James Clay Fuller

Past time to follow the health care money

2009-12-16T09:22:00.000-08:00

Industries that profit hugely from America's health care scam – notably insurance companies and pharmaceutical makers, but others as well – have spent massive sums to prevent any genuine reform of the non-system.

Many news and even some of the pseudo news outfits have reported what those companies spent and are spending to lobby against reform.

The Washington Post, CNN, New York Times and others said repeatedly during the fall that the profiteers were laying out $1.5 million a day to make sure we don't get affordable health care for all Americans. No doubt the expenditures have increased over the past month or so.

Estimates of the total spent by the profiteers on anti-reform lobbying go to more than $500 million since last spring.

CNN noted back in September that the expenditures to that point would cover top-drawer insurance for more than 30,000 Americans for one year. By now that number has to be 35,000 thousand Americans.

But...

A very important set of facts has never been reported, so far as I can find. None of the badly educated, largely untrained stenographers who have replaced reporters seems even to have asked the big questions:

Exactly where is all the money going? Precisely how is it being spent? Who's collecting what the insurers and pharmas are paying?

Much of the money goes into the personal bank accounts of the lobbyists, of course.

The Guardian, a Brit news operation that does a better job of covering Washington than most U.S. news outfits, reported during the fall that the various health care industries had deployed a total of six (count them, six) lobbyists for each and every member of Congress. Of course, that's on average; some of the few unbought liberals may get only one or two or none at all, and Joe Lieberman probably has eight or nine brushing off his chair as he sits down for lunch while three others spread his napkin on his lap and four more serenade him. If you have a precious possession, you cherish it.

However, it is clear, on the face of it, that not all the money is being paid to lobbyists just to talk to members of Congress, sing them lullabies and massage them with expensive oils and ointments.

So where is the money going? To “charities” favored by legislators with power? To campaign funds? To wives and siblings and girlfriends under various ruses? To “nonprofit” employers of said wives, siblings and girlfriends? To PACs that saddle the various members' favorite hobby horses?

C'mon, “news” people. Where the hell is the money going, exactly? And I do mean exactly.

If the expenditures for lobbying are declared, and obviously a large percentage of the total is declared, then it is possible to find out who is being paid what.

___________________________________

Oh, and while we're at it, why do the corporate “news” media generally ignore the fact that Hadassah Lieberman, Joe's wife, has spent most of the past ten years or so as a highly-paid lobbyist for the major pharmceutical companies? She was director of policy, planning and communications for Pfizer, one of the biggest drug makers, and then a lobbyist for the pharma industry until quite recently. Before getting in the health care biz, she was a research analyst for Lehman Brothers, the big investment house that collapsed in 2008.

Her activities are highly relevant and should be noted in every story about his gun-for-hire activities.

And why don't the purported news outfits include in reports on the Senate farce the fact that the wife of Sen. Chris Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat who was involved in writing the Senate's bill, is on the boards of directors of three health care corporations and for a time sat on the board of a subsidiary of AIG, the government funds gulping insurance giant?

And why hasn't anyone made a big splash by reporting on the stock in pharmaceutical, insurance and other health care companies owned by members of Congress? Democraticunderground.com stated way back in June that more than 30 “key” members of Congress owned substantial amounts of stock in pharmas and that some are directors of drug companies.

I come near to weeping sometimes for what has happened to the craft to which I devoted my entire working life.

Here again, at least for a while

2009-12-14T10:05:00.001-08:00

Back around the end of May, I decided to take some time off from this blog and from other public writing, except for occasional letters to the editors of various publications. Initially, I did not intend to stay away for quite so long.

First, I knew that I was heading into a ridiculously busy summer, filled with many house guests and travel. We had one period of more than a month during which we had house guests continuously.

(Yeah, even if you love 'em, it can make you a little crazy.)

More importantly, it was time to step aside from the daily crises and distraction issues and try to figure out what's really going on in this mess of a country, which now can be accurately described as the world's largest and most powerful banana republic. It's official policies frequently are incoherent and often are patently irrational; it is almost ungovernable, yet swarms with authoritarian politicians, clerics and other demagogues eager to tell others how they should govern or be governed. It is greatly burdened with politicians too cowardly or too venal to act as they should.

It's very easy to get caught up in the latest, the almost daily scandals and hot stories –- what really is the significance of the fact that Tiger Woods cheated on his wife or that Sarah Palin is using her persona as a political Paris Hilton to make millions? -- and fail to see the massive changes taking place in our government and society. A lot easier, as well, to avoid facing those changes directly.

Americans are given to watching the ripples and entirely missing the shifting of the tides.

Even the health care battle is largely trivialized, while the real importance of that battle – important beyond even the question of whether Americans ever will get decent, affordable health care – is ignored.

Through the summer and fall, I read, listened and came to several mostly unhappy conclusions. Now, for awhile, I'll write again.

Yes, I know. Who gives a damn? I'm nobody and what I have to say doesn't matter.

I don't imagine myself to be a great pundit. Usually, only a few hundred people – very rarely a few thousand – ever see what I write. I'm a hick from the sticks, lacking a PhD and lacking a major newspaper or syndicate to inflate my importance. So read it or don't. At least I'll be able to consolidate my gleanings and get the conclusions down so that I can stop spending most of my waking hours ruminating on things over which we, the people, no longer have much power.

The first couple of articles to follow probably will not be on the really big subjects, but rather on things that offer clues to where we're going on the life or death issues.

jcf

Quiet shifts in the body politic

2009-12-14T09:50:00.000-08:00

There are shifts in the body politic that are as yet not generally recognized, and some of them suggest that a major political realignment may be brewing.

I'm not talking phony astroturf movements, or bubba teabaggers being led by their noses to do the dirty work of right wing billionaires. Not even referring to the sometimes reported but poorly documented disaffection of a badly-defined “moderate” element of the electorate.

Even occasional news media references to an obviously enraged but unfocused non-bubba portion of the population don't quite get at what may be an important shift in political perceptions. So many angry people are just angry without having any clear sense of who is doing what to them; they know they're being screwed, but are more likely than not to blame the wrong people, because the flood of misinformation and lies from corporation-controlled “news” media, Fixed News and talk radio overwhelms a limited ability for critical thought.

An old friend of mine personifies the real change I think is happening, that has to some extent already happened.

He and I became friends in early childhood, which is to say more than 65 years ago. His parents were distinctly upper crust in our small town/suburb. His father was a banker. I was distinctly from the wrong side of the tracks. His mother openly disapproved of our friendship and would allow us to play together, other than at school, only rarely and only if she could keep a close eye on me. Guess she thought I'd steal his toys, or the silverware.

He is a calm fellow, an ideal member of any committee or board, always seeking to get things done while seeing to it that no one is offended or left out.

I tend to be more volatile, much less patient, and recognized years ago that I am not suited to committees. I don't do committees any more.

Yet we have been friends all these years. We get together with our spouses about once a month, sometimes more often. We spend a long weekend with two other couples every summer, fishing, cooking together, ambling through country shops and such. My old friend and I are both deeply interested in history; the two of us went to France a couple of years ago to tour Normandy invasion sites, museums and cemeteries.

I am a lifelong political liberal, considered myself a Democrat until just three or four years ago. My friend was a solid, active Republican until a couple of years ago or so. He held municipal office as a Republican. He was on a first-name basis with Republican governors and members of Congress. His political support was recognized and valued by those Republican politicians.

My working life was spent as a journalist, including 30 years with a metropolitan daily newspaper. I, too, was on a first-name basis with rich and powerful people in business and politics, though the relationships were more arms-length, as they were supposed to be.

So, for 50 or 60 years we argued occasionally, politely and respectfully, about government, business and politics.

Now we don't -- or if we do, it's about minor details rather than the big picture.

I am no longer a Democrat. My old friend is no longer a Republican. We are both appalled at what we see in government and politics.

A few evenings ago, we and our spouses had dinner together, with another couple. The third couple is a male-female odd couple. The lady is vaguely liberal. While a decent sort on a strictly personal level, the man is far right on all things having to do with politics and government. An ex-marine, he believes all wars in which the United States is involved are just wars or we wouldn't be in them. He believes that the Cheney torture program was justified, that maybe there really were “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, that our economy would be perfect if government would just get out of the way, stop collecting taxes and let corporations do whatever they choose to do without interference.

That right-winger was quickly backed into confused silence the other night during a discussion of war, health care, the deteriorating condition of our beloved state of Minnesota and related topics. My old friend, the (until fairly recently) lifelong Republican. and I, the (until fairly recently) lifelong Democrat, argued from the same positions, arrived at separately. We each had loads of facts and details to support our shared belief that politicians of both major parties are ignoring the welfare of the American public, doing the bidding of the very rich at our expense and are generally pursuing inhumane and devastating policies.

The failure of this country to provide basic health care for millions of its citizens sickens that old Republican just as it sickens me. Domestic spying, use of cruel anti-gay propaganda to build support for a right-wing agenda, unnecessary wars, slavish catering to right wing Zionists and Cubans in Florida anger him as they anger me.

We disagree still on some details. Would this or that tax be right and appropriate, should this or that regulation be adopted? But the disagreements are not on basic points, and left to discussion we could work out the details. (Compromise. An interesting word. You can find it in a dictionary. It does not mean capitulation by one side in a dispute.)

Of course, my former Republican friend is just a single individual, as am I. But I know a large and growing number of former Democrats very like me, and I know several former Republicans who are very like, or increasingly like, my lifelong friend.

I also know adherents of both big parties who have gone to extremes -- especially, I must say, on the right -- but they are far fewer than those who are looking for some way to bring us back to a rational and democratic form of government.

We're not talking what the idiot press calls “moderates,” by the way. As near as it can be defined, that just means rightist Republicans who call themselves Democrats. The shift is not to radicalism, but it is to “the left” -- toward humanism and humanity, away from the amorality of the corporate world and corporate-controlled politicians.

It may be late, but the realignment is happening. If we are too late to save American democracy, at least we will be a pain in the butt to the oligarchy that seems close to establishing itself as the country's government.

Daring to challenge St. Obama

2009-05-23T06:18:00.000-07:00

People who are unhappy with some of the moves, or failures to move, by President Obama are being told, in effect, to sit down and shut up.

“Give the man a chance,” someone inevitably says when we complain that Obama's economic advisers are members of the same crowd that brought us our economic troubles –- most of them frequent passers through the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street jobs paying well upward of $1 million a year.

The same message is practically shouted when we note that the Obama economic program protects the very wealthy, helps the Wall Street and banking moguls consolidate their power (and become even more “too big to fail”) and ensures that more jobs are lost and that the incomes of those of us who are not enormously rich will continue to slip and that our economic perches become ever more precarious.

“Just wait. We'll see how it works out,” we're told when we point out that Obama has given the National Rifle Association it's latest boost toward arming the entire population –- or at least the far right side of the population –- by bowing without even a complaint to the latest ploy that allows the carrying of concealed weapons in national parks.

“Stop whining; would the alternative have been better?” we are asked when we note that Obama's approach to the Middle East, our ongoing senseless wars and the taking and treatment of prisoners around the world seems to be acceptance of Dick Cheney's policies. (And, boy, are the right wing fruit cakes warming up their voices to crow over that fact; the letters already are starting to appear in newspapers all over the country. See New York Times letters page for May 20 for one example.)

Health care? Self-proclaimed “liberals” and, especially, “moderates” are telling us to shut our pie holes when we object to the fact that single payer, government-run health care was taken “off the table” from day one of the Obama administration. Those already prepared to name schools after the young president snarl when we point out that the plans being espoused by Obama and the Democrats in Congress are at bottom little more than profit-assurance programs for insurance companies and pharmas.

Well, gang, I'm not going to shut up, and neither are a host of others who are paying close attention to the Washington dance.

Do you think the rich guys are keeping quiet and waiting to “see how it plays out?” Do you think the bankers –- who have been using millions of our tax dollars to lobby Congress since the moment they got the TARP checks –- are patiently waiting to see what Obama and their stooges in Congress do about the economy? Is the arms industry not talking constantly into the ears of their servants in government? Has AIPAC been silent since last November?

Well, gee, how about all the “progress” Obama and the Dems have made on things like –- uh, well, say protecting us from credit card predation?

If you believe the credit card moves really benefit us, I want to tell you about a number of deals I can offer you, for just a piddling fee, on bridges, land, insurance, mortgage refinancing and anything else you may want.

I'm sick to death of being taken and having no ability to do anything about it, so maybe it's time I join the takees.

Gee whiz golly gosh: Congress, with Obama's backing, intends to restrict credit card interest rates to –- what is today's number? Maybe 28 percent? Wow, what a deal huh? Meanwhile the banks are paying their suckers –- that is, customers -– as much as 3 percent in some cases. Even a point or two more for dollars you're willing to tie up for several years. Yessiree, a hell of a deal.

Also banks supposedly will be limited in when and how much they can jump the interest rates they charge on cards. Maybe.

But here's what people who don't know the banking game probably don't realize: In return for taking such punishment, the banks plan to bring back annual fees for the right to carry their credit cards. They intend to drop most or all of their “incentive” programs such as providing frequent flyer miles. They've said so; read the business pages.

The banks come out ahead. We pay fees for the right to buy on credit and pay interest rates that throughout history, up to the past few decades, were illegal (and even brought physical punishment up to and including death) in all societies throughout the world. The banks lose the costs of administering those bothersome incentive programs –- which came about, anyway, only because there was some competition among banks and other institutions for credit card accounts.

With the consolidation in the financial rackets brought about by the economic collapse and the resulting bailout and help -- actually, demand -- by government for further mergers, competition has been made all but obsolete. The big financial outfits still standing can carve up the credit card market with only minor squabbling. There is no further need for those costly competitive gambits.

Isn't it interesting that come high tide for them or low, the political right pitches and fights and demands and attacks for what it wants?

The left, when it wins an election or three, says “Let's be moderate” and “Let's see how it plays out,” and clears the field for the armies of the right to surround our politicians. And we go incrementally forever rightward. In or out of office, the right, the hugely rich, the Powers That Be, fight on. They gain three steps, perhaps the liberals take us back one, and then the right moves another three toward their goals.

Oh, you say, but we're making such wonderful progress on some important issues. We have stem cell research back, and it's obvious that prohibitions against gay people marrying will, in a few years, have gone the way of laws against interracial marriages, for example.

True, and those are good things. But they never were issues for the rich and powerful, who only went along with the religulous right on such things because those people were useful for a time. The wild-eyed preachers and their followers are much weaker now than they were even five years ago –- they'll be back, of course, but not for quite awhile -– and so the rich can get rid of them in the same way that they scrape muck from their boots after a stroll around the stable yard.

The rich have no religion but power and privilege, and they're still in charge. Our society is far, far to the right of where it was 50 years ago on all things that matter to the very rich and powerful, and we are still losing power and wealth to them. Jobs are still leaving the country, either abroad or into the ether. There is less economic security every day for the poor and middle class. The real powers of the country are effectively slicing away at health care, education, employee rights, safety protection for workers.

But, gee, “Shut up and give the man a chance.”

Meanwhile, let's see if you can find the pea under one of the three cups I will place on this little table....

Guns: Pimping for a dirty business

2009-04-24T15:50:00.000-07:00

You have to give America's increasingly extreme political right great credit in one area.

Its propagandists, the ones it has right now, are the best at flaying facts and selling disinformation since things went belly up for Joseph Goebbels 1945.

The best of the best –- or, from a moral standpoint, worst of the worst -– are those who directly serve the makers and peddlers of military-style guns and other people-killing devices, the profiteering promoters of murder on a massive scale. In that, too, they have much in common with Dr. Goebbels.

They get great help from our cowardly politicians -– which is to say almost all of our politicians -– and from an equally cowardly press and a whole bunch of ignorant suckers among the American public, but that is largely a testament to their skill.

In late March, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went farther than is usual for a U.S. official in admitting that our country bears substantial responsibility for the growing power and brutality of Mexico's drug cartels. Specifically, she admitted the obvious fact that demand for drugs in this country fuels the growth of the mobs and the less-known fact that the drug gangs get the bulk of their weaponry from suppliers in the United States.

The second piece of information, on weapons, was confirmed by Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Defense.

Clinton's statement may have taken what passes for courage in American politics, unpleasant truths being widely regarded as untouchable. Few facts could more clearly demonstrate the political power our elected officials have granted those who produce and promote violence for profit.

Although there was little or no coverage in the establishment media, a couple of other people in the new Obama administration already had made such acknowledgments. The gun racket had anticipated Clinton's admission.

Fox Propaganda, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and various other screaming sociopaths were ready, of course, but their rants were predictable and dull. Everybody who can walk and chew gum had to have known in advance what they would say: Weak-kneed liberals apologizing to criminals, what we need is armed troops standing three feet apart along the entire border, it's all the fault of them furriners, and look-out-folks-they're-gonna-take-your-guns-away.

When it comes to carrying water for the murder businesses, those people are useful, but minor players. The gun nuts go elsewhere for the authoritative word on what they should think.

Their secret decoder rings are set for the National Rifle Association and dozens upon dozens of Web sites and blogs narrowly aimed at the kind of suckers who have bought into the fictions about impending gun confiscation and the need to be prepared for a socialist or fascist coup.

(Beck, for one, doesn't seem to know the difference between socialist and fascist, and it's a good bet that a high percentage of those who take him seriously are equally in the dark on that point and many other points of fact.)

So I looked in on several of the aluminum hat gun nutter sites, the ones that carry articles, and sometimes ads, about what body armor to buy and where to buy it, and rant after rant about the dire threat of a dictatorship of the left. The official position of the death peddlers became obvious within half an hour. The “talking points” had to have been distributed before Clinton's statement got it's brief flurry of coverage.

In a nutshell here they are, without most of the boilerplate rhetoric about “Mainstream Media's huge disinformation campaign to demonize the American gun owner,” etc., etc., ad nauseum:

-- The attempt to slow the flow of weapons to Mexican criminals will, as Michael Gaddy of LewRockwell.com assured his readers, morph into 'the war on guns'” planned by President Obama. (Fact: Obama has always taken a “moderate” -- that is, rather weak -- stance on guns and gun control.)

-- Obama administration people are pushing the idea that the weapons going into Mexico are coming from America's private gun owners. (Fact: No such claim has even been implied, let alone stated. Absolutely nobody, other than the wing nuts, is talking about individual American gun owners shipping their weapons to Mexico.)

-- And -– booga booga booga -– the real supplier of weapons to the drug gangs is the U.S. government, using the Mexican government as a middle man. (Too absurd for any rational person, but readily believed in the gun worshippers subculture. Government conspiracy, doncha know.)

In the hands of Gaddy, who describes himself as an army veteran of Vietnam, Grenada and Beirut, that translates to, “Our corrupt government, cooperating with Mexico's equally corrupt government, has embarked on a campaign to deprive American citizens of the means to defend ourselves from tyranny, screening their own involvement in arming violent criminal drug cartels.”

(One could assume from Gaddy's fantasy that Barack Obama is not only a secret Muslim and a citizen of some other country but also a secret employee of the drug cartels, specializing in armament.)

-- But the main story, put forth by one Ralph Weller of Gun News Daily, who claims to know all this because he “lived and worked in Mexico in a border town for about five years,” is that all of the assault rifles, machine pistols, hand grenades and other murder tools in the hands of Mexico's drug pushers are from “Europe, China, Russia and South America” or “they came from illegal arms manufacturers in India or Pakistan.” Take your pick, apparently; the two theories about source are presented separately within the same essay.

For added spice, Weller's piece charges that, rather than weapons going from the United States to Mexico, the opposite is true, that “illegal full-auto weapons and grenades” are flowing along with drugs from Mexico to this country. That creative claim appears to be unique to Weller at this point.

Weller's article, which carries no attribution for any statement and not a single checkable fact, has been picked up by more than a dozen other right-wing and/or gun nutter Web sites that I saw. I'd be very surprised if there aren't many more I didn't see. Those I got into all presented it as absolute proof that arms are not going to Mexico from this country and that the claim is just groundwork for a government attempt to seize Americans' god-given guns.

I tried to find reliable information on Weller's identity and background, but biographical information, other than a brief paragraph he apparently wrote, doesn't seem to be available. There was another Ralph Weller, a ranking executive of Otis Elevator Co., but he died in 1995, and I could find no link between him and the above-quoted water boy for the gun peddlers.

Most of the gun-nut sites push the idea that President Obama is a very busy man, hatching a great plot to take all guns away from all American civilians.

In truth, Obama is very timid about taking on the gun nuts. If you check his positions and statements going back to his days in the Illinois Legislature, it becomes clear that he's never called for a ban on guns, never even hinted he wants handguns made illegal. He has –- take a deep breath now -– suggested that handguns should be registered and that assault weapons and armor-piercing ammunition should be permanently banned.

Obama, to the horror of the gun nuts, also has suggested (nothing more) that we should return to a prohibition against carrying concealed weapons and the closing of a loophole that allows private sale (including at gun shows) of all kinds of weapons and ammunition without any record or registration of the weapons and buyers.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, the NRA, which speaks from Olympus in the minds of those who dwell in the gun-nut world, created a wholly fictional claim that Obama had a “ten-point plan” to alter the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The NRA said Obama will “ban the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns” and also “ban the use of firearms for home self defense.”

The aluminum hat crowd believes that with greater certainty than it believes the sun rises in the east.

---------------------------

When Ralphy, the young hero of a wonderful movie titled “A Christmas Story,” got his first, greatly anticipated message from Little Orphan Annie after he at long last received his secret decoder ring, he was outraged, and threw the ring away.

The message: “Don't forget to drink your Ovaltine.”

It's a great pity the wing nuts and gun freaks, not to mention members of Congress, don't have the same ability to recognize and reject business-sponsored crapola.

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Lest anyone mistake me: I grew up with firearms.

My father lived for fishing and, especially, hunting. It was his great passion. But he lost a leg to a careless fool of a hunter when he was 18, and his “good foot” carried a piece of a bullet lodged there thanks to the idiocy of yet another careless hunter. Neither of the people who shot him were in his hunting party at the time of the incidents. He would not tolerate the slightest carelessness with a gun of any type, and twice that I can recall, he chased people from the field on the sheer strength of his anger -– no physical threats made or implied.

I owned both a rifle and a .410 shotgun by the time I was 11. I gave up hunting in my late teens almost entirely because of the dangerous behavior of other hunters. I continued to target shoot now and then for many years. I have nothing against well-behaved hunters, certainly nothing against people who use guns for target shooting, skeet and other non-lethal sport. If it were convenient, I might be one of them.

But as one who spent many hours of my youth in the field, I can see absolutely no legitimate civilian use for military-type semiautomatic and automatic weapons, let alone bazookas, rocket launchers and other types of iron designed specifically for the killing of human beings. The same goes for armor-piercing ammunition. I'm somewhat ambivalent on handguns. There obviously are many people who should not have them, and a considerable body of research shows that, despite NRA propaganda to the contrary, a vast majority of innocent citizens who think they can defend themselves and their homes with such weapons are deluding themselves and asking for trouble.

Guns 2: The hidden business

2009-04-24T15:35:00.000-07:00

When Hillary Clinton declared in March that weapons are flowing from the United States to Mexico's drug cartels, you'd have thought she'd revealed that madwoman Ann Coulter is a drag queen, rather than stated a fact well known to law enforcement people and many others on both sides of the border.

(About Coulter: You didn't know? Where did you think Bill O'Reilly goes when he's not in the Fox Propaganda studio?)

There was hardly a newspaper that didn't carry the Clinton story on the front page, and, for a day or two, no television faux news station that didn't use it at least twice an hour.

In fact, the simple admission of the gun trafficking was hardly more shocking than Clinton's acknowledgment that demand from the U.S. is what put the drug mobs in business and keeps them rich.

The coverage faded quickly in establishment news outlets, however, leaving only the occasional uninformed television “reporter” or Fox flunky to ask some minor Obama administration official whether the president wants to “confiscate the guns of private citizens.”

Clinton's statement should have been the kickoff of big-time investigations of the gun-peddling business by at least a couple of news organizations. But that wasn't going to happen. The quick fade to black was as predictable as a Rush Limbaugh tirade. The gun trade is a dung pile very carefully avoided by establishment news outfits.

Just in case, though, I waited for a couple of weeks after the Clinton pronouncement to see if, just maybe, some news outlet, some small, surviving group of real journalists. would seek answers to the painfully obvious questions: Where do the weapons come from and who's selling them to Mexican killers? (A longer but still incomplete list of other necessary questions is included below.)

Hasn't happened, of course.

American newspapers and broadcast news presenters have avoided crossing gun makers and sellers since before I got into the news trade, and that's about 50 years ago. They were afraid to take on the killing business even before the National Rifle Association became almost entirely a propaganda and lobbying agency for the murder business and before it gained genuine political power through what often is delicately described as “distribution of wealth.”

No, I can't explain it. Like anyone else out here, I can only guess.

Every so often during my 30-year tenure on what was, through most of those years, a very good metropolitan daily newspaper, I pitched the idea of probing the gun manufacturing and selling rackets. More often than not, my bosses acted as though I were soundless and invisible. I got no response at all, neither aye nor nay. Once or twice, I was told -– as happened on other possible subjects occasionally -– that such an investigation would take too much work, too much time; the newspaper couldn't afford to have me or any other reporter devote that much effort to one subject.

If I pointed out that we did occasionally devote much time and work to a single story (or series of stories), the response was that afore-mentioned silence and invisibility. Although I could hear myself and see myself in mirrors, and co-workers could see and hear me, the bosses didn't seem to be aware of my presence.

Most of the time, I think the excuses were exactly what I was told, when I was told anything, but after years of periodically making the pitch, the scenes began to have an unpleasantly eerie feel.

The thing is, nobody else in this country did the obvious gun stories either.

During my career I did a number of “big” stories that my bosses were reluctant to embark upon. The stories that met with initial reluctance almost always involved unpleasant facts about some business or group of businesses – often businesses that purchased substantial amounts of advertising.

The reluctance of editors to take on such subjects was understandable. If we produced information that made some business guys sweat, the editors took much heat.

Sometimes, inevitably, reporting turns up information to show that what you thought might be something illegal or exploitive of the public or otherwise rotten actually is at least acceptable, if not benign. The work you put in on the subject is therefore “wasted,” though I never saw it that way.

Yet far more often than not, if I or another reporter had solid grounds for wanting to dig into something, we got a green light.

Not on the gun racket, though.

You might wonder what made me think the gun business -– manufacture and large-lot sales -– needed examination. It's the same sort of thinking that has led to countless journalistic investigations:

There are far more guns in this country and elsewhere in the world than there are legitimate users. Hunters, skeet shooters, competitive target shooters, hobby shooters, have all the guns they can use, and street gangs, drug cartels, terrorists and all sorts of ugly and evil people have many, many more guns than are required by or could be used by all of the legitimate users in the world.

Production of guns exceeds legal or legitimate purchases by multiples, though we don't really know by how much.

We need numbers. How many of what types of guns are made, how many of those can be shown to have been sold to legitimate users? Where have the rest gone? Who has them? How did they get them?

The gun business and its apologists like to talk about “stolen” guns arming the gangs and such in this country. But how many guns actually are taken in known thefts, and how does that match up with the armories of drug gangs, street gangs and all the other brutal thugs? On the face of it, it is obvious that the criminals have many more guns than have shown up on lists of stolen property. Perhaps someone needs to explain to people in the gun trade that they should lock up their inventory.

Terrorists around the world, war lords and small strongman governments, the Italian Mafia and the Russian Mafia and lord knows how many other mafias are armed to the teeth, despite prohibitions of weapons sales to those people by almost all established governments. So who is making the hundreds of thousands of weapons those large-scale thugs acquire in such numbers, and who is selling them? Do gun makers “lose” 40, 50, 80 percent of their production out the back door? Really? They have no effective security? Or, alternatively, they just “don't know” who's buying half or more of what they produce?

Show me a legitimate business of any size that doesn't know what it produces, what it sells, what it has in inventory and who its buyers are. If you know one, and they do show up from time to time, it will not be in business long. And it won't have been profitable for long, let alone for centuries.

What use to private citizens are automatic weapons, assault rifles, rocket launchers, antiaircraft rockets, body armor, armored vehicles and other killing devices obviously designed solely for the killing of human beings? Who makes those, who sells them and who are the buyers? Really, who are the buyers -– age, background, income, and psychology. (Dangerous ground, but on the face of it there are some seriously disturbed people stockpiling extremely threatening weaponry. Right here in the U.S. of A. Read the gun blogs)

Oh, yes: Who gets how much profit from such things? And which politicians get how much in “campaign contributions” from the people who make the profits?

About the gun bloggers' claim that the bloodthirsty mobs are getting their guns from illegal manufacturers in, say, Pakistan or India: Really? A bunch of little tin-shed copyists, presumably without heavy manufacturing equipment, are turning out machine guns and assault rifles and other sophisticated weapons by the millions? And they can't be located and shut down?

Those are just some of the questions that have popped into my head at various times, making me believe that some capable journalists -– there are some left, though their numbers are dwindling rapidly -– really need to look hard look at the weapons business.

Wish I could say I expect that to happen.

Guns 3: Dangerous people

2009-04-24T15:01:00.000-07:00

This country needs to take a really good look at its semi-underground gun culture.

It probably needs two such investigations, one by some official organization, preferably under Congressional sponsorship, and one by a team, or several teams, of thorough and courageous journalists -– if such can still be found.

Both probes would have to be separate from the even more immediately needed hard looks at the business of manufacturing and selling the kinds of weapons that have as their only purpose the killing of humans. To try to combine serious investigations of the weapons business and the culture of gun nuts who, knowingly or not, front for the killing industries would be simply too big, and too likely to confuse issues.

The American gun culture harbors a lot of seriously disturbed people who, I strongly believe, are of more immediate danger to us, individually and collectively, than any group of overwrought religionists camped among the stony hills and valleys of Pakistan or Afghanistan.

Just seek out their publications and Web sites and read what they say, especially in comments posted with articles about supposed government plots to ban guns, or keep ammunition off the market, or the attempts they are absolutely certain “Barack Hussein” -- a frequent usage -- is going to make to ban all firearms in this country. You'll find a lot of calls for armed revolution and reminders that if anyone crosses them, “we have guns.”

“Maybe it's time to revolt and rid this union of socialists and communists, peacefully if possible but with force when all else fails,” said “Kevin, a Gun Owner” on “KeepAndBearArms.com. He also suggested that House Speaker Pelosi “is an outright idiot, she should be tarred and feathered and sent packing on a rail.”

On the same site, someone identified only as Tim quoted J.Edgar Hoover at length, warning of “a defiant, and lawless communist party, which is fanatically dedicated to the Marxist cause of world enslavement and destruction of the foundations of our Republic.”

In fact, the belief in an international communist conspiracy to take over the United States, abetted by Jews and civil rights organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, is alive and well in the world of gun nuts.

The rants quoted above are among the more civil I saw. Some sites are little more than collections of obscene, hate-filled ravings against practically everyone who can in any way be called “liberal,” with special attention these days for Barack Obama. The president frequently is characterized as an agent of Islam, plotting to destroy the united States. I'm none too delicate about “bad” language, as regular readers know, but I would not quote here much of what I've read recently on the gun-nut Web sites.

There are a whole lot of potential Timothy McVeighs out there, folks, and since November 2008 election they seem to have shaken loose all the bolts that held them, however tenuously, to the floor of reality.

We need reporters to start digging and to report back to the public on who those people are and what they're really about -– and what they're about is not simple support for “Second Amendment rights,” despite the propaganda put out for general consumption.

What most people know of the gun culture, of course, is the National Rifle Association, which generally is seen as a benign supporter of hunters and sport shooters and from a liberal point of view, a somewhat over-zealous defender of “Second Amendment rights.”

A bit of nosing through books and current information on the Web suggests strongly to me –- supporting an impression I've had since I was a kid who did a lot of shooting and hunting -– that the NRA is a well-structured front for the gun makers and peddlers. Not the “defense industry,” but the people who provide the millions of weapons that magically find their way into the hands of huge criminal organizations, terrorist organizations, drug cartels and various other violently criminal mobs.

It is a machine for the production of brilliant propaganda, obfuscations, lies and double talk, and perhaps the biggest and most successful organizer of ignorant, paranoid suckers since the Third Reich died in a bunker.

Sporting guns and pheasant hunting ain't in it folks, and though many of the NRA's less involved members and adherents think of it as a support organization for sportsmen, it hasn't made a very serious effort to operate on that front for quite awhile now.

Oh, it still supports gun-safety programs for youth and such things, but those pretty much run themselves with volunteers, and don't seem to occupy much of the attention of the organization's paid operatives.

Also, it's simple fact that only the most paranoid of gun nuts think there is even the remotest possibility that any politicians in this country are out to take away hunters' shotguns and rifles. We all know that is never going to happen, and the vast majority of us would object powerfully if anyone tried.

Nope. What the NRA is about -– listen to any of its officers' speeches, catch interviews with them on TV, read any of their numerous articles –- is defending the “right” to purchase man-killing weapons and their ammunition. AK47s and bullets designed to tear up the insides of a living being hit by them, are not useful in the world of skeet shooting or hunting, folks. They're not much use, either, to a competitive shooter. Skiers don't carry fully automatic guns on their backs in the biathlon.

NRA officials dance delicately around the purpose of advanced human-killing weaponry. They generally turn the inevitably timid questioning of reporters on that subject to DEFENDING THE SECOND AMENDMENT. (Yeah, that's generally spoken in the verbal equivalent of capital letters.)

We have a RIGHT to “bear arms,” doncha see, and what might be done with them is something we shouldn't really discuss.

Quick fact: The NRA often trumpets the fact that it was founded in 1871. What it is less noisy about is the other salient fact about its beginnings: It was from its first day focused on supporting the ownership of military weapons by those whom we might now characterize as right-wing and anti-government. The organizers and officers of the organization through its early years were downright disdainful of “sportsmen,” historians say. Guns were for support of a certain way of life.

Some people connect the early organization with the Ku Klux Klan, but, to date, I haven't seen any evidence to that effect.

What is a demonstrable fact is that the NRA regularly puts out the most blatant lies imaginable to stir up its members and other gun nuts and make them and the wider public believe that good, honest folk are in danger of having their guns taken away. Any suggestion of regulating the manufacture and sale of any kind of weapon is taken as such a threat.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, the NRA blatantly lied about Barack Obama in its publications, in advertising and in every media it uses. The organization claimed that the then-candidate had a “10-point plan” to strip Americans of their guns. The claim was entirely fiction. Obama always has taken a very soft approach to gun control, suggesting only registration of handguns and restrictions on the sale of military style automatic weapons. He doesn't go anywhere near far enough for most liberals.

It's safe to say that most NRA members, and many others, still believe that Obama is a would-be confiscator of guns.

But the NRA is far too soft for the real gun nuts. They often rail on the Web sites of other gun organizations about the NRA's willingness to occasionally, and very slightly, compromise with Congress when it comes up with some toothless plan to keep heavy weapons out of the hands of the blatant madmen.

(I just read an on-line debate on whether people who have been diagnosed with severe mental illness should be prevented from obtaining weapons. The pros and cons seemed fairly evenly divided. Some writers thought “rights” come first, some allowed that maybe certain kinds of diagnoses should preclude gun ownership – although in such cases, the people in question should be locked up anyway.)

The thing is, the Second Amendment debate is phony.

What most of the country believes now – that there is an honest question of whether that amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees individuals the right to own whatever weapons they choose to have – is false.

That even most people who hope for some gun control believe it is an open question is the NRA's greatest success -– a triumph of false propaganda, a tribute to Joseph Goebbels assertion that some lies are too big not to be believed by an ignorant public.

Go to http://www.fair.org and look for a September/October 1996 article by Howard Friel, headlined “How the NRA Rewrote the Constitution.” You may have to go to an archives or advanced search page to find the article.

What it says, clearly and with considerable grounding, is that courts, including appeals courts, in this country have issued what the writer designates “an unbroken chain” of decisions over (then) six decades ruling that the Second Amendment does not confer an individual right to possess firearms. That “well regulated militia” mentioned in the amendment means exactly what it appears to mean.

The U.S. Supreme Court has never directly addressed individual gun ownership, at least not until the recent decision of the Bush court to strike down Washington, D.C.'s strong gun control law. But that decision, declaring the Washington regulations “over broad,” avoided the central issue of what the Second Amendment really means. It left room for substantial restrictions on gun possession and use.

With a substantial number of Bush appointees on the bench now -– some of them, such as torture promoter Jay Bybee, with worse than doubtful qualifications -– the legal battle may get rougher before long.

In the meantime, you will observe that our captive establishment news media inevitably behave as though the NRA interpretation of the law -– a false interpretation -– is correct or at least probably correct. They never, and I do mean never, mention the long history of judicial decisions declaring that there is no individual right to weapons.

But, a reminder: Very few Americans, and no politicians I know of, want to take anyone's sporting guns away. As for some of the psychotic paranoids whose writings I've been reading on the gun sites: we have to talk about strongly controlling the kinds of heavy-duty military weapons they favor.

Ken Poplawski, who killed three Pittsburgh policemen April 4 with an AK-47, was a guy very like those who spew hate daily on numerous gun-lover Web sites. As noted in Salon.com on April 7, he “believed that the United States was controlled by a secret Jewish cabal that had a master plan to abrogate freedom of speech and use the U.S. military to police Americans.”

I saw that very proposition mentioned five or six times on gun-lover sites the day I wrote this essay.

Car companies: Save or not save?

2009-04-07T10:46:00.000-07:00

It's terrible to contemplate the lost jobs and the resulting suffering that the failures of the American auto industry have brought to our country.

If you understand what has happened, it's also impossible not to be angry -– no, furious –- at the foolish, narrow-minded, short-sighted, greedy executives who have killed or nearly killed what once was our greatest industry.

In some ways, they have been even more bullheaded and misdirected than their counterparts in the world of finance.

The auto industry, for one thing, had more and clearer warnings about their impending downfall than did the bankers, brokers and insurance grubbers, and the warnings started years earlier. Also, the essential part of what needed to be done was obvious to anyone with no more than an average ability to navigate life.

Lee Iacocca's 2007 book, “Where Have All the Leaders Gone?” was very clear about the fact that the industry had too many models, too many brands and too little awareness of the future, for example, but it was far from the first such warning. Many people wrote and talked in recent years about the need to improve quality and to begin shifting production from gas-guzzling behemoths to smaller, more efficient vehicles.

With the blind arrogance that is virtually the signature attribute of American corporate executives, but is multiplied by ten in the car business, the auto bosses refused to hear what they did not like.

The extreme right of the Republican Party –- which is to say, the people in control of that party –- now claims that it's all the fault of the people who do, or did, the physical work of building the vehicles. If they hadn't made solid, middle-class livings, and had good health care coverage, and livable pensions, the industry would have been just fine, in their absurd rewriting of the facts.

Just Monday (April 6), my local birdcage liner carried an op-ed piece by the Chicago Tribune's Steve Chapman declaring that President Obama is wrong to try to save the American car makers, mainly because their downfall would/will take down the unions. To Chapman and his ilk, anything that will do major damage to labor unions is wonderful, regardless of how badly others, and the country itself, are hurt. Their belief in the rights of the very rich to rule unchallenged is religious in its depth and passion.

But here's a rub: If you know what has happened, it's impossible not to be more than a little angry at the auto workers, too.

That's not because they managed through their unions to get good pay and good benefits –- I don't know when in this country it became evil to get a decent hunk of the profits from what you produce, somehow wrong to get enough of the pie to live comfortably –- but because they too solidly backed the self-destructive moves of the people who ran the companies they worked for.

How often over the years did you see the “buy American,” anti-Japanese bumper stickers and hear rants from union officials, and rank-and-file workers about it being anti-American to refuse to buy Detroit junk even though much better products were available at better prices?

We all saw the angry lectures on television, and several times I heard, in person, union members ranting about how buying Hondas and Toyotas was little short of criminal when we could purchase rattling, rust-prone Pontiacs, and Buicks with mushy suspension and sloppy steering, and Fords with windshields that tended to crack once a month, and uselessly gigantic vehicles that got less than ten miles to a gallon of gasoline.

Of course, the ranters didn't mention the innumerable faults, just that somehow it was our duty to pay excessive sums for the garbage rolling out of American factories.

Here folks, git yerselves a nice a three-ton Yugo. Only $52,000. How about a shiny version of the Lada that gets maybe 19 miles per gallon on the highway on a good day; only $37,000.

Up until quite recently, auto industry unions had enough clout that they could have asserted pressure on the companies to build better, more efficient, more reasonably priced vehicles. Instead, they added their voices to the chorus of industry denial and refusal.

Personally, I'm not sure what I want to see happen with the auto makers.

America should make things, not just shovel money -– or, rather, computer numbers that represent money –- from one place to another. And Americans should have the opportunity for work that provides solid incomes, security, health care and decent homes and, equally important, for jobs that provide them with the pride and satisfaction of producing something useful, something that works and has a real purpose.

If the American auto industry is ready to buckle down to designing and producing vehicles that we need and want now, I'll blow the horn for government support, and back politicians who will fight to make the industry whole and well again.

Sadly, there's no sign that it's ready. American car companies, and oil companies and some unions, fought to prevent Congress from mandating the present very modest goal of average fleet fuel consumption of 35 miles per gallon by 2020 – eleven years from now. European cars surpassed that goal a few years ago; they now average better than 40 miles per gallon and are improving annually.

(A grinding kicker to those mileage facts: According to a report by MSNBC.com, two-thirds of the 113 most fuel-efficient car models sold in Europe but not available in this country are made by American car companies or by foreign manufacturers with large sales in the U.S. -- companies such as Toyota and Nissan.)

Even more sadly, it is not at all clear that Americans –- American industry, or what's left of it -– still have enough of our self-proclamed “knowhow” plus the will to be able, in this country, to design and build attractive cars that also are fuel efficient.

There's quite a stink among the true believers of the right about the firing of General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner, and quite a few people not on the right are wondering by what authority the Obama administration told Wagoner to take a hike.

“Unprecedented” is a word being thrown around frequently, but inaccurately. You may recall that the government also demanded new top executives for AIG, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

By what right? When it's public money, the government has the right. Obama was perfectly correct, I believe, in saying that if General Motors wanted more taxpayer dollars, it would first have to replace Wagoner, who was obstinate beyond any semblance of reason in his adherence to the cult of big and inefficient vehicles.

Wagoner was a force behind the commercialization of the Hummer at exactly the wrong time in history, as noted a few days ago by Frank Rich of the New York Times, and he pushed hard for still greater reliance on huge SUVs exactly at the time the market finally began to shift toward more affordable, fuel efficient and less polluting vehicles.

The problem is that getting rid of the chief executive of one of the Former Big Three is a useless gesture if much more isn't done quickly. Wagoner -– a Harvard MBA, not surprisingly -– is a career General Motors guy. Most of the people on the next few management levels below him also are career GM guys. And the same thing applies, for the most part, at Ford and Chrysler.

Car company culture is as deeply embedded as it is wrongheaded. Everyone who has any power has been brought up in the business, and the people who have advanced are those who bought in entirely to the beliefs of the people who have run the companies for decades. Scorn is heaped on fuel efficient, small and inexpensive. Big and powerful is good. Bigger the better. Trends? Fugeddaboudit.

The Minneapolis Auto Show occupied the city's Convention Center for more than a week in late March. GM North American Vice President Mark LaNeve showed up late in the show's run to dispense wisdom to dealers and the press. He was quoted in the Star Tribune as saying that while the company has “introduced an onslaught of new fuel-efficient and crossover cars” GM is “already the truck leader, and we plan to stay there.”

LaNeve also declared that “Americans are not naturally inclined to buy small cars,” although he allowed that “they want good fuel mileage.”

Translated: GM is slowly and reluctantly bringing out some fuel-efficient cars, but with nowhere near the mileage easily available from foreign brands, or even from its own brand in Europe. It's idea of “good fuel mileage” for North America is to build hybrid SUVs that will do better than the usual nine miles to the gallon, but still only in the low 20s per gallon, at best.

Oh, and a big reason that Americans, to this point, have not wanted small cars is decades of relentless car company advertising pushing the false belief that bigger cars are better, strong and safer than standard-sized models. The industry's general line of advertising has been on a par with 1940s and '50s cigarette ads for honesty.

As it happened, I was at the Auto Show at the peak hours on its first Saturday, a few days before LaNeve showed up. Attendance was much smaller than I'd seen at previous shows -– I'm something of a car buff, and go to auto shows whenever I'm in the neighborhood –- and it was obvious that other attendees were mostly ignoring the big vehicles while paying very close attention to vehicles such as the new version of Honda's small hybrid and the Fit and Ford Focus.

Those who are concerned about style and pizzazz were paying a lot of attention to the Mini Cooper, and one or two other sporty little things. Almost everybody I saw walked past the big SUVs without a glance, or if they did glance, tended to shake their heads in a “they don't get it” way.

The only, and I do mean only, large vehicle that caught any serious attention during the two hours I wandered the building was a General Motors concept car, which was interesting, although no one expects to see it on the road.

Folks, the people who run the American car companies really, seriously, do not get it.

So now what?

Damned if I know, but the conversation is important and should not be left to the politicians, union haters and the awesomely out of touch industry executives who brought their companies down. Tens of thousands of jobs and even, possibly, the direction of our economy are at stake.

There is space here for thoughtful suggestions that could be passed on to those in power.

Senate race: Enough already

2009-04-03T13:38:00.000-07:00

Minnesotans are inclined to let the election process take its course, and so we've been patient beyond reason with the drawn out battle to determine a winner in the U.S. Senate race between right wing Republican Norm Coleman and Al Franken, whose position on the left-to-right scale is pretty much unknown.

(Republicans, of course, scream that Franken is a lefty extremist, probably somewhere near Leon Trotsky is his views. That's just for the nutter “base.” In fact, he's probably too far to the right for genuine liberals. He has thus far refused to back a single-payer health care system, for example, and there are indications that he'll join fellow Minnesota Democrat Amy Klobuchar in slavish support of Israel, regardless of what evils it perpetrates.)

But the election is over. It's time to put away patience and start yelling.

It's been apparent for weeks now that the Republicans know perfectly well Coleman lost. The continued court charade has one purpose only: To keep Minnesota from getting its full representation in Congress, given that the newly elected senator is a Democrat. Coleman's own legal team admits they've lost. Some Republican officials also admit it, but, of course, their claim these days –- height of irony -– is that any election won by a Democrat was “stolen.”

Flat fact: We elected a Democrat, they don't want another Democrat in the Senate so long as they can prevent him from being seated. Democracy? Screw it. Full representation for Minnesotans? Screw it. Just keep the Democrat out as long as the courts allow the game to continue. It's the Republican Way.

Norm Coleman's career in elected office is over. He and the Republican machine know that, too. After the election court debacle, he probably couldn't be elected to the Apple Valley city council – although that may be overstating the case. At any rate, he couldn't be elected to any state-wide office or any Congressional seat except, no doubt, the one on which the incomparably ridiculous Michele Bachmann already squats like some crazed Easter bunny on a sparrow's nest.

There's no doubt that Coleman and those whom he really serves have come to some agreement about his reward for continuing the act; we'll learn what that is after the curtain finally drops.

But, c'mon folks. Enough is enough. Continuation of the farce should cost the Republicans more than legal fees. It should cost them votes, it should bring down a hard rain of contempt on the entire party.

You can email Minnesota party headquarters at Info@mngop.com. Better yet, email Republican State Chairman Ron Carey at Chairman@mngop.com

Keep it short, keep it clean, but make it bite.

Management: The book not written

2009-03-15T09:09:00.000-07:00

For more than 30 years, I kept notes on the silliness, childish attitudes, wrong-headed assumptions, dishonesty, greed and frequent over-the-top stupidities of American business leadership.

Oh, yes: I also took notes when I ran across a genuinely intelligent and able business leader, but the stack of those notes was thin by comparison. The truly intelligent and mature top executives, and I did encounter some great ones, are stuck in my mind yet; they were shining rarities.

As a business and economics reporter who consistently dealt with the top levels of management in many industries, but especially financial businesses, I had plenty of opportunity for observation.

I planned for most of those years to spend some considerable amount of post-retirement time writing what I intended to be a funny but scathing book about corporate management.

Just a couple of months after retiring from full-time newspaper work, however, I decided (a.) I didn't want to spend any more time with or on the people who wear the big titles in American big business, (b.) there is no way to make a dent in their thick skulls anyway, and (c.) neither our politicians nor the average worker has the guts to take them on, so such a work would be a complete waste of my time at worst, and at best merely fuel for employee grumbling that was almost constant anyway.

In truth, most Americans admire and actually fawn on the rich and powerful, no matter how cretinous.

Out went the notes, and away went the responsibility I had laid on myself for producing the book.

Now and then I still get the urge to smack some executives upside the head, of course, and that feeling grew much stronger and more frequent over the past few years, as it became ever more apparent that they were leading us into an economic disaster that didn't have to happen.

So let me summarize in a tiny fraction of the space, and without the hundreds of items of specific evidence, the conclusions of my 40-plus years of reporting and editing:

The American management class is made up, in vast majority, of dimwitted, ignorant cowards who, while dodging genuine responsibility at every turn, believe themselves to be the best, brightest and bravest heroes in all the land. Delusion is, in fact, their most characteristic flaw.

Nothing is sillier than the constant bleating about the rarity of management talent – bleating that has become even louder in the face of our economic meltdown and the accompanying incontrovertible proof that the people at the top of our financial institutions and most of the rest of our corporations have been wrong about almost everything they have done, said or preached throughout their grotesquely over-paid careers.

Those guys still claim with straight faces that they have to pay themselves and each other and their little vice presidential toadies and market manipulators huge sums of money in order to retain “management talent” that might otherwise go elsewhere. (Where they might go in this stinking swamp of failure is left unsaid.)

The degree to which any of the claimants believes what he is saying about the need for “retention compensation” is a measure of his intellectual incapacity. The degree to which he's just blowing diversionary smoke is yet another measure of his crookedness.

For a solid, clear analysis of the falsity of financial industry executive claims that the present mess is someone else's fault and that they couldn't have done anything different from what they did, see the op-ed piece by William D. Cohan in the March 12 New York Times. Cohan nails it.

Speaking of the banking and brokerage hotshots, Cohan says: “Could these Wall Street executives have made other, less risky choices? Of course they could have, if they had been motivated by something other than absolute greed.”

At another point, after laying down more evidence, Cohan says, “So enough already with the charade of Wall Street executives pretending not to know what really happened and why.”

Hear! Hear!

Much the same thing could be said about auto industry executives who are now playing along with the right-wing flapjaws who, with the goal of using our present economic crisis to further weaken labor unions, are trying to lay the near collapse of that industry at the feet of the manufacturing plant employees who actually make (or made) the cars.

Again, along with dishonesty, delusion: A great many top executives have been coddled, feted and had their behinds kissed so regularly and amorously for so long that they really believe themselves infallible. Ergo, all mistakes must have been committed by someone else.

Before some unreconstructed right winger emails me:

Your question is, “If they're so bad, how come the companies did so well for so long?” The answer, though possibly not simple enough for those who can think only in bumper sticker terms, is not all that complicated:

First, a great many companies, including almost all of our big banks and the American auto makers, profited mightily, but temporarily, by following models that had no chance of long-term functioning. There simply was no way that the mortgage-based securities could go on producing profits indefinitely; collapse was inevitable, and many people recognized that even though the bank leaders did not – or would not.

There was no way that the American manufacturers' refusal to recognize environmental needs and the coming collapse of gas-guzzling behemoths could lead to anything but a sales implosion. Most of the world could see that; auto company executives shut their eyes to it.

Secondly, it takes no genius to profit in an up market. It took some sense and perspective to recognize that the decades of credit spending that kept the American economy moving so swiftly for so long had to slow drastically at some not-too-distant point. Almost no American corporate executives had that sense or perspective.

Neither did they have the sense to realize that their taking bigger and bigger pieces of the economic pie for themselves while using their purchased politicians to squeeze the incomes of the vast majority of the world's people inevitably would lead at some point to a huge dropoff in markets for the crap they peddled.

Along with delusional thinking, another of the primary characteristics of American corporate management is cowardice – particularly a paralyzing fear of doing anything that everyone else isn't doing and a terror of taking honest responsibility for one's decisions and actions. Evidence has turned up showing that some bankers were aware that the sub-prime mortgage market was going to cave in soon, but lacked the guts to pull out while all the other banks were still playing the crooked game. They didn't want to face their directors, even though they owned the directors, and talk about why they were “passing up profits.”

Do you know what the enormous growth of university MBA programs in recent decades is really about?

The simple, but essentially accurate, answer is that it is yet another manifestation of corporate executives' desire to lay off responsibility onto “experts.” I'll say more about that in an upcoming essay, but for now leave it at this: Everything that can be taught about managing people and businesses – to someone who has the capacity to learn – can be taught in less than a day. The rest is technical detail, the deconstructing of normal morality and replacing it with an insanely inhumane template for business, and providing elaborate lessons in how to create excuses for failure.

More evidence of the fear of simple decision making is found in the fact that for as long as I can remember – and that's a long way back – American corporations and executives and would-be executives have jumped on one “management” fad after another. There have been dozens of such fads, perhaps 30 or 40 over the time since I first started following business and economics as a reporter.

There was the period – what? maybe 25 years ago now – when everybody who wanted to be somebody or thought he was somebody in the American corporate world read at least two books about the wonders of the Japanese management style. That was before Japan's rigidly structured economy went into a decade-long tailspin, of course.

A few of the others that come to mind: Quality circles, Total Quality Management, Matric Management, Term-Based Management, Peak Performance (whatever that was), and two or three types of “re -engineering.” A quick Google search will turn up a couple dozen more such bits of nonsense.

And every one of those fads produced very high-paying work for “consultants.” Of course, some “consultants” didn't need such a fad. They had their little niches that could be used in conjunction with whatever the flavor-of-the-month management style was – speech consulting, appearance consulting, consulting on how to make a presentation, and on and on and on.

All of those vacuous ideas, and all of that consultant money had and has one purpose: To absolve executives from responsibility and to push the onus of making decisions onto someone or something else.

The only proper response to the claims that some executive is worth millions or even tens of millions of dollars a year for his (or, rarely, her) management skills is a ripe tomato in the kisser followed by a severance notice.

A personal story; bankers are idiots

2009-03-09T17:23:00.000-07:00

You can hardly have a conversation these days that doesn't at some point include angry mention of bankers.

The anger is about the taxpayer bailout of banks and the fact that the same dribbling idiots who brought the banks and our economy to ruin are still in charge of those institutions, drawing down their millions in annual pay for incompetent and profligate performance.

Count me among those who are enraged by the fact that the bailouts have not included, as a requirement for payment, that at least the top three layers of management of the bad banks be fired.

(I'll write more on this soon, but do not believe the crapola about management talent being so rare that we must keep those people. In any substantial institution, there are dozens, in the really big ones even hundreds, of people well below the levels of top management who are smarter and better qualified than the top officers to run the organization. The nature of top executive selection in large American corporations guarantees that almost all of said corporations will be headed by jackassess, albeit jackassess of good appearance and impressive demeanor.)

I just was touched, personally, by a bank –- a bailed out bank -– in such a way as to demonstrate the ingrained foolishness of our MBA-addled management class and the wrongheadedness of corporate culture in this country.

It's a more personal story than I'm comfortable telling, and it reflects badly on my judgment, but it so perfectly exemplifies one type of nuttiness plaguing our banks and other big corporations that I'm going to tell it anyway.

For a goodly number of years –- I'm not sure how many, but at least 15, probably 20 or more –- my wife and I have had a U.S. Bank credit card.

U.S. Bank is the lead bank of U.S. Bancorporation, which recently sold $6.6 billion in preferred stocks and warrants (junk, in plain language) to the government. That “sale” was part of the bailout program.

Frankly, embarrassingly and carelessly, I let the balance on that card climb to a substantial (for us) level. Like so many others, I've been busy trimming monthly expenses over the past year, and figured to get to that card balance very soon. The balance came from a series of unexpected but necessary house repairs and our penchant for travel.

I wasn't overly bothered, not as bothered as I should have been, because, due to our very high credit score and top-of-the-heap credit rating, our interest rate on the card balance was less than 8 percent. That's real money, but not terrible in this day.

About two weeks ago, I paid slightly more than half the card balance, with the intention of making another substantial payment when this month's bill arrives.

A week ago, I received a notice from U.S. Bank that it is raising the interest rate on our card balance, as of April 1, to 20.99 percent. From, effectively, 8 percent to 21 percent -- a near tripling of the interest rate to a level that in most times and in most places would be classified as usury and would be illegal. But, of course, over the past 30 years or so, all usury laws have been erased by our governors and those they serve.

I called the “customer service” department of the bank and demanded an explanation. Today, as I write this, I got a brief note claiming that the near-tripling of the interest rate on our card balance was because of “late payments” and our having gone over the card credit limit.

Since I am never late with payments on any bill, and could recall no time at which our charges went over the card's limit, I started digging through my files. None of our bills for the past 15 months showed a balance over the limit, and none that I could find indicated late payment. So I called the bank again.

My mistake. It turns out that, undoubtedly because the mail was slower than I expected, two times last year my payments were two days late. And once, because of an automatic charge that I had forgotten about, the bank claims that I once went over the credit limit for two days –- although I believe that is wrong, given the balances recorded on my bills and the size of the charge in question.

But my mistake anyway. The rules of cut-throat American business mean one should never play it so close as to allow the possibility of a mail delay causing a late payment and never get within $1,000 of your credit limit on anything (or, probably, within $200 if your credit limit is $1,000 or less).

This has done my wife and I real damage. The reports from U.S. Bank have reduced us from an A credit score to a C-plus score, a very thin hair below a B score. Presumably that is temporary, but it could last a long time simply because credit issuers of all types believe it is to their advantage to charge as much as they can get from anybody at any time.

In America today, long-term high performance counts for nothing, and no slack is allowed for minor error, even by customers of many years.

The American management credo calls for gouging whenever and wherever possible. Grab what you can and to hell with relationships, common sense or mitigating factors.

Of course I knew that, and the carelessness was mine.

Being, still, more fortunate than the rapidly growing majority of Americans, I will pay off the U.S. Bank credit card this month. We will never use that card again. We won't cancel it, of course, because in the nasty wonderland of American banking, your credit rating is reduced for canceling a card account. But we won't use the damned thing again. Ever.

And what has U.S. Bank gained from its practice and from harming us, its long-term customers?

Well, it will receive no more interest on the credit card in question. Rather than slightly less than 8 percent on balances that tend to rise and fall with the events of our lives, it will get no interest because there will never again be a balance.

If my wife and I were in the financial shape of what now is a substantial majority of Americans, we probably would stop using that card, but we'd go on paying 21 percent interest on the balance. No doubt that is happening to many people. But a growing number of such people won't be able to reduce balances while paying such usurious rates, and, eventually, literally millions will give up trying.

The result of such vicious banking practices must lead to increased bankruptcies. It cannot be otherwise.

In the long run, the banks will lose.

But it doesn't matter to them. They can't see such obvious facts. The culture and the boobs at the top demand that the banks gouge and grab until there is nothing left to grab.

I'm grateful that I'm still able to step away and give them the proverbial raised middle digit in parting.

A final note: Today I received in the mail from U.S. Bank several checks, which could be used to draw against our credit card account. It offered a 1.9 percent interest rate on any balance we might create by using those checks –- unless there should be a late payment, of course, or it rains on a Thursday after a new moon, or the bank president's dog gets fleas. The bank sends us such checks several times a year. We never have used one. Never will. This batch has already gone through the shredder.

Execs err, employees are supposed to pay

2009-02-21T19:39:00.000-08:00

The publisher of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Chris Harte, is outraged that the 116 members of the now flabby, right-leaning newspaper's pressman's union have thus far refused to agree to major cuts in pay and work rule changes that would significantly weaken their protections against overwork, forced overtime and similar abuses.

Avista Capital Partners, a New York investment (read financial speculation) firm that bought the Star Tribune in 2007, put the paper into a Chapter 11 bankruptcy a couple of months ago. It now is asking the federal bankruptcy court to cancel the pressmen's labor contract on the grounds that the union has failed “to enter serious negotiations for concessions needed because of a sharp decline in advertising revenue as well as debt from the 2007s acquisition...”

So the Strib's own reporter, David Phelps, said in a Nov. 20 story in the publication's business section.

In truth, the Avista move, and Harte's outrage -- Phelps called it “frustration” but the stronger feelings came through in the story -– are new, but hardly unexpected, examples of outrageous, jaw-dropping arrogance on the part of the lords of the universe class.

It is right up there with the chief executives of auto manufacturers flying to Washington on separate, hugely expensive private aircraft to beg for government money to hold off self-created ruin. It easily matches $100,000 office rugs and million dollar office redecoration for sheer, stupid gall.

Those guys, too, are angry because anyone dares to question their right to such goodies.

Harte's snit demonstrates, with no chance of misunderstanding, the sense of entitlement and superiority ingrained in the minds of the Avista speculators and corporate strippers.

The country is teetering on the edge of a depression that may exceed the misery of the 1930s. The great majority of the population is hurting financially and millions of people are falling into desperate straits, but the Avista guys think others should pay the cost of their stupidities.

To fully understand, the public needs to know some things that weren't in Phelps' story.

Avista bought the Strib from the McClatchy Company for $530 million. Avista borrowed most of the purchase price. It is what the business world, never fond of straight talk, calls a leveraged buyout.

Nobody among Avista's principals had ever before been involved in the news business, and it was clear none of them had any interest in journalism.

The almost-clearly-stated goal of the Avista crowd and Harte, who owns slightly more than 4 percent of the Strib, was to strip the newspaper company of major assets, such as real estate –- sell off the land, buildings and anything else with cash value –- and reduce operating costs by slashing staff, then sell what is left of the poor old rag to some sucker who wants to try running a newspaper.

If the Strib were a stand-alone business it would be profitable today. It reported an operating profit of $31 million for 2008. That's before taxes and other payments, so without Avista and Harte, as a stand alone business, its net profit would have been less than that -– but it would have shown a net profit.

What put it into Chapter 11, and what may put the Star Tribune out of business, is the enormous debt that Avista stuck it with. The company is strangling on those loan payments.

Harte and the rest of the Avista crowd miscalculated as badly as the boobs who run the big banks and brokerage houses. Like those other bozos, the Avista geniuses assumed that the money would just keep rolling in and their speculations would go on floating forever on tainted air.

Now Harte, and no doubt the rest of the Avista crowd, are outraged, yes outraged, that the pressmen don't much feel like cutting themselves out of the middle class to rescue the fools who put their livelihoods, and what was one of the country's best newspapers, in jeopardy.

I'm truly sad to say it -– I loved the Strib most of the years I worked there, and for most of my life before I worked there –- but it may be the best thing for everybody, including the beleaguered employees, if Harte and Avista go under, even if they take the Strib with them.

After all the moaning and whining, the United States will have newspapers. Minneapolis will have a newspaper. The Strib soon will be little more than a shell anyway, and it's outright collapse probably will hasten the day that someone who actually knows how to run a newspaper will show up.

As for Harte and his money-playing partners:

Really, they should shut up and take what's coming to them without trying to squeeze more out of the newspaper's dedicated employees, who are hurting badly enough but will hurt much more before this is over.

Bankers contrite? Not a chance

2009-02-03T08:54:00.000-08:00

It's almost impossible at times to keep from laughing out loud as people from Barack Obama to my neighborhood handyman complain about bank executives and other big shots who continue to pay themselves big bonuses and buy fancy private jets even as they suck up billions of dollars of tax money.

People are astonished that the billionaires “just don't get it.” The bankers and industrialists are supposed to be contrite and to accept more modest pay, say my neighbors. The bankers and brokers have behaved “unconscionably” in continuing to pay themselves big bucks, says our new president.

Ya gotta chuckle, at least.

To be clear:

Ladies and gentlemen, the top level bank executives and stock peddlers and auto manufacturing executives and Ponzi scheme operators are not even slightly sorry about anything they have done. Given the opportunity –- as they hope and expect -– they will do it all again, but to still greater gain for themselves.

They will take the taxpayer billions and use it to benefit themselves to the greatest degree possible; it is what is right, in their unshakable view of the world. They are furious at suggestions that the public should get some stake in their enterprises merely for bailing them out to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

They are deeply annoyed, and even angry, that anyone out here in the jungle dares to question them on anything. They are mostly –- not all and not entirely –- holding their tongues about criticism from the public, but they're even angrier that politicians they own have the effrontery to criticize of their behavior. That some politicians dare to suggest ways to rein them in through renewed regulation and rules on executive pay is outrageous as far as the masters of the universe are concerned.

In their own eyes, those masters have made no mistakes, other than a few very minor public relations errors, such as auto company CEOs flying separate private jets to Washington for a congressional hearing. And, if you read their comments carefully, you realize that they are not at all sure even that was a mistake; private jets and $10,000-a-night hotel suites are simply part of what is due them.

They continue to do things like spending millions on redecorating their offices because in their eyes, such things are right and normal for people of their stature. That they continue to do them clearly demonstrates the depth of their belief in their own privilege.

They do not make mistakes, they are congenitally unable to make mistakes.

That is their genuine and deeply held belief.

If you don't understand that, you never will understand the battle just now beginning in Congress, in the media and in our society.

The surprise and outrage of citizens and politicians –- mostly faked on the part of the president and members of Congress, who know better -– is another demonstration of how little most Americans know about how things work in this country and about the people who run things here.

It may seem arrogant on my part to say that. I do understand that most people have not had my advantage in having worked for several decades at a job that kept me in close contact with the rich and powerful. I earned my living in part by conversing, in groups and often one-to-one, with many of the very rich and genuinely powerful, including the chief executives of some of our biggest banks and corporations. I talked frequently with many of the image shapers, apologists and intellectual gurus of the right and left, including several times with the greatest con man of all time, Milton Friedman, who remains a saint of the political right.

Still, there's plenty of readily-available information, even in the right-run corporate media, about who those people are and why they don't feel in the least contrite.

So put aside the bewilderment and surprise and deal with the fact that we will never get the slightest change in methods, beliefs or behavior, let alone contrition, from the very rich and powerful people of the corporate world. They and their MBA flunkies have a set of beliefs that will not change. Their talent for self-delusion and penchant for self-justification is equal to that of the Nazi generals.

They will not willingly accept any public control over their behavior. They will fight with every powerful weapon they have to prevent any increase of government regulation, or rules of conduct, or restrictions on executive compensation, or strengthening of the ability of unions to organize, or to increase their taxes or, indeed, to greatly limit the amount of our tax money, yours and mine, that flows to them, or even to establish some control over how they spend our tax money.

In fact, they are using our tax money this minute to shore up their power and undermine ours; a recent, back-of-the-paper article in the New York Times and a couple in small publications have noted that the banking/investment firms have substantially increased their lobbying efforts in Washington and in state capitals in recent weeks. Lobbying is expensive. The money comes from us.

Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, still they only effective and entirely accurate big-media critic of the banks, has pounded bank executives frequently, most recently Monday, Feb. 2, and is clear that they have been awesomely stupid.

Krugman also insists that public investment in the banks and their mostly worthless assets should give the public a powerful voice in how the banks' business is conducted henceforth. He seems to stand alone on that essential point, unless you count us no-count citizens.

But even Krugman has not to date called for firing the whole lot of idiots who created the desperate mess we, and the world, are in.

For the life of me, I can't see how anything can change, or how our economy or economies around the world can be saved unless we kick out every big-bank executive in the top three or four levels of the organizations' hierarchies. If the boss is a dangerous idiot, it is a given that so are almost all of the people he has allowed to rise to the heights in his organization. If you've ever worked for any kind of a corporation, you know that to be true.

When the bankers claim that they must pay huge bonuses to their people in order to “keep the best and brightest,” the only rational response is to laugh them out of the room. They and their “best and brightest” have driven our economy into the ground. That is the indisputable truth.

So why aren't we laughing, and, especially, why aren't our politicians laughing and the kicking the fat cats in their fat asses?

The Republicans, we understand. Those who are left are either mad ideologues or they are venal toadies who follow the orders of the people who bought them their positions, knowing that if they don't, they'll be thrown aside.

But the Democrats?

Most of them are as afraid as their Republican counterparts of the big money. Quite a few of them –- think Blue Dog (or dirty dog) Democrats -- have the intellectual capacity, depth of humanity and world understanding of cacti, and a majority appear to have no more spine than the night crawlers we Minnesotans use for walleye bait in the summer.

(Come to think of it, “bait” may be a more apt descriptor than I at first realized. Something to lure our votes, to sucker us into biting the hook.)

It may be possible yet to set things right and avert a depression that will make that of the 1930s look like a minor recession, but it will happen only if we hound the Democrats, including the new president and his crew, mercilessly. To get things right, we have to bombard their offices with snail mail, emails and phone calls, day after day, week after week. We must demand they throw the bums out, to insist that our interests, not the interests of the rich and presently all-powerful must be served.

How likely is that?

A pertinent comment from Albert Einstein, sent to me recently by friend and fellow journalist Lydia Howell:

“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”

-----------------------------

Remember how for years we were told by Republican Party people and business executives that what we desperately needed in government was business acumen?

“Government should be run on a businesslike basis,” we were told, and this or that Democratic candidate was unfit because “He has no business experience,” or “Doesn't know how to run anything; he's never run a business.” We should “model government on business,” ran the unending mantra.

I submit that the two politicians of the past 50 years who best exemplify American business are George W. Bush (incompetent but arrogant from his first day to his last) and Rod Blagojevich (public office acquired and held solely for the purpose of self-enrichment).

And you know what? The right is still preaching the same exhausted sermon; it's just that only a handful of loyal nutters are listening at the moment. But they'll be back.

A modest propsal for peace

2009-01-15T14:16:00.000-08:00

Obviously, I have been away from this blog for some time. It happens every year in December and January, and perhaps next year I'll just admit in advance that I can't keep up with holiday-time demands and continue to write frequently. At any rate, I hope to be back to normal frequency from now until the end of November of this year.

There is a workable solution to the central problem of the Middle East. I refer, of course, to the unending hatred between Israel's right wing, terrorist-born leaders and the equally murderous Islamic extremists who want Israel wiped out.

The solution is not obvious, at least to the great majority of Americans who get their ignorance fully cooked from this country's corporate “news” media, but more intelligent readers will grasp the concept when it is laid before them.

Therefore, with great humility, I lay it before you:

Probably the only possibly action that does not end with the annihilation of humankind, is to move Israel to what is now called Texas.

Other locations also could work, but Texas is by far the best.

Don't laugh.

Any objections that will at first occur to you are easily washed away by pure reason.

For example: Some readers may reflexively point out that Texas already is occupied and possesses a semblance of government.

So what?

In 1948, a western world steeping in guilt over what happened to European Jews under the sadistic madmen from Germany -- and wetting its pants in fear of the Irgun and other Zionist terrorists -- had no qualms about brushing aside the Arabic people who had occupied what was then Palestine for a thousand years or so.

We, the western world, simply declared that Palestine was, in a moment, Israel, a Jewish state. We allowed, indeed encouraged, the new country to strip the former residents of their homes, olive groves, gardens, and all livelihoods and drive them out. We nodded in understanding when the newly designated Israelis bulldozed entire villages and towns – often with no more than an hour's notice – and, indeed, occasionally gunned down men, women and children who were slow to get moving.

After all, who has more right to murder, torture and brutalize innocent human beings than those who, as innocent human beings, were murdered, tortured and otherwise brutalized by someone entirely different from their own victims. Vengeance on the not guilty, we could call it.

Why, do tell, should we treat Texas and Texans any differently?

In fact, the similarities between Palestine and Texas are striking.

It was widely said in western Europe and the United States in the late 1940s and early '50s that the people of Palestine were followers of a peculiar and suspect religion (that is, a religion different from those commonly practiced here). The word also spread widely that they had done little with the land they occupied -– there were hardly any tall buildings or supermarkets -- so it made sense to replace them with those whose religion was at least familiar to us and who would “turn the desert into a garden.”

Well, Texas is populated, to the extent it is, by people who mostly are at least nominal members of a peculiar religion –- it's called Southern Baptist, or Baptism or Baptistry or some such –- and who have done almost nothing useful with the property.

(Vulgar people and those who need to belittle others whom they would destroy in order to strengthen their sense of superiority are prone to call those peculiar religionists “water heads” or “dunkers.” We won't encourage that, but we will be understanding.)

We must declare that Southern Baptists have every right to their religion, and that it does not, in itself, make them wasters, drunks and prone to violence and pickup trucks. But, privately, we know that they are not the moral equals of Episcopalians, Methodists and Lutherans. Just look at the rates of divorce, domestic abuse and alcoholism.

But, religious rights aside, they must go.

It is fair to point out that while Texas has the shell of a democratic system of government, it does not, in fact, practice democracy -- which makes it very like both Israel and Hamas-ruled Gaza in respect to governance.

Evidence is everywhere.

Israel's Supreme Court ruled a couple of weeks ago that the Israeli government must allow news reporters into Gaza and give them room to move around and report what they see and learn. Israel's government and its military have refused to honor that ruling because they don't like it and “what the world doesn't know won't hurt us.” Thus, there is no rule of law. (There are dozens of other easily available examples of the dismissal of law.)

In Texas, legislators did not like the possibility of substantial numbers of their body being replaced through honest elections; the legislators redistricted the entire state so that liberals are permanently relegated to a safely small minority in their legislature and congressional delegation, regardless of the wishes of the wider population.

Equally, one of the people Texas sent to Washington –- the very one who chiefly engineered the redistricting, oddly enough -– was pretty much forced to avoid running for re-election after having been censured three times by colleagues in Washington and having been indicted for criminal activity. He, Tom DeLay, has been “awaiting” trial for three years, but no trial is in sight; it will not happen unless and until acquittal can be guaranteed before proceedings begin. Thus, there is no rule of law. Dozens of other examples can be found to support that statement.

So let's bring in the Israelis to drive out the beer-swilling, spouse beating water head fornicators and create a garden spot of the now largely wasted area called Texas.

But the region is part of the United States?

So what? We're not doing anything with it, certainly nothing that benefits mankind.

Some also may question where the Texans can go. That is no more a problem that was the relocation of Palestinians who, remember, occupied their homeland a whole lot longer than have today's Texans.

Push them over the borders into New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana, all of which are largely occupied by similar peoples. Better yet, drive them, as proud early American occupiers did the continent's native peoples, to places even more suited to their lazy, ignorant, unproductive lifestyles and weird religions.

Mississippi would be perfect.

As in the Middle East, some of those already occupying the other spaces may object to having large numbers of refugees thrust upon them, especially with no international help to sustain the newcomers, to feed and house them, but, hey, you can't make an omelet...

There are benefits to the plan beyond the obvious.

For one thing, Israel's population has grown very rapidly since we encouraged them to kick out and/or eliminate Palestinians in 1948. Various sources say most growth now is internal, rather than through immigration. Despite the generally effective methods previously mentioned, many Arabs/Palestinians remain within Israel's borders. The Arab population is growing more rapidly than the Jewish population, which scares the hell out of the ruling class of Israelis despite the fact that the Arab “citizens” are all but entirely disenfranchised and Israel is, officially, a Jewish state.

(Israel's government just adopted a law that makes Arab political parties illegal. See comments above about rule of law.)

From it's first day as an officially recognized country, the leaders of Israel admitted –- actually bragged -– that they had no intention of staying within the internationally declared borders. Almost all of the country's early leaders (many of whom were flat-out unrepentant terrorists) wrote of their intention to expand, although western journalists ignored their statements in that regard. Later political leaders have not repudiated the expansionist intent.

So, when we move Israel to Texas, we will leave the Palestinian/Arab residents to be absorbed again into the new Palestinian state, or protectorate or whatever it becomes. Not our problem.

Some Americans almost certainly will raise the question of cost. Even if we merely herd the present Texans on foot to their new locations, some cost is involved. And, of course, there will be a great cost attached to moving Israel to Texas.

I assure you it is not a problem.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful organization of Zionists who hold U.S. citizenship, raises enormous sums of money at the drop of a hat. That money now is mostly used to buy American politicians, control U.S. public opinion about Israel, abuse Palestinians and publicly castigate anyone with different views. The money can easily be shifted to the cause of moving Israel to Texas.

Using AIPAC for the cause has the additional great benefit of bringing great pressure to bear on anyone who might object to the relocation plan.

The American “news” media are terrified of taking any position not thoroughly supported by AIPAC. More, the organization's long-standing tactic of labeling anyone who opposes it on any subject as “antiSemitic” tends to intimidate into silence almost everyone who thinks of taking a stance contrary to the organization or Israel's right-wing government.

The citizens of New Israel will have far less population density than they now have so it should be a considerable number of years before they begin pushing at the United States to the north, east and west and Mexico to the south. Perhaps the additional land will, in fact, suffice until such point that later generations lose the expansionist desire. It's possible.

Unfortunately, it also is possible that former Texans –- known for their adoration of guns and violent recreation -- may begin sniping and firing rockets into New Israel from their new locations. In truth, it's almost a sure thing. But I'll leave that to other heads to explore. I've done my bit.

I'll also leave to more experienced and clever people the choosing of a new enemy.

Hamas, now in control in Gaza, has been presented as the new Al Quida, or Taliban, or, at any rate, the presently most-cited devil's disciple. And, indeed, Al Quida and the Taliban have long since lost their grip on the attention of the American public. Their place on the fear scale has slipped to the level of impotence. Hamas, as touted by Israel and the U.S. government, has kept American hearts palpitating, but Hamas recruitment will immediately sink to almost nothing as soon as Israel moves, and many of its present members will melt away. (Indeed, Hamas never would have existed without Israel's help.)

The American arms industry, fronted by right wing politicians and “pundits,” will require a new and frightening foe in order to maintain profits. But they've been completely successful over many years in manufacturing such foes as needed, and that success no doubt will continue.

------------------

Gaza, the center of the present conflict, has 1.5 million people held captive in 140 square miles. That's roughly 10,000 people per square mile. Imports of even essentials such as food and medical supplies, are greatly limited. The residents are not allowed to leave; Israel even denies visas to young people who have been accepted as students at foreign universities. Some sources say unemployment is more than 40 percent, and human rights organizations report that a very large percentage of the population is routinely malnourished.

Israel has a bit more than 7.3 million people in 7,850 square miles, a space about the size of new Jersey. That's about 935 people per square mile, although various demographic studies indicate that Arab residents are considerably more crowded than others.

Texas has 23.5 million people in 268,601 square miles – about 87.5 people per square mile. Lots of room.

Vote fraud hasn't disappeared

2008-11-11T10:56:00.000-08:00

Yes, I was wrong. Barack Obama was elected, and rather handily at that. And I'm happy for that, very pleased to have been wrong, very relieved that the neocons will be out of power come Jan. 20.

There was a considerable period of time during which I was one of the constant watchers who feared, at least a little, that the right wing extremists who have controlled the White House for so long might not vacate the premises regardless of the election outcome. Given the powerfully favorable reaction in this country and abroad to Obama's election, I doubt many still harbor that fear.

Even people who lean heavily to the right have expressed (assume temporary) support for the president-elect and happiness at what the election shows, or what they think it shows, about racial attitudes in the United States. They would not tolerate an illegal power grab, even one preceded by a false flag attack.

Just a couple of things:

First, those of us who predicted large-scale vote suppression efforts and fraud by the Republicans were not entirely wrong. The attempts were widespread, but considerably less successful than they were in 2000 and 2004 for several reasons.

One major reason was that the Republicans could not muster the big funding for such efforts that they received in the previous two presidential election years.

In the last couple of weeks before Nov. 4, I saw several reports about right wing billionaires cutting way back on their contributions to dirty tricks crews because of how hard they were hit by the economic collapse they helped to create. Greed and gut-level, immediate self interest outweighed their desire to keep Democrats out of power.

In fact, the emails now being sent by Republican Party organizations and fund raisers to their supporters are downright funny on the question of campaign money. They are filled with whines about how Republicans were outspent by Obama and other Democrats who somehow “unfairly” raised more money than they did.

The outraged wording of the messages strongly suggests that it is a Republican right to get and spend far more than their opponents. And the authors of the notes are angry -– deeply outraged, in fact -- that so many not-rich citizens kicked in enough to build bigger dollar totals for Obama and other Democrats than the rich folks provided John McCain and Republican congressional candidates.

(I got myself on some Republican email lists more than a year ago. It's been both revealing and entertaining.)

Another big reason the attempts to keep likely Democratic voters away from the polls were considerably less successful than some feared, and less successful than they might have been, was the simple stupidity of Republican planners and the somewhat unexpected firmness of numerous judges around the country. I'll spare the detail, but the fact is that attempts by Republicans to keep large blocs of people from voting were thrown out firmly and quickly by judges in several states.

Some of us had feared that the White House's campaign of loading the bench with right wingers had got far enough to permit even fairly weak vote-suppression efforts to fly, but that turned out not to be true. And in several instances, the cases brought by the Republicans were so feeble that even someone the likes of John Roberts or Samuel Alito would have been hard-pressed to come up with excuses to accept the arguments.

Also, and this was very important, extremely partisan and ethics-impaired state officials such as the Ohio secretary of state, have been replaced in several states since 2004.

Then there was the fact that, as reported by the New York Times and others, Democratic voters turned out in bigger numbers than in the past, while the turnout of Republican voters actually slipped by a bit more than 1 percent from 2004. Sarah Palin's presence on the Republican ticket may have inspired the right wing “base,” as the talking heads kept telling us, but apparently it didn't do much for saner middle class Republicans.

Now for the “buts:”

It is a very safe assumption that the actual vote for Obama, let alone the votes that would have been cast for him if some people had not been blocked from voting, was greater than the number reported. It is unrealistic to think that the illegal tricks used in 2000 and 2004 -– hiding of votes, hacking of voting machines to switch votes from Democrat to Republican candidates and such -– didn't take place this year.

There was far too much evidence such shenanigans going into the election. It's not an issue in the corporate news media because those tricks and vote suppression attempts were not enough keep Obama from winning. And Democrats are too happy to bother with sniffing out vote fraud.

That, while understandable, is a serious mistake.

It is so because there will be much closer elections in the future, as there have been in the past. If the Democrats don't make an effort beginning in January, when they will pretty much control U.S. government, to block future right wing vote suppression and vote fraud, it will cost them future elections, just as it cost them the presidency and probably a number of congressional seats in 2000 and 2004.

There are ways to set up voter registration requirements that will permanently shut down the worst of the vote suppression scams. The “Help America Vote” law, which was in fact designed to help trick out elections, can be revised so that it requires a paper trail on all votes and provides voters with a way of seeing that their votes are recorded properly. The law also can be rewritten to require machines that are not readily rigged for fraud, as are so many of the machines now in use.

Suppose Obama does what economist and New Yorks Times columnist Paul Krugman and a few others have recommended and comes out of the chute fighting. The hatred and opposition he'll get from the Wall Street crowd and the billionaires you never heard of will surpass anything we've seen since Franklin Roosevelt had the extreme right plotting an overthrow of our government.

In such a scenario, the Republicans won't have so much trouble raising the money to defeat him in 2012, and a fully-funded right wing, supported by an army of gun nuts, end-times evangelicals and other self-destructive haters could make re-election highly doubtful.

It wouldn't be good idea to leave the paths to vote suppression and fraud wide open.

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Sorry if this is a bit late in being posted. I wasn't avoiding admitting my error. Right after the election I took a break, went out of town to a conference on an area of interest that has nothing to do with electoral politics.

Republicans suppressing the vote

2008-10-29T08:32:00.001-07:00

With just a few days to go to the 2008 election, it looks like Democrat Barack Obama will get more votes than will John McCain, the floundering, panic-stricken Republican candidate for president.

At least more Americans will try to vote for Obama than will vote for McCain.

The chances of Obama being sworn in as president of the United States may be substantially less than 50-50, however. The Obama vote will have to be overwhelming, a landslide -– no, a tidal wave -– to get the man into the Oval Office as anything but a visitor. If the polls are anywhere near right, that isn't going to happen.

Some congressional seats that would be won by Democrats in fair elections also probably will be taken by Republicans.

If you get your news primarily from corporate outlets, you may be unaware of, or at least know very little about, the second biggest under-reported story of this decade.

(Failure to report ahead of time on the inevitable collapse of the subprime mortgage pyramid probably ranks first.)

Corporate newspapers and broadcast outlets are largely ignoring a massive Republican campaign to suppress Democratic votes and to commit vote fraud on a grand scale -- bigger and considerably more widespread than the efforts of 2000, 2004 and 2006.

The corporate press is, in fact, helping the Republican cause beyond simply pretending that the party's suppression/fraud campaign doesn't exist. The ACORN flap was fake. That organization, engaged in registering mostly minority and low-income voters, flatly is not engaged in fraud. The publishers, editors and producers could not help but know that, since they know what really happened and even said so deep in some stories. But they played it big anyway.

That bit of slight of hand was created by the McCain campaign with the aid of various official and unofficial party organizations to cover the fact that the Republicans have a genuine and much bigger fraud campaign in place.

As I've said here several times over the past four or five years, if you want to know what the Republicans are doing on the dark side, look at what they claim their opponents are doing. It's a standard Rovian trick. Democratic “leaders” are blindsided every time, the corporate media always plays along.

The Democratic Party is, as usual, wandering around with its head......in the sand. The party “leaders” don't like real fights, and apparently won't take this one on.

For the past couple of months, I've been keeping clippings and printouts of news articles, editorials and op-ed essays detailing various pieces of the real vote suppression and fraud campaign. Stories on individual pieces of that campaign pop up here and there, but they almost never are picked up by corporate news agencies outside the immediately affected geographic area, and I don't know of any big news outlet that has put the pieces together to show its auditors or readers the whole picture.

CNN said last week it was going to try, but what it did was mostly just a rehash of the phony ACORN story.

My stack of paper on Republican vote suppression now is more than a foot deep. Might be two feet deep or more if I go through all of the pile next to my desk, but I've uncovered enough to make the point.

Here are some, only a sampling, of the components of what shapes up as a major Republican effort:

* Until mid-September, the Veterans Administration -– politicized like all other government departments under Bush/Cheney -– blocked efforts to register veterans in VA hospitals and residential facilities as voters. VA officials ignored demands from several congressmen that they allow registration efforts in those facilities. In September, Veterans for Common Sense won a lawsuit giving the veterans access to voter registration and to voting Nov. 4.

It is not known, however, whether election officials and non-partisan groups actually have been allowed into all of the VA facilities, or whether they've had to do their work this late in the game. (Information, Veterans for Common Sense and Associated Press.)

* In Wisconsin, the Republican attorney general, J.B. Van Hollen, filed suit in September seeking a court order to force the state's Government Accountability Board to cross-check voters who registered after Jan. 1, 2006, against Department of Transportation, criminal and death records. Completing such an examination before Nov. 4 is impossible and “will disenfranchise voters,” said Madison, Wis., City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl.

The suit covers only Dane County, an urban county with a high percentage of academics and students and other young people. It includes the main campus of the University of Wisconsin. The Government Accountability Board opposes the suit, saying the belated registration checks would uncover little or no fraud but would “cause unnecessary hardship and confusion at the polls.”

The board noted that discrepancies between various lists typically come because people often write their names differently on different forms -– using a middle initial on one, but not another, for example –- and do not involve fraud. (Information, the Capital Times, Madison, Wis.)

Almost identical suits have been filed by Republicans in several other urban areas around the country, mostly where the presidency and/or Senate seats are closely contested.

Several studies over several years have concluded that fraud in voting is extremely rare, by the way.

* Similarly, although some details differ, approximately 50,000 voters in Georgia have been “flagged” because computers determined, often inaccurately, that there are mismatches in their personal identification information in various files. About 4,500 of those, most of them native-born Americans, had their citizenship questioned. In many cases, notices carrying deadlines for clarifying the mismatches, proving citizenship and such were mailed too late for individuals to meet those deadlines. (Source, CNN.com, which reported on line that similar voter list purges are taking place across the country, and especially in swing states.)

* A number of reports indicate a high probability that the presidential election in Ohio will be stolen again.

One tactic, which would take a couple of pages to explain thoroughly, may disenfranchise up to 600,000 Ohio voters, mostly in areas which have high percentages of minority and low-income citizens, according to groups such as Advancement Project and Project Vote that advocate for the poor or seek to increase voter registration.

This tactic comes directly from the Republican Party and was passed by the Republican-dominated State Legislature in 2005. (Oddly, it sunsets – ceases to exist – on Jan. 1 of next year.) It requires county boards to send non-forwardable notices to voters 60 days before an election, and effectively disenfranchises anyone whose notice is returned.

People do not have to be notified that their voter registrations are in question. A board can overturn the disenfranchisement, but not until after the election, of course, since people won't know they've been cut from the rolls until they try to vote.

An Advancement Project spokeswoman pointed out that a single piece of mail may be returned for many reasons, including errors in the data base from which it is sent, mailing label misprints, failure to include an apartment number and a host of other errors on the mailing end.

Several other people have noted that members of the military called to active duty often are among those who lose their vote under the system.

This suppression technique, called “caging” is being used this year by Republicans in several swing states. (Information, Advancement Project, Project Vote, TruthOut.)

Also note that, in defiance of a court order, 56 of Ohio's 88 counties destroyed election materials from the 2004 election that would have shown what happened (how the election was stolen) that year.

One thing that is known is that more than 300,000 registered voters in Ohio, all but a tiny handful in heavily Democratic districts, were purged from the rolls in 2004 by Republican-controlled election boards. After the 2004 election, another 170,000 voters were purged in another county that recently had tipped toward Democrats. (Bush “won” the 2004 election in Ohio by 119,000 votes.)

There also were at least partially successful attempts to prevent absentee balloting by residents of heavily Democratic areas, other attempts to cancel voter registrations, big questions about use of electronic voting machines and numerous incidents of potential voters being given false information and falsely threatened with legal action if they voted. (Several sources, including, notably, The Smirking Chimp Web site,)

* In Michigan, where the Republicans are using several tactics to block votes by Democrats, a favorite method is to use a list of home foreclosures in predominately black neighborhoods to challenge voters at the polls.

A foreclosure notice does not mean that someone has moved as yet. But the voters will be challenged, and some will be chased off; others will be unable or afraid to fight the challengers through official means to regain their vote. (Sources, Marketwatch.com and Michigan Messenger.)

Intimidation is, in fact, a major reason such tactics work.

* In Mississippi, which has a hotly contested Senate race going, Gov. Haley Barbour, with the help of the state's secretary of state, put the senate race at the very bottom of the ballot, although state election law requires that federal elections must be at the top of the ballot. Under that law, Senate candidates should be right below the candidates for president.

The two state officials claimed they could put the Senate contest at the bottom, where they hope it will be overlooked by some voters, because it is a special election. The seat was vacated by Trent Lott (you remember that sweetheart) and the man who is now the Republican candidate was appointed to fill it temporarily by Gov. Barbour. (Sources, Clarion Ledger, New York Times)

* On Air America Radio, and in much more detail in Rolling Stone, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Mike Papantonio reported that Republicans are using 30 (yes 30) distinct scams around the country, particularly in swing states, to disenfranchise Democratic voters.

A favorite involves those name-match techniques. If you signed your voter registration card as P.K. Whoknows, but signed your drivers license application Pepe K. Whoknows, Republican poll watchers, who have the lists, will challenge your right to vote, and in some places will be able to have you removed from voting rolls. Think of all of the various official documents you've signed; it's a very good bet they don't all match.

Such techniques, again, are being applied almost exclusively to districts with high percentages of likely Democratic voters. They're being used in New Jersey, Michigan, Ohio, Colorado, Montana and several other states, notably newly competitive states in the South. (Sources, Air America, Rolling Stone, TruthOut.)

* In Florida, a wide variety of reports show, every possible vote suppression technique seems to be in play again. And, though I haven't seen anything specific on this, the use of cops to chase potential black and low-income Hispanic voters from the polls seems as likely now as it did in 2000, when there were many reliable reports of such activity, including several by major corporate news organizations.

Florida's Republican-controlled legislature deliberately limited the early-voting hours to just a few within the working day, weekdays. The law also severely limited the number of early-voting sites. The obvious goal, according to Floridians, was to inhibit voting by elderly residents, the disabled and working poor who dare not stay away from their jobs to vote and who are likely to vote Democratic.

This week, after the tactic received coverage on television and in some newspapers outside of Florida, the state's governor issued an executive order expanding the early voting hours. There's no way to know how many voters were discouraged by their first attempts and learn of the new hours, or won't trust that they can vote, however.

The ballot in Florida's Palm Beach County has such a peculiar layout that many voters in past elections have complained of mistakenly voting for the wrong candidates. There is a similar problem in North Carolina. (Source, New York Times.)

* In North Carolina, black citizens at an early voting site were loudly heckled by a group of McCain supporters. (Source, Democracy Now.)

* In some venues, voting officials have deliberately given college students false information, leading them to believe they are not eligible to vote. (TruthOut.)

* In Montana, 6,000 voters were purged from the voting rolls in Democrat-leaning counties on the grounds that their mailing addresses had changed. Turns out a significant number of those purged are military personnel on active duty -– quite a few serving in Iraq -– and another substantial number are students seeking to vote in their home districts. There also were a number of elderly folks who had moved from their homes to senior housing and hadn't yet changed their registration addresses. (Source, an irate essay by John Bohlinger, Republican lieutenant governor of Montana. )

* In several states, voting machines have switched Democratic votes to Republican candidates in early elections. There are many problems, yet, with such machines, particularly in swing states.

There are so many similar stories I could double the length of this piece and still not come close to using all of those I have in hand. There's the story of hundreds of absentee ballots being sent out with the name “Barack Osama” instead of Barack Obama. And there's the story of an email sent by the Pennsylvania Republican Party's “Victory 2008” committee to Jews throughout the state, falsely alleging that Obama “taught members of Acorn to commit voter registration fraud” and hinting that Obama has the same goals for Jews as Hitler did in the 1930s. And many more.

So just one final note:

Reporter Alexander Bolton wrote an article I found on thehill.com on Oct. 21 about the efforts of police departments in major cities across the country to “beef up their ranks” and otherwise prepare for “possible civil unrest and riots” once the Nov. 4 election returns are known.

The facts of his story were confirmed by Catherine Elsworth, Los Angeles-based reporter for the British paper, The Telegraph.

“Some worry that if Barack Obama loses and there is suspicion of foul play in the election, violence could ensue in cities with black populations,” Bolton wrote.

Among the many scary facts in the story: In Oakland, cops plan to deploy extra units in riot gear, as well as extra traffic cops, and will have SWAT teams on standby. (Do you suppose those cops might intimidate would-be voters? Having seen the ninja turtles in their black armor during the Republican National Convention, I tell you flatly that they will.)

Similar preparations have been made in Chicago, Philadelphia and other large cities with substantial black populations, Bolton said.

He and Elsworth said cops are worried that angry mobs could be set off not by an Obama loss, as such, but by perception of another stolen election. One possible trigger, they said, is a repeat of the deliberate tactic, widely used in 2000 and 2004, of keeping black citizens from voting by providing too few voting machines and polling places in their neighborhoods, thus requiring standing in lines for many hours to vote, and having the polls close before you can vote, or perhaps by jiggering of voting machines, or discovery of other tricks.

One can't but ask: Do the cops know something we don't?

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Isn't it ironic? Republicans claim to want to export “democracy” to other countries, but try very hard to keep it from functioning in America. Of course, what they mean by “democracy” when talking of other countries is corporate rule.

See you in the camps.

Gas price electioneering

2008-10-28T10:32:00.000-07:00

Excited about the big drop in gasoline prices?

Don't get too wound up.

At the beginning of the July 4 holiday period in 2006, the average price of gasoline in the United States was $2.873. By the middle of October, as the mid-term elections neared, the national average price of gasoline was $2.219, and prices hit a low of $2.02 in states such as Missouri, that, coincidentally, were states the Republican Party felt it needed to win.

By early December of 2006, a time when gasoline prices historically drop, the national average price of a gallon of gasoline had bounced back to $2.297. The elections were over. The price of gasoline jumped around quite a bit over the next few months, with several reasons cited for the volatility, but we know the trend was up, up, up.

Oil company execs know who provides the special tax breaks at times when they're already pulling in profits at unprecedented levels.

But of course it's all coincidental.

The truth: We are two Americas

2008-10-23T09:24:00.000-07:00

Over all, the United States of America has the government it deserves.

Millions of us, and the rest of the world, deserve better, but there doesn't seem to be much of significance we can do about that at the moment. The ignorant rule. Or, rather, the plutocrats rule to their own benefit, and the deluded mob supports them.

A change of presidents, if it comes, will not change that significantly.

Think about the fact that Sarah Palin, a babbling fool who isn't even qualified for her first political job as mayor of a very small town, is the Republican Party's vice presidential candidate and that she is adored by a significant portion of the population.

Think about Sen. Ted Stevens, the Republican senator from Palin's home state of Alaska, who is a grasping, self-serving, power-loving plutocrat, on trial for corruption but still apt to be re-elected.

Think about the fact that Michele Bachmann, at least equal to Palin in ignorance and lack of intellectual capacity, represents Minnesota's Sixth Congressional District, and probably will be reelected in November.

Think about all of the other venal fools and obvious crooks who hold high office in this country. Think about the lumpish egomaniac who lost two elections but still sits in the White House and is called president.

It is difficult to explain to someone from another country –- it is difficult for many of us to understand –- but obviously it is true that millions of Americans really do want their country run by people who are as undereducated and as lacking in curiosity and ability to understand complex questions as they are themselves. Corrupt crooks? No problem; elect them anyway if they share your view of gays or immigrants.

“My opinion is as good as anyone else's” is a sentence I've heard many times from people who have no understanding at all of economics, history, science or philosophy –- in fact, no comprehension of a world beyond their limited circles, no clue as to the way government works and no sense of morality beyond what the preachers tell them on Sunday mornings.

As the crowds at Palin's rallies demonstrate, millions of Americans believe that “being a mom” is all the experience one needs to be vice president, and therefore president, of the United States.

Juggling play dates and getting kids to hockey practice on time is regarded as sufficient to teach one how to deal with multiple wars and evaluate possible solutions to global warming –- unless one rejects the concept because it doesn't fit with what you believe about “end days,” of course.

So, no, their opinions aren't as good as anyone else's. But they never will recognize that.

Get out there and listen to those people, the American electorate. You'll find they believe that “all men are equal,” and don't grasp the fact that the equality the founders of this country aimed for was equality of opportunity. If you're a dummy, you are NOT equal to a knowledgeable, intellectually active person when it comes to discerning how best to govern this over-sized country.

It was not the illiterate stable hands nor even the barkeeps, good men though they may have been, who wrote the Declaration of Independence and led the Revolution against England.

That is an admission none of us are supposed to make, lest we be struck down as “elitists.” Strive to elect politicians who are smarter than the average loaf of bread and know more than the average 12-year-old and we become “Eastern elitists,” which is something as repulsive as dog droppings on the soles of one's shoes.

The mob despises “elites,” which is to say intelligent, educated people with some understanding of the world beyond the circumscribed lives of middle class suburbanites.

Palin's “real America,” is semi-literate, despises knowledge, deeply mistrusts anyone who isn't exactly like themselves and, in fact, wants to banish all who are different -- particularly darker skinned people and those who come from different cultures.

If you doubt that, you haven't been out and about much outside your own liberal circles. Twice in the past week I've heard Republican voters -– the very people who are being hurt the most by the economy created by the political right -– railing about blacks and Hispanics and Asians and blaming them for everything from the downward slide of our cities to the great economic crash of 2008.

In fact, Bachmann said a few days ago that the meltdown of financial institutions is the fault of non-whites and the white folks who coddle them.

The “real Americans” wouldn't put someone as ignorant as themselves in charge of the corporations in which they make their livings, but they have no qualms about putting such a person in the White House or Congress.

Because the people who play to them and simultaneously abuse them –- the corporate right wingers –- tell them so, they believe that government is simple. Listen to the conversations around you when you're outside your own circle of safety. See how often you here someone say about some complex problem , “All you have to do is....” or “We just have to....”

Usually, we “just have to cut taxes” and/or “cut the fat out of government” because that's what the corporate executives and the politicians they own tell us.

Want to have some fun? Ask one of those lunch room experts to be specific about how another tax cut for the rich will benefit all of America or, even better, to get specific about that “fat” in government.

Where, very precisely, is all that fat that will save us billions of dollars? Demand facts, not right-wing generalizations, but be prepared to duck. They tend to get angry when caught with their ignorance on display.

To some unknown degree, a majority of the American public walks blindly through life because we no longer have a functioning mass news system. We have a mass propaganda system, easily manipulated by the political right and inclined anyway to believe whatever the power elite tells them.

Need an example?

People who regularly read good Internet news sources such as TruthOut, know that the Republicans already have in place a massive system of vote suppression and election fraud which will function powerfully on Nov. 4. But ask your neighbors what they know of that.

You'll find that most of them “know” ACORN is a corrupt organization that has been busy registering fraudulent voters. They don't know that's been disproven time after time. They know nothing of the huge Republican vote suppression efforts in Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Colorado and other states, and they certainly don't know about the blatant fixing of voting machines to produce Republican election victories in some of those states.

Few of the “mainstream” media have mentioned those facts. The New York Times and McClatchy newspapers do some good reporting, but they're inconsistent, and most dailies and almost all of television are useless for getting a handle on what's really going on in this crumbling country.

CNN tried Thursday, Oct. 23, to report on vote suppression, but it so carefully, and falsely, “balanced” the reports that they gave the impression that the suppression techniques were necessary to stem massive voter fraud – which, in fact, is nonexistant except in swing states where the Republican Party has set up its scams.

We'd have better major news sources if the American public demanded them, but often –- you've heard it many times from co-workers and neighbors -– Americans don't want to know about all the unpleasantness. They're happier with a “news” media that ignores the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the astonishing evils perpetrated in Africa by people who buy American arms.

News like that can spoil one's dinner and take the fun out of watching “Dog the Bounty Hunter.”

I have no polls on this in hand, but I'd be willing to bet that a majority of Americans figure the huge bailout of banks and brokerages is necessary to save our economy because the bigshots say so.

I'll give very big odds that only a small minority is aware of the fact that about $25 billion of $125 billion of our tax dollars just turned over to nine big American banks will be used to pay dividends to stockholders of those banks, and that $250 million of that amount will go directly into the pockets of the banks' executives and directors. (Figures from an op-ed piece by David S. Scharfstein and Jeremy C. Stein in the New York Times of Oct. 21.)

This is a fact: We are two countries within a single set of borders and coastlines. The bigger of the two countries is insular, anti-intellectual, uninterested in knowing truths that don't fit its preferred view of the world. Its denizens believe the corporate elite on all major points, even as that elite takes more and more of the wealth and power to itself and systematically disenfranchises most citizens and undermines their futures and the futures of their children.

The wealthiest five percent of the population exports the country's jobs, effectively cuts the pay of workers while expanding their work loads, pays their politicians to see to it that the country's educational system deteriorates. That small group of plutocrats keeps health care beyond the reach of an ever larger portion of the population in order to avoid paying taxes for a real care system. They let the country's infrastructure deteriorate for the same reason, and refuse to do anything about climate change or environmental degradation or oil dependency because there is big money to be made from preserving the status quo.

Meanwhile, the victims who have joined Palin's “real America” are focused on deliberately goosed up issues such as abortion and -– horrors! -- the possibility that gay Americans might be treated simply as citizens. The “real Americans” can grasp such issues, or think they can, without having to think about them. They also have swallowed whole the money elite's constantly touted idea that all taxes are bad.

The smaller country, the educated, the people who seek to understand how things work here and abroad and hope to maintain a semblance of democracy and equality of opportunity...that country is in very deep trouble and may be driven into hiding before long. It is not gladly tolerated by the richest five percent who increasingly own everything worth having within the borders and coastlines of what is called (now ironically) the United States of America.

Don't bite on the blather about “reaching across the aisle,” no matter who's doing the blathering.

The two Americas cannot cooperate in any meaningful way. The far right does not compromise, and it has filled its army of the ignorant with hate; it is like a horde of Genghis Khan's Mongols, intent on destroying all who impede conquest.

Conservatives and progressives, old-style Republicans and Democrats, could compromise. But the decent human beings who once made up the Republican Party are irrelevant now; they exist in an ether, without power or influence.

One side will win, the other will lose and be left as ineffective as today's old Eisenhower Republicans. If the right wins, their opposition may face much, much worse than loss of influence.
------------------------------------------------

A couple of relevant facts:

On Oct. 22, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, supported by 30 countries around the world, released the results of a 20-year study. It found that economic inequality had increased in 27 of the 30 countries over that period. The highest levels of inequality –- more wealth accruing to the already wealthy while poverty increased among the general population -– were in Mexico, Turkey and the United States. The gaps between rich and poor have increased substantially since 2000, the report said. France, which America's right wing politicians love to berate and mock, was one of three countries that showed progress toward greater equality.

Wordsmart, a company that sells vocabulary-improvement home courses, says that from 1950 to the present, the useful vocabulary of the average American teenager dropped from 25,000 to 10,000 words. That's roughly a 60 percent decrease in the number words kids readily recognize and can use. It seems obvious: If you lack the words to describe, analyze, think with, you can't think critically to any real depth. At this rate, Americans will be reduced to “Me Tarzan, you Jane” by 2050.

Observations on a small, conservative city

2008-10-16T10:50:00.000-07:00

It's beginning to seem that America's right wing nuts hate themselves almost as much as they despise everybody who isn't them –- which is to say white, dogmatically religious, and proudly ignorant of other places, other cultures and other points of view.

How else explain the fact that supporters of the extreme political right continually, actively, even vehemently fight against their own interests? How explain that they apparently adore politicians and the tiny minority of fabulously wealthy people who, with the help of right-wing politicians, take and keep everything they can from the rest of us?

Such thoughts were inspired by a long drive around St. Cloud, Minnesota, and its little metropolitan area on Monday, Oct. 13. There's no science to this, only observation:

St. Cloud is the core city of central Minnesota, a town of roughly 67,000 at the center of a little metropolitan area that has a population of about 185,000. About 40 percent of its residents have some German ancestry, according to the most recent census figures, and a very large chunk of the population –- 66,000-plus out of a membership for all churches of a bit more than 105,000 -– are Roman Catholic.

It also has a long history of racist and antisemitic incidents, mostly centering on St. Cloud State University. And it is a center of antiabortion activity.

It was one of the few areas in Minnesota that gave a solid majority of its votes to George W. Bush in 2004, although John Kerry topped Bush statewide.

Near the golf club, most of the McMansions display McCain lawn signs, of course. They're the homes of the early middle aged, sort-of rich second-level corporate executives and lawyers who, at least until a few weeks ago, erroneously fancied themselves as on their way to joining the rolls of the masters of the universe.

Oddly, I spotted only a couple of lawn signs for Michele Bachmann in the neighborhood. She's the outrageously silly, far-right Sixth District first-term congresswoman who is best known for embracing George W. Bush at a public event and not letting go. Don't know what to make of that lack of visible support among the people who are to large degree responsible for disgracing my state with her presence in Congress.

In St. Cloud's solidly middle class neighborhoods, lawn signs for the presidential candidates are unusually sparse. By my observation, Obama signs outnumbered McCain signs by a clear but not overwhelming number.

I'd love to know what that combination means –- relatively few signs, but a majority for the Democrat –- but I doubt that a poll would tell us. It's one of those situations that invites lies to pollsters: Folks in a heavily Catholic, historically very conservative town who are leaning toward a pro-choice, black Democrat may not want their neighbors to know where they stand. Other residents may not want to admit to all and sundry that they won't vote for a black man under any circumstances. Like that.

I saw very few signs in support of Norm Coleman, the Bush-backing senator who is desperately trying now to pretend he's an “independent thinker,” and none for his Democratic opponent, comedian Al Franken, who is greatly despised by country folks for his irreverent and sometimes foul-mouthed humor, as inaccurately presented to them by the Republican party.

The “What are these people thinking?” moments of my drive came in the hardscrabble neighborhoods, and there are a lot of those in central Minnesota and north.

They are places where little, old frame houses, quite a few in poor repair, sit next to warehouses and light industrial buildings, and places where a neighborhood six or seven blocks long and four or five blocks deep is completely surrounded by more warehouses, cheap retail outlets and heavily-used roads.

There are more political signs in those neighborhoods than in the vicinity of the country club, and they are overwhelmingly McCain/Palin signs. In fact, I don't recall seeing a single Obama sign in the several low-income neighborhoods I drove through.

It is not logical, but I've seen the same thing in poorer, mostly-white neighborhoods in Minneapolis. The people whose jobs are most at risk, who have the hardest time getting reliable health care, whose pay has been stagnant for years as prices rise and the rich get enormously richer, whose schools have become run down and overcrowded -– those people are passionately for the politicians who are deliberately tearing down their lives and blocking any chances they or their children had for economic improvement.

I think it is to some degree a testament to how successful the right has been in dumbing down our educational system and creating a class of low-level workers too ignorant to recognize that they are being exploited. They're angry and they hate, but the negative emotions are turned 180 degrees from those who are the source of their problems.

In the case of St. Cloud, the support among the relatively poor for those who will do them the most harm almost certainly also has a strong religious element. St. Cloud, in my experience and observation, still fosters the kind of Catholicism that says the priests and bishops are the undeniable holders of moral truth, and the priests and bishops are immovably against birth control and stem cell research and freedom for gays, and they have made abortion virtually the only issue that matters in the eyes of many of their faithful.

Ergo: One cannot vote for a Democrat without real risk of being condemned to Hell.

It's not only the Catholics who cling to such views, of course. Many of the more rabid evangelicals hold to the same beliefs, and there are lots of small true-believer churches around St. Cloud.

But what's more puzzling is that the same pro-right views seem to be at the very core of what even the non-religious hold dear in places like St. Cloud and some of the poorer blue-collar neighborhoods of cities like Minneapolis and St. Paul and, no doubt almost everywhere across the country.

There are only two things I can come to in explanation.

One is the success of the far right in preaching simple-minded, pro-war “my country right or wrong” jingoism, with powerful undertones of racism, religious bigotry and fear of all things “foreign.” The right has been pushing those views for decades, and the left hasn't even tried to make a counter effort. The Democratic Party, the organization, is stuck in the 1940s, assuming despite massive evidence to the contrary that its positions are so obviously correct that it doesn't have to sell them.

Hell, much of the time it doesn't even fight for equal time, or stand up to the election fraud that the Republican Party has made a routine part of its campaigns.

The other thing, and I admit I'm on very shaky ground here, is drawn from many conversations over the past few years with people in places like St. Cloud and Alexandria (another, smaller city northwest of St. Cloud, with a more rural outlook). And that is that a lot of people seem to dislike themselves for not being richer and smarter. Especially richer. Yet they also and more openly despise most people who are different from themselves, especially those who are highly educated –- the much hated “intellectual elite.”

Maybe they draw some comfort by associating themselves with the views of the corporate big shots and mock-populist pols such as George Bush, Newt Gingrich, et al.

I'd like to have a roomful of shrinks chew that over for a bit.

If Barack Obama does become president –- still doubtful, I think, given the likelihood of massive electoral fraud by the Republicans, not ACORN -- and even if the economic meltdown brings the Democrats substantial majorities in both houses of Congress, we probably will see more of what we've had over recent years. The political right, though a minority, will choose the topics, pick the battles, get the headlines, shape what the country believes and continue to spread their power over a growing army of the ignorant. The odds are that a Democratic government, if it comes, will be short-lived.

And we will continue on our road to becoming a backward, third world mess of a country fighting a cultural civil war rather than working toward a common good.

How desperately we need a progressive political party, and how unlikely it is that we will get one.

Fraud on a grand scale

2008-10-07T17:50:00.000-07:00

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.” -- Benito Mussolini, Italian dictator, 1922-43, creator of modern fascism.

To be fair, it should be noted that Mussolini was talking about something more than business corporations when he spoke about the merger of corporate and government power. “Corporation” in his lexicon included other centers of power, such as industry organizations, the church, all sorts of powerful, right-leaning organizations. Italian business leaders loved it anyway, since they also controlled those other organizations.

Anyway, welcome to end times – the end of American democracy, that is. Welcome, too, to American corporatism.

What we soon will have is Mussolini's dream, a dictatorship of the very few, the very rich, coordinated by a little gang of political managers who are eager to rule an empire on behalf of that tiny economic elite. Never mind that the empire is imploding; there's still plenty of money and power to be had.

Here are some observations suggesting that our democracy is, indeed, on its last legs and that it's time to start talking about how to live, or survive, under circumstances that are terribly different from what we have known all of our lives:

* The corporate media all but ignored the fact that the White House threatened martial law if Congress did not pass its bailout bill. That bill, now law, saves some of the country's richest and most powerful aristocrats from financial losses but does nothing, from the viewpoint of the vast majority of citizens, to heal the economy. Less than nothing, in fact. It will drain our purses even further, transfer much of what we have left to the super-rich.

Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., stood up in the House before the second vote on the bailout bill and listed the threats made by the White House, through Treasury officials, about what would happen if the House again rejected the bill. It was fear-mongering on a scale that overshadowed even the lying threats used to get us into Iraq. A select few members of Congress, Sherman among them, were told that if the bill didn't pass, martial law might be declared. Others were merely threatened with investment market collapse (on a scale we are on the way to achieving anyway).

The rightist propaganda machines that pass for news operations declined to tell the public about the threat to stage a coup.

America no longer has a mass media dedicated to keeping it informed. It does have an executive branch that threatens, and may be ready, to throw out our form of government, to simply take over, unless all of its demands are met by our increasingly powerless Congress.

* It seems clearer with each day that we know considerably less than we may have thought we knew about the worldwide economic meltdown. We have been told that the financial collapse, the drying up of credit, the dive of the stock markets are rooted in the discovery that the value of mortgages behind a bunch of securities is considerably less than it was supposed to be.

But wait a minute.

The worst estimates predict foreclosure on about two million mortgages in the United States, and many of those, probably a majority, wouldn't be going into the tank had not the credit market dried up. And that supposedly dried up because many mortgage-backed securities were bad. It's a circular argument.

Many of the home buyers could have been rescued simply by renegotiating to more reasonable interest rates from their lenders. Of course, that assumes the lenders are/were run by intelligent, responsible human beings, an assumption we now know beyond doubt is not true.

So how did this American dive turn so quickly into a crisis involving the biggest banks around the world? France, Germany, all of Europe, in fact, have had to bail out some of their biggest banks over the past couple of weeks, apparently because all of them owned some of those mostly worthless mortgage-backed securities and/or depended on big American banks for loans. Now its spreading into Asia.

Huh?

It doesn't track, unless, for example, there is some sort of gigantic Ponzi scheme underlying the crisis. Did some of the undeniably crooked subprime mortgage lenders sell the same bundles of mortgages, the same securities, to more than one buyer? Are the perpetrators more criminal and are the banks even more careless and more stupid than we think?

(Charles Ponzi, an Italian immigrant, promised a 50 percent short-term return on investments he sold. He kept the thing going for quite a long time, taking out enough money to live a lavish life, but selling more and more of the “investments” and paying off earlier investors with the proceeds from more recent sales. There were no actual investments.)

That may be wildly off-target, yet the size of the mortgage default pool doesn't seem to fit the size of the bank and investment firm collapse.

Perhaps it's more simple: The banks extended far too much credit in all directions, including to us through our credit cards, and the failure of just one base card in the house of cards was enough to bring it all down.

At any rate, I want a real explanation, plus some real answers about what can be done. Picking my pocket to keep some masters of the universe in mansions, yachts and private jets is not the right answer. Of that I am certain.

* To repeat -– and this has to be hammered at until everyone understands:

The bailout plan that was pushed through our Congress of cowards, has no purpose other than to save some very rich people some big money. See what Dennis Kucinich has to say on that score. (One report, by Chris Hedges, can be found at http://www.truthdig.com. Or simply Google “Kucinich, bailout.” In a reasonable world, Kucinich would be the Democratic nominee for president.

For thoughts on what really is needed to begin recovery, see Bob Herbert's op-ed column in the Oct. 7, 2008, New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com).

* A new plan, announced Monday (Oct. 6) will have the Federal Reserve System buy enormous amounts of unsecured short term debt, called commercial paper, that corporations use to finance their day-to-day operations. The Fed will do it because banks won't lend to those corporations any more. Never before has the Fed been involved in anything like such involvement with corporations.

That means, folks, that the Fed, which exists on our money, will loan directly to big corporations, getting unsecured -- and, in some cases, undoubtedly worthless -- notes in exchange. There is no guarantee that the Fed (we) will be paid.

Other countries, notably Sweden in recent years, have taken temporary ownership of banks and/or other corporations that had to be bailed out. The governments were then able to run the businesses efficiently, get rid of failed but hugely over-paid executives, and sell the corporations or their assets once they had returned to stability.

But the masters of the universe who own American politicians and corporations won't have that. That would be (Horrors!!!!) socialism. So government must hand the supremely rich corporate owners and executives billions of dollars of our money and hope that those dummies, who destroyed the businesses, will fix them with at least some of those dollars, not stuffing too much into their own pockets.

We cannot have a government-funded program to restore our crumbling infrastructure. We cannot treat mortgage debt as we do other debt, so that courts can restructure the terms of loans. We cannot control executive pay -- and, despite what you've been told, the bailout law doesn't limit such pay in most cases. We can't put more public money into saving our crumbling educational system. And most especially we cannot have universal health care in this country. (Just ask John McCain; he is adamantly, one might say wildly, against it. In fact, he wants to do away with Medicare.)

All of those things would be socialism, not to mention expensive.

But our government can take billions of our dollars –- we're rapidly headed toward trillions –- and put them at tremendous risk in a very dicey attempt to bail out corporations run to ruin by fantastically greedy owners and executives who will remain in power.

And let us remember that we continue to spend billions on a useless and powerfully destructive war, a fact that deeply undercut our economy long before mortgage-backed securities fell into a pit.

We are told over and over that we “must save Wall Street to save Main Street.”

It is a lie equal to “We have proof that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction.” We're not saving Wall Street, just a few of its richest denizens, and we're certainly not doing anything to save Main Street.

But taking from the millions to protect the wealth of the richest 1 percent of us -- that, apparently is not socialism.

Well, perhaps it isn't exactly socialism, since the vast majority of us pay but stand no chance of getting anything back for our contributions. So perhaps we need a different label for what's going on, something similar, but with a different meaning.

How about National Socialism? Does that work, do you think?

Coming:

* We can expect major efforts at vote fraud on behalf of John McCain and other Republican candidates. The evidence that everything is in place for that effort removes any question of whether it will happen.

* One of the major forces behind the dismantling of the U.S. Constitution is, of course, big business, but smaller businesses have become active participants in the destruction of our democracy over the past two decades. The business of American business is fraud, and to get away with it, the masters of universe needed their politicians to get rid of the rule of law and to put government of, by and for the people out of the way.

Unintended lessons of the bailout

2008-10-01T18:59:00.000-07:00

That the American people are going to be swindled again, or further swindled, to bail out the untouchable, unreachable rich seems inevitable.

The volume of commentary on the banker bailout is huge, and most of it should go directly to the “junk” folder or a recycling plant. I'm not going to add to the pile. Instead, at the bottom of this, I'll include links to some informed and truly perceptive analyses that you almost certainly won't find in the corporate media. It will suffice for now to say that the best and most knowledgeable observers agree that the plan will indeed aid the big-buck bankers while doing little for the rest of us.

We need to talk, however. There are some related issues that aren't being discussed at all, so far as I can find. This is a good time to think about who's doing this to us, and how and why.

Know thine enemy. And thine jackass.

As I write this, the U.S. Senate has just approved the lightly altered bailout plan (Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2008). The House is expected to vote Thursday (Oct. 2), and like most people I know, I'm betting it also will approve the scheme, though more narrowly.

Leaders of both parties have had sufficient time to bring serious pressure to bear on those who voted no the first time around, and all sorts of games, from nasty to petty, are being played to line up the yes votes.

A couple of reports today say Congressional leaders have blocked constituent emails to members of Congress on the phony grounds that they fear their server will crash. Constituent contacts have been overwhelmingly against the bailout, members of Congress admit. But an employee of my Congressman, Keith Ellison, said the blockage is not deliberate. He said the servers simply can't handle the volume of emails being sent prior to the vote. I tried a couple of times to email Ellison and couldn't get far enough to enter text, let alone hit the send key.

His Minnesota office is answering telephone calls. That's good enough.

One thing that the public really must notice, or be led to notice, is that the corporate media are once again acting as touts for the powerful politicians who are most involved in screwing us over. Like the public, they're pretty much ignoring the lame George W. Bush. No one, possibly including even his wife and daughters, any longer believes that what he has to say about anything matters to anyone.

The media are jumping through hoops for the Congressional leadership of the Corporate Party, however. That is, for the top dogs of both Republican and Democratic wings of the party, who are united on the bailout to a degree not seen since the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

Listen to the language the next time you turn on CNN or CNBC. (Fox Propaganda? We know what they'll say about anything before Bill O'Reilly warms up his tonsils.)

The people of the perfect teeth are working hard to assure us that the bailout is necessary “not for Wall Street, but for Main Street,” as the corporate elite's political water carriers have so nicely phrased it. Opponents of the scheme are made, with smirks and well-placed little head shakes, to seem misguided. Proponents are presented as sages, doing their best to rescue a public that “doesn't understand” the plan.

Note that in print, even more than on television or radio thus far, the Washington scheme is increasingly referred to as “the rescue plan,” rather than the bailout. That was prescribed by party and congressional leadership, and a bunch of the newspapers and the Associated Press –- once the most neutral of all news services-– jumped on it immediately. A couple of longer neutral terms are used by some reporters who couldn't quite swallow “rescue” in one bite.

The party hotshots are “rebranding” the bailout. It's still the same pile of horse dung in the middle of a muddy street, but from now on we're going to call it something like “Frederick's Fine Fertilizer” and the press will work to make you believe your nose is wrong and that it really smells sweet. And that probably will work in the long run.

If you listen carefully to the language of the television spinners, read carefully, and watch the well-rehearsed “spontaneous” facial expressions and body language, you'll see the salesmanship at work.

What it tells you is important, and though we all know it, we tend to forget: Broadcast “news” generally isn't reporting these days so much as it is flackery, and the loudmouth salesmen and the plethora of babes who've replaced real reporters on most television systems are there to sell their masters' points of view. The situation isn't much better on most newspapers.

(Revealing sidelight: In newspapers, both reporters and writers of letters to the editor frequently refer to “extreme leftists” and the “extreme left of the Democratic Party.” No news story ever refers to a Republican as a right winger or extremist, and as frequent letter writers of liberal persuasion can attest,
no letter using such a phrase will be printed. Right wingers are merely “conservatives.”)

The other important side story of our miserable economic situation is how much it reveals about our politicians and the people who own them.

Ye, gods: John McCain and Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Adam Putnam lined up shoulder to shoulder to march over us. (Putnam is the redheaded right wing nutter from Florida's 12th Congressional District who has been on television a lot the past week, expounding on the need for the bank bailout.)

It's enough to make the heart of a $30-million-a-year bank executive go pittypat.

There has been some media talk, though much too little, about the 180-degree difference of opinion between the Democrats who voted against the bailout the first time around and the Republicans who did the same. The difference matters. It, coupled with the fact that a big bloc of Democrats voted for the bill, demonstrates better than any nose count on any other issue why a victory of Obama over McCain won't be anything like enough to bring desperately needed “change” to our government.

The Democrats who voted against the bill Sunday did so mostly for the right reasons, according to various reports, including those from news outfits that disapprove. Very pointed nudges from hundreds and even thousands of constituents helped, of course. The stated reasons were that the Treasury plan was too much a handout to the bankers and others who created the economic spinout in the first place, and provided too little help to the victims of their fraud and avarice and to the vast majority of taxpayers.

Many of the right-wing Republicans who rejected the pro-bailout arguments of their leaders and the White House did so because, they said, it was a “big step toward socialism.”

No, they weren't kidding.

Dozens of “free-market” Republican zealots have found a home in Congress since Ronald Reagan arrived, dragging Phil Gramm, Newt Gingrich and other extremists behind him. They get a lot of help from the Blue (Dirty) Dog Democrats, by the way.

They are people who believe that capitalism -– their version -– and a “free market economy” are holy. And those systems require that government function almost exclusively to benefit the richest five percent (or less) of the population. Socialism is when government functions to benefit the majority of the population.

I worked with top corporate and bank executives for four-plus decades, and I know many people who inherited great wealth and power –- the “old money” elite. The statement above is not an exaggeration.

(An aside: They, through their wholly-owned politicians, such as George W. Bush, talk much about “spreading democracy” throughout the world. Democracy, as they use the word, is most accurately defined as corporate control of government. They want the engines of their wealth to control other countries as they mostly control ours. If they believed in democracy as most of us understand the term, would they be working so hard and spending so much money to suppress the votes of those in this country and abroad who disagree with their view of the world?)

I think, though I have no immediate evidence, that the right wing extremists were frightened by calls from the public for renewed regulation of financial businesses and restrictions on executive pay in bailed-out corporations and for other limits on the freedom of the elite to run things entirely as the choose. They see any restrictions on their behavior as sinful, literally evil.

They're calling for tax breaks for corporations and their major owners as part of the “rescue” package even as we are about to go hundreds of billions of dollars deeper into debt, but they are against tax breaks for anyone else.

When the politicians of the right talk about “protecting taxpayers,” as they are now, keep in mind which taxpayers they mean. It isn't you and me.

Also look closely at the structure of the bailout package. It is a design to further increase the wealth of the mighty by stealing from the rest of us. The insurance provisions and the “need” for consultants to design and run the bailout program –- endlessly lucrative jobs for the very people who created the crash -– is a way to hand out more licenses to steal billions of tax dollars. It's Halliburton in Iraq all over again.

The right wingers were and are angry because they believe the bailout doesn't yet contain enough for the billionaires, not because it isn't a real recovery plan.

Understand: the people of the extreme right are royalists. They believe in the sovereignty of money. They do not willingly tolerate any restrictions on the power of the very rich.

An honest plan to revive the economy and save the public from paying deeply and long for the crimes of the corporate and banking elite requires, among other things, a breaking up of the corporate/banking giants. Instead, our politicians are eagerly helping the giants grow bigger by eating their weakened competitors. We are very close to being directly ruled by the wealthy elite, very nearly to the point of entering America's post-Constitutional era. Or perhaps we're already through the door.

-----------------------------------

For cogent and truly informed analyses of the bailout plan, check out these essays:

“Firing Back On the CRA Libel” by Sara Robinson on Blog for Our Future, http://ourfuture.org

“Recapitalize the banking system” by George Soros, from the Financial Times, http://www.ft.com

“Hyperventilating on the Bailout” by Charles R. Morris from the Washington Independent, http://washingtonindependent.com

Contact your reps in Congress now

2008-09-21T10:47:00.000-07:00

There are at least three urgent reasons to contact your senators and representatives in Congress now. This week. No later than Wednesday.

First, we taxpayers -- as opposed to the rich, who pay very little in taxes -- are about to bail out giant financial institutions throughout the country by buying their little-value and next-to-worthless assets at premium prices. At the same time, the rich guys who milked those institutions, and us, for billions in personal income already have begun their fight to keep the government from -– finally, and far too late –- imposing meaningful regulation of their activities.

The New York Times reported Saturday on the great cry arising from hedge fund managers and other billionaires who find it intolerable that the government is imposing restrictions on short selling of stocks. That's just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Bits and pieces that have shown up in obscure reports over the past month indicate –- and it is entirely in character; virtually inevitable -– that the financial industry is sending out its armies of lobbyists to fight any attempts to regulate them.

Remember, the guys who run and ran those giant scam factories have made fortunes almost too large to comprehend and they have lost little or nothing of what they've taken. As soon as possible, they'll begin new cons.

In essence, since we're bailing them out with our tax dollars, we're going to be paying the untold millions they will hand over to their lobbyists and funnel to members of Congress in various ways to prevent Congress from protecting us from their future abuses.

We must not let this happen, which means we have to lean on every member of Congress constantly until we have genuine regulation of financial industries.

Second, the bailout package – the present estimate is $1 trillion, and that's almost certainly low -- must include regulation of executive pay and should include penalties for the billionaires who brought us to the brink of ruin. So far, they're still walking away with tens of millions of dollars when they lose their jobs, and that doesn't include the extremely excessive compensation they've received while driving their institutions into bankruptcy.

Members of Congress must hear the demand for justice, and cash, over and over from thousands of us, the people who pay for everything.

Third, get ready now to fight the inevitable assault on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and dozens of other programs that benefit taxpaying citizens. Tell your members of Congress now that you will not tolerate cuts in those programs.

You'll be asked what you would do, then, to provide the money for the bailout -– which very soon will be referred to only as “the national debt” and “the deficit,” rather than a bailout. Tell them: Start by forcing the billionaires to pay taxes. Bring back the money hidden in offshore accounts specifically to avoid paying rightful U.S. taxes. Shut down the absurd and costly tax cuts the Republicans have given the very rich, and, if at all possible, go after the back taxes they owe. It is insane to allow the richest Americans to pay nothing or next to nothing in taxes.

Trickle down? We've been trickled on, all right. The financial collapse is at least partially a result of that “trickle down.”

I'm guessing the first hints of a right-wing drive to drastically cut social programs will be heard within days of the passage of a bailout package for financial institutions.

I will be out of town for a couple of days. More on these topics soon after I get back. Keep your eye on economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. He's doing more than hinting about what's going on these days.

The rich grow more powerful as we suffer

2008-09-18T13:46:00.003-07:00

As you watch your assets bleed away this week and into the future, take time to recognize two facts thus far not mentioned much, if at all, by the panting reporters and sweating pundits:

What is happening now was easily preventable, but it perfectly suits the goals of the tiny minority of super rich who hold most of the real power in this country.

Given the docility and frequent dimness of the media, it may be years before a handful of obscure economic experts publish largely ignored books addressing what happened and how we have come to the miserable state we will by then be in. They may have to publish abroad.

But though the details of how this mess came to be are very complicated indeed, the basic situation is easy to understand.

In the early 1930s, after the unfettered greed of the country's economic and industrial leaders had led to yet another, particularly horrendous, depression, Americans elected Franklin Roosevelt president and put a bunch of Democrats in Congress. That led quickly to a whole lot of necessary regulation of American business, particularly of financial businesses. Central to the Roosevelt recovery was the strict separation of commercial banking from investment banking, insurance and brokerage businesses.

Most people know that. I'm sure everyone reading this knows the history.

What didn't get taught in most public high schools, however, is the fact that the American brahmins hated Roosevelt to a degree barely comprehensible today and fought every move he made.

George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, was one of the most active of Roosevelt enemies, incidentally. (That's a particularly interesting story; check it out while you can still afford to keep your computer on line.)

One of the things they hated most was government regulation of their businesses. That people were starving didn't matter a damn; they believed, as their real and psychological descendants believe today, that some people are born to have power and wealth, and the great unwashed simply don't matter.

Think that's farfetched? Have you read Ayn Rand? A recent survey showed that something over half of top-level corporate executives have read and subscribe to the theory espoused in her awkwardly written novel, “Atlas Shrugged” -- that unmitigated self-interest is the only proper guiding principle.

You know the “great” economist Milton Friedman, the hero of the rich and the far right? His views were similar to those of Rand; he spent the last years of his life working to do away with public education because he didn't believe the “lower classes” should be taught any more than what is essential for them to do whatever work is assigned to them.

It was a long, slow climb back from the Roosevelt years for the very rich, and a couple of wars got in the way, but the brahmins conned the American public and in 1980 elected Ronald Reagan president of the United States.

Enough history. Everyone knows enough of what has happened since then, although we probably should note that the only blip in the return of almost all power to the extremely wealthy was the brief presidency of Jimmy Carter. The other Democratic president since then, Bill Clinton, helped rather than hindered the return of the American aristocracy to full strength.

Separation of commercial banking and investment market firms, which had been slipping for some time, was erased by Congress, with the approval of President Bill Clinton, in 1998.

So what's happening now is beyond even what happened in the 19th century “gilded age” and in the 1920s:

The concentration of control over this country's financial life -– and many of the world's key economic entities –- is proceeding with dizzying speed this week.

When I was covering the activities of investment bankers and brokerage houses in the 1960s, I was regularly in touch with at least a dozen firms, several other of them based in Minneapolis and locally owned. There were hundreds of others around the country. As of a few weeks ago, there were just five free-standing investment banking/brokerage firms of any size in the entire country.

As I write this, only two of those investment houses remain, and at least one of those, Morgan Stanley, probably will be gone in a matter of days, probably sold to Wachovia, according to the New York Times and CNBC. Wachovia is a giant with fingers in every aspect of finance, insurance and investment. The other independent investment house, Goldman Sachs, probably will be auctioned off, CNBC reported Wednesday (Sept. 17).

Then, of course, there are the direct government (taxpayer-funded or backed) buyouts. Jobs are disappearing at a great and accelerating pace, our incomes are shrinking and our assets are being siphoned off because of the crimes and incompetence of the financial industry executives, but we are being put on the hook, without our permission, for literally trillions of dollars to prop up entities that are “too big to fail.”

In fact, it is unfortunately true in at least some instances. The collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or the insurance behemoth American International Group (A.I.G.) undoubtedly would have brought international panic and collapse. We're on the hook now for $85 billion just for A.I.G.

(Keep in mind, as these buyouts and other deals build, that the U.S. auto industry also is looking for a handout -- $50 billion in government aid to pay for what they should have been doing for years on their own dime, shifting to energy efficient vehicles.)

But here's another fact to contemplate: In a decently regulated economy, those entities would not have been allowed to grow to a size that put them beyond reach of paying for their failures. If their growth had been limited, they could have suffered the consequences of the stupidity, criminality and greed of the people who ran them and who in most cases run them still.

We're suffering because of a terrible failure to regulate even as our politicians not only allow but play midwife to the birth of other beyond-reach financial giants.

Think back just a couple of years, and a couple of decades before that. We've seen hundreds of mergers, as no longer regulated corporations and financial institutions got bigger and bigger. Each merger was described as being done “for competitive reasons.” When I was covering some of those mergers for a newspaper, I pointed out, when I could, that they actually shrunk the pool of competitors.

So the money guys now have merged most industries to the point where competition in critical businesses is all but nonexistent. They did it “for competitive reasons.”

The current “consolidation” under pressure to prevent worldwide panic is pretty much the last step in the process of bringing our economy and much of the world economy under control of a tiny handful of Randian tycoons.

While we're going broke, while we watch what we've spent a lifetime building collapse through no fault of our own – except perhaps voting Republican – the fat cats grow to the ultimate obesity.

I don't know that there is anything that can be done at this point. I'm damned sure there is nothing that can be done without a radical upheaval in our government even more powerful than Franklin Roosevelt and his congressional allies brought to it in the 1930s. And, really, what are the chances of that?

If John McCain is elected president, it will amount to turning our government over to the people who run Bank of America and Wachovia and a few other entities and removing all opposition. McCain always has been a loud voice for deregulation of all financial businesses and, until the past three days, was braggingly proud of it.

Americans should remember that he also was one of the Keating Five – the worst of the Keating Five to be truthful, and the only one to survive in office through pandering, begging, groveling and lying. (Google “Keating Five”; you'll get the gist of the story in 10 or 15 minutes.)

But even with great advice, superior intelligence and the best intentions in the world, how can anyone now unscramble what the political/social extreme right has done, with the stupid, inadvertent help of the religious right? How do you break the brokerage and investment banking businesses from the giant commercial banks that have absorbed them into their very entrails? How do you get control of a gigantic insurance company that now is an “everything financial” hodgepodge with bases in almost every country in the world?

I have no answers to those questions. Neither, I suspect, do people who are infinitely more knowledgeable than I am on such things. But if someone doesn't come up with answers, and if the public doesn't demand the answers, we are on our way to seeing the final move into what amounts to a worldwide oligarchy.

To somewhat rework a crude but apt old army saying, used when a situation appeared hopeless: Either promote a massive upheaval in our government or stick your head between your legs and kiss your assets goodbye.

McCain, Keating and Willy Loman

2008-09-18T13:46:00.002-07:00

The Oct. 9, 1999, edition of the Phoenix newspaper, the Arizona Republic, the state's largest newspaper, carried a column by Bill Muller, setting out in somewhat more than ordinary detail the long and mutually helpful association of John McCain with Charles Keating.

Keating was the savings and loan shark who was known for buying members of the Senate and thumbing his nose at government regulators, which he could do because his senators, including McCain, protected him. Keating ultimately went to prison. You can find the article on line, and it is very much worth looking at if you have forgotten or are too young to remember the ugliness of that scandal.

The Nov. 29, 1989, issue of the Phonix New Times, had a more opinionated – one might say angry -- piece by a writer named Tom Fitzpatrick on McCain's misdeeds with and on behalf of Keating. Written as a letter to McCain, the piece (1989, remember) is noteworthy in part because of these three sentences: “You won't let anyone forget that you were a prisoner of war. But you have played that tune too long. By now your constant reminders about your war record make you seem like a modern version of Arthur Miller's tragic failure Willy Loman.”

Speaking with forked tongue

2008-09-18T13:46:00.001-07:00

Sarah Palin, the extreme right's favorite vicious babe, on Wednesday (Sept. 17) offered a revealing little sidelight to the financial and economic horrors that were developing through the day. In a single speech, Palin allowed that a McCain/Palin presidency would bring a return to strong regulation of business and, a minute or two later vowed that they will, “get government out of the way of business.” I heard her on CNBC.