Professor Smartass

PIC: put a little Occupy in every letter to Congress

2011-11-28T18:34:00.000-08:00

I've heard from several sources that for every letter a congressman or senator receives, they figure there are ten people who feel the same way but are too lazy to write. I think there might be an easy way to convince them that quite a few more than ten agree with you.

For example, look at the two letters below with the exact same text.

Which is more likely to put the fear of God (or more accurately, the fear of real democracy) into the hearts of our profoundly corrupt legislators?

click to see full-sized

I might be overly optimistic, but if you choose your words and issues carefully, the letter on the right might convince a corrupt politician that you don't represent ten people, you represent 99% of the people.

There are a lot of images of the Guy Fawkes or V for Vendetta mask online--find one you like and add it to a letter to local tool of Wall Street posing as your elected representative.

Let them know you see behind THEIR mask.

Condoleezza Rice on Bush Poison Scare

2011-11-01T09:59:00.000-07:00

It was just a few weeks after 9/11 when then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice received an alarming message from Vice President Dick Cheney: President Bush may have been fatally poisoned.

She later found out that the president had gone to the White House kitchen for a snack, but the entire kitchen staff was in a meeting, so he began looking through cupboards and cabinets for himself.

Cheney found him lying on the floor unconscious, his clothing stained with amonia and bleach-scented cleaners, which he feared the president ingested, thinking they were alcoholic beverages since he would be unable to read the labels.

The president was rushed to secure emergency room in the White House basement where his stomach was pumped.

Rice said the story had a happy ending. Bush had apparently found a bottle of peppermint schnapps, drank the whole thing and spilled some on his shirt.

Not wanting to take the time to go back to his room and have the valet change his shirt for him, he tried to remove the stain himself with various kitchen cleaners and declining coordination until he blacked out from the schnapps.

"We learned an important lesson about the president's security that day," Rice said. "We had to be prepared for every contingency."

She said Vice President Cheney supervised the installation of child-proof locks on all liquor cabinets and cleaning supplies cupboards throughout the White House and even tested them by watching the president try to open them.

The only damage done to the president was some scrapes on his face from his fall that were not explained to the public at the time.

"If we had told people what had happened, the president's life would have been at risk every time we traveled, simply by terrorists disabling child-proof locks on cleaning supplies. The public's right to know was outweighed by the president's safety.

friendly advice for centrist Obama supporters

2011-09-07T16:12:00.000-07:00

You are doing a piss poor job of convincing progressives to reelect Obama.

Ibelieved you guys were actually Republican trolls until I heard thesame words coming out of the mouths of top Obama aides and in onlyslightly milder form out of the mouths of the president and VP himself.

Does that persuade you and make you want to keep reading?

I didn't think so.

Sowhy do you repeatedly insult the progressive majority of Democrats to try to keep them in the Obama tent?

I am not 100% pleased with Obama, but I will be voting for him again.Your efforts mostly make me feel like an idiot for doing so.

If you sincerely want to help Obama win reelection, here's some tips that might help you warm up the base.

Enoughwith the insults. You know what I'm talking about--calling anyone whocriticizes Obama from the left ''far left'' (going as far as to say weare as bad as the far right), ''the professional left,'' ''hopelessidealists,'' and perhaps most aggravatingly ''Obama haters.'' That lastone is just fucking lazy. You borrowed it from the Bush PR team.

Stop being crybabies. When you come to a discussion board, expect that people are going tocriticize your guy as well as praise him. If you want undiluted praise,go to Obama's campaign website. If you come to a site like this expectto have to defend some of his actions and do so as if talking to yourpeers not your children.

Retire some of these talking points:

You don't understand the process--it requires compromise.Actually, we understand that perfectly well. What we don't understandis why the president we elected to pursue Democratic policies givesaway half the pie before negotiations even start and then gives up evenmore to make a deal. That would make some kind of sense onceRepublicans took over the House, but Obama did this even when Democratshad majorities in both chambers. Either honestly explain why he didthis or just leave it alone.

Most of us also notice that thisisn't the way the GOP negotiates, regardless of whether they hold theWhite House or either chamber of Congress. They start with proposalsthat are clearly conservative, excoriate the Democrats, and thengrudgingly compromise at the end of negotiations (and sometimes noteven then).
Obama has to be president of ALL Americans.Again, this one is an insult to our intelligence. We understand that hehas to be president of ALL Americans, but we hold elections to decidewhat policies we want our president pursue. A solid majority ofAmericans thought they elected a Democratic president, not one whorarely mentions the name of his own party and blames it as much as theopposition that blocks everything and tries to destroy popular,effective programs, and not one who thinks every proposal has toinclude at least 50% Republican content. The Republicans certainlydon't play that way when they take office, and even if they did, thatwould mean our vote would be meaningless since either party would dothe same thing. With just the Democrats doing it, we essentially have achoice being 100% GOP policies or just 50% plus, which is barely achoice at all. So stow this shit.
Any Republican will be WORSE.progressives seem to know this better than you or Obama does. If theyare so bad, stop agreeing with them and letting them set the agenda, asyour points about process and bipartisanship prove.
Obama will be more progressive in his second term.Maybe FDR did that, but no president in my lifetime has. Bill Clintonwas doing well to hold onto office and like Obama agreed with the GOPpolicies far too often. For good or ill, you have to run on what Obamahas actually done (and not just the nice things he has said or will sayduring the campaign.

That brings me to the one thingyou guys do well, the list of Obama's accomplishments. Even yourpresentation there has room for improvement though.

Edit the list for a progressive audience.The catfood commission, the Afghanistan surge, and certainly the recentdebt ceiling deal are not things you want to brag about with aprogressive audience.
Emphasize the radical and confrontational rather than incremental and bipartisan.So for example with health care reform, instead of talking about themarket based exchanges and ''cost controls,'' the latter meaningcontrolling costs for insurance companies, talk about what the reformdid to help the average American and bring insurance companies and bigpharma to heel.
Give it to people in chunks instead of the big dump.Focus especially on progressive moves that aren't getting a lot of MSMcoverage, like working to get Medicare Part D to negotiate drug prices.

Thereare a couple of points that you also avoid mentioning, like why Obamastarted with an economic team that included so many of the architectsof our financial collapse, and why he lets firms like Goldman Sachspick their regulators instead of picking their cellmates in the Federalpen.

Another area where you need to address progressive concernsis K-12 education. I'm glad Obama gave schools money to keep them fromlaying off teachers, but a lot of us who care about kids have troubletrusting him on this issue when he hired an education secretary whoright wingers praise for his union-busting, mass firing of teachers,emphasis on repetitive standardized testing and privatized charterschools, all ''reforms'' backed by billionaire dilettantes rather thantrained educators.

The problem with Obama's approach to WallSt, education, trade, and other aspects of foreign policy is that it istop down rather than bottom up--he appears to talk to almostexclusively the wealthy and largely does what they ask, rather thanlooking at the wishes of average Americans, who would like to see WallStreet subject to the rule of law and suffer the same kind ofconsequences a middle class or poor person would if they intentionallycaused as much damage, and would like to have safe public schools thatborrow the best practices of private schools, rather than privatizingpublic schools so our tax dollars can be siphoned off in profits andteachers treated like interchangeable burger flippers.

You mustaddress these concerns if you want to get progressives in the tent, andaddress them in the way that Bruno Bettelheim laid out in his essay''The Victim.'' He told about how as a concentration camp inmate heneeded to get an SS guard's approval to get medical treatment forfrostbite. He had to make his case to someone who had no sympathy, allthe power, and a gun. So far, you guys have been arguing more like theguard than the inmate.

FIRE Def. Sec. Panetta for threat to military retirement

2011-08-27T17:58:00.000-07:00

It appears that when the current administration talks about cutting defense, they don't mean cutting endless wars, or corrupt contracts with connected corporations--they want to privatize (which means give to Wall Street) the troops pensions. At least that's what Secretary of Defense Leon Pannetta said recently at National Defense University citing a plan by an advisory board of corporate suits.

It would be no surprise if the Republicans proposed this, given their constant schemes to undermine and privatize Social Security, but if Obama and Democrats in Congress embrace and push for this, there would be no surer sign that care more about obeying Wall Street than winning elections.

The ''reform'' would change military retirement from a guaranteed amount based on rank and available immediately when they retire after 20 or 30 years of service to a 401K type plan than wouldn't be available until they are 60. One military group did the math and it would end up costing an E-7 $1.6 MILLION over the course of their retirement, an 85% cut.

This is a classic corporate move on a couple of levels: reducing and/or stealing employees pensions, and by saying currently serving troops would be spared the change is a standard union-busting move--divide and conquer future vs. current employees.

That Obama's Secretary of Defense even mentioned this other than to tear it to shreds destroys one of the things many progressive Democrats took pride in during the Bush years: Republicans give lip service to supporting the troops, but Democrats supported them in ways that mattered most to the troops, with VA funding, strengthening the GI Bill and the like.

That might have been why troops donated to Obama six to one over McCain in 2008 (besides the mistaken impression that he was anti-war).

This shoots that advantage in the face.

Pragmatically,this is not just an insult to the troops, but it will make it even easier for mercenary companies to lure highly trained troops out of the military with their big paydays. That training cost taxpayer money, and the longer they stay in the military, the better return we get on our investment in them. When they join mercenary companies, we end up paying even more for the services of someone we paid to train in the first place.

This is not just my opinion, but when a similar ''reform'' was attempted in the 80's, the Pentagon had to plead to get it reversed because so many people were leaving the military.

If Democrats in Congress and the White House want to cut military spending, fine. Let them do it by ending the wars, and taking our troops off oil reserve hostile takeover and pipeline (and poppy field) protection duty (or at least making the oil company assholes actually pay for the service).

Panetta should publicly apologize for publicly even entertaining this idea. If he does not, the right wing talking point about Democrats not supporting the troops will sadly be true. If he won't apologize and condemn the idea, he should be fired.

Tell Obama, your senators, and you congressman exactly that.

''Super Congress'' amounts to affirmative action quota for dying GOP

2011-08-02T17:56:00.000-07:00

Now is the moment. No more games. No more gimmicks. The Constitution must be amended to keep the government in check. We’ve tried persuasion. We’ve tried negotiations. We’re tried elections. Nothing has worked.

Mitch McConnell

Oh you foolish withered jellyfish of a man! No need to amend the constitution. Obama has just ensured your power no matter how quickly and much your party shrivels.

The super congress will be divided 50/50 between Dems and Republicans, apparently regardless of the composition of congress, and regardless of the fact that the GOP is going the way of the horse and buggy.

Check the demographics of the last few elections and the general demographics of the country as a whole. Angry racist whites are a dying minority but the vast majority of GOP voters. Other major ethnic groups largely vote democratic, as even younger whites do. The only thing slowing this trend is the persistence of some elected Democrats in supporting republican policies, muddying the water about who is who.

If Democrats did NOTHING differently, Republicans will eventually shrivel to the size and influence of the Lyndon LaRouche party.

Instead, Obama came up with a deal that give them 50% say in budget and tax issues no matter what, and if corporate Democrats end up in the other slots, they will have greater than 50% influence.

Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot: if the Democratic Party's only constituency were a dying minority, would the GOP do everything possible to give Democrats a veto power over Congress?

More importantly, doesn't this perverse form of an affirmative action quota for racist waterboys for the rich spit in the face of democracy itself since elections won't change it's composition?

I've said it before but this is now exhibit A: If Democrats in Congress were vampire hunters who stumbled across their quarry weak and about to burst into flames in the midday sun, instead of putting a stake in the bloodsucker, they would drag it into the shade and open a vein to feed it. If it was their own blood, it wouldn't be so bad, but it is invariably ours.

the rich should fear their servants

2011-07-17T13:09:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article that said the greatest fear of the wealthy is political violence in the streets.

But it’s not the people outside the gates they should fear--it’s all the ”little” people they need to fear run their lives, the butlers, nannies, drivers, gardeners, accountants, ass-wipers, and probably even the private security.

Even if these servants are well-compensated, they have eyes and ears and could realize that their bosses are screwing their friends and family and even endangering their lives.

Those inside the walls might take action or even leak some useful information to the rest of us.

Jack London wrote about this happening in a revolution in the US in THE IRON HEEL. It was incredibly accurate about the methods of the wealthy today even though it was written over a hundred years ago.

You can see a real life example of this in THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED when the wealthy of Venezuela are fretting on camera that their servants may be spying on them, then the camera turns for just a second to a Native maid dusting whose eyes flash up making you wonder if they were right.

So it will be here.

We have already seen this with low and mid-level people who execute the orders of the rich in the defense and foreign policy establishment, from functionaries who refuse to lie like the Iraq Survey Group and the pre-Iraq War intel analysts, to those in the military who leaked specifics of war plans against Iran and the suspicious movement of nuclear weapons in the US, to the wholesale leaking of Bradley Manning.

You can’t be an idiot and do those kind of government jobs, and when they see the real agenda, not of protecting our security or even enriching average Americans, but of killing people and crushing democracies to enrich a very few, they can’t do their job blindly forever. As Frederick Douglass said, when someone realizes they are doing an injustice, either they will be eaten by guilt until they end the injustice or they will figure out a way to justify it in their mind.

In the Internet Age, when it is so easy to find other opinions and facts about what’s going on, a literate person would have a hard time keeping up the walls of rationalization for long.

When enough of their servants say “ENOUGH,” their day will be over. Then we can get on with solving our pressing problems without worrying about whether the solutions offend or cut into the profit margins of pampered, morally degenerate trust fund babies.

Japan's nuclear meltdown shows threat of gov't of, by, and for the rich

2011-03-16T12:28:00.000-07:00

As if we hadn't seen enough of it in recent years with unnecessary wars that drained our treasury and killed our patriotic youth, massive oil spills that contaminate major supplies of seafood, trade deals that exported our jobs, demands for deregulation of the financial industry, then bailouts when they destroy what they just had deregulated, taking our homes with mortgage scams, put tax avoidance of the rich as the absolute top priority ahead of schools, heat for the poor and old, health care, and honoring the contracts of public employees.

Now with the meltdown in Japan, what most people see as a no-rush, second or third tier issue, the rich's demand that we stick with dirty energy sources like oil, coal, and nuclear power, which they have figured out how to monopolize and manipulate the price of, instead of allowing us to switch to limitless sources of clean energy is going to cost us thousands, maybe millions of lives. Not slowly from a cancer here, or a mine collapse there, but all at once.

Japan's earthquake has led to an accidental Hiroshima that could affect the whole world, and it was entirely avoidable. But our politicians, both here, in Japan, and around the world, have been bought by a financial elite that would rather risk millions of lives than pass up a chance to increase their profit margins.

That cloud of radiation that might drift over to us through the jetstream could just as easily be coming from nuclear plants built on or near faults here in California.

We can no longer afford a political system that allows such a malignant financial elite to call the shots.

We must put our people ahead of their profits.

It's a matter of survival.

WISCONSIN PROTESTERS: call out the national guard yourselves

2011-02-19T20:17:00.000-08:00

The one card Governor Scott Walker has to play is calling out the national guard, but what if protesters beat him to the punch?

If you know someone in the guard ask them if they will obey the order to disperse or even fire on their friends and neighbors, and what kind state they think they'd end up living in if they did. Then post their replies to blogs or here, anonymously if they want or with their names if they are willing.

It would be a good question for capitol and state police as well.

Reporters should be asking guard commanders the same question. (I'm going to email or call later today).

Even if they say they. Will follow orders, it will plant a seed of doubt.

If someone says they won't follow the orders, I would challenge them to join the protest in uniform--which would be a good idea for veterans among protesters right now. If the right doesn't mind calling teachers and other public workers lazy pigs, it will a lot harder for them to do if it makes them look like they aren't ''supporting the troops.''

Maybe if you know a someone in the military in Iraq or Afghanistan, especially public workers deployed in the guard, you could get video clips of statements of support.

We need to do more than beat the right here--we need to make them afraid to bash public workers and union bash ever again. We should make them BEG for the privilege to vote for the Employee Free Choice Act. This needs to be their Waterloo, and we need the troops on our side to do it.

SANCTITY OF CONTRACTS: Wall Street execs vs. Wisconsin public workers

2011-02-16T22:01:00.000-08:00

If you recall, after Obama was sworn in, people asked if he would add some strings to the no strings attached bailout of Wall Street to the tune of $700 BILLION, like capping executive compensation or cutting those bonuses that surely no one deserved if their company needed a bailout. Obama's excuse for not doing so was those Wall Street execs had CONTRACTS, gosh darn it, and we can't violate those CONTRACTS even if we want to.

Fine.

If he really believes that, he SHOULDN'T be freezing the salaries of federal workers many of whom have unions and are under contract, and SHOULD be backing the public workers in Wisconsin to the hilt and unleashing his Labor and Justice Department on the governor of Wisconsin the way Eisenhower, Kennedy and Nixon went after governors in the Jim Crow states since the governor is trying to nullify all those contracts.

I'm not hearing much noise like that.

What is the difference between the two sets of workers besides that one works in the private sector and one works in the public?

It can't be that one involves individuals making contract with employers as opposed to large groups making contracts with employers because our government doesn't seem to mind mergers of corporations for more bargaining clout--why should they mind the merger of individuals for more bargaining clout?

The private versus public sector distinction was wiped out by the bailout. Every bank an brokerage that got taxpayer money was a de facto public entity until that money was entirely repaid. If they hadn't gotten the money, many of them would have gone under, which is worse than what Wisconsin or any state faces since they have the power to either borrow with bonds or raise taxes.

It can't be that all contracts are not created equal, with the contracts of the wealthy being more valid than contracts with the working and middle class?

It can't be that the only difference is that public workers don't have as much money to contribute as individual Wall Street execs, or that public worker unions can't offer megabucks jobs as lobbyists, CEO's or do-nothing board members after politicians leave office can it? Or that they can't offer those kinds of bribes to politicians' family members while the politician is still in office like Wall Street can?

If that was the case, how can we accuse any other government of corruption, even our own oil company consultant, brother of a drug lord puppet in Afghanistan?

In reality Obama has shown repeatedly that the contracts of middle class workers are only fit to wipe his ass with. Obama had no trouble demanding concessions from the autoworkers union to bail out Detroit, so those private sector contracts didn't seem so sacred. And Obama's education secretary made his bones in Chicago with union-busting (and therefore contract-busting) mass firings of teachers to clear the path for for-profit charter schools and education management companies. Those teachers were also middle class people.

The White House and Congress could at least be honest with the working and middle class and say, ''This is what Wall Street is paying us to screw you. If you can scrape together the money to top that, we can talk,'' instead of just assuming we can't pay.

Or maybe we have to figure out a way to get closer to one person one vote instead of one dollar one vote before most of us end up living in cardboard boxes and sifting throw the garbage and sewage of the rich to survive.

a violent reaction to nonviolent revolution

2011-02-14T17:43:00.000-08:00

`Buzzflash posted a debate on violent versus nonviolent revolution between anti-war activists David Swanson and Ted Rall, but I felt an important angle was left out. Here's my comment:

RE: blocking the courthouse

The hypothetical Swanson mentioned about blocking the courthouse until they allow gay marriages and Rall's reply to it about the cops dragging off the protesters or them being slaughtered shows the real use of violence, and even Martin Luther King used it in this way: when you get those in power to use violence against non-violent protesters and it is broadcast on TV for all to see, those in power have lost. They can only retain power by using escalating violence and eventually, they will get to the point where police and soldiers will no longer pull the trigger--and then we have won.

That is what happened during the coup against Gorbachev and what happened when we tried to overthrow Hugo Chavez early in the Bush years. In the latter case, enough of the military was tired of being the bad guys to their own people to undo the coup.

Nonviolence can work if you are willing to be on the receiving end of a rifle butt, tear gas canister, or even a bullet.

But as cities and states across the country are cutting police forces and looking to cut public pensions (which police would have), I don't think we have far to go before they will stop beating us and start joining us.

FINISH THIS SENTENCE: Low taxes on the rich matter more to Republicans than ____________.

2011-02-10T08:53:00.000-08:00

For example, Michelle Bachmann thought low taxes on the rich were more important than veterans benefits--until vets handed her her ass and she backed off.

Clearly, low taxes on the rich are more important than smaller classes in K-12.

Low taxes on the rich are more important than having enough firefighters.

Low taxes on the rich are more important to Republicans than having enough cops on the streets.

Ironically, low taxes on the rich are even more important to Republicans than low taxes on everyone else.

and so on.

Please add your own (with a link if possible).

NOTE: Unfortunately, that question could also include a lot of Blue Dog and DLC Democrats, who (like Republicans), think public office is a way to audition for jobs as lobbyists, CEO's, or highly paid, do-nothing board members.

Egypt example should kill ''internet kill switch'' bill in US

2011-01-28T18:54:00.000-08:00

Sen. Joe Lieberman and Sen. Susan Collins have reintroduced a bill to set up an internet kill switch that can be activated by the president in the case of a cyber emergency, supposedly by terrorists or China or something.

Egypt has pulled just such a switch in the face of growing demonstrations to overthrow the Mubarak regime.

We should learn two things from Egypt's example:

The kill switch is more likely to be used to kill domestic dissent, which is exactly how it's being used in Egypt. If they were really worried about certain government or industry users, they could simply call them up and tell them to pull the ethernet cable or wifi card out of their computers--it ain't rocket science.
The kill switch doesn't work. The leader who pulls it admits that he is a coward afraid of his own people having access to information and access to each other. Those who propose such a switch in the United States or elsewhere have contempt for democracy and even if elected, serve the very wealthy who need protection from democracy not the rest of us.

Instead of looking for ways to silence dissent and keep up the embarrassing kibuki pretense of democracy, where we can vote all we want so long as the wealth of the very wealthy remains untouched and their crimes go unpunished, our government should be looking for ways to sync their words with reality instead of PR tested talking points and sync their policies with the common good instead of using public office to line up their next job as a lobbyist, CEO, or board member for the companies they served while in office (or if they are president, the more circuitous bribes of speaking fees and donations to their foundations and presidential libraries).

If Washington doesn't learn the lesson of Egypt and serve the massive middle and working class instead of the miniscule moneyed class, a lot of DC politicians will be joining Hosni Mubarak on whatever desolate rock where he lives out his sorry life.

Poll: should Wikileaks just release their ''thermonuclear file''?

2011-01-24T13:49:00.000-08:00

Rather than waiting for some judicial or other harm to come Assange and others in the organization, wouldn't the best protection be releasing the thermonuclear file, so everyone's anger is focused on the corruption in their governments and even those tasked with persecuting Wikileaks might realize they would better serve the common good by staying their hand?

If Wikileaks dropped some of their biggest bombs, it could reset our democracy and force Washington to acknowledge what and who is really driving many of our policies instead of insulting our intelligence with childish drivel about chasing terrorists with the most powerful military in the world, which if true would be like swatting at flies with a bazooka.

Wouldn't it be nice if we had real information, so we could make real choices about whether to support wars?

If we could see the internal discussions of the Wall Street bailout from both the Wall Street side and the government side?

That would be democracy. What we have now is an increasing hollow puppet show. Everyone sees that they are puppets, that the script is crappy, and we suspect whose hands are up their asses, but we don't have the definitive evidence to prove it.

Wikileaks could do that, save their own asses, give our democracy back to us, and maybe even give it to some people who never had it before. That's worth more than any game of chess they are playing now.

Why Wikileaks gives me hope

2010-11-29T16:58:00.000-08:00

Over the last decade, it has become obvious to anyone paying attention that the very wealthy few were calling the shots and Washington does exactly what they are told, even when destroyed our middle class and our real national security to pursue goals that benefited that very few financially. Even the base of the right wing saw this clearly with the Wall Street bailout. Wall Street threatened to destroy our economy if we didn't bail them out (as if they hadn't already ) and our elected representatives voted to give them the money in spite of overwhelming public opposition.

A couple of things allowed them to do all this: 1) lame propaganda reasons fed to the public that just enough believed to vote for and give a democratic seal of approval to those action, 2) middle and upper middle class people in government and the corporate media who repeat and reinforce the propaganda and enact and enforce the real policy, and most importantly, 3) those functionaries either looking the other way or keeping their mouths shut about what is really going on.

Over the past few decades, we have seen tiny cracks in that wall of silence as individuals realized that by quietly serving the financial elite, they may be enriching their own family, but they were betraying other families like theirs, their country, and the human race. Daniel Ellsberg, the Church Committee, the Iran Contra hearings, journalists like Gary Webb, insiders who spoke out about the fabrication of intelligence before the Iraq War even started, Ambassador Joe Wilson, each seemed like a rock thrown in a pond that made ripples for a moment before the flat calm returned as if nothing ever happened.

Wikileaks could be different. The sheer volume of material makes you wonder if there aren't a LOT of people contributing material, and the recent State Department document dump shows that it can do real damage both to the propaganda facade and hopefully even the real policy.

Even if Wikileaks itself is shut down, and everyone who ever funneled documents to them is thrown in prison, whistleblowing has reached a critical mass and the genie cannot be put back in the bottle. It is also likely that those who have access to even more damaging information will be emboldened the more other people put out there.

This must scare the shit out the rich more than Nat Turner scared white plantation owners in the 19th century, and it should.

If Washington fails to do their job of making Wall Street, bankers, and the old money, spoiled trust fund babies subject to the rule of law instead of allowing them to make the law, some regulator told to look the other way, a soldier or diplomat asked to carry corporate water when it violates human rights or democracy, or a reporter who actually uses their skills to afflict the comfortable will air their dirty laundry in front of the whole world.

Once Washington realizes that nobody is listening when they say these leaks are treason and a danger to our national security, they will be forced to do one of two things:

their jobs. Start legislating in the public interest not the interest of the wealthiest few, and bring the few to justice when they harm the rest of us and the rest of the world

or
Give up the pretense of democracy and execute the Pinochet Option.

The problem with the latter is it would depend on the same people to execute it who are now leaking like sieves, and in the long run, Americans will have no stomach for persecuting their relatives and neighbors.

The Libertarian wing of the Republican Party likes to entertain the Ayn Rand fantasy of the elite John Galts of the world withdrawing the contribution of their works and talents from the rest of us and the world falling apart, but they have it exactly backwards. First, that financial elite has no talent other than a lack of conscience and a mistaken belief that they are better than those born to the middle and working class, and second, without the willing cooperation of hundreds, even thousands of the working and middle class, they could not manipulate world events, access their fortunes, eat, and in many cases, they could not even wipe their asses since they have always had someone to do it for them.

Wikileaks isn't a crack in the dam of silence of all those people who carry water for the rich, it is the dam breaking, and the wall of water is fast approaching the mansions of those who have treated the rest of us like sheep for the slaughter for too long.

GRAPH: WAITING FOR SUPERMAN a SUPERDUD

2010-11-17T11:11:00.000-08:00

Davis Guggenheim's ''blame the teachers, trust the corporate CEO's'' documentary has done less than a third the box office of his AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH at the same point.

Maybe the public put two and two together and figured out that it's unlikely that the bad guys in AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH are the SUPERMAN their kids WAITING FOR.

Don't you think there could be ways to fix our schools without making the rich richer?

Do you really think we can attract the best teachers if we take away their union and make their job security subject to the whims of a trust fund baby CEO, who spends all his time figuring out how to reduce labor costs or goose quarterly profits by FIRING people?

We can fix schools within the public sector. The contribution CEO's, corporations, and hedge fund managers can make is PAYING THEIR FAIR SHARE OF TAXES and improving pay and working conditions so parents have time to supervise their kids and help them with their homework instead of working three jobs just to make the rent and put food on the table.

We could take that extra tax money and reduce class size, something that would make it easier for more teachers and students to succeed and make the job more attractive since it will involve more teaching and less crowd control.

Then when schools are failing, bring in MORE resources, tutors, after school programs, social workers, whatever it takes to get the kids up to speed, and encourage collaborations between teachers instead of competition so they can ALL do the best job possible.

Most people must have some intuitive sense that what I just said is closer to the way to go, and that trusting the people who outsourced our jobs, gambled with and foreclosed our mortgages, crashed our economy then asked for bailouts greater than the whole defense budget just a few years before, is not.

compromise is like a bowel movement

2010-11-15T09:30:00.000-08:00

It may be necessary, but it is distasteful to announce it ahead of time.

Obama is not reassuring Democrats or the general public when he announces compromise before negotiations have even started.

It is best to announce your ideals and the policy you will fight for, then after actually going to the mat to get those ideals enacted, including using the bully pulpit to get the public to pressure your political opponents to give ground, and then when you've gone as far as you can, compromise as close as possible to the end, but apologize and say exactly who was the problem and what they demanded for their vote or their excuse for not giving it no matter what.

To do it the way Obama does is the equivalent of walking into a car dealership and telling them you are willing to pay a price they are comfortable with before you even say what model you want.

The Republicans seem to understand this, the Democrats, and Obama in particular, seem to think it's a virtue to tell us they are ready to pinch a loaf of compromise before their lunch has even reached the launch pad.

Bush CENSORED best parts of his autobiography

2010-11-12T13:07:00.000-08:00

George W. Bush left some memorable key moments of his life, some funny, others of profound historic consequence.

To complete the historical record, we fished the censored pages from his editor's trash.

Some excerpts from the missing chapters:

Retired Bush valet: W has never wiped own ass

(AP) Thrallport, Maine--Alan Puckerthorn, recently retired lifelong valet of President George W. Bush is surprised that the public thinks of his former master as a "regular guy."

"I served Master Junior from the time he was out of his nappies until my arthritis made it difficult for me to dress and wipe him everyday," Puckerthorn said. "I doubt that he could survive more than a few hours or even minutes without servants to attend to his needs."

Remarkably, he claims the president has never even wiped himself after defecating. "Never. A gentleman does not touch feces even with toilet paper." In fact, toilet paper has never touched Bush's posterior. "His mother insisted we cleanse his anus with natural sponges soaked in mineral water, and then blow on it until it dried."

The rest of the chapter

No one could have predicted 9/11...except the pilot for a TV show on Fox a few months before 9/11.

Bush admits three separate times Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11...

Bush entertains real 9/11 funders at the White House

In 1999, Dick Cheney explained the strategic importance of the Middle East, Central Asia, and the pipeline routes from those areas--that just happen be exactly where we are fighting the "War on Terror"

WMD: who has enough to be a threat to the United States?

Colin Powell's aide says Iraq War about OIL so we can't leave

Bush had innovative plan to avoid bad press in Iraq War says British government: kill journalists

Effects of Bush's pre-emptive war on bad press

Jesus talks to George W. Bush at his ranch

One day, George W. Bush was walking through woods at his ranch in Texas, and the Lord Jesus met him and walked with him, as Bush said he often did.

“Mr. President,” Jesus began respectfully, “I am deeply troubled.”

“What’s eating ya, beard boy?” Bush said to his Lord and Savior.

“I am deeply troubled because I have seen a country that does not know me. Their people do not follow my ways, and their leaders do not fear God and glorify themselves instead of him. They ignore the cries of their people and add to their affiliction. What would you do to make such a country come to know my love, Mr. President?”

George W. Bush did not think at all, for he was a decisive man who knew what he knew and needed no thought or evidence to tell others what to do. “This leader’s a bad man?”

“Yes,” Jesus said.

“We got to take him out. We’ll give some money to his enemies or even his bodyguards, so maybe one of ‘em’ll air condition his head and take his place.”

The rest of the chapter

Comparison to Bush Disgusts Chimps

by Milo Cornelius Science Newswire staff writer

December 13, 2006

(Science Newswire) DES MOINES -- Conservatives howl when anyone compares George W. Bush to Hitler, and the left rolls their eyes when the right compares Bush to Winston Churchill or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but no one has taken much offense when Bush is compared to a chimp—until now. Chimps who have been taught to communicate with humans have unanimously expressed anger and dismay at being compared with President Bush.

Over the last few decades, researchers have been able to teach primates to communicate with American Sign Language, lexigrams, and computers. Although their vocabulary is rudimentary, it is more than adequate not only for asking for basic needs to be met, but for expressing feelings and opinions.

Their distress was first discovered when a researcher was working on basic math with signing chimp Washoe, and she overheard another scientist refer to Bush as a “chimp faced moron.” She stopped her lesson to sign over and over “bush dirty bad stupid not chimp,” and persisted until the offending person told her that he agreed Bush was not a chimp, and that chimps are not dirty bad and stupid like Bush.

the rest of the story

Bush's forbidden love in the White House

Bush's love of bald heads

PIC: Bush PR effort in Middle East fails for mysterious reasons...

PICS: Bush Blackwater mercenary buddies forced to rebrand

Bush seeks Condi's help in a crisis at the UN

PIC: People of the world vote Bush number one!

Bush celebrates his black approval rating after Hurricane Katrina

Bush impeachment polls more like Nixon than Clinton

ANIMATION: changing map of Bush's true believers in the US

Reaction to Al Gore getting Nobel Prize

After a terrifying temper tantrum when he heard that his one time political opponent Al Gore had won the Nobel Prize, President George W. Bush was consoled when he heard the judges at the Hague would be far more likely to vote for him.

When President George W. Bush heard that Al Gore won the Nobel Prize, he terrified White House staff by smashing vases, slapping and kicking any servants that crossed his path and demanding to know why they hadn't bought the prize for him, drinking two bottles of cooking sherry, and refusing to take his psychiatric medications.

By Saturday, his handlers were able to calm him somewhat by sending him on a bike ride and promising he could watch ESPN the rest of the day when he returned.

the rest of the story

Bush says no WMD in Russia

At a press conference yesterday, President George W. Bush said he did not send troops to back Georgia in their brief war with Russia because Russia had no WMD.

"Look, I'm concerned when nations cross the borders of other nations and bomb and kill innocent people, but the fact is, Russia has no weapons that can reach the United States and no WMD. They just aren't a threat to us."

When pressed further, Bush said he had his staff review the public statements of his vice president Dick Cheney, his secretary of defense, Condi Rice, and former secretary of defense Don Rumsfeld over the last seven years and found that only two or three countries in the world may have nuclear weapons and other "WMD." MORE

Bush Bailout of Wall St. proves Orwell and Jack London right about the degeneracy and incompetence of the financial elite

King of Cayman Islands thanks Bush for Wall St. Bailout

The Cayman Islands formally thanked the United States for the first installment of the $350 billion Wall Street bailout.

"Just about all that money ended up in our banks, Mon," said king of the Caymen Islands and president of the Third National Bank of Post Office Box 7, Haile Ken Lay Selassie.

The Cayman Islands are notorious for their secret bank accounts used to escape individual and corporate taxes and launder drug money to make it available to banks and Wall St.

the rest of the chapter...

Bush to pardon at last minute to give more time for crimes

President Bush will not grant any pardons until immediately before Barack Obama's inauguration, so that he won't leave any of his administration's crimes unpardoned, a high ranking White House official said.

"We plan to be working until the very end of the administration, and the president wants to make sure his cabinet and staff are protected from prosecution for all their work," the official said.

In an earlier press conference, the president had revealed his thinking on this, saying, "One mistake my dad made was pardoning his fellas for Iran Contra on Christmas Eve, which my advisers tell me is nearly a month from the leaving office day. They could a done a lot of work for Poppy in that month and they wouldn't a had immunity. That would have a tragedery, which is to say a strategic tragedy."

the rest of the story

Oliver Stone's "W": "Forrest Gump goes to the White House" instead of the "Crawford Caligula"

voting guide for CA college students & educators

2010-10-21T08:38:00.000-07:00

Some voting recommendations for Californians, especially college students.
:
****CRUCIAL**** vote for Democrats for California Assembly and California Senate even if you haven't heard of them before. Every year, the Republican minority in both houses holds the state budget hostage because California is one of three states that requires a 2/3 vote to pass a budget and taxes. Proposition 25 would change the budget vote to a simple majority.

If you're a college student, this is why the classes you need keep getting cut, fees go up, and your instructors worry about losing their jobs.

If you like getting an education, vote YES on 25, Jerry Brown for governor, and any Democrat for California Senate and Assembly. If you are a friend of mine and Libby's, it will keep the two of employed and less likely to ask to live on your couch.

YES 19
Legalize Marijuana (save money on law enforcement and get tax income from pot)

NO 20
Redistrict Congressional Districts (whenever legislators want to screw us but are afraid we will take notice, they create commissions to avoid responsibility and make it harder for us to block their action)

YES 21
VLF Surcharge for State Parks (adds $18 to vehicle license fees to keep state parks open because of budget logjam. Sounds good to me).

NO 22
Prohibit the State from Taking Local Funds

NO 23
Suspend Air Pollution Control Laws (AB 32)

YES 24
Repeal Corporate Tax Loopholes

YES 25
Majority Vote Budget (this is a big one. See CRUCIAL note above).

NO 26
Two-Thirds Vote Requirement for Fees (corporations want this to avoid paying for clean up of environmental damage they cause)

YES 27
Eliminate Commission on Redistricting (see Prop 20 above)

Senator
Barbara Boxer (D)
Boxer is running against another self-funded corporate CEO with no experience in elected office, who like Whitman, doesn't think she needs to learn the ropes with lower office but can skip straight to the big leagues.

Even more transparently than Whitman, Boxer's opponent Carly Fiorina is a cookie cutter conservative who thinks the way to create jobs is do away with environmental and workplace regulations, so your boss can treat you like shit, pay you nothing, and give you cancer.

Governor
Jerry Brown (D)
Think about it--do we really need another Republican who thinks economic development means cutting education spending and lowering working and environmental standards to Third World levels?

And when a corporate CEO with no political experience (and until very recently, no record of even voting) is running for office, it's not about ideology, it's about cutting the taxes of the rich and diverting our taxes into the pocket of the already wealthy. You can take that to the bank (she sure as hell will).

We don't need another Arnold twin who talks a moderate game then takes an axe to programs that help middle and working class people.

Jerry Brown is a blast from the past when California was the top in the nation in schools and standard of living. When his dad was governor he even enacted the radical idea that higher education ought to be free for everyone who can benefit from it (that commie bastard)! That's a trip down memory lane we need to take.

Lieutenant Governor
Gavin Newsom (D)

Secretary of State
Debra Bowen (D)

Secretary of State is actually important. A few years back, most Californians were using electronic voting machines that were easily rigged or hacked, and across the country, they gave results that didn't match the exit polls like paper ballots. Bowen fixed this.

Attorney General
Kamala Harris (D)

Controller
John Chiang (D)

Treasurer
Bill Lockyer (D)

Insurance Commissioner
Dave Jones (D)

Superintendent of Public Instruction
Tom Torlakson

The other guy is an administrative tool who will play ball with the business people trying to privatize K-12 education and think the answer to everything is more standardized tests. (Recent research has shown that most jobs do not involve filling in bubbles on scantrons).

Should Democratic base VOTE bipartisan like Dem leaders?

2010-09-05T19:03:00.000-07:00

Seriously, since Obama continued the Wall Street Bailout, based half the stimulus on GOP ideas, asked Republicans for advice on health care reform and passed a version strikingly similar to Republican Mitt Romney's in Massachusetts, and now are making noises about the need to cut the budget, especially social security with his catfood commission headed by right wing crank Alan Simpson, wouldn't he be pleased if we donated to, campaigned, and voted for SOME Democrats and SOME Republicans?

I can't think of a single Republican I'd want to vote for, but they must have an important contribution to make since the White House bends over backwards to get their advice and uses their ideas even when it doesn't result in Republican votes and even when he didn't NEED Republican votes.

Wouldn't it make him happy if we followed in his footsteps?

Apply ''No Mosque near Ground Zero'' rule to right wing violence

2010-08-30T09:13:00.000-07:00

If Democrats like Howard Dean and Harry Reid are going to cede that the right is right about the "no mosque near Ground Zero" rule, we should at least qualify it by saying we should apply the same logic to acts of right wing violence.

But instead of saying ''no Christian churches near sites of right wing violence'' which would be as unfair as the right implying all mosques harbor terrorists, let's pick something closer to the actually inciting right wing violence: right wing talk radio and Fox News.

Certainly, Bill O'Reilly excoriated abortionist George Tiller on TV before his assassination, so applying the mosque rule, out of respect for Dr. Tiller and his family, everyone listening to right wing talk radio or watching Fox News within two blocks of the Church where he was shot should turn it off. Since most people listen to talk radio in their cars, signs should be posted telling people to turn it off before they drive through the zone of exclusion.

The should be done at that Unitarian church shooting, where the culprit said he did it because he hated Democrats, liberals, African Americans and homosexuals, and had books by Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly on his shelf. Out of respect for the two dead, seven wounded, and hundreds, terrorized, please turn off right wing talk radio in the two block radius zone of exclusion.

And certainly anti-government rhetoric motivated Tim McVeigh's attack on the Oklahoma City Federal Building, which was after all, a federal government building. They have a nice memorial there now. If you are close enough to see it, you should have already turned off Rush, especially since on the recent anniversary of the attack, he spent time talking sympathetically about the government attack on the Branch Davidians in Waco that Tim McVeigh in part felt he was avenging when he killed 168 people and wounded 680 at the OKC Federal Building.

That one was so big, maybe the zone of exclusion should extend to ALL federal buildings.

Ironically, right wing violence has touched the Ground Zero mosque controversy itself. Someone stabbed a Muslim cabbie in New York City after asking him whether he was Muslim. The attackers diaries were filled with anti-Muslim rhetoric that sounds awfully familiar. Since many cabbies are Muslim immigrants and cabs drive all over New York City, please turn off right wing talk radio two blocks before you enter the city.

I say this not asking that the government restrain anyone's freedom of speech (or listening), but ask that our friends on the right do this because they have convinced me that this is the proper way to show respect for the victims of terrorism.

talking to college kids about Obama & Democrats

2010-08-15T16:23:00.000-07:00

I teach college English composition, so my students are all those idealistic kids who voted for Obama and helped put him over the top.

I was impressed with changes made to the student loan program to take the loans away from private banks, formulas that dramatically lowered monthly payments (mine went down 40%), and forgiveness of balances after ten years of payments for those who went into public service.

I expected my students to be equally impressed by this as I was when I told them about it since most of them struggle to work their way through college. Instead, the comments I got were ''Why do we have to pay for college at all?''

''Isn't college free in Europe?''

and of course, "I don't get it. What difference does that make?''

My point is not that the ONLY changes that should be made are sweeping game changers--sometimes incrementalism is the only option--but when you got elected with the support of idealistic kids, you better do something for them that they can instantly understand or better yet, they can clearly see and feel the effects of in their lives.

I suspect that in other areas where kids aren't directly affected, like foreign policy, they see even less reason to be excited since the change is mostly in tone not substance.

I work with my faculty union and see this in the frustration our negotiators have: they are fighting for a small but significant change, but they can't get faculty to take any kind of job action (let alone strike) so they end up with even less. To get people to act on their own behalf, the change needs to be big and clear, not a 3-5% change in their life amortized over a decade.

Kids are definitely not going to be impressed by the Gibbs/Rahm/Axelrod strategy of telling progressive voters (which is what college kids are) to sit down, shut up, and vote for them because their only other choice is the GOP Manson family. That's the kind of thing that pissed off college kids in the 60's, and if they stick with that strategy, Obama will go from being this generation's JFK to to its 1968 LBJ.

What should Wikileaks leak NEXT?

2010-07-27T22:13:00.000-07:00

Assuming they had access to everything, what would be most vital to the public interest and cutting through the lies and crap from DC?

My top three:

every shred of paper from the Cheney Energy Task Force in early 2000. One of the few documents that was released in response to a FOIA request was a map of Iraq's oil fields divided up and a list of foreign suitors for those fields. What role did this play not only in our Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but seeking bases and political machinations in Central Asia, where we are trying to wrestle the Caspian pipeline business away from Russia. Did they do this solely for the benefit of oil and energy companies, or out of a misguided sense of seeking energy security? Were there dissenting voices in the military and foreign policy establishment that said this would make a LESS secure world since Russia and China might not like us having that degree of hegemony?
The Saudi pages Bush classified in a panic in the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 Report. It is already a matter of public record that we were attacked by terrorists given logistical help by an agent of our ally Saudi Arabia, who also funneled money to the terrorist and was in constant phone contact with their embassy and consulate before the attack. The piece that is missing is why they would do that and why the Bush administration didn't even skip a heartbeat before defending and embracing them.
Likewise, why did our government initially ignore the documented financial help and direction Pakistan gave to al Qaeda and the Taliban, including evacuating key leaders from Tora Bora? In the last couple of years, they seem to be noticing, though the most damning evidence was available immediately after 9/11. What was the reason for the selective outrage? or more importantly, why the long delay before the outrage? What other issues did we have with Pakistan then and now that would explain it?

OK, I lied. A fourth I'd like to see:
Has the Pentagon done an assessment of the security threat Wall Street's shorting of other countries economies and/or how the gutting of our industrial base have created? Are they monitoring the threat and have they prepared contingency plans to neutralize it?

There's probably a whole lot that could be asked on the domestic front as well, but I'm curious to hear what other's want leaked.

Shirley Sherrod & To Kill a Mockingbird

2010-07-24T20:40:00.000-07:00

While not all conservatives had access to the real story like Breitbart might have, I'm wondering if, when he scoured the tapes to edit them, he might have been incensed at the real message in Shirley Sherrod's speech: that someone grew past their racial hatred to realize they are the same as the hated other, and worse, that a black person was in a position to feel sorry for and help a white and the whites wanted and were grateful for it.

The last time I heard a story like this was TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD.

If you haven't read the book or seen the movie, a black man is accused of raping and beating a young white woman.

It becomes clear at the trial though that she was lonely,and was constantly asking the black guy to do chores around her house, which he did for free. Then when they were alone, she finally came on to him, but rather than kiss or have sex with her, he ran away.

Her father saw her advances through the window and beat her after the black man left.

It should have been clear to the jury that the black man couldn't have choked and punched the girl since he had one useless, deformed arm.

But the black man made a fatal mistake on the stand: when asked why he did the chores for free, he said he felt sorry for her.

And that struck at the jury's racist pride--they convicted him.

So it was with the Shirley Sherrod story.

Breitbart and Fox News peddled a story that fit the prejudices of their conservative audience: if a black person had any power, they would use it to harm or withhold help from whites (just as the conservatives know they would do themselves to blacks, Latinos, Muslims, gays, and others in that position).

But more outrageous to them than her imagined offense was the real one: her racism melted, she saw some white farmers as more like her own family than not, did everything in her power to help them, and they were grateful.

Maybe more offensive to them than that was she was in the position of power and the whites in need, was that her actions reminded conservatives why they are dying.

Not just through legislation and the Civil Rights movement, but slowly a person or family at a time, racial fear and hatred are being chipped away, until only the most hateful and ignorant hang on to it, like their favorite doll or teddy bear from childhood.

And their power will be dead when black and white folks alike can look at them and not feel fear or hatred, but simply sorry for them, like we would for a Boo Radley in our own family we were trying to draw out of his shell.

We aren't quite there yet though when the NAACP and the president of the United States still jump when our disturbed cousins say so, and abandon their posts as our Atticus Finches.

Obama: don't bow & scrape to business--divide & conquer

2010-07-10T10:17:00.000-07:00

An article in Politico says the Obama administration is worried the are gaining an unfair reputation of being anti-business and includes the pitch Rahm Emanuel is making publicly to get back in corporate America's good graces, but only one part of it is on target, the point about reregulation (see highlight in excerpt below).

The fact is, when Wall Street is run like a boiler room scam factory, it's bad for legitimate businesses that produce actual goods and services, who could become the target of the next pump and dump bubble. Worse, without fairly applied regulation, smaller businesses must always be afraid that larger, more politically connected corporations will cheat them in deals or use monopolistic tactics to put them out of business with impunity.

There is also the old Henry Ford case to be made prosperous workers buy more products, and the various scams and exorbitant health insurance costs have meant less money for workers to spend buying electronics, cars, and refrigerators.

Probably the best cases to be made though is a Machiavellian divide and conquer one: not all businesses are the same just as not all people are. There were and are some bad actors who harmed not just the American people but all other American businesses.

Unless a business really believed they could get out of paying for health insurance altogether, health care reform will help them (and it would have helped them more if it had been even more progressive and gave people a public option).

Likewise, the damage BP has done to fisheries, tourism, and probably even some agriculture in the Gulf of Mexico is incalculable. When you add the other hidden costs of catering to the oil industry like the taxes we pay that go to subsidies, tax breaks, and troops to seize and protect oil reserves and pipeline routes, taking care of the health effects of burning fossil fuels, and the suppression of alternative energy to replace it.

Rahm's approach assumes that a business is a business is a business, but that is like saying your corner diner is the same as Microsoft is the same as a tobacco company, ''massage'' parlor, or Tony Robbins get-rich-quick scam.

Clamping down on and holding the bad actors accountable makes it possible for ethical businesses to thrive since the lack of regulation puts ethical businesses at a disadvantage against the unethical who will cut corners in product or worker safety or by giving their customers less than promised.

And just as many conservatives think certain individuals are so dangerous to society that they cannot be allowed to live, so it is with certain businesses and even whole industries that need to be put to death or at least put out on ice floe in the arctic, so that their survival depends on their anti-climate change propaganda being true.

If BP hasn't earned that fate, we should apologize for executing Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer*, and Tim McVeigh.

To do this though, taking care of the public good would have to be a top priority, and if you read up on the DLC, corporate wing of the Democratic Party that Obama has filled his administration with, it is obvious that they would rather replace the Republicans not just in elected offices, but in the hearts of sociopathic CEO's and trust fund babies as their most trusted servants, and if that means grinding us up and using us to chum for sharks off the back of the wealthy's yacht, so be it.

W.H. works to flip anti-business rep
By: Ben White
July 8, 2010 12:51 PM EDT

Obama has been happy to be seen by voters as cracking down on Wall Street but those efforts have had an unintended result: feeding a sense that the president and his party are indifferent or even actively hostile toward big business, whether those businesses are Silicon Valley tech companies, Midwestern manufacturers or Main Street small businesses.

And it is more than just politics: Obama’s aides believe confidence in the general direction of White House policy has an effect on the willingness of corporations to hire, invest and push the economy toward a more solid recovery.

The stakes are high. Nearly every economic report suggests that corporate America, flush with cash and generating strong profits, is waiting to unleash a wave of hiring if only they have confidence there will be no double-dip recession and that consumers will have money to spend.

***

In a Thursday interview, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel argued that rather than recoiling against Obama, business leaders should be grateful for his support on at least a half-dozen counts: his advocacy of greater international trade and education reform open markets despite union skepticism; his rejection of calls from some quarters to nationalize banks during the financial meltdown; the rescue of the automobile industry; the fact that the overhaul of health care preserved the private delivery system; the fact that billions in the stimulus package benefited business with lucrative new contracts, and that financial regulation reform will take away the uncertainty that existed with a broken, pre-crash regulatory apparatus.

FULL TEXT

*NOTE: I know Dahmer was only executed by poetic justice not by the judicial system.

BP spill could move Southern whites left, but will Dems be there?

2010-06-06T21:33:00.000-07:00

I was a conservative & evangelical in 1989, seemingly the unshakable base of the GOP, but I went to work as a commercial fisherman in Alaska that summer and ended up cleaning oil off rocks and picking up dead animals instead.

More disturbing to me than the actual spill though, was the relationship between the Coast Guard and Exxon, the corporation that caused the damage.

A helicopter landed on a beach we were cleaning, and a Coast Guard captain and a greasy, frat boy Exxon exec got out. I expected the captain to be leading this guy around by the scruff of his neck and rubbing his nose in the oil patties. Instead, the Exxon exec was barking out orders and the Coast Guard captain was all "Yes, sir! No, sir! Right away, Sir!"

I grew up with a great respect for the military, was in a cadet program all through high school, served briefly in the military myself, and was shocked to see a high ranking officer grovel before a corporate criminal.

It was clear that Exxon was above the law, we needed politicians who would change that, and Republicans refused to do so, so I became a New Deal Democrat on the spot.

I suspect the same will happen to many Southern whites as they try to get help by appealing to their Republican elected officials and get nothing. They will migrate to politicians and the party more likely to restore and protect the waters that give them their livelihood.

Sadly, over twenty years later I saw the same scene re-enacted with a BP exec in the Gulf of Mexico even though we have a Democratic president, a Democratic Senate, and a Democratic House of Representatives. So even as Southern whites may be driven left, they will find no major party there to receive them, just more bowing and scraping to corporate money and power.

An unequivocally progressive Democratic Party could capitalize on this moment and re-establish a New Deal-like consensus that would last decades.

Instead, under the leadership of Rahm Emanuel, and unfortunately even President Obama, they are striving to replace the GOP as corporate water boy, and looking to line their pockets with corporate donations now and when they leave elected office, with fat salaries as corporate lobbyists, CEO's, and board members.

The newly lefter bubbas will find they have nowhere to go.

Arizona debates removing Spanish city names

2010-05-18T16:43:00.000-07:00

Arizonans have realized they have passed their law requiring police to check the papers of suspected illegal immigrants too late--uninvited Mexicans gave Spanish names to most of the cities and geographic features in the state, including the largest cities. The state legislature is working to undo this cultural vandalism.

State senator Russel Pearce explains how he realized the need for the change, "I was driving home from shooting prairie dogs with my four year old granddaughter and as we drove through Mesa, she asked, 'Grandpa, what does Mesa mean?' and I didn't know. I didn't have a good answer for her. Can you imagine how humiliating that was?"

While Pearce was telling the story to Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was giving a cavity search to a Hispanic he suspected of being an illegal immigrant, and the suspect told Pearce that "mesa" was the Spanish word for "table" and that lots of place names in Arizona were Spanish. The suspect lost consciousness and was loaded in the back of a truck to be dumped over the border before he could elaborate.

Pearce then examined a map with several of his colleagues and realized they did not know the meaning of most of the place names in the state, and decided that they must be changed so that other parents and grandparents would not be embarrassed in the same way Pearce was, or worse, have to tell their children that a place, maybe even the city they live in, was named by Mexicans.

One passing Democrat said some of the names were Native American, which further enraged the conservatives. "We killed them, we killed damn near ALL of them," one legislator said. "Why should we be reminded that they used to be squatting on our state before we got here and undo all that killing?"

State legislators are divided on how to remedy the language problem though.

Half want to simply change the present names to English words that sound like the current ones. Tucson would become Two songs, Phoenix would become Fee Nix, Mesa would become Messy, and so on.

The other half, including Pearce, want to translate the offending foreign names. Pearce said, ''Phoenix is some kind of dead bird that comes back to life after being burned to ashes in their religion, so we would call the city "Ashy Bird." Tucson would become Volcano Bottom, and Tempe would become Tampon.

"Once we fix this, we will have to figure out how to deal with other states that have the same problem like New Mexico, California, Rhode Island," said Pearce. "We will probably boycott states until they follow our example and change to real American names. They don't seem to understand what this country is about."

Legislators are also considering keeping one token Spanish name to acknowledge that some Mexicans come here legally and know their place. "We might even change the name of Phoenix to a different Spanish word, 'Pendejo,' which my legal Hispanic friends tells me means 'beautiful pendant.'"

Arizona bans Arabic numerals

2010-05-16T13:38:00.000-07:00

(Patriot Newswire) After sparking national controversy by requiring police to check the papers of those they suspect of being illegal immigrants and banning ethnic studies, Arizona continues its march toward cultural purity with a ban on Arabic numerals.

Tom Horne, Arizona's superintendent of public instruction, explains why he felt the ban was necessary: "I was shocked to learn that students at all levels were being taught with the numbers of our non-European enemies, who we are engaged in a multi-millennial existential struggle to the death with us in the War on Terror. Worse, these numbers are being used all over the country."

Horne illustrated the threat posed by Arabic numerals in a presentation at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

"If you look at this photo behind me of Osama bin Laden, you'll notice them squiggly lines in the background. Now I've been told those are actually Arabic letters, and we have absolutely no way of knowing what those letters say--hell, they might not even be spelling words in English. If our children are learning Arabic numerals, they could be passing terrorists messages without us knowing it right under our noses."

Arizona governor, Jan Brewer, fully supported Horne's move. "Superintendent Horne tells me that the Latin language, which has nothing to do with the hordes of Latin Americans swarming our borders but instead was the language of the great Caucasian Roman Empire, has a perfectly good set of numbers our teachers can begin using immediately, Roman numerals."

Some rank and file Republicans in Arizona are unsure whether using Roman numerals would be an improvement.

Bob Herman, a mudflap salesman in Tempe explains their concern. "The Roman Empire was great and all that, but didn't they roll around in the sheets with the Egyptians and Africans they conquered? Can we really be sure that those numerals were invented by a guy who was just, you know, European?"

Horne is looking to address this concern with DNA testing of ancient Romans. To prepare for the possibility of a multi-ethnic outcome, he is also scouting for backup numerals of Celtic, Viking, or at least Albino origin.

Why does Obama seek consensus with GOP & every financial scammer but not teachers?

2010-04-29T12:19:00.000-07:00

Recently, Arne Duncan warned against letting teachers' unions interfere with his drive to privatize K-12 education with for profit charter schools, as if teachers were part or even all of the problem, saying states shouldn't weakening their overhaul plans simply to win buy-ins from unions. "Watered-down proposals with lots of consensus won't win," he said, implying that democracy as well as teachers are the problem.

Even if teachers WERE the problem, on every other issue, Obama has bent over backwards to find consensus with those who CREATED problems even if it meant alienating his progressive base.

He spent far more time in the healthcare debate trying to woo Republicans with market based solutions and delivered tens of millions of new customers to the health insurance companies who created the problem in exchange for some good but modest reforms that help consumers. Progessives, particularly single payer and public option advocates, only got token input even though both would be more cost effective and cover more people than the Rube Goldberg contraption that keeps private insurance in control, and making profits from money that could be going to actual medical care.

Likewise, when it comes to Wall Street, he put the architects of the deregulation, Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, and lax regulators like Geithner, in charge of our economic policy, whose collapse they largely caused.

And on energy, in spite of good action on going green, he gave a massive gift to oil companies by opening up new areas to offshore drilling. In case you haven't noticed, they repaid that kindness with an oil spill rivaling the Exxon Valdez, and they didn't exactly thank us for prying open Iraq for them with lower prices at the pump.

Even if public school teachers were the problem, if he followed the model he used with these other bad actors, he would give them everything they want--smaller class size, more autonomy in the classroom, tutors, social workers, and after school programs to make up for weak families, and a diverse curriculum to keep kids hooked in who aren't necessarily fascinated by practicing for standardized tests--and only then make a token effort at the charter school ''reform.''

Hell, he would give schools a $700 billion bailout while scolding them for the error of their ways. (no one seems to take about how thirty years of Republican budget and tax priorities have resulted in schools being required to do more and more with less and less).

Instead, he is taking the very opposite approach from those other issues. Teachers are not only vilified but ignored (unlike health insurance companies, Wall Street execs, and oil companies). Non-teachers who run for-profit charter schools and administrators willing to execute the whims of this profits over pupils approach without question are in the driver's seat and no teachers can contribute let alone question what they do. They must agree, get out of the way, or be fired. And even if they agree, they might be fired wholesale anyway in an effort to break unions and bring in more inexperienced, and therefore docile, teachers.

If Obama sincerely believes teachers are bad actors, why the difference from how he treats corporate bad actors, who he puts in the driver's seat of reform? It couldn't be because no teacher's union has enough money to match in campaign contributions what the corporate interests driving for-profit reform have? How many congressman and senators leave office for cushy, high-paying jobs as teachers' union lobbyists, executives, or board members? What kind of insider stock tips could they get from teachers? ''Short chalk and buy whiteboard markers''?

Obama's ideas for K-12 education reform are identical to the Bush administration's, and in that case we did not hesitate to call it what it was: corruption. When Democrats sell out our kids like so many subprime mortgages, we should not hesitate to call that corruption too.

It seems more and more like Obama made a Faustian bargain with the financial elite: let me make some moderate reforms in a few areas, and I'll let you continue to act like a chainsaw waving serial killer in all the others. The last president who seemed to make a deal like that, Lyndon Johnson, who got the Great Society and Civil Rights in exchange for the Vietnam War, was not treated kindly by history, and Obama won't be either if he continues down this path instead of purging the cancers like Duncan from his administration and making the more radical change that is necessary to keep us from slipping into a Third World kleptocracy.

BBC's Greg Palast on Arne Duncan

Washington Post on Duncan's problematic record

More on Duncan's disturbing record

Why did Huffington post failed economic advisor Larry "Jabba the Hutt" Summers?

2010-04-17T15:18:00.000-07:00

I've long admired Arianna Huffington's writing and frequently visit Huffington Post for political news, opinion, humor, and more, so I was surprised to see a column on her website entitled "Relief for Middle Class Families" by President Obama's economic advisor, Larry Summers. If you know this guy's resume, he cares about the middle class the way Jeffrey Dahmer cared about people he ate.

When he worked for the Clinton administration, he backed or applauded every one of the middle class and even upper middle class killing initiatives of conservatives like deregulating Wall Street, and trade policies that not only managed to decimate our manufacturing base, but actually made people poorer in other countries too.

In the case of backing neo-liberal shock therapy for Russia, that not only made the Russians worse off than they were under communism and shortened their average life expectancy, he made the world a less safe place since Russia has since figured out that we were trying to make them a Third World nation.

And in spite of their economic problems, Russia does still have nukes.

Larry Summers is the lowest form of moral filth.

If a poor person robs a liquor store and kills someone, they might have at least been doing it out of economic desperation or because they were driven by a drug habit. People like Summers coolly and calmly plan the poverty and death of millions and even billions, not to survive themselves and feed their families, but to have bragging rights at the country club, the financial elite's equivalent of whipping it out to see who's is bigger. He and his friends could live comfortably for their rest of their lives on the wealth they have now, and so could their descendants for ten generations before one would have to think of getting a job.

Summers presence in the Obama administration, along with Robert Rubin, and failed regulator Tim Geithner, is an indictment of the failure of our democracy, and undermines the credibility of the Obama and administration and the Democratic congress when they talk about reforming Wall Street and Banking.

We do not fight rapists, child molesters, and serial killers by putting the criminals in charge of writing the laws to punish and prevent those crimes. If we did, we would rightly expect that the law would require the police to deliver their victims to the criminals, clean up the crime scene, and dispose of the bodies for them at taxpayer expense--sort of like what happened with health care reform.

Worse, their presence in the Obama administration and the continuation of much of the same policies makes me wonder if this or any president is actually in charge, or if they are helpless shopkeepers in Wall Street mafia bust out of America.

I am not opposed to Larry Summers expressing his opinions on Huffington Post. But he should pay a price: endure and answer the questions and follow up questions of the toughest critics of the policies he has advocated and the damage they have done to middle class (like Naomi Klein, Greg Palast, Elizabeth Warren, or David Sirota to name a few) and the most important question would be what he has EVER done in the past that would make us think he will protect and advance the interests of the middle class.

Then he submit to a polygraph, forensic accounting, and make restitution for his economic crimes against working and middle class people around the world.

Once all that has occurred, I would like to hear what he has to say about helping the middle class.

Until then, Arianna needs to hold the Obama administration accountable for putting these Wall Street economic terrorists in charge of our economy that they broke instead of giving them a forum to pretend like they care about their victims (while they are still eating our livers prepared by their private chefs).

Who profits from Afghanistan's Opium?

2010-03-30T08:08:00.000-07:00

A former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, which borders Afghanistan described the open production of opium, open manufacture into heroin, and open export from the country.

That is about the only good thing you can say about the Taliban; there are plenty of very bad things to say about them. But their suppression of the opium trade and the drug barons is undeniable fact.

Now we are occupying the country, that has changed. According to the United Nations, 2006 was the biggest opium harvest in history, smashing the previous record by 60 per cent. This year will be even bigger.

Our economic achievement in Afghanistan goes well beyond the simple production of raw opium. In fact Afghanistan no longer exports much raw opium at all. It has succeeded in what our international aid efforts urge every developing country to do. Afghanistan has gone into manufacturing and 'value-added' operations.

It now exports not opium, but heroin. Opium is converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in kitchens but in factories. Millions of gallons of the chemicals needed for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker. The tankers and bulk opium lorries on the way to the factories share the roads, improved by American aid, with Nato troops.

Murray doesn't go into detail about which US and UK officials and ultimately banks that launder the drug money might be benefiting from the drug trade, but he does give a helpful analogy of what happened to a Russian whistleblower on their part of the drug trade:

There are a number of theories as to why Litvinenko had to flee Russia. The most popular blames his support for the theory that FSB agents planted bombs in Russian apartment blocks to stir up anti-Chechen feeling.

But the truth is that his discoveries about the heroin trade were what put his life in danger. Litvinenko was working for the KGB in St Petersburg in 2001 and 2002. He became concerned at the vast amounts of heroin coming from Afghanistan, in particular from the fiefdom of the (now) Head of the Afghan armed forces, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, in north and east Afghanistan...
Litvinenko uncovered the St Petersburg end and was stunned by the involvement of the city authorities, local police and security services at the most senior levels. He reported in detail to President Vladimir Putin. Putin is, of course, from St Petersburg, and the people Litvinenko named were among Putin's closest political allies. That is why Litvinenko, having miscalculated badly, had to flee Russia.

I had as little luck as Litvinenko in trying to get official action against this heroin trade. At the St Petersburg end he found those involved had the top protection. In Afghanistan, General Dostum is vital to Karzai's coalition, and to the West's pretence of a stable, democratic government.
UK Daily Mail July 21, 2007

What are the chances that the assholes on Wall Street are using this drug money as a way to cover their bad bets or simply out of greed as was the case when they were caught with their hands in the drug money and terrorist cookie jar of BCCI?

That one involved former senators, congressmen, and cabinet secretaries as the final Senate Foreign Relations Conmmittee Report on BCCI included Brent Scowcroft, Clarke Clifford, Lawrence Eagleburger, and Henry Kissinger's firm among others.

If our Congress was doing it's job, they would investigate which banks are profiting from the billions in drug money that have to be laundered from a drug trade as large and out in the open as Afghanistan's, but they are unlikely to do that since it will undoubtedly lead back to the malignant cancers on Wall Street who outsourced our jobs, destroyed our economy, foreclosed our houses, and blackmailed us for trillions in bailouts.

Those cancers own our government, which means our troops will die guarding drug dealers and oil pipelines to ensure that the descendants of today's spoiled trust fund babies won't have to get a job for ten generations instead of nine.

MORE ON AFGHANISTAN

OIL THEFT MOTIVE FOR IRAQ WAR

Gen. Petraeus's comments subtext: Israel vs. OIL

2010-03-18T01:13:00.000-07:00

The story about General David Petraeus saying Israel's treatment of Palestinians endangers our troops is not remarkable for its insight, people from Noam Chomsky to neocon Fareed Zakaria have said this since 9/11 and even before, but what is remarkable is that someone in Petraeus position SAID it and it was publicly acknowledged.

I don't doubt Petraeus' concern for our troops, but generals work for elected civilians, which means the civilians may have realized the limits of seizing oil and pipeline routes with naked force.

Recall that when Bush invaded Iraq, Cheney's energy task force had been pouring over maps of Iraqi oil fields and foreign suitors who wanted contracts to drill their (and US companies weren't on the list), Condaleeza Rice's memo about merging the seemingly unrelated objectives of fighting terrorism and seizing oil fields, and the US written Hydrocarbon Law that Bush tried to force the Iraqis to pass that would have given 88% of their oil income to foreign oil companies (ours).

The Iraqi parliament refused to pass that bill in spite of offers of millions in bribes to each member because they knew if they voted for it, they were signing their death warrants. The one popular thing Saddam did was nationalize their oil, to keep most of the profits in the country, and the politicians who undid that would be literally torn to shreds by their own people, not to mention they would never win a fair election again.

The result is that the contracts Iraqis have given out pay out far less than the oil companies wanted as the people of Iraq naturally prefer, and many those contracts have gone to non-American companies despite our troops being a literal gun to Iraq's head. Our oil companies probably could have gotten the same deals from Saddam when the sanctions were lifted if we HADN'T invaded.

Likewise in Afghanistan, though we installed a pliant puppet government with a former Unocal consultant as president to oversee the pipeline route and his heroin dealer brother to shepherd that income to Wall Street, our military presence there has not quelled the Taliban and created the peace along the pipeline route necessary to pump natural gas from Turkmenistan through Pakistan to India.

Worse, client state Pakistan has made a deal for a competing pipeline from Iran that reduces the value of "our" pipeline route. So far, our reaction has been to suddenly notice the terrorists in Pakistan who have been there all along and even funded by their government.

But that is at best a holding maneuver.

Somewhere in the corporate board rooms of the oil and gas cartels, they must be realizing that brute force is not working. The natives are not cooperating with the pillage and rape of their own country's oil, gas, and pipeline income.

So what to do? They can't simply walk away from the greatest source of the world's dwindling, easily accessible oil and gas.

Simple.

What they are doing is what they should have done in the first place: offer the natives better deals as occurred in Iraq, and minimize any political offense that would prevent their government from making deals with American companies.

Which circles back to Israel.

In countries where the leaders have to be somewhat responsive to public opinion, doing business with us means tacitly condoning our ally Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the occupied territories. Their leaders can hardly afford to be seen on the front page of their newspapers signing a deal with Exxon or Chevron when the photo next to it is a dead Palestinian child or a bulldozed Palestinian home.

Likewise, even countries our oil companies already have deals with like Saudi, Kuwait, and the various Emirates must react to public opinion when it reaches a certain peak of outrage as happened during the oil embargo during the 70's.

At that point, it is no longer a matter of just padding oil companies profits, but of strategic access to the fuel that runs the world.

After the debacle of Iraq, longstanding plans to invade Saudi Arabia if the royal family is overthrown or another embargo occurred suddenly look less practical.

The only way to keep the oil flowing is to remove the political offense. Make the Israelis behave, pull back to the 1967 borders, give the Palestinians their state and stop the invasions of Lebanon. The Arab governments have said they will recognize Israel in exchange for this and polls of Arab citizens shown the same.

From the Brookings Institute

When those conditions are met, we will be in no danger of having the oil tap turned off.

Our foray into 19th century, British style colonialism in Asia has failed, and now the masters of the universe on Wall Street must swallow their pride and deal with the people of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia as equals and get some of their oil wealth or keep pretending they are inferior races to be herded and exterminated until we are chased out of their countries and get none of the oil money at all.

I think I know which side they'll take, and if it comes to a fight between the Israel Lobby and the Oil Industry, with trillions of dollars in oil income in jeopardy, there is no doubt who will drink whose milkshake.

Are Democrats pulling a Jedi mind trick on Health Care Reform?

2010-03-15T16:13:00.000-07:00

Are Democrats about to dramatically improve and pass what so far has looked like a deeply flawed and corrupt bill by adding a strong public option or Medicare buy in?

Think about it: only an idiot would really think the Republicans would support real health care reform that took money out of the pockets of insurance companies, and if the debate started with single payer, a public option, or opening medicare to all, enough Blue Dogs and DLCers would have joined the GOP to sustain a filibuster and kill the bill. Likewise, the media would not have been kind to such a bill and would have parroted the GOP talking points about the evils of socialism.

So what do you do? Get over the initial hurdles with a bill that is nearly identical to one signed into law by a Republican governor. Republicans will protest it anyway, but swing voters might notice their hypocrisy, which would limit the effectiveness of GOP protests.

Once the bill got past the procedural hurdles to the point that it could be done with reconciliation, it still does no good to telegraph the punch, but it does help to get the public to visibly ''twist their arms'' with ever growing demands for a public option.

Then if they substitute a strong public option, Medicare buy in, or hell, even single payer at the last second, the protests of the right and their parrots in the media won't matter. The public will get it, and thank the Democrats for it at the polls in November.

It would have a side benefit as far as all the money insurance companies threw at Democrats to sway their vote. The Democrats would get to keep that money, and what could the insurance companies say? That they expected a quid pro quo? A second benefit would be that Democrats could honestly say their vote on this could not be bought in spite of all the money that was showered on them and it could reset the relationship between pols and lobbyists.

This scenario would require a lot of coordination and discipline, which the Democrats as a party rarely demonstrated apart from voting for the worst excrement of the Bush administration, and maybe the current talk of a public option is just shining us on until they pass a corporate give away--but maybe, just maybe, these aren't the droids you're looking for.

Move along.

Move along.

UPDATE: I was wrong. March 29, 2010

Democrats use Osama-Saddam bait & switch on health care

2010-03-11T09:32:00.000-08:00

I have often complained that the Democrats have failed to learn the right lessons from the GOP's superior mastery of propaganda and PR. In the health care reform debate, they have misapplied the GOP methods again, using bait and switch, with hope and platitudes about health care replacing the GOP fear of terrorist bogeymen.

The GOP used an Osama-Saddam bait and switch. They got everybody mad at Osama, associate him with Saddam, then dropped Osama out of the equation.

With health care reform, Democrats got everybody excited about a public option, associate it with mandated private insurance, then drop the public option, which will be kept in a freezer in a cave with Osama until needed again.

The big difference is people bought the Osaddama lie for long enough to get the war started. By contrast, no one seems to be fooled by substituting slavery to private insurance companies for the kind of public insurance system every other industrialized country has that is less costly and more effective than ours (except at lining the pockets of the already wealthy).

But the Democrats don't seem to care that they haven't fooled anyone and are going ahead with legislation written by and for the criminals who have killed and bankrupted so many Americans with their epic greed.

Good luck in that fall election, Democrats.

You'll need it.

Time to call bullshit on the Bipartisan War on Public Education

2010-03-03T18:46:00.000-08:00

Both Barack Obama and his secretary of education have praised a Rhode Island district for firing all their teachers to supposedly help the school's performance.

But in what other endeavor in life is wholesale firing of the frontline troops considered the solution to the problem?

When Abraham Lincoln had a general who wouldn't pursue the enemy, did he tell him to discharge all his troops and assemble a new army?

When American car companies lost market share to Japan for decades, could they have turned that around by firing all the workers?

When we lost the Vietnam War, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and Alexander the Great lost Afghanistan, was it because each empire needed to fire their troops and recruit fresh ones to win?

In the first two cases, the problem was clearly incompetence at the top: a general who refused to do his job, and executives who didn't think their primary job was building the best cars on the market but instead, maximizing profits by cutting corners on quality.

In the case of Vietnam and Afghanistan where multiple generals and empires failed equally, it was clearly not a failure of the generals but of the enterprise itself: occupying people who didn't want to be occupied.

The problem with public education is at the top. Politicians, tax cut advocates, and privatizers who have no interest in seeing schools succeed are setting the agenda.

First taxes were cut or kept from growing with the need to fund our schools, then that was used as an excuse to cut the enrichment programs like art and music that might have kept some marginal students engaged and class sizes increased just as more and more students were coming to school with chaotic home lives that don't prepare them for the discipline of school.

Then we allowed politicians to micromanage curriculum down to what lesson teachers will do on which day and exactly which words and exercises they will use, robbing teachers of the ability create lessons that will engage their students. Most teachers create their own materials and lessons anyway, but at the risk of their job if they have a particularly authoritarian and bureaucratic principal.

Then we let testing companies sell our politicians on endless testing instead of once or twice a year, which enriches the test companies but helps our kids no more than a doctor would who took your temperature every ten minutes but did nothing with the information except tell you how quickly you're dying.

Finally, private education companies and real estate moguls pay politicians to privatize public education under the euphemism ''charter schools,'' which skim off the students with engaged parents and oddly don't have to follow all the same rules as regular public schools, accelerating the death spiral of public education. And we all know from the Blackwater, Halliburton, and KBR examples that there are NEVER costs overruns or failure, or such close connections to certain elected officials who get campaign donations and lobbyist or CEO jobs when they leave office, which gives them incentives to overlook any failings.

And to the extent that those charter schools do work, the rewards will go to the stockholders and executives, not the teachers who are usually not unionized.

and that union business is the only other time I can think of mass firings being used, like when Ronald Reagan fired all the air traffic controllers rather than negotiating with them even though it put the flying public at risk as military air traffic controllers tried to step in handle much busier and more complex civilian traffic.

Is there any chance that's what this is about? Giving unionized workers who have some measure of control of their work environment and some foothold in a middle class income a beat down, to send a message to other unionized public workers?

Would you take a job that required a college degree but people with no training in your field could dictate exactly how you do your job, measure your success, and fire you because the teachers in other classrooms might not be doing as good a job as you? Don't we usually require college degrees for jobs that require some creativity and initiative rather than just reciting a script like a tour guide?

This is rot and corruption at the top, strip mining our kids futures for profit.

Here in LA, in addition to turning some schools over to charter companies, some have been given to teachers to run with less top down and more cooperative management, with teachers even making decisions about hiring and firing on equal terms with other stakeholders like parents instead of being treated like day laborers.

I will be curious to see how that turns out, though I suspect it's a token bone thrown to teachers, that will eventually be taken away regardless of the outcome.

Rob from the mercenaries and give to the troops

2010-02-24T17:14:00.000-08:00

I teach writing at community college, and had a conservative student who was a Marine who had served in Iraq, and he seemed to hate Blackwater and the rest of the mercenaries as much as any lefty does.

Their presence is seriously demoralizing to our troops.

It occurred to me that even conservatives would support eliminating mercenaries from a ''support the troops'' angle.

Simply pledge to take the money from the mercenaries and give it to the troops.

And if we canceled the mercenary contracts and used every penny that had gone to them to raise the pay of our troops, especially those most at risk of being poached by mercenary companies, we would still end up saving money.

How?

Every former special forces, pilot, or other badass who leaves the military early to join a mercenary outfit cost a lot to train, and training their replacement will cost a lot. We would prevent that loss by retaining them in the regular military. (We would also cut off the gift of that taxpayer funded training to those companies).

Save money, support the troops, look like the good guys on the international stage...that would be tough for even the corrupt politicians who set up the contracts and get the kickbacks to argue against.

Hit DEBIT NOT CREDIT to screw Wall Street BACK (and it will help REAL businesses)

2010-01-09T22:29:00.000-08:00

Our elected representatives in Washington seem congenitally unable to punish and neuter Wall Street for the economic terrorism they have visited upon the United States and the entire world with their various scams and trade deals that are decimating the middle class, so we are left to do it for ourselves.

One way to screw them is to stop doing business with national banks and move to community banks or better yet a CREDIT UNION.

NPR revealed another way to castrate these bastards when they talked about the difference between the fees for credit versus debit and who profits from each.

The bottom line is credit charges to merchants are much higher, usually a flat fee plus a percentage, whereas debits are just a flat fee. And credit card companies twists the knife in the businesses by having higher set fees for cheaper purchases. How much does it cost businesses? One merchant interviewed said:

"On the cost of a $5 purchase item, we lose a dollar of that sale."

While this directly hurts businesses, it's not hard to figure out that this extra cost will be past will be passed on to customers.

Two companies control 80% of all credit card business, which is why they can charge such extortionate rates. And those fees go to them. While debit charges travel through the same networks, they don't pay nearly as much to those monopolies.

There are two ways you can use this knowledge to screw the Wall Street assholes who are screwing us:

Obviously, hit the DEBIT button instead of credit every time you have a choice. If enough people did this, it would help businesses as much as any tax cut (without cutting tax revenues we could use for schools, health care, and taking care of our veterans maimed in our now endless wars).

A little less obvious is telling business people to let customers know that hitting debit saves them money and that savings could be passed on to customers. One woman called into the NPR show and said when clerks ask her "debit or credit," she asks them what they prefer and they say they don't care.

The best thing about hitting the DEBIT button is it helps the REAL businesses that provide products and services while hurting the Ponzi schemes of sociopathic trust fund babies on Wall Street who have never made or done anything of value in their whole lives.

If the law cannot or will not reach into their gated community and private compounds, we can--not by climbing over their walls but simply by cutting off the flow of our money that keeps them alive and that they use as the club to beat us.

Now if we could just convince their servants to leave them, they would die of starvation and infection from their unwiped asses.

NOTE: The NPR story had more details like how buying gas can lead to overdraft fees even if your bank account isn't overdrawn. Here's a TRANSCRIPT and the AUDIO.

Response to Democratic party chair quitting

2010-01-09T10:09:00.000-08:00

Chair Rochelle Sivan sent to the Framingham, Massachusettes Democratic Town Committee resigning because she changed her party affiliation from Democrat to none, and her letter was published in the Boston Globe.

My short response is ''Thank you."

The reasons why she quit will be familiar to progressive Democrats: continuing the Bush wars, the bailout that favored the Wall Street sociopaths instead of their victims, the erosion of our civil rights, and the final straw is the health care reform bill that also rewards the criminal insurance companies by delivering us as their coerced customers.

She anticipated the response of the apologists for the Democratic Party and gave her response to each:

Elect more Democrats and progressives - there are 82 members in the Congress Progressive Caucus and only 52 conservative "blue dogs" but which side constantly prevails? The problem isn't in the numbers.

The bill will be improved later - Like Nafta? Or the Patriot Act? Will that happen when we have control over the Congress and Presidency? Oh wait...

The other side is worse - Yes, the Democrats are better than the party of rabid conservatives the GOP has become, but not enough to matter, not enough to make the changes this country so desperately needs.

There is no other choice - I agree there is no viable third party but almost all of the important achievements the Left has won for the people of this country have come from people working outside of the political system - see the Abolitionists, the Labor activists, the Suffragettes and the Civil Rights movements. Apparently, the existing political system is too invested in the status quo to change without enormous outside pressure.

FULL TEXT

I posted the following response on the Boston Globe article:

In a two dominant party system like ours, the two parties don't exist forever. When one party no longer serves a sufficient constituency, it can disappear in a flash like the Whigs did. In the case of the Whigs, they failed to deal forcefully with slavery and left the wound to fester into gangrene.

We are at a very unusual place where that is about to happen to both parties. While the right wing constituency doesn't seem to realize the problem, the left does all too well--our economy and political system is rigged to benefit a very, very few even when it harms or even kills (in the case of our wars and health care system) the vast majority of working and middle class Americans.

The Bush administration pulled the mask off this system, making even the slightly milder corruption of the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress intolerable to those of us who really believe our government should try to form a more perfect union and support the general welfare.

The problem is not individual politicians or even one party, but a system that makes profound corruption and amorality the norm. While there have been some campaign finance and ethics reform, the fact that politicians can leave office and go to work as lobbyists, CEOs, and board members for companies that have business before Congress and still be respected by their colleagues and even run for office again instead of being thrown in prison makes us look like a Third World kleptocracy.

To POLITICO: on "Anxious Democrats"

2009-12-30T17:55:00.000-08:00

POLITICO posted a story discussing Democrats in Congress supposedly dithering over whether to tack to the left or center in the upcoming 2010 election. I posted this in the comments:

Unlike the Republicans who must choose between their base of racists, religious extremists, and economic royalists and independents who find them morally repulsive, the Democrats could easily appeal to both their progressive base and independents by implementing progressive policies that broad majorities of Americans would support:
Reregulate Wall Street & prosecute and imprison those at the top who knowingly committed fraud.
Break up any business big enough to buy or intimidate our democracy.
Enact a Wall Street transaction tax steep enough to kill speculation, and force investors to place long term bets on companies they actually hope will succeed (instead of creating one pump & dump bubble after another).
Base our trade policy on what is good for American families, not speculators on Wall Street.
Pass health care reform that does more to help middle and working class families than it does to protect and enrich insurance companies.
Enact a separation of corporation and state when it comes to foreign policy, so we don't overthrow governments or invade countries just because some oil company, banana plantation, or sweatshop owner got their panties in a knot because the leader of a country drove a hard bargain for their natural resources or raised the minimum wage. This change alone would make it harder for terrorist groups to recruit.
End privatization of government functions that are invariably the result of corruption that in turn then uses our tax dollars to fund further corruption.
Invest more in alternative energy than we do in invading and occupying oil producing and pipeline countries. Besides giving us an endless supply of nearly free energy, it would break the power of oil companies to dictate our foreign policy and impoverish countries like Saudi Arabia that use their oil wealth fund terrorist groups.
Listen to teachers for advice about how to fix schools instead of scammers who hope to make money on privatizing them.
Legalize marijuana and deal with other illegal drugs by reducing demand and through treatment--exactly the way the wealthy and politicians deal with their kids when get caught with the stuff.
And that is the bottom line to all progressive positions. Treat your fellow citizens the way you would members of your own family, not overly indulgent, but not as sheep to be fleeced or led to the slaughter either.
If Democrats did things like this, were guided by that principle, or even appeared to be, they would not have to worry about 2010 or any election after that.
Unfortunately, by trying to split the baby between the needs of the working and middle class and the rapacious, insatiable demands of the sociopathic trust fund babies on Wall Street, they look weak and unwilling to stand up for their core principles at best, and at worst, as corrupt as the Republicans only with the lipstick of soothing social justice platitudes instead of the shrill, sharp absolutes of the religious right.
Neither option will get the Democratic base out, nor will it inspire independents to vote for Democrats unless they decide based on a coin toss.

PROGRESSIVE DEMS: PURGE the DLC/Blue Dogs or SURGE out the door?

2009-12-20T10:53:00.000-08:00

Surge out the door into a new progressive democratic party that is.

Progressives in the Democratic Party are faced with a serious dilemma. While it is clear that at least the majority of elected Democrats in Congress are progressives, the Blue Dog/DLC wing is more than willing to sabotage any progressive change by siding with the Republicans on all issues that have to do with money: health care insurance reform, war, the nature of any economic stimulus, Wall Street bailouts, trade, privatizing government functions to reward cronies, and after giving away the store to corporate America, claiming that spending on education, health care, social security and the like are breaking our budget (not the corporate welfare of defense spending and now direct cash surrenders to Wall Street).

Compounding this problem is that though progressives seem to be a majority of Democrats, the leadership of the Senate is not, and the leadership of the House, while nominally progressive, seems to follow their lead in many priorities.

The fact that corporate owned politicians are the functional majority even while the Democratic Party (which we wrongly assume means progressive) is the majority on paper partly explains some of the worst and otherwise inexplicable actions of the Democrats like compromising more than half way on any legislation BEFORE THEY EVEN INTRODUCE IT, which inevitably leads to negotiating a halfway okay policy down to nothing. For example, the public option was a compromise to begin with. If Congress was really interested in providing the most cost effective option, they would have started with single payer and negotiated down to a public OPTION.

They must do this because though progressives are the majority of Democrats, the DLC/Blue Dogs do not care about the success of progressive goals or even the Democratic Party--they care about who's writing the checks, now as donations and later as their employers.

In the 90s, the Republicans purged their ranks of those who wouldn't reliably vote for certain core principles. While that led to horrible policy when they were in power, if someone voted for them, they could at least know that certain things were going to happen: taxes for the rich and corporations would be lowered, businesses would be deregulated, wars would be started.

What does anyone expect when the Democrats win? That essentially the same foreign and economic policies will be pursued with a friendlier face, and maybe some modest social programs will be implemented to salve the pain of deindustrialization and outsourcing our jobs, and the maimed veterans of the corporate wars will actually get the care and benefits they were promised?

So one temptation is to try the purge, take over the party structure, favor more progressive candidates in primaries, etc. There are a couple of problems with this: the corporate candidates will always have the money and friendlier media coverage. Another is that the purge in the GOP was from less reliably corporate to MORE reliably corporate, so the money and power was on the side of the purge. That all of the replacements parrot a religious right line as well is simply a matter of sticking to a marketing strategy that worked for a couple of decades (they are probably frantically pitching new images to focus groups, like their Ayn Rand, selfish superman one). Our purge would not be guaranteed success.

A surge out the door of the party to form a new party, possibly combining with some of the smaller progressive parties of the left like the Greens, would have it's own set of problems. One is that some progressives would stay in the Democratic Pary out of inertia. Another is where the corporatist Democrats would go--to the GOP. They would not tolerate being in a powerless micro-minority party. That is not what they are paid to do. Even if a similar schism occurred in the GOP, with the teabagger know-nothings leaving the corporatists, creating a three or even four party system, the gullibility of the teabaggers shows that they will be swayed into alliances with the corporatists most of the time if a policy can be sold with fear, racism, get-rich-quick, anti-intellectual, or violent themes. And of course the corporate Dems, whether in a rump Democratic Party or as Republicans would vote with them as well, leaving us about where we are now.

I think I laid out the negatives of both options, and would definitely like to hear the problems with that analysis.

100,000 troops to chase 100 al Qaeda members in Afghanistan and 300 in Pakistan?

2009-11-26T23:04:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post reported that there are 100 members of al Qaeda left in Afghanistan and about 300 in Pakistan. With Obama's troop increase to about 100,000, that will be 1,000 troops per terrorist in Afghanistan or 250 per terrorist in all of the ''AfPak'' theater.

I don't think Obama is stupid enough to believe Fox News that these guys are supermen who could punch through the concrete walls or eat the steel bars of a supermax prison like licorice or take over an airplane while handcuffed so they have to be blindfolded, stripped naked and sodomized during flights to keep them under control.

Does someone want to tell me with a straight face that we are occupying Afghanistan to prevent or punish terrorism? The Taliban are a bunch of illiterate hillbillies that have no capability to harm our troops if we don't go to them, and the rump of al Qaeda would probably need at most special forces and some predator drones to clean up--or simply tell the Saudis to stop giving them money and it won't matter how many are left. They wouldn't be able to buy a bus ticket, let alone a plane ticket to get over here.

Wouldn't it be nice if Obama told us the truth?

Afghanistan sits on a historic trade route from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean and the rest of the world. A few hundred years ago, that route carried spices, cloth, and opium. Today in addition to the income from heroin, oil and natural gas pipelines could flow through those same passes from the Caspian Sea basin as even Colin Powell's former chief of staff confirms. If we can pacify and stabilize Afghanistan, American and European companies could profit from that flow. Would the petroleum that went to the end of that pipeline end up in Europe and America? Maybe some. Most would go the emerging markets of China and India.

Would the income from those pipelines make it to the pockets of average Americans?

Sure. Didn't you get your thank you check from ExxonMobil for their new contracts in Iraq?

If we fail in Afghanistan, the oil & gas will still make it to market through a competing Iranian pipeline project which will end in Pakistan just like the US planned one through Afghanistan. Pakistan's initial agreement on the Iran pipeline is probably why we suddenly noticed terrorists there after years of ignoring their presence and their governments support of them, including Pakistan helping top al Qaeda leaders out of Tora Bora in 2001.

When Obama makes his pitch for more troops in Afghanistan, he could come clean with the American about why we are there, but if he doesn't it will be further proof that he doesn't work for us, but instead works for at least defers to the same handful of business interests that got our economy and foreign policy into its current mess.

Obama: LBJ without the accomplishments

2009-11-25T08:04:00.000-08:00

Pardon me for being impolite, but if Obama signs health care reform that looks anything like the deeply compromised and watered down bills in the House and Senate, that will hardly be an accomplishment on par with starting Medicare, most of college financial aid, and finally ensuring the full civil rights of African Americans.

LBJ did all that, and people still hated him for the war, and he was unable to run for a second term of his own.

Obama won't have even the figleaf of a major domestic policy victory to cover continuing and escalating the war in Afghanistan. He will barely have an aphid on a figleaf if he keeps following the path of micro-incremental, semi-reforms of the DLC, and worse, leaving the criminals who caused our economic problems in charge of economic policy instead of throwing them off the roof of the White House.

Wall Street gets EXACTLY what they want, and we get crumbs so long as it doesn't offend Wall Street or more likely, even enriches them further. Cases in point: the no-strings attached bailouts, health care reform BIBI (By Insurance companies For Insurance companies), and now the ongoing war in Afghanistan as order by the oil & gas companies. And even during the campaign, Obama was careful to send signals to Wall Street that he wasn't going to reverse the trade agreements that have decimated our manufacturing jobs.

Obama could theoretically have taken care of average Americans AND most of big business by simply singling out a couple of bad actors in the business world, explaining how their sociopathic behavior hurts not only middle class working people but even other businesses, and then showing them NO MERCY. I would nominate the health insurance industry, big oil for their role in our wars, and of course the economic terrorists on Wall Street.

Instead, he has given all three a big sloppy kiss (do you really think Afghanistan is about terrorists not pipelines and drug money for Wall St?)

Likewise, poll after poll shows that an overwhelming majority of Americans want health care reform that includes a full public option that allows anyone to escape the abuses of private insurance and get into a program like Medicare. Instead, we will be required to buy insurance from those abusive companies with no discernible restraints on pricing, and only a handful will have access to a public program that will be more expensive than private insurance. Do Democrats in Congress and President Obama really think that's a formula to get re-elected? In that case, they might also think being tough on rapists would be forcing their victims to marry them.

I think Obama is a good guy, but our democracy has a serious problem when he can't take the action necessary to correct our problems for fear of offending the people who created the problem, even as their actions are likely to drag us into more debt, war, and poverty.

We need WAR TAX to force GOP to choose between war & ''no new taxes''

2009-11-24T10:16:00.000-08:00

David Obey has stumbled upon a way to further sink the GOP.

He warned Obama that if he continued the Afghanistan War, he would institute a ''war surtax'' of 1% for most people and 5% for the wealthiest to pay for it.. He should add a bracket for businesses too.

I would formalize it and add that when ever troops are sent into harms way, the tax is triggered and stays in place until the war is over, and the rates could be adjusted annually depending on the actual cost of the war.

Bush accidentally set the precedent for this when he continually asked for war spending as supplementals instead of as part of his regular budget (so he could claim his budget wasn't creating as big a deficit as it really was).

Republicans in Congress who want to see any war continue as long as possible should be asked if they support such a proposal to pay for current and future wars or whether we should continue to charge our grandchildren for them.

The current cost of our two ongoing wars:

It was around $937 billion when I posted it, so divided by the 308 million people who live in the United States, it would be about $3000, per man, woman and child. That would be lower for most of us if we charged the wealthy a slightly higher percentage than the rest of us.

And that would be on top of what we spend on the military that's in the regular budget.

Separating war spending from the rest of the budget would force Republicans (and business-owned Democrats) to make a Sophie's Choice between two of their cherished policies: endless wars and no new taxes.

I suspect they would try to have it both ways or call for cuts in social programs instead, but since so many people are struggling right now, that might not go over so well.

It would also help people re-connect taxes to actual government action, rather than the current disconnect between what people want, and their GOP pavlovian conditioning to assume any tax increase is bad. Maybe people would start to wonder what percentage of the budget goes to other issues too.

Is Rahm Emanuel Karl Rove's retarded cousin?

2009-11-21T11:15:00.000-08:00

I would submit that he is equally amoral as Karl Rove but less competent.

Rove at least seemed to have a coherent plan to keep his guy in office: smear and fear. Smear your critics, make the public and legislators fear terrorists and crossing Bush. While the corruption and incompetence of the Bushies at actually governing or conducting a war led to their eventual train wreck, Rove's smoke and mirrors were enough to get Bush into his second term.

By contrast, whatever political advice Rahm Emanuel is giving Obama seems solely designed to appeal to corporate patrons with little thought to how it will play with average Americans, particularly, no thought to how the public will react if the final form of health insurance reform is perceived as a gift to insurance companies instead of helping the rest of us.

It is really dishonest to say they are ''moderate'' or ''pragmatic'' when in reality, they are serving their corporate donors and future corporate employers rather than the wishes of their constituents.

This has been made most obvious in polls of voters in blue dogs' states and districts about the public option in health care reform:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/21/montantans-not...

http://www.laprogressive.com/2009/09/22/new-study-publi... /

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/09/analysis-public-...

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/10/abc-new...

Even voters who reside in more conservative districts are not retarded or prefer being raped by insurance companies to having access to something like Medicare as an alternative.

In fact, one CBS poll found that even Republican voters favor a public option.
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/09/poll-even-re...

Even in places where people have drunken the conservative KoolAid and think they don't want a public option, once they had it given to them, they would probably cling to as tenaciously as the teabaggers cling to Medicare, even as they decry ''socialized medicine.''

Giving people a real public option would yield long term dividends for the Democrats.

Even severe compromises on health care would have been easier to swallow if Obama had taken swift action to punish, rein in, and neuter Wall Street--especially after giving them the second half of the Bush no strings attached bailout.

Obama has certainly done good things on less visible issues like student aid and repairing our image abroad although even the foreign affection for Obama will wear off if he continues Bush like policies in Afghanistan and starts a new Operation Condor in Latin America.

And if corporate compliant Rahm is calling the shots, that is likely to be the trajectory.

Even on the pragmatic level of giving Obama's base a reason to pound the pavement and open our wallets for him in 2012, baldly corporate first action seems stupid.

So my question is, is Rahm brilliantly playing some long game of chess on behalf of the American people, or is he so syphilictically corrupt that he can't help but do a Bush-like corporate smash-and-grab robbery of the treasury on behalf of big business?

NOTE: no offense meant to the retarded, those with syphilis, or Karl Rove

Jobs Program? How about a Clean Energy Conversion Corps?

2009-11-12T11:38:00.000-08:00

President Obama has announced a forum for brainstorming on ways to create jobs.

How about a program modeled on the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression only with a more specific focus: converting our power grid to clean energy to break the backs of oil and power companies that blackmail our economy, and in the case of oil, demand our tax dollars and the lives of our troops to increase their assets?

Call it the CECC: the Clean Energy Conservation Corps.

To be most effective at meeting that goal, as much as possible, solar panels should be installed on homes rather than in large scale power plants, to make it more difficult for any one corporation to monopolize power production or game the market.

This should also be done with installers directly employed by the government, not contracted out for the simple reason that if it was contracted out, the work would go to the usual corrupt suspects, who would underpay their workers, do a shitty job, then stash as much of the money as possible in the Cayman Islands--and only bring the money back into the country to buy corrupt politicians, cocaine, and whores (and buy cocaine and whores FOR corrupt politicians).

Directly employing people by the government is also preferable to the other scam of giving tax credits to businesses that create jobs. Too often, businesses get it who are going to hire people anyway, or they do hire additional new people, they figure out how to pay them as little as possible, give them the fewest benefits, and fire them whenever they like.

A directly government run program could give pay and benefits that force the private sector to treat their employees better to compete for workers with the public sector.

I'm sure conservatives and corrupt Blue Dog Democrats will complain about the cost, but within the last year, we had both a Republican and Democratic president write blank checks to Wall Street with absolutely no strings attached, and as thanks to the American taxpayers, they went right back to shitting on us and using our money to party. No politician should ever be able to say they are worried about spending again. What they are worried about is who that spending helps: most want it to go to the already wealthy who can reward them not only with campaign donations but jobs with fat paychecks when they leave office as lobbyists, CEO's, and do-nothing board members--NOT to empower the middle class.

Capitalism can still work, but right now, corporate America, the banks, and Wall Street are like a drug or gambling addict, who hasn't admitted they have a problem and checked into treatment. We shouldn't give them any more money when it is just going to go up their nose, in their arm, or out the window in Vegas.

What kind of health care insurance reform (if any) should America have?

2009-11-09T09:45:00.000-08:00

I know it's a little late in the process to ask, but this is just a quick reality check.

Letter to Obama: be honest about oil & gas motive for wars

2009-10-30T20:10:00.000-07:00

Sent through the White House contact page:

President Obama,

As you are reassessing our military presence in Afghanistan, I would urge you talk frankly with the American people about the role pipelines play in our presence there, and whether that is in the interest of average Americans or just the energy companies scrambling to take business from Russia. Colin Powell's former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson gave an excellent speech on this last week, and I was saddened that no president or cabinet member has talked this honestly about our foreign policy.

You can see his speech here.

Ironically, T. Boone Pickens made a similar point recently when he said if we pull out of Iraq, the Chinese will get all the best contracts. I think the American people should hear from our leaders that our troops are being used as leverage in oil company negotiations, don't you?

Pickens failed to point out that China would be getting those contracts without losing the life of one of their troops or taking the life of a single Iraqi. Maybe if our military wasn't available to our oil companies to enforce contract terms to their liking, they would learn how to negotiate as well as the Chinese.

The grown up lie about Iraq and Afghanistan is that we need those oil and gas resources, so we must kill and occupy to get it. But China and other countries are showing that's not necessary for access--you just have to make a deal favorable to both sides. The only thing that could be hurt by that approach is oil company profits margins, but we would save untold billions in unnecessary wars and would stop earning the animosity of people whose families we kill on behalf of Unocal, Chevron, and Exxon.

To the extent that you and your administration are not putting these business motives for our wars front and center in the public debate, you are following the Bush administration example and depriving the public of the chance to make an informed decision and neutering our democracy.

Sincerely,

VIDEO: OIL, FOREIGN POLICY & DEMOCRACY Colin Powell's former chief of staff tell the truth

2009-10-28T09:36:00.000-07:00

Colin Powell's former chief of staff confirms what those who have read history know: we are in the region to control their oil ( and I would add not particularly for the benefit of the American people).

Part 2 of this lecture lays out oil and pipeline motives of our current policies from the edge of the Mediterranean to Pakistan.

Part 3 describes the implications for our democracy that the real motives for coups, occupation, and wars for oil are not discussed with the public.

The first part is very good too, but the other two are essential to understanding what are government is doing.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

When our President Bush and now unfortunately President Obama talk about Iraq, Afghanistan, and our role in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Persian Gulf, they tell us fairy tales about fighting terrorism, spreading democracy, and stopping small nations from getting nukes, each is a demonstrable lie that makes us look like imbeciles for not tar and feathering and running out of office anyone who repeats that line of shit.

If we were after terrorists, we would choke off their supply of money, hunt down members of their groups with the CIA, special forces, and Predator drones. Then we would figure out how to make joining those groups less attractive by reducing grievances in the region that drive people into those groups.

One of those grievances is lack of democracy. We don't have to invade and occupy countries to spread democracy, we can simply turn off the supply of money and weapons to dictators in countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and in the past, Pakistan (oddly, once that country reverted to democracy from a dictatorship, they moved from our buddy list to shit list, and we noticed the terrorists who were there all along).

Likewise, while we should discourage nuclear proliferation, any country getting nukes will not be a threat to us. We have thousands and every world leader knows that if they launch one at us or give them to terrorists to detonate here, before one mushroom cloud clears here, their country will be burned off the map.

By contrast, Wilkerson discusses the drive to control the world's declining oil supplies, and two ways to deal with that end:

having a plan to switch to other kinds of energy in an orderly fashion

scrambling to control the last barrels then scrambling to replace oil when it's finally gone

He made it clear we are currently pursuing the second course.

We must ask the White House and our representatives in the House and Senate to cut the shit and be honest about what we are doing there, who demanded the action, and what benefit if any it will give average Americans, so we can decide how much more of our tax dollars and how many more of our troops we want to die there.

Wilkerson's bio & background on talk

MORE IRAQ OIL THEFT SOURCES

Democrats.com call for donor BOYCOTT of Dem Party until public option OPEN TO ALL signed into law

2009-10-26T11:34:00.000-07:00

They want those who sign their petition to only give DIRECTLY to candidates who support Medicare for All or at least a strong public option until Congress passes such a bill and the president signs it. Their petition will be sent to the DNC, DSCC, & DCCC, along with signers messages like mine:

Democrats cannot afford to take their voter base for granted. If you desert us, we will desert you. The corporate Democrats might bring in the big bucks, but you need our small bucks AND OUR VOTES.

TELL THOSE CORRUPT BLUE DOG BASTARDS TO DO THE RIGHT THING FOR ONCE IN THEIR SQUALID CAREERS. Then they can go back to trolling for their after office gigs as lobbyists, CEO's, and corporate board members.
The Republicans went from the top of the world to fly-covered road kill in the blink of an eye. It could happen to the Democrats too if you don't neuter your filthy blue dogs.

Even if you have never given to these blanket funds, telling then YOU WON'T GIVE in the future will put the fear of God in them.

Here's the text of the petition:

To: Gov. Tim Kaine, Chair, Democratic National Committee (DNC)
Sen. Bob Menendez, Chair, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC)
Rep. Chris Van Hollen, Chair, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC)

I write to inform you that I am joining the Democratic Donor Strike against the DNC, DSCC and DCCC, which will last until the Democratic Congress passes - and President Obama signs - healthcare reform with a robust public option:
* based on Medicare rates, not negotiated rates
* nation-wide, with no state opt-outs
* administered by Medicare, not a for-profit insurance company
* available immediately
Until then, I will only support individual Democrats who support single-payer Medicare for All (the 88 sponsors of HR 676), or (at a minimum) pledge to vote against a bill without a strong public option. I will also support challengers who support Healthcare Not Warfare.

We elected solid Democratic majorities in Congress and a Democratic President to fulfill Democratic promises of progressive change. We did not elect Republican Senator Olympia Snowe to break those promises.

And if a small number of corporate-funded Democrats in the Senate and House stand in the way, it is the job of our leaders - Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and President Obama - to persuade those Democrats to stand with the party that elected them. Even "fiscally conservative" Democrats have absolutely no excuse for voting against a robust public option, because CBO says it will save $110 billion.

So if I receive a fundraising email from the DNC, DSCC or DCCC, I will reply with a link to this petition. If I receive a fundraising call, I will tell the caller about this petition. If I receive a fundraising letter, I will return the envelope with a link to this petition:

http://www.democrats.com/donor-strike-for-public-option

We desperately need real health reform, starting with a robust public option. Until you deliver on your promises of change, I will reserve my contributions for individual Democrats who will truly fight for what we all believe.

Sincerely,

LINK to SIGN THE PETITION

T. Boone Pickens confirms Iraq War for OIL

2009-10-22T10:23:00.000-07:00

Straight from the horse's mouth:

Financier T. Boone Pickens speaks during the World Business Forum in New York October 6, 2009. (REUTERS/Lucas Jackson)

Published on Thursday, October 22, 2009 by Reuters

Pickens says US Firms 'Entitled' to Iraqi Oil

by Tom Doggett

WASHINGTON - Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens told Congress on Wednesday that U.S. energy companies are "entitled" to some of Iraq's crude because of the large number of American troops that lost their lives fighting in the country and the U.S. taxpayer money spent in Iraq. Boone, speaking to the newly formed Congressional Natural Gas Caucus, complained that the Iraqi government has awarded contracts to foreign companies, particularly Chinese firms, to develop Iraq's vast reserves while American companies have mostly been shut out.

"They're opening them (oil fields) up to other companies all over the world ... We're entitled to it," Pickens said of Iraq's oil. "Heck, we even lost 5,000 of our people, 65,000 injured and a trillion, five hundred billion dollars."
President Barack Obama has pledged to withdraw U.S. troops in Iraq.

"We leave there with the Chinese getting the oil," Pickens said.
FULL TEXT

Essentially, Pickens is saying America can only get a piece of Iraq's oil if we have a gun in their face.

There are a couple of problems with that calculus though.

First, even if American oil companies get oil concessions in Iraq, there is no guarantee that means they will sell it to American citizens for less, or reward us for the sacrifices of tax dollars and our troops lives that it took to get those contracts.

And while we are rightly focused on the thousands of our troops who have died, the Iraqis might be thinking more about the over one million Iraqis killed, with every other family having lost at least one member.

The other thing to note is that China and other countries were somehow able to negotiate contracts with Iraq without invading or occupying the country. Could it be that one way to negotiate is to offer more favorable terms than you competitors instead putting a gun in the face of the people you're negotiating with?

That might be hard to grasp if you are used to calling up Washington and getting the CIA or Pentagon to remove leaders who don't agree to your terms. Military action is a form of welfare for oil companies.

That certainly seemed to be the case in Iraq since as soon as Dick Cheney came into office, he formed a secretive energy task force, and the only revealing document anyone could pry out of it was a map of Iraq's oil fields divided up and a list of foreign suitors for those fields.

And if you think taking care of the oil companies also meant getting cheap gas for the rest of us, think again. BBC journalist Greg Palast was told by a top CIA oil analyst that the war was to prevent the price of oil from going down. The industry's own journal said in 2002 that once sanctions came off Saddam, he could pump too much oil and drive the price DOWN. President Bush even seemed to confirm this when he sent Russia's Putin reassurances that an Iraq War would NOT result in lower oil prices.

The other thing the awarding of contracts to other countries proves is that the oil companies are lying, and getting politicians in DC to lie for them, about Iraqis demanding unreasonable terms that make it impossible for them to drill there and make a profit. Somehow those other countries think Iraq's terms are manageable.

In reality, it is our oil companies who are making unreasonable demands on the Iraqis. After the invasion, President Bush hired an American consulting firm to write an oil law for the Iraqis that gave 88% of their oil income to big oil companies, a deal none of Iraq's oil rich neighbors wouldn't take without a gun to their head, and a provision rarely discussed in the American press, who instead focus on the ethnic division of oil income. The Bush administration pushed so hard for this law that at one point Iraq's prime minister said Bush would fire him if it wasn't passed, and while the Iraqi cabinet approved the law, the full parliament wouldn't vote for it even when the big oil companies offered them bribes of millions of dollars each.

If the war was not about oil, then US politicians would not be browbeating the Iraqis to accept American oil company terms as Joe Biden recently did--they would be twisting the arms of the oil companies to make them give Iraqis the best possible deal so it wouldn't look like oil was why we invaded and to reduce animosity toward the US in the region.

The fact that the likes of T. Boone Pickens are complaining about the Iraqi government shows that we might have done the Iraqis one favor--given them a government that actually looks out for their interests instead of politicians simply lining their own pockets. Now if we could just do ourselves the same favor.

MORE IRAQ OIL THEFT SOURCES

Letter to Obama: open public option to ALL & don't reward insurance companies

2009-09-22T12:19:00.000-07:00

Someone pointed out to me a section of one of Obama's speeches that the public option would only be open to those without insurance, so I wrote this brief letter:

President Obama,

Please make any public option available to all Americans, not just those without health insurance. Otherwise, the rest of us could be stuck with the crappy insurance our employers chose, and that choice likely wasn't based on what was best but what was cheapest or even gave them kickbacks.

Likewise, there should be no mandate to buy or subsidies to pay for private insurance unless their overhead spending (advertising, executive salaries, profits, and those claim denial operators) is limited to 10% as Sen. Feinstein proposed.

We should not reward health insurance companies for their sociopathic behavior that has harmed and even killed so many Americans just to increase their profits by forcing people to become their customers.

Feel free to plagiarize this in communication with the White House or your Congresspeople.

MODEST PROPOSAL: Pay CEO's with stock they CAN'T sell

2009-09-17T12:04:00.000-07:00

Instead of short term bonuses, CEO's should be paid bonuses over ten or twenty years, or even over the rest of their lives with the amount varying according to the current performance of the company, and of course ending if the company goes bankrupt.

One way to do this is to give them stock with no-options: no option to sell, especially to pump and dump with insider trading.

This would encourage them to build the company for long term success and even to withstand incompetent management after they leave.

Whatever the problems are with this, it would be far superior to the current system where bonuses are given out regardless of performance, with execs acting more like parasites draining blood from their host until it's dead instead of nurturing it's real (not paper) growth and stability.

Someone will say that you can't force them to keep stock, but that is essentially what they do to employees with pensions. Then when they fuck up by giving too much money to their cronies or not hiding their bookkeeping sleight of hand well enough, their employees are left eating dog food when they retire.

The only real problem I see with this is there aren't enough MBA's who don't actually know how to make things and provide services.

These sociopathic trust fund babies didn't rake leaves and flip burgers as kids like the rest of us, but instead stole money from their mummy's purse to spend on coke and whores. Now they just steal from their shareholders and employees.

It could be that in the long run, this would restore something like a meritocracy to our financial elite that would replace the current clusterfuck of country club Caligulas.

Rolling Stones' Matt Taibbi's 9/11 truth smears

2009-09-12T11:14:00.000-07:00

As I was rushing to get ready for work the other day, I caught a snippet of an interview of Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone on Pacifica Radio. He was slamming 9/11 truthers for their theories about controlled demolition, how they discount scores of witnesses for the official version of the story, but embraces the individuals, however few, who back them up, and said he trusted the debunking 9/11 truther websites by Popular Mechanics and 9/11 myths. That was irksome because as usual the debunkers focus on the few issues that sound wackiest and sidestep those too big to sweep under the carpet.

But what was more irritating was his analysis of WHY any 9/11 conspiracy was unlikely:

9/11 truthers are racists who don't think Arabs or Muslims are smart enough to plan and carry out an attack like 9/11.
Such a conspiracy would require too many people to keep their mouths shut--someone would have spilled the beans by now.

Washington doesn't need a "New Pearl Harbor" to justify war. The American people are so sheepish, they would go along with any war, and even if they did protest, it would have no effect--like the Vietnam War protests had no effect.

The powerful people on Wall Street are lazy golfers who just think about bribing politicians to change the rules to make it easier to make money.

The last is most annoying since Taibbi just wrote a long piece on how Goldman Sachs has been behind every bubble since the Great Depression, but let's look at these in order:

9/11 truthers are racists

That's ironic. I had a very un-racist reason wonder if the attacks were solely the work of crazed fundamentalists. Most human beings of any race or religion don't engage in behavior that doesn't have some hope of a positive outcome. What possible positive outcome could have resulted for al Qaeda or Muslims anywhere from 9/11? Anyone familiar with our foreign policy would have more or less predicted what we did: kill a lot of Muslims and/or Arabs who had nothing to do with the attacks. It seems that those who believe the official story think Muslims are too stupid to understand cause and effect.

Those who back the official explanation of 9/11 have often bought into profoundly racist excuses for continuing the war in Iraq: can the Iraqis defend and police themselves if we pullout or will there be chaos? Are they "ready" for democracy?

That was a discussion that could be heard ad nauseum on network and cable news talk shows, and makes them sound less like people and more like cavemen who have only recently descended from the trees, developed the power of speech, and shed their vestigial tail.

Too many people to keep a secret

Taibbi probably heard of the Manhattan Project to develop the atom bomb. Thousands of people worked on the project, but only a few knew what the whole project was about, and the general public didn't hear about it until we dropped the bomb. It's easy to see this being the case if 9/11 was more a matter of prodding some crazies here, and impeding some investigations there. And we did have whistleblowers come forward to say their significant warnings were ignored from FBI field officers like Colleen Rowley to White House terrorism czar Richard Clarke.

More significantly, what happened to those who did come forward either with information or to ask sharp questions were often reviled in the press or hounded out of their jobs. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney asked the right questions about our how any war games going on that day might have interfered with our air defenses that day and Don Rumsfeld refused to answer or provide the documentation she asked for. She was ridiculed in the press, not supported by the Democratic Party, and ultimately hounded from office and her party. The right wing media was less successful but just as vicious in attacking Richard Clarke and the Jersey Girls, a group of 9/11 widows who pressed for a 9/11 Commission. The right was successful in purging anchor Dan Rather from CBS, not for questioning 9/11 but for the lesser matter of Bush's own questionable record of military service. When Joe Wilson blew the whistle on one of the lies that led to the Iraq War, his wife was outed as a CIA covert operative, and both were attacked in the press. This would send a clear message to anyone with information that contradicted the official explanation of 9/11: keep your mouth shut or suffer severe consequences.

The clock on when we should expect to see 9/11 whistleblowers come forward should really start when Bush left office and Obama was inaugurated, and if I had that kind of information, I would be watching very carefully to see how Obama dealt with other misdeeds of Bush to see whether the chances of action being taken would outweigh possible retaliation. So far, if I was one of those people, I wouldn't have seen enough to make it worth the risk.

Washington doesn't need a "New Pearl Harbor" to justify war.

This was true throughout the Cold War, but a funny thing happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union--for a while, Washington was embarrassed to claim that dirt-poor Third World countries were a security threat to the United States. So other excuses were trotted out.

Papa Bush suddenly noticed that his pal Manuel Noriega in Panama was dealing drugs. That military action was so quick, public reaction didn't have time to have an effect.

The first Gulf War was sold more honestly (at least at first) as being about control of the world's oil supply; we didn't want Saddam to have it (not said out loud was that was our job). When that proved too abstract for most Americans to grasp, they shifted away from geopolitics to comic book demonization--Saddam Hussein was the new Hitler. This worked so well that when Bush decided at the end of the war to leave Saddam Hussein in power, the public still believed the propaganda instead of the realpolitik explanation. It cost Papa Bush in the polls and ultimately cost his presidency. That's a lesson politicians would remember--if you start with a big lie stick with it.

Papa Bush tried another approach with Somalia and Clinton inherited and stuck with it--it was a humanitarian intervention. The problem was, when our troops were killed there, the public soured on the mission and Clinton pulled our troops out.

That actually happened as far back as Reagan with "peacekeepers" in Lebanon. Once the Marine barracks was hit by a suicide bomber, Reagan had to pull out because the public didn't think a "humanitarian intervention" was worth so many deaths.

When the humanitarian excuse was used again for our intervention in the Balkans, Clinton bent over backwards to avoid the possibility of American casualties, which insured public apathy about the project.

The lesson for the DC establishment the last couple of decades has not been to ignore public opinion about going to war. They can only afford to do that if the war is quick like Grenada, Panama, or there were relatively few to no casualties as in the Balkans.

If they were going to start a prolonged war that will incur casualties along the way, they know they need a big excuse that has some staying power. Saddam's imaginary weapons of mass destruction and even more imaginary will to commit suicide by using them against the United States, who could retaliate hundreds of times over and burn Iraq off the map with our thousands of nukes, would have been a harder sell without the smoldering rubble of the World Trade Center in the back of the public's mind.

The lazy elite

This is true, but not in a way that excuses exonerates them from advocating and profiting from extreme acts of violence against innocent civilians.

Steven Kinzer of the New York Times wrote about how this plays out in foreign policy in his book Overthrow about the various coups and military interventions the US has sponsored to overthrow governments that weren't sufficiently compliant to American business interests. The most obvious example was Iran's secular, democratically elected president was ousted in a US backed coup because he wanted to keep more of the oil profits in Iran instead of giving them away to foreign big oil companies. He was replaced with a dictator, the Shah of Iran.

The same happened with the elected president of Guatamala, Jacobo Arbenz when he tried to enact land reform that enraged the United Fruit Company that considers Central America their private plantation. He was ousted in a US backed military coup.

It happened again when Chile elected a president a bit too socialist for the tastes (and profits of the American elite). Salvador Allende was replaced with the bloody dictator Augusto Pinochet.

In the current Iraq War, apart from the no bid contracts Bush gave to GOP cronies like Halliburton, KBR, and Blackwater (now Xe), the business-first motive is most obvious in the decrees of Bush-appointed governor of Iraq Paul Bremer that privatized and allowed foreign ownership of Iraq government assets, and in the first draft of the Iraq Hydrocarbon Law, written by an American company hired by George W. Bush, which gave 88% of Iraq's oil income to foreign oil companies, a deal none of Iraq's oil rich neighbors would accept without a gun to their heads. Remarkably, though the Iraqi cabinet approved the law, the parliament continues to refuse to pass it, and American oil companies keep lowballing bids on Iraqi contracts, thinking the presence of our troops is going to force the Iraqis to take otherwise unacceptable terms.

And this is why Taibbi is right about the financial elite being lazy, country club lounging golfers, but wrong about the consequences. It would be far more work to negotiate creatively to make a profit from governments protecting their own people's interest than it is to simply pick up the phone and ask those politicians, that Taibbi acknowledges are bought, to incite a coup or even go to war.

The work of diplomats and CIA agents to undermine and even oust foreign governments, or the military to invade countries cost the sociopathic trust fund babies of Wall Street nothing in time or money (apart from the required campaign contributions and later jobs for bought pols when they leave office). It is the ultimate in socializing cost and privatizing profits.

And it is like an addictive drug. Why bother to negotiate creatively, when you can step away from the table, let someone kill the leader or country you were negotiating with, and you can simply come back later and pick up what you want without opposition?

The Wall Street types would not necessarily even have to ask for a 9/11 to get it.

It is not hard to imagine the oil execs who met with Cheney for his energy task force, telling Cheney to do what it takes to get Iraq's tens of trillions of dollars worth of oil reserves under their control, pipeline routes through Afghanistan, and possibly even control of Iran's oil, since that's about all it took in the past. They leave the details and the works to the public servants, and they come back later to pick up the pieces of the countries that were broken for them.

The kind of scheming that Taibbi described in his article on Goldman Sachs would require more work and planning on the part of Wall Street suits than ordering up a war or coup.

Government and the Wall Street interests have likewise shown no hesitation to harm Americans when it served some larger goal, as happened with above ground nuclear testing, MK-ULTRA drug and mind control experiments conducted on our troops and college students, allowing cocaine into the US as part of the Iran Contra deal, and setting up a health insurance system that makes more money when it denies care to its customers and lets them die.

What is most disturbing about Taibbi's dismissal of 9/11 truthers is that he sidestepped some legitimate issues like the failure to protect what should have been our most secure airspace for two hours and the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11's finding evidence of Saudi government involvement in the attacks, which the Bush administration immediately swept under the rug and most in the press never mentioned again. An FBI document later shed light on the Saudi agent who picked up two of the hijackers at LAX when they arrived in the US, set them up in an apartment, and funneled money to them from the Saudi ambassador's wife until 9/11. The agent also made multiple calls to the Saudi embassy before and during their stay in the US.

Does it make me a nut if I wonder what the meaning of that finding is? We were attacked by an ally, did nothing to that ally in return, but used the attack as an excuse to launch two wars and curb civil liberties at home. That is not a theory but a matter of public record, but Taibbi and others in the press won't put those indisputable dots together because they don't want to be called crazy by the rich and powerful, stop being invited to the best parties, or most importantly, fired.

War on Terror shift to Pakistan over Iran Pipeline

2009-08-25T10:35:00.000-07:00

I was puzzled why, after years of doing our bidding in the War on Terror, Pakistan suddenly was recognized as a haven of terrorists that must be dealt with--even though the same extremist groups had been there all along, often acting with the blessing and support of Pakistani intelligence, and tacitly the US.

I had a fleeting hope that Obama was actually going to end the War on Terror by extinguishing the relatively small terrorist groups that might be motivated to launch 9/11 type attacks against us, dig up the body of bin Laden, do the DNA tests, declare him dead, and thereby end the remaining public support for the War on Terror.

I should have known that was too much to hope for since Obama never addressed the real reasons for our invasions of Iraq or Afghanistan.

Iraq has tens of trillions of dollars worth of easy extracted oil, but no contracts with American companies before the war. One of our goals in the Iraq War was to force them to give up 88% of their oil income to oil companies as stated in a Bush sponsored Hydrocarbon Law. For comparison, the Saudis, only give up about half. Despite Bush and members of both parties in Washington strong-arming Iraqis to pass it, they could only get the Iraqi cabinet to pass it, never the whole parliament--even when the oil companies offered millions in bribes to each member.

Similarly, energy companies courted the Taliban for a pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and Pakistan to take natural gas to India but gave up in frustration shortly before 9/11. In 2006, India was concerned about continuing the project until America gave assurances that we would protect the pipeline. Those assurances were repeated in 2008. (Thanks to chill_wind at DU, who provided another good background link on the pipeline)

The Pakistan link of the pipeline route seemed to be in place--until IRAN proposed an alternative to the Afghanistan route that ran from Iran to Pakistan to India instead. And Pakistan accepted the offer:

Perhaps the most convenient distraction of the entire War on Terror has been the fact that war makes privatization easier. Energy economist John Foster notes how the focus on national security masks a critical motive of the AfPak war: “Rivalry for pipeline routes and energy resources reflects competition for power and control in the region.”
One such route is the massive Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-India-Pakistan pipeline, which would transport 30 billion cubic metres of natural gas per year. Meanwhile, Iran is planning an alternative pipeline through Pakistan and India, to which Pakistan has agreed to in principle.
(from Vancouver, BC's Straight.com)

What is the US response to losing this game of geopolitical chess? Patrick Clawson, Deputy Director for Research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said:

Washington fears the pipeline will reduce the West's economic leverage over Tehran - economic leverage that is necessary to persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

(from Voice of America)

The only thing I disagree with in that quote is that Washington probably doesn't want the economic leverage to make Iran drop their nuclear program, but instead wants Iran to drop their nuclear program so that the US has the full range of options to coerce Iran to conform to our oil & gas companies business interests.

The real decision-makers in Washington have no concern about nuclear proliferation. If they did, they would bomb or invade North Korea every time they did a nuclear test or launched a missile over Japan.

The real decision-makers in Washington have no concern about terrorism. If they did, they would have gone after the country that the FBI found sent one of their intelligence agents to pick up two of the hijackers at the Los Angeles airport, set them up in an apartment, and then funneled money to them from the their ambassador's wife until 9/11. The Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 also found this country same country involved in the attack: Saudi Arabia.

Business interests dictate foreign policy. If you want to find out how much, read the Pulitzer Prize winning history of oil, THE PRIZE by Daniel Yergin. When oil companies want something, they don't ask senators and presidents for favors, they give orders. You might also read OVERTHROW by Steven Kinzer on why the US overthrew various other countries governments, including the secular, democratically elected one in Iran in 1953.

Business uses our state department and military to coerce deals with other countries because it costs them next nothing. They make a tens of million dollars of political donations and reap hundreds of billions in profit when the politicians follow their orders and cook up a war. And we don't present them with a bill for the military action or get a cut of the profits from the oil or land we stole for them.

Worst of all though is that our elected leaders don't talk honestly about any of this with the public and instead misplace blame for events like 9/11 and make up embarrassingly juvenile fairy tales about an "Islamofascist" menace from countries that have no ability invade or hold territory in the United States, and no technology equal to ours unless we sell it to them. To the extent that we are not let in on the real debate, we do not have a real democracy.

Bottom line in health care debate: I trust democracy with my life more than for-profit corporations

2009-08-20T11:18:00.001-07:00

Capitalism is fine when you are buying a tennis shoes, a computer, or car. If you make a bad choice, you are out a few bucks.

However, if you (or more likely your employer) choose a bad insurance company, it could bankrupt you or cost you your life when they deny your claim for treatment.

With a private insurance company, once you make a costly claim, you are nothing but a potential loss to them that they are desperate to get off the books, so they may deny that claim (with the PRIVATE death panels that already exist). Your only hope is to get media coverage to shame them into changing their mind. The only people who have clout with the company are major shareholders. It's a one dollar one vote system, and when you cost more than you give them, you have no vote.

In a government run system, if you were denied a claim, you would at least have recourse to complain to your elected officials who in turn could pressure bureaucrats. That politician wants the vote of you, your family, and friends.

I like one person one vote more than one dollar one vote.

WaPo publisher's apology shows why newspapers are dying

2009-07-05T13:10:00.000-07:00

Recently, the publisher of the Washington Post, Katharine Weymouth, advertised a dinner at her home where, for the low price of $250,ooo, you could talk off the record with Post reporters and top Obama administration officials. The first was to be on health care reform (paid for by Kaiser Permanente). Weymouth later ran an unconvincing apology claiming she knew little about the details of the event that was supposed to take place in her own home.

While this story by itself has little direct consequence, it is further evidence of what we all should have learned about the financial elite in the last decade, as I explain in my letter to the Post:

Weymouth's hard-to-believe apology as well as the original idea for the event itself shows why newspapers and our democratic process are dying: the public is fed platitudes and PR spin to herd them toward pre-approved opinions while the real debate is going on behind closed doors between those who have the money to buy the outcome they want.

The original article shows one part of the problem is nepotism. Weymouth got her job not because she is the crème de la crème of journalists but because she is the grand-daughter of famed owner Katherine Graham. Owning the press no more makes you a competent publisher than being the first president Bush's son makes you a competent president.

When the press is a for-profit business, it is the toy or tool of the wealthy. They can take a good paper and turn it into a worthless rag as has happened at the Los Angeles Times, or they can simply shut it down as is happening at newspapers across the county because though profitable, they don't make enough of a profit margin to please their owners.

We need a new model of press, perhaps like the Guardian in the UK that is run like PBS & NPR here (but the Guardian doesn't have to beg for corporate donations). We should also fully fund PBS & NPR, so they aren't beholden to corporations and the foundations of the wealthy to stay in business.

We need a new model for business and especially news that doesn't depend on the whims of the Katherine Weymouths of the world.

Even better would be if she simply gave the paper to its employees to run as a non-profit.

We need a new model for journalism, business, and government that limits the power of those who only bring money not talent to the table (and NO, bookkeeping scams you learned in your MBA program are no more talents than stealing money from your mother's purse was when you were a kid).

Since the wealthy love charity and their foundations so much, Weymouth could do a great public service by removing herself entirely from the operation of the paper, and letting the reporters choose their own editors from their midst rather than letting the idle rich pick those who are corporate compliant. Then Weymouth should never speak to the reporters or editors again except for a congratulatory phone call when they get their Pulitzers.

If the presidency of George W. Bush, the Enron collapse, the theft of countless pensions, the attempted theft through privatization of Social Security, the banking crisis, our health insurance system that puts profits ahead of saving lives, and our on-going wars for oil and pipeline routes in the Middle East were not evidence enough, Katherine Weymouth provides further proof that the financial elite in this country is as morally and intellectually crippled as George W. Bush--and just as dangerous when their hands are on the levers of power.

Sincerely,

More on the inevitable extinction of the financial elite

Jack London accurately detailed utter failure of our financial elite

2009-06-16T18:30:00.000-07:00

Just about a hundred years ago, Jack London wrote The Iron Heel about the oligarchy in America taking open control of the government to crush the rising political power of the working and middle class:

The Iron Heel

by Jack London

chapter 5 excerpt

He sketched the economic condition of the cave-man and of the savage peoples of to-day, pointing out that they possessed neither tools nor machines, and possessed only a natural efficiency of one in producing power. Then he traced the development of machinery and social organization so that to-day the producing power of civilized man was a thousand times greater than that of the savage.

`Five men,' he said, `can produce bread for a thousand. One man can produce cotton cloth for two hundred and fifty people, woollens for three hundred, and boots and shoes for a thousand. One would conclude from this that under a capable management of society modern civilized man would be a great deal better off than the cave-man. But is he? Let us see. In the United States to-day there are fifteen million8 people living in poverty; and by poverty is meant that condition in life in which, through lack of food and adequate shelter, the mere standard of working efficiency cannot be maintained...

`But to return to my indictment. If modern man's producing power is a thousand times greater than that of the cave-man, why then, in the United States to-day, are there fifteen million people who are not properly sheltered and properly fed? Why then, in the United States to-day, are there three million child laborers? It is a true indictment. The capitalist class has mismanaged. In face of the facts that modern man lives more wretchedly than the cave-man, and that his producing power is a thousand times greater than that of the cave-man, no other conclusion is possible than that the capitalist class has mismanaged, that you have mismanaged, my masters, that you have criminally and selfishly mismanaged....

`You have failed in your management. You have made a shambles of civilization. You have been blind and greedy. You have risen up (as you to-day rise up), shamelessly, in our legislative halls, and declared that profits were impossible without the toil of children and babes. Don't take my word for it. It is all in the records against you. You have lulled your conscience to sleep with prattle of sweet ideals and dear moralities. You are fat with power and possession, drunken with success; and you have no more hope against us than have the drones, clustered about the honey-vats, when the worker-bees spring upon them to end their rotund existence. You have failed in your management of society, and your management is to be taken away from you.

FULL TEXT

The words Jack London put in his characters mouth in The Iron Heel still ring true, though it needs some additions:

When you are no longer allowed in one country to work women and children around the clock for starvation wages, you simply move your factory to another country that will let you abuse your workers.

And you figured out the way to keep moving the factories forever: break the economies of the countries that are strong, so when you have finally worked your way down to the poorest of poor here, the formerly rich countries will be grateful for your starvation wages jobs. Isn't that what is happening to America today?

When one of your country club brethren charges you too much for health insurance for your employees, rather than drive a hard bargain with your fraternity brother, you simply stop giving health insurance to your employees and let them fend for themselves.

If anything in America tends to produce a more vigorous democracy like decent education in K-12 or college, you tell your bought off politicians in state capitals and Washington to starve it of funds or kill it outright.

You publicly claim to believe in competition, but use your pawns in Washington to tax your small competitors and subsidize you. And when someone comes along with a better product that would bury something like say, GASOLINE, you buy up the patents and if it isn't a patentable technology, you launch a massive PR campaign to crush it.

One person in America can do the work that a thousand did a hundred years ago, and yet they can only survive by incurring debt and more debt, and working two jobs and then three.

All so you can put more and more money in the bank than you can ever spend in your lifetime. Do you think your descendant four generations out will thank you for your hard work (if you did any) to accumulate your fortune, or will they be a moral and intellectual cripple like Paris Hilton and so many of the idle rich?

And those who inherited great wealth, don't you secretly know that you are incompetent and even helpless to defend yourselves without your army of middle and working class drones who manage your money, cut the crust off your toast and wipe your ass?

George Orwell said essentially the same thing as London in 1984:

From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations...

But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction -- indeed, in some sense was the destruction -- of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared...

For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away.
MORE

I like capitalism, and I'd like to be rich, but no one person, small group of people, or business should be so powerful that they can buy our government and have the power of life and death over the rest of us.

And if you don't think they have the power of life and death, think about someone whose health insurance denied a life saving procedure to fatten their profit margin, or a Gold Star Mom, mourning her child killed in Iraq, the country with the world's third largest oil reserves, in a war that our politicians tell us over and over had nothing to do with fattening the profit margins of oil companies.

The question is not if but when their depraved, withered hands will be pried from the levers of power. What they probably fail to realize is that the more radical action Obama takes, the longer their reprieve from forced retirement as Masters of theUniverse.

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