Town Hall Meeting

Capitalism, sometimes called Wall Street, works thusly, from this hilarious article by Joel Stein. For the record, I think kiva is a good idea, so long as the lender remains a SILENT partner!

Cupcake Kings Go Global, With a Little Help From Joel
By Joel Stein Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2008

Anyone can lend money; I am able to lend genius. So when I started making small loans to Third World entrepreneurs through the nonprofit website kiva.org I felt as though I wasn’t doing enough. That’s why a few weeks after I sent $25 to a baker in Nicaragua, I decided I needed to stop being a silent partner and start calling him all the time with my ideas.

Unfortunately, Freddy Antonio Castillo Luna doesn’t have e-mail or a phone in his bakery-home outside Managua. So I had to get a Kiva volunteer to go there with a cell phone and translate. My first suggestion was to change the name of the place from the Little Mango Bakery to the far more compelling Joel and Freddy’s Extreme Cupcakery. I thought the bakery should switch its focus from empanadas and breadsticks to extreme cupcakes, for which we would charge $4 apiece. I would have my loan repaid in five cupcakes, assuming generous tipping.

Click here to read the rest

Don’t all these appointments kinda make you ill? Why don’t they pick someone new? Such as for treasury, someone who has won a nobel prize for economics, like Joseph Stiglitz, or how about James
Galbraith? Obama doesn’t even seem to be trying to make his administration look like change. All this talk of hope is for a good reason, its all we have left!

…
Sic Transit: The Honeymoon is Looking a Bit Wan
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Two years without a single leak and suddenly, last week, Obama’s operation was like a sieve. That’s what happens when you pick up the phone and call one of the Clintons. Or, to put it another way, that’s what happens when someone claims you, the president elect, picked up the phone and called Mrs Clinton to ask whether she’d like to be secretary of state.

Out the window goes the sense of purposeful strides towards a new-look Administration. In comes a dreadful feeling that somehow we’ve slipped a dimension in the space-time continuum and are heading back into the Clinton era. A couple of more weeks and the Republicans will be calling for a special prosecutor.

I’ve had people try to explain to me the political logic of Obama offering his erstwhile Democratic rival a top position in his cabinet. Better to have her inside the tent. Send her off on bouts of futile shuttle diplomacy, like Condoleezza Rice.

It still doesn’t add up. Why march back briskly into Clintontime? Besides, she’d make a lousy Secretary of State. Mrs Clinton has never displayed any talent for negotiation, nor even any conspicuous appetite to find out what is going on in the world, let alone come up
with a new vision of America’s role in the 21st century. She’s an interventionist by instinct, her finger twitching over the Bomb Release lever. She voted yes on the Iraq war. She was an ardent
advocate of NATO’s onslaught on Yugoslavia. If we do get Hillary at State we may get Madeleine Albright as one of her sidekicks – the woman who said in the late 1990s that starving half a million Iraqi children was “worth it”, probably the line that the 9/11 al Qaeda hijackers were muttering to themselves when they sped on their mission of revenge towards the Twin Towers. This is change?

The answer of course is that there has to be a good deal of similarity between the Clinton and Obama administrations, because Obama is a neoliberal interventionist like Bill, and because the 45 and 50-year
old veterans of the two Clinton administrations who have been cooling their heels in law firms and think tanks for eight years make up a high percentage of those in the hiring line, particularly those who placed an early bet on Obama. To round off the symmetry he new White House counsel will be Greg Craig, who defended Clinton during his impeachment.

The young people who worked for Obama and who voted for him have been feeling wan this week, amid all the retro talk about the Clintons. And the cabinet members Obama has announced or who are being bandied about are not inspiring. They’re dull like former Democratic senator Tom Daschle getting Health and Human Services. Howard Dean, who was a doctor and who had hands-on time grappling with health insurance when he was governor of Vermont, would have been a much better choice. Janet Napolitano, the Arizona governor slated to be head of Homeland Security, horrified labor organizers at one meeting earlier this year listening to her boasting about kicking migrant workers back into Mexico. One nominee headed towards a Republican roasting in his hearings is Eric Holder, named to be Attorney General. As number 2 in Clinton’s Justice Department, Holder played a grimy role in one of the most scandalous affairs of Clinton-time, the last minute pardon by Clinton of billionaire trader and denizen of the FBI’s most wanted list, Marc Rich. (See Jeffrey St. Clair’s account of the pardons for Holder’s central role in the affair.)

Other possible appointments are not demonstrative of a resolute change of pace. The talk is of keeping Robert Gates on as Defense Secretary, although Gates has made no significant mark on the vast pork barrel beside the Potomac. The conversion of this mucky schemer of yesteryear into revered emblem of sound governance is one of the many marvels of our age. Somewhere down the road we’ll probably end up with another slimy fellow, former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, who counts among his regular roosts CSIS and the Center for A New American Security, also decorated by the odious Robert Kaplan and Dr John Nagl.

The most significant appointment will be Treasury Secretary. On current form Obama will play it safe with the top nominees to run this Department. The trouble here is that there is no safe option and the
usual suspects will have the usual limited perspective. He’d better get this one right. A conventional appointee could doom his administration right from the start.

In sum, this looks like a standard issue, business-as-usual cabinet in the making, about as exciting as looking at one of the regular network panel shows on a Sunday morning. Can’t they find anyone under 40 who looks like they might want to do things different and shake things up?

The Golden Age of Eating was….

But first a quotation from Paul Craig Roberts:

The Korean War ended 55 years ago, and the US still has troops in Korea.

Germany was defeated in 1945, and the US still has troops in Germany.

A country that must go hat in hand to its creditors must first look to where costs can be cut. Annual military spending of $700 billion is certainly a good place to start.

But the US government has far more hubris than intelligence and is on its way to being a failed state that has to print money to pay its bills.

It is not too late for the US to save itself and the dollar standard, but it would require a rapid transition from arrogance to humility. The rest of the world can bring America down by not lending to us, in which case neither the trade nor budget deficits could be financed.

The guy leading Obama’s intelligence transition team is apparently John Brennan. He says that rendition (also known as kidnapping) is not only useful but okay. We gotta nip these things in the bud if we really get “change we need” rather than this same old crap.

Check out this excerpt from the interview:

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to excerpts from a December 2005 interview with John Brennan, the former CIA official now leading Obama’s intelligence transition. Brennan was interviewed by Margaret Warner on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer about his views on the Bush administration’s practice of extraordinary rendition.

MARGARET WARNER: So, was Secretary Rice correct today when she called it a vital tool in combating terrorism?

JOHN BRENNAN: I think it’s an absolutely vital tool. I have been intimately familiar now for the past decade with the cases of rendition that the US government has been involved in, and I can say, without a doubt, that it has been very successful as far as producing intelligence that has saved lives.

MARGARET WARNER: So is it—are you saying both—in two ways, both in getting terrorists off the streets and also in the interrogation?

JOHN BRENNAN: Yes. The rendition is the practice or the process of rendering somebody from one place to another place. It is moving them. And US government will frequently facilitate that movement from a country to another.

MARGARET WARNER: Why would you not, if this—if you have a suspect who’s a danger to the United States, keep him in the United States’ custody? Is it because we want another country to do the dirty work?

JOHN BRENNAN: No, I don’t think that’s it at all. Also, I think it’s rather arrogant to think that we’re the only country that respects human rights. I think that we have a lot of assurances from these countries that we hand over terrorists to that they will in fact respect human rights. And there are different ways to gain those assurances. But also, let’s say an individual goes to Egypt, because they’re an Egyptian citizen, and the Egyptians then have a longer history, in terms of dealing with them, and they have family members and others that they can bring in, in fact, to be part of the whole interrogation process.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s John Brennan, who heads up the transition team on intelligence. Mel Goodman?

MELVIN GOODMAN: Well, John Brennan is being completely dishonest there. All of the operational people I’ve talked to know that the people who were turned over to the Arab intelligence services—and remember, this is Egypt, this is Syria, this is Jordan, this is Saudi Arabia—that all of these foreign intelligence services commit torture and abuse. Now, if any of these suspects had anything to say to us that was of any utility, we would have kept them. We would have controlled these people. They would have become our sources and our assets. When we turned them over, we were turning over people who we felt had very little to offer, and we were turning over them to them, to the Arab liaison services for torture and abuse.

John Brennan has defended the warrantless eavesdropping. John Brennan has basically defended all of the violations that were committed at the CIA in the run-up to the war and in the postwar period. So the signal this sends to CIA employees who tried to get it right—and there were a few who tried to get it right—is the worst kind of signal. And if this is Obama’s judgment about a national security team, it’s very reminiscent of what Bill Clinton did in 1993, when he appointed people such as Jim Woolsey and Les Aspin and Warren Christopher and Tony Lake to the national security positions, and all of them had to be removed before the first term was over. So this is very disquieting, what
we’re learning now.

AMY GOODMAN: In fact, NPR attributed Obama’s reversal on FISA and telecom immunity to the fact that he was relying on the advice of John Brennan, an emphatic supporter of these policies.

MELVIN GOODMAN: Well, then you have to wonder who he’s relying on, in terms of advice, to keep Bob Gates at the Pentagon, which I think is another example of continuity and not change. You mean to tell me that there are no Democrats who are qualified to become the Secretary of Defense? Bob Gates has supported all of the policies that Obama said he was going to look at very carefully and seemed to oppose: expansion of NATO, bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, deployment of missiles in Poland, deployment of radars in the Czech Republic, the continued acquisition of a national missile defense, which is the most expensive item in the Pentagon’s procurement project, an item that we’ve spent over $500 billion on in the last forty years. This is—again, this is not change; this is continuity.

UPDATE
Brennan is now “Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism.” Sigh.

From the beaten down regular US citizen…

I tend to pick emotionally unavailable governments…So even though America steals my money to pay off gambling debts, beats me senseless, kicks my cat through a window, then goes out on power-drunken binges, bombing people, poisoning the planet, and annihilating whole civilizations — I know that, deep down, America really loves me

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/day131008.html

From a 37 year old hedge fund manager….

The boss of a successful US hedge fund has quit the industry with an extraordinary farewell letter dismissing his rivals as over-privileged “idiots” and thanking “stupid” traders for making him rich….All of this behaviour supporting the aristocracy only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/oct/18/banking-useconomy

Thanks G for the links!

If you have some time, check this speech out, I think she represents the best of the future for the Left. She was asked by faculty to speak at the University of Chicago last week to counter the proposed $200 million “Milton Friedman Institute.” The speech is excellent, and directly relates the Milton Friedman ideas with what is happening to the economy today. You may have run across her before. Here are some really good excerpts:

His thoughts were enormously profitable. And he was rewarded. His work was rewarded. I don’t mean personally greedy. I mean that his work was supported at the university, at think tanks, in the production of a ten-part documentary series called Freedom to Choose, sponsored by FedEx and Pepsi; that the corporate world has been good to Milton Friedman, because his ideas were good for them.

…what we are seeing with the crash on Wall Street, I believe, should be for Friedmanism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for authoritarian communism: an indictment of ideology.

Read the transcript here:
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/6/naomi_klein#
Or watch the video here. Her speech starts about 11 minutes into the program.
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/6/stream

One of my biggest worries about Obama is that his economic policies will be as right wing as Bill Clintons. And the fact that Obama taught at the University of Chicago and has some “chicago boys” on his economic team is scary. But of course Obama is miles ahead of McCain on most issues, even economic ones, so what can we do?

I watched the entire debate last night and rated it for freepress.net, then watched about 3 hours of post debate coverage on TV. NO ONE brought up McCain’s plan to create a “league of democracies.” He has brought this up as far back as May 2007, and brought it up again during last night’s debate. This is an extremely radical idea, and must be discussed. Would this plan include the democracy of Venezuela, which McCain and even Obama claim is a “rogue state?” And by the way, isn’t “rogue state” a reserved word for a nation that does not participate in the Non Proliferation Treaty? McCain’s “league of democracies” should bring up tons of questions…Who would it include and not include?…Do you care about it’s impact on the UN and how badly it would undermine the UN’s purpose?…Hamas was democratically elected, would Palestine be included? This idea is so radical and reckless it can’t be allowed to go on without question. I feel so-so about Obama on foreign policy, but compared to McCain Obama is a saint. Please, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, NPR, PBS, SOMEONE, investigate this and explain to the American voter what McCain’s plan is.

Just a reminder to McCain and any “league of democracy” fan out there: the U.N. is there to prevent war and get countries who disagree with each other to engage peacefully in one place. Do you really think you can top that? Just admit it, this is about expanding your empire.

Have you heard of Bikini Island? Apparently it’s this small set of islands in the Pacific where the inhabitants lived for centuries, and in 1946 the US decided they wanted it to test nuclear bombs. Some of the Bikinians decided to stay. Peter Gabriel wrote a song about it, super heavy when you know this story. Listen to it here:

Here is some more info:

“An American came to Bikini. He said he was the most powerful man in the world. He said he wanted to drop a bomb on Bikini. He said America wanted to use Bikini and that we would have to leave.”

–Kilon Bauno, Chief of the Bikinians

http://highschoolbioethics.georgetown.edu/units/cases/unit3_3.html
http://www.aracnet.com/~pdxavets/cushing2.htm

It’s unbelievable this type of history just gets swept under the rug. When I read about things like this I think of how ridiculous it is to say things like “lets get America back to doing good.” As a good friend of mine said, “when I read or hear someone say ‘lets get the US back on track,’ I turn off immediately because it’s pure nationalist propaganda that’s very carefully packaged and consumed primarily by the (disappearing) middle class.”

To add insult to injury, that two piece bathing suit we all know about was named after this island and the detonations were used as a marketing gimmick on the reasoning that the suit would cause a burst of excitement. I can’t make this stuff up, believe me.

Even though these things don’t technically exist, artist Trevor Paglen has taken photos of 189 spy satellites and has put them on display at UC Berkeley. Below is one of the photos. Check out the Wired article about it here. The exhibition is August 6th through September 14th. Funny quote from Paglen: “The National Reconnaissance Office cannot classify Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.”

I am going to miss his insights a ton, we all lost a very important comedian yesterday. Check out this routine analyzing the first Bush, first Iraq War…We Like War

It is about 5:30pm PST, and Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich took to the floor of the House of Representatives to present 35 Articles of Impeachment against George W. Bush. The House session is being televised live on C-SPAN. Check it out on your TV or watch it online here: http://www.c-span.org/

For those who may think that impeachment isn’t worth it since he will be out of office anyway in 5 months (ahem, Speaker Pelosi), I say that this is a very important thing to do, even if it comes AFTER he is out of office. The reason is we must prosecute Presidents that abuse their power in order to prevent future ones from trying to do it too. Whether it’s Obama or McCain, they will look and say “hey if Bush can break the law without consequences, why can’t I do it too?” And when it comes to Bush, he didn’t just break any law, he broke extremely serious ones like the ultimate crime of aggression by invading another country that did not attack it.

Bill Moyers consistently goes in depth to actually look at an issue. His interview with Rev. Wright is no different. Please watch the video or read the transcript. Rev. Wright (and now Bill Moyers for that matter) is being treated like a villain without any evidence to back it up, and most news media give only little sound-bites by which to judge him. After watching this I learned the guy was a US Marine for 6 years, and is extremely intelligent-he has multiple Master’s Degrees. He cares deeply for people who suffer. And, the remarks he made, when taken in context, are quite intelligent and need to be said. The only remarkable thing about this is that no one is allowed to speak the hard truth.

For instance, the “God Damn America” sound-bite. He was saying that God doesn’t fail, but that governments fail. Then he goes on to give examples: Japanese Empire, Roman Empire, British Empire, the American Empire. They can do very bad things. So you do not Bless a government, in fact, when they do wrong, you Damn it. He goes on to explain a number of the things America has failed at quite terribly, which are indisputable. Watch the full clip of the sermon in the interview.

In his first sermon after 9/11, his words were right on the money. He said that violence begets violence, terrorism begets terrorism, and America has committed state terrorism on a number of occasions. I put his words from that sermon here, aren’t these things indisputable?

We took this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache, the Arawak, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo. Terrorism! We took Africans from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism! We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel. We bombed the black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenagers and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hard-working fathers. We bombed Gadafi’s home and killed his child. “Blessed are they who bash your children’s head against a rock!” We bombed Iraq. We killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to payback for the attack on our embassy. Killed hundreds of hard-working people; mothers and fathers who left home to go that day, not knowing that they would never get back home. We bombed Hiroshima! We bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye! Kids playing in the playground, mothers picking up children after school, civilians – not soldiers – people just trying to make it day by day. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and Black South Africans, and now we are indignant? Because the stuff we have done overseas has now been brought back into our own front yards! America’s chickens are coming home to roost! Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred and terrorism begets terrorism. A White Ambassador said that y’all not a Black Militant. Not a Reverend who preaches about racism. An Ambassador whose eyes are wide open, and who’s trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised–

Same thing, different day. Go here for the pictures. The turnout was much smaller this year than the 4 year anniversary. I’d say 5,000 people showed up this time. It could be due to the news no longer covering the war. Apparently “only” around 30 civilians have been killed there per day in the past few months. What progress! Let’s just forget about it and talk about election politics instead, that’s much more important apparently. It’s heartbreaking to think we have more troops in Iraq than at any time during this war, yet news coverage is so minimal. I suppose it could also have to do with the fact that more journalists have died in this war than in any other war.

…and get angry!

and this doesn’t even mention the deaths and lives ruined.

-Thanks Narda and Topy for the link!

I was just reading this and couldn’t believe what I read…

http://www.antiwar.com/pilger/?articleid=12279
…..
Shortly before [Suharto] died, I interviewed Alan Clark, who under Thatcher was Britain’s minister responsible for supplying Suharto with most of his weapons. I asked him, “Did it bother you personally that you were causing such mayhem and human suffering?”

“Curiously not.”
…

If you don’t want to hear the mainstream media version of Suharto’s legacy (so that you don’t have to hear from people like the above), check out a good discussion by Democracy Now! here:
Former Indonesian Dictator Suharto In Depth Discussion

Another mass protest in Los Angeles, one of many around America this weekend. Here are some pictures. The war is 4 1/2 years old now. It is unbelievable how the reasons for the war were all completely proven false, yet the war goes on. WTF! I estimate the crowd at around 7500.

Another group of major protests are planned for October 27. Most are sponsored by the A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition, and you can view the locations here. Or go to our demonstrations page to see where else demonstrations may be happening. Please go. If you have never been to a peace protest before, then I encourage you to go even more, you won’t regret it.

In April 2006 at Johns Hopkins University, a student asked a question about what the legal status of private military contractors is in Iraq. Bush dodged the question, see the video below in case you never saw this. The current situation with Blackwater and the other 120,000 to 180,000 private military contractors in Iraq shows you just how little has actually been done in this area. One theory on why Bush answered the way that he did here (specifically the word “delegation”) is so he could avoid any problems during war crimes trials. No matter what his reason is, the answer is unacceptable and the mainstream media is complicit by not getting the answer to this question back in 2003, let alone 2006 or 2007.

Check out this short film (about 7 minutes). The film was made to supplement Naomi Klein’s new book, “The Shock Doctrine.” Klein is an excellent writer and is one of the smartest leaders of the young movement for peace and democracy.

Or as some prefer to call it, the anti imperialist or anti capitalist movement?

If you listen to nothing else from that excellent interview by Hudson, start at minute 40. Find out what Greenspan and the big moneymen know about keeping people in line. And note that Hudson is presidential candidate Kucinich’s new chief economic advisor.

reposted: http://www.kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=21767

-Thanks G for the link!

I got a Bachelor’s degree in Economics, and I think this cartoon gave me plenty more to think about. How many of us really understand how our monetary system works? Maybe 1% or fewer? Check out the cartoon here. The title is “In Debt We Have Trusted,” For over 300 years

Here are some images I like…