Once more, into the breach

Wednesday November 11, 2009

. . . .Great new music alert. Micky & The Motorcars just released their first live CD, Live at Billy Bob's Texas, available now at their website. (It's available in stores as well, but I'm loath to give my money to Best Buy or Wal-Mart, when it's just as easy to purchase it direct from the artist, and all the money goes back to them.) 22 tracks of absolutely killer music by the younger brothers of Braun clan out of Idaho, of course, you know the two older brothers as Reckless Kelly. It's a great chance to catch some good young artists going deep into their catalog and doing what they do best, playing music.

. . . .And on the same pop culture note, Star Trek is being released on DVD and Blu-Ray on November 17th. If you didn't catch it this last Memorial Day weekend at your cineplex, pick it up immediately and check it out. J.J. Abrams didn't just reboot the franchise, he gave it new life, new blood and whole new possibilities.

. . . .And not a word about Sons of Anarchy until I get the chance to watch it on my DVR.

. . . .As promised, back into the fray. First up, the large piece of elephant shit that was delivered on Saturday night by the House of Representatives. Now a couple of points right off the bat. I know a good number of people, sincere, good people who truly believed that this was the best thing for them to work for, and that it would do some long term good, who are right now really looking like someone has hit them upside the head, hard, with the flat side of a shovel and wondering just what in the blue hell happened. Well, first up, I'm going to re-run a piece that I wrote and published back on October 13th about the legislative process:

. . . .Now, what responses from readers let me know is that a whole lot of people don't know how the legislative process actually works. So today, we're going to do two things, explain how the mechanics of the legislative process works, who the real players are on the field, and how they're being manipulated.

. . . .So, on to the real legislative process, in this case, Baucus's turd will suffice to serve as the guidepost as to how it all goes together. A bill, any bill, House or Senate, first goes through it's committee of jurisdiction, in this case the Senate Finance Committee, for what's called a chairman's mark-up, where the initial framework of the bill is hammered out, with the various and sundry mark-ups, attachments, and riders are put together and it's put to a committee vote, that's what happened today with the Baucus bill. Now, that was public spectacle, and in truth, most committee mark-up votes are the ones you see televised and pundits nodding sagely about and analyzing. In truth, this is only of 4 way stations in a bill's life cycle, and like all hideously, grotesquely hatched entities, when it goes through it's other 3 life cycles, may be a different animal completely. From the committee of jurisdiction, it now goes to the Rules committee, which most of you have never heard of. There's a reason for this. In the Rules committee, the Rules chairperson now lays the bill out for the Rules committee, and it's here, where members of the majority party attach all types of riders, attachments, amendments or take a bunch out, and members of the minority party wail and gnash their teeth together about what's happening. Now the interesting part is that yes, the Finance committee vote was scheduled at 11 AM Eastern time in full view of every media outlet, and Finance committee debates were highly televised. Not so once it hits the Rules Committee, which will most likely schedule it's hearings on it for about 3 AM on a Wednesday morning (really, they will!) and this is quite on purpose, because by the time the Chairman's mark-up leaves the Rules committee as a rule, it will be an entirely different sort of monster altogether, completely rewritten with new amendments, riders, other items taken out. Now, there's been much ado about the "72 hour" rule, about how there's supposed to be 72 hours by the time a "rule" (which is what the mark-up is called once it leaves the Rules Committee) and the floor vote, and much blaming of this newest Democratic Congress. They're only payng back tit for tat. That 72 hour rule has been suspended due to "emergency" since the Republican Congress of 2001, and hasn't been put back in place once since 9/11. Everyone, everyone is using it to their advantage, and has for the last 8 years now. So, this particular bill will leave the Rules committee in the middle of the night, and there will be a general floor vote on it within minutes of it's leaving Rules. Now, at that point, it becomes a bill, but it only came from the Senate, before it ever goes for signature, it has to go through a conference committee of both House and Senate, which has arcane rules all it's own, to hammer out all the differences. The point is, no matter what you heard or saw today, this bill will be completely rewritten 2 more times,and be a totally different animal, that reads entirely differently, before it ever arrives for any signature. So, what you've hearing today is not what it will be.

. . . .And that's precisely what happened to it, it sat in a rules committee all day Saturday, away from the eyes and ears of the press and the public, and it was rushed to the floor for vote on Saturday night.

. . . .The idiocy is that Pelosi and company are absolutely in love with themselves over the process, and completely lost sight of the end product. All I kept hearing was that this is the first time in 60 years of attempted health care reform that a bill was able to pass the House, and that 's what I keep hearing. The second piece of idiocy is the attempt to call it bipartisan, one vote from a lone Republican rep that had to be wined and dined solo by the White House is not bipartisan.

. . . .There's so much that's wrong with this thing, it's impossible to go into it in one day or one column, but suffice to say, from examining it, one whole hell of a lot deals got cut that make the health insurance companies richer, Big Pharma richer, and the doctors are going to love it.

. . .The only good thing that came out of it was Bart Stupak outing himself as a stooge for The Family, the C Street Fundamentalist Christian mafia that he's a tool for, and the people who are trying to array themselves to go up against Goldman-Sachs. We'll start examining The Family and their pervasive influence as deeply as we explored Goldman, and get back to getting all the players straight in the world that runs the world we live in.

. . . .Goldman, you know, those people on Wall Street, whose CEO claims they're doing "God's work". From Charles Gasparino, one of the better financial writers I know:

The only thing worse than Goldman Sachs amassing close to $20 billion in bonus money for its executives based on various government subsidies and bailout measures is listening to senior executives there trying to explain it all away. The spin job has been coming from an unlikely source: The normally media shy Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein has been making the rounds lately, talking to selective reporters, including William Cohan, who recently wrote a book about the fall of Bear Stearns and now has the firm's complete cooperation as to write something on Goldman Sachs, the most prestigious of the Wall Street firms, even if it needed a bailout to survive last year's financial crisis..

Cohan's Bear book, the first of many financial crisis tomes (including my own) wasn't exactly a puff piece, but trading access for information is a time honored journalistic practice, and it's human nature to be nicer to someone who gives you information. So presumably we'll all find out from Cohan how, in the throes of the financial crisis, Goldman really didn't need the $10 billion in bailout money it received from the federal government as its stock cratered; that it was forced to take the cash from then-Treasury Secretary (and former Goldman CEO) Hank Paulson, or how despite its exposure to troubled insurance giant AIG, Goldman was miraculously "hedged," against losses, meaning that the fed's AIG's bailout last year didn't really help Goldman survive last year's panic. No, Goldman survived because it was built for survival.

Forget the absurdity of such claims, Blankfein has been on a roll of late, repeating them time and again, not just presumably to Cohan, but to a growing number of credulous journalists who will stomach just about anything to get a few minutes with the CEO of the Great Goldman Sachs, even if its greatness was put to the test last year.

Blankfein's spinning is reaching epic proportions. Several recent stories about Goldman have cast the firm as the Great Satan of the securities markets, or as Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi put it, the "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." No longer is Blankfein simply trying tell the world Goldman isn't the root of all evil; rather, old Lloyd is informing us all that Goldman is a source of goodness in the world. The exact quote, from the Times of London has Blankfein professing that as CEO of the vampire squid he's actually "doing God's work," simply by doing what banks get paid to do: Raising money for clients and investing in businesses.

Oh really, Lloyd? My brother is a doctor who works in the intensive care unit of an inner city hospital; he could have a cushy lucrative practice here in New York, but he likes helping people, and yet he has never once told me he's doing God's work even after he explained one afternoon how he had just saved a homeless man's life by massaging his heart.

Believe it or not, I happen not to fall into the camp of Goldman haters, where people believe the firm is behind every scandal and conspiracy and may have even created the swine flu virus so it could corner the market for drug stocks. (Though Goldman and several other firms did seem to have no problem obtaining for their employees the swine-flu vaccine, which is in short supply.) Indeed, as I show in my new book The Sellout, when it came to risk-taking over the last 30 years on Wall Street, Goldman did it better than any other firm on the Street. The folly that was found at a firm like Bear Stearns, with its CEO caring more about playing bridge and golf (and allegedly smoking marijuana) than tending to the firm's balance sheet, would never happen at Goldman Sachs.

But there is something truly unsettling about the new message coming from the firm, honed I hear from a phalanx of image consultants who are literally trying to re-write history as the firm gets ready to dole out its enormous bonus pool. And that's what all this spinning is about. For the record Goldman Sachs didn't take down the financial system last year -- Citigroup, Merrill, Lehman or Bear are much more responsible for that. And for the record every firm spins -- its called public relations, and Goldman will need all the PR it can muster as it decides in the coming weeks how much of the $20 billion it will hand out to its executives. My sources at Goldman say Blankfein won't be stingy because he needs to prevent top producers from bolting to hedge funds and private equity.

What makes Goldman so contemptible is that its level of spin has almost no basis in reality. We are supposed to believe Goldman wasn't bailed out; it didn't need the government's money when big investors where yanking funds from the firm and its stock was plummeting and now the firm is doing "God's work," even as government bureaucrats continue to subsidize how the firm makes most of its money -- through risk taking and bond trading, all on the backs of the US taxpayer.

Goldman, in case you haven't heard, has been classified as a commercial bank, meaning it can borrow cheaply to finance its risk taking, and can borrow from the Federal Reserve in a pinch. That's why it's amassing such massive profits. And yet not a penny of its massive bonus pool will be lent out to funding-starved small businesses. Think about that: The Federal Government run by the most Liberal Administration in years, is subsidizing big business at the expense to small business.

How did this bizarre scenario develop? Who knows, but it should come as no surprise that Wall Street -- Goldman in particular -- funneled far more money to president Obama than it did to his Republican challenger, John McCain. Maybe that's why the president has been eerily silent on the Goldman Sachs subsidy, even as Lloyd Blankfein tells the world he's doing "God's work."

. . . .Why am I so hard on them? Could it be because we're no longer a democracy, a republic, but are instead a corporatocracy run by Goldman? From Felix Salmon, over at Reuters:

First up there was the pairing of Robert Rubin and Stephen Friedman. Both of them attempted to become venerable eminences grises, but neither succeeded, in the end. Friedman became chairman of the New York Fed, where he helped to which put together the deal under which AIG’s CDS counterparties, foremost among them Goldman Sachs, got paid out at 100 cents on the dollar, He was also involved in approving and which also approved Goldman’s request to become a bank holding company. He then inexplicably bought tens of thousands of shares Goldman shares in the open market — a clear conflict of interest given his position at the Fed — resulting in his resignation shortly afterwards.

Rubin, of course, looks even worse. As arguably the most Wall Street-friendly Treasury secretary ever, he helped to inflate the deregulatory financial-services bubble on the basis that big banks were extremely sophisticated and more than capable of looking after their own risk books. He then moved to the ultimate cushy job at Citigroup, where he got paid $10 million a year despite having no employees, no P&L, and no defined responsibilities. In hindsight, his main contribution to the bank was to be the biggest internal cheerleader for the fixed-income group, which he encouraged to take on ever-greater amounts of risk despite the fact that no one in senior management (including himself) really had a clue what they were doing. Result: disaster.

Rubin and Friedman were succeeded by Corzine, whose post-Goldman career has been spent almost entirely in politics. He was pretty ineffective in the Senate, before moving to the governorship of New Jersey. (In a classic case of the squid’s tentacles being everywhere, he there helped oversee the incoherent mess at Ground Zero, due to New Jersey’s 50% stake in the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, charged with rebuilding at the site, was former Goldman senior partner John Whitehead.) Never much of a natural politician, he basically bought both jobs, which at least meant that he wasn’t corrupt. But after he was almost killed in a 91 mile-an-hour car crash where he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, he lost a large chunk of whatever leadership ability he had formerly held. His political demise yesterday, at the hands of an oafish opponent, comes as little surprise.

Corzine, in his turn, was replaced (indeed, ousted) by Hank Paulson. Paulson’s post-Goldman career, of course, was spent as the Treasury secretary who oversaw the biggest financial meltdown since the 1929 crash. Reading Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail, which was clearly written with a lot of help from Paulson, he comes across as a man who was always at least one step behind the curve, someone who could never get ahead of the unfolding crisis, who was prone to inconsistent and ad hoc decisionmaking, and who went out of his way, even before getting a waiver allowing himself to talk to Goldman Sachs, to be as helpful to them as he possibly could.

Paulson seems to have spent a large amount of the crisis throwing up in his office bathroom, and even into Nancy Pelosi’s wastebin. Of course, he couldn’t simply go see a doctor, like the rest of us, because he’s a Christian Scientist. Similarly, he hobbled his ability to communicate by refusing to ever touch email: instead, any time he wanted to say anything to anybody he’d have to do so over the phone or in person. No wonder he was semi-permanently hoarse, and his phone records are insane.

Paulson’s biggest failure, of course, was that of Lehman Brothers: he set up an emergency weekend confab at the New York Fed in an attempt to save it, but refused steadfastly to ever consider any public help at all, and also failed to keep British regulators in the loop, despite the fact that their assent would be needed in the event that Barclays were to acquire Lehman. In fact, when the fateful phone call to the Brits was made, it was the hapless Christopher Cox who made it, rather than Paulson. In general, Paulson was more of a bully than a leader, and he managed to be equally unpopular both on Capitol Hill and at the White House.

Looking at the list, it seems to comprise men who are very long on hubris, and who have no doubt that if they can run Goldman Sachs, they can do anything else, with normal rules not really applying to them. All of them, post-Goldman, have been tarnished. If Lloyd Blankfein has any sense, he’ll retire quietly.

. . . . .All of which makes a nice transition to this wonderful piece penned by David A. Love:

Often, people will look at a high-profile example of corruption, and conclude that the egregious act is an exception to the rule. In reality, it might be the tip of the iceberg.

On October 29, 2009, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania did a wonderful thing when it expunged the records of as many as 6,500 juveniles in Luzerne County. That’s not a misprint.

Two judges in that county were sent up the federal river for locking up thousands of innocent children over five years, in exchange for $2.6 million in kickbacks from private juvenile detention centers. Judges Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan helped the developers secure the county contracts to build the prisons. Moreover, they filled the detention centers with warm bodies— many of whom were first-time offenders with minor infractions— and illegally denied the teens access to an attorney.

In the case of Luzerne, the “cash for kids” scheme was a coldblooded expression of greed, and we should not downplay the seriousness of the crimes committed. Yet, what happened in this rural county in northeastern Pennsylvania is a reflection of what America’s criminal justice system has become— a for-profit, money-making enterprise.

Often, our poorer children, disproportionately of color, are funneled into a cradle-to-prison pipeline through adulthood. With a criminally negligent public school system, and job opportunities outsourced abroad, many children at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder are ensured a future of little else than street corners or prison bars. In fact, many urban schools are nothing more than prison prep, complete with police and metal detectors.

Interestingly, the children of Luzerne, a county which is nearly 97% white, did not resemble the “usual suspects” in the criminal justice system. But that really is not the point— when prisons are a capitalistic endeavor, warm bodies are needed as the raw materials, and so they must come from somewhere. And consequently, justice takes a backseat to dollars. From the foodservice industry and the phone companies, to the Wall Street bankers and the investors, many people have a vested interest in filling up those empty prison beds and maximizing their cut. American capitalism made the U.S. prison population the world’s largest at 2.5 million, with mass incarceration for nonviolent drug offenses and victimless crimes.

And American-style capitalism is problematic for the culture of corruption it has enabled, in the absence of an effective regulatory framework. Much attention has been paid to Bernie Madoff, that poster child of the Ponzi schemes, who defrauded investors out of $65 billion. The damage he created is impressive, from the family savings that were forever lost, to the charities that went under. But like the judges in Luzerne County, Madoff was merely a cog in a wheel of corruption that enabled greed.

Madoff himself said he was surprised his scheme lasted so long, and that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigators were so clueless about his fraudulent activities over 16 years. The fact is, some members of the SEC staff were inexperienced or just idiots. Further, Madoff had too much credibility with the SEC and was not properly investigated, with red flags uncovered yet ignored.

With the deregulation of the financial sector and the evisceration of the Glass-Steagall Act came the financial crisis of 2008. The system had become the Ponzi scheme. The economy was built on paper shuffling and no tangible products. Consumers were preyed upon with sketchy, deceptive and destructive subprime mortgages. Banks gambled people’s money in high-risk, high-stakes poker games. And with a revolving door between Wall Street and the Treasury department, the same people with the gambling problem are running the casino, and “monitoring” it as well.

The banks that ruined the country swore by the free market when it suited them. But now, they gladly accept their corporate welfare bailout checks, and scoff at the rest of us. Wall Street has rebounded, business as usual, and Gordon Gekko is smiling. Meanwhile, America’s former middle class is joining the ranks of the poor, and the foreclosed are filling the nation’s homeless shelters. Short of bold government action of Rooseveltian proportions, there will be no economic recovery for everyday people. After all, the unemployed, the homeless, and the soon-to-be unemployed and homeless generally are not big spenders.

The moneyed interests also have corrupted the political process, and a prime example is the behavior of Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and the “Blue Dog” Democrats in the health care reform debate. Lieberman has earned a special place in the hearts and minds of progressives of late for vowing to stand with Republicans, and filibuster any health care bill that contains a public option. He has even said he would rather have no bill at all than a bill with a public option.

In American political folklore, the Senate is presented as an august deliberative body where cooler heads prevail, where genteel statesmen and stateswomen put the brakes on rash and potentially harmful legislation, for the betterment of all. In reality, the Senate is a place where bold legislation for the public good is killed, because industries put a contract out on democratic ideas. And they instruct their employees, the senators, to stop these ideas in their tracks. This is a bipartisan endeavor. The Blue Dog Democrats, who are the self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives of their party, distinguish themselves from other Democrats by their greed and hypocrisy. They receive the most corporate money, and have rejected less costly health reform bills that would hurt their benefactors. Ask Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, chair of the Senate Finance committee, and a key player in this year’s health reform debate. Baucus received $3.4 million from health and insurance industry interests between 2003 and 2008, more than any other member of Congress. Judging from the sad excuse for a health reform bill that came out of his committee, the industry got its money’s worth.

And Lieberman, the dirty dog that Democrats love to hate, is a fully-owned subsidiary of the insurance industry. Over the course of his career, he has received $2.6 million from the insurance companies. In addition, his wife is a health care industry lobbyist. Despite the overwhelming popular support in Connecticut for a public option, Lieberman has decided to follow the money. The Democrats must take Lieberman to the woodshed for his double-crossing ways, and relieve him of his coveted chair in the Homeland Security and Government Affairs committee. Not to be outdone, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN), whose wife has made at least $2 million sitting on the board of a major health insurance company, hinted that he would filibuster the public option as well. Apparently, faced with the prospect of the Democratic leadership opening a big can of whup ass on him, he backed off.

The problem here is not just Senators Lieberman, Baucus, Bayh and a few other unscrupulous politicians. The fact is the entire political game, the link between money and politics, is rancid and is killing democracy. In the case of health care reform, the corrupting influence of money is literally sucking the country’s life blood.

As in the days of old before the 1929 stock market crash and the New Deal, corporations have far more influence in this society than they are entitled. Citibank gleefully proclaimed in a series of reports in 2005 and 2006 that the U.S. is a plutonomy— a system of wealth inequality in which the richest 1% hold a disproportionately large share of wealth. The rich are likely to get even wealthier, at the expense of labor. This rising inequality, Citibank predicts, will lead to a political backlash.

And some backlash is needed now. It is certain that the outrageous displays of greed and corruption deserve our attention and our outrage. But to dismiss them as exceptions to the rule, rather than products of a systemic, vulturous culture that must be attacked, is to choose a perilous path.

. . . .Now, one last one, which I didn't cover over the last few days, the shootings at Ft. Hood in Texas back on Friday, which the media, in it's frenzy, got all wrong.
- First and foremost, this is an Army matter, for it's CID (Criminal Investigative Division), and once that report is finalized for it's investigative commanding officers, what they decide to release of it's particulars will be their business, period. That's how the Army works. Anything else, anything else at all, will be complete and total speculation.
-For comparison's sake, there were 3 other shootings on Army posts this year, which you probably didn't hear about.
- There were 78 other shootings that day across the United States, resulting in fatalities.
- Today, gunmen burst into a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous and opened fire, killing one, down near El Paso
- In Tualatin, Oregon today, a gunman opened up on a lab that does drug test processing, and killed 2 and injured 2 others.

. . . .In other words, it happens in this country a lot, but because we are obsessed as a nation with having a Darth Vader at all times, with having an identifiable enemy in these times that seem so out of control, it is much easier to point at Hasan, and paint him as a sleeper terrorist, instead of what he was, a jihadist in an American Army uniform who had clearly given signal after signal to his commanding officers that this was something that was coming from him, acting on his own and of his own volition, all of which speaks more to the negligence of his commanding officers and the dereliction of their duty and passing him on continually as "someone else's" problem, than it does to someone, who upon viewing and hearing the body of their work, was so clearly giving those signals.

. . . From Cenk Uygur, one of my favorite commentators:

Predictably, after the Ft. Hood shooting some idiot conservatives are suggesting that we do some sort of loyalty exam for Muslim-Americans before allowing them into the US military. Who is "we"? Who gets to do this exam? What, presumably more American people like whites or Christians?

Why don't Muslim Americans decide which Christians get to enter the US military? Oh, does that sound offensive? Does it sound weird? Why should it sound any different than Christians getting to decide which other Americans they will allow into the US military?

A lot of people are rightfully making the point that you can not generalize about millions of Muslims in this country based on two guys. Just as you cannot generalize about all right-leaning white Christians (let alone all Christians in their entirety) based on what domestic terrorists like Tim McVeigh did, or Terry Nichols, or Eric Rudolph, or Scott Roeder or ...

But there is a more important point here. Muslims Americans don't have to prove a damn thing to you. They are Americans just like anyone else, whether right-wing clowns like it or not. They are not 80% American. They are not 90% as American as you are. You don't get to judge how American they are.

Here is the unalterable fact that the right-wing of this country has to get used to: Muslim-Americans are 100% American. There are no degrees of how American you are. They have the same exact rights, privileges and responsibilities as any other American does. They don't have to answer to you.

I'm agnostic now, but I was born Muslim. My whole family is Muslim. They're all Americans. Not one of them is one percent less of an American than any other race or religion in this country. My family became American by becoming naturalized. If anything, that shows that we are even more loyal to this country. Our citizenship is not an accident of birth, we chose America.

If someone challenges how American I am based on my race, ethnicity or religion (or lack thereof), them's fightin' words. These colors don't run. There is no one in the country more American than I am.

And at least I understand the whole point of the country. We are all created equal. We all have the same rights. We do not judge people based on their race or religion. That is part and parcel of what America is all about. And if you don't understand that, I question how American you are.

. . . How irrelevant is Sarah Palin and how far has she fallen. Well, apparently taking over for Glenn Beck on "conspiracies from thin air" front, she is now claiming an anti-Christian conspiracy in the redesign of U.S. coins. Of course, Sarah points to the nefarious Barack Obama for it. It's so whacked out that Fox News, of all people, took up the fact checking on this one. Brett Baier did the fact-checking on who called the shots on this unholy redesign. It was. . .drumroll. . .George W. Bush. . . .go back to defending Carrie Prejean's tits and homemade sex tape Sarah.

. . . . . Some other round-ups from the end of the day:

Yglesias:

Make it electric:

— Giant piles of garbage are floating around in the oceans.

— Anti-tax movement ponders defeat in Washington and Maine.

— The future of real estate is in walkable urbanism.

— Stupak Amendment is potentially much more far-reaching than its proponents claim.

— Obama says that “instead of claiming God for our side, we remember Lincoln’s words, and always pray to be on the side of God.”

— Snoop Dogg supports entrepreneurship; I’ve got my mind on my money and money on my mind.

— Hezbollah foreign relations chief endorses Oprah.

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. This rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, no one gets to dictate the terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. This ain't a dress rehearsal, it's the real thing, right here, right now. Make it count.

The Desolation Angel

Does this thing have a reset button?

Tuesday November 10, 2009

. . . . .Alright, where's the reset button on this thing?

. . . .Seriously, between what was absolutely a perfect storm of (a) having to suddenly move from the Twilight Zone house that was a combination of Jurassic Park and the back alley at a Renaissance Faire (b) a completely blown back (c) a wonderful bout of bronchitis (coughing from which blew the back, and wound up with me spending at least 4 nights getting only 2 to 3 hours of sleep at a time from the coughing and culminated in a great Sunday morning spent at urgent care) along with (d) various and sundry of other of life's little dramas and (e) some serious time spent chugging away at a couple more chapters in the book finally winding up in (f) having to head back out to work (yes, there is a hurricane coming in) and (g) refusing to believe that at the very least, the kitchen, living room and bathroom in the new place had to be together since (h) I won't be back until Thanksgiving weekend and will have to turn right back around and do another long stretch at work; this, my passion got put aside for a few days.

. . . .Not to worry, we'll be back on it tomorrow and hammering away at a few topics, which will include;

. . . .First and foremost, that damn health care bill. If the bill that Baucus is working on in the Senate is a feral pig turd; this one that the House passed on Saturday night is a true piece of elephant shit. For a variety of reasons -
- Why was the vote taken on a Saturday night? I'll resurrect a piece from about 60 days ago where I explained why these particular bills are specifically slotted for a Saturday night.
- How the bill is funded - here's a clue, Medicare cuts. Got news, I've paid into Medicare my entire working life, I'll be eligible for it about the time this piece of crap takes effect in 2014, and I don't want it.
- Mandated coverage, it's either get coverage or pay a fine, a steep one.
- How the bill legislatively outlaws abortion. As I've said before, as a columnist, I don't have a position on it. The United States Supreme Court said it's legal, it's legal. The new health care bill from the House legislatively outlaws it.
- How the sponsor of that particular amendment, Bart Stupak, outed himself with that move as a stooge for "The Family", the C Street mafia that is trying to outmuscle Goldman and JP Morgan as the prime mover and shaker of behind the scenes government puppet masters.

. . . .The Fort Hood shootings, and how your "news" media, the infotainment channels; Fox, CNN, MSNBC, all of them, completely blew it.

. . . The CEO of Goldman-Sachs says that they're doing God's work, and performing a lot of social good with their particular well-chronicled shenanigans.

. . .And the beat goes on and on and on. Back in the groove tomorrow evening.

. . .Till then

Kip

Oh gosh, lookee there. . . .

Thursday November 5, 2009

. . . . ."I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies" Thomas Jefferson

. . . .Before we get into the hot and pertinent topics of the day, first up, the best program on television, Sons of Anarchy, was on with this week's episode on Tuesday night and delivered hot and strong. Consistently, week after week, Kurt Sutter and the cast deliver the best program since Deadwood. If you don't watch it, you're missing a reason to set 1 hour aside a week for yourself. For those of you who do watch (a) Bobby has figured everything out (b) Tig is nervous, and rightfully so, that he's being replaced (c) Chips' brother, Jimmy O, on the scene next week will change everything (d) Darby lived, and that's not good news for Zoebel (e) the pin is absolutely pulled on the two human fragmentation grenades that go by the names of Jax and Hale and finally (f) Gemma will have to tell them all, the final scene in the church was positively moving. The overarching theme this season is about family, and how we have to make our family where it is and with those we've been gifted to have around us, and accept them as they are, and ourselves as we are.

. . . . .As always, what I care about most and first is the group of bastards that are really running the country, and who have screwed it all up, and remain it's biggest threat, and no Righties, it's not Barack Obama and the Left, and no, Progressives, it's not the GOP. Both parties are actually one and the same, and neither side has it right anyhow, as Tuesday's elections and the incredibly inane, banal and completely whacked-out wrong coverage proved, but more on that later on in the post.

. . . . .I can't go too much longer without mentioning this one, JP Morgan Chase, David Rockefeller's baby and Goldman's partner in crime is busy bankrupting the country as well. As this report from the AP shows, JP Morgan went under the table to cut deals in Alabama, and as a result bankrupted Jefferson County:

JPMorgan Chase & Co. has agreed to pay $75 million in fines and forfeit $647 million in fees to settle federal regulators' charges that it made unlawful payments to friends of public officials to win municipal bond business in Jefferson County, Ala.

The Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday announced the settlement with JPMorgan.

The SEC had alleged that JPMorgan and former managing directors Charles LeCroy and Douglas MacFaddin made about $8.2 million in undisclosed payments in 2002 and 2003 to close friends of several Jefferson County commissioners. The money went to local brokerage firms whose principals or employees were friends of the county officials, the SEC said. Starting in July 2002, LeCroy and MacFaddin solicited the county for a $1.4 billion sewer bond deal.

Swayed by the payments, the county commissioners voted to select JPMorgan's securities division as managing underwriter of the bond offerings and its affiliated bank as swap provider for the transactions, the SEC said. The $5 billion in municipal bond business and interest-rate swap agreements awarded to JPMorgan was the largest such deal in its securities division's history, according to the SEC.

JPMorgan failed to disclose any of the unlawful payments or conflicts of interest in the bond offering documents, but passed on the cost of the payments by charging the county higher interest rates on the swap transactions, the SEC said.

"The transactions were complex but the scheme was simple," SEC Enforcement Director Robert Khuzami said in a statement. "Senior JPMorgan bankers made unlawful payments to win business and earn fees."

Under terms of the settlement, the Wall Street bank did not admit or deny the SEC allegations in agreeing to pay a $25 million civil fine and make a $50 million payment to the county, and to forfeit $647 million in termination fees it claims the county owes on the canceled interest-rate swap contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

JPMorgan also was censured and agreed to refrain from future violations of the securities laws.

Regulators have issued warnings for years over so-called "pay-to-play" relationships between investment firms and government officials in the $2.7 trillion municipal bond market, tapped by state and local governments around the country to finance schools, roads, hospitals and public works projects. The Jefferson County scandal has roiled Alabama's most populous county and last week brought the federal bribery conviction and ouster of Birmingham's mayor.

The move lowers Jefferson County's bond debt to about $3.2 billion from $3.9 billion, but officials had no immediate comment on whether that was enough to help the county avoid filing what would be the largest municipal bankruptcy ever.

. . . .Entire piece here.

. . . .Dylan Ratigan, with some solutions for what we can do, right now, to not necessarily fix anything, but at least begin to get some idea about, and transparency around just how bad it all really is right now:

1. Inject transparency, primarily to bring almost $600 trillion of crooked insurance scams to the forefront. Force almost all swaps onto exchanges, not just the 20% as current proposed reform does.

Secretary Geithner, Chairman Frank and Chairman Dodd are protecting the last of the Wall Street secret money-making schemes. They don't want to force transparency on this market because it would disclose the fraud this massive bank scheme is -- a taxpayer subsidized secret insurance market which sells cheap insurance to hedge funds, power and food and energy companies, and makes for huge profits at banks and insurance companies. Insurance and idle speculation in secret is a brilliant way for banks and other financial services companies to make money (who doesn't want to collect insurance premiums every month for something you'll never have to pay for?!) And a great way to make oil, food and electricity company CEOs richer as they pay less for their insurance. One problem -- they are all surfing on the taxpayers back to the tune of $24 trillion at risk last I checked -- and the U.S. government is the one letting them do it. Still. Now bigger than ever.

2. Demand capital to back Wall Street's gambling. As Tyler Durden at Zerohedge.com said about this clip from the show, do this and it is a guarantee that very few firms will have Goldman's trading pattern each and every quarter.

In Vegas, you need to have actual money to gamble. Your own money. It's crazy, but true. Even today, in many cases more than ever, U.S. banks use America's FDIC insured safe deposits to fund their own mad bonus-seeking speculation. Once the banks blow through that -- they borrow from the biggest money printing house in the world, the U.S. Federal Reserve to do the same thing. This is truly insane. The banks and their traders keep the upside. You, the taxpayer, keep the downside. No one else in the world can pay themselves billions to take infinite risk with little or no money down, except a big bank CEO. And we thought they were good at their jobs making all that money, when all they did was rig the game using our government to do it.

3. Enact a tax-code to encourage long-term investment and discourage short-term profit. Fortunes should not be made in minutes but over years through the creation of value to society.

As long as the easiest way for a man or woman to make money is to spend their day clicking for dollars, why would they bother doing all the work of investing in the long-term economic development of private business in America? Tax code in general should encourage investment, jobs, and innovation in America and discourage idle speculation as the easiest way for a college kid to get rich. There are sensible ways to use tax policy to encourage this that do not hamper liquidity.

4. Break up the Too Big To Fail banking institutions. Start with Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan. Right Now.

How do you expect any other business to compete with the chosen few who are guaranteed profits? The more risk they take, the more they make. Why do you think they invented a fake $600 Trillion secret derivative market in the first place? Bigger bonuses baby. All upside. No downside. Thank you Uncle Sam. Thank you Secretary Geithner.

. . . . .If you're not at least catching on to the fact that these financial institutions, the select few, namely two of them; Goldman-Sachs and JP Morgan Chase are the biggest long-term threats to this country and it's middle class, and long term real prosperity, I don't know what else to tell you.

. . . .Yet another one from Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, on how Wall Street is stealing any wealth in this country

On Tuesday, March 11th, 2008, somebody — nobody knows who — made one of the craziest bets Wall Street has ever seen. The mystery figure spent $1.7 million on a series of options, gambling that shares in the venerable investment bank Bear Stearns would lose more than half their value in nine days or less. It was madness — "like buying 1.7 million lottery tickets," according to one financial analyst.

But what's even crazier is that the bet paid.

At the close of business that afternoon, Bear Stearns was trading at $62.97. At that point, whoever made the gamble owned the right to sell huge bundles of Bear stock, at $30 and $25, on or before March 20th. In order for the bet to pay, Bear would have to fall harder and faster than any Wall Street brokerage in history.

The very next day, March 12th, Bear went into free fall. By the end of the week, the firm had lost virtually all of its cash and was clinging to promises of state aid; by the weekend, it was being knocked to its knees by the Fed and the Treasury, and forced at the barrel of a shotgun to sell itself to JPMorgan Chase (which had been given $29 billion in public money to marry its hunchbacked new bride) at the humiliating price of … $2 a share. Whoever bought those options on March 11th woke up on the morning of March 17th having made 159 times his money, or roughly $270 million. This trader was either the luckiest guy in the world, the smartest son of a bitch ever or…

. . . . .

The counterfeit nature of our economy is troubling enough, given that financial power is concentrated in the hands of a few key players — "300 white guys in Manhattan," as a former high-placed executive puts it. But over the course of the past year, that group of insiders has also proved itself brilliantly capable of enlisting the power of the state to help along the process of concentrating economic might — making it less and less likely that the financial markets will ever be policed, since the state is increasingly the captive of these interests.

The new president for whom we all had such high hopes went and hired Michael Froman, a Citigroup executive who accepted a $2.2 million bonus after he joined the White House, to serve on his economic transition team — at the same time the government was giving Citigroup a massive bailout. Then, after promising to curb the influence of lobbyists, Obama hired a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist, Mark Patterson, as chief of staff at the Treasury. He hired another Goldmanite, Gary Gensler, to police the commodities markets. He handed control of the Treasury and Federal Reserve over to Geithner and Bernanke, a pair of stooges who spent their whole careers being bellhops for New York bankers. And on the first anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, when he finally came to Wall Street to promote "serious financial reform," his plan proved to be so completely absent of balls that the share prices of the major banks soared at the news.

The nation's largest financial players are able to write the rules for own their businesses and brazenly steal billions under the noses of regulators, and nothing is done about it. A thing so fundamental to civilized society as the integrity of a stock, or a mortgage note, or even a U.S. Treasury bond, can no longer be protected, not even in a crisis, and a crime as vulgar and conspicuous as counterfeiting can take place on a systematic level for years without being stopped, even after it begins to affect the modern-day equivalents of the Rockefellers and the Carnegies. What 10 years ago was a cheap stock-fraud scheme for second-rate grifters in Brooklyn has become a major profit center for Wall Street. Our burglar class now rules the national economy. And no one is trying to stop them.

. . . .Entire piece here.

. . . .How deep does this shit go?
- From the Wall Street Journal -

One of Russia's most powerful tycoons -- barred entry to the U.S. for years due to U.S. government concerns about possible ties to organized crime -- visited the country twice this year under secret arrangements made by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska met with FBI agents in August and earlier this month as part of a continuing criminal probe, according to two administration officials. The focus of that probe couldn't be learned.

Mr. Deripaska used the opportunity of his recent U.S. visits to meet with top executives of U.S. investment banks Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. The aluminum giant he controls, UC Rusal, is preparing for an initial public offering, a vital part of Mr. Deripaska's efforts to save his debt-burdened business.

. . . .That's how deep this shit goes. And you spend all your time worrying that somehow the guy in the White House, who is the ultimate capitalist, the man who received the largest campaign contribution in the history of U.S. politics from Goldman-Sachs is a "socialist". . . . sometimes I am completely astounded as to how stupid people can be.

. . . .Now, on Tuesday's elections and the incredibly mundane, banal, inane amount of analysis, punditry and airtime spent on them. It's not nearly as complex as anyone wants to make it, it's not nearly the signal or the stirring of the tea leaves that anyone wants it to be, and it sure as hell better not be a "portent" to any politician for next year.

. . . .Unfortunately, it will be, and here's how it will play out. Democrats are, for the most part, spineless pussies, who, most likely have spent all day today wetting their finger and putting it up to see which way the wind is blowing, so they know which way they should face. Republicans automatically assume that they are right, have always been right and cannot possibly be wrong, since by genetic heritage and birthright, they're born to rule and sure as hell wish that we could get back to that two class system in the country so they can have servants again, and will charge off half-cocked, headlong, continuing to lead their party over the edge, into the maw of destruction that it's now headed into.

. . . It played out very simply. The vast majority of voters in this country, in the space of less than 2 years, have dropped their party identification, since neither party is worth hyena crap anymore, and are no registered independents. In an economy this bad, with more and more people waking up to the fact that "their" politician, regardless of party, is a bought and paid for dancing monkey for their campaign contributors and lobbyists, are getting into the habit of voting out the incumbent. In the cases of the governors of Virginia and New Jersey, it was simple, in both cases, it was a case of the people electing the guy they disliked less. In Upstate New York 23, where the Republican Party went on it's ideological purge and ate it's own young, the Conservative teabagger from out-of-district who was so breathlessly endorsed by the Republican Party's de facto leader Rush Limbaugh and his floozy Sarah, got trounced by a Democrat. Now think on that and let it sink in. A district that hadn't elected a Democrat since 1852, when faced with a choice between a teabagger and a Dem, elected a Dem.

. . .That's the portent that's being missed, and it's being missed big. Instead of taking a step back to realize just how badly the extremists have marginalized their party, have made it now an ideology, a dogma, a religion; the teabaggers, who live backwards anyhow, are rushing to challenge all over as of today, in what apparently is an effort to drive that party's bus right off the cliff.

. . . And if the remaining members of the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower and Goldwater allow it and want it to go that way, I say good riddance.

. . . .Why do I hate teabaggers, wingnuts and extremists? These very same people criticized, and called un-American, and unpatriotic anyone who criticized George W. Bush while he was in office and while troops were in harm's way during two wars, the same two wars that continue today.

"Today, thousands will pour into Washington to tell Nancy Pelosi and the Congress to send Obama to a death panel..." —Wingnut stereotype Erick Erickson

Sending the president to a death panel, eh? So much for not undermining the commander in chief while the troops are in harm's way.

. . . .Let me be the first to say it, Erick Erickson isn't a patriot, I doubt he's an American, and he is a traitor, sowing treason and sedition. Ditto that for Rep. Michelle Bachmann of Anoka, Minnesota.

. . . At least one member of that party grew a set on Wednesday. RNC chairman Michael Steele:
Rogue warfare, perhaps? RNC Chairman Michael Steele issued a stern rebuke to conservatives like Sarah Palin and Tim Pawlenty, who immersed themselves in Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman’s losing House campaign. “If you don't live in the district, you don't vote there, your opinion doesn't matter very much,” Steele said. "It serves as an important lesson on how we manage an opportunity to win a seat. And how not to mismanage by putting in a botched process.” Steele went on, “I don't see a victory in losing seats.
- Rush will probably call him out on the radio on Thursday, and Steele will have to tuck his tail between his legs, take his punishment and cave in to the Repubs real leader.

. . . .Damn those pesky homemade sex tapes! The Right wing bimbo-of-the-moment from a few months ago, Carrie Prejean, who was being sued the Miss Universe California pageant for the cost of her plastic surgery (it was either that or they wanted their tits back) had countersued the pageant. Seems they let her know they had a copy of a tape that she'd made a while back that had found it's way onto the Internet, yes, those amateur sites. She dropped her suit rather quickly.

. . .Absolutely great article by Anna Quindlen in Newsweek that I highly recommend for anyone, no matter your political stripe or leaning.

From time to time the American people participate in a mass delusion about how their government works. Such a delusion took place exactly a year ago, when a 47-year-old African-American who had once been accorded little chance of prevailing was elected president of the United States.

History will judge Barack Obama over the long haul. But we've learned something in the short term that is simple, obvious, and has less to do with him than with the Founding Fathers. This is a country that often has transformational ambitions but is saddled with an incremental system, a nation built on revolution, then engineered so the revolutionary can rarely take hold.

Checks and balances: that's how we learn about it in social-studies class, and in theory it is meant to guard against a despotic executive, a wild-eyed legislature, an overweening judiciary. And it's also meant to safeguard the rights of the individual; as James Madison, president and father of the Constitution, once said, "I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." But what our system has meant during the poisonous partisan civil war that has paralyzed Washington in recent years is that very little of the big stuff gets done. It simply can't.

That's really how our government works, by inches. In our long history it seems that the decision to wage war is the most sweeping act of the executive and legislative branches, although the British would likely argue that Franklin Roosevelt even brought an incremental approach to that in the run-up to World War II. In modern times, most true transformation has come through the judiciary: Brown, Roe, Miranda. Perhaps that is because consensus on the court is manageable, with only five of nine required, or because justices have life tenure, and need not spend their days looking to the next election, the focus group, the polls. Although we view the past through a lens of misty historical romanticism, there's no question that the calculus of elected office at the moment is startlingly cynical. Henry Paulson, the last Treasury secretary in the last Bush administration, told Todd Purdum of Vanity Fair that he was most shocked by the perfidy of official Washington, in which members of Congress would tell him privately that they supported policies that they would oppose, even vigorously trash, in public. "I didn't understand the system," Paulson concluded, the system in which men and women have their consciences excised in the course of government service. The small steps an incremental system guarantees become even smaller in the face of pitched partisan rancor, until eventually nothing moves at all.

. . . . .Entire piece here.

. . . .Now, very seriously, I recommend reading the entire piece, balanced, well-thought out and the very least a cool breath of rationality and sense, and an excellent treatise on how government really works.

. . .That said, I absolutely fell over myself laughing at the painful truths exposed in this one, which is a perfect storm of Bob Cesca and Matt Taibbi, melded together:

While the leftnutbaggers devour Barack Obama for not firing an organic utopia of free marijuana and health care out of his armpits on Day 1, they should be aware that the moron bullet the nation dodged in 2008 is waiting in the wings for a presidential run. Of course, any sane person would assume quitting her gubernatorial position to cash in on book deals would've doomed Sarah Palin's political career, but never underestimate the American propensity for dumb. Via Matt Taibbi:

Palin’s paranoid ramblings and self-pitying tantrums on the way out of office not only didn’t injure her chances for national office, they actually appeared to help, as polls taken in the week after her resignation showed that 71% of Republicans were now prepared to vote for her for president in 2012. Just as she had during the campaign last fall, Palin defied rational analysis by making a primal connection with the subterranean resentments of white middle America, which is apparently so pissed off now at the rest of the planet for not coddling its hurt feelings in the multicultural age that it is willing to embrace any politician who validates its insane sense of fucked-overness.

Granted, this is from an unpublished piece just after her resignation it still rings true among the xenophobic, crazier-by-the-minute GOP base. Also, Shannyn Moore points out that Sarah Palin is out there robocalling and waiting to take credit for any teabagger wins today like some sort of undying, lowest common denominator Terminator.

Could a divided Democratic Party and an increasing testicle-themed grip on the GOP be the perfect storm for a Palin presidency? It's hard to say until today's election results are in, but should Obama continue to be attacked for not being the Ultra-Progressive John Rambo he never promised to be, we might be looking at a "Battle of the Fringes" come 2012 which could easily digress into a coin-toss for the White House. That said, let me know how health care reform thrives under an administration who thinks the King James and a Tylenol should replace Medicare.

[Redmond's Note: This post is not meant as a tacit Obama love-fest - I've got my pet causes, too *cough*Geithner*cough*. It's more of a reminder that a ticking timebomb of winking jingoism is primed to detonate our asses back into the Dark Ages at a moment's notice. An FYI if you will.]

Adding... You could also file this post under "Why Voting for Kucinich in 2012 is a HORRIBLE Idea." Don't get me wrong, I agree with the guy on a majority of issues but realistically he's just not electable and I prefer casting votes that won't land the GOP back in the White House.

. . . . .And this last one, by Chez Pazienza, over at Deus ExMalcontent, snarky, smart-ass and dead-on, and why I fear the current incarnation of the Republican Party and the religious whackos and wingnuts that have taken it over:

One of the most pervasive themes in right-wing discourse throughout the years has been a fear of infestation -- the notion that non-whites, gays, immigrants, godless humanists, basically anyone deemed "not us" are replicating like the vermin they are and, if left unchecked, will eventually eviscerate the values of "traditional America" via their sheer unholy numbers. It's this amusingly irrational brand of paranoia that haunts the dreams of not only your average semi-literate, Keystone Light-drinking lummox, but equally scares the hell out of ostensibly educated folk who you'd think would know better.

People like Pat Boone.

Sure, Boone's little more than an irrelevant caricature -- admittedly the biggest WASP who's ever walked the face of the earth and Anita Bryant's only slightly more masculine counterpart in espousing the Gospel of Whitey -- but it's still tough to imagine him dabbling in eliminationist fantasies aimed at, of all places, the White House. And yet that's exactly what he's now doing. In a move that's even more painfully embarrassing than that ridiculous metal album he recorded back in the early 90s, Boone's penned a column for Newsmax in which he claims that the home of the president of the United States needs to be tented and fumigated to kill off the "social and political voracious varmints" who've overrun it.

Boone writes, "Experts come in, actually envelope the whole dwelling in a giant tent -- and send a very powerful fumigant, lethal to the varmints and unwelcome creatures, into every nook and cranny of the house. Done thoroughly, every last destructive insect or rodent is sent to varmint hell -- and in a day or two, the grand house is habitable again."

And no doubt Pat's willing to donate his own personal supply of Zyklon B gas to the proceedings. Either way, feel free to take a minute to stop laughing.

Yes, of course this is (no pun intended) the most rat-shit absurd thing you've ever heard, dreamed up by a guy who likely longs for the good old days when "coloreds" couldn't use the same bathroom as him, much less occupy the highest office in his beloved country. But this kind of horseshit is just the latest example of something I've mentioned a couple of times here before: the utter dehumanization of Barack Obama by his political adversaries.

Back in September, I wrote this:

"That's really what it's all about, though -- the fact that Barack Obama's political enemies don't actually accept him as president. They consider him an illegitimate -- his presidency some kind of sham, regardless of the overwhelming majority he won back in November of 2008. They've demonized and marginalized him -- called him a foreigner, a socialist, a threat to the American way of life, a cult leader intent on indoctrinating and enslaving our children through sheer force of personality. They bring guns to places he's speaking; they have so little respect for the man or the fact that he won the office he now holds that they intimate that they're willing to cause physical harm to him and his supporters."

And now, not surprisingly, they refer to him and his family as insects -- "unwelcome creatures" infesting the White House that require quick and absolute extermination so that the natural order of things can be restored.

Newsmax should be wary of printing this kind of crap right now, given that just a few weeks ago they rushed, uncharacteristically red-faced, to take down a post which seemed to advocate a military coup against the president of the United States. I'd have to assume its only Pat Boone's status as a walking punchline that's leading them to leave his own bit of eliminationist wishful thinking up on their site for the moment. Regardless of who says it, though, it's wrong to beat the drum this loudly against a sitting president, to show the office -- not simply the man and his family, but the office -- so little respect.

Not only is it wrong -- and stop me if you've heard this one before -- it's flat-out dangerous given the current political climate.

All the way back in August of last year -- long before the Tea Baggers, the Birthers, the death panel rumors, fears of the encroaching socialist menace, conspiracist lunacy about the indoctrination of our children, even the presidential election itself -- I wrote this in response to the rise in right-wing, eliminationist rhetoric and violence:

"It's an agenda which has, admittedly, been proclaimed and perpetuated -- whether in jest or not -- by people like Limbaugh, Coulter and Savage for some time. These three and others like them have honed their talk of zero-tolerance for the people across the aisle to a knife's edge. For years, they've blanketed the airwaves, bookshelves and internet with ultra-nationalist agitprop which asserts that those who don't think like them are not simply to be argued with and voted down, they must be utterly crushed underfoot by any means necessary -- even if it involves, as Coulter once said, taking a baseball bat to them -- because they are nothing less than the enemy of the United States of America. In the words, if not actually the minds, of these seemingly fascist demagogues, liberals are as dangerous and absolute a threat to our way of life as the terrorists they supposedly coddle.

...Whether they mean it to or not, the invective of clowns like Limbaugh does have an impact. Listen long enough to right-wing propaganda and your eyes eventually glaze over, your brain shuts down and you begin to subscribe completely to the alternate reality that it's constructed out of thin air: an America where your new non-white neighbors are terrorists, immigrants are stealing your job, homosexuals want to lure your children into a life of sodomy, and treasonous liberals are plotting against you and your god at every turn. Believe this paranoid fantasy completely and who knows what you'll be capable of doing to defend your way of life."

I have no doubt that Boone's piece is supposed to be a joke -- but it's one that, in context, isn't all that funny.

Which is surprising given that Pat Boone's entire existence is one of the funniest fucking things imaginable.

. . . .I miss you Mom, a lot. Thanks for watching over me.

. . . .. . . .And that's the way it is:

. . . . .. . . .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: Gregory, MI 48137]

One more time, by the numbers, let's get it. . . . .

Tuesday November 4, 2009

. . . . . .So, I got a lot of stuff to do today, dispensing with the normal pleasantries and diving right in. It's Tuesday, I'm moving again, and getting ready for a very long run out at work, and so we'll get all wonky and deep into numbers, but that's what's important, I don't have paid sponsors or advertisers to drive me into a 24 hour news cycle, and actual numbers and data drive the real world around. Keeping our eye on the ball, and keeping it focused where it needs to be, looking back one year exactly; and I think Bill Maher captures my mood and thoughts exactly.

Maher:

Yeah, I'm disappointed, too. I thought we were sweeping into power; I thought change meant Change. I believed all that talk about another First 100 Days, a la Roosevelt. Well, that didn't happen. The question is, is this as good as it gets from Obama, or is he pacing himself? He may have a four and eight-year plan and they included a first year of just gettin' to know you and not gonna rock the boat too much. Well, Mission Accomplished on that.

It's still to early to lose hope in a guy as smart and talented as Barack Obama. But I would counsel him to remember: If you're going undercover to infiltrate how Washington works, so you become one of them for a while, to gain their confidence, well, it can be just like all those movies where a cop goes deep, deep, DEEP undercover with drug people and -- fuck, he's a drug addict, too!

Logic tells me that really smart guys like Obama and Rahm Emanuel know better what they're doing than I do. They certainly know things I don't know. I think we have the same general goals and beliefs. And this is what they do for a living -- I wouldn't even try it. But I will never stop having this doubt: that maybe if they had really charged in there riding the forceful energy of the historic election, and acted like it was an emergency moment -- which it was -- they could have gotten some big victories right up front, and there really could have been an historic "first hundred days" for this administration and the country. Instead of what happened, which is the Obamas got a dog. It could have worked -- the country had given its endorsement to "...and now for something completely different." There might have been a way to knock the Republicans back on their heels right away, with the argument that "The American people demanded we make these changes, and you are unpatriotic to stand in their way."

We'll never know. Because that moment passed, and now it could follow the pattern of World War I and devolve into boring, static trench warfare where nothing really gamechanging happens while both sides slowly bleed to death.

That said, I do not forget that if the election had gone the other way, we'd right now have a barter economy and be at war with Honduras.

. . . . .A good friend of mine got caught by this very next thing, as did a lot of you, (c'mon admit it. You know you wanted it to be true!) as Cesca points out.

Super Stupid

Here's the rundown of the prominent wingnuts who seriously thought Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers visited the White House this year. Ed Morrissey actually wrote that they visited more often "than Petraeus and McChrystal combined."

It goes without saying that Drudge was smack in the middle of the kneejerk bonanza.

They're smart!

. . . . . .I'm not going to waste time reading tea leaves and scrying on two governor's elections in East Coast states and one congressional district election in upstate New York on the Canadian border, all in an off-year. Let's stay focused on a couple of things. Focus here, people, focus!!

. . . .Ezra Klein, with a good one:

Budget context

A good, well, tweet from Chris Hayes:

Anyone notice that the pres signed a $680 BILLION defense approp bill in the midst of our debates about $90b a yr for hc?

That $680 billion, incidentally, doesn't count the cost of the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.

You could say a lot about this juxtaposition, but among other things, it's a reminder that there's real rhetorical power in the time frame that gets chosen for a given policy. The stimulus, for instance, was explained as a two-year cost, so it was $800 billion, rather than $400 billion a year. Health-care reform is being sold as a 10-year cost, so it's $900 billion, rather than $90 billion a year. The defense appropriation is explained in terms of single-year cost, so it's $680 billion, as opposed to the $10 trillion or so that it would cost if you took into account expected growth.

There are reasons for all this. The stimulus was going to be spent over two years. Health-care reform is being balanced in the 10-year budget window. The defense bill is a single-year appropriation. Washington's professional wonk set knows all that. But most people just hear the numbers, and they don't necessarily know that the "trillion dollar health-care bill" the GOP keeps talking about will actually cost $90 billion a year, and it will cut the deficit. Standardizing all costs to an annual cost would do a lot to help people figure this out. And explaining things in terms of the federal budget -- how much is $90 billion as a percent of what we'll spend this year? How about $680 billion? -- would do a lot to help people put it all in context.

. . . .And, as long as we're getting all crazy with numbers and such, two of my favorite brains together in one post, Yglesias on Krugman:

Stimulus and the Future

Paul Krugman makes the important point that those who claim fiscal restraint amidst a depression is a favor to young people don’t know what they’re talking about:

Deficit hawks like to complain that today’s young people will end up having to pay higher taxes to service the debt we’re running up right now. But anyone who really cared about the prospects of young Americans would be pushing for much more job creation, since the burden of high unemployment falls disproportionately on young workers — and those who enter the work force in years of high unemployment suffer permanent career damage, never catching up with those who graduated in better times.

Even the claim that we’ll have to pay for stimulus spending now with higher taxes later is mostly wrong. Spending more on recovery will lead to a stronger economy, both now and in the future — and a stronger economy means more government revenue. Stimulus spending probably doesn’t pay for itself, but its true cost, even in a narrow fiscal sense, is only a fraction of the headline number.

The objective correlation of interests actually goes the other way around. A deflationary situation is good for retired people. They’re not impacted by the labor market situation, and flat-or-falling consumer prices make their revenue from Social Security or bonds go further. Young people, by contrast, would be much better off getting a job and paying taxes later than being unemployed out of school and suffering for it indefinitely.

. . . .And while we're doing numbers this morning, we'll go back to Ezra Klein, who tackles one of the fundamentals underlying the health care reform screaming matches, that of numbers, prices and costs:

An insurance industry CEO explains why American health care costs so much

On Friday, I sat down with Kaiser Permanente CEO George Halvorson to talk about health-care reform. The conversation was long and ranging and will take a while to transcribe. But before we really got into the weeds, Halvorson handed me an astonishing packet of charts. The material was put together by the International Federation of Health Plans, which is pretty much what it sounds like: an association of insurance plans in different countries. But it showed something I've never seen before, at least not at this level of detail: prices.

The packet's 36 pages are mostly graphs showing the average prices paid in different countries for different procedures, diagnostics and drugs. There is a thudding consistency to the pages: a series of crude bars, with the block representing the prices paid by American health-insurance plans looming over the others like a New York skyscraper that got lost in downtown Des Moines.

There is a simple explanation for why American health care costs so much more than health care in any other country: because we pay so much more for each unit of care. As Halvorson explained, and academics and consultancies have repeatedly confirmed, if you leave everything else the same -- the volume of procedures, the days we spend in the hospital, the number of surgeries we need -- but plug in the prices Canadians pay, our health-care spending falls by about 50 percent.

In other countries, governments set the rates that will be paid for different treatments and drugs, even when private insurers are doing the actual purchasing. In our country, the government doesn't set those rates for private insurers, which is why the prices paid by Medicare, as you'll see on some of these graphs, are much lower than those paid by private insurers. You'll also notice that the bit showing American prices is separated into blue and yellow: That shows the spread between the average price (the top of the blue) and the 90th percentile (the top of the yellow). Other countries don't have nearly that much variation, again because their pricing is standard.

The health-care reform debate has done a good job avoiding the subject of prices. The argument over the Medicare-attached public plan was, in a way that most people didn't understand, an argument about prices, but it quickly became an argument about a public option without a pricing dimension, and never really looked back. The administration has been very interested in the finding that some states are better at providing cost-effective care than other states, but not in the finding that some countries are better at purchasing care than other countries. "A health-care debate in this country that isn't aware of the price differential is not an informed debate," says Halvorson. By that measure, we have not had a very informed debate. But download this pack of charts (pdf), and you'll be a bit more informed.

. . . .Like I said waaayyy up above, I agree with Bill Maher, I'm disappointed in this President, but 30 years of watching Congress and the White House, and 5 years of writing about it, I should know better, I suppose. And I'm in full agreement with the good Mr. Maher on one thing else, as well, should the oppostion have won a year ago today; we'd all be eating kibbles and bits, with a higher unemployment rate, be at mandatory snake-handling classes every Tuesday and already have launched an all-out nuclear strike against everybody that isn't Uh-Murican, you betcha!

. . . .And given that thought, Andrew Sullivan provides the quote for the day, uttered by none other than Bush1 about that most deified (and lied about) father figure of the utter mess that we're in today:
“Reagan is a conservative. An extreme conservative. All the blockheads and dummies are for him, and when he says that something is necessary, they trust him. But if some Democrat had proposed what Reagan did, with you, they might not have trusted him,” - George H W. Bush, according to Mikhail Gorbachev.

. . . .And it's important to capture that thought, the off-the-cuff remark, that Bush1 made, because it's truth and reality. Reagan is deified, and the upstate New York events this weekend, as a Republican candidate was purged because she wasn't ideologically "pure" enough, point to the very fact that dogma, myth and conservatism as religion have all taken their corrosive place in the corruption of political thought that the Republican party has become. Sullivan:

Conservatism As Doctrine

It's hard to find a more sublime version of it than Laura Ingraham's email:

Conservatism is the most influential political philosophy of the past 100 years because it's built upon essential truths.

The past 100 years? I don't know any Hooverites who think the last century was a triumph for small government and individual liberty. Look at the size of government since 1909. Look at the level of taxation. Look at the welfare state. Look at racial civil rights. Look at the role of women. The West is immeasurably more statist than it was a hundred years ago, and even the most dramatic counter-revolutionaries, such as Reagan and Thatcher, did very little to alter the contours of the state. The Bush Republicans implemented the biggest expansion of government power, debt and spending since LBJ.

But, look, Ingraham isn't really thinking here. This is a statement of doctrine, not politics, and all religions require a certain mythology (the idea that a conservative movement that began in the late 1950s extends backward to the earliest part of the century is truly religious thinking). So one can forgive the thoughtless hyperbole.

What worries me is the slow transformation of what was a vital pragmatic adjustment to liberalism's policy failures in the 1980s into a kind of eternal dogma. But tax cuts are not always the solution to every emergent problem; global warfare may not be the best way to exercize American power in the multi-polar world we now live in; social change - a multi-racial society where women and gays seek and deserve full equality - should be imaginatively shaped by the right, not outright rejected on religious or nostalgic grounds.

. . . .And John Batchelor, over at The Daily Beast with his take on the killing field that upstate New York 23 has bizarrely become as the GOP eats it's own young:

The news arrived this morning like the report of a mugging that the Republican Party choice for the 23rd, the sturdy, dull, dutiful Dede Scozzafava, was quitting the campaign for Congress and releasing her supporters without a recommendation. Scozzafava’s late decision, with less than 66 hours until the polls open, hints at backstairs deals, whispered pay-offs, promises from Albany, all of which is likely untrue and romantic rubbish.

Scozzafava leaves the race and returns to her New York Assembly seat as a Republican. Not a Club for Growth libertarian "Too Big to Fail!" Republican; not a Tea Party “Mad as Hell!” Republican; not a Fox News or talk radio "We report!" Republican. Just a Republican like me and a few others who pay mind to the fact that the party comes from a philosophy that is tolerant, obedient, respectful, curious, generous, kind, liberty-loving, and not much in fashion just now.

The most melodramatic turn in the fairy tale of “conservative financial expert” Doug Hoffman rising up on the shoulders of Republican celebrities such as Fred Thompson, Steve Forbes, and Dick Armey to contest the special election in the 23rd New York Congressional district against the regular Republican incumbent is that this is not a simple story about winning on Tuesday. No, this is a story about the sneaky takeover of the shabby GOP remnant by the most arrogant creatures in American politics, the Club for Growth and their fair-weather companions, the hungry Republican zombies.

All together, these potentates constitute a right-wing nihilism made up of charming or churlish older males who come down from their gated neighborhoods in Olympus now and again to preach their giddy “I’ve got mine!” libertarian cant to the meek of the Earth and threaten mayhem against the Republican Party if it does not obey a Busby Berkeley kick-line of billionaire cranks.

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who is pre-selling her book, and Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, who is selling his obscure presidential candidacy, leaped late into the parade for Hoffman with no interest whatsoever in the candidate or the cause. Palin and Pawlenty look to be needy creatures controlled by their appetites for headlines and hooey and seem out of their depth here, like puppies on the Adirondack Northway. Former New York Governor George Pataki’s late-in-the-day endorsement of Hoffman against his own predilection for Scozzafava (reportedly she was Pataki’s posse’s pick to start with, a hard-slogging minority assemblywoman) is not explicable except that, in the end, most successful politicians learn to walk upright without a spine.

The New York 23rd remains a cautionary tale about the Club for Growth and its snooty deviousness during the last days of the GOP. The national polls show a Republican Party withered to just 20 percent of respondents, and now there is a possibility of single digits before someone turns off the creepy movie, I, Zombie. The talk radio choir and their Fox News pantomimes have seized on the Hoffman boom as a demonstration of the potential strength of the Tea Party conservatives. Rush Limbaugh has called Dede Scozzafava a “pretender” and an “extreme liberal Republican” who “might as well be a Democrat.” Limbaugh has twisted himself and logic into explaining how Hoffman is not a third-party candidate in order to fend off the chilling possibility that the Republican Taliban is slouching to a new low and into a third-party cave.

The enthusiasms of the New York 23rd will swiftly fade as the Republican right-wing rallies for next year’s Apocalypse-lite mid-term elections, though the footnote may read that this special election was a marker when the party of Ike, Nixon, Ford, and the Bushes began its autumnal stroll into the oblivion of a bootless cult.

. . . .And while we're at the business of myths and debunking them with good solid data this morning. I've heard ad nauseum from people that the housing bubble burst, not because a bunch of idiots went out and bought homes they couldn't afford with mortgages larger than their monthly income, but instead the myth, that perpetual American desire for good, solid, middle class white people not be at fault for anything, the myth that somehow HUD, Fannie Mae, ACORN, well they pushed loans through to certain people based on the CRA. Krugman puts a pin in that one, and echoes something I've been saying all year long. You think 09 was bad? Wait until '10 when the commercial mortgages all crash baby.

CRE and the CRA

Zombies, zombies, everywhere. One of the enduring myths of the financial crisis has been the claim that it was the result of (a) Fannie and Freddie (b) the Community Reinvestment Act, which forced poor, helpless bankers to make loans to you-know-who. It’s a myth that won’t go away — I get asked about it almost every time I give a public lecture — even though it has been extensively debunked. (See, e.g., here.)

But reading this scary piece about commercial real estate, I realized that CRE offers yet another debunking. After all, there was no federal act driving banks to lend money for office parks and shopping malls; Fannie and Freddie weren’t in the CRE loan business; yet 55 percent — 55 percent! — of commercial mortgages that will come due before 2014 are underwater.

The lenders didn’t need government urging to dive deep into a property bubble, and drown.

. . . .And Krugman, one more time, on just how close we came:

The story so far, in one picture

World industrial production in the Great Depression and now:

Data for the Depression courtesy of Eichengreen and O’Rourke. Data for the Great Recession (starting April 2008) from Netherlands Bureau for Cyclical Economic Analysis.

Basically, we started out with a year that matched the Great Depression, but have since pulled back a bit from the edge of the abyss.

. . . .I miss you Mom, a lot. Thanks for watching over me.

. . . .. . . .And that's the way it is:

. . . . .. . . .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: Gregory, MI 48137]

On the whole, I'd much rather be in Louisiana

Monday November 3, 2009

. . . . "For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor-other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.

Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of Government. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people's mandate to end it. Under that mandate it is being ended.

The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the Government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They granted that the Government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the Government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live.

Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.

These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.

The brave and clear platform adopted by this Convention, to which I heartily subscribe, sets forth that Government in a modern civilization has certain inescapable obligations to its citizens, among which are protection of the family and the home, the establishment of a democracy of opportunity, and aid to those overtaken by disaster.

But the resolute enemy within our gates is ever ready to beat down our words unless in greater courage we will fight for them….

We are poor indeed if this Nation cannot afford to lift from every recess of American life the dread fear of the unemployed that they are not needed in the world. We cannot afford to accumulate a deficit in the books of human fortitude….

Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference…."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt June 1936

. . . .The playlist has changed up quite a bit, and my own dulcet tones are back on the airwaves after a week of silence observed for my Mother.

. . . .I was reading over at Kurt Sutter's blog, SutterInk, and he promised, and tweeted, that Gemma will have tell all to Clay and Jax by Week 10, which is next week, so the big set-up for that should be this week on SoA.

. . . .Was reading today, that one of the finest shows ever put on television, The Wire, now has a class at Harvard based on it. Cool beans, it was, and remains, one of the best examples yet of being able to capture metathemes of modern urban life in America contained within the capsules and constraints of a character driven weekly drama. Well, that and the fact that Jimmy McNulty remains one of my fictional soul mates and doppelgangers.

. . . . .Welcome back to the start of another week, and the Halloween chills just haven't stopping coming at you. Yes, finance, money and the banks remain the top priority. We are getting screwed, and everyone wants to talk about everything else, and there is a prime suspect, out of the line-up of the usuals, Timothy Geithner, our illustrious Goldman alum, and protege at Goldman of Hank Paulson, who, (shock, awe and surprise) was Geithner's predecessor as Treasury Sec.

. . . .As promised from yesterday, a continuation of the wheelings and dealings of the most predatory, blood-sucking parasites in this galaxy, Goldman-Sachs, and how they're continuing to eviscerate middle-class America, from McClatchy:

Joining other Wall Street firms that bought millions of subprime mortgages, Goldman companies have gone to courts from California to Florida seeking approval to foreclose on the homes of middle- and lower-income Americans who couldn't keep up with their loans' soaring monthly payments.

Some borrowers were speculators or homebuyers who exaggerated their incomes on loan applications, thinking they'd always have an escape hatch because housing prices would keep rising. Others, however, were victims of fast-talking mortgage brokers who didn't explain that the loans' interest rates could rise to as high as 15 percent. Many borrowers who defaulted on their mortgages may never qualify for a home loan again.

In court encounters, Goldman and other Wall Street firms have faced the impact of their own wheeling and dealing. Many of the families being put on the street never would've gotten their big mortgages if investment banks hadn't provided a seemingly insatiable secondary market for millions of loans to marginally qualified buyers.

Subprime borrowers were supposed to provide a safe income stream for investors who bought mostly high-grade, triple-A-rated bonds from Goldman and bigger subprime players, such as now-defunct Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch.

Now, millions of these borrowers have defaulted on mortgage payments, contributing to a historic slump in home prices and depressing the bonds' value. Half the homes in some California neighborhoods have been subject to foreclosures or short sales, in which a home is sold for less than the mortgage balance, and either the seller or the lender takes a loss.

. . . . .Entire story here.

. . . . On the man who is suspect Number 1 behind the complete lack of transparency on Wall Street, Dylan Ratigan:

A year ago it was revealed to the American people that our banking system was a legalized Ponzi scheme in which bank and insurance CEOs paid themselves billions of dollars in personal compensation to lend and insure assets with money they didn't have to customers who couldn't pay back the loans.

In those dark days between the fall of Lehman Brothers and before the presidential election, we were often carried through that time by the small glimmer of hope in that at least we would soon have a new leader who would hopefully fix this mess and punish those responsible.

Yet in the past 9 months, not only has the administration not fixed anything, they have made things much worse for anyone who isn't a Wall Street banker. Therefore, we are past the point where anyone in power still gets the benefit of the doubt and the process of taking back our country for all citizens must begin now.

This is why I think we must ask if U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is still the right person for the job. It has become clear recently that back in his previous role as New York Federal Reserve Governor, he unnecessarily gave billions of dollars of US tax money to banks and insurance companies with few strings attached. And it is now becoming clear that his lack of meaningful action is helping many of these same banks steal more by legalizing their most economically dangerous, socially destructive and self-enriching practices.

Yesterday on NBC's Meet the Press, Secretary Geithner again endorsed House bank reform legislation that would allow, by my calculations, as much as 80%, or $475 trillion, of the bank's $600 trillion in crooked insurance schemes to still be held in secret. It was and is the secret risks held in this very market that led to our collapse in the first place and continue to pose massive future risk to the global economy.

He also continued to employ the bankers' favorite, and most ludicrous, lie : that the taxpayer must somehow continue to pay executives at companies like AIG ungodly sums of money under the threat that if we don't, somehow the taxpayer will never make their money back. Well let me tell you something, the taxpayer and our nation, will never get back the lost wealth taken under these false circumstances and this colossal breach of fiduciary duty. The idea that we must somehow perpetuate this system with our tax money and the future wealth of our children goes against the very American ideal of failure, adaptation and innovation, not to mention of our democracy.

Also last week, the Treasury Secretary endorsed a piece of legislation that instead of stopping a select few companies from profiting from the implicit taxpayer-guarantee of Too Big Too Fail seeks to officially condone it. If the most prized skill in our society economically is a competition to see who can lend and insure the most money without consequences, you have doomed our nation's people to lose everything in the world's largest ever betting parlor; and that is precisely the system this Treasury Secretary -- Tim Geithner -- is seeking to legalize in America today.

However, the smoking gun for Secretary Geithner comes from a recent Bloomberg FOIA disclosure regarding events from last November. It was then that New York Federal Reserve Governor Tim Geithner decided to deliver 100 cents on the dollar, in secret no less, to pay off the counter parties to the world's largest (and still un-investigated) insurance fraud -- AIG. This full payoff with taxpayer dollars was carried out by Geithner after AIG's bank customers, such as Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and Societe Generale, had already previously agreed to taking as little as 40 cents on the dollar. Even after the GM autoworkers, bondholders and vendors all received a government-enforced haircut on their contracts, he still had the audacity to claim the "sanctity of contracts" in the dealings with these companies like AIG.

None of us were in the rooms when these decisions were made, so I don't pretend to know if Mr. Geithner was the one lone, sane voice of reason fighting against mysterious forces or the primary proponent. However, I fail to see the reasoning for why we continue to rely on those who were in the room when these horrendous decisions took place to be the same people that we choose to deal with their aftermath. There are just certain situations that are not suited for continuity. The best analogy I can think of is that it would be like asking Al Cowlings to spearhead the Nicole Brown Simpson murder investigation under the premise that he knows the layout and the "players" best.

The fact is that there are people who understand all of the intricacies of finance and policy as well as Secretary Geithner, but whose allegiances to the taxpayer are much clearer. People like Elizabeth Warren, Neil Barofsky, Rob Johnson, and Senator Maria Cantwell just to name a few.

To stop the theft from continuing, it requires that the most basic rules of capitalism be applied to our banks and that our future national wealth be safeguarded by the US Government. The current custodian of America's wealth, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, is not doing a good job of either. The time for corrective action is now.

. . . .From over at the Daily Beast, Nomi Prins on just how badly he's doing his job, and the particulars behind how these banks are screwing you and I on a daily basis:

Too big to fail means big enough to screw taxpayers twice.

That’s my conclusion after a few weeks of combing through FDIC databases, trying to calculate the price to consumers following the decade of bank consolidation—following the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act—that reached a government-sponsored peak during last fall’s economic crisis. As banks keep merging, so does their share of our deposits. In 1998, the five largest U.S. commercial banks held 19 percent of total domestic deposits. In 2004, they held 27 percent. And since the Federal Reserve brokered marriages of the largest banks last fall, it is now 40 percent.

n layman’s terms, this means that the biggest banks enjoy increasingly captive power over their customers—the opposite of competition in the so-called free markets. That dominance provides the inner-circle banks every incentive to do everything they can to profit from their newly acquired customers (and old standby ones). After all, our deposits, plus fees and charges, represent the highest quality of real money for them to work with. That’s aside from the backing we’ve involuntarily provided through various federal sustenance programs.

Captive customers are very lucrative. Nearly three-quarters of banks’ total service charges of $34.3 billion in 2008 came from overdraft or NSF (not sufficient funds) fees.

That’s our money. It’s not like banks don’t require payment for their services in order to sustain them, but the problem with the biggest banks is that they extort disproportionate sums from customers relative to the smaller banks, in almost every way.

In general, not only do big banks charge higher service fees for the luxury of taking your checking deposits and using them as capital for other ventures, but the interest they provide on these, and savings accounts, are comparatively abysmal relative to smaller banks. Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and J.P. Morgan Chase don’t even make the top 25 in highest savings interest rates provided.

Yet the rates bigger banks charge to lend money are higher than smaller ones. Big banks like Wells Fargo charge an average annual rate of 14.2 percent for its credit cards, Citibank (the consumer-banking arm of Citigroup) charges an average of 15.99 percent, whereas smaller banks like First Command Bank or CNB Bank charge just 4.5 and 5.25 percent, respectively.

Media and congressional noise about these egregious practices prompted Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT) to unveil the Fairness and Accountability in Receiving Overdraft Coverage Act, which would force banks to rethink them. Among other suggestions, Dodd’s act requires banks to gain customers’ "opt-in" approval for their overdraft programs. Less than a week after Dodd announced drafting the legislation, J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo responded by voluntarily announcing changes to their overdraft programs—in the hope of thwarting Dodd from going through with it, but that didn’t work.

There are other regulatory concerns. The Riegle-Neal Act, which is supposed to be enforced by the Federal Reserve Board, holds that no bank hold more than 10 percent of national deposits. Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and J.P. Morgan Chase sit at 13 percent, 11 percent, and 9 percent of national deposits held, respectively, accordingly to my calculations.

As long as mega banks remain intertwined along lines of commercial banking and consumer oriented services, vs. investment banking and speculative activities that count on federal, deposit, and fee capital in order to operate—our money is doubly on the table—through government support and fee extraction.

If Congress, the Fed, and the Treasury Department continue to address the problem of "too big to fail" and "systemically important" with so called reforms that keep these banks big while asking them to put aside more capital for risk mitigation purposes, that capital will likely come from their most solid source—us.

. . . .Read the entire piece here.

. . . .And just because I have to do this, and am assuming that you all are intelligent enough to understand the background behind it, yesterday's quote of the century:

"Well, the truth is that nothing is better than that..." —Joe Lieberman on healthcare reform with a public option, on Sunday's Face the Nation

Such an attention whore.

. . . .And Andrew Sullivan provides my smart, intelligent, snarky quote of week so far:

"Neoconservatism has become a set of attitudes that might be summed up as, 'somewhere, shaggy kids might be having sex or smoking dope—so let’s cut interest rates and invade Iraq!'” - Daniel McCarthy, TAC.

. . . .Even more competitors for quotes of the week. On State of the Union with John King on CNN yesterday morning, Senate Minority Leader John Boehner was asked point-blank to articulate for viewers and voters exactly what the Republican counter-proposal to the Democratic health care reform bills were. His response was to direct views to the GOP website where there were "8 or 9 ideas about reforming health care". Seriously, my WTF? factor raises on a daily basis.

. . . . . .And the point of all this? Well, the McCain campaign's own economic advisor makes the point eloquently himself. A point that asshats like Lieberman, Boehner and Cantor are missing completely. Douglas Holtz-Eakins is out of extensions on his health care insurance, and will not be able to get anymore due to a pre-existing condition. Holtz-Eakins said on Monday that unless the Republicans can put together a comprehensive, alternative plan instead of just standing in opposition to the current proposed plans from an ideological standpoint, they absolutely will be the ultimate losers in the health care reform debate. All anyone will remember as premiums skyrocket, as more people lose their jobs and their coverage, as more people cannot afford health care coverage and go bankrupt is the people who stood in the way of an effort to change the system.

. . . . . .It's not often that I find myself in agreement with either Robert Reich or Michael Moore, either one, but in this case, at least partially, I do. First up Reich, who stays focused on the same thing that I'm staying focused on; the economy, the financial crisis and the increasing number of jobs lost and homes foreclosed on:

Barack Obama came to the White House intent on not repeating Clinton's failure to enact universal health care. Did he over-learn the Clinton lesson? Obama seems to have made all the right moves to enact something he can credibly label health-care reform: Rather than spend his political capital elsewhere, he reserved most of it for health care.

I sincerely hope America gets genuine health reform and I hope it's stronger than what's emerging in the Senate. (Whoever voted for Joe Lieberman last time around ought to pray for continued good health.) I worry, though, that Obama's strategy may turn out to be a mistake comparable to Clinton's overemphasis on deficit reduction. Obama's focus on health care rather than jobs, when the economy is still so fragile and unemployment moving toward double digits, could make it appear that the administration has its priorities confused. While affordable health care is critically important to Americans, making a living is more urgent. Yet the administration's efforts to date on this more basic concern have been neither particularly visible nor coherent.

The current rate of unemployment would have been even higher were it not for the federal stimulus package, but the stimulus should have been much larger. Especially with the states still cutting back on spending and raising taxes, the federal stimulus will be barely enough to keep unemployment from hitting 11 percent by the middle of 2010. Yet as the rate of unemployment continued to rise faster and higher than the White House anticipated, Obama could not return to Congress to seek a larger stimulus. He was spending political capital on health care.

The Wall Street bailout, meanwhile, has saved Wall Street but left most regional banks in deep distress. Almost nothing has trickled down. Small businesses still can't get loans. Foreclosures continue to mount largely because jobs continue to vanish and homeowners can't pay their mortgages. Yet at this point, on the eve of a health care bill, it would be difficult for Obama to return to Congress seeking billions more to aid distressed homeowners and small businesses. . . . . .

. . . . . .The Obama White House bought off the medical-industrial complex by promising it fatter profits, bolstered by tens of millions of new paying customers.

That and other deals cut with industry -- including promises to Big Pharma that Medicare wouldn't use its bargaining clout to reduce drug prices, to the AMA that doctors wouldn't have to face larger cuts in Medicare reimbursement rates, and to private insurers that the White House wouldn't fight hard for a public insurance option -- are likely to make the resulting reform far more costly than it would be otherwise. These extra costs will be borne by those Americans who will be required to buy insurance but won't qualify for federal assistance, along with Medicare beneficiaries who will be paying more and receiving less. These people may not know they're indirectly paying the costs of buying off these industries, but they'll know they're getting shafted (Republicans will be sure to make them aware, even though the GOP has a much longer record of shafting the middle class for the benefit of big business).. . . . . .

. . . . . .If Obama and the Democrats lose one or both houses of Congress in the midterms, it will be because the president learned only the most superficial lesson of the Clinton years. Health-care reform is critically important. But when one out of six Americans is unemployed or underemployed, getting the nation back to work is more so.

. . . . .Read the entire piece here at Robert Reich's blog.

. . . . .And this one, where I actually find myself agreeing with Michael Moore on 12 of his 15 things in an Action Plan for every American:

FIVE THINGS WE DEMAND THE PRESIDENT AND CONGRESS DO IMMEDIATELY:

1. Declare a moratorium on all home evictions. Not one more family should be thrown out of their home. The banks must adjust their monthly mortgage payments to be in line with what people's homes are now truly worth -- and what they can afford. Also, it must be stated by law: If you lose your job, you cannot be tossed out of your home.

2.

3. Demand publicly-funded elections and a prohibition on elected officials leaving office and becoming lobbyists. Yes, those very members of Congress who solicit and receive millions of dollars from wealthy interests must vote to remove ALL money from our electoral and legislative process. Tell your members of Congress they must support campaign finance bill H.R.1826.

4. Each of the 50 states must create a state-owned public bank like they have in North Dakota. Then congress MUST reinstate all the strict pre-Reagan regulations on all commercial banks, investment firms, insurance companies -- and all the other industries that have been savaged by deregulation: Airlines, the food industry, pharmaceutical companies -- you name it. If a company's primary motive to exist is to make a profit, then it needs a set of stringent rules to live by -- and the first rule is "Do no harm." The second rule: The question must always be asked -- "Is this for the common good?" (Click here for some info about the state-owned Bank of North Dakota.)

5. Save this fragile planet and declare that all the energy resources above and beneath the ground are owned collectively by all of us. Just like they do it in Sarah Palin's socialist Alaska. We only have a few decades of oil left. The public must be the owners and landlords of the natural resources and energy that exists within our borders or we will descend further into corporate anarchy. And when it comes to burning fossil fuels to transport ourselves, we must cease using the internal combustion engine and instruct our auto/transportation companies to rehire our skilled workforce and build mass transit (clean buses, light rail, subways, bullet trains, etc.) and new cars that don't contribute to climate change. (For more on this, here's a proposal I wrote in December.) Demand that General Motors' de facto chairman, Barack Obama, issue a JFK man-on-the-moon-style challenge to turn our country into a nation of trains and buses and subways. For Pete's sake, people, we were the ones who invented (or perfected) these damn things in the first place!!

FIVE THINGS WE CAN DO TO MAKE CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT LISTEN TO US:

1. Each of us must get into the daily habit of taking 5 minutes to make four brief calls: One to the President (202-456-1414), one to your Congressperson (202-224-3121) and one to each of your two Senators (202-224-3121). To find out who represents you, click here. Take just one minute on each of these calls to let them know how you expect them to vote on a particular issue. Let them know you will have no hesitation voting for a primary opponent -- or even a candidate from another party -- if they don't do our bidding. Trust me, they will listen. If you have another five minutes, click here to send them each an email. And if you really want to drop an anvil on them, send them a snail mail letter!

2.

3. Recruit someone to run for office who can win in your local elections next year -- or, better yet, consider running for office yourself! You don't have to settle for the incumbent who always expects to win. You can be our next representative! Don't believe it can happen? Check out these examples of regular citizens who got elected: State Senator Deb Simpson, California State Assemblyman Isadore Hall, Tempe, Arizona City Councilman Corey Woods, Wisconsin State Assemblyman Chris Danou, and Washington State Representative Larry Seaquist. The list goes on and on -- and you should be on it!

4. Show up. Picket the local branch of a big bank that took the bailout money. Hold vigils and marches. Consider civil disobedience. Those town hall meetings are open to you, too (and there's more of us than there are of them!). Make some noise, have some fun, get on the local news. Place "Capitalism Did This" signs on empty foreclosed homes, closed down businesses, crumbling schools and infrastructure. (You can download them from my website.)

5. Start your own media. You. Just you (or you and a couple friends). The mainstream media is owned by corporate America and, with few exceptions, it will never tell the whole truth -- so you have to do it! Start a blog! Start a website of real local news (here's an example: The Michigan Messenger). Tweet your friends and use Facebook to let them know what they need to do politically. The daily papers are dying. If you don't fill that void, who will?

FIVE THINGS WE SHOULD DO TO PROTECT OURSELVES AND OUR LOVED ONES UNTIL WE GET THROUGH THIS MESS:

1. Take your money out of your bank if it took bailout money and place it in a locally-owned bank or, preferably, a credit union.

2. Get rid of all your credit cards but one -- the kind where you have to pay up at the end of the month or you lose your card.

3. Do not invest in the stock market. If you have any extra cash, put it away in a savings account or, if you can, pay down on your mortgage so you can own your home as soon as possible. You can also buy very safe government savings bonds or T-bills. Or just buy your mother some flowers.

4.

5. Take care of yourself and your family. Sorry to go all Oprah on you, but she's right: Find a place of peace in your life and make the choice to be around people who are not full of negativity and cynicism. Look for those who nurture and love. Turn off the TV and the Blackberry and go for a 30-minute walk every day. Eat fruits and vegetables and cut down on anything that has sugar, high fructose corn syrup, white flour or too much sodium (salt) in it (and, as Michael Pollan says, "Eat (real) food, not too much, mostly plants"). Get seven hours of sleep each night and take the time to read a book a month. I know this sounds like I've turned into your grandma, but, dammit, take a good hard look at Granny -- she's fit, she's rested and she knows the names of both of her U.S. Senators without having to Google them. We might do well to listen to her. If we don't put our own "oxygen mask" on first (as they say on the airplane), we will be of no use to the rest of the nation in enacting any of this action plan!

. . . . And since I had so much fun with the folks over at StrangeMaps, here's another one that speaks volumes about who we are as a culture, and how we've gotten ourselves into this mess, and if you don't get the significance of it, there's no hope for you. Let me spell it out for you, the furthest anyone in the United States has to go to get a Big Mac is 145 miles, and that's out in the middle of South Dakota (I can testify to it, I've been there):

. . . . .Each light represents a McDonald's location in the continental United States. Altogether, there are over 13,000 McDonalds restaurants in the U.S. of A. 'Nuff said.

. . . .I've held off on the inviting target that the Republican party has made of itself up in New York in the 23rd District, where they purged themselves of their candidate because she couldn't pass their ideology test, and Newt Gingrich and Michael Steele have found themselves faced off against Alaskan Barbie, Tim "Anyway the wind blows and the dollars are flowing" Pawlenty and Caribou Barbie's crony Flab Limbaugh over the candidate, the election is tomorrow, and the results will be telling. But, that doesn't mean that Frank Rich, over at the New York Times doesn't have an interesting perspective, and some insight:
BARACK OBAMA’S most devilish political move since the 2008 campaign was to appoint a Republican congressman from upstate New York as secretary of the Army. This week’s election to fill that vacant seat has set off nothing less than a riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war. No matter what the results in that race on Tuesday, the Republicans are the sure losers. This could be a gift that keeps on giving to the Democrats through 2010, and perhaps beyond.

The governors’ races in New Jersey and Virginia were once billed as the marquee events of Election Day 2009 — a referendum on the Obama presidency and a possible Republican “comeback.” But preposterous as it sounds, the real action migrated to New York’s 23rd, a rural Congressional district abutting Canada. That this pastoral setting could become a G.O.P. killing field, attracting an all-star cast of combatants led by Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, William Kristol and Newt Gingrich, is a premise out of a Depression-era screwball comedy. But such farces have become the norm for the conservative movement — whether the participants are dressing up in full “tea party” drag or not.

The battle for upstate New York confirms just how swiftly the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama. The movement’s undisputed leaders, Palin and Beck, neither of whom has what Palin once called the “actual responsibilities” of public office, would gladly see the Republican Party die on the cross of right-wing ideological purity. Over the short term, at least, their wish could come true.

The right’s embrace of Hoffman is a double-barreled suicide for the G.O.P. On Saturday, the battered Scozzafava suspended her campaign, further scrambling the race. It’s still conceivable that the Democratic candidate could capture a seat the Republicans should own. But it’s even better for Democrats if Hoffman wins. Punch-drunk with this triumph, the right will redouble its support of primary challengers to 2010 G.O.P. candidates they regard as impure. That’s bad news for even a Republican as conservative as Kay Bailey Hutchison, whose primary opponent in the Texas governor’s race, the incumbent Rick Perry, floated the possibility of secession at a teabagger rally in April and hastily endorsed Hoffman on Thursday.

The more rightists who win G.O.P. primaries, the greater the Democrats’ prospects next year. But the electoral math is less interesting than the pathology of this movement. Its antecedent can be found in the early 1960s, when radical-right hysteria carried some of the same traits we’re seeing now: seething rage, fear of minorities, maniacal contempt for government, and a Freudian tendency to mimic the excesses of political foes. Writing in 1964 of that era’s equivalent to today’s tea party cells, the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that the John Birch Society’s “ruthless prosecution” of its own ideological war often mimicked the tactics of its Communist enemies.

The same could be said of Beck, Palin and their acolytes. Though they constantly liken the president to various totalitarian dictators, it is they who are re-enacting Stalinism in full purge mode. They drove out Arlen Specter, and now want to “melt Snowe” (as the blog Red State put it). The same Republicans who once deplored Democrats for refusing to let an anti-abortion dissident, Gov. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, speak at the 1992 Clinton convention now routinely banish any dissenters in their own camp.

These conservatives’ whiny cries of victimization also parrot a tic they once condemned in liberals. After Rush Limbaugh was booted from an ownership group bidding on the St. Louis Rams, he moaned about being done in by the “race card.” What actually did him in, of course, was the free-market American capitalism he claims to champion. Limbaugh didn’t understand that in an increasingly diverse nation, profit-seeking N.F.L. franchises actually want to court black ticket buyers, not drive them away.

This same note of self-martyrdom was sounded in a much-noticed recent column by the former Nixon hand Pat Buchanan. Ol’ Pat sounded like the dispossessed antebellum grandees in “Gone With the Wind” when lamenting the plight of white working-class voters. “America was once their country,” he wrote. “They sense they are losing it. And they are right.”

They are right. That America was lost years ago, and no national political party can thrive if it lives in denial of that truth. The right still may want to believe, as Palin said during the campaign, that Alaska, with its small black and Hispanic populations, is a “microcosm of America.” (New York’s 23rd also has few blacks or Hispanics.) But most Americans like their country’s 21st-century profile.

That changing complexion is part of why the McCain-Palin ticket lost every demographic group by large margins in 2008 except white senior citizens and the dwindling fifth of America that’s still rural. It’s also why the G.O.P. has been in a nosedive since the inauguration, whatever Obama’s ups and downs. In the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll, only 17 percent of Americans identify themselves as Republicans (as opposed to 30 percent for the Democrats, and 44 for independents).

No wonder even the very conservative Republican contenders in the two big gubernatorial contests this week have frantically tried to disguise their own convictions. The candidate in Virginia, Bob McDonnell, is a graduate of Pat Robertson’s university whose career has been devoted to curbing abortion rights, gay civil rights and even birth control. But in this campaign he ditched those issues, disinvited Palin for a campaign appearance, praised Obama’s Nobel Prize, and ran a closing campaign ad trumpeting “Hope.” Chris Christie, McDonnell’s counterpart in New Jersey, posted a campaign video celebrating “Change” in which Obama’s face and most stirring campaign sound bites so dominate you’d think the president had endorsed the Republican over his Democratic opponent, Jon Corzine.

Only in the alternative universe of the far right is Obama a pariah and Palin the great white hope. It’s become a Beltway truism that the White House’s (mild) spat with Fox News is counterproductive because it drives up the network’s numbers. But if curious moderate and independent voters are now tempted to surf there and encounter Beck’s histrionics for the first time, the president’s numbers will benefit as well. To the uninitiated, the tea party crowd comes across like the barflies in “Star Wars.”

There is only one political opponent whom Obama really has to worry about at this moment: Hamid Karzai. It’s Afghanistan and joblessness, not the Stalinists of the right, that have the power to bring this president down.


. . . .I miss you Mom, a lot. Thanks for watching over me.

. . . .. . . .And that's the way it is:

. . . . .. . . .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: Gregory, MI 48137]

Awesome, just awesome

Monday November 2, 2009

. . . . .You need to get yourself ready for a week that will be chockful of just absolutely awesome levels of stupid and crazy. Three things are going to happen this week that will change your life forever.

. . . .On a note that I find vital from a pop culture standpoint, this week, ABC Network premieres V, the remake of the specials, miniseries and series from the 80's. Actually, it was a damn good series for the times, and as far as I'm concerned, had some pretty good portents and messages in it. Suffice to say, I've never in my life been someone who anticipated a visit from anyone else from "someplace else", I've always been paranoid of that. Considering what a bad job we've done caretaking this planet, and just what an awesomely shitty job we've done as a species in terms of coexisting and helping one another, anyone with advanced enough technology would wipe us out the second they got here. On top of that, just using some simple math and the realization that our broadcasts; radio, television and such are the very first hint of our society that someone else would get to gain some knowledge about us. Well, the following map, from Strange Maps speaks for itself:

. . . . .Personally, I think it's pretty damn presumptuous and arrogant of us to believe that anyone at all would want to come here. Me, I come from the Independence Day, Predator, Aliens and V crowd, I wouldn't trust 'em.

. . . .So, like I said, 3 things that are just monumentally in-your-face stupid will or are happening this week.

. . . .Item 1, I spent all last week zeroing in on my favorite bloodsucking bastards over at Goldman-Sachs, with plenty of data to back it all up, (read the previous posts below) and, lo and behold, up they crop on a Sunday. Now, let's start with something simple, like the diatribe that I posted up yesterday on Citigroup and Goldman. Well, on Sunday night, the CIT group filed bankruptcy in a Federal Court. The bottom line; The U.S. Taxpayer, you and I, will lose $2.4 billion on this bankruptcy, and Goldman will profit $1 billion on the bankruptcy.From the AP on Sunday night:

WASHINGTON -- Lender CIT Group has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, in an effort to restructure its debt while trying to keep loans flowing to the thousands of mid-sized and small businesses.

CIT's move will wipe out current holders of its common and preferred stock, likely meaning the U.S. government and taxpayers will lose the $2.3 billion sunk into CIT last year to prop up the ailing company. Goldman Sachs however, will gain $1 billion because of CIT's bankruptcy, according to a report published Oct. 4 by theFinancial Times:

The payment stems from the structure of a $3bn rescue finance package that Goldman extended to CIT on June 6 2008, about five months before the Treasury bought $2.3bn in CIT preferred shares to prop it up at the height of the crisis...

While Goldman is entitled to demand the full amount, it is likely to agree to postpone payment on a part of that sum, these people added. A CIT filing last week said that it was in negotiations with Goldman "concerning an amendment to this facility".

The $2.3 billion lost in taxpayer funds is the largest amount lost since the government began infusing banks with capital, according to the Financial Times.

CIT made the filing in New York bankruptcy court Sunday, after a debt-exchange offer to bondholders failed. CIT said in a statement that its bondholders have overwhelmingly approved a prepackaged reorganization plan which will reduce total debt by $10 billion while allowing the company to continue to do business.

"The decision to proceed with our plan of reorganization will allow CIT to continue to provide funding to our small business and middle market customers, two sectors that remain vitally important to the U.S. economy," said Jeffrey M. Peek, chairman and CEO. Peek has said he plans to step down at the end of the year.

The Chapter 11 filing is one of the biggest in U.S. corporate history. CIT's bankruptcy filing shows $71 billion in finance and leasing assets against total debt of $64.9 billion. Its collapse is the latest in a string of huge cases driven by the financial crisis over the past two years, as bailed out industry heavyweights like General Motors and Chrysler both entered bankruptcy court.

CIT has been trying to fend off disaster for several months and narrowly avoided collapse in July. It has struggled to find funding as sources it previously relied on, such as short-term debt, evaporated during the credit crisis.

It received $4.5 billion in credit from its own lenders and bondholders last week, reportedly made a deal with Goldman Sachs to lower debt payments, and negotiated a $1 billion line of credit from billionaire investor and bondholder Carl Icahn. But the company failed to convince bondholders to support a debt-exchange offer, a step that would have trimmed at least $5.7 billion from its debt burden and given CIT more time to pay off what it owes.

It is unclear what the filing will mean for the nation's small businesses, many of which look to CIT for loans to cover expenses like buying materials at a time when other credit is hard to come by.

Analysts have warned that already ailing sectors, like retailers, could be hit especially hard, since CIT serves as the short-term financier for about 2,000 vendors that supply merchandise to more than 300,000 stores.

. . . .Now, let's contrast this little morsel, released on Sunday night, with what our earnest Treasury Secretary (and Goldman alum) Timothy Geithner (who by the way was the protege of former Treasury Secretary and Goldman alum Hank Paulson) had to say on Sunday morning on NBC's Meet The Press:
"The banking system is dramatically more stable now that it was . . . .a year ago."
"The big risk we face now is big banks are not going to take enough risk"
"Unemployment is worse than anyone expected, but growth is back more quickly and stronger than anyone expected" (WTF??)
On unemployment "It's probably going to rise further before it comes down again" (Unh-huh)
And I've saved the best for last -
"Wall Street has changed"

. . . .Like I said, awesome levels of stupid and crazy.

. . . .Now, I wrote about this earlier last week, but this week marks Item 2 of crap that will change your life forever. Back on Wednesday September 9th (yes, it was the President's health-care speech to the joint session, but that wasn't the headline event that day, in terms of long-term political effect) Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was argued before the Supreme Court of the United States. This is the most important case in ages, and it is flying completely under the radar, with Tuesday Nov. 3 marked out for the decision, which has already been broadcast in that code that Supreme Court Justices have, as being already decided. What it will mean, if the rulings go the way the tea leaves are scrying out, is that essentially, the American citizen will forever be locked out of the American political scene, and it will be a Supreme Court ruling that gives corporations free rein in lobbying money, campaign contributions and outright gifts. From the Washington Post:

The full impact of what the court could do in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has only begun to receive the attention it deserves. Even the word "radical" does not capture the extent to which the justices could turn our political system upside down. Will it use a case originally brought on a narrow issue to bring our politics back to the corruption of the Gilded Age?

Citizens United, a conservative group, brought suit arguing that it should be exempt from the restrictions of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance law for a movie it made that was sharply critical of Hillary Clinton. The organization said it should not have to disclose who financed the film.

Instead of deciding the case before it, the court engaged in a remarkable act of overreach. On June 29, it postponed a decision and called for new briefs and a highly unusual new hearing, which is Wednesday's big event. The court chose to consider an issue only tangentially raised by the case. It threatens to overrule a 1990 decision that upheld the long-standing ban on corporate money in campaigns.

I don't have the space to cite all the precedents, dating to the 1976 Buckley campaign finance ruling, that the court would set aside if it were to throw out the prohibition on corporate money. Suffice it to say that there is one member of the court who has spoken eloquently about the dangers of ignoring precedents.

"I do think that it is a jolt to the legal system when you overrule a precedent," he said. "Precedent plays an important role in promoting stability and evenhandedness. It is not enough -- and the court has emphasized this on several occasions -- it is not enough that you may think the prior decision was wrongly decided. That really doesn't answer the question, it just poses the question."

This careful jurist continued: "And you do look at these other factors, like settled expectations, like the legitimacy of the court, like whether a particular precedent is workable or not, whether a precedent has been eroded by subsequent developments." He paraphrased Alexander Hamilton as saying in Federalist 78, "To avoid an arbitrary discretion in the judges, they need to be bound down by rules and precedents."

Chief Justice John Roberts, the likely swing vote in this case, was exactly right when he said these things during his 2005 confirmation hearings. If he uses his own standards, it is impossible to see how he can justify the use of "arbitrary discretion" to discard a well-established system whose construction began with the Tillman Act of 1907.

Were the courts that set the earlier precedents "legitimate"? This ban was upheld over many years by justices of various philosophical leanings. We are not talking about overturning a single decision by a bunch of activists in robes seizing a temporary court majority.

Are the precedents "workable"? The answer is clearly yes, which is why there is absolutely no popular demand to let corporate cash loose into our politics. Our system would be less "workable" if the court abruptly changed the law.

Has the precedent been "eroded"? Absolutely not. In case after case, no matter where particular court majorities stood on particular campaign finance provisions, the ban on corporate contributions was taken for granted. As the court stated just six years ago, Congress's power to prohibit direct corporate and union contributions "has been firmly embedded in our law." That's what you call "settled expectations."

This case is the clearest test that Roberts has faced so far as to whether he meant what he said to Congress in 2005. I truly hope he passes it. If he doesn't, he will unleash havoc in our political system and greatly undermine the legitimacy of the court he leads.

. . . .This will be the ulimate test for Chief Justice John Roberts. Pay close attention to the ruling this week.

. . . . . Now, on that same subject of lobbying corruption. Let's move on to Net Neutrality. Now, very simply, Net Neutrality is the concept that all content in the United States should move at the same speed, regardless of source, and regardless of the telecom or ISP it's being carried on. In other words, the carriers should care only about the speed of the bits and bytes, and not what is contained within those bits and bytes. Consumer Reports, some of the most trustworthy people around have a very simple explanation for it:

Network neutrality is a fancy way of saying the networks that deliver the Internet should treat all content, sites, and applications equally and shouldn’t discriminate against certain traffic based on its source, destination or message. The basic idea is the Internet should be open so consumers have unrestricted access to lawful Web sites and online businesses can compete freely.

Some Internet service providers want to give preferential treatment to certain network traffic –for example, their own content or that of those willing to pay extra fees. Without network neutrality Internet service providers could block or slow down traffic to any Web sites or services they choose. Services, such as making free or cheap phone calls over the Internet, or streaming video, could be blocked. So could the sharing of lawful media content or access to certain political content.

. . . .Now, here's the rub, and the problem, and item #3 that will change your life forever, and you'll bitch later, but you could have done something now, like contact your legislator. Representative Markey has brought to the floor of the House, H.R. 3458 the Internet Freedom Preservation Act, which would enforce Net Neutrality. Now, here we go with the normal circus of corruption, graft and greed. The original "maverick", Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona has received $1.9 million dollars from telecom lobbyists (courtesy of OpenSecrets) to introduce an amendment to Senate version that would completely eliminate net neutrality. AT&T, Charter, Comcast, BellSouth, Knology et al, through their lobbying group have asked McCain to put the vote through for them that would eliminate net neutrality and allow the telecoms and ISP's to decide which content is delivered at which speeds, if delivered at all. In other words, they'll speed up their own content and slow down anyone who doesn't pay them a fee, and guess where and to whom those increased fees will get passed down to? Hell, we're already 15th in the world in broadband communications, maybe we can get ourselves down to where we are in health care. 37th.

. . . .The best part of it is his blatant, out in the open hypocrisy about things. He's on record as being for Net Neutrality long before his current stance of being against it:

So, John McCain wants the internet to be a terrifying user experience for everybody, and is pimping the ironically named, net neutrality-killing "Internet Freedom Act" as a means of satisfying the telecoms that have so devotedly lobbied him for favor. The thing is, if it seems like not too long ago, McCain was singing an entirely different tune on the issue, well, there's a reason for that: not too long ago, McCain was singing an entirely different tune on the issue. Don't believe me? Well, here's what McCain economic advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin had to say on the matter when he was interviewed on C-SPAN by Amy Schatz, telecommunications reporter from the Wall Street Journal:

SCHATZ: Let's switch to everyone's favorite telecom topic: net neutrality. Can you explain to us what Senator McCain's position is on net neutrality?

HOLTZ-EAKIN: His position is that aggressive and prescriptive legislation on net neutrality is not desirable at this time. It's premature. There is yet no demonstrable damage from a practice that a net neutrality legislation would solve. His preferred way of addressing issues like this is let the marketplace develop, watch for and be aggressive about monitoring for abuse of practices, for monopoly power, for unfair representation to consumers, and if you find such behavior, apply a remedy and get damages. But that's an approach that doesn't pretend to know in advance what's the business model of tomorrow, what's the product line of tomorrow, and who will be providing that product.

Now of course, McCain has telecom lobbyists telling him that about the damage that a piece of net neutrality legislation could wreak on their ability to accrue wealth, so his tune has changed. But there's another interesting quirk, here: McCain's strange new take on "internet freedom" doesn't square, at all, with another telecommunications issue he's spoken out about -- a la carte cable television packages. In the case of cable television, McCain supports the open-source, pro-consumer model of content packaging that he now wants to destroy on the internet.

. . . .So, we know a couple of things. John McCain hates him some Net Neutrality these days, and if he has his way, well, the good folks over at Gizmodo have put together this sample chart for what the worst-case scenario will probably look like once this legislation with McCain's amendment passes, and if you think it's unlikely, take a look at your cable or satellite tiers, and get ready.

Losing Net Neutrality: The Worst Case Scenario

It's alarmist, over-the-top pro-net-neutrality propaganda, sure, but this chart goes a long way to explaining why the IT dude at the office wears that "All Packets are Created Equal" shirt to work every Thursday: because tiered ISPs are scary.

And before you dismiss the chart outright, check out your cable company's channel packages. Replace content provider fees with new network backbone charges, and cable packages with traffic or website packages, and hey, look, shit—this doesn't seem so crazy, does it? Click here for the full version. [Reddit via Crunchgear]

. . . .I'm telling you, absolutely awesome levels of stupid, crazy and corrupt. I can hardly wait to see what Monday morning brings.

. . . .I miss you Mom, a lot. Thanks for watching over me.

. . . .. . . .And that's the way it is:

. . . . .. . . .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: Gregory, MI 48137]

Halloween aftermath

Sunday November 1st, 2009

. . . .Just a couple of quick items here on a Sunday morning, in my continued pursuit of exposing the bastards behind the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression, and these assholes are intent on continuing it and profiting from it, bottomfeeders that they are.

. . . .Well, that and the fact that I'm sick as hell and have a blown-out back.

. . . .All, I'm gonna say about the following is "I told you so", from McClatchy this morning.

In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.

Goldman's sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation's premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies.

Only later did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk.

Now, pension funds, insurance companies, labor unions and foreign financial institutions that bought those dicey mortgage securities are facing large losses, and a five-month McClatchy investigation has found that Goldman's failure to disclose that it made secret, exotic bets on an imminent housing crash may have violated securities laws.

"The Securities and Exchange Commission should be very interested in any financial company that secretly decides a financial product is a loser and then goes out and actively markets that product or very similar products to unsuspecting customers without disclosing its true opinion," said Laurence Kotlikoff, a Boston University economics professor who's proposed a massive overhaul of the nation's banks. "This is fraud and should be prosecuted."

John Coffee, a Columbia University law professor who served on an advisory committee to the New York Stock Exchange, said that investment banks have wide latitude to manage their assets, and so the legality of Goldman's maneuvers depends on what its executives knew at the time.

"It would look much more damaging," Coffee said, "if it appeared that the firm was dumping these investments because it saw them as toxic waste and virtually worthless."

Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman's chairman and chief executive, declined to be interviewed for this article.

A Goldman spokesman, Michael DuVally, said that the firm decided in December 2006 to reduce its mortgage risks and did so by selling off subprime-related securities and making myriad insurance-like bets, called credit-default swaps, to "hedge" against a housing downturn.

DuVally told McClatchy that Goldman "had no obligation to disclose how it was managing its risk, nor would investors have expected us to do so ... other market participants had access to the same information we did."

For the past year, Goldman has been on the defensive over its Washington connections and the billions in federal bailout funds it received. Scant attention has been paid, however, to how it became the only major Wall Street player to extricate itself from the subprime securities market before the housing bubble burst.

Goldman remains, along with Morgan Stanley, one of two venerable Wall Street investment banks still standing. Their grievously wounded peers Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch fell into the arms of retail banks, while another, Lehman Brothers, folded.

To piece together Goldman's role in the subprime meltdown, McClatchy reviewed hundreds of documents, SEC filings, copies of secret investment circulars, lawsuits and interviewed numerous people familiar with the firm's activities.

McClatchy's inquiry found that Goldman Sachs:

• Bought and converted into high-yield bonds tens of thousands of mortgages from subprime lenders that became the subjects of FBI investigations into whether they'd misled borrowers or exaggerated applicants' incomes to justify making hefty loans.
• Used offshore tax havens to shuffle its mortgage-backed securities to institutions worldwide, including European and Asian banks, often in secret deals run through the Cayman Islands, a British territory in the Caribbean that companies use to bypass U.S. disclosure requirements.
• Has dispatched lawyers across the country to repossess homes from bankrupt or financially struggling individuals, many of whom lacked sufficient credit or income but got subprime mortgages anyway because Wall Street made it easy for them to qualify.
• Was buoyed last fall by key federal bailout decisions, at least two of which involved then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a former Goldman chief executive whose staff at Treasury included several other Goldman alumni.

The firm benefited when Paulson elected not to save rival Lehman Brothers from collapse, and when he organized a massive rescue of tottering global insurer American International Group while in constant telephone contact with Goldman chief Blankfein. With the Federal Reserve Board's blessing, AIG later used $12.9 billion in taxpayers' dollars to pay off every penny it owed Goldman.

These decisions preserved billions of dollars in value for Goldman's executives and shareholders. For example, Blankfein held 1.6 million shares in the company in September 2008, and he could have lost more than $150 million if his firm had gone bankrupt.

With the help of more than $23 billion in direct and indirect federal aid, Goldman appears to have emerged intact from the economic implosion, limiting its subprime losses to $1.5 billion. By repaying $10 billion in direct federal bailout money — a 23 percent taxpayer return that exceeded federal officials' demand — the firm has escaped tough federal limits on 2009 bonuses to executives of firms that received bailout money.

Goldman announced record earnings in July, and the firm is on course to surpass $50 billion in revenue in 2009 and to pay its employees more than $20 billion in year-end bonuses.

. . . . . .Read the entire article here.

. . . . . .And I'll put the bottom tag line of the article here.

COMING TOMORROW

Since the economic collapse that swept millions of Americans out of their jobs and homes, Goldman Sachs has moved aggressively to recover its losses. The firm is pursuing marginally qualified borrowers into state courts federal and bankruptcy across the country and seeking to seize their homes. McClatchy examines one couple's multi-year attempt to get Goldman to admit that it had purchased their mortgage.

. . . . .And this from the New York Times on Citibank, this morning:

OVER the past 80 years, the United States government has engineered not one, not two, not three, but at least four rescues of the institution now known as Citigroup. In previous instances, the bank came back from the crisis and prospered.

Will Citigroup rise again from its recent near-death experience?

The answer to that question concerns not only the 276,000 employees who work at what was once the world’s largest bank, but the nation’s taxpayers as well. Even as Citigroup’s stock has soared from a low of $1.02 to its current $4.09 — and the company has eked out a $101 million profit in the third quarter along the way — it’s still unclear whether it can climb out of the hole that its former leaders dug before and during the mortgage mania. If Citigroup remains stuck, taxpayers will be on the hook for outsize losses.

Citigroup remains a sprawling, complex enterprise, with 200 million customer accounts and operations in more than 100 countries. And when people talk about institutions that have grown so large and entwined in the economy that regulators have deemed them too big to be allowed to fail, Citigroup is the premier example.

As a result, the government has handed Citigroup $45 billion under the Troubled Asset Relief Program over the last year. Through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, a major bank regulator, the government has also agreed to back roughly $300 billion in soured assets that sit on Citigroup’s books. Even as other troubled institutions recently curtailed their use of another F.D.I.C. program that backs new debt issued by banks, Citigroup has continued to tap the arrangement.

Citigroup is also one of only two TARP recipients so desperate for capital that they’ve swapped government-issued shares into common stock, diluting existing shareholders. (GMAC, the troubled auto lender that may receive another government infusion, is the other.)

While Citigroup has written down tens of billions of dollars’ worth of mortgages on its books, there are looming problems in its huge credit card portfolio. Of the company’s $1.2 trillion in credit commitments outstanding in the second quarter, $873 billion were credit card lines. A measure of the bank’s efforts to wrestle that problem to the ground is the interest it charges customers: in October, Citigroup raised interest rates on some credit card holders to 29.99 percent.

. . . .Read the entire piece here.

. . . .We are so far beyond capitalism and free-market enterprise, there isn't even a word to describe this economic and political shell game. We truly have become a corporatist society, in which the personal, economic well-being of the singular entity known as the "corporation" comes first and foremost. And most of you spent your summer calling him a "socialist", or a "communist", or a "fascist". This guy is the ultimate corporate, capitalist tool.

. . . .I'm re-running the one from Larry Flynt from earlier in the summer:

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.

I'm calling for a national strike, one designed to close the country down for a day. The intent? Real campaign-finance reform and strong restrictions on lobbying. Because nothing will change until we take corporate money out of politics. Nothing will improve until our politicians are once again answerable to their constituents, not the rich and powerful.

Let's set a date. No one goes to work. No one buys anything. And if that isn't effective -- if the politicians ignore us -- we do it again. And again. And again.

The real war is not between the left and the right. It is between the average American and the ruling class. If we come together on this single issue, everything else will resolve itself. It's time we took back our government from those who would make us their slaves.

. . . .Catch up on the last 10 postings, where I've been writing about, and putting contributions about this same thing up, day after day after day. It's the most important issue we face, and it's meaningless, at least apparently, based on the level of apathy most people are exhibiting about, to most folks.

. . . .Outta here, I may update later today.

. . . .. . . .And that's the way it is:

. . . . .. . . .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: Gregory, MI 48137]

I think my costume this year will be guy who turns all his lights off and calls the cops on the kids who come up on his porch

Saturday October 31, 2009

. . . . .Well then, that's it. October is over and the official night of traipsing around getting the yearly dose of high fructose corn syrup and adults all reeaallly wishing their partner dresses like they're attending a pajama party at the Playboy Mansion is upon us.

. . . .. By the way, if you've never done it, try for Halloween in New Orleans some year, between that cities history steeped in voodoo, vampire and Creole lore; and the night itself, which down on Bourbon Street is a warm-up for Mardi Gras, it's a night not to be missed and has to be experienced at least noce in a lifetime.

. . . .But that also means it's Saturday, time for taking a tad easier, and rounding up some of the week. I always make sure to keep the last 10 posts up below this one, so you can cruise down the column and check my list of 15 albums of music that you should be listening to, but probably aren't and it makes a great shopping list.

. . . .There's also instructions there down below this post for how to watch the embedded videos, catch the embedded videos, and switch out to the external site if you're reading this on the Facebooks notes page.

. . . .Couple of more book recommendations:
- The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals and The Truth About Corporate Corruption by John Perkins. Far from being a MIB, conspiracy theorist, Perkins worked for the World Bank as an economic hit man, (there is such a thing) and as such has an insider's view of what we all fear, and some of us know, that there's no difference between the two parties, there hasn't been a difference between any President at all going back to Reagan, and that the country, and world, really is run by global corporations, who use money as a weapon.

. . . .Is it sinking in yet? Why my mantra is, was, and always will be "follow the money"?

- Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Out Politics and Haunts Our Future by Will Bunch is current and timely. If you go back in these columns to the June-July timeframe (use the archives at left), there really is a comprehensive pattern that started with Reagan and led to the current economic, social and political meltdown. Bunch is a good historian and can back his thesis up with fact and data, and can easily help connect the dots from one to the other.

. . . .I was asked the other day why I'm so hard on Beck, Limbaugh and Palin. Two different reasons. Beck and Limbaugh, I believe, are smart enough, intelligent enough and savvy enough to do something entirely different than what they're doing presently. I cannot forgive them for backing the current version of the Republican Party. Neither party is working for the good of the Republic, neither party is working for a better America, and they're smart enough to put their gifts to use to try and offer solutions and build something better, but instead they choose to walk down that road of diviseness, racism, hatred and exclusion, but have a large enough audience to instead work on a broader framework of what we need to do, but instead spend their time haranguing about what the current President, Administration and Congress are doing and inventing mythical conspiracies that don't exist. Nothing more than dancing monkeys for their corporate advertising masters, they are nothing but servants for those who would keep the American people in the dark and keep them from focusing on what's really going on. Palin is an entirely different matter, that woman is evil personified, and is the epitome of everything that's wrong with American politics today. Ignorant of policy, anti-intellectual, anti-knowledge and someone who wants only to have her hands on the nuclear launch codes so she can help hasten along the Armageddon that she and her Left Behind crowd so desperately want. Media savvy and a whore for whomever will pay her speaking engagement fee, she is vanity and cult of personality personified.

. . . . On the cinema front, I'm also geeking out over the fact that Boondock Saints II: All Saint's Day opened last night, with the same cast, director and screenwriter from the original and the fact that the remake of Red Dawn is filming in Michigan right now, using Detroit and the lakes and woods up North as it's locales.

. . . . .So, onto the Saturday morning round-up:

. . . .Thomas Jefferson said it back in the day, when he was looking forward, and he was a very, very prescient man.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be."

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation then by deflation, the banks and the corporations will grow up around them, will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies."

"I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our constitution - taking from the federal government their power of borrowing."

. . . .That serves as the basis, as long as I'm talking about it, for why I spend so much time talking about the current financial crisis, it's history and it's roots from over 30 years ago. It's the most important thing on the plate right now, without a sound financial basis and institutions, we are summarily and thoroughly screwed.

. . . .Les Leopold:

Everyone realizes that we have to do something about "too big to fail." But there are two fundamentally different paths: one threatens the very existence of the billionaire bailout society and the other makes it permanent.

The obvious way to end "too big to fail" is to break up large financial institutions so that they are "small enough to fail." Paul Volker, not a radical by any means, argues for this. Even Alan Greenspan -- the very personification of the financial establishment -- agrees.

But to do so threatens the elite status of insiders at giant institutions like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley. They make their billions from the combination of government welfare and their enormous, market-distorting size. Right this moment we are still bailing them out through a series of subsidies that go well beyond TARP.

Also, there are far fewer large financial institutions left in the marketplace which means that the remaining giants have near-monopoly pricing power. But most importantly everyone knows that we won't let them fail. That gives them access to cheaper capital -- they don't have to pay the risk premium other borrowers have to pay because you and I, through Uncle Sam, are implicit cosigners on the downside of the deal. And of course, they have excessive political muscle.

For those of you that believe financial institutions have the very best talent and therefore deserve the very best pay, take a look at Why Do Bankers Make So Much Money?"" by Rick Bookstaber. Here's one memorable passage:

"But I don't buy the notion that there are so many who have the level of talent that justifies tens and even hundreds of millions in compensation. I think this level of compensation, and the notion of talent behind it, is the result of the inherent uncertainty in the financial enterprise, one that makes it very difficult to assess talent. Indeed, I think the invocations of talent for money producers in finance are akin to those that, in times past, were set aside for the mystical powers of saints and witches."

Treasury Secretary Geithner doesn't want a radical departure from that witches' brew. He argues that it's possible to prevent the next meltdown by setting up a new watchdog council of regulators and by increased regulations on the large institutions that are designated (in secret, mind you) as too big to fail. He hopes that the next meltdown can be avoided by monitoring them closely, requiring more capital reserves, and by prohibiting excessive leverage. And if they go under Geithner wants the large institutions to be assessed to pay for the bailouts, after the fact. (Why not before the fact? Geithner thinks they would view it as insurance and gamble even more.)

Sadly, this would make bailouts a permanent feature of our financial system. It would guarantee the perpetuation of our billionaire bailout society for generations to come. (See "Breaking out of the Billionaire Bailout Society" on

Today, our large financial institutions have an even a tighter grip. But our political establishment is afraid to break them up. If Roosevelt or Taft were around today, they'd probably get the same treatment as back-benchers like Dennis Kucinich.

It's not often that we can see such a clear fork in the road. We can either prop up the billionaire bailout society or we can begin the necessary process of breaking it up. You know what the financial interests want. It's now a question of whether popular resentment can be translated into a new populist rebellion.

Granted, it's not looking too good. But to quote Yogi Berra "It ain't over till it's over."

. . . .And right here is where my sharpest division with, and sharpest disgagreement with this current Administration comes in. It's also why I laughed so hard I wet myself whenever I heard the words "socialist", "communist" or "fascist" leveled at this current White House all summer long. That really is the proof of the dumbing down of America, since the following is just more evidence for two things (a) this guy is the ulimate corporate-capitalist tool and (b) we really are the United States of Goldman-Sachs.
. David Sirota:

Many readers here likely remember September 29, 2008. For a brief moment, the U.S. House extended a big middle finger at Wall Street - and then, quite predictably, the entire political, media and corporate Establishment went apeshit. Though it only lasted a few days, the standoff helped further controversialize the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and thus ultimately forced the addition of some (albeit mild) restrictions on its power.

Most of us who opposed the TARP as written - and there were not many willing to take that position - were not against taking any action. We were against Congress trampling the Constitution and turning the Treasury Secretary into a king, and we were against simply handing away $700 billion with no strings attached. For this, we were attacked by the Punditburo, which preposterously likened a vote for the bill as a courageous - and necessary - vote for landmark civil rights legislation (I shit you not). And for the most part, the American public has remained opposed to writing blank checks to Wall Street, especially considering the news that these kinds of bailouts have put taxpayers on the hook for trillions of dollars.

And yet, as I show in my new newspaper column out today, the Obama administration, far from backing off or restricting TARP, is quietly moving forward a plan to create an even bigger, more permanent TARP.

In the column, I explain the details of this new bailout, which Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) calls "TARP on Steroids." You can find the relevant sections I refer to here in sections 1109 and 1604 of the bill, and you can see Sherman's full analysis of the proposal here. I also encourage you to watch the video clip at the bottom of this post in which Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner - the same Geithner who this week was nailed for secretly giving away billions via the AIG bailout - said the White House would oppose any Democratic amendments that would limit this new TARP on Steroids to $1 trillion. And, you can listen here to my Q&A about this issue with Sherman this week on my AM760 radio show.

I wish I could say I was surprised at this - but this is what you get when an administration packs its top-level economic positions with people connected to the same financial firms that destroyed the economy. Corruption, as we are learning, is not the exclusive domain of one party. The only question is whether or not Congress will stage another September 29th. I sure hope it does.

Read the full column here.

. . . .Taibbi, with more details on how the bastards at AIG, Goldman-Sachs and Fed screwed us all in those dark days of September-October of '08:

Forget Galleon: What about Goldman’s ex-boss?

The deal contributed to the more than $14 billion that over 18 months was handed to Goldman Sachs, whose former chairman, Stephen Friedman, was chairman of the board of directors of the New York Fed when the decision was made. Friedman, 71, resigned in May, days after it was disclosed by the Wall Street Journal that he had bought more than 50,000 shares of Goldman Sachs stock following the takeover of AIG. He declined to comment for this article.

In his resignation letter, Friedman said his continued role as chairman had been mischaracterized as improper. Goldman Sachs spokesman Michael DuVally declined to comment.

AIG paid Societe General $16.5 billion, Deutsche Bank $8.5 billion and Merrill Lynch $6.2 billion.

via New York Fed’s Secret Choice to Pay for Swaps Hits Taxpayers – Bloomberg.com.

Robert Khuzami, Director of Enforcement at the SEC, speaks at a press conference where charges where announced against hedge fund managers, Fortune 500 executives, and a management consulting director for participating in insider trading schemes that resulted in more than $20 million in illegal profits, at the US Attorney's office on October 16, 2009 in New York City. (Michael Nagle/Getty)

It’s kind of amazing that with all the uproar over the Galleon business, nobody is making much hay over the recent revelations about the AIG bailouts, which make former Goldman chief and former New York Fed chairman Stephen Friedman look every bit as guilty of insider machinations as Raj Rajaratnam of the Galleon fund.

It’s impossible to grasp the totality of Friedman/Goldman’s grossness with regard to the AIG story without a little context. Remember the basic timeline. In the middle of the mortgage bubble, Goldman Sachs found a patsy-buffoon named Joe Cassano at a little corner of AIG called AIG Financial Products, or AIGFP. Cassano was recklessly writing hundreds of billions of dollars worth of credit default swaps for banks like Goldman and Deutsche, essentially insuring certain investments for these banks, including extremely risky mortgage-backed deals.

Goldman took out billions of these CDS positions with Cassano, who had written upwards of $440 billion of these CDS without having even a fraction of the money he would have needed to cover that bet in the event of a disaster of the type that actually ended up taking place, specifically a downgrade of AIG’s credit rating that forced Cassano to pony up wads of cash to cover those positions.

The important thing to remember about all of this is that just because Goldman was buying “insurance” from Cassano, that doesn’t mean they were being responsible. On the contrary: Goldman was creating well over ten billion dollars worth of exposure to a guy that they must have known was an absolute idiot. Now, in a world where actual capitalism existed, Goldman should then have been highly invested in making sure that AIG did not go under. A dead and bankrupt AIG should not have been good news to a company like Goldman Sachs, which had billions of dollars riding on AIG’s financial health.

But if anything Goldman behaved throughout the runup to AIG’s collapse like it couldn’t care less if the company died. In fact Goldman accelerated AIG’s demise by making margin calls against AIG, for both the CDS deals and for deals it had done with Win Neuger, who was running AIG’s securities lending business. What really sank AIG was the fact that the downgrade of its credit rating permitted companies like Goldman to demand large sums of money from AIG in the form of these margin calls, and AIG could not get its hands on enough cash to meet its demands, resulting in the death spiral situation we all witnessed last September. Of all the firms making such demands against AIG, Goldman was the most aggressive (I have more on this coming out in a forthcoming book) and my sources who were involved in the AIG bailout bunker scene of a year ago almost to a man report that Goldman and its chief Lloyd Blankfein took an extremely hard line with AIG.

Why would it act like that? Well, in a normal capitalistic situation, it wouldn’t. But Goldman, it turned out, had an ace in the hole. It seems that when the state stepped in and decided to bail AIG out, its former director, Stephen Friedman, was among those making the decision that AIG’s counterparties should be paid 100 cents on the dollar for its CDS debts. It never made sense that AIG/AIGFP would decide on its own to pay its creditors 100 cents on the dollar for its debts, but now we know, thanks to reporting from Bloomberg, that it wasn’t AIGFP and its CFO Elias Habayeb who was making that decision.

It was, instead, a group of people from the New York Fed who gave that order a group that included Tim Geithner and Friedman. Goldman ended up getting almost $14 billion from AIG after the bailout. And Friedman, we later found out, bought 50,000 shares of Goldman stock after this deal was struck. He resigned in May from the Fed, a few days after the Wall Street Journal broke the story about Friedman’s stock purchases.

Friedman surely had information about key moves involving the bank — like Goldman getting paid off at par in the AIG bailout, or Goldman getting a federal bank charter overnight so that a mountain of cheap Fed money could save it from bankruptcy — before the market got it. That he bought 50,000 shares in Goldman after the AIG bailout and is not in jail right now is sort of amazing, until you consider that it will be a cold day in hell before a former head of Goldman Sachs is arrested for insider trading, even when he gets caught doing it red-handed.

All of this matters for two reasons. One, it’s yet another example of how Goldman’s success isn’t attributable to how “smart” the bank and its employees are.

Instead of working something out with a company it had stupidly become overexposed to, Goldman instead hastened AIG’s demise because it was, perhaps, the one way it could cash in fully on its reckless deals — by forcing it into the arms of the government and getting the taxpayer to pony up for Cassano’s dumb calls.

Had AIG proceeded to an ordinary bankruptcy, had the company’s downfall happened via normal market procedures, Goldman might have gotten 40, 50, maybe 60 cents on the dollar. If that! Instead it got completely paid off, among other things because its connections to the government actually incentivized it to cripple a company to which it was exposed to the tune of billions.

Second, the non-punishment of Friedman just stands out like a hairy, golf-ball-sized mole on the face of the American capital markets. No question about it, it’s interesting that Galleon and Raj Rajaratnam are getting perp-walked by the FBI (note that it’s the FBI, and not the castrated and seemingly completely captive SEC, that’s going to be pushing these enforcement actions). Galleon isn’t small potatoes and from what I understand there are other hedge funds with even higher profiles that may fall later on. These are surprising and meaningful moves and and it suggests that the enforcement community is not yet completely corrupted.

But Goldman’s continued impunity leaves a mighty stink-cloud over American business, no matter how many Raj Rajaratnams get dragged off to jail.

Thanks again to Eric Salzman over at MonkeyBusiness, by the way — and good luck with your new thing.

. . . .Oh yeah, and the whole thing I wrote about yesterday saying not to trust the GDP numbers, and how meaningless they were? Well, it definitely was on October surprise yesterday as the market tanked, based on some other numbers, those being consumer spending. (Hint: when no one has a job, and those that do are worried how long their's is going to last, people don't spend money).

. . . .Krugman with a follow-up to those numbers, and his initial analysis, which I agreed with:

What recovery should look like

A followup to my note on why 3.5% is not enough. There have only been two occasions since the 1930s when unemployment has been roughly as high as it is now: the 1981-2 recession and, before that, the 1974-5 recession. (I like to include both because otherwise the usual suspects will start chanting “Reagan! Reagan! Reagan!” and drown out any coherent discussion). Here’s what growth looked like in the 6 quarters following each trough:

BEA

Again, 3.5 is a lot better than zero. But what we need is a string of numbers about twice that high. And bear in mind that, as Ryan Avent points out, even those V-shaped recoveries took a long time to get unemployment down to acceptable levels. Three years into the “Morning in America” recovery, the unemployment rate was still 7 percent.

. . . .Chez, over at DeusExMalcont, with more reaction to the video that got put up here yesterday, courtesy of Taibbi and the MonkeyBusiness blog. (scroll down to Friday's if want to catch the video I'm talking about in all it's baseball bat swinging, profane glory):

Grab a baseball bat and crank up Disturbed's Prayer.

Meet the new face of American outrage: relatively intelligent, surprisingly informed and (therefore) extremely pissed off.

God how I'd love to see this motherfucker put in a room with Jim Cramer.

. . . .Yglesias, with his wrap-up from late last night:

He wears the same hat and sweater every day:

— TNR and guilt by association.

— On Saturday, October 31, at 3:30 p.m. EST, GESTURES will be meeting in Dupont Circle to perform ROUTINE EMERGENCY TRAINING. During this exercise, GESTURES will be testing and otherwise handling NO-JAZZ, NEW ORLEANS RHYTHMS, PUNK COMPOSITION and other hazardous materials.

— Tom Zarek was right.

— Ex-insurgent reintegration in Afghanistan.

— NBA salary cap projections.

Halloween weekend so it’s time for “Nightmare on My Street” — DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince.

. . . . .The Political Carnival's round-up:

Saturday Linkage

I feel like I have sleeping sickness, just want to lay out right here and snooze.

Medical alert after series of passengers mysteriously faint mid-flight on their way to Britain

Study: Inheritance produces inequality

Bunny suicide calendar slammed

Sources: Abdullah to Pull out of Afghan Runoff

Creepy crawlies from the dawn of time: Newly-discovered prehistoric spider's web is world's oldest

Peninsula artist carves 319-pound pumpkin

. . . .Ezra Klein's link dump:

Tab dump

1) The New Republic and guilt by association.

2) Marty Peretz apologizes to Matt Yglesias.

3) "Great beer and great wine are on the same team."

4) "We find no clear relation between income inequality and class-based voting."

Recipe of the day: The best way to do toasted pumpkin seeds.

I just met a pale girl dressed in anachronistic clothing who looks a lot like the child kidnapped on this very block, on this very day, a hundred years ago. She asked me to wish you a Happy Halloween!

. . . .Andrew Sullivan's round-up last night:

Today was a big day for the Dish, as the HIV ban was finally struck down by the president's pen. Andrew shared his thoughts.

Levi continued to turn up the heat on Palin, who appeared less qualified than Quayle. Freddie, Rauch, and Andrew examined the pitfalls of empire in Afghanistan, Goldstone sat down with Bill Moyers, Hillary played the bad cop to Pakistan, and Andrew explained to John Cole the wariness of dealing with a Democratic president who supports gay rights. More details from the Nozette case emerged here and here.

In Halloween coverage, we judged the best costumes, saw the holiday as a pride parade for straight people, looked at fellating bats, really looked at fellating bats, and featured one of the best MHBs in a while. Meanwhile, young Iranians were still in the streets.

. . . . .I'm going to end today with a wonderful piece written by Mr. Bob Herbert, in the New York Times this week that can be summed up in one sentence. If not now, when? If not us, then who?

One of the most cherished items in my possession is a postcard that was sent from Mississippi to the Upper West Side of Manhattan in June 1964.

“Dear Mom and Dad,” it says, “I have arrived safely in Meridian, Mississippi. This is a wonderful town and the weather is fine. I wish you were here. The people in this city are wonderful and our reception was very good. All my love, Andy.”

That was the last word sent to his family by Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old college student who was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, along with fellow civil rights workers Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, on his first full day in Mississippi — June 21, the same date as the postmark on the card. The goal of the three young men had been to help register blacks to vote.

The postcard was given to me by Andrew’s brother, David, who has become a good friend.

Andrew and that postcard came to mind over the weekend as I was thinking about the sense of helplessness so many ordinary Americans have been feeling as the nation is confronted with one enormous, seemingly intractable problem after another. The helplessness is beginning to border on paralysis. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, nearly a decade long, are going badly, and there is no endgame in sight.

Monday morning’s coffee was accompanied by stories about suicide bombings in the heart of Baghdad that killed at least 150 people and wounded more than 500 and helicopter crashes in Afghanistan that killed 14 Americans.

Here at home, the terrible toll from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression continues, with no end to the joblessness in sight and no comprehensible plans for fashioning a healthy economy for the years ahead. The government’s finances resemble a Ponzi scheme. If you want to see the epidemic that is really clobbering American families, look past the H1N1 virus to the home foreclosure crisis.

The Times ran a Page A1 article on Monday that said layoffs, foreclosures and other problems associated with the recession had resulted in big increases in the number of runaway children, many of whom were living in dangerous conditions in the streets.

Americans have tended to watch with a remarkable (I think frightening) degree of passivity as crises of all sorts have gripped the country and sent millions of lives into tailspins. Where people once might have deluged their elected representatives with complaints, joined unions, resisted mass firings, confronted their employers with serious demands, marched for social justice and created brand new civic organizations to fight for the things they believed in, the tendency now is to assume that there is little or nothing ordinary individuals can do about the conditions that plague them.

This is so wrong. It is the kind of thinking that would have stopped the civil rights movement in its tracks, that would have kept women in the kitchen or the steno pool, that would have prevented labor unions from forcing open the doors that led to the creation of a vast middle class.

This passivity and sense of helplessness most likely stems from the refusal of so many Americans over the past few decades to acknowledge any sense of personal responsibility for the policies and choices that have led the country into such a dismal state of affairs, and to turn their backs on any real obligation to help others who were struggling.

Those chickens have come home to roost. Being an American has become a spectator sport. Most Americans watch the news the way you’d watch a ballgame, or a long-running television series, believing that they have no more control over important real-life events than a viewer would have over a coach’s strategy or a script for “Law & Order.”

With that kind of attitude, Andrew Goodman would never have left the comfort of his family home in Manhattan. Rosa Parks would have gotten up and given her seat to a white person, and the Montgomery bus boycott would never have happened. Betty Friedan would never have written “The Feminine Mystique.”

The nation’s political leaders and their corporate puppet masters have fouled this nation up to a fare-thee-well. We will not be pulled from the morass without a big effort from an active citizenry, and that means a citizenry fired with a sense of mission and the belief that their actions, in concert with others, can make a profound difference.

It can start with just a few small steps. Mrs. Parks helped transform a nation by refusing to budge from her seat. Maybe you want to speak up publicly about an important issue, or host a house party, or perhaps arrange a meeting of soon-to-be dismissed employees, or parents at a troubled school.

It’s a risk, sure. But the need is great, and that’s how you change the world.

. . . .I miss you Mom, a lot. Thanks for watching over me.

. . . .. . . .And that's the way it is:

. . . . .. . . .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: Gregory, MI 48137]

Safe haven

Friday October 30, 2009

. . . .It's Friday, the end of what's been an almost impossible two weeks for me, but we're rolling on up to it now. It is Halloween Eve after all.

. . . .I like Bill Maher's take on Halloween. "Let's be honest here now, Halloween is an excuse to finally dress like a hooker."

. . . .For all the pertinents, i.e. if you're reading this in the Facebook Notes, or as a feed, and how to get to the external site for the music; if you're looking for some information on the permanent site for my Mom's tribute page and how that'll be set up, or how to turn the podcast/playlist/soundtrack on and off to watch embedded videos, scroll down and catch the opening paragraphs of the last couple of days.

. . . .Today is momentous at your local multiplex. Today, October 30th, Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day opens up. If you've never seen Boondock Saints, of course, you have no idea what I'm talking about, and you've not seen one of the best movies ever produced. In fact, if you've not seen the first one, put it in your Netflix or Blockbuster order list.

. . . .On the tech front, I've found it pretty interesting to track the progress of the H1N1 virus using the Google Flu Trends map, but it gets realllly interesting when you compare that one with a new type of map, TrendsMap, which maps Twitter chatter and tweets. Using viral tracking techniques within social media is actually far more accurate than hospital or doctor's reports, which aren't real-time, but are cumulative from the past weeks. These two maps are real-time.

. . . . . .Onto the biggest news of the last couple of days, first a chart, then all the analyses, and finally my own. From Ezra Klein in the Washington Post:

Good news for people who like good news

"Knock knock."

"Who's there?"

"Quarterly GDP."

"Sigh. Quarterly GDP who?"

"Quarterly GDP growth, yo! I'm back!"

. . . . Reaction from Andrew Sullivan:

A Stimulus Upswing Of 9.9 Percent Since Obama Took Office

[At] long last, the American economy is growing again. Jobs, however, are still tricky to come by. Initial jobless claims declined by 1,000 from the previous week, but remain 10,000 about their level on October 10. Continuing claims fell to their lowest level since March, but this primarily reflects the exhaustion of benefits; workers receiving extended benefits are not counted in the total. So while the end to contraction has stopped the labour market bleeding, recovery has yet to begin the healing. Growth is good, but absent job creation it is difficult to get too excited.

Jon Hilsenrath of the WSJ is worried that the rebound is unsustainable. But please try and get some perspective. Only six months ago, we were afraid the entire global economy would be in a continued death spiral by now. It isn't. One reason is that the Bush and Obama administrations pushed through emergency - and expensive - programs to prevent a second Great Depression. They may not be enough; and the deleveraging of the Bush debt (public and private) may take a while. But this is a real and tangible gain, given the very real likelihood of total meltdown only a few months ago. It is not cheer-leading to note that. Much much more is needed to tell if this recovery is self-sustaining. But a 3.5 percent gain is better than a 6.4 loss. In fact,

The two-quarter swing in the rate of growth of 9.9 percentage points was the largest since 1980.

. . . .Yglesias, with Christian Romer's take on the numbers:

CEA Chief Christina Romer blogs on the GDP numbers:

After four consecutive quarters of decline, positive GDP growth is an encouraging sign that the U.S. economy is moving in the right direction. However, this welcome milestone is just another step, and we still have a long road to travel until the economy is fully recovered. The turnaround in crucial labor market indicators, such as employment and the unemployment rate, typically occurs after the turnaround in GDP. And it will take sustained, robust GDP growth to bring the unemployment rate down substantially. Such a decline in unemployment is, of course, what we are all working to achieve.

One of the things that makes American politics weird is that nobody in the administration is really supposed to talk about the fact that this is much more up to Ben Bernanke than it is up to Barack Obama. There’s disagreement as to whether expansionary monetary policy should be halted as soon as GDP starts growing or else should be continued until we have unemployment a few percentage points lower. This is a very important debate. But it’s a debate over which the country’s elected officials have extremely little formal influence.

. . . . .Paddy over at The Political Carnival:

Another topic that won't be mentioned on Fox today.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The U.S. economy grew at a 3.5% annual rate in the third quarter, ending a string of declines over four quarters that resulted in the most severe slide since the Great Depression.

The growth, reported by the government Thursday morning, was slightly stronger than expectations. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com had forecast 3.2% growth in gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the nation's economic activity. The economy shrank at a 0.7% rate in the second quarter.

The positive GDP report is one more sign that the economy has likely pulled out of the deep recession that started in December 2007.

. . . .Cesca, with the last word:

We're not feeling it yet, but in a technical sense the recession is done. GDP grew last quarter by 3.5 percent. The first growth in the economy since 2007.

Griping from wingnuts about how it would've been higher and sooner had there been no economic stimulus plan in 5... 4... 3... 2...

. . . . And now, the important take on it, the one from Krugman, who, along with Roubini, spent since 2005 predicting all of the meltdown that would occur, by the numbers, in order, with everyone calling them doomsayers, which they weren't, and specifically, Krugman, who was screaming for a larger stimulus package from the beginning. Was he right? Yes, the numbers say so, and sheer fundamental economic principle. When private spending dries up, as it did when the speculative credit bubble burst and AIG punched a $50 billion (in real, honest to god paper dollars) hole in the fabric of the universe. His take on all of it, from the New York Times on Thursday, with a much more important chart:

Growth and jobs

Just a quick note on the GDP report. Obviously, 3.5 percent growth is a lot better than shrinkage. But it’s not enough — not remotely enough — to make any real headway against the unemployment problem. Here’s the scatterplot of annual growth versus annual changes in the unemployment rate over the past 60 years:

BEA, BLS

Basically, we’d be lucky if growth at this rate brought unemployment down by half a percentage point per year. At this rate, we wouldn’t reach anything that feels like full employment until well into the second Palin administration.

. . . .My own take? It is extremely simple and I've said the same thing time and time again. A recovery that does not include jobs is not a recovery. The top 1% of Americans making money again utilizing the same fast and loose de-regulated shady derivative trading practices while more and more people lose their homes and declare bankruptcy is not a recovery. There is no recovery period, in a country that has lost it's manufacturing base as it was shipped overseas along with jobs. This is not a recovery, and personally, I'll go a step further and state that these GDP figures are extremely early, and in light of the fact that they follow the first time in history that GDP was negative for 4 consecutive quarters makes all of the celebration a little premature. I maintain this, that 2010 will be even worse than 2009 with a steeper decline and bigger crash as all the commercial mortgages come due at the end of the year and they can't be paid, and go into default and foreclosure.

. . . .Now that's where we've been, and maybe where it's headed, but let's take a look at where we're at economically right here, right now.

. . . .Yglesias, on the type of society that we've built, and myth of upward mobility, (which was touched on here earlier this week talking about the Billionaire Bailout society), and the best part is, the analysis comes from the very conservative Brookings Institution:

Pete Davis mentions a new book that sounds interesting. He observes that we like to think of the United States as a land of opportunity, “but a new book, Creating an Opportunity Society, by Ron Haskins and Belle Sawhill of the Brookings Institution proves otherwise.”

That’s what we like to think, but a new book, Creating an Opportunity Society, by Ron Haskins and Belle Sawhill of the Brookings Institution proves otherwise. They took a close look at intergenerational mobility and found that 42% of American men with fathers in the bottom income quintile remain there as compared to: Denmark, 25%; Sweden, 26%; Finland, 28%; Norway, 28%; and the United Kingdom, 30%. They present a wealth of new and old research evidence to support the conclusion that if you’re born poor in America, you’re likely to remain poor.

This basic result has been known for quite some time, at least in liberal circles (conservatives like Greg Mankiw believe the U.S. is ruled by a genetic aristocracy). And the interpretation seems pretty clear. The high level of income inequality in the United States leads to highly unequal opportunities for American children, whereas the low levels of income inequality in Nordic countries lead to more equal outcomes.

Davis says the book “is not a liberal polemic,” but I’m not really sure where else any analysis of this issue would lead you. One of the co-authors, Ron Haskins, has definite conservative credentials so I’ll be interested to see what kind of conservative ideas are in here, but “make America more like Sweden” doesn’t strike me as a very promising foundation for bipartisanship.

. . . .And Ezra Klein, with another take on how we arrived at the financial fiasco that we're all living in:

I'm a bit late on John Cassidy's thoughtful overview of the financial crisis, but it echoes Henry Blodget's take, not to mention my own:

Imagine that you and another armed man have been arrested and charged with jointly carrying out a robbery. The two of you are being held and questioned separately, with no means of communicating. You know that, if you both confess, each of you will get ten years in jail, whereas if you both deny the crime you will be charged only with the lesser offense of gun possession, which carries a sentence of just three years in jail. The best scenario for you is if you confess and your partner doesn’t: you’ll be rewarded for your betrayal by being released, and he’ll get a sentence of fifteen years. The worst scenario, accordingly, is if you keep quiet and he confesses.

What should you do? The optimal joint result would require the two of you to keep quiet, so that you both got a light sentence, amounting to a combined six years of jail time. Any other strategy means more collective jail time. But you know that you’re risking the maximum penalty if you keep quiet, because your partner could seize a chance for freedom and betray you. And you know that your partner is bound to be making the same calculation. Hence, the rational strategy, for both of you, is to confess, and serve ten years in jail. In the language of game theory, confessing is a “dominant strategy,” even though it leads to a disastrous outcome.

In a situation like this, what I do affects your welfare; what you do affects mine. The same applies in business. When General Motors cuts its prices or offers interest-free loans, Ford and Chrysler come under pressure to match GM’s deals, even if their finances are already stretched. If Merrill Lynch sets up a hedge fund to invest in collateralized debt obligations, or some other shiny new kind of security, Morgan Stanley will feel obliged to launch a similar fund to keep its wealthy clients from defecting. A hedge fund that eschews an overinflated sector can trail its rivals, and lose its major clients. So you can go bust by avoiding a bubble. As Charles Prince and others discovered, there’s no good way out of this dilemma. Attempts to act responsibly and achieve a cooperative solution cannot be sustained, because they leave you vulnerable to exploitation by others. If Citigroup had sat out the credit boom while its rivals made huge profits, Prince would probably have been out of a job earlier. The same goes for individual traders at Wall Street firms. If a trader has one bad quarter, perhaps because he refused to participate in a bubble, the results can be career-threatening.

Thomas Frank calls this a "smart-for-one, dumb-for-all" problem. What's rational for the individual is fatal for the collective. It's why we'll never get rid of bubbles. They don't rely on people being stupid, or even evil. They just rely on irrational profit streams that are then tapped by rational imitators. This is why the most important aspect of financial regulation is crude, strong limits on leverage so no single bank can owe enough money that the system relies on its health. We can't protect against the occasional fire. But we can protect against it consuming everything in the neighborhood.

. . . .Which does nothing more than echo my own position on why, even as a free-market proponent, I scream for regulation of Wall Street and the speculators and am willing to storm the battlements to get the anti-trust exemption removed from the health insurance companies. The day that corporations were legally ruled to be a unique entity (1963 Supreme Court) with all the rights and privileges of any other citizen, and those "citizens", those "entities", received special treatment, laws, and privileges different than other flesh and blood entities and citizens, all capitalist and free-market priniciples were thrown out the window and we started marching down this road towards a corporatist state. Reaganomics was a total failure, and there has been nothing but a disaster from day One using trickle-down and supply-side economics. Those corporate "individuals" were treated differently in tax law, the ability to move profits offshore untaxed, in regulation and in privilege than the voting citizens of this Republic, and did so solely to profit themselves, and not be contributing members of the Republic. There's two things here, (a) the video below and (b) an upcoming Supreme Court ruling next week, which has been flying under the radar, that will if decided the way it most likely will go, will cement forever the corporatist state that we now live in, and seal off forever, the rights of the individual. You've all been too busy paying attention to everything else that they want you to pay attention to even know about it. Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, which could be on the docket as early as next Tuesday, Nov. 3 could well seal off the citizens of this Republic forever from their own government. The United States Supreme Court will more than likely lift the ban on corporate political spending, at which point we truly will have become the United States of Goldman-Sachs, GE and AHIP. The $1.6 billion in lobbying money that AHIP threw at the members of Congress in the run-up to the Health Care Debate will be chump change. The $6 billion dollars spent lobbying and in campaign contributions this last election cycle will be a tiny figure, and no vote in Congress will ever again have the voice of the people as any influence at all on it.

. . . Now, this video (remember, go up to the top left where the podcast is, and pause it, middle button) comes via Taibbi, from the MonkeyBusiness blog. Fair warning, it's loaded with f-bombs, rants and raves, but the guy is a genius, uses a bat, fer Chrissake, knows the data, is loud and gets the entire overall, 30 year pattern that's taken shape by a government (both parties) that is a wholly owned subsidiary of Goldman-Sachs and JP Morgan Chase:

"Hell, It Takes Even Eli Manning Six Years to Make a Hundred Million Dollars!"

Get a bat and turn the music up. Then cut up your credit cards and send them back from where they came with a big GFY message....and pull your money out of the big boys and put it in the local community bank...if you can find one. I love this guy. Lots of F-bombs so be forewarned.

. . . .It is profane, loud and dead-on. I love this guy, he's saying the same shit I've been saying for years now, and he's saying it loud, and he's right. I feel like I just met a long-lost twin brother of a different mother.

. . . .A word real quick here about health care reform, since I've been surprisingly quiet about it, for me at least, all week. Both bills, the Senate and House versions suck, and here's why. The Senate version, despite it's public option, mandates coverage, which ultimately, without breaking the anti-trust exemption of the health care insurance companies, will lead to them price-fixing as a cartel. The House version is worse, with a very weak option, that ultimately leads to the government mandating the prices for health care, and does not provide a true public option, which in a marketplace setting would force lowered costs and value, instead, government wonks will set pricing, which ultimately will lead to disaster.

. . . .It's been almost a week since I went after one of my favorite used-to-be wingnut headliners, but once again, Caribou Barbie proves that she knows absolutely nothing of politics, and is in the game for one thing and one thing only, attention and money. (Kind of like the $300,000 dollars she took from the Chinese government to speak in Hong Kong, with no press there. Can you say Manchurian Candidate?). From The Political Carnival:

Iowa Republicans wince at Sarah Palin's $100K speaking fee

"Really, really odd". Yep, she is.

A conservative Iowa group’s effort to lure Sarah Palin to its banquet next month has had an unintended effect: Rather than exciting conservatives about the prospect of a visit from the former Alaska governor, the group’s plan to raise a six-figure sum to bring her to the state has GOP activists recoiling at the thought of paying to land a politician's speaking appearance.

(snip)

But representatives from other Iowa-based political advocacy groups said they would never consider shelling out money for what many politicians see as a privilege: the opportunity to speak to a room full of sure-fire caucus-goers who often serve as precinct captains and can be instrumental to a presidential candidate’s success.

“If somebody tells me they want me to pay an appearance fee, it tells me they’re not very serious about running for president,” said Ed Failor, Jr., president of Iowans for Tax Relief and an influential GOP insider.

“I found it really, really odd,” Failor said.

. . . .Here's what the tundra's favorite attention whore quitter will find out; that the wingnuts who touch themselves and wince whenever her name is mentioned will, and have, already turned the enslaved eyes towards Newt Gingrich, the grandfather of their movement, now that he's thrown his hat in the ring already. I full well realize that there is a tiny cult element of the hard-right that snake-handles, speaks in tongues and prays daily for her to be President, but face it slaves, she just wants to cash in. Buh-bye bitch!!

. . . .Now, let's contrast that crass, ignorant, cash-hungry wannabe caribou with this.

. . . .I remember being absolutely appalled that George W. Bush never attended a military funeral in his entire time in office, basically his entire time that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were being prosecuted. I remember being furious that he would not allow the media to cover military men and women who had paid the ultimate sacrifice coming home. The only thing I distinctly remember is the ridiculous picture of GWB in a flight uniform standing on a carrier deck with a "Mission Accomplished" banner behind him, and 3,000 more deaths over the years in front of him.

Wednesday night at midnight, the Air Force base at Dover:

. . . Agree or disagree with this man, but he, at least compared to his predecessor, knows and understands the consequences of his policy decisions.

. . . .. . . .And that's the way it is:

. . . . .. . . .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: Gregory, MI 48137]

It's got something going for it. . . .

Thursday October 29, 2009

. . . . . .Alrighty then, we're starting to get back on track and rolling.

. . . . .Like I said before, gotta get up everyday and do it, regardless.

. . . . .My Mom's tribute, which will now be 2 posts below this one, if you scroll down, you can catch it there. After it's rolled to the bottom, I'll give it a permanent parking spot and it's own permanent website, so if you want to go leave a message, a comment, just spend some time hanging out with her, you'll be able to.

. . . . .A couple of quick notes for new readers:
(1) If you're reading this on the Facebook Notes page, I would suggest going to the external site, The Desolation Angel - An Idiot's Ravings, and checking it out there, there's a podcast and playlist that always accompanies this, kind of like the prize in a Crackerjack box, but you can't get them if you don't go there. The same goes for any embedded videos that I may put there.
(2) And when it comes to that playlist, if you're trying to watch one of the embedded videos, to keep it from crossfeeding, and allow yourself to hear it plainly, go to the upper left hand corner of this post to the Podbean player, look for the long, narrow horizontal bar with the word "Podbean" on it, look to it's left hand side and you'll see 3 buttons, the middle one is the play/pause button, you can pause it, watch a video and then go back to the music.
(3) The same goes for the music, I provide a large playlist, go to the Podbean player, look at the list and click on any song there that you may want to hear, you don't have to listen to it in order, and if I haven't shuffled the order in a while, you may want to check out some of the tunes near the bottom.

. . . .And while we're still on the tech front, as I promised yesterday, we'll go a little deeper than surface on the Facebook re-design that was launched over the weekend.
(1) It sucks, of that there is no doubt, however, there isn't a lot that can be done about it for a lot of reasons. (By the way, I spent a good part of Sunday and Monday researching and coming up with fixes for it, if you're a friend of mine on FB, go to my profile and pull them up).
(2) Remember that whole dumbass group that got started along about 3-4 months now along the lines "We will not pay for Facebook"? It was dumbass for a couple of reasons. (a) What it guaranteed was that Facebook would be entirely advertiser supported and not subscriber supported. In other words, if you're a Facebook member, you have an opinion, (which everyone is entitled to), but you don't have any say and you don't have a vote, period. That's just economics at work, there isn't a soul at FB that has to, or is forced to listen to, the "will of the people". It's about dollars, and no one, anyone has the weight or the value to force any change at all "back to the original". The membership made that plainly clear to them when they told them that they didn't value it enough to pay for it, which leads to (b) they let them know, with that group, and their voices, that they actually were arrogant enough to believe that somehow they were entitled to the service it provides, so the only people that now count to them are the ones who turned their cash flow positive last month, their advertisers, who due to being the ones that support the service that everyone believes now that they're entitled to, now have 100% of the say in what's in the newsfeed that's seen.
(3) The solution to all of it is so simple, and it's staring everyone in the face, but no one is doing it. I became an advertiser on Facebook, the cost is relatively low, for this column, for my businesses, now I have a real say in what the future shape of it will look like.
(4) With that same dumbass group and stunt, FB's membership has actually put them in the driver's seat, instead of the 3o million members. They now have hard data to come back at everyone and say "you didn't want to pay for it", so it's all up to the advertisers. C'mon, you really, really didn't think that FB's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, the 24 year old billionaire, and his developers were doing this for your convenience and fun, did you? They also can come back now and look at the membership and say "Hey, if you want a say in it's look, it's functionality and feel, pay up, and make it worth our while." Didn't think of that, did you?

. . . .On a sidenote, I'm absolutely dumbfounded with the number of conservative and wingnut people I know who are screaming about the change, and essentially, demanding a "socialist" service that they don't pay for, and somehow believe that they have the inherent right to have a say in how it should be tailored to their demands.

. . . . Now, what's amazing to me is the number of people who consider themselves "tech literate" that couldn't go figure out the fixes to at least bring it back to 70% resemblance of what it used to look like. These guys are not stupid. They knew very well that if they launched in on a weekend and there were attributes that people didn't like, there's enough good hackers amongst their 30 million members that people would come up with workarounds on their own and those fixes would go viral quickly.

. . . . .As for the real fix, since in no possible way now can it be fixed so that your FB "friends" see both your status updates and links, photos, etc at the same time; either you pick status updates or News Feed (and there are two of them, the Live Feed and the News Feed, where FB's algorithm "picks" what you'll see); again that solution is simple, but requires thinking outside the box. Get a Twitter account, set your Facebook and Twitter accounts to feed one another, install TweetDeck so you can see them both; embed your links in your Twitter updates (using "short" URL's) and post to TweetDeck and it will simultaneously feed both your Twitter and FB accounts, and once again, allow you to provide links to things "outside the wall" within your status update on FB.

. . . Alright, I'm sorry, I was talking geek again, just get a hold of me, and I'll walk you through how to set it up.

. . . .Sheesh, good thing I didn't decide to throw FriendFeed in there as well, at that point, I may have well as have been talking about differential equations using calculus. . . .Just. . .get a hold of me, I'll help you set it up.

. . . .Now, on another tech front, and one which truly is vital to everyone who is reading this in the way you're reading it, let's talk about Net Neutrality, an issue that will come up over and over again this week. Net Neutrality is simple, it's about all content, by all providers being carried at the same speed. It's not about government controlling the Internet, as cult leader Beck, who is the bought and paid for dancing monkey by the big telecoms would have people believe. They dropped some dollars on him due to his ability to create conspiracies out of thin air and his cult following which repeats everything he hypnotizes them to say. Again, it's about all content by all providers being communicated at the same speed. Now, Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona has introduced an amendment to the Net Neutrality bill that would allow the provider to control the bandwidth and speed of all content. He was paid $879,000 to do so by the lobbyists. What it means is that if this bill passes with that amendment; then Charter, Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, BellSouth, Knology, WildBlue et al will control the speed with which content is streamed, and have openly stated that they would slow down all content except their own. We already have truly shitty broadband performance, as a matter of fact, the U.S. is 15th in the world at broadband performance and rapidly dropping down the list. Before you sputter at that number, it's data and fact, get over it, it's kind of like health care, you can wave a flag and shout "USA,USA" all you want to, but the bottom line is, we suck. Net Neutrality legislation would make it better and raise us up near the top again, but the lobbyists and the big telecoms will win out unless you do something about it.

. . . .OK, on to the international front:
- Let's set the stage:
- Karzai's brother is the CIA contact inside the Afghan government, which is a huge mistake. He is a drugrunner and a go-between for the Taliban, and brother to an illegitimate leader of a corrupt government.
- Troops in Afghanistan presently outnumber the Taliban 12 to 1
- We've been in Afghanistan now longer than in Vietnam
- A car bomb rips through a marketplace in Peshawar, Pakistan hours after Sec'y of State Clinton arrives in Pakistan, killing 100, mostly women and children
- The Taliban attack a UN guesthouse in Kabul, Afghanistan killing 12, including 1 American
- October has become the deadliest month yet in the history of this engagement for U.S. troops.
- This is actually two wars, the war against the Taliban, and the war against the drug lords. Those were DEA agents who were killed last weekend in the chopper crashes, not troops.

. . . And I put all that together as a prelude to this piece by Ron Kovic, whom you may remember as the author of Born On the Fourth of July, a combat vet from Vietnam who served with honor and was decorated, and lost the use of his legs there, who has this letter to the President:

Dear Mr. President,

As a former United States Marine Corps Sergeant who was shot and paralyzed from my mid-chest down on January, 20th, 1968 during my second tour of duty in Vietnam, and who has lived with the wounds of that war for the past forty one years, I am writing this letter to you deeply concerned with General Stanley A. McChrystal's request for a troop escalation in Afghanistan.

Escalating this war and deploying more of America's sons and daughters to this conflict is a huge mistake -- another Vietnam disaster in the making. We are at a crucial turning point Mr. President and the decision you are about to make in the coming days and weeks may very well be the most important decision of your presidency. I cannot begin to comprehend the thoughts going through your mind as you contemplate this difficult decision, the awful burden it must be.

Many of us who served in Vietnam promised ourselves long ago that we would never again allow what happened to us in that war to ever happen again. We had an obligation as citizens, as Americans, as human beings to raise our voices in protest. We could never forget the hospitals, the intensive care wards, the wounded all around us fighting for their lives. Those long and painful years after we came home.

In your recent address to the VFW on August, 17, 2009 in Phoenix, Arizona, you stated that the war in Afghanistan was a "war of necessity." I remember as I watched and listened to you that day wondering if you had any idea what you were getting us into, if you knew anything of Vietnam and the painful lessons I and others of my generation had learned from that war. You were three years old when I joined the Marine Corps out of high school in 1964, seven when I was shot and paralyzed in 1968, ten when I joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and began to protest against that war.

There were the trials and days and nights I spent in jail in my wheelchair feeling more like a criminal than someone who had once risked his life for his country, but I continued to speak. Perhaps it was survivors guilt or my own need to be forgiven and keep others from coming back like me, but as I sat before those crowds I began to open up my heart in a way I had never done before, sharing everything; all the horrors and nightmares, all the things I had locked deep inside of me, and had for so long been afraid to say. It was an extraordinary time Mr. President, an agonizing time, a time of great conflict, a time of great sorrow, and a time that would forever change the way we saw our country and the world.

In your book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream you spoke of that time, the Sixties, admitting that you were, "to young to fully grasp the nature of those changes, too removed to see the fallout on Americas psyche." I write this letter to you Mr. President as both a survivor and witness to that time and someone who must live with the consequences of a decision made by our government and it's leaders four long decades ago.

Physically and emotionally Mr. President I have struggled to live with the enormous challenge of being paralyzed. It is not an easy wound to live with. There are the bedsores and the catheters, the urinary tract infections and high fevers, the lack of sexual function, spasms, and terrible insomnia that torments you in the night. Each morning you wake up wondering how you're going to make it through another day. There is an entire body that does not feel or move from your mid-chest down and constantly you are lifting yourself up from your cushion in your wheelchair to keep your skin from breaking down.

You struggle to look normal, to fit into in this world again after all that has happened to you. It all seems so overwhelming at first Mr. President, but somehow you find a way to continue on. There are the anxiety attacks and the horrifying nightmares, the depression and thoughts of giving up. You're scared and you try your best to hide all that you've lost, all that you're going through every day, you can't move or feel anymore. It is an overwhelming and unspeakable injury Mr. President, but you go on. You do your best. You've got to keep living. You've got to keep getting up every morning no matter how crazy it all seems.

The years pass and you're still alive. You're amazed that after all these years, all the frustrations and confinement, in and out of bed, hospitals, fevers, IVs, wetting your pants, soiling the sheets, nightmares, anxiety attacks, insomnia, that you are still here, still in this world. Yet you continue on to make the best of what is left. You try to sit proudly in your wheelchair everyday trying not to lose your balance. It is amazing how normal a person can look if he only tries. You do your best to get back into life again but you know deep down inside that nothing will ever be the same, that you have lost more than most people could ever imagine, sacrificed more for your country, short of dying, than most of your fellow citizens could ever comprehend. It is a horrifying wound.

You watch your friends and fellow veterans die year after year from alcohol, drugs, suicides, a shot gun blast to the face, a car crash, an over dose, festering bed sores, toxic shock syndrome, pneumonia, homelessness, destitution and the loneliness of being forgotten. You see it all and you know that there is no flag, no parade, no welcome home that can ever make up for what you and the others have lost, for all that you have seen and endured; all those speeches, Memorial Days, Fourth of July fireworks, slogans and rhetoric about freedom and sacrifice and how, "necessary" this or that the war was, and If we did not stop them there than they would surely come to get us here.

It's way too much for a young man to see -- way too much for anyone to comprehend. Yet you go on. You do your best to block it out, to focus on the beauty of life -- the more positive things. You are amazed at the resiliency of the human spirit. You tell others how grateful you are to be alive, how you believe your wound is a blessing in disguise. And though that may be true, there are still moments in the early morning as you lie alone in your bed, slowly awakening to the wound one more time. You think, you ponder, you reflect on all that you have lost -- all those years, all that sorrow -- they come flooding back. For all the healing, despite all that you are now grateful for, all that you cherish and love; for all the goodness and kindness, despite the beauty of this still very beautiful world and all the hope and promise that it represents. But it lingers, that sorrow, that sadness. If but briefly for all that was lost for all that can never be again.

~ Ron Kovic

. . . The man served with honor and dignity, and gave the use of his body to the flag, and knows things, has experienced things none of us can know or imagine, we need to consider his words carefully and give them gravitas and weight.

. . . .I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan both broke their armies and their empires trying to conquer the provinces that would comprise the present day Afghanistan; the British Empire walked in there 100 years ago with the what was then the world's finest military machine, and left in defeat. The Soviet Empire walked in there 30 years ago, with what was then the world's finest military machine, and left in defeat. So will we. We, as a nation, in our arrogance, refuse to look at the lessons of history and continue to think of ourselves as somehow exceptions to the rule. It will be our undoing someday.

. . . .The day that the previous Administration (and now this Administration is following the same path) abandoned the hunt for the psychotic mass murder of 3,000 people and lied to invade a sovereign country and do a nation building exercise (how's that worked out for us?). The day that the previous Administration decided to removed the secular Christian leader of Iraq (yes, Saddam Hussein was a Christian, that's what Ba'athists are), the only man that both Ahmadenijad and bin Laden were afraid of (Hussein couldn't stand either one), we completely destabilized the Middle East and allowed Ahmadenijad to concentrate on obtaining nuclear weapons, and bin Laden to concentrate on embedding al-Queada all throughout Taliban councils in the region. Typical neo-con arrogance that now has led to this.

. . . .On to our incredibly skewed society and how we've perverted the meaning of the words capitalism and free-market. Les Leopold:

Democracy, socialism, capitalism, neo-liberalism -- none of them do justice to who we are and where we're headed. Socialism left the planet several decades ago, except in the minds of Fox News pundits. We're not sure what capitalism really is anymore, now that we've bailed out the entire financial sector. Neo-liberalism is so passé, as major governments around the world intervene to halt the financial collapse. And democracy is still with us, we hope, but we wonder for how long as our politicians and policies seem so easily bought and sold.

Perhaps we need a new vocabulary, one that helps us describe a society that promotes the accumulation of vast riches, bails out the rich when they take too many chances, and avoids responsibility for the common good. Even Milton Friedman would have trouble calling that capitalism.

How about the Billionaire Bailout Society?

Here are its salient features:

1. We promote accumulation of vast fortunes without limits.
2. We shun progressive income taxes that could narrow the gap.
3. We keep most of finance deregulated even after it has collapsed so spectacularly.
4. We let the minimum wage atrophy.
5. We discourage unionization.
6. We let middle class jobs disappear.
7. We allow a revolving door between public office and high paying private sector jobs.
8. We let our public infrastructure deteriorate.
9. We belittle government and public service.
10. We promote private gain as the best way to promote the common good.
11. We force our children to pile up debt in order to get an education.
12. We live with a porous safety net.
13. We encourage health care to be a profit maximizing enterprise.
14. We allow institutions to become too big to fail.
15. We bail out the largest financial institutions when they do fail, even if that means transferring trillions to Wall Street.
16. We allow Wall Street to use its bailout money to lobby against the public interest.
17. We let Wall Street keep its bailout-created "profits" and bonuses.
18. We have no clue if the financial sector provides any real value to our economy.
19. We permit financial hucksters to buy up solid companies, load them up with debt, take the cash, and then drive them into the ground.
20. We bad-mouth as protectionist all efforts to keep jobs in this country.
21. We don't have any serious plan for returning to a full-employment economy.
22. We live in awe of billionaires.

. . . .Read the entire piece here.

. . . With some data and back-up for that above, Yglesias:

Bubbles and Inequality

There’s something that’s pretty . . . suggestive about the apparent historical link between huge runups in the share of income controlled by the very wealthiest people and the emergence of asset price bubbles and the subsequent crises:

But what would explain the link? Steve Randy Waldman speculates that it’s all about the difference between loose monetary policy creating consumer price inflation and loose monetary creating asset price inflation:

Whether an economy generates asset price inflation or consumer price inflation depends on the details of to whom cash flows. In particular, cash flows to the relatively wealthy lead to asset price inflation, while cash-flows to the relatively poor lead to consumer price inflation.

This is because richer people have a lower marginal propensity to consume. As Kevin Drum puts it:

So: as income inequality goes up, more money flows to the well-off, who use it to buy financial assets. Conversely, less money flows to the poor and middle class, who respond by increasing their debt level. Both of these mechanisms produce a higher demand for financial assets and therefore promote asset inflation.

This seems reasonably plausible to me.

. . . .There was a little ruffle when I mentioned that the Fox News cult only has .6% to .8% of the viewing audience during the daytime, well, since I am a firm believer in numbers, I won't do it myself, but I'll let our buddy Chez over at Deus ExMalcontent speak for it himself with the Honorable Mention Quote of the Week, and it's centered around Fox News Shepard Smith apologizing on-air, live for one of the stories he was presenting not being "fair and balanced". Chez:

"2.5 million Americans watch Fox News, which means that 297.5 million Americans don't."

-- Commenter "Underoath" at the Huffington Post, responding to the story about Shepard Smith apologizing on-air for what he called Fox News's lack of balance in covering the New Jersey governor's race

I post this comment because it brings up a point I've always wanted to mention here: Fox News's perceived power within the news media -- it's supposed absolute domination of both the medium and the message -- is really nothing more than a product of the media loving to talk about themselves. Yes, Fox has a firm grip on the cable audience -- particularly one relentlessly loyal facet of the audience, which clings to its every word and indulges its every whim -- and that makes for much hand-wringing among its competitors and detractors. But let's be honest: In the great scheme of things, how many people really watch cable news regularly? Sure, O'Reilly or Beck can pull in a couple of million viewers -- on a really good day -- but even now, with its authority waning, network news still nets up to 25-million viewers a night (with even the lowest-rated show pulling around 6-million people). And keep in mind that we're talking about national numbers -- as in a couple of million Fox viewers out of around 300-million people in the entire United States.

To put things in perspective, during the heyday of network dominance, a local news 11pm show in New York City could occasionally come close to that kind of number.

Yes, Fox News is powerful among the select demographic that watches it. Big picture, though? It's nowhere near the inescapable cultural force that it and the media echo chamber it inhabits would have you believe.

. . .Speaks for it all, doesn't it? I stick by my label. . .a cult.

. . . .And while I'm doing charts and numbers, let's go on to the next one. I've said all along, that I call it "climate change", and I've always made the assertion here that numbers, that data, that the Laws of Mathematics, of Physics, of Thermodynamics, reign supreme. They're universal, logical and always true and it's impossible for a religious or political twist to be put on them. I also will say, and have said that it's human arrogance, plain and simple, which would lead people to either (a) assert that they know the reasons and causes or (b) assert that somehow it isn't happening (stick fingers in ears, shake head side-to-side rapidly, saying "lalalala" loudly). These are eons long cycles and bald fact is, that engine is turned on and cycling, and like all large engines, once the cycle is turned on, it's too late to do anything about it. (BTW, cap-and-trade is insanity, trading pollution to speculators? C'mon!). Anyhow, finally, finally, someone got smart enough to take the numbers to some statisticians, who are my very favorite type of geeks. They sincerely don't care about the political, religious or cultural implications or labels on things, they only care about the numbers. They came up with the following chart, which has been published in USA Today, the A.P. and widely through other sources. In a blind test, a group of statisticians was given the data and told to trend it without being told what it represented, the effect being to remove all bias. Here's what they found:

Graphic shows the departure from normal annual world temperature

. . . .I've said it before, I'll say it again. We're arrogant, as a species, to believe that somehow our political or religious beliefs can have that type of influence. I care about 3 things, the overall temperature (BTW, it will only take a 4 degree rise to say ta-ta to everything); the dirt (it took 10,000 years to deposit the top soil in the Great Plains, and only a little less than 200 for us to reduce it to 1% of what it was) and the water.

. . . .More on that dirt and water thing tomorrow.

. . . .Because what the dirt and water do is provide the food we eat. Cesca:

The next step has to be focused upon doing something about the poisoned filth we've collectively nicknamed "food." Without any real changes in how our food is produced, the health care system will continue to bloat and fall apart. Not unlike the insides of an average American body.

Corporate agribusiness has invested nearly $1.2 billion (and growing) on lobbyists -- more money than even the defense lobby. Naturally, much of this lobbying has been aimed at deregulating how food is processed and manufactured, as well as how corporate agribusinesses raise and process livestock. It's an industry that's entangled in everything from Big Tobacco to human trafficking and illegal immigration.

Most recently, and speaking of poisoned filth, you may have watched as Rick Berman was eviscerated by Rachel Maddow on MSNBC a few weeks ago. In case you missed it, Berman's Center for Consumer Freedom is financed by corporate agribusiness, among others, and tasked with deceiving the public about everything from high fructose corn syrup to transfat, mercury levels in fish, obesity issues, food labels, and tobacco laws. CCF is all about confusing the public by muddying scientific fact and skewing the debate onto ridiculous tangents to the point where it's difficult to tell the difference between what's healthy and what's crap. It's Glenn Beck's rodeo clown strategy applied to food.

The consequence for you and me, of course, is that the food is becoming increasingly toxic, both in terms of what goes into our bodies, and in terms of how deregulation and deception is hurting the economy. What good is health care reform if we're still being fed poison? What good is an economic recovery if big business is still gaming the system?

. . . . .Full piece here

. . . .. . . .And that's the way it is:

. . . . .. . . .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: Gregory, MI 48137]