James Clay Fuller

Corporate killers: truths we won't face

2010-03-04T11:18:00.000-08:00

There is no essential difference between an American health insurance company and the American and Italian Mafias.

There is no substantive difference between a big pharmaceutical corporation and a Mexican or Colombian illegal drug cartel.

There is no qualitative difference between New York and Chicago mobs and Blackwater (Xe) and most of the other pieces of the profiteering “defense” industry.

If you work for any such organization you are, in a rational moral sense, equal to a button man, a contract killer, a bag man, a dealer selling drugs to kids on street corners or a mob lawyer.

Of course, if you work for one of the deadly but legal organizations, you no doubt have covered yourself in ignorance and denial of how evil they are. Given the fact that they are legal, you can justify your involvement to your own satisfaction. Maybe.

Yes, I mean those statements literally.

Seeing that, many Americans would immediately identify me as a left-wing nut, an extremist, and quite possibly dangerous. Even many who think the tea party loonies are just slightly off center would have no hesitation in calling me a radical and probably crazy.

In reading those opening four statements, many who think of themselves as “liberals” will suck in their breath a bit and think to themselves that I have, at least, wildly exaggerated the situation. Some will feel unease in the chest or gut, or wherever they usually first register fear and uncertainty. They will not under any circumstances associate themselves with what I have said.

The United States of America, even more than most other countries and much more than many, is built on myths. One of the most false of those myths is that this is a benign country, one that cares for its people and all the peoples of the world. Another is that we are a brave nation, willing to fight and die for justice and humanity.

In fact, and the fact is plain if you dare to face it, this is a country that is entirely self-centered, eager to grasp wealth wherever it is available, more than willing to do terrible harm to those who might try to get some piece of what our ruling elite desires.

And this is, at the same time, a cowardly country, peopled in majority by the constantly fearful.

More than anything else, this country and its people quake before uncomfortable truths, truths that lay bare our grasping and selfishness, our cruelty and, especially, our legions of fears. We won't admit them or talk about them, our “media” will not acknowledge their existence. We are terrified by the fact that we are afraid.

And so what I said in those first four sentences of this little essay will be rejected by almost everyone who reads them.

They are true nevertheless.

Our insurance corporations and pharmas and arms industries profit enormously from death and mayhem. That is established fact.

More criminally, they increase their profits by increasing the suffering of others, and they do that through the use of every tool at their disposal. They cheat and lie to their customers and to the government (which knows it is being lied to and does nothing in response). They do everything in their power to avoid doing what they have promised to do, to avoid paying what they legitimately owe, and they are extremely successful at that avoidance. That also is established fact.

And by avoiding what they've promised to do, in refusing to deliver what they have claimed they would deliver, they cause death and enormous physical suffering, not to mention financial ruin, for the people they claim to serve. That, too, is established fact.

Everyone in this country knows that you are extremely lucky to actually get a health insurance company to pay what it has promised if and when you get seriously ill. We know, every one of us, that insurance companies regularly come up with phony excuses for not paying –- you had a “pre-existing condition” or you somehow brought your suffering on yourself or, or, or... They took your money until you needed to use your insurance; they won't pay but they won't give back what you paid them over years, perhaps many decades.

The cases run to the hundreds of thousands, probably the millions. We all know it, because documented examples of such corporate behavior are reported all over the country daily.

A few days ago as I write this, Rachel Maddow talked about this on her MSNBC television show. I was disappointed, even offended, though, by her repeated statement that paying out on the insurance they sold “is not the business” of the insurance companies. They are “not in the business of paying,” she said again and again. “They are in the business of taking our money and making profits.”

She was right, of course, but she was very wrong to accept this as just the way things are.

To take money and use dirty tricks and hide behind laws that they paid to have written (or have written themselves) and to cause people to suffer and die and sink into homeless poverty as a result is, in a moral sense, as criminal as selling cocaine and heroin at school doors or forcing children into sex slavery.

The death and the physical agonies and the ruined lives are equally terrible whether the cause is cocaine or heroin or the withholding of a needed medication or the refusal to pay for treatment of cancer.

To sell needed pharmaceuticals at multiples sometimes hundreds of times the cost of making them, and to withhold supplies to those who cannot pay those outrageous prices, certainly is as criminal, in a legitimate if not legal sense, as fostering addictions and then charging users prices that demand they commit other illegal acts in order to pay to feed their habits.

And don't buy the pharma claims that they need the money for research. Get the facts. Governments pay for most pharmaceutical research. That legal drug prices in this country are set at what should be criminal levels is easily demonstrable: The same drugs that are sold in this country are sold by the same companies all over the world for prices that often are no more than a small fraction of what we pay. The proof is easy to find; it's been reported over and over.

They sell to us at insane prices, and refuse us the drugs if we can't pay, simply because they can get away with it here; the drug companies write the laws that affect their industry.

Push back your conventional American acceptance of all things corporate and think about this: Doing things deliberately that kill and maim and cause great suffering in order to profit is what it is, whether done under the umbrella of an outlaw gang or a legal corporation. People get just as dead, their physical agonies are just as horrible, the poverty caused is just as real.

As for the war racket: I shouldn't have to go into great detail about the likes of Blackwater. It was created by a gang of professional killers and given its source of income – from our tax dollars -- by a bunch of politicians who were friendly with its founders. It serves no legitimate purpose. What it does legitimately should be done by our military. Those things were done by our military until the Bush gang came along. That the company routinely acts criminally has been shown over and over; just go to Google.

Of course, in America, if something is legal, as the profit-sucking activities of the insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies are legal, we accept it as legitimate. We might complain, but we don't really do anything. We still see the executives of those corporations as outstanding individuals, because we admire wealth above all else. We think it's fine if our neighbors work in jobs that, for example, consist of finding ways not to pay policy holders who now need their insurer to deliver what was promised.

We also honor our legislators and our judges. But the great majority of our legislators are no better than cops who take bribes from gangsters to look the other way as arms and drug deals are perpetuated on our streets. A large and growing number of our judges –- up to and including the majority of five on what we used to call the Supreme Court –- are on an exact moral par with judges who take direct payments from the New York mob or the Russian mafia.

What they do may be “legal” since they wrote the laws, but it is criminal in the true sense.

That's the way it is in America.

Apparently most Americans approve, since they don't choose to do anything to bring change.

-------------------------------

At some point, we should talk about treason.

Some on the right no doubt would call me a traitor should they happen on my little essay on corporate criminality. But, believe it or not, treason is defined not as opposing corporations or corporate rule but as “acting to overthrow one's government or to harm or kill its sovereign” or “a violation of allegiance to one's sovereign or state.” -- Random House Webster's College Dictionary.

So unless you regard corporations as sovereign – which, come to think of it, many Americans do – opposition to the criminal behavior of corporations is not treason.

But, given the true, traditional and dictionary definition of treason, this country needs some serious discussion of the activities of politicians who push our country into war for the sole purpose of profit for the economic elite.

We should talk about a major political party that is openly and uncompromisingly dedicated to making our government fail -– with the help of some equally dedicated but slightly less open members of the other major party.

We should talk about a growing segment of our judiciary -– and most especially the five-member majority of our highest judicial body -– which ignores the oaths it swore on Bibles in which the members claim to believe and has dedicated itself to tearing down the Constitution of the United States in order to benefit that same tiny elite.

Perhaps another time.

State Republicans can crush people, too

2010-03-01T14:28:00.000-08:00

March 1, 2010

The Minnesota House of (you may laugh) Representatives failed Monday (today) to override a veto by right wing Gov. Tim Pawlenty of funding for General Assistance Health Care, a program that provides, until now, health care for poor people, mostly elderly, children and many military veterans. The vote was 87 to override, 46 against – 3 votes short of the two-thirds majority needed to override.

Very quickly, off the top of my head:

I attended the “rally” at the Minnesota State Capitol this afternoon in support of a House override of Gov. Tim Pawlenty's veto of a bill to continue GAMC (a health-care program for the poor.)

Would guess about 150 – 200 people showed up to stand around outside the front door to the House chamber and, eventually, wander around the nearby halls. Ran into my state rep., good guy Frank Hornstein, in the hall outside the chamber. He told me that the Dems already knew the Republicans were taking a page from Congressional Republicans and voting as a block – no exceptions – to prevent an override. Republican minority wins again.

I was allowed into the House gallery and listened to what is loosely called “debate” for about half an hour. The stench of hypocrisy, combined with the stink of Republican smugness and the sounds of weak Democratic whining disgusted me and I left.

If you want to go on believing that “representative democracy” works, do not actually listen to what passes for debate in a legislative body.

Republican side was best represented by Rep. Tony Cornish, who is chief of police of Lake Crystal, Minn., a very small town in Blue Earth County in southern Minnesota.

The stylish Rep. Cornish – really nice, well cut sports jacket and what appeared to be razor-cut hair -- declared that he and other Republicans have “no need to be ashamed” of refusing to override the veto nor of supporting Pawlenty's decision to stop funding GAMC. “We can't afford to take care of everybody,” he declared with jutting jaw. Besides, funding health care for the poor “hurts other people” by forcing them to pay more taxes, he said.

The representative of – who the hell are this guy's constituents? -- also said he would “not be intimidated” by the very quiet people out in the halls and warned other Republicans against being intimidated. Very brave. Those elderly veterans and mostly gray haired matrons probably looked pretty dangerous to a tough cop.

Cornish also objected to frequent references to god and Biblical dictates of caring for others from Democrats. Cornish said he would put his church attendance record up against that of any other member of the House. He added that “I have a heart, too,” but he offered no evidence to support that contention.

I had to agree with him on the god references. It was a sad display by the Dems. They offered few real arguments for supporting GAMC and sounded merely pouty; they already had surrendered.

The other major argument, made by less forceful Republicans, was that there shouldn't be an override “because negotiations with Gov. Pawlenty and Republicans” are still continuing. That's eyewash for the press, soundbites for television. The Republicans have stuck, just like in Congress, and consider “negotiations” to mean the other side surrenders all.

Oh yeah: Cornish said most plainly something that came more obliquely from other Republicans: If people are going to use the Bible for justification of actions like supporting GAMC, then they have to stand by (his opinion) Biblical bans on abortion and gay unions and other things Republicans don't like.

Comment: Forget the old sausage-making analogy. I've seen the making of sausage. It doesn't come close to being as ugly or nauseating as the process of legislating for the rich and against the vast majority of citizens. It's not even as off-putting as the weak-kneed performance of Democrats when confronted with strong opposition from the right.

I used to subscribe to the common feeling, when seeing or hearing of someone's suffering because of great illness, severe injury or financial disaster: “I wouldn't wish that on anybody.”

Well now I do wish it. The right wing sociopaths will never concern themselves with the pain of the poor until their own insulation, or perceived insulation, is stripped away. So I will rejoice every time one of those heartless bastards is taken down by the kind of misery that afflicts so many who are not as well protected by relative wealth, family and other resources.

The exceptionalism of such people will prevent them from learning anything even if they are hit by physical or financial disaster, of course. When it happens to others, it is deserved, or at least a result of their own imprudence. When it happens to them, members of the smug right, only then does it become truly unfair, a victimization.

Another day that will live in infamy

2010-02-03T14:46:00.000-08:00

“...and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
-- Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 19, 1863; “The Gettysburg Address.”

It's a good idea, I think, to take out a sizable piece of white paper and write on it in bold, black lettering this date: January 21, 2010. Then, with or without frame, hang it somewhere in your home where you will see it daily.

If you're clever with computers, perhaps you can get yourself a presentable printout to frame. You might want to add a simple elucidation. The piece of printer paper I've pinned temporarily to the wall in my office carries, under the date, the words “Roberts court kills U.S. democracy.”

I was angry and hurried when I did that. The date may be sufficient. The truth is that the court merely injected the final, fatal dose of poison into the veins of a representative democracy that already was critically sick. It will be a lingering death, probably with occasional spurts of what look like potential returns to health.

January 21, 2010.

It is a date as important as any we were required to memorize as school children. It is far more significant than the ubiquitous 9/11. The latter is a political expedient, a rallying cry for demagogues who lead their thoughtless followers by means of fear and lies. January 21, 2010 is a day on which, truly, this country changed drastically for the worse, and probably for the remainder of its existence.

That is not exaggeration, not hyperbole, as I trust Americans are beginning to realize.

Some people, supporters of the power of wealth and the tweedy sort of (figuratively) pipe sucking academics who want always to appear serene and ever so objective, dismiss the importance of the court decision on the grounds that corporations already have so much power a little more won't make much difference.

One answer to that is that, yes, corporations – that is, the highest level of corporate executives – have too much political power. We need to take away some of that power. If members of a gang carrying knives confront us on the street and demand everything we have, we don't immediately go to our government and plead with it to provide the gangsters with guns because they are inadequately armed.

Another answer is that the decision by the Corporate Five on the court is, without question, a signal to those whom they serve that even the thin gloves they wear now can come off. Whatever the corporate leaders choose to do to win and hold decisive power over our government, presumably short of open physical intimidation, this court will support. If representative democracy is to function in this country, we cannot allow that.

If, as I now hope, there is a rebellion – I do hope for a bloodless rebellion – in this country, that date will be the rallying cry. If, as is almost certain, there is no rebellion, it will be the date we will have to point to as the day that signaled that there was no future for government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

The next two articles below deal in more detail with the Extreme Court's decision of Jan. 21, 2010.

Extreme Court wrote law it wanted

2010-02-03T14:27:00.000-08:00

On Jan. 21, 2010, the Supreme Court of the United States handed the members of a tiny, almost exclusively male club the ability to amplify their already too-powerful voices in the country's political arena to the point that they can, at will, drown out all other voices.

Corporations, which is to say top-level executives, have the right to spend unlimited amounts of company money to support candidates of their choice in political campaigns, the court said.

Members of that little club -– membership determined solely by massive wealth -- don't even have to be citizens of the United States.

By acting through businesses incorporated in this country, an oil sheik from Saudi Arabia or the government of China can have more to say about who is elected to run our government than millions of U.S. citizens, as individuals or groups. Money absolutely determines who is elected to office in this country of half-educated, television-benumbed, badly led voters.

Right wing pundits and various Pollyannas to the contrary, that is not hyperbole. It is fact. If you are not one of the elite, but find your glass still half full, the content of that glass is poisoned Kool-Aid.

The decision to allow unfettered campaign spending by corporations was committed by five proud right wing activists among the nine justices.

Make that four proud right wing activists and one man, Thomas, who always votes with them for unfathomable reasons that appear to be rooted in constant rage.

The decision hangs on a legal fiction, the personhood of corporations, that was almost accidentally arrived at in the nineteenth century and gradually and carelessly strengthened over the years. Even so, the doctrine of corporate personhood never until Jan. 21, 2010, meant what the court of Chief Justice John Roberts said it means.

Justice Roberts and the court's other warriors of the right made a carefully calculated move to advance their political and social goals. Legal experts not financially and ideologically attached to right-wing organizations widely agree that the case that was the basis for the decision, Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission, did not call for such a far-reaching conclusion.

In its ruling, the court overturned roughly a century of precedent -– numerous previous rulings that allowed Congress to establish restrictions on corporate spending on political campaigns.

The majority explained the hurry-up by claiming the situation was a “legal emergency” but offered no serious explanation or evidence to support that claim.

To get to where they wanted to go, Roberts and Co. took a case that, in the eyes of numerous Constitutional law experts I've heard and read, begged to be decided on a quite narrow, technical question. Instead, the court made a sweeping declaration that all restrictions on corporate campaign spending are illegal.

It was in such a rush that, as the New York Times said, it moved “at breakneck speed,” giving lawyers just a month to prepare their briefs on a complex issue -– much less than is usual -– and even held hearings during its vacation period.

Roberts and his group had something it wanted to do, and it's logical and reasonable to conclude from their actions that they knew what that was before they read the briefs or heard the arguments.

The court majority made law, it did not interpret law.

It's members haven't admitted political motivation, of course, nor will they. There simply is no other rational explanation for what occurred.

Look at the players in this tragic farce:

Roberts was known to openly favor the interests of corporations and very wealthy individuals over the interests of ordinary citizens long before his appointment by George W. Bush to the Supreme Court.

As a judge, Roberts took at least two questionable stands against environmentalists and for corporations accused of polluting the environment and breaking environmental laws. As a lawyer he worked pro bono (taking no fee) to break a Colorado state constitutional amendment protecting gay rights. He was closely involved for some time with the right-wing Federalist Society but during his confirmation hearings denied ever being a member. His decisions and his activities as a lawyer show him as a fighter for the powerful and dismissive of individual rights. Roberts was a legal adviser to Jeb Bush during the election debacle of 2000, helping him to find ways to give the Florida vote to Bush's brother George.

At his confirmation hearings in 2005, the unmistakably smug Roberts repeatedly testified, often sporting his trademark smirk, that he would be “conservative” in deciding matters of law and very, very respectful of precedence. He lied and, given his behavior since joining the bar, it was obvious that he lied. He already personified the “activist” judge. Millions of us were disgusted with Democrats who joined in the 78-22 confirmation vote.

In 2000, Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas voted to hand the presidency to George Bush in what was, obviously to almost all of America, a purely political decision. No further detail is needed.

The fifth vote in January to give corporations complete freedom to buy elections was cast by Samuel Alito Jr., a George W. Bush appointee. During his confirmation hearings four years ago, Alito also promised, falsely, to interpret law, not make it, to be respectful of precedence and to be anything but political in his consideration of law. Since joining the court, he has taken an unfailingly right wing approach and brought new energy to the term “activist judge.”

Much has been written about Alito's obvious anger and mouthing of the words “not true” (I lip-read it as “simply not true”) when President Obama criticized the court's January decision during his state of the union speech. I half expected Alito to add “boy” to the sentence.

But in truth, Roberts' reaction was more telling: Roberts sat tall and smirked; he had won for the rich and powerful, those he clearly sees as the country's rightful rulers, and he damned well took pride in that. Watch the video.

Even retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, a conservative who has been deeply reluctant to criticize the court, allowed the other day that the Jan. 21 decision was not a good one and that one result is likely to be “an increasing problem for maintaining an independent judiciary,” because big-money interests undoubtedly will greatly influence the elections of judges.

The Roberts majority maintained in its ruling that to keep corporations from unrestrained campaigning for specific candidates is contrary to the First Amendment right of free speech.

That's false on the face of it, because the individuals who make up a corporation -– U.S. citizens, anyway -– have and always have had as much right as anyone else to speak up on behalf of politicians they favor and against those they don't like. Forbidding direct corporate participation in campaigns does not in any way limit the rights of those living, breathing individuals.

I can publicly declare that Minnesota's absentee governor, Tim Pawlenty, is a heartless servant of billionaires and send contributions to any candidate who runs against him. Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America, can say that Barack Obama is a revolution-seeking Marxist and can contribute to the campaign of anyone who runs against the president. That was true before this court decision. He and I and you and Aunt Sophie all had those rights and have them still.

Our Supreme Court now says, however, that Moynihan and others of the Corporate Rich Guy Club have rights that go a thousand times beyond your rights and mine and those of Aunt Sophie. They have a right to blare their opinions so loudly that other voices disappear under the din.

Not so incidentally, the Moynihans of the world get to decide who they shout for and against with the corporate loudspeakers. Under the law written by Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito, there is no requirement that the super rich guys at the top of big corporations have to consult their employees or even their shareholders on which politicians to back.

Big business is fond of claiming in its advertising that “we are our people” or some such crap. Have any of you who have worked for corporations ever been consulted by the top-tier executives about what political stances the company should take?

Shareholders, including those who hold shares through mutual funds, have real financial stakes in corporations. I've owned corporate shares in small quantities since I was in my early 20s. I've yet to have any executive or representative of any company ask my permission before spending corporate millions to lobby for or against various bills and laws.

The Supreme Court did not explain why top-level corporate executives have a “right” to spend your money and mine to buy politicians they favor, even though we may oppose those politicians.

(That raises some very interesting questions about what corporate stock ownership really means, but don't look for any straight answers anytime in this century.)

Why do corporations have First Amendment rights? the naïve citizen asks.

Because, the Roberts court says, it is established through much law and many decisions that in the United States, a corporation has the legal status of a person.

Only that ain't true.

Supporters of the Jan. 21 decision are disingenuously claiming that the four dissenters to that decision admitted in the dissent that corporations have such “personhood” status. Actually, the minority noted clearly that corporations have a “limited” status as persons. The majority conveniently forgot about the limitations.

The economic royalists also deliberately overlooked another fact pointed out by the court's dissenters: That numerous court decisions going back to the 1880s, but especially since 1908, have affirmed that Congress has the right to bar corporations from many political activities.

In fact, the establishment of the doctrine of corporation as person has a murky and dubious history. The first declaration of that doctrine apparently was made by one Supreme Court justice, Morrison Remick Waite, in 1886.

Despite the fact that the U.S. Constitution makes no mention of corporations, Waite issued his opinion in a lawsuit involve a county and a railroad. The decision was rendered without the court hearing arguments on the case, according to the book “The Post-Corporate World, Life After Capitalism” by David Korten. Other researchers agree.

In fact, Waite's decision, to be found on http://laws.findlaw.com/us/118/394.html states flatly that “the court does not wish to hear argument on the question” of whether corporations are entitled to “equal protection of the laws.” Equal to the protections offered individuals, that is. That decision referred to the Fourteenth Amendment, not the First.

Some reports and histories say that Waite's solo declaration may then have been amplified by a court reporter, who wrote that the Constitution, “which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations.”

In any case, the “personhood” of a corporation is undeniably a fiction. A corporation cannot serve on a jury, cannot hold public office, cannot be drafted into the military, does not go to jail for crimes committed –- and, in fact, neither do its officers, generally. Murders have been committed on behalf of corporations, but no corporate executive has ever been executed or sentenced to life in prison for those capital crimes.

A corporation cannot have all of the privileges of citizenship if it does not bear all the responsibilities of citizenship.

If the law does not recognize that simple fact, then the law is wrong and must be changed. If the Supreme Court refuses to recognize the reality, then the court should be somehow overturned, through legislation, through an alteration of the Constitution and/or through impeachment of the justices who denied the truth of the law for political reasons.

Up to now, the court has maintained that the rights of corporations are limited and can be further restricted “when there is compelling national interest” in establishing restrictions.

Preservation of the integrity of our electoral system would appear to be a compelling national interest.

But...Don't expect politicians, Democrat or Republican, to act. Certainly they will not move for impeachment. Almost as surely, they will do nothing to reestablish limits on corporate campaign spending; there probably aren't more than 40 members of Congress, both houses, willing to displease corporate funders to that degree.

We sink or swim without the help of politicians.

We'll pay for the court's excess

2010-02-03T14:14:00.000-08:00

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of the state and corporate power.”

...Benito Mussolini, founder of Italian fascism.

Government officials and the armies of pundits will not admit it – at least not in public – but the plain truth is that representative democracy in the United States is all but dead.

It will take a bit of time before it turns entirely to dust and collapses, but it is no more than a decaying zombie. By late this year, the advancing mortification will be unmistakable to anyone with clear eyes. By the middle of 2012, even the boobs will be able to see what's going on, if they care.

Mouthpieces for corporations and the economic elite are out and about now, cool and smiling, telling Americans that the widespread concern and anger over the U.S. Supreme Court's Jan. 21 decision that allows corporations to spend without restraint on political campaigns is greatly exaggerated.

Haughty and dismissive of critics, they sneer at the supposedly gaga liberals who say the decision is a disaster for democracy.

Given the fawning respect right-wing spokesmen get from todays faux reporters, and given the corporate-owned “news” media's disdain for liberals, the public undoubtedly will come rapidly to accept their message for a time, even as our governmental system disintegrates.

Who are you going to believe, your own eyes or the beautifully dressed, handsome, smooth talkers on television?

Americans choose television every time; that's part of how we got here.

Attack ads work. Unanswered and inadequately answered attack ads work absolutely. A massive campaign advertising a vicious darling of the right as a sweet fellow who has only your interests at heart also works, though not quite so well.

The Supreme Court has told the world's corporations that they may spend whatever it takes to overwhelm the voices of liberalism, that they are free to buy and control government in this country.

In fact, the consequences of the court's poisonous decision inevitably will be far broader and far worse than acknowledged by any of the politicians and pundits whose comments I've seen or heard.

* Many people are predicting a flood of corporate-financed attack ads against any politician who stands against anything any major business interest favors.

Of course they are right, though the flood may not be quite as bad this year as it surely will be in following years. It's a fair guess that many and perhaps most giant corporations, completely unleashed for the first time in the modern media era, will test the water this year, and refrain from a total assault across the country.

They'll want to figure out whether there will be a consumer backlash if they go too far – and figure out what is “too far.” They'll want to know how much honest reporting the vestiges of news operations will do on their activities and how much they can keep from the public. They'll want to conduct polls and other research to calculate finely just how far they can go.

And, probably, some executives will simply be intimidated at first by the freedom, uncertain of how to use it, like hormone-driven teenagers together in a safely private place for the first time. Learned inhibitions will hold back natural desire for awhile, but probably not for long.

Many millions of corporate dollars will be spent on the 2010 campaign, but they may be only a fraction of what will be poured into the elections of 2012 and thereafter, at least until the corporate hold on government is so complete as to be dent proof. After that, the political frontmen will have to work harder for a smaller share of the wealth, I'd guess.

* An inevitable result of the court's obviously political decision is one I've yet to hear anyone speak of: The disdain and, in truth, contempt it brings on the court itself.

Throughout my longish life, Americans have revered the Supreme Court even when we haven't agreed with its decisions. We have accepted it as the final arbiter of what our government can and cannot do, what we as citizens may and may not do. The 2000 decision to give the presidency to George W. Bush even though he did not win election did much harm to the court's standing with the public.

In the end, though, we accepted that patently partisan decision in the expectation that the court eventually would return to operating for and under law.

In fact, it has become even more politically motivated – remember how Republicans used to rail about “activist judges?” -- and millions of us hold the “justices” who participated in the Jan. 21 fraud in utter contempt. Three of the justices who handed the presidency to Bush also voted with the majority in the Jan. 21 travesty, thus demonstrating their fealty to ideology over law. We are justified in our contempt.

Reverence for the court? Not again for decades, if ever. It is just another right wing political body. When it screws us over, we must try to fight back, and if that means greatly reducing the court's power, so be it. If it takes altering the Constitution, let's try to do it. The court deserves no more referential treatment than any other piece of Republican party machinery.

This may well weaken the rule of law in this country. It is not our fault, but the doing of the court itself.

* Approximately 85 percent of all judges in America are elected. A majority of even the voting public ignore judicial races, and either don't vote or simply vote on the basis of name recognition. Incumbents always win unless they have achieved public attention through some egregiously bad behavior. But judicial campaigns still cost money.

It is henceforth amazingly easy, and pretty cheap, comparatively, for the corporate elite to buy our judges on all levels. Despite false protest from the right, it's extremely difficult now for individual citizens or even groups of citizens to win a legal fight against a large corporation. The businesses can afford to drag things out, to use the best legal help money can buy, to overwhelm the lowly citizen.

You can see how much easier that will be when the corporations have purchased the benches for those who sit upon them. Prepare your farewells to any vestiges of an honest judicial system.

* An obvious corollary to the point above is that businesses will be more eager to challenge citizens in court, and to challenge any regulatory law or, say, laws protecting employees or consumers from corporate wrongdoing. The likelihood of a corporate win in any such case will rise dramatically as soon as the hired judges are in place.

* In every story about the court decision, the corporate media equates “corporations and unions” as though they are equal players on the political field. Even the nuttiest of the teabaggers probably doesn't believe that, but it goes on. Labor unions can't raise one twentieth of the money that corporations can, and the unions are becoming weaker by the day as the right presses attacks against them.

Soon we'll see more stories equating MoreOn and other Internet-based liberal organizations with corporations and their trade organizations. The great majority of the public also will see that fiction for what it is. Labor unions and all of the money-raising liberal organizations together cannot raise half of what just one of the lobbying industries can spend on a campaign. To insinuate that they can play dollar for dollar against the combined powers of the pharmaceuticals, insurers, war industries, mining industry, lumber industry, and all the rest is wildly absurd.

But that's how the corporate press plays it; it must work for them to some degree.

* Although I've been avoiding most other comments on the Jan. 21 decision until I complete this piece, I am aware that while recognition was a little slow, a number of people now have pointed out that the Supreme Court – Justice Anthony Alito's insolence to the contrary – has opened the door to heavy foreign involvement in our electoral process. Hell, it blew away the door and the wall it hung in.

Aramco, the American subsidiary of Saudi Oil, is now free to play in our elections; it is a duly-registered American corporation. Several American corporations are owned by the government of China, and that country has pieces of many others. Bin Laden Construction operates legally (and as far as I know legitimately) in this country. So does an oil company in which the Bush family and the bin Laden family share ownership. Yes, really. The list is extremely long.

As Greg Palast of Greg Palast.com put it Jan. 22, “There is nothing that stops, say, a Delaware-incorporated handmaiden of the Burmese junta from picking a Congressman or two with a cache of loot masked by a corporate alias.”

Heavy spending by foreign interests, including foreign governments, to elect people who are favorable to them, or can be paid to be favorable to them, is certain. It will happen.

* Let's lump these: The essential facts are the same from a political standpoint. Among things that will not happen in Congress – or that will be reversed – because of massively increased corporate control of elections are these: Passage or enforcement of laws governing health and safety of workers; employee rights in labor organizing; laws requiring overtime pay; laws governing discrimination in employment because of sex, race, religious affiliation and sexual orientation; meaningful regulation of financial institutions; genuine health care reform; laws allowing reimportation of prescription drugs; serious regulation of insurance companies; meaningful improvement in laws governing the environment, clean air, clean water, preservation of wildlife habitat; protection of wilderness areas from lumbering and mining, and any other protections of natural resources against exploitation by corporations.

There will be some things done for show, and some existing laws will be enforced at their present levels for a while, but as corporate power grows, even those things will be pushed aside as unnecessary.

Some people do and will doubt that corporations would move forcefully in the mentioned areas. I do not understand that doubt. They are all situations on which corporations and their industrial associations have spent millions of dollars for lobbying. Why would they not press forward now that their advantage is greatly increased?

* The corporate world, often in alliance with the religious right, has been shoving its nose farther and farther into the tent of public education for decades. Look for that to accelerate. The corporate elite, as the brilliant comedic social commentator George Carlin long ago pointed out, does not want an educated American public. They want a trained workforce, able to run the machines that remain in this country, and to keep the books and stock the shelves; the last thing they want is millions of citizens capable of critical thought. Involvement in education will accelerate.

Even before the Jan. 21 decision, the religious anti-intellectuals of Texas had a big and growing effect on the contents of textbooks used throughout this country. The religious right controls the Texas Board of Education and Texas has a unified textbook purchasing system. If Texas wants science out and statements favorable to the religious right in a book, it often gets in or the publisher loses sales to all of Texas. In most areas, local school boards make book-buying decisions; a publisher will sell to all of Texas, even if it loses sales to local districts here and there. And the creationists are pushing again, even in places such as my native, generally educationally liberal Minnesota.

Corporations are happy to ally with the religious right if both get the kind of teaching they want. The children of the corporate elite do not go to public schools.

* Eventually, the relationship of the corporate elite and the religious right will change, but the shift probably will take a long time. The corporate hierarchy – highly educated, for the most part, and arrogant beyond measure – are, in private, extremely contemptuous of the spitting, shouting preachers and their bumpkin followers. The religious nuts are useful to the corporatists yet, but as the latter grow in open power, they'll undoubtedly get tired of catering in any way to people they see as hugely inferior. But we may be talking decades before an open split occurs.

* The “two party system” will continue. It's a handy fiction that keeps much of the great uninformed public relatively happy. Liberals will be almost entirely out, however. Not a huge change, since the billions of dollars in corporate lobbying money has long given the edge to right-leaning politicians. Now, however, we'll see the start of more and more openly dismissive treatment of genuine liberals who want public office. Give us exactly what we want or forget being elected to anything, the corporations will say, and they will be served. Liberals, already scarce, will become an almost extinct breed in the world of elected office.

* Let's not forget one of the biggest and worst of certainties resulting from the ability of corporations to buy elections: Settle down to perpetual war, people. War is immensely profitable, and profit is why we've been in Iraq for so long, and why we'll be there for some years yet and why we'll be in Afghanistan for many years yet and why we are almost certain to get into yet another unwinnable, perpetual war if and as the Iraq killing winds down. It's incredibly easy in this day of Fox Nooz and bent politicians and right wing preachers to drum up public support for yet another holy war, and with Congress bought and paid for, there's no stopping it. “We have always been at war with East Asia.”

The only thing George Orwell got wrong in “1984” was the year.

* There is a flood of ideas pouring out now from many irate liberal commentators, organizations and a few politicians. There are several small pushes now for Constitutional amendments. The public won't get behind any of them in meaningful numbers. The American public is past caring about much except taxes and, in a substantial minority, guns and Gawd.

Several bills have been suggested, some of them very sensible. Alan Grayson, the rich liberal from Florida, has introduced five bills, all of which would alleviate the situation to some degree. They won't pass, almost certainly won't even get hearings. Members of Congress are looking at who will contribute to their re-election campaigns and who might pour in millions against them.

Fageddaboudit.

* Speaking of corporate spending and legislative attempts at blocking corporate power in campaigns, one noble attempt looks like it should work, if it gets enough coverage from the corporate media. That is an attempt to bar corporations that have federal contracts from using their money to support political candidates. It is a supremely rational and righteous plan, and should run through Congress...maybe even with the support of two or three Republicans. Except...

The Roberts court still sits at the top of the pile. Given their history, there seems little to no chance that the five pimps would allow such a law to stand. If it comes to a test, they will do what they did on Jan. 21 – decide their course in advance and in favor of corporations over citizens and then create law to cover their decision.

* There already is a major rush from liberal organizations to raise money to fight the corporate takeover of elections and to combat right-wing candidates. Do what you like on that. I'm going to save my money to be used as best we can for the survival of my family. MoveOn, TruthOut, Progressive Democrats of America, Credo and all the rest, taken together, can't put as much money into a campaign as any two of the biggest insurance companies and one pharma. Goldman Sachs alone can outspend any six of the liberal organizations and not even have to reduce its executive bonuses.

Some people, not all of them corporate toadies, say now that the Jan. 21 decision to allow corporations to run free in the field of electoral politics won't bring much of a change from what we have now, because corporate money, dispersed by lobbyists, already pretty much runs Congress.

Yes, it does to a disgusting degree. But there have been some restraints. Now and then overreaching lobbyists and even some of the people they've bribed, have gone to jail or lost their Congressional or statehouse sinecures.

The new situation means that the corporations and their lobbyists don't have to risk illegal activity or worry about possible opposition. They can simply buy Congressional seats, and state legislative seats and judgeships.

This is Benito Mussolini's dream come true. In fact, it goes beyond his realistic dreams. And it's done without a drop of blood being shed or any need to face the anger of the leaders of the world. Quiet and clean, like a good mob hit.

Dems really are that dumb

2010-01-26T13:00:00.001-08:00

It finally became clear – a fact so obvious that I kept looking past it for other explanations for why Barack Obama and the Congressional Dumbocrats have accomplished so little of what the majority of Americans want.

Big campaign contributions aside, they didn't understand. In fact, they lacked and still lack even the beginnings of understanding of why they were elected.

Locked into the circular nonsense support system within the Beltway, and within the party hierarchy, they didn't even begin to grasp that America wanted real change, not just the promise of change.

They thought it was as it has been for decades: People like or dislike your campaign promises and style, but they don't actually think things will be substantially different after an election. In fact, the pols hold, we, the people, don't want anything but the color of the paint to change.

Now the White House and the Dumbocrats are flailing helplessly, at a total loss as to why they have dropped so far so fast. In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, they are trying desperately to continue in the belief that only the far left wanted big shifts in policy and practice.

They didn't believe we really wanted the wars to end. They didn't believe we wanted the bankers and Wall Street truly brought to heel, and that dainty wrist slaps wouldn't begin to satisfy an angry public. They didn't think we were even aware of the continuing loss of civil liberties, loss of things such as habeas corpus, let alone believing that we wanted rights restored. They didn't take seriously demands for equal treatment of gays. They certainly didn't believe that we, the great majority, wanted big money out of the lawmaking process.

They were absolutely certain that if they went on as usual, the liberals would line up again and yet again to vote for them because, as Rahm Emanuel said, “Where else are they going to go?”

I'm sure most of the people who read this thing understood all that long ago. I didn't really get my head around it until, after an exchange of emails with my excellent state representative, I went downstairs to fix myself some lunch a couple of days ago. Sitting at the kitchen table I had one of those forehead slapping moments.

My God! They really didn't understand and still don't!

So now an obviously bewildered Barack Obama has summoned his campaign staff to return and begin selling him again to the American public. And Congressional Democrats already are putting themselves into position to lie down under the wheels of the very-minority right wing machine. Surrender is their first response to the slightest hint of adversity.

Meanwhile, the White House still is full of revolving-door Wall Streeters, and Obama is still – still, for heaven's sake! -- talking nonsense about bipartisanship and cooperation with the Dirty Dogs.

Meanwhile, the public is enormously angry and growing daily more angry but, in its ignorance of how things work, aiming its anger mostly in the wrong direction and supporting the very people who intend them the most harm.

Folks, there is little chance for a cure of idiocy on this level.

Given the Jan. 21 decision of the five warriors for the oligarchy on the Supreme Court, make that no chance.

_______________

Given the state of things, please consider taking the action recommended in the short essay immediately below this one. It is one of the very few actions you can take that could actually weaken the power elite to at least a small degree. Close your accounts with any of the giant banks; dump their credit cards and get some from smaller issuers. Please.

Take a little bite out of big banks

2010-01-22T19:03:00.000-08:00

A group of people that includes Arianna Huffington has begun what appears to be a genuine grassroots movement to cut the “too big to fail” banks down to a more reasonable size.

Huffington isn't promoting herself on this campaign, at least not in a big way. She's apparently letting the thing build on its own, among anonymous citizens who see the logic and act, and pass the word to their friends.

Soon after I discovered the existence of the movement, a friend mentioned in an email that he and his partner are moving all of their funds from one of the giant robber banks with which they done business for many years to a credit union. That gives strength to the sense that this is a movement that may catch on; the friend had only just heard of the wider movement of which I speak.

It's a lovely idea. The required actions are cost-free and would take the average person very little time. That doesn't mean that average, almost terminally lazy American will do it, of course, but I'd like to think enough people will act to bite a few million dollars from the incomes of the made men of banking.

Simply withdraw any funds you have in the big banks and move the money to smaller institutions, and replace credit cards from the big banks with others issued by smaller organizations. There are many smaller banks, community banks and credit unions that can use your business and will better use your money.

You're fully protected by federal deposit insurance from losses up to $250,000 in a small bank just as you are in a big one

Credit unions and many community banks still are lending to consumers and to small businesses, while the big banks are hoarding their resources and slipping much of the money into the pockets of their executives.

It really is easy. Aside from big-bank credit cards, I did it more than two decades ago. Almost all of my banking is done through my credit union. I was lazy about the credit cards, but I'll have dumped the big-bank cards within the next seven days, and it's taken less effort than a walk around the block.

Top executives of Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America appeared before a Congressional committee Jan. 13, 2010, and recited their bland, we-don't-really-mean-it mea culpas. Most people didn't see their tightly scripted appearances because increasingly feeble television news operations can do only one news story at a time, and – rightfully, if they can do only one – the story of the week was Haiti. That saved the bankers from another explosion of public anger.

To make action easier, Huffington and the other people who started this thing -– they describe themselves as a group of friends who came up with the plan during a dinner conversation -- have created Moveyourmoney.info, an apparently amateur-made Web site.

If you don't know of a credit union for which you are eligible for membership, or don't know how to find a community bank, the Web site has a place to type in your zip code. Then click, and you'll get a list of community banks in your area. There is no charge.

I'd add a caution, though:

The people who created the site obviously can't know the country community-by-community. When I tried out the list of banks for my area, several of the names that came up were branches of TCF Bank. No one who cares about honest politics or social justice would do business with a TCF Bank. The organization is the feudal playground of an extreme right winger who was for a time chairman of the Minnesota Republican Party and who often spouts Cheney-like pronouncements through the local media.

But several alternatives were offered, fortunately. Do check out the banks on theMoveyourmoney.info list, before moving your money. That takes only minutes.

Do it.

Teaching how not to think

2010-01-14T11:39:00.000-08:00

The biggest laugh of my week came from the front page of the New York Times Sunday (1/10) business section.

No kidding.

At the bottom of the page was the beginning of a rather long story about how some business schools are beginning to change their curricula to incorporate – prepare yourself for this – lessons in critical thinking!

Times writer Lane Wallace began with a breathless description of how a decade ago Roger Martin, then the new dean of Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, had a “Eureka moment” when he realized that the highly successful principal of a local elementary school and a hotshot lawyer tied to investment banking used essentially the same thought process in their jobs.

They both “thrived by thinking through clashing priorities and potential options, rather than hewing to any pre-planned strategy,” Wallace gushed.

The great moment led Martin to a conclusion that was, at the time, a revolutionary concept in the world of educating the world's future corporate leaders.

That conclusion, getting serious broader attention only since the dumbest guys in the room (my phrasing, not the admiring Mr. Wallace's) brought us to the brink of economic collapse, is “a feeling that people need to sharpen their thinking skills, whether it's questioning assumptions or looking at problems from multiple points of view,” in the words of David A. Garvin, a Harvard Business School professor who co-wrote a book on “Rethinking the M.B.A.: Business Education at a Crossroads.”

So help me, I'm not making this up. You can find it in the gray pages of the mighty New York Times.

The article went on to say that some business educators are seriously considering that elements of a liberal arts education might be good for their students – notably the parts of such an education that lead people to think about the situations with which they are faced and consider a variety of possibilities for explaining and dealing with those situations. Why, it is suggested, one might even question the usual, clear corporate roadmap for dealing with every and any question.

Wow!

A few of the educators are even talking about “understanding cultural contexts,” said reporter Wallace. Well, that is, the folks at Stanford's graduate business school are talking about that. Some.

A bit more than half way through his report, however, Wallace admitted that such thoughts “are far from universal” among business educators. The sturdy people at the University of Chicago, for example, ain't havin' any of that there touchy-feely stuff; they're sticking to the straight and narrow: crunch the numbers and act according to corporate guidelines and never mind about putting things in context and examining potentially different ways of acting.

Wallace then quoted a couple of sources who suggested that no more than 25 percent of accredited business schools actually are considering different ways of looking at business, themselves and the world. And from further descriptions, it appears that there's something of a hitch in the thinking of those in the minority of schools actually making or proposing some changes.

The writer of the article didn't describe it as a hitch, however. I do. And it is this: Rather than actually trying to increase the critical thinking skills of their students, the schools “open to change” are trying to devise a new formula to replace the present ones. They call it “design thinking” and they've begun classes in it.

It's hysterical. You gotta laugh. No other way to avoid crying.

Beginning more than 35 years ago, while I was a full-time business and economics writer, dealing daily with the top levels of American corporate management and often with the supposedly great thinkers among America's economists, I began to complain to my colleagues about the terrible intellectual rigidity and lack of moral base I regularly encountered among the growing number of corporate leaders who held advanced business degrees.

It wasn't long before I started predicting that MBA programs – beginning with that of Harvard, the model for all the others in this country – would bring this country and it's economy to ruin or to a new form of corporate-led facism, or both.

My colleagues responded that while they also saw problems brewing, I was exaggerating the dangers. They didn't see what I thought I saw: a major cultural shift toward absolute amorality in business.

That shift should now be apparent to everyone. Don't try to hold your breath until the corporate world begins to move back toward some level of ethical behavior.

The new Reid flap: Pure B.S.

2010-01-11T09:32:00.000-08:00

This country is drowning in bullshit.

Please forgive the crudeness, but no other term quite conveys the necessary level of contempt for deliberate, nonsensical phoniness.

The hottest “news” story at the moment is an absurd flap over comments made two years ago by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his new apology for stating some simple, obvious facts at that time.

Reid suddenly was pilloried in the corporate media a couple of days ago for statements made during the early stages of the presidential campaign to the effect that Barack Obama might become the USA's first black president in part because he was “light-skinned” and had “no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one.” The stories continue to run; see the New York Times, page one, on Sunday, Jan. 10, 2010, and any network or cable news show at any time, day or night.

Use of the long-outdated word Negro was pretty dumb, but other than that Reid's observations were unmistakably accurate.

We're told that Obama and Reid got together and the senator apologized to the president for his remarks and the president accepted the apology because he knows Harry is a good guy and not a racist.

If we could get a transcript of that conversation, I'm guessing that they shook their heads together over the reaction to the comments and that Obama chided Reid a little for being silly enough to say something that could be twisted by the scandal mongers, Republicans and the dimwits of the press into being racist.

It's simply, sadly fact: In this country, a really dark-skinned black man could not have been elected president. It is equally fact that Obama has no touch of black dialect unless he chooses to, and then he injects it subtly and beautifully into his speech.

I hope someone brings out a video, but it almost certainly won't happen: Some time after his election, Obama spoke to an almost entirely black audience at some large event. May have been an NAACP meeting, may have been a convention of another mostly black group. I wish I could remember the specifics, but cannot.

At any event, the speech was televised. As Obama spoke, I said to my wife: “Hey, listen. He's talking black.” Her attention had been elsewhere; she stopped, listened for just a minute and said, “Yes, he is.” And he was. The rhythm of his sentences was different, pronunciations were slightly altered, certain sounds were stretched. It was fairly subtle, but unmistakable.

For the record: I do not say these things as insult to the president. On the contrary, I rather admired how well and how easily he changed his speech, and it made perfect sense to me as one who knows quite a lot about politics – as much sense as his dropping those black-community cadences when speaking to a bunch of white guys in $5,000 suits.

Beyond that, judging from my own fairly broad circle of acquaintances and friends, and knowledge of others who are selectively flexible in their speech, I'd lay very big bucks that millions of middle class black Americans can and do exactly the same thing with their speech, depending on locale and present company at any given time.

Reid simply made a quick, clear, honest observation. That it has become a big hoohaw is pure bullshit. But then, so is about 95 percent of political discourse in this country, at least as reported in the corporate media.

Even the underpants bomber was wearing out as a point of fixation for the talking models on television “news,” and they needed something else that would help them avoid real journalism for a few days.
------------------------------------
One other observation: Throughout my youth, in my part of the country, “Negro” was a word that acknowledged ethnicity without carrying negative connotations. It may have been used differently elsewhere, but here in the north central part of the country it was a respectful word, and so it also was on radio, television and in newspapers.

Though I have no problem with black people shifting their preference to other terms, and have shifted along with them, I think some of the complaints from younger blacks about the word Negro stem from lack of historical perspective and, frankly, from the arrogance of youth which crosses all ethnic borders: Anything of an earlier generation which is not the same as their usage and taste is stupid, ugly, etc., etc.

The routine of government lies

2009-12-27T09:20:00.000-08:00

We, the public, cannot trust our government to tell us the truth about any major event affecting our lives.

Let me qualify that. Some government agencies, such as the Congressional Budget Office, that have thus far remained largely nonpartisan, routinely tell truth, even uncomfortable truth. The White House, Congress and its members and all the agencies controlled by the military, “intelligence” outfits and other self-serving bodies, such as “Homeland Security,” routinely lie to the public.

The greater the importance of an event to the public, the more certain it is that we will be fed lies.

Almost everyone knows that, though we seldom state it so bluntly, or even face it so openly in our own minds. It's one hell of a frightening fact: Our government lies to us, often outrageously, more often than it tells us the truth. The bigger the event, the more likely that government will offer us monstrous lies.

“America does not torture.” Yeah, right.

(Yes, we expect that of modern American politicians, but it's still hard to face when we're talking about The Government.)

We recognize that only the hopelessly naive believe the entire official stories of the murder of John F. Kennedy, the events that got us into Vietnam in a big way, the absurd Cheney/Bush story of our reasons for invading Iraq, and countless other events big and small.

I don't mean that the Kennedy assassination was engineered by the Pentagon, or that the FBI killed Martin Luther King. I don't mean that Dick Cheney and his evil cohort engineered the horrors of Sept. 11, 2001; I do defy you to find reason to believe the official stories are accurate and real. “Faith” doesn't count.

What I mean, simply, is that the lies and coverups are so numerous and in many cases so obvious that we who value truth simply must recognize that we don't know and probably never will know what happened in event after event.

Often the coverups obviously are created simply to save some bumbling fool's ass, or hide the gross incompetence of a group of politicians or crony appointees. (Heckuva job, Brownie.) Usually, we're denied certain knowledge of some stupid error, rather than knowledge of a deliberate crime, although it would be unrealistic to suggest that the lies never cover real crimes, even capital crimes.

All of which is by way of leading up to what seems to me very probably another government lie that the great majority of Americans have accepted without quibble.

I don't think we know, nor do I think we'll ever know, what really happened at Fort Hood on Nov. 5, 2009.

Quickly: No, I do not believe the shootings of military personnel and civilians was part of a terrorist attack plotted by some group in Iran or Pakistan. I do not believe that Major Nidal Hasan had accomplices. It seems quite clear that the man was desperately mentally ill, that he started the thing by himself, and probably with little planning beyond some wild imaginings within his fevered brain.

It's also obvious that the Army should have recognized the depth of Hasan's illness and done something about him, and it, long before he began shooting. The Army's feeble excuses – akin, as numerous people have noted, to the Catholic Church's weak excuses for not stopping child abusers within the ranks of its clergy – hardly are strong enough to be taken seriously as coverup.

However, there are big problems with the official story of Nov. 5.

Hasan, a psychiatrist, a doctor, is not a known marksman with a handgun or any other weapon. As a medical man, he probably spent very little time – as in almost none – on weapons ranges honing his shooting skills. Sketchy stories of his early life give no indication that he grew up with guns or used them regularly, if at all, during his youth.

Our “news” media, always ready to swallow the official take on any story, has never asked about that, so far as I can tell. I can find no evidence that they've sought Hasan's military weapons records – which by now could easily be falsified in any case, though questions immediately after the shooting might well have produced records we could trust. I've not heard nor seen a single reference to anyone checking to see if Hasan was known at private shooting ranges.

But, the official story is that this doctor, this unpracticed shooter, walked into a building on Fort Hood and within the space of approximately 10 minutes shot and killed 13 people and wounded another 30.
Reports said he carried two handguns, but later reports by several agencies quoting military sources suggested that he used only one of the two pistols.

As someone who did grow up with guns, who fired shotguns and rifles and sometimes handguns from the time I was 9 or 10 until my early 20s, my first reaction was “Ain't no way.”

My present take is exactly the same.

Even assuming the man was a cold, calm shooter and not the emotional and mental wreck all the reports show him to be, that is a very unlikely, though not quite impossible, outcome. Even if that cold, calm shooter was highly practiced, an absolute ace with handguns, 13 dead and 30 wounded in not quite 10 minutes is an unlikely result. Rambo movies are not reality, or anything close to it, people.

Say that the emotional and mental wreck we know Hasan to have been used just one gun and 43 dead and wounded becomes what I would say is a practical impossibility, though others certainly will disagree.

We can presume that the people who were shot, and those who avoided being shot, were not standing calmly, facing Hasan and awaiting their turns to be slaughtered. They were running, ducking, hiding, probably yelling and rolling and generally making a hell of a terrified fuss. And remember that he would have been distracted by at least a couple of attempts to take him down.

Immediately after the shootings there were some suggestions in television reports that some of the victims were or may have been shot by military people and/or police officers trying to get Hasan. Very quickly, however, those suggestions simply stopped. The curtain dropped with a thud. No one mentioned the possibility again after a surprisingly short time – a matter of hours.

So far as I've been able to find, no one has even hinted at the possibility of “friendly fire” deaths or injuries since then.

It seems very likely to me that some of the dead and/or wounded were shot accidentally by people other than Hasan. In fact, under the circumstances that have been presented to us, I can't believe anything else. Some military people or police or both – scared, confused, probably panicked – shot carelessly or stupidly and hit innocent people.

As coverups go, this is very far from being the worst. If what I think happened is correct, the official story has been doctored almost certainly to protect well-meaning people who were badly trained or emotionally and mentally ill-suited to handle such an emergency. They were not up to the task they took on, and the military cannot bring itself to admit that it's people were, at best, incompetent, unqualified to deal with the terrible mess they found themselves in.

We're being lied to again. And a government that lies to us to protect incompetents and to save reputations certainly has no qualms about lying to us to cover its deliberate crimes.

The New York Times reported on Dec. 9, 2009, that the FBI has named its former director, William H. Webster, to conduct an “independent” review of the bureau's handling of information about the Fort Hood shootings. Not of the incident itself, mind you, but the FBI's own handling of information – i.e. what it told us.

Anyone here believe Webster is going to say anything other than that the FBI was generally brilliant in its providing the government and the public with accurate information on a confusing situation?

I didn't think so.

Now we are confronted with another situation – and apparent attempt to blow up an airliner as it approached Detroit -- that is guaranteed to provide us with more official stories that we cannot trust.

But worse than that: We now have a "news media" that lacks competence and, anyway, has no interest in pursuing the big stories or getting at the truth.

We want truth. We are not likely to get it, on this or any other event that reflects badly, however correctly, on our government or its various cops, spooks, military or guns for hire. We are not likely to get it on any major event that would require a difficult and/or lengthy pursuit by well trained and dedicated reporters; those are so rare as to be effectively nonexistant.

Past time to follow the health care money

2009-12-16T09:22:00.000-08:00

Industries that profit hugely from America's health care scam – notably insurance companies and pharmaceutical makers, but others as well – have spent massive sums to prevent any genuine reform of the non-system.

Many news and even some of the pseudo news outfits have reported what those companies spent and are spending to lobby against reform.

The Washington Post, CNN, New York Times and others said repeatedly during the fall that the profiteers were laying out $1.5 million a day to make sure we don't get affordable health care for all Americans. No doubt the expenditures have increased over the past month or so.

Estimates of the total spent by the profiteers on anti-reform lobbying go to more than $500 million since last spring.

CNN noted back in September that the expenditures to that point would cover top-drawer insurance for more than 30,000 Americans for one year. By now that number has to be 35,000 Americans.

But...

A very important set of facts has never been reported, so far as I can find. None of the badly educated, largely untrained stenographers who have replaced reporters seems even to have asked the big questions:

Exactly where is all the money going? Precisely how is it being spent? Who's collecting what the insurers and pharmas are paying?

Much of the money goes into the personal bank accounts of the lobbyists, of course.

The Guardian, a Brit news operation that does a better job of covering Washington than most U.S. news outfits, reported during the fall that the various health care industries had deployed a total of six (count them, six) lobbyists for each and every member of Congress. Of course, that's on average; some of the few unbought liberals may get only one or two or none at all, and Joe Lieberman probably has eight or nine brushing off his chair as he sits down for lunch while three others spread his napkin on his lap and four more serenade him. If you have a precious possession, you cherish it.

However, it is clear, on the face of it, that not all the money is being paid to lobbyists just to talk to members of Congress, sing them lullabies and massage them with expensive oils and ointments.

So where is the money going? To “charities” favored by legislators with power? To campaign funds? To wives and siblings and girlfriends under various ruses? To “nonprofit” employers of said wives, siblings and girlfriends? To PACs that saddle the various members' favorite hobby horses?

C'mon, “news” people. Where the hell is the money going, exactly? And I do mean exactly.

If the expenditures for lobbying are declared, and obviously a large percentage of the total is declared, then it is possible to find out who is being paid what.

___________________________________

Oh, and while we're at it, why do the corporate “news” media generally ignore the fact that Hadassah Lieberman, Joe's wife, has spent most of the past ten years or so as a highly-paid lobbyist for the major pharmceutical companies? She was director of policy, planning and communications for Pfizer, one of the biggest drug makers, and then a lobbyist for the pharma industry until quite recently. Before getting in the health care biz, she was a research analyst for Lehman Brothers, the big investment house that collapsed in 2008.

Her activities are highly relevant and should be noted in every story about his gun-for-hire activities.

And why don't the purported news outfits include in reports on the Senate farce the fact that the wife of Sen. Chris Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat who was involved in writing the Senate's bill, is on the boards of directors of three health care corporations and for a time sat on the board of a subsidiary of AIG, the government funds gulping insurance giant?

And why hasn't anyone made a big splash by reporting on the stock in pharmaceutical, insurance and other health care companies owned by members of Congress? Democraticunderground.com stated way back in June that more than 30 “key” members of Congress owned substantial amounts of stock in pharmas and that some are directors of drug companies.

I come near to weeping sometimes for what has happened to the craft to which I devoted my entire working life.

Here again, at least for a while

2009-12-14T10:05:00.001-08:00

Back around the end of May, I decided to take some time off from this blog and from other public writing, except for occasional letters to the editors of various publications. Initially, I did not intend to stay away for quite so long.

First, I knew that I was heading into a ridiculously busy summer, filled with many house guests and travel. We had one period of more than a month during which we had house guests continuously.

(Yeah, even if you love 'em, it can make you a little crazy.)

More importantly, it was time to step aside from the daily crises and distraction issues and try to figure out what's really going on in this mess of a country, which now can be accurately described as the world's largest and most powerful banana republic. It's official policies frequently are incoherent and often are patently irrational; it is almost ungovernable, yet swarms with authoritarian politicians, clerics and other demagogues eager to tell others how they should govern or be governed. It is greatly burdened with politicians too cowardly or too venal to act as they should.

It's very easy to get caught up in the latest, the almost daily scandals and hot stories –- what really is the significance of the fact that Tiger Woods cheated on his wife or that Sarah Palin is using her persona as a political Paris Hilton to make millions? -- and fail to see the massive changes taking place in our government and society. A lot easier, as well, to avoid facing those changes directly.

Americans are given to watching the ripples and entirely missing the shifting of the tides.

Even the health care battle is largely trivialized, while the real importance of that battle – important beyond even the question of whether Americans ever will get decent, affordable health care – is ignored.

Through the summer and fall, I read, listened and came to several mostly unhappy conclusions. Now, for awhile, I'll write again.

Yes, I know. Who gives a damn? I'm nobody and what I have to say doesn't matter.

I don't imagine myself to be a great pundit. Usually, only a few hundred people – very rarely a few thousand – ever see what I write. I'm a hick from the sticks, lacking a PhD and lacking a major newspaper or syndicate to inflate my importance. So read it or don't. At least I'll be able to consolidate my gleanings and get the conclusions down so that I can stop spending most of my waking hours ruminating on things over which we, the people, no longer have much power.

The first couple of articles to follow probably will not be on the really big subjects, but rather on things that offer clues to where we're going on the life or death issues.

jcf

Quiet shifts in the body politic

2009-12-14T09:50:00.000-08:00

There are shifts in the body politic that are as yet not generally recognized, and some of them suggest that a major political realignment may be brewing.

I'm not talking phony astroturf movements, or bubba teabaggers being led by their noses to do the dirty work of right wing billionaires. Not even referring to the sometimes reported but poorly documented disaffection of a badly-defined “moderate” element of the electorate.

Even occasional news media references to an obviously enraged but unfocused non-bubba portion of the population don't quite get at what may be an important shift in political perceptions. So many angry people are just angry without having any clear sense of who is doing what to them; they know they're being screwed, but are more likely than not to blame the wrong people, because the flood of misinformation and lies from corporation-controlled “news” media, Fixed News and talk radio overwhelms a limited ability for critical thought.

An old friend of mine personifies the real change I think is happening, that has to some extent already happened.

He and I became friends in early childhood, which is to say more than 65 years ago. His parents were distinctly upper crust in our small town/suburb. His father was a banker. I was distinctly from the wrong side of the tracks. His mother openly disapproved of our friendship and would allow us to play together, other than at school, only rarely and only if she could keep a close eye on me. Guess she thought I'd steal his toys, or the silverware.

He is a calm fellow, an ideal member of any committee or board, always seeking to get things done while seeing to it that no one is offended or left out.

I tend to be more volatile, much less patient, and recognized years ago that I am not suited to committees. I don't do committees any more.

Yet we have been friends all these years. We get together with our spouses about once a month, sometimes more often. We spend a long weekend with two other couples every summer, fishing, cooking together, ambling through country shops and such. My old friend and I are both deeply interested in history; the two of us went to France a couple of years ago to tour Normandy invasion sites, museums and cemeteries.

I am a lifelong political liberal, considered myself a Democrat until just three or four years ago. My friend was a solid, active Republican until a couple of years ago or so. He held municipal office as a Republican. He was on a first-name basis with Republican governors and members of Congress. His political support was recognized and valued by those Republican politicians.

My working life was spent as a journalist, including 30 years with a metropolitan daily newspaper. I, too, was on a first-name basis with rich and powerful people in business and politics, though the relationships were more arms-length, as they were supposed to be.

So, for 50 or 60 years we argued occasionally, politely and respectfully, about government, business and politics.

Now we don't -- or if we do, it's about minor details rather than the big picture.

I am no longer a Democrat. My old friend is no longer a Republican. We are both appalled at what we see in government and politics.

A few evenings ago, we and our spouses had dinner together, with another couple. The third couple is a male-female odd couple. The lady is vaguely liberal. While a decent sort on a strictly personal level, the man is far right on all things having to do with politics and government. An ex-marine, he believes all wars in which the United States is involved are just wars or we wouldn't be in them. He believes that the Cheney torture program was justified, that maybe there really were “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, that our economy would be perfect if government would just get out of the way, stop collecting taxes and let corporations do whatever they choose to do without interference.

That right-winger was quickly backed into confused silence the other night during a discussion of war, health care, the deteriorating condition of our beloved state of Minnesota and related topics. My old friend, the (until fairly recently) lifelong Republican. and I, the (until fairly recently) lifelong Democrat, argued from the same positions, arrived at separately. We each had loads of facts and details to support our shared belief that politicians of both major parties are ignoring the welfare of the American public, doing the bidding of the very rich at our expense and are generally pursuing inhumane and devastating policies.

The failure of this country to provide basic health care for millions of its citizens sickens that old Republican just as it sickens me. Domestic spying, use of cruel anti-gay propaganda to build support for a right-wing agenda, unnecessary wars, slavish catering to right wing Zionists and Cubans in Florida anger him as they anger me.

We disagree still on some details. Would this or that tax be right and appropriate, should this or that regulation be adopted? But the disagreements are not on basic points, and left to discussion we could work out the details. (Compromise. An interesting word. You can find it in a dictionary. It does not mean capitulation by one side in a dispute.)

Of course, my former Republican friend is just a single individual, as am I. But I know a large and growing number of former Democrats very like me, and I know several former Republicans who are very like, or increasingly like, my lifelong friend.

I also know adherents of both big parties who have gone to extremes -- especially, I must say, on the right -- but they are far fewer than those who are looking for some way to bring us back to a rational and democratic form of government.

We're not talking what the idiot press calls “moderates,” by the way. As near as it can be defined, that just means rightist Republicans who call themselves Democrats. The shift is not to radicalism, but it is to “the left” -- toward humanism and humanity, away from the amorality of the corporate world and corporate-controlled politicians.

It may be late, but the realignment is happening. If we are too late to save American democracy, at least we will be a pain in the butt to the oligarchy that seems close to establishing itself as the country's government.

Daring to challenge St. Obama

2009-05-23T06:18:00.000-07:00

People who are unhappy with some of the moves, or failures to move, by President Obama are being told, in effect, to sit down and shut up.

“Give the man a chance,” someone inevitably says when we complain that Obama's economic advisers are members of the same crowd that brought us our economic troubles –- most of them frequent passers through the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street jobs paying well upward of $1 million a year.

The same message is practically shouted when we note that the Obama economic program protects the very wealthy, helps the Wall Street and banking moguls consolidate their power (and become even more “too big to fail”) and ensures that more jobs are lost and that the incomes of those of us who are not enormously rich will continue to slip and that our economic perches become ever more precarious.

“Just wait. We'll see how it works out,” we're told when we point out that Obama has given the National Rifle Association it's latest boost toward arming the entire population –- or at least the far right side of the population –- by bowing without even a complaint to the latest ploy that allows the carrying of concealed weapons in national parks.

“Stop whining; would the alternative have been better?” we are asked when we note that Obama's approach to the Middle East, our ongoing senseless wars and the taking and treatment of prisoners around the world seems to be acceptance of Dick Cheney's policies. (And, boy, are the right wing fruit cakes warming up their voices to crow over that fact; the letters already are starting to appear in newspapers all over the country. See New York Times letters page for May 20 for one example.)

Health care? Self-proclaimed “liberals” and, especially, “moderates” are telling us to shut our pie holes when we object to the fact that single payer, government-run health care was taken “off the table” from day one of the Obama administration. Those already prepared to name schools after the young president snarl when we point out that the plans being espoused by Obama and the Democrats in Congress are at bottom little more than profit-assurance programs for insurance companies and pharmas.

Well, gang, I'm not going to shut up, and neither are a host of others who are paying close attention to the Washington dance.

Do you think the rich guys are keeping quiet and waiting to “see how it plays out?” Do you think the bankers –- who have been using millions of our tax dollars to lobby Congress since the moment they got the TARP checks –- are patiently waiting to see what Obama and their stooges in Congress do about the economy? Is the arms industry not talking constantly into the ears of their servants in government? Has AIPAC been silent since last November?

Well, gee, how about all the “progress” Obama and the Dems have made on things like –- uh, well, say protecting us from credit card predation?

If you believe the credit card moves really benefit us, I want to tell you about a number of deals I can offer you, for just a piddling fee, on bridges, land, insurance, mortgage refinancing and anything else you may want.

I'm sick to death of being taken and having no ability to do anything about it, so maybe it's time I join the takees.

Gee whiz golly gosh: Congress, with Obama's backing, intends to restrict credit card interest rates to –- what is today's number? Maybe 28 percent? Wow, what a deal huh? Meanwhile the banks are paying their suckers –- that is, customers -– as much as 3 percent in some cases. Even a point or two more for dollars you're willing to tie up for several years. Yessiree, a hell of a deal.

Also banks supposedly will be limited in when and how much they can jump the interest rates they charge on cards. Maybe.

But here's what people who don't know the banking game probably don't realize: In return for taking such punishment, the banks plan to bring back annual fees for the right to carry their credit cards. They intend to drop most or all of their “incentive” programs such as providing frequent flyer miles. They've said so; read the business pages.

The banks come out ahead. We pay fees for the right to buy on credit and pay interest rates that throughout history, up to the past few decades, were illegal (and even brought physical punishment up to and including death) in all societies throughout the world. The banks lose the costs of administering those bothersome incentive programs –- which came about, anyway, only because there was some competition among banks and other institutions for credit card accounts.

With the consolidation in the financial rackets brought about by the economic collapse and the resulting bailout and help -- actually, demand -- by government for further mergers, competition has been made all but obsolete. The big financial outfits still standing can carve up the credit card market with only minor squabbling. There is no further need for those costly competitive gambits.

Isn't it interesting that come high tide for them or low, the political right pitches and fights and demands and attacks for what it wants?

The left, when it wins an election or three, says “Let's be moderate” and “Let's see how it plays out,” and clears the field for the armies of the right to surround our politicians. And we go incrementally forever rightward. In or out of office, the right, the hugely rich, the Powers That Be, fight on. They gain three steps, perhaps the liberals take us back one, and then the right moves another three toward their goals.

Oh, you say, but we're making such wonderful progress on some important issues. We have stem cell research back, and it's obvious that prohibitions against gay people marrying will, in a few years, have gone the way of laws against interracial marriages, for example.

True, and those are good things. But they never were issues for the rich and powerful, who only went along with the religulous right on such things because those people were useful for a time. The wild-eyed preachers and their followers are much weaker now than they were even five years ago –- they'll be back, of course, but not for quite awhile -– and so the rich can get rid of them in the same way that they scrape muck from their boots after a stroll around the stable yard.

The rich have no religion but power and privilege, and they're still in charge. Our society is far, far to the right of where it was 50 years ago on all things that matter to the very rich and powerful, and we are still losing power and wealth to them. Jobs are still leaving the country, either abroad or into the ether. There is less economic security every day for the poor and middle class. The real powers of the country are effectively slicing away at health care, education, employee rights, safety protection for workers.

But, gee, “Shut up and give the man a chance.”

Meanwhile, let's see if you can find the pea under one of the three cups I will place on this little table....

Guns: Pimping for a dirty business

2009-04-24T15:50:00.000-07:00

You have to give America's increasingly extreme political right great credit in one area.

Its propagandists, the ones it has right now, are the best at flaying facts and selling disinformation since things went belly up for Joseph Goebbels 1945.

The best of the best –- or, from a moral standpoint, worst of the worst -– are those who directly serve the makers and peddlers of military-style guns and other people-killing devices, the profiteering promoters of murder on a massive scale. In that, too, they have much in common with Dr. Goebbels.

They get great help from our cowardly politicians -– which is to say almost all of our politicians -– and from an equally cowardly press and a whole bunch of ignorant suckers among the American public, but that is largely a testament to their skill.

In late March, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went farther than is usual for a U.S. official in admitting that our country bears substantial responsibility for the growing power and brutality of Mexico's drug cartels. Specifically, she admitted the obvious fact that demand for drugs in this country fuels the growth of the mobs and the less-known fact that the drug gangs get the bulk of their weaponry from suppliers in the United States.

The second piece of information, on weapons, was confirmed by Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Defense.

Clinton's statement may have taken what passes for courage in American politics, unpleasant truths being widely regarded as untouchable. Few facts could more clearly demonstrate the political power our elected officials have granted those who produce and promote violence for profit.

Although there was little or no coverage in the establishment media, a couple of other people in the new Obama administration already had made such acknowledgments. The gun racket had anticipated Clinton's admission.

Fox Propaganda, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and various other screaming sociopaths were ready, of course, but their rants were predictable and dull. Everybody who can walk and chew gum had to have known in advance what they would say: Weak-kneed liberals apologizing to criminals, what we need is armed troops standing three feet apart along the entire border, it's all the fault of them furriners, and look-out-folks-they're-gonna-take-your-guns-away.

When it comes to carrying water for the murder businesses, those people are useful, but minor players. The gun nuts go elsewhere for the authoritative word on what they should think.

Their secret decoder rings are set for the National Rifle Association and dozens upon dozens of Web sites and blogs narrowly aimed at the kind of suckers who have bought into the fictions about impending gun confiscation and the need to be prepared for a socialist or fascist coup.

(Beck, for one, doesn't seem to know the difference between socialist and fascist, and it's a good bet that a high percentage of those who take him seriously are equally in the dark on that point and many other points of fact.)

So I looked in on several of the aluminum hat gun nutter sites, the ones that carry articles, and sometimes ads, about what body armor to buy and where to buy it, and rant after rant about the dire threat of a dictatorship of the left. The official position of the death peddlers became obvious within half an hour. The “talking points” had to have been distributed before Clinton's statement got it's brief flurry of coverage.

In a nutshell here they are, without most of the boilerplate rhetoric about “Mainstream Media's huge disinformation campaign to demonize the American gun owner,” etc., etc., ad nauseum:

-- The attempt to slow the flow of weapons to Mexican criminals will, as Michael Gaddy of LewRockwell.com assured his readers, morph into 'the war on guns'” planned by President Obama. (Fact: Obama has always taken a “moderate” -- that is, rather weak -- stance on guns and gun control.)

-- Obama administration people are pushing the idea that the weapons going into Mexico are coming from America's private gun owners. (Fact: No such claim has even been implied, let alone stated. Absolutely nobody, other than the wing nuts, is talking about individual American gun owners shipping their weapons to Mexico.)

-- And -– booga booga booga -– the real supplier of weapons to the drug gangs is the U.S. government, using the Mexican government as a middle man. (Too absurd for any rational person, but readily believed in the gun worshippers subculture. Government conspiracy, doncha know.)

In the hands of Gaddy, who describes himself as an army veteran of Vietnam, Grenada and Beirut, that translates to, “Our corrupt government, cooperating with Mexico's equally corrupt government, has embarked on a campaign to deprive American citizens of the means to defend ourselves from tyranny, screening their own involvement in arming violent criminal drug cartels.”

(One could assume from Gaddy's fantasy that Barack Obama is not only a secret Muslim and a citizen of some other country but also a secret employee of the drug cartels, specializing in armament.)

-- But the main story, put forth by one Ralph Weller of Gun News Daily, who claims to know all this because he “lived and worked in Mexico in a border town for about five years,” is that all of the assault rifles, machine pistols, hand grenades and other murder tools in the hands of Mexico's drug pushers are from “Europe, China, Russia and South America” or “they came from illegal arms manufacturers in India or Pakistan.” Take your pick, apparently; the two theories about source are presented separately within the same essay.

For added spice, Weller's piece charges that, rather than weapons going from the United States to Mexico, the opposite is true, that “illegal full-auto weapons and grenades” are flowing along with drugs from Mexico to this country. That creative claim appears to be unique to Weller at this point.

Weller's article, which carries no attribution for any statement and not a single checkable fact, has been picked up by more than a dozen other right-wing and/or gun nutter Web sites that I saw. I'd be very surprised if there aren't many more I didn't see. Those I got into all presented it as absolute proof that arms are not going to Mexico from this country and that the claim is just groundwork for a government attempt to seize Americans' god-given guns.

I tried to find reliable information on Weller's identity and background, but biographical information, other than a brief paragraph he apparently wrote, doesn't seem to be available. There was another Ralph Weller, a ranking executive of Otis Elevator Co., but he died in 1995, and I could find no link between him and the above-quoted water boy for the gun peddlers.

Most of the gun-nut sites push the idea that President Obama is a very busy man, hatching a great plot to take all guns away from all American civilians.

In truth, Obama is very timid about taking on the gun nuts. If you check his positions and statements going back to his days in the Illinois Legislature, it becomes clear that he's never called for a ban on guns, never even hinted he wants handguns made illegal. He has –- take a deep breath now -– suggested that handguns should be registered and that assault weapons and armor-piercing ammunition should be permanently banned.

Obama, to the horror of the gun nuts, also has suggested (nothing more) that we should return to a prohibition against carrying concealed weapons and the closing of a loophole that allows private sale (including at gun shows) of all kinds of weapons and ammunition without any record or registration of the weapons and buyers.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, the NRA, which speaks from Olympus in the minds of those who dwell in the gun-nut world, created a wholly fictional claim that Obama had a “ten-point plan” to alter the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The NRA said Obama will “ban the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns” and also “ban the use of firearms for home self defense.”

The aluminum hat crowd believes that with greater certainty than it believes the sun rises in the east.

---------------------------

When Ralphy, the young hero of a wonderful movie titled “A Christmas Story,” got his first, greatly anticipated message from Little Orphan Annie after he at long last received his secret decoder ring, he was outraged, and threw the ring away.

The message: “Don't forget to drink your Ovaltine.”

It's a great pity the wing nuts and gun freaks, not to mention members of Congress, don't have the same ability to recognize and reject business-sponsored crapola.

---------------------

Lest anyone mistake me: I grew up with firearms.

My father lived for fishing and, especially, hunting. It was his great passion. But he lost a leg to a careless fool of a hunter when he was 18, and his “good foot” carried a piece of a bullet lodged there thanks to the idiocy of yet another careless hunter. Neither of the people who shot him were in his hunting party at the time of the incidents. He would not tolerate the slightest carelessness with a gun of any type, and twice that I can recall, he chased people from the field on the sheer strength of his anger -– no physical threats made or implied.

I owned both a rifle and a .410 shotgun by the time I was 11. I gave up hunting in my late teens almost entirely because of the dangerous behavior of other hunters. I continued to target shoot now and then for many years. I have nothing against well-behaved hunters, certainly nothing against people who use guns for target shooting, skeet and other non-lethal sport. If it were convenient, I might be one of them.

But as one who spent many hours of my youth in the field, I can see absolutely no legitimate civilian use for military-type semiautomatic and automatic weapons, let alone bazookas, rocket launchers and other types of iron designed specifically for the killing of human beings. The same goes for armor-piercing ammunition. I'm somewhat ambivalent on handguns. There obviously are many people who should not have them, and a considerable body of research shows that, despite NRA propaganda to the contrary, a vast majority of innocent citizens who think they can defend themselves and their homes with such weapons are deluding themselves and asking for trouble.

Guns 2: The hidden business

2009-04-24T15:35:00.000-07:00

When Hillary Clinton declared in March that weapons are flowing from the United States to Mexico's drug cartels, you'd have thought she'd revealed that madwoman Ann Coulter is a drag queen, rather than stated a fact well known to law enforcement people and many others on both sides of the border.

(About Coulter: You didn't know? Where did you think Bill O'Reilly goes when he's not in the Fox Propaganda studio?)

There was hardly a newspaper that didn't carry the Clinton story on the front page, and, for a day or two, no television faux news station that didn't use it at least twice an hour.

In fact, the simple admission of the gun trafficking was hardly more shocking than Clinton's acknowledgment that demand from the U.S. is what put the drug mobs in business and keeps them rich.

The coverage faded quickly in establishment news outlets, however, leaving only the occasional uninformed television “reporter” or Fox flunky to ask some minor Obama administration official whether the president wants to “confiscate the guns of private citizens.”

Clinton's statement should have been the kickoff of big-time investigations of the gun-peddling business by at least a couple of news organizations. But that wasn't going to happen. The quick fade to black was as predictable as a Rush Limbaugh tirade. The gun trade is a dung pile very carefully avoided by establishment news outfits.

Just in case, though, I waited for a couple of weeks after the Clinton pronouncement to see if, just maybe, some news outlet, some small, surviving group of real journalists. would seek answers to the painfully obvious questions: Where do the weapons come from and who's selling them to Mexican killers? (A longer but still incomplete list of other necessary questions is included below.)

Hasn't happened, of course.

American newspapers and broadcast news presenters have avoided crossing gun makers and sellers since before I got into the news trade, and that's about 50 years ago. They were afraid to take on the killing business even before the National Rifle Association became almost entirely a propaganda and lobbying agency for the murder business and before it gained genuine political power through what often is delicately described as “distribution of wealth.”

No, I can't explain it. Like anyone else out here, I can only guess.

Every so often during my 30-year tenure on what was, through most of those years, a very good metropolitan daily newspaper, I pitched the idea of probing the gun manufacturing and selling rackets. More often than not, my bosses acted as though I were soundless and invisible. I got no response at all, neither aye nor nay. Once or twice, I was told -– as happened on other possible subjects occasionally -– that such an investigation would take too much work, too much time; the newspaper couldn't afford to have me or any other reporter devote that much effort to one subject.

If I pointed out that we did occasionally devote much time and work to a single story (or series of stories), the response was that afore-mentioned silence and invisibility. Although I could hear myself and see myself in mirrors, and co-workers could see and hear me, the bosses didn't seem to be aware of my presence.

Most of the time, I think the excuses were exactly what I was told, when I was told anything, but after years of periodically making the pitch, the scenes began to have an unpleasantly eerie feel.

The thing is, nobody else in this country did the obvious gun stories either.

During my career I did a number of “big” stories that my bosses were reluctant to embark upon. The stories that met with initial reluctance almost always involved unpleasant facts about some business or group of businesses – often businesses that purchased substantial amounts of advertising.

The reluctance of editors to take on such subjects was understandable. If we produced information that made some business guys sweat, the editors took much heat.

Sometimes, inevitably, reporting turns up information to show that what you thought might be something illegal or exploitive of the public or otherwise rotten actually is at least acceptable, if not benign. The work you put in on the subject is therefore “wasted,” though I never saw it that way.

Yet far more often than not, if I or another reporter had solid grounds for wanting to dig into something, we got a green light.

Not on the gun racket, though.

You might wonder what made me think the gun business -– manufacture and large-lot sales -– needed examination. It's the same sort of thinking that has led to countless journalistic investigations:

There are far more guns in this country and elsewhere in the world than there are legitimate users. Hunters, skeet shooters, competitive target shooters, hobby shooters, have all the guns they can use, and street gangs, drug cartels, terrorists and all sorts of ugly and evil people have many, many more guns than are required by or could be used by all of the legitimate users in the world.

Production of guns exceeds legal or legitimate purchases by multiples, though we don't really know by how much.

We need numbers. How many of what types of guns are made, how many of those can be shown to have been sold to legitimate users? Where have the rest gone? Who has them? How did they get them?

The gun business and its apologists like to talk about “stolen” guns arming the gangs and such in this country. But how many guns actually are taken in known thefts, and how does that match up with the armories of drug gangs, street gangs and all the other brutal thugs? On the face of it, it is obvious that the criminals have many more guns than have shown up on lists of stolen property. Perhaps someone needs to explain to people in the gun trade that they should lock up their inventory.

Terrorists around the world, war lords and small strongman governments, the Italian Mafia and the Russian Mafia and lord knows how many other mafias are armed to the teeth, despite prohibitions of weapons sales to those people by almost all established governments. So who is making the hundreds of thousands of weapons those large-scale thugs acquire in such numbers, and who is selling them? Do gun makers “lose” 40, 50, 80 percent of their production out the back door? Really? They have no effective security? Or, alternatively, they just “don't know” who's buying half or more of what they produce?

Show me a legitimate business of any size that doesn't know what it produces, what it sells, what it has in inventory and who its buyers are. If you know one, and they do show up from time to time, it will not be in business long. And it won't have been profitable for long, let alone for centuries.

What use to private citizens are automatic weapons, assault rifles, rocket launchers, antiaircraft rockets, body armor, armored vehicles and other killing devices obviously designed solely for the killing of human beings? Who makes those, who sells them and who are the buyers? Really, who are the buyers -– age, background, income, and psychology. (Dangerous ground, but on the face of it there are some seriously disturbed people stockpiling extremely threatening weaponry. Right here in the U.S. of A. Read the gun blogs)

Oh, yes: Who gets how much profit from such things? And which politicians get how much in “campaign contributions” from the people who make the profits?

About the gun bloggers' claim that the bloodthirsty mobs are getting their guns from illegal manufacturers in, say, Pakistan or India: Really? A bunch of little tin-shed copyists, presumably without heavy manufacturing equipment, are turning out machine guns and assault rifles and other sophisticated weapons by the millions? And they can't be located and shut down?

Those are just some of the questions that have popped into my head at various times, making me believe that some capable journalists -– there are some left, though their numbers are dwindling rapidly -– really need to look hard look at the weapons business.

Wish I could say I expect that to happen.

Guns 3: Dangerous people

2009-04-24T15:01:00.000-07:00

This country needs to take a really good look at its semi-underground gun culture.

It probably needs two such investigations, one by some official organization, preferably under Congressional sponsorship, and one by a team, or several teams, of thorough and courageous journalists -– if such can still be found.

Both probes would have to be separate from the even more immediately needed hard looks at the business of manufacturing and selling the kinds of weapons that have as their only purpose the killing of humans. To try to combine serious investigations of the weapons business and the culture of gun nuts who, knowingly or not, front for the killing industries would be simply too big, and too likely to confuse issues.

The American gun culture harbors a lot of seriously disturbed people who, I strongly believe, are of more immediate danger to us, individually and collectively, than any group of overwrought religionists camped among the stony hills and valleys of Pakistan or Afghanistan.

Just seek out their publications and Web sites and read what they say, especially in comments posted with articles about supposed government plots to ban guns, or keep ammunition off the market, or the attempts they are absolutely certain “Barack Hussein” -- a frequent usage -- is going to make to ban all firearms in this country. You'll find a lot of calls for armed revolution and reminders that if anyone crosses them, “we have guns.”

“Maybe it's time to revolt and rid this union of socialists and communists, peacefully if possible but with force when all else fails,” said “Kevin, a Gun Owner” on “KeepAndBearArms.com. He also suggested that House Speaker Pelosi “is an outright idiot, she should be tarred and feathered and sent packing on a rail.”

On the same site, someone identified only as Tim quoted J.Edgar Hoover at length, warning of “a defiant, and lawless communist party, which is fanatically dedicated to the Marxist cause of world enslavement and destruction of the foundations of our Republic.”

In fact, the belief in an international communist conspiracy to take over the United States, abetted by Jews and civil rights organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, is alive and well in the world of gun nuts.

The rants quoted above are among the more civil I saw. Some sites are little more than collections of obscene, hate-filled ravings against practically everyone who can in any way be called “liberal,” with special attention these days for Barack Obama. The president frequently is characterized as an agent of Islam, plotting to destroy the united States. I'm none too delicate about “bad” language, as regular readers know, but I would not quote here much of what I've read recently on the gun-nut Web sites.

There are a whole lot of potential Timothy McVeighs out there, folks, and since November 2008 election they seem to have shaken loose all the bolts that held them, however tenuously, to the floor of reality.

We need reporters to start digging and to report back to the public on who those people are and what they're really about -– and what they're about is not simple support for “Second Amendment rights,” despite the propaganda put out for general consumption.

What most people know of the gun culture, of course, is the National Rifle Association, which generally is seen as a benign supporter of hunters and sport shooters and from a liberal point of view, a somewhat over-zealous defender of “Second Amendment rights.”

A bit of nosing through books and current information on the Web suggests strongly to me –- supporting an impression I've had since I was a kid who did a lot of shooting and hunting -– that the NRA is a well-structured front for the gun makers and peddlers. Not the “defense industry,” but the people who provide the millions of weapons that magically find their way into the hands of huge criminal organizations, terrorist organizations, drug cartels and various other violently criminal mobs.

It is a machine for the production of brilliant propaganda, obfuscations, lies and double talk, and perhaps the biggest and most successful organizer of ignorant, paranoid suckers since the Third Reich died in a bunker.

Sporting guns and pheasant hunting ain't in it folks, and though many of the NRA's less involved members and adherents think of it as a support organization for sportsmen, it hasn't made a very serious effort to operate on that front for quite awhile now.

Oh, it still supports gun-safety programs for youth and such things, but those pretty much run themselves with volunteers, and don't seem to occupy much of the attention of the organization's paid operatives.

Also, it's simple fact that only the most paranoid of gun nuts think there is even the remotest possibility that any politicians in this country are out to take away hunters' shotguns and rifles. We all know that is never going to happen, and the vast majority of us would object powerfully if anyone tried.

Nope. What the NRA is about -– listen to any of its officers' speeches, catch interviews with them on TV, read any of their numerous articles –- is defending the “right” to purchase man-killing weapons and their ammunition. AK47s and bullets designed to tear up the insides of a living being hit by them, are not useful in the world of skeet shooting or hunting, folks. They're not much use, either, to a competitive shooter. Skiers don't carry fully automatic guns on their backs in the biathlon.

NRA officials dance delicately around the purpose of advanced human-killing weaponry. They generally turn the inevitably timid questioning of reporters on that subject to DEFENDING THE SECOND AMENDMENT. (Yeah, that's generally spoken in the verbal equivalent of capital letters.)

We have a RIGHT to “bear arms,” doncha see, and what might be done with them is something we shouldn't really discuss.

Quick fact: The NRA often trumpets the fact that it was founded in 1871. What it is less noisy about is the other salient fact about its beginnings: It was from its first day focused on supporting the ownership of military weapons by those whom we might now characterize as right-wing and anti-government. The organizers and officers of the organization through its early years were downright disdainful of “sportsmen,” historians say. Guns were for support of a certain way of life.

Some people connect the early organization with the Ku Klux Klan, but, to date, I haven't seen any evidence to that effect.

What is a demonstrable fact is that the NRA regularly puts out the most blatant lies imaginable to stir up its members and other gun nuts and make them and the wider public believe that good, honest folk are in danger of having their guns taken away. Any suggestion of regulating the manufacture and sale of any kind of weapon is taken as such a threat.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, the NRA blatantly lied about Barack Obama in its publications, in advertising and in every media it uses. The organization claimed that the then-candidate had a “10-point plan” to strip Americans of their guns. The claim was entirely fiction. Obama always has taken a very soft approach to gun control, suggesting only registration of handguns and restrictions on the sale of military style automatic weapons. He doesn't go anywhere near far enough for most liberals.

It's safe to say that most NRA members, and many others, still believe that Obama is a would-be confiscator of guns.

But the NRA is far too soft for the real gun nuts. They often rail on the Web sites of other gun organizations about the NRA's willingness to occasionally, and very slightly, compromise with Congress when it comes up with some toothless plan to keep heavy weapons out of the hands of the blatant madmen.

(I just read an on-line debate on whether people who have been diagnosed with severe mental illness should be prevented from obtaining weapons. The pros and cons seemed fairly evenly divided. Some writers thought “rights” come first, some allowed that maybe certain kinds of diagnoses should preclude gun ownership – although in such cases, the people in question should be locked up anyway.)

The thing is, the Second Amendment debate is phony.

What most of the country believes now – that there is an honest question of whether that amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees individuals the right to own whatever weapons they choose to have – is false.

That even most people who hope for some gun control believe it is an open question is the NRA's greatest success -– a triumph of false propaganda, a tribute to Joseph Goebbels assertion that some lies are too big not to be believed by an ignorant public.

Go to http://www.fair.org and look for a September/October 1996 article by Howard Friel, headlined “How the NRA Rewrote the Constitution.” You may have to go to an archives or advanced search page to find the article.

What it says, clearly and with considerable grounding, is that courts, including appeals courts, in this country have issued what the writer designates “an unbroken chain” of decisions over (then) six decades ruling that the Second Amendment does not confer an individual right to possess firearms. That “well regulated militia” mentioned in the amendment means exactly what it appears to mean.

The U.S. Supreme Court has never directly addressed individual gun ownership, at least not until the recent decision of the Bush court to strike down Washington, D.C.'s strong gun control law. But that decision, declaring the Washington regulations “over broad,” avoided the central issue of what the Second Amendment really means. It left room for substantial restrictions on gun possession and use.

With a substantial number of Bush appointees on the bench now -– some of them, such as torture promoter Jay Bybee, with worse than doubtful qualifications -– the legal battle may get rougher before long.

In the meantime, you will observe that our captive establishment news media inevitably behave as though the NRA interpretation of the law -– a false interpretation -– is correct or at least probably correct. They never, and I do mean never, mention the long history of judicial decisions declaring that there is no individual right to weapons.

But, a reminder: Very few Americans, and no politicians I know of, want to take anyone's sporting guns away. As for some of the psychotic paranoids whose writings I've been reading on the gun sites: we have to talk about strongly controlling the kinds of heavy-duty military weapons they favor.

Ken Poplawski, who killed three Pittsburgh policemen April 4 with an AK-47, was a guy very like those who spew hate daily on numerous gun-lover Web sites. As noted in Salon.com on April 7, he “believed that the United States was controlled by a secret Jewish cabal that had a master plan to abrogate freedom of speech and use the U.S. military to police Americans.”

I saw that very proposition mentioned five or six times on gun-lover sites the day I wrote this essay.

Car companies: Save or not save?

2009-04-07T10:46:00.000-07:00

It's terrible to contemplate the lost jobs and the resulting suffering that the failures of the American auto industry have brought to our country.

If you understand what has happened, it's also impossible not to be angry -– no, furious –- at the foolish, narrow-minded, short-sighted, greedy executives who have killed or nearly killed what once was our greatest industry.

In some ways, they have been even more bullheaded and misdirected than their counterparts in the world of finance.

The auto industry, for one thing, had more and clearer warnings about their impending downfall than did the bankers, brokers and insurance grubbers, and the warnings started years earlier. Also, the essential part of what needed to be done was obvious to anyone with no more than an average ability to navigate life.

Lee Iacocca's 2007 book, “Where Have All the Leaders Gone?” was very clear about the fact that the industry had too many models, too many brands and too little awareness of the future, for example, but it was far from the first such warning. Many people wrote and talked in recent years about the need to improve quality and to begin shifting production from gas-guzzling behemoths to smaller, more efficient vehicles.

With the blind arrogance that is virtually the signature attribute of American corporate executives, but is multiplied by ten in the car business, the auto bosses refused to hear what they did not like.

The extreme right of the Republican Party –- which is to say, the people in control of that party –- now claims that it's all the fault of the people who do, or did, the physical work of building the vehicles. If they hadn't made solid, middle-class livings, and had good health care coverage, and livable pensions, the industry would have been just fine, in their absurd rewriting of the facts.

Just Monday (April 6), my local birdcage liner carried an op-ed piece by the Chicago Tribune's Steve Chapman declaring that President Obama is wrong to try to save the American car makers, mainly because their downfall would/will take down the unions. To Chapman and his ilk, anything that will do major damage to labor unions is wonderful, regardless of how badly others, and the country itself, are hurt. Their belief in the rights of the very rich to rule unchallenged is religious in its depth and passion.

But here's a rub: If you know what has happened, it's impossible not to be more than a little angry at the auto workers, too.

That's not because they managed through their unions to get good pay and good benefits –- I don't know when in this country it became evil to get a decent hunk of the profits from what you produce, somehow wrong to get enough of the pie to live comfortably –- but because they too solidly backed the self-destructive moves of the people who ran the companies they worked for.

How often over the years did you see the “buy American,” anti-Japanese bumper stickers and hear rants from union officials, and rank-and-file workers about it being anti-American to refuse to buy Detroit junk even though much better products were available at better prices?

We all saw the angry lectures on television, and several times I heard, in person, union members ranting about how buying Hondas and Toyotas was little short of criminal when we could purchase rattling, rust-prone Pontiacs, and Buicks with mushy suspension and sloppy steering, and Fords with windshields that tended to crack once a month, and uselessly gigantic vehicles that got less than ten miles to a gallon of gasoline.

Of course, the ranters didn't mention the innumerable faults, just that somehow it was our duty to pay excessive sums for the garbage rolling out of American factories.

Here folks, git yerselves a nice a three-ton Yugo. Only $52,000. How about a shiny version of the Lada that gets maybe 19 miles per gallon on the highway on a good day; only $37,000.

Up until quite recently, auto industry unions had enough clout that they could have asserted pressure on the companies to build better, more efficient, more reasonably priced vehicles. Instead, they added their voices to the chorus of industry denial and refusal.

Personally, I'm not sure what I want to see happen with the auto makers.

America should make things, not just shovel money -– or, rather, computer numbers that represent money –- from one place to another. And Americans should have the opportunity for work that provides solid incomes, security, health care and decent homes and, equally important, for jobs that provide them with the pride and satisfaction of producing something useful, something that works and has a real purpose.

If the American auto industry is ready to buckle down to designing and producing vehicles that we need and want now, I'll blow the horn for government support, and back politicians who will fight to make the industry whole and well again.

Sadly, there's no sign that it's ready. American car companies, and oil companies and some unions, fought to prevent Congress from mandating the present very modest goal of average fleet fuel consumption of 35 miles per gallon by 2020 – eleven years from now. European cars surpassed that goal a few years ago; they now average better than 40 miles per gallon and are improving annually.

(A grinding kicker to those mileage facts: According to a report by MSNBC.com, two-thirds of the 113 most fuel-efficient car models sold in Europe but not available in this country are made by American car companies or by foreign manufacturers with large sales in the U.S. -- companies such as Toyota and Nissan.)

Even more sadly, it is not at all clear that Americans –- American industry, or what's left of it -– still have enough of our self-proclamed “knowhow” plus the will to be able, in this country, to design and build attractive cars that also are fuel efficient.

There's quite a stink among the true believers of the right about the firing of General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner, and quite a few people not on the right are wondering by what authority the Obama administration told Wagoner to take a hike.

“Unprecedented” is a word being thrown around frequently, but inaccurately. You may recall that the government also demanded new top executives for AIG, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

By what right? When it's public money, the government has the right. Obama was perfectly correct, I believe, in saying that if General Motors wanted more taxpayer dollars, it would first have to replace Wagoner, who was obstinate beyond any semblance of reason in his adherence to the cult of big and inefficient vehicles.

Wagoner was a force behind the commercialization of the Hummer at exactly the wrong time in history, as noted a few days ago by Frank Rich of the New York Times, and he pushed hard for still greater reliance on huge SUVs exactly at the time the market finally began to shift toward more affordable, fuel efficient and less polluting vehicles.

The problem is that getting rid of the chief executive of one of the Former Big Three is a useless gesture if much more isn't done quickly. Wagoner -– a Harvard MBA, not surprisingly -– is a career General Motors guy. Most of the people on the next few management levels below him also are career GM guys. And the same thing applies, for the most part, at Ford and Chrysler.

Car company culture is as deeply embedded as it is wrongheaded. Everyone who has any power has been brought up in the business, and the people who have advanced are those who bought in entirely to the beliefs of the people who have run the companies for decades. Scorn is heaped on fuel efficient, small and inexpensive. Big and powerful is good. Bigger the better. Trends? Fugeddaboudit.

The Minneapolis Auto Show occupied the city's Convention Center for more than a week in late March. GM North American Vice President Mark LaNeve showed up late in the show's run to dispense wisdom to dealers and the press. He was quoted in the Star Tribune as saying that while the company has “introduced an onslaught of new fuel-efficient and crossover cars” GM is “already the truck leader, and we plan to stay there.”

LaNeve also declared that “Americans are not naturally inclined to buy small cars,” although he allowed that “they want good fuel mileage.”

Translated: GM is slowly and reluctantly bringing out some fuel-efficient cars, but with nowhere near the mileage easily available from foreign brands, or even from its own brand in Europe. It's idea of “good fuel mileage” for North America is to build hybrid SUVs that will do better than the usual nine miles to the gallon, but still only in the low 20s per gallon, at best.

Oh, and a big reason that Americans, to this point, have not wanted small cars is decades of relentless car company advertising pushing the false belief that bigger cars are better, strong and safer than standard-sized models. The industry's general line of advertising has been on a par with 1940s and '50s cigarette ads for honesty.

As it happened, I was at the Auto Show at the peak hours on its first Saturday, a few days before LaNeve showed up. Attendance was much smaller than I'd seen at previous shows -– I'm something of a car buff, and go to auto shows whenever I'm in the neighborhood –- and it was obvious that other attendees were mostly ignoring the big vehicles while paying very close attention to vehicles such as the new version of Honda's small hybrid and the Fit and Ford Focus.

Those who are concerned about style and pizzazz were paying a lot of attention to the Mini Cooper, and one or two other sporty little things. Almost everybody I saw walked past the big SUVs without a glance, or if they did glance, tended to shake their heads in a “they don't get it” way.

The only, and I do mean only, large vehicle that caught any serious attention during the two hours I wandered the building was a General Motors concept car, which was interesting, although no one expects to see it on the road.

Folks, the people who run the American car companies really, seriously, do not get it.

So now what?

Damned if I know, but the conversation is important and should not be left to the politicians, union haters and the awesomely out of touch industry executives who brought their companies down. Tens of thousands of jobs and even, possibly, the direction of our economy are at stake.

There is space here for thoughtful suggestions that could be passed on to those in power.

Senate race: Enough already

2009-04-03T13:38:00.000-07:00

Minnesotans are inclined to let the election process take its course, and so we've been patient beyond reason with the drawn out battle to determine a winner in the U.S. Senate race between right wing Republican Norm Coleman and Al Franken, whose position on the left-to-right scale is pretty much unknown.

(Republicans, of course, scream that Franken is a lefty extremist, probably somewhere near Leon Trotsky is his views. That's just for the nutter “base.” In fact, he's probably too far to the right for genuine liberals. He has thus far refused to back a single-payer health care system, for example, and there are indications that he'll join fellow Minnesota Democrat Amy Klobuchar in slavish support of Israel, regardless of what evils it perpetrates.)

But the election is over. It's time to put away patience and start yelling.

It's been apparent for weeks now that the Republicans know perfectly well Coleman lost. The continued court charade has one purpose only: To keep Minnesota from getting its full representation in Congress, given that the newly elected senator is a Democrat. Coleman's own legal team admits they've lost. Some Republican officials also admit it, but, of course, their claim these days –- height of irony -– is that any election won by a Democrat was “stolen.”

Flat fact: We elected a Democrat, they don't want another Democrat in the Senate so long as they can prevent him from being seated. Democracy? Screw it. Full representation for Minnesotans? Screw it. Just keep the Democrat out as long as the courts allow the game to continue. It's the Republican Way.

Norm Coleman's career in elected office is over. He and the Republican machine know that, too. After the election court debacle, he probably couldn't be elected to the Apple Valley city council – although that may be overstating the case. At any rate, he couldn't be elected to any state-wide office or any Congressional seat except, no doubt, the one on which the incomparably ridiculous Michele Bachmann already squats like some crazed Easter bunny on a sparrow's nest.

There's no doubt that Coleman and those whom he really serves have come to some agreement about his reward for continuing the act; we'll learn what that is after the curtain finally drops.

But, c'mon folks. Enough is enough. Continuation of the farce should cost the Republicans more than legal fees. It should cost them votes, it should bring down a hard rain of contempt on the entire party.

You can email Minnesota party headquarters at Info@mngop.com. Better yet, email Republican State Chairman Ron Carey at Chairman@mngop.com

Keep it short, keep it clean, but make it bite.

Management: The book not written

2009-03-15T09:09:00.000-07:00

For more than 30 years, I kept notes on the silliness, childish attitudes, wrong-headed assumptions, dishonesty, greed and frequent over-the-top stupidities of American business leadership.

Oh, yes: I also took notes when I ran across a genuinely intelligent and able business leader, but the stack of those notes was thin by comparison. The truly intelligent and mature top executives, and I did encounter some great ones, are stuck in my mind yet; they were shining rarities.

As a business and economics reporter who consistently dealt with the top levels of management in many industries, but especially financial businesses, I had plenty of opportunity for observation.

I planned for most of those years to spend some considerable amount of post-retirement time writing what I intended to be a funny but scathing book about corporate management.

Just a couple of months after retiring from full-time newspaper work, however, I decided (a.) I didn't want to spend any more time with or on the people who wear the big titles in American big business, (b.) there is no way to make a dent in their thick skulls anyway, and (c.) neither our politicians nor the average worker has the guts to take them on, so such a work would be a complete waste of my time at worst, and at best merely fuel for employee grumbling that was almost constant anyway.

In truth, most Americans admire and actually fawn on the rich and powerful, no matter how cretinous.

Out went the notes, and away went the responsibility I had laid on myself for producing the book.

Now and then I still get the urge to smack some executives upside the head, of course, and that feeling grew much stronger and more frequent over the past few years, as it became ever more apparent that they were leading us into an economic disaster that didn't have to happen.

So let me summarize in a tiny fraction of the space, and without the hundreds of items of specific evidence, the conclusions of my 40-plus years of reporting and editing:

The American management class is made up, in vast majority, of dimwitted, ignorant cowards who, while dodging genuine responsibility at every turn, believe themselves to be the best, brightest and bravest heroes in all the land. Delusion is, in fact, their most characteristic flaw.

Nothing is sillier than the constant bleating about the rarity of management talent – bleating that has become even louder in the face of our economic meltdown and the accompanying incontrovertible proof that the people at the top of our financial institutions and most of the rest of our corporations have been wrong about almost everything they have done, said or preached throughout their grotesquely over-paid careers.

Those guys still claim with straight faces that they have to pay themselves and each other and their little vice presidential toadies and market manipulators huge sums of money in order to retain “management talent” that might otherwise go elsewhere. (Where they might go in this stinking swamp of failure is left unsaid.)

The degree to which any of the claimants believes what he is saying about the need for “retention compensation” is a measure of his intellectual incapacity. The degree to which he's just blowing diversionary smoke is yet another measure of his crookedness.

For a solid, clear analysis of the falsity of financial industry executive claims that the present mess is someone else's fault and that they couldn't have done anything different from what they did, see the op-ed piece by William D. Cohan in the March 12 New York Times. Cohan nails it.

Speaking of the banking and brokerage hotshots, Cohan says: “Could these Wall Street executives have made other, less risky choices? Of course they could have, if they had been motivated by something other than absolute greed.”

At another point, after laying down more evidence, Cohan says, “So enough already with the charade of Wall Street executives pretending not to know what really happened and why.”

Hear! Hear!

Much the same thing could be said about auto industry executives who are now playing along with the right-wing flapjaws who, with the goal of using our present economic crisis to further weaken labor unions, are trying to lay the near collapse of that industry at the feet of the manufacturing plant employees who actually make (or made) the cars.

Again, along with dishonesty, delusion: A great many top executives have been coddled, feted and had their behinds kissed so regularly and amorously for so long that they really believe themselves infallible. Ergo, all mistakes must have been committed by someone else.

Before some unreconstructed right winger emails me:

Your question is, “If they're so bad, how come the companies did so well for so long?” The answer, though possibly not simple enough for those who can think only in bumper sticker terms, is not all that complicated:

First, a great many companies, including almost all of our big banks and the American auto makers, profited mightily, but temporarily, by following models that had no chance of long-term functioning. There simply was no way that the mortgage-based securities could go on producing profits indefinitely; collapse was inevitable, and many people recognized that even though the bank leaders did not – or would not.

There was no way that the American manufacturers' refusal to recognize environmental needs and the coming collapse of gas-guzzling behemoths could lead to anything but a sales implosion. Most of the world could see that; auto company executives shut their eyes to it.

Secondly, it takes no genius to profit in an up market. It took some sense and perspective to recognize that the decades of credit spending that kept the American economy moving so swiftly for so long had to slow drastically at some not-too-distant point. Almost no American corporate executives had that sense or perspective.

Neither did they have the sense to realize that their taking bigger and bigger pieces of the economic pie for themselves while using their purchased politicians to squeeze the incomes of the vast majority of the world's people inevitably would lead at some point to a huge dropoff in markets for the crap they peddled.

Along with delusional thinking, another of the primary characteristics of American corporate management is cowardice – particularly a paralyzing fear of doing anything that everyone else isn't doing and a terror of taking honest responsibility for one's decisions and actions. Evidence has turned up showing that some bankers were aware that the sub-prime mortgage market was going to cave in soon, but lacked the guts to pull out while all the other banks were still playing the crooked game. They didn't want to face their directors, even though they owned the directors, and talk about why they were “passing up profits.”

Do you know what the enormous growth of university MBA programs in recent decades is really about?

The simple, but essentially accurate, answer is that it is yet another manifestation of corporate executives' desire to lay off responsibility onto “experts.” I'll say more about that in an upcoming essay, but for now leave it at this: Everything that can be taught about managing people and businesses – to someone who has the capacity to learn – can be taught in less than a day. The rest is technical detail, the deconstructing of normal morality and replacing it with an insanely inhumane template for business, and providing elaborate lessons in how to create excuses for failure.

More evidence of the fear of simple decision making is found in the fact that for as long as I can remember – and that's a long way back – American corporations and executives and would-be executives have jumped on one “management” fad after another. There have been dozens of such fads, perhaps 30 or 40 over the time since I first started following business and economics as a reporter.

There was the period – what? maybe 25 years ago now – when everybody who wanted to be somebody or thought he was somebody in the American corporate world read at least two books about the wonders of the Japanese management style. That was before Japan's rigidly structured economy went into a decade-long tailspin, of course.

A few of the others that come to mind: Quality circles, Total Quality Management, Matric Management, Term-Based Management, Peak Performance (whatever that was), and two or three types of “re -engineering.” A quick Google search will turn up a couple dozen more such bits of nonsense.

And every one of those fads produced very high-paying work for “consultants.” Of course, some “consultants” didn't need such a fad. They had their little niches that could be used in conjunction with whatever the flavor-of-the-month management style was – speech consulting, appearance consulting, consulting on how to make a presentation, and on and on and on.

All of those vacuous ideas, and all of that consultant money had and has one purpose: To absolve executives from responsibility and to push the onus of making decisions onto someone or something else.

The only proper response to the claims that some executive is worth millions or even tens of millions of dollars a year for his (or, rarely, her) management skills is a ripe tomato in the kisser followed by a severance notice.

A personal story; bankers are idiots

2009-03-09T17:23:00.000-07:00

You can hardly have a conversation these days that doesn't at some point include angry mention of bankers.

The anger is about the taxpayer bailout of banks and the fact that the same dribbling idiots who brought the banks and our economy to ruin are still in charge of those institutions, drawing down their millions in annual pay for incompetent and profligate performance.

Count me among those who are enraged by the fact that the bailouts have not included, as a requirement for payment, that at least the top three layers of management of the bad banks be fired.

(I'll write more on this soon, but do not believe the crapola about management talent being so rare that we must keep those people. In any substantial institution, there are dozens, in the really big ones even hundreds, of people well below the levels of top management who are smarter and better qualified than the top officers to run the organization. The nature of top executive selection in large American corporations guarantees that almost all of said corporations will be headed by jackassess, albeit jackassess of good appearance and impressive demeanor.)

I just was touched, personally, by a bank –- a bailed out bank -– in such a way as to demonstrate the ingrained foolishness of our MBA-addled management class and the wrongheadedness of corporate culture in this country.

It's a more personal story than I'm comfortable telling, and it reflects badly on my judgment, but it so perfectly exemplifies one type of nuttiness plaguing our banks and other big corporations that I'm going to tell it anyway.

For a goodly number of years –- I'm not sure how many, but at least 15, probably 20 or more –- my wife and I have had a U.S. Bank credit card.

U.S. Bank is the lead bank of U.S. Bancorporation, which recently sold $6.6 billion in preferred stocks and warrants (junk, in plain language) to the government. That “sale” was part of the bailout program.

Frankly, embarrassingly and carelessly, I let the balance on that card climb to a substantial (for us) level. Like so many others, I've been busy trimming monthly expenses over the past year, and figured to get to that card balance very soon. The balance came from a series of unexpected but necessary house repairs and our penchant for travel.

I wasn't overly bothered, not as bothered as I should have been, because, due to our very high credit score and top-of-the-heap credit rating, our interest rate on the card balance was less than 8 percent. That's real money, but not terrible in this day.

About two weeks ago, I paid slightly more than half the card balance, with the intention of making another substantial payment when this month's bill arrives.

A week ago, I received a notice from U.S. Bank that it is raising the interest rate on our card balance, as of April 1, to 20.99 percent. From, effectively, 8 percent to 21 percent -- a near tripling of the interest rate to a level that in most times and in most places would be classified as usury and would be illegal. But, of course, over the past 30 years or so, all usury laws have been erased by our governors and those they serve.

I called the “customer service” department of the bank and demanded an explanation. Today, as I write this, I got a brief note claiming that the near-tripling of the interest rate on our card balance was because of “late payments” and our having gone over the card credit limit.

Since I am never late with payments on any bill, and could recall no time at which our charges went over the card's limit, I started digging through my files. None of our bills for the past 15 months showed a balance over the limit, and none that I could find indicated late payment. So I called the bank again.

My mistake. It turns out that, undoubtedly because the mail was slower than I expected, two times last year my payments were two days late. And once, because of an automatic charge that I had forgotten about, the bank claims that I once went over the credit limit for two days –- although I believe that is wrong, given the balances recorded on my bills and the size of the charge in question.

But my mistake anyway. The rules of cut-throat American business mean one should never play it so close as to allow the possibility of a mail delay causing a late payment and never get within $1,000 of your credit limit on anything (or, probably, within $200 if your credit limit is $1,000 or less).

This has done my wife and I real damage. The reports from U.S. Bank have reduced us from an A credit score to a C-plus score, a very thin hair below a B score. Presumably that is temporary, but it could last a long time simply because credit issuers of all types believe it is to their advantage to charge as much as they can get from anybody at any time.

In America today, long-term high performance counts for nothing, and no slack is allowed for minor error, even by customers of many years.

The American management credo calls for gouging whenever and wherever possible. Grab what you can and to hell with relationships, common sense or mitigating factors.

Of course I knew that, and the carelessness was mine.

Being, still, more fortunate than the rapidly growing majority of Americans, I will pay off the U.S. Bank credit card this month. We will never use that card again. We won't cancel it, of course, because in the nasty wonderland of American banking, your credit rating is reduced for canceling a card account. But we won't use the damned thing again. Ever.

And what has U.S. Bank gained from its practice and from harming us, its long-term customers?

Well, it will receive no more interest on the credit card in question. Rather than slightly less than 8 percent on balances that tend to rise and fall with the events of our lives, it will get no interest because there will never again be a balance.

If my wife and I were in the financial shape of what now is a substantial majority of Americans, we probably would stop using that card, but we'd go on paying 21 percent interest on the balance. No doubt that is happening to many people. But a growing number of such people won't be able to reduce balances while paying such usurious rates, and, eventually, literally millions will give up trying.

The result of such vicious banking practices must lead to increased bankruptcies. It cannot be otherwise.

In the long run, the banks will lose.

But it doesn't matter to them. They can't see such obvious facts. The culture and the boobs at the top demand that the banks gouge and grab until there is nothing left to grab.

I'm grateful that I'm still able to step away and give them the proverbial raised middle digit in parting.

A final note: Today I received in the mail from U.S. Bank several checks, which could be used to draw against our credit card account. It offered a 1.9 percent interest rate on any balance we might create by using those checks –- unless there should be a late payment, of course, or it rains on a Thursday after a new moon, or the bank president's dog gets fleas. The bank sends us such checks several times a year. We never have used one. Never will. This batch has already gone through the shredder.

Execs err, employees are supposed to pay

2009-02-21T19:39:00.000-08:00

The publisher of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Chris Harte, is outraged that the 116 members of the now flabby, right-leaning newspaper's pressman's union have thus far refused to agree to major cuts in pay and work rule changes that would significantly weaken their protections against overwork, forced overtime and similar abuses.

Avista Capital Partners, a New York investment (read financial speculation) firm that bought the Star Tribune in 2007, put the paper into a Chapter 11 bankruptcy a couple of months ago. It now is asking the federal bankruptcy court to cancel the pressmen's labor contract on the grounds that the union has failed “to enter serious negotiations for concessions needed because of a sharp decline in advertising revenue as well as debt from the 2007s acquisition...”

So the Strib's own reporter, David Phelps, said in a Nov. 20 story in the publication's business section.

In truth, the Avista move, and Harte's outrage -- Phelps called it “frustration” but the stronger feelings came through in the story -– are new, but hardly unexpected, examples of outrageous, jaw-dropping arrogance on the part of the lords of the universe class.

It is right up there with the chief executives of auto manufacturers flying to Washington on separate, hugely expensive private aircraft to beg for government money to hold off self-created ruin. It easily matches $100,000 office rugs and million dollar office redecoration for sheer, stupid gall.

Those guys, too, are angry because anyone dares to question their right to such goodies.

Harte's snit demonstrates, with no chance of misunderstanding, the sense of entitlement and superiority ingrained in the minds of the Avista speculators and corporate strippers.

The country is teetering on the edge of a depression that may exceed the misery of the 1930s. The great majority of the population is hurting financially and millions of people are falling into desperate straits, but the Avista guys think others should pay the cost of their stupidities.

To fully understand, the public needs to know some things that weren't in Phelps' story.

Avista bought the Strib from the McClatchy Company for $530 million. Avista borrowed most of the purchase price. It is what the business world, never fond of straight talk, calls a leveraged buyout.

Nobody among Avista's principals had ever before been involved in the news business, and it was clear none of them had any interest in journalism.

The almost-clearly-stated goal of the Avista crowd and Harte, who owns slightly more than 4 percent of the Strib, was to strip the newspaper company of major assets, such as real estate –- sell off the land, buildings and anything else with cash value –- and reduce operating costs by slashing staff, then sell what is left of the poor old rag to some sucker who wants to try running a newspaper.

If the Strib were a stand-alone business it would be profitable today. It reported an operating profit of $31 million for 2008. That's before taxes and other payments, so without Avista and Harte, as a stand alone business, its net profit would have been less than that -– but it would have shown a net profit.

What put it into Chapter 11, and what may put the Star Tribune out of business, is the enormous debt that Avista stuck it with. The company is strangling on those loan payments.

Harte and the rest of the Avista crowd miscalculated as badly as the boobs who run the big banks and brokerage houses. Like those other bozos, the Avista geniuses assumed that the money would just keep rolling in and their speculations would go on floating forever on tainted air.

Now Harte, and no doubt the rest of the Avista crowd, are outraged, yes outraged, that the pressmen don't much feel like cutting themselves out of the middle class to rescue the fools who put their livelihoods, and what was one of the country's best newspapers, in jeopardy.

I'm truly sad to say it -– I loved the Strib most of the years I worked there, and for most of my life before I worked there –- but it may be the best thing for everybody, including the beleaguered employees, if Harte and Avista go under, even if they take the Strib with them.

After all the moaning and whining, the United States will have newspapers. Minneapolis will have a newspaper. The Strib soon will be little more than a shell anyway, and it's outright collapse probably will hasten the day that someone who actually knows how to run a newspaper will show up.

As for Harte and his money-playing partners:

Really, they should shut up and take what's coming to them without trying to squeeze more out of the newspaper's dedicated employees, who are hurting badly enough but will hurt much more before this is over.

Bankers contrite? Not a chance

2009-02-03T08:54:00.000-08:00

It's almost impossible at times to keep from laughing out loud as people from Barack Obama to my neighborhood handyman complain about bank executives and other big shots who continue to pay themselves big bonuses and buy fancy private jets even as they suck up billions of dollars of tax money.

People are astonished that the billionaires “just don't get it.” The bankers and industrialists are supposed to be contrite and to accept more modest pay, say my neighbors. The bankers and brokers have behaved “unconscionably” in continuing to pay themselves big bucks, says our new president.

Ya gotta chuckle, at least.

To be clear:

Ladies and gentlemen, the top level bank executives and stock peddlers and auto manufacturing executives and Ponzi scheme operators are not even slightly sorry about anything they have done. Given the opportunity –- as they hope and expect -– they will do it all again, but to still greater gain for themselves.

They will take the taxpayer billions and use it to benefit themselves to the greatest degree possible; it is what is right, in their unshakable view of the world. They are furious at suggestions that the public should get some stake in their enterprises merely for bailing them out to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

They are deeply annoyed, and even angry, that anyone out here in the jungle dares to question them on anything. They are mostly –- not all and not entirely –- holding their tongues about criticism from the public, but they're even angrier that politicians they own have the effrontery to criticize of their behavior. That some politicians dare to suggest ways to rein them in through renewed regulation and rules on executive pay is outrageous as far as the masters of the universe are concerned.

In their own eyes, those masters have made no mistakes, other than a few very minor public relations errors, such as auto company CEOs flying separate private jets to Washington for a congressional hearing. And, if you read their comments carefully, you realize that they are not at all sure even that was a mistake; private jets and $10,000-a-night hotel suites are simply part of what is due them.

They continue to do things like spending millions on redecorating their offices because in their eyes, such things are right and normal for people of their stature. That they continue to do them clearly demonstrates the depth of their belief in their own privilege.

They do not make mistakes, they are congenitally unable to make mistakes.

That is their genuine and deeply held belief.

If you don't understand that, you never will understand the battle just now beginning in Congress, in the media and in our society.

The surprise and outrage of citizens and politicians –- mostly faked on the part of the president and members of Congress, who know better -– is another demonstration of how little most Americans know about how things work in this country and about the people who run things here.

It may seem arrogant on my part to say that. I do understand that most people have not had my advantage in having worked for several decades at a job that kept me in close contact with the rich and powerful. I earned my living in part by conversing, in groups and often one-to-one, with many of the very rich and genuinely powerful, including the chief executives of some of our biggest banks and corporations. I talked frequently with many of the image shapers, apologists and intellectual gurus of the right and left, including several times with the greatest con man of all time, Milton Friedman, who remains a saint of the political right.

Still, there's plenty of readily-available information, even in the right-run corporate media, about who those people are and why they don't feel in the least contrite.

So put aside the bewilderment and surprise and deal with the fact that we will never get the slightest change in methods, beliefs or behavior, let alone contrition, from the very rich and powerful people of the corporate world. They and their MBA flunkies have a set of beliefs that will not change. Their talent for self-delusion and penchant for self-justification is equal to that of the Nazi generals.

They will not willingly accept any public control over their behavior. They will fight with every powerful weapon they have to prevent any increase of government regulation, or rules of conduct, or restrictions on executive compensation, or strengthening of the ability of unions to organize, or to increase their taxes or, indeed, to greatly limit the amount of our tax money, yours and mine, that flows to them, or even to establish some control over how they spend our tax money.

In fact, they are using our tax money this minute to shore up their power and undermine ours; a recent, back-of-the-paper article in the New York Times and a couple in small publications have noted that the banking/investment firms have substantially increased their lobbying efforts in Washington and in state capitals in recent weeks. Lobbying is expensive. The money comes from us.

Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, still they only effective and entirely accurate big-media critic of the banks, has pounded bank executives frequently, most recently Monday, Feb. 2, and is clear that they have been awesomely stupid.

Krugman also insists that public investment in the banks and their mostly worthless assets should give the public a powerful voice in how the banks' business is conducted henceforth. He seems to stand alone on that essential point, unless you count us no-count citizens.

But even Krugman has not to date called for firing the whole lot of idiots who created the desperate mess we, and the world, are in.

For the life of me, I can't see how anything can change, or how our economy or economies around the world can be saved unless we kick out every big-bank executive in the top three or four levels of the organizations' hierarchies. If the boss is a dangerous idiot, it is a given that so are almost all of the people he has allowed to rise to the heights in his organization. If you've ever worked for any kind of a corporation, you know that to be true.

When the bankers claim that they must pay huge bonuses to their people in order to “keep the best and brightest,” the only rational response is to laugh them out of the room. They and their “best and brightest” have driven our economy into the ground. That is the indisputable truth.

So why aren't we laughing, and, especially, why aren't our politicians laughing and the kicking the fat cats in their fat asses?

The Republicans, we understand. Those who are left are either mad ideologues or they are venal toadies who follow the orders of the people who bought them their positions, knowing that if they don't, they'll be thrown aside.

But the Democrats?

Most of them are as afraid as their Republican counterparts of the big money. Quite a few of them –- think Blue Dog (or dirty dog) Democrats -- have the intellectual capacity, depth of humanity and world understanding of cacti, and a majority appear to have no more spine than the night crawlers we Minnesotans use for walleye bait in the summer.

(Come to think of it, “bait” may be a more apt descriptor than I at first realized. Something to lure our votes, to sucker us into biting the hook.)

It may be possible yet to set things right and avert a depression that will make that of the 1930s look like a minor recession, but it will happen only if we hound the Democrats, including the new president and his crew, mercilessly. To get things right, we have to bombard their offices with snail mail, emails and phone calls, day after day, week after week. We must demand they throw the bums out, to insist that our interests, not the interests of the rich and presently all-powerful must be served.

How likely is that?

A pertinent comment from Albert Einstein, sent to me recently by friend and fellow journalist Lydia Howell:

“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”

-----------------------------

Remember how for years we were told by Republican Party people and business executives that what we desperately needed in government was business acumen?

“Government should be run on a businesslike basis,” we were told, and this or that Democratic candidate was unfit because “He has no business experience,” or “Doesn't know how to run anything; he's never run a business.” We should “model government on business,” ran the unending mantra.

I submit that the two politicians of the past 50 years who best exemplify American business are George W. Bush (incompetent but arrogant from his first day to his last) and Rod Blagojevich (public office acquired and held solely for the purpose of self-enrichment).

And you know what? The right is still preaching the same exhausted sermon; it's just that only a handful of loyal nutters are listening at the moment. But they'll be back.

A modest propsal for peace

2009-01-15T14:16:00.000-08:00

Obviously, I have been away from this blog for some time. It happens every year in December and January, and perhaps next year I'll just admit in advance that I can't keep up with holiday-time demands and continue to write frequently. At any rate, I hope to be back to normal frequency from now until the end of November of this year.

There is a workable solution to the central problem of the Middle East. I refer, of course, to the unending hatred between Israel's right wing, terrorist-born leaders and the equally murderous Islamic extremists who want Israel wiped out.

The solution is not obvious, at least to the great majority of Americans who get their ignorance fully cooked from this country's corporate “news” media, but more intelligent readers will grasp the concept when it is laid before them.

Therefore, with great humility, I lay it before you:

Probably the only possibly action that does not end with the annihilation of humankind, is to move Israel to what is now called Texas.

Other locations also could work, but Texas is by far the best.

Don't laugh.

Any objections that will at first occur to you are easily washed away by pure reason.

For example: Some readers may reflexively point out that Texas already is occupied and possesses a semblance of government.

So what?

In 1948, a western world steeping in guilt over what happened to European Jews under the sadistic madmen from Germany -- and wetting its pants in fear of the Irgun and other Zionist terrorists -- had no qualms about brushing aside the Arabic people who had occupied what was then Palestine for a thousand years or so.

We, the western world, simply declared that Palestine was, in a moment, Israel, a Jewish state. We allowed, indeed encouraged, the new country to strip the former residents of their homes, olive groves, gardens, and all livelihoods and drive them out. We nodded in understanding when the newly designated Israelis bulldozed entire villages and towns – often with no more than an hour's notice – and, indeed, occasionally gunned down men, women and children who were slow to get moving.

After all, who has more right to murder, torture and brutalize innocent human beings than those who, as innocent human beings, were murdered, tortured and otherwise brutalized by someone entirely different from their own victims. Vengeance on the not guilty, we could call it.

Why, do tell, should we treat Texas and Texans any differently?

In fact, the similarities between Palestine and Texas are striking.

It was widely said in western Europe and the United States in the late 1940s and early '50s that the people of Palestine were followers of a peculiar and suspect religion (that is, a religion different from those commonly practiced here). The word also spread widely that they had done little with the land they occupied -– there were hardly any tall buildings or supermarkets -- so it made sense to replace them with those whose religion was at least familiar to us and who would “turn the desert into a garden.”

Well, Texas is populated, to the extent it is, by people who mostly are at least nominal members of a peculiar religion –- it's called Southern Baptist, or Baptism or Baptistry or some such –- and who have done almost nothing useful with the property.

(Vulgar people and those who need to belittle others whom they would destroy in order to strengthen their sense of superiority are prone to call those peculiar religionists “water heads” or “dunkers.” We won't encourage that, but we will be understanding.)

We must declare that Southern Baptists have every right to their religion, and that it does not, in itself, make them wasters, drunks and prone to violence and pickup trucks. But, privately, we know that they are not the moral equals of Episcopalians, Methodists and Lutherans. Just look at the rates of divorce, domestic abuse and alcoholism.

But, religious rights aside, they must go.

It is fair to point out that while Texas has the shell of a democratic system of government, it does not, in fact, practice democracy -- which makes it very like both Israel and Hamas-ruled Gaza in respect to governance.

Evidence is everywhere.

Israel's Supreme Court ruled a couple of weeks ago that the Israeli government must allow news reporters into Gaza and give them room to move around and report what they see and learn. Israel's government and its military have refused to honor that ruling because they don't like it and “what the world doesn't know won't hurt us.” Thus, there is no rule of law. (There are dozens of other easily available examples of the dismissal of law.)

In Texas, legislators did not like the possibility of substantial numbers of their body being replaced through honest elections; the legislators redistricted the entire state so that liberals are permanently relegated to a safely small minority in their legislature and congressional delegation, regardless of the wishes of the wider population.

Equally, one of the people Texas sent to Washington –- the very one who chiefly engineered the redistricting, oddly enough -– was pretty much forced to avoid running for re-election after having been censured three times by colleagues in Washington and having been indicted for criminal activity. He, Tom DeLay, has been “awaiting” trial for three years, but no trial is in sight; it will not happen unless and until acquittal can be guaranteed before proceedings begin. Thus, there is no rule of law. Dozens of other examples can be found to support that statement.

So let's bring in the Israelis to drive out the beer-swilling, spouse beating water head fornicators and create a garden spot of the now largely wasted area called Texas.

But the region is part of the United States?

So what? We're not doing anything with it, certainly nothing that benefits mankind.

Some also may question where the Texans can go. That is no more a problem that was the relocation of Palestinians who, remember, occupied their homeland a whole lot longer than have today's Texans.

Push them over the borders into New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana, all of which are largely occupied by similar peoples. Better yet, drive them, as proud early American occupiers did the continent's native peoples, to places even more suited to their lazy, ignorant, unproductive lifestyles and weird religions.

Mississippi would be perfect.

As in the Middle East, some of those already occupying the other spaces may object to having large numbers of refugees thrust upon them, especially with no international help to sustain the newcomers, to feed and house them, but, hey, you can't make an omelet...

There are benefits to the plan beyond the obvious.

For one thing, Israel's population has grown very rapidly since we encouraged them to kick out and/or eliminate Palestinians in 1948. Various sources say most growth now is internal, rather than through immigration. Despite the generally effective methods previously mentioned, many Arabs/Palestinians remain within Israel's borders. The Arab population is growing more rapidly than the Jewish population, which scares the hell out of the ruling class of Israelis despite the fact that the Arab “citizens” are all but entirely disenfranchised and Israel is, officially, a Jewish state.

(Israel's government just adopted a law that makes Arab political parties illegal. See comments above about rule of law.)

From it's first day as an officially recognized country, the leaders of Israel admitted –- actually bragged -– that they had no intention of staying within the internationally declared borders. Almost all of the country's early leaders (many of whom were flat-out unrepentant terrorists) wrote of their intention to expand, although western journalists ignored their statements in that regard. Later political leaders have not repudiated the expansionist intent.

So, when we move Israel to Texas, we will leave the Palestinian/Arab residents to be absorbed again into the new Palestinian state, or protectorate or whatever it becomes. Not our problem.

Some Americans almost certainly will raise the question of cost. Even if we merely herd the present Texans on foot to their new locations, some cost is involved. And, of course, there will be a great cost attached to moving Israel to Texas.

I assure you it is not a problem.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful organization of Zionists who hold U.S. citizenship, raises enormous sums of money at the drop of a hat. That money now is mostly used to buy American politicians, control U.S. public opinion about Israel, abuse Palestinians and publicly castigate anyone with different views. The money can easily be shifted to the cause of moving Israel to Texas.

Using AIPAC for the cause has the additional great benefit of bringing great pressure to bear on anyone who might object to the relocation plan.

The American “news” media are terrified of taking any position not thoroughly supported by AIPAC. More, the organization's long-standing tactic of labeling anyone who opposes it on any subject as “antiSemitic” tends to intimidate into silence almost everyone who thinks of taking a stance contrary to the organization or Israel's right-wing government.

The citizens of New Israel will have far less population density than they now have so it should be a considerable number of years before they begin pushing at the United States to the north, east and west and Mexico to the south. Perhaps the additional land will, in fact, suffice until such point that later generations lose the expansionist desire. It's possible.

Unfortunately, it also is possible that former Texans –- known for their adoration of guns and violent recreation -- may begin sniping and firing rockets into New Israel from their new locations. In truth, it's almost a sure thing. But I'll leave that to other heads to explore. I've done my bit.

I'll also leave to more experienced and clever people the choosing of a new enemy.

Hamas, now in control in Gaza, has been presented as the new Al Quida, or Taliban, or, at any rate, the presently most-cited devil's disciple. And, indeed, Al Quida and the Taliban have long since lost their grip on the attention of the American public. Their place on the fear scale has slipped to the level of impotence. Hamas, as touted by Israel and the U.S. government, has kept American hearts palpitating, but Hamas recruitment will immediately sink to almost nothing as soon as Israel moves, and many of its present members will melt away. (Indeed, Hamas never would have existed without Israel's help.)

The American arms industry, fronted by right wing politicians and “pundits,” will require a new and frightening foe in order to maintain profits. But they've been completely successful over many years in manufacturing such foes as needed, and that success no doubt will continue.

------------------

Gaza, the center of the present conflict, has 1.5 million people held captive in 140 square miles. That's roughly 10,000 people per square mile. Imports of even essentials such as food and medical supplies, are greatly limited. The residents are not allowed to leave; Israel even denies visas to young people who have been accepted as students at foreign universities. Some sources say unemployment is more than 40 percent, and human rights organizations report that a very large percentage of the population is routinely malnourished.

Israel has a bit more than 7.3 million people in 7,850 square miles, a space about the size of new Jersey. That's about 935 people per square mile, although various demographic studies indicate that Arab residents are considerably more crowded than others.

Texas has 23.5 million people in 268,601 square miles – about 87.5 people per square mile. Lots of room.

Vote fraud hasn't disappeared

2008-11-11T10:56:00.000-08:00

Yes, I was wrong. Barack Obama was elected, and rather handily at that. And I'm happy for that, very pleased to have been wrong, very relieved that the neocons will be out of power come Jan. 20.

There was a considerable period of time during which I was one of the constant watchers who feared, at least a little, that the right wing extremists who have controlled the White House for so long might not vacate the premises regardless of the election outcome. Given the powerfully favorable reaction in this country and abroad to Obama's election, I doubt many still harbor that fear.

Even people who lean heavily to the right have expressed (assume temporary) support for the president-elect and happiness at what the election shows, or what they think it shows, about racial attitudes in the United States. They would not tolerate an illegal power grab, even one preceded by a false flag attack.

Just a couple of things:

First, those of us who predicted large-scale vote suppression efforts and fraud by the Republicans were not entirely wrong. The attempts were widespread, but considerably less successful than they were in 2000 and 2004 for several reasons.

One major reason was that the Republicans could not muster the big funding for such efforts that they received in the previous two presidential election years.

In the last couple of weeks before Nov. 4, I saw several reports about right wing billionaires cutting way back on their contributions to dirty tricks crews because of how hard they were hit by the economic collapse they helped to create. Greed and gut-level, immediate self interest outweighed their desire to keep Democrats out of power.

In fact, the emails now being sent by Republican Party organizations and fund raisers to their supporters are downright funny on the question of campaign money. They are filled with whines about how Republicans were outspent by Obama and other Democrats who somehow “unfairly” raised more money than they did.

The outraged wording of the messages strongly suggests that it is a Republican right to get and spend far more than their opponents. And the authors of the notes are angry -– deeply outraged, in fact -- that so many not-rich citizens kicked in enough to build bigger dollar totals for Obama and other Democrats than the rich folks provided John McCain and Republican congressional candidates.

(I got myself on some Republican email lists more than a year ago. It's been both revealing and entertaining.)

Another big reason the attempts to keep likely Democratic voters away from the polls were considerably less successful than some feared, and less successful than they might have been, was the simple stupidity of Republican planners and the somewhat unexpected firmness of numerous judges around the country. I'll spare the detail, but the fact is that attempts by Republicans to keep large blocs of people from voting were thrown out firmly and quickly by judges in several states.

Some of us had feared that the White House's campaign of loading the bench with right wingers had got far enough to permit even fairly weak vote-suppression efforts to fly, but that turned out not to be true. And in several instances, the cases brought by the Republicans were so feeble that even someone the likes of John Roberts or Samuel Alito would have been hard-pressed to come up with excuses to accept the arguments.

Also, and this was very important, extremely partisan and ethics-impaired state officials such as the Ohio secretary of state, have been replaced in several states since 2004.

Then there was the fact that, as reported by the New York Times and others, Democratic voters turned out in bigger numbers than in the past, while the turnout of Republican voters actually slipped by a bit more than 1 percent from 2004. Sarah Palin's presence on the Republican ticket may have inspired the right wing “base,” as the talking heads kept telling us, but apparently it didn't do much for saner middle class Republicans.

Now for the “buts:”

It is a very safe assumption that the actual vote for Obama, let alone the votes that would have been cast for him if some people had not been blocked from voting, was greater than the number reported. It is unrealistic to think that the illegal tricks used in 2000 and 2004 -– hiding of votes, hacking of voting machines to switch votes from Democrat to Republican candidates and such -– didn't take place this year.

There was far too much evidence such shenanigans going into the election. It's not an issue in the corporate news media because those tricks and vote suppression attempts were not enough keep Obama from winning. And Democrats are too happy to bother with sniffing out vote fraud.

That, while understandable, is a serious mistake.

It is so because there will be much closer elections in the future, as there have been in the past. If the Democrats don't make an effort beginning in January, when they will pretty much control U.S. government, to block future right wing vote suppression and vote fraud, it will cost them future elections, just as it cost them the presidency and probably a number of congressional seats in 2000 and 2004.

There are ways to set up voter registration requirements that will permanently shut down the worst of the vote suppression scams. The “Help America Vote” law, which was in fact designed to help trick out elections, can be revised so that it requires a paper trail on all votes and provides voters with a way of seeing that their votes are recorded properly. The law also can be rewritten to require machines that are not readily rigged for fraud, as are so many of the machines now in use.

Suppose Obama does what economist and New Yorks Times columnist Paul Krugman and a few others have recommended and comes out of the chute fighting. The hatred and opposition he'll get from the Wall Street crowd and the billionaires you never heard of will surpass anything we've seen since Franklin Roosevelt had the extreme right plotting an overthrow of our government.

In such a scenario, the Republicans won't have so much trouble raising the money to defeat him in 2012, and a fully-funded right wing, supported by an army of gun nuts, end-times evangelicals and other self-destructive haters could make re-election highly doubtful.

It wouldn't be good idea to leave the paths to vote suppression and fraud wide open.

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Sorry if this is a bit late in being posted. I wasn't avoiding admitting my error. Right after the election I took a break, went out of town to a conference on an area of interest that has nothing to do with electoral politics.