How Rights Become Privileges: MO Amendment 2

The 2012 Missouri primary had several important lessons to impart. The first, which I may have discussed in previous election years, is that the way to bring the "correct" voters to the polls is to have an apparently innocuous but important candidate or issue and a loud, contentious issue or candidate that only seems to matter to one side. In this primary cycle, there was a preponderance of hotly contested Republican seats, and a very dangerous, never advertised Tea Party constitutional amendment. Republicans came out to vote overwhelmingly, and the Amendment passed resoundingly. The full body of the amendment is at the bottom of this article. Basically on the ballot it read as if it was just reinforcing the first clause of the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

  • In reality, it says that people have the right to worship the (singular, Christian) Almighty God (but not all those others) including to pray whenever their conscience dictates (such as during science classes).
  • Public meetings can now be started with exclusionary prayers as long as the officiant is invited by someone.
  • I have not yet figured out how the mandatory publishing of the Bill of Rights in schools will be twisted, but I expect as a precedent to posting the Ten Commandments adjacent (as an alleged inspirational source)
  • Students cannot be punished for refusing to do assignments that might conflict with their faith (evolution, geology, astronomy, etc).
So I expect Missouri to soon be incurring legal fees on the order of replacing several major bridges, or (more likely) in lieu of funding science education for a decade. [More (Including the language of the Amendment)]

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Using the Internet to warn about home construction fraud

I used to work as an Assistant Attorney General in the area of consumer fraud. Back in the 1980's there weren't many ways to get the word out that you had been ripped off by a contractor. You would likely complain to your friends and family, and that is about it. That has certainly changed. Here is a website created recently by Ray Gregory, a friend of mine who was ripped off by a contractor--this work isn't even close to acceptable. Thanks to the Internet, anyone considering using this contractor will find the name Timothy W. Watson of Norfolk, Virginia prominently listed next to vivid photos and descriptions of his extremely crappy work. Perhaps this website will prevent other innocent people from getting ripped off. We are ALL leaving indelible trails on the Internet these days, both innocent people, but also the scoundrels.

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JP Morgan continues to slurp at the public trough

According to Bloomberg:

JPMorgan receives a government subsidy worth about $14 billion a year, according to research published by the International Monetary Fund and our own analysis of bank balance sheets. The money helps the bank pay big salaries and bonuses. More important, it distorts markets, fueling crises such as the recent subprime-lending disaster and the sovereign-debt debacle that is now threatening to destroy the euro and sink the global economy . . . To estimate the dollar value of the subsidy in the U.S., we multiplied it by the debt and deposits of 18 of the country’s largest banks, including JPMorgan, Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc. The result: about $76 billion a year. The number is roughly equivalent to the banks’ total profits over the past 12 months, or more than the federal government spends every year on education.
On his June 22, 2012 show, Bill Moyers discussed this insane state of affairs, and the rampant corruption and criminality of Wall Street with Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone and Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism. Yves Smith offers this as part of the solution to the ongoing problem with large Wall Street banks:
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean when you say banks should be more like a utility? YVES SMITH: Banks, more than any other business, more than military contractors, live off the government. They depend on government backstopping. They exist only by way of government issued licenses, which if you had open entry you'd see much lower fees. And they get some confidence from the public from the fact that they are regulated. Oh, and the most important thing is they have access to-- MATT TAIBBI: The Federal Reserve. YVES SMITH: --the Federal Reserve. MATT TAIBBI: They're getting huge amounts of free money. YVES SMITH: Well, not just the free money. The Federal Reserve basically guarantees the payment system. You know, that's the really critical architecture that banks control is that, you know, we write checks to each other. We have credit cards. They clear through banks. But the fact that banks can exchange money with each other confidently is because the Fed stands behind that. So there's a much-- there's another layer of Fed backstopping beyond what we think of the way they step in in a crisis or the way they're now intervening to help the banks. So the fact that these institutions really depend in a very fundamental way on government support means they don't have any right to the upside. I mean, they should really be paid like public servants. I mean, I'm not kidding. I mean, and if they had been, if the pay had been ratcheted down after the crisis, I would have had a lot more sympathy for them, even if they just behaved for a couple of years. You know, they were bailed out. And then in 2009 the industry went and paid itself record bonuses, higher than 2007 instead of rebuilding their balance sheets. I mean, this was just a slap in the face for the public. BILL MOYERS: And there's no shame. YVES SMITH: No.

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Four trillion in secret loans

Keep in mind that all of the U.S. tax receipts for an entire year are only two trillion dollars. Now read this:

""This report reveals the inherent conflicts of interest that exist at the Federal Reserve.  At a time when small businesses could not get affordable loans to create jobs, the Fed was providing trillions in secret loans to some of the largest banks and corporations in America that were well represented on the boards of the Federal Reserve Banks.  These conflicts must end," [Senator Bernie] Sanders said."

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The real lesson of Facebook

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone sharply questions the integrity of the stock market:

Virtually every week now we see stories like this that hint at a kind of two-tiered market system – in which most of the real action takes place inside an unregulated black-box network of connected insiders who don’t disclose their relationships or their interests, while everyone else, i.e. the regular suckers, live in the more tightly-policed world of prospectuses and quarterly reporting and so on. . . . Sooner or later, people are going to clue into the fact that one or two big banks, acting in concert with a choice assortment of unscrupulous "preferred investors," can at least temporarily prop up or topple just about anything they want, from Greece to Bear Stearns to Lehman Brothers.

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