The Booboisie creates a fire from the ashes of the Bush Administration, proving once again the timeless dictum of H.L. Mencken: ‘No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American voter.'
We are witnessing, we are told, a groundswell of anger from a spontaneous, grass-roots movement against the president, Congress, Democrats, socialists (are commies extinct?), the debt, higher taxes, the “takeover” of the health system, and on and on. But the tea party appears to be as bothered by the policies of Franklin Roosevelt as those of Barack Obama.
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The media repeatedly invoke grass roots and other code words to describe the tea party. Tell a lie often enough and it is believed. Our media wizards must realize that with the revelations of high-powered funding and the involvement of Republican operatives, the characterization of the tea party as a spontaneous, ground-up movement does not fit; nagging facts nevertheless must bow to pursuing the “colorful.”
Phi Beta Iota: Extracts are provided. This is an important document that confirms the total abdication by Congress and the Executive of their Constitutional duties with respect to the public interest. The USA is owned and operated by Wall Street for its benefit, and We the People have been completely disenfranchised at the same time that the Commonwealth has been looted.
EXTRACT:
No matter how much Obama talks about his “tough” new financial regulatory reforms or offers rote condemnations of Wall Street greed, few believe there’s been real change. That’s not just because so many have lost their jobs, their savings and their homes. It’s also because so many know that the loftiest perpetrators of this national devastation got get-out-of-jail-free cards, that too-big-to-fail banks have grown bigger and that the rich are still the only Americans getting richer.
This intractable status quo is being rubbed in our faces daily during the pre-election sprint by revelations of the latest banking industry outrage, its disregard for the rule of law as it cut every corner to process an avalanche of foreclosures. Clearly, these financial institutions have learned nothing in the few years since their contempt for fiscal and legal niceties led them to peddle these predatory mortgages (and the reckless financial “products” concocted from them) in the first place. And why should they have learned anything? They’ve often been rewarded, not punished, for bad behavior.
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The much acclaimed new documentary about the global economic meltdown, “Inside Job,” has it right. As its narrator, Matt Damon, intones, our country has been robbed by insiders who “destroyed their own companies and plunged the world into crisis” — and then “walked away from the wreckage with their fortunes intact.” These insiders include Dick Fuld and four other executives at Lehman Brothers who “got to keep all the money” (more than $1 billion) after Lehman went bankrupt. And of course Robert Rubin, who encouraged Citigroup to step up its investment in high-risk bets like Countrywide’s mortgage-backed securities. Rubin, now back as a rainmaker on Wall Street, collected more than $115million in compensationduring roughly the same period Mozilo “earned” his half a billion. Citi, which required a $45 billiontaxpayers’ bailout, recently secured its own slap-on-the-wrist S.E.C. settlement — at $75 million, less than Rubin’s earnings and less than its 2003 penalty ($101 million) for its role in hiding Enron profits.
It should pain the White House that its departing economic guru, the Rubin protégé Lawrence Summers, is an even bigger heavy in “Inside Job” than in the hit movie of election season, “The Social Network.” Summers — like the former Goldman Sachs chief executive and Bush Treasury secretary Hank Paulson — is portrayed as just the latest in a procession of policy makers who keep rotating in and out of government and the financial industry, almost always to that industry’s advantage. As the star economist Nouriel Roubini tells the filmmaker, Charles Ferguson, the financial sector on Wall Street has “step by step captured the political system” on “the Democratic and the Republican side” alike. But it would be wrong to single out Summers or any individual official for the Obama administration’s image of being lax in pursuing finance’s bad actors. This tone is set at the top.
Asked in “Inside Job” why there’s been no systematic investigation of the 2008 crash, Roubini answers: “Because then you’d find the culprits.” With the aid of the “Manhattan Madam” (and current stunt New York gubernatorial candidate) Kristin Davis, the film also asks why federal prosecutors who were “perfectly happy to use Eliot Spitzer’s personal vices to force him to resign in 2008” have not used rampant sex-and-drug trade on Wall Street as a tool for flipping witnesses to pursue the culprits behind the financial crimes that devastated the nation.
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Even as the G.O.P. benefits from unlimited corporate campaign money, it’s pulling off the remarkable feat of persuading a large swath of anxious voters that it will lead a populist charge against the rulers of our economic pyramid — the banks, energy companies, insurance giants and other special interests underwriting its own candidates. Should those forces prevail, an America that still hasn’t remotely recovered from the worst hard times in 70 years will end up handing over even more power to those who greased the skids.
We can blame much of this turn of events on the deep pockets of oil billionaires like the Koch brothers and on the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which freed corporations to try to buy any election they choose. But the Obama White House is hardly innocent. Its failure to hold the bust’s malefactors accountable has helped turn what should have been a clear-cut choice on Nov. 2 into a blurry contest between the party of big corporations and the party of business as usual.
Phi Beta Iota: The Tea Party is an unwitting circus act fully funded and controlled by the New York mandarins. The lack of responsible alternatives on the left or the right, combined with the naivete of the public in thinking that the Tea Party is anything other than a side show, could lead–we never thought we would say this–to a new Administration and Congress even more ineffective than the last two. The further American governance moves from the truth, the deeper our grave.
A recent article in Christian Science Monitor on military health care costs identified, in microcosm, the battle we face in the coming years in defending the military community’s sunk investment in its future.
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After citing all DoD’s arguments that it’s being “eaten alive” by “unsustainable” military health care cost increases, the reporter had the courtesy of quoting me on the other side of the argument:
“’There’s a fundamental difference between social insurance programs open to every American and military benefits earned by decades of service and sacrifice,’ said Steve Strobridge, director of Governmental Relations for MOAA.
“What Mr. Strobridge raises here is a moral issue: Should the military be treated differently than nonmilitary America when it comes to pay and benefits? The armed forces put their lives, limbs, and mental health on the line for the safety of the country, or they potentially do. On a practical level, you need strong benefits to recruit and maintain a strong, all-volunteer military.”
And then came this kicker:
“But here’s another moral angle: Sacrifice goes with the territory of being in the armed services, and the military budget needs serious cutting. Should sacrifice not also extend to the defense of the nation’s financial health if it’s in critical danger?”
And there’s the problem. Sacrifices already endured are assigned no value. It’s the budget shrug: “They volunteered, didn’t they?”
Every 15 years or so, that indifference leads to cuts that eventually wreck retention — and then national leaders have to pull out all the stops and spend even more to solve the military manpower crisis they refused to prevent.
The real issue is, “How much is it worth for the country to be able to defend itself?”
Phi Beta Iota: With all due respect to MOAA, the real issue is NOT “what price defense” but rather “how best to defend.” There are three simple solutions to the military and and benefits problem that do NOT require reductions:
1. Restore the universal draft including immigrants and including a mid-career “sabatical” between military and private sector. This bonds the nation–one boot camp, three choices: Armed Forces, Peace Corps, Homeland Service.
2. Establish Constitutional honest government tht does not lead the Republic into elective wars for ideological and private reasons on the basis of (most recently) 935 documented lies. The same honest government can be expected to end the acquisition of things we do not need (e.g. missile defense in Poland, J-22, new nuclear submarine) at costs we cannot afford.
3. End the fiction that future Medicare costs re unfunded. They are only unfunded because a corrupt Congress in cahoots with a corrupt Administration (both parties) has forbidden price negotiation. The minute we restore honest government current and future Medicare costs come down to 1% (ONE percent) of what we pay now.
Thomas Jefferson: A Nation's best defense is an educated citizenry.
Russell Ackoff: Stop trying to do the wrong things righter; do the right things.
Robert Steele: The truth at any cost reduces all other costs.
You can only hope that the very preliminary peace efforts in Afghanistan bear fruit before long. But for evidence that the United States is letting its claim to greatness, and even common decency, slip through its fingers, all you need to do is look at the way we treat our own troops.
The idea that the United States is at war and hardly any of its citizens are paying attention to the terrible burden being shouldered by its men and women in uniform is beyond appalling.
Bob Herbert
We can get fired up about Lady Gaga and the Tea Party crackpots. We’re into fantasy football, the baseball playoffs and our obsessively narcissistic tweets. But American soldiers fighting and dying in a foreign land? That is such a yawn.
I would bring back the draft in a heartbeat. Then you wouldn’t have these wars that last a lifetime. And you wouldn’t get mind-bending tragedies like the death of Sgt. First Class Lance Vogeler, a 29-year-old who was killed a few weeks ago while serving in the Army in his 12th combat tour. That’s right, his 12th — four in Iraq and eight in Afghanistan.
In so many fields, owing to the Internet-driven democratization of knowledge, we learn that that the power associated with hoarded knowledge has been abused, and the position of leadership – the priesthood – associated with the acquisition of knowledge has been leveraged to manipulate and deceive. “Everything you know is wrong!”
David Freedman has a great article in the Atlantic about medical deception, called “Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science,” which focuses on Dr. John Ioanniddis’ dedication to exposing bad science in medicine.
He’s what’s known as a meta-researcher, and he’s become one of the world’s foremost experts on the credibility of medical research. He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain—is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong. He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed. His work has been widely accepted by the medical community; it has been published in the field’s top journals, where it is heavily cited; and he is a big draw at conferences. Given this exposure, and the fact that his work broadly targets everyone else’s work in medicine, as well as everything that physicians do and all the health advice we get, Ioannidis may be one of the most influential scientists alive. Yet for all his influence, he worries that the field of medical research is so pervasively flawed, and so riddled with conflicts of interest, that it might be chronically resistant to change—or even to publicly admitting that there’s a problem.
At e-Patients.net, Peter Frishauf writes a response to the Atlantic article, called “Fixing those Damn Lies.” How do we fix them? The Atlantic piece discusses Ioannidis’ suggestions to change the culture of medical research, and reset expectations. It’s okay to be wrong in science – in fact, it’s almost a requirement. The scientific method is about testing and proving hypotheses – proving can be “proving wrong” as well as “proving right.” Either way, you’re learning, and extending science.
Frishauf also mentions how medicine and science should embrace the Internet “and figure out a way to better incorporate patient self-reported and retrospective data in trials,” which is one goal of participatory medicine. He also suggests “giving up on tenure-tied-to-the-peer-reviewed-literature, and embracing a moderated form of pre and post-publication peer review,” something that came up in discussion when I spoke at the Central Texas World Future Society Tuesday evening. (More about this in an earlier e-Patients.net post by Frishauf.)
Knowledge is not a citadel or ivory tower, but a network that we could all be working, challenging, and improving.
In April 2010 CITI held its first conference on “Mobile Money”, focusing on the macroeconomic aspects. Since then, developments have accelerated. Around the world, the rapid spread of mobile phones is being followed by their use as a tool for financial transactions. The cell phone serves as a bank account, debit card, and money creator. Developing countries lack effective financial infrastructure. The positive economic impact of the mobile telecommunications infrastructure has been demonstrated, as has been the ability of microfinance to stimulate economic activity. Now a hybrid of the technologies has begun to emerge, enabling a mobile financial system. A notable example is Kenya where the M-PESA system (‘m-money’ in Swahili) has transferred in its short history over $5.4 billion by 12 million customers. This conference addresses some of the following issues:
What are the economics of mobile money?
What policy issues does it raise?
Is m-money a threat to the traditional banking system?
How might it be regulated?
Security issues
Consumer protection perspectives
Investor perspectives
Indicators for demand
M-money and m-health
What are consumer and privacy protection issues?
Who will control the system—banks or telecom operators?
Unflattering photos of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Sen. Barbara Boxer and California Rep. Maxine Waters play a central role in a new TV commercial created by a Republican front group, telling Latino voters to stay home on Election Day.
The Spanish-language ads, entitled “No Votes” (“Don't Vote”), are sponsored by a Virginia-based group that calls itself “Latinos for Reform.”
Published reports indicate that the ads are the work of Robert Desposada, a Republican political consultant, former Republican National Committee director of Hispanic affairs and pundit on the Spanish language TV network Univision.
Imagine for a moment that the New York State Police are warning American boaters to steer clear of the Canadian side of Lake Ontario because they might fall victim to pirates.
Imagine that violent gangs armed with military weaponry created a no man's land along a portion of the border shared by the United States and Canada that challenged the sovereignty of both nations.
Would this for a moment be tolerable? Would the president of the United States or the leaders of Congress simply treat it as a regrettable yet acceptable border problem? Of course not. Yet residents of South Texas are expected to endure precisely this situation on the U.S.-Mexican border.
