To buy much of this requires you to hold deeply ridiculous beliefs about the American economy. You must believe that Obama bears responsibility for events that predate his presidency and deserves applause for the demand created by aging cars and worn- down machinery. You must believe that Congress, which controls fiscal policy, and the Federal Reserve, which controls monetary policy, bear little or no responsibility for the economy, but that the president, who controls neither fiscal nor monetary policy, is the primary driver of job creation. You must believe that governors have absolute power over state economies and that global demand is irrelevant. You must also renounce belief in Christmas — or at least its influence on the consumer-driven economy.
Virtually no one really believes these things. But partisans and the news media routinely act as if they are true. They make up a useful shorthand that is arguably good for the political system: Better for presidents to believe re-election hinges on economic performance than, say, on the quality of their attack ads.
Yesterday I had the satisfaction of having a pleasant conversation with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I had not seen him since 2006, more than five years ago, when he visited our country to participate in the 14th Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement of Countries in Havana. During the summit, Cuba was elected for the second time as president of the organization for a three-year term.
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With all four I spoke about some of the difficulties facing the world at the time; problems that have become progressively more complex.
Turn off your televisions. Ignore the Newt-Mitt-Rick-Barack reality show. It is as relevant to your life as the gossip on “Jersey Shore.” The real debate, the debate raised by the Occupy movement about inequality, corporate malfeasance, the destruction of the ecosystem, and the security and surveillance state, is the only debate that matters. You won’t hear it on the corporate-owned airwaves and cable networks, including MSNBC, which has become to the Democratic Party what Fox News is to the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party. You won’t hear it on NPR or PBS. You won’t read about it in our major newspapers. The issues that matter are being debated, however, on “Democracy Now!,” Link TV, The Real News, Occupy websites and Revolution Truth. They are being raised by journalists such as Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. You can find genuine ideas in corners of the Internet or in books by political philosophers such as Sheldon Wolin. But you have to go looking for them.
Voting will not alter the corporate systems of power. Voting is an act of political theater. Voting in the United States is as futile and sterile as in the elections I covered as a reporter in dictatorships like Syria, Iran and Iraq. There were always opposition candidates offered up by these dictatorships. Give the people the illusion of choice. Throw up the pretense of debate. Let the power elite hold public celebrations to exalt the triumph of popular will. We can vote for Romney or Obama, but Goldman Sachs and ExxonMobil and Bank of America and the defense contractors always win. There is little difference between our electoral charade and the ones endured by the Syrians and Iranians. Do we really believe that Obama has, or ever had, any intention to change the culture in Washington?
Phi Beta Iota: Brother Hedges is missing the big picture. He's right on the fundamentals–where the real debate is–but he is missing the very real possibilities represented by We the People Reform Coalition. Neither the Green Party (accredited) nor the Justice Party (not accredited) have the strategic understanding necessary to flip the system. That can only be found at We the People Reform Coalition, and its two-step plan for leveraging our collective power to demand the Electoral Reform Act of 2012 in time to allow a third wave – a coalition cabinet, not just a solitary individual president – to be elected, effectively trashing the two-party tyranny in a non-violent legitimizing revolution. The economy is being “juiced”, unemployment is actually 22.4%, we anticipate a humongous socio-economic crash in the USA in 2013-2014, and speculate that this will lead to a violent revolution that begins with burning to the ground the mansions of those who comprise the 1%, most of them rapidly going into exile.
As has been reported elsewhere, Summify says it’s mothballing its service (a decision that was not received warmly by many users), and the team of five will join the growing ranks at Twitter’s new headquarters. The two co-founders, who are originally from Romania, moved to Vancouver, B.C. when they were accepted into an incubator program called Bootup Labs and later received angel funding (according to one report, a Summify investor posted a message that suggested the Twitter acquisition was an all-stock transaction, but the tweet was later deleted). Like some other services such as News.me, Summify filtered a user’s activity streams, then used an algorithm to produce a daily email with links to the most-shared content in their social networks.
Phi Beta Iota: CIA, IBM, Google, and NSA all stink at both early warning (anomaly detection and pattern analysis in multi-cultural multidisciplinary multidomain contexts) and at sense-making. The primary reason they stink is their obsessive substitution of technology for thinking. As James Bamford has documented so well, one single human brain can do more, with less energy and mass, than all of NSA's corporate vapor-ware computers. Novices work with data; journeymen work with models; masters worth with whole systems assumptions and fully integrate human and machine capabilities into their M4IS2 system, which does not exist together because of the isularity, myopia, and general ignorance of all so-called “intelligence” services.
US: For the record. Declaring “war” on the United States, a militant Palestinian faction — Ma'sadat al-Mujahidin — claimed responsibility for a 19 January forest fire near Reno, Nevada. The group threatened more action and set a 3-month deadline for the “enemies of Islam” to “disavow” Israel's control of contested lands and its “actions against our Muslim brothers.”
Comment: Palestinians have threatened attacks inside the US, but the few details suggest American activists started this fire, if it proves to be arson. The group's bravado exceeds its demonstrated capabilities.
Phi Beta Iota: The fire was an accident, and the elderly man that disposed of hot ashes improperly has come forward. However, the combination of the accident and the false claim highlight once again how vulnerable America is to acts of man that leverage the sustained idiocy of what passes for socio-economic design. There is a race on between the forces of legitimate democracy and fundamentalist terrorism–not only Islamic fundamentalists but Christian fundamentalists and eco-terrorism fundamentalists as well as Occupy anarchists. The USA is now in Bill Moyer's Stage Six–Occupy was a grand success (and also SOPA, KEYSTONE, and the recall movements in Wisconsin and Montana)–but we are far from achieving the strategic campaign that specifically embraces each sub-movement for democracy as a distinct but coordinated elements. We the People Reform Coalition tries to do that but everyone–especially the Tea Party, Occupy, and the various splinter movements associated with Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, Ralph Nader, and Patrick Buchanan–refuse to consider a grand strategy–they are all still in the self-centered stage of “me is we” instead of “we is me.” 2012 is a turning point year at multiple levels–unless we achieve a non-violent revolution that restores the legitimacy of governances Of, By, and For, we anticipate a very violent 2013 – 2014.
The debate over corporate power and money in politics is beginning to generate some significant light – good analysis, integral thinking, creativity – as well as heat – passion, slogans, quick response. If both of these forces of nature can synergize we might get some seriously transformational results out of the process.
The Alternet article below by Steven Rosenfeld gives an excellent overview – the best I've seen so far – of many major streams of thought and action currently being played out regarding “money in politics”. It is an excellent contribution to helping us see the bigger landscape through which all these streams are flowing. (After the article, I've excerpted nine of the best comments on it, the ones with additional thought-provoking approaches to handling the problem.)
As a journalist, Rosenfeld is fairly – and with due complexity – presenting diverse perspectives so that we – citizens, activists, voters – can see them with all their strengths and weaknesses and make up our own minds. This is a gigantic gift and, in my view, one of the highest forms of journalism. The subsequent comments add to such journalism's service to our democratic collective intelligence.
But something is still missing. Even higher forms of democratic collective intelligence can be called forth, more dynamic uses of this rich diversity, namely productive conversations of the following two types:
As we’ve noted for years, the entire strategy of Washington towards the economy is to cover up the fraud which caused the financial crisis … even though prosecuting fraud and re-establishing the rule of law is the only way to get out of this depression.
One major front in Washington’s cover-up effort has been to settle fraud cases with the big banks for pennies on the dollar. This is a backdoor bailout for the banks, encourages them to commit more fraud, and fails to plug the basic holes in the economy which are preventing a recovery.
Why are we bringing this up now?
Because Obama is making a giant push to pressure the states attorneys general to settle all of their mortgage-related fraud claims against the banks for pennies on the dollar.
Yves Smith – who has an ear to the ground on this – warns that a settlement which hurts consumers and the economy will happen very quickly if people don’t raise a ruckus.
