November 30, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
MAKING GOVERNMENT BAD
Right-wingers tell us that government, particularly "big government," is bad. Big government encroaches on our freedoms, they say. But they aren't bothered in the least by things like spying on us, suspending habeas corpus, attempts to dictate our sexual behavior, monitoring what we read, and listening to our phone calls. Oh no. Government is only bad when it interferes with the ability to make money. People who say government doesn't work are only too happy to prove it when they get into power. We saw that in spades during the Reagan years and it's been worse with George W. Bush. This column by Paul Krugman is at www.nytimes.com:
As the Bush administration sinks deeper into its multiple quagmires, the personality cult the G.O.P. once built around President Bush has given way to nostalgia for the good old days. The current cover of Time magazine shows a weeping Ronald Reagan, and declares that Republicans “need to reclaim the Reagan legacy.”
But Republicans shouldn’t cry for Ronald Reagan; the truth is, he never left them. There’s no need to reclaim the Reagan legacy: Mr. Bush is what Mr. Reagan would have been given the opportunity.
In 1993 Jonathan Cohn - the author, by the way, of a terrific new book on our dysfunctional health care system - published an article in The American Prospect describing the dire state of the federal government. Changing just a few words in that article makes it read as if it were written in 2007.
THE BUSH PERSONALITY CULT
Some of the most detestable people in history have their fans. Serial killers on Death Row usually get lots of mail from women wanting a relationship. There are devotees of Hitler. Charles Manson had his groupies. There are still people in this country who think George W. Bush is a smart and courageous leader. If Bush is intelligent, he disguises it very well. This article by Jaime O'Neill is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
People who cling to the insane notion that George W. Bush is a smart guy who's been good for the country are fond of citing the fact that the 43rd president of the United States has degrees from Harvard and Yale. Other delusional defenders of Bush intelligence point to the assertion from the White House press office that Bush read 94 books in the first nine months of this year, despite all those other time-consuming duties he had to perform.
That's the same Bush, I guess, and the same avid reader who could not be troubled to read a one-page summary of the possible negative results of an American invasion of Iraq, a summary boiled down especially for him by career military and State Department officials precisely because it had generally been known that this was a president who doesn't read much, a fact he acknowledged in an interview with Fox's Britt Hume way back in 2003when he copped to the fact that he doesn't even read newspapers. "I glance at the headlines just to kind of (get) a flavor of what's moving," Bush said. "I rarely read the stories." So, those career foreign service people condensed lots of info into one page˜and still the man didn't read the thing, an act of nonfeasance in office that is still bearing rotten fruit.
Last year, after Bush spokespeople had spent a couple of years trying to spin Bush's lack of curiosity and reluctance to read stuff, Bush told NBC's Brian Williams: "I said I was looking for a book to read, Laura said you ought to try Camus. I also read three Shakespeares. ... I've got a eck-a-lec-tic reading list."
Monday, November 26, 2007
November 26, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
NO MORE REPUBLICAN ECONOMIES
Ever since Herbert Hoover, Republicans in power means lousy economies. Hoover mismanaged the economy and the Great Depression came and took hold. In the Nixon era we saw high inflation and stagnating wages. In Reagan's era there were tax cuts and bonanzas for the rich, but most of the rest of us didn't benefit. The lousy economy in 1992 helped defeat George H. W. Bush. Now with Junior in charge things are worse than ever. I hope that George W. Bush will go down with Herbert Hoover in the memory of Americans of just how rotten things get with these trickle down, give-everything-to-the-rich, thugs in charge. This commentary by Paul Krugman is at www.nytimes.com:
What’s really remarkable about this dismal outlook is that the economy isn’t (yet?) in recession, and consumers haven’t yet felt the full effects of $98 oil (wait until they see this winter’s heating bills) or the plunging dollar, which will raise the prices of imported goods.
The response of those who support the Bush administration’s economic policies is to complain about the unfairness of it all. They rattle off statistics that supposedly show how wonderful the economy really is. Many of these statistics are misleading or irrelevant, but it’s true that the official unemployment rate is fairly low by historical standards. So why are people so unhappy?
The answer from Bush supporters — who are, on this and other matters, a strikingly whiny bunch — is to blame the "liberal media" for failing to report the good news. But the real explanation for the public’s pessimism is that whatever good economic news there is hasn’t translated into gains for most working Americans.
One way to drive this point home is to compare the situation for workers today with that in the late 1990s, when the country’s economic optimism was almost as remarkable as its pessimism today. For example, in the fall of 1998 almost two-thirds of Americans thought the economy was excellent or good.
With right-wingers it's a Pavlovian response. "Liberal media" pops out of their mouths instantly if there's something in the news they don't like. If the media are scourging Democrats or liberals, right-wingers don't have a problem. But have a report about racism, economic inequality, Republican corruption, or global climate change and immediately it's the "liberal media." If there is any conclusive proof the media aren't liberal, look at the Scott McClellan revelations about the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame. It's gotten virtually
no attention from the "liberal media," but we've heard about Natalie Halloway all over again. This article by Dave Zweifel is at www.commondreams.org:
A sneak peek at former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s soon-to-be-published book reveals that virtually every bigwig in the Bush administration passed along lies about who was involved in outing CIA agent Valerie Plame — including the president himself.
McClellan in 2003 stood at the White House press room podium and said that neither Karl Rove nor Scooter Libby, the two most senior aides to George Bush and Dick Cheney, had anything to do with leaking to several members of the press that Plame was an undercover CIA agent. She was exposed in an apparent retaliation for a guest column her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had written for the New York Times, claiming that Bush had lied about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities in his State of the Union address.
As it later turned out, not only was Bush’s speech a lie, but McClellan’s defense of Rove and Libby was also an outright lie. McClellan’s memoir, to be published next spring, claims that five of the highest-ranking officials in the administration were involved in his telling that lie to the press and the rest of the nation: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president’s chief of staff and the president himself.
But the McClellan excerpts got little play last week in our so-called anti-George Bush liberal media.
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
NO MORE REPUBLICAN ECONOMIES
Ever since Herbert Hoover, Republicans in power means lousy economies. Hoover mismanaged the economy and the Great Depression came and took hold. In the Nixon era we saw high inflation and stagnating wages. In Reagan's era there were tax cuts and bonanzas for the rich, but most of the rest of us didn't benefit. The lousy economy in 1992 helped defeat George H. W. Bush. Now with Junior in charge things are worse than ever. I hope that George W. Bush will go down with Herbert Hoover in the memory of Americans of just how rotten things get with these trickle down, give-everything-to-the-rich, thugs in charge. This commentary by Paul Krugman is at www.nytimes.com:
What’s really remarkable about this dismal outlook is that the economy isn’t (yet?) in recession, and consumers haven’t yet felt the full effects of $98 oil (wait until they see this winter’s heating bills) or the plunging dollar, which will raise the prices of imported goods.
The response of those who support the Bush administration’s economic policies is to complain about the unfairness of it all. They rattle off statistics that supposedly show how wonderful the economy really is. Many of these statistics are misleading or irrelevant, but it’s true that the official unemployment rate is fairly low by historical standards. So why are people so unhappy?
The answer from Bush supporters — who are, on this and other matters, a strikingly whiny bunch — is to blame the "liberal media" for failing to report the good news. But the real explanation for the public’s pessimism is that whatever good economic news there is hasn’t translated into gains for most working Americans.
One way to drive this point home is to compare the situation for workers today with that in the late 1990s, when the country’s economic optimism was almost as remarkable as its pessimism today. For example, in the fall of 1998 almost two-thirds of Americans thought the economy was excellent or good.
THE ALLEGED "LIBERAL MEDIA"
With right-wingers it's a Pavlovian response. "Liberal media" pops out of their mouths instantly if there's something in the news they don't like. If the media are scourging Democrats or liberals, right-wingers don't have a problem. But have a report about racism, economic inequality, Republican corruption, or global climate change and immediately it's the "liberal media." If there is any conclusive proof the media aren't liberal, look at the Scott McClellan revelations about the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame. It's gotten virtually
no attention from the "liberal media," but we've heard about Natalie Halloway all over again. This article by Dave Zweifel is at www.commondreams.org:A sneak peek at former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s soon-to-be-published book reveals that virtually every bigwig in the Bush administration passed along lies about who was involved in outing CIA agent Valerie Plame — including the president himself.
McClellan in 2003 stood at the White House press room podium and said that neither Karl Rove nor Scooter Libby, the two most senior aides to George Bush and Dick Cheney, had anything to do with leaking to several members of the press that Plame was an undercover CIA agent. She was exposed in an apparent retaliation for a guest column her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had written for the New York Times, claiming that Bush had lied about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities in his State of the Union address.
As it later turned out, not only was Bush’s speech a lie, but McClellan’s defense of Rove and Libby was also an outright lie. McClellan’s memoir, to be published next spring, claims that five of the highest-ranking officials in the administration were involved in his telling that lie to the press and the rest of the nation: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president’s chief of staff and the president himself.
But the McClellan excerpts got little play last week in our so-called anti-George Bush liberal media.
Saturday, November 24, 2007
November 24, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
THE CHRISTMAS LEMMINGS
Call me a Grinch, I guess. I don't like Christmas. I don't like the avarice, I don't like the crowds, and I don't like the hypocrisy. This season is supposedly about celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ, but it has little to do with Christ and lots to do with consumerism. Historical evidence doesn't even support the idea that Jesus was born in December. Christmas was borrowed from the Roman holiday Saturnalia, which is mostly about the winter solstice. Other pagan traditions, such as the Christmas tree, have been incorporated down through the centuries. It would be a much better season if we just had a simple celebration of the solstice. I don't mind the bright lights and other festive decorations to brighten up the darkness of this time of year. But let's ditch the consumerism, the phony cheer, and the insincere platitudes. This article by Danny Schechter is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
BOSTON, MA November 24 2007: You could almost run that old Lone Ranger theme - the famous William Tell Overture - as the soundtrack to the local news stories I watched here in Boston on Thanksgiving day featuring perky local news "correspondents" stirring a buying frenzy with upbeat reports on manic consumers racing into malls for "midnight madness" sales.
It was, in the words of Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping, a "shopopocalyse." His crusade against out of control consumption is pictured in the new film "What Would Jesus Buy?," opening at some theaters in LA and San Francisco.
This highly relevant film was not on TV, of course, because our media is deeply complicit in promoting/encouraging mindless consumerism through newspapers, commercials and on newscasts. This is a well-practiced formula mirroring TV's promotion of the war in Iraq, as the line between selling and telling disappears. Media outlets are amply rewarded with endless ad revenues hyping all the discounted goodies you can get with the Boston Globe packing no less than 43 advertising/sales supplements (down from 47 a year ago) into a paper that had wall to wall Macy ads, including some offering $10 coupons to bribe you into the stores. Marketing is what the media does best.
The only negative note was the fear among some that toys might be unsafe because of lead or other dangers. Some 26 million toys have been recalled this year, a sign that the regulators were asleep on this front in the economic wars as they were on Wall Street. The real danger may not be lead in the toys but another type of lead in our heads that leads to denial on the part of millions that we can go on with addictive well-cultivated crazed consumption habits.
PAYING DEARLY FOR IRAQ WAR
One of Hemingway's short stories has the line "the war was always there." It's that way with Iraq. No matter how many distractions there are, the war is always there It has cost us dearly in American lives and wounded, in the huge military outlays, and in credibility around the world. It's also costing us in food and fuel prices. I dread trips to the grocery store or the gas station. We're getting the worst of all worlds: flat or declining wages and skyrocketing prices. This article by Blake Fleetwood is at www.huffingtonpost.com:
There is a compelling article in yesterday's New York Daily News by Pulitzer Prize winner William Sherman.
Sherman shows that there is not much for us to be thankful for in terms of the cost of food we put on the table this week.
Consumers are getting slammed with the biggest increase in food prices in a decade -- fueled by a perfect storm of rising grain prices and a falling dollar.
Poultry -- including your Thanksgiving Turkey -- along with dairy products have risen the most. A glass of milk costs New Yorkers up to 42% more than last holiday season.
The wholesale price of eggs has soared 86% compared to last fall, at one point.
"I'm spending $50 to $80 more a week on food than last year", according to one Harlem shopper.
The surge is driven by a ripple effect -- the Iraq war, the rise in oil prices, the growing deficits -- and a confluence of factors beginning with corn and wheat crops diverted to ethanol production, according to economists.
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
THE CHRISTMAS LEMMINGS
Call me a Grinch, I guess. I don't like Christmas. I don't like the avarice, I don't like the crowds, and I don't like the hypocrisy. This season is supposedly about celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ, but it has little to do with Christ and lots to do with consumerism. Historical evidence doesn't even support the idea that Jesus was born in December. Christmas was borrowed from the Roman holiday Saturnalia, which is mostly about the winter solstice. Other pagan traditions, such as the Christmas tree, have been incorporated down through the centuries. It would be a much better season if we just had a simple celebration of the solstice. I don't mind the bright lights and other festive decorations to brighten up the darkness of this time of year. But let's ditch the consumerism, the phony cheer, and the insincere platitudes. This article by Danny Schechter is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
BOSTON, MA November 24 2007: You could almost run that old Lone Ranger theme - the famous William Tell Overture - as the soundtrack to the local news stories I watched here in Boston on Thanksgiving day featuring perky local news "correspondents" stirring a buying frenzy with upbeat reports on manic consumers racing into malls for "midnight madness" sales.
It was, in the words of Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping, a "shopopocalyse." His crusade against out of control consumption is pictured in the new film "What Would Jesus Buy?," opening at some theaters in LA and San Francisco.
This highly relevant film was not on TV, of course, because our media is deeply complicit in promoting/encouraging mindless consumerism through newspapers, commercials and on newscasts. This is a well-practiced formula mirroring TV's promotion of the war in Iraq, as the line between selling and telling disappears. Media outlets are amply rewarded with endless ad revenues hyping all the discounted goodies you can get with the Boston Globe packing no less than 43 advertising/sales supplements (down from 47 a year ago) into a paper that had wall to wall Macy ads, including some offering $10 coupons to bribe you into the stores. Marketing is what the media does best.
The only negative note was the fear among some that toys might be unsafe because of lead or other dangers. Some 26 million toys have been recalled this year, a sign that the regulators were asleep on this front in the economic wars as they were on Wall Street. The real danger may not be lead in the toys but another type of lead in our heads that leads to denial on the part of millions that we can go on with addictive well-cultivated crazed consumption habits.
PAYING DEARLY FOR IRAQ WAR
One of Hemingway's short stories has the line "the war was always there." It's that way with Iraq. No matter how many distractions there are, the war is always there It has cost us dearly in American lives and wounded, in the huge military outlays, and in credibility around the world. It's also costing us in food and fuel prices. I dread trips to the grocery store or the gas station. We're getting the worst of all worlds: flat or declining wages and skyrocketing prices. This article by Blake Fleetwood is at www.huffingtonpost.com:
There is a compelling article in yesterday's New York Daily News by Pulitzer Prize winner William Sherman.
Sherman shows that there is not much for us to be thankful for in terms of the cost of food we put on the table this week.
Consumers are getting slammed with the biggest increase in food prices in a decade -- fueled by a perfect storm of rising grain prices and a falling dollar.
Poultry -- including your Thanksgiving Turkey -- along with dairy products have risen the most. A glass of milk costs New Yorkers up to 42% more than last holiday season.
The wholesale price of eggs has soared 86% compared to last fall, at one point.
"I'm spending $50 to $80 more a week on food than last year", according to one Harlem shopper.
The surge is driven by a ripple effect -- the Iraq war, the rise in oil prices, the growing deficits -- and a confluence of factors beginning with corn and wheat crops diverted to ethanol production, according to economists.
Friday, November 23, 2007
November 23, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
CONSERVATIVES ARE LIARS
The only time conservatives aren't lying is when their mouths aren't moving. They have a rotten filthy ideology. The only way they can sell it is by lying. They combine the lying with bigotry, hate mongering, and greed, but lying is the major tactic. This article by David Michael Green is at www.commondreams.org:
These lies are legend, and they’re endlessly retold. Everything from the one about the liberal bias in the media, or the one about Ronald Reagan ending the Cold War, to the one about how the private sector is so much more efficient than the government. And how about Saddam’s arsenal of WMD, eh? Or the tax cuts that weren’t going to drive the federal government into deficit? Or remember when George Bush told us that the war in Iraq was over, before it had even really started? Or the bit about how global warming is just a great big conspiracy among those noted well-known cabalists, er … climatology scientists?
I’m only just getting started here, but you get the point. If you’re a conservative you basically have two choices - lie or lose. ‘Cause if you tell the truth, no one in his or her right mind would buy the garbage you’re peddling.
The list of lies is endless, but my personal favorite is the one about how conservatism is the ideology of freedom, and specifically freedom from an overweening, intrusive, liberty-stealing, nanny-state government.
Sometimes when I hear that howler, I have to pinch myself to make sure I’m not off in some virtual reality world (like ‘Liberty’ University, or the Republican national convention) somewhere. Because, clearly, between me and the well-programmed fool mouthing these hopeless inanities, one of us is, that’s for sure.
But I’ll tell you what, if conservatism is the ideology of freedom - then I’m the Queen of England. And, one thing you can be sure of is that I’m not the Queen of England. I don’t even have the right parts and pieces, and the only crown I’ve ever worn was given to me forty years ago by some pimply-faced teenager working the cash register at Burger King. Somehow, I don’t think that counts.
MOBBED UP RUDY
There are lots of disturbing things about Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani. His convenient flip-flopping on issues should send off alarms. His stance on attacking Iran is a major red flag. But his record as mayor of New York and his ties to organized crime should also raise concerns. This article by Howie Klein is at www.alternet.org:
Giuliani's problems go well beyond his immediate associates-- criminals and ne'er-do-wells like best buddy/Mafia bagman Bernie Kerik, South Carolina cocaine dealer Tom Ravenel, or an assortment of monstrosities in his inner circle from child molesting priest Alan Placa to countless unscrupulous money men and paid off shills working to rig the election for Giuliani, like Paul Singer, the guy who has been bankrolling the attempt to steal California's electoral votes and the one fireman willing-- for cash-- to dispute Rudy's shameful real 9/11 record.
Today's Chicago Tribune has been digging where Republicans feared someone was bound to go eventually: Giuliani's multimillion dollar, very shady business connections. And "each revelation raises new questions for the first major presidential candidate in memory to build a multimillion-dollar business on the foundation of his time in elected office, and not the other way around."
Giuliani has managed to hide most of his mobster connections-- but not all. He hides behind "confidentiality agreements" and, basically, says that the crooks he's dealing with are entitled to their privacy. "Questioned during a campaign appearance Tuesday in Chicago, Giuliani said that, 'all of Giuliani Partners' clients, maybe with one or two exceptions, I'm not even sure that's right, are public. ... At least the ones that I was familiar with.'"
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
CONSERVATIVES ARE LIARS
The only time conservatives aren't lying is when their mouths aren't moving. They have a rotten filthy ideology. The only way they can sell it is by lying. They combine the lying with bigotry, hate mongering, and greed, but lying is the major tactic. This article by David Michael Green is at www.commondreams.org:
These lies are legend, and they’re endlessly retold. Everything from the one about the liberal bias in the media, or the one about Ronald Reagan ending the Cold War, to the one about how the private sector is so much more efficient than the government. And how about Saddam’s arsenal of WMD, eh? Or the tax cuts that weren’t going to drive the federal government into deficit? Or remember when George Bush told us that the war in Iraq was over, before it had even really started? Or the bit about how global warming is just a great big conspiracy among those noted well-known cabalists, er … climatology scientists?
I’m only just getting started here, but you get the point. If you’re a conservative you basically have two choices - lie or lose. ‘Cause if you tell the truth, no one in his or her right mind would buy the garbage you’re peddling.
The list of lies is endless, but my personal favorite is the one about how conservatism is the ideology of freedom, and specifically freedom from an overweening, intrusive, liberty-stealing, nanny-state government.
Sometimes when I hear that howler, I have to pinch myself to make sure I’m not off in some virtual reality world (like ‘Liberty’ University, or the Republican national convention) somewhere. Because, clearly, between me and the well-programmed fool mouthing these hopeless inanities, one of us is, that’s for sure.
But I’ll tell you what, if conservatism is the ideology of freedom - then I’m the Queen of England. And, one thing you can be sure of is that I’m not the Queen of England. I don’t even have the right parts and pieces, and the only crown I’ve ever worn was given to me forty years ago by some pimply-faced teenager working the cash register at Burger King. Somehow, I don’t think that counts.
MOBBED UP RUDY
There are lots of disturbing things about Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani. His convenient flip-flopping on issues should send off alarms. His stance on attacking Iran is a major red flag. But his record as mayor of New York and his ties to organized crime should also raise concerns. This article by Howie Klein is at www.alternet.org:
Giuliani's problems go well beyond his immediate associates-- criminals and ne'er-do-wells like best buddy/Mafia bagman Bernie Kerik, South Carolina cocaine dealer Tom Ravenel, or an assortment of monstrosities in his inner circle from child molesting priest Alan Placa to countless unscrupulous money men and paid off shills working to rig the election for Giuliani, like Paul Singer, the guy who has been bankrolling the attempt to steal California's electoral votes and the one fireman willing-- for cash-- to dispute Rudy's shameful real 9/11 record.
Today's Chicago Tribune has been digging where Republicans feared someone was bound to go eventually: Giuliani's multimillion dollar, very shady business connections. And "each revelation raises new questions for the first major presidential candidate in memory to build a multimillion-dollar business on the foundation of his time in elected office, and not the other way around."
Giuliani has managed to hide most of his mobster connections-- but not all. He hides behind "confidentiality agreements" and, basically, says that the crooks he's dealing with are entitled to their privacy. "Questioned during a campaign appearance Tuesday in Chicago, Giuliani said that, 'all of Giuliani Partners' clients, maybe with one or two exceptions, I'm not even sure that's right, are public. ... At least the ones that I was familiar with.'"
Thursday, November 22, 2007
November 22, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
REMEMBERING JFK
It was this day in 1963 that President John F. Kennedy was shot down in the streets of Dallas, Texas, while riding in an open limousine on his way to deliver a campaign speech. American history took a decisive and ominous turn on that day.
JFK dealt with virulent right-wingers in his time. That morning a full page newspaper ad in Texas called JFK a traitor because he wanted to take a new direction with the Soviet Union and because he didn't overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba. The right wing probably didn't like movements toward improving life for ordinary Americans in programs that were to pass in the Johnson administration such as Medicare and civil rights legislation.
We saw several assassinations of progressive leaders in the 60's, including Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X. Violence and repression are the tools of the right wing. But throughout human history the repressive elements have been defeated. We have a lot of work to do, but work we must.
LET'S START WITH IMPEACHMENT
It's too bad that life can't work the way a computer works. You have a "system restore" option on a computer to take it back to settings from an earlier time. The United States needs a system restore now, but we can't undo so much damage that the Bush administration has inflicted on the country and on the world. We can't bring back the dead in Iraq and Afghanistan. We can't undo the massive physical and psychological damage to the troops wounded and killed in Bush's wars. But we can establish this as a dividing line to show that we've learned from this experience and will not repeat what we've witnessed during the Bush years. I believe a first, actually a modest step, is to impeach Bush and Cheney. It will show that we, along with the world, abhor what has happened. It is not acceptable. This column by Robert Parry is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
In early fall 2003, George W. Bush joined in what appears to have been a criminal cover-up to conceal the role of his White House in exposing the classified identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson.
That is the logical conclusion one would draw from a new statement by then-White House press secretary Scott McClellan when it is put into a mosaic with previously known evidence.
McClellan says President Bush was one of five high-ranking officials who caused McClellan to lie to the public in clearing Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff I. Lewis Libby of any responsibility for the leak of Plame’s employment as an undercover intelligence officer.
“The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” McClellan said. “So I stood at the White House briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.
“There was one problem. It was not true.
“I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the Vice President, the President’s chief of staff, and the President himself.”
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
REMEMBERING JFK
It was this day in 1963 that President John F. Kennedy was shot down in the streets of Dallas, Texas, while riding in an open limousine on his way to deliver a campaign speech. American history took a decisive and ominous turn on that day.
JFK dealt with virulent right-wingers in his time. That morning a full page newspaper ad in Texas called JFK a traitor because he wanted to take a new direction with the Soviet Union and because he didn't overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba. The right wing probably didn't like movements toward improving life for ordinary Americans in programs that were to pass in the Johnson administration such as Medicare and civil rights legislation.
We saw several assassinations of progressive leaders in the 60's, including Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X. Violence and repression are the tools of the right wing. But throughout human history the repressive elements have been defeated. We have a lot of work to do, but work we must.
LET'S START WITH IMPEACHMENT
It's too bad that life can't work the way a computer works. You have a "system restore" option on a computer to take it back to settings from an earlier time. The United States needs a system restore now, but we can't undo so much damage that the Bush administration has inflicted on the country and on the world. We can't bring back the dead in Iraq and Afghanistan. We can't undo the massive physical and psychological damage to the troops wounded and killed in Bush's wars. But we can establish this as a dividing line to show that we've learned from this experience and will not repeat what we've witnessed during the Bush years. I believe a first, actually a modest step, is to impeach Bush and Cheney. It will show that we, along with the world, abhor what has happened. It is not acceptable. This column by Robert Parry is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
In early fall 2003, George W. Bush joined in what appears to have been a criminal cover-up to conceal the role of his White House in exposing the classified identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson.
That is the logical conclusion one would draw from a new statement by then-White House press secretary Scott McClellan when it is put into a mosaic with previously known evidence.
McClellan says President Bush was one of five high-ranking officials who caused McClellan to lie to the public in clearing Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff I. Lewis Libby of any responsibility for the leak of Plame’s employment as an undercover intelligence officer.
“The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” McClellan said. “So I stood at the White House briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.
“There was one problem. It was not true.
“I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the Vice President, the President’s chief of staff, and the President himself.”
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
November 20, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
THE BUSHES MAKE THE MAFIA LOOK HONEST
The Bush family has been a parasite in the body politic. They've used the government and their connections to enrich themselves at much harm to the country and to the world. Prescott Bush, grandfather of the current Oval Office occupant, was a financier for Adolf Hitler. Former President George H. W. Bush headed up the CIA before moving on to the vice presidency and presidency. Junior was a failed businessman, bailed out consistently by his daddy's friends. He has brought that same dismal standard to the White House. The Bushes have been heavily involved with the Saudis, including the bin Laden family, for decades. The Mafia makes money in things like prostitution, drug running, and gambling, which seems almost honorable in contrast to war profiteering. This article by Bill Gallagher is at www.commondreams.org:
Making money from government service and war, and lining the pockets of family and friends is a sacred creed in the Bush family. The Corleone family in “The Godfather” showed more restraint and was less inclined toward violence than the greedy gangsters the Bush crime family unleashed on the world.
Using public office and influence to make millions is so ingrained in the Bushevik regime that they don’t even think twice when they raid the public treasury to take care of themselves.
Vice President Dick Cheney cashed in on his stint as secretary of defense to rake in millions in government contracts as CEO of Halliburton. The no bid, cost-plus contracts Halliburton subsequently landed in Iraq are just good business deals, expected spoils for imperial lords. The fact that Cheney was still getting residual payments from the company should in no way be considered a conflict.
As the Bushes gather this week, they have much to be thankful for. Their family business thrives and their wealth grows as the rest of the nation worries about having a job, making mortgage payments, having health insurance and paying for college tuition — concerns unknown and unfelt among the well-stuffed Bush brood.
Neil Bush, the president’s brother, is cashing in on the No Child Left Behind Act. Neil, you’ll recall, escaped indictment for his role in the collapse of the Silverado Savings and Loan. The taxpayers picked up the tab for his malfeasance. Failure in business means nothing when all you have to do is shake down your daddy’s pals for your next entrepreneurial experiment.
MCCLELLAN: BUSH INVOLVED IN PLAME LEAK
Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan in a new book says that George W. Bush and top White House officials were involved in the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's name. McClellan, when he was working for the White House, denied such involvement. The evidence is clear that Bush and his minions leaked Valerie Plame's name to get revenge on her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, for writing an op-ed piece in The New York Times disputing Bush's claim that Saddam Hussein tried to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger. Bush and company compromised important intelligence and undoubtedly caused contacts of Valerie Plame to be killed in reprisal. This is just one in a series of impeachable offenses committed by Bush. This article by Matt Apuzzo is at www.sfgate.com:
Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan blames President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for efforts to mislead the public about the role of White House aides in leaking the identity of a CIA operative.
In an excerpt from his forthcoming book, McClellan recounts the 2003 news conference in which he told reporters that aides Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby were "not involved" in the leak involving operative Valerie Plame.
"There was one problem. It was not true," McClellan writes, according to a brief excerpt released Tuesday. "I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest-ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president's chief of staff and the president himself."
Bush's chief of staff at the time was Andrew Card.
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
THE BUSHES MAKE THE MAFIA LOOK HONEST
The Bush family has been a parasite in the body politic. They've used the government and their connections to enrich themselves at much harm to the country and to the world. Prescott Bush, grandfather of the current Oval Office occupant, was a financier for Adolf Hitler. Former President George H. W. Bush headed up the CIA before moving on to the vice presidency and presidency. Junior was a failed businessman, bailed out consistently by his daddy's friends. He has brought that same dismal standard to the White House. The Bushes have been heavily involved with the Saudis, including the bin Laden family, for decades. The Mafia makes money in things like prostitution, drug running, and gambling, which seems almost honorable in contrast to war profiteering. This article by Bill Gallagher is at www.commondreams.org:
Making money from government service and war, and lining the pockets of family and friends is a sacred creed in the Bush family. The Corleone family in “The Godfather” showed more restraint and was less inclined toward violence than the greedy gangsters the Bush crime family unleashed on the world.
Using public office and influence to make millions is so ingrained in the Bushevik regime that they don’t even think twice when they raid the public treasury to take care of themselves.
Vice President Dick Cheney cashed in on his stint as secretary of defense to rake in millions in government contracts as CEO of Halliburton. The no bid, cost-plus contracts Halliburton subsequently landed in Iraq are just good business deals, expected spoils for imperial lords. The fact that Cheney was still getting residual payments from the company should in no way be considered a conflict.
As the Bushes gather this week, they have much to be thankful for. Their family business thrives and their wealth grows as the rest of the nation worries about having a job, making mortgage payments, having health insurance and paying for college tuition — concerns unknown and unfelt among the well-stuffed Bush brood.
Neil Bush, the president’s brother, is cashing in on the No Child Left Behind Act. Neil, you’ll recall, escaped indictment for his role in the collapse of the Silverado Savings and Loan. The taxpayers picked up the tab for his malfeasance. Failure in business means nothing when all you have to do is shake down your daddy’s pals for your next entrepreneurial experiment.
MCCLELLAN: BUSH INVOLVED IN PLAME LEAK
Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan in a new book says that George W. Bush and top White House officials were involved in the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's name. McClellan, when he was working for the White House, denied such involvement. The evidence is clear that Bush and his minions leaked Valerie Plame's name to get revenge on her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, for writing an op-ed piece in The New York Times disputing Bush's claim that Saddam Hussein tried to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger. Bush and company compromised important intelligence and undoubtedly caused contacts of Valerie Plame to be killed in reprisal. This is just one in a series of impeachable offenses committed by Bush. This article by Matt Apuzzo is at www.sfgate.com:
Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan blames President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for efforts to mislead the public about the role of White House aides in leaking the identity of a CIA operative.
In an excerpt from his forthcoming book, McClellan recounts the 2003 news conference in which he told reporters that aides Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby were "not involved" in the leak involving operative Valerie Plame.
"There was one problem. It was not true," McClellan writes, according to a brief excerpt released Tuesday. "I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest-ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president's chief of staff and the president himself."
Bush's chief of staff at the time was Andrew Card.
Monday, November 19, 2007
November 19, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
RACISM AT THE CORE OF CONSERVATISM
Some people are upset that Ronald Reagan's image has been "tarnished" by suggestions that Reagan was a racist. He wasn't personally bigoted, they tell us. But Reagan used race-baiting effectively in his political career, as did Richard Nixon. Racism was an issue they could use to attract the Southern white voters they wanted. Racism has played a role in California too. Proposition 187 a few years was targeted at Hispanics. When you hear rhetoric about illegal immigration from Republicans there's more then a smidgen of racism involved. The "war on terror" has a heavy racist influence. Some of the more extreme right are claiming that the Muslim world is out to destroy the white Christian world. This column by Paul Krugman is at www.commndreams.org:
The centrality of race - and, in particular, of the switch of Southern whites from overwhelming support of Democrats to overwhelming support of Republicans - is obvious from voting data.
For example, everyone knows that white men have turned away from the Democrats over God, guns, national security and so on. But what everyone knows isn’t true once you exclude the South from the picture. As the political scientist Larry Bartels points out, in the 1952 presidential election 40 percent of non-Southern white men voted Democratic; in 2004, that figure was virtually unchanged, at 39 percent.
More than 40 years have passed since the Voting Rights Act, which Reagan described in 1980 as “humiliating to the South.” Yet Southern white voting behavior remains distinctive. Democrats decisively won the popular vote in last year’s House elections, but Southern whites voted Republican by almost two to one.
The G.O.P.’s own leaders admit that the great Southern white shift was the result of a deliberate political strategy. “Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization.” So declared Ken Mehlman, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, speaking in 2005.
And Ronald Reagan was among the “some” who tried to benefit from racial polarization.
NEW WINE, OLD WINESKINS
Right-wing ideology is essentially about selfishness. You justify selfishness by suggesting that other people aren't as worthy of success. They're inferior and there to be exploited. It reminds me a little of the metaphor attributed to Christ in the Gospels. He spoke of new wine and old wineskins. You didn't put new wine in old wineskins. Conservative ideology is a consistent repackaging of the old ideas of social Darwinism, imperialism, and exploitation. You find some way to put an intellectual veneer on the old ideas, whether it be some racist tract like The Bell Curve or this book, A Farewell to Alms, that says some societies, such as the British, prospered because the rich and successful passed along the traits that made them successful to their children. This article by Daniel Brook is at www.thenation.com:
In his account of the relationship between literacy and economic growth, a relationship considered to be central to explanations of industrialization, Clark dismisses both the Marxist idea that the technological advance of the printing press was crucial to the spread of literacy and the Weberian insight that converting from a religion where the laity was forbidden to read the Bible on their own (medieval Catholicism) to one where they were encouraged to do so (Protestantism) increased literacy rates in Britain. For Clark, the rise of literacy is explained by the reproduction of a population that was better at reading. Similarly, Clark dismisses the structural arguments of both Jared Diamond, who in Guns, Germs, and Steel attributes the West's dominance to geographical good fortune, and Kenneth Pomeranz, who explains in The Great Divergence that Britain's resources--some naturally occurring, such as coal, and some pilfered, like the North American colonies themselves--were the keys to industrialization. Clark has little patience for those who suggest that democracy, which renders kleptocratic rule untenable, matters much at all. And the Adam Smith disciples at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank fare even worse. To Clark, the incentives of Smith's "invisible hand" work only for peoples who have already had the bourgeois virtues bred into them.
The most important question raised by A Farewell to Alms is not raised by Clark himself, however, but by the publication of his book. In the late nineteenth century, America's best-known social Darwinist, William Graham Sumner, a professor of political and social science at Yale, wrote, "Let every man be sober, industrious, prudent, and wise, and bring up his children to be so likewise and poverty will be abolished in a few generations." For Clark, this is exactly what came to pass in England. Clark eschews the term "social Darwinism," but it's an apt description of his thesis. The question raised by the publication of his book, then, is: why is social Darwinism back in vogue?
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
RACISM AT THE CORE OF CONSERVATISM
Some people are upset that Ronald Reagan's image has been "tarnished" by suggestions that Reagan was a racist. He wasn't personally bigoted, they tell us. But Reagan used race-baiting effectively in his political career, as did Richard Nixon. Racism was an issue they could use to attract the Southern white voters they wanted. Racism has played a role in California too. Proposition 187 a few years was targeted at Hispanics. When you hear rhetoric about illegal immigration from Republicans there's more then a smidgen of racism involved. The "war on terror" has a heavy racist influence. Some of the more extreme right are claiming that the Muslim world is out to destroy the white Christian world. This column by Paul Krugman is at www.commndreams.org:
The centrality of race - and, in particular, of the switch of Southern whites from overwhelming support of Democrats to overwhelming support of Republicans - is obvious from voting data.
For example, everyone knows that white men have turned away from the Democrats over God, guns, national security and so on. But what everyone knows isn’t true once you exclude the South from the picture. As the political scientist Larry Bartels points out, in the 1952 presidential election 40 percent of non-Southern white men voted Democratic; in 2004, that figure was virtually unchanged, at 39 percent.
More than 40 years have passed since the Voting Rights Act, which Reagan described in 1980 as “humiliating to the South.” Yet Southern white voting behavior remains distinctive. Democrats decisively won the popular vote in last year’s House elections, but Southern whites voted Republican by almost two to one.
The G.O.P.’s own leaders admit that the great Southern white shift was the result of a deliberate political strategy. “Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization.” So declared Ken Mehlman, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, speaking in 2005.
And Ronald Reagan was among the “some” who tried to benefit from racial polarization.
NEW WINE, OLD WINESKINS
Right-wing ideology is essentially about selfishness. You justify selfishness by suggesting that other people aren't as worthy of success. They're inferior and there to be exploited. It reminds me a little of the metaphor attributed to Christ in the Gospels. He spoke of new wine and old wineskins. You didn't put new wine in old wineskins. Conservative ideology is a consistent repackaging of the old ideas of social Darwinism, imperialism, and exploitation. You find some way to put an intellectual veneer on the old ideas, whether it be some racist tract like The Bell Curve or this book, A Farewell to Alms, that says some societies, such as the British, prospered because the rich and successful passed along the traits that made them successful to their children. This article by Daniel Brook is at www.thenation.com:
In his account of the relationship between literacy and economic growth, a relationship considered to be central to explanations of industrialization, Clark dismisses both the Marxist idea that the technological advance of the printing press was crucial to the spread of literacy and the Weberian insight that converting from a religion where the laity was forbidden to read the Bible on their own (medieval Catholicism) to one where they were encouraged to do so (Protestantism) increased literacy rates in Britain. For Clark, the rise of literacy is explained by the reproduction of a population that was better at reading. Similarly, Clark dismisses the structural arguments of both Jared Diamond, who in Guns, Germs, and Steel attributes the West's dominance to geographical good fortune, and Kenneth Pomeranz, who explains in The Great Divergence that Britain's resources--some naturally occurring, such as coal, and some pilfered, like the North American colonies themselves--were the keys to industrialization. Clark has little patience for those who suggest that democracy, which renders kleptocratic rule untenable, matters much at all. And the Adam Smith disciples at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank fare even worse. To Clark, the incentives of Smith's "invisible hand" work only for peoples who have already had the bourgeois virtues bred into them.
The most important question raised by A Farewell to Alms is not raised by Clark himself, however, but by the publication of his book. In the late nineteenth century, America's best-known social Darwinist, William Graham Sumner, a professor of political and social science at Yale, wrote, "Let every man be sober, industrious, prudent, and wise, and bring up his children to be so likewise and poverty will be abolished in a few generations." For Clark, this is exactly what came to pass in England. Clark eschews the term "social Darwinism," but it's an apt description of his thesis. The question raised by the publication of his book, then, is: why is social Darwinism back in vogue?
Sunday, November 18, 2007
November 18, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
THE EVOLUTION OF CREATIONISM
A few hundred years ago you could imagine a shaman or priest leading a ceremony to ask the favor of the Rain God, or some other member of the pantheon of nature gods that prevailed in primitive religion. A few days ago Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue led a prayer calling for rain in drought-stricken Georgia. It's just evidence of how superstition still holds a major place in American society. A good percentage of Americans don't accept evolution theory and still buy into the creationist myth in Genesis. In the past few years there has been a movement called Intelligent Design to give creationism a scientific gloss. PBS aired a good documentary about Intelligent Design, the "think tank" that promotes Intelligent Design, and how Intelligent Design fails to stand scientific muster. This article by Gordy Slack is at www.opednews.com:
But like bacteria adapting to antibiotics, creationism has slimmed down once again, this time shedding even a mention of an intelligent designer. A new textbook put out by the Discovery Institute, the Seattle think tank that promotes I.D., doesn't even have the words "intelligent design" in its index. Instead of pushing I.D. explicitly, "Explore Evolution: The Arguments for and Against Darwinism," promoted as a high school- or college-level biology text, "teaches the controversy." Teach the controversy is the new mantra of the I.D. movement.
"We want to teach more about evolution," says Discovery Institute's Casey Luskin, "not less." The "more" they want to teach, of course, is what they see as evolution's shortcomings, leaving an ecological niche that will then be filled by intelligent design.
But not all creationists have embraced the strategy. Many responded to the Dover trial by coming out of I.D.'s big tent, which once gave shelter to young earth creationists, old earthers, academics interested in I.D.'s hypotheses, and anyone who wanted to promote a Christian-compatible view of science. Judge Jones' decision was like a lightning strike on the big top, sending many of the constituents running home through the rain. Creationist groups like Answers in Genesis, the Institute for Creation Research, and Reasons to Believe are now attacking I.D. for not having the guts to call its designer God or to be explicit about such key questions as the age of the world. (Answers in Genesis' answer: about 6,000 years.)
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
THE EVOLUTION OF CREATIONISM
A few hundred years ago you could imagine a shaman or priest leading a ceremony to ask the favor of the Rain God, or some other member of the pantheon of nature gods that prevailed in primitive religion. A few days ago Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue led a prayer calling for rain in drought-stricken Georgia. It's just evidence of how superstition still holds a major place in American society. A good percentage of Americans don't accept evolution theory and still buy into the creationist myth in Genesis. In the past few years there has been a movement called Intelligent Design to give creationism a scientific gloss. PBS aired a good documentary about Intelligent Design, the "think tank" that promotes Intelligent Design, and how Intelligent Design fails to stand scientific muster. This article by Gordy Slack is at www.opednews.com:
But like bacteria adapting to antibiotics, creationism has slimmed down once again, this time shedding even a mention of an intelligent designer. A new textbook put out by the Discovery Institute, the Seattle think tank that promotes I.D., doesn't even have the words "intelligent design" in its index. Instead of pushing I.D. explicitly, "Explore Evolution: The Arguments for and Against Darwinism," promoted as a high school- or college-level biology text, "teaches the controversy." Teach the controversy is the new mantra of the I.D. movement.
"We want to teach more about evolution," says Discovery Institute's Casey Luskin, "not less." The "more" they want to teach, of course, is what they see as evolution's shortcomings, leaving an ecological niche that will then be filled by intelligent design.
But not all creationists have embraced the strategy. Many responded to the Dover trial by coming out of I.D.'s big tent, which once gave shelter to young earth creationists, old earthers, academics interested in I.D.'s hypotheses, and anyone who wanted to promote a Christian-compatible view of science. Judge Jones' decision was like a lightning strike on the big top, sending many of the constituents running home through the rain. Creationist groups like Answers in Genesis, the Institute for Creation Research, and Reasons to Believe are now attacking I.D. for not having the guts to call its designer God or to be explicit about such key questions as the age of the world. (Answers in Genesis' answer: about 6,000 years.)
Friday, November 16, 2007
November 16, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
SAY ONE THING, DO ANOTHER
George W. Bush once described the Constitution as "an expletive deleted piece of paper." But Bush gave a speech yesterday before the ultra right wing Federalist Society extolling the virtues of Constitutional checks and balances. This is the guy who has trampled all over the Constitution and civil liberties sermonizing about the Constitution. Adolf Hitler couldn't have done it better. This article by Robert Parry is at www.consortiumnews.com:
In a Nov. 15 speech to the right-wing Federalist Society, the President embraced the Constitution’s checks and balances as a vital protection against tyranny. And he demanded that federal judges act as fair referees, not political or ideological partisans.
To many Americans who have been aghast at Bush’s six-plus years of trampling the Constitution, such pronouncements might represent a textbook case of “cognitive dissonance,” a psychological term describing the uncomfortable tension when one’s stated principles are at odds with one’s actions.
For Bush, however, this divergence of words from behavior may be closer to the fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes, when the monarch strutted about in invisible garments while his terrified subjects kept quiet about his nakedness.
In this case, the Washington press corps reported on Bush’s speech as if the President were entirely sincere and left out contradictory facts.
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
SAY ONE THING, DO ANOTHER
George W. Bush once described the Constitution as "an expletive deleted piece of paper." But Bush gave a speech yesterday before the ultra right wing Federalist Society extolling the virtues of Constitutional checks and balances. This is the guy who has trampled all over the Constitution and civil liberties sermonizing about the Constitution. Adolf Hitler couldn't have done it better. This article by Robert Parry is at www.consortiumnews.com:
In a Nov. 15 speech to the right-wing Federalist Society, the President embraced the Constitution’s checks and balances as a vital protection against tyranny. And he demanded that federal judges act as fair referees, not political or ideological partisans.
To many Americans who have been aghast at Bush’s six-plus years of trampling the Constitution, such pronouncements might represent a textbook case of “cognitive dissonance,” a psychological term describing the uncomfortable tension when one’s stated principles are at odds with one’s actions.
For Bush, however, this divergence of words from behavior may be closer to the fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes, when the monarch strutted about in invisible garments while his terrified subjects kept quiet about his nakedness.
In this case, the Washington press corps reported on Bush’s speech as if the President were entirely sincere and left out contradictory facts.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
November 15, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
THE EDUCATION MYTH
Corporations, business, and their political bedfellows consistently find ways to blame working Americans for our declining standard of living. We have to be "competitive," you see. It's all about "efficiency" and "maximizing profit." The reason we're sliding downhill, according to some pundits, is that we just aren't educated enough. Get that degree, Bucky, and you'll be fine. The data don't bear that out. People with degrees have been taking the biggest hits thanks to insane trade deals that allow outsourcing of American jobs. This commentary by David Sirota is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
Fortune magazine, for instance, recently reported that economic data proves that "the skill premium, the extra value of higher education, must have declined after three decades of growing." Specifically, "the real annual earnings of college graduates actually declined 5.2 percent, while those of high school graduates, strangely enough, rose 1.6 percent." Similarly, Businessweek has reported that "real wages for young Americans with a bachelor's degree have declined by almost 8% over the past three years" and "economists suspect that global competition has something to do with it."
That's an understatement, as shown in a stunning new report out today from the good folks at the Economic Policy Institute. Using government data, the think tank finds that "the educational group most vulnerable to offshoring are those with at least a four-year college degree." That vulnerability helps drive down wages for better-educated workers because they know that if they try to demand good pay, their employer could simply pick up and leave.
Obviously, this has everything to do with America's corrupt NAFTA-style trade policy - a policy that the U.S. House ratified last week in its vote for the Peru Free Trade Agreement, and that now awaits Senate ratification. This trade policy without enforceable labor, wage, environmental, human rights or product safety standards encourages large corporations to manufacture a race to the bottom in which workers have to keep accepting lower and lower wages (or other standards) in hopes of keeping their employer in their country.
THE RIGHT WING'S ROAD TO SERFDOM
Economist Friedrich von Hayek wrote an influential book called The Road to Serfdom whose central idea is that free market economies and political freedom go together, and that any government "encroachment" into the private sector leads to loss of political freedom. The great example of that for von Hayek and others is the Soviet Union. However, when you look at von Hayek's ideas put into practice in places like Chile you see a crushing and oppressive system. Augusto Pinochet's regime was a horror and right-wing systems everywhere are proving just as oppressive. This is an analysis of Naomi Klein's new book The Shock Doctrine and the dangers of right-wing economics. The article by Christopher Hayes is at www.inthesetimes.com:
Written in exile, while Europe burned, The Road to Serfdom’s simple but powerful thesis was that the encroachment of the state into economic affairs inevitably leads to an encroachment in all spheres. For Hayek and his intellectual descendants—from Friedman (Milton) to Friedman (Thomas)—political freedom and economic freedom were inseparable and mutually reinforcing. And over the last 30 years, the adherents of the Friedman/Hayek School have pointed to two coincidental trends in global political economy to back this grand claim: First, the fall of command-and-control economies and the dismantling of welfare states. The second, the rise of democratic governance. With cunning aplomb, neoliberal writers and historians have packaged these two distinct phenomena together as one single story of progress and development. Look: Freedom’s on the march!
Klein resurrects Hayek’s argument and inverts it, showing how time and again, the “economic freedom” envisioned by Hayek and his ilk has been imposed at the expense of political freedom, often, Klein writes, “midwifed by the most brutal forms of coercion.” From Chile to Iraq, majorities empowered to choose their own government don’t start clamoring for flat taxes, privatized post offices and an end to controls on foreign capital. Instead, they often form unions or call for increased social spending. The Shock Doctrine is an encyclopedic catalog of the tactics that governments, corporations and economists have used to impose— usually over popular opposition—what Klein calls the “policy trinity” of the Chicago-School program: “the elimination of the public sphere, total liberation for corporations and skeletal social spending.”
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
THE EDUCATION MYTH
Corporations, business, and their political bedfellows consistently find ways to blame working Americans for our declining standard of living. We have to be "competitive," you see. It's all about "efficiency" and "maximizing profit." The reason we're sliding downhill, according to some pundits, is that we just aren't educated enough. Get that degree, Bucky, and you'll be fine. The data don't bear that out. People with degrees have been taking the biggest hits thanks to insane trade deals that allow outsourcing of American jobs. This commentary by David Sirota is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
Fortune magazine, for instance, recently reported that economic data proves that "the skill premium, the extra value of higher education, must have declined after three decades of growing." Specifically, "the real annual earnings of college graduates actually declined 5.2 percent, while those of high school graduates, strangely enough, rose 1.6 percent." Similarly, Businessweek has reported that "real wages for young Americans with a bachelor's degree have declined by almost 8% over the past three years" and "economists suspect that global competition has something to do with it."
That's an understatement, as shown in a stunning new report out today from the good folks at the Economic Policy Institute. Using government data, the think tank finds that "the educational group most vulnerable to offshoring are those with at least a four-year college degree." That vulnerability helps drive down wages for better-educated workers because they know that if they try to demand good pay, their employer could simply pick up and leave.
Obviously, this has everything to do with America's corrupt NAFTA-style trade policy - a policy that the U.S. House ratified last week in its vote for the Peru Free Trade Agreement, and that now awaits Senate ratification. This trade policy without enforceable labor, wage, environmental, human rights or product safety standards encourages large corporations to manufacture a race to the bottom in which workers have to keep accepting lower and lower wages (or other standards) in hopes of keeping their employer in their country.
THE RIGHT WING'S ROAD TO SERFDOM
Economist Friedrich von Hayek wrote an influential book called The Road to Serfdom whose central idea is that free market economies and political freedom go together, and that any government "encroachment" into the private sector leads to loss of political freedom. The great example of that for von Hayek and others is the Soviet Union. However, when you look at von Hayek's ideas put into practice in places like Chile you see a crushing and oppressive system. Augusto Pinochet's regime was a horror and right-wing systems everywhere are proving just as oppressive. This is an analysis of Naomi Klein's new book The Shock Doctrine and the dangers of right-wing economics. The article by Christopher Hayes is at www.inthesetimes.com:
Written in exile, while Europe burned, The Road to Serfdom’s simple but powerful thesis was that the encroachment of the state into economic affairs inevitably leads to an encroachment in all spheres. For Hayek and his intellectual descendants—from Friedman (Milton) to Friedman (Thomas)—political freedom and economic freedom were inseparable and mutually reinforcing. And over the last 30 years, the adherents of the Friedman/Hayek School have pointed to two coincidental trends in global political economy to back this grand claim: First, the fall of command-and-control economies and the dismantling of welfare states. The second, the rise of democratic governance. With cunning aplomb, neoliberal writers and historians have packaged these two distinct phenomena together as one single story of progress and development. Look: Freedom’s on the march!
Klein resurrects Hayek’s argument and inverts it, showing how time and again, the “economic freedom” envisioned by Hayek and his ilk has been imposed at the expense of political freedom, often, Klein writes, “midwifed by the most brutal forms of coercion.” From Chile to Iraq, majorities empowered to choose their own government don’t start clamoring for flat taxes, privatized post offices and an end to controls on foreign capital. Instead, they often form unions or call for increased social spending. The Shock Doctrine is an encyclopedic catalog of the tactics that governments, corporations and economists have used to impose— usually over popular opposition—what Klein calls the “policy trinity” of the Chicago-School program: “the elimination of the public sphere, total liberation for corporations and skeletal social spending.”
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
November 14, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
REALITY CHECK: MOST OF US WON'T BE RICH
Some working class people oppose taxing the very wealthy what the very wealthy should pay because they, the working class people, think by some happenstance they too will be rich one day and they don't want to pay those taxes. If I were to get rich, I don't think I'd mind paying taxes all that much. I would still be rich. But the fact is that most of us will never be rich. The system is designed to keep most of us at subsistence level. This article by John Buell is at www.commondreams.org:
Though polls suggest American citizens would support such reforms now, many working-class Americans still shrug off or even resist any tax increase. They assume that they too will become rich, either by working hard or developing a new product or just through luck. Call it Powerball politics.
Some might change their minds if commentators, even those on the left, did more to remind citizens that many of today’s wealthiest did not, as the Smith Barney ad used to say, “Make money the old fashioned way, they earned it.” Behind many of today’s great fortunes lie abuses of power and privilege by those already well placed. In addition, not only have these actions failed to bring the poor and working class along, they have contributed to their problems.
Sklar points out that much of today’s great wealth comes from Wall Street speculation. The current difficulties in the subprime mortgage market are symptomatic of larger pathologies. Guardian (London) business writer Will Hutton points out: “lending 100 percent mortgages to borrowers with no income, employment or assets, packaging up the resulting debt and selling it to banks around the globe while taking a handsome fee on every transaction - can be launched with impunity.”
Conflicts of interest and abuse of insider information taint the entire system. The firms issuing the new securities pay the purportedly impartial rating agencies, Moody’s and Standard and Poor. The Bush administration touts the freedom to create these new exotic financial instruments. Nonetheless, when the whole system eventually starts to implode, the same insiders who once demanded freedom from government beg the Federal Reserve to opens the discount window to keep big financial houses from failing.
GIULIANI IS A THUG
I heard that the Congressman from the district, Republican Rubber Stamp George Radanovich, has endorsed Rudolph Giuliani for president. Radanovich has been onboard for every vile thing the Bush administration has done, and apparently likes the cut of the cloth of a thug like Rudy Giuliani. It's interesting that Pat Robertson, that "pro-life" guy, has also endorsed Rudy. Robertson isn't bothered by Giuliani's past support for abortion rights, among other things. This commentary by Margaret Kimberley is at www.truthout.org:
Now Giuliani is running for the Republican presidential nomination and he is the very worst of a bad lot. He unabashedly supports the occupation of Iraq and a military attack on Iran. He doesn't think simulating drowning via water boarding is torture and agrees wholeheartedly with the Bush destruction of civil liberties.
If a potential Giuliani presidency in any way resembles a Giuliani mayoralty then the country would be in for a truly awful time. As mayor Giuliani promoted the worst, least competent people to high positions in New York City government. Bernard Kerik, an undercover cop, had the shrewdness to put himself in the right place at the right time when he volunteered to drive Rudy around during his mayoral campaign. Despite the lack of any other credential, his rise to power was swift. First he was made a Deputy Commissioner at the Department of Corrections, then Commissioner.
Kerik was nothing but a crook. Fully aware that Kerik was under investigation for taking money from a construction company with organized crime connections, Giuliani nonetheless appointed him Police Commissioner. While others insist that they informed Giuliani of Kerik's mob ties, Rudy claims not to remember. He certainly didn't remember when he recommended his pal for a cabinet level position as Secretary of Homeland Security. When Kerik imploded under an avalanche of bad publicity Rudy just shrugged his shoulders, confident that he would continue to get away with doing whatever he wants.
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
REALITY CHECK: MOST OF US WON'T BE RICH
Some working class people oppose taxing the very wealthy what the very wealthy should pay because they, the working class people, think by some happenstance they too will be rich one day and they don't want to pay those taxes. If I were to get rich, I don't think I'd mind paying taxes all that much. I would still be rich. But the fact is that most of us will never be rich. The system is designed to keep most of us at subsistence level. This article by John Buell is at www.commondreams.org:
Though polls suggest American citizens would support such reforms now, many working-class Americans still shrug off or even resist any tax increase. They assume that they too will become rich, either by working hard or developing a new product or just through luck. Call it Powerball politics.
Some might change their minds if commentators, even those on the left, did more to remind citizens that many of today’s wealthiest did not, as the Smith Barney ad used to say, “Make money the old fashioned way, they earned it.” Behind many of today’s great fortunes lie abuses of power and privilege by those already well placed. In addition, not only have these actions failed to bring the poor and working class along, they have contributed to their problems.
Sklar points out that much of today’s great wealth comes from Wall Street speculation. The current difficulties in the subprime mortgage market are symptomatic of larger pathologies. Guardian (London) business writer Will Hutton points out: “lending 100 percent mortgages to borrowers with no income, employment or assets, packaging up the resulting debt and selling it to banks around the globe while taking a handsome fee on every transaction - can be launched with impunity.”
Conflicts of interest and abuse of insider information taint the entire system. The firms issuing the new securities pay the purportedly impartial rating agencies, Moody’s and Standard and Poor. The Bush administration touts the freedom to create these new exotic financial instruments. Nonetheless, when the whole system eventually starts to implode, the same insiders who once demanded freedom from government beg the Federal Reserve to opens the discount window to keep big financial houses from failing.
GIULIANI IS A THUG
I heard that the Congressman from the district, Republican Rubber Stamp George Radanovich, has endorsed Rudolph Giuliani for president. Radanovich has been onboard for every vile thing the Bush administration has done, and apparently likes the cut of the cloth of a thug like Rudy Giuliani. It's interesting that Pat Robertson, that "pro-life" guy, has also endorsed Rudy. Robertson isn't bothered by Giuliani's past support for abortion rights, among other things. This commentary by Margaret Kimberley is at www.truthout.org:
Now Giuliani is running for the Republican presidential nomination and he is the very worst of a bad lot. He unabashedly supports the occupation of Iraq and a military attack on Iran. He doesn't think simulating drowning via water boarding is torture and agrees wholeheartedly with the Bush destruction of civil liberties.
If a potential Giuliani presidency in any way resembles a Giuliani mayoralty then the country would be in for a truly awful time. As mayor Giuliani promoted the worst, least competent people to high positions in New York City government. Bernard Kerik, an undercover cop, had the shrewdness to put himself in the right place at the right time when he volunteered to drive Rudy around during his mayoral campaign. Despite the lack of any other credential, his rise to power was swift. First he was made a Deputy Commissioner at the Department of Corrections, then Commissioner.
Kerik was nothing but a crook. Fully aware that Kerik was under investigation for taking money from a construction company with organized crime connections, Giuliani nonetheless appointed him Police Commissioner. While others insist that they informed Giuliani of Kerik's mob ties, Rudy claims not to remember. He certainly didn't remember when he recommended his pal for a cabinet level position as Secretary of Homeland Security. When Kerik imploded under an avalanche of bad publicity Rudy just shrugged his shoulders, confident that he would continue to get away with doing whatever he wants.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
November 13, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
NEOCONS AND FALSE NARRATIVES
Several years ago there was a movie called "Capricorn One." The movie's premise was that a manned Mars landing was faked. It looked real on television, but it wasn't really happening. Neocons who have sold the American public on things like trickle down economics, the dangers of "big government," and huge and costly military adventures have been running their own version of "Capricorn One" for a long time. Even as the Soviet Union was tottering, the neocons constructed another reality about the danger of the Soviet Union and the need for a huge military buildup. Robert Parry talks about it at www.consortiumnews.com:
As the Soviet Union continued its decline through the 1980s, the Reagan administration kept its eyes wide shut. The housebroken CIA analytical division knew better than to continue challenging the Soviet-juggernaut narrative.
Ironically, when the Soviet empire broke apart from 1989 to 1991, the CIA analysts came in for ridicule for “missing” the Soviet collapse.
But the neocons simply adjusted the narrative: Rather than accept that the Nixon-Ford détente-ists had been right about signs of Soviet weakness in the 1970s, the narrative became that Ronald Reagan had “won” the Cold War by supporting brush-fire wars, lavishing money on the Pentagon, and telling Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down that wall.”
An accurate narrative might have suggested that Reagan and the neocons had unnecessarily extended the Cold War, enriched military contractors, inflicted needless bloodshed, and strengthened future enemies like bin Laden. But the accepted narrative essentially justified all the carnage and corruption as essential to victory.
IS "DISAPPROVAL" STRONG ENOUGH?
New polls show that Americans are increasingly fed up with George W. Bush. Pollsters like to use a nice word like "disapprove." "Disapprove" is when someone talks a little loudly at dinner. It's not nearly strong enough to describe my feelings about this creep and the people who have supported him. They have the unmitigated gall to preach "morality" to us, or talk about U. S. sovereignty, or to claim that the war against al-Qaeda is the apocalypse. In the meantime, they rake in their war profits and they and their families don't risk a thing in fighting this "clash of civilizations." This commentary by Eugene Robinson is at www.thenewstribune.com:
It’s official: Bush Derangement Syndrome is now a full-blown epidemic. George W. Bush apparently has reduced more of his fellow citizens to frustrated, sputtering rage than any president since opinion polling began, with the possible exception of Richard Nixon.
That should be a pretty good indicator of where Bush will rank when historians get their hands on his shameful record – in the cellar, alongside the only president who ever had to resign in disgrace.
A new Gallup Poll released last week showed that 64 percent of Americans disapprove of how the Decider is doing his job. That sounds bad enough – nearly two-thirds of the country thinks its leader is incompetent. But when you look more closely at the numbers, you see that Bush’s abysmal report card – only 31 percent of respondents approve of the job he’s doing – actually overstates our regard for his performance.
According to Gallup, if you lump together the Americans who “strongly” approve of Bush as president with those who only “moderately” feel one way or the other about him, you end up with about half the population. That leaves a full 50 percent who “strongly disapprove” of Bush – as high a level of intense repudiation as Gallup has ever seen in its decades of polling.
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
NEOCONS AND FALSE NARRATIVES
Several years ago there was a movie called "Capricorn One." The movie's premise was that a manned Mars landing was faked. It looked real on television, but it wasn't really happening. Neocons who have sold the American public on things like trickle down economics, the dangers of "big government," and huge and costly military adventures have been running their own version of "Capricorn One" for a long time. Even as the Soviet Union was tottering, the neocons constructed another reality about the danger of the Soviet Union and the need for a huge military buildup. Robert Parry talks about it at www.consortiumnews.com:
As the Soviet Union continued its decline through the 1980s, the Reagan administration kept its eyes wide shut. The housebroken CIA analytical division knew better than to continue challenging the Soviet-juggernaut narrative.
Ironically, when the Soviet empire broke apart from 1989 to 1991, the CIA analysts came in for ridicule for “missing” the Soviet collapse.
But the neocons simply adjusted the narrative: Rather than accept that the Nixon-Ford détente-ists had been right about signs of Soviet weakness in the 1970s, the narrative became that Ronald Reagan had “won” the Cold War by supporting brush-fire wars, lavishing money on the Pentagon, and telling Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down that wall.”
An accurate narrative might have suggested that Reagan and the neocons had unnecessarily extended the Cold War, enriched military contractors, inflicted needless bloodshed, and strengthened future enemies like bin Laden. But the accepted narrative essentially justified all the carnage and corruption as essential to victory.
IS "DISAPPROVAL" STRONG ENOUGH?
New polls show that Americans are increasingly fed up with George W. Bush. Pollsters like to use a nice word like "disapprove." "Disapprove" is when someone talks a little loudly at dinner. It's not nearly strong enough to describe my feelings about this creep and the people who have supported him. They have the unmitigated gall to preach "morality" to us, or talk about U. S. sovereignty, or to claim that the war against al-Qaeda is the apocalypse. In the meantime, they rake in their war profits and they and their families don't risk a thing in fighting this "clash of civilizations." This commentary by Eugene Robinson is at www.thenewstribune.com:
It’s official: Bush Derangement Syndrome is now a full-blown epidemic. George W. Bush apparently has reduced more of his fellow citizens to frustrated, sputtering rage than any president since opinion polling began, with the possible exception of Richard Nixon.
That should be a pretty good indicator of where Bush will rank when historians get their hands on his shameful record – in the cellar, alongside the only president who ever had to resign in disgrace.
A new Gallup Poll released last week showed that 64 percent of Americans disapprove of how the Decider is doing his job. That sounds bad enough – nearly two-thirds of the country thinks its leader is incompetent. But when you look more closely at the numbers, you see that Bush’s abysmal report card – only 31 percent of respondents approve of the job he’s doing – actually overstates our regard for his performance.
According to Gallup, if you lump together the Americans who “strongly” approve of Bush as president with those who only “moderately” feel one way or the other about him, you end up with about half the population. That leaves a full 50 percent who “strongly disapprove” of Bush – as high a level of intense repudiation as Gallup has ever seen in its decades of polling.
Monday, November 12, 2007
November 12, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
BUT REAGAN WAS "LIKABLE," WASN'T HE?
Ronald Reagan has become like a god to right-wingers. Things were so much better when Saint Reagan was president, we're told. He single-handedly took on the Soviet Union and showed those Communists who was boss. He lifted the economy from its malaise and created millions of jobs (never mind those deficits). He was a "great" president. Never mind the facts. This item comes from Paul Krugman showing a history of Reagan's race baiting. But race baiting is a good thing in right-wing world, I guess. This is linked at www.nytimes.com:
So there’s a campaign on to exonerate Ronald Reagan from the charge that he deliberately made use of Nixon’s Southern strategy. When he went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980, the town where the civil rights workers had been murdered, and declared that “I believe in states’ rights,” he didn’t mean to signal support for white racists. It was all just an innocent mistake.
Indeed, you do really have to feel sorry for Reagan. He just kept making those innocent mistakes.
When he went on about the welfare queen driving her Cadillac, and kept repeating the story years after it had been debunked, some people thought he was engaging in race-baiting. But it was all just an innocent mistake.
When, in 1976, he talked about working people angry about the “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks at the grocery store, he didn’t mean to play into racial hostility. True, as the New York Times reported,
The ex-Governor has used the grocery-line illustration before, but in states like New Hampshire where there is scant black population, he has never used the expression “young buck,” which, to whites in the South, generally denotes a large black man.
THE DEREGULATION DISASTER
It's an old saying now that if we refuse to learn from history we're doomed to repeat the same mistakes. That is certainly true in management of the economy. We should have learned big lessons from the Great Depression and what led up to the Depression. But the advocates of deregulation and free markets must have thought the Depression was just an anomaly. It wasn't. Deregulation has consistently led to disaster. We're seeing it now in the subprime mortgage crisis. This commentary by Robert Kuttner is at www.latimes.com:
The deepening calamity now spreading from financial markets to the broader economy results from the failed fantasy that markets can regulate themselves.
We supposedly learned this lesson once, after the crash of 1929. In the aftermath, we built a dynamic system of managed capitalism so that a financial collapse would never again create a Great Depression.
But beginning in the 1970s, free-market economists and financial elites convinced Congress and presidents of both parties that a deregulated economy would be a more dynamic one; that something new about technology or trade or ideology meant that markets were at last truly self-governing.
New, exotic forms of financial engineering proliferated. These were praised as improving efficiency.
We have just had a full field test of free-market ideology, and once again it failed.
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
BUT REAGAN WAS "LIKABLE," WASN'T HE?
Ronald Reagan has become like a god to right-wingers. Things were so much better when Saint Reagan was president, we're told. He single-handedly took on the Soviet Union and showed those Communists who was boss. He lifted the economy from its malaise and created millions of jobs (never mind those deficits). He was a "great" president. Never mind the facts. This item comes from Paul Krugman showing a history of Reagan's race baiting. But race baiting is a good thing in right-wing world, I guess. This is linked at www.nytimes.com:
So there’s a campaign on to exonerate Ronald Reagan from the charge that he deliberately made use of Nixon’s Southern strategy. When he went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980, the town where the civil rights workers had been murdered, and declared that “I believe in states’ rights,” he didn’t mean to signal support for white racists. It was all just an innocent mistake.
Indeed, you do really have to feel sorry for Reagan. He just kept making those innocent mistakes.
When he went on about the welfare queen driving her Cadillac, and kept repeating the story years after it had been debunked, some people thought he was engaging in race-baiting. But it was all just an innocent mistake.
When, in 1976, he talked about working people angry about the “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks at the grocery store, he didn’t mean to play into racial hostility. True, as the New York Times reported,
The ex-Governor has used the grocery-line illustration before, but in states like New Hampshire where there is scant black population, he has never used the expression “young buck,” which, to whites in the South, generally denotes a large black man.
THE DEREGULATION DISASTER
It's an old saying now that if we refuse to learn from history we're doomed to repeat the same mistakes. That is certainly true in management of the economy. We should have learned big lessons from the Great Depression and what led up to the Depression. But the advocates of deregulation and free markets must have thought the Depression was just an anomaly. It wasn't. Deregulation has consistently led to disaster. We're seeing it now in the subprime mortgage crisis. This commentary by Robert Kuttner is at www.latimes.com:
The deepening calamity now spreading from financial markets to the broader economy results from the failed fantasy that markets can regulate themselves.
We supposedly learned this lesson once, after the crash of 1929. In the aftermath, we built a dynamic system of managed capitalism so that a financial collapse would never again create a Great Depression.
But beginning in the 1970s, free-market economists and financial elites convinced Congress and presidents of both parties that a deregulated economy would be a more dynamic one; that something new about technology or trade or ideology meant that markets were at last truly self-governing.
New, exotic forms of financial engineering proliferated. These were praised as improving efficiency.
We have just had a full field test of free-market ideology, and once again it failed.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
November 11, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
CAPITALISM DIGGING ITS OWN GRAVE
Predatory capitalism has had a new heyday since Ronald Reagan became president in 1981. We've seen the decline of unions, deregulation of key industries, globalization that is outsourcing jobs to cheaper labor markets, and massive tax breaks for the rich. Wages for workers have stagnated or declined and we've seen attempted assaults by the right wing on fundamental programs such as Social Security. Thanks to predatory capitalism, there has been a failure to address global climate change. We had the savings and loan scandal during the Reagan years. We have the subprime mortgage scandal now. Poverty remains persistent in the United States, the richest country on the planet. It's time for a 21st century New Deal. This article by Stephen Fleischman is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
In a free labor system, under capitalism, you pay your worker a wage (that represents only a part payment for the value he produces). You have only to extract the surplus value that the worker contributes to the making of the product. You call it profit and say it is derived from entrepreneurial skill, reward for taking risks, from the machinery, the land, or other such gibberish. Once you extract the surplus value the worker creates, let him be free to go his own way and the devil take the hindmost. There is always a plentiful supply of labor to be had.
That's not the end of the story. What happens is that eventually, the worker wises up and starts to demand the full value of his work, or maybe settle for a larger slice of the pie. That's when the fur begins to fly. That's called the class struggle.
Throughout economic history that struggle has gone on. It's an old, old fight between the haves and the have-nots. It pushes capital on to heights of glory, monopoly and war. We're in such a period right now.
THE CASE FOR A WEAK DOLLAR
I don't claim to be an economist, but the arguments in this article for a weaker dollar make sense. You're always hearing horrified talk about inflation from the political and economic elites. You can't have raises in wages because they're "inflationary." The elites don't like inflation because it means debt gets paid off in cheaper dollars, for instance. For most of us, though, a little inflation isn't so terrible. The other impact of the strong dollar has been to aid and abet the outsourcing of jobs. This article by Mark Weisbrot is at www.alternet.org:
What do policy-makers in China, Japan, Argentina, Malaysia, Indonesia, the European Union and many other countries understand that ours don't? It seems they know that if the value of their currencies rises too much, it can hurt their economy. But for a number of reasons it hasn't quite sunk in here.
Which is too bad, because we've lost more than three million manufacturing jobs in the U.S. since 2001, and much if not most of this job loss is due to the dollar being overvalued. This is bad news not only for the people who lost those jobs, but for the tens of millions more whose wages are depressed by the displacement of these workers - and arguably for the nation as a whole, as America's manufacturing base continues its process of "hollowing out."
Perhaps most amazing is that now that the dollar is finally falling - it has dropped by 23 percent against a trade-weighted basket of currencies since February 2002 -- we hear warnings from prominent citizens and government officials that this is something we should be worried about. Just last week, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, reacting to the dollar's recent fall, said that relying on a weaker dollar to boost growth isn't a "sound approach."
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
CAPITALISM DIGGING ITS OWN GRAVE
Predatory capitalism has had a new heyday since Ronald Reagan became president in 1981. We've seen the decline of unions, deregulation of key industries, globalization that is outsourcing jobs to cheaper labor markets, and massive tax breaks for the rich. Wages for workers have stagnated or declined and we've seen attempted assaults by the right wing on fundamental programs such as Social Security. Thanks to predatory capitalism, there has been a failure to address global climate change. We had the savings and loan scandal during the Reagan years. We have the subprime mortgage scandal now. Poverty remains persistent in the United States, the richest country on the planet. It's time for a 21st century New Deal. This article by Stephen Fleischman is at www.smirkingchimp.com:
In a free labor system, under capitalism, you pay your worker a wage (that represents only a part payment for the value he produces). You have only to extract the surplus value that the worker contributes to the making of the product. You call it profit and say it is derived from entrepreneurial skill, reward for taking risks, from the machinery, the land, or other such gibberish. Once you extract the surplus value the worker creates, let him be free to go his own way and the devil take the hindmost. There is always a plentiful supply of labor to be had.
That's not the end of the story. What happens is that eventually, the worker wises up and starts to demand the full value of his work, or maybe settle for a larger slice of the pie. That's when the fur begins to fly. That's called the class struggle.
Throughout economic history that struggle has gone on. It's an old, old fight between the haves and the have-nots. It pushes capital on to heights of glory, monopoly and war. We're in such a period right now.
THE CASE FOR A WEAK DOLLAR
I don't claim to be an economist, but the arguments in this article for a weaker dollar make sense. You're always hearing horrified talk about inflation from the political and economic elites. You can't have raises in wages because they're "inflationary." The elites don't like inflation because it means debt gets paid off in cheaper dollars, for instance. For most of us, though, a little inflation isn't so terrible. The other impact of the strong dollar has been to aid and abet the outsourcing of jobs. This article by Mark Weisbrot is at www.alternet.org:
What do policy-makers in China, Japan, Argentina, Malaysia, Indonesia, the European Union and many other countries understand that ours don't? It seems they know that if the value of their currencies rises too much, it can hurt their economy. But for a number of reasons it hasn't quite sunk in here.
Which is too bad, because we've lost more than three million manufacturing jobs in the U.S. since 2001, and much if not most of this job loss is due to the dollar being overvalued. This is bad news not only for the people who lost those jobs, but for the tens of millions more whose wages are depressed by the displacement of these workers - and arguably for the nation as a whole, as America's manufacturing base continues its process of "hollowing out."
Perhaps most amazing is that now that the dollar is finally falling - it has dropped by 23 percent against a trade-weighted basket of currencies since February 2002 -- we hear warnings from prominent citizens and government officials that this is something we should be worried about. Just last week, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, reacting to the dollar's recent fall, said that relying on a weaker dollar to boost growth isn't a "sound approach."
Thursday, November 08, 2007
November 08, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
BUSH'S INFAMOUS LEGACY
A few days ago The Fresno Bee had a letter from a guy who used to write a lot. I would call this guy the Sycophant. He loves rich people. He'll give you all those glorious statistics about how the rich pay most of the income taxes, suggesting that they're the real movers and shakers of our society and pay more than their fair share in taxes. He conveniently ignores the big picture, of course, the way right-wingers are prone to do.
Sycophant was offering a defense of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq. According to Mr. S., we're protecting our "sovereignty." The attacks on 9/11, as far as I can tell, had nothing whatever to do with sovereignty. They were conducted by religious fanatics against a civilian target. They were criminal, not military, acts. But 9/11 is the only thing that ever gave George W. Bush any kind of posture as a world and national leader.
As we approach the end of this administration, we can only begin to comprehend the vast damage it has done. This article by Joseph E. Stiglitz is at www.vanityfair.com:
When we look back someday at the catastrophe that was the Bush administration, we will think of many things: the tragedy of the Iraq war, the shame of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the erosion of civil liberties. The damage done to the American economy does not make front-page headlines every day, but the repercussions will be felt beyond the lifetime of anyone reading this page.
I can hear an irritated counterthrust already. The president has not driven the United States into a recession during his almost seven years in office. Unemployment stands at a respectable 4.6 percent. Well, fine. But the other side of the ledger groans with distress: a tax code that has become hideously biased in favor of the rich; a national debt that will probably have grown 70 percent by the time this president leaves Washington; a swelling cascade of mortgage defaults; a record near-$850 billion trade deficit; oil prices that are higher than they have ever been; and a dollar so weak that for an American to buy a cup of coffee in London or Paris—or even the Yukon—becomes a venture in high finance.
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
BUSH'S INFAMOUS LEGACY
A few days ago The Fresno Bee had a letter from a guy who used to write a lot. I would call this guy the Sycophant. He loves rich people. He'll give you all those glorious statistics about how the rich pay most of the income taxes, suggesting that they're the real movers and shakers of our society and pay more than their fair share in taxes. He conveniently ignores the big picture, of course, the way right-wingers are prone to do.
Sycophant was offering a defense of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq. According to Mr. S., we're protecting our "sovereignty." The attacks on 9/11, as far as I can tell, had nothing whatever to do with sovereignty. They were conducted by religious fanatics against a civilian target. They were criminal, not military, acts. But 9/11 is the only thing that ever gave George W. Bush any kind of posture as a world and national leader.
As we approach the end of this administration, we can only begin to comprehend the vast damage it has done. This article by Joseph E. Stiglitz is at www.vanityfair.com:
When we look back someday at the catastrophe that was the Bush administration, we will think of many things: the tragedy of the Iraq war, the shame of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the erosion of civil liberties. The damage done to the American economy does not make front-page headlines every day, but the repercussions will be felt beyond the lifetime of anyone reading this page.
I can hear an irritated counterthrust already. The president has not driven the United States into a recession during his almost seven years in office. Unemployment stands at a respectable 4.6 percent. Well, fine. But the other side of the ledger groans with distress: a tax code that has become hideously biased in favor of the rich; a national debt that will probably have grown 70 percent by the time this president leaves Washington; a swelling cascade of mortgage defaults; a record near-$850 billion trade deficit; oil prices that are higher than they have ever been; and a dollar so weak that for an American to buy a cup of coffee in London or Paris—or even the Yukon—becomes a venture in high finance.
Sunday, November 04, 2007
November 04, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
ABORTION IS NOT MURDER
Republicans have been able to use the abortion issue to energize the Christian right for a long time. The Christian right takes the unequivocal position that abortion is murder. They don't have a problem with capital punishment or killing children in wars, but they insist that a fetus is "human life" and killing the fetus is murder. Garry Wills presents some strong arguments against the evangelical position in this column at www.latimes.com:
About 10% of evangelicals, according to polls, allow for abortion in the case of rape or incest. But the circumstances of conception should not change the nature of the thing conceived. If it is a human person, killing it is punishing it for something it had nothing to do with. We do not kill people because they had a criminal parent.
Nor did the Catholic Church treat abortion as murder in the past. If it had, late-term abortions and miscarriages would have called for treatment of the well-formed fetus as a person, which would require baptism and a Christian burial. That was never the practice. And no wonder. The subject of abortion is not scriptural. For those who make it so central to religion, this seems an odd omission. Abortion is not treated in the Ten Commandments -- or anywhere in Jewish Scripture. It is not treated in the Sermon on the Mount -- or anywhere in the New Testament. It is not treated in the early creeds. It is not treated in the early ecumenical councils.
BUSH THE MASTER OF ECONOMIC DISASTER
It's amazing that Republicans have tried to represent themselves as the fiscally responsible party when it is they who have run up gargantuan deficits and gone on drunken sailor spending sprees. We got the first run of this under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush makes Reagan look fiscally prudent. This commentary is from www.americablog.com:
Bush can conveniently blast the Democrats for spending but nobody can deliver destruction to the economy the way Bush can do it. Some of his greatest hits include:
- Largest decline in housing prices since 1991.
- Crumbling US dollar, weakest showing against leading five currencies since early 1970s. This includes 37 year low against Canadian dollar. Against the UK pound, it's over $2 to buy only one.
- Skyrocketing and "out of control" oil prices, record highs at the pump.
- Billions of US taxpayer dollars lost, missing, and who knows what from Iraq. Costs for war to drag out for decades.
- Record high budget deficit, compounded by GOP spending boondoggles.
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
ABORTION IS NOT MURDER
Republicans have been able to use the abortion issue to energize the Christian right for a long time. The Christian right takes the unequivocal position that abortion is murder. They don't have a problem with capital punishment or killing children in wars, but they insist that a fetus is "human life" and killing the fetus is murder. Garry Wills presents some strong arguments against the evangelical position in this column at www.latimes.com:
About 10% of evangelicals, according to polls, allow for abortion in the case of rape or incest. But the circumstances of conception should not change the nature of the thing conceived. If it is a human person, killing it is punishing it for something it had nothing to do with. We do not kill people because they had a criminal parent.
Nor did the Catholic Church treat abortion as murder in the past. If it had, late-term abortions and miscarriages would have called for treatment of the well-formed fetus as a person, which would require baptism and a Christian burial. That was never the practice. And no wonder. The subject of abortion is not scriptural. For those who make it so central to religion, this seems an odd omission. Abortion is not treated in the Ten Commandments -- or anywhere in Jewish Scripture. It is not treated in the Sermon on the Mount -- or anywhere in the New Testament. It is not treated in the early creeds. It is not treated in the early ecumenical councils.
BUSH THE MASTER OF ECONOMIC DISASTER
It's amazing that Republicans have tried to represent themselves as the fiscally responsible party when it is they who have run up gargantuan deficits and gone on drunken sailor spending sprees. We got the first run of this under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush makes Reagan look fiscally prudent. This commentary is from www.americablog.com:
Bush can conveniently blast the Democrats for spending but nobody can deliver destruction to the economy the way Bush can do it. Some of his greatest hits include:
- Largest decline in housing prices since 1991.
- Crumbling US dollar, weakest showing against leading five currencies since early 1970s. This includes 37 year low against Canadian dollar. Against the UK pound, it's over $2 to buy only one.
- Skyrocketing and "out of control" oil prices, record highs at the pump.
- Billions of US taxpayer dollars lost, missing, and who knows what from Iraq. Costs for war to drag out for decades.
- Record high budget deficit, compounded by GOP spending boondoggles.
Saturday, November 03, 2007
November 03, 2007
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
GIULIANI IS A LIAR IN THE BUSH MODE
Rudy Giuliani, like typical Republican candidates, is truth challenged. He has been running on the terrorism issue, claiming he was aware of the dangers of terrorism years before 9/11. But when he testified before the 9/11 Commission it was clear he didn't know much about terrorism at all. Now he's attacking universal healthcare as "socialized medicine" and claiming that his chances of surviving prostate cancer in Britain were much smaller than in the United States. The problem is he had a government health program, and the prostate survival rates in Britain are equivalent to those in the United States. This column by Paul Krugman is at www.nytimes.com:
Let’s start with the facts: Mr. Giuliani’s claim is wrong on multiple levels - bogus numbers wrapped in an invalid comparison embedded in a smear.
Mr. Giuliani got his numbers from a recent article in City Journal, a publication of the conservative Manhattan Institute. The author gave no source for his numbers on five-year survival rates - the probability that someone diagnosed with prostate cancer would still be alive five years after the diagnosis. And they’re just wrong.
You see, the actual survival rate in Britain is 74.4 percent. That still looks a bit lower than the U.S. rate, but the difference turns out to be mainly a statistical illusion. The details are technical, but the bottom line is that a man’s chance of dying from prostate cancer is about the same in Britain as it is in America.
ARMAGEDDON POLITICS
The mix of politics and religion is volatile at best. If you combine the politics with a desire for Armageddon you move into the danger zone. There are people with a major influence in U. S. foreign policy who not only yearn for Armageddon; they want to make it happen. This article by Jon Basil Utley is at www.alternet.org:
Most journalists find it difficult to take seriously that tens of millions of Americans, filled with fantasies of revenge and empowerment, long to leave a world they despise. These Armageddonites believe that they alone will get a quick, free pass when they are "raptured" to paradise, no good deeds necessary, not even a day of judgment. Ironically, they share this utopian fantasy with a group that they often castigate, namely fundamentalist Muslims who believe that dying in battle also means direct access to Heaven. For the Armageddonites, however, there are no waiting virgins, but they do agree with Muslims that there will be "no booze, no bars," in the words of a popular Gaither Singers song.
These end-timers have great influence over the U.S. government's foreign policy. They are thick with the Republican leadership. At a recent conference in Washington, congressional leader Roy Blunt, for example, has said that their work is "part of God's plan." At the same meeting, where speakers promoted attacking Iran, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay glorified "end times." Indeed the Bush administration often consults with them on Mideast policies. The organizer of the conference, Rev. John Hagee, is often welcomed at the White House, although his ratings are among the lowest on integrity and transparency by Ministry Watch, which rates religious broadcasters. He raises millions of dollars from his campaign supporting Israeli settlements on the West Bank, including much for himself. Erstwhile presidential candidate Gary Bauer is on his Board of Directors. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson also both expressed strong end-times beliefs.
IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
GIULIANI IS A LIAR IN THE BUSH MODE
Rudy Giuliani, like typical Republican candidates, is truth challenged. He has been running on the terrorism issue, claiming he was aware of the dangers of terrorism years before 9/11. But when he testified before the 9/11 Commission it was clear he didn't know much about terrorism at all. Now he's attacking universal healthcare as "socialized medicine" and claiming that his chances of surviving prostate cancer in Britain were much smaller than in the United States. The problem is he had a government health program, and the prostate survival rates in Britain are equivalent to those in the United States. This column by Paul Krugman is at www.nytimes.com:
Let’s start with the facts: Mr. Giuliani’s claim is wrong on multiple levels - bogus numbers wrapped in an invalid comparison embedded in a smear.
Mr. Giuliani got his numbers from a recent article in City Journal, a publication of the conservative Manhattan Institute. The author gave no source for his numbers on five-year survival rates - the probability that someone diagnosed with prostate cancer would still be alive five years after the diagnosis. And they’re just wrong.
You see, the actual survival rate in Britain is 74.4 percent. That still looks a bit lower than the U.S. rate, but the difference turns out to be mainly a statistical illusion. The details are technical, but the bottom line is that a man’s chance of dying from prostate cancer is about the same in Britain as it is in America.
ARMAGEDDON POLITICS
The mix of politics and religion is volatile at best. If you combine the politics with a desire for Armageddon you move into the danger zone. There are people with a major influence in U. S. foreign policy who not only yearn for Armageddon; they want to make it happen. This article by Jon Basil Utley is at www.alternet.org:
Most journalists find it difficult to take seriously that tens of millions of Americans, filled with fantasies of revenge and empowerment, long to leave a world they despise. These Armageddonites believe that they alone will get a quick, free pass when they are "raptured" to paradise, no good deeds necessary, not even a day of judgment. Ironically, they share this utopian fantasy with a group that they often castigate, namely fundamentalist Muslims who believe that dying in battle also means direct access to Heaven. For the Armageddonites, however, there are no waiting virgins, but they do agree with Muslims that there will be "no booze, no bars," in the words of a popular Gaither Singers song.
These end-timers have great influence over the U.S. government's foreign policy. They are thick with the Republican leadership. At a recent conference in Washington, congressional leader Roy Blunt, for example, has said that their work is "part of God's plan." At the same meeting, where speakers promoted attacking Iran, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay glorified "end times." Indeed the Bush administration often consults with them on Mideast policies. The organizer of the conference, Rev. John Hagee, is often welcomed at the White House, although his ratings are among the lowest on integrity and transparency by Ministry Watch, which rates religious broadcasters. He raises millions of dollars from his campaign supporting Israeli settlements on the West Bank, including much for himself. Erstwhile presidential candidate Gary Bauer is on his Board of Directors. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson also both expressed strong end-times beliefs.
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