The Family - NPR's Terry Gross on Fresh Air

a disturbing interview with jeff sharlet...

A secretive fellowship of powerful Christian politicians includes some names that have recently been prominent in the headlines: Sen. John Ensign, Rep. Bart Stupak and Rep. Joe Pitts. Writer Jeff Sharlet describes the men's involvement with the Family, and discusses recent developments within the group.

listen here...

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Only AFTER giving handouts to the super-rich elites, do we NOW consider using TARP for jobs

sheesh... how low can we go...? using federal bailout money to bailout REAL people who really NEED it... f*****g commie socialists...

During a speech about the economy next week, President Obama is likely to endorse using some of the government's $700 billion financial bailout for a new jobs-creation program, the White House said Friday.

"The president thinks we should and must do everything in our power to create an environment for job growth and job creation," press secretary Robert Gibbs said. When asked whether Obama will talk on Tuesday about the use of bailout funds, Gibbs said, "I think that's likely."

this week's unemployment report is being trumpeted as if it was the second coming but let's not forget, REAL unemployment is still pushing toward 20%, foreclosures have shown no signs of slowing down, and the middle class in the u.s. is still swirling the drain...

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And the sunrises ain't bad either...

taken from the same spot as the sunset photo in the earlier post...






All photos taken at 6:58 a.m.
4 December 2009
High desert, Nevada

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Spitzer: The Rx has been wrong from the beginning

and THIS, dear friends, is precisely WHY spitzer had to be taken out...

eliot spitzer in an interview on democracy now...

[I]t wasn’t that the Fed was asleep at the switch; they were actually complicit. And by that, what I mean is that the Chairman, Ben Bernanke, and Tim Geithner, when he was the president of the New York Fed, actually built and participated in creating the structure that now has collapsed. And that, I think, is what is so problematic to so many of us. They are now claiming credit for having taken trillions of our tax dollars and given those dollars back to the banks to return them to solvency, when the initial bankruptcy and the initial illiquidity and the initial crisis was very much a consequence of the very policies they put in place.

Stepping back for a moment, we have a major crisis in this nation, and that crisis is jobs. That crisis is that we are seeing the elimination of the middle-class job foundation that permits most Americans to do better year after year after year. The reality is median family income has been stagnant for forty years, and the policies of what I call financialization, which is major banks trading assets back and forth, the Wall Street banks, such as Goldman, which is rightly a lightning rod right now for much of what’s going on, buying and selling, playing with tax dollars in proprietary trading—they make huge money, nothing is added to the economy, jobs are sent overseas. All of this going on simultaneously. That is what our economy has become.

And Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner were the architects of this. And now they are saying, “Didn’t we do a good job six months ago giving money to the banks?” No. Go back two, three, five years. Where were they? Tim Geithner, over and over, bailed out the banks. He was, as president of the New York Fed, the overseer of the institution that collapsed. And so, it’s akin to going to a doctor who has said, “I have a great technique for you: I’m going to bleed you,” and he bleeds you, and he gets you more and more sick and sick and sick. Then when you’re about to die, he puts a tourniquet on you and says, “Gee, I’m good.” No, your prescriptions have been wrong since the beginning.

you simply CAN'T have a truth-teller in a position of power, not in this country, not at this time...

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Back in the land of terrific sunsets

4:41 p.m.
High desert
Nevada
3 December 2009

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'There hasn't been two seconds of intelligent discussion about living standards in Afghanistan'

this guy is talking about the afghanistan i have personally experienced...

The poverty in Afghanistan is almost beyond imagining. Thirty Afghans die from TB every day; life expectancy is 43 years; per capita income is $426; only 13% have access to sanitary drinking water; fewer than one in four are literate; access to electricity is among the lowest in the world. Conditions for women are brutal. If Obama plans to address these issues, he's pretty much keeping it secret, points out world poverty expert Jeffrey Sachs. But without addressing them, can stepped-up American military involvement succeed? Or is it bound to fail?

and he makes the same point i've been making ever since my feet first hit the ground in kabul back in march 2008...

Columbia University economist Jeffrey D. Sachs, one of the foremost experts on extreme poverty in underdeveloped nations, says it is past time for the United States to end its war in Afghanistan, the world’s fifth poorest nation. In an interview with Nieman Watchdog in November, Sachs said the United States should reverse its priorities and fund major sustainable development programs, which would not only help reduce Afghanistan’s overwhelming poverty but would be a surer way to help achieve greater U.S. security.

As Sachs wrote last May in The Guardian newspaper of London, U.S. foreign policy “has failed in recent years mainly because the U.S. has relied on military force to address problems that demand development assistance and diplomacy. Young men become fighters in places such as Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan and Afghanistan because they lack gainful employment. Extreme ideologies influence people when they can’t feed their families, and when lack of access to family planning leads to an unwanted population explosion.”

This applies particularly to Afghanistan and the neighboring provinces of Pakistan, which “are impoverished regions, with vast unemployment, bulging youth populations, prolonged droughts, widespread hunger and pervasive economic deprivation. It is easy for the Taliban and al-Qaida to mobilize fighters under such conditions.” With improved economic conditions, a major recruiting tool for the Taliban and al-Qaida – as well as extremists’ threats to the United States – would be substantially weakened.

i've said it repeatedly - desperate people will do desperate things... why can't we see that and do something to break the cycle...?

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7 nights with Newsmax, Ralph Reed, Dick Morris, John Fund and Grover Norquist... A trip to DIE for...!

< snark >

i'm packin' my bags...



if this doesn't get your juices pumpin', i don't know what will...

a perfect stocking-stuffer...!

< /snark >

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Kiss my butt, BofA

with real unemployment hovering well in excess of 17%, it's positively gagging to read a story of how bank of america, the recipient of more than $45B of taxpayer largesse, can now, as a result of being able to pay it back and thus sidestep federal compensation regulations imposed on bailed out banks, contemplate paying ken lewis' replacement an equally bloated, obscene salary...

gag me with a spoon...

Despite continuing problems with its loans to struggling homeowners and consumers, Bank of America plans to return the $45 billion in aid that it received at the height of the financial panic — a step that, only months ago, would have been almost unimaginable.

But like many other big banks, Bank of America is once again making money, in large part through Wall Street businesses like trading stocks and bonds, rather than by making loans. Its recovery, while many ordinary Americans are still struggling, is an important milestone in the government’s yearlong effort to stabilize the nation’s financial industry.

[...]

It is a particularly delicate time for Bank of America, which has struggled to find a replacement for Mr. Lewis. By paying back the money that it received under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, Bank of America will free itself from exceptional federal oversight of its executives’ pay — a thorny issue in recruiting a new chief executive.

Indeed, Bank of America’s board has been riven by dissent over just who should lead the bank into its post-bailout period. Several potential candidates have said they were not interested in the job, in part because of the bank’s federal bailouts and the strings attached to them.

why is bofa's recovery so goddam important "while many americans are still struggling"...? huh...? why...?

the only way i can see to stop this naked highway robbery is to systematically purge the government of the super-rich, elite former banksters that are now (and have been for some time) calling the shots for our economy... they're not going to be stopped by a mere hold on a nomination (see previous post)... they have to be removed... all of them...

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Big news - Bernie Sanders puts a hold on Bernanke's nomination

O. M. G...! am i witnessing an outbreak of senatorial cojones...?

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today placed a hold on the nomination of Ben Bernanke for a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve.

“The American people overwhelmingly voted last year for a change in our national priorities to put the interests of ordinary people ahead of the greed of Wall Street and the wealthy few,” Sanders said. “What the American people did not bargain for was another four years for one of the key architects of the Bush economy.”

As head of the central bank since 2006, Bernanke could have demanded that Wall Street provide adequate credit to small and medium-sized businesses to create decent-paying jobs in a productive economy, but he did not.

He could have insisted that large bailed-out banks end the usurious practice of charging interest rates of 30 percent or more on credit cards, but he did not.

He could have broken up too-big-to-fail financial institutions that took Federal Reserve assistance, but he did not.

He could have revealed which banks took more than $2 trillion in taxpayer-backed secret loans, but he did not.

“The American people want a new direction on Wall Street and at the Fed. They do not want as chairman someone who has been part of the problem and who has been responsible for many of the enormous difficulties that we are now experiencing,” Sanders said. “It’s time for a change at the Fed.”

not only did sanders have the guts to do it, he also had the guts NOT to do it anonymously...

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The last time there was a troop surge in Afghanistan, 3M people fled to Pakistan

juan cole...

The last time a foreign military staged a 'surge,' i.e. the Soviets in the early 1980s, it produced so much violence that 3 million Afghans were forced to flee to northern Pakistan. Islamabad is wary lest that patter be repeated.

which would explain why pakistan has more than a few concerns about obama's proposed escalation in afghanistan... i know quite a few afghans who had to beat feet across the khyber pass to peshawar and beyond to save their skins when things got too hot in kabul... the refugee existence was unimaginably miserable for most of them, one which nobody i know desires to repeat any time soon...

al jazeera...

Pakistani government officials have expressed concern about President Barack Obama's new Afghan strategy, which calls for Pakistan to step up its co-operation against the Taliban in exchange for a pledge of a long-term partnership.

In an address to unveil a new strategy for the eight-year conflict in Afghanistan, Obama said on Tuesday a cancer had taken root in Pakistan's border region with Afghanistan and promised US help to end it.

The Pakistani Foreign Affairs Ministry issued a cautious response that stressed the "need for clarity" in the new US policy.

"Pakistan looks forward to engaging closely with [the] US in understanding the full importance of the new strategy and to ensure that there would be no adverse fallout on Pakistan," the ministry said in a statement on Wednesday.

"Pakistan and the US need to closely co-ordinate their efforts to achieve shared objectives. There is certainly the need for clarity and co-ordination on all aspects of the implementation of the strategy."

what puzzles me the most is that job creation and poverty alleviation, two critical elements that almost every afghan i talk with says could significantly reduce the level of violence, were nowhere to be found in obama's speech ... it was only two weeks ago that i posted (here) on a poll taken by oxfam in afghanistan that unequivocally said this...

Poverty and unemployment are overwhelmingly seen as the main reasons behind conflict in Afghanistan, according to a survey in that country.

[...]

Oxfam said the survey showed that the country needed more than military solutions.

so, who the hell is obama listening to anyway...? oh, never mind... silly me... it must be the defense contractors...

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Mr. CIA - more on Erik Prince and Blackwater

hoo-boy... surprising but not surprising if you know what i mean...

[T]he truth about [Erik] Prince may be orders of magnitude stranger than fiction. For the past six years, he appears to have led an astonishing double life. Publicly, he has served as Blackwater’s C.E.O. and chairman. Privately, and secretly, he has been doing the C.I.A.’s bidding, helping to craft, fund, and execute operations ranging from inserting personnel into “denied areas”—places U.S. intelligence has trouble penetrating—to assembling hit teams targeting al-Qaeda members and their allies. Prince, according to sources with knowledge of his activities, has been working as a C.I.A. asset: in a word, as a spy. While his company was busy gleaning more than $1.5 billion in government contracts between 2001 and 2009—by acting, among other things, as an overseas Praetorian guard for C.I.A. and State Department officials—Prince became a Mr. Fix-It in the war on terror. His access to paramilitary forces, weapons, and aircraft, and his indefatigable ambition—the very attributes that have galvanized his critics—also made him extremely valuable, some say, to U.S. intelligence.

no question about it... you couldn't make this shit up...

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In only ONE YEAR, Sprint gives law enforcement agencies GPS info 8 MILLION TIMES...!

ummm... whaddaya say to this except, HOLY SHIT...! i mean i knew it was happening but not on this scale...

chris sogohian via emptywheel...

Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers' (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers.

The evidence documenting this surveillance program comes in the form of an audio recording of Sprint's Manager of Electronic Surveillance, who described it during a panel discussion at a wiretapping and interception industry conference, held in Washington DC in October of 2009.

It is unclear if Federal law enforcement agencies' extensive collection of geolocation data should have been disclosed to Congress pursuant to a 1999 law that requires the publication of certain surveillance statistics -- since the Department of Justice simply ignores the law, and has not provided the legally mandated reports to Congress since 2004.

meanwhile, our "change we can believe in" president keeps on keepin' on...

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God, I'm sick of context-free news reportage

having just spent some time working in kosovo while getting a "deep-dive" education on current goings-on in that relatively newly-hatched country and then reading this, i'm once again left amazed at just how much what can only be a deliberate omission of relevant context can skew a news story...

Despite its troubles, Kosovo offers model for nation-builders
In newest country, improvements come slowly but steadily

[...]

And yet, in spite of its problems and growing pains, Kosovo is cited by many diplomats as a credible model of nation-building, a sign -- relevant to the current debate over Afghanistan -- that a determined effort by foreigners can help to build a country from the ashes.

After years of ethnic conflict, security and stability are taking root.

[...]

[C]onstruction cranes rise like green shoots from the skyline of Pristina, Kosovo's capital, which is in the midst of a building boom thanks to foreign aid.

In another hopeful sign, Kosovo in mid-November held its first municipal elections since declaring independence on Feb. 17, 2008. Although there were a handful of violent incidents during the campaign, voters cast their ballots in peace and there were no major allegations of fraud.

it would have been helpful to provide a little more context although i despair of finding that most basic journalistic blandishment in the wapo of the 21st century...

the context that is sadly missing is the enormous corruption that fuels kosovo... with a massive set of laws on the books, all written by outsiders but virtually no functioning justice system to apply them, kosovo is nearly as much of a wild, anything-goes frontier as is afghanistan... (having spent considerable time recently in both places, i believe the comparison is apt...)

bootlegged and counterfeit products, human trafficking, a vibrant drug trade, politicians openly on the take, brand new roads and buildings already crumbling due to lack of any construction codes or standards, all conspire to make the wapo's rosy picture of a nation "a-building" more than a bit lame...

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Ok, now let's ban the cross as a symbol of militant Christianity

i thought the Swiss were smarter than this... guess not...

Swiss voters have approved a proposal to ban the construction of minarets, after a rightwing campaign that labelled the mosque towers as symbols of militant Islam, projections by a respected polling institute show.

The projections based on partial returns indicate that support swung from 37% in favour of the ban a week ago to 59% in today's referendum.

[...]

The nationalist Swiss People's party (SPP) described minarets, the distinctive spires used in most countries for calls to prayer, as symbols of rising Muslim political and religious power that could eventually turn Switzerland into an Islamic nation.

Muslims make up about 6% of Switzerland's 7.5 million people, many of them refugees from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Fewer than 13% practice their religion, the government says, and Swiss mosques do not broadcast the call to prayer outside their buildings.

it's cold comfort to know that islamic hysteria isn't restricted to the u.s...

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In the U.S. and most of the rest of the world, Monsanto OWNS soybeans and corn

heckuva strategy... genetically modify seeds, patent them, build dominant market share to insure that your seeds are the only ones available and then keep raising the prices... pretty soon, the world's food supply belongs to YOU... it's the same strategy employed by the banksters to keep us servile and productive for our masters...

For plants designed in a lab a little more than a decade ago, they've come a long way: Today, the vast majority of the nation's two primary crops grow from seeds genetically altered according to Monsanto company patents.

Ninety-three percent of soybeans. Eighty percent of corn.

The seeds represent "probably the most revolutionary event in grain crops over the last 30 years," said Geno Lowe, a Salisbury, Md., soybean farmer.

But for farmers such as Lowe, prices of the Monsanto-patented seeds have steadily increased, roughly doubling during the past decade, to about $50 for a 50-pound bag of soybean seed, according to seed dealers.

The revolution, and Monsanto's dominant role in the nation's agriculture, has not unfolded without complaint. Farmers have decried the price increases, and competitors say the company has ruthlessly stifled competition.

Now Monsanto -- like IBM and Google -- has drawn scrutiny from U.S. antitrust investigators, who under the Obama administration have looked more skeptically at the actions of dominant firms.

once again, the wapo manages to publish a story without context... how can a news organization of the supposed reputation of the washington post manage to ignore the on-going global outcry against genetically-modified food production in general and monsanto and its terminator seeds in particular that has been going on for years...? it's stunning... really...

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The "recovery"...? HA...!! How about 36M folks on food stamps...

seeing light at the end of the tunnel...? me neither... guess it's probably because i'm not a member of the super-rich elite...

food stamps...

With food stamp use at record highs and climbing every month, a program once scorned as a failed welfare scheme now helps feed one in eight Americans and one in four children.

It has grown so rapidly in places so diverse that it is becoming nearly as ordinary as the groceries it buys. More than 36 million people use inconspicuous plastic cards for staples like milk, bread and cheese, swiping them at counters in blighted cities and in suburbs pocked with foreclosure signs.

Virtually all have incomes near or below the federal poverty line, but their eclectic ranks testify to the range of people struggling with basic needs. They include single mothers and married couples, the newly jobless and the chronically poor, longtime recipients of welfare checks and workers whose reduced hours or slender wages leave pantries bare.

[...]

From the ailing resorts of the Florida Keys to Alaskan villages along the Bering Sea, the program is now expanding at a pace of about 20,000 people a day.

There are 239 counties in the United States where at least a quarter of the population receives food stamps, according to an analysis of local data collected by The New York Times.

foreclosures...

The Obama administration on Monday plans to announce a campaign to pressure mortgage companies to reduce payments for many more troubled homeowners, as evidence mounts that a $75 billion taxpayer-financed effort aimed at stemming foreclosures is foundering.

“The banks are not doing a good enough job,” Michael S. Barr, Treasury’s assistant secretary for financial institutions, said in an interview Friday. “Some of the firms ought to be embarrassed, and they will be.”

Even as lenders have in recent months accelerated the pace at which they are reducing mortgage payments for borrowers, a vast majority of loans modified through the program remain in a trial stage lasting up to five months, and only a tiny fraction have been made permanent.

meanwhile, as citizen anger at the incredible amount of our money being thrown at those who already have way too much of it continues to grow, the likes of the fed's bernanke simply can't stop defending the very system that precipitated this hellish mess...

In a column published on The Washington Post’s Web site and scheduled to appear on the op-ed page on Sunday, the chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, sharply criticized a Senate provision that he said “would strip the Fed of all its bank regulatory powers” and a House provision to repeal a 30-year-old law “to protect monetary policy from short-term political influence.”

The Federal Reserve’s jurisdiction to regulate banks has come under increasing attack in Congress in recent months, reflecting the anger of voters at the huge taxpayer costs of the bailout of Wall Street.

Mr. Bernanke repeated, as he has many times before, that while some of the measures in response to the financial crisis were “distasteful and unfair,” they were necessary.

ol' ben is such an obvious tool... admitting that things are "distasteful and unfair" but still "necessary" is akin to the old parental adage - "this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you" - while strapping the hapless kid with the business end of a belt...

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A modest proposal for replacing Guantánamo

having just completed an 11-hour flight on my favorite airline from hell, united, i am moved to suggest that detainees from guantánamo could very easily be placed instead in the economy section of a united 747 and shuttled endlessly back and forth across the atlantic while being forced to watch bad movies and eat tasteless food, all the while being strapped into a seat that, at best, would provide legroom but precious little comfort to a 5 year-old... i seriously doubt it would be a tenth as expensive as guantánamo and the opportunities for escape at 36,000 feet would certainly be minimal...

just a thought...

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Dubai finally admits a bit of the truth

i love how the 2d paragraph starts - "the fallout came swiftly"... 'scuse me, but what a pile of bullshit... it may have SEEMED swift but only for those who haven't been paying attention...

hardly a secret, dubai's bailout request to abu dhabi (see below) made dubai the butt of jokes as the whimpering plea of a compulsive gambler... there were rumblings last january when i posted about those jumping ship (here) and have devoted a number of other posts (here) to my impressions of that supremely soulless place that harbors the all-too-common delusion that money can buy not just anything, but EVERYTHING...

perhaps the biggest reason the dubai debt crisis took the world by surprise is the intense repression of news exercised by obscenely bloated, super rich sheiks that call the shots in the uae... the fact that it's hitting the news at all suggests to me that the problem is massively more serious than they're letting on...

Just a year after the global downturn derailed Dubai's explosive growth, the city is now so swamped in debt that it's asking for a six-month reprieve on paying its bills — causing a drop on world markets Thursday and raising questions about Dubai's reputation as a magnet for international investment.

The fallout came swiftly and was felt globally after Wednesday statement that Dubai's main development engine, Dubai World, would ask creditors for a "standstill" on paying back its $60 billion debt until at least May. The company's real estate arm, Nakheel — whose projects include the palm-shaped island in the Gulf — shoulders the bulk of money due to banks, investment houses and outside development contractors.

In total, the state-backed networks nicknamed Dubai Inc. are $80 billion in the red and the emirate needed a bailout earlier this year from its oil-rich neighbor Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.

boo-freakin'-hoo...

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What percent of the world's population AREN'T the major news organizations interested in...? Would you believe HALF...?

from the europe blog post by hamish macdonald on al jazeera...

I was recently passed this link by John Owen at London's City University journalism school and thought it might be of interest to others.

The 'Hum News' posting considers what it calls the "Geographic Gap" of the contemporary news environment. That is, world news is covered by a very small number of news organisations and those organisations choose to only cover a small portion of the world's news. I know it sounds like a riddle, but it is the reality of international news.

Although there is now a proliferation of news outlets, particularly online, there are in fact fewer reliable, independent organisations actually gathering the information and delivering it in a balanced fashion.

Hum News points out that while there are 237 countries or territories in the world, the four biggest news organisations only report from 121 countries. This means there are 116 countries not covered. By Hum's calculations that is:

"almost half the world, and 4 billion people"

Of course, it would be foolish for us to expect that news organisations cover every single thing that happens everywhere in the world. But just how important are the 116 countries not covered by the big news organisations?

from juan cole...

63 of these ignored countries and territories are desperately poor.

All this has security implications for the United States. What do you want to bet that in the late 1990s, Afghanistan was in the 116? Hard to know an attack was being planned out there if you don't know the place exists.

What HUM does not say is that the ignoring of the 116 comes from the news corporations' profit motive, which is increasingly driving them to ignore most real news in favor of infotainment. Desperately poor 4th world countries? Not entertaining.

professor cole also points out that those four news organizations supply the world with 90% of its news... he also notes this about al jazeera...

Aljazeera's model, being backed by the Qatar Foundation, may be one of the few ways out of this information gap. Aljazeera English does a better job covering subsaharan Africa and Latin American than any other Anglophone news service, and they pay attention to the poor and working people.

the times i've had the opportunity to watch al jazeera, i confess to being quite impressed with both the depth and the breadth of its news coverage... sure, like every news organization, it has its spin, but, overall, it's remarkably objective... i've learned things from al jazeera about what's going in the rest of the world i would never have learned otherwise...

keep in mind that virtually all of al jazeera's news clips are posted on its youtube site here...

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On this day of thanks, with Black Friday looming ahead, let's reflect on our obsession with materialism

it's been quite a while since i posted (here) on reverend billy and his church of stop shopping, so i decided to do a bit of googling to see what he's up to these days... i found that he and his posse have morphed into the church of life after shopping... i'm glad to see he's still kicking around...



besides being a decent showman, rev. billy's also pretty articulate...

A mile-long trail of cars and trucks curves through my neighborhood. As we greet each other at the frontdoor of the Greenwood bodega, we glance over at the motorists, sitting there. In one way or another we know – that traffic jam is corrupt. We look over at the stack of newspapers inside the front door. The news is corrupt. We look up at the jetliner descending into La Guardia. That flight is corrupt.

We live in this era of corruption, hiding in plain sight. All public activities are controlled by players who pay for control. The public has no role except as consumers. Many of us would say, “It’s always been like this.” But I think corruption has changed in recent years. It has become so general that it wraps around us. It activates, engages and surrounds our senses like a powerful movie in the shape of a shell. The industries, celebrities and public agencies overlap their corruption on this shell.

The corruption is ambient now. A shell with a dazzling, pixilated surface. It’s like a Diamondvision in the shape of wind-tunnel. Products, celebrities, Christmas, gunships and candy appear and do their vaudeville routine. We live in this shell of unaccountably and secretly managed – well, what is it? It succeeds because we don’t notice it, we don’t know how to describe it. I can flail at it with phrases like “the great fake community” or the “privatized commons.” I don’t have it in words that work down here on the corner. Oh yes - we all know about the government bail-outs. We know about the insurance lobbyists writing the congressmens’ speeches. We look at the papers, up at the jet, and out at the glowing faces on the highway.

What would I say if I had the words? That shell! It is the slippery and vast high alter of Consumerism! It expertly mimics us, but more than that – the professionals who control it anticipate what we WILL do, because they study our habits, our desires, our human-ness. Sadly, the shell broadcasts a completely believable Democracy. Has anything so universal ever been so hidden? The shell is un-locatable. It is as close as the radio in the dashboard of the citizens in traffic; it is as far as the Afghani war. The shell is bounding with young families made happy by Big Pharma, bubble credit, the hallucinating momentum of American greatness…

We see ourselves in the shell and we continue to wait, to waste our lives. That’s the trouble. The true cost of corruption is that we sit in traffic. A lot of us aren’t within reach anymore, so we cannot be creative as a community. That is what, for modern western culture, Americans invented. But it has gone up onto the shell now and performs brilliantly back at us, sitting in our cars, or in our drugs, or in our Christmas. Ultimately the violence of this present kind of corruption is our silence. We can no longer reach around the product-shell to address each other directly. But I’m repeating myself.

Breaking through the shell is illegal, but it is the necessary interruption of our time. We must walk into the traffic and try to say hello. I’m writing this after I walked back to my home from the bodega. The traffic citizens are still sitting out there. I could go back down and… what? …start the revolutionary season’s greetings. What if our Christmas this year was completely different?

i, for one, am thankful there are people like reverend billy out there...

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Yep, the banksters have a LOT to be thankful for - massive bailouts and no regulation

meanwhile, all we peasants can expect is a lump of coal in our christmas stockings...

from the wapo... (the strikeout is mine...)

The nation's bankers banksters have much to be thankful for as they sit down to their turkey dinners on Thursday.

At this time last year, the American financial system was near collapse, rescued only by hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. Now the system has stabilized, and the industry is on the verge of a coup that many would have thought impossible a year ago: an escape from any major reform of financial regulations.

On Tuesday, the American Financial Services Association even held a conference call with reporters to update them on its efforts -- successful so far -- to torpedo plans for a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which would protect people from the sort of lending abuses that led to last year's implosion.

The ASFA, a trade group of credit card issuers, auto-finance companies, mortgage lenders and others leading the fight against the CFPA, took the unusual approach on Tuesday of publicly celebrating the reform's fading prospects.

"This was supposed to be a slam-dunk," crowed Bill Hempler, the group's top lobbyist. But instead, he said, "Democratic members are increasingly having heartburn over CFPA and maybe second thoughts."

[...]

Now these same companies [CIT, CitiFinancial, Countrywide, EquiFirst, HSBC, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo Financial and GMAC], suffering from some combination of amnesia and ingratitude, are determined to fight off regulatory efforts to prevent a repeat of the same cycle of bubble, collapse and bailout. Big firms such as J.P. Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Bank of America -- direct or indirect beneficiaries of federal bailouts -- are all battling efforts to rein in derivatives. And credit card issuers, facing new regulations scheduled to take effect in February, have responded by increasing their rates and fees.

check THIS as a rationale for fighting re-regulation...

[T]he argument most likely to prevail for the financial firms on Capitol Hill was offered by Chris Stinebert, the trade group's chief. "Especially now, when we're in a very, very sensitive time, when the capital markets are just starting to recover," he said, "introducing a high level of uncertainty in the marketplace could be very detrimental."

amazingly enough, dana milbank, well-known for shilling the views of his ultra-establishment employer, actually decides to call a spade a spade...

Or, to put it another way: Don't regulate us now because the economy is still suffering from the mess we made because we weren't regulated the last time. Chutzpah, it appears, is recession-proof.

how long will it take the long-suffering citizens of our formerly devoted-to-the-common-good country to realize we've been the victims of yet another coup d'etat, this one of truly staggering proportions... bless the 17+% unemployed who owe their circumstances largely to the banksters... and fie on the banksters who will be celebrating the latest fast one they pulled on us peasants...

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