When my kids were small my wife loved to make them costumes every Halloween. Halloween is my favorite Holiday of the year. ( because it lacks the pretense of so many of the others and is mainly for kids nowadays, although it wasn't always that way.) It's the only Holiday were we exclusively celebrate the dark side of our reality and as we all know to have light we also need the contrasting darkness. Unfortunately to some extent the media has turned Halloween into a 365 yr. event. Open up your morning newspaper or spend 5 mins. watching cable news and you'll see what I mean. But, in many respects even our economy has become like a Halloween skit as well , where there are now so many scams out here every time you pick up the ph. lately it's trick or treat being sold to you. We live in some pretty scary times so Halloween seems more real then ever.
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Sunday, October 31, 2010
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Beach Report:
NJ DEP Commissioner Martin ( pic left) has announced that he intends to re-examine a request by Atlantic City's Gov't for an adjustment to the AISPP dune height to return the view and the ocean breeze to the AC boardwalk. Sounds pretty reasonable doesn't it? Well, almost, but here's the rub. The Commish also said he's kicking this whole topic to none other then Prof. Stewart Farrell Founder and Director of The Stockton Coastal Research Center for their recommendations to be submitted to the Commish this coming spring. One problem I can immediately see, is that Prof. Farrell is one of the prime proponents of the AC Project as it exists and a major beneficiary of DEP contracts , in the past. In essence the Commissioner is asking Prof. Farrell to do what? Is he going to recommend a lowering of the so called dune heights after he has personally spent over a decade promoting just such projects? Maybe? I cannot say, though I'm happy about this eventuality. Farrell has been in the past one of the biggest and most vocal promoters and supporters in public for these projects. He and his Institute have given their support and backing all along the way. For Prof. Farrell and his Center to now recommend such a lowering would fly in the face of his own position and his center's for the last two decades. If the present dune (levee) height is maintained because Prof. Farrell and his center's reputation becomes the issue, and not AC's future, it will be too bad. Hopefully, the Gov. and Commissioner Martin will not simply follow the disastrous advice ( if he recommends against lowering ) of Prof. Farrell and his Center. Prof. Farrell's career and economic well being are not dependent on whether or not AC has any scenic views or ocean breezes from the boardwalk, tens of thousands of others however are very much impacted by this ongoing situation. Depending on how this whole situation resolves will IMO greatly impact the future of the whole area. People come here to SEE and smell the ocean and continuing to deny them this simple benefit from our once famous boardwalk is just foolish.
click on the title link for the entire AC Press article with Commissioner Martin's full statement.
Friday, October 29, 2010
SCIENCE FRI. - ONE WAY TRIP TO MARS ?
@ the title link is an interesting proposal that was published yesterday in the Journal Of Cosmology. I can think of more then a few people I'd like to see sent on this one way trip. Anyway, it's an interesting idea and I'm sure the Chinese will probably follow up on it , were broke, so it's not going to done by us any time soon.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
PLASTICS
We need to return to using glass for many of the immediate storage uses we're now using plastic for. Plastic bottles, cans cartoons wrapping all need to be banned immediately, they are unnecessary and are environmentally harmful. I wish these folks well.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
THE LIBERAL ELITE TAKES A HIT
Published on Monday, October 25, 2010 by TruthDig.com
The World Liberal Opportunists Made
by Chris Hedges
The lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, which looks set to make sweeping gains in the midterm elections, is the direct result of a collapse of liberalism. It is the product of bankrupt liberal institutions, including the press, the church, universities, labor unions, the arts and the Democratic Party. The legitimate rage being expressed by disenfranchised workers toward the college-educated liberal elite, who abetted or did nothing to halt the corporate assault on the poor and the working class of the last 30 years, is not misplaced. The liberal class is guilty. The liberal class, which continues to speak in the prim and obsolete language of policies and issues, refused to act. It failed to defend traditional liberal values during the long night of corporate assault in exchange for its position of privilege and comfort in the corporate state. The virulent right-wing backlash we now experience is an expression of the liberal class’ flagrant betrayal of the citizenry.
The liberal class, which once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible, functioned traditionally as a safety valve. During the Great Depression, with the collapse of capitalism, it made possible the New Deal. During the turmoil of the 1960s, it provided legitimate channels within the system to express the discontent of African-Americans and the anti-war movement. But the liberal class, in our age of neo-feudalism, is now powerless. It offers nothing but empty rhetoric. It refuses to concede that power has been wrested so efficiently from the hands of citizens by corporations that the Constitution and its guarantees of personal liberty are irrelevant. It does not act to mitigate the suffering of tens of millions of Americans who now make up a growing and desperate permanent underclass. And the disparity between the rhetoric of liberal values and the rapacious system of inverted totalitarianism the liberal class serves makes liberal elites, including Barack Obama, a legitimate source of public ridicule. The liberal class, whether in universities, the press or the Democratic Party, insists on clinging to its privileges and comforts even if this forces it to serve as an apologist for the expanding cruelty and exploitation carried out by the corporate state.
Populations will endure repression from tyrants as long as these rulers continue to effectively manage and wield power. But human history has amply demonstrated that once those in positions of power become redundant and impotent, yet retain the trappings and privileges of power, they are swiftly and brutally discarded. Tocqueville observed that the French, on the eve of their revolution, hated the aristocrats about to lose their power far more than they had ever hated them before. The increased hatred directed at the aristocratic class occurred because as the aristocracy lost real power there was no decline in their fortunes. As long as the liberal class had even limited influence, whether through the press or the legislative process, liberals were tolerated and even respected. But once the liberal class lost all influence it became a class of parasites. The liberal class, like the déclassé French aristocracy, has no real function within the power elite. And the rising right-wing populists, correctly, ask why liberals should be tolerated when their rhetoric bears no relation to reality and their presence has no influence on power.
The death of the liberal class, however, is catastrophic for our democracy. It means there is no longer any check to a corporate apparatus designed to further enrich the power elite. It means we cannot halt the plundering of the nation by Wall Street speculators and corporations. An ineffectual liberal class, in short, means there is no hope, however remote, of a correction or a reversal through the political system and electoral politics. The liberals’ disintegration ensures that the frustration and anger among the working and the middle class will find expression in a rejection of traditional liberal institutions and the civilities of a liberal democracy. The very forces that co-opted the liberal class and are responsible for the impoverishment of the state will, ironically, reap benefits from the collapse. These corporate manipulators are busy channeling rage away from the corporate and military forces hollowing out the nation from the inside and are turning that anger toward the weak remnants of liberalism. It does not help our cause that liberals indeed turned their backs on the working and middle class.
The corporate state has failed to grasp the vital role the liberal class traditionally plays in sustaining a stable power system. The corporate state, by emasculating the liberal class, has opted for a closed system of polarization, gridlock and political theater in the name of governance. It has ensured a further destruction of state institutions so that government becomes even more ineffectual and despised. The collapse of the constitutional state, presaged by the death of the liberal class, has created a power vacuum that a new class of speculators, war profiteers, gangsters and killers, historically led by charismatic demagogues, will enthusiastically fill. It opens the door to overtly authoritarian and fascist movements. These movements rise to prominence by ridiculing and taunting the liberal class for its weakness, hypocrisy and uselessness. The promises of these proto-fascist movements are fantastic and unrealistic, but their critiques of the liberal class are grounded in truth.
The liberal class, despite becoming an object of public scorn, still prefers the choreographed charade. Liberals decry, for example, the refusal of the Democratic Party to restore habeas corpus or halt the looting of the U.S. Treasury on behalf of Wall Street speculators, but continue to support a president who cravenly serves the interests of the corporate state. As long as the charade of democratic participation is played, the liberal class does not have to act. It can maintain its privileged status. It can continue to live in a fictional world where democratic reform and responsible government exist. It can pretend it has a voice and influence in the corridors of power. But the uselessness of the liberal class is not lost on the tens of millions of Americans who suffer the awful indignities of the corporate state.
The death of the liberal class cuts citizens off from the mechanisms of power. Liberal institutions such as the church, the press, the university, the Democratic Party, the arts and labor unions once set the parameters for limited self-criticism and small, incremental reforms and offered hope for piecemeal justice and change. The liberal class could decry the excesses of the state, work to mitigate them and champion basic human rights. It posited itself as the conscience of the nation. It permitted the nation, through its appeal to public virtues and the public good, to define itself as being composed of a virtuous and even noble people. The liberal class was permitted a place within a capitalist democracy because it also vigorously discredited radicals within American society who openly defied the excesses of corporate capitalism and who denounced a political system run by and on behalf of corporations. The real enemy of the liberal class has never been Glenn Beck, but Noam Chomsky.
The purging and silencing of independent and radical thinkers as well as iconoclasts have robbed the liberal class of vitality. The liberal class has cut itself off from the roots of creative and bold thought, from those forces and thinkers who could have prevented the liberal class from merging completely with the power elite. Liberals exude a tepid idealism utterly divorced from daily life. And this is why every television clip of Barack Obama is so palpably pathetic.
Unions, organizations formerly steeped in the doctrine of class warfare and filled with those who sought broad social and political rights for the working class, have been transformed into domesticated junior partners of the capitalist class. Cars rolling out of the Ford and GM plants in Michigan were said to have been made by Ford-UAW. And where unions still exist, they have been reduced to simple bartering tools, if that. The social demands of unions early in the 20th century that gave the working class weekends off, the right to strike, the eight-hour workday and Social Security have been abandoned. Universities, especially in political science and economics departments, parrot the discredited ideology of unregulated capitalism and globalization. They have no new ideas. Artistic expression, along with most religious worship, is largely self-absorbed narcissism meant to entertain without offense. The Democratic Party and the press have become courtiers to the power elite and corporate servants.
Once the liberal class can no longer moderate the savage and greedy inclinations of the capitalist class, once, for example, labor unions are reduced to the role of bartering away wage increases and benefits, once public education is gutted and the press no longer gives a voice to the poor and the working class, liberals become as despised as the power elite they serve. The collapse of liberal institutions means those outside the circles of power are trapped, with no recourse, and this is why many Americans are turning in desperation toward idiotic right-wing populists who at least understand the power of hatred as a mobilizing force.
The liberal class no longer holds within its ranks those who have the moral autonomy or physical courage to defy the power elite. The rebels, from Chomsky to Sheldon Wolin to Ralph Nader, have been marginalized, shut out of the national debate and expelled from liberal institutions. The liberal class lacks members with the vision and fortitude to challenge dominant free market ideologies. It offers no ideological alternatives. It remains bound to a Democratic Party that has betrayed every basic liberal principle including universal healthcare, an end to our permanent war economy, a robust system of public education, a vigorous defense of civil liberties, job creation, the right to unionize and welfare for the poor.
“The left once dismissed the market as exploitative,” Russell Jacoby writes. “It now honors the market as rational and humane. The left once disdained mass culture as exploitative; now it celebrates it as rebellious. The left once honored independent intellectuals as courageous; now it sneers at them as elitist. The left once rejected pluralism as superficial; now it worships it as profound. We are witnessing not simply a defeat of the left, but its conversion and perhaps inversion.”
Capitalism, and especially corporate capitalism, was once viewed as a system to be fought. But capitalism is no longer challenged in public discourse. Capitalist bosses, men such as Warren Buffett, George Soros and Donald Trump, are treated bizarrely as sages and celebrities, as if greed and manipulation had become the highest moral good. As Wall Street steals billions of taxpayer dollars, as it perpetrates massive fraud to throw people out of their homes, as the ecosystem that sustains the planet is polluted and destroyed, we do not know what to do or say. We have been robbed of a vocabulary to describe reality. We decry the excesses of capitalism without demanding a dismantling of the corporate state. Our pathetic response is to be herded to political rallies by skillful publicists to shout inanities like “Yes we can!”
The liberal class is finished. Neither it nor its representatives will provide the leadership or resistance to halt our slide toward despotism. The liberal class prefers comfort and privilege to confrontation. It will not halt the corporate assault or thwart the ascendancy of the corporate state. It will remain intolerant within its ranks of those who do. The liberal class now honors an unwritten quid pro quo, one set in place by Bill Clinton, to cravenly serve corporate interests in exchange for money, access and admittance into the halls of power. The press, the universities, the labor movement, the arts, the church and the Democratic Party, fearful of irrelevance and desperate to retain their positions within the corporate state, will accelerate their purges of those who speak the unspeakable, those who name what cannot be named. It is the gutless and bankrupt liberal class, even more than the bizarre collection of moral and intellectual trolls now running for office, who are our most perfidious opponents.
Copyright © 2010 Truthdig, L.L.C.
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
I've been reading Chris Hedges for years and I don't usually agree with him. His devastating and angry critique here of what he calls the Liberal Elite isn't new and commentators like Prof. Noam Chomsky and others have been saying similar things for yrs., but there is something different about this article. Chris and others like Ted Rall the cartoonist on the left seem to have given up on so called Liberal Elite now and are advising more radical prescriptions. In this country such calls to arms are dangerous IMO and would probably lead to the opposite situation. I agree with Chris that the so called Liberal elite is so vested in it's own interests and careers that it's not about to allow for "real" Change anymore then the so called Tea party movement. The Tea party is allowed by the Corporatist elite only because it furthers their interests and pushes the GOP even further to the right. Movement left however as we've seen will be met with all the force and $$ of both elites. Nevertheless, Chris is right when he says the Liberal elite is a spent force that is essentially an empty suit, unwilling and unprepared to implement meaningful Change anymore. What will replace it is the scary question and only time will tell.
The World Liberal Opportunists Made
by Chris Hedges
The lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, which looks set to make sweeping gains in the midterm elections, is the direct result of a collapse of liberalism. It is the product of bankrupt liberal institutions, including the press, the church, universities, labor unions, the arts and the Democratic Party. The legitimate rage being expressed by disenfranchised workers toward the college-educated liberal elite, who abetted or did nothing to halt the corporate assault on the poor and the working class of the last 30 years, is not misplaced. The liberal class is guilty. The liberal class, which continues to speak in the prim and obsolete language of policies and issues, refused to act. It failed to defend traditional liberal values during the long night of corporate assault in exchange for its position of privilege and comfort in the corporate state. The virulent right-wing backlash we now experience is an expression of the liberal class’ flagrant betrayal of the citizenry.
The liberal class, which once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible, functioned traditionally as a safety valve. During the Great Depression, with the collapse of capitalism, it made possible the New Deal. During the turmoil of the 1960s, it provided legitimate channels within the system to express the discontent of African-Americans and the anti-war movement. But the liberal class, in our age of neo-feudalism, is now powerless. It offers nothing but empty rhetoric. It refuses to concede that power has been wrested so efficiently from the hands of citizens by corporations that the Constitution and its guarantees of personal liberty are irrelevant. It does not act to mitigate the suffering of tens of millions of Americans who now make up a growing and desperate permanent underclass. And the disparity between the rhetoric of liberal values and the rapacious system of inverted totalitarianism the liberal class serves makes liberal elites, including Barack Obama, a legitimate source of public ridicule. The liberal class, whether in universities, the press or the Democratic Party, insists on clinging to its privileges and comforts even if this forces it to serve as an apologist for the expanding cruelty and exploitation carried out by the corporate state.
Populations will endure repression from tyrants as long as these rulers continue to effectively manage and wield power. But human history has amply demonstrated that once those in positions of power become redundant and impotent, yet retain the trappings and privileges of power, they are swiftly and brutally discarded. Tocqueville observed that the French, on the eve of their revolution, hated the aristocrats about to lose their power far more than they had ever hated them before. The increased hatred directed at the aristocratic class occurred because as the aristocracy lost real power there was no decline in their fortunes. As long as the liberal class had even limited influence, whether through the press or the legislative process, liberals were tolerated and even respected. But once the liberal class lost all influence it became a class of parasites. The liberal class, like the déclassé French aristocracy, has no real function within the power elite. And the rising right-wing populists, correctly, ask why liberals should be tolerated when their rhetoric bears no relation to reality and their presence has no influence on power.
The death of the liberal class, however, is catastrophic for our democracy. It means there is no longer any check to a corporate apparatus designed to further enrich the power elite. It means we cannot halt the plundering of the nation by Wall Street speculators and corporations. An ineffectual liberal class, in short, means there is no hope, however remote, of a correction or a reversal through the political system and electoral politics. The liberals’ disintegration ensures that the frustration and anger among the working and the middle class will find expression in a rejection of traditional liberal institutions and the civilities of a liberal democracy. The very forces that co-opted the liberal class and are responsible for the impoverishment of the state will, ironically, reap benefits from the collapse. These corporate manipulators are busy channeling rage away from the corporate and military forces hollowing out the nation from the inside and are turning that anger toward the weak remnants of liberalism. It does not help our cause that liberals indeed turned their backs on the working and middle class.
The corporate state has failed to grasp the vital role the liberal class traditionally plays in sustaining a stable power system. The corporate state, by emasculating the liberal class, has opted for a closed system of polarization, gridlock and political theater in the name of governance. It has ensured a further destruction of state institutions so that government becomes even more ineffectual and despised. The collapse of the constitutional state, presaged by the death of the liberal class, has created a power vacuum that a new class of speculators, war profiteers, gangsters and killers, historically led by charismatic demagogues, will enthusiastically fill. It opens the door to overtly authoritarian and fascist movements. These movements rise to prominence by ridiculing and taunting the liberal class for its weakness, hypocrisy and uselessness. The promises of these proto-fascist movements are fantastic and unrealistic, but their critiques of the liberal class are grounded in truth.
The liberal class, despite becoming an object of public scorn, still prefers the choreographed charade. Liberals decry, for example, the refusal of the Democratic Party to restore habeas corpus or halt the looting of the U.S. Treasury on behalf of Wall Street speculators, but continue to support a president who cravenly serves the interests of the corporate state. As long as the charade of democratic participation is played, the liberal class does not have to act. It can maintain its privileged status. It can continue to live in a fictional world where democratic reform and responsible government exist. It can pretend it has a voice and influence in the corridors of power. But the uselessness of the liberal class is not lost on the tens of millions of Americans who suffer the awful indignities of the corporate state.
The death of the liberal class cuts citizens off from the mechanisms of power. Liberal institutions such as the church, the press, the university, the Democratic Party, the arts and labor unions once set the parameters for limited self-criticism and small, incremental reforms and offered hope for piecemeal justice and change. The liberal class could decry the excesses of the state, work to mitigate them and champion basic human rights. It posited itself as the conscience of the nation. It permitted the nation, through its appeal to public virtues and the public good, to define itself as being composed of a virtuous and even noble people. The liberal class was permitted a place within a capitalist democracy because it also vigorously discredited radicals within American society who openly defied the excesses of corporate capitalism and who denounced a political system run by and on behalf of corporations. The real enemy of the liberal class has never been Glenn Beck, but Noam Chomsky.
The purging and silencing of independent and radical thinkers as well as iconoclasts have robbed the liberal class of vitality. The liberal class has cut itself off from the roots of creative and bold thought, from those forces and thinkers who could have prevented the liberal class from merging completely with the power elite. Liberals exude a tepid idealism utterly divorced from daily life. And this is why every television clip of Barack Obama is so palpably pathetic.
Unions, organizations formerly steeped in the doctrine of class warfare and filled with those who sought broad social and political rights for the working class, have been transformed into domesticated junior partners of the capitalist class. Cars rolling out of the Ford and GM plants in Michigan were said to have been made by Ford-UAW. And where unions still exist, they have been reduced to simple bartering tools, if that. The social demands of unions early in the 20th century that gave the working class weekends off, the right to strike, the eight-hour workday and Social Security have been abandoned. Universities, especially in political science and economics departments, parrot the discredited ideology of unregulated capitalism and globalization. They have no new ideas. Artistic expression, along with most religious worship, is largely self-absorbed narcissism meant to entertain without offense. The Democratic Party and the press have become courtiers to the power elite and corporate servants.
Once the liberal class can no longer moderate the savage and greedy inclinations of the capitalist class, once, for example, labor unions are reduced to the role of bartering away wage increases and benefits, once public education is gutted and the press no longer gives a voice to the poor and the working class, liberals become as despised as the power elite they serve. The collapse of liberal institutions means those outside the circles of power are trapped, with no recourse, and this is why many Americans are turning in desperation toward idiotic right-wing populists who at least understand the power of hatred as a mobilizing force.
The liberal class no longer holds within its ranks those who have the moral autonomy or physical courage to defy the power elite. The rebels, from Chomsky to Sheldon Wolin to Ralph Nader, have been marginalized, shut out of the national debate and expelled from liberal institutions. The liberal class lacks members with the vision and fortitude to challenge dominant free market ideologies. It offers no ideological alternatives. It remains bound to a Democratic Party that has betrayed every basic liberal principle including universal healthcare, an end to our permanent war economy, a robust system of public education, a vigorous defense of civil liberties, job creation, the right to unionize and welfare for the poor.
“The left once dismissed the market as exploitative,” Russell Jacoby writes. “It now honors the market as rational and humane. The left once disdained mass culture as exploitative; now it celebrates it as rebellious. The left once honored independent intellectuals as courageous; now it sneers at them as elitist. The left once rejected pluralism as superficial; now it worships it as profound. We are witnessing not simply a defeat of the left, but its conversion and perhaps inversion.”
Capitalism, and especially corporate capitalism, was once viewed as a system to be fought. But capitalism is no longer challenged in public discourse. Capitalist bosses, men such as Warren Buffett, George Soros and Donald Trump, are treated bizarrely as sages and celebrities, as if greed and manipulation had become the highest moral good. As Wall Street steals billions of taxpayer dollars, as it perpetrates massive fraud to throw people out of their homes, as the ecosystem that sustains the planet is polluted and destroyed, we do not know what to do or say. We have been robbed of a vocabulary to describe reality. We decry the excesses of capitalism without demanding a dismantling of the corporate state. Our pathetic response is to be herded to political rallies by skillful publicists to shout inanities like “Yes we can!”
The liberal class is finished. Neither it nor its representatives will provide the leadership or resistance to halt our slide toward despotism. The liberal class prefers comfort and privilege to confrontation. It will not halt the corporate assault or thwart the ascendancy of the corporate state. It will remain intolerant within its ranks of those who do. The liberal class now honors an unwritten quid pro quo, one set in place by Bill Clinton, to cravenly serve corporate interests in exchange for money, access and admittance into the halls of power. The press, the universities, the labor movement, the arts, the church and the Democratic Party, fearful of irrelevance and desperate to retain their positions within the corporate state, will accelerate their purges of those who speak the unspeakable, those who name what cannot be named. It is the gutless and bankrupt liberal class, even more than the bizarre collection of moral and intellectual trolls now running for office, who are our most perfidious opponents.
Copyright © 2010 Truthdig, L.L.C.
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
I've been reading Chris Hedges for years and I don't usually agree with him. His devastating and angry critique here of what he calls the Liberal Elite isn't new and commentators like Prof. Noam Chomsky and others have been saying similar things for yrs., but there is something different about this article. Chris and others like Ted Rall the cartoonist on the left seem to have given up on so called Liberal Elite now and are advising more radical prescriptions. In this country such calls to arms are dangerous IMO and would probably lead to the opposite situation. I agree with Chris that the so called Liberal elite is so vested in it's own interests and careers that it's not about to allow for "real" Change anymore then the so called Tea party movement. The Tea party is allowed by the Corporatist elite only because it furthers their interests and pushes the GOP even further to the right. Movement left however as we've seen will be met with all the force and $$ of both elites. Nevertheless, Chris is right when he says the Liberal elite is a spent force that is essentially an empty suit, unwilling and unprepared to implement meaningful Change anymore. What will replace it is the scary question and only time will tell.
Monday, October 25, 2010
CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN? REALLY?
What Happened to Change We Can Believe In?
by Frank Rich
PRESIDENT Obama, the Rodney Dangerfield of 2010, gets no respect for averting another Great Depression, for saving 3.3 million jobs with stimulus spending, or for salvaging GM and Chrysler from the junkyard. And none of these good deeds, no matter how substantial, will go unpunished if the projected Democratic bloodbath materializes on Election Day. Some are even going unremembered. For Obama, the ultimate indignity is the Times/CBS News poll in September showing that only 8 percent of Americans know that he gave 95 percent of American taxpayers a tax cut.
The reasons for his failure to reap credit for any economic accomplishments are a catechism by now: the dark cloud cast by undiminished unemployment, the relentless disinformation campaign of his political opponents, and the White House's surprising ineptitude at selling its own achievements. But the most relentless drag on a chief executive who promised change we can believe in is even more ominous. It's the country's fatalistic sense that the stacked economic order that gave us the Great Recession remains not just in place but more entrenched and powerful than ever.
No matter how much Obama talks about his "tough" new financial regulatory reforms or offers rote condemnations of Wall Street greed, few believe there's been real change. That's not just because so many have lost their jobs, their savings and their homes. It's also because so many know that the loftiest perpetrators of this national devastation got get-out-of-jail-free cards, that too-big-to-fail banks have grown bigger and that the rich are still the only Americans getting richer.
This intractable status quo is being rubbed in our faces daily during the pre-election sprint by revelations of the latest banking industry outrage, its disregard for the rule of law as it cut every corner to process an avalanche of foreclosures. Clearly, these financial institutions have learned nothing in the few years since their contempt for fiscal and legal niceties led them to peddle these predatory mortgages (and the reckless financial "products" concocted from them) in the first place. And why should they have learned anything? They've often been rewarded, not punished, for bad behavior.
The latest example is Angelo Mozilo, the former chief executive of Countrywide and the godfather of subprime mortgages. On the eve of his trial 10 days ago, he settled Securities and Exchange Commission charges for $67.5 million, $20 million of which will be footed by what remains of Countrywide in its present iteration at Bank of America. Even if he paid the whole sum himself, it would still be a small fraction of the $521 million he collected in compensation as he pursued his gambling spree from 2000 until 2008.
A particularly egregious chunk of that take was the $140 million he pocketed by dumping Countrywide shares in 2006-7. It was a chapter right out of Kenneth Lay's Enron playbook: Mozilo reassured shareholders that all was peachy even as his private e-mail was awash in panic over the "toxic" mortgages bringing Countrywide (and the country) to ruin. Lay, at least, was convicted by a jury and destined to decades in the slammer before his death.
The much acclaimed new documentary about the global economic meltdown, "Inside Job," has it right. As its narrator, Matt Damon, intones, our country has been robbed by insiders who "destroyed their own companies and plunged the world into crisis" - and then "walked away from the wreckage with their fortunes intact." These insiders include Dick Fuld and four other executives at Lehman Brothers who "got to keep all the money" (more than $1 billion) after Lehman went bankrupt. And of course Robert Rubin, who encouraged Citigroup to step up its investment in high-risk bets like Countrywide's mortgage-backed securities. Rubin, now back as a rainmaker on Wall Street, collected more than $115million in compensation during roughly the same period Mozilo "earned" his half a billion. Citi, which required a $45 billion taxpayers' bailout, recently secured its own slap-on-the-wrist S.E.C. settlement - at $75 million, less than Rubin's earnings and less than its 2003 penalty ($101 million) for its role in hiding Enron profits.
It should pain the White House that its departing economic guru, the Rubin protégé Lawrence Summers, is an even bigger heavy in "Inside Job" than in the hit movie of election season, "The Social Network." Summers - like the former Goldman Sachs chief executive and Bush Treasury secretary Hank Paulson - is portrayed as just the latest in a procession of policy makers who keep rotating in and out of government and the financial industry, almost always to that industry's advantage. As the star economist Nouriel Roubini tells the filmmaker, Charles Ferguson, the financial sector on Wall Street has "step by step captured the political system" on "the Democratic and the Republican side" alike. But it would be wrong to single out Summers or any individual official for the Obama administration's image of being lax in pursuing finance's bad actors. This tone is set at the top.
Asked in "Inside Job" why there's been no systematic investigation of the 2008 crash, Roubini answers: "Because then you'd find the culprits." With the aid of the "Manhattan Madam" (and current stunt New York gubernatorial candidate) Kristin Davis, the film also asks why federal prosecutors who were "perfectly happy to use Eliot Spitzer's personal vices to force him to resign in 2008" have not used rampant sex-and-drug trade on Wall Street as a tool for flipping witnesses to pursue the culprits behind the financial crimes that devastated the nation.
The Obama administration seems not to have a prosecutorial gene. It's shy about calling a fraud a fraud when it occurs in high finance. This caution was exemplified most recently by the secretary of housing and urban development, Shaun Donovan, whose response to the public outcry over the banks' foreclosure shenanigans was to take to The Huffington Post last weekend. "The notion that many of the very same institutions that helped cause this housing crisis may well be making it worse is not only frustrating - it's shameful," he wrote.
Well, yes! Obama couldn't have said it more eloquently himself. But with all due respect to Secretary Donovan's blogging finesse, he wasn't promising action. He was just stroking the liberal base while the administration once again punted. In our new banking scandal, as in those before it, attorneys general in the states, where many pension funds were decimated by Wall Street Ponzi schemes, are pursuing the crimes Washington has not. The largest bill of reparations paid out by Bank of America for Countrywide's deceptive mortgage practices - $8.4 billion - was to settle a suit by 11 state attorneys general on the warpath.
Since Obama has neither aggressively pursued the crash's con men nor compellingly explained how they gamed the system, he sometimes looks as if he's fronting for the industry even if he's not. Voters are not only failing to give the White House credit for its economic successes but finding it guilty of transgressions it didn't commit. The opposition is more than happy to pump up that confusion. When Mitch McConnell appeared on ABC's "This Week" last month, he typically railed against the "extreme" government of "the last year and a half," citing its takeover of banks as his first example. That this was utter fiction - the takeover took place two years ago, before Obama was president, with McConnell voting for it - went unchallenged by his questioner, Christiane Amanpour, and probably by many viewers inured to this big lie.
The real tragedy here, though, is not whatever happens in midterm elections. It's the long-term prognosis for America. The obscene income inequality bequeathed by the three-decade rise of the financial industry has societal consequences graver than even the fundamental economic unfairness. When we reward financial engineers infinitely more than actual engineers, we "lure our most talented graduates to the largely unproductive chase" for Wall Street riches, as the economist Robert H. Frank wrote in The Times last weekend. Worse, Frank added, the continued squeeze on the middle class leads to a wholesale decline in the quality of American life - from more bankruptcy filings and divorces to a collapse in public services, whether road repair or education, that taxpayers will no longer support.
Even as the G.O.P. benefits from unlimited corporate campaign money, it's pulling off the remarkable feat of persuading a large swath of anxious voters that it will lead a populist charge against the rulers of our economic pyramid - the banks, energy companies, insurance giants and other special interests underwriting its own candidates. Should those forces prevail, an America that still hasn't remotely recovered from the worst hard times in 70 years will end up handing over even more power to those who greased the skids.
We can blame much of this turn of events on the deep pockets of oil billionaires like the Koch brothers and on the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which freed corporations to try to buy any election they choose. But the Obama White House is hardly innocent. Its failure to hold the bust's malefactors accountable has helped turn what should have been a clear-cut choice on Nov. 2 into a blurry contest between the party of big corporations and the party of business as usual.
© 2010 New York Times
Frank Rich is a regular columnist for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including The Great Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina.
I don't always agree with Frank Rich but this article is pretty much how I feel about the current situation in this election cycle. Like many Independent Progressives I'm not happy with how the Obama regime has turned out these last two yrs. They in my view have walked away from most of what they campaigned on in 2008. In fact, I'll go as far as to say they think they've pulled off a clever bait and switch on their base. Have they? If the GOP wins Congress next week ( most polls predict they will), it won't be because the horribly failed policies and political and economic prescriptions they endlessly sell the public are now suddenly popular again, it will be because Obama's team has failed to deliver on it's own promises. Astoundingly, I watch and half listen to this man still out here trying to sell himself in a Progressive frame, even when most if not all of his actual policies are pure Corporatist neo-liberalism and anything but Progressive or as the right like to call us Leftists. Obama is IMO politically to the right of Richard Nixon.
by Frank Rich
PRESIDENT Obama, the Rodney Dangerfield of 2010, gets no respect for averting another Great Depression, for saving 3.3 million jobs with stimulus spending, or for salvaging GM and Chrysler from the junkyard. And none of these good deeds, no matter how substantial, will go unpunished if the projected Democratic bloodbath materializes on Election Day. Some are even going unremembered. For Obama, the ultimate indignity is the Times/CBS News poll in September showing that only 8 percent of Americans know that he gave 95 percent of American taxpayers a tax cut.
The reasons for his failure to reap credit for any economic accomplishments are a catechism by now: the dark cloud cast by undiminished unemployment, the relentless disinformation campaign of his political opponents, and the White House's surprising ineptitude at selling its own achievements. But the most relentless drag on a chief executive who promised change we can believe in is even more ominous. It's the country's fatalistic sense that the stacked economic order that gave us the Great Recession remains not just in place but more entrenched and powerful than ever.
No matter how much Obama talks about his "tough" new financial regulatory reforms or offers rote condemnations of Wall Street greed, few believe there's been real change. That's not just because so many have lost their jobs, their savings and their homes. It's also because so many know that the loftiest perpetrators of this national devastation got get-out-of-jail-free cards, that too-big-to-fail banks have grown bigger and that the rich are still the only Americans getting richer.
This intractable status quo is being rubbed in our faces daily during the pre-election sprint by revelations of the latest banking industry outrage, its disregard for the rule of law as it cut every corner to process an avalanche of foreclosures. Clearly, these financial institutions have learned nothing in the few years since their contempt for fiscal and legal niceties led them to peddle these predatory mortgages (and the reckless financial "products" concocted from them) in the first place. And why should they have learned anything? They've often been rewarded, not punished, for bad behavior.
The latest example is Angelo Mozilo, the former chief executive of Countrywide and the godfather of subprime mortgages. On the eve of his trial 10 days ago, he settled Securities and Exchange Commission charges for $67.5 million, $20 million of which will be footed by what remains of Countrywide in its present iteration at Bank of America. Even if he paid the whole sum himself, it would still be a small fraction of the $521 million he collected in compensation as he pursued his gambling spree from 2000 until 2008.
A particularly egregious chunk of that take was the $140 million he pocketed by dumping Countrywide shares in 2006-7. It was a chapter right out of Kenneth Lay's Enron playbook: Mozilo reassured shareholders that all was peachy even as his private e-mail was awash in panic over the "toxic" mortgages bringing Countrywide (and the country) to ruin. Lay, at least, was convicted by a jury and destined to decades in the slammer before his death.
The much acclaimed new documentary about the global economic meltdown, "Inside Job," has it right. As its narrator, Matt Damon, intones, our country has been robbed by insiders who "destroyed their own companies and plunged the world into crisis" - and then "walked away from the wreckage with their fortunes intact." These insiders include Dick Fuld and four other executives at Lehman Brothers who "got to keep all the money" (more than $1 billion) after Lehman went bankrupt. And of course Robert Rubin, who encouraged Citigroup to step up its investment in high-risk bets like Countrywide's mortgage-backed securities. Rubin, now back as a rainmaker on Wall Street, collected more than $115million in compensation during roughly the same period Mozilo "earned" his half a billion. Citi, which required a $45 billion taxpayers' bailout, recently secured its own slap-on-the-wrist S.E.C. settlement - at $75 million, less than Rubin's earnings and less than its 2003 penalty ($101 million) for its role in hiding Enron profits.
It should pain the White House that its departing economic guru, the Rubin protégé Lawrence Summers, is an even bigger heavy in "Inside Job" than in the hit movie of election season, "The Social Network." Summers - like the former Goldman Sachs chief executive and Bush Treasury secretary Hank Paulson - is portrayed as just the latest in a procession of policy makers who keep rotating in and out of government and the financial industry, almost always to that industry's advantage. As the star economist Nouriel Roubini tells the filmmaker, Charles Ferguson, the financial sector on Wall Street has "step by step captured the political system" on "the Democratic and the Republican side" alike. But it would be wrong to single out Summers or any individual official for the Obama administration's image of being lax in pursuing finance's bad actors. This tone is set at the top.
Asked in "Inside Job" why there's been no systematic investigation of the 2008 crash, Roubini answers: "Because then you'd find the culprits." With the aid of the "Manhattan Madam" (and current stunt New York gubernatorial candidate) Kristin Davis, the film also asks why federal prosecutors who were "perfectly happy to use Eliot Spitzer's personal vices to force him to resign in 2008" have not used rampant sex-and-drug trade on Wall Street as a tool for flipping witnesses to pursue the culprits behind the financial crimes that devastated the nation.
The Obama administration seems not to have a prosecutorial gene. It's shy about calling a fraud a fraud when it occurs in high finance. This caution was exemplified most recently by the secretary of housing and urban development, Shaun Donovan, whose response to the public outcry over the banks' foreclosure shenanigans was to take to The Huffington Post last weekend. "The notion that many of the very same institutions that helped cause this housing crisis may well be making it worse is not only frustrating - it's shameful," he wrote.
Well, yes! Obama couldn't have said it more eloquently himself. But with all due respect to Secretary Donovan's blogging finesse, he wasn't promising action. He was just stroking the liberal base while the administration once again punted. In our new banking scandal, as in those before it, attorneys general in the states, where many pension funds were decimated by Wall Street Ponzi schemes, are pursuing the crimes Washington has not. The largest bill of reparations paid out by Bank of America for Countrywide's deceptive mortgage practices - $8.4 billion - was to settle a suit by 11 state attorneys general on the warpath.
Since Obama has neither aggressively pursued the crash's con men nor compellingly explained how they gamed the system, he sometimes looks as if he's fronting for the industry even if he's not. Voters are not only failing to give the White House credit for its economic successes but finding it guilty of transgressions it didn't commit. The opposition is more than happy to pump up that confusion. When Mitch McConnell appeared on ABC's "This Week" last month, he typically railed against the "extreme" government of "the last year and a half," citing its takeover of banks as his first example. That this was utter fiction - the takeover took place two years ago, before Obama was president, with McConnell voting for it - went unchallenged by his questioner, Christiane Amanpour, and probably by many viewers inured to this big lie.
The real tragedy here, though, is not whatever happens in midterm elections. It's the long-term prognosis for America. The obscene income inequality bequeathed by the three-decade rise of the financial industry has societal consequences graver than even the fundamental economic unfairness. When we reward financial engineers infinitely more than actual engineers, we "lure our most talented graduates to the largely unproductive chase" for Wall Street riches, as the economist Robert H. Frank wrote in The Times last weekend. Worse, Frank added, the continued squeeze on the middle class leads to a wholesale decline in the quality of American life - from more bankruptcy filings and divorces to a collapse in public services, whether road repair or education, that taxpayers will no longer support.
Even as the G.O.P. benefits from unlimited corporate campaign money, it's pulling off the remarkable feat of persuading a large swath of anxious voters that it will lead a populist charge against the rulers of our economic pyramid - the banks, energy companies, insurance giants and other special interests underwriting its own candidates. Should those forces prevail, an America that still hasn't remotely recovered from the worst hard times in 70 years will end up handing over even more power to those who greased the skids.
We can blame much of this turn of events on the deep pockets of oil billionaires like the Koch brothers and on the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which freed corporations to try to buy any election they choose. But the Obama White House is hardly innocent. Its failure to hold the bust's malefactors accountable has helped turn what should have been a clear-cut choice on Nov. 2 into a blurry contest between the party of big corporations and the party of business as usual.
© 2010 New York Times
Frank Rich is a regular columnist for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including The Great Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina.
I don't always agree with Frank Rich but this article is pretty much how I feel about the current situation in this election cycle. Like many Independent Progressives I'm not happy with how the Obama regime has turned out these last two yrs. They in my view have walked away from most of what they campaigned on in 2008. In fact, I'll go as far as to say they think they've pulled off a clever bait and switch on their base. Have they? If the GOP wins Congress next week ( most polls predict they will), it won't be because the horribly failed policies and political and economic prescriptions they endlessly sell the public are now suddenly popular again, it will be because Obama's team has failed to deliver on it's own promises. Astoundingly, I watch and half listen to this man still out here trying to sell himself in a Progressive frame, even when most if not all of his actual policies are pure Corporatist neo-liberalism and anything but Progressive or as the right like to call us Leftists. Obama is IMO politically to the right of Richard Nixon.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF OIL SIGHTED IN THE GULF!!
Just when everyone thought the OIL spill was over this. @ the title link read an article that just hit the Nets. It seems the massive OIL spill of the summer has a second curtain call yet if these reports are right. I feel really sorry for the folks along the Gulf. What happened down there should be a cautionary warning to those out here that want to believe this massive spill didn't do any lasting damage. It did and it continues to.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
THE BV$H LIE
David Michael Green
George W. Bush
by David Michael Green | October 23, 2010 - 12:35pm
First the Big Reagan Lie, now the Even Bigger Bush Lie.
It was only a matter of time, of course, before conservatives would come out of hiding.
Pummeled over the years for their association with the catastrophe known as the Bush administration, singing its praises had become too great a lie even for those whose every political utterance is an exercise in deceit and hypocrisy.
But I knew they wouldn't wait long before trying to canonize their main man, just as they've already done over the years by building a one-man Mt. Rushmore In The Sky for their patron, Saint Ronald of Hollywood-cum-Washington (and what, really, was the difference between the two in his case, anyhow?).
And now, of course, they are starting to do it for the Caligula Kid as well. Billboards are popping up on the landscape with a picture of the prior president, asking, "Miss me yet?" Regressive commentators on television are beginning to dare mentioning the Bush years again. Recent poll data shows that Bush and Obama are rated as near equals in the public's assessment of the two presidencies. Now the Boy King's memoir is soon to be released, and we can certainly expect a lot more of these attempts at reviving the stinking corpse of his wrecking ball presidency.
But the project of turning Bush into a great president comes with a few, um, issues associated with it, however. Heck, even just rescuing him from the cesspool of the club of failed presidents requires no small miracle.
Most of the presidents amongst these bottom-dwellers are guilty of some singular bungling of large proportion, such as failing to prevent the Civil War, blowing Reconstruction, or doing too little in response to the Great Depression. Those are serious indictments. But what if you were guilty of the equivalent of all of those crimes, plus ten more? All in one presidency?
Meet George W. Bush, 43rd president of the United States.
Trying to mythologize the Bush presidency is not going to be easy.
If you manage to turn a record high surplus into a record high deficit, and to double the national debt in the process, history will not hold you in high regard for doing so, just as it indicts Ronald Reagan for tripling the debt on his watch.
If your policies serve the interests of an economic oligarchy rather than the people, history will not approve of that, just as it does not admire Republican presidents from Grant to Hoover for doing the same.
If you populate your administration with corrupt political cronies rather than experts and experienced administrators, history will treat you poorly for it, just as it does Ulysses Grant.
If you completely fail to respond to a catastrophic hurricane that drowns a major city, history will adore you about as much as it does Nero, who fiddled while Rome burned.
If you manage to sell your country a war on the basis of lies, history will not regard you well, as it has not Lyndon Johnson for precisely that reason.
If you succeed in mismanaging a war into protracted failure, history will not be kind to you for that, just as it isn't kind to Harry Truman for the stalemate of Korea.
But if you manage to do that for seven years, rather than three, history will be even less kind to you.
And if you manage to that for not one but two wars, over seven years time, history will be very angry indeed.
If you make your country hated in the world, history will not respect you, just as it admires John Kennedy for doing the opposite.
If you shred the US Constitution in order to facilitate a police state with unlimited government powers, history will cast its aspersions upon you, just as it does on Joe McCarthy.
If you ignore a looming catastrophe like global warming - and indeed if you exacerbate that catastrophe - history will regard you very poorly, just as historians generally agree that James Buchanan is America's worst president for failing to respond to its unfolding Civil War crisis.
If you are warned of a cataclysmic terrorist attack by your staff and do not respond, instead spending the month before on vacation, history will devastate you for this alone, just as one of Stalin's great crimes (among many) was to fantasize that Nazi Germany would not attack the Soviet Union, ultimately at a cost of tens of millions of his people.
Indeed, if you spend more time during your presidency on vacation than any other president ever, history will not admire you, just as it does not admire Warren Harding.
If you run for president as one kind of politician but then completely abandon those politics for something different (and supremely ugly), history will not look kindly upon you, just as it does not upon John Tyler.
If you employ disgusting prejudices to win elections, history will consider you cheap garbage for doing so, just as it does George H. W. Bush.
And if you manage to deeply polarize your country, especially in a time of national crisis, history will admire you about as much as it does Richard Nixon for doing the same thing.
If you did any one of these things, you'd find yourself down at the bottom of the list in the historical ranking of American presidents.
But if you've managed to do every one of these things over the course of a single presidency, you'd not only occupy the very bottom slot on the list, you'd be in a category all your own.
It really is astonishing, isn't it, to think about how thoroughly this perfect storm of a president could wreak havoc on a developed (or is it?) democracy (or is it?) in the 21st century.
But what is even more astonishing is that his mythologized revival is already showing signs of working.
Even today, less than two years out of that nightmare.
Even today, with both of Bush's two wars still endlessly droning on, still dragging down the country as they chew up American, Iraqi and Afghani lives like some sort of industrial-scale human sacrifice machine.
Even today, as Bush's economic depression spreads misery across the land.
It's astonishing that the guy is taken even remotely seriously, let alone that he has not been thrown in jail or met the same fate that the Tsar or Il Duce did.
It's astonishing that he would dare to publish a book less than two years after having wrecked a world so thoroughly.
In just what sort of country can something so shameful happen?
Yep, trying to mythologize the Bush presidency is not going to be easy.
If this were Sweden or Canada, that is.
But this is America.
_______
ABOUT AUTHOR
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.
George W. Bush
by David Michael Green | October 23, 2010 - 12:35pm
First the Big Reagan Lie, now the Even Bigger Bush Lie.
It was only a matter of time, of course, before conservatives would come out of hiding.
Pummeled over the years for their association with the catastrophe known as the Bush administration, singing its praises had become too great a lie even for those whose every political utterance is an exercise in deceit and hypocrisy.
But I knew they wouldn't wait long before trying to canonize their main man, just as they've already done over the years by building a one-man Mt. Rushmore In The Sky for their patron, Saint Ronald of Hollywood-cum-Washington (and what, really, was the difference between the two in his case, anyhow?).
And now, of course, they are starting to do it for the Caligula Kid as well. Billboards are popping up on the landscape with a picture of the prior president, asking, "Miss me yet?" Regressive commentators on television are beginning to dare mentioning the Bush years again. Recent poll data shows that Bush and Obama are rated as near equals in the public's assessment of the two presidencies. Now the Boy King's memoir is soon to be released, and we can certainly expect a lot more of these attempts at reviving the stinking corpse of his wrecking ball presidency.
But the project of turning Bush into a great president comes with a few, um, issues associated with it, however. Heck, even just rescuing him from the cesspool of the club of failed presidents requires no small miracle.
Most of the presidents amongst these bottom-dwellers are guilty of some singular bungling of large proportion, such as failing to prevent the Civil War, blowing Reconstruction, or doing too little in response to the Great Depression. Those are serious indictments. But what if you were guilty of the equivalent of all of those crimes, plus ten more? All in one presidency?
Meet George W. Bush, 43rd president of the United States.
Trying to mythologize the Bush presidency is not going to be easy.
If you manage to turn a record high surplus into a record high deficit, and to double the national debt in the process, history will not hold you in high regard for doing so, just as it indicts Ronald Reagan for tripling the debt on his watch.
If your policies serve the interests of an economic oligarchy rather than the people, history will not approve of that, just as it does not admire Republican presidents from Grant to Hoover for doing the same.
If you populate your administration with corrupt political cronies rather than experts and experienced administrators, history will treat you poorly for it, just as it does Ulysses Grant.
If you completely fail to respond to a catastrophic hurricane that drowns a major city, history will adore you about as much as it does Nero, who fiddled while Rome burned.
If you manage to sell your country a war on the basis of lies, history will not regard you well, as it has not Lyndon Johnson for precisely that reason.
If you succeed in mismanaging a war into protracted failure, history will not be kind to you for that, just as it isn't kind to Harry Truman for the stalemate of Korea.
But if you manage to do that for seven years, rather than three, history will be even less kind to you.
And if you manage to that for not one but two wars, over seven years time, history will be very angry indeed.
If you make your country hated in the world, history will not respect you, just as it admires John Kennedy for doing the opposite.
If you shred the US Constitution in order to facilitate a police state with unlimited government powers, history will cast its aspersions upon you, just as it does on Joe McCarthy.
If you ignore a looming catastrophe like global warming - and indeed if you exacerbate that catastrophe - history will regard you very poorly, just as historians generally agree that James Buchanan is America's worst president for failing to respond to its unfolding Civil War crisis.
If you are warned of a cataclysmic terrorist attack by your staff and do not respond, instead spending the month before on vacation, history will devastate you for this alone, just as one of Stalin's great crimes (among many) was to fantasize that Nazi Germany would not attack the Soviet Union, ultimately at a cost of tens of millions of his people.
Indeed, if you spend more time during your presidency on vacation than any other president ever, history will not admire you, just as it does not admire Warren Harding.
If you run for president as one kind of politician but then completely abandon those politics for something different (and supremely ugly), history will not look kindly upon you, just as it does not upon John Tyler.
If you employ disgusting prejudices to win elections, history will consider you cheap garbage for doing so, just as it does George H. W. Bush.
And if you manage to deeply polarize your country, especially in a time of national crisis, history will admire you about as much as it does Richard Nixon for doing the same thing.
If you did any one of these things, you'd find yourself down at the bottom of the list in the historical ranking of American presidents.
But if you've managed to do every one of these things over the course of a single presidency, you'd not only occupy the very bottom slot on the list, you'd be in a category all your own.
It really is astonishing, isn't it, to think about how thoroughly this perfect storm of a president could wreak havoc on a developed (or is it?) democracy (or is it?) in the 21st century.
But what is even more astonishing is that his mythologized revival is already showing signs of working.
Even today, less than two years out of that nightmare.
Even today, with both of Bush's two wars still endlessly droning on, still dragging down the country as they chew up American, Iraqi and Afghani lives like some sort of industrial-scale human sacrifice machine.
Even today, as Bush's economic depression spreads misery across the land.
It's astonishing that the guy is taken even remotely seriously, let alone that he has not been thrown in jail or met the same fate that the Tsar or Il Duce did.
It's astonishing that he would dare to publish a book less than two years after having wrecked a world so thoroughly.
In just what sort of country can something so shameful happen?
Yep, trying to mythologize the Bush presidency is not going to be easy.
If this were Sweden or Canada, that is.
But this is America.
_______
ABOUT AUTHOR
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.
Friday, October 22, 2010
THE ORANGE PEKOE PARTY OF THE KOCH BROS. and Fellow Billionaires
The tea party: A conspiracy by the uber-rich to control America
By DOUG THOMPSON
Tea party faithful: False patriots for a false cause (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)
Let’s call the phony grassroots tea party what it is: A gaggle of political misfits whose ignorance of key issues is matched only by the mindless enthusiasm of the hysterical idiots who support the movement.
The monumental stupidity of too many of the candidates fielded by this consultant-driven creation of the Koch brothers and big industry is on display daily.
But while too many of the candidates fielded by the party are idiots, the party itself is part of a billionaire-funded grand scheme to place control of the American government firmly under control of the uber-rich.
Christine McDonnell, the Delaware Senate fruitcake/candidate put her incompetence on display Tuesday by claiming the Constitution doesn’t call for a separation of church and state and then compounding that ignorance by a shocked claim that she didn’t know the prohibition was in the First Amendment.
Where does the party of orange pekoe find these loons? Stupid question. They found them among the ignorant masses who flock to the tea party’s sham rallies and buy into the con-artist messages.
Christine McDonnell, Sharron Angle, Joe Miller, et al — the list goes on, led — of course — by the grand dame of tea party politics: the dipsy diva Sarah Palin.
And while the tea party cons the American public with its phony claim of grassroots action — the uber-rich industry magnates who fund the “party of the people” are planning a post-election retreat in Palm Springs in January to plan their next phase of the takeover of the government.
Charles and David Koch, billionaires who own Koch Industries, also operate a foundation that funds advocacy groups like the tea party and that foundation is inviting the rich and powerful to the exclusive Rancho Mirage resort for a meeting to “plan and expand efforts to review strategies for combating the multitude of public policies that threaten to destroy America as we now it.”
The invitation letter, signed by Charles Koch, asks: “If not us, who? If not now, when?”
The agenda, according to the letter, includes “climate change alarmism, socialized health care,” and “the regulatory assault on energy,” a key issue for an energy and manufacturing conglomerate like Koch Industries.
Just how much Koch pours into the tea party is hidden beneath a mountain of tax laws that protects the rich and powerful from disclosing how much they contribute and how much the groups spend.
But Koch money funded creation of Citizens for a Sound Economy, the consultant-created phony grassroots operation that became the foundation for FreedomWorks, the Dick Armey creation that spawned the tea party. I was the Senior Communications Associate for The Eddie Mahe Company, the Washington consulting firm that helped create Citizens for a Sound Economy for the Kochs and a former colleague from my days at that firm now runs the Koch political action committee.
The tea party has about a much connection to real grassroots as Christine McDonnell has with the Constitution and the First Amendment.
The Tea Party plays on the ignorance of the average American voter and the so-called “party of the people” is nothing more than a sham organization that the rich and powerful are using to take over America.
And every vote cast for a tea party candidate is a vote to support a billionaire-funded coup to seize control of the government.
It was a toss up today to re-publish this story from the Capitol Hill Blue site or another story about how America is acting collectively like millions of battered housewives and are getting ready to give their batters ( the GOP) another turn at abusing them. The second story was just to depressing. Doug Thompson, once a right winger himself and someone who professionally knows his way around inside right wing politics and thought savages the so called Tea Party today @ his long time political blog. Capitol Hill Blue
Thursday, October 21, 2010
THE AC PRESS GETS IT WRONG ON BEACH REPLENISHMENT AGAIN...
@ the title link is the AC Press editorial today on Beach Replenishment. This is a topic as some of you are aware I know something about. As usual the editorial staff @ the Press just doesn't have all the facts about beach replenishment and instead of facts prefers to merely mouth politically correct platitudes about this "method" of trying to maintain beaches. They also , like to talk dismissively about those of us that oppose these projects as "environmentalist," as if that term is the equivalent of being a terrorist or some other radical group that nobody should listen to. Until, the day comes when the Press and others are willing to openly debate in public this issue all were ever going to hear is a one sided lecture from a group of people who know only what they're being fed by the groups and individuals that think they and we ( society) somehow benefit from these misbegotten and poorly thought through pork barrel projects. The reality in Atlantic City's and Absecon Islands case is that the Army Corp. Beach project ( AISPP) has caused enormous damage to our local economy because of it's poorly designed, so called template. By blocking valuable and absolutely necessary Ocean views and Ocean breezes from our once famous Boardwalk this single project now plays a central role in the continuing and spiraling decline of our once prosperous resort.
The Governor's Taskforce & The Straw Man
Even Gov. Christie's task force for the redev. of AC has recognized this and hopefully is advising the Gov. to make needed adjustments to this Project to mitigate these issues. The Press however, never seems to miss an opportunity to show it's openly admitted bias for these Projects. It's story today trying to contrast Holgate's wild life reserve and AC and other resorts as regards beach replenishment is what's called a straw man argument.
The AC PRESS IS WRONG
It's time for the Press to openly admit it's been wrong about the effects of the AISPP and it's time it needs to understand that it's continuing support of the AISPP ( as it presently exists) is just giving aid and comfort to those forces that want to continue to see AC reduced to a 3rd rate and rapidly fading gaming resort. The simple truth is the AISPP is an ongoing fiasco, a disaster that just keeps on driving away what's left of our tourist base. With the fading appeal of AC's aging and poorly managed Casinos, coupled with a city Gov't that is totally about itself and it's own political power and perks, this Project and the rest of AC's declining and decaying infrastructure has left AC poised to return to where it was in the mid. 70's , before Casino gaming arrived. The AC Press though has no excuse for not knowing better at this time in history. Instead, it continues to echo the wrong headed and ignorant arguments it has accepted as fact as regards so called Beach replenishment.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
The 2010 Sea Glass Convention
The 2010 Sea Glass Convention
@ the title link a NY Times article about the 2010 Sea Glass Convention out @ Cape Cod , Mass. this year. I didn't get to go this year. :(
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
DC etc...
The U.S. Capitol Building and the Nat'l Mall looking toward the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.
It was time to take an up close and personal look at the subject of so many of my articles and posts these days, The District of Columbia, also refereed to as D.C., "inside the Belt Way" , Washington, DC etc. I did just this over the last week along with side trips to coastal North Carolina, down near Wilmington and southern Va., to vist old friends. All in all we had a great time. Our DC visit covered just about all the major highlights like the Capitol bldg. tour, cafeteria ( the food was decent and relatively inexpensive) and the Vietnam memorial ( depressing to say the least.) We also visited the relatively "new" American Indian " museum ( really interesting and the bldg. is a piece of art itself, the Lincoln Memorial, Air and Space Museum, The Museum of Natural History, The Nat'l Archives, the Herschon Art Museum and the Nat'l Portrait Gallery.
Bright Sunny Days
The weather couldn't have been better for both our days in DC, temps. in the high 60's / low 70's blue skies and no wind. Just sitting out on the Nat'l mall that lies in the center of everything was delightful. The first day we visited the Air and Space Museum filled with historic planes and missiles like the Wright Bros. plane and the Apollo 11 moon capsule as well as dozens of other famous planes and displays. ( always worth a visit.) We also went past the White House ( you can't get close anymore) and briefly visited the Lincoln Memorial and walked past the Wash. monument as well. The second day included visits to see the "Hope Diamond" and other gem collections, now located in the Museum of Natural History ( it looked fake). Then we walked across the street to see the actual Declaration of Independence ( terribly faded) and U.S. Constitution ( in great condition) docs. as well as the only know existing copy of the English "Magna Carta." For some odd reason the Nat'l Archives also had the original copy of the Nazis era "Nuremberg Laws" available outside the rotunda for viewing just opposite the Magna Carta. Maybe, they felt it's removal of human rights was a good contrast and a warning that progress isn't a straight line? Whatever, it was weird finding it there. We topped off our visit with my favorite stop, to see the paintings and drawings of Norman Rockwell @ the Nat'l Portrait Gallery.
All in all the area around the mall was filled with attractions and great restaurants, bars and shops and looked prosperous and clean. The Nat'l monuments are huge and awe inspiring. DC is definitely worth a visit but take the time ( at least two full days) and plan your stops to make the most of your visit. If going by car ( as we did) I recommend staying outside the city and driving in each day, other wise you'll pay very high room rates . Parking is readily available and not to bad price wise for a full day in a covered garage down town. We ate in two restaurants in the so called China town section near the FBI building and Ford's Theater about two blocks off the mall and in the center of everything. Clydes was great but a bit pricey and The Matchbox was delightful, modern and inexpensive for what we ordered. Both restaurants were within walking distance of everything and good parking. DC is a most if you've never been or if your returning as I was after so many years. We saw tons, but left tons more to go back to see some day and my guess is by then there will be even more and better attractions.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
THE PICK UP POSSE STRIKES AGAIN!!
The Ventnor Pickup Posse is organizing a cleanup in conjunction with the Clean Ocean Action.Saturday, October 23rd at Newport Avenue Pavilion by the boardwalk at 9 am.All pickup equipment will be supplied by the Clean Ocean Action that morning.Come out and exercise your right to a clean ocean!!!Any questions, please contact609-214-9379This event is sponsored by Adventure Aquarium in Camden, NJ
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Marine Science Symposium
This coming Sat. Oct. 16th don't miss the Marine Science Symposium at the Gardeners Basin Aquarium in A.C.
Saturday, October 09, 2010
BEACH REPORT:
Let the People Vote!
It was reported in this week's Downbeach Current that Margate clerk Tom Hiltner had confirmed over 400 registered voters signatures had been certified on the petition handed in a few weeks ago by a local Margate Citizens group, asking that a referendum be held in regards to the Fire House renovation issue now raging in Margate. It's still however, not clear whether Margate is going to allow this vote to go forward after City Solicitor Mary Siracusa ruled that she believes Margate is exempt from holding such a referendum, on this type of issue, according to State law. The Citizens group's lawyers have disputed this ruling and I'm assuming a judge will end up deciding this issue before any vote is scheduled.
BAD MISTAKE
I believe the faction of Margate's authorities trying to stop this election on legalistic grounds is making a very bad mistake. When this many voters want a vote you have a vote. Let the people decide this issue is my belief. Yes, we have a representative democracy, not a direct democracy some will argue and the Commissioners have already decided, but NJ law allows for referendums and every once in a great while situations such as this do arise. Let the people decide this issue. I believe the Commission should come together and support this referendum no matter how they feel about this particular issue. If the Commissioners who voted for this plan have a good case let them convince the rest of us of it and it shall be. If they cannot, then so be it. This is what democracy is all about.
Friday, October 08, 2010
SCIENCE FRI: - EARTH'S RIVERS IN CRISIS
@ the title link is an interesting article @ the Live Science Journal all about the building crisis surrounding Earth's river systems.
Thursday, October 07, 2010
Wednesday, October 06, 2010
HUFFINGTON POST - THE SPOT LIGHT SERIES
@ the title link read @ the Huffington Post's new debate series on Energy.
Tuesday, October 05, 2010
Monday, October 04, 2010
WORSE THEN POLLUTION
Published on Monday, October 4, 2010 by The Guardian/UK
Worse Than Pollution: Crazy Ants, Bird-Eating Mice and Murdering Mink
They read like creatures in a gothic novel, but the species we've introduced round the world are real and cause untold harm
On a dark night last week a group of animal rights activists in Donegal made their own special contribution to the International Year of Biodiversity. They cut their way into a fur farm and released 5,000 mink. This, within their circles, was considered a clever thing to do. A spokesperson for the Alliance for Animal Rights said: "I commend whoever risked their freedom to do this." The Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade announced that "we fully support what has happened".
Had these people tipped a tanker load of bleach into the headwaters of the river Finn, they would have done less damage. The effects would be horrible for a while, but the ecosystem could then begin to recover. The mink, by contrast, will remain at large for years, perhaps millennia. Like many introduced species, American mink can slash their way through the ecosystem, as they have no native predators, and their prey species haven't evolved to avoid them. Is there anything the animal lovers in Donegal could have done that would have harmed more animals?
But there's a second question raised by this act of preternatural imbecility: what were the mink doing there anyway? In other respects the Irish Republic appears to be a civilised country, in this case it looks barbaric. While the United Kingdom banned fur-farming in 2000, Irish governments have resisted prohibition, to protect a tiny but wildly destructive industry. The republic's five remaining fur farms are the sole source of continuing releases of mink, either through raids or accidents. They are also places of astonishing cruelty, in which intelligent carnivores are confined to cages the size of a few shoeboxes. The Irish government is considering phasing out fur farming in 2012. Until then, its citizens will continue to pay more to eradicate mink than they make from breeding them.
But Ireland is a small player. Two-thirds of the world's mink farming and 70% of its fox farming takes place in other EU countries. Denmark alone produces 40% of the global supply of mink pelts. Feral American mink on the continent are even more damaging than they are here, as they drive out the endangered European mink. The EU's 6,000 fur farms are an affront to the values it proclaims.
This month governments meet at Nagoya, in Japan, to review the Convention on Biological Diversity. It has, so far, been a dismal failure. Perhaps the starkest botch has been their inability or unwillingness to control the spread of invasive species. The stories I am about to tell read like a gothic novel.
Consider, for example, the walking catfish, which is now colonising China, Thailand and the US, after escaping from fish farms and ornamental ponds. It can move across land at night, reaching water no other fish species has colonised. It slips into fish farms and quietly works through the stock. It can burrow into the mud when times are hard and lie without food for months, before exploding back into the ecosystem when conditions improve. It eats almost anything that moves.
Its terrestrial equivalent is the cane toad, widely introduced in the tropics to control crop pests. It's omnivorous and just about indestructible: one specimen was seen happily consuming a lit cigarette butt. Nothing which tries to eat it survives: it's as dangerous to predators as it is to prey. Unlike other amphibians, it can breed in salty water: it's as if it had waddled out of the pages of Karel Capek's novel War With the Newts.
The world's most important seabird colony – Gough Island in the South Atlantic – is now being threatened by an unlikely predator: the common house mouse. After escaping from whaling boats 150 years ago, it quickly evolved to triple in size, and switched from herbivory to eating flesh. The seabirds there have no defences against predation, so themouse simply walks into their nests and starts eating the chicks alive. Among their prey are albatross fledglings, which weigh some 300 times as much as the mice. A biologist who has witnessed this carnage observed that "it is like a tabby cat attacking a hippopotamus".
On Christmas Island the yellow crazy ant does something similar: it eats alive any animal it finds in its path. It is also wiping out the rainforest, by farming the scale insects that feed on tree-sap. Similar horror stories are unfolding almost everywhere. The species we introduce, unlike the pollution we produce, don't stop when we do. A single careless act (think of the introduction of the rabbit or the lantana plant to Australia) can transform the ecology of a continent.
According to a government report, invasive species cost Britain several billion pounds a year. The global damage they cause, it says, amounts to almost 5% of the world economy. A single introduced species – a speargrass called Imperata – keeps 2 million square kilometres in the tropics out of agricultural production, equivalent to the arable area of the US, while ensuring that the native ecosystem can't regenerate.
In most cases there's a brief period in which an invasive species can be stopped. So you would expect governments to mobilise as soon as the threat appears. But in many parts of the world the policy appears to consist of staring dumbly at the problem while something can be done, then panicking when it's too late. When museum weed(Caulerpa taxifolia) escaped into the Mediterranean from the Oceanographic Museum in Monaco, the authorities responded by bickering over whose fault it was. In 1984, when the invasion was first documented, the weed occupied one square metre of seabed. It could have been eradicated in half an hour. Now it has spread across 13,000 hectares and appears to be uncontrollable.
Australia, the continent that has been hit hardest by introductions, still seems incapable of regulating the trade in dangerous species. As the Guardian's new Biodiversity100 campaign shows, 90 potentially invasive plant species are being sold in nurseries there, while 210 species of aquarium fish can be imported without a licence. The UK has some good policies at home. It spent £10,000 in 2006, for example, on a strategy (successful so far) for excluding the South American water primrose, whose control now costs France several million euros a year. But in its overseas territories – of which Gough island is one – it reacts slowly, if at all.
The mink, the walking catfish, the cane toad, the mutant house mouse, these are potent symbols of humanity's strangely lopsided power. We can sow chaos with a keystroke in an investment bank, one signal to a Predator drone, a seed dislodged from the sole of a boot, a fish tank emptied into a canal. But when asked to repair the mess we've made, we proclaim our impotence. Our challenge this century is to meet our capacity for harm with an equal power for good. We are not, so far, doing very well.
• A fully referenced version of this article can be found at www.monbiot.com
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2010
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