Author’s Note: Values and Principles is yet another chapter missing from my presentation of Namaste: If Not Now, When? I decided to include it last night after watching the disturbing, if not surprising, audience reaction at the Tea Party/GOP debate to a series of questions CNN correspondent Wolf Blitzer asked candidate Ron Paul regarding whether an uninsured 30-year-old man, who could afford but did not buy medical insurance, hospitalized in a coma from traumatic injuries suffered during an accident should be allowed to die without medical intervention to save his life. Several people in the audience shouted out “Yes,” and the audience erupted into loud cheering interrupting Mr. Paul’s response. This incident followed an incident a week earlier in the first debate at the Reagan Library when the audience erupted into wild cheering during the lead-in to a question by Brian Williams of NBC directed to Texas Governor Rick Perry when Williams mentioned that the State of Texas had executed 234 people during his terms in office. After the cheering subsided, he completed the question asking Perry if he had trouble sleeping at night worrying about whether one of them might have been innocent. “No, sir. Not at all,” Perry said.

Cameron Todd Willingham was convicted and sentenced to death for setting the fire that burned down his house killing his three children to collect the insurance on the basis of an unqualified expert who testified that the fire was an arson caused by an accelerant. An independent and highly qualified expert reviewed the forensic evidence years later and concluded that the state’s expert was mistaken, there was no accelerant, and the fire was an accident. The report was presented to Governor Perry before the execution in an effort to spare Mr. Willingham’s life. Nevertheless, Governor Perry did not stay the execution and the State of Texas executed Mr. Willingham.

The Texas Forensic Science Commission conducted an independent review of Mr. Willingham’s case and retained another nationally recognized arson expert, Craig Beyler, who agreed with the independent expert. He specifically concluded that there was no credible scientific basis for the conclusion that arson had been committed.

Governor Perry intervened and ended the commission’s investigation before Beyler testified.

The following definition from Wikipedia is relevant to a comprehensive understanding of the information in the chapter:

Kleptocracy: alternatively cleptocracy or kleptarchy, from Greek: κλέπτης (thieve) and κράτος (rule), is a term applied to a government that takes advantage of governmental corruption to extend the personal wealth and political power of government officials and the ruling class (collectively, kleptocrats), via the embezzlement of state funds at the expense of the wider population, sometimes without even the pretense of honest service. The term means “rule by thieves”. Not an “official” form of government (such as democracy, republic, monarchy, theocracy) the term is a pejorative for governments perceived to have a particularly severe and systemic problem with the selfish misappropriation of public funds by those in power. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleptocracy)

As always, previous chapters of Namaste: If Not Now, When? can be found in my Diaries or at my blog.

Values and Principles

Without values and principles we are nothing. Beneath the personalities that we develop and wear like a suit of clothes when we go out in public and the manner in which we perceive the environment around us and express ourselves, our values and principles are the invisible structure that defines who and what we are and informs our lives with meaning and purpose. We begin to develop them early in childhood and, as adults, we are known and will be remembered for our acts and omissions, which were an expression of our values and principles. They will be our legacy and those who are into accumulating money, toys, and power are destined to create a legacy of dust in an barren room.

Values and principles are important to me and I would never sacrifice them for any reason. I believe in speaking the truth, treating everyone with dignity and respect, following the Golden Rule, and being of service to others.

I have saved many lives without seeking anything in return.

My immortal soul is important to me and I would never sell out.

Although inconvenient to be without, money never has mattered to me and I do not like to accumulate stuff.

I have given away everything of value that I owned.

All of my current possessions came out of dumpsters, except my rusty and faded 15-year-old rebuilt pickup truck that I got out of a junkyard.

Most of my food comes out of dumpsters.

Nevertheless, I am happy and consider myself rich beyond measure.

I pity a man like Barack Obama, who has no values or principles, except accumulating wealth and power. He so transparently is for sale to the highest bidder. In his case that is the Kleptocracy that stands behind the curtain and tells him what to do.

Who are the Kleptocrats?

They are the too big to fail (TBTF) high flying Wall Street bankers who call themselves the Masters of the Universe (MOTU) and the über rich who own corporate America and the military industrial complex (MIC). Seeking world hegemony and control of all the world’s natural resources and influenced by neoliberals Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman and the neoconservative Leo Straus, all of whom who taught at the University of Chicago, the Kleptocrats have an insatiable craving for wealth and power and they are willing to tell any lie and do anything to get what they want.

They may call themselves neoliberals or neoconservatives, Republicans or Democrats, but they really only care about playing their dark games exploiting people and natural resources to accumulate wealth and power.

They see themselves as beyond the reach of the law and they instigate never-ending war to steal what they want while manipulating people with myths and archetypes using propaganda to justify what they do.

They steal taxpayer money by giving it away to pay-to-play private contractors with no-bid, no-cap, cost-plus contracts with no expectation that the contract will be completed or the money accounted for.

They are deliberately destroying the middle class in the United States, the labor unions, public education, and the safety net to plunge everyone except themselves into debt slavery in order to exploit them as a source of cheap labor at home and warm bodies to discard in war.

They own the mainstream media and they manipulate it to hide what they are doing by demonizing progressives, teachers, labor unions, Muslims, illegal immigrants, and anyone with dark skin.

I regard Barack Obama and the Kleptocrats who own him as lost souls.

They have doomed themselves to spiritually empty and lonely lives perpetually servicing a runaway addiction to money and power that can never be satisfied.

Although they may own many palatial mansions in exotic locations filled with expensive ornaments, they are little more than plush prisons surrounded by high walls and protected by security guards.

They may own expensive vehicles, yachts, and jet planes, but they dare not go anywhere without a security detail.

They may be surrounded by people, but they are alone because people like them for their money, not for whom they are. Even their families may seem like ghosts with open empty mouths and pale outstretched hands waiting for them to die.

Do the Kleptocrats know or care how many lives have they stained, ruined, and extinguished?

How can they stand the emptiness of their lives?

Better to love and be loved. Be grateful that you are not like them because their days are numbered and no one will mourn their passing.

Cross Posted at my blog and the Smirking Chimp.

Namaste: If Not Now, When? Is my intellectual property. I retain full rights to my own work. You may copy it and share it with others, but only if you credit me as the author. You may not sell or offer to sell it for any form of consideration. I retain full rights to publication.

Masoninblue

Burning Down The House: Dynamite Live Performance By The Talking Heads

Author’s Note: This is another missing chapter from Namaste: If Not Now, When? I apologize for the length of this chapter as it is somewhat longer than the previous chapters presented. I decided not to break it into 2 parts as it is a complicated subject and I did not want to disturb the flow and continuity. Thanks to all for reading. I welcome comments.

Previous chapters can be found here in my Diaries or at my blog.

Barack Obama is a horrible president whose policies evidence idolatry for the filthy rich, loathing and contempt for the poor, and unqualified support for outright criminal predation toward the middle class. On those rare occasions that he uses the presidential bully pulpit, he uses it for so-called “hippie punching” to attack, insult, and marginalize socially progressive democrats who dare question his authority and the wisdom of his decisions. Difficult to imagine a worse set of undesirable qualities in a president during a time of great financial upset.

There is no evidence that he has any empathy or desire to assist people who are suffering through the Main Street Great Depression. For example, his response to the real estate forfeiture crisis, or Forfeiture Gate, is an excellent example of his stubborn and pervasive unwillingness to help people whom banks defrauded.

In September 2004, the FBI began warning about an “epidemic” of control frauds in real estate mortgages initiated by lenders. A “control fraud” occurs when someone who controls an apparently legitimate business, such as a bank, uses the business as a means to commit fraud.

As William K. Black, an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri in Kansas City and the former Senior Regulator in charge of investigating the Savings and Loan fiasco during the Reagan administration explains, control fraud epidemics typically occur when financial deregulation, desupervision, and perverse compensation systems create a “criminogenic environment.” After reviewing the real estate forfeiture mess, he concluded in a piece that he wrote for the Huffington Post, dated February 25, 2009:

(1) the FBI accurately described mortgage fraud as “epidemic;”

(2) nonprime lenders are overwhelmingly responsible for the epidemic;

(3) the fraud was so endemic that it would have been easy to spot if anyone looked;

(4) the lenders, the banks that created nonprime derivatives, the rating agencies, and the buyers all operated on a “don’t ask; don’t tell” policy;

(5) willful blindness was essential to originate, sell, pool and resell the loans;

(6) willful blindness was the pretext for not posting loss reserves;

(7) both forms of blindness made high (fictional) profits certain when the bubble was expanding rapidly and massive (real) losses certain when it collapsed;

(8) the worse the nonprime loan quality the higher the fees and interest rates, and the faster the growth in nonprime lending and pooling the greater the immediate fictional profits and (eventual) real losses;

(9) the greater the destruction of wealth, the greater the (fictional) profits, bonuses, and stock appreciation;

(10) many of the big banks are deeply insolvent due to severe credit losses;

(11) those big banks and Treasury don’t know how insolvent they are because they didn’t even have the loan files; and

(12) a “stress test” can’t remedy the banks’ problem – they do not have the loan files.

Charles Ferguson, the documentary filmmaker who produced No End in Sight, about the never ending mismanaged war in Iraq, also produced Inside Job, which details how the financial collapse that began in 2008 was caused by the criminal greed of the global financial elite empowered by government deregulation and the viral spread of rapacious neoliberal free-market ideology. These billionaire Masters of the Universe, or the MOTU, do not believe in right or wrong. They only believe in making money. For example, in an interview by Andrew O’Hehir of Salon.com, Ferguson said,

When I started making the film I knew that there had to have been some bad behavior, but I had no idea that on a very large scale people had designed securities with the intention of selling them and gambling on their failure. I was stunned when I discovered it.

* * *

If there’s a place in the world where you can make a billion dollars by being a criminal, that place is going to attract criminals. And if you have a system that is appropriately regulated so the only way that you can make money is by doing something worthwhile, you are not going to attract criminals to run that industry.

We now have a situation where the way that you can make the most money is by doing criminal things. And you get away with it. You can even destroy your own company. In some cases, destroying your company is the way that you make the most money. And that’s bad. Personally, from the experience of researching and making this film, I think that legal controls on the structure of executive compensation are a very important part of fixing this.

By the way, from the experience of starting my software company, I can tell you that people in high technology are extremely aware of this. I dealt with the venture capital firm that invested in my company and they were extremely clear. They said: You’re going to get a salary. It’s going to be $100,000 a year. It’s never going to go up. You will never get a bonus. You will have no outside activities of any kind. You will not make a dime doing anything else. Your stock will vest over five years. And if you want to make money, you make that stock worth something. Period. It’s really simple.

The real estate foreclosure crisis is a desperate effort by the insolvent TBTF banks, which Professor Black calls systemically dangerous institutions, or SDIs, to avoid liability for fraudulently selling worthless mortgage backed securities (MBSs) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) to institutional investors. Criticizing the Obama administration’s decision not to reign in the TBTF/SDI banks as “insane, he says,

The administration may be proposing no new laws to make the oligarchs even bigger, but it (1) has encouraged their growth through acquisitions of failed banks and (2) stood silent and useless as many of the SDIs have continued to grow. It is insane to allow the SDIs to continue to exist and it is doubly insane to allow, much less encourage, them to grow.

In what I can only describe as knowingly and intentionally aiding and abetting the biggest criminal bank fraud ever perpetrated, the Obama administration and the Congress successfully convinced the professional Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to rewrite long standing accounting rules allowing the banks and the Federal Reserve, which has taken over a trillion dollars in toxic mortgages as wholly inadequate collateral, to refuse to recognize hundreds of billions of dollars of losses.

According to William Black and Randall L. Wray, the FASB’s new rule produces enormous fictional “income”and “capital” at the banks. The fictional income produces real bonuses to the CEOs that make them even wealthier. The fictional bank capital allows the regulators to evade their statutory duties under the Prompt Corrective Action (PCA) law to close the insolvent and failing banks.

The inflated asset values allow the Fed and the administration to ignore the Fed’s massive loss exposure and allow Treasury to spread propaganda claiming that TARP resolved all the problems — at virtually no cost. Donovan claims that we have held the elite frauds accountable — but we have done the opposite. We have made the CEOs of the largest financial firms — typically already among the 500 wealthiest Americans — even wealthier. We have rewarded fraud, incompetence, and venality by our most powerful elites.

If the government does not hold the fraudulent CEOs responsible, who is supposed to stop the epidemic of elite financial fraud? The Obama administration’s answer is the fraudulent CEOs themselves, at a time of their choosing. You can’t make this stuff up.

The banks and the Obama administration accuse the borrowers of misrepresenting their assets and borrowing more money than they could afford to pay back. Under this scenario, the banks are the victims and they are entitled to forfeit the homes and kick the deadbeat borrowers into the street with all of their stuff. Black and Wray destroy this argument.

That homeowners would default on the nonprime mortgages was a foregone conclusion throughout the industry — indeed, it was the desired outcome. This was something the lending side knew, but which few on the borrowing side could have realized.

The homeowners were typically fraudulently induced by the lenders and the lenders' agents (the loan brokers) to enter into nonprime mortgages. The lenders knew the "loan to value" (LTV) ratios and income to debt ratios that they wanted the borrower to (appear to) meet in order to make it possible for the lender to sell the nonprime loan at a premium. LTV can be gimmicked by inflating the appraisal. The debt to income ratios can be gimmicked by inflating income. "Liar's" loan lenders used that loan format because it allowed the lender to simultaneously loan to a vast number of borrowers that could not repay their home loans, at a premium yield, while making it look to the purchaser of the loan that it was relatively low risk. Liar's loans maximized the lender's reported income, which maximized the CEO's compensation.

The problem is that only the most sophisticated nonprime borrowers (the speculators who bought six homes) (1) knew the key ratios they had to appear to meet, (2) had the ability to induce an appraiser to inflate substantially the reported market value of the home, and (3) knew how to create false financial information that was internally consistent and credible. The solution was for the lender and the lender's agents to (1) instruct the borrower to report a certain income or even to fill out the application with false information, (2) suborn an appraiser to provide the necessary inflated market value, and (3) create fraudulent financial information that had at least minimal coherence.

When the overburdened homeowner began missing payments, late fees and higher interest rates kicked-in, boosting the stated income of mortgage servicers and the value of the securities. Not coincidentally, the biggest banks own the servicers and could maximize claims against the mortgages by running up the late fees. It was quite convenient to "misplace" mortgage payments, so even homeowners who were never delinquent could get hit with fees and higher rates. And when payments were received, the servicers would (illegally) apply them first to the late fees, meaning the homeowners were unknowingly still missing mortgage payments. The foreclosure process itself generates big fees for the SDI banks.

And, miracle of miracles, the banks would end up with the homes and get to restart the whole process again — from resale of the home through the financing, securitizing, and fee-for-servicing juggernaut.

Unfortunately, it did not go quite as smoothly as planned. The SDIs were supposed to act like neutron bombs — killing the homeowners but leaving the homes standing, to be resold. The problem is that wiping out borrowers lowered the value of real estate, crushing not only the real estate market but also construction and through to all associated sectors from furniture and home restoration supplies to big ticket purchases that rely on home equity loans. It also led to questions about the value of the securitized toxic waste manufactured and held directly or indirectly by financial institutions.

Next, a few judges began to question the foreclosures, as they saw case after case in which the banks claimed to have lost the paperwork or submitted amateurishly forged documents. Or, several banks would go after the same homeowner, each claiming to hold the same mortgage (Bear sold the same mortgage over and over). Insiders began to offer depositions exposing fraud and perjury. It became apparent that in many and perhaps most cases, the trusts responsible for the securities (often these are "special purpose" subsidiaries of the banks) never received the "notes" signed by the borrowers — as required by both IRS tax code and by 45 of the US states. Without the notes, billions of dollars of back taxes could be due, and the foreclosures violate state law. Finally, the Attorneys General of all fifty states called for a foreclosure moratorium.

I cannot imagine a stronger issue for a populist president to seize and use to turn his fortunes around as well as those of his party, but not Barack Obama.

He sided with the criminal banks and added insult to injury with his worthless Home Affordable Mortgage Program, or HAMP that cruelly raised financially struggling homeowner’s hopes while setting them up to miss mortgage payments by telling them to miss a payment so that they would qualify for the program and then inventing reasons to extend the application process and finally rejecting them at about the same time that the banks initiated the fraudulent foreclosure process with forged documents. So many people have been burned that hardly anyone applies to enter the program anymore. Only $12 billion out of the $65 billion authorized by Congress for the program has been spent.

Why it is almost as if the president is a full fledged member of the MOTU conspiracy to steal people’s homes. Either that or he is dumber than a box of rocks. I believe all of us can agree that he is not the latter.

Namaste

If Not Now, When?

Cross Posted at my blog and the Smirking Chimp

Author’s Note: Each chapter of this book can be read as a stand-alone and it is not necessary that they be read in numerical order. All of the previous chapters are posted here in my Diaries or at my blog.

I welcome comments and will respond as time allows. Thanks for reading.

Chapter 25

Neoconservatism Is Also A Cancer

Neoconservative, or neocon is an aggressive political philosophy based on notions of American exceptionalism and manifest destiny that supports using modern American economic and military power to assert global hegemony in the name of bringing democracy, and human rights to other countries. Early neoconservatives, such as Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D) of Washington State, were former liberals who believed liberalism had failed and no longer meant anything.

Over time, neoconservatism developed into a philosophy that supports using United States economic and military power in the name of democracy to establish a world empire that seizes and guarantees continuing long term corporate access to diminishing precious natural resources, primarily oil and gas.

Leo Straus, a political science professor at the University of Chicago from 1949 to 1969, taught and significantly influenced many neoconservatives. Straus taught that society should be led by a group of elite vanguards, whose job is to protect liberal society against the dangers of excessive individualism, and create inspiring myths to make the masses believe that they are fighting against anti-democratic and anti-liberal forces.

Irving Kristol first used the term neoconservative to describe his political views in 1979 followed by Norman Podhoretz several years later. William Kristol, Irving Kristol’s son, founded the Project for the New American Century. Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Richard Perle, Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Cheney, and George W. Bush are well known neoconservatives.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama may not describe themselves as neoconservatives, but they certainly speak and act as though they are.

The PNAC released a Statement of Principles on June 3, 1997, endorsed by its members and a variety of other notable conservative politicians and journalists. The statement began by framing a series of questions, which the rest of the document proposed to answer:

As the 20th century draws to a close, the United States stands as the world’s pre-eminent power. Having led the West to victory in the Cold War, America faces an opportunity and a challenge:

Does the United States have the vision to build upon the achievements of past decades?

Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests?

The answers:

1. We need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future;

2. We need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values;

3. We need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad; [and]

4. We need to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.

In September 2000, the PNAC published a controversial 90-page report entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For a New Century, in which it stated:

The American peace has proven itself peaceful, stable, and durable. It has, over the past decade, provided the geopolitical framework for widespread economic growth and the spread of American principles of liberty and democracy. Yet no moment in international politics can be frozen in time; even a global Pax Americana will not preserve itself.

To preserve this Pax Americana,

[What we require is] a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States’ global responsibilities. Of course, the United States must be prudent in how it exercises its power. But we cannot safely avoid the responsibilities of global leadership of the costs that are associated with its exercise. America has a vital role in maintaining peace and security in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. If we shirk our responsibilities, we invite challenges to our fundamental interests. The history of the 20th century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire. The history of the past century should have taught us to embrace the cause of American leadership.

Most troubling of all was Section V, entitled Creating Tomorrow’s Dominant Force, that included the following sentence:

Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor

The events of 9/11 were the “Pearl Harbor” that they were waiting for and they certainly milked it for all it was worth.

The only question is what role, if any, did the Bush Administration play in creating or allowing those events to happen.

I do not know the answer, but I do want the 9/11 investigation reopened because I am not satisfied with the conclusions reached by the 9/11 Commission. The answer is beyond the scope of this book.

By the end of the Bush Administration, the PNAC ceased to exist. The Foreign Policy Initiative is its successor organization.

The Bush Doctrine of aggressive war was neoconservatism made manifest. If anything, Barack Obama has amped up the intensity of the Bush Doctrine, so there is little doubt that he too is a neoconservative, as well as a neoliberal.

Aggressive war to steal natural resources that belong to others has caused, at a minimum, over 1 million Iraqi deaths, thousands upon thousands of Afghan and Pakistani deaths, and the deaths of 5 to 10 thousand U.S. service men and women, not to mention the injured and the loss of trillions of dollars.

The people responsible for starting those wars and authorizing the use of torture to obtain false statements with which to continue justifying those wars are war criminals who should be prosecuted for their crimes. That includes Barack Obama who has done everything possible to cover-up, protect, and continue committing those crimes.

Quoting the Dude in The Big Lebowski yet again,

This aggression will not stand, man.

Cross-Posted at my blog and the Smirking Chimp.

Namaste: If Not Now, When? Is my intellectual property. I retain full rights to my own work. You may copy it and share it with others, but only if you credit me as the author. You may not sell or offer to sell it for any form of consideration. I retain full rights to publication.

My real name is Frederick Leatherman. I was a criminal-defense lawyer for 30 years specializing in death-penalty defense and forensics. I also was a law professor for three years.

Now I am a writer and I haul scrap for a living in this insane land.

Heh.

Namaste

Masoninblue

Author’s Note: Each chapter of this book can be read as a stand-alone and it is not necessary that they be read in numerical order. All of the previous chapters are posted here in my Diaries or at my blog.

I welcome comments and will respond as time allows. Thanks for reading.

Chapter 24

Neoliberalism Is A Cancer (Part 2)

Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) revived interest in free market, or neoliberal economics with his best selling book, The Road to Serfdom, which is Amazon’s all time highest selling political book. He wrote it in the 1930s to counter the argument that fascism was capitalism’s last dying gasp.

Hayek was an Austrian and, among other appointments, he taught at the University of Chicago from 1950 to 1962 where he met and no doubt influenced Milton Friedman.

In 1991 President George H. W. Bush awarded Hayek the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the two highest civilian awards in the United States, for a “lifetime of looking beyond the horizon.”

Hayek did not believe in democracy. When asked what he thought about the Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet, who overthrew and assassinated the popularly elected social democrat President Salvador Allende in 1973 and presided over a 17-year brutal dictatorship that disappeared 3,000 suspected dissenters, Hayek said,

Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism. My personal impression — and this is valid for South America – is that in Chile, for example, we will witness a transition from a dictatorial government to a liberal government.

By liberal, of course, he meant free markets liberated from government regulation and oversight.

Milton Friedman (1912-2006) was an even more influential advocate of neoliberal free markets.

He joined the faculty at the University of Chicago in 1946, where he later founded the Chicago School of Economics. He served as Senator Barry Goldwater’s chief economics adviser during Goldwater’s unsuccessful 1964 campaign for President and, after retiring from the University of Chicago in 1977, he served unofficially as Ronald Reagan’s economic adviser during Reagan’s successful campaign for President. During President Reagan’s eight years in office, he served as a member of the President’s Economic Policy Advisory Board.

Hayek and Friedman were anything but liberal, as that term is commonly understood today. Ronald Reagan adored both of them.

Barack Obama, who also taught at the University of Chicago and adores Reagan, is also a neoliberal. He too believes in free markets, including free trade agreements, even though they invariably create jobs in foreign countries at the expense of increasing unemployment here at home. He objects to imposing any restrictions on corporations outsourcing jobs, and he opposes any form of effective regulatory oversight on the banks and insurance companies.

With the single exception of his willingness to bail out failing banks and corporations at taxpayer expense, which is corporate socialism, he has not shown any interest in or support for implementing socialist policies. People who claim he is a communist or a socialist are lying, stupid, or not paying attention.

Walter Benn Michaels, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago said in the November, 2010 issue of Le Monde,

In reality, there’s nothing the slightest bit socialist about Obamacare, much less about immigration. In fact, unlike the Tea Party, Chicago-school economists identify open borders with free markets and argue that it’s not immigration but “immigration controls” that are “a form of socialist central planning”. Even more to the point, there’s nothing communist about illegal immigration which, from an economic standpoint, is preferable to legal immigration because it “responds to market forces in ways that legal immigration does not” and thus “benefits both the undocumented workers who desire to work… in the US and employers who want flexible, low-cost labour”. So when [Glen]Beck, speaking for all the Tea Partiers, pronounces his judgment – “Immigration good; illegal immigration bad” – he may think he’s opposing communism, but what he’s actually opposing is neoliberalism in its purest form. The thing the Tea Party regards as the greatest threat to capitalism is capitalism itself.

In the name of free trade (cutting labor costs in order to increase profits), which is another neoliberal goal along with free markets, corporations have outsourced more than four million jobs by transferring operations and building new sweat-shop factories in foreign countries where they can and do exploit labor and pollute the environment with impunity. As a result, in Fiscal Year 2010, corporations reported higher profits than ever before. Yet, they paid no taxes on income earned outside the United States and they parked all of that money outside the country in offshore banks.

Meanwhile, there are 29.5 million people in the United States who are unemployed, underemployed, and too discouraged to continue looking for jobs that do not exist.

According to telephone surveys of households back in July 2010, the real unemployment rate was 22% and I suspect it has increased since then. There are not even enough new jobs being created to keep up with the number of new people entering the work force each month.

The unemployment situation is so bad that earlier this year, over one million people applied for 50,000 new jobs advertised by McDonalds.

Businesses are hoarding money and refusing to hire new employees because there is not enough demand for their goods and services to justify the expense.

There is not enough demand because nobody has any money to spend. People do not have money to spend because they are unemployed, underemployed, or afraid they are going to lose their jobs and their homes to Forfeiture Gate.

Therefore, it is unreasonable to believe that the private sector will create jobs.

There is nothing on the horizon that warrants a reasonable belief that the economy is going to improve in the foreseeable future without massive government spending to create jobs.

Nevertheless, Obama is grimly determined not to do that under any circumstances. Instead, he insists on imposing austerity measures to reduce government spending. That means slashing social security, Medicare, and Medicaid. This is another goal of neoliberalism: eliminate the safety net.

There is no credible evidence to support a belief that reducing government spending will do anything except increase unemployment, reduce demand for goods and services, and pitch our economy over the cliff into the abyss with no safety net to break the fall.

Obama has no plan and he is not even working on a real plan to create jobs. As the legendary Dude said in The Big Lebowski,

This aggression will not stand, man.

Cross-Posted at my blog and the Smirking Chimp.

Namaste: If Not Now, When? Is my intellectual property. I retain full rights to my own work. You may copy it and share it with others, but only if you credit me as the author. You may not sell or offer to sell it for any form of consideration. I retain full rights to publication.

Masoninblue

Chapter 3

Ma’at And The Golden Rule

The Ancient Egyptians believed that the universe emerged out of chaos and they perceived an underlying beauty, harmony, balance, and order to the universe that they regarded as holy. They attributed these qualities to a goddess they called Ma’at, whom they worshipped and experienced in their lives as a vital living spiritual force. Isfet, goddess of chaos, was her opposing force and they viewed the universe as a battleground between them.

The Ancient Egyptians believed Ma’at manifested externally in their lives by regulating the weather and the changing seasons as well as the movements of the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars. They believed she manifested internally in their consciousness as a code of moral and ethical conduct that required speaking the truth and treating others with honor and respect in the spirit of fairness and justice.

Ma’at is the earliest known version of the Golden Rule. As an expression of divine wisdom, Ma’at is reminiscent of St. Thomas Aquinas’s notion of natural or moral law. For example, he believed that the “standards of morality are in some sense derived from, or entailed by, the nature of the world and the nature of human beings.” The Ancient Egyptians believed Ma’at trumped manmade law and their emphasis on reaching conclusions that were consistent with Ma’at, or the spirit of the law, stands out in marked contrast to the rote application of the most relevant rule in a lengthy and detailed list of rules as is more typical of Jewish law.

Ma’at prevailed over Isfet for at least a thousand years beginning no later than the time that Menes unified the Two Lands of Upper and Lower Egypt in approximately 3,000 BCE until the fabled Old Kingdom passed into history at the end of the 6th Dynasty in approximately 2186 BCE with the death of Pepi II. He died at the age of 92 outliving all of his heirs. His death also marked the beginning of the First Intermediate Period, a time of declining central authority and civil war between the rulers of various powerful city states within the Egyptian empire. Eleventh Dynasty Pharaoh Mentuhotep II of Thebes eventually restored Ma’at when he reunited Egypt in 2025 BCE by seizing Herakleopolis, the capitol city of the rival 10th Dynasty. This marked the beginning of the Middle Kingdom and the shift of power from Memphis (modern day Cairo) to Thebes.

Ma’at was depicted on the walls of temples and tombs performing one of her most sacred duties at the Weighing of the Heart ceremony in the Hall of Two Truths in the Duat, or Egyptian underworld. She is depicted as a young woman holding a scepter with one hand, carrying an ankh with the other, and wearing an ostrich feather tucked into her headband. Known as the feather of truth, she would remove it from her headband and place it on one plate of a scale to counterbalance the weight of a recently departed person’s heart, symbolizing the soul. If the soul were lighter than the feather, it would achieve immortality and accompany Osiris to his home in the constellation of Orion and be reborn as a star. If the soul outweighed the feather, it would achieve eternal restlessness after dying a second time devoured by Amit, depicted as a female demon with a body part lion, hippopotamus, and crocodile.

During the Old Kingdom, the pharaoh’s primary role was to maintain Ma’at in society. Known as the Lord of Ma’at, he was said to decree with his mouth the Ma’at in his heart. This was an extremely important responsibility because the natural order and cosmic harmony would be disturbed, if someone violated Ma’at and pharaoh failed to restore it by making sure that justice was done, or if pharaoh violated Ma’at by his own conduct. Eerily similar to what we modern humans call the butterfly effect, the Ancient Egyptians believed that such disruptions would unleash ever more unpredictable and serious consequences reverberating throughout the Two Lands, including droughts, floods, pestilence, starvation, blindness, epidemics of disease, and accidents resulting in serious injury or death. Indeed, the First Intermediate Period often is described as such a time in the literature of that time.

As I ponder President Obama’s incomprehensibly inept and corrupt policy of “looking forward, not backward,” I cannot help but gasp at how offensive it is to our collective sense of justice, or Ma’at as the Ancient Egyptians would have called it, and wonder what will be the extent of the damage it causes. Our republic cannot survive our justice system officially transforming into a two-tiered system with one set of rules for you and me and another set of rules (no rules) for the rich; yet that is exactly what is happening.

On November 8, 2010, the five-year statute of limitations expired forever barring the prosecution of Jose Rodriguez, the CIA official who deliberately destroyed the 92 CIA torture tapes in order to prevent the prosecution of the CIA agents and two psychologists who did the torturing. Attorney General Michael Mukassey appointed First Assistant United States Attorney John Durham three years earlier to investigate and prosecute the person or persons responsible for destroying the tapes and despite an ironclad case against Jose Rodriguez, a CIA agent who admitted deliberately destroying the tapes to prevent them from being used against the torturers, Mr. Durham waited until the day after the statute of limitations expired to have one of his assistants announce that he had decided not to charge anyone. No further explanation was provided regarding the basis for his decision.

Half a continent away in Vail, CO, District Attorney Mark Hurlbert decided not to prosecute Martin Erzinger, who manages more than $1 billion in assets for Morgan Stanley in Denver, for a felony hit and run because Mr. Erzinger would be fired, if he were convicted of a felony.

According to court documents, on July 3, 2010, Dr. Steven Milo, a 34-year-old liver-transplant surgeon from New York City, was bicycling eastbound on Highway 6, when Erzinger allegedly veered onto the side of the road and struck Dr. Milo from behind with his black 2010 Mercedes Benz sedan, knocking him to the pavement. Mr. Erzinger then struck a culvert and fled the scene without stopping or calling 911 to report the accident. Fortunately for Dr. Milo, a passing motorist, who saw the accident, stopped to help him, called 911, and provided a description of the vehicle.

Mr. Erzinger drove all the way through Avon, a nearby town, negotiating its roundabouts, and stopped in a Pizza Hut parking lot on the other side of town where he called the Mercedes auto assistance service, reported damage to his vehicle, and requested a tow truck. When Avon police officers spotted the Mercedes sedan in the parking lot a few minutes later and stopped to investigate, they found Erzinger placing the front fender and passenger side mirror in the trunk of the car. When they questioned him about the accident, Erzinger told them that he did not know he hit anyone.

Dr. Milo sustained spinal cord injuries, bleeding from his brain, and damage to his knee and scapula.
Although Mr. Erzinger was initially charged with a felony hit and run, Eagle County District Attorney Mark Hurlbert agreed to drop the felony in exchange for Mr. Erzinger pleading guilty to two misdemeanor traffic offenses and agreeing to make full restitution to Dr. Milo. He explained his decision to the press stating that he decided to drop the felony because a felony conviction could jeopardize Mr. Erzinger’s job.

Harold Haddon, Dr. Milo’s attorney, filed an objection to the proposed plea agreement stating,
The proposed disposition is not appropriate given the shocking nature of the defendant’s conduct and the debilitating injuries which Dr. Milo has suffered . . . He will have lifetime pain. His ability to deal with the physical challenges of his profession — liver transplant surgery — has been seriously jeopardized.

Dr. Milo also wrote a letter to the District Attorney objecting to the plea agreement. He said,
Mr. Erzinger struck me, fled and left me for dead on the highway. Neither his financial prominence nor my financial situation should be factors in your prosecution of this case.

Nevertheless, despite Mr. Haddon’s and Dr. Milo’s objections and substantial public criticism, the District Attorney refused to change his mind. Defending his decision, as if Mr. Erzinger were a man of limited financial means and there were no such thing as auto insurance coverage for personal liability or the existence of civil remedies in tort, Mr. Hurlbert said,

The money has never been a priority for them. It is for us. Justice in this case includes restitution and the ability to pay it. Erzinger is willing to take responsibility and pay restitution. Felony convictions have some pretty serious job implications for someone in Mr. Erzinger’s profession, and that entered into it. When you’re talking about restitution, you don’t want to take away his ability to pay.

As a retired law professor and former criminal defense attorney for thirty years, I can say with absolute certainty that the District Attorney’s decision and his explanation are 100% bullshit. Keeping in mind that the District Attorney never claimed that he would have difficulty proving his case against Mr. Erzinger, no prosecutor I’ve ever known would have seriously considered dropping the felony, if the defendant were a regular person named John Smith, whether employed or unemployed, insured or uninsured.

The outcomes in both of these cases are offensive because just as there is no doubt that Jose Rodriguez and Martin Erzinger would have been convicted of felonies and sentenced to prison, if the prosecutors had done their jobs, there is no question that ordinary citizens like you and me would never have received the same deferential treatment accorded to them. Such outcomes are destroying public faith and confidence in the prosecution and judicial system (Ma’at). Vigilantism, disrespect for law, and citizen disorder are the inevitable result (Isfet) when the prosecutorial and judicial systems are corrupted.

To express the idea in Ancient Egyptian terms, President Barack Obama destroyed Ma’at with his policy of “looking forward, not backward.” We must restore Ma’at and with it all of our invaluable civil rights.

Robert L. Borosage is a Progressive Democrat and the President of the Institute for America’s Future. He blogs at the Huffington Post and his piece today is entitled, “Bushwacking Obama: Conservatives Call for “Fixing” Social Security.” In it he explains how Obama would sabotage his chances for reelection in 2012, if he were to attack social security, which most of us have figured out is one of Obama’s most cherished goals.

In fact, I think Obama was extremely unhappy with the Catfood Commission’s failure to agree on a deficit reduction recommendation that included cutting Social Security and he decided on another way to skin that cat before Christmas by:

(1) extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich;

(2) reducing the payroll FICA tax by 2%; and

(3) sacrificing Social Security to get Republican support to pass a bill increasing the debt limit.

I don’t know if Borosage agrees with me, although I suspect he does, and even though he pitched his piece as a warning to Obama regarding his chances for reelection, I’m inclined to think he’s far more concerned about saving Social Security from Obama rather than actively promoting Obama’s chances for reelection.

At any rate, I recommend his piece to all Firepups as a well-written primer upon which to base our arguments against cutting social security when we attempt to convince the incredibly annoying, willfully ignorant, blind, and suicidally inclined Obamabots and the so-called “serious” Democrats in Congress who are likely to follow Obama’s lead, play the Kabuki El Foldo Game and rush like lemmings over a cliff just like they did with his god-awful health insurance and Big PhRMA corporate giveaways. I don’t know about y’all, but I don’t think I can handle another kabuki summer like 2009 without setting my hair on fire on the village green.  . . . Read the rest of this entry →

The results of the 2010 Arab Public Opinion Poll conducted by the University of Maryland and Zogby International are a devastating indictment of U.S. policies in the Middle East and show strong disapproval of President Obama.

High Points:

Only 20% describe their views about President Obama as positive, which is down 25 points from one year ago, while 62% describe their views about President Obama as negative, a 39 point increase from one year ago.

Only 16% describe their attitude as hopeful about Obama Administration policy in the Middle East, a 35 point drop from last year, while 63% are discouraged, a 48 point increase.

61% are most disappointed by the way the Obama Administration handled the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Asked to identify two out of a list of nine factors that they believe drive American policy in the Middle East, 49% picked protecting Israel and 44% picked controlling oil. 33% each picked weakening the Muslim world and preserving regional and global dominance. Only 7% picked fighting terrorism.

57% believe the Middle East will be better off if Iran acquires nuclear weapons.

Check it out here.