President Obama's Second Inauguration

Here we are celebrating the second inauguration of President Obama, yet we are still hearing from the stonewallers on the right. Listening to NPR this afternoon, I heard more delusional grandstanding by rightwing pundits.

Their old and stale presidential campaign slogan of the “takers and makers” is still being pulled up from the grave, and their belief that the corporate elite are the makers, when in reality they are the nation’s most dramatic, and at times, grotesque takers!!! They cannot make the profits they have experienced unless the government steps in to offer them significant handouts, perks and favors, along with opportunities to feed from the government gravy train.

They have loved their government no-bid contracts, government bid contracts, government military support in regions of the world where they are mining and drilling and need public protections to make their profits, along with shipping lanes protections; tax write-offs, tax breaks, corporation protections; patent and copyright protections; tax abatements; good roads, bridges, shipping ports, rails all paid for by the taxpayers; government grants; bailouts; government subsidies; cheap Federal Reserve borrowing; inexpensive government leases on public lands; and more!

When will they stop getting drunk on the Kool-Aid that they mix up for each other and serve in their fantasy beakers? I guess it will never end until they are further marginalized by a public that will wake up to the truth-one person at a time. Then and only then will the voting public choose candidates that represent THEIR own best interests and not the interests of the corporate elite who want to deny then health care, good wages, educational opportunities, and truth. Too many people have not a clue other than they are haters and deniers of fact.

The sad truth now is that more and more people are leaving high school without the skills that would allow their brains to read for meaning, analyze and formulate deductions from the content they are reading. Fiction is too abstract for many; therefore, schools are using non-fiction instead. Often we blame the teacher instead of blaming the individual, their family, or other factors.

Our GOPsychopathetics want to rail about their individualism and that people need to take care of themselves instead of having the government take care of them. Yet, this thinking fails when they blame teachers instead of the individual for not taking responsibility for their own learning. They want all of us to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps!

I would like Bobby Jindal aka Alfred E. Newman, and Mitch – the – Scarecrow (Wizard of Oz) – McConnell to sit on the floor and try pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. It cannot be done. It is a delusion. It is very clear that neither of them, nor their sociopathic cellmates in Congress or in various governorship positions have NEVER EVER accomplished a damn thing totally by themselves. Nor has BP or any other corporation, for that matter.

What we are hearing today from the rightwing GOPsychopathetics is that Obama needs to be less divisive and more uniting. How hypocritical these blank-slated humans are to their own history. Don’t they remember their last president LilboyBush who upon winning a second term said that he had gained political capital and was going to use it?

President Mission Accomplished spent his political capital giving more to the Real Takers of this nation while the Democrats felt it should be spent differently. On the other side, President Obama has always tried to compromise, find consensus, and communicate to the GOP, yet has found them not willing to do the same. The difference in the use of political capital is that President Obama has clearly stated his commitment to those who have paid into their payroll tax commitments and who expect to receive them upon retirement, while those in the GOP want to alter that commitment in favor of more and more offerings and transfers of wealth to those 1%ers buying up all the political favor cards.

One GOPie said on the radio that too many people are receiving Social Security and that should stop. The middle class don’t require such a benefit, since they are not that needy when compared to the less fortunate among us. Social Security is not a pending issue!! It can be fixed by simply removing the cap on wages over $106,800. At that point, a means testing formula could be implemented for those at the top of the earning’s scale.

I do believe that these GOPsychopathetics seem to ignore the fact that it has not been President Obama who has been divisive but the very folks on the right. We have had Boehner and McConnell both preaching how their objective was to stand in Obama’s way throughout his first term in hopes of making him a one-term president. Well, what they had hoped for just didn’t happen as they had expected. They decided to nominate Mr. 47% as their presidential candidate, and had their rape denying zombies run for congressional seats as they flushed diversity down the toilet. Don’t forget their hatred for anyone voting against them to do it easily. Or, their brigade of psychopaths led by the likes of Allen West hoping to retain their spot in the congressional dining room. And then, there is the Tea Party, which is totally bent over showing its array of obstructionist assholes.

So, the fact is that it has been the rightwing style jihadist (modified definition: refers to a person who believes that a far-right state governing the entire community of Americans must be created, and that this necessity justifies hateful and hostile conflict with those who stand in its way.) that have been standing in the way of progress, jobs, growth, stimulus, reforms in health care, banking, finance, taxes, military spending, global climate change, alternative energy development, and more.

We all know what the GOP playbook was throughout President Obama’s first term, now we have to see if Barack is able to use HIS political capital to set the stage for a turn over in 2014 that will send those obstructionist GOPies back home for good; and, if that would make a difference.

(http://eye-on-washington.blogspot.com)

The Koch Brothers Hate Democracy-They Buy It!

The Koch Brothers – Exposed!

 April 20, 2012 By Julian Brookes

From the Rolling Stone

If the Koch brothers didn't exist, the left would have to invent them. They're the plutocrats from central casting – oil-and-gas billionaires ready to buy any congressman, fund any lie, fight any law, bust any union, despoil any landscape, or shirk any (tax) burden to push their free-market religion and pump up their profits.

But no need to invent – Charles and David Koch are the real deal. Over the past 30-some years, they've poured more than 100 million dollars into a sprawling network of foundations, think tanks, front groups, advocacy organizations, lobbyists and GOP lawmakers, all to the glory of their hard-core libertarian agenda. They don't oppose big government so much as government – taxes, environmental protections, safety-net programs, public education: the whole bit. (By all accounts, the Kochs are true believers; they really buy that road-to-serfdom stuff about the the holiness of free markets. Still, you can't help but notice how neatly their philosophy lines up with their business interests.) They like to think of elected politicians as merely "actors playing out a script," and themselves as supplying "the themes and words for the scripts." Imagine Karl Rove’s strategic cunning, crossed with Ron Paul’s screw-the-poor ideology, and hooked up to Warren Buffett's checking account, and you’re halfway there.

For years, the brothers shunned the spotlight. David Koch used to joke that the family business, the Wichita, Kansas-based Koch Industries – with annual profits estimated at $100 billion, it's the second-biggest private firm in America – was "the largest company you’ve never heard of." But when Barack Obama became president, the Kochs, like a lot of right-wingers, flipped out. They threw their weight behind a stealth campaign to turn back the president’s "socialist" agenda: They were early backers, some say puppet masters, of the Tea Party movement, and when the tea-infused GOP retook the House in the famous midterm "shellacking" of 2010, it was with a big assist from Koch money. (They later blessed the brief, ill-fated presidential run of Tea Party-favorite Herman Cain. That's how crazy – or cynical – these guys are.) Progressive activists and the news media started paying attention – most notably ThinkProgress and Jane Mayer of The New Yorker – and pretty soon the Kochs had become the poster boys of "the 1 percent" and a surefire fundraising tool for the Democratic Party; at the mere mention of the Koch name, liberal wallets fall open.

Now the Kochs are the subject of a blistering (but to all appearances factual) documentary by the activist filmmaker Robert Greenwald. Koch Brothers Exposed aims to show how the brothers' machinations affect the lives of "living, breathing human beings," as Greenwald put it to me at the film’s New York premiere in late March. "When I learned about the damage the Kochs were doing to our democracy, I wanted to make sure more Americans understood what they're up to."

On the evidence of Koch Brothers Exposed, the more relevant question is: What aren't they up to? The film – scrappy and low-budget, but effective all the same – weaves together a string of shorter videos produced over the past year by Greenwald’s nonprofit Brave New Films, each looking at a separate tentacle of the "Kochtopus," as lefty wags have dubbed the Kochs' network. It recounts how the brothers have:

 • helped fund efforts to undo a model diversity policy in the Wake County school system in North Carolina, effectively resegregating the district – part of a larger campaign, the film alleges, to weaken the public school system and prepare the way for widespread privatization;
• pushed voter ID laws – purportedly aimed at combating ballot fraud but really designed to keep Democrats from voting – through their financial support for the American Legislative Exchange Council, an increasingly radioactive business group specializing in the drafting of corporate-friendly pick-up-and-pass legislation for state lawmakers. (ALEC is also behind the insane "Stand Your Ground" gun laws at issue in the Trayvon Martin shooting case);
• pumped millions of dollars into more than 150 colleges and university in exchange for control over hiring and curriculum decisions, to ensure students will be exposed to the free-market fundamentalism of Ayn Rand, Freidrich von Hayek and like minds;
• bankrolled a coordinated campaign to swing public opinion in favor of privatizing Social Security, deploying Koch-funded think tanks, experts, and pundits to spread the myth that the program is on the brink of bankruptcy.

(Greenwald might equally well have documented Koch-funded efforts to repeal Obama's health care law, deny climate change, undermine collective-bargaining rights, or block Wall Street reform, but there's only so much a single film can cover.)

All diabolical stuff, from the liberal point of view. Of course, you might want to argue that even if the scale of the Kochs' doings puts them in a league of their own, they're just exercising their constitutional right to play politics at the platinum level, like plenty of other high rollers on the right (and on the left, for that matter). Which of course gets at the basic problem – the gigantic power of money in American politics makes a joke of our democracy. And, for sure, without ever touching the subject directly Greenwald's film makes a powerful case for campaign finance reform, by showing the malign sway a couple of rich guys with radical views can have over millions of lives. But Greenwald isn't just saying the system is rotten, or that the Kochs are wrong (though he is saying both); he wants to persuade us – viscerally – that these guys are bad.

He makes a strong circumstantial case. The film brings us to Penn Road in Crossett, Arkansas, a low-income black community where, by all appearances, the residents who haven't already died from cancer are stuck at home, tethered to oxygen tanks. Could all this death and illness have anything to do with the stream of stinking toxic waste water out back oozing downstream from the Koch-owned Georgia-Pacific plant? The residents sure think so. A woman named Dolores Wimberley sobs at the grave of her non-smoking, non-drinking 43-year-old daughter, who died of lung cancer, and says, "I feel that Georgia Pacific and Koch is responsible for my daughter’s death."

Koch Industries vehemently denies any responsibility for the cancer deaths in Crossett and touts its environmental record as "exemplary." As ThinkProgress and others have documented, it is not: Koch Industries has been named one of the top ten worst polluters in the country and found criminally liable in more than one pollution-related case, including one involving the discharge of (carcinogenic) benzene. And, wouldn't you know, the company has lobbied hard to prevent the E.P.A. from classifying formaldehyde, produced in huge quantities by none other than Georgia-Pacific, as a "known carcinogen" in humans.

Greenwald lays it on a bit thick here and there, but that's kind of the point. "A lot of progressives really believe that if we can turn out one more white paper with bullet points about how to fix Problem X, we can fix it," Greenwald says. "But that's not primarily the way you reach people or move them. You reach the heart first. What I always try to do is make the political personal."

But you have to ask: Who’s going to watch, or even hear about, Koch Brothers Exposed?  The film isn't being released to theaters, since Greenwald reckoned few moviegoers would be willing to pony up $10 or more to see a no-frills documentary about a couple of oldster ideologues, however powerful or well researched. So to get the word out Brave New Films has teamed up with 40-plus progressive membership organizations and labor unions to form a far-flung anti-Koch coalition. The idea is that groups and individuals will hold screenings everywhere from their homes to bowling alleys, church basements, college campuses, and union halls. "The ultimate goal," Greenwald told Alternet, another partner, is "organize, organize — and then, organize." (Lefty activists are notoriously single-issue, but the all-enveloping reach of the Kochtopus makes opposing the brothers something all liberals can get behind: education, environment, labor rights, campaign finance, corporate malfeasance – everyone’s cause is on the line.) Available via streaming outlets and cable video-on-demand starting May 8, the film has the potential at least to reach beyond the choir into millions of American homes.

Have the Kochs caught Greenwald's flick? It has certainly crossed their radar. Google "Koch Brothers Exposed" and the first thing you see is a paid text ad that reads, "YouTube propagandist-for-hire dishonestly attacks Koch for cash." It links to Kochfacts.com, the company’s all-purpose damage-limitation website. A lawyer for Koch industries recently fired off a statement to Deadline Hollywood saying, "Mr. Greenwald's statements are maliciously false and misleading, and we urge the news media not to republish them," conveniently forgetting that the news media (from The New Yorker to the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times) is a major source of Greenwald's information. The film maker is pushing back with his Top Ten Koch Facts and a busy media schedule.

Whether or not Greenwald’s film reaches its hoped-for audience, we can expect to hear plenty about the Koch brothers this campaign season. Obama and the Democrats are going to make the election a referendum on a Republican Party hijacked by ideological zealots, 1 percenters, and religious nuts – we’re a long way from hope and change here – and the Kochs make a handy proxy for two out of the three. Team Obama regularly beats the Koch drum in their fundraising emails, leading to an angry public back-and-forth recently between a Koch lieutenant and the president's campaign manager. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney has been discreetly courting the Kochs, who backed him for president in 2008 and are said to have pledged to raise $100 million to defeat Obama. As Greenwald put it in a recent interview, Charles and David Koch "are going to do everything their money will allow them to do to influence this election negatively."

This video shows just how much the Koch brothers hate America. All they want to do is use it for their own greedy benefit. They are fascist in nature, since they buy political influence, buy legislation, and reward those in government once they leave through their sponsored Think Tank operations. They "train" their predators through the Think Tanks, and then, sponsor them to run for political office. And, once they serve, they are then returned to the Koch sponsored Think Tanks as a financial reward. This is fascist.

These predators want the Keystone Pipeline because they would be the oil refiners in the U.S. They are predators--evil predators. They don't care if they pollute, destroy lives, or destroy Democracy. It is all about THEM. They are Ayn Rand predators financing the Tea Party candidates.


The Mormon Liar-Mitt Romney has his hand in the Koch's wallet. From one predator to another.

(http://eye-on-washington.blogspot.com)

The Corporate and Political Tea Party Fears The Occupiers

Citizen’s Arrest! Citizen’s Arrest! 12/16-18-11 From Counterpunch.org

The Mayberry Incident

by KATHLEEN PEINE

The president was coming to town. And Neil Jednoralski was prepared. He’d taken his list and checked it twice. Handcuffs, Arrest Warrant, 4 guns! Check.

Barack Obama was coming to Osawatomie, Kansas, reportedly to do a Teddy Roosevelt impression. Neil was going to do his best Gomer Pyle. “Citizen’s Arrest, Citizen’s Arrest!” Sadly, both Barack and Neil were spectacular failures in their attempted impersonations.

Mr. Jednoralski is no stranger to high stakes political gamesmanship. He’s run for Kansas State Representative in the past–an obvious stepping stone position just before Crop Circle Prevention and Awareness Coordinator. But what particular crime was he taking it upon himself to arrest Obama for? Civil liberties trashing? Indiscriminate murder by drones? No. British and Indonesian Citizenship- fraud by virtue of pretending to be eligible to be president. Yep, it’s the season for that crap again. Mr. Jednoralski is a member of the Tea Party.

Why am I telling about this not even out of the ordinary incident? The town hall meetings of the past couple years had all manner of this nonsense. It’s all actually a little tedious, but this is why it holds my interest:

The similarity to Mayberry doesn’t end with the Citizen’s Arrest plan. (And no I’m not old enough to have seen Andy Griffith pre-rerun…youngsters go to YouTube to see what I mean, and check for Teddy Roosevelt out-takes while you’re there). Anyway, after Mr. Obama dusted the land with his fauxopulist lies and safely exited, Mr. Jednoralski was allowed to retrieve his handcuffs and……… his 4 guns. He had a genteel visit from Secret Service prior to the visit telling him not to show up. He got the drunk uncle at Thanksgiving treatment. Just put him in the easy chair and give him some pie. Go hide his car keys and hope he naps.

Contrast that with the treatment that the Occupiers have endured. “Get back your handcuffs and guns? Hell, we won’t even give you back your books, hippie. And what’s that? You want your tent back that you donated for a free first aid stand? I needed to shred that for cleanliness.”

This, along with folks languishing in jail (who can make bail) for misdemeanor offenses. They typically hold them just as long as they can to make a statement. I think you can guess what that statement is.

I’m not even arguing against the drunk Thanksgiving uncle treatment- it probably was the way to go with this guy. One reader commented after a story on Jednoralski that she looked him up, and he has a facebook page. Evidently he likes lolcats and wants a wife! He doesn’t sound terrifying, but if he’s got a nephew who sits on a sidewalk he’s not supposed to occupy….well, he’s got it coming right?

The Home Owner’s Association for the totality of humanity (the 1%) have been given all manner of firepower to get the damn kids off the lawn.

Much was made by the media, framing it “Occupy versus Teaparty” earlier this year. As fun as it is to picture that grudge match, maybe even both parties in Lucha libre suits, it’s just more prepackaged drivel. To claim any sort of balancing equivalence in regard to Occupy and the Teaparty is insane. Cauliflower versus Cigarettes! Vomit versus Cotton Candy!

And perhaps even more galling is the manner in which this works out for all the corrupt politicians. The Tea Party gets powerful, and their people push through deranged agendas, all with dripping acquiescence from the Democrats. And Obama again gets to look like the sane one-despite the sterile psychopathy of being the drone killing jokester. There is no Republican/Teaparty-Democrat/Occupy reality here. Poor Occupy is up against them all.

And presidential detractors get to appear as yokel fools. If you have a problem with the man in charge- well, this is the company you keep…. Neil and his handcuffs. Send ½ the country towards crazy and ½ to deluded; then walk away with the spoils.

I’ve made mention of the manner that Occupy protesters are tricked into walking on streets only to be brutally taken down by the militarized police forces. More than enough first hand reports and video have been coming in to prove that this is the case- yet other protesters like the Phelps clan (homophobic agenda cult) get time in front of the Supreme Court to ensure their rights are protected. Crazy drunken uncles get treated very well, indeed.

The take home note is this: the wackier you are, the more your needs are catered to— you hold no real threat to power. Your very existence “proves” what a free country this is.

This Mayberry treatment is the best example I can think of to illustrate the sheer corporate and political control of the Tea Party as well as proving the legitimacy of Occupy.

If there is any doubt which “protest” genuinely makes the powerful nervous, just remember that Neil Jednoralksi is comfortable at home with his cuffs at the ready. Oh and he likes lolcats and wants a wife, too.

Kathleen Peine writes out of the US Midwest and can be contacted at kathypeine@gmail.com

President Obama Can No Longer Be Trusted To Tell The Truth!

"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger." 
-- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials.

Hey Barack, don’t let that hopey-changey thing penetrate too deeply into that over inflated psyche of yours now that Egypt has turned the tide of change and hope honestly.

The Egyptians stole your slogan and actually acted upon it. Not like you who bastardized it. You have totally abandoned your message of hope and change that was so inspiringly delivered in the halls of Minnesota.

“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America. I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment that we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth.”

Was he kidding on that day back in 2008 as he spoke in St. Paul when he clinched the Democratic presidential nomination?

Then later, during his State of the Union speech, he said, “We’re the nation that put cars in the driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook. In America, innovation doesn’t just change our lives. It is how we make our living.”

Those points were true, but most of Americans are either working at low paying jobs, are underemployed, or unemployed, or working part-time, or filling the most recently hired 36,000 service worker jobs spread out around the nation. 36,000 is small potatoes Barack. Is this how we now make our living? Is this the real America, which contradicts the delusional America that you speak about?

The populist revolution that took hold from the ground up, with no leader to march them into the promised land, or through the gates of prosperity was done by oppressed citizens that lived under an autocracy supported by the United States. They did it one person at a time. It was the thousand monkey phenomena being fulfilled. They had patience and determination, as well as a will to win their fight.

I’m sorry Barack, it had nothing to do with your wishy-washy-wordy-thingy that you do. It had nothing to do with your “nicey”, orderly, and genuiney transitiony request of the Dictator from the Nile, Mr. 2011 Pharoah himself, and torturer-in-arms-with the USA, renditiony brother-in-arms that has more than likely disappeared.

This change was a people-thing! It was not done by overweight Cheez Curl eating, recliner sitting, reality t.v. watching sluggish, heart attack-in-waiting under-achieving, flag waving for Glenn Beck sub-literate thinking, and over ego believing American patriots; but, by a group of oppressed Arabs who, once and for all, had enough of the dictatorial, military protected bull-shit. A threshold had been reached, and the people stood with the many in the military, who decided that the best thing for the nation was to escort the Pharoah off of his throne.

From my perspective, I might view you as a Mubarak-lite, in spite of your reign being only 2.5 years long, and Hosni’s beginning during the Reagan period with his dictator loving Ring Around the Hosni and other cozy affairs with Middle Eastern, and Central American dictators.

President Obama believes that dictators deserve an “orderly and genuine transition” when moving the deck chairs all around a sinking Titanic Middle East. He does it here, too, from his Oval Office deck chair. The dictators in the U.S. come from the corporate board rooms, and the pompously decorated elite offices of CEOs, and CFOs of our corporate and financial oligarchs, and keptocrats.

It is singing Koombya  with such palsee-whalesee Tea Party loving Republicans holding their leach collared Democrats at their heels. Republicans love being the Dominatrix’ of the nation.

Having a democracy that serves the best interest of a sustainable society is NOT part of the plan of this American President--Get-hosedkne--Obama. The plan has been to further extend the LilboyBush presidency.

• We were lied into war and the war criminals are still free, writing books, giving lectures, and making appearances. No large scale investigation of the war, and its planning processes have been independently investigated by a body with legal authority.
• These two particular wars are draining the nation’s economic resources as they are funneled into the war profiteering machine. One reason the price of oil rises is because the US uses massive amounts of fuel and oil products in the war theaters, as well as during naval battle ship maneuvers, and on the number of bases the military has built around the global. This entire military conglomerate has drained the nation of what it requires to protect its citizens from starvation, freezing to death, illness, domestic jobs development and more.
• We continue to live under a state of emergency, which was declared, 10 years ago, under the rule of LilBoyBush. Living under such a state of emergency interferes with the flow of a free market, as was pointed out in Washington’s blog piece, “We Cannot Separate Economics and Politics. And Those Who Speak Out Against Bad Policy Are Helping The Economy, 2-8-11. These ongoing lies are destroying our free market, which is decreasing the value of our money, and investing more risky and precarious.
• We continue handing out basically free money to the bankstas who were responsible for the economic collapse, unemployment, and foreclosures, while the Fed mops up their Treasuries and toxic bonds. None of these bankstas have been forced to testify before a Grand Jury with legal authority, or at the least, expose and make transparent all of their toxic securities (MBS), and the number of foreclosed and abandoned homes that have been returned to them.

Obama SotU: “At stake right now is not who wins the next election -- after all, we just had an election. At stake is whether new jobs and industries take root in this country, or somewhere else. It's whether the hard work and industry of our people is rewarded.”

The new jobs and industries are growing in China, and elsewhere, allowing Walmart to become their supply chain into the US.

ObamaSotU: “Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing again.

Thanks to the tax cuts we passed, Americans' paychecks are a little bigger today. Every business can write off the full cost of new investments that they make this year. And these steps, taken by Democrats and Republicans, will grow the economy and add to the more than one million private sector jobs created last year.”

Yes Mr. Obama, Middle America has received little in their paychecks, while the elite have received millions more in their paychecks.

Obama SotU: “And now it's our turn. We know what it takes to compete for the jobs and industries of our time. We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.”

Why was the nation allowed to fall behind? Why did Congress and presidents allow the corporate elite to sell out and sell off our jobs in the first place?

Barack Obama is engaged in a full out assault against working people as did LilBoyBush. He has abandoned organized and unorganized labor. The organized laborers in Wisconsin are fighting for dear life to retain collective bargaining rights. We are seeing an organized effort by neo-liberals and Tea Bagging Shit-Throwing Republicans funded by labor-hating corporate “Royalists” to bring workers to their knees and become American serfs.

Obama has thrown these supporters under the bus. Be Afraid. Be Afraid people your Medicare, or Medicaid, or Social Security, or your pension are all the reasons why the nation continues to collapse economically. IT IS YOUR FAULT for wanting to save a little money and pay your bills and send your kids to college. IT IS YOUR FAULT for having trust and faith in the system that allowed the American corporation to grow so large that they could become multi-national in strength and power; and in doing so, have benefited hugely from the economic and political Nanny State created for them via laws, patent rules, trade laws, foreign worker exploitation, off-shoring, and tax hiding clauses in the law.

Here is what Dr. Dean Baker wrote in his piece titled Greenspan's Incompetence Badgers Wisconsin's Workers.

“[T]he number of jobs now stands at 7,700,000 below its pre-recession level. Furthermore, no one is projecting that this gap is about to be closed in the next several years.

There should be zero doubt: this downturn is the reason that Wisconsin has a budget crisis. Perhaps Wisconsin's leaders can be blamed for not recognizing that the economy was being managed by complete incompetents - and planning accordingly - but this is the story of the state budget crisis.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the economy is operating at more than 6.4 percentage points below its potential level of output. If Wisconsin's state economy was 6.4 percent larger, and its revenues increased accordingly, it would have more than $4 billion in additional revenue in its coffers over the next two years.

This increase in revenue would easily cover the projected deficit. This is even before we add in the savings from lower payouts for unemployment insurance and other benefits that would follow from a return to normal levels of unemployment. In short, there can be little dispute that Wisconsin's budget crisis is Alan Greenspan's work.

The allegations of the union bashers can easily be shown to be nonsense. Wisconsin's public sector workers are paid no more than their private sector counterparts. They tend to get somewhat better pensions and health care coverage, but this is offset by lower pay for comparably skilled workers. Nor has there been an explosion of public sector employment under the period in which Democrats governed the state [or most other states].

How does it change anything if we know that Greenspan (last seen being feted at the Brookings Institution) is the real villain in the Wisconsin budget crisis? First, it should turn the heat where it belongs: Washington.

The problem of the downturn is a lack of demand. A lack of demand is solved by spending money. We have to get our elected representatives to ignore the shrill whining of the Wall Street deficit hawks. We need sufficient stimulus from the public sector to overcome the falloff of more than $1.2 trillion in spending from the private sector that resulted from the collapse of the housing bubble.

If members of Congress are too intimidated to do what is needed to fix the economy, then Wisconsin's [and all other state] legislators should do what common sense dictates: follow the money. Rather than taking pay and benefits from schoolteachers and firefighters, it makes sense to take money from the people who have it. This means taxing Wisconsin's wealthy and its corporations. The tax increase only needs to be temporary, since the state budget should be fine once the economy recovers.

Of course the wealthy and the corporations will claim that they will leave the state and stop hiring, but these are not people who are known for their truthfulness. They are known for their money.

If these big winners in the downturn are forced to share more of their wealth until the economy recovers, then maybe they will put more pressure on Congress to support the sort of stimulus needed to get the economy back on track. This would be a real win-win for just about everyone.” 

In Washington’s Blog piece he brings up a very important point of view when examining the well-being of a political system. When our representatives, president, military, justice department, congress have broken the circle of trust they must deliver to its citizens, then our economy, our political system, and our social fabric can no longer maintain its integrity.

This is what was written: “Being able to trust people might seem like a pleasant luxury, but economists are starting to believe that it’s rather more important than that. Trust is about more than whether you can leave your house unlocked; it is responsible for the difference between the richest countries and the poorest.

Above all, trust enables people to do business with each other. Doing business is what creates wealth….Confidence is like the gasoline, without it the machine won’t move.

Trust is gone: there is no longer trust between counterparties in the financial system. Furthermore, confidence is at a low. Investors have lost their confidence in the ability of shares to provide decent returns (since they haven’t).

As trust declines, so does Americans’ willingness to invest their money in the financial system….Public distrust of bankers and financial markets has risen dramatically with the financial crisis. [The] loss of trust in the financial system played a critical role in the collapse of economic activity that followed. To undo the damage, financial regulation needs to focus on restoring that trust.

Dr. Baker went on to dispel the Be Afraid of Entitlements in his piece The President as Storyteller-in-Chief.

The center-right story centers on government excess: large budget deficits, overpaid public employees and bloated government social programs. Just as was the case with President Reagan's stories, these stories are not true.

The large budget deficits were an outcome of the crisis: Tax collections plummeted and spending on countercyclical programs like unemployment insurance rose. The deficits in the years preceding the crisis were actually relatively small when measured against the size of the economy.

[W]e have the story of out-of-control social programs. There are a number of programs focused on helping low-income people that even collectively don't amount to a hill of beans in terms of the total budget. We can stop paying for nutrition for poor children or buying heating oil for low-income seniors, but even zeroing out these programs entirely barely makes a dent in the budget.

Then we have the universal programs, like Social Security and Medicare. These programs cost a lot of money, but people are willing to pay for them. Furthermore, the story of exploding growth in these "entitlements" stems entirely from our broken health care system.

If per person health care costs in the United States were the same as in any other wealthy country, we would be looking at enormous budget surpluses, not deficits. Everyone in Washington knows this, but they are scared of the drug companies, the insurance companies, the doctors' lobbies and other powerful interest groups, so instead they push for cutting these essential programs.

In short, the center-right story's can easily be shown to be nonsense. However, President Obama has put up nothing to counter it. He has backed away from telling the public the truth: The country faces an enormous economic hole right now because the financial industry ran wild over the last decade and the Fed and other government regulators let them.

It would not be difficult to come up with salacious images of people like Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide or Robert Rubin of Citigroup living the good life, while tens of millions of people suffer unemployment and/or foreclosures because of the fallout from their greed. President Obama could also highlight the incredible incompetence of top economic officials like Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, who let the $8 trillion housing bubble grow unchecked.

This would provide a compelling and truthful narrative to focus the nation's attention. Polls consistently show that the public has an intense dislike of Wall Street. What better place to direct people's anger than on those who are actually responsible for the economic crisis?

However, President Obama has opted to go in a different direction. He has instead embraced the false narrative pushed by the center-right, actually implying the problem is somehow out-of-control government spending, as though the housing bubble was not the source of the economic crisis. This may endear him to the Wall Street crew, but this narrative is a disaster for those who care about putting people back to work, providing workers with a secure retirement, and protecting the gains that unions have helped to secure for workers in both the public and private sector.”

Unfortunately, the public’s trust in government as a whole, the justice system, bankers, and the corporate media are at all-time lows. Why? Because the government has been caught lying. The government repeatedly said about the subprime crisis, banking crisis, debt crisis, mortgage crisis, and other economic crises [are contained and under control. And, that our experts in government and in the Fed are going to fix it]. It wasn’t, and they didn’t…and so, the people have lost trust in the government.” (Washington’s blog piece noted.)

The piece went on to say that it isn’t just the economic crisis that has caused a breech of trust, but it goes deeper. There was a lack of honesty and truth surrounding 9/11: weapons of mass destruction, that it was unforeseeable; that government doesn’t spy on its own people; it doesn’t torture, or engage in rendition with dictators; the citizens haven’t seen honest and non-partial investigations around any of these overwhelming factors that impact our nation and the trust of our representatives.

Abusive financial practices have gone unchecked and the individuals responsible for them have actually been rewarded instead of prosecuted. “The public will need to hold the perpetrators of the economic disaster responsible, [and] will have to see proof that government and business leaders can behave responsibly before they will trust them again.” (Washingtonsblog.com)

Yet, today our president continues to surround himself with those who have been within the circle of those responsible for our financial disaster while he repeatedly wants us to believe that they can be trusted to repair a system that is collapsing from within.

Obama has said to us that his “mission has to be to accelerate hiring and accelerate growth.” How when tax cuts to the rich, two wars continue, outsourcing is the norm, and the bankstas have been recapitalized and the upper 10% have had a wealth resurrection? I don’t trust his words.

Obama has brought on even more banksta people. William Daley, the son of the late Mayor Daley of Chicago--one of the biggest mayoral machine-makers in history. William Daley, is now Obama’s Chief of Staff. He came from JPMorgan Chase, as a chief operational officer. His job was to push government away from regulation and reform, and he ignored the dangers that would eventually come from unbridled corporate power.

Professor Michael Hudson wrote in Obama’s New Chief of Staff Sought to Loosen Post-Enron Corporate Reforms, “It makes you pause when you see people who worked in the banks that caused the problems---people who lobbied for positions that would have done even greater damage to the economy---being recycled into government.” (Rheingold, Center for Public Integrity).

Daley pushed for Sarbanes-Oxley to be made more impotent, and hoped to see greater protections for corporate auditors by making it harder to sue or investigate them. He also worked inside the Clinton administration, therefore, is one of those Clintonestas who helped bring about NAFTA and other destructive worker policies we refer to as neo-liberal.

Even in 2007, he was against excessive oversight in the world of international markets, which doesn’t sound like he was supportive of domestic workers getting protections from these neo-liberal policies.

Daley also spent three years at SBC Communications, which acquired AT&T. And, “when White Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel called a top JPMorgan executive to ask for the bank’s support in creating a new consumer-protection agency, the executive---former Commerce Secretary [under Clinton] William Daley---said no, according [to as source].”

Other Clintonestas surrounding Obama are Gene Sperling, economic overseer, and budget director Jacob Lew.

When Americans see that President Obama works his hardest to hire those who were involved in practices that helped destroy our economic, which is not recovering for tens of millions of working and unemployed people, there is nothing else we can feel but that our trust has been killed. This is why many of us fully relate to the populist revolutionary movement choreographed by the Egyptian people, and which is now spreading to Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and all points global.

It is unlikely to happen here because too many are fattened up on Cheez Curls and to engrossed by fantasy television, while enjoying their self-loathing Social Security and Medicare checks.

President Obama has turned his back on real reform and the average working American and the retirees, who worked to make this nation great. He has turned to face the Rightwingers, Tea Partiers, and corporate oligarchs. There is no reason to trust a single word he speaks. The lame duck is now walking badly.

Thanks for reading, jerry

http://eye-on-washington.blogspot.com 

President Obama’s Christmas and New Year’s Greeting

Well, we have now put Christmas day behind us with new years approaching and our Obamadier had enjoyed his Christmas holiday with his family. Most Americans have been handed canned rations, while our president feasted upon the famous White House Christmas dinner served up by the White House cook and staff. How nice.

New Year’s celebrations will bring merriment and joy as The Obamadier toasts to the delusional optimistic fantasies that float about in his sugarplum brain. Chaos will likely be the legacy of 2011.

The past week has shown us that Barack Obama has been bitten by the rabid dogs of Congress, once more, certifying that he now has a full-blown case of rabies. Our president is a rabid Democrat who has been filled with the toxic venom of the Grotesquely Outrageous Psychopathetics-GOP-engaged in a planned demolition of the lives of many working Americans trying to keep from drowning in their pool of personal debt.

It is a sad day for a Democratic president, although it is in name only, and not by action, when a rabid GOP pundit, Charles Krauthammer, says that he has made centrist decisions of which he approves.  Mr. Krauthammer is a contributing editor of the Weekly Standard and has been proclaimed as the centrist voice for conservatives.

The joke is what counts for centrist in America today was considered radical rightwing around 30 plus years ago. But now, the right has moved so far right that they should be called the American Reichwing. Obamadier has leaped into the GOP’s regressive sliding scale of insanity and austerity-building programming on one end, and with an American style fascism on the other. So, where does centrism fit in?

This is the HOPE and CHANGE he has delivered to all of those who dedicated time and energy into electing him to the Office of President of the United States. It was a major con-job. It was an attack upon Democrats by The Obamadier, who has been praised by the likes of those who supported LilBoyBush and his introduction into an American-style fascism.

I have been saying this for 10 years, now, and little has changed. For nearly 20% of working Americans, it has gotten worse, throughout most or all of the states making up this union of American states by those Neoconclastics living among us.

Neoconclastics - I will define my new word as the deliberate destruction of the working class culture, which relies upon social safety nets, as well as, worker’s rights, environmental protections, local sovereign rights by community residents, and the overall protections amassed by average Americans and held up as democratic icons over the centuries. This planned destruction has been moved forward by plutocrats for the sole purpose of protecting and enriching the regressive elite corporate and greedy members within the government and society.

What is currently evolving is a movement by them to move the nation and the rights of citizens away from democracy.

Here is one example, as stated by Karl Denninger, in the piece called Recission Under Fire by the Fed (12-17-10, Market-ticker):

“Fraud…is a business practice. And protecting fraud is the primary function of The Fed:

Consumer groups and industry lawyers say a rule under consideration by the central bank would make it harder for borrowers to exercise their right of “rescission,” which forces a lender to relinquish a lien on a mortgaged property. They said the number of rescissions have grown in recent years as a result of the foreclosure crisis and allegations that mortgage documents were fabricated or processed improperly.

Ken Markison, regulatory counsel at the Mortgage Bankers Association, said the change would save lenders money. “Greater clarity will help avoid unnecessary litigation and reduce costs.”

Nowhere is the point made that the reason these “costs” show up is that the lender screwed the borrower in the first instance. What The Fed proposes to do is to force the principal repayment to happen before the lien is released. This effectively destroys the remedy, since without the ability to pledge the collateral for the new loan it will be impossible to obtain a new loan.” (End)

We have a Fed, and those who support the economic crime syndicate’s banker-Ben Bernanke- believing that the foreclosed-upon homeowner has no right to demand the fraudulent banksta prove he/she actually holds the mortgage paperwork!!

As Ben Bernanke says out loud to the mirror whenever he trims his beard, “We don’t need no stinkin’ paperwork!”

The Neoconclastics are hard at work to kill YOU!

The President [and his team] also chose to cover up the economic crimes. “Not only has the greatest wave of financial fraud in our history gone largely uninvestigated and unpunished, the government and this administration with its stress tests (which were fakes), its relaxation of accounting standards which permitted banks to hold toxic assets on their books at far higher prices than any investor would pay, with its failure to make criminal referrals where these were clearly warranted, with its continuation in office—sometimes in acting capacities—of some of the leading non-regulators of the earlier era, has continued an ongoing active complicity in financial fraud. And, the perpetrators, of course, prospered as never before: reporting profits that they would not have been able to report under honest accounting standards and converting tax payer support into bonuses; while at the same time cutting back savagely on loans to businesses and individuals, and ramping up foreclosures, much of that accomplished with forged documents and perjured affidavits.

Could the President and his administration have done something? Yes, they could have. Where was the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation? Why did they choose not to implement the law—the Prompt Corrective Action law—which requires the federal government to take into receivership financial institutions when there is a significant risk of large taxpayer losses to the insurance fund? Where were the FBI and the Department of Justice? Did the President do anything? No. Is he doing anything now? No. Why not? The most likely answer is that he did not want to.” (James K. Galbraith: Whose Side Is Obama On?, Alternet. Org, 12-10-10).

Yet, The Obamadier wants to demonize unions and public government employees who have representation through a union. He wants to finger wag at workers who have been severely damaged, economically, by those who he has given a Green-Light-GO—those inside and working for the economic crime syndicate. He has listened to the likes of Larry Summers, Timmie Geithner, Gensler, Rubin, Bernanke and others when they told him that it was all under control, so forgetaboutit!

Right.

‘It was all under control’ meaning that the criminals, fraudsters, shysters, bankstas, conartists whose pockets are filled with the free money handed out to them, are now under the Government Protection Program.

Here is what Paul Krugman said in his NYT piece, “Humbug Express”:

“If you listen to the recent speeches of Republican presidential hopefuls, you’ll find several of them talking at length about the harm done by unionized government workers, who have, they say, multiplied under the Obama administration. A recent example was an op-ed article by the outgoing Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, who declared that “thanks to President Obama,” government is the only booming sector in our economy: “Since January 2008” — silly me, I thought Mr. Obama wasn’t inaugurated until 2009 — “the private sector has lost nearly eight million jobs, while local, state and federal governments added 590,000.

Horrors! Except that according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, government employment has fallen, not risen, since January 2008. And since January 2009, when Mr. Obama actually did take office, government employment has fallen by more than 300,000 as hard-pressed state and local governments have been forced to lay off teachers, police officers, firefighters and other workers.

But anyone paying attention knew why public employment had risen — and it had nothing to do with Big Government. It was, instead, the fact that the federal government had to hire a lot of temporary workers to carry out the 2010 Census — workers who have almost all left the payroll now that the Census is done.

There has not, however, been any visible effort to retract those erroneous claims. And this isn’t the only case of a claimed huge expansion in government that turns out to be nothing of the kind. Have you heard the one about how there’s been an explosion in the number of federal regulators? Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute looked into the numbers behind that claim, and it turns out that almost all of those additional “regulators” work for the Department of Homeland Security, protecting us against terrorists.”

Mr. Obamadier has joined the ranks of the Neoconclastics who want to cut your Social Security but privatizing it and reducing benefits, cut Medicaid and Medicare, ie.- to kill you, outsource more of your jobs, steal your retirement, jack up the price of your health care, take more of your wages, and hijack your democracy!

The Obamadier scam continues. What is clear is that he, nor his TeamingWeenings want us to know the economy is failing. He claims that tax cuts for the rich are required to bring back jobs, when in fact, those tax cuts will be used to defeat liberal and progressive Democrats, and moderate Republicans in 2012. The tax cut for the rich will become a taxpayer funded subsidy campaign contribution for those running as Reichpublicans.

Who and what is responsible for the lousy economy? Robert Reich says this:

 “Story A: Big government, bureaucrats, and the cultural and intellectual elites that back them.” [This is the Republican and Obama tale of woe as they place blame on the easy marks.] “Story B: Big business, Wall Street, and the powerful and privileged who represent them.” [A more accurate account of the culprits.]

Reich continues by saying, “In reality, the lousy economy is due to insufficient demand—the result of the nation’s almost unprecedented concentration of income at the top. The very rich don’t spend as much of their income. And since the housing bubble burst, the middle class hasn’t had the buying power to keep the economy going. That concentration of income, in turn, is due to globalization and technological change—along with unprecedented campaign contributions and lobbying designed to make the rich even richer and do nothing to help average Americans, insider trading, and political bribery.

[Story] A is the story President Obama is telling, indirectly, through his deficit commission, his freeze on federal pay, his freeze on discretionary spending, and his wavering on extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich.

[Obama] “He’s telling story A. Making a big deal out of the deficit—appointing a deficit commission and letting them grandstand with a plan to cut $4 trillion out of the projected deficit over the next ten years--$3 of government spending for every $1 of tax increase—is telling story A. Announcing a two-year freeze on federal salaries—explaining that “I did not reach this decision easily—these are people’s lives”—is also telling story A. What the public hears is government bureaucrats are being paid too much, and that if we get the federal payroll under control we’ll all be better off. Proposing a freeze on non-discretionary (non-defense) spending is telling story A. So is signaling a willingness to extend the Bush tax cuts to the top.” And so, is [the likely appointment] of a Wall Streeter to be his top economic advisor another confirmation that story A is The Obamadier’s agenda? (Robert Reich, The Big Economic Story, and Why Obama Isn’t Telling It, 12-1-10).

And, if this isn’t enough for ya.

“Nine firms—five of them foreign—were able to borrow between $5.2 billion and $6.2 billion in U.S. government securities, which effectively act like cash on Wall Street, for four-week intervals while paying one-time fees that amount to the miniscule rate of 0.0078 percent. This was all done with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The program, called the Term Securities Lending Facility ensured that the firms had cash on hand to lend, invest, and trade.” (Shahien Nasiripour, Huffingtonpost, Money For Nothing: Wall Street Borrowed from Fed at 0.0078 Percent, 12-1-10).

Paul Krugman wrote, “Last week, reports Shahien Nasiripour of The Huffington Post, all the Republican members of the [Financial Crisis Inquiry] [C]ommission voted to exclude the following terms from the[ir] report: “deregulation”, “shadow banking”, “interconnection”, and, yes, “Wall Street”.”

He also stated, “This bubble was inflated by irresponsible lending, made possible both by bank deregulation and the failure to extend regulation to “shadow banks”, which weren’t covered by traditional regulation but nonetheless engaged in banking activities and created bank-type risks. It turned out that Wall Street had created a web of interconnection nobody understood…”

Krugman stated in his “Wall Street Whitewash” (NYT, 12-16-10), with quote:

“Last week, Spencer Bachus, the incoming G.O.P. chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, told The Birmingham News that “in Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.”

Now Reuters wrote that “The plan agreed to by President Barack Obama and Republican leaders last week could push up debt levels, increasing the likelihood of a negative outlook on the United States rating in the coming two years, the ratings agency said.”

Holy shit! A downgrade from A to Aaa could cause a serious blow to US Treasuries, which are barely paying anything at all, and wound what is considered to be the only safe security for many Americans.

Reuters also said that “After Obama announced his plan, Treasury prices fell sharply in volatile trade last week and yields have hit a six-month high, in part due to concerns over the effect the package will have on government debt levels. If the bill becomes law, it will "adversely affect the federal government budget deficit and debt level," Moody's said.”

The Obamadier appears to be listening to his Neoconclastic regressive henchmen who are out to behead the working class American. Is this his HOPE AND CHANGE?

If it were not for Jon Stewart, maybe the 9/11 responders would have ignored by the Reichpublicans, once again.

This Neoconclastic ideology is what took the economy down the rabbit hole, which will end up getting deeper for many Americans.

Such a plutocracy (those in political control of the state by an oligarchy of the wealthy) is filled with Regressive evildoers who have been elected by the American sub-literates, and who thus far haven’t realized that they are being dope-slapped and robbed by the very people they elected to represent them.

Happy New Year!

Thanks for reading, jerry

http://eye-on-washington.blogspot.com