The New Secessionists

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_new_secessionists_20100426/#

Chris Hedges

Acts of rebellion which promote moral and political change must be nonviolent. And one of the most potent nonviolent alternatives in the country, which defies the corporate state and calls for an end to imperial wars, is the secessionist movement bubbling up in some two dozen states including Vermont, Texas, Alaska and Hawaii.  These movements do not always embrace liberal values. Most of the groups in the South champion a “neo-Confederacy” and are often exclusively male and white. Secessionists, who call for statewide referendums to secede, do not advocate the use of force. It is unclear, however, if some will turn to force if the federal structure ever denies them independence.

These groups at least grasp that the old divisions between liberals and conservatives are obsolete and meaningless. They understand that corporations have carried out a coup d’état. They recognize that our permanent war economy and costly and futile imperial wars are unsustainable and they demand that we take popular action to prevent citizens from being further impoverished and robbed by Wall Street speculators and corporations.

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Terrorizing Immigrants

By Stephen Lendman

On April 20, Reuters headlined, "Arizona passes tough illegal immigration law," saying:

State lawmakers "passed a controversial immigration bill on Monday (April 19) requiring police in the state (to) determine if people are in the United States illegally, a measure critics say is open to racial profiling."

Called "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhood Act," the Arizona House and Senate passed it, sending it to Governor Jan Brewer who signed it on April 23 to make it Arizona law.

The National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (NNIRR) works for "a just immigration and refugee policy in the United States (for) all immigrants, regardless of immigration status....advocating for their full labor, environmental, civil and human rights."

"We are ALL Arizona," it said before the bill became law. "Stop the Criminalization of Immigrants, End Racial Profiling! Tell AZ Governor to Veto (this) Anti-Immigrant Bill," saying:

"The Arizona State Legislature just passed a law (SB 1070) that legalizes unchecked racial profiling by police of anyone they 'suspect' is undocumented. It would criminalize all undocumented immigrants as 'trespassers' and subject them to misdemeanor or, in some cases, felony charges for a new 'trespass' crime."

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Danny Schechter: It's Time to Break Up the Banks

By Danny Schechter

Director, Plunder The Crime Of Our Time

The President has spoken, but the system is still broken. The SEC has come down on Goldman Sachs but the company is now mounting a no-expense spared defense.. Shocking disclosures of greed and fraud continue to trickle out from the Mammon factory and Babyloniaan leviathan that is Wall Street.

What is, and isn’t, being done by “da people” to fight back?

The major issue on the agenda for activists is not just the Administration’s tepid financial reform package due for a Senate vote this week but supporting new legislation to break up the banks, a proposal that challenges the “TOO BIG TO FAIL” understanding between government and the banks. Thousands of activists are calling on their representatives to back the bill, and MoveOn.org is planning ads.

There is an ad already out there to fight fraud.Check it out.

If you support this call, sign this petition on the A New Way Forward website. Democrats.com Offers This Appeal. Protest Plans: A Movement Is Starting to Move

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Unshakable Truth in Haiti: Reflections on Genocide

by Jesse Hagopian

Since my family and I survived the te tromble—Creole for the 7.0 earthquake that devastated Haiti—I have returned home with unshakable thoughts of life and death.

Only two days before the quake my son Miles and I had accompanied my wife, Sarah, to Haiti who works regularly in the country as an HIV educator for healthcare workers.  When the Enriquillo faultline shifted at 4:53 pm on January 12, 2010, our bed was sent across the hotel room, the other side of the building collapsed, and as we would soon find out, Haiti was devastated.  We had one Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) at our hotel and when the word got out that there was a trained medical professional, people began flocking to what became a makeshift medical clinic for hundreds of badly injured Haitians.  The EMT quickly deputized my wife and I as orderlies in his driveway “emergency room” and without any prior medical training, we assisted in whatever way we could—ripping sheets to use as bandages, setting splints, tying tourniquets.

It was during the second day after the quake that I witnessed, for the first time, someone die.  This beautiful boy was about eight years old and I remember he was wearing a bright yellow shirt with a graphic of the sun rising over mountains. His father had worked all night, a translator relayed to us, digging him out of the concrete debris that had been their home.  His son’s screams, which had served to guide rescuers to his location, had turned to irregular intervals of low moans by the time he reached us.  The boy was laid out on a cream-colored polyester blanket with part of his brain exposed where a brick had crushed his skull and his father knelt at his side blowing frantically into his mouth.  The father was not administering CPR—I doubt he had formal medical training—rather it was a devoted attempt to animate his son’s listless body with his own life force. Yet even as we began dressing his abrasion the boy took his final breath.  The father, with a look of anguish that made me avert my eyes, quickly fled the area to grieve in seclusion and the child’s motionless body lay on the blanket for some time before anyone could bring themselves to remove him.  I have since learned that some 270,000 other Haitians were also crushed to death by falling cement walls and ceilings—which were themselves a product of the crushing poverty that has left the people of Haiti with the barest of building materials.

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Is the Tea Party Losing Steam?

By Richard Kim , The Nation
Posted on April 23, 2010, Printed on April 23, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/146586/

When tea party organizers chose the Washington Ellipse as the setting for their Tax Day protest, they were undoubtedly thinking of its theatrical potential. Behind looms the Washington Monument, an obelisk to the hero of American Revolution and Constitution and a fitting symbol of the tea party's esprit de corps. In front stands the White House, whose occupant, according to protesters' signs, is busy plotting more taxes, more communism and the end of America. Those who took the podium borrowed from the surrounding majesty to endow their struggle with an epic righteousness: "We are going to keep faith with every generation since 1776 that has successfully passed the baton of freedom to the next generation. We will not allow that...chain of freedom to be broken on our watch," declared Congresswoman Michele Bachmann. But beyond the rhetoric and amid the crowd of a few thousand, the concerns were on a smaller scale--like about incandescent light bulbs.

That's what inspired one woman, Dot, to drive down from Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Dot is concerned about the deficit and the healthcare bill that "nobody read," but most of all she is panicked about light bulbs. "The government is already starting to fine people if you have the incandescent kind," she said, "but if cap and trade passes, then you're going to have each home audited, and that information is going to be listed to real estate agents, and you won't be able to sell your house."

Dozens of tea partyers I spoke with repeated some version of Dot's tale of government intrusion, little lies laced with tiny truths. "With this consumer protection agency," one man told me, "the government is going to make it illegal for you to have more than two credit cards." A woman in a red-white-and-blue pantsuit said, "There's a charter school in New York City teaching children how to be political activists--Muslim activists." Each of these stories lurks in the substrata of tea party blogs, and many are simply warmed-over right-wing myths that predate the tea party itself. What impresses is the fine-grained obsessiveness with which these ideas are pursued; I came to Washington looking for Ahabs, but the tea partyers I met are preoccupied with chasing minnows of their own imagining, not hunting the great white whale of government.

What does this kaleidoscope of kookiness add up to? According to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, tea partyers are richer, whiter, better educated, older, more male and more likely to be employed than the rest of America. In other words, they largely come from society's "haves," who now worry, as Thomas Edsall argues in The Atlantic Monthly, that "the competition for resources cannot be resolved by...economic growth," and so are rallying to hold on to their wealth, status, authority and autonomy. Or as one tea party sign put it, Your Fair Share Is Not in My Pocket. For those on the left who believe that government should act as an agent of redistribution, this evidence should put to rest the idea that the tea party is a constituency we can work with. The question is, How useful are they to the GOP?

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Is It Time to Replace the American Dream?

Tarcher/Penguin / By Jeremy Rifkin

Today's youth find little value in the caricature of human nature as rational, calculating and utilitarian. They prefer to think of human nature as empathic.

The following is an adapted excerpt from Jeremy Rifkin's new book, 'The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis' (Tarcher/Penguin; January 2010).

For two hundred years the American Dream has served as the bedrock foundation of the American way of life. The dream, reduced to its essence, is that in America, every person has the right and opportunity to pursue his or her own individual material self interest in the marketplace, and make something of their life, or at least sacrifice so the next generation might enjoy a better life. The role of the government, in turn, is to guarantee individual freedom, assure the proper functioning of the market, protect property rights, and look out for national security. In all other matters, the government is expected to step aside so that a nation of free men and woman can pursue their individual ambitions.

Although American history is peppered with lamentations about the souring of the dream, the criticism never extends to the assumptions that underlie the dream, but only to political, economic and social forces that thwart its realization. To suggest that the dream itself is misguided, outdated, and even damaging to the American psyche, would be considered almost treasonous. Yet, I would like to suggest just that.

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Bogus Washington-Proposed Financial Reform

By Stephen Lendman, Host of Progressive Radio News Hour

In Washington, the more things change, the more they stay the same, or usually get worse. It's true each election cycle, and when Congress enacts "reform," watch out.

Exhibit A:

Obamacare: legislation that rations care and enriches corporate providers.

Exhibit B:

Financial reform, shaping up to be more business as usual, masquerading as change, and leaving what's needed unaddressed and papered over.

What Real Reform Looks Like - Abolish or Nationalize the Fed

For many years, Ron Paul waged a lonely struggle to abolish the Fed, trying and failing in the 106th, 107th, 108th, and 110th Congresses. Numerous times he explained what he said on the House floor on September 10, 2002, namely:

"Since the creation of the Federal Reserve, middle and working-class Americans have been victimized by a boom-and-bust monetary cycle. In addition, most Americans have suffered a steadily eroding purchasing power because of the Federal Reserve's inflationary policies. This represents a real, if hidden, tax imposed on the American people," a 1913 dollar (when the Fed was created) today worth about a nickel and continues to erode.

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Financial Crisis as a Crime Story

By Danny Schechter

Director. Plunder: The Crime Of Our Time

In politics, it’s always all about the narrative, about how issues are framed.

As we ask ourselves, how we can be experiencing the largest economic meltdown in decades with millions out of work, and millions more losing their homes, and yet, with no real mass mobilization or ongoing response from the progressive world.

To understand this paradox, we need to reflect on how most of us we define the problem.

To this day, there has not been an aggressive investigation of who and what brought down the system ala the Pecora Commission appointed by FDR. Instead we have a wimpy ineffectual body that can’t get its act together. The New York Times, which hailed its appointment, now buries its defacto obit way back in the business section, noting it has “been hobbled by delays and internal disagreements and a lack of focus,”

At the same time, the bookshelves are filling up with volumes of complicated treatises on the complexities of derivatives, risky profit models and credit default swaps. The practitioners of the “dismal science” of economics are having a field day with longwinded dissertations that fail to engage the popular imagination.

We had a word for this when I worked in network television—MEGO, standing for “My Eyes Glaze Over!”

More popular writers are spinning catchy “yarns” like “The Big Short” which put it all down with psychologically-driven, character-based storytelling to how deluded everyone on Wall Street was. That leaves us feeling superior to the dunderheads who lost us trillions and, then, laughed all the way to their mansions in the Hamptons.

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Then and Now

TWO FINANCIAL INVESTIGATIONS: One Went after The Banksters, The Other Became A Forum For Bluster

By Danny Schechter l Host of News Dissector Thursdays at 10 am

Director, Plunder, The Crime of Our Time

A Tale of Then and Now, FDR vs Obama: A Story of Shame, Co-optaton, Partisan Bickering and Industry Lobbying To Undermine Financial Reform

2009, The Intent: Speaker Nancy Pelosi: “What I want to initiate is the equivalent of what happened in the 30's. They had something that was called the Pecora Commission. This was the commission that was formed when Franklin Roosevelt took office and they investigated what happened with the markets... We need to know. Some people can tell you one piece of it. Others can tell you another piece of it. But really it's very hard – do you understand it? -- for the American people and the rest of us as we try to make policy as we go forward to see the ramifications of any of the changes we're being asked to make.”

THEN: Robert Kuttner:  In 1932 through 1934 the Senate Banking Committee, led by its Chief Counsel Ferdinand Pecora, ferreted out the deeper fraud and corruption that led to the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. The Pecora Committee's findings helped change the political mood, and laid the groundwork for the sweeping financial reforms of Roosevelt's New Deal. Roosevelt himself often conferred with Pecora, encouraged him, and depended on Pecora's work to build the public support for reform. He appointed Pecora to one of the newly created results of his handiwork, the Securities and Exchange Commission, though Pecora was disappointed not to be its chairman.

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Aafia Siddiqui: Victim of American Depravity

By Stephen Lendman,

On February 3, 2010, after a sham trial, the Department of Justice announced Siddiqui's conviction for "attempting to murder US nationals in Afghanistan and six additional charges." When sentenced on May 6, she faces up to 20 years for each attempted murder charge, possible life in prison on the firearms charge, and eight years on each assault charge.

In March 2003, after visiting her family in Karachi, Pakistan, government Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agents, in collaboration with Washington, abducted Siddiqui and her three children en route to the airport for a flight to Rawalpindi, handed them over to US authorities who took them secretly to Bagram prison, Afghanistan for more than five years of brutal torture and unspeakable abuse, including vicious beatings and repeated raping.

Bogusly charged and convicted, Siddiqui was guilty only of being Muslim in America at the wrong time. A Pakistani national, she was deeply religious, very small, thoughtful, studious, quiet, polite, shy, soft-spoken, barely noticeable in a gathering, not extremist or fundamentalist, and, of course, no terrorist.

She attended MIT and Brandeis University where she earned a doctorate in neurocognitive science. She did volunteer charity work, taught Muslim children on Sundays, distributed Korans to area prison inmates, dedicated herself to helping oppressed Muslims worldwide, yet lived a quiet, unassuming nonviolent life.

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Did Iraq Just Elect a Mass Murderer?

AlterNet / By Joshua Holland

The charge that Ayad Allawi committed a heinous crime was widely reported outside the United States, but our media killed it.

We can’t know whether the new Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi, murdered six restrained men in cold blood while a mix of Iraqi and American guards looked on in shock.  

What we do know is that Allawi was alleged to have committed the gruesome crime just before the “hand-over” of the government to Iraqi nationals in 2004 (he served as interim prime minister in Iraq’s transitional government). The allegations were made by an award-winning journalist in a major mainstream publication -- Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald -- relying on two sources who confirmed details of the event independently of one another. 

We also know that the American media, with few exceptions, killed the story entirely. The few outlets that alluded to the charges did so with such a degree of skepticism -- essentially accepting official denials (and half-denials) as the end of the matter -- as to render it virtually meaningless.  

As a result, in 2004, with debate over the invasion of Iraq front and center around the world, the American public got a far different picture of the conflict -- and the leaders George W. Bush installed in the fledgling Iraqi government -- than the people of every other English-speaking country in the world. 

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HOW A 77 YEAR OLD VISIONARY AUTHOR BECAME THE TARGET OF A FAR-RANGING RIGHT WING CONSPIRACY THEORY

AlterNet / By Peter Dreier

The bizarre tale of how Frances Fox Piven came to be seen as the author of a blueprint for a radical takeover of American society by paranoid conservatives.

Sociologist Frances Fox Piven often gets requests from students who want to interview her about her political theories and activism. So when Kyle Olson phoned her in January, told her he was a college student in Michigan, and asked if he could videotape an interview with her about her recent book Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America, Piven agreed.

Temporarily housebound and recovering from a auto accident, the 77-year old Piven invited Olson to her New York apartment. On February 1, Olson and a friend arrived from Michigan with a video camera. Piven offered them something to drink. Then, for about an hour, she and Olson sat at her round dining room table and talked about everything from the founding fathers to Fox News, while the friend taped them.

After Olson and his friend left her apartment, Piven didn't think much about the interview. "This was so commonplace," she said later, "that it didn't strike me as especially important." She recalled thinking that, "Students these days use cameras to 'write' term papers. It didn't seem unusual that he wanted to use a video."

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Beck and Limbaugh Should Stop Exploiting their Addictions

WHY GLENN BECK AND RUSH LIMBAUGH SHOULD STOP EXPLOITING THEIR ADDICTIONS FOR PETTY THEATRICS

Beacon Broadside / By Jonathan M. Metzl

Right-wingers craft the angry, white, male addict in remission as the embodiment of a new American conservative ideal. They're way off base.

Has addiction become the new rhetoric of the right?

Glenn Beck suggested as much in his in his recent keynote address to the Conservative Political Action Conference when he parlayed his own history of substance abuse into a critique of so-called big government. "I'm a recovering alcoholic," Beck explained. "I screwed up my life six ways to Sunday." Beck argued that his experiences as an alcoholic privileged him to critique the seemingly different "addictions" to government perpetuated by progressives and liberals. "It is still morning in America," he decried. "It just happens to be kind of a head-pounding-hung-over-vomiting-for-four-hours kind of morning in America."

For much of the following week, Rush Limbaugh used his own, well-publicized addiction to prescription painkillers -- "Have you ever had a genuine addiction to something? Well I have and let me tell you about it" -- as a jumping off point into full-throated damnation of President Obama and his "liberal" followers. "Liberals," Limbaugh told his radio listeners, "their lives are basically meaningless, their addiction to power and dominance and control is what drives them."

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WILL AMERICANS REJECT THE PARTY OF "HELL NO"?

Campaign for America's Future / By Robert L. Borosage

Most Americans are only beginning to sense just how unified the Republican minority has been in obstruction. It's dubious that this is a winning political strategy.

House Republican leader John Boehner's final rant against health care reform, featuring the refrain of "hell no," aptly summarized the temper and the substance of the general Republican position as the run up to the fall elections begins. (Rumors that the normally phlegmatic Boehner was incensed because a tax on tanning salons is the only tax in the health care bill that will kick in this year are unfounded. Democratic aides gleefully dismiss allegations that the tax was aimed personally at the perpetually tanned Boehner, a congressman from Ohio. )

Republicans pivoted immediately from "kill the bill" to "repeal the deal.' Reacting to defeat in the manner of a spoiled child taking away the ball after losing a game, Senator John McCain, once known for his independence, led a chorus of Republicans vowing "no cooperation" on any future issue. It will be hard to tell the difference. Most Americans are only beginning to sense just how unified the Republican minority has been in obstruction. Record filibusters in the Senate. Unprecedented holds on Obama appointees. Not one vote from Republicans for health care reform in the House or Senate. Not one Republican vote in the House for financial reform. Not one Republican vote in the Senate banking committee. Republicans even filibustered the recovery plan after their members had worked to weaken it. They bet early and often on Obama's failure - and it appears to be paying off.

Republicans have been salivating about their prospects in the fall elections. Newt Gingrich predicts they will take control of both Houses. Prognosticators expect big gains. If Republicans gain significant seats, what will be the mandate? What are they for? You can't tell from this Congress. They've chosen simply to stand in the way.

This isn't an accident. It is, as George W. Bush would say, "strategery." You may think elections should provide voters with a clear choice, each candidate detailing where he or she would take the country, but today's politics are defined by the 30 second attack ad, not Lincoln-Douglas debates. (And that's the tame part. The health care debate was punctuated by racial and homophobic slurs, a brick through the home office window of a Democratic legislator, death threats and more)

Republicans believe, as corporate lobbyist and conservative strategist, former Rep. Vin Weber, summarized, "this year will be a referendum on Democrats. We need an alternative agenda [for the presidential race] - but that's not the principle objective in off-year elections."
"Hell no" will do fine.

A Republican Party pro, former Rep. Tom Davis, president of the Republican Main Street Partnership, and former head of the Republican Congressional Committee, recently spelled out the strategy for Republicans in Politico.

The Democrats' fate, he argues, depends on "events on the ground," primarily the economy. If the economy comes back, Dems will be rewarded; if not, they will be punished.

But, he warns, Republicans shouldn't "count their chickens." "Voters fired Republicans in 2006 and 2008 and are not eager to put them back in charge." Luckily, in a two party election, Republican candidates will get the protest vote. That's a vote to check Obama, for divided government, and "American voters like divided government." [This curious notion is conventional wisdom, but while Americans may end up with divided government, they don't like gridlock. They are looking for solutions to big time problems]

Davis urges Republicans to be careful: don't fall for "traps set by Democrats to make the elections a choice between competing visions." If it's a choice, Republicans will get hurt. A choice election would motivate the Democratic base.

"Republican leaders should remember that they need not offer specifics," Davis writes. "Specific programs are targets." They let Democrats pose a choice; they can "drive away wary voters." Also, Davis warns, Republicans need to "measure their words and actions" so they don't drive away independents. Obviously, those angry tea partiers will need to be put in the closet. "Red meat is more likely to awaken the Obama surge voters than to prompt additional turnout among Republicans."

So the Conservative Political Action Committee Conference came and went, with Republican pre-presidentials lining up one after another to indict Obama and demonize House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, without revealing much of what they actually were peddling. The current conservative darling, Marco Rubio, running for the Senate seat in Florida, was a classic example. After detailing the corporate and top end tax cuts he supports - eliminating taxes on estates, capital gains, dividends and interest (the unearned income that accrues largely to the wealthiest Americans) and lowering corporate taxes, he called for "serious measures that show that we are serious about getting control of our federal national debt," while mentioning nary a one.

The perils of policy are clear. A leading Republican conservative, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, has had the courage to step up and offer an alternative "Roadmap"for America's future. He decided it was important to show Republicans had the policies to lift us from this crisis.

His plan, like Rubio's speech, features steep tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans, elimination of corporate tax while raising taxes on middle income Americans through a value added tax, a hidden sales tax on consumers. He would cut and privatize Social Security, terminate Medicare, Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program, replacing them with vouchers of decreasing value over time. He'd move to supplant employer based insurance with a refundable tax credit so individuals can experience the delight of bargaining with insurance companies on their own for coverage -- without any of the protections in the health care reform bill. He'd freeze domestic discretionary spending for a decade. This would reduce federal spending to a level not seen since the 1950s when Medicare and Medicaid did not exist and the poverty rate among the elderly was at 50 %.

In Ryan's world, millionaires would pay taxes at a lower rate than middle income earners. More seniors would end in poverty. The healthy might afford health insurance; the sick would go without. The nation's sewers and bridges would continue to collapse. Its schools remain unrepaired and overcrowded. And, after all that, the national debt would still soar to 175% of GDP by 2050, adding literally trillions in deficits.

House minority leader John Boehner said he couldn't think of anything to disagree with this program, but noted not all Republicans support it. Once analysts got a hold of it, Boehner disavowed it as "Ryan's plan." So Republicans will follow Davis' advice. Offer a protest, not a choice, and hope Americans don't look behind the curtain.

The logic of the Republican strategy is clear. With unemployment high, incomes stagnant, and Wall Street cashing million dollar bonuses, voters have much to be mad about. And they generally discount complaints about the minority's obstruction; voters sensibly expect the president and the governing party to deliver and punish them if they don't.

But the cynics may be mistaken this fall. Americans are hurting and know the country is in trouble. They are looking for answers. They know Washington is busted, dominated by entrenched corporate lobbies, big money, and partisan politics. Republicans have linked arms with the worst special interests to stave off reforms. They've stood with the insurance companies against health care reform. They are soliciting Wall Street money while fighting to gut consumer financial protection. Their plan for jobs is to peddle more of the conservative policies that put us in this hole.

If Democrats focus on creating jobs while pushing to curb the financial casino and protect consumers from abuses of credit card companies, payday lenders and mortgage brokers -- and Republicans continue their obstruction -- voters might just decide the election is a choice: between those struggling for change and those standing with the entrenched interests against it. That's a choice that just might arouse the Obama base enough to make a difference. If the jobs don't come back and Democrats decide its easier to cater to the banking lobby than to buck it, then, despite the historic achievement on health care, the Republican strategy of "hell no" might just work.



The Next Big Thing

“We need a jailout, not just a bailout”

NOW THAT HEALTH CARE IS “DONE,” IT’S TIME FOR FINANCIAL REFORM WITH A FOCUS ON FRAUD AND CRIME IN THE SUITES

By Danny Schechter, Host of The News Dissector on Thursday at 10

Author of The Crime Of Our Time

In Britain, the police are raiding Hedge Funds to bust insider traders. In America, the Hedge Funds are still raiding us, even as public opinion calls for a crackdown on Wall Street. One recent poll, in a nation that seems so divided on everything, showed 82% for aggressive action. 82%!

A new Bloomberg survey says the public wants the government to punish  the financial fraudsters. “57 percent of Americans have a mostly unfavorable or very unfavorable view of Wall Street, versus fewer than one-quarter who have a favorable opinion. Banks are viewed badly by 54 percent of poll respondents, and 60 percent have a negative opinion of insurance companies.”

In a sense, reformers have won the fight of public opinion, but the financial reform battle promises to be even tougher than the health care fight.

Why?

The public is just not as informed about complicated financial issues. Their eyes glaze over with all the talk of derivatives and credit default swaps. Those favoring needed reforms still don’t offer a popularly understood narrative based on morality as well as insider economic analysis. Few commentators outside the business press are talking about it.

This is why I made a new film Plunder, The Crime of Our Time investigating the crisis as a crime story. Because that’s what it is!

The Banks do understand the scale of the problem and the depths of anger by their customers. As a result, they are upping their touchy-feeling TV ads and  fielding the biggest army of lobbyists in history to confuse, complicate, contain and, where possible cancel proposed reforms. It was reported that there were 6-8 lobbyists for each Member of Congress working against health care reform. On bank reform issues, it’s 25-1. Banks have the money and target it on politicians as a prudent investment to foster a climate that will allow them to make even more.

So far, the coalition for financial reform is not as large or organized as the movements championing health care reform. The AFL-CIO has resorted to guerilla theater, not guerilla warfare, a la the Tea Partiers. Most informed observers, to quote a Bidenism, know this issue is the real big F**k’in deal.

Even as more financial scandals surface, there is far too little follow up, not to mention investigations and denunciations. One report on Sify.com reveals, “since the financial crisis erupted in 2008, the FBI's 1,000-agent New York office has tripled its mortgage fraud investigations squad and beefed up its securities and financial fraud group.

“The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center says it received 336,655 fraud complaints last year related to financial losses of $560 million, double the dollar amount reported the year before.”

Progressives don’t seem to appreciate the scale of this problem or how it could be turned into THE issue to organize around.  In contrast, the right just wants to ignore it because it believes the private sector can do no wrong.

Recently, documents surfaced from the Lehman bankruptcy showing how that company cooked the books along with many others in the industry. But, what’s being done about it, asks former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer and Josh Rosner, the managing director of an independent financial services research firm, writing:

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist — and certainly not an accountant — to deduce one thing from the Lehman scandal. The misleading of regulators, investors and the public did not happen in isolation. Like Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Wachovia, Washington Mutual, Fannie/Freddie, CDOs, Bear, AIG, bond insurers, GM, Chrysler, CIT, California, Greece and the countless others wrapped up in this crisis, Lehman is “symptomatic of a banking system bent on finding ways to hide risk from the investing public and regulatory community.” …

It should be clear to all that a deeper examination of the relationship between all the audit firms and their clients on the issue of risk-obfuscation is needed. Limiting any inquiry to Lehman alone is inadequate.”

The cost of inaction is likely to be more  big bank failures and more meltdowns. Don’t take my word for it. Lehman’s new chief is among those making scary warnings as Ed Harrison of Credit Writedowns explains:

“Lehman head Brian Marsal warned that Wall Street had not learned its lesson in the credit crisis and that another megabank bankruptcy was likely. Marsal made the remarks while in Berlin for a bankruptcy conference in an interview with German business daily Handelsblatt:

“Handelsblatt: you are handling the largest bankruptcy in human history. Can anything like this happen again?

“Bryan Marsal: It is even likely that a case of Lehman will repeat itself. In any case, as long as nothing fundamental changes in financial regulation and in financial institutions. Wall Street has not really learned a lot from the situation. There is still much too much leverage in the market, and credit default swaps remain completely unregulated. Even with regulators and in the companies little has been done after the global catastrophe.”

Underline that: “LITTLE HAS BEEN DONE.”

The situation is bad and getting worse. The Wall Street Journal reported recently on its front page about woes in the banking sector, noting banks are experiencing the biggest full year decline in 67 years.

Just two factoids to put in your don’t bank on the banks file:

- 16 year high of 702 banks at risk, according to the FDIC

--highest level of loans at least three months past due ever recorded

So far the government response has been less than forceful when it comes to the underlying frauds---no serious Pecora type investigation accompanied by some talk of beefing up white collar crime task forces but with few prosecutions so far. President Obama has mentioned this but not yet made it an issue. It seems to have become a ‘ho-hummer.’

Our fearless media is also downplaying this diaster because they don’t have a first class, high profile villain like Bernie Madoff to use to personalize the problem.

In other words, it’s shady business as usual with more businesses going out of business. And alongside this failure is a growing meltdown for what used to be the middle class and working class.

Quite reasonably, the public is becoming angrier because jobs are not coming back. And quiet as it is kept, they may not be coming back.

Writes Mark Zandi, “The job losses over the past three years have been across a wide range of industries and from coast to coast. And if you’ve lost your job, in all likelihood you will remain unemployed for longer than in any period since the Great Depression.”

Explains Eric Janzen of iTulip.com, “The cumulative and lasting damage caused by two consecutive, predictable and thus preventable asset bubbles is starting to dawn on their victims. Some call it the “new normal.” Millions of Americans have not recovered the income or job status they enjoyed a decade ago.’

This is not an abstraction. Just this morning, a man hustled me for a quarter as I was leaving the subway. As I reached into my pocket, he had a change of mind. “Forget it man,” he said. “I don’t need no quarter. I need a job.” It was as if he was talking to himself.

No Jobs, seething unrest and a slo-go approach to reform are a toxic mix. I feel like a broken record hoping  growing outrage will finally turn into action. People feel robbed because they are being robbed. They are losing jobs, homes and hope. Many are beaten down but others are slowly rising up.

It’s one thing to feel good fulminating against a love affair with Capitalism. It’s another to realize that’s all we got, and so we  must, once again, try to drive the corrupt money changers and banksters out of the system

For progressives who protested on health care, isn’t it time to engage the real pain in our economy? Has ignoring the crime of our time also become “the new normal?”

News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org. His new film Plunder The Crime Of Our Time (Plunderthecrimeofourtime.com) is out next month on DVD from Disinfo. Comments to Dissector@mediachannel.org



HIGHTOWER: JUST HOW NUTTY IS THE TEXAS BOARD OF EDUCATION?

AlterNet / By Jim Hightower

Right-wing fanatics are turning "Texas education" into an oxymoron.

In the good-and-good-for-you department, food scientists are now touting the health benefits of enjoying a handful of nuts every day.

I, for one, am glad, because I love nuts -- pecans, hazelnuts, pistachios, almonds, you-name-'em. But my favorite nuts, by far, are the homegrown natives that have taken root in one particularly fertile area of my state: the Texas Board of Education. You just can't get any nuttier than this bunch!

This board, little-known even to us Texans, has lately risen to national notoriety, making our state's educational system a punch line for comedians everywhere. That's because a handful of ultra-right-wing nutcases have taken over this elected overseer of Texas educational policy, and they're hell-bent to supplant classroom education with their own brand of ideological indoctrination.

Their way of achieving this political goal is to rewrite the state standards that textbook publishers must follow to get the lucrative contracts for providing teaching materials for every student in the state, from first grade through high school.

Their latest exercise in ideological correctness comes at the expense of the social studies curriculum. They spent last week going through guidelines for history, government, economics and sociology textbooks, purging references that offend their doctrinaire sensibilities and substituting their own nutty biases and ignorance.

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George Lakoff's 14 Words that Could Save California

AlterNet / By Daniela Perdomo

The minority rules in the California Legislature and is responsible for the state's budget logjam -- linguist George Lakoff has an elegant solution to fix it.

Here's the little-known truth about California: Since 1978, the state has been subject to what is essentially minority rule. Proposition 13 -- mostly packaged as a property tax law change -- was passed that year, altering the state constitution to read that a two-thirds super-majority is needed in the state legislature to pass any revenue increases. But what this has turned out to really mean is that one-third plus one vote, or 34 percent, of the state legislature can control all legislative decisions.

You thought filibustering on Capitol Hill was bad? This is worse. And California is the only state with such a rule in place, now or ever.

As the state faces a growing budget deficit -- now estimated to be $20 billion -- the tyranny of the minority has grown more apparent to voters who have hardly noticed the two-thirds requirement all these years, but who now see public programs and schools being shut down or underfunded left and right in order to close the widening budgetary gap.

"This is an issue about democracy and most people don't know it," says renowned Berkeley linguist and Democratic consultant George Lakoff. "That is the reason we have a budget crisis, which in the end is really a crisis of democracy."

Lakoff and a few other groups have their eyes set on reforming the two-thirds budget trainwreck via the November midterm elections. Let the majority of voters decide whether a minority should rule Sacramento.

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Making the Iraq War Disappear

By Danny Schechter

Host of The News Dissector, Thursdays at 10:00 am

The American media loves anniversaries of major events because these provide the ideal news pegs to do follow-up stories.

You would think that they would have pulled out the stops for the seventh anniversary of the US war on Iraq, a conflict that was described by the Pentagon in its first days as a "cake walk" and designed as a quick intervention modelled after the in-and-out combat of Operation Desert Storm ending Baghdad's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

However, not only did US plans not work out that way, but the news commitment faded and, in the process - as one would expect - so did public attention.

The networks went from 'all the war, all the time,' to withdrawing troops long before the military did. 

As a result, the situation was uniformly described as "quiet" with no real assessment offered on the costs, casualties and consequences of what just about everyone considers a botched and failed mission.

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Desperate Attempt to Beat the Healthcare Bill

AlterNet / By Adele M. Stan

Quoting scripture, spouting lies and blowing dog-whistles to violence, the right wing's queen of crazy takes center stage in desperate, last-gasp fight against health-care reform.

In a last-ditch, desperate attempt to kill health-care reform, the captains of the religious right and the Tea Party Nation turned their lonely eyes to her -- the conservative queen of crazy, Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn. -- and a supporting cast of angry white men.

"So here we are; we're at the bottom of the ninth," Bachmann told a Capitol Hill gathering (video) of several hundred Tea Party protesters on Tuesday morning. "We've won every inning so far -- so that should feel pretty good."

"Yeah!" the crowd yelled back.

"All we have to do is to keep this up until Saturday," Bachmann said, "...and we are gonna kill the bill." Saturday is the day on which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is expected to call a vote on the health-care reform legislation. In order to do so, the House will have to pass the bill, as is, that passed the Senate on Christmas Eve. It will do so with a package of separately-passed "fixes" to the Senate bill that will be taken up in the Senate via a budget reconciliation process, which cannot be filibustered. That means the fix package can be passed on a simple majority of 51 votes, instead of the 60 required to end a filibuster.

If the size of the crowd around Bachmann on a beautiful Washington, D.C., morning was any indication, the grass roots of the Tea Party movement appeared to have thrown in the town on their opposition to health-care reform. While a similar rally led by Bachmann in November drew thousands to Capitol Hill, today's event, promoted by the astroturfing group, FreedomWorks, drew a mere fraction of that number. At the Tuesday rally, Bachmann held back on some of the more colorful rhetoric she displayed at a "Kill the Bill" rallyshe headlined in her home state on Saturday, at which she compared President Barack Obama and Pelosi to Venezuela's socialist President Hugo Chavez, and declared Obama to be "the first post-American president."

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WILL OBAMA'S USDA ATONE FOR DECADES OF RACISM?

AlterNet / By Kari Lydersen

For decades, rampant racism blocked access to critical government farm loans for thousands of farmers. President Obama appears ready to change that.

Native American North Dakota ranchers George and Marilyn Keepseagle applied for their first loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture back in 1975, hoping to buy higher quality livestock. George, now 69, remembers having the strange feeling that the county loan officer charged with evaluating their application didn't seem to want them to succeed.

Two decades later, after struggling to get USDA loans to help recover from storms, low cattle prices and other calamities, the Keepseagles have no doubt the county loan officers did not have their best interests in mind. 

The Keepseagles allege the USDA's farm loan program unfairly forced them to sell 380 acres of George's family land in 1999, wreaking financial havoc on their lives and pushing them into foreclosure. They are the lead plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit charging that tens of thousands of Native Americans suffered about a billion dollars in economic damage because of blatant discrimination at county USDA loan offices. 

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