Elites in Both Parties Created Trump's Triumph

Here are three articles from Salon.com that make interesting observations:

We can’t vote for either one: On world stage, Clinton and Trump present different, but serious, dangers
It is pathetically impossible to determine which one would be worse, the only metric we have left. It's OK to pass

[...] The best that can be said of this political season is that the fixed framework of American politics appears to be fracturing. This will be a fine thing if it proves to be so, and I view this development as especially important in its medium-term potential on the foreign policy side. The question is whether things will truly fall apart, or at least begin to do so. Two policies hang in the balance above all others—the relationship with Israel and our fomented confrontation with Russia—and I will return to them.

For now we must accept that the process of coming apart, while desirable, could never be other than messy. And neither could we rightly expect to define its form. Political irruptions of the kind we witness are almost always uncontrollable during certain stages. Nobody knows where the water will go when the river overflows its banks. In this case, we have an egregious candidate who stands outside the political superstructure, apparently prompting paroxysms within the policy cliques and what we call the deep state, and an egregious candidate whose priority in all spheres is to reinforce both. I leave readers to assess the implications here as they might, but there is no denying it is a hard call.

[...]

Clinton, we have to conclude without qualification, holds out zero promise of an altered direction in American foreign policy. So far as I can make out, she has never once in her decades of public service evinced any modicum of imagination or original thought on a foreign policy question. This applies to means as well as ends. Clinton is shoulder-to-shoulder with Defense Secretary Carter on every question wherein their views have intersected and aired: NATO’s eastward thrust, the power transformation in the western Pacific, Syria, Iraq, the Middle East altogether. She could comfortably reappoint Carter as President Obama reappointed the hawkish Robert M. Gates (to the astonishment and dismay of many). There has been talk she could name Vicky Nuland secretary of state—more feminist progress, we would be advised in such an eventuality.

Clinton famously declared a “reset” in Russian relations during her early years as Obama’s secretary of state—amateurishly sending Sergei Lavrov some cutie-pie button so marked. (The Russian foreign minister must have looked at the ceiling half in despair.) We understood—or the Russians did, anyway—what this meant quickly enough: Let’s get back to the Yeltsin-era subservience. Vladimir Putin’s sin lies solely in his refusal; the rest is Washington’s expertise in crowd control—we being the crowd—and the Pentagon’s desire to keep defense contractors in double-digit profits.

[...]

My starting point with Trump is his position on American exceptionalism. It is implicit but discernible. He plainly considers America the greatest of great nations, fine, but he runs on the premise that it is great no longer. As the TomDispatch web site pointed out Thursday, “The Donald is the first American presidential candidate to openly campaign on a platform of American decline, while Hillary is still stuck in a world of too-many-superlatives for the waning American century.”

[...]

Here he is last Wednesday on the O’Reilly Factor, the Fox News program, when asked about the Pentagon’s recent allegations that Russian jets flew imprudently close to American ships in the Baltic. I would have said American ships sail imprudently close to Russian waters, but never mind:

“If it were me, I will tell you, I would call him [Putin] and say, ‘Don’t do it. Just stop it. Don’t do it.’ … Let’s go. Come on. We’re going to have a good relationship. Don’t do it.’”

“Don’t do it,” as an Irish journalist named Danielle Ryan has since pointed out, “is not some revolutionary position on Russia.” Of course not, and one would never select The Don to quarterback any genuine reset in Washington’s relations with Moscow. But it is impossible, simply impossible, to ignore the core thoughts: Trump takes us back to the pre-Bush II era, that time long ago when American presidents and State Department secretaries did not refuse contact with adversaries or those with alternative views. Trump would talk, not bomb, shell, sanction or subvert. He is not phobic with regard to the Russians. He does not demonize others with other perspectives. This is a positive value out of anyone’s mouth. Excellent he has introduced it into the conversation.

[...]

Hillary Clinton derives from a tradition from which American policy must break. Donald Trump by definition derives from no tradition. One cannot vote for the former, but it does not follow one therefore votes for the latter. Sanders supporters and various stripes of Hillary-haters who now contemplate voting for Trump—and one hears of many—should take note. Too many problems attaching to Trump.

To call Trump’s foreign policy thinking inchoate is too indulgent, given it implies he is doing his thinking and is not yet finished. I do not see that he has or is. In my read he still draws from the raw instinct that has propelled him in business, wherever that may be. He is a seat-of-the-pants man as yet. So we do not truly know what he would do in any given case.

He does not grasp the reality of complexity, let’s say. As noted in a previous column, there is some likelihood that the policy cliques will shove him into a crash course on the orthodoxy and the deep state’s protocol now that he is unambiguously the Republican candidate. But we do not know this yet, either.

We do not know much, in short. I confess to liking Trump’s capacity to connect with undercurrents in American society and culture that the elites of both parties have ignored with impunity for decades now. Deprivation and abuse among muddled-thinking people—political, social, economic—is no different from deprivation and abuse among the clear-minded. But this is not the same as elevating ignorance, xenophobia and “America First” nationalism to a position requiring respect.

All this puts him well beyond the pale. No vote for Trump, then.[...]

So don't vote at all? Usually I say, vote for the one who would do the least damage. Is it impossible to tell? Difficult, I concede, but I'm not entirely convinced that not voting is the answer. Though living on the West coast as I do, I have to say that I have lost any confidence that my vote has counted in any presidential election ever. Before the polls even close in the West, the Media is on the air announcing the winner. People East of the Mississippi pick the president, the rest of us... not so much.

I believe Governor's make better Presidential candidates, because they have held elected office and you can see how they chose to govern. But where are they in this election cycle? Gone. Which leaves us with:

Our awful elites gutted America. Now they dare ring alarms about Trump, Sanders — and cast themselves as saviors
Both parties ignored workers, spewed hate, enriched themselves, hollowed out democracy. Now the problem's populism?

[...] Elites on both sides insisted on not addressing the root causes of economic dissatisfaction, hence the long-foreseen rise of Trump. Paul Krugman, a Hillary acolyte, is nothing more than a neoliberal, whose prescriptions always stay strictly within orthodox parameters. Yet he was construed as some sort of a liberal lion during the Bush and Obama years. Not for him any of Bernie’s “radical” measures to ensure economic justice and fairness. Oh no, we have to stay within the orthodoxies of the economics profession. Now he’s all offended about Trump!

The worst offenders of all are the American left’s cultural warriors, who daily wage some new battle over some imagined cultural offense, which has nothing to do with the lives of normal people but only the highly tuned sensibilities of those in the academic, publishing, and media ecospheres.

The Hillary supporters have the authoritarian mentality of small property owners. They are the mirror image of the “realist” Trump supporters, the difference being that the Trump supporters fall below the median income level, and are distressed and insecure, while the Hillary supporters stand above the median income level, and are prosperous but still insecure.

To manipulate them, the Democratic and Republican elites have both played a double game for forty years and have gotten away with it. They have incrementally yet quite comprehensively seized all economic and political power for themselves. They have perverted free media and even such basics of the democratic process as voting and accountability in elections. Elites on both sides have collaborated to engineer a revolution of economic decline for the working person, until the situation has reached unbearable proportions. The stock market may be doing well, and unemployment may theoretically be low, but people can’t afford housing and food, they can’t pay back student loans and other debts, their lives, wherever they live in this transformed country, are full of such misery that there is not a single word that an establishment candidate like Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush says that makes sense to them.

This time, I truly believe, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between them. When they did have a difference to choose from—i.e., the clear progressive choice, Bernie over Hillary, who consistently demonstrates beating Trump by double the margins Hillary does—the elites went for Hillary, even though she poses the greater risk of inaugurating Trump as president. And now you want us to listen to your panic alarms?

The game, for the elites, is over. This is true no matter what happens with the Sanders campaign. The Republican party as we have known it since the Reagan consensus (dating back to 1976) is over. The Democratic party doesn’t know it yet, but Bill Clinton’s neoliberalism (and what followed in his wake with complicity with Bush junior, and the continuation of Bush junior’s imperialist policies with Barack Obama) is also over, or well on its way to being over. The elites are in a cataclysmic state of panic, they don’t know whether to look right or left, they have no idea what to do with Trump, they don’t know what to do with the Bernie diehards, they have no idea how to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

[...]

The election of Trump would end the Republican party as we know it, but more refreshingly it would also end the Democratic party as we know it. The limits of the academic left’s distracting cultural discourse in keeping economic dissatisfaction in check would be fully exposed. Trump threatens the stability of the fearmongering discourse of Sullivan and his like. The threat to their monopoly of discourse is the real reason for the panic.

Oh, and Hillary, good luck fighting Trump with your poll-tested reactions. Your calculated “offenses” against his offensiveness against women or minorities or Muslims are going to be as successful as the sixteen Republicans who’ve already tried it. You won’t be able to take on Trump because you do not speak the truth, you speak only elite mumbo-jumbo. Trump doesn’t speak the truth either, but he’s responding to something in the air that has an element of truth, and you don’t even go that far, you speak to a state of affairs—a meritocratic, democratic, pluralist America—that doesn’t even exist. [...]

The election of Trump ending BOTH parties as we know them? In a way that does sound good... but what would they be replaced with? A Viking Raider, perhaps? Read on:

It’s not about sexism: Camille Paglia on Trump, Hillary’s “restless bitterness” and the end of the elites
We don't know if Trump can morph into a statesman. We do know the media/political class fears his threat to Hillary

[...] In our current campaign, the obvious strategy by Democratic operatives to disrupt Donald Trump’s rallies and link him to brewing fascism (via lurid media images of wild-eyed brawlers) has backfired with a bang. The seething demonstrators who blocked Trump’s motorcade at last week’s state GOP convention in Burlingame, California, forcing him and his retinue to ditch their vehicles and sprint to a rear entrance on foot, managed to alienate mainstream voters, boost Trump’s national momentum, and guarantee his sweeping victory in this week’s Indiana primary. With the withdrawal of Ted Cruz, Trump is now the presumptive GOP nominee. Great job, Dem wizards!

The helicopter TV footage of Trump and his Secret Service detail on the move was certainly surreal. All those beefy men in shiny, dark suits rapidly filing through narrow concrete barriers (like cattle chutes at a rodeo) and then scrambling up a grassy knoll! [...] The optics of the aerial photos made Trump look like a late Roman emperor being hustled to safety by the Praetorian Guard, which over time had become a kingmaker, supplanting the authority of the Senate and the old patrician class.

Trump has knocked the stilts out from the GOP establishment and crushed the pretensions of a battalion of political commentators on both the Left and Right. Portraying him as a vile racist, illiterate boob, or the end of civilization as we know it hasn’t worked because his growing supporters are genuinely motivated by rational concerns about border security and bad trade deals. Whether Trump, with his erratic impulses and gratuitous crudities, can morph toward statesmanship remains to be seen.

[...]

The aerial view of Trump at Burlingame gave me a moment of gender vertigo. His odd, brassy blonde hairdo, which I normally think of as a retro Bobby Rydell quiff, looked from behind like a smoothly backcombed 1960’s era woman’s bouffant. Shelley Winters flashed into my mind, and then it hit me: “It’s all about his mother!” I had never seen photos of Mary MacLeod Trump (who died at 88 in 2000) and immediately looked for them. Of course, there it was—the puffy blonde bouffant to which Trump pays daily homage in his impudent straw thatch.

In their focus on Trump’s real-estate tycoon father, the media seem to have missed that the teetotaling Trump’s deepest connection was probably to his strong-willed, religious mother. Born in the stark, wind-swept Hebrides Islands off the western coast of Scotland (the next North Atlantic stop is Iceland), she was one tough cookie. She and her parents were Gaelic speakers, products of a history extending back to the medieval Viking raids. I suddenly realized that that is Trump’s style. He’s not a tribal Highlander, celebrated in Scotland’s long battle for independence from England, but a Viking, slashing, burning, and laughing at the carnage in his wake. (Think Kirk Douglas flashing his steely smile in the 1958 Hollywood epic, The Vikings.) Trump takes savage pleasure in winning for its own sake—an attribute that speaks directly to the moment, when a large part of the electorate feels that the U.S. has become timid and uncertain and made far too many humiliating concessions to authoritarian foreign powers like China, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Despite their show of bravado, most savvy Democratic strategists have surely known for months that Trump was by far the most formidable of Hillary Clinton’s potential opponents—which is why they’ve been playing the race and riot cards against him to the max. Hillary has skimmed along in her bouncing gender bubble, virtually untouched by her too chivalrous Democratic rivals. Far from Hillary (in this election cycle or the last) having a harder time as a woman candidate, she has been habitually shielded by her gender. At the early debates, for example, Martin O’Malley was paralyzed by his deference to her sacred womanhood and hardly dared raise his voice to contest her brazen untruths from three feet away. Meanwhile, in debate after debate, unconstrained by the sycophantic media moderators, Hillary rudely interrupted, talked over both O’Malley and Bernie Sanders, and hogged airtime like it was going out of style. Not until CNN’s April 14 debate in Brooklyn on the eve of the New York primary did moderators forcibly put a lid on Hillary’s obnoxious filibustering.

The most pernicious aspect of this Democratic campaign is the way the field was cleared long in advance for Hillary, a flawed candidate from the get-go, while an entire generation of able Democratic politicians in their 40s was muscled aside, on pain of implied severance from future party support. It is glaringly obvious, given how well Bernie Sanders (my candidate) has done despite a near total media blackout for the past year, that Hillary would never have survived to the nomination had she had younger, more well-known, and centrist challengers. Hillary’s front-runner status has been achieved by DNC machinations and an army of undemocratic super-delegate insiders, whose pet projects will be blessed by the Clinton golden hoard. Hillary has also profited from Sanders’ too-gentlemanly early tactics, when he civilly refrained from pushing back at key moments, such as the questionable Iowa and Nevada caucuses, which he probably would have won had there not been last-minute monkey business by party operatives. [...]

And so it grinds on. I do agree with the one author though, that Trump's success is a direct result of the actions of the political establishment that is attacking him. In a sense, they created his success by the things they have done over the past decades. Are the majority of Americans turning against the political establishment "Elites" in both parties?

Perhaps we shall see in November. Meanwhile, people on both sides can sing "It's My Party And I'll Cry If I Want To".
     

Oregon is ranked among the 14 worst states in the US with corruption problems

Actually, most of the 50 states didn't do very well in a recent investigation:

Oregon gets an F on holding officials accountable

SALEM — Oregon continues to take heat from government accountability groups for the influence-peddling scandal involving former Gov. John Kitzhaber and his fiancée, Cylvia Hayes.

A report released Monday by the Center for Public Integrity ranks Oregon 44 out of 50 states in terms of ethics and public records laws. It says state officials and lawmakers have failed to address profound weaknesses revealed by the allegations that forced Kitzhaber from office in February.

"For many, Kitzhaber's resignation is a thing of the past," the report says. "But the scandal that ensnared the former governor highlights a wobbly legal framework in Oregon's government, where good behavior is taken for granted rather than enforced."

The report, written by Lee van der Voo, a freelancer for The New York Times who covered Kitzhaber's resignation, blasts the Oregon Government Ethics Commission for being slow to respond to media reports that Kitzhaber and Hayes might have used their public roles to profit Hayes' private environmental consulting business. The couple remain under federal investigation. No criminal charges have been filed.

Oregon is among 14 states that received an "F" overall. The three highest-ranked states — California, Alaska and Connecticut — scored in the C-range. Thirty-three states got Ds. [...]

Read the whole thing, for embedded links and more. Reasons sited were budget cuts, which meant there were no funds for auditing or monitoring actions of politicians. How convenient.

The last integrity investigation was in 2012, when Oregon received a C- rating. So things have been getting worse. The following link gives a list of categories, and the individual grade to each, which leads up to the composite grade of "F", detailing Oregon's corruption problems:

Oregon gets F grade in 2015 State Integrity Investigation

I'm not surprised by any of it. But what is to be done about it? Nothing, I suspect.

     

"The Clintons are counting on America to digest their ethical lapses the way a python swallows a goat" Will we?

Hillary’s Cynical Song of Self

Recently I wrote a column about Hillary Clinton’s method of lying: bald deceit sold to liberals with a wink-and-nod as the price of advancing a progressive agenda in this bigoted country of ours. Several readers wrote me to object that the mendacity I ascribed to Mrs. Clinton applied equally to Republicans.

Maybe. But what was striking about these critics is that none of them bothered to rebut the point that Mrs. Clinton is a habitual liar who treats truthfulness in politics the way a calorie-counting diner might treat hollandaise sauce on steak: to be kept strictly on the side or dribbled on in measured doses. Her lying has become as much a given in the liberal mind as Bill Clinton’s womanizing: He does his thing, she does hers.

Get over it.

All of which means that Mrs. Clinton’s presidential bid is an exercise in—and a referendum on—cynicism, partly hers but mainly ours. Democrats who nominate Mrs. Clinton will transform their party into the party of cynics; an America that elects Mrs. Clinton as its president will do so as a nation of cynics. Is that how we see, or what we want for, ourselves?

This is what the 2016 election is about. You know already that if Mrs. Clinton runs for president as an Elizabeth Warren-style populist she won’t mean a word of it, any more than she would mean it if she ran as a ’90s-style New Democrat or a ’70s-style social reformer. The real Hillary, we are asked to believe, is large and contains multitudes.

In other words, she’s singing a Song of Herself. She will say, do, and be pretty much anything to get elected. And the rest of us are supposed to fall in line because we prefer our politics to be transactional not principled, our politicians to be opportunists not idealists, and our national creed to be “do what you gotta do” not “upon this rock.” This is what might be called the Clinton Bargain: You can always count on their self-interest trumping other considerations, so you never have to fear that they can’t be bought.

The only question is who is doing the buying.

In recent days we’ve begun to learn some of their names: [...]

Hillary doesn't have to appear perfect to win; she only has to appear to be less-bad than any Republican candidate she runs against. And with the media on her side, she just might pull it off.

The article goes on to postulate the reasons why. And one or two why-nots. The author thinks Hillary can be beat. Ida know. I won't hold my breath. Read the whole thing, and see what you think.


Also see: Clinton's email spin-control, and the questions that nobody is asking

     

Clinton's email spin-control, and the questions that nobody is asking

Fact check: Clinton e-mails and the privacy 'privilege'

[...] Clinton, a likely presidential candidate in 2016, has been embroiled in an e-mail controversy since March 2, when The New York Times reported that she exclusively used a private e-mail account at clintonemail.com to conduct government business. At a press conference on March 10, Clinton said she sent and received more than 60,000 e-mails during her time in office. At the State Department's request, Clinton turned over about half of them to the government in December. The rest were deleted because they were personal, she said.

Asked whether she would agree to allow an "independent third party to come in and examine your e-mails," Clinton replied that she should be treated no differently than federal employees who have a government e-mail account and a personal e-mail account. They can decide when they send an e-mail whether to use the government or private account.

"So, even if you have a work-related device with a work-related .gov account, you choose what goes on that," she told reporters.

That's true, of course, but the situation she describes is not entirely analogous, since Clinton had no government account. She made the choice to use only a personal e-mail account set up on a personal server.

Moreover, Clinton's office went too far when answering the same question in a Q&A it released on the day of the press conference. The Q&A detailed the Clinton team's review process and answered some common questions that have been raised since the Times story first appeared.

One of the questions in the Q&A: "Do you think a third party should be allowed to review what was turned over to the Department, as well as the remainder that was not?" Clinton's office answered, in part: "Government officials are granted the privacy of their personal, non-work related emails, including personal emails on .gov accounts. Secretary Clinton exercised her privilege to ensure the continued privacy of her personal, non-work related emails."

That characterization of the rules governing government e-mail systems is not accurate.

State Department policy — spelled out in the Foreign Affairs Manual under "Points to Remember About E-mail" — says there is "no expectation of privacy." Specifically, 5 FAM 443.5 says, in part: "Department E-mail systems are for official use only by authorized personnel" and "The information in the systems is Departmental, not personal. No expectation of privacy or confidentiality applies."

Clinton is correct that the department policy allows employees to delete e-mails that are not work-related. The 5 FAM 443.5 rule also says, "Messages that are not records may be deleted when no longer needed."

But Baron — who served 13 years as director of litigation at the National Archives, which is responsible for maintaining government records — said in an interview that Clinton's use of a private server gave her exclusive control, thus preventing the department from having full access to e-mails she sent and received while a federal employee. Government employees have no right to privacy on government computers and even personal e-mails are subject to review and perhaps release at the department's discretion.

"Setting up a private server to conduct public business inappropriately shifts control of what is accessible to the end user alone rather than allowing the institution to decide threshold questions," he told us.

We sent e-mails to Clinton's office and to the State Department asking about the privacy claim but received no response. [...]

Read the whole thing for embedded links and more.

The article goes on to say that Clinton claims that she was emailing people in the State Department with .gov email accounts, and that they have copies of the emails she sent. Sure, the one's she sent to THEM. What about the other emails she sent other people, as Secretary of State? Ironically, her statement also confirms something else. The people in the State Department that she was emailing, knew that she was not using a .gov account, and they just let her do it anyway. Why was she allowed to do this?

If this were a Republican being investigated, the press would be asking those people, "What did you know and when did you know it? Why was she allowed to break the rules her position required her to follow?" Will the press do so this time? If they don't, then WE need to.

ALL politicians, regardless of party affiliation, need to be questioned and held accountable for their actions, if we are to get better people in office. Clinton has been let off the hook so many times, she just keeps on acting as if she has privileges no one else has. Why? Because too many people let her do it. And that just encourages more of the same. It has to stop.

     

"Provoking Emotions" = "Political Intolerance"

I guess it's good or bad, depending on if you are in power or not:

S. African President Walks Out of Parliament Amid Chaos

[...] Early this year, the public protector ordered Zuma to pay back to the state a portion of the $23 million used for security upgrades to the home. Zuma was in parliament to explain his response to the public protector’s report. “I have responded appropriately and I am saying people who did the upgrades at Nkandla, they are the ones who always determine who pays, when to pay,” he explained.

But the leader of the newly formed Economic Freedom Fighters, (EFF) Julius Malema, who was expelled from the ruling ANC partly for undermining Zuma’s authority, demanded a precise response. “The question we are asking today and we are not going to leave here before we get an answer, is when are you paying the money?” he stated.

When President Zuma insisted that he had already answered the question, there was commotion as EFF members refused to take instructions from the speaker of the House of Representatives.

It is at this point that Zuma decided to walk out. The speaker then temporarily adjourned parliament and called in riot police to eject EFF members, who violently refused and instead started chanting "pay back the money."

Chaos: scuffling, shoving

When it was time for parliament to resume, ANC members of parliament charged towards the EFF members, leading to a scuffle as they pushed and shoved each other.

[...]

The ruling ANC is now calling on parliament to slap the EFF members with the strongest sanction possible. In a strongly worded statement, the ANC warned the EFF not to provoke emotions, saying this could lead to political intolerance with dire consequences to the country’s democracy.

A bit ironic, that last statement. When the ANC was in political opposition, they did their share of provoking emotions. But now that they are in power, provoking emotions is a bad and dangerous thing.

Here is an earlier post I did, about the money issue the president is being questioned about:

What South African Taxpayer's Money Buys

I'm no fan of Julius Malema. But taxpayers everywhere have the right to question how the government is spending their tax dollars.
     

Too RUDE, but All Too True

Anyone who lives in Oregon should understand this:

John Oliver leads left-wing cable television slam-a-thon of Cover Oregon



The parody was excellent.

     

The Washington D.C. Political Class

Why do Jay Carney and Claire Shipman decorate their house with Soviet propaganda posters?

[...] Now, to be fair, both sides of the power couple studied Russian during their Ivy League educations (he: Yale, she: Columbia) and became Moscow correspondents for major news agencies (he: TIME Magazine back when it still mattered, she: CNN), where they met prior to the fall of the USSR. But the fact that they seem to be nostalgic for the communist era tells us a lot.

While life among the Moscow elite may have been fairly comfortable, it was not so for scores of millions of victims of the regime, less well-connected or ideologically heterodox. In fact, as The Black Book of Communism informs us, communism killed more people than even Nazism. With their fancy Ivy League educations, the Power Couple ought to know this.

How many foreign correspondents in Berlin in the 1930s (people like William L. Shirer) brought home Nazi propaganda posters and raised their children among them?

The sad fact is that progressives in much of the developed world have a soft spot in their hearts for communism. Yeah, it murdered a hundred million people or more, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. And those who were murdered were not very fashionable, for the most part.

The Washingtonian photo is a tell. There is a sickness, a willful blindness toward the crimes of communism because it is so close to the progressive ideology that animates the American Ruling Class. Shipman and Carney are the perfect exemplars of that class. Smart, fit, busy, anxious to make their own lives perfect, and convinced that the price other people pay for their progressive dreams is not worth mentioning or even noticing.

Read the whole thing for embedded links and photos. One of my favorites is the severed finger on the bookcase.

The original article is meant to be a glossy puff-piece, and the photos are supposed to be light-hearted and jokey, which is why they are so fake, I guess. Yet it illustrates something I've said before, that the political class lives in another world from most Americans, totally out of touch with the realities most Americans are facing, and are looking out for themselves, not us.
   

The "Permanent Political Class" Problem

I came across this book a while back:

Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison

One of the biggest scandals in American politics is waiting to explode: the full story of the inside game in Washington shows how the permanent political class enriches itself at the expense of the rest of us. Insider trading is illegal on Wall Street, yet it is routine among members of Congress. Normal individuals cannot get in on IPOs at the asking price, but politicians do so routinely. The Obama administration has been able to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to its supporters, ensuring yet more campaign donations. An entire class of investors now makes all of its profits based on influence and access in Washington. Peter Schweizer has doggedly researched through mountains of financial records, tracking complicated deals and stock trades back to the timing of briefings, votes on bills, and every other point of leverage for politicians in Washington. The result is a manifesto for revolution: the Permanent Political Class must go.

Pretty serious accusations. Could it really be that bad? Apparently. The TV Program 60 Minutes eventually did a show about it. It generated so much outrage, that Congress had to pass a law forbidding themselves from participating in insider trading. But guess what? It didn't last long:

Congress Quickly And Quietly Rolls Back Insider Trading Rules For Itself

In November of 2011, the TV show 60 Minutes did a big expose on insider trading within Congress. While everyone else is subject to basic insider trading rules, it turned out that members of Congress were exempt from the rules. And, as you would imagine, many in Congress have access to market-moving, non-public information. And they made use of it. To make lots and lots of money. Of course, after that report came out and got lots of attention, Congress had to act, and within months they had passed the STOCK Act with overwhelming support in Congress to make insider trading laws that apply to everyone else finally apply to Congress and Congressional staffers as well. As that link notes:

The lopsided votes showed lawmakers desperate to regain public trust in an election year, when the public approval rating of Congress has sunk below 15 percent.

Of course, here we are in 2013 and, lo and behold, it is no longer an election year. And apparently some of the details of the ban on insider trading were beginning to chafe Congressional staffers, who found it hard to pad their income with some friendly trades on insider knowledge.

So... with very little fanfare, Congress quietly rolled back a big part of the law late last week. Specifically the part that required staffers to post disclosures about their financial transactions, so that the public could make sure there was no insider trading going on. Congress tried to cover up this fairly significant change because they, themselves, claimed that it would pose a "national risk" to have this information public. A national risk to their bank accounts.

It was such a national risk that Congress did the whole thing quietly, with no debate. The bill was introduced in the Senate on Thursday and quickly voted on late that night when no one was paying attention. Friday afternoon (the best time to sneak through news), the House picked it up by unanimous consent. The House ignored its own promise to give Congress three days to read a bill before holding a vote, because this kind of thing is too important to let anyone read the bill before Congress had to pass it.

And, of course, yesterday, President Obama signed it into law. Because the best way to rebuild trust in Congress, apparently, is to roll back the fact that people there need to obey the same laws as everyone else. That won't lead the public to think that Congress is corrupt. No, not at all.

That was last year; so it just continues, "Business as usual." Disgusting. Visit the original article for all the embedded links.

There is a Question and Answer segment on the webpage for Peter Schweizer's book:

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Exclusive: A Q&A with Author Peter Schweizer

Q:When did you realize that so many insider trading and sweetheart land deals were going on?

A: When I first discovered that members of Congress are exempt from insider trading laws, I didn’t believe it. Then, when I started to look at their stock trades and compare them with what they were doing in office, I was stunned.

Q: What do you mean by the "Permanent Political Class"?

A: I think politics in Washington has become a business opportunity. Republicans and Democrats are not so different as you think. They work together to enrich themselves. They have designed the system to work so that they can make lots of money doing things that would get the rest of us sent to jail.

Q: What do you mean by "honest graft"?

A: When people think of politicians making money in Washington, they think of bribery and other illegal activities. That’s small potatoes. The real money is made by doing stuff that’s legal, including insider trading on the stock market and land deals.

Q: Politicians are exempt from insider trading laws? You’re kidding, right?

A: No. They write the rules, and guess what: the rules that apply to us don’t apply to them. By the way, they are also exempt from whistleblower laws. If you see your boss committing a financial crime, you can report them and you will be protected. You can’t be fired. But if your boss is a congressman? You’re toast. You are not protected.

Q: What’s wrong with politicians who trade stock? Don’t we want them involved in the economy?

A: Yes, but they are doing exactly what corporate insiders get sent to jail for doing. It’s a double standard and it’s unfair. If Martha Stewart had been in the U.S. Senate, she would have been protected.

Congress should be forbidden to pass any laws that do not also apply to themselves. If they had to get their own health care under the same laws that we do, the Affordable Care Act would not exist in it's present form; it would have been something better. The Healthcare.gov site might have actually worked, if they and their families had to use it themselves.

If congress had to actually live under the laws they pass for the rest of us, they would take greater care. But they don't, and they don't. That needs to change.

Congress is supposed to exist to serve us, not rule over us.


Also see:

Jon Stewart Tears Up Congress For Quietly Scaling Back Insider Trading Law: The ‘F*cker Act’

   

USA, the world's largest oil producer?

Yep. That's where we are heading:

U.S. to become world's largest oil producer before 2020, IEA says

The U.S. will become the world’s top producer of oil within five years, a net exporter of the fuel around 2030 and nearly self-sufficient in energy by 2035, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency.

It’s a bold set of predictions for a nation that currently imports some 20% of its energy needs.

Recently, however, an “energy renaissance” in the U.S. has caused a boost in oil, shale gas and bio-energy production due to new technologies such as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Fuel efficiency has improved in the transportation sector. The clean energy industry has seen an influx of solar and wind efforts.

By 2015, U.S. oil production is expected to rise to 10 million barrels per day before increasing to 11.1 million bpd by 2020, overtaking second-place Russia and front-runner Saudi Arabia. The U.S. will export more oil than it brings into the country in 2030.

Around the same time, however, Saudi Arabia will be producing some 11.4 million bpd of oil, outpacing the 10.2 million from the U.S. In 2035, U.S. production will slip to 9.2 million bpd, far behind the Middle Eastern nation’s 12.3 million bpd. Iraq will exceed Russia to become the world’s second largest oil exporter.

At that point, real oil prices will reach $125 a barrel. By then, however, the U.S. won’t be relying much on foreign energy, according to the IEA’s World Energy Outlook.

Globally, the energy economy will undergo a “sea change,” according to the report, with nearly 90% of Middle Eastern oil exports redirecting toward Asia. [...]

This report also confirms the claims made by Porter Stansberry, that I referred to in an earlier post about President Obama capitalizing on an oil boom, like Teddy Roosevelt and FDR did. And with the same corrupting influences.

   

The Rampant Voter Fraud that the Mainstream Media won't tell you about

The hits keep coming: Project Veritas exposes non-citizens, dead people registered to vote in NC — and so much more

Fraud? What voter fraud? While progressives continue to deny, deny, deny, investigative journalist James O’Keefe and Project Veritas continues to expose, expose, expose.

The latest target: North Carolina.

Project Veritas pulled up jury refusal forms and voter history documents to show that non-citizens and dead people there are registered to vote.

Watch as a man posing as a non-citizen with a passport is stubbornly encouraged by NC officials — who refuse to examine his ID — to vote. Listen to a conversation with election officials who joke about running over Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Listen to the election judge who only wants to uphold certain parts of the state constitution. And witness a University of North Carolina official chuckling as a “student” brags about voting in two different states to infiltrate GOP primaries. [...]

Which is worse, the liars and cheats who fraudulently vote, or the public officials who look the other way or even encourage it?

I know that in many places ID is not required to vote, but this just shows why proper identification needs to be required. And what about the fraudulent voting that has been uncovered? Why are there no consequences?

Where is the integrity of our voting system? There are laws against voter fraud, so why aren't these people being prosecuted? What good are laws that aren't enforced? Where is the accountability of those whose job it is to enforce our laws?

     

Government Employee Unions are Ruining Us

SOMEBODY'S GOTTA SAY IT ... GOVT. EMPLOYEE UNIONS ARE THE ENEMY

Here come the howls of outrage. "You are anti-union." Well, you're only partially right. I'm anti-government employee union. I don't have a particular problem with the legality of private-sector unions, so long as: (1) Employees vote by secret ballot as to whether or not the union will be formed; and (2) No employee should ever be forced to join a union nor should they be forced to pay dues to any union.

Government employee unions? Those are a completely different matter. These are people who spend millions of dollars to elect their bosses and then demand raises, pension plans and other benefits of those very bosses with threats that they will fire them if they refuse to go along. The taxpayers then have to pay for these bloated salaries, pensions and benefits. If more money is needed to pay the union tab, the unions then start spending millions on campaigns to raise taxes. It was government labor unions that were the primary financiers of the recent campaign to initiate a state income tax in the State of Washington. Why? The state needed the money to fund their classy ride.

It was John F. Kennedy who gave federal government employee unions the right to engage in collective bargaining. This was done not through legislation, but through an executive order. Franklin D. Roosevelt campaigned federal employee unions ... Kennedy presented this wonderful gift to the American taxpayer.

Here's something the Republicans can address. They need to begin making the case immediately for decertifying all federal government employee unions. For decades the primary advantage of being a federal employee was relative job security. Now these people make more than their counterparts in the private sector, they have better pension plans and better benefits ... and, as I said, they elect their own bosses. It needs to end.

Government employee unions are destroying California, and are about to do the same to the rest of the country:

AND THEN THERE'S CALIFORNIA

Perhaps more so than any other state, California's financial troubles can be placed at the doorsteps of California's government employee unions. In California unionized prison guards can earn over $100,000 a years. The unions are clearly bankrupting the state, and they show no sign of slowing down. And just who was it that gave California government employees the right to engage in collective bargaining? Why .. that would be none other than Jerry Brown when he was governor the last time. And who did the dumb mass voters of California just put back into the governor's office? Again ... Jerry Brown. Businesses and high-achieving individuals are bailing out of California right and left. Can't blame them.

It's just this simple ... government employee unions are at war with the taxpayers. The unions realize this ... the taxpayers don't seem to. Helluva way to fight a war.

Oh ... by the way. You do know which side The Community Organizer is on, don't you?

California and other profligate states are failing due to government employee unions strangling them. We must NOT bail them out:

Smash the Union Thugocracy
Republicans must not bailout profligate states nor the unions behind them.

One of the first orders of business in the next Republican-controlled House of Representatives will be the demand for bailouts of states that have been especially profligate: California, New York, Michigan, Illinois, and Connecticut. Throughout 2009 and 2010, these states stayed above water with repeated infusions of federal cash. These one-shot stimulus payments must be repeated each year. They are all non-recurring expenditures requiring separate annual appropriations.

The Republican House must say no and hold the line, stopping this raid on the federal Treasury. The cry in the caucus must ring loud: “No More Bailouts.”

But, as the Republicans demand fiscal discipline and refuse to make the citizens of other, more responsible states subsidize California and New York’s wayward finances, we need to focus on the union power that has forced states, localities, and school boards to raise taxes, borrow money, and — ultimately — depend on federal bailouts.

These unions have forced contracts on their states, localities, and school boards which provide for ever higher wages, benefits, and pensions. Even now, teachers are on strike in a suburb of Pittsburgh because they feel a 4.5 percent annual wage increase is inadequate.

The House must create a federal bankruptcy procedure for states that cannot make ends meet requiring — as in corporate bankruptcies — that state governments abrogate all their union contracts. The new state bankruptcy procedure should offer all states — and through them, their localities, counties, and school boards — the ability to reorganize their finances free of the demands of their union agreements.

This measure will return our state and local governments to the sovereignty of the people and take them away from the “thugocracy” of public-employee unions.

When states such as California and New York come to Washington begging for relief, they will threaten us with the closure of their schools and the release of their prison inmates if we deny them subsidies. Liberals and President Obama will try to portray the battle as schoolchildren versus niggardly Republican legislators.

But the real fight will be between schoolchildren and citizens on the one hand and unions on the other. The House must shape the issue so that it exposes the real cause of the state shortfalls: The excessive agreements public employee unions have won over the years.

The unions are about to fall prey to what Margaret Thatcher identified as the terminal drawback of socialism: Eventually, you run out of other people’s money.

Such an approach will also have a larger political impact. [...]

The article goes on to describe how public-employee unions used their tremendous power to in the recent election. The Democrats they elect are answerable to the government employee unions, not the taxpayers who have to pay the bills. We are becoming slaves to government employees.

The people of the Obama administration like to talk at length about "greedy" businesses. What about the "greedy" government unions, who are destroying us? This abuse MUST come to and end.

States that want bailouts, should be forced to declare bankruptcy, and dissolve their government employee unions. Those unions would first be given a chance to work with their state governments, to balance their budgets and avoid bankruptcy. If the unions refuse, let them be dissolved. Before they destroy us and themselves by collapsing our currency with debts.
     

What NPR's Vivian Schiller is pushing for

Check out her agenda. She's got BIG plans:

NPR CEO Vivian Schiller Key Architect of FCC Govt Takeover of the News

Last week, National Public Radio CEO Vivian Schiller took a break from her crusade for a government takeover of the media to swat a fly. With now-former NPR analyst Juan Williams suitably splattered across the evening news after politically incorrect comments he made on Fox News, Schiller can return to her real passion – the creation of a national network to ensure that in the future, you get your news from the government in general and NPR in particular.

[...]

Schiller, a former New York Times executive, is one of a few dozen power players working with the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and a leftist group called Free Press to “reinvent journalism.” That’s how the FTC describes it. The FCC calls what they are doing the “Future of Journalism.” Free Press, a think tank funded by leftist billionaire George Soros, among others, calls it “the new public media.”

It’s all the same thing, a plan to take over local news coverage from for-profit television, radio and print media, which Schiller and her friends claim is in danger of extinction. These “friends” get together regularly with the heads of the FCC and FTC to brainstorm the details in government and congressional meetings. These meetings include the leaders of all the country’s public broadcasting outlets, including PBS, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and American Public Media.

They are beefing up their staffs in local news markets with herds of public news reporters to “take over” coverage as commercial media fails. Nationwide, this will cost $40 billion to $60 billion over a decade, they believe. Their plans, according to the FCC’s Future of Media report, are to raise this money by taxing for-profit news organizations – the ones whose reporting Schiller is supposedly trying to “save.” They want to charge “spectrum fees” of five percent of broadcast station revenues for use of the public spectrum and airwaves, which the government controls. They figure that could bring in $1.8 billion a year. A one percent tax on all electronic devices like cell phones, televisions and laptops could bring in billions more. So would a monthly fee on internet subscriptions.

While conservatives were busy arguing that NPR should be defunded in the wake of the Williams debacle, Schiller was putting the finishing touches on the national infrastructure NPR has launched to deliver this new government news product to cities across the nation. A decade ago, defunding NPR would have sufficed. To stop Schiller now, Republicans would have to defund PBS and CPB as well to have any hope of torpedoing her plans to build a nationwide news delivery system in the style of the BBC, but on steroids. Schiller imagines a national public print, television and radio news leviathan that would compete with the top five news companies in the news industry.

“We can create a national network around all of public radio that provides the kind of public service that is being not provided by other media companies that are suffering,” Schiller told Cyberjournalist.net. Never mind that her planned confiscation of their revenues will cause them more suffering and possibly send them to an early death. [...]

Read the whole thing. Chilling, absolutely chilling. She's actually creating the problem she claims she is trying to solve, then pushing her own power grab as the solution. And why not? She has gotten away with it thus far. Another example of government power gone wild. Once released, it knows no limits.

Creating a government controlled news monopoly with taxpayers money is not what taxes are for. De-fund the lot of them... NOW.


Also see:

Marxist Censorship Dreams, and the FCC
     

P. J. O'Rourke: "This is not an election on November 2. This is a restraining order."

They Hate Our Guts And they’re drunk on power.

Perhaps you’re having a tiny last minute qualm about voting Republican. Take heart. And take the House and the Senate. Yes, there are a few flakes of dander in the fair tresses of the GOP’s crowning glory—an isolated isolationist or two, a hint of gold buggery, and Christine O’Donnell announcing that she’s not a witch. (I ask you, has Hillary Clinton ever cleared this up?) Fret not over Republican peccadilloes such as the Tea Party finding the single, solitary person in Nevada who couldn’t poll ten to one against Harry Reid. Better to have a few cockeyed mutts running the dog pound than Michael Vick. [...]

Read the whole thing. It's true to my experience of the Democrat party, which is why I stopped being one long ago.

Remember in November.
     

Greece and national character. Are we there yet?

We may not be there yet, but we are well on our way if we keep on going the way we are:

Revolt of the Accountants

[...] The coming rebellion in the voting booth is not only about the economic impact of spending, debt and deficits on America's future. It's also to some degree about the feared impact of all those things on the character of the American people. There is a real fear that government, with all its layers, its growth, its size, its imperviousness, is changing, or has changed, who we are. And that if we lose who we are, as Americans, we lose everything.

This is part of what's driving the sense of political urgency this year, especially within precincts of the tea party.

The most vivid illustration of the fear comes, actually, from another country, Greece, and is brilliantly limned by Michael Lewis in October's Vanity Fair. In "Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds," he outlines Greece's economic catastrophe. It is a bankrupt nation, its debt, or rather the amount of debt that has so far been unearthed and revealed, coming to "more than a quarter-million dollars for every working Greek." Over decades the Greeks turned their government "into a piñata stuffed with fantastic sums" and gave "as many citizens as possible a whack at it." The average government job pays almost three times as much as the average private-sector job. The retirement age for "arduous" jobs, including hairdressers, radio announcers and musicians, is 55 for men and 50 for women. After that, a generous pension. The tax system has disintegrated. It is a welfare state with a cash economy.

Much of this is well known, though it is beautifully stated. But all of it, Mr. Lewis asserts, has badly damaged the Greek character. "It is simply assumed . . . that anyone who is working for the government is meant to be bribed. . . . Government officials are assumed to steal." Tax fraud is rampant. Everyone cheats. "It's become a cultural trait," a tax collector tells him.

Mr. Lewis: "The Greek state was not just corrupt but also corrupting. Once you saw how it worked you could understand a phenomenon which otherwise made no sense at all: the difficulty Greek people have saying a kind word about one another. . . . Everyone is pretty sure everyone is cheating on his taxes, or bribing politicians, or taking bribes, or lying about the value of his real estate. And this total absence of faith in one another is self-reinforcing. The epidemic of lying and cheating and stealing makes any sort of civic life impossible."

Thus can great nations, great cultures, disintegrate, break into little pieces that no longer cohere into a whole. [...]

Not only is this corruption changing the character of our nation; the people who are doing the corruption are insulating themselves from the damage they are causing:

[...] Those in power institute the regulations and rules, and then hire people to protect them from the burdens and demands of their legislation. There is no congressman passing tax law who doesn't have staffers in his office taking care of his own financial life and who will not, when he moves down the street into the lobbying firm, have an army of accountants to protect him there.

Washington is now to some degree the focus of the same sort of profound resentment that Hollywood liberals inspired when they really mattered, or seemed really powerful. For decades they made films that were not helpful to our culture or society, that were full of violence and sick imagery. But they often brought their own children up more or less protected from the effects of the culture they created. Private schools, nannies, therapists, tutors. They bought their way out of the cultural mayhem to which they'd contributed. Their children were fine. Yours were on their own.

This is part of why people dislike "the elites" and why "the elites," especially in Washington, must in turn be responsive, come awake, start to notice. People don't like it when they fear you are subtly, day by day, year by year, changing the personality and character of their nation. They think, "You are ruining our country and insulating yourselves from the ruin. We hate you." And this is understandable, yes? [...]

YES indeed!
     

Hedge Funds, Democrats & the Financial Crisis

While posting about the Chelsea Clinton Wedding, I came across some links about Clinton/Democrat corruption, and our current financial crisis. Here are some of the more interesting bits:

Bridegroom's Father is Ex-Congressman & Convicted Felon

[...] It Runs in the Family

Edward Mezvinsky was convicted of fraud for shady business deals that had prosecutors calling him a "one-man crime wave." Prosecutors claimed that in 20 years of doing business between 1980 and 2000, every single deal he consummated displayed aspects of fraud. After his indictment in 2001, he pleaded guilty to 31charges of bank fraud, mail fraud, and wire fraud. He tried to raise a defense of diminished capacity due to his suffering from bipolar disorder, but the judge disallowed it.

His rip-off of almost $10 million got him seven years in the hoosegow. Ed Mezvinsky got out of the federal lock-up in 2008. By then, his son Marc was dating Chelsea Clinton. Both children of politicos attended Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, where they studied finance. They became friends at Stanford, and the friendship ripened into a romance sometime around 2007.

Post-Palo Alto, while Marc decided to enter the more venerable profession of investment banking, Chelsea opted to join a hedge funds. She eventually got a job with the Avenue Capital Group, big campaign donors for both her parents.

Hedge funds as they are now constituted were illegal from 1933 to 2000, as their type of activity was outlawed as it was considered as destabilizing speculation that helped cause the Great Depression. In the year 2000, her papa bear Bill Clinton turned his back on 67 years of proven financial regulation and signed a bill legitimating speculation. Mama bear Hillary was running for the U.S. Senate in the State of New York, Moloch's Big Town, and needed the big bucks from the free-booting financiers.

Baby bear Chelsea is doing very nicely as one of the parasitical class that has turned the United States into an economic and financial casino. A "casino" economy and stock market is a state of affairs which economists considered to be the antithesis of a well-managed economy well into the 1990s, when the hustlers took over and began to brazenly rule the roost. [...]

Of course, you aren't hearing any of this from the MSM, as they gush, and gush, and GUSH over the $3,000,000 dollar Clinton wedding. After all, as they keep telling us, the Clintons are political ROYALTY. And isn't that what America's all about? Worshiping Royalty?

Unfortunately, the corruption continues. Lest you think this is all in the past, it's tentacles most definitely reach into the present:

The Soul of the Democratic Party Sold

[...] Hedge funds have been major financial backers of Democratic candidates ever since Bill Clinton made like Abe Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, and set them free. Chelsea's mother Hillary received mucho hedge fund loot during her 2008 bid for the Democratic Presidential nomination. Hedge fund managers hedge their bets, and they also heavily backed Barack Obama, who rewarded them with a watered down "financial reform" bill that left hedge funds unmolested and hedge fund mangers' incomes taxed at the lower capital gains tax rate.

Former Goldman Sachs trading desk honcho Rahm Emmanul is President Obama's chief of staff, whilst his recent Supreme Court nominee, Elena Kagan, worked as a paid "adviser" to the financial power house. Goldman Sachs is what J.P. Morgan and the House of Morgan and Paul Mellon and the Mellon Bank were to Republican Administrations in previous years, the marionette master who pulls the strings.

As predicted by naysayers, within seven years of Clinton legitimating financial speculation, hedge funds and other speculative financial schemes helped bring the U.S. economy back on its knees in the worse political catastrophe since the Great Depression.

Since it was Bill Clinton's "centrist" Democratic Leadership Council that sold the soul of the Democratic Party to Wall Street, it is fitting that Chelsea Clinton should be marrying the son of a convicted felon who works for the titan of Wall Street, a firm that engages in legal robbery. It recently got off easy from double dealing in the subprime mortgage market with a half-billion-dollar fine. [...]

Remember when the Goldman-Sachs executives were hauled before Congress to testify? It was just a dog-and-pony show for the cameras. Sachs went along with it, and in return were basically getting a bail-out.

Bill Clinton's administration occurred during one of the most prosperous times in American history, but he had little to do with it. He was riding the coattails of prosperity set into motion by previous Republican Administrations. Clinton's spending was held in check by a Republican dominated Congress, so Clinton didn't over-spend. Where the Republican's failed, was in going along with Clinton's "Centrist" financial reforms and his expansion of the Community Reinvestment Act in 1997, which was then used by "activists" and "community organizers" (like Obama?) to coerce lending institutions to make millions of bad loans.

When there were signs that the melt-down was coming, some Republicans tried to make corrective reforms, but they were blocked by Democrats. Thus, the inevitable happened.

Now, what can we do about it? Remember in November.


Also see:

The roots of the financial crisis
     

Federalize the news industry? To what ends?

Will journalists wake up in time to save journalism from Obama's FTC?

[...] Those in the administration who clearly view independent journalism as an obstacle to "change we can believe in" and their numerous allies in the old media, non-profit, and academic communities who either share a similar ideological vision or see the FTC process as their salvation against the Internet, will no doubt dismiss my assertions as extemism or alarmism.

Fine, call me whatever, but what they cannot deny is what is clearly written in the FTC document and what it reveals about the intention behind the initiative, which is to transform the news industry from an information product collected by private individuals and entrepreneurs as a service to private buyers, to a government-regulated public utility providing a "public good," as defined and regulated by government.

The authors hide this dangerous intention behind carefully worded expressions of concern for preserving "quality journalism" and "addressing emerging gaps in reporting," and they rationalize their proposed approach of massive government intervention in the news process as simply an extension of what government has always done via postal subsidies, tax breaks, and so forth.

Jeff Jarvis, a veteran of the old media and a pioneer of the Internet-based new media with his Buzz Machine blog, provides a thorough analysis of what the FTC is considering and explicates the dangerous consequences that will follow.

[...]

Conservative journalists will do well not to roll their eyes impatiently with liberal colleagues who don't understand that government always expands its control over any activity it either funds or regulates, and therefore must be limited at every level to well-defined, narrowly circumscribed powers that only it can fulfill, as was done by the U.S. Constitution.

Better to explain yet again that the original intention of the Founders with respect to the media - "Congress shall make no law respecting ... the freedom of the press" - is the key to saving independent journalism.

Then we must remind them that the adversarial relationship that is supposed to exist between journalists and public officials must apply no matter who those public officials might be or what political party or ideological school of thought they represent.

Elected officials' first thought is always about re-election, while career government workers' is job security. A journalist's first thought is supposed to be getting the facts.

To that end, we're supposed to be adversaries, not co-conspirators, partners, favored "stakeholders," or beneficiaries. That's why the Constitution made us independent.

Read the details. What this FTC document says. Unbelievable. If we allow this, if we let it happen, then we deserve what we get.


Also see:

Seizing The News Business
     

Union abuses are costing taxpayer's plenty

The taxpayers need to be outraged. From Neal Boortz:

THE UNIONS ARE OUTRAGED?

Yesterday I told you about the unionized New York City bus drivers who took an average of two months paid leave in order to recover from being "assaulted" by spit. Turns out that someone in New York is actually trying to do something about these abuses. That person would be MTA Chairman Jay Walder, and boy does he have the unions spitting nails. They are actually MAD that they are being called out for not doing their job.

The bus driver assault story is pretty outrageous. But unfortunately, it doesn't stop there. Here are some other examples from the New York Post of some of the outrageous union practices in New York City.

• Overtime kicks in by eight-hour day rather than 40-hour week. So employees earn full pay while working less by calling out sick and then making up the lost wages through (premium) overtime.
  
  
• Many bus drivers clock a 12-hour shift for driving four hours in the morning rush and four in the evening rush. For the four hours in between, they're paid for being available -- but with no work to do.
  
  
• Whenever crew members of the Long Island Rail Road are switched from one train to another, they get another day's full pay.
  
  
• Real-time bus arrival information is finally being tested on Manhattan's 34th Street -- more than a decade after technology had made it possible. Union drivers didn't want to be tracked, so union bus mechanics refused to service wheels with the rotation-counting device needed to supplement GPS in its early days.
  
  
• While the new system on the Canarsie line can run trains with no crew aboard, L trains still operate with crews of two -- thanks to union work rules.
  
  
• The union representing crane operators insists on having full-time "oilers" at construction sites every day. But unlike the steam-driven equipment of old, modern cranes don't need constant lubrication.
  
  
• On building sites across the city, union operators must staff elevators -- even when they have normal push-buttons for each floor.
  
  
• Told it would cost $1,000 to have a union electrician plug a laptop into the wall of a Midtown hotel, one smart customer ran out and bought a spare battery for $70 instead -- and then noted it would be cheaper to buy a whole new computer than to pay the hotel electrician.
  
  
• A Midtown hotel just lost out on hosting the Sidney Hillman Foundation awards dinner after its unionized workers said they'd refuse to serve the foundation president -- because he also heads up a rival union.

Sort of makes you wonder how much money we could save on government if government employee unions were made illegal.

Bold emphasis mine. It's a good question. If the unions are going to destroy the taxpayers who pay them, I say destroy the parasitical unions. It's self-defense.


Also see:

Another perfect example of how unionized government employees are dragging us all down

Why Greece is in trouble. And a warning for us.

The cure for Greece is the one for US too
     

Large Crowd in D.C., Nationwide Protests

One estimate says 25,000 or more in D.C. alone:


Day of defiance: Nationwide protests as Slaughter House rushes through Demcare

Follow link for more photos and info.

Also see:

The Demcare bribe list, Pt. III; Update: Late-night wheeling and dealing into the midnight hour; Stupak press conference 11am Saturday; CANCELED

     

"We can’t allow the law of the jungle to become the new Washington norm"

Health Care Debate: What’s Important?

[...] It troubles me that the Democrat strategies, first of the “nuclear option” and now the “Slaughter Rule”, which seemed so outrageous at first blush, quickly settle down and become part of the normal political landscape. I guess that’s the way it is with outrages: After a while, you just take them in stride.

That’s a problem for us. The anti-democratic tactics of the Democrats are the stuff of Third World strongmen, or maybe Chicago politics. But we can’t allow the law of the jungle to become the new Washington norm.

[...]

By the rules of traditional American lawmaking and politicking, Washington would have listened to the people. Obama’s plans for health care reform would have halted. The work-in-progress would have been considerably amended, or even restarted, to bring the political center on board.

But Obama wasn’t having any of it. Rather than working with the people, he chose instead to throw out the lawmaking rulebook. This was done for the explicit purpose of thwarting the election results. Thus we moved into the previously-illicit territory of “nuclear options” and “Slaughter Rules”. This is without precedent in modern American democracy.

Maybe that’s the way major laws get passed in various undemocratic hellholes. We cluck our tongues at the corrupt systems of such places, and we bask in our smug superiority. But not here, no. It can’t be happening here. [...]

Maynard goes on to say that if this law is passed, in this way, it will change the relationship between Washington and the People, forever. And of course, it will open the door for... what next?

Of course it isn't just Obama who is the problem here. It's the entire Democrat leadership, who believe "The ends justify the means". They want not only to seize absolute power, but also ensure they keep it. By any means possible. If in the process they destroy our current political system, so much the better. They can then replace it with a system that won't limit their powers.

Absolute power, corrupting absolutely. If we let them.


Also see: The Big Lie

     

Why Obamacare is a swindle

Thomas Sowell breaks down the talking points versus the reality of Obamacare.

And what IS the updated price tag, as they are about to push this through? Have a look:

Updating the Price Tag

Even the estimates keep rising. The reality, even more so.