Apologies and Update

Three weeks ago, my week of postings on the material in the new 2009 edition of Bad Money was truncated by the schedule of my book tour. As a result, I didn't get to my intended last commentary - the dangerous analogies between the 2007-2009 disaster stage of U.S. financialization and the earlier decline-of-empire political economics of Britain, Holland and treasure-galleon Spain.

Usual business-cycle patterns no longer apply. The 2007-2009 implosion occurs in a very different context than the 1929-1933 events around which Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has built his resume and cast himself as a second-depression crisis manager. I appreciated your comments and reactions back in early April, and hopefully tomorrow's posting will stir another round.

Politically, I think the Obama administration's financial policy situation has improved, less because of the rise in public confidence, which could tumble again, than because of evidence that White House perceptions of the financial bail-out have become more practical. The tougher line on banks viz credit cards and the seeming decision not to ask Congress for more bail-out money are both pluses, as is Obama's criticism of the hedge funds et al in the Chrysler bail-out. Whatever the underlying intentions, the p.r. is better.

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/tpmcafe-main/~3/0ytO1vySvFY/

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Republican Agonistes: GOP wrestles with the toxic
embrace of its wingnut base

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player! DOWNLOAD (124)
PLAY (849)

Republicans were out this weekend in force, holding town-hall meetings designed to "reconnect" with constituents -- and demonstrating in the process that they remain as clueless as ever.

As it happens, there was also an interesting Rasmussen poll showing that those constituents basically despise them:

Just 21% of GOP voters believe Republicans in Congress have done a good job representing their own party?s values, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

Sixty-nine percent (69%) say congressional Republicans have lost touch with GOP voters throughout the nation. These findings are virtually unchanged from a survey just after Election Day.

Among all voters, 73% say Republicans in Congress have lost touch with the GOP base.

Seventy-two percent (72%) of Republicans say it is more important for the GOP to stand for what it believes in than for the party to work with President Obama. Twenty-two percent (22%) want their party to work with the President more.

In other words, the Republican base, by a large margin, is unhappy with their party's political leadership for not being right-wing enough. And that happens to comport with what their real leadership, aka the Right-Wing Punditocracy, has been saying.

Unfortunately for Republicans, the electorate at large has a distinctly different outlook. They strongly want Republicans to cooperate with President Obama, and strongly believe they are not making a good-faith effort to do so, either. Republicans want to fight, but this not a fight Republicans are winning:

A new CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll shows that the president has a 63 percent favorability rating. But 31 percent of Americans approve of how congressional Republicans have conducted themselves, a dropoff of 13 percentage points from February when the same question was asked.

Here's the standard GOP analysis of the problem:

Shortly after the November elections, Republicans en masse began to acknowledge that the party had lost its way on the issue of fiscal discipline during the Bush administration. Their vote against the stimulus bill was the first real test for Republicans to exercise their frustration with what they describe as excessive federal spending. And they're shaping a message around this theme.

"We are united," said Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. "The debt of this country is a national crisis and a national security issue."

The problem with this is that Republicans seem to believe that it was simply George W. Bush's profligate ways with the budget that caused the economic disaster we currently are confronting. And that's part of the picture, to be sure. But only a small part.

The cold reality is that, as we explained after the election, the economic turmoil was created by a broad swath of Bush policies that, in every respect, were clear products of conservative fiscal and governmental philosophy:

The swirling global economic crisis produced by Republican rule is only the most prominent debacle produced by eight years of conservative philosophy being put into action. Conservatives never met a deregulation scheme they didn't like -- and it was that very mania for breaking down well-established institutional barriers, particularly in the financial sector, that led to the housing bubble and the collapse on Wall Street. Certainly, Democrats played along, often eagerly -- but they were being conservative when they did.

No doubt the solutions to the economic crisis will entail re-regulating the financial sector and imposing strict government oversight. And when they do, no doubt conservatives will accuse Democrats of indulging "socialism". But it is to laugh: the right has earned all the credibility of Joe the Plumber on such matters.

Especially when you consider all the other fruits of conservative governance:

• Foreign-policy debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• A government that invades nations under false pretenses.
• A nation less secure and at greater risk of terrorist attacks than ever.
• A sinking economy.
• An expanding gap between rich and poor.
• Utter inaction on global warming.
• $5-a-gallon gasoline.
• An unresolved immigration problem.
• An incapacity to deal with natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina.
• A debacle in public-school education testing and funding.
• Declining food and consumer-product safety standards.
• A government that spies on its own citizens.
• A government that tortures prisoners held in their detention facilities.

These messes weren't the result of George W. Bush being too liberal and straying too far from the movement's party line. To the contrary -- they're the direct result of him toeing that line to the millimeter. They are all the direct product of the conservative philosophy of governance.

So it's not surprising that the public now believes more in liberal solutions than conservative ones:

The survey found the public holds greater confidence in Democrats than in Republicans in handling most of the issues that are involved in Obama's legislative agenda.

Democrats were favored by a margin of 61 percent to 29 percent on education; 59 percent to 30 percent on health care and 59 percent to 31 percent on energy. Congress is expected to consider major legislation later this year in all three areas.

Democats were also viewed with more confidence in handling taxes, long a Republican strong suit. The only issue among nine in the survey where the two parties were rated as even was in the war on terror.

Conservatives had their shot and blew it -- and it goes well beyond George W. Bush's budget failures.

Read The Full Article:
http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/republican-agonistes-gop-wrestles-to

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Top GOPer on Judiciary Shunned By Panel 23 Yrs
Ago

If this doesn't sum up the current status of the Republican party, I don't know what would: The Senate GOP has chosen as its top member on the Judiciary Committee a hard right conservative rejected by the panel -- then in the hands of the Republicans --[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/mydd/~3/vhLMfgMYF-o/0650

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Ignoring Politico's own reporting,
Budoff Brown advances misleading CPR ad

In a May 3 Politico article, reporter Carrie Budoff Brown wrote that Conservatives for Patients' Rights (CPR) "releas[ed] a 60-second spot featuring Dr. Brian Day, a past president of the Canadian Medical Association, describing how patients in the country are 'languishing and suffering on waiting lists.' " She added: "Expect to see Day lobbying members of Congress -- and many more stories from both sides in the weeks to come." However, Budoff Brown did not mention that Day has said he favors the health care systems of several Western European countries, not the current U.S. system of health care, as her Politico colleague Ben Smith has previously noted.

In an April 27 Politico blog post, Smith reported that, during an October 9, 2008, interview with the Fraser Institute, Day stated: "I think this is what people tend to forget. They equate alternatives to the Canadian health care system with 'Americanization,' which is not what we're talking about. We're talking about countries like Belgium, and Switzerland, and France, and Austria." In an October 22, 2007, op-ed for Canada's National Post newspaper, Day similarly wrote that "the goal of the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) -- of which I am President -- is to help improve our universal system, not destroy it." Day went on to note in the op-ed that he is not in favor of the U.S. system:

Let me be clear: I am not for an American-style system in Canada.

It is true that I believe in competition. But not the type of unhealthy competition that seems to exist between Canada and the United States in health care. As two of the world's richest countries, we seem to be in a race to the bottom when it comes to health. Canada's health system has been ranked 30th by the World Health Organization, and the U.S. was ranked 37th. Why would anyone copy a system that ranks substantially below ours?

The May 3 article by Budoff Brown is the latest in which she has provided an uncritical platform for CPR and other conservatives to attack progressive health care reform.

From Budoff Brown's May 3 article, "The five faces to watch for in debate over care":

The Storyteller: Jane Doe

Health care is about to enter the heart-tugging phase.

Groups on the right and left have been quietly building arsenals of narrators -- people who can sear the American conscience with personal stories.

The American Cancer Society collects cases through a call center in Texas. The SEIU gathers stories by congressional district. And Conservatives for Patients' Rights, an organization poised to oppose the Obama plan, sent a former CNN reporter to Britain and Canada to produce a documentary on outrages in the European system that critics claim the White House plan will mimic.

The last major health care reform effort in the 1990s was defined by Harry and Louise, the fictional middle-class couple featured in an insurance industry ad. And an extraordinarily complex bill went down amid a flurry of 30-second ads.

Given the fragmented media environment, a singular TV ad may not hold as much sway as it did in the early '90s. But that doesn't mean either side plans to pass up the tool.

Conservatives for Patients' Rights was the first to use it, releasing a 60-second spot featuring Dr. Brian Day, a past president of the Canadian Medical Association, describing how patients in the country are "languishing and suffering on waiting lists."

Expect to see Day lobbying members of Congress -- and many more stories from both sides in the weeks to come.

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/mediamatters/latest/~3/3HePNd7PgwU/200905040018

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Ignoring Politico 's own reporting, Budoff Brown
advances misleading CPR ad

In a May 3 Politico article, reporter Carrie Budoff Brown wrote that Conservatives for Patients' Rights (CPR) "releas[ed] a 60-second spot featuring Dr. Brian Day, a past president of the Canadian Medical Association, describing how patients in the country are 'languishing and suffering on waiting lists.' " She added: "Expect to see Day lobbying members of Congress -- and many more stories from both sides in the weeks to come." However, Budoff Brown did not mention that Day has said he favors the health care systems of several Western European countries, not the current U.S. system of health care, as her Politico colleague Ben Smith has previously noted.

In an April 27 Politico blog post, Smith reported that, during an October 9, 2008, interview with the Fraser Institute, Day stated: "I think this is what people tend to forget. They equate alternatives to the Canadian health care system with 'Americanization,' which is not what we're talking about. We're talking about countries like Belgium, and Switzerland, and France, and Austria." In an October 22, 2007, op-ed for Canada's National Post newspaper, Day similarly wrote that "the goal of the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) -- of which I am President -- is to help improve our universal system, not destroy it." Day went on to note in the op-ed that he is not in favor of the U.S. system:

Let me be clear: I am not for an American-style system in Canada.

It is true that I believe in competition. But not the type of unhealthy competition that seems to exist between Canada and the United States in health care. As two of the world's richest countries, we seem to be in a race to the bottom when it comes to health. Canada's health system has been ranked 30th by the World Health Organization, and the U.S. was ranked 37th. Why would anyone copy a system that ranks substantially below ours?

The May 3 article by Budoff Brown is the latest in which she has provided an uncritical platform for CPR and other conservatives to attack progressive health care reform.

From Budoff Brown's May 3 article, "The five faces to watch for in debate over care":

The Storyteller: Jane Doe

Health care is about to enter the heart-tugging phase.

Groups on the right and left have been quietly building arsenals of narrators -- people who can sear the American conscience with personal stories.

The American Cancer Society collects cases through a call center in Texas. The SEIU gathers stories by congressional district. And Conservatives for Patients' Rights, an organization poised to oppose the Obama plan, sent a former CNN reporter to Britain and Canada to produce a documentary on outrages in the European system that critics claim the White House plan will mimic.

The last major health care reform effort in the 1990s was defined by Harry and Louise, the fictional middle-class couple featured in an insurance industry ad. And an extraordinarily complex bill went down amid a flurry of 30-second ads.

Given the fragmented media environment, a singular TV ad may not hold as much sway as it did in the early '90s. But that doesn't mean either side plans to pass up the tool.

Conservatives for Patients' Rights was the first to use it, releasing a 60-second spot featuring Dr. Brian Day, a past president of the Canadian Medical Association, describing how patients in the country are "languishing and suffering on waiting lists."

Expect to see Day lobbying members of Congress -- and many more stories from both sides in the weeks to come.

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/mediamatters/latest/~3/3HePNd7PgwU/200905040018

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Unions and the Middle Class Crisis

Paul Krugman’s column today is a clarion call. Some of the wage cuts, like the givebacks by Chrysler workers, are the price of federal aid. Others, like the tentative agreement on a salary cut here at The Times, are the result of discussions[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://www.taylormarsh.com/2009/05/04/unions-and-the-middle-class-crisis/

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Ed Schultz explains why Fox was shut out at
presser

The mouthpieces at Fox are still wondering why President Obama didn’t call on their network for a question during last week’s press conference. Well, MSNBC’s Ed Schultz has broken it down for them: Fox’s problem is that it is not a real news network, and it should stop expecting to be treated like one.

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/0Rl8SKYlZ8c/-Ed-Schultz-explains-w
hy-Fox-was-shut-out-at-presser

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Rachel Corrie Lives On

MAL has an e-mail interview coming up with the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice. Look for it soon.

Here is a note from Rachel's family from the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice site.
Written by Craig Corrie on Oct 2, 2006
This speech was written by the family of Rachel Corrie and read on Saturday, April 12, 2003 at numerous peace rallies around the world. Rachel was an accomplished writer and cared deeply about working for justice and peace in the world. To read some of Rachel?s writings, please visit the Guardian: here.---
On March 16 (2003), our daughter and sister Rachel Corrie was killed by an Israeli army bulldozer while she was trying to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home in the Gaza Strip. Rachel chose to go to Rafah, a city at the southern tip of Gaza, because she believed the world had forsaken this place.
During her time there, Rachel became our eyes and ears of as she told us about the tanks and bulldozers passing by, about the homes with tank-shell holes in their walls, about the rapidly multiplying, Israeli army towers with snipers lurking along the horizon, about apache helicopters and invisible drones buzzing over the city for hours at a time, about wells and greenhouses, and olive groves destroyed, and about the giant metal wall being built around Gaza.
She told us of help she received from an Israeli soldier who e-mailed to her Hebrew phrases to use when confronting Israeli soldiers in tanks and bulldozers. What would your mother think? She also told us about Ali, the eight-year old Palestinian boy shot and killed two days before she arrived, about large groups of Palestinian men rounded up and held for hours at a time, about Palestinian students and workers who could not get to their university or to their jobs because of closed checkpoints, and about Palestinian municipal water workers fired upon while trying to make repairs. She told us, too, of sleeping on the floor and sharing blankets with a family of five, of helping the young boy Nidal with his English as he helped her with her Arabic, and of kind Palestinians who gave her lemony drinks to cure her flu bug. She wrote, 'I am also discovering a degree of strength and of basic ability for humans to remain human in the direst of circumstances. I think the word is dignity'.
Rachel had dreams. She believed that her hometown Olympia, Washington, could gain a lot and offer a lot by committing to a sister-city relationship with Rafah. She envisioned e-mail exchanges between children in the two cities. She wrote, 'Many Palestinian people want their voices to be heard, and I think we need to use some of our privilege as internationals to get those voices heard directly in the US, rather than through the filter of well-meaning internationals such as myself'.
Rachel believed that she might see a Palestinian state or a democratic Israeli-Palestinian state within her lifetime. She wrote, ?I think freedom for Palestine could be an incredible source of hope to people struggling all over the world.?
Rachel aligned herself with non-violent Palestinian peace activists, with non-violent Israeli peace activists, and with non-violent international peace activists working courageously to make all of these dreams come true. She lost her life in that effort when she was crushed four weeks ago by an Israeli army bulldozer.
It is now up to us each and every one of us? to stand up with the same conviction and courage and from our pulpits, from our podiums, from our streets, and through our letters to Congress, the Secretary of State, and the President, to shout along with Rachel, ?this has to stop!' I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and to devote our lives to making this stop. I don?t think its an extremist thing to do anymore. I still really want to dance around to Pat Benetar and to have boyfriends and to make comics for my coworkers. But I also want this to stop!'---Note on GIYUS.org: GIYUS.org is a worldwide online network supporting Israeli militarism [and dedicated to sullying the memory of Rachel Corrie, among other distasteful pursuits]. It is intended to intimidate bloggers and other writers and create an impression that a strong grassroots community exists in support of Israeli atrocities and state terror.
If you ever seen a piece in MyDD and Daily Kos, for example, that cites human rights data in criticizing Israeli foreign policy?a real no-no for this group?you will see an immediate response from GIYUS.org.

GIYUS.org members? comments are welcome here to promote their point of view, but actually responding to the points made in the piece would be a welcome change.---

Read The Full Article:
http://malcontends.blogspot.com/2009/05/rachel-corrie-lives-on.html

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Holder May Help Spanish Judge Try Bush Officials.

video details and more



Listening to Bolton, it's quite clear that he either (a) has no idea what he is talking about, or (b) he knows fine well what they law says but doesn't think the US should pay any attention to international law, which is the more likely of the two.

Here's what the well known left winger Ronald Reagan had to say when he signed up to the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.

The core provisions of the Convention establish a regime for international cooperation in the criminal prosecution of torturers relying on so-called "universal jurisdiction." Each State Party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.

Perhaps Bolton actually thinks the United States should proceed with prosecution although, given his track record, that would be highly surprising.

But he's flat out wrong when he states that this is none of Spain's business. Unless the US bring their own prosecutions, other nations are obligated to act under the Convention.

Tags: Bolton, Holder, Bush, Cheney, war crimes, war criminals, torture

Read The Full Article:
http://the-osterley-times.blogspot.com/2009/05/holder-may-help-spanish-judge-try-
bush.html

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!

Put your copyright in, take your copyright out,
put your copyright in and shake it all about

So it seems today is copyright themed, and the timing probably has something to do with the Pirate Bay ruling everybody's talking about. As an Anarchist problems surrounding property are quite intriguing to me and when it comes to the largely unmapped territory of intellectual property rights and cybertheft, more accurately known as piracy, my mouth begins to literally water.

If you know it or not Anarchist theory holds a lot of answers to life's question, and, yes, Copyright laws are one of them. Take the pending implosion of the newspaper industry. Everybody's panicking because they see it as the end of journalism as we know (but is that really a bad thing? I'm looking at you New York Times).

It is simply the creative destruction of the marketplace. In the words of Eddie Vedder: "It's evolution, baby!"

If there is a demand for professional, in-depth journalism I'm guessing some enterprising individual will provide the service. If the void left by the Christian Science Monitor prods blogs into more dynamic news coverage I say more power to them. This type of pressure is a good thing. There's even a newspaper who is taking suggestions -- along with donations of course -- of what people want to read exposes about, the most popular subjects get the most attention. The cyber age is moving us in a more democratic direction where I feel more competitors will ultimately mean better quality products. I personally believe with the birth of the Kindle, if Amazon or some other company can bring major newspapers aboard, has the prospect of delivering a techno-conscious service. This might just appeal to people already privy to buying a Kindle but maybe a subscription service that includes a package of magazines, ebooks and newspapers might be the answer.

In any case, to find out how these might happen without laws checkout crypto-anarchism, smart contracts and copyleft. In brief, if a content provider wants to ensure nobody pirates their product they can encrypt it and send it through a peer-to-peer service which secures a reciprocal business relationship. See, no laws need be invoked. Actually, now that I think of it, the reason more business isn't conducted this way is because copyright laws disincentivize this type of innovation.

For a great summary of all this stuff see this video. It's by a youtuber named ReIgNoFrAdNeSs, if you have a youtube account become a subscriber, his videos are, like, totally sinister.



video details and more

Read The Full Article:
http://thumbjig.blogspot.com/2009/05/put-your-copyright-in-take-your.html

Add to del.icio.us   Digg this   Post to Furl   Add to reddit   Add to myYahoo!