multifarious

Swan Songs?

2009-08-01T07:19:00.000-07:00

Businesses go away when consumers find other more attractive paradigms and products. Then other companies or paradigms form to fill the void. It's called creative destruction.

In this case the destruction comes because the music industry took gross advantage of consumers, retailers and the artists themselves. I think no group of people are happier than artists at the demise of record companies. No one needs them anymore and everyone is happy about it.

Why should we not be happy about the demise of companies that instead of creatively finding ways to satisfy consumers sued them?

Multifarious
USA
August 1st, 2009
9:17 am

2009-05-11T08:06:00.001-07:00

May 11th, 2009 8:50 am

"It looks as if America may finally get what every other advanced country already has: a system that guarantees essential health care to all its citizens."

Not to me.

I have had continuous health insurance for over 30 years.

My partner and I were paying $2004 a month for coverage. She is a breast cancer survivor (over 10 years) and I had bypass surgery 11 years ago.

When the policy came due in February they raised us 29% shoving us right out of the system.

Beware of wolves in sheep's clothing.
— Multifarious, USA

Op-Ed Columnist: Harry, Louise and Barack

2009-05-10T21:37:00.000-07:00

May 10th, 2009 9:36 pm

"It looks as if America may finally get what every other advanced country already has: a system that guarantees essential health care to all its citizens."

Not to me.

I have had continuous health insurance for over 30 years.

My partner and I were paying $2004 a month for coverage. She is a breast cancer survivor and I had bypass surgery 11 years ago. When the policy came due in February they raised us 29% shoving us right out of the system.
— Multifarious, USA

Drawings of Some of The Slaves From The Slave Ship Amistad

2009-04-24T17:55:00.000-07:00

In 1839, the Spanish slave ship Amistad set sail from Havana to Puerto Principe, Cuba. The ship was carrying 53 Africans who, a few months earlier, had been abducted from their homeland in present-day Sierra Leone to be sold in Cuba. The captives revolted against the ship’s crew, killing the captain and others, but sparing the life of the ship’s navigator so that he could set them on a course back to Africa. Instead, the navigator directed the ship north and west. After several weeks, a U.S. Navy vessel seized the Amistad off the coast of Long Island. The Africans were transported to New Haven, Connecticut, to be tried for mutiny, murder, and piracy. These charges later were dismissed, but the Africans were kept in prison as the case turned to salvage claims and property rights. In a trial in Federal District Court, a group of Cuban planters, the government of Spain, and the captain of the Amistad all claimed ownership of the Africans. After two years of legal battles, the case went before the U.S. Supreme Court, which ultimately ordered that the captives be set free. Thirty-five of the former captives returned to their homeland; the others had died at sea or while awaiting trial. New Haven resident William H. Townsend made drawings (and in most cases recorded the names) of the Amistad captives at the time of their trial. These drawings have been preserved in the library of Yale University.

The drawings are here: http://www.wdl.org/en/search/gallery?ql=en&a=-8000&b=2009&c=SL&c=CU&r=NorthAmerica From The World Digital Library a wonderful resouce.

Google, Microsoft finance UN Library of World's Knowledge site

2009-04-24T17:26:00.000-07:00

The U.N. rolled out a new website on Tuesday that offers free access to rare manuscripts, books, films and map ranging from 8,000 old paintings to recent books.

The site cost $10 million and was financed by private donors, including Google, Microsoft, the Qatar Foundation, King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

The World Digital Library, an online project by the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco), aims to display and explain just how broad and diverse human cultures are by displaying the content for free in seven languages.

Among the artifacts is a 1,000-year-old Japanese novel that is believed to be the first novel in history and the earliest known map to mention America by name.

About a tenth of the 1,200 exhibits are from Africa - the oldest an 8,000-year-old painting of bleeding antelopes

The project was launched by James Billington, a librarian at the US Library of Congress, the world's biggest library.

The website currently in early stages and only has about 1,200 documents but is expected to grow substantially.

The material is drawn from about 30 libraries and archives across the world, and will be made available in English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

On the Net:

www.wdl.org

Yanks in Crisis

2009-04-23T22:18:00.000-07:00

"The Great Depression altered the national consciousness. So far, the Great Recession has not."

But being manhandled by banks and credit card issuers might.

We do not use banks out of choice, we need them. We carry credit cards because we cannot function without them.

We American's want to be left alone by our government and be free to live our own lives as best we can but there are limits and those limits have been crossed.

As individuals there is nothing that we can do to combat abusers of our system of free enterprise. Only government can.

April 23rd, 2009 10:18 pm

Reclaiming America’s Soul

2009-04-23T21:53:00.000-07:00

April 23rd, 2009 9:52 pm

Justice is always after the fact. Looking back is the only way to see where justice is required and no price is too dear to pay for it.

The Debate Over Online News: It's the Consumer, Stupid

2009-04-09T17:49:00.001-07:00

"We have seen the future and it is here. It is a linked economy. It is search engines. It is online advertising. That's where the future is. And if you can't find your way to that, then you can't find your way" so says Charlie Rose at the end of his conversation with Ariana Huffington and Tom Curley, AP's president and CEO.

Catch Ariana's commentary on the interview here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/the-debate-over-online-ne_b_185309.html

Ariana is correct, it's ALWAYS about the consumer, always.

You Don't Burn Down The Whole House Just To Kill One Mosquito

2009-04-08T18:02:00.000-07:00

I found Newt Gingrich's response to the North Korean missile firing, well, quizzical to say the least.

On Fox News Sunday the ex Speaker of The United States House of Representatives seemed to be saying that we should have taken out the North Korean missile. Like I said, quizzical.

I lived and worked in South Korea for over 35 years. When I arrived in Seoul South Korea in the autumn of 1971 I found that the Korean Peninsula was the most heavily armed piece of real estate on the planet.

The two Korea's were divided by a "Demilitarized Zone" (talk about an oxymoron) when fighting stopped in 1953. By 1971 there were nearly 1million soldiers facing each other across the DMZ. There was a massive amount of heavy artillery on both sides of the divide; there still is.

The capital of South Korea, Seoul, lies just 35 miles south of the DMZ, well within range of the the North's artillery. Seoul is a large city of 10 million. The Seoul National Capital Area which includes Seoul and the major port city of Inchon has a combined population of 24.5 million making it the worlds second most populated metropolitan area.

I have seen estimates that between 5 and 8 million people in the Seoul metro area would be killed within the first 24 hours after the outbreak of war. To anyone with any common sense this is a chilling reality.

The standoff between north and south has been facilitated in part by China who props up the North Korean regime, the U.S. who provides a defense umbrella and Japan which has deep economic ties and still allows the United States to base soldiers on its territory. Each of the three have much to lose in the ghastly event that war should break out.

Today, South Korea fears greatly the collapse of the regime in Pyongyang. It is important to remember that entire families were torn apart when the DMZ was established. Mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters were separated mostly never to see each other again. Most don't know whether their relatives lived or died.

South Korea is today a booming middle class economy. Seoul has been rebuilt (beautifully) from the ashes of war and life is good.

North Korea is a basket case. Drought creates the starvation of millions of people and as advanced as the South Korean economy is that is how devastated the North Korean economy is. A nighttime satellite picture of the Korean Peninsula tells the story; the south glistens with lights, the north is virtually completely dark. The image is striking.

The South Koreans learned much when with the fall of East Germany and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. Suddenly a divided German was one again with one half being wealthy and the other relatively poor. The melding of the two was a big hit to the West German economy. But what could the German's do? After all, these were brothers and sisters, mothers and children, husbands and wives who had been separated for decades. They were all German's.

The same is true of the two Korea's. Should the North Korean regime collapse there would certainly be war (between the armies) while millions of North Korean refugees would go south and others would go north seeking refuge in China. The last thing China needs is more people!

Of equal concern for the Chinese would be the presence of the American Army on their southern border as the South, with the help of the Americans would certainly defeat the North Korean Army and the north would be taken over militarily by South Korean and American forces.

It is unbelievable to me that the ex Republican Speaker of The House of Representatives would sanction a disaster now to avert one that will probably never occur due to a North Korean missile attack on the United States.

The North Korean regime is a bad one, its leader Kim Jong Il is frankly nuts. But Kim Jong Il and the leaders of the North Korean Army understand the concept of annihilation.

The Korean's have a saying "you don't burn down the whole house just to kill one mosquito", just what the reckless Mr. Gingrich seems to be advocating.

RIP Old Media

2009-04-08T09:03:00.000-07:00

I laughed the other day when I read that the Chairman of AP, Dean Singleton rattled his sabers at Google and Yahoo. Poor guy, he just doesn't get it. "AP Fighting to Reclaim Revenue From Web Portals"

In 1996 Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of MIT's Media Lab published "Being Digital". It is still a great read and highly recommended.

Being Digital opened my eyes to what the future held. It is still a great read and highly recommended.

Negroponte taught me the difference between atoms and bits. It is not atoms that we want, it is bits that we want. We don't want a CD (atoms), we want the music (bits) that is on the CD. We don't want a DVD (atoms) we want the content on the DVD (bits). And we certainly don't want a newspaper, we want the content that is printed on it.

To much ridicule (I'm 61) as most of my contemporaries thought I was nuts, I proclaimed the Internet the backbone of the future. "CB radio of the '90's" I heard. "A passing fad" they said.

About the same time I heard a radio interview, Fresh Air I think, with Andy Grove then Chairman of Intel. In the interview Grove said that by the following year more individual Email's would be sent than letters through postal mail. A few days later I mentioned this to a VC that I was pitching and he laughed in my face.

Executives in the Music, Movie, Newspaper and Magazine industries apparently didn't read Professor Negroponte's book and if they did they didn't understand it or laughed at it.

At the time I recognized the need for a catalog of Web sites (we got Yahoo! and LookSmart)and was having the conversation about what the economic model for the Web would look like. I was assured that Web sites linking to content would have to pay publishers for the right to link to it. I didn't see it that way because I believed that the Internet would dominate media, communications and much more from that point forward.

I would love to see Google and Yahoo! grant Mr. Singleton his wish and stop linking to AP headlines for a week or so. AP better keep the paddles handy, Mr. Singleton's reaction would be interesting.

China's Yuan Ambitions

2009-04-06T10:35:00.000-07:00

China is playing a growing role in discussions over solutions to current economic problems. Much of the talk has focused on money. Beijing has signed currency swap agreements with six central banks: Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Belarus and most recently Argentina. China has long wanted its currency to play a more important role in the global financial system. These swap arrangements come in the context of that broader policy aim. Read the entire WSJ story here: China's Yuan Ambitions

A National Rifle Association advertising campaign distorts Obama's position on gun control beyond recognition.

2009-04-04T11:13:00.000-07:00

A National Rifle Association advertising campaign distorts Obama's position on gun control beyond recognition.

The NRA is circulating printed material and running TV ads making unsubstantiated claims that Obama plans to ban use of firearms for home defense, ban possession and manufacture of handguns, close 90 percent of gun shops and ban hunting ammunition.

Much of what the NRA passes off as Obama's "10 Point Plan to 'Change' the Second Amendment" is actually contrary to what he has said throughout his campaign: that he "respects the constitutional rights of Americans to bear arms" and "will protect the rights of hunters and other law-abiding Americans to purchase, own, transport, and use guns."

The NRA, however, simply dismisses Obama's stated position as "rhetoric" and substitutes its own interpretation of his record as a secret "plan." Said an NRA spokesman: "We believe our facts."

Perhaps so, but believing something doesn't make it so. And we find the NRA has cherry-picked, twisted and misrepresented Obama's record to come up with a bogus "plan."

Thanks NRA, keep up the good work you sicko's. See post below.

The facts are here:http://www.barackobama.com/pdf/issues/additional/Obama_FactSheet_Western_Sportsmen.pdf

14 Dead in Rampage in Binghamton, N.Y.

2009-04-03T20:06:00.000-07:00

The massacre continues. A nursing home in North Carolina. A church in Tennessee. A center to teach immigrants to become American citizens in Binghamton New York. A war on the Mexican border being fought mostly with assault rifles bought from U.S. arms dealers since Bush let the ban on them lapse. Four police officers were fatally shot March 21 in Oakland, California.

Three police officers were killed in Pittsburgh this morning at the hands of a nut job "armed with an AK-47 rifle and several powerful handguns, including a .357 Magnum" says the New York Times.

According to the Times several of this monsters friends say that he feared ''the Obama gun ban that's on the way'' and ''didn't like our rights being infringed upon.''

What the hell is the matter with you people?

The blood of the dead and wounded is on the hands of the members of the NRA.

No one wants to take the guns from sportsmen, but how many bullets does it take to kill a deer?

Tell me, just how many holes can you put into a paper target anyway?

You people are nuts and innocent people are dying because of your idiocy.

Rupert Murdoch Doesn’t Get IT

2009-04-03T17:20:00.000-07:00

This is already an old argument, I've been having it for nearly 15 years.

In a speech before The Cable Show, an annual cable television industry event, in Washington, D.C. Rupert Murdoch showed just how out of touch he is.

"People reading news for free on the Web, that's got to change," said Murdoch.

Reviving an already tired argument Murdoch raised his concern that search engines, blogs and portals steal revenue from newspaper sites by linking to stories published by them. The covetous Mr. Murdoch seems to resent that the referring site earns advertising dollars that he thinks belong to him.

"The question is, should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyright... not steal, but take," said Murdoch. "Not just them but Yahoo."

This is the Internet era and Mr. Murdoch has it backwards. The real question is should newspaper publishers pay the referrer for sending traffic to their sites not the other way around.

Obama’s Ersatz Capitalism

2009-04-01T10:14:00.000-07:00

Joseph E. Stiglitz, a professor of economics at Columbia who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1995 to 1997, was awarded the Nobel prize in economics in 2001. His analysis of the Obama Administration's bank bailout plan offers insight as to why the plan is a win-win-lose proposal: the banks win, investors win — and taxpayers lose.

The definition of insanity....doing the same thing over and over again and each time expecting a different outcome

2009-03-28T18:55:00.000-07:00

What surprises us that a declaration of war creates a war? In this case, a war that has gone on for 30 some years that will cost the United States over $14 billion this year alone.

What surprises us about the lack of gun control creates uncontrollable gun violence? In this case violence that has killed 7,337 people since January 2007 in this war alone.

What surprises us about demand creating supply? In this case drugs on one side and guns on the other.

What surprises us about draconian unpopular laws creating social disorder, mass civil disobedience and unsustainable demands on civil society?

Steele Ridiculous

2009-03-28T10:19:00.000-07:00

Charles M. Blow writes in the New York Times this morning about the circus that is known as the Republican Party. His witty and insightful piece highlights the empty heads that now constitute their "leadership".

These are serious times that require serious thinking by seriously thinking people.

Maybe it’s me but has anyone heard anything of substance from any of the clowns of the media/political circus known as the Republican Party?

Eric Kantor was asked yesterday morning by the comedy team of Doocy/Carlson if he found “symbolism” in the fact that the Republican “budget” proposal only contained 19 pages when the Administrations budget was some 140 pages. You bet there’s symbolism in that - one was substantial, the other, well, empty.

It is truly distressing that in a time that demands rational thinking and cooperative effort that the best the Republican’s can come up with are the likes of Cantor, Limbaugh, Steele, Malkin, Hannity, Levin, Coulter, etc who don't represent American ideals in any way. They are deeply wounded people who are incapable of intelligent discourse.

http://blow.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/28/steele-ridiculous/?apage=4#comment-16815

The Market Mystique

2009-03-27T18:43:00.000-07:00

Dr. Krugman nails it again...as he points out, we've got foxes protecting hen houses....

The bank I use, Wells Fargo, has become absolutely predatory charging outrageous fees for simple banking and holding incoming funds for as long as they legally can. I received a check from a Fortune 100 company and Wells held it for 18 days….18 days!

Banking in the US is a mess. Banks have become the enemy of their customers. They are big and strong and impossible to talk to.

It seems to me that what is needed at this point is besides strict regulation is nationalization of the largest banks. We then turn them into “national” banks owned by the government (the people) and a second banking system that goes back to the days of toasters, state banks. Small regional banks that know their customers.

With strict regulation as to what the National Banks can and cannot do banking will become much more competitive.

We cannot afford to have a system that holds us hostage to ever increasing fees.

I don’t like banks, I never have. But I NEED a bank the same way I need electricity. Our local electric company is regulated and they still manage to get electricity to us all while remaining in the background. Have you ever heard anyone say that they hate their electric company? Not true of banks, telecoms and cable providers-monopolists all.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/was-i-unfair/#comment-157171

Obama's 'Science' Fiction

2009-03-12T22:29:00.000-07:00

Charles Krauthamer must be the smartest person on the planet, or he may be second behind Limbaugh, or third behind Hannity or maybe first amongst equals, what's the difference. You guys are experts on science, bioethics, medical ethics, economics, governance, science, so many things...it must be really awesome to be you. You are smarter than scientists, doctors, effective politicians, Nobel Prize winning economists and it seems the vast majority of the people of the planet, after all, so many of us are so wrong about so many things in your eyes. Wow, what it must be like to be so smart about so many things.
3/13/2009 1:28:11 AM

From The Torches and Pitchforks File......Psssst, pass it on.

2009-03-11T17:35:00.000-07:00

Help Us Dig Up The Praise That Today's Bailout Bandits Once Received

"Over the past few months we've seen the media begin to cast a hairy eye on many of the financial characters it once dubbed as experts, creators of great wealth and oracles of market behavior. Many of these people are now considered the perpetrators of our current financial crisis.

We need your help to collect the heaps of praise that newspapers, magazines and TV news shows doled out when times were good. Now that times are bad, it's even more important to remind ourselves how easily the wool can be pulled over the media's eyes and, consequently, those who consume it.

We want to find laudatory reports on not only the alleged Ponzi fraudsters like Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford, but also executives like former Merrill CEO John Thain and former top Citigroup adviser Robert Rubin. We need your help to research front-page magazine spreads, fawning TV interviews, and any other gratuitous praise of the perpetrators of this economic meltdown. It doesn't matter how far back you need to go.

Email submissions+praise@huffingtonpost.com with the articles you find. Include your name, the date the article was published, and let us know if you would like to remain anonymous.

Some examples of people to start with are John Thain, Robert Rubin, Dick Fuld, John Mack, Ken Lewis, Jacob Ezra Merkin, Vikram Pandit, Allen Stanford, Bernie Madoff and Walter Noel to name a few."

This Is Not a Test. This Is Not a Test.

2009-03-11T12:27:00.000-07:00

America is constipated from having gorged on an imagined banquet.

Our national dialog is dominated by those whose political voice still screams from the narrowness of their own greed-those who earn millions of dollars a year to spew that which profits them, regardless of the truth. Listen to the dialog, it’s shallowness is appalling yet it still dominates our discourse.

The real ability to address real issues is drowned out by the noise spewed across our airwaves. Jon Stewart vs. Jim Kramer. Rush Limbaugh against us all the rest of us. Sean Hannity screaming unverifiable absurdity - nothing real, nothing of substance, just the stuff that is believed by those too lazy to unveil the truth.
Instead of thinking and learning we allow our own laziness to substitute for genuine rational, intelligent and informed discourse.

There is NOTHING today that cannot be verified by a simple Web search if we will are only willing to use some of our God given intelligence and energy to find it. Our discourse is dominated by the petty because we allow it to be so.

The issues are lost in a scream-fest. Some of us who think that we are betrayed by the captains of finance, others who bemoan the loss of the politics of the 1980’s. We are a bewildered populace assaulted by a media that has degenerated by a narrowness fed only by its own ratings and greed.

The American people must emerge from the fog of the absurd idea of God given right to live in energy thirsty McMansion’s and the unsustainable belief that unfettered access to petroleum and the monsters that gulp it up is a right granted to American’s because we are somehow exceptional.

No longer America, no longer.

You guys are just so fuked.....

2009-02-24T21:07:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama towers...

God Bless Us All

2009-02-24T20:23:00.001-08:00

Tonight, Barack Obama melted the pavement.

The tributary known as Black History flowed into the river known as American History and they began to flow as one.

Great speech President Obama. We are blessed to have you as our leader.

'nuff said.....

2009-02-23T19:11:00.001-08:00

Say It Aint So Joe.......

2009-02-11T22:28:00.000-08:00

Judd Gregg's Refusal To Vote On Stimulus Provokes Firestorm At Home And In Washington MoveOn Goes After Cornyn For Skipping Stimulus Vote Is Stimulus Victory Obama's Opening Act Or Sign Of Reduced Expectations?Slate: Bush Attempted To Destroy Laws Of War That Lincoln Created Reid And Pelosi's Stimulus Standoff: She 'Went Through The Roof'US, Russian Satellites Collide 500 Miles Over Siberia

Slumdogs Unite!

2009-02-10T14:54:00.000-08:00

Americans “resent people who appear to be living high off a system dominated by insiders with the right connections.”

By FRANK RICH
Published: February 7, 2009

SOMEDAY historians may look back at Tom Daschle’s flameout as a minor one-car (and chauffeur) accident. But that will depend on whether or not it’s followed by a multi-vehicle pileup that still could come. Even as President Obama refreshingly took responsibility for having “screwed up,” it’s not clear that he fully understands the huge forces that hit his young administration last week.
The tsunami of populist rage coursing through America is bigger than Daschle’s overdue tax bill, bigger than John Thain’s trash can, bigger than any bailed-out C.E.O.’s bonus. It’s even bigger than the Obama phenomenon itself. It could maim the president’s best-laid plans and what remains of our economy if he doesn’t get in front of the mounting public anger.

Like nearly everyone else in Washington, Obama was blindsided by the savagery and speed of Daschle’s demise. Conventional wisdom had him surviving the storm. Such is the city’s culture that not a single Republican or Democratic senator called for his withdrawal until the morning of his exit. Membership in the exclusive Senate club, after all, has its privileges. Among Daschle’s more vocal defenders was Bob Dole, who had recruited him to Alston & Bird, the law and lobbying firm where Dole has served as “special counsel” when not otherwise cashing in on his own Senate years by serving as a pitchman for Pepsi and Viagra.

In New York, editorial pages on both ends of the political spectrum, The Wall Street Journal and The Times, called for Daschle to step down. But not The Washington Post. In a frank expression of the capital’s isolation from the country, it thought Daschle could still soldier on even though “ordinary Americans who pay their taxes may well wonder why Mr. Obama can’t find cabinet secretaries who do the same.”
As Jon Stewart might say, oh those pesky ordinary Americans!

In reality, Daschle’s tax shortfall, an apparently honest mistake, was only a red flag for the larger syndrome that much of Washington still doesn’t get. It was the source, not the amount, of his unreported income that did him in. The car and driver advertised his post-Senate immersion in the greedy bipartisan culture of entitlement and crony capitalism that both helped create our economic meltdown (on Wall Street) and failed to police it (in Washington). Daschle might well have been the best choice to lead health-care reform. But his honorable public record was instantly vaporized by tales of his cozy, lucrative relationships with the very companies he’d have to adjudicate as health czar.

Few articulate this ethical morass better than Obama, who has repeatedly vowed to “close the revolving door” between business and government and end our “two sets of standards, one for powerful people and one for ordinary folks.” But his tough new restrictions on lobbyists (alreadycompromised by inexplicable exceptions) and porous plan for salary caps on bailed-out bankers are only a down payment on this promise, even if they are strictly enforced.

The new president who vowed to change Washington’s culture will have to fight much harder to keep from being co-opted by it instead. There are simply too many major players in the Obama team who are either alumni of the financial bubble’s insiders’ club or of the somnambulant governmental establishment that presided over the catastrophe.

This includes Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary. Washington hands repeatedly observe how “lucky” Geithner was to be the first cabinet nominee with an I.R.S. problem, not the second, and therefore get confirmed by Congress while the getting was good. Whether or not this is “lucky” for him, it is hardly lucky for Obama. Geithner should have left ahead of Daschle.

Now more than ever, the president must inspire confidence and stave off panic. As Friday’s new unemployment figures showed, the economy kept plummeting while Congress postured. Though Obama is a genius at building public support, he is not Jesus and he can’t do it all alone. On Monday, it’s Geithner who will unveil the thorniest piece of the economic recovery plan to date — phase two of a bank rescue. The public face of this inevitably controversial package is now best known as the guy who escaped the tax reckoning that brought Daschle down.

Even before the revelation of his tax delinquency, the new Treasury secretary was a dubious choice to make this pitch. Geithner was present at the creation of the first, ineffectual and opaque bank bailout — TARP, today the most radioactive acronym in American politics. Now the double standard that allowed him to wriggle out of his tax mess is a metaphor for the double standard of the policy he must sell: Most “ordinary Americans” still don’t understand why banks got billions while nothing was done (and still isn’t being done) to bail out those who lost their homes, jobs and retirement savings.

As with Daschle, the political problems caused by Geithner’s tax infraction are secondary to the larger questions raised by his past interaction with the corporations now under his purview. To his credit, Geithner, like Obama, has devoted his career to public service, not buckraking. But he still has not satisfactorily explained why, as president of the New York Fed, he failed in his oversight of the teetering Wall Street institutions. Nor has he told us why, in his first major move in his new job, he secured a waiver from Obama to hire a Goldman Sachs lobbyist as his chief of staff. Nor, in his confirmation hearings, did he prove any more credible than the Bush Treasury secretary, the Goldman Sachs alumnus Hank Paulson, in explaining why Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail while A.I.G. and Citigroup were spared.

Citigroup had one highly visible asset that Lehman did not: Robert Rubin, the former Clinton Treasury secretary who sat passively (though lucratively) in its executive suite as Citi gorged on reckless risk. Geithner, as a Rubin protégé from the Clinton years, might have recused himself from rescuing Citi, which so far has devoured $45 billion in bailout money.

Key players in the Obama economic team beyond Geithner are also tied to Rubin or Citigroup or both, from Larry Summers, the administration’s top economic adviser, to Gary Gensler, the newly named nominee to run the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and a Treasury undersecretary in the Clinton administration. Back then, Summers and Gensler joined hands with Phil Gramm to ward off regulation of the derivative markets that have since brought the banking system to ruin. We must take it on faith that they have subsequently had judgment transplants.

Obama’s brilliant appointees, we keep being told, are irreplaceable. But as de Gaulle said, “The cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men.” You have to wonder if this team is really a meritocracy or merely a stacked deck. Not only did Rubin himself serve on the Obama economic transition team, but two of the transition’s headhunters were Michael Froman, Rubin’s chief of staff at Treasury and later a Citigroup executive, and James S. Rubin, an investor who is Robert Rubin’s son.
A welcome outlier to this club is Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairmanchosen to direct Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. But Bloomberg reported last week that Summers is already freezing Volcker out of many of his deliberations on economic policy. This sounds like the arrogant Summers who was fired as president of Harvard, not the chastened new Summers advertised at the time of his appointment. A team of rivals is not his thing.

Americans have had enough of such arrogance, whether in the public or private sectors, whether Democrat or Republican. Voters turned on Sarah Palin not just because of her manifest unfitness for office but because her claims of being a regular hockey mom werecontradicted by her Evita shopping sprees. John McCain’s sanctification of Joe the Plumber (himself a tax delinquent) never could be squared with his inability to remember how many houses he owned. A graphic act of entitlement also stripped naked that faux populist John Edwards.

The public’s revulsion isn’t mindless class hatred. As Obama said on Wednesday of his fellow citizens: “We don’t disparage wealth. We don’t begrudge anybody for achieving success.” But we do know that the system has been fixed for too long. The gaping income inequality of the past decade — the top 1 percent of America’s earners received more than 20 percent of the total national income — has not been seen since the run-up to the Great Depression.

This is why “Slumdog Millionaire,” which pits a hard-working young man in Mumbai against a corrupt nexus of money and privilege, has become America’s movie of the year. As Robert Reich, the former Clinton labor secretary, wrote after Daschle’s fall, Americans “resent people who appear to be living high off a system dominated by insiders with the right connections.”

The neo-Hoover Republicans in Congress, who think government can put Americans back to work with corporate tax cuts but without any “spending,” are tone deaf to this rage. Obama is not. It’s a good thing he’s getting out of Washington this week to barnstorm the country about the crisis at hand. Once back home, he’s got to make certain that the insiders in his own White House know who’s the boss.

Treasury Chief Aims to Restore ‘Lost Faith’ in Bailout

2009-02-10T14:52:00.000-08:00

Lost faith huh......

February 10th, 2009 2:51 pm

Consumer credit????? The major banks, I personally know of two incidents one involving Wells Fargo and the other Bank of America, of refusing to release funds claiming that it would take 11 business days to clear an out of state check.

It seems to me that getting these banks to start lending again is now less of a priority than getting them to release our own funds.

11 business days, in this case including President's Day (a bank holiday) is a total of 18 days.

The banks are taking gross advantage of consumers and small business in order to increase their float. This is causing, certainly in our case, extreme stress on our ability to do business. They are holding funds needed for payroll and other expenses. By holding our funds they slow our cash flow to the detriment of our company, our employees and those that we rely upon for goods and services to run our business.

The banks must be either nationalized or come under strict regulation that ensures that they do the right thing for our country and our economy.
— Multifarious, USA

Will Obama Save Liberalism?

2009-02-05T20:04:00.000-08:00

397. EDITORS' SELECTIONS
January 26, 2009 6:01 pm

So conservatives of the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush years have a fair amount to be proud of do they?

Decades of conservative led deregulation of the financial system has left the country gorged by greedy Wall Street bankers, our monetary system feckless and our economy in the worst shape since the 1930’s.

Jihadism rages while we are bogged down in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that continue to cost America inconceivable amounts of lives and treasure.

Law and Order? America leads the world in the percentage of our citizens that are incarcerated. Do you really consider that a success?

A New York Times editorial published August 12, 2007 points out that The World Health Organization ranked the United States 37th in the world in the quality of our health care and conservatives remain obstructionist regarding universal health care falsely labeling it as “nationalized health care”.

Our educational system is ranked amongst the lowest of developed countries and we have one of the highest school drop-out rates in the world.

Liberalism has triumphed over conservatism in America because conservatives, when given the opportunity, governed selfishly and to the detriment of the greater good.

Mr. Kristol, while berating President Obama’s reference to America’s founding fathers (little did we know that conservatives have the phrase copyrighted!) says that today’s dangers are less stark than those of The Greatest Generation. This after 7 years of conservatives declaring Jihadism the greatest threat that civilization has ever faced.

Conservatives of the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush years have nothing to be proud of and I for one will not miss Mr. Kristol’s exhortation of the virtues of conservatism on these pages.

Field of Dreams

2009-02-04T21:03:00.001-08:00

I've watched Field of Dreams, maybe one hundred times, more or less. I've been brought to tears every time I've seen it, as I remember.

Field of Dreams is the kind of story that tells you what you need to hear, every time you see it and when you need to hear it.

Tonight; faith. Field of Dreams is about faith. It is about believing that what you need to happen, happens when you need it. Faith.

I first learned what a "circular reference" was when I learned to use Lotus123. Field of Dreams is a story within a story within a story....it keeps telling itself.

Virtual Face-Off: What Does Google Owe Newspapers?

2009-02-04T19:27:00.000-08:00

NEWSPAPERS CRASHING AND BURNING

37. February 4, 2009
10:21 pm

So, say Google enters into negotiations (which it won’t) with the newspapers and Google doesn’t agree to one of the papers demands or the amount the paper want’s to charge? Which paper wants to be the first to be left out of the search results?

Remember 1998 when newspapers started to squirm about what to do with this new technology? Many refused to put their content online-they lost. Some tried registration schemes (so how are you monetizing the registration information?). Some tried to sell content or charge a fee for “premium” content (we know how that worked out don’t we NYT…).

Buggy whips, telegrams, victrola’s (don’t even get me started on the idiots who run the music business!), sundial’s……….

We need in-depth investigative reporting. I love the NY Times and have been a reader for most of my life. But content is king and content producers are the Crown Prince’s and Princess’es of this new technology. I have no doubt that Thomas Friedman, Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks (not William Kristol!!!!) will find plenty of outlets that will be more than willing to pay them to write. Eyeballs, eyeballs, eyeballs. The papers better get over it really quickly and get with the program.

— Multifarious

Internet Money in Fiscal Plan: Wise or Waste? (2)

2009-02-03T14:44:00.000-08:00

Reading the comments posted by readers of this article you start to understand how most people don't even understand what broadband is.

255.February 03, 2009 5:50 pm
Link

DSL is NOT broadband. DSL is an old joke perpetuated by monopolistic telecommunications companies. Allowing Verizon, Cox Communications and COMCAST to dictate our future is ludicrous. The US should launch anti-trust action against these monopolies and break them up or force them to do what is good for the public and the future of our economy.

Internet Money in Fiscal Plan: Wise or Waste?

2009-02-03T09:08:00.000-08:00

Extension of broadband into rural areas of the U.S. (absolutely necessary) will not come close to meeting the real broadband needs of a 21st century America. I am afraid that current proposals mask the real issues and lull us into complacency.

The United States currently ranks 14th (as low as 18 as measured by some) in broadband amongst the nations of the world. We are driving on a two-lane road when a multi-lane superhighway is required.

For the United States to be competitive with the rest of the world, and for our citizens to learn, research and consume in a modern world a high-speed broadband infrastructure is not an option.

According to A new study by the Communications Workers of America (Speed Matters http://www.speedmatters.org/document-library/sourcematerials/cwa_report_on_internet_speeds_2008.pdf) the median download speed in the U.S. is an agonizingly slow 2.35 megabits per second. Compare this to Japan where the median download speed is 63.60 Mbps. In South Korea it’s 49 Mbps and in Finland it’s 21.7Mbps.

All manner of Internet and Web development is stifled without assurance that advanced applications are accessible to a wide-spectrum of user.

South Korea, which already offers its citizens broadband speeds of up to 100Mbps, is planning to introduce 1Gbps service by 2012. That’s a tenfold increase. Comcast and Verizon are only now planning for speeds approaching 100 Mbps by 2010.

The major carriers in the United States are without adequate competition, or in its place, government "stimulation" or mandate. While these carriers concern themselves with maintaining control over what they consider to be THEIR infrastructure and access to the public through it, the rest of the world is moving swiftly to ensure modernity for their societies.

Broadband is a necessary public utility, the development of which requires urgent federal government attention.

220.February 03, 2009 3:30 pm

"Raise More Hell"

2009-02-01T11:46:00.000-08:00

Betsy Moon: What Would Molly Ivins Think?

I miss Mollie Ivins. Her death was untimely.

Every column she wrote was biting and humorous and you always knew where she stood. She was a fearless advocate of First Amendment rights and an outspoken critic of hypocrisy.

Here is some of the best of Molly Ivins:
Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?
You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You
Shrub : The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush
Bushwhacked : Life in George W. Bush’s America

Herbert Hoover Lives

2009-02-01T11:26:00.000-08:00

Once again, Frank Rich nails it......

401.February 01, 2009 12:03 pm
Link

Poor Michael Steele, he has just become Chairman of nothing left to lose.

Rush Limbaugh flies from NFL game to NFL game in his private jet while he thinks that it is still 1999 and that the country is as fat and happy as he is. In a dark hour some humor is a necessity and so Mr. Rich – watching the far-right hijack what is left of the Republican Party is a laugh riot.

There is a complete void of leadership in the Republican Party due in large part to the abrogation of responsibility for the sake of ideology. Limbaugh is filling that void.

In the words of George W. Bush "Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again".

These are serious times that call for serious people with serious solutions for serious problems. Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the obstructionists are not close to being that.

The vast majority of the American people won’t be fooled again. Limbaugh will lead the rest into a vast right wing irrelevance.

“The risk of a near-depression shouldn’t be underestimated.” ....Nouriel Roubini

2009-01-31T23:51:00.000-08:00

Roubini Sees Global Gloom After Davos Vindication
By Simon Kennedy

Jan. 30 (Bloomberg) -- At the World Economic Forum two years ago, Nouriel Roubini warned that record profits and bonuses were obscuring a “hard landing” to come. “I really disagree,” countered Jacob Frenkel, the American International Group Inc. vice chairman and former Israeli central banker.

No more. “Roubini was intellectually courageous, and he called the shots correctly,” says Frenkel, whose AIG survives only on the basis of more than $100 billion of government loans. “He gained credibility, and he deserves it.”

This week, New York University’s Roubini returned to the WEF and the Swiss ski resort of Davos as the prophet of the worst economic and financial crisis since the Great Depression - - joining the ranks of previous “Dr. Dooms” who made their names through contrarian calls that proved correct.

Even as he wins plaudits for his prescience, Roubini, 50, says worse lies ahead. Banks face bigger credit losses than they realize, more financial companies will require state takeovers and the world economy will keep shrinking throughout 2009, he says.

“The consensus is catching up with me, but it’s still behind,” Roubini said in an interview in Davos. “I don’t know what some people are smoking.”

‘Catastrophic’

As long ago as February 2007, Roubini was writing on his blog that “the party will soon be over,” and warning of “painful consequences for the U.S. and the global economy.” By last February, his tone had become apocalyptic, raising the specter of a “catastrophic” meltdown that central banks would fail to prevent, triggering the bankruptcy of large banks with mortgage holdings and a “sharp drop” in equities.

The next month, Bear Stearns Cos. failed, to be taken over by JPMorgan Chase & Co. in a government-backed deal. Then, in September, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. went bankrupt, prompting banks to hoard cash and depriving businesses and households of access to capital. The U.S. took over AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index suffered its worst year since 1937.

“I was intellectually vindicated,” Roubini says. “But I was vindicated by having an economic disaster which has political and social consequences.”

Predecessors

Roubini’s predecessors in the role of economic nay-sayer include some well-known names: Joseph Granville, publisher of the Granville Market Letter, who forecast the stock-market declines of 1976 and 2000; Henry Kaufman, who as a managing director at Salomon Brothers projected rising interest rates that led to a U.S. recession in the early 1980s; Marc Faber, publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, who predicted the 1987 stock crash; and Yale University’s Robert Shiller, a former colleague of Roubini’s, who forecast the end of the dot-com bubble in his 2000 book “Irrational Exuberance” and said in a second edition in 2005 that the U.S. housing market had undergone the biggest speculative boom in U.S. history.

Granville, 85, says the key to being an outlier is not to doubt your analysis.

“I don’t have anything to do with emotion,” says Granville, who’s based in Kansas City. “Keep your head, follow the numbers and ignore the rest.”

Roubini was born in Istanbul, the son of an importer- exporter of carpets, and spent his childhood in Israel, Iran and Italy. It was while living in Milan from 1962 to 1982, he says, that he became attracted to economics: “Economics had the tools to understand the world, and not just understand it but also change it for the better.”

International Economics

After a year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he earned an economics degree at Milan’s Universita’ L. Bocconi and then his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1988, where he specialized in international economics.

Jeffrey Sachs, he says, became his “role model” at Harvard by demonstrating that economists could shape public policy -- as Sachs did by lobbying for poor countries to have their debts relieved by richer governments. Sachs is now a professor at Columbia University.

“You sensed there was something beyond academia, that you have to figure out the big issues of the global economy,” says Roubini. “You have to be engaged, and can’t just be in an ivory tower.”

For much of the 1990s, Roubini combined academic research and policy-making by teaching at Yale and then in New York, while also spending time at the International Monetary Fund, the Federal Reserve, World Bank and Bank of Israel.

Joining Clinton

By 1998 he had attracted the attention of President Bill Clinton’s administration, joining it first as a senior economist in the White House Council of Economic Advisers and then moving to the Treasury department as a senior adviser to Timothy Geithner, then the undersecretary for international affairs and now Treasury secretary in the Obama administration.

Roubini returned to the IMF in 2001 as a visiting scholar while it battled a financial meltdown in Argentina. He co-wrote a book on saving bankrupt economies entitled “Bailouts or Bail- ins?” and opened his own global consulting firm, which now employs two dozen economists and publishes a popular Web site and blog.

“Nouriel has a rare combination of economics and the real world, and so has great insight because of that,” says Shiller. “He looks into the details and rolls up his sleeves.”

Roubini says working on emerging-market blowouts in Asia and Latin America allowed him to spot the looming disaster in the U.S. “I’ve been studying emerging markets for 20 years, and saw the same signs in the U.S. that I saw in them, which was that we were in a massive credit bubble,” he says.

Still a Pessimist

With that bubble now popped, Roubini remains more pessimistic than economists elsewhere. The IMF forecasts global growth of 0.5 percent this year and bank losses from toxic U.S.- originated assets of $2.2 trillion. By contrast, Roubini sees the global economy shrinking this year, and banks writing down at least $3.6 trillion -- compared to the $1.1 trillion disclosed so far.

While the U.S. government is resisting nationalizing its biggest banks, Roubini says it will have no choice because they are now “effectively insolvent.” And the outcome may be even worse than even he anticipates if governments fail to take aggressive steps to recapitalize banks and revive their economies, he says: “The risk of a near-depression shouldn’t be underestimated.”

Roubini, who’s now working on a book about the crisis, says he takes no particular pleasure in his role as Dr. Doom or the attention it brings him.

“I’m not a permanent bear,” he says. “I’ll be the first to call a recovery, but I just don’t see it yet, and it’s getting uglier.”

Health care now!

2009-01-29T21:59:00.000-08:00

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.....
Health Care Now

The Worst Is Yet To Come

2009-01-29T20:53:00.000-08:00

The origins of this (recession) (depression) call it what you will I think go back to the idea that "government is the problem". There are some things that only government can do. One is to regulate financial markets. The idea that markets are self-regulating, I hope, has been totally discreditied. Regulation is the only way to reign in greed.

There are many answers here, they are not pretty: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4590

For months and months and months, talk-talk-talk-blah-blah-blah radio, along with the likes of Phil Graham insisted that there was no recession while the people who knew were shouted down.....we get what we deserve. The lesson: leave your ideology behind and pay attention.

Will Obama Save Liberalism?

2009-01-26T06:44:00.000-08:00

The New York Times Editorial Board has finally come to their senses and William Kristol will no longer be a Times columnist.

Mr. Kristol is a hack. His articulation doesn't rise to the level of Times columnists and his columns continually contained unsupported drivel.

His assertion in his last column that "all good things must come to an end", as usual, twists the truth. The end of conservatism is indeed the good thing.

His column follows:

All good things must come to an end. Jan. 20, 2009, marked the end of a conservative era.
Since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, conservatives of various sorts, and conservatisms of various stripes, have generally been in the ascendancy. And a good thing, too! Conservatives have been right more often than not — and more often than liberals — about most of the important issues of the day: about Communism and jihadism, crime and welfare, education and the family. Conservative policies have on the whole worked — insofar as any set of policies can be said to “work” in the real world. Conservatives of the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush years have a fair amount to be proud of.

They also have some regrets. They’ll have time to ponder those as liberals now take their chance to govern.

Lest conservatives be too proud, it’s worth recalling that conservatism’s rise was decisively enabled by liberalism’s weakness. That weakness was manifested by liberalism’s limp reaction to the challenge from the New Left in the 1960s, became more broadly evident during the 1970s, and culminated in the fecklessness of the Carter administration at the end of that decade.

In 1978, the Harvard political philosopher Harvey Mansfield diagnosed the malady: “From having been the aggressive doctrine of vigorous, spirited men, liberalism has become hardly more than a trembling in the presence of illiberalism. ... Who today is called a liberal for strength and confidence in defense of liberty?”

Over the next three decades, it was modern conservatism, led at the crucial moment by Ronald Reagan, that assumed the task of defending liberty with strength and confidence. Can a revived liberalism, faced with a new set of challenges, now pick up that mantle?

The answer lies in the hands of one man: the 44th president. If Reagan’s policies had failed, or if he hadn’t been politically successful, the conservative ascendancy would have been nipped in the bud. So with President Obama today. Liberalism’s fate rests to an astonishing degree on his shoulders. If he governs successfully, we’re in a new political era. If not, the country will be open to new conservative alternatives.

We don’t really know how Barack Obama will govern. What we have so far, mainly, is an Inaugural Address, and it suggests that he may have learned more from Reagan than he has sometimes let on. Obama’s speech was unabashedly pro-American and implicitly conservative.

Obama appealed to the authority of “our forebears,” “our founding documents,” even — political correctness alert! — “our founding fathers.” He emphasized that “we will not apologize for our way of life nor will we waver in its defense.” He spoke almost not at all about rights (he had one mention of “the rights of man,” paired with “the rule of law” in the context of a discussion of the Constitution). He called for “a new era of responsibility.”

And he appealed to “the father of our nation,” who, before leading his army across the Delaware on Christmas night, 1776, allegedly “ordered these words be read to the people: ‘Let it be told to the future world that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it.’”

For some reason, Obama didn’t identify the author of “these timeless words” — the only words quoted in the entire speech. He’s Thomas Paine, and the passage comes from the first in his series of Revolutionary War tracts, “The Crisis.” Obama chose to cloak his quotation from the sometimes intemperate Paine in the authority of the respectable George Washington.

Sixty-seven years ago, a couple of months after Pearl Harbor, at the close of a long radio address on the difficult course of the struggle we had just entered upon, another liberal president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, also told the story of Washington ordering that “The Crisis” be read aloud, and also quoted Paine. But he turned to the more famous — and more stirring — passage with which Paine begins his essay:

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”

That exhortation was appropriate for World War II. Today, the dangers are less stark, and the conflicts less hard. Still, there will be trying times during Obama’s presidency, and liberty will need staunch defenders. Can Obama reshape liberalism to be, as it was under F.D.R., a fighting faith, unapologetically patriotic and strong in the defense of liberty? That would be a service to our country.

This is William Kristol’s last column.

So conservatives of the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush years have a fair amount to be proud of do they?

Decades of conservative led deregulation of the financial system has left the country gorged by greedy Wall Street bankers, our monetary system feckless and our economy in the worst shape since the 1930’s.

Jihadism rages while we are bogged down in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that continue to cost America inconceivable amounts of lives and treasure.

Law and Order? America leads the world in the percentage of our citizens that are incarcerated. Do you really consider that a success?

A New York Times editorial published August 12, 2007 points out that The World Health Organization ranked the United States 37th in the world in the quality of our health care and conservatives remain obstructionist regarding universal health care falsely labeling it as “nationalized health care”.

Our educational system is ranked amongst the lowest of developed countries and we have one of the highest school drop-out rates in the world.

Liberalism has triumphed over conservatism in America because conservatives, when given the opportunity, governed selfishly and to the detriment of the greater good.

Mr. Kristol, while berating President Obama’s reference to America’s founding fathers (little did we know that conservatives have the phrase copyrighted!) says that today’s dangers are less stark than those of The Greatest Generation. This after 7 years of conservatives declaring Jihadism the greatest threat that civilization has ever faced.

I am tired of the deification of Ronald Regan. Communism was going bankrupt when he took office, it merely collapsed during his tenure. He gave us the collapse of the Savings & Loan system, made mockery of environmental efforts and allowed the spread of AIDS through his ignorant homophobia. He gave us Iran-Contra, a clearly illegal enterprise for which several of his top aids were convicted of crimes against The United States.

Conservatives of the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush years have nothing to be proud of and I for one will not miss Mr. Kristol’s exhortation of the virtues of conservatism on the pages of The New York Times.

It's Pretty Grim Out There, But At Least We Have Rob Blagojevich......

2009-01-25T15:13:00.000-08:00

Is there any question that Rob Blagojevich is the funniest man in America? Watch it Steven Colbert!

No Time For Poetry

2009-01-25T14:51:00.000-08:00

I have been amused this week to hear the pundits on the right denigrate President Obama's (oh that sounds good!) inaugural address.

As Frank Rich so aptly writes today

"But there’s a reason that this speech was austere, not pretty. Form followed content. Obama wasn’t just rebuking the outgoing administration. He was delicately but unmistakably calling out the rest of us who went along for the ride as America swerved into the dangerous place we find ourselves now."

Let us not forget, George W. Bush won the 2004 election decisively. A majority of American's voted for him.

It's hysterical that Rush and crew decry President Obama's policies as socialist. Sean Hannity rails 5 days a week that American's want the government to take care of them. In this regard, you've got to agree with him, it's time for personal responsibility. It is also time to recognize that there are some things that only government can do and that it is time that the American government start getting it right.

Patricia J. Williams wrote an interesting article in The Nation recently in which she talks about a list a friend of her's wrote: "Millions of people are expected to descend on the nation's capital for the inauguration of Barack Obama. It is unprecedented: churches, temples, mosques and tribal councils have hired buses to attend. Schools are closing for the day. Universities are setting up JumboTrons to watch the festivities. Global media will join the dancing in the streets.

A friend recently asked me if I thought all these constituencies were celebrating the same things. Did I think this coronation-scaled civic bliss was mostly about Obama's being our first African-American president? Or was it because his win convinces us that some "post-race" American Dream has been ultimately affirmed? That he's going to improve the economy? Repair global relations?

The question made me reflect for a moment. Yes, the symbolism of his race is significant, although it certainly cannot be equated with the end of racism. And surely we're uplifted by Obama's being so genuinely likable and smart. No doubt the euphoria is also unusually great because his campaign drew constituents into political engagement--the phone banks, the door-to-door canvassing, the social networks, mass e-mails and text messages. As a result, people feel personal, even possessive, satisfaction about his victory.

But at least as important as all that, I think, is a kind of Wizard of Oz-ish fizzy relief about George W. Bush's exit--as in Ding Dong, the Wicked Warlock is melting into a nice little past-tense puddle. There's a giddily celebratory sweeping out of the indubitably, absolutely, completely, very worst president in our history. So many bad things have happened in the past eight years that it's hard to keep them all in one's head at one time. Another friend says he hung a list in the hallway of his apartment building, tabulating all the really awful things he blames Bush for. Other neighbors added to it. At first, he said, he was going to use it to host an inauguration party at which people would knock back a shot for each phenomenally inept executive flub. But then, he says, "I realized we'd all be drunk for a year."

The entire article is here, but here is the list. It's certainly food for thought.

"Pax Americana and the aspiration to consolidate a global American empire. The Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive warfare. Hurricane Katrina and "heckuva job, Brownie." The explicit rejection of the Geneva Conventions. John Yoo's and Alberto Gonzales's redefinition of torture. Paul Wolfowitz as head of the World Bank subsidizing his girlfriend. Ahmad Chalabi. The FCC allowing greater consolidation of media. The outing of Valerie Plame. The manipulations asserting that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The addled handling of Harriet Miers's nomination to the Supreme Court. Opposition to stem cell research. The looting of the National Museum of Iraq, and the burning of Baghdad's National Library. Donald Rumsfeld's remarks that rioting in Iraq was the sign of a liberated people and that Iraq was no more violent than some American cities. Stacking the Civil Rights Commission with conservatives, like Abigail Thernstrom, who want to overturn sections of the Voting Rights Act. The shooting death of Italian intelligence officer Nicola Calipari and injury of journalist Giuliana Sgrena at the hands of American soldiers. The appointment of ultraconservatives John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. Cheney filling his friend with birdshot. The USA Patriot Act. Doing away with habeas corpus. The National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping of citizens' phone calls and e-mails. The notion of an unchecked, unaccountable "unitary executive." The failure to keep official numbers of dead Iraqi civilians. The forbidding of photographs, or even visibility, of American military dead. The multilayered, high-level lying about how football hero Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan. Halliburton taking kickbacks from Kuwaiti oil suppliers. Paul Bremer dispensing billions of dollars for contracts in Iraq, which disappeared, never to be accounted for or recovered. Blackwater mercenaries accused of murdering Iraqi civilians. "Military tribunals" established outside the military justice system, with no due process or right to an attorney or to cross-examination or even to know the charges. The silly disparagement of the national anthem sung in Spanish. Bush talking directly to God. Abu Ghraib. Profiling Arab, Muslim and Latino immigrants. Guantánamo. Extraordinary rendition. Lousy veterans' benefits. Lousy veterans' hospitals. The failure to provide soldiers with reinforced armored vehicles ("You go to war with the army you have," explained Rumsfeld). The refusal to recognize post-traumatic stress disorder as a legitimate condition. Monica Goodling's political litmus tests in hiring for nonpolitical posts in the Justice Department. Expelling Helen Thomas from the White House press room and putting in fake reporter "Jeff Gannon" to throw adoring softball questions. John Ashcroft's draping of bare-breasted sculptures in the Justice Department. His subpoenas of more than 2,500 records of abortions performed at public hospitals. Gonzales firing US Attorneys around the country for political reasons. Oh, and did I forget the economy?"

On Day One, Obama Sets a New Tone

2009-01-21T21:39:00.001-08:00

“Problems cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness that created them.”
Albert Einstein

It Is A Great Day To Be An American

2009-01-20T18:00:00.000-08:00

The Election of Barack Obama Makes Us Proud

2009-01-19T19:22:00.000-08:00

Barack Hussein Obama
The 44th President
of The United States of America

A Surprise for the Right: Obama's Election Has Caused a Patriotic Spirit to Sweep America

Tomorrow will be a day that Americans will remember for years to come. It will be a day when most Americans -- whatever their partisan bent -- will feel particularly good about our country. But it will also be a day when people around the globe look at America differently than they did the day before. And they too will be inspired that everyday Americans mobilized successfully to take our country back -- that America did not fail them. The world will celebrate that we chose to chart a future governed by the American principles that they have long admired -- not the arrogance and selfishness they had come to loath.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

2009-01-18T20:18:00.000-08:00

“I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking at Mason Temple, Memphis, TN on April 3, 1968.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered this speech in support of the striking sanitation workers at Mason Temple in Memphis, TN on April 3, 1968—the day before he was assassinated.

Thank you very kindly, my friends. As I listened to Ralph Abernathy in his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about. It's always good to have your closest friend and associate say something good about you. And Ralph is the best friend that I have in the world.
I'm delighted to see each of you here tonight in spite of a storm warning. You reveal that you are determined to go on anyhow. Something is happening in Memphis, something is happening in our world.
As you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of general and panoramic view of the whole human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, "Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?" — I would take my mental flight by Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn't stop there. I would move on by Greece, and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality.
But I wouldn't stop there. I would go on, even to the great heyday of the Roman Empire. And I would see developments around there, through various emperors and leaders. But I wouldn't stop there. I would even come up to the day of the Renaissance, and get a quick picture of all that the Renaissance did for the cultural and esthetic life of man. But I wouldn't stop there. I would even go by the way that the man for whom I'm named had his habitat. And I would watch Martin Luther as he tacked his ninety-five theses on the door at the church in Wittenberg.
But I wouldn't stop there. I would come on up even to 1863, and watch a vacillating president by the name of Abraham Lincoln finally come to the conclusion that he had to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. But I wouldn't stop there. I would even come up to the early thirties, and see a man grappling with the problems of the bankruptcy of his nation. And come with an eloquent cry that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.
But I wouldn't stop there. Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, "If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy." Now that's a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around. That's a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a away that men, in some strange way, are responding — something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee — the cry is always the same — "We want to be free."
And another reason that I'm happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we're going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demand didn't force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence.
That is where we are today. And also in the human rights revolution, if something isn't done, and in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed. Now, I'm just happy that God has allowed me to live in this period, to see what is unfolding. And I'm happy that He's allowed me to be in Memphis.
I can remember, I can remember when Negroes were just going around as Ralph has said, so often, scratching where they didn't itch, and laughing when they were not tickled. But that day is all over. We mean business now, and we are determined to gain our rightful place in God's world.
And that's all this whole thing is about. We aren't engaged in any negative protest and in any negative arguments with anybody. We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying that we are God's children. And that we don't have to live like we are forced to live.
Now, what does all of this mean in this great period of history? It means that we've got to stay together. We've got to stay together and maintain unity. You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the salves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh's court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that's the beginning of getting out of slavery. Now let us maintain unity.
Secondly, let us keep the issues where they are. The issue is injustice. The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers. Now, we've got to keep attention on that. That's always the problem with a little violence. You know what happened the other day, and the press dealt only with the window-breaking. I read the articles. They very seldom got around to mentioning the fact that one thousand, three hundred sanitation workers were on strike, and that Memphis is not being fair to them, and that Mayor Loeb is in dire need of a doctor. They didn't get around to that.
Now we're going to march again, and we've got to march again, in order to put the issue where it is supposed to be. And force everybody to see that there are thirteen hundred of God's children here suffering, sometimes going hungry, going through dark and dreary nights wondering how this thing is going to come out. That's the issue. And we've got to say to the nation: we know it's coming out. For when people get caught up with that which is right and they are willing to sacrifice for it, there is no stopping point short of victory.
We aren't going to let any mace stop us. We are masters in our nonviolent movement in disarming police forces; they don't know what to do, I've seen them so often. I remember in Birmingham, Alabama, when we were in that majestic struggle there we would move out of the 16th Street Baptist Church day after day; by the hundreds we would move out. And Bull Connor would tell them to send the dogs forth and they did come; but we just went before the dogs singing, "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me round." Bull Connor next would say, "Turn the fire hoses on." And as I said to you the other night, Bull Connor didn't know history. He knew a kind of physics that somehow didn't relate to the transphysics that we knew about. And that was the fact that there was a certain kind of fire that no water could put out. And we went before the fire hoses; we had known water. If we were Baptist or some other denomination, we had been immersed. If we were Methodist, and some others, we had been sprinkled, but we knew water.
That couldn't stop us. And we just went on before the dogs and we would look at them; and we'd go on before the water hoses and we would look at it, and we'd just go on singing "Over my head I see freedom in the air." And then we would be thrown in the paddy wagons, and sometimes we were stacked in there like sardines in a can. And they would throw us in, and old Bull would say, "Take them off," and they did; and we would just go in the paddy wagon singing, "We Shall Overcome." And every now and then we'd get in the jail, and we'd see the jailers looking through the windows being moved by our prayers, and being moved by our words and our songs. And there was a power there which Bull Connor couldn't adjust to; and so we ended up transforming Bull into a steer, and we won our struggle in Birmingham.
Now we've got to go on to Memphis just like that. I call upon you to be with us Monday. Now about injunctions: We have an injunction and we're going into court tomorrow morning to fight this illegal, unconstitutional injunction. All we say to America is, "Be true to what you said on paper." If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn't committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so just as I say, we aren't going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.
We need all of you. And you know what's beautiful tome, is to see all of these ministers of the Gospel. It's a marvelous picture. Who is it that is supposed to articulate the longings and aspirations of the people more than the preacher? Somehow the preacher must be an Amos, and say, "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." Somehow, the preacher must say with Jesus, "The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to deal with the problems of the poor."
And I want to commend the preachers, under the leadership of these noble men: James Lawson, one who has been in this struggle for many years; he's been to jail for struggling; but he's still going on, fighting for the rights of his people. Rev. Ralph Jackson, Billy Kiles; I could just go right on down the list, but time will not permit. But I want to thank them all. And I want you to thank them, because so often, preachers aren't concerned about anything but themselves. And I'm always happy to see a relevant ministry.
It's all right to talk about "long white robes over yonder," in all of its symbolism. But ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here. It's all right to talk about "streets flowing with milk and honey," but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can't eat three square meals a day. It's all right to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day, God's preachers must talk about the New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee. This is what we have to do.
Now the other thing we'll have to do is this: Always anchor our external direct action with the power of economic withdrawal. Now, we are poor people, individually, we are poor when you compare us with white society in America. We are poor. Never stop and forget that collectively, that means all of us together, collectively we are richer than all the nations in the world, with the exception of nine. Did you ever think about that? After you leave the United States, Soviet Russia, Great Britain, West Germany, France, and I could name the others, the Negro collectively is richer than most nations of the world. We have an annual income of more than thirty billion dollars a year, which is more than all of the exports of the United States, and more than the national budget of Canada. Did you know that? That's power right there, if we know how to pool it.
We don't have to argue with anybody. We don't have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don't need any bricks and bottles, we don't need any Molotov cocktails, we just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say, "God sent us by here, to say to you that you're not treating his children right. And we've come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment, where God's children are concerned. Now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you."
And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy—what is the other bread?—Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven't been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying, they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right.
But not only that, we've got to strengthen black institutions. I call upon you to take your money out of the banks downtown and deposit your money in Tri-State Bank—we want a "bank-in" movement in Memphis. So go by the savings and loan association. I'm not asking you something we don't do ourselves at SCLC. Judge Hooks and others will tell you that we have an account here in the savings and loan association from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. We're just telling you to follow what we're doing. Put your money there. You have six or seven black insurance companies in Memphis. Take out your insurance there. We want to have an "insurance-in."
Now these are some practical things we can do. We begin the process of building a greater economic base. And at the same time, we are putting pressure where it really hurts. I ask you to follow through here.
Now, let me say as I move to my conclusion that we've got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end. Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point, in Memphis. We've got to see it through. And when we have our march, you need to be there. Be concerned about your brother. You may not be on strike. But either we go up together, or we go down together.
Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness. One day a man came to Jesus; and he wanted to raise some questions about some vital matters in life. At points, he wanted to trick Jesus, and show him that he knew a little more than Jesus knew, and through this, throw him off base. Now that question could have easily ended up in a philosophical and theological debate. But Jesus immediately pulled that question from mid-air, and placed it on a dangerous curve between Jerusalem and Jericho. And he talked about a certain man, who fell among thieves. You remember that a Levite and a priest passed by on the other side. They didn't stop to help him. And finally a man of another race came by. He got down from his beast, decided not to be compassionate by proxy. But with him, administering first aid, and helped the man in need. Jesus ended up saying, this was the good man, this was the great man, because he had the capacity to project the "I" into the "thou," and to be concerned about his brother. Now you know, we use our imagination a great deal to try to determine why the priest and the Levite didn't stop. At times we say they were busy going to church meetings—an ecclesiastical gathering—and they had to get on down to Jerusalem so they wouldn't be late for their meeting. At other times we would speculate that there was a religious law that "One who was engaged in religious ceremonials was not to touch a human body twenty-four hours before the ceremony." And every now and then we begin to wonder whether maybe they were not going down to Jerusalem, or down to Jericho, rather to organize a "Jericho Road Improvement Association." That's a possibility. Maybe they felt that it was better to deal with the problem from the causal root, rather than to get bogged down with an individual effort.
But I'm going to tell you what my imagination tells me. It's possible that these men were afraid. You see, the Jericho road is a dangerous road. I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. And as soon as we got on that road, I said to my wife, "I can see why Jesus used this as a setting for his parable." It's a winding, meandering road. It's really conducive for ambushing. You start out in Jerusalem, which is about 1200 miles, or rather 1200 feet above sea level. And by the time you get down to Jericho, fifteen or twenty minutes later, you're about 2200 feet below sea level. That's a dangerous road. In the days of Jesus it came to be known as the "Bloody Pass." And you know, it's possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it's possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking. And he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the Levite asked was, "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?" But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?"
That's the question before you tonight. Not, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?" The question is not, "If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?" "If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?" That's the question.
Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make America a better nation. And I want to thank God, once more, for allowing me to be here with you.
You know, several years ago, I was in New York City autographing the first book that I had written. And while sitting there autographing books, a demented black woman came up. The only question I heard from her was, "Are you Martin Luther King?"
And I was looking down writing, and I said yes. And the next minute I felt something beating on my chest. Before I knew it I had been stabbed by this demented woman. I was rushed to Harlem Hospital. It was a dark Saturday afternoon. And that blade had gone through, and the X-rays revealed that the tip of the blade was on the edge of my aorta, the main artery. And once that's punctured, you drown in your own blood—that's the end of you.
It came out in the New York Times the next morning, that if I had sneezed, I would have died. Well, about four days later, they allowed me, after the operation, after my chest had been opened, and the blade had been taken out, to move around in the wheel chair in the hospital. They allowed me to read some of the mail that came in, and from all over the states, and the world, kind letters came in. I read a few, but one of them I will never forget. I had received one from the President and the Vice-President. I've forgotten what those telegrams said. I'd received a visit and a letter from the Governor of New York, but I've forgotten what the letter said. But there was another letter that came from a little girl, a young girl who was a student at the White Plains High School. And I looked at that letter, and I'll never forget it. It said simply, "Dear Dr. King: I am a ninth-grade student at the White Plains High School." She said, "While it should not matter, I would like to mention that I am a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune, and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I'm simply writing you to say that I'm so happy that you didn't sneeze."
And I want to say tonight, I want to say that I am happy that I didn't sneeze. Because if I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around here in 1960, when students all over the South started sitting-in at lunch counters. And I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream. And taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around in 1962, when Negroes in Albany, Georgia, decided to straighten their backs up. And whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can't ride your back unless it is bent. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been here in 1963, when the black people of Birmingham, Alabama, aroused the conscience of this nation, and brought into being the Civil Rights Bill. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have had a chance later that year, in August, to try to tell America about a dream that I had had. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been down in Selma, Alabama, been in Memphis to see the community rally around those brothers and sisters who are suffering. I'm so happy that I didn't sneeze.
And they were telling me, now it doesn't matter now. It really doesn't matter what happens now. I left Atlanta this morning, and as we got started on the plane, there were six of us, the pilot said over the public address system, "We are sorry for the delay, but we have Dr. Martin Luther King on the plane. And to be sure that all of the bags were checked, and to be sure that nothing would be wrong with the plane, we had to check out everything carefully. And we've had the plane protected and guarded all night."
And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?
Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

I Have a Dream

2009-01-18T09:09:00.001-08:00

Martin Luther King, Jr.

"I Have a Dream"
delivered 28 August 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C.

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

We cannot walk alone.

And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.

We cannot turn back.

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: "For Whites Only." We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until "justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream."¹

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. And some of you have come from areas where your quest -- quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" -- one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; "and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together."2

This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with.

With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

And this will be the day -- this will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning:

My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.

Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim's pride,

From every mountainside, let freedom ring!

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.

And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.

Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.

Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.

Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.

But not only that:

Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.

From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last! Free at last!

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!3

This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land.....

2009-01-17T23:20:00.000-08:00

This was first posted by me on election night. It seems appropriate to post again:

During the summer of 1961 at the age of 14 I spent a week in the San Bernardino (CA) mountains at a camp run by an organization called, at the time, The National Conference of Christians and Jews. The camp was called “Brotherhood USA”. This was a special time in my life, it was instrumental in forming the opinions, feelings, belief's, faith and instincts of the man I became.

The camp brought together kids from all over the Los Angeles area. Hispanics, blacks, whites, Jews and Christians (there weren't too many Muslims in LA in those days that I know of - I probably did not know one).

This was a week of “Kumbaya”, “We Shall Overcome (some day - ay, ay ay....)” and “This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land” and the experience had a profound effect on me.

I was young and impressionable and at the end of that week I was greatly inspired. “Civil Rights” seemed a completely normal state, discrimination repugnant and racial division unnatural.

As the bus bringing us back into the LA basin approached the parking lot where our parents were to pick us up, a black guy and a white girl, both about my age who had met at the camp and fallen in love were told by one of the counselors that they’d need to stop holding hands. I will never forget that counselor’s words; “you need to stop that" he said, "we understand - but your parents won’t”. Hearing this shocked me.

Sometime later I told my parents that I was going to join The Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”). My parents were shocked and forbade me from joining (it wasn’t that they were bigots; they remembered the McCarthy hearings of just a few years before when association with the wrong groups led to big trouble). That was the last I thought of it.

On September 15, 1963 the nation was shocked when four little girls were killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham Alabama.

It was Later that year, just before Thanksgiving, a Friday mid-morning during my junior year of high school; at around 11 AM we all became aware that something terrible had happened, President Kennedy had been assassinated.

One evening the next summer my best friend and I were “cruising” Van Nuys Blvd. near the famous Bob’s Big Boy drive-in restaurant. The news of the “Gulf of Tonkin Incident” came over the radio and my friend and I both agreed that if America went to war because we’d been attacked that it was our duty to enlist in the Army to defend our country.The Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law that year.

1965 was a tumultuous year. Dr. Martin Luther King led the Selma to Montgomery March's and the nation was shocked at the brutality of the reaction of Sheriff Jim Clark and the Alabama State Troopers.

I graduated high school and turned 18 in that year, the year that The National Voting Rights Act became American law. Think of it - 43 years ago we needed to enact a law that guaranteed every American their God-given natural right to vote in a free election.

Sadly, for so many years, many would not exercise their right to vote and many would still be denied that right because of continued discrimination, ignorance, greed and immorality.

Turning 18 that summer I was obligated to sign up for the Orwellian misnamed “Selective Service”, otherwise known as “the draft”.

In September of that year I started college while the U.S. was pouring troops into Vietnam. By 1966 opposition to the war was raging, America was divided and my father, who had served in World War II (and came home after 18 months in a German prison camp with a Purple Heart), like the fathers of so many others, was furious with me for not enlisting and going off to “defend your country”, something that by then I had no intention of doing. "Your country right or wrong" and "Love it or leave it" seemed absurd ideas to me.

By 1968 I was an anti-war activist, marching in local protests and doing everything I could to avoid the draft. I supported Eugene McCarthy the “anti-war” candidate for president and continued to appeal against my draft board’s repeated attempts to conscript me.

On April 4, 1968 Martin Luther King was assassinated. Bobby Kennedy had announced his candidacy for president and I had become an ardent supporter of his. Then on June 6, just after accepting his victory in the California presidential primary, Bobby was shot down in the kitchen of The Ambassador Hotel, then a Los Angeles landmark. That night was a turning point for me. That was the night I became totally cynical politically and lost faith in the U.S. government and in the American people's ability to self govern rationally and fairly. I hadn't lost faith in our system as it was intended by our forefathers, but in our ability as a people to do the right thing.

Then came Tricky Dick, Watergate, the continued bombing of Vietnam and the disclosure of the secret bombing of Laos and the invasion of Cambodia. My cynicism stiffened.

On the evening of May 4, 1970 I met my father for dinner at The Sizzler Steak House on Wilshire Blvd. in West Los Angeles. I was distraught as 4 students had died and 9 others wounded that day, shot on the campus of Kent State University by Ohio National Guardsmen during a campus protest against the invasion of Cambodia. Dinner with Dad didn’t last long; shortly after we sat down at the table he made the statement that “they should have shot more of them.” I left the restaurant, a wound having been cut between my father and myself that would never be healed.

The war ended in April 1974 after thousands upon thousands of American's were killed and wounded both physically and emotionally. The emotionally wounded included those like my father and me who’s relationship would never heal from the bitterness that terrible mistaken war had created. But the war did not end that day, it raged and raged on in the discourse in America and continued to pervade our society and politics for years and years to come.

I commented recently to my partner that I thought the Vietnam war would not end until our generation died out.

These were painful times for so many. For me, the loss of Bobby was a seminal event in my life. It would be 40 years before I was inspired again by a candidate for president.

For forty years, while always voting, there has not been one candidate that I could really believe in. I thought Al Gore would have been a great president but that didn’t work out well and the way it ended made me even more of a cynic. The last eight years has only reinforced what I already believed and felt.

About a month or two after September 11, 2001 an employee of mine asked me why I wasn’t displaying the American flag on my car. I explained to this person that back in the late ‘60’s and early '70's the flag was used as a club by some people; it was the time of “America, love it or leave it”, a time of great turmoil in our country and great bitterness amongst our people. We all know what has happened since-how our political leadership intentionally divided us for their own selfish, misguided, evil political gain.

But I think the Vietnam war has finally ended tonight. I think we have overcome our racial and political divisiveness tonight. Tonight I am proud to be an American again. Tonight I believe in the American promise again. I didn’t think that I would ever see what I’ve seen today. “God Bless America” - our flag belongs to all of us again - not just to those who would use it to divide us.

Tonight I am moved. I am moved by the grace of the American promise. I am moved by where we have come from and what we are as a people. Tonight I am truly proud to be an American again.

God Bless America. God Bless The American People. And God Bless Barack Obama. Tonight "someday" has come. Tonight, we have finally overcome.

"Some people see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say, why not?"

2009-01-17T07:04:00.000-08:00

Robert F. Kennedy

Recapturing American's Moral Vision

delivered 18 March 1968, University of Kansas

Chancellor, Governor and Mrs. Docking, Senator and Mrs. Pierson, ladies and gentlemen and my friends:

I'm very pleased to be here. I'm really not here to make a speech. I've -- I've come because I came from Kansas State and they want to send their love to all of you. They did. That's all they talk about over there, how much they love you. Actually, I want to establish the fact that I am not an alumnus of Villanova.

I'm very pleased and very touched, as my wife is, at your warm reception here. I think of my colleagues in the United States Senate, and I think of my friends there, and I think of the warmth that exists in the Senate of the United States -- I don't know why you're laughing. I was sick last year and I received a message from the Senate of the United States which said: "We hope you recover," and the vote was 42 to 40.

And then they took a poll in a -- one of the financial magazines of five hundred of the largest businessmen in the United States, to ask them, what political leader they most admired, who they wanted to see President of the United States. And I received one vote -- and I understand they're looking for him. I could take all my supporters to lunch, but I'm -- I don't know whether you're going to like what I'm going to say today but I just want you to remember, as you look back upon this day, and when it comes to a question of who you're going to support -- that it was a Kennedy who got you out of class.

I am very pleased to be here with my colleagues, Senator Pierson, who I think has contributed so much in the Senate of the United States, who has fought for the interests of Kansas and has had a distinguished career, and I'm very proud to be associated with him. And Senator Carlson who is not here, who is one of the most respected members of the Senate of the United States -- respected not just by the -- on the Republican side, by the Democratic side, by all of his colleagues, and I am pleased and proud to be in the Senate with Senator Carlson from the State of Kansas.

And I'm happy to be here with an old friend, Governor Docking. I don't think there was anyone that was more committed to President Kennedy and made more of an effort under the most adverse circumstances and with the most difficult situation than his father, who was Governor of the State of Kansas -- nobody I worked with more closely, myself, when I was in Los Angeles. We weren't 100 percent successful, but that was a relationship that I will always value, and I know how highly President Kennedy valued it and I'm very pleased to see him -- and to have seen his mother, Mrs. Docking today also, so I'm very pleased to be in his State.

And then I'm pleased to be here because I like to see all of you, in addition.

In 1824, when Thomas Hart Benton was urging in Congress the development of Iowa and other western territories, he was opposed by Daniel Webster, the Senator from Massachusetts. "What," asked Webster, "What do we want with this vast and worthless area? This region of savages and wild beasts of deserts of shifting sands and of whirlwinds, of dust, and of cactus and of prairie dogs? "To what use," he said, "could we ever hope to put these great deserts? I will never vote for one-cent from the public treasury to place the west one inch closer to Boston than it is now." And that is why I am here today instead of my brother Edward.

I'm glad to come here to the home of the man who publicly wrote:

If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all the youthful vision and vigor, then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come out of our college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow.

And despite all the accusations against me, those words were not written by me. They were written by that notorious seditionist, William Allen White. And I know what great affection this university has for him. He is an honored man today, here on your campus and around the rest of the nation. But when he lived and wrote, he was reviled as an extremist and worse. For he spoke -- he spoke as he believed. He did not conceal his concern in comforting words. He did not delude his readers or himself with false hopes and with illusions. This spirit of honest confrontation is what America needs today. It has been missing all too often in the recent years and it is one of the reasons that I run for President of the United States.

For we as a people -- we as a people are strong enough; we are brave enough to be told the truth of where we stand. We -- And this country needs honesty and candor in its political life and from the President of the United States. But I don't want to run for the presidency -- I don't want America to make the critical choice of direction and leadership this year without confronting that truth. I don't want to win support of votes by hiding the American condition in false hopes or illusions. I want us to find out the promise of the future, what we can accomplish here in the United States, what this country does stand for and what is expected of us in the years ahead. And I also want us to know and examine where we've gone wrong. And I want all of us, young and old, to have a chance to build a better country and change the direction of the United States of America.

This morning I spoke about the war in Vietnam, and I will speak briefly about it in a few moments. But there is much more to this critical election year than the war in Vietnam. It is, at a root, the root of all of it, the national soul of the United States. The President calls it "restlessness." Our cabinet officers, such as John Gardner and others tell us that America is deep in a malaise of spirit: discouraging initiative, paralyzing will and action, and dividing Americans from one another, by their age, their views, and by the color of their skin and I don't think we have to accept that here in the United States of America.

Demonstrators shout down government officials and the government answers by drafting demonstrators. Anarchists threaten to burn the country down and some have begun to try, while tanks have patrolled American streets and machine guns have fired at American children. I don't think that this a satisfying situation for the United States of America. Our young people -- the best educated, and the best comforted in our history -- turn from the Peace Corps and public commitment of a few years ago to lives of disengagement and despair -- many of them turned on with drugs and turned off on America -- none of them here, of course, at Kansas -- right?

All around us, all around us -- not just on the question of Vietnam, not just on the question of the cities, not just on the question of poverty, not just on the problems of race relations -- but all around us, and why you are so concerned and why you are so disturbed -- the fact is, that men have lost confidence in themselves, in each other. It is confidence which has sustained us so much in the past -- rather than answer the cries of deprivation and despair -- cries which the President's Commission on Civil Disorders tells us could split our nation finally asunder -- rather than answer these desperate cries, hundreds of communities and millions of citizens are looking for their answers to force and repression and private gun stocks, so that we confront our fellow citizen across impassible barriers of hostility and mistrust. And again, I don't believe that we have to accept that. I don't believe that it's necessary in the United States of America. I think that we can work together. I don't think we have to shoot at each other, to beat each other, to curse each other, and criticize each other. I think that we can do better in this country. And that is why I run for President of the United States.

And if we seem powerless to stop this growing division between Americans who at least confront one another, there are millions more living in the hidden places whose names and faces are completely unknown. But I have seen these other Americans. I have seen children in Mississippi starving, their bodies so crippled from hunger and their minds have been so destroyed for their whole life that they will have no future. I have seen children in Mississippi, here in the United States, with a gross national product of 800 billion dollars -- I have seen children in the Delta area of Mississippi with distended stomachs, whose faces are covered with sores from starvation, and we haven't developed a policy so we can get enough food so that they can live, so that their children are not -- so that their lives are not destroyed. I don't think that's acceptable in the United States of America, and I think we need a change.

I have seen Indians living on their bare and meager reservations with no jobs, with an unemployment rate of 80 percent, and with so little hope for the future -- so little hope for the future that for young people, for young men and women in their teens, the greatest cause of death amongst them is suicide. That they end their lives by killing themselves -- I don't think that -- that we have to accept that -- for the first American, for the -- this minority here in the United States.

If young boys and girls are so filled with despair when they're going to high school and feel that their lives are so hopeless and that nobody's going to care for them, nobody's going to be involved with them, and nobody's going to bother with them -- that they either hang themselves, shoot themselves or kill themselves. I don't think that's acceptable and I think the United States of America, I think the American people, I think we can do much, much better. And I run for the presidency because of that.

I run for the presidency because I have seen proud men in the hills of Appalachia, who wish only to work in dignity, but they cannot, for the mines are closed and their jobs are gone and no one -- neither industry, nor labor, nor government -- has cared enough to help. I think we here in this country, with the unselfish spirit that exists in the United States of America, I think we can do better here also.

I have seen the people of the black ghetto, listening to ever greater promises of equality and of justice, as they sit in the same decaying schools and huddled in the same filthy rooms, without heat, warding off the cold and warding off the rats. If we believe that we, as Americans, are bound together by a common concern for each other, then an urgent national priority is upon us. We must begin to end the disgrace of this other America. And this -- And this is one of the great tasks of leadership for us, as individuals and citizens this year.

But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task: It is to confront the poverty of satisfaction, purpose, and dignity that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product now is over 800 billion dollars a year. But that Gross National Product -- if we judge the United States of America by that -- that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and it counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

If this is true here at home, so it is true elsewhere in world. From the beginning our proudest boast has been the promise of Jefferson, that we, here in this country, would be the best hope of mankind. And -- And now as we look at the war in Vietnam, we wonder if we still hold a decent respect for the opinions of mankind and whether the opinion maintained a descent respect for us, or whether like Athens of old we will forfeit sympathy and support, and ultimately our very security in the single-minded pursuit of our own goals and our own objectives. I do not want, and I do believe that most Americans do not want, to sell out America's interest to simply withdraw -- to raise the white flag of surrender in Vietnam -- that would be unacceptable to us as a people, and unacceptable to us as a country.

But I -- But I am concerned about the course of action that we are presently following in South Vietnam. I am concerned -- I am concerned about the fact that this has been made America's war. It was said a number of years ago that this is "their war" -- "this is the war of the South Vietnamese," that "we can help them, but we can't win it for them." But over the period of the last three years we have made the war and the struggle in South Vietnam our war, and I think that's unacceptable. I don't accept the idea that this is just a military action, that this is just a military effort, and every time we have had difficulties in South Vietnam and Southeast Asia we have had only one response; we have had only one way to deal with it. Month after month, year after year we have dealt with it in only on way, and that's to send more military men and increase our military power and I don't think that's the kind of a struggle that it is in Southeast Asia.

I think that this is a question of the people of South Vietnam. I think it's a question of the people of South Vietnam feeling its worth their efforts, that they're going to make the sacrifice, that they feel that their -- their country and their government is worth fighting for. And I think the developments of the last several years have shown, have demonstrated that the people of South Vietnam feel no association and no affiliation for the government of Saigon. And I don't think it's up to us here in the United States, I don't think it's up to us here in the United States, to say that we're going to destroy all South Vietnam because we have a commitment there. The commander of the American forces at Ben Tre said we had to destroy that city in order to save it. So 38,000 people were wiped out or made refugees. We here in the United States -- not just the United States government, not just the commander and forces in South Vietnam, the United States government and every human being that's in this room -- we are part of that decision and I don't think that we need do that any longer, and I think we should change our policy.

I don't want to be part of a government; I don't want to be part of the United States; I don't want to be part of the American people, and have them write of us as they wrote of Rome: "They made a desert and they called it peace."

I think that we should go to the negotiating table, and I think we should take the steps to go to the negotiating table. And I've said it over the period of the last two years. I think that we have a chance to have negotiations, and the possibility of meaningful negotiations, but last February, a year ago, when the greatest opportunity existed for negotiations the Administration, and the President of the United States felt that the military victory was right around the corner. And we sent a message to Ho Chi Minh, in February 8th of 1967 virtually asking for their unconditional surrender. We are not going to obtain the unconditional surrender of the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong any more than they are going to obtain the unconditional surrender of the United States of America. We're going to have to negotiate. We're going to have to make compromises. We're going to have to negotiate with the National Liberation Front. But people can argue, "That's unfortunate that we have to negotiate with the National Liberation Front," but that is a fact of life.

We have three choices: We either can pull out of South Vietnam unilaterally and raise the white flag -- I think that's unacceptable. Second, we can continue to escalate, we can continue to send more men there, until we have millions and millions of more men and we can continue to bomb North Vietnam, and in my judgment we will be no nearer success, we will be no nearer victory than we are now in February of 1968. And the third step that we can take is to go to the negotiating table. We can go to the negotiating table and not achieve everything that we wish. One of the things that we're going to have to accept as American people, but the other, the other alternative is so unacceptable. One of the things that we're going to have to accept as American people and that the United States government must accept, is that the National Liberation Front is going to play a role in the future political process of South Vietnam. And we're going to have to negotiate with them. That they're going to play some role in the future political process of South Vietnam, that they're going to be elections and the people of South Vietnam are ultimately going to determine and decide their own future.

That is the course of action -- That is the course of action that I would like to see. I would like to see the -- the -- the United States government to make it clear to the government of Saigon that we are not going to tolerate the corruption and the dishonesty. And I -- I think that we should make it clear to the government of Saigon that if we're going to draft young men, 18 years old -- of age here in the United States, if we're going to draft young men who are 19 years old here in the United States, and we're going to send them to fight and die in Khe Sanh, that we want the government of South Vietnam to draft their 18-year-olds and their 19-year-olds.

And I want to make it clear that if the government of Saigon, feels Khe Sanh or Que Son and the area in the demilitarized zone are so important, if Khe San is so important to the government of Saigon, I want to see those American marines out of there and South Vietnamese troops in there.

I want to have an explanation as to why American boys killed two weeks ago in South Vietnam, were three times as many -- more than three times as many, as the soldiers of South Vietnam. I want to understand why the casualties and the deaths over the period of the last two weeks at the height of the fighting should be so heavily American casualties, as compared to the South Vietnamese. This is their war. I think we have to make a -- the effort to help them. I think that we have to make the effort to fight, but I don't think we should have to carry the whole burden of that war. I think the South Vietnamese should.

And if I am elected President of the United States, with help, with your help, these are the kinds of policies that I'm going to put into operation.

We can do better here in the United States. We can do better. We can do better in our relationships to other countries around the rest of the globe. President Kennedy, when he campaigned in 1960, he talked about the loss of prestige that the United States had suffered around the rest of the globe. But look at what our condition is at the present time. The President of the United States goes to a meeting of the OAS at Montevideo -- can he go into the city of Montevideo? Or can he travel through the cities of Latin America where there was such deep love and deep respect? He has to stay in a military base at Montevideo, with American ships out at sea and American helicopters overhead in order to ensure that he's protected. I don't think that's acceptable. I think that the President -- that we should have conditions here in the United States, and support enough for our policies, so that the President of the United States can travel freely and clearly across all the cities this country, and not just to military bases. I think there's more that we can do internally here. I think there's more that we can do in South Vietnam. I don't think we have to accept the situation as we have it at the moment. I think that we can do better, and I think the American people think that we can do better.

George Bernard Shaw once wrote, "Some people see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say, why not?"

So I come here to Kansas to ask for your help. In the difficult five months ahead before the convention in Chicago, I ask for your help and for your assistance. If you believe the United States can do better, if you believe that we should change our course of action, if you believe that we should -- that the United States stands for something here internally as well as elsewhere around the globe, I ask for your help and your assistance and your hand over the period of the next five months.

And when we win in November -- And when we win in November, and we begin a new period of time for the United States of America, I want the next generation of Americans to look back upon this period and say as they said of Plato: "Joy was in those days, but to live."

Thank you very much.

A More Perfect Union.....

2009-01-17T05:42:00.000-08:00

From Here.....

To Here.....

Glory hallelujah.....

The Power of Nonviolence The Nation Magazine, January 14, 2009

"Letter from a Birmingham Jail"
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

16 April 1963
My Dear Fellow Clergymen:
While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities "unwise and untimely." Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against "outsiders coming in." I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty five affiliated organizations across the South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Frequently we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here. I am here because I have organizational ties here.

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their "thus saith the Lord" far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city's white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action. We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good faith negotiation.

Then, last September, came the opportunity to talk with leaders of Birmingham's economic community. In the course of the negotiations, certain promises were made by the merchants--for example, to remove the stores' humiliating racial signs. On the basis of these promises, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights agreed to a moratorium on all demonstrations. As the weeks and months went by, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. A few signs, briefly removed, returned; the others remained. As in so many past experiences, our hopes had been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community. Mindful of the difficulties involved, we decided to undertake a process of self purification. We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves: "Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?" "Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?" We decided to schedule our direct action program for the Easter season, realizing that except for Christmas, this is the main shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic-withdrawal program would be the by product of direct action, we felt that this would be the best time to bring pressure to bear on the merchants for the needed change.

Then it occurred to us that Birmingham's mayoral election was coming up in March, and we speedily decided to postpone action until after election day. When we discovered that the Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene "Bull" Connor, had piled up enough votes to be in the run off, we decided again to postpone action until the day after the run off so that the demonstrations could not be used to cloud the issues. Like many others, we waited to see Mr. Connor defeated, and to this end we endured postponement after postponement. Having aided in this community need, we felt that our direct action program could be delayed no longer.

You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. Some have asked: "Why didn't you give the new city administration time to act?" The only answer that I can give to this query is that the new Birmingham administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one, before it will act. We are sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Albert Boutwell as mayor will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is a much more gentle person than Mr. Connor, they are both segregationists, dedicated to maintenance of the status quo. I have hope that Mr. Boutwell will be reasonable enough to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from devotees of civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I it" relationship for an "I thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal. Let me give another explanation. A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up that state's segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout Alabama all sorts of devious methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties in which, even though Negroes constitute a majority of the population, not a single Negro is registered. Can any law enacted under such circumstances be considered democratically structured?

Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First-Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.

I hope you are able to see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was evidenced sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience.

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country's antireligious laws.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn't this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn't this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn't this like condemning Jesus because his unique God consciousness and never ceasing devotion to God's will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber. I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I began thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency, made up in part of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so drained of self respect and a sense of "somebodiness" that they have adjusted to segregation; and in part of a few middle-class Negroes who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because in some ways they profit by segregation, have become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad's Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro's frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible "devil."

I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the "do nothingism" of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. For there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle. If this philosophy had not emerged, by now many streets of the South would, I am convinced, be flowing with blood. And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as "rabble rousers" and "outside agitators" those of us who employ nonviolent direct action, and if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies--a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place. The Negro has many pent up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides -and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: "Get rid of your discontent." Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremist. But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Was not Martin Luther an extremist: "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God." And John Bunyan: "I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience." And Abraham Lincoln: "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free." And Thomas Jefferson: "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal . . ." So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary's hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime--the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

I had hoped that the white moderate would see this need. Perhaps I was too optimistic; perhaps I expected too much. I suppose I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action. I am thankful, however, that some of our white brothers in the South have grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it. They are still all too few in quantity, but they are big in quality. Some -such as Ralph McGill, Lillian Smith, Harry Golden, James McBride Dabbs, Ann Braden and Sarah Patton Boyle--have written about our struggle in eloquent and prophetic terms. Others have marched with us down nameless streets of the South. They have languished in filthy, roach infested jails, suffering the abuse and brutality of policemen who view them as "dirty nigger-lovers." Unlike so many of their moderate brothers and sisters, they have recognized the urgency of the moment and sensed the need for powerful "action" antidotes to combat the disease of segregation. Let me take note of my other major disappointment. I have been so greatly disappointed with the white church and its leadership. Of course, there are some notable exceptions. I am not unmindful of the fact that each of you has taken some significant stands on this issue. I commend you, Reverend Stallings, for your Christian stand on this past Sunday, in welcoming Negroes to your worship service on a nonsegregated basis. I commend the Catholic leaders of this state for integrating Spring Hill College several years ago.

But despite these notable exceptions, I must honestly reiterate that I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say this as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say this as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen.

When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a few years ago, I felt we would be supported by the white church. I felt that the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.

In spite of my shattered dreams, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.

I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: "Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother." In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: "Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern." And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South's beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: "What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they when Governor Wallace gave a clarion call for defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?"

Yes, these questions are still in my mind. In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? I am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

There was a time when the church was very powerful--in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being "disturbers of the peace" and "outside agitators."' But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were "a colony of heaven," called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be "astronomically intimidated." By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests. Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent--and often even vocal--sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic. Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? Perhaps I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true ekklesia and the hope of the world. But again I am thankful to God that some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in the struggle for freedom. They have left their secure congregations and walked the streets of Albany, Georgia, with us. They have gone down the highways of the South on tortuous rides for freedom. Yes, they have gone to jail with us. Some have been dismissed from their churches, have lost the support of their bishops and fellow ministers. But they have acted in the faith that right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. Their witness has been the spiritual salt that has preserved the true meaning of the gospel in these troubled times. They have carved a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment. I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America's destiny. Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation -and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands. Before closing I feel impelled to mention one other point in your statement that has troubled me profoundly. You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping "order" and "preventing violence." I doubt that you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its dogs sinking their teeth into unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I doubt that you would so quickly commend the policemen if you were to observe their ugly and inhumane treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you were to watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you were to see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys; if you were to observe them, as they did on two occasions, refuse to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together. I cannot join you in your praise of the Birmingham police department.

It is true that the police have exercised a degree of discipline in handling the demonstrators. In this sense they have conducted themselves rather "nonviolently" in public. But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation. Over the past few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends. Perhaps Mr. Connor and his policemen have been rather nonviolent in public, as was Chief Pritchett in Albany, Georgia, but they have used the moral means of nonviolence to maintain the immoral end of racial injustice. As T. S. Eliot has said: "The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason."

I wish you had commended the Negro sit inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy two year old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: "My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest." They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience' sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Never before have I written so long a letter. I'm afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?

If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.

I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil-rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood, Martin Luther King, Jr

17 Predictions for 2017. On January 17, 2017.....

2009-01-16T15:47:00.000-08:00

Sunrise Over The White House

I predict that on January 17, 2017....
1. A Democrat will be inaugurated the 45th President of The United States (the first Woman president? Caroline Kennedy?).
2. Barack Obama will leave office with the highest approval ratings of any president in American history.
3. All American's will have health insurance. All American's will be free to choose their health care insurer and we will all have more health care choices than we do today.
4. By all measures the health and health care of all American's will rank higher against other countries of the world than it does today.
5. Republican's will still be two decades away from attaining a majority in any branch of our government.
6. Marriage will be freely available to all American's.
7. Abortion will still be legal in all 50 states.
8. Conservatism will remain a totally repudiated governing philosophy.
9. Roland Burris will not be remembered except in that cemetery in Illinois.
10. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger will still be well known as an American hero. Only George W. Bush will have forgotten him.
11. We will have forgotten George W. Bush
12. Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity will be completely gone from American media.
13. The United States will once again have a budget surplus and Social Security and Medicare will both be solvent and thriving.
14. American universities will be awarding more science and technology degrees than law and business - to Americans.
15. America will be independent of foreign oil with at least 25% of our energy needs coming from "alternative" energy sources.
16. Several Bush administration officials will not be able to go to most countries without facing the threat of arrest for war crimes.
17. America will have regained its moral authority and will be once again admired around the globe as a great nation.
17A. My grandchild will be 7 1/2 years old and will be living in a secure and peaceful world.

The Sad Legacy of George W. Bush

2009-01-16T09:06:00.000-08:00

The legacy of the Bush years is a sad one-more for us than for him. He leaves office with America's position weakened in most ways, some more consequential than others.

George W. Bush came to office promising us that he was a "uniter, not a divider". In that he was ironically correct:

"A president who laboured to produce Republican hegemony ended up dramatically weakening the Republican Party. The Democratic Party is now in a more powerful position than it has been at any time since the second world war. In the Senate, the Democrats have a majority of 59 seats to 41 (including two independents who caucus with the Democrats); in the House, they hold 256 seats to the Republicans’ 178. Americans who came of age during the Bush years identify with the Democrats by the largest majority recorded for any age cohort since the second world war."

The Economist January 15, 2009

The Economist (generally considered a reasonably conservative publication) article is an in-depth look a the two-term Bush reign.

"How will Mr Bush be judged in the light of history? “Many historians”, says Princeton’s Mr Wilentz, “are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.”

The entire article is here: The frat boy ships out

Next Time I'm Flying USAir.....

2009-01-15T18:28:00.000-08:00

As a frequent flier all I can say about today's incident in New York is bravo to an experienced, brilliantly trained and very brave pilot and his crew.

The details of what happened today are amazing. It seems that this very quick-thinking professional made a decision to make a water landing between 57th and 42nd Streets because he knew that there would be many water taxi's and ferries right there to rescue his passengers. Bravo and Wow!

The 43rd President of The United States

2009-01-15T17:01:00.000-08:00

George W. Bush - one trick pony...his speech leaves me speechless except to say; thank you Lord that the 8 year reign of this delusional moron is over.

What Bush Left Out of His Flat Farewell

The 50 Most Loathsome People of 2008

2009-01-13T07:14:00.000-08:00

The 50 Most Loathsome People of 2008 is a wonderful piece of writing (I wish I could write so well!) Enjoy! I'm not so sure I agree with all of the people listed but nonetheless, this is great stuff. Three favorites:

11. Rush Limbaugh

Charges: The father of modern stupidity, Limbaugh spins reflexively, never struggling with issues, because he knows his conclusion must favor Republicans, and his only task is finding a way to get there. In other words, he may or may not actually believe what he’s saying, but it’s beside the point. His job is not to say what he thinks, but to instruct his listeners on what they should think. If the facts don’t agree, he can always change them, as his “ditto heads” are already armed against the contrary evidence with the all-purpose “liberal bias” attack. “Rush is right,” as the slogan goes, and all those nerdy reporters in the “drive by media” are lying, because they secretly love terrorists. It’s this creepily worshipful, breathtakingly infantile abdication of intellect to a blatantly dishonest hypocrite that makes Limbaugh’s audience so goddamn sad. These pathetic, insecure, failures of men look to Rush as the champion of their impotent rage, helping them to externalize responsibility for their own deficiencies, pinning the blame on those darn liberals and their racial and gender equality.

Exhibit A: You have to marvel at the sheer ignominy of someone who coins the term “Obama recession” two days after the election.

Sentence: Tiny speaker implanted in his inner ear which blares Randi Rhodes 24-7.

3. Sean Hannity

Charges: This relentlessly repugnant McCarthyite tool really outdid himself this year, in an all-out quest to otherize Obama in any way he could. This paranoid pustule is able to find a liberal conspiracy lurking behind any mundane occurrence, even attributing Obama’s selection as Time’s Person of the Year, an event as predictable as sunrise, to a pay-to-play scheme. Hopelessly outmatched shill Alan Colmes is finally leaving his role as Hannity’s doormat; he will not be replaced.

Exhibit A: "I never questioned anyone's patriotism."

Sentence: Wrongfully convicted of murdering Vince Foster, based on evidence falsified by Jerome Corsi.

................and, the #1 most loathsome person of 2008 is ......(drum roll)....................you guessed it,

1. Sarah Palin

Charges: If you want to know why the rest of the world is scared of Americans, consider the fact that after two terms of disastrous rule by a small-minded ignoramus, 46% of us apparently thought the problem was that he wasn’t quite stupid enough. Palin’s unending emissions of baffling, evasive incoherence should have disqualified her for any position that involved a desk, let alone placing her one erratic heartbeat from the presidency. The press strained mightily to feign respect for her, praising a debate performance that involved no debate, calling her a “great speaker” when her only speech was primarily a litany of insults to city-dwellers, echoing bogus sexism charges when a male Palin would have been boiled alive for the Couric interview alone, and lionizing her as she used her baby as a Pro-life stage prop before crowds who cooed when they should have been hurling polonium-tipped javelins. In the end, Palin had the beneficial effect of splitting her party between her admirers and people who can read.

Exhibit A: Waving her embryo-loving credentials, in the form of her Down syndrome baby, at "But ultimately what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the healthcare reform that is needed to help shore up our economy."

Sentence: Hand-to-hand combat with Vladimir Putin and a pack of wolves.

The End of the Financial World as We Know It

2009-01-12T22:04:00.001-08:00

In a new world where we are all victims of the largest economic crime in human history The End of The Financial World As We Know It an essay that continues at How to Repair a Broken Financial World are essential reading.

The Bernard Maddoff scandal is the tip of the iceberg. Wall Street investment bankers and their co-conspirators live lifestyles that are beyond the wildest dreams of most Americans. Fancy homes in towns like Greenwich and Chappaqua, vacation homes in places like Aspen, Santa Fe, and various other exotic locations all over the world. Yachts, airplanes, mansions, art collections, $100,000 watches (my personal favorite) - you name it, all bought with misbegotten dollars sucked straight out of the top of the financial system. That sucking sound you hear is your children's futures evaporating into the pockets of these scum suckers. Confiscation of their assets and prison terms are really too good for these people.

Pew Global Attitudes Project

2009-01-12T21:45:00.000-08:00

The decline of American prestige? "I strongly disagree with the assessment that our moral standing has been damaged," Bush answered, proposing that the questioner "Go to Africa. . . . Go to India. . . . Go to China and ask." ....you gotta love those ChiComs!

Bush Serving Bush.....

2009-01-12T21:19:00.000-08:00

I was fortunate enough to see George W. Bush's press conference in its entirety this morning. It was, to say the least, jaw dropping. It is a moment in American presidential history that will be remembered for decades.

I've heard today comparison's to Nixon's "you won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore" but as an act of sheer contempt for the American people it was astounding. The whole 45 minutes could have been condensed into two words: f@#k you.

Campbell Brown Rips Bush For Katrina Remarks

"Many people will disagree over many aspects of the Bush legacy," Brown said. "But on the government's handling of Katrina? It is impossible to challenge what so many of us witnessed firsthand, what the entire country witnessed through the images on our television screens day and night.

"Mr. President, you cannot pat yourself on the back for that one," she then said. "We will debate the war in Iraq, debate national security, the economy, and the rest of your legacy. Those debates will continue for years to come. But on how you handled Katrina, there is no debate."

Here are the facts of the Bush administration:

UNEMPLOYMENT RATE
Then: 4.2% (Bureau of Labor Statistics, January 2001)
Now: 6.7% (Bureau of Labor Statistics, November 2008)

DOW JONES INDUSTRIAL AVERAGE
Then: 10,587 (close Friday, Jan. 19, 2001)
Now: 8,474 (close Monday, Jan. 12, 2009)

BUSH FAVORABILITY RATING
Then: 50% (1/01 NBC/WSJ poll)
Now: 31% (12/08 NBC/WSJ poll)

CHENEY FAVORABILITY RATING
Then: 49% (1/01 NBC/WSJ poll)
Now: 21% (12/08 NBC/WSJ poll)

CONGRESS APPROVAL RATING
Then: 48% (1/01 NBC/WSJ poll)
Now: 21% (12/08 NBC/WSJ poll)

SATISFIED WITH THE NATION'S DIRECTION
Then: 45% (1/01 NBC/WSJ poll)
Now: 26% (12/08 NBC/WSJ poll)

CONSUMER CONFIDENCE (1985=100)
Then: 115.7 (Conference Board, January 2001)
Now: 38.0, which is an all-time low (Conference Board, December 2008)

FAMILIES LIVING IN POVERTY
Then: 6.4 million (Census numbers for 2000)
Now: 7.6 million (Census numbers for 2007 -- most recent numbers available)

AMERICANS WITHOUT HEALTH INSURANCE
Then: 39.8 million (Census numbers for 2000)
Now: 45.7 million (Census numbers for 2007 -- most recent available)

U.S. BUDGET
Then: +236.2 billion (2000, Congressional Budget Office)
Now: -$1.2 trillion (projected figure for 2009, Congressional Budget Office)

Geez Frank, what surprises you?

2009-01-11T16:02:00.000-08:00

... the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country......Hermann Goering

What’s most remarkable about the Times article, however, is how little stir it caused.

Eight Years of Madoffs

The Senate Needs To Concentrate On Business, Not Bulls@#t

2009-01-10T14:49:00.000-08:00

This topic will be addressed more in depth in another post but I use it to highlight that if anyone thinks that Republicans are going to anything but obstructionist in the coming years is badly mistaken.
Venture capitalist says U.S. losing green race

"None of the panel's Republicans attended, a sign of the continuing partisan split on Capitol Hill over how to address global warming."

So as far as I'm concerned there's no reason for Democrat's not to pull the stops out:
How To Get Franken Seated Now: Nuclear Joe Biden
Because the bottom line is that Republican's, as I said, will be as obstructionist as they can possibly be. Cornyn Says It Again: Senate GOP Will Block The Seating Of Al Franken Further: Al Franken stole the election? Prove it or shut up.

We have serious issues. It is time for serious leaders to concentrate on them.

"We've come to a point where every retailer, in some way, is a discounter,"

2009-01-10T13:09:00.000-08:00

Thirty years ago Department Stores were regional. They knew their customers, they bought for local tastes and preferences and they worked hard to keep their customers. Their leaders were "merchandisers" whose primary focus was the satisfaction of the desire's of their customers.

The retail landscape is starkly different today.

Beginning in the late '70's the American retailer discovered "private label". Private label are house brands. House brands (merchandise that is manufactured directly for the retailer bypassing independent designers) now make up 70%+ of the merchandise offered in most retail stores. Companies like Limited, Gap, Macy's, Dillards and the rest found that by bypassing middle men that they could increase GROSS margins to 70% to 85%. Retailers thought that by having merchandise made directly for them by factories in locations like Hong Kong, The Marianna Islands, India, Bangladesh and many other countries that they (the retailer) could offer their customers a more unique selection of merchandise. Worse, these retail organizations began to be led by executives with financial expertise instead of merchandising expertise.

Unfortunately for the retailer their merchandising showed a lack of creativity. But that was not the point. The point for the retailer was that they could now "mark-down" their merchandise and still show a profit. Consumers soon learned that they did not have to pay full retail for anything, the stores further squeezed profit by reducing levels of customer service and the primary driver for the consumer became price, price, price.

"If I see 20 percent off, I say forget it. Or even 25 percent. I definitely go for the 40, 70 or 80 percent," said Sandstrom, 68. "That's what I look for and I never used to be that way. I just feel I'm going to get what I can get for as little as I can."

So says a consumer quoted in an article today on the San Francisco Gate Web site. Read the article.

The American retailer has lost their way. A major "shake-out" has already begun and I expect it to continue. If the American retailer wants to once again begin to create loyalty they are going to have to go back to basics including value (not cost but VALUE), service and most important refocus their attention on their customers.

Channeling FDR on Public Works

2009-01-09T11:30:00.000-08:00

From the Peterson Institute....
Channeling FDR on Public Works

"On the one hand, the public wants action. On the other, Americans are skeptical about government’s ability to solve problems. Congress can’t politically afford to ignore either of these concerns."

It seems to me that thinking Americans are skeptical about ineffective and inadequate governments ability to solve problems, not governments ability in general. There are some things that only government can do. After all, the American government is made up of Americans - brilliant, innovative and entrepreneurial Americans like the rest of us.

Fortunately for us the Obama administration is appointing people who come to their jobs with extraordinary intellects and "can do" attitudes. People who will put "protection" back into The Environmental Protection Agency, the needs of labor back to the Labor Department, justice back to the Justice Department and so on-the exact opposite of what we've had for the last 8 years.

It's going to be a rough ride....

2009-01-08T18:44:00.000-08:00

They called him "Dr. Doom" and ridiculed him when he warned about what was happening. That was 2006. He was right then, read what he has to say now:

“Because the United States is such a huge part of the global economy, there’s real reason to worry that an American financial virus could mark the beginning of a global economic contagion.” – Nouriel Roubini, March 2008 Last year’s worst-case scenarios came true. The global financial pandemic that I and others had warned about is now upon us. But we are still only in the early stages of this crisis. My predictions for the coming year, unfortunately, are even more dire: The bubbles, and there were many, have only begun to burst.

Harry Smith: Ann Coulter, goofy and sophomoric

2009-01-06T08:26:00.000-08:00

Oh Harry, you are too kind! The woman is a sociopath (and she doesn't deserve a forum of any kind).

"Coulter appeared on CBS's The Early Show where she told anchor Harry Smith that he was her favorite for having her on this morning after The Today Show had canceled her. Smith allowed Coulter to rant, but then pushed her on claims of right-wing victimization and urged her to "take a breath." He also called her "goofy" and "sophomoric."

Watch the video (you have to go there because I won't have this witch's face on my blog).

How we got into this mess....

2009-01-06T06:50:00.000-08:00

In the final analysis I believe that the rape of the US economy will overshadow Iraq as the worst of the Bush era travesties.

Conservative economic ideology has been ruinous. As a philosophy it is bankrupt. It started with Reagan and ended with Bush.

How we got into this mess by Felix Rohatyn

The Truth About the Community Reinvestment Act

2009-01-05T21:59:00.000-08:00

There's a lot of noise out there....read what the House of Representatives has to say;

"The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (CRA) encourages federally insured banks and thrifts to meet the credit needs of the entire communities they serve,including low- and moderate-income areas, consistent with safe and sound banking practices."

The purpose of The Community Reinvestment Act was to stop the horrid practice of red-lining and in no way obligated any lender to lower their standards. It only required to use the same standards throughout the communities that they served.

The Community Reinvestment Act defined

Ann Coulter's "Today" Show Appearance Canceled

2009-01-05T21:22:00.000-08:00

NBC should be praised for good taste. Enough said; this woman doesn't deserve the publicity she is getting.

Did you hear FDR prolonged the Great Depression?

2009-01-03T17:11:00.000-08:00

There is going to be a lot of misinformation thrown around in the next couple of years....David Sirota sorts some of it out:

Conservatives' newest talking point -- designed to stop Congress from passing an economic stimulus package -- is breathtaking.

Hint, hint, helllooooooo.....

2009-01-02T23:17:00.001-08:00

Maybe your problem is that you still allow Tom Delay to have ANY influence with you...whooooooo, you people are lost, lost, lost (although we fully support a multi-party system maybe this is a REALLLLLLLY good thing for the country). I'll say one thing about you guys, you are always good for a laugh.

Dear Dr. Krugman, the word is....

2009-01-02T18:58:00.000-08:00

.....delusional

Welcome 2009!

2009-01-01T07:56:00.001-08:00

Wishing You and Yours a Happy, Healthy and Prospersous 2009!

2008-12-31T18:32:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year from The Magnificant Seven!

Simply Vulgar...

2008-12-28T23:06:00.000-08:00

This man's pomposity is simply vulgar
George, Abe, Rick & Barack

Idiocy Has Consequences-You Betcha

2008-12-28T11:40:00.000-08:00

The soon to be Ex-President and the soon to be Ex-Vice President and several of their minions, have begun an extraordinary attempt at rehabilitating their legacy; Iraq-bad intelligence (much of it from “prior to my arrival in Washington”), the economic meltdown? History will prove that it came from many decisions “that took place over a decade or so, before I arrived". Read Timoth Egan in The New York Times today:

"Down the road, Iraq may fall back into the chaos of sectarian violence, and if that happens, Bush will wash his hands of it. That’s the premise of a new book, “Unintended Consequences: How War in Iraq Strengthened America’s Enemies,” by Peter W. Galbraith."

“The pretense that the surge is a success and that therefore the United States is winning the Iraq war,” he writes, “is the opening salvo in a coming blame game as to who lost Iraq.”

The leaders of the (less and less influential) right-wing noise machine, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity began, (absurdly and irresponsibly) , soon after the election to try to pin the recession on Barack Obama:

Hannity, Limbaugh promote myth of an "Obama recession"
Summary: Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh continue to suggest that President-elect Barack Obama is to blame for the decline in the stock market, referring to the state of the stock market as an "Obama recession." In fact, analysts have refuted the proposition that the market decline has anything to do with anticipation of Obama's presidency.
Their time has come and gone. History will judge the Bush administration harshly. Limbaugh and Hannity are in the process of being banished to a place far, far away. The Republicans got the ball and fumbled it and no amount of spin can change that.

The American people are for the most part intelligent and above all fair. Most of us know the difference between right and wrong and true and false and that is something that reactionaries can never take away from us. But they continue to try.

Listen to the right, led by Limbaugh and Hannity try to blame our current ecomonic mess on Jimmy Carter and The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). According to these bigots the CRA forced banks to make loans to unqualified lenders. These people know full well that the CRA was intended to end the insidious practice known as red-lining. Red-lining (banks actually drew red lines on their maps around certain communities, mostly inner-city) was a system used by banks to not make mortgage loans to minorities. Limbaugh and Hannity flat out lie on this one as the CRA ONLY required that banks apply the same standards to all communities in their lending areas. Nothing more.

Thus, pinning our economic crisis to the sub-prime problem and then tieing that to the CRA is a disgusting form of opaque racisim much harder to discern than the racism behind Limbaugh's disgusting attempt to sanitize the distribution of the disgusting "parody" of Puff The Magic Dragon by a candidate for the charimanship of the Republican Party, the Tennesseean, Chip Saltsman.

These guys are done, over, kaput, washed up, irrelevent and taking up valuable space on the planet. Their vulgarity has no place in our politics and in our national identity. Good by and good riddence.

From The Economist; Ship of fools

Political parties die from the head down

JOHN STUART MILL once dismissed the British Conservative Party as the stupid party. Today the Conservative Party is run by Oxford-educated high-fliers who have been busy reinventing conservatism for a new era. As Lexington sees it, the title of the “stupid party” now belongs to the Tories’ transatlantic cousins, the Republicans.
There are any number of reasons for the Republican Party’s defeat on November 4th. But high on the list is the fact that the party lost the battle for brains. Barack Obama won college graduates by two points, a group that George Bush won by six points four years ago. He won voters with postgraduate degrees by 18 points. And he won voters with a household income of more than $200,000—many of whom will get thumped by his tax increases—by six points. John McCain did best among uneducated voters in Appalachia and the South.
The Republicans lost the battle of ideas even more comprehensively than they lost the battle for educated votes, marching into the election armed with nothing more than slogans. Energy? Just drill, baby, drill. Global warming? Crack a joke about Ozone Al. Immigration? Send the bums home. Torture and Guantánamo? Wear a T-shirt saying you would rather be water-boarding. Ha ha. During the primary debates, three out of ten Republican candidates admitted that they did not believe in evolution.
The Republican Party’s divorce from the intelligentsia has been a while in the making. The born-again Mr Bush preferred listening to his “heart” rather than his “head”. He also filled the government with incompetent toadies like Michael “heck-of-a-job” Brown, who bungled the response to Hurricane Katrina. Mr McCain, once the chattering classes’ favourite Republican, refused to grapple with the intricacies of the financial meltdown, preferring instead to look for cartoonish villains. And in a desperate attempt to serve boob bait to Bubba, he appointed Sarah Palin to his ticket, a woman who took five years to get a degree in journalism, and who was apparently unaware of some of the most rudimentary facts about international politics.
Republicanism’s anti-intellectual turn is devastating for its future. The party’s electoral success from 1980 onwards was driven by its ability to link brains with brawn. The conservative intelligentsia not only helped to craft a message that resonated with working-class Democrats, a message that emphasised entrepreneurialism, law and order, and American pride. It also provided the party with a sweeping policy agenda. The party’s loss of brains leaves it rudderless, without a compelling agenda.
This is happening at a time when the American population is becoming more educated. More than a quarter of Americans now have university degrees. Twenty per cent of households earn more than $100,000 a year, up from 16% in 1996. Mark Penn, a Democratic pollster, notes that 69% call themselves “professionals”. McKinsey, a management consultancy, argues that the number of jobs requiring “tacit” intellectual skills has increased three times as fast as employment in general. The Republican Party’s current “redneck strategy” will leave it appealing to a shrinking and backward-looking portion of the electorate.
Why is this happening? One reason is that conservative brawn has lost patience with brains of all kinds, conservative or liberal. Many conservatives—particularly lower-income ones—are consumed with elemental fury about everything from immigration to liberal do-gooders. They take their opinions from talk-radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and the deeply unsubtle Sean Hannity. And they regard Mrs Palin’s apparent ignorance not as a problem but as a badge of honour.
Another reason is the degeneracy of the conservative intelligentsia itself, a modern-day version of the 1970s liberals it arose to do battle with: trapped in an ideological cocoon, defined by its outer fringes, ruled by dynasties and incapable of adjusting to a changed world. The movement has little to say about today’s pressing problems, such as global warming and the debacle in Iraq, and expends too much of its energy on xenophobia, homophobia and opposing stem-cell research.
Conservative intellectuals are also engaged in their own version of what Julian Benda dubbed la trahison des clercs, the treason of the learned. They have fallen into constructing cartoon images of “real Americans”, with their “volkish” wisdom and charming habit of dropping their “g”s. Mrs Palin was invented as a national political force by Beltway journalists from the Weekly Standard and the National Review who met her when they were on luxury cruises around Alaska, and then noisily championed her cause.
Time for reflection
How likely is it that the Republican Party will come to its senses? There are glimmers of hope. Business conservatives worry that the party has lost the business vote. Moderates complain that the Republicans are becoming the party of “white-trash pride”. Anonymous McCain aides complain that Mrs Palin was a campaign-destroying “whack job”. One of the most encouraging signs is the support for giving the chairmanship of the Republican Party to John Sununu, a sensible and clever man who has the added advantage of coming from the north-east (he lost his New Hampshire Senate seat on November 4th).
But the odds in favour of an imminent renaissance look long. Many conservatives continue to think they lost because they were not conservative or populist enough—Mr McCain, after all, was an amnesty-loving green who refused to make an issue out of Mr Obama’s associations with Jeremiah Wright. Richard Weaver, one of the founders of modern conservatism, once wrote a book entitled “Ideas have Consequences”; unfortunately, too many Republicans are still refusing to acknowledge that idiocy has consequences, too.

Goodwill Toward Men...

2008-12-25T14:26:00.001-08:00

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men.”

Undignified?

2008-12-23T21:31:00.000-08:00

It's been kinda fun today; the crackpots are out in force over President-elect Obama's beach picture...undignified for a President or President-elect they say. You know, one picture is worth 1000 words.....lol

Crazy Conspiracy Theorists or Panicked Capitalist's? Paul; I Think You Are Giving Them Too Much Credit....

2008-12-23T20:35:00.000-08:00

Crazy conspiracy theorists

Poor Rush, poor Sean, poor Bill-O (he just canceled his radio show, why do you think? Certainly not because it was a successful enterprise!) - they just don’t like America anymore. Their professional survival now depends upon their expressed hatred of what is left of all that is still good about America.

Their audiences are shrinking down to the core anti-intellectual know-nothings and they know it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/22/business/media/22radio.html?scp=1&sq=talk%20radio&st=cse

“Through the first three quarters of the year, network radio ad spending declined 3.5 percent from the same time in 2007, according to Nielsen. The radio industry, while still a $20 billion business, has been on a downward trajectory for years as consumers have spent less time listening. But talk still has an edge over other formats, Ms. Mijatovic said, because the listeners are engaged with the hosts “and don’t tune out.”

These clowns are not conservatives, they are reactionaries and even more to the point; they are capitalists. They sell a product and will do whatever they have to do to continue to sell their product just like anyone else with a business.

As their rants become more and more incomprehensible and as they become more and more inconsequential the best thing to do is simply ignore them.

Oh, and by the way Amy, they’ll not be going to Iraq, they’ll join their buddies in Dubai (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/12/business/12haliburton.html?scp=1&sq=halliburton%20dubai&st=cse)

And heeeeere they come, around the clubhouse turn, down the home stretch....the worst president ever?

2008-12-22T22:43:00.000-08:00

The Worst President Ever?

What An Outragesouly Arrogant Disgusting Prick This Man Is. He has not one decent cell in his body...

2008-12-22T22:31:00.000-08:00

Dick Cheney, saying that if Biden "wants to diminish the office of the vice president, that's obviously his call."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/21/americas/biden.php

In a democracy Mr. Cheney, power is derived from the the power of the people. Rot in hell next to Nixon DICK.

By the way Dick, how do you like that new condo in Dubai? Go there, stay there.

Bubbles Do Burst, Don't They.....

2008-12-22T20:47:00.000-08:00

Many thanks to Alan Greenspan....The King of Bubble Blowers
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/22/opinion/22krugman.html

America's Best and Brightest. That Sucking Sound You Hear is Your Money Going Into Their Pockets.....

2008-12-21T00:12:00.000-08:00

Stuffing YOUR Money Right Into THEIR Own Pockets-America's Best and Brightest Taking You To the Cleaners....They are still living in multi-million dollar homes in Chappaqua and Greenwich, sailing on their yachts and flying in their private jets....WHAT WILL YOU DO?

Origins of The Economic Crisis - Jeff Frankel's Weblog

"Every two years, Harvard Kennedy School hosts the newly elected Members of Congress for a three-day “briefing” on a wide variety of topics. We had an excellent turnout this week: 40 of the 50 new congresspeople, from both parties. I participated in a panel titled “Understanding the Economic Crisis,” along with Greg Mankiw, Elizabeth Warren and Robert Lawrence (on video).
Trying to explain the origins of the financial crisis and recession in ten minutes, even to the extent any of us understands it, was a tall order. But I tried to cram it all into a single slide."

Really Folks, How Much Of This Are We Going To Take?

2008-12-21T00:01:00.000-08:00

The fruit of hypocrisy

"Houses of cards, chickens coming home to roost - pick your cliche. The new low in the financial crisis, which has prompted comparisons with the 1929 Wall Street crash, is the fruit of a pattern of dishonesty on the part of financial institutions, and incompetence on the part of policymakers.
We had become accustomed to the hypocrisy. The banks reject any suggestion they should face regulation, rebuff any move towards anti-trust measures - yet when trouble strikes, all of a sudden they demand state intervention: they must be bailed out; they are too big, too important to be allowed to fail."

And billions of OUR dollars continue to pour into THEIR pockets....

Where Are The People?

2008-12-20T22:16:00.001-08:00

Who Wants to Kick a Millionaire?
"What will it take for the American people to say "enough"?

"Last week ABC News asked 16 of the banks that have received handouts from the Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program the same two direct questions: How have you used that money, and how much have you spent on bonuses this year? Most refused to answer."

"Banks that were rescued with billions of dollars in public funds have, in most cases, refused to provide specifics about how they have used or intend to use the money."

When will the American people wake up and have a tea party?

Where Will Dick Retire To? No Extradition, No Way, No How.....

2008-12-16T20:11:00.000-08:00

Hey, he's already got friends there.....http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Politics/story?id=2943017

R.I.P.

2008-12-16T19:10:00.000-08:00

On December 9 Rush Limbaugh, referencing an article posted on ABCnews.com titled “The Most Stolen Cars in the US” made the following absurd claim;

“RUSH: Quick, folks, what are the two most stolen cars in America, according to Forbes.com? Two most stolen cars in America. If you said the Escalade, you're right, if you said Hummer, you're right. SUVs. Why? Not because they can strip 'em and ship parts overseas. It's because those are the cars people want. They're General Motors products. Escalade and a Hummer. That's what people want, but what are we going to make for them? A bunch of crap! Well, yeah, crime will go down. Who's going to want to steal crap?”

To begin with, Hummers and Escalades are NOT the most stolen cars in the US, that honor goes to the 1995 Honda Civic according to State Farm Insurance. Here’s the complete list:

1. 1995 Honda Civic
2. 1991 Honda Accord
3. 1989 Toyota Camry
4. 1997 Ford F150 Series
5. 1994 Chevrolet C/K 1500 Pickup
6. 1994 Acura Integra
7. 2004 Dodge Ram Pickup
8. 1994 Nissan Sentra
9. 1988 Toyota Pickup
10. 2007 Toyota Corolla

No Rush, “people” don’t want Hummer’s and Escalade’s, thieves do. Limbaugh’s stock-in-trade is spin. He reports only those things that benefit his own political agenda and spins the rest. Lies, half-truths, untruths, misrepresentation, straw-man arguments and innuendo are what’s in his toolbox.

Hummer’s and Escalade’s are not the “most stolen” cars in the US, they have, according to State Farm, the highest “theft claim rates”. Read the details; theft claim rates are based upon the cost of the vehicle and the number of them sold.

According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the Highway Loss
Data Institute, the 2003-05 model Cadillac Escalade EXT and Cadillac Escalade 4dr have theft claim rates seven to eight times the average for all cars.

Highest Theft Claim Frequencies, 2003-05 Model Passenger Vehicles:

1. Cadillac Escalade EXT 4dr 4WD
2. Cadillac Escalade 4dr
3. GMC Savana 1500 cargo
4. Dodge Ram 1500 quad

Which newer cars are stolen the least?

Lowest Theft Claim Frequencies, 2003-05 Model Passenger Vehicles:

1. Ford Taurus
2. Pontiac Vibe 4WD
3. Buick LeSabre
4. Buick Park Avenue 4dr

Back in October one of the nation’s largest Hummer dealers “Towbin Hummer” located in Las Vegas closed its doors due to a huge DECREASE in sales, and trust me, Vegas is a Hummer kind of town. A Towbin sales person told me yesterday that they still have 13 unsold on their lot. Who wants to buy a dinosaur really cheap?

Towbin Motorcars is one of the most prominent auto dealers in the western US. Towbin sells Bentley’s, Rolls Royce’s, and now, the Mercedes Smart Car. Yes, Towbin has replaced Hummer with Smart. Undoubtedly a smart move.

Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and the rest would have us believe that “The Big Three” US automakers are in trouble because of onerous regulations imposed by the US government. As usual, the “conservative right” manipulates the information to prove their point. No boys, the problem is that GM, Chrysler and to a lesser extent make products that no one wants to buy.

Something That You Need To Read Today.....

2008-12-05T12:23:00.000-08:00

Newly elected members of Congress hear dismal economic forecast at Harvard conference

By JEREMY P. JACOBS, PolitickerMA.com Reporter
Politicker Photo
Newly elected members of Congress listen to panelists discuss the current economic crisis
CAMBRIDGE - Forty newly elected members of Congress gathered Thursday morning to hear some of Massachusetts' finest economists discuss the current crisis and possible remedies.
And one thing became clear very quickly: No one knows a surefire way out of the mess.
The forum took place at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government as part of its four-day conference this week for recently elected members of Congress. It featured panelists with economic expertise from the Kennedy School, Harvard's economics department and Harvard's law school.
Jeffrey Frankel, an economics professor at the Kennedy School and former member of President Bill Clinton's council of economic advisors, summed up the tone of the meeting in his opening remarks.
"No one thoroughly understands the economic crisis," Frankel said.
As the representative-elects listened intently, Frankel discussed what he viewed as the causes for the current crisis, tracing it back to the subprime mortgage crisis that hit in the summer of 2007. On Monday, the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee, of which Frankel is a member, announced that the recession began in December of 2007 and has not ended. That makes it longer than the country's previous two recessions.
"Everyone expects the recession to continue at least into the middle of 2009," Frankel said.
Gregory Mankiw, an economics professor at Harvard University, said that the current downturn is "one of those areas where economists do not see through a single lens" and that "it is very hard for anyone in your shoes to figure out what is the right thing to do."
Mankiw said the root of the problem was many financial institutions betting that housing prices nationwide would not drop by 20 percent, which they haven't since the 1930s. When those prices did drop 20 percent, it shook the foundation of those institutions investments.
Mankiw said that economists are looking at three areas for ways to fix the current problem: monetary policy, fiscal policy and fixing the financial system. On fiscal policy, which Congress controls, Mankiw said the tension is between cutting taxes and increasing government spending to create jobs and, therefore, increase consumer spending. Most textbooks, Mankiw said, agree that an influx of government spending most effectively accomplishes that goal. But, he added, not all economists agree on that point.
"I don't think the economics community has a very clear answer on that question," he said.
Elizabeth Warren, a professor at Harvard Law School and a member of the newly appointed committee charged with overseeing the Wall Street bailout package, pointed to demographical factors for the economic problems. Fully employed males, she said, make less money now than they did in the 1970s when adjusted for inflation. However, spending on housing, healthcare, child care, transportation and taxes has increased, Warren said, which has lead to more debt and less saving. Warren also prescribed establishing a Consumer Product Safety Commission to monitor financial consumer products.
"Every can of soda, every candy, everything we touch," she said, "is regulated for safety at some level...and yet financial products are not governed by that; they are governed by contracts."
The newly-elected members of Congress listened silently throughout the panelist opened remarks and then posed a few questions before session adjourned.
The new members that are attending the conference include the following, listed alphabetically by state:
Parker Griffith (AL-5, D)
Ann Kirpatrick (AZ-01, D)
Jackie Speier (CA-12, D)
Laura Richardson (CA-37, D)
Jared Polis (CO-02, D)
Mike Coffman (CO-06, R)
Jim Himes (CT-04, D)
Alan Grayson (FL-8, D)
Bill Posey (FL-15, R)
Tom Rooney (FL-16, R)
Suzanne Kosmas (FL-24, D)
Debbie Halvorson (IL-11, D)
Bill Foster (IL-14, D)
Aaron Schock (IL-18, R)
Steve Scalise (LA-01, R)
Niki Tsongas (MA-05, D)
Frank Kratovil (MD-01, D)
Chellie Pingree (ME-01, D)
Mark Schauer (MI-07, D)
Gary Peters (MI-09, D)
Erik Paulsen (MN-03, R)
Larry Kissell (NC-08, D)
John Adler (NJ-03, D)
Leonard Lance (NJ-07, R)
Martin Heinrich (NM-01, D)
Harry Teague (NM-02, D)
Ben Lujan (NM-03, D)
Paul Tonko (NY-21, D)
Dan Maffei (NY-25, D)
Chris Lee (NY-26, R)
Steve Driehaus (OH-1, D)
Marcia Fudge (OH-11, D)
John Boccieri (OH-16, D)
Kathy Dahlkemper (PA-03, D)
Pedro Pierluisi (PR-AL, D)
Jason Chaffetz (UT-03, R)
Glenn Nye (VA-2, D)
Tom Perriello (VA-05, D)
Gerry Connolly (VA-11, D)
Cynthia Lummis (WY-AL, R)
Jeremy P. Jacobs is a PolitickerMA.com Reporter and can be reached via email at jeremy.jacobs@politickerma.com.

America Doesn't Need a Transportation Bill, We Need a Transportation POLICY

2008-12-04T10:45:00.000-08:00

There is a thread on National Journal Experts Blog Transportation:

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2008
How To Write The Next Transportation Bill?
Although we don't have a new Transportation secretary yet, we do know that the most important task that person will face will be guiding the reauthorization of the surface transportation law (SAFETEA-LU), which expires Sept. 30, 2009. The nation's transportation needs have changed and expanded dramatically since the Eisenhower administration launched the Interstate System in 1956. At the same time, the fuels tax that has funded the program since its inception can no longer serve as the sole source of revenue as people drive more fuel-efficient vehicles. What do you think the new secretary's top five priorities should be for updating the law to meet the nation's 21st-century transportation needs?
-- Lisa Caruso, NationalJournal.com

Isn't the formation of a 21st century transportation "policy" really what is called for?

President Obama should elevate the position of Secretary of Transportation to the same level of importance that he says he is raising the Secretary of Commerce to.

A strong Secretary of Transportation, working in concert with a strong Secretary of Energy to develope policy's needed by us is impaerative if we are to develope the new transportation and energy sources that we so badly need.

Happy Thanksgiving

2008-11-26T20:47:00.001-08:00

If They Are Too Big To Fail, They Are Too Big.

2008-11-26T08:09:00.000-08:00

During the last years corporate America has been allowed to consolidate into monopolies. Giant corporations exist today in Telecommunications, Health Care, Automotive Manufacturing, Financial Services and many other industries that are vital to U.S. national security.

Certainly, recent events have taught us that we need to expand our definition of “national security” to include the health and well-being of our financial structure. Washington now tells us that GM is “too big to fail”, that Citibank is “too big to let go” and that a failure of AIG would trigger a global financial disaster . Unfortunately this seems to be true and equally unfortunate is that there are corporations in other industries that are presumably “too big to let go” (Verizon?).

All this has come about because our government “let go”. The last 25 years has seen an unraveling of regulation in many industries and sectors as the idea that “all government is bad” ruled the day. This has been especially true of the Bush Administration which has left several of our governmental departments to atrophy or fall apart almost completely. We hear and see that the departments of Justice, Commerce, Treasury, Energy, Health and Human Services and others have become dysfunctional as ideologues have taken over and career officials have left in droves. Financial, and more to the point anti-trust regulation has deteriorated to a point that is dangerous to our society and our economy.

So the question begs “if it’s too big to fail, isn’t it just too big?”.

While “big” maybe better for upper management and occupants of executive suites (and their compensation) it certainly has not been good for the U.S. consumer and the American economy.

The United States is today 15th in the world in broadband penetration. Broadband is undoubtedly as important to our future as the Interstate Highway System was when Eisenhower envisioned an expansive highway network that would facilitate the ease of movement of goods and people to an unprecedented extent. In Japan it is easy to have a teleconference via cell phone speeding from Tokyo to Osaka on the “bullet train”. In South Korea wireless is ubiquitous and the entire country is covered. And in the United States, Verizon still sells DSL, an outdated 20th century technology, as broadband and the consumer, for the most part, doesn’t understand why the Internet runs so slowly.

While the U.S. has all but sanctioned monopolies our government has not ensured that these mega-corporations serve the public and invest in, build and deploy the latest technologies. Greed and lack of foresight has made us a second rate telecommunications power. And certainly, in the early 21st century, telecommunications, electronic commerce and general interconnectivity are issues of national security.

I believe that it is way past time to look at monopolistic practices in vital industries as a danger to our national security.

It is therefore incumbent upon our new President and his administration to immediatly strengthen national security by assuring modernization and enforcement of regulations that prohibit the growth of any business that is deemed “too big to fail”.

Time For A Re-definition: What Does National Security Mean?

2008-11-25T18:30:00.001-08:00

Defining National Security

For far too long the U.S. has seen “national security” exclusively as a military question. American’s have been led to believe, certainly during the last eight years, that military superiority equaled national security.

The Bush Administration, and its “neo-con” policy influencers have denigrated the concept of “soft power”, repudiated long-standing and important bi-lateral and multi-lateral agreements (The Geneva Convention) and shunned any who opposed it as being “wimps” or lacking a vision of American Empire.

Many on the far right even speak of “decoupling” – the idea that what happens in the rest of the world doesn’t matter to us. They still seem to believe that the U.S. is the only super-power and that America doesn’t need to react need to concern itself with global events because as the only remaining super-power we can dictate to the rest of the world and create events rather than having to respond to them. What could be further from the truth.

Decoupling is a myth. Globalization has caused the global economy to integrate. As we've seen, events in the U.S. have far-reaching consequences that spread rapidly to the rest of the world. And vice-versa.

The American situation at the beginning of the 21^st century demands a redefinition of whatthe idea of “national security” means to us. We can no longer afford to live in an intellectual bubble that insulates us from knowing what the consequences of our, and other global players, actions are.

If the freezing of lending, the collapse of the mortgage industry, troubles in the Automobile industry, government bailouts and the specter of corporate CEO’s begging for huge sums of money have taught us anything it should be that many things can affect our National Security, not just military affairs. We must expand our definition of national security to encompass financial well-being as well.

The exercise of wise “soft power” oversees, and proper government regulation of key industries at home are integral parts of America’s national security.

We are not used to being led well

2008-11-25T18:13:00.000-08:00

It will be awhile before we get used to being led well again. This has been a long 8 years for the body politic. It will be interesting to see America respond to good governance again.

What's The Matter With Us?

2008-11-24T12:30:00.000-08:00

Gary Becker & Richard Posner
The Becker Posner Blog

The Financial Crisis: Why Were Warnings Ignored?--Posner“

"Citi was heavily involved in derivatives, which have been described by Warren Buffett as ‘financial weapons of mass destruction.'

It should be clear by now to any rational person that the deepening economic crisis has it's origins in a total lack of oversight by the governments of the world.

Some very smart people, including Nouriel Roubini, Paul Krugman, and many others warned about what was happening. Why were they ignored?

Could it have been greed? Could it have been that the exact same people who had the most to lose or gain ignored what they didn't want anyone to really know?

I am unable to believe that the the very same people who still feed at the trough today-those who claimed that they actually were entitled to 7,8,9 or even 10 figure incomes because they were the smartest people around really didn't know what was happening. I believe that they ignored or refused to acknowledge the truth so that they could continue to suck huge salaries and bonuses out of the system. And they are still getting away with it!

Thomas Frank asked "What's The Matter With Kansas?"....it's time to ask, what's the matter with the American people?"

If a brilliant economist yells to the crowd, is it the people's fault if they don't hear? You betcha!

2008-11-24T09:50:00.000-08:00

Paul Krugman
The few, the proud, the destructive

We are getting so screwed.....

2008-11-24T09:18:00.000-08:00

what's worse is that these thieving greedy bastards are getting their pockets filled again...pockets that are already over-flowing with huge ill-begotten booty. It's our money folks....

Robert Reich
Citigroup Scores

"If you had any doubt at all about the primacy of Wall Street over Main Street; the utter lack of transparency behind the biggest government giveaway in history to financial executives, and their shareholders, directors, and creditors; and the intimate connections the lie between Administrations -- both Republican and Democratic -- and the heavyweights on Wall Street, your doubts should be laid to rest. Today it was decided the government will guarantee more than $300 billion of troubled mortgages and other assets of Citigroup under a federal plan to stabilize the lender after its stock fell 60 percent last week. The company will also will get a $20 billion cash infusion from the Treasury Department, adding to the $25 billion the bank received last month under the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

This is not a particularly good deal for American taxpayers, but it is a marvelous deal for Citi. In return for all the cash and guarantees they are giving away, taxpayers will get only $27 billion of preferred shares paying an 8 percent dividend. No other strings are attached. The senior executives of Citi, including those who have served at the highest levels in the US government, have done their jobs exceedingly well. The American public, including the media, have not the slightest clue what just happened.

Meanwhile, more than a million workers in the automobile industry, along with six million homeowners in danger of losing their homes, and a millions of Americans who depend on small businesses and retailers for paychecks, are getting nothing at all."

Paul Kedrosky
Good Bank, Bad Bank, and Fucked Bank

Yves Smith - Naked Capitalism
WSJ: US Agrees to Bail Out Citi (Updated)

Paulson: Fighting the Financial Crisis

2008-11-18T11:52:00.000-08:00

The Bush Administration has been distinguished by incompetence. It has been a circus. It continues to be a circus and will remain a circus until January 20, 2009. Why should they be expected to be competent now?

America elected Bush twice and now pays for choosing its leader based upon who they would rather have a beer with. Didn't someone not to long ago say something about "chickens coming home to roost"?

From The New York Times - Fighting the Financial Crisis, One Challenge at a Time

Fannie, Freddie, Phony

2008-11-18T09:42:00.000-08:00

Paul Krugman points out that the noise coming from the Republican's and the conservative (bowel) movement (Fannie Freddie Phony) is mostly an alternative reality coming from the usual suspects (ready Limbaugh, Hannity and the rest) and couldn't be further from the truth (again).

Conservatives are screaming today that our current fiscal and monetary crisis's are the result of Congress having forced private banks to make sub-standard loans. The act did nothing of the kind. The act made the practice of "red-lining" illegal and forced lenders to standardize requirements across an entire community.

The cause of our current troubles are described by Paul Volcker today in an article in the Telegraph:

"There has been leveraging in the economy beyond imagination, and nobody was saying we need to do something," he said. "There are cycles in human nature and it is up to regulators to moderate these excesses. Alan was not a big regulator."

Even so, he said the arch-culprit was the bonus system that allowed bankers to draw forward "tremendous rewards" before the disastrous consequences of their actions became clear, as well as the new means of credit alchemy that let them slice and dice mortgage debt into packages that disguised risk."

Volcker Issues Dire Warning....

2008-11-18T09:22:00.000-08:00

Paul Volcker is one of the leading economic thinkers of our time. He, as Chairman of the Federal Reserve (he was appointed by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 and reappointed by President Ronald Reagen in 1983), was instrumental in leading the United States out of the stagflation of the late '70's and early '80's. It seems that he is one of the leading contenders for the post of Secretary of the Treasury in the Obama administration. I think he is the right man for the job during times like these.

So it wasn't good news this morning to see Chairman Volckers warning this morning in the Telegraph

"Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, has warned that the economic slump has begun to metastasise after a shocking collapse in output over the past two months, threatening to overwhelm the incoming Obama administration as it struggles to restore confidence"

Like the man said "fasten your seat belts, it's gonna be a wild ride"

Stop These Greed Ridden Maggot Clowns NOW

2008-11-11T19:05:00.000-08:00

These Bozo's continue to rob us. You need to help STOP THEM NOW.
Bonuses for Wall Street Should Go to Zero, U.S. Taxpayers Say
Here is a complete list of email addresses for all of the members of congress. Tell them not to let these thieves get away with this anymore. And while your at it why don't you tell them that all of these guys should be prosecuted...all of them.Not just the CEO's but anyone in a position to have known what what was going on. I say that they go down to the VP level. These people deserve to lose their ill begotten riches and go to prison too.

Oh, How You Can Get Stucco

2008-11-10T22:03:00.000-08:00

"Cocoanuts" starring the Marx Brothers was released in 1929. A real estate boom that you've probably heard about was roaring. We all know how that one went....

Groucho: "You can have any kind of a home you want. You can even get stucco. Oh, how you can get stucco."

Negative equity in US widespread

"Nearly a quarter of all homes with mortgages in the US are in negative equity, figures have showed.
First American CoreLogic, a real estate data company, found 7.6 million properties in the country were worth less than the mortgage as of September 30, while another 2.1 million were within striking distance."

Radiance and Rosebud

2008-11-10T18:59:00.000-08:00

The Secret Service assigned code names to the First Family today. Radiance and Rosebud, what perfect names for two fabulous first daughters.

I am the father of two gorgeous wonderful young women. They have become everything that I could ever hope that they would be.

It fills my heart to see the love in the First Family and what wonderful girls Sasha and Malia are. We should all be thankful that they will be shared with us. We, the people, are truly blessed.

Not The Obama Agenda, The American Agenda

2008-11-06T22:59:00.000-08:00

Paul Krugman writes "The Obama Agenda".

Barack Obama has a mandate to begin a new paragraph in the American commentary. It need not contain comma's or semi-colons.

Remember This?

2008-11-06T22:34:00.000-08:00

If you are a boomer, like me (I was born in 1947), you'll remember these small flag decals that people put on their cars during the '60's and '70's "love or leave it" period. I went looking for one today (see below) and I couldn't find one. I'm betting that they become a hot item again....

A few weeks after 9/11 my daughter, then a college student, asked me "Dad-when is this flag stuff going to stop?", I told her I thought it would last awhile.

Honey, I can tell you today that it has just begun again. Not to divide us, but this time to unite us (does anyone know where I can get one of those waving flag decals to put on my car?).