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.

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

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.

McCain's wife vows to give her fortune away to Lehman & Merril Lynch victims

Cindy McCain gives away her fortune to bankrupted Merril Lynch clients

In a scene reminiscent of It's a Wonderful Life, John McCain and his wife Cindy appeared at a Merrill Lynch office and passed out cash to investors who had lost their life savings in the firm's crash.

As investors clamored at the teller's window, Cindy dumped out a suitcase of money, began to ask how much each one had lost, and gave each piles of freshly printed money.

"There's plenty for everyone!" Mrs. McCain said.

Later she told reporters that her husband was despondent when he saw the news of the Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch crashes. "Not just because they were his biggest donors and lent him their corporate jet, but because of what it would do to the little people who put their trust in their social betters, the wealthy."

She said presidential candidate and senator McCain felt guilty for supporting decades of deregulation and carrying water for Wall Street.

"John thought if Wall Street did well, it would trickle down on the little people, the voters. Instead of a trickle of pure, life-giving water, it was more like the trickle out of John's diaper when he forgets to take his incontinence medication."

Concerned that her husband's despondency could accelerate the deterioration of his health and mental faculties, or spark a temper tantrum that would take several of their household staff to contain, she struck upon the idea repaying bankrupted investors out of her own personal fortune.

"Daddy left me oh-so-much money when he died, and since John is a senator, we don't have to spend it on ANYTHING. People are always giving him meals and trips and airplane rides. People that visit politicians are ever-so-generous!"

McCain gave away $30 million before the Merril Lynch office closed, and said she will make it right with every investor, or give away every penny of her $200 million personal fortune trying.

Senator McCain smiled soporifically throughout the proceedings because of a heavy dosage of xanax.

"Karl Rove is taking the day off, and he said it would be best if John was drugged since that's what they did to President Bush to keep him out of trouble when Karl was busy."

Mrs. McCain said if an bankrupted investor needs money before she can get to them, they can go to a nearby McCain campaign headquarters and make a withdrawal.

"Or any Republican candidate," she added. "I'm sure they all feel just awful about how this whole deregulation thing turned out and want to make amends, not just with words, but in the one way that counts: money."

ATTACK heart of failed GOP economic faith

Deregulation, privatization, low taxes on the wealthy and corporations, anti-unions (both domestic and foreign)--which of these has been a success for average Americans?

Deregulation has led to Enron and related Wall Street scams. Unless you are in the top tier of investors, you can't know if the information you are getting on companies you are invested in or thinking of investing in is accurate.

When energy was deregulated, the prices shot through the roof and rolling blackouts resulted here in California, and the Northeast blacked out through corporate indifference to maintaining infrastructure when it wasn't required by law.

Letting corporations decide how to deal with environmental and labor concerns on their own has had equally disastrous results.

Privatization has been an even greater disaster. In principle (like communism) it should work beautifully: the profit motive should encourage efficiency and cost savings. In practice, there are two fatal flaws:

1. The buyer and consumer of the services are not the same people. If the congressional committee or agency picks a low bidder who provides a crappy product or no product at all, they don't feel the effects, and the public doesn't even necessarily connect the dots back to that decision-maker.
2. The contracting process is easily corrupted by campaign contributions and the revolving door. The first is self-evidently true. If someone makes a political donation, they will get special consideration. The second is a more insidious and deep-rooted. When you look at the history of businesses like Bechtel and Halliburton that have had their corporate officers like George Schultz, Cap Weinberger, and Dick Cheney go back and forth between Cabinet secretary positions and their corporate boardrooms, it's obvious they aren't taking a break to donate their services to our country--they are pursuing corporate profits by other means. Cheney's deferred compensation from Halliburton simply brings this out into the open.

Low taxes on the wealthy and corporations have been pursued since the Reagan era despite the vast majority of economists repudiating "trickle down" economics (a term right wing propagandists contort themselves to avoid while still defending the concept). What we have have lost in public services like education far outweighs the few low wage jobs that might be generated for extra caddies and cabana boys at country clubs.

Their anti-union policies have been the equivalent of an Iraqi IED, blowing countless Americans out of the middle class and into the Walmart class of working poor. Their trade policies not only undermine unionization here, but in the countries at the other end, freeing their governments to be even more brutal in stopping their workers from banding together to demand a living wage, and those are the people that we will call terrorists and spend hundreds of billions to kill when they get so desperate that they come here and blow themselves and a couple of Americans up too.

In the economic realm, doing what is morally right is also practical and in the security interests of the United States. We don't have many Europeans come over here and blow stuff up because they are relatively happy with their lives. Our own political system is more stable when we have a broad middle class, as is our economy when people make enough money to buy the products they make as even nazi-loving Henry Ford realized a hundred years ago.

The GOP economic platform benefits very, very few Americans, and you could almost list them by name and count them on your fingers and toes.

No one in Washington is saying this because this policy is bought and paid for with political donations and revolving door jobs for most Republicans and many Democrats.

For most of human history, there has been one economic model: those with the most money or brute force took from everyone else and reduced them to servitude and survival level poverty. For brief time in the United States and for a bit longer with more success in Europe, we tried another model, nurturing a broad middle class, giving all a chance at education, owning a home, and participating in the democratic process.

While there was a communist threat, the corporate world and the wealthy pretended to ally themselves with the middle and working class. But now that that dragon is slain, they have turned and pointed the long knives, still hot and dripping with blood, at our hearts.