The Other Nixon Legacy

The Nixon Library released another 265 hours of conversations Richard Nixon recorded during his presidency. What's interesting about these conversations is how they show the kind of progress we can make in 50 years, and how far we still have to go.

In those conversations, according to the New York Times article, Colson told Nixon he had always had "a little prejudice." Nixon responded that he himself wasn't prejudiced but that "I've just recognized that, you know, all people have certain traits."

In other words, Nixon prejudged people based on their ethnicity because "all people" have certain traits. One of the dictionary definitions of prejudice is "preconceived notion or opinion." So there's no question that anyone who makes broad assumptions about someone based on race or ethnicity is prejudiced in at least one sense of the word.

Another dictionary definition of prejudice is "an irrational attitude or hostility directed against an individual, a group, a race or their supposed characteristics." This is the one that Nixon thinks he is innocent of.

But in practice, one sort of prejudice makes the other sort possible. By buying into the idea that certain groups all share some trait, you automatically exclude a person from consideration for certain jobs solely based on their ethnicity. And the crazy thing is, especially in the US, almost no one can claim any one ethnicity -- my ancestors came from at least five different countries and pretty much everyone here can say that.

Most of the headlines echo the New York Times: "In Tapes, Nixon Rails about Jews and Blacks." But Nixon was bigoted all around. From the Times:

“The Jews have certain traits,” he said. “The Irish have certain — for example, the Irish can’t drink. What you always have to remember with the Irish is they get mean. Virtually every Irish I’ve known gets mean when he drinks. Particularly the real Irish.”

Nixon continued: “The Italians, of course, those people course don’t have their heads screwed on tight. They are wonderful people, but,” and his voice trailed off.

Paradoxically, this is a ray of light.

Nixon was obviously prejudiced in all senses of the word against pretty much everyone. At the time of these conversations people were becoming what the right loves to call "politically correct" about racism. But 10 years earlier Nixon's ethnic slurs would not have raised any eyebrows.

The headlines on this story trumpet Nixon's prejudice against Jews and blacks, but relegate his racism against the Italians and the Irish to minor talking points that burnish Nixon's racist credentials. These days Nixon's anti-Irish and anti-Italian prejudices seem silly, nonsensical and almost quaint.

The most damning thing in the Nixon story was this (from the Times):

At another point, in a long and wandering conversation with Rose Mary Woods, his personal secretary, that veered from whom to invite to a state dinner to whether Ms. Woods should get her hair done, Nixon offered sharp skepticism at the views of William P. Rogers, his secretary of state, about the future of black Africans.

“Bill Rogers has got — to his credit it’s a decent feeling — but somewhat sort of a blind spot on the black thing because he’s been in New York,” Nixon said. “He says well, ‘They are coming along, and that after all they are going to strengthen our country in the end because they are strong physically and some of them are smart.’ So forth and so on.

“My own view is I think he’s right if you’re talking in terms of 500 years,” he said. “I think it’s wrong if you’re talking in terms of 50 years. What has to happen is they have to be, frankly, inbred. And, you just, that’s the only thing that’s going to do it, Rose.”

It's taken less than 40 years for a black man to attain the highest office in the land, not 500. But, some will argue, Nixon was right after all: Obama is the son of a Kenyan and a white American. He had been "inbred."

No, Nixon was just racist and wrong. Colin Powell would have been able to run for president and win. I don't think Powell has the stomach for the crap you have to put up with to get elected (I don't see how anyone can stand it). But he has the ability to lead and he had the trust of the American people until he was caught up in the Bush administration's lies on Iraq. And he was serving in Nixon's military at the time Nixon made his pernicious remarks!

And, yeah, Powell too had been "inbred." But that's the point. Everyone in this country has been thrown into the melting pot. It doesn't take 500 years for this to happen: it only takes the time for racist bigots to die out and the artificial barriers that separate us to fall away and allow us to treat each other as equals.

In the next 50 years we'll likely see the last vestiges of racism against American blacks die out, and the anti-gay hysteria disappear completely. As groups assimilate prejudice eventually evaporates (new prejudices may form as new out-groups arrive, but that's life).

This question of assimilation seems to be the bone of contention for a lot of people on the right today. They aren't prejudiced, they insist, but it's not right that Mexican Americans "refuse" to learn English or that American Muslim women wear veils or that Somali Americans eat weird food. These people demand assimilation instantly, but they miss the lessons of history.

Assimilation doesn't happen in a day. Japanese, Chinese, Irish, Italian, Norwegian and German immigrants spoke their native languages.

But their kids assimilated and now all their descendants speak English and wear jeans and eat hamburgers and French fries. And we eat Kung Pao chicken and sushi and beef burritos.

The wrong way to force assimilation was what happened to many American Indians -- kids were taken from their parents, stripped of their clothing and their names and forced to learn English.

If you want to hire someone you don't criticize their clothes, what they eat and how they talk. It's the same thing with assimilating recent immigrants into our society. To encourage assimilation and remove racial tension we need to accept people for what they are. We can't insist they change instantly -- it's not possible. The adults will never change, because adults can't. But their kids -- their kids will be 100% American if we don't alienate them.

Like the generations of Swedes, Frenchmen, Russians, Poles, Czechs who came to this country, these new kids will forget their parents' native tongues, throw away their veils, and stop eating weird food. Their parents will bemoan the loss, but hey -- that's life in America. If we make the American way of life attractive and inviting the kids will be helpless to resist The Borg of American popular society.

At the same time we may get something new in the process. Like pizza: the staple of American life.

Son of Trying Again

Getting back to how the organizations that run the derivatives market fuck people over...

The clearinghouses that run the inner circle of the derivatives market are very exclusive. As the article details, banks try get into to the club only to be rebuffed for "having too little capital." But that's not the real reason.

“We are not a nobody,” said Sanjay Kannambadi, chief executive of BNY Mellon Clearing, a subsidiary created to get into the business. “But we don’t qualify. We certainly think that’s kind of crazy.”

The real reason the bank is being shut out, he said, is that rivals want to preserve their profit margins, and they are the ones who helped write the membership rules.

Mr. Kannambadi said Bank of New York’s clients asked it to enter the derivatives business because they believe they are being charged too much by big banks. Its entry could lower fees. Others that have yet to gain full entry to the derivatives trading club are the State Street Corporation, and small brokerage firms like MF Global and Newedge.

Preserve their profit margins...exactly what I have been saying all along. And these committees, not the government, write the rules. Great. Please let's continue to have more shit and paranoia blamed on the government so these assholes can continue to rip people off.

So is there a way to quantify all of this? No. Why?

The precise amount that banks make trading derivatives isn’t known, but there is anecdotal evidence of their profitability. Former bank traders who spoke on condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements with their former employers said their banks typically earned $25,000 for providing $25 million of insurance against the risk that a corporation might default on its debt via the swaps market. These traders turn over millions of dollars in these trades every day, and credit default swaps are just one of many kinds of derivatives.

The secrecy surrounding derivatives trading is a key factor enabling banks to make such large profits.

Super! So nothing at all has changed since 2008. Ah well, let's just say it's all the fault of the government and move on. These guys running these clearinghouses are all rugged individualists simply reaping the benefits of a free market. We need to leave them alone because it's clear that their market is perfectly competitive. The government just needs to get out of the way and watch the economy take off. Except, how can it when these people ARE TAKING ALL OF THE MONEY!

Since I know some of you aren't getting this yet, here's another way to look at it.

And the profits on most derivatives are masked. In most cases, buyers are told only what they have to pay for the derivative contract, say $25 million. That amount is more than the seller gets, but how much more — $5,000, $25,000 or $50,000 more — is unknown. That’s because the seller also is told only the amount he will receive. The difference between the two is the bank’s fee and profit. So, the bigger the difference, the better for the bank — and the worse for the customers.

It would be like a real estate agent selling a house, but the buyer knowing only what he paid and the seller knowing only what he received. The agent would pocket the difference as his fee, rather than disclose it. Moreover, only the real estate agent — and neither buyer nor seller — would have easy access to the prices paid recently for other homes on the same block.

Wow, that's fantastic. And this is perfectly OK with 30 to 40 million of you?

But listen, I can feel many of you still digging in your heels as you always do and refusing to accept these facts. Let's keep going because I know your knee is jerking to that ol' classic, "Let Loose the Market (And Watch It Take Off)."

Mr. Griffin said last week that customers have so far paid the price for not yet having electronic trading. He puts the toll, by a rough estimate, in the tens of billions of dollars, saying that electronic trading would remove much of this “economic rent the dealers enjoy from a market that is so opaque.”

Tens of billions. Staggering. So where is the government again? Oh, that's right...neutered in the corner by Tea Party hysteria.

Under the Dodd-Frank bill, the clearinghouses were given broad authority. The risk committees there will help decide what prices will be charged for clearing trades, on top of fees banks collect for matching buyers and sellers, and how much money customers must put up as collateral to cover potential losses.

There is so much anti-government fervor out there that conservative Democrats, feeble minded wankers that they are, are succumbing to zillions of falsehood riddled with paranoia. People like Bernie Sanders and Sherrod Brown are painted as Nazis...choking the "poor and helpless" derivatives market out of their money and giving it to a lazy, lower class useful idiot with a flat screen. The more we fail to recognize that men like Sanders and Feingold are our last line of defense, the more our country decays.

Basically, what we are doing is blowing up our air force on the eve of a major aerial conflict because a little over a third of our country is afraid of flying.

Trying Again

I've put up a fair amount of information regarding the shift of wealth in this country and how, unless you are very wealthy, you are being screwed over by the top two percent in this country. This will continue to happen as long as we have somewhere between 30 and 40 million people in our country who have a pathological hatred of government.

It's pretty clear to me that it's going to take a long time to convince some of you. More than likely I never will. Because even after all the information I have put up here, I still get questions like this.

Do you have some way of quantifying the gouging that you are talking about?

When I answer a question like this with figures and commentary (by myself and others), they dismiss it all as illogical and the sources as biased...ironically falling into the genetic fallacy trap of which I am so often accused. An example of this was a challenge that was recently issued to demonstrate a counterpoint to a recent study which showed the stimulus and TARP programs to be successful. I have to see such a model.

Still, the questions persist.

Ripped off HOW? How does someone else getting richer rip me, or you, off?

Trying again...

A Secretive Banking Elite Rules Derivatives Trading
Clubby Clearinghouses Limit Competition and Consumers Face Higher Prices.

The banks in this group, which is affiliated with a new derivatives clearinghouse, have fought to block other banks from entering the market, and they are also trying to thwart efforts to make full information on prices and fees freely available.

Banks’ influence over this market, and over clearinghouses like the one this select group advises, has costly implications for businesses large and small, like Dan Singer’s home heating-oil company in Westchester County, north of New York City.

This fall, many of Mr. Singer’s customers purchased fixed-rate plans to lock in winter heating oil at around $3 a gallon. While that price was above the prevailing $2.80 a gallon then, the contracts will protect homeowners if bitterly cold weather pushes the price higher.

But Mr. Singer wonders if his company, Robison Oil, should be getting a better deal. He uses derivatives like swaps and options to create his fixed plans. But he has no idea how much lower his prices — and his customers’ prices — could be, he says, because banks don’t disclose fees associated with the derivatives.

“At the end of the day, I don’t know if I got a fair price, or what they’re charging me,” Mr. Singer said.

Seems pretty straight forward to me. Any of you getting it now? Or we going to fall back into the "winning the argument-want him to fail-never be wrong" pathology again?

See, this is what happens when you don't have enough regulation. People are gouged out of money and purposefully left in the dark. Do they have any other choice? If you think they do, call Mr. Singer and tell him. Let me know how the conversation goes.

The marketplace as it functions now “adds up to higher costs to all Americans,” said Gary Gensler, the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates most derivatives. More oversight of the banks in this market is needed, he said.

Sorry, Gary, but that's not going to happen any time soon. People think that government is the problem. Until they ditch their pathology, banks are going to continue these practices.

But, hey, what about the financial overhaul bill?

Under the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul, many derivatives will be traded via such clearinghouses. Mr. Gensler wants to lessen banks’ control over these new institutions. But Republican lawmakers, many of whom received large campaign contributions from bankers who want to influence how the derivatives rules are written, say they plan to push back against much of the coming reform. On Thursday, the commission canceled a vote over a proposal to make prices more transparent, raising speculation that Mr. Gensler did not have enough support from his fellow commissioners.

Excuse me, but doesn't the GOP want to support guys like Dan Singer? I guess they would rather support the banks.

“When you limit participation in the governance of an entity to a few like-minded institutions or individuals who have an interest in keeping competitors out, you have the potential for bad things to happen. It’s antitrust 101,” said Robert E. Litan, who helped oversee the Justice Department’s Nasdaq investigation as deputy assistant attorney general and is now a fellow at the Kauffman Foundation. “The history of derivatives trading is it has grown up as a very concentrated industry, and old habits are hard to break.”

And I'm the one that gets ripped for not having any depth, economically speaking.

But how exactly do these clearinghouses keep people out? And why is that relevant? More on that tomorrow.

Collapse

Take a look at these two photos. On the top is what the Metrodome, home of the Minnesota Vikings, is supposed to look like. On the bottom is what it looks like this morning after 16 inches of snow have been dumped on it.

I can't help but think of the Dome as a metaphor this morning for the Democrats...super inflated and pumped up after the 2008 election...completely collapsed and deflated after a mountain of bullshit has been heaped upon them.

To me, the snow represents how the "minority" party can be effective if that party has a relentless, well financed engine of propaganda behind it. 30 percent approval rating or less? No problem. Let's get Rush, Glenn and Sarah on it. Problem solved. Democrats have nothing like this. Perhaps it's simply not in their nature. More likely is the fact that they don't have irrational fear combined with paranoia about the government on their side. Whatever the reason, the Democrats have caved to so many things in the last week that this image of the snow heaped Dome is honestly perfect.

For the next two years, they need to heed the advice of the unnamed Holocaust survivor. "When someone says they want to kill you, believe them." I know I'm going to heed it. Quite literally, lives are at stake as is the future of this country.

And I'm not going to sit around and watch aimlessly as pathological ideologues destroy it.

WTF Has Obama Done?

Signed the Christopher and Dana Reeve Paralysis Act, the first piece of comprehensive legislation aimed at improving the lives of Americans living with paralysis.

One of the main reasons why I am a Democrat is because they seem to understand (in giant leaps and bounds) that helping people is a good thing. And that it's OK when the government does it. Apparently, the only "help" that the government is allowed to do in GOP Land is related to guns and blowing things up. Certainly, I have no problem with this if the situation presents itself where that is necessary but their mindset seems awfully narrow.

Surprise, surprise...

So Obvious

Fox News has been the talk of town of late. Check out this video of Hannity.



What I love about this one is how he doesn't actually say that Scott is wrong. Just another fine example of shamelessly playing to the bigots in the base. Check out this photo (left) of Scott. Could he BE any more obvious?

A leaked document from Fox News managing editor Bill Sammon also has the Internet buzzing. I have no idea why. Are there people out there that are still surprised by the fact that Fox News manipulates language in order to sway people to think a certain way?

Here is the memo.

1) Please use the term "government-run health insurance" or, when brevity is a concern, "government option," whenever possible.

2) When it is necessary to use the term "public option" (which is, after all, firmly ensconced in the nation's lexicon), use the qualifier "so-called," as in "the so-called public option."

3) Here's another way to phrase it: "The public option, which is the government-run plan."

4) When newsmakers and sources use the term "public option" in our stories, there's not a lot we can do about it, since quotes are of course sacrosanct.

Yeah, and? Why is this a shocking revelation? I suppose it is very interesting to see how Fox uses the word "government" and how insistent they are that is mentioned a great deal. Since we have been discussing this recently, I thought at least worthy of a note. This is yet another fine example of how marketing manipulates people into acting against their self interest. The word "government" is a code word specifically used to control thought.

In many ways, it's a trigger word (see: The Manchurian Candidate) used to activate somewhere between 30-40 million Americans. Clearly, it's very successful.

Hell, they don't need to kill anyone anymore. When you have that many people so nicely controlled, who needs assassins?

Fuck You

I'm not usually this blunt with titles in my posts but that is my message for the GOP today and its supporters. Fuck you. Fuck you and your single minded pathology that desires all Democrats to fail regardless of the human consequence.

Senate Republicans today blocked a procedural vote to take a straight up and down vote on health care compensation for 9/11 workers. I guess the people that dug body parts out of the rubble and got really sick as a result of all the environmental hazards need to pull themselves up by their boot straps and get their own fucking health care, right? How are these people any different than our troops? The (phony) gripe by the GOP is that it the price tag is too much (7.4 billion dollars) and they are worried how to pay for it.

How about the tax breaks you just gave to Thurston Howell? Assholes.

I'm trying really hard to see their side of it, being the reflective guy I am, but they have about as much of a "side" as the Selma police had in the 50s and 60s. NONE.

Click here for a list of the douchebags who hypocritically beat people with the flag but then do nothing about it.

Deal With It

A couple of months back, as part of continuing education, I participated in a two day seminar titled "Beyond Diversity." For the most part, I consider myself to be a racially sensitive person but I quickly found out how many things I take for granted every day. For example, see any Band Aids at Target or elsewhere that are NOT white flesh colored (other than the cute kiddie ones)? How about hair care products that are made for the type of hair that black people have? These might seem like minor things but this is our culture. For the time being, anyway, it is a white dominated culture and that's a problem. The evidence is in the numbers but I'll get to that in a moment.

If these examples don't convince you, ask someone you know that is black if, when they teach their children how to drive, if they also teach them how not to get shot by a police officer (regardless of said officer's skin color). Every parent in the seminar, who had children of driving age, taught their kids where to put their hands, how to talk to the officer, and how, because they were black, they had to be more careful than white drivers. Since I knew that the people at the seminar were probably very tuned in to race issues, I decided to ask every black person I see regularly if they had children of driving age or older and if they taught them in the same manner.

Every single one said the same thing as the folks at the seminar.

Whether we want to admit it or not, we still have racial issues in this country. More importantly we have four basic areas of denial or avoidance that are illustrated beautifully in comments on this blog nearly every day. Before I detail what they are, however, I want to make one thing very clear. There is one reason and one reason alone why I am talking about this: The Achievement Gap.

The achievement gap has long been documented between whites and blacks and is numerical evidence that our culture is still white dominated. Even today, we see the same problems we have seen for decades.

“There’s accumulating evidence that there are racial differences in what kids experience before the first day of kindergarten,” said Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard. “They have to do with a lot of sociological and historical forces. In order to address those, we have to be able to have conversations that people are unwilling to have.”

Conversations people are unwilling to have....so true...especially here.

But how does this unwillingness that Ferguson mentions manifest itself? Through the following four areas

1. Ignorance. We see two different types here: unconsciousness (I don' t know what I don't know) and Dys-Consciousness (I don't know but I think I do). The former describes myself when I learned about the band aid colors. The latter describes someone who would say "I'm not racist. I have a Black friend." Something else to avoid here is, when discussing issues of race, don't make your black friend a spokesperson. "Well, he's black-let's ask him?" essentially says that all black people think alike because of their race.

2. Denial. This describes some of my readers. Many of you bitch that "it's all over now-why can't the blacks just get past it?" Or "we've already had this discussion." To answer the first question, because of the achievement gap and to answer the second, it's not good enough because of the achievement gap. Face the numbers. Deal with it.

Another element of denial is something else we see all the time: Blaming the Victim. There are great examples of it in comments all the time. I'm certain we will see several after this post. If Bill accuses Hank of being prejudiced or participating in discrimination, somehow (as if by magic, see: out of someone's ass) Bill is the problem, not Hank. "He brings it on himself" is the phrase we hear most commonly.

3. Redefinition. Another area in which several of my readers reside. "It's only a few people" or "It's in human nature. There's nothing I can do about it." I've said the latter myself and I was most assuredly wrong to do so. We also here people say that it's not race but behavior...which is actually prejudiced if you think about it. So, if they are black, they behave a certain way?

4. Counteratttack/Competing Victimizations. This is the area in which most of the right wing pundits reside. The obsession with the wise Latina remark by Sonia Sotomayor is a great example of this. The New Black Panther voting "story" is another. Simply mention that someone is prejudiced on any right wing blog and watch this area unfold in all its glory as well as both of these comments. You'll see them faster than flies screaming to shit.

In looking at these four stages of avoidance, it is quite clear that they all exacerbate the problem. Folks, we need to start having these conversations and not fall into any of these stages because the numbers don't lie. As long as we, as a culture, continue to fail black people, the issue of race is going to continue to come up and the wheel of perpetuity keeps on spinning like wheels in a good, old fashioned Minnesota snow storm. The word "racist" will be heard over and over again. I know many of you don't like it when it does.

So, you don't like it when the issue of race comes up and it makes your head hurt? Fine. Work on fixing the achievement gap which starts with a conversation. Face the problem and deal with it rather than being a dick about it.

After all, it's honestly in your self interest if you think about it.

Brought to you by McDonald's

Tonight is McDonald's night at my children's school. Know what that means? It means that the McDonald's in our neighborhood will donate 20 percent of all its earnings this evening to our school's PTO. I talk a lot on here about the incorporation of our country and this is one fine (shitty) example. Any of you know why our education system REALLY sucks? It's because of crap like this. Let's market to a bunch of kids and use our little carrot of money to an already underfunded entity in our country and draw them in like flies to shit.

Further, we have an enormous (pun intended) problem with obesity in this country and McDonald's is part of the problem, not a solution. Even worse than that, it's just another example of how our children are brainwashed into believing that everything is sponsored by something. Success means private corporation...especially if an athlete or movie star is associated with it. Learning? That's boring! Someday I'll make it rich and be like _____ because _____ Inc. says I will if I buy their product. As an instructor, I don't have millions of dollars to throw into a PR campaign. They do.

Sadly, they win every time.

So, the next time any of you want to whine about liberals destroying our schools, why don't you stop and think about shit like this? What's destroying our schools is our materialistic and indulgent culture...brought you by McDonald's!

And your seemingly never ending support and worship of private corporations.

A Chronic Lack

The fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans these days is one very simple core belief: the middle class drives our economy. Either you believe this or you don't. If you don't, you live on Fantasy Island. There are less people spending less money so we are stagnate and unemployment remains high. It's really quite simple when you think about it. The solution of most on the right (libertarian, conservative, whatever) is to give the rich more money whether it's through tax breaks or charity vis a vis corporate welfare or Tea Party "grass roots" organizations (© The Koch Brothers).

Many of our nation's companies have already accepted this new normal. Remember the Citigroup document? This is but one example of hard evidence that the middle class is all but gone. So, when will those of you in the middle class wake up and realize that you are the solution to our economic woes? More importantly, when will you see that there is one party that is decidedly against that solution and one that is trying to realize it?

Robert Reich, the Secretary of Labor under President Clinton, wrote a brilliant piece last week on Sarah Palin and the angry middle class. I won't comment on his thoughts on Ms. Palin. That's not allowed, of course, because I'm "obsessed." You can add that rule to the lexicon of BIG NO-NOS in our little Lewis Carroll looking glass prism of unreality. You know which one I'm talking about, right? The one where all criticisms of George W. Bush are manifestations of psychosis and ignorance, denial, redefination, and counterattack/competing victimizations are perfectly normal when discussing race.

Instead, I'm going to talk about the other stuff he put in his column, regarding the middle class, which was far more insightful. Case in point...

The anxiety began three decades ago when the median male wage that had been rising for three decades began to stagnate. Families responded by sending wives and mothers into the paid workforce, working longer hours, and then, finally, going deep into debt.

Three decades ago? Hmm...who has been saying that lately? Me.

So, why is the middle class (and many of you) so angry?

According to the right-wing narrative, the calamity that's befallen the middle class is due to the cultural and intellectual elites who run the mainstream media and direct the government, dispense benefits to the undeserving (immigrants and poor blacks), advocate multiculturalism, and dominate popular culture (supporting abortion and gay marriage).

Remember Alinksy's last interview in Playboy? He saw all this coming in 1972.

The right would give them scapegoats for their misery -- blacks, hippies, Communists -- and if it wins, this country will become the first totalitarian state with a national anthem celebrating "the land of the free and the home of the brave." But we're not going to abandon the field to them without a long, hard fight -- a fight I think we're going to win. Because we'll show the middle class their real enemies: the corporate power elite that runs and ruins the country -- the true beneficiaries of Nixon's so-called economic reforms. And when they swing their sights on that target, the sh-- will really hit the fan.

Alinsky died that year and clearly his battle was lost. Many in the middle class--many of YOU--have accepted the right's narrative, as defined by Reich, as gospel.

So, if we can get past this lie, what is the real problem? Reich knows.

In reality, the bad economy is likely to continue for most Americans beyond seven years -- maybe for 10 or more -- because of a chronic lack of aggregate demand. So much income and wealth have now concentrated at the top that the broad middle and working class no longer has the buying power to get the economy going again.

Folks, this is the one and only reason why I am as upset as I am. It's not because I'm envious of those who have more money than me. I'm not 10 years old for crying out loud. It's because I am so enormously frustrated at those who can't accept this simple fact that Reich has so eloquently summarized. The working class of this country has no buying power any longer. They are being gouged out of every dime they have by people who DO NOT NEED THE MONEY. Until this changes, our economy is going to suck. Big time. In order for that to change, the wealthy are going to have to alter their lifestyles.

The real problem lies in our economic structure: the yawning gap between Wall Street and Main Street, the incentives operating on large corporations to pare American payrolls and expand abroad, and the demand for short-term profits over better jobs and wages for most Americans.

In "Inside Job," former Fed Chair Paul Volker calls Wall Street CEO salaries "excessive." No shit. They are quite literally ruining this country's economy.

So, what should we do?

The real solution lies in changing that structure: making taxes more progressive, investing in education and infrastructure, and having a national economic strategy for good jobs and wages.

In other words, the platform of the Democratic Party. The three ideas listed here are anathema to any conservative or libertarian even though they have been proven to work in the past, time and again. They worked for FDR. They worked for Harry Truman. They worked for Dwight Eisenhower (a pinko Commie by the standard set by today's right with his 9o percent tax rate). They worked for Jack Kennedy. All of these men had a progressive tax platform, invested in education and infrastructure, and had sound economic strategies for good jobs and wages. Even Bill Clinton had this in the beginning and then he began to succumb to the lure of that ol' siren song of deregulation and look where that led us.

I understand that many of you are control freaks who can't admit when you are wrong but you are completely in error about this one. Worse, by not supporting these very clear solutions, you are exacerbating the problem. Why this leads to more bile and mouth foaming heaped at me and the Democrats is beyond me. Is it hubris? Adolescent power fantasies? I guess I'm really not certain.

But if you look at history, this sort of blindness produces a kind of state that I know that none of you want. So, get with the fucking program, pull your heads out of your asses, and start supporting solutions. Even if you have to admit that you are wrong and that someone else with a different perspective might know what's in your self interest.

People like me do this every day. It's called reflection.

And it's what saves civilizations.

Not White

I was cleaning out the game shelf and saw this card game that my kids play with from time to time. It's basically a deck of cards with all the famous Bible characters on it. Since I haven't done a religion post in a while and it is Sunday today, I thought we'd take a look at one particular card.

Check out the one of Jesus Christ.

First of all, what up with the sandy blond beard and brown hair? Weird. And I love the idyllic setting..quite child like...and that's just why I put it up here. For many ADULT Americans, this is how they view Jesus...through the eyes of an eight year old.

Let's start with one basic and simple fact. Prepare yourself for this one, folks. I know it will come as quite a shock for all of you.

(Mark lowers his voice to soft whisper)

Jesus was not white.

And he did not look like Duane Allman.

In fact, Jesus probably looked at lot more like this.

Minus the gray hairs because he died when he was in his early 30s. And the extra chub.

I can't help but wonder how this simple fact would completely fuck up so many people if Christ ever does return. He lived in the Middle East so he basically "looked like a terrorist." So, does that mean if he were praying on a plane people would get nervous? More importantly, how much prejudice and discrimination would he encounter? Oh, that's right. None. There are no racists in this country except for Sonia Sotomayor.

The real problem here as well as an eternal frustration for me is how many people believe silly fairy tales like the Duane Allman Jesus. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, though, because many of these same people believe that they wealthy of this country are going to magically save the country through self regulation and tax cuts that pay for themselves.

I suppose it makes it simpler for them to see have this sanitary and simple image of Christ but wouldn't God, as we do with our own children, want us to become as intelligent, mature, and successful as possible? Maybe he might want us to take the time and research what kind of man Christ really was and why did and said the things he did...y'know, deal with the complexities of historical and geographical context and all.

The word complexity, though, seems to be sneered at in our country today. We cheer idiocy and intelligence is viewed as being sacrilegious or (gasp!) elitist. Why do we have the perpetual need to pursue the uninformed child inside of all of us when what we should really be doing is pursuing the self actualized adult? I guess I'm holding out hope that some day we can give up fairy tales like this one and move on to a higher level of spirituality. I can start small.

Let's take up a notch over Dora The Explorer, hmm?

WTF Has Obama Done?

Eliminated subsidies to private lender middlemen student loans and protect student borrowers.

This one is in my top five. And, yes, it was in the health care bill.

Way to go, Mr. President!

The Konstitutional Klub

Apparently...and I'm still recovering from pulling several stomach muscles laughing my ass off...Michele Bachmann is organizing classes on the US Constitution. As you swallow the small amount of vomit in your mouth, you should probably know that Bachmann is doing this for all the incoming Congressional freshmen just to make sure that they understand what it "really" means.

She's brought together a faculty that is mighty impressive, I must say. On staff will be Sean Hannity, Andrew Napolitano (the only one who is actually qualified) and David Barton, a Christian evangelist who has called the separation of church and state a "myth."

I hope they release an online version of the class or perhaps there's some way I can get a look at the curriculum. I'm sure it will be more of the same beating of the Constitutional club over the head in order to further a tragically warped belief system but, I have to admit, I'm too curious. For example, how are they going to address the issue of slavery? Or the formation of the national bank? Taxes? Interstate Commerce? Borrowing money on the credit of the United States?

I suppose I (sadly) already know the answer.

WTF Has Obama Done?

As John McHypocrite yells at the very officials he said we would listen to on DADT, today's WTF is dedicated to him and his pandering to the homophobes of the base.

Appointed More Openly Gay Officials Than Any Other President In US History.

OMG! The anti-colonial Kenyan (© Newt Gingrich) is letting the fags run roughshod over us. Hide the kids!

The Blindness of Rage

A friend of mine put this quote up as his Facebook status the other day.

“It is easier to find people fit to govern themselves than people fit to govern others.” Lord Acton

This friend of mine is of the right leaning bend and I asked him if he knew anything about Lord Acton, in particular, his letter to General Lee at the end of the Civil War. He did not but just liked the quote because he, like many conservatives/libertarians, get their jollies out of using the government as a punching bag.

Lord Acton was a forefather of the libertarian movement in the 19th century. A British politician, historian and writer, he wrote to Lee after the South surrendered, commenting that Lee was "fighting battles for our liberty, our progress, and our civilization." My friend had no answer to this question. Let's see if any of you do.

Do states rights over a "tyrannical" government trump the actual, physical rights of human beings?

The problem we get into here is that people who think like Lord Acton (see: several of my commenters) think that only the laws they like apply to them. The ones they don't like are a product of "tyranny." This is usually the point where the Constitution comes out as baseball bat to beat people over the head. Kindly ignore the myriad of points in our nation's history where things that weren't in the Constitution (and should've been) were made into laws or put in later because THEY MADE SENSE.

One thing that I have really notice lately is the arrogance of the comments of my libertarian/conservative/whatever readers. Their anaphylactic reaction to someone who humbly suggests "It is in your best interest to _____" is nauseating.

But that's what adolescent power fantasies perpetuated by the the likes of Lord Acton, Ayn Rand, and the Cato Institute will get you...the blindness of rage. Because the simple fact is that everyone wants to govern themselves. Sorry, you don't get to...:(

From Reagan's nine scary words to Palin's death panels, a great number of incredibly moronic people now believe that the gubmint is a comin' to gin 'em...with the actual culprits laughing all the way to the bank.

Two Guys That Know Nothing

There are times when I marvel at the arrogance of my commenters. I don't profess to be an expert on the economy. In fact, I'm not sure anyone is....except the usual cast of characters that comment here...in their minds. For example, when I say that TARP and the stimulus saved the economy, they say I'm an idiot. And a socialist. When I say that it saved jobs, same thing. When I say it helped GDP, same thing. Why? Because I don't think like them...libertarianese, I guess.

More than likely, it's because I don't agree with them which is a mammoth sin when you operate in a world where everyone is never wrong and has to win the argument every single time. I'm certain, however, that I'm in good company.

I guess Mr. Zandi and Mr. Blinder are also idiots. And socialists. And fascists. Let's just ignore the fact that they are both fully qualified economists and focus on the common trait they share with myself: they think that the government can help the economy. They think it DID in this case. And they have the proof to back it up. Further, it helped prevent a worldwide financial collapse.

Zandi and Blinder offer the first comprehensive estimate of our full response to the crisis: Absent the financial rescue and the stimulus, "GDP in 2010 would be about 6 ½ percent lower, payroll employment would be less by some 8 ½ million jobs, and the nation would now be experiencing deflation."

Notice the part I bolded. AND THE STIMULUS. More importantly, they (and me) are issuing all of you naysayers a challenge.

Different models do give different answers. That's why we say we welcome others to try and estimate this. But you can't make anything come out that you want. These models are fitted to real data. They're not just made up. They describe how the U.S. economy worked in the past.

Making anything come out that you want...say, if you have the same idea (cut taxes for the rich, cut corporate taxes, deregulate blah blah blah) over and over again on how to fix the economy?

So, by all means, let's see your model, folks. I welcome you to try.

Oh, and don't forget to come up with some solutions going forward as both Zandi and Blinder have.

Blinder: I would do two things, both aimed at jobs. I would do the so-called new jobs tax credit on a much bigger and better scale than the HIRE Act, which was a baby step. The second thing I would do is a WPA-like program of temporary, direct, public hiring. People could work in parks, in maintenance, the many paper-shuffling jobs there are in government. You could save a lot of state and local jobs that would otherwise be terminated.

Zandi: If the unemployment rate was peaking at 7 percent, I'd say no worries, no need for more stimulus. But I'm nervous about 9.5 percent unemployment when you have a zero percent interest rate and a huge deficit. If we're all wrong and we go into recession, we've got no policy response. So I think it's prudent to err on the side of doing too much rather than too little. And we can do that. We're not Greece or Britain or Germany. We have a 3 percent 10-year Treasury yield. We have always solved our fiscal problems, and the world has faith we will solve our future ones. So we have the resources.

I've been saying pretty much the same thing all along. I guess all three of us are idiots, though. Anyone is who thinks the government is the solution, right?

The Report Is In

The military has released its report on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and, as expected, has determined that having gay and lesbians serve openly in the military carries a very low risk. And, as expected, the Republicans in the Senate are against it.

Back in the election of 2008, John McCain was asked if he would support DADT and he said he would "if the generals said it was OK." Of course, this was before the GOP had to lick the boots of the homophobes in their base in order to win elections. Now Senator McCain has backed away from this and is against it....even though his own wife and daughter support the change! WTF??!!

Actually, the answer to this, once again, is THEY WANT HIM TO FAIL. The GOP knows that if President Obama is successful at doing anything, it will energize the base and sway independents back his way which is all he pretty much needs to win in 2012. It doesn't matter that the repeal of DADT has the support of the majority of the country. In fact, that's precisely why the GOP is trying to sabotage it. If it passes, people will be happy with the president and they don't want that.

The truly sad part about all of this is the number of good men and women we have lost over the years, who would help defend our nation, because of this policy. In so many ways, the GOP, who laughingly prides itself on standing firm on the defense of this nation is, is purposefully sabotaging our nation's security with this and the START treaty dithering. Why again?

"The single most important thing we can achieve is for President Obama to be a one term president" ----Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

The Annual Argument

At least once I year I go to my father's house for Thanksgiving or Christmas and we have an argument. This year it started when he start crowing proudly about the signs he had put on the highway in front of his house. It was a quote attributed to Barack Obama from 2006, "We are no longer a Christian nation."

Of course, every time my dad says something like this he gets it off the Internet. It turns out that this quote is pulled from a longer speech, and it's the result of Obama making a mistake reading the speech. The original speech read, "We are no longer just a Christian nation." When delivered, Obama misspoke, saying, "We are no longer a Christian nation -- at least, not just." (See FactCheck.org for the details.) The gist of Obama's remarks is that America is no longer a nation of Christians alone, but of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, and so on. And there's not just one brand of Christianity: there are Catholics, Baptists, Mormons, Evangelicals -- some of whom have more vehement disagreements among themselves than they have with Muslims or Jews.

The reality is that the United States has never been a Christian nation. England is a Christian nation-- the queen is the official head of the Anglican church -- and the Puritans fled Christian England because of religious persecution. The Constitution doesn't mention god at all. The Declaration of Independence speaks of "Laws of Nature and Nature's God" -- which sounds more like some kind of Druidical naturist deity -- and that men are "endowed by their Creator" with inalienable rights.

There is no mention of Christ, and a subsequent amendment forbids the establishment of an official state religion. The founders were deists and many were Christians, to be sure, but the whole point of coming here was to escape the religious tyranny of Europe.

So, not knowing at the time that he was selectively quoting Obama, I took the bait and asked, "Since when do you care about Christianity?"

No one ever talks about it, but from what I understand, when my dad was a teenager he and his mother were in an a sanitarium for a time with tuberculosis. This was before antibiotics were in use. They eventually left and my dad turned out to be fine, but his mother was dying. Ultimately she committed suicide rather than suffer a horrible death. In the standard fashion everyone told him that God had taken her and that she was in a better place, but he had seen first hand what torture she had been through. He was bitter, came to hate God, never attended church and wanted nothing to do with religion. I can sympathize completely.

Fast forward twenty years. A Jehovah's Witness comes to the door of our house, talks to my mom, gets her to study the bible. After a while she starts talking about not celebrating birthdays or Christmas, says that the bible disallows blood transfusions and certain . . . private practices. This is too much for my dad. After a thorough search for the right church (he went down the block from his office) he got biblical arguments from a pastor. My parents had numerous knock-down drag-out arguments about religion right in front of me. In the end my dad won, because of various admonitions in the bible for wives to be submissive to their husbands: he turned my mother's religion against her.

After that my dad went to church sporadically and after a while stopped completely. When one of my sisters was married at the Church he had convinced my mother to join (the one next to his office) he refused to go because my other sister -- the one who had married a Hispanic guy from Texas -- was in attendance. Hence, my question: "Since when do you care about Christianity?"

Acknowledging my point, he says, "I'd rather have Christianity than Muslims. They're a vicious, violent people. In Saudi Arabia they stone adulterers and cut off the hands of thieves. They killed all those people on 9/11. They're animals." And he proceeds to talk about how there are three billion Muslims and what a danger they are. I'm not sure why the number three billion is important -- that would be almost half the world's population, which he is apparently advocating going to war with. (According to various sources, there are about 1.5 billion Muslims and 2.1 billion Christians.)

So I ask him who was responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing, the bombing at the Olympics in Atlanta (he'd forgotten about that one), various abortion clinic bombings in the US, the assassination of American abortion doctors (one in a church!), the IRA bombings in England, the burning, drowning and crushing of witches in Salem and Europe, the Crusades, and so on. He brushes that all off, saying only some Christians do that, and it was a long time ago. When I point out that harsh punishments aren't meted out in most Muslim countries for minor crimes -- Turkey, Indonesia, Egypt, Iraq (before we invaded), etc., etc. -- he looks puzzled. Apparently this wasn't in the script from the Internet. Turkey doesn't even have the death penalty.

The rant then becomes general, about losing the United States to foreigners, bemoaning the fact that half the kids in California are Mexican. He complains that kids can't even fly the American flag anymore. I'd never heard of this. My brother-in-law explains that a principal in California sent some kids with American flags on their t-shirt home. Looking at the Fox News report on the incident, it appears the principal told the kids to go home on Cinco de Mayo because he suspected their wearing the American flag on their shirts was an attempt to start a fight with Mexican kids by disrespecting their "day." (I think the principal was out of line, but can understand the action: wearing the flag like gang colors is not patriotism, it's thuggery. The kids were not punished and free to wear American flags on other days, according to an NBC affiliate.)

Then he goes into full rant mode. The illegal immigrants should have no rights. They're stealing jobs from Americans. They're destroying our way of life. They have everything given to them. "Filthy jobs like picking tomatoes that Americans won't do because they pay too little?" I ask. "Aren't the people paying the illegals just as guilty as the illegals, if not more so?" But somehow he just shrugs that off.

"In a poll 58% of the American people said they are against illegal immigration," he says. "I'm one of them," I answer. But he doesn't hear me. "This is supposed to be a democracy, and Obama's not doing anything about illegals." In fact, Obama has been doing more about it than Bush ever did -- more arrests, more punishments of employers, etc. But my dad pays no heed to all that.

Then he says, "I think we should shoot them when the cross the border. They're committing a crime." I ask him if really means this, and he says he'd do it himself.

So now we come full circle. Muslims are monstrous animals because they amputate the hands of thieves and stone adulterers. Yet my dad has no problem shooting someone in cold blood who's just trying to find a better life and feed their kids doing grunt field work for almost no pay that no one else in the United States is willing to do.

And it's not just my dad who's demanding death if he doesn't get what he wants. Conservatives threaten civil war if they don't get certain electoral and legislative results. What, you ask? When did they do that? Republicans in both Alaska and Texas have talked about secession over and over. And of course, secession from the Union is simply not possible, and will certainly cause civil war.

Conservatives uniformly favor the death penalty, and expanding the crimes that are covered by it, and rolling back appeals in capital cases. Conservatives like Palin are always bragging about hunting and killing animals. Hunting isn't wrong, and I don't oppose it -- but it's certainly more violent than not hunting. Conservatives are always trying to expand the presence of guns in everyday society. They support laws allowing people to freely shoot trespassers. The conservative answer to violence appears to be the threat of more violence.

And then my brother-in-law chimes in, saying that the only problem with nuking the whole Middle East is that we'd have a hard time getting the oil out. (The same brother-in-law who had to explain his "Obama trap" joke to his mother. You know, the piece of watermelon under a box propped up with a stick.)

And then there are the calls to nuke Iran from Cheney and regime change in North Korea from McCain, and, well, you get the picture.

American conservatives who are constantly advocating violence in all its high and low forms have no moral high ground when they complain about Muslims being a violent people.

So I ask my dad why he thinks Muslims hate us. He has absolutely no idea. It's obvious he's never considered it for even a second. I tell him that bin Laden started his jihad because of the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War.

Just like my dad thinks that Muslims and Mexicans are destroying the American way of life, the Muslim terrorists in Pakistan, Yemen and Saudi Arabia believe we are destroying their very way of life. We are invading their countries -- Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Kuwait -- even more overtly than Mexicans are invading our country by attacking and stationing troops there. We are perverting their culture -- spreading English, Christianity, loose morals, obscene dress, money lending -- just like Mexicans and Muslims are speaking Spanish and Arabic and building mosques in America. Mexicans are stealing American jobs, Americans are stealing Muslim oil.

Conservatives in the Middle East are upset about societal change and foreign influence, and they advocate violence to stop it. Conservatives in the United States are their mirror images, taking the bait that their counterparts in the Middle East are throwing them.

We really need to take into account the sentiments of people in other countries when we interact with them. I'm not saying that we should kowtow to terrorists. But there's very rarely only one solution to any given problem. In retrospect it was obviously a bad idea to leave troops in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War -- the parallels to the Crusades are just too stark. We wound up taking our troops out of there in 2003 anyway. Important lessons can be learned here with Iraq and Afghanistan.

Radicalized Muslims are intentionally inciting conflict with the United States. They want us to lump all Muslims together and attack Muslims in general so that they can claim they were right all along about the "crusaders" trying to destroy Islam. When American conservatives advocate violence against all Muslims and turn our conflict with a few Muslim terrorists into a broadside against all Islam, the terrorists win.

WTF Has Obama Done?

Have to get back on track with this one...

SIGNED A NEW START TREATY WITH THE RUSSIANS

Of course, it hasn't been ratified yet by the Senate because...why again? Oh yeah, the GOP wants him to fail.

Epic. Success.

I'm quite sad to report to all my libertarian and conservative friends that the government takeover and restructuring of General Motors has been a whopping success. Shares surged in their debut on November 18, 2010. As of today, they are trading at 33.80. This is a much bolder offering than was originally thought possible. In addition, it has allowed GM to trim the government's stake from 61 percent to 26 percent-much faster than expected.

There were many predictions of doom/gloom coupled with the usual boiling pit of sewage rhetoric but none of that has happened. Rest assured, though, I won't be holding my breath that any of my right leaning commenters are going to admit that they were wrong. In the final analysis, it doesn't really matter. What had to be done was done and, like many actions that the Obama administration has taken, success was the result.

See what can be accomplished when one doesn't have anaphylactic reactions to government?