Monday - Perfect Storm

Monday September 14, 2009

. . . . ."It is a time when one's spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why, when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death." Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)


. . . .There is something about Sunday evenings, something about them, especially the gray ones, when you're traveling alone, that are so lonely and empty. Sunday evenings should be spent with your people, being in the warmth of close relationships and bonds, eating a bowl of soup.

. . . .Well, it's time to jump into things big, I do talk, quite a bit, about nexus points, about those points in time when everything changes, on an otherwise mundane day, just a typical day in the calendar or of the week, but somehow, looking back, you can see them as points where everything changed. If you're in tune enough, you can feel them if they're happening around you.

. . . .And on a more pedestrian note, being a football fanatic, yes, Saturday's University of Michigan game made me smile, things are getting back to normal in Ann Arbor. Being a U of M fan, it was even more delicious to see Michigan State return to it's normal ways as well, finding a way to self-destruct and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Hey State fans, want to make snide remarks about Appalachian State anymore? Go Chips!!

. . . .Sunday was even better. Despite a new coach and a new quarterback, the Lions once again succeeded in making their opponent, this time the New Orleans Saints, look like an absolute Super Bowl lock. I give the Lions all due praise for their consistency. There are many teams in the NFL that unfairly tease their fans from time to time with glimmers of actually getting up to ordinary, or up to being able to win from time to time. Not the Lions. . . . .with them, you can count on them to be miserable. . . .What are the Harrah's sports book odds on them going 0-for-the-season this year as well? Anybody check?

. . . .The Americana Music Conference is this week in Nashville, TN. Some of my favorite artists; Cross Canadian Ragweed, Reckless Kelly, The Drive-By Truckers, Wilco et al will be there. It should be a very, very good time.

. . . .And even for the usually off the wall, anything goes MTV VMA's; Kanye was waaayyy off base last night, and way out of bounds with what he did to Taylor Swift. This wasn't a PSA about Katrina and George Bush, this was merely an artist who'd been voted an award. However, in that community, I've got a feeling the Dre and Snoop will take care of things their own way, and let Mr. West know how out of bounds he was.

. . . .Lest all rappers get a bad name from that, I'd like to mention that Jay-Z came out over the weekend with his benefit concert in New York for the families of victims of 9/11, and as usual it was well received.

. . . As well, U2 opened the North American leg of it's world tour in Chicago at Soldier Field over the weekend, the stage as promised, is an engineering marvel, but it's kind of impossible for even an engineering marvel to upstage the 4 working class lads from North Dublin.

. . . .The playlist, if I get around to it tonight, should have some new, brand-brand new stuff in it, things I think you'll enjoy.

. . . .I talked up above about it being the confluence of a perfect storm. It is, if you're paying attention. It's all coming together in a way that just is not good, and the best part of it is, we're the ones at fault, not anyone else.

. . . .Bear with it today, read all the way through it. I reiterated on Saturday my anger over the build-up to 9/11 and the over 20 warnings that 2 administrations received; my anger over Bush and Cheney almost immediately abandoning the hunt for bin Laden in Afghanistan to invade Iraq on false pretenses and sacrificing so many good young people on a fool's errand; my doubts about Afghanistan now. I've spent the last month writing about how fractured this country is becoming, and how separated it is, about how the gulf is widening; about how frustrated people are with the finances of this country and their own finances, and about how dangerous it is for China to hold most of our debt; about how we're not paying attention to the basics in our own biosphere like dirt and water. About the fact that neither party; Republican or Democrat has anyone's interests at heart, least of all their voters, but instead work only for their lobbyists and campaign donors, in this case, notably recently, the health insurance lobby; about how the CFR and Trilaterals, by owning Goldman-Sachs; JP Morgan Chase, the Treasury and the Fed, are ultimately shaping the world though the most effective means possible, money, to their own vision, laid out very publicly by George Herbert Walker Bush 30 some odd years ago.

. . . .Like any human body, when stress finally overwhelms the system and sickness sets in good and hard and takes us down; we are a body politic; a Republic and the stresses, the fractures, are setting in hard, all coming together at once, and we are ripe to be taken down, stricken down like any other organic system. This all goes so far beyond Republican and Democrat; liberal vs. conservative; progressive vs. populist that the scope of it is beyond comprehension.

. . . .First up; today marks another anniversary. This time, the President spoke from Wall Street, on the anniversary of the financial crisis that fairly well cemented the election for him. Regular readers probably know of my complete disdain for the phantom "recovery" we're supposedly in, and the contempt within which I hold Summers, Geithner, Bernanke, Paulson. Men from two administrations who have done nothing but make Goldman-Sachs and JP Morgan Chase richer through all of this. Men who have helped make the institutions that were "too big to fail" far bigger than they were a year ago, and even more prone to take down the U.S. economy and world economy even further than it already is. It's Day 365, and your wallet, and our country's economy is still being held hostage by the Fed, the Treasury, AIG, Goldman-Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and China. Please take the time to read some of the excerpts below, without a solid banking and credit system, everything else is nothing more than an ephemeral wisp of unpaid for, unfunded smoke.

. . . .All from television this morning:
- Elizabeth Warren, the TARP watchdog (who has been harshly critical of how the TARP funds are being handled) on Dylan Ratigan's Morning Meeting on MSNBC this morning:
"Until we have a credible liquidation threat, we don't have capitalism in America."
- Dylan Ratigan himself, on NBC's The Today Show:
"We are falsely perpetuating failed businesses like Citigroup and AIG."
- Robert Reich and Pat Buchanan, two complete political polar opposites on Morning Joe on MSNBC found themselves, surprisingly, in complete agreement:

Professor Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary in the Clinton administration, and Pat Buchanan had a rare moment of agreement this morning when they were discussing the one-year anniversary of the beginning of the financial crisis.

Reich lamented that the banks seemed to have learned nothing from the crisis as they have returned to the business practices that got them in trouble in the first place. Buchanan agreed, saying the banks are still "carrying these subprime mortgages in their colon. It's like a tumor."

Buchanan then asked Reich if he believed the government should have allowed a couple of the massive banks to fail like Lehman Brothers to teach them them the lesson that the government won't always consider them too big to fail. Reich found himself unexpectedly agreeing once more:

You know it's interesting Pat Buchanan, I start worrying about my own convictions when I hear you repeating back to me exactly what I believe. We ought to have either had kind of a restructuring of all of these big banks based upon something like Chapter 11, or we should have had a kind of temporary receivership, but we have the worst of both worlds. Taxpayers bailed them out so right now they know they were going to get a bailout next time. Before they didn't even know they were going to get a bailout, now they're making these wild trades they're doing the same risky stuff they were doing before, and now they know that if they get in trouble the government is going to bail them out because they are, quote, "too big to fail." Nothing in capitalism, no entity should be too big to fail.

. . . .Elliot Spitzer, on CBS's Early Show:
"We are not doing well in reforming the financial system".

. . .Robert Reich, from his blog today:

Let's be clear: The Street today is up to the same tricks it was playing before its near-death experience. Derivatives, derivatives of derivatives, fancy-dance trading schemes, high-risk bets. “Our model really never changed, we’ve said very consistently that our business model remained the same,” says Goldman Sach's chief financial officer.

The only difference now is that the Street's biggest banks know for sure they'll be bailed out by the federal government if their bets turn sour -- which means even bigger bets and bigger bucks.

Meanwhile, the banks' gigantic pile of non-performing loans is also growing bigger, as more and more jobless Americans can't pay their mortgages, credit card bills, and car loans. So forget any new lending to Main Street. Small businesses still can't get loans. Even credit-worthy borrowers are having a hard time getting new mortgages.

The mega-bailout of Wall Street accomplished little. The only big winners have been top bank executives and traders, whose pay packages are once again in the stratosphere. Banks have been so eager to lure and keep top deal makers and traders they've even revived the practice of offering ironclad, multimillion-dollar payments – guaranteed no matter how the employee performs. Goldman Sachs is on course to hand out bonuses that could rival its record pre-meltdown paydays. In the second quarter this year it posted its fattest quarterly profit in its 140-year history, and earmarked $11.4 billion to compensate its happy campers. Which translates into about $770,000 per Goldman employee on average, just about what they earned at height of boom. Of course, top executives and traders will pocket much more.

Every other big bank feels it has to match Goldman's pay packages if it wants to hold on to its "talent." Citigroup, still on life-support courtesy of $45 billion from American taxpayers, has told the White House it needs to pay its twenty-five top executives an average of $10 million each this year, and award its best trader $100 million.

A few banks like Goldman have officially repaid their TARP money but look more closely and you'll find that every one of them is still on the public dole. Goldman won't repay taxpayers the $13 billion it never would have collected from AIG had we not kept AIG alive. (In one of the most blatant conflicts of interest in all of American history, Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein attended the closed-door meeting last fall where then Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who was formerly Goldman's CEO, and Tim Geithner, then at the New York Fed, made the decision to bail out AIG.) Meanwhile, Goldman is still depending on $28 billion in outstanding debt issued cheaply with the backing of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Which means you and I are still indirectly funding Goldman's high-risk operations.

. . . .Dylan Ratigan, mentioned above, the host of Morning Meeting:

The American people have been taken hostage to a broken system.

It is a system that remains in place to this day.

A system where bank lobbyists have been spending in record numbers to make sure it stays that way.

A system that corrupts the most basic principles of competition and fair play, principles upon which this country was built.

It is a system that so far has forced the taxpayer to provide the banks with the use of $14 trillion from the Federal Reserve, much of the $7 trillion outstanding at the US Treasury and $2.3 trillion at the FDIC.

A system partially built by the very people who currently advise our President, run our Treasury Department and are charged with its reform.

And most stunningly -- it is a system that no one in our government has yet made any effort to fundamentally change.

Like health care, this is a referendum on our government's ability to function on behalf of the American people. Ask yourself how long you are willing to be held hostage? How long will you let our elected officials be the agents of those whose business it is to exploit our government and the American people at any cost?

As hostages -- was there any sum of money we wouldn't have given AIG?

Why did we pay Goldman Sachs and all the other banks 100 cents on the dollar for their contracts with AIG, using taxpayer money, while we forced GM and others to take massive payment cuts?

Why hasn't any of the bonus money paid to the CEOs that built this financial nuclear bomb been clawed back?

And more than anything else -- why does the US Congress refuse to outlaw the most anti-competitive structure known to our economy, one summed up as TOO BIG TOO FAIL?

It has become startlingly clear that we as a country, and I as a journalist, had made a grave error in affording those who built and ran those banks and insurance companies the honorable treatment of being called capitalists. When in fact the exact opposite was true, these people were more like vampires using the threat of Too Big Too Fail to hold us hostage and collect ongoing ransom from the US Government and the American taxpayer.

This was no unlucky accident. The massive spike in unemployment, the utter destruction of retirement wealth, the collapse in the value of our homes, the worst recession since the Great Depression all resulted directly from these actions.

Even with all that -- the only changes that have been made, have been made to prop up and hide the massive flaws on behalf of those who perpetuated them. Still utterly nothing has been done to disclose the flaws in this system, improve it or rebuild it.

Last fall was an awakening for me, as it was for many in our country.

And yet, our Congress has yet to open its eyes, much less do anything about it. In fact conditions have never been better for the banks or worse for the rest of us.

Why is this? Who does our Government work for? How much longer will we as Americans tolerate it? And what, if anything, can we do about it?

As we approach the anniversary of the bailouts for our banks and insurers -- and watch the multi-trillion taxpayer-funded programs at the Federal Reserve continue to support banks and subsidize their multibillion bonus pools, we must ask if our politicians represent the interests of America? Or those who would rob America of its money and its future?

As a country, we must demand that our politicians stop serving those whose business models are based on systemic theft and start serving those who seek to create value for others -- the workers, innovators and investors who have made this country great.

. . . .From Alan Colmes' blog:

Oliver Willis links to the Vanity Fair piece by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele that instructs who the teabaggers should really be protesting against.

As the Bush administration waned, the Treasury shoveled more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in tarp funds into the financial system—without restrictions, accountability, or even common sense. The authors reveal how much of it ended up in the wrong hands, doing the opposite of what was needed.

It boggles the mind that money was quickly doled out with no accountability. It was given to institutions whether they wanted it or not. Some of hem were troubled; others were troubling.

…once the money left the building, the government lost all track of it. The Treasury Department knew where it had sent the money, but nothing about what was done with it. Did the money aid the recovery? Was it spent for the purposes Congress intended? Did it save banks from collapse? Paulson’s Treasury Department had no idea, and didn’t seem to care. It never required the banks to explain what they did with this unprecedented infusion of capital.

Monies went to more than just big-name institutions.

The excesses weren’t confined to big-city banks. A subsidiary of North Carolina–based B.B.&T., after accepting $3.1 billion in tarp money, sent dozens of employees to a training session at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Sarasota, Florida. TCF Financial Corp., based in Wayzata, Minnesota, sent 40 “high-performing” managers, lenders, and other employees on a junket in February to Cancún, soon after receiving more than $360 million in tarp funds.

But let’s face it: episodes like these, infuriating as they may be, aren’t the real issue. The real issue is tarp itself, one of the most questionable ventures the U.S. government has ever pursued. Adopted as a plan to buy up toxic assets—one that was quickly deemed impractical even by those who first proposed it—it evolved into something more closely resembling an all-purpose slush fund flowing out to hundreds of institutions with their own interests and goals, and no incentive to deploy the money toward any clearly defined public purpose.

. . . .Les Leopold:

Maybe the most sophisticated economic models all point upward, but our sense of history should be flashing warning lights. There are a few enduring lessons we can't avoid: any nation that fails to find enough work for its people, and that doesn't rein it its obscene distribution of income, is courting catastrophe. Consider these problem areas:

1. As Larry Summers recently said, unemployment will remain, "unacceptably high." Truer words were never spoken. He's telling us that the recovery will be so anemic that current massive job shortfall is likely to continue for years. According to the most recent government numbers, there are about 29 million Americans out of work or forced into part-time work. If that continues, as Summers predicts, consumer demand will be low and misery for millions will be high. That's bad economics.

2. We have done almost nothing about financial institutions that are too big to fail. Supposedly we're supervising them more carefully. But all the evidence suggest that they are off and running into a new round of fantasy finance. Goldman Sachs already is selling repackaged synthetic securities, precisely the kind that crashed the system last time around, (and Moody's again is rating them AAA.) Large banks are making a move into "Death Bonds," finding new ways to skim profits by buying up and securitizing life insurance policies of the elderly and ill. We could stop this madness either by nationalizing the largest institutions entirely, or breaking them down so that they truly were small enough to fail. Trust-busting Teddy Roosevelt would have understood what to do. But in today's Washington such a discussion is off limits.

3. There still are no controls on the specialty derivatives that caused the last crash and likely to contribute to the next one. In fact, I've been told by reliable sources that derivative traders are pooling a bit of their upcoming bonus money to fund a billion dollar lobbying effort to make sure no serious reforms take place.

4. Despite President Obama's insightful words last May, nothing has been done to shrink Wall Street's size, let alone its political power. The Pay Czar was supposed to crack the whip on outrageous compensation packages. Instead, Mr. Czar immediately said that it's okay for Andrew J. Hall, an oil speculator, to receive $100 million in trading fees from CitiGroup, a bank which we basically own. What a Wall Street recruiting poster for new math whizzes!

5. Most importantly, we've failed to address the major cause of the entire mess: the underlying distribution of income and wealth. The fantasy finance casino and its bubbles grew from the fact that the super-rich accumulated too much capital after years and years of tax "reforms" that gushed money to the top. When they ran out of real world investments, their capital rushed to Wall Street's speculative securities. And they are doing it again. You can't limit catastrophic speculation without returning excess capital to society. And there is plenty of excess: The latest tax data shows we have the worst income distribution since 1929. Not only are we failing to learn from history, we are begging to repeat it.

The failure of Washington to clamp down on Wall Street is also creating a very negative political feedback loop between government and the public. Most Americans are furious about Wall Street's outsized pay and profits. They are also furious about the inability of the administration and Congress to act. There's a growing sense that the rich and powerful are in control of financial policy and of the political process. This fuels anti-government anger which undermines the things we need government to do: raise taxes on the super-rich; put in place a windfall profits taxes on Wall Street; cap outrageous financial compensation packages; and enact public programs and national industrial policies that create real jobs for the unemployed.

Given the failure to enact serious reforms, it wouldn't take much to push the economy off the cliff again: a severe pandemic flu, a terrorist attack, a major weather event or an unexpected failure of a company that is too big too fail could set off a major economic relapse.

. . . .Stiglitz, from Bloomberg today, one of the most prescient economists around:

Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize- winning economist, said the U.S. has failed to fix the underlying problems of its banking system after the credit crunch and the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

“In the U.S. and many other countries, the too-big-to-fail banks have become even bigger,” Stiglitz said in an interview today in Paris. “The problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis.”

Stiglitz’s views echo those of former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who has advised President Barack Obama’s administration to curtail the size of banks, and Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer, who suggested last month that governments may want to discourage financial institutions from growing “excessively.”

A year after the demise of Lehman forced the Treasury Department to spend billions to shore up the financial system, Bank of America Corp.’s assets have grown and Citigroup Inc. remains intact. In the U.K., Lloyds Banking Group Plc, 43 percent owned by the government, has taken over the activities of HBOS Plc, and in France BNP Paribas SA now owns the Belgian and Luxembourg banking assets of insurer Fortis.

While Obama wants to name some banks as “systemically important” and subject them to stricter oversight, his plan wouldn’t force them to shrink or simplify their structure.

Stiglitz said the U.S. government is wary of challenging the financial industry because it is politically difficult, and that he hopes the Group of 20 leaders will cajole the U.S. into tougher action.

. . . .Krugman, from his New York Times magazine piece, on the roots of the crisis, and why we're doomed to repeat it:

Few economists saw our current crisis coming, but this predictive failure was the least of the field’s problems. More important was the profession’s blindness to the very possibility of catastrophic failures in a market economy. During the golden years, financial economists came to believe that markets were inherently stable — indeed, that stocks and other assets were always priced just right. There was nothing in the prevailing models suggesting the possibility of the kind of collapse that happened last year. Meanwhile, macroeconomists were divided in their views. But the main division was between those who insisted that free-market economies never go astray and those who believed that economies may stray now and then but that any major deviations from the path of prosperity could and would be corrected by the all-powerful Fed. Neither side was prepared to cope with an economy that went off the rails despite the Fed’s best efforts.

And in the wake of the crisis, the fault lines in the economics profession have yawned wider than ever. Lucas says the Obama administration’s stimulus plans are “schlock economics,” and his Chicago colleague John Cochrane says they’re based on discredited “fairy tales.” In response, Brad DeLong of the University of California, Berkeley, writes of the “intellectual collapse” of the Chicago School, and I myself have written that comments from Chicago economists are the product of a Dark Age of macroeconomics in which hard-won knowledge has been forgotten.

What happened to the economics profession? And where does it go from here?

As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn’t sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations. The renewed romance with the idealized market was, to be sure, partly a response to shifting political winds, partly a response to financial incentives. But while sabbaticals at the Hoover Institution and job opportunities on Wall Street are nothing to sneeze at, the central cause of the profession’s failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess.

Unfortunately, this romanticized and sanitized vision of the economy led most economists to ignore all the things that can go wrong. They turned a blind eye to the limitations of human rationality that often lead to bubbles and busts; to the problems of institutions that run amok; to the imperfections of markets — especially financial markets — that can cause the economy’s operating system to undergo sudden, unpredictable crashes; and to the dangers created when regulators don’t believe in regulation.

. . . .Pay attention to much of what is mentioned above, particularly how fragile everything still is, and how little it would take to topple it all again. I say that as a lead-in to this Reuters article that is the one thing that no one wants to talk about, that of China calling in the debt that they hold, as truly, they really are the only things propping our economy up:

A report that Chinese state-owned companies will be allowed to walk away from loss-making commodity derivative trades provoked anger and dismay among investment bankers on Monday as they feared it may set a damaging precedent.

. . . .How and why are the financial institutions still being allowed to take even bigger risks than they were taking a year ago, this time with yours and my money? It's simple, and two-fold. First and foremost is the lobbying money that gets thrown at legislators everyday. The health-care industry, which has dumped over $1.6 billion in lobbying money and campaign contributions this year alone, isn't the only high flyer in Washington. The financial services and investment bank lobbying firms are in that stratosphere too. I want to thank reader Kay for sending along this link to the Lobbying Disclosure Act Database, where Senators and Representatives are required to file quarterly disclosures.

. . . .I agree with Otis Gibbs, a great musician, whose Facebook posting today read:

"Otis Gibbs wants to force all elected officials to wear NASCAR type uniforms with the logos of their campaign donors plastered all over, so that we can plainly see who they are really representing."

. . . .Now, I've rattled on in this forum enough about my sincere hatred for the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission, David Rockefeller's babies (JP Morgan Chase). I'd like to thank my friend Matthew, over in Peoria, for the link to this one. Ron Paul, whom I often disagree with, but agree with just as much (it's about a 50/50 thing) has just as big a beef with the Fed as many people, and it's getting the CFR jumpy, from the New American website:

Near the start of this year Ron Paul (R-Texas) introduced H.R. 1207, the Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009. The bill was referred to the House Committee on Financial Services. As of this writing, H.R. 1207 has 282 cosponsors.

A Senate equivalent, S.604, the Federal Reserve Sunshine Act of 2009, has been introduced by Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). It has 23 cosponsors. Both bills have received a tremendous groundswell of grass-roots support. Much of the support is coming from ordinary people who have become aware of the fact that the Federal Reserve has created trillions of dollars literally out of nothing during the past calendar year in its effort to micromanage its way out of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

If such a measure were passed by both houses of Congress and signed into law by President Obama, the resulting bill would allow the Government Accounting Office to conduct audits of Federal Reserve System monetary policy. The bill proposes to scrutinize the Fed’s dealings not just on domestic monetary policy but on dealings with foreign central banks and foreign governments.

The power elite is worried. Evidence for this can be found in a short article "The Fed's Political Problem" appearing on the website of Foreign Affairs, flagship journal for the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The article's author, Alan S. Blinder, is a senior-level economics professor at Princeton University who also directs Princeton’s Center for Economic Policy Studies. From 1994 to 1996 he served as vice chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

Blinder first argues a thesis he proposed back in 1997, that some areas of government are properly political and others are properly technocratic. He places monetary policy in the latter, where it can operate independently of political oversight. The drawback of Ron Paul’s bill is that it would transfer Fed oversight to the political realm and end its independence.. . . . . . .

. . . . . .The dollar’s value will drop considerably more should it lose its status as the world’s reserve currency. The Chinese are getting very nervous about the money-creation spigot in Washington, D.C. Perhaps these are the kinds of developments that elites such as Blinder don’t want the public to know about. Clearly the elites are uncomfortable with the amount of attention the Fed has received — the public being aware of the trillions having been created literally out of thin air during the past year. “What will this do to the long-term purchasing power of my money?” is a perfectly valid question many ordinary Americans are asking.

. . . . .Which of course, does tie in with Health Care Reform, for there remains one fundamental question, how does it get paid for? Now, that is a rhetorical question. I've spent the better part of a month trying to examine it from several points of view. There are plans out there that are basically revenue neutral, and involve restructuring administratively, eliminating unnecessary testing and redundancy, putting the caps back in place that existed pre-Reagan on health insurance companies, and tort reform. However, not much of that is on the table at all. There is one other fundamental problem that I have with all of it. "Health Care Reform" is really a misnomer, as the primary focus has been, and remain on, health care insurance companies. Now, as a utilitarian, I truly have absolutely no use for, nor can I see any reason for health care insurance companies very existence! They do not manufacture a product, nor provide a true product. They do not provide a service, it's actually the health care provider that supplies the service. The health insurance companies entire existence, their only reason to exist is to broker risk and act as middlemen, skimming an inordinately large amount of profit from the transaction. The entire system could be reformed by going back to a simple Keynesian economic equation, that of doctors and hospitals providing the medical care at a negotiated price with the patient. This would be far too simple, and far too economical, and put too much logic in the equation between doctor and patient.

. . . .Now, the issue of Joe Wilson will not go away. For some, Joe Wilson has rapidly become a folk hero. To me, he's a piece of pond scum, a bastard child of Strom Thurmond, and one item in particular about him makes me want to spit in his face, his treatment of veterans:
- Jon Soltz, the founder of VoteVets.org, who served as a Captain in Operation Iraqi Freedom, at VetVoice.com:

The only thing more "out there" than Joe Wilson's disrespectful display during the president's speech to Congress on health care is Representative Wilson's all over the place take on two of the largest government-run health systems there are -- the ones that benefit our troops and veterans.

Wilson has railed against health care reform, warning that offering more choice to people amounts to a government takeover of health insurance. To him, it's an evil that has to be defeated.

Yet, at the same time, Wilson hasn't said whether he's opted into TRICARE for Life. The completely government-run health insurance system for certain military retirees is available to Wilson, as he's a 31-year Guard and Reserve veteran (though he joined after getting out of Vietnam). If he's not, of course, then he's taking insurance from the government-run pool offered to Congressmen. Then, there's all of our active duty service members who are on TRICARE -- stuck in an evil government system that must have turned them into Communists by now.

Wilson has saved them and gotten them out of TRICARE, right?

Right?

"TRICARE provides world class health care," said Wilson in a press release. "I believe TRICARE is one part of our health care system that's working."

What?! Joe Wilson is all for this horrible fascist system of government care?

Well, maybe not. Despite being against government health care, and then paying lip service about the awesomeness of government-run TRICARE, Wilson's voted to underfund it.

In 2007, Wilson was against $1.9 billion for military medical care (including funds for Walter Reed) and in 2005 voted against expanding TRICARE eligibility for our Guard and Reserve components, despite the fact that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has them fighting alongside the active component more than ever before.

OK, so Wilson suffers from split personality disorder when it comes to government health care for troops. But, he must be against the Department of Veterans Affairs, another bastion of Marxist thought, turning generations of American veterans into pinkos.

"With a growing number of servicemembers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, we must go to great measures to ensure our veterans receive the best care possible. That means greater oversight of the facilities, hospitals, and clinics that care for our veterans. They deserve access to the highest quality medical technology and a health care system that is responsive to their immediate and long-term needs. Their sacrifice and commitment to this nation deserves nothing less," said Wilson on his campaign site.

Gosh, that sounds just like Hitler, doesn't it?

Oh, but thank heaven, Joe Wilson voted repeatedly to cut veterans care, and save us from modern day Leninism. He voted for a $14 million cut in 2003, against $1.6 billion for the agency in 2005, $2.9 billion again in 2005, for a $13.5 billion cut in 2005, against $1.8 billion in 2003, and millions and millions more.

Maybe it's asking too much for me to ask that Joe Wilson think like a rational human being, but I'll ask anyway. He needs to decide whether offering citizens the option of getting the same kind of coverage we in the military get is evil or not evil.

If it's not -- if military and veterans government-run insurance and care is not malevolent -- then he needs to stop his shouting and properly fund TRICARE and the VA, and let everyone have the option of getting a public insurance plan.

But, if government-run care and insurance really is wicked, then he needs to stop lying about how he feels about TRICARE and Veterans Care. He should tell the truth about why he voted against funding for those programs -- because he thinks troops and veterans should be left out in the cold and turned away in return for their service.

Until he's honest about his position on Veterans Care, Military Care, and the Public Option, I can only say this: Representative Wilson, YOU LIE.

. . . . .Joe Wilson, you are a shameful, lying piece of dog crap.

. . . .From one of my favorite websites, Open Congress, again more proof of Joe Wilson's hypocrisy and lying:

However, in 2003, Wilson voted to provide federal funds for illegal immigrants’ healthcare. The vote came on the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003, which contained Sec. 1011 authorizing $250,000 annually between 2003 and 2008 for government reimbursements to hospitals who provide treatment for uninsured illegal immigrants. The program has been extended through 2009 and there is currently a bipartisan bill in Congress to make it permanent.

Hospitals have a legal obligation to treat everyone who comes in seeking care, regardless of citizenship status, insurance or other characteristics. This means that hospitals treat millions of people every year who don’t have the means to pay. Obviously, this drives up the nation’s healthcare costs overall. Section 1011 helps cushion the costs for hospitals, but it’s not nearly enough to cover the actual costs in most areas.

. . . .And on the other issue, that of what he did. Joe Wilson has every right to say it, (though the evidence above clearly points out that he's just another lying POS politician who is riding the current Right Wing resentment-of-a-black-leader tsunami), the forum he said it in and when he said it was all wrong. It is not a First Amendment rights issue, it is not a Freedom of Speech issue. When you are elected as a United States Representative, you also take on the the responsibility and accountability of living by the Rules of Decorum while sitting in and serving in that seat in a formal setting, some of the Rules of Decorum, directly from the House of Representatives website:

• Avoid personality

• Address remarks to the chair

• Refer to other members only in the third person

• Refrain from discussing the president's character

. . . .For a full PDF copy of the Rules of Decorum, from the House website, click here.

. . . .For those for whom Joe Wilson has become a cause celebre, and a folk hero, just more proof that the Republic is becoming unhinged and fractured beyond health, help and healing. The Right wing, the neoconservative movement has become a movement far beyond John McCain or Orrin Hatch, true Republicans, and is now a party and a movement that counts Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh as their spokesmen; Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and yes, Joe Wilson as their leaders, and Fox News as their House Organ.

. . . .First up, yesterday's 9/12 protest in Washington was far more lightly attended than being reported, and the movement is resorting to sending around a Photoshopped picture as it's "proof". For one, I don't understand Beck's 9/12 movement. If the stated intention is to rally the country to the state it was in on the day after 9/11, it seems that he's doing absolutely the opposite, and splitting the country in two. As I recall, the country rallied around an extremely unpopular President and followed him, and supported one another, despite political differences. That is not the purpose behind Beck's 9/12 project at all. I fear that once again, as with the Religious Right, the Republican party, the party of oppotunists is riding that wave. The Democratic part, the party of spineless pussies, is doing their best to do nothing, and assume that the Republicans are right.
. . . .John Avlon, in The Daily Beast today:

The weirdness of the Wingnut summer isn’t over. The anger has metastasized into the body politic, and it’s going to get a lot uglier from here.

Obama Derangement Syndrome is establishing itself as a potent political force, able to rally tens of thousands of citizens to the Washington Mall after Glenn Beck’s call. Joe Wilson’s outburst isn’t an embarrassment of incivility to these folks; it is a rallying cry for an army of useful idiots. But Republicans will soon find that they cannot contain or moderate this strain—while Democrats won’t understand what hit them.

The wave of white people that descended on Washington, D.C., this Saturday wasn’t motivated by simple racism, as some liberals might wish—at least that’s what the lady waving the Confederate flag told me. No, this was something else: a pent-up frustration at unprecedented Washington overspending and an individualistic resentment of the welfare state, all mixed with a dose of self-referential patriotism and a spicy dash of paranoia.. . . . .

. . . . . .

But back to the woman with the Confederate flag. She gave her name as Becky. I asked her why she was carrying the Stars and Bars to the rally. “Because I’m from the South…It has nothing to do with slavery. People think it means slavery. That’s not what it stood for. It stood for the Union.”

Somewhere, Lincoln just threw up. A guy named Norm decided to step in and help her out: “I don’t think it’s so much that anybody would advocate any secession-like movement, or that anybody wants to remove a star from the flag. I think if anything, the Confederate flag serves to remind me of where we’ve been and where we would not like to go again.”

There is a “don’t make me shoot this dog” aspect to this logic: an angry, divisive protest designed to stop the divisions they see erupting from Washington’s policies. The date of the protest provides the ultimate irony—it was pitched by Glenn Beck as a day to reflect the national unity and patriotism that was evident on 9/12/01, the day after the terrorist attacks. And yet this protest celebrated the deepest domestic political divisions we’ve seen since, with unhinged accusations of traitors and despots in the White House and talk of resistance and revolution.

Liberals who want to ignore the populist anger do so at their political peril—the frustration at Washington overspending is real, a reflection of bailout backlash. People are frustrated because they are expected to pay their bills and balance their budgets, but both big business and big government seem arrogantly exempt.

But Republicans are playing a dangerous game. They are benefitting from all this anger in the short term, but they have tapped into something deep and ugly that they can’t control. Calling the president a communist or even Hitler is something far beyond simple incivility or street theater—it is an accusation that intentionally stirs the crazy pot. It is ultimately an incitement to violence.

. . . .Hendrik Hertzberg, in The New Yorker today:

Perhaps it was naïve, and obviously it was optimistic, to hope that once Obama—having been elected by a large and undisputed majority, unlike his two predecessors—took office the nastiness of the assault against him would subside. And so it did, briefly. But as the reality sank in that this temperamentally conservative President intends to make good on his substantively progressive promises, the fury returned, uglier than before and no longer subject to the minimal restraints inherent in a national electoral campaign aimed at persuading a plurality of voters. Lies and fantasies about health-care reform swirled together with lies and fantasies about the chief executive himself. Obama is plotting to set up “death panels,” government tribunals authorized to euthanize the old and sick. Obama was born in Kenya and therefore his very Presidency is unconstitutional. Obama will cut Medicare benefits to provide coverage to illegal aliens. Obama seeks to indoctrinate children in Marxist ideology and put teenagers in “reëducation camps.” Obama is a Communist. Obama is a Fascist.

This sort of lunatic paranoia—touched with populism, nativism, racism, and anti-intellectualism—has long been a feature of the fringe, especially during times of economic bewilderment. What is different now is the evolution of a new political organism, with paranoia as its animating principle. The town-meeting shouters may be the organism’s hands and feet, but its heart—also, Heaven help us, its brain—is a “conservative” media alliance built around talk radio and cable television, especially Fox News. The protesters do not look to politicians for leadership. They look to niche media figures like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, and their scores of clones behind local and national microphones. Because these figures have no responsibilities, they cannot disappoint. Their sneers may be false and hateful—they all routinely liken the President and the “Democrat Party” to murderous totalitarians—but they are employed by large, nominally respectable corporations and supported by national advertisers, lending them a considerable measure of institutional prestige. The dominant wing of the Republican Party is increasingly an appendage of the organism—the tail, you might say, though it seems to wag more often from fear than from happiness. Many Republican officeholders, even some reputed moderates like Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, have obediently echoed the foul nonsense.

. . . .Why is all this so important? Guess who's back? The same guy who planned and executed the murder of 3,000 people, and prospered so well when Bush and Cheney abandoned the hunt for him. Osama bin Laden released an audiotape today:

But the core of bin Laden’s message is a warning to Americans to take note, not of an impending attack by some outside force, but of what bin Laden seems to suggest is a grave threat posed by an “enemy within”: the pro-Israel lobby in Washington.

“The White House is occupied by pressure groups,” bin Laden says. “The time has come for you to liberate yourselves from fear and the ideological terrorism of neo-conservatives and the Israeli lobby.”

. . . .The man is very much alive, and very much paying attention to the current political scene in Washington.
. . . .We have met the enemy, and he is us, looking straight back at us in the mirror.

. . . .And one more, on that front. One of the scariest things I've heard of yet, in the biosphere we all live in. From the L.A. Times:

Staphylococcus aureus is a common bug that can cause serious infections. An antibiotic-resistant strain, called MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), has increased dramatically in recent years. It typically spreads in hospitals. But it's also found in healthy people in the community. It spreads from skin-to-skin contact with someone who is infected, or by touching surfaces contaminated with the germ.

Little is known about places in the environment where MRSA can hide. A study presented today, however, is the first to show that public beaches may be reservoirs for the bug. Staph was isolated in marine water and in intertidal beach sand in nine of 10 public beaches in Washington state, and half of the strains were MRSA, according to the study from researchers at the University of Washington. When examined, those strains appeared to be the type that spreads in hospitals rather than community-acquired MRSA.

How beaches are becoming contaminated with hospital-acquired MRSA is unknown, said the lead author of the study, Dr. Marilyn C. Roberts. The study was presented this morning at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy in San Francisco.

"Where all these organisms are coming from and how they are getting seeded, we don't know," Roberts said. The samples were "grab-and-go" samples, meaning that researchers didn't spend a lot of time thinking about where to collect the samples. And, Roberts said, "the fact that we found these organisms suggests [beach contamination] is much higher than we normally thought."

Another study on beach sand, published in June in the Journal of Epidemiology, found that people who dug in the sand or covered themselves with sand were more likely to have diarrheal illnesses in the following week or two compared with beachgoers who just walked on the beach or lay on the sand. The most likely scenario for MRSA infection, Roberts said, is getting sand in a cut or abrasion. But the risk of getting MRSA at the beach cannot be estimated at this time.

. . . .We created MRSA. It evolved in response to our overuse of antibiotics, which came out of our fear of something "scary", so we used a curative, a preventive, to keep an "infection" from getting into our system. Think about everything else that I wrote about above, and draw the metaphor for yourself.

. . . .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.