Good Cop - Bad Cop

[sidecross]

Obama after George W certainly looks like the 'good cop', but they are cops just the same.

The current military position for Afghanistan is still more war and many are beginning to oppose this war policy.

Obama's views on prosecution torture are very disappointing too. The following is an article by Chris Hedges.


Published on Monday, May 4, 2009 by TruthDig.com

Buying Brand Obama

by Chris Hedges

Barack Obama is a brand. And the Obama brand is designed to make us feel good about our government while corporate overlords loot the Treasury, our elected officials continue to have their palms greased by armies of corporate lobbyists, our corporate media diverts us with gossip and trivia and our imperial wars expand in the Middle East. Brand Obama is about being happy consumers. We are entertained. We feel hopeful. We like our president. We believe he is like us. But like all branded products spun out from the manipulative world of corporate advertising, we are being duped into doing and supporting a lot of things that are not in our interest.

What, for all our faith and hope, has the Obama brand given us? His administration has spent, lent or guaranteed $12.8 trillion in taxpayer dollars to Wall Street and insolvent banks in a doomed effort to reinflate the bubble economy, a tactic that at best forestalls catastrophe and will leave us broke in a time of profound crisis. Brand Obama has allocated nearly $1 trillion in defense-related spending and the continuation of our doomed imperial projects in Iraq, where military planners now estimate that 70,000 troops will remain for the next 15 to 20 years. Brand Obama has expanded the war in Afghanistan, including the use of drones sent on cross-border bombing runs into Pakistan that have doubled the number of civilians killed over the past three months. Brand Obama has refused to ease restrictions so workers can organize and will not consider single-payer, not-for-profit health care for all Americans. And Brand Obama will not prosecute the Bush administration for war crimes, including the use of torture, and has refused to dismantle Bush's secrecy laws or restore habeas corpus.

Brand Obama offers us an image that appears radically individualistic and new. It inoculates us from seeing that the old engines of corporate power and the vast military-industrial complex continue to plunder the country. Corporations, which control our politics, no longer produce products that are essentially different, but brands that are different. Brand Obama does not threaten the core of the corporate state any more than did Brand George W. Bush. The Bush brand collapsed. We became immune to its studied folksiness. We saw through its artifice. This is a common deflation in the world of advertising. So we have been given a new Obama brand with an exciting and faintly erotic appeal. Benetton and Calvin Klein were the precursors to the Obama brand, using ads to associate themselves with risqué art and progressive politics. It gave their products an edge. But the goal, as with all brands, was to make passive consumers mistake a brand with an experience.

"The abandonment of the radical economic foundations of the women's and civil-rights movements by the conflation of causes that came to be called political correctness successfully trained a generation of activists in the politics of image, not action," Naomi Klein wrote in "No Logo."

Obama, who has become a global celebrity, was molded easily into a brand. He had almost no experience, other than two years in the Senate, lacked any moral core and could be painted as all things to all people. His brief Senate voting record was a miserable surrender to corporate interests. He was happy to promote nuclear power as "green" energy. He voted to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He reauthorized the Patriot Act. He would not back a bill designed to cap predatory credit card interest rates. He opposed a bill that would have reformed the notorious Mining Law of 1872. He refused to support the single-payer health care bill HR676, sponsored by Reps. Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers. He supported the death penalty. And he backed a class-action "reform" bill that was part of a large lobbying effort by financial firms. The law, known as the Class Action Fairness Act, would effectively shut down state courts as a venue to hear most class-action lawsuits and deny redress in many of the courts where these cases have a chance of defying powerful corporate challenges.

While Gaza was being bombarded and hit with airstrikes in the weeks before Obama took office, "the Obama team let it be known that it would not object to the planned resupply of ‘smart bombs' and other hi-tech ordnance that was already flowing to Israel," according to Seymour Hersh. Even his one vaunted anti-war speech as a state senator, perhaps his single real act of defiance, was swiftly reversed. He told the Chicago Tribune on July 27, 2004, that "there's not that much difference between my position and George Bush's position at this stage. The difference, in my mind, is who's in a position to execute." And unlike anti-war stalwarts like Kucinich, who gave hundreds of speeches against the war, Obama then dutifully stood silent until the Iraq war became unpopular.

Obama's campaign won the vote of hundreds of marketers, agency heads and marketing-services vendors gathered at the Association of National Advertisers' annual conference in October. The Obama campaign was named Advertising Age's marketer of the year for 2008 and edged out runners-up Apple and Zappos.com. Take it from the professionals. Brand Obama is a marketer's dream. President Obama does one thing and Brand Obama gets you to believe another. This is the essence of successful advertising. You buy or do what the advertiser wants because of how they can make you feel.

Celebrity culture has leeched into every aspect of our culture, including politics, to bequeath to us what Benjamin DeMott called "junk politics." Junk politics does not demand justice or the reparation of rights. Junk politics personalizes and moralizes issues rather than clarifying them. "It's impatient with articulated conflict, enthusiastic about America's optimism and moral character, and heavily dependent on feel-your-pain language and gesture," DeMott noted. The result of junk politics is that nothing changes - "meaning zero interruption in the processes and practices that strengthen existing, interlocking systems of socioeconomic advantage." It redefines traditional values, tilting "courage toward braggadocio, sympathy toward mawkishness, humility toward self-disrespect, identification with ordinary citizens toward distrust of brains." Junk politics "miniaturizes large, complex problems at home while maximizing threats from abroad. It's also given to abrupt unexplained reversals of its own public stances, often spectacularly bloating problems previously miniaturized." And finally, it "seeks at every turn to obliterate voters' consciousness of socioeconomic and other differences in their midst."

An image-based culture, one dominated by junk politics, communicates through narratives, pictures and carefully orchestrated spectacle and manufactured pseudo-drama. Scandalous affairs, hurricanes, earthquakes, untimely deaths, lethal new viruses, train wrecks-these events play well on computer screens and television. International diplomacy, labor union negotiations and convoluted bailout packages do not yield exciting personal narratives or stimulating images. A governor who patronizes call girls becomes a huge news story. A politician who proposes serious regulatory reform, universal health care or advocates curbing wasteful spending is boring. Kings, queens and emperors once used their court conspiracies to divert their subjects. Today cinematic, political and journalistic celebrities distract us with their personal foibles and scandals. They create our public mythology. Acting, politics and sports have become, as they were during the reign of Nero, interchangeable.

In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we do not seek reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion. We ask to be indulged and comforted by clichés, stereotypes and inspirational messages that tell us we can be whoever we seek to be, that we live in the greatest country on Earth, that we are endowed with superior moral and physical qualities, and that our future will always be glorious and prosperous, either because of our own attributes, or our national character, or because we are blessed by God. Reality is not accepted as an impediment to our desires. Reality does not make us feel good.

In his book "Public Opinion," Walter Lippmann distinguished between "the world outside and the pictures in our heads." He defined a "stereotype" as an oversimplified pattern that helps us find meaning in the world. Lippmann cited examples of the crude "stereotypes we carry about in our heads" of whole groups of people such as "Germans," "South Europeans," "Negroes," "Harvard men," "agitators" and others. These stereotypes, Lippmann noted, give a reassuring and false consistency to the chaos of existence. They offer easily grasped explanations of reality and are closer to propaganda because they simplify rather than complicate.

Pseudo-events-dramatic productions orchestrated by publicists, political machines, television, Hollywood or advertisers-however, are very different. They have, as Daniel Boorstin wrote in "The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America," the capacity to appear real even though we know they are staged. They are capable, because they can evoke a powerful emotional response, of overwhelming reality and replacing reality with a fictional narrative that often becomes accepted truth. The unmasking of a stereotype damages and often destroys its credibility. But pseudo-events, whether they show the president in an auto plant or a soup kitchen or addressing troops in Iraq, are immune to this deflation. The exposure of the elaborate mechanisms behind the pseudo-event only adds to its fascination and its power. This is the basis of the convoluted television reporting on how effectively political campaigns and politicians have been stage-managed. Reporters, especially those on television, no longer ask if the message is true but if the pseudo-event worked or did not work as political theater. Pseudo-events are judged on how effectively we have been manipulated by illusion. Those events that appear real are relished and lauded. Those that fail to create a believable illusion are deemed failures. Truth is irrelevant. Those who succeed in politics, as in most of the culture, are those who create the brands and pseudo-events that offer the most convincing fantasies. And this is the art Obama has mastered.

A public that can no longer distinguish between truth and fiction is left to interpret reality through illusion. Random facts or obscure bits of data and trivia are used to bolster illusion and give it credibility or are discarded if they interfere with the message. The worse reality becomes-the more, for example, foreclosures and unemployment skyrocket-the more people seek refuge and comfort in illusions. When opinions cannot be distinguished from facts, when there is no universal standard to determine truth in law, in science, in scholarship, or in reporting the events of the day, when the most valued skill is the ability to entertain, the world becomes a place where lies become true, where people can believe what they want to believe. This is the real danger of pseudo-events and why pseudo-events are far more pernicious than stereotypes. They do not explain reality, as stereotypes attempt to, but replace reality. Pseudo-events redefine reality by the parameters set by their creators. These creators, who make massive profits peddling these illusions, have a vested interest in maintaining the power structures they control.

The old production-oriented culture demanded what the historian Warren Susman termed character. The new consumption-oriented culture demands what he called personality. The shift in values is a shift from a fixed morality to the artifice of presentation. The old cultural values of thrift and moderation honored hard work, integrity and courage. The consumption-oriented culture honors charm, fascination and likability. "The social role demanded of all in the new culture of personality was that of a performer," Susman wrote. "Every American was to become a performing self."

The junk politics practiced by Obama is a consumer fraud. It is about performance. It is about lies. It is about keeping us in a perpetual state of childishness. But the longer we live in illusion, the worse reality will be when it finally shatters our fantasies. Those who do not understand what is happening around them and who are overwhelmed by a brutal reality they did not expect or foresee search desperately for saviors. They beg demagogues to come to their rescue. This is the ultimate danger of the Obama Brand. It effectively masks the wanton internal destruction and theft being carried out by our corporate state. These corporations, once they have stolen trillions in taxpayer wealth, will leave tens of millions of Americans bereft, bewildered and yearning for even more potent and deadly illusions, ones that could swiftly snuff out what is left of our diminished open society.

© 2009 TruthDig.com

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, will be out in July, but is available for pre-order.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/04

[sidecross]

May 6, 2009

Charges Seen as Unlikely for Lawyers Over Interrogations

By DAVID JOHNSTON and SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — An internal Justice Department inquiry into the conduct of Bush administration lawyers who wrote secret memorandums authorizing brutal interrogations has concluded that the authors committed serious lapses of judgment but should not be criminally prosecuted, according to government officials briefed on a draft of the findings.

The report by the Office of Professional Responsibility, an internal ethics unit within the Justice Department, is also likely to ask that state bar associations consider possible disciplinary action, including reprimands or even disbarment, for some of the lawyers involved in writing the legal opinions, the officials said.

The conclusions of the 220-page draft report are not final and have not yet been approved by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. The officials said it is possible the final report might be subject to revision, but they did not expect major alterations in its main findings or recommendations.

The draft report is described as very detailed, tracing e-mail messages between Justice Department lawyers and officials at the White House and the Central Intelligence Agency. Among the questions it is expected to consider is whether the memos reflected the lawyers’ independent judgments of the limits of the federal anti-torture statute or were skewed deliberately to justify what the C.I.A. proposed.

At issue are whether the Justice Department lawyers acted ethically in writing a series of legal opinions from 2002 to 2007. The main targets of criticism are John Yoo, Jay S. Bybee, and Steven G. Bradbury, who as senior officials in the department’s Office of Legal Counsel were the principal authors of the memos.

The opinions permitted the C.I.A. to use a number of interrogation methods that human rights groups have condemned as torture, including waterboarding, wall-slamming, head-slapping and other techniques. The opinions allowed many of these practices to be used repeatedly and in combination.

Several legal scholars have remarked that in approving waterboarding — the near-drowning method that President Obama and his aides have described as torture — the Justice Department lawyers did not cite cases in which the United States government had prosecuted American law enforcement officials and Japanese interrogators in World War II for using the procedure.

In a letter made public on Monday, the Justice Department advised two Democratic senators on the Judiciary committee, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, that the former department lawyers who wrote the opinions had until Sunday to submit written appeals to the findings.

The draft report on the interrogation opinions was completed in December and has provoked controversy within counterterrorism circles, which has intensified since last month when the Obama administration disclosed four previously secret opinions written from 2002 and 2005, which for the first time detailed the approved procedures.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/us/politics/06inquire.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

[Isaiah Mpski]

So what?

Somebody will ose a job,but probably take some sort of severence pay with them.

Listem Sidey this kind of shit has been going on at least since-as the author quote-since WWII.

It reached it's hey-day in the Reagan Administration and the Central American Wars,in which we supported right wing death squads throughout the Americas.
We trained Somatic Psychotreatment physicians from other countries the use of such therapies as truth serum,ect,deep shock insulin and Indaclon during the late 60's and early 70's.These are probably still be used in many countries throughout the world.
The thinking behind protocols such as these was extremely loose but effective.Which led to the experimentation of the effects of LSD and the tragedies involved there.:o

[sidecross]

Obama after George W certainly looks like the 'good cop', but they are cops just the same.

The current military position for Afghanistan is still more war and many are beginning to oppose this war policy.

Obama's views on prosecution torture are very disappointing too. The following is an article by Chris Hedges.


Published on Monday, May 4, 2009 by TruthDig.com

Buying Brand Obama

by Chris Hedges

Barack Obama is a brand. And the Obama brand is designed to make us feel good about our government while corporate overlords loot the Treasury, our elected officials continue to have their palms greased by armies of corporate lobbyists, our corporate media diverts us with gossip and trivia and our imperial wars expand in the Middle East. Brand Obama is about being happy consumers. We are entertained. We feel hopeful. We like our president. We believe he is like us. But like all branded products spun out from the manipulative world of corporate advertising, we are being duped into doing and supporting a lot of things that are not in our interest.

What, for all our faith and hope, has the Obama brand given us? His administration has spent, lent or guaranteed $12.8 trillion in taxpayer dollars to Wall Street and insolvent banks in a doomed effort to reinflate the bubble economy, a tactic that at best forestalls catastrophe and will leave us broke in a time of profound crisis. Brand Obama has allocated nearly $1 trillion in defense-related spending and the continuation of our doomed imperial projects in Iraq, where military planners now estimate that 70,000 troops will remain for the next 15 to 20 years. Brand Obama has expanded the war in Afghanistan, including the use of drones sent on cross-border bombing runs into Pakistan that have doubled the number of civilians killed over the past three months. Brand Obama has refused to ease restrictions so workers can organize and will not consider single-payer, not-for-profit health care for all Americans. And Brand Obama will not prosecute the Bush administration for war crimes, including the use of torture, and has refused to dismantle Bush's secrecy laws or restore habeas corpus.

Brand Obama offers us an image that appears radically individualistic and new. It inoculates us from seeing that the old engines of corporate power and the vast military-industrial complex continue to plunder the country. Corporations, which control our politics, no longer produce products that are essentially different, but brands that are different. Brand Obama does not threaten the core of the corporate state any more than did Brand George W. Bush. The Bush brand collapsed. We became immune to its studied folksiness. We saw through its artifice. This is a common deflation in the world of advertising. So we have been given a new Obama brand with an exciting and faintly erotic appeal. Benetton and Calvin Klein were the precursors to the Obama brand, using ads to associate themselves with risqué art and progressive politics. It gave their products an edge. But the goal, as with all brands, was to make passive consumers mistake a brand with an experience.

"The abandonment of the radical economic foundations of the women's and civil-rights movements by the conflation of causes that came to be called political correctness successfully trained a generation of activists in the politics of image, not action," Naomi Klein wrote in "No Logo."

Obama, who has become a global celebrity, was molded easily into a brand. He had almost no experience, other than two years in the Senate, lacked any moral core and could be painted as all things to all people. His brief Senate voting record was a miserable surrender to corporate interests. He was happy to promote nuclear power as "green" energy. He voted to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He reauthorized the Patriot Act. He would not back a bill designed to cap predatory credit card interest rates. He opposed a bill that would have reformed the notorious Mining Law of 1872. He refused to support the single-payer health care bill HR676, sponsored by Reps. Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers. He supported the death penalty. And he backed a class-action "reform" bill that was part of a large lobbying effort by financial firms. The law, known as the Class Action Fairness Act, would effectively shut down state courts as a venue to hear most class-action lawsuits and deny redress in many of the courts where these cases have a chance of defying powerful corporate challenges.

While Gaza was being bombarded and hit with airstrikes in the weeks before Obama took office, "the Obama team let it be known that it would not object to the planned resupply of ‘smart bombs' and other hi-tech ordnance that was already flowing to Israel," according to Seymour Hersh. Even his one vaunted anti-war speech as a state senator, perhaps his single real act of defiance, was swiftly reversed. He told the Chicago Tribune on July 27, 2004, that "there's not that much difference between my position and George Bush's position at this stage. The difference, in my mind, is who's in a position to execute." And unlike anti-war stalwarts like Kucinich, who gave hundreds of speeches against the war, Obama then dutifully stood silent until the Iraq war became unpopular.

Obama's campaign won the vote of hundreds of marketers, agency heads and marketing-services vendors gathered at the Association of National Advertisers' annual conference in October. The Obama campaign was named Advertising Age's marketer of the year for 2008 and edged out runners-up Apple and Zappos.com. Take it from the professionals. Brand Obama is a marketer's dream. President Obama does one thing and Brand Obama gets you to believe another. This is the essence of successful advertising. You buy or do what the advertiser wants because of how they can make you feel.

Celebrity culture has leeched into every aspect of our culture, including politics, to bequeath to us what Benjamin DeMott called "junk politics." Junk politics does not demand justice or the reparation of rights. Junk politics personalizes and moralizes issues rather than clarifying them. "It's impatient with articulated conflict, enthusiastic about America's optimism and moral character, and heavily dependent on feel-your-pain language and gesture," DeMott noted. The result of junk politics is that nothing changes - "meaning zero interruption in the processes and practices that strengthen existing, interlocking systems of socioeconomic advantage." It redefines traditional values, tilting "courage toward braggadocio, sympathy toward mawkishness, humility toward self-disrespect, identification with ordinary citizens toward distrust of brains." Junk politics "miniaturizes large, complex problems at home while maximizing threats from abroad. It's also given to abrupt unexplained reversals of its own public stances, often spectacularly bloating problems previously miniaturized." And finally, it "seeks at every turn to obliterate voters' consciousness of socioeconomic and other differences in their midst."

An image-based culture, one dominated by junk politics, communicates through narratives, pictures and carefully orchestrated spectacle and manufactured pseudo-drama. Scandalous affairs, hurricanes, earthquakes, untimely deaths, lethal new viruses, train wrecks-these events play well on computer screens and television. International diplomacy, labor union negotiations and convoluted bailout packages do not yield exciting personal narratives or stimulating images. A governor who patronizes call girls becomes a huge news story. A politician who proposes serious regulatory reform, universal health care or advocates curbing wasteful spending is boring. Kings, queens and emperors once used their court conspiracies to divert their subjects. Today cinematic, political and journalistic celebrities distract us with their personal foibles and scandals. They create our public mythology. Acting, politics and sports have become, as they were during the reign of Nero, interchangeable.

In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we do not seek reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion. We ask to be indulged and comforted by clichés, stereotypes and inspirational messages that tell us we can be whoever we seek to be, that we live in the greatest country on Earth, that we are endowed with superior moral and physical qualities, and that our future will always be glorious and prosperous, either because of our own attributes, or our national character, or because we are blessed by God. Reality is not accepted as an impediment to our desires. Reality does not make us feel good.

In his book "Public Opinion," Walter Lippmann distinguished between "the world outside and the pictures in our heads." He defined a "stereotype" as an oversimplified pattern that helps us find meaning in the world. Lippmann cited examples of the crude "stereotypes we carry about in our heads" of whole groups of people such as "Germans," "South Europeans," "Negroes," "Harvard men," "agitators" and others. These stereotypes, Lippmann noted, give a reassuring and false consistency to the chaos of existence. They offer easily grasped explanations of reality and are closer to propaganda because they simplify rather than complicate.

Pseudo-events-dramatic productions orchestrated by publicists, political machines, television, Hollywood or advertisers-however, are very different. They have, as Daniel Boorstin wrote in "The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America," the capacity to appear real even though we know they are staged. They are capable, because they can evoke a powerful emotional response, of overwhelming reality and replacing reality with a fictional narrative that often becomes accepted truth. The unmasking of a stereotype damages and often destroys its credibility. But pseudo-events, whether they show the president in an auto plant or a soup kitchen or addressing troops in Iraq, are immune to this deflation. The exposure of the elaborate mechanisms behind the pseudo-event only adds to its fascination and its power. This is the basis of the convoluted television reporting on how effectively political campaigns and politicians have been stage-managed. Reporters, especially those on television, no longer ask if the message is true but if the pseudo-event worked or did not work as political theater. Pseudo-events are judged on how effectively we have been manipulated by illusion. Those events that appear real are relished and lauded. Those that fail to create a believable illusion are deemed failures. Truth is irrelevant. Those who succeed in politics, as in most of the culture, are those who create the brands and pseudo-events that offer the most convincing fantasies. And this is the art Obama has mastered.

A public that can no longer distinguish between truth and fiction is left to interpret reality through illusion. Random facts or obscure bits of data and trivia are used to bolster illusion and give it credibility or are discarded if they interfere with the message. The worse reality becomes-the more, for example, foreclosures and unemployment skyrocket-the more people seek refuge and comfort in illusions. When opinions cannot be distinguished from facts, when there is no universal standard to determine truth in law, in science, in scholarship, or in reporting the events of the day, when the most valued skill is the ability to entertain, the world becomes a place where lies become true, where people can believe what they want to believe. This is the real danger of pseudo-events and why pseudo-events are far more pernicious than stereotypes. They do not explain reality, as stereotypes attempt to, but replace reality. Pseudo-events redefine reality by the parameters set by their creators. These creators, who make massive profits peddling these illusions, have a vested interest in maintaining the power structures they control.

The old production-oriented culture demanded what the historian Warren Susman termed character. The new consumption-oriented culture demands what he called personality. The shift in values is a shift from a fixed morality to the artifice of presentation. The old cultural values of thrift and moderation honored hard work, integrity and courage. The consumption-oriented culture honors charm, fascination and likability. "The social role demanded of all in the new culture of personality was that of a performer," Susman wrote. "Every American was to become a performing self."

The junk politics practiced by Obama is a consumer fraud. It is about performance. It is about lies. It is about keeping us in a perpetual state of childishness. But the longer we live in illusion, the worse reality will be when it finally shatters our fantasies. Those who do not understand what is happening around them and who are overwhelmed by a brutal reality they did not expect or foresee search desperately for saviors. They beg demagogues to come to their rescue. This is the ultimate danger of the Obama Brand. It effectively masks the wanton internal destruction and theft being carried out by our corporate state. These corporations, once they have stolen trillions in taxpayer wealth, will leave tens of millions of Americans bereft, bewildered and yearning for even more potent and deadly illusions, ones that could swiftly snuff out what is left of our diminished open society.

© 2009 TruthDig.com

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, will be out in July, but is available for pre-order.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/04


Chris Hedges wrote the above article on 5/5/09; he certainly was among the first to warn us about Obama.

[willoweyes]

tough to read this Sidecross--I WANT to believe so bad. . . .I want to clap my hands and bring Tink back from the brink--

As Robert Penn Warren said in the 1950s: [slightly paraphrased thru memory:] "We need help to break out of our terrible American Rhythm; the rhythm between complacency and panic."

basic rule of thumb: when someone calls you a consumer and tells you to buy green, run.

when someone asks you to believe the health/industrial complex will save you money, run. To Canada.

The Obama product is the best, however. Did you hear his jokes at the National Washington press corps dinner? What delivery! "Did you hear how much trouble Rahm Emanuel was having, trying to say "day" after "mother?"
(get it? i had to have it explained to me--)_and then there was the one about John Boehner? "You know--we have something in common. He's a man of color too. . . .just no color found in nature."

i love the man--he's so perfect, (in 2007, on this Board, I pointed out that he had to be computer-generated. . . .) it is hard to tell myself that he doesn't know best. Like Father.

God help us. Or somebody.

Or lordy, lordy, we will have to help ourselves.

[craazyman]

I warned Bopes about Obama, but Bopes jumped down my throat and called me a racist. I also warned about the snake oil , uh, I mean Peak Oil, salesmen and their PR agents. I don't begrudge a man to make a living, but not by scaring women and children.

ha ha ha ha

I have learned a little more about American history in recent months and it is clear to me that what we're going through is quite normal. Andrew Jackson would not be surprised. Nor would his nemisis, Biddle. le plus ces change . . .

It is best to remove all but very modest balances from any multinational financial institutions and keep your money in a local bank that doesn't have much construction or commercial real estate lending.

The only way to defeat the beast of Baal is to stop funding it. We may yet have a chance at the America envisioned by Washington and Jefferson, although I would expect that it won't include California or Texas. It may infact be restricted to Vermont, New Hampshire and Virginia with perhaps some midwestern states allowed in (but not Ohio or Chicago). It will be a small place, but Athens had only 10,000 citizens.

[suebee]

and how do we stop funding it (Baal)?

a little before your time i think c-man but you might enjoy this: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2009/06/seventies-nyc200906

[Isaiah Mpski]

Go back to the gold standard but include diamonds this time. :D

[sidecross]

The Disease of Permanent War

by Chris Hedges

The embrace by any society of permanent war is a parasite that devours the heart and soul of a nation. Permanent war extinguishes liberal, democratic movements. It turns culture into nationalist cant. It degrades and corrupts education and the media, and wrecks the economy. The liberal, democratic forces, tasked with maintaining an open society, become impotent. The collapse of liberalism, whether in imperial Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire or Weimar Germany, ushers in an age of moral nihilism. This moral nihilism comes is many colors and hues. It rants and thunders in a variety of slogans, languages and ideologies. It can manifest itself in fascist salutes, communist show trials or Christian crusades. It is, at its core, all the same. It is the crude, terrifying tirade of mediocrities who find their identities and power in the perpetuation of permanent war.

It was a decline into permanent war, not Islam, which killed the liberal, democratic movements in the Arab world, ones that held great promise in the early part of the 20th century in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iran. It is a state of permanent war that is finishing off the liberal traditions in Israel and the United States. The moral and intellectual trolls-the Dick Cheneys, the Avigdor Liebermans, the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads - personify the moral nihilism of perpetual war. They manipulate fear and paranoia. They abolish civil liberties in the name of national security. They crush legitimate dissent. They bilk state treasuries. They stoke racism.

"War," Randolf Bourne commented acidly, "is the health of the state."

In "Pentagon Capitalism" Seymour Mellman described the defense industry as viral. Defense and military industries in permanent war, he wrote, trash economies. They are able to upend priorities. They redirect government expenditures towards their huge military projects and starve domestic investment in the name of national security. We produce sophisticated fighter jets, while Boeing is unable to finish its new commercial plane on schedule and our automotive industry goes bankrupt. We sink money into research and development of weapons systems and neglect renewable energy technologies to fight global warming. Universities are flooded with defense-related cash and grants, and struggle to find money for environmental studies. This is the disease of permanent war.

Massive military spending in this country, climbing to nearly $le1 trillion a year and consuming half of all discretionary spending, has a profound social cost. Bridges and levees collapse. Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. Trillions in debts threaten the viability of the currency and the economy. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick and the unemployed are abandoned. Human suffering, including our own, is the price for victory.

Citizens in a state of permanent war are bombarded with the insidious militarized language of power, fear and strength that mask an increasingly brittle reality. The corporations behind the doctrine of permanent war-who have corrupted Leon Trotsky's doctrine of permanent revolution-must keep us afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear means that we will be willing to give up our rights and liberties for security. Fear keeps us penned in like domesticated animals.

Mellman, who coined the term permanent war economy to characterize the American economy, wrote that since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its tax dollars on past, current, and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government. The military industrial establishment is a very lucrative business. It is gilded corporate welfare. It comes with guaranteed profits. Defense systems are sold before they are produced. Military industries are permitted to charge the federal government for huge cost overruns. Massive profits are always guaranteed.

Foreign aid is given to countries such as Egypt, which receives some $3 billion in assistance and is required to buy American weapons with $1.3 billion of the money. The taxpayers fund the research, development and building of weapons systems and then buy them on behalf of foreign governments. It is a bizarre circular system. It defies the concept of a free-market economy. These weapons systems are soon in need of being updated or replaced. They are hauled, years later, into junk yards where they rust. It is, in economic terms, a dead end. It sustains nothing but the permanent war economy.

Those who profit from permanent war are not restricted by the economic rules of producing goods, selling them for a profit, then using the profit for further investment and production. They operate, rather, outside of competitive markets. They erase the line between the state and the corporation. They leech away the ability of the nation to manufacture useful products and produce sustainable jobs. Mellman used the example of the New York City Transit Authority and its allocation in 2003 of $3 billion to $4 billion for new subway cars. New York City asked for bids, and no American companies responded. Melman argued that the industrial base in America was no longer centered on items that maintain, improve, or are used to build the nation's infrastructure. New York City eventually contracted with companies in Japan and Canada to build its subway cars. Mellman estimated that such a contract could have generated, directly and indirectly, about 32,000 jobs in the United States. In another instance, of 100 products offered in the 2003 L.L. Bean catalogue, Mellman found that ninety-two were imported and only eight were made in the United States.

The late Senator J. William Fulbright described the reach of the military-industrial establishment in his 1970 book "The Pentagon Propaganda Machine." Fulbright explained how the Pentagon influenced and shaped public opinion through multimillion dollar public relations campaigns, Defense Department films, close ties with Hollywood producers, and use of the commercial media. The majority of the military analysts on television are former military officials, many employed as consultants to defense industries, a fact they rarely disclose to the public. Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general and military analyst for NBC News, was, The New York Times reported, at the same time an employee of Defense Solutions, Inc., a consulting firm. He profited, the article noted, from the sale of the weapons systems and expansion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan he championed over the airwaves.

Our permanent war economy has not been challenged by Obama and the Democratic Party. They support its destructive fury because it funds them. They validate its evil assumptions because to take them on is political suicide. They repeat the narrative of fear because it keeps us dormant. They do this because they have become weaker than the corporate forces that profit from permanent war.

The hollowness of our liberal classes, such as the Democrats, empowers the moral nihilists. A state of permanent war means the inevitable death of liberalism. Dick Cheney may be palpably evil while Obama is merely weak, but to those who seek to keep us in a state of permanent war it does not matter. They get what they want. Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote Notes from the Underground to illustrate what happens to cultures when a liberal class, like ours, becomes sterile, defeated dreamers. The main character in Notes from the Underground carries the bankrupt ideas of liberalism to its logical extreme. He becomes the enlightenment ideal. He eschews passion and moral purpose. He is rational. He prizes realism over sanity, even in the face of self-destruction. These acts of accommodation doom the Underground Man, as it doomed imperial Russia and as it will doom us.

"I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect," the Underground Man wrote. "And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something."

We have been drawn into the world of permanent war by these fools. We allow fools to destroy the continuity of life, to tear apart all systems, economic, social, environmental and political, that sustain us. Dostoevsky was not dismayed by evil. He was dismayed by a society that no longer had the moral fortitude to confront the fools. These fools are leading us over the precipice. What will rise up from the ruins will not be something new, but the face of the monster that has, until then, remained hidden behind the facade.

© 2009 TruthDig.com

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, will be out in July, but is available for pre-order.



http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/18

[bopes]

I warned Bopes about Obama, but Bopes jumped down my throat and called me a racist. . . .


Now wait just a second there! I never called you a racist! (Did I? :confused:)

[suebee]

:cry: "I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect," the Underground Man wrote. "And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something."

scant comfort this echo

[Isaiah Mpski]

Wonderful reflection Sue Bee,but remember God helps he or she who helps themselves.:cool:

[sidecross]

FBI Blows It: Supposed Terror Plot Against NY Synagogues Is Bogus

By Robert Dreyfuss, The Nation


By the now, it's maddeningly familiar. A scary terrorist plot is announced. Then it's revealed that the suspects are a hapless bunch of ne'er-do-wells or run-of-the-mill thugs without the slightest connection to any terrorists at all, never mind to Al Qaeda. Finally, the last piece of the puzzle: the entire plot is revealed to have been cooked up by a scummy government agent-provocateur.

I've seen this movie before.

In this case, the alleged perps -- Onta Williams, James Cromitie, David Williams, and Laguerre Payen -- were losers, ex-cons, drug addicts. Al Qaeda they're not. Without the assistance of the agent who entrapped them, they would never have dreamed of committing political violence, nor would they have had the slightest idea about where to acquire plastic explosives or a Stinger missile. That didn't stop prosecutors from acting as if they'd captured Osama bin Laden himself. Noted the Los Angeles Times:

Prosecutors called it the latest in a string of homegrown terrorism plots hatched after Sept. 11.

"It's hard to envision a more chilling plot," Assistant U.S. Atty. Eric Snyder said in court Thursday. He described all four suspects as "eager to bring death to Jews."

Actually, it's hard to imagine a stupider, less competent, and less important plot. The four losers were ensnared by a creepy FBI agent who hung around the mosque in upstate New York until he found what he was looking for. Here's the New York Times account:

Salahuddin Mustafa Muhammad, the imam at the mosque where the authorities say the confidential informant first encountered the men, said none of the men were active in the mosque. ...
Mr. Cromitie was there last June, and he met a stranger.

He had no way of knowing that the stranger's path to the mosque began in 2002, when he was arrested on federal charges of identity theft. He was sentenced to five years' probation, and became a confidential informant for the F.B.I. He began showing up at the mosque in Newburgh around 2007, Mr. Muhammad said.

The stranger's behavior aroused the imam's suspicions. He invited other worshipers to meals, and spoke of violence and jihad, so the imam said he steered clear of him.

"There was just something fishy about him," Mr. Muhammad said. Members "believed he was a government agent."

Mr. Muhammad said members of his congregation told him the man he believed was the informant offered at least one of them a substantial amount of money to join his "team."

So a creepy thug buttonholes people at a mosque, foaming at the mouth about violence and jihad? This is law enforcement? Just imagine if someone did this at a local church, or some synagogue. And the imam says the people "believed he was a government agent."

Preying on these losers, none of whom were apparently actual Muslims, the "confidential informant" orchestrated the acquisition of a disabled Stinger missile to shoot down military planes and cooked up a wild scheme about attacking a Jewish center in the Bronx.

It gets even more pathetic:

The only one of the four suspects who appears to have aroused any suspicion was Payen, a Haitian native who attended the Newburgh mosque. Assistant imam Hamid Rashada said his dishevelment and odd behavior disturbed some members, said the assistant imam, Hamid Rashada.
When Payen appeared in court, defense attorney Marilyn Reader described him as "intellectually challenged" and on medication for schizophrenia. The Associated Press said that when he was asked if he understood the proceedings, Payen replied: "Sort of."

Despite the pompous statements from Mayor Bloomberg of New York and other politicians, including Representative Peter King, the whole story is bogus. The four losers may have been inclined to violence, and they may have harbored a virulent strain of anti-Semitism. But it seems that the informant whipped up their violent tendencies and their hatred of Jews, cooked up the plot, incited them, arranged their purchase of weapons, and then had them busted. To ensure that it made headlines, the creepy informant claimed to be representing a Pakistani extremist group, Jaish-e Muhammad, a bona fide terrorist organization. He wasn't, of course.

It is disgusting and outrageous that the FBI is sending provocateurs into mosques.

The headlines reinforce the very fear that Dick Cheney is trying to stir up. The story strengthens the narrative that the "homeland" is under attack. It's not. As I've written repeatedly, since 9/11 not a single American has even been punched in the nose by an angry Muslim, as far as I can tell. Plot after plot -- the destruction of the Brooklyn Bridge! bombing the New York Subways! taking down the Sears Tower! bombing the Prudential building in Newark! -- proved to be utter nonsense.


Robert Dreyfuss is the author of "Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam" (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books).

http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/140209

[Isaiah Mpski]

Google McIntosh County Oklahoma Sheriff.
I had a serious discussion with the man-Jones-last week.


You can come and help me if you wish.
I promise you fun and exciting times although you will have to work hard.

[Isaiah Mpski]

Fundamental Islamism was unleased many many moons ago.
It's time to let it battle it out with States that don't believe in Gott.
I think we are on the verge of either a great catastrophe or a shift toward protectionism.:D
We must rebuild our textile industry for one.:rolleyes:
And use the sagas of the American Indians and their relationship to Asians in general,as a calling card for bringing in Chinese tourists.;)

If you haven't spent any time amongst the Native Americans you've missed out on synchronicity and karma all rolled into Juan.:cool:

[sidecross]

Hold Your Applause

by Chris Hedges

Did they play Barack Obama's speech to the Muslim world in the prison corridors of Abu Ghraib, Bagram air base, Guantanamo or the dozens of secret sites where we hold thousands of Muslims around the world? Did it echo off the walls of the crowded morgues filled with the mutilated bodies of the Muslim dead in Baghdad or Kabul? Was it broadcast from the tops of minarets in the villages and towns decimated by U.S. iron fragmentation bombs? Was it heard in the squalid refugee camps of Gaza, where 1.5 million Palestinians live in the world's largest ghetto?

What do words of peace and cooperation mean from us when we torture-yes, we still torture-only Muslims? What do these words mean when we sanction Israel's brutal air assaults on Lebanon and Gaza, assaults that demolished thousands of homes and left hundreds dead and injured? How does it look for Obama to call for democracy and human rights from Egypt, where we lavishly fund and support the despotic regime of Hosni Mubarak, one of the longest-reigning dictators in the Middle East?

We may thrill to Obama's rhetoric, but very few of the 1.3 billion Muslims in the world are as deluded. They grasp that nothing so far has changed for Muslims in the Middle East under the Obama administration. The wars of occupation go on or have been expanded. Israel continues to flout international law, gobbling up more Palestinian land and carrying out egregious war crimes in Gaza. Calcified, repressive regimes in countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia are feted in Washington as allies.

The speech at Cairo University, which usually has trucks filled with riot police outside the university gates and a heavy security presence on campus to control the student body, is an example of the facade. Student political groups, as everyone who joined in the standing ovation for the president knew, are prohibited. Faculty deans are chosen by the administration, rather than elected by professors, "as a way to combat Islamist influence on campus," according to the U.S. State Department's latest human rights report. And, as The Washington Post pointed out, students who use the Internet "as an outlet for their political or social views are on notice: One Cairo University student blogger was jailed for two months last summer for ‘public agitation,' and another was kicked out of university housing for criticizing the government."

The expanding imperial projects and tightening screws of repression lurch forward under Obama. We are not trying to end terror or promote democracy. We are ensuring that our corporate state has a steady supply of the cheap oil to which it is addicted. And the scarcer oil becomes, the more aggressive we become. This is the game playing out in the Muslim world.

The Bush White House openly tortured. The Obama White House tortures and pretends not to. Obama may have banned waterboarding, but as Luke Mitchell points out in next month's issue of Harper's magazine, torture, including isolation, sleep and sensory deprivation and force-feeding, continues to be used to break detainees. The president has promised to close Guantanamo, where only 1 percent of the prisoners held offshore by the United States are kept. And the Obama administration has sought to obscure the fate and condition of thousands of Muslims held in black holes around the globe. As Mitchell notes, the Obama White House "has sought to prevent detainees at Bagram prison in Afghanistan from gaining access to courts where they may reveal the circumstances of their imprisonment. It has sought to continue the practice of rendering prisoners to unknown and unknowable locations outside the United States, and sought to keep secret many (though not all) of the records regarding our treatment of those detainees."

Muslim rage is stoked because we station tens of thousands of American troops on Muslim soil, occupy two Muslim nations, make possible the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine, support repressive Arab regimes and torture thousands of Muslims in offshore penal colonies where prisoners are stripped of their rights. We now have 22 times as many military personnel in the Muslim world as were deployed during the crusades in the 12th century. The rage comes because we have constructed massive military bases, some the size of small cities, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Kuwait, and established basing rights in the Gulf states of Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. The rage comes because we have expanded our military empire into neighboring Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. It comes because we station troops and special forces in Egypt, Algeria and Yemen. And this vast network of bases and military outposts looks suspiciously permanent.

The Muslim world fears, correctly, that we intend to dominate Middle East oil supplies and any Caspian Sea oil infrastructure. And it is interested not in our protestations of good will but in the elemental right of justice and freedom from foreign occupation. We would react, should the situation be reversed, no differently.

The brutal reality of expanding foreign occupation and harsher and harsher forms of control are the tinder of Islamic fundamentalism, insurgences and terrorism. We can blame the violence on a clash of civilizations. We can naively tell ourselves we are envied for our freedoms. We can point to the Koran. But these are fantasies that divert us from facing the central dispute between us and the Muslim world, from facing our own responsibility for the virus of chaos and violence spreading throughout the Middle East. We can have peace when we shut down our bases, stay the hand of the Israelis to create a Palestinian state, and go home, or we can have long, costly and ultimately futile regional war. We cannot have both.

Obama, whose embrace of American imperialism is as naive and destructive as that of George W. Bush, is the newest brand used to peddle the poison of permanent war. We may not see it. But those who bury the dead do.


Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, will be out in July, but is available for pre-order.


http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/06/08-3

[willoweyes]

My buddy Pete Veeck (son of Bill--or as they used to call him: Bill's little Peter) told me today, we are missing the point in Afghanistan--our army is serving its bankers--the Chinese--and we are acting as their mercenary agents in the region.

After all, what else do we have to offer our creditors, other than our weapons and our bodies? (they already have our Hummers. . . .)
__________________________
Learn Mandarin

[Isaiah Mpski]

As many of you may or may not know,Willow got a heavy rainfall last night.
Willow and DC.Do you need any help.
I have a boy going back through there on to Austin to rebuild a 19th centuary home there..
He is stout.All State Football and went on to play ball for Army.His dad is a doc and his Mother is a real live VICKS and is squessing every penny like she's gonna try to take it with her.He needs a wife.Where is your daughter now and what do you think she's worth?
Yeah,I feel the same way about my Children and GrandChildren.

I haven't heard a peep from SB.Thank goodness she didn't cut off my e-mail like you did Weisberg.:(

Have you even looked up my mineral interests in Carter County?;).Son is the last name.The logo was Sun overlain with Son

I figure I've lost at least half a mil in McIntosh County through graft and the like.:mad:Easily that much.Maybe 6 or7 times more.
The real ironic thing is though,the people who stole it from us had it all stolen at the ens when they had 100 wells out there and are now in Bankruptcy Court,probably less out of the final deal than I because a title search back to IT days will reveal what is whose and why.

That one 150 mineral acre ownership looks good to me but I'd rather sale the working well in Ardmore-Ardmore # 3(sp) I think it's called.In the city limits though,leased by Kaiser.:confused:

[sidecross]

Shame: The 'Anti-War' Democrats Who Sold Out

By Jeremy Scahill, AlterNet

In a vote that should go down in recent histories as a day of shame for the Democrats, on Tuesday the House voted to approve another $106 billion dollars for the bloody wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and increasingly Pakistan). To put a fine point on the interconnection of the iron fist of U.S. militarism and the hidden hand of free market neoliberal economics, the bill included a massive initiative to give the International Monetary Fund billions more in U.S. taxpayer funds.

What once Democrats could argue was "Bush's war," they now officially own. In fact, only five Republicans voted for the supplemental (though overwhelmingly not on the issue of the war funding). Ron Paul, who made clear he was voting against the war, was a notable exception.

This vote has revealed a sobering statistic for the anti-war movement in this country and brought to the surface a broader issue that should give die-hard partisan Democrats who purport to be anti-war reason for serious pause about the actual state of their party. Only 30 Democrats voted against the war funding when it mattered. And these 30 did so in the face of significant threats to their political future from the White House and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. That means that only 30 out of 256 Democrats are willing to stand up to the war and the current president presiding over it. Their names are listed below; I would encourage people to call them and thank them for standing up and voting no when it counted.

Two other Democrats, not expected to vote against the war funding, joined the anti-war Democrats. Brad Sherman and Pete Stark brought the total number of Democratic votes against the supplemental to 32.

Now, there are many Democrats who consistently vote for war funding, including Nancy Pelosi, but not many of them have such little shame that they dare characterize themselves as anti-war. Remember, 221 voted Tuesday in favor of the war funding. But for those who campaign as anti-war and signed pledges not to continue funding war and then vote for billions more for wars they claim to oppose, Tuesday should be remembered as a day of shame and cowardice. Here are the Democrats who voted against war funding when it didn't count and yes (on Tuesday) when it did--and when refusing to do so might have affected them personally: Yvette Clarke, Steve Cohen, Jim Cooper, Jerry Costello, Barney Frank, Luis Gutierrez, Jay Inslee, Steve Kagen, Edward Markey, Doris Matsui, Jim McDermott, George Miller, Grace Napolitano, Richard Neal (MA), James Oberstar, Jan Schakowsky, Mike Thompson, Edolphus Towns, Nydia Velázquez, and Anthony Weiner. These legislators should be called and asked why they voted for war funding they claimed to oppose last month.

Tuesday's vote came after an intense campaign by progressive bloggers, activists and anti-war Congressmembers Dennis Kucinich, Lynn Woolsey and Jim McGovern to get the 39 Democrats needed to block war funding to vote against it. This was made possible due to a roller-coaster-like series of events in the weeks and days preceding the vote.

The White House and the Democratic Congressional Leadership played a very dirty game in their effort to ram through the funding. In the crosshairs of the big guns at the White House and on Capitol Hill were anti-war legislators (particularly freshmen), and the movement to hold those responsible for torture accountable.

In funding the wars post-Bush, the Obama White House has been able to rely on strong GOP support to marginalize the anti-war Democrats who pledged back in 2007 to vote against continued funding (as 51 Democrats did in May when the supplemental was first voted on). But the White House ran into trouble on this bill because of Republican opposition to some of the provisions added to the bill (primarily the IMF funding) and one removed (the Graham-Lieberman amendment that would have blocked the release of prisoner abuse photos). This created a situation where the White House and pro-war Democrats actually need a fair number of anti-war Democrats (whose votes seldom matter this much) to switch sides and vote with them. That is why this battle was so important for the anti-war movement.

Many Democrats (who may not have necessarily been against the supplemental) were up in arms when the Graham-Lieberman provision (which the White House “actively” supported) was on the table. Facing warnings that it could derail the funding package, the White House stepped in, deploying Rahm Emanuel to the Hill to convince legislators to drop the amendment, while at the same time pledging that Obama would use his authority to continue to fight the release of more photos:

Emanuel ‘rushed’ to Capitol Hill and prevailed upon Senate Democrats to remove the torture photo measure in exchange for an explicit White House promise that it would use all means at its disposal to block the photos’ release. Obama also issued a letter to Congress assuring it he would support separate legislation to suppress the photos, if necessary, and imploring it to speed passage of the war-spending bill. The rider would “unnecessarily complicate the essential objective of supporting the troops,” Obama wrote.
In other words, Obama took a position that amounted to providing political cover to Democrats to support the war funding, while pledging to implement, through other means, the very policy they supposedly found objectionable.

From the jump, the White House and Democratic Leadership had the gloves off in the fight. Consider this report from last week:

Rep. Lynn Woolsey of California, a leader of the antiwar Democrats, said the White House is threatening to withdraw support from freshmen who oppose the bill, saying “you’ll never hear from us again.”

She said the House leadership also is targeting the freshmen.
It’s really hard for the freshmen,” she said. “Nancy’s pretty powerful.”
Jane Hamsher, meanwhile, reported on Monday that it appeared Emanuel was "cutting deals with Republicans to go easy on them in the 2010 elections in exchange for votes." In the end, the White House got five Republicans to vote for the funding, including New York Republican John McHugh, the man President Obama nominated two weeks ago to be Army secretary. A "senior Republican source" according to FOX News "suggested McHugh could be creating a conflict of interest by voting on military-related legislation while his Army secretary nomination is pending before the Senate."

What repelled the Republicans from a vote to fund the war was hardly a sudden conversion to pacifism (in fact, their position was hypocritical). It was largely when the White House and Congressional Democratic leadership added a provision to the bill that will extend up to $100 billion in credits to the International Monetary Fund. This sent many Republicans to the microphones to denounce the funding as a "global bailout" and will undoubtedly be used as a campaign issue in 2010 to attack the Democrats who voted for the spending bill. For its part, the Democratic leadership, in trying to win Democratic support, portrayed the IMF funding as a progressive policy:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is trying to paint the IMF provision as a “very important national security initiative.” The IMF, she said, “can be a force for alleviating the fury of despair among people, poor people throughout the world.”
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer's office put out a position paper that declared the IMF funding "is key to making us more secure," adding that the money will ensure that the "IMF has the ability to play its central role in resolving and preventing the spread of international economic and financial crises." The paper also provided a litany of comments from prominent Republicans praising the IMF, including from the Bretton Woods Committee (Henry Kissinger, Condoleezza Rice, Henry Paulson, Robert Rubin, James A. Baker, Nicholas F. Brady, Colin Powell, Paul A. Volcker, Paul H. O’Neill, etc.). Also, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Newt Gingrich and, of course, George W. Bush.

If there was a real opposition party in Congress, all of this would have provided yet more reasons to vote against the bill.

It is a pathetic symbol of just how bankrupt the Congressional Democratic leadership is when it comes to U.S. foreign policy that Pelosi, Hoyer et al are trying to use funding for the IMF to convince other Democrats to support war funding. The IMF has been a destabilizing force in many countries across the globe through its austerity measures and structural adjustment schemes. Remember, it was the policies of the IMF and its cohorts at the World Bank and World Trade Organizations that sparked global uprisings in the 1990s.

To support the IMF funding scam, the Center for American Progress, which has passionately supported Obama’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan, released a position paper this week called, “Bailing Out the Bailer-Outer: Five Reasons Congress Should Agree to Fund the IMF.”

Thankfully, at least a handful of Democrats seemed to understand the atrocious role the IMF has played and tried (unsuccessfully) to impose rules on the funding that would have confronted the IMF’s austerity measures by requiring that “the funds allocated by Congress for global stimulus are used for stimulatory, and not contractionary, purposes.”

In urging their colleagues to oppose the war funding and the IMF funding, Kucinich and California's Bob Filner sent a Dear Colleague letter, which stated: "The IMF has a long history of placing economic conditions on countries receiving loans that have actually damaged, rather than stimulated, those economies, and its policies have not changed enough to warrant support." They charged that the IMF funding "would be used to bail out private European banks with U.S. taxpayer money." In addition to the military and IMF funding, the bill also provides $10.4 billion for the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and $7.7 billion for "Pandemic Flu Response."

Under the leadership of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, the Democratic-controlled Congress has been a house of war. Unfortunately, it is not a house where the war is one of noble Democrats fighting for peace, freedom and democracy against the evil, belligerent Republicans as they advocate and implement policies of preemptive war, torture and the violation of civil liberties. Instead, it is a house void of substantive opposition to the ever-expanding war begun under Bush and escalating under Obama.

Tuesday's vote was another one of those moments in Congress where heroes are made, like the day when Sen. Russ Feingold stood alone as the sole Senator to vote against the USA Patriot Act. To paraphrase Bush, it was one of those days when we truly discover who is for war and who is against it.

Below are the Democrats who stood against Obama's expanding war the day their votes mattered (See where your Representative stood here):

Tammy Baldwin, Michael Capuano, John Conyers, Lloyd Doggett, Donna Edwards, Keith Ellison, Sam Farr, Bob Filner, Alan Grayson, Raul Grijalva, Michael Honda, Marcy Kaptur, Dennis Kucinich, Barbara Lee, Zoe Lofgren, Eric Massa, Jim McGovern, Michael Michaud, Donald Payne, Chellie Pingree, Jared Polis, Jose Serrano, Carol Shea-Porter, Jackie Speier, John Tierney, Nikki Tsongas, Maxine Waters, Diane Watson, Peter Welch, and Lynn Woolsey.


Jeremy Scahill, an independent journalist who reports frequently for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!, has spent extensive time reporting from Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is currently a Puffin Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. His writing and reporting is available at RebelReports.com.



http://www.alternet.org/world/140715/shame%3A_the_%27anti-war%27_democrats_who_sold_out_/

[Isaiah Mpski]

Thanks Sidey,thats a neat and informative post.;)
Have you been following the recent events here in McIntosh County,Oklahoma?Pittsburg County-first county to the south- Judge Bartholet(sp).
What a screwed up world the white man has created.:eek:

[sidecross]

Serving the Medical-Industrial Complex

by Robert Parry

The usual knock on government programs is that they're not as efficient as the private sector, which we're told can provide the same product for less money and with higher quality. Thus, it should be no big deal when the public and private collide because the private sector should prevail.

However, in providing health insurance, those rules clearly don't apply, which is why congressional Republicans and so-called "centrist" Democrats are going to such lengths to deny the American people access to a public option on health insurance.

Indeed, if a public option were to be piggybacked onto the existing Medicare bureaucracy, the chances for savings could be impressive for average Americans and the overall American economy.

Insurance middlemen could be eliminated; investigators who ferret out "preexisting conditions" wouldn't be needed; doctors could save on administrative costs; the burden on U.S. industry providing health benefits could be reduced; and more money could be freed to cover the nearly 50 million uninsured or for actual doctoring.

For a nation facing multiple fiscal crises - all complicated by the costs of health care - one might think that the most sure thing in the health care debate would be to allow a cost-saving public option, which as President Barack Obama says would help keep private health insurers "honest" regarding their promises to trim waste and control premiums.

According to a New York Times/CBS poll, that point is obvious to 72 percent of the American people who favor "offering everyone a government administered health insurance plan like Medicare that would compete with private health insurance plans."

It's also reflected in a study cited by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and other insurance industry defenders saying that 119 million Americans would bolt from their private insurers to the public option if they were given the chance.

To put that figure in perspective, it is about two-thirds of Americans who have private insurance through their employers or as individuals. In other words, the industry's defenders say two of every three customers want out.

Though some analysts doubt the defection rate would reach 119 million, Grassley's argument is that Americans would so prefer a government-run plan that it would destroy the private insurance industry - and that therefore the public option simply can't be permitted.

Grassley's fear of 119 million Americans voting with their pocketbooks against private health insurance represents a remarkable admission of failure by the industry and its backers. It says, in effect, that the industry's treatment of its customers has been so highhanded over the decades that the industry can only survive if Americans are left with the unappetizing choice of private coverage or no coverage.

Representing Whom?

So, not only are the Republicans - and some Democrats - standing against the desires for 72 percent of the population but, in effect, they also are trying to lock in 119 million unhappy customers for a profit-making industry. To add another windfall for the insurance industry, Congress may compel the near 50 million uninsured to buy insurance under penalty of fines.

Even in the sorry history of special-interest-dominated Washington, it is rare for politicians to so blatantly adopt defense of a private industry over the will of the people.

One might think that Democrats would take this club and beat the Republicans over the head with it. The Democrats could argue that the public option is not only popular but could save money for struggling U.S. businesses by bringing down their health insurance costs and freeing up more money for investment and for the hiring of new workers.

One of the key factors that drove General Motors into bankruptcy was how its health insurance benefits for employees inflated the company's costs-per-worker total and thus hurt its competitiveness against rivals who operate in countries where the government pays for health care.

The public option issue also would seem ready-made for Democrats given that the New York Times/CBS poll found that a solid majority of Americans (57 percent) were willing to pay higher taxes so that all Americans could have "health insurance that they can't lose no matter what." [NYT, June 21, 2009]

Nevertheless, key "centrist" Democrats, such as Sens. Max Baucus of Montana and Kent Conrad of North Dakota, are ready to scuttle the public option to secure a few GOP votes so they can claim their plan is "bipartisan." Conrad has called for substituting a privately run, non-profit "cooperative" for the public option.

While Conrad's "cooperative," which would be ostensibly owned by its members, has some superficial appeal, it would require the creation of an entirely new bureaucracy - rather than relying on the government's existing infrastructure for Medicare - and would likely be run by high-paid executives recruited from the existing private insurance industry.

Critics of Conrad's plan also note that the cooperative would have far less leverage in negotiating lower prices from pharmaceutical companies and other parts of the medical industry, so the savings would be marginal - which is exactly why the idea appeals to industry groups.

Patrons and the People

It goes without saying that the medical-industry complex has made generous contributions to all the key lawmakers, especially those like Grassley and Baucus who are at the top of the influential Senate Banking Committee.

But the obsession of some Senate Democrats, like Conrad, to find "common ground" with Republicans seems to go beyond simply rewarding benefactors. Though it's clear that many, if not most, Republicans have a single-minded goal - to sabotage the Obama administration - Democrats nevertheless continue in their quest for the elusive "bipartisanship."

This quest goes on despite the fact that Republicans were trounced in the last two elections, are down to 40 senators, and are facing historically low approval ratings. Still, "centrist" Democrats insist on bending over backwards to accommodate the GOP desires, even when those desires fly in the face of popular opinion and do not represent the most sensible policies.

These Democrats - sometimes including President Obama - appear deeply influenced by Inside-the-Beltway chatter coming from pundits who still reflect the Ronald-Reagan-to-George-W.-Bush conventional wisdom that "government is the problem," that tax cuts are the answer to every question, and that "self-regulating markets" have made bureaucrats largely irrelevant.

Despite the nation's cascading crises - which can be traced to too little government, excessive tax cuts and a lack of sound regulation - the chattering class has not been shaken from its biases. So, the minority Republicans are given far more time and space than they reasonably deserve (and much more than minority Democrats got during George W. Bush's presidency).

Amid Republican charges of "socialism," the reaction of Democrats, like Baucus and Conrad, is to position themselves in what they must consider the safe center, earning praise from the pundits for their courageous willingness to stand up to the Democratic "base" - and to the overwhelming majority of Americans - in order to stop the public option.

But Baucus and Conrad will likely find that the safe center isn't so safe. When half-measures and half-baked compromises leave the American people disappointed or angry, the fault will be laid on the government's failure to do the job right.

And that failure will be cited by Republicans and the pundits as further proof of the superiority of the private sector.

© 2009 Consortium News

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat. His two previous books are Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'.


http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/06/23-0

[suebee]

"Finally, New Rule: he’s your president not your boyfriend. Now, last week in this space I criticized President Obama for not fighting corporate influence enough - that made some liberals very angry. My phone rang off the hook, my email filled up, and Nancy Pelosi got so mad her faced moved. Look, folks, I like Obama too, I’m just saying let’s not make it a religion. And as far as you folks on the right, who think that we are now somehow in league, we’re not in league: I was criticizing Obama for not being hard enough on the corporate douche bags you live to defend. I don’t want to be on your team, pick another kid. So I stand by my words, but there is another side to the story, and that is that every time Obama tries to take on a progressive cause, there is a major political party standing in his way: the Democrats.

"Now people talk a lot about a third political party in America. We don’t need a third party, we need a first party. You go to the polls and your choices are the guy who voted for the first Wall Street bailout, or the guy who voted for the next ten. This week we are hearing that a public option for health care is unlikely, because it doesn’t have the support of enough Democrats. Even Ted Kennedy’s plan, yes Ted Kennedy, leaves 37 million uninsured. This is because we don’t have a left and a right party in this country anymore, we have a center-right party and a crazy party. And over the last 30-odd years, Democrats have moved to the right and the right has moved into a mental hospital. So what we have is one perfectly good party for hedge-fund managers, credit card companies, banks, defense contractors, big agriculture and the pharmaceutical companies - that’s the Democrats. And they sit across the isle from a small group of religious lunatics, flat-earthers and civil war re-enactors, who mostly communicate by AM radio and who call themselves the Republicans, and who actually worry that Obama is a socialist. A socialist! He’s not even a liberal. I know he’s not because he’s on TV. And while I see Democrats on television, I don’t see actual liberals. And, if occasionally you do get to hear Ralph Nadar, or Noam Chompsky or Dennis Kucinich, they’re treated like buffoons. Okay, these are not three of the worlds most charismatic men, but then nobody’s going to confuse Newt Ginbgrich with Zach Efron, and I have to look at his fat face on TV more often than I do that free credit report song. Shouldn’t there be one party that unambiguously supports cutting the military budget, a party that is straight up in favor of gun control, gay marriage, higher taxes on the rich, universal health care, legalizing pot, and steep direct taxing of polluters? These aren’t radical ideas. A majority of Americans are either already for them, or would be if they were properly argued and defended. And what we need is an actual progressive party to represent the millions of Americans who aren’t being served by Democrats. Because bottom line, Democrats are the new Republicans. It’s like when some Chinese company buys the name of some great old American brand and slaps it on some cheap crap. You buy it out of reflex and it’s only later that you think ‘wow’ I didn’t even know Woolworths made dildos."

Bill Maher Real Time Friday 6/19/09

[willoweyes]

Thanks Ms. Bee and Sidecross for these posts--"He's not your boyfriend. . . ."

80 percent of the American people want the govt. to take over health care management--and no one I know gives a s--t for the insurance industry. Major analysts say the days of employer supplied healthcare is OVER.

So there is only one road out of Dodge folks--and if Congress doesn't take it, we won't have to wait for an Apocalypse in the Mideast to give us blood in the streets.

Healthcare in the USA is the core rot eating at the soul of our dour society. It's fundamental. "Even" savages don't suppose that only some members of the tribe deserve the chant and the witchdoctor.

When I think about this fight, I feel myself becoming big and green . . . .

[craazyman]

what do you think I've been saying all this time, and all youze guys thought I was a Consoyvatuv. LOL.

[bopes]

cm if you're a conservative then I'm a black guy.

[bopes]

Speaking of conservatives, how about this SC governor guy, not to mention that NV senator guy?

I mean, WTF?

Can't these republicans organize their affairs more, what is the word ... plausibly? circumspectly? less bizarrely?

Maybe they should study the French more.

[suebee]

Bopes - the republicans HAVE entered a mental hospital. :rolleyes: and isnt is a bit weird to see all this? i mean really? :eek: or is it just because there is no hiding anymore and its no longer just the local news we get and its actually been this way since 1790 and we just didnt know? :errf: wtf do we do?

[bopes]

but didn't grownups, like in the old days, know how to handle things like extramarital affairs less hopelessly ineptly?

If these extramarital-affair guys are (or were) the likeliest next GOP presidential prospects, then Sarah Palin must be licking her chops right now. Watching her competition be taken down by their own cheatin' hearts must be easier than shooting moose from a helicopter.

[craazyman]

Palin to Admit Affair

(AP) New York

Alaska governor and former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin is prepared to admit participation in an extramarital affair, sources close to the governor's office told the Associated Press late Wednesday afternoon.

Ms. Palin's announcement comes immediately on the heels of similar announcements by South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and Nevada senator John Ensign, two prominent republicans with aspirations to national political office.

Ms. Palin's situation is unusual for two reasons. First, rarely has a female politician been snared in a sex scandal and second, because Ms. Palin's partner is alleged to be television talk show host David Letterman. Mr. Letterman recently was forced to apologize on his nationally televised late night comedy show for making inappropriate jokes about Ms. Palin's teenage daughter.

"Sarah and Dave's affair began two years ago, during the presidential campaign," a source close to the governor revealed. "He roughed her up in an interview and then she followed him into the men's room at the Minneapolis airport, grabbed his pee-pee and gave it a few vicious shakes," the source said. The source indicated that event led to a heated argument which turned passionate after a brief struggle between the two.

Governor Palin is preparing for a teary press conference on Thursday, during which she will apologize to the nation and to Mr. Letterman's wife. Mr. Letterman made a lengthy trip to Alaska last summer reportedly for a dogsledding tour. When asked how one can dogsled in the summer, Mr. Letterman replied, "That's a good question." Mr. Letterman's staff was unsure of his whereabouts for a three week period in August.

Associated Press writers Hung So Lo and Harry Balls contributed to this report.

[bopes]

bravo!

(cm your day job isn't at the Onion, by any chance?)

[suebee]

looks like its gonna have to be sarah palin/michelle bachmann for the GOP in 2012.

im waiting for bachmann to spontaneously combust.

[bopes]

From the urban survival (http://urbansurvival.com/week.htm) guy, here's the conspiracy-theorist take on the SC governor situation:

Are we seeing another application of what in the alphabet agency/spy business is called a "honey pot" operation?

. . . am I seeing a dandy way for the PTB to put those who get in the way of the globalist agenda to single out and destroy opposition? Why, it'd be far more efficient than assassination or disappearances, although there's enough wet-work to bring those along, too, in one remembers Dr. David Kelly and those missing microbiologists, but that's a whole different branch of the global railroad.

"Honey Pot" operations are a marvelously efficient way to clean up messy loose ends and opposition. Defined in Wikipedia as: "Honeypot or honeytrap may refer to: Espionage recruitment involving sexual seduction in reality or fiction. A type of sting operation such as a bait car or honeypot (computing) , a trap to help fight unauthorized computer access."

Now, let's see here, can I make up a list?

Mark Sanford, opposes economic stimulus ram down and a few months later is discredited with an affair.

You've been following the adventures of Italy's prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and a rumored indiscretion?

Former NY State AG Elliot Spitzer who went after all kinds of PTB interests and then, two days after reports that he was a client of a high-end prostitution ring, he resigned as governor of NY

If you want to remember back to 1987, there was the highly publicized Gary hart/Donna Rice affair. Ex-senator about to run for president - taken out by what?

Just ask yourself the simple - and obvious - question. . . . All victims of 'testosterone poisoning'?

[suebee]

heres short article on the dead dr. kelly bopes-

http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MOO401A.html

dont want to read about any of the other dead microbiologists....

and c-man that should have been [ "pee-pee" ? :razz::p;) ]

[bopes]

Thanks for filling in those details, suebee.

Hmmm... so let's see now, if you're a high-profile executive-branch type who openly resists the PTB agenda, then you get honey-potted.

Whereas if you're a lower level intelligence functionary, you just get whacked.

Where do people like Ron Paul fit into that equation?

[craazyman]

They're a bunch or republicans the way they kevetch about Sanford and his problem keeping his pants on. And Ron Paul, another republican! What? The democrats are chopped livah all the sudden here? No respect for the democrats anymorh? Do you see that Murray? Look at these people will ya? They've all lost their minds! They've all gone nuts! Defending republicans like they was your cousin Lou from the Bronx? The one that ran the pickle stoh and went to the synagogue every Friday for as long as he was out of the wheel chayh. Did he evah vote once for a republican? Just once? Oy Vey and on my motha's grave he nevah once vote for a republican. Not even for the school board. Nevah. What's the world coming to?

[Isaiah Mpski]

That's the same thing I said when R.Nixon won the election in 68.
Did you see the tape where he comments about abortions put out by his library yesterday.:rolleyes:
"...should be used only in extreme cases-you know-white woman,black guy..":)

I almost fell out of my chair.If he'd inacted that law where would the number juan player picked in the NBA draft today be.:hmm:

I hate to pat myself on the back but it was no coincidence that I was beaten and thrown into hell a week before his re-election.I was one of those leaders who went to the draft card burnings,and anti-war rallies,and had my picture taken.haha.:eek:

[sidecross]

Oy vey, what a group of schlimazels.

[craazyman]

Shit. Michael and Farrah in one day. Both way too young. They are beginning to drop. Better get our shit together. Get our shit together. Get it together. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Get it all together. Gotta get it together. Can't go another day without getting that shit together.

[sidecross]

Well today is my birthday and I am heading towards being 65.

My gift today is to still be here and now!

[bopes]

yeah hang in there, sidey and a very happy birthday! We can't afford to lose anyone else.

Very sad about Michael and Farah. Do you think Michael timed it to go out the same day Farah? Maybe he got tired of waiting for Liz Taylor.

[craazyman]

happy birthday verycrosss. ;)

I am at a point where 65 no longer seems old in the slightest degree.

Once again, the republicans serve as role models here. John McCain running for presdent at 72. You have 7 more years to prepare. And the Gipper himself, tearing down the Berlin Wall when he was in his 70s, the muscles that took! And should I mention Strom Thurmond, who served his country with distinction well into his 80s?

You are still a growing boy!

[suebee]

happy returns sidey.

i think sometimes the shit just falls into place. accidentally/a little at a time/like osmosis - when youre not looking. cant figure it otherwise. and i am the princess of pop adolecense so i know whereof i speak.

[bopes]

Did you see the tape where he comments about abortions put out by his library yesterday.:rolleyes:
"...should be used only in extreme cases-you know-white woman,black guy..":)

I almost fell out of my chair.

I hadn't heard that one Isaiah but it doesn't surprise me. I heard another clip of Nixon's voice on the phone (I forget what he was talking about), and I had forgotten how utterly creepy the guy sounded.

I think the various comedic impressions of Nixon over the years have obscured and softened in peoples' minds the scary reality of the guy.

[willoweyes]

you had us all leaping and frolicking about the office--a few celebrants even began disrobing before they were prevented by saner heads--

could any news have been more felicitously received?

then my Israeli sister-in-law said, in her inimitable accent, "Shouldn't ve check out a more reputable news source before we break out ze champagne?":o

[Isaiah Mpski]

Bopes,the whole fuking nation was crazy at the time.
And me stuck on Galveston Island,just like the Truman show.

When my man lost in the Democratic primary I knew we were in trouble and when everyday Bopes,EVERYDAY,100-150 names would be published in the paper as to who had been killed in Viet Nam etc,the day before,I knew I had to do something.
The Weathermen were serious people in their own right.Basically Fascists who were serious about bringing down American infrastructure.Power grids,water systems,organized simultaneous bursts of profitable anarchy-rob the local bank in a town of three thousand and a super WalMart type shit.Ignorant ass-holes who I shouldn't have been associating with.

He was freakin scary guy,Nixon..meglamaniac(sp),but he was right in his philosophy.
"Fry their ass anyway possible."

What we are seeing now is countries like NK and Mynamar-small as they are-developing their future around a nuclear war through which they plan to survive by building underground bunkers.
We have to have a SOLID peace with China.
Hong Kong ain't British no more.

[sidecross]

Published on Saturday, June 27, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Financial Reform, Words and Deeds

by Ralph Nader

It's good that Barack Obama is an agile basketball player because on financial regulatory reform he's having to straddle an ever widening chasm between his words and his deeds.

Obama said: "Millions of Americans who have worked hard and behaved responsibility have seen their life dreams eroded by the irresponsibility of others and by the failure of their government to provide adequate oversight. Our entire economy has been undermined by that failure."

"Over the past two decades, we have seen, time and again, cycles of precipitous booms and busts. In each case, millions of people have had their lives profoundly disrupted by developments in the financial system, most severely in our recent crisis."

Strong words, even though he didn't include "corporate crime, fraud and abuse" to replace the euphemism "irresponsibility." One would think that his 88 page reform proposal to Congress would be up to his words. Instead he provides Washington aspirins for Wall Street brain cancer.

The anemic nature of these reforms ostensibly designed to prevent or deter another big bust on Wall Street and its hostage grip on the nation's savings and investments immediately drew the ire of well-regarded business columnists.

Joe Nocera of the New York Times wrote the "the Obama plan is little more than an attempt to stick some new regulatory fingers into a very leaky financial dam rather than rebuild the dam itself." Nocera asserts that the reforms do not "attempt to diminish the use" of the customized type of derivatives which trillions of risky dollars generated "enormous damage to the financial system" ala A.I.G's collapse. He notes President Roosevelt's far more fundamental reforms, included the Glass-Steagall Act, which "separated banking from investment." It prevented a lot of banking mischief until Clinton, his Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Citigroup got Glass-Steagall repealed in 1999. Obama is not proposing to re-instate this critical safeguard. Nocera said, firms "will have to put up a little more capital, and deal with a little more oversight, but....in all likelihood, [it will] "be back to business as usual."

Star business reporter, Gretchen Morgenson, ripped into the Obama plan in the Sunday New York Times for doing too little to eliminate systemic risks posed by financial firms that are "too big to fail." "Rather than propose ways to shrink these companies and the risks they pose, the Geithner plan argues instead for enhanced regulatory oversight of the behemoths." She implies that taxpayers will be on the hook for even greater bailouts in the future.

A measure to prevent the "too big to fail" bailouts was suggested by none other than Obama's current economic advisor, former Federal Reserve Chairman, Paul Volcker. Speaking in China, no less, Volcker recently said the Federal government could simply prevent these big banks from trading for their own accounts. But Obama is not listening to Volcker these days. Instead Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and White House advisor, Larry Summers, who played important roles in the past decade facilitating the enormous speculation on Wall Street, have got Obama's ear.

The President's plan omits, (1) strong antitrust enforcement, (2) tough corporate crime prosecution, and (3) more authority for shareholders, who own their companies, to control their hired bosses. The plan should have included giving shareholders the decisive power to set executive compensation-the perverse compensation incentives helped push companies to wild speculation.

The reform plan's defaults go on and on. There are no mechanisms to encourage millions of investors to band together in Financial Consumer Associations. In 1985 then Cong. Chuck Schumer (Dem. NY) introduced such an amendment to the savings and loans bailout legislation. It did not pass.

What about sub-prime mortgage securities? Banks would be required to retain just a five percent stake before handing them off to other syndicates. This hardly is enough to induce prudence by banks selling these mortgages to impecunious home buyers.

Obama does propose a new financial consumer regulatory agency. But unless he appoints someone, as chair, like tough-minded Harvard Law Professor, Elizabeth Warren, who advanced the idea, the regulated financial firms will, as usual, take over the agency.

The Washington Post's Steven Pearlstein, derided the Obama proposals for not being "grounded, first and foremost, in a thorough and independent analysis of how the crisis was allowed to develop and what regulators did and didn't do to prevent it...." He was disappointed by the lack of controls over "hedge funds, private-equity funds or structured investment vehicles."

Obama did strengthen the fiduciary duties to investors by stock brokers. But he did not give these defrauded investors any better civil action rights in court beyond what they were left with by the hand-tying securities law passed in 1995.

So now it is up to Congress and its hordes of banking and insurance lobbyists. Good luck, savers and investors. Unless that is, you're doing your business with credit union cooperatives which don't gamble with your money.


http://www.commondreams.org/print/43911

[craazyman]

In 1930s it took the tenaciousness of a little known lawyer with subpoena power, Ferdinand Pecora, along with his commission appointed to investigate the collapse of 1929 and cause of the depression before any real reform was put in place. This took several years to play out.

Obama's proposal is a joke. A total joke. Designed and written by financial lobbyists and their appointed bureaucrats like Giethner and Summers.

But there is a commission being formed by Congress to investigate what led to the crash ( they should just ask me, but I am not waiting for that to happen ). If they have any integrity left at all, if there is any integrity at all left in this country among those in positions of power and authority (as there is with Elizabeth Warren) then things might get more interesting.

Obama is not coming even close to leading. He is following. And he's following the wrong crowd.

At this point, I hope he is a one-term president. But maybe he will step up and eventually bring the change we can believe in. Hope springs eternal.

[craazyman]

Belive it or not, this is from the publishers of the Wall Street Journal . . .


http://www.marketwatch.com/story/story/print?guid=982D6862-82E4-45C5-91A2-86B6C0F7604A


'Pretty Boy' Paulson and the Goldman Gang

Commentary: 'Public Enemies' run, not rob, our banks today
By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- Yes, two Great Depressions linked in a mysterious time-warp: Bank robbers and robber banks. Back in the dark days of the first Great Depression John Dillinger was admired, a dapper Robin Hood. Banks were the real villains.

Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, "Pretty Boy" Floyd, and "Machine Gun" Kelly were the "American Idols" of their day -- "Public Enemies" to the FBI. But folk heroes to an angry public who cheered when Dillinger destroyed bank records during holdups.

Scene from 'Public Enemies'Watch a scene from the new movie "Public Enemies" starring Johnny Depp, Marion Cotillard and Christian Bale. Video courtesy of Universal Pictures.
Yes, good ol' John cared for the little guy, our "stand-in," a secret way of getting back at the crooks running America's banks. Imagine him storming into a bank in a three-piece suit sporting a Tommy gun. In broad daylight! A real man. He leaps over a counter confronting a scared teller, gently taps a stack of bills with his gun barrel: "That's your money, mister?" He nods. "We're here for the bank's money, not yours. Put it away."

Banks were easy pickings for Dillinger, strategies he picked up in the slammer: "They ain't tough enough, smart enough, or fast enough. I can hit any bank I want, any time. They got to be at every bank, all the time." And he cleaned up, till a friend ratted on him.

Today it's far worse. Back in the 1930s we got a flood of new laws and regulations protecting small investors and consumers. Today we just got Obama's proposed new legislation that's already being watered down by Wall Street lobbyists. How? Easy.

Because today's new Dillingers are inside the system, officers and bureaucrats running the banks, regulators, monetary system, government. The usual suspects: "Pretty Boy" Paulson and his Goldman Gang, "Helicopter Machine Gunner" Bernanke, "Bonny" Dodd and "Clyde" Geithner.

They're the new "Public Enemies," calling the shots from inside, robbing us blind, costing us trillions. Worse yet, the new president loves the new Dillinger Gang. Like the Depression-era masses, he's mesmerized by the bank robbers, and hired them!

Modern Dillingers own the banks, and government
How bad is it? Real bad: Remember former SEC chairman Arthur Levitt, who stood up for the little guy in the '90s? The guy who once attacked banks with this comment: "America's investors have been ripped off as massively as a bank being held up by a guy with a gun and a mask."

Well, he's inside too, just hired as a "policy adviser" by Wall Street's Goldman Gang, just weeks after Goldman hired away the top staffer on the U.S. House Financial Services Committee. The pattern's obvious: Wall Street's arming itself with vast lobbying firepower to kill off much of the proposed regulations, just as they did during the Enron and mutual fund scandals reform movement earlier this decade.

And that, my dear friends, is why today's Wall Street conspiracy of banks and lobbyists, their well-paid pals in Congress and throughout the federal bureaucracies and regulators, plus their Trojan Horses in the White House, will continue driving America straight into the third meltdown Robert Shiller warns about: Our "vulnerability to bubble thinking is greater than it's ever been ... We recently lived through two epidemics of excessive financial optimism ... the dot-com and the subprime ... we are close to a third episode."

The rapidly-approaching "third episode" became painfully obvious in reading Black Swan author Nassim Taleb's idealistic "Ten Principles for a Black Swan-proof World" in the Financial Times. Idealistic, yes, but drenched in satire. Satire because we know the new Dillinger Gang, the Goldman Conspiracy and their allies all across Wall Street, could never steal as much money from taxpayers in Taleb's utopian "Black Swan-proof" world.

So Wall Street will surrender nothing, and, therefore, every one of Taleb's 10 Black Swans remains intact, a time bomb, a disaster waiting to happen. Here's why:

BS-1. Don't give the recovery to the same idiots who created the mess
Taleb was more colorful: "People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it), should never be given a new bus." There were so many drivers it is "irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess." But we have. And they will fail to create a "Black Swan-proof world."

BS-2. Nothing should ever become too big to fail
Get rid of losers early, while small, warns Taleb. Unfortunately, bankers are so greedy they're already spending millions on lobbyists and political donations to do just the opposite. They love "big." So count on endless loopholes undermining new regulations.

BS-3. Stop socialization of losses and privatization of gains
Taleb warns: We've "managed to combine the worst of capitalism and socialism. In France in the 1980s, the socialists took over the banks. In the U.S. in the 2000s, the banks took over the government." Only a naive idealist would expect them to surrender this Black Swan: After the next crash Wall Street will dump their losses on taxpayers (again).

BS-4. Incentive bonuses are increasing America's financial risks
You wouldn't give incentives to the manager of a nuclear plant, says Taleb. Incentives risk financial safety. "Bonuses do not accommodate the hidden risks of blow-ups. It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards." Sadly, Wall Street greed demands huge bonuses. So no changes: This Black Swan also remains as a WMD.

BS-5. High-leveraged debt increases the danger of a massive meltdown
While past equity bubbles were "mild," future "debt bubbles are vicious." Add highly leveraged debt, as we're doing now with bailouts and stimulus spending, and you get "wild and dangerous gyrations and leaves no room for error." But the Gang can't see it.

BS-6. No more derivatives ... nobody understands these WMDs
Taleb warns: "Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning. ... Derivatives need to be banned because nobody understands them and few are rational enough to know it. Citizens must be protected from themselves, from bankers selling them 'hedging' products, and from gullible regulators who listen to economic theorists."

BS-7. 'Restoring confidence' is for Ponzis, politicians and economists
Rumors are part of life, "governments cannot stop the rumors." If you hear rhetoric about "restoring confidence" from politicians or economists, they're hiding something.

BS-8. Do not give an addict more drugs if he has withdrawal pains
What a great metaphor: "Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homeopathy, it is denial. The debt crisis is not a temporary problem, it is a structural one. We need rehab." And yet, Obama's new bank regulatory reform package gives Wall Street access to an endless supply of their favorite drugs: derivatives, debt and bonuses.

BS-9. Never count on Wall Street advice or management for retirement
Wall Street hates Taleb for saying this: Markets are not "storehouses of value," they lack "the certainties that normal citizens require." But this Black Swan is Wall Street's "cash cow." They make hundreds of billions delivering advice and skimming money under the guise of managing our assets. They'll never give up this opportunity to steal our money.

BS-10. Let entrepreneurs, not bankers, take risks and run America
Taleb the idealist: "Finally, this crisis cannot be fixed with makeshift repairs, no more than a boat with a rotten hull can be fixed with ad-hoc patches. We need to rebuild the hull with new (stronger) materials." Before Obama's reforms Taleb offered his own: We must help "what needs to be broken break on its own, converting debt into equity, marginalizing the economics and business school establishments, shutting down the 'Nobel' in economics, banning leveraged buyouts, putting bankers where they belong, clawing back the bonuses of those who got us here, and teaching people to navigate a world with fewer certainties."

Do this and "we will see an economic life closer to our biological environment: smaller companies, richer ecology, no leverage -- a world in which entrepreneurs, not bankers, take the risks and companies are born and die every day without making the news. In other words, a place more resistant to black swans."

Remember Taleb's 10 Black Swans, because any one could trigger a disaster. Yet sadly and unfortunately, we already know Wall Street refuses to rebuild its rotting hull. Wall Street hates change. And is now, like the Titanic before it, on a collision course that will sink the good ship, the USS Utopia and its cargo of 10 beautiful black swans, steaming into the great fog banks hiding a massive iceberg ... the Great Depression 2.

[Isaiah Mpski]

Crazzy,do you mind if I renane you?
First let us review our backgrounds,
\
My Father's side of the family started with the birth Michael Son jr on July 4th,1776.
His Father Michael Sr,had been in the army for two years(before that he serverd as a mercenary) and was from an area of Virginia that is now West Virginia.
I know he knew James Monroe as he named his second son after him.That was before Monroe got into politics and I can still see Sgt Son(husband of Elizabeth of Augusta County,Va)sitting around a fireplace,talking,while the seige of Boston went on around them. :errf:

My Mother's side of the family comes from Seminole-Comanche blood,most notable of which is Quanah Parker. :D

Crazzy if you had come here,along with SB and Willow on the weekends we probably could have raised one half mil which you would have put in JST and we would all be happy now.

Ok.That opportunity has come and gone and you finally see the Clinton Machine,under the cover of darknees,like a metastatic hydroencephelitic growth on mankind,evolve.

Here is what we have to do.Fuk with China.
Make their dollars worthless.The GD TV I bought from them might as well come from post war Japan.
We are in an abyss my friends.
I have had the opportunity of troop review following Sir Rumsfield's dismissal,He is a wise man,however we have gone way past serious ass kicking time and I'm very much afraid that we don't come back to our half of the world IMMEDIATELY we are going to see Viet Nam repeated in Afganistan,and this time there will be few who will want to come with us.

Our country(my country whiteman) is in a perilous situation.
We need to revert to part of the thinking that went on with Monroe's time.:hmm:
Any well-backed serious attempt to start panic in America could very well result in a shutdown of infrastructure and widespread anarchy.That is why some people in Iran are probably getting their heads cut off today.
We need to prepare now.That is why I bought this place 26 yrs ago.
McIntosh County,Oklahoma,Section 3-11-16.

[suebee]

watching obama address the NAACP. i know more is needed than words but damn the man is good. this is one of his best. i always end up in tears.

[Isaiah Mpski]

Yes Obama seems to have a good honorable head on his shoulders.
The Medico-Pharmaco industry has him terribly fooled though,as do his Generals who tell him Afganistan can be controled through increasing American Military presence.
Let the Talabani take om China and Russia who claim not to believe in God and please send all that money we are spending everyday overseas in our own country.

[Isaiah Mpski]

Thank you for bringing this thread to consciouness as post 49 is as true now as it was then.
A small intelligent group of citizens could come into McIntosh County and because of several reasons-most of all you'd have a fun place to live and work for awhile because I know in no time at all we could have enough money to inagurate Daniel in his proper place Mexico-and literally show that there is a Heaven on earth. ;)

What about your idea of renting the houseboat SB.
Anyone else up for that? :D

You softies could sleep up in my place overlooking the lake.Sixty miles long,and again up for rent.

[Isaiah Mpski]

Ok.
tODAY i SHALL GO OUT AND PREPARE A COUPLE OF ACRES FOR FALL GARDEN.
Just because some of you may get smart,may get lucky etc and will need something to eat if you decide to WORK and live here for a spell.

Some new comer up the road shot Bambi,his mother,father and sister.To say I am pissed doesn't give proper emotion to the situation.
I fed them my summer garden all this time and some hill billy red neck decides he needs to buy a few acres in the country and get some easy meat out of season.

Any suggestions short of knocking on his door and making a citizen's arrest.

the two little twins-white spots and all were almost tame enough to eat out of my hand.

[willoweyes]

Isaiah, I am so sorry. please do call the game warden and also the newspaper.

Bastards.

good luck with your fall garden. I am knee deep in eggplants tomatoes and peppers--ratatouille! We received an inch of rain Thursday--Praise the Lord! and green reigns.

[Isaiah Mpski]

Willow I wouldn't think of that as he might find the plants that come up every year in Herb's garden.
Remember Herb was my handy man who was found dead,with a bloody nose,two days after a local bank president and father of local DA I sued told me on the phone he(now dead bank president) was going to have me murdered.Herb was 43,after about a year his death was declared "natural".Stroke I think they told his wife.
Do you know how to kill a squid?You cut off his arms.

Willow,you have to understand the mentality of those idiots.
They do not understand why you don't kill deer out of season.To them it's there,it's easy to get,so they take advantage of it.:(
To hell with the neighbors.Shoot them if they don't like it.:p

There is a better and perhaps a way to punish them and hopefully put them in a Federal Ct room.:rolleyes:
They made the big mistake of hiring a bulldozer awhile ago,which bulldozed the idiots a road to the lake,without the corps knowledge.I think the fines for that start at about 10k and then tack on the value of every tree with greater than 4 inch diameter and you come up with at least 25k.
Plus court fees etc and possible loss of land if they don't pay the fines.
The fines are very valuable to the few corpmen who maintain this lake.We started out in 1965 with 120 and we are down to 12 now.They love to catch people doing things like that and really go out of their way to give them hell.;)

Again I reiterate my plans to take back control of the majority of this part of the lake so it can be better regulated and utilized.

Politics Willow,politics.