Who is crazy?

The mainstream media is going after anyone who dares to stray from what they consider to be the proper boundaries of discourse. He dares to treat mainstream political discourse "as the political freak show that it is." That's why Alan Grayson, who is one of the few people in Congress who is really working hard to get to the bottom of serious problems, has a big target on his back--he is being labeled as crazy by a mainstream media that doesn't know what to do when someone asks real questions about real issues. Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com explores this problem at length, pointing out the other side of the coin, that in Media-World, those who are certifiably insane are being labeled as "sane" as long as they stay within predesignated boundaries. For example:

Just consider who is supported and embraced by those who slap the "crazy" label on the forehead of every perceived dissident. Hillary Clinton -- the ultimate embodiment of Democratic Party Seriousness and Sanity -- supported the invasion of Iraq by warning of scary weapons and Al Qaeda ties that did not exist . . . and she spent her campaign beating her chest and doing things like threatening to "totally obliterate" Iran. While in office, Barack Obama has endorsed putting people in cages with no charges, assassinating American citizens with no due process, eavesdropping on Americans en masse with little oversight, increasing military spending beyond its shockingly inflated levels while searching for ways to cut Medicaid and Social Security, and blocking judicial review of presidential felonies and war crimes on the ground that those criminal acts constitute vital "state secrets" and must be protected. Most Serious, Sane Democrats have supported all of that insanity.
What honest person can argue with Greenwald's list? But he was just getting warmed up. There's a lot more, including this:
Meanwhile, the GOP establishment from top to bottom spent a decade cheering on torture, disappearances, abductions, unprovoked wars, chronic presidential lawbreaking and truly sick McCarthyite witch hunts. Both of the Sane Parties conspired to transfer, with little accountability, massive amounts of public wealth to the very Wall Street firms which virtually destroyed the entire world economy, while standing by and doing very little about tragic levels of joblessness or the future risk of Wall-Street-caused financial crises; kept us waging war for a full decade in multiple countries (while threatening others) even as we near the precipice of bankruptcy, the hallmarks of under-developed nation status and the disappearance of the social safety net; and are so captive to the corporate interests which own the Government that they viciously compete with one another over who can be a more loyal servant to those interests.
Greenwald is not suggesting that those who step out of the mainstream are always correct about everything they say. But he does give credit to Alan Grayson, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul for not buying into most of the rubbish that we are being fed by the media. We live in world painted upside-down by a media that is largely not about traditional Fourth Estate values. Rather than feed us information that will allow a democracy to thrive, the mainstream media, based on its constant miserable failures over the past ten years, is clearly more interested in destroying those who dare to ask questions that might threaten our corporate-military-prison-industrial-Complex.

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“The greatest preventable holocaust in the history of planet Earth”

"The greatest preventable holocaust in the history of planet Earth" That's the judgment on what awaits us from Michael Ruppert, in a new documentary entitled "Collapse". The age of fossil fuels has been a blip in the scale of human history. We've only been using them a few centuries, and yet we are unable to remember a time when fossil fuels were not abundant and cheap. That age is now over. Recent experience has taught us that the end of this age was heralded by massive price spikes and has already caused the greatest economic dislocation since the Great Depression, or possibly even including it. Given that the growth of human population has so neatly coincided with the growth in the production of fossil fuels, human population now faces a analogous decline on the far side of the bell curve.

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Payday loan opponents struggle to get a fair hearing

Payday loans are high-interest short-term unsecured small loans that borrowers promise to repay out of their next paycheck, typically two weeks later. Interest rates are typically 300% to 500% per annum, many multiples higher than the exorbitant rates charged by banks on their credit cards. A typical payday borrower takes out payday loans to pay utility bills, to buy a child’s birthday present or to pay for a car repair. Even though payday loans are dangerous financial products, they are nonetheless tempting to people who are financially stressed. The growth of payday lenders in the last decade has been mind-boggling. In many states there are more payday lenders than there are McDonald’s restaurants. In Missouri Payday lenders are even allowed to set up shops in nursing homes. Missouri’s payday lenders are ferociously fighting a proposed new law that would put some sanity into a system that is often financially ruinous for the poor and working poor. Payday lenders claim that the caps of the proposed new law would put them out of business. Their argument is laughable and their legislative strategy is reprehensible. Exhibit A is the strategy I witnessed Thursday night, February 18, 2010. On that night, Missouri State Senator Joe Keaveny and State Representative Mary Still jointly held a public hearing at the Carpenter Branch Library in the City of St. Louis City to discuss two identical bills (SB 811 and HB 1508) that would temper the excesses of the payday loan industry in Missouri. Instead of respecting free and open debate and discussion regarding these bills, payday lenders worked hard to shut down meaningful debate by intentionally packing the legislative hearing room with their employees, thereby guaranteeing that A) the presenters and media saw an audience that seemed to favor payday lenders and B) many concerned citizens were excluded from the meeting. As discussed further down in this post, payday lenders are also responsible for flooding the State Capitol with lobbyists and corrupting amounts of money.carpenter-branch-library When I arrived at 7:00 pm, the scheduled starting time, I was refused entry to the meeting room. Instead, I was directed to join about 15 other concerned citizens who had been barred from the meeting room. There simply wasn’t room for us. But then who were those 100 people who had been allowed to attend the meeting? I eventually learned that almost all of them were employees of payday lenders; their employers had arranged for them to pack the room by arriving en masse at 6 pm. Many of the people excluded from the meeting were eventually allowed to trickle into the meeting, but only aspayday-employees other people trickled out. I was finally allowed into the meeting at 8 pm, which allowed me to catch the final 30 minutes. In the photo below, almost all of the people plopped into the chairs were payday lender employees (the people standing in the back were concerned citizens). This shameful tactic of filling up the meeting room with biased employees has certainly been used before.

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The shifting purpose of the military occupation of iraq

Today, Arianna Huffington reviewed the long history of shifting rationalizations for having a huge U.S. military occupation of Iraq:

The White House served up a blast from the past this week with word that it was planning to rebrand the Iraq war -- something the Bushies did quite often. Come Sept. 1, it will be good-bye "Operation Iraqi Freedom," hello "Operation New Dawn"! This New Dawn will, incidentally, still see 50,000 U.S. troops left in Iraq. So we started with 2001's "Gathering Threat" and 2002's "Axis of Evil," moved to 2003's "Shock and Awe" and "Mission Accomplished," then pinballed from "Fight 'em There, Not Here" ('04) to "Last Throes" ('05) to "Stay the Course" ('05) to "The New Way Forward" ('06). "Operation New Dawn" sounds like "A New Way of Forgetting This Ever Happened." It's time to brand the war what it always was -- "A Huge, Tragic Mistake" -- and get the hell out.
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The problem with politicians

Colin Beavan (No Impact Man) sums it up like this at his blog:

[T]he politics of Washington are defunct. The Democratic politicians want to beat the Republicans. The Republican ones want to beat the Democratic ones. They are, like the rest of us, scared for their jobs! But the American people? We just want to get along with each other and solve problems. We want happy lives and to be kind to our neighbors. We want leaders who care about us more than their own careers.
Americans are often under the illusion that we have meaningful choices when we vote in national elections, but that is dangerously simplistic. Big money and commercial media pre-designate the candidates who qualify as "serious candidates" long before the citizens vote. Those candidates who prevail are those that have given sufficient winks and nods to big money such that they continue to get well-funded. To compound things, big money likes the status quo. Hence, Barack Obama's continuing lovefest with Wall Street (Disclosure: I voted for Obama but I'm sorely disappointed--yet I still think he is far preferable to McCain-Palin). There are no easy solutions to this problem. The start of a solution, in my opinion, is to give smart, "non-connected" and non-monied people a real chance to get elected. There are several "clean money" campaign reform proposals floating about (for details on one of these, see this post by Lawrence Lessig). The purpose of clean-money elections is the radical idea promoted by the Founding Fathers: that We the People would self-govern. The topic Colin Beavan raises today is the most important political topic out there, in my opinion. Without an honest, open and self-critical deliberative process, we don't actually have a democracy. With the current system of private-money elections (especially in the wake of Citizens United), we don't have an honest, open and self-critical deliberate process. What we have instead, is what Beavan has described: a big expensive game where politicians do anything and say anything to maintain their power and perks.

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