September 2008 Archives

"'Will you walk into my mortgage ?" said the spider to the fly;
"'Tis the prettiest little mortgage that ever you did spy.
The way into my mortgage is up a variable rate,
And I have many curious things to show when by these rules we skate."
"Oh no, no," said the little fly; "to ask me is in vain,
For who accepts your variable rate can ne'er be out of debt again."

Excerpts from Michael Moore's latest letter:

Let me cut to the chase. The biggest robbery in the history of this country is taking place as you read this. Though no guns are being used, 300 million hostages are being taken. Make no mistake about it: After stealing a half trillion dollars to line the pockets of their war-profiteering backers for the past five years, after lining the pockets of their fellow oilmen to the tune of over a hundred billion dollars in just the last two years, Bush and his cronies -- who must soon vacate the White House -- are looting the U.S. Treasury of every dollar they can grab. They are swiping as much of the silverware as they can on their way out the door.

Wall Street and its backers created this mess and now they are going to clean up like bandits. Even Rudy Giuliani is lobbying for his firm to be hired (and paid) to "consult" in the bailout. NOTHING in this "bailout" package will lower the price of the gas you have to put in your car to get to work. NOTHING in this bill will protect you from losing your home. NOTHING in this bill will give you health insurance.

This bailout's mission is to protect the obscene amount of wealth that has been accumulated in the last eight years. It's to protect the top shareholders who own and control corporate America. It's to make sure their yachts and mansions and "way of life" go uninterrupted while the rest of America suffers and struggles to pay the bills. Let the rich suffer for once. Let them pay for the bailout. We are spending 400 million dollars a day on the war in Iraq. Let them end the war immediately and save us all another half-trillion dollars!

What did Garrison Keilor Have to Say?

Poor Larry Craig got a truckload of moral condemnation for tapping his wingtips in the men's john, but his party proposes to spend 5 percent of the GDP to buy up bad loans made by men who walk away with their fortunes intact while retirees see their 401K go pffffffff like a defunct air mattress, and it's business as usual. Mr. McCain is a lifelong deregulator and believer in letting brokers and bankers do as they please -- remember Lincoln Savings and Loan and his intervention with federal regulators on behalf of his friend Charles Keating, who then went to prison? Remember Neil Bush, the brother of the C.O., who, as a director of Silverado S&L, bestowed enormous loans on his friends without telling fellow directors that the friends were friends and who, when the loans failed, paid a small fine and went skipping off to other things? Mr. McCain now decries greed on Wall Street and suggests a commission be forme d to look into the problem. This is like Casanova coming out for chastity.

The Republican Party used to specialize in gimlet-eyed, steel-rim, crepe-soled common sense and then it was taken over by crooked preachers who demand we trust them because they're packing a Bible and God sent them on a mission to enact lower taxes, less government. Except when things crash, and then government has to pick up the pieces.

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I'm thinking and reading some about the financial crisis. There are a lot of suggestions about what to do - contact Obama with your opinions, contact your Representatives, take to the streets, etc. I think that it's also personal and am interested in ideas that DCP readers have for how to get through this crisis and how to respond to it.

Locally, Washington Mutual has collapsed. Personally, our son's best friend has a job in jeopardy. Others we know or meet have accounts they want to be reassured about or investments that are down the tubes. National Review's Mark Krikorian now has a post titled "Cause and Effect?" on the collapse of Washington Mutual. The only implied cause in the post is a news release from Wamu which says "Company ranks in top ten of Hispanic Business' Diversity Elite and earns perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index" - See National Review". So the scapegoat is minority lending? Sounds like a cop out. As Michael Moore points out, one of the actual main causes of foreclosure is medical bills incurred by those without health insurance who have something catastrophic happen. Remember the bankruptcy bills and the stories of those with huge medical bills? Doesn't every candidate encounter such people on the road?

At our house, we don't know where to start but one place is belt cutting, which we were already starting before this banking thing completely hit the fan. We want to make permanent changes and drive less, not because gas is high, but because every tank of gas has a history. We want to eat less processed food, not just because it's more expensive, but because it's unhealthy. It not only hurts us and puts us more at risk (and we don't all have health insurance!) but we don't know it's history either! We don't intend to rush out and buy gold, nor do we know of a magic change in investments that will cut risk of loss of retirement funds. We do see a connection between the war costs and Wall Street greed so continue to support neither. We have probably never felt so powerless, and an election in less than 40 days is a first start.

What are others thinking and doing out there? (photo sent by Judith Wood in CA, just as I was going to break precedent and not use one)

(Editor's note: This article was submitted by Madame Defarge in her efforts to help spread Professor Ramirez's lecture on the Subprime debacles and the resulting bailouts. Thanks Madame.)

On September 24th, Steven Ramirez, a professor of law at Loyola University Chicago, gave a very interesting presentation called "The Subprime Debacle & Subprime Bailouts: Subprime Enforcement, Subprime Accountability, & Subprime Responsibility."

Prof. Ramirez kindly wrote down his thoughts & sent me a copy. Follow me below the fold to read what he has to say about the mess and his proposed solutions to resolving it. After you read this, you'll know more than McCain.

If you agree with his solution, please pass this information on to others and contact your senators/representatives.

Can our lawmakers hear us?

Apparently not. Because if they were listening to us, we would not be in this financial crisis right now.

We, the people, have been crying and begging for jobs, for lower gas prices, for help funding our education and funding our kids' education, for help starting small businesses, and for help saving ourselves from bankruptcy, or our homes from foreclosure. Yet they haven't heard and haven't responded for years!!!

We are angry as Hell and we're tired of the disconnect between our lawmakers in DC--living high on the hog of our sweat and tears--while our floor is crashing below us.

Now, those same people who have destroyed us, sponged us for every penny in our wallet, and have abandoned us are asking for us to save their rich hineys and save their jobs so that they can continue to soak us for more.

I'm mad as Hell, and so are a lot of people I know.

I've tried to call Congress to tell them my opinion, but guess what happens? The phone is ringing but nobody answers. It's a literal representation of some philosophical analogy of what they've been doing anyways. Tone deaf. They have been tone deaf for years. But they will be tone deaf no more!

Listen up Congress. Listen up candidates. And listen well.

We're pissed off, and come Hell or high water, you will hear us!

Bottom's up economics or trickle-down economics.

Which is better for the common good?

Isn't that what the focus of this financial crisis should be about? Common good.

What do you think?

I have been saving this photo and racist email for awhile as I suspected that America is more racist than it appears, especially in areas where the racism is no longer overt. Now a new study proves my point. America is still a very racist country. This includes a shockingly large percentage of Democrats and Independents.

Here are some of the findings:

The poll sampled 2777 white Americans and was done by AP-Yahoo News, conducted with Stanford University. One third of white Democrats harbored negative views toward blacks and 40% had at least a partially negtive view (harbored at least one presented negative). This could mean 2-1/2 percentage points who might not vote for Obama, according to the analysis, enough to swing a close race away from him. They also used a model to predict that Obama's support would be at least 6% higher if not for the racism.

Obama was nominated on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, in a nation that enshrined slavery in its Constitution. Bush is unpopular, as is the war, and McCain is old and unqualified. We are going through hard times. 70% of Democrats support Obama, 85% of Republicans support McCain, though there are now more Democrats. Independents may decide the election.

Republicans surveyed were prejudice, but also wouldn't vote for any Democrat, white, black, brown or any other color. Some Democrats also penalize Obama because they value experience over change (mostly older voters.) At least a portion of them planned to vote for McCain. More whites did say good things about blacks than negative. Obama's support among blacks is nearly unanimous.

The poll used a telephone interview and also recorded peoples' responses to black or white faces flashed on a computer screen and apply adjectives to them. Frequently used words inccluded "violent" and "lazy" and "irresponsible." More than a quarter of white Democrats agreed that "if blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites." More than a third of Independents used such negative terms and characterizations. More than half of whites combined revealed more negative feelings toward blacks than whites. 59% of Clinton's white backers wanted Obama for President and nearly 17% planned to vote for McCain.

The survey was conducted Aug. 27 to Sept. 5. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.1 percentage points.

Here is a circulating WINGNUT EMAIL & also a picture that was sent to my uncle. Anyone with intelligence KNOWS the racist stereotypes are flawed because there is such a thing as "white privilege" - ie., there is a strong history of exclusion on the basis of race and a continuing power discrepancy in favor of white people, albeit rich white people. That is not to say that minorities and poor white people are not pitted against each other for the benefit of the rich white people, and opening up the Guns, Gods and Gays wedge by the conservative candidates plays directly into this. They are then free to accuse others of being racist and sexist (or unpatriotic) when it is patently ridiculous. It is one of the oldest forms of propaganda, used successfully by Hitler, for example. Slugbug

Proud To Be White (smear email that is popular in America)

Someone finally said it. How many are actually paying attention to this? There are African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, Arab Americans, Native Americans, etc......And then there are just - Americans. You pass me on the street and sneer in my direction. You Call me 'White boy,' 'Cracker,' 'Honkey,' 'Whitey,' 'Caveman,' .....And that's OK. But when I call you Nigger, Kike, Towel head, Sand-nigger, Camel Jockey, Beaner, Gook, or Chink, .....You call me a racist. You say that whites commit a lot of violence against you, so why are the ghettos the most dangerous places to live? You have the United Negro College Fund. You have Hispanic History Month. You have Martin Luther King Day. You have Asian History Month. You have Black History Month. You have Cesar Chavez Day. You have Ma'uled Al-Nabi. You have Yom Hashoah. You have Kawanza. You have the NAACP. And you have BET. If we had WET (White Entertainment Television).....We'd be racists. If we had a White Pride Day.....You would call us racists. If we had White History Month.....We'd be racists. If we had any organization for only whites to 'advance' OUR lives,.....We'd be racists. We have a Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, a Black Chamber of Commerce, and then we just have the plain Chamber of Commerce. Wonder who pays for that? If we had a college fund that only gave white students scholarships.....You know we'd be racists. There are over 60 openly-proclaimed Black-only Colleges in the US, yet if there were 'White-only Colleges'.....THAT would be a racist college.

UPDATE:
I wanted to add a comment I received via email, with an important precaution about interpreting polls of this kind.

There is also a documented Reverse Bradley Effect.Wikipedia

This study relies on telephone contacts, and so disproportionately misses younger voters, who have cell phones only, and are far less racist than their elders.

I was a little taken aback at first by the message below, as we are coming close to an election and I am finding it hard to be relaxed, objective, fired up, fired down, mindful or much of anything else. I reread it though, including the book review, and now plan to read this book, along with the new Thomas Frank one, to regain a little equilibrium and focus. I think this will help with the job, the political activity and all the rest and that it should be time well spent.

This was the message:

I consider this election, the economy and other things a challenge to my mindfulness. I found comfort this weekend in reading and meditating. I have always felt that people who kill and promote war, such as Hitler were supposed to be my “enemy”. I realized that I could not be following in the right path if I gave that label to any living being. The Buddha teaches us that in order to love anything or anyone we must understand them first, so I decided to find some book or something that would help me understand folks that I feel are kind of like the “American Enemies”, Bush, Cheney, Bill O., FOX news etc. The book below has been extremely enlightening in helping me understand how people’s minds work when they are fearful and anxious. If you can afford to buy this book it will help. It also explains how people in the face of overwhelming evidence, they will cling to a lie that is unsubstantiated as long as it makes them comfortable and less fearful.

It would be dishonest if I were to say to you all that I love Dick Cheney; his crowd and the robotic individuals that follow his doctrine, but at least I am beginning to understand how and why they see the world in the way they do.

State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind (Hardcover) This book offers great insight into why people in America are not seeing the same things and the psychological reasons why.

The bottom line in all of this is if you can find someone that is “willing” to listen and is on the fence they are worth your time to talk to and hold a debate or discussion. The individuals that believe with all their being that Iraq attacked us on 9/11 and that the earth is 5 thousand years old, it truly is not worth getting upset about or wasting your time because you will “never” convince them. Remember Bush even said there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved, yet 30% + of his supporters still believe that he did. Once scared individuals latch on-to something concrete they will not give it up for fear their reality will become distorted.

This is the other book I plan to read. I heard the author interviewed on Bob Edwards' show on NPR. You will probably remember his other book which came out right after the last election and was called "What's the Matter with Kansas." The broadcast was very good but the essence of why I want to read it is contained in the title on the book jacket. (Read & Listen at NPR.Org

On the morning of 9/11, I was enjoying the cloudless blue-sky vista out of my office window overlooking Dupont Circle, when someone yelled to check out the office TV about a plane crash in New York. And so we sat, and watched the 2nd plane come in, and soon were looking out across the low DC skyline (no building can be higher than the Washington Monument, about 12-14 stories) at the smoke rising from the attack on the Pentagon.

As has been noted many places, "everything changed." Now in the unfolding election, we are seeing the results of one of the most pernicious of those changes, John McCain's decision to abandon the last whimpering vestiges of any commitment to truth.

Will I live long enough to feel that I really knew what happened at 911? I think of the decades-long debate over the 1963 Kennedy assassination, and I doubt it. But I have little doubt that the official investigation was woefully incomplete, just as all previous such investigations are incomplete. Conspiracy or no, such investigations always threaten to pull into the light of day, at the very least, the grotesque incompetencies that fester inside every bureaucracy that our species has ever created. (Think about the breaking news yesterday about the lurid goings-on in the Interior Department's office regulating oil drilling on Indian lands, complete with rock concert tickets, good meals, and--are we primates or what--sex.) No bureaucracy looks good in the light of such intense scrutiny, and any government worth its salt is prepared to do almost anything to prevent opening the latest can of worms, regardless of whether there was any criminal intent or conspiracy.

Let's not be naive here. When have politicians ever felt compelled to stick closely to the truth? How about never? But when it came time to slop the hogs (or put lipstick on the pig, etc.), the long-established practice was to have someone other than the top of the ticket do the dirty work. Sometimes the hatchetman (almost always men, until recently) would be easy to identify: no one had any doubts who Spiro Agnew was carrying water for when he attacked the press as "nattering nabobs of negativism," a phrase that we should always remember sprang from the pen of the illustrious William Safire--whom the New York Times rewarded with a permanent editorial sinecure after Safire had written some of the most destructive and reckless political rhetoric in the country's history. The liberal media my eye.

As we saw in 2004, however, shadowy Republican millionaires and billionaires like T. Boone Pickens (he of the more recent claim to solve the country's liquid fuels policy by converting cars and trucks to natural gas--instead of electricity--a bad idea that would put billions more into his pockets and that of the oil and gas industry at the expense of the country's environment and a continuation of our dependence on fossil fuels) were happy to fund the Swift Boaters attacks on John Kerry's campaign. And the media proceeded to amplify these false attacks, while Bush stayed at arms length.

But McCain has abandoned the fig-leaves and pretenses of not having any contact with the 527-third-party swift-boat attackers. He doesn't need these hacks. He is testing an entirely new premise: that the presidential candidate of one of the two major parties can get up every day and spew out lie after lie without, at the least, suffering any damages in the polls, and possibly, if some polling is to be believed, actually increasing his chances of getting elected.

This way lies madness. We are rushing toward a tipping point, where the voters are being faced with as stark a choice as voters have ever faced: do we want to live in a country in which we require that our leaders at least occasionally touch bases with reality, or are we ready to sacrifice the last vestiges of civilization and the tattered rule of law and turn the country over to the destructive world in which our freedom as individuals and our destiny as a country is entirely at the whim of the last words to come out of the president's mouth.

I have always enjoyed DCP so much because readers and contributers have such an appreciation and gift for music, dance, painting, writing and other creative arts as well as being informed, compassionate and dedicated about domestic politics and foreign policy of our world. So today I am posting something that I hope is a break from war talk and the distraction of an increasingly ugly domestic political season.

The Seattle-Tehran Poster Show Remix showed at Bumbershoot in Seattle over Labor Day weekend and selections will hang this fall at Verite Coffee Seattle locations. I visited it and photographed some pieces and context.

The websites are SeattleTehran or Design Commission and also Verite Coffee. This show is very close to my heart because I have had such wonderful Iranian friends and always wanted to visit there until things got all messed up. People talk about "nuking Iran" (even a Presidential candidate jokes about it) but probably don't know that we helped overthrow their democratically-elected leader. We then installed the Shah, who was overthrown because he was intolerably cruel, and in the anarchy which followed, fundamentalism was allowed to rise. We shouldn't be so smug as we seem to be a stone's throw away from the same fate ourselves.

About the Seattle-Tehran Poster Show:

It is a selection of fifty posters from each city in a variety of mediums sharing cultural themes such as music, fillm, theater and contemporary art. Artists ranged from Tehran University Professors to younger talents born since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, both male and female. The Iranian designs are paired with Seattle designs and the exhibition is premiering at Bumbershoot as the first exhibition of contemporary Iranian posters hosted in this country. In 2009, the exhibit will travel to Iran and the designers will meet each other.

Here is another website:

Fellowship for Reconciliation - The Conscience of the Peace Community - founded in 1914, following World War II. It is an international interfaith movement with chapters in 43 countries and there are 100 local groups in the US. The Fellowship opposes war and seeks those who will respond to conflict nonviolently. Delegations of peacemakers are sent to conflicted regions and to nations regarded as "enemies" and there they reach out on a people-to-people basis. In 2005, delegations started to go to Iran. American delegations have also gone to Vietnam, the former Soviet Union, Iraq, Nicaragua, Colomobia, Israel/Palestine, Philippines, much of Eastern Europe.