Author: Maryscott OConnor

Crossposted from MY LEFT WING

A front page contributor on My Left Wing named Konopelli used this picture in a post the race baiting going on in right wing talk radio right now — specifically, on Rush “Douchebag of the Decade” Limbaugh’s right wing hatefest:

The people in that picture…

Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.

The President will not be turning his full attention to the plight of BLACK PEOPLE because he is a BLACK PERSON. He will be turning his attention to the plight of ALL PEOPLE because he is the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

YES, a greater percentage of black people are fucked right now as a demographic. Guess what — in sheer NUMBERS, if you want to go down THAT road, a greater NUMBER of WHITE people are fucked. You want to start playing THAT game? Jesus motherfucking christ. Do we REALLY want to keep playing the goddamned RACE game?

Unbelievable. This is sociology. This is economics. This is education, healthcare, infrastructure, energy… This is not demographics. This is not race.

Holy fucking shit. After all these years, we’re still stuck here. Still mired in the goddamned ditch.

And it’s going to take more decades and decades, because douchebags like Rush Limbaugh (and his black COUNTERPARTS, I imagine, though as someone who’s sociologically and geographically, for the most part, segregated, I am utterly ignorant of their identities), constantly perpetuate it AND incite not only the ignorant WHITES, but the ignorant BLACKS, as well, to perpetuate this horrendous state of affairs in their daily lives as well as in the nation’s political goings-on.

Christ, I feel so fucking helpless. I used to feel that, maybe if I had a talk radio show, or could anchor one of those cable news op-ed shows, like The Ed Show or Countdown, maybe I might be able to affect change.

But I’ve been watching them for years, listening to them for years. And I helped, in my small way, to get Obama elected. And while he’s made some pretty great changes on the one hand… on the other, he’s perpetuating the greatest fraud in American capitalist history with these motherfucking bailouts; he and his “Justice” Department have denied Habeas Corpus to prisoners at the base at Bagram — something he vehemently denounced as a Presidential candidate — might as well have just said, “We’re closing Guantanamo and moving it to Bagram“; and I could write another entire essay about the war crimes that won’t be prosecuted, but for the fact that it would send me into a death spiral of depression from which I’m afraid I would never recover; well, the list goes on, and as the months and years go by, it will doubtless increase and my disillusionment grow.

So that idea that any sort of wider platform for my outraged and articulate, impassioned voice might truly affect powerful and quicker change? A childish idealist’s fantasy. Change on the vast political stage comes at a glacial pace; thus it has ever been and thus it will ever be — unless, of course, that change is of the stuff of nightmares. Genocide can happen overnight. That, we’ve all witnessed. That kind of change can happen in the blink of an eye.

But the overturning of centuries of deeply embedded, well-loved but wrong-headed belief systems? That, unfortunately, takes years and years — sometimes centuries in itself. Witness the reluctance of a powerful church to finally codify in their record books that a scientific visionary was right all those years ago in his insistence that the earth revolved around the sun and not, as was for so long the overwhelming consensus of the mass of men, the reverse.

Change: we can believe in it, it is out there and we can hope for it, work for it… Maybe the man who promised it to us and led us to the very edge of it might seem to — and might actually — betray us… I don’t know, I think we place too much expectation on someone who merely articulated our hopes and dreams. He isn’t Moses. WE’RE Moses. We’re ALL Moses. We must take responsibility for ourselves, for being unable to fulfill our own promise. We may make it to the edge of the Promised Land, and our children may enter it — but I don’t think we’ll be allowed in. Our sins are too great: including elevating the men who give us hope and show us what needs to be changed — and then casting them down when THEY fail to make all those changes, as if one man or a few can do it all for us.

We have to remember, to keep reminding ourselves about the grim reality of any positive change: it creeps up on humanity, it does not charge. To crucify the men who gave us hope in that change for being unable to significantly alter the reality of how it all works is to stand on the beach and order the tides to stop — and shriek with rage when they do not.

Crossposted from MY LEFT WING

Halle-fuckin’-LUJAH!

 Huffington Post:

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is allowing Americans to make unlimited trips and money transfers to family in Cuba and easing other restrictions Monday to usher in a new era of openness toward the island nation ruled by communists for 50 years.

The formal announcement was being made at the White House Monday afternoon, during presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs’ daily briefing with reporters, a senior administration official told The Associated Press. The official spoke on condition of anonymity before the announcement.

With the changes, Obama aims to lessen Cubans’ dependence on the Castro regime, hoping that will lead them to demand progress on political freedoms, the official said. About 1.5 million Americans have relatives on the island nation that turned to communist rule in 1959 when Fidel Castro seized control.

Jesus fucking christ, it is about goddamned time.
That’s one longstanding failed policy down, eleventy-thousand more to go.

Failed Drug War, anyone?

I see Lousy Immigration Policy on the horizon…

How about the Ludicrous Prison System?

I’m not holding out much hope for prosecuting war crimes, but maybe. Just maybe. The man obviously has a conscience, but I have a feeling his canny, pragmatic and above all political savvy might just be leaving that till his second term. Ah, well. I’ve got my complaints, and they’re serious motherfucking complaints, but…

Still. Jesus. It’s goddamned amazing to be seeing all these long-awaited and above all SENSIBLE steps being enacted so freaking SWIFTLY by this so-called “centrist.” I’ve seen him do more positive shit in less than 90 days than I could EVER have dreamed possible.

Go ahead, my dear “leftist,” Free Mumia, disrupt-every-peace-rally-I’ve-ever-been-to-with-your-own-agenda types. Go ahead and tell me he’s Just Another Bush in Disguise. Go ahead and tell me he’s Just the Same Old Corporatist. I’ll be over here, eating some “Change Has Most Definitely Come” cake.

Eat it.

Originally Posted at MY LEFT WING on Monday, October 27, 2008

Whenever I hear the old joke, “He was born on third base but thinks he hit a triple,” I cringe a little, because I immediately think of the inverse — of the millions of people who are born with two strikes against them.  

Lately I cringe when I hear the ludicrous charge being leveled against Barack Obama: that he intends to apply socialist policies in the United States. The charge is ludicrous because he does not intend such a thing — not because socialism is ludicrous. To the contrary.  

Here is another thing that makes me cringe:

“In America, if you have the brains and the talent and are willing to work as hard as it takes, you can make it to the top.”  

Well, yes; the operative word in that oft-repeated maxim is “can.” But you can have a top-class brain and a top-class talent and work yourself to the bone and still go to the grave with nothing in this country… if you happen to have been born with two strikes against you.  

That is to say: You can have the brains and the talent and all the drive imaginable, and end up at a dead end because you got pregnant at 16 when abortion was illegal or unavailable… and find yourself in your mid-thirties a cashier at Sears, bone-tired with three kids at night, answering all the “Jeopardy” questions, wondering how the hell you ended up single and miserable and resenting these kids you love.  

You can be brilliant and gifted and work yourself silly to save money to transfer from community college to the Ivy League school that accepted you — but because you were unlucky enough to be born into a bad neighbourhood you will never get to that hallowed school and instead be shot dead, collateral damage in a turf war drive-by shooting, itself the sociological result of the grinding poverty produced by decades of racial and societal design.  

Worse: Born with two strikes, you wind up before the pitch, you take a huge swing — you miss, and you end up, at 17, in prison. And you spend the rest of your life going through a societally designed revolving door in that prison. You may have made that “first strike,” but the odds were against you from the beginning. You never had a chance. And you’re not alone. Watch MSNBC’s “Lock Up: Raw” sometimes. Look at the faces on that show. Ever notice anything? Check out American prison statistics against American census numbers. The ratio of the American population as a whole to African-Americans in prison is grotesque. This is not accidental. Nor are African-Americans hard-wired to commit crimes. And people who dismiss slavery as having happened “200 years ago” and African-Americans and “liberal guilt” as “blaming everything on something that happened 200 years ago” had better check up on their MUCH more recent history.  

See, brains and talent and hard work don’t mean a thing when you aren’t to the manour born in America; not unless you step into at least a tiny little bit of luck to go with it. And that shouldn’t have to be the American Way.  

And that’s why the reflexively negative response to socialism angers me so much. Just what is so wrong with a level playing field? For that, after all, is what socialism is. A recent interviewer actually quoted Karl Marx’s maxim derisively to Joe Biden: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” (as if it were the sum total of Marx’s philosophy). It is, however, a good beginning — and that is, actually, what America desperately needs.  

A level playing field, indeed. Imagine an America in which everyone begins life on home base, with no balls and no strikes. Or, to use a clearer analogy — on a level field, rather than some on a mountaintop and some in a ditch. Simple, really: Healthcare for all, food and shelter, education and basic employment — all basic necessities guaranteed for all. For every other element one might wish, one would simply have to… work hard. To compete in a truly free market, unemcumbered by hunger, by the disabilities of race, family circumstances, “who you know.” One’s merits would truly be the yardstick by which accomplishments, achievements and advancements would be measured. THAT… is socialism.  

Now, WHO could feel threatened by THAT?  I’ll tell you who: The TRUE elitists in this VERY unlevel playing field on which we all stumble and on which we’ve been playing, blindfolded, listening to propaganda over their corporate-funded loudspeakers for generations. Propaganda that’s told us that “Socialism equals Communism equals Russia equals Stalin equals BAD!  When Americans hear the phrase “socialised Medicine,” for instance, for decades we’ve picture Russian breadlines, as surely as Pavlov’s dogs (a Russian scientist — isn’t THAT an irony) drooled when they heard bells ringing. Oh, yes, the moneyed elitist classes of America for generations have done spent their brainwashing dollars well: We, the People, have been cutting off our collective nose to spite our face and cheering jubilantly as we did it.  

But a funny thing happened on the way to pay the health insurance bills: We bought computers. Little by little, the proletariat began to learn, picking up bits of information along with “barley legal porn.” (It didn’t hurt that the older folk began to die off. Sorry, grandpa.) The spectre of Stalin’s Communist Russia, truly hideous as it was, began to fade; Communism isn’t as easy to use as a completely dishonest conflationary scare tactic with the utterly, totally different Socialism when it’s more of a paragraph in a history book than an actual memory.  

And lately, we have several decades’ worth of examples of wildly successful Socialist nations to refute arguments against Socialist philosophy and economics. Not hideous beasts of governments run amok; rather, governments providing basic necessities and services with fabulous efficiency, NOT meddling in their citizens’ private lives… and then getting out of the way. And the citizens’ approval ratings of their governments? Through the roof. Their Happiness index? Quality of life? Life expectancy? Through the roof. And ours? Let’s just say we’re competing with the likes of Bolivia.  

So… Maybe Americans are getting… less stupid. Because for one thing, they’re not buying the “Barack is a Socialist” garbage. And for another, they seem to recognise Socialism when they see it (See: $700 billion bailout for the financial system and using taxpayer money to do it)… and they seem, by all known polling systems, to think it would be a REALLY good idea to start doing some MORE of it — where it counts: say, healthcare, education, green infrastructure…  

SO WAKE THE FUCK UP, Washington and Corporate Elites. The Sleeping Giant is stirring. And I have… More Cowbell.  

Crossposted from MY LEFT WING

I don’t know what disturbs me more: the Saturday Night Live Weekend Update Sarah Palin appearance I’ve now watched over half a dozen times, or the collective cognitive dissonance that overtook the national media — and, apparently, almost everyone in America — with respect to that appearance.

No, I did not find it — or, needless to say, Sarah Palin — charming. Certainly not “hilarious.” Yes, she does, demonstrably, have “rhythm.” No, the fact that she was able to be a “good sport” and appear on a television program that has been skewering her for weeks does not raise her in my esteem one single iota. And no, that sketch did not make me smile. It in fact made me want to vomit.

Where is my sense of humour, you ask? Am I, in fact, a dour liberal determined to glower through November 4th? What exactly is my fucking problem? Glad you asked — if, in fact, you asked. Yeah, I’ve got a couple of problems…

FIRST PROBLEM:

If a Democratic VP sat there smiling and dancing in her chair (Or even WORSE, a BLACK MALE Democratic VP) while a heavily weighted, menacing RAP song was performed wherein a GUN went off not once but TWICE — and the second time it wasn’t a MOOSE that got shot, but some unseen SOMEONE in the distance…

Would there be no faux outrage the next day on the news shows from Republican surrogates? A RAP SONG, glorifying GUN VIOLENCE?

SECOND PROBLEM:

It WAS funny, by itself. But Sarah Palin was sitting there. Sarah Palin sat there, tacitly endorsing a menacing-sounding song that included TWO SHOCKING, PAINFUL sounds of REPEATED gunshots.

The SECOND, as I said, was aimed at an UNSEEN someone in the distance. And Sarah Palin sat there, smiling and approving.

And I cannot help but think that there were people watching that, psychotic people, who looked at her sitting there — people with TRAVIS BICKLE TENDENCIES, who were wearing their tinfoil antennae and received her message louder and clearer than they have at her rallies: GO SHOOT HIM.

I think the sketch would have been very funny without her sitting there. But WITH her sitting there, smiling and dancing in her chair? Grotesquely ugly. And Amy Poehler’s face as she aimed her last shots and stalked off the stage was ugly, too.

“When I say ‘Obama,’ you say ‘AYERS.’
‘Obama’ — ‘Ayers’
‘Obama’ — ‘Ayers’
McCain-Palin, gonna put the nail in the coffin”

That last line in particular; did Palin have approval of the song lyrics? Was she allowed to SEE the lyrics? Did she know about the gunshots? Did they rehearse? Did she hear the gunshots? These are all things I’m curious to know.

Of course, since she won’t answer REAL policy questions, I’m sure I’ll not know the answers to THESE questions before the election, if ever.

I’ve got this on DVR. I’ve watched it over and over. It makes me more sick to my stomach every time I watch it.

And it truly is curious — what is truly horrific would actually BE hilarious were she NOT sitting there, virtually placing a seal of approval on it. It is her very PRESENCE that renders it toxic. It is her APPROVAL that renders it NOT comedy but just another negative campaign speech — but this time with visual aids.

I’m sure many will say I am being overly sensitive. Perhaps it is the effect of recent events — a reporter assaulted at a Palin rally, or the oft-reported, twice shouted “KILL HIM” at the mention of Obama’s name at McCain-Palin events… But then, it doesn’t really matter why I am sensitive to this stuff, now, does it? After weeks of goading their supporters and needling, poking and prodding them, after weeks of hate speech and negative ads full of lies, weeks of encouraging their surrogates to lie blatantly on every conceivable platform, McCain and Palin are reaping what they have sown.

Last night, after attending an Obama rally, residents of Fayetteville, North Carolina came outside to discover that THIRTY OF THEIR CARS HAD THEIR TIRES SLASHED

But I’m sure that Sarah Palin and John McCain — who’s so very, very “proud of the people who attend [his] rallies” — will immediately repudiate and disavow this heinous act and, of course, dismiss it as the act of one bad apple. Nothing to do, of course, with the poisonous speech and the lies his campaign has been spreading for weeks about Barack Obama. Nothing at all, at all, at all.

BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG

Crossposted from MY LEFT WING

 First, for all you people who think he was “taken by surprise” by McCain’s announcement — the withered fool showed his hand in their second phone conversation. You don’t think from that MOMENT Camp Obama was preparing a response? Pshaw.

Obama may not share all my political views, but with each passing day he has my growing admiration as a superb politician.
He made everyone wait for his response — and they cut into all programming to run his PRESS CONFERENCE about it. He got free air time to

A) Act, sound and look Presidential — AGAIN;

B) Tell the TRUE story of how things transpired that day — AND make McCain look like the weaselly douchebag he is by illustrating how McCain stole the credit for the joint statement idea and tried to undercut Obama by going ahead with the “postpone the debate” idea and calling his own press conference; and

C) He basically got to call McCain a chickenshit who can’t walk and chew gum at the same time — in his usual cool, unimpeachable way.

Every day, in every way, I’m feeling better and better about this election.

Crossposted from MY LEFT WING

John McCain‘s CAMPAIGN MANAGER, Rick Davis took a leave of absence — that is, he “stopped taking a salary” — from his lobbying firm in 2006… but that firm has been accepting FIFTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS a MONTH until…

LAST MONTH. For, apparently, no reason. No work has been done by Davis’s firm on behalf of Freddie Mac since Davis “stopped drawing a salary.” John McCain and his campaign claimed as recently as TWO DAYS AGO that Rick Davis has NOTHING TO DO with Freddie Mac. Nothing. And that he has NEVER lobbied for Freddie Mac.

Why was Freddie Mac paying Rick Davis’s lobbying firm $15 THOUSAND a MONTH until 24 days ago?

THIS IS FUCKING HUGE.

No, seriously. If this is not THE NUMBER ONE STORY in the media this week, there is something VERY VERY VERY wrong with the media and with us for not MAKING them cover it as the NUMBER ONE STORY.

Because THIS IS FUCKING HUGE.

Connect the dots: McCain… Rick Davis… Freddie Mac… FINANCIAL APOCALYPSE… Government Bail Out.

John McCain = CORRUPTION

He has two choices (aside from simply throwing his hands in the air and admitting to the American people that his campaign is a disaster and further, properly reflects what his Administration would look like): Either he throws Davis under the bus and claims total ignorance — which makes him look… totally ignorant; or they circle the wagons and McCain marches into the Valley of Death with a huge, flashing red sign over his head that says: MOST CORRUPT CANDIDATE EVER. And a tattoo on his forehead that reads: PROPERTY OF FREDDIE MAC.

Naturally, it appears the McCain campaign has opted for the latter approach. And the only thing standing between their SUCCEEDING at this outrageous tack and the whole goddamned country erupting into Watergate-sized horror at this… is the media — and us.

Crossposted from MY LEFT WING

The Bush/Paulson Economic Bail Out Proposal is an American Kristallnacht in the making.

So posits a DKos diarist named Mr. Tek.

And before anyone starts screaming about Godwin’s Law and the Jewish persecution of Kristallnacht… THIS IS ABOUT ECONOMICS. As was Kristallnacht, as Tek’s essay explains.

I have taken the liberty of editing Tek’s piece for spelling, grammar, syntax and punctuation, and emphasising elements of the essay I feel are important to the historical parallel. I’ve also reproduced only that part of the essay I believe relevant to the argument.

… Kristallnacht…

This event was completely planned and executed by a “mob” who attacked Jews in massive numbers in a night that was the epitome of an orgy of violence.

The “mob,” which was purported to be a spontaneously formed reaction to events, was in reality a carefully orchestrated event to justify even more emergency powers.

…
Three days later, on November 12, Hermann Goering called a meeting of the top Nazi leadership to assess the damage done during the night and place responsibility for it. Present at the meeting were Goering, Goebbels, Reinhard Heydrich, Walter Funk and other ranking Nazi officials. The intent of this meeting was two-fold: to make the Jews responsible for Kristallnacht and to use the events of the preceding days as a rationale for promulgating a series of antisemitic laws which would, in effect, remove Jews from the German economy. An interpretive transcript of this meeting is provided by Robert Conot, Justice at Nuremberg, New York: Harper and Row, 1983:164-172):

   ‘Gentlemen! Today’s meeting is of a decisive nature,’ Goering announced. ‘I have received a letter written on the Fuehrer’s orders requesting that the Jewish question be now, once and for all, coordinated and solved one way or another.’

   ‘Since the problem is mainly an economic one, it is from the economic angle it shall have to be tackled. Because, gentlemen, I have had enough of these demonstrations! They don’t harm the Jew but me, who is the final authority for coordinating the German economy. `If today a Jewish shop is destroyed, if goods are thrown into the street, the insurance companies will pay for the damages; and, furthermore, consumer goods belonging to the people are destroyed. If in the future, demonstrations which are necessary occur, then, I pray, that they be directed so as not to hurt us.

   ‘Because it’s insane to clean out and burn a Jewish warehouse, then have a German insurance company make good the loss. And the goods which I need desperately, whole bales of clothing and whatnot, are being burned. And I miss them everywhere. I may as well burn the raw materials before they arrive.

   ‘I should not want to leave any doubt, gentlemen, as to the aim of today’s meeting. We have not come together merely to talk again, but to make decisions, and I implore competent agencies to take all measures for the elimination of the Jew from the German economy, and to submit them to me.’

It was decided at the meeting that, since Jews were to blame for these events, they be held legally and financially responsible for the damages incurred by the pogrom. Accordingly, a “fine of 1 billion marks was levied for the slaying of Vom Rath, and 6 million marks paid by insurance companies for broken windows was to be given to the state coffers. (Snyder, Louis L. Encyclopedia of the Third Reich. New York: Paragon House, 1989:201).

Finally, how all of this relates to us.

We have had 30 years of tax policies that seemed, irrationally, to be designed to force a complete meltdown of the economy.  It was always believed that the people pushing for these policies had not thought them through but only wanted to reward greed.

Now, suddenly, during the very week that the system starts to collapse, a piece of legislation that was at the very least months if not YEARS in the writing, magically appears — seemingly from whole cloth at the last moment.

No one has read even a small portion of it, but what has been published is a clear manifesto to provide powers to the treasury that can only be described as a Coup d’état:

A coup d’état (pronounced ku?de??t?? AHD: [ko?o”d? tä]), often simply called a coup, is the sudden overthrow of a government by a part of the state establishment — usually the military — to replace the branch of the stricken government, either with another civil government or with a military government.

The coup d’état succeeds if its opponents fail to thwart the usurpers, allowing them to consolidate their positions, obtain the surrender of the overthrown government or acquiescence of the populace and the surviving armed forces, and thus claim legitimacy. Coups d’état typically use the power of the existing government for the takeover. As Edward Luttwak remarks in Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook: A coup consists of the infiltration of a small, but critical, segment of the state apparatus, which is then used to displace the government from its control of the remainder. In this sense, the use of either military or another organized force is not the defining feature of a coup d’état.

This is not a military takeover, nor will the resulting fascist state be militant to the extent that the Nazis were.  WE WILL NOT BECOME A NAZI STATE.

…

If you think I am alarmist, you are welcome to believe that, but you need to explain a deliberately engineered financial crisis, and a “panic driven” bill that ends all government authority over the agency that is to be tasked with solving that crisis.

I deleted, for purposes of reproducing what I consider an otherwise astute analysis of this situation, Mr. Tek’s penultimate paragraph:

We will, however, become a fascist state — either when this election is called off, or a few months later when congress is thanked for their time and told to go home. Or the appearance of a Democratic shell may be retained to provide a fig leaf, but this crowd does not seem either that sophisticated or concerned about appearances.

I think Mt. Tek underestimates the canny ability of the people attempting to perpetrate this second U.S. coup d’etat to do so while keeping things running ‘smoothly’ as ever. That is to say, if they do manage to pull off this wretched thing, they will not have to call off the election or suspend Congress.

First, as we’re all aware, they’re quite capable of fixing elections and killing Presidents. Second, Congress is, as the proposal demonstrates, effectively castrated by this legislation and therefore its continued presence as a calming influence over the masses will be necessary. Members of Congress who desire to scream to the rafters about the coup d’etat will naturally be allowed to do so, because — as we’ve seen before — nobody listens, anyway.

So, here’s my take on it: Mr. Tek is correct; if this thing is allowed to happen, we will have, indeed, experienced our own version of Kristallnacht, without actual, real-time bloodshed (that will come later as the repercussions begin to hit real people — the repercussions of THIS one act, as opposed to those of the past several years of deregulations’ influence).

So it must not happen.

Unlike what appears to be the vast majority of my liberal peers, I happen to feel mildly optimistic about the situation. I think the Democratic congress knows full well what we’re facing and that they will not allow this to happen. I know Senator Obama knows what this Bush Administration coup attempt is; I know he is doing his damndest to fight it and that he needs his Democratic congressional allies to support that fight.

Whether we win this today or November 4th and in January, I cannot know. I do know that whatever the outcome, this is a bleak, black era in which we’re living — but the one referenced by Mr. Tek and myself in reproducing his essay was worse. And we — humanity — overcame that.

We will overcome this, too.

Crossposted from MY LEFT WING

The Bush Administration has presented Congress with a hurriedly created “LEGISLATIVE PROPOSAL FOR TREASURY AUTHORITY TO PURCHASE MORTGAGE-RELATED ASSETS” and now expects it to be voted on and passed with all the expedience and passivity it received when it presented its last two disastrously precipitous cartes blanche: the Iraq War Resolution and the Patriot Act.

Congress must refuse. This is another Patriot Act, another Iraq War Resolution moment. Stand FIRM, Democrats.

This is a classic Fork in the Road moment for Congressional Democrats and Republicans of conscience. It is time, long past time, actually, to stand up and say “ENOUGH” to Unchecked Powers demanded by this Executive Branch. ENOUGH, for the love of all that is sacred in this nation, all that is sacred in the Constitution of this nation.

ENOUGH.

No. We REFUSE to give another INCH of unchecked power to this so-called “unitary executive”. It is beyond absurd, it is an insult to this nation and its Constitution. NO MORE — ENOUGH.

Barack Obama must refuse, but he CANNOT be expected to stand alone. He MUST have the entire Democratic party behind him as he holds firm and repeats with finality and strength the one word that gave us all such a feeling of, yes, hope as we listened to him at his convention in Denver: “ENOUGH.”

ENOUGH.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The Anonymous Democratic Congressperson’s Email That Signals We Will Win This One

Paulsen and congressional Republicans, or the few that will actually vote for this (most will be unwilling to take responsibility for the consequences of their policies), have said that there can’t be any “add ons,” or addition provisions. Fuck that. I don’t really want to trigger a world wide depression (that’s not hyperbole, that’s a distinct possibility), but I’m not voting for a blank check for $700 billion for those mother fuckers.

Nancy said she wanted to include the second “stimulus” package that the Bush Administration and congressional Republicans have blocked. I don’t want to trade a $700 billion dollar giveaway to the most unsympathetic human beings on the planet for a few fucking bridges. I want reforms of the industry, and I want it to be as punitive as possible.

Henry Waxman has suggested corporate government reforms, including CEO compensation, as the price for this. Some members have publicly suggested allowing modification of mortgages in bankruptcy, and the House Judiciary Committee staff is also very interested in that. That’s a real possibility.

We may strip out all the gives to industry in the predatory mortgage lending bill that the House passed last November, which hasn’t budged in the Senate, and include that in the bill. There are other ideas on the table but they are going to be tough to work out before next week.

I also find myself drawn to provisions that would serve no useful purpose except to insult the industry, like requiring the CEOs, CFOs and the chair of the board of any entity that sells mortgage related securities to the Treasury Department to certify that they have completed an approved course in credit counseling. That is now required of consumers filing bankruptcy to make sure they feel properly humiliated for being head over heels in debt, although most lost control of their finances because of a serious illness in the family. That would just be petty and childish, and completely in character for me.

I’m open to other ideas, and I am looking for volunteers who want to hold the sons of bitches so I can beat the crap out of them.

Crossposted from MY LEFT WING

DIGG THIS, please

UPDATE: The Bush Administration has handed in an utterly heinous proposal for the bail out, as I surmised in — my ruminations on Sanders’s brilliant proposal below his text…

LEGISLATIVE PROPOSAL FOR TREASURY AUTHORITY TO PURCHASE MORTGAGE-RELATED ASSETS

… making Bernie Sanders’s proposal all the more attractive and even more NECESSARY a consideration. The Democrats in Congress cannot ignore Sanders’s proposal given the outright power grab that Paulson’s proposal clearly is. I’m frankly astonished at Paul Krugman’s relatively mild response to this clearly fascistic proposal from the Bush Administration.

Sanders Op-Ed: Billions for Bailouts! Who Pays?

09/19/2008

By Senator Bernie Sanders

The current financial crisis facing our country has been caused by the extreme right-wing economic policies pursued by the Bush administration.  These policies, which include huge tax breaks for the rich, unfettered free trade and the wholesale deregulation of commerce, have resulted in a massive redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the very wealthy.  

The middle class has really been under assault.  Since President Bush has been in office, nearly 6 million Americans have slipped into poverty, median family income for working Americans has declined by more than $2,000, more than 7 million Americans have lost their health insurance, over 4 million have lost their pensions, foreclosures are at an all time high, total consumer debt has more than doubled, and we have a national debt of over $9.7 trillion dollars.

While the middle class collapses, the richest people in this country have made out like bandits and have not had it so good since the 1920s.  The top 0.1 percent now earn more money than the bottom 50 percent of Americans, and the top 1 percent own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent.  The wealthiest 400 people in our country saw their wealth increase by $670 billion while Bush has been president.  In the midst of all of this, Bush lowered taxes on the very rich so that they are paying lower income tax rates than teachers, police officers or nurses.

Now, having mismanaged the economy for eight years as well as having lied about our situation by continually insisting, “The fundamentals of our economy are strong,” the Bush administration, six weeks before an election, wants the middle class of this country to spend many hundreds of billions on a bailout.  The wealthiest people, who have benefited from Bush’s policies and are in the best position to pay, are being asked for no sacrifice at all.  This is absurd.  This is the most extreme example that I can recall of socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor.

In my view, we need to go forward in addressing this financial crisis by insisting on four basic principles:

(1) The people who can best afford to pay and the people who have benefited most from Bush’s economic policies are the people who should provide the funds for the bailout.  It would be immoral to ask the middle class, the people whose standard of living has declined under Bush, to pay for this bailout while the rich, once again, avoid their responsibilities.  Further, if the government is going to save companies from bankruptcy, the taxpayers of this country should be rewarded for assuming the risk by sharing in the gains that result from this government bailout.

Specifically, to pay for the bailout, which is estimated to cost up to $1 trillion, the government should:

a)  Impose a five-year, 10 percent surtax on income over $1 million a year for couples and over $500,000 for single taxpayers.  That would raise more than $300 billion in revenue;

b) Ensure that assets purchased from banks are realistically discounted so companies are not rewarded for their risky behavior and taxpayers can recover the amount they paid for them; and

c) Require that taxpayers receive equity stakes in the bailed-out companies so that the assumption of risk is rewarded when companies’ stock goes up.

(2) There must be a major economic recovery package which puts Americans to work at decent wages.  Among many other areas, we can create millions of jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and moving our country from fossil fuels to energy efficiency and sustainable energy.  Further, we must protect working families from the difficult times they are experiencing.  We must ensure that every child has health insurance and that every American has access to quality health and dental care, that families can send their children to college, that seniors are not allowed to go without heat in the winter, and that no American goes to bed hungry.

(3) Legislation must be passed which undoes the damage caused by excessive de-regulation.  That means reinstalling the regulatory firewalls that were ripped down in 1999.  That means re-regulating the energy markets so that we never again see the rampant speculation in oil that helped drive up prices.  That means regulating or abolishing various financial instruments that have created the enormous shadow banking system that is at the heart of the collapse of AIG and the financial services meltdown.

(4) We must end the danger posed by companies that are “too big too fail,” that is, companies whose failure would cause systemic harm to the U.S. economy.  If a company is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.  We need to determine which companies fall in this category and then break them up.  Right now, for example, the Bank of America, the nation’s largest depository institution, has absorbed Countrywide, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, and Merrill Lynch, the nation’s largest brokerage house.  We should not be trying to solve the current financial crisis by creating even larger, more powerful institutions.  Their failure could cause even more harm to the entire economy.

In my view, if Obama were to sign on to this proposal by Bernie Sanders, the inherent wisdom in its sensibility and populism would put him over the top and leave McCain in the elitist dust where he lives.

My instinct is that Obama will not, however. I get the feeling Sanders issued this proposal in the wee hours precisely because the congressional leaders who met with Bernanke and Paulson are hammering out their own proposal as we speak, and Sanders wanted to get this out there first — because he knows there’s not a chance in hell something this reasonable will be on the table.

No, we’ll likely be getting a proposal that shafts the vast majority of the American people, and Obama will be asked to sign his name to it or seem the traitor — the first twist of the knife by his own party members, the first not-so-gentle reminder to him and to us of just who is who and what is what. NOT so fast there, kiddies, with that Hope and Change schtick. Just so you all remember, when you look at those polls and start thinking about all those wonderful reforms you’ll be wanting to pass when President Obama takes office — this is OUR America, and President Obama is, after all, Our Man.

But  perhaps Sanders released it on the off chance that Obama has the derring do to take the sort of risk with the sort of pay off this act would entail?

Because… consider it. This proposal is not outlandish or unreasonable. It is not in Dennis Kucinich- Department-of-Peace-territory. This proposal is eminently fair. This proposal has “wildly popular with the American people if it ever saw the light of day” written all over it.

Crossposted from MY LEFT WING

Bill Maher is wrong about religious people when he says they are all either deluded, crazy, intellectually lazy or just plain stupid…

… and I say that as an atheist who thinks religion is responsible for more evil than anything else in human history, that all religions are plain fucking crazy and that most religious people are either deluded, crazy, intellectually lazy or just plain stupid.

Important distinction.

Of course, I believe that the vast majority of HUMANS, irrespective of their religious beliefs or lack thereof, are either deluded, crazy, intellectually lazy or just plain stupid. That, in fact, these qualities might be causally related TO many people’s religious beliefs.

But trust me — I’ve known enough atheists to confirm for anyone who hasn’t that the vast majority of ATHEISTS are ALSO either deluded, crazy, intellectually lazy or just plain stupid. These qualities are not in special reserve for the religiously inclined.

Full disclosure: I agree with virtually everything Bill Maher says about religion. I’ll be among the first in line to see Religulous, and while my laughter will likely be raucous, I’ll probably also be weeping on the inside for the travesty that is America the Religious.

But Maher, astute and intellectually sound as his arguments against religion are, always takes his position and his arguments to the point of ignorant bigotry himself, and so loses the case.

Look, I stipulate to the insanity of magical thinking, of believing in an invisible being who cares about your every thought, feeling and action. I think it’s fucking crazy and stupid, too.

But allow me to quote William Shakespeare:

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

That one sentence has been my guiding philosophy when it comes to precisely such things as religion and religious faith; I think it’s crazy to believe such things, but if you believe such things, I will do my damndest to respect the POSSIBILITY that you have an insight or a spiritual connection to the universe that I do not.

As long as you keep your religion out of MY life — and that includes my government and its laws, we can co-exist as peacefully as man and fish.

The sort of arrogance Maher exhibits in pronouncing himself the arbiter of ultimate truth and denouncing all religious faith as hysterical, nonsensical insanity (without EVER making ANY room for the possibility that there MIGHT be something in the universe to which he is not personally privy) is exactly what divides not only people like him and me from, uh, MOST people on the planet, but also divides him from me.

When Maher takes the stage and excoriates the intrusion of religion into government, the evils perpetrated upon humanity by religion and its adherents, I applaud wildly. But then he veers off into territory utterly lacking in appropriate humility — exactly the same mentality he deplores in religious people — when he declares, definitively and brooking no dissent, that they are wrong and he is right, period… And I cringe.

Bill, excuse me, but… HOW THE FUCK DO YOU KNOW THAT?

I have long argued that “atheist” is as much a misnomer as any declarative noun that assumes the existence of a god, because the non-existence of a god is equally unprovable as its existence. The very closest we can come to accuracy in describing ourselves is as “agnostics” — literally, “not knowing.” But laying aside semantics, perhaps we can agree that calling oneself an atheist is no less intellectually dishonest than claiming to “know” that there IS a god.

It’s ALL a matter of faith. Maher can pooh-pooh this argument as much as he likes, but the fact remains that since he CANNOT know if there is or is not something larger than us out there in the universe, be it an omniscient, omnipotent single deity or a cabal of prickly, capricious gods who resemble the Justice League or merely an arrangement of energy and matter comprised of the collective unconscious of all humanity from the beginnings of its existence… Maher’s atheism is a matter of faith.

Which means that his bold, declarative denunciations of religion as mass insanity and idiocy, while for the most part an opinion I share, are MERE OPINION. And that he could be wrong.

Now, Bill Maher’s reflections and observations as to the evils of religion and its application in human society remain valid and righteous, and confirmed by the opinion of many others. He would do well, however, to stick to the facts and relegate his belief system (insofar as it relates to verifiable facts versus unverifiable faith and how subscribing to the latter automatically qualifies one for membership in the Society of Insane Buffoonery) to private conversation, lest he lose all credibility in this arena by becoming exactly the thing he professes to despise: dogmatic and rigid in demanding the rest of the world see things his way and no other.