Loyal Resistance

Molybdenum, Tungsten, and Big Bertha

2011-08-21T09:17:00.001-04:00

Some very interesting Insight into the world of war profiteering, and the world of limited natural resources

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In today's excerpt - molybdenum and tungsten. A key German advantage in World War I was Big Bertha, a forty-three ton gun which could fire a 16-inch, 2,200 pound shell nine miles. However, after a few days of firing, the twenty-two foot steel barrel would be useless since the iron in steel has a low melting point. The solution? Molybdenum from America in World War I and tungsten from supposedly neutral Portugal in World War II:

"The famous Krupp armament company found a recipe for strengthening steel: spiking it with molybdenum. Molybdenum ... could withstand the excessive heat because it melts at 4,750°F, thousands of degrees hotter than iron, the main metal in steel.

"Back in the trenches, the Germans were soon blazing away at the French and British with a second generation of 'moly steel' guns. But Germany soon faced another huge Bertha setback - it had no supply of molybdenum and risked running out. In fact, the only known supplier was a bankrupt, nearly abandoned mine on Bartlett Mountain in Colorado.

"[One world war later], Nazi Germany coveted tungsten for making machinery and armor-piercing missiles, and its lust for [it] surpassed even its lust for looted gold, which Nazi officials happily bartered for tungsten. And who were the Nazis' trading partners? ... It was supposedly neutral Portugal whose tungsten fed the wolfish appetite of the German kriegwerks. ...

"Proving his worth as a former professor of economics, [Portugal's Prime Minister Antonio] Salazar leveraged his country's near monopoly on the metal (90 percent of Europe's supply) into profits 1,000 percent greater than peacetime levels. ...

" Salazar ... played the Axis and Allies brilliantly with vague promises, secret pacts, and stalling tactics that kept the tungsten trains chugging. He had increased the price of his country's one commodity from $1,100 per ton in 1940 to $20,000 in 1941, and he'd banked $170 million in three frenzied years of speculation. Only after running out of excuses did Salazar institute a full tungsten embargo against the Nazis on June 7, 1944, the day after D-Day, by which point the Allied commanders were too preoccupied (and disgusted) to punish him. I believe it was Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind who said that fortunes can be made only during the building up or tearing down of an empire, and Salazar certainly subscribed to that theory. In the so-called wolfram war, the Portuguese dictator had the last lycanthropic laugh."

Author: Sam Kean
Title: The Disappearing Spoon
Publisher: Back Bay
Date: Copyright 2010 by Sam Kean
Pages: 91-94

The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements
by Sam Kean by Little, Brown and Company

Hardcover

If you wish to read further: Buy Now




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A question of class

2011-08-20T10:07:00.000-04:00

A question of class

Colonizing, De-Colonizing, and Greed!

2011-08-20T08:03:00.001-04:00

So this is how it works.....it's all about money, and power. Aw shucks! I thought it was about what was good for people and their countries

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In today's excerpt - in the 17th through the 19th centuries, an astonishing thing happened: the countries from the tiny continent of Europe took over almost the entire rest of the world and ran those lands as colonies. All of Africa save Ethiopia became colonies; all of the Americas, almost all of Asia (save China, which became a de facto colony after the opium wars). And while this was portrayed as an effort to lift up these savage countries ("the white man's burden"), it retarded the natural development of leadership within these countries and instead became an opportunity for daring entrepreneurs like Cecil Rhodes to build fortunes.

The benefits to the European governments that did the colonizing was far less evident though, and the colonies became a financial burden, which led to the unraveling of the British, French and other empires in the aftermath of two world wars. However, the great mineral wealth of these countries was too much for the businesses and entrepreneurs to leave behind, so as these countries were being "de-colonized", the sponsoring countries attempted to leave behind "friendly" leadership, even if the result was to continued to retard the development of organic leadership and democracy within those countries. Such was the case with the African nation of Gabon and the "Elf affair" which splashed across European headlines in the mid-1990s. One of the most fascinating aspects of this - which is relevant in understanding the selection of post-colonial dictators in numerous other countries - is that the French chose a dictator from a minority tribe to increase that dictator's dependency on French support:

"The so-called Elf affair scandal began in 1994 when U.S.-based Fairchild Corp. opened a commercial dispute with a French industrialist, triggering a stock exchange inquiry.

Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens

by Nicholas Shaxson by Palgrave Macmillan

Hardcover ~ Release Date: 2011-04-12

If you wish to read further: Buy Now

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Delanceyplace is a brief daily email with an excerpt or quote we view as interesting or noteworthy, offered with commentary to provide context. There is no theme, except that most excerpts will come from a non-fiction work, mainly works of history, are occasionally controversial, and we hope will have a more universal relevance than simply the subject of the book from which they came.

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China's "Great Leap Forward"....1958 to 1962

2011-08-10T21:01:00.001-04:00

Holly crap batman! .....this is a totally sad story.... oh the humanity! For all those Conservative Republicans, who constantly tell us how great the 1950's were, and how we all need to return to the values of that time!, .....I think you need to look at the "bigger" picture! It was not a great time for ALL PEOPLES on this big blue planet!

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In today's excerpt - during Chairman Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward, which was an effort to use centralized Communist planning to vault China's economy past those of the Western European powers, China endured one of the greatest tragedies in human history - the death of over 45 million people:

"Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell. Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up with and overtake Britain in less than fifteen years. By unleashing China's greatest asset, a labour force that was counted in the hundreds of millions, Mao thought that he could catapult his country past its competitors. Instead of following the Soviet model of development, which leaned heavily towards industry alone, China would 'walk on two legs': the peasant masses were mobilized to transform both agriculture and industry at the same time, converting a backward economy into a modern communist society of plenty for all.

"In the pursuit of a utopian paradise, everything was collectivized, as villagers were herded together in giant communes which heralded the advent of communism. People in the countryside were robbed of their work, their homes, their land, their belongings and their livelihood. Food, distributed by the spoonful in collective canteens according to merit, became a weapon to force people to follow the party's every dictate. Irrigation campaigns forced up to half the villagers to work for weeks on end on giant water-conservancy projects, often far from home, without adequate food and rest. The experiment ended in the greatest catastrophe the country had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives. ...

"At least 45 million people died unnecessarily between 1958 and 1962. The term 'famine', or even 'Great Famine', is often used to describe these four to five years of the Maoist era, but the term fails to capture the many ways in which people died under radical collectivization.
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A Psychopath with Hysterical Symptoms = Adolf Hitler

2011-07-27T07:58:00.001-04:00

"There was no medical reason for Hitler's second blindness and Dr. Forster reinforced in his initial conclusion that his patient was definitely 'a psychopath with hysterical symptoms.' Hitler, however, was convinced he was permanently blind."

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In today's excerpt - in 1918, after one final military assault that fails, Germany is defeated. Young Adolf Hitler, blind after a mustard gas attack, and humiliated after the Fatherland's defeat, vows to enter politics. His entry is part of a wave that carries Europe from royalty to revolution - sweeping aside those kings and emperors that had carried Europe into the unprecedented carnage of a pointless war:

"Throughout Europe royalty was clinging to hollow power. From the untitled masses were emerging men like Hitler who would come to wield the substance of power, men of common and often vulgar beginnings, riding the relentless wave of popular revolt against a war which had demanded sacrifices for goals no one could define.

"As the train took Hitler to a hospital in the Pomeranian town of Pasewalk, his own pain and despair obliterated any such aspiration, but after several weeks of medical treatment be began to regain his sight.

"Sight also brought Hitler hope and renewed interest in the events of the day. Berlin itself was in a state of virtual siege as the new Chancellor urged the Kaiser to abdicate so that an armistice could be signed.

"The shame of Germany's surrender on November 11 in the forest of Compiegne overwhelmed him. Life seemed unbearable, but that night, or the next, Hitler was abruptly delivered from his misery, as he lay in despair on his cot, by a 'supernatural vision' (perhaps deliberately induced Dr. Forster). Like St. Joan, he heard voices summoning him to save Germany. All at once 'a miracle came to pass' - the darkness encompassing Hitler evaporated. He could see again! He solemnly vowed, as promised, that be would 'become a politician and devote his energies to carrying out the command he had received.' "

Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography

by John Toland by Anchor

About Us

Delanceyplace is a brief daily email with an excerpt or quote we view as interesting or noteworthy, offered with commentary to provide context. There is no theme, except that most excerpts will come from a non-fiction work, mainly works of history, are occasionally controversial, and we hope will have a more universal relevance than simply the subject of the book from which they came.

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Islam, Trade, and the Camel

2011-06-14T09:49:00.001-04:00

The camel is a truly amazing animal !

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In today's excerpt - founded by the prophet Muhammad in the sixth century C.E., Islam spread faster than Christianity and its kingdom grew larger than the Roman Empire. By one estimate, the Islamic caliphate's revenue in 820 C.E. was no less than five times greater than that of the Christian Byzantine Empire. This fortune was built on trade and the marketplace, and that trade was built on the backs of camels:

"Water scarcity presented the primary obstacle standing between Islam and its historic rise to greatness through trade. First and foremost, it needed a way to cross the long expanse of its own hot, waterless interior deserts. Its first triumphant innovation, which at a stroke transformed the barren desert barrier into an insulated, exclusive Islamic trade highway, came by its disciplined organization of the hardy camel, with its prodigious water-storing capacity, into long trade caravans and military supply transports. A caravan of 5,000 to 6,000 camels could carry as much cargo as a very large European merchant sailing ship or a fleet of barges on China's Grand Canal. Islam's quasi-monopoly over this powerful pack animal provided it with the mobility to cross and exit its desert homelands - and to make its mark on world history.

"The one-humped Saharan dromedary was specially adapted for the hot deserts. It could go without drinking water for a week or more, while plodding some 35 miles per day across the desert sands with a 200-pound load on its back, Water was stored in its bloodstream - its fatty hump, which grew flaccid during long journeys without nourishment, functioned as a food reserve - and it maximized water retention by recapturing some exhaled water through its nose. Once at a water source the camel speedily rehydrated by consuming up to 25 gallons in only ten minutes. It even could tolerate briney water. It possessed an uncanny memory for the location of water holes. Moreover, it could eat the thorny plants and dry grasses that grew on and lands and were indigestible by most other animals. During a trip, camels could lose one-quarter their body weight, twice the amount fatal to most other mammals. The camel's extraordinary physical attributes made it possible for caravans to make the two-month, trans-Sahara trip from Morocco to Walata at the frontiers of the Mali Empire in Africa, which included one notorious stage of ten waterless days. ... Camels took Arab merchants and soldiers everywhere."

Author: Steven Solomon
Title: Water
Publisher: Harper
Date: Copyright 2010 by Steven Solomon
Pages: 133-135

Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization
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Sybil Ludington of Ludingtonville Mass.

2011-06-13T07:31:00.001-04:00

Click on the link for the entire story. The former governor from Alaska should read this!

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In today's excerpt - with all deference to a former governor from Alaska, not only was the purpose of Paul Revere's ride to warn the revolutionaries of an impending British attack, there was another heroic ride of warning twice as long as Revere's. The rider was sixteen year old Sybil Ludington:

"[The militia rallied and] discouraged the British from any further attacks in the area. As a result, the Americans in the vital region gained precious time to organize and resist, in large part due to the efforts of sixteen-year-old Sybil Ludington,

"And, unlike Revere, Sybil Ludington completed her mission without being captured. Yet she remains largely unknown.

In perhaps the ultimate tribute, the name of her hometown was to be changed from Fredericksburg to Ludingtonville.
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In These Times

2011-06-12T09:09:00.001-04:00

This nonprofit and independent newmagazine established in 1976 is probably exactly what we need to be in wide circulation and widely read today!

Amplify’d from www.inthesetimes.com

In These Times is a nonprofit and independent newsmagazine committed to political and economic democracy and opposed to the dominance of transnational corporations and the tyranny of marketplace values over human values.

The late Sen. Paul Wellstone, one of the first subscribers to In These Times, put it this way: “Meaningful democracy cannot survive without the free flow of information, even (or especially) when that information threatens the privileged and the powerful. At a time of growing media concentration, In These Times is an invaluable source of news and information that the corporate media would too often prefer to ignore.”

“If it weren’t for In These Times, I’d be a man without a country.” —Kurt Vonnegut
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The Second-String Psychopaths

2011-06-12T08:38:00.001-04:00

Must of what has happened lately in politics sadly seems to support this thesis.

Amplify’d from www.commondreams.org

The Rise of the Second-String Psychopaths

by David Schwartz

The great writer Kurt Vonnegut titled his final book A Man without a Country. He was the man; the country was the United States of America. Vonnegut felt that his country had disappeared right under his – and the Constitution’s – feet, through what he called “the sleaziest, low-comedy Keystone Cops-style coup d’état imaginable.” He was talking about the Bush administration. Were Vonnegut still alive in the post-Bush era, he would not have felt that his country had returned.

How had our country disappeared? Vonnegut proposed that among the contributing factors was that it had been invaded – as if by the Martians – by people with a particularly frightening mental illness. People with this illness were termed psychopaths.
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Two obscure events that saved the union....interesting!

2011-06-07T06:41:00.001-04:00

This www.delanceyplace.com excerpt got me thinking about the civil war, slave states vs. free states.....the Erie Canal, and the Mississippi River, all at the same time. It is all interesting history, and very interesting events that tend to shape what this country is today! I,m currently reading Mark Twain's "Life on the Mississippi", and find it an eye opener into that period of American history. Mark Twain was a Mississippi river boat pilot, and I recommend the book for an education in the importance of this big muddy river. Apparently Samuel Langhorne Clemmons (1835-1910) was smack-dabe in the middle of all these important events and turns of American history!

Amplify’d from campaign.r20.constantcontact.com

In today's excerpt - the completion of the Erie Canal and the extension of Illinois' border north to include the land that became Chicago saved the Union. The Mississippi River held an economic dominance over the middle of the country in the early 1800s, and put that dominance in the hands of Louisiana, Missouri and other slaveholding states. It was only the opening of the Erie Canal that created a self-contained East-West economic region among the Great Lakes states, and thus gave them economic independence from this Mississippi dominance. So when Congress was carving out the new state of Illinois under the dictates of the "Northwest Ordinance" - one of the three key "founding documents" in American History since it helped define how new states could be admitted to the country - it was careful to extend its borders to include a port on Lake Michigan:
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The Diminishing Social Security Safety Net

2011-06-05T10:01:00.001-04:00

At age 68, after working hard and raising three kids, and help in the raising of two grandkids, Social Security and Medicare, are the only way my wife Carolyn, 67yrs.) ,and I are able to stay alive for a few more years, and maintain a semblance of dignity.

I recently had "open heart" surgery that replaced a broken Aorta Valve, and a damaged Aorta Artery. There is no question that without this operation, I would not be here. We were not able to save enough money during our working years to keep us financially independent. Ergo, we would now probably now be a financial burden on our kids.

I am very grateful for the social safety nets that are now in place, and I constantly try to appreciate the days, months, and years that I may still participate in our world of family and friends. Our participation is good not just for ourselves, but for our extended family.

So, the way I see it, the social safety net is a benefit to everyone. The social safety nets are, and should be considered a benefit to our country and our society. It saddens me to think that the future is looking so bleak for the younger generation, and for our country, and our society. We are all together in this great adventure called life!

Amplify’d from finance.yahoo.com

3 Ways Your Social Security Payments Are Already Being Cut

by Alicia Munnell
Friday, June 3, 2011
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Policy experts have focused on alternative ways of eliminating Social Security's 75-year financing gap, but lost in the debate is the fact that even under current law Social Security will provide less retirement income relative to previous earnings than it does today. Combine the already legislated reductions with potential cuts to close the financing gap, and Social Security may no longer be the mainstay of the retirement system for many people.

1. The Extension of the Full Retirement Age

2. The Increase in Medicare Premiums

3. The Taxation of Social Security Benefits
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Pit bulls as "Nanny dogs"

2011-06-05T09:26:00.001-04:00

That muscular chest.....that big head.....that massive and strong looking jaw! I just don't like seeing that dog next to that little baby!

Amplify’d from beta.news.yahoo.com

Pit bulls’ surprising past: Nanny dogs
By Claudine Zap | The Upshot – Thu, Jun 2, 2011

Try to quickly summon an image of good-with-small-children dog, and chances are you'll picture something adorably Benji-shaggy. Or maybe a sweetie-pie golden retriever, or a loveball of a lab. It's not likely, at least not in today's perception of the breed, that an American pit bull terrier leaps to mind.

But not so long ago, pit bulls were brought in as "nanny dogs," the trusted caretaker pups to watch over kids.

Vintage photographs recently posted on a personal blog show off the breed as babysitter.

More vintage photos of pit bulls with children

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Homeowner Forcloses on the Bank!

2011-06-05T07:53:00.001-04:00

Sweet Justice!

Amplify’d from www.realclearpolitics.com

Florida Homeowner Forecloses On ... Bank

Instead of Bank of America foreclosing on some Florida homeowner, the homeowners had sheriff's deputies foreclose on the bank. (More ...)
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Dolphins

2011-05-24T21:04:00.001-04:00

Free Trade, and the WTO is just about making rich people richer

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Thom's blog

American can no longer label tuna products as "dolphin safe"

If you thought our government was in charge of making laws - think again. It turns out the World Trade Organization is telling us what to do. Yesterday - the WTO took a bite out of US sovereignty - ruling that American can no longer label tuna products as "dolphin safe." Why? Because such labeling could restrict the purchase of certain foreign tuna products - thus limiting "free trade" in America.

So now with no incentive to catch dolphin-safe tuna - expect transnational corporate seafood companies around the world to go gangbusters scooping up tuna out of the ocean with no regard to what else might get trapped in their nets. The US has lost 9 out of every 10 cases in front of the WTO since joining the organization in 1995 - so where are the Tea Party protests on this important issue of sovereignty?

Oh right - their corporate founders love free trade - even though it screws America.

-Thom

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400 super rich Americans control more we

2011-04-11T20:59:00.001-04:00

Interesting statistic........does any one really give a shit!.....apparently not!

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Thom's blog

400 super rich Americans control more wealth in the country than 150 million other Americans

Even though a government shutdown was averted - working class people will still be screwed over in America. A new report by Wealth for the Common Good shows that the 400 richest people in America - our nation's oligarchs - have never had it so good and are paying the lowest taxes ever in their lifetimes.

Those 400 super rich Americans control more wealth in the country than 150 million other Americans, and yet are effectively taxed at a rate of just over 16% while the rest of spay up to 35% plus higher levels of sales, property, and other taxes. To put that in perspective These 400 rich oligarchs effective tax rate has dropped by more than 2/3 since Dwight Eisenhower's administration - while the rate for working people has nearly doubled. Rich people get a 2/3 tax cut over the last 50 years - working people get screwed with a 100% tax hike.

To make matters worse - average CEO pay increased dramatically last year - despite an 20% real under- and un-employment rate plaguing the rest of us. And yet - now Congress says they're gonna pass a budget that cuts federal education, health care, and energy assistance programs for working class Americans while doing nothing to make America's oligarchs pay their fair share or sacrifice even one damn thing.

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Supersize Me!

2011-04-01T06:54:00.001-04:00

David Wallerstein......a great marketeer! Here's the explanation for that "great big bucket of popcorn" at the movies, and a lot of other larger than life food items!

Amplify’d from campaign.r20.constantcontact.com

In today's excerpt - supersizing and the 'thrifty gene':

"That distinction [of inventing supersizing] belongs to a man named David Wallerstein. Until his death in 1993, Wallerstein served on the board of directors at McDonald's but in the fifties and sixties he worked for a chain of movie theaters in Texas where he labored to expand sales of soda and popcorn - the high-markup items that theaters depend on for their profitability. As the story is told in John Love's official history of McDonald's, Wallerstein tried everything he could think of to goose up sales - two-for-one deals, matinee specials - but found he simply could not induce customers to buy more than one soda and one bag of popcorn. He thought he knew why: Going for seconds makes people feel piggish.

"Wallerstein discovered that people would spring for more popcorn and soda - a lot more - as long as it came in a single gigantic serving. Thus was born the two-quart bucket of popcorn, the sixty-four-ounce Big Gulp, and in time the Big Mac and the jumbo fries, though Ray Kroc himself took some convincing.

Author: Michael Pollan
Title: The Omnivore's Dimemma

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The Demise of the Tea Party

2011-04-01T06:19:00.001-04:00

" a large group of politically naive white voters who are being manipulated to vote against their best interests by radical millionaires and billionaires like the Koch brothers and Dick Armey"

WELL SAID!

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Thom's blog

Is the demise of the Tea Party near?

Is the demise of the Tea Party near? According to a new CNN poll - the Tea Party's favorability rating has sunk to an all-time low - just 32%. And 47% of respondents view Tea Partiers negatively. The poll is on the heels of nearly three months of Tea Party rule in the House of Representatives that's seen nothing accomplished on jobs or getting our economy moving again. And this week - there are reports that Tea Party Republicans are threatening to shut the government down unless they get everything they want in budget negotiations.

Maybe people are finally starting to see the Tea Party for what it really is - a large group of politically naïve white voters who are being manipulated to vote against their best interests by radical millionaires and billionaires like the Koch brothers and Dick Armey.

-Thom

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Peter the Wild Boy

2011-03-30T09:29:00.001-04:00

Very interesting article from the UK Guardian

Amplify’d from www.guardian.co.uk

Peter the Wild Boy's condition revealed 200 years after his death

Feral German child who was kept as a pet in George I's court had Pitt-Hopkins syndrome, research into portrait suggests

The condition that affected Peter the Wild Boy, a feral child found abandoned in a German forest and kept as a pet at the courts of George I and II, has been identified more than 200 years after his death.

Peter's charming smile, seen in his portrait painted in the 1720s by William Kent on the king's grand staircase at Kensington Palace, was the vital clue.

Lucy Worsley, the historian at Historic Royal Palaces who has been researching Peter's strange life, suspected from contemporary accounts that he was autistic.

She showed the portrait and gave the description of his physical characteristics and odd habits to Phil Beale, professor of genetics at the Institute of Child Health.
Read more at www.guardian.co.uk

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Debtor's Prison! ....When's it your turn

2011-03-24T20:23:00.001-04:00

Haven't you had enough!

Amplify’d from campaign.r20.constantcontact.com

Thom's blog

Have we officially returned to when the Robber Barons ruled?

We know that millions around the nation have been screwed over by predatory lenders and fine print credit card contracts - and now are swimming in debt. But can you believe that some of these people are actually being thrown in prison for going into debt? That's right - American in the 21st century is bringing back debtors' prisons. People who can't pay off their credit cards can be thrown in jail in a third of the states in our nation - and since the start of 2010 - over 5,000 arrest warrants have been issued against people who owe as little as $1,000 to massively profitable corporations like Capital One.

So let me get this straight - a few years after the financial crisis where massive fraud was perpetrated by Wall Street - not one bankster is in jail - but 5,000 low or middle-class Americans who were screwed over by these banksters were sent to debtor's prison??

It's official - Republicans have set our country back more than 100 years - to the 1800's - when the Robber Barons ruled and our politics were corrupted to the core.

-Thom

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Holy Sanctimony Batman!.its Scott Walker

2011-03-20T08:47:00.001-04:00

Why are all these people who want to start preemptive wars in other countries and on the middle class in our own country always in direct communication with God? How come they are always so completely calm and so completely sure of themselves? Could it be that they are so completely DELUSIONAL!

Amplify’d from thinkingblue.blogspot.com

"Jesus Christ? Hey Hi, Scott Walker Here."

HOLY SANCTIMONY BATMAN… It all fits together for me now… How
this idiot never seems to get upset; How he never seems to use
reason; How Stepford Wife he looks when he speaks (looking afar
as his mouth moves with emphasis on certain words)… Another
NUTBALL at the helm… If he could preempt wars… Oops, I
forgot he has… WAR ON THE MIDDLE-CLASS… It is beyond
disgusting! thinkingblue

Scott Walker Believes He’s Following Orders from the Lord

By Matthew Rothschild

March 09, 2011 "The Progressive" - -The dogmatic unwillingness of Wis. Gov. Scott Walker to negotiate or to compromise with Democrats or unions has surprised many people
in the state. One explanation for his attitude may be found in
his religious convictions.

In a talk to the Christian Businessmen’s Committee in
Madison on November 13, 2009, Walker, who was raised by a Baptist
preacher, spoke about his personal relationship with God, his
“walk to Christ,” and his belief in the need to
“trust and obey” the Lord.

Walker said that God has told him what to do every step of the
way, including about what jobs to take, whom to marry, and when
to run for governor.

He said he was trusting and obeying God when he took a job at IBM
and then at the Red Cross. ““Lord, if this is what you
want, I’ll try it,” he said. It was all about “trust and obey.”

Fourteen months later, at his inaugural prayer breakfast, Walker
said, “The Great Creator, no matter who you worship, is the
one from which our freedoms are derived, not the government.”

Walker’s views disturb Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of
the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

“It is frightening that the highest executive in our state
suffers from the delusion that God dictates his every move,”
she says. “Consider the personal and historic devastation
inflicted by fanatics who think they are acting in the name of
their deity.” MORE HERE
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ThinkingBlue: Jesus Christ? Hey Hi, Scott Walker Here.

2011-03-20T08:22:00.000-04:00

ThinkingBlue: Jesus Christ? Hey Hi, Scott Walker Here.

If Walker is successful, Wisconsin is screwed!

2011-03-02T08:21:00.001-05:00

I guess you could call this a "power grab"....using money problems as an excuse to roll over the people. Walker is disgusting, and should be "recalled" and banished from the state, and from public life!

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Thom's blog

Governor Walker...but Wait! There's More...

ThinkProgress has pointed out some lesser-known provisions that Scott Walker and his Republican colleagues are trying to slip through the state legislature that should worry many Wisconsinites. Even if protestors successfully defend their rights to collectively bargain - they still have to deal with a GOP-led assault on the several health, environmental, and economic programs including a bill that will allow the state's uber-conservative Health and Human Services Secretary to override state Medicaid laws to make deep cuts into the critical health care program.

There's also legislation that will exempt local governments from having to disinfect their waters - and a similar bill that exempts large tracts of wetlands from environmental oversight. It just so happens that many of those wetlands are owned by a rich Republican donor...talk about cronyism.

The GOP wants Wisconsin voters to have to show an ID when they vote from now on - a move that could disenfranchise many elderly, urban, and low-income voters.

And finally - there are two bills that drastically increase Governor Walker's powers, including giving him authority to write rules for the state's ethics watchdog agency - and allowing Walker to turn 37 state civil servants into political appointees thus politicizing critical social services.

What we're seeing in Wisconsin is not the agenda of a Republican governor - it's the agenda of a radical autocrat. And if Walker is successful - Wisconsin is screwed.

-Thom
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Budget Cutting Consequences

2011-02-24T20:29:00.001-05:00

Essential services, or some extra cash for the rich folks......your choice!

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Thom's blog

Two children died in a fire in Philadelphia on Tuesday - and budget cuts could be to blame

Two children died in a fire in Philadelphia on Tuesday - and budget cuts could be to blame. In an effort to cut spending - the city of Philadelphia "browned out" - or closed some of it's fire stations for a day. One of those fire stations that were closed was Engine 61 - and it just so happened to be the nearest company to the fire that killed those two children - and thus would have been first on the scene. As local firefighter Mike Cane said, "Whether...that company was in service, they would have made a difference?

Nobody can answer that...what we can say is, maybe if they were there...Maybe them kids would have had a shot." These are the real-life consequences of budget cutting.

It's time we roll back the Reagan tax cuts instead of rolling back critical funding for firefighters who keep our communities safe. The purpose of a budget is not to give tax breaks to the rich in order to screw over everyone else.

-Thom

(How far back would you roll taxes? Tell us here.)

Thank you for being part of our ever growing community for News, Debate and Opinion on the Thom Hartmann Program.

Click here to subscribe to the Thom Hartmann Newsletter.

Sincerely,
The Thom Hartmann Program
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Let us give thanks to the Wisconsin-14

2011-02-21T13:43:00.001-05:00

Other legislators throughout the country should take note that it may be necessary for them to take the same steps in order to preserve democracy in this country. This is the first "shot across the bow" on the war between average hard-working Americans, and big business money interests that are represented by the U.S. Supreme Court in their recently destructive "Citizens United" give away. They want it all!.....and what better way than to destroy the unions and the protection of collective bargaining.

Amplify’d from thinkingblue.blogspot.com

We The People of the USA Need To Thank
The Wisconsin 14

IT'S NOT ABOUT THE WISCONSIN BUDGET!

IT ABOUT WAR ON DEMOCRACY!

You still can’t find a single Democratic state senator in
the entire state of Wisconsin. All 14 of them remain in
self-imposed exile in Illinois, and as long as they stay there,
they can continue to prevent passage of a highly controversial
bill that would sharply reduce benefits for teachers and other
government employees and, more importantly, gut public labor unions.

At the moment, only five states prohibit collective bargaining by
teachers and other public employees, as the map below
demonstrates. Georgia is one of the five. (Note: The right to
bargain collectively does not imply the legal right to strike in many states.)

As I've written in my last blog, What we are seeing here today is WAR. Not the blood and guts war that the Republicans would prefer but a war never-the-less on Democracy. And if We-The-People lose this war our America will never be the same.

Since SCOTUS (5/4) ruled blatantly in favor of Corporations (in the
Citizen United ruling on corporate campaign spending), by 5
conservative judges who followed their Republican political
ideologies in lockstep, against the people and for the
corporations, a plutocracy has taken shape. This ruling has
emboldened the GOP to openly oppose any democratic rules in which
we live under. If they succeed in destroying our Democracy
altogether we will find that life ruled by the wealthiest amongst
us to be much oppressed and not worth living. Think Slavery,
it’s not farfetched it’s REAL!

This is real (although it seems like it should be just a bad dream)
We-The-People are about to lose that status and become
We-The-Slaves to Corporate/Wealthy Interests. It is so obvious
but so many will deliberately refuse to see it just to prove a
point. It won't be the rich and powerful that takes us down it
will be the foolish. tb

"A fool contributes nothing worth hearing and takes offense at everything." Aristotle

ThinkingBlue

Yes, there are two Americas’ Virginia, they exist as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist. One tolerant and broadminded, the other intolerant and narrow-minded!

Sincerely, thinkingblue, from the TOLERANT AND BROADMINDED USA

PS: Joe (You Lie) Wilson, et al reside in the other America!

Monday, February 21, 2011
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Frank Sinatra's traumatic birth

2011-02-19T09:36:00.001-05:00

Here's some biographical information about Frank Sinatra that few people are aware of. It was a surprise to me.

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In today's excerpt - Frank Sinatra carried the scars of his traumatic birth for the rest of his life:

"A raw December Sunday afternoon in 1915, a day more like the old century than the new among the wood-frame tenements and horse-shit-flecked cobblestones of Hoboken's Little Italy, a.k.a. Guinea Town. The air smells of coal smoke and imminent snow. The kitchen of the cold-water flat on Monroe Street is full of women, all gathered around a table, all shouting at once. On the table lies a copper-haired girl, just nineteen, hugely pregnant. She moans hoarsely: the labor has stalled. The midwife wipes the poor girl's brow and motions with her other hand. A doctor is sent for. Ten long minutes later he arrives, removes his overcoat, and with a stern look around the room - he is the lone male present - opens his black bag. From the shining metallic array inside he removes his dreaded obstetric forceps, a medieval-looking instrument, and grips the baby with it, pulling hard from the mother's womb, in the violent process fearfully tearing the left side of the child's face and neck, as well as its left ear.

"The doctor cuts the cord and lays the infant - a boy, huge and blue and bleeding from his wounds, and apparently dead - by the kitchen sink, quickly shifting his efforts to saving the nearly unconscious mother's life. The women lean in, mopping the mother's pallid face, shouting advice in Italian. One at the back of the scrum - perhaps the mother's mother, perhaps someone else - looks at the inert baby and takes pity. She picks it up, runs some ice-cold water from the sink over it, and slaps its back. It starts, snuffles, and begins to howl.

"Mother and child both survived, but neither ever forgot the brutality of that December day. Frank Sinatra bore the scars of his birth, both physical and psychological, to the end of his years. A bear-rug-cherubic baby picture shot a few weeks after he was born was purposely taken from his right side, since the wounds on the left side of his face and neck were still angry-looking. Throughout Sinatra's vastly documented life, he would rarely - especially if he had anything to do with it - be photographed from his left. One scar, hard to disguise (though frequently airbrushed), ran diagonally from the lower-left corner of his mouth to his jawline. His ear on that side had a bifurcated lobe - the classic cauliflower - but that was the least of it: the delicate ridges and planes of his left outer ear were mashed, giving the appearance, in early pictures, of an apricot run over by a steamroller. The only connection between the sonic world and the external auditory meatus - the ear hole - was a vertical slit. Later plastic surgery would correct the problem to some extent.

"That wasn't all. In childhood, a mastoid operation would leave a thick ridge of scar tissue on his neck behind the ear's base. A severe case of cystic acne in adolescence compounded his sense of disfigurement: as an adult, he would apply Max Factor pancake makeup to his face and neck every morning and again after each of the several showers he took daily.

"Sinatra later told his daughter Nancy that when he was eleven, after some playmates began to call him 'Scarface,' he went to the house of the physician who had delivered him, determined to give the good doctor a good beating. Fortunately, the doctor wasn't home. Even when he was in his early forties, on top of the world and in the midst of an artistic outpouring unparalleled in the history of popular music, the birth trauma - and his mother - were very much on Sinatra's mind. Once, in a moment of extraordinary emotional nakedness, the singer opened up very briefly to a lover. 'They weren't thinking about me,' he said bitterly. 'They were just thinking about my mother. They just kind
of ripped me out and tossed me aside.' "

Author: James Kaplan
Title: Frank
Publisher: Doubleday
Date: Copyright 2010 by James Kaplan
Pages: 3-5

Frank: The Voice
by James Kaplan by Doubleday

Hardcover ~ Release Date: 2010-11-02

If you wish to read further: Buy Now

Should you use the above link to purchase a book, delanceyplace proceeds
from your purchase will benefit a children's literacy project.
Delanceyplace is a not-for-profit organization.

About Us

Delanceyplace is a brief daily email with an excerpt or quote we view as interesting or noteworthy, offered with commentary to provide context. There is no theme, except that most excerpts will come from a non-fiction work, mainly works of history, are occasionally controversial, and we hope will have a more universal relevance than simply the subject of the book from which they came.

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Wake Up Tea Party, We May Be On the Same Side In Wisconsin.

2011-02-18T12:43:00.001-05:00

Once again Rachel Maddow clears up a mystery and brings up the magical word called TRUTH. You will not believe what the Republicans are trying to do to the WE THE PEOPLE. Wake up Tea Party, we may be on the SAME SIDE!

Amplify’d from www.thethinkingblue.com

Rachel Maddow - BAKE SALES VS. BILLIONAIRES

The Rachel Maddow Show
of February 17, 2011, summed up what is really happening in
Wisconsin. It's not about BUDGET, it's not about UNIONS, it's not
even about Left and Right. It's about SURPRISE, SURPRISE... about
plutocracy! Oh, this sounds so REAL, you know Real as in reality.
Thanks Rachel once again you cleared up the confusion we all feel
about things that happen around us THAT MAKE NO SENSE AT ALL.
thinkingblue

PLUTOCRACY - a
government or state in which the wealthy class rules.

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Unless You're Big Business, You

2011-02-03T06:47:00.001-05:00

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Thom's blog

Unless You're Big Business, You're Screwed!

Republican Chairman of the House Government Oversight Committee - and small-time criminal turned into the richest man in Congress - Darrell Issa is outsourcing his job to corporate CEOs. Back in December - Issa asked more than one hundred businesses to outline what federal regulations he should attempt to strike down with his new powers as Chairman. And though Issa intended to keep the responses from the corporate community to his inquiry private - unlike the personal information of people who've filed Freedom of Information Act requests - which he wants to make public - the organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington uncovered more than 30 of these responses. The wish-list of deregulation includes: dismantling the EPA - repealing lead-paint restrictions - ending coal tar and hydraulic fracking regulations - and ending required flammability tests for children's mattresses.

Basically - free reign to pollute the environment - contaminate our drinking war - poison our families with lead - and mass produce fire traps for children...that's what the business community wants Darrell Issa to let them get away with. Republicans are busy renaming House Committees - like removing the word "labor" from the Labor and Education Committee - and removing the words "civil rights" from the Civil Rights and Constitution Subcommittee. I suggest they go ahead and rename Issa's Government Oversight Committee too. Let's just call it the "Unless You're Big Business, You're Screwed" Committee.

-Thom
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Judicial Corruption

2011-01-28T07:54:00.001-05:00

Welcome to "The United Corporations of America" !

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Thom's blog

This is judicial corruption at it's worst, and these men should be impeached or prosecuted

Last week - Common Cause petitioned the Department of Justice to look into possible improprieties on the part of Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia for not recusing themselves from the Citizens United decision. Both Justices had headlined speaking events at political strategy sessions hosted by the billionaire Koch brothers - brothers who certainly benefit from the Citizens United decision. Now - thanks to reporting from Think Progress's Lee Fang - we can throw Justice Samuel Alito into the mix too. Last year - Alito was the headline speaker at a fundraising event hosted by the Manhattan Institute - a right-wing think tank funded by big corporations like Exxon and CIGNA. So here we have 3 Supreme Court Justices headlining political fundraising events for organizations and corporations that benefited directly from the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision last year. This is judicial corruption at it's worst, and these men should be impeached or prosecuted.

-Thom
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Citizens United decision should be overturned!

2011-01-20T19:42:00.001-05:00

What a Koch! The "Citizens United" decision by the Supremes was totally disgusting!

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Thom's blog

Could the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision soon be overturned?

One year after the ruling - could the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision soon be overturned? The progressive organization Common Cause is asking the Department of Justice to look into possible "conflict of interest" behind the scenes of the Citizens United ruling. In the petition to the DOJ - Common Cause argues that Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia should have recused themselves from the Citizens United case since they were actively involved in political strategy sessions hosted by the billionaire Koch Brothers - two men who benefited considerably from the Supreme Court's ruling.

The allegation is based on documents obtained by ThinkProgress and the New York Times that suggest the two Justices attended a Palm Springs event hosted by the Koch brothers around the same time the high court was hearing arguments in the case. If the petition is successful - the DOJ could disqualify Justices Scalia and Thomas from the ruling - and thus overturn the decision altogether. Of course this wouldn't be the first time Scalia and Thomas demonstrated a "conflict of interest". Thomas didn't recuse himself from the Bush v. Gore decision in 2000 that handed the presidency over to George W. Bush even though Thomas's wife was working on the Bush transition team. And Scalia went on a hunting trip with former Vice President Dick Cheney right before he ruled in favor of Cheney in a case before the high court. Overturning Citizen's United based on these guys' impropriety should be just a start - they should also be impeached for corruption.

-Thom
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More Guns More Violence, More Guns, More Violence...etc.etc.

2011-01-15T09:33:00.001-05:00

Makes no sense!

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Thom's blog

We need to retreat from this culture of violence, not reload again...

Since the shooting of Representative Giffords - Members of Congress are now worried about their own security - both in DC and their home districts. In the nation's Capitol - Congress has access to enhanced security thanks to the Capitol police. Though that's not good enough for Republican Congressman Louie Gohmert - the guy who's just about afraid of everything from gays to terror babies. He's proposing legislation that would allow Members of Congress to carry guns in DC and get this - even on the House floor. I guess he took Sarah Palin's speech to heart on Wednesday when she talked about how politicians of old settled their difference with pistol duels.

Outside Washington - back in their home districts - Members of Congress must rely on local law enforcement to provide security. A task that's increasingly difficult as states are bankrupt and are forced into laying off police officers - mainly thanks to irresponsible tax cuts and fiscal policy brought to us by Republican state Governors and right-wing ballot initiatives over the last few decades. In response - Republican Peter King - is calling to borrow money from China to provide Members of Congress with personal security when they're outside of Washington, DC. King is also introducing legislation to ban carrying firearms within 1,000 feet of himself or any of his 534 colleagues.

It's unclear how average citizens like us can qualify for that same protective barrier. Fear isn't exclusive to Congress though - it's also felt among gun owners in the wake of Tucson. Owners of gun shops across Arizona have seen weapon sales nearly double in the days since the massacre as people fear tougher gun laws could be coming down the pike. Reagan and Palin and the rest of the GOP are right - we are an "exceptional" nation. Of all the advanced nations in the world - we're the only one that thinks more guns equals more security. And after each new gun massacre jolts our nation year in and year out - we refuse to change. We need to retreat from this culture of violence, not reload again.

-Thom
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Guns and Butter

2011-01-06T07:50:00.001-05:00

Eisenhower was "Supreme Allied Commander" in WWII.....seems like he knew exactly what he was talking about when he made these pronouncements against militarism, and defense spending. I have a real hard time understanding why nothing is ever mentioned about the unbelievable cost of our current wars. The Republicans are constantly talking about our national debt, and yet it's never pointed out that taxes were cut during a time of war, and the war costs were never covered in the budget. Why is that!! ?

Amplify’d from www.theatlantic.com

The Tyranny of Defense Inc.

In 1961, Dwight Eisenhower famously identified the military-industrial complex, warning that the growing fusion between corporations and the armed forces posed a threat to democracy. Judged 50 years later, Ike’s frightening prophecy actually understates the scope of our modern system—and the dangers of the perpetual march to war it has put us on.

By Andrew J. Bacevich

“Every gun that is made,” Eisenhower told his listeners, “every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” Any nation that pours its treasure into the purchase of armaments is spending more than mere money. “It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.” To emphasize the point, Eisenhower offered specifics:

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities … We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

Yet in Cold War Washington, Eisenhower’s was a voice crying in the wilderness. As much as they liked Ike, Americans had no intention of choosing between guns and butter: they wanted both. Military Keynesianism—the belief that the production of guns could underwrite an endless supply of butter—was enjoying its heyday.
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Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan

2011-01-05T10:56:00.001-05:00

Two of our country's great poets

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In today's excerpt - in the wake of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, folk singer Woody Guthrie wrote the song "This Land is Your Land," a satire and protest against what he saw as the unrealistic vision of Irving Berlin's "God Bless America."

"Folk music's hero was, of course, Woody Guthrie. Guthrie led by example, not by precepts, although his charisma and songwriting skills gave him a certain messianic quality. ... Musicians simply followed Guthrie. He was a journeyman,
traveling across the United States to learn traditional folk and blues songs, trailing migrant workers from Oklahoma to California. Guthrie's observations of the economic and environmental hardships of the Dust Bowl era inspired him to write his own lyrics about working people, which he set to traditional
folk music.

"In the late 1950s, growing pools of folksingers in Cambridge and Greenwich Village took Guthrie's lead and focused on the issues of the day, especially civil rights. Though all these musicians knew and admired Guthrie, the one to seek him out in his declining years at the Greystone Hospital in Morristown, New Jersey, was Bob Dylan. Dylan idolized Guthrie, calling him 'the true voice of the American Spirit'

Author: Michelle Mercer
Title: Will You Take Me As I Am
Publisher: Free Press
Date: Copyright 2009 by Michelle Mercer
Pages: 34-35
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George Carlin and Richard Pryor

2010-12-31T06:49:00.001-05:00

They had a miserable childhood, and somehow became superstar comedians.......interesting.

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The Delanceyplace End-of-Year Comedy Week

In today's encore excerpt - the lives of superstar comedians George Carlin and Richard Pryor bear witness to the pain beneath much of our humor:

"George Carlin's father, an ad salesman, was a drinker prone to violent outbursts, and when George was only two his mother grabbed him and his older brother fled down the fire escape and left for good. Mary Carlin and her boys spent two years shuttling among friends and relatives before finally getting an apartment of their own - with George's father stalking them all the way. 'He hounded her' says Carlin. 'And he frightened her. When we lived on One Hundred Fortieth Street, we would come back from downtown, get off the subway, and the procedure was my mother would go to the call box get the local precinct and say 'Hi it's Mary and the kids. I'm at One Hundred and Forty-fifth Street. Come and get us.' And they would drive us home and see us into the house. Sometimes he'd be across the street just looking.' Even when they finally moved into an apartment that his father didn't know the whereabouts of, his mother was still on edge. If they got an unexpected knock she'd tell George to peek under the door. If he saw a lady's shoes, he could open it. A man's shoes and they would stay quiet until the visitor went away. This family drama ended only when his father died. George was eight. ...

"He was born Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor on December 1, 1940, in Peoria, Illinois. His mother, who appears to have been a prostitute, and his father married when Richard was three and split up when he was ten. He then went to live with his grandmother, who ran a chain of whorehouses in town. In his autobiography, Pryor Convictions, Pryor describes learning about sex by peeking through keyholes to watch the prostitutes at work, and soaking up neighborhood lore at a bar called the Famous Door where 'people came in to exchange news, blow steam, or have their say.' He was kicked out of Catholic school when they found out about the family business and he moved into an integrated elementary school. There he got an early taste of racism when he gave a scratch pad as a gift to a little white girl he had a crush on. The next day, as Pryor tells it, the girl's angry father came to school and berated him in front of the class: 'Nigger don't you ever give my daughter anything.' "

Author: Richard Zoglin

Title: Comedy at the Edge

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Date: Copyright 2008 by Richard Zoglin

Pages: 19-20, 44

About Us

Delanceyplace is a brief daily email with an excerpt or quote we view as interesting or noteworthy, offered with commentary to provide context. There is no theme, except that most excerpts will come from a non-fiction work, mainly works of history, are occasionally controversial, and we hope will have a more universal relevance than simply the subject of the book from which they came.

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What's all this about "Mainstream Media" ?

2010-12-28T07:52:00.001-05:00

So much for that fairy tale about the liberal bias of mainstream media !

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Thom's blog

Mainstream media has been taken over by Conservative ideology

You need to know this. The mainstream media has been taken over by Conservative ideology. A new Pew Research Center Survey studied the media exposure of politicians during the recent midterm elections. What they found was - out of the ten most covered candidates during the election season - the top 3 were all Republicans. And most surprising - Sarah Palin - who essentially has no job and was not running for one - received three times more coverage to spew her talking points than the sitting Vice President Joe Biden. Also - conservative commentators like Glenn Beck received considerably more media coverage than their more liberal counterparts like Keith Olbermann. These findings from the Pew Research Center are similar to a study by MediaMatters back in 2006 that found that Republican talking heads appeared on Sunday morning news shows 58% of the time compared to Democratic commentators appearing only 42% of the time. And finally - reporter Sebastian Jones - with "The Nation" magazine - uncovered at least 75 corporate lobbyists or PR officials that now appear on television political talk shows with no disclosure of what business interests they actually work for. Their job? To do the bidding of their corporate overlords under the disguise of "expert political commentary". So now can we finally put an end to the myth that there is a liberal bias in the mainstream media? And hopefully now start recognizing we need to create new media outlets that aren't beholden to corporate interests or the talking points of their billionaire owners like Rupert Murdoch. Maybe then American will again hear the news they need to know.

-Thom

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Why? Because We Still Like You~ !

2010-12-23T08:07:00.001-05:00

Kids can be cruel !

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In today's excerpt - The Mickey Mouse Club television show was cancelled in 1958 after three seasons, and almost all the Mouseketeers, who were pre-teens and teenagers, found themselves out of work and trying to reenter normal life. Very few received help from Disney or were able to sustain careers in the entertainment world, and most went on to lives filled with disappointment. Even returning to their former schools proved daunting:

"The clash between the [ex-]Mouseketeers' former selves still on television in reruns, and the teenagers careening toward adulthood who they now were, highlighted the larger conflict that would mar their lives for years to come: the idyllic '50s sensibility their screen images represented versus the hipper grown-ups they were trying to become. 'After a while it was a part of my life that I wanted over, and it just wouldn't die,' Dennis Day said in an interview. 'There were all those reruns, and people kept recognizing me.'

"This conflict first played itself out in the halls of the schools to which the Mouseketeers were hoping to return quietly and without incident. Kids in Karen Pendleton's seventh-grade class would ask her for her autograph, but when the guileless middle-schooler would give it to them, they'd tear it up in front of her.

Her classmates would say things like, 'Wiggle your ears and I'll give you some cheese.'

"Don Agrati, a tiny thirteen-year-old, acquired the nickname 'Mouse' the second he returned to public school and suffered from the same unoriginal - though still hurtful - teasing methods

Kids would sing 'The Mickey Mouse Club March' whenever he entered the cafeteria. 'I was in fights every day and I was just miserable,' he recalls. '

Author: Jennifer Armstrong

Title: Why? Because We Still Like You

Publisher: Grand Central

Date: Copyright 2010 by Jennifer Armstrong

Pages: 164-166
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The Brain,...Stress,.....and Human Perception

2010-12-20T04:52:00.001-05:00

Some interesting facts about our sensory perception in times of stress.

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In today's excerpt - in moments of extreme duress, such as that which police experience during a shooting, human perception alters radically:

"Over a period of five years, [researcher Alexis] Artwohl gave hundreds of police officers a written survey to fill out about their shooting experiences. Her
findings were remarkable: virtually all of the officers reported experiencing at least one major perceptual distortion. Most experienced several. For some, time moved in slow motion. For others, it sped up. Sounds intensified or disappeared altogether. Actions seemed to happen without conscious control. The mind played tricks. One officer vividly remembered seeing his partner 'go down in a spray of blood,' only to find him unharmed a moment later. Another believed a suspect had shot at him 'from down a long dark hallway about forty feet long'; revisiting the scene a day later, he found to his surprise that the suspect 'had actually been only about five feet in front of [him] in an open
room.' Wrote one cop in a particularly strange anecdote, 'During a violent shoot-out I looked over ... and was puzzled to see beer cans slowly floating through the air past my face. What was even more puzzling was that they had the word Federal printed on the bottom. They turned out to be the shell casings ejected by the officer who was firing next to me.' ...

"The single distortion under fire that Artwohl heard about most, with a full 84 percent of the officers reporting it, was diminished hearing.

"The brain's tendency to steer its resources into visually zeroing in on the threat also explains the second most common perceptual distortion under fire. Tunnel vision, reported by 79 percent of Artwohl's officers, occurs when the mind locks on to a target or threat to the exclusion of all peripheral information.

"According to Artwohl's findings, the warping of reality under extreme stress often ventures into even weirder territory. For 62 percent of the officers she surveyed, time seemed to lurch into slow motion during their life-threatening encounter - a perceptual oddity frequently echoed in victims' accounts of emergencies like car crashes.

The truth, psychologists believe, is that it's really our memory of the event that unfolds at the pace of molasses; during an intensely fear-provoking experience, the amygdala etches such a robustly detailed representation into the mind that in retrospect it seems that everything transpired slowly. Memories, after all, are notoriously unreliable, especially after an emergency. Sometimes they're eerily intricate, and yet other times
vital details disappear altogether.

Author: Taylor Clark

Title: Nerve

Publisher: Little, Brown

Date: Copyright 2011 by Taylor Clark

Pages: 245-248

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Delanceyplace is a brief daily email with an excerpt or quote we view as interesting or noteworthy, offered with commentary to provide context. There is no theme, except that most excerpts will come from a non-fiction work, mainly works of history, are occasionally controversial, and we hope will have a more universal relevance than simply the subject of the book from which they came.

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The annexation of Mexico

2010-12-17T06:29:00.001-05:00

From sea to shiny sea!

Amplify’d from campaign.r20.constantcontact.com

In today's excerpt - in 1836, a small group of "Texans" living in northern Mexico rebelled against that country in a quest for independence, in some part because Mexico had outlawed slavery. Mexico's General Santa Anna failed to quell that small rebellion, then was captured and lost that territory. He was released and allowed to return to Mexico, where he regained the leadership of the country, rationalizing his defeat by comparing his loss to Napoleon's war against the Russians. However, the bitter humilation of defeat stayed with Santa Anna and the Mexican nation, and led directly to the Mexican America War of 1845. There Santa Anna again lost - and had to cede a vast portion of the country from New Mexico to California to the United States:

When Sam Houston and the Texans laid a trap with 800 men along the San Jacinto River, an overconfident Santa Anna dismissed the possibility of an attack. Assaulting 1,500 Mexicans in the late afternoon of April 21, the Texans defeated them in about eighteen minutes and promptly vented their anger over the Alamo and Goliad on their prisoners. Six hundred and fifty Mexicans were killed while just two Texans met the same fate. Santa Anna escaped, only to be captured the next day, disguised as a common soldier wearing diamond studs in his linen shirt.

"The loss of Texas was a decisive moment in the development of Mexican attitudes toward the United States. ... The creation of the Republic of Texas transformed apprehension into anger.

By the late 1830s, Mexican newspapers were calling for war against the United States. The manifest design of the [United States on the northern territories of Mexico] seemed all too clear. Santa Anna's adviser, Jose Marfa Tornel, later explained that Americans had been united since 1776 in 'their desire to extend the limits of the republic to the north, to the south, and to the west,' by whatever means necessary. The American 'frenzy to usurp and gain control of that which rightfully belongs to its neighbors' resembled the 'roving spirit' of 'barbarous hordes' from a 'far remote north.' ...

Why should a civilized people respect the Americans? 'Nowhere else on the face of the globe is the feeling of the white race stronger against those which, in its pride, it designates as colored.' Americans exploited and cheated Indians. Americans enslaved African Americans. Their pompous support for the rights of man rested on tyranny over others. How could Americans, who had 'opened a vast market of human flesh in Texas ... dare to acclaim the sacred name of liberty[?]' Americans' behavior in Texas echoed their behavior in Florida.

The loss of Texas would inevitably lead to the loss of New Mexico and California. 'Our national existence ... would end like those weak meteors which, from time to time, shine fitfully in the firmament and disappear.'

"In 1837 Santa Anna managed to restore his reputation, with his usual flair

In the early 1840s he commissioned a statue of himself with a finger pointing north to Texas, as if to trump his critics by reminding the world of his unfinished business."

Author: Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton

Title: The Dominion of War

Publisher: Penguin

Date: Copyright 2005 by Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton

Pages: 268-271
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Why? Because We Still Like You

2010-12-10T07:07:00.001-05:00

Who's the leader of the club that's made for you and me?

Amplify’d from campaign.r20.constantcontact.com

n today's excerpt - to help finance the construction of his new theme park, Walt Disney launched a new 1955 television show that revolutionized programming and dominated the daytime ratings with the unheard of strategy of letting regular kids be the stars of a show. For the kids that starred, the work was hard, and they survived in part with their own small subversions. For example, the pre-teen boys who starred in The Mickey Mouse Club defied the wishes of the show's producers and tilted their Mouseketeer caps back to show off their golden pompadours:

A guy could have the coolest hair in town, but no one would know about it if he wore his Mouseketeer cap according to regulation.

The guys had to have their waves out. And producers' demands that they wear the stupid hats way down on their heads wrecked everything. 'All the guys hated the ears,' Lonnie says now. 'They'd always want us to wear it like a monk.'

"The solution: the boys would act like they were going along with the producers' ridiculous rules until the last second before shooting started, then sneak the cap back two inches or so, just as cameras started to roll, pushing as much hair as possible forward with it to approximate a decent wave.

"More than ten million children watched the first season of The Mickey Mouse Club, and two million Mouse ears sold in the show's first three months,

The Mickey Mouse Club made a generation of kids feel like they belonged to their own elite group, a feeling that would lodge itself in their hearts and make them remember Mouseketeers Annette, Tommy, Darlene, Cubby, Karen, Lonnie, Sherry, Doreen, and the rest of the gang for the rest of their lives."

Author: Jennifer Armstrong
Title: Why? Because We Still Like You
Publisher: Grand Central
Date: Copyright 2010 by Jennifer Armstrong
Pages: 3-6
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200 Years In 4 Minutes (this is a must see video!!)

2010-12-05T17:32:00.001-05:00

Statistics, presented visually..... Interesting!

Despite only lasting 4 minutes, this remarkable video is sure to have a very long lasting impact. h/t to @amp-arif for first Amplifying it.

Amplify’d from www.talkingpointsmemo.com

Via the BBC, Hans Rosling examines the correlation between income growth and life expectancy in 200 countries over the last 200 hundred years in an amazing animation. Take a look:

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2009: The Year Wall Street Bounced Back and Main Street Got Shafted

2010-01-05T08:13:00.001-05:00

2009: The Year Wall Street Bounced Back and Main Street Got Shafted
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2009

In September 2008, as the worst of the financial crisis engulfed Wall Street, George W. Bush issued a warning: “This sucker could go down.” Around the same time, as Congress hashed out a bailout bill, New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg, the leading Republican negotiator of the bill, warned that “if we do not do this, the trauma, the chaos and the disruption to everyday Americans’ lives will be overwhelming, and that’s a price we can’t afford to risk paying.”

In less than a year, Wall Street was back. The five largest remaining banks are today larger, their executives and traders richer, their strategies of placing large bets with other people’s money no less bold than before the meltdown. The possibility of new regulations emanating from Congress has barely inhibited the Street’s exuberance.

But if Wall Street is back on top, the everyday lives of large numbers of Americans continue to be subject to overwhelming trauma, chaos and disruption.

It is commonplace among policymakers to fervently and sincerely believe that Wall Street’s financial health is not only a precondition for a prosperous real economy but that when the former thrives, the latter will necessarily follow. Few fictions of modern economic life are more assiduously defended than the central importance of the Street to the well-being of the rest of us, as has been proved in 2009.

Inhabitants of the real economy are dependent on the financial economy to borrow money. But their overwhelming reliance on Wall Street is a relatively recent phenomenon. Back when middle-class Americans earned enough to be able to save more of their incomes, they borrowed from one another, largely through local and regional banks. Small businesses also did.

It’s easy to understand economic policymakers being seduced by the great flows of wealth created among Wall Streeters, from whom they invariably seek advice. One of the basic assumptions of capitalism is that anyone paid huge sums of money must be very smart.

But if 2009 has proved anything, it’s that the bailout of Wall Street didn’t trickle down to Main Street. Mortgage delinquencies continue to rise. Small businesses can’t get credit. And people everywhere, it seems, are worried about losing their jobs. Wall Street is the only place where money is flowing and pay is escalating. Top executives and traders on the Street will soon be splitting about $25 billion in bonuses (despite Goldman Sachs’ decision, made with an eye toward public relations, to defer bonuses for its 30 top players).

The real locus of the problem was never the financial economy to begin with, and the bailout of Wall Street was a sideshow. The real problem was on Main Street, in the real economy. Before the crash, much of America had fallen deeply into unsustainable debt because it had no other way to maintain its standard of living. That’s because for so many years almost all the gains of economic growth had been going to a relatively small number of people at the top.

President Obama and his economic team have been telling Americans we’ll have to save more in future years, spend less and borrow less from the rest of the world, especially from China. This is necessary and inevitable, they say, in order to “rebalance” global financial flows. China has saved too much and consumed too little, while we have done the reverse.

In truth, most Americans did not spend too much in recent years, relative to the increasing size of the overall American economy. They spent too much only in relation to their declining portion of its gains. Had their portion kept up — had the people at the top of corporate America, Wall Street banks and hedge funds not taken a disproportionate share — most Americans would not have felt the necessity to borrow so much.

The year 2009 will be remembered as the year when Main Street got hit hard. Don’t expect 2010 to be much better — that is, if you live in the real economy. The administration is telling Americans that jobs will return next year, and we’ll be in a recovery. I hope they’re right. But I doubt it. Too many Americans have lost their jobs, incomes, homes and savings. That means most of us won’t have the purchasing power to buy nearly all the goods and services the economy is capable of producing. And without enough demand, the economy can’t get out of the doldrums.

As long as income and wealth keep concentrating at the top, and the great divide between America’s have-mores and have-lesses continues to widen, the Great Recession won’t end — at least not in the real economy.

What the hell is the matter with Kansas...part two

2010-01-05T08:04:00.001-05:00

Reducing America's Economic Polarization Will Lead to Political Comity

We frequently hear pundits pontificating about the rising level of political polarization in Congress.

Often the blame is ascribed to plummeting levels of civility among Members. In fact, ten years ago the House actually conducted several "civility retreats" aimed at fostering a more civil atmosphere inside the body. These events featured motivational speakers and smaller "encounter-group-like" seminars - and were widely attended by Members and their families. Needless to say, this approach didn't do much for the actual "civility index" in Congress.

And then there are the "centrists" who think that the partisan divide can best be bridged by proposals that seek to "moderate" the Democratic "change" agenda. Of course, most of these "moderates" want to water down Democratic proposals to change the status quo -- proposals that would reduce the power of the Wall Street gang, the private insurance industry, the energy companies and Chamber of Commerce. This presents a serious problem to most Democrats because the interests of these special interests are generally diametrically opposed to the interests of the American people. But it turns out they are also counterproductive when it comes to ending political polarization as well. Here's why:

Several years ago, a group of political scientists that included Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, conducted an important study on the causes of political polarization. Their results were published in a fascinating book, Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches. Their study found that there is a direct relationship between economic inequality and polarization in American politics.

The team measured political polarization in congressional votes over the last century, and found a direct correlation with the percentage of income received by the top 1% of the electorate.

They also compared the Gini Index of Income Inequality with congressional vote polarization of the last half-century and found a comparable relationship.

Why should this be? It doesn't take a political genius to figure out that if people have more in common they are more likely to support similar proposals and perspectives. Political polarization in Congress does not result from some new inability to "communicate" or "empathize." It results from the fact that the major constituencies of the two parties have increasingly divergent economic interests.

To put it simply, Republicans increasingly represent the interests of the wealthiest elements of American society, and Democrats represent everyone else. As the gap between the incomes of these segments of the population grows, so does the gap between their economic interests and the policy proposals they support.

So in other words, if you want to do something about the political polarization of Congress, you have to deal with the underlying cause. You have to reduce the growing level of income inequality in America. Unfortunately, when "Moderate" Democrats attempt to defang Democratic proposals to rein in private insurance companies, Wall Street banks, energy companies, and the Chamber of Commerce they have exactly the opposite effect. The actions of these "Moderates" serve to perpetuate income inequality - and as a direct consequence, the political polarization they are so quick to attack.

We should remember that the level of income inequality is far from being a static feature of American society.

Paul Krugman points out that at the beginning of the Great Depression, income inequality, and inequality in the control of wealth, was very high. Then came the "the great compression" between 1929 and 1947. Real wages for workers in manufacturing rose 67% while real income for the richest 1% of Americans fell 17%. This period marked the birth of the American middle class. Two major forces drove these trends - unionization of major manufacturing sectors, and the public policies of the New Deal that were sparked by the Great Depression.

The growing spending power of everyday Americans spurred the postwar boom from 1947 to 1973. Real wages rose 81% and the income of the richest 1% rose 38%. Growth was widely shared, but income inequality continued to drop.

From 1973 to 1980, everyone lost ground. Real wages fell 3% and income for the richest 1% fell 4%. The oil shocks, and the dramatic slowdown in economic growth in developing nations, took their toll on America's and the world's economies.

Then came what economist Paul Krugman calls "the New Gilded Age." Beginning in 1980, there were big gains at the very top. The tax policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations magnified income redistribution.

In the last 20 years, there has been a massive re-polarization of incomes in America between the wealthiest 1% of the population and everyone else. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that fully two-thirds of all income gains during the last economic expansion (2002 to 2007) flowed to the top 1% of the population. And that, in turn, is one of the chief reasons why the median income for ordinary Americans actually dropped by $2,197 per year since 2000.

From 1990 to 2004, the income of the top 1% of the population has increased 57%. The richest Americans - the top one-tenth of 1% - have experienced income growth of 85%. Yet the median income of the bottom 90% has increased only 2%

Now the CEO of the average company in the Standard and Poor's Index makes10.9 million. That means that before lunch, on the first workday of the year, he (sometimes she) has made more than the minimum wage workers in his company will make all year. That translates to5,240 per hour - or about 344 times that pay of the typical American worker.
Most people would consider a salary of100,000 per year reasonably good pay. But the average CEO makes that much in the first 20 hours of the work year.
And that's nothing compared to some of the Kings of Wall Street. In 2007, the top 50 hedge and private equity fund managers averaged588 million in compensation each- more than 19,000 times as much as the average U.S. worker. And by the way, the hedge fund managers paid a tax rate on their income of only 15% -- far lower than the rate paid by their secretaries.
So if all the "moderates" who say they want to help end the polarization of Congress are serious, they need to get to work supporting the Democratic agenda to end the stranglehold of the wealthiest, most powerful economic interests, and support measures to once again increase taxes on the wealthiest among us at least to the levels they were back in the Clinton Administration. In other words, if you want to end the polarization of Congress, you have to end the economic polarization of America.

Robert Creamer is a long-time political organizer and strategist, and author of the recent book: "Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win," available on Amazon.com.
Books By Robert Creamer

Five Editorials...Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission

2009-09-15T08:40:00.006-04:00

The Trial of John Roberts

By JEFFREY ROSEN
Published: September 12, 2009
Washington

Related
Times Topics: John G. Roberts Jr.

FOUR years ago, when John Roberts became chief justice of the United States, he said that he hoped to emulate the modesty and unanimity of his greatest predecessor, John Marshall. But if Chief Justice Roberts presides over a broad, ideologically divided ruling in a campaign finance case the court heard last week, he risks being remembered instead as a conservative Earl Warren.

For decades conservatives have attacked Warren, who was chief justice from 1953 to 1969, as the face of liberal judicial activism. They have criticized him for presiding over a court that imposed a contested vision of social justice on an unwilling nation — overturning decades of precedents and scores of federal and state laws in the process.

Moreover, conservatives view Warren as a Machiavellian former politician (he had been governor of California) who used incremental strategies to pursue radical ends — handing down a series of cautious decisions that favored the police, for example, and then tying their hands by requiring officers to read suspects their rights in the 5-to-4 Miranda decision of 1966.

Likewise, if the Roberts court issues a sweeping 5-to-4 decision in the current case, Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission, striking down longstanding bans on corporate campaign expenditures, it would define John Roberts as indelibly as Miranda defined Earl Warren. And there is no reason for the court to do so: it would be easy for the justices to rule narrowly in the Citizens United case, holding that the corporate-financed political material in question — a documentary called “Hillary: the Movie” — isn’t the kind of campaign ad that federal law was intended to regulate.

But many conservatives, and even some liberal devotees of the First Amendment, are urging the Roberts court to uproot federal and state regulations on corporate campaign spending that date back to 1907, as well as decades of Supreme Court precedents. If Chief Justice Roberts takes that road, his paeans to judicial modesty and unanimity would appear hollow.

In his confirmation hearings in 2005, Judge Roberts talked about the “jolt to the legal system” that occurs whenever the Supreme Court overturns its own precedents. And soon after taking office, he expressed concern that his colleagues were acting more like law professors than members of a collegial court in their willingness to divide along predictable party lines. He said he would try to persuade his colleagues to converge around narrow, unanimous opinions that avoided the most contentious constitutional issues. The result, he said, would help shore up the court’s legitimacy in a polarized age.

During his four terms as chief justice, Mr. Roberts has had mixed success in achieving his vision of narrow, unanimous opinions, although he surely deserves credit for trying. Under his leadership, the percentage of 5-to-4 decisions has fluctuated from a low of 11 percent in his first term to a high of 33 percent in the term that ended in 2007. Chief Justice Roberts has been most successful in achieving unanimity in cases involving business interests, which now represent some 40 percent of the court’s docket. According to the United States Chamber of Commerce, 79 percent of these cases are decided by margins of 7-to-2 or better.

At his best, Chief Justice Roberts has distanced himself from the most ardent conservative culture warriors on the court, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. In his most impressive act of judicial statesmanship, he persuaded his colleagues to converge around a narrowly written 8-to-1 decision in June that sidestepped the constitutional difficulties raised by a bipartisan amendment to the federal Voting Rights Act. (Only Justice Thomas dissented.) And Justice Roberts pointedly refused to join Justices Scalia, Thomas and Anthony Kennedy when they called in 2007 for gutting campaign finance regulations — endorsing a more modest position that Antonin Scalia attacked as “faux judicial restraint.”

If, however, in the Citizens United case, Justices Roberts and Samuel Alito now join Justices Scalia, Kennedy and Thomas in a 5-to-4 decision that broadly overturns longstanding bans on corporate campaign expenditures, the 2007 Scalia critique will be vindicated. And liberals will conclude that John Roberts is guilty of precisely the kind of strategic temporizing that conservatives have long ascribed to Earl Warren.

There is, of course, a case to be made for Warren Court activism, and it was made in the Citizens United argument last week by Floyd Abrams, a principled liberal who opposes campaign finance regulations on free speech grounds. (Paradoxically, he was arguing on behalf of Senator Mitch McConnell, the very conservative leader of the Senate Republicans.) Mr. Abrams invoked the landmark 1964 decision in New York Times v. Sullivan — which held that public figures could not sue the press for defamation unless there was “actual malice” involved — as one in which the court was right to rule broadly and overturn 150 years of settled jurisprudence.

But the Sullivan decision was 9-to-0: not a single justice believed that The New York Times could be sued for running an ad that the police commissioner in Montgomery, Ala., viewed as critical of his actions against civil rights protesters. Moreover, it was a decision that was acceptable to the country as a whole at a time when all three branches of government agreed about the importance of federal civil rights laws.

In fact, the most successful decisions of the Warren era fit the same model. Despite conservative caricatures of him as an activist who didn’t care about public opinion, Warren was a canny politician who viewed his role as working harmoniously with the governing majority in the White House and Congress to solve the nation’s problems. The unanimous Brown v. Board of Education was popular with 54 percent of the country when it came down in 1954. Baker v. Carr, the landmark 6-to-2 decision (Justice Charles Evans Whittaker did not participate) from 1962 that Warren considered the most important of his tenure, was hailed by voters from both parties for recognizing the principle of “one man, one vote.” Griswold v. Connecticut, the 7-to-2 decision from 1965 striking down an archaic Connecticut law forbidding the use of contraceptives by married couples, was supported by broad national majorities.

HOW, then, by the late 1960s did Warren become a symbol of judicial arrogance? The answer, according to the historian Lucas A. Powe Jr., can be found in its controversial decisions on criminal procedure. These cases tended to be closely divided along ideological lines and intensely opposed by national majorities. Mapp v. Ohio of 1961, for example, was a 6-to-3 decision that imposed the exclusionary rule on the states, changing the law in half of them and freeing guilty defendants across the country. Escobedo v. Illinois of 1964, the 5-to-4 decision that held that suspects have a right to a lawyer during police interrogations, created a political firestorm.

The success of Earl Warren’s bipartisan decisions, and the intense controversy produced by his ideologically divided ones, offers a cautionary tale for Chief Justice Roberts. If he presides over a court that establishes itself as the adversary rather than the partner of the president and Congress — imposing hotly contested visions of free speech and racial equality with a narrow court majority — he will become as polarizing a figure at the beginning of his tenure as Warren became at the end of his own.

John Roberts clearly understands the stakes. During an interview at end of his first term, he told me that the most successful chief justices in American history have been able to persuade their colleagues to speak with one voice. By contrast, he said, 5-to-4 decisions involving the most controversial questions in American politics make it harder for the public to respect the court as an institution that transcends politics.

Now he can support a narrow, restrained campaign finance decision that Republicans and Democrats can embrace, or he can hand down a broad, activist decision that turns our political system upside down. John Marshall or Earl Warren: the choice is his.

Jeffrey Rosen is a law professor at George Washington University and the legal affairs editor of The New Republic.
===================================================================================

September 10, 2009

Justices Are Pressed for a Broad Ruling in Campaign Case

By ADAM LIPTAK
WASHINGTON — There seemed little question after the argument in an important campaign finance case at the Supreme Court on Wednesday that the makers of a slashing political documentary about Hillary Rodham Clinton were poised to win. The open issue was just how broad that victory would be.

The argument was extraordinary in its timing, length and participants. It took place during the court’s summer break, almost a month before the start of the new term in October; lasted more than 90 minutes instead of the usual hour; and featured the Supreme Court debuts of Justice Sonia Sotomayor and the solicitor general, Elena Kagan.

It was, moreover, a rare re-argument. When the case was first heard in March, it centered on whether the restrictions on corporate spending in the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance law applied to the documentary “Hillary: The Movie,” which was produced by a nonprofit advocacy corporation called Citizens United. In the request for re-argument, the court raised the much broader question of whether it should sweep away restrictions on political speech by corporations.

On Wednesday, Ms. Kagan all but said that a loss for the government would be acceptable, so long as it was on narrow grounds.

She suggested to the justices that Citizens United might not be the sort of corporation to which some campaign finance restrictions ought to apply. What the Supreme Court should not do, she said, is overrule two earlier decisions and thereby allow all kinds of corporations to spend money to support or oppose political candidates, principally through television advertisements.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., on hearing the government’s position, accused it of engaging in strategic behavior.

“So you want to give up this case,” Chief Justice Roberts said to Ms. Kagan, “change your position, and basically say you lose solely because of the questioning we have directed on re-argument?”

Ms. Kagan did not go that far. But she said, “If you are asking me, Mr. Chief Justice, as to whether the government has a position as to the way it loses, if it has to lose, the answer is yes.”

Chief Justice Roberts and several of the court’s more conservative justices seemed frustrated with the complex state of modern campaign finance law and appeared ready to take bold action. Justice Sotomayor, like some of the court’s more liberal members, seemed inclined to take a narrower approach.

“Wouldn’t we be doing some more harm than good,” she asked Floyd Abrams, “by a broad ruling in a case that doesn’t involve more business corporations, and actually doesn’t involve the traditional nonprofit corporation?”

“Your honor,” Mr. Abrams responded, “I don’t think you’d be doing more harm than good in vindicating the First Amendment rights here, which transcend that of Citizen United.” Mr. Abrams represented Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader and a longtime foe of campaign finance regulation.

The order calling for re-argument in the case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, No. 08-205, asked the parties to offer their views on whether the court should overrule a 1990 decision, Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, which upheld restrictions on corporate spending to support or oppose political candidates, and part of McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, the 2003 decision that upheld the central provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

The McCain-Feingold law bans the broadcast, cable or satellite transmission of “electioneering communications” paid for by corporations in the 30 days before a presidential primary and in the 60 days before the general election. The law requires the government, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said, to make an array of distinctions — among speakers, what they say and when they say it — that raise serious First Amendment concerns.

The court could rule in favor of Citizens United without making fundamental changes to the political landscape. It could say that the McCain-Feingold law was not meant to address 90-minute documentaries like the one at issue. It could say that the way Citizens United wanted to distribute the documentary, on a cable video-on-demand service, was not covered by the law. Or it could, as Ms. Kagan suggested, carve out some kinds of corporations.

Justice Sotomayor asked Theodore B. Olson, a lawyer for Citizens United, whether his side had abandoned earlier arguments based on the McCain-Feingold law rather than the First Amendment rights of all corporations.

Mr. Olson indicated that he was prepared to accept any sort of victory. But he added that the court would have to confront the larger question in the case soon enough and that whatever interim lines the court drew would chill free speech in the meantime.

Mr. Abrams reminded the court that it could have decided New York Times v. Sullivan, the 1964 decision that revolutionized the law of libel, on quite narrow grounds. When First Amendment rights are in danger, Mr. Abrams said, a broad ruling can be the correct one.

“Hillary: The Movie,” a caustic critique of Mrs. Clinton, was shown in theaters in six cities, and it remains available on DVD and the Internet. A three-judge panel of the Federal District Court said last year that it could not be transmitted on cable because it had only one purpose: “to inform the electorate that Senator Clinton is unfit for office, that the United States would be a dangerous place in a President Hillary Clinton world and that viewers should vote against her.”

Ms. Kagan disavowed a statement that a government lawyer made when the case was first argued in March. The lawyer said the government could ban the distribution of books paid for by corporations before elections.

“The government’s answer has changed,” Ms. Kagan said, adding that the Federal Election Commission had never tried to regulate distribution of books.

Chief Justice Roberts bristled at that statement. “We don’t put our First Amendment rights in the hands of F.E.C. bureaucrats,” he said.

He then asked about pamphlets. “A pamphlet would be different,” Ms. Kagan said. “A pamphlet is pretty classic electioneering.”

Much of the argument was taken up by discussions of whether the speech of corporations might be treated different from that of individuals. Mr. Olson and Justice Antonin Scalia noted that most corporations were small, had limited assets and often were owned by a single shareholder. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked about “megacorporations” with foreign investors.

Changes at the court, particularly the replacement of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. in 2006, have substantially altered its attitude to campaign finance laws. A five-justice majority of the Roberts court has been hostile to such laws, but Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito have so far moved in cautious increments.

Judging by the request for re-argument and the tenor of the questioning on Wednesday, that may be about to change.
===================================================================================

September 8, 2009
EDITORIAL

A Threat to Fair Elections

The Supreme Court may be about to radically change politics by striking down the longstanding rule that says corporations cannot spend directly on federal elections. If the floodgates open, money from big business could overwhelm the electoral process, as well as the making of laws on issues like tax policy and bank regulation.

The court, which is scheduled to hear arguments on this issue on Wednesday, is rushing to decide a monumental question at breakneck speed and seems willing to throw established precedents and judicial modesty out the window.

Corporations and unions have been prohibited from spending their money on federal campaigns since 1947, and corporate contributions have been barred since 1907. States have barred corporate expenditures since the late 1800s. These laws are very much needed today. In the 2008 election cycle, Fortune 100 companies alone had combined revenues of $13.1 trillion and profits of $605 billion. That dwarfs the $1.5 billion that Federal Election Commission-registered political parties spent during the same election period, or the $1.2 billion spent by federal political action committees.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the limitations on corporate campaign expenditures. In 1990, in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, and again in 2003, in McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, it made clear that Congress was acting within its authority and that the restrictions are consistent with the First Amendment.

In late June, the court directed the parties to address whether Austin and McConnell should be overruled. It gave the parties in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission a month to write legal briefs on a question of extraordinary complexity and importance, and it scheduled arguments during the court’s vacation.

All of this is disturbing on many levels. Normally, the court tries not to decide cases on constitutional grounds if they can be resolved more simply. Here the court is reaching out to decide a constitutional issue that could change the direction of American democracy.

The court usually shows great respect for its own precedents, a point Chief Justice John Roberts made at his confirmation hearings. Now the court appears ready, without any particular need, to overturn important precedents and decades of federal and state law.

The scheduling is enormously troubling. There is no rush to address the constitutionality of the corporate expenditures limit. But the court is racing to do that in a poorly chosen case with no factual record on the critical question, making careful deliberation impossible.

Most disturbing, though, is the substance of what the court seems poised to do. If corporations are allowed to spend from their own treasuries on elections — rather than through political action committees, which take contributions from company employees — it would usher in an unprecedented age of special-interest politics.

Corporations would have an enormous say in who wins federal elections. They would be able to use this influence to obtain subsidies, stimulus money and tax loopholes and to undo protections for investors, workers and consumers. It would take an extraordinarily brave member of Congress to stand up to agents of big business who then could say, quite credibly, that they would spend whatever it takes in the next election to defeat him or her.

The conservative majority on the court likes to present itself as deferential to the elected branches of government and as minimalists about the role of judges. Chief Justice Roberts promised the Senate that if confirmed he would remember that it’s his “job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.”

If the court races to overturn federal and state laws, and its well-established precedents, to free up corporations to drown elections in money, it will be swinging for the fences. The American public will be the losers.
===================================================================================

September 11, 2009
EDITORIAL

The Court and Campaign Finance

In the Supreme Court this week, Elena Kagan, the new solicitor general, eloquently defended the longstanding ban on corporate spending in political campaigns. But the conservative justices who spoke showed a disdain for both Congress’s laws and for the court’s own prior rulings. If the ban is struck down, as we fear, elections could be swamped by special-interest money.

Conservative jurists talk about judicial modesty and deferring to the elected branches. But in the questioning, Justice Antonin Scalia made clear that he considers Congress to be a self-interested actor when it writes campaign finance laws. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito seemed to put little weight on the fact that the court has repeatedly upheld a ban on corporate campaign expenditures.

What the conservatives seemed most concerned about was protecting the interests of corporations. The chief justice and Justice Scalia seemed especially perturbed that what they see as the inviolable right of these legal constructs to speak might be infringed upon.

The conservatives also seemed incredulous that vast amounts of corporate money flooding into campaigns could be seen as corrupting the system. We agree with Senator John McCain, who told reporters after the argument that he was troubled by the “extreme naïveté” some of the justices showed about the role of special-interest money in Congressional lawmaking.

The more liberal justices — including Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was participating in her first argument — were far more sympathetic to the ban on corporate expenditures, but they have only four votes.

There is still some hope that Chief Justice Roberts may decide his affection for corporations is less important than the reputation of the Roberts court. If he does, there is a chance for a limited, and relatively undamaging, ruling that hews closely to the facts of this case.

The underlying dispute is a narrow First Amendment challenge brought by Citizens United, a nonprofit group that wanted to show an anti-Hillary Clinton movie on a video-on-demand service during the primary season. The court could uphold its right to show the movie without opening the door to a new era of political corruption.
===================================================================================

It Could Be the End of Our Democracy as We Know It

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090906_it_could_be_the_end_of_our_democracy_as_we_know_it/

Posted on Sep 6, 2009

By E.J. Dionne

President Barack Obama’s health care speech on Wednesday will be only the second most consequential political moment of the week.

Judged by the standard of an event’s potential long-term impact on our public life, the most important will be the argument before the Supreme Court (on the same day, as it happens) about a case that, if decided wrongly, could surrender control of our democracy to corporate interests.

This sounds melodramatic. It’s not. The court is considering eviscerating laws that have been on the books since 1907 in one case and 1947 in the other, banning direct contributions and spending by corporations in federal election campaigns. Doing so would obliterate precedents that go back two and three decades.

The full impact of what the court could do in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has only begun to receive the attention it deserves. Even the word radical does not capture the extent to which the justices could turn our political system upside down. Will the high court use a case originally brought on a narrow issue to bring our politics back to the corruption of the Gilded Age?

Citizens United, a conservative group, brought suit arguing that it should be exempt from the restrictions of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance law for a movie it made that was sharply critical of Hillary Clinton. The organization said it should not have to disclose who financed the film.

Instead of deciding the case before it, the court engaged in a remarkable act of overreach. On June 29, it postponed a decision and called for new briefs and a highly unusual new hearing, which is Wednesday’s big event. The court chose to consider an issue only tangentially raised by the case. It threatens to overrule a 1990 decision that upheld the long-standing ban on corporate money in campaigns.

I don’t have the space to cite all the precedents the court would have to set aside, going back to the Buckley campaign finance ruling of 1976, if it threw out the prohibition on corporate money. Suffice it to say that there is one member of the court who has spoken eloquently about the dangers of ignoring precedents.

“I do think that it is a jolt to the legal system when you overrule a precedent,” he said. “Precedent plays an important role in promoting stability and evenhandedness. It is not enough—and the court has emphasized this on several occasions—it is not enough that you may think the prior decision was wrongly decided. That really doesn’t answer the question, it just poses the question.”

This careful jurist continued: “And you do look at these other factors, like settled expectations, like the legitimacy of the court, like whether a particular precedent is workable or not, whether a precedent has been eroded by subsequent developments.”

He learnedly cited Alexander Hamilton, who wrote in Federalist 78: “To avoid an arbitrary discretion in the judges, they need to be bound down by rules and precedents.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, the likely swing vote in this case, was exactly right when he said these things during his 2005 confirmation hearings. If he uses his own standards, it is impossible to see how he can justify the use of “arbitrary discretion” to discard a well-established system whose construction began with the Tillman Act of 1907.

Were the courts that set the earlier precedents “legitimate”? This ban was upheld over many years by justices of a variety of philosophical leanings. We are not talking about overturning a single decision by a bunch of activists in robes seizing a temporary court majority.

Are the precedents “workable”? The answer is clearly yes, which is why there is absolutely no popular demand to let corporate cash loose into our politics. Our system would be less “workable” if the court abruptly changed the law.

Has the precedent been “eroded”? Absolutely not. In case after case, no matter where particular court majorities stood on particular campaign finance provisions, the ban on corporate contributions was taken for granted. As the court stated just six years ago, Congress’ power to prohibit direct corporate and union contributions “has been firmly embedded in our law.” That’s what you call “settled expectations.”

This case is the clearest test Justice Roberts has faced so far as to whether he meant what he said to Congress in 2005. I truly hope he passes it. If he doesn’t, he will unleash havoc in our political system and greatly undermine the legitimacy of the court he leads.

E.J. Dionne’s e-mail address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.

© 2009, Washington Post Writers Group

The Wing-Nut Code: What Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin Are Really Saying to Their Followers

2009-09-13T09:55:00.003-04:00

By Adele M. Stan, AlterNet

Posted on September 2, 2009, Printed on September 13, 2009

http://www.alternet.org/story/142333/

Editor's note: As members of the Tea Party and patriot movements march and rally in Washington, D.C., on September 12, they will be out in full regalia, and you can expect the speeches to be loaded with code -- signals to various factions of their coalition, some of them armed, to mobilize politically on specific issues (health-care reform, energy reform, net neutrality) and against President Obama himself. Here's a glossary of the symbols and shorthand likely to be employed in this weekend's smoke-and-mirrors display of purported right-wing power.

When Glenn Beck offers an odd-looking icon for his 9-12 Project, or Sarah Palin says something about her native state that sounds a bit to off-kilter to the ears of those in the lower 48, it's tempting to think, well, they're just nuts. Perhaps they are, but that's beside the point. The point is that when Beck throws up a graphic of a segmented snake as his project's mascot, or Palin speaks of her native land as the "sovereign" state of Alaska, they're blowing a kind of dog-whistle for the armed and paranoid who make up the right-wing, neo-militia "Patriot" movement and the broader "Tea Party" coalition. The loose affiliation of right-wing groups under the Tea Party umbrella can make it difficult to discern who's truly dangerous, and who's just an angry blowhard.

For instance, in its report about the resurgence of the militia movement, the Southern Poverty Law Center notes that a Minuteman militia in Southern California uses the Tea Party anthem as its call to arms. Scott Roeder, the militant anti-abortion activist who is charged with the killing of Dr. George Tiller, counts himself among the members of the patriot movement.

But in Pittsburgh earlier this month, I sat among a group of disgruntled senior citizens at a conference sponsored by the astroturf group, Americans for Prosperity, who probably don't spend their weekends training for a war with the government, but nonetheless consider themselves to be part of the Tea Party coalition -- and perhaps even the patriot movement. Nonetheless, when conference speakers made reference to gun rights, they received heartfelt applause.

The Tea Party coalition is mobilizing for what it promises will be a big march on Washington on Sept. 12. As the date approaches, expect to hear more disguised shout-outs to patriots and tea-partiers, as right-wing politicians seek to placate the hordes said to be on their way to the nation's capitol. Members of the far-right Tea Party and patriot movements love the iconography of the American Revolution. They fancy themselves as "patriots" in the mold of Ethan Allen and Charles Gadsden -- men who led militias against the troops of England's despotic King George III. Yet much of their ideology stems from the states' rights philosophy of the Confederacy in the Civil War, and sometimes the ideas and symbols of the two wars are drawn together in a tangle of rage.

Some self-described "patriots" take part in the resurgent militia movement, but many do not. However, gun enthusiasts are rife in their ranks, and many view their role as one of "resistance" to what they see as government encroachment in their lives. They oppose virtually all forms of taxation and almost anything run by the government. (Hence, the title of the site run by Grassfire.org known as ResistNet.)

Here are some words and images used by right-wing political and media figures as signals to the patriot and Tea Party constituencies, signals used to organize the throngs against health care legislation, environmental reforms and all things identified with President Barack Obama.

1. Snakes! -- Even before the American Revolution, the rattlesnake -- native to North America -- was a potent symbol for the American colonies. The patriot movement has appropriated the use of a number of Revolutionary War militia flags that feature rattlesnakes, often accompanied by the words, "Don't Tread On Me."

The most recognizable of these is the Gadsden flag, a yellow flag emblazoned with the image of a coiled snake, and the "Don't Tread On Me" slogan.

It's the image that graced the sign carried by the New Hampshire man who showed up with a gun strapped to his leg outside the venue where Obama was scheduled to conduct a town-hall meeting on health care reform.

At the Americans for Prosperity Conference that I attended, a group called American Majority offered for sale a poster that featured the same coiled-snake image. Beck, when creating the iconography for his 9-12 Project -- an organizing hub for town-hall disrupters and people preparing to join the Sept. 12 Tea Party march on Washington -- found a slightly more obscure version of the colonial snake that would resonate, nonetheless, with the patriot types.

Beck's snake is segmented into nine parts, to align with his project's "nine principles." The image is a variation on this one, by Benjamin Franklin, which is thought to be the first political cartoon to run in an American newspaper.

Franklin's snake is segmented into eight parts, representing what were then only eight American colonies. His cartoon implores all eight to join together to fight the French in the French and Indian War and is labeled with the slogan, "Join, or Die."

Bottom line: Any time you see the snake used as a graphic element by right-wingers, you can safely assume it's a call to the often-armed and sometimes-violent members of the patriot movement.

2. The tree of liberty -- This reference comes from a famous Thomas Jefferson quote: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots." You'll often find it used in bits and pieces as a form of code.

Outside the New Hampshire town hall, the armed man held a sign that not only featured the coiled snake of the Gadsden flag, but a reference to the Jefferson quote: "It is time to water the tree of liberty."

Note the call of secessionists speaking just this week on the steps of the Texas state capitol building. Fringe gubernatorial candidate Debra Medina may have flubbed the Jefferson quote, but her intent is clear: "We are aware that stepping off into secession may be a bloody war," she said at the rally called by the Texas Nationalist Movement. "We are aware that the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots." In an example of how more-establishment types signal the far right in code, Ralph Reed used another piece of the quote while speaking at an Americans for Prosperity-sponsored rally against health care reform in Atlanta on Aug. 15: "Our right to protest has been purchased with the blood of patriots who paid the ultimate price so that we could be free men and women and have the ability to petition our government. We will not be intimidated, we will not be silenced, and we will not go away." That "blood of patriots" bit? Dog whistle to the gun nuts.

3. Patriot -- A patriot is a member of a movement seen by its participants as the resistance -- often armed -- to the perceived conspiracy of socialists, Jews, blacks and other people "not like us," who have taken over the government, the global banking system and the world. Some self-identified patriots are armed to the teeth and seem pathologically violent; others, not so much. As Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons wrote in a 1995 edition of The Progressive about the patriot movement: Attending a patriot meeting is like having your cable-access channel video of a PTA meeting crossed with audio from an old Twilight Zone rerun.

The people seem so sane and regular. They are not clinically deranged, but their discourse is paranoid, and they are awash in the crudest conspiracy theories.

When you hear a right-wing politician or media figure refer to someone as a "patriot," watch out! That patriot may think it his patriotic duty to take you out.

4. Tea Party -- The Tea Party coalition encompasses a broad swath of the right -- including members of the religious right and the patriot movement. (There's even an organization called Tea Party Patriots.) Taking its name from the Boston Tea Party -- a famous incident that foreshadowed the American Revolution -- the Tea Party coalition was initially drawn together under the anti-taxation umbrella by such astroturfing outfits as FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity and Grassfire. (The Boston Tea Party was an act of civil disobedience at which revolutionaries threw overboard, as a tax protest, the cargo of three tea-carrying British vessels. King George III had slapped a hefty tax on the tea, in a defiance of the colonial Continental Congress.)

5. Sovereign -- In the right wing, this term has two meanings. The most troubling refers to a notion called "sovereign citizen," a term popularized by the violent Posse Comitatus militia formation in the 1970s to argue that white people have a superior form of citizenship to that of black people. More commonly, the term "sovereign" refers to a states' rights philosophy that is consonant with secessionist ideologies. Before she left office in July, Palin signed a "sovereignty resolution," reasserting Alaska's rights as a "sovereign state" under the U.S. Constitution. Legislators in 36 other states have introduced similar resolutions, according to the right-wing Tenth Amendment Center. Palin, you'll recall, sent a video shout-out last year to the secessionist Alaska Independence Party, of which her husband, Todd, was a member for seven years.

6. Tenth Amendment -- The final amendment to in the Bill of Rights reads simply: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."

Secessionists and states' rights enthusiasts argue that the federal government has already unconstitutionally usurped all sorts of powers from the states. Bear in mind that the argument for states' rights and state sovereignty provided the justification offered by the states of the Confederacy during the Civil War.

The issue at had was not slavery, per se, the argument went -- it was the federal government overstepping into the jurisdiction of the states when it began to regulate slavery. The 10th Amendment movement is tied in with the Tea Party and patriot movements: On the Web site of the Tenth Amendment Center, one finds yet another version of the "Don't Tread On Me" flag, and links to 35 state groups identified as part of the patriot movement -- a number of them state chapters of Glenn Beck's 9-12 Project. State-sovereignty enthusiasts are known as "tenthers".

7. Second Amendment -- The right to bear arms, the patriot movement's cornerstone. Beck devotes a whole channel of his 9-12 Project Web site to this most-precious amendment to the Constitution. Members of the Tea Party and patriot movements read this amendment in absolutist terms, arguing that the Constitution allows the federal government no earthly role in the regulation of firearms. The amendment is simple, and was passed at a time when the young United States was dependent on state-based militias for the nation's self-defense: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Earlier this year, legislators in the states of Montana and Tennessee decided to test the limits of the Second Amendment by passing gun laws designed to conflict with federal regulations, in the hope of calling forth a showdown on not just the Second Amendment, but the Tenth Amendment, as well. At issue is the federal regulation of firearms produced within each state for use within that state's boundaries. In the past, the federal government has justified federal regulation of firearms based on the constitutional power granted for the regulation of interstate commerce. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has responded to both states, taking issue with their new laws -- a mere volley in what promises to be a constitutional showdown.

8. Revolution -- When these folks talk about a revolution, they're not talking in merely philosophical terms. No, this is no paradigm shift, no sea-change. This is about guns. Remember, they're all little Ethan Allens and George Washingtons, ready to take on the tyrant's guard. So when Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., told a town-hall meeting last week, "We're almost reaching a revolution in this country," he's giving a nod to the patriot movement.

9. The government -- Plain and simple, all things bad and evil. Oklahoma's Republican junior senator, Tom Coburn, gave the patriots a nod last month when he told David Gregory, host of NBC's Meet the Press that members of Congress who face threats of violence over the prospect of health care reform have "earned" that response, because Congress has caused people to "stop having confidence in, in our government." Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy Coburn said this after Gregory noted that Timothy McVeigh, who killed more than 160 people when he blew up the Oklahoma federal building, bore the Jefferson "tree of liberty" quote on the T-shirt he wore that day -- the same quote on the sign that armed man in New Hampshire held to greet the president. Timothy McVeigh's T-shirt

Finally, it must be noted the code is not always necessary to send the signal. There are sins of commission, and sins of omission, such as that of Sen. Charles Grassely, R-Iowa, who simply stood by as an audience member at one of his town-hall meetings on health care reform last month called for an armed intervention on the White House. Audience member Tom Eisenhower said that Obama was "acting like a little Hitler," and suggested that others gather up their guns and join him for a visit to Washington. Grassley didn’t condemn the man or his suggestions but went on to rationalize Eisenhower’s anger, calling health care reform "the straw that broke the camel’s back," especially in light of the "General Motors nationalization" and the "nationalization of banks."

Adele M. Stan AlterNet's Washington bureau chief.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/142333/

FoxPAC: Network Again Engaging in Political Advocacy with "9-12 Project" September 11, 2009 12:57 pm ET

2009-09-13T09:37:00.003-04:00

September 11, 2009 12:57 pm ET

Comments

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Friday, September 11, 2009

CONTACT

Jess Levin (202) 772-8162

jlevin@mediamatters.org

Washington, D.C. - Today, on the eighth anniversary of 9-11, one day before Glenn Beck's "9-12 Project" descends on Washington, Media Matters for America calls attention to what has become a familiar, disturbing pattern on the purportedly "fair and balanced" news network.

Fox News now routinely engages in political advocacy against the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress, and Beck's promotion of a September 12 march on Washington is the latest example. Network executives have made little effort to hide Fox News' agenda, with one referring to the network as the "voice of opposition."

"There is little difference between being the 'voice of opposition' and just being the opposition," said Eric Burns, president of Media Matters. "Since the president's election, Fox News has become nothing more than the 24/7 media wing of the Republican Party. No political party in American history has had such an enormous megaphone."

BACKGROUND:

Since President Obama's inauguration, Fox News network executives have made their intentions clear. In clips aired on the March 23 broadcast of NPR's Media Circus, vice president for programming Bill Shine referred to the network as the "voice of opposition." And chief executive officer Roger Ailes reportedly said of the new administration: "I see this as the Alamo," adding, "If I just had somebody who was willing to sit on the other side of the camera until the last shot is fired, we'd be fine."

On air, the network's agenda is even clearer. Fox News personalities and hosts have promoted and encouraged viewers to "join" tea party protests and town hall meetings. They have implored viewers to call Congress and the White House to protest Democratic policies. And they have declared "Victory!" when Democratic legislation has been stalled.

Most recently, Beck and Fox News have repeatedly promoted Beck's "9-12 Project," which, in addition to encouraging local events, is organizing a September 12 march on Washington, which Fox News will broadcast live.

Beck's 9-12 Project "a place" for people looking to take back their country. Beck started the 9-12 Project, which describes itself as "a place for you and other like-minded Americans looking for direction in taking back the control of our country."

Beck's FoxNews.com website, under a section titled, "TAKE ACTION: GET INVOLVED!" states of the 9-12 Project: "Check out Beck's new Web site for updates on the stories and people who prove that your values and principles are still very much alive." 9-12 Project organizes events across country.

The conservative project frequently organizes events around the country. For instance, members of the 9-12 Project have helped organize tea parties, and Beck's 9-12 website is working with others for a "March on Washington," among other local events, on September 12.

Beck will participate in a 9-12 "March on Washington" by broadcasting live from 1 to 3 p.m. ET on Fox News.

Beck: "9-12 Projects and rallies happening all over." In recent months, Beck has frequently touted the effectiveness of his 9-12 Project in organizing followers. On August 12, for instance, Beck described the 9-12 Project as giving "ourselves an outlet of voice to connect, because you needed to community organize. ... Well, you have already done it. There are 9-12 Projects and rallies happening all over.

The biggest one seems to be in Washington, D.C., on September 12."

Beck: "We started that. Millions all involved across the country and the 9-12 project and other organizations like it." On August 27, Beck said of the 9-12 Project:

BECK: Now, the second part of this. A few months ago, I told you, you got to know you're not alone. You've got to know. You got to unite. Talk to people. Make sure you know you're not alone, through the 9-12 Project. We started that. Millions all involved across the country and the 9-12 Project and other organizations like it. I knew we needed to connect with one another.

Beck: "On 9-12, I hope to see you in Washington. I will make sure you're seen all over the country." On August 28, Beck described the 9-12 march on Washington as something "worth standing up for" and told viewers, "I hope to see you in Washington. I will make sure you're seen all over the country."

Beck: Will we find people "to stand for our country?" Discussing his participation in the 9-12 march, Beck asked viewers: "Will we find another 50 men or women willing to stand for our country and the republic? On the Fox News Channel, you can find out all of the details at the 912Project.com."

9-12 march website: Beck "really helping our numbers grow!" A post on the 9-12 march website 912dc.org states, "The recent coverage by Glenn Beck is really helping our numbers grow!" The website frequently mentions Beck's promotion of the march and excerpted a September 8 USA Today article which reported that the march has been "[e]ncouraged by conservative commentators such as Fox's Glenn Beck."

For more examples of the network's political advocacy, please see Media Matters' comprehensive report:

"Voice of the opposition": Fox News openly advocates against Democratic Congress, White House

Uncivil Discourse

2009-09-13T09:22:00.000-04:00

Bill Moyers: The editors of THE ECONOMIST magazine say America's health care debate has become a touch delirious, with people accusing each other of being evil-mongers, dealers in death, and un-American.

Well, that's charitable.

I would say it's more deranged than delirious, and definitely not un-American.

Those crackpots on the right praying for Obama to die and be sent to hell — they're the warp and woof of home-grown nuttiness. So is the creature from the Second Amendment who showed up at the President's rally armed to the teeth. He's certainly one of us. Red, white, and blue kooks are as American as apple pie and conspiracy theories.

Bill Maher asked me on his show last week if America is still a great nation. I should have said it's the greatest show on earth. Forget what you learned in civics about the Founding Fathers — we're the children of Barnum and Bailey, our founding con men. Their freak show was the forerunner of today's talk radio.

Speaking of which: we've posted on our website an essay by the media scholar Henry Giroux. He describes the growing domination of hate radio as one of the crucial elements in a "culture of cruelty" increasingly marked by overt racism, hostility and disdain for others, coupled with a simmering threat of mob violence toward any political figure who believes health care reform is the most vital of safety nets, especially now that the central issue of life and politics is no longer about working to get ahead, but struggling simply to survive.

So here we are, wallowing in our dysfunction. Governed — if you listen to the rabble rousers — by a black nationalist from Kenya smuggled into the United States to kill Sarah Palin's baby. And yes, I could almost buy their belief that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, only I think he shipped them to Washington, where they've been recycled as lobbyists and trained in the alchemy of money laundering, which turns an old-fashioned bribe into a First Amendment right.

Only in a fantasy capital like Washington could Sunday morning talk shows become the high church of conventional wisdom, with partisan shills treated as holy men whose gospel of prosperity always seems to boil down to lower taxes for the rich.

Poor Obama. He came to town preaching the religion of nice. But every time he bows politely, the harder the Republicans kick him.

No one's ever conquered Washington politics by constantly saying "pretty please" to the guys trying to cut your throat.

Let's get on with it, Mr. President. We're up the proverbial creek with spaghetti as our paddle. This health care thing could have been the crossing of the Delaware, the turning point in the next American Revolution — the moment we put the mercenaries to rout, as General Washington did the Hessians at Trenton. We could have stamped our victory "Made in the USA." We could have said to the world, "Look what we did!" And we could have turned to each other and said, "Thank you."

As it is, we're about to get health care reform that measures human beings only in corporate terms of a cost-benefit analysis. I mean this is topsy-turvy — we should be treating health as a condition, not a commodity.

As we speak, Pfizer, the world's largest drug maker, has been fined a record $2.3 billion dollars as a civil and criminal — yes, that's criminal, as in fraud — penalty for promoting prescription drugs with the subtlety of the Russian mafia. It's the fourth time in a decade Pfizer's been called on the carpet. And these are the people into whose tender mercies Congress and the White House would deliver us?

Come on, Mr. President. Show us America is more than a circus or a market. Remind us of our greatness as a democracy. When you speak to Congress next week, just come out and say it. We thought we heard you say during the campaign last year that you want a government run insurance plan alongside private insurance — mostly premium-based, with subsidies for low-and-moderate income people. Open to all individuals and employees who want to join and with everyone free to choose the doctors we want. We thought you said Uncle Sam would sign on as our tough, cost-minded negotiator standing up to the cartel of drug and insurance companies and Wall Street investors whose only interest is a company's share price and profits.

Here's a suggestion, Mr. President: ask Josh Marshall to draft your speech. Josh is the founder of the website talkingpointsmemo.com. He's a journalist and historian, not a politician. He doesn't split things down the middle and call it a victory for the masses. He's offered the simplest and most accurate description yet of a public insurance plan — one that essentially asks people: would you like the option — the voluntary option — of buying into Medicare before you're 65? Check it out, Mr. President.

This health care thing is make or break for your leadership, but for us, it's life and death. No more Mr. Nice Guy, Mr. President. We need a fighter.

That's it for the Journal. I'm Bill Moyers. See you next time.

It Could Be the End of Our Democracy as We Know It

2009-09-13T09:01:00.003-04:00

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090906_it_could_be_the_end_of_our_democracy_as_we_know_it/

Posted on Sep 6, 2009

By E.J. Dionne

President Barack Obama’s health care speech on Wednesday will be only the second most consequential political moment of the week.

Judged by the standard of an event’s potential long-term impact on our public life, the most important will be the argument before the Supreme Court (on the same day, as it happens) about a case that, if decided wrongly, could surrender control of our democracy to corporate interests.

This sounds melodramatic. It’s not. The court is considering eviscerating laws that have been on the books since 1907 in one case and 1947 in the other, banning direct contributions and spending by corporations in federal election campaigns. Doing so would obliterate precedents that go back two and three decades.

The full impact of what the court could do in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has only begun to receive the attention it deserves. Even the word radical does not capture the extent to which the justices could turn our political system upside down. Will the high court use a case originally brought on a narrow issue to bring our politics back to the corruption of the Gilded Age?

Citizens United, a conservative group, brought suit arguing that it should be exempt from the restrictions of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance law for a movie it made that was sharply critical of Hillary Clinton. The organization said it should not have to disclose who financed the film.

Instead of deciding the case before it, the court engaged in a remarkable act of overreach. On June 29, it postponed a decision and called for new briefs and a highly unusual new hearing, which is Wednesday’s big event. The court chose to consider an issue only tangentially raised by the case. It threatens to overrule a 1990 decision that upheld the long-standing ban on corporate money in campaigns.

I don’t have the space to cite all the precedents the court would have to set aside, going back to the Buckley campaign finance ruling of 1976, if it threw out the prohibition on corporate money. Suffice it to say that there is one member of the court who has spoken eloquently about the dangers of ignoring precedents.

“I do think that it is a jolt to the legal system when you overrule a precedent,” he said. “Precedent plays an important role in promoting stability and evenhandedness. It is not enough—and the court has emphasized this on several occasions—it is not enough that you may think the prior decision was wrongly decided. That really doesn’t answer the question, it just poses the question.”

This careful jurist continued: “And you do look at these other factors, like settled expectations, like the legitimacy of the court, like whether a particular precedent is workable or not, whether a precedent has been eroded by subsequent developments.”

He learnedly cited Alexander Hamilton, who wrote in Federalist 78: “To avoid an arbitrary discretion in the judges, they need to be bound down by rules and precedents.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, the likely swing vote in this case, was exactly right when he said these things during his 2005 confirmation hearings. If he uses his own standards, it is impossible to see how he can justify the use of “arbitrary discretion” to discard a well-established system whose construction began with the Tillman Act of 1907.

Were the courts that set the earlier precedents “legitimate”? This ban was upheld over many years by justices of a variety of philosophical leanings. We are not talking about overturning a single decision by a bunch of activists in robes seizing a temporary court majority.

Are the precedents “workable”? The answer is clearly yes, which is why there is absolutely no popular demand to let corporate cash loose into our politics. Our system would be less “workable” if the court abruptly changed the law.

Has the precedent been “eroded”? Absolutely not. In case after case, no matter where particular court majorities stood on particular campaign finance provisions, the ban on corporate contributions was taken for granted. As the court stated just six years ago, Congress’ power to prohibit direct corporate and union contributions “has been firmly embedded in our law.” That’s what you call “settled expectations.”

This case is the clearest test Justice Roberts has faced so far as to whether he meant what he said to Congress in 2005. I truly hope he passes it. If he doesn’t, he will unleash havoc in our political system and greatly undermine the legitimacy of the court he leads.

E.J. Dionne’s e-mail address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.

In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition

2009-08-18T09:38:00.000-04:00

Birthers, Town Hall Hecklers and the Return of Right-Wing Rage

By Rick Perlstein

Sunday, August 16, 2009

In Pennsylvania last week, a citizen, burly, crew-cut and trembling with rage, went nose to nose with his baffled senator: "One day God's going to stand before you, and he's going to judge you and the rest of your damned cronies up on the Hill. And then you will get your just deserts." He was accusing Arlen Specter of being too kind to President Obama's proposals to make it easier for people to get health insurance.

In Michigan, meanwhile, the indelible image was of the father who wheeled his handicapped adult son up to Rep. John Dingell and bellowed that "under the Obama health-care plan, which you support, this man would be given no care whatsoever." He pressed his case further on Fox News.

In New Hampshire, outside a building where Obama spoke, cameras trained on the pistol strapped to the leg of libertarian William Kostric. He then explained on CNN why the "tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of tyrants and patriots."

It was interesting to hear a BBC reporter on the radio trying to make sense of it all. He quoted a spokesman for the conservative Americans for Tax Reform: "Either this is a genuine grass-roots response, or there's some secret evil conspirator living in a mountain somewhere orchestrating all this that I've never met." The spokesman was arguing, of course, that it was spontaneous, yet he also proudly owned up to how his group has helped the orchestration, through sample letters to the editor and "a little bit of an ability to put one-pagers together."

The BBC also quoted liberal Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin's explanation: "They want to get a little clip on YouTube of an effort to disrupt a town meeting and to send the congressman running for his car. This is an organized effort . . . you can trace it back to the health insurance industry."

So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers -- these are "either" the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president -- too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters' signs -- too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don't understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can't understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.

In the early 1950s, Republicans referred to the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as "20 years of treason" and accused the men who led the fight against fascism of deliberately surrendering the free world to communism. Mainline Protestants published a new translation of the Bible in the 1950s that properly rendered the Greek as connoting a more ambiguous theological status for the Virgin Mary; right-wingers attributed that to, yes, the hand of Soviet agents. And Vice President Richard Nixon claimed that the new Republicans arriving in the White House "found in the files a blueprint for socializing America."

When John F. Kennedy entered the White House, his proposals to anchor America's nuclear defense in intercontinental ballistic missiles -- instead of long-range bombers -- and form closer ties with Eastern Bloc outliers such as Yugoslavia were taken as evidence that the young president was secretly disarming the United States. Thousands of delegates from 90 cities packed a National Indignation Convention in Dallas, a 1961 version of today's tea parties; a keynote speaker turned to the master of ceremonies after his introduction and remarked as the audience roared: "Tom Anderson here has turned moderate! All he wants to do is impeach [Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl] Warren. I'm for hanging him!"

Before the "black helicopters" of the 1990s, there were right-wingers claiming access to secret documents from the 1920s proving that the entire concept of a "civil rights movement" had been hatched in the Soviet Union; when the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act was introduced, one frequently read in the South that it would "enslave" whites. And back before there were Bolsheviks to blame, paranoids didn't lack for subversives -- anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists even had their own powerful political party in the 1840s and '50s.

The instigation is always the familiar litany: expansion of the commonweal to empower new communities, accommodation to internationalism, the heightened influence of cosmopolitans and the persecution complex of conservatives who can't stand losing an argument. My personal favorite? The federal government expanded mental health services in the Kennedy era, and one bill provided for a new facility in Alaska. One of the most widely listened-to right-wing radio programs in the country, hosted by a former FBI agent, had millions of Americans believing it was being built to intern political dissidents, just like in the Soviet Union.

So, crazier then, or crazier now? Actually, the similarities across decades are uncanny. When Adlai Stevenson spoke at a 1963 United Nations Day observance in Dallas, the Indignation forces thronged the hall, sweating and furious, shrieking down the speaker for the television cameras. Then, when Stevenson was walked to his limousine, a grimacing and wild-eyed lady thwacked him with a picket sign. Stevenson was baffled. "What's the matter, madam?" he asked. "What can I do for you?" The woman responded with self-righteous fury: "Well, if you don't know I can't help you."

The various elements -- the liberal earnestly confused when rational dialogue won't hold sway; the anti-liberal rage at a world self-evidently out of joint; and, most of all, their mutual incomprehension -- sound as fresh as yesterday's news. (Internment camps for conservatives? That's the latest theory of tea party favorite Michael Savage.)

The orchestration of incivility happens, too, and it is evil. Liberal power of all sorts induces an organic and crazy-making panic in a considerable number of Americans, while people with no particular susceptibility to existential terror -- powerful elites -- find reason to stoke and exploit that fear. And even the most ideologically fair-minded national media will always be agents of cosmopolitanism: something provincials fear as an outside elite intent on forcing different values down their throats.

That provides an opening for vultures such as Richard Nixon, who, the Watergate investigation discovered, had his aides make sure that seed blossomed for his own purposes. "To the Editor . . . Who in the hell elected these people to stand up and read off their insults to the President of the United States?" read one proposed "grass-roots" letter manufactured by the White House. "When will you people realize that he was elected President and he is entitled to the respect of that office no matter what you people think of him?" went another.

Liberals are right to be vigilant about manufactured outrage, and particularly about how the mainstream media can too easily become that outrage's entry into the political debate. For the tactic represented by those fake Nixon letters was a long-term success. Conservatives have become adept at playing the media for suckers, getting inside the heads of editors and reporters, haunting them with the thought that maybe they are out-of-touch cosmopolitans and that their duty as tribunes of the people's voices means they should treat Obama's creation of "death panels" as just another justiciable political claim. If 1963 were 2009, the woman who assaulted Adlai Stevenson would be getting time on cable news to explain herself. That, not the paranoia itself, makes our present moment uniquely disturbing.

It used to be different. You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to "debunk" claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president's program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn't adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of "conservative claims" to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as "extremist" -- out of bounds.

The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest. Latest word is that the enlightened and mild provision in the draft legislation to help elderly people who want living wills -- the one hysterics turned into the "death panel" canard -- is losing favor, according to the Wall Street Journal, because of "complaints over the provision."

Good thing our leaders weren't so cowardly in 1964, or we would never have passed a civil rights bill -- because of complaints over the provisions in it that would enslave whites.

nixonland@live.com

Rick Perlstein is the author of "Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America" and "Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus." He will be online to chat with readers Tuesday at 11 a.m. Submit your questions and comments before or during the discussion.

The Big Takeover

2009-03-25T10:04:00.002-04:00

Matt Taibbi puts all this into plain and understandable language!

Frank

The Big Takeover

The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution

MATT TAIBBI

Posted Mar 19, 2009 12:49 PM

It's over — we're officially, royally fucked. no empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).

So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck — bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: "The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now," he said. "When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too." In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being "consumed by the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet's investment portfolio down."

Liddy made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick from being left out in someone else's financial weather. He conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the causes of its "pneumonia" was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn't have, in a toxic and completely unregulated derivatives market.

Nor did anyone mention that when AIG finally got up from its seat at the Wall Street casino, broke and busted in the afterdawn light, it owed money all over town — and that a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in this particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high rollers at its table. Or that this was a casino unique among all casinos, one where middle-class taxpayers cover the bets of billionaires.

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.

I. PATIENT ZERO

The best way to understand the financial crisis is to understand the meltdown at AIG. AIG is what happens when short, bald managers of otherwise boring financial bureaucracies start seeing Brad Pitt in the mirror. This is a company that built a giant fortune across more than a century by betting on safety-conscious policyholders — people who wear seat belts and build houses on high ground — and then blew it all in a year or two by turning their entire balance sheet over to a guy who acted like making huge bets with other people's money would make his dick bigger.

That guy — the Patient Zero of the global economic meltdown — was one Joseph Cassano, the head of a tiny, 400-person unit within the company called AIG Financial Products, or AIGFP. Cassano, a pudgy, balding Brooklyn College grad with beady eyes and way too much forehead, cut his teeth in the Eighties working for Mike Milken, the granddaddy of modern Wall Street debt alchemists. Milken, who pioneered the creative use of junk bonds, relied on messianic genius and a whole array of insider schemes to evade detection while wreaking financial disaster. Cassano, by contrast, was just a greedy little turd with a knack for selective accounting who ran his scam right out in the open, thanks to Washington's deregulation of the Wall Street casino. "It's all about the regulatory environment," says a government source involved with the AIG bailout. "These guys look for holes in the system, for ways they can do trades without government interference. Whatever is unregulated, all the action is going to pile into that."

The mess Cassano created had its roots in an investment boom fueled in part by a relatively new type of financial instrument called a collateralized-debt obligation. A CDO is like a box full of diced-up assets. They can be anything: mortgages, corporate loans, aircraft loans, credit-card loans, even other CDOs. So as X mortgage holder pays his bill, and Y corporate debtor pays his bill, and Z credit-card debtor pays his bill, money flows into the box.

The key idea behind a CDO is that there will always be at least some money in the box, regardless of how dicey the individual assets inside it are. No matter how you look at a single unemployed ex-con trying to pay the note on a six-bedroom house, he looks like a bad investment. But dump his loan in a box with a smorgasbord of auto loans, credit-card debt, corporate bonds and other crap, and you can be reasonably sure that somebody is going to pay up. Say $100 is supposed to come into the box every month. Even in an apocalypse, when $90 in payments might default, you'll still get $10. What the inventors of the CDO did is divide up the box into groups of investors and put that $10 into its own level, or "tranche." They then convinced ratings agencies like Moody's and S&P to give that top tranche the highest AAA rating — meaning it has close to zero credit risk.

Suddenly, thanks to this financial seal of approval, banks had a way to turn their shittiest mortgages and other financial waste into investment-grade paper and sell them to institutional investors like pensions and insurance companies, which were forced by regulators to keep their portfolios as safe as possible. Because CDOs offered higher rates of return than truly safe products like Treasury bills, it was a win-win: Banks made a fortune selling CDOs, and big investors made much more holding them.

The problem was, none of this was based on reality. "The banks knew they were selling crap," says a London-based trader from one of the bailed-out companies. To get AAA ratings, the CDOs relied not on their actual underlying assets but on crazy mathematical formulas that the banks cooked up to make the investments look safer than they really were. "They had some back room somewhere where a bunch of Indian guys who'd been doing nothing but math for God knows how many years would come up with some kind of model saying that this or that combination of debtors would only default once every 10,000 years," says one young trader who sold CDOs for a major investment bank. "It was nuts."

Now that even the crappiest mortgages could be sold to conservative investors, the CDOs spurred a massive explosion of irresponsible and predatory lending. In fact, there was such a crush to underwrite CDOs that it became hard to find enough subprime mortgages — read: enough unemployed meth dealers willing to buy million-dollar homes for no money down — to fill them all. As banks and investors of all kinds took on more and more in CDOs and similar instruments, they needed some way to hedge their massive bets — some kind of insurance policy, in case the housing bubble burst and all that debt went south at the same time. This was particularly true for investment banks, many of which got stuck holding or "warehousing" CDOs when they wrote more than they could sell. And that's were Joe Cassano came in.

Known for his boldness and arrogance, Cassano took over as chief of AIGFP in 2001. He was the favorite of Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, the head of AIG, who admired the younger man's hard-driving ways, even if neither he nor his successors fully understood exactly what it was that Cassano did. According to a source familiar with AIG's internal operations, Cassano basically told senior management, "You know insurance, I know investments, so you do what you do, and I'll do what I do — leave me alone." Given a free hand within the company, Cassano set out from his offices in London to sell a lucrative form of "insurance" to all those investors holding lots of CDOs. His tool of choice was another new financial instrument known as a credit-default swap, or CDS.

The CDS was popularized by J.P. Morgan, in particular by a group of young, creative bankers who would later become known as the "Morgan Mafia," as many of them would go on to assume influential positions in the finance world. In 1994, in between booze and games of tennis at a resort in Boca Raton, Florida, the Morgan gang plotted a way to help boost the bank's returns. One of their goals was to find a way to lend more money, while working around regulations that required them to keep a set amount of cash in reserve to back those loans. What they came up with was an early version of the credit-default swap.

In its simplest form, a CDS is just a bet on an outcome. Say Bank A writes a million-dollar mortgage to the Pope for a town house in the West Village. Bank A wants to hedge its mortgage risk in case the Pope can't make his monthly payments, so it buys CDS protection from Bank B, wherein it agrees to pay Bank B a premium of $1,000 a month for five years. In return, Bank B agrees to pay Bank A the full million-dollar value of the Pope's mortgage if he defaults. In theory, Bank A is covered if the Pope goes on a meth binge and loses his job.

When Morgan presented their plans for credit swaps to regulators in the late Nineties, they argued that if they bought CDS protection for enough of the investments in their portfolio, they had effectively moved the risk off their books. Therefore, they argued, they should be allowed to lend more, without keeping more cash in reserve. A whole host of regulators — from the Federal Reserve to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — accepted the argument, and Morgan was allowed to put more money on the street.

What Cassano did was to transform the credit swaps that Morgan popularized into the world's largest bet on the housing boom. In theory, at least, there's nothing wrong with buying a CDS to insure your investments. Investors paid a premium to AIGFP, and in return the company promised to pick up the tab if the mortgage-backed CDOs went bust. But as Cassano went on a selling spree, the deals he made differed from traditional insurance in several significant ways. First, the party selling CDS protection didn't have to post any money upfront. When a $100 corporate bond is sold, for example, someone has to show 100 actual dollars. But when you sell a $100 CDS guarantee, you don't have to show a dime. So Cassano could sell investment banks billions in guarantees without having any single asset to back it up.

Secondly, Cassano was selling so-called "naked" CDS deals. In a "naked" CDS, neither party actually holds the underlying loan. In other words, Bank B not only sells CDS protection to Bank A for its mortgage on the Pope — it turns around and sells protection to Bank C for the very same mortgage. This could go on ad nauseam: You could have Banks D through Z also betting on Bank A's mortgage. Unlike traditional insurance, Cassano was offering investors an opportunity to bet that someone else's house would burn down, or take out a term life policy on the guy with AIDS down the street. It was no different from gambling, the Wall Street version of a bunch of frat brothers betting on Jay Feely to make a field goal. Cassano was taking book for every bank that bet short on the housing market, but he didn't have the cash to pay off if the kick went wide.

In a span of only seven years, Cassano sold some $500 billion worth of CDS protection, with at least $64 billion of that tied to the subprime mortgage market. AIG didn't have even a fraction of that amount of cash on hand to cover its bets, but neither did it expect it would ever need any reserves. So long as defaults on the underlying securities remained a highly unlikely proposition, AIG was essentially collecting huge and steadily climbing premiums by selling insurance for the disaster it thought would never come.

Initially, at least, the revenues were enormous: AIGFP's returns went from $737 million in 1999 to $3.2 billion in 2005. Over the past seven years, the subsidiary's 400 employees were paid a total of $3.5 billion; Cassano himself pocketed at least $280 million in compensation. Everyone made their money — and then it all went to shit.

II. THE REGULATORS

Cassano's outrageous gamble wouldn't have been possible had he not had the good fortune to take over AIGFP just as Sen. Phil Gramm — a grinning, laissez-faire ideologue from Texas — had finished engineering the most dramatic deregulation of the financial industry since Emperor Hien Tsung invented paper money in 806 A.D. For years, Washington had kept a watchful eye on the nation's banks. Ever since the Great Depression, commercial banks — those that kept money on deposit for individuals and businesses — had not been allowed to double as investment banks, which raise money by issuing and selling securities. The Glass-Steagall Act, passed during the Depression, also prevented banks of any kind from getting into the insurance business.

But in the late Nineties, a few years before Cassano took over AIGFP, all that changed. The Democrats, tired of getting slaughtered in the fundraising arena by Republicans, decided to throw off their old reliance on unions and interest groups and become more "business-friendly." Wall Street responded by flooding Washington with money, buying allies in both parties. In the 10-year period beginning in 1998, financial companies spent $1.7 billion on federal campaign contributions and another $3.4 billion on lobbyists. They quickly got what they paid for. In 1999, Gramm co-sponsored a bill that repealed key aspects of the Glass-Steagall Act, smoothing the way for the creation of financial megafirms like Citigroup. The move did away with the built-in protections afforded by smaller banks. In the old days, a local banker knew the people whose loans were on his balance sheet: He wasn't going to give a million-dollar mortgage to a homeless meth addict, since he would have to keep that loan on his books. But a giant merged bank might write that loan and then sell it off to some fool in China, and who cared?

The very next year, Gramm compounded the problem by writing a sweeping new law called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that made it impossible to regulate credit swaps as either gambling or securities. Commercial banks — which, thanks to Gramm, were now competing directly with investment banks for customers — were driven to buy credit swaps to loosen capital in search of higher yields. "By ruling that credit-default swaps were not gaming and not a security, the way was cleared for the growth of the market," said Eric Dinallo, head of the New York State Insurance Department.

The blanket exemption meant that Joe Cassano could now sell as many CDS contracts as he wanted, building up as huge a position as he wanted, without anyone in government saying a word. "You have to remember, investment banks aren't in the business of making huge directional bets," says the government source involved in the AIG bailout. When investment banks write CDS deals, they hedge them. But insurance companies don't have to hedge. And that's what AIG did. "They just bet massively long on the housing market," says the source. "Billions and billions."

In the biggest joke of all, Cassano's wheeling and dealing was regulated by the Office of Thrift Supervision, an agency that would prove to be defiantly uninterested in keeping watch over his operations. How a behemoth like AIG came to be regulated by the little-known and relatively small OTS is yet another triumph of the deregulatory instinct. Under another law passed in 1999, certain kinds of holding companies could choose the OTS as their regulator, provided they owned one or more thrifts (better known as savings-and-loans). Because the OTS was viewed as more compliant than the Fed or the Securities and Exchange Commission, companies rushed to reclassify themselves as thrifts. In 1999, AIG purchased a thrift in Delaware and managed to get approval for OTS regulation of its entire operation.

Making matters even more hilarious, AIGFP — a London-based subsidiary of an American insurance company — ought to have been regulated by one of Europe's more stringent regulators, like Britain's Financial Services Authority. But the OTS managed to convince the Europeans that it had the muscle to regulate these giant companies. By 2007, the EU had conferred legitimacy to OTS supervision of three mammoth firms — GE, AIG and Ameriprise.

That same year, as the subprime crisis was exploding, the Government Accountability Office criticized the OTS, noting a "disparity between the size of the agency and the diverse firms it oversees." Among other things, the GAO report noted that the entire OTS had only one insurance specialist on staff — and this despite the fact that it was the primary regulator for the world's largest insurer!

"There's this notion that the regulators couldn't do anything to stop AIG," says a government official who was present during the bailout. "That's bullshit. What you have to understand is that these regulators have ultimate power. They can send you a letter and say, 'You don't exist anymore,' and that's basically that. They don't even really need due process. The OTS could have said, 'We're going to pull your charter; we're going to pull your license; we're going to sue you.' And getting sued by your primary regulator is the kiss of death."

When AIG finally blew up, the OTS regulator ostensibly in charge of overseeing the insurance giant — a guy named C.K. Lee — basically admitted that he had blown it. His mistake, Lee said, was that he believed all those credit swaps in Cassano's portfolio were "fairly benign products." Why? Because the company told him so. "The judgment the company was making was that there was no big credit risk," he explained. (Lee now works as Midwest region director of the OTS; the agency declined to make him available for an interview.)

In early March, after the latest bailout of AIG, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner took what seemed to be a thinly veiled shot at the OTS, calling AIG a "huge, complex global insurance company attached to a very complicated investment bank/hedge fund that was allowed to build up without any adult supervision." But even without that "adult supervision," AIG might have been OK had it not been for a complete lack of internal controls. For six months before its meltdown, according to insiders, the company had been searching for a full-time chief financial officer and a chief risk-assessment officer, but never got around to hiring either. That meant that the 18th-largest company in the world had no one checking to make sure its balance sheet was safe and no one keeping track of how much cash and assets the firm had on hand. The situation was so bad that when outside consultants were called in a few weeks before the bailout, senior executives were unable to answer even the most basic questions about their company — like, for instance, how much exposure the firm had to the residential-mortgage market.

III. THE CRASH

Ironically, when reality finally caught up to Cassano, it wasn't because the housing market crapped but because of AIG itself. Before 2005, the company's debt was rated triple-A, meaning he didn't need to post much cash to sell CDS protection: The solid creditworthiness of AIG's name was guarantee enough. But the company's crummy accounting practices eventually caused its credit rating to be downgraded, triggering clauses in the CDS contracts that forced Cassano to post substantially more collateral to back his deals.

By the fall of 2007, it was evident that AIGFP's portfolio had turned poisonous, but like every good Wall Street huckster, Cassano schemed to keep his insane, Earth-swallowing gamble hidden from public view. That August, balls bulging, he announced to investors on a conference call that "it is hard for us, without being flippant, to even see a scenario within any kind of realm of reason that would see us losing $1 in any of those transactions." As he spoke, his CDS portfolio was racking up $352 million in losses. When the growing credit crunch prompted senior AIG executives to re-examine its liabilities, a company accountant named Joseph St. Denis became "gravely concerned" about the CDS deals and their potential for mass destruction. Cassano responded by personally forcing the poor sap out of the firm, telling him he was "deliberately excluded" from the financial review for fear that he might "pollute the process."

The following February, when AIG posted $11.5 billion in annual losses, it announced the resignation of Cassano as head of AIGFP, saying an auditor had found a "material weakness" in the CDS portfolio. But amazingly, the company not only allowed Cassano to keep $34 million in bonuses, it kept him on as a consultant for $1 million a month. In fact, Cassano remained on the payroll and kept collecting his monthly million through the end of September 2008, even after taxpayers had been forced to hand AIG $85 billion to patch up his fuck-ups. When asked in October why the company still retained Cassano at his $1 million-a-month rate despite his role in the probable downfall of Western civilization, CEO Martin Sullivan told Congress with a straight face that AIG wanted to "retain the 20-year knowledge that Mr. Cassano had." (Cassano, who is apparently hiding out in his lavish town house near Harrods in London, could not be reached for comment.)

What sank AIG in the end was another credit downgrade. Cassano had written so many CDS deals that when the company was facing another downgrade to its credit rating last September, from AA to A, it needed to post billions in collateral — not only more cash than it had on its balance sheet but more cash than it could raise even if it sold off every single one of its liquid assets. Even so, management dithered for days, not believing the company was in serious trouble. AIG was a dried-up prune, sapped of any real value, and its top executives didn't even know it.

On the weekend of September 13th, AIG's senior leaders were summoned to the offices of the New York Federal Reserve. Regulators from Dinallo's insurance office were there, as was Geithner, then chief of the New York Fed. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who spent most of the weekend preoccupied with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, came in and out. Also present, for reasons that would emerge later, was Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs. The only relevant government office that wasn't represented was the regulator that should have been there all along: the OTS.

"We sat down with Paulson, Geithner and Dinallo," says a person present at the negotiations. "I didn't see the OTS even once."

On September 14th, according to another person present, Treasury officials presented Blankfein and other bankers in attendance with an absurd proposal: "They basically asked them to spend a day and check to see if they could raise the money privately." The laughably short time span to complete the mammoth task made the answer a foregone conclusion. At the end of the day, the bankers came back and told the government officials, gee, we checked, but we can't raise that much. And the bailout was on.

A short time later, it came out that AIG was planning to pay some $90 million in deferred compensation to former executives, and to accelerate the payout of $277 million in bonuses to others — a move the company insisted was necessary to "retain key employees." When Congress balked, AIG canceled the $90 million in payments.

Then, in January 2009, the company did it again. After all those years letting Cassano run wild, and after already getting caught paying out insane bonuses while on the public till, AIG decided to pay out another $450 million in bonuses. And to whom? To the 400 or so employees in Cassano's old unit, AIGFP, which is due to go out of business shortly! Yes, that's right, an average of $1.1 million in taxpayer-backed money apiece, to the very people who spent the past decade or so punching a hole in the fabric of the universe!

"We, uh, needed to keep these highly expert people in their seats," AIG spokeswoman Christina Pretto says to me in early February.

"But didn't these 'highly expert people' basically destroy your company?" I ask.

Pretto protests, says this isn't fair. The employees at AIGFP have already taken pay cuts, she says. Not retaining them would dilute the value of the company even further, make it harder to wrap up the unit's operations in an orderly fashion.

The bonuses are a nice comic touch highlighting one of the more outrageous tangents of the bailout age, namely the fact that, even with the planet in flames, some members of the Wall Street class can't even get used to the tragedy of having to fly coach. "These people need their trips to Baja, their spa treatments, their hand jobs," says an official involved in the AIG bailout, a serious look on his face, apparently not even half-kidding. "They don't function well without them."

IV. THE POWER GRAB

So that's the first step in wall street's power grab: making up things like credit-default swaps and collateralized-debt obligations, financial products so complex and inscrutable that ordinary American dumb people — to say nothing of federal regulators and even the CEOs of major corporations like AIG — are too intimidated to even try to understand them. That, combined with wise political investments, enabled the nation's top bankers to effectively scrap any meaningful oversight of the financial industry. In 1997 and 1998, the years leading up to the passage of Phil Gramm's fateful act that gutted Glass-Steagall, the banking, brokerage and insurance industries spent $350 million on political contributions and lobbying. Gramm alone — then the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee — collected $2.6 million in only five years. The law passed 90-8 in the Senate, with the support of 38 Democrats, including some names that might surprise you: Joe Biden, John Kerry, Tom Daschle, Dick Durbin, even John Edwards.

The act helped create the too-big-to-fail financial behemoths like Citigroup, AIG and Bank of America — and in turn helped those companies slowly crush their smaller competitors, leaving the major Wall Street firms with even more money and power to lobby for further deregulatory measures. "We're moving to an oligopolistic situation," Kenneth Guenther, a top executive with the Independent Community Bankers of America, lamented after the Gramm measure was passed.

The situation worsened in 2004, in an extraordinary move toward deregulation that never even got to a vote. At the time, the European Union was threatening to more strictly regulate the foreign operations of America's big investment banks if the U.S. didn't strengthen its own oversight. So the top five investment banks got together on April 28th of that year and — with the helpful assistance of then-Goldman Sachs chief and future Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson — made a pitch to George Bush's SEC chief at the time, William Donaldson, himself a former investment banker. The banks generously volunteered to submit to new rules restricting them from engaging in excessively risky activity. In exchange, they asked to be released from any lending restrictions. The discussion about the new rules lasted just 55 minutes, and there was not a single representative of a major media outlet there to record the fateful decision.

Donaldson OK'd the proposal, and the new rules were enough to get the EU to drop its threat to regulate the five firms. The only catch was, neither Donaldson nor his successor, Christopher Cox, actually did any regulating of the banks. They named a commission of seven people to oversee the five companies, whose combined assets came to total more than $4 trillion. But in the last year and a half of Cox's tenure, the group had no director and did not complete a single inspection. Great deal for the banks, which originally complained about being regulated by both Europe and the SEC, and ended up being regulated by no one.

Once the capital requirements were gone, those top five banks went hog-wild, jumping ass-first into the then-raging housing bubble. One of those was Bear Stearns, which used its freedom to drown itself in bad mortgage loans. In the short period between the 2004 change and Bear's collapse, the firm's debt-to-equity ratio soared from 12-1 to an insane 33-1. Another culprit was Goldman Sachs, which also had the good fortune, around then, to see its CEO, a bald-headed Frankensteinian goon named Hank Paulson (who received an estimated $200 million tax deferral by joining the government), ascend to Treasury secretary.

Freed from all capital restraints, sitting pretty with its man running the Treasury, Goldman jumped into the housing craze just like everyone else on Wall Street. Although it famously scored an $11 billion coup in 2007 when one of its trading units smartly shorted the housing market, the move didn't tell the whole story. In truth, Goldman still had a huge exposure come that fateful summer of 2008 — to none other than Joe Cassano.

Goldman Sachs, it turns out, was Cassano's biggest customer, with $20 billion of exposure in Cassano's CDS book. Which might explain why Goldman chief Lloyd Blankfein was in the room with ex-Goldmanite Hank Paulson that weekend of September 13th, when the federal government was supposedly bailing out AIG.

When asked why Blankfein was there, one of the government officials who was in the meeting shrugs. "One might say that it's because Goldman had so much exposure to AIGFP's portfolio," he says. "You'll never prove that, but one might suppose."

Market analyst Eric Salzman is more blunt. "If AIG went down," he says, "there was a good chance Goldman would not be able to collect." The AIG bailout, in effect, was Goldman bailing out Goldman.

Eventually, Paulson went a step further, elevating another ex-Goldmanite named Edward Liddy to run AIG — a company whose bailout money would be coming, in part, from the newly created TARP program, administered by another Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari.

V. REPO MEN

There are plenty of people who have noticed, in recent years, that when they lost their homes to foreclosure or were forced into bankruptcy because of crippling credit-card debt, no one in the government was there to rescue them. But when Goldman Sachs — a company whose average employee still made more than $350,000 last year, even in the midst of a depression — was suddenly faced with the possibility of losing money on the unregulated insurance deals it bought for its insane housing bets, the government was there in an instant to patch the hole. That's the essence of the bailout: rich bankers bailing out rich bankers, using the taxpayers' credit card.

The people who have spent their lives cloistered in this Wall Street community aren't much for sharing information with the great unwashed. Because all of this shit is complicated, because most of us mortals don't know what the hell LIBOR is or how a REIT works or how to use the word "zero coupon bond" in a sentence without sounding stupid — well, then, the people who do speak this idiotic language cannot under any circumstances be bothered to explain it to us and instead spend a lot of time rolling their eyes and asking us to trust them.

That roll of the eyes is a key part of the psychology of Paulsonism. The state is now being asked not just to call off its regulators or give tax breaks or funnel a few contracts to connected companies; it is intervening directly in the economy, for the sole purpose of preserving the influence of the megafirms. In essence, Paulson used the bailout to transform the government into a giant bureaucracy of entitled assholedom, one that would socialize "toxic" risks but keep both the profits and the management of the bailed-out firms in private hands. Moreover, this whole process would be done in secret, away from the prying eyes of NASCAR dads, broke-ass liberals who read translations of French novels, subprime mortgage holders and other such financial losers.

Some aspects of the bailout were secretive to the point of absurdity. In fact, if you look closely at just a few lines in the Federal Reserve's weekly public disclosures, you can literally see the moment where a big chunk of your money disappeared for good. The H4 report (called "Factors Affecting Reserve Balances") summarizes the activities of the Fed each week. You can find it online, and it's pretty much the only thing the Fed ever tells the world about what it does. For the week ending February 18th, the number under the heading "Repurchase Agreements" on the table is zero. It's a significant number.

Why? In the pre-crisis days, the Fed used to manage the money supply by periodically buying and selling securities on the open market through so-called Repurchase Agreements, or Repos. The Fed would typically dump $25 billion or so in cash onto the market every week, buying up Treasury bills, U.S. securities and even mortgage-backed securities from institutions like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan, who would then "repurchase" them in a short period of time, usually one to seven days. This was the Fed's primary mechanism for controlling interest rates: Buying up securities gives banks more money to lend, which makes interest rates go down. Selling the securities back to the banks reduces the money available for lending, which makes interest rates go up.

If you look at the weekly H4 reports going back to the summer of 2007, you start to notice something alarming. At the start of the credit crunch, around August of that year, you see the Fed buying a few more Repos than usual — $33 billion or so. By November, as private-bank reserves were dwindling to alarmingly low levels, the Fed started injecting even more cash than usual into the economy: $48 billion. By late December, the number was up to $58 billion; by the following March, around the time of the Bear Stearns rescue, the Repo number had jumped to $77 billion. In the week of May 1st, 2008, the number was $115 billion — "out of control now," according to one congressional aide. For the rest of 2008, the numbers remained similarly in the stratosphere, the Fed pumping as much as $125 billion of these short-term loans into the economy — until suddenly, at the start of this year, the number drops to nothing. Zero.

The reason the number has dropped to nothing is that the Fed had simply stopped using relatively transparent devices like repurchase agreements to pump its money into the hands of private companies. By early 2009, a whole series of new government operations had been invented to inject cash into the economy, most all of them completely secretive and with names you've never heard of. There is the Term Auction Facility, the Term Securities Lending Facility, the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, the Commercial Paper Funding Facility and a monster called the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (boasting the chat-room horror-show acronym ABCPMMMFLF). For good measure, there's also something called a Money Market Investor Funding Facility, plus three facilities called Maiden Lane I, II and III to aid bailout recipients like Bear Stearns and AIG.

While the rest of America, and most of Congress, have been bugging out about the $700 billion bailout program called TARP, all of these newly created organisms in the Federal Reserve zoo have quietly been pumping not billions but trillions of dollars into the hands of private companies (at least $3 trillion so far in loans, with as much as $5.7 trillion more in guarantees of private investments). Although this technically isn't taxpayer money, it still affects taxpayers directly, because the activities of the Fed impact the economy as a whole. And this new, secretive activity by the Fed completely eclipses the TARP program in terms of its influence on the economy.

No one knows who's getting that money or exactly how much of it is disappearing through these new holes in the hull of America's credit rating. Moreover, no one can really be sure if these new institutions are even temporary at all — or whether they are being set up as permanent, state-aided crutches to Wall Street, designed to systematically suck bad investments off the ledgers of irresponsible lenders.

"They're supposed to be temporary," says Paul-Martin Foss, an aide to Rep. Ron Paul. "But we keep getting notices every six months or so that they're being renewed. They just sort of quietly announce it."

None other than disgraced senator Ted Stevens was the poor sap who made the unpleasant discovery that if Congress didn't like the Fed handing trillions of dollars to banks without any oversight, Congress could apparently go fuck itself — or so said the law. When Stevens asked the GAO about what authority Congress has to monitor the Fed, he got back a letter citing an obscure statute that nobody had ever heard of before: the Accounting and Auditing Act of 1950. The relevant section, 31 USC 714(b), dictated that congressional audits of the Federal Reserve may not include "deliberations, decisions and actions on monetary policy matters." The exemption, as Foss notes, "basically includes everything." According to the law, in other words, the Fed simply cannot be audited by Congress. Or by anyone else, for that matter.

VI. WINNERS AND LOSERS

Stevens isn't the only person in Congress to be given the finger by the Fed. In January, when Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida asked Federal Reserve vice chairman Donald Kohn where all the money went — only $1.2 trillion had vanished by then — Kohn gave Grayson a classic eye roll, saying he would be "very hesitant" to name names because it might discourage banks from taking the money.

"Has that ever happened?" Grayson asked. "Have people ever said, 'We will not take your $100 billion because people will find out about it?'"

"Well, we said we would not publish the names of the borrowers, so we have no test of that," Kohn answered, visibly annoyed with Grayson's meddling.

Grayson pressed on, demanding to know on what terms the Fed was lending the money. Presumably it was buying assets and making loans, but no one knew how it was pricing those assets — in other words, no one knew what kind of deal it was striking on behalf of taxpayers. So when Grayson asked if the purchased assets were "marked to market" — a methodology that assigns a concrete value to assets, based on the market rate on the day they are traded — Kohn answered, mysteriously, "The ones that have market values are marked to market." The implication was that the Fed was purchasing derivatives like credit swaps or other instruments that were basically impossible to value objectively — paying real money for God knows what.

"Well, how much of them don't have market values?" asked Grayson. "How much of them are worthless?"

"None are worthless," Kohn snapped.

"Then why don't you mark them to market?" Grayson demanded.

"Well," Kohn sighed, "we are marking the ones to market that have market values."

In essence, the Fed was telling Congress to lay off and let the experts handle things. "It's like buying a car in a used-car lot without opening the hood, and saying, 'I think it's fine,'" says Dan Fuss, an analyst with the investment firm Loomis Sayles. "The salesman says, 'Don't worry about it. Trust me.' It'll probably get us out of the lot, but how much farther? None of us knows."

When one considers the comparatively extensive system of congressional checks and balances that goes into the spending of every dollar in the budget via the normal appropriations process, what's happening in the Fed amounts to something truly revolutionary — a kind of shadow government with a budget many times the size of the normal federal outlay, administered dictatorially by one man, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. "We spend hours and hours and hours arguing over $10 million amendments on the floor of the Senate, but there has been no discussion about who has been receiving this $3 trillion," says Sen. Bernie Sanders. "It is beyond comprehension."

Count Sanders among those who don't buy the argument that Wall Street firms shouldn't have to face being outed as recipients of public funds, that making this information public might cause investors to panic and dump their holdings in these firms. "I guess if we made that public, they'd go on strike or something," he muses.

And the Fed isn't the only arm of the bailout that has closed ranks. The Treasury, too, has maintained incredible secrecy surrounding its implementation even of the TARP program, which was mandated by Congress. To this date, no one knows exactly what criteria the Treasury Department used to determine which banks received bailout funds and which didn't — particularly the first $350 billion given out under Bush appointee Hank Paulson.

The situation with the first TARP payments grew so absurd that when the Congressional Oversight Panel, charged with monitoring the bailout money, sent a query to Paulson asking how he decided whom to give money to, Treasury responded — and this isn't a joke — by directing the panel to a copy of the TARP application form on its website. Elizabeth Warren, the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, was struck nearly speechless by the response.

"Do you believe that?" she says incredulously. "That's not what we had in mind."

Another member of Congress, who asked not to be named, offers his own theory about the TARP process. "I think basically if you knew Hank Paulson, you got the money," he says.

This cozy arrangement created yet another opportunity for big banks to devour market share at the expense of smaller regional lenders. While all the bigwigs at Citi and Goldman and Bank of America who had Paulson on speed-dial got bailed out right away — remember that TARP was originally passed because money had to be lent right now, that day, that minute, to stave off emergency — many small banks are still waiting for help. Five months into the TARP program, some not only haven't received any funds, they haven't even gotten a call back about their applications.

"There's definitely a feeling among community bankers that no one up there cares much if they make it or not," says Tanya Wheeless, president of the Arizona Bankers Association.

Which, of course, is exactly the opposite of what should be happening, since small, regional banks are far less guilty of the kinds of predatory lending that sank the economy. "They're not giving out subprime loans or easy credit," says Wheeless. "At the community level, it's much more bread-and-butter banking."

Nonetheless, the lion's share of the bailout money has gone to the larger, so-called "systemically important" banks. "It's like Treasury is picking winners and losers," says one state banking official who asked not to be identified.

This itself is a hugely important political development. In essence, the bailout accelerated the decline of regional community lenders by boosting the political power of their giant national competitors.

Which, when you think about it, is insane: What had brought us to the brink of collapse in the first place was this relentless instinct for building ever-larger megacompanies, passing deregulatory measures to gradually feed all the little fish in the sea to an ever-shrinking pool of Bigger Fish. To fix this problem, the government should have slowly liquidated these monster, too-big-to-fail firms and broken them down to smaller, more manageable companies. Instead, federal regulators closed ranks and used an almost completely secret bailout process to double down on the same faulty, merger-happy thinking that got us here in the first place, creating a constellation of megafirms under government control that are even bigger, more unwieldy and more crammed to the gills with systemic risk.

In essence, Paulson and his cronies turned the federal government into one gigantic, half-opaque holding company, one whose balance sheet includes the world's most appallingly large and risky hedge fund, a controlling stake in a dying insurance giant, huge investments in a group of teetering megabanks, and shares here and there in various auto-finance companies, student loans, and other failing businesses. Like AIG, this new federal holding company is a firm that has no mechanism for auditing itself and is run by leaders who have very little grasp of the daily operations of its disparate subsidiary operations.

In other words, it's AIG's rip-roaringly shitty business model writ almost inconceivably massive — to echo Geithner, a huge, complex global company attached to a very complicated investment bank/hedge fund that's been allowed to build up without adult supervision. How much of what kinds of crap is actually on our balance sheet, and what did we pay for it? When exactly will the rent come due, when will the money run out? Does anyone know what the hell is going on? And on the linear spectrum of capitalism to socialism, where exactly are we now? Is there a dictionary word that even describes what we are now? It would be funny, if it weren't such a nightmare.

VII. YOU DON'T GET IT

The real question from here is whether the Obama administration is going to move to bring the financial system back to a place where sanity is restored and the general public can have a say in things or whether the new financial bureaucracy will remain obscure, secretive and hopelessly complex. It might not bode well that Geithner, Obama's Treasury secretary, is one of the architects of the Paulson bailouts; as chief of the New York Fed, he helped orchestrate the Goldman-friendly AIG bailout and the secretive Maiden Lane facilities used to funnel funds to the dying company. Neither did it look good when Geithner — himself a protégé of notorious Goldman alum John Thain, the Merrill Lynch chief who paid out billions in bonuses after the state spent billions bailing out his firm — picked a former Goldman lobbyist named Mark Patterson to be his top aide.

In fact, most of Geithner's early moves reek strongly of Paulsonism. He has continually talked about partnering with private investors to create a so-called "bad bank" that would systemically relieve private lenders of bad assets — the kind of massive, opaque, quasi-private bureaucratic nightmare that Paulson specialized in. Geithner even refloated a Paulson proposal to use TALF, one of the Fed's new facilities, to essentially lend cheap money to hedge funds to invest in troubled banks while practically guaranteeing them enormous profits.

God knows exactly what this does for the taxpayer, but hedge-fund managers sure love the idea. "This is exactly what the financial system needs," said Andrew Feldstein, CEO of Blue Mountain Capital and one of the Morgan Mafia. Strangely, there aren't many people who don't run hedge funds who have expressed anything like that kind of enthusiasm for Geithner's ideas.

As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.

The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.

"But wait a minute," you say to them. "No one ever asked you to stay up all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what's left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell clerks. Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?"

But before you even finish saying that, they're rolling their eyes, because You Don't Get It. These people were never about anything except turning money into money, in order to get more money; valueswise they're on par with crack addicts, or obsessive sexual deviants who burgle homes to steal panties. Yet these are the people in whose hands our entire political future now rests.

Good luck with that, America. And enjoy tax season.

[From Issue 1075 — April 2, 2009]

It's time to fight back!

2009-03-18T08:38:00.003-04:00

Hightower was always one of my favorite commentators. The idea that there has never been, nor ever should be a "class war" is one of the myths that conservatives have perpetrated on us for a long time now. It has always irked me that they react in horror when someone says something that might allude to the idea of "class war". It's time for us to understand that this very real class war has been a part of the American scene for a very long time, and it's time for us to organize, and fight back with every tool and weapon available to us!

Frank

Hightower: Conservatives Are Blind, Deaf and Dumb to Class Warfare

By Jim Hightower, Creators Syndicate
Posted on March 12, 2009, Printed on March 18, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/131083/

David Brooks was upset. You can tell when this conservative and rather-professorial columnist for the New York Times gets upset, because his words almost sag with disappointment -- you can practically hear the tsk-tsks and the heavy sighs in each paragraph. When most commentators on the right see things that offend them, they get snarling mad; Brooks gets sad.

What saddened Brother Brooks this time was Barack Obama's budget. In a recent column, he noted that the $3.6 trillion total is "gargantuan" (we columnists are paid to make keen observations like that), but what really upset him was that the tax burden to finance universal health care, energy independence and other big initiatives in Obama's budget "is predicated on a class divide."

With heavy sighs, Brooks expressed great despair that "no new burdens will fall on 95 percent of the American people," adding with a tsk-tsk that "all the costs will be borne by the rich and all benefits redistributed downward."

Leaving aside the fact that such things as health-care coverage for every American and a booming green energy economy will benefit the rich as well as the rest of us, Brooks' column was echoing a prevalent theme in all of the right's attacks on Obama's economic proposals: Class War! Indeed, the Times' columnist even suggested (sadly) that Obama's budget was fundamentally un-American: "The U.S. has never been a society riven by class resentment," he sniffed.

Whoa, professor, get a grip! Better yet, get a good history book (Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" would be an eye-opening place to start). While our schools, media and politicians rarely mention it, America's history is replete with class rebellions against various moneyed elites who act as though they're the top dogs and ordinary folks are just a bunch of fire hydrants.

Check out the Tenant Uprisings of 1766, Shay's Rebellion in the 1780s, the Workingmen's Movement of the 1830s ... on into the post-Civil War populist movement that confronted the robber barons, the bloody labor battles at Haymarket and Homestead in the late 1800s, Coxey's Army in 1894, the Bonus March of 1932, the Penny Auctions by farmers in the 1920s and '30s, the rise of the CIO in the Depression years ... and right into modern-day fights involving environmental justice, fair trade, women's pay, workplace safety, tenant rights, janitors, farmworkers, union-busting, bank redlining, consumer gouging, clean elections and so forth.

If Brooks & Co. are so isolated as to imagine that our citizenry harbors no class resentment, they should go to any Chat & Chew Cafe across the land and listen to the locals express their innermost feelings about today's greedheaded Wall Streeters who wrecked our economy for their own enrichment. There is a fury in the countryside toward these plutocratic purse-snatchers who are being allowed to keep their exalted executive positions, draw fat paychecks and get trillions of dollars in bailout money from common taxpayers. People don't merely resent them, they yearn for the legalization of tar-and-feathering!

Yet, Brooks and his political brethren are now bemoaning the plight of the plutocrats, assailing the "redistributionists" who talk of spreading America's wealth. In his column, Brooks cried out for a conservative vision of "a nation in which we're all in it together -- in which burdens are shared broadly, rather than simply inflicted on a small minority."

Do we look like we have suckerwrappers around our heads? Where were these tender-hearted champions of sharing throughout the last 30 years, when that same "small minority" was absolutely giddy with redistributionist fervor -- redistributing upward, that is?

With the full support of their political hirelings from both parties, this minority created tax dodges, trade scams, corporate subsidies, deregulation fantasies, financial hustles, de-unionization schemes, bankruptcy loopholes and other mechanisms that turned government into a redistributionist bulldozer, shoving wealth from the workaday majority into their own pockets.

Brooks might have missed this 30-year class war, but most folks have been right in the thick of it and are not the least bit squeamish about supporting a national effort to right those wrongs. After all, even a dog knows the difference between being stumbled over -- and being kicked.

To find out more about Jim Hightower, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the new book, "Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow." (Wiley, March 2008) He publishes the monthly "Hightower Lowdown," co-edited by Phillip Frazer.

Class Warfare?

2009-01-27T18:31:00.004-05:00

I always was astounded at how Republicans kept critisizing Democrats for daring to bring up "class warfare".

The subject was completely offbounds.

Why does the subject keep coming up?

There is no class warfare

There is no war.

We (the people) done lost!

Frank

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January 27, 2009

OP-ED COLUMNIST

The Same Old Song

By BOB HERBERT

What’s up with the Republicans? Have they no sense that their policies have sent the country hurtling down the road to ruin? Are they so divorced from reality that in their delusionary state they honestly believe we need more of their tax cuts for the rich and their other forms of plutocratic irresponsibility, the very things that got us to this deplorable state?

The G.O.P.’s latest campaign is aimed at undermining President Obama’s effort to cope with the national economic emergency by attacking the spending in his stimulus package and repeating ad nauseam the Republican mantra for ever more tax cuts.

“Right now, given the concerns that we have over the size of this package and all the spending in this package, we don’t think it’s going to work,” said Representative John Boehner, an Ohio Republican who is House minority leader. Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Mr. Boehner said of the plan: “Put me down in the ‘no’ column.”

If anything, the stimulus package is not large enough. Less than 24 hours after Mr. Boehner’s televised exercise in obstructionism, the heavy-equipment company Caterpillar announced that it was cutting 20,000 jobs, Sprint Nextel said it was eliminating 8,000, and Home Depot 7,000.

Maybe the Republicans don’t think there is an emergency. After all, it was Phil Gramm, John McCain’s economic guru, who told us last summer that the pain was all in our heads, that this was a “mental recession.”

The truth, of course, is that the country is hemorrhaging jobs and Americans are heading to the poorhouse by the millions. The stock markets and the value of the family home have collapsed, and there is virtual across-the-board agreement that the country is caught up in the worst economic disaster since at least World War II.

The Republican answer to this turmoil?

Tax cuts.

They need to go into rehab.

The question that I would like answered is why anyone listens to this crowd anymore. G.O.P. policies have been an absolute backbreaker for the middle class. (Forget the poor. Nobody talks about them anymore, not even the Democrats.) The G.O.P. has successfully engineered a wholesale redistribution of wealth to those already at the top of the income ladder and then, in a remarkable display of chutzpah, dared anyone to talk about class warfare.

A stark example of this unholy collaboration between the G.O.P. and the very wealthy was on display in the pages of this newspaper on Jan. 18. The Times’s Mike McIntire wrote an article about the first wave of federal bailout money for the financial industry, which was handed over by the Bush administration with hardly any strings attached. (Congress, under the control of the Democrats, should never have allowed this to happen, but the Democrats are as committed to fecklessness as the Republicans are to tax cuts.)

The public was told that the money would be used to loosen the frozen credit markets and thus help revive the economy. But as the article pointed out, there were bankers with other ideas. John C. Hope III, the chairman of the Whitney National Bank in New Orleans, in an address to Wall Street fat cats gathered at the Palm Beach Ritz-Carlton, said:

“Make more loans? We’re not going to change our business model or our credit policies to accommodate the needs of the public sector as they see it to have us make more loans.”

How’s that for arrogance and contempt for the public interest? Mr. Hope’s bank received $300 million in taxpayer bailout money.

The same article quoted Walter M. Pressey, president of Boston Private Wealth Management, which Mr. McIntire described as a healthy bank with a mostly affluent clientele. It received $154 million in taxpayer money.

“With that capital in hand,” said Mr. Pressey, “not only do we feel comfortable that we can ride out the recession, but we also feel that we’ll be in a position to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves once this recession is sorted out.”

Take advantage, indeed. That, in a nutshell, is what the plutocracy is all about: taking unfair advantage.

When the G.O.P. talks, nobody should listen. Republicans have argued, with the collaboration of much of the media, that they could radically cut taxes while simultaneously balancing the federal budget, when, in fact, big income-tax cuts inevitably lead to big budget deficits. We listened to the G.O.P. and what do we have now? A trillion-dollar-plus deficit and an economy in shambles.

This is the party that preached fiscal discipline and then cut taxes in time of war. This is the party that still wants to put the torch to Social Security and Medicare. This is a party that, given a choice between Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, would choose Ronald Reagan in a heartbeat.

Why is anyone still listening?

Loyal Resistance

Molybdenum, Tungsten, and Big Bertha

A question of class

Colonizing, De-Colonizing, and Greed!

China's "Great Leap Forward"....1958 to 1962

A Psychopath with Hysterical Symptoms = Adolf Hitler

Islam, Trade, and the Camel

Sybil Ludington of Ludingtonville Mass.

In These Times

The Second-String Psychopaths

The Rise of the Second-String Psychopaths

Two obscure events that saved the union....interesting!

The Diminishing Social Security Safety Net

3 Ways Your Social Security Payments Are Already Being Cut

Pit bulls as "Nanny dogs"

Pit bulls’ surprising past: Nanny dogs

Homeowner Forcloses on the Bank!

Florida Homeowner Forecloses On ... Bank

Dolphins

400 super rich Americans control more we

Supersize Me!

The Demise of the Tea Party

Peter the Wild Boy

Peter the Wild Boy's condition revealed 200 years after his death

Debtor's Prison! ....When's it your turn

Holy Sanctimony Batman!.its Scott Walker

ThinkingBlue: Jesus Christ? Hey Hi, Scott Walker Here.

If Walker is successful, Wisconsin is screwed!

Budget Cutting Consequences

Let us give thanks to the Wisconsin-14

ThinkingBlue

Monday, February 21, 2011

Frank Sinatra's traumatic birth

Wake Up Tea Party, We May Be On the Same Side In Wisconsin.

Unless You're Big Business, You

Judicial Corruption

Citizens United decision should be overturned!

More Guns More Violence, More Guns, More Violence...etc.etc.

Guns and Butter

The Tyranny of Defense Inc.

By Andrew J. Bacevich

Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan

George Carlin and Richard Pryor

What's all this about "Mainstream Media" ?

Why? Because We Still Like You~ !

The Brain,...Stress,.....and Human Perception

The annexation of Mexico

Why? Because We Still Like You

200 Years In 4 Minutes (this is a must see video!!)

2009: The Year Wall Street Bounced Back and Main Street Got Shafted

What the hell is the matter with Kansas...part two

Five Editorials...Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission

The Wing-Nut Code: What Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin Are Really Saying to Their Followers

FoxPAC: Network Again Engaging in Political Advocacy with "9-12 Project" September 11, 2009 12:57 pm ET

Uncivil Discourse

It Could Be the End of Our Democracy as We Know It

In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition

The Big Takeover

It's time to fight back!

Hightower: Conservatives Are Blind, Deaf and Dumb to Class Warfare

By Jim Hightower, Creators SyndicatePosted on March 12, 2009, Printed on March 18, 2009http://www.alternet.org/story/131083/

© 2009 Creators Syndicate All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/131083/

Class Warfare?

The Same Old Song

By Jim Hightower, Creators Syndicate
Posted on March 12, 2009, Printed on March 18, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/131083/

© 2009 Creators Syndicate All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/131083/