Robber Banks are Killing the Economy
Right now the largest, most pervasive criminal activity being carried on in this country is not illegal immigration, it’s not drug sales, it’s not human trafficking, it’s not smuggling, it’s not even the illegal sale of non-FDA approved imported wigs, it’s the industry wide fraud and creative accounting practices of the entire American financial world.
Jeff Connaughton, a former senatorial aide now concentrating on Wall Street and the regulatory system has come out and flatly stated that Wall Street has progressed from the unethical to the criminal with a speed and a voracity that is nothing short of shocking.
The idea that what Wall Street firms are doing is merely unethical, he states, is preposterous. Illegal activity is far past pervasive, it is epidemic. Every single major bank has whole departments committed to fraud, robo-signing affidavits for foreclosures and credit card judgments both of which, despite being blatantly criminal, have become standard bank policy. Both banks and hedge funds routinely withhold any damaging information about the products they sell and trade, a clear violation of all fair trade practices and a felony. In addition many sales are based on insider information, a blatantly criminal activity, also a felony while many other sales are consummated in house, ahead of their client’s orders and to the bank’s own benefit, another felony.
Corrupt accounting is so endemic to the system that industry analysts are forced to figure in estimated levels of fraud just to get a credible picture in their calculations of the public disclosures of major financial companies. Why is this? How can something as blatantly criminal as this be happening? It‘s simple, an almost complete lack of regulation, and in he cases where even the weakest regulation does exist, regulators who are in bed with the big banks.
Matt Taibbi takes it a step further and more deeply into the political realm by suggesting that Obama is allowing it to happen, even encouraging it by his soft stance relative to whether these activities are criminal or just unethical but then soft pedals his own accusation by suggesting that the President has, as an ulterior motive, the building of confidence in the financial system so as to bolster it against collapse. I think Matt is one of the smartest guys out there but if he really believes this, I think he’s way of base. Or, if he’s right, the President is.
What Connaughton seems to be saying is that the President and Tim Geithner are doing the same thing that all the bankers did before the crash, covering up the problems in hopes that it will eventually go away or that it will become the next administrations problem. This is farcical. Covering up the sins of the criminal only makes him think that he can continue getting away with his illegal acts. The only thing that stops crime is punishment and not the little slaps on the wrist that Obama’s regulators have been timidly dealing out to those few who have been confronted with their misdeeds.
The financial sector has been screwing the country for too long. First they were aided by the Bush administration’s relaxing of regulations and now they are being helped along by Obama’s fear of their collapse. It’s a legitimate fear but the solution is pure bullshit. The only way to bolster confidence in the American financial markets is to convince the public that they are stable and honest and the only way to do that is to make them so. If that entails pulling down a couple of the giants and trampling them underfoot, so be it. The problem with our financial, institutions right now is that they all believe that they can cover up their sins by committing more sins. We have to prove that theory wrong. Morgan Stanley’s president James Gorman will sit up and pay attention if he sees JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon and Wells Fargo’s John Stumpf in handcuffs.
The American public will applaud, not panic if it actually can see our government acting like a government and doing something about a problem. You want to create confidence in the financial sector, Barak, put the crooks in jail and help the honest guys, if there are any, run the system the right way. Of course this means you will have to forget about any financial contributions from that sector of the economy.
And as an added bonus: All-American Bitch of the Month
Alice Walton, who is worth 21 Billion bucks but who doesn’t pay her Wal-Mart employees enough to keep over half of them from being eligible for food stamps. Of course, those food stamps are paid for by the American taxpayers. She calls herself a “job creator” but the jobs she creates don’t pay enough to keep her employees off the dole. Gee, Alice, do you think you could scrape along on say, 20 billion and maybe pay your employees a living wage. Would that be too much to ask?
A Newtish Thing
The Newt that walks like a man has come down on the OWS demonstrators, claiming that they are just a bunch of lazy, dirty, do nothings who are leaching off society. This led to the conclusion that it is okay to mace them and mistreat them because they didn’t pay for the parks anyway so why should they have any right to use them? I have always said that Newt was a very smart, very devious guy with no moral center. I’m no longer sure I was right about the smart part.
Then I heard Senator Kyl agree with Newt and I knew I was wrong about the smart part.
Just for laughs let’s take Newts moronic statement apart. No they didn’t pay for the parks, Newt, neither did you or I or anyone who uses it or any of the other parks in the country. We all did, through taxes, that stuff the Republican’s don’t want to pay. There’s no way you can, with any certainty, say that the occupiers don’t pay taxes. I know for a fact that at least a couple of the people who I saw in Zuccotti Park pay a hell of a lot of taxes, probably more than you.
Of course some of them are do nothings, just like any crowd of people but many of them are hard working folks who have lost their jobs because of the massive screw-up caused by Republican demands to cut regulations on the financial sector, demands led by you and Kyl for your own financial benefit. I’m talking here about lobbyist fees and campaign funding from big business. You know what lobbyist fees are, Newt. They’re the $1.6M you got from Freddie Mac as a “consultants fee.” You and Kyl are as guilty of killing jobs as Jamie Dimon and his den of thieves over at JP Morgan ever were.
I don’t like Newt Gingrich, Surprise! But the editorial about him in the Washington Post this week is an example of Republican attack politics rather than fair reporting.
Yes, the Newted thing calls for the abolition of child labor laws but he then goes on o explain himself and what he says makes sense… to a degree. Letting kids work, earn money and acquire some self respect is indeed a good thing, the problem is that such a situation is quickly taken advantage of, by Newt’s unconscionable big business supporters who will soon have child sweat shops back in full swing. It would indeed be nice if some kind of compromise between no child works and five years olds working twelve hour shifts were possible, but there are just too many greedy bastards out there looking to take advantage of any unscrupulous opportunity to scrape out anther dime.
The brilliant Paul Krugman has come up with an interesting point of view on the Republican candidates. He contends that they fall into two camps. Romney on the one side who absolutely doesn’t believe in the Right wing ideology and the rest of the fools and nuts, Does this mean that the problem is that the Republican ideology only works for fools and nuts?
On the fools and nuts side, Santorum is having his surge and why not? Newt is actually the smartest of the Republican candidates, but Rick is the biggest God monger (now where does that leave the rest of them?) Rick depends on an earnest demeanor, to lay his spread of phony religious baloney on the masses heads. Newt is slick and clever and he knows how to charm the masses, but his comeuppance will arrive when it becomes clear what a despicable liar and morally bankrupt slime he truly is. Rick will get his when the true believers realize what a dark and morally corrupt individual he really is. The Pennsylvania voters got it the last time he ran. We’ll all get it this time.
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And while we’re speaking about Right Wing slime, the deficit reduction committee or the gang of twelve as they were scornfully known did not come up with a solution to the deficit problem allowing the decisions to go to Sequester. Why? Why can’t twelve men, good and true come up with the answer to a problem that is plaguing our country? The answer is that at least six of those men are not good and true. Six of them are restrained by a pledge they have made to the paid lobbyist for rich anti-tax positions, the evil gnome, Grover Norquist. Why are congressmen groveling before this ridiculous nobody? Why have supposedly grown men allowed this sycophant of the rich to dictate their actions? The answer is simple. Money. Norquist, as the slimy servant of the rich, promises them the rewards of eternal campaign contributions in exchange for their subservience to his commands. He does worse, he promises the retraction of those rewards if they fail to kneel before his fetid feet. This obeisance to a promise other than their oath of office is tantamount to treason because they are putting an outside influence above said oath. The Congressional Oath of Office states, “…I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion…”
Norquist’s pledge is very specifically a mental reservation and it’s purpose is notably the evasion of the Constitution which states definitively that, “Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises to pay the debts and provide for common defense and general welfare of the United States.”
It’s pretty clear that anyone who has signed Norquist’s pledge is in direct violation of their Constitutional responsibilities and should be drummed out of office, all their post congressional privileges stripped from them and they should be forbidden from ever again holding public office.
It’s more than clear that the only reason Norquist hasn’t been run out of Washington is congressional cowardice. Why do we need a bunch of quivering dogs running our country? I call for a national moratorium that states that any member of the government who doesn’t publically reject Norquist and his pledge be driven out of office regardless of any other position he may hold on any other topic. This does not mean that members of congress cannot vote against taxes. This is specifically an attack on Norquist and the un-democratic kind of government brought on by such pledges weather for or against taxes or anything else. Our legislators must approach all legislation with open minds and unbound by any outside influence or the last vestiges of democracy will be trampled in the mud.
Bits and Pieces #17
What actually happened on ABC’s This Week? Did Stephanopoulos decide that he needed more face time on an important show or did Christiane Amanpour decide that she needed to get back in the field, a place where she is the complete package, reporting on events that are actually happening instead of sitting behind a desk talking about them. The money guess is that the suits at ABC decided that they needed a more genial and charming host instead of the serious, Amanpour who maybe took too many shots at the greedy parts of the business community, of which ABC is an integral part.
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Michelle Bachman sits on the House Intelligence Committee. Is that a problem or a punch line?
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The battle over abortion goes on but the solution to a great deal of this problem still seems to elude the religious right. Led by the Catholic Church the rejection of contraception as a solution is actually a crime against humanity.
The religious twits don’t seem to understand that the use of contraceptives, while not necessarily increasing copulation, will most certainly reduce population. Nick Kristoff, one of my favorite writers came up with a great line this week, “Umbrellas don’t cause rain.” Think about it.
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Bank of America just moved trillions of dollars of risky derivatives off Merrill Lynch’s (a subsidiary of B of A) books. They were moved too B of A, so that the losses would be covered by the FDIC. That means that us as taxpayers are now covering B of A’s bet up to as much as $53 trillion. This has happened because commercial and investment banks can now, thanks to the trashing of the Glass/Steagall Act, be the same bank and thereby get the FDIC to cover the toxic assets that they couldn’t if a bank was just an investment bank.
FDIC insurance was set up to protect commercial bank investments from the bank collapsing. It was never meant to cover the gamble that investment banks live on. It didn’t have to until the two merged after the removal of Glass/Steagall. We need Glass/Steagall back so that these investment bank crooks, the ones who like to shoot crap with their investors money aren’t doing the same thing with the money that depositors put in commercial banks.
Commercial Bank= a place to put money where it is relatively safe
Investment Bank= a place to gamble with your money. Not even close.
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Did you know that 64% of voters blame the government for he economic crisis while only 34% blame the financial sector. That’s as it should be only the government they should be blaming is the Bush government that relaxed all controls over the financial sector and allowed it to run amok and crash the economy.
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During the Bush administration Republicans passed and signed a $286 billion infrastructure bill for bridges, roads and mass transit. Today, they violently oppose it. Why, because it is proposed by Obama. They don’t care about what happens to this country or its people a long as they get rid of that black guy in the White House. And Herman Cain thought he had a chance?
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The Boston Globe ran a chart a couple of weeks ago that the Presidents election committee should post on every billboard in the country. It showed how many trillions every president has added to the national debt. The debt was $1 trillion when Ronald Reagan took office. Since then it has run like this: In trillions;
Reagan- $1.9
George HW Bush -$1.5
Bill Clinton – $1.4
Obama- $2.4
And oh yeah
George Bush -$6.4
How the hell did that happen? Maybe two wars, massive tax cuts, etc. Even the allegedly socialist Obama doesn’t compare with the out of control Bush who, accompanied by many of the same Republicans who are now screaming to reduce the debt, ran up nearly half of it in only eight of the past thirty years.
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In the land of the fantasy we find they have their own TV network. It’s called Fox News who this year came out with an attack on SpongeBobSquarePants. Yeah, that’s right, folks. Fox is at war with a drawing. Gretchen Carlson claims that the dastardly cartoon character is teaching kids that man is the cause of global warming. This is because the Department of Education handed out a book featuring SpongeBob and blaming man for global warming.
What’s her beef? She claims that man causing global warming is a disputed fact. Sure it is Gretchen. It’s frantically disputed by the companies currently creating pollution and by the brain dead sycophants who are dumb enough to believe their propaganda.
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House Speaker Boehner thinks $166 in payroll tax savings s a measly amount of money and not worth bothering about. That’s because the vainglorious clown spends more than that on sun tan oil per month. Hundreds of working people responded to the Speaker’s idiotic remark, all allowing that it was the difference between making it that month and not making it. Of course Boehner and the greedy rich slugs he represents wouldn’t understand that. Maybe if we equated it with not having enough cash to gas up their yachts they’d get the point.
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Why has the Army denied access to all but 20 public and reporters at the Bradley Manning trial? Why aren’t computers and recording devices allowed in the courtroom and why does an Army public affairs officer who refuses to give his name tell reporters that there will be no transcript of the trial available for three or four months? I’ll tell you why. It’s because the army knows it has no legitimate case against Manning. None of the documents released have led to any kind of action against the US or it’s personnel. No one ha been killed because of them and the only thing the army has to hang its hat on it that many people who should not have been putting their thoughts and comments into a computer have been embarrassed. Oh yeah, there’s also the point that security was so lax at the base at which, Manning was stationed that I could have broken the code and I can barely turn my computer on. Manning saw some pretty serious shit on the tapes that he uncovered, including the murders of women and children by US troops. This is stuff that should be brought to light and the crimes depicted solved. Manning is a hero for revealing this tripe to the open air and the degenerates at army command who are trying to convict him to cover up their own inadequacies should all be brought to trail.
I really don’t understand the army, point in this trail. Every day it goes on it makes them look like bigger, more incompetent fools. Even if they get their revenge on Manning and he goes to jail the army looks, more and more like a bunch of petulant children getting even with another kid they don’t like. The military’s disgracing itself just at a time when an important bill has been passed giving them authority over American citizens on American soil. If this is an example of Military justice than the passing of that bill is a cause for armed revolution because the army has shown absolutely no affinity for any type of justice and no grasp of the principles they have been selected to defend.
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Since 2009, according to the Center for Public Integrity, the Chamber of Commerce’s more than 850 business and trade groups have spent $1.3 billion to fight financial reform. In case you don’t understand what that means, let me phrase it a different way. Big business is looking to screw you. Right now the Consumer Financial Index Board created by Elizabeth Warren and headed by Richard Cordray is the only thing that stands between you and the financial screwing you deserve if you don’t vote Democratic in the next election. I say that with all sincerity because if the Republicans get into both houses they will surely tear all consumer protection apart and completely dismantle all business regulations, leaving the American public at the mercy of a voracious business community that is smart enough to make money when it completely lacks regulation but not smart enough to realize that if they destroy their own labor pool they will also be destroying their consumer base and damning the country to a generation long recession.
Creating The Military State
I really don’t know what’s wrong with the morons in congress. I’m not talking right or left here, I’ m talking stupid. With all the work they have to do on a disastrous economy, failed infrastructure and a collapsing educational system they are wasting their time trying to destroy one of the few things in our country that has currently been working. I’m speaking about our Homeland security system, which, with the help of some terrorist incompetence, has managed to keep the post 911 incidents to a bare minimum. Yes, there have been a couple of semi-successful nuts with bombs that have slipped through the web but considering how many people there are in the world that hate us, their lack of success has been startling.
So why is congress wasting their time working on provisions in the military budget bill that will take the primary responsibility of interrogating, charging and trying most terrorism cases away from the FBI and federal prosecutors and turning it over to military intelligence who have already established their title as an oxymoron.
These new establishments would weaken national security, crush our already fragile justice system, degrade our intelligence gathering abilities and weaken cooperation from foreign governments. It would put us one step closer to being a military dictatorship, would give the gun nuts a viable platform for retaining the right to own every kind of weapon up to heavy tanks and seriously impair our personal freedoms under the constitution. In addition it would place our military, an organization not necessarily known for its sensitivity to outside need, in direct conflict with the American public by giving it the right to act against that public without regard to the restraints now in place. If there is any oxymoron that holds more truth than military intelligence it is military justice.
I am, of course, speaking again of the National Defense Authorization Act. There are both House and Senate versions but both are abominations. Both allow for the arrest and detention without trial of American citizens, both make the gulag at Guantanamo a permanent boil on the ass of the nation. Both are unnecessary and un-American.
Being such, the question comes immediately to mind, why are we pursuing these goals? Why does the military want these powers when they will only lead to confrontations with US citizens and a loss of respect for those in their ranks?
President Obama, who has maintained a conservative stance in matters of terrorism and detention, has stated that he will veto the entire military budget if it contains these egregious sections but it seems that, of late, he has been faltering in his reserve. It is this blogs opinion that he should do exactly what he promised, to the entire current budget and have congress come back with a new budget cleansed of any taint of the offensive content.
As of November 30th, there have been 381 proposed amendments to this bill, most of them having nothing to do with the problem sections, but of those proposed amendments, every one that has to do with the problem sections have been either withdrawn or rejected. As of December 21st, the Senate has passed the bill with the offending sections intact. Someone in congress is working very hard to turn this country into a military dictatorship and it behooves both the media and the government to ferret out this fascist slime before he or they are successful.
Received my most positive feedback from the 11/24 blog “OWS and Why We need It,” but interestingly enough I also got a great deal of negative feedback over my suggestion that one of the cures for our problems was one or a series of national referendums to adjust our governmental structure to the needs of this century and its populace.
It was quickly and correctly pointed out that governance by referendum has almost ruined California and I take full responsibility for not giving a more detailed explanation of my theory. My concept was not for governance by national referendum. Anyone who has observed the process is fully aware that the population of this country is neither well enough informed nor expressive of significant enough interest to make such an ongoing process work. All you have to do is check our voter turnout figures which are the lowest in the civilized world to know such a concept would be far worse than what we currently have. What I had in mind was, as stated above, a single or a small series of referendums that would realign the government through the amending of the constitution, so that it would better serve the needs and rights of the public. I make this suggestion because it has become abundantly clear that congress has neither the will nor the incentive to legislate for the good of the population in general.
Why do I say this? How about observation? All you’ve got to do is watch what isn’t accomplished in the halls of congress and you realize that our current legislators have no incentive to get the job done. Unfortunately the much-considered option of replacing them all, won’t work. This was proved by the pathetic gaggle of new house members elected by the Tea Party in 2010 that almost
without exception have turned out to be non-functional boobs.
Which leaves us in the position of depending on these morons to supply the legislation that is needed to get the country back on line. But the passing of such legislation will be, in many cases, to the direct detriment of most of the currently sitting legislators. Why? Because it would take away benefits and powers that are the core of why people run for congress. In case you haven’t noticed being a congressmen is a very lucrative job, both during its tenure and even more so after. A sitting congressman collects a higher than average salary, about $175K per year. On top of that he is constantly bombarded by all sorts of perks provided by the lobbyists for every corporation and organization that wants that congressman’s favorable vote on its suit.
When I printed earlier this year that big oil spent hundreds of millions of dollars to promote their position, where did you think that money went? Well, most of it went to members of congress and their re-election campaigns. That same number is repeated by every organization that has an agenda up for legislation. We’re talking billions divided by 525 members of congress. Not a bad payday. And when they retire or are voted out of office, what do congressmen do? They become lobbyists for the same companies who paid lobbyists to influence them. That’s when they really get the big bucks.
Now considering this, why would any congressman vote to prohibit the practice of lobbying? They wouldn’t. Yet that practice is probably the greatest impairment to the democratic system extent and should be the first or second target of a referendum.
A perfect example of how this system works is the Keystone XL Pipeline. Everyone who has looked at this project with anything like a dispassionate eye has concluded that it is a disaster. It will not, despite the claims of the lobbyists and John Boehner create jobs, because work on the pipeline will be done by men who are already employees of TransCanada. In fact in the long run it will cost jobs because by allowing the oil to ne piped through the US to ports in Texas it will open new markets in China and India to the oil companies that had previously only had the US as a market. These competing markets will raise the cost of oil to us, raising prices on gas and costing us jobs because of those increased prices.
In addition the pipeline is planned to go through ecologically sensitive areas with the probability that any rupture would poison a significant portion of our mid-western water supply. TransCanada’s other pipeline, only a little over a year old, has already had a major rupture. Then there are oil sands, the source of the pipelines oil. Oil sands are the dirtiest, most ecologically damaging form of oil and therefore by themselves a huge threat to the ecology of the world. All in all there is no reasonable way this project can be considered a plus. In fact it is a true horror, bad for our country in so many ways that no logical, honest legislator would even consider it. Yet there it is, supported by any number of our so-called legislators. Why? The almighty buck produced by lobbyists for the financial welfare of our elected officials, prodded by the degenerate lobbyists who work their butts off to subvert the democratic system for the benefit of big business and themselves.
If you expect these congressmen, who benefit so greatly from it, to vote against this system, which works so well to their benefit but not to ours, you are delusional. The only way to fix this system is to take the vote out of their hands and put it where it belongs, in the hands of the individual voters who make up the citizenry of the United States. The intention of the founders has been subverted to an extent that we can no longer depend on those we elect to carry out programs that benefit the people. They seem to be interested only in those programs that benefit themselves so we must take back that which we have given them and decide for ourselves how we wish the country to be governed. That act can be accomplished through a national referendum. We the people must provide a list of constitutional changes that must be made so that our errant legislators will have a new set of guidelines and be regulated by a new set of rules that will help them toe the lines of ethics and morality that have all but disappeared in today’s self-motivated society.
Let’s face it folks, the curse of Any Rand is upon us. We have become a society where everyone thinks and acts only in their own self-interest with no thought of how they can help society or the general citizenry. This is especially seen in those giants of industry and banking who no longer worry about making a competing product or providing a necessary service but only about how much they can acquire for themselves, how many more yachts they can buy and how many castles they can construct. True a select few are above this, seeing the need for them to use their wealth judiciously, understanding the fact that with great wealth comes great responsibility and rising to the challenge, but they are only a select few, far to few among the legion of the wealthy whose greed knows only one command… MORE!
If we are to continue to succeed as a nation, those greedy few must be brought to heel. They must be stopped from using their wealth to destroy the principles of democracy and since they have already undermined the current system to the point that meaningful legislation can no longer be passed by our governing bodies, it behooves us to take the torch of liberty in our hands and use it to lead us to a new and meaningful source of legislation. It’s time to make big changes in the way things are done around here.
Three Little Pieces
I was checking out MoveOn.com’s The Daily Share and came across three of the most moving pieces that I have seen in years. What made them interesting is that the were each moving for a different reason and in a different way.
The first was a piece of video of a little girl, maybe six or seven giving a report in class and just as she was finishing she looked across the room at an opening door, did a huge double take and screamed “Daddy!” She then raced across the room and was lifted into the arms of her father, a soldier returning from active duty who had obviously come straight to the school to get his daughter. The girl sobbed her joy as she was held by Dad. The caption of the short film is “Reasons why we shouldn’t go to war,” or something like that. Sure it was corny but it was damned effective.
The second piece is just a photo of a sign in what looks like a vehicle window. The sign says “New Company Policy: We are Not Hiring Until Obama Is Gone.” This sign says it all for Right Wing patriotism and for any sense of responsibility or fealty to our country. It says, screw America and all Americans. Who cares what happens to the country or its people as long as we get our way. Unfortunately the photographer didn’t include the name of the company so that we all could boycott the products made by people who hate America.
The third piece was a video of a twelve year-old Canadian girl, Severn Cullis-Suzuki, making a speech at the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. This lovely child accuses the adults of the world of failing to act as its shepherds so that children like her can have a future, but she does it with such calm dignity and self assurance that the message was most assuredly driven home to those at the conference. The piece struck me on two levels. One is that of a child having to tell adults what they should already know, but even more I was struck by what a wasteful species we belong to, one that has wasted fully one half of is potential since the beginning of time, by its subjugation of all its female members. If this girl had been born in Afghanistan instead of Canada her obvious talent and intelligence would have been completely wasted. This is an even bigger crime than what we as a species are doing to our planet.
How did we get ourselves into this position? How does mankind waste the vast reserves of intelligence, talent and human fortitude that their women bring to the species? Well it probably started with male ego but it was certainly advanced by organized religion, the most efficient tool to subjugate both men and women ever invented by man. I will not get into a discussion of the relative plusses and minuses of religion here, suffice it to say that without the existence of organized religion, and I cannot imagine our species allowing this diabolical tool of power to not exist, women would now hold a much more important place in the world we inhabit.
Oil is Killing Us
I keep reading the steaming pile that comes out of big oil’s advertising mills and lobbyist promotions and I’m forced to gag every time they turn out more lying crap and the American public swallows it. When are we going to learn that big oil cares nothing for anything except profits. Sure any company has to show a profit to stay in business but if they have to poison the planet and kill off hundreds of thousands of people a year to get it, then they must be considered a threat to humanity. It is way past time to put the internal combustion engine on the shelf. It has been ready to go for a number of years but big oil has done everything in its rather impressive power to keep it in our cars and poisoning our kids. I’ve laid out a short list of attempts to supplant the internal combustion engine, all of which have been mysteriously curtailed despite their seemingly successful application. Take a look. You tell me.
1996, the first electric car, the EVI by General Motors. It was leased in California, never sold. It went 0-100klm in 9 seconds and it was quiet, caused no pollution and could be charged in our garage with a regular electrical outlet. Ten years later they were gone. GM wouldn’t renew the leases, recalled them and destroyed them all.
1997, Nissan came out with the Hyper Mini, electric cars tat were only released in Tokyo except for a group that were leased to the city of Pasadena, CA. They used them for city workers. The city tried to buy them but in August of 2006 when the leases ran out Nissan recalled them and destroyed them.
Also in 1997 Toyota came out with the RAV4-EV a four-wheel electric car, powered by the EV-95 NiMH battery. IT cost 9 cents a kilowatt hour to recharge it and you could fill it up for $2.70. They stopped manufacture in 2003 and when the leases ran out in 2005 they pulled it and destroyed them all.
In 2005 Chevron-Texaco bought out the patents for the EV-95 NiMH battery from Toyota for $30M and tore down the factory that made them.
IN addition, BMW developed a commercial car that ran on hydrogen around 2001. Arnold Schwarzenegger drove a Hummer powered by hydrogen when he was governor of California.
Last year the GENEPAX, a car that runs on water was developed. It can drive one hour @ 80 Km per hr on a liter of water.
Why are none of these cars already in the market? Why would an oil company, Chevron-Texaco buy up a battery patent and destroy the factory that makes them? The answer is simple. The advent of all this new technology will drop the bottom out of the oil market. The oil companies can’t let that happen no matter how many hundreds of thousands of people are poisoned by their product. They aren’t in the medical business they’re in the oil business and it doesn’t matter to them if they poison the planet as long as they show a huge profit.
Now there is nothing illegal about Chevron-Texaco buying up a patent and trashing the product; immoral, yes, inhuman, certainly but not illegal. So what do you do? What we have always done in order to get regress in situations that are not dealt with by the law. Boycott any product made by Chevron-Texaco. There are plenty of oil companies from which you can buy anything they sell. I already carry a list of gas companies that I will not buy from in my car. I rarely have trouble finding a place to fill up.
And when a boycott puts Chevron-Texaco out of business we can move on to BP, Exon and the rest.
Susan Smith Dale and Big Media
I am constantly bemused at the way the Right, vigorously attacks any form of humanitarian cause, as if it were the instrument of the collapse of all social networks. I was reading a column by Susan Smith Dale another of the Right Wing blonde bimbos who seem to know all the party lines and none of the facts. Why are they all blonde and why are they all unable to delineate between fact and fiction? Anyway, the non-notable Ms Dale spends a whole column trying unsuccessfully to explain why the Left is undergoing a spectacular collapse. I would have thought this would have been rather easy considering the states of international, especially European governments and our own congress but Ms Dale in true bimbo fashion titters around the factless edges of the problem and wanders off into a rather toothless attack on OWS accusing the demonstrators of soon to be violent actions. Soon to be? Based on what? Well, maybe she does have something. If the local mayors and police continue to act like graduates of the Gestapo, sooner or later there will, in fact, be violence. I am constantly amazed by the sense of discipline and control exhibited by the young demonstrators in the face of constant acts of violence perpetrated against them by the police in various cities. Maybe Ms Dale will get at least one thing right. Maybe some dumb cop, yes there are smart cops and they are in the majority, but maybe one of the dumb ones will do something so unquestionably idiotic that one of the demonstrators will retaliate and then we will have true chaos. Let’s just hope that the demonstrator who retaliates isn’t armed or there will be a lot of dead people in the streets. Our police have shown no ability to react to any kind of contention in a balanced manner.
But back to Ms Dale and her accusation that the Left is collapsing, despite the fact that, it is supported by the majority of western mainstream media. The first part of that statement is irrefutably false. I don’t know why, it should be true, it just isn’t. All you have to do is look at the chaos of the Republican presidential debates and you can see that they are more in danger of collapse than their oft non-functioning opponents.
It’s the other part of the statement that fascinates me. And it may be partly true, mainly because that media, which is not influenced by the Right leaning corporations that own it, and which still has the ability to think and editorialize for itself, does support, mostly Left leaning causes. Why, probably because they make the most sense and appear to be best for the country as a whole. There are, however, whole segments of the media, such as talk radio, News Corp TV, various Foxx TV channels, CNN and any number of newspapers like the Wall Street Journal, New York Post and a whole raft of others where party line rather than facts dictates the editorial content. These cannot be ignored just because of a long running if totally false American tradition of impartial news. The fiction of impartial news was never true, but the myth, like most long running traditions has managed to remain clutched to our hopeful breasts.
We as a people still believe what we hear and see on the radio, TV and in print. We shouldn’t, but we do. It probably comes from our Constitution which has always guaranteed free speech and which, by doing so, has created a culture where because our media was free of government control, pretty much free to say what it wanted, we have always regarded as not only free to declaim, but truthful in its declamations.
This, of course, is far from true. No, the government does not limit what the media can say but the media is, at this point in history, being controlled by a far more insidious editor. Little by little, as our TV stations and newspapers are being taken over by huge conglomerates we find that their editorial policies are falling victim to the political and economic policies of the corporations that now own them. Yes the media is still free of government control but it is now falling under the control of a much more dangerous master, the small-minded leaders of big business. Right now, more than half the existing media in this country is controlled by people who bear, you, the citizens of the United States no good will. They are business leaders whose only objective is to grow greater and greater profits regardless of what that enterprise does to the United States as a whole and they will exercise more than enough influence on their employees to assure that they will write whatever opinionated half truths or lies that are needed to influence you, the reader, to make decisions that are in their best interests and not your own.
If this is what the inadequate Ms Dale considers a strong Left leaning influence in the media, then her information gathering resources are only half as pathetic as her understanding of the situation.
An Attack Against Liberty
So finally the Democrats and Republicans have found something on which they can agree and as one would expect it’s a catastrophe. A bill drafted in secret by Carl Levin (D-MI) and John McCain (R-AZ) and passed in a closed-door committee meeting without even a single hearing will come up for a Senate vote this week. It is the most lurid assault on the United States Constitution we have yet faced, in that it will allow detention of American citizens, without charge or trial, indefinitely, in the United States or abroad by the military. This insult to the concept of individual liberty is the strongest assault on our freedom ever attempted by even the most totalitarian fanatics.
It is called The Worldwide indefinite detention without charge or trial provision in S.1867, the National Defense Authorization Act bill. It is now on the Senate floor. It’s so offensive that even Ron Paul (R-TX) called it out at a recent Republican Debate. This is exactly the kind of big government no one wants or needs. In fact it is an assault on every kind of personal liberty we have fought for, for two hundred years.
It’s bad enough that every Homeland Security Official thinks they have a right to grab and hold anyone with a foreign accent for any reason they want, this is the ultimate “1984” culmination. We will have finally arrived at the complete fascist state. Just as important we will have allowed the terrorists to win because what makes our country different from theirs will no longer exist. Unfortunately those of us who used this exact example when we fought Homeland Security over the suspension of habeas corpus during the Bush/Cheney years will have been proved right. Not exactly a victory to be hoped for.
We all understand that in the last decade, congress has become less than functional, in fact less than useless, but have they all become such pathetic, cowardly worms that they are willing to give up our most cherished freedoms as they quake in fear at the few toothless terrorists that have managed to survive the onslaught of our armed forces and to hear them tell it, super functional defense agencies.
Senator Mark Udall (D-CO) has offered up the Udall Amendment, which is said to strip away the harmful provisions but why take the chance. This piece of legislation is already soaked in the blood of every man woman and child who ever died to protect our blessed freedoms. This bill is an assault on everything American. Whether you’re a liberal or a right-winger you should hate it out of hand. It is the most offensive piece of legislation I have read in years. Which, by the way, is why Lindsey Graham (R-SC) the sleaze that walks like a man, is for it. You just can’t fix stupid. You can, however, prevent it from doing any damage. Call your Senator and tell him or her to reject this bill in its entirety.
I had a fellow grad of my old high school come after me for just these sentiments yesterday on Facebook. Unfortunately for his argument he quoted a portion of the proposed law that was exactly what I have been attacking, a section of language that is so vague that It will allow our over eager law enforcement people to grab up anyone they want regardless of guilt or innocence or unproven involvement
Sure we live in a dangerous world but it is that way because there are people out there who want to take away our freedoms. The question becomes, are we such quivering cowards that we are willing to give away those freedoms just to keep these bad guys from coming after us? Right now we have more than enough tools at our disposal to handle anything that the bad guys can throw at us. What we have to do is use those tools to their best advantage. That means our various agencies cooperating instead of contending. That means using our almost unlimited network of communication and intelligence to do the job for which it was intended. We have the most far reaching intelligence system known to man. Our defense budget is greater than the combined defense budgets of the rest of the nations in the world. If that isn’t enough to get the job done, further eroding our freedoms isn’t going to help. If those appointed to defend the country with the overwhelming tools they have already been given can’t get the job done then rather than taking away more of our already eroded freedoms, we must replace them.
Right now between the armed forces, the intelligence community and Homeland Security we have almost five million people assigned to the defense of the country. If that many people, with the largest financial portion of the national budget can’t protect the nation with the laws they already have then we are wasting a hell of a lot money that could be put to better use.
This proposed legislation is a disgrace to everything we hold dear as a country. IT must be stopped and the people who proposed it must be voted out of office. We don’t need more laws limiting our freedom, we need more competent people protecting it.
the bad guys away, not to be lazy and just get a law changed so that we can grab up everybody in sight violate their freedoms and then say look at us, we got the bad guys. Right no there is no nation on earth that can face us down. All we have to do to keep it that way is pay attention and do the jobs we are said to do.
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