How broken is our system of electing members of Congress? It's abominable, according to Senator Ted Kaufman, who is not seeking election and who is willing to speak candidly on major issues. It's no coincidence that he is not running and that he is willing to speak candidly, according to Kaufman.
Do you want to know who Timothy Geithner cares about more than our elected representatives, more than Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid? Review his calendar and you'll see that it's Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs.
What is the cost of the U.S. invasion of Iraq? The cost, which will continue to mount for decades, is staggering, even insane. It wasn't $50 B, as W stated; it's already in the trillions. Here are the numbers from the Washington Post. The reason for the U.S. invasion and occupation? Unknown. The deleterious effect on the soldiers, their families and the U.S. economy? Long term and devastating. For the hawks, it was fun going in with all those fancy weapons blazing, but they are not offering any ideas as far as cleaning up this catastrophic mess. And those hawks have absolutely nothing to offer to the massive number of Iraqi refugees, who have spilled all over the Middle East, placing an enormous burden on Syria and Jordan. And combat is not "over," per the recent lies of the Obama Administration. And the corrupt corporate media is, for the most part, not calling out the Obama Administration for this recent fabrication any more than they confronted the U.S. for the fictitious "reasons" for invading in the first place. The media excels at serving as official stenographer for U.S. politicians whenever the topic is war (and see this piece on a documentary by Phil Donahue, and this article regarding Amy Goodman's views about the additional failures of the media). The corporate media bears thus much of the blame for the bleak economic future of the U.S.
Through his hard-charging and entertaining investigative pieces in Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi has repeated snuffed out that little spark of hopefulness in me. His latest article in Rolling Stone was the most crushing of all: "Wall Street's Big Win: Finance reform won't stop the high-risk gambling that wrecked the economy - and Republicans aren't the only ones to blame." Taibbi proposes that the recent Wall Street "reform" fixed about 10% of the problem, and that it was designed primarily to cover up an uncomfortable political truth:
The huge profits that Wall Street earned in the past decade were driven in large part by a single, far-reaching scheme, one in which bankers, home lenders and other players exploited loopholes in the system to magically transform subprime home borrowers into AAA investments, sell them off to unsuspecting pension funds and foreign trade unions and other suckers, then multiply their score by leveraging their phony-baloney deals over and over. It was pure financial alchemy – turning manure into gold, then spinning it Rumpelstiltskin-style into vast profits using complex, mostly unregulated new instruments that almost no one outside of a few experts in the field really understood. With the government borrowing mountains of Chinese and Saudi cash to fight two crazy wars, and the domestic manufacturing base mostly vanished overseas, this massive fraud for all intents and purposes was the American economy in the 2000s; we were a nation subsisting on an elaborate check-bouncing scheme. And it was all made possible by two major deregulatory moves from the Clinton era: the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which allowed investment banks, insurance companies and commercial banks to merge, and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which exempted the entire derivatives market from federal regulation. Together, these two laws transformed Wall Street into a giant casino, allowing commercial banks to act like high-risk hedge funds, with a whole new galaxy of derivative bets to lay action on. In fact, the laws made Wall Street even crazier than a casino, because in a casino you have to put up actual money to make bets. But thanks to deregulation, financial companies like AIG could bet billions, if not trillions, without having any money at all to back up their gambles.The Republicans are to blame, right? That's only half right. Consider what happened to the "Volcker rule," a proposal designed to restore the firewall between investment houses and commercial banks. It never had a chance . . . [More . . . ]
In this video of his March 4, 2010 lecture, David Cobb, a "pissed off American," presents important historical background regarding the relationship between the United States government and corporations. "Corporation" never appears in the U.S. Constitution, while "people" appears 34 times. It was traditionally a privilege to form a corporation, not a right, and corporations failing to act in the public interest could have their charters revoked. The United States is, technically speaking, a constitutional representative democracy. "Democracy" means "rule by the people." After offering this definition (that exactly matches the etymology), Cobb asked how many people in his audience believed that we currently have a functioning democracy in the United States, and the answer was overwhelmingly no. He argues that Citizens United eliminates our ability to have a functioning democracy. Unelected and unaccountable corporate CEO's are deciding how much toxic waste will be dumping into the environment and what choices we will have regarding transportation and health care. They are even deciding whether the U.S. goes to war. Thus he (along with Riki Ott, seen in the latter half of the video) are working with the Ultimate Civics and Campaign to Legalize Democracy, an effort to establish that corporations are not "persons." This group seeks systemic changes. He reminds us that many organizations that are now well-recognized as having effected important changes were disparaged and harassed when they were making those changes. It's time for the people to make dramatic change in how we run our society instead of begging "for a few less parts per billion." He argues that the abolitionists didn't tinker at the margins. They demanded substantial and immediate change. They exhibited courage. As Ott asks, "Do we care enough to make a difference?" Are we willing to take real steps to make sure that "human values count?" Here's the bottom line: Abolish corporate personhood. "Only human beings, not corporations, are entitled to Constitutional rights." Further, we need to establish that "Money is not speech, so that we can have appropriate and proper campaign finance laws" that won't allow corporations, or any other party to control the electoral process. Local communities need to be able to regain control. It is a movement from the grassroots. Cobb argues that he doesn't expect any visionary leadership to come from NGOs, because they are too wrapped up in the corporate culture. To sum up, here are the goals: