idea was that Republicans should claim that up is down — that reform legislation is a “big bank bailout bill,” rather than a set of restrictions on the banks."

Do slimeballs like Luntz have a trace of integrity left? If "evil" is consciously lying to promote theft, then Luntz fully fits the bill.

The last paragraph is great and a concise summary:

"So it’s the punks versus the plutocrats — those who want to rein in runaway banks, and bankers who want the freedom to put the economy at risk, freedom enhanced by the knowledge that taxpayers will bail them out in a crisis. Whatever they say, the fact is that people like Mr. Shelby are on the side of the plutocrats; the American people should be on the side of the punks, who are trying to protect their interests."

Right-on, Paul Krugman!!

Comment I found at The Nation website

2010-01-26T00:57:00.000-08:00

Some years back, Honda had a choice between building a plant in the United States or Canada. They settled on Canada, because their government-run health plan would save them money. While the drug companies and the health care industry will make a lot of money out of healthcare "reform," it will drive up costs for other business interests.

The economies of "developed" Western nations are supported by the disposable incomes of ordinary workers. Since the purpose of "free trade" and "neoliberal economics" is to drive down wages, they are destroying their market and their wealth.

The economic elites are very stupid, and will destroy themselves along with the world's economy!

Pervis James Casey

Riverside, CA

Questions about the Christmas Plane Incident

2010-01-05T00:37:00.000-08:00

The Northwest Flight 253 intelligence failure: Negligence or conspiracy?

Questions mount over attempt to bomb Detroit-bound jetliner

READ THIS RE SOLVING GLOBAL HEATING

2010-01-05T00:35:00.000-08:00

Prescription for the Planet: The Painless Remedy for Our Energy & Environmental Crises (Paperback)
~ Tom Blees

An Integral Analysis needed

2009-12-16T18:38:00.000-08:00

Someone(s) need(s) to deconstruct, unpack, analyze the following from an Integral AQAL place:

- The Tea Baggers
- The plutocratic (my term) Corporate establishment
- The Republican Party
- Wall Street
- Progressives
- Democrats
- Neoliberals
- Neoconservatives
- Right wing Christians
- Cultural conservatives
- Cultural progressives
- Socialists

and many more players....

I will begin shortly - stay tuned....

Health Care DEform

2009-12-16T18:04:00.001-08:00

Watching/responding to MSNBC 121609

Howard Dean is holding his own against tweety bird's hot air except Tweety says if you don't like your ins. co., go somewhere else - MONOPOLIES

dumb fuzzy headed corporate tweety (CMatthews) - passing medicare for all through reconciliation would DESTROY the Senate LOL

Tea party manipulated by Armey tool of corporatocracy anger at govt from amber level - progressives anger at Congress/Obama from green lvl.

I like Ed Shutlz & I share his anger re health care DEform, but he's not thinkin clearly-just stated that teapartiers want pub opt.!

Olbermann's comment is strong EXCEPT he thinks it's just Obama's weakness at fault not the truth-he's been bought & paid for by corps.

I like his prescription though - see vid I'll post later:

------------------

Digby:

And Obama can say that you’re getting a lot, but also saying that it “covers everyone,” as if there’s a big new benefit is a big stretch. Nothing will have changed on that count except changing the law to force people to buy private insurance if they don’t get it from their employer. I guess you can call that progressive, but that doesn’t make it so. In fact, mandating that all people pay money to a private interest isn’t even conservative, free market or otherwise. It’s some kind of weird corporatism that’s very hard to square with the common good philosophy that Democrats supposedly espouse.

Nobody’s “getting covered” here. After all, people are already “free” to buy private insurance and one must assume they have reasons for not doing it already. Whether those reasons are good or bad won’t make a difference when they are suddenly forced to write big checks to Aetna or Blue Cross that they previously had decided they couldn’t or didn’t want to write. Indeed, it actually looks like the worst caricature of liberals: taking people’s money against their will, saying it’s for their own good. — and doing it without even the cover that FDR wisely insisted upon with social security, by having it withdrawn from paychecks. People don’t miss the money as much when they never see it.

What this huge electoral mandate and congressional majority have gotten us, then, is basically a deal with the insurance industry to accept 30 million coerced customers in exchange for ending their practice of failing to cover their customers when they get sick — unless they go beyond a “reasonable cap,” of course. (And profits go up!) If that’s the best we can expect of progressivism for the next generation then I’m afraid we are in deep trouble.

This is NOT progressivism; it's corporatist neoliberalism (or neoconservatism) - take your pick.

It's corporate plutocracy with the government part of the ruling system R or D, with 38 or so exceptions in the House and perhaps 4-5 in the Senate. if that.

Tea parties on the ground of being

2009-11-13T19:46:00.000-08:00

The "tea partiers" manipulated by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Armey, and plenty of Republicans are at a level of identity and consciosuness which is chauvinistic, nationalistic, ethnocentric and, in typical right-wing fashion, paranoid about our being attacked by all the not-like-us other groups. It's a low level of consciousness, and until they grow out of it, we'll have a block of reactionaries yelling and screaming and blocking change.

They also are afraid of big government (except in its defense functions), because they are confusing the pre-individual collective oppression we had (on this planet) under communism and fascism with the trans-individual conscious collective "we" that is democratic government that represents us, that serves the large conscious "us," and is Constitutionally prohibited against transgressing our own civil rights. These unfortunate people who haven't even grown to full individuality to think for themselves are oblivious to the fact that we live in a corporate plutocracy, and the threat from that to our democracy and well being on all fronts is much greater than their delusional "big government" fears.

The further down the chain of consciousness one lives at, the more OTHERS one fears (rendered through hatred -same thing- aversion) others unlike oneself. The Islamic fundamentalists are prime examples, of course. The tea-partiers aren't too many levels above that.

The politicians, including the loathsome Lieberman, may have some right-wing ethnocentric, nationalistic, paranoid beliefs, but are more likely influenced by living large via contributions and other ways they are interested parties, funneling in filthy lucre from the big healthcare, energy, and military-industrial corporations.

"Anatomy of Casino Capitalism" pt.2

2009-11-12T21:15:00.001-08:00

"Anatomy of Casino Capitalism" pt.2 - intvw w/Jane D'Arista - http://tinyurl.com/yem5nro

PLAN by James K. Galbraith

2009-11-12T00:20:00.000-08:00

I found this article from a link at Bill Moyers's page at pbs.org. It's very good, and has given me a new perspective on "free markets" and the fact that truly free markets are supported by sane regulation and balanced by a robust public sector. The learning curve for me is encapsulated in the following paragraph:

The rot comes from predators posing as conservatives and mouthing the rhetoric of “free markets.” They are not actually interested in free markets. Their goal is to use the government to build monopolies, to control resources, to block regulation, to crush unions, to divert as much as possible from taxpayers into private pockets. They have a reckless attitude toward war-making and they put the financial system in peril by failing to enforce standards of ethics and transparency. As a result, they imperil the country’s credit in the world. True conservatives recognize this, which is why they defected from Bush and McCain long ago.

============================================

Plan
By James K. Galbraith

Can Capitalism survive? No. I do not think it can.
—Joseph Schumpeter, 1942

The problem is not how to save capitalism but how to save the unique and successful mixed economy built in the United States over the eighty-five years since the New Deal. Our system is not capitalism. Our economy has a large public sector, which at its best was competently concerned with research, defense, financial stability, environmental safety, social security, and large measures of education, health care, and housing. Today, after thirty years of attack on government, all these functions are damaged and in peril.

The rot comes from predators posing as conservatives and mouthing the rhetoric of “free markets.” They are not actually interested in free markets. Their goal is to use the government to build monopolies, to control resources, to block regulation, to crush unions, to divert as much as possible from taxpayers into private pockets. They have a reckless attitude toward war-making and they put the financial system in peril by failing to enforce standards of ethics and transparency. As a result, they imperil the country’s credit in the world. True conservatives recognize this, which is why they defected from Bush and McCain long ago.

Our postwar system was built on technological leadership, financial stability, and collective security. The world gave us credit and used our currency. Why? Because we gave it back the public goods of peace and economic progress. We were the bulwark during the Cold War. Our system wasn’t imperial: we spoke instead of community, of freedom, of common purposes and common values, and the world took us seriously because we had paid our dues.

The next successful system should be built on that model—that is, on the basis of regulated finance, collective security, and, above all, a national purpose. Since energy and climate change will dominate the global agenda for the next generation and perhaps even the following, dealing with these issues must become our generation’s purpose too. Although America is the world’s great energy wastrel, among developed countries we are the best positioned to change, to reduce our own fossil-fuel use and help the world do likewise. We have the science, the technology, the engineering, and the educational capacity to take the lead.

What we do not have is the capacity to figure out, in advance, a coherent national strategy toward this goal, and for using our government to advance that strategy. We have no capacity to plan, and that is what we need now.

“Planning” has been a dirty word in American politics for decades. For the hard-line right, planning destroyed freedom: it was the “road to serfdom.” Anti-planners also thought it a failure; for them the collapse of the U.S.S.R. was due to “central planning.” But without public planning, who is in charge? Lobbyists who represent the private planning of the great corporations. The public interest ceases to exist, and the public sector becomes nothing more than a trough at which private interests come to feed.

What the government needs most today is to regain an independent capacity to think. The government needs a way to imagine the future that is not dominated by lobbies or even by Congress so long as Congress is dominated by lobbies. Planning is a process: thinking, coordination, action. What is the long-term national interest? What specific targets must be met? What is the best way to do it, and who plays what role?

For instance, carbon prices and cap-and-trade systems will help to deal with the climate crisis, but they cannot do the whole job. Markets do not design new systems— new patterns of transport and housing, new technologies for electric power, for vehicles, for heating and cooling. To design a system, to put the pieces together, to identify the most promising lines of attack and take steps to achieve them: that is the planner’s role.

Imagine a Federal Department of Energy and Climate with real independence. It could make an honest evaluation of ethanol. It could review the prospects and assess the dangers of next-generation nuclear power. It could make a judgment on carbon capture. It could consider all the serious conservation proposals, such as Joe Kennedy’s program to retrofit housing in the snow belt. It could fund new research centers in the major universities, so that in a decade the country will have trained the experts we will need to implement the plans we make.

Planning is not coercive, but it should be privileged. Once Congress approves a plan, budgeting and appropriation rules should favor public capital spending that implements the plan. For instance, such investments would not be subject to “pay-go” restrictions; as long-term improvements, they properly should be funded by issuing long-term debt. The planning process would thus parallel the budget process, superseding it in the areas of infrastructure, technology, and environmental management that would be the main arenas for the plan. Dealing with the energy and climate crises will require direct public action and the cooperation of the private sector, which will be achieved in part by regulation and standards. Clearly, the challenge is daunting. But it’s not hopeless. If the country gets it right, all of us can have work for a generation, a better living standard afterward, and leave the planet more or less intact. And in addition, we stand a chance, otherwise improbable, of persuading the rest of the world to keep our line of credit open.

© November 2008 The Harper's Magazine Foundation.

What Must Be Done to Reform Wall St. Banks at the least

2009-11-11T15:22:00.000-08:00

Congressional reform must repeal (or un-do) the two odious laws deregulating Wall St. in '99 and '00 -The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which dissolved the firewall between commercial and investment banks (undoing the Glass-Steagall act of the Depression era) and The Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000 (which deregulated exotic financial instruments like credit default swaps), both of which opened the Wall St. Casino doors wide and free from transparency and oversight, it will be a good bill. It must break up the too- big-to-fail banks decisively (reinstating the separation of commercial and investment banks would do this). If it doesn't accomplish at least those two goals, it's window dressing.

Anatomy of Casino Capitalism

2009-11-11T13:53:00.000-08:00

FIRST PART of clear, more complex analysis of the banksters schemes: More parts to follow.

Two art pieces by me-"watermarked"

2009-11-11T13:50:00.000-08:00

http://imageplanet24.blogspot.com/2009/11/two-art-pieces-by-me-watermarked.html

More evidence that we live in a corporate plutocracy

2009-11-05T12:29:00.000-08:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

What Must be Done (and Undone)

2009-11-04T01:28:00.001-08:00

Repeal these toxic laws that enabled the great Wall St. bank/investment houses consolidation and ushered in the casino speculation which caused a near meltdown and now a lingering great recession worldwide:

- The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999
- The Commodities Futures Modernization Act in 2000

Reinstate the firewall between commercial banks and investment banks, and reinstate strong transparent regulation of all "exotic" betting speculative financial instruments including derivatives and other new schemes.

Robert Reich Nails It!!

2009-10-30T02:52:00.000-07:00

is being processed...

Robert Reich

Former Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley

Posted: October 26, 2009 09:49 PM

THE HUFFINGTON POST
cross-posted from Robert Reich's blog

Breaking Up the Big Banks, and Why Congress Won't Do It

And now there are five -- five Wall Street behemoths, bigger than they were before the Great Meltdown, paying fatter salaries and bonuses to retain their so-called"talent," and raking in huge profits. The biggest difference between now and last October is these biggies didn't know then that they were too big to fail and the government would bail them out if they got into trouble. Now they do. And like a giant, gawking adolescent who's just discovered he can crash the Lexus convertible his rich dad gave him and the next morning have a new one waiting in his driveway courtesy of a dad who can't say no, the biggies will drive even faster now, taking even bigger risks.

What to do? Two ideas are floating around Washington, but only one is supported by the Treasury and the White House. Unfortunately, it's the wrong one.

The right idea is to break up the giant banks. I don't often agree with Alan Greenspan but he was right when he said last week that "[i]f they're too big to fail, they're too big." Greenspan noted that the government broke up Standard Oil in 1911, and what happened? "The individual parts became more valuable than the whole. Maybe that's what we need to do." (Historic footnote: Had Greenspan not supported in 1999 Congress's repeal of the Glass Steagall Act, which separated investment from commercial banking, we wouldn't be in the soup we're in to begin with.)

Former Fed Chair Paul Volcker, whose only problem is he's much too tall, last week told the New York Times he'd like to see the restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act provisions that would separate the financial giants' deposit-taking activities from their investment and trading businesses. If this separation went into effect, JPMorgan Chase would have to give up the trading operations acquired from Bear Stearns. Bank of America and Merrill Lynch would go back to being separate companies. And Goldman Sachs could no longer be a bank holding company.

But the Obama Administration doesn't agree with either Greenspan or Volcker. While it says it doesn't want another bank bailout, its solution to the 'too big to fail' problem doesn't go nearly far enough. In fact, it doesn't really go anywhere. The Administration would wait until a giant bank was in danger of failing and then put it into a process akin to bankruptcy. The bank's assets would be sold off to pay its creditors, and its shareholders would likely walk off with nothing. The Treasury would determine when such a "resolution" process was needed, and appoint a receiver, such as the FDIC, to wind down the bank's operations.

There should be an orderly process for putting big failing banks out of business. But this isn't nearly enough. By the time a truly big bank gets into trouble -- one that poses a "systemic risk" to the entire economy -- it's too late. Other banks, competing like mad for the same talent and profits, will already have adopted many of the excessively-risky banks' techniques. And the pending failure will already have rocked the entire financial sector.

Worse yet, the Administration's plan gives the big failing bank an escape hatch: The receiver might decide that the bank doesn't need to go out of business after all -- that all it needs is some government money to tide it over until the crisis passes. So the Treasury would also have the authority to provide the bank with financial assistance in the form of loans or guarantees. In other words, back to bailout. (Historical footnote: Summers and Geithner, along with Bob Rubin, while at Treasury in 1999, joined Greenspan in urging Congress to repeal Glass-Steagall. The four of them -- Greenspan, Summers, Rubin and Geithner also refused to regulate derivatives, and pushed Congress to stop the Commodity Futures Trading Corporation from doing so.)

Congress is cooking up a variation on the "resolution" idea that would give the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation authority to trigger and handle the winding-down of big banks in trouble, without Treasury involvement, and without an escape hatch.

Needless to say, Wall Street favors the Administration's approach -- which is why the Administration chose it to begin with. If I were less charitable I'd say Geithner and Summers continue to bend over bankwards to make Wall Street happy, and in doing so continue to risk the credibility of the president, as well as the long-term financial stability of the system.

Wall Street could live with the slightly less delectable variation that Congress is coming up with. But Congress won't go as far as to unleash the antitrust laws on the big banks or resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act. After all, the Street is a major benefactor of Congress and the Street's lobbyists and lackeys are all over Capitol Hill.

The Street obviously detests the notion that its behemoths should be broken up. That's why the idea isn't even on the table. But it should be. No important public interest is served by allowing giant banks to grow too big to fail. Winding them down after they get into trouble is no answer. By then the damage will already have been done.

Whether it's using the antitrust laws or enacting a new Glass-Steagall Act, the Wall Street giants should be split up -- and soon.

-----------

my comment -

You said it, Robert Reich! Great post, and right to the point. I couldn't have said it any better. I'm saving this post and using it as a template to measure the future regulations proposed by Obama and the Congress (I have faint hope that the recommendations you cite that we NEED will be implemented given the hold Wall St. has over the admin. and Congress via lobbying and campaign contribution funds. Until and unless we have public financing of campaigns or elect incorruptible officials, we are stuck with this plutocratic, undemocratic, corrupt disaster.

REVISED ENLARGED POST FOR EMPHASIS

2009-10-29T16:39:00.000-07:00

Obama admin. fights against breaking up TBTF casino banks/financial houses

The Obama admin. is going against Paul Volker, who is advising them.

The administration is resisting reinstating Glass-Steagall, (undoing the main culprit in our current economic disaster The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999), meaning reinstating the firewall between investment banks and commercial banks (breaking up the too-big-to-fail behemoths), the repeal of which law in 1999 set off the casino capitalism on Wall St. and led to the meltdown we're now in, worldwide:

Read - from thinkprogress .org and from The New York Times -

http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/10/28/reed-citi-repeal/comment-page-1/#comment-159548

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/business/21volcker.html

Geithner and Summers are Wall St. casino colluders and enablers of the worst sort, and are making the next crash inevitable, when they should be doing everything they can to prevent another one. Obama cannot be ignorant of this. He is a plutocratic corporatist through his endorsement of his economic team, and must be spoken out against.

Obama admin. resists reinstating Glass-Steagall separation of commerical and investment banks

2009-10-29T12:42:00.000-07:00

Citigroup Chairman Who Pushed For Glass-Steagal Repeal: Put It Back

Last week, the New York Times reported that Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve Chairman and current head of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, is having a hard time within the administration selling his view that banks should be forced to separate their depository functions from their investment banking wings. “People say I’m old-fashioned and banks can no longer be separated from nonbank activity,” Volcker said. “That argument brought us to where we are today.”

One of the manifestations of that argument was the repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act, which from 1933 to 1999 prohibited a bank holding company from owning investment arms. The prohibition was repealed by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, after intense lobbying on the part of two companies that wanted to merge: Travelers (which owned the investment bank Salomon Smith Barney) and Citicorp. These two companies combined to create Citigroup.

Of course, Citigroup received $50 billion in TARP money, and is not likely to pay back anytime soon, which has evidently led to some soul-searching on the part of John Reed, the former Citi CEO whose “strenuous lobbying” helped lead to the Glass-Steagal repeal. Real Times Economics noted that Reed penned a letter to the New York Times saying that things were better the old way:

As another older banker and one who has experienced both the pre- and post-Glass-Steagall world, I would agree with Paul A. Volcker (and also Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England) that some kind of separation between institutions that deal primarily in the capital markets and those involved in more traditional deposit-taking and working-capital finance makes sense. This, in conjunction with more demanding capital requirements, would go a long way toward building a more robust financial sector.

As Noam Scheiber wrote, “Wow. Maybe the consensus on this really is starting to change.”

Many economists blame the repeal of Glass-Steagal for inciting a casino-like mentality in a previously staid banking industry. “The culture of investment banks was conveyed to commercial banks and everyone got involved in the high-risk gambling mentality. That mentality was core to the problem that we’re facing now,” said Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

Of course, separating investment banking from deposit-taking wouldn’t have solved all of the ills in the financial sector. After all, AIG, Lehman Brothers, and Bear Stearns would not have been any better off. At the end of the day, much stronger capital and leverage requirements and a resolution authority for unwinding any firm, no matter how complicated, will do a lot to ensure that a giant financial institution doesn’t need to be propped up in order to protect the wider economy.

That said, it’s surprising the extent to which the administration has ducked and dodged this question. At least, some discussion of a policy that ensures banks aren’t mixing risky with non-risky activities internally (even if it doesn’t amount to breaking the companies up) should be on the table.

================

October 21, 2009

Volcker Fails to Sell a Bank Strategy

By LOUIS UCHITELLE

Listen to a top economist in the Obama administration describe Paul A. Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman who endorsed Mr. Obama early in his election campaign and who stood by his side during the financial crisis.

“The guy’s a giant, he’s a genius, he is a great human being,” said Austan D. Goolsbee, counselor to Mr. Obama since their Chicago days. “Whenever he has advice, the administration is very interested.”

Well, not lately. The aging Mr. Volcker (he is 82) has some advice, deeply felt. He has been offering it in speeches and Congressional testimony, and repeating it to those around the president, most of them young enough to be his children.

He wants the nation’s banks to be prohibited from owning and trading risky securities, the very practice that got the biggest ones into deep trouble in 2008. And the administration is saying no, it will not separate commercial banking from investment operations.

“I am not pounding the desk all the time, but I am making my point,” Mr. Volcker said in one of his infrequent on-the-record interviews. “I have talked to some senators who asked me to talk to them, and if people want to talk to me, I talk to them. But I am not going around knocking on doors.”

Still, he does head the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, which makes him the administration’s most prominent outside economic adviser. As Fed chairman from 1979 to 1987, he helped the country weather more than one crisis. And in the campaign last year, he appeared occasionally with Mr. Obama, including a town hall meeting in Florida last fall. His towering presence (he is 6-foot-8) offered reassurance that the candidate’s economic policies, in the midst of a crisis, were trustworthy.

More subtly, Mr. Obama has in Mr. Volcker an adviser perceived as standing apart from Wall Street, and critical of its ways, some administration officials say, while Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary, and Lawrence H. Summers, chief of the National Economic Council, are seen, rightly or wrongly, as more sympathetic to the concerns of investment bankers.

For all these reasons, Mr. Volcker’s approach to financial regulation cannot be just brushed off — and Mr. Goolsbee, speaking for the administration, is careful not to do so. “We have discussed these issues with Paul Volcker extensively,” he said.

Mr. Volcker’s proposal would roll back the nation’s commercial banks to an earlier era, when they were restricted to commercial banking and prohibited from engaging in risky Wall Street activities.

The Obama team, in contrast, would let the giants survive, but would regulate them extensively, so they could not get themselves and the nation into trouble again. While the administration’s proposal languishes, giants like Goldman Sachs have re-engaged in old trading practices, once again earning big profits and planning big bonuses.

Mr. Volcker argues that regulation by itself will not work. Sooner or later, the giants, in pursuit of profits, will get into trouble. The administration should accept this and shield commercial banking from Wall Street’s wild ways.

“The banks are there to serve the public,” Mr. Volcker said, “and that is what they should concentrate on. These other activities create conflicts of interest. They create risks, and if you try to control the risks with supervision, that just creates friction and difficulties” and ultimately fails.

The only viable solution, in the Volcker view, is to break up the giants. JPMorgan Chase would have to give up the trading operations acquired from Bear Stearns. Bank of America and Merrill Lynch would go back to being separate companies. Goldman Sachs could no longer be a bank holding company. It’s a tall order, and to achieve it Congress would have to enact a modern-day version of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which mandated separation.

Glass-Steagall was watered down over the years and finally revoked in 1999. In the Volcker resurrection, commercial banks would take deposits, manage the nation’s payments system, make standard loans and even trade securities for their customers — just not for themselves. The government, in return, would rescue banks that fail.

On the other side of the wall, investment houses would be free to buy and sell securities for their own accounts, borrowing to leverage these trades and thus multiplying the profits, and the risks.

Being separated from banks, the investment houses would no longer have access to federally insured deposits to finance this trading. If one failed, the government would supervise an orderly liquidation. None would be too big to fail — a designation that could arise for a handful of institutions under the administration’s proposal.

“People say I’m old-fashioned and banks can no longer be separated from nonbank activity,” Mr. Volcker said, acknowledging criticism that he is nostalgic for an earlier era. “That argument,” he added ruefully, “brought us to where we are today.”

He may not be alone in his proposal, but he is nearly so. Most economists and policy makers argue that a global economy requires that America have big financial institutions to compete against others in Europe and Asia. An administration spokesman says the Obama proposal for reform would result in financial institutions that could fail without damaging the system.

Still, a handful side with Mr. Volcker, among them Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics at Columbia and a former official in the Clinton administration. “We would have a cleaner, safer banking system,” Mr. Stiglitz said, adding that while he endorses Mr. Volcker’s proposal, the former Fed chairman is nevertheless embarked on a quixotic journey.

Alan Greenspan, the only other former Fed chairman still living, favored the repeal of Glass-Steagall a decade ago and, unlike Mr. Volcker, would not bring it back now. He declined to be interviewed for this article, but in response to e-mailed questions he cited two recent public statements in which he suggested that the nation’s largest financial institutions become smaller, so that none would be too big to fail, requiring a federal rescue.

Taking issue implicitly with the Volcker proposal to split commercial and investment banking, he has said: “No form of economic organization can fully contain bouts of destructive speculative euphoria.”

For his part, Mr. Volcker is careful to explain that he supports 80 percent of the administration’s detailed plan for financial regulation, including much higher capital requirements and “guidelines” on pay. Wall Street compensation, he said in a recent television interview, “has gotten grotesquely large.”

Before the credit crisis, the big institutions earned most of their profits from proprietary trading, and those profits led to giant bonuses. Mr. Volcker argues that splitting commercial and investment banking would put a damper on both pay and risky trading practices.

His disagreement with the Obama people on whether to restore some version of Glass-Steagall appears to have contributed to published reports that his influence in the administration is fading and that he is rarely if ever in the small Washington office assigned to him.

He operates from his own offices in New York, communicating with administration officials and other members of the advisory board mainly by telephone. (He does not use e-mail, although his support staff does.) He travels infrequently to Washington, he says, and when he does, the visits are too short to bother with the office. The advisory board has been asked to study, amid other issues, the tax law on corporate profits earned overseas, hardly a headline concern.

So Mr. Volcker scoffs at the reports that he is losing clout. “I did not have influence to start with,” he said.

NYTIMES - October 21, 2009

Chevron, Epitome of Corporate Crime

2009-09-11T02:23:00.000-07:00

The legal battle between indigenous communities in Ecuador and oil giant Chevron is a fight sixteen years in the making. This unprecedented lawsuit holds Chevron accountable for the clean-up of the damages it has done to the once pristine Amazonian rainforest and the people who call it home. Dubbed the 'Amazon Chernobyl', the land inhabited by indigenous communities for generations has been left contaminated beyond imagination.

With all the evidence pointing to Chevron's guilt, a judgment of potentially $27 billion was expected to be handed down against the company as early as next month in Ecuador.

Chevron - one of the wealthiest corporations in world history - has already said that it will refuse to pay, requiring U.S. courts to enforce any potential fine. Chevron's legal strategy before a U.S. court would almost certainly be centered on convincing the court that the company did not receive a fair trial in Ecuador; thus, Chevron has a strong incentive to build a case now against the Ecuadorian court.

This "evidence" magically emerged last week when the oil giant took dirty measures to avoid cleaning up its mess. Chevron appears to have resorted to its own Nixon-style sting operation in an attempt to delay and corrupt trial proceedings by releasing grainy online videos trying to implicate the judge presiding over the trial in a $3 billion bribery scheme.

Chevron's attempt at smoke and mirrors would be laughable if the results were not so serious. While asserting that no impropriety occurred, hoping to avert any further effort by Chevron to delay or de-legitimize a ruling, the judge recused himself from the case last week.

This "bribery plot" is just the latest in a string of underhanded - and potentially illegal - attempts by Chevron to derail the case and distract from the fact of Chevron's obvious guilt. The timing is also suspicious given this week's release of the groundbreaking and critically-acclaimed documentary film about the case, CRUDE: the real price of oil.

TAKE ACTION

* See "CRUDE: The Real Price of Oil" at a movie theater near you!
* Visit the ChevronToxico website for action steps to take right now!
* Join Global Exchange on a Reality Tour to Ecuador in November!
* Attend the West Coast Convergence for Climate Justice & Action to learn more!

Thank you, as always, for your work on behalf of peace & justice,

Antonia Juhasz, Director, The Chevron Program, Global Exchange

Global Exchange is an international human rights group that relies on its members - tens of thousands of people like you - to work with us to create social, political and environmental justice.

Please become a Global Exchange member today. Your tax-deductible donation helps keep our programs running.

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WWW.GLOBALEXCHANGE.ORG

Audit The Fed!

2009-09-08T14:10:00.001-07:00

Ben Bernanke's Bad Memory

By Dean Baker

To combat the financial crisis set off by the collapse of the housing bubble, the Federal Reserve Board has lent out more than $2 trillion through various special lending facilities. While the Fed discloses aggregate information on the loans made through each of the facilities, it will not disclose how much money it lent to specific banks or under what terms. By contrast, the Treasury puts this information about its $700 billion TARP bailout up on its website.

Partly in response to this huge increase in the Fed's power (its secret lending is equal to two-thirds of the federal budget), more than 270 representatives in Congress have co-sponsored a bill that would have the Government Accountability Office audit the Fed. In principle, this audit would examine the Fed's loans and report back to the relevant congressional committees, which could decide to make this information public.

Most people might consider it perfectly reasonable to have Congress's auditing arm review what the Fed has done with $2 trillion of the taxpayer's money to ensure that everything is proper. After all, we wouldn't let other government agencies spend one millionth of this amount ($2 million) without some sort of record that could be verified.

However, the Fed and its chairman Ben Bernanke do not see it this way. Mr. Bernanke warned Congress last month that such an audit could jeopardize the Fed's independence, which in turn: "could raise fears about future inflation, leading to higher long-term interest rates and reduced economic and financial stability."

Okay, Ben Bernanke warned Congress that if the Fed had less independence, it could lead to "reduced economic and financial stability." We have just been through a year in which the "Great Depression" was a more frequent topic of conversations that the Superbowl, World Series, and Oscars combined. In fact, Mr. Bernanke is given credit for preventing another Great Depression. The Congressional Budget Office is now projecting that unemployment will average in the double digits through 2010 and it will not be until 2014 that the unemployment rate falls back to its normal level.

Did Mr. Bernanke forget about the current state of the economy and the financial collapse that he was frantically trying to head off when he warned Congress that if the Fed were less independent, it could lead to "reduced economic and financial stability"? After all, how do you get less economic and financial stability than the Great Depression?

This is not the first time when Ben Bernanke's memory appears to have failed him when we was addressing Congress about an important policy issue. Last September, when he was telling Congress that the economy would collapse if it did not approve the $700 billion TARP bailout, he warned that the commercial paper market was shutting down.

This was hugely important because most major companies rely on selling commercial paper to meet their payrolls and pay other routine bills. If they could not sell commercial paper, then millions of people would soon be laid off and the economy would literally collapse.

What Mr. Bernanke apparently forgot to tell Congress back then is that the Fed has the authority to directly buy commercial paper from financial and non-financial companies. In other words, the Fed has the power to prevent the sort of economic collapse that Bernanke warned would happen if Congress did not quickly approve the TARP. In fact, Bernanke announced that the Fed would create a special lending facility to buy commercial paper the weekend after Congress voted to approve the TARP.

Mr. Bernanke has taken extraordinary measures in the last year that have been successful in preventing a much worse downturn. Nonetheless, Congress should not forget that it was incredible mismanagement by Bernanke and his predecessor Alan Greenspan that brought about this disaster in the first place. If Mr. Bernanke is approved for another term, as seems likely, Congress should not be hesitant to use more oversight than it did in past years. And it certainly should not let the Fed send $2 trillion out the door without a verifiable paper trail.

Given the track record for Mr. Bernanke's version of bank independence, it is hard to imagine that greater congressional oversight would lead to worse outcomes.

Why a change in consciousness is vital

2009-09-03T14:26:00.000-07:00

Inner transformation, i.e. people developing themselves beyond individualistic-me-vs-them consciousness to a level of consciousness that apprehends that we are all individuals AND are all interconnected and interdependent (ONE) is vital. Greed and ego-limiting blinders can't be contained by regulation alone. The (thinking-rational [independent] segment of) conservatives don't even KNOW about or acknowledge this level that includes and transcends individualism in INTERdependence, not dependence. (Growth and evolution goes from dependence to independence to interdependence). They are afraid of regressing down to the pre-individualistic (dependent) mythic-membership level of rule/role uniformity collectivism exemplified by Stalinism, Maoism, Communism, fascism, medievalism, etc. The irony is that the religious wing of the conservatives are AT that level - Christian fundamentalism (My way or no way - one of us or an infidel).

Wendell Potter apologizes

2009-09-02T01:12:00.000-07:00

Published on Tuesday, September 1, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
Rally Against Wall Street's Health Care Takeover

by Wendell Potter

Saturday, August 29 I had the good fortune to speak at a community rally for health care reform in a city park in downtown Portland, Oregon. It was a broad-based and diverse group with many signs and placards supporting the 'public option' being debated by Congress, and others calling for 'single payer' reform like that working effectively in other countries such as Canada. Here is what I said:

I would like to begin by apologizing to all of you for the role I played 15 years ago in cheating you out of a reformed health care system. Had it not been for greedy insurance companies and other special interests, and their army of lobbyists and spin-doctors like I used to be, we wouldn't be here today.

I'm ashamed that I let myself get caught up in deceitful and dishonest PR campaigns that worked so well, hundreds of thousands of our citizens have died, and millions of others have lost their homes and been forced into bankruptcy, so that a very few corporate executives and their Wall Street masters could become obscenely rich.

......

Read the rest of Wendell Potter's speech here

Bush's Third Terrm

2009-09-01T19:41:00.000-07:00

It sounds like the plot for the latest summer horror movie. Imagine, for a moment, that George W. Bush had been allowed a third term as president, had run and had won or stolen it, and that we were all now living (and dying) through it. With the Democrats in control of Congress but Bush still in the Oval Office, the media would certainly be talking endlessly about a mandate for bipartisanship and the importance of taking into account the concerns of Republicans. Can't you just picture it?

Bush's Third Term?

Barack Obama Administration

David Swanson: Imagine that George W. Bush had been allowed a third term as president, had run and had won or stolen it, and that we were all now living (and dying) through it.

There's Dubya now, still rewriting laws via signing statements. Still creating and destroying laws with executive orders. And still violating laws at his whim. Imagine Bush continuing his policy of extraordinary rendition, sending prisoners off to other countries with grim interrogation reputations to be held and tortured. I can even picture him formalizing his policy of preventive detention, sprucing it up with some "due process" even as he permanently removes habeas corpus from our culture.

I picture this demonic president still swearing he doesn't torture, still insisting that he wants to close Guantánamo, but assuring his subordinates that the commander-in-chief has the power to torture "if needed," and maintaining a prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan that makes Guantánamo look like summer camp. I can imagine him continuing to keep secret his warrantless spying programs while protecting the corporations and government officials involved.

If Bush were in his third term, we would already have seen him propose, yet again, the largest military budget in the history of the world. We might well have seen him pretend he was including war funding in the standard budget, and then claim that one final supplemental war budget was still needed, immediately after which he would surely announce that yet another war supplemental bill would be needed down the road. And of course, he would have held onto his secretary of defense from his second term, Robert Gates, to run the Pentagon, keep our ongoing wars rolling along, and oversee the better part of our public budget.

Bush would undoubtedly be following through on the agreement he signed with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for all US troops to leave Iraq by the end of 2011 (except where he chose not to follow through). His generals would, in the meantime, be leaking word that the United States never intended to actually leave. He'd surely be maintaining current levels of troops in Iraq, while sending thousands more troops to Afghanistan and talking about a new "surge" there. He'd probably also be escalating the campaign he launched late in his second term to use drone aircraft to illegally and repeatedly strike into Pakistan's tribal borderlands with Afghanistan.

If Bush were still "the decider" he'd be employing mercenaries like Blackwater and propagandists like the Rendon Group and he might even be expanding the number of private security contractors in Afghanistan. In fact, the whole executive branch would be packed with disreputable corporate executive types. You'd have somebody like John ("May I torture this one some more, please?") Rizzo still serving , at least for a while, as general counsel at the CIA. The White House and Justice Department would be crawling with corporate cronies, people like John Brennan, Greg Craig, James Jones, and Eric Holder. Most of the top prosecutors hired at the Department of Justice for political purposes would still be on the job. And political prisoners, like former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman and former top Democratic donor Paul Minor would still be abandoned to their fate.

In addition, the bank bailouts Bush and his economic team initiated in his second term would still be rolling along--with a similar crowd of people running the show. Ben Bernanke, for instance, would certainly have been reappointed to run the Fed. And Bush's third term would have guaranteed that there would be none of the monkeying around with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that the Democrats proposed or promised in their losing presidential campaign. At this point in Bush's third term, no significant new effort would have begun to restore Katrina-decimated New Orleans either.

If the Democrats in Congress attempted to pass any set of needed reforms like, to take an example, new healthcare legislation, Bush, the third-termer, would have held secret meetings in the White House with insurance and drug company executives to devise a means to turn such proposals to their advantage. And he would have refused to release the visitor logs so that the American public would have no way of knowing just whom he'd been talking to.

During Bush's second term, some of the lowest-ranking torturers from Abu Ghraib were prosecuted as bad apples, while those officials responsible for the policies that led to Abu Ghraib remained untouched. If the public continued to push for justice for torturers during the early months of Bush's third term, he would certainly have gone with another "bad apple" approach, perhaps targeting only low-ranking CIA interrogators and CIA contractors for prosecution. Bush would undoubtedly have decreed that any higher-ups would not be touched, that we should now be looking forward, not backward. And he would thereby have cemented in place the power of presidents to grant immunity for crimes they themselves authorized.

If Bush were in his third term, some of his first and second term secrets might, by now, have been forced out into the open by lawsuits, but what Americans actually read wouldn't be significantly worse than what we'd already known. What documents saw the light of day would surely have had large portions of their pages redacted, and the vast bulk of documentation that might prove threatening would remain hidden from the public eye. Bush's lawyers would be fighting in court, with ever grander claims of executive power, to keep his wrongdoing out of sight.

Now, here's the funny part. This dark fantasy of a third Bush term is also an accurate portrait of Obama's first term to date. In following Bush, Obama was given the opportunity either to restore the rule of law and the balance of powers or to firmly establish in place what were otherwise aberrant abuses of power. Thus far, President Obama has, in all the areas mentioned above, chosen the latter course. Everything described, from the continuation of crimes to the efforts to hide them away, from the corruption of corporate power to the assertion of the executive power to legislate, is Obama's presidency in its first seven months.

Which doesn't mean there aren't differences in the two moments. For one thing, Democrats have now joined Republicans in approving expanded presidential powers and even--in the case of wars, military strikes, lawless detention and rendition, warrantless spying, and the obstruction of justice--presidential crimes. In addition, in the new Democratic era of goodwill, peace and justice movements have been strikingly defunded and, in some cases, even shut down. Many progressive groups now, in fact, take their signals from the president and his team, rather than bringing the public's demands to his doorstep.

If we really were in Bush's third term, people would be far more active and outraged. There would already be a major push to really end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan. Undoubtedly, the Democrats still wouldn't impeach Bush, especially since they'd be able to vote him out before his fourth term, and surely four more years of him wouldn't make all that much difference.

About David Swanson

David Swanson is the author of the new book Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union (Seven Stories Press, 2009). He holds a master's degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia and served as press secretary for Kucinich for President in 2004. more...

Copyright 2009 The Nation

sell outs

2009-08-31T20:12:00.000-07:00

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Exclusive - Backstage With Douglas Rushkoff

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Protests

What can we do about China and Global Heating?

2009-08-30T20:17:00.000-07:00

From "Fahreed Zakahria GPS" on CNN earlier today:

ZAKARIA: Now for my "What in the World" segment.

Here's what got my attention this week: a somewhat shocking report from British Petroleum. Have you switched all your bulbs to compact fluorescents? Are you thinking of buying a new hybrid car? Are you careful to recycle every last scrap of paper off your desk?

Good for you, you're doing your part but I'm sorry to tell you, you may be wasting your time.

Listen to this: for the sixth year in a row, coal consumption has grown. King coal is the fuel that is driving global warming. It is the earth's biggest polluter. Many scientists tell us that it is the fastest growing, dirtiest fuel in the world. And the country driving most of the growth -- China.

That's what a fascinating new report from the energy giant BP says. Last year, China burned more than double the amount of coal that the world's second biggest user did, the United States. And while U.S. usage went down a little last year and Spain cut its usage by more than a quarter, China actually burned 7 percent more coal in 2008 than it did in 2007. That uptick in China was responsible for an extra 366 million tons of emissions into the atmosphere.

The root of the problem is that China's addictive coal habit is precisely what is driving its extraordinary growth. Coal is what fires many of the plants that make the sneakers and the steel and the silicon chips which China then sells to the rest of the world at a profit. And there's no sign they're slowing down.

An MIT study says that China builds new coal-fired powered plants at the rate of two each week. And "Science Magazine" found that if China keeps on this path, by 2030 they will be emitting as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the entire world does today.

A Hole in One for UBS

2009-08-26T15:12:00.001-07:00

Amy Goodman's column -

"Who Is Obama Playing Ball With?"

How states can solve their insolvencies NOW

2009-08-26T14:37:00.000-07:00

States should seriously consider forming their own public banks, like North Dakota has, per Ellen Brown's recommendations - see her article -

"How California Could Turn Its IOUs Into Dollars"

A message to Bill Maher and other atheists

2009-08-26T14:36:00.000-07:00

Atheism and reason are the halfway house dividing lower religion from higher spirituality. This house is where the mythic daddy God has to die so that spirituality which includes and transcends reason can be unfolded and manifested in an individual further along (if he or she keeps developing in this lifetime).

My same ol' progressive rant about Obama and the establishment

2009-08-21T03:52:00.000-07:00

I’m not so sure Obama was sincere during the campaign about being for progressive causes including single payer, since he’s done 180s on many campaign promises – need I list them?
Beginning with his appt. of Rahm E. the neoliberal free market believer and AIPAC supporter, onto his Wall St. appointments to Treasury through supporting Cheney’s secrecy and coverup of torture, to confabing with Pharma, I think he is staunchly in the corporatist neoliberal column – another Bill Clinton. There’s not even fire in his belly for a public option.

The only answer for all this corporatist corruption is public financing of campaigns and strong lobbying reform. Also, it would be nice to have a vibrant progressive third party that rejects corporatism and currying favor (and needless to say bags of cash) with/from the corporacratic plutocracy that both parties are essentially wings of.

The Banana Republic of America

2009-08-18T00:37:00.000-07:00

From the Huffington Post:

Income Inequality Is At An All-Time High: STUDY

Income inequality in the United States is at an all-time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression, according to a recently updated paper by University of California, Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez. The paper, which covers data through 2007, points to a staggering, unprecedented disparity in American incomes. On his blog, Nobel prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called the numbers "truly amazing."

Though income inequality has been growing for some time, the paper paints a stark, disturbing portrait of wealth distribution in America. Saez calculates that in 2007 the top .01 percent of American earners took home 6 percent of total U.S. wages, a figure that has nearly doubled since 2000.

As of 2007, the top decile of American earners, Saez writes, pulled in 49.7 percent of total wages, a level that's "higher than any other year since 1917 and even surpasses 1928, the peak of stock market bubble in the 'roaring" 1920s.'"

Beginning in the economic expansion of the early 1990s, Saez argues, the economy began to favor the top tiers American earners, but much of the country missed was left behind. "The top 1 percent incomes captured half of the overall economic growth over the period 1993-2007," Saes writes.

Despite a rising stock market, largely growing employment and a historic housing boom things were not nearly so rosy for the rest of U.S. workers. This trend, according to Saez, only accelerated during the George W. Bush's tenure as President:

"...while the bottom 99 percent of incomes grew at a solid pace of 2.7 percent per year from 1993-2000, these incomes grew only 1.3 percent per year from 2002-2007. As a result, in the economic expansion of 2002-2007, the top 1 percent captured two thirds of income growth."

=========

My comments there (and others'):

racetoinfinity:
--------------
Welcome to the New Gilded Age or alternatively, if you like pulp fiction, The Banana Republic of America! The plutocracy finally got what it's wanted since Ronnie, turbocharged by Bush's corruption of democratic safeguards against greed, corruption, war profiteering, and disdain for the commons (including the health of our "same boat" Spaceship Earth and the common good (or Justice and Love).

Posted 04:04 PM on 08/16/2009

TRex86

---------
The Republican party is the shock troops of the plutocracy. Their only agenda is the transfer of wealth to the wealthy. They oppose Health Reform because it is a liberal social proram that will secure the loyalty of a new generation of Americans to the Democratic party. Their conservative "values" are a hoax. Their fiscal probity is a convenient pose now that they are out of power. The truth is that they have been waging a counter-revolution since the New Deal. They came close to taking over during the Depression. (Roosevelt didn't save us from Communism; he saved us from fascism).
Since the 1930's the ruling class has waged war from the top down. Looking at the graph above they had to wait a long time, but the economic dislocations that followed the Vietnam War created the opportunity to implement their strategy to concentrate wealth at the top. From 1975 on the real income of EVERYONE but the top one percent has fallen. Household incomes grew briefly from having two earners, but that stalled out by the early 90's. Only during the Clinton years did this trend reverse, which is why they did everything in their power to get him out of office.

Posted 08:49 PM on 08/16/2009

Antiks
-------
Clinton wasn't FDR though. He was more conservative than you think.

Also, Clinton presided over the dot com bubble which burst just as GWB got into office. The economy was good back then because it was inflated.
Posted 06:15 PM on 08/17/2009

racetoinfinity
-------------
You're right. Clinton was a DLC neoliberal corporatist, which is what I believe Obama to be, unfortunately.

Nader on our current situation and more

2009-08-14T13:50:00.000-07:00

Nader Was Right: Liberals Are Going Nowhere With Obama

by TruthDig.com

By Chris Hedges

The American empire has not altered under Barack Obama. It kills as brutally and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under George W. Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury to enrich the corporate elite as rapaciously. It will not give us universal health care, abolish the Bush secrecy laws, end torture or “extraordinary rendition,” restore habeas corpus or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of citizens. It will not push through significant environmental reform, regulate Wall Street or end our relationship with private contractors that provide mercenary armies to fight our imperial wars and produce useless and costly weapons systems.

The sad reality is that all the well-meaning groups and individuals who challenge our permanent war economy and the doctrine of pre-emptive war, who care about sustainable energy, fight for civil liberties and want corporate malfeasance to end, were once again suckered by the Democratic Party. They were had. It is not a new story. The Democrats have been doing this to us since Bill Clinton. It is the same old merry-go-round, only with Obama branding. And if we have not learned by now that the system is broken, that as citizens we do not matter to our political elite, that we live in a corporate state where our welfare and our interests are irrelevant, we are in serious trouble. Our last hope is to step outside of the two-party system and build movements that defy the Democrats and the Republicans. If we fail to do this we will continue to undergo a corporate coup d’etat in slow motion that will end in feudalism.

We owe Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney [1] and the Green Party an apology. They were right. If a few million of us had had the temerity to stand behind our ideals rather than our illusions and the empty slogans peddled by the Obama campaign we would have a platform. We forgot that social reform never comes from accommodating the power structure but from frightening it. The Liberty Party, which fought slavery, the suffragists who battled for women’s rights, the labor movement, and the civil rights movement knew that the question was not how do we get good people to rule—those attracted to power tend to be venal mediocrities—but how do we limit the damage the powerful do to us. These mass movements were the engines for social reform, the correctives to our democracy and the true protectors of the rights of citizens. We have surrendered this power. It is vital to reclaim it. Where is the foreclosure movement? Where is the robust universal health care or anti-war movement? Where is the militant movement for sustainable energy?

“Something is broken,” Nader said when I reached him at his family home in Connecticut. “We are not at the Bangladesh level in terms of passivity, but we are getting there. No one sees anything changing. There is no new political party to give people a choice. The progressive forces have no hammer. When they abandoned our campaign they told the Democrats we have nowhere to go and will take whatever you give us. The Democrats are under no heat in the electoral arena from the left.

“There comes a point when the public imbibes the ultimatum of the plutocracy,” Nader said when asked about public apathy. “They have bought into the belief that if it protests it will be brutalized by the police. If they have Muslim names they will be subjected to Patriot Act treatment. This has scared the hell out of the underclass. They will be called terrorists.

“This is the third television generation,” Nader said. “They have grown up watching screens. They have not gone to rallies. Those are history now. They hear their parents and grandparents talk about marches and rallies. They have little toys and gizmos that they hold in their hands. They have no idea of any public protest or activity. It is a tapestry of passivity.

“They have been broken,” Nader said of the working class. “How many times have their employers threatened them with going abroad? How many times have they threatened the workers with outsourcing? The polls on job insecurity are record-high by those who have employment. And the liberal intelligentsia have failed them. They [the intellectuals] have bought into carping and making lecture fees as the senior fellow at the institute of so-and-so. Look at the top 50 intelligentsiaE2not one of them supported our campaign, not one of them has urged for street action and marches.”

Our task is to build movements that can act as a counterweight to the corporate rape of America. We must opt out of the mainstream. We must articulate and stand behind a viable and uncompromising socialism, one that is firmly and unequivocally on the side of working men and women. We must give up the self-delusion that we can influence the power elite from the inside. We must become as militant as those who are seeking our enslavement. If we remain passive as we undergo the largest transference of wealth upward in American history, our open society will die. The working class is being plunged into desperation that will soon rival the misery endured by the working class in China and India. And the Democratic Party, including Obama, is a willing accomplice.

“Obama is squandering his positive response around the world,” Nader said. “In terms of foreign and military policy it is a distinct continuity with Bush. Iraq, Afghanistan, the militarization of foreign policy, the continued expansion of the Pentagon budget and pursuing more globalized trade agreements are the same.”

This is an assessment that neoconservatives now gleefully share. Eliot A. Cohen, writing in The Wall Street Journal, made the same pronouncement.

“Mostly, though, the underlying structure of the policy remains the same,” Cohen wrote [2] in an Aug. 2 opinion piece titled “What’s Different About the Obama Foreign Policy.” “Nor should this surprise us: The United States has interests dictated by its physical location, its economy, its alliances, and above all, its values. Naive realists, a large tribe, fail to understand that ideals will inevitably guide American foreign policy, even if they do not always determine it. Moreover, because the Obama foreign and defense policy senior team consists of centrist experts from the Democratic Party, it is unlikely to make radically different judgments about the world, and about American interests in it, than its predecessors.”

Nader said that Obama should gradually steer the country away from imperial and corporate tyranny.

“You don’t just put out policy statements of congeniality but statements of gradual redirection,” Nader said. “You incorporate in that statement not just demilitarization, not just ascension of smart diplomacy, but the enlargement of the U.S. as a humanitarian superpower, and cut out these Soviet-era weapons systems and start rapid response for disaster like earthquakes and tsunamis. You expand infectious disease programs which the U.N. Developmental Commission says can be done for $50 billion a year in Third World countries on nutrition, minimal health care and minimal shelter.”

Obama has expanded the assistance to our class of Wall Street extortionists through subsidies, loan guarantees and backup declarations to banks such as Citigroup. His stimulus package does not address the crisis in our public works infrastructure; instead it doles out funds to Medicaid and unemployment compensation. There will be no huge public works program to remodel the country. The president refuses to acknowledge the obvious—we can no longer afford our empire.

“Obama could raise a call to come home, America, from the military budget abroad,” Nader suggested. “He could create a new constituency that does not exist because everything is so fragmented, scattered, haphazard and slapdash with the stimulus. He could get the local labor unions, the local Chambers of Commerce and the mayors=2 0to say the more we cut the military budget the more you get in terms of public works.”

“They [administration leaders] don’t see the distinction between public power and corporate power,” Nader said. “This is their time in history to reassert public values represented by workers, consumers, taxpayers and communities. They are creating a jobless recovery, the worst of the worst, with the clear specter of inflation on the horizon. We are heading for deep water.”

The massive borrowing acts as an anesthetic. It prevents us from facing the new limitations we must learn to cope with domestically and abroad. It allows us to live in the illusion that we are not in a state of irrevocable crisis, that our decline is not real and that catastrophe has been averted. But running the national debt can work only so long.

“No one can predict the future,” Nader added hopefully. “No one knows the variables. No one predicted the move on tobacco. No one predicted gay rights. No one predicted the Berkeley student rebellion. The students were supine. You never know what will light the fire. You have to keep the pressure on. I know only one thing for sure, the whole liberal-progressive constituency is going nowhere.”

www.TruthDig.com

Copyright © 2009 Truthdig, L.L.C.

--------------------

The only thing I don't agree with is Chris Hedges's call for full commitment to socialism.

First, I don't think we could do it here, with such a conservative Southern right-wing population, and the scare word that is is.

Until campaign finance and lobbying reform it will be hard to get off the war ecomomy - the military/industrial complex (which includes the dinosaur oil & gas companies that were just listed has being in the top 10 for executive compensation - they have had a bonanza during the last 8 years, thanks to their cronies BushCo, I need not tell you, as they kept getting up to the tipping point of Global Heating.) That's one of the most depressing things - a lot of scientists think it's too late to stop Global Heating - we can only mitigate the worst efffects - I'll still be alive when the misery begins, I'm afraid.

Second, at this point, I support a mixed economy, private and public, with strong regulation of Wall St, and health, woker safety and wages portections, FAIR trade, not free trade, that outsources jobs, drives wages and working conditions down, and encourages illegal immigration, all to give CEOs millions in salaries and bonuses, support for unions, and so on, health care reform with at least a single payer option, and most importantly (and most improbably, because Congress has to cut its payday - public campaign funding for Federal elections and strong lobbying reform (despite SCOTUS's terrible decision equating speech with money.)

As far as getting people to organize, the mainstream media is so corporate controlled, consciously or unconsciously, that our only hope is getting people off their asses through internet and messaging communication, if that can be done).

People have to raise their consciousness, too.

P.S. As you probably know, since November, when he appointed Robert Rubin acolytes Geithner and Summers to Treasury, I knew we had a neoliberal DLC pro-Wall St. free trader like Bill Clinton, and I was disappointed in Obama, and knew he'd not keep a lot of his progressive campaign promises.

Glenn Greenwald tells it like it is, as usual

2009-08-02T04:03:00.000-07:00

Glenn Greenwald at salon.com

Thursday July 30, 2009 08:31 EDT

Practicalities v. principles: the prime Beltway affliction

NAOMI KLEIN ON A BIG PICTURE

2009-07-30T15:34:00.000-07:00

The following was adapted from a speech on May 2, 2009 at The Progressive’s 100th anniversary conference and originally printed in The Progressive magazine, August 2009 issue:

We are in a progressive moment, a moment when the ground is shifting beneath our feet, and anything is possible. What we considered unimaginable about what could be said and hoped for a year ago is now possible. At a time like this, it is absolutely critical that we be as clear as we possibly can be about what it is that we want because we might just get it.

So the stakes are high.

I usually talk about the bailout in speeches these days. We all need to understand it because it is a robbery in progress, the greatest heist in monetary history. But today I'd like to take a different approach: What if the bailout actually works, what if the financial sector is saved and the economy returns to the course it was on before the crisis struck? Is that what we want? And what would that world look like?

The answer is that it would look like Sarah Palin. Hear me out, this is not a joke. I don't think we have given sufficient consideration to the meaning of the Palin moment. Think about it: Sarah Palin stepped onto the world stage as Vice Presidential candidate on August 29 at a McCain campaign rally, to much fanfare. Exactly two weeks later, on September 14, Lehman Brothers collapsed, triggering the global financial meltdown.

So in a way, Palin was the last clear expression of capitalism-as-usual before everything went south. That's quite helpful because she showed us-in that plainspoken, down-homey way of hers-the trajectory the U.S. economy was on before its current meltdown. By offering us this glimpse of a future, one narrowly avoided, Palin provides us with an opportunity to ask a core question: Do we want to go there? Do we want to save that pre-crisis system, get it back to where it was last September? Or do we want to use this crisis, and the electoral mandate for serious change delivered by the last election, to radically transform that system? We need to get clear on our answer now because we haven't had the potent combination of a serious crisis and a clear progressive democratic mandate for change since the 1930s. We use this opportunity, or we lose it.

So what was Sarah Palin telling us about capitalism-as-usual before she was so rudely interrupted by the meltdown? Let's first recall that before she came along, the U.S. public, at long last, was starting to come to grips with the urgency of the climate crisis, with the fact that our economic activity is at war with the planet, that radical change is needed immediately. We were actually having that conversation: Polar bears were on the cover of Newsweek magazine. And then in walked Sarah Palin. The core of her message was this: Those environmentalists, those liberals, those do-gooders are all wrong. You don't have to change anything. You don't have to rethink anything. Keep driving your gas-guzzling car, keep going to Wal-Mart and shop all you want. The reason for that is a magical place called Alaska. Just come up here and take all you want. "Americans," she said at the Republican National Convention, "we need to produce more of our own oil and gas. Take it from a gal who knows the North Slope of Alaska, we've got lots of both."

And the crowd at the convention responded by chanting and chanting: "Drill, baby, drill."

Watching that scene on television, with that weird creepy mixture of sex and oil and jingoism, I remember thinking: "Wow, the RNC has turned into a rally in favor of screwing Planet Earth." Literally.

But what Palin was saying is what is built into the very DNA of capitalism: the idea that the world has no limits. She was saying that there is no such thing as consequences, or real-world deficits. Because there will always be another frontier, another Alaska, another bubble. Just move on and discover it. Tomorrow will never come.

This is the most comforting and dangerous lie that there is: the lie that perpetual, unending growth is possible on our finite planet. And we have to remember that this message was incredibly popular in those first two weeks, before Lehman collapsed. Despite Bush's record, Palin and McCain were pulling ahead. And if it weren't for the financial crisis, and for the fact that Obama started connecting with working class voters by putting deregulation and trickle-down economics on trial, they might have actually won.

The President tells us he wants to look forward, not backwards. But in order to confront the lie of perpetual growth and limitless abundance that is at the center of both the ecological and financial crises, we have to look backwards. And we have to look way backwards, not just to the past eight years of Bush and Cheney, but to the very founding of this country, to the whole idea of the settler state.

Modern capitalism was born with the so-called discovery of the Americas. It was the pillage of the incredible natural resources of the Americas that generated the excess capital that made the Industrial Revolution possible. Early explorers spoke of this land as a New Jerusalem, a land of such bottomless abundance, there for the taking, so vast that the pillage would never have to end. This mythology is in our biblical stories-of floods and fresh starts, of raptures and rescues-and it is at the center of the American Dream of constant reinvention. What this myth tells us is that we don't have to live with our pasts, with the consequences of our actions. We can always escape, start over.

These stories were always dangerous, of course, to the people who were already living on the "discovered" lands, to the people who worked them through forced labor. But now the planet itself is telling us that we cannot afford these stories of endless new beginnings anymore. That is why it is so significant that at the very moment when some kind of human survival instinct kicked in, and we seemed finally to be coming to grips with the Earth's natural limits, along came Palin, the new and shiny incarnation of the colonial frontierswoman, saying: Come on up to Alaska. There is always more. Don't think, just take.

This is not about Sarah Palin. It's about the meaning of that myth of constant "discovery," and what it tells us about the economic system that they're spending trillions of dollars to save. What it tells us is that capitalism, left to its own devices, will push us past the point from which the climate can recover. And capitalism will avoid a serious accounting-whether of its financial debts or its ecological debts-at all costs. Because there's always more. A new quick fix. A new frontier.

That message was selling, as it always does. It was only when the stock market crashed that people said, "Maybe Sarah Palin isn't a great idea this time around. Let's go with the smart guy to ride out the crisis."

I almost feel like we've been given a last chance, some kind of a reprieve. I try not to be apocalyptic, but the global warming science I read is scary. This economic crisis, as awful as it is, pulled us back from that ecological precipice that we were about to drive over with Sarah Palin and gave us a tiny bit of time and space to change course. And I think it's significant that when the crisis hit, there was almost a sense of relief, as if people knew they were living beyond their means and had gotten caught. We suddenly had permission to do things together other than shop, and that spoke to something deep.

But we are not free from the myth. The willful blindness to consequences that Sarah Palin represents so well is embedded in the way Washington is responding to the financial crisis. There is just an absolute refusal to look at how bad it is. Washington would prefer to throw trillions of dollars into a black hole rather than find out how deep the hole actually is. That's how willful the desire is not to know.

And we see lots of other signs of the old logic returning. Wall Street salaries are almost back to 2007 levels. There's a certain kind of electricity in the claims that the stock market is rebounding. "Can we stop feeling guilty yet?" you can practically hear the cable commentators asking. "Is the bubble back yet?"

And they may well be right. This crisis isn't going to kill capitalism or even change it substantively. Without huge popular pressure for structural reform, the crisis will prove to have been nothing more than a very wrenching adjustment. The result will be even greater inequality than before the crisis. Because the millions of people losing their jobs and their homes aren't all going to be getting them back, not by a long shot. And manufacturing capacity is very difficult to rebuild once it's auctioned off.

It's appropriate that we call this a "bailout." Financial markets are being bailed out to keep the ship of finance capitalism from sinking, but what is being scooped out is not water. It's people. It's people who are being thrown overboard in the name of "stabilization." The result will be a vessel that is leaner and meaner. Much meaner. Because great inequality-the super rich living side by side with the economically desperate-requires a hardening of the hearts. We need to believe ourselves superior to those who are excluded in order to get through the day. So this is the system that is being saved: the same old one, only meaner.

And the question that we face is: Should our job be to bail out this ship, the biggest pirate ship that ever was, or to sink it and replace it with a sturdier vessel, one with space for everyone? One that doesn't require these ritual purges, during which we throw our friends and our neighbors overboard to save the people in first class. One that understands that the Earth doesn't have the capacity for all of us to live better and better.

But it does have the capacity, as Bolivian President Evo Morales said recently at the U.N., "for all of us to live well."

Because make no mistake: Capitalism will be back. And the same message will return, though there may be someone new selling that message: You don't need to change. Keep consuming all you want. There's plenty more. Drill, baby, drill. Maybe there will be some technological fix that will make all our problems disappear.

And that is why we need to be absolutely clear right now.

Capitalism can survive this crisis. But the world can't survive another capitalist comeback.

i heart david sirota

2009-07-24T14:05:00.000-07:00

David Sirota

Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist
Posted: July 24, 2009 01:04 PM

Attack of the One-Percenters: Land Rover Liberals, Corrupt Cowboys & the Millionaire Media

The health care debate has reminded us that there really are three separate but coordinated armies that defend the status quo in Washington -- and will defend that status quo, whether on health care or any other economic issue. In my newspaper column today, I look at who these factions are, and what their motives are. You can read the column here.

In a nutshell, you have the Land Rover Liberals, many coming from the 14 out of 25 wealthiest congressional districts that Democrats now represent. Right now, their opposition to health care and tax reform is being led by Boulder, Colorado Rep. Jared Polis (D).

You also have the Corrupt Cowboys -- those lawmakers from very poor, mostly Southern and Western parts of the country. These people give themselves Americana sounding nicknames like "Blue Dog Democrats" or "Main Street Republicans" so as to pretend their opposition to health care comes from their being down home guys "representin' the folks back home." Of course, these same lawmakers are among the most rapacious corporate fundraisers and lobbyist-connected insiders in Congress. And as I pointed out yesterday, there's no evidence that the districts and states the Corrupt Cowboys represent despise health reform by virtue of the fact that they are culturally conservative bastions. In fact, Nate Silver says there's exactly the opposite evidence:

There's not really any evidence that health care reform is unpopular in the Blue Dog districts. Although there are exceptions, most of the Blue Dog districts are fairly poor. A Quinnipiac poll released earlier this month suggested that while 53 percent of voters overall think "think it's the government's responsibility to make sure that everyone in the United States has adequate health care," 61 percent of voters making under $50,000 do. Also, while Quinnipaic did not break out the results for moderate and conservative Democrats, which are plentiful in these Districts, one can reasonably infer them. In this poll, 79 percent of liberals agreed with the statement as did 77 percent of Democrats -- not a very big difference. Since almost all liberals are Democrats and about half of all Democrats are liberals, that suggests that support for health care reform among non-liberal Democrats is something like 75 percent.

Thus, the story about the honest, god-fearing, good ol' boy cowboys opposing health care reform out of representational obligation has only been able to become conventional wisdom through the Millionaire Media -- the elite national press corps, chock full of very wealthy people, that disseminates the most pernicious kind of anti-reform propaganda. These are the same people who insisted we should immediately rush $12 trillion in bailout cash out to Wall Street speculators, and who now insist that 64 years of debates over a $1 trillion health care proposal is inappropriately "rushing" health care reform. They are also the voices who are actually deriding health care reform as an inhumane proposal to legislatively waterboard the poor, persecuted richest one percent.

In the column, I look at the motives of all these groups, and give President Obama huge props for taking them on. As a sometime critic of Obama, I really think he's doing a fantastic job right now, and the news this morning from the New York Times that "the president planning trips across the country" to campaign for health care reform is just fantastic. He's going to have to take on the three groups I discuss in my column -- and if he can beat them, we're going to get universal health care.

Read the whole column here.

The column relies on grassroots support -- and because of that support, it is getting wider and wider circulation (a big thank you to all who have helped with that). So if you'd like to see my column regularly in your local paper, use this directory to find the contact info for your local editorial page editors. Get get in touch with them and point them to my Creators Syndicate site. Thanks, as always, for your ongoing readership and help contacting local editors. This column couldn't be what it is without your help.

===================

tallahassee.com

July 24, 2009

David Sirota: 1-percenters launch attack on health care

David Sirota
Creators Syndicate

Here's a truism: The wealthiest 1 percent have never had it so good.

According to government figures, 1-percenters' share of America's total income is the highest it has been since 1929, and their tax rates are the lowest they've faced in two decades. Through bonuses, many 1-percenters will profit from the $23 trillion in bailout largesse the Treasury Department now says could be headed to financial firms.

And, most of them benefit from IRS decisions to reduce millionaire audits and collect zero taxes from the majority of major corporations.

But what really makes the ultra-wealthy so fortunate, what truly separates this moment from a run-of-the-mill Gilded Age, is the unprecedented protection the 1-percenters have bought for themselves on the most pressing issues.

To review: With 22,000 Americans dying each year because they lack health insurance, Congress is considering universal health care legislation financed by a surcharge on income above $280,000 — that is, a levy almost exclusively on 1-percenters. This surtax would graze just 5 percent of small businesses and would recoup only part of the $700 billion the 1-percenters received from the Bush tax cuts.

In fact, it is so minuscule, those making $1 million annually would pay just $9,000 more in taxes every year — or nine-tenths of 1 percent of their 12-month haul.

Nonetheless, the 1-percenters have deployed an army to destroy the initiative before it makes progress.

The foot soldiers are the Land Rover Liberals. These Democratic lawmakers secure their lefty labels by wearing pink-ribbon lapel pins and supporting good causes like abortion rights. However, being affluent and/or from affluent districts, they routinely drive their luxury cars over middle-class economic interests. Hence, this week's letter from dot-com tycoon Rep. Jared Polis, D-Boulder, Colo., and other Land Rover Liberals calling for the death of the surtax.

Echoing that demand are the Corrupt Cowboys — those like Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., who come from the heartland's culturally conservative and economically impoverished locales. These cavalrymen in both parties quietly build insurmountable campaign war chests as the biggest corporate fundraisers in Congress. At the same time, they publicly preen as jes' folks, make twangy references to "voters back home," and now promise to kill the health care surtax because they say that's what their communities want. Cash payoffs made, re-elections purchased, the absurd story somehow goes that because blue-collar constituents in Flyover America like guns and love Jesus, they must also reflexively adore politicians who defend 1-percenters' bounty.

That fantastical fairly tale, of course, couldn't exist without the Millionaire Media — the elite journalists and opinionmongers who represent corporate media conglomerates and/or are themselves extremely wealthy. Ignoring all the data about inequality, they legitimize the assertions of the 1-percenters' first two battalions, while actually claiming that America's fat cats are unfairly persecuted.

For example, Washington Post editors deride surtax proponents for allegedly believing "the rich alone can fund government." Likewise, Wall Street Journal correspondent Jonathan Weisman wonders why the surtax "soak(s) the rich" by unduly "lumping all of the problems of the finances of the United States on 1 percent of (its) households?"

And most brazenly, NBC's Meredith Vieira asks President Obama why the surtax is intent on "punishing the rich?"

For his part, Obama has responded with characteristic coolness — and a powerful counter-strike. "No, it's not punishing the rich," he said.

"If I can afford to do a little bit more so that a whole bunch of families out there have a little more security, when I already have security, that's part of being a community."

If any volley can thwart this latest attack of the 1-percenters, it is that simple idea.

# David Sirota is the bestselling author of "Hostile Takeover" (2006) and "The Uprising" (2008). Contact him at ds@davidsirota.com.

On postmodern law

2009-07-23T13:34:00.001-07:00

To continue.....completely unedited (sorry - may spruce up later) -- --

Of course, I really should and will go research what others have written about Integral and postmodern law, especially at Integral research sites like Wilber's and Cohen's.

Off the cuff, I'd say that green law holon recognizes the untouchable, sacrosanct, in a sense nature of the Rational transformative orange European Enlightenment-informed principles of separation of church and state and full individual rights, but understands that with time, history, development, growth, regress, evolution, temporary devolution, progress, reaction, etc. the CONTEXT of those golden rules changes and so the Constitution can be applied to new situations and new agencies of consciousness (people and compassionately extending down, ultimately to rocks lol). Well, of course, an obvious example is Women's Suffrage, not achieved until 1920, and banning segregation by race in public schools, and public facilities, and on and on. Actually that's a modern/postmodern outlook. Anyone who thinks the Constitution is a dead document is a frozen amber level mythic/membership believer -- except that postmodern relativistic pluralism often is ill in-formed by pre-trans confusions and is arrested in its development to integral pluralism; this is a legitimate gripe by the right, and one that progressives need to address, and that includes all other distorted translations of that pathology (political correctness afraid of true holarchy, run amok).

Holonic AQAL question

2009-07-14T17:25:00.000-07:00

Sotomayor's green postmodern pluralism flummoxes amber/orange (or SD- blue/orange) conservative Sens. - but postmodern relative pluralism IF healthy not pre-trans "infected" - what is the healthy iteration for the law, for a judge, for a court for that?

Comments from other AQAL or SD students and interested welcome. I'll ponder on it meself.

Matt Taibbi turns over a boulder!

2009-07-08T23:46:00.000-07:00

MATT TAIBBI THROWS SOME BURNING SUNLIGHT ON GOLDMAN SACHS! MUST-READ - CLICK HERE

My comment at the site:

You hit it out of the ballpark, Matt T. Great! Dynamite!

And I urge everyone to support CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM - it's the only way we can possibly escape becoming the banana republic we're fast becoming -

Go to: Change Congress and Change Congress's Partners

and

Like slowing down Global Heating, I have hope, in the face of grim evidence. for a true democratic republic, not a corrupt corporocratic plutocracy.

I HAPPEN TO LIKE KRUGMAN AND RICH

2009-07-08T19:59:00.000-07:00

I'm not, as anyone who has read this blog knows, not a dummy for corporate mainstream news publications.

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

July 5, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Bernie Madoff Is No John Dillinger
By FRANK RICH

THE judge condemned Bernie Madoff’s crimes as “extraordinarily evil.” The New York Daily News, whose publisher was a Madoff victim, chose “The Pariah” as its front-page headline and promised that the dastardly villain would suffer “everlasting consumption in the jaws of the devil.” The Times declared that the Madoff case, by attaching a human face to a financial meltdown that produced fear, panic and loss, had “put an entire era on trial.”

But for all this rhetorical thunder, Madoff’s 150-year sentence still seemed an anticlimax, as if the trial of the century had ended without a verdict. There was no national catharsis. The news landed with something of a thud. On the most-watched network newscast, “NBC Nightly News,” it received second billing to Day Four of updates on Michael Jackson’s death.

Madoff, it turned out, was no Public Enemy No. 1 to rival John Dillinger, the Great Depression thug at the center of Hollywood’s timely release this holiday weekend, “Public Enemies.” In the context of our own Great Recession, Madoff’s old-fashioned Ponzi scheme was merely a one-off next to the esoteric (and often legal) heists by banks and bankers. They gamed the entire system, then took the money and ran before the bubble burst, sticking the rest of us with that fear, panic and loss.

The estimated $65 billion involved in Madoff’s flimflam is dwarfed by the more than $2.5 trillion paid so far by American taxpayers to bail out those masters of Wall Street’s universe. A.I.G. alone has already left us on the hook for $180 billion. It’s hard for those who didn’t have money with Madoff to get worked up about him when so many of the era’s real culprits have slipped away scot-free. Already some of those same players are up to similarly greedy shenanigans again now that the coast seems to be clear.

Washington had no choice but to ride to their rescue last fall to prevent even greater systemic catastrophe. But that rescue is tainted. As the economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote in this month’s Vanity Fair, “In the developing world, people look at Washington and see a system of government that allowed Wall Street to write self-serving rules which put at risk the entire global economy — and then, when the day of reckoning came, turned to Wall Street to manage the recovery. They see continued re-distributions of wealth to the top of the pyramid, transparently at the expense of ordinary citizens.”

Not just in the developing world, but in America. Look at what we saw last week alone.

To beat out the implementation of new regulations, banks are rapidly jacking up checking-account charges and credit card fees, even for those who have paid their bills on time. As Eric Dash of The Times reported on Thursday, the institutions that received the most bailout loot are often the biggest offenders.

That would include the too-big-to-fail Citigroup, which has so far received $45 billion in taxpayers’ money, along with guarantees on $300 billion in toxic assets, to mitigate its reckless risk-taking during the reign of such obscenely rewarded (and now departed) executives as Charles Prince and Robert Rubin. While taxpayers will soon own some 34 percent of Citi, it is not only increasing our credit card interest rates (to nearly 30 percent in some cases) but raising its own base salaries (by 50 percent) to work around Washington’s new restrictions on bonuses. New rules may come and go, but loopholes remain eternal.

We also have learned, from The Wall Street Journal on Thursday, that Goldman Sachs, another bailout recipient, is on track to pay its employees an average of $700,000 each in 2009, which, incredibly, is a bit higher than its compensation average in the pre-crash year of 2007. In a scathing and controversial new article in Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi accuses Goldman of having earned such rewards by engineering “every major market manipulation since the Great Depression.”

What’s uncontroversial and indisputable is that Goldman alumni have played key roles in both the Bush and Obama administrations’ responses to the current crisis — even though Goldman has a big stake in the outcome. The dense revolving-door conflicts of interest are appalling. Goldman is howling about Taibbi’s article, but the bottom line was articulated last week by the economic blogger Felix Salmon of Reuters. He wrote that he couldn’t “think of a single government regulation over the past couple of decades which has remotely harmed Goldman Sachs” as opposed to the many that “have done it a world of good.”

Goldman also rules at the New York Fed, a supposed monitor of Wall Street. Until May the Fed’s chairman was serving simultaneously on the Goldman board; he resigned only after The Wall Street Journal reported that he was also still buying Goldman stock during his Fed tenure. At least that other failed watchdog, the Securities and Exchange Commission, has now cleaned house. But Politico reported last week that its new chairwoman, Mary Schapiro, had been the star draw at a lavish June banquet for the S.E.C. Historical Society, an independent organization that sold tables for up to $7,500 to “law and lobbying firms that do business with the S.E.C.” Among the buyers: Standard & Poor’s, a credit ratings agency that enabled the subprime bubble by giving its approval to wildly speculative derivatives.

It’s against this grand backdrop of business-as-usual at the top of the pyramid that we learned at week’s end that the speed of job losses is accelerating again. The government also reported that Americans who still do have jobs now have an average 33-hour workweek, the lowest since tracking began in 1964.

The Obama administration’s response to the economic crisis is rapidly facing its own stress tests. We will soon learn the ultimate fate and stringency of the regulatory package sent to Congress, including the consumer-protection agency the banks want to maim or kill. The stimulus’s ability to put Americans back to work remains an open question. Should we have a jobless recovery or, worse, a second-wave recession like the one that blindsided F.D.R. in 1937, it will be as catastrophic for the Democrats as it will be for the country.

Barney Frank seems to understand the political dynamic better than the White House. He told bankers back in February, “People really hate you, and they’re starting to hate us because we’re hanging out with you.” If the administration wants to be reminded of how quickly today’s already sour mood can turn rancid, Michael Mann’s haunting “Public Enemies” could not be a more apt refresher course. The casting alone tells you where the audience’s sympathies will lie: Dillinger is played by America’s reigning male sweetheart, Johnny Depp, while his G-man pursuer, Melvin Purvis, is in the hands of the thorny Christian Bale.

“Public Enemies” doesn’t make a federal case of parallels between its era and ours. It doesn’t have to. But it’s instructive to revisit the actual history. In the book that inspired the film, the journalist Bryan Burrough writes that Detective magazine polled movie theater owners during Dillinger’s yearlong spree of 1933-34, and found that in terms of drawing audience applause Public Enemy No. 1 beat out F.D.R. and Charles Lindbergh. Roosevelt ran with it. As Steve Fraser writes in his cultural history of Wall Street, “Every Man a Speculator,” F.D.R. “likened his Wall Street villains to ‘kidnappers and bank robbers’ eluding capture” in his 1936 re-election campaign. He knew Wall Street manipulators were the real targets of the public’s ire.

Another look at this much-chronicled past, “Dillinger’s Wild Ride,” by Elliott J. Gorn, a professor of history at Brown University, is the first to be published during our own hard times. In it you learn that ordinary law-abiding Americans even wrote letters to newspapers and politicians defending Dillinger’s assault on banks. “Dillinger did not rob poor people,” wrote one correspondent to The Indianapolis Star. “He robbed those who became rich by robbing the poor.”

Gorn writes that the current economic crisis helped him understand better why Americans could root for a homicidal bank robber: “As our own day’s story of stupid policies and lax regulations, of greedy moneymen, free-market hucksters, white-collar thieves, and self-serving politicians unfolds, and as banks foreclose on millions of families’ homes, workers lose their jobs, and life savings disappear, it becomes clear why Dillinger’s wild ride so fascinated America during the 1930s.” An outlaw could channel a people’s “sense of rage at the system that had failed them.”

As Gorn reminds us, Americans who felt betrayed didn’t just take to cheering Dillinger; some turned to the populism of Huey Long, or to right-wing and anti-Semitic demagogues like Father Coughlin, or to the Communist Party. The passions unleashed by economic inequities are explosive because those inequities violate the fundamental capitalist faith. It’s the bedrock American dream that virtues like hard work and playing by the rules are rewarded with prosperity.

In 2009, too many who worked hard and played by the rules are still suffering, while too many who bent or broke the rules with little or no accountability are back reaping a disproportionate share of what scant prosperity there is. The tepid national satisfaction taken in Bernie Madoff’s terminal prison sentence should be a warning to the White House. In the most devastating economic catastrophe since Dillinger’s time, many Americans know all too well that justice has yet to be served.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

OBAMA: LISTEN TO KRUGMAN, THIS TIME, PLEASE

2009-07-08T02:18:00.000-07:00

July 3, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
That ’30s Show
By PAUL KRUGMAN

O.K., Thursday’s jobs report settles it. We’re going to need a bigger stimulus. But does the president know that?

Let’s do the math.

Since the recession began, the U.S. economy has lost 6 ½ million jobs — and as that grim employment report confirmed, it’s continuing to lose jobs at a rapid pace. Once you take into account the 100,000-plus new jobs that we need each month just to keep up with a growing population, we’re about 8 ½ million jobs in the hole.

And the deeper the hole gets, the harder it will be to dig ourselves out. The job figures weren’t the only bad news in Thursday’s report, which also showed wages stalling and possibly on the verge of outright decline. That’s a recipe for a descent into Japanese-style deflation, which is very difficult to reverse. Lost decade, anyone?

Wait — there’s more bad news: the fiscal crisis of the states. Unlike the federal government, states are required to run balanced budgets. And faced with a sharp drop in revenue, most states are preparing savage budget cuts, many of them at the expense of the most vulnerable. Aside from directly creating a great deal of misery, these cuts will depress the economy even further.

So what do we have to counter this scary prospect? We have the Obama stimulus plan, which aims to create 3 ½ million jobs by late next year. That’s much better than nothing, but it’s not remotely enough. And there doesn’t seem to be much else going on. Do you remember the administration’s plan to sharply reduce the rate of foreclosures, or its plan to get the banks lending again by taking toxic assets off their balance sheets? Neither do I.

All of this is depressingly familiar to anyone who has studied economic policy in the 1930s. Once again a Democratic president has pushed through job-creation policies that will mitigate the slump but aren’t aggressive enough to produce a full recovery. Once again much of the stimulus at the federal level is being undone by budget retrenchment at the state and local level.

So have we failed to learn from history, and are we, therefore, doomed to repeat it? Not necessarily — but it’s up to the president and his economic team to ensure that things are different this time. President Obama and his officials need to ramp up their efforts, starting with a plan to make the stimulus bigger.

Just to be clear, I’m well aware of how difficult it will be to get such a plan enacted.

There won’t be any cooperation from Republican leaders, who have settled on a strategy of total opposition, unconstrained by facts or logic. Indeed, these leaders responded to the latest job numbers by proclaiming the failure of the Obama economic plan. That’s ludicrous, of course. The administration warned from the beginning that it would be several quarters before the plan had any major positive effects. But that didn’t stop the chairman of the Republican Study Committee from issuing a statement demanding: “Where are the jobs?”

It’s also not clear whether the administration will get much help from Senate “centrists,” who partially eviscerated the original stimulus plan by demanding cuts in aid to state and local governments — aid that, as we’re now seeing, was desperately needed. I’d like to think that some of these centrists are feeling remorse, but if they are, I haven’t seen any evidence to that effect.

And as an economist, I’d add that many members of my profession are playing a distinctly unhelpful role.

It has been a rude shock to see so many economists with good reputations recycling old fallacies — like the claim that any rise in government spending automatically displaces an equal amount of private spending, even when there is mass unemployment — and lending their names to grossly exaggerated claims about the evils of short-run budget deficits. (Right now the risks associated with additional debt are much less than the risks associated with failing to give the economy adequate support.)

Also, as in the 1930s, the opponents of action are peddling scare stories about inflation even as deflation looms.

So getting another round of stimulus will be difficult. But it’s essential.

Obama administration economists understand the stakes. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, Christina Romer, the chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, published an article on the “lessons of 1937” — the year that F.D.R. gave in to the deficit and inflation hawks, with disastrous consequences both for the economy and for his political agenda.

What I don’t know is whether the administration has faced up to the inadequacy of what it has done so far.

So here’s my message to the president: You need to get both your economic team and your political people working on additional stimulus, now. Because if you don’t, you’ll soon be facing your own personal 1937.

Home

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Ending to the greatest film of all time

2009-07-05T00:33:00.000-07:00

Clarke and Kubrick were "talking" evolution, back in 1966-67, when it was just catching on that evolution went past the biological.

Palin's latest odd moment

2009-07-03T16:43:00.001-07:00

Sarah Palin said today , "We are fishermen; we know only DEAD fish go with the flow." Naked phobia about the green holon from the amber/orange one. I like its directness, even though I think she be knuclehead/dragger.

The only way change will ever happen

2009-06-30T23:32:00.001-07:00

As I and many others have known, and as the current watering down (hopefully not too bad a watering down) of healthcare reform is showing, it's the influence of campaign contributions and lobbying money from the big corporate entitites that prevents progressive evolutionary change in our system.

I invite you to join in changing the poltical system to one of public finance of Congressional (and Presidential) campaigns and transparency in government -

Start here -

CHANGE CONGRESS

And continue here -

PARTNERS OF "CHANGE CONGRESS"

The Iranian Election

2009-06-14T14:28:00.000-07:00

Quite probable fraud. Even though the rural less-educated population who are most likely at the same blue mythic-membership level (holon) that Ahmadinejad undoubtedly mostly voted for him, statistics show that when the absoulte number of voters is high, the more progressive (evolved)candidate wins, because there is more participation from the young and urban voters. It's probable that Ahmadinejad, who is orange-green won. I think Ahmadinejad's win a case of fraud, as do many others. Look at the percentages - they are absurd given the information we had before about the probable results. And, of course, look at the repression that is happening for protestors. Not that we didn't have two stolen elections in '00 and '04 (and, ok, Kennedy in '60).

Photograph by Mario of

2009-06-14T04:36:00.001-07:00

Tuscany at webshotes.com - exquisite nature (and Nature) and exquite art -

Media Matters "Shatters" / Enlightens the purposefully dark untrue myths put out by CRP

2009-06-09T15:50:00.000-07:00

Via Stand with Dr. Dean -

Report reveals truth behind Rick Scott and CRP's allegations against the public option healthcare plan

By Joe Frandino

SEIU’s Change That Works Health Care Campaign has produced a detailed rebuttal to “Bulldozer” that the Media Matters Action Network has posted below.

Media Matters Action Network released this report on June 5, following Rick Scott and Conservatives for Patients’ Rights’ controversial segment that was directed at combating the public option health-care plan…

CPR Wants Viewers To Believe That The Health Insurance Market Is Large And Varied

FALSE CLAIM: “There are hundreds of choices of health care plans today…” [Conservatives for Patients’ Rights “Bulldozer” Ad, 6/4/09]

FACT: Only A Few Insurance Companies Dominate The Market, Leaving Americans With Limited Choices In Health Care. According to the American Medical Association, 94 percent of United States health care markets are considered highly concentrated, meaning that one company or a small group of companies control a great deal of the market. [American Medical Association, “Competition in Health Insurance,” 2008 Update]

CPR Wants Viewers To Believe The Government Will Take Away American’s Choices

FALSE CLAIM: “This government-run plan could crush all your other choices, driving them out of existence…” [Conservatives for Patients’ Rights “Bulldozer” Ad, 6/4/09]

FACT: Public Plan Will Only Drive Out Inefficient Private Plans, Leaving Consumers With Greater Choices And Better Care Options. According to Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) chairman Glenn Hackbarth’s comments on National Journal’s health care blog, “some private plans will not survive this competition – namely, plans that do little more than offer free-choice of provider, fee-for-service coverage. We don’t need those plans; a public plan can do that better.” [National Journal’s Health Care Blog, 12/8/08]

FACT: Private Plans That Offer Lower-Cost Options And More Comprehensive Plans Will Be Able To Compete. According to the Urban Institute: “Private plans that offer better services and greater access to providers, even at a somewhat higher cost than the public plans, would survive the competition in this environment. It is also conceivable that private plans offering a lower-cost option – for example, lower premiums than the public plan, say by exploiting care management innovations, and network and payment rate limitations – could stake out a separate niche in some markets.” [Urban Institute, 3/18/09]

FACT:Many States Run Public And Private Plans Alongside Each Other Successfully. According to the Center for American Progress: “Today, state governments (all of which regulate insurance companies) operate public Medicaid programs, purchase insurance for thousands of public employees, and regulate insurers. In fact, many states successfully offer their employees and retirees private health insurance plans side-by-side with these states’ self-funded health insurance plans.” [Center for American Progress, March 2009]

CPR Wants Viewers To Believe The Government Will Remove Coverage For 119 Million Americans

FALSE CLAIM: “Government-run plan” will force “119 million off their current insurance coverage, leaving no choices in health insurance and government in control of your health care.” [Conservatives for Patients’ Rights “Bulldozer” Ad, 6/4/09]

FACT:CBO Director: Lewin Study Claims Are Overstated. According to National Journal’s Congress Daily: “CBO Director Elmendorf told Senate Finance Committee members and staffers he expects fewer Americans would migrate from private health insurance to a public plan than projected by the oft-quoted study by nonpartisan policy experts at the Lewin Group.” [National Journal’s CongressDaily, 5/20/2009]

FACT: Lewin Group Is Mouthpiece For Insurance Industry. The Lewin Group was “acquired” by Ingenix in 2007, according to the Ingenix website. Ingenix is “a leading health information technology company.” According to the New York Times, INgenix is the “database business” of UnitedHealth Group. [Ingenix.com, 6/12/07; New York Times, 3/31/08]

CPR Wants Viewers To Support Maintaining The Failed Status Quo

Rick Scott in “Bulldozer”: “It’s not too late. Protect your health care choices. Tell Congress to say ‘no’ to a government-run plan.” [Conservatives for Patients’ Rights “Bulldozer” Ad, 6/4/09]

FACT: Scott Has Made His Fortune Off Our Broken Health Care System

Scott was ousted by the company’s board of directors in 1997 in the midst of the nation’s biggest health care fraud scandal, which involved alleged Medicaid and Medicare fraud

Scott Received Nearly $10 Million In Severance And A 5 Year Contract With Columbia/HCA Following Resignation. Modern Healthcare reported that Richard L. Scott’s “$9.9 million severance included a five-year consulting contract with HCA.” [Modern Healthcare, 7/11/05]

Scott’s 5 Year Consulting Contract Paid $950,000 Every Year. According to the New York Times: “The Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corporation said yesterday that it had agreed to pay its former chairman and chief executive nearly $10 million when he was forced out in July in the wake of an unfolding criminal investigation of the company. The agreement with the executive, Richard L. Scott, provided for a one-time payment of $5.13 million, as well as a five-year annual consulting fee of $950,000, for a total of $9.88 million, according to a copy of a severance agreement included in the company’s quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.” [New York Times, 11/14/97]

Scott’s Severance Package Included $300 Million In Stocks. According to the Florida Times-Union, Richard L. Scott left Columbia/HCA “with a $10 million severance package and 10 million shares of stock valued at more than $300 million.”

SIGN DR. HOWARD DEAN'S PETITION

2009-06-08T12:47:00.000-07:00

TO DEMAND THAT A PUBLIC OPTION BE INCLUDED IN ANY HEALTH CARE REFORM BILL:

click - here

SAVING THE PLANET-REQUIRED WATCHING

2009-06-05T03:48:00.000-07:00

Required watching for citizens of Planet Earth:

"Earth 2100" The final Century of Civilization?"

Big Finance Still Owns Congress and Obama despite his rhetoric

2009-06-05T00:34:00.000-07:00

From the New York Times today:

Areas in bold are my emphasis.

June 5, 2009

Back to Business

Ailing, Banks Still Field Strong Lobby at Capitol

By STEPHEN LABATON

WASHINGTON — As he often does, President Obama took the opportunity in a bill-signing ceremony last month to remind Congress “to do what we were actually sent here to do — and that is to stand up to the special interests, and stand up for the American people.”

But Mr. Obama did not mention that the measure he was signing, the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act, was missing its centerpiece: a change in bankruptcy law he once championed that would have given judges the power to lower the amount owed on a home loan.

It had been stripped out three weeks earlier in a showdown between Senate Democrats and the nation’s banks, including many that are getting big government bailouts.

As Congressional Democrats and the White House crow about multiple victories over the financial industry, including new rules for credit card issuers, banks are quietly savoring an even bigger victory of their own.

The defeat of the bankruptcy proposal is a testament to the enduring influence of banks, even as the industry struggles financially and suffers from its role in the economic crisis.

It also shows that in the coming legislative battles that will shape the future of the economy, the financial industry — through a powerful and well-financed lobbying force — may have a far stronger hand to play than might seem evident.

Documents and interviews with lawmakers, lobbyists and administration officials show that the banks defeated the bankruptcy change — the industry picturesquely calls it the “cramdown” provision — by claiming that it would push up interest rates and slow the housing market’s recovery, even though academic studies have countered such claims.

The industry also steadfastly refused offers to negotiate over a weaker version. And it poured millions of dollars into lobbying: four of the industry’s top trade groups spent nearly as much on lobbying in the first three months of this year as they did in all of 2001.

But an industry strategy of dividing the Democrats had the most success.

One target was Senator Mary Landrieu, the moderate Democrat from Louisiana. On April 1, about 30 bankers from Louisiana crowded into a room off the Senate floor to press their view that the bankruptcy measure would force them to raise mortgage rates and hurt the very homeowners Congress was seeking to help.

Donnie Landry, a senior executive vice president at MidSouth Bank of Lafayette, La., recalled that last year Ms. Landrieu had “not been very receptive to some of our concerns. But this time she could not have been more cordial,” even helping them get to see Senator Christopher J. Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat who is the chairman of the Senate banking committee, while they were at the Capitol.

Ms. Landrieu was among 12 Democrats joining 39 Republicans to vote against the measure, while Mr. Dodd was one of the 45 Democrats and independents who supported it — still 15 votes shy of the 60 needed to shut off a filibuster.

Aaron Saunders, a spokesman for Ms. Landrieu, told reporters at the time that the senator had voted against the measure because of the concerns raised by Louisiana bankers that the provision could cause mortgage rates to rise.

Throughout it all, the banks took advantage of the Obama administration’s seeming ambivalence. Despite its occasional populist rhetoric, the White House was conspicuously absent from weeks of pivotal negotiations this spring.

“This would have been a much different deal if Obama had pressed it,” said Camden R. Fine, head of the Independent Community Bankers of America and one of the chief lobbyists opposing the bankruptcy change. “The fact that Obama effectively sat it out helped us a great deal.”

Surprising Ease

In the end, the banks’ startling success in defeating the provision, which was pushed hardest by Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, caught even their lobbyists by surprise. Not only did they defeat the cramdown provision, but the banks walked away with billions in new bailout money.

The housing bill Mr. Obama signed on May 20 saves banks and credit unions at least $13 billion in special fees that they would have had to pay to replenish dwindling deposit insurance funds.

The outcome left some Democrats frustrated and fuming. “This is one of the most extreme examples I have seen,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, shortly before the vote, “of a special interest wielding its power for the special interest of a few against the general benefit of millions of homeowners and thousands of communities now being devastated by foreclosure.”

The lament was a far cry from the outlook in January, when banking lobbyists believed their situation was hopeless. Some 10,000 homes were being foreclosed on every day. A new president who had campaigned in favor of the proposal — and who co-sponsored similar legislation as a senator — was about to take office.

While Republicans had defeated the measure in 2008, Congress was now more solidly in Democratic hands.

The industry’s worst fears began to come true in early January when Senator Charles E. Schumer announced that he had persuaded Citigroup to endorse the idea. Mr. Schumer had held discussions with Vikram S. Pandit, Citigroup’s chief executive, and Lewis B. Kaden, a vice chairman. Mr. Schumer then spoke to other top executives, including Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, hoping to peel more big banks away from the opposition.

Housing advocacy groups argued that it was unfair that bankruptcy judges have had the authority since 1978 to modify mortgages on vacation homes, farms and even luxury yachts, but not on primary residences. They also argued that a string of federal programs to help reduce foreclosures had been ineffective because of resistance by lenders and investors who own pools of loans, all of whom stand to lose money when a mortgage is modified.

Those arguments won the day in the House, which adopted the legislation on March 5 by a 234-191 vote.

In the Senate, where Republicans were looking for a chance to recoup after narrowly failing to block Mr. Obama’s huge stimulus package, the banks argued that the proposal interfered with their contractual rights.

But the real threat was to their profits. The proposal would have shifted negotiating power to the millions of troubled homeowners who could use the threat of bankruptcy to wrest lower monthly payments from lenders. The banks claimed that that would force them to raise rates.

That claim is in dispute. For one thing, the legislation would not have applied to new mortgages.

Moreover, until a Supreme Court decision in 1993, some bankruptcy judges had modified mortgages on primary residences, and recent studies by Adam J. Levitin, an associate law professor at Georgetown University Law Center, concluded that those modified mortgages did not result in increases in lending rates.

Still, Mr. Durbin knew he had a fight on his hands. Within his own party, moderates were badly split. Some, like Senator Tim Johnson of South Dakota and Senator Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, represent states that are the corporate home to major banks. The industry has showered both lawmakers with campaign cash.

Senator Carper’s three largest contributors this election cycle have been executives and political action committees at Citigroup, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks money and politics. Out of the $4.6 million he has raised, some $375,000, or 8 percent, has been from banks, credit unions and related trade groups.

Senator Johnson has raised about $6.2 million, of which at least $280,000, or 4.5 percent, has come from groups opposed to the legislation.

Compromise Falls Flat

To win industry support in enlisting more of his colleagues, Mr. Durbin approached the trade associations.

Shortly after negotiations began, the American Bankers Association abandoned the talks, saying there was no compromise they could ever support. Soon after, Mr. Fine’s community bankers also left the talks, having refused a demand by Mr. Durbin to publicly announce support for the principle of allowing bankruptcy judges to reduce mortgage payments.

Mr. Durbin next sought a compromise with credit unions and three large banks — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo. In April, at a delicate stage in the talks, Mr. Durbin gave the banks a proposed compromise that was marked not to be circulated, a senior Congressional aide involved in the talks recalled.

Within six minutes, the memo was distributed to the entire Republican caucus — along with a warning from Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, to stay away from it. The compromise went nowhere.

While Mr. Obama reaffirmed his support for the proposal shortly after becoming president, administration officials barely participated in the negotiations, a factor that lobbyists said significantly strengthened their hand. Lawmakers who have discussed the issue with the administration said that the president’s senior aides had concluded that a searing fight with the industry was simply not worth the cost.

Moreover, Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary, did not seem to share Mr. Obama’s enthusiasm for the bankruptcy change.

Mr. Geithner was lobbied by the industry early. Two days after he was sworn in, he invited Mr. Fine from the community bankers to his office for a private meeting. The association, with influential members in every Congressional district, is one of Washington’s most powerful trade groups.

A senior adviser to Mr. Geithner said the administration supported the cramdown proposal, but it preferred that distressed homeowners seek to modify their loans through the Treasury’s new $75 billion program, which rewarded banks if they modified home loans, rather than through bankruptcy court.

Mr. Durbin acknowledges that it was a mistake not to call on the administration for help.

“If I would have known how it would unfold, I would have called on the White House earlier to get involved,” he said.

Deal Now, Pay Later

While Mr. Durbin had trouble rounding up Democratic votes, Republican leaders kept their members — and potential renegade banks — in line.

Senator Jon Kyl, the Arizona Republican leading the charge against the bankruptcy change, told bankers there would be consequences if they dealt with the Democrats. According to an April 20 e-mail message between industry officials in touch with Mr. Kyl, he told them “not to make a deal with Durbin and then come looking to Republicans when they need help on something like regulatory restructuring.”

In an interview, Mr. Kyl, the Senate’s No. 2 Republican, did not recall whether he had made the statement, although he remembered telling bankers that he could not defend them if they did not first defend themselves. “I very pointedly said, ‘Don’t make a deal with Durbin on this. You don’t need to. If he has the votes he wouldn’t be dealing,’ ” Mr. Kyl recalled.

There was no counterweight to that legislative muscle. Bankrupt homeowners do not have a political action committee or lobbyists.

Mr. Fine reports that the political action committees run by his association alone have built a war chest of nearly $2 million, a 40 percent jump over the last year, even though members have had to cut other expenses in the recession.

“The banks get it,” Mr. Fine said. “They understand you need a strong political action committee to get access to the fund-raisers. That’s where the lawmakers are.”

Carl Hulse contributed reporting, and Kitty Bennett contributed research.

================

Comments about left vs right, gay identity, enlightened leaders and more

2009-06-03T15:22:00.000-07:00

Great reply "dakotawoman". The anecdotal (almost every gay or lesbian person I know says they feel/think that they were born this way) and emerging scientific evidence is that homosexuality is not a behavior, but an inborn constitutional trait, like eye color or skin color. This dissolves completely the uninformed argument of "Joanne38", who seems to argue that homosexuality is something that can be chosen or acquired. Full equal civil rights for LGBT are a win-win propostion, advancing society positively.

I am coming from Piaget, not biology, although both are involved and important. I think a lot of people get "stuck" at low levels of consciousness and unless they want to grow, they won't, but not that there is no hope for them. We are all one in Reality.

I agree that we want to choose leaders who have achieved and that means operate/live on the highest level of consciousness - the minimum level being n environmentally aware one which understands the finite nature of our resources on this planet and the urgent (Global Warming) need for cooperative, coordinated interdependent flexible (as you say, ability to go outside the box of FLATLAND) thought and action, and understands and apprehends the flow (and hopefully the levels of development around the world inside and out). We can even hope for even more enlightened leaders who understand that we are all one.

Left, Right, and Upward Spiral Transformation

2009-06-03T02:32:00.000-07:00

I have been proclaiming that progressives (the NEW NEW left) are more evolved than the right (either the religious wing [mythic level] or the Wall St. one [concrete rational self-interested competitive level]), and I still think that's true.

The commenter below stated that the right is concrete and the left is abstract. A child develops concrete-operational thinking (a level) (foundation below) before he/she develops conceptual thinking. Just so with showing that progressives are more evolved.

The old left was about how the environment determines equity, well being, justice or the lack thereof, while tending to diminish the importance of (the uniqueness of) the individual. The BEST of the right has been about how individuals' inner responsibility, values, and hard work determine happiness, well being, and justice (for one and all, ideally, -- [my ed.]: but not in practice, power-lust and greed tend to overwhelm the best intentions of good fellowship and just opportunity.

The new progressive synergizes both into a new tier that transcends and includes both aspects of ourselves.

It's really as simple as the progression of a single human being as he or she grows from dependence (the old Left) to independence (the best of the Right) to interdependence (uniqueness and universality, ego and transcendence of it) progressives as I denote them. A lot of people don't get this far, but the planet and the human experiment demands that we step UP to the interdependent "plane" sooner than later,as glaciers melt in the Himalayas and Greenland.

See last night's ABC News's special "Earth 2100" - global warming and the necessity of collective cooperative interdependent consciousness and action now.

The crucial discernment

2009-05-25T23:05:00.000-07:00

In rock, in hippie culture past or revived-present, in "New Age" pursuits, is it pre-personal (contacting and re-integrating the pathological European dissociation [not healthy differentiation]) is part of the healing and transformation - then a synergy of recontacted somatic energy and higher mind transforms to the centaur/psychic holon.. If you contact the pre-personal and stay there, you have regressed. Is the consciousness trans-personal, trans-egoic, trans-rational. If pre-, then the rational, personal, individuated, healthy egoic is "higher."

Time for planetary leadership

2009-05-19T14:02:00.000-07:00

Is there anybody at an Integral second tier level who wants to try to lead the effort to salvage the planet including humans?

Look at our beautiful planet. Time for planetary concerns to take top priority.

We're running out of time, fast. Please watch this excellent and alarming NOW special - "On Thin Ice" originally broadcast a few weeks ago.

And now for some comic relief

2009-05-17T16:25:00.000-07:00

The heavy seriousness (and deservedly so - plus I hope the Kosmic giggle as the ground of being and transcendent LOVE/lumination) - of topics here compels me to lighten up: Enjoy this scene from the black comedy classic, "The Loved One" (1965) (Tony Richardson) -

The Amoral Insiders

2009-05-13T16:31:00.000-07:00

People like Chris Matthews who, according to his show today, think torture should be illegal but "on the table" for "ticking time bomb" emergencies and such are amoral people who don't understand Spirit and its evolution through (and as) us. They're afraid of death, and they don't realize that living on a higher ethical, humane, and loving level is a value added to help the Planet much greater than condoning cruel sadism which should be and is abhorred by advanced civilization.

A DAILY NECESSITY TO BE INFORMED

2009-05-13T16:06:00.000-07:00

Since I think Glenn Greenwald's columns at salon.com are required reading for the informed, no need to paste his columns here anymore - just click the link and bookmark it for daily reading - truth to power -

GLENN GREENWALD AT SALON.COM

More visual art and a poem

2009-05-11T02:30:00.000-07:00

GET WITH IT
IT'S ALREADY HERE. It's here (and now). It's

already perfect - now GET WITH IT ------

SIGN A PETITION TO ABOLISH THE FED

2009-05-05T18:11:00.000-07:00

SIGN A PETITION TO ABOLISH THE FED.

From the article "REVIVE LINCOLN'S MONETARY POLICY: AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA" by Ellen Brown

2009-05-05T16:32:00.000-07:00

"Today we the people are starting to understand our banking and monetary system, and we are shocked, dismayed, and furious at what we are discovering. The wizard behind the curtain turns out to be a small group of men pulling levers and dials, creating an illusory money scheme that, behind all the talk and bravado, is mere smoke and mirrors. These levers are controlled by a privately-owned, unaccountable central bank called the Federal Reserve, which has recently dispensed billions if not trillions in funds to its banker cronies, without revealing where these monies are going even under Congressional inquiry or in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. As Chris Powell pointed out recently in conjunction with an FOIA request brought by Bloomberg News, which the Fed declined to comply with:

'Any government that can disburse $2 trillion secretly, without any accountability, is not a democratic government. It is government of, by, and, for the bankers."”

Full article: here

Fairly shocking news

2009-05-04T15:13:00.000-07:00

CNN reports that Global Warming is last on a list of 20 concerns voters have, according to some poll. That's shocking. It should be no. 1.

I was reminded of how serious the problem has become and how much faster it is proceeding/accelerating by this MSNBC special - FUTURE EARTH - check it out!

A brief history of the last 44 years

2009-05-03T18:27:00.000-07:00

"Keeping up with the Joneses" has been around for most of the modern era in America, meaning since the 20s; it got a big shot in the arm in the 50s (and was also criticized in the press, in fiction, and in plays and movies then).

The counterculture (hippie, yippie, New Left) of the 60s was in part a rebellion against just that shallow status-seeking materialistic culture. It failed to thrive because of many internal contradictions and fallacies, and also because of conscious sabotage and fighting against it by the reactionaries (read "conservatives" [Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, et al]) who were appalled at change, growth, and evolution. Not only did they want to roll back the clock from the 60s and 70s, they wanted to roll it back to pre-FDR and probably back to pre-Teddy Roosevelt.

So here we are again having been in that meme basically since the 80s and it's all come crashing down, except for the insiders who have gotten filthy rich on it before it crashed.

Pull the thread to where it stops tugging and read this Frank Rich column

2009-04-27T02:55:00.000-07:00

April 26, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

The Banality of Bush White House Evil

By FRANK RICH

WE don’t like our evil to be banal. Ten years after Columbine, it only now may be sinking in that the psychopathic killers were not jock-hating dorks from a “Trench Coat Mafia,” or, as ABC News maintained at the time, “part of a dark, underground national phenomenon known asthe Gothic movement.” In the new best seller “ Columbine,” the journalist Dave Cullen reaffirms that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were instead ordinary American teenagers who worked at the local pizza joint, loved their parents and were popular among their classmates.

On Tuesday, it will be five years since Americans first confronted the photographs from Abu Ghraib on “60 Minutes II.” Here, too, we want to cling to myths that quarantine the evil. If our country committed torture, surely it did so to prevent Armageddon, in a patriotic ticking-time-bomb scenario out of “24.” If anyone deserves blame, it was only those identified by President Bush as “a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values”: promiscuous, sinister-looking lowlifes like Lynddie England, Charles Graner and the other grunts who were held accountable while the top command got a pass.

We’ve learned much, much more about America and torture in the past five years. But as Mark Danner recently wrote in The New York Review of Books, for all the revelations, one essential fact remains unchanged: “By no later than the summer of 2004, the American people had before them the basic narrative of how the elected and appointed officials of their government decided to torture prisoners and how they went about it.” When the Obama administration said it declassified four new torture memos 10 days ago in part because their contents were already largely public, it was right.

Yet we still shrink from the hardest truths and the bigger picture: that torture was a premeditated policy approved at our government’s highest levels; that it was carried out in scenarios that had no resemblance to “24”; that psychologists and physicians were enlisted as collaborators in inflicting pain; and that, in the assessment of reliable sources like the F.B.I. director Robert Mueller, it did not help disrupt any terrorist attacks.

The newly released Justice Department memos, like those before them, were not written by barely schooled misfits like England and Graner. John Yoo, Steven Bradbury and Jay Bybee graduated from the likes of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Michigan and Brigham Young. They have passed through white-shoe law firms like Covington & Burling, and Sidley Austin.

Judge Bybee’s résumé tells us that he has four children and is both a Cubmaster for the Boy Scouts and a youth baseball and basketball coach. He currently occupies a tenured seat on the United States Court of Appeals. As an assistant attorney general, he was the author of the Aug. 1, 2002, memo endorsing in lengthy, prurient detail interrogation “techniques” like “facial slap (insult slap)” and “insects placed in a confinement box.”

He proposed using 10 such techniques “in some sort of escalating fashion, culminating with the waterboard, though not necessarily ending with this technique.” Waterboarding, the near-drowning favored by Pol Pot and the Spanish Inquisition, was prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II. But Bybee concluded that it “does not, in our view, inflict ‘severe pain or suffering.’ ”

Still, it’s not Bybee’s perverted lawyering and pornographic amorality that make his memo worthy of special attention. It merits a closer look because it actually does add something new — and, even after all we’ve heard, something shocking — to the five-year-old torture narrative. When placed in full context, it’s the kind of smoking gun that might free us from the myths and denial that prevent us from reckoning with this ugly chapter in our history.

Bybee’s memo was aimed at one particular detainee, Abu Zubaydah, who had been captured some four months earlier, in late March 2002. Zubaydah is portrayed in the memo (as he was publicly by Bush after his capture) as one of the top men in Al Qaeda. But by August this had been proven false. As Ron Suskind reported in his book “The One Percent Doctrine,” Zubaydah was identified soon after his capture as a logistics guy, who, in the words of the F.B.I.’s top-ranking Qaeda analyst at the time, Dan Coleman, served as the terrorist group’s flight booker and “greeter,” like “Joe Louis in the lobby of Caesar’s Palace.” Zubaydah “knew very little about real operations, or strategy.” He showed clinical symptoms of schizophrenia.

By the time Bybee wrote his memo, Zubaydah had been questioned by the F.B.I. and C.I.A. for months and had given what limited information he had. His most valuable contribution was to finger Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as the 9/11 mastermind. But, as Jane Mayer wrote in her book “The Dark Side,” even that contribution may have been old news: according to the 9/11 commission, the C.I.A. had already learned about Mohammed during the summer of 2001. In any event, as one of Zubaydah’s own F.B.I. questioners, Ali Soufan, wrote in a Times Op-Ed article last Thursday, traditional interrogation methods had worked. Yet Bybee’s memo purported that an “increased pressure phase” was required to force Zubaydah to talk.

As soon as Bybee gave the green light, torture followed: Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002, according to another of the newly released memos. Unsurprisingly, it appears that no significant intelligence was gained by torturing this mentally ill Qaeda functionary. So why the overkill? Bybee’s memo invoked a ticking time bomb: “There is currently a level of ‘chatter’ equal to that which preceded the September 11 attacks.”

We don’t know if there was such unusual “chatter” then, but it’s unlikely Zubaydah could have added information if there were. Perhaps some new facts may yet emerge if Dick Cheney succeeds in his unexpected and welcome crusade to declassify documents that he says will exonerate administration interrogation policies. Meanwhile, we do have evidence for an alternative explanation of what motivated Bybee to write his memo that August, thanks to the comprehensive Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees released last week.

The report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.

In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee’s memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) “Downing Street memo,” in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” A month after Bybee’s memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on “Meet the Press,” hyping both Saddam’s W.M.D.s and the “number of contacts over the years” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.

But there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it. Torture may have been the last hope for coercing such bogus “intelligence” from detainees who would be tempted to say anything to stop the waterboarding.

Last week Bush-Cheney defenders, true to form, dismissed the Senate Armed Services Committee report as “partisan.” But as the committee chairman, Carl Levin, told me, the report received unanimous support from its members — John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman included.

Levin also emphasized the report’s accounts of military lawyers who dissented from White House doctrine — only to be disregarded. The Bush administration was “driven,” Levin said. By what? “They’d say it was to get more information. But they were desperate to find a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.”

Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to “protect” us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from “another 9/11,” torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality.

Levin suggests — and I agree — that as additional fact-finding plays out, it’s time for the Justice Department to enlist a panel of two or three apolitical outsiders, perhaps retired federal judges, “to review the mass of material” we already have. The fundamental truth is there, as it long has been. The panel can recommend a legal path that will insure accountability for this wholesale betrayal of American values.

President Obama can talk all he wants about not looking back, but this grotesque past is bigger than even he is. It won’t vanish into a memory hole any more than Andersonville, World War II internment camps or My Lai. The White House, Congress and politicians of both parties should get out of the way. We don’t need another commission. We don’t need any Capitol Hill witch hunts. What we must have are fair trials that at long last uphold and reclaim our nation’s commitment to the rule of law.

==================

Four clear just views about moving ahead with prosecution of illegal acts by The Bush Administration

2009-04-24T22:48:00.000-07:00

April 24, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

Reclaiming America’s Soul

By PAUL KRUGMAN

“Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.” So declared President Obama, after his commendable decision to release the legal memos that his predecessor used to justify torture. Some people in the political and media establishments have echoed his position. We need to look forward, not backward, they say. No prosecutions, please; no investigations; we’re just too busy.

And there are indeed immense challenges out there: an economic crisis, a health care crisis, an environmental crisis. Isn’t revisiting the abuses of the last eight years, no matter how bad they were, a luxury we can’t afford?

No, it isn’t, because America is more than a collection of policies. We are, or at least we used to be, a nation of moral ideals. In the past, our government has sometimes done an imperfect job of upholding those ideals. But never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for. “This government does not torture people,” declared former President Bush, but it did, and all the world knows it.

And the only way we can regain our moral compass, not just for the sake of our position in the world, but for the sake of our own national conscience, is to investigate how that happened, and, if necessary, to prosecute those responsible.

What about the argument that investigating the Bush administration’s abuses will impede efforts to deal with the crises of today? Even if that were true — even if truth and justice came at a high price — that would arguably be a price we must pay: laws aren’t supposed to be enforced only when convenient. But is there any real reason to believe that the nation would pay a high price for accountability?

For example, would investigating the crimes of the Bush era really divert time and energy needed elsewhere? Let’s be concrete: whose time and energy are we talking about?

Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to rescue the economy. Peter Orszag, the budget director, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to reform health care. Steven Chu, the energy secretary, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to limit climate change. Even the president needn’t, and indeed shouldn’t, be involved. All he would have to do is let the Justice Department do its job — which he’s supposed to do in any case — and not get in the way of any Congressional investigations.

I don’t know about you, but I think America is capable of uncovering the truth and enforcing the law even while it goes about its other business.

Still, you might argue — and many do — that revisiting the abuses of the Bush years would undermine the political consensus the president needs to pursue his agenda.

But the answer to that is, what political consensus? There are still, alas, a significant number of people in our political life who stand on the side of the torturers. But these are the same people who have been relentless in their efforts to block President Obama’s attempt to deal with our economic crisis and will be equally relentless in their opposition when he endeavors to deal with health care and climate change. The president cannot lose their good will, because they never offered any.

That said, there are a lot of people in Washington who weren’t allied with the torturers but would nonetheless rather not revisit what happened in the Bush years.

Some of them probably just don’t want an ugly scene; my guess is that the president, who clearly prefers visions of uplift to confrontation, is in that group. But the ugliness is already there, and pretending it isn’t won’t make it go away.

Others, I suspect, would rather not revisit those years because they don’t want to be reminded of their own sins of omission.

For the fact is that officials in the Bush administration instituted torture as a policy, misled the nation into a war they wanted to fight and, probably, tortured people in the attempt to extract “confessions” that would justify that war. And during the march to war, most of the political and media establishment looked the other way.

It’s hard, then, not to be cynical when some of the people who should have spoken out against what was happening, but didn’t, now declare that we should forget the whole era — for the sake of the country, of course.

Sorry, but what we really should do for the sake of the country is have investigations both of torture and of the march to war. These investigations should, where appropriate, be followed by prosecutions — not out of vindictiveness, but because this is a nation of laws.

We need to do this for the sake of our future. For this isn’t about looking backward, it’s about looking forward — because it’s about reclaiming America’s soul.

=========================

Two other excellent columns/posts -

Arianna Huffington - "The Torture Moment"

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Arianna Huffington

Posted April 24, 2009 | 07:10 PM (EST)

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The Torture Moment

This is a defining moment for America.

The way we respond -- or fail to respond -- to the revelations about the Bush administration's use of torture will delineate -- for ourselves and for the world -- the kind of country we are.

It is a test of our courage and our convictions. A test of whether we are indeed a nation of laws -- or a nation that pays lip service to the notion of being a nation of laws.

And everyone engaged in our public conversation has a role to play.

So far, the media are not getting high marks. They can't seem to shake their addiction to looking at every issue -- even one that pivots on questions of morality, not politics -- through the archaic prism of right vs. left.

So we got CNN's Ed Henry mainlining a right-left 8-ball at Tuesday's press briefing, asking Robert Gibbs, "Is this an example of this White House giving in to pressure from the left?"

And we got the Washington Post's Dan Balz saying -- in two different pieces -- that Obama's release of the torture memos "has stirred a major controversy on the right and left." According to Balz, "the anger on the right was expected. But Obama faces equally strong reaction from the left, where there is a desire to punish Bush administration officials for their actions... Obama owes his presidency in part to this constituency, who rallied to him during the battle for the Democratic nomination because he presented himself as a staunch and early opponent of the war in Iraq. Now they are demanding that he acknowledge their point of view."

Since when is the need to adhere to the laws that govern us a left-wing "point of view"? Is Thou Shalt Not Kill a "point of view"? When the police arrest a rapist, is it because rape is inherently, inarguably wrong -- or because that's the cops' "point of view"?

Isn't torture one of those things where there really is no legitimate other side?

And if this really is a question of right vs. left, how do Henry, Balz, and all the others framing the discussion that way account for Shepard Smith's table-slamming outburst on FoxNews.com's The Strategy Room? Was his "We are AMERICA! We do not fucking torture!" a left-wing point of view confusingly expressed by a right-wing commentator?

Memo to the media: Time to check in for a serious round of "right vs left" rehab. When it comes to torture, the only appropriate framing is "right vs wrong."

Obama and his team have had their own problems with the issue. Despite a commitment to looking forward, they failed to see the massive wall of public indignation directly in front of them.

After all the internal back-and-forth they apparently had about how to handle the issue, it was interesting to see how fast they reversed course -- the president quickly walking back from Rahm Emanuel's unequivocal "no prosecution" position.

Once the spotlight was turned on, it was impossible to sustain the let's-just-move-on stance. What is at stake is just too huge to sweep under the presidential rug. It leaves too big a lump in the middle of the Oval Office -- and too big a stumbling block in the path of Obama's presidency.

I understand the president's preference for "reflection" over "anger and retribution." But this is not about personal pique or a desire for vengeance. It's about the nation's fundamental morality.

Which is why it is imperative that we keep the pressure on the president, on Congress, and on the Justice Department. Not left-wing pressure. Not blogospheric pressure. Moral pressure. The pressure born of America's values.

Pressure to do the right thing. The moral thing. The legal thing. Pressure to keep the acts of the Bush White House from being implicitly condoned. And to keep the abuse of presidential power -- and the use of torture -- from becoming American precedent.

In pushing for a truth commission on torture, Sen. Patrick Leahy had repeatedly said that "we can't turn the page unless we first read the page." But we've actually read the page -- the torture memos -- and been horrified by what we're read. So now we need to act on that horror. And we can only do that by holding accountable those responsible for authorizing the use of torture.

The clock is ticking while the world waits to see if Yeats was right. Do the best of us really lack the conviction necessary to make sure that justice is done? Is it really only the worst of us who are full of passionate intensity? (See Rove and Cheney and Hayden coming out swinging, acting -- as John Cusack described them to me -- "like caged, cornered animals.")

And do the best of us become the worst of us if our passionate intensity does not make the leap from words to action?

----------

and the suberb -

Glenn Greenwald - "Democratic complicity and what 'politicizing justice' really means"

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/24/democrats/print.html

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Democratic complicity and what "politicizing justice" really means

Trying to block criminal investigations for political reasons is itself a form of corruption.

Glenn Greenwald

Apr. 24, 2009 |

(updated below)

Bush-defending opponents of investigations and prosecutions think they've discovered a trump card: the claim that Democratic leaders such as Nancy Pelosi, Jay Rockefeller and Jane Harman were briefed on the torture programs and assented to them. The core assumption here -- shared by most establishment pundits -- is that the call for criminal investigations is nothing more than a partisan-driven desire to harm Republicans and Bush officials ("retribution"), and if they can show that some Democratic officials might be swept up in the inquiry, then, they assume, that will motivate investigation proponents to think twice.

Those who make that argument are clearly projecting. They view everything in partisan and political terms -- it's why virtually all media discussions are about what David Gregory calls "the politics of the torture debate" rather than the substantive issues surrounding these serious crimes -- and they are thus incapable of understanding that not everyone is burdened by the same sad affliction that plagues them.

Most people who have spent the last several years (rather than the last several weeks) vehemently objecting to the Bush administration's rampant criminality have been well aware of, and quite vocal about, the pervasive complicity of many key Democrats in this criminality. Just to cite two examples, here is my December, 2007 post entitled "Democratic complicity in Bush's torture regime", and here is another from July, 2008, arguing that Democrats have blocked investigations into Bush crimes because of how it would implicate them; quoting The New Yorker's Jane Mayer as saying that "many of those who might ordinarily be counted on to lead the charge are themselves compromised"; and quoting Jonathan Turley as saying (on Keith Olbermann's program) that "the Democrats have been silently trying to kill any effort to hold anyone accountable because that list could very well include some of their own members."

The reality is exactly the opposite (as usual) of what is being depicted in our media discussions. The call for criminal investigations of torture and other forms of government criminality is the most apolitical and non-partisan argument one can make. The ones who are trying to politicize the justice system and exploit the rule of law for partisan gain are those who are arguing against criminal investigations. John Cole explained this point perfectly yesterday:

At some point they are going to figure out that for most of us, we don’t care if the person has a (R) or (D) behind their name when they were instituting a policy of torture. That is what is so depressing (to me, at least) about the Ari Fleischer’s and the Thiessen’s of the world. They honestly seem to think this is nothing more than a partisan witch-hunt, the same old Washington gotcha politics. It isn’t. When you torture people, you have crossed a really clear line. Innocent people are dead. Lives have been ruined. Our international reputation has been destroyed. Yes, the Bush administration will get most of the blame, but that is because they were in charge and they did this, not because of what party they happen to belong to. If Jane Harman and Nancy Pelosi knew about this and ok’d it, they are just as culpable.

Precisely. To be fair, there are disputes about what exactly Democratic leaders were and were not told, and there are disputes about what they said or did not say. That's what happens when a government operates in virtually total secrecy and does everything possible to stonewall public disclosure. The dispute over the role of Democratic leaders further bolsters the need for full-scale investigations: we ought to know everything that led to these crimes, including the true extent to which the "opposition party" was informed about what was being done and approved of it. The failure of the Democratic Party to meaningfully oppose what was done over the last eight years is a crucial part of the story here and light needs to be shined on that as much as anything else. I don't know of a single person who has devoted themselves to arguing for investigations who contests that fact.

The inability of so many people (both Republicans and Obama-loyal Democrats) to view the need for prosecutions independent of political considerations is a potent sign of how sick our political culture has become. The need for criminal investigations is motivated by one simple, consummately apolitical fact: serious and brutal crimes were committed at the highest levels of the government, ones that left a trail of many victims. A country that purports to live under the rule of law has no choice but to treat its most powerful members who commit serious crimes exactly the same as ordinary citizens who do so. That has nothing to do with Republicans or Democrats.

It has to do with the most central premise of the American system of government: that we are a nation of laws, not men, and all are equal before the law. People like John McCain argue that only "banana republics" prosecute former political leaders, but the reality is exactly the opposite. As the Western world has spent decades pointing out, the hallmark of an under-developed, tyrannical society is the very same premise we have embraced: that political elites are free to break the law with impunity and never suffer the consequences that ordinary citizens do.

* * * * *

Interestingly -- and encouragingly -- the potency of this principle is such that a call for criminal investigations is now slowly though clearly starting to seep into our mainstream discussions. In The New York Times, Paul Krugman today emphatically calls for criminal investigations, mocking Obama supporters who claim that applying the rule of law will unduly interfere with Obama's political agenda and pointing out that prosecutions are needed "not out of vindictiveness, but because this is a nation of laws." In The Washington Post today, the now-Pulitzer-Prize-winning Eugene Robinson echoes this argument:

The many roads of inquiry into the Bush administration's abusive "interrogation techniques" all lead to one stubborn, inconvenient fact: Torture is not just immoral but also illegal. This means that once we learn the whole truth, the law will oblige us to act on it. . . . The rule of law is one of this nation's founding principles. It's not optional. Our laws against torture demand to be obeyed -- and demand to be enforced.

That torture is a serious felony certainly is a "stubborn, inconvenient fact." Even the Bush-enabling Washington Post Editorial Page today points out that "American officials condoned and conducted torture"; "Eric H. Holder Jr., the attorney general of the United States, has stated flatly that it is illegal"; and "in a country founded on the rule of law, a president can't sweep criminality away for political reasons, even the most noble." I hope Obama loyalists study that last sentence and digest it.

As Andrew Sullivan hinted at last night, my claim yesterday that not a single "establishment pundit" has been advocating criminal investigations was a bit overstated -- Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann have been admirably banging this drum on MSNBC for weeks (and Sullivan for much longer than that) -- but a simple, non-partisan call to apply the rule of law to our government leaders was largely missing from most mainstream discussions, until now. As torture disclosures increase -- the ACLU yesterday announced that it has forced the DOD to agree to release many new photos showing American abuses of detainees outside of Abu Ghraib -- the pressure is clearly rising for criminal investigations.

* * * * *

Nonetheless, as they have done for years, Democratic leaders continue to lead the way in shielding Bush crimes from scrutiny and stifling public disclosure of what was done. Obama met yesterday with Congressional leaders and emphatically argued against the establishment of a Truth Commission, insisting that such an inquiry would interfere with his political agenda. Senate Majority "Leader" Harry Reid then dutifully and obediently announced that Senate Democrats will block any such investigations in favor of a Senate Intelligence Committee proceeding that will occur largely in secret and will not be completed until the end of the year, at least (I remember when Democrats used to mock GOP leaders for having Dick Cheney come to Congress and give them their marching orders). Democratic Congressional leaders are doing now what they did throughout the Bush presidency: namely, pretending to oppose what was done while doing everything possible to protect and enable it and shield the wrongdoers from scrutiny (in large part because some of the wrongdoing was by their own party).

Obama's ostensible motives here are no better. The claim that punishing Bush crimes will undermine his political interests is not only false (as Krugman definitively establishes today) but also corrupt. Democrats spent the last several years vehemently complaining about the "politicization of the Justice Department" under Alberto Gonzales. Yet so many of these same Democrats are now demanding that the Obama DOJ refrain from prosecuting Bush criminals based on purely political grounds: namely, that those prosecutions will interfere with Obama's political agenda.

Blocking criminal investigations for political reasons is definitively corrupt -- period. That's true whether Democrats or Republicans do it. In The New York Times today, Mark Mazzetti and Neil Lewis advance the Jane-Harman/Alberto-Gonzales/AIPAC scandal by making clear that at the core of the scandal lies the actions of Alberto Gonzeles, who intervened to block a criminal investigation of Harman for purely political reasons:

One reason Mr. Gonzales intervened, the former officials said, was to protect Ms. Harman because they saw her as a valuable administration ally in urging The New York Times not to publish an article about the National Security Agency’s program of wiretapping without warrants.

As Michael Isikoff pointed out on Rachel Maddow's show earlier this week, what Gonzales did there (blocking a criminal investigation of Harman because the investigation would undermine the White House's political interests) is extremely similar to what many Obama loyalists are arguing now (that criminal investigations of Bush crimes should be blocked because such investigations would undermine the White House's political interests). That is what made the efforts of Rahm Emanuel, Robert Gibbs and even Obama to dictate who would and would not be prosecuted so improper: it the role of independent Justice Department officials to make that decision based on purely legal and apolitical grounds, not the role of White House officials to try to interfere for political reasons. I was preceded yesterday on Warren Olney's To the Point program by Philip Zelikow, and Zelikow said: "I really don't think the President should have opinions on who should or should not be prosecuted -- full stop."

Punishing politically powerful criminals is about vindicating the rule of law. Partisan and political considerations should play no role in it. It is opponents of investigations and prosecutions who are being driven by partisan allegiances and a desire to advance their political interests. By contrast, proponents of investigations are seeking to vindicate the most apolitical yet crucial principle of our system of government: that we are a nation of laws that cannot allow extremely serious crimes to be swept under the rug for political reasons. That's true no matter what is best for Obama's political goals and no matter how many Democrats end up being implicated -- ethically, politically or even legally -- by the crimes that were committed.

UPDATE: Just to underscore how continuously Democrats are complicit in thwarting the rule of law in the United States: one of Obama's most impressive and rule-of-law-defending appointees, Dawn Johnsen, has had her nomination as OLC Chief blocked for months by the Right, and the office of a key Democratic Senator -- Ben Nelson -- just told Greg Sargent that Nelson "is all but certain to vote against Johnsen," substantially increasingly the GOP's chances of preventing her from becoming head of the OLC. That's our bipartisan Washington establishment in a nutshell: key Bush torture architects such as John Rizzo and Bush intelligence policy defenders such as John Brennan are able to remain in positions of high power in the Obama administration, while those, like Johnsen, who want accountability for government crimes are considered fringe, extremist and unfit for office.

-- Glenn Greenwald

----------------------------

Frank Rich - "The Banality of Bush White House Evil"

April 26, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

The Banality of Bush White House Evil

By FRANK RICH

WE don’t like our evil to be banal. Ten years after Columbine, it only now may be sinking in that the psychopathic killers were not jock-hating dorks from a “Trench Coat Mafia,” or, as ABC News maintained at the time, “part of a dark, underground national phenomenon known as the Gothic movement.” In the new best seller “Columbine,” the journalist Dave Cullen reaffirms that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were instead ordinary American teenagers who worked at the local pizza joint, loved their parents and were popular among their classmates.

======================

MUST READ - THAT MEANS YOU!

2009-04-17T21:22:00.000-07:00

A must-read post by Glenn Greenwald -

Updated list of things to do....

2009-04-12T02:50:00.000-07:00

Essential things that must be done, and aren't being proposed by the Administration or Congress (or anyone outside of the progressive blogs):

1) Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act.

2) Stop the exemption for over-the-counter derivatives.

3) Rescind the Bankruptcy Bill of 2005.

4) Temporary "nationalization" (or call it another word) of the "too big to fail" zombie banking houses. Break them up again. "Too big to fail" is to big to exist in a sustainble healthy economy.

5) Look into closing the Fed, and let the gov't "own" the
money supply, not a private unaccountable front for the
very wealthy and more than average power/status-hungry
elite using The Fed.)

no. 6) is perhaps the most essential - public funding of campaigns. I know the right wing packed Supreme Court (4-3. I hope) declared money to be "speech" and therefore protected by the 1st amendment. I hope that doesn't nullify public funding. Of course, even before that decision, getiing Congress to pass a law shutting down their gravy train never succeeded, despite Public Citizen, Common Cause, and a lot of voters' appeals. But I don't see any other way to TRULY get the corporate corruption out of Washington.

7) Restore the Fairness Doctrine to broadcasting, which was done away with in relative stealth during the Reagan administration, and has given us a huge right-tilt wacko radio and the propaganda wacko right wing Fox News Channel.

8) Reform credit card companies (the huge Wall St. banks that have been so beneficial to the world economy) - basically, reinstate USURY laws.

--------------

Also, get rid of Geithner/Summers; replace them with people who will work for Main St. and the public interest, not in the interests of the plutocratic elite on Wall St. who (along with their paid-for cohorts in government, who lifted regulations above) got us into this mess.

Too big to fail is too big to exist; enforce the anti-trust laws.

Despite the Supreme Court declaring money "free speech," the only way out is 100% transparent public financing of campaigns. And maybe some legislators will have the guts to pass a law undoing the designation of corporations as "persons" under the law enacted toward the end of the 19th century, which ushed in the first Robber Baron Gilded Age.

Re-membering

2009-04-11T15:14:00.000-07:00

Advice from Self to my self - rekindling my higher self - If you're afraid to go transpersonal in public, don't be. You're not being vulnerable to hurt; you can shine on in the Kosmic-Joke-Love being strong with the Power of Love, although it IS easier to put the shell up and be like most people and live in a (an illusory unhappy lonely bummed out to some extent) shell.

Good column by Krugman

2009-04-11T03:35:00.001-07:00

April 10, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

Making Banking Boring

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Thirty-plus years ago, when I was a graduate student in economics, only the least ambitious of my classmates sought careers in the financial world. Even then, investment banks paid more than teaching or public service — but not that much more, and anyway, everyone knew that banking was, well, boring.

In the years that followed, of course, banking became anything but boring. Wheeling and dealing flourished, and pay scales in finance shot up, drawing in many of the nation’s best and brightest young people (O.K., I’m not so sure about the “best” part). And we were assured that our supersized financial sector was the key to prosperity.

Instead, however, finance turned into the monster that ate the world economy.

Recently, the economists Thomas Philippon and Ariell Reshef circulated a paper that could have been titled “The Rise and Fall of Boring Banking” (it’s actually titled “Wages and Human Capital in the U.S. Financial Industry, 1909-2006”). They show that banking in America has gone through three eras over the past century.

Before 1930, banking was an exciting industry featuring a number of larger-than-life figures, who built giant financial empires (some of which later turned out to have been based on fraud). This highflying finance sector presided over a rapid increase in debt: Household debt as a percentage of G.D.P. almost doubled between World War I and 1929.

During this first era of high finance, bankers were, on average, paid much more than their counterparts in other industries. But finance lost its glamour when the banking system collapsed during the Great Depression.

The banking industry that emerged from that collapse was tightly regulated, far less colorful than it had been before the Depression, and far less lucrative for those who ran it. Banking became boring, partly because bankers were so conservative about lending: Household debt, which had fallen sharply as a percentage of G.D.P. during the Depression and World War II, stayed far below pre-1930s levels.

Strange to say, this era of boring banking was also an era of spectacular economic progress for most Americans.

After 1980, however, as the political winds shifted, many of the regulations on banks were lifted — and banking became exciting again. Debt began rising rapidly, eventually reaching just about the same level relative to G.D.P. as in 1929. And the financial industry exploded in size. By the middle of this decade, it accounted for a third of corporate profits.

As these changes took place, finance again became a high-paying career — spectacularly high-paying for those who built new financial empires. Indeed, soaring incomes in finance played a large role in creating America’s second Gilded Age.

Needless to say, the new superstars believed that they had earned their wealth. “I think that the results our company had, which is where the great majority of my wealth came from, justified what I got,” said Sanford Weill in 2007, a year after he had retired from Citigroup. And many economists agreed.

Only a few people warned that this supercharged financial system might come to a bad end. Perhaps the most notable Cassandra was Raghuram Rajan of the University of Chicago, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, who argued at a 2005 conference that the rapid growth of finance had increased the risk of a “catastrophic meltdown.” But other participants in the conference, including Lawrence Summers, now the head of the National Economic Council, ridiculed Mr. Rajan’s concerns.

And the meltdown came.

Much of the seeming success of the financial industry has now been revealed as an illusion. (Citigroup stock has lost more than 90 percent of its value since Mr. Weill congratulated himself.) Worse yet, the collapse of the financial house of cards has wreaked havoc with the rest of the economy, with world trade and industrial output actually falling faster than they did in the Great Depression. And the catastrophe has led to calls for much more regulation of the financial industry.

But my sense is that policy makers are still thinking mainly about rearranging the boxes on the bank supervisory organization chart. They’re not at all ready to do what needs to be done — which is to make banking boring again.

Part of the problem is that boring banking would mean poorer bankers, and the financial industry still has a lot of friends in high places. But it’s also a matter of ideology: Despite everything that has happened, most people in positions of power still associate fancy finance with economic progress.

Can they be persuaded otherwise? Will we find the will to pursue serious financial reform? If not, the current crisis won’t be a one-time event; it will be the shape of things to come.

David Brooks is off today.

racetoinfinity

Age of Greed

From "Counterpunch"

discussion

The Plutocrats' Rise The Peoples' Decline

t.e!

Senator Sanders's great speech

Check out this great MSN video: Fired up over tax cuts

PROSPERITY NOT AUSTERITY with J Stiglitz, D Baker &

Paul Street's prescription for Electoral & Congressional Reform

Buying America

Paul Street's prescription for Electoral & Congressional Reform

"shaggyct" of Huffpo commenters pool

Interview with Michael Hirsh by Jonanthan Alter on his new book "Capital Offense"

Obama's Labor Day Speech

new vid

Interesting comment to Frank Rich's Aug 28 column in NYT "The Billionaires Bankrolling The Tea Party"

Glenn Greenwald & Jane Hamsher on The Dylan Ratigan Show

Jane Hamsher on legalizing pot

Shrinking Middle Class

Dispersant feared worse poison that oil alone

FinReg bill discussed on Dylan Ratigan

COREXIT dispersant is banned in Europe for a reason

If the oil gusher is unstoppable....

supertankers

Against and For Temporay Receivership of BP by The Federal Government

Is It Political Lunacy for the President to Take Charge in the Gulf Or Political Lunacy for Him Not To? A Colloquy

Robert Reich has the answers

Putting BP Under Temporary Receivership: Some Qs and As

Closing the Hole in the Gulf: A Petroleum Engineer Responds

Two Oil Drilling Experts Illuminate BP's Incompetence and Impotence on The Dylan Ratigan Show and offer some better solutions

Arianna Huffington: Financial Reform: A Win for Wall Street, A Cold Shoulder for Main Street

60 minutes report worth watching again

Dr. Reece Halter on the ecological devestation of the BP OIL DISASTER

Big Brother Luntz

Comment I found at The Nation website

Riverside, CA

Questions about the Christmas Plane Incident

READ THIS RE SOLVING GLOBAL HEATING

An Integral Analysis needed

Health Care DEform

Tea parties on the ground of being

"Anatomy of Casino Capitalism" pt.2

PLAN by James K. Galbraith

What Must Be Done to Reform Wall St. Banks at the least

Anatomy of Casino Capitalism

Two art pieces by me-"watermarked"

More evidence that we live in a corporate plutocracy

What Must be Done (and Undone)

Robert Reich Nails It!!

Robert Reich

Breaking Up the Big Banks, and Why Congress Won't Do It

REVISED ENLARGED POST FOR EMPHASIS

Obama admin. fights against breaking up TBTF casino banks/financial houses

Obama admin. resists reinstating Glass-Steagall separation of commerical and investment banks

Citigroup Chairman Who Pushed For Glass-Steagal Repeal: Put It Back

Volcker Fails to Sell a Bank Strategy

Chevron, Epitome of Corporate Crime

Audit The Fed!

Ben Bernanke's Bad Memory

Why a change in consciousness is vital

Wendell Potter apologizes

Bush's Third Terrm

Bush's Third Term?

About David Swanson

sell outs

What can we do about China and Global Heating?

A Hole in One for UBS

How states can solve their insolvencies NOW

A message to Bill Maher and other atheists

My same ol' progressive rant about Obama and the establishment

The Banana Republic of America

Nader on our current situation and more

Glenn Greenwald tells it like it is, as usual

NAOMI KLEIN ON A BIG PICTURE

i heart david sirota

On postmodern law

Holonic AQAL question

Matt Taibbi turns over a boulder!

I HAPPEN TO LIKE KRUGMAN AND RICH