August's End

The End of August

. . . . ."The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" - Would those of you who attempt to co-opt or quote the words of a man who was a far greater light than any of you can ever hope to be do some things please?
(1) Quote it correctly and in full, the word "watered" isn't in there, anywhere
(2) Take the time to actually read Jefferson's works and understand his intent behind the sentence and catch the phrasing. He was talking about self-sacrifice and being willing to give a full measure of yourself.

. . . . .Because, truly, the current crop of wingnuts carrying that as their catchphrase right now, have been weighed and measured, and truly found wanting.

. . . . .There exists somewhere, beyond our imagining, a place. We dreamed it once, into existence, and somehow, we've lost that dream. It is not gone, like all things with value and worth, we've merely neglected it and now must work for it again now, to reattain it.

. . . .The playlist is simply Irish bands. Yes, of course, Van and U2 are there. But there have been, and are many others from the place of my ancestors; bands you may not have heard of, but good bands, good musicians, all with that Irish sound. Horslips, The Waterboys, The Pogues, The Boomtown Rats, and a nod to a couple of transplant bands, Flogging Molly and The Dropkick Murphys. It's an Irish thing, gotta do it every so often.

. . . . .Rave on Tommy Gavin, rave on.

. . . . .I'm just gonna go out on a limb here; but do people like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck realize that the mere fact that they're allowed onto radio and TV every day with their outlandish tin-foil hat conspiracy theories about death panels, FEMA camps and a secret army and allowed to talk about them, and are not given the least bit of attention by the government that they theorize constantly as supposedly plotting against them, is the first, foremost and logical proof that they're full of shit? I'm just asking. I'm just wondering if they can make that connection, that's all. I'm desperately hoping you all already put that logical equation together for yourselves.

. . . .And speaking of Beck, now that a total of 46 advertisers have pulled their advertising from his show, that boy has turned the fever swamp crazy up to about 14 on a 10 scale. We really are talking full-bore bull-goose loony here, I mean it.

. . . . .Now, as for the other half of the lunatic fringe version of Abbot and Costello, Rush Hindenburg, err, I mean Limbaugh. Rush has been in type of sweaty, gassy, necrophiliac delirium since Ted Kennedy's death, and on Friday was in an orgasmic state describing some of the scenes. Now, I've maintained all along, as someone who is 28 years clean and sober, and heading fast for 29, that Rush isn't sober. Reading his transcripts reinforces that for me, regardless of my distaste and disgust for his traitorous mumblings every day. Friday, he provided proof positive, in an obvious "slip" of the tongue, that despite his raptorous ramblings about going through treatment and getting clean that no indeed, he's not sober:

LIMBAUGH: And I had -- I played a game yesterday afternoon. I watched a replay of this whole thing, and I said, "You know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna take a drink in honor of Ted Kennedy of the caravan going to the library there to lie in repose, I'm gonna take a drink for every black person I see on the parade route." And I was sober at the end of the parade. They forgot to stack the deck with any black people, but there were a lot of union thugs out there. I mean, what a -- no better way to honor Ted Kennedy, take a drink for every black person you see on the caravan route.

. . . .Now, yes, there was the all day, every day, racist cracker slant on things in there, but more important, his admission to drinking. So, for those of you who read me to see if you can find anything in here that isn't factual, and try to provide some refutation, here's your "proof" and your "truth". My question for you, after that, is simple. If he's lied to you about being sober, which is the ground zero, the foundation for any sober person, what else has your esteemed Republican leader been lying to you about?

. . . .Now that Freakonomics, by the brilliant economist Steven D. Levitt, has been reissued in an expanded paperback version, (and the book really is brilliant, and different), it may be time to revisit the postulates that Levitt put forth in the 1st edition, and in light of the entirety of the media and societal circus surrounding the health care reform debate, examine them again, and see if they're still holding true:
- Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life
- The conventional wisdom is often wrong
- Dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle, causes
- "Experts" use their informational advantage to serve their own agenda
- Knowing what to measure, and how to measure it, makes a complicated world much less so.

. . . .Yes, without having to explain or expand any of the above points, since they're all staring us in the face every day, I'd say he's still pounding the proverbial nail right on the head.

. . . . .Nicholas Kristof, in the New York Times, on Saturday. "Our existing health system knocks off more people than an army of 'death panels' could, working 24/7.":

Long-term care constitutes a difficult and expensive challenge in any health system. But the American patchwork, full of cracks through which people fall, has a special problem with medical expenses of all kinds bankrupting couples.

A study reported in The American Journal of Medicine this month found that 62 percent of American bankruptcies are linked to medical bills. These medical bankruptcies had increased nearly 50 percent in just six years. Astonishingly, 78 percent of these people actually had health insurance, but the gaps and inadequacies left them unprotected when they were hit by devastating bills.

The existing system doesn’t just break up families, it also costs lives. A 2004 study by the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, found that lack of health insurance causes 18,000 unnecessary deaths a year. That’s one person slipping through the cracks and dying every half an hour.

In short, it’s a good bet that our existing dysfunctional health system knocks off far more people than an army of “death panels” could — even if they existed, worked 24/7 and got around in a fleet of black helicopters.

So, for those of you inclined to believe the worst about President Obama, think it through. Suppose he is indeed a secret, foreign-born Muslim agent who is scheming to undermine American family values while killing off as many grandmothers as possible.

If all that were true, why on earth would he be trying so hard to reform our health care system? We already know how to prod families into divorce and take a life unnecessarily every 30 minutes — all we need to do is reject reform and stick with exactly what we have.

. . . . .Now, in a unique twist that could only come from the fringe movement that loosely identifies itself as the Republican Party, the entire imaginary science-fiction scenario that they continue to foster around "death panels" does have a grain of truth in it, but that grain of truth, it turns out, is turning around to bite them in the butt. Jacob Weiserg, in his column in this week's Newsweek did some investigation and it turns out that the GOP, with the leadership of Sen. Graessley, one of the foremost fosterers of the outrageous lies, in truth, through a twist in legislation on a bill he sponsored some time ago, have put a financial incentive in the system to "pull the plug on Grandma", specifically in the year 2010.

The republicans charge that Democratic health care reform would, in Sen. Charles Grassley's words, "pull the plug on Grandma." According to Sen. Jon Kyl, the bills before Congress would ration medical treatment by age. Rep. John Boehner says they promote euthanasia. Sarah Palin has raised the specter of "death panels." Such fears are understandable. It's not preposterous to imagine laws that would try to save money by encouraging the inconvenient elderly to make an early exit. After all, that's been the Republican policy for years.

It was Grassley himself who devised the "Throw Mama From the Train" provision of the GOP's 2001 tax cut. The estate-tax revision he championed will reduce the estate tax to zero next year. But when it expires at year's end, the tax will jump back up to its previous level of 55 percent. Grassley's exploding tax break has an entirely foreseeable, if unintended, consequence: it incentivizes ailing, elderly rich people to end their lives—paging Dr. Kevorkian—before midnight on Dec. 31, 2010. It also gives their children an incentive to sign DNR orders and switch off respirators in time for the deadline. This would be a great plot for a P. D. James novel if it weren't an actual piece of legislation.

. . . .Irony. Ah, I love it. It can have such a delicious twist sometimes.

. . . And it's gotten truly ridiculous when an insurance company exec, on Friday, in the New York Times admitted that they rationed care.

“I believe we’re getting the pushback because we are standing up for what we believe in,” said Cheryl Tidwell, 45, Humana’s director of commercial sales training. “We believe there’s a better way to control costs by controlling utilization and getting people involved in their health care.”

Some workers said that unlike other contributors to the country’s health care problems — the doctors who overprescribe, the hospitals that fail to control infection, the consumers who do not take care of themselves — insurance companies are faceless, impersonal and distant.

They do not save lives. They just pay the bills. When they have reason to interact with patients, it is usually because something has gone wrong. “You’re not having a good day when you’re talking to us, unfortunately,” Mr. Shireman said.

. . . .David Sirota, political columnist comments:

Now, I know we're supposed to think that private for-profit health care companies don't ration care, while government-run programs like Medicare do - but as the insurance industry admits right here for all to see, that's just not the case. The obvious truth is that the health insurance industry works hard to "control utilization" - that is, it works hard to make sure that when you need a costly medical service, you are "controlled" (read: prevented) from getting it.

Sure, we're all against excessive testing - and there are good ways to deal with those inefficiencies. But that's not what the insurance industry is talking about. It is talking about its practice of rationing care - and now that reality is right there in black and white for all to see.

. . . .Bill Moyers, appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday (should be required viewing for everyone). Bill is one of the most reasoned, intelligent people around, and in a very, very long conversation with Bill, had quite a bit to say about health care reform that can be summed up in one phrase; "we're all in the same boat".

. . . .Now, on the same night, earlier in the evening, Bill Moyer's Journal ran a new documentary, by Maggie Mahar, whose province in reporting is strictly health care, filmed it and was driven by her book "Money-Driven Medicine", Mahar speaks:

What I learned, during those years, is that in our health care system, profits often trump patients. A great many people are selling and selling hard. By law, for-profit corporations are supposed to put their shareholders' interests first: this means that they must strive to maximize profits. And this goes a long way toward explaining why U.S. healthcare is so expensive.

. . . .The whole video, which I urge you to watch, can be seen here, at Bill Moyer's Journal.

. . . .I hope and I pray that everyone is now starting to see that fact, that this really is about the existing structure, and the health insurers, against us, and anything else is just a smoke screen being put up by one of their puppets.

. . . .Joe Klein, in this week's Time, on the Republican nihilist jihad that they've turned the health care reform debate into:

It is a very different story among Republicans. To be sure, there are honorable conservatives, trying to do the right thing. There is a legitimate, if wildly improbable, fear that Obama's plan will start a process that will end with a health-care system entirely controlled by the government. There are conservatives — Senator Lamar Alexander, Representative Mike Pence, among many others — who make their arguments based on facts. But they have been overwhelmed by nihilists and hypocrites more interested in destroying the opposition and gaining power than in the public weal. The philosophically supple party that existed as recently as George H.W. Bush's presidency has been obliterated. The party's putative intellectuals — people like the Weekly Standard's William Kristol — are prosaic tacticians who make precious few substantive arguments but oppose health-care reform mostly because passage would help Barack Obama's political prospects. In 1993, when the Clintons tried health-care reform, the Republican John Chafee offered a creative (in fact, superior) alternative — which Kristol quashed with his famous "Don't Help Clinton" fax to the troops. There is no Republican health-care alternative in 2009. The same people who rail against a government takeover of health care tried to enforce a government takeover of Terri Schiavo's end-of-life decisions. And when Palin floated the "death panel" canard, the number of prominent Republicans who rose up to call her out could be counted on one hand.
An argument can be made that this is nothing new. Dwight Eisenhower tiptoed around Joe McCarthy. Obama reminded an audience in Colorado that opponents of Social Security in the 1930s "said that everybody was going to have to wear dog tags and that this was a plot for the government to keep track of everybody ... These struggles have always boiled down to a contest between hope and fear." True enough. There was McCarthyism in the 1950s, the John Birch Society in the 1960s. But there was a difference in those times: the crazies were a faction — often a powerful faction — of the Republican Party, but they didn't run it. The neofascist Father Coughlin had a huge radio audience in the 1930s, but he didn't have the power to control and silence the elected leaders of the party that Limbaugh — who, if not the party's leader, is certainly the most powerful Republican extant — does now. Until recently, the Republican Party contained a strong moderate wing. It was a Republican, the lawyer Joseph Welch, who delivered the coup de grâce to Senator McCarthy when he said, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" Where is the Republican who would dare say that to Rush Limbaugh, who has compared the President of the United States to Adolf Hitler?
This may tell us something about the actual state of play on health care: the nutters are a tiny minority; the Republicans are curling themselves into a tight, white, extremist bubble — but there may be enough of them raising dust to render creative public policy impossible. Some righteous anger seems called for, but that's not Obama's style. He will have to come up with something, though — and he will have to do it without the tiniest scintilla of help from the Republican Party.

. . . . Entire article here.

. . . . .Absolutely required reading is The Death of Conservatism by Sam Tenenhaus, a history of how the Conservative Movement and the Republican Party have completely abandoned the principles they were built on, and become a party that has a foundational structure that is nothing more than religious/political dogmatic ideology, dominated by "religious kooks", a phrase taken from Barry Goldwater, who warned of this exact thing back in the '60's. From a review of the new book by Lee Siegel:

The explicit argument first. For Tanenhaus, the conservatives have abandoned their core values of respect for tradition and sensitivity to the necessity of change—of pragmatic, principled adaptability—for a rigid absolutism that expresses itself in a politics of destruction and mechanical negativity.

The party that once stood for governmental ballast and probity in the '50s, and for governmental order and responsibility in the late '60s—as the liberals’ well-intentioned war and their well-intentioned welfare state came crashing down on society—now identified government itself with the forces of evil.

An interesting consequence followed. Since political power can only operate through government, the conservatives had chosen to exert their power more directly, around politics, as it were, by means of cultural confrontation, personal attack, and reflexive stonewalling. This is why conservatives seem most politically organized when out of power, and why when they attain political power, they immediately begin to act like apolitical outlaws.

It’s also why their preferred battleground has been the arena of culture, not politics. As Tanenhaus observes in his book, ever since Buckley equated America’s “ruling class” with “the opinion-makers” (the media, mostly), conservatives have set their sights on liberal dominance of culture. The New Left’s desire to take power by making “the long march through institutions” (i.e. universities) has now become the right wing’s desire to acquire power by making a long march through the media.

. . . .The implosion of that same Republican Party has begun. On Sunday, Dick Cheney appeared on Fox News Sunday, and said that the torture investigation that is starting up "offends the hell out of me" and claims that it is politically motivated. Thank the Creator for John McCain, who along with Orrin Hatch, is about one of only 2 Republicans left that I have even a shred of respect for. McCain was on Face The Nation later in the day, and went right after Cheney. Now, let's get something straight right from the get-go. Cheney is a coward who never wore a uniform, found his way out of it, never faced combat or death and whose only experience pulling a trigger was to shoot his best friend in the face with a shotgun while bird hunting. McCain's record is exemplary, a combat pilot, who faced death every day, and spent 5 years being held prisoner and tortured, his experiences make him the only subject matter expert in a singularly one-sided debate. McCain's reponse to Cheney's assertions around torture? The the torture didn't work, wasn't effective, violated international law and the Geneva Convention, and most importantly, helped recruit new members of Al-Quaeda.
. . . .And on Sunday, on State of the Union on CNN, Senator Orrin Hatch, leading Republican from Utah stated that Vicki Kennedy would be a "great" replacement for her deceased husband in the Senate.

. . . . .Saturday, August 29th, marked the 4th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of New Orleans. That place is more than just my jumping off point for work, and I am humbled, always, by the undefeated spirit of it's people, and their love for their hometown, and what they've done to rebuild their city, and their region. Do me a favor please? The next time you're vacation down there, quit asking if there are still Hurricane Katrina "tours", and go yourself down to the lower 9th Ward, where the destruction is still quite evident, and people are still living in FEMA trailers, then roll your sleeves up there, or where you live, and ask yourself what you can do to help.

. . . .Sometimes people wonder how long a generation lasts. It should be pretty obvious from this summer that a generation is 40 years. This summer marked the 40th anniversaries of Woodstock, Kent State and the Moonwalk back in '69. The summer of '09 is marked by the deaths of so many, Ted Kennedy's being most prominent, and in my own personal life, the deaths of more people, friends, who were close to me, than any year in recent memory.

. . . . I realize that all of the economic/financial/credit front sometimes seems like homework, or a college MacroEcon 101 course, but you all are very smart people, and like me, understand that everything else, absolutely everything, health care reform, climate challenges, education; absolutely all of it is meaningless without a solvent economy and a robust financial and credit system, and they're all in trouble. It's important to take a look at what's going on, what's coming, and what we can do about it.

. . . . .Time to check in with all of my buddies on the economic/financial front who saw it coming, and no one wanted to listen to them. Nassim Taleb, the author of The Black Swan, who is another of my favorite cynics (along with Roubini, Krugman, Stiglitz, Levitt and Zandi) on why there isn't really a recovery going on, and how dangerous things are right now, in the Financial Times over the weekend:

The core of the problem, the unavoidable truth, is that our economic system is laden with debt, about triple the amount relative to gross domestic product that we had in the 1980s. This does not sit well with globalisation. Our view is that government policies worldwide are causing more instability rather than curing the trouble in the system. The only solution is the immediate, forcible and systematic conversion of debt to equity. There is no other option.

Relying on standard models to build policies makes us all fragile and overconfident. Asking the economics establishment for guidance (particularly after its failure to see the risk in the economy) is akin to asking to be led by the blind – instead we need to rebuild the world to make it resistant to the economist’s mystifications.

Invoking the pre-internet Great Depression as guidance for current events is irresponsible: errors in fiscal policy will be magnified by this kind of thinking. Monetary policy has always been dangerous. Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve chairman, tried playing with the business cycle to iron out bubbles, but it eventually got completely out of control. Bubbles and fads are part of cultural life. We need to do the opposite to what Mr Greenspan did: make the economy’s structure more robust to bubbles.

The only solution is to transform debt into equity across all sectors, in an organised and systematic way. Instead of sending hate mail to near-insolvent homeowners, banks should reach out to borrowers and offer lower interest payments in exchange for equity. Instead of debt becoming “binary” – in default or not – it could take smoothly-varying prices and banks would not need to wait for foreclosures to take action. Banks would turn from “hopers”, hiding risks from themselves, into agents more engaged in economic activity. Hidden risks become visible; hopers become doers.

It is sad to see that those who failed to spot the problem (or helped to cause it) are now in charge of the remedy. Just as the impending crisis was obvious to those of us who specialise in complexity and extreme deviations, the solution is plain to see. We need an aggressive, systematic debt-for-equity conversion. We cannot afford to wait a day.

. . . . . .Roubini, in Forbes, on stopping the cycle of spend-and-borrow:

In the last few months the world economy has been saved from a near-depression. That feat has been achieved by a range of extraordinary government stimulus measures: In the U.S. and in China, and to a lesser extent in Europe, Japan and other countries, governments have pumped liquidity, slashed policy rates, cut taxes, primed demand and ring-fenced and back-stopped the financial system. All of this has worked, but at a cost. Governments have been spending and borrowing like never before. The question now is: how do they stop?

This is not a simple problem. Restore normality too soon and the risk is that a weak recovery will double dip into a second and deeper recession. Restore it too late and inflation will already be ingrained.

. . . . .Krugman, in yesterday's New York Times on debt:

So new budget projections show a cumulative deficit of $9 trillion over the next decade. According to many commentators, that’s a terrifying number, requiring drastic action — in particular, of course, canceling efforts to boost the economy and calling off health care reform.

The truth is more complicated and less frightening. Right now deficits are actually helping the economy. In fact, deficits here and in other major economies saved the world from a much deeper slump. The longer-term outlook is worrying, but it’s not catastrophic.

The only real reason for concern is political. The United States can deal with its debts if politicians of both parties are, in the end, willing to show at least a bit of maturity. Need I say more?

So is there anything to worry about? Yes, but the dangers are political, not economic.

As I’ve said, those 10-year projections aren’t as bad as you may have heard. Over the really long term, however, the U.S. government will have big problems unless it makes some major changes. In particular, it has to rein in the growth of Medicare and Medicaid spending.

That shouldn’t be hard in the context of overall health care reform. After all, America spends far more on health care than other advanced countries, without better results, so we should be able to make our system more cost-efficient.

But that won’t happen, of course, if even the most modest attempts to improve the system are successfully demagogued — by conservatives! — as efforts to “pull the plug on grandma.”

So don’t fret about this year’s deficit; we actually need to run up federal debt right now and need to keep doing it until the economy is on a solid path to recovery. And the extra debt should be manageable. If we face a potential problem, it’s not because the economy can’t handle the extra debt. Instead, it’s the politics, stupid.

. . . . .Now, the next thing that will knock us down and take this economy under? Commercial real-estate. The country is reeling from the subprime crisis and the incredible amount of residential foreclosures, it would only logically follow that commercial would be next. From the Wall Street Journal:

Federal Reserve and Treasury officials are scrambling to prevent the commercial-real-estate sector from delivering a roundhouse punch to the U.S. economy just as it struggles to get up off the mat.

Their efforts could be undermined by a surge in foreclosures of commercial property carrying mortgages that were packaged and sold by Wall Street as bonds. Similar mortgage-backed securities created out of home loans played a big role in undoing that sector and triggering the global economic recession. Now the $700 billion of commercial-mortgage-backed securities outstanding are being tested for the first time by a massive downturn, and the outcome so far hasn't been pretty.

. . . . .Which brings us to a couple of things. I do have a tendency to rail on about the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, Goldman-Sachs & JP Morgan Chase. Texas Representative Ron Paul has asked for some time, and introduced a resolution to audit the Fed and make it transparent right now, just exactly how much money it has, and where any monies owed or due are coming from. Now, House Finance Committee Chair, Rep. Barney Frank has joined in, and promised passage of a Fed audit resolution by Fall. Ryan Grim reports here.

. . . .As well as the obvious reasons, one more credit market indicator that Summers, Geithner and Bernanke are taking the kid gloves approach to Wall Street. Bloomberg reports that Wall Street's leverage practices are rising at their fastest pace since 2007, the very same action that led to September of 2008's debacle:

Banks are increasing lending to buyers of high-yield company loans and mortgage bonds at what may be the fastest pace since the credit-market debacle began in 2007.

Credit Suisse Group AG and Scotia Capital, a unit of Canada’s third-largest bank, said they’re offering credit to investors who want to purchase loans. SunTrust Banks Inc., which left the business last year, is “reaching out to clients” to provide financing, said Michael McCoy, a spokesman for the Atlanta-based bank. JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc. are doing the same for loans and mortgage-backed securities, said people familiar with the situation.

The increase suggests money is being used for riskier home- loan, corporate and asset-backed securities because it excludes Treasuries, agency debt and mortgage bonds guaranteed by Washington-based Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac of McLean, Virginia or Ginnie Mae in Washington. Broader data on loans for investments isn’t available.

The increase over that 14-week stretch is the biggest since the period that ended April 2007, three months before two Bear Stearns Cos. hedge funds failed because of leveraged investments. The world’s largest financial institutions have taken $1.6 trillion in writedowns and losses since the start of 2007, helping to trigger the worst financial calamity since the 1930s, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

. . . .While here on Main Street, in your own home, things just keep getting a little worse, day by day. Reuters reports that millions of people have had their credit card limits cut, and millions more are facing it as the deadline for new consumer protection actions comes onto the horizon. It's the biggest industry shake-up in 20 years.

Millions of Americans have already seen their credit card limits shrink, and millions more face the same fate as lenders prepare for tougher U.S. consumer protection rules.

Since the financial crisis deepened a year ago, credit card companies have been closing millions of inactive accounts, cutting credit limits and raising interest rates to cushion themselves from record loan losses.

This is just the beginning of the biggest shake-up in the credit card industry in at least 20 years, analysts said.

. . . . .Now, what this entire financial mess means on another close to home front is that farmers are facing their lowest crop prices in years. Farm incomes are down 38% this year, and farmers are barely hanging on. The Wall Street Journal reports in:

"The Agriculture Department said it expects net farm income -- a widely followed measure of profitability -- to drop to $54 billion in 2009, down $33.2 billion from last year's estimated net farm income of $87.2 billion, which was nearly a record high. The drop in farm prices is likely to lead to a slower increase in food costs for American consumers, economists say."
"Gene Gourley, who raises 60,000 hogs every year on his farm in Webster City, Iowa, is losing as much as $30 on each hog he sells. He said Thursday that he is rethinking plans to buy a trailer for hauling feed to his livestock. 'With hogs losing so much money, you're basically burning up anything you could have saved," said Mr. Gourley. "You just don't have the equity to go buy new upgrades.'"

. . . . .Bloomberg reports in on the same:

"'I haven't talked to a dairy farmer who isn't losing money,' said Jim Goodman, an organic-milk producer who farms 500 acres about 70 miles northwest of Madison, Wisconsin.

Farms with at least 1,000 cows are losing $30,000 to $40,000 a month, Goodman said. Revenue from dairy products may fall 34 percent this year to $23 billion, while the value of meat animals will drop 11 percent, according to the USDA. "

. . . . .What this means for all of us here at home is kind of a "perfect storm". As jobs are lost, and incomes are reduced, there is less household money available for food, higher prices mean that we'll all be buying the cheaper food, and farmers will be making less money. As farmers make less money, more will go out of the farming business, leaving it to the agribusiness megacorporations, which can then act as a cartel, fixing prices. . . .can anyone say oil? Sound familiar? Because it's what's coming.

. . . . .Now, there is another challenge facing farmers which will affect all of us. That's arable land and available water.

. . . . . .Know the quickest way to make either a conservative or a liberal's eyes glaze over and have them begin repeating canned talking points from the experts and pundits on their respective sides? Say the words "global warming", "global cooling", or "climate change".

. . . . .Here's what I know, and where I come from
- I deal only in data and fact, measurables
- When those facts are presented, I'm not stupid enough to fool myself and think that I know either (a) a cause or (b) an answer. I know that we've been on this planet for only an eyeblink in the expanse of time, and can have no knowledge whatsoever of what planetary or "long" cycles may exist, or what they entail. In terms of answers, I don't think we have any yet, (and as a side note, cap-and-trade is simply lunacy. The idea of making carbon emissions a tradeable commodity makes about as much sense as developing heretofore unknown forms of credit derivatives and trading them for profit, oh yeah, that's right, we already tried that. Didn't work out so well.)

. . . .So anyhow, here are the facts, the data, as they come up, (and this is another section that we'll start to add in this walkabout, this column, about the Grand Unified Field Theory of Everything)
- The Department of Defense and the Department of Defense (two pretty reliable sources) are taking it seriously, and running scenarios and making plans:

The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.

Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change.

Recent war games and intelligence studies conclude that over the next 20 to 30 years, vulnerable regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia, will face the prospect of food shortages, water crises and catastrophic flooding driven by climate change that could demand an American humanitarian relief or military response.
But a growing number of policy makers say that the world’s rising temperatures, surging seas and melting glaciers are a direct threat to the national interest.

“The sense that climate change poses security and geopolitical challenges is central to the thinking of the State Department and the climate office,” said Peter Ogden, chief of staff to Todd Stern, the State Department’s top climate negotiator.

Although military and intelligence planners have been aware of the challenge posed by climate changes for some years, the Obama administration has made it a central policy focus.

A changing climate presents a range of challenges for the military. Many of its critical installations are vulnerable to rising seas and storm surges. In Florida, Homestead Air Force Base was essentially destroyed by Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and Hurricane Ivan badly damaged Naval Air Station Pensacola in 2004. Military planners are studying ways to protect the major naval stations in Norfolk, Va., and San Diego from climate-induced rising seas and severe storms.

Another vulnerable installation is Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian Ocean that serves as a logistics hub for American and British forces in the Middle East and sits a few feet above sea level.

. . . . . .Another report zeros in on the rural Midwestern states, home to many farmers:

rural Midwestern states will face the greatest consequences of climate change. The three that will face the steepest rise in temperature -- Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa -- are farm states whose soil will be significantly less productive as temperatures rise more than 10 degrees Fahrenheit there by 2100.

The rise by by 2050 -- only 41 years from now -- is also projected to be substantial. (Click here for an interactive map of the analysis.)

. . . . .NASA reports that this July 2009 is the second hottest on record globally, going back over a hundred years.

. . . . .And anyone at all who has lived through this Summer of '09 with it's record temps in the South and the West and it's lack of rain, contrasted with the wet, soaked summer that wasn't in the upper Midwest and Great Lakes has your own mirror to look into and know that something, somehow is changing. As of this morning, it's not an exaggeration to say that California, and Los Angeles are burning. 71 square miles in the Angeles National Forest, 2 firefighters dead, and entire cities like Pasadena and Glendale under mandatory evacuation orders.

. . . .And this one, another study that looks at what summers will be like in the next 40 years, based on mathematical models of current trends:

The findings are startling, as the study found that even a modest amount of global warming would have a large effect on weather extremes, including extreme heat events. In a sobering set of tables, the group projected that Chicago and New York could experience more extreme heat in August 40 years from now than Atlanta experiences today. The real threat of these heat waves isn’t higher power bills and sweaty armpits; it’s the cascading set of health impacts they would inflict upon the vulnerable populations of American cities.

Extreme weather events can wreak havoc upon unprepared populations, such as the Chicago heat wave of 1995 and the 2003 European heat wave, which killed an estimated 40,000 people. These heat waves have proven especially deadly to vulnerable populations, such as the elderly and persons with respiratory illness. Health officials have found themselves besieged in unanticipated extreme weather events, as infants and the elderly succumb to extreme heat or from air pollution exacerbated by high temperatures.

. . . .Now, getting back to arable, farmable land in the United States and what farmers face, and consequently we face, this study, done at Cornell University, presents some pretty grim facts:

• At the present growth rate of 1.1% per year, the U.S. population will double to more than half a billion people within the next 60 years. It is estimated that approximately one acre of land is lost due to urbanization and highway construction alone for every person added to the U.S. population.
• This means that only 0.6 acres of farmland would be available to grow food for each American in 2050, as opposed to the 1.8 acres per capita available today. At least 1.2 acres per person is required in order to maintain current American dietary standards. Food prices are projected to increase 3 to 5-fold within this period.
• If present population growth, domestic food consumption and topsoil loss trends continue, the U.S. will most likely cease to be a food exporter by approximately 2025 because food grown in the U.S. will be needed for domestic purposes.
• Since food exports earn $40 billion for the U.S. annually, the loss of this income source would result in an even greater increase in America's trade deficit.
• Considering that America is the world's largest food exporter, the future survival of millions of people around the world may also come into question if food exports from the U.S. were to cease.

. . . . Now, in reference to point 2, there are some solid geographical facts that we have to face. It took 10,000 years to put the topsoil in place in Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and other farming states. There is, at best, a good inch of it left. In the high-minded debates that everyone wants to engage in, topsoil, dirt is not a topic that anyone wants to talk about, but got news kiddies, dirt is where it all starts, and where it will all end.

. . . .Water is the other thing that no one ever wants to talk about in every high-minded conceptual debate about what's happening, but there's one more fact about water that everyone needs to bear in mind. Only 1% of the world's water supply is drinking water.

. . . .The rule of 3's. 3 minutes without oxygen, 3 days without water, 3 weeks without food. It's lights out.

. . . .Water and dirt, where it all began, and where'll it'll end, because we're not keeping our eye on the ball.

. . . .Finally today, Barbara V. sent this along, entirely appropriate, on the day Ted Kennedy was buried. It's a message Grandpa Fools Crow, that yes, is entirely appropriate for Ted, but also Barbara, for you, and for the vast number of friends that I have across this Nation; good people, all of you, who have a voice, and aren't afraid to use it, and to stand up:

There are certain prayers or actions we can take that will call the Powers. The Powers can only work through the people. The Powers are always waiting to express themselves through people that are ready. Every person born is born with a purpose. They have a song to sing. They have a mission to accomplish. Every true purpose will always be about serving the Creator and helping others. When we let the Powers know that we are ready to serve the people, the Powers get excited because they can now do things to help the people and make things better for them. The decision is powerful because it turns an idea into action.
Great Spirit, the greatest joy or feeling that I have ever experienced is when you are using me to help the people, the feeling of giving, the feeling of being your channel. Today, let me have that feeling of giving. Use me as You will.

. . . .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.

Friday wrap-up

Friday August 27, 2009

. . . .. . . .There are seven sins in the world: Wealth without work, Pleasure without conscience, Knowledge without character, Commerce without morality, Science without humanity, Worship without sacrifice and Politics without principle.
. . . .Mahatma Ghandi (1869 - 1948) courtesy of my friend Dave.

. . . .So, here we are at the end of another week, and I'm still quite enjoying the walkabout, and probably won't come back for some time.

. . . The playlist, well, it's Full-Throttle Friday, enjoy.

. . . .Long, long time ago, it seems now, but really, just back in July, we started the Grand Unified Field Theory of Every Damn Thing, and believe it or not, we've been still walking down that road.

. . . .You see, I don't operate in 30-second sound bites, I don't operate in a 24-hour pundit driven "infotainment" cycle, like Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN.

. . . .I'm not dependent on viewers, and Nielsen numbers, and pulling in ratings, to keep viewers and charge advertisers more, to up a contract.

. . . .I'm not dependent on Arbitron numbers to pull in listeners.

. . . .So, I don't have to depend on outrageous lies and fiction like Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, O'Reilly, Olbermann, Maddow, Dobbs, or Scarborough. I don't have to depend on labeling and painting one side or another with smears, and names that valiant men who wore the uniform of this country died to defeat.

. . . .What I do get to do is investigate, research, and if I lay something out and say it's a fact, there's data and truth behind it. What I get to do is have an opinion, and if it's an opinion, I'll tell you it is.

. . . .Now, as part of everything, for the last 3 weeks, every day, I've been doing a few things; unmasking and exposing the outrageous lies and smears that the infotainment media like Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity and O'Reilly and unelected officials like Palin and Gingrich have been spreading. I've been exposing the puppet masters, the insurance industry CEO's and their lobbyists, who have been pulling their strings, and orchestrating the carefully planned and organized "spontaneous grass-roots" protests.

. . . .I've done some research and found at least 4 different health care reform alternatives, all of which are very practical, are tax-neutral, and don't add to the rising deficit. All of them are available in columns from the last 2 weeks, especially, and still posted in the string of the last 10 posts, that are all below this.

. . . . .Now, with (a) the excellent article put forth in this month's Atlantic, the cover story written by David Goldhill, and recapped here with a solid, practical health care system reform plan (put together by a businessman, not a politician, a lawyer, a lobbyist or a doctor, so it makes sense and it works) last week (b) the straightforward, practical, do-able, revenue and tax neutral 4 point proposal put forward by practicing physician and clinical professor at U.S.C. Hospital Dr. Paul Toffel (recapped here last week) and, finally (c) the excellent print article in the latest Rolling Stone by investigative journalist Matt Taibbi on how Washington has blown health care reform, period, overall.

. . . .Probably about an hour's worth of reading overall, and the way forward, the go forward plan is laid right out, in solid, practical steps. Are we interested? No, absolutely not, most people aren't interested at all in doing any solid, forward thinking work.
. . . .It's about exposing what's happening and going on around here. My friend, Matthew P., over Peoria way has done the same thing in his blog, Armchair Atlas.

. . . .We both have other jobs, ones that we feed our families with, yet have found the time to do the research, and in short time, found practical, workable plans, the centerpieces of all of them being cutting down on administrative costs and errors, tort reform, and in my case, regulating health insurance company fees back to their pre-1984 levels.

. . . .In all cases, it points back to the health insurers, who lay at the bottom of everything, and are absolutely fear-ridden at the thought of losing some of their obscene revenues.

. . . .If, you're a newer reader, before you dismiss anything, I'm going to ask you to scroll down through here, read the last 10 days worth of columns, go to the left hand side to the archives and read the last month's worth, fact and data, real input and fact are all presented, no hyperbole, none of the stupid name-calling.

. . . . .Now, Barbara V., down in North Carolina, sends this one along today from the New England Journal of Medicine:

It has been clear for some time that the primary hurdle to enacting health care reform is figuring out how to pay for it. Virtually all Republicans and some Democrats have been unwilling to sign on to increasing taxes on high-income Americans as a partial answer. The idea of taxing the most generous health insurance benefits has met with resistance as well. The use of electronic health records and an emphasis on prevention and early treatment of illnesses have been ballyhooed as ways to generate savings to help pay for reform, but there is no solid evidence that these measures will reduce spending anytime soon, although they might improve care. Unfortunately, legislators are ignoring the option of funding reform by harvesting available savings from within the health care system itself. I believe Congress must go back to the drawing board. Given the state of the economy and the continuing rapid growth in health care expenditures, lawmakers need the political will to devise a plan that will control accelerating costs and be budget-neutral — and to disregard the expected backlash from stakeholders (organized medicine, the insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry, and the trial lawyers) and an uninformed public.

Time and again over the past century, there have been attempts to make the health care system more effective and efficient, the only real success being the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. Since then, various stakeholders have managed to block any efforts at restructuring that have threatened their profits. When the U.S. economy faced its most severe test during the Great Depression, Social Security was enacted over vigorous opposition. The current crisis presents a similar opportunity to provide high-quality health care coverage to all Americans while bringing spending back in line. Comprehensive reform might also act as a government stimulus package, freeing up cash that consumers would otherwise be spending on medical care and thereby aiding the recovery.

Some drivers of health care costs (such as demographic changes) cannot be controlled; others (such as unhealthy lifestyles) are difficult to attack. However, great savings could be achievable in two areas: administrative costs and unnecessary care. In the current health care system, administrative costs are generally estimated to account for 15 to 25% of total expenditures¹; if we settled on an estimate of 20%, that would amount to $500 billion annually. The complexity of the present system, with multiple sources of coverage, is the main cause of such high administrative costs. Every insurance plan has different benefits with different copayments and deductibles, and many require preapprovals for various tests. The multiple interactions this complexity necessitates between physicians’ offices and insurance companies — to get authorization and to haggle over payment — translate into personnel requirements (and associated costs) on both sides. Insurance companies also conduct extensive vetting of applicants for individual policies to determine whether any preexisting conditions disqualify them from coverage and what their premiums should be — an activity that, along with spending on marketing, further raises companies’ overhead.

Unnecessary care is believed to be responsible for as much as 30% of health care spending,² or up to $830 billion this year alone. This problem results largely from the perverse incentives built into the health care system, in which there is a clear conflict of interest.

. . . .I want you to go back up and re-read the bold font portion of that article. I put that emphasis there for a reason. Here's the plain fact; doctor after doctor has said the same thing, that the health care system is broken, irretrievably broken. The current private health insurance system kills, murders, approximately 20,000 people per year. Read that figure again, I'm not talking about uninsured people, nor underinsured people. I'm talking about people currently on employer health insurance plans, private plans, approximately 20,000 who will be murdered by an insurance underwriter somewhere when they are dropped when they get sick, or are kicked under a pre-existing conditions clause.

. . . The author makes the same point as every other article I've pulled, legislators are ignoring available savings from making the current system more efficient. Sometimes, I feel like I'm the only person asking why that is, why are they ignoring what's in front of their face?

. . . . . .. . . . .The thing we have to talk about is the meta-theme, the paradigm. Here's where that's at. I put forward this proposition. That it wouldn't matter who the President was, it wouldn't matter if John McCain had won the election, we'd still be in the same position economically. I doubt that health care reform would be touched, but that would be due to the real bad guys in this equation; the pharmaceutical companies, the insurers and the health care providers who have pumped over $1.6 billion in lobbying money into the 535 Senators and Representatives, and the 3,300 lobbyists now registered as health care lobbyists, that's a ratio of 6:1. You can scroll down and catch last week's columns to see the fact and evidence behind both of those statements.

. . . .This column reported earlier this month, on a story in U.S. News and World Report that was picked up by Time magazine, that reported on UnitedHealthcare's basic ownership of the Blue Dog Democrats, with the obscene amount of lobbying money and campaign contributions being thrown at them.

. . . .Ben Smith, in Politico, reports that California's largest health insurer today blasted out an e-mail to it's plan members, asking them to help stop health care reform. Wonder why that would be.

. . . .Now, there are some other grim facts facing everyone.

. . . Aon Consulting reports that employer-provided health insurance costs will rise 10.5% in the next 12 months, which people will feel as it comes out of their paychecks or in reduced coverage.

. . . .A study by the Commonwealth Fund reports that health care costs will rise by 94% by the year 2020, from an average of $12,298 to $23, 894. That's coming directly out of your paycheck by the way, you do realize that don't you? Employers are not carrying that burden free gratis, or out of goodwill. If you want health insurance, they calculate that, and that's money you don't get in your gross pay, that would otherwise be profit to them and could be negotiated by you in the form of a pay raise, but, since you don't see it, it doesn't count, and it can't be real, the American way of thinking.

. . . .So what do we get for that? A large number of yelling, people who say "No health care reform". An entire party of Representatives and Senators who say "No health care reform". Notice that the phrase isn't "No public option" or "No single payer", the phrase used, even by some of you, is "No health care reform".

. . . .To that, I have only one dumbfounded response, as those people who would say that fly directly in the face of logic, fly directly in the face of fact. . . . . .you're a moron.

. . . .I am in not in favor of a public option, or single payer either one. The 4 plans that I researched don't make mention of that, and actually reduce costs and save money. Those aren't on the table, nor are they being discussed. . . . .In the end, it's all about the money-grubbing 535, the Representatives and Senators, who are wholly owned subsidiaries of lobbyists, special interests, and large campaign donors; in the case of health care reform, health insurers, who stand to lose massive amounts of money if true reform of administrative costs, of medical errors, of wrong treatment and mistreatment, along with tort reform and medical malpractice reform are instituted; if health care insurers administrative fees are capped back at what they were pre-Bush1, 4%.

. . . . .What a large number of people ARE in favor of, by blocking health care reform, is bankrupting themselves and bankrupting the economic system yet another way obviously.

. . . .What a large number of people ARE in favor of is finding themselves a couple of years from now in exactly the same position as a number of other people, without health insurance just as a catastrophic illness is ready to kill them, as they are kicked off the rolls for a pre-existing condition.

. . . .What a large number of people obviously ARE in favor of is stopping thinking for themselves, not doing research and analysis, not finding fact. After all, Rush, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and Sean Hannity can do it for you. They ARE smarter than you aren't they? That is why you listen to them isn't it?

. . . .What a large number of people ARE in favor of is completely losing all sense of self-sufficiency, self-sustenance and independence. You see, if people were to really stop, examine the facts and look at their own accountability and responsibility in everything that's happened, they'd have to stop yelling, stop labeling, and do what the founders of this country really intended, engage in self-reflection and ask themselves what they can do to help build for the future. That's too much work, these days though. My friend Matthew, out in Peoria, posited today to me in a Facebook comment that most people would rather be whiners and asking what would be so bad about people actually being in charge of their own health care. He asks a pertinent question, that of us becoming a nation of people who expect others to take care of us.

. . . .I would agree with him, with not just the completely irrational responses to the health care reform debate but the personalization of the current sitting President as somehow responsible for "everything".

. . . Let's go over it again. The President of the United States doesn't have a vote, he cannot spend a dime of your money, nor collect any money from you, he can't appoint judges or Cabinet secretaries. If he vetos a bill and refuses to sign it, the veto can be overridden.

. . . .It's the 535 lifetime appointees down the street, the people that you all continue to put back in their seats, election after election who: craft, write and shape legislation and vote it in; vote on budgets, tax cuts and tax raises; vote on judges; and either filibuster a bill to death, or vote it in and can override a Presidential veto.

. . . .A President - a political figure with essentially no power within the Constitutional structure of the United States Government and a limited lifetime of 4 to 8 years at the outside.

. . . .A Senator or Representative - a lifetime political figure, who if they ever leave office, immediately takes a job with a lobbying firm down the street on K street and, truly are the 535 people who make the lasting, permanent impact on yours, on my, on everyone's lives. A person who is wholly owned by lobbyists, special interests and campaign contributors, and who votes as they direct.

. . . . . .I posit this to you. That the bulk of the American people have become woefully uninformed, ignorant and stupid as to basic civics and government. It has become fashionable and easy to blame one man for the mess, blame one man for the problems, and wait for one man to fix it all, or, wait for one man to fail and say "see, I told you".

. . . .And I say this to you, if you are one of those people who are blaming the current President, who has been in office a grand total of 6 months for (a) the mess that health care is (b) the financial crisis that actually finally blew out it's tires last September 15th, a full 60 days before the election, under the previous Adminstration's leadership. WAKE THE HELL UP YOU IDIOTS!!! The roots of both extend back over 30 years, several Administrations and Congresses and both parties.

. . . Excuse me, I just had to get that out of my system. Because if you are blaming him for 30 years worth of mismanagement by previous Congresses and Administrations, that somehow you think everything was rosy and great before he got there, I have a question. Can I have some of what you're taking, because it must be some really great shit.

. . . .He has his part, now. He wanted the office, and he's got it. So, it is his responsibility to get the TARP funds back under control, which are very, very separate from stimulus package funds. I find most people have a very difficult time making a distinction between the two, and haven't bothered to do basic research. Stimulus package funds are just now hitting the pipeline, so my judgement on them is reserved. I've written continually about how badly I think Summers, Geithner and Bernanke are performing, and they work for him. I don't see a recovery in the credit market and banking sector, and they work for him, it's his problem now. Health Care is not unique or new to him, every President, has had a crack a health care reform, all the way back to Harry S. Truman, and if you want to scream Socialism, you should have been screaming it all the way back when Medicare and Medicaid were enacted, and I better not catch you cashing even one Social Security check, lest your integrity on the position come into question. What I am waiting to see on Health Care Reform actually has nothing at all to do with single payer or public option. I want to see if and how the pharmaceutical manufacturers and their lobbyists act, and I want to see if the current system of private health insurance, it's practices and it's administrative actions are going to come under scrutiny.

. . . .You want to know the problem with Geithner, Summers, Bernanke et al? They're not watching the store, or if they are, it's with a blind eye, because Wall Street is back to it's old tricks again, right in front of everyone's eyes. Jason Linkins:

Hey kids, remember how once upon a time, a bunch of smarty-pants Wall Street types decided that they could reap a crap-ton of magical treasure by repackaging good mortgages and bad mortgages and snips and snails and puppy-dog tails into massive collateralized debt obligations, presented them butter-side-up to various ratings agencies, earned AAA-ratings, then launched a series of high-stakes bets on their financial performance, leveraged out the ass, with AIG covering everybody's bets? It was a brilliant idea that only hit a teensy little hitch when the housing market didn't keep expanding, forever, like the universe, and the whole infernal house of cards collapsed? GOOD TIMES.

Anyway, those good times are set to roll again! Enter the Re-Remic, which stands for "resecuritization of real estate mortgage investment conduits." Now, WTF does that mean, exactly? Sam Jones at FT/Alphaville calls it "mutton dressed as lamb." "Or," he says, "in the patois of the international back-office banking shameless: recooked CDOs."

A re-remic is - to all intents and purposes - a CDO. A collateralised debt obligation. It's a CDO with a few structural quirks like low granularity or sequential capital repayment that are supposed to convince investors it's a different thing entirely.

A re-remic though...targets a specific bond, and then rejuices it. Take, for example, a subprime CDO triple-A tranche. Said tranche may rather have suffered of late. So why not re-remic it? Take the suffering triple A bond (perhaps its now AA) and then put it through the CDO tranching machine again: carve out, from that single bond, another set of tranches, one of which, according to subordination and other tricks, will be triple-A once more.

Does any of this seem familiar? Unless you are, say, the main character from the movie Memento, you might, like the Awl's Alex Balk, recognize Re-Remics as something that looks "a lot like the collateralized debt obligations that helped bring about the recession in the first place." That's because that's exactly what they are! But, as Balk gently snarks, "this time it will be different, because the only thing that could go wrong is that the housing market loses further value, and we all know that can't happen, because of, I dunno, magic!"

. . . .Now for those of you who are actually keeping track of the financial crisis that this country, and the world still finds itself in, and who are aware that the it started long before last January 20th, and know of my distaste for Goldman-Sachs and especially JP Morgan Chase and David Rockefeller, the following from the Washington Post should tweak you right up. Remember last September 15th, 2008 when we had to save the 5 biggest banks, because they were too big to fail and would have brought the entire world economy down with them. Well. . . .now 3 of the 5 have grown even bigger and now between just 3 of them hold a third of all deposits in the Unites States, half of all mortgages, and 2/3 of all credit cards. Now, when these three go, the entire world is going up in flames, and I won't be happy that I predicted it. David Cho:

When the credit crisis struck last year, federal regulators pumped tens of billions of dollars into the nation's leading financial institutions because the banks were so big that officials feared their failure would ruin the entire financial system.

Today, the biggest of those banks are even bigger.

The crisis may be turning out very well for many of the behemoths that dominate U.S. finance. A series of federally arranged mergers safely landed troubled banks on the decks of more stable firms. And it allowed the survivors to emerge from the turmoil with strengthened market positions, giving them even greater control over consumer lending and more potential to profit.

J.P. Morgan Chase, an amalgam of some of Wall Street's most storied institutions, now holds more than $1 of every $10 on deposit in this country. So does Bank of America, scarred by its acquisition of Merrill Lynch and partly government-owned as a result of the crisis, as does Wells Fargo, the biggest West Coast bank. Those three banks, plus government-rescued and -owned Citigroup, now issue one of every two mortgages and about two of every three credit cards, federal data show.

A year after the near-collapse of the financial system last September, the federal response has redefined how Americans get mortgages, student loans and other kinds of credit and has made a national spectacle of executive pay. But no consequence of the crisis alarms top regulators more than having banks that were already too big to fail grow even larger

. . . .You want to know where the problem comes from? Where the roots of it lie? I'm going to re-run last Friday's piece by Larry Flynt, which made the most sense of any damn thing I've read in a year now. Now, regular readers know that I rail on and on that there is no difference between the two parties, that America is owned bought and sold. I write continually about the influence of the Trilateral Commission, David Rockefeller, and Goldman Sachs. The person who has written the best piece on it, the person who's made the most sense. . . . .Larry Flynt:

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.

. . . .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.

Mid-week worn out, not over the hump yet blues

Wednesday August 26, 2009

. . . .. . . .There are seven sins in the world: Wealth without work, Pleasure without conscience, Knowledge without character, Commerce without morality, Science without humanity, Worship without sacrifice and Politics without principle.
. . . .Mahatma Ghandi (1869 - 1948) courtesy of my friend Dave.


. . . . .Caleb is off to the North Country again, for another year at school. Good luck son, and thanks for being the person you are.

. . . .Playlist has gotten stale, so it's all new shtuff. With a new voice-over intro. Enjoy, I've taken a very definite turn in a different direction, and as always, there's a "DaVinci" code in the playlist, a message. You'll figure it out, but you have to listen all the way through.

. . . . .First and foremost, regardless of how you felt about his past, or his politics, an era ended today. Ted Kennedy started his long walk home to be with his brothers, JFK and Bobby, his sister Eunice, and his nephew John Jr.

. . . . .I'm more acutely aware than most of you of Ted's past, of Chappaquidick, of his drinking and his messy divorce. I'm Irish, and was baptized Catholic. Enough said. Any transgressions that Ted committed in this life are now a matter for him and his Creator, and I'm not going to put myself in the position of the ultimate Judge. I've made enough mistakes of my own in my life, and don't need to add standing in for the Creator to the list.

. . . .What I will say is this. The Senate, and American politics, have lost a true legislator, an orator of the same caliber as Daniel Webster, and a legislator and deal-maker that was mentored by Tip O'Neill. When a piece of legislation was stalled, it was always Ted that was called on by either party. Many of you of the conservative bent have no idea how much you have to thank him for, when a piece of legislation was stalled, it was Ted that was called on to get a compromise measure through the Dems. When it was a piece of Legislation that was Dem sponsored, it was Ted who was called on to reach across the aisle and find the compromises and make the negotiations necessary to get it to pass.

. . . .Why is it significant to me? I was born in 1957, the tail end of the baby boom. I remember JFK and Bobby getting shot. I know that Ted Kennedy was the last in a long line of Democrats, real Democrats, that went back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and ran through Harry S. Truman. Any regular reader here knows that I state constantly, and provide background and fact for, the assertion that I constantly make that everything changed, the course of human history, the course of this country's future all changed 30 years ago. At that Democratic convention, Jimmy Carter, with David Rockefeller and Zbignew Brzezinski pulling the strings got the nomination and our history was altered forever, as Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission took over the White House, from point on, forever; as Rockefeller, JP Morgan Chase and Goldman-Sachs took over the Fed, the Treasury, Securities and Exchange, Trade Ambassador, and the control of commodities forever. With JFK and Bobby dead, and Ted stained forever by his own actions, this country was lost at that moment forever to special interests far more powerful and wealthy than any of us can even imagine.

. . . .In thinking about that line of politicians that is now severed, an era that is now over, it becomes apparent to me that I don't fit anymore, that there is a crystalline reason behind my criticism of the American political scene of the last 3 decades. The caricatures and cartoonish figures that pass for Democrats and Republicans at this point are an insult to any thinking person's intelligence. I have a friend, Dave, who hopes that the Democratic party can move on. I hope not, not as they are now. In truth, they are as big a joke and fringe group as Republicans, I think it is time for 2 new parties; parties that truly represent America, because, we, the American people are no longer represented.

. . . .Large, sweaty, gassy, drug-addled Limbaugh was congratulating himself on radio today for predicting Ted Kennedy's death. My personal hope? That Rush chokes on his own vomit, asphyxiates and dies while trying to swallow a sandwich whole because he's too Oxycontined out to realize what he's doing. . . .and soon.

"This nation was founded by men of many nations and backgrounds. It was founded on the principle that all men are created equal, and that the rights of every man are threatened when the rights of one man are diminished. . . . .The fires of discord are burning in every city, North and South, where legal remedies are not at hand. Redress is sought in the streets, in parades, and in protests which create tensions and threaten violence and threaten lives.

We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and as a people. It cannot be met by repressive police action. It cannot be left to increased demonstrations in the streets. It cannot be quieted by token moves or talk. It is a time to act in the Congress, in your state and local legislative bodies and, above all, in all of our daily lives.

It is not enough to pin the blame on others, to say this is a problem of one section of the country or another, or deplore the facts that we face. A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all.

- John F. Kennedy, June 11, 1963

. . . .So, I managed to piss a few of you off here a couple of weeks ago with my constant hammering on the rent-a-mob protestors at Town Halls, at the hammering away I've done day after day around the incredible amount of money being poured into Washington by the health care lobbyists, and the number of health-care lobbyists registered per Representative or Senator. With the chart that I put up that gave an exact listing of which Senator and Representative have been given how much and by how. I've said over and over that the entire movement, the entire piece of blocking health care reform was not a grass-roots movement and that people were being duped, that in the end, the insurers were the ones behind it.

. . . .Mike Papantonio, asking a simple question. Who's Funding Health Care Opposition?:

The insurance industry is so worried that they now have phonied up protest groups showing up at town hall meetings to disguise the fact that 70 percent of Americans want a choice between private insurance and a government run plan.

One of the phony consumer groups that has created chaos at town hall meetings is a group called Conservatives for Patients Rights (CPR). The founder of CPR, Rick Scott, was CEO of Columbia HCA during a time when Columbia was punished with a 1.7 billion dollar U.S. Government penalty for fraud. The caliber of fraud that Mr. Scott allowed to occur at his company not only included ripping off patients, doctors, and the government, it also included kickbacks to health care providers.

Here is what Mr. Scott's "protesters" probably don't know: In the last 10 years, the health care insurance industry has increased their profits by 450 percent. In fact, if Rick Scott's plan succeeds in ending reform, profits will get even bigger for the cash fat insurance industry.

Projections show that by 2016, premiums for employer health care plans will increase by 85 percent. The net effect of that is that employers will simply drop employee health care plans. If employers do maintain their plans, employees with histories of physical illness will be the first to lose their jobs because their bad health will increase premium costs for their employer. Employers in a veiled kind of way will be asking new questions when they interview job applicants. The new questions will center around past health problems, smoking history, weight management history, and even family health history. The new criteria for hiring will not only be skill and qualifications. The health history of employees and their family will be equally as important. If Rick Scott's hired protesters really want something to shout about, they should be screaming at the top of their voice that America's insurance companies should not have a special exemption that excludes that industry from anti-trust laws. It is the only industry besides professional baseball that has a special exemption excluding them from price fixing oversight by government. With that special exemption, they use their billions in profits to pay fraudulent activists groups to create the illusion that the opinion of 70 percent of Americans is not really relevant.

. . . .The Blue Dog Democrats? The ones who are supposedly looking out for America's fiscal future, who are so egalitarian and fiscally conservative and responsible. Bull! They're owned, heart and soul, by health care industry lobbying money. From McClatchy:

As the Obama administration and Democrats wrangled over the timing, shape and cost of health care overhaul efforts during the first half of the year, more than half the $1.1 million in campaign contributions the Democratic Party's Blue Dog Coalition received came from the pharmaceutical, health care and health insurance industries, according to watchdog organizations.

The amount outstrips contributions to other congressional political action committees during the same period, according to an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit watchdog organization. The Blue Dogs, a group of fiscally conservative lawmakers, successfully delayed the vote on health care overhaul proposals until the fall.

"The business community realizes that (the Blue Dogs) are the linchpin and will become much more so as time goes on," former Mississippi congressman turned lobbyist Mike Parker told the organization's researchers.

On average, Blue Dog Democrats net $62,650 more from the health sector than other Democrats, while hospitals and nursing homes also favor them, giving, respectively, $5,680 and $5,550 more, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit organization that tracks the influence of money in politics.

, , , , , I want to thank the folks over at the Campaign for America's future for this chart, that they've put together, which in dramatic visual fashion, demonstrates one thing. . . . .
. . . . .What the chart demonstrates, and I highly recommend going to the linked website above to look at the original, and get the largest version. What it shows is that there truly is one, and only one group behind all of it, AHIP. Don't know what AHIP means? That's the initials for the trade association and lobbying group called America's Health Insurance Providers. I've been saying it all along, those bastards have the game rigged, kill about 20,000 people a year through pre-existing conditions clauses, are responsible for half the bankruptcies in America, are rich and there isn't a shred of truth behind any of the lies and the bullshit, that it's merely about them continuing to screw the American people and run their insurance racket without regulation, without competition and more importantly, continuing to not do a damn thing for any of you.


. . . .So, let me get this straight. There's a very powerful group of people, with a political/religious agenda, who are backed by a central organization, who kill people by biological selection, through a set of criteria that the victims aren't aware of, and who are accumulating power and wealth, and are acting as shadow figures organizing a segment of the populace against the existing political system. . . . .and they're calling the other guy a Nazi?????

. . . .I'm just saying, you know? Help me out here.

. . . And, by the way, being of a questioning nature, I really, really wanted to know just where the damn Nazi comparison started that are being constantly reinforced and put out there by Limbaugh, Beck and the like. So. . . .I did some research, did some reading and tracking down, and all I can say is. . . .what a bunch of tools! If you're one of those people who is fomenting and fostering it, all I can say is. . .you're a tool, too. See, as it all comes down, the comparison with Hitler actually started with none other than Lyndon Larouche. Name sound familiar to some of you? It should, he's the extremist wingnut movement leader who has been all over the map and spectrum and is now feeding that frenzy, and all for his own ends. From Max Blumenthal, over at the Daily Beast:

Emanuel then stood and excused himself from the hearing room, apparently unaware that Chaitkin had launched the opening volley of an orchestrated propaganda campaign designed to link him and the White House’s health-care reform proposals to the T-4 mass euthanasia program of Adolph Hitler.

Emanuel and his fellow panelists may have been similarly uninformed about Chaitkin’s senior role in the political empire of Lyndon LaRouche, the eccentric movement leader whose activities have confounded and outraged observers from across the spectrum. LaRouche has been accused of everything from Holocaust denial to gay bashing (his outfit introduced a ballot measure in California to quarantine AIDS patients). In 1988, LaRouche was convicted and jailed for mail fraud.

Leonard Zeskind, who studies extremist and cult groups, has called LaRouche a “crank fascist,” while Dennis King, the author of Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, went further, describing the former Marxist ideologue as a “pure Nazi” and totalitarian who tells his followers that they are members of an elite race called the “Golden Souls” who will one day rule the ignorant masses. In his investigative report on the mysterious death of LaRouche’s longtime printer, journalist Avi Klein wrote, “More than anything else… what [LaRouche’s movement] resembles is a vast and bizarre vanity press.”

While Chaitkin’s confrontation with Emanuel remained obscure and generally unreported, LaRouche’s myriad journals and Web sites promoted the incident along with reams of related material likening Obama to Hitler. At the same time, LaRouche’s ersatz political action committee, LPAC, distributed posters to movement followers portraying Obama with a Hitler moustache. According to Jeff Steinberg, a longtime LaRouche cadre who edits the movement’s political journal, Executive Intelligence Review, top LaRouche advisors decided during the congressional debate over the stimulus package to liken Obama’s policies to those of Hitler.

“We went after this thing five months ago and put everything out publicly through our magazine and web sites and decided to make a very harsh and shocking point,” Steinberg told me. “It is our view that there's a lot of people who for pragmatic reasons could be inclined to accept policies that could take us down that slippery slope to Hitler’s policies in 1939.”

. . . .In other words, Palin, Gingrich, Graessley, Limbaugh, Beck. . . .all tools themselves who are tools of Lyndon frickin' LaRouche. It just don't get no better at all.

. . . .Speaking of Beck, Glenn shouldn't worry, Sarah is riding to the rescue, despite the fact that 38 advertisers have now pulled their ads from his show. She used her Facebook page to urge people to watch Glenn. Now, there's a true brain spasm for you. If Sarah hasn't checked it out lately, that's probably not the forum, nor the place to do that. Once again Sarah, you get to see a birth certificate when you can produce a high school diploma for all of us.

. . . .I'm going to go back to the one thing that really counts in all of this, the economy, which is in much more dismal shape than anyone wants to talk about.

. . . .I travel quite often in my profession, as such I meet lots of interesting folks. On my last flight, the person sitting next to me in a seat was a Treasury agent, who as we talked, was more than willing to talk "out of class". I've written here over and over about the sorry state of this nation's economy, and expressed concern that China would wind up calling in their debt, which would bankrupt us. Got news, they have. It started 8 months ago, when they called their markers in, and were talked into not doing it all at once and bankrupting the rest of the world. They're doing it in small chunks and incrementally right now, but they are definitely calling it in. The U.S. Treasury is broke, plain and simple. That would put a reason behind the Treasury's not calling in the TARP funds that should have been paid back, but are instead going back in Goldman's, AIG's and the Big 5's coffers and being paid out in bonuses. Those banks, as reprehensible as they are, right now are the only firewall we have from the United States becoming a Chinese province.

. . . .Which would also explain a couple of other things

.. . . .Like 7 of the top 10 banks that received bailout finds pumping $6 million dollars in lobbying money back at Congress. From Public Citizen's Press Room:

Lobbyists, political action committees (PACs) and trade associations tied to the banks receiving the most federal bailout money have scheduled 70 fundraisers for members of Congress since Election Day and have made $6 million in federal campaign contributions, according to a Public Citizen report released today.

The report, "Bank-Rolling Congress," contains Public Citizen’s analysis of fundraiser invitations collected by the Sunlight Foundation and campaign contribution disclosures that lobbyists and lobbyist-affiliated PACs are required to make to the Senate. The study was based on an examination of the 10 banks receiving the most Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) money and five trade associations opposing a government agency to oversee consumer financial products. (The Sunlight data shows no fundraisers hosted by three of the 10 banks and one of the trade associations. One firm, SunTrust Bank, did not report any lobbying.)

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce PAC and Chamber lobbyists who have worked on financial services issues were behind 35 of the scheduled fundraisers since November, more than any other group. In June, the Chamber announced a projected $100 million campaign to beat back federal regulation.

Lobbyists representing the American Bankers Association and that association’s PAC contributed nearly $2 million in the period studied. Lobbyists and a PAC tied to Citigroup, which is one-third owned by taxpayers, gave more than $1 million. Lobbyists and PACs associated with Goldman Sachs, Mortgage Bankers Association of America, J.P. Morgan Chase and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce each gave more than $500,000.

. . . . .From the Center for Public Integrity, this report that the prime culprits behind the subprime mortgage blowout are at it again. They're using money that was supposed to go to homeowners to help modify loans, shore up their own assets and make themselves richer, while the TARP watchdogs and Congress turn a blind eye:

Firms that fed off the subprime lending frenzy that devastated the banking system are lining up to collect more than $21 billion in taxpayer funds meant to help bail out borrowers now in trouble on their loans.

The funds come from the federal government’s Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), begun in February by the Obama administration to coax lenders into modifying mortgages that might otherwise result in foreclosure. According to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of public records, of the 25 top participants in the program, at least 21 were heavily involved in the subprime lending industry. Most specialized in servicing subprime loans, but several both serviced and originated the loans.

Among those on the list:

• At least two firms that earlier settled charges of illegal collection practices brought by federal regulators; another was placed under federal supervision before voluntarily surrendering its bank charter;

• A subprime subsidiary of top-bailout recipient American International Group Inc. (AIG);

• Two former subsidiaries of Merrill Lynch & Co. and one former subsidiary of Lehman Brothers, investment banks that helped underwrite the subprime boom, and;

• A subsidiary of the now-sold, former No. 1 subprime lender in the nation, Countrywide Financial Corp.

. . . .And what do we have to show for all of it? The map below, which shows how bad unemployment is across the United States as of the end of July. That's what we left with, what we have to show for all of it.


. . . .And that's how bad it really 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.

Tuesday - Ragged and Worn

Tuesday August 25, 2009

. . . . .Follow your instincts, and you'll find yourself walking away from the bonds of the community, the circle of friends, the civilization and society, the family and friends that you've surrounded yourself with.

. . . .At that point, you'll be faced with a choice. Go back inside the box to what's familiar, and where you can always "win", or strike off into the unknown and find out something new about yourself. You'll stumble and fall, often. Many times, what you have to say will be unpopular, or will strike a nerve or chord with people. You'll find yourself stretching your wings, and no longer do you have to live up to what or who people think you are, you can be who you are, and discover that along the way, with all it's pain, and it's heartache, for all the time you'll walk that road alone, in the end, it's worth it.

. . . .It won't turn out the way you planned it, it never does, not for anyone who is successful. It's being able to adapt to what life throws at you, being able to live it on it's terms, and realizing that life and the universe are far larger and bigger than any of us, and our job, well, our job is to realize that and work with it, not against it. You'll work longer hours than you can imagine, nights, weekends, holidays, be away from the people you love, and you'll question every minute of it, but as long as you can provide them something better, that's a legacy that anyone would be proud to leave as their footprint. In the end, even though a full, rich life is one filled with people and friends, it's that long bloodline that reaches back into history, that bloodline that each generation tried to leave something better that counts. It's not our job to re-create the past, or do the same; it's our job, always, to do better. As long as we strive for that, then our parents and grand-parents did their job. It's always our job to stand aside and let the next generation pass us, surpass us and now leave their mark.

. . . .For my son, Caleb. I love you son, go flourish and grow. Go do it.

. . . .Kiss your kids and tell the ones you love out loud that you do.

. . . .My name is Kip Williams, the son of Norman Williams, the grandson of Anthony Williams.
My sons are Cody Williams and Caleb Williams.

. . . Some days, I do come down off my soapbox, and some days I'm human too.

Monday - time to man up

Monday August 24, 2009

. . . .. . . .There are seven sins in the world: Wealth without work, Pleasure without conscience, Knowledge without character, Commerce without morality, Science without humanity, Worship without sacrifice and Politics without principle.
. . . .Mahatma Ghandi (1869 - 1948) courtesy of my friend Dave.

. . . .I had one of those "oh, crap" moments over the weekend, when it was pointed out to me that I'd headed up both Thursday and Friday's columns with a July date, instead of August. Seems I time-slipped 30 days somewhere in there.

. . . .As well, I'd managed to put a week old intro into the playlist, oh well.

. . . ."Let's do the time warp again......." Does anyone else miss midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show? I do.

. . . .A toast! . . . . .Oh, go on. . . .just throw the toast, you know you want to.

. . . .So, on with the walkabout, which actually is proving quite fruitful. I do love these rambles, they allow me to slip the bonds and strictures that we all occasionally impose on ourselves.

. . . .The problem with that, with starting to box yourself into those bonds, structural belief systems and strictures? It becomes dogma, and dogma, in any form is dangerous, it kills the spirit, kills the ability to think outside the box, color outside the lines.

. . . .And that, my friends, is what makes us unique, differentiates us from one another. It is when we no longer are connected to the collective consciousness, but slip into the hive-mind that we lose the ability to see the data flows, the streams of information that flow into nodal points, see the influences and waves in the stream, and thereby influence the probabilities.

. . . .. Here's the paradox. It's the connection to others, being part of the collective consciousness that makes us human, but it's when we slip into drone status, become part of the hive mind that we just become part of the mass, rolling along with it, no longer an individual. As an individual, a unique singularity, only then are we able to 'step outside' and see the information, the data and the nodal points where things can be nudged and influenced, work with the probability waves of the complex, chaotic systems to 'know' just where to push and when to influence the movement of the mass, to try and head towards a predictable outcome.

. . . .So, then, here's my question, as I re-read last week's columns. How come it is that it takes a paralyzed First amendment champion, a man who's made his living off selling sex, to make more sense than any politician I've heard in the last 30 years. I will tell you that I particularly don't care what you, or anyone else thinks of Larry Flynt. It's just sex, relax and get over it. His piece, Common Sense 2009, which you can read below in Friday's post, in whole, made more sense than anything else I've read in the last 9 months.

. . . .More so, how come it takes true outsiders, true renegades to become of those catalysts? And there's more than one, the probability waves that I always write about are building. Readers of this column know that Larry wrote just about the same thing that I was writing 6 to 8 weeks ago.

. . . .And there's more and more of us.

. . . .Because, you see, you can throw all of it at me you want. I don't care. Seriously. Being autocratic does have it's benefits. You can throw it at me that you think, or are somehow misled to believe that this country was founded as a "Christian nation". You can throw it at me that it was about land ownership, freedom from the King, the ability to start a business, whatever, I don't care what you believe.

. . . .It's essence, what this country was founded on was a quest for justice; social, personal, economic, societal. Justice, in all it's forms.

. . . .We, in the end, are made up of the worst that the English monarchy and Europe had to throw at the continent. Yes, there were some "upper crust" folks, but the rest of us. We're descended from thieves and whores, we're descended from every prisoner that ever got thrown out of prison and into indentured servitude. We're descended, in my case, from the Irish who were starved out of their lands, and a Dakota, who had to escape to Canada to get away from the U.S. Army and came across the river to Detroit and impregnated my great-grandmother. We're, as a people descended from a diaspora caused by every pogrom, purge, war, conflict; the worst Europe could throw at the world.

. . . .Of course, like all human beings, some of the first things we did were to recreate here, what was fled from there, screwed a few things up, some badly, but we're still young, and still have that chance to salvage some meaning, some connection, some redemption and some honor.

. . . .I always say that a human being is born seeking three things; (1) a sense of family and home, connectedness (2) redemption, the internalized knowledge that we're essentially good, and that our time here meant something and (3) honor, the knowing inside that our time here was worthwhile, that we stood for something.

. . . .All 3 of those can be boiled down to one word - justice.

. . . .So, can I do or write anything any differently that what I've written or said.

. . . .It's your country, pay attention

. . . .I said on Friday, that my litmus test for every Administration is Leonard Peltier's parole hearing, the results of it always let me know just where that White House and Administration stand. So. . . .guess what? This White House is no different from the Bush43 White House, which was no different than the Clinton White House, which was no different than the Bush41 White House, which was no different than Carter, which was no different than Reagan.

. . . .Yes, yes, yes, I'm sure that you can point out plenty of differences, but in essence, it's just more of the same-old, same-old. A 4 to 8 year limited political lifespan figurehead who serves as a lightning rod and will attract attention, media focus and people's consciousness; while the 535 corporate slaves, elected and re-elected for life do their master's bidding and we become the Corporate States of America, a wholly owned subsidiary of Goldman-Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and GE, and now we can add UnitedHealth to the list.

. . . .Cenk Uygur, on just how badly they've handled things so far in 6 months:

It is an axiom of American politics that the Democratic Party will negotiate from a position of weakness and the Republican Party will proceed from strength. The number of seats they hold in Congress is irrelevant to this paradigm. The Republicans could be down to five senators and they would still charge into battle. And the Democrats would, from the outset, assume that the Republicans are right (and mainstream) and that since their own position is too extreme they must concede as soon as possible to remain politically viable. There is no Republican talking point that won't scare the bejesus out of the Democratic Party.

Now, let us imagine for a moment a world where this axiom was not true, a world where the Democrats proceeded from strength. Here is how the health care debate would have unfolded instead.

1. Before introducing any legislation, the Democrats hold hearings on the state of health care in this country. They bring in the top health care industry executives and ask them to answer for these grave injustices and inefficiencies:

a. The practices of denying people care through rescission and denying people coverage because of pre-existing conditions. Rescission is where insurance companies will let people die because of a technicality. As soon as you have a serious, life-threatening condition (in other words, an expensive one, the kind you bought insurance for), they will go back over your original forms and see if there is any way they can deny you coverage. They have been known to deny treatment for cancer because someone didn't report that they had acne -- literally.

Then the Democratic congressmen and senators would get on all of the cable shows and pronounce that they are shocked to find out that private health care insurance companies kill people for a profit in this country. Of course, the reality is that they do. In fact, it is their fiduciary responsibility to do so. They must maximize profits, and in health care, one way to do so is to deny coverage for the most expensive treatments and conditions.

b. Then the Democrats would ask the CEOs of these companies how much money they make. The CEO of UnitedHealth Group would have to concede that he has three quarters of a billion dollars in stock options. Then a Democratic congressman would lean in toward his microphone with great gravity and ask, "You mean to tell me that you deny people the life-saving procedures they need because it costs too much money while you personally are set to make over $750 million?"

c. Then you bring out family members of people who have died because they were denied insurance coverage either for pre-existing conditions or because an insurance company executive had found some technicality in their forms. Ask them how it feels to go on without their loved ones and how they felt about the practice of rescission. Finally, ask them how they feel about the millions of dollars the CEO of the company that denied the coverage makes.

d. Bring out the private insurance bureaucrats who deny people coverage on a regular basis. Not just the people who practice rescission or find pre-existing conditions, but also the people who decide what procedures you can and cannot get based on your coverage. Have them explain what bureaucratic standards they use to get between you and your doctor.

e. Bring out the accountants of these private health care companies and have them explain how much money they spend on overhead, advertising and executive salaries. Ask them how much they have increased premiums over the last ten years -- the answer is a stunning 119%. Ask them to repeat how much money they spent on advertising and executive compensation.

f. Bring back the CEOs and show them pictures of the people who died because their companies wouldn't cover their medical expenses, as they had promised. Then show them pictures of their own houses/mansions and yachts and jets. And ask them, one simple question: "Was it worth it?"

After the hearings announce with serious concern and appropriate gravity that something must be done about this! The problem is undeniable and there has to be something that Congress can do to help protect the American people.

2. Introduce single-payer legislation. Say that anything less would continue the rapacious system of private insurance for profit in this country. You wouldn't leave fire protection in the hands of private bureaucrats who get to decide who lives or who dies based on how much money their CEO is going to make. So, why would you do the same in health care coverage? No, it is an essential duty of the government to protect the well-being of their citizens.

3. Announce that you must do the will of the people by voting as a Democratic bloc. The American people voted for 60 Democratic senators, and 60 Democratic senators they should have. Anything else would be a slap in the face of democracy.

If they wanted the Republicans to be in charge, they could have easily voted that way. If they wanted the Republicans to be able to block legislation with filibusters, they could have given them 41 senators. But the American people in their infinite wisdom chose not to. They chose to give the Democrats an unstoppable coalition so that they could bring the real change they were promised.

Treat the Republicans as the irrelevancy they are. Let them cry in the corner, but under no circumstances should you allow the press to consider them a pertinent part of this debate. Remind the press at every turn what they said and what they wrote when the Democrats were in the minority -- that the Republicans represented mainstream America and that the Democrats should not be covered because media coverage is about what will actually get done. Now that the Democrats have much larger majorities than the Republicans ever had, the opposite must also be true -- Republicans are an irrelevant minority party and the Democrats are the mainstream.

4. If absolutely necessary, compromise with some of the more conservative (read corporate controlled) Democrats and settle for a public option. Then make an enormous deal out of how reasonable and magnanimous you are for coming up with this middle ground approach. Then brag about how you delivered on your promises, got the American people the change they voted for, and you still did it in a moderate and centrist way.

Now, back in the real world, we know that the Democrats would never have the fortitude to do things this way, but you have to wonder why. What is missing in the politicians of this party that makes them incapable of putting together a strong argument for their own side? A spine or other body parts might be mentioned. But how long can people go on voting for a party that they know is constitutionally weak and almost never does what they promise? Especially when we know it's because they're too timid to?

But it's not just a matter of having the courage of your convictions, you also have to question how savvy Democrats are. Why have they not realized in all of these years how the media game is played? Can they not see that everything in politics is framing? That it's not the answer, but the question that's most important. If you ask the question "can government run health care in this country?" you're having a different debate then if you ask the question "should we allow private health insurance companies to make decisions on who lives or dies based on how much profit they're going to make?".

It's all in the question. So, I have one last one for the Democrats: How long can you keep getting outplayed by the Republicans, not deliver on your promises and continue to ask for our votes?

. . . . .Now, combine the above piece with (a) the excellent article put forth in this month's Atlantic, the cover story written by David Goldhill, and recapped here with a solid, practical health care system reform plan (put together by a businessman, not a politician, a lawyer, a lobbyist or a doctor, so it makes sense and it works) last week (b) the straightforward, practical, do-able, revenue and tax neutral 4 point proposal put forward by practicing physician and clinical professor at U.S.C. Hospital Dr. Paul Toffel (recapped here last week) and, finally (c) the excellent print article in the latest Rolling Stone by investigative journalist Matt Taibbi on how Washington has blown health care reform, period, overall.

. . . .Probably about an hour's worth of reading overall, and the way forward, the go forward plan is laid right out, in solid, practical steps. Are we interested? Not just no, but Hell NO! We'd much rather have drama, we'd much rather have screaming and yelling at Town Halls. We'd much rather stand on the side of the road and throw rocks at one another, and label one another. "Nazi", "Socialist", "Fascist". That's the American way, let's find a bad guy, drag up something completely unrelated and de-focus off the issue at hand.

. . . .It's easier to be dragged around like sheep and swallow wholly fictional things whole. Now, just how did an entire segment of the population come under the "death panel" science-fiction scenario cooked up and fomented by Palin, Gingrich and Graessley? Well, could it have something to do with the $1.6 billion in lobbying money thrown at Congress on health care reform alone? Could it have something to do with the registered 6 lobbyists on health care reform alone for every Representative and Senator? (3,300 registered lobbyists for 535 Representatives and Senators).

. . . .Let's take a look at who really is owned, bought and paid for:

Elected Official		Pty		ST		Interest Group		Giver Rank		Amount		Total
Sen John McCain		R		AZ		Retired		1		$32,841,726.00		$32,841,726.00
Sen. John Cornyn		R		TX		Retired		1		$1,001,383.00		$1,797,846.00
						Health Professionals		4		$796,463.00
Sen. Mitch McConnell		R		KY		Retired		3		$908,480.00		$1,694,880.00
						Health Professionals		5		$786,400.00
Sen Max Baucus		D		MT		Health Professionals		2		$790,141.00		$1,514,216.00
						Insurance		5		$724,075.00
Sen. Chris Dodd		D		CT		Insurance		3		$1,381,556.00		$1,381,556.00
Sen. Chuck Grassley		R		IA		Health Professionals		1		$470,956.00		$1,334,941.00
						Insurance		2		$364,998.00
						Pharma/Health Products		4		$250,150.00
						Hospitals/Nursing Homes		5		$248,837.00
Sen. Mark Warner		D		VA		Retired		3		$1,331,885.00		$1,331,885.00

. . . .Now, that's just the Hall of Fame, the All-Stars of lobbying bribery and corruption how about the next tier? Let's take a look. . . .

Elected Official		Pty		ST		Interest Group		Giver Rank		Amount		Total
Joe Lieberman		I		CT		Retired		5		$995,788.00		$995,788.00
Sen. Arlen Specter		D		PA		Pharmaceuticals/Health Products		2		$510,549.00		$915,332.00
						Health Professionals		5		$404,783.00
Sen. Ben Nelson		D		NE		Insurance		1		$611,086.00		$896,879.00
						Pharmaceuticals/Health Products		3		$285,793.00
Sen. Orrin G Hatch		R		UT		Pharma/Health Products		1		$606,081.00		$885,881.00
						Health Professionals		5		$279,800.00
Sen. John Thune		R		SD		Retired		1		$858,490.00		$858,490.00
Sen Tom Harkin		D		IA		Health Professionals		2		$498,651.00		$823,865.00
						Pharma/Health Products		5		$325,214.00
Sen. Claire McCaskill		D		MO		Retired		3		$784,134.00		$784,134.00
Sen. Deborah Ann Stabenow		D		MI		Retired		3		$394,429.00		$762,184.00
						Health Professionals		4		$367,755.00
Sen. Richard Burr		R		NC		Pharma/Health Products		1		$403,848.00		$747,224.00
						Health Professionals		4		$184,776.00
						Insurance		5		$158,600.00
Sen. Mark Udall		D		CO		Retired		2		$734,258.00		$734,258.00
Mike Enzi		R		WY		Pharma/Health Products		1		$353,912.00		$725,711.00
						Insurance		3		$194,250.00
						Health Professionals		4		$177,549.00
Sen. Jon L Kyl		R		AZ		Health Professionals		4		$709,083.00		$709,083.00
Sen. Edward M Kennedy		D		MA		Pharmaceuticals/Health Products		3		$389,490.00		$689,697.00
						Health Professionals		4		$300,207.00
Sen. Sherrod Brown		D		OH		Health Professionals		2		$676,139.00		$676,139.00
Sen Blanche Lincoln		D		AR		Health Professionals		1		$401,700.00		$629,700.00
						Hospitals/Nursing Homes		5		$228,000.00
Sen Tom Carper		D		DE		Insurance		1		$355,680.00		$623,200.00
		D		DE		Pharma/Health Products		5		$267,520.00
Sen. John Ensign		R		NV		Health Professionals		3		$346,475.00		$648,937.00
						Insurance		4		$302,462.00
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson		R		TX		Retired		1		$601,290.00		$601,290.00
Sen. Kent Conrad		D		ND		Insurance		2		$327,125.00		$598,158.00
						Health Professionals		4		$271,033.00
Sen James Webb		D		VA		Retired		3		$573,651.00		$573,651.00
Sen. Saxby Chambliss		R		GA		Insurance				$558,836.00		$558,836.00
Sen. Tom Udall		D		MN		Retired		2		$539,949.00		$539,949.00
Sen. Olympia J. Snowe		R		ME		Retired		1		$179,708.00		$517,867.00
						Health Professionals		2		$174,574.00
						Insurance		3		$163,585.00
Sen. David Vitter		R		LA		Health Professionals		1		$321,000.00		$516,848.00
						Retired		5		$195,848.00
Sen. Bob Corker		R		TN		Health Professionals		5		$512,539.00		$512,539.00
Sen. Mike Crapo		R		ID		Insurance		2		$304,950.00		$502,750.00
								3		$197,800.00
Sen. Jeff Sessions		R		AL		Retired		2		$295,421.00		$502,231.00
						Health Professionals		4		$206,810.00

. . . .Now, just to round out our rogue's gallery, let's do one more, and stop the list at the $100,000 level of lobbying and campaign contribution amount:

Elected Official		Pty		ST		Interest Group		Giver Rank		Amount		Total
Sen. James W DeMint		R		SC		Health Professionals		4		$256,312.00		$481,914.00
						Insurance		5		$225,602.00
Kay R. Hagan		D		NC		Retired		3		$473,649.00		$473,649.00
Sen. Richard C. Shelby		R		AL		Insurance		2		$461,499.00		$461,499.00
Sen Ron Wyden		D		OR		Health Professionals		2		$165,050.00		$450,135.00
						Hospitals/Nursing Homes		4		$145,200.00
						Retired		5		$139,885.00
Sen. Bernie Sanders		I		VT		Retired		1		$434,899.00		$434,899.00
Sen. Jeff Merkley		D		OR		Retired		3		$422,221.00		$422,221.00
Sen. Susan Collins		R		ME		Health Professionals		4		$392,169.00		$392,169.00
Sen. Roger Wicker		R		MS		Retired		3		$192,655.00		$382,155.00
						Health Professionals		4		$189,500.00
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse		D		RI		Retired		3		$377,806.00		$377,806.00
Rep. Ben Cardin		D		MD		Health Professionals		5		$370,408.00		$370,408.00
Sen. Tim Johnson		D		SD		Insurance		1		$346,497.00		$346,497.00
Sen. Jon Tester		D		MT		Retired		3		$345,647.00		$345,647.00
Sen. Robert F. Bennett		R		UT		Insurance		2		$209,700.00		$342,244.00
		R		UT		Pharma/Health Products		5		$132,544.00
Sen. Geoorge V Voinovich		R		OH		Retired		2		$219,136.00		$355,336.00
						Insurance		5		$136,200.00
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen		R		NH		Retired		4		$349,798.00		$349,798.00
Sen Richard D. Lugar		R		IN		Retired		1		$330,456.00		$330,456.00
Sen. Russ Feingold		D		WI		Health Professionals		3		$307,078.00		$307,078.00
Sen. Patty Murray		D		WA		Retired		3		$304,805.00		$304,805.00
Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg		D		NJ		Retired		5		$289,683.00		$289,683.00
Sen. Thad Cochran		R		MS		Health Professionals		4		$153,050.00		$287,250.00
						Pharma/Health Products		5		$134,200.00
Sen John A Barrasso		R		WY		Health Professionals		2		$272,050.00		$272,050.00
Sen. Pat Roberts		R		KS		Retired		4		$266,688.00		$266,688.00
Sen Jay Rockefeller		D		WV		Health Professionals		2		$262,950.00		$262,950.00
Sen. Tom Coburn		R		OK		Health Professionals		1		$193,414.00		$255,615.00
						Hospitals/Nursing Homes		5		$62,201.00
Sen. Barbara A Mikulski		D		MD		Pharma/Health Products		4		$117,495.00		$228,279.00
						Health Professionals		5		$110,784.00
Sen. Charles E. Schumer		D		NY		Insurance		4		$219,800.00		$219,800.00
Sen. Jim Bunning		R		KY		Insurance		1		$141,433.00		$213,183.00
						Health Professionals		4		$71,750.00
Rep. Jeff Bingaman		D		NM		Health Professionals		3		$207,563.00		$207,563.00
Rep. John Boehner		R		OH		Insurance		1		$134,900.00		$205,600.00
						Pharma/Health Products		3		$70,700.00
Rep. Kendrick B Meek		D		FL		Retired		4		$88,402.00		$166,452.00
						Health Professionals		5		$78,050.00
Rep. Eric Cantor		R		VA		Insurance		2		$132,900.00		$147,900.00
						Eli Lilly & Co.		2		$15,000.00
Rep. Chris Murphy		D		CT		Retired		1		$110,700.00		$145,550.00
						Health Professionals		2		$34,850.00
Sen. Johnny Isakson		R		GA		Health Professionals		5		$125,750.00		$125,750.00
Rep. Joseph Crowley		D		NY		Insurance		1		$49,000.00		$120,272.00
						Health Professionals		2		$44,000.00
						Pharma/Health Products				$27,272.00
Rep. Dave Camp		R		MI		Insurance		1		$57,250.00		$132,500.00
		R		MI		Pharma/Health Products		2		$49,000.00
		R		MI		Health Professionals		5		$26,250.00
Rep. Judd Gregg		R		NH		Pharma/Health Products		2		$129,000.00		$189,200.00
								4		$60,200.00
Rep. Steny H. Hoyer		D		MD		Insurance		1		$94,020.00		$178,230.00
						Health Professionals		2		$84,210.00
Sen. Nancy Pelosi		D		CA		Health Professionals		1		$126,500.00		$175,000.00
						Insurance		2		$48,500.00
Rep. Earl Pomery		D		ND		Insurance		1		$72,500.00		$169,985.00
						Health Professionals		2		$67,385.00
						Hospitals/Nursing Homes		3		$30,100.00
Rep. Tom Price		R		GA		Health Professionals		1		$140,350.00		$159,700.00
						Insurance		2		$19,350.00
Rep. Frank Pallone Jr.		D		NJ		Health Professionals		1		$122,150.00		$141,150.00
						Insurance		5		$19,000.00
Sen. James E Risch		R		ID		Retired		2		$126,800.00		$126,800.00
Jemes E Clyburn		D		SC		Pharma/Health Products		1		$77,500.00		$123,500.00
						Health Professionals		4		$46,000.00
Rep. Xavier Becerra		D		CA		Health Professionals		1		$64,450.00		$122,827.00
		D		CA		Insurance		2		$30,300.00
		D		CA		Pharmaceuticals		3		$28,077.00
Rep. Allyson Schwartz		D		PA		Health Professionals		2		$61,823.00		$123,623.00
						Retired		3		$61,800.00
Rep. Ron Kind		D		WI		Insurance		1		$63,359.00		$118,178.00
						Health Professionals		2		$41,500.00
						Pharmaceuticals/Health Products		4		$13,319.00
Sen. Mitch McConnell		R		KY		Kindred Healthcare		2		$116,200.00		$116,200.00
Rep. Pete Sessions		R		TX		Health Professionals		1		$60,750.00		$110,250.00
						Insurance		4		$25,000.00
						Pharmaceuticals/Health Products		5		$24,500.00
Rep. Charles B. Rangel		D		NY		Insurance		1		$60,400.00		$109,900.00
						Health Professionals		2		$49,500.00
Rep. Spencer Bachus		R		AL		Insurance		1		$109,000.00		$109,000.00
Rep. Paul Ryan		R		WI		Insurance		1		$44,750.00		$108,340.00
						Retired		2		$40,035.00
						Health Professionals		4		$23,555.00
Rep. Mike Rogers		R		MI		Pharma/Health Products		1		$50,000.00		$107,300.00
						Insurance		2		$30,000.00
						Health Professionals		3		$27,300.00

. . . .Get the drift? The Health Care Reform debate was over before it started. You don't have a say, and your voice doesn't count, no matter which side of the issue you find yourself on, until all lobbying money and campaign contribution money is shut off period. Get a clue, Congress is for sale. Your Congressperson, Representative and Senator is a whore, standing on the street corner, hand out, selling themselves, their vote and your interests and future to whomever is willing to pony up the freight.

. . . .I need to make sure to give credit to Brian Ross, writer, satirist and political journalist for this list. It's easy to find the data, it's at Open Secrets, but it's a heck of a job to pull it together.

. . . .I've said it all along, there's no shadowy conspiracy, no Men In Black. David Rockefeller says it openly, has said it all along, in speech after speech, but no one pays attention. Too busy watching the 3 greatest entertainment arms in history; Fox News, CNN & MSNBC. Those folks are doing their jobs, well I might add. Their job? As employees of a media corporation, their job is the same as any other actor or actress; pull in viewers, keep viewers to get ratings and pull more advertising dollars in for the corp. Otherwise, they have no job. Get the hint? It's not to deliver the news.

. . . Why am I so cynical? So distrusting, so disgusted with anyone, anyone at all who labels themselves a Democrat, a Republican, a conservative, a liberal, a member of the Right or a member of the Left? To me, all that means is that you've drunk the Kool-Aid and have become one of the sheeple.

. . . .Joe Lieberman, one of the larger pieces of shit to ever walk the halls of Congress on Sunday on CNN's State of the Union

"The uninsured can wait until the recession is over"

. . . .How can I not be a cynic? And thanks for the transition, you moron.

. . . .In the mere course of the last 4 weeks of this column, if you take the time to dig into the archives, there is an entire history of the last 30 years, and how we've been sold down the river, lied to, stolen from and used, be everyone, by all sides and ideological stripe.

. . . .A history that shows us, if you for one moment subscribe to the notion that somehow if you identify yourself with a group, any group that currently dominates the scene: Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative, extremist, progressive, Left, Right; those whom you put your faith in, those whom you trust to lead your movement, your group, have lied to you, have no intention of every coming through with the promises they've made you. If some of you are the faithful, no matter what stripe or ideology, then you must be more bitter than most, if the dawning of realization has struck you.

. . . .The best ones? Those of you who watch that damn television, listen to that goddamn talk radio; have even a little bit of faith in O'Reilly, Beck, Olbermann, Dobbs, Limbaugh, Hannity, Maddow, Scarborough, Brezeskini; you're suckers, morons, idiots and being played for fools.

. . . .Where, oh where could this disillusionment come from? One simple thing. You can throw it all out; health care reform, Afghanistan, education, climate change (which is real), energy independence (our greatest threat to national security), "green" everything, tech infrastructure improvements without some recovery in the financial markets, and that recovery has to mean jobs and income for the American people, which isn't happening and aren't there. Let me make a simple statement, and pound it over and over again: We are not in an economic recovery, and it's getting worse! It's about facts and data, it's about reality.

. . . .Now, before I get off on this roll, no, I'm not insane enough or stupid enough to blame the financial crisis on this Administration. Any sentient creature that breathes oxygen, has opposable thumbs and walks upright knows that the bubble actually burst last September 15, well before the election and had been built for quite some time before that, going all the way back to Reagan laying the groundwork with the signing of Garn-St. Germain, Bush1 and Clinton destroying the manufacturing base in this country with NAFTA, and Bush2 and Paulson getting straight on into bed with the Big 5 banks, AIG and Goldman-Sachs and entirely deregulating the credit derivatives and trading regulations. This Administration inherited the mess, and first half of the bailouts, $750 billion worth, that no one still knows exactly where it went to.

. . . .But, it is this Administration that is now in control, and it is this Administration that must somehow get the credit markets stable again, and the economy in this country growing in order to not create new jobs, but merely put the 7 million some odd plus people who have lost their jobs back to work somehow. That's the task.

. . . . .Paul Krugman, on Sunday on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos:

"We've got a problem with terminology because we usually say either the economy is in recession or the economy is recovering. Either you're in hell or you're in heaven. And the trouble is we're actually in purgatory. We're actually in a situation almost for sure GDP is growing; almost for sure the business cycle leading committee will eventually decide the recession ended this summer. But almost surely also we're still losing jobs. The unemployment rate is going to continue to rise. So we're in that infamous jobless recovery state."

. . . .Robert Reich, on the same program:

"Anyone who says we're out of the woods, or even moving out of the woods has got to be lost at sea. There is no evidence that this economy is doing much better. The best that can be said is that we're getting worse more slowly."

. . . .Noriel Roubini, the brightest economist of the bunch, on a phantom recovery:

Data from the US — rising unemployment, falling household consumption, still declining industrial production, and a weak housing market — suggest that America’s recession is not over yet. A similar analysis of many other advanced economies suggests that, as in the US, the bottom is quite close but it has not yet been reached. Most emerging economies may be returning to growth, but they are performing well below their potential.

Moreover, for a number of reasons, growth in the advanced economies is likely to remain anaemic and well below trend for at least a couple of years.

The first reason is likely to create a long-term drag on growth: households need to deleverage and save more, which will constrain consumption for years.

Second, the financial system — both banks and non-bank institutions — is severely damaged. Lack of robust credit growth will hamper private consumption and investment spending.

Third, the corporate sector faces a glut of capacity, and a weak recovery of profitability is likely if growth is anaemic and deflationary pressures still persist. As a result, businesses are not likely to increase capital spending.

Fourth, the re-leveraging of the public sector through large fiscal deficits and debt accumulation risks crowding out a recovery in private-sector spending. The effects of the policy stimulus, moreover, will fizzle out by early next year, requiring greater private demand to support continued growth.

There are also now two reasons to fear a double-dip recession. First, the exit strategy from monetary and fiscal easing could be botched, because policymakers are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If they take their fiscal deficits (and a potential monetisation of these deficits) seriously and raise taxes, reduce spending, and mop up excess liquidity, they could undermine the already weak recovery.

But if they maintain large budget deficits and continue to monetise them, at some point — after the current deflationary forces become more subdued — bond markets will revolt. At this point, inflationary expectations will increase, long-term government bond yields will rise, and the recovery will be crowded out.

A second reason to fear a double-dip recession concerns the fact that oil, energy and food prices may be rising faster than economic fundamentals warrant, and could be driven higher by the wall of liquidity chasing assets, as well as by speculative demand. Last year, oil at $145 a barrel was a tipping point for the global economy, as it created a major income shock for the US, Europe, Japan, China, India and other oil-importing economies. The global economy, barely rising from its knees, could not withstand the contractionary shock if similar speculative forces were to drive oil rapidly towards $100 a barrel.

So the end of this severe global recession will be closer at the end of this year than it is now, the recovery will be anaemic rather than robust in advanced economies, and there is a rising risk of a double-dip recession. The recent market rallies in stocks, commodities, and credit may have gotten ahead of the improvement in the real economy. If so, a correction cannot be too far behind.

. . . . . .McClatchy asking a simple question, "what rebound"? Foreclosures and unemployment are on the rise?:

Delinquency and foreclosure rates for U.S. mortgages continued to rise in the second quarter, with loans to the most qualified borrowers going bust at an unnerving clip, especially in hard-hit states such as Florida and California.

The numbers reported Thursday by the Mortgage Bankers Association show clearly that rising job losses are worsening the nation's housing troubles and threaten the Obama administration's efforts to keep owners from losing their homes.

. . . .And this, this is what Bernanke, the Fed Chair, had to say last week, as reported in the Washington Post:

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke rendered his most positive assessment of the economy yet in a speech Friday and gave credit in part to his own institution's handling of the worst economic crisis in decades.
The U.S. and global economy "appear to be leveling out," Bernanke told an audience of some of the world's leading economists and central bankers, and "prospects for a return to growth in the near term appear good."
But the meat of Bernanke's speech was not about the stabilizing economy, but rather an extensive defense of the Fed's handling of the financial crisis and recession. It is part of a broader effort to shore up confidence in the central bank, which has come under fire in Congress and in public opinion polls for its role in various bailouts.

. . . . . .Little difference in outlooks?

. . . .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.

Friday musings

Friday August 21, 2009

. . . .No guru, no method, no teacher . . . .free your mind.

. . . .Outta my mind on a Friday, just doing a walkabout and letting my mind, spirit and heart wander where they will.

. . . .I work at an absolutely magnificent job. Watching lightning storms across the Gulf of Mexico is impossible to describe unless you're there to see it, and even then it takes the words away.

. . . . .Lots of friends gathering this weekend down in Ohio for some good times together, some coming together in a good way. Hoka my friends, from a long ways off. I can't see you, but I can hear you and feel you, thanks for thinking of me.

. . . .There are seven sins in the world: Wealth without work, Pleasure without conscience, Knowledge without character, Commerce without morality, Science without humanity, Worship without sacrifice and Politics without principle.
. . . .Mahatma Ghandi (1869 - 1948) courtesy of my friend Dave.

. . . .Pretty well describes our society the last 30 years, doesn't it? Don't parse it, don't try to fit groups into it and certain groups, or yourself, outside it. When I say our society, I mean "our" society, that'd be all of us, each and every last one. We are all part of what's happened, and we've all played our part in it.

. . . .So, two things happened today, and it's the reaction to both, that, sadly enough, doesn't surprise me at all. A convicted murderer, the man responsible for the bomb on PanAm Flight 103 out of Lockerbie, Scotland was set free today and sent home to a hero's welcome to Libya. Leonard Peltier was denied parole again today, sent back to prison again.

. . . .When I mentioned this on my Facebook page, the comments were amazing. The attitude towards Leonard was "so what?", that's the way it goes, he must be guilty, while there was absolute outrage over the Lockerbie bomber being set free.

. . . . .No knowledge of history 30 years ago, nor no attention paid to any current news. Leonard did not commit those murders, that's a well-known fact and has been for 30 years. Just this last year, one of his co-defendants in the trial, who was found innocent and set free, confessed to those murders. Leonard has served those 30 years so the FBI can cover it's own ass.

. . . .So, in this little random sampling, it becomes apparent that we have now become a nation of people in whose mind it's OK that a man, a citizen of this country and a member of the First Nations, spend his life in jail for a crime he did not commit because a foreign national who is guilty of murder, multiple murders, was set free on foreign soil, by a foreign court and went home to a foreign nation. The equation balances, in their minds, and their anger over the one is entirely and completely justified being taken out on another, because, after all, this is America, and by God, there will be justice, even if it's a life taken from someone else.

. . . .Got it. Thanks for helping me understand that.

. . . .This country, this nation, this people, and it's future generations, deserves everything that happens to it.

. . . .Every one has different breaking points, and I promised a long time ago in this column that when mine was reached, after giving this Administration a fair chance, that I'd be as relentless on them as I was on Bush43. That point's been reached. For some folks, it was the mere fact that a mixed race man was elected President of the United States, that ain't me, racism to me, is the absolutely stupidest act that a human being can let wander through their brain. Compassion, intelligence, wit, humor, grace, beauty, soulfulness all know no color. Neither does stupidity or hatred. For some, it's been the health care reform debate, again something that I find ephemeral. That fight's already over, and the insurers and pharmaceutical companies will be the big winners, no matter the policy. Two things plague me, one is the hands-off, kid gloves approach to Wall Street, AIG, Goldman-Sachs and the Big 5 banks, specifically, JP Morgan Chase. The second is my litmus test, we all have them, don't kid yourself. For every President, for every Administration, for me, it's Leonard Peltier. The second he comes up for parole in a new Administration, I watch closely, and the second it's turned down, that Administration becomes, in my mind, just like all the rest.

. . . .This Administration has now joined Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush1, Carter, Clinton and Bush2 as "just like all the rest". We've not had a real Administration, not a real Chief Executive, not a real President, since Johnson. They've all sucked.

. . . .Now, you're going to have to go some to beat George W. Bush, but this current Administration is reaching for those depths rather rapidly.

. . . .An open letter to President Obama:
Dear President Obama,
Would you please, please go find your testicles? You were one vice-presidential candidate from losing the election. Had McCain had the brains to put Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee on his ticket, he'd be saddled with the financial mess that Bush left you with, he'd be saddled with finally going after bin Laden in Afghanistan, not you. You were lucky enough that somehow, he had an addled 70 year old plus moment and put a complete wingnut moron on his ticket. Who knew that he could find a Republican woman crazier than Michelle Bachmann? But he did, and it gave you the White House. Your predecessor screwed things up so badly that he also gave you a super majority in the House and Senate, and somehow or another, you haven't seemed to grasp that yet.
I thought it would be a good thing to have a Chicago street fighter in the White House, a bare knuckles, union organizing brawler, someone who fought and beat Big Jim Thompson's Republican machine in Illinois. Someone who understood that underneath the gentility and civility, American politics is a knock-down, drag-out bloody brawl. After all, you were from Chicago, and you had Rahm Emmanuel, the most feared man in the Capitol Building on your side. For god's sake, this man sent a dead fish to an opponent, and carved up a Senate dining room table with a steak knife when he was mad at someone one time.
Now, don't get me wrong, after the complete lack of brains in the White House for the previous 8 years (and I don't count Rove and Cheney, these two are Satan's minions, inhabited by an evil, malevolent intelligence from another dimension) it was time for some smarts in the White House. I'm saying this as someone who has a measured IQ of 183, an eidetic memory and can speed-read close to a 900 words a minute and retain it; but I'm also saying it as someone who is a classic lawyer turned outlaw biker type who wears black t-shirts, jeans, work boots, is tattooed, pierced and loves rock and roll and boobs and will kick your ass in a heartbeat, leave you laying bloody in the street, if necessary and not have a second thought about it.
And that's what I'm talking about, show some balls and start kicking some ass. Start with your own party and let Rahm whip the House and Senate into line. Now, that is one thing I'll give your predecessor, he got things done. They might have been the wrong things, but when someone in his party got out of line, he just put them in the closet with old Karl and Dick and they came out changed people. You, well you've got just about the most unruly, out of control super majority I've even seen, and you don't want to seem to do anything about it. Your predecessor just did shit, period, whether or not they wanted to go along.
Take a lesson there dude, your opponents are kicking the shit out of you. You're standing there, like the good nerdy policy wonk, talking all intellectual, and in the meantime, they're mussing your hair, insulting your wife and taking your drink and spilling it on the floor and you aren't doing anything about it.
Quit being such a wimp, start showing some leadership qualities, get your own folks in line, stand up to your opponents and fight, and maybe we'll start believing you again, but till then, nope, not me.

. . . . .In the New York Times this morning, Paul Krugman:

A backlash in the progressive base — which pushed President Obama over the top in the Democratic primary and played a major role in his general election victory — has been building for months. The fight over the public option involves real policy substance, but it’s also a proxy for broader questions about the president’s priorities and overall approach.

The idea of letting individuals buy insurance from a government-run plan was introduced in 2007 by Jacob Hacker of Yale, was picked up by John Edwards during the Democratic primary, and became part of the original Obama health care plan.

One purpose of the public option is to save money. Experience with Medicare suggests that a government-run plan would have lower costs than private insurers; in addition, it would introduce more competition and keep premiums down.

And let’s be clear: the supposed alternative, nonprofit co-ops, is a sham. That’s not just my opinion; it’s what the market says: stocks of health insurance companies soared on news that the Gang of Six senators trying to negotiate a bipartisan approach to health reform were dropping the public plan. Clearly, investors believe that co-ops would offer little real competition to private insurers.

Also, and importantly, the public option offered a way to reconcile differing views among Democrats. Until the idea of the public option came along, a significant faction within the party rejected anything short of true single-payer, Medicare-for-all reform, viewing anything less as perpetuating the flaws of our current system. The public option, which would force insurance companies to prove their usefulness or fade away, settled some of those qualms.

That said, it’s possible to have universal coverage without a public option — several European nations do it — and some who want a public option might be willing to forgo it if they had confidence in the overall health care strategy. Unfortunately, the president’s behavior in office has undermined that confidence.

On the issue of health care itself, the inspiring figure progressives thought they had elected comes across, far too often, as a dry technocrat who talks of “bending the curve” but has only recently begun to make the moral case for reform. Mr. Obama’s explanations of his plan have gotten clearer, but he still seems unable to settle on a simple, pithy formula; his speeches and op-eds still read as if they were written by a committee.

Meanwhile, on such fraught questions as torture and indefinite detention, the president has dismayed progressives with his reluctance to challenge or change Bush administration policy.

And then there’s the matter of the banks.

I don’t know if administration officials realize just how much damage they’ve done themselves with their kid-gloves treatment of the financial industry, just how badly the spectacle of government supported institutions paying giant bonuses is playing. But I’ve had many conversations with people who voted for Mr. Obama, yet dismiss the stimulus as a total waste of money. When I press them, it turns out that they’re really angry about the bailouts rather than the stimulus — but that’s a distinction lost on most voters.

So there’s a growing sense among progressives that they have, as my colleague Frank Rich suggests, been punked. And that’s why the mixed signals on the public option created such an uproar.

Now, politics is the art of the possible. Mr. Obama was never going to get everything his supporters wanted.

But there’s a point at which realism shades over into weakness, and progressives increasingly feel that the administration is on the wrong side of that line. It seems as if there is nothing Republicans can do that will draw an administration rebuke: Senator Charles E. Grassley feeds the death panel smear, warning that reform will “pull the plug on grandma,” and two days later the White House declares that it’s still committed to working with him.

It’s hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Obama has wasted months trying to appease people who can’t be appeased, and who take every concession as a sign that he can be rolled.

Indeed, no sooner were there reports that the administration might accept co-ops as an alternative to the public option than G.O.P. leaders announced that co-ops, too, were unacceptable.

So progressives are now in revolt. Mr. Obama took their trust for granted, and in the process lost it. And now he needs to win it back.

. . . .John Avlon, with further commentary on the insane course that the far Left and the Democratic House are pursuing, bringing about the demise of any realistic health care reform as much and as rapidly as any insane "death panel" smears:

Liberals revolt against a Democratic president’s pragmatism. Self-defeating stupidity ensues.

We’ve seen this movie before. Here’s a highlight soundbite: “The idea of all or nothing has been pursued now for nearly three decades. No one has benefitted from that.”

That was Jimmy Carter back in 1979, proposing phased-in health-care reform, creating insurance for catastrophic illness. He was opposed by Ted Kennedy and the unions who wanted to hold out for a Canadian-style single-payer system on the grounds that Carter’s plan was “too inequitable.” There were 18 million uninsured Americans then. Now there are 46 million.

But still some liberals are pursuing an all-or-nothing approach to health-care reform, with 60 House Democrats sending a letter to Obama HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius stating that any health-care legislation “MUST contain a public option.” “Democrats drawing a line in the sand against conservatives in their own party?” Rachel Maddow intoned, “Pinch me, I’m dreaming.”

Time for a wake-up call. With all the hate-filled hyperbole festering around the summer’s health-care debate (Hitler references now seem to appear almost daily), it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that there is essentially one substantive sticking point separating the center from the left: the public option.

That’s the proposal that is acting as the thin-edge of the wedge in conservatives’ apparently effective argument that health-care reform represents a slippery slope toward socialism.

Remove that plank and replace it with a nonprofit cooperative based on local models that have existed in the heartland for decades—as a bipartisan group of senators has proposed—and the reasonable edge of the opposition evaporates along with most of the cost.

The creation of a nonprofit co-op—run by its members—would cost an estimated $6 billion in startup seed capital from the government. In contrast, the public-insurance option—run by a new government bureaucracy—would cost between $500 billion and $1 trillion in taxpayer dollars. If you take the president’s pledge that any health-care overhaul will be deficit neutral seriously—or if you can read a poll or balance a checkbook—you’ll quickly see that the difference isn’t trivial. It’s a fight about adding another trillion dollars to the deficit.

There are just two problems with this common ground compromise alternative: the far left and the far right.

Liberals are arguing that without the public option there is essentially no health-care reform. That’s absurd—President Obama was right when he said this weekend that the public option was “one sliver” of health-care reform. A nonprofit co-op is another means to the end of offering uninsured individuals and families an alternative to private insurance companies as a way to increase competition and drive down costs. The reason liberals are kicking back so hard against it is that it does not achieve their desired ideological end—a step toward the Canadian-style single-payer system that Ted Kennedy and Co. held out for three decades ago.

In the run to the ramparts, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) went on with CNN’s Campbell Brown in the first wave of the pushback, arguing that liberals had already compromised and wouldn’t go any further even at the president’s request. “No one can say that we're not willing to compromise. …We did that on single-payer.”

But that’s a concession to reality, not to Republicans or Blue Dog Democrats. The single-payer plan may be the fondest wish for the far left but it’s a non-starter in the rest of the nation. That’s why the RNC is already at work trying to paint even the co-op as government-run health care. Republicans want to keep the boogeyman of socialized medicine alive as long as they can. They want to run against the public option because they know it is a fight they can win. If Obama embraced a proposal like medical-malpractice reform, performing a bit of political judo, they wouldn’t know what to do.

But the fact that even the rumor of single-payer is being used to derail a health-care overhaul at large is lost on the left. Witness New York Rep. Anthony Weiner, who took to the airwaves to argue that not only would health-care reform without the public option fail to pass the Democratic House, but that getting insurance companies out of the health-care business entirely was his ultimate goal. A combination of horror and hilarity ensued. Here’s an exchange from MSNBC’s Morning Joe:

Scarborough: You are making the point of the people at the town-hall meetings who say this is Barack Obama’s opportunity to get rid of private health care and turn it completely over to the government. I’m sitting here stunned, saying ‘Oh My God, you’re making the point of the health-care protesters.’

Weiner: If Barack Obama doesn’t want to do it, I want to do it.

On Hardball later in the day, Weiner channeled his inner Karl Rove, arguing that ramming health-care reform through on a narrow party-line vote with a public option was not only doable but desirable, saying, “I think we can do it with 51 in the Senate.”

When Chris Matthews asked him if “the government will still function if you try to jam this through with 51 votes,” Weiner answered, “I think it will.” That’s a pretty slim reed to try to hang the fate of an administration. It’s the mark of ideologically irresponsible liberals like Bella Abzug, who legendary centrist Democrat New York Sen. Pat Moynihan once described as “those who want to ruin if they cannot rule.”

The source of this disconnect can be found in this statistic, courtesy of Michael Barone: Of the 21 top Democratic House leadership members and chairmen, five come from districts carried by John McCain, but the average vote in the other 16 districts was 71 percent to 27 percent for Obama. Like Los Angeles’ Maxine Waters and New York’s Anthony Weiner, they are ideologically and geographically insulated from the skepticism generating from the great middle of the country.

It’s a mistake that the architect of Medicaid and Medicare, Lyndon Johnson, never made. A Southern Democrat—sometimes derided by liberals as an “Eisenhower Democrat” when he was Majority Leader of the Senate—understood the need for bipartisan support for any major social reforms: His Medicare bill received the support of 70 House Republicans and 16 Senate Republicans. Even Newt Gingrich got it—his Welfare reforms gained the support of 101 Democrats at the high-water mark of the second Republican Revolution.

Liberals are in deep denial about the source of the president’s falling poll numbers during this summer’s health-care debate. They think the problem—perceptions of arrogant over-reaching liberalism—is the cure. It’s the same self-serving mistake that the extremes always make.

President Obama needs to depolarize the health-care debate. He got off-message because he got off-center. Embracing a bipartisan bill that replaces the public option with a nonprofit co-op will not “muddy” the debate but help clarify it. It will not be a retreat but a way forward.

Lyndon Johnson once joked that “the difference between liberals and cannibals is that cannibals don’t eat their friends and family members.” In half-century-long history of failed health-care reforms from Harry Truman on down, liberal cannibalism has been as much to blame for defeats as fear-mongering from the far right.

The perfect cannot be the enemy of the good. The goal is to decrease costs and increase coverage. If today’s liberals don’t understand the lesson of their own political history and insist on attacking their president, they will have the failure of this health-care reform on their hands.

. . . .I'm going to suggest that you go out and grab the latest print edition of Rolling Stone, the one that comes out today, July 22nd with the Beatles on the cover and sit down and read Matt Taibbi's piece on how Washington is completely screwing up health care reform, some excerpts from the opening paragraph:

America’s disastrous health care system is responsible for incalculable amounts of illness, death, lost productivity and federal deficit — not to mention anxiety, anger and disgrace. And it’s not going to get fixed, writes Matt Taibbi in the new issue of Rolling Stone, because it’s encased in another failed system: the U.S. government. Rather than attempt to remedy the problem this summer, our government sat down and demonstrated its dizzying ineptitude. “We might look back on this summer someday and think of it as the moment when our government lost us for good,” writes Taibbi. “It was that bad.”

Taibbi breaks down the five steps Congress took to be sure no bill would pass — aiming low, gutting the public option, packing it with loopholes, providing no leadership and blowing the math — in his story, which is available on stands now. In a series of video interviews for RollingStone.com, Taibbi explores one of our system’s most severe flaws, explains how the government wedged itself into an awkwardly damning position, and looks at how the proposed bill would change the ordinary American’s life.

. . . . .Taibbi, after his brilliant piece putting the connections together, gathering the history and the data, and exposing Goldman-Sachs for the bastards that they are, now turns his considerable investigative journalistic expertise on Washington, health care reform, and how everyone, that's everyone, the President and both parties in Congress, are screwing us royally.

. . . . .Now, Krugman, in the piece above Avlon's, makes mention of Max Baucus and the Gang of Six, who have been charged with putting together a bipartisan version of the Health Care Reform Bill, in September, when Congress returns. This means a couple of things (1) America's Health Care Choices of Act 2009, the House version, was a sham, political theater designed to "show" that same progressive base that Krugman refers to something and (2) we don't know the substance of the real bill yet, that's what August was for. Let the Representatives take the heat at town halls, then let the deals start to be cut at the Senate level come September.

. . . .Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor:

Last night, the so-called "gang of six" -- three Republican and three Democratic senators on the Senate Finance Committee -- met by conference call and, according to Senator Max Baucus, the committee's chair, reaffirmed their commitment "toward a bipartisan health-care reform bill" (read: less coverage and no public insurance option). The Washington Post reports that the senators shared tales from their home states, where some have been besieged by protesters angry about a potential government takeover of the nation's health care system.

It's come down to these six senators. The House has reported a bill as has another Senate committee, but all eyes are fixed on Senate Finance -- and on these three Dems and three Republicans, in particular. But who, exactly, anointed these six to decide the fate of the nation's health care?

I don't get it. Of the three Republicans in the gang, the senior senator is Charles Grassley. In recent weeks, Grassley has refused to debunk the rumor that the House's health-care bill will spawn "death panels," empowered to decide whether the sick and old get to live or die. At an Iowa town meeting last Tuesday Grassley called the president and Speaker Nancy Pelosi "intellectually dishonest" for claiming the opposite. On Thursday Grassley told the Washington Post that Congress should scale back its efforts to overhaul health care in the wake of intense anger at town hall meetings. But -- wait -- the anger is largely about distortions such as the "death panels" that Grassley refuses to debunk.

This week on Fox News Grassley termed the House bill "the Pelosi Bill," and called it "a government takeover of heath care, exploding the deficit because it's not paid for and it's got high taxes in it."

I really don't get it. We have a Democratic president in the White House. Democrats control sixty votes in the Senate, enough to overcome a filibuster. It is possible to pass health care legislation through the Senate with 51 votes (that's what George W. Bush did with his tax cut plan). Democrats control the House. The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is a tough lady. She has said there will be no health care reform bill without a public option.

So why does the fate of health care rest in Grassley's hands?

It's not even as if the gang represents America. The three Dems on the gang are from Montana, New Mexico, and North Dakota -- states that together account for just over 1 percent of Americans. The three Republicans are from Maine, Wyoming, and Iowa, which together account for 1.6 percent of the American population.

So, I repeat: Why has it come down to these six? Who anointed them? Apparently, the White House. At least that's what I'm repeatedly being told by sources both on the Hill and in the administration. "The Finance Committee is where the action is. They'll tee-up the final bill," says someone who should know.

. . . .Now, regular readers know that I rail on and on that there is no difference between the two parties, that America is owned bought and sold. I write continually about the influence of the Trilateral Commission, David Rockefeller, and Goldman Sachs. The person who has written the best piece on it, the person who makes the most sense this week. . . . .Larry Flynt:

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.

. . . .I'm going to ask you to go back in the column's archives, over there on your left, to the end of July and the beginning of August, you'll find more background on what Flynt is writing about, on the Trilateral Commission, on David Rockefeller, more data and facts.

. . . .And why wouldn't I be a little cynical? Ben Bernanke addressed a conference today and said that the U.S. economy was on the "cusp" of a recovery, but even in recovery, "jobs would be scarce".

. . . .The sharpest, funniest cultural/political/societal commentator that we're gifted to have, Bill Maher, has taken to publishing his closing monologue from Real Time with Bill Maher, on HBO every Friday. He is always insightful, funny and gifted. This week's:

New Rule: If Mitt Romney, Karl Rove and Sarah Palin all think America has never done anything wrong, we must be doing something wrong. Look at them: an empty suit, an empty heart and an empty head. It looks like the news team on Good Morning Hell. And what they've been competing about lately is who would not apologize the most. America is infallible, and apologies are horrible things that must never, ever be given. Except by me when I make a joke about the Pope. "We're perfect -- deal with it," is their new handshake. But I say, what's wrong with America occasionally saying, "I'm sorry"? Because these are the three sorriest white people I've ever seen.

If in your eyes America can do no wrong, you should really look into Lasik surgery. There's the rational, mature assessment of our country: that it's a great nation -- especially if you like fried foods -- but it also has its faults. And then there's the Republican view: that it's perfect and pure in every way and it's always right all the time, just like Leviticus and Ronald Reagan.

If the founders were alive today, Republicans would be giving them shit because the Preamble to the Constitution says, "In order to form a more perfect union? Hello, it's already perfect! Why are you suggesting American apologetics, Ben Franklin?"

One of the things that makes Republicans furious about our current president is their idea that Obama is always apologizing for America's biggest mistakes. Unlike President Bush. Who was one of America's biggest mistakes.

In his first week as president, Obama did an interview with Arab TV in which he said, "We sometimes make mistakes. We have not been perfect." Thought crime! And then he went to Cairo and violated one of those absolute eternal rules the Right Wing is always making up out of thin air: "The president must never apologize on foreign soil. Lest our allies begin to doubt that we're assholes. "

But what did Obama actually say to make Karl Rove's head explode and the popcorn fly out? Cover your children's ears: When he was asked if he believed in American exceptionalism, he said he did, the same way "the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks in Greek exceptionalism." Yes, our so-called president actually said people in other countries might like their countries better. I was so shocked I nearly dropped the Bible I was using to help me masturbate into my gun.

In her farewell speech -- if only -- Sarah Palin kept telling us "how she's wired." Now I'm not a doctor, or an electrician -- but this is faulty wiring, this worldview that, in her words, "we should never apologize for our country." Really? Never? Not for slavery? Or Japanese internment camps, or if we tortured the wrong guy at Guantanamo? The Indians? Nothing, Sarah? "The Real Housewives of Atlanta"? Shouldn't John McCain apologize for... you?

When did intractability become a virtue? Mitt Romney's new book is called No Apology: The Case For American Greatness. You can find it at Borders, in the "Suck-Up" section. It's such a perfect title, combining paranoia with arrogance: "No one has yet asked me to apologize but, if someone ever does, fuck them."

Conservatives think apologizing is a sign of weakness. It's what liberal pussies do, when they're not busy driving electric cars and feeling empathy. When in fact it's the weak and the scared who are too insecure to apologize. Apologies are actually a sign of strength. That's why six-year-olds hate them.

In Rwanda, after a genocide that killed a million people, they set up special courts where people stood up and said, "Hey, sorry I macheted your entire family. My bad." And believe it or not, in most cases, that was enough. That's the power of an apology. A recent study reveals that doctors who are willing to apologize to patients for their mistakes are sued for malpractice about half as much as doctors who aren't willing to apologize.

Apologies can do great things, and they can enable great things. And if you still don't believe me, I have three words for you: make-up sex.

. . . .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.

OK, It's Thursday, walkabout's over. . .nah, not really, not ever with me

Thursday August 20, 2009

. . . . . .No guru, no method, no teacher . . . . . free your mind


. . . .No wonder I felt the need for respite, and a little mental and spiritual walkabout. Hurricane is whipping the seas up off to the East, and another friend, an elder, a teacher went home last night.

. . . .She was a walking example of how to "be", a woman who truly lived a life full of grace and beauty, but she is on her way home now. Home to her husband, her brother, and to her Vickie, free now of all the physical problems and pain that come to all of us with age.

. . . .She was an Elder of the First Nations on this continent, respected, wise, loving, humorous, and had an infectious giggle.

. . . .I remember her lessons through metaphor "Don't go standing by the side of the road getting all holy on yourself", "Don't get ahead of yourself, then you're getting ahead of Spirit."

. . . .Side note from me to Mike (you know which one of the 17 Mike's that I know I'm talking to) - Are you listening?

. . . .There are others who have spent far more time with her, who were blessed to have known her much better, who will have stories and memories of their own, and who can relate them far better.

. . . .I was a lucky person for having known her, and having been blessed to have been around her.

. . . .She is someone who will truly be both mourned and celebrated. She's going home.

. . . .Playlist reflects it, I've changed it up.

. . . . So, on with the show! I said it earlier this week, I can't be anything, either in person, or here in this forum other than who I am.

. . . . . .This Saturday morning, tickets go on sale for the fall leg of Bruce's tour, check Ticketmaster for sale times and venues. As well, the Kings of Leon are out there this fall, and Metallica and AC/DC. Quit telling yourself that you should go, pick up the phone, get some tickets and go, rock and roll is what keeps your blood moving.

. . . .I'm probably going to keep ticking people off, no, not probably, it's a guarantee that no matter what your leanings, what your philosophies, during the course of any given week, I'll most likely hit a nerve.

. . . .Get over it. If we were all the same, thought the same, believed the same, it'd be a hive-mind. A collective consciousness with one thought, and that my friends is what's known as a closed system.

. . . .Physical laws of the universe. Closed systems eventually die by blowing up from the inside. The feedback loop, the information that any system uses to monitor itself, becomes corrupt without at least one external influence to keep it from oscillating out of control.

. . . .It is dynamic, chaotic systems that grow. There is always a feedback loop, an information loop in every system, closed or open. Open systems utilize an external control on the feedback loop, that keeps the feedback loop from oscillating out of control and destroying the very system that it is designed to give information back to.

. . . .I don't care whether or not the system is a person, a group of friends, a company, a working group, a collective, a society, a machine, a software system, a collective cloud computing group, an organized group of cells, a plant, a galaxy, or a collection of souls. The rules are still the rules, and they operate the same way.

. . .Think about it.

. . . .So, on that note, and based on what I'm seeing and hearing, based on the e-mails I receive, here we go.

. . . .Dave, who is a frequent contributor to this column, is also someone I work with. It's Dave who really understands the cognitive dissonance of the public at large, the willingness of people to fly in the face of simple logic and say some really incredible things, based on what they have running around in their heads.

. . . .So, the next section is presented today by both Dave and myself.

. . . I had someone one time, a regular reader, who contributes and is a faithful, as soon as it's published, read it right away person tell me that there were "days that it's like homework", they still enjoyed it, they learned, and got more information.

. . . .OK, so today, it's not homework, at least not this section, it's more like a classroom, 7th grade Civics to be exact, in response to a lot of those e-mails and comments.

. . . .Legislative Branch - that'd be the Congress, both the House of Representatives and The Senate.
. . . .Executive Branch - that'd be the White House, the President
. . . .Judicial Branch - that'd be the Supreme Court, the Court of Appeals, the Circuit Court

. . . .OK, now - who is the one person out of all those people that those first 2 branches encompass who can't vote on any bill, because he or she doesn't have a vote? That'd be the President
. . . .OK, now - who is the one person out of the last 2 branches who can't make a legal or court ruling on any of those bills that the Legislative Branch crafts and passes? That'd be the President.
. . . .OK, now - who doesn't, and that's important, doesn't appoint those judges? That's right, that'd be the President, who can only nominate, but it's those crafty folks in the Legislative Branch who have the final vote on it that installs people.
. . . .OK, now - who is the one person out of the first two again, who can't spend a dime of your money, or can't collect it? Riiiigggghht! That'd be the President. It'd be the Legislative branch again, the ones who do the voting on budgets, programs and taxation.

. . . .The President - a person who has a limited lifespan of 4 years, 8 years max, term-limited. Someone who doesn't have a vote on legislation; someone who can nominate, but not vote for any federal judicial opening; someone who can propose a budget, propose a program, propose budget cuts, propose taxes, but cannot, repeat cannot, actually perform any action around them, other doing the final signature.

. . . .The Legislative Branch, 535 money-hungry maniacs that you, we, all of us, elect for life most of the time. 435 Representatives and 100 Senators, not term-limited, who are re-elected time, and time and time again. A number of men and women, who ostensibly belong to two parties, and quite often act that way on camera, as if in opposition to one another, engaging in political theater; but who, at the end of the day, golf together, go to dinner together, quite often share apartments and houses in Georgetown.

. . . .The Legislative Branch, 535 politicians who depend entirely on, live for, are sustained by lobbyists and campaign contributors. 535 men and women, who, the day they take office, begin the fundraising and campaigni1.6 ng for the next election, that is their primary job, to sustain themselves in that office. That fundraising and campaign contributions are of such a magnitude that neither you nor I can even come near it. Goldman-Sachs is the single largest campaign contributor in history, the 5 Health care industry lobbies have between 2008 and 2009 put $1.6 billion into the campaign coffers and fundraisers of Representatives and Senators.

. . . .535 Representatives and Senators. Write them an e-mail or a letter expressing your concern about a particular issue or their particular position on an issue. You will get a response, true. More than likely, if any of you have done that, the letter was written by a staffer, is somewhat generic in nature, and in addressing your issue, will more than likely also contain a brief summation of what they've done in the past about it, and a strong statement about how they plan to act on it in the future. It'll be signed, yes, but laser printers do wonderful things these days.
. . .Call their office, if you get an answer, and not voicemail, you'll get a junior level staffer or an intern, they'll listen, tell you that your Rep or your Senator will get the message, and that's pretty much the last you'll hear of it.

. . . .Know why? It's simple. Call about healthcare, you'll get a response. Do you think you'll be listened to? I think not. You simply don't have the clout for that to happen. Now, the $1.6 billion dollars in lobbying and campaign contributions that the health care industry suppliers, that the insurance industry, that pharmaceutical manufacturers have pumped into the offices of Representatives and Senators, now that has clout. The 6 to 1 ratio of registered health care lobbyists (over 3,300 lobbyists for 535 Senators and Representatives), now that has clout that you don't have.

. . . .Right now, all that's happening around health care reform is political theater. U.S. News and World Report broke the story last week on United Healthcare's lock on any resulting programs and reforms, as reported here on the day it broke, and this week now in Time magazine.

. . . .Follow the money. I say it constantly, and the links are always provided here to do that. What you're seeing is political theater, the outcome, in reality, has already been decided.

. . . .And the question remains - why such hostility directed towards the President? Or rather, why the surprise? Any student of the United States will tell you that the country is about evenly divided, 45/45. There is a very narrow band of true independent voters in the middle, and that is who, at least on a Presidential level, everything is aimed at. (See above, the rules of the game are entirely different for Reps and Sens). The entire Presidential process involves almost exclusively wooing the voters within your own party up until the magic convention delegate number is reached in order to beat your opponent. At that moment, the switch flips, and everything is aimed at that narrow band of voters in the middle, since they're the crucial ones.

. . . .The same type of hostility was directed by everyone on one side for Bush's two terms. Was the expectation any different that the switch would flip and the same level not be directed at Obama?

. . . .You know, I've got to correct myself there. The same type of hostility wasn't directed at Bush. Not the lunatic fringe variety that seems to be coming out of the woodwork now. Imagine armed citizens coming to a Bush town hall. Nope, can't even see it. There'd have been live coverage of the Secret Service and Marine snipers turning them into hamburger; the media would have had a field day pulling their e-mails and finding their terrorist connections, and there would have been a White House special investigations team to uncover their plot. No one, no one would have gone on National radio and compared a sitting President of the United States to Adolph Hitler, that's simply a slap in the face to every American alive, and especially to every veteran buried in every National Cemetery.

. . . .I still don't believe that the issue is health care. Nope, the anger is outsize compared to the issue, and I don't believe that everyone is stupid enough to think that the financial collapse was this President's fault. It can't be health care, because anyone living in this country knows that the health care system is broken, and desperately in need of repair.

. . .We are an increasingly polarized nation. What we are seeing is the tail end of the baby boom. It's often been said that the baby boom postwar generation defined the nation's politics, it's culture and it's society.

. . . .It's also been said that the baby-boomers were perhaps the most selfish, self-centered generation in history, the most narcissistic. At this point, I wholeheartedly agree. When I keep hearing "I want my country back" and look at who is yelling it. When I hear, "Hey, we have the chance to finish what we started at Woodstock", I look at the age of who is saying it.

. . . .Give it up. It's passed us by, and our time is gone. Not going, gone. Yet, somehow, we cannot let go of the idea that we are the most important generation to ever walk the face of this country, and what we want, "we" being whatever group of baby-boomers has gotten together and rallied around one idea or another.

. . . . .It's their turn now, theirs.

. . . .Like Piney said to Jax in last season's ending episode of Sons of Anarchy "Time for a change".

. . . . . .Speaking of which, Season 2 starts on FX on September 3rd. And yes, I'm just a wee bit excited about it, kind of moist actually. Just informed by e-mail that Season 1 on DVD has arrived at the house, so Cody, go ahead and open up the box from Amazon and rewatch Season 1.

. . . . .Outta here for tonight. See ya tomorrow.

. . . .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.

Wednesday AM

. . . .Last night I dreamed I made it to the Promised Land

I was standing at the gate, I had the key in my hand

Saint Peter said "Come on in boy, you're finally home"

I said "No thanks Pete, I'll just be movin' along"

.. . .I ain't ever satisfied

 

Thanks Steve

 

Steve Earle "I Ain't Ever Satisfied"

Mid-Week Musings

. . . . . .So the question then becomes one that is philosophical in nature. How do you reconcile the fierce passions that reside within a soul, how do you find that balance point between all things?

 

. . . . . .I ask this question because I feel like going off on one of my walkabouts, that I do from time to time here, a walkabout of the mind, the soul and the heart, that restless searching that overtakes you as you walk down life's path, at least if you're me it does. I can't pretend to speak for every man or woman, I only know myself and at that, not well, or at least, not well enough yet.

 

. . . . .I'm prompted here by several things, so this may take a few days, who knows, as I divert from one of my passions, that of the meta-theme of politics, of tech, of culture, of economics, of rock and roll, of music and of news of the weird to explore this for a while.

 

. . . .I have to give myself that space, that freedom, that room to ramble in order to be able to put myself back into the discipline of not just writing about the subjects I write about, of not just trying to broadcast them thematically with voice and music and hope you catch the symbolic language that is the entire tapestry woven together.

 

. . . . .If you were to look back over the years that I've written this column, I suppose there's a book here, a novel, and maybe someday, I'll put all that together.

 

. . . . You see, for me, at least, I see all of those subjects as very closely interrelated, points that all come together. You've heard me, read me go on about chaos theory, about the mathematical study of complex systems and all their various disparate inputs and how those come together, and the probability waves can be calculated, so where and how the input points need to be tuned, tweaked, pushed, pressured in order to try and arrive at one of several probably outcomes.

 

. . . . Each of those things is an expression, an aspect of the human soul, and taken together, can paint the portrait

 

. . . . I wonder, and am in despair, at Doug's and Vicki's deaths. What drives that complete emptiness, that complete hopelessness? That need to complete the final act of complete control and punch your own ticket, end the ride before the conductor says it's time.

 

. . . .I don't get it, and I feel so sad about it. I don't know what's it's like to feel that empty and that cold. I've had my moments, sure we all have had, I think, but at the end of the day, I fight and I don't give up, that's one of my positive and negative characteristics both. When other saner, more balanced people than me know that a fight is lost, they walk away and accept defeat.

 

. . . .I can't

 

. . . I hung in longer than any human being would have or could have in a friendship that had ended and become one-sided a long, long time ago, in the stubborn belief that my friend would see what he was doing not to me, that's meaningless really, but what he was doing to himself, and the damage it cost him, but I couldn't walk away, not until the breaking point had long been past, and everyone else had long since left.

 

. . . .I cling insanely to the stubborn belief that somehow, someway if you just keep at it, eventually, anything can be overcome. I suppose it's the Irish.

 

. . . .I find myself these days, being willing to pay the price for my beliefs, for my doing what I know is right, for saying what other people are afraid to say, even if it means that I go it alone. It's worth it.

 

. . . .Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. Thanks Kris, still the best words written on it yet.

 

. . . .I acted dishonorably once, horribly dishonorable. I can never do that again, and find myself these days doing and saying the things I need to do to keep myself in congruence with that, to maintain integrity with my own soul and my own beliefs, it's worth it.

 

. . . .As I was privileged to Dance out there again this summer, I remembered why I'm here, and why it's a joy to be alive everyday, and grateful for it. As I prayed and danced, I remembered that I'm just a common man, but that commonness, that feeling of being connected to all things, to all people is the unique gift.

 

. . . . .There can be only one you, only one me, we are unique, each of us, but one connected to the other. All blood is blue on the inside, red when exposed to air. Each of us has the same frame, the same skeleton, the same organs and are more alike than we know, and less than we know. We forget that we are 98% water, that we are mostly empty space, electrons, protons and neutrons whirling around nuclei, yet something animates us, drives us, gives us that divine spark, gives us that understanding that the Universe and it's Laws are bigger than we are, that a Creator surely must have made us, put it all together, and we are just one piece of the puzzle, but an important piece, each of us a keystone in it's own right.

 

. . . .I am described sometimes as intense, passionate. Stubborn is another one that comes to mind, along with some others that are slightly less acceptable in mixed company. How could I not do anything other than what I do? How could I not live any other way than the way I live now?

 

. . . .With all of my flaws, my lumps, my bumps and warts, with all of the mistakes I've made and things I've done, I can know and remember these days, with some of the things I'm doing to balance it out now, that I am a good man, that I've been the best father I can be, the best son I could and the best friend that I was capable of being to people. I truly believe some of them don't know that to this day, I'd take a bullet for them, or kill to keep them from being hurt, but that's OK. All that's important is that I know it, that I believe that and that I act like that.

 

. . . So when I say, I got your back, I mean it.

 

. . . .Here's some advice, hard won, from someone who has seen far too much death in the last 5 years. Live every day like it's your last go-round on the carousel.

 

. . . It may be, you know.

 

. . . So go for it, what the hell are you waiting for?

 

. . . .All in, balls out, full throttle, pedal all the way down to the metal.

 

. . . .It's better to burn out, than fade away. Thanks Neil, for those words.

 

The Desolation Angel

We'll hold the last train home for you, don't worry

Tuesday - And it just keeps rolling on

Tuesday July 18, 2009

No guru, no method, no teacher . . . .free your mind

. . . .OK, so I'm trying to get my head wrapped around this whole Al Roker in the early AM thing on the Weather Channel, before the Today show. Where did that come from? Did Al suddenly wake up one day and say "Hey, I need a second job"? Did he take heed and a warning from Ed McMahon, another famous "second guy" who was in so much financial trouble when he died? Did Al say to himself "Hey, I'm a second guy too, maybe I should get another job, just in case, you know."?

. . . . .And speaking of the Weather Channel, and specifically hurricanes, a subject near, dear and personal to me. "Cone of uncertainty"? "Cone of uncertainty"? Come on! No, no, no, no, no. Stealing a phrase from chaos theory of complex systems (which a hurricane certainly) without understanding the probabilistic number theory behind it (the phrase) does not make something that translates to "We don't know" sound more plausible or scientific.
. . . .OK, right to it, we got no time to waste

. . . .The public option being dropped? There's some things that it's not. It's not the end of the world, and regardless, if any health care reform legislation at all gets passed, that will stand as monumental. Now, if that legislation gets passed and it actually contains consumer costs, and is revenue and tax neutral, all the better. I'm with Matthew Yglesias on this one:

Indeed, for all the fetishization of the public plan among liberals, it's worth emphasizing that the sort of plan being envisioned by congressional liberals would affect relatively few people. Moreover, the flipside of Barack Obama's promise that the currently insured won't be forced to change their coverage is that the currently insured also wouldn't be allowed to drop out of their current plans and opt in to a new public one.

Which isn't to say that the main plans currently being offered don't have a lot to offer the insured majority. In fact, they offer a great deal, most notably a set of consumer protections that would cap out-of-pocket health costs, guarantee access to preventive care, and prevent insurers from treating people well as long as they're healthy only to start monkeying around when they get sick. This would be a big deal. The bills in Congress also envision expanding the Medicaid program that currently serves the poor. This would only help a relatively narrow slice of the near-poor, but for those who are helped, the help would be enormous.

Finally, and critically, the plans in Congress aim to fix the broken individual market for health insurance.

Most kinds of insurance you can just go and buy for yourself. But health insurance doesn't work like that because nobody wants to sell an insurance policy to anyone who would want to buy one. The fear is that you'd let yourself go uninsured until you find our you're going to need medical care, and then go buy some insurance. This problem of so-called "adverse selection" means health insurance can only work when an employer can bundle together a big group of people, leaving the self-employed, the unemployed, and those working for small firms at a huge disadvantage. All versions of health insurance reform before Congress would offer a three-fold fix to this. First, force insurers to offer a defined set of benefits to all comers at a fixed price—no discrimination based on gender, health status, whatever. Second, fix the adverse-selection problem this causes by mandating that everyone get themselves some health insurance. Third, to fix the economic hardship this might apply to some families, offer generous subsidies to ensure affordability for all.

This would, if done correctly, more-or-less solve the problem of the uninsured. And those of us who do have insurance would be spared the insurance-related anxiety that's endemic in contemporary American life. No longer would the state of your health care need to be a dominant decision in making career choices, and no longer would the risk of job loss also be the risk of preventable death or medical bankruptcy.

The idea of the public option is that instead of the menu of choices available to consumers on this new individual insurance market ("the exchange") being restricted to existing private insurers, the government would also create a new competing entity. This is a good idea, that holds some promise for improving quality and reducing costs. But even without it, everything outlined above would still happen. That would be a huge win for the uninsured, the poor, the anxiety-stricken middle class, and ultimately for the economy as a whole. It wouldn't be an ideal health plan or the best bill you can imagine. But it's no exaggeration to say that it would be the greatest progressive legislative accomplishment in four decades, and that's nothing to sneer at.

. . . .Now, given that, and given the kind of rational, logical choices that we've explored here in the last couple of columns, who would be against health care reform legislation? Well. . . .how about those who have a huge financial stake in maintaining the status quo. Leading the opposition to health-care reform legislation, let's take a look at a rogue's gallery, and yes, it's about the money. From Margaret Talev at McClatchy:

Much of the money and strategy behind the so-called grassroots groups organizing opposition to the Democrats' health care plans comes from conservative political consultants, professional organizers and millionaires, some of whom hold financial stakes in the outcome.

If President Barack Obama and Congress extend health insurance coverage to millions of uninsured Americans, raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for it, and limit insurers' discretion on who they cover and what they charge, that could pinch these opponents.

These opposition groups appear to have spent at least $10 million so far on ads attacking the Democrats' plans. Still, supporters of a health care overhaul have outspent opponents by more than 2-to-1 so far, according to Evan Tracey of the Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks ad spending. Supporters include drug makers angling for their own protections, unions, the American Medical Association and AARP, the seniors' lobby. Supporters announced this week that they intend to spend $150 million promoting an overhaul.

The opposition groups' names sound catchy and populist: Patients First. Patients United. Americans for Prosperity. Conservatives for Patients' Rights. FreedomWorks. 60 Plus. Club for Growth.

Here's who's behind them:

Conservatives for Patients' Rights is led by health care entrepreneur Rick Scott, the co-founder of Solantic urgent care walk-in centers, which he's spread across Florida and is looking to expand. While 80 percent of its patients have at least some insurance, Solantic also bills itself as an alternative to emergency-room care and a resource for patients with no insurance.

Scott left his job as CEO of the Columbia/HCA hospitals during a federal Medicare fraud probe in 1997 that led to a historic $1.7 billion settlement. He wasn't prosecuted and got a golden parachute.

Solantic's growth, Scott said in a telephone interview, is due in part to the trend in which "deductibles and co-payments are going up. As that happens, more people want us."

FreedomWorks, which has been advocating against the overhaul but has not launched TV ads, is chaired by Dick Armey, the former Republican majority leader of the House of Representatives from Texas.

But also noteworthy are the group's other backers and board members. They include billionaire flat-tax proponent and former GOP presidential candidate Steve Forbes; Richard J. Stephenson, who founded Cancer Treatment Centers of America, which offers alternative as well as standard therapies, sometimes not covered by insurance; and Frank M. Sands, Sr., chief executive officer of an investment management firm whose offerings include a Healthcare Leaders portfolio.

. . . .I always say it, and I'm going to keep saying it. Follow the money!

. . . And the idea of co-ops that the Blue Dogs and centrist Repubs have run up the flagpole in the last few days as an "alternative" to a public plan. Drop it, right now, it will do nothing to lower costs for consumers. Sam Stein:

The health care reform compromise that centrist Democrats and several Republicans have indicated they'd support has shown an inability to effectively lower premiums for consumers, a newly resurfaced government study shows.

In recent days, a slew of lawmakers, notably Sens. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) and Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), have begun a renewed push to establish health care insurance cooperatives as an alternative to a publicly run insurance plan.

But there's a study at hand that undercuts the argument that co-ops would drastically alter the health insurance market.

The U.S. General Accounting Office produced a report on cooperatives in March 2000 that was mostly sour on the idea. Using five different co-ops as examples, the study concluded that on the key function -- lowering the cost of insurance -- these non-profit insurance pools came up well short.

"The cooperatives' potential to reduce overall premiums is limited because (1) they lack sufficient leverage as a result of their limited market share; (2) the cooperatives have not been able to produce administrative cost savings for insurers; or (3) their state laws and regulations already restrict to differing degrees the amount insurers can vary the premiums charged different groups purchasing the same health plan."

Part of the problem was availability. While cooperatives sought to provide more choice of insurance to participants, oftentimes they failed to get consumers a broader range of options. "Not all plans are available in all areas served by each cooperative, and individual employers using some cooperatives may limit the choice of plans their employees can select," the study concluded.

And without a large number of participants, co-ops essentially were subject to the whims of the insurance market, unable to use market influence to get consumers better deals on coverage. "None of the purchasing cooperatives we reviewed had a large enough market share to create bargaining leverage and therefore had a limited ability to significantly increase the percentage of small employers offering coverage in their state," the study found.

In fact, even though these co-ops were able to simplify some of the administrative functions of health insurance, the GAO concluded that they were unable to effectively lower administrative costs. "[W]hile the cooperatives tried to obtain premium reductions by assuming some of the administrative responsibilities of insurers, the anticipated administrative savings either never materialized or were not valued by insurers," the study concluded.

. . . .You wouldn't have happened to have noticed the phrase "insurers" over and over in the above piece,would you have?

. . . .And yes, the mendacity and audacity works both ways. Tom Daschle, one of the Dem's strongest proponents of their plan, is exposed in this piece from Time Magazine, as someone who says one thing out of one side of his mouth, but means another (that makes him a politician, by the way):

This is how Washington really works: Even a top liberal advocate for taking a strong stand against the insurance industry takes money behind the scenes from the insurance industry.

On Sunday, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who was once a nominee to be President Obama's Secretary of Health And Human Services, appeared on NBC's Meet The Press, playing the role of the liberal standard bearer, opposite Oklahoma conservative Sen. Tom Coburn. Daschle spoke out against insurers, praised the so-called "public option," and at one point framed the debate over health reform to host David Gregory this way:

Well, David, I guess the, the basic question is, are we building this new system for the American people or for the insurance companies? I mean, that's really the key question. How will they be better served?

Sounds like tough-talk from a man who was introduced on the show as "former Senate majority leader Democrat Tom Daschle, an informal adviser to the White House and author of 'Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.' " Left unmentioned was the fact that Daschle, in his capacity as a high-paid consultant at the law firm Alston and Bird, is once again working closely with lobbyists for UnitedHealth, the largest U.S. industry player, aiding the company's effort to convince moderate Senate and House Democrats to, among other things, kill the public option and keep company profits high.

A couple weeks back, BusinessWeek reporters Chad Terhune and Keith Epstein confronted Daschle about his role playing both sides of the health care reform debate. (The entire piece, about how UnitedHealth has already won the health care reform war, is a must read.)

. . . .The piece above mentions the article from U.S. News and World Report that this column reported on last Tuesday (see below) and reaches the same conclusions, that all of this is really just political theater, UnitedHealth really already has won the war, no matter what happens from here, they get richer.

. . . .Now, all that being said, it does point something out for me. Many, many readers make the mistake, a very bad one, and assume that somehow I'm a Democrat, a liberal one after reading me, and can't look at the detail that I put behind things, and get stuck on the fact that I absolutely loath and cannot stomach the current crop of Republicans, who are no more Dwight D. Eisenhower Republicans than a papaya is an ear of corn. They're basically a bunch of elitist, religious kooks who are just as interested in staying power as the ones they currently oppose. Now, here's the rub, and why I'm staunchly independent. I cannot stomach the current crop of Democrats either, these are most definitely the exact opposite of give-em-hell Harry S. Truman, a true Midwestern populist, firebrand Democrat. Now, the country is pretty evenly divided, in terms of political leanings vs. electoral college representation. There are about 4o% Dems, who will always vote that way, regardless; and about 40% Repubs, who will always vote that way regardless. That leaves 20% of the population to sway. Neither side is stupid, and is completely dependent on votes. That means that both party machines are in full swing trying to woo and sway voters in that narrow band in between and that's where their efforts are focused.
Cenk Uygur:

A Rasmussen poll now has the Republican Party as more trusted on the health care issue than Democrats. That's insanity. The Republicans have killed all efforts at health care reform before, they're killing it as we speak and they almost exclusively represent the interests of the private insurance companies who want to continue to jack up our rates (private insurance premiums have gone up 119% in the last ten years).

So, how are they winning? Because the Democrats brought a scalpel to a gun fight. The Republicans have attacked and attacked and attacked. Meanwhile, what has been the Democratic response? They're reaching out in a spirit of bipartisanship. Why?

Someone says they're going to bite your head off and will almost all vote against you, what is your purpose in continuing to reach out to them? They say they will under no circumstances vote for real health care reform with a public option, which you have said many times before is essential. They are in essence saying the only way they would vote for your bill is if they were positive it sucked. So, why do the Democrats continue to help the Republicans in killing this thing?

It is the unbearable weakness of Democratic being. They cannot find it in their hearts to strongly argue for their own position. To be fair, in this case, the weakness is mainly Obama's. The White House has clearly indicated this weekend that they have already given up on the public option -- and they're still begging the Republicans to work with them. Frankly, it's pathetic.

This continual and monumental weakness has a price. When the other side makes its case and you don't -- you lose. The Republicans never hesitate to make their case, even if they have to lie, cheat and scaremonger to do it. While the Democrats are scared of their own shadow. Obama is playing patty-cakes out there in his town halls. When is the last time he threw a real punch?

. . . .And that's the point I keep trying to make. The Laws of Physics, Thermodynamics, Mathematics and Logic all dictate the same thing. Force can only be met with an equal and opposing force; for an equation to be balanced, the other side of the equation must be equal. The Universe doesn't work any other way, and sprinkling pixie dust on it doesn't make it happen.

. . . .This next piece is rather long and complex, you may not want to read all of it, but some of you will want to. I'll summarize it and hit the high points, and recap again at the end of it for those of you who don't want to wade through it. However, some of you are truly geeks, numbers geeks and understand economics, money supply and the forces that work on both pretty darn well and are pretty smart people, so I'll just go ahead and put it out there. What it summarizes is something that other people, myself and 4 other economists (Roubini, Zandi, Stiglitz & Krugman) besides these 2 are saying. That the economy is nowhere near recovery, not on a local scale, a global scale or a national scale; that what we are seeing right now is a temporary blip, an upside bubble, but that's all it is, a bubble. The causes behind this trainwreck are very complex, and very longstanding, going back 30 years, and the foundational elements that created it are still fundamentally strong, and haven't been weakened that much and are still in play, and will be in play for some time to come. Michael D. Intriligator and R. Kyle Martin - The Rise and Fall of Artificial Wealth:

Overview:

Christina Romer, Chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, said she is "incredibly confident" the U.S. economy will recover within a year. We disagree.

The objectives of this paper are four-fold: 1) To discuss the economic growth associated with the rise in the temporary, hence, artificial wealth experienced by Americans from 2001 to 2006, 2) To discuss the economic contraction which we relate to the evaporation of this "nouveau" wealth, 3) To estimate the shape of the recovery curve for the U.S. economy as America rebuilds; this time with genuine wealth production, and, finally, 4) To provide suggestions that could speed the economic recovery while simultaneously enhancing the well-being of millions of Americans.

The projections presented in this paper estimate that the GDP of $14.26T achieved in 2008 will not be achieved again until 2013 and that unemployment will not fall back to a level of 6.25% until 2016. Our recommendations for speeding this recovery are presented in the conclusion.

The Rise in "Artificial" Wealth

Beginning in 2001 Alan Greenspan and the Fed began an aggressive campaign of lowering the target Federal Funds rate as shown in Figure 1. By June 25, 2003, they had lowered this rate to a remarkable 1%. This lower interest rate led to lower mortgage interest rates that resulted in both re-financing and housing booms; in retrospect creating a housing bubble. The lower monthly payments directly translated to a homeowner's ability to buy a more expensive property for a given monthly payment. For example, a person who was able to afford a $500K home in 2000 could now qualify for a loan to purchase a $750K home. This nouveau purchasing power drove a home-buying frenzy.

Figure 1: The Target Federal Funds Rate

This buying frenzy pushed valuations to historical highs when compared with conventional valuations, creating a housing bubble. Case in point: the ratio of total residential real estate to GDP, had been in the range of 0.52 in 1945 to 1.13 in 1999. Beginning in 2000, however, this ratio began to escalate in an almost uncontrolled manner as shown in Figure 2. These data were extracted from the Z.1 Flow of Funds Accounts of the United States [PDF]. By 2005 this ratio of GDP to Aggregate Housing Value peaked at a never before seen level of 1.72.

The key points that can be extracted from this ratio are that: 1) Housing values in aggregate became grossly overvalued by 2006 by a much larger margin than any time dating back to 1945 and 2) A correction in aggregate housing valuation had to take place, with declines back to "normal" levels

Figure 2: Aggregate Residential Housing Values compared with GDP

In order to arrive at a quantitative measure of what constitutes reasonable real estate valuations, we divide the aggregate household real estate in the U.S. by the GDP for the corresponding year as shown in Figure 3 over the same time-frame; 1946 - 2008. In this plot we've also indicated the upper and lower bands of fair valuation (FVBs) (Fair Valuation Bands). Figure 3 below indicates that in no other time dating back to 1945 did real estate valuations get so over-inflated.

Figure 3: The upper and lower bands for reasonable real estate valuations are determined by plotting the ratio of [Aggregate Household Real Estate]/GDP. Temporary Artificial Wealth was created when real estate valuations exceeded these historical norms.

The values used to generate this plot were extracted from the Federal Reserve's Balance Sheet of Household and Non-profit Organizations, Table B.100. Each report covers a ten-year time-span.

Not only escalating prices to over-inflated levels but also by over-building drove this over-valuation of aggregate housing valuation starting in 2000. It was, however, the over-inflated home values that drove the artificial wealth effect associated with housing depicted in Figure 4. It was this newfound wealth, which empowered homeowners with additional purchasing power. It was all these homeowners' new purchases that drove up corporate revenue and earnings and hence the overall stock market. For this reason, this paper focuses on the core problem that led to the situation this country is in right now; artificial wealth created by housing.

Figure 4: The artificial wealth created by residential housing is depicted as the green area under the inflation-adjusted Home Price Index (HPI) curve and bounded on the bottom by the linearly regressed inflation-adjusted Home Price Index from 1970 to 1999 and extrapolated to 1999 (dashed). The blue curve indicates the Nominal (non-inflation adjusted) U.S. Home Price Index.

Therefore, it follows that to bring aggregate home valuations back in line with historical norms, the opposite must occur; specifically, home prices must continue to fall and less new homes must be built in order to allow the over-supply to be absorbed by the market. However, before we move on to the recovery phase, let's review how this artificial wealth changed the dynamics of the U.S. economy.

Artificial Wealth and the Dynamics of the Economy

Heading into the new century, Americans grew accustomed to spending almost everything they earned. Their savings rate as a percentage of disposable income typically hovered around 2 percent between 2000 to the end of 2004. At the peak of the real estate boom in 2005 and 2006, however, the savings rate had dropped even further; averaging less than 1 percent and even went negative in Q3 of 2005. These data are plotted in Figure 5.

Figure 5: Personal Savings Rate as a percent of disposable personal income.

Coupled with escalating home values and looser credit policies, individuals were easily able to take on additional debt by opening up Home Equity Lines of Credit (HELOCs). These HELOCs enabled them to fix up their homes (e.g. kitchen remodels with granite counter-tops), buy new SUVs, flat-panel TVs and so on. Basically, Americans in aggregate went on a buying spree. To exacerbate the situation, homeowners were now able to refinance at low interest rates (e.g. 3.875% for a 5/1ARM). These lower interest rates lowered the monthly payments and put more disposable cash in the hands of consumers. This further fanned the flames of increased consumer demand. This inflated demand drove stock prices to new highs; e.g. the S&P 500 surpassed 1,500 on October 8, 2007.

American's 401Ks were doing very well; their home values were up; and they were flush with spending cash. So, life was good for America on average - that is until late October 2007 when the tide turned.
Americans' artificial real estate wealth started to vaporize as is shown in Figures 2, 3 and 4. The loss of value of residential real estate will now be estimated. The aggregate dollar value of U.S. residential real estate in Figure 6 was extracted from Line Item 4 of Table B.100 p. 102 - Balance Sheet of Households in the Federal Reserve Release Z-1 [PDF].

Figure 6: Value of U.S. Household Real Estate in pre-inflation-adjusted dollars. Factoring in inflation translates to an even greater loss of "artificial wealth."

Using the data from Figure 5, in pre-inflation adjusted dollar terms, the lost wealth of household real estate between the peak in 2006 and Q1 2009 amounted to $4 Trillion ($21.883T-$17.870T). We can get a more accurate estimate of the loss of real estate wealth by accounting for the additional loss in value caused by the devaluation of the dollar caused by inflation. Building on the solid work of Daniel R. Amerman, CFA, the true lost wealth from residential real estate should account for the devaluation of the dollar due to inflation. Amerman's calculations show that between 2006 and Q1 2009 inflation wiped away another $2T of wealth. Thus, the loss of wealth associated with single family residences amounted to roughly $6T.

To get a good idea of the magnitude of real estate wealth lost by an average American homeowner, Figure 7 depicts the 20 City Composite Case-Schiller Home Index. The median home price dropped by $60,000, or 32%, from $185K to $125K.

Figure 7: The Case-Schiller 20 City Composite Home Index for Q1 of each year since 1987

As Americans saw their real estate wealth evaporate, they cut back on their spending. This drop in consumption drove down corporate top-line revenue as well as earnings. This drop in corporate earnings negatively impacted stock prices. One year after the October 2007 peak, the S&P 500 dropped by 40% to 899 on October 6, 2008. Now Americans were confronted with two major sources of lost wealth; 1) Their residential real estate and 2) Their savings tied to the stock market; e.g. mutual funds in their IRAs and 401K plans. Therefore, the disintegration of this artificial wealth is really comprised of two primary components for the average American: 1) Loss of value in their personal real estate and 2) Loss of value of their financial investments. To further exacerbate the problem, the drop in home values has limited consumers' ability to obtain new HELOCs or request credit increases.

In certain instances HELOCs are either being frozen or the limits are being reduced. For example, after JP-Morgan Chase acquired WAMU (Washington Mutual), HELOC borrowers received letters requesting proof of income. For those individuals who lost their jobs, or experienced a major reduction in income, their HELOCs were frozen so that no further borrowing would be possible. Now that Americans' confidence in their ability to draw from their HELOCs has been eroded, they have become more aggressive in savings. This is both good and bad. The higher savings, hence, lower purchasing drive corporate revenues down. These lower revenues are being offset through cost cutting such as increased layoffs. America cannot rebuild its wealth on cost-cutting alone. We must create businesses that employ Americans.

A large percentage of the 76 million baby boomers born between 1946 and 1960 were not saving enough for retirement to begin with. On average they were saving even less when the were under the impression that their temporary artificial wealth was actually permanent. As they are heading down the home stretch towards retirement age, they will have no choice but to get more aggressive in their savings to make up for their portfolio losses and for the "loss" of their temporary real estate wealth. This upcoming phase of cash conservation will further put a damper on the economic recovery.

Many economists agree that full-employment corresponds to an unemployment rate of around 5%. So, let's use this as our target. To achieve this target let's look at where we stand today: The number of unemployed persons increased by 787,000 to 14.5 million in May 2009, then another 467,000 lost their jobs in June and another 381,000 in July bringing the unemployment rate to 9.5 percent . Since the start of the recession in December 2007, the number of unemployed persons has risen by over 7 million, and the unemployment rate has grown by 4.5 percentage points. This severity of this growth in unemployment is depicted in Figure 8:

Figure 8: The growth in unemployment in the U.S.

By the last quarter of 2008, the recession rushed in with full force in the wake of the huge disintegration of artificial wealth. Individuals severely cut their discretionary spending which drove down corporate earnings and hence the S & P 500 as shown in Figure 9. The truth had clearly been revealed that much of this wealth that had been created over the previous five or six years was actually temporary and hence created an Artificial Wealth Effect (Jesus Huerta de Soto Financial Crisis: The Failure of Accounting Reform. Mises Daily. Posted on 2/4/2009).

One of the primary drivers of the explosion in artificial wealth was the loose credit policies. Individuals were able to obtain loans for which they could not maintain payments of the long-run. For example, they were able to obtain 5/1 ARMs (Adjustable Rate Mortgages) which were either interest-only or fully-amortized loans with low fixed rates for the first five years. When these rates adjusted upwards many homeowners couldn't afford the new payments which resulted in short-sales and foreclosures.

The banks got stuck holding the proverbial bag; specifically, hundreds of thousands of homes were returned to the banks' possession. This devaluation of the underlying real estate assets gave rise to toxic assets in the secondary market. Toxic assets are assets that becomes illiquid when its secondary market disappears. Toxic assets cannot be sold, as they are often guaranteed to lose money. The term "toxic asset" was coined in the financial crisis of 2008/09, in regards to mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps, all of which could not be sold after they exposed their holders to massive losses where the amount owed on the mortgage was more than the value of the home - hence, toxic assets.

In a report released by RealtyTrac, a total of 1.53 million properties were in the foreclosure process in the first six months of the 2009. The "true" amount of toxic assets can be approximated by subtracting the value of the price the bank ultimately sells the home from the amount of the mortgage. The magnitude of this amount increases as the value of home prices declines.

Figure 9: Plot of the S&P 500 Index from October 1, 2002 thru August 3, 2009.

The Recovery

Now that consumer spending appears to have stabilized at an anemic minimum level sufficient for day-to-day survival, we should now look to the future of the recovery. As a starting point we evaluate previous recoveries to see how long it has taken to regain full employment after levels of high unemployment. In Figure 10 presents the average unemployment rate for the civilian labor force 16 years and over. Unemployment peaked at 9.7 percent in 1982, and it took five years for unemployment to drop to 5.3 percent in 1989.

Figure 10: U.S. Unemployment rate since 1960 for the civilian labor force 16 years and older.

However, in the 1980s, residential real estate was fairly valued when measured against GDP, so in the next section we take a critical look at how long the recovery will take.

Estimating the Shape of the Economic Recovery Curve

Since one can do a reasonably good job in quantifying the economic growth associated with this run-up in artificial wealth in both the real estate and equity markets, one could also estimate he shape of the recovery curve by understanding the dynamics of how the economy will be re-built in the wake of the vacuum left by the evaporation of this artificial wealth.

As a starting point, given that approximately 70% of the GDP is consumer spending, the shape of the recovery could be estimated by plotting the recovery forecast for each of the IBD 197 O'Neil industry groups and then aggregating these together to arrive at a total GDP and total employment rate. This obviously would be highly data intensive. However, by making a few simplifications we could start to get a good estimate of the shape of the recovery curve. The simplifications made in this paper entail analyzing several disparate key industry segments and then using these findings as a rough approximation for the aggregate US economy .

To start with, we will look at the largest sectors, which include construction, technology, financial services, health services, retail and so on. Within the 197 Industry groups, there are several groups that are essentially sub-categories of the larger segments. For example, the Building Wood Products category is essentially a sub-set of the overall construction industry.

So, let's start with the construction sector. In the U.S. Although the housing boom is long gone, government spending on infrastructure could rejuvenate this sector over the next year to eighteen months. Without any aggressive construction subsidies, the U.S. could look to Japan's lost decade of the 1990s. In the late 1980s Japan's real estate values skyrocketed. However, this was a bubble - it had to be - at one time the value of Japan's real estate surpassed that of the U.S. and Japan's land mass is only about the size of California. Once Japan's real estate bubble burst, it took another ten years for their economy to recover. Thus, if we assume that all of President Obama's shovel-ready programs kick into high gear quickly, it will still be another 18 months at least for the construction industry to get back to full employment. That's a good start. But, now let's take a closer look at the fallout from the residential real estate market. With the fall in demand for goods came unemployment. Those without jobs obviously have limited ability to spend. According to the American Banker's Association, the number of HELOCs which are delinquent by 30 days or more rose from 1.89% in Q1 of 2008 to 3.52% in Q1 of 2009. In parallel, the number of real estate foreclosures is rising. The bulk of Americans who are fortunate enough to be gainfully employed have dramatically cut their discretionary spending. Looking back to Figure 3, we see that America's savings rate hit a new ten-year high of over 4 percent in the first quarter of 2009. In order to end this recession, Americans must start spending. This will put others back to work to support the demand.

Looking at U.S. manufacturing production, it will take several years to get back to pre-recessionary production levels after drops of 3% in 2008 and 12% this year. The contraction in this sector is considerably worse than the recessions of 1980-1982 and 1974-1975. Kiplinger's estimates that of the 2 million manufacturing jobs lost since Jan. 2008, only about two-thirds will return by 2013 (Pg. 1 The Kiplinger Letter, July 10, 2009). Orders for big ticket items such as aircraft and farm and construction equipment from overseas are also being impacted by the worldwide recession and will take at least a couple of years to improve.

Let's continue the analysis by evaluating the consumer electronics goods sector. Americans need disposable cash before they will buy new gadgets. So, this market will be the proverbial tail (of discretionary spending) wagged by the dog (income). A rise in disposable cash must be tied to a rise in employment. Therefore, we must focus on identifying sectors of the economy where jobs will be created.

Next, let's look at the financial services industry. A large number of jobs lost in the financial service sector have vanished permanently. Even under a best-case scenario it will take 2 ½ years for those in the financial services sector to get back to full-employment. However, even then, many will be making significantly less money than during the boom years. Case in point: Mortgage brokers and loan officers. Even 2 ½ years out, the average income of those re-employed in the financial services industry will average at best 70% of what they were making during the boom years. Real Estate, both residential and commercial, is another industry in which incomes will remain significantly lower than during the boom years

On the bright side, there will certainly be solid growth in the health care industry as more and more baby boomers reach retirement age. The growth in employment in this sector is already occurring. So, this sector will help to offset a small portion of the unemployment.

In the automotive sector, new car sales just now appear to be bottoming out. Americans are holding on to their older cars longer and will buy new cars now only as they need them. Many want to wait until GM and Chrysler re-tool and come out with fuel-efficient vehicles. So, it may take this industry takes another four to five years to get back to healthy growth.

Now consider another sector - start-ups. Alarmingly, the liquidity crisis has put a damper on funds available to Venture Capital firms, which fund entrepreneurial start-ups. These start-ups would typically be an excellent source of employment. Even if the government made available billions of dollars to VC firms today, it would take at least a year for funders to develop concepts for companies and to raise this money. A year after that they would be up and running and beyond that they could be able to experience good growth. However, Mark Andreessen, the multi-millionaire founder of Netscape, predicts that hundreds of VC firms will fail over the next several years. Therefore, unless the government figures out a way to funnel capital into VC firms or sets up its own VC firms, new venture initiation will severely stagnate for years to come. Currently, many of the VC firms are staying away from new venture initiation and are channeling their energies on growing companies that are already quite mature. So, again, to experience significant employment by start-ups, we would be looking at 5 years out unless there is a major change of government policy.

After consolidating the bottoming out and growth prospects for each sector of the economy, one can see that the recovery defined in terms of both employment and GDP will be slow and painful. These recovery curves are projected out to 2015 in Figure 7 below.

Figure11: Projections of the recovery curves for GDP and Employment through 2015.

These projections estimate that the GDP of $14.26T achieved in 2008 won't be achieved again until 2013. They also indicate that unemployment will slowly improve until it falls to 6.25% in 2016.

Conclusion and Suggestions that could speed the economic recovery

The problem with President Obama's approach to date is that he has been trying to fix the economic problems with a top-down approach. Obama has essentially continued the Bush - Paulson TARP approach, bailing out huge banks, insurance companies, brokerage houses and some major corporations. This approach is similar to President Reagan's "trickle down" economics that didn't work then and that is not working today. Implementing strategic "bottom-up" initiatives would directly address the problems at hand by creating more jobs and by putting more disposable cash in the hands of homeowners.
In this paper we propose two major bottom-up policy initiatives which would dramatically speed the recovery by focusing directly on benefiting millions of middle-class Americans as opposed to pumping billions of dollars of capital into large financial institutions and waiting for the trickle down benefits.

These programs are as follows:

i) In the short-term, Americans would have more ability to spend money if the Government would pass a bill that would give homeowners the opportunity to convert their current mortgages to interest-only for some duration of time, e.g. one, two, or three years. This could put several hundred dollars of disposable income back into the hands of consumers every month during the duration of the program. For example, for a $300,000 mortgage with a 5.5% interest rate, the total fully-amortized monthly payment would be $1,703 of which $328 is principal and $1,375 is interest in the first month. By allowing this borrower to pay interest only, the borrowers monthly payments would be reduced by $328 (or $3,396 per year) during the duration of the interest-only program. This would be a virtually no-cost government stimulus.

ii) The government could tremendously facilitate the creation of new jobs by participating in new venture initiation through matching investment in Venture Capital (VC) funded start-ups in the areas of high-technology, biotechnology, and alternative energy. There are many start-ups currently seeking to raise capital. They have interested investors, however, all they need is an entity to lead the round. If the government would take the lead on strategic investments, a multitude of companies would be created which would add wealth to America in the long term. These government investments would have huge long-term benefit to the U.S. as a whole and they would promote keeping the U.S. at the competitive forefront of the world.

A comprehensive and cohesive solution to the current economic crisis could be implemented by expanding the above recommendations to include the following: 1) Expanding student loan programs which would lead to a higher-skilled labor pool, 2) Augmenting unemployment insurance to include an option for individuals to borrow, 3) Augmenting health insurance by enabling a larger percentage of citizens to qualify at reasonable rates (e.g. much below the current HIPAA rates which keep escalating) , and 4) Greater support for small and medium size businesses that are the engines of employment, investment, and growth for the economy.
The implementation of these program would form a solid foundation upon which the U.S. could re-build its economy and ensure a sustainable economic future for the country. If the first two programs above are initiated aggressively, the economic recovery will accelerate. Otherwise, we are in for a long and painful recovery.

. . . .To summarize, in case you skipped the entire article, which I hope you didn't, some of the data and numbers are eye-opening. The problem with the economic collapse and the approach this administration is taking to it is that it's nothing new. The approach, regardless of party is that same as it's been in every Adminstration back to Reagan, top-down, supply-side, trickle-down economics, which leads inevitably to the huge gap we've seen, a bubble that cannot sustain itself, except to make those creating it, riding it to the top and also hedging against the losses on the bottom richer. Two simple programs; not bank or investment house bailouts, not stimulus packages, not tax cuts, not supply-side injections of cash; two simple programs; Suspending paying on principal on home mortgages for some period of time, from 1 to 3 years and government matching of venture capital funds in biotechnology, alternative energy and "high" technology could salvage the economy both short-term and long-term. Yesterday, we went over just how bad the current economy really is, despite the declarations that the recession was "over", and it is grim.

. . . .In my own simple mind, these two things would accomplish several things - make "toxic" assets on bank books viable again, as the non-payment of anything is what makes them toxic. Paying interest would make them viable, and keep the banks going, albeit at a "real" valuation for them and the owners of those assets. That disposable income would now be spent on what are called durable goods, and put money back into the manufacturing sector of the economy, which has the whiplash effect of starting the profit cycle. Most importantly, the taxpayer funds that are going to prop up the banks, wouldn't be going there, and could be used elsewhere in the budget. Secondly, matching funds with venture capitalists in tech start-ups sends a clear message that this country is now starting to move past yesterday, and is getting serious about tomorrow.

. . . .I am growing increasingly skeptical, daily of the job that Geithner, Summers, and Bernanke are doing, and am more convinced than ever that the ultimate goal is only the strengthening of Goldman-Sachs and Rockefeller's JPMorgan Chase bank, and that any benefit to us is only a side benefit and crumbs. Where everyone else sees a slow recovery, I see another bubble building. It's simple, I watch two things, the price of gold, and the price of crude oil. Gold is only getting higher, while crude continues to be trading low, a sure sign. Oil is the world's heroin, when the heroin dealers are looking out 6 months to a year ahead and see low demand, and lower prices, they're generally pretty good indicators. Gold is the drug of choice for hoarders, those who look ahead and see the same trouble, and know that there's no money in trading back into currency, since none of it is going up (with the notable exception of the Chinese yuan, the nation that will eventually emerge within 18 months as the world's superpower) so they keep their investments in precious metals, and see that as a long-term viable option, not a short-term one.

. . . .Yet more advertisers have withdrawn from running their ads on the Glenn Beck show. (1) He deserves to be taken off the air. (2) It's about time that people started reacting responsibly to this kind of fringe-lunatic programming that masquerades as information. Best Buy, Travelocity, even Wal-Mart have all pulled their advertising. Now, we'll find out if Rupert Murdoch is serious about backing him, or if he (Murdoch) follows his own mantra and the dollars.

. . . . .I know that some days, it's like homework or something getting through this, but I think you're all smart folks. In fact, it's pretty obvious that I believe you're a lot smarter than anyone in Washington thinks you are. It's simple, I don't think the answers lie in Washington anymore, they lie in us. Keep reading all this stuff, you'll have a better understanding of it than listening to tne news will give you.

. . . .So, enough cheery news for the day

. . . .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.

Monday - Fresh Outlook, Everything Old is New Again

Monday August 17, 2009

No guru, no method, no teacher . . . . . .free your mind

. . . . .Fresh new week, fresh new outlook and perspective, but guess what? Same issues, same news.

. . . .I'm gonna tell you all something. Everything changed on Friday, everything, in 24 hours. I could feel it, and those feelings are never wrong. Something went on behind the scenes, not sure what, but it will play out this week. I've always said, I want the White House Chief of Staff's job. From the New York Times over the weekend. Rahm Emmanuel, the "most influential Chief of Staff in a generation."

. . . .The playlist. Well, it all comes down like this. The 40th anniversary of Woodstock was this last weekend, and that changed everything for a lot of people. Now, musically, everyone and his brother ran Woodstock specials this weekend. Well. . . .one of the greatest aspects of it for me, is that the re-release of the Woodstock album isn't really a re-release. What they've done is take every track, by every artist, from that weekend, and that's now the re-release of the CD set. Been listening to it all weekend. So. . . .I roll with it like this. What's going to happen is that I'll run tracks from that set all week, they deserve it. But, I'm going to mix it up with music from today, so it'll be one track from Woodstock, something new and so on like that. 40 years of rock and roll. . . yeah!

. . . . .So, last week, we spent the week on health care reform, absolutely necessary, and we're not letting off the throttle on that one. But a couple of other really, important things happened last week as well, kind of a classic "watch the right hand, so you don't pay attention to the left hand" kind of thing, around finance and banking, and for me, at least, in Afghanistan.

. . . .And we're not letting off on health care.

. . . .Because you know what? We, all of us, the collective, have a job here as American citizens. It's called fighting crazy, fighting stupid, and injecting some rationality and common sense back into things, getting it grounded in logic and facts.

. . . . .But the first thing we have to talk is the larger theme, the construct, the paradigm. Here's where that's at. People's anger is real, but I posit this, I put forward this proposition. That it wouldn't matter who the President was, it wouldn't matter if John McCain had won the election, we'd still be in the same position economically. I doubt that health care reform would be touched, but that would be due to the real bad guys in this equation; the pharmaceutical companies, the insurers and the health care providers who have pumped over $1.6 billion in lobbying money into the 535 Senators and Representatives, and the 3,300 lobbyists now registered as health care lobbyists, that's a ratio of 6:1. You can scroll down and catch last week's columns to see the fact and evidence behind both of those statements.

. . . . .As long as everyone stands on either side of the road throwing rocks at one another, as long as conservatives see liberals as the enemy and vice versa, as long as Democrats see Republicans as the enemy and vice versa, as long as we persist in labeling one another, marginalizing, disenfranchising one another, then the real bad guys continue to get away with murder.

. . . .And again, I will put forth to you that it's long pent-up anger with business as usual in the Beltway. I've watched the tapes over and over, that kind of emotion and anger is real, it's not staged. Now, getting that many people organized with the same slogans, the same signs, that's organized.

. . . . .There had to be more than one Medicare recipient, fully aware that it's a government-run program who was railing against "socialized medicine"; there had to be more than one congestive heart failure man or woman that can't afford health-care because their small business failed carrying a sign. There had to be more than one person who couldn't and can't afford chemo and that was also a McCain supporter.

. . . . .So, it begs the question, and it's one of the central questions that this column is devoted to; who are we missing in the logical equation and why do they not want to be seen?

. . . . .The question? Why do we want to keep in place a system that is more disease management than it is health care? Why do we want to keep in place a system that is irretrievably broken, wasteful and doesn't actually provide health care? (See last week's columns just below this one).

. . . .We don't have to, and there are rational approaches.

. . . .From the Atlantic, this month's cover story, by David Goldhill:

I’m a businessman, and in no sense a health-care expert. But the persistence of bad industry practices—from long lines at the doctor’s office to ever-rising prices to astonishing numbers of preventable deaths—seems beyond all normal logic, and must have an underlying cause. There needs to be a business reason why an industry, year in and year out, would be able to get away with poor customer service, unaffordable prices, and uneven results Indeed, I suspect that our collective search for villains—for someone to blame—has distracted us and our political leaders from addressing the fundamental causes of our nation’s health-care crisis. All of the actors in health care—from doctors to insurers to pharmaceutical companies—work in a heavily regulated, massively subsidized industry full of structural distortions. They all want to serve patients well. But they also all behave rationally in response to the economic incentives those distortions create. Accidentally, but relentlessly, America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results. Incentives that emphasize health care over any other aspect of health and well-being. That emphasize treatment over prevention. That disguise true costs. That favor complexity, and discourage transparent competition based on price or quality. That result in a generational pyramid scheme rather than sustainable financing. And that—most important—remove consumers from our irreplaceable role as the ultimate ensurer of value. These are the impersonal forces, I’ve come to believe, that explain why things have gone so badly wrong in health care, producing the national dilemma of runaway costs and poorly covered millions. That’s the premise behind today’s incremental approach to health-care reform. Though details of the legislation are still being negotiated, its principles are a reprise of previous reforms—addressing access to health care by expanding government aid to those without adequate insurance, while attempting to control rising costs through centrally administered initiatives. Some of the ideas now on the table may well be sensible in the context of our current system. But fundamentally, the “comprehensive” reform being contemplated merely cements in place the current system—insurance-based, employment-centered, administratively complex. It addresses the underlying causes of our health-care crisis only obliquely, if at all; indeed, by extending the current system to more people, it will likely increase the ultimate cost of true reform. I also believe that unless we fix the problems at the foundation of our health system—largely problems of incentives—our reforms won’t do much good, and may do harm. To achieve maximum coverage at acceptable cost with acceptable quality, health care will need to become subject to the same forces that have boosted efficiency and value throughout the economy. We will need to reduce, rather than expand, the role of insurance; focus the government’s role exclusively on things that only government can do (protect the poor, cover us against true catastrophe, enforce safety standards, and ensure provider competition); overcome our addiction to Ponzi-scheme financing, hidden subsidies, manipulated prices, and undisclosed results; and rely more on ourselves, the consumers, as the ultimate guarantors of good service, reasonable prices, and sensible trade-offs between health-care spending and spending on all the other good things money can buy. These ideas stand well outside the emerging political consensus about reform. The most important single step we can take toward truly reforming our system is to move away from comprehensive health insurance as the single model for financing care. And a guiding principle of any reform should be to put the consumer, not the insurer or the government, at the center of the system. I believe if the government took on the goal of better supporting consumers—by bringing greater transparency and competition to the health-care industry, and by directly subsidizing those who can’t afford care—we’d find that consumers could buy much more of their care directly than we might initially think, and that over time we’d see better care and better service, at lower cost, as a result. A more consumer-centered health-care system would not rely on a single form of financing for health-care purchases; it would make use of different sorts of financing for different elements of care—with routine care funded largely out of our incomes; major, predictable expenses (including much end-of-life care) funded by savings and credit; and massive, unpredictable expenses funded by insurance. For years, a number of reformers have advocated a more “consumer-driven” care system—a term coined by the Harvard Business School professor Regina Herzlinger, who has written extensively on the subject. Many different steps could move us toward such a system. Here’s one approach that—although it may sound radical—makes sense to me. First, we should replace our current web of employer- and government-based insurance with a single program of catastrophic insurance open to all Americans—indeed, all Americans should be required to buy it—with fixed premiums based solely on age. This program would be best run as a single national pool, without underwriting for specific risk factors, and would ultimately replace Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance. All Americans would be insured against catastrophic illness, throughout their lives. Proposals for true catastrophic insurance usually founder on the definition of catastrophe. So much of the amount we now spend is dedicated to problems that are considered catastrophic, the argument goes, that a separate catastrophic system is pointless. A typical catastrophic insurance policy today might cover any expenses above, say, $2,000. That threshold is far too low; ultimately, a threshold of $50,000 or more would be better. (Chronic conditions with expected annual costs above some lower threshold would also be covered.) We might consider other mechanisms to keep total costs down: the plan could be required to pay out no more in any year than its available premiums, for instance, with premium increases limited to the general rate of inflation. But the real key would be to restrict the coverage to true catastrophes—if this approach is to work, only a minority of us should ever be beneficiaries. How would we pay for most of our health care? The same way we pay for everything else—out of our income and savings. Medicare itself is, in a sense, a form of forced savings, as is commercial insurance. In place of these programs and the premiums we now contribute to them, and along with catastrophic insurance, the government should create a new form of health savings account—a vehicle that has existed, though in imperfect form, since 2003. Every American should be required to maintain an HSA, and contribute a minimum percentage of post-tax income, subject to a floor and a cap in total dollar contributions. The income percentage required should rise over a working life, as wages and wealth typically do. All noncatastrophic care should eventually be funded out of HSAs. But account-holders should be allowed to withdraw money for any purpose, without penalty, once the funds exceed a ceiling established for each age, and at death any remaining money should be disbursed through inheritance. Our current methods of health-care funding create a “use it or lose it” imperative. This new approach would ensure that families put aside funds for future expenses, but would not force them to spend the funds only on health care. What about care that falls through the cracks—major expenses (an appendectomy, sports injury, or birth) that might exceed the current balance of someone’s HSA but are not catastrophic? These should be funded the same way we pay for most expensive purchases that confer long-term benefits: with credit. Americans should be able to borrow against their future contributions to their HSA to cover major health needs; the government could lend directly, or provide guidelines for private lending. Catastrophic coverage should apply with no deductible for young people, but as people age and save, they should pay a steadily increasing deductible from their HSA, unless the HSA has been exhausted. As a result, much end-of-life care would be paid through savings.

. . . .Read the entire piece here.

. . . .I'm going to ask you right now, before you read today's further, to scroll down and take a look at Friday's post and it's chart at the top which tells us how much is being spent, per person per year, on health care right now (answers questions in the above piece on how people pay for it) and ready Thursday's piece with the sound, logical 4 point plan from our friend, the practicing physician and clinical professor at U.S.C. that matches the above plan point for point.

. . . .From my friend Matthew, over in Peoria:

I do however believe that Americans should demand more of the health care industry in terms of value. In most industries, prices are set by consumer demand (i.e. when prices go up, consumption goes down). Granted, health care is an emotional issue. However, I find most Americans spend a lot more time shopping for a car than they do for health care. Especially those of us with "great" health coverage. Why is it that insurance companies can get enormous discounts on health care coverage (Medicare included), yet as a consumer you would pay almost double? Could it be that we let the providers get away with this double standard? How many of us examine our EOB's as closely as we examine our restaurant bill?

. . . .So, here's my bottom line. As consumers, as people who should be in charge of our own choices, and demand more from the suppliers, we've screwed up. In classic American fashion, it's got to be someone else's fault for the mess, because after all, again in classic, whiny American fashion, we're good people, and we mean well, and whenever anything goes wrong, it's all Washington's fault, we bear no responsibility or accountability whatsoever!

. . . Rick Perlstein, in the Washington Post:

The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president -- too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters' signs -- too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don't understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can't understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.

In the early 1950s, Republicans referred to the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as "20 years of treason" and accused the men who led the fight against fascism of deliberately surrendering the free world to communism. Mainline Protestants published a new translation of the Bible in the 1950s that properly rendered the Greek as connoting a more ambiguous theological status for the Virgin Mary; right-wingers attributed that to, yes, the hand of Soviet agents. And Vice President Richard Nixon claimed that the new Republicans arriving in the White House "found in the files a blueprint for socializing America."

When John F. Kennedy entered the White House, his proposals to anchor America's nuclear defense in intercontinental ballistic missiles -- instead of long-range bombers -- and form closer ties with Eastern Bloc outliers such as Yugoslavia were taken as evidence that the young president was secretly disarming the United States. Thousands of delegates from 90 cities packed a National Indignation Convention in Dallas, a 1961 version of today's tea parties; a keynote speaker turned to the master of ceremonies after his introduction and remarked as the audience roared: "Tom Anderson here has turned moderate! All he wants to do is impeach [Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl] Warren. I'm for hanging him!"

Before the "black helicopters" of the 1990s, there were right-wingers claiming access to secret documents from the 1920s proving that the entire concept of a "civil rights movement" had been hatched in the Soviet Union; when the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act was introduced, one frequently read in the South that it would "enslave" whites. And back before there were Bolsheviks to blame, paranoids didn't lack for subversives -- anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists even had their own powerful political party in the 1840s and '50s.

The instigation is always the familiar litany: expansion of the commonweal to empower new communities, accommodation to internationalism, the heightened influence of cosmopolitans and the persecution complex of conservatives who can't stand losing an argument. My personal favorite? The federal government expanded mental health services in the Kennedy era, and one bill provided for a new facility in Alaska. One of the most widely listened-to right-wing radio programs in the country, hosted by a former FBI agent, had millions of Americans believing it was being built to intern political dissidents, just like in the Soviet Union.

So, crazier then, or crazier now? Actually, the similarities across decades are uncanny. When Adlai Stevenson spoke at a 1963 United Nations Day observance in Dallas, the Indignation forces thronged the hall, sweating and furious, shrieking down the speaker for the television cameras. Then, when Stevenson was walked to his limousine, a grimacing and wild-eyed lady thwacked him with a picket sign. Stevenson was baffled. "What's the matter, madam?" he asked. "What can I do for you?" The woman responded with self-righteous fury: "Well, if you don't know I can't help you."

. . . .Everything old is new again.

. . . .Paul Krugman, in the New York Times:

Sure enough, President Obama is now facing the same kind of opposition that President Bill Clinton had to deal with: an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency, that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex.

This opposition cannot be appeased. Some pundits claim that Mr. Obama has polarized the country by following too liberal an agenda. But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing.

Right now, the charge that’s gaining the most traction is the claim that health care reform will create “death panels” (in Sarah Palin’s words) that will shuffle the elderly and others off to an early grave. It’s a complete fabrication, of course. The provision requiring that Medicare pay for voluntary end-of-life counseling was introduced by Senator Johnny Isakson, Republican — yes, Republican — of Georgia, who says that it’s “nuts” to claim that it has anything to do with euthanasia.

And not long ago, some of the most enthusiastic peddlers of the euthanasia smear, including Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, and Mrs. Palin herself, were all for “advance directives” for medical care in the event that you are incapacitated or comatose. That’s exactly what was being proposed — and has now, in the face of all the hysteria, been dropped from the bill.

Yet the smear continues to spread. And as the example of Mr. Gingrich shows, it’s not a fringe phenomenon: Senior G.O.P. figures, including so-called moderates, have endorsed the lie.

. . . .Now, we spent last week debunking and truthtelling around some of the myths, lies and distortions being perpetrated around Health Care Reform (scroll down, see last week's columns on Monday, Tuesday & Wednesday). Let's go a little further into the disingenuousness, mendacity and audacity of some of the players.

. . . .We have such short memories. Doesn't anyone remember Terry Schiavo? An entire group in Congress called for direct governmental intervention into a family's, personal, medical decision. Now just who was it that led the charge on that and weighed in with opinions? Bearing in mind that we are talking about politicians and lawyers, the two lowest forms of life on Earth. Let's take a look at the list of players, all of whom now are decrying government intervention in end-of-life decisions and spreading the "death panel" science-fiction scenarios. (By the way, if any of it sounds familiar and is somehow ringing some sub-conscious bell with people, remember that Star Trek original series episode where the computer on some world decided who nee