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REMEMBER KATRINA!
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Dot Calm says, "Greetings, faithful Readers!"
Thank you for your patience with my webmeister (and younger daughter), the Scallion, who has been crazy busy lately because she recently started a new job. She and President Obama had the same first full day on their new jobs: the day after Inauguration.
Speaking of the Inauguration ...
My daughter, her husband, and Robin, my daughter's best friend from high school, braved the cold and the crowds to attend the Inauguration. Never had any of them seen so many people in one place before. It took them 3 hours just to get from their car, which they had to park in overflow parking several blocks away from the Metro station, to the trains. Ultimately, it took them from 7:30 a.m., when they left the house, until 12:30 to get to the Mall, which was already so full that they ended up in the overflow area, standing room only, craning their necks to see the jumbotrons.
They were amazed to see the place so packed.
They were even more amazed to see so very many people wearing Obama gear. The Obamas were nothing short of iconic that day.
They wondered, Has there ever been anything like this in American history? Has there ever been such a well attended Inauguration? They couldn't imagine so many people turning out for a Republican wearing Bush or Cheney or McCain or Palin shirts, hats, coats, scarves, etc. Laughable!
My daughter and her friend found the ceremony incredibly moving, as did so many of the attendees--hardly a dry eye in the house. The atmosphere was a complete celebration--a pervading sense of relief had snapped the last eight years of fear, tension, outrage, and stress.
Robin is of mixed-race heritage. She brought pictures of her deceased parents and grand-mother to the Inauguration to symbolize their approval--they surely would have attended in body if they could have.
The crowds waved their flags and cheered every time Obama opened his mouth. My daughter leaned over to her friend and said, in awe, Look--we have our flag back!
The crowd loudly boo'ed Bush every time he appeared or spoke. Although some of the attendees disapproved of the booing and tried to be kind, my daughter found the boos to be very cathartic.
Little did any of us know that our "fair and balanced" media would soon resort to calling the Obamas "trailer trash" (or simply "trash" here in the South, where we have so many white-skinned trailer-dwellers whom they dare not offend) ... or that CNN would accuse the Obamas of "gaffes" during their Springl 2009 visit to the UK ... while the BBC reported that the Brits went absolutely ga-ga over both Michelle and Barack. How funny that, thanks to our "liberal" media, our First Family is more popular abroad than here at home.
After the Inauguration ceremony, our brave little trio attempted to wend their weary way home. DC wasn't terribly organized--there were no cops to direct traffic where they were needed most. My daughter's husband saw the wind blow the trash right out of the trash-cans--the wind was horrific--and they knew that our "fair and balanced" media would surely blame all the Blacks who attended the Inauguration for being trash and for leaving trash, even though, as Robin said, the litter was no worse than you'd find at an equally well-attended concert.
The crowds were so thick that it was nearly impossible to find a place to warm up and eat the food they'd packed. The Smithsonian was open, but every building had a long line of Inauguration attendees trying to get in and get warm. My son-in-law suggested the Air and Space museum--even though there was a huge line to get in, it was a large museum that could accommodate more people. So, there they went. When they finally got in, they found wall-to-wall people, many of whom were asleep on the benches and floors from the cold and exhaustion. My daughter & Co found a place to sit on the floor and picnic on cold peanut butter sammiches and hot cocoa.
After they refreshed themselves, they headed home--braving again the cold and the crowds. Again, it took hours to get into the Metro station and onto the trains.
They considered themselves lucky to be walking back into the house before 7 p.m. They had hot Thai food delivered--and then watched the Inauguration on TV.
Was it worth it? I asked. Definitely! I'd do it all again in a heartbeat! my daughter replied.
With that, we bring you our latest catch-up post. Take your time and happy reading!
*****
What is a Plutocracy?The term "plutocracy" is formally defined as government by the wealthy, and is also sometimes used to refer to a wealthy class that controls a government, often from behind the scenes. More generally, a plutocracy is any form of government in which the wealthy exercise the preponderance of political power, whether directly or indirectly.
Plutocracy may also have social and cultural aspects.
Thus, in Democracy for the Few political scientist Michael Parenti is led to comment "American capitalism represents more than just an economic system; it is an entire cultural and social order, a plutocracy, a system of rule that is mostly by and for the rich. Most universities and colleges, publishing houses, mass circulation magazines, newspapers, television and radio stations, professional sports teams, foundations, churches, private museums, charity organizations, and hospitals are organized as corporations, ruled by boards of trustees (or directors or regents) composed overwhelmingly of affluent businesspeople. These boards exercise final judgment over all institutional matters."
The question of whether or not the United States could be said to be a plutocracy is discussed at length in Who Rules America, by sociologist G. William Domhoff. There Domhoff remarks: "The idea that a relatively fixed group of privileged people might shape the economy and government for their own benefit goes against the American grain.
Nevertheless, the owners and top-level managers in large income-producing properties are far and away the dominant power figures in the United States. Their corporations, banks, and agribusinesses come together as a corporate community that dominates the federal government in Washington. Their real estate, construction, and land development companies form growth coalitions that dominate most local governments."
In the US, plutocratic governance is abetted by mass media owned by the hyperwealthy and operated in their own economic self-interest, the failure to provide public financing to political candidates, poor oversight of the electoral process, elitist Supreme Court appointments, the organization of wealth into socially-irresponsible corporations, the collapse of meaningful regulatory regimes, plutocratically financed "think tanks" (propaganda distribution centers), and an impoverished educational system that has failed utterly to provide Americans with the elements of political literacy (all of which have their foundations in philosophy).
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If you tell the truth,
you don't have to remember anything.
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Has America Become a Plutocracy?Why the Clinton legacy is part of the plutocraticproblem. It was all about money and war, not theeconomy and justice.by Patrice AymeThe USA used to have an economy (say in 1940). Now it has a plutonomy led by a plutocracy, and it has not been good for the majority of people on the planet, including average US citizens, who are hurt and mystified. In particular the plutonomy created HMOs, making money from people’s lives.
The most extraordinary con job may have been the Clintons’ presidency, supposedly a democratic twin headed monster president, who prepared, helped and instigated many of the errancies the G.W. Bush presidency would soon more thoroughly implement.
To bring change to America means to get back to a real economy, and industry, away from just restricting the concept of economy to a strict plutonomy, a transfer of wealth from the poor to the likes of the Clintons and their friends.
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Money will not buy happiness,
but it will let you be unhappy in nice places.
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American democracy has been subverted:* The stealing of the 2000 and 2004 elections by the Republicans
* The take-over of federal and state governments by American plutocrats resulting in a one-party system
* The Supreme Court coup d'etat of 2000 resulting in a tyrannous Bush administration
* The use of opinion polls for plutocratic goals
* The American people failing to educate themselves to be able to institute a true democracy and take back their government from the plutocrats.
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The Holocaust was an obscene period
in our nation's history.
I mean in this century's history.
But we all lived in this century.
I didn't live in this century. –-Senator Dan Quayle, Sept. 15, 1988
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*****
Some Jingle Bombs for Your Enjoyment
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wskT6YfVB6E*****
Bush LibrariumCursor over everything so as not to miss the goodies.
http://www.goodnightbush.com/librarium/*************************************************************
Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day.
Teach him how to fish,
and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day.
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Dot Calm asks: YA HEAR THIS, AMERICA???http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/world/americas/08fujimori.html?_r=2&hpwPeru’s Ex-President Convicted of Rights Abuses Opponents of Alberto K. Fujimori, president of Peru from 1990 to 2000, celebrated the verdict that was announced Tuesday. by SIMON ROMEROPublished: April 7, 2009 CARACAS, Venezuela — A three-judge panel of Peru’s Supreme Court on Tuesday convicted former President Alberto K. Fujimori of human rights abuses and sentenced him to 25 years in prison. The abuses included the killing of 25 people by a military death squad created by Mr. Fujimori in the early 1990s as the country was locked in a bloody conflict with Maoist rebels.
*****
Just Look at the Picturehttp://www.debunking911.com/thermite.htm
*****
From The NationThe Death and Life of Great American Newspapers:
"Communities across America are suffering through a crisis that could leave a dramatically diminished version of democracy in its wake. It is not the economic meltdown, although the crisis is related to the broader day of reckoning that appears to have arrived. The crisis of which we speak involves more than mere economics. Journalism is collapsing, and with it comes the most serious threat in our lifetimes to self-government and the rule of law as it has been understood here in the United States ..."
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090406/nichols_mcchesney?rel=rightsideaccordian*************************************************************
If hunters "own" the wild animals
and presume the right to shoot them,
why don't people opposed to hunting
have an equal right
to "own" the animals and say No?
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A few words from Dot CalmCaution: may or may not be in free versedo you wonder if angela merkel is pouting
that she didn't get her back rub from
obama?? :/
***
this to my friends at the white house:
Could we please bring the SOLAR PANELS back to the white house? They were removed faster than R. Reagan could say SOLAR PANELS. That would be a good thing to do as well as set a REALLY GOOD example for the rest of the country.
***
this to CREDO ...
We are the laughing stock of the world as we watch this despicable person, Karl Rove, get away with crime after crime. If we can set a trap to cleverly ensnare a president for "lying" about sex, why in God's name are we all of a sudden wobbly-kneed about hauling this man's ass off to jail?
***
thank gawd i don't have a dawg in this polluted race.
So here's my crack at it. Synthetic CDOs were often invested in credit-default swaps, insurance like products taken out to protect against the chance that the person on the other end of the deal defaults. So a synthetic CDO hedges against default in the actual CDO. And as often the case with credit-default swaps, you don't have to own the underlying asset to you can bet against a synthetic version of an actual CDOs, which has as its collateral actual loans to U.S. consumers and businesses. You can see the layers of financial alchemy involved in this and why the house of cards came tumbling down when the underlying asset on which all of this was built, U.S. mortgages, soured as home prices fell. Long answer to a short question.
***
An Open Letter to Our Republican Friends...
Now be honest, you had to be proud of the way our President and his First Lady represented us on their first trip to Europe as President and First Lady. It felt so wonderful to watch the reaction of the Europeans. After eight long years of embarrassment, rolling our eyes and shaking our heads, the long nightmare is over. Sunshine floods heads, even though our country faces the most serious financial setback since the ‘30s. We know our president can’t solve the serious problems facing our land, we will help; we will help gladly because we know we’re working towards the same thing. The financial health of our country. What a weight has been lifted now that we’ve shaken off the paranoia that everyone is out to hurt us; to get us; to attack us. Remember what happened on 9/11/2001. How could we forget? No one was ever brought to justice for that crime. We were made to believe that an evil man in Iraq did this to us. Look here everyone...see? Saddam Hussein had it in for us and figured out how to run planes into buildings. See what he did? Don’t look there; look here! And so we followed the bouncing ball. Then, before we knew what happened Saddam Hussein was hanged from the gallows. How could we forget the image? Only one problem: he didn’t do it! When the administration could no longer hide that little fact any longer, they said: Okay, so he wasn’t responsible for 9/11...he was a bad man anyway. Have you ever wondered what it must have been like for Saddam? One day he hears that the United States is gunning for him. Why? They’ve always looked the other way when he slaughtered his own people. Who put the bee up their asses?
***
HR 875 Is Not About Food safety, It's About Genocide of Agricultural
Biodiversity.
One of the most potentially dangerous bills we've ever heard of is
trying to sneak its way through Congress right now, in the sheep's
clothing of so-called "modernization" of food safety. HR 875 (text of
bill) is a bill put up by Monsanto and other monolithic corporations
trying to seize totalitarian control over all agriculture. It was
introduced by Rosa DeLauro, whose husband WORKS for Monsanto, and is
ultimately about one thing, defining ONLY their own GMO products as
"safe."
What makes the bill so dangerous is that it is heavy on penalties
including prison time, while at the same time being incredibly vague
about what would actually trigger those sanctions. HR 875 is nothing
but a Trojan horse, with an invading army to be designated later, in
the form of an bureaucratic administrator (most likely a corporate
lobbyist shill) with draconian LAW MAKING POWER to make up their own
definitions so that all competitors are either driven into bankruptcy
or locked up. There are problems with food safety we can talk about,
but HR 875 is not going to make us safer, any more than invading Iraq
made us safer. It MUST be stopped.
***
this letter went to henry pulizzi at dow jones...
i'm sure the ceo of citibank feels he is
worth every nickel of the mega million dollar
order for his new corporate jet...especially
after seeing the fine jets his collegues were
flying in...then there is the "thane" god who felt
he was worth every last thread of new multi-million
dollar rugs for his multi-million dollar office...why,
there is simply nothing these jokers aren't worthy of...
right??
...all i have is gold-plated shower doors, plumbing
fixtures and towel bars...but they are not heated...
guess i'm just too low class...
keep it up, boys...as you continue to gorge yourselves,
remember the story of the golden goose?? looks like
you won't be satisfied til you kill it, will you??
***
remember this?
http://pubrecord.org/law/628-white-house-finds-14-million-missing-e-mails-doj-lawyer-says.html***
did you hear alberto gonzales can't find a
job? wonder if it has anything to do with
his amnesia??
***
found this on teh Interwebs...
tokin librul says:
People, people, people…
Do not be naive…
There is absolutely, utterly NO PHUQING WAY anybody in the Obama regime will try to bring ANY charges against ANY former Bushevik.
That is because there is not a single jury in the whole country that would convict any of them for ‘excessive’ zeal in ‘trying to protect the American people.’
We are ALL good Germans now…
Dot Calm and the Scallion think this is a grand way to spell our favoroite word!***
NOTICE:
following is the "official" (hear that?)
OFFICIAL (that means i really mean it!)
spelling of the word f**k ... ready?
the following is the result of several hours
of family collaboration:
phuque (n.) -- singular
phuques (n.) -- plural
phuquin' (adj.)
have a good day! :D
***
article by charles
sauerkrauthammer...
http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_12111866this may seem like nothing right now,
but these phuques are already planning
for the next election! i'm not kidding!
***
this to congess.org...
I oppose giving Congress a pay raise this year simply because ANY pay raise is ludicrous as we learn of its monumental dereliction of responsibility. Had Congress been more alert, this terrible financial debacle NEVER would have happened.
Consider Congress's objection to cutting pay raises and/or bonuses for CEOs et al and its rejection of the plight of the workers, further defining the government as a PLUTOCRACY.
***
please, will everyone intercede on behalf of
the "shoe thrower" in iraq?
i'm afraid the punishment will far exceed the
deed of this man...he is obviously frustrated
by the ruination of his beloved country.
i know americans would take action if america
were invaded, plundered, pilfered, its women raped,
citizens murdered, sweet children killed, museums
raided, electricity and clean water disrupted, food
shortages and the rest of the indignities the good
people of iraq have endured at our hands...
and Jesus instructed his Disciples before
sending them off to preach the Gospel:
if any town did not accept them and the
Gospel, they were to leave that town
and shake its dust from their feet.
this is more currently reflected in a picture
taken after the Chinese banished the
missionaries. it shows a pair of shoes tied
together and strung over a barbed wire
fence on the border of China.
I never appreciated the significance of shoes.
This is exemplefied in the Bush news conference
in Baghdad.
Recently, I learned that exposing the sole of one's
shoe to another is an insult in that part of the world.
did anyone watch frontline this evening?
***
the butcher of new bern
so i go for a blood test...i had too much
of the stuff...to check that the tegretol
isn't eating my liver...with or without
onions...this fat f**k, smelling of her
mcdonalds gourmet dinner...sticks my
arm and hurts me to the point that i was
trying to pull my arm loose...stay still,
she says...you're f**kin hurting me, you
****! now i shoot up every morning, which
i did this morning and NEVER hurt myself...
not only that...the last time i had it done
this beautiful asian girl put the needle in,
drew the blood, and put that little wad
of cotton on the site w/o my even knowing
when she was done! go figure!
how about that f**k b???ovich...or whatever
the hell his name is...ever see a pik of him?
they're gonna love him in the big house...that
perfectly coiffed hair...yummy, wouldn't you
know it...he's a f**kin dem...oh, my bleeding gums!
so we're bailing out this company, that bank, bail
bail, bail...then when general windows and doors
is looking for nothing more than a swing loan, to
meet their payroll, the f**kin bank won't give it to
them! aarrgghhhh...!
i give up!
***
Obama's Inauguration Gift
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/a-gift-for-the-down-and-out-the-inauguration/i think itz time to call this a DEPRESSION,
don't you???
***
Jdimytai Damour
it just isn't a workable name...i was thinking
this nat'l. shopping season should be in
memory of the trampled walmart worker...
but his name just doesn't lend itself...now
if his name was something like, bob smith, it
might have worked, but i just can't see the
name, Jdimytai Damour rolling off tongues...:/
***
look...read a little bit of this account of the
events of nov. 22nd, 1963...new players
appear with each book...this are 3 names
i've never heard of...
http://books.google.com/books?id=YOWNw_rmTKYC&pg=PA7&lpg=PA7&dq=Carlos+Marcello,+Santo+Trafficante,+and+Johnny+Rosselli&source=web&ots=j2VOuPkFvC&sig=P9KokWIVCe6l91SJGHICzIHfHxI&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=2&ct=result#PPA2,M1***
i don't think obama should rule from
the middle! a-h didn't, remember? they
came out with a plan to take down every
institution in this country...obama should
hit the ground running to repair the
damage that has been done!
the kyoto treaty treaty was the first
thing the fux got us out of...remember?
just cuz we were the biggest polluters!
***
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (a.k.a. Chavez: Inside the Coup) is a 2002 documentary about the April 2002 Venezuelan coup attempt which briefly deposed Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. A television crew from Ireland's national broadcaster, RTÉ, happened to be recording a documentary about Chávez during the events of April 11, 2002. Shifting focus, they followed the events as they occurred. During their filming, the crew recorded images of the events that they say contradict explanations given by Chávez's opposition, the private media, the US State Department, and then White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer. The documentary says that the coup was the result of a conspiracy between various old guard and anti-Chávez factions within Venezuela and the United States.
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Alternative Health proponents
want it both ways:
first, they say that your regular doctor
doesn't know as much as they do
and that conventional medicine is a failure.
Then, they claim that their products are
"clinically tested" and "scientifically proven"
to work.
Unfortunately, "regular" medicine is no more scientific.
They only think they are --
and they depend on you to think so, too.
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A Word from Bill MoyersApril 3, 2009
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the Journal.
For months now, revelations of the wholesale greed and blatant transgressions of Wall Street have reminded us that "The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One." In fact, the man you're about to meet wrote a book with just that title. It was based upon his experience as a tough regulator during one of the darkest chapters in our financial history: the savings and loan scandal in the late 1980s.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: These numbers as large as they are, vastly understate the problem of fraud.
BILL MOYERS: Bill Black was in New York this week for a conference at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice where scholars and journalists gathered to ask the question, "How do they get away with it?" Well, no one has asked that question more often than Bill Black.
The former Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention now teaches Economics and Law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. During the savings and loan crisis, it was Black who accused then-house speaker Jim Wright and five US Senators, including John Glenn and John McCain, of doing favors for the S&L's in exchange for contributions and other perks. The senators got off with a slap on the wrist, but so enraged was one of those bankers, Charles Keating — after whom the senate's so-called "Keating Five" were named — he sent a memo that read, in part, "get Black — kill him dead." Metaphorically, of course. Of course.
Now Black is focused on an even greater scandal, and he spares no one — not even the President he worked hard to elect, Barack Obama. But his main targets are the Wall Street barons, heirs of an earlier generation whose scandalous rip-offs of wealth back in the 1930s earned them comparison to Al Capone and the mob, and the nickname "banksters."
Bill Black, welcome to the Journal.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Thank you.
BILL MOYERS: I was taken with your candor at the conference here in New York to hear you say that this crisis we're going through, this economic and financial meltdown is driven by fraud. What's your definition of fraud?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Fraud is deceit. And the essence of fraud is, "I create trust in you, and then I betray that trust, and get you to give me something of value." And as a result, there's no more effective acid against trust than fraud, especially fraud by top elites, and that's what we have.
BILL MOYERS: In your book, you make it clear that calculated dishonesty by people in charge is at the heart of most large corporate failures and scandals, including, of course, the S&L, but is that true? Is that what you're saying here, that it was in the boardrooms and the CEO offices where this fraud began?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Absolutely.
BILL MOYERS: How did they do it? What do you mean?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, the way that you do it is to make really bad loans, because they pay better. Then you grow extremely rapidly, in other words, you're a Ponzi-like scheme. And the third thing you do is we call it leverage. That just means borrowing a lot of money, and the combination creates a situation where you have guaranteed record profits in the early years. That makes you rich, through the bonuses that modern executive compensation has produced. It also makes it inevitable that there's going to be a disaster down the road.
BILL MOYERS: So you're suggesting, saying that CEOs of some of these banks and mortgage firms in order to increase their own personal income, deliberately set out to make bad loans?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Yes.
BILL MOYERS: How do they get away with it? I mean, what about their own checks and balances in the company? What about their accounting divisions?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: All of those checks and balances report to the CEO, so if the CEO goes bad, all of the checks and balances are easily overcome. And the art form is not simply to defeat those internal controls, but to suborn them, to turn them into your greatest allies. And the bonus programs are exactly how you do that.
BILL MOYERS: If I wanted to go looking for the parties to this, with a good bird dog, where would you send me?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, that's exactly what hasn't happened. We haven't looked, all right? The Bush Administration essentially got rid of regulation, so if nobody was looking, you were able to do this with impunity and that's exactly what happened. Where would you look? You'd look at the specialty lenders. The lenders that did almost all of their work in the sub-prime and what's called Alt-A, liars' loans.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah. Liars' loans--
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Liars' loans.
BILL MOYERS: Why did they call them liars' loans?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Because they were liars' loans.
BILL MOYERS: And they knew it?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: They knew it. They knew that they were frauds.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Liars' loans mean that we don't check. You tell us what your income is. You tell us what your job is. You tell us what your assets are, and we agree to believe you. We won't check on any of those things. And by the way, you get a better deal if you inflate your income and your job history and your assets.
BILL MOYERS: You think they really said that to borrowers?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: We know that they said that to borrowers. In fact, they were also called, in the trade, ninja loans.
BILL MOYERS: Ninja?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Yeah, because no income verification, no job verification, no asset verification.
BILL MOYERS: You're talking about significant American companies.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Huge! One company produced as many losses as the entire Savings and Loan debacle.
BILL MOYERS: Which company?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: IndyMac specialized in making liars' loans. In 2006 alone, it sold $80 billion dollars of liars' loans to other companies. $80 billion.
BILL MOYERS: And was this happening exclusively in this sub-prime mortgage business?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: No, and that's a big part of the story as well. Even prime loans began to have non-verification. Even Ronald Reagan, you know, said, "Trust, but verify." They just gutted the verification process. We know that will produce enormous fraud, under economic theory, criminology theory, and two thousand years of life experience.
BILL MOYERS: Is it possible that these complex instruments were deliberately created so swindlers could exploit them?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Oh, absolutely. This stuff, the exotic stuff that you're talking about was created out of things like liars' loans, that were known to be extraordinarily bad. And now it was getting triple-A ratings. Now a triple-A rating is supposed to mean there is zero credit risk. So you take something that not only has significant, it has crushing risk. That's why it's toxic. And you create this fiction that it has zero risk. That itself, of course, is a fraudulent exercise. And again, there was nobody looking, during the Bush years. So finally, only a year ago, we started to have a Congressional investigation of some of these rating agencies, and it's scandalous what came out. What we know now is that the rating agencies never looked at a single loan file. When they finally did look, after the markets had completely collapsed, they found, and I'm quoting Fitch, the smallest of the rating agencies, "the results were disconcerting, in that there was the appearance of fraud in nearly every file we examined."
BILL MOYERS: So if your assumption is correct, your evidence is sound, the bank, the lending company, created a fraud. And the ratings agency that is supposed to test the value of these assets knowingly entered into the fraud. Both parties are committing fraud by intention.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Right, and the investment banker that — we call it pooling — puts together these bad mortgages, these liars' loans, and creates the toxic waste of these derivatives. All of them do that. And then they sell it to the world and the world just thinks because it has a triple-A rating it must actually be safe. Well, instead, there are 60 and 80 percent losses on these things, because of course they, in reality, are toxic waste.
BILL MOYERS: You're describing what Bernie Madoff did to a limited number of people. But you're saying it's systemic, a systemic Ponzi scheme.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Oh, Bernie was a piker. He doesn't even get into the front ranks of a Ponzi scheme...
BILL MOYERS: But you're saying our system became a Ponzi scheme.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Our system...
BILL MOYERS: Our financial system...
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Became a Ponzi scheme. Everybody was buying a pig in the poke. But they were buying a pig in the poke with a pretty pink ribbon, and the pink ribbon said, "Triple-A."
BILL MOYERS: Is there a law against liars' loans?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Not directly, but there, of course, many laws against fraud, and liars' loans are fraudulent.
BILL MOYERS: Because...
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Because they're not going to be repaid and because they had false representations. They involve deceit, which is the essence of fraud.
BILL MOYERS: Why is it so hard to prosecute? Why hasn't anyone been brought to justice over this?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Because they didn't even begin to investigate the major lenders until the market had actually collapsed, which is completely contrary to what we did successfully in the Savings and Loan crisis, right? Even while the institutions were reporting they were the most profitable savings and loan in America, we knew they were frauds. And we were moving to close them down. Here, the Justice Department, even though it very appropriately warned, in 2004, that there was an epidemic...
BILL MOYERS: Who did?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: The FBI publicly warned, in September 2004 that there was an epidemic of mortgage fraud, that if it was allowed to continue it would produce a crisis at least as large as the Savings and Loan debacle. And that they were going to make sure that they didn't let that happen. So what goes wrong? After 9/11, the attacks, the Justice Department transfers 500 white-collar specialists in the FBI to national terrorism. Well, we can all understand that. But then, the Bush administration refused to replace the missing 500 agents. So even today, again, as you say, this crisis is 1000 times worse, perhaps, certainly 100 times worse, than the Savings and Loan crisis. There are one-fifth as many FBI agents as worked the Savings and Loan crisis.
BILL MOYERS: You talk about the Bush administration. Of course, there's that famous photograph of some of the regulators in 2003, who come to a press conference with a chainsaw suggesting that they're going to slash, cut business loose from regulation, right?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, they succeeded. And in that picture, by the way, the other — three of the other guys with pruning shears are the...
BILL MOYERS: That's right.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: They're the trade representatives. They're the lobbyists for the bankers. And everybody's grinning. The government's working together with the industry to destroy regulation. Well, we now know what happens when you destroy regulation. You get the biggest financial calamity of anybody under the age of 80.
BILL MOYERS: But I can point you to statements by Larry Summers, who was then Bill Clinton's Secretary of the Treasury, or the other Clinton Secretary of the Treasury, Rubin. I can point you to suspects in both parties, right?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: There were two really big things, under the Clinton administration. One, they got rid of the law that came out of the real-world disasters of the Great Depression. We learned a lot of things in the Great Depression. And one is we had to separate what's called commercial banking from investment banking. That's the Glass-Steagall law. But we thought we were much smarter, supposedly. So we got rid of that law, and that was bipartisan. And the other thing is we passed a law, because there was a very good regulator, Brooksley Born, that everybody should know about and probably doesn't. She tried to do the right thing to regulate one of these exotic derivatives that you're talking about. We call them C.D.F.S. And Summers, Rubin, and Phil Gramm came together to say not only will we block this particular regulation. We will pass a law that says you can't regulate. And it's this type of derivative that is most involved in the AIG scandal. AIG all by itself, cost the same as the entire Savings and Loan debacle.
BILL MOYERS: What did AIG contribute? What did they do wrong?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: They made bad loans. Their type of loan was to sell a guarantee, right? And they charged a lot of fees up front. So, they booked a lot of income. Paid enormous bonuses. The bonuses we're thinking about now, they're much smaller than these bonuses that were also the product of accounting fraud. And they got very, very rich. But, of course, then they had guaranteed this toxic waste. These liars' loans. Well, we've just gone through why those toxic waste, those liars' loans, are going to have enormous losses. And so, you have to pay the guarantee on those enormous losses. And you go bankrupt. Except that you don't in the modern world, because you've come to the United States, and the taxpayers play the fool. Under Secretary Geithner and under Secretary Paulson before him... we took $5 billion dollars, for example, in U.S. taxpayer money. And sent it to a huge Swiss Bank called UBS. At the same time that that bank was defrauding the taxpayers of America. And we were bringing a criminal case against them. We eventually get them to pay a $780 million fine, but wait, we gave them $5 billion. So, the taxpayers of America paid the fine of a Swiss Bank. And why are we bailing out somebody who that is defrauding us?
BILL MOYERS: And why...
WILLIAM K. BLACK: How mad is this?
BILL MOYERS: What is your explanation for why the bankers who created this mess are still calling the shots?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, that, especially after what's just happened at G.M., that's... it's scandalous.
BILL MOYERS: Why are they firing the president of G.M. and not firing the head of all these banks that are involved?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: There are two reasons. One, they're much closer to the bankers. These are people from the banking industry. And they have a lot more sympathy. In fact, they're outright hostile to autoworkers, as you can see. They want to bash all of their contracts. But when they get to banking, they say, ‘contracts, sacred.' But the other element of your question is we don't want to change the bankers, because if we do, if we put honest people in, who didn't cause the problem, their first job would be to find the scope of the problem. And that would destroy the cover up.
BILL MOYERS: The cover up?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Sure. The cover up.
BILL MOYERS: That's a serious charge.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Of course.
BILL MOYERS: Who's covering up?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Geithner is charging, is covering up. Just like Paulson did before him. Geithner is publicly saying that it's going to take $2 trillion — a trillion is a thousand billion — $2 trillion taxpayer dollars to deal with this problem. But they're allowing all the banks to report that they're not only solvent, but fully capitalized. Both statements can't be true. It can't be that they need $2 trillion, because they have masses losses, and that they're fine.
These are all people who have failed. Paulson failed, Geithner failed. They were all promoted because they failed, not because...
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, Geithner has, was one of our nation's top regulators, during the entire subprime scandal, that I just described. He took absolutely no effective action. He gave no warning. He did nothing in response to the FBI warning that there was an epidemic of fraud. All this pig in the poke stuff happened under him. So, in his phrase about legacy assets. Well he's a failed legacy regulator.
BILL MOYERS: But he denies that he was a regulator. Let me show you some of his testimony before Congress. Take a look at this.
TIMOTHY GEITHNER:I've never been a regulator, for better or worse. And I think you're right to say that we have to be very skeptical that regulation can solve all of these problems. We have parts of our system that are overwhelmed by regulation.
Overwhelmed by regulation! It wasn't the absence of regulation that was the problem, it was despite the presence of regulation you've got huge risks that build up.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, he may be right that he never regulated, but his job was to regulate. That was his mission statement.
BILL MOYERS: As?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: As president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which is responsible for regulating most of the largest bank holding companies in America. And he's completely wrong that we had too much regulation in some of these areas. I mean, he gives no details, obviously. But that's just plain wrong.
BILL MOYERS: How is this happening? I mean why is it happening?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Until you get the facts, it's harder to blow all this up. And, of course, the entire strategy is to keep people from getting the facts.
BILL MOYERS: What facts?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: The facts about how bad the condition of the banks is. So, as long as I keep the old CEO who caused the problems, is he going to go vigorously around finding the problems? Finding the frauds?
BILL MOYERS: You--
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Taking away people's bonuses?
BILL MOYERS: To hear you say this is unusual because you supported Barack Obama, during the campaign. But you're seeming disillusioned now.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, certainly in the financial sphere, I am. I think, first, the policies are substantively bad. Second, I think they completely lack integrity. Third, they violate the rule of law. This is being done just like Secretary Paulson did it. In violation of the law. We adopted a law after the Savings and Loan crisis, called the Prompt Corrective Action Law. And it requires them to close these institutions. And they're refusing to obey the law.
BILL MOYERS: In other words, they could have closed these banks without nationalizing them?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, you do a receivership. No one -- Ronald Reagan did receiverships. Nobody called it nationalization.
BILL MOYERS: And that's a law?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: That's the law.
BILL MOYERS: So, Paulson could have done this? Geithner could do this?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Not could. Was mandated--
BILL MOYERS: By the law.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: By the law.
BILL MOYERS: This law, you're talking about.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Yes.
BILL MOYERS: What the reason they give for not doing it?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: They ignore it. And nobody calls them on it.
BILL MOYERS: Well, where's Congress? Where's the press? Where--
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, where's the Pecora investigation?
BILL MOYERS: The what?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: The Pecora investigation. The Great Depression, we said, "Hey, we have to learn the facts. What caused this disaster, so that we can take steps, like pass the Glass-Steagall law, that will prevent future disasters?" Where's our investigation?
What would happen if after a plane crashes, we said, "Oh, we don't want to look in the past. We want to be forward looking. Many people might have been, you know, we don't want to pass blame. No. We have a nonpartisan, skilled inquiry. We spend lots of money on, get really bright people. And we find out, to the best of our ability, what caused every single major plane crash in America. And because of that, aviation has an extraordinarily good safety record. We ought to follow the same policies in the financial sphere. We have to find out what caused the disasters, or we will keep reliving them. And here, we've got a double tragedy. It isn't just that we are failing to learn from the mistakes of the past. We're failing to learn from the successes of the past.
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: In the Savings and Loan debacle, we developed excellent ways for dealing with the frauds, and for dealing with the failed institutions. And for 15 years after the Savings and Loan crisis, didn't matter which party was in power, the U.S. Treasury Secretary would fly over to Tokyo and tell the Japanese, "You ought to do things the way we did in the Savings and Loan crisis, because it worked really well. Instead you're covering up the bank losses, because you know, you say you need confidence. And so, we have to lie to the people to create confidence. And it doesn't work. You will cause your recession to continue and continue." And the Japanese call it the lost decade. That was the result. So, now we get in trouble, and what do we do? We adopt the Japanese approach of lying about the assets. And you know what? It's working just as well as it did in Japan.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah. Are you saying that Timothy Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, and others in the administration, with the banks, are engaged in a cover up to keep us from knowing what went wrong?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Absolutely.
BILL MOYERS: You are.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Absolutely, because they are scared to death. All right? They're scared to death of a collapse. They're afraid that if they admit the truth, that many of the large banks are insolvent. They think Americans are a bunch of cowards, and that we'll run screaming to the exits. And we won't rely on deposit insurance. And, by the way, you can rely on deposit insurance. And it's foolishness. All right? Now, it may be worse than that. You can impute more cynical motives. But I think they are sincerely just panicked about, "We just can't let the big banks fail." That's wrong.
BILL MOYERS: But what might happen, at this point, if in fact they keep from us the true health of the banks?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, then the banks will, as they did in Japan, either stay enormously weak, or Treasury will be forced to increasingly absurd giveaways of taxpayer money. We've seen how horrific AIG -- and remember, they kept secrets from everyone.
BILL MOYERS: A.I.G. did?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: What we're doing with -- no, Treasury and both administrations. The Bush administration and now the Obama administration kept secret from us what was being done with AIG. AIG was being used secretly to bail out favored banks like UBS and like Goldman Sachs. Secretary Paulson's firm, that he had come from being CEO. It got the largest amount of money. $12.9 billion. And they didn't want us to know that. And it was only Congressional pressure, and not Congressional pressure, by the way, on Geithner, but Congressional pressure on AIG.
Where Congress said, "We will not give you a single penny more unless we know who received the money." And, you know, when he was Treasury Secretary, Paulson created a recommendation group to tell Treasury what they ought to do with AIG. And he put Goldman Sachs on it.
BILL MOYERS: Even though Goldman Sachs had a big vested stake.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Massive stake. And even though he had just been CEO of Goldman Sachs before becoming Treasury Secretary. Now, in most stages in American history, that would be a scandal of such proportions that he wouldn't be allowed in civilized society.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah, like a conflict of interest, it seems.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Massive conflict of interests.
BILL MOYERS: So, how did he get away with it?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: I don't know whether we've lost our capability of outrage. Or whether the cover up has been so successful that people just don't have the facts to react to it.
BILL MOYERS: Who's going to get the facts?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: We need some chairmen or chairwomen--
BILL MOYERS: In Congress.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: --in Congress, to hold the necessary hearings. And we can blast this out. But if you leave the failed CEOs in place, it isn't just that they're terrible business people, though they are. It isn't just that they lack integrity, though they do. Because they were engaged in these frauds. But they're not going to disclose the truth about the assets.
BILL MOYERS: And we have to know that, in order to know what?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: To know everything. To know who committed the frauds. Whose bonuses we should recover. How much the assets are worth. How much they should be sold for. Is the bank insolvent, such that we should resolve it in this way? It's the predicate, right? You need to know the facts to make intelligent decisions. And they're deliberately leaving in place the people that caused the problem, because they don't want the facts. And this is not new. The Reagan Administration's central priority, at all times, during the Savings and Loan crisis, was covering up the losses.
BILL MOYERS: So, you're saying that people in power, political power, and financial power, act in concert when their own behinds are in the ringer, right?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: That's right. And it's particularly a crisis that brings this out, because then the class of the banker says, "You've got to keep the information away from the public or everything will collapse. If they understand how bad it is, they'll run for the exits."
BILL MOYERS: Yeah, and this week in New York, at this conference, you described this as more than a financial crisis. You called it a moral crisis.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Yes.
BILL MOYERS: Why?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Because it is a fundamental lack of integrity. But also because, if you look back at crises, an economist who is also a presidential appointee, as a regulator in the Savings and Loan industry, right here in New York, Larry White, wrote a book about the Savings and Loan crisis. And he said, you know, one of the most interesting questions is why so few people engaged in fraud? Because objectively, you could have gotten away with it. But only about ten percent of the CEOs, engaged in fraud. So, 90 percent of them were restrained by ethics and integrity. So, far more than law or by F.B.I. agents, it's our integrity that often prevents the greatest abuses. And what we had in this crisis, instead of the Savings and Loan, is the most elite institutions in America engaging or facilitating fraud.
BILL MOYERS: This wound that you say has been inflicted on American life. The loss of worker's income. And security and pensions and future happened, because of the misconduct of a relatively few, very well-heeled people, in very well-decorated corporate suites, right?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Right.
BILL MOYERS: It was relatively a handful of people.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: And their ideologies, which swept away regulation. So, in the example, regulation means that cheaters don't prosper. So, instead of being bad for capitalism, it's what saves capitalism. "Honest purveyors prosper" is what we want. And you need regulation and law enforcement to be able to do this. The tragedy of this crisis is it didn't need to happen at all.
BILL MOYERS: When you wake in the middle of the night, thinking about your work, what do you make of that? What do you tell yourself?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: There's a saying that we took great comfort in. It's actually by the Dutch, who were fighting this impossible war for independence against what was then the most powerful nation in the world, Spain. And their motto was, "It is not necessary to hope in order to persevere."
Now, going forward, get rid of the people that have caused the problems. That's a pretty straightforward thing, as well. Why would we keep CEOs and CFOs and other senior officers, that caused the problems? That's facially nuts. That's our current system.
So stop that current system. We're hiding the losses, instead of trying to find out the real losses. Stop that, because you need good information to make good decisions, right? Follow what works instead of what's failed. Start appointing people who have records of success, instead of records of failure. That would be another nice place to start. There are lots of things we can do. Even today, as late as it is. Even though they've had a terrible start to the administration. They could change, and they could change within weeks. And by the way, the folks who are the better regulators, they paid their taxes. So, you can get them through the vetting process a lot quicker.
BILL MOYERS: William Black, thank you very much for being with me on the Journal.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Thank you so much.
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Always remember you're unique.
Just like everyone else.
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Articles The Scallion Found in Her TravelsWhy Sarah Palin is Brainless and Why it Mattershttp://www.newsweek.com/id/160080/page/1The Psychology of Fundieshttp://www.counterpunch.org/davis01082005.html*************************************************************
Don't be irreplaceable.
If you can't be replaced,
you can't be promoted.
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A Letter from Dot Calm to Saxby ChamblissCongratulations! Must admit I was rooting for Jim Martin, tho. It's a matter of character, or better yet, Christianity. And we all know how important it is to demonstrate our Christianity these days, no matter how hypocritical we may be. Funny how one just can't forget a mean-spirited remark. Unless one happens to be a Georgian. Since I'm not, thank God, it still gives me a chill thinking those weird voters chose you, a Vietnam draft dodger, over Max Clelland, who left three limbs there. Guess the Georgian voters might have voted for him if only he left one more limb, right?
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As a cynic, I generally expect the worst.
I'm rarely disappointed.
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A Letter from Dot Calm to Senator ShelbyDear Senator Shelby:
As you know the economy in America is strained.
Jobs and our national security are in danger; one
reason being the instability in the automobile
industry.
We MUST have a viable automobile industry infra-
structure. Please do NOT filibuster attempts to
save this important industry.
America cannot, nor should it become dependent
on other nations, as you suggest, for its automobiles.
To do less than support the industry in its time of need
would label you a traitor!
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A censor is someone
who views pornography all day
but does not get corrupted,
even though he is certain you would be.
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A Letter from Dot Calm to Thom HartmannThom — You give these Ayn Randians too much air time without giving their opposition any air time.
Randians haven’t won any elections. They’re a small percentage of people.
Randians say they don’t want controls on the market, but here’s the key.
It isn’t that Randians don’t want controls on the economy: it’s that they don’t want government controls on the economy — they have no objection to the controls inherent in monopolies and back-room deals. Isn’t that control too? They don’t seem to object to stopping unions. Isn’t that control? Lobbyists perform control of a sort too. I haven’t heard Randians condemning that kind of control.
What opposition? you say. How about some real long-term solutions, rather than just trying to get the government to rescue us. While I agree that one of the functions of government is to keep things fair and keep the playing field level, governments are short-sighted and not creative; they react rather than invent.
The long-term solution we pose is to stop artificially propping up old-fashioned cut-throat feudal Capitalism and let it evolve to the next incarnation of capitalism: Co-operative or Progressive Capitalism. If businesses, big and small, were owned by the workers rather than stock-holders, many of the evils inherent in hierarchical Capitalism would go away naturally: if workers owned the business and shared the profit (or loss), they would be motivated to work to the very best of their ability; they would run the business democratically, thus learning democracy on a very real level; and the business would be run for long-term viability rather than short-term profit percentage.
One of the evils built into stock-based Capitalism that most people are unaware of is that, to keep the stock value up (and that’s what businesses depend on to stay afloat), they don’t just have to be profitable, or have increasing profit, they must have an increasing PERCENTAGE of profit. That means a business that is doing well, making a steady profit, selling a steadily increasing amount of their product, paying all of their bills with money left over, is, in stock market terms, failing.
In order to have an increasing PERCENTAGE of profit, the costs of manufacturing (or advertising, or whatever) must be a steadily decreasing percentage of the equation. This means the company must keep decreasing the cost of labor and/or materials. That means overstressed workers, poorer quality materials, or cheating someone somewhere. Stock-based Capitalism demands underpaid workers and poorly made goods in order to feed the ever-growing need for profit for the stock-holders, who do no work, but “let their money work for them.” That’s another way of saying the game is rigged to make the rich richer and the poor and middle poorer. It’s a part of the system, it’s the only way it CAN work when it’s set up that way.
If the workers own the company, instead of the stockholders, the company only needs to make enough money to keep paying its workers, buy materials, do Research and Development, and do maintenance. The drive is to keep the business alive, long-term, by providing a superior product at a fair price and paying the workers a living wage. This builds a strong middle class which has money to buy things, which keeps the economy going. (And Yes, tariffs are needed to keep this fair.)
In Argentina, workers have been taking over abandoned factories (and other businesses) and running them. They face artificial difficulties in that there are conspiracies fighting against them succeeding, both in government and in businesses owned by Economic Royalists. But they are succeeding anyway. More slowly than we would like, but they are.
This is the next stage of the evolution of Capitalism. Businesses still compete against each other in an open marketplace. But the people who do the real work also get the reward for the work and the responsibility of the sense of ownership. The quality of goods and materials would improve. We win all ’round.
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A Zen master once said to me,
"Do the opposite of whatever I tell you."
So I didn't.
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A Letter from Dot Calm to the Honorable Scott Thomas3B Prosecutorial District AttorneyPlease consider bringing charges against George Bush for unAmerican behavior...in fact, traitorous behavior while holding the highest office in the land. George Bush started a war with a country that did us no harm. In doing so, he ended the lives of many of our servicemen and women and depleted our treasury.
In addition to the unnecessary waste mentioned above, George Bush is responsible for the deaths of countless Iraqi men, women, and children.
Regarding Dick Cheney, his vengeful behavior in outing a CIA operative, Valerie Plame, was dangerous on so many levels, the most dangerous being her safety. But Cheney also brought down a front organization that Plame and others worked through. The expense of Cheney’s little tantrum was not only costly, it put an American operative’s life in danger.
Sincerely,
A concerned American
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Some people drink from the fountain of knowledge;
others just gargle.
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A Letter from Dot Calm to Speaker Pelosi on Universal Health CareDear Speaker Pelosi:
A National Health Care System would certainly improve our GNP by supporting a healthy populace in addition to covering every American.
Speaker Pelosi, I know you and indeed all members of Congress have excellent health care coverage. I’m grateful to say I do, too. Eight years ago, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. MS is a disease of the nervous system. I use a daily injection system called Copaxone. This drug slows the process of the disease spreading to other parts of my body, especially my brain.
It is scary to be me these days. But I don’t have the daily concern of paying the $16,000/year for the injections it takes to maintain my current level of ability.
It saddens me to know the United States is the only developed country in the world that does not cover its citizens with universal health care. This is a travesty that has been perpetuated way too long. It is time to stop blaming this political party or that one and put the wheels in motion for universal health care.
Respectfully,
Dot Calm
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No one is listening until you fart.
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A Martha Stewart Thanksgiving?!Dot Calm's amazing older daughter (aka the Scallion's Wonder Woman sister) e-mailed the family the funniest Thanksgiving story any of us had ever read. Unfortunately, the webmeister (aka the Scallion) can't track down all of Act 1. Oh well! The rest of it stands on its own pretty well. The Scallion, who has met Fred and Ethel, says that she'd rather have her own mother-in-law for two years than Fred and Ethel for two days. And considering that the Scallion finally had to resort to blackmail and taking bribes to keep herself from killing her mother-in-law and hiding the body by the time the woman finally moved back into her own home, it's safe to say that the comparison is not a compliment.Act 1: Emptying the dishwasher so I can get ready to cook. Suddenly, Fred toddles his walker right smack into the middle of the kitchen and stops cold, grinding everyone and everything to a halt. Must...have...Cheerios...now...! "Dad, can't it wait?" pleads one of his sons. MUST...HAVE...CHEERIOS...NOW! I pop a Lexapro. That's better.
Act 2: Ethel making turkey sandwiches for herself and Fred for lunch. I say, "Ethel, there are chips in the pantry if you like." "Ah, no. We don't eat those." OK. Fine. Soooooo, I skip to the bathroom to take a long overdue shower and enjoy some alone time. Suddenly I hear, "Fred? Do you want some chips?" "Sure." ...Just shoot me...PLEASE!
Act 3: Two -- count 'em -- two book reports due tomorrow. My older daughter is all proud of herself when she declares to one and all she's all done and wants to know if her friend can come over and play. (Why is it they NEVER play at the friend's house?) I say, "Let me see what you have." I look at her summary. The name of the book is, "The Best Year Ever." According to my daughter, the main character's name is Huckleberry Finn. Call it a hunch, but I suspected that wasn't right. Soooooo, I start reading the book. Opening line reads, "Unless you are Huckleberry Finn, the first day of school isn't too bad." Ah ha! Just as I thought! Crap!!! Now I have to break the bad news to the Drama Queen. This isn't going to be pretty. So I pop a Lexapro, wash it down with a Sea Breeze and gently tell her the main character isn't HF. I wince and hold my breath. A flood of emotions takes control of her. My daughter (hysterically): "But Mommy! Now I'll have to do the whole thing over." I think to myself, "Yep. Sucks to be you." But I softly explain about "Find & Replace." Let's read together and figure out the main character's name. On page 14, the mystery is finally solved! It's actually a little girl. Not a boy. Her name is Beth Bradley. Good. She believes me now. But I know deep in her heart she thinks I'm an evil bitch!
I stuck my husband with the other daughter and her book report. Yeah me!
Act 4: Time to fix another meal. Aren't these people ever full???
Act 5: If you thought my older daughter's book report was bad, wait till I tell you about Math! She shoves a packet of math pages in front of me and asks me to sign them. OK. First one is an 88. Not great, but I can live with it. Next one is a 76. Hum. Not working for me. Soooooo, I say, "Tell me about this." "It's OK, Mommy. The test is over." Is that so? "Do you know what you did wrong?" "Yes, Mommy." "OK. Then it will only take a minute to write out the corrections to the ones you got wrong." Shit! Here come the tears again! "But the test is over, you evil bitch!" Sooooooo, I start reading her math book and learning all about compatible numbers. Then, I teach it to my daughter. More tears. Another Lexapro and a swig of the Sea Breeze. I neatly write out on theme paper all the questions she got wrong. There was nothing I'd rather be doing -- except for maybe preparing another meal for The Insatiables. She reluctantly completes everything. I then sign all the papers and staple them to her packet so the teacher can see that, even though I work full time and entertain, I am an involved Mommy.
Epilogue: the Math teacher gave my older daughter extra credit for all the work she did and told her to thank me! How 'bout THAT?
Fred and Ethel are on de plane...de plane.....
All will be right with the world again soon.
Epilogue to the epilogue (from the "you can't make this shit up" department: ...Soooooo, my older daughter comes home from school all excited Thursday. My daughter (excitedly): Mommy! Guess what! My Math teacher asked me if I want to move into Advanced Math!" Damn! I'm good!
The Scallion offered the following remarks: tell your older daughter that I had to look up the definition of compatible numbers--we called it "rounding" when we were in school--but, as an engineer, I use compatible numbers every day in my work. Also, instead of popping the Lexapro yourself, why not grind it up and slip it to Fred and Ethel (and whoever else ails ye)? A nice, spicy curry--they'd never know. They'll suddenly be in a good mood...and they won't have a clue why. ...It'd be a new experience for them. *************************************************************
If you lend someone $20 and never see that person again,
it was probably worth it.
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A Letter from George Duhbya to AmericaAuthor unknown
I'm Really Gonna Miss Systematically Destroying This PlaceOh, America. Eight years went by so fast, didn't they? I feel like I hardly got to know you and methodically undermine everything you once stood for. But I guess all good things must come to an end, and even though you know I would love to stick around for another year or four—maybe privatize Social Security or get us into Iran—I'm afraid it's time to go. But before I leave, let me say, from the bottom of my heart: I can't think of another country I would've rather led to the brink of collapse.
Boy, oh boy, if these Oval Office walls could talk. Seems like it was only yesterday that I started my first term despite having actually lost to Al Gore by more than a half million votes. Hmm. We were all so young and peaceful then. Gosh, gas was still under $2 a gallon! On my watch it peaked at more than twice that. Never getting it up to $6 or ideally $7.50 will be one of my few regrets when I leave office.
It's just gonna be so hard packing up my things and heading off into the sunset come January. I wish I could go on forever giving massive and disastrous tax cuts to the wealthy, taking the country from a surplus to a deficit—nearly $500 billion this year, likely to pass $1 trillion next year, fingers crossed—and just generally doing irreparable damage to the very underpinnings of our economy, but, well, I'm afraid the Constitution says I can't. And not even I can overrule the Constitution. Though Lord knows I tried! Initiating blanket wiretaps without warrants, suspending habeas corpus for prisoners in Guantanamo, infiltrating an unknown number of nonviolent civilian antiwar groups without permission… such wonderful memories. I'm going to cherish them forever.
My fellow Americans, I only hope that every time you have your civil liberties encroached upon by the Patriot Act, you'll think of me.
Everywhere I look brings back memories. The Blue Room is where Laura and I put up our first White House Christmas tree. Down the hall, in the East Room, is where I concocted my favorite signing statement to circumvent the anti-torture guidelines of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, and—ooh!—right across the way is where Cheney and I decided to use the death of 3,000 Americans on 9/11 and the nation's subsequent fear of another attack as an excuse to carry out our long-standing plan to invade Iraq. I should really get a picture before I leave.
Speaking of pictures, whenever I look at the dusty old newspaper photos of those tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib or the crumpled ruins of that bridge in Minnesota, I can hold my head up high knowing that I truly fucked this nation—physically and symbolically—beyond repair. I only wish I had the time to destroy a couple more major American cities.
And Cheney, I almost forgot about Cheney. What a guy, huh? I can't believe that in a few short weeks he's never going to talk to me again. The stories I could tell you about what went on in some of those back rooms—well, you wouldn't believe me if I declassified the memos. I don't know, maybe in 20 years, when the economy has rebounded and the people displaced by Katrina have rebuilt their lives from scratch with almost no federal assistance, Cheney and I can meet up again in the Rose Garden and reminisce over the good old days, when it seemed like there was no part of this great country we couldn't ruin forever.
What am I going to do once I'm no longer president? I've gotten so used to waking up every day, playing fetch with the dogs on the White House lawn, and then spending a lazy afternoon shredding every last bit of our good will abroad in a mind-boggling display of diplomatic incompetence.
The worst part about leaving is knowing I can never screw up anything this big again. Don't get me wrong, I'm only 62. I could still bankrupt an oil company, or become the next MLB commissioner and ruin baseball. But I'll never get the opportunity to fuck up on this massive of a scale again. Even if you put me back in charge for another term, I could only take the U.S. from a rapidly declining world power to not a world power at all. I don't mean to gloat, but I think it's safe to say that no one can ever unseat the American empire like I unseated the American empire.
Still, I have to admit, sometimes I think I could've dismantled so much more. The very fact that the environment still exists, that a mere 4,000 troops have died in Iraq, that there is still the slightest glimmer of hope for the future left in this nation—it's easy to feel like maybe I didn't do my job. But no, no, there's no use having any regret. I fucked everything up the best I could and that's good enough for me.
You know, I've got a few weeks left. I could still illegally fire some U.S. attorneys for political reasons, or finally get rid of that pesky separation between church and state. Or maybe I could just bomb a place. Like Russia. But this time, I would really savor it.
As long as I live, America, I'll never forget irreparably ruining you. Unless we all die in a nuclear war or calamitous environmental disaster brought on by my neglect. Either way, I'll see you all in heaven!
*************************************************************
If at first you don't succeed,
skydiving is not for you.
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A Word from the Activist CommunityIAVA: American troops exposed to toxins in IraqThis week reports surfaced that KBR, a military-contracting firm, may have knowingly exposed troops to dangerous toxins in Iraq. Today, I am asking you to take a stand with IAVA, and call for accountability.
In April of 2003, members of the Indiana National Guard were protecting KBR employees at a power plant in Southern Iraq. After their service, some of these troops exhibited signs of cancer, tumors and rashes, and new reports indicate that these injuries may be the result of exposure to toxins present at the site.
Incredibly, CBS News has uncovered evidence that KBR may have known about the risks months before it took any action to inform those soldiers.
So far KBR has denied any wrongdoing, despite the evidence. Sign our petition and tell KBR to come clean.
At least one Indiana Guardsman has died from lung cancer already. Others are sick. In fact, records from the CBS investigation show that 60 percent of the soldiers exposed "exhibit symptoms of exposure."
So please add your name to the petition.
We need your support to ensure that KBR works hand-in-hand with both Congress and the military to find out exactly what needs to be done to protect our veterans.
We'll be working in Washington, D.C. to ensure that Congress addresses this issue head-on with a full investigation, and outreach to the veterans who may have been affected by this and similar cases.
Help us win this fight by signing the petition today.
Thank you for your continued support.
Sincerely,
Paul Rieckhoff
Iraq Veteran
Executive Director
Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America
***
NorthStar: the secret about flu vaccinesWell, if nothing else, at least the American Association of Pediatrics (AAP) is predictable. Every year at about this time (going back to at least 2002 ), the AAP goes into marketing overdrive and puts out an report urging parents to get flu shots for themselves and their kids. And this year, like previous years, they’re recommending children as young as 6 months get the vaccine.
Well, there goes my dream of a more sensible world in 2009!
What a bunch of phooey.
First off, the flu vaccine hardly ever targets the correct virus circulating in a given year. Even the CDC basically admits they’re shooting in the dark. That’s why you’re given three different strains of viruses. They’re hoping at least one of them will hit the mark.
On the CDC’s web site it states: ‘How well the flu vaccine works depends on how well the match is between the influenza (flu) vaccine and the types of flu viruses that are circulating that year. Scientists try to predict what strains (types) of flu viruses are most likely to spread and cause illness each year to put into the vaccine.’
Okay…but here’s the problem…
The CDC’s ‘predictions’ hardly ever hit the mark.
Case in point: last year’s flu vaccine was only 44% effective in preventing the flu. This is according to the CDC’s own numbers, folks!
Why such bad results?
Here’s a surprise: two of the vaccine's three components didn't match most of the flu viruses circulating.
But many elderly people (those most at risk) and parents of young children got lulled into a false sense of security. As a result, millions of people who thought they were protected actually ended up getting very sick.
In fact, last year, by mid-February, flu deaths peaked at 9.1% of all U.S. deaths. Annually, about 30,000 people die from the flu. And the flu vaccine hasn’t done much to cut into those numbers.
In my book, the flu vaccine is a medical failure of tragic proportions. In fact, calling it a ‘vaccine’ at all is certainly irresponsible, if not criminal.
Nevertheless, the scare-tactic marketing continues. And more people than ever have been ambushed into getting the annual flu shot.
Last year a record 113 million doses were given out. That was up almost 10 million from the previous year. (Guess all that marketing is starting to pay off.)
Plus, your local government is now starting to get in on the act.
The state of New Jersey now mandates that children ages 6 months to 5 years old get a flu shot to enroll in preschool or day care.
According to New Jersey state law, parents had until December 31, 2008 to get their kids ‘vaccinated’ against the flu or the kids couldn’t go to school or day care.
What scares me most about this development isn’t the government gone berserk (I imagine that other states may actually follow suit), it’s that children are now required to get a risky vaccine they could do without.
There is no question that routine vaccines cause serious problems in many children.
But the flu vaccine is even scarier. Here’s why…
Thimerosal is a mercury-containing preservative used in some vaccines since the 1930s. It’s known to break down into ethyl mercury in the body. Many experts believe this mechanism triggers autism in some children.
One significant study published in 2003 in the Journal of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons examined the link between vaccines and autism. Results showed that kids who receive just three vaccines containing thimerosal were 27 times more likely to develop autism compared to children who get vaccines with no thimerosal.
The CDC of course denies a connection between autism and thimerosal. But, in 2001 they went ahead and eliminated from most childhood vaccines as a ‘precautionary’ measure.
A lot of docs like me are now waiting for children who received this wave of ‘thimerosal-free’ vaccines to mature. Hopefully, we’ll see a drop in the cases of autism.
But here’s the problem. The flu vaccine still contains thimerosal.
Besides the fact that the flu shot won’t do a lick of good at protecting your child against the flu, now you’ve got autism to worry about again. For parents, this is the biggest reason to avoid the vaccine.
In my book, any pediatrician who doesn’t warn you about the thimerosal in the flu shot just doesn’t have your child’s best interest in mind. There is a thimerosal-free flu vaccine, but chances are your pediatrician won’t have it.
My advice? Skip the flu vaccine all together.
A strong immune system is all you need to fight off the flu virus. So, keep up the healthy eating habits (discussed in last week’s GTGH) in 2009.
Plus, there are loads of research linking vitamin D deficiencies and a weakened immune system. Instead of the ‘flu shot-in-the-dark,’ try upping your intake of vitamin D to at least 2000 IU per day during the winter months. That should help boost your protection against anything Mother Nature throws at you!
Until next time,
Allan Spreen, M.D.
NorthStar Nutrituonals
***
Center for Constitutional RightsToday, we released our newest white paper, "Restore. Protect. Expand the Constitution: Ending Arbitrary Detention, Torture and Extraordinary Rendition," as part of our 100 Days to Restore the Constitution campaign. I hope you'll read it and share it with your colleagues, friends and fellow advocates for justice. Click here to download.
It's been an interesting week in news regarding the US torture program. From Vice President Cheney admitting on national television that he authorized torture; to the release of a bipartisan report by the Senate Armed Services Committee that found high level officials including Donald Rumsfeld directly responsible for the torture of detainees in U.S. custody; to exciting Supreme Court news in our case against Rumsfeld for torture on behalf of four British former Guantanamo detainees. The Supreme Court vacated and ordered the lower court to reconsider a terrible decision which included the finding that Guantanamo detainees are not "persons" under U.S. law and so have no right to be free from torture, and that officials couldn't be held accountable because torture is "a foreseeable outcome" of military detention.
The Center for Constitutional Rights has always called for prosecutions and accountability, and it seems the tide is starting to shift in our direction.
Our white paper presents a blueprint to President Obama: we lay out the history of abuses and a series of swift, concrete actions he can take to end torture, extraordinary rendition and arbitrary detention, restore the rule of law, and hold those responsible for torture accountable. CCR's white paper is available online at www.ccrjustice.org/100Days/.
While you're on our site, watch a short piece on how to produce a 60-Second Soapbox video to let the new president know what your constitutional priorities are for his first 100 days in office.
In 2009, we will be mounting a cross-country tour of speaking events relating to the campaign: look for us in a city near you.
Best wishes for a peaceful New Year.
Sincerely,
Vincent Warren
Executive Director
***
The Scallion Writes to CongressI'm glad that President Obama is holding the American auto-makers' feet to
the fire. For too long, fascist-style Capitalism has allowed them to do
what's best only for those at the top. They have for far too long ignored
what the American people want. When I bought my 1992 Ford Taurus, the
company was on the down-swing of its Dr. Deming 1980s "Quality is Job 1"
campaign. My 1992 model was inferior in many ways to my friend's 1988
model that inspired me to buy my car. I still have that car because I
promised myself that my next car would be electric. Unfortunately,
American car makers preferred to make gas-guzzling Hummers and shit-ugly
vans. It looks like the old Taurus won't hold up long enough for me to
replace it with a truly fuel efficient vehicle. It looks as though I will
finally have to go Japanese and replace my American car with a Toyota
Prius. What a shame--my entire family, who for generations pledged only to
own American cars, have all had to go Japanese. I only hope that President
Obama goes far enough in his demands on our auto industry. The way they
are currently going, I don't think that the consumers would miss them at
all if they went under.
***
How dare Congress even consider giving itself a pay raise! How dare
Congress demand a hand-out from the American people after spending
billions -- probably trillions -- giving hand-outs to their rich CEO
cronies and friends in Wall Street. This is yet one more proof that our
government is completely out of step with the reality being lived by the
people. The government is made up of people who are far too rich to
understand ordinary American's challenges -- and they are far too
self-insulated to care. It would be better in this season of giving for
Congress at least to pretend to make a sacrifice here and there after how
they've taken the bread from the mouths of the poor and working classes
and given it to the rich so they can have even more yachts, mansions,
cars, planes, and servants. Since our existing single-party system of
rich, privileged Republicrats is not serving Us the People, it is time for
America to wake up and start voting Green!
submitted to http://congress.org
***
Kucinich Takes on the BanksOnce they were as gods, but the deities of the American banking system are now in ruins, plunged from their pedestals into the maw of taxpayer largesse. Congress voted to give the banks $700 billion, lifting them temporarily out of their sepulcher of debt, while revealing a deep truth about the condition of America's financial powers:
They never had the money they said they had as they constructed their debt-based monetary system which now lies in ruins. Their decisions on behalf of depositors, shareholders and investors were lacking in basic integrity and common sense. Green gods bailing out with their golden parachutes.
There was a time when their power was real. Come with me to Cleveland 30 years ago today.
Dec. 15, 1978, Cleveland, Ohio
I awoke to find a curt payment demand that was dropped on my front step by a grandfatherly man who supplemented his Social Security delivering the morning newspaper. The headline plastered across the front page:
Cleveland Trust: Pay Up. Bank would relent if Muny Light were sold, Forbes believes.
One of America's largest banks, Cleveland Trust, led local banks in demanding immediate payment from the city by midnight, Dec. 15, of $14.5 million in short-term loans.
I regarded the headline skeptically. Having lived in 21 different places by the time I was 17, including a couple of cars, I had come to an encyclopedic knowledge of dun letters, sent to my parents by battalions of bill collectors seeking immediate payment for televisions, cars and a variety of household appliances that never seemed to work. I first came to regard these credit alarms with trepidation, later with impassiveness, with the expectation that as our family grew to two adults and seven children it would soon be on the move again, incurring new delinquencies with each new address. Lack of access to money, housing and credit seemed to be a permanent condition.
Now, having fought through a thicket of consequence to become America's youngest mayor, elected on a promise to stop the privatization of the city's electric system, I was faced with paying off loans taken out by the previous mayor, for the financing of municipal projects of dubious value.
The banks refused to extend terms of payment and connived with City Council members to block alternative payment plans, such as the sale of city land or tax revenues. The banks knew the city couldn't otherwise pay. They demanded instead the sale of the city's electric system, Muny Light, to an investor-owned electric company, the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co. (CEI). The president of the Cleveland Council, George Forbes, had met with the head of Cleveland Trust bank, who insisted on the sale of Muny Light as a precondition for extending the city credit. This was a case of the bank blackmailing the city, pure and simple.
The alternative to accepting the bank's blackmail was default. Cleveland could become the first city since the Depression to default on its financial obligations. Cities rely on credit for everyday operations and for meeting long-term financial obligations, such as infrastructure improvements. If banks called in their loans, the city would head toward dire straits. No one knew that better than the law firm of Squire Sanders and Dempsey, which had served as bond counsel for the city of Cleveland while the city entered fiscal peril and was simultaneously, though not coincidentally, the principal law firm for the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co. Through Squire Sanders and Dempsey, CEI had access to the intricacies of the city of Cleveland's financial records.
Under the previous administration, the city began using bond funds for general operating purposes. As mayor, I inherited $40 million worth of debt that had to be refinanced before the end of my first year in office. Under my predecessor, the city had illegally spent money it did not have, and yet it had the key to every bank in town and the confidence of the bond rating houses, at precisely the same time it was preparing for the sale of the municipal electric system to CEI.
Cleveland Trust and another bank demanding the sale of Muny Light, National City, were principal stock owners in CEI. Several members of CEI's board sat on the boards of local banks as interlocking directorates. There was a myriad of bank-utility business relations. Cleveland Trust bank, which handled CEI's demand deposits, pension funds and other assets, would directly profit from the sale of Muny Light. In a way, the banks were the private utility. With the sale, CEI would have an electricity monopoly in Cleveland and would be able to name its price for electricity and get it. Everyone in the Muny Light territory would receive at least a 20 percent rate increase as the rates would be raised to CEI's levels.
The city was self-sufficient with Muny Light for many years. Muny provided power to 46,000 homes with low electric rates, which contributed to the economic growth of the city. That was until the late 1960s and early '70s, when a series of suspicious mechanical failures and power outages diminished the system's reliability. At that time, under heavy lobbying from CEI, the Cleveland City Council delayed the passage of legislation for $9.8 million in repairs to Muny Light's generators, thereby forcing the city to purchase power at a premium from its competitor, CEI. The city became increasingly dependent on an interconnection between CEI and Muny Light, a high-voltage line over which power could be transferred from CEI to the city, to ensure reliability. The city's power system began to experience more unexplained power failures. CEI began to make public overtures to purchase Muny Light. The sale of Muny Light to CEI was soon supported by most of Cleveland's media, business, political and labor interests.
In November 1976, the City Council passed legislation authorizing the sale of Muny Light for a fraction of its value. I was clerk of Cleveland's Municipal Court at the time and I objected to the sale. I was advised that there was no way to stop the sale, but I saw it differently. Cleveland had a long history of municipal power. I could sense a terrible injustice was being visited upon the people of the city by its leading institutions, which were conspiring to deprive the city of its public power system.
I organized a petition drive that attracted support from city neighborhoods served by Muny Light. A full civic campaign was born with an intense effort made under brutal weather conditions to gather the signatures necessary to put the issue on the ballot. There was much at stake besides the monetary value of the system: The people's right to own an electric system. And the historic position of Muny Light, one of America's first municipal electric utilities, founded 70 years earlier by Cleveland Mayor Tom Johnson. Muny Light provided electricity to about one-third of the homes and businesses in the city at a peak savings of 20-30 percent over the rates charged by CEI. Additionally, Muny Light provided millions of dollars annually in savings to taxpayers by serving 76 city facilities. It also provided Cleveland's street lighting. High electric rates and higher taxes would follow if Muny were sold. The private sector was forcing the sale for its own profit at the expense of the community.
On Jan. 4, 1977, the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB), in an antitrust review required of any company applying to operate a nuclear power plant, ruled that CEI had conspired to put Muny Light out of business. CEI tried to force Muny Light into price-fixing and blocked Muny expansion, stopped the installation of Muny Light pollution-abatement equipment and forced the city to buy power it didn't need. In addition, the ASLB uncovered a CEI budget planning report for 1971 that spoke of a five-year plan "to reduce and ultimately eliminate" Muny Light.
The ASLB determined that CEI deliberately caused a Christmas-season blackout on the Muny Light system and sent salesmen into Muny Light territory offering "reliable CEI service." The private utility illegally tripled the cost of purchased power, thereby driving up Muny Light's operating costs. CEI illegally blocked Muny Light's access to power from other companies, all in violation of federal antitrust law. As a condition of receiving its license to operate a nuclear power plant, CEI had to provide Muny Light with access to cheap power. Documents showed that CEI executives believed the purchase of Muny Light would increase CEI's earnings by $2.732 a share, eliminate a competitive threat, and push the company's growth rate to 10 percent, further enhancing investment.
Documents in the case also demonstrated CEI's successful attempts to subvert media editorial policy through cunning use of the company's large advertising budget. Over the years, several local reporters lost their jobs after writing reports unfavorable to CEI, and CEI bragged internally about placing verbatim company-written propaganda as general media editorial content.
Confronted with the federal finding that bolstered a previously filed $330 million antitrust damage suit, the Cleveland city administration's response was incredible: "Now CEI has to buy Muny Light!"
At the same time the campaign to sell Muny Light accelerated, a high-powered rifle shot ripped through my house, just missing my head.
A cavalcade of media editorials commenced favoring the transfer of Muny Light to CEI.
During an ensuing legal battle over the validity of the referendum petitions, I became a candidate for mayor. I promised that if elected I would save the system. I won the election. My first act in office was to cancel the sale of Muny Light. I next had to pay off a $14 million CEI electricity bill that the previous administration owed and wanted to satisfy through the sale of the light system.
I had been in the mayor's office barely a year, facing a municipal horror story of huge snow storms, massive water main breaks and a police strike. I had cut city spending by 10 percent through eliminating corrupt contracts, payroll padding and attritional cutbacks. Through the year, I struggled with a recall attempt for firing a police chief. The recall was backed by banks, utility and real estate interests with a last-minute appeal printed by the Plain Dealer to sell Muny Light. Credit rating agencies, which had looked the other way while CEI was attempting to gain Muny Light in the previous administration, downgraded the city's finances.
Another Muny Light-related attempted assassination was averted when I was rushed to a hospital vomiting blood from a profusely bleeding ulcer. Some years later, a congressional investigation produced information from an undercover agent of the Maryland State Police that the assassination attempt was to occur while I was the grand marshal in a local parade. A local television investigative report claimed the assassin's services were purchased because I refused to sell the electric system.
One month later, I was back at work trying to find a way to save Muny Light. The utility's financial difficulties, though contrived largely through interference with the system by CEI, were depicted as so overwhelming that only the sale of the electric system itself would save the city from financial catastrophe. I held several meetings with bank officials. and it became clear we were heading for trouble on the question of refinancing. The banks were going to try to force me to sell the electric system. I went public with a plea for an income tax increase to protect the city's solvency.
On Dec. 15, I made a last-minute appeal to Cleveland Trust. It was 8 o'clock in the morning. I met with Brock Weir, the chairman of Cleveland Trust, Council President Forbes and our host, a local businessman. I had the intention of protecting Muny Light and avoiding a default.
"There's just one thing you've got to do," said the Council president, who strongly favored the sale.
Weir, the bank CEO with the stern visage: "If you sell Muny Light, we'll roll over the notes. I can get you $50 million in new financing. We'd get other banks to participate." It was a bribe.
My thoughts went to the street just outside the boardroom. Some 20 years earlier, a few blocks from where this meeting was taking place, I slept with my brothers and sister and parents in a car, homeless. I remembered an apartment where my parents sat underneath the pale yellow light of a kitchen wall lamp, counting their pennies on an old porcelain-topped table. The pennies dropped, click, click, click. Pennies to pay the utility bills.
It matters how much people pay for electricity. It matters if the public owns its own system and has political and financial control over rates. I could hear the pennies dropping, click, click, click, as Mr. Weir insisted on the sale of Muny Light. I remembered my family and the struggles of people like them. I couldn't do it. I couldn't sell. Not for $50 million, not for anything.
"I'm not going to sell, even if it means my career," I said, as Council President Forbes looked on in surprise.
"Why do you want to end your career? Sell the system. Get rid of it!" he said.
"Is there some other way we can work this out?" I asked Brock Weir.
He shook his head "No."
Throughout that day, every media outlet in Cleveland echoed the sentiment of Cleveland Trust's chairman, including the morning newspaper headline, with such depth of coverage and intensity that it seemed the city itself would crumble unless I agreed to the sale, which also included a provision dropping the $330 million antitrust damage suit.
The objective condition of the city's finances received no honest review. The sale of Muny Light was depicted as the only way the city could avoid fiscal disaster. The majority leader of the City Council held a news conference live on the 6 o'clock news. He declared that if I sold Muny Light, "the chairman of the Cleveland Trust bank has informed the council that his bank will purchase $50 million worth of city bonds. So, in effect, we have a plan sitting on the mayor's desk that will absolutely end the city's financial problems, if he will put his signature on it."
The $50 million bribe had been brought out into the open in a manner that now suggested it was a legitimate offer, a fake solution to a fake crisis. I refused to sell.
As Cleveland television stations covered the event live, with a countdown clock that looked like a twisted version of New Year's Eve, midnight struck. Television networks of several countries recorded the grim event: The city of Cleveland became the first American city to go into default since the Great Depression. The default was over just $14.5 million dollars in credit.
When I called for a congressional investigation a few days later, Cleveland Trust denied it wanted Muny Light, CEI denied it wanted Muny Light, the council president denied the chairman of Cleveland Trust wanted Muny Light, and the majority leader said he was mistaken when he said live on the 6 o'clock news that the bank chairman offered $50 million in credit for Muny Light. Muny Light was no longer the issue. It was the mayor and his obstinacy that caused the crisis. So went the waltz into a netherworld devoid of truth, justice, reality or morality.
Though the people of Cleveland supported keeping Muny Light by a margin of 2 to 1 in a referendum a few months later, and passed an income tax increase by the same margin in order for the city to pay off the defaulted bond anticipation notes, the state of Ohio intervened and put the city into fiscal receivership. I lost the mayor's race in 1979. The banks renegotiated the defaulted notes, at a profit. The city lost its antitrust suit against CEI in 1981, in a hung jury. An appeal failed.
I was out of major public office for almost 15 years until, in 1993, Cleveland announced an expansion of Muny Light (now called Cleveland Public Power). At that time, the City Council and others decided that I had made the right decision in refusing to sell Muny Light. The city and its residents had saved hundreds of millions of dollars through Muny Light's reduced electric rates and the savings the taxpayers enjoyed from Muny's lower-cost power for street lighting and city buildings.
I attempted another political comeback and this time succeeded, getting elected to the state Senate with the motto: "Because he was right." My campaign literature showed a radiant light bulb behind my name. Two years later, I was elected to Congress, with the slogan "Light up Congress." Today I am the chairman of the House Government Oversight Domestic Policy Subcommittee, which has broad jurisdiction over most government departments and agencies, including the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and electric utility matters generally.
The Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co. is now a subsidiary of First Energy Co., which was fined by the NRC for various safety violations and, a few years ago, was found to have primary responsibility for the 2003 blackout that left 50 million people throughout the northeastern United States without electricity.
Cleveland Trust no longer exists. No other bank involved in the default survives, except for National City, which next week faces extinction through shareholder approval of a takeover by PNC bank. I have spent much time trying to save National City.
One newspaper, the Cleveland Press, which advocated that CEI be Cleveland's sole electricity provider, ceased publication. The other strong proponent of the sale of Muny Light, the Plain Dealer, struggles to survive.
The city's electric system endures and this past year celebrated its 100th anniversary.
***
Rape as a Weapon of WarThe Democratic Republic of Congo is host to
the world’s deadliest conflict since World War II.And women and girls have borne the brunt of this horrific crisis, with rape as a weapon of war on a scale seen nowhere else in the world.
But you can do something about it.
Tell President-Elect Obama to announce his plan to end sexual violence in Congo.
Eastern Congo is the worst place in the world to be a woman in 2008. Rape and sexual violence are routinely used as a weapon to destroy women, families, and communities. It is time to get serious about ending the conflict and protecting and empowering Congo’s women.
The US government is in a unique position to take action immediately. They can promote peace through aggressive diplomatic efforts, increase UN patrols and support organizations that help keep women safe, and work to ensure that perpetrators are brought to justice.
Oxfam America has joined with the RAISE Hope for Congo campaign to raise awareness about the crisis. And by adding your voice, you are helping to raise awareness about the horrors of this nine-year conflict.
Tell the president-elect to announce his plan to end the vicious cycle of sexual violence.And to further strengthen your voice, please tell all of your friends and family, post it on Facebook and MySpace, or write about it on your blog.
The women of Congo are depending on you. Please take action today.
Sincerely,
Tim Fullerton
Oxfam America
***
Moms Rising Do you think your mother or grandmother were ever upset about unfair wages for women? It's possible that she saw this (in)famous T.V. ad with Batman, Robin... and Batgirl who demands better pay. The ad was created decades ago to raise consciousness about the need for equal pay for equal work.
We sure need someone like Batgirl today. A new report found that women lose approximately $434,000, on average, over a 40-year period because of the gender wage gap.1 2 Other studies show that moms, especially single moms, fare even worse with the gender wage gap.
But the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is standing in the way of fair pay by actively opposing pay equity reform proposals that are now up for review in Congress.3 4
*Join MomsRising.org and the Center for American Progress Action Fund in Telling the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to: "Get out of the way of fair pay!"
http://www.OutOfTheWayOfFairPay.org
And, while you're on that page, don't forget to check out our revised version of the original Batgirl ad!
Forward this email to friends and family so they too can see this Batgirl video, and also join you in sending the U.S. Chamber of Commerce a note requesting that they, "Get out of the way of fair pay!"--with a note cced to your Congressional Representatives at the same time. Let's do some old fashioned (and fun!) consciousness raising about the need for fair pay, while also urging our leaders do the right thing at the same time.
Wonderful to be doing this together!
--Joan, Kristin, Roz, Mary, Katie, Ashley, Donna, Julia, Nanette, and the MomsRising Team
1. The gender wage gap is the annual difference in median wages between men and women who are employed full-time and it widens over time.
2. Lifetime Losses: The Career Wage Gap, http://www2.americanprogressaction.org/o/507/t/1371/content.jsp?content_KEY=2219
3. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act are important steps to making sure that women are paid what they are worth. These pieces of legislation would make it easier for women to recover lost wages from bosses who discriminate and by requiring the federal government to be more proactive in preventing and battling wage discrimination.
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Before you criticize someone,
you should walk a mile in their shoes.
That way, when you criticize them,
you're a mile away and you have their shoes.
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John Kennedy once said to a assembled group of scholars in the White House, "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House -- with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."
Here are some pearls of wisdom from Jefferson himself:
When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.
The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes -- a principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.
I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.
No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.
The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
In light of the present financial crisis, it's interesting to read what Thomas Jefferson said in 1802:
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.
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If you think nobody cares if you're alive,
try missing a couple of car payments.
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A Word from Greg Palast
STICK YOUR DAMN HAND IN IT
20th Birthday of the Exxon Valdez Lie
by Greg Palast
March 23, 2009
"Gail, Please! Stick your hand in it!"
The petite Eskimo-Chugach woman gave me that you-dumb-ass-white-boy look.
"Gail, Gail. STICK YOUR DAMN HAND IN IT!"
She stuck it in, under the gravel of the beach at Sleepy Bay, her village's fishing ground. Gail's hand came up dripping with black, sickening goo. It could make
you vomit. Oil from the Exxon Valdez.
It was already two years after the spill and Exxon had crowed that Mother Nature had happily cleaned up their stinking oil mess for them. It was a lie. But the media wouldn't question the bald-faced bullshit. And who the hell was going to investigate Exxon's claim way out in some godforsaken Native village in the Prince William Sound?
So I convinced the Natives to fly the lazy-ass reporters out to Sleepy Bay on rented float planes to see the oil that Exxon said wasn't there.
The reporters looked, but didn't see it, because it was three inches under their feet, under the shingle rock of the icy beach. Gail pulled out her hand and now the whole place smelled like a gas station. The network crews wanted to puke.
And now, with their eyes open, they saw the oil, the vile feces-colored smear across the glaciated ridge faces, the poisonous "bathtub ring" that ran for miles and miles at the high tide level. And it's still there. Less for sure. But twenty years later, IT'S STILL THERE, GODDAMNIT. And I want YOU, dear reader, to stick your hand in it. I want YOU, President Obama, to stick your hand in it before you blithely fulfill your Palin-esque campaign promise for a little more offshore drilling.
***
Tuesday marks the 20th Anniversary of the Exxon Valdez grounding and the smearing of 1,200 miles of Alaska's coastline with its oil.
It also marks the 20th Anniversary of a lie. Lots of lies: catalogued in a four-volume investigation of the disaster; four volumes you'll never see. I wrote that report, with my team of investigators working with the Natives preparing fraud and racketeering charges against Exxon. You'll never see the report because Exxon lawyers threatened the Natives, "Mention the f-word [fraud] and you'll never get a dime" of compensation to clean up the villages. The Natives agreed to drop the fraud charge -- and Exxon stiffed them on the money. You're surprised, right?
***
Doubtless, for the 20th Anniversary of the Great Spill, the media will schlep out that old story that the tanker ran aground because its captain was drunk at the wheel. Bullshit. Yes, the captain was "three sheets to the wind" -- but sleeping it off below-decks. The ship was in the hands of the third mate who was driving blind. That is, the Exxon Valdez' Raycas radar system was turned off; turned off because it was busted and had been busted since its maiden voyage. Exxon didn't want to spend the cash to fix it. So the
man at the helm, electronically blindfolded, drove it up onto the reef.
So why the story of the drunken skipper? Because it lets Exxon off the hook: Calling it a case of "drunk driving" turns the disaster into a case of human error, not corporate penny-pinching
Indeed, the "human error" tale was the hook used by the Bush-stacked Supreme Court to slash the punitive damages awarded against Exxon by 90%, from $5 billion, to half a billion for 30,000 Natives and fishermen. Chief Justice John Roberts erased almost all of the payment due with the la-dee-dah comment, "What more can a corporation do?"
Well, here's what they could have done: Besides fix the radar, Exxon could have set out equipment to contain the spill. Containing a spill is actually quite simple. Stick a rubber skirt around the oil slick and suck it back up. The law requires it and Exxon promised it.
So, when the tanker hit, where was the rubber skirt and where was the sucker? Answer: The rubber skirt, called "boom" -- was a fiction. Exxon promised to have it sitting right there near the Native village at Bligh Reef. The oil company fulfilled that promised the cheap way: they lied.
And the lie was engineered at the very top. After the spill, we got our hands on a series of memos describing a secret meeting of chief executives of Exxon and its oil company partners, including ARCO, a unit of British Petroleum. In a meeting of these oil chieftains held in April 1988, ten months before the spill, Exxon rejected a plea from T.L. Polasek, the Vice-President of its Alaska shipping operations, to provide the oil spill containment equipment required by law. Polasek warned the CEOs it was "not possible" to contain a spill in the mid-Sound without the emergency set-up.
Exxon angrily vetoed ARCO's suggestion that the oil companies supply the rubber skirts and other materiel that would have prevented the spill from spreading, virtually eliminating the spill's damage.
Regulations state that no tanker may leave the Alaska port of Valdez without the "sucker" equipment, called a "containment barge," at the ready. Exxon signed off on the barge's readiness. But, that night twenty years ago, the barge was in dry-dock with its pumps locked up under arctic ice. By the time it arrived at the tanker, half a day after the spill, the oil was well along its thousand-mile killing path.
Natives watched as the now-unstoppable oil overwhelmed their islands. Eyak Native elder Henry Makarka saw an otter rip out its own eyes burning from oil residue. Henry, pointing down a waterside dead-zone, told me, in a mix of Alutiiq and English, "If I had a machine gun, I'd shoot every one of those white sons-of-bitches."
***
Exxon promised -- promised -- to pay the Natives and other fisherman for all their losses. The Chief of the Natives at Nanwalek lost his boat to bankruptcy. His village, like other villages, Native and non-Native, decayed into alcoholism. The Mayor of fishing port Cordova killed himself, citing Exxon in his suicide note.
On the island village of Chenega, Gail Evanoff's uncle Paul Kompkoff was hungry. Until the spill, he had lived on seal meat, razor clams and salmon Chenegans would catch, and on deer they hunted. The clams and salmon were declared deadly and the deer, not able to read the government warning signs, ate the poisoned vegetation and died.
The President of Exxon, Lee Raymond, helicoptered into Chenega for a photo op. He promised to compensate the Natives and all fishermen for their losses, and
Exxon would thoroughly clean the beaches.
Uncle Paul told the Exxon chief of his hunger. The oil company, sensing PR disaster, shipped in seal meat to the isolated village. The cans were marked, "NOT FIT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION." Uncle Paul said, "Zoo food."
Paul didn't want a seal in a can. He wanted a boat to go fishing, to bring the village back to life.
Two years after the spill, Otto Harrison, General Manager of Exxon USA, told Evanoff and me to forget about a fishing boat for Uncle Paul. Exxon was immortal and Natives were not. The company would litigate for 20 years.
They did. Only now, two decades on, Exxon has finally begun its payout of the court award -- but only ten cents on the dollar. And Uncle Paul's boat? No matter. Paul's dead. So are a third of the fishermen owed the money.
***
Lee Raymond, President of Exxon at the time of the spill -- and its President when the company made the secret decision to do without oil spill equipment, retired in April 2006. The company awarded him a $400 million retirement bonus, more than double the bonuses received by all AIG executives combined.
***
Gail's oily hand never made it to national television. The networks were distracted with another oil story.
After sailing back to Chenega from Sleepy Bay, I sat with Uncle Paul, watching the smart bombs explode over Baghdad. Gulf War I had begun.
Uncle Paul was silent a long time. The generals on CNN pointed to the burning oil fields near Basra. Paul said, "I guess were all some kind of Native now."
Damn that Lincoln: Abe's to blame for Jindal
by Greg Palast
Damn that Abe Lincoln. When Louisiana and Mississippi seceded from the Union, a sensible president would have sent
them a box of chocolates with a note, "Goodbye and good riddance."
Tonight, following Barack Obama's budget presentation to Congress, effectively the president's first State of the Union Address, the Republicans have chosen to give their party's response, the governor of the state that wanted to leave the Union, Louisiana's Bobby Jindal.
Jindal's going to tell us that Barack Obama is a terrible President because Obama wants to require states like Louisiana to extend unemployment insurance to - get this - the unemployed! (Technically, the federal government would pay 100% of the cost of reforming Louisiana's and Mississippi's Scrooge-sized benefit requirements.)
Jindal, and some other Republican governors, notably Haley Barbour of Mississippi, are actually turning down millions in federal funds for their own state's unemployed out of fear that, four years from now, they may have to maintain full unemployment insurance like the rest of America.
Barbour's excuse, parroted by Jindal, is that the Obama payments to the unemployed of their states would mean, when the economy returns to expansion, that their state would have to increase unemployment insurance taxes and payments to the US average, scaring away new employers. "I mean, we want more jobs," says Barbour. Um, this is the Governor of MISSISSIPPI talking. Exactly what new "jobs" is he talking about? Is Microsoft is based in Gulfport? Is Genentech opening its new headquarters in Bogalusa?
As an economist, I can tell you that the only industry Mississippi leads in is deep-fried chicken-dog manufacturing. I will admit that Louisiana and Mississippi can boast of growing employment at several casinos and cathouses spilling across what the locals charmingly call the "Coon-ass Riviera." Jindal's Louisiana is, after all, the state that solved its unemployment problem by sending its unemployed to Texas in FEMA trailers.
And it's true that Jindal's and Barbour's states do lead the nation in a few indicators. Like poverty: Mississippi has America's highest poverty rate. Louisiana is third worst in America.
And how about their commitment to education? Louisiana ranks 5th and Mississippi 2nd worth in school kids' math scores. As Randy Newman notes about the gulf states' education policies, "good ol' boys... from LSU, went in dumb, come out dumb, too."
Jindal himself is a product of a more advanced culture: His parents are Democrats. The Jindals are Hindus who come from the Punjab in India, a state known for its welfare safety net. Jindal, turning away from the successful example of his parents' politics and culture, has gone native, becoming a born-again Christian Republican who doesn't accept Darwinian evolution nor Keynesian economics. (I hear he may complete his redneck makeover next week by marrying his cousin at a tractor pull.)
For over a century, Louisiana and Mississippi have been trying to attract employers by changing their economy from one based on involuntary servitude to one based on voluntary servitude, selling their citizens to the lowest bidder. The results are blindingly visible: Mississippi and Louisiana, under the Barbour/Jindal Republican regime, maintain the lowest per-capita incomes in the nation (50th and 46th respectively). Mississippi and Louisiana infant mortality rates (1st and 3rd in deaths in the USA) would shame Costa Rica.
Years back, when I worked as an economic consultant to New Orleans, the Louisiana State Legislature was about to require that schools teach evolution as merely a theory equal to the Bible's literal creation myth. When asked if this would harm big employers' views of the state, I said, "Not at all: most national employers think of Louisiana as a state filled with Bible-thumping, dumb-bell rednecks. You won't have to worry about changing that impression."
OK, it's easy to make jokes about America's own Third World states. And before I get a zillion complaints, I'll be the first one to note that Louisiana has birthed the extraordinary, including the greatest of America's investigative journalists, the late Ron Ridenhour, jazz, Chris Ruth's Steakhouse and gris-gris. And it was Louisiana that long ago led the nation in social reform, whose governor, in 1932, led the national fight to create a program now known as "unemployment insurance." Really.
Nevertheless, Jindal's rejection of funds for his state's own unemployed simply follows a history of local Republican plantation-mentality cruelty. After Hurricane Katrina, I met a young man, Stephen Smith, who was stranded with a family on Highway 10 for
four days while George Bush photo-strafed him from overhead. An elderly man with Stephen died of dehydration after giving his grandchildren his last bottle of water. (See Stephen on Big Easy to Big Empty,
click here.)
I investigated the drowning of New Orleans and the "let'm drown" rescue plans of the Bush Administration. What I found was sickening, heartless and Republican. Marie Antoinette at least offered cake.
Now, once again, the Republican party, by making Jindal the party's official spokesman, is adopting the Barbour-ous refusal to reach out a saving hand to Americans drowning in this economy.
So, let me make a suggestion for Governors Jindal and Barbour. If you cannot join America in accepting our President's call to arms against disaster, if you reject our President's State of the Union - then leave the Union.
As the prescient Phil Ochs sang,
And here's to the government of Mississippi In the swamp of their bureaucracy they're always bogging down…
…And the speeches of the governor are the ravings of a clown
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of
Mississippi find yourself another country to be part of
Amen.
Obama's "Way-to-Go, Brownie!" Moment?
by Greg Palast
for the Huffington Post
Has Barack Obama forgotten, "Way-to-go, Brownie"? Michael Brown was that guy from the Arabian Horse Association appointed by George Bush to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Brownie, not knowing the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain from the south end of a horse, let New Orleans drown. Bush's response was to give his buddy Brownie a "way to go!" thumbs up.
We thought Obama would go a very different way. You'd think the studious Senator from Illinois would avoid repeating the Bush regime's horror show of unqualified appointments, of picking politicos over professionals.
But here we go again. Trial balloons lofted in the Washington Post suggest President-elect Obama is about to select Joel Klein as Secretary of Education. If not Klein, then draft-choice number two is Arne Duncan, Obama's backyard basketball buddy in Chicago.
Say it ain't so, President O.
Let's begin with Joel Klein. Klein is a top notch anti-trust lawyer. What he isn't is an educator. Klein is as qualified to run the Department of Education as Dick Cheney is to dance in Swan Lake. While I've never seen Cheney in a tutu, I have seen Klein fumble about the stage as Chancellor of the New York City school system.
Klein, who lacks even six minutes experience in the field, was handed management of New York's schools by that political Jack-in-the-Box, Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The billionaire mayor is one of those businessmen-turned-politicians who think lawyers and speculators can make school districts operate like businesses.
Klein has indeed run city schools like a business - if the business is General Motors. Klein has flopped. Half the city's kids don't graduate.
Klein is out of control. Not knowing a damn thing about education, rather than rely on those who actually work in the field (only two of his two dozen deputies have degrees in education), Klein pays high-priced consultants to tell him what to do. He's blown a third of a billion dollars on consultant "accountability" projects plus $80 million for an IBM computer data storage system that doesn't work.
What the heck was the $80 million junk computer software for? Testing. Klein is test crazy. He has swallowed hook, line and sinker George Bush's idea that testing students can replace teaching them. The madly expensive testing program and consultant-fee spree are paid for by yanking teachers from the classroom.
Ironically, though not surprisingly, test scores under Klein have flat-lined. Scores would have fallen lower, notes author Jane Hirschmann, but Klein "moved the cut line," that is, lowered the level required to pass. In other words, Klein cheats on the tests.
Nevertheless, media poobahs have fallen in love with Klein, especially Republican pundits. The New York Times' David Brooks is championing Klein, hoping that media hype for Klein will push Obama to keep Bush schools policies in place, trumping the electorate's choice for change.
Brooks and other Republicans (hey, didn't those guys lose?) are pushing Klein as a way for Obama to prove he can reach across the aisle to Republicans like Bloomberg. (Oh yes, Bloomberg's no longer in the GOP, having jumped from the party this year when the brand name went sour.)
Choosing Klein, says Brooks, would display Obama's independence from the teacher's union. But after years of Bush kicking teachers in the teeth, appointing a Bush acolyte like Klein would not indicate independence from teachers but their betrayal.
Hoops versus Hope
The anti-union establishment has a second stringer on the bench waiting in case Klein is nixed: Arne Duncan. Duncan, another lawyer playing at education, was appointed by Chicago's Boss Daley to head that city's train-wreck of a school system. Think of Duncan as "Klein Lite."
What's Duncan's connection to the President-elect? Duncan was once captain of Harvard's basketball team and still plays backyard round-ball with his Hyde Park neighbor Obama.
But Michelle has put a limit on their friendship: Obama was one of the only state senators from Chicago to refuse to send his children into Duncan's public schools. My information is that the Obamas sent their daughters to the elite Laboratory School where Klein-Duncan teach-to-the-test pedagogy is dismissed as damaging and nutty.
Mr. Obama, if you can't trust your kids to Arne Duncan, why hand him ours?
Lawyer Duncan is proud to have raised test scores by firing every teacher in low-scoring schools. Which schools? There's Collins High in the Lawndale ghetto with children from homeless shelters and drug-poisoned 'hoods. They don't do well on tests. So Chicago fired all the teachers. They brought in new ones - then fired all of them too: the teachers' reward for volunteering to work in a poor neighborhood.
It's no coincidence that the nation's worst school systems are run by non-experts like Klein and Duncan.
Obama certainly knows this. I know he knows because he's chosen, as head of his Education Department transition team, one of the most highly respected educators in the United States: Professor Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University.
So here we have the ludicrous scene of the President-elect asking this recognized authority, Dr. Darling-Hammond, to vet the qualifications of amateurs Klein and Duncan. It's as if Obama were to ask Michael Jordan, "Say, you wouldn't happen to know anyone who can play basketball, would you?"
Classroom Class War
It's not just Klein's and Duncan's empty credentials which scare me: it's the ill philosophy behind the Bush-brand education theories they promote. "Teach-to-the-test" (which goes under such pre-packaged teaching brands as "Success for All") forces teachers to limit classroom time to pounding in rote low-end skills, easily measured on standardized tests. The transparent purpose is to create the future class of worker-drones. Add in some computer training and - voila! - millions trained on the cheap to function, not think. Analytical thinking skills, creative skills, questioning skills will be left to the privileged at the Laboratory School and Phillips Andover Academy.
We hope for better from the daddy of Sasha and Malia.
Educationally, the world is swamping us. The economic and social levees are bursting. We cannot afford another Way-to-go Brownie in charge of rescuing our children.
****************
Greg Palast is the father of school-aged twins and the author of, "No Child's Behind Left," included in his New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse. Palast is a Nation Institute Puffin Foundation Fellow for investigative reporting. Get a signed copy of Armed Madhouse for the holidays for a tax-deductible contribution to the Palast Investigative Fund at
www.PalastInvestigativeFund.org
*****
The Lawyer and the MexicanA lawyer and a Mexican are sitting next to each other on a long flight. The lawyer is thinking that Mexicans are so dumb that he could pull one over on one easily. So the lawyer asks the Mexican if he would like to play a fun game. The Mexican is tired and just wants to take a nap, so he politely declines and tries to catch a few winks.
The lawyer persists, saying that the game is a lot of fun. "I ask you a question, and if you don't know the answer, you pay me only $5; you ask me one, and if I don't know the answer, I will pay you $500."
This catches the Mexican's attention; to keep the lawyer quiet, he agrees to play the game.
The lawyer asks the first question. "What's the distance from The Earth to the moon?" The Mexican doesn't say a word, reaches in his pocket pulls out a five-dollar bill, and hands it to the lawyer.
Now, it's the Mexican's turn. He asks the lawyer, "What goes up a hill with three legs and comes down with four?"
The lawyer uses his laptop, searches all references. He uses the earphone; he searches the Net and even the Library of Congress. He sends e-mails to all the smart friends he knows--all to no avail.
After one hour of searching he finally gives up. He wakes up the Mexican and hands him $500. The Mexican pockets the $500 and goes right back to sleep.
The lawyer is going nuts not knowing the answer. He wakes the Mexican up and asks, "Well, so what goes up a hill with three legs and comes down with four?"
The Mexican reaches in his pocket, hands the lawyer $5 and goes back to sleep.
Moral: don't mess with Mexicans. They only talk differently...
*****
A Word from Cindy Sheehan
You're in the Army now, so shut the f--k up!
This week, we have another amazing edition of Cindy Sheehan's Soapbox!
Cindy chats with former Colonel Ann Wright, who served her country honorably for 29 years in the Army Reserve and has been serving her country even more honorably as an anti-war, pro-justice activist since she resigned her post in the Foreign Service after George Bush illegally and immorally invaded Iraq. Ann is one of the hardest workers in the Peace Activist and works with female vets and works for families whose daughters have been harmed by fellow soldiers and the US Military.
Sara Rich also joins us for this fascinating conversation. Sara is another super-mom who fought for her daughter Suzanne Swift after Suzanne, a soldier, had not only been sexually harassed, but raped by a superior while Suzanne was stationed in Iraq. Incredibly, after Suzanne complained, she somehow ended up court-martialed and in military jail, but her attackers have not served a minute.
Fully 1/3 of our female soldiers are raped/killed or physically abused in the military and 9 out of 10 report being sexually harassed. What a great reason NOT to join the military if you are a female...but also, do you want to be turned into a rapist or sexual predator if you are a male?
Cindy has found a new mission and passion in her anti-war work. Cindy realizes that we have very little affect on stopping the Robber Class wars, so what we have to do is stop our children from being killed, maimed, raped or kill innocent people in the Robber Class wars.
There will also be a speech on the show by Major General Smedley Butler on "War is a Racket" and other counter-military recruitment features.
Order Myth America: 10 Greatest Myths of the Robber Class and the Case for
Revolution today!
RIP
Casey Austin Sheehan
May 29, 1979 to April 04, 2004
Loving and loved son, brother, grandson, uncle, nephew and friend.
We miss you!
***
Myth America: 10 Greatest Myths of the Robber Class and the Case for Revolution! by Cindy Sheehan
For a modest donation to Cindy's Soapbox, you can download Cindy's e-book on the myths being perpetrated on us, the robbed classes, by the obscenely rich robber classes. A small price to pay for the truth.
***
Occupier, Occupied
The right of a population to resist being occupied by a foreign country/military/corporation is a basic human right that has been enshrined in international law.
I recognize that the person who killed my son, Casey, in Iraq had every right to do so. I am not in any way happy about it, but if Casey's commander-in-chief and vice commander-in-chief had not placed him (immorally AND illegally) in the country of Iraq to be a an occupier, then the Iraqi would not have killed him. George and Dick knowingly put Casey in harm's way and I won't rest until I see justice for Casey's (and over one-million others) murder. That is also my right: redress for wrong and to see justice finally consummated.
Let's play the "al-Qaeda committed 9-11" game. If so, I believe and Osama bin Laden has confirmed it: one of the reasons that we were attacked on 9-11 is the USA's overwhelming support of Israel in Israel's violent and inhumane occupation of Palestine and oppression of the Palestinian people. I have visited Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan and I have spoken to many, many Iraqis and I have a deep sympathy for the plight of all occupied peoples, but I don't really have empathy because, even though our country has been taken over by fascist pigs, we are not overtly occupied here in America.
However, I am sitting here wondering what it would feel like to be micro-occupied. I imagine sitting at home in my comfortable house with plenty of room for my family. Suddenly, another family, from far away that doesn't even speak my language or know anything about my family's culture, violently invades my home and isolates my family in a back bedroom where we slowly starve to death; or are forced to go through many checkpoints and security checks with a real danger of being killed, to go out and buy food and other supplies. Complaining to law enforcement does no good because my occupiers have bought the legal system with bribes or intimidation.
I don't think I would like that. I don't think I would like a foreign country to come to America and occupy my community…I think I may even resist that occupation and call myself a "freedom fighter" or "patriot," but never a "terrorist."
This micro scenario is what the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine must undergo on a macro and daily basis from the "super-religious" Judeo/Christian cultures of Israel/America. The US may not have soldiers on the ground or in the air in Israel, but every bomb dropped or bullet fired has been purchased with a portion of the billions of dollars of blood money that we the taxpayers of the US fork over to the government of Israel every year (another good argument not to pay your federal taxes). The people of Palestine have been "complaining" internationally for decades and they get little, if any relief or justice. An Iraqi man that I met in Istanbul asked me: "Doesn't the world care about us?" And the people of Afghanistan have no voice at all.
With dual-citizen, Rahm Emanuel as Obama's chief of staff and ultra-Zionists, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in tip-top positions, I see no relief for the people of Palestine (or Iraq/Afghanistan, for that matter) in the near future, but this issue is one that must take precedence in the new regime.
An equitable and humane solution to the crisis must be worked out so Palestinians have the right of return to their homes/homeland and autonomy in deciding what kind of government that THEY want.
The Jesus that the Christians worship, whose story originated in that part of the world said: "No one can serve two masters (Mt 6:4)." It is time that the Israeli lobby's (AIPAC) influence be eliminated from our government and it is time that our elected politicians first think of what's good for America and Americans---being Israel's proxy in the international community and supporting Israel financially and defending its abominable behavior to the Palestinians has proven to be disastrous for our country.
There are many citizens in Israel who abhor the behavior of their government, as many of us abhor the behavior of our government---rejecting state-sponsored violence and occupation doesn't make one "anti-Semitic" or "anti-American" it makes one "pro-Human." Such accusations are puerile and meant to demean the person who is "pro-Human" because the message of peace cannot be credibly attacked.
***
Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be soldiersWith the announced increase in US troop levels to Afghanistan and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Michael Mullen, promising after the extra 30,000 troops are sent to Southern Afghanistan that ""When we get additional troops here, I think the violence level is going to go up. The fight will be tougher," I thought it would be appropriate to re-release an article that I wrote on July 13th, 2006.
I have also heard some anecdotal evidence from several people who do counter-recruitment that recruiters are targeting young people of color even more intensely now telling them that they will be "Fighting for Obama," but I haven't seen any recruitment figures since the election.
Even more urgently, Dick Cheney, et al, are all over the media, not only admitting to, but bragging about war crimes. It is time that an American administration be held criminally accountable for their war crimes, as I say in my article below.
This is so distressing to me that we are being conditioned to see Afghanistan as the "good war" and that the flag-draped coffins that will only be viewed by the dead soldier's family and loved ones will start to stream home and the "anti-Republican-war" movement will stand down as evidenced at the recent United for Peace and Justice gathering where it was decided to do a mass protest highlighting the "economic crisis" in NYC instead of an anti-war protest on the 6th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.
There will be a mass mobilization on March 21st around the nation anyway with the Peace Movement leading the way.
Mamas Don't Let your Babies grow up to be Soldiers!
Cindy Sheehan
As of today (July 13, 2006) , the War Department lists 2544 as the number of murdered troops in Iraq. Dozens of innocent Iraqis are being killed due to this war crime every day. More than 80 Iraqis were killed in Baghdad alone on July 9th: dozens of people just in one city on one day who would be alive if not for BushCo.
I don't know what number Casey was. I have seen people say 614, I have seen people say 714. It doesn't matter, because Casey and the other 2543 were not numbers. They were living, breathing, loving, worthwhile, and contributing members of society. They could pass drug tests (unlike their "commander-in-chief" at their ages) and they honorably volunteered to serve their country to defend America and our freedoms. What George Bush and the rest of the war profiteers have committed in Iraq is abuse and misuse and had nothing to do with defending America or protecting our freedoms. The lies are well documented. The lies are written on my heart forever.
Between WWI and WWII, Marine Major General Smedley Butler wrote a short dissertation called War Is a Racket. I wish to God I had read this before Casey enlisted because I believe that he would be alive today if only I had. The first two paragraphs succinctly define the entire booklet and the reason not to allow your child to fall into the hands of the military-industrial-war complex:
War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
In his treatise Butler goes on to define the "damned" war profiteers of his day: the DuPont family, the steel companies, the leather companies, the t-shirt manufacturers, etc. The profits for these companies increased at a minimum ten-fold in the WWI years and in retrospect even seem like healthy profits in 2006 dollars. He also complains about the 6000 buckboards for the colonels, thousands of saddles for the cavalry, and hundreds of airplane engines that were never used in the war. The waste of money and the waste of life in war are horrendous and inherently immoral - always!
The criminal tradition of the enormous profiteering that went on in WWI and all the other wars is going on today in the war crime of Iraq. The Halliburtons, Bechtels, Blackwater Secutities, KBR's, are raking in the billions at a clip that would make Barbary Coast pirate's head spin. The no-bid profiteers are cronies and/or former companies of the vice president and most of the Bush regime. I don't know how can the blood-monied devils can look at their own children or grandchildren and not be ashamed and appalled that their insatiable greed killed someone else's flesh and blood.
Napoleon once said:
All men are enamored of decorations…they are positively enamored of them.
Casey was in the paramilitary Boy Scouts founded by Lord Baden Powell, who was a militarist. I am not knocking the Boy Scouts because Casey was an Eagle Scout, and he gained a lot of positive skills in the Scouts. But he was also taught how to be a good soldier: To pledge to do his duty to God and Country. Does that include marching reluctantly off to a war which one knows is wrong? Does that include putting "the mission" first, above even ones own family and life no matter how disordered and corrupt the mission is? Boy Scouts earn decorations for their paramilitary uniforms and I know I sewed dozens on Casey's sash (I always complained that sewing should be their first mandatory badge so the Scout could do it himself). Then Casey "graduated" to soldier and started earning his "Man Scout" badges. I was handed his Bronze Star and Purple Heart at his funeral like I should be a proud mom being pinned with his Eagle Scout badge. The Man Scout Badges, Gen. Butler explains, were instituted so the military wouldn't have to pay the soldiers more money. How many Man Scout badges can make up for the needless, senseless, and avoidable murder of your oldest child?
In war correspondent Christopher Hedges book: War is the Force That Gives Us Meaning, he writes:
The disillusionment comes later. Each generation again responds to war as innocents. Each generation discovers its own disillusionment - often at a terrible price.
The terrible price is that, once again, we forget that the war machine loves to greedily consume our children for the terrible profits that they so willingly and cheerfully reap. Hence the phrase: "Laughing all the way to the bank." How does it feel that the vultures are laughing at how gullible we are to so naïvely cough up our young? Previous generations of mothers have watched presidents and other cheerleaders for war and mayhem drag us into war after war and we mothers are unwilling and unknowing accomplices in our children's murders. War will finally have to stop when we mothers and fathers stop allowing our leaders to march our children off to wars to feed the ravenous war monster: This hideous war monster counts on families forgetting that the last war for revenue was fought against phantom enemies that can't be confined within borders. Whether the wars are covert or overt, they are always being waged with our babies' blood.
Tragically, I don't know anyone, war supporter or not, who raised their children to be war criminals. There are no people in our country who have hoped that one day that their son would grow up to rape Iraqi girls and kill innocent Iraqis in cold blood. The Mahmoudiya and Haditha incidents are horrible atrocities, but unfortunately, are not isolated incidents in the Iraq war crime. War breeds atrocities, and so does occupation and counterinsurgency. I wish to God that Mahmoudiya and Haditha were isolated incidents, but we know that they are not. When the neocons despicably spit out the blather that we need to "Stay the course," I wonder what that means? Rape and murder?
To be honest with ourselves and our children, instead of the flags and Man Scout badges that our soldiers decorate their uniforms with, they should have their suits covered with corporate logos like NASCAR drivers. A Halliburton patch here and an Exxon patch there. I also believe, like Gen. Butler said: during times of war, CEO's of war profiteers should only be allowed to earn as much as a common soldier.
Sounds fair to me and I believe war will end if the war profiteers, politicians and generals were required to send their own children to fight for their ill-gotten gains before they sent ours.
Our nation forgot the lessons of Vietnam where not one person over the rank of lieutenant was even tried for war crimes. It is incumbent upon this generation of war victims to make sure that this unspeakable episode does not repeat itself. The people responsible for sending our children to this war crime should not get off scot-free. BushCo should be the ones sent to federal prison for crimes against humanity and crimes against peace.
Holding our leaders accountable for unnecessary war and killing innocent people? It's a new concept, but I think one that just might work. Let's try it this time.
But more important: don't let your babies grow up to be soldiers.
***
El Imperio and the Declaration of Human Rights
Since my son, Casey was a victim of the US Military Empire in 2004, I have traveled the world and met with people in almost 20 countries that have also been victimized by the US.
Whether it was the First Nation people in Honolulu who could no longer fish or swim in their ancestral waters of Pearl Harbor because of the toxic contamination by the Navy, or my brothers and sisters in Daichuri, South Korea whose village was being destroyed so the nearby Army base, Camp Humphrey could build a golf course, I always walk away from these encounters with an extra steely resolve to try and confront the US Military Industrial Complex wherever I can, and to try and ease the suffering of so many people.
Today, I am in Havana, Cuba for an international gathering of human rights activists on the 60th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Human Rights. Besides Cuban activists, we heard testimony from activists from: Guatemala, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Spain, and Puerto Rico, among others. In the translator hanging off of my ear, I heard time and time again, The Empire. Or, el imperio. The Empire is of course the United States of America. No question about it.
The US has been meddling in the affairs of these South American and Latin American countries for centuries. We have installed dictators after overthrowing democratically elected and popular governments. We have used these countries as a dumping ground for our toxic products and have used the IMF and World Bank to impoverish governments so they would be crushed by debt after we unleashed Economic Hitman on these already poor countries. We steal their natural resources and if any Latin American leader dare stand up to The Empire, he will be either executed, or demonized as we try to undermine his effectiveness.
Today, I heard the testimony of Camilo whose father was killed in the terrorist attack by Luis Posada Carriles on a Cuban airliner. Carriles is being harbored by the US and refuses to extradite him to Venezuela to face charges for the murder of 73 Cubans. But, but, but, I thought the US did not harbor terrorists? I also met again with family members of the Cuban 5 who have been in US prisons for 10 years after being arrested for espionage while they were ferreting out terrorism against Cuba in Miami.
On Human Rights Day, we should be celebrating the fact that we live in a country that practices peace over war, economic justice over rancid capitalism, environmental protection over ecologic degradation, and human rights over torture, occupation, oppression and murder.
However, if one takes the time to read the entire document of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it becomes apparent that the US is the biggest violator of the UDHR on the planet.
No country is perfect, but the people of the USA, my brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, must take leadership in first internalizing, then fostering and the precepts of the UDHR.
Every human deserves basic rights. No one human deserves more and certainly no one deserves less.
With more and more of our fellow citizens becoming unemployed, uninsured and food insecure, we may soon join the ranks of these third world countries that have had to suffer deprivation while we consumed an over-excess of the worlds resources.
Eleven million children around the world, over 30,000 per day, die before their 5th birthdays each year.
That is not a statistic that I can live with. I hope it will also spur you to confront The Empire in every way possible.
***
Peace
Peace is not an absence of war: it's an absence of preparing for war or an absence of using violence or threats of violence to solve problems. --Cindy Sheehan
Today is the 67th anniversary of the "day that will live in infamy." Likely, if you were alive 67 years ago, you were a very young person. I know a few people who can still remember when the Japanese attacked a US naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, but I remember the stories that my parents told me about that day.
My mom was sitting at the kitchen table eating biscuits when she heard the news on the radio: she was 10 years old. My dad lived in Oklahoma, but my mom lived in Hawthorne, California so her family was terrified that California would be struck soon. I can imagine that in years to come, my children will be telling their children about what they were doing when they heard that the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were attacked on 9-11-01.
There was already a terrible world war raging on December 7th, 1941, but that was the symbolic day that the US entered WWII. The event led to Congress formally declaring war against Japan four days after the attack. Even though the US has been embroiled in many wars, police actions and covert wars since then, this was the last time that a war was constitutionally declared. Not that it makes violence correct, but the "manual" was followed. Millions of people perished in World War II and weapons of mass destruction were unleashed by the US on innocent civilians.
The US and the USSR emerged from WWII as the world's "Super-Powers." The "Super" powers of the US appear to be violent intimidation and gross militarism. The USSR Empire has already crumbled under the weight of its military machine and it looks like the US won't be far behind, especially with President-Elect Obama wanting to foolishly increase the mistake in Afghanistan. Will someone please tell him that Afghanistan has been the burial ground of many Empires----or don't tell him, it is time for the US military Empire to crumble, too.
If the USA had a national Peace Movement, Obama would not be our President-Elect right now. Dennis Kucinich (D-Oh) would have been the nominee for the Democrats and Ron Paul (R-Tx) would have been nominated from the GOP and Cynthia McKinney (G) and Ralph Nader (I) would have had seats at debates. What we have here in the US is an "anti-war" movement that is selective in its opposition to war. It seems that for many of the national organizations, Democratic Wars are okay, while Republican Wars are bad. That's why we need a movement with integrity and vision that doesn't exist to shill for the Democrats, but exists to be the clarion call that ALL violence is wrong and solving problems using violence or the threat of violence is a crime against humanity and always criminally prosecutable---whether George Bush or Barack Obama is the one making these threats or promising escalation of violence. The use of violence is inherently wrong in an individual and millions of times worse coming from a state.
Last year, on the 5th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, I called for a mass mobilization in Washington, DC, but the leaders of some national organizations did not want to "embarrass the Democrats." What is going to happen now that we will have a Democrat as President in 2009, on the 6th anniversary of the invasion? Obama is a President who is clearly not only not a "Peace President" (is there such a thing?) or even "anti-war." He never promised an immediate and complete withdrawal from Iraq and has promised to escalate the violence in Afghanistan. These were his campaign promises, folks. Obama has betrayed the base that got him elected by exploiting this mis-perception of himself to win and then appointing people to his Cabinet that are causing the neocon hawks to swoon with joy.
The tiny Peace Movement that we do have in the US has always said that the US invasions and occupations of BOTH Iraq and Afghanistan are illegal and immoral and our troops should be brought home immediately and the US Empire should be reduced to a size that can be drowned in a bath tub. The "anti-war" movement was always very careful to make a distinction between Iraq (bad) and Afghanistan (justified) which to me was always a failure and bad reasoning that would eventually harm the integrity of the movement.
You know the US Peace Movement.You have seen it at work. The members ride their bikes or take public transportation to protests, or drive ancient vehicles seemingly held together by bumper stickers. They are the ones that stand outside of prisons holding candles protesting the state-sanctioned murder of even one individual. They are the ones that kneel in front of the White House in orange jumpsuits protesting torture. They are the ones that gather in the thousands every year to demand the closing of the School of the Americas (WINSEC). The Peace Movement knows that violence is self-perpetuating and creates more violence. The Peace Movement does the hard work of confronting Empire and does it in a peaceful, yet righteously strident, way.
The Anti-Republican-War movement are the ones that hold marches on the weekends where the status-quo won't be inconvenienced, pat themselves on the back, and then go to their national meetings to plan how more Democrats can be elected.
Working for Peace is not monetarily rewarding, but the lined faces of the people I know who have worked for Peace for decades glow with the satisfaction of the work and are faces that can be looked at in a mirror without shame.
The Anti-Republican-War Movement will stand down during the Obama regime and "give him a chance." The Peace movement is still working and will continue to work no matter whom is President.
Peace is not for cowards. Peace takes a lot of work, resources and energy. Most people do not have the will or stamina for peace.
The Peace Movement demanded from Bush and will demand from Obama a complete and immediate withdrawal of US Forces and independent contractors from Iraq and Afghanistan and a declared end to the USA's War of Terror.
We demand that ALL torture prisons, in Guantanamo Cuba and around the world be closed and that the humans incarcerated in those prisons be released, or tried with full protection of commonly held law (that used to exist in the US) and that the Military Commission's Act be repealed.
We demand that the US take a more balanced approach to Israel's occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people and work with the international community to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
We demand that the USA PATRIOT ACT be repealed. (Obama voted to renew it).
We demand that the FISA Modernization Act be repealed. (Obama voted to take away our 4th amendment rights).
We demand that most of the 800+ US bases around the world be closed and our troops brought back to their home bases and attrition be used to reduce the size of our "standing Army" that is un-Constitutional, anyway.
We demand that the US military be reduced to a size that can be used for defensive purposes, natural disasters and international emergencies only---not be built up with another 100,000 troops. (Another Obama campaign promise).
We demand that the budget for the Pentagon be reduced dramatically and the money be used for education, jobs and health care here in the US. If everyone (not just the wealthy) had easy access to these basic human rights, then why would there become a part of the US military Empire?
We demand that the Posse Comitatus Act be fully restored so US forces and weapons CANNOT be used against we citizens.
Not only do we demand these things, but if you look carefully, you will see us out in the streets working for these things. Working for Peace puts one at odds against a corrupt two party system that always works for war.
I can't imagine a better place to be or a better thing to be doing.
The Obama administration will definitely separate the "wheat from the chaff" and we will see who really want true peace and those who will accept Democratic violence.
***
Is Citigroup Thankful for Corrupt Government and Robbed Taxpayers?They should be, because Citigroup, which was already a huge winner in 1999 when then Secretary of the Treasury, Larry Summers worked with the Clinton administration and Congress, repealed the Glass-Steagall Act so Citicorp could become Citigroup, has today received another gift from the US government. The Glass-Steagall Act was a reform instituted during the Great Depression to prevent financial concerns from consolidating and becoming "too big to fail." The Graham-Bliley-Leach (bi-partisan) Act that repealed Glass-Steagall was a gift to Wall Street which has wreaked so much havoc today.
Today, Citigroup received another 25 billion influx of capital (I am still waiting for my bailout) and a guarantee of 300 billion to salvage the company from having to pay the price for their failing mortgage backed securities. It still makes more sense to me to save homeowners from losing their homes, but that's just me. Citigroup were definitely the big winners today, after GM and Ford were sent back to Detroit empty-handed. I don't think any capitalists should be bailed out, but it is hard to figure out the "Plan."
We have decades of economic, security, environmental and war problems to solve and President-Elect Obama is filling his nascent administration with Blue-Tinged Neo-cons (Clinton and Biden, so far) for his foreign policy team and blatant Economic Hitmen for his financial team. These Economic Hitmen like Larry Sanders and Timothy Geithner who have been practicing their neo-liberal policies of "Shock economics" all over the world and have been instrumental in our current financial crises, now they will be part of the governmental institution that will give them more legitimacy in some eyes for further destruction.
Even though the situation seems dire and even more dire to me because many of the "left-intelligentsia" are falling for rhetoric-based "hope" and are rolling over for it, I still think we do have some things to be thankful for this week.
Personally, I am thankful for my six-month-old Grandson, Jonah, and for my children and friends and family. I am extremely thankful for the huge support that Cindy for Congress garnered over the past year and for our very respectable showing on November 4th. I am thankful for the friends we have made here in San Francisco and for the opportunity to challenge Nancy Pelosi again in 2010.
I am also thankful, that even though we have a "new boss" that is "same as the old boss" transitioning into our White House, George Bush and his criminal cronies will be through infecting our Republic. I am aware that it is the same Empire only with a new cast of characters, but how great will it be not to have to hear George's fake cowboy accent anymore? I am grateful that part of his huge unpopularity is due to the fact that I went down to Texas to camp on his doorstep and point out the fact that the not only did the Emperor have no clothes, but he was also a liar and a criminal.
There is still much work to do. When the euphoria wears off of the electorate and the Democrats realize that Obama is not the Messiah they have been waiting for (the Republicans got that "wake up call" from Bush), we have to be here to pick up the pieces. We also have to keep pointing out inconvenient and troubling truths no matter how unpopular it makes us. Once a person has connected the dots, those connections, correlations and truths cannot be easily discarded, and one cannot go back on "Soma vacations" (see Huxley's Brave New World) of denial no matter how tempting that is.
*************************************************************
The President has kept
all the promises he intended to keep.–-Clinton aide George Stephanopolous
*************************************************************
Any chance of your requesting an
accounting of the 700 billion dollars
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is
doling out to whomever he chooses in
whatever amount he chooses without
public input or recourse?
As you know, all decisions made by the
Secretary are non-reviewable. Rather
than go down in the history books as the
biggest aberration this country has had
the misfortune of encountering, why not
do one positive thing we can remember
you for? It will certainly make your
mother and father proud after the
past eight years of death and destruc-
tion you've imposed on our beloved
country.
Just asking.
*****
Obama's Use of Complete Sentences Stirs Controversy
Stunning Break with Last Eight Years
In the first two weeks since the election, President-elect Barack Obama has broken with a tradition firmly established over the past eight years through his controversial use of complete sentences, political observers say. Millions of Americans who watched Mr. Obama's appearance on CBS' "Sixty Minutes" this past Sunday witnessed the president-elect's unorthodox verbal tick, which had Mr. Obama employing grammatically correct sentences virtually every time he opened his mouth. But Mr. Obama's decision to use complete sentences in his public pronouncements carries with it certain risks, since after the last eight years many Americans may find his odd speaking style jarring.
According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, some Americans may very well find it "alienating" to have a
President who speaks English as if it were his first language. "Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement,"
says Mr. Logsdon. "If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist." The historian also said that if Mr. Obama insists on using complete sentences in his speeches, the public may find itself saying, "Okay, subject, predicate, subject predicate - we get it, stop showing off."
The President-elect's stubborn insistence on using complete sentences has already attracted a rebuke from one of his harshest critics, Gov. Sarah
Palin of
Alaska. "Talking with complete sentences there and also too talking in a way that ordinary Americans like Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder can't really do there, I think needing to do that isn't tapping into what Americans are needing also," she said.
*************************************************************
Outside of the killings,
Washington has one of the lowest crime rates
in the country.--Mayor Marion Barry, Washington, DC
*************************************************************
I know you are aware of Blackwater USA and its abuses. However, are you aware of smuggling weapons/ammunition hidden in pallets of dog food headed to Iraq? Where are the weapons really headed and for what purpose? And, finally, are these weapons going to be used against our armed forces?
*************************************************************
Ninety percent of the politicians
give the other ten percent a bad name.
–-Henry Kissinger
*************************************************************
I am saddened and frankly stunned to learn that the new administration, for whom I supported and voted, will not investigate this evil administration’s torture policy. It places my beloved America among the rest of those we’ve fought from its inception.
I will never forget Bush referring to our Constitution as a goddamned piece of paper; others of his adherents referred to it as quaint and outdated. I knew he meant every word. He followed through with his barbarian behavior.
This administration has so violently assaulted everything our country stands for that it will take generations for it to recover.
Americans must not ignore the memos written by this administration sanctioning torture. With the Internet, there is no reason under the sun not to research the subject. There are no excuses.
It puts our fighting men and women at new risk. The crime spree going down for the past eight years by the Bush administration can’t be ignored. Eventually, it will be investigated. Torture must be investigated by executive order: who is responsible...who violated the law...
How will we exist as a nation of laws once it is realized this country tortures?
*************************************************************
Isn't it funny
how the word "politics"
is made up of the words
"poli,"
meaning "many" in Latin,
and "tics"
as in "bloodsucking creatures"?
*************************************************************
A Word from AlterNetRove's IT Guru Warned of Sabotage Before Fatal Plane Crash; Was Set to Testify By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! Mike Connell, the chief IT consultant to Karl Rove, reportedly asked for protective custody from the government before he died.
Why I'm Rooting for 3 Big Economic Bubbles By Stephen Pizzo, News for Real We need a healthcare bubble, an infrastructure bubble and a green bubble right now -- or else the whole thing will pop.
The US Has 761 Military Bases Across the Planet, and We Simply Never Talk About It By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com America garrisons the globe in ways that are truly unprecedented, but if you live in the United States, you rarely hear a word about it.
Announcing the 2008 P.U.-litzer Prizes By Jeff Cohen, Norman Solomon, AlterNet The year's stinkiest media performances.
Getting Past the 'Protein Myth' That Keeps People from Quitting Meat and Dairy By Kathy Freston, Huffington Post The way Americans obsess about protein, you'd think protein deficiency was the number one health problem in America. Of course it's not.
The 10 Greediest People of 2008 By Sam Pizzigati, Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality For obvious reasons, we probably couldn't have picked a better year than 2008 to "honor" our most avaricious.
The 10 Most Awesomely Bad Moments of the Bush Presidency By Brad Reed, AlterNet A shorter version of our long national nightmare.
Was the 'Credit Crunch' a Myth Used to Sell a Trillion-Dollar Scam? By Joshua Holland, AlterNet Even as the media continue to repeat the claim that credit has frozen up, evidence has emerged suggesting the entire story is wrong.
No Justice for the African-Americans Targeted by White Vigilantes After the Katrina Flooding By Liliana Segura, AlterNet Journalist A.C. Thompson discusses his groundbreaking piece on the white men who roamed post-Katrina New Orleans shooting African Americans.
Why Was Cheney So Quick to Admit He's a War Criminal? By Marjorie Cohn, AlterNet Cheney confessed because he thinks either Bush will pardon him or that Obama won't prosecute him -- but the law would forbid both approaches.
The Fed and the Treasury Need to Come Clean About Where The Money Is Going By Nomi Prins, The Nation Some major steps toward transparency are needed to begin to ensure that the bailout money is not being squandered.
Disney Exhibit Gives Visitors a Warped Idea of Waste and Consumption By Elizabeth Royte, AlterNet The message of the exhibit, sponsored by the largest garbage company, is that we needn't radically change our lifestyle or our way of thinking.
Autoworkers Forced to Take Concessions in Industry Bailout By Tiffany Ten Eyck, Labor Notes Yet another example of the right-wing agenda to do away with labor rights.
Kids Learn that Killing Is Fun at the Army's Lethal New Theme Park By Penny Coleman, AlterNet The Army's new recruitment tool lets high-tech video game centers desensitize, condition, train and even enlist America's youth.
Fox Gives Racist, Out of Control Cop His Own TV Show By Angela Kelley, America's Voice "Smile, You're Under Arrest" -- that's the name of a new reality TV show starring none other than Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Pension Funds Collapse: The End of Retirement? By Shamus Cooke, Information Clearing House Unless things change fast, history will show that the phenomenon of "retirement" was limited to one generation.
Going, Going, Gone! Bush Auctions Off Wilderness Land in Utah By Lisa Derrick, Firedoglake "These lands are not Cheney's and Bush's. The lands are ours. ... They're part of our legacy."
Did America Get Punk'd on the Bailout? By David Sirota, Campaign for America's Future The answer is yes ... now here's what to do about it.
A Bigot, Anti-Choice Pastor Picked for Obama's Inauguration By Sarah Posner, TheNation.com A very strange pick -- Pastor Rick Warren opposes gay marriage, doesn't believe in evolution and compared abortion to the Holocaust.
How To Be an Ethical Consumer Without Breaking the Bank By Suyeon Khim, Campus Progress There are many affordable ways to spend your hard-earned cash in accordance with progressive values.
Did Dick Cheney Just Confess to a War Crime on National TV? By ZP Heller, Brave New Films The VP and his hubris have finally gone too far.
Even the State Department Recommends Dumping Blackwater By Satyam Khanna, Think Progress A panel commissioned by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has called for the security firm's contract not to be renewed next year.
Cruel and Unusual: Serving a Death Sentence in a Prison Hospital By Liliana Segura, AlterNet Montell Johnson was sent from California to Illinois to be executed. His sentence was commuted. Michael Moore: Save the Auto Industry and Kick Its CEOs to the Curb By Michael Moore, MichaelMoore.com These auto execs don't deserve a dime. Fire all of them, and take over the industry for the good of the workers, the country and the planet.
When Faith Turns Deadly By Joshua Holland, AlterNet Larry Beinhart, author of Wag the Dog, discusses religion, politics and hucksters in his new novel. How Did We Ever Let This Guy Get Away with Being a War President? By Gary Brecher, eXiled Online Only a fool like Bush could pick an anti-American Arab country, add an invading army, and expect a nice fluffy democracy soufflé.
Former News Radio Staffer Spills the Beans on How Shock Jocks Inspire Hatred and Anger By Dan Shelly, Milwaukee Magazine Behind the scenes of one of the largest and most successful news/talk radio stations in America.
$2 Trillion Handed out by Paulson and Bernanke, But Who Got It, Nobody Knows By Nicholas von Hoffman, The Nation We have no idea who got this money or the conditions or collateral put up in return for the loans.
We've Cut Cigarette Smoking by Half -- and We Didn't Have to Arrest 20 Million People to Do It By Paul Armentano, NORML If lawmakers really wanted to address marijuana use, they would regulate and tax pot like they do tobacco.
Do You Want to See What War Looks Like? By Jennifer Fenton, The Wip Dead bodies and blown-out humvees in Casey Porter's films reveal the brutality of the surge in Iraq.
Democrats' Soft Spot for Automakers Have Shielded Detroit from Its Own Bad Decisions By Garland McLaurin, American News Project The automobile lobby is back on Capitol Hill to secure $25 billion in loans. Will the money get wasted or put to good use?
Why the Economy Grows Like Crazy Amid High Taxes By Larry Beinhart, AlterNet The raw truth is that the economy has grown faster when taxes were higher, but how can we explain that phenomenon? *************************************************************
Isn't it strange?
The same people who laugh
at gypsy fortune tellers
take economists seriously.
--Cincinnati Enquirer
*************************************************************
Dear President-elect Obama:
CONGRATULATIONS! Our prayers are with you. We will be watching you and, unfortunately, watching out for you.
Below is from an article I read on Buzzflash. It angered both me and my husband. Please be vigil; pay attention to the Secret Police instructing you and your beautiful family.
*****
GOP Senators Already Planning to Filibuster Justice and Fight Obama Court PicksA BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSISby Meg WhiteIn an about-face on procedural policy in Congress, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) recently promised to aggressively filibuster judicial candidates proposed by President-elect Barack Obama.
"I will lead a filibuster if the nominee is the kind of radical leftist who decides cases based on empathy rather than the Constitution or the law. And if that's what [Obama] intends to do, then I'll try to get my colleagues to join in that as well," Kyl said in a speech at a Federalist Society meeting last week.
But that's not what he was saying when his man was in the Oval Office.
Back in 2005, Kyl was anti-filibuster as a result of being frustrated with Democrats, who were in the minority, using filibusters to block President George W. Bush's judicial appointments.
*****
Senator Kyl: I was disheartened to read in BuzzFlash that you intended to obfuscate any legislation originating from a newly elected President Obama. While that may strengthen your cohones with your colleagues, you wouldn't be doing a service to your country.
It is an attitude like yours that got our country into the mess it will take generations to extricate.
You are urged to reconsider.
*************************************************************
The statistics on sanity
are that
one out of every four Americans
are suffering
from some form
of mental illness.
Think of your three best friends.
If they're okay,
then it's YOU."
--Rita Mae Brown
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Prop 8: not all humans are created equal?Proposition 8 was a California State ballot proposition that amended the state Constitution to restrict the definition of marriage to a union between a man and a woman. It overrode a recent California Supreme Court decision that had recognized same-sex marriage in California as a fundamental right. The official ballot title language for Proposition 8 is "Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry." The entirety of the text to be added to the constitution was: "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."
The campaigns for and against Proposition 8 raised $35.8 million and $37.6 million, respectively, becoming the highest-funded campaign on any state ballot that day and surpassing every campaign in the country in spending except the presidential contest. The proponents argued for exclusively heterosexual marriage while claiming that failure to change the constitution would require changes to school curriculum and threaten church tax benefits. The opponents argued that eliminating the rights of any Californian and mandating that one group of people be treated differently from everyone else was unfair and wrong.
*****
Senator Lieberman actually wants to be a Republican. It is sort of like being born a homosexual. As much as you try to deny it, you can't.
*****
I’m so proud to be an American! Yes, Michelle, we are proud to be Americans, too.
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The new Obama administration
is currently trying
to get Helen Thomas’s front row seat back
during Press Conferences.
Yay!
Then everything will be right again with the world.
Well, almost.
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Bail Out the Automotive Industry?Is This Somebody’s Idea of a Joke?
For the past 60 years, the “suits” in the automotive industry proceeded, with blinders and earplugs firmly in place, proudly ignoring what their consumers wanted or needed.
Today, the big 3 are drowning in red ink. Why? Well, I for one drive a Toyota Prius Hybrid and am lovin’ it. The tank holds 11.2 gallons of liquid gold. It gets 50 mi/gal. All any one in the big 3 had to do was buy one, take it apart, and figure out how those clever Japanese did it. Why should they? They’ll get bailed out; Chrysler can tell you that.
Are the suits in the American automotive industry that stupid? Not one of them smart enough to figure out how to make a hybrid? Or was the money from the oil industry just too juicy?
Weren’t you incensed watching those Shit-Ugly-Vans roll off lots across the country ready to slurp up gas faster than you can say "smart Arab, stupid American"?
As Oliver Hardy would say to Stan Laurel: another fine mess you’ve gotten us into.
The Wall Street Journal has a comprehensive article on this fiasco:
Detroit auto makers need more than a bail out.
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I got lost in thought.
It was unfamiliar territory.
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Sarah Palin, bless her heart, is dumber than a rock. Not to scare you or anything, but did you realize she doesn’t have a clue what countries make up NAFTA? Like Canada, the U.S. and Mexico is just too much for her to deal with. Besides, she can’t see a one of them from her kitchen window. Africa a continent? Nooo. Really? But, she felt quite entitled to ask if she could call Senator Biden, Joe (as in Joe, the plumber). Senator Biden, ever the gentleman, said “sure.”
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The hypocrisy of Sarah Palinhttp://whywontgodhealamputees.com/blog/?p=260
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Politics is supposed be
the second oldest profession.
I have come to realize
that it bears
a very close resemblance to the first.
–-Ronald Reagan
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It is time for Congressional Democrats to take the bailout bux away from the Bush administration?
Even as the company was pleading with the federal government for another $40 billion dollars in bailout bux, AIG sent top executives to a secret gathering at a luxury resort in Phoenix last week.
Reporters caught the AIG executives on hidden cameras poolside and leaving the spa at the Pointe Hilton Squaw Peak Resort, despite apparent efforts by the company to disguise its involvement.
Psst...we found out!
AIG made significant efforts to disguise the conference, making sure there were no AIG logos or signs anywhere on the property. A hotel employee told reporter Josh Bernstein, "We can't even say the word AIG.” A company spokesperson, Nick Ashooh, confirmed AIG instructed the hotel to make sure there were no AIG signs or mention of the company by staff.
Pile this lunacy on top of the Bush administration's secret and illegal $140 billion tax windfall for banks, while Congress was busy debating the $700 billion bailout and it is fair to ask—when can impeachment proceedings begin? Oh, wait!...I forgot...impeachment is off the table.
These people are starting to make me angry!
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It's easy being a humorist
when you've got the whole government
working for you.
–-Will Rogers
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The Fourteenth Amendment (Amendment XIV) to the United States Constitution is one of the post-Civil War Reconstruction Amendments, first intended to secure the rights of former slaves. It was proposed on June 13, 1866, and ratified on July 9, 1868.
The amendment provides a broad definition of citizenship, overruling Dred Scott v. Sandford which had excluded slaves and their descendants from possessing Constitutional rights. The amendment requires states to provide equal protection under the law to all persons within their jurisdictions and was used in the mid-20th century to dismantle racial segregation in the United States, as in Brown v. Board of Education. Its Due Process Clause has been the basis of much important and controversial case law regarding privacy rights, abortion (see Roe v. Wade), and other issues.
The other two Reconstruction Amendments are the Thirteenth Amendment (banning slavery) and the Fifteenth Amendment (banning race-based voting qualifications). In The Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1872), dissenting Supreme Court Justice Swayne wrote, "Fairly construed, these amendments may be said to rise to the dignity of a new Magna Carta."
Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
Section 3. No one shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.
Section 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
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Every day,
self-proclaimed stock market "experts"
tell us why the market just went up or down,
as if they really knew.
So where were they yesterday?
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From The Plain Dealer:Peace group drops protest againstvirtual war gameSaturday, August 30, 2008
The local chapter of Veterans for Peace has agreed to suspend its public protest against the Virtual Army Experience game at the Cleveland National Air Show now that the U.S. Army is limiting the game to people 17 and older.
The Army recruiting video game originally targeted teens as young as 13 to use simulated machine guns to kill virtual enemies in a projected Middle East war setting. Show-goers sit in a replica of a Humvee, virtually speed through desert terrain and shoot fake machine guns at life-size pictures of people projected on a wraparound screen.
This sounds fun.
The game will be on exhibit during the Labor Day weekend show at Burke Lakefront Airport today through Monday. It travels to festivals and air shows across the country. The Army removed it from Summerfest in Milwaukee last month after festival officials complained.
Earlier this month, Veterans for Peace urged supporters to call organizers of the air show, its commercial sponsors and public officials to ask the Army not to bring the simulators. Instead maybe they can bring some torture tapes. Y’know, like finger nails being pulled out. Ooo
this is so excited it gives me goose bumps just thinking about .
Come on people! Have we lost all sense of what is right and proper? If I had a son or daughter of cannon-fodder age, I’d be pissed off knowing they were being brain washed from very young and impressionable ages! Where are we getting these ideas, from the Nazi playbook?
And another thing! I would bet my sawed-off shot gun these are the very same people screaming the loudest about the poor little aborted blobs that would one day be cute and cuddly babies!
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Politics is the art
of looking for trouble,
finding it everywhere,
diagnosing it incorrectly,
and applying the wrong remedies.
–-Groucho Marx
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Studs TerkelStuds Terkel, prize-winning author and radio broadcast personality was born Louis Terkel in New York on May 16, 1912. His father, Samuel, was a tailor and his mother, Anna (Finkel) was a seamstress. He had three brothers. The family moved to Chicago in 1922 and opened a rooming house at Ashland and Flournoy on the near West side. From 1926 to 1936 they ran another rooming house, the Wells-Grand Hotel at Wells Street and Grand Avenue. Terkel credits his knowledge of the world to the tenants who gathered in the lobby of the hotel and the people who congregated in nearby Bughouse Square a meeting place for workers, labor organizers, dissidents, the unemployed, and religious fanatics of many persuasions. In 1939 he married Ida Goldberg and had one son.
Terkel attended University of Chicago and received a law degree in 1934. He chose not to pursue a career in law. After a brief stint with the civil service in Washington D.C., he returned to Chicago and worked with the WPA Writers Project in the radio division. One day he was asked to read a script and soon found himself in radio soap operas, in other stage performances, and on a WAIT news show. After a year in the Air Force, he returned to writing radio shows and ads. He was on a sports show on WBBM and then, in 1944, he landed his own show on WENR. This was called the Wax Museum show that allowed him to express his own personality and play recordings he liked from folk music, opera, jazz, or blues. A year later he had his own television show called Stud's Place and started asking people the kind of questions that marked his later work as an interviewer.
In 1952 Terkel began working for WFMT, first with the "Studs Terkel Almanac" and the "Studs Terkel Show," primarily to play music. The interviewing came along by accident {LISTEN}. This later became the award-winning, "The Studs Terkel Program." His first book, Giants of Jazz, was published in 1956. Ten years later his first book of oral history interviews, Division Street : America, came out. It was followed by a succession of oral history books on the 1930s Depression, World War Two, race relations, working, the American dream, and aging. His latest book, Will the Circle Be Unbroken : Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith, was published in 2001. Terkel continues to interview people, work on his books, and make public appearances. He is Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at the Chicago Historical Society.
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Blessed are the young,
for they shall inherit the National Debt.
–-Herbert Hoover
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Robert Goulet, the Suave Baritone, Dead at 73by Douglas MartinRobert Goulet, who marshaled his dark good looks and thundering baritone voice to play a dashing Lancelot in the original “Camelot” in 1960, then went on to a wide-ranging career as a singer and actor, winning a Tony, a Grammy and an Emmy, died yesterday in Los Angeles.
Robert Gerard Goulet was born on Nov. 26, 1933, in Lawrence, Mass. He died awaiting a lung transplant, said his spokesman, Norm Johnson,
Goulet did not become a hit-record machine, a perennial on Broadway, a major movie star or, by his own evaluation, a finely accomplished actor. But his more than 60 albums, travels with touring theatrical revivals and many Las Vegas gigs were enough to ensure nearly a half-century of popularity.
In 1982, he was named Las Vegas entertainer of the year. In an article this year, The Las Vegas Review-Journal said he had prized a picture showing the day his name appeared on the marquees of two showplaces: the Desert Inn, where he had just played, and the Frontier, where he was starting.
His Las Vegas success led to roles parodying himself as the consummate lounge singer, a part he played in the movie “Atlantic City” (1980). He was the voice for a character much like himself in a “Simpsons” episode, and he portrayed Robert Goulet in ESPN commercial spots that won a sports Emmy for best promotional shorts in 1996.
Goulet’s rise after “Camelot” was swift. In 1962, he won a Grammy Award as best new artist for his first two albums, “Always You” and “Two of Us,” and his hit single “What Kind of Fool Am I.” Two years later, his album “My Love Forgive Me” went gold; 17 of his albums from 1962 to 1970 made the charts.
He reached the peak of his popularity in the ’60s. In 1966, he starred in a television adaptation of “Brigadoon,” which won an Emmy as outstanding musical program. He won a Tony for his performance in the 1968 Broadway musical “The Happy Time.” And he appeared frequently on popular television programs like “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
His first marriage, to Louise Longmore, ended in divorce in March 1963. That November, he married the singer and actress Carol Lawrence. The couple were called a real-life Ken and Barbie, but they divorced in 1981 and an acrimonious tell-all book by Ms. Lawrence followed.
Besides his wife, the former Vera Novak, Mr. Goulet is survived by a daughter, Nicolette, from his first marriage; his sons Christopher and Michael from his second; and two grandchildren.
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Why is it that,
as soon as politicians get elected,
they believe all our money belongs to them?
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You Made a Mistake? A Mistake?"I made a mistake," Greenspan said, "in presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks and (other financial institutions) were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms."
Really? Even I lock my doors at night, Mr. Greenspan!
This will go down as the biggest effin’ understatement of 2008!
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Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain --
and most fools do.
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Early e-voting results in vote flipping in three statesso far, and what you can do.Posted by Xeno on October 27, 2008
Martinsburg man says machine switched Democratic vote to Republican 5 times … Roger Belozier, a veteran and retired postal worker from Berkeley County, experienced problems with electronic voting machines when he went to vote early in the Martinsburg courthouse.
“I reviewed my vote to make sure it was a straight Democratic ticket. But it switched my vote to Republican candidates five different times. I was able to cancel out the Republican votes.
“But I am scratching my head. Why did the machine switch my votes five different times? I asked someone to come over and explain it to me,” Belozier said on Wednesday. “I am concerned about a lot of people who might not notice or people who might be intimidated. They have to raise their hands and ask for some help.”
Tracy Lopez had the same problem when she went to vote in Martinsburg with her husband last week, according to a message she posted on a political Web site supporting Obama.
“When I pressed ‘Barack Obama,’ it checked off ‘John McCain,’ ” Lopez wrote. “I de-selected, and instead of taking any chances, I chose straight Democratic ticket rather than go through the whole thing and have any mistakes.”
Lopez, who declined to be interviewed personally, thought, “Maybe I had just been clumsy. But my husband confirmed that he had the same exact thing happen to him. He was on a different voting machine, voting at the same time I was.”
…Secretary of State Betty Ireland held a press conference on Wednesday to “discuss recent reports of purported problems regarding touch- screen voting machines.” Ireland vigorously defended iVotronic voting machines made by Election Systems & Software from Omaha, Neb. After some individuals reported voting problems, Ireland contacted county clerks and “advised them to examine their machines” and to re-calibrate them if necessary.
How about this: fire Secretary of State Betty Ireland and throw these machines in the garbage heap where they belong. Recalibrate my butt. What she means by “recalibrate” is make the vote flip fraud not show up to the voting individual, which is easily done with proprietary software. An electronic vote is a vote thrown away.
I noted in passing last week that West Virginia has had the distinct honor of being the first state in the union to report problems (surprise! surprise!) with its electronic voting systems. There are now also reports that similar problems have been happening in Tennessee and Texas as well. No doubt these won’t be the last.
So what exactly has happened? Largely, the problem has been what’s been dubbed “vote flipping” or “vote switching” — which is exactly what it sounds like. According to a report by my buddy Scott Finn over at West Virginia Public Broadcasting from late last week:
Voters in at least two West Virginia counties — Jackson and Putnam — say electronic voting machines are switching their votes from Democrat to Republican.
The two county clerks, both Republicans, say they don’t think there’s a problem. But these voting problems have gotten the attention of everyone from CNN to liberal website The Huffington Post.
So far, eight voters from Jackson and Putnam counties have come forward to say their electronic voting machines kept changing their votes from Democrats to Republicans — usually, from Obama to McCain.
Wired News also reports that Ohio and Berkeley counties have been having similar problems.
It appears that some of the problems have to do with the fact that the software is simply faulty, and requires “re-calibration” by voting officials.
According to an account in the Decatur County Chronicle:
“The way the machine is set up, when you are standing in front of it and seeing it at a certain angle, it looks like you are touching the middle (of the button) when you are actually touching the line above it,” Box said.
Election Commissioner Rick Box and fellow Election Commissioner Grafton Dodd tested the machines on Monday. Dodd could not be reached for comment but Box said he found the area of the screen where the buttons for President are located are extremely close together. He blames the problem in part on poor design by software programmers, and adds that there may be sensitivity issues with the screen itself.
In other words, it’s the voter’s fault!
This should piss you off, but there are things you can still do to protect the vote. Get involved in your area (or go document the results in a place you suspect will have vote fraud). Doesn’t sound like much, but it may help.
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Only two things are infinite:
the universe and human stupidity ...
and I’m not sure about the former.
*************************************************************
The Republican War on DemocracyBy pushing photo ID laws, Republicans aren't curbing voter fraud. They're denying Americans their legal rights.
The 2008 presidential election in the US may well leave us all waxing nostalgic for the good old disaster days of 2000 and 2004.
Given the asterisks in the record books next to both of those elections, you might think that Democrats, the victims of the anti-democratic (small "d") attacks in both elections, would have spent the intervening years putting virtually all resources into making sure there wouldn't be another such electoral disaster in 2008. You would have been horribly mistaken.
In addition to proving miserable failures (although, admittedly, they didn't try very hard) at rolling back the tsunami of wholly unverifiable electronic voting systems now set for use, misuse and utter breakdown across the country this November, the Democrats have also made little headway in ending what will be one of the most troubling problems this year: voter disenfranchisement via phony Republican claims of "voter fraud."
The Republicans, on the other hand, have been at work for years developing their anti-democratic (small "d" again, but it may as well be a capital "D") schemes.
For a glimpse at what may well be the Rosetta Stone of Republican disenfranchisement efforts, one need look no further than at what Paul Weyrich, one of the founding fathers of modern American conservatism, told a gathering of some 15,000 preachers at a training conference in Dallas, Texas in 1980 (at which both Ronald Reagan and the right-wing Rev. Jerry Falwell shared the podium).
"Many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome -- good government. They want everybody to vote," Weyrich instructed the flock in comments captured on video.
"I don't want everybody to vote," he continued unapologetically. "Elections are not won by a majority of people; they never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now."
And here comes the key to what will be the most crucial driving force for the entire Republican party effort this November: "As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."
Thus spoke Weyrich in 1980, and the party leaders have followed in good faith ever since. Their disciples continue today to regularly advise the most powerful Republican insiders in the country.
And thus have they gone forth to find every measure -- no matter how adverse to the key American value of democracy, or how expensive the cost may be -- to keep legitimate, legal voters from being able to cast their vote and have that vote counted accurately.
Not every voter, of course. Just the ones who tend to vote Democratic. The easiest ones to target among those who don't tend to vote Republican: African-Americans, Hispanics, the elderly, the urban poor, and even students. All in the hopes, as Weyrich urged, of keeping Republican "leverage in ... elections ... up" by keeping "the voting populace ... down.”
According to the non-partisan League of Women voters, some 21 million Americans do not have the type of photo identification required by the most draconian types of polling-place photo ID restrictions that are now being pushed -- by hook and by crook -- in states across the country. Among that group, some 25% of African-Americans, 18% of Americans over 65, 10% of the 40 million Americans with disabilities, 15% of low-income voters and untold numbers of voting-aged college students who reside in states other than where they may have valid drivers' licenses would have difficulty voting under such laws. (You may add to the Republican enemies list: married women, hurricane victims, and those suffering from palsy, if you like.)
With that in mind, the Republicans have stopped at nothing, in order to see such laws passed wherever possible, and otherwise enforced nonetheless even where such poll restrictions have been found by the courts to be illegal and/or unconstitutional.
An unprecedented decision by the now rightward-slanted US supreme court earlier this year, allowed such a law to stand in Indiana. The result: the disenfranchised in the state's May primary election included college students and nuns in their 80s and 90s from St Mary's Convent (one of the "nonagenarian hooligans" kept from her right to vote was 98 years old) and vets of multiple foreign wars, not to mention those who simply didn't bother to show up, since they knew they'd not be allowed to vote. All of that following the state of Indiana's own admission in the court case that they were unable to document a single case of voter fraud in the state's history that would have been prevented by their new voter-suppression law.
The supporters of such laws, however, argue that it's easy to get one of the free IDs that Indiana offers. Fact is, it's not easy at all, and those supposedly free IDs can get rather expensive. And the same effort is underway in other states as well.
In Missouri, for instance, a state regarded by the McClatchy News Service as "Ground Zero," in 2006, for the GOP's voter disenfranchisement effort, a man was arrested while legally voting two weeks ago during a state primary election. He was sent to jail because he offered two different pieces of perfectly legal ID, but none that the poll workers at his polling place wanted to accept. That, even after the state's supreme court found draconian photo ID restrictions to be unconstitutional there.
In the same state in 2006, not long after the state court's decision, the secretary of state herself (a Democrat), responsible for enforcing the election laws there, was told three times as she was trying to vote that she needed to present a photo ID. Of course she didn't, and she has some familiarities with the law. But that didn't stop them from trying anyway, even as Missouri has some 200,000 voters who could, according to the secretary of state's own numbers, be kept from exercising their legal franchise under such laws.
Make no mistake. This is an effort that reaches to the highest federal levels. For example, despite a very clear federal law that requires it -- the Bush administration's department of veterans affairs has disallowed voter registration activities in VA hospitals and other facilities, describing such activities as "partisan" (telling, that). Thus, it's assured that many of those who put their very lives on the line under the premise of spreading democracy throughout the world will have no voice in that same democracy back in their own country this year.
The beat goes on and will continue to grow louder through Election Day in November. Count on it.
The Prospect's Art Levine elegantly and accurately referred to all of this as The Republican war on voting. But make no mistake about it, this is an all out Republican war on democracy in which we will be witnessing an unprecedented "troop surge" between here and November.
Paul Weyrich is surely smiling.
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The difference between genius and insanity
is that genius has its limits.
*************************************************************
The Monster YearsWatching our president-elect the other night wasn’t just a victory for tolerance or a mandate for progressive change: it was the end of the monster years. For fourteen years, America’s political life has been dominated by monsters like Karl Rove, who declared that liberals wanted to offer “therapy and understanding” to terrorists. Monsters like Dick Cheney, who saw 9/11 as an opportunity to start torturing people. Four years ago, it seemed as if the monsters would dominate American politics for a long time to come. But for now, at least, they’ve been banished to the wilderness. And that’s good.
*****
The 14th Sign of a Country Turning Fascist.14. Fraudulent elections:
Elections in the form of plebiscites or public opinion polls are usually bogus. When actual elections with candidates are held, they become perverted by the power elite to get the desired result. Common methods include maintaining control of the election machinery, intimidating and disenfranchising opposition voters, destroying or disallowing legal votes, and, as a last resort, turning to a judiciary beholden to the power elite.
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Atheism is a non-prophet organization.
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A Word from DEMOCRACY NOW!
* Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) Calls for Independent Counsel to Investigate Cheney and Rumsfeld for Violating Torture Laws *
Democratic Congressman Jerrold Nadler of New York has urged Attorney General Michael Mukasey to appoint an independent counsel to investigate Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and other senior Bush administration officials for violations of the law relating to the torture of prisoners in US custody. Nadler is the chair of the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/23/rep_jerrold_nadler_d_ny_calls
* Did Obama Aide Admiral Dennis Blair Lie to Congress? *
President-elect Obama is expected to name his intelligence team today: Leon Panetta for the CIA, John Brennan as a key White House adviser, and Admiral Dennis Blair as Director of National Intelligence. Blair, as Allan Nairn reported on Democracy Now!, was implicated in backing the perpetrators of church massacres in East Timor in 1999. Award-winning investigative reporter Allan Nairn reveals new information that indicates he may have lied to Congress.
Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/1/9/did_obama_aide_admiral_dennis_blair
* As Obama Issues Dire Warning on Economy, a Look at "The Plot Against Pensions and the Plan to Save Them" *
For the 50 million Americans with 401(k) retirement plans, 2008 is a year many wish they could forget. Workers saw their 401(k) plans lose between 20 and 30 percent of their value as the Dow Jones Industrial Average suffered its worst year since the Great Depression. We speak with Teresa Ghilarducci, director of the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis, about her new book When I'm Sixty-Four: The Plot Against Pensions and the Plan to Save Them.
Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/1/9/as_obama_issues_dire_warning_on
* Max Blumenthal on "Rick Warren's Double Life" *
President-elect Barack Obama is drawing criticism from many supporters for his choice to deliver the invocation at next month's inauguration. Obama has selected the Reverend Rick Warren, a leading evangelical opponent of abortion and same-sex marriage. Warren supported California's recent gay marriage ban and has compared abortion to the Nazi Holocaust. In a recent interview with the website BeliefNet.com, Warren said he thinks gay marriage is comparable to incest, polygamy and child abuse. We speak to investigative journalist Max Blumenthal.
Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/23/max_blumenthal_on_rick_warrens
* Republican IT Specialist Dies in Plane Crash *
A top Republican internet strategist who was set to testify in a case alleging election tampering in 2004 in Ohio has died in a plane crash. Michael Connell was the chief IT consultant to Karl Rove and created websites for the Bush and McCain electoral campaigns. Michael Connell was deposed one day before the election this year by attorneys Cliff Arnebeck and Bob Fitrakis about his actions during the 2004 vote count in Ohio and his access to Karl Rove's email files and how they went missing.
Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/22/republican_it_specialist_dies
* US Auto Giants, Workers Face Uncertain Future as Bush Admin Mulls "Orderly" Bankruptcy *
The future of auto giants General Motors and Chrysler remains up in the air one week after Senate Republicans rejected a deal to grant the automakers $14 billion in emergency loans. Chrysler is closing all of its plants today. The White House says it is considering allowing the companies to go bankrupt in what it describes as an "orderly way." We speak to union activist and writer Gregg Shotwell, a thirty-year General Motors retiree.
Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/19/us_auto_giants_workers_face_uncertain
* Katrina's Hidden Race War: In Aftermath of Storm, White Vigilante Groups Shot 11 African Americans in New Orleans *
In a shocking new report, The Nation magazine exposes how white vigilante groups patrolled the streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, shooting at least eleven African American men. Local police have never conducted investigations into the shootings. We speak to reporter A.C. Thompson and New Orleans resident Donnell Herrington, who nearly died after being shot by a white vigilante.
Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/19/katrinas_hidden_race_war_in_aftermath
* Take Back the Land: Miami Grassroots Group Moves Struggling Families into Vacant Homes *
The Miami grassroots group Take Back the Land has launched a campaign to help some of the victims of the foreclosure crisis. The group has been helping homeless families illegally move into vacant homes that have been foreclosed. We speak to Take Back the Land founder Max Rameau.
Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/19/take_back_the_land_miami_grassroots
* Headlines for December 19, 2008 *
US Accused of New Civilian Killings in Afghanistan
Obama to Name Labor, Trade Selections
Obama's Intel Chief Pick Backed Indonesian Occupation of East Timor
Pentagon Prepares to Shut Gitmo
Rwandan Sentenced to Life in Prison in Genocide Trial
US Opposes UN Declaration Affirming Gay Rights
Castro Offers to Release Dissidents for Freedom of "Cuban 5"
Coleman Lead Falls to 5 Votes in Minn. Recount
New School Students Win Demands in Protest
Cheney Declares Right to Withhold Records
Chicago Activist, Journalist Beauty Turner Dies at 51
Mark Felt, "Deep Throat" in Watergate Scandal, Dies at 95
Listen/Watch/Read
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/19/headlines
* EXCLUSIVE...AWOL US Soldier Seeks Asylum in Germany Over Returning to "Illegal" War in Iraq *
A US soldier who went absent without leave a year and a half ago to avoid returning to Iraq has applied for asylum in Germany. Specialist Andre Shepherd served in Iraq between September 2004 and February 2005 as an Apache helicopter mechanic. When his unit was called up to return to Iraq in early 2007, he went AWOL to avoid redeployment, calling the war "illegal." He lived underground in Germany for a year and a half before applying for asylum two weeks ago. We speak with Shepherd in his first international broadcast interview.
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http://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/12/exclusiveawol_us_soldier_seeks_asylum_in
* US Use of Bases in Germany for Iraq War Goes Against German Constitution that Forbids Launching Wars from German Soil, Says Activist *
Germany is home to tens of thousands of US troops and the largest number of US bases in the world outside of America. We speak with US activist Elsa Rassbach. She moved to Berlin, where she is part of the American Voices Abroad Military Project.
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http://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/12/us_use_of_bases_in_germany
* Senate Report Finds Rumsfeld Directly Responsible for US Torture of Prisoners *
A bipartisan Senate report has accused former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials of being directly responsible for the abuse and torture of prisoners at Guantanamo and other US prisons. We speak with the man who sued Donald Rumsfeld in Berlin, German, attorney Wolfgang Kaleck.
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http://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/12/senate_report_finds_rumsfeld_directly_responsible
* Headlines for December 12, 2008 *
Senate Panel Faults Rumsfeld, Bush Admin for Torture at Gitmo, Foreign Jails
57 Dead in Iraq Bombing
Gates: Thousands More US Troops in Afghanistan by Spring
6 Killed in US Strike in Pakistan
Auto Bailout Collapses in Senate
Obama Chooses Daschle for Top Health Post
Bank of America Announces Mass Layoffs
Jobless Claims at 26-Year High
Developing Nations Agree to Emissions Cuts
Chavez Renews Effort to End Term Limits
Antiwar Vet Plans Civil Suit over Hempstead Protest Injuries
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http://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/12/headlines
* US Interrogator in Iraq Says Torture Policy Has Led to Deaths of Thousands of American Soldiers *
We speak with a former special intelligence operations officer who led an interrogations team in Iraq two years ago. His nonviolent interrogation methods led Special Forces to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq. He has written a new book, How to Break a Terrorist: The US Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq. The publication date for the book was delayed for six weeks due to the Pentagon's vetting of it. The soldier wrote it under the pseudonym, Matthew Alexander, for security reasons. He says the US military's use of torture is responsible for the deaths of thousands of US soldiers by inspiring foreign fighters to kill Americans.
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http://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/3/us_interrogator_in_iraq_says
* Attorney Scott Horton on "Justice After Bush: Prosecuting an Outlaw Administration" *
We speak with Scott Horton, an attorney specializing in international law and human rights. He is also a legal affairs contributor to Harper's magazine, where he has the cover story in the latest issue, called "Justice After Bush: Prosecuting an Outlaw Administration." We also speak with Horton about Eric Holder, President-elect Barack Obama's choice for attorney general.
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http://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/3/attorney_scott_horton_on_justice
* Headlines for December 3, 2008 *
US Refuses to Sign Treaty Banning Cluster Bombs
Automakers Seek $34 Billion Bailout
Rice Arrives in India Following Mumbai Attacks
Obama Considers Naming Holbrooke South Asia Envoy
Chinese Americans Protest Nomination of Richardson to Cabinet Post
Obama Pledges to Work with Governors
Gates: Closing Gitmo Will Be "High Priority"
Climate Activists Protest at Climate Conference
EPA Guts Mountaintop Mining Rule Protecting Streams
Legendary Folk Singer Odetta, 77, Dies
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http://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/03/headlines
* Democracy Now! Exclusive (Part 1): Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn on the Weather Underground, the McCain Campaign Attacks, President-Elect Obama and the Antiwar Movement Today *
In the late stages of the presidential race, no other name was used more by the McCain-Palin campaign against Barack Obama than Bill Ayers. Ayers is a respected Chicago professor who was a member of the 1960s militant antiwar group the Weather Underground. In their first joint television interview, Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn discuss the McCain campaign attacks, President-elect Obama, the Weather Underground, the legacy of 1960s social justice movements, and more.
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http://www.democracynow.org/2008/11/14/exclusive_in_first_joint_broadcast
* Headlines for November 14, 2008 *
UN Forced to Stop Gaza Food Aid
US Attack Kills 8 in Pakistan
Bush: Don't Blame Market for Financial Collapse
US to Host Global Financial Summit
FDIC to Propose New Foreclosure Assistance
Jobless Claims Hit 16-Year High
Obama to Give Up Senate Seat
Emanuel Apologizes for Father's Israel Comments
Clinton Said to Be in Running for Sec. of State
US Rejects Russian Missile Proposal
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http://www.democracynow.org/2008/11/14/headlines
*****
Barack Obama's Election Night Slide Showhttp://flickr.com/photos/barackobamadotcom/sets/72157608716313371/show/*****
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