07 February 2010

There are points in time when everything changes. . . . .

Monday February 8, 2010

. . . . . There's a storm coming

. . . . .
So, I'm sticking with the promise to keep the playlist to people you should be listening to, but probably aren't. The model for getting music distributed, and played, is incredible. It is an organic movement, one that is grassroots and allows musicians to get directly to their fans and grab new ones.

. . . .So, given that, some people you should connect with, and get some free downloads, and keep track of.

. . . .As always, the first shout out goes to Shooter Jennings, Waylon Jennings and Jessie Colter's son, he who understands the bridge between Outlaw Country and Rock and Roll, he who was asked before Slash Hudson to be Velvet Revolver's lead guitar player.

. . . Jubal Lee Young

. . . Otis Gibbs
. . . .Chris Knight
. . . .Kevin Deal
. . . .Ryan Bingham (who provided the soundtrack for Crazy Heart)

. . . .
John Hiatt, one of America's greatest songwriters, has a new album due out in March of this year. If you know John Hiatt, you can pre-order the new album here. If you don't know who he is, that's your loss.

. . . . .
If 24 doesn't pick up soon, it's gonna be 12 1/2 for me reeaalll rapidly.

. . . . .Went to see From Paris, With Love last night. The John Travolta - Jonathan Rhys Meyers vehicle put together by Luc Besson (La Femme Nikita, The Professional, Taken), it's surprisingly good, with a few twists, not in plot, which you can see coming a mile away, but in character development. John Travolta has come a long, long way from Danny Zucko or Vinnie Barbarino. He makes an absolutely delicious crazed anti-hero. He and Bruce Willis have it down pat. The concept of the old, burned out CIA operative training a newbie by throwing him in the deep end right off the bat isn't new, but the two of them have some good chemistry on screen, despite a plot with screaming holes in it.

. . . . . .So, this has been a momentous week. I talk often in this column about nodal points in history, those mundane dates when everything changed, and it isn't even obvious in retrospect, it takes digging into history, fact, dates, names to find out what occurred. I've written about it often, and you'll have to dig through the archives, but it's easy to find out how April 11th, 1972 was a turning point; how March 13th, 1978, or December 5th, 1982 all meant huge turning points. I say easy, but it actually takes hours of research, or putting facts, names, dates together, of seeing what lobbyists visited when, and what riders were put on what pieces of legislation when, to see how it all got shaped, not in the background, but right out in front of people's eyes. It's just that the information flows so fast, and there's so much of it, it's hard to pick it out of the data stream, and live a normal, everyday life where people take care of their daily business.

. . . . .It's about understanding Chaos Theory, which isn't about chaos at all, but about complex, dynamic systems and the statistical probability theory behind the fractal probabilities of outcomes and possible endpoints.

. . . .In the end, despite human machinations and manipulations, we are all subject to the Laws of Mathematics, Physics, Thermodynamics and Logic. There is no escaping, eluding or bending them. They always win, and they always provide the answer. . . .follow the money.

. . . This is my daily business, so it's easy.

. . . .This last week, this weekend, in retrospect, it will be seen as one of those nodal moments in time.

. . . .Now, I've warned all along that this fall's little rise in the market and the slowing in unemployment numbers was a false light in the gloom, and that 2010 would be far worse than 2009 as China withdrew it's artificial propping up of the yuan, and as commercial mortgages began to enter the massive failure cycle that the residential failure took on last year. That's one point, and it's starting already. From Baseline Scenario:
he entirely pointless G7 meeting this weekend only served to underline the fact that Europe is again entering a serious economic crisis.

At the end of the meeting yesterday, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told reporters, “I just want to underscore they made it clear to us, they the European authorities, that they will manage this [the Greek debt crisis] with great care.”

But the Europeans are not being careful – and it’s not just about Greece any more. Worries about government debt and associated public sector liabilities (e.g., because banking systems are in deep trouble) have spread through the eurozone to Spain and Portugal. Ireland and Italy are next up for hostile reconsideration by the markets, and the UK may not be far behind.

What are the stronger European countries, specifically Germany and France, doing to contain the self-fulfilling fear that weaker eurozone countries may not be able to pay their debt – this panic that pushes up interest rates and makes it harder for beleaguered governments to actually pay?

The Europeans with deep-pockets are doing nothing – except insist that all countries under pressure cut their budgets quickly and in ways that are probably politically infeasible. This kind of precipitate fiscal austerity contributed directly to the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s.

The International Monetary Fund was created after World War II specifically to prevent such a situation from recurring. The Fund is supposed to lend to countries in trouble, to cushion the blow of crisis. The idea is not to prevent necessary adjustments – for example, in the form of budget deficit reduction – but to spread those out over time, to restore confidence, and to serve as an external seal of approval on a government’s credibility.

Dominique Strauss-Khan, the Managing Director of the IMF, said Thursday on French radio that the Fund stands ready to help Greece. But he knows this is wishful thinking.

  • “Going to the IMF” brings with it a great deal of stigma. European governments are unwilling to take such a step as it could well be their last.
  • The IMF is supposed to provide only “balance of payments” lending. That doesn’t fit well when a country is in a currency union such as the euro, which floats freely and does not have a current account issue, and the main problem is just the budget.
  • Greece and the other weak eurozone countries need euro loans, not any other currency. If the IMF lent euros, that would be distinctly awkward – as this is what the European Central Bank (ECB) is supposed to control.
  • Sending Greece to the IMF would result in some international “burden sharing,” as it would be IMF resources – from all its member countries around the world – on the line, rather than just European Union funds. But is the US really willing to burden share through the IMF? After all, Europe has long refused to confront the trouble in its weaker countries, now known as PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain)? How would the Chinese react if such a proposition came to the IMF?
  • Would the Europeans really want the IMF and its somewhat cumbersome rules to get involved – this would be a huge loss of prestige. It could also lead to some perverse outcomes – you never know what the IMF and the US Treasury (and Larry Summers) will come up with in terms of needed policies (ask Korea about 1997-98; not a good experience). The European Union (EU) has handled IMF recent engagement well in eastern Europe (from the EU perspective), but that was seen as the EU’s backyard. If the eurozone is in trouble, everyone will be paying much more attention – no more sweetheart deals.
  • The IMF gave eastern Europe amazingly good deals over the past 2 years (by IMF standards). Would this fly with financial markets in the sense of restoring confidence in the PIIGS and their medium-term fiscal futures?
  • Does the IMF really have enough resources to backstop all the PIIGS? The IMF’s notional capital was increased substantially last year, but just based on what we see now, the Fund would need even more ready money to tackle the eurozone – all the weaker countries would need at least preventive lending programs and these would need to be large. If that is where this goes, the EU looks simply awful and has failed at a deep level.
  • The IMF could play a constructive “technical assistance role” alongside the European Commission, but everyone would want to keep this pretty low profile. Anything that goes to the IMF executive board would result in a lot of cheering and jeering from emerging markets. This would break the power of Europe on the international stage – perhaps a good thing, but not at all what the European policy elite is looking for.

The IMF cannot help in any meaningful way. And the stronger EU countries are not willing to help – in part because they want to be tough, but also because they do not have effective mechanisms for providing assistance-with-strings. Unconditional bailouts are simple – just send a check. Structuring a rescue package that will garner support among the German electorate – whose current and future taxes will be on the line – is considerably more complicated.

The financial markets know all this and last week sharpened their swords. As we move into this week, expect more selling pressure across a wide range of European assets.

As this pressure mounts, we’ll see cracks appear also in the private sector. Significant banks and large hedge funds have been selling insurance against default by European sovereigns. As countries lose creditworthiness – and, under sufficient pressure, very few government credit ratings will hold up – these financial institutions will need to come up with cash to post increasing amounts of collateral against their derivative obligations (yes, the same credit default swaps that triggered the collapse last time).


. . . The arrest of Ken Lewis, and in his testimony, if it ever occurs, finally shining a light on Bernanke's and Paulson's involvement, will be another point.

. . . .Now on that, I point you towards one sent along to me (and I'd excerpted earlier this week as well) by John, a good friend, and very aware and awake man of my acquaintance who picked this one up from Bloomberg penned by David Reilly, regarding Goldman's involvement in the AIG debacle, and why wouldn't they? They held both the bottom and top end of the deal:

Jan. 29 (Bloomberg) -- The idea of secret banking cabals that control the country and global economy are a given among conspiracy theorists who stockpile ammo, bottled water and peanut butter. After this week’s congressional hearing into the bailout of American International Group Inc., you have to wonder if those folks are crazy after all.

Wednesday’s hearing described a secretive group deploying billions of dollars to favored banks, operating with little oversight by the public or elected officials.

We’re talking about the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, whose role as the most influential part of the federal-reserve system -- apart from the matter of AIG’s bailout -- deserves further congressional scrutiny.

The New York Fed is in the hot seat for its decision in November 2008 to buy out, for about $30 billion, insurance contracts AIG sold on toxic debt securities to banks, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co., Societe Generale and Deutsche Bank AG, among others. That decision, critics say, amounted to a back-door bailout for the banks, which received 100 cents on the dollar for contracts that would have been worth far less had AIG been allowed to fail.

That move came a few weeks after the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department propped up AIG in the wake of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s own mid-September bankruptcy filing.

. . . .That's backed up by this piece in this morning's New York Times penned by Gretchen Morgensen that puts more of those pieces in place:
Billions of dollars were at stake when 21 executives of Goldman Sachs and the American International Group convened a conference call on Jan. 28, 2008, to try to resolve a rancorous dispute that had been escalating for months.

A.I.G. had long insured complex mortgage securities owned by Goldman and other firms against possible defaults. With the housing crisis deepening, A.I.G., once the world’s biggest insurer, had already paid Goldman $2 billion to cover losses the bank said it might suffer.

A.I.G. executives wanted some of its money back, insisting that Goldman — like a homeowner overestimating the damages in a storm to get a bigger insurance payment — had inflated the potential losses. Goldman countered that it was owed even more, while also resisting consulting with third parties to help estimate a value for the securities.

After more than an hour of debate, the two sides on the call signed off with nothing settled, according to internal A.I.G. documents and an audio recording reviewed by The New York Times.

Behind-the-scenes disputes over huge sums are common in banking, but the standoff between A.I.G. and Goldman would become one of the most momentous in Wall Street history. Well before the federal government bailed out A.I.G. in September 2008, Goldman’s demands for billions of dollars from the insurer helped put it in a precarious financial position by bleeding much-needed cash. That ultimately provoked the government to step in.

With taxpayer assistance to A.I.G. currently totaling $180 billion, regulatory and Congressional scrutiny of Goldman’s role in the insurer’s downfall is increasing. The Securities and Exchange Commission is examining the payment demands that a number of firms — most prominently Goldman — made during 2007 and 2008 as the mortgage market imploded.


. . . .Full piece here.

. . .. Now, it's completely amazing to me that some of the most serious investigative journalism out there is being done by Rolling Stone, of all magazines, led of course by the fearless Matt Taibbi, now you can add Hustler for heaven's sake, and Maxim.

. . . .Hustler
makes sense to me, Larry Flynt, believe it or not, is one of the most plain spoken, intelligent true patriots and citizens of the Republic that there is (obviously I don't have a problem with supposed "pornography", yes, I'm a true Libertarian). Before talking further about what's contained in this month's issue, I'm going to recycle part of piece that Larry Flynt wrote last fall:

The American government -- which we once called our government -- has been taken over by Wall Street, the mega-corporations and the super-rich. They are the ones who decide our fate. It is this group of powerful elites, the people President Franklin D. Roosevelt called "economic royalists," who choose our elected officials -- indeed, our very form of government. Both Democrats and Republicans dance to the tune of their corporate masters. In America, corporations do not control the government. In America, corporations are the government.

This was never more obvious than with the Wall Street bailout, whereby the very corporations that caused the collapse of our economy were rewarded with taxpayer dollars. So arrogant, so smug were they that, without a moment's hesitation, they took our money -- yours and mine -- to pay their executives multimillion-dollar bonuses, something they continue doing to this very day. They have no shame. They don't care what you and I think about them. Henry Kissinger refers to us as "useless eaters."

But, you say, we have elected a candidate of change. To which I respond: Do these words of President Obama sound like change?

"A culture of irresponsibility took root, from Wall Street to Washington to Main Street."
There it is. Right there. We are Main Street. We must, according to our president, share the blame. He went on to say: "And a regulatory regime basically crafted in the wake of a 20th-century economic crisis -- the Great Depression -- was overwhelmed by the speed, scope and sophistication of a 21st-century global economy."

This is nonsense.

The reason Wall Street was able to game the system the way it did -- knowing that they would become rich at the expense of the American people (oh, yes, they most certainly knew that) -- was because the financial elite had bribed our legislators to roll back the protections enacted after the Stock Market Crash of 1929.

Congress gutted the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial lending banks from investment banks, and passed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which allowed for self-regulation with no oversight. The Securities and Exchange Commission subsequently revised its rules to allow for even less oversight -- and we've all seen how well that worked out. To date, no serious legislation has been offered by the Obama administration to correct these problems.

Instead, Obama wants to increase the oversight power of the Federal Reserve. Never mind that it already had significant oversight power before our most recent economic meltdown, yet failed to take action. Never mind that the Fed is not a government agency but a cartel of private bankers that cannot be held accountable by Washington. Whatever the Fed does with these supposed new oversight powers will be behind closed doors.

Obama's failure to act sends one message loud and clear: He cannot stand up to the powerful Wall Street interests that supplied the bulk of his campaign money for the 2008 election. Nor, for that matter, can Congress, for much the same reason.

Consider what multibillionaire banker David Rockefeller wrote in his 2002 memoirs:

"Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure -- one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it."

Read Rockefeller's words again. He actually admits to working against the "best interests of the United States."


Need more? Here's what Rockefeller said in 1994 at a U.N. dinner: "We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis, and the nations will accept the New World Order." They're gaming us. Our country has been stolen from us.

Journalist Matt Taibbi, writing in Rolling Stone, notes that esteemed economist John Kenneth Galbraith laid the 1929 crash at the feet of banking giant Goldman Sachs. Taibbi goes on to say that Goldman Sachs has been behind every other economic downturn as well, including the most recent one. As if that wasn't enough, Goldman Sachs even had a hand in pushing gas prices up to $4 a gallon.

The problem with bankers is longstanding. Here's what one of our Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, had to say about them:

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation, and then by deflation, the banks and the corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their father's conquered."

We all know that the first American Revolution officially began in 1776, with the Declaration of Independence. Less well known is that the single strongest motivating factor for revolution was the colonists' attempt to free themselves from the Bank of England. But how many of you know about the second revolution, referred to by historians as Shays' Rebellion? It took place in 1786-87, and once again the banks were the cause. This time they were putting the screws to America's farmers.

Daniel Shays was a farmer in western Massachusetts. Like many other farmers of the day, he was being driven into bankruptcy by the banks' predatory lending practices. (Sound familiar?) Rallying other farmers to his side, Shays led his rebels in an attack on the courts and the local armory. The rebellion itself failed, but a message had been sent: The bankers (and the politicians who supported them) ultimately backed off. As Thomas Jefferson famously quipped in regard to the insurrection: "A little rebellion now and then is a good thing. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

Perhaps it's time to consider that option once again.

. . . .Which ring well with the words written by Thomas Jefferson in 1816 as a battle cry:
crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

. . . .Which is a lead-in to what I referred to above, that a piece in Hustler magazine now represents a piece of investigative journalism that deserves your time. Brad Friedman has written a piece on Sibel Edmonds, the former FBI translator turned whistleblower who has been twice gagged by the Bush Administration and who is able to name names in the article "Traitors Among Us", those names including Hastert, Wolfowitz, Perle, Grossman, etc. among others. and details blackmail of sitting U.S. Congressmembers, the theft and sale of nuclear secrets to the foreign black market and treasonous and traitorous acts by top members of the State and Defense Departments among others. She's fully clothed in the article, buy the damn thing anyhow and read it.

. . . And while you're at it being politically incorrect, pick up a copy of Maxim magazine, which is carrying a heretofore censored and gagged story on the death of Republican IT guru Mike Connell, excerpted here, courtesy of The Brad Blog:
ust over a month prior to his death --- the day prior to the 2008 general election, in fact --- Connell was compelled to give a deposition in the ongoing 2004 election fraud lawsuit, as he had earlier been said to have been guilt-ridden and ready to spill the beans about what had really happened in Ohio in 2004. After word of his intentions to tell what he knew had made its way onto the Internet, allegations that he had been threatened by Karl Rove to take the fall followed. Connell began shutting up. While he was subpoenaed and compelled to appear for a deposition in November of 2008, that deposition remains sealed by federal court order, and Connell would die before he was allowed to serve as a witness in the case.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has yet to release a cause for Connell's crash on his solo, and final flight home. But as The BRAD BLOG reported on two occasions last year, Connell's family members have grown more and more suspicious of the circumstances under which the experienced pilot ended up crashing to the ground just prior to his scheduled landing at the Akron-Canton Regional Airport days before Christmas a little more than a year ago.

His wife Heather has grown increasingly angry according to Worrall, at what appears to be a rather curious investigation. "I have pieces of my husband's brain!," she is quoted as telling him in the Maxim article which The BRAD BLOG was given an early embargoed look at. "I picked them up with my hands six days after the crash. Chunks of his skin and internal organs. How is that a proper investigation? How is that acceptable?" she asks, while wondering why his ever-present BlackBerry, and it's many phone numbers, notes, files and contacts, is still missing, even though his backpack was found still zipped with the matching Bluetooth earpiece still inside.

On that BlackBerry were "hundreds, if not thousands, of sensitive files and e-mails relating to Karl Rove and the Bush administration," explains Worrall. "I want to know where my husband's phone is," Heather tells him "angrily" in the piece.

As Heather grows more furious and curious, Mike's sister Shannon, as Worrall reports, says she is "convinced he was murdered."

"I think they played him," Shannon says, "His death would have been a really nice Christmas present for Rove and Cheney."

Worrall pulls together the entire story for the bulk of the world which remains unfamiliar with any of it. Despite how close Connell was said to have been with Rove, and how important he was to so many high officials in the GOP, including John McCain whose campaign website he also built, none of them ever released an official statement on his death to our knowledge.

The Maxim piece also adds a number of other previously unreported details along the way. Among them:

  • During his calls to the tower, after word of the crash, a Greentown Fire Department official is quoted as explaining the he was told "the tower was in lockdown and that no information was available."
  • The night crash scene, which would normally be roped off and investigated in daylight, was lit by towers, photographed and documented by officials from the NTSB and FAA, and then "Connell's plane was hastily removed to a secure hangar under the cover of darkness. By 6 A.M. the investigators had vanished, leaving behind them a trail of debris and one very angry widow."
  • Connell's final words, just after screaming "Nine nine November declaring an emergency!" were "Oh, fuck!" and then silence as the control tower tape goes dead. Officials reported his last words as "Oh, God!" out of purported respect to Connell's deep Catholic religious beliefs. [Note: We've heard those recordings, and can confirm Worrall's reportage here, though we don't believe we've ever reported specifically on them, or publicly released the audio here on The BRAD BLOG.]
  • The contracts between OH Sec. of State Blackwell and Connell, on behalf of GovTech, contradict his testimony that SMARTech, a highly partisan rightwing outfit in Chattanooga, TN, "merely acted as a backup site for election data". SMARTech owns the servers where Ohio's election night reporting system was mysteriously transfered to in the middle of the night as the country was waiting for final results in 2004. The setup allowed for a potential "man-in-the-middle" hack of the data. The contract shows that Connell's company and/or Blackwell had direct remote access to both server systems on Election Night.
  • Worrall reports that a "deep throat" document anonymously sent to Connell's family and a number of FBI agents last year, purporting to be an "after action report" by a black ops agent tasked with sabotaging Connell's plane --- as we briefly discussed in a report here last November --- is believed to be "genuine" by "a number of experts from the intelligence community" who have seen it.
  • Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who reported in detail on Ohio's 2004 election debacle for Rolling Stone magazine was interviewed for the story, and tells Worrall that he believes what happened during that election was "more serious than Watergate" as "The Ohio vote undermines the very foundation stone of American democracy." He goes on to call for an "official investigation. Otherwise this becomes a blueprint for how to steal an election from here to eternity."

In a background item on the story over on his own blog, Worrall notes that he "took nearly a year to unravel this compelling, and complicated story."

. . . .Which leads me to this, as oftentimes I'm referred to as a "conspiracy theorist". I don't mind, I can back up anything that's here with fact, data, dates, names; and it's not about Men In Black, Roswell aliens, crystal skulls or arcane ceremonies. It's about money, power and those who feel entitled to rule. From Janine Wedel:
Shadow Elite, which exposes the new breed of power brokers who are a bit like the public policy equivalent of sci-fi shape-shifters. I call them flexians, people I've targeted in previous posts like Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Tom Daschle, and Barry McCaffrey, who cycle through identities and venues of power, both government and corporate, advancing their own personal agendas and those of their associates, not you, or the government agencies flexians are paid to serve, with your tax dollars.


Today's players are more dangerous and insidious to democracy than the power brokers who came before them. More peripatetic, they move seamlessly among public, corporate, think tank, and media organizations, and are more difficult to detect and less transparent. They cross borders and boundaries in areas of finance, health care, the economy, and the military, among others. They defy all the old standards of accountability. I plan to ferret out the shadow elite, their enablers, and the developments that encourage them, with, I hope, your help.

This case, involving moonlighting, multiple roles, and potentially divided loyalties within an agency whose mission is to protect Americans, points toward a disturbing trend I examine in Shadow Elite: power brokers and supposed public servants, with a multiplicity of ever-fluid involvements that lack traditional checks and balances, moving themselves, their connections, and their expertise through government, business, media, and think-tank organizations.

This trend can endanger democracy and the national interest. As in the CIA/BIA case, the danger often begins with the contracting out of official information and expertise -- "Is government outsourcing its brain?" an article in the Wall Street Journal asked -- and thus whether government is capable of minding the store. The widespread draining of official government is depriving it of crucial in-house expertise and institutional memory. But there is an even more disturbing implication. As players blend and blur their roles across organizations, the boundaries and purposes of those organizations also blend and blur. What are we to make of the BIA? Is it an offshoot of the CIA? As they trundle back and forth between Wall Street and Washington, does the information the CIA officers glean in one venue seep into the other?

Unfortunately, there are plenty of recent examples of dangers to democracy that arise when government and business intertwine, and loyalties are blowing in the wind.

One of these is the "SWIFT" case, in which a private company, given "government" access to sensitive, private data about U.S. citizens and other countries, not only worked alongside government to analyze the data, but then also (supposedly) oversaw the process.

Following 9/11, one government surveillance program tracked money flowing into and out of the U.S., transactions abroad and, in a small portion of cases, financial transactions within the U.S. SWIFT takes its name from the Belgium-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, a "member-owned cooperative" that processes international financial transactions. Through SWIFT, the U.S. Treasury Department sought and gained access to large numbers of financial and communication records.

Treasury then established the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, run out of the CIA, to analyze the SWIFT data and later shared it with the CIA and FBI. It also hired Booz Allen Hamilton (whose majority owner is the Carlyle Group), now as an "independent" auditor, which, along with SWIFT, reviewed Treasury's logs of information searches. When the surveillance program was exposed amid controversy in 2006, a key question was how Booz Allen could be impartial given its record as a government contractor and the close ties of its executives to high government officials, and considering the fact that some of these executives are themselves one-time intelligence officials. As Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Project, put it:

"It is bad enough that the administration is trying to hold out a private company as a substitute for genuine checks and balances on its surveillance activities. But of all companies to perform audits on a secret surveillance program, it would be difficult to find one less objective and more intertwined with the U.S. government security establishment."

Both the SWIFT and the CIA moonlighting episodes remind us that even more than in the novels of John Le Carre, a master of complexity himself, the machinations of today's players and entities are difficult to track and pin down. Le Carre has written that mixed loyalties can sometimes provide clarity, once writing, "the more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal." I don't buy it when it comes to the world of power and influence. In our new world of shadow elite, the more professional roles players have and the more venues in which they operate, the less we typically know about their motives and agendas. It might be serving them quite well, but it's unlikely they are serving the American people or the ideals of democracy and accountability.

. . . .Now, completely sideways jumping, one moment that leaps to mind as a bright spot is someone, persons in power are finally talking about Don't Ask, Don't Tell; which by the way is abhorrent, and the repealing of it will be the first step towards full equal rights for all citizens of this Republic. Frank Rich, from the Times:
A funny thing happened after Adm. Mike Mullen called for gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military: A curious silence befell much of the right. If this were a Sherlock Holmes story, it would be the case of the attack dogs that did not bark.

John McCain, commandeering the spotlight as usual, did fulminate against the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” But the press focus on McCain, the crazy man in Washington’s attic, was misleading. His yapping was an exception, not the rule.

Many of his Republican colleagues said little or nothing. The right’s noise machine was on mute. The Fox News report on Mullen’s testimony was fair and balanced — and brief. The network dropped the subject entirely in the Hannity-O’Reilly hothouse of prime time that night. Only ratings-desperate CNN gave a fleeting platform to the old homophobic clichés. Michael O’Hanlon, an “expert” from the Brookings Institution, speculated that “18-year-old, old-fashioned, testosterone-laden” soldiers who are “tough guys” might object to those practicing “alternative forms of lifestyle,” which he apparently views as weak and testosterone-deficient. His only prominent ally was the Family Research Council, which issued an inevitable “action alert” demanding a stop to “the sexualization of our military.”

The occasional outliers notwithstanding, why did such a hush greet Mullen on Capitol Hill? The answer begins with the simple fact that a large majority of voters — between 61 percent and 75 percent depending on the poll — now share his point of view. Most Americans recognize that being gay is not a “lifestyle” but an immutable identity, and that outlawing discrimination against gay people who want to serve their country is, as the admiral said, “the right thing to do.”

Mullen’s heartfelt, plain-spoken testimony gave perfect expression to the nation’s own slow but inexorable progress on the issue. He said he had “served with homosexuals since 1968” and that his views had evolved “cumulatively” and “personally” ever since. So it has gone for many other Americans in all walks of life. As more gay people have come out — a process that accelerated once the modern gay rights movement emerged from the Stonewall riots of 1969 — so more heterosexuals have learned that they have gay relatives, friends, neighbors, teachers and co-workers. It is hard to deny our own fundamental rights to those we know, admire and love.

But that’s not the whole explanation for the scant pushback in Washington to Mullen and his partner in change, Defense Secretary Robert Gates. There is also a potent political subtext. To a degree unimaginable as recently as 2004 — when Karl Rove and George W. Bush ran a national campaign exploiting fear of gay people — there is now little political advantage to spewing homophobia. Indeed, anti-gay animus is far more likely to repel voters than attract them. This equation was visibly eating at Orrin Hatch, the Republican senator from Utah, as he vamped nervously with Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC last week, trying to duck any discernible stand on Mullen’s testimony. On only one point was he crystal clear: “I just plain do not believe in prejudice of any kind.”

Now that explicit anti-gay animus is an albatross, those who oppose gay civil rights are driven to invent ever loopier rationales for denying those rights, whether in the military or in marriage. Hatch, for instance, limply suggested to Mitchell that a repeal of “don’t ask” would lead to gay demands for “special rights.” Such arguments, both preposterous and disingenuous, are mere fig leaves to disguise the phobia that can no longer dare speak its name. If gay Americans are to be granted full equality, the flimsy rhetorical camouflage must be stripped away to expose the prejudice that lies beneath.


. . . .Now, bear Rich's premise and what he posits in mind, bring it to the forefront of your consciousness when looking at the next two little pieces about both the Prez and Sarah.

. . . Which when I talk about pivotal moments, means that the following two little nuggets signal that everything has changed.
. . . .The President's attendance at the National Prayer Breakfast, sponsored by The Family, the very notorious far Right Fundamentalist Christian power brokers who have helped sponsor Uganda's death penalty for homosexuality, when he is Goldman-Sachs' guy in the White House sets up one of two things either (a) an incredible rivalry between the two most powerful groups in Washington that will result in a war that will occur under the radar that we won't see or (b) a detente, a sense of cooperation between those two groups with the Prez as the broker, in order to preserve the current order, based on what happened on Saturday night and Sunday morning.

. . . I refer of course to Sarah Palin's keynote address to Tea Party Convention, and her announcement on Fox News on Sunday morning that she was running for President.

. . . .Citizens of the Republic, meet your next President.

. . . .I do not joke about that, she will be the next President.

. . . .And that will also mean the end of the Republic of the United States of America.

. . . .Sarah Palin, is, to me, the embodiment, as of this moment, of sheer evil. She is cunning, manipulative and ruthless, like all religious fanatics. There have been no political figures to compare her to, the closest comparisons are to Father Coughlin or Aimee Semple McPherson. She believes herself to be on a divine mission. Sarah Palin is first and foremost, an Apocalyptic Pentecostal, who believes thoroughly in the mythological Christian end-times, and for her, that takes precedence over being a citizen of the Republic, and her religious beliefs override any allegiance to the Constitution of the United States of America. To have her in possession of the nuclear launch codes is simply put, terrifying. To have her in a position to craft and push legislation and court decisions that will push this country even further towards a Fundamentalist Christian theocracy is an acknowledged probability in the 97th percentile.

. . . .The fact that her husband, who now, it turns out, did much of the day to day governance of Alaska, and was a member of a separatist/secessionist group that advocated for the violent overthrow of the American government, that she twice gave the keynote address to it's convention, will be forgotten.

. . . .The fact that she quit the only job she's had on a State or Federal level, that was the equivalent of being the mayor of Fargo, ND will be forgotten.

. . . Her incredible history of lies, duplicity and manipulation, though well recorded will be forgotten.

. . . .Her incredible shallowness, lack of policy knowledge, and complete ignorance of both common historical fact, and present day events will be forgotten.

. . . .This country of sheeple will elect her, and in so doing, the results will be what they deserve.

. . . The speech itself was actually quite masterful. A complete ad hominem attack on the President, no substance, no policy, no fact and an entire hour of very carefully chosen emotional buzzwords that built the hysteria and completely pandered to the sense of disengagement, dislocation and anger that the citizens of this country now feel, with no answers at all, other than "anyone not in this hall is the enemy, and the other and it's all their fault, and I represent your answer, no real specifics on that, just me representing your answer, anything but the other guy".

. . . .And remember, if Rahm Emmanuel says "retards" he has to resign, but if Rush says it, it's cute.

. . . .Fundamentalist religious fanaticism, carefully disguised.

. . . .She is not fit to govern.

. . . .Now, my differences with this President are well documented, and based in fact and data. Regardless of that, he is the duly elected President of the United States; elected under due Constitutional process, as ratified by the Electoral College; as were all his predecessors. He is an American citizen, he is not a Muslim, and he's not near as far Left as his opponents wish to paint him.

. . . .In other words, he's just like the guy before him, and the guy before that, and the guy before that.

. . . And just because I haven't picked on Sarah's unmedicated lunatic partner in crime for a while, the philosophical leader of the GOP, Mr. Glenn Beck. Courtesy of Chez over at Deus ExMalcontent:

"He chose to use his name, Barack, for a reason. To identify, not with America -- you don't take the name Barack to identify with America. You take the name Barack to identify with what? Your heritage? The heritage, maybe, of your father in Kenya, who is a radical? Really? Searching for something to give him any kind of meaning, just as he was searching later in life for religion."

-- Glenn Beck

Look, I get that Glenn Beck is just fucking around, because there's simply no way anybody could be this batshit crazy and be allowed out of the hospital much less on television, but at some point he's gonna have to drop the Andy Kaufman routine and tip his cards to the dumb-asses who hang on every word that comes out of his mouth. For the good of us all.

Honestly, there's just no way that anybody who scribbles this kind of indecipherable crap on a chalkboard for an hour every night can be serious:


By the way, Matt Osborne actually attempts to inject a shot of Haloperidol into Beck's schizophrenic psychosis by debating the origin of Obama's name. Better listen to him -- he's pre-law.

Osborne Ink: Dear Glenn Beck: The Meaning of "Barack"/2.5.10

. . . .I do this, like some others like me do it, not to be read, because most of you don't. Not read it, not really, all the way through and think about it. You don't listen, you don't pay attention, you don't even want to comprehend all of it. I do it for one simple reason. Like all good Americans in this 21st century, when the shit really hits the fan, most of you will throw your hands up and yell "How come someone didn't warn us!". . .We're trying to, you're not listening.

. . . When are you going to wake up?

. . . .It's time for two new parties, ones that truly represent us. Get in touch with me.

. . . . . .. . . . .Live every day out loud

. . . And that's how it is today, from the last, lonely outpost.
. . . .I miss you Mom and Dad, a lot. Thanks for watching over me and us.


. . . . .. . . .We can salvage this shipwreck of a Nation. It will take all of us working together. It will take all of us understanding the concepts of the Great American Experiment, the political process of the Republic. It's amazing, I don't see eye-to-eye on every issue with my friends, but we respect one another's opinion, share information, share facts, and we don't talk over one another or at one another, we talk with one another. It's amazing what happens when a group of people who share the common goal of leaving a better country for their children and grandchildren can do when they sit down with one another as human beings, and realize that we each have power, and together, we are unstoppable.

. . . .I'm going to ask this of you for the next 30 days. Turn your TV off, turn your radio off. Start to use that beautiful mind that your Creator gave you, that your underpaid, underappreciated High School teachers tried to develop. If you hear something, if you read something, if someone sends you an e-mail that says "this bill will do this", or "this politician says this", I'm asking you to check it out. Check it out this way, use some of the following fact-based sites, who exist solely for the purpose of data and fact-checking.
- If whatever you've heard or read concerns a bill in Congress, use the following -
- Open Congress, it's non-partisan and devoted to a complete tracking of every bill in Congress, both houses. How a bill is developed, who is sponsoring it, what the riders are, what the discussion around it is.
- GovTrack, again non-partisan, non-commercial and open source; devoted to the same things, tracking Congress.
- Open Secrets, one of the most important ones, it tracks the lobbying money and campaign contributions flowing to your congressperson, and most of the time is a pretty good predictor of how they'll vote.
- Political Party Time, non-partisan, devoted to solely tracking political fundraisers, and letting you know exactly what parties your Representative and Senators are throwing for fundraisers and who is attending and how much money they're throwing at them to gain influence.

. . . .If someone sends something to you saying "this is so" or "that is so" or "the President/Senator/Representative said this" use the following:
- Fact Check, non-partisan, designed to separate fact from bullshit and fiction
- Snopes, devoted to the same thing.
- Politifact, devoted to getting to the truth, and separating out the lies that are spread.


. . . .I keep doing this not because I don't have faith, but because I do have faith. I have faith in the ultimate triumph of the spirit, intellect and heart of the American people. I have faith that the people I know want to leave something better for future generations, and know that something is terribly wrong, and want to do something about it. I do it because Paine and Jefferson were brilliant, unique singularities and were right.

. . . .I keep doing this because I don't believe in big imaginary friends for adults, I don't believe in alien conspiracies running the Government, I don't believe the Roswell bodies are at Wright-Patterson, I don't believe that a big portal will open up on Dec. 21, 2012, I don't believe that the spaceships will show up.

. . . I do believe that the people who have fucked everything up are greedy, avaricious human beings who have been able to steal from the American people, to harm them, who have run unchecked because no one calls it out for what it is. I believe that if we shine the light of day on it, if the people of this country have had enough, we can change it, and change it for the better.

. . . . I keep doing this because I do believe that people, human beings, unchecked will continue to do what they've done throughout history, and throughout the history of this country. Together, they will find the solutions and provide better for their children and grandchildren.

. . . .I believe in us, I believe in people. I believe in the beauty, power and grace of the individual.

. . . .I do this for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of knowing what they do, what they believe, what they know is right. I do it for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of faith, hope, love, hate, justice, war and peace.

. . . .I do it because I believe in justice, in all it's forms.

. . . .I do this everyday for the people and kids who are tattoed, pierced and inked and keep getting told to get "into the mainstream". I do this everyday for those guys who wear black that you don't understand, you just know there's something about them, and that when the chips are down, when you have to walk down a dark alley somewhere, and you know what's waiting for you at the end of it, and you can only take one person with you, that's who you want walking with you, because you know you'll come back out alive, and that guy doesn't care what it costs him.

. . . .I do this everyday for the outcasts, the misfits, the ones who don't fit and who will turn their back on you and walk away when you try to make them fit into a mold. I do it everyday for everyone who does it their way, knows that they're paying a high price for it, but the freedom is worth the cost.

. . . . I do this everyday for outlaws, cowboys, renegades, pirates and fallen angels. I do it everyday for the people who understand that rock and roll can save their soul, that redemption can be found in a 3-chord lick from a vintage Les Paul. I do it for the men and women who aren't afraid to turn it all the way up, who keep looking for an 11 setting on a volume knob that only goes to 10, who know that rock and roll's got nothing to do with age.


. . . .If right now, you're doing something you don't want to do, stop it. If you've surrounded yourself with people who want you to do or be something other than who you are, walk away. If you've got people around you who actually let it slip out that they think you "should be doing (fill in the blank here)" and it involves your life, your future, your existence as an individual, walk away, right now, and don't look back. You don't owe anyone anything. Live fearlessly. If the people around you can't accept it, can't accept you as you are, really are, they aren't and weren't friends anyhow.

. . . .Don't march to anyone else's drumbeat, don't drink the Kool-Aid, anyone's. Right, Left, conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, Christian, Buddhist, Pagan. Use your own mind, that's why you were given one. Examine, question, do what's right for you first, everything else will fall in place from there, quit looking for the path, you're already on it.

. . . .Come out of the gate each morning with both barrels blazing, pedal-to-metal, full-tilt boogie, all-in and balls-out, what's stopping you? Do you want to live forever? That'd be boring.

. . . .Got your back. somewhere out there in the night

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments before they're ripped away from you. This rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, absolutely no one gets out alive. There aren't a lot of second chances, and we don't get to dictate terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. This ain't no dress rehearsal, and the curtain's gone up, it's real and right now. It's not about yesterday or tomorrow. It's about right fucking here, right fucking now. This, what you're reading, what you're hearing, is the proof, the words, the sounds and the sights of someone changing his own life and his own world and not being afraid to put it out there. What have you done for yourself lately and why are you waiting? Do it now.

The Desolation Angel
from somewhere halfway to Heaven, and just a mile out of Hell


You know someone like me, there's still a few of us left. If we have to, we'll stand at the gates of Hell and hold the last train home for you.. . . . . .

[where: 29.52N, 91.57W]
[where: Chelsea, MI]


05 February 2010

Geez. . .isn't this fun?

Friday February 5, 2010

. . . . . There's a storm coming

. . . .I forget sometimes the real reach that this column has, it has grown exponentially, for which I'm grateful, and I am oblivious to that sometimes, and still treat it as if it's a personal thing that my friends read and that I use to get the thoughts that run through my fevered brain down in permanent form.

. . . . .And here's why I'm sometimes stunned by it. The other day, got home from a hitch, back in the house, opening up 7 days worth of mail. Now, I buy a lot of music, I have a lot of music sent to me (if you're reading this on the Facebooks Notes page, switch out to the external site, The Desolation Angel - An Idiot's Ravings, that's where the podcast/playlist and all the music is) and I give it all a listen, it used to be tracks from people who said "here, listen to this", it grew to artists and musicians, established ones, who sent me tracks, from there to some fairly large name rock and rollers who would send me demo tracks, alternate version tracks, etc.

. . . .So, back to the story, I'm opening the mail, there's a large greeting card size envelope with something inside it. Hand lettered in pen to me, bunch of stamps from the Post Office on it to get enough postage to cover the weight, and a return label that had been printed on someone's computer. Inside it, a CD from a person I'd never heard of sent to me.

. . . .The whole scenario plainly said, "Hey, I'm starting out and trying to get established. Mister, please play my music."

. . . .Now, for that alone, I'd play the shit out of this man, just for balls, whether he was any good or not. I remember, I know, what it's like to feel that young, and impassioned, and to not even care if somebody liked what I did, or not. To pursue a passion, a muse.

. . . .As it is, he's fucking great. His name is Kevin Deal, he's out of Texas, and you're hearing some tracks on his playing now in the podcast that goes with the external site. He's a damn good musician, and he's trying his heart out to be listened to. He's got a good, greasy Texas blues rock and roll feel to his music. You can feel that dry, hot, dusty West Texas wind in his music.

. . . .He wrote every track on that album, titled "7", and available here on his website. So for once, I'm not going to stay neutral, please, support independent musicians and people who are just starting out, please remember, that in our arrogance as baby boomers, and believing that just because rock and roll started with us, that it isn't always the "old guys" who are the best. Classic is just another word for old, and the old masters, the Eric Claptons, the Jeff Becks, the Jimmy Pages are in their own words "old now", and want the music to evolve, and younger artists to be supported and listened to.

. . . . . .So, while still on cultural notes, Lost premiered this week to bring the world it's last season of the stories of the survivors of Oceanic 815 and the story of the Island, Benjamin Linus, Charles Widmore, etc. Now, if you haven't watch the show, this paragraph will be completely out to lunch to you. Now, I've been sucked into the show from the beginning; believing that it would wind up where it's wound up now. The show's entire theme, the entire story arc over all these seasons was revealed in the beginning of this show. It's a simple premise; that destiny is not pre-determined; that fate isn't fate, but something we shape ourselves. . . .but be damn careful about reshaping it, and understand that when you hit the "reset" button on things, you affect a lot more than just yourself. . . . So, for those of you who do watch it, what do we have going into the season? - We have this; two separate timelines, both of them real, neither of them imagined in which significant events have transpired. We finally know who, or what, or something or other about Ol' Smokey; we know for sure that Hurley sees dead people and can talk to them, that Miles really can talk to dead people, we have Jacob occupying Sayid now, with Ol' Smokey in Locke, so the two baddest boys on the Island are now in opposition. We have some more answers about Richard, and we now from the flash-sideways that regardless of whether or not 815 ever crashed, that all the survivors would have interacted with one another somehow, and the outcomes for them didn't turn out so well in their own lives without the crash happening. We have the Island on the bottom of the ocean in that timeline, with a fully intact 4 toed statue and New Otherton built. We have Desmond just deciding to sit down next to Jack on an airplane at 35,000 feet, and not ever really being on the plane, and we have Jack's dad Christian, or his body, at least disappearing off the plane. Nice set-up for the concluding season.

. . . .Which brings something else to mind, I'd been sure that all along that Christian was the one carrying Jacob, apparently not. So who was he carrying?

. . . .So, anyhow, this next little piece was inspired by a couple of people I know, who upon examining piece on the upcoming budget that was supposedly "Libertarian" based in thought, (and I very intentionally used the word supposedly) started a discussion thread. One of the comments made was "I could get behind the Libertarians more, if they tackled the . . .issues, such as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and could see what their stance was.

. . . .I've cleaned this up a lot, and gotten more rational about it, so here goes.

. . . Point 1, first and foremost, any discussion at all about policy of any kind, fiscal or otherwise, without a base understanding of Libertarian thought, which begins with the individual, is pointless and moot. In fact, without the personal and social aspects of Libertarianism, you don't have Libertarianism at all, merely the Republican bastardization of it, combined with their particular theocratic Christian morality twist on it.

. . . .Point 2. No discussion can occur without some common grounding in fact. Most pertinent to this discussion is the fact that this country was not founded as a Christian theocracy. Thomas Jefferson was a deist, the foremost philosopher behind the founding of the democratic republic that would become the United States of America was in fact the author of Virginia's Religious Freedom Act of 1779 and feared two forces far more than the military for taking over the political process of theRepublic, the churches and banking. Both of which now hold dominant sway.

. . . And I say most pertinent to this thread for one reason. Libertarianism is based in the primacy of self-determinism. More on that in a bit, after clearing up one more point.

. . . The libertarian definition of property extends far beyond the commonly used understanding of it. Property is far more than what I own, the physical objects, far more than land. It is my body, and more than that, it is my thoughts, my words, my voice, all of it. My property.

. . . .Now think about that, long and hard. Now, think about the preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America and what it declares. Now, think about the 1st 10 Amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. An immediate bastardization of Libertarianism.

. . . .No government, no body politic can grant me the right to freedom of speech, I am born with it. Now, no government can grant it to me, nor can it take it away. As well, it's not government's job to guarantee it for me. As an individual born with that right, I am also accountable and responsible for publishing or broadcasting that free speech, responsible for conducting that business necessary for it, and accountable for it's rewards or it's punishments.

. . . .This is only one example, but it applies to everything. No person may be restricted, nor granted, by any government, or body politic, rights that they are inherently born with.

. . . Now, I will say this, this country, this society, 98% of the people I know are not mature enough to handle living in a society governed by Libertarian philosophy. They would be "offended", or wish to tell another how to live, or want a personal "issue" legislated.

. . . .Self-determinism, in all it's forms, and in full force, is not for the the faint of heart, not for those who spend time caring what other people think of them or what they say, nor for those who wish to tell others how they should live or what they should be thinking about an issue. It is only for those who understand that being autocratic is often a survival issue.

. . . .I say that for one simple reason. Applying that philosophy to all people and all actions means that (a) I am free to act as I want with my own property, and on my own property and (b) I absolutely must respect other's inherently born right to do the same.

. . . What does that mean? It means that Don't Ask, Don't Tell shouldn't not only have been enacted, it shouldn't have even been an issue. It means that with a true Libertarian philosophy underpinning society; no gun-control laws, no religious, sexual preference, etc. discrimination, no abortion laws, no drug laws; no laws or policies that legislate moral or ethical issues. The only "laws" or policies that would exist are laws that impart punishment for infringing on another's property.

. . . . .I say no drug laws as someone who just passed 29 years sober and clean. I say it as someone who knows that this country has the largest number of prisoners of any nation on Earth (not percentage, not per capita) and that 54% of those prisoners are non-violent drug offenders who cost on average, $225,000 per year to house. Over 3 million of them.

. . . . .No gun control laws is simple, if I wish to use my currency to buy a firearm, and use it, that's my business.

. . . Now, that goes into what Gil asked about police and military. If I use that firearm to harm another's property (body, house, etc.) than I am forfeit for harming that property.

. . . It becomes a quid pro quo system, harm another's property, your own is forfeit.

. . . . Military becomes the same issue. They are used simply to protect the "property" of a nation. That would have made 9/11 much simpler. bin-Laden and his followers would have been hunted down and made to forfeit for their destruction of that property (lives) and the expensive, deadly nation building exercises that we've pursued in Iraq and Afghanistan would have been abandoned, and those people allowed to pursue their lives and property. Simply put, their lives, their business.

. . . .Which brings me back to the point I made earlier about religion. Since Eisenhower really, Kennedy cannot be counted, a less than full term, this country has edged closer and closer to being a religious oligarchy, as the conservative movement has been subverted by the Religious Right, who wish to parade as faux Libertarians (fiscal only, but Christian morality imposed) but in matter of fact wish to impose a theocracy (i.e. Tea Partiers, Glenn Beck, etc.)

. . . .So that brings me squarely back to this issue of budgets, deficits, surpluses, etc. I pay no attention to them, they are academic issues that are "paper" only, and have been since Reagan switched the basis for the dollar over to oil, and Bush1 and Clinton sold the debt to China and Saudi Arabia (who now between the two of them own 100% of it). The last two Presidents are the two apex examples of meaningless figureheads, both of them owned wholly by Wall Street.

. . . So, time for a little Econ 101 homework, on deficits, and inflation. From Krugman, via Yglesias:

Great Paul Krugman post illustrates the point that the budget crisis in Spain has basically nothing to do with irresponsible budgeting. Pre-crisis Spain had a budget surplus and a low debt load. The problem is that the structure of the EU has made it impossible for Spain to adapt to a large negative shock:

DESCRIPTION

So what happened? Spain is an object lesson in the problems of having monetary union without fiscal and labor market integration. First, there was a huge boom in Spain, largely driven by a housing bubble — and financed by capital outflows from Germany. This boom pulled up Spanish wages. Then the bubble burst, leaving Spanish labor overpriced relative to Germany and France, and precipitating a surge in unemployment. It also led to large Spanish budget deficits, mainly because of collapsing revenue but also due to efforts to limit the rise in unemployment.



. . . . . We are further away from true Libertarian thought than we have ever been. Reagan started the landslide, which often provokes argument, since he "cut taxes" and "started the conservative revolution". He also increased Federal spending as a percentage of GNP, and grew governments size by 4%, and immediately adopted a discredited economist, Arthur Laffer, whose economic theory was sketched on a cocktail napkin as the leading light in the nation's dismal economic gloom, and pardoned the Keating 5 (hello, John McCain). More scarily, he adopted and thanked Zbigniew Brzezinski's tome, sponsored by David Rockefeller, from which George Bush Sr. first adopted the phrase "New Economic World Order". Combine that with Bush1 and Clinton crafting NAFTA and passing it, and Clinton's abolition of Glass-Steagall and that sets the stage for the last two empty suits that have occupied the White House and the wholesale transfer of wealth from this nation's citizenry not to Washington, but to 1 investment house, 1 insurance company and 5 banks.

. . . . .The city of Washington D.C. is a wholly owned subsidiary of lobbyists and campaign contributors, and the recent decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission now guarantees that for our lifetimes and beyond, the governance of the country has now been put beyond the citizens of the Republic and is now the exclusive province of corporations, business and Wall Street.

. . . .Citibank's vision of the plutonomy has finally come to pass.

. . .And why is all that so important, because the following video and map is the scariest, most important thing I've seen in a while:

The Scariest Map Ever - At Least for Americans

More precisely, this map will be scary for people in the US. It's a time-lapse video of unemployment rates over two years - the darker the color, the higher the rates. Welcome to the jobless future.

[via LaToya Egwuekwe]



. . . . .So, now that I've pulled the pin on that grenade. Let's rock.

. . . .From around the horn:

. . .Frank Schaeffer, on the Prez, and his association with the second most powerful group in D.C., (next to G-S):

Why Is Obama Helping a Hate Group?

Would President Obama speak at a prayer breakfast organized by the KKK? Would Jim Wallis and other "progressive" Christians attend?

Then what will they be doing on Thursday Feb 3 at the National Prayer Breakfast founded and sponsored by the notorious gay-bashing "The Family" fringe far right group? (I ask this as a practicing progressive Christian and repentant former religious right leader).

Yes, that's the same folks who's key members here and in Africa are mired in the Uganda kill the gays legislation!

Yes, that's the same folks who long ago used their US government/hard right contacts to try and get the US Government to cozy up to fascist dictator-for-life Franco of Spain.

Yes, that's the "C-Street" adulterers club in Wash DC that coddles far right philandering Republicans and protects them when they cheat on their wives, not to mention on their country by using their senator and congressmen members to export the worst of American fundamentalism abroad using quasi-governmental auspices.

These are the folks that the evangelicals and others have been in bed with for years at the National Prayer Breakfast.

Why?

It's about access to power, stupid! And this nefarious and shadowy group can put you in the room with power and money. They are also part of scandals involving John Ensign and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford which has placed a spotlight on The Family.

. . . .Full piece here.

. . . .Matt Taibbi on another wonderful bunch running around the American landscape:

We, the Tea Partiers

· We protest against a heavy-fisted form of government that seeks to further regulate private enterprise and hinder future profits (i.e., banking and energy industries…).

via We, the Tea Partiers – The York Daily Record.

The writer goes on to protest cap and trade, which I also think is a bad idea, but not for the same reasons, obviously. But that other line — that is why the Tea Party “movement” is not a movement but a top-down manipulation, a misdirection.

These are people who’ve been gouged for years by the deregulated banking, mortgage lending, and commodities trading business, and when Obama sends down very weak, watered-down regulations to deal with those problems, they howl that he’s against “private enterprise” because that’s what they’ve been told to think by the Glenn Becks of the world.

Did you know that insider trading isn’t even illegal in the commodities trading business? Do you honestly think gas prices were high in 2008 because we weren’t drilling enough in the Gulf of Mexico?

You idiots are being used. Think for yourselves. If the Fox Network believes it so wholeheartedly, how could it possibly be in your interest? They’ll take your ratings, sure, so they can sell you Charmin and $5 footlongs. I mean, Jesus, how can you not see that? If you had real allies that powerful, don’t you think someone would have taken care of you by now?

. . . And for the record, if you're a new reader, personally, I think the concept of cap-and-trade was invented by a lunatic. Speculating and trading on pollution? We can see how well that worked out with mortgages and other commodities didn't we?

. . . And a beautiful little closing piece by Ezra Klein today:

Lawrence Lessig's cri de coeur against money in politics picks, I think, exactly the right target. "This is corruption," he says. "Not the corruption of bribes, or of any other crime known to Title 18 of the U.S. Code. Instead, it is a corruption of the faith Americans have in this core institution of our democracy. The vast majority of Americans believe money buys results in Congress (88 percent in a recent California poll). And whether that belief is true or not, the damage is the same. The democracy is feigned. A feigned democracy breeds cynicism. Cynicism leads to disengagement."

I've written about Lessig's argument before, and argued that money is not the fundamental force that is breaking our government. But I agree with Lessig that it is the fundamental force destroying trust in our government.

I obsess over the harm procedure and polarization do to the system, but the corrosive effect of cash makes fixing either immeasurably more difficult. Whatever actually is wrong with the system, its evident unfairness, the fact that the game is clearly rigged, is good enough for most people to give up on it. Don't like the outcomes? Blame the special interests. On some level, their presence and structural advantages absolve the rest of us of the responsibility for solving our problems and winning our arguments. It's not that we're losing, or not trying hard enough. It's that we never had a chance in the first place.

It also warps our understanding of our problems. If special interests hold this much power, then it's pretty obvious that the answer to our problems lies in beating them back. The health-care reform debate featured an almost monomaniacal focus on insurers as the cause of all policy and political problems. That was never true, and it had the effect of making the policy worse -- we let providers off the hook and gave up trying to convince people that the system itself had to be changed -- and the politics bizarre, as reformers spent most of their time hammering a group that was a lot closer to neutral than it was to opposed.

The effect is similar for politicians: It gives them an excuse for their decisions and a way to obscure their reasoning. Politicians can rail against insurers rather than arguing about whether they should be trying harder to convince Americans of things they don't already believe, like that the system shouldn't be built around employers. Since everyone knows that special interests run everything, it makes perfect sense when legislators spend their time talking about special interests.

The debate would have been very different, and arguably better, if we weren't so tuned to the power of money. But that can't happen until money is less powerful. Lessig goes further in this essay than I've seen him go before and calls for a constitutional convention that could rip corporations out of politics once and for all. His analysis requires nothing less. If what you're attacking isn't just money in politics, but the perception of money running politics, you can't content yourself with half-measures. The break needs to be sharp and loud and clean.
. . . .Remember, if they are a politician, they are corrupt, no matter who they are, no matter their association with you. If they are an elected official at any level, in any office, in the Republic of the United States of America today, they are corrupt.

. . . .I do this, like some others like me do it, not to be read, because most of you don't. Not read it, not really, all the way through and think about it. You don't listen, you don't pay attention, you don't even want to comprehend all of it. I do it for one simple reason. Like all good Americans in this 21st century, when the shit really hits the fan, most of you will throw your hands up and yell "How come someone didn't warn us!". . .We're trying to, you're not listening.

. . . When are you going to wake up?

. . . .It's time for two new parties, ones that truly represent us. Get in touch with me.

. . . . . .. . . . .Live every day out loud

. . . And that's how it is today, from the last, lonely outpost.
. . . .I miss you Mom and Dad, a lot. Thanks for watching over me and us.


. . . . .. . . .We can salvage this shipwreck of a Nation. It will take all of us working together. It will take all of us understanding the concepts of the Great American Experiment, the political process of the Republic. It's amazing, I don't see eye-to-eye on every issue with my friends, but we respect one another's opinion, share information, share facts, and we don't talk over one another or at one another, we talk with one another. It's amazing what happens when a group of people who share the common goal of leaving a better country for their children and grandchildren can do when they sit down with one another as human beings, and realize that we each have power, and together, we are unstoppable.

. . . .I'm going to ask this of you for the next 30 days. Turn your TV off, turn your radio off. Start to use that beautiful mind that your Creator gave you, that your underpaid, underappreciated High School teachers tried to develop. If you hear something, if you read something, if someone sends you an e-mail that says "this bill will do this", or "this politician says this", I'm asking you to check it out. Check it out this way, use some of the following fact-based sites, who exist solely for the purpose of data and fact-checking.
- If whatever you've heard or read concerns a bill in Congress, use the following -
- Open Congress, it's non-partisan and devoted to a complete tracking of every bill in Congress, both houses. How a bill is developed, who is sponsoring it, what the riders are, what the discussion around it is.
- GovTrack, again non-partisan, non-commercial and open source; devoted to the same things, tracking Congress.
- Open Secrets, one of the most important ones, it tracks the lobbying money and campaign contributions flowing to your congressperson, and most of the time is a pretty good predictor of how they'll vote.
- Political Party Time, non-partisan, devoted to solely tracking political fundraisers, and letting you know exactly what parties your Representative and Senators are throwing for fundraisers and who is attending and how much money they're throwing at them to gain influence.

. . . .If someone sends something to you saying "this is so" or "that is so" or "the President/Senator/Representative said this" use the following:
- Fact Check, non-partisan, designed to separate fact from bullshit and fiction
- Snopes, devoted to the same thing.
- Politifact, devoted to getting to the truth, and separating out the lies that are spread.


. . . .I keep doing this not because I don't have faith, but because I do have faith. I have faith in the ultimate triumph of the spirit, intellect and heart of the American people. I have faith that the people I know want to leave something better for future generations, and know that something is terribly wrong, and want to do something about it. I do it because Paine and Jefferson were brilliant, unique singularities and were right.

. . . .I keep doing this because I don't believe in big imaginary friends for adults, I don't believe in alien conspiracies running the Government, I don't believe the Roswell bodies are at Wright-Patterson, I don't believe that a big portal will open up on Dec. 21, 2012, I don't believe that the spaceships will show up.

. . . I do believe that the people who have fucked everything up are greedy, avaricious human beings who have been able to steal from the American people, to harm them, who have run unchecked because no one calls it out for what it is. I believe that if we shine the light of day on it, if the people of this country have had enough, we can change it, and change it for the better.

. . . . I keep doing this because I do believe that people, human beings, unchecked will continue to do what they've done throughout history, and throughout the history of this country. Together, they will find the solutions and provide better for their children and grandchildren.

. . . .I believe in us, I believe in people. I believe in the beauty, power and grace of the individual.

. . . .I do this for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of knowing what they do, what they believe, what they know is right. I do it for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of faith, hope, love, hate, justice, war and peace.

. . . .I do it because I believe in justice, in all it's forms.

. . . .I do this everyday for the people and kids who are tattoed, pierced and inked and keep getting told to get "into the mainstream". I do this everyday for those guys who wear black that you don't understand, you just know there's something about them, and that when the chips are down, when you have to walk down a dark alley somewhere, and you know what's waiting for you at the end of it, and you can only take one person with you, that's who you want walking with you, because you know you'll come back out alive, and that guy doesn't care what it costs him.

. . . .I do this everyday for the outcasts, the misfits, the ones who don't fit and who will turn their back on you and walk away when you try to make them fit into a mold. I do it everyday for everyone who does it their way, knows that they're paying a high price for it, but the freedom is worth the cost.

. . . . I do this everyday for outlaws, cowboys, renegades, pirates and fallen angels. I do it everyday for the people who understand that rock and roll can save their soul, that redemption can be found in a 3-chord lick from a vintage Les Paul. I do it for the men and women who aren't afraid to turn it all the way up, who keep looking for an 11 setting on a volume knob that only goes to 10, who know that rock and roll's got nothing to do with age.


. . . .If right now, you're doing something you don't want to do, stop it. If you've surrounded yourself with people who want you to do or be something other than who you are, walk away. If you've got people around you who actually let it slip out that they think you "should be doing (fill in the blank here)" and it involves your life, your future, your existence as an individual, walk away, right now, and don't look back. You don't owe anyone anything. Live fearlessly. If the people around you can't accept it, can't accept you as you are, really are, they aren't and weren't friends anyhow.

. . . .Don't march to anyone else's drumbeat, don't drink the Kool-Aid, anyone's. Right, Left, conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, Christian, Buddhist, Pagan. Use your own mind, that's why you were given one. Examine, question, do what's right for you first, everything else will fall in place from there, quit looking for the path, you're already on it.

. . . .Come out of the gate each morning with both barrels blazing, pedal-to-metal, full-tilt boogie, all-in and balls-out, what's stopping you? Do you want to live forever? That'd be boring.

. . . .Got your back. somewhere out there in the night

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments before they're ripped away from you. This rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, absolutely no one gets out alive. There aren't a lot of second chances, and we don't get to dictate terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. This ain't no dress rehearsal, and the curtain's gone up, it's real and right now. It's not about yesterday or tomorrow. It's about right fucking here, right fucking now. This, what you're reading, what you're hearing, is the proof, the words, the sounds and the sights of someone changing his own life and his own world and not being afraid to put it out there. What have you done for yourself lately and why are you waiting? Do it now.

The Desolation Angel
from somewhere halfway to Heaven, and just a mile out of Hell


You know someone like me, there's still a few of us left. If we have to, we'll stand at the gates of Hell and hold the last train home for you.. . . . . .

[where: 29.52N, 91.57W]
[where: Chelsea, MI]

30 January 2010

Ah, Monday . . . . .personally, I like 'em (they're a travel day for me)

Sunday/Monday January 30, Feb 1 2010

. . . .There's a storm coming

. . . . . .
So, on into a new month. February, the year's coldest, bleakest, grayest month. Broken up in the middle with a celebration of erotic love that we've sanitized in our Hallmark way, cleaned it up a whole bunch, made it OK and safe. You do know the origins of Valentine's Day don't you?
-Please tell me that you're at least that educated, please, hunh?

. . . .Valentine's Day. In Ancient Rome, the period between February 13-15 was a fertility celebration. And of course, in my second home, New Orleans, Mardi Gras reaches full peak on that day, the 14th, as it heads towards it's biggest blast on Fat Tuesday,this year, February 16, the night it shuts down. Mardi Gras actually begins 6 weeks beforehand, and builds to peak on Fat Tuesday, as everyone is invited to be extremely human, and indulge in all their passions, all lasivicious and salacious, to ready themselves for the period of sacrifice and atonement between Fat Tuesday and Easter Sunday.

. . . . .
Ya just gotta love Catholicism. Go screw your brains out, eat and drink all you want to and anything you want to, throw a little ash on your forehead, go sit in the dark and tell a stranger you did it, and it's all cool! Who knew?

. . . .By the way, if you're reading this on the Facebooks Notes page, you're invited, please to switch over here to the external site that this note originates from, The Desolation Angel - An Idiot's Ravings, to enjoy the embedded playlist and podcast, the music and any videos I've embedded.

. . .
So, normally, from artists long gone, I tend to ignore "lost" tapes or releases. If they'd wanted it released, they would have done it during their lifetime, or soon after their death. However. a new, yes new, Jimi Hendrix album will be out on March 2, Valleys of Neptune, with cuts that were found on tapes. The first single from album been released and can be found here. The Hendrix Foundation is doing good work right now, and this release, at least, isn't the family picking the carcass clean for the meat off the bones. Personally, I'm delighted and wiggling like a puppy at the thought, and ecstatic.

. . . . .Musing on it, what the hell ever happened to Elvin Bishop or Wet Willie? Are they dead, alive, working the casino circuit, rich and retired, or broke, drunk and living on skid row? Does anyone at all know? Write me and let me know.

. . . .. And can I tell you just how much of a damn I don't give about the Grammy's or the Pro Bowl? Two of the most meaningless events ever conceived. The Grammy's have never once reflected the state of American rock and roll music and it's state, and the Pro Bowl is idiotic, and moving it to one week before the Super Bowl even dumber. Though, of course, it at least piles two meaningless events into one Sunday and doesn't tie up two of them.

. . . . ."Yet suppose further. Suppose that all worlds, all universes, met at a single nexus, a single pylon, a Tower. And within it, a stairway, perhaps rising to the Godhead itself. Would you dare climb to the top, gunslinger? Could it be that somewhere above all of endless reality, there exists a room?...

"You dare not."

And in the gunslinger's mind, those words echoed: You dare not.
-Stephen King The Dark Tower

. . . . Just reflecting tonight, I know that Stephen King is thought of as a "pop" writer, and has turned out some dreck in his life, but anyone who can turn out The Green Mile and the Shawshank Redemption, two of the best stories, and best movies I've ever had the privilege to see, and written The Stand and The Dark Tower series, does truly have something amazing going on.

. . . . Queued up on the Kindle? One recommended by my friend Matthew, Over the Edge of the World, by Lawrence Bergreen. An account of the first sea voyage to circle the entire globe, Magellan's expedition. I'm looking forward to it.

. . . . .So, it's always climate change that I talk about, not "global warming". I'm really hoping that people are getting a clue now after the meteorological nightmare that this Winter has been across the United States. Sub-zero freezing in the upper Midwest, Great Lakes and Northeast. Snow and ice all the way across Arizona, through Kansas, into Tennessee, Mississippi and the Carolina's. I work out in the Gulf of Mexico, it's the coldest months I've even experienced out here. It's never been below 50 before the last two winters. Last winter and this winter are the first two years that New Orleans, Morgan City and the Gulf Coast have seen snow. It's been two months now of below 40 degree temperatures with driving rain and wind. (Note: for those of you who always assume that I live some Pirates of the Caribbean life in the sunshine, one word for you. . .wrong!).

. . .Let's go over it again. Most of you haven't paid the slightest attention to chaos theory (which isn't about chaos at all, but the apparently "random" behavior of complex, large, dynamic systems, which isn't random at all) and fractal differential equations (which predict, accurately, the probabilities of outcomes, dependent on large or infinite numbers of variables). What we are experiencing as cooling, is the result of global warming. Again, simple Physics 101. All systems in the universe live in a state of entropy, that of heading inevitably, and invariably towards order and equilibrium, level flat energy. So, what the term "global warming" refers to, is the warming of the polar caps, which, upon release, into the oceans, which are much larger masses than the continents, attempt to achieve a temperature equilibrium. Think of it as an ice chest, a closed system, much like our physical world, that was all water (comparatively, water to land is an immense ratio). Now, as in an ice chest, we've introduced large ice floes. Now, let's go back to the ice chest analogy, what happens to an ice chest, with water in it, that you've got a bunch of pop cans in (the land)? Fairly even temperature. Now, empty a couple of bags of ice into the water, which is the methodology that you use to get the pop cans (the land) the coldest, what happens? It's far, far relatively colder than just putting the pop cans in a pile of ice, and it maintains that temperature far longer.

. . . .Welcome to the new ice age folks. I'll survive, I'm trained. My sons will survive, they're trained. My niece and nephew will survive, my sister has made sure they're trained. What will you do? Most of you have done some camping, but can you survive an extended period in the wilderness in an extremely cold situation? Do you know how to get water, make fire, find shelter, stay warm and dry? I do.

. . . . .And unless you're a really close friend, don't show up at my door.

. . . .Instead, I'd recommend that you spend some time reading this guy, one of the sharpest I know of, when you think of survivalist, you normally think of some caricature of a human being, sitting in his dark basement sweating and listening to Alex Jones broadcasts on a short wave, obsessed with weapons. Not this guy, James Wesley Rawles is a very, very smart man, who is well versed in economic survival, urban survival and most importantly, calm preparedness. Anyone who believes that chance and fortune favor the prepared mind is a leg up, at least in my book, on most people I know.

. . .. So, on the whole polar ice caps melting thing.

. . .Take a look here, from the NOAA's (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency) latest data:

Compare side-by-side images of Northern Hemisphere sea ice extent for any two dates in the satellite record (1979-present).



. . . .Now, I live in Michigan, surrounded by the Great Lakes, and base out of New Orleans, 3 foot below sea level, and work out at sea. I basically live in Waterworld, and as a matter of fact, have my own base (I live and work there for weeks at a time). I'm prepared, and can survive in it. Can you?

. . . And as for that loss of arable land thing? I'd recommend you spend some time going over the data that this guy, Bruce Sundquist, provides on the carrying capacity of the little blue pearl we live on. Remember, we live in a finite world, in a finite physical reality with finite physical resources. As a nation, we have 5% of the world's population, and consume 25% of those resources, an imbalanced ratio at best. So, back to that arable land thing. It took hundreds of 1,000's of years to put that topsoil that has fed us and a good portion of the world on the Great Plains. In a little over 100 years, we've reduced it to less than an inch. Per capita grain production, world-wide, actually peaked back in 1984 and has been sliding down ever since, due to soil erosion and loss. The U.S. loses topsoil at the rate of 1700 tons per square mile per year. World wide, however, is where this plays out, as the scenario has reversed itself, and we've become a major food and grain importer, not exporter. Remember that Washington and our Wall Street Overseers have been pushing "globalization" for years, (world trade doubles in real, not relative, terms, about every 2 decades) and the real problem lies in the amount of arable land that is being lost per year world wide, around 75 Giga-tons per year, that's 75,000,000 tons per year of topsoil, arable land, available for food growth per year gone, and irreplaceable.

. . . Well, not exactly irreplaceable. Give it few more eons and epochs, about 60,000 years with it's primary user (that'd be us) gone, and it'll come back.

. . . . .ATTN: CREATIONISTS - YOU ARE DIPSHITS! A relative of Tyrannosaurus Rex, Bistahieversor sealeyi, the ancestor of ol' Rexie, has, through carbon dating of the fossil bones, been dated to roam the Earth 10 million years before T. Rex. (Hint: The Earth is not 6,000 years old, and it wasn't created in 6 days)

. . . . .So, getting back to that sustainability thing, water would be the other critical ingredient in the mix (A person can live for weeks without food, but for only 4 days max without water.) With the way we've treated our water, at this point now, less than 1% of the world's fresh water is available now for human use. By the way, that 1% is only .007% of all water available on Earth.

. . . .One other person that I spend some well worth it time reading is John Perkins, the Economic Hit Man. A former EHM for various consultantcies working for the Fed, The World Bank and the IMF; John knows where all the bones are hidden, and all the skeletons are buried. Sharp as hell, and willing to expose everything, John is worth reading regularly. John, doing a lot of our dirty work in his earlier career, spends time shining a light under the dark rocks of just exactly how, as a Nation, we truly are the IMF and World Bank, and how we've continually attempted to interfere in and manipulate world events to make sure that those aforementioned financial Overseers prospered.

. . . And the reason that I mention John is simple, the problems I mentioned above are oftentimes shrugged off with the attitude of "we'll just grow (as in economically) our way out of it." I've got to mention my friend Dave, with whom I've had a couple of fascinating discussions about this, for this particular thread of thinking. For those who truly, really believe that we can grow our way out of it, remember that we live in a physical world, with limited resources. Let's go back to a statement, that was not a one-off, that I made above, that real doubling of world trade occurs about every two decades, and that for a 50% increase in GDP then, from where we are now a decade, it will take 50% more energy, in our case as a human race with the available energy sources we use, 50% more barrels of oil and twice as much coal as we use now. For the world GDP to double, another 20 years, it will take 100% more barrels of oil, and 100% more coal than we use now. Now, remember that we live in a physical world, with limited resources, and we also now, are on the backside of what's called diminishing returns. As the total oil reservoir world-wide depletes, it requires more energy and investment to get less out now, comparatively, than what we used to get it at the beginning (I do know this, it's the field I work in). Now, I'm going to make it very clear, I'm not talking about, or addressing pollution effects, emissions, etc. I'm talking a numbers game here, pure numbers. Three factors come into play: expanding population, expanding usage, and, final exhaustion of any particular form of fossil fuel energy (i.e. oil or gas).

. . . . . . . By the year 2020, that is 9 years from now, global energy demand will have risen 40%

. . . .So, mathematically, it leads to a graph looking something like this:

This little piece of the post today is shallow, I admit, and does not give even reasonable attention to nuclear and conservation elements.


From various sources - 2005 consumption was over 30 billion barrels a year

The critical factor to understand in the graph above is that
in each year, we are now consuming more oil than is being discovered.

. . . .Let me repeat that, the graph above does not reflect that "we're out of oil", though it points, indisputably, and irrevocably, to that fact in the future. What it means, is that with available figures and crunching the numbers as accurately as anyone can, which means looking backward, we are now consuming more than we are discovering every year, and ratio has only increased since then, 6 years later. Demand is simply outstripping supply.

. . . .I know that I have a very diverse, large readership from across the political spectrum and belief spectrum, I've done what I can to keep the above discussion to simply the numbers, since those are fact and cannot be denied, and for any reasonable discussion to take place, where we still miss the boat as an American public, is that it is absolutely necessary, an absolute requirement, to have a common reality, a common set of facts to work from.

. . . .Of the various pieces that come across my desk, one of the absolute best I've read came from Truthout. A thought-provoking piece that I believe reflects the mood of many of us who still have some working synapses: Bernard Weiber with Drifting Toward Catastrophe: A Seven-Headed Beast:

Sometimes, when reading the news, I find myself caught up in close-up mode: deep into the details, the news-of-the-day stories, the gossip, the momentary winners and the losers, the minutiae of daily political life.

In both instances, while one learns much in close-up mode, it's also important to pull back, to see not just the trees and flowers, but the forest and the contextual landscape. To see what it is we citizens are really talking about, and fighting about - the deeper content. Pundits and politicians are more comfortable in close-up mode. The large issues are much more difficult, complex, even scary to deal with.

But it's those grand issues that will determine our future, America's future, the planet's future. Who's up and who's down in the polls are, in that sense, distractions from the more meaningful realities.

That's what I find so discouraging these days. This country, humanity, the globe are rushing pell-mell to disaster, mostly by neglecting what needs to be done while we're diddling with the political minutiae. This tendency to avoid the obvious larger questions reminds one of the thrust of Albert Einstein's famous quote: "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."

Consider the following seven areas of concern. No doubt, you could add many more to the list.

Fixing a Broken System

1. Every so often, unfettered capitalism nearly collapses into itself. President FDR realized that truth in the Great Depression and saved the capitalist system by introducing major reforms into the mix. Now 70-plus years later, after the unbridled capitalism of the Reagan-Cheney-Bush era, where greed and rapaciousness were encouraged to run amuck, it's clear that once again the system requires major reforms to save it. Obama, who put into power noted deregulators, who helped lead the economy into near-collapse (Summers, Geithner, Bernanke et al.), doesn't appear to have the will or desire to fight this battle other than with rhetoric. And, thus, the economy continues to "drift toward unparalleled catastrophe." Americans' anger directed at corporatist greed and abuse of power and at the politicians who benefit from that system, but do precious little to help the hurting middle-class and the poor, is diluting the power of the American Dream. As we slide further into a second Great Depression this year and next, that anger is going to spill out in more and more ugly and, likely, more violent ways.

The US, which should be leading the world in innovation and marketing in fields such as nonfossil fuel energy, stem-cell research and other scientific advances, is lagging way behind and may not be able to catch up. China, India and Brazil, among others, benefit big time, as the US slips further down the list of vibrant, economically secure and growing societies. Part of the reason America can't move quickly in these areas is that a third of the country is caught up in fundamentalist-derived fear and suspicion of science, egged on by political conservatives, who benefit by this know-nothing foundation of their base voters.

Why is this system continuing as is? At least one major reason is that the short-term (often quarterly) bottom line rules. There is no room for consideration of long-range consequences of short-term actions. And there is precious little concern for something known in most Western societies as "the public good."

Usually, the often xenophobic and racist elite philosophy behind this selfish attitude is disguised and hidden. But every so often, we get to see what really is going on. Just the other day, the Republican candidate for governor in South Carolina, Lieutenant-Gov. Andre Bauer, explained why he didn't want the state providing benefits to those less fortunate, such as free or reduced-price meals in school cafeterias:

"My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed," Bauer said, according to the Greenville News. "You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better."

This philosophy of justified selfishness and racism helps explain why the many thousands of poor, mostly black Americans were ignored and left to their own devices post-Katrina in New Orleans under the "compassionate conservatism" of George W. Bush. At least 1300 citizens died from such neglect.

Imperialism Is So 20th Century

2. Imperialism no longer works. Nationalist and religious guerrilla forces can force high-tech imperialist armies into prolonged and massively expensive stalemates. Since the US can't move fast enough in developing energy alternatives, it remains locked into the battle around the globe in other countries for the remaining traditional fuels: coal, oil, gas. Even the negative environmental ramifications of bio-mass energy haven't been thought through. This way of operating is a self-destructive loop, one that winds up involving the US in senseless, outrageously expensive wars around the globe, associated with obtaining and protecting natural resources, where all the high-tech hardware is no real match for native anger and determination (read: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somali, Yemen, Pakistan etc.). But President Obama continues on with many of the same reckless imperialist policies as his predecessors. And "thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."

Getting All Hot and Bothered

3. While the world fiddles, the planet burns. The developing world, anxious to achieve first-world superpower status, repeats the worst aspects of industrialization, which pollution helps to more quickly heat up the planet. Perhaps the best worst example: millions of newly better-off Chinese are buying cars and, like many in the US, China's rulers refuse to deal with the reality and ramifications of global warming and climate change.

The Big Flush

4. The economy is in the toilet, even though establishment economists keep telling us how we're just about to turn the corner. Try telling that to the 15 million to 20 million workers who have lost their jobs these past two years and can't find others. And we're not even at the bottom of this recession/depression yet, as the next wave of mortgage foreclosures (in private residences and commercial property) and owner walk-aways are cresting. And the ripple effects from such widespread joblessness and homelessness have devastating long-term consequences socially, culturally, economically as federal, state and local tax revenues continue to decline, and in terms of rising crime rates. The infrastructure in cities and towns can't be properly maintained and improved since there's no money to fix roads, bridges, schools etc.

So, what does Obama do? He plays politics with deficit fears

Military Stalemates

5. Military experts have told the president and the public that the two wars America is fighting right now cannot be won. The most one can hope for is a stalemate while US forces try to build up local armies to battle anti-Western extremists. President Obama himself, for example, has said there is little chance of victory in Afghanistan (a lesson already learned by the Brits and Russians, who were forced to withdraw over the past century and more), but he's sending more American young men and women to fight and die there anyway, in order to withdraw them later on a US timetable.

Change Policies? Why?

6. Because his favorable numbers are slipping, and he got his Massachusetts wake-up call, Obama is reconstituting his old campaign staff to prepare for the midterm elections in November. He proclaimed his policies and priorities, all good ones, during the 2008 campaign, but hardly fought for most of them. It's mostly public relations and spin doctoring now. It would seem to make sense to examine, and perhaps alter, the administration's ongoing policies - but instead, we will hear new campaign buzzwords, slogans and marching orders for the upcoming election cycle. Of course, Obama could take another course: He could just get in there with the wide range of campaign promises he ran on in 2008, and fight like hell to get them implemented. But that would require a willingness to slug it out with his political enemies, and Obama seems content to try to work with those who wish him no good.

Which translates to: Nothing will really get done. Partisan sniping and mud throwing have become the new permanent political norms. And, now, with the Republicans in possession of 41 votes in the Senate, much of the more progressive agenda is endangered, as the GOP can just filibuster any and all bills, if it so chooses. And the Democrats, per usual, will roll over on their backs in a submissive posture. No wonder Congress ranks so low in the estimation of the electorate - Republicans more than Democrats, but they, too.

Check out this observation by Kos (Markos Mulitsas Zuniga, founder/editor of DailyKos.com), talking about the thoroughgoing ineffectiveness of the Democrats:

"THAT's why the base is sitting things out. They don't need blogs or MSNBC to tell them that Democrats can't govern. They already knew that Republicans don't WANT to govern, but the Democrats were supposed to be different. And they are, they WANT to govern, but they can't. And the voters that worked their asses off to give Democrats the White House and super majorities in Congress are now realizing that it was all for nothing. That all that talk about hope and change was cynical bullshit designed to motivate them. It worked once, but that crowd is learning the art of political cynicism, and it ain't pretty."

In our electoral system, every action is calculated by the politicians, not for the public good, but for how it will affect their re-election chances. And, thus, we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

The Corporate Lock

7. Corporations, which already control most of the institutions that affect our lives - including making sure there will be no truly effective national health care reforms - now have been given carte blanche by the US Supreme Court to spend us much as they wish, however they wish, to influence more aspects of American life, specifically the electoral process. They can, for example, openly move to buy politicians now, as they have been given the same status as actual persons. One perhaps unforeseen consequences of this new activist-court opinion is that foreigners and multinational corporations, and even other governments through corporations, can buy their way directly into influencing American elections. If China or France, or even al-Qaeda, doesn't like certain US policies, they can just pour billions into corporations designated to electing friendly politicians in the US Congress.

The Pandora's box has been opened through this unwise court decision, and we all are going to pay a penalty for years to come - at least until the composition of the Supreme Court changes with fewer conservative ideologues on the bench.

As I said, I'm just listing seven off-the-top-of-my-head larger issues here that go beyond the daily political minutiae. I'll be interested to see what you come up with on your own list.
. . . .Frank Rich, over in the New York Times, delivers an incisive, insightful analysis of Wednesday's SOTU. Long after a lot of the insta-pundits, but timely and thoughtful. (Remember my last post about old gunslingers vs. young gunslingers). Frank Rich in the Times with The State of The Union is Comatose:
HANDS down, the State of the Union’s big moment was Barack Obama’s direct hit on the delicate sensibilities of the Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. The president was right to blast the 5-to-4 decision giving corporate interests an even greater stranglehold over a government they already regard as a partially owned onshore subsidiary. How satisfying it was to watch him provoke Alito into a “You lie!” snit. Here was a fight we could believe in.

Good thing, too, since our union is not strong. It is paralyzed. Many Americans were more eagerly anticipating Steve Jobs’s address in San Francisco on Wednesday morning than the president’s that night because they have far more confidence in Apple than Washington to produce concrete change. One year into Obama’s term we still don’t know whether he has what it takes to get American governance functioning again. But we do know that no speech can do the job. The president must act. Only body blows to the legislative branch can move the country forward.

The historian Alan Brinkley has observed that we will soon enter the fourth decade in which Congress — and therefore government as a whole — has failed to deal with any major national problem, from infrastructure to education. The gridlock isn’t only a function of polarized politics and special interests. There’s also been a gaping leadership deficit.

In Obama’s speech, he kept circling back to a Senate where both parties are dysfunctional. The obstructionist Republicans, he observed, will say no to every single bill “just because they can.” But no less culpable are the Democrats, who maintain “the largest majority in decades” even after losing Teddy Kennedy’s seat — and yet would rather “run for the hills” than accomplish anything.

What does strong Senate leadership look like? That would be L.B.J. in the pre-Kennedy era. Operating with the narrowest of majorities and under an opposition president, he was able to transform a sleepy, seniority-hobbled, regionally polarized debating society into an often-progressive legislative factory. As Robert Caro tells the story in his book “Master of the Senate,” this Senate leader had determination, “a gift for grand strategy,” and a sixth sense for grabbing opportunities for action before they vanished for good. He could recognize “the key that might suddenly unlock votes that had seemed locked forever away” and turn it quickly. The horse trading with recalcitrant senators was often crude and cynical, but the job got done. L.B.J. knew how to reward — and how to punish.

We keep hearing that they just don’t make legislative giants like that anymore. In truth, the long drought has led us to forget what they look like and to define senatorial leadership down. L.B.J.’s current successor, Harry Reid, could be found yawning on camera Wednesday night. He might as well have just taken the whole nap. Here was this leader’s pronouncement last week on the future of the president and his party’s No. 1 priority: “We’re not on health care now. We’ve talked a lot about it in the past.” Yes, a lot of talk — a year’s worth, in fact — with nothing to show for it.

If Reid can serve as the face of Democratic fecklessness in the Senate, then John McCain epitomizes the unpatriotic opposition. On Wednesday night he could be seen sneering when Obama pointed out that most of the debt vilified by Republicans happened on the watch of a Republican president and Congress that never paid for “two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription drug program.” The president’s indictment could have been more lacerating. Crunching Congressional Budget Office numbers, David Leonhardt of The Times calculated that of the projected $2 trillion swing into the red between the Clinton surplus and 2012, some 33 percent could be attributed to Bush legislation and another 20 percent to Bush-initiated spending (Iraq, TARP) continued by Obama. Only 7 percent of the deficit could be credited to the Obama stimulus bill and 3 percent to his other initiatives. (The business cycle accounts for the other 37 percent.)

Obama should turn up the heat on both the G.O.P’s record of fiscal recklessness and its mad-dog obstructionism. He should stop paying lip service to the fantasy that his Congressional opposition has serious ideas to contribute to the cleanup. Better still, he should publicize exactly what those “ideas” are.

Yes, the Republicans were correct to laugh at one of the president’s own gimmicks on Wednesday night: a symbolic and pointless spending “freeze.” But their own alternatives are downright hilarious. When the G.O.P. House leadership last year announced its plan to cut federal spending by $75 billion annually, it enumerated specific new cuts of only $5 billion per year. A tax-cut-laden “stimulus plan” endorsed by Jim DeMint, the South Carolina senator and Tea Party hero, “would cost more than $3 trillion — more than triple the cost of Obama’s stimulus — over the next decade,” in the estimate of Jonathan Chait of The New Republic.

On State of the Union day, the Republican National Committee gathered at its winter meeting at Waikiki Beach to battle over a measure that would deny campaign funds to candidates who didn’t pass a Tea Party ideological purity test. Back in Washington, other party thinkers trotted out some more brilliant ideas. Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin congressman hailed as the Republicans’ new intellectual hope, laid out a lengthy “G.O.P. Road Map for America’s Future” on The Wall Street Journal op-ed page that proposed cutting taxes (disproportionately for the wealthy) and privatizing Medicare and Social Security but devoted no bullet point to creating jobs for Americans in urgent need. On the Hill that morning, Michele Bachmann of Minnesota led House colleagues in signing a “Declaration of Health Care Independence” to complement a bill that would let Americans “purchase insurance with their own tax-free money.” Gee, why did no else think of that ingenious fix for a health care system that leaves 46.3 million uninsured and whose runaway costs are on track to eat up one-fifth of the American economy?

It was a heartening breakthrough when Obama dismissed such idiocies repeatedly in his televised meeting with House Republicans on Friday. He mocked G.O.P. legislative snake oil that promises to lower all medical costs and “won’t cost anybody anything.” He must keep this up — and be equally tough on the slackers in his own party who stall his agenda. And he must be less foggy on the specifics of what that agenda is. Though on Wednesday night he asked Congress to “take another look” at the health care bill, even now it’s unclear what he believes that bill’s bedrock provisions should be. He also said he wouldn’t sign any financial regulatory bill that “does not meet the test of real reform,” yet tentatively praised a House bill compromised by a banking lobby that is in bed with Democrats and Republicans alike. The Senate, of course, has yet to produce any financial reform bill.

Americans like Obama far more than they like any Congressional leader. They might even like more of his policies if he spelled them out. But none of that matters if no Democrat fears him enough to do any of his bidding and no Republican believes there’s any price to be paid for always saying no.

A year in, we have learned that all the conciliatory rhetoric won’t cut it. But a president with a big megaphone and large legislative majorities has more powerful strings to pull, no matter what happened in one special election in Massachusetts. If he can’t get a working government, at least he can shake things up in November.

Just look at how a sharp public slap provoked Justice Alito, threw a spotlight on the court’s dubious jurisprudence and sparked an embarrassing over-the-top hissy fit on the right. A do-nothing Congress, at a time when ever more Americans are losing their jobs and homes, is an even riper target than the Supreme Court — and far more politically vulnerable. Without strong medicine from Obama, we can be certain of the same result: a heedless Congress will keep doing nothing. If he steps it up, there’s at least a shot that his presidency, and maybe even the country, will be pulled back from the brink.


. . . . . . .And speaking of the Times, and David Brook's column that I tweeted and FB'ed last week, here's Matt Taibbi with a response to the Brooks editorial. I love Matt's work, he's one of the most fearless journalists around, unafraid to have an opinion, and Hunter S. Thompson's adopted son of gonzo journalism, From True/Slant and the Taibblog:

Brooks lays out the crux of his case his case in his first three grafs of his article:

Politics, some believe, is the organization of hatreds. The people who try to divide society on the basis of ethnicity we call racists. The people who try to divide it on the basis of religion we call sectarians. The people who try to divide it on the basis of social class we call either populists or elitists.

These two attitudes — populism and elitism — seem different, but they’re really mirror images of one another. They both assume a country fundamentally divided. They both describe politics as a class struggle between the enlightened and the corrupt, the pure and the betrayers.

Both attitudes will always be with us, but these days populism is in vogue. The Republicans have their populists. Sarah Palin has been known to divide the country between the real Americans and the cultural elites. And the Democrats have their populists. Since the defeat in Massachusetts, many Democrats have apparently decided that their party has to mimic the rhetoric of John Edwards’s presidential campaign. They’ve taken to dividing the country into two supposedly separate groups — real Americans who live on Main Street and the insidious interests of Wall Street.

Now, there’s bullshit all up and down this lede. The first lie he tells involves describing everyone who is a critic of Wall Street as a populist. It’s sort of a syllogism he’s getting into here:

All people who criticize Wall Street are populists.

All populists think of themselves as enlightened and pure, and are primarily interested in dividing society, the same way racists do.

Therefore, all people who criticize Wall Street are primarily interested in dividing society, just like racists.

This is obnoxious on so many levels it’s almost difficult to know where to start. As for the populism label, let me quote the Alison Porchnik character from Annie Hall (Woody’s first wife, in the movie): “I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype.”

Brooks here is trying to say that by criticizing, say, Goldman Sachs for mass thievery — criticizing a bank for selling billions of dollars worth of worthless subprime mortgage-backed securities mismarked as investment grade deals, for getting the taxpayer to pay them 100 cents on the dollar for their billions in crap investments with AIG, for forcing hundreds of millions of people to pay inflated gas and food prices when they manipulated the commodities market and helped push oil to a preposterous $149 a barrel, and for paying massive bonuses after receiving billions upon billions in public support even beyond the TARP — that in criticizing the bank for doing these things, people like me are primarily interested in being divisive and “organizing hatreds.”

He is also saying that by making these criticisms, people like me are by implication making statements about our own moral purity and enlightenment relative to others. He goes on:

It’s easy to see why politicians would be drawn to the populist pose. First, it makes everything so simple. The economic crisis was caused by a complex web of factors, including global imbalances caused by the rise of China. But with the populist narrative, you can just blame Goldman Sachs.

Second, it absolves voters of responsibility for their problems. Over the past few years, many investment bankers behaved like idiots, but so did average Americans, racking up unprecedented levels of personal debt. With the populist narrative, you can accuse the former and absolve the latter.

Stuff like this makes me want to scream. If I’m writing about a bank that took a half-billion worth of mortgages where the average amount of equity in the home was less than 1%, and where 58% of the mortgages had no documentation, and then sold those mortgage-backed securities as investment-grade opportunities to pensions and other suckers — and then bet against the same kind of stuff they were enthusiastically selling to other people — is Brooks seriously suggesting that I also have to point out that the Chinese economy was doing well at the time?

Yeah, okay, the rise of China is a factor in the overall decline of the American economy, but it has nothing to do with the Goldman story, which is a specific crime story about a specific bank. If I’m writing about a gang of car thieves, what, we’re supposed to also mention that the endive crop was weak in that part of the country that year? What the fuck? And this whole business about how criticizing Goldman absolves voters — Jesus, how primitive can you get? Using that logic, criticizing anyone for anything is invalid:

ME: Well, Ike Turner was sort of a dick because he used to get high and punch his wife in the face all the time…

BROOKS: But it’s so easy to say that.

ME: It’s easy to say that a guy who punches his wife in the face is a jerk? (Scratching head) Well… I guess you’re right about that. Would you like me to say it while juggling three chainsaws? Would it be harder to say then, and would you have less of a problem with it?

BROOKS: But by criticizing Ike Turner, you’re absolving all the people who do other bad things. Like purse-snatchers in Central Park, and those kids who keyed my Lexus, and all those baseball players who took steroids! Rafael Palmeiro lied to congress! What about them?

ME: Dude, are you okay? Your pupils look dilated.

BROOKS: You’re absolving Mark McGwire! The single-season home run record is a fraud!

ME: (backing away slowly toward the door) Okay, yeah, sure. Listen, I’ll catch up with you later, okay? I’ve got to return some videotapes.

And so on. The entire argument is literally this nonsensical. If Brooks disagrees with criticism of banks like Goldman, he has a fantastic platform to point out where those criticisms are incorrect. The best platform there is, in fact. But not only does he not go in that direction, he does just the opposite — he concedes that these criticisms are basically true, and chooses instead to argue against the wisdom of making those criticisms, apparently because “bashing the rich” will make them less inclined to “channel opportunity to new groups.” The emphasis in this next excerpt is mine:

So it’s easy to see the seductiveness of populism. Nonetheless, it nearly always fails. The history of populism, going back to William Jennings Bryan, is generally a history of defeat.

That’s because voters aren’t as stupid as the populists imagine. Voters are capable of holding two ideas in their heads at one time: First, that the rich and the powerful do rig the game in their own favor; and second, that simply bashing the rich and the powerful will still not solve the country’s problems.

Political populists never get that second point. They can’t seem to grasp that a politics based on punishing the elites won’t produce a better-educated work force, more investment, more innovation or any of the other things required for progress and growth.

In fact, this country was built by anti-populists. It was built by people like Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln who rejected the idea that the national economy is fundamentally divided along class lines. They rejected the zero-sum mentality that is at the heart of populism, the belief that economics is a struggle over finite spoils. Instead, they believed in a united national economy — one interlocking system of labor, trade and investment.

Hamilton championed capital markets and Lincoln championed banks, not because they loved traders and bankers. They did it because they knew a vibrant capitalist economy would maximize opportunity for poor boys like themselves. They were willing to tolerate the excesses of traders because they understood that no institution is more likely to channel opportunity to new groups and new people than vigorous financial markets.

What’s so ironic about this is that Brooks, in arguing against class warfare, and trying to present himself as someone who is above making class distinctions, is making an argument based entirely on the notion that there is an lower class and an upper class and that the one should go easy on the other because the best hope for collective prosperity is the rich creating wealth for all. This is the same Randian bullshit that we’ve been hearing from people like Brooks for ages and its entire premise is really revolting and insulting — this idea that the way society works is that the productive ” rich” feed the needy “poor,” and that any attempt by the latter to punish the former for “excesses” might inspire Atlas to Shrug his way out of town and leave the helpless poor on their own to starve.

That’s basically Brooks’s entire argument here. Yes, the rich and powerful do rig the game in their own favor, and yes, they are guilty of “excesses” — but fucking deal with it, if you want to eat.

And the really funny thing about Brooks’s take on populists… I mean, I’m a member of the same Yuppie upper class that Brooks belongs to. I can’t speak for the other “populists” that Brooks might be referring to, but in my case for sure, my attitude toward the likes of Lloyd Blankfein and Hank Paulson has nothing to do with class anger.

I don’t hate these guys because they’re rich and went to fancy private schools. Hell, I’m rich and went to a fancy private school. I look at these people as my cultural peers and what angers me about them is that, with many coming from backgrounds similar to mine, these guys chose to go into a life of crime and did so in a way that is going to fuck things up for everyone, rich and poor, for a generation.

Their decision to rig the markets for their own benefit is going to cause other countries to completely lose confidence in the American economy, it will impact the dollar, and ultimately will make all of us involuntary debtors to whichever state we end up having to borrow from to bail these crimes out.

And from my perspective, what makes these guys more compelling as a journalistic subject than, say, the individual homeowner who took on too much debt is a thing that has nothing to do with class, not directly, anyway. It’s that their “excesses” exist in a nexus of political and economic connections that makes them very difficult to police.

We have at least some way of dealing with the average guy who doesn’t pay his debts — in fact our government has shown remarkable efficiency in passing laws like the bankruptcy bill that attack that particular problem, and of course certain banks always have the option of not lending that money (and I won’t even get into the many different ways that the banks themselves bear responsibility for all the easy credit that was handed out in recent years).

But the kinds of things that went on at Goldman and other investment banks, in many cases there are not even laws on the books to deal with these things. In some cases what we’re talking about is the highly complicated merger of crime and policy, of stealing and government, which is both fascinating from a journalistic point of view and ought to be terrifying from the point of view of any citizen, rich or poor.

And even if I were to accept the Brooksian view of an upper class that must be looked to to fix things and take care of the lower classes and create the needed wealth to help us escape our economic crisis, the whole point is that this upper class he is talking about has abdicated that very responsibility — and, perhaps having reached the cynical conclusion that our society is not worth saving, has taken on a new mission that involves not creating wealth for all but simply absconding with whatever wealth is remaining.

It’s not pessimism or “combative divisiveness” to talk about these problems and insist that they get fixed. On the contrary, it’s a very positive view of what citizenship is to believe that everyone has a real role in fixing his country’s problems, and that when we identify problems, we should try to do something about them because we might actually succeed.

On the other hand, telling oneself that when powerful people “rig the game” one should just tolerate it, because one’s best hope for seeing the situation fixed rests in hoping those same powerful people fix it themselves — I would describe that as pessimism, or something worse than pessimism. The whole point of America is that we are all supposed to be our own masters, never viewing anyone as being by birth or situation inherently better or more capable than ourselves, and so the notion of relying upon some nebulous class of investment bankers to “channel opportunity” from on high strikes me as being un-American.

And besides, the fact that a lot of these guys have made a lot of money recently doesn’t make them “upper class.” They’re the same assholes we all were in high school and college, except that they made some very particular moral choices in adulthood, and became criminals, and have now arranged things so that they’re going to be tough as hell to catch. And when they fall, which a lot of them will… I mean a lot of these guys are ten seconds from losing it all and spending the next ten years working the laundry room at Danbury or pushing shopping carts under the FDR expressway. And they know it. These people aren’t the nobility. They’re people just like us, only stupider and less ashamed of themselves.

That’s not a class story. It’s a crime story, and it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with China.

. . . .Matt has laser-like focus and remains squarely focused on Goldman-Sachs, Paulson, Geithner, Summers, et al. Now, from David Fiderer, a long, detailed piece that does show some factual, legal light on what occurred back in the summer and fall of '08 around AIG, Paulson and company did in fact commit criminal acts against the American people:
Too Big To Fail is revelatory, though not in the way Andrew Ross Sorkin intended. The book offers startling evidence that Hank Paulson and his deputies colluded with Goldman to create a liquidity crisis at AIG, and to manipulate the government funding a backdoor bailout of AIG's CDO counterparties, most notably Goldman. It's not that Sorkin's sources recounted the truth. Quite the opposite. Rather, they told him stories that were so transparently dishonest that the truth emerges by way of negative implication.
To understand what happened, you need to remember that the top guys at Goldman are really, really smart. They are like champion chess players who anticipate the possible moves of their opponent. The guys at Goldman can quickly grasp how pieces of a financial transaction work together, like the pieces on a chessboard, to game out different scenarios. This attribute is not unique to the guys at Goldman; it's an essential quality of every good banker. But it does mean that the guys at Goldman cannot credibly profess to being oblivious.
Goldman bought credit protection exclusively from AIG because:

Like its peers, Goldman underwrote billions of dollars of toxic securities known as subprime collateralized debt objections, or CDOs, and simultaneously bought credit protection on those CDOs in the form of credit default swaps. But Goldman was unique in that it only bought protection from AIG Financial Products, or AIGFP, and no one else. Under normal standards of risk management, this approach is imprudent; a bank should diversify its risk exposures whenever it can. Given that AIG was Goldman's biggest client, and that the CDO exposure at AIG was a huge part of Goldman's equity base, it's inconceivable that Hank Paulson, Goldman's CEO until June 2006, would not have been regularly briefed on this matter. The same goes for Goldman's board of directors. It's a very basic and essential part of any bank's risk management and corporate governance.

1) AIG Financial Products was not regulated, whereas the monolines were;

This is one of those really basic things that few in the media seems to grasp. The other large companies offering credit protection on the CDOs were the monoline insurance companies, names like MBIA or AMBAC. AIGFP was not regulated, whereas the monolines were. A regulator can order an insurer to withhold any payout that might impair that company's ability to service its other policyholders

2) AIGFP was willing to post cash collateral, which was outside the grasp of a bankruptcy judge;

Here's another very basic thing. The credit protection sold by the monolines included financial guarantees as well as credit default swaps, whereas AIGFP extended only credit default swaps. A credit default swap is a financial derivative. One of the common, and insidious, attributes of financial derivatives is that a counterparty may need to post margin, or cash collateral, whenever the spot value of its contractual claim turns negative.

3) AIGFP would have been wiped out by a bankruptcy filing, because it was active in financial trading;

There's another reason why the monolines had the upper hand, whereas AIGFP did not. Bankruptcy was always a viable option for the monolines, whereas it was not for AIGFP. Aside from its book of business providing credit support for CDOs, AIGFP was very active in all sorts of financial trading of all sorts of derivatives.

4) AIG did not understand what it was doing; it relied on the rating agencies.

But if Goldman was so smart, how could AIG be so dumb? There's a short answer and a long answer. The short answer is three little letters: AAA. The long answer gets to the same result; it just takes a longer while to get there.

According to Michael Lewis's reporting in Vanity Fair, the guys at AIGFP were clueless

But Goldman's credit default swaps would not trigger a bankruptcy, because there was no way to figure out their market value.

Goldman started harassing AIGFP to start posting cash collateral as early as August 2007, when the matter went to the "highest levels" at Goldman Sachs.

But Goldman met with limited success, for obvious reasons. The idea that these CDOs could be marked to market is a joke. There never was any real market of buyers and sellers of these things. AIG's auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and the Fed's auditor, Delloite & Touche, determined under fair value accounting rules that there was no way that the CDO obligations could be valued according to any market benchmark.

Various side deals mask the true magnitude of Goldman's participation in AIG's CDO portfolio.

According to the AIG memo on CDO exposures, dated November 27, 2007, obtained by CBS News, Goldman's CDOs represented about a third of the $67 billion total. But that may have been understating Goldman's role in building up the portfolio. About 16 of Societe Generale's trading positions were for CDOs that were arranged by Goldman.

On September 15, 2008, the rating agencies thought that AIG's CDO portfolio looked just fine.

The Washington Post printed a 2,700-word article about AIG's internal e-mails during 2007, when the guys at AIGFP kept insisting that the CDOs did not present any kind of troublesome risk. But the Post left out a critical element in the narrative. At that time, virtually all of the 148 CDO trades, listed in a November 27, 2007 memo obtained by CBS, were still rated AAA.

Was AIG really too big to fail? Maybe if you worked for Goldman.

The party line, expressed in Too Big To Fail and elsewhere, is that an AIG bankruptcy posed a greater systemic risk than a Lehman bankruptcy, because AIG was so much bigger. But that analysis is highly superficial and very misleading.

Goldman's scheme to create a liquidity crisis at AIG, in order to manipulate the government into paying CDO counterparties 100 cents on the dollar

Because of laws that emasculated regulatory oversight, Goldman's trading positions in credit derivatives with AIG had escaped the scrutiny of the Fed until September 11 or 12, 2008, when AIG told the New York Fed that it would soon run out of cash. The CDOs did not trigger a liquidity crisis at AIG, at least, not directly. Rather, it was the imminent cash drain from anticipated downgrades, from AA- to A-, which would trigger $30 billion in new collateral postings on AIGFP's trading positions. In addition, someone at the company had screwed up. They had invested billions in cash collateral, intended for someone else, in highly rated mortgage securities, for which there was suddenly no liquid market. So AIG needed to come up with the cash right away.

Simultaneously, of course, Lehman Brothers was imploring the government for support, and Paulson's position, at least on September 12, 2008, was that the Federal government would provide no support of any kind to bail out a private company like Lehman or AIG. Private bankers must come up with a private solution on their own.

September 15, 2008: Paulson's deputy sabotages efforts to negotiate a private bank deal.

September 16, 2008: Paulson installs a CEO at AIG who will favor Goldman.

October 7, 2008: Paulson's appointee unnecessarily pays out $18.7 billion to the CDO counterparties in exchange for nothing.

November 6, 2008: Only at the point when AIG is once again running out of cash and running out of time, and the CDO banks now hold the upper hand, Geithner is brought in to settle a matter when the government is backed into a corner. (Checkmate anyone?)

November 12, 2008: Following public disclosure of the backdoor bailout, Paulson announces his big bait-and-switch: his refusal to use TARP funds to stabilize the mortgage markets.


. . . .The bottom line? Hank Paulson, Lloyd Blankfein, Joseph Cassano of AIG, Timothy Geithner all colluded to rip off the American economy.

. . . .The full piece, with a ton of details, can be found here.

. . . .Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. Sometimes reading me is like doing homework. It's your fucking country, it's your future and it's your kids, why the hell should you invest any energy and effort into knowing anything goddamn thing? Hunh? You work hard, blah, blah, blah.


. . . .Now, our smirk of the day, comes courtesy of (surprise!) Tits VonLipstick, my favorite quitting Alaskan ex-governor attention whore. Now, Tits invented a word "mandation" and used it recorded on video and preserved forever, in her debut on Fox. Now, Tits, in that debut as a Fox News pundit this week (note: Pundit - someone who makes more money than you who repeats what someone else just said under the assumption that you're a moron) displayed this incredible ignorance and stupidity, and the underlying arrogant assumption that she can invent words and it's OK (don'cha know, wink, wink, ya get what I mean). There is no such word, it cannot be found in Websters, or the American Heritage Dictionary as a real word. She was called out on it, and there have been a flurry of hatemails to various columnists, from Teabaggers, when they could spare 20 minutes from having Glenn Beck's balls dipping in their mouth, all citing a wiki, for fuck's sake, with a definition of "mandation". A fucking wiki!!! (piss on self laughing, fall down). Probably the same folks who turned in research papers in college citing Wikipedia as a source and then got pissed when they got a failing grade on it. As I've said, she is the walking incarnation of ignorance, know-nothingness and quitting.

. . . . .So, of course, Pat Buchanan, that walking example of racism, bigotry and anti-Semitism used Tits as some kind of example after Scott Brown's election in Mass. The folks over The Political Carnival have a friend, a 72-yr old (and it's important for him to note that, he's seen a lot more than the rest of us) who goes by the handle 42bkdodgr, and he responded to Pat's remarks thusly about The Dumbing Down of America:
The Dumbing of America

For the past week something has been gnawing at me, but I couldn’t figure out what is was until a few days ago. It was remark made by Pat Buchanan following the election of Scott Brown to the U. S. Senate.

On MSNBC Pat said, to the effect, that the election of Scott Brown was the voters way of telling the Democrats they were rejecting the eastern establishment Harvard and Yale elitists for the Sarah Palin type of politician.

Pat, Sarah Palin just happens to be the exact opposite of your so called elitist group.

You glowingly support Sarah Palin who:

* Went to five colleges to get a degree

* When asked to name the newspapers she reads “ All of 'em, any of 'em that have been in front of me over all these years”

* When asked to name her favorite Founding Father, answered “all of them”.

* When asked on her foreign policy insights into Russia, answered, “They're our next door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska”.

* In the book Game Change, she is portrayed as someone who knew very little about WWI, WWII, the Cold War, and was not aware of the difference between North and South Korea.

You think this is the type of intellect Americans should elect to the highest office in this country? A person who can’t answer some very basic political questions?

Pat we are in the midst of a Great Recession, created by the Bush Administration, and most states in the last few years, have and are experiencing an economic crisis, that has required them to cut funding to their educational systems... which affects staffing levels, class size and student programs.

These cutbacks in funding could very well result in our country seeing a generation of less educated people, and I think we are already seeing signs of it.

In 2009 the Oklahoma Council of Public conducted a survey of 1000 high school students asking them 10 questions that are given to candidates for U.S. Citizenship.

Only 3% of the students surveyed would have passed the citizenship test. Included in the test were such questions as:

--Who was the first President of the United States?
--We elect Senators for how many years?
--What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution?
--What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress?

The organization that conducted the test said Arizona had similar test results, and they are concerned about the rest of the country.

A recent high school graduation report by the Southern Regional Education Board stated that only 61% of South Carolina’s entering freshman wind up graduating from high school compared to a national average of 73%; which I feel isn‘t a great percentage either.

Meanwhile, China and India continue to stress the importance of having a good education to their youth, which will eventually result in those countries passing us by both intellectually and competitively in the near future.

This country must begin investing in our educational system and have programs that stress the importance of having a good education to our youth by:

(1) establishing procedures to remove unqualified teachers, regardless of tenure
(2) developing subjects and/or programs that will enable our students to be competitive in the 21st century
(3) having realistic exams to judge a student’s true educational level
(4) having merit pay for outstanding teachers
(5) not having a curriculum whose sole purpose is to teach students to achieve at least the minimum scores for state and/or federal requirements
(6) reducing class size

Unless we start taking such action, we will become an uneducated and non-competitive country in the future.
. . . .I do this, like some others like me do it, not to be read, because most of you don't. Not read it, not really, all the way through and think about it. You don't listen, you don't pay attention, you don't even want to comprehend all of it. I do it for one simple reason. Like all good Americans in this 21st century, when the shit really hits the fan, most of you will throw your hands up and yell "How come someone didn't warn us!". . .We're trying to, you're not listening.

. . . When are you going to wake up?

. . . .It's time for two new parties, ones that truly represent us. Get in touch with me.

. . . . . .. . . . .Live every day out loud

. . . And that's how it is today, from the last, lonely outpost.
. . . .I miss you Mom and Dad, a lot. Thanks for watching over me and us.


. . . . .. . . .We can salvage this shipwreck of a Nation. It will take all of us working together. It will take all of us understanding the concepts of the Great American Experiment, the political process of the Republic. It's amazing, I don't see eye-to-eye on every issue with my friends, but we respect one another's opinion, share information, share facts, and we don't talk over one another or at one another, we talk with one another. It's amazing what happens when a group of people who share the common goal of leaving a better country for their children and grandchildren can do when they sit down with one another as human beings, and realize that we each have power, and together, we are unstoppable.

. . . .I'm going to ask this of you for the next 30 days. Turn your TV off, turn your radio off. Start to use that beautiful mind that your Creator gave you, that your underpaid, underappreciated High School teachers tried to develop. If you hear something, if you read something, if someone sends you an e-mail that says "this bill will do this", or "this politician says this", I'm asking you to check it out. Check it out this way, use some of the following fact-based sites, who exist solely for the purpose of data and fact-checking.
- If whatever you've heard or read concerns a bill in Congress, use the following -
- Open Congress, it's non-partisan and devoted to a complete tracking of every bill in Congress, both houses. How a bill is developed, who is sponsoring it, what the riders are, what the discussion around it is.
- GovTrack, again non-partisan, non-commercial and open source; devoted to the same things, tracking Congress.
- Open Secrets, one of the most important ones, it tracks the lobbying money and campaign contributions flowing to your congressperson, and most of the time is a pretty good predictor of how they'll vote.
- Political Party Time, non-partisan, devoted to solely tracking political fundraisers, and letting you know exactly what parties your Representative and Senators are throwing for fundraisers and who is attending and how much money they're throwing at them to gain influence.

. . . .If someone sends something to you saying "this is so" or "that is so" or "the President/Senator/Representative said this" use the following:
- Fact Check, non-partisan, designed to separate fact from bullshit and fiction
- Snopes, devoted to the same thing.
- Politifact, devoted to getting to the truth, and separating out the lies that are spread.


. . . .I keep doing this not because I don't have faith, but because I do have faith. I have faith in the ultimate triumph of the spirit, intellect and heart of the American people. I have faith that the people I know want to leave something better for future generations, and know that something is terribly wrong, and want to do something about it. I do it because Paine and Jefferson were brilliant, unique singularities and were right.

. . . .I keep doing this because I don't believe in big imaginary friends for adults, I don't believe in alien conspiracies running the Government, I don't believe the Roswell bodies are at Wright-Patterson, I don't believe that a big portal will open up on Dec. 21, 2012, I don't believe that the spaceships will show up.

. . . I do believe that the people who have fucked everything up are greedy, avaricious human beings who have been able to steal from the American people, to harm them, who have run unchecked because no one calls it out for what it is. I believe that if we shine the light of day on it, if the people of this country have had enough, we can change it, and change it for the better.

. . . . I keep doing this because I do believe that people, human beings, unchecked will continue to do what they've done throughout history, and throughout the history of this country. Together, they will find the solutions and provide better for their children and grandchildren.

. . . .I believe in us, I believe in people. I believe in the beauty, power and grace of the individual.

. . . .I do this for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of knowing what they do, what they believe, what they know is right. I do it for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of faith, hope, love, hate, justice, war and peace.

. . . .I do it because I believe in justice, in all it's forms.

. . . .I do this everyday for the people and kids who are tattoed, pierced and inked and keep getting told to get "into the mainstream". I do this everyday for those guys who wear black that you don't understand, you just know there's something about them, and that when the chips are down, when you have to walk down a dark alley somewhere, and you know what's waiting for you at the end of it, and you can only take one person with you, that's who you want walking with you, because you know you'll come back out alive, and that guy doesn't care what it costs him.

. . . .I do this everyday for the outcasts, the misfits, the ones who don't fit and who will turn their back on you and walk away when you try to make them fit into a mold. I do it everyday for everyone who does it their way, knows that they're paying a high price for it, but the freedom is worth the cost.

. . . . I do this everyday for outlaws, cowboys, renegades, pirates and fallen angels. I do it everyday for the people who understand that rock and roll can save their soul, that redemption can be found in a 3-chord lick from a vintage Les Paul. I do it for the men and women who aren't afraid to turn it all the way up, who keep looking for an 11 setting on a volume knob that only goes to 10, who know that rock and roll's got nothing to do with age.


. . . .If right now, you're doing something you don't want to do, stop it. If you've surrounded yourself with people who want you to do or be something other than who you are, walk away. If you've got people around you who actually let it slip out that they think you "should be doing (fill in the blank here)" and it involves your life, your future, your existence as an individual, walk away, right now, and don't look back. You don't owe anyone anything. Live fearlessly. If the people around you can't accept it, can't accept you as you are, really are, they aren't and weren't friends anyhow.

. . . .Don't march to anyone else's drumbeat, don't drink the Kool-Aid, anyone's. Right, Left, conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, Christian, Buddhist, Pagan. Use your own mind, that's why you were given one. Examine, question, do what's right for you first, everything else will fall in place from there, quit looking for the path, you're already on it.

. . . .Come out of the gate each morning with both barrels blazing, pedal-to-metal, full-tilt boogie, all-in and balls-out, what's stopping you? Do you want to live forever? That'd be boring.

. . . .Got your back. somewhere out there in the night

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments before they're ripped away from you. This rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, absolutely no one gets out alive. There aren't a lot of second chances, and we don't get to dictate terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. This ain't no dress rehearsal, and the curtain's gone up, it's real and right now. It's not about yesterday or tomorrow. It's about right fucking here, right fucking now. This, what you're reading, what you're hearing, is the proof, the words, the sounds and the sights of someone changing his own life and his own world and not being afraid to put it out there. What have you done for yourself lately and why are you waiting? Do it now.

The Desolation Angel
from somewhere halfway to Heaven, and just a mile out of Hell


You know someone like me, there's still a few of us left. If we have to, we'll stand at the gates of Hell and hold the last train home for you.. . . . . .

[where: 29.52N, 91.57W]
[where: Chelsea, MI]


29 January 2010

A day further along

Friday January 29, 2010

. . . .It is the year 2010. I was born in 1957, therefore grew up watching Lost in Space, The Jetsons, reading Popular Science, et al.
. . . . .WHERE ARE THE FLYING CARS! I WAS PROMISED FLYING CARS!! DAMMIT, I WANT MY FLYING CAR! AND HOUSEHOLD ROBOTS TOO! AND AN ORBITING MARS VACATION SPOT!

. . . .Thank you for allowing me to get that out of my system.

. . . .I do want to mention, at least here, another musician who's often overlooked, and who took to the web and technology, early on, and I mean early. Todd Rundgren, whose abilities and musical talents are often overlooked in relation to technology, has always had a killer website. It's here, that he distributes his music, most of it for free, give it a look here at this jump.

. . . .And I'm always, and have always been, a big supporter of, and fan of, Shooter Jennings, Waylon's son. For those of you who turn your noses up at "country", you're once again working on categories and labels. Before Slash Hudson was asked to join Velvet Revolver as their guitarist, Shooter was asked first, he's that much rock and roll, heavy hard core rock and roll. And, as he and Drea DeMatteo have had their first child, Alabama, Shooter has become a lot more conscious, and has joined a whole bunch of us out here on the edge of things and is doing his part to wake people up. He broke up his band, The .357's, and formed a new one, Heirophant, which is getting ready to release their first one in March, Black Ribbons. He has his own website and his own YouTube channel, check them out at the underlined links. 

. . . .And one more thing, enough with the kiddies claiming Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters somehow have "sold out" and with Wheels somehow ripped off Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers and Learning To Fly. (1) Two entirely different songs (2) Every chord and riff in rock and roll have already been played. It's about how it's played, about how it's arranged and how much passion and belief the artist puts behind the song. (3) For those of you completely unaware, unknowing and so out of touch with rock and roll as to be pop music devotees, Dave and Tom and very good friends. Some months after Kurt's death, Tom offered Dave a job in the Heartbreakers, to keep him working and because he loved Dave's musical sense and abilities. Dave declined and went on to form the Foo's, who are arguably one of the best rock and roll bands around. And don't piss in Dave when you're around me. He went through enough after Kurt died, knowing full well that bitch Courtney killed Kurt, but no one would listen to him. (As for me, whenever Courtney's name is mentioned around me, all I do is say a little prayer, as in I pray that Courtney meets her Creator someday soon, like immediately, if not sooner.)

. . . .So, only 5 days until Lost comes back. The final season for all you Losties, and as the producers promised, all questions WILL be answered. If you're not a Lostie, or haven't followed it, I suggest you not even try, it would be waaayyy tooo confusing.

. . . .And before we leave off from popular culture, can I puh-leeze tell you how much of a fuck I do not give about NBC, Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien? The FX Network, TNT, USA and a host of other cable channels are consistently putting out better entertainment; edgier, better acted, better directed and better written series these days. NBC died in the way back after the 70's era of Saturday Night Live was over and the original cast left, and after the first two seasons of ER. 

. . . . .I didn't mention that over the holiday break, the youngest son, Caleb, picked up a new puppy, who of course, is my grandpuppy. A little 6 week old bundle of fur Black Labrador puppy named Roscoe. I didn't know how much I've missed having a dog around since my Jake died, some 4 years ago now, and I still miss him so. Roscoe is, to me at least, the cutest damn dog in the whole world, and he already knows who his Grandpa is.

. . . .Yes, I know that the State of the Union speech was Wednesday night, and I've waited until now, 2 days later to even say anything about it, but to me, at least, when we're talking about the President of the United States and a once a year address that sums up where we are as a nation and a people, it takes a little bit of time and distance to absorb, analyze and look at it properly. Anyone can, and most everyone does, react instantly to try and be the fastest pundit in the West. 

. . . .Let me tell you something, as a gunslinger by trade. There's a lot of fairly good, young gunslingers in graveyards who were fast. When you meet an old gunslinger (ahem), it's because they're good, and accurate. 

. . . .That and the fact that he was a man today and walked straight into the camp of the Republican House and faced them solo, and took them to task, and let them know straight up what was what. Now folks, this is the man who was elected. And as for having a set, it's a hell of lot more than a dweeb like Eric Cantor can say. From a personal standpoint, all he came off looking like today was a dweeby pussy.

. . . .Let me say this, from an emotional standpoint, SOTU made me feel good, and I liked some of the direct challenges and call-outs that occurred; that's a leader at work. 

. . . .I think anyone who reads me knows my position on the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. As far as I'm concerned, Justice Alito's completely disrespectful response to the President's calling out of that shameful, treasonous decision only confirms what I've said; that Justices Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Kennedy and Scalia are bought and paid for judicial activists who work only for their overseers, and will, as young men, all continue to rewrite the Constitution of the United States of America to their boss's satisfaction.

. . . .Now, there's a bunch of folks who have gotten their panties in a wad over the President calling out the Supreme Court over that obscene decision, let's look at the text and wording that he used:
“With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections,”
. . . .Point 1, he's right. Point 2, and I'll point it out again, it opens us up for this country entirely becoming a corporatist state and any foreign power, through ownership of U.S. Corporations (anyone think of Al-Queada Inc., it's possible) owning candidates and the government of the United States of America. Point 3, this decision will soon outrank Dred Scott as the single worst decision in Supreme Court history.

. . . . .Paul Campos, over in the Daily Beast, on why Alito and company are wrong, dead wrong, in criticizing the President for calling them out:
All this is nonsense. It’s nonsense because it is based on the assumption that, when justices of the Supreme Court decide politically controversial issues, they do, or at least ought to do, so on the basis of “the law” rather than “politics,” and that therefore the kinds of criticisms that would obviously be appropriate when directed at politicians are disrespectful demagoguery when uttered in the presence of these robed eminences.
The fact that this assumption is treated as uncontroversial by almost everyone in our political and legal culture does not render it any less absurd. Consider the Citizens United decision. Technically, the issue in this case was whether the free-speech clause of the First Amendment prohibits Congress from forbidding corporations to spend money directly on political campaigns, rather than limiting them to doing so through political action committees.
As a practical matter, there is quite literally no difference between the questions “does the First Amendment do this?” and “should the First Amendment do this?” The men who ratified the First Amendment lived in a world without anything even vaguely resembling the modern versions of corporations, political parties, political campaigns, media technologies, and a host of other things of crucial importance to debates regarding the best way to achieve campaign-finance reform.
Asking whether the document they drafted prohibits or permits the kinds of laws struck down by the Citizens United case is a nonsense question. It’s like asking what the Constitution tells us to do about global warming or health-care reform. In other words, if by “the First Amendment” one means nothing more mystical or mysterious than “an English sentence of 45 words, making some fairly general statements, written by men (as opposed to omniscient beings) 220 years ago,” then the First Amendment is of no use to anyone in regard to questions such as those presented by the Citizens United case.
This, of course, is why many people reject the very idea of “originalism” in Constitutional interpretation—the idea that constitutional issues should be decided on the basis of what the authors or readers of that document meant by it or thought it meant.
Yet the alternatives to originalism are, if anything, even less satisfactory if one wants to separate “law” from “politics.” For example, the idea of a “living Constitution,” whose meaning changes over time, is either an example of magical thinking, or code for “ we make the Constitution mean whatever we want it to mean.” And, if “the First Amendment” really just means Supreme Court precedents about the First Amendment, then such decisions are essentially an extremely confused and inefficient form of legislation. (This, in fact, is the most sensible way to think of them.)
When Supreme Court justices engage in what is called constitutional interpretation, they are by necessity making purely political decisions. Those decisions, and the justices who make them, deserve exactly as much respect as the decisions and the men and women who make them warrant.
In other words, in cases such as Citizens United, the distinction between “law” and “politics” is completely meaningless
. . .And from Doug Kendall, the president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, a sobering analysis of how the majority justices were, in fact, judicial activists, and did in fact, rewrite Constitutional Law:
In fact, Obama's carefully-phrased comment to the justices highlights two critical aspects of the majority's decision in Citizens United v. FEC, both of which constitute dangerous and revolutionary shifts in long-settled law:
  1. The Court ruled that the First Amendment makes no distinction among speakers -- that the identity of a speaker makes no difference for purposes of government regulation of speech. As Justice Stevens pointed out in his dissenting opinion, this logic leads to some remarkable conclusions: "Such an assumption would have accorded the propaganda broadcasts to our troops by 'Tokyo Rose' during World War II the same protection as speech by Allied commanders." Stevens also clearly explained that the majority's logic "would appear to afford the same protection to multinational corporations controlled by foreigners as to individual Americans." This is truly an unprecedented reading of the Bill of the Rights that could have consequences that reach even beyond campaign finance law. By eliminating any distinction among speakers, which, as Obama noted, has been recognized for at least a century, the Court hinted that any regulation that distinguishes between corporations and individuals may be problematic -- raising the question of what other rights currently reserved for citizens the Court might soon extend to corporations. As Stevens noted in his dissent, under the majority's logic, "it may be a First Amendment problem that corporations are not permitted to vote, given that voting is, among other things, a form of speech."
  2. To make matters worse, the Court dramatically redefined the meaning and standard of "corruption," ruling that only the strictest and most direct forms of corruption -- e.g. bribery -- are prohibited, and not, as was previously the standard, any "appearance of undue influence." This critical component of last week's decision redefined the boundaries of what constitutes corruption and made influence by special interests significantly more difficult to prove. More important, the ruling, as Obama precisely indicated and as Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) fervently reiterated this morning on the Senate floor, appears to sweep away vital barriers that were keeping foreign special interests, such as Toyota, from manipulating American elections. If all speakers are treated equally under the First Amendment, and the only corruption Congress can prohibit is direct vote-trading for money, then there is no reason why foreign companies with a U.S.-presence couldn't spend endless amounts of money to influence U.S. elections. Under the logic of the Supreme Court's decision, just as Exxon can now spend millions to oppose a candidate who, for example, supports the climate bill, so, too, could Toyota or other foreign companies.
If Justice Alito wanted to disclaim any of this, or if he thought that the majority's opinion was not as far-reaching as Justice Stevens' powerful dissenting opinion demonstrated, he should have written a concurring opinion. He should have explained how the logic of the Court's opinion doesn't change course on over a century of campaign finance law that seeks to limit corporate influence in elections and showed us that the Court's formalistic approach to the First Amendment and corporations won't lead to foreign corporate spending in U.S. elections. But muttering at the State of the Union clarifies nothing.
The stakes here are extraordinarily high. As Obama alluded in his comment, the last century has witnessed a historic trend toward greater enfranchisement of American citizens, accompanied by a significant increase in restrictions on corporate spending to influence elections. The Court's decision in Citizens United unequivocally halts and reverses that trend, pulling the rug out from under decades of progress toward achieving the democracy envisioned by the Founders, and improved upon by successive generations of Americans that amended the Constitution to guarantee the right to vote to all citizens, irrespective of race, sex, age, and class. If Justice Alito believes that the damage done to our electoral system by the majority's opinion in Citizens United can be contained, we hope that he will explain it in a judicial opinion in the next case that seeks to chip away further at what remains of our Nation's campaign finance laws.

. . . More on the State of the Union in a couple of paragraphs.

. . . .The response to Bernanke's nomination in front of the Senate as Federal Reserve Chairman only proves that Goldman-Sachs and JP Morgan Chase do own Washington. On Wednesday, pre-SOTU, and post-SOTU, the media was buzzing that there weren't enough votes to reconfirm Bernanke. By Thursday morning, Senators who had previously said they were voting no, were voting yes, and the affirmations were coming in one by one. Now, the question is; who got to who on that one?

. . . And by the way, it's nearly so nefarious as all that. It's simple, Bernanke's term ran out on Sunday, Senators hate to work on Fridays, and there was a huge storm bearing down on the East Coast. It's pretty simple, their convenience outweighed the needs of the American people.

. . . The fact that Timothy Geithner will not face losing his position as Secretary of the Treasury, and will not face censure, or criminal charges, again points out that the Senate, and House, are in the end wholly-owned subsidiaries of these same Wall Street investment houses.

. . . And believe it or don't, today's big news about extremely strong GDP numbers with no jobs in the recovery, and foreclosures, defaults and layoffs rising just goes to prove the point, and prove it well. I was insulted to have the media spend about 4 hours trying to find the "reasons". It's extraordinarily simple. When you are a corporation who has moved all your manufacturing and labor overseas and offshore, and you have no more overhead, when you've crashed your remaining employee's retirement plans and all the money went to coroporate dividends, it's simple. Combine that with the big money (our money) being shown as profits by Goldman-Sachs, the 5 "Too Big To Fail" banks, all with TARP funds, and it's a simple goddamn formula. 

. . . .Doesn't anyone else think it's particularly craven, self-seeking, and, God forbid, flip-flopping, that Tits McLipstick, Alaska's most famous quitting governor would (1) agree to be the headline speaker at the TeaBaggers Convention (for a modest fee of $325 per head just for the pleasure of listening natter on about nothing of substance, dropping vowels and winking all the way) and distance herself from the GOP (2) Step out when the TeaBaggers were being represented in the media by the idiots and morons that were seeking the publicity, then (3) come back in as the headline speaker the day after a strong State of The Union speech by the President, on the day that he walked straight into the GOP House retreat, by himself, and took them on, in a very strong showing AND urge the reconciliation between the Teabaggers the GOP after McCain's numbers show that he has only 40% support in his own district for re-election. Ya just gotta love that manipulative little attention whore, doncha' know!

. . . .And of course there would be a John Edwards tape with his mistress, of course. How cheesy.

. . . .Now then, working backwards, today's hour-long session with the House Republicans where the President absolutely schooled the Republicans was remarkable. I'm amazed at the Repubs stupidity in allowing cameras in. I think there's a lesson here, the President works best alone (take that as a message Rahm and Axelrod) and isn't afraid to walk into a gunfight. Hands down, he won this one, and it's sound bites and images will last longer than the SOTU. Best statement on it yet came from Ezra Klein as he tweeted today "Obama's Q & A with the House Republicans is the most compelling political television I've seen. . .maybe ever".

. . . .Back to the State of the Union address (Note: Yes, you can tell, I take it in the order (the issues, that is) in the order of what's important to me)

. . . .The statement by the President: "This year, I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are."

. . . .That is a statement that I'll hold him to. I am a hard-core, straight up, tattoed black-wearing hetero pirate and renegade who loves women, loves their curves, (OK, I'll stop now, I am capable of getting really graphic!) and I have too many friends who are gay, who are lesbian, who love their country and are simply excluded or separated from society because of their sexual orientation. I got news, I've got one little lesbian friend who is as close as a sister that I'd trust with my back in a firefight long before I trusted about 60% of my straight friends. My gay friends are gay, and it's that simple. It doesn't have a damn thing to do with whether or not they can serve in the military. 

. . . . "We face a deficit of trust"

. . . . ."Just saying no to everything may be good short-term politics, but it's not leadership"

. . . . . "Change has not come fast enough"

. . . . . ."It's time to get serious about the problems that are hampering our growth"

. . . . . "For these Americans and so many others, change has not come fast enough. Some are frustrated; some are angry. They don't understand why it seems like bad behavior on Wall Street is rewarded, but hard work on Main Street isn't; or why Washington has been unable or unwilling to solve any of our problems. They're tired of the partisanship and the shouting and the pettiness. They know we can't afford it. Not now.
So we face big and difficult challenges. And what the American people hope -- what they deserve -- is for all of us, Democrats and Republicans, to work through our differences; to overcome the numbing weight of our politics. For while the people who sent us here have different backgrounds, different stories, different beliefs, the anxieties they face are the same. The aspirations they hold are shared: a job that pays the bills; a chance to get ahead; most of all, the ability to give their children a better life"


. . . . . . ".It's because of this spirit -- this great decency and great strength -- that I have never been more hopeful about America's future than I am tonight. Despite our hardships, our union is strong. We do not give up. We do not quit. We do not allow fear or division to break our spirit. In this new decade, it's time the American people get a government that matches their decency; that embodies their strength."

. . . . .It was masterful, and I need him to deliver on it, as a citizen, and as a person.


. . . .And on this next section, I need him to deliver, and I need Congress to listen, with both ears, unstopped and clear, I need that for my kids, my grandpuppy and my someday grandkids:
"Of course, none of these reforms will even happen if we don't also reform how we work with one another. Now, I'm not naïve. I never thought that the mere fact of my election would usher in peace and harmony and some post-partisan era. I knew that both parties have fed divisions that are deeply entrenched. And on some issues, there are simply philosophical differences that will always cause us to part ways. These disagreements, about the role of government in our lives, about our national priorities and our national security, they've been taking place for over 200 years. They're the very essence of our democracy.
But what frustrates the American people is a Washington where every day is Election Day. We can't wage a perpetual campaign where the only goal is to see who can get the most embarrassing headlines about the other side -- a belief that if you lose, I win. Neither party should delay or obstruct every single bill just because they can. The confirmation of, I'm speaking to both parties now. The confirmation of well-qualified public servants shouldn't be held hostage to the pet projects or grudges of a few individual senators.
Washington may think that saying anything about the other side, no matter how false, no matter how malicious, is just part of the game. But it's precisely such politics that has stopped either party from helping the American people. Worse yet, it's sowing further division among our citizens, further distrust in our government.
So, no, I will not give up on trying to change the tone of our politics. I know it's an election year. And after last week, it's clear that campaign fever has come even earlier than usual. But we still need to govern.
To Democrats, I would remind you that we still have the largest majority in decades, and the people expect us to solve problems, not run for the hills.  And if the Republican leadership is going to insist that 60 votes in the Senate are required to do any business at all in this town -- a supermajority -- then the responsibility to govern is now yours as well. Just saying no to everything may be good short-term politics, but it's not leadership. We were sent here to serve our citizens, not our ambitions. So let's show the American people that we can do it together.

. . . . .So, here's how it lays out. I still believe that as long as Geithner and Summers are in place, that the White House will be run by Wall Street, but it's the best option possible, given the idiocy and rampant obstructionism aimed at bringing down the country that the Republican party seems to be entrenched in these days, and careening even further towards the cliff.

. . . .They were called out the other night, and had it put on front street. Their response/rebuttal was at it's highest point and best trivial, idiotic and clueless. Normal for them these days. When their best leader, John McCain is run over by bulldozers because he's not conservative enough and doesn't pass the purity test, well, that tells you everything you need to know.

. . . .The American people have caught on to them, the Repubs, and now know that their first priority remains defeating the President, even if it means the destruction of the Republic. And they've caught onto the Teabaggers as the fever-swamp wingnuts that they are.

. . . .Tina Brown over at the Daily Beast had a cogent reaction to the SOTU:
When Obama dispenses with that dread sobriquet “professorial,” he does it by being, well, more professorial. This time he gave us not the wonky professor but the academic star who has had enough with the antics of his rowdy class. “The time for bickering is past! The time for games is OVER!”
It was a boon that, true to form, Republican Congressman Joe Wilson scored an own goal by yelling, “You lie!” when Obama had said—truthfully—that illegal immigrants would not be covered (as distinct from legal but non-citizen immigrants).
Obama’s great asset has always been an ability to maintain his air of authority without being baritone about it. He can be boring, but he is never ridiculous or pompous. When he called timeout on the bickering and the games, the Republicans sitting sullenly on their hands were reduced on TV to foolish members of the class who had been throwing ink bombs all summer at the math teacher. They looked all the more surly after Obama had wrung a double thumbs-up from John McCain for adopting a McCain campaign measure—offering Americans who can’t get insurance because of pre-existing conditions low-cost coverage to protect them against financial ruin if they get seriously ill.
No, he wasn’t convincing about the cost of all this, and he lost me when he got into that damn insurance exchange, but he had an ace up his sleeve with Ted Kennedy’s posthumous letter. His riff about what the dying senator had called the “character of our country” was inspired, reminiscent of his original career-making “not a liberal America and a conservative America” hit at the 2004 Democratic convention. There was something about the writerly way Obama relished the phrase “the character of our country” that made it his own, not Ted’s, and conjured up an America that was flinty but big-hearted, self-sufficient but also neighborly. It communicated, at the eleventh hour, the missing soul in the partisan debate.
Perhaps Obama is often slow to nail controversies because he needs time to live inside them for a while in his head. It’s unnerving for the rest of us, but even the haters, one feels, are made to think more deeply than they’d like before they return to the bickering and the games.

 . . . .And on to some of the other topics of the week, as I return to finance, Wall Street and why it's so damn important, From Zero Hedge, via Dylan Ratigan, on why people like me get tweaked:
Bloomberg's David Reilly puts to paper what everyone watching this week's Geithner grilling was all too aware of.
The idea of secret banking cabals that control the country and global economy are a given among conspiracy theorists who stockpile ammo, bottled water and peanut butter. After this week’s congressional hearing into the bailout of American International Group Inc., you have to wonder if those folks are crazy after all.

Wednesday’s hearing described a secretive group deploying billions of dollars to favored banks, operating with little oversight by the public or elected officials.

We’re talking about the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, whose role as the most influential part of the federal-reserve system -- apart from the matter of AIG’s bailout -- deserves further congressional scrutiny.

The New York Fed is in the hot seat for its decision in November 2008 to buy out, for about $30 billion, insurance contracts AIG sold on toxic debt securities to banks, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co., Societe Generale and Deutsche Bank AG, among others. That decision, critics say, amounted to a back-door bailout for the banks, which received 100 cents on the dollar for contracts that would have been worth far less had AIG been allowed to fail.
Perhaps the catharsis of writing about it will make the pain from the ever more obvious realization of what is going on behind the scenes finally go away. Or maybe not.
“In fact, when the information was finally released, under pressure from Congress, nothing happened,” Towns said. “It had absolutely no effect on AIG’s business or financial condition. But it did have an effect on the credibility of the Federal Reserve, and it called into question the Fed’s penchant for secrecy.”

Now, I’m not saying Congress should be meddling in interest-rate decisions, or micro-managing bank regulation. Nor do I think we should all don tin-foil hats and start ranting about the Trilateral Commission.

Yet when unelected and unaccountable agencies pick banking winners while trying to end-run Congress, even as taxpayers are forced to lend, spend and guarantee about $8 trillion to prop up the financial system, our collective blood should boil.

. . . .Hats off to James O'Keefe, the mack pimp daddy wannabe of false ACORN footage fame, who somehow, through Breitbart's twisted tutelage believed that walking into Senator Mary Landrieu's office while dressed like the construction worker in the Village People to plant an illegal secret wiretap for his own purposes would somehow turn out well for him.

. . .. Point 1 is that I work in New Orleans, and O'Keefe's white bread ass is lucky that he was arrested by the FBI, and not just run out into Poydras street and having a staffer let some nearby folk know what had happened. He's damn lucky that he's not cut up into little chunks right now and alligator bait down near Morgan City or Port Sulphur somewhere.


. . . . .Anyhoo, it's time to be moseying along, be back at you at the start of the week. 

. . . When are you going to wake up?

. . . .It's time for two new parties, ones that truly represent us. Get in touch with me.

. . . . . .. . . . .Live every day out loud

. . . And that's how it is today, from the last, lonely outpost.
. . . .I miss you Mom and Dad, a lot. Thanks for watching over me and us.


. . . . .. . . .We can salvage this shipwreck of a Nation. It will take all of us working together. It will take all of us understanding the concepts of the Great American Experiment, the political process of the Republic. It's amazing, I don't see eye-to-eye on every issue with my friends, but we respect one another's opinion, share information, share facts, and we don't talk over one another or at one another, we talk with one another. It's amazing what happens when a group of people who share the common goal of leaving a better country for their children and grandchildren can do when they sit down with one another as human beings, and realize that we each have power, and together, we are unstoppable.

. . . .I'm going to ask this of you for the next 30 days. Turn your TV off, turn your radio off. Start to use that beautiful mind that your Creator gave you, that your underpaid, underappreciated High School teachers tried to develop. If you hear something, if you read something, if someone sends you an e-mail that says "this bill will do this", or "this politician says this", I'm asking you to check it out. Check it out this way, use some of the following fact-based sites, who exist solely for the purpose of data and fact-checking.
- If whatever you've heard or read concerns a bill in Congress, use the following -
- Open Congress, it's non-partisan and devoted to a complete tracking of every bill in Congress, both houses. How a bill is developed, who is sponsoring it, what the riders are, what the discussion around it is.
- GovTrack, again non-partisan, non-commercial and open source; devoted to the same things, tracking Congress.
- Open Secrets, one of the most important ones, it tracks the lobbying money and campaign contributions flowing to your congressperson, and most of the time is a pretty good predictor of how they'll vote.
- Political Party Time, non-partisan, devoted to solely tracking political fundraisers, and letting you know exactly what parties your Representative and Senators are throwing for fundraisers and who is attending and how much money they're throwing at them to gain influence.

. . . .If someone sends something to you saying "this is so" or "that is so" or "the President/Senator/Representative said this" use the following:
- Fact Check, non-partisan, designed to separate fact from bullshit and fiction
- Snopes, devoted to the same thing.
- Politifact, devoted to getting to the truth, and separating out the lies that are spread.


. . . .I keep doing this not because I don't have faith, but because I do have faith. I have faith in the ultimate triumph of the spirit, intellect and heart of the American people. I have faith that the people I know want to leave something better for future generations, and know that something is terribly wrong, and want to do something about it. I do it because Paine and Jefferson were brilliant, unique singularities and were right.

. . . .I keep doing this because I don't believe in big imaginary friends for adults, I don't believe in alien conspiracies running the Government, I don't believe the Roswell bodies are at Wright-Patterson, I don't believe that a big portal will open up on Dec. 21, 2012, I don't believe that the spaceships will show up.

. . . I do believe that the people who have fucked everything up are greedy, avaricious human beings who have been able to steal from the American people, to harm them, who have run unchecked because no one calls it out for what it is. I believe that if we shine the light of day on it, if the people of this country have had enough, we can change it, and change it for the better.

. . . . I keep doing this because I do believe that people, human beings, unchecked will continue to do what they've done throughout history, and throughout the history of this country. Together, they will find the solutions and provide better for their children and grandchildren.

. . . .I believe in us, I believe in people. I believe in the beauty, power and grace of the individual.

. . . .I do this for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of knowing what they do, what they believe, what they know is right. I do it for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of faith, hope, love, hate, justice, war and peace.

. . . .I do it because I believe in justice, in all it's forms.

. . . .I do this everyday for the people and kids who are tattoed, pierced and inked and keep getting told to get "into the mainstream". I do this everyday for those guys who wear black that you don't understand, you just know there's something about them, and that when the chips are down, when you have to walk down a dark alley somewhere, and you know what's waiting for you at the end of it, and you can only take one person with you, that's who you want walking with you, because you know you'll come back out alive, and that guy doesn't care what it costs him.

. . . .I do this everyday for the outcasts, the misfits, the ones who don't fit and who will turn their back on you and walk away when you try to make them fit into a mold. I do it everyday for everyone who does it their way, knows that they're paying a high price for it, but the freedom is worth the cost.

. . . . I do this everyday for outlaws, cowboys, renegades, pirates and fallen angels. I do it everyday for the people who understand that rock and roll can save their soul, that redemption can be found in a 3-chord lick from a vintage Les Paul. I do it for the men and women who aren't afraid to turn it all the way up, who keep looking for an 11 setting on a volume knob that only goes to 10, who know that rock and roll's got nothing to do with age.


. . . .If right now, you're doing something you don't want to do, stop it. If you've surrounded yourself with people who want you to do or be something other than who you are, walk away. If you've got people around you who actually let it slip out that they think you "should be doing (fill in the blank here)" and it involves your life, your future, your existence as an individual, walk away, right now, and don't look back. You don't owe anyone anything. Live fearlessly. If the people around you can't accept it, can't accept you as you are, really are, they aren't and weren't friends anyhow.

. . . .Don't march to anyone else's drumbeat, don't drink the Kool-Aid, anyone's. Right, Left, conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, Christian, Buddhist, Pagan. Use your own mind, that's why you were given one. Examine, question, do what's right for you first, everything else will fall in place from there, quit looking for the path, you're already on it.

. . . .Come out of the gate each morning with both barrels blazing, pedal-to-metal, full-tilt boogie, all-in and balls-out, what's stopping you? Do you want to live forever? That'd be boring.

. . . .Got your back. somewhere out there in the night

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments before they're ripped away from you. This rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, absolutely no one gets out alive. There aren't a lot of second chances, and we don't get to dictate terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. This ain't no dress rehearsal, and the curtain's gone up, it's real and right now. It's not about yesterday or tomorrow. It's about right fucking here, right fucking now. This, what you're reading, what you're hearing, is the proof, the words, the sounds and the sights of someone changing his own life and his own world and not being afraid to put it out there. What have you done for yourself lately and why are you waiting? Do it now.

The Desolation Angel
from somewhere halfway to Heaven, and just a mile out of Hell


You know someone like me, there's still a few of us left. If we have to, we'll stand at the gates of Hell and hold the last train home for you.. . . . . .

[where: 29.52N, 91.57W]
[where: Chelsea, MI]

26 January 2010

And it goes something like this. . . .

Tuesday January 26, 2010

. . . . . .
No, the party hasn't stopped yet down in the Quarter, and yes, the entire city is captivated by the Saints, and yes, it's close to Mardi Gras.

. . . The road goes on forever, and the party never ends.

. . . .The playlist, I like it, but I'll change the order up from time to time. My right, and my druthers.

. . . .I would like to publicly thank my youngest son, Caleb, for sending me the photos of my new grand-dog, Roscoe, a Black Lab puppy. He is the cutest dog in the entire known history of dogdom, and the smartest. I mean that.

. . . .If you're reading this on the Facebook Notes page, switch out to the external site, the music is there, and any videos I embed are always there as well, which you can't see on the FB Notes page.

. . . .What's on the Kindle right now?

- The Given Day by Dennis Lehane
- Nine Dragons by Michael Connelly
- Last Night in Twisted River - John Irving
- The Devil in the White City - Erik Larson
- The First Rule - Robert Crais
- Storms of My Grandchildren - Dr. James Hansen (more, much more on this one later on in the column, one of the best, hardest, most prescient books I've read).

. . . .Now, after my rant about Facebook users the other day, it's beginning to dawn on me, that most people, and I do mean most, are really at the end of the day, clueless when it comes to tech. They might have a good vocabulary, and know some buzzwords and know how to look and talk like they have some idea of what they're doing, but they don't period. Typical bullshit, refusal to read instructions, then outrage later when something that explained carefully up front, but required effort to find out, happens. So, as a service for you FB users, (and I'm one, it's a useful social networking media utility), from the New York Times (before they start to charge for online content) a useful list of what you should be looking at in your FB settings, since most of you are in the welfare-king or welfare-queen entitlement category and believe somehow that you have rights within a free utility and service that you feel entitled to and refuse to pay for, and can't get a clue that they won't ever charge for membership, since they want the ability to control your information, your settings and your privacy, and when you don't pay, you don't have a say with them as to what happens and how it happens (hint: they (Zuckerberg and company) want it that way. And I don't want to hear shit from any of you about privacy or First Amendment Rights. (a) In a corporatist, profit-driven system, the advertisers that do pay FB's bills have the say, you don't and (b) you're a person, not a corporation, therefore, by Supreme Court ruling, you don't have any rights, a corporation's rights supercede yours:

1. Who Can See The Things You Share (Status Updates, Photo, Videos, etc.)

Probably the most critical of the "privacy" changes (yes, we mean those quotes sarcastically) was the change made to status updates. Although there's now a button beneath the status update field that lets you select who can view any particular update, the new Facebook default for this setting is "Everyone." And by everyone, they mean everyone.

If you accepted the new recommended settings then you voluntarily gave Facebook the right to share the information about the items you post with any user or application on the site. Depending on your search settings, you may have also given Facebook the right to share that information with search engines, too.

To change this setting back to something of a more private nature, do the following:

  1. From your Profile page, hover your mouse over the Settings menu at the top right and click "Privacy Settings" from the list that appears.
  2. Click "Profile Information" from the list of choices on the next page.
  3. Scroll down to the setting "Posts by Me." This encompasses anything you post, including status updates, links, notes, photos, and videos.
  4. Change this setting using the drop-down box on the right. We recommend the "Only Friends" setting to ensure that only those people you've specifically added as a friend on the network can see the things you post.

2. Who Can See Your Personal Info

Facebook has a section of your profile called "personal info," but it only includes your interests, activities, and favorites. Other arguably more personal information is not encompassed by the "personal info" setting on Facebook's Privacy Settings page. That other information includes things like your birthday, your religious and political views, and your relationship status.

After last month's privacy changes, Facebook set the new defaults for this other information to viewable by either "Everyone" (for family and relationships, aka relationship status) or to "Friends of Friends" (birthday, religious and political views). Depending on your own preferences, you can update each of these fields as you see fit. However, we would bet that many will want to set these to "Only Friends" as well. To do so:

  1. From your Profile page, hover your mouse over the Settings menu at the top right and click "Privacy Settings" from the list that appears.
  2. Click "Profile Information" from the list of choices on the next page.
  3. The third, fourth, and fifth item listed on this page are as follows: "birthday," "religious and political views," and "family and relationship." Locking down birthday to "Only Friends" is wise here, especially considering information such as this is often used in identity theft.
  4. Depending on your own personal preferences, you may or may not feel comfortable sharing your relationship status and religious and political views with complete strangers. And keep in mind, any setting besides "Only Friends" is just that - a stranger. While "Friends of Friends" sounds innocuous enough, it refers to everyone your friends have added as friends, a large group containing hundreds if not thousands of people you don't know. All it takes is one less-than-selective friend in your network to give an unsavory person access to this information.

3. What Google Can See - Keep Your Data Off the Search Engines

When you visit Facebook's Search Settings page, a warning message pops up. Apparently, Facebook wants to clear the air about what info is being indexed by Google. The message reads:

There have been misleading rumors recently about Facebook indexing all your information on Google. This is not true. Facebook created public search listings in 2007 to enable people to search for your name and see a link to your Facebook profile. They will still only see a basic set of information.

While that may be true to a point, the second setting listed on this Search Settings page refers to exactly what you're allowing Google to index. If the box next to "Allow" is checked, you're giving search engines the ability to access and index any information you've marked as visible by "Everyone." As you can see from the settings discussed above, if you had not made some changes to certain fields, you would be sharing quite a bit with the search engines...probably more information than you were comfortable with. To keep your data private and out of the search engines, do the following:

  1. From your Profile page, hover your mouse over the Settings menu at the top right and click "Privacy Settings" from the list that appears.
  2. Click "Search" from the list of choices on the next page.
  3. Click "Close" on the pop-up message that appears.
  4. On this page, uncheck the box labeled "Allow" next to the second setting "Public Search Results." That keeps all your publicly shared information (items set to viewable by "Everyone") out of the search engines. If you want to see what the end result looks like, click the "see preview" link in blue underneath this setting.

Take 5 Minutes to Protect Your Privacy

While these three settings are, in our opinion, the most critical, they're by no means the only privacy settings worth a look. In a previous article (written prior to December's changes, so now out-of-date), we also looked at things like who can find you via Facebook's own search, application security, and more.

While you may think these sorts of items aren't worth your time now, the next time you lose out on a job because the HR manager viewed your questionable Facebook photos or saw something inappropriate a friend posted on your wall, you may have second thoughts. But why wait until something bad happens before you address the issue?

Considering that Facebook itself is no longer looking out for you, it's time to be proactive about things and look out for yourself instead. Taking a few minutes to run through all the available privacy settings and educating yourself on what they mean could mean the world of difference to you at some later point...That is, unless you agree with Facebook in thinking that the world is becoming more open and therefore you should too.

Note: Other resources on Facebook's latest changes worth reading include MakeUseOf's 8 Steps Toward Regaining your Privacy, 17 steps to protect your privacy from Inside Facebook,

. . . .Yes, Apple's rumored Tablet, with the big unveil set for Wednesday will probably be the game-changer that the iPod and the iPhone were. If the rumors are true, just try to picture and iPhone mated up with a netbook and document editor/manager/file system, touch screen controlled, all partnered with Verizon on it's vast 3G network (and yes, it's superior to AT&T's network).

. . . Just picked up a Blackberry Storm2, and I like it so far, but once Apple breaks it's iPhone contract with AT&T, and Verizon has the iPhone available, in the March to June of this year (2010) timeframe, I'm switching that day. That will be one of those that Verizon will offer the iPhone at a reasonable price at, no matter where you are in your contract.

. . . .I'm looking for some folks to join up on a Google Wave with me and see if we can't get this whole collaborative, cloud computing thing going and give it a try. I believe that there's a lot of value with a collaborative sharepoint site for small business applications, non-profits, limited existence groups, social groups, etc.
. . . .Google Wave address is k.williamsdesolationangel@googlewave.com




. . . . From Slate, David Kairys puts forth some sound thinking on the flawed logic behind last week's Supreme Court decision on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and the probably, (highly probably) results from this travesty. This is a big deal, a really big deal, and in one fell swoop the Supreme Court of the United States of America struck democracy down, felled it, and I don't think in today's corporatist plutonomy (that'd be the the former Republic of the United States of America in which most of us find our residence). What the decision is to me, at least, is prima facie evidence that the Court is bought and paid for, and the Justices lie. The 5 "conservative" justices who ruled in the majority of the decision were all appointed strictly for their stated belief in "conservatism" as applied to judicial principles, that is, the belief that the Constitution and previous court rulings should never be interpreted, but strictly applied. The Court went far beyond the scope of the case before it, and used some twisted logic in telling us that money is free speech and corporations are people.

The court's main rationale is that limits on using corporate treasuries for campaigns are a "classic example of censorship," as Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority. To get there, Kennedy depends on two legal theories that blossomed as constitutional principles in the mid-1970s: money is speech and corporations are people. Both theories are strange, if not simply wrongheaded—why, according to the Constitution or common sense, would money be speech or corporations be people? The court has also employed theories not uniformly but, rather, as constitutional cover for dominance of the electoral system by corporations and by the wealthy.

The first theory appeared in a 1976 decision, Buckley v. Valeo, which invalidated some campaign-finance reforms that came out of Watergate. The Court concluded that most limits on campaign expenditures, and some limits on donations, are unconstitutional because money is itself speech and the "quantity of expression"—the amounts of money—can't be limited.

But in subsequent cases, the conservative justices who had emphatically embraced the money-is-speech principle didn't apply it to money solicited by speakers of ordinary means. For example, the court limited the First Amendment rights of Hare Krishna leafleters soliciting donations in airports to support their own leafleting. The leafleting drew no money-is-speech analysis. To the contrary, the conservative justices, led by Chief Justice Rehnquist, found that by asking for money for leafleting—their form of speech—the Hare Krishnas were being "disruptive" and posing an "inconvenience" to others. In other words, in the court's view, some people's money is speech; others' money is annoying. And the conservative justices have raised no objection to other limits on the quantity of speech, such as limits on the number of picketers.

The money-is-speech theory turns out to be a rhetorical device used exclusively to provide First Amendment protection for all money that wealthy people and businesses want to give to, or to spend, on campaigns. It also doesn't make sense under long established free-speech law. Spending or donating money to support or facilitate speech is expressive and deserves some protection. But money simply doesn't make it into the category of things that are and embody speech, such as books, films, or blogs. Traditional speech-law analysis would separate the speech from the conduct (or "nonspeech") elements of campaign spending and donation and allow considerable leeway to regulate the latter. Even as to "pure" speech, "compelling" government interests are overriding. And spending and donating money seem, among the traditional speech-law categories, a "manner" of speaking that the court has said usually can be "reasonably regulated."

The other basic theory supporting the ruling in Citizens United—the court's claim that, for some purposes, corporations are constitutionally, if not actually, people—comes out of the long history of the development of corporations. But the extension of corporate personhood to campaign speech is a controversial innovation of the conservative justices over the last few decades.

In Citizens United, Justice Kennedy discusses business corporations as if they were clubs or political associations with political viewpoints and elected leaders. But corporate managers don't function as representatives or employees of shareholders, who have no say, no shared political views, and no expectation that their investments will be used for political ends. In the wake of the court's ruling this week, will some corporations pick a party or politics while others channel unheard of amounts of money to both major parties? Will investors be influenced by a corporation's political portfolio?

The Citizens United decision will make it harder to achieve reforms opposed by major corporations and change business as well as politics. Increasing the constitutional rights of corporations beyond their business purposes is really about increasing the rights and power of corporate managers. Government has enabled corporate managers to control huge accumulations of wealth without any personal risk—an arrangement that contributes to wild, bubble-producing economic swings and collapses. Citizens United invites that arrangement directly into politics and elections.


. . . .On that same topic, Roger Fallihee over at Open Salon on how corporations as people can be expected to act:

I for one am hopeful that the legally defined "human corporations" (humcorps), will be governed by what's good and decent rather than merely the bottom line... the same way that moms and dads all over this country manage their families.

If the humcorp is a person then the Chairman/CEO should be considered the parent. Since the strong family is the backbone of our society it would make sense that the strong humcorp, guided by the same principals as the strong family, should be the backbone of our economy.

If they behave like good parents this will benefit us all.

1) Like any good breadwinner, the humcorp should make sure that those closest to it are taken care of. No good American dad or mom is going to feed people in China or Sri Lanka without first making sure that their own family has been fed, so no humcorp should ship a job overseas without making sure that every able-bodied local family member is working.

2) It would be considered abuse if a parent didn't provide medical attention to their children so humcorps should be required to do the same.

3) Just like mom won't let the dog shit on the rug, humcorps must not pollute our environment.

4) When money is tight everyone shares in the pain. If Sally has to give up her violin lessons then mom and dad cancel their trip to Hawaii. If banks lay off tellers, executives forgo their bonuses.

5) A good mom and dad try their hardest to make sure that all of their children have a warm, comfortable place to sleep, a full belly, and decent clothes. The lowest paid full-time employee of a humcorp should make enough money to have at least those three things.

Of course many humcorps will choose the Livia Soprano model of nurturing over the John Walton style. But people guilty of abuse and neglect go to prison, or at the very least lose custody of their children, so humcorps should be held to the same standard.

Depending on how this Supreme Court ruling is interpreted, maybe deadbeat dads and deadbeat corporations will face the same fate... removal from society until they learn how to become better citizens.

. . . .And William J. Astore over at Truthout on how the Supreme Court ruling affirms what most of us already know, that we don't count anymore, and that being a citizen of the Republic is meaningless:

This week's Supreme Court ruling that corporations are protected by "free speech" rights and can contribute enormous sums of money to influence elections is a de jure endorsement of the de facto dominance of corporations over our lives. Indeed, corporations are the new citizens of this country, and ordinary Americans, who used to be known as "citizens," now fall into three categories: consumers, warriors and prisoners.

Think about it. Perhaps you've noticed, as a friend of mine has, that the term "citizen" has largely disappeared from our public and political discourse. And what term has taken its place? Consumer. That's our new role: not to exercise our rights as citizens (perish the thought, that's for corporations to do!), but to exercise our credit cards as consumers. Here one might recall President George W. Bush's inspiring words to Americans after 9-11 to "go shopping" and to visit Disney.

Think again of our regulatory agencies like the FDA or SEC. They no longer take action to protect us as "citizens." Rather, they act to safeguard the confidence of "consumers." And apparently the only news that's worthy of note is that which affects us as consumers.

As one-dimensional "consumers," we've been reduced to obedient eunuchs in thrall to the economy. Our sole purpose is to keep buying and spending. Corporations, meanwhile, are the citizen-activists in our politics, with the voting and speech rights to match their status.

At the same time we've reduced citizens to consumers, we've reduced citizen-soldiers to "warriors" or "warfighters." The citizen-soldier of World War II did his duty in the military, but his main goal was to come home, regain his civilian job, and enjoy the freedoms and rights of American citizenship. Today, our military encourages a "warrior" mentality: a narrow-minded professionalism that emphasizes warfighting skills over citizenship and civic duty.

And if that's not disturbing enough, think of our military's ever-increasing reliance on private military contractors or mercenaries.

The final category of American is all-too-obvious: prisoner. No country in the modern industrialized world incarcerates more of its citizens than the United States. More than 7.3 million Americans currently languish somewhere in our prison system. Our only hope, apparently, for a decline in prison population is the sheer expense to states of caring and feeding all these "offenders."

There you have it. Corporations are our new citizens. And you? If you're lucky, you get to make a choice: consumer, warrior or prisoner. Which will it be?

. . . .And the best commentary summing up what this absolutely unfettered display of rewriting law by the Supreme Court means that I've read this week, from E. J. Dionne, Jr. over at Buzzflash, from the New Republic:
"Populism" is the most overused and misused word in the lexicon of commentary. But thanks to a reckless decision by Chief Justice John Roberts' Supreme Court and also the greed of the nation's financial barons, we have reached a true populist moment in American politics.

The Supreme Court's 5-4 decision last week giving American corporations the right to unlimited political spending was an astonishing display of judicial arrogance, overreach and unjustified activism.

Turning its back on a century of practice and decades of precedent, a narrow right-wing majority on the court decided to change the American political system by tilting it decisively in favor of corporate interests.

An unusually blunt headline in Friday's print edition of The New York Times told the story succinctly: "Lobbies' New Power: Cross Us, and Our Cash Will Bury You."

Think of this rather persuasive moment in a chat between a corporate lobbyist and a senator: "Are you going to block that taxpayer bailout we want? Well, I'm really sorry, but we're going to have to run $2 million worth of really vicious ads against you." The same exchange might take place on tax breaks, consumer protections, environmental rules and worker safeguards.

Defenders of this vast expansion of corporate influence piously claim it's about "free speech." But since when is a corporation, a creation of laws passed by governments, entitled to the same rights as an individual citizen? This ruling will give large business entities far more power than any individual, unless you happen to be Michael Bloomberg or Bill Gates.

The only proper response to this distortion of our political system by ideologically driven justices is a popular revolt. It would be a revolt of a sort deeply rooted in the American political tradition. The most vibrant reform alliances in our history have involved coalitions between populists (who stand up for the interests and values of average citizens) and progressives (who fight against corruption in government and for institutional changes to improve the workings of our democracy). It's time for a new populist-progressive alliance.

. . . And Ezra Klein, with a pithy last word (for today) and succinct summation of the implications of that obscenity spewed forth by Roberts, Kennedy, Scalia, Thomas et al:

The corporate 'I'

Justin Fox -- writing from his new perch as editor of the Harvard Business Review -- thinks that the Supreme Court's vision of the corporation would make Milton Friedman blush:

The Supreme Court was dealing with three different and conflicting strands of law and precedent: (1) the many laws and past court rulings restricting corporate political involvement, (2) the precedent that political spending is equivalent to First-Amendment-protected speech, (3) laws and precedent that establish corporations as persons.

The court majority chose to jettison (1) and stick with (2) and (3). I'm in no position to say the justices were wrong as matter of law. But as a matter of policy and common sense, it's clearly (3) that's most problematic. If corporations are persons, they are — if they behave as Milton Friedman wanted them to — persons with mental and emotional impairments so severe that any decent judge would feel entirely justified in declaring them incompetent.



. . . .I said earlier in the column that I'd talk a bit about Dr. James Hansen's Storms of My Grandchildren. This book is possibly the best I've read yet. Hansen, NASA's leading scientist, and a director, is one of the world's leading experts on climate change. The popular meme of the deniers is that a scientist talking truthfully about climate change and talking about what's happening does so only for personal profit and for acceptance and advancement. This cannot be true with Hansen, who has faced nothing but governmental censorship, scorn and career blocks for talking about what's happening. He has the data, and he also has the accurate picture of what's happening, and and how fast it's happening. I agree with one reviewer, in that, it will truly give you nightmares once the full implication of it sets in .
- The best suggestion that Hansen makes has nothing to do with stopping, or preparing for the effects of climate change. It's to set down and write a letter to your grandchildren, telling them you're sorry for dooming them to a life that will short, nasty, brutal and vicious.

. . . And it would only be Ezra Klein who could dig this one up, a Keynes vs. Hayek rap that sums up the conflicting arguments about where to go economic policy wise right now:

Keynes v. Hayek

Now in convenient rap form.

. . .As per normal, I'm part of group of bloggers, columnists and writers who keep a close eye on the far-Right Religious Right and their ability to be complete fever-swamp wingnuts. Frank Schaeffer, a founder of the Religious Right and who now works daily to fix that karma: Click the underlined hyperlink to be taken to his latest GritTV broadcast.


. . . When are you going to wake up?

. . . .It's time for two new parties, ones that truly represent us. Get in touch with me.

. . . . . .. . . . .Live every day out loud

. . . And that's how it is today, from the last, lonely outpost.
. . . .I miss you Mom and Dad, a lot. Thanks for watching over me and us.


. . . . .. . . .We can salvage this shipwreck of a Nation. It will take all of us working together. It will take all of us understanding the concepts of the Great American Experiment, the political process of the Republic. It's amazing, I don't see eye-to-eye on every issue with my friends, but we respect one another's opinion, share information, share facts, and we don't talk over one another or at one another, we talk with one another. It's amazing what happens when a group of people who share the common goal of leaving a better country for their children and grandchildren can do when they sit down with one another as human beings, and realize that we each have power, and together, we are unstoppable.

. . . .I'm going to ask this of you for the next 30 days. Turn your TV off, turn your radio off. Start to use that beautiful mind that your Creator gave you, that your underpaid, underappreciated High School teachers tried to develop. If you hear something, if you read something, if someone sends you an e-mail that says "this bill will do this", or "this politician says this", I'm asking you to check it out. Check it out this way, use some of the following fact-based sites, who exist solely for the purpose of data and fact-checking.
- If whatever you've heard or read concerns a bill in Congress, use the following -
- Open Congress, it's non-partisan and devoted to a complete tracking of every bill in Congress, both houses. How a bill is developed, who is sponsoring it, what the riders are, what the discussion around it is.
- GovTrack, again non-partisan, non-commercial and open source; devoted to the same things, tracking Congress.
- Open Secrets, one of the most important ones, it tracks the lobbying money and campaign contributions flowing to your congressperson, and most of the time is a pretty good predictor of how they'll vote.
- Political Party Time, non-partisan, devoted to solely tracking political fundraisers, and letting you know exactly what parties your Representative and Senators are throwing for fundraisers and who is attending and how much money they're throwing at them to gain influence.

. . . .If someone sends something to you saying "this is so" or "that is so" or "the President/Senator/Representative said this" use the following:
- Fact Check, non-partisan, designed to separate fact from bullshit and fiction
- Snopes, devoted to the same thing.
- Politifact, devoted to getting to the truth, and separating out the lies that are spread.


. . . .I keep doing this not because I don't have faith, but because I do have faith. I have faith in the ultimate triumph of the spirit, intellect and heart of the American people. I have faith that the people I know want to leave something better for future generations, and know that something is terribly wrong, and want to do something about it. I do it because Paine and Jefferson were brilliant, unique singularities and were right.

. . . .I keep doing this because I don't believe in big im
aginary friends for adults, I don't believe in alien conspiracies running the Government, I don't believe the Roswell bodies are at Wright-Patterson, I don't believe that a big portal will open up on Dec. 21, 2012, I don't believe that the spaceships will show up.

. . . I do believe that the people who have fucked everything up are greedy, avaricious human beings who have been able to steal from the American people, to harm them, who have run unchecked because no one calls it out for what it is. I believe that if we shine the light of day on it, if the people of this country have had enough, we can change it, and change it for the better.

. . . . I keep doing this because I do believe that peopl
e, human beings, unchecked will continue to do what they've done throughout history, and throughout the history of this country. Together, they will find the solutions and provide better for their children and grandchildren.

. . . .I believe in us, I believe in people. I believe in the beauty, power and grace of the individual.

. . . .I do this for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of knowing what they do, what they believe, what they know is right. I do it for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of faith, hope, love, hate, justice, war and peace.

. . . .I do it because I believe in justice, in all it's forms.

. . . .I do this everyday for the people and kids who are tattoed, pierced and inked and keep getting told to get "into the mainstream". I do this everyday for those guys who wear black that you don't understand, you just know there's something about them, and that when the chips are down, when you have to walk down a dark alley somewhere, and you know what's waiting for you at the end of it, and you can only take one person with you, that's who you want walking with you, because you know you'll come back out alive, and that guy doesn't care what it costs him.

. . . .I do this everyday for the outcasts, the misfits, the ones who don't fit and who will turn their back on you and walk away when you try to make them fit into a mold. I do it everyday for everyone who does it their way, knows that they're paying a high price for it, but the freedom is worth the cost.

. . . . I do this everyday for outlaws, cowboys, renegades, pirates and fallen angels. I do it everyday for the people who understand that rock and roll can save their soul, that redemption can be found in a 3-chord lick from a vintage Les Paul. I do it for the men and women who aren't afraid to turn it all the way up, who keep looking for an 11 setting on a volume knob that only goes to 10, who know that rock and roll's got nothing to do with age.


. . . .If right now, you're doing something you don't want to do, stop it. If you've surrounded yourself with people who want you to do or be something other than who you are, walk away. If you've got people around you who actually let it slip out that they think you "should be doing (fill in the blank here)" and it involves your life, your future, your existence as an individual, walk away, right now, and don't look back. You don't owe anyone anything. Live fearlessly. If the people around you can't accept it, can't accept you as you are, really are, they aren't and weren't friends anyhow.

. . . .Don't march to anyone else's drumbeat, don't drink the Kool-Aid, anyone's. Right, Left, conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, Christian, Buddhist, Pagan. Use your own mind, that's why you were given one. Examine, question, do what's right for you first, everything else will fall in place from there, quit looking for the path, you're already on it.

. . . .Come out of the gate each morning with both barrels blazing, pedal-to-metal, full-tilt boogie, all-in and balls-out, what's stopping you? Do you want to live forever? That'd be boring.

. . . .Got your back. somewhere out there in the night

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments before they're ripped away from you. This rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, absolutely no one gets out alive. There aren't a lot of second chances, and we don't get to dictate terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. This ain't no dress rehearsal, and the curtain's gone up, it's real and right now. It's not about yesterday or tomorrow. It's about right fucking here, right fucking now. This, what you're reading, what you're hearing, is the proof, the words, the sounds and the sights of someone changing his own life and his own world and not being afraid to put it out there. What have you done for yourself lately and why are you waiting? Do it now.

The Desolation Angel
from somewhere halfway to Heaven, and just a mile out of Hell


You know someone like me, there's still a few of us left. If we have to, we'll stand at the gates of Hell and hold the last train home for you.. . . . . .

[where: 29.52N, 91.57W]
[where: Chelsea, MI]

24 January 2010

Monday - Football Hangover

Monday January 25, 2010

. . . . . So, the playoffs were in full swing yesterday, the 4 best teams in professional football went at it on Sunday, and you couldn't ask for better games. Indy-New York proved that Mark Sanchez and Rex Ryan are for real, Peyton's ability to step up in a big game merely won out in the end. New Orleans - Minnesota what can you say? The two best teams in pro football head to head and tied up at the end of regulation, very evenly matched. Poorly officiated game, the hit on Favre was entirely illegal and uncalled for. I love Brett Favre, I love that old man, who doesn't know how to say quit, who plays injured, who never quits. I love the Saints too, I work in that city, and I know that the Saints fans are long-suffering and this Saints team deserved to be there. Didn't matter to me who won, I love them both.

. . . . .Finally saw Avatar in Imax 3-D, and the movie kicks ass. I know that message is entirely predictable, very heavy-handed and you could see it coming a long, long way off. By the way, it's not the environmental message in there I'm talking about either. I'm talking about a far, far simpler one. It's the simplest message of all. When you plan in stealing something that belongs to someone else, or taking something away that someone else is the caretaker of, don't let arrogance overcome you, or the thought that you have superior firepower. When you're in an alien environment, you're out of place. Don't push someone to the point where they come back at you with absolutely everything they have, and they no longer even fear losing their lives. They will have a tendency to cut your chest open, rip your heart out, leave you on the ground bleeding out and not give a damn.

. . . That message

. . . .As for the news of the day, it hasn't changed that much since I posted a few days ago.

. . . .I'd like to thank my friend Kay for pointing something out . About 12 million kids will go to bed hungry tonight. There are homeless vets all over the country. 17 million people are out of work, there are elderly people all over who will go to bed tonight without their meds because they can't afford them, but by God, there at 12 separate telethons going for Haiti right now.

. . . .We should be ashamed.

. . . .I don't begrudge the people of Haiti, and in fact, have helped out myself.

. . . .But Jesus people, we can't and won't take care of our own.

. . . .I know. I base out of New Orleans, and I watch that city still dig out from Katrina on a daily basis.

. . . My other rant, it's one that will probably piss a few folks off.

. . . .I got started on it the other day when a bunch of folks all joined one of the damn Facebook groups that was titled something along the lines of "We will not pay (some dollar amount) for Facebook starting on (some date)" and all got hit hard with a pretty nasty virus that hacked their account, and started malwareing out video links to the virus.

. . . .They deserved having it happen to them. Period.

. . . . .It's simple, Facebook's business plan was and is well published. It was published over a year ago, and there aren't any plans, for now, to charge for it. They have over 300 million subscribers, and went cash-flow positive this year, a full year ahead of time, on advertisers.

. . . .Now, there's nothing that says that in the future they won't charge. Once they hone and beta test their web portal, they will become Google size and be able to compete with them, if not overtake them, and at that point, they may well charge. So what? If it's a useful utility, you'll pay for it. Starting this month, the New York Times is finally catching on, and will start charging for web content.

. . . .And if you leave, so what? Do you think they'll really care? At over 300 million subscribers? They could lose over half, and still not feel it.

. . . .You do understand that they're in a profit making business don't you, and you're not entitled to it, for free, in any way, shape, fashion, manner or form.

. . . .It's a business decision on their part to offer it to you for free, that's all. And it could well be a business decision to charge for it.

. . . . . .Now, if you're one of those people who only, and I mean only, spends your time on fucking Farmville, having a lonely cow wander through MY status update page, I can understand your outrage.

. . . .Let me differentiate here, there are many people who utilize Facebook for a whole lot more than Farmville, or their Aquarium or whatever, and they also spend a lot of time communicating a whole lot more.

. . . .What I'm getting at is this, if I'm your "friend" on Facebook, I care about how you are doing, not about your goddamn cow, or your fucking fish. Review a book, tell me how your family is, keep me updated, link to some music, or a photo, link to an article, something interesting.

. . . Take a damn stand for something.

. . . And do it on your own.

. . . .You have absolutely no idea how insecure and stupid it appears whenever I see one of those "If you're a Christian, copy and paste this to your status, I'll bet you won't". Or "If you believe in this, copy and paste to your status, I bet you won't".

. . . .With my particularly autocratic and idiosyncratic personality, put that shit out there, it's a guarantee that I'm not gonna copy and paste a damn thing.

. . . . .I have plenty of opinions, and I'm not afraid to put them out there, and I don't need other people's confirmation that I have a brain and know how to use it.

. . . .That's a good part of what's destroyed this country, a bunch of sheeple now, instead of people.

. . . Anyhow, on to today's selections.

. . . .Yglesias on the double-bind that the Democrats have now put themselves in:

Bill Galston, as best I can tell, always thinks bold progressive action is a bad idea. He always thought taking up health reform was a bad idea. But even he understands that having come so far, it’s doubly suicidal to back out and not pass anything.

To try to put something I’ve said before in another way, folks working on the Hill need to try to step for a moment outside their little circle of Hilliness. Those of us who follow this stuff professional are aware that there is not and has never been a bill called “the Obama health care plan” nor is there any such thing as “Obamacare.” There are, rather, separate pieces of legislation. A House bill, a Senate bill, a Senate Finance Committee draft. And to professionals, there are important differences between these bills. House members voted for the House bill, but the Senate bill is something else entirely. Senate members voted for the Senate bill, but some amendments to make the tax provisions less-unfavorable to union members would be a whole separate bill. I understand all that. I write blog posts about it all the time.

But no normal people care about that even a little. The public has views on the “Obama health care plan.” And 59 out of 59 Democratic incumbent Senators voted for the Obama health care plan. And 218 Democratic House incumbents voted for the Obama health care plan. This plan does not poll well today. And if the narrative about the plan in the media becomes a narrative of failure, all about why Obamacare went down, it will poll even worse. And this plan has unpopular elements, and it has elements that can—and will—be portrayed in a misleadingly negative light. And all this is already baked into the cake. The votes cannot be untaken. But it is still possible to (a) accomplish something for the American people, (b) at least have a chance at turning the narrative around, and (c) avoid demoralizing those people who do like the health care plan.

. . . .And Yglesias again on the insanity of the Supreme Court decision earlier this week:

Something worth mentioning in the context of the Citizens United decision, though not directly tied to the issue at hand there, is that a group doesn’t actually need to spend vast sums of money to have a decisive influence on politics. It just needs to be able to credibly threaten to spend said sums. Bank of America, for example, dedicates $2.3 billion to marketing in 2008 so it’s clear that they’ve got the budget to mount a $100 million series of scathing attacks on a Senator who pisses them off and basically laugh that off (and note that in 2004 total spending on Senate campaigns was just $400 million). And if you can have it be the case that just one Senator goes down to defeat for having pissed off BofA then everyone else will learn the lesson and avoid pissing them off in the future. You don’t need to actually sustain that volume of campaign spending.

I’ve seen a lot of jokes about the idea of corporate-sponsored candidates and such. But the real issue here isn’t so much affirmative activity on the part of businesses as it is negative activity on the part of politicians. We’ll be looking at one further step toward a political system in which large business interests have a de facto veto over all policy questions. Politicians will still be free, of course, to have feisty debates about which party is more to blame for the budget deficit, about who loves the pledge of allegiance more, about who’s more determined to pretend that there won’t be bailouts after the next financial panic, etc.

. . . And Frank Schaeffer, with some action around that Supreme Court decision that I can live with:

Stop the Court and Big Business from Hijacking Democracy

By Frank Schaeffer

T There's only one real answer (legislative parsing aside) to the Supreme Court's attack on democracy by its ruling that big business can spend its billions to support or oppose candidates.

You're looking at it right here. Trust me, we have the power-- it's called corporate fear of losing money, time and privacy.

I'm a blogger and writer. There are thousands like me. Together we have the power to keep corporate America from destroying our democracy. We can unleash the righteous anger of the population in a way that will make the "Tea Parties" look like a Sunday school picnic!

Here's how--

Let us bloggers, writers and activists - of all political positions -- promise corporate America that the first corporations to make use of this Supreme Court ruling will pay a price so steep that no one else will ever want to try it again.

Here's what I propose:

Let all bloggers who agree that democracy is at risk because of this decision unite here today to preemptively declare that any corporation that takes advantage of the Court ruling will:

  • Have its directors, named and outed-- inclusive of office addresses of the person posted widely and repeatedly with calls to picket them 24/7


  • It's executives named and outed-- inclusive of office addresses of the person posted widely and repeatedly with calls to picket them 24/7


  • It's major stock holders named and outed-- inclusive of office addresses of the person posted widely and repeatedly with calls to picket them 24/7


  • That there will be agitation for the corporate headquarters to picketed


  • That the PR firm, add agency and creative people who work on any such add campaign (and media firm, TV and/or radio station's executives that sell them the time) be outed -- inclusive of office addresses of the person posted widely and repeatedly with calls to picket them 24/7


...And that all this will be done by all bloggers to the best of their investigative abilities... and we promise to do this regardless of the content of the add and even if in some individual instance we agree with the candidate (or cause) being helped.

Yes, this is a threat and a promise, actually a sacred vow to sustain our democracy.

Let the first corporation to try stripping the rest of us actual individual citizens of our free speech -- by overwhelming us with their money at the behest of the election-stealing Court -- become a cautionary tale that will not soon be forgotten.

Do you agree?

Will you promise to make this happen?

Then say so! Sign this statement, post it on your blog and pass it on
. . . . .And Krugman, on just how bad the economy still is, don't believe your local media.

Quite aside from everything else going on, the economic recovery isn’t looking very good. Unemployment claims are stalled at a level that bodes ill for for the overall employment picture (don’t count on falling unemployment until that number falls well below 400,000). And the 10-year bond rate, which is my personal index of the market’s expectations about recovery, has been falling off again after rising for several weeks.

No reason to panic — but it does look as if this recovery is going to be jobless for quite a while.

. . .And Frank Rich, in the New York Times on just how out of touch with the American people, this President really is, so much so, it's frightening:

It was not a referendum on Barack Obama, who in every poll remains one of the most popular politicians in America. It was not a rejection of universal health care, which Massachusetts mandated (with Scott Brown’s State Senate vote) in 2006. It was not a harbinger of a resurgent G.O.P., whose numbers remain in the toilet. Brown had the good sense not to identify himself as a Republican in either his campaign advertising or his victory speech.And yet Tuesday’s special election was a dire omen for this White House. If the administration sticks to this trajectory, all bets are off for the political future of a president who rode into office blessed with more high hopes, good will and serious promise than any in modern memory. It’s time for him to stop deluding himself. Yes, last week’s political obituaries were ludicrously premature. Obama’s 50-ish percent first-anniversary approval rating matches not just Carter’s but Reagan’s. (Bushes 41 and 43 both skyrocketed in Year One.) Still, minor adjustments can’t right what’s wrong.

Obama’s plight has been unchanged for months. Neither in action nor in message is he in front of the anger roiling a country where high unemployment remains unchecked and spiraling foreclosures are demolishing the bedrock American dream of home ownership. The president is no longer seen as a savior but as a captive of the interests who ginned up the mess and still profit, hugely, from it.

That’s no place for any politician of any party or ideology to be. There’s a reason why the otherwise antithetical Leno and Conan camps are united in their derision of NBC’s titans. A TV network has become a handy proxy for every mismanaged, greedy, disloyal and unaccountable corporation in our dysfunctional economy. It’s a business culture where the rich and well-connected get richer while the employees, shareholders and customers get the shaft. And the conviction that the game is fixed is nonpartisan. If the tea party right and populist left agree on anything, it’s that big bailed-out banks have and will get away with murder while we pay the bill on credit cards — with ever-rising fees.

Politically, no other issue counts. In last weekend’s Washington Post/ABC News poll, 42 percent of Americans chose the economy as the country’s most pressing concern. Only 5 percent picked terrorism, and 2 percent Afghanistan. Obama’s highest approval ratings are now on foreign policy and national security issues — despite the relentless hammering from the Cheney right — but voters don’t care.

Does health care matter? Not as much as you’d think after this yearlong crusade. In the Post/ABC poll, the issue was second-tier — at 24 percent. Obama has blundered, not by positioning himself too far to the left but by landing nowhere — frittering away his political capital by being too vague, too slow and too deferential to Congress. The smartest thing said as the Massachusetts returns came in Tuesday night was by Howard Fineman on MSNBC: “Obama took all his winnings and turned them over to Max Baucus.”

Worse, the master communicator in the White House has still not delivered a coherent message on his signature policy. He not only refused to signal his health care imperatives early on but even now he, like Congressional Democrats, has failed to explain clearly why and how reform relates to economic recovery — or, for that matter, what he wants the final bill to contain. Sure, a president needs political wiggle room as legislative sausage is made, but Scott Brown could and did drive his truck through the wide, wobbly parameters set by Obama.

Ask yourself this: All these months later, do you yet know what the health care plan means for your family’s bottom line, your taxes, your insurance? It’s this nebulousness, magnified by endless Senate versus House squabbling, that has allowed reform to be caricatured by its foes as an impenetrable Rube Goldberg monstrosity, a parody of deficit-ridden big government. Since most voters are understandably confused about what the bills contain, the opponents have been able to attribute any evil they want to Obamacare, from death panels to the death of Medicare, without fear of contradiction.

It’s too late to rewrite that history, but it may not be too late for White House decisiveness. Whatever happens now — good, bad or ugly — must happen fast. Each day Washington spends dickering over health care is another day lost while the election-year economy, stupid, remains intractable for Americans who are suffering.

On the economic front, Obama needs both stylistic and substantive makeovers. He has stepped up the populist rhetoric lately — and markedly after political disaster struck last week — but few find this serene Harvard-trained lawyer credible when slinging populist rhetoric at “fat-cat” bankers. His two principal economic policy makers are useless, if not counterproductive, surrogates. Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary, was probably fatally compromised from the moment his tax lapses surfaced; now he is stalked by the pileup of unanswered questions about the still-not-transparent machinations at the New York Fed when he was knee-deep in the A.I.G. bailout. Lawrence Summers, the top administration economic guru, is a symbol of the Clinton-era deregulatory orgy that helped fuel the bubble.

The White House clearly knows this duo is a political albatross. After the news broke that 85,000 more jobs had been lost in December despite some economists’ more optimistic predictions, Christina Romer, a more user-friendly (though still academic) economic hand, was dispatched to the Sunday shows. This is at best a makeshift solution.

Obama needs more independent economists like Paul Volcker, who was hastily retrieved from exile last week after the Massachusetts massacre prompted the White House to tardily embrace his strictures on big banks. Obama also needs economic spokesmen who are not economists and who can authentically speak to life on the ground. Obama must also reconnect. The former community organizer whose credit card was denied at the Hertz counter during the 2000 Democratic convention now spends too much time at the White House presiding over boardroom-table meetings and stiff initiative rollouts instead of engaging with Americans not dressed in business suits.

When it comes to economic substance, small symbolic gestures (the proposed new bank “fee”) won’t cut it. Nor will ineffectual presidential sound bites railing against Wall Street bonuses beyond the federal government’s purview. There’s no chance of a second stimulus. The White House will have to jawbone banks on foreclosures, credit card racketeering and the loosening of credit to small businesses. This means taking on bankers who were among the Obama campaign’s biggest backers and whose lobbyists have castrated regulatory reform by buying off congressmen of both parties. It means pressing for all constitutional remedies that might counter last week’s 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision allowing corporate campaign contributions to buy off even more.

It’s become so easy to pin financial elitism on Democrats that the morning after Brown’s victory the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee had the gall to accuse them of being the “one party who bailed out the automakers and insurance companies.” Never mind that the Bush White House gave us the bank (and A.I.G.) bailouts, or that the G.O.P. is even more in hock than Democrats to corporate patrons. The Obama administration is so overstocked with Goldman Sachs-Robert Rubin alumni and so tainted by its back-room health care deals with pharmaceutical and insurance companies that conservative politicians, Brown included, can masquerade shamelessly as the populist alternative.

Last year the president pointedly studied J.F.K.’s decision-making process on Vietnam while seeking the way forward in Afghanistan. In the end, he didn’t emulate his predecessor and escalated the war. We’ll see how that turns out. Meanwhile, Obama might look at another pivotal moment in the Kennedy presidency — and this time heed the example.

The incident unfolded in April 1962 — some 15 months into the new president’s term — when J.F.K. was infuriated by the U.S. Steel chairman’s decision to break a White House-brokered labor-management contract agreement and raise the price of steel (but not wages). Kennedy was no radical. He hailed from the American elite — like Obama, a product of Harvard, but, unlike Obama, the patrician scion of a wealthy family. And yet he, like that other Harvard patrician, F.D.R., had no hang-ups about battling his own class.

Kennedy didn’t settle for the generic populist rhetoric of Obama’s latest threats to “fight” unspecified bankers some indeterminate day. He instead took the strong action of dressing down U.S. Steel by name. As Richard Reeves writes in his book “President Kennedy,” reporters were left “literally gasping.” The young president called out big steel for threatening “economic recovery and stability” while Americans risked their lives in Southeast Asia. J.F.K. threatened to sic his brother’s Justice Department on corporate records and then held firm as his opponents likened his flex of muscle to the power grabs of Hitler and Mussolini. (Sound familiar?) U.S. Steel capitulated in two days. The Times soon reported on its front page that Kennedy was at “a high point in popular support.”

Can anyone picture Obama exerting such take-no-prisoners leadership to challenge those who threaten our own economic recovery and stability at a time of deep recession and war? That we can’t is a powerful indicator of why what happened in Massachusetts will not stay in Massachusetts if this White House fails to reboot.

. . . When are you going to wake up?

. . . .It's time for two new parties, ones that truly represent us. Get in touch with me.

. . . . . .. . . . .Live every day out loud

. . . And that's how it is today, from the last, lonely outpost.
. . . .I miss you Mom and Dad, a lot. Thanks for watching over me and us.


. . . . .. . . .We can salvage this shipwreck of a Nation. It will take all of us working together. It will take all of us understanding the concepts of the Great American Experiment, the political process of the Republic. It's amazing, I don't see eye-to-eye on every issue with my friends, but we respect one another's opinion, share information, share facts, and we don't talk over one another or at one another, we talk with one another. It's amazing what happens when a group of people who share the common goal of leaving a better country for their children and grandchildren can do when they sit down with one another as human beings, and realize that we each have power, and together, we are unstoppable.

. . . .I'm going to ask this of you for the next 30 days. Turn your TV off, turn your radio off. Start to use that beautiful mind that your Creator gave you, that your underpaid, underappreciated High School teachers tried to develop. If you hear something, if you read something, if someone sends you an e-mail that says "this bill will do this", or "this politician says this", I'm asking you to check it out. Check it out this way, use some of the following fact-based sites, who exist solely for the purpose of data and fact-checking.
- If whatever you've heard or read concerns a bill in Congress, use the following -
- Open Congress, it's non-partisan and devoted to a complete tracking of every bill in Congress, both houses. How a bill is developed, who is sponsoring it, what the riders are, what the discussion around it is.
- GovTrack, again non-partisan, non-commercial and open source; devoted to the same things, tracking Congress.
- Open Secrets, one of the most important ones, it tracks the lobbying money and campaign contributions flowing to your congressperson, and most of the time is a pretty good predictor of how they'll vote.
- Political Party Time, non-partisan, devoted to solely tracking political fundraisers, and letting you know exactly what parties your Representative and Senators are throwing for fundraisers and who is attending and how much money they're throwing at them to gain influence.

. . . .If someone sends something to you saying "this is so" or "that is so" or "the President/Senator/Representative said this" use the following:
- Fact Check, non-partisan, designed to separate fact from bullshit and fiction
- Snopes, devoted to the same thing.
- Politifact, devoted to getting to the truth, and separating out the lies that are spread.


. . . .I keep doing this not because I don't have faith, but because I do have faith. I have faith in the ultimate triumph of the spirit, intellect and heart of the American people. I have faith that the people I know want to leave something better for future generations, and know that something is terribly wrong, and want to do something about it. I do it because Paine and Jefferson were brilliant, unique singularities and were right.

. . . .I keep doing this because I don't believe in big im
aginary friends for adults, I don't believe in alien conspiracies running the Government, I don't believe the Roswell bodies are at Wright-Patterson, I don't believe that a big portal will open up on Dec. 21, 2012, I don't believe that the spaceships will show up.

. . . I do believe that the people who have fucked everything up are greedy, avaricious human beings who have been able to steal from the American people, to harm them, who have run unchecked because no one calls it out for what it is. I believe that if we shine the light of day on it, if the people of this country have had enough, we can change it, and change it for the better.

. . . . I keep doing this because I do believe that peopl
e, human beings, unchecked will continue to do what they've done throughout history, and throughout the history of this country. Together, they will find the solutions and provide better for their children and grandchildren.

. . . .I believe in us, I believe in people. I believe in the beauty, power and grace of the individual.

. . . .I do this for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of knowing what they do, what they believe, what they know is right. I do it for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of faith, hope, love, hate, justice, war and peace.

. . . .I do it because I believe in justice, in all it's forms.

. . . .I do this everyday for the people and kids who are tattoed, pierced and inked and keep getting told to get "into the mainstream". I do this everyday for those guys who wear black that you don't understand, you just know there's something about them, and that when the chips are down, when you have to walk down a dark alley somewhere, and you know what's waiting for you at the end of it, and you can only take one person with you, that's who you want walking with you, because you know you'll come back out alive, and that guy doesn't care what it costs him.

. . . .I do this everyday for the outcasts, the misfits, the ones who don't fit and who will turn their back on you and walk away when you try to make them fit into a mold. I do it everyday for everyone who does it their way, knows that they're paying a high price for it, but the freedom is worth the cost.

. . . . I do this everyday for outlaws, cowboys, renegades, pirates and fallen angels. I do it everyday for the people who understand that rock and roll can save their soul, that redemption can be found in a 3-chord lick from a vintage Les Paul. I do it for the men and women who aren't afraid to turn it all the way up, who keep looking for an 11 setting on a volume knob that only goes to 10, who know that rock and roll's got nothing to do with age.


. . . .If right now, you're doing something you don't want to do, stop it. If you've surrounded yourself with people who want you to do or be something other than who you are, walk away. If you've got people around you who actually let it slip out that they think you "should be doing (fill in the blank here)" and it involves your life, your future, your existence as an individual, walk away, right now, and don't look back. You don't owe anyone anything. Live fearlessly. If the people around you can't accept it, can't accept you as you are, really are, they aren't and weren't friends anyhow.

. . . .Don't march to anyone else's drumbeat, don't drink the Kool-Aid, anyone's. Right, Left, conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, Christian, Buddhist, Pagan. Use your own mind, that's why you were given one. Examine, question, do what's right for you first, everything else will fall in place from there, quit looking for the path, you're already on it.

. . . .Come out of the gate each morning with both barrels blazing, pedal-to-metal, full-tilt boogie, all-in and balls-out, what's stopping you? Do you want to live forever? That'd be boring.

. . . .Got your back. somewhere out there in the night

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments before they're ripped away from you. This rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, absolutely no one gets out alive. There aren't a lot of second chances, and we don't get to dictate terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. This ain't no dress rehearsal, and the curtain's gone up, it's real and right now. It's not about yesterday or tomorrow. It's about right fucking here, right fucking now. This, what you're reading, what you're hearing, is the proof, the words, the sounds and the sights of someone changing his own life and his own world and not being afraid to put it out there. What have you done for yourself lately and why are you waiting? Do it now.

The Desolation Angel
from somewhere halfway to Heaven, and just a mile out of Hell


You know someone like me, there's still a few of us left. If we have to, we'll stand at the gates of Hell and hold the last train home for you.. . . . . .

[where: 29.52N, 91.57W]
[where: Chelsea, MI]

21 January 2010

Note to self: Yes, I was right

Friday January 22, 2010

. . . . .
Yes, I know it's been a while, and a lot has happened. It's a work-life balance thing. My job has changed considerably. I work on a 7-7 rotation, instead of 14-14, which means essentially 9 and 5, since I live in the upper Midwest but work in the Gulf of Mexico, I can always add 2 days travel time on either end. It keeps me busy, but it pays the bills with two boys in college, and I'm part of launching a new protocol at work, which keeps me considerably busy.

. . . . .So, anyhow, music that you should be listening to, but probably aren't. Every link I provide here is to the artist's website, where you can purchase their music from independent distributors, and no, I don't do MP3 downloads, too much data lost over America's antiquated, slow broadband data network. Buy the CD's.
- Danny Barnes, with his newest release Pizza Box. The words genre-bending are often thrown about, but in this case, it's well-deserved. Danny Barnes takes the banjo in the same direction for rock and roll, that Bela Fleck took it towards jazz.
-
Kevin Deal, his latest outing is 7. Kevin is a Texas musician, with an Austin twist on rock and roll/country and doesn't fit comfortably anywhere, which is why I love him.
- Jubal Lee Young, whose The Last Free Place in America is brilliant. Jubal is the son of legendary musicians (Americana) Steve Young and Terry Newkirk. Jubal's music is classic country-rock/Americana with a lyrical base that comes straight out of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Jubal fits right in well with James McMurtry, Chris Knight, Steve Earle and Otis Gibbs and paints a realistic, dark, smoky picture of an America that we all know, and for many of us, have walked in.
- James Otto, whose Sunset Man is perfect Muzik Mafia right out of Nashville. For those of you completely out of the loop, the Muzik Mafia is a loose confederation of musicians who are near and dear to Kid Rock's heart, and whose members include Big & Rich and Gretchen Wilson. 'Nuff said.

. . . . .In all the movies you see this winter with blockbusters like Avatar and The Book of Eli, with big romantic comedies like It's Complicated and Up In The Air, with an action thriller like From Paris, With Love opening soon, don't miss Crazy Heart, this year's The Wrestler. Jeff Bridges' performance is stunning, as a down and out outlaw country rocker, whose songs have propelled Colin Ferrell's character to fame and supporting work from Robert Duvall and the always underrated Maggie Gyllenhall, it's a can't miss. I've lived too much of it myself, and know too many people for whom parts of it ring painfully true. The soundtrack was done by another of my favorite musicians you should be listening to, but aren't, Ryan Bingham, an ex-pro bull rider with a keen lyrical sense.

. . . .Let me put this on record. Jay Leno is a douche, and the execs at NBC are asshats.

. . . .And another reason that I very much held off on writing this week was to wait and see what would happen around two very, very big things. They did and we'll tackle the most important one first.

. . . .That would be the obscene decision, rendered by the extreme Right-wing judicial activists; Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy and Alito, on the Supreme Court of the United States, who on Thursday handed down the decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, repealing decades of campaign finance law and throwing the door wide open for blatant ownership of the electoral process, campaigns and the United States Government by corporations. Forever more, there will be no limit on campaign contributions by corporations, nor a limit on how many PAC's they can form.

. . . .So let me get this straight; Obama's birth certificate is a fake, but corporations are people? Welcome to the United States of America. What a country.

. . . . .Hell, Goldman-Sachs announced their candidacy for President for the 2012 elections. They simply said, let's cut out the middleman.

. . . .This is absolutely insane. Now, it's become blatant. I knew, we all knew that corporations and Wall Street owned Washington, but it's now apparent that JP Morgan Chase, David Rockefeller and Goldman-Sachs own the Supreme Court as well.

. . . .The one thing positive that came out of this is the exposure of the Roberts court as the one dreaded word that the Right loves to throw around; "judicial activism". In this case, Roberts showed that he was a bought and owned tool for the corporate interests that put him there in the first place, and he and his 4 cronies rewrote law, going far, far beyond the original scope of the case in front of them, and did so to play toady for their corporate masters.

. . . .Washington, democracy, the political process is now completely out of reach of, and out of touch with, the average citizen, and forever more will be. This is a corner, that once being turned, cannot be returned to. The path cannot be retraced.

. . . .We are now, very blatantly, a corporatocracy, no longer a democracy, no longer a republic.

. . . .Citibank's dream of the plutonomy has come true, and will only get worse. When 42% of the wealth of this nation is owned by 1% of the population, with the percentage getting respectively, larger and smaller by the month, it's over.

. . . .Goodbye democracy. You were a grand experiment that lasted almost 200 years, but in 1978, that changed forever, and today's decision means that we have turned a final corner with no hope of return. Hello, indentured servitude for the rest of us. You, all of you, will soon wish for a return to the near-anarchy of pure democracy, wax nostalgic for a Congress and a White House that debated one another, fought, and bickered.

. . . .The other biggie this week was simple, and very predictable, as were the resulting actions. That would be Brown vs. Coakley in Massachusets for Teddy Kennedy's empty Senate seat.

. . . .Yes, Brown is a Republican, but his stances and positions are far to the left of even Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, and Coakley ran a miserable campaign.
- Brown won, which in the subsequent 24 hours brought a feeding frenzy about in the Democratic Party, much like the feeding frenzy that was seen in the Republican Party after last year's elections.
- What it means is simple, that miserable piece of shit, bought and paid for by lobbyists, only good for enriching health insurance companies and pharmaceutical manufacturers Senate Health Care bill will die a well deserved death.
. . . .Let me divert here for a moment. Yes, the health care system in this country is broken, eating up 16% to 18% of GDP, while delivering an inferior product to those it does deliver it to, leaving 46 million on the outside, either not getting treated and dying, or waiting too long to see a doctor, most of the time at an emergency room or an urgent care clinic, and thereby using that much more resources for something that could have been taken care of earlier.
- Hopefully, any Health Care Reform bill that comes about now would address some of the items in Health Care that need addressing, like 33% of physician's time being spent on administrative paperwork, and forms, and reinstitute the 4% cap on profits for health care insurers that existed pre-Reagan (the man who literally started this mess).
- What it also guarantees is that that probably won't happen, and the Senate will stay in total gridlock for the next 3 years. You thought they did nothing now? Wait. The obstructionist party of No, whose entire aim is to bring down America will start doing gridlock battle with the lunatic nanny-state party of redistributing wealth and deciding what's best for everyone, and the quagmire that Washington's been in for the last year, will get even worse.
- What it did do was re-focus this President on priorities, and what the people want. The message came through to him loud and clear. By Thursday, he was focused on the true felons in the mess in this country, the CEO's and Operating principles of the 5 "Too Big To Fail" banks and the Wall Street speculators who drove the bubble that doomed this country's economy.

. . . .The important thing is that finally it looks like Summers and Geithner have been thrown to the side of the road like the cheap pick-ups they were and the Prez is finally listening to the big old guy, Volcker.

. . . .Taibbi, on how thin the ice is that Geithner is walking on:

Obama shifts power away from Geithner

Senior administration officials say there is now broad consensus within the White House and the Treasury for the plan advanced by Volcker, who leads an outside economic advisory group for the president. At its heart, Volcker’s plan restricts banks from making speculative investments that do not benefit their customers. He has argued that such speculative activity played a key role in the financial crisis. [Source]

Obviously this is good news, but what I find irritating about it is that the government only starts listening to its voters once the more corrupt option turns out to be untenable. They are making these moves out of necessity now, and that’s great — but it’s too bad they had to drive us right to the edge of the cliff before they thought about backing up.

There are rumors all over the place that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is about gone, and I’ve even heard some gossip indicating that Rahm Emanuel might have to start watching his back. Hey, whatever works. Obama, as is his nature I think, tried to take the fork in the road all year, making nice to his base while actually delivering to his money people, not realizing the two were perpetually in conflict. His failure to make a clear choice, or rather to make the right choice, is what has doomed him everywhere politically.

It will be interesting to see what comes next, whether this is just for show or not.



. . .All I can say is, it's about time.

. . . . The other thing that the Senate and House won't do is address climate change, which outweighs the financial crisis as the single most important issue facing us.

. . . .Now, let's get another thing straight about me and climate change. It is happening, the data proves that, and anyone living through this winter anywhere here on Earth should know that by now. Where both the Left and the Right have it all wrong is in their positions. The Right has it wrong in denying that it's happening, it is, period. Where they have it right is in it's causes. It's not man-made. We have exacerbated it, accelerated it, but it's causes are far more universal and older than that, and also inevitable, we cannot escape it. Where the Left has it right is that it is happening, but again, all wrong in the causation. There's a lot of people getting very rich over people's worry and guilt, Al Gore being first and foremost among them, becoming a billionaire off his carbon trading bank.

. . .The cause is simple, it's sunspots, and a natural eons and ages long cycle. What we need to be doing is preparing for what's coming. A melting of the polar ice caps, making coastal lands uninhabitable, and cities like London, Singapore, Hong Kong and New Orleans disappear from the maps, and displacing 10's of millions of people. What it means is that large stretches of arable land will be gone, and unable to grow food, leading to even more unrest and wars over land and food.

. . . .What it means for us a nation is even simpler. We have 5% of the world's population, and we consume 25% of it's resources. That is simply an unsustainable model, economically or physically, there is no perpetual motion machine, no snake oil, no elixir that can make that happen.

. . . .What we need to be doing is preparing for what is, as has now been found, a rapidly accelerating curve. We won't. Congress will stay stalled, there won't be the money to do a damn thing, and we will have doomed our kids and grandkids, to world in total upheaval.

. . .Sorry to be such a naysayer and a doom prophet, but unless we do something, and do it now, to prepare for what now is inevitable, we will be caught totally unprepared.

. . . .And one more thing. I want to congratulate Cindy McCain, the wife of Sen. John McCain and Meghan McCain, his daughter, for their very public support and standing up and speaking out for marriage equality, and gay and lesbian civil rights. They risk their very souls with the Republican Party (and their husband/dad) for that one.

. . . .So, the round-up from around the horn and back from all of your favorites:
- From Steve Clemons, who did an interview with Joseph Stiglitz, one of the clearest-minded economists around on the new direction that the White House is taking in going after Wall Street:

This is a seven-minute clip of a high substance, politically significant exchange with Nobel Economics Laureate Joseph Stiglitz -- who hopes that Obama's economic team will soon -- finally -- learn from the serious mistakes they have made.

Stiglitz says that there is a major battle of ideas underway. He said that the belief that markets were self-correcting, efficient, and no need for government was completely wrong. He said that regulation is vital.


Stiglitz also said that the first stimulus package was badly designed, deployed, and inadequate in size. He said that there will need to be another stimulus package -- mostly focused on helping the states manage their state budget implosions. Stiglitz said that states face a collective $200 billion shortfall in 2010 and that the employment and program slashing states will do is very de-stimulative.

Stiglitz also said that the bank bailout schemes perversely bailed out the banks that made profits through gambling and did virtually nothing for the smaller community and regional banks that made loans and profits in normal ways. Stiglitz lamented that many of these good institutions that did nothing wrong were the ones allowed to go under.

Joe Stiglitz is worth spending a lot more time than 7 minutes with -- and one can do that here by watching a longer presentation with him followed by questions and answers from a New America Foundation audience.

Freefall.jpgOr, better yet, read his new book, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy -- which is #81 on Amazon's list as I write this.

Suffice it to say that the course of ideas that Stiglitz has been advocating are what many who supported Barack Obama thought they would be getting from the administration, but instead of Stiglitzianism, America got Rubinism -- not from a team of rivals but from a "team of Rubins."

. . . .Jason Linkins, on just how truly terrifying that decision from the SCOTUS really, really was and why anyone, absolutely anyone, no matter what your political stripe, should be storming that building with flaming torches:

If you're looking for a concise way of capturing today's Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, how about: "We are all royally, hopelessly fucked for the rest of recorded time"? It's coarse, I know, but it really does the trick.

As you may have heard, in a 5-4 decision, the SCOTUS essentially went at the teeth of McCain-Feingold reform with hammer and tongs, leaving America in a "David After Dentist" state, wailing, "What's happening? Is this going to be forever?" Except that its not the anesthetic talking -- it's the very real, excruciating pain.

In one swoop, the court did away with nearly everything in federal campaign finance law, allowing corporations free reign to inject as much money as they jolly well please into federal campaigns. The decision completes what Slate's Dahlia Lithwick calls "The Pinocchio Project," in which the Court transforms "a corporation into a real live boy," complete with personhood, free-speech rights and the unfettered opportunity to drown the body politic in a tidal wave of perverse incentives.

Here's what President Barack Obama had to say about this:

"With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics," said President Obama in a statement. "It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans... That's why I am instructing my Administration to get to work immediately with Congress on this issue. We are going to talk with bipartisan Congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision."

Oh, but the president is being charitable! Here are some data points to chew on:

A very large percentage of U.S. corporations are owned by foreign persons or entities. In 2006, USA Today reported: "Nearly one in five U.S. oil refineries is owned by foreign companies. Foreign companies also have a sizable presence in running power plants, chemical factories and water treatment facilities in the United States." It was also reported that, "Roads and bridges built by U.S. taxpayers are starting to be sold off, and so far foreign-owned companies are doing the buying." In 2008, it was reported that foreign ownership of U.S. companies "more than doubled" between 1996 and 2005. To get a fix on the spending power, consider this: "The total receipts of foreign-owned companies were $1.7 trillion in 1996 and just $39 billion in 1971."

I'm not trying to stoke zero-sum xenophobia, here. The idea of foreign persons or entities seizing -- by judicial fiat -- such a dramatic advantage in terms of influence over the American people seems to me to be, as they say, less than ideal.

In the 2008 election, Barack Obama and John McCain combined to spend about $1 billion, a number that Politico's Jeanne Cummings called "an unprecedented figure." And the combined expenditures of the entire 2008 cycle came to "a record-shattering $5.3 billion in spending by candidates, political parties and interest groups on the congressional and presidential races."

TOTAL AMOUNT OF BONUSES PAID OUT BY GOLDMAN-SACHS, 2009: $16 billion

TOTAL AMOUNT OF BONUSES PAID OUT BY JPMORGAN CHASE, 2009: $27 billion

TOTAL AMOUNT OF BONUSES PAID OUT BY MORGAN STANLEY, 2009: $14 billion

TOTAL AMOUNT OF BONUSES PAID OUT BY CITIGROUP, 2009: $25 billion

In the Massachusetts Senate election, Martha Coakley raised about $5 million and spent about $4 million -- obviously not particularly well, considering Scott Brown only spent about one-fifth of that amount. But! Imagine what might have happened if that election, in which America's insurance companies believed they had tens of billions of dollars at stake, took place in the environment created by this Supreme Court decision. Yeah, that feeling is the hair standing on the back of your neck.

What, if anything, is preserved from campaign finance reform? Well, corporations still have to disclose the money they spend -- I'm sure that you're only too familiar with the awesome job the media has done penetrating the shadow network of corporate influence, which I would characterize as "the null set." Also, issue ads will continue to require those teensy disclaimers at the bottom of the screen, divulging the entity behind the ad. So, look forward to ads from outfits like "Americans For Freedom and Awesomeness" and crap like that.

Let's go back to Lithwick, on the scene as this decision was rendered:

While Stevens is reading the portion of his concurrence about the "cautious view of corporate power" held by the framers, I see Justice Thomas chuckle softly...Stevens hammers, more than once this morning from the bench on the principle that corporations "are not human beings" and "corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires." He insists that "they are not themselves members of 'We the People' by whom and for whom our Constitution was established."


But you can plainly see the weariness in Stevens eyes and hear it in his voice today as he is forced to contend with a legal fiction that has come to life today, a sort of constitutional Frankenstein moment when corporate speech becomes even more compelling than the "voices of the real people" who will be drowned out. Even former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist once warned that treating corporate spending as the First Amendment equivalent of individual free speech is "to confuse metaphor with reality." Today that metaphor won a very real victory at the Supreme Court. And as a consequence some very real corporations are feeling very, very good.

This decision is nutlog, utterly bonkers. If corporations can't be held to account in electoral politics, we are seriously at an end. So it's a good thing that John Edwards's love child is clogging up the news cycle today!

. . . .Cesca, on the maniac fever swamp wingnuts who now occupy the Party of No and their sweaty, heaving response to that insane ruling (Note to self: Yes, they really do want to see America destroyed):

Of course the Republicans are. Because they're all about populism, right? Not only are the Republicans against taxing the banks to recover the TARP funds, but they're also against re-regulating Wall Street, and they're in favor of allowing corporations to spend unlimited cash on political campaigns (that is, unless that corporation is run by George Soros, right?). The GOP reactions to the Citizens United decision:

– Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX): “It is about a nonprofit group’s ability to speak about the public issue. I can’t think of a more fundamental First Amendment issue. … [The ruling could] open up resources that have not previously been available [for Republicans].” [NYT]

– Rep. Steve King (R-IA): “The Constitution protects the rights of citizens and employers to express their viewpoints on political issues. Today’s Supreme Court decision affirms the Bill of Rights and is a victory for liberty and free speech.” [Statement]

– Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN): “If the freedom of speech means anything, it means protecting the right of private citizens to voice opposition or support for their elected representatives. The fact that the Court overturned a 20-year precedent speaks volumes about the importance of this issue.” [Statement]

– Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY): The court took a step toward “restoring the First Amendment rights [of corporations and unions]. … By previously denying this right, the government was picking winners and losers.” [AP]

– RNC Chairman Michael Steele: “Today’s decision by the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. FEC, serves as an affirmation of the constitutional rights provided to Americans under the first amendment. Free speech strengthens our democracy.” [Statement]

– Senate Candidate Marco Rubio: “Today’s SCOTUS decision on McCain-Feingold is a victory for free speech.” [Statement]

And here's the president's response to Citizens United:

With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics. It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans. This ruling gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington — while undermining the influence of average Americans who make small contributions to support their preferred candidates.

That’s why I am instructing my Administration to get to work immediately with Congress on this issue. We are going to talk with bipartisan Congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision. The public interest requires nothing less.

My only gripe is "bipartisan," of course. But I think the battle lines are clear. The Republicans are on the side of the corporations overpowering common voters.

Oh, and by the way:

President Obama earlier today announced his proposed "Volcker Rule," which would limit the reckless risk-taking of big banks by barring them from "from owning, investing, or sponsoring hedge fund or private equity funds and from engaging in proprietary trading."
. . . .Charles Johnson, over at Little Green Footballs, putting facts, faces and names behind my absolute loathing of the Tea Party movement, and why I consider them nothing more than non-thinking meat sacks who haven't a clue as to what democratic process in a Republic is:

Tea Party 'Hero' Arrested For Rape, Stolen Grenade Launcher Discovered

US News | Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 6:11:16 pm PST

A former Marine and current member of the Oathkeepers militia group, who was a featured speaker at the July 4th tea party in Oklahoma, has been arrested on suspicion of rape — and when his home was searched, police discovered a grenade launcher stolen from a California Army base: Domestic Terrorist In Texoma.

A Stephens County man is behind bars on a rape charge.

“We come home and those bastards want to talk about how we’re domestic terrorists and a threat to this country. It makes me so angry,” said Charles Dyer, who has been accused of committing rape.

Dyer has been charged with first degree rape. When police searched Dyer’s home for evidence on that charge, they found a grenade launcher that matched the description of one of three that were reportedly stolen from an Army post in California.

More incriminating evidence against Dyer has surfaced in a YouTube video. The video shows Dyer, a former U.S. Marine, talking proudly about domestic terrorism. “Join the military?”, said Dyer. “Depends on what you want to do with it. Me? Im going to use my training and become one of those domestic terrorists that you’re so afraid of from the DHS reports.”

The video of Dyer on YouTube shows him with some friends at a paintball facility in California. Dyer’s comments in the video are not only powerful but disturbing and show his contempt for authority.

“I’m certainly not going to be hiding from my command anymore. I’m not hiding from ATF. Not hiding from FBI. Any organization. If they want to come get me I’m not going to be afraid,” Dyer said. “Patriots we are not overpowered. If we united under one banner and fight for our children’s liberity and the constitution, our resolve is invincible to any standing army,” Dyer said.

Here’s video of Dyer speaking at the Oklahoma tea party, about his duty to uphold his “oath to the Constitution” and resist the federal government.

UPDATE at 1/20/10 10:55:46 pm:

And here’s the video mentioned in the news story above, in which Dyer talks about using his military training “to become a domestic terrorist.”

(Hat tip: pnw_pirate.)

. . . .And another one on that sick, twisted movement, and why they disgust me:

'Tea Party Leader': The GOP Never Calls Me Back

US News | Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 2:56:26 pm PST

Dale Robertson is in the Washington Times again, described as a “leading figure” in the tea party movement: ‘Tea party’ activists feel slighted by GOP.

Leading figures in the burgeoning “tea party” movement complain they are being ignored by the Republican National Committee, despite having already shown their clout in taking down moderate Republicans in a New York special House race and the Florida Republican Party hierarchy.

“I have called into the RNC many times, and they still haven’t called me back,” said Dale Robertson, head of TeaParty.org, which he claims has upwards of 7 million members. “I’ve called them, lots of times. I called them this morning. I called them yesterday. It’s like they ignore you as they try to figure out a strategy on how to defeat you.”

Here’s Robertson at the February 27, 2009 Houston Tea Party. Now why in the world would the GOP fail to return his calls? It’s a real head-scratcher.

The last time I posted a link to a Washington Times article about Robertson, I got several insult-laced emails outraged that I described him as a “tea party leader,” saying that he had nothing to do with the Houston tea party groups, and demanding that I post a correction. And now here he is again in the far right Washington Times, touted as one of the main leaders of the teabaggers, and boasting that his group has 7 million members.

Don’t bother emailing again, folks; if you can’t control your own message, to the point where the Washington Times is promoting this idiot as your leader, I’m not going to accept any of the blame for it.

This kind of thing is why the tea party “movement” is such a bad joke.

. . . .But wait, everyone asks me why I'm a Libertarian, 'cuz trust me, I have no use for the Democrats either, due to their simple stupid inability to do anything. Ezra Klein:

Can Democrats govern?

It's worth taking a step back from health-care reform for a second. What Democrats are doing isn't just abandoning a particular policy issue. They're proving themselves unable to govern.

Democrats spent most of 2009 with 60 votes in the Senate and about 256 in the House. They had a popular new president who was following a disastrous Republican administration and a financial crisis. The opposition party was polling somewhere between foot fungus and spoiled meat. You don't get opportunities like this very often. The Senate majority, in fact, was larger than either party had enjoyed since the 1970s. And what have Democrats accomplished?

Well, not much. You can see a list here. A stimulus that was too small. Ted Kennedy's Serve America Act. Credit card regulations that were largely an acceleration of rules the Federal Reserve was going to impose anyway. I guess they almost passed a compromised health-care bill, but you don't go down in history for almosts.

If Democrats abandon health-care reform in the aftermath of Brown's victory, the lesson will be that they can't govern. No majority within the realm of reason will give them the votes to move their agenda swiftly and confidently. Even the prospect of the most significant legislative achievement in 40 years, an achievement that will save hundreds of thousands of lives, will not keep them from collapsing into chaos when they face adversity.

At that point, what's the pitch for voting for Democrats? That they agree with you? A plumber and I both agree that my toilet should work. But if he can't make it work, I'm not going to pay him any money or invite him into my home. Governance isn't just about ideology. It's also about competence and will. That's where Democrats are flagging.

You could argue that it's not fair to brand "Democrats" as at fault here. There's something to that. The leadership and the president would happily pass and sign legislation. But a party is as a party does. Democrats often run on the need to have enough votes to act. If they can't act even with those votes, then there's a real problem. Would Republicans be so terrorized if they were in a similar circumstance? The GOP forged ahead with its attempts to impeach Bill Clinton even after voters cut them down for it in the 1998 election. Those were some odd priorities, but at least the party was committed to the agenda it ran on. Democrats may not want to go quite that far in terms of party discipline, but they need to get a whole lot further than they are now.

. . . .And Yglesias with an end-piece on just how screwed up the Democrats really are:

The “Never Takes Responsibility for Anything” Wing

225px-Mary_Landrieu_Senate_portrait 1

One of the most frustrating things about self-described “centrist” Democrats is their general unwillingness to face up to the fact that they’ve been the dominant faction in the Democratic Party for decades. Jimmy Carter was a different kind of Democrat, a southern moderate. And Bill Clinton was a southern moderate in the Jimmy Carter mold. So was Al Gore. John Kerry hailed from a different New England liberal political tradition, but in 2004 ran straight out of the moderate playbook—support for both beginning and continuing the war in Iraq, incrementalism on health care, no serious cap and trade agenda, etc.

I think Barack Obama’s campaign sort of broke with that mold, as does Speaker Pelosi in the House, but the reality is that the pivotal members of the House are moderate Blue Dogs and the pivotal members of the Senate are moderates like Mary Landrieu. Consequently, governance in the Obama era has been determined by what moderates like Mary Landrieu are willing to do. Which is fine as far as it goes, but it means that if voters don’t like the results Landrieu doesn’t get to complain that someone else screwed things up:

Other centrist Democrats said the results in Massachusetts could become a blessing in disguise by forcing Democrats to rein in their legislative agenda and focus on less expansive policies than the health care overhaul now teetering with the loss of the Democratic majority’s crucial 60th vote.

“The loss in Massachusetts should serve as a wake-up call to the wing of the Democratic Party that wants the federal government to overreach and overspend,” said Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana. “We need to get back to the basics.”

You can easily imagine an alternate universe in which the Senate Democratic Caucus took an oath of party loyalty, that all 60 Democrats would vote for cloture on all leadership-supported bills, allowing measures to pass with just 51 votes. Had that happened, we would have gotten a bigger, more liberal-friendly stimulus. And the Senate would have finished up with a more liberal version of health reform some time ago. And the Senate probably would have passed some other liberal stuff in the meantime. Had that happened, and had the voters been displeased with it, then it might make perfect sense for Landrieu to complain about some non-Landrieu “wing” of the Democratic Party.

But in the world that exists, the only “wing” that matters is the Mary Landrieu wing. They decide how much stimulus we get. They decide their can’t be a public option. They decide their needs to be a months-long quest to get Chuck Grassley to offer “Republican cover” for a health care vote. Either the strategy is working better than the alternatives, or else it’s the Landrieu wing that needs to change things up. But defeats can’t be the fault of the people who haven’t been in the driver’s seat since the seventies.

. . . . .The evidence is in front of your eyes and in your face everyday. There's "them" and there's "us", that's all. A two-tier economic system that doesn't care if you live or die. A two-party system with two corrupt, incompetent, spiritually and morally bankrupt parties purporting to represent us, the American people, and a climate that is irrevocably changing with no response in place to it.

. . . When are you going to wake up?

. . . .It's time for two new parties, ones that truly represent us. Get in touch with me.

. . . . . .. . . . .Live every day out loud

. . . And that's how it is today, from the last, lonely outpost.
. . . .I miss you Mom and Dad, a lot. Thanks for watching over me and us.


. . . . .. . . .We can salvage this shipwreck of a Nation. It will take all of us working together. It will take all of us understanding the concepts of the Great American Experiment, the political process of the Republic. It's amazing, I don't see eye-to-eye on every issue with my friends, but we respect one another's opinion, share information, share facts, and we don't talk over one another or at one another, we talk with one another. It's amazing what happens when a group of people who share the common goal of leaving a better country for their children and grandchildren can do when they sit down with one another as human beings, and realize that we each have power, and together, we are unstoppable.

. . . .I'm going to ask this of you for the next 30 days. Turn your TV off, turn your radio off. Start to use that beautiful mind that your Creator gave you, that your underpaid, underappreciated High School teachers tried to develop. If you hear something, if you read something, if someone sends you an e-mail that says "this bill will do this", or "this politician says this", I'm asking you to check it out. Check it out this way, use some of the following fact-based sites, who exist solely for the purpose of data and fact-checking.
- If whatever you've heard or read concerns a bill in Congress, use the following -
- Open Congress, it's non-partisan and devoted to a complete tracking of every bill in Congress, both houses. How a bill is developed, who is sponsoring it, what the riders are, what the discussion around it is.
- GovTrack, again non-partisan, non-commercial and open source; devoted to the same things, tracking Congress.
- Open Secrets, one of the most important ones, it tracks the lobbying money and campaign contributions flowing to your congressperson, and most of the time is a pretty good predictor of how they'll vote.
- Political Party Time, non-partisan, devoted to solely tracking political fundraisers, and letting you know exactly what parties your Representative and Senators are throwing for fundraisers and who is attending and how much money they're throwing at them to gain influence.

. . . .If someone sends something to you saying "this is so" or "that is so" or "the President/Senator/Representative said this" use the following:
- Fact Check, non-partisan, designed to separate fact from bullshit and fiction
- Snopes, devoted to the same thing.
- Politifact, devoted to getting to the truth, and separating out the lies that are spread.


. . . .I keep doing this not because I don't have faith, but because I do have faith. I have faith in the ultimate triumph of the spirit, intellect and heart of the American people. I have faith that the people I know want to leave something better for future generations, and know that something is terribly wrong, and want to do something about it. I do it because Paine and Jefferson were brilliant, unique singularities and were right.

. . . .I keep doing this because I don't believe in big im
aginary friends for adults, I don't believe in alien conspiracies running the Government, I don't believe the Roswell bodies are at Wright-Patterson, I don't believe that a big portal will open up on Dec. 21, 2012, I don't believe that the spaceships will show up.

. . . I do believe that the people who have fucked everything up are greedy, avaricious human beings who have been able to steal from the American people, to harm them, who have run unchecked because no one calls it out for what it is. I believe that if we shine the light of day on it, if the people of this country have had enough, we can change it, and change it for the better.

. . . . I keep doing this because I do believe that peopl
e, human beings, unchecked will continue to do what they've done throughout history, and throughout the history of this country. Together, they will find the solutions and provide better for their children and grandchildren.

. . . .I believe in us, I believe in people. I believe in the beauty, power and grace of the individual.

. . . .I do this for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of knowing what they do, what they believe, what they know is right. I do it for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of faith, hope, love, hate, justice, war and peace.

. . . .I do it because I believe in justice, in all it's forms.

. . . .I do this everyday for the people and kids who are tattoed, pierced and inked and keep getting told to get "into the mainstream". I do this everyday for those guys who wear black that you don't understand, you just know there's something about them, and that when the chips are down, when you have to walk down a dark alley somewhere, and you know what's waiting for you at the end of it, and you can only take one person with you, that's who you want walking with you, because you know you'll come back out alive, and that guy doesn't care what it costs him.

. . . .I do this everyday for the outcasts, the misfits, the ones who don't fit and who will turn their back on you and walk away when you try to make them fit into a mold. I do it everyday for everyone who does it their way, knows that they're paying a high price for it, but the freedom is worth the cost.

. . . . I do this everyday for outlaws, cowboys, renegades, pirates and fallen angels. I do it everyday for the people who understand that rock and roll can save their soul, that redemption can be found in a 3-chord lick from a vintage Les Paul. I do it for the men and women who aren't afraid to turn it all the way up, who keep looking for an 11 setting on a volume knob that only goes to 10, who know that rock and roll's got nothing to do with age.


. . . .If right now, you're doing something you don't want to do, stop it. If you've surrounded yourself with people who want you to do or be something other than who you are, walk away. If you've got people around you who actually let it slip out that they think you "should be doing (fill in the blank here)" and it involves your life, your future, your existence as an individual, walk away, right now, and don't look back. You don't owe anyone anything. Live fearlessly. If the people around you can't accept it, can't accept you as you are, really are, they aren't and weren't friends anyhow.

. . . .Don't march to anyone else's drumbeat, don't drink the Kool-Aid, anyone's. Right, Left, conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, Christian, Buddhist, Pagan. Use your own mind, that's why you were given one. Examine, question, do what's right for you first, everything else will fall in place from there, quit looking for the path, you're already on it.

. . . .Come out of the gate each morning with both barrels blazing, pedal-to-metal, full-tilt boogie, all-in and balls-out, what's stopping you? Do you want to live forever? That'd be boring.

. . . .Got your back. somewhere out there in the night

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments before they're ripped away from you. This rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, absolutely no one gets out alive. There aren't a lot of second chances, and we don't get to dictate terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. This ain't no dress rehearsal, and the curtain's gone up, it's real and right now. It's not about yesterday or tomorrow. It's about right fucking here, right fucking now. This, what you're reading, what you're hearing, is the proof, the words, the sounds and the sights of someone changing his own life and his own world and not being afraid to put it out there. What have you done for yourself lately and why are you waiting? Do it now.

The Desolation Angel
from somewhere halfway to Heaven, and just a mile out of Hell


You know someone like me, there's still a few of us left. If we have to, we'll stand at the gates of Hell and hold the last train home for you.. . . . . .

[where: 29.52N, 91.57W]
[where: Chelsea, MI]

13 January 2010

A plea for help

Thursday January 14, 2010

. . . . .
Haiti

. . . . .What was the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and arguably the world, with the worst infrastructure on the planet, is now a leveled pile of rubble after the 7.0 earthquake. There are hundreds of thousands dead, 3 million in need of help. With no doctors, no nurses, the film coming in shows people trying to tend to one another's injuries, with dead bodies laying next to them in the street, with countless more laying dead under collapsed buildings.

. . . .Simple things become vital. Water, food, shelter. None of those are available. Countless Haitians in America are trying to find out if their family members are even alive.

. . . .The U.N. troops stationed there were and are involved in tending to their own, and trying to tend to their wounded and injured, and count their own dead bodies.

. . . You can make a donation to the American Red Cross of $10 simply by texting 'Haiti' to 90999, standard texting rates will apply, and you'll be billed the $10 on your next phone bill.

. . . .American Airlines is flying doctors and nurses to Haiti for free, call 212-967-6767 for details.

. . . .Prayer and good intention and thoughts are good, but action is real, and it's what will provide the help. Go give blood, contact the Red Cross, contact the Clinton Global Initiative, and see what you can do that's concrete, real and will provide relief, help and aid to the people of Haiti.

. . . .If you're reading this on the Facebook Notes page, you can switch out to the external site, The Desolation Angel, and pick up the multi-media, the playlist and all the rest.

. . . .Now, as to the earthquake itself, I hear a HAARP playing somewhere. Learn more here, or here.

. . . .There have been some incredibly sick and twisted responses to the Haitian disaster as well, from the usual suspects.

. . . .Rush Limbaugh, on Wednesday evening, offered to buy the Nazi sign that hung over Auschwitz's gate "Arbeit Mach Frei" (Work Sets You Free) and send it to Haiti to remind the Haitians right from the start "not to expect handouts from anyone".

. . . .I very sincerely hope that sweaty bastard dies a very long, slow, painful death somewhere. Preferably not alone but with a bunch of people just walking around him, ignoring him, and letting his insignificant dung-beetle self just fade away.

. . . . Pat Robertson offered up the fundamentalist Right wing view of Haiti as well. He said the Haiti had been "cursed" by a "pact with the devil" and called it, the earthquake, a "blessing in disguise".

. . .
That fate I'm hoping for Rush? The same for Pat, only double, count on it.

. . . .And make sure to cruise down and read Tuesday's post about the fundamentalist view and End time philosophy and politics. That video only reinforces it.

. . . . .Paul Raushenbush responds to Robertson:

Go to Hell, Pat Robertson -- and the sooner the better. Your 'theological' nonsense is revolting. Don't speak for Haiti, and don't speak for God. Haiti is suffering a catastrophe and you offer silliness at best, and racism at the worst. Haiti was the first island in the Western hemisphere to overthrow slavery and white oppression -- this is what you call a pact with the Devil? God's heart is breaking with this tragedy, and ours should be too. You never had much credibility -- but now it is all gone.

That is enough time spent on you. Let's get back to thinking how we can call upon all of the goodness in our traditions and in our country to help the people of Haiti.

The American Red Cross is one place where you can donate. You can find more information on their efforts in Haiti here.

. . . . The financial crisis inquiry hearings started on Wednesday, and there's a lot to cover here. It still remains Issue #1, despite the media's and government's efforts to put everything else under the sun up as an issue here at home on domestic policy issues.

. . . . .First up, my favorite crusader, Dylan Ratigan, on the expected bullshit and clouding that will come from the financial execs:

"Everything is context-driven. After ten benign years in the context of where we were...How would you look at the risk of a hurricane? The season after we had four hurricanes on the East Coast, which was actually extraordinary versus the year before, rates got very low... that year after 4 hurricanes... rates went up spectacularly... Is the risk of hurricanes any different any of those times?"
-Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs (January 12, 2010)

It is true that our economy was hit by hurricane Mr. Blankfein, but it was one created by you and your cohorts.

The financial services industry lobbied for the repeal of the Glass Steagall Act in 1999. That allowed banks to use their custodial power over your money to assume huge risks in investment markets.

They also lobbied for the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which allowed banks to trade their crooked insurance in secret and exempted from all supervisory authority.

And to help grow the hurricane, then CEO of Goldman Sachs Hank Paulson made a personal plea to the SEC to allow banks to leverage more money against their capital. As much as $4,000 for every $100 in capital they held.

Wall Street may claim this was caused by a perfect storm, but the only thing perfect about it was their ability to line their pockets at the expense of our country.

Look at just the past few years of compensation for some of the CEO's testifying today. Numbers that don't even include the expected record-breaking 2009 bonuses.

  • $410 million for Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein over 3 years
  • $195 million in that timespan for JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon
  • $132 million for just two years work at Morgan Stanley for John Mack


Brian Moynihan has just stepped into his role as CEO of bank of America. But he stands to do just fine... His predecessor Ken Lewis made 150 million for 5 years before stepping down.

Unfortunately for the rest of us, their man-made money-making hurricane has devastated this country.

  • The deficit has skyrocketed over the past ten years. Our national debt now more than 12 trillion dollars.
  • More than 2 million families have lost their homes to foreclosure in the last 3 years. And seniors are denied interest on their savings, just so banks can receive tons of cheap money to try to gamble their way out of their hole.


So to you hurricane-makers, we say it's time for you to come clean on your actions, let us fix your crooked system and finally pay us back for your destruction.

Today, Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack and JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon talked about clawbacks they've instituted for their banks to recoup future losses... but what about the clawbacks for the bonuses you made over the past 10 years? The ones you made on the massive fraud that the American taxpayer is currently paying for?

Not to mention, the record-breaking bonuses to be awarded next week gambling with our bailout money. Take a listen to Mr. Mack's justification during a recess this morning.

Potentially record profits Mr. Mack but they are clearly the result of a windfall of taxpayer support. So it only makes sense that this country follow the lead of Great Britain and France and enact a windfall profits tax.

Look at it this way: If we found out Katrina was the result somebody's get-rich quick scheme, wouldn't we demand restitution?

. . . .Les Leopold watched Day 1 of the FCIC and has this reaction:

The heads of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America came to testify and said... just about nothing.

Yes, they made mistakes. But gee, they had learned a great deal and they certainly didn't cause the crash. They promised they are managing risk better, even though they claimed always to have done so. Also, they insist they are not too big too fail and they are reforming compensation so we shouldn't worry about their sky-high compensation packages.

After these predictable pronouncements, Phil Angelides -- the former Democratic California State Treasurer and Chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) -- came out swinging at Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs. But he ended up shadow-boxing.

. . . .Leopold documents the empty answers and bullshit that the CEO's of the 5 "Too Big To Fail" Banks" brought to the table today here.

. . . . .Spitzer, Black and company list the 10 questions that the FCIC absolutely must ask, but hasn't yet:
1. AIG: What was your firm's relationship with AIG? How much exposure did you have to AIG? What information did you publicly disclose about that exposure? Did you think AIG's CDS strategy was "good business"? Do you think we still would have needed to rescue AIG if its derivatives had been centrally cleared, as some in Congress have proposed?

2. Disclosure: Were your financial statements during 2005-08 accurate? What did your officers disclose to your board about your bank's exposure to the nonprime mortgage markets before 2008? What specific information did you publicly disclose about your exposure to derivatives and nonprime mortgages? When did officers or employees of your firm recognize that there was a serious risk of a housing bubble? What did they recommend, and what changes did the firm implement, in response to the identification of this risk? Why?

3. Pay: What was your bank's total compensation for officers for each year from 2001 to the present? What were the components of that compensation? Identify and explain where compensation created perverse incentives in the following contexts: your bank, other banks, executive compensation advisory firms, audit firms, appraisers, rating agencies, loan brokers, loan officers? What aspects of compensation produced these perverse incentives? When did employees of your bank become aware of the literature in economics, criminology, and compensation warning of these perverse incentives? What specific actions did the bank take in response? Which elements of your bank's compensation system create perverse incentives?

4. Ratings: Why do you think the rating agencies gave AAA ratings to toxic CDOs? Did you think CDO credit ratings accurately reflected their credit worthiness? Did employees of your bank ever express concerns internally/publicly about the judgment of the ratings agencies? If so, when was the first time?

5. Moral hazard: What incentives at your institution helped lead to the financial crisis? What conversations did you have with the Fed regarding your exposure to CDS and other derivatives? What monetary value would you place on the government guarantee of your deposits?

6. Mortgage fraud: Name the three nonprime specialty lenders with the worst reputations for originating fraudulent mortgages. Name the three nonprime specialty lenders with the worst reputations for originating predatory loans. Is there any legitimate business reason why a secured lender would seek to induce appraisers to inflate the value of the secured property? When did employees of your bank become aware that coercion of appraisers to inflate appraised values was becoming common? What action did they take or recommend when they became aware?

7. Warnings: What were the three most significant specific steps your banks took in response to the FBI's September 2004 warning that the developing "epidemic" of mortgage fraud would produce a crisis if it were not stemmed? Why do you think the spread on nonprime mortgages fell after this warning, and other warnings? Why did bank loss reserves also fall during this time? What were your bank's analyses of these risks and the adequacy of loss reserves (industry-wide and at your bank) and how did they change as the markets exhibited these perverse patterns? What did your bank's officers recommend that the bank do in response to these perverse market conditions and what actions did the bank actually take? Were the industry reactions, and your bank's reactions, to the warnings adequate?

8. Lobbying: How much has your bank spent on lobbying over the last five years? This year? How many additional personnel has your bank hired full-time or as consultants to lobby the federal government?

9. Crimes: How many criminal referrals has your bank made for mortgage-related frauds in each year beginning in 2002? How many named your own officers or employees? Does the FBI have adequate resources to investigate such frauds? Explain how an epidemic of mortgage fraud must lead to widespread accounting and securities fraud if the mortgage paper is to be resold.

10. Regulation: Did the passage of the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000 contribute to the crisis? Did the federal regulators' efforts to preempt state regulation of predatory mortgage lenders contribute to the crisis? Should the Federal Reserve have used its authority under HOEPA to regulate nonprime lending during the financial bubble? Provide any contemporaneous analyses of the role of regulation, deregulation, and desupervision in contributing to the crisis. Did your bank lobby (directly or indirectly through trade associations) in support of deregulatory efforts that contributed to the crisis?

. . . .And all of that will fall under, what we call in my business, Root Cause Analysis, in other words finding the true, rational reasons behind an event of this proportion, the financial crisis that rocked the world, brought about the 2nd Great Depression and continues to affect us every day. What's important now is to move on, and move forward. What are the answers, what do we do from here that's different so it doesn't happen again? If we repeat the same actions, with the same conditions and expect different results, that will be the definition of clinical insanity.

. . . . .So, with Step 1, Thomas Frank, columnist for the Wall Street Journal, on bringing back Glass-Steagall, the law that Clinton repealed and actually was another step, another block in destroying Middle Class America, and helping bring about Bush 1's "New Economic World Order" (his phrase, used repeatedly) and Citicorp's "plutonomy" that began with Reagan's undermining of America with the Laffer curve and trickle-down economics:

Last month, Sens. Maria Cantwell and John McCain proposed a measure that would revive parts of the old Glass-Steagall Act, the 1933 law that separated investment from commercial banking. After having been diluted many times over the years, Glass-Steagall was largely repealed in 1999, permitting a wave of consolidation in the financial industry.

The latest crisis has provoked a new debate over the old regulatory regime. Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz has argued that the repeal of Glass-Steagall had an "especial role" in making the financial calamity of 2008 possible. Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, currently the head of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, has called for a new separation between commercial banking and riskier financial activities.

Any discussion about breaking up the financial industry, however, runs into a powerful stereotype: the overwhelming consensus belief in the risible backwardness of Glass-Steagall.

In 1999, the last time the 1933 law was being debated, it was routinely described as a "Depression-era" law, a "relic" of a benighted age, "venerable," "obsolete," "outdated," "archaic," insufficient to meet the public's "sophisticated needs" in the bold new era of accelerated everything. The measure that overturned Glass-Steagall in 1999 was, of course, called the "Financial Services Modernization Act."

Half-baked historicism like that was persuasive stuff in those days. On the occasion of the old banking law's repeal, President Bill Clinton intoned that Glass-Steagall was "no longer appropriate to the economy in which we live. It worked pretty well for the industrial economy. . . . But the world is very different."

Today, as we begin to debate Glass-Steagall all over again, the old stereotypes are simply being pulled out of deep-freeze. The futility of efforts to "turn back the clock" are noted. A clever put-down from an anonymous Treasury official is much repeated: it "would be like going back to the Walkman."

The old law's revival is said to be a way of pandering to the low emotions of the public, as opposed to its higher faculties of reason. A Business Week story on the subject understands the Cantwell-McCain proposal as a way of "soothing public anger over bailouts and bonuses." Politico's account of the measure chalks the whole thing up to "populist angst," whatever that is.

What no one has yet grasped is that pooh-poohing Glass-Steagall in this way is about as sound a move as was slapping down your savings on shares of TheGlobe.com.

One of these days, we will finally dispel the "New Economy" mysticism that beclouds this issue and begin to think seriously about how to re-regulate the financial sector. And when we do, we may find that the answer involves some version of the idea behind Glass-Steagall--drawing a line between banks that the government effectively guarantees and banks that behave like big hedge funds, experimenting with the latest financial toxins. Hopefully, that day will come before Wall Street decides to take another headlong run at some attractive cliff.

. . . .That's Step 1, but Robert Reich, believes, and posts in his blog and I agree with him, that this is another watershed moment for this Administration, and that the White House has to get involved. Personally, I tend to agree with him, but I don't look for it, since Goldman-Sachs was the singlest largest campaign contributor in the history of American politics ($168 million) to President Obama's campaign. Reich, a former Secretary of Labor under Clinton, started out as an ardent supporter of this Administration, but like so many of us, bloggers, columnists, writers, has come to realize that this Administration, more so than any other, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street is the largest group of corporatists to ever occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Ave:

It has been more than a year since all hell broke loose on Wall Street and, remarkably, almost nothing has been done to prevent all hell from breaking loose again.

In fact, close your eyes and you could be back in the wilds of 2007. Bankers are still making wild bets, still devising new derivatives, still piling on debt. The big banks have access to money almost as cheaply as in 2007, courtesy of the Fed, so bank profits are up and bonuses as generous as at the height of the boom.

The only difference is that now the Street's biggest banks know they are "too big to fail" and will be bailed out by taxpayers if they get into trouble -- which means they have every incentive to make even riskier bets. And, of course, American taxpayers are out some $120 billion, while millions have lost their homes, jobs and savings.

All could be forgiven if the House and Senate committees with responsibility for coming up with new regulations were about to come down hard on the Street and if the Obama administration were pushing them to. But nothing of the sort is happening. Yes, the White House has indicated interest in charging banks for the cost of the bailout, but this is not real reform; it's just making up for some of the direct costs of cleaning up the mess.

The bill that has already emerged from the House is hardly encouraging. Dubbed the "Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act", it effectively guarantees future Wall Street bailouts. The bill authorizes Fed banks to provide up to $4,000 billion in emergency funding the next time the Street crashes. That is more than twice what the Fed pumped into financial markets last year. The bill also enables the government, in a banking crisis, to back financial firms' debts -- a wonderful insurance policy if you are a bondholder. To be sure, the bill authorizes the Fed and Treasury to spend these funds only when "there is at least a 99 per cent likelihood that all funds and interest will be paid back," but predictions about pending economic disasters can be conveniently flexible, especially when it comes to bailing out the Street.

If this were not enough, the House bill creates regulatory loopholes big enough for bankers to drive their Ferraris through. Consider derivatives. Last year, as taxpayers threw money at the Street, congressional leaders promised to put derivative trading on public exchanges. The prices of derivatives could be disclosed and margin requirements imposed, making it more likely that traders would make good on their bets. Yet the House bill exempts nearly half the $600,000bn of outstanding derivatives trades.

The bill also allows -- but, notably, does not require -- regulators to "prohibit any incentive-based payment arrangement". This makes fat bonuses the norm unless a regulator has reason to prevent them. And as we witnessed last year, bank regulators tend not to disturb the status quo. The House bill does not even make an attempt to unravel the conflict of interest that led credit ratings agencies to turn a blind eye to the risks the Street was taking on.

What is truly remarkable is what Congress and the administration have shown no interest in doing. Large numbers of Americans have lost their homes to bank foreclosures or are in danger of doing so. Yet American bankruptcy law does not allow homeowners to declare bankruptcy and have their mortgages reorganized. If it did, homeowners would have more bargaining power to renegotiate with banks. But neither Congress nor the administration has pushed to change the bankruptcy laws. Wall Street opposes such change and was instrumental in narrowing the scope of personal bankruptcy in the first place.

Nor have lawmakers shown any enthusiasm for resurrecting the wall that used to exist between commercial and investment banking. The Glass-Steagall Act, passed in the wake of the Great Crash of 1929, separated the two after it became obvious that commercial deposits needed to be insured by government and kept distinct from the betting parlor of investment banking. But Wall Street forced Congress to take down the wall in 1999, enabling financial supermarkets such as Citigroup to use its deposits to make all sorts of bets. Even Obama adviser and former Fed chief Paul Volcker has argued that the two functions should be separated again.

Nor is anyone talking seriously about using antitrust laws to break up the biggest banks -- the traditional tonic for any capitalist entity that is "too big to fail". Five giant Wall Street banks now dominate US finance. If it was in the public's interest to break up giant oil companies and railroads a century ago, and the mammoth telephone company AT&T, it is not unreasonable to break up the almost infinitely extensive tangles of Citigroup, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. No one has offered a clear reason why giant banks are important to the US economy. Logic and experience suggests the reverse.

What happened to all the tough talk from Congress and the White House early last year? Why is the financial reform agenda so small, and so late?

A larger explanation, I am afraid, is the grip Wall Street has over the American political process. The Street is where the money is and money buys campaign commercials on television. Wall Street firms and executives have been uniquely generous to both parties, emerging as one of the largest benefactors of the Democrats. Between November 2008 and November 2009, Wall Street doled out $42m to lawmakers, mostly to members of the House and Senate banking committees and House and Senate leaders. In the first three quarters of 2009, the industry spent $344m on lobbying - making the Street one of the major powerhouses in the nation's capital.

Money is powerful. Talk is cheap. Mr Obama recently called the top bankers "fat cats", and the bankers insisted they were shocked -- shocked! -- to learn how intransigent their lobbyists had been in opposing financial reform. The bankers even claimed a "disconnect" between their intentions and their lobbyists' actions. This was all for the cameras, of course.

But the widening gulf between Wall Street and Main Street -- a big bail-out for the former, unemployment checks for the latter; high profits and giant bonuses for the former, job and wage losses for the latter; buoyant expectations of the former, deep anxiety and cynicism by the latter; ever fancier estates for denizens of the former, mortgage foreclosures for the rest -- is dangerous. Americans went ballistic early last summer when AIG executives got big bonuses after taxpayers had bailed them out. They will not be happy when Wall Street hands out billions in bonuses very soon. Angry populism lurks just beneath the surface of two-party politics in America. Just listen to Sarah Palin or her counterparts on American talk radio and yell television. Over the long term, the political stakes in reforming Wall Street are as high as the economic.

. . . .So, what can we do as average Americans to regain some control. It's simple. Move your money, take it out of any bank that took TARP funds, cut up your credit cards from "Too Big To Fail" banks, and move your money to local banks, to credit unions, to regional banks. A word of advice from my favorite smart-ass Bill Maher:

Hello, I'd like to take a moment to address the millions and millions of you all across America who are currently stuck in an abusive relationship.

Now I know what some of you are thinking: Who is Bill Maher to give me relationship advice?

But that doesn't mean I don't know a dysfunctional relationship when I see one. Especially when it's staring me right in the face.

You know who you are. Those of you staying in a relationship long after it's turned bad. Sticking around despite the abuse -- even as it's gotten worse and worse over the years. Sticking around only because it seems easier than breaking up -- and besides, where else are you going to go?

That's right, I'm talking to all of you that keep doing your banking at the giant, too big to fail, Wall Street banks that brought our economy to the brink of disaster, were rescued by trillions of dollars of our taxpayer money, then paid us back by using that money to hire lobbyists to convince our lawmakers in Washington to kill financial reform.

They took our money... but cut back on lending.

They took our money... and made record profits -- and paid themselves record bonuses.

They took our money... then returned to the risky behavior that led to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, with record unemployment, bankruptcies, and foreclosures.

They took our money... but kept on with all the greedy, abusive, ruthless, and cold-blooded practices that have earned them untold billions of dollars a year -- year after year after year. Things like charging you outrageous fees for anything and everything, jacking up your credit card interest rate to 30 percent for being late on one payment (it's a good thing sodomy is legal!), and refusing to renegotiate your mortgage after the housing bubble they helped create burst.

These big banks, deemed "Too Big To Fail" by our Wall Street-friendly leaders in Washington, are convinced that they can get away with anything -- because they always have.

But here's the thing. You don't have to put up with this nonsense. You don't have to stay in a loveless, abusive relationship with your Big Bank.

In fact, it's easy to get out -- and into something much, much better.

My friend Arianna Huffington has started a campaign designed to convince people to move their money out of these big banks and put them into smaller, local, community banks and credit unions that are more likely to see you as a person, not as an account number... and also to reinvest in the community where they are.

It's a pretty simple idea: If enough people who have money in one of the Big Six banks -- that is, JP Morgan/Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs -- move it into a local community bank or credit union, then collectively we, the people, will have taken a big step toward fixing our broken financial system.

It's easy, and painless, and will send a powerful message to Wall Street and to our leaders in Washington.

Face it: Real change is not going to come from Congress. It's not going to come from the White House. And it's certainly not going to come from the lobbyists Wall Street hires to make sure their special interests keep beating out the public interest.

We've got to do it ourselves. And moving your money is a great way to start.

This is not a conservative idea or a liberal idea. It's not left or right. It's populism at it's best -- and it's already attracted people from all walks of life who are sick and tired of the Big Banks and are ready to do something about it.

So it's time to go break up with your banker and get the hell out. Go to MoveYourMoney.info and see just how easy it is to end your abusive relationship and find true banking love. Or, at least hot, sweaty, monkey, banking sex.

MoveYourMoney.info. Tell 'em Dr. Bill sent you...

. . . . . .Now, the other flip side of domestic policy of course, is foreign policy. Which would lead us straight to the Underpants Bomber, and the incredibly wrong-headed, willfully fearful response and the idiocy that it will lead us all to, which will not result in us being any more secure, nor any safer, but instead will only provide a facade. Bob Cesca:

For much of the last decade, the Republican line about liberals has been that whenever we downplayed the urgency of the so-called terrorist threat (or dared to criticize then-President Bush for that matter) we were somehow emboldening the terrorists.

For example, during the 2004 campaign, John Kerry was annihilated by the Dick Cheney wingnut right when he said, "We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance."

Oh holy hell! Kerry said what?!

He was exactly right, of course, both strategically and rhetorically. The senator was outlining how we ought to be simultaneously destroying al-Qaeda and, in the "home of the brave," we ought to be acting like grown-ups rather than a nation of scared little pee-pants infants frightened of unseen toe monsters lurking under the bed.

What the far-right has never grasped, however, is that the whole point of a terrorist attack isn't necessarily to kill people. The point is to terrorize. Scott Shanes in the New York Times quoted a former Homeland Security and CIA official:

"We give comfort to our enemies," said Charles E. Allen, a 40-year C.I.A. veteran who served as the top intelligence official at the Department of Homeland Security from 2007 to early last year. Exaggerated news coverage and commentary, he said, "creates an atmosphere of tension and fear, and to me that's exactly the wrong way to go."

Fareed Zakaria spelled it out even further this week:

The purpose of terrorism is to provoke an overreaction. Its real aim is not to kill the hundreds of people directly targeted but to sow fear in the rest of the population. Terrorism is an unusual military tactic in that it depends on the response of the onlookers. If we are not terrorized, then the attack didn't work. Alas, this one worked very well.

In the case of the Underpants Bomber, by collectively losing our shit and inflating a minor fracas out of proportion -- by acting as though this was a major bloody attack and subsequently acquiescing to full body scans and further violations of our civil liberties, we're handing al-Qaeda a victory. The attempt was a failure, but the overreaction in its aftermath turned it into an easy win for al-Qaeda.

Good job, Republicans. Good job, Fox News.

Speaking of which, it didn't take long for Fox Nation to run a banner headline equating the failed Underpants Bomber incident with the earthquake in Haiti.

"Pres. Obama Reacts to Haiti Earthquake Faster Than Christmas Bomber"

Not surprisingly, Rush Limbaugh said the same thing on his Wednesday radio broadcast.

The implication of Limbaugh and the Fox Nation headline was that the President should have reacted more quickly to the relatively very minor Underpants Bomber than to the catastrophic earthquake that might've killed upwards of 500,000 people. In this case, they're amplifying a failed incendiary device to a level more significant than a massive loss of life in one of the world's most destructive natural disasters.

Of course the President is going to react more quickly to a disaster like the earthquake in Haiti than he is to a Junior Qaeda with an exploding taint (who, by the way, didn't kill anyone). Any rational observer can see that the President's reactions have been proportional to the gravity of the events.

Nevertheless, Limbaugh and Fox Nation continue to illustrate how the far-right invariably overreacts to terrorism, blowing it way out of proportion and elevating a scattered network of radicals to a fighting status equaling the mighty United States. It's been this way since September 11. "The response of the onlookers," as Zakaria wrote, has been obscene.

Rewind a few years. Limbaugh once told his audience, "Civil liberties are worthless if we are dead." In late 2005, Senator "Big John" Cornyn said, "None of your civil liberties matter much after you're dead." Predictably enough, in a 2006 poll, Gallup reported that Republicans were more willing to give up basic liberties for the sake of preventing terrorism. This is precisely the overreaction that terrorists seek, and it's precisely what the Republicans are giving them.

Today, it's Liz Cheney and her fear-mongering commercials. It's Peter King, who's been all over cable news hyperventilating into a paper sack since Christmas. It never ceases to amaze me how a faction of allegedly tough-talking conservatives can be so easily frightened by a kid with exploding underpants who couldn't even do it right. Listening to Republicans for the last several weeks, you'd think Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a steroid-pumped, 12-foot-tall transforming robot with ICBMs strapped to his gigantic unit. In reality, this guy was the Steve-O of terrorists -- only, Steve-O was usually successful when attempting to blow up his jockeys.

But, by now, the damage is done. The Republican fear-mongering and overreaction to the Underpants Bomber has signaled that we're all too willing to give "comfort to our enemies" by handing them exactly what they seek: a national panic attack and an increased willingness to give up our liberties for the illusion of security.

. . . . . .. . . . .Live every day out loud

. . . And that's how it is today, from the last, lonely outpost.
. . . .I miss you Mom and Dad, a lot. Thanks for watching over me and us.


. . . . .. . . .We can salvage this shipwreck of a Nation. It will take all of us working together. It will take all of us understanding the concepts of the Great American Experiment, the political process of the Republic. It's amazing, I don't see eye-to-eye on every issue with my friends, but we respect one another's opinion, share information, share facts, and we don't talk over one another or at one another, we talk with one another. It's amazing what happens when a group of people who share the common goal of leaving a better country for their children and grandchildren can do when they sit down with one another as human beings, and realize that we each have power, and together, we are unstoppable.

. . . .I'm going to ask this of you for the next 30 days. Turn your TV off, turn your radio off. Start to use that beautiful mind that your Creator gave you, that your underpaid, underappreciated High School teachers tried to develop. If you hear something, if you read something, if someone sends you an e-mail that says "this bill will do this", or "this politician says this", I'm asking you to check it out. Check it out this way, use some of the following fact-based sites, who exist solely for the purpose of data and fact-checking.
- If whatever you've heard or read concerns a bill in Congress, use the following -
- Open Congress, it's non-partisan and devoted to a complete tracking of every bill in Congress, both houses. How a bill is developed, who is sponsoring it, what the riders are, what the discussion around it is.
- GovTrack, again non-partisan, non-commercial and open source; devoted to the same things, tracking Congress.
- Open Secrets, one of the most important ones, it tracks the lobbying money and campaign contributions flowing to your congressperson, and most of the time is a pretty good predictor of how they'll vote.
- Political Party Time, non-partisan, devoted to solely tracking political fundraisers, and letting you know exactly what parties your Representative and Senators are throwing for fundraisers and who is attending and how much money they're throwing at them to gain influence.

. . . .If someone sends something to you saying "this is so" or "that is so" or "the President/Senator/Representative said this" use the following:
- Fact Check, non-partisan, designed to separate fact from bullshit and fiction
- Snopes, devoted to the same thing.
- Politifact, devoted to getting to the truth, and separating out the lies that are spread.


. . . .I keep doing this not because I don't have faith, but because I do have faith. I have faith in the ultimate triumph of the spirit, intellect and heart of the American people. I have faith that the people I know want to leave something better for future generations, and know that something is terribly wrong, and want to do something about it. I do it because Paine and Jefferson were brilliant, unique singularities and were right.

. . . .I keep doing this because I don't believe in big im
aginary friends for adults, I don't believe in alien conspiracies running the Government, I don't believe the Roswell bodies are at Wright-Patterson, I don't believe that a big portal will open up on Dec. 21, 2012, I don't believe that the spaceships will show up.

. . . I do believe that the people who have fucked everything up are greedy, avaricious human beings who have been able to steal from the American people, to harm them, who have run unchecked because no one calls it out for what it is. I believe that if we shine the light of day on it, if the people of this country have had enough, we can change it, and change it for the better.

. . . . I keep doing this because I do believe that peopl
e, human beings, unchecked will continue to do what they've done throughout history, and throughout the history of this country. Together, they will find the solutions and provide better for their children and grandchildren.

. . . .I believe in us, I believe in people. I believe in the beauty, power and grace of the individual.

. . . .I do this for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of knowing what they do, what they believe, what they know is right. I do it for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of faith, hope, love, hate, justice, war and peace.

. . . .I do it because I believe in justice, in all it's forms.

. . . .I do this everyday for the people and kids who are tattoed, pierced and inked and keep getting told to get "into the mainstream". I do this everyday for those guys who wear black that you don't understand, you just know there's something about them, and that when the chips are down, when you have to walk down a dark alley somewhere, and you know what's waiting for you at the end of it, and you can only take one person with you, that's who you want walking with you, because you know you'll come back out alive, and that guy doesn't care what it costs him.

. . . .I do this everyday for the outcasts, the misfits, the ones who don't fit and who will turn their back on you and walk away when you try to make them fit into a mold. I do it everyday for everyone who does it their way, knows that they're paying a high price for it, but the freedom is worth the cost.

. . . . I do this everyday for outlaws, cowboys, renegades, pirates and fallen angels. I do it everyday for the people who understand that rock and roll can save their soul, that redemption can be found in a 3-chord lick from a vintage Les Paul. I do it for the men and women who aren't afraid to turn it all the way up, who keep looking for an 11 setting on a volume knob that only goes to 10, who know that rock and roll's got nothing to do with age.


. . . .If right now, you're doing something you don't want to do, stop it. If you've surrounded yourself with people who want you to do or be something other than who you are, walk away. If you've got people around you who actually let it slip out that they think you "should be doing (fill in the blank here)" and it involves your life, your future, your existence as an individual, walk away, right now, and don't look back. You don't owe anyone anything. Live fearlessly. If the people around you can't accept it, can't accept you as you are, really are, they aren't and weren't friends anyhow.

. . . .Don't march to anyone else's drumbeat, don't drink the Kool-Aid, anyone's. Right, Left, conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, Christian, Buddhist, Pagan. Use your own mind, that's why you were given one. Examine, question, do what's right for you first, everything else will fall in place from there, quit looking for the path, you're already on it.

. . . .Come out of the gate each morning with both barrels blazing, pedal-to-metal, full-tilt boogie, all-in and balls-out, what's stopping you? Do you want to live forever? That'd be boring.

. . . .Got your back. somewhere out there in the night

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments before they're ripped away from you. This rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, absolutely no one gets out alive. There aren't a lot of second chances, and we don't get to dictate terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. This ain't no dress rehearsal, and the curtain's gone up, it's real and right now. It's not about yesterday or tomorrow. It's about right fucking here, right fucking now. This, what you're reading, what you're hearing, is the proof, the words, the sounds and the sights of someone changing his own life and his own world and not being afraid to put it out there. What have you done for yourself lately and why are you waiting? Do it now.

The Desolation Angel
from somewhere halfway to Heaven, and just a mile out of Hell


You know someone like me, there's still a few of us left. If we have to, we'll stand at the gates of Hell and hold the last train home for you.. . . . . .

[where: 29.52N, 91.57W]
[where: Chelsea, MI]

12 January 2010

Tuesday clip dump

Tuesday January 12, 2010

. . . .Ok, enough already, I've been extremely busy. I'm working long hours this week, I take time everyday to work on the book, and I've been having to be "social" after work.

. . . .On top of that, I finally found out what's tearing my hands up so badly during the winter. Back to liquid laundry soap, right now, no more powder.

. . . . At any rate, if you're reading this on the Facebook Notes page, thanks. Switch out to the external site, The Desolation Angel, to pick up the music and playlist, which has changed up somewhat, at least the order.

. . . . . .Mark McGwire using steroids? Not news. Sarah Palin getting a Fox News show and cementing their positions as not a news channel, but instead a theo-political channel, a kind of 700 Club for angry people? Not news, it's in the same category as the announcement that Simon Cowell would be leaving Idol after this season.

. . . . A 7.0 quake off Haiti today, with a 6.5 off the California coastline over the weekend. That's news people, now, that's news, and shit you need to be paying attention to.

. . . . . Wake up!!

. . . .Now, off to the races. Back on the air, my favorite, Dylan Ratigan, going right after Timothy Geithner, Prime Number 1 in the line-up of usual suspects when we talk about the financial disaster that this Nation is still in:

As we sit here today, Wall Street continues to exploit a policy of government-sponsored giveaways and secrecy to pay themselves billions.

Record-setting bonuses due to banks like Goldman Sachs as early next week.

Yet instead of acting as our cop, Secretary Tim Geithner has become central to what may be a cover-up of the greatest theft in U.S. history.

Here is the evidence.


COUNT 1: The AIG Emails:

Recently-released emails show Geithner's New York Federal Reserve Bank directing AIG to keep details of the 100-cents-on-the-dollar bailout secret in 2008 -- A reversal of the traditional role of government, which is to force companies to become more transparent, not less.

A Treasury Spokeswoman says: "Secretary Geithner played no role in these decisions and indeed, by November 24, he was recused from working on issues involving specific companies, including AIG."

Friday, the White House also defended the Treasury Secretary:

Gibbs: These decisions did not rise to his level at the fed.


CNN's Ed Henry: How do you know that he wasn't involved? He was the leader of the New York Fed.

Gibbs: Right, but he wasn't on the emails that have been talked about and wasn't party to the decision that was being made.

He wasn't party to a decision to hide $62 billion dollar payouts to firms that became insolvent during his 5-year watch at the New York Fed?

Congressman Darrell Issa speculates that maybe Geithner wasn't on the emails in question because his people felt so strongly they already knew their boss's intentions, they didn't feel the need to bother him with the details.


COUNT 2: He wasn't even a regulator!

In Geithner's own words during confirmation hearings in March:

"First of all, I've never been a regulator...I'm not a regulator."

According to the New York fed bank's website, that was your job!! And I quote from the Fed's website: "As part of our core mission, we supervise and regulate financial institutions in the Second District."

That district of course is the epicenter for bailed out banks and billion dollar bonuses.


Count 3: "The Christmas Eve Taxpayer Massacre."

As you were wrapping those last presents, Geithner's Treasury Department lifted the 400-billion dollar cap on taxpayer responsibility for potential losses for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The new cap? Unlimited taxpayer funds! Interesting timing... Christmas eve, Tim?

Still no word on recovering the hundreds of millions paid to the CEOs who created this mess.


COUNT 4: He's too cozy with certain banks.

Remember those call logs when he first started... 80 contacts with Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and CitiGroup CEOs in just 7 months!

But Bank of America's CEO only got three calls. Apparently Bank of America is not one of Geithner's favorites, especially when you consider that there are still many unanswered questions about Tim Geithner's role in threatening to fire Bank of America management if they didn't go through with a deal to buy Merrill lynch.


COUNT 5: TARP Special Investigator Neil Barofsky's report says Geithner's New York Fed overpaid the big banks through AIG by billions of dollars.

Geithner says it had to be done. Maybe so, maybe not, but this takes us to our final point.

Since then, the Treasury Secretary has yet to really prove whose side he's on -- the Wall Street big wigs or the American taxpayer? Here's the litmus test: Mr. Geithner, show us the past ten years of AIG emails or step down so that we can get somebody who will. A crime has been committed against the American taxpayer and right now you are standing at the door of the crime scene refusing to let anyone in.

Show us you're not involved Mr. Geithner, prove the white house correct in defending you. All we are asking for is the transparency promised by the President you serve.

. . . .I will say it again, and again, and again. This President, this White House, history will come to show, will be the greatest corporatist tool that ever sat in that seat. Fans of pure capitalism should be proud of him, and not being idiotic enough to call a man who so obviously is a bought and paid for tool of Wall Street a "communist". What idiocy. He proved it on Wall Street and with the banks, and he proved it on Health Care Reform when he made the Health Insurance Providers and the Pharmaceutical Companies the beneficiaries of the checks being written by Congress. Robert Reich:

There's only one big remaining issue on health care reform: how to pay for it. The House wants a 5.4 percent surtax on couples earning at least $1 million in annual income. The Senate wants a 40 percent excise tax on employer-provided "Cadillac plans." The Senate will win on this unless the public discovers that a large portion of the so-called Cadillacs are really middle-class Chevys, expensive not because they deliver more benefits but because they have higher costs.

The dirty little secret under the hood is that less than 4 percent of the variation in the cost of current health-care plans has to do with how many benefits they provide. Most plans that cost more do so because (1) a particular set of employees is older and tends to get sicker than the average set of employees (that's true for a lot of old rust-belt firms), (2) the plan is offered by a small business that lacks bargaining clout with insurers (small businesses pay, on average, 16 percent more for the health insurance they provide, per capita), (3) the work that employees do subjects them to greater risk of medical problems (health-care workers, for example), or (4) most employees are women (who tend to have higher health-care costs than men because women are the ones who bear children). Plans could also cost more but deliver average benefits because (5) insurers in the area don't face much competition (one main reason for the public option).

So by taxing so-called Cadillac plans, the Senate bill would actually end up taxing the Chevy plans of a large portion of the middle class. And as time goes by, a still larger portion, since the Senate plan is geared to the overall rate of inflation rather than to the (much higher) rate of increases in health-care costs.

In any event, I thought a major purpose of health-care reform was to get more care to more people, not to cut it back. Even employees who get extra dollars of wages to make up for the cutbacks won't necessarily plow those wages back into health care.
. . . .And why this reversal from President Obama? Taibbi:

During the presidential primary, in the spring of 2008, Obama ran a campaign ad aimed directly at Tauzin, chief executive officer of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. In the ad, titled “Billy,” Obama tells a small gathering of seniors:

“The pharmaceutical industry wrote into the prescription drug plan that Medicare could not negotiate with drug companies. And you know what, the chairman of the committee who pushed the law through went to work for the pharmaceutical industry making $2 million a year. Imagine that. That’s an example of the same old game-playing in Washington. I don’t want to learn how to play the game better. I want to put an end to the game-playing.”

But Obama has played the game, and Tauzin was one of the first players he picked for his team. White House visitor logs show that between Feb. 4 and July 22, Tauzin visited his office an average of once every 15 days — about as frequently as Tauzin probably collects that generous paycheck candidate Obama derided. We don’t know how often Tauzin visited after July, because of the ad hoc nature of White House visitor log releases.

via Once Obama’s target, lobbyist Tauzin now his pet | Washington Examiner.

Is there anyone out there who relied on Obama’s promises on health care as a key reason for voting for him, whether during the primary season or during the general election campaign? If so, I’m interested in hearing what you think now.

. . . .And it dovetails nicely into this. The Supreme Court is due to hand down it's decision tomorrow on Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, which we've talked about in here before. Out last possible chance at a voice in politics as citizens is probably going away. Cesca:

This is more than a little scary. The Supreme Court is set to hand down its decision on Citizens United v Federal Election Commission tomorrow.

The decision will decide whether corporations can, once again, contribute money (as its form of "speech") to political campaigns. If the Court decides in favor of Citizens United and against the FEC, rules under McCain-Feingold will, in effect, be ruled unconstitutional, allowing corporations even greater influence over politics and policy in America.

As if corporations weren't insanely powerful enough already. The further and unfettered corporate screwing of America could begin immediately, and there's very little that can be done to put the egg back into the shell.

. . . .Cenk Uygur weighs in today with a challenge to a surprising branch of American politics to join in the fight to get things rolling the right way again:

I issue a challenge to the tea-party movement. If you're true to your word, and you believe in protecting the American people and principles, and you think government is too big and hands out money to the wrong people, then join us in fighting against the biggest giveaway to biggest culprits. Fight the power of the banks with us.

Don't listen to your leaders that tell you that liberals aren't capitalists. That's nonsense. We're the real capitalists. Just like you, we don't think the government should be in the business of handing out taxpayer money to people who didn't earn it. And if you're against handing out government money, you certainly have to be against giving that money to the richest people in the country and the ones that caused the economic collapse in the first place. You're not a sucker, are you? Why would you want to give away your money to those people?

The bank executives who are responsible for our terrible recession are about to walk away with record setting bonuses. Where did they get that money in these tough economic times? From you! They picked your pocket.

You know who helped them do it? George W. Bush and Hank Paulson. But also Tim Geithner and Barack Obama. I told you we agreed. See, I wasn't kidding. Hey, why don't you ask your organizers who have been so busy protecting private insurance companies how come they never organize any protests against Tim Geithner? Wouldn't he be a natural target as the Treasury Secretary when the economy is in recession and the banks are getting away with billions? Have you ever wondered why those well-funded tea party organization websites never have buses going to protest at Wall Street or the Treasury Department?

Join us. We can build a real populist movement that isn't funded by corporate America. That actually cares about the American people and throws the crooks out on their ass. That fights the elites who have captured the government and turned it into their own private piggy bank.

Or don't join us, just as long as you fight in the right direction. Prove you're legit. Fight against the banks that are about to take all of our money home in bonuses for themselves. You fight them from the right. We'll fight them from the left. And we'll meet you in the middle. The real middle of the country that is tired of being run over by the big and powerful interests in Washington and Wall Street.



. . . .But then, I think Cenk is barking up the wrong tree. The tea partiers would all rather engage in their masturbatory fantasies about the Alaskan Barbie McLipschmutz, the quitting ex-governor, than engage in anything that's constructive and real about rebuilding and protecting America.

. . . . .And no, I'm not going to let that other little tidbit go either. Sarah Palin may be a lot of things; ambitious, street-smart, media savvy (none of which qualifies her for President by the way, or any other office for that matter, oh wait, don't have to worry about that, she quit the political office she was elected to, it was too tough to actually do the job), but she is also a religious fundementalist, which makes her corrosive and poisonous. No one would know better than Frank Schaeffer, one of the Founding member of the political arm of the Religious Right, who is still trying to atone for that atrocity:
Do you want to understand Sarah Palin's attraction to the born-again Republican/Fox crowd? Then you have to "get" the apocalyptic fantasy world they live in.

Palin and FOX

Palin comes from that world of hysterical paranoid delusion. It's her attraction to the people who like her. God has "raised her up for such a time as this" they believe. It is why FOX News just hired her as a commentator.

Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye's Left Behind series of sixteen novels (so far!) represents everything that is most deranged about Palin's religion.

Understanding why those books are popular is the key to "getting" the Palin FOX News deal.

The Left Behind novels represent the fundamentalist end times view Palin buys into and have sold tens of millions of copies while spawning an "End Times" cult, or rather egging it on. Such products as Left Behind wall paper, screen savers, children's books, and video games have become part of the ubiquitous American background noise.

Embracing rumor as fact

Less innocuous symptoms include people stocking up on assault rifles and ammunition, adopting "Christ-centered" home school curricula, fearing higher education, embracing rumor as fact, and learning to love hatred for the "other," as exemplified by a revived anti-immigrant racism, the murder of doctors who do abortions, and even a killing in the Holocaust Museum.

No, I am not blaming Palin, Jenkins and LaHaye's product line for murder or racism or any other evil intent or result. What I am saying is that feeding the paranoid delusions of people on the fringe of the fringe -- people who think they alone are "Real Americans" -- contributes to a dangerous climate that may provoke violence in a few individuals.

Convincing folks that Armageddon is on the way, and all we can do is wait, pray, and protect our families from the chaos that will be the "prelude" to the "Return of Christ," is perhaps not the best recipe for political, economic, or personal stability, let alone social cohesion! It may also not be the best philosophy on which to build American foreign policy -- especially for a Palin-type who we now know didn't even know why North and South Korea were divided into two!

Palin might not know about the 2 Koreas but she knows when Jesus is returning!

Here's the official position of Sarah Palin's denomination, of which she'd been a member for 25 years until she left when political ambition meant that she needed to clear the decks of embarrassment. (Then on the advice of her political McCain handlers further distanced herself. Palin was born into a Roman Catholic family. She was "born-again" and joined the Wasilla Assembly of God, a Pentecostal church, which she attended until 2002. Palin then switched to the Wasilla Bible Church equally if not even more nutty, because, she said, she preferred the children's ministries. When in Juneau, she attends the Juneau Christian Center. After the Republican National Convention, a spokesperson for the McCain campaign told CNN that Palin "doesn't consider herself Pentecostal" and has "deep religious convictions on the 'End Times.'"
The momentum toward what amounts to a whole subculture seceding from the union (in order to await "The End") and/or a time when the US government quits taxing us, is irrevocably prying loose a chunk of the American population from both sanity and their fellow citizens. If you think Palin's fans are nuts; they are. If you think the tea baggers are odd--they are. The theology of the "End" is behind both. In the religious version Jesus is on the way. In the "tea bagger" secular version: the US government is the enemy and is the harbinger of doom, collapse and the end.

Disclosure -- I was one of these nuts

A time-out for disclosure is in order. I knew Jerry Jenkins quite well many years ago when I was a Religious Right leader before I quit in the mid 1980s. We worked on a project together. I also knew Tim LaHaye. I'm betting that they mean well. It seems to me that they also have no idea what they have helped unleash. You can be very decent and very blind.

That said . . . the evangelical/fundamentalists--and hence, from the early 1980s until the election of President Obama in 2008, the Religious Right as it informed U.S. policy through the then dominant Republican Party--are in the grip of an apocalyptic Rapture cult centered on revenge and vindication. This End Times death wish is built on a literalist interpretation of the Book of Revelation. Too bad.

The weirdest book in the Bible (and that's saying something!)

Revelation: this weird book, was the last to be included in the New Testament. It was included as canonical only relatively late in the process after a heated dispute. The historic Churches East and West remain so suspicious of Revelation that to this day it has never been included as part of the cyclical public readings of scripture in Orthodox services. The book of Revelation is read in Roman and Anglican Churches only during Advent.

Given that Revelation is now being hyped as the literal--even desired--roadmap to Armageddon and given Palin and her long time church buys into this vision, it's worth pausing to note that it's nothing more than a bizarre pastoral letter that was addressed to seven specific churches in Asia at the end of the first century by someone (maybe John or maybe not) who appears to have been far from well when he wrote it. In any case, the letter was not intended for use outside of its liturgical context, not to mention that it reads like Jesus on acid.
Jenkins and LaHaye and now Palin have cashed in on years of evangelical/fundamentalists' imagined victimhood

I say imagined, because the born-agains had one of their very own, George W. Bush, in the White House for eight long, ruinous years and also dominated American politics for the better part of thirty years before that. Nevertheless, their sense of being a victimized mi¬nority is still very real--and very marketable. Whether they were winning politically or not, they nurtured a mythology of persecu¬tion by the "other." Evangelical/fundamentalists believed that even though they were winning, somehow they had actually lost.

Most of that sense of lost battles is related to the so-called culture wars issues in which evangelical/fundamentalists did not fare so well, from the legalization of abortion to gay rights. But rather than admitting that they were often losing the arguments, or had come across as so mean (or plain dumb) that few outsiders wanted to be like them, they blamed everyone else, from the courts to or-ganizations such as Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, the New York Times, and the "left-wing media." Just about any scapegoat would do to deny or disguise the simple fact that fewer Americans wanted to follow the evangelical/fundamentalist Church Ladies into their gloomy cave (and/or the never-never land of the Rapture) and park their brains there.

Mea Culpa

I used to be part of the self-pitying, whining, evangelical/fundamentalist chorus. I remember going on the Today Show with host Jane Pauley back in the late 1970s (or early 1980s). I debated with the head of the American Library Association about my claim that our evangelical/fundamentalist books weren't getting a fair shake from the "cultural elites." We Schaeffers were selling millions of books, but the New York Times never reviewed them. I made the point that we were being ignored by the "media elite," which was somewhat ironic, given that I had been invited to appear on Today to make that claim.

I dropped out of the evangelical/fundamentalist subculture soon after that Today appearance (years later I was back on Today in my secular writer incarnation, being interviewed about a book of mine on the military/civilian divide, but I decided not to mention that I'd been on the show about thirty years before in what seemed like ei¬ther another lifetime or an out-of-body experience.

Fox/Palin: pushing the victimhood mythology

Others like FOX and Palin carried on where I and many others in the first wave of the anti-abortion/religious right wave left off, pushing the victimhood mythology to the next generation of evangelical/fundamentalists, and they have cultivated a following among the terminally aggrieved based on ceaselessly warning them about "the world."
Conclusion

The expanding Left Behind entertainment empire also feeds the dangerous delusions of Christian Zionists, who are convinced that the world is heading to a final Battle of Armageddon and who see this as a good thing! Christian Zionists, led by many "re¬spectable" mega-pastors--including Reverend John Hagee--believe that war in the Middle East is God's will.

In his book Jerusalem Countdown: A Warning to the World, Hagee maintains that Rus¬sia and the Arabs will invade Israel and then will be destroyed by God. This will cause the Antichrist--the head of the European Union--to stir up a confrontation over Israel between China and the West.

Perhaps, in the era of Obama, Hagee will do a fast rewrite and say that President Obama is the Antichrist, because the same folks who are into Christian Zionism are also into the far, far loony right of the Republican Party represented by oddities like Sarah Palin. These are the same people who insist that President Obama is a "secret Muslim," "not an American," and/or "a communist," "more European than American," or whichever one of those con¬tradictory things is worse--not like us anyway, that's for sure.

Palin buys into the Christian Zionist agenda hook line and sinker. She's all for unbridled US military action. She's for this because theologically speaking the more war the better, at least in the Middle East. Jesus needs war to fulfill "prophecy" so he can "come back"!

Palin's unreconstructed theology is the real story here. And I don't know of one media outlet that has connected these dots in the mainstream.

. . . . . .. . . . .Live every day out loud

. . . And that's how it is today, from the last, lonely outpost.
. . . .I miss you Mom and Dad, a lot. Thanks for watching over me and us.


. . . . .. . . .We can salvage this shipwreck of a Nation. It will take all of us working together. It will take all of us understanding the concepts of the Great American Experiment, the political process of the Republic. It's amazing, I don't see eye-to-eye on every issue with my friends, but we respect one another's opinion, share information, share facts, and we don't talk over one another or at one another, we talk with one another. It's amazing what happens when a group of people who share the common goal of leaving a better country for their children and grandchildren can do when they sit down with one another as human beings, and realize that we each have power, and together, we are unstoppable.

. . . .I'm going to ask this of you for the next 30 days. Turn your TV off, turn your radio off. Start to use that beautiful mind that your Creator gave you, that your underpaid, underappreciated High School teachers tried to develop. If you hear something, if you read something, if someone sends you an e-mail that says "this bill will do this", or "this politician says this", I'm asking you to check it out. Check it out this way, use some of the following fact-based sites, who exist solely for the purpose of data and fact-checking.
- If whatever you've heard or read concerns a bill in Congress, use the following -
- Open Congress, it's non-partisan and devoted to a complete tracking of every bill in Congress, both houses. How a bill is developed, who is sponsoring it, what the riders are, what the discussion around it is.
- GovTrack, again non-partisan, non-commercial and open source; devoted to the same things, tracking Congress.
- Open Secrets, one of the most important ones, it tracks the lobbying money and campaign contributions flowing to your congressperson, and most of the time is a pretty good predictor of how they'll vote.
- Political Party Time, non-partisan, devoted to solely tracking political fundraisers, and letting you know exactly what parties your Representative and Senators are throwing for fundraisers and who is attending and how much money they're throwing at them to gain influence.

. . . .If someone sends something to you saying "this is so" or "that is so" or "the President/Senator/Representative said this" use the following:
- Fact Check, non-partisan, designed to separate fact from bullshit and fiction
- Snopes, devoted to the same thing.
- Politifact, devoted to getting to the truth, and separating out the lies that are spread.


. . . .I keep doing this not because I don't have faith, but because I do have faith. I have faith in the ultimate triumph of the spirit, intellect and heart of the American people. I have faith that the people I know want to leave something better for future generations, and know that something is terribly wrong, and want to do something about it. I do it because Paine and Jefferson were brilliant, unique singularities and were right.

. . . .I keep doing this because I don't believe in big im
aginary friends for adults, I don't believe in alien conspiracies running the Government, I don't believe the Roswell bodies are at Wright-Patterson, I don't believe that a big portal will open up on Dec. 21, 2012, I don't believe that the spaceships will show up.

. . . I do believe that the people who have fucked everything up are greedy, avaricious human beings who have been able to steal from the American people, to harm them, who have run unchecked because no one calls it out for what it is. I believe that if we shine the light of day on it, if the people of this country have had enough, we can change it, and change it for the better.

. . . . I keep doing this because I do believe that peopl
e, human beings, unchecked will continue to do what they've done throughout history, and throughout the history of this country. Together, they will find the solutions and provide better for their children and grandchildren.

. . . .I believe in us, I believe in people. I believe in the beauty, power and grace of the individual.

. . . .I do this for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of knowing what they do, what they believe, what they know is right. I do it for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of faith, hope, love, hate, justice, war and peace.

. . . .I do it because I believe in justice, in all it's forms.

. . . .I do this everyday for the people and kids who are tattoed, pierced and inked and keep getting told to get "into the mainstream". I do this everyday for those guys who wear black that you don't understand, you just know there's something about them, and that when the chips are down, when you have to walk down a dark alley somewhere, and you know what's waiting for you at the end of it, and you can only take one person with you, that's who you want walking with you, because you know you'll come back out alive, and that guy doesn't care what it costs him.

. . . .I do this everyday for the outcasts, the misfits, the ones who don't fit and who will turn their back on you and walk away when you try to make them fit into a mold. I do it everyday for everyone who does it their way, knows that they're paying a high price for it, but the freedom is worth the cost.

. . . . I do this everyday for outlaws, cowboys, renegades, pirates and fallen angels. I do it everyday for the people who understand that rock and roll can save their soul, that redemption can be found in a 3-chord lick from a vintage Les Paul. I do it for the men and women who aren't afraid to turn it all the way up, who keep looking for an 11 setting on a volume knob that only goes to 10, who know that rock and roll's got nothing to do with age.


. . . .If right now, you're doing something you don't want to do, stop it. If you've surrounded yourself with people who want you to do or be something other than who you are, walk away. If you've got people around you who actually let it slip out that they think you "should be doing (fill in the blank here)" and it involves your life, your future, your existence as an individual, walk away, right now, and don't look back. You don't owe anyone anything. Live fearlessly. If the people around you can't accept it, can't accept you as you are, really are, they aren't and weren't friends anyhow.

. . . .Don't march to anyone else's drumbeat, don't drink the Kool-Aid, anyone's. Right, Left, conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, Christian, Buddhist, Pagan. Use your own mind, that's why you were given one. Examine, question, do what's right for you first, everything else will fall in place from there, quit looking for the path, you're already on it.

. . . .Come out of the gate each morning with both barrels blazing, pedal-to-metal, full-tilt boogie, all-in and balls-out, what's stopping you? Do you want to live forever? That'd be boring.

. . . .Got your back. somewhere out there in the night

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments before they're ripped away from you. This rodeo is a one-way