At a Salon.com article entitled "The corporate financiers are wrong," Joe Conason says the obvious about "free market" fanatics because it is necessary to say the obvious about "free market" fanatics, given that they've been so successful at promulgating their drivel. What is the obvious thing we now need to…
The list has grown too long to ignore. We are a country that exercises almost no foresight. We wait for disasters to occur and only then (if then) does it occur to us to do something about the problem.
Here’s an especially heinous example: our government hires numerous financial experts, of course. Alan Greenspan was one of them. Why couldn’t any of them see the subprime disaster long before it occurred? Instead, our government’s experts allowed unscrupulous mortgage companies to lend out far too much money to homeowners in the form of “exploding ARMs” such that it was entirely predictable that the borrowers would fall behind on their payments after only a few years, and that many would lose their homes through foreclosure. Our government stood by while these loans were hyper-securitized to the point where the unscrupulous mortgage companies would go belly up, tranch-laden real estate trusts (who ultimately purchased the loans) would throw their hands and claim that they were innocent and Wall Street would laugh all the way to the bank. That is, until Wall Street failed and successfully begged the federal government to bail out Bear Stearns. All of this was entirely foreseeable. The real disaster is that we failed to use our brains.
For another example, think of the Minnesota Bridge collapse. Let’s see… what might happen if you don’t allocate proper federal funding to fund sufficient bridge inspections? Of course, it’s only after a huge bridge collapses or a major levee breaks that we …
The "bipartisan" telecom immunity bill is about to be made law. It contains a specific provision granting amnesty to the telecoms which has been titled ""Protection of Persons Assisting the Government." How bad is this new law? That depends on how badly you prefer that Courts be open and accessible…
Why should President Bush be impeached at this point in time? That was the subject of this article at DemocracyNow. Dennis Kucinich, a member of the House of Representatives from Ohio pointed to the concern that President Bush intends to bomb Iran based on lies. He repeatedly indicated that impeachment…
Tonight, I had the privilege to attend a private screening of Phil Donahue’s new movie, “Body of War.” The film was shown to several hundred people attending the 2008 National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
In his introduction to the film, Donahue indicated that “We have the most sanitized war in our history.” His point was that the American people cannot deal appropriately about this war if they can’t see the images related to the war. He implored, “Show the people the sacrifices the men and women of this country are making.” The American people cannot feel the pain caused by this war, because the full story of the war is not available to them, thanks to the continuing media blackout of all inconvenient images and stories. Instead of learning about what’s really happening in Iraq, the American people keep getting distracted with things like entertainment parading as news or tax cuts.
Donahue stated that the US involvement in Iraq has caused more than 20,000 “grievous injuries,” a fact which he finds “beyond horrible.”
What are the kinds of images that the American people are denied? Everyone knows about the government’s attempt to keep Americans from seeing pictures of coffins of soldiers returning from Iraq. There are equally dramatic pictures available, however. One of those was briefly shown in the film, and it was run only in the Rocky Mountain News. It is a photo of a woman who wanted to sleep next to the coffin of her …