CHICAGO POLITICIANS?

THE ABSURD TIMES

Illustration: Hizzonor:

John McCain has been saying "If I needed any lessons in honesty, I wouldn't ask a Chicago politician. The implication is that Chicago politics is corrupt. The truth is, such is impossible. There is and was no corruption in Chicago Politics. Ever.

Corruption, after all, is a decline from traditionally accepted standards. In Chicago, the standards are clear -- vote right and be treated right. That's it. Lies are not accepted. One mayor, after Richard, called Mike Blandick did lie -- he said the streets were all plowed after a 3 foot snowstorm and they weren't. He left office immediately. One corruption was a (snicker) "reform" candidate called "Calamity Jane," because she actually tried to reform things. Then Harold Washington fit the correct tradition. He died and now Daley's son is in charge and everyone is happy.

To the tune of "John Henry":

When Dick Daley was a little baby
Sittin on his mammies knee,
He took some land in his grubby little hand
Said Chicago will belong to me, lord lord,
Chicago will belong to me.

When Dick Daley was in the first grade,
His future was realized,
Cuz before he got into the Second Grade,
He had the whole damn scholl organized, lord lord,
He had the whole damn school organized.

Now ther's some say he's a grafter,
And a bigger crook there could not be.
But we were proud of our Political guy,
He gave the state to John F. Kennedy, lord lord,
He gave the state to John F. Kennedy.

And I'm proud to say I had a part in it.

Here are a few of his quotes -- see if you can find a single lie in any of them:

• 
  
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• The policeman isn't there to create disorder; the policeman is there to preserve disorder.^[1]

Said during the civil disorders associated with the Democratic National Convention in 1968.

• I'm not the last of the old bosses. I'm the first of the new leaders.^[2]

• Even the Lord had skeptical members of his party. One betrayed him, one denied him and one doubted him.^[3]

• Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you lousy mother-fucker, go home.^[4]

Said to Senator Abe Ribicoff of Connecticut when the Senator challenged Daley's use of force during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

• Good government is good politics and politics is good government.^[5]

An ofttimes repeated maxim of Daley's to describe his view on the inseparability of politics and government.

• I have conferred with the superintendent of police this morning and I gave him instructions that an order be issued by him immediately and under his signature to shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand.^[4]

Stated one week following the 1968 Chicago riots to the people of Chicago because of his dissatisfaction with the minimum use of force employed by Police Superintendent James B. Conlisk in dealing with rioters.

• They have vilified me, they have crucified me; yes, they have even criticized me.^[6]

A statement he once made in response to criticisms, alluding that he treated criticism on par with vilification and crucifixion.

• If a man can't put his arms around his sons and help them, then what's the world coming to?^[7]

Response to criticism for steering millions of dollars in city insurance to an agency where his son worked.

Here is Wikkipedia discussion:

Democratic Party machine politics

Known for shrewd party politics, Daley was the prototypical machine politician, and his Chicago Democratic Machine, based on control of thousands of patronage positions, was instrumental in bringing a narrow 8,000 vote victory in Illinois for John F. Kennedy in 1960. Many Daley opponents allege that Mayor Daley, JFK, and LBJ stole the 1960 election by stuffing ballot boxes in Texas and rigging the vote in Chicago.

Daley was usually open with the news media, meeting with them for frequent news conferences, and taking all questions – if not answering all of them. According to columnist and biographer Mike Royko, Daley got along better with editors and publishers than with reporters.

Daley had limited opposition among the 50 aldermen of the Chicago City Council. For the most part, the aldermen supported Daley and the official party position consistently, except for a small number of Republicans from the German wards on the northwest side of the city and a small number of independents (a group that grew during Daley's mayoralty to represent groups that felt disenfranchised by Daley's policies).

Daley's chief means of attaining electoral success was his reliance on the local precinct captain, who marshaled and delivered votes on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis. Many of these precinct captains held patronage jobs with the city, mostly minor posts at low pay. Each ward had a ward leader in charge of the precinct captains, some of whom were corrupt. The notorious First Ward (encompassing downtown, which had many businesses but few residents) was tied to the local mafia or crime syndicate, but Daley's own ward was supposedly clean and his personal honesty was never questioned successfully primarily because he controlled all levels of the government and media that could have questioned him.

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He was even a Republican once, but he straighten out later.

Keynes Lives!

THE ABSURD TIMEs

Illustrations: Top, Paul Krugman wins the Nobel Prize in Economics. This illustrates the fact that the inane days of Milton Friedman are over. During his days of huge influence, every discussion I had with one of the morons ended with them saying "You just don't understand Economics." Now, I do understand Economics. All it took was a world-wide crash.

Second: One of you sent this: illustrates nicely the "flat earth" approach of "supply-side" economics.

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From the campaign: McCain starts off one of his speeches with "My fellow prisoners,...." Is he having flashbacks? No one on his campaign notices at all. Then his crowds start yelling "terrorist," "kill him," and so forth, and McCain just smiles. Finally, one woman called Obama "an Arab," and that was just too much. I mean, you can't let things get outta hand. McCain shook his head and said "No, he is a decent person."

They sent Sarah to drop the first puck at a Flyer's game in Plilly. This really show how out of touch they are. According to Bob Ueker, they boo kids at Easter Egg hunts. They have booed everyone except Kate Smith while she sang "God Bless America." I can't trust such an organization in the White House. Total lack of reality.

Here's another article:

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The Fannie/Freddie Flat Earth Theory

October, 14 2008

By Dean Baker
Source: t r u t h o u t

Dean Baker's ZSpace Page
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For the last month, most of the world has been watching the Wall Street gang drowning in their own greed as they threaten to pull the rest of us down with them. However, while we have been distracted, the Flat Earth Society has developed its narrative to explain the crisis.

In the Flat Earth version, the real villains in the story were the public/private mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Prominent Congressional Democrats like Senators Charles Schumer and Chris Dodd, and Representative Barney Frank, are cited as accomplices. According to the Flat-Earthers, the problem wasn't sleaze bag bankers pulling down tens of millions a year pushing predatory loans to people who didn't understand them; the real problem was Congressional Democrats, who wanted the government to help the poor and minorities buy homes.

Before addressing the Flat Earth argument, I should be very clear that I have long been a harsh critic of Fannie and Freddie. They committed a colossal mistake by failing to recognize the housing bubble. It is understandable that you could miss an $8 trillion housing bubble if you drive a bus or sell shoes for a living. It's a little harder to accept this sort of mistake from companies that own or guarantee trillions of dollars of mortgage debt.

I first warned that the collapse of the housing bubble would lead to serious problems for Fannie and Freddie in the fall of 2002 , before they began to move into the risky mortgages that were the immediate cause of their collapse. When almost all you own is mortgage debt, and the mortgage default rate rises to several times its normal level, it is virtually guaranteed that you're going to face serious problems. Obviously, Fannie and Freddie's venture into more risky mortgages in the years 2005 to 2007 worsened the problem.

While no one should shed any tears over the collapse of these two giants - the top management and shareholders got what they deserved - it is equally ridiculous to lay the blame for the financial crisis on the shoulders of Fannie and Freddie.

The underlying problem was the housing bubble, which Alan Greenspan allowed to grow unchecked and, arguably, actively promoted. The bubble was accentuated by the willingness of banks to ignore normal prudential standards in issuing mortgages and to make loans that they knew could not be paid off by the borrowers. And, of course, leveraging themselves to the sky guaranteed full-fledged disaster

Banks would issue these loans because they knew they could dump them into the secondary market where securitizers would peddle them off to suckers all round the world. This is where Fannie and Freddie came in. They purchased many of the junk mortgages issued by banks in the years 2005 to 2007. According to the Flat-Earthers, this makes Fannie and Freddie the cause of the current crisis.

There is one basic problem with the Flat Earth story: Fannie and Freddie jumped into the junk mortgage market because they were trying to keep pace with the private issuers of mortgage-backed securities. Fannie and Freddie made a conscious decision to dive into the junk in order to protect their market share, which was being seriously eroded by the aggressive tactics of private giants like Citigroup and Merrill Lynch.

The market share of Fannie and Freddie. in the years 2004 to 2007, never came close to its level before the junk market took off. According to data from the Federal Reserve Board, Fannie and Freddie securitized $315.2 billion worth of mortgages in 2002, accounting for 50.1 percent of the new mortgage debt that year. In 2006, they securitized $276.0 billion in mortgages, giving them a market share of just 34.8 percent.

Fannie and Freddie's conduct was despicable. Their decision to dive into the junk certainly contributed to the further expansion of the bubble and worsened the pain from its eventual collapse. However, they were followers, not leaders. They didn't cause the bubble and the subprime craziness. This train had already left the station. Fannie and Freddie's crime was going along for the ride.

Fannie and Freddie could have instead played a positive role in this crisis. Suppose in 2004 or 2005 one of these mortgage giants issued a statement warning of the dangerous over-valuation in many housing markets across the country. Instead of easing mortgage standards, imagine that Fannie or Freddie announced that it was tightening its rules for mortgages in the most over-valued markets, requiring nonborrowed down payments of 20 percent, or even 30 percent, in order to protect against anticipated price declines.

This action would have produced howls of outrage from builders, realtors, and other big beneficiaries of the housing bubble. It also would have led to headlines and possibly some serious analysis of the evidence for a housing bubble. It may have saved the country from much of the pain it is now suffering.

But this sort of step would have required real courage and leadership, traits rarely found in high positions in Washington, or on Wall Street. Fannie and Freddie should be blamed for following the herd off the cliff. They stand out as especially big sheep. But only the Flat-Earthers could make them the main villains in this story.

Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of "The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer" (www.conservativenannystate.org). He also has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues. You can find it at the American Prospect's web site.

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bailout and what it means

THE ABSURD TIMES

Illustration: Here is one view of the would-be VP. See www.whatnowtoons.com

The Absurd Times has done its best to avoid any copyright infractions. Keith has been good enough, for example, to allow us to repost his work, but we would never steal it, even though we don't make a cent with this exercise in futility. However, there are apparently some problems for artists and I'm including Keith's posting about it here. Then I will go on the the bailout:

-----Inline Attachment Follows-----

I'd like to ask you to help cartoonists & Illustrators with an urgent problem. We are asking you to send an email on behalf of the cartoonists. The Senate just passed the "Orphan Works Bill," quickly, behind closed doors and without a vote, through a controversial practice known as "hotlining." The bill rewrites the copyright law in ways that are devastating to cartoonists, artists, writers, photographers and songwriters.

The two artists organizations I'm active in, the National Cartoonists Society and the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, and dozens of other trade organizations, are urging their members to write to their congressmen at this hour, because there is a risk that the House will pass the Senate version of the bill, again without debate and without a vote, by adding it to a larger budget or bailout bill at the end of the current session, in the next few hours.

The Orphan Works bill is being pushed by Google, which plans to catalogue millions of images and doesn't want to deal with the rights of copyright holders. The bill will make it easy for anyone to reprint copyrighted work, without the permission of the copyright holder, and artists will find that it is difficult or impossible to control where their work is reprinted. The bill also imposes new costs and procedures on artists, all to benefit Google.

I'd like to ask everyone who reads my blog, or subscribes to my newsletter, to do the cartoonists a favor by emailing their congressman and asking him or her to oppose the Orphan Works Bill now, by visiting this web site, which helps you to send an automatic email to your congressman. It is quick and easy to send this email, and it would be much appreciated by the desperate cartoonists.

To learn more about the Orphan Works Bill, visit here.

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I've done my best to tolerate this absurdity, honest. From what I can tell, it is just a last minute pillaging of the till by the Bushman. Some articles below are the work of people with more generosity than I have.
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Forwarded Message: Here's How to Fix the Wall Street Mess ...from Michael Moore

Here's How to Fix the Wall Street Mess ...from Michael Moore

Wednesday, October 1, 2008 3:16 PM

From:

"Michael Moore" <maillist@michaelmoore.com>

The richest 400 Americans -- that's right, just four hundred people -- own MORE than the bottom 150 million Americans combined. 400 rich Americans have got more stashed away than half the entire country! Their combined net worth is $1.6 trillion. During the eight years of the Bush Administration, their wealth has increased by nearly $700 billion -- the same amount that they are now demanding we give to them for the "bailout." Why don't they just spend the money they made under Bush to bail themselves out? They'd still have nearly a trillion dollars left over to spread amongst themselves!

Of course, they are not going to do that -- at least not voluntarily. George W. Bush was handed a $127 billion surplus when Bill Clinton left office. Because that money was OUR money and not his, he did what the rich prefer to do -- spend it and never look back. Now we have a $9.5 trillion debt. Why on earth would we even think of giving these robber barons any more of our money?

I would like to propose my own bailout plan. My suggestions, listed below, are predicated on the singular and simple belief that the rich must pull themselves up by their own platinum bootstraps. Sorry, fellows, but you drilled it into our heads one too many times: There... is... no... free... lunch. And thank you for encouraging us to hate people on welfare! So, there will be no handouts from us to you. The Senate, tonight, is going to try to rush their version of a "bailout" bill to a vote. They must be stopped. We did it on Monday with the House, and we can do it again today with the Senate.

It is clear, though, that we cannot simply keep protesting without proposing exactly what it is we think Congress should do. So, after consulting with a number of people smarter than Phil Gramm, here is my proposal, now known as "Mike's Rescue Plan." It has 10 simple, straightforward points. They are:

1. APPOINT A SPECIAL PROSECUTOR TO CRIMINALLY INDICT ANYONE ON WALL STREET WHO KNOWINGLY CONTRIBUTED TO THIS COLLAPSE. Before any new money is expended, Congress must commit, by resolution, to criminally prosecute anyone who had anything to do with the attempted sacking of our economy. This means that anyone who committed insider trading, securities fraud or any action that helped bring about this collapse must go to jail. This Congress must call for a Special Prosecutor who will vigorously go after everyone who created the mess, and anyone else who attempts to scam the public in the future.

2. THE RICH MUST PAY FOR THEIR OWN BAILOUT. They may have to live in 5 houses instead of 7. They may have to drive 9 cars instead of 13. The chef for their mini-terriers may have to be reassigned. But there is no way in hell, after forcing family incomes to go down more than $2,000 dollars during the Bush years, that working people and the middle class are going to fork over one dime to underwrite the next yacht purchase.

If they truly need the $700 billion they say they need, well, here is an easy way they can raise it:

a) Every couple who makes over a million dollars a year and every single taxpayer who makes over $500,000 a year will pay a 10% surcharge tax for five years. (It's the Senator Sanders plan. He's like Colonel Sanders, only he's out to fry the right chickens.) That means the rich will still be paying less income tax than when Carter was president. This will raise a total of $300 billion.

b) Like nearly every other democracy, charge a 0.25% tax on every stock transaction. This will raise more than $200 billion in a year.

c) Because every stockholder is a patriotic American, stockholders will forgo receiving a dividend check for one quarter and instead this money will go the treasury to help pay for the bailout.

d) 25% of major U.S. corporations currently pay NO federal income tax. Federal corporate tax revenues currently amount to 1.7% of the GDP compared to 5% in the 1950s. If we raise the corporate income tax back to the level of the 1950s, that gives us an extra $500 billion.

All of this combined should be enough to end the calamity. The rich will get to keep their mansions and their servants, and our United States government ("COUNTRY FIRST!") will have a little leftover to repair some roads, bridges and schools.

3. BAIL OUT THE PEOPLE LOSING THEIR HOMES, NOT THE PEOPLE WHO WILL BUILD AN EIGHTH HOME. There are 1.3 million homes in foreclosure right now. That is what is at the heart of this problem. So instead of giving the money to the banks as a gift, pay down each of these mortgages by $100,000. Force the banks to renegotiate the mortgage so the homeowner can pay on its current value. To insure that this help does no go to speculators and those who have tried to make money by flipping houses, this bailout is only for people's primary residence. And in return for the $100K paydown on the existing mortgage, the government gets to share in the holding of the mortgage so that it can get some of its money back. Thus, the total initial cost of fixing the mortgage crisis at its roots (instead of with the greedy lenders) is $150 billion, not $700 billion.

And let's set the record straight. People who have defaulted on their mortgages are not "bad risks." They are our fellow Americans, and all they wanted was what we all want and most of us still get: a home to call their own. But during the Bush years, millions of them lost the decent paying jobs they had. Six million fell into poverty. Seven million lost their health insurance. And every one of them saw their real wages go down by $2,000. Those who dare to look down on these Americans who got hit with one bad break after another should be ashamed. We are a better, stronger, safer and happier society when all of our citizens can afford to live in a home that they own.

4. IF YOUR BANK OR COMPANY GETS ANY OF OUR MONEY IN A "BAILOUT," THEN WE OWN YOU. Sorry, that's how it's done. If the bank gives me money so I can buy a house, the bank "owns" that house until I pay it all back -- with interest. Same deal for Wall Street. Whatever money you need to stay afloat, if our government considers you a safe risk -- and necessary for the good of the country -- then you can get a loan, but we will own you. If you default, we will sell you. This is how the Swedish government did it and it worked.

5. ALL REGULATIONS MUST BE RESTORED. THE REAGAN REVOLUTION IS DEAD. This catastrophe happened because we let the fox have the keys to the henhouse. In 1999, Phil Gramm authored a bill to remove all the regulations that governed Wall Street and our banking system. The bill passed and Clinton signed it. Here's what Sen. Phil Gramm, McCain's chief economic advisor, said at the bill signing:

"In the 1930s ... it was believed that government was the answer. It was believed that stability and growth came from government overriding the functioning of free markets.

"We are here today to repeal [that] because we have learned that government is not the answer. We have learned that freedom and competition are the answers. We have learned that we promote economic growth and we promote stability by having competition and freedom.

"I am proud to be here because this is an important bill; it is a deregulatory bill. I believe that that is the wave of the future, and I am awfully proud to have been a part of making it a reality."

This bill must be repealed. Bill Clinton can help by leading the effort for the repeal of the Gramm bill and the reinstating of even tougher regulations regarding our financial institutions. And when they're done with that, they can restore the regulations for the airlines, the inspection of our food, the oil industry, OSHA, and every other entity that affects our daily lives. All oversight provisions for any "bailout" must have enforcement monies attached to them and criminal penalties for all offenders.

6. IF IT'S TOO BIG TO FAIL, THEN THAT MEANS IT'S TOO BIG TO EXIST. Allowing the creation of these mega-mergers and not enforcing the monopoly and anti-trust laws has allowed a number of financial institutions and corporations to become so large, the very thought of their collapse means an even bigger collapse across the entire economy. No one or two companies should have this kind of power. The so-called "economic Pearl Harbor" can't happen when you have hundreds -- thousands -- of institutions where people have their money. When you have a dozen auto companies, if one goes belly-up, we don't face a national disaster. If you have three separately-owned daily newspapers in your town, then one media company can't call all the shots (I know... What am I thinking?! Who reads a paper anymore? Sure glad all those mergers and buyouts left us with a strong and free press!). Laws must be enacted to prevent companies from being so large and dominant that with one slingshot to the eye, the giant falls and dies. And no institution should be allowed to set up money schemes that no one can understand. If you can't explain it in two sentences, you shouldn't be taking anyone's money.

7. NO EXECUTIVE SHOULD BE PAID MORE THAN 40 TIMES THEIR AVERAGE EMPLOYEE, AND NO EXECUTIVE SHOULD RECEIVE ANY KIND OF "PARACHUTE" OTHER THAN THE VERY GENEROUS SALARY HE OR SHE MADE WHILE WORKING FOR THE COMPANY. In 1980, the average American CEO made 45 times what their employees made. By 2003, they were making 254 times what their workers made. After 8 years of Bush, they now make over 400 times what their average employee makes. How this can happen at publicly held companies is beyond reason. In Britain, the average CEO makes 28 times what their average employee makes. In Japan, it's only 17 times! The last I heard, the CEO of Toyota was living the high life in Tokyo. How does he do it on so little money? Seriously, this is an outrage. We have created the mess we're in by letting the people at the top become bloated beyond belief with millions of dollars. This has to stop. Not only should no executive who receives help out of this mess profit from it, but any executive who was in charge of running his company into the ground should be fired before the company receives any help.

8. STRENGTHEN THE FDIC AND MAKE IT A MODEL FOR PROTECTING NOT ONLY PEOPLE'S SAVINGS, BUT ALSO THEIR PENSIONS AND THEIR HOMES. Obama was correct yesterday to propose expanding FDIC protection of people's savings in their banks to $250,000. But this same sort of government insurance must be given to our nation's pension funds. People should never have to worry about whether or not the money they've put away for their old age will be there. This will mean strict government oversight of companies who manage their employees' funds -- or perhaps it means that the companies will have to turn over those funds and their management to the government. People's private retirement funds must also be protected, but perhaps it's time to consider not having one's retirement invested in the casino known as the stock market. Our government should have a solemn duty to guarantee that no one who grows old in this country has to worry about ending up destitute.

9. EVERYBODY NEEDS TO TAKE A DEEP BREATH, CALM DOWN, AND NOT LET FEAR RULE THE DAY. Turn off the TV! We are not in the Second Great Depression. The sky is not falling. Pundits and politicians are lying to us so fast and furious it's hard not to be affected by all the fear mongering. Even I, yesterday, wrote to you and repeated what I heard on the news, that the Dow had the biggest one day drop in its history. Well, that's true in terms of points, but its 7% drop came nowhere close to Black Monday in 1987 when the stock market in one day lost 23% of its value. In the '80s, 3,000 banks closed, but America didn't go out of business. These institutions have always had their ups and downs and eventually it works out. It has to, because the rich do not like their wealth being disrupted! They have a vested interest in calming things down and getting back into the Jacuzzi.

As crazy as things are right now, tens of thousands of people got a car loan this week. Thousands went to the bank and got a mortgage to buy a home. Students just back to college found banks more than happy to put them into hock for the next 15 years with a student loan. Life has gone on. Not a single person has lost any of their money if it's in a bank or a treasury note or a CD. And the most amazing thing is that the American public hasn't bought the scare campaign. The citizens didn't blink, and instead told Congress to take that bailout and shove it. THAT was impressive. Why didn't the population succumb to the fright-filled warnings from their president and his cronies? Well, you can only say 'Saddam has da bomb' so many times before the people realize you're a lying sack of shite. After eight long years, the nation is worn out and simply can't take it any longer.

10. CREATE A NATIONAL BANK, A "PEOPLE'S BANK." If we really are itching to print up a trillion dollars, instead of giving it to a few rich people, why don't we give it to ourselves? Now that we own Freddie and Fannie, why not set up a people's bank? One that can provide low-interest loans for all sorts of people who want to own a home, start a small business, go to school, come up with the cure for cancer or create the next great invention. And now that we own AIG, the country's largest insurance company, let's take the next step and provide health insurance for everyone. Medicare for all. It will save us so much money in the long run. And we won't be 12th on the life expectancy list. We'll be able to have a longer life, enjoying our government-protected pension, and living to see the day when the corporate criminals who caused so much misery are let out of prison so that we can help reacclimate them to civilian life -- a life with one nice home and a gas-free car that was invented with help from the People's Bank.

Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com

P.S. Call your Senators now. Here's a backup link in case we crash that site again. They are going to attempt their own version of the Looting of America tonight. And let your reps know if you agree with my 10-point plan.


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Capitalism Reaches a Crossroads

October 04, 2008 By Carl Bloice
Source: BlackCommentator.com

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'Even now, someone somewhere is penning a book with a snappy title The End of Capitalism,' columnist Philip Stephens, associate editor of the Financial Times wrote recently. Not to worry, he continued, that's not about to happen. However, eight days earlier Martin Wolf, associate editor and chief economics commentator at the same paper observed that what was 'until recently, the brave new financial system is melting away before our eyes.' On the night of September 18 members of Congress were summoned to a Capitol Hill conference room where they were told that if they did not act quickly to approve a radical revamp of how the government deals with the economy, capitalism might indeed collapse. That's before President George W. Bush said, 'If money isn't loosened up, this sucker could go down.'



Not to worry, cautioned the editor of the conservative German newspaper Die Weit. 'These are all trials and crises, but they will not spell the end of America's distinctiveness.'



'The country will never convert to socialism, nor will it become a mega-state. Faced with similar circumstances, that might be the response of the pessimistic Europeans. America's culture of optimism - which all too often gets on the Europeans' nerves because they consider it to be naïve and superficial - also has the power to identify a setback as exactly that and not the end of the world,' the paper editorialized. That was a few days before the U.S. Treasury took responsibility for the well-being of distressed financial institutions all over the world.



No, the U.S. is not about to become socialist any time too soon. That alternative has not been placed before the public in a way that could be considered preferable to what we've got. Besides, a system ceases to be when it is replaced by something else. But with each passing day, as the crisis has deepened, it has become more and more obvious that 'unfettered' capitalism and 'market fundamentalism' and the neo-liberal policies they produce are discredited. Indeed, most of the world had rejected them before the current crisis began.



'The globalization agenda has been closely linked with the market fundamentalists - the ideology of free markets and financial liberalization,' economist Joseph Stiglitz told Nathan Gardels on the Huffington Post recently. 'In this crisis, we see the most market- oriented institutions in the most market-oriented economy failing and running to the government for help.' Everyone in the world will say now that this is the end of market fundamentalism.



'In this sense, the fall of Wall Street is for market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for communism - it tells the world that this way of economic organization turns out not to be sustainable,' said Stiglitz. 'In the end, everyone says, that model doesn't work. This moment is a marker that the claims of financial market liberalization were bogus.'



Conservative commentator and political operative, Newt Gingrich, has come up with the terms 'crony capitalism' and 'bureaucratic capitalism,' both of which he says will be the outcome of the Bush Administration's bailout scheme. The former will mean 'a welfare state for rich investors,' he says, the latter 'salary caps and other government regulatory requirements which would drive the `private' out of `private enterprise'.'



There's a lot of talk out there about the bailout being 'socialism for the rich.' That's all so much seemingly clever rhetoric designed to make a political point, but of no substance. Nothing the Bush Administration is pushing (with the help of a Democratic Congress) bears any resemblance to anything that could remotely be called socialism. In fact, it looks far more like Italy under Mussolini than the USSR under Brezhnev. As truthdig.com columnist Robert Sheer noted last week, 'what is proposed is not the nationalization of private corporations but rather a corporate takeover of government. The marriage of highly concentrated corporate power with an authoritarian state that services the politico-economic elite at the expense of the people is more accurately referred to as `financial fascism'.'



The new Treasury Department fund 'will share many characteristics of the expanding government-sponsored pools known as sovereign funds,' wrote Landon Thomas, Jr. in the New York Times September 23.



'The new fund, assuming it is approved by Congress, could pull the United States deeper into a form of capitalism in which the most powerful financial entities are not risk-happy investment banks, but more cautious state-sponsored entities,' wrote Thomas. 'While not necessarily a third economic way, this general approach presumes that the government - in addition to the private sector - plays a crucial role in deciding how best to deploy a nation's investment capital.'



'This gets to the point of state capitalism and defining what the role of the government is in a free- market economy,' Douglas Rediker, a former investment banker at the New America Foundation in Washington, told Thomas.



'The result of the bailout would be that the government would virtually control many of the largest financial institutions in the country,' wrote Dan La Botz in Monthly Review online. 'The U.S. government and the banks of the country would suddenly be fused - or perhaps entangled would be a better word - into one extremely powerful political-economic entity. While the proposal does not envision state control of the economy as a long-term proposition, merely long enough to save the bankers, still the impact of the current proposals now being debated in Congress will be far-reaching. The American government and the people have suddenly found themselves at a turning point which was not foreseen and for which no one was prepared.'



'If you wanted to devise a name for this approach, you might pick the phrase economist Arnold Kling has used: Progressive Corporatism.,' wrote Times columnist David Brooks the same day. 'We're not entering a phase in which government stands back and lets the chips fall. We're not entering an era when the government pounds the powerful on behalf of the people. We're entering an era of the educated establishment, in which government acts to create a stable - and often oligarchic - framework for capitalist endeavor.'



'After a liberal era and then a conservative era, we're getting a glimpse of what comes next,' wrote Brooks



I can hardy wait.



An inevitable consequence of globalization is that many of the critical problems facing the planet today can only be solved through international cooperation and coordination. These include: climate change and other threats to the biosphere, aids and other infectious diseases, human migration and international finance.



The current economic crisis is an international one yet the recourse chosen by Washington to deal with it globally is to 'press' other countries to adopt measures similar to those adopted in the U.S. Under such circumstances the chance of a collective effort to restructure world capitalism would seem remote, if possible. But the demand for such is out there and how our country responds will go a long way in determining the contours of international affairs for decades to come. One has only to grasp the nature of the remarks at the recent opening of the United National General Assembly to appreciate the seriousness of the challenge.



Last week in New York, one after another, heads-of- state rose to the Assembly rostrum to drive home the message: the 'credit crunch' in the U.S. is much more than a crisis in U.S. banking; it reflects a problem threatening economic devastation across the globe. It requires an international cooperative effort in which diktat, posing as 'leadership', cannot be tolerated. Don't even think about handing the problem to the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. The UN itself should be the arena for countries to discuss a solution for the global financial crisis, said Brazil's President, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva: 'The global nature of this crisis means that the solutions we adopt must also be global, and decided upon within legitimate, trusted multilateral forum, with no impositions.'



Arguably some of the strongest remarks to the UN came from the leaders of Latin American countries but the most fundamental challenges came from traditional U.S. allies such as France and Germany. These are capitalist countries and for the foreseeable future will remain so. But they have a strikingly different view of how the international economy should function.



German chancellor, Angela Merkel, even revealed that an attempt had been made to enlist Washington in a collective effort to head off the crisis. At last year's meeting of the major industrial powers, she said, she had - in the world of the New York Times - 'strongly urged both the United States and Britain to be more rigorous in supervising financial activities, and even offered specific proposals to be applied to banks and other institutions.' But the U.S. was unresponsive, she said, while seeming 'to express a certain exasperation that the United States was now asking Europe for help, after inflicting damage on the rest of the world that could have been avoided.'



'At the moment, I don't think Japan needs to launch a program similar to that of the United States,' Japanese Vice Finance Minister Kazuyuki Sugimoto told reporters in Tokyo, while the European Union let it be known that its members would not be putting up money to rescue banks. 'This crisis originated in the



US and is mainly hitting the US,' German Finance Minister Steinbeck said last week. In Europe and Germany, such a package would be 'neither sensible nor necessary.'



The U.S. 'has not only turned away from decades of rhetoric about the virtues of the free market and the dangers of government intervention, but it has also probably undercut future American efforts to promote such policies abroad,' wrote the New York Times' Nelson Schwartz from Paris September 18. And most of the other governments are none to happy about it. Japanese commentators were quick to note that the Treasury bailout is precisely what Washington told them not to try when that country faced an economic crisis only a few years ago. (A condition of help for South Korea when it faced an economic crisis in the 90s was that Seoul not bail out banks and other failing enterprises.)



Last Friday, editors of the center-right German newspaper Allegemeine Zeitung compared the U.S. financial crisis to 911 saying 'this time, the attack on all-American doctrines is not the work of some foreign enemy. It comes from within, from the depths of the system. Largely unobstructed by its own state controls, American capitalism has created its own suicide bomber whose explosives - derivatives - have had an even greater effect than the flying bombs of the jihadists. The whole world - and not just New York - has a new ground zero now - Wall Street.'



French political leaders immediately seized on the latest bailout moves to trumpet their own version of 'economic patriotism.' 'We're not going to accept to pay for the broken dishes of a failed regulation' and a 'corruption of capitalism,' said French Prime Minister Francois Fillon. Nicolas Sarkozy has called for a world to 'learn the lessons of the worst financial crisis since the 1930s.' He proposed to 'moralize' capitalism, freeing it from speculators whom he labeled 'the new terrorists.' Last week, as President Bush went on television to admit the crisis is grave, Sarkozy stoutly defended capitalism but observed that 'A certain idea of globalization is drawing to a close with the end of a financial capitalism that had imposed its logic on the whole economy and contributed to perverting it.'



'The crisis is not a crisis of capitalism,' said Sarkozy. 'It is the crisis of a system that is far from the values of capitalism and betrayed capitalism.'



In 2006, long before there was any acknowledgement of the chaos to come (I put it that way because working people in the U.S. were already facing home foreclosures),when the world's elite gathered at Davos, Switzerland, chancellor Merkel had observed that 'What we have is a completely new balance of power in the world today.'



That too was evident in the General Assembly debate. In prior years no one would have expected Latin American governments to openly challenge Washington and Wall Street's conduct in the international economy. However, over a brief recent period, left-leaning political forces have taken power electorally in a number of countries, having in common a rejection of the exploitative policies of the World Bank and IMF, and the influence of the same 'market fundamentalists' that the Asians are repulsing and who have led the U.S., itself, into the present economic cul-de-sac.



No one was surprised that Cuban first vice-president Jose Ramon Machado Ventura would tell the UN that the drive for profits was increasing poverty and that the current crisis threatened the 'existence of mankind.' 'Fabulous fortunes cannot be wasted while millions are starving and dying of curable diseases,' he said. 'For a large part of the non-aligned nations, the situation is becoming unsustainable. Our nations have paid and will continue to pay the cost and consequences of the irrationality, wastefulness and speculation of a few countries in the...north.'



'The prevailing world order, unjust and uncontained, must be replaced,' Machado Ventura said.



'We don't want to conceive of the idea that the rescue of the dignity of the world's poor does not have the same priority or the same urgency of saving the institutions that operate the most powerful financial centre in the world,' said Dominican Republic president Leonel Fernandez. 'We need an international financial plan that is as urgent and as bold as the one to save Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch and American International Group.' Fernandez added that while $700 billion is being set aside to rescue U.S. financial institutions, for something like $50 billion millions around the world could be spared a miserable existence.



'We're not going to accept to pay for the broken dishes of a failed regulation' and a 'corruption of capitalism,' said French Prime Minister Francois Fillon. Sarkozy called for a world to 'learn the lessons of the worst financial crisis since the 1930s.' 'Let's create a regulated capitalism,' he said.



On September 24 in Berlin, German Finance Steinbruck repeated Merkel's charge that Washington had, last year, resisted specific calls for regulations in the financial marketplace. 'Crisis management alone will not rebuild the lost confidence,' he said. 'We must civilize financial markets, and not just through moral appeals against excess and speculation. Self-regulation is no longer sufficient.' The US belief in 'laisser- faire capitalism; the notion that markets should be as free as possible from regulation; these arguments were wrong and dangerous,' he said. 'This largely under- regulated system is collapsing today.'



Steinbeck went on to propose new regulations and said that amid the current economic crisis the US is poised to lose its role as a global financial 'superpower.' The new world will become 'multipolar' with the emergence of stronger, better capitalized centers in Asia and Europe, he said.



Meanwhile, Oskar Lafontaine, leader of Germany's fast growing and increasingly influential Left Party, said the world is confronted with more than a banking or economic crisis and - in the words of Der Spiegel - 'but rather one of the entire intellectual and moral direction of Western society.' 'We no longer have a social market economy because of the regimes of the international financial markets,' Lafontaine said the consequence of which is increased privatization of the social services and a threat to the retirement security of millions of people. Lafontaine said the Left party wants the re-creation of a Bretton Woods-style system of foreign exchange controls with fixed trading bands, controls on international capital flows and on financial products.



'We believe that financial products should be forced to get official stamps of approval just like pharmaceutical products,' Lafontaine, the former head of the country's Social Democratic Party, said. 'Because the bitter truth is that many extremely greedy bankers don't even understand themselves what they've done. These are people who started something without knowing what they were doing and it's ended in disaster.'



'When enough banks have been nationalized or gone bust, when the last reputations have been properly shredded, and when prices of Fifth Avenue apartments and Mayfair town houses have fallen finally to earth, politicians are going to have to think hard about the lessons of the financial crash of 2008,' wrote Stephens of the Financial Times. 'Even now, someone somewhere is penning The End of Capitalism. Experience tells us snappy book titles should be treated with caution. The global financial system will never be the same again. But just as history survived the collapse of communism, so the market economy will weather the demise of Bear Stearns, Lehman, Merrill Lynch and HBOS.'



'The credit crunch and the financial firestorm have also provided a neat metaphor for the big shift in economic power in the world,' writes Stephens. He goes on to endorse the call for 'more global governance: credible international rules.'



'Capitalism will survive these financial shocks,' said Stephens. Probably it will; in any case it's good to have faith.



On Monday, the House of Representatives voted down the final draft of the bailout plan hurriedly crafted by the Administration and Congressional leaders from the two major parties. This set the stage for what was certain to be desperate attempts to put together a compromise that could win legislative approval. This takes place against a backdrop of widespread public opposition to the original plan and ever greater turmoil in the foreign money markets and on Wall Street.



Meanwhile, the dangers and challenges over the next few weeks and months are enormous. On the world scene, the U.S. could join in an international - and more democratic - effort at reconstructing capitalism in an effort to save it, or the White House - whoever lives there - and the Congress could lead us along a path of international isolation in which the rest of the world goes about its business, leaving us in economic mire. On the home front, the policymakers could enshrine a new form of corporate and more authoritarian capitalism or enact policies bent toward greater equality, solidarity and social and economic justice (things real socialists have never ceased advocating). The latter is what we should be insisting upon.


BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member Carl Bloice is a writer in San Francisco, a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and formerly worked for a healthcare union.

****************************************************

Bailout Debate

October, 04 2008By Danny Schechter
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The Queston That Should Be At The Heart Of The Bailout Debate: Will The Paulson Plan Work Or Potentially Make Things Worse?

Most of the people who oppose the bailout do so for ideological reasons. Conservative Republicans fear the advance of socialism in the form of government intervention. They picture themselves as saving the Republic from collectivist marauders out to destroy the free market. And that includes Henry Paulson the former head of Goldman Sachs who came to government from Wall Street and still embodies its values.

Democrats are divided too. Some say the voting for the bill while holding their noses. Others say they have to "do something" or else, and have no alternative plan. Still others see it as rewarding the people who created the crisis.

What the media often misses are the people who argue that the measure is unlikely to restore confidence or get credit flowing again. These people are actually pragmatists and work in the financial industry. In large part because politics is polarized along partisan lines, their non-partisan assessments are not taken seriously

Others don't really analyze what's in the bill and present it in symbolic terms as a needed solution without noting that in just a week it went from just three pages to over 451.

Actually, since everyone agrees that the crisis is unlikely to go away anytime soon, we have to look at more than one bill.

As for the insiders, there's David Tice, a respected Denver investment advisor who told Investment News: "We don't believe these bailout packages will fix the Wall Street credit mechanism," he said. "Credit will be restrictive no matter what happens with the bailout package."

Tice is projecting pain, doom and gloom for the next five years. The business outlet reported, "Mr. Tice provided a litany of reasons why he believes the U.S. economy is headed toward recession, if not a full-blown depression."

The bill the Treasury Department insisted had to be simple and "clean" and could not allow the adding of provisions for bankruptcy reform ended up getting vast tax breaks tacked on as Bloomberg reported, "The U.S. Senate approved tax cuts valued at more than $100 billion, including a host of alternative energy credits and dozens of breaks for businesses and individuals, as part of its $700 billion bank rescue bill."

Websites like Naked Capitalism were filled with contributions by economists and traders pointing to technical flaws in the plan that will undermine its effectiveness.

Example: "I think it's very telling that in two days of hearings and two weeks of discussion we have yet to see *any* detailed mechanism for how Paulson's plan will increase the supply of, say, inventory loans. It's not that every economist in the world is an idiot, it's just not going to help. I think people have fallen into the fallacy that if it costs a lot it must be valuable. Paulson's plan falls into the category of very expensive way to hurt ourselves. (As for its cost, A treasury official was pressed on why they sought $700 billion: "where did that number come from, a study or data point?" No, he replied, we just wanted it to be big!")

Hmmmm..

As for the bill itself, listen to Ralph Nader's dissection, even if you think he's a hasbeen.

"The revised bailout legislation is the same $700 billion piece of burnt toast, with some window dressing, sugar coating, and $150 billion of pork tax cuts covering everything from casinos to coal.

But this isn't even the main course that Senate is serving up for Congress on Friday. The main course is on page 92 of the 451 page document:

BORROWING LIMITS TEMPORARILY LIFTED. - During the period beginning on the date of enactment of this Act and ending on December 31, 2009, the Board of Directors of the Corporation may request from the Secretary, and the Secretary shall approve, a loan or loans in an amount or amounts necessary to carry out this subsection, without regard to the limitations on such borrowing under section 14(a) and 15(c) of the Federal Deposit Insurance Act (12 U.S.C. 1824(a), 1825(c)).

Translation: Bush, McCain, and Obama want Congress to co-sign off on the mother of all blank checks, paving the way for a sinking dollar and higher interest rates."

So before you turn the bailout into an argument between the sensible and responsible versus the emotional and angry, look at the details, consider the costs and ask why you are persuaded it will have the effect its proponents claim. TED spread is at a new record. Bad news

On Friday morning, the economist Paul Krugman sounded like a desperado:

"Double plus ungood news on multiple fronts this morning. The credit crunch is getting worse: LIBOR jumped again, the on employment: payrolls down 159,000, average work week down, official unemployment rate flat at 6.1 percent but broad measure (U6) up from 10.7 to 11.

We are going over the edge."

China's Premier Wen Jiabao told China Daily on Friday, "I'm very concerned." He didn't seem to buy into all the fear mongering, asking: "What is the actual degree of the problem? How will develop? What will be the effect on the US and the world." His advice: "Pluck up one's courage and be confident as these are more important than gold or currency.,

Ok, I am "plucked," even as they plunder on, but we still don't know with any certainty if the ever expanding bailout will straighten a system out of wack, create jobs, restore capitalism and make it all ok again? Remember the NY Times first described the bailout as a "hail Mary play" in which you throw the football and pray. Has it come to that?

What if all of this "debate" is just more sound and fury, signifying less than meets the eye? Markets are still deeply "stressed" and its unlikely that the solution our Congress is backing will solve anything.

Danny Schechter is the author of PLUNDER: Investigating Our Economic Calamity (Cosimo-Newsdissector.com/Plunder) and the director of IN DEBT WE TRUST the film that warned of the crisis. (indebtwetrust.com)

Comments to Dissector@mediachannel.org

Understanding McCain

THE ABSURD TIMES

Illustration: We welcome back our illustrator. He has escaped the wind swept deserts of the southwest, pulled the cactus pins out of his feet, returned to north of the Mason-Dixon line, eaten some real food and quenched his thirst and is ready for action.

About the only way to get an idea of what McCain stands for a believes is to quote him and paraphrase his own statements and those of his own trusted advisors.

We are only in an "intellectual depression."
The fundamentals of our economy are strong.
I don't know much about economics.
We are a nation of whiners.
The workers of the United States are the fundamentals of our society.
I am going to clean up Washington by kicking out the lobbists, except those who run my campaign (most of them).
Obama has been in Washington too long.
I am a Maverick -- just like James Garner.
Our economy is in a mess.
I know how to be President of the United States because I was a POW.
I will fire the head of the SEC. [That would be illegal]
Sarah Palin is the most qualified person in the United States to be President if something happens to me.
Bomb, bomb, bomb -- bomb, bomb Iran.
(Just kidding)
Al Kyda is trained in Iran.
Did I mention I'm a maverick?
I am going to learn how to use the google.
I will learn how to use the e-mail.
"John McCain helped invent the Blackberry for America." [One of his spokesman -- the product was invented in Canada.]
Yes, I have several houses, but when I was a POW I didn't even have a chair.

You know, this is getting pretty depressing, so I'll stop here.
Below is an article that makes a bit of sense out of our economic situation:


************************************************************************

Wall Street and Washington

How the Rules of the Game Have Changed

September 21, 2008 By Steve Fraser
Source: TomDispatch

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What is Washington to do as the financial system collapses? Clearly, stark differences in approach as well as in public policy have already emerged. Bail-out Bear Stearns and pump up the brokerage and investment business with new lines of credit. Nationalize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on the backs of the taxpayer -- but let Lehman drown. Tell the financial community to save itself, after which Bank of America salutes and buys Merrill Lynch. Then, the Fed gets cold feet and decides it can't let an institution the size of the insurance giant AIG go under as well. Washington is left staring into the abyss. The old rules no longer apply.

And that's the point. At moments of crisis since the mid-1980s, the relationship between Washington and Wall Street has changed fundamentally, at least when compared to anything that would have been recognizable in the previous century. As a result, the road ahead is dark and unknown.

During the nineteenth century, Washington was generally happy to do favors for Wall Street financiers. Railroad tycoons, who often used those railroads as vehicles of extravagant speculation, enjoyed subsidies, tax exemptions, loans, and a whole smorgasbord of financial fringe benefits supplied by pliable Congressmen and Senators (not to mention armadas of state and local officials).

Since the political establishment was committed to laissez-faire, legerdemain by greedy bankers was immune from public scrutiny, which was also useful (for them). But when panic struck, the mighty, as well as the meek, went down with the ship. Washington felt no obligation to rush to the rescue of the reckless. The bracing, if merciless, discipline of the free market did its work and there was blood on the floor.

By early in the twentieth century, however, the savage anarchy of the financial marketplace had been at least partially domesticated under the reign of the greatest financier of them all, J.P. Morgan. Ever since the panic of 1907, the legend of Morgan's heroics in single-handedly stopping a meltdown that threatened to become worldwide, the iron discipline he imposed on more timorous bankers, has been told and re-told each time an analogous implosion looms.

Indeed, last week's news carried its fair share of 1907-Morgan stories, trailing in their wake an implicit wistfulness. They all asked, in effect: Where is the old boy when we need him?

Back then, with Morgan performing his role as the nation's unofficial private central banker, Teddy Roosevelt's administration continued to keep its distance from Wall Street, still unready to offer salvation to desperate financial oligarchs. Not normally chummy with Morgan and his crowd, Roosevelt did cheer from the sidelines as the über-banker performed his rescue operation.

As it turned out, though, the days of Washington agnosticism about Wall Street were numbered. The economy had become too complex and delicate a mechanism and, in 1907, had come far too close to meltdown -- even Morgan's efforts couldn't prevent several years of recession -- to leave financial matters entirely in the hands of the private sector.

First came the Federal Reserve. It was established in 1913 under President Woodrow Wilson as a quasi-public authority meant to regulate the country's credit markets -- albeit one heavily influenced by the viewpoints and interests of the country's principal bankers. That worked well enough until the Great Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed and lasted until World War II. The depth of the country's trauma in those long years vastly expanded the scope of Washington's involvement in the financial marketplace.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal did, as a start, engage in some bail-out operations. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation, actually created by President Herbert Hoover, continued to rescue major railroads and other key businesses, while some of the New Deal's efforts to help homeowners also rewarded real estate interests. The main emphasis, however, now switched to regulation. The Glass-Steagall Banking Act, the two laws of 1933 and 1934 regulating the stock exchange, the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other similar measures subjected the financial sector to fairly rigorous public supervision.

This lasted for at least two political generations. Wall Street, after all, had been convicted in the court of public opinion of reckless, incompetent, self-interested, even felonious behavior with consequences so devastating for the rest of the country that government was licensed to make sure it didn't happen again.

The undoing of that New Deal regulatory regime, and its replacement, largely under Republican administrations (although Glass-Steagall was repealed on Clinton's watch), with what some have called the "socialization of risk" has contributed in a major way to the mess we're in today. Beginning most emphatically with the massive bail-out of the savings and loan industry in the late 1980s, Washington committed itself, at least under conditions of acute crisis, to off-loading the risks taken by major financial institutions, no matter how irrationally speculative and wasteful, onto the backs of the American taxpaying public.

Despite free market/anti-big-government rhetoric, real-life Washington has tacitly acknowledged the degree to which our national economy has become dependent on the financial sector (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate -- or FIRE). It will do whatever it takes to keep it afloat.

This applies not only to particular institutions like Bear Stearns, or even to mortgage mega-firms like Fannie and Freddie, but to finance in general. When it seemed necessary, public monies were indeed funneled in the general direction of the banking/brokerage community to shore up the whole rickety structure. This allowed one burst bubble -- the dot-com debacle -- to be replaced by another, namely our late, lamented mortgage/collaterized-debt-obligation bonanza, just now dramatically going down the tubes.

Backstopping the present bail-out is the ever-credulous, put-upon American public with its presumably inexhaustible resources. Even while Washington was instituting the periodic "socialization" of bad debts, it was systematically abandoning the New Deal's commitment to regulation. That, of course, was in the very period when financial markets became ever more arcane, ever less comprehensible even to their Frankenstein-ian inventors, and ever more in need of monitoring. So the "socialization of risk" was accompanied by the "privatization of reward," which now is likely to prove a truly deadly combination.

That the crisis has now reached a newly terrifying stage is suggested by Washington's sudden willingness to depart from the new orthodoxy and let the huge investment bank, Lehman Brothers, go under. Some may see in this a steely return to a laissez-faire faith. More likely, it represents wholesale confusion on the part of Bush administration and Federal Reserve policymakers about what to do, even as all endangered businesses have come to take it for granted that Washington will toss them a life-preserver when they need it.

The times call for a new departure. The next administration, which will surely enter office under the greatest economic pressure in memory, must confront reality. The financial system is out of control and has led the economy into a wildly turbulent sea of heavily leveraged speculation.

It's time for a reversal of course. Stringent re-regulation of FIRE is not enough anymore. Washington's mission may, at this late date, be an even greater one than Roosevelt's New Deal faced. The government must figure out how to deploy its power to shift the flow of investment capital out of the mine-fields of speculative paper transactions and back into productive channels that will help meet the material needs of American society. Real value must be created in place of chimeras. In the meantime, we all have ringside seats -- in fact, far too close to the action for comfort -- as another gilded age is ending. What comes after is, in part, up to us.

Steve Fraser is working on a book about the two gilded ages. A TomDispatch regular and co-director of the American Empire Project series at Metropolitan Books, he is the author of, among other works, the recently published Wall Street: America's Dream Palace.

[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing, co-founder of the American Empire Project, author of The End of Victory Culture, and editor of The World According to Tomdispatch: America in the New Age of Empire.]

Various Forms of Fascism

THE ABSURD TIMES




Illustration: Our illustrator has returned from the wilds of Red-States and parts unknown, picked the cacti out of his feet, and rejoined us. He doesn't have magazines yet, but he is doing a great job of finding things I never seem to run into. Oh, yes, as I once was into physique training, I can say that the above is hardly her body (it's too defined), but the point gets through. There seems to be one of her in a bathing suit in Kuwait with the Alaska National Guard carrying a rifle. I dunno. I did hear one good line: "There are more holes in her speech than in a Moose in Alaska." I don't want to sound sexist, so I will say that there is a nice body in the pic.









I notice all Pilan could do at their first stop in small town Wisconsin
was repeat her speech word for word. And she's avoiding the talking
heads this week end to see her son off to Iraq, so they say. Maybe
they're afraid she'll -what's that word?-misspeak herself, so she's in
seclusion while they do an accelerated tool job on her
pol-speakability.
What I dislike about this country's mentality is summed up in the way
they change their tune, ie: The war in Iraq is illegal! (yes but now we
are winning). Oh, well then it's OK.
******************

AFTER WRONGFUL RNC ARRESTS, DEMOCRACY NOW! VOWS TO CONTINUE REPORTING, UNABATED AND UNEMBEDDED

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We hope you had a chance to tune in to Democracy Now!'s extended coverage of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions over the past two weeks. We grilled politicians with tough questions and exposed the backroom corporate suites. We deployed our reporters into the protest-filled streets to broadcast voices of the silenced majority.

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This week's arrests of journalists including Democracy Now!'s own Amy Goodman, Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar are chilling examples of how police targeted journalists during the RNC in St. Paul. As you probably know, Amy has been charged with a misdemeanor for intervening to stop the wrongful arrests of her colleagues who face pending felony charges for simply carrying out their journalistic duties.

The world watched as the Twin Cities Police trampled the first amendment. The YouTube video of Amy's arrest has been viewed more than 750,000 times. It was the most watched YouTube video on Tuesday. The story of journalist arrests and charges was covered by media outlets from the LA Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, San Francisco Guardian, Philadelphia Daily News, Denver Post, Associated Press, Editor & Publisher, Salon.com, as well as by local and public radio stations, and by political and news bloggers around the world.

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Video of DN! Arrests & Action Alert
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*********************************


A History of Zionism

Zionist Nationalist Myth Of Enforced Exile

Israel deliberately forgets its history

September 06, 2008 By Schlomo Sand
Source: Le Monde diplomatique

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An Israeli historian suggests the diaspora was the consequence, not of the expulsion of the Hebrews from Palestine, but of proselytising across north Africa, southern Europe and the Middle East.

Every Israeli knows that he or she is the direct and exclusive descendant of a Jewish people which has existed since it received the Torah (1) in Sinai. According to this myth, the Jews escaped from Egypt and settled in the Promised Land, where they built the glorious kingdom of David and Solomon, which subsequently split into the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. They experienced two exiles: after the destruction of the first temple, in the 6th century BC, and of the second temple, in 70 AD.

Two thousand years of wandering brought the Jews to Yemen, Morocco, Spain, Germany, Poland and deep into Russia. But, the story goes, they always managed to preserve blood links between their scattered communities. Their uniqueness was never compromised.

At the end of the 19th century conditions began to favour their return to their ancient homeland. If it had not been for the Nazi genocide, millions of Jews would have fulfilled the dream of 20 centuries and repopulated Eretz Israel, the biblical land of Israel. Palestine, a virgin land, had been waiting for its original inhabitants to return and awaken it. It belonged to the Jews, rather than to an Arab minority that had no history and had arrived there by chance. The wars in which the wandering people reconquered their land were just; the violent opposition of the local population was criminal.

This interpretation of Jewish history was developed as talented, imaginative historians built on surviving fragments of Jewish and Christian religious memory to construct a continuous genealogy for the Jewish people. Judaism's abundant historiography encompasses many different approaches.

But none have ever questioned the basic concepts developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Discoveries that might threaten this picture of a linear past were marginalised. The national imperative rejected any contradiction of or deviation from the dominant story. University departments exclusively devoted to "the history of the Jewish people", as distinct from those teaching what is known in Israel as general history, made a significant contribution to this selective vision. The debate on what constitutes Jewishness has obvious legal implications, but historians ignored it: as far as they are concerned, any descendant of the people forced into exile 2,000 years ago is a Jew.

Nor did these official investigators of the past join the controversy provoked by the "new historians" from the late 1980s. Most of the limited number of participants in this public debate were from other disciplines or non-academic circles: sociologists, orientalists, linguists, geographers, political scientists, literary academics and archaeologists developed new perspectives on the Jewish and Zionist past. Departments of Jewish history remained defensive and conservative, basing themselves on received ideas. While there have been few significant developments in national history over the past 60 years (a situation unlikely to change in the short term), the facts that have emerged face any honest historian with fundamental questions.

Founding myths shaken

Is the Bible a historical text? Writing during the early half of the 19th century, the first modern Jewish historians, such as Isaak Markus Jost (1793-1860) and Leopold Zunz (1794-1886), did not think so. They regarded the Old Testament as a theological work reflecting the beliefs of Jewish religious communities after the destruction of the first temple. It was not until the second half of the century that Heinrich Graetz (1817-91) and others developed a "national" vision of the Bible and transformed Abraham's journey to Canaan, the flight from Egypt and the united kingdom of David and Solomon into an authentic national past. By constant repetition, Zionist historians have subsequently turned these Biblical "truths" into the basis of national education.

But during the 1980s an earthquake shook these founding myths. The discoveries made by the "new archaeology" discredited a great exodus in the 13th century BC. Moses could not have led the Hebrews out of Egypt into the Promised Land, for the good reason that the latter was Egyptian territory at the time. And there is no trace of either a slave revolt against the pharaonic empire or of a sudden conquest of Canaan by outsiders.

Nor is there any trace or memory of the magnificent kingdom of David and Solomon. Recent discoveries point to the existence, at the time, of two small kingdoms: Israel, the more powerful, and Judah, the future Judea. The general population of Judah did not go into 6th century BC exile: only its political and intellectual elite were forced to settle in Babylon. This decisive encounter with Persian religion gave birth to Jewish monotheism.

Then there is the question of the exile of 70 AD. There has been no real research into this turning point in Jewish history, the cause of the diaspora. And for a simple reason: the Romans never exiled any nation from anywhere on the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean. Apart from enslaved prisoners, the population of Judea continued to live on their lands, even after the destruction of the second temple. Some converted to Christianity in the 4th century, while the majority embraced Islam during the 7th century Arab conquest.

Most Zionist thinkers were aware of this: Yitzhak Ben Zvi, later president of Israel, and David Ben Gurion, its first prime minister, accepted it as late as 1929, the year of the great Palestinian revolt. Both stated on several occasions that the peasants of Palestine were the descendants of the inhabitants of ancient Judea (2).

Proselytising zeal

But if there was no exile after 70 AD, where did all the Jews who have populated the Mediterranean since antiquity come from? The smokescreen of national historiography hides an astonishing reality. From the Maccabean revolt of the mid-2nd century BC to the Bar Kokhba revolt of the 2nd century AD, Judaism was the most actively proselytising religion. The Judeo-Hellenic Hasmoneans forcibly converted the Idumeans of southern Judea and the Itureans of Galilee and incorporated them into the people of Israel. Judaism spread across the Middle East and round the Mediterranean. The 1st century AD saw the emergence in modern Kurdistan of the Jewish kingdom of Adiabene, just one of many that converted.

The writings of Flavius Josephus are not the only evidence of the proselytising zeal of the Jews. Horace, Seneca, Juvenal and Tacitus were among the Roman writers who feared it. The Mishnah and the Talmud (3) authorised conversion, even if the wise men of the Talmudic tradition expressed reservations in the face of the mounting pressure from Christianity.

Although the early 4th century triumph of Christianity did not mark the end of Jewish expansion, it relegated Jewish proselytism to the margins of the Christian cultural world. During the 5th century, in modern Yemen, a vigorous Jewish kingdom emerged in Himyar, whose descendants preserved their faith through the Islamic conquest and down to the present day. Arab chronicles tell of the existence, during the 7th century, of Judaised Berber tribes; and at the end of the century the legendary Jewish queen Dihya contested the Arab advance into northwest Africa. Jewish Berbers participated in the conquest of the Iberian peninsula and helped establish the unique symbiosis between Jews and Muslims that characterised Hispano-Arabic culture.

The most significant mass conversion occurred in the 8th century, in the massive Khazar kingdom between the Black and Caspian seas. The expansion of Judaism from the Caucasus into modern Ukraine created a multiplicity of communities, many of which retreated from the 13th century Mongol invasions into eastern Europe. There, with Jews from the Slavic lands to the south and from what is now modern Germany, they formed the basis of Yiddish culture (4).

Prism of Zionism

Until about 1960 the complex origins of the Jewish people were more or less reluctantly acknowledged by Zionist historiography. But thereafter they were marginalised and finally erased from Israeli public memory. The Israeli forces who seized Jerusalem in 1967 believed themselves to be the direct descendents of the mythic kingdom of David rather than - God forbid - of Berber warriors or Khazar horsemen. The Jews claimed to constitute a specific ethnic group that had returned to Jerusalem, its capital, from 2,000 years of exile and wandering.

This monolithic, linear edifice is supposed to be supported by biology as well as history. Since the 1970s supposedly scientific research, carried out in Israel, has desperately striven to demonstrate that Jews throughout the world are closely genetically related.

Research into the origins of populations now constitutes a legitimate and popular field in molecular biology and the male Y chromosome has been accorded honoured status in the frenzied search for the unique origin of the "chosen people". The problem is that this historical fantasy has come to underpin the politics of identity of the state of Israel. By validating an essentialist, ethnocentric definition of Judaism it encourages a segregation that separates Jews from non-Jews - whether Arabs, Russian immigrants or foreign workers.

Sixty years after its foundation, Israel refuses to accept that it should exist for the sake of its citizens. For almost a quarter of the population, who are not regarded as Jews, this is not their state legally. At the same time, Israel presents itself as the homeland of Jews throughout the world, even if these are no longer persecuted refugees, but the full and equal citizens of other countries.

A global ethnocracy invokes the myth of the eternal nation, reconstituted on the land of its ancestors, to justify internal discrimination against its own citizens. It will remain difficult to imagine a new Jewish history while the prism of Zionism continues to fragment everything into an ethnocentric spectrum. But Jews worldwide have always tended to form religious communities, usually by conversion; they cannot be said to share an ethnicity derived from a unique origin and displaced over 20 centuries of wandering.

The development of historiography and the evolution of modernity were consequences of the invention of the nation state, which preoccupied millions during the 19th and 20th centuries. The new millennium has seen these dreams begin to shatter.

And more and more academics are analysing, dissecting and deconstructing the great national stories, especially the myths of common origin so dear to chroniclers of the past.

Shlomo Sand is professor of history at Tel Aviv university and the author of Comment le people juif fut inventé (Fayard, Paris, 2008)

________________________________________________________

(1) The Torah, from the Hebrew root yara (to teach) is the founding text of Judaism. It consists of the first five books of the Old Testament (the Pentateuch): Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.

(2) See David Ben Gurion and Yitzhak Ben Zvi, Eretz Israel in the past and present, 1918 (in Yiddish), and Jerusalem, 1980 (in Hebrew); Yitzhak Ben Zvi, Our population in the country, Executive Committee of the Union for Youth and the Jewish National Fund, Warsaw, 1929 (in Hebrew).

(3) The Mishnah, regarded as the first work of rabbinic literature, was drawn up around 200 AD. The Talmud is a synthesis of rabbinic discussions on the law, customs and history of the Jews. The Palestinian Talmud was written between the 3rd and 5th centuries; the Babylonian Talmud was compiled at the end of the 5th century.

(4) Yiddish, spoken by the Jews of eastern Europe, was a Germano-Slavic language incorporating Hebrew words.

Translated by Donald Hounam

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Amy Goodman on Her Arrest, and a comment

Why We Were Falsely Arrested

September 05, 2008 By Amy Goodman
Source: Truthdig

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ST. PAUL, Minn.—Government crackdowns on journalists are a true threat to democracy. As the Republican National Convention meets in St. Paul, Minn., this week, police are systematically targeting journalists. I was arrested with my two colleagues, "Democracy Now!" producers Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar, while reporting on the first day of the RNC. I have been wrongly charged with a misdemeanor. My co-workers, who were simply reporting, may be charged with felony riot.

The Democratic and Republican national conventions have become very expensive and protracted acts of political theater, essentially four-day-long advertisements for the major presidential candidates. Outside the fences, they have become major gatherings for grass-roots movements—for people to come, amidst the banners, bunting, flags and confetti, to express the rights enumerated in the Constitution's First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Behind all the patriotic hyperbole that accompanies the conventions, and the thousands of journalists and media workers who arrive to cover the staged events, there are serious violations of the basic right of freedom of the press. Here on the streets of St. Paul, the press is free to report on the official proceedings of the RNC, but not to report on the police violence and mass arrests directed at those who have come to petition their government, to protest.

It was Labor Day, and there was an anti-war march, with a huge turnout, with local families, students, veterans and people from around the country gathered to oppose the war. The protesters greatly outnumbered the Republican delegates.

There was a positive, festive feeling, coupled with a growing anxiety about the course that Hurricane Gustav was taking, and whether New Orleans would be devastated anew. Later in the day, there was a splinter march. The police—clad in full body armor, with helmets, face shields, batons and canisters of pepper spray—charged. They forced marchers, onlookers and working journalists into a nearby parking lot, then surrounded the people and began handcuffing them.

Nicole was videotaping. Her tape of her own violent arrest is chilling. Police in riot gear charged her, yelling, "Get down on your face." You hear her voice, clearly and repeatedly announcing "Press! Press! Where are we supposed to go?" She was trapped between parked cars. The camera drops to the pavement amidst Nicole's screams of pain. Her face was smashed into the pavement, and she was bleeding from the nose, with the heavy officer with a boot or knee on her back. Another officer was pulling on her leg. Sharif was thrown up against the wall and kicked in the chest, and he was bleeding from his arm.

I was at the Xcel Center on the convention floor, interviewing delegates. I had just made it to the Minnesota delegation when I got a call on my cell phone with news that Sharif and Nicole were being bloody arrested, in every sense. Filmmaker Rick Rowley of Big Noise Films and I raced on foot to the scene. Out of breath, we arrived at the parking lot. I went up to the line of riot police and asked to speak to a commanding officer, saying that they had arrested accredited journalists.

Within seconds, they grabbed me, pulled me behind the police line and forcibly twisted my arms behind my back and handcuffed me, the rigid plastic cuffs digging into my wrists. I saw Sharif, his arm bloody, his credentials hanging from his neck. I repeated we were accredited journalists, whereupon a Secret Service agent came over and ripped my convention credential from my neck. I was taken to the St. Paul police garage where cages were set up for protesters. I was charged with obstruction of a peace officer. Nicole and Sharif were taken to jail, facing riot charges.

The attack on and arrest of me and the "Democracy Now!" producers was not an isolated event. A video group called I-Witness Video was raided two days earlier. Another video documentary group, the Glass Bead Collective, was detained, with its computers and video cameras confiscated. On Wednesday, I-Witness Video was again raided, forced out of its office location. When I asked St. Paul Police Chief John Harrington how reporters are to operate in this atmosphere, he suggested, "By embedding reporters in our mobile field force."

On Monday night, hours after we were arrested, after much public outcry, Nicole, Sharif and I were released. That was our Labor Day. It's all in a day's work.

Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 700 stations in North America.

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Democracy Now Arrests.
By Baldwin, Anthony

This horrified me..

This is democracy now?!

I have filed it under "Fascism"

Anthony Baldwin.