Go Mr. Grayson!

Fighting the good fight is Mr Grayson of Florida. I received this e-mail from his campaign today and hope you can take the time to look it over and sign the letter if you are so moved:

Denver Public Library closings...

So here's the deal Mayor Hickenlooper struck with the City Council regarding library closures (briefly):

• All schedule changes will take effect on December 1, 2010
• Bear Valley, University Hills, Woodbury and Montbello will remain open 48 hours per week
• Schlessman will be reduced from 40 to 36 hours per week, but will retain 4 hours of service on Sunday
• Hampden and Byers will go from 40 to 32 hours of service per week
• The Central Library will lose 4 hours of service on Saturday mornings. Central will be open on both Saturdays and Sundays from 1 - 5 p.m.

Matt Taibbi is G-O-D

 In another brilliant expose on the state of the Union, Matt Taibbi in his most recent article Rolling Stone Magazine gives John Madden a run for his commentator-money with his play-by-play description of the 'Restoring American Financial Stability Act' that was recently weaving it's way through Washington. 

 

Wall Street's War by Matt Taibbi

 Opening in the early months of May when the legislation was heading toward the finish line, Taibbi is astonished to discover the bill contains aggressive measures to rein in Wall Street's rodeoesque wild west show.  As Washington barrel races toward the finish line, Taibbi not only learns a lesson that schools Schoolhouse rock (well duh, we always knew the little song was too simplistic and overly optimistic, but it still did more to teach the route a bill has to take that is more educational and no less optimistic than most  civics classes) but reveals the real problem in Washington- which is that a SMALL(say, three of four) number of (corrupt) men hold all the power over whether a bill or amendment will even get a vote, let alone pass and the representation we all assume we're getting when we vote for our representatives in the Senate and the House is virtually nonexistent.  This article along with the blog entry he wrote in response to reader reaction and as a follow-up to what has happened since writing his article are a must read and a reference point for everything we see (or think we see) going on in politics today. CHEERS MATT! 

http://www.rollingstone.com:80/politics/news/;kw=[36899,157778]


See his blog at:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/taibbiblog/;kw=[blog,58584]

Thumb's down for the NBC anchor

A few weeks ago, while perusing the television dreck (i.e. channel surfing), I paused a moment to watch Rachel Maddow- one of the newsy type shows that I will watch and even then I watch it knowing she is subject to corporate censorship as she depends on sponsors to stay on the air. This particular day Rachel was in Louisiana doing the journalism gig on the oil volcano that was just making it into the public eye although it had been spewing with ferocity since the 20th of April. (note: since the first days of the spill the numbers went from 42,000 gallons of oil per day to 200,000 gallons per day to the most current lowballed estimate of 56,000  BARRELS of oil per day and that assumes that April 20th was indeed the day the leak began). In an attempt to fill in time Brian Williams News anchor and managing editor of one of the Big Three mainstream news shows- NBC Nightly News. As Rachel spoke with him about the disaster, he gave his cheerleady comment that the experts that were on the field leading the cleanup efforts knew the most about the problem- that's why they're doing the job they are doing- because they are the experts.

Just makes me want to weep! They know best! They are so good that we should be happy they are the ones in charge- even though they are the ones who caused this in the first place.

But that wasn't the end of his words of wisdom to the peons who were watching the destruction of the gulf, he went on to add in his rivaling a Buffalo Jill tone (paraphrased) "The men who are hired by the White House to advise the president on financial matters are often criticized for having come from the banks but these are the men that KNOW- these are the men that understand the financial institutions from the INSIDE."

OMG! So you, Brian Williams, are going to sit there in that seat of honor as a guest for Ms. Maddow  and advocate for the men who have aided and abetted the financial sting of the century- and made sure it was legal while at the same time praising the people who are destroying the gulf coast? Mind boggling. You, Mr. Williams, are either as dumb as the people you generally talk to (and you might recall you are on the Rachel Maddow show NOT on NBC nightly news when you speak to people like their television numbed robots who barely know how to use their remotes) or you think you are as smart as the crooks that committed these crimes --and I am inclined to think that is the case. 

But here is the Big Problem with Mr. Williams little hypothesis that the oil volcano and the financial meltdown can only be handled by those who understand "The Business"-- they, the bankers and the oil industry and big business..., have gamed the system. They have made the rules and they made them so that they will benefit from them. They are like the cheaters we all remember from when we were kids-- you know That Kid? The one who got all the kids in the neighborhood gathered round to play his new game and then he gave his lengthy specifications until the disgruntled parishioners finally jeered, "Ah come on, let's just play the game." So the game is afoot and the future Monopoly creator watches over the game like a Hawk after dinner. Sensing the possibility of losing the game a New Rule is suddenly shouted out. There is some disgruntlement but the game continues until yet another... and another... new Moment of Concern causes That Kid to call out a new rule to adjust the game back in his favor. It's not that the game is so complicated or requires only the smartest kids to understand them, it's simply that That Kid adjusts the "rules" so that he is always going to win.

When we were kids we all knew what this was: It was called CHEATING.

And cheaters are not going to do anything but continue cheating until they are shut down. The way to solve the problems on Wall Street and with the Oil industry is to clean up the rules and enforce them- we will never figure out how to play their game because they will keep changing the rules so they will win.

The interesting difference between the game That Kid, the neighborhood cheater, developed is that eventually the kids in the neighborhood figure out they can't win and quit playing. We just keep playing...

From Lawrence Lessig. . .

Today, FixCongressFirst.org is launching an effort to build the biggest lobby in the history of American politics -- one that will beat out Exxon Mobile, SEIU, and the NRA for influence and remake Washington in its own image.

Who are these shadowy powerbrokers going to be, exactly?

You and me -- we the people.

In Washington, they say, money talks. Today, we're starting a movement of citizens prepared to speak Congress' language.

Join us by taking the Funders Pledge now:

http://fixcongressfirst.org/pledge

By taking the pledge, you'll commit to stop contributing to the campaign of any member of Congress who opposes the Fair Elections Now Act.

When thousands of ordinary citizens join the lobbying game -- by committing as a bloc to withhold our donations until they cater to our interests -- we'll show Congress that the cost of opposing election reform is more than it can bear.

Here's how it works:

• Visit fixcongressfirst.org/pledge to add your name to the pledge.
• We'll automatically check the records to find the contributions you've made of more than $200. All you have to do is enter an estimate of your campaign contributions from the last two election cycles of less than $200 (the government doesn't keep records of contributions of that size).
• Your total will be added to the amounts entered by everyone else, showing just how much campaign cash Congress members forfeit by opposing the Fair Elections Now Act.

Once the pledges start rolling in, you'll be able to view the amount of contributions lost by every member of Congress on our "Whip" page:

http://fixcongressfirst.org/Whip

Last year, tens of thousands of people supported the beta run of this pledge effort. This year, we're looking to top that figure -- and we've already got the ball rolling, with a collection of major political donors on board and enthusiastically recruiting their friends and colleagues to join us. The more pledges we get now, the more powerful our citizen lobby will become.

Take the Funders Pledge now:

http://fixcongressfirst.org/pledge

If all of us become lobbyists, we can make lobbying extinct -- and show Congress that corporate interests can't match the power of millions of Americans acting as one.

I hope you'll sign on to this campaign now -- and invite your friends to join us.

-- Lawrence Lessig

Greed is god!

Will Goldman Sachs prove greed is God? 

by Matt Taibbi

"So Goldman Sachs, the world's greatest and smuggest investment bank, has been sued for fraud by the American Securities and Exchange Commission... Much of America is going to reflexively insist that Goldman's only crime was being smarter and better at making money than IKB and ABN-Amro, and that the intrusive, meddling government (in the American narrative, always the bad guy!) should get off Goldman's Armani-clad back. Another side is going to argue that Goldman winning this case would be a rebuke to the whole idea of civilisation – which, after all, is really just a collective decision by all of us not to screw each other over even when we can. It's an important moment in the history of modern global capitalism: whether or not to move forward into a world of greed without limits."


See the full article at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/apr/24/will-goldman-prove-greed-is-god

"In these times" by Christopher Malone

original story featured on AlterNet

http://www.alternet.org/story/146346/the_tea_parties_bring_back_social_darwinism?page=entire

The Tea Parties Bring Back Social Darwinism

The right-wing populism manifested in the movement is essentially the same old Social Darwinism that appeared in U.S. society in the nineteenth century.

April 10, 2010  |  

Photo Credit: ajagendorf25

One thing is certain about this fall’s election: The field upon which American politics will play out is a populist one.

Populism has long been part of the American political tradition, dating at least to the political ascent of Andrew Jackson in the 1820s. Its appeal is deceptively simple. The details vary but populism’s basic, urgent message remains the same: The game has been rigged by a small group of powerful people, and something must be done. Now.

What makes the current moment so rare is that both left- and right-wing populism have surfaced at the same time. Which side’s message wins out may determine the trajectory of the next era in American political life.

With its recent national convention and the emergence of a de facto leader in Sarah Palin, the Tea Party movement has sent waves of populist energy through the American electorate. The movement’s agenda is not yet fully formed, and it consists mostly of a vitriolic disdain for the Obama administration. Much work lies ahead in terms of developing its message, logic, strategy, tactics and constituency.

But if the Tea Party is a young movement finding its footing, its ideological underpinning is old indeed. The right-wing populism manifested in the movement is essentially the same old Social Darwinism that became a kind of sacred truth in American society in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Father of modern conservatism

Modern American conservatism formed in the early years of the Cold War, when New Deal liberalism seemed triumphant. Though it has many tributaries, the mainstream movement consists of several core ideas: that societies are ordered in classes based on divine intent and/or personal responsibility; that property and freedom are inseparable; that markets should be unfettered from government regulation; that traditions must be adhered to for social stability; and that societies should evolve slowly.

All of modern conservatism’s founders articulated these principles in their writings. Perhaps the most influential work in conservatism’s late-twentieth-century ascent was Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative, published in 1960. But one of the original progenitors of contemporary social and political conservative thought—William Graham Sumner (1840-1910)—is nowhere to be found in lists of modern conservatism’s canonical texts. The reason is simple. His philosophy is so harsh and reactionary that to embrace it openly would be political suicide. Nonetheless, his ideas are everywhere in the right-wing populism that has gained ground during the last year.

Sumner believed that the fundamental law of the universe was survival of the fittest. So progressivism or socialism or any ideology that aimed to “save individuals from any of the difficulties or hardships of the struggle for existence” was pure folly. Like today’s right-wing populist revolt, Sumner’s brand of Social Darwinism propagated an unabashed but seamless defense of two groups that would seem to be at odds: the Captain of Industry and the Forgotten Man.

For Sumner, both of these figurative “men” had more to fear from the paternal state than they did from each other. Take the Captain of Industry. For Sumner, society depended on the creation of individual wealth; thus, social advancement for all depended on the financial abilities of the few. “If we should set a limit to the accumulation of wealth,” he wrote, “we should say to our most valued producers, ‘We do not want you to do us the services which you best understand how to perform, beyond a certain point.’ It would be like killing off our generals in a war.”

Sumner believed hereditary wealth was a product of the laws of nature as well, and he defended it vigorously. Since the millionaire and his offspring were responsible for enriching their communities through their wealth production, personal wealth had to stay in the family. To do otherwise was a state-sponsored assault on personal liberty.

But if Sumner strongly defended the wealthy, his defense of the Forgotten Man—who prizes liberty, not wealth, above all—was equally fervent. “It is plain enough that the Forgotten Man and the Forgotten Woman are the very life and substance of society,” he wrote. “They are the ones who ought to be first and always remembered. They are always forgotten by sentimentalists, philanthropists, reformers, enthusiasts, and every description of speculator in sociology, political economy or political science.”

A free man in a free state had only one major duty, according to Sumner: “to take care of his or her own self. That is a social duty.” If one could not take care of oneself, that was of no consequence to others.

Sumner believed that the causes of poverty were misunderstood and the policy of state intervention was deeply misguided. Social welfare through state intervention replaced the survival of the fittest with the survival of the unfit. And that was disastrous for civilization.

The road to Sarah Palin

The New Deal was about many things, but at its core it sought to rearrange the relationship—formed in the Gilded Age of the late-nineteenth century—between the government, the Forgotten Man, and the Captain of Industry. With the help of an economic crisis, Franklin D. Roosevelt convinced Americans that government intervention was necessary to curb the Captain of Industry’s greed and irresponsibility.

Over the last four decades, conservatives have successfully mounted a counter-argument to this New Deal narrative. The key to their success has been Sumner’s Forgotten Man, the same mythical figure that Tea Partiers have been fighting for. The left underestimates the power of their grievances at its peril.

In the world according to Tea Party protesters, poverty is not about the structural deficiencies of capitalism; it is about personal idleness and extravagance. Welfare is not about alleviating poverty; it is about doing away with a government handout that breeds dependency. Gay marriage is not about “equal rights”; it is about government telling you what values you should be compelled to uphold. The estate tax on the super-rich is not about the fair redistribution of wealth; it is a final assault—a “death tax”—on the liberty of the dearly departed.

In their world, the Forgotten Man and Woman are constantly (in Sumner’s words) “threatened by every extension of the paternal theory of government.” This is the logic of Sumner’s Social Darwinism. Its broad appeal lies in an elegant simplicity: government always crushes the individual’s liberty.

Combating Social Darwinism

Conventional wisdom holds that Barack Obama is not a natural populist, that this cerebral former law professor doesn’t know how to push populist buttons. That may be true. But Obama understands that for decades the American public has been fed a steady diet of Sumner’s Social Darwinism. Today, fewer Americans trust government than at any point in modern history—and this is after a financial meltdown. Making the case that government can be trusted to stand between the Forgotten Man and the corporate raiders who caused this mess is not easy. After a year in which the discussion turned on government intervention in many aspects of American society, it was only a matter of time before we saw the return of Social Darwinism.

Despite Americans’ lack of trust in government, Obama and his supporters should take comfort in two things. First, whether or not they believe that government actually works, the overwhelming majority of Americans believe that government should solve big problems. The doctrine of “mind your own business” is so far out of the mainstream today that few could imagine government not involved in social welfare programs like education and healthcare. The era of big government is here to stay.

Second, those New Deal policies that were directed at FDR’s “forgotten” men and women eventually created the biggest middle class in the history of human civilization. Though it has lost ground, the middle class is also here to stay. Defeating Social Darwinism means framing every policy decision around that class. Doing so will require more left-leaning populism from this president. (emphasis mine) He must persuade Americans that all the taken-for-granted fundamentals of modern middle-class life—healthcare, home mortgages, college education for the kids, etc.—are jeopardized by the power and greed of the new Captains of Industry.

To move the country forward, in other words, Obama must learn from the battles that FDR fought in the 1930s. Today, the stakes are just as high and the challenges are just as great. There is hope to be found in this fact: FDR’s successes created the most prosperous three decades in American history. Obama can do the same. But where there is a way, there isn’t necessarily a will. Time will tell.

The Fed in Hot Water

Robert Reich wrote on his blog @ http://robertreich.org/:
"The Fed has finally came clean. It now admits it bailed out Bear Stearns – taking on tens of billions of dollars of the bank’s bad loans – in order to smooth Bear Stearns’ takeover by JPMorgan Chase. The secret Fed bailout came months before Congress authorized the government to spend up to $700 billion of taxpayer dollars bailing out the banks, even months before Lehman Brothers collapsed. The Fed also took on billions of dollars worth of AIG securities, also before the official government-sanctioned bailout.

The losses from those deals still total tens of billions, and taxpayers are ultimately on the hook. But the public never knew. There was no congressional oversight. It was all done behind closed doors. And the New York Fed – then run by Tim Geithner – was very much in the center of the action.

This raises three issues.
First, only Congress is supposed to risk taxpayer dollars. The Fed is not part of the legislative branch. Its secret deals, announced almost two years after they were done, violate the democratic process, if not the Constitution itself. Thomas Jefferson put a stop to Alexander Hamilton’s idea of a powerful central bank out of fear it would be unaccountable to the public. The Fed has just proven Jefferson’s point.

Second, if the Fed can secretly bail out big banks, the problem of “moral hazard” – bankers taking irresponsible risks because they know they’ll be rescued – is far greater than anyone assumed after Congress and the Bush and Obama administrations bailed out the banks. Big banks will always be too big to fail because they know the Fed will secretly back them up if they get into trouble, even if Congress won’t do it openly.

Third, the announcement throws a monkey wrench into the financial reform bill now on Capitol Hill, which gives the Fed additional authority by, for example, creating a consumer protection bureau inside it. Only yesterday, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) blasted the Dodd bill for expanding the Fed’s authority “even as it remains shrouded in secrecy.”

The Fed has a big problem. It acts in secret. That makes it an odd duck in a democracy. As long as it’s merely setting interest rates, its secrecy and political independence can be justified. But once it departs from that role and begins putting billions of dollars of taxpayer money at risk — choosing winners and losers in the capitalist system — its legitimacy is questionable.

That it chose to reveal the truth about its activities during a week when Congress is out of town, when much of official Washington and the Washington media have gone on vacation, and only after several federal courts have held that the Fed must release documents related to its bailout of Bear Stearns, suggests it would rather remain secret than become transparent.

Much of what Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner did (when Geithner was at the New York Fed) in 2008 was presumably necessary. But the public has no way of knowing. The public doesn’t even know who else the Fed has bailed out, or what entities it will bail out in the future. All we know is the Fed secretly bailed out Bear Stearns and AIG and thereby subjected taxpayers to risks that remain even today, without informing the public. That’s not a record on which to build public trust."

Can anyone say "Corporate Control" or "Who really writes the rules?" This isn't an April Fool's joke either sadly.