WaPo publisher's apology shows why newspapers are dying

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

selfish reasons for Americans to worry about what happens to Russia

It seems that since the end of the Cold War, the financial elite have become more brazen in screwing the middle and working class (and even a lot of the rich) and buying politicians more openly to help them do so.

They may have been more circumspect in the past because for all its flaws, communism would look more attractive to Europeans and Americans if we were still treated the way we were in the robber baron era, and while the Soviet Union was a going concern, it would look like a realistic rather than hypothetical option.

So we got the original "Third Way" between capitalism and socialism, smoothing the corners and rough edges off capitalism enough that people didn't think too much about alternatives.

Once the Soviet Union was gone, the financial elite seem to believe Francis Fukuyama's pronouncement that it was the end of history and they had won. Without an alternative for people to look to, the Third Way became three-quarters of the way to fascism and back to the era of Charles Dickens--smoothing the edges off capitalism was too expensive when the rich could just keep the tax money that costs in their pocket, and then privatize any surviving government services, so the tax dollars that are collected end up back in their hands.

If that is how they treat us now, regardless of whether you think Putin is a nice guy, do you think the financial elite are going to treat us any better once they don't even have Russia as a major REGIONAL obstacle?

If they replace every government that doesn't do business on terms the IMF, World Bank, Wall St, oil companies and the like dictate, is that going to make life any better for the rest of us?

When the sun never set on the British Empire, far from helping the folks back in England, those were the darkest days of the Industrial Revolution, when men, women, and children worked 16 hours a day, seven days a week.

Have our lives gotten any better since we've gone from one of two superpowers to the SOLE superpower in the world?

If not why should we expect to get any better if the continue to isolate Russia and take away their oil and gas business until they become a super-sized Somalia?

Previous post on Russia post-Cold War

Why Wikileaks gives me hope

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:

1. 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
   
   
2. 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.

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

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.

Gov't reaction to Wall Street meltdown like ''punishment'' of Prescott Bush for hiding Nazi money

If an ordinary citizen gave aid and comfort to our arch-enemy in World War II, they would have at minimum expected to spend the rest of their lives in prison or more likely, ended up like the Rosenbergs, executed for helping the Soviets.

Prescott Bush's bank was managing assets of a Nazi financier, including a steel plant that made heavy use of concentration camp labor. Far from being unaware of this, Bush mentioned it in correspondence and was concerned that his bank's ''interests be protected.'' The government found this activity troubling enough that they seized the banks assets under the Trading with the Enemy Act.

Bush's punishment for his involvement?

You would think he would have at least ended up like John Walker Lind, stripped naked, blind-folded, and held in solitary until the trial that put him in prison for life (or shortened his life).

Instead, the whole business was hushed up and he later won a Senate seat.

It seems that something similar is going on with Wall Street today. Can anyone doubt that Wall Street's concerted effort to get themselves deregulated, their Rube Goldberg maze of shell corporations and off-shore accounts, and intentional defrauding of ordinary investors, mortgage holders, and retirees has done more damage to our economy than Tim McVeigh, Osama bin Laden, and all the other terrorists to ever blow up anything in the US combined?

And in fact, the connection to terrorism is not just by analogy, but literal. To the degree that we face a legitimate terrorist threat, it is because business interests demand to be put ahead of human rights, democracy, and even the national security of the United States.

The foremost example of this is how we treated Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev hoped to transition to a European-style social democracy, but the investor class and banks wanted a Russia that was easy to plunder of their natural resources and industry. The result was the standard of living and even life expectancy in Russia DROPPED after the fall of communism, and Putin succeeds partly because he is trying to reclaim their dignity by standing up to us. Oil companies interest in stripping Russia of their oil, gas, and pipeline income further antagonizes a Russia that we now no longer have an ideological beef with. In effect, for the sake of corporate profits, we are reigniting a Cold War with an enemy with thousands of nuclear weapons.

Worse, business is a direct cause of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the Bush administrations failure to bring a quick conclusion to the War on Terror. Those in the Islamic world do not hate us for our freedom, but because we take theirs away to ensure that our oil companies have compliant governments to deal with, from overthrowing the democratically elected secular government of Iran in the 1950s to backing the oppressive Saudi government for decades. Oddly, even though the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 found direct involvement of the Saudi government in the attacks nothing was done about it. Whether this was done because we didn't want to jeopardize business ties with Saudis or because the Saudis were doing the Bush administration a favor with the attack, neither is acceptable.

And yet, the punishment of the wealthy who endanger and loot us like this will be much like Prescott Bush's. The public will use our taxpayer dollars to clean up their mess, and they will continue to live lives of leisure and be free exercise their power as ''masters of the universe'' even though they are masters of nothing but moving our money into their pockets.

I have no problem with capitalism in theory, but in practice, we can no longer afford a financial elite that not only ignores the law, but buys our politicians and makes the indefensible legal.

Any solution to this current problem has to involve putting the fear of God or at least fear of the wrath of the American people into these spoiled sociopathic trust fund babies, the likes of which no financial elite has felt since the Russian or even French Revolution.

Anything less than that leaves America and the world at risk from more attacks by these economic terrorists who make 9/11 look like a toddler's temper tantrum.

TO OBAMA: in every war speech, add military & economic reality check

I posted the following to the Change.gov's Citizens' Briefing Book of ideas for Obama. If you like what I have to say, go there and vote it up. If you don't, go make a better suggestion.

Congress should be required to detail in any authorization of military action or funding of on-going military action and the president should be required to cite in detail in any speech about military action the following:

• How large the military of that country is compared to ours. If the threat is supposedly about WMD, they must recite the number of nukes we have, and what any country knows we would do if they launched nukes at us or gave terrorists a nuke they detonate here: burn them off the map before the mushroom cloud cleared here.

Once that is discussed, people will wonder why we are even considering attacking that country, which leads to what Napoleon said wars are really all about:

"There is only one thing in this world, and that is to keep acquiring money and more money, power and more power. All the rest is meaningless."

The Bush administration and our Congress, including most Democrats, have been profoundly dishonest about this in the current Iraq War. Therefore, they should be required to enumerate the following about future military conflicts:

• Describe the historic business interests the United States or other foreign powers have had in that country. Obviously, with Iran, Iraq, and Venezuela, that interest is oil. Oil is also less obviously but equally our interest in the Sudan, Nigeria, and a good deal of AFRICOM.

• Describe in detail which business interests have lobbied for the military action, how much they have given to members of Congress who did and didn't vote for the action, how much money they plan to make in the invaded or intimidated country, and what percentage of their profits they pay in taxes to the United States.

In the current Iraq War, we still haven't heard details about what oil companies demanded of Cheney in his energy task force, but we do know they were pouring over maps of Iraq and lists of which countries had oil contracts there. After the invasion, Bush forced them to privatize most of their economy and is pressuring to pass a Hydrocarbon (oil) law that originally gave 88% of the oil income to oil companies, a deal other oil rich Gulf countries would never accept without a gun to their heads (which Iraq has).

While the Iraqi cabinet approved the law,the parliament figured out it was a bad deal, so the oil companies actually tried to BRIBE them with millions of dollars each to pass it--and they STILL wouldn't pass it.

MORE IRAQ OIL THEFT LINKS

• Describe in detail what the average American will get for sacrificing our tax dollars and soldiers lives for these business interests.

In the case of Iraq, our reward from oil companies was continued demands for tax breaks & subsidies, being gouged at the pump, AND demand for more drilling rights in federal lands with no obligation to sell the oil here or even drill it in a timely manner to help prices here.

As we saw with the Wall Street crisis this fall and even more clearly with how they spent our bailout money on mergers, exorbitant executive bonuses, and lavish parties, America's financial elite are not only incompetent and morally bankrupt, but they are a threat to the economic security and safety of average Americans.

The economic pain we are feeling now is just a taste of what they have dealt out to other countries for decades, crushing their dreams of democracy and decent standard of living just to get a few more percentage points of profit.

Unfortunately, George W. Bush was not an aberration, but their greed, callousness, and incompetence lurching into plain view for all to see for the first time.

Just because they have scurried back to the shadows doesn't mean they aren't still calling the shots.

The way to start to pry their sociopathic hands from wheel of state is to demand our elected officials state publicly what the financial elite demand of them in private before another generation of Americans is further impoverished, killed in their wars, and asked to take the lives of those who stand in the way of their profits.

Gallup poll: Financial "elitist" is McCain

A favorite dig of the now defunct Hillary campaign and likely of McCain's once Karl Rove kicks into high gear is that Obama is some kind of elitist.

However, John McCain is the one with the back of the financial elite according to this Gallup poll, and Obama has the lead with people struggling to make ends meet.

MORE GALLUP ANALYSIS OF OBAMA VS. McCAIN

People must be figuring out that the GOP is the party of Wall Street at the expense of Main Street. For all their talk of family values, patriotism, and religion, they would send your job to Bangladesh in a heartbeat, and if you are lucky enough to keep a job, they'll rob your paycheck by not regulating health insurance companies or checking the power of oil companies to jack up gas prices.

The evidence is pretty clear if you look at after tax income in the last couple of decades we have been guided by Republican economics:



The Republicans love the wealthy like their own family, and love the rest of us the way a lion loves a gazelle.

Wall St. Bailout proves Orwell right: financial elite, you are OBSOLETE!

Or a vestigial limb that evolution will eventually remove.

As we have seen in the myriad scams and schemes that led to the bailout, they do nothing productive but instead, drain wealth from those who know how to make things and provide services, and even from taxpayers with wars to seize assets for them and subsidies to prop up their poorly run businesses.

Orwell goes even farther and says that modern technology has the means to produce enough wealth to give a comfortable lifestyle to everyone on earth with fairly minimal work. But that would endanger the elite, who would begin to look superfluous, so the excess wealth must be destroyed--spent on weapons that make no one's life easier and used to destroy other weapons, people, and things, which in turn absorbs more wealth to repair.

We see this most clearly in the United States. We can't afford to pay decent salaries to workers because the money must all go to execs and dividends. We can't afford to have decent government run schools or health care because the rich must not be taxed more than they want to be and more must be spent on our military than all other countries combined--never mind that all the yahoos with hunting rifles and shotguns would be more than enough to give anyone stupid enough to invade us a serious headache.

America and the world are at a cross-roads: do we continue to run our world into the ground and kill each other so that a handful of people can control more money than their family could spend in twenty generations or do we tell those people ENOUGH? Would it really hurt them to only have enough excess wealth for three or four generations?

Would it hurt them to make them treat the rest of us like members of the human family instead of like cattle they can milk, slaughter, or sell for their own enrichment?

This is what Orwell said about the wealthy in the modern world in 1984:

The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. At present, when few human beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial processes of destruction had been at work. The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of that period looked forward. In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient -- a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete -- was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society. As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen-fifties have never been fully repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still there. 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. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process -- by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute -- the machine did raise the living standards of the average humand being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

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. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. 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.

1984

MORE BAILOUT ON PROFESSOR SMARTASS

Was the bailout "crisis" a fraud?

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

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

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

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.

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

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).