NightBlogger

Patrick Martin
On the eve of the US elections
In the run-up to Election Day, with polls pointing to a lopsided victory by the Democratic Party, both Barack Obama and leading congressional Democrats are making it clear in advance that a popular repudiation of the Bush administration will not determine the policies of an Obama White House or Democratic Congress. Having capitalized on popular hatred for President George Bush and mobilized working and young people on the basis of calls for “change” and “new politics” and invocations of the “fierce urgency of now,” Obama and the Democratic leadership are taking pains to reassure the ruling elite that if they win the election, they will carry out a thoroughly conventional and conservative agenda that upholds the interests of the financial aristocracy.

The mantra of spokesman after spokesman is that the Democrats should not “overreach,” that they should disavow “one-party rule,” and that bipartisan consensus should be the goal of the new administration. They are, in other words, repudiating the most fundamental precept of democracy—that the decision made by the voters on Election Day should determine public policy. Tens of millions of people are going to vote for Obama in the hope that this will lead to a rapid end to the war in Iraq and to domestic policies that promote jobs and decent living standards, as opposed to the unrestrained profiteering by big business and the wealthy fostered by the Bush administration.

The policy of the incoming administration will not be guided by these popular illusions, however, but by the reality of a worldwide financial crisis, a deepening slump in the United States, and the ongoing resistance to imperialist military occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. A principal concern of Obama and his key strategists is that a large-scale Democratic victory will arouse popular expectations that they have no intention of meeting. The disavowal of any political mandate in Tuesday’s voting was spelled out by the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, Senator John Kerry, in an appearance as an Obama surrogate on the NBC Sunday interview program “Meet the Press.” Program host Tom Brokaw asked Kerry about statements from House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, a New York Democrat, that Obama should move rapidly on tax cuts for middle-income and low-income families, health care reform and a substantive program to promote alternative energy.

Asked how he would pay for such policies, Rangel had replied, “Don’t ask me where the money will come from. I’m going to go to the same place that Paulson went”—referring to the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street authored by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Brokaw asked Kerry, “Is that responsible fiscal policy?” The senator responded, “I don’t agree with all of that and nor does Barack Obama. Barack Obama is the person running for president and he’s made it very clear we’re going to have to restore fiscal responsibility to Washington.”

Kerry added that Obama would seek significant Republican input and involvement in his administration. “He’s going to govern in a way that brings the country together, and no matter what our majority, he’s going to seek to reach a broader consensus because that’s the only way we can govern America at this time.” The senator suggested that the Democrats would not seek to use their majority to push through policies opposed by the Republicans. “We don’t need to pass things by 51 votes or 60 votes,” he said, referring to the Senate. “We need to build 85-vote majorities.”

This statement deserves serious consideration. Insistence on “85-vote majorities” in the Senate means giving the Republican minority veto power over government policy. It amounts to a repudiation of any conception of democracy. If the Democrats win on Tuesday, it will be because of broad popular sentiment for a reversal of the policies of war and social reaction pursued for the past eight years by Bush. But Kerry insists that it would be wrong for the Democrats to govern as though they had a mandate.

The anti-democratic character of this stance was underscored as Kerry voiced his agreement with comments by former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey, who declared recently: “By my lights, the primary threat to the success of a President Obama will come from some Democrats… emboldened by the size of their congressional majority… Obama will need to communicate the following to Congress, in no uncertain terms: The Democrats have not won a mandate for all their policies. Rather, the American people have resoundingly registered their frustration with a failed status quo, and the next president must chart a new, less partisan course.”

Such a position is in stark contrast to the way the Republicans governed after Bush was installed in the White House in 2000 by the Supreme Court. Although Bush had lost the popular vote to his Democratic opponent Al Gore, and the Republicans had far smaller majorities in the House and Senate than the Democrats will enjoy after November 4, the incoming administration boasted that the election had delivered it 100 percent of the power.

Bush proceeded to make policy accordingly, ramming through (with significant Democratic support) massive tax cuts for the wealthy, and then embarking on wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and a host of other policies that were widely opposed by the American public.

Kerry’s remarks are an indication that an incoming Democratic administration will do as the Democrats did after their sweeping victory in the 2006 congressional elections, which was propelled largely by popular hostility to the war in Iraq. The newly installed Democratic majorities in the House and Senate pledged to work with President Bush on a bipartisan basis. The new House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, immediately ruled out any effort to impeach Bush and eventually agreed to continue funding the Iraq war throughout the remainder of Bush’s presidency.

The comments by Kerry and other Democratic spokesmen underscore the essentially fraudulent character of the entire 2008 election. Despite large increases in voter turnout and widespread involvement by new layers of the population, particularly youth and students, the American people will end up serving as little more than extras in a conflict within the ruling elite. Once Election Day is past, Obama will put “hope” and “change” back in his briefcase and go about his real business: defending the interests of corporate America.

The Democrats responded with alacrity to the danger of a meltdown in the financial markets, turning over trillions in public funds to bail out the banks and speculators. The same political figures will turn to working people after the election and tell them that there is no money to provide health care, jobs, education and other social benefits, especially given the need to spend even more for wars in the Middle East and Central Asia.

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Speaking in the Tongues of Brokers
Joe Bageant
Any number of cultural historians have noted the American belief that success is a sign of God’s favor. And over the past couple of decades he has had a downright love fest with the already-rich. So much so that the richest 400 Americans now have more money stashed away that the combined bottom 150 million Americans. Some $1.6 trillion bucks.

This was accomplished by selling off or shipping out ever available asset, from jobs to seaports, smashing usury and anti-monopoly laws, raiding the public coffers and manipulating the medium of exchange and blackmailing the peasantry regarding common needs such as heath care and energy to keep their asses warm — to name a few. The ultimate coup was to convince the entire nation that the well being of the rich, meaning the well being of Wall Street, was indeed the common man’s well being.

All went well for a while. People went into credit card hock up to their noses in order to provide 26% credit card interest to Wall Street, etc. And when that became untenable, flimsy mortgages were cranked out by the millions ensuring that every American who could hold a crayon could sign to purchase a home. To facilitate this all sorts of shaky ‘mortgage instruments’ were created — balloon, (sign here Jeeter, you’re gonna flip it in a year and make a hundred K on this house trailer) interest only, and finally negative balance mortgages where you only paid part of the interest and the rest was rolled back into the principal balance. And joy of joys you could refinance a couple of times while the inflated value of these houses was on the way up. Life was good for everybody.

The bill was never gonna come due because, god in his wisdom, had deemed that capitalism would defy the second law of thermodynamics and expand forever. So every time a bank made a mortgage loan of say, $400,000, even though the debtor had never even made a payment yet, the loan was declared a bank asset and another $400,000 was loaned against it. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve Bank yelled whoopee and printed another $800,000 in currency. Of course at some point the country had to run out of customers, so the loans got easier and easier. No matter that debt is not wealth. Wink and call it that and most folks won’t even look up from their new big screen high resolution digital TVs.

Problem was that all the jobs to pay for this stuff were stampeding off toward places in China with names containing a lot Xs, Zs and praying for a vowel. It was becoming clear that the entire economy was running on fumes. In fact less than fumes. It was running on the odor of paper. Mountains of the stuff. Bundles of mortgages and very strange securities and derivatives of unknown origin and value. Paper that stated its own worth and signed by some mystic hand no one could quite identify though the blurry signatures looked to read Greenspan, Paulson and Bernanke.

But there was a rub. Things reached the point where there simply was not anything left to defraud the public out of, nothing left to steal from the nation’s productive capability, no matter how much paper Jeeter and Maggie signed for that trailer house, no matter how secure Brian and Jennifer out there in Arlington, Virginia and Davis, California thought they were. So the only thing left to do was steal from future generations of Americans and accept an I.O.U. which the government would happily sign on behalf of the people and enforce. By the wildest coincidence, under the Bush administration this I.O.U. happened to tally up to about $700 billion.

Seeing the oncoming train of financial disaster, the financiers just about wet their pants, and screamed “We want it all now! And if we don’t get it the ‘economy’ will lock its brakes and crash. Remember, we control the medium of exchange. Nobody gets a paycheck if we don’t. Remember that it’s lines of credit from us that backs every working man’s and woman’s paycheck in the country. So pay the hell up.”

Folks, they’ve got us all by the nuts and nipples. McCain knows that. Obama knows that. In the end, regardless of the so-called dissenters in the House and the Senate, we will pay up. It s election season and the dissent is for show. So it looks like we will get some “concession.” For example, we will get shares in these “toxic assets” that are stinking up the joint. The rich need to dump them and dump them fast. In another magnanimous concession, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation will raise the insurance on “our savings” to $250,000 (how many readers have 250 K in the bank?). But it will be redeemable in even more inflated currency amid an inflationary environment. And, in case you didn’t know, the FDIC has up to ten years to pay up on that insurance. So don’t get any ideas about running off to Mexico, to which by the way, we are a net debtor nation.

We will pay. We will pay because the European banks holding all that bad paper we wrote demand that we make good on it so even more of their banks will not fail. We will pay because the Chinese, the Japs and everyone else will cut off the loan tap with which we pay the interest (not the principal) on our exploding super nova of national debt. We will pay because God loves the rich. We will pay because we will not be offered any other choice. We will pay because George Bush worked hard for all those Ds in school and became the first MBA president. We will pay because our media has internalized the capitalist system so thoroughly they can only talk in Wall Speak. We will pay because the only language we have to describe our world is that of our oppressors because we have been taught to think in Wall Speak. We will pay because we hitched our wagon to last stage capitalism and even though the wagon has now two wheels over the cliff and roars forward, we don’t know where the brake handle is located. And because we don’t know any better or understand any possible resistance to the system because we have been kept like worms in a jar and fed horse shit.

And as we all know, worms do not rise up in revolt.

That takes a backbone.

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Interview with Dennis Kucinich regarding the Federal Reserve and Impeachment. Kucinich explains his introduction of Articles of Impeachment is in no way symbolic. “George Bush has committed offenses that should cause him to be impeached and removed from office. On the Federal Reserve: “The Federal Reserve is not federal and whatever they have in reserve doesn’t belong to the people.The Federal Reserve is there to protect the position of the banks.”

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Dr. Kevin Barrett/Silvia Cattori
I make the effort to share this information because it gives me, at last, a plausible answer to a long-unanswered question: Why, no matter how much intelligent goodwill exists in the world, is there so much war, suffering and injustice? It doesn’t seem to matter what creative plan, ideology, religion, or philosophy great minds come up with, nothing seems to improve our lot. Since the dawn of civilization, this pattern repeats itself over and over again.

The answer is that civilization, as we know it, is largely the creation of psychopaths. All civilizations, our own included, have been built on slavery and mass murder. Psychopaths have played a disproportionate role in the development of civilization, because they are hard-wired to lie, kill, cheat, steal, torture, manipulate, and generally inflict great suffering on other humans without feeling any remorse, in order to establish their own sense of security through domination. The inventor of civilization, “the first tribal chieftain who successfully brainwashed an army of controlled mass murderers,” was almost certainly a genetic psychopath. Since that momentous discovery, psychopaths have enjoyed a significant advantage over non-psychopaths in the struggle for power in civilizational hierarchies — especially military hierarchies.

Behind the apparent insanity of contemporary history, is the actual insanity of psychopaths fighting to preserve their disproportionate power. And as their power grows ever-more-threatened, the psychopaths grow ever-more-desperate. We are witnessing the apotheosis of the overworld — the overlapping criminal syndicates that lurk above ordinary society and law just as the underworld lurks below it. More

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Glenn Greenwald:

“While Katie Couric impressively argued that the media did fail to do its job — pointing out that the White House threatened networks which were perceived to be too critical with cutting off access to the war and that anyone who questioned the war was deemed unpatriotic and all of that “affected the level of aggressiveness that was exercised by the media” — the painfully empty-headed Charlie Gibson and the mindlessly establishment-defending Brian Williams both insisted that the media did a perfectly fine job and that they would do nothing different.”

Read Glenn’s post here

Chris Matthews whines about how the press was manipulated by Bush and White House instead of admitting the media didn’t do their job. Journalists can’t be manipulated if they’re objectively reporting the news instead of serving as government stenographers.

SilentPatriot
crooksandliars
Although Scott McClellan’s memoir is chock full of juicy bits about George Bush, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and the myriad pre-war lies the White House force-fed America, perhaps the most important (and most overlooked) critique McClellan levels is aimed squarely at the “liberal media” and how they acted as “deferential, complicit enablers” of the administration’s “propaganda” leading up to the war. On the TODAY show this morning, Matt Lauer asked “the big three” — Charlie Gibson, Brian Williams and Katie Couric — whether they thought McClellan was accurate in his criticism of the press. Their answers are revealing to say the least. [Throw in Chris Matthews, Larry King and Wolf Blitzer; they all did the Brian Williams thing].

To her credit, Couric admits that mistakes were made and that she could have done a better job vetting the administration’s claims; although she also admitted that the White House threatened to cut off her access after she filed critical reports. But Gibson and Williams (along with, one would assume, the majority of the elite press) simply lack the ability to recognize that they were duped, and that they thus duped their viewers. Indeed, as Glenn documents in a lengthy post today:

“This is why most establishment journalists will never be convinced that they failed to do their job, no matter how much evidence is presented: because of the understanding they have of what ‘their job’ actually is.” More

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