Do the Midterms Matter? The GOP's Agenda Has To Be Stopped, But What Change Did/Will We Get? Kenny Boy/Mozilo = Altar Boys?

Latest Election News (emphasis marks added - Ed.):

1. From The Guardian: Joe Miller Lied About Computer Tampering Scandal

Looks like it's back to the corrupt but non-computer-tampering Lisa Murkowski or the decent Dem Scott McAdams! Yay, Tea Party!

Thursday October 28 2010

Sarah Palin and other prominent right-wingers will today rush to the aid of the beleaguered Tea Party-backed candidate for the US Senate, Joe Miller, after newly released documents reveal he lied about a computer tampering scandal. The row has created alarm about the election chances of Miller, until recently regarded as a safe Republican bet to win the Alaska race. . . . Joe Miller is down to third place with 23% in a new Alaska poll. This, it has to be said, is very different from other polls that have showed him around the mid-30s and a point or two ahead of Lisa Murkowski. His disapproval rating in the poll is an astonishing 68%.

2. From The Guardian: The GOP's Coming Tea Party Hangover

My, my, how things have changed in a week. Busy beavers, eh?

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Just weeks ago, the Republican party was falling over itself to co-opt the
Tea Partiers. Now that looks like a poor political bet.

Republican strategist Karl Rove first excoriated Tea Party-backed Delaware senatorial candidate Christine O'Donnell, then embraced her cause – a switch he may now be repenting at leisure.

Did the Rand Paul supporters who attacked a female protester from the liberal group MoveOn outside a debate in Kentucky on Monday night cost their man the race for Senate?

The answer – sadly – is probably not. Kentucky is a deep shade of Republican red. It would be a major upset if Paul – the Tea Party-backed GOP candidate and the son of libertarian hero Ron Paul – actually lost to Democrat Jack Conway.
But this does not mean that the thuggish antics of his supporters, or Paul's own unsettling performance on the campaign trail, is irrelevant. Instead, these furores play into the bigger question of whether the Tea Party movement, the passions it has unleashed, and the candidates it has propelled to prominence across the country are a net positive or negative for the Republican party.

The answer is becoming ever clearer. Tea is the Republican party's cocaine: thrilling for a moment, but ruinous over time.

3. From The Guardian: Remember Nikki Haley? She Could Lose

Who? Oh yes . . . the original "power of the Tea Party" story!

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

When she won the GOP primary for governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley seemed a sure thing to win the governor's mansion. After all, it's South Carolina, right?

But she has stumbled badly and could possibly lose, reports Ed Kilgore at tnr.com. Interestingly, her Democratic opponent is (gasp!) . . . well, first of all, a Democrat, which is gaspy enough in South Carolina. But secondly, an Arab (Vincent Sheheen, of Lebanese extraction). Haley herself is Sikh, as you'll recall.

Anyway: it's about the sex. She has evidently refused lately to sign an affadavit swearing that she did not have sex with two men who say they had sex with her. She also says that if elected, she'll resign if it's ever proven that she had sex with either of these fellows.

And the Charleston City Paper, in a lengthy article dissecting all this, notes that tea party Senator Jim DeMint has thus far stayed a millions miles away from Haley.

There's a web site, if you're interested, called Conservatives for Truth in Politics that's tracking all this. Boy, I thought when I read the name, that must be a lonely bunch. But it turns out that the only truth they're really concerned with is about Haley's amorous athletics.

Sheheen, I see, got the endorsement of the Chamber of Commerce, so it seems unlikely that he's some kid of liberal flamethrower. His victory would be more of an oddity than anything, but I guess it's always good to see Sarah P. lose one.

4. From The Guardian: The Tea Party Movement: Deluded and Inspired by Billionaires

Not really new news now, but an interesting take from the Brits. (Okay, I give up. It's not that different from most knowledgeable Americans'.)

Monday, October 25, 2010

By funding numerous rightwing organisations, the mega-rich Koch brothers have duped millions into supporting big business.

The Tea Party movement is remarkable in two respects. It is one of the biggest exercises in false consciousness the world has seen – and the biggest Astroturf operation in history. These accomplishments are closely related.

An Astroturf campaign is a fake grassroots movement: it purports to be a spontaneous uprising of concerned citizens, but in reality it is founded and funded by elite interests. Some Astroturf campaigns have no grassroots component at all. Others catalyse and direct real mobilisations. The Tea Party belongs in the second category. It is mostly composed of passionate, well-meaning people who think they are fighting elite power, unaware that they have been organised by the very interests they believe they are confronting. We now have powerful evidence that the movement was established and has been guided with the help of money from billionaires and big business. Much of this money, as well as much of the strategy and staffing, were provided by two brothers who run what they call "the biggest company you've never heard of".

Charles and David Koch own 84% of Koch Industries, the second-largest private company in the United States. It runs oil refineries, coal suppliers, chemical plants and logging firms, and turns over roughly $100bn a year; the brothers are each worth $21bn. The company has had to pay tens of millions of dollars in fines and settlements for oil and chemical spills and other industrial accidents. The Kochs want to pay less tax, keep more profits and be restrained by less regulation. Their challenge has been to persuade the people harmed by this agenda that it's good for them.

5. From The New York Times: Secret Money in Iowa

And stateside we learn the facts on the latest midwest election chicanery brought to us by John Roberts' suborned Supreme Court. (So where did you think Karl Rove had gotten his funding, ad infinitum?)

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Bruce Braley, a Democrat from northeastern Iowa, has been a popular two-term congressman and seemed likely to have an easy re-election until the huge cash mudslide of 2010. The Republican Party had largely left him alone, but then a secretive group called the American Future Fund began spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on distortion-heavy attack ads.

Mr. Braley is now struggling to maintain his lead against a Republican challenger, Benjamin Lange, who is running on a familiar program of smaller government and opposition to the health care law, the stimulus and growing federal spending. Mr. Braley has disclosed all of the donors behind his ads and his campaign; Mr. Lange generally will not discuss his independent support.

Mr. Braley has shown admirable political courage throughout the race, staunchly defending his support for health care reform, the stimulus and the Bush-era bank bailout. Each will benefit the country over time, he said. “I’m going to stand my ground and won’t be intimidated,” he told a local radio station a few weeks ago.

That position stood him well in the relatively liberal 1st District of Iowa until he became a target of the American Future Fund, one of several conservative groups spending millions of dollars to defeat Democrats while promising their donors anonymity.

As The Times reported recently, the American Future Fund was started with money from Bruce Rastetter, an ethanol company executive. Mr. Braley supports ethanol tax credits — a favorite in Iowa. Mr. Rastetter, who is pushing to defeat several Democrats on the House energy and agriculture committees, has not explained his political goals.

The fund, based in Iowa, has spent at least $574,000 to run a series of anti-Braley ads. One that is particularly pernicious shows images of the ruined World Trade Center and then intones, “Incredibly, Bruce Braley supports building a mosque at ground zero.” Actually, Mr. Braley has never said that, stating only that the matter should be left to New Yorkers.

. . . Mr. Braley has also been the subject of $250,000 worth of attack ads by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which also has not disclosed its contributors.

He is only one of many candidates being pummeled this year by secret money and shamefully false advertising. The American Action Network, another conservative group that does not disclose its donors, is targeting Representative Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, in his race against Sam Caligiuri, a Republican.

The group is running an ad claiming that the health reform law, which Mr. Murphy supported and Mr. Caligiuri wants to repeal, requires jail time for people who do not buy health insurance. The law does no such thing.

Do the midterms matter? So many on the left seem unsure (and are thinking about not voting or voting Green or Purple or Pink (chartreuse?)), but who would have thought you'd get a decent treatment of this issue from the pages of Newsweek? Not I. Jonathan Alter makes a terrific argument that we've got to remove the emotional component from our voting in order to ensure that we do not add to our own long-term hangover from the Cheney/Bush stolen years. Although I don't agree with all his thoughts, they're a good start (emphasis marks added - Ed.).

Why the Midterms Matter

The GOP’s agenda has to be stopped.

Jonathan Alter

Prediction is an addiction in the press corps. We can search for the key to the Keystone State with sophisticated cross tabs of projected African-American turnout for Joe Sestak in Philadelphia. We can offer the early read on early voting for Barbara Boxer in Alameda County. We can practically study the entrails of Kentucky possum to project Rand Paul’s totals among white men under 30.

But elections aren’t just about who wins. They’re about what happens when one or the other party wins. We’re so eager to promote ourselves with the smartest take on how President Obama and the Democrats got themselves in this pickle that we haven’t done a good job explaining the stakes. We manage to sever cause from effect.

Let’s say you’re an independent voter who wants to send Obama a message on Nov. 2. Have the media told you what that would say? Here’s a clue: moderate Republicans are extinct. With big wins, the Tea Party will transform itself from an insurgency into the driving force within the GOP. Gains in statehouses and legislatures will allow right-wingers to use the 2010 census to redraw district lines that will entrench them in power until 2020. Back in charge in Washington, they will likely block even centrist choices for courts. Extremist senators like Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn will move from being irritants on the fringe to players at the center of our politics.

A question for Democrats disinclined to work on congressional campaigns: do you know the GOP agenda? In brief: repeal health-care reform, so if you lose your job and your kid gets sick, you may have to sell the house; repeal financial reform, so Wall Street scammers and predatory lenders can return to doing everything they did before they wrecked the economy; maintain corporate-welfare subsidies that move jobs overseas; reduce spending by slashing education funding; and ending all clean-energy projects aimed at curbing our dependence on Mideast oil.

Of course, these policies won’t cut the deficit. Republicans insist on extending $700 billion in tax cuts for the wealthy and leaving the $500 billion defense budget un-touched. Entitlements would merely be “reviewed regularly,” the GOP leadership says, which is code for doing nothing.

. . . The party is powered by outrage over bailouts and the stimulus. When pressed, Republican candidates say GM could have survived without Washington. How? Liquidation would have meant the loss of a million jobs. To everyone’s surprise, the auto companies are on the mend, and the banks, despite those obnoxious bonuses, have paid back the taxpayers with interest. TARP worked!

The GOP plan for job creation: cutting taxes and deregulation. We tried that in 2001 only to experience the weakest decade of job growth since the ’30s.

. . . The depressed Democratic base needs to ask itself some questions: Do women want more representatives who oppose abortion? Do Hispanics want to see immigration reform postponed? Do young voters want college loans slashed? If they don’t, they’ll set aside whatever valid grievances they may have with Obama and mobilize.

. . . a right-wing Republican takeover of Congress and state capitals isn’t something to accept with indifference. Midterms matter, and voters tempted to skip this election should have their heads examined.

Frank Rich asks the questions that have the Left in a muddle (and let us know, by the by, that Robert Rubin's corrupt activities and automatic "get out of jail free" card are what brought us the "no prosecute" Wall Streeters administration). But are these enough reason to throw away the rest of your (and your children's children's) future?

What Happened to Change We Can Believe In?

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 $115 million 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.

Seems clear enough to me. Is it to you?

Suzan
_________________

Wiki/Fake News Abounds (Election Time!) - CIA-Collusion In Lies - Wall Street Banksters Ripping Off Homeowners in New Property Tax Collection Scheme

Wikileaks exposes CNN's latest try at the obfuscation of the real issues:


Be truthful now. How many of you saw these liars (appearing below) on TV "news" shows and knew with your every fiber that they had to be lying and that the whole U.S. intelligence network had to have been either making it up wholly or lying quite badly about the real events?

I remember seeing these braying asses reporting on precise scud missile attacks under fake palm trees and wondering to myself how the heck they had the balls (er, pardon me, chutzpah!) to film such a pack as these. Let alone testify to its truthfulness. (At that moment, of course, my family began to believe that a previously bright member was now crazy, especially when I started to tell everyone about my experience and knowledge of scud missile unreliability attributable to my aerospace software training.) (Emphasis marks added for your further enlightenment - Ed.)

Faking News: CNN Gulf War Studio Footage and Saddam's Hole

But the faking of US news goes beyond having CIA assets in the newsrooms.

The truth is the US news is managed by a power structure that has absolutely no regard for objectivity or truth.

Below is an example of how the Military Industrial Complex creates TV reality. It shows how the news is manipulated by powers that go well beyond those in the newsroom.

In the video below, you will see a CNN reporter pretending to be reporting from the Gulf during the Gulf War with Iraq. He is actually in a studio playing a let's pretend game of fear and worry as nonexistent scud missiles with possible chemical weapons fly over head.

You might also recall the "Weapons of Mass Deception" that was also presented as reality to create an Iraq war fever here in the US. It was all a game of mass mind manipulation presented as reality by those creating fake news.

Charles Jaco was the CNN reporter famous for covering the 1990 Persian Gulf War.

The first part of this video shows the stage set he was on, and he was clowning around with fellow CNN staff. The Saudi Arabian "hotel" in the background were fake palm trees and a blue wall in a studio. This clip was leaked by CNN staff.

The second part of this video was a live CNN satellite feed recorded onto VHS showing the final cut. Charles Jaco was wearing a different jacket, but he had the same act. The acting was terrible as Charles Jaco wore a gas mask, and his fellow correspondent Carl Rochelle wore a helmet.

The sirens and missile sound effects are part of the stage set. The camera never pans out or shows the sky.

These clips are the highest quality of this newscast and behind the scenes.Yes, Charles Jaco was a reporter for CNN. Google his name and read the results.

This is the reason why I don't trust mainstream news. It is all theater and it's completely staged. I only use the news as a guide to get an idea of what is going on, and then I do further research myself. You can start your own research by visiting my website here.

I also suggest reading the books of Edward Bernays to learn how the media and government fool the masses on an unprecedented scale.This video is FAIR USE depicting an historical event. I encourage this video to be downloaded, and re-uploaded to other websites to get more people to see this.

Charles Jaco currently works as a reporter for FOX 2 NOW in Saint Louis, Missouri.

. . . We call for a Truth Commission in the United States. The people of South Africa did it, why can't we? (Source: The New American Dream) There is a history to this goosestepping mentality that is promoted as news here in the US.

. . . American journalists have long been bitterly opposed to the recruitment of reporters by U.S. intelligence agencies, and the fraudulent use of journalism credentials by intelligence operatives. Since the mid-1970s, journalists and others-including some of the nation's top foreign policy-makers-believed that the CIA could no longer recruit reporters as spies. They shared a widespread but inaccurate assumption that the U.S. government had banned such objectionable practices as part of a package of reforms revamping codes of conduct for covert intelligence operations adopted in response to recommendations of the 1976 Church Committee report.

In its investigation of U.S. foreign and military intelligence operations, the committee - the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho) - found that more than 50 American journalists had worked clandestinely as CIA agents during the Cold War era. The committee's final report strongly condemned this practice and unequivocally called on the intelligence community to "permit American journalists and news organizations to pursue their work without jeopardizing their credibility in the eyes of the world through covert use of them."

. . . IN FEBRUARY 1996, an independent task force of the Council on Foreign Relations led by Richard Haass, a former senior director for Near East and South Asian Affairs of the National Security Council in the Bush administration, proposed taking a "fresh look . . . at limits on the use of non-official 'covers' for hiding and protecting those involved in clandestine activities."

Haass later publicly expanded on this point, challenging what he characterized as the prohibition on the use of journalists as undercover intelligence agents. The outcry among journalists - including many who are members of the Council of Foreign Relations - led council president Leslie Gelb to distance himself and the council from the task force and its recommendations . . . The reaction to the controversy among U.S. intelligence professionals, however, was quite different - and far more disturbing to journalists.

John Deutch, Director of Central Intelligence, appeared before Congress and said there was no need to change U.S. policy as Haass had advocated, since the CIA already had the power to use U.S. reporters as spies. Under the terms of the guidelines adopted after the Church Commission report, the CIA director retained the right to approve such recruitment if he judged it necessary, Deutch explained.

Deutch received public support for his interpretation of the CIA's prerogative from Stansfield Turner, the CIA chief in the Carter administration.

Speaking to a gathering of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Turner revealed that he had authorized the use of journalists in intelligence operations three times during his tenure as CIA director (Kate Houghton - source: cpj.org). . . .

And speaking of scary things happening (Happy Halloween!) (emphasis marks added - Ed.).

Delusional USA? Wage earners certainly.

Once again, we see the numbers (from Shadow Stats) and what the bankster insiders knew in September/October of 2008. Hit 'em hard before they ask too many questions!

Scary New Wage Data

David Cay Johnston

Oct. 25

Now for some really scary breaking news, from the latest payroll tax data. Every 34th wage earner in America in 2008 went all of 2009 without earning a single dollar, new data from the Social Security Administration show. Total wages, median wages, and average wages all declined, but at the very top, salaries grew more than fivefold.

Not a single news organization reported this data when it was released October 15, searches of Google and the Nexis databases show. Nor did any blog, so the citizen journalists and professional economists did no better than the newsroom pros in reporting this basic information about our economy. The new data hold important lessons for economic growth and tax policy and take on added meaning when examined in light of tax return data back to 1950.

The story the numbers tell is one of a strengthening economic base with income growing fastest at the bottom until, in 1981, we made an abrupt change in tax and economic policy. Since then the base has fared poorly while huge economic gains piled up at the very top, along with much lower tax burdens.

A weak foundation cannot properly support a massive superstructure, as the leaning Tower of Pisa shows. The latest wage data show the disastrous results some of us warned about, although like the famous tower, the economy only lists badly and has not collapsed.

Measured in 2009 dollars, total wages fell to just above $5.9 trillion, down $215 billion from the previous year. Compared with 2007, when the economy peaked, total wages were down $313 billion or 5 percent in real terms.

The number of Americans with any wages in 2009 fell by more than 4.5 million compared with the previous year. Because the population grew by about 1 percent, the number of idle hands and minds grew by 6 million.

These figures show, far more powerfully than the official unemployment measure known as U3, how both widespread and deep the loss of jobs was in 2009. While the official unemployment rate is just under 10 percent, deeper analysis of the data by economist John Williams at http://www.shadowstats.com shows a real under- and unemployment rate of more than 22 percent.

Only 150.9 million Americans reported any wage income in 2009. That put us below 2005, when 151.6 million Americans reported wages, and only slightly ahead of 2004, when 149.4 million Americans held at least one paying job. For those who did find work in 2009, the average wage slipped to $39,269, down $243 or 0.6 percent, compared with the previous year in 2009 dollars.

. . . they do give us a stunning picture of what’s happening at the very top of the compensation ladder in America. The number of Americans making $50 million or more, the top income category in the data, fell from 131 in 2008 to 74 last year. But that’s only part of the story.

The average wage in this top category increased from $91.2 million in 2008 to an astonishing $518.8 million in 2009. That’s nearly $10 million in weekly pay!

You read that right. In the Great Recession year of 2009 (officially just the first half of the year), the average pay of the very highest-income Americans was more than five times their average wages and bonuses in 2008. And even though their numbers shrank by 43 percent, this group’s total compensation was 3.2 times larger in 2009 than in 2008, accounting for 0.6 percent of all pay. These 74 people made as much as the 19 million lowest-paid people in America, who constitute one in every eight workers.

. . . What does this all mean? It is the latest, and in this case quite dramatic, evidence that our economic policies in Washington are undermining the nation as a whole.

We have created a tax system that changes continually as politicians manipulate it to extract campaign donations. We have enabled ‘‘free trade’’ that is nothing of the sort, but rather tax-subsidized mechanisms that encourage American manufacturers to close their domestic factories, fire workers, and then use cheap labor in China for products they send right back to the United States.

This has created enormous downward pressure on wages, and not just for factory workers.

Combined with government policies that have reduced the share of private-sector workers in unions by more than two-thirds — while our competitors in Canada, Europe, and Japan continue to have highly unionized workforces — the net effect has been disastrous for the vast majority of American workers. And of course, less money earned from labor translates into less money to finance the United States of America.

This systematic destruction of the working class and middle class has come during an era notable for celebrating the super-rich just for being super-rich. From the Forbes 400 launch in 1982 and Robin Leach’s Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous in 1984 to the faux reality of the multiplying Real Housewives shows, money voyeurism has grown in tandem with stagnant to falling incomes for the vast majority. There has also been huge income growth at the top and the economic children of income inequality: budget deficits and malign neglect of our commonwealth.

Read it all and weep, amici.

My buddy the Earth-Bound Misfit enlightens us on the latest Rand Paul pacifists here:

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

An Acceptable Way to Argue If You Are a Brown-Shirted Thug

That would be to knock a woman to the ground and stomp on her head.

Except it wasn't done by a brown-shirted thug from the SA. It was done by goons who support Rand Paul. Because stomping on a woman's head is simply acceptable if you happen to be a Teabagger or a Republican.

And you just have to know that all of the Wingnut blogs think that stomping on people's heads is OK, don't you.

Here's an edifying history lesson from the good guys exposing the real Crooks and Liars (emphasis marks added - Ed.):

Following up on yesterday's correction of Rush Limbaugh's historical revisionism, noting that both Blackshirts and Brownshirts made their political bones by beating up on union organizers and socialists . . .

In the final years of the Weimar Republic, Germany was mired in a grave political and economic crisis that left the society verging on civil war. Street violence by paramilitary organizations on the Left and the Right increased sharply. In the final ten days of the July 1932 parliamentary elections, Prussian authorities reported three hundred acts of politically motivated violence that left twenty-four people dead and almost three hundred injured. In the Nazi campaigns, propaganda and terror were closely linked.

In Berlin, Nazi Party leader Joseph Goebbels intentionally provoked Communist and Social Democratic actions by marching SA [Brownshirt] storm troopers into working-class neighborhoods where those parties had strongholds. Then he invoked the heroism of the Nazi "martyrs" who were injured or killed in these battles to garner greater public attention. Nazi newspapers, photographs, films, and later paintings dramatized the exploits of these fighters.

. . . In the first eight months of 1932, the Nazis claimed that 70 "martyrs" had fallen in battle against the enemy. Such heroic depictions - set against the grim realities of chronic unemployment and underemployment for young people during the Weimar period - no doubt helped increase membership in the SA units, which expanded in Berlin from 450 men in 1926 to some 32,000 by January 1933.

Sound familiar? Wonder if they all drank tea.

The new Goebbels speaks (loudly) from Fox (Faux) Snooze (and then the audience returns to its slumber or sports obsessions):



If you wondered what all that supreme corporate moolah was doing to the educational institutions of higher learning in this country, check out this gem (and while you're reading, don't forget about that "Waiting for Superman" movie by Davis Guggenheim, presented by Honda, currently making the propaganda rounds):

Imagine the cries of bloody murder . . . in the faculty lounge of Mortarboard U's department of Circadian Arcadian Plebular Music Studies. Heavens to Sallust! But then how about this approach:

"Minnesota's state college system has created an online "accountability dashboard" for each campus. Bright, gas-gauge-style graphics indicate how many students complete their degrees; how run-down (or up-to-date) facilities are; and . . . . The California State University system, using data from outside sources, posts online the median starting and mid-career salaries for graduates of each campus, as well as their average student loan debt." Sniff sniff . . . no wonder there's pushback, or at least dark subvocalizations from our gowned goons:

"It's a reflection of a much more corporate model of running a university, and it's getting away from the idea of the university as public good . . . the focus on serving student "customers" and delivering value to taxpayers will turn public colleges into factories . . . it will upend the essential nature of a university, where the Milton scholar who teaches a senior seminar to five English majors is valued as much as the engineering professor who lands a million-dollar research grant." Clearly written to undermine itself, eh?

Gotta love objective reporters and editors. If they're not exactly Father Smiths, they're at least all Winston Smiths at heart.

If you thought nothing bad could have possibly been going on internationally during those tough-on-the-USA Cheney/Bush/NSA/CIA years, think again, babies.

The NSA/CIA leadership were pretty tough on us (US) at home, but you'd be amazed at what they let China and others get away with (and do to US) internationally. It wasn't reported, of course, stateside, but that shouldn't worry anyone - they were quite successful - and won the real war - against US.

The Online Threat

Should we be worried about a cyber war?

by Seymour M. Hersh

Some experts say that the real danger lies in confusing cyber espionage with cyber war.

On April 1, 2001, an American EP-3E Aries II reconnaissance plane on an eavesdropping mission collided with a Chinese interceptor jet over the South China Sea, triggering the first international crisis of George W. Bush’s Administration. The Chinese jet crashed, and its pilot was killed, but the pilot of the American aircraft, Navy Lieutenant Shane Osborn, managed to make an emergency landing at a Chinese F-8 fighter base on Hainan Island, fifteen miles from the mainland. Osborn later published a memoir, in which he described the “incessant jackhammer vibration” as the plane fell eight thousand feet in thirty seconds, before he regained control.

The plane carried twenty-four officers and enlisted men and women attached to the Naval Security Group Command, a field component of the National Security Agency. They were repatriated after eleven days; the plane stayed behind. The Pentagon told the press that the crew had followed its protocol, which called for the use of a fire axe, and even hot coffee, to disable the plane’s equipment and software. These included an operating system created and controlled by the N.S.A., and the drivers needed to monitor encrypted Chinese radar, voice, and electronic communications. It was more than two years before the Navy acknowledged that things had not gone so well.

“Compromise by the People’s Republic of China of undestroyed classified material . . . is highly probable and cannot be ruled out,” a Navy report issued in September, 2003, said.

The loss was even more devastating than the 2003 report suggested, and its dimensions have still not been fully revealed. Retired Rear Admiral Eric McVadon, who flew patrols off the coast of Russia and served as a defense attaché in Beijing, told me that the radio reports from the aircraft indicated that essential electronic gear had been dealt with. He said that the crew of the EP-3E managed to erase the hard drive — “zeroed it out” — but did not destroy the hardware, which left data retrievable: “No one took a hammer.” Worse, the electronics had recently been upgraded. “Some might think it would not turn out as badly as it did, but I sat in some meetings about the intelligence cost,” McVadon said. “It was grim.”

The Navy’s experts didn’t believe that China was capable of reverse-engineering the plane’s N.S.A.-supplied operating system, estimated at between thirty and fifty million lines of computer code, according to a former senior intelligence official. Mastering it would give China a road map for decrypting the Navy’s classified intelligence and operational data. “If the operating system was controlling what you’d expect on an intelligence aircraft, it would have a bunch of drivers to capture radar and telemetry,” Whitfield Diffie, a pioneer in the field of encryption, said. “The plane was configured for what it wants to snoop, and the Chinese would want to know what we wanted to know about them — what we could intercept and they could not.” And over the next few years the U.S. intelligence community began to “read the tells” that China had access to sensitive traffic.

The U.S. realized the extent of its exposure only in late 2008. A few weeks after Barack Obama’s election, the Chinese began flooding a group of communications links known to be monitored by the N.S.A. with a barrage of intercepts, two Bush Administration national-security officials and the former senior intelligence official told me.

The intercepts included details of planned American naval movements. The Chinese were apparently showing the U.S. their hand. (“The N.S.A. would ask, ‘Can the Chinese be that good?’ ” the former official told me. “My response was that they only invented gunpowder in the tenth century and built the bomb in 1965. I’d say, ‘Can you read Chinese?’ We don’t even know the Chinese pictograph for ‘Happy hour.’ ”)

Why would the Chinese reveal that they had access to American communications? One of the Bush national-security officials told me that some of the aides then working for Vice-President Dick Cheney believed — or wanted to believe—that the barrage was meant as a welcome to President Obama. It is also possible that the Chinese simply made a mistake, given the difficulty of operating surgically in the cyber world.

Admiral Timothy J. Keating, who was then the head of the Pacific Command, convened a series of frantic meetings in Hawaii, according to a former C.I.A. official. In early 2009, Keating brought the issue to the new Obama Administration. If China had reverse-engineered the EP-3E’s operating system, all such systems in the Navy would have to be replaced, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. After much discussion, several current and former officials said, this was done. (The Navy did not respond to a request for comment on the incident.)

Admiral McVadon said that the loss prompted some black humor, with one Navy program officer quoted as saying, “This is one hell of a way to go about getting a new operating system.”

. . . There is surprising unanimity among cyber-security experts on one issue: that the immediate cyber threat does not come from traditional terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, at least, not for the moment. “Terrorist groups are not particularly good now in attacking our computer system,” John Arquilla told me. “They’re not that interested in it — yet.

The question is: Do vulnerabilities exist inside America? And, if they do, the terrorists eventually will exploit them.” Arquilla added a disturbing thought: “The terrorists of today rely on cyberspace, and they have to be good at cyber security to protect their operations.” As terrorist groups get better at defense, they may eventually turn to offense.

Jeffrey Carr, a Seattle-based consultant on cyber issues, looked into state and non-state cyber espionage throughout the recent conflicts in Estonia and Georgia. Carr, too, said he was skeptical that China or Russia would mount a cyber-war attack against the United States. “It’s not in their interest to hurt the country that is feeding them money,” he said.

“On the other hand, it does make sense for lawless groups.” He envisaged “five- or six-year-old kids in the Middle East who are working on the Internet,” and who would “become radicalized fifteen- or sixteen-year-old hackers.” Carr is an advocate of making all Internet service providers require their customers to use verifiable registration information, as a means of helping authorities reduce cyber espionage.

Earlier this year, Carr published “Inside Cyber Warfare,” an account, in part, of his research into cyber activity around the world. But he added, “I hate the term ‘cyber war.’ ” Asked why he used “cyber warfare” in the title of his book, he responded, “I don’t like hype, but hype sells.”

Why not ignore the privacy community and put cyber security on a war footing? Granting the military more access to private Internet communications, and to the Internet itself, may seem prudent to many in these days of international terrorism and growing American tensions with the Muslim world. But there are always unintended consequences of military activity — some that may take years to unravel.

Please read the whole article if you have the time. There's lots more hype!

And now on to today's latest hype. And it's a doozy, babies, I happen to know some folks who are victims of this one. (And you thought there was a limit to the evil ones' doings. Ah . . . NO!)

Wall Street Banksters Now Ripping Off Homeowners in Property Tax Collection Scheme

October 24, 2010

Just when you think things can't get any worse for homeowners.

According to a Huffington Post investigative report, city and county governments are selling off homeowner property tax debts to Big Banksters like JP Morgan and Chase. Those banks then add penalty fees and exorbitant interest rates on the tax liens owed by the desperate homeowners. The homeowners find that their tax debt of a few hundred dollars can balloon into many thousands of dollars.

When the homeowner cannot pay the privatized tax liens, the banksters will force the mortgagee into foreclosure.

. . . Nearly a dozen major banks and hedge funds, anticipating quick profits from homeowners who fall behind on property taxes, are quietly plowing hundreds of millions of dollars into businesses that collect the debts, tack on escalating fees and threaten to foreclose on the homes of
those who fail to pay.

The Wall Street investors, which include Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase & Co., have purchased from local governments the right to collect delinquent taxes on several hundred thousand properties, many in distressed housing markets, the Huffington Post Investigative Fund has found . . . . At first, property owners may owe little more than a few hundred dollars, only to find their bills soaring into the thousands. In some jurisdictions, the new Wall Street tax collectors also chase debtors over other small bills, such as for water, sewer and sidewalk repair . . . (source: huffington post).

The banksters make it so that the Homeowners can't even make partial payments.

They tell the homeowners to pay up or lose their homes.

This Wall Street scam is legal in about 26 states.You might remember that these banks and hedge funds were some of the very ones that were bailed out by homeowners with trillions in government guarantees.

But not only are the banksters forcing homeowners into foreclosures so they can get paid off by the government for their supposed losses. They are now forcing them into foreclosure over tax liens so they can get homeowner properties for very little investment.That is some way to say thanks.

And on another ironic note, here's what passes for a "liberal" (who "can't see past his own privilege") at the Washington Post. (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

Richard Cohen, the Washington Post's torture-loving "liberal" columnist who denounces liberals as "leftists" and "communists" and who was so certain of the validity of President Bush's case for war in Iraq he sneered that only a "fool or possibly a Frenchman" could fail to see its wisdom, once again demonstrates the absurdity of the notion that the Post is a liberal paper.

The problem with Cohen's column today isn't that arguing against hate crimes legislation constitutes apostasy; it's the way in which he argues against hate crime legislation that causes the skin to crawl.

Cohen begins by noting what he calls New York City's "hate-crime spree, culminating early this month with the torture of three men in the Bronx, purportedly for being gay," which he follows by asserting:

Almost as bad as hate crimes themselves is the designation. It is a little piece of totalitarian nonsense, a way for prosecutors to punish miscreants for their thoughts or speech, both of which used to be protected by the Constitution (I am an originalist in this regard).

Really? Calling the torture of three gay men a "hate crime" is almost as bad as torturing three gay men? That the Washington Post would publish such warped anti-gay moral equivalence doesn't really surprise me; that it would come from the paper's purportedly liberal columnist is, however, quite disappointing.

Later, Cohen really drives home the point that it's absurd to think of him as a liberal:

Do yourself a favor, and read it.

Suzan
_______________

Chinese Funding of Chamber of Commerce/Boehner/McConnell Necessitates Circus Clown Acts To Distract - K(C)ochomania - Civil War Not That Far Fetched?

In my humble opinion, no one has captured our time better - forever - than John Lennon, and it's evident why he was seen as such a dire threat to the powers that be. His killer's father was a CIA operative or didn't you know that yet?

And the "Cold Turkey" of financial catastrophe has got us . . . on the financial run.

My buddy over at Down With Tyranny has distilled the strange brew coming out of the Rethugs for the last 30 years into a very tasty nugget (as far as explaining things go) - for the Chinese. I have to admit that I wondered what this was all about going back as far as George HW Bush's Chinese escapades in the 70's while he was still the reigning CIA DC operative. Remember when he was surprisingly made CIA Director before Reagan's advent? And how the MSM all chimed in that he had no experience there, so he'd be a good choice? Laughs on US.

I guess after the currency manipulations of late any questions we have left will have to await the onset of the commissars. (And you perhaps wondered why the Rethugs felt the need to put real clowns on public display - just more flashing lights to distract the circus attendees, dear.) (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

Has The Republican Party Turned Itself Into A Great Big Chinese Mole?

Last month we looked at how Congress finally dealt with the plague of Chinese currency manipulation. China is fighting back - by spending money to help elect John Boehner Speaker and Mitch McConnell Senate Majority Leader. It's illegal and it's a job of outsourcing in the opposite direction. Instead of sending American jobs to China this time, China has tasked their sleazy friends at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce with this one.

Why? Good question. Apart from the fact that Boehner has never found a "free" trade agreement-- no matter how destructive to his own constituents - that he didn't embrace and champion, there's plenty of unregulated cash sloshing around in this pot. From NAFTA, CAFTA, the WTO/GATT, to all the fast track legislation and to the current bills he's pushing to send more U.S. jobs to South Korea, Bahrain and Colombia, Boehner has always been and still is a fanatic supporter of "free" (rather than fair) trade.

When Tim Ryan's bill to curb China's currency manipulation hit the floor last month it passed with a gigantic bipartisan majority, 348-79, most Republicans abandoning Boehner and crossing the aisle to vote with Ryan and the Democrats - in effect, to vote for American working families instead of with China's authoritarian communist regime. Even the senior Republican members of Ohio's congressional delegation - ALL of them - voted against Boehner in a rare show of independence. 99 Republicans voted for American families and American jobs; 74 Republicans voted with China's government.

At the time we first looked at it, I couldn't understand. And then the story broke about how China is helping to finance the Chamber of Commerce's multimillion dollar effort to flood the TV and radio airwaves with lies about Democrats in order to put their two agents-- Boehner and McConnell-- into power. I asked Tim Ryan what had happened and he was blunt in pointing out that the whole GOP House leadership - Boehner, Eric Cantor, Mike Pence, Pete Sessions, Darrell Issa, Paul Ryan, David Dreier, Joe Barton, Jerry Lewis, Kevin McCarthy, the guys charged with keeping the campaign cash flowing - were the ones whipping against the bill.

They failed miserably - basically only the crackpots like Michele Bachmann, Steve King, Wally Herger, Mean Jean Schmidt, Scott Garrett, John Campbell, Marsha Blackburn, Tom McClintock, Louie Gohmert, Tom Price, Gary Miller, Paul Broun, and Trent Franks-- had the temerity to thumb their noses at the voters this close to an election - along with three craven and cowardly sellouts desperate for financial help in tough races: Mary Bono Mack (CA), Leonard Lance (NJ) and Dave Reichert (WA).

Yesterday's Capitol Fax broke the story that one of Mitch McConnell's pet candidates, like him another GOP-living-a-lie-closet-queen, Mark Kirk, planned a "Beijing fundraiser which was held the day before a House vote to close tax loopholes for companies that send jobs out of the country." Kirk, of course followed the company line and joined Boehner in voting against closing tax loopholes that would prevent companies from using current U.S. foreign tax credit rules to subsidize their foreign activities, just as he voted more recently against reining in China's systematic currency manipulation that results in dumping, stealing market share and loss of American jobs.

The Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v FEC has made it possible to hide the sources of foreign (illegal) yuan, dinars and rubles flooding into the electoral system. When the Democrats tried addressing that with the DISCLOSE Act, it passed narrowly in the House 219-206, only two Republicans willing to cross the aisle and vote for sunlight (while a whole pack of corrupt Blue Dogs-- 5 of whom (Bobby Bright, Frank Kratovil, Glenn Nye, Travis Childers, and Jim Marshall) are also getting foreign money through the Chamber of Commerce - opposed the bill. That's when well documented Chinese agent Mitch McConnell moved into action. He was instrumental in getting every single Republican senator to join a filibuster to kill the bill and keep the foreign money flowing into GOP campaign coffers. Nancy Pelosi's blog warned about what is happening in stark terms:

Shadowy front groups headed up by Republican operatives and funded by secret corporate donors are supporting the GOP and their special interest agenda - shipping good-paying American jobs overseas, turning Social Security over to Wall Street, and turning Medicare over to the insurance companies. An editorial in today’s Los Angeles Times highlights the secret money that is being used to influence Americans:

. . . Democracy 21, a campaign-spending watchdog group, estimates that as much as $300 million will be spent anonymously in this election cycle; voters will never know where the money came from

. . . Crossroads GPS has not disclosed its donors. Campaign reform advocates are asking the Internal Revenue Service to investigate the group to determine whether it’s in violation of a requirement that it not be “primarily engaged” in supporting or opposing candidates.

One remedy for the avalanche of anonymous attack ads is the DISCLOSE Act, which would require nonprofits like Crossroads GPS and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (which is covered by a different provision of the tax code) to disclose the names of the companies, organizations and individuals who fund them. The legislation has been approved by the House but was blocked in the Senate by a Republican filibuster; it could, and should, be revived in a postelection session. The DISCLOSE Act also would require the chief officers of corporations - and nonprofits such as Crossroads GPS - to appear in ads and take responsibility for them, just as candidates do for advertising sponsored by their campaigns.

There is no cogent argument against maximum disclosure . . . . Even as it ruled this year that corporations had the right to engage in political spending, the Supreme Court upheld disclosure requirements, noting a previous holding that “disclosure could be justified based on a governmental interest in ‘provid[ing] the electorate with information’ about the sources of election-related spending.

”That is what the DISCLOSE Act would do. If those who seek to influence elections don’t have the courage of their convictions, Congress must act to identify them.

Tuesday Think Progress revealed what appears to be a bit more than a coincidence to me: the Chamber of Commerce conducting outsourcing seminars for the Chinese government. Among the many lies told by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently, chief Chamber lobbyist Bruce Josten said that his organization’s foreign affiliates, called AmChams, are only “comprised of American companies doing business abroad in those countries.” In fact, the Chinese AmCham is comprised of Chinese firms like Northern Light Venture Capital; the AmCham in Russia is comprised of Russian state-run ompanies like VTB Bank; and, the AmCham of Abu Dhabi is comprised of UAE state-run oil companies.

The ties between the AmChams and the U.S. Chamber are deep. In addition to sharing staff members, the Chinese AmCham has worked closely with the U.S. Chamber and the Chinese government to sponsor a series of seminars in America to teach American businesses how to outsource jobs to China (called the China Grassroots Program).

Click on the link for an invite to an event sponsored by the right-wing billionaire Sheldon Adelson, inviting local businesses in Florida to come to Jacksonville and learn about outsourcing from Chinese government officials like Li Haiyan, the Counselor for Economic Affairs for the People’s Republic of China, U.S. Chamber lobbyist Joseph Fawkner, and BChinaB, a firm that specializes in helping American firms outsource their manufacturing jobs to China.

Please click the link and read the whole essay.

On the home front I want to mention that the President of the Greensboro, NC, Chamber of Commerce just recently resigned because he had been offered a much more lucrative assignment in suburban DC. And he's very well-qualified for almost any type of top position: ex-military, no discernible education otherwise. Takes orders perfectly.

From the same trustworthy source we have the inside story on Robert Menendez - remember him? Human metaphor for the downfall of the Democratic Party and how the Dems became Dims. (Hint! Money. Money. Money. Money!)

Worst DSCC Chair Ever (On Purpose)

In yesterday's Charlotte Observer, North Carolina's #1 newspaper, there was a glowing endorsement of Elaine Marshall's Senate scrappy insurgent campaign. The endorsement was a slap in the face not just to reactionary corporate shill and incumbent Richard Burr, but also to his pal, sleazy New Jersey ward-heeler and failed DSCC chair Robert Menendez. Marshall, they enthused, "dove into this year's Senate race without Democratic Party backing, yet beat the party's hand-picked choice in the primary. 'I don't have to vote with the Senate leadership,' she told us. 'I wasn't their pick'."

Not only was she not their pick, when North Carolina Democrats let Menendez know what he could do with his pick - and handed the progressive, activist Marshall a decisive win against the corporate-oriented slug - Menendez took his toys and ran back to Washington. He had forced Marshall to spend almost a million dollars to win a primary fight he insisted on - even after she won the first round - and since then has studiously, many would say vindictively, ignored North Carolina, easily the Democrats' best chance of picking up a GOP-held seat in the entire country.

From the time he handed Scott Brown Teddy Kennedy's Senate seat in Massachusetts, right through all his wrong-headed primary meddling, Menendez's place in history has been assured: the worst DSCC Chair ever. He has been the driving force in making John Cornyn look astute and in turning a filibuster-proof Democratic majority into a hodge podge that may or may not be able to cling to a bare majority. Out of touch, self-serving political hacks like Menendez and Redfern are managing to emphasize that the Democratic Party, despite the disciples of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt at the grassroots level is anything but a peoples' party.

I never trust Time Magazine for any type of real news, and yet, they may surprise me (although I'm sure this is just more flashing-light type distraction from the real issues for circus goers). From the Curious Capitalist blog at Time Magazine we read (emphasis marks added - Ed.):

"Will the Federal Reserve Cause a Civil War?"

November 3rd is when the Federal Reserve's next policy committee meeting ends, and if you thought this was just another boring money meeting you would be wrong. It could be the most important meeting in Fed history, maybe. The US central bank is expected to announce its next move to boost the faltering economic recovery. To say there has been considerable debate and anxiety among Fed watchers about what the central bank should do would be an understatement. Chairman Ben Bernanke has indicated in recent speeches that the central bank plans to try to drive down already low-interest rates by buying up long-term bonds. A number of people both inside the Fed and out believe this is the wrong move. But one website seems to believe that Ben's plan might actually lead to armed conflict. Last week, the blog, Zerohedge wrote, paraphrasing a top economic forecaster David Rosenberg, that it believed the Fed's plan is not only moronic, but "positions US society one step closer to civil war if not worse."

I'm not sure what "if not worse," is supposed to mean. But, with the Tea Party gaining followers, the idea of civil war over economic issues doesn't seem that far-fetched these days. And Ron Paul definitely thinks the Fed should be ended. In TIME's recent cover story on the militia movement many said these groups are powder kegs looking for a catalyst. So why not a Fed policy committee meeting. Still, I'm not convinced we are headed for Fedamageddon. That being said, the Fed's early November meeting is an important one. Here's why:

Usually, there is generally a consensus about what the Federal Reserve should do. When the economy is weak, the Fed cuts short-term interest rates to spur borrowing and economic activity. When the economy is strong and inflation is rising, it does the opposite. But nearly two years after the Fed cut short-term interest rates to basically zero, more and more economists are questioning whether the US central bank is making the right moves. The economy is still very weak and unemployment seems stubbornly stuck near 10%.

The problem is the Fed only directly sets short-term interest rates. And they are already about as close to zero as you can go. That's why Ben Bernanke has been recently talking about something called "quantitative easing." That's when the Fed basically creates money to buy the long-term bonds that it doesn't directly control, and drive down those interest rates as well. That should further reduce the cost of borrowing for large companies and homeowners. Some people are calling this "QE2" because the Fed made a similar move during the height of the financial crisis when it bought mortgage bonds.

Not everyone agrees this is a good move. In fact, a number of presidents of regional Fed banks, not all of which get to vote at Fed policy meetings, have recently come out against Bernanke's plans. Some say it sets bad policy. Others think it will stoke inflation, which might be the point. Few, though, have warned of armed conflict. Here's how Zerohedge justifies its prediction of why the Fed's Nov. 3rd meeting will lead to violence:

In a very real sense, Bernanke is throwing Granny and Grandpa down the stairs - on purpose. He is literally threatening those at the lower end of the economic strata, along with all who are retired, with starvation and death, and
in a just nation where the rule of law controlled instead of being abused by the kleptocrats he would be facing charges of Seditious Conspiracy, as his policies will inevitably lead to the destruction of our republic.

OK. The idea that Bernanke might kill large swaths of low-income neighborhoods or Florida by his plan to further lower interest rates is a little ridiculous. But there is a point in Zerohedge's crazy. Lower rates do tend to favor borrowers over savers. And the largest borrowers in the country are banks, speculators and large corporations. The largest spenders in our country though tend to be individuals. Consumer spending makes up 70% of the economy. And the vast majority of consumers are on the low-end of the income scale. So I think it is a valid question to ask whether the Fed's desire to drive down interest rates at all costs policy is working. Companies are already borrowing at low rates. They are just not spending. (Read a special report on the financial crisis blame game)

That being said, civil war, probably not. "It is a gross exaggeration," says Allan Meltzer, who is a top Fed historian at Carnegie Mellon. "I cannot recall ever learning about riots or civil war even when the Fed made other mistakes." When I called, David Rosenberg was traveling and couldn't talk, but he did send me a quick e-mail to stress that he has never, ever suggested that any moves the Fed makes will lead to a militia uprising.

Some smart people, though, including Meltzer, it appears, and Rosenberg do think the path of quantitative easing that the Fed looks likely to embark on is the wrong move. John Taylor, a top Fed scholar at Stanford, says eventually you will have to pull the support out, and when you do a year from now when the economy is recovering he thinks it could be quite disruptive. So even if you don't double dip now, you might double dip then. And even if you don't it would make for a slow recovery. Others, such as Raghuram Rajan, who has became famous for warning about the possibility of a financial crisis back in 2005, believe low-interest rates could be creating new bubbles in say gold or commodities.

So it seems clear what the Fed is likely to do. How the economy, the militias and the rest of us react is up in the air. The count down is on. T minus 15 days to Fedamageddon. See you there, hopefully.

Read more here.

More K(C)ochomania from Think Progress (and did you get your invite to the confab they are having for large donors in Palm Springs in January yet? Call if not, as you don't want to miss this one - they are planning 2012's spectacular!). Those C(K)ocks! What philanthropists!!! If you're wondering where the funding for Jim Demented"s Democratic opponent (unknown previously to the Dims in S.C.) came from, read on. They fund lots of good causes - like repealing Social Security, etc., etc. One more interesting moment in the essay comes when it traces Beck's long-term funding by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He tells his lower-class, uneducated listeners to "give back their paychecks to their employers" in so many words. And the Chamber of Horrors (er, of Commerce) can now tell their employees how to vote - specifically - and for whom!

In 2006, Koch Industries owner Charles Koch revealed to the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore that he coordinates the funding of the conservative infrastructure of front groups, political campaigns, think tanks, media outlets and other anti-government efforts through a twice annual meeting of wealthy right-wing donors. He also confided to Moore, who is funded through several of Koch’s ventures, that his true goal is to strengthen the “culture of prosperity” by eliminating “90%” of all laws and government regulations. Although it is difficult to quantify the exact amount Koch alone has funneled to right-wing fronts, some studies have pointed toward $50 million he has given alone to anti-environmental groups.

Recently, fronts funded by Charles and his brother David have received scrutiny because they have played a pivotal role in the organizing of the anti-Obama Tea Parties and the promotion of virulent far right lawmakers like Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). (David Koch praised DeMint and gave him a “Washington Award” shortly after the senator promised to “break” Obama by making health reform his “Waterloo.”)

While the Koch brothers — each worth over $21.5 billion — have certainly underwritten much of the right, their hidden coordination with other big business money has gone largely unnoticed. ThinkProgress has obtained a memo outlining the details of the last Koch gathering held in June of this year. The memo, along with an attendee list of about 210 people, shows the titans of industry — from health insurance companies, oil executives, Wall Street investors, and real estate tycoons — working together with conservative journalists and Republican operatives to plan the 2010 election, as well as ongoing conservative efforts through 2012.

According to the memo, David Chavern, the number two at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Fox News hate-talker Glenn Beck also met with these representatives of the corporate elite. In an election season with the most undisclosed secret corporate giving since the Watergate-era, the memo sheds light on the symbiotic relationship between extremely profitable, multi-billion dollar corporations and much of the conservative infrastructure. The memo describes the prospective corporate donors as “investors,” and it makes clear that many of the Republican operatives managing shadowy, undisclosed fronts running attack ads against Democrats were involved in the Koch’s election-planning event:

– Corporate “investors” at the Koch meeting included businesses with a strong profit motive in rolling back President Obama’s enacted reforms. Several companies impacted by health reform, including Allan Hubbard of A & E Industries, a manufacturer of medical devices and Judson Green, a board member of health insurance conglomerate Aon, were present at the meeting. Other businessmen at the meeting, like Omaha Burger King franchiser Mike Simmonds, are owners of fast food stores which have fought efforts to provide health insurance to their employees. Many corporate attendees of the meeting represent the financial industry impacted by Wall Street reform. For instance, attendee Bill Cooper is the CEO of TCF Financial, a corporation involved in the mortgage banking industry. Cooper recently filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Wall Street reform. Other financial industry players in the meeting hail from firms ranging from Bank of America, JLM Investment, Allied Capital Corp, AMG National Trust, the Blackstone Group and Citadel Investment.

Annie Dickerson, a representative of Paul Singer, a powerful hedge fund manager who also gives tens of millions to Republican causes, was present. In addition, Koch Industries itself has a hedge fund and other financial derivative products in its portfolio of interests, which include oil pipelines, coal shipping, asphalt, refineries, consumer goods, timber, ranching, and chemicals.

– Several executives at the meeting have an incentive to stop Democrats and President Obama from addressing climate change and enacting clean energy reform. The meeting included oil executives from Aspect Energy, Murfin Drilling, Anschutz Company, GeoPark Holdings, Smoky Oil, and several members of Koch’s various subsidiaries. The meeting documents explicitly state that funding efforts to curb “climate change alarmism” were discussed.

– Fred Malek, Karl Rove’s top fundraiser for his $56 million attack ad campaign against Democrats, attended the meeting, along with leaders of other secret attack groups. Heather Higgins, who leads the Independent Women’s Forum, a shadowy group that has spent millions of dollars in attack ads on health reform, attended the meeting. So did Gretchen Hamel, a former Bush flak who now runs an attack ad group called “Public Notice,” which denounces spending programs.

– Participants collaborated with infamous consultants who specialize in generating fake grassroots movements, as well as experts on how corporations should take advantage of Citizens United. One session, about how to “mobilize Citizens for November,” involved a discussion with Republican strategists Tim Phillips and Sean Noble, anti-union leader Mark Mix, and longtime Koch operative Karl Crow. Phillips — a veteran astroturf lobbyist who previously managed a deceptive grassroots lobbying campaign to help the Hong Kong-based Tan family maintain their forced abortion sweatshops in the Mariana Islands — now leads the day-to-day operations of Americans for Prosperity, the group ThinkProgress first reported to have helped organize many of the initial Tea Party rallies against Obama.

Americans for Prosperity, founded and financed by David Koch, has a field team of over 80 campaign staffers spread out around the country, and additionally plans to spend $45 million dollars worth of attack ads against Democrats. Shortly before the planning meeting, Crow authored a campaign finance memo explaining that because of the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, he advised specifically that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s 501(c)(6) and Americans for Prosperity’s 501(c)(4) can “now use general treasury funds to produce communications materials opposing or supporting specific candidates” and corporations can aggressively pressure their employees to vote a certain way.

The memo notes that participants in the 2010 election planning meeting “committed to an unprecedented level of support.”

Interestingly, the Koch meetings are managed by Kevin Gentry, an executive who doubles as a staffer in the Koch Industries lobbying office in Washington and as the key point person who helps deliver Koch charitable foundation grants. As ThinkProgress has documented, Koch Industries has dramatically boosted its own profits by using conservative front groups to manipulate public policy. The fusion between the “intellectual” conservative movement and big businesses opposed to regulations and accountability has a history in America dating back to the New Deal. During the 30's, the Du Pont family and other wealthy interests organized an assortment of “Liberty League” front groups to try to defeat New Deal agenda items and repeal President Roosevelt’s Social Security program.

Now, corporations fund groups like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute — both had representatives at the Koch meeting — to further their lobbying agenda. The American Enterprise Institute even changed its name from the New Deal-era American Enterprise Association to try to dispel the notion that they were nothing more than a glorified business trade association.

As the memo states, Beck has addressed this regular gathering of conservative corporate executives in previous years. Past Koch meetings have included various Republican lawmakers, including DeMint, and Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia as speakers.

After ThinkProgess published its exclusive investigation of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce revealing that the Chamber has been actively fundraising from foreign corporations for its 501(c)(6) account used to run a $75 million attack ad campaign, Chamber lobbyists found common cause with Beck and many of the conservative talking heads. Shortly after our investigation, Beck hosted an on-air fundraiser, asking his audience to give to the Chamber. Casual observers might have been surprised by the Chamber’s swift alliance with Beck (Chamber executives appeared on the Beck radio program and sung Beck’s praises on the Chamber blog), who has compared Obama to Adolf Hitler and called the President a “racist” who has a “deep-seated hatred for white people.”

By telling his listeners to give money to the Chamber, Beck, who owns a media company worth more than $32 million dollars and an experimental Mercedes Benz, essentially told his working class viewers to give their wages back to their employers. However, Beck never disclosed his long working history of discussing political strategy with America’s largest corporations. The Koch memo clearly shows that Beck has been collaborating with the Chamber, as well as other titans of industry, for years. In his latest appeal for support to the Chamber’s foreign-funded trade association, which already counts JP Morgan and ExxonMobil as dues-paying members, Beck yesterday told his audience that the Chamber simply “defends the little guy.”

Click to view a letter inviting corporate executives to attend the next Koch meeting in January, along with a list of the sessions held by Koch for the last meeting in June of 2010. An attendee list of the June, 2010 meeting is attached at the bottom of the document.

Some of the donors at the Koch meeting were longtime Bush fundraisers, like Cintas Corporation CEO Dick Farmer and wholesale executive Art Pope. However, many names appear to be relatively new to conservative movement “investment.”

Click here for a listing of the attendees.

CAN YOU SAY "TREASON" YET?

I found another essay of pearls, which appears below. Click on the link for the whole schmear. Whether you are at one with this perspective or not, you've got to admit that debt is the word currently.

From Global Depression to Global Governance

The role of the corporate elites' secretive global thinktanks

We now stand at the edge of the global financial abyss of a ‘Great Global Debt Depression,’ where nations, mired in extreme debt, are beginning to implement ‘fiscal austerity’ measures to reduce their deficits, which will ultimately result in systematic global social genocide, as the middle classes vanish and the social foundations upon which our nations rest are swept away.

How did we get here? Who brought us here? Where is this road leading?

Not bad questions for now, although we do notice that the positions pay very well - forever.

From Global Research, we read about the secret groups who have purposely evolved our societies into funding ventures for their personal enrichment - explaining the totally unexpected oil shocks of the 1970's and much, much more (emphasis marks added - Ed.):

As historian Carroll Quigley wrote:

"The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations."

In 1954, the Bilderberg Group was formed as a secretive global think tank, comprising intellectual, financial, corporate, political, military and media elites from Western Europe and North America, with prominent bankers such as David Rockefeller, as well as European royalty, such as the Dutch royal family, who are the largest shareholders in Royal Dutch Shell, whose CEO attends every meeting. This group of roughly 130 elites meets every year in secret to discuss and debate global affairs, and to set general goals and undertake broad agendas at various meetings. The group was initially formed to promote European integration. The 1956 meeting discussed European integration and a common currency. In fact, the current Chairman of the Bilderberg Group told European media last year that the euro was debated at the Bilderberg Group.

In 1973, David Rockefeller, Chairman and CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank, Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Group, formed the Trilateral Commission with CFR academic Zbigniew Brzezinski. That same year, the oil price shocks created a wealth of oil money, which was discussed at that years Bilderberg meeting 5 months prior to the oil shocks, and the money was funneled through western banks, which loaned it to ‘third world’ nations desperately in need of loans to finance industrialization.

When Jimmy Carter became President in 1977, he appointed over two dozen members of the Trilateral Commission into his cabinet, including himself, and of course, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was his National Security Adviser. In 1979, Carter appointed David Rockefeller’s former aide and friend, Paul Volcker, who had held various positions at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the U.S. Treasury Department, and who also happened to be a member of the Trilateral Commission, as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. When another oil shock took place in 1979, Volcker decided to raise interest rates from 2% in the late 70s, to 18% in the early 80's.

The effect this had was that the countries of the developing world suddenly had to pay enormous interest on their loans, and in 1982, Mexico announced it could no longer afford to pay its interest, and it defaulted on its debt, which set off the 1980s debt crisis – collapsing nations in debt across Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia.

It was the IMF and the World Bank came to the ‘assistance’ of the Third World with their ‘structural adjustment programs’, which forced countries seeking assistance to privatize all state owned industries and resources, devalue their currencies, liberalize their economies, dismantle health, education and social services; ultimately resulting in the re-colonization of the ‘Third World’ as Western corporations and banks bought all their assets and resources, and ultimately created the conditions of social genocide, with the spread of mass poverty, and the emergence of corrupt national elites who were subservient to the interests of Western elites.

The people in these nations would protest, riot and rebel, and the states would clamp down with the police and military. In the West, corporations and banks saw rapid, record-breaking profits. This was the era in which the term ‘globalization’ emerged. While profits soared, wages for people in the West did not. Thus, to consume in an economy in which prices were rising, people had to go into debt. This is why this era marked the rise of credit cards fueling consumption, and the middle class became a class based entirely on debt.

In the 1990's, the ‘new world order’ was born, with America ruling the global economy, free trade agreements began integrating regional and global markets for the benefit of global banks and corporations, and speculation dominated the economy.

The global economic crisis arose as a result of decades of global imperialism – known recently as ‘globalization’ – and the reckless growth of – speculation, derivatives and an explosion of debt.

As the economic crisis spread, nations of the world, particularly the United States, bailed out the major banks (which should have been made to fail and crumble under their own corruption and greed), and now the West has essentially privatized profits for the banks, and socialized the risk.

In other words, the nations bought the debt from the banks, and now the people have to pay for it. The people, however, are immersed in their own personal debt to such degrees that today, the average Canadian is $39,000 in debt, and students are graduating into a jobless market with tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt that they will never repay. Hence, we are now faced with a global debt crisis.

Please read on for the history of the G-20, China policies and your future of paying off for the rest of your and your children's children's lives the debts they have incurred.

After that, if you're up to it, some light reading about:

The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012

Tom Engelhard at TomDispatch also has some well-thought-out conversation you may want to consider as you decide whether to vote at the next election (or just move out of the country) or not (emphasis marks added - Ed.).

A World Made by War How Old Will You Be When the American War State Goes Down?

Tom Engelhardt

When you look at me, you can’t mistake the fact that I’m of a certain age. But just for a moment, think of me as nine years old. You could even say that I celebrated my ninth birthday last week, without cake, candles, presents, or certainly joy. I’ve had two mobilized moments in my life. The first was in the Vietnam War years; the second, the one that leaves me as a nine-year-old, began on the morning of September 11, 2001. I turned on the TV while doing my morning exercises, saw a smoking hole in a World Trade Center tower, and thought that, as in 1945 when a B-25 slammed into the Empire State Building, a terrible accident had happened.

Later, after the drums of war had begun to beat, after the first headlines had screamed their World-War-II-style messages (“the Pearl Harbor of the 21st century”), I had another thought. And for a reasonably politically sophisticated guy, my second response was not only as off-base as the first, but also remarkably dumb. I thought that this horrific event taking place in my hometown might open Americans up to the pain of the world. No such luck, of course.

If you had told me then that we would henceforth be in a state of eternal war as well as living in a permanent war state, that, to face a ragtag enemy of a few thousand stateless terrorists, the national security establishment in Washington would pump itself up to levels not faintly reached when facing the Soviet Union, a major power with thousands of nuclear weapons and an enormous military, that “homeland” - a distinctly un-American word - would land in our vocabulary never to leave, and that a second Defense Department dubbed the Department of Homeland Security would be set up not to be dismantled in my lifetime, that torture (excuse me, “enhanced interrogation techniques”) would become as American as apple pie and that some of those “techniques” would actually be demonstrated to leading Bush administration officials inside the White House, that we would pour money into the Pentagon at ever escalating levels even after the economy crashed in 2008, that we would be fighting two potentially trillion-dollar-plus wars without end in two distant lands, that we would spend untold billions constructing hundreds of military bases in those same lands, that the CIA would be conducting the first drone air war in history over a country we were officially not at war with, that most of us would live in a remarkable state of detachment from all of this, and finally - only, by the way, because I’m cutting this list arbitrarily short - that I would spend my time writing incessantly about “the American way of war” and produce a book with that title, I would have thought you were nuts.

But every bit of that happened, even if unpredicted by me because, like human beings everywhere, I have no special knack for peering into the future. If it were otherwise, I would undoubtedly now be zipping through fabulous spired cities with a jetpack on my back (as I was assured would happen in my distant youth). But if prediction isn’t our forte, then adaptability to changing circumstances may be - and it certainly helps account for my being here today. I’m here because, in response to the bizarre spectacle of this nation going to war while living at peace, even if in a spasmodic state of collective national fear, I did something I hardly understood at the time. I launched a nameless listserv of collected articles and my own expanding commentary that ran against the common wisdom of that October moment when the bombing runs for our second Afghan war began. A little more than a year later, thanks to the Nation Institute, it became a website with the name TomDispatch.com, and because our leaders swore we were “a nation at war,” because we were indeed killing people in quantity in distant lands, because the power of the state at home was being strengthened in startling ways, while everything still open about our society seemed to be getting screwed shut, and the military was being pumped up to Schwarzeneggerian dimensions, I started writing about war.

At some level, I can’t tell you how ridiculous that was. After all, I’m the most civilian and peaceable of guys. I’ve never even been in the military. I was, however, upset with the Bush administration, the connect-no-dots media coverage of that moment, and the repeated 9/11 rites which proclaimed us the planet’s greatest victim, survivor, and dominator, leaving only one role, greatest Evil Doer, open for the rest of the planet (and you know who auditioned for, and won, that part hands down)!

P.S. I thought the same thing on the day of 9/11 - that this horrendous event "might open Americans up to the pain of the world."

Read on, Garth!

Still in the dark?

You may be beyond help.



Suzan
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