People's Daily Brief

Obama's Dire Wolves

The Obamanable Spyman

You were warned.

Obama Protects CIA Torture Memos

Hope Abandoned

By CHRIS FLOYD
Counterpunch

It is understandable that people hunger desperately for change after the open, scalding evils of the Bush years. It is understandable that they would seize on an attractively packaged figure who made a few progressive noises, carried a great deal of genuinely symbolic weight due to his race, and was more personable, cool and articulate than his god-awful predecessor. It is understandable that many people would want to give this figure the benefit of the doubt, to turn a blind eye to the many warning signs that emerged during the campaign, and hope for the best. After all, who would not rather live in hope?

But hope must be grounded in reality; and it must be invested in the right place. When reality gives it the lie, then it must be abandoned. There is no hope to be found in the Obama Administration: no hope for genuine change, no hope for a clean break (or any kind of break) from the relentless and ruthless promotion of empire, oligarchy and militarism. By his own choices -- his appointments, his policies, his court actions, his rhetoric -- Barack Obama has demonstrated beyond all doubt his sincere and abiding commitment to "continuity" in the most pernicious and corrosive elements of America's lawless hyper-state. To place one's hope in such a figure is a crippling, disastrous folly.

Infinity's Kin

Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is
one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity.

Charles Baudelaire

The Ones Who Got It Right

 

by Ralph Nader
CommonDreams.org

Why is it that well regarded people working the fields of corporate power and performance who repeatedly predicted the Wall Street bubble and its bursting receive so little media and attention?

Instead, the public is still being exposed to the comments and writings of people like Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, James Glassman (of Dow 36,000 notoriety) while others like Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers, and Gary Gensler are newly-appointed at high levels in the Obama Administration. These men were variously architects, rationalizers and implementers of the massive de-regulation and non-regulation that unleashed the epic forces of greed, speculation and ruination of millions of livelihoods and trillions of dollars other peoples’ money worldwide.

Here are some of the people who got it right—early and often:

 1. William Greider—author and columnist with The Nation magazine—wrote books (including Secrets of the Temple, 1988) and articles warning about the Federal Reserve and the anti-democratic consequences of rampant corporate globalization.

 2. Robert Kuttner whose books (e.g. Everything for Sale, 1999) and articles predicted what will happen to workers and pensions when the regulatory state is tossed aside by the corporatists operating inside and outside of government.

3. Jim Hightower whose books (If the Gods Has Meant Us to Vote, They Would Have Given Us Candidates, 2000) and the monthly mass circulation Hightower Lowdown newsletter pointed out again and again the abuses of the “greedhounds” and vastly overpaid corporate bosses that have run consumers of health care, credit, cars and banks into the ground.

4. Nomi Prins (Other People's Money, 2004) a former managing director of Goldman Sachs, quit in disgust and began disclosing how these giant Wall St. firms deal and how, with their ideological backers, they wove their webs of deception and fraud against investors, students borrowing money for college, taxpayers ripped off by corporate contractors, sick people gouged and insurance companies denying legitimate claims. (See her book Jacked: How “Conservatives” Are Picking Your Pocket, 2008)

5. John R. MacArthur, author (The Selling of “Free Trade”, 2001) columnist and publisher of Harpers, authored a sharp, prophetic criticism of NAFTA’s effect on U.S. and Mexican workers. Finally, on March 24, 2009 the New York Times featured a report titled “NAFTA’s Promise, UNfulfilled.”

6. Robert A.G. Monks—the leading shareholder rights advocate in our country warned for years in books (latest Corpocracy, 2008) , articles, testimony and standup challenges at corporate annual meetings that keeping investors—the owners of these companies—powerless and dominated by corporate executives would lead to big trouble. Everyday, you can now see the ways that avaricious abuses of executive compensation by Wall Street led to cooking the books, hiding the debts and wildly losing other peoples’ money.

7. Tom Stanton, whose 1991 book State of Risk, exposed the dangerously undercapitalized condition of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and predicted coming disaster if this reckless leveraging continued. By comparison, a year ago Fannie and Freddie’s federal regulator, James B. Lockhart III called fears of a bailout “nonsense” and amazingly further lowered the required capital levels months before their collapse and takeover a few months later. Mr. Lockhart is still in his job heading a new regulatory entity over these two goliaths.

8. Republican Kevin Phillips, (latest book Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism, 2007) whose numerous writings on Wall Street power and money and the dictatorial rule of the plutocracy were wise, historically—rooted premonitions of future collapse.

9. Dean Baker, (latest Plunder and Blunder, 2004) Washington-based economist, warned repeatedly earlier in this decade of the housing bubble and the calamitous consequences once it burst. He even sold his own home in 2004 and became a tenant, so convinced was he of the housing precipice.

10. Then there is Naomi Klein who has been documenting how economic disasters produced by corporations and their governmental cohorts end up not with reforms but with further increasing the power of the corporate state. (See Shock Doctrine the Rise of Disaster Capitalism, 2007)

Chances are that outside the independent media and an occasional public tv-radio interview, you have not seen or read them in the mass media. But they were right, so why haven’t you? Well, first of all, they took on commercial interests and called them out by name and specific misdeeds. Take it from one who knows, big advertisers do not hesitate to let their media outlets know about their displeasure. Publishers, editors and producers will deny being affected by such realities of the bottom line but money talks—not always but enough to screen out or marginalize the provocative early warners.

Second, these early warners are not like their counterparts such as the market fundamentalists and other active corporatists in the world of writers and commentators. The latter meet and plan often and ferociously attach themselves to political and corporate leaders. While the progressive forecasters do not connect either with each other or with their policy allies on Capitol Hill as much. The media likes to see growing power like that of the intertwined Heritage Foundation with the Reagan regime and their supporters in Congress.

Third, there is this sense that these progressives are exposing conditions that the reporters themselves should be revealing. So why not publish staff-driven magazine-style features instead of publicizing outsiders and covering an unfolding story as reportage. Journalistic prizes go to the former. But, they’re not the same either in reader impact or for change.

Finally, there are establishment figures who tried, in their own way, to blow the whistle—James Grant, Henry Kaufman and, twenty five years ago, Felix Rohatyn come to mind. Their astute alarms regarding excessive risk-taking were ignored. They are not getting much media play either.

Maybe it’s also a cultural thing. Big book deals, radio talk shows, promotions and quotable celebrity status go to the rogues, the grossly negligent, the suppressors of truth and the wrongdoers. They’re just so much more exciting!

This is a fast road to a state of decay.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His most recent book is The Seventeen Traditions.

Thy Hands Made Both

Stretch or contract me, Thy poor debtor;

 This is but tuning of my breast,
 To make the music better.
 
Whether I fly with angels, fall with dust,

Thy hands made both, and I am there;
 Thy power and love, my love and
trust

 Make one place ev'rywhere.
 

George Herbert

Life Revives

Do you know what makes the prison disappear?
Every deep, genuine affection.
Being friends, being brothers,
loving, that is what opens the prison,
with supreme power, by some magic force.
Without these one stays dead.
But whenever affection is revived, there life revives.

Vincent van Gogh

Saint Teresa

Just as we cannot stop the movement of the heavens,
revolving as they do with such speed, so we cannot restrain our thought.
And then we send all the faculties of the soul after it, thinking we are lost,
and have misused the time that we are spending in the presence of God.

Yet the soul may perhaps be wholly united with Him in the Mansions very
near His presence, while thought remains in the outskirts of the castle,
suffering the assaults of a thousand wild and venomous creatures and
from this suffering winning merit. So this must not upset us, and we
must not abandon the struggle, as the devil tries to make us do.
Most of these trials and times of unrest come from the fact that we
do not understand ourselves.

Teresa of Avila

The Quiet Coup

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.

The Big Takeover

 

The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution

And yet again Rolling Stone magazine delivers the most coherent and powerful investigative report of one of the truly core stories of our time.

It's A Bird, It's A Plane, It's Superpresident!

Lately I've been biding time in a megalopolis of over ten million homo sapiens. Human beings overstates the case. I've noticed chemtrails in the sky increasingly lately, including a massive display one cold, clear February morning and an obscene display during peak rush hour yesterday. No one in my circles talked about it, nothing in the news, barely even any mention at all on the internets--the video above the sole notable exception.  

People are so caught up in compulsively staring at their mobile phones--the streets are a sea of downgazing faces now, so much for "petals on a wet, black bough"--and obsessively twitting the dials on their miniature serotonin delivery pop music devices, that they don't even see the government dosing the very skies above them with a gigantic web of some ghastly white death sticky chemical.

Not really counting on my fellow man to grok that Barracks "Mr. Afghanistan" Obama and his trusty companion Timmy Goldman Geithner are looting their past, present and future right before their very eyes either.

Speaking Up In A Country Of Listeners

March 2009

Dear People's Daily Brief,

Tremendous news! Congress has finally passed the monumental
piece of wilderness legislation that you've been helping to push
forward.

Thank you for making this dream a reality! I cannot tell you how
huge today is for wilderness history. The passage of the Omnibus
Public Land Management Act provides the largest expansion of our
wilderness system in some 15 years. It means protection for more
than 2 million acres of special wild lands, rivers and cultural
sites throughout the nation, and it makes the National Landscape
Conservation System official.

Our staff members have sunk their hearts into working on various
components of the legislation for years, and we could not have
been successful without your support!

In recent months alone your many phone calls and letters to
decision makers have been critical to pushing the bill forward.
Thanks to your help, special lands throughout the nation are
sure to remain spectacular.

This tremendous victory truly demonstrates what we can achieve
when we bring all of The Wilderness Society's resources to bear.
It's also a powerful reminder of what we can accomplish in our
campaign to stop new oil and gas leasing in the Arctic Ocean.

I'd ask that you take a moment to enjoy this win for wilderness
today and let it give you energy for the work ahead, especially
in these final days before the Mineral Management Services'
March 30 deadline for public comments on their plan to open 73
million acres to new oil and gas leasing.

Thank you for all you do for wild lands. Together, there's
nothing we can't accomplish.

Best wishes,

Bill Meadows, President
The Wilderness Society

The Miracle

If Spring came but once in a century, instead of once a year, or burst
forth with the sound of an earthquake, and not in silence, what wonder
and expectation there would be in all hearts to behold the miraculous
change! But now the silent succession suggests nothing but necessity.
To most men only the cessation of the miracle would be miraculous and
the perpetual exercise of God's power seems less wonderful than its
withdrawal would be.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Solis

 

Two Prayers For Alchemists

Karl von Eckartshausen

I

1. Light Supreme, who art the Divine in Nature and dwellest in its innermost parts as in Heaven, hallowed be thy qualities and laws!

2. Wherever thou art, all is brought to perfection; may the realm of thy Knowledge become subject unto thee.

3. May our will in all our work be only thee, self-moving Power of Light! And as in the whole of Nature thou accomplishest all things, so accomplish all things in our work also.

4. Give us of the Dew of Heaven, and the Fat of the Earth, the Fruits of Sun and Moon from the Tree of Life.

5. And forgive us all errors which we have committed in our work without knowledge of thee, as we seek to turn from their errors those who have offended our precepts. And leave us not to our own darkness and our own science, but deliver us from all evil through the perfection of thy Work, Amen.

II

Hail, pure self-moving Source, O Form, pure for receiving the Light! The Light of all things unites itself with thee alone.

Most blessed art thou among all receptive forms, and blessed is the Fruit that thou conceivest, the Essence of Light united with warm substance.

Pure Form, Mother of the most perfect Being, lift thyself up to the Light for us, now as we toil and in the hour when we complete the Work!

Treat The Earth Well

Treat the earth well
  it was not given to you by your parents 
      it was loaned to you by your children. 

    ~ Crazy Horse

The Hour Of Lead

After great pain, a formal feeling comes —
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs —
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round —
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought —
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone —

This is the Hour of Lead —
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons recollect the Snow —
First — Chill — then Stupor — then the letting go —

~ Emily Dickinson

In The Land Of The Blind

The afternoon of 11 September 001 e.v. I remarked to a very good, old, close brother in arms that everything I'd ever hoped, dreamed, or worked for, all my efforts and labors had been in vain.  

The enemy had won.

I saw the future and it was over.

I was crestfallen. 

Little did I know my heart could break ever further into oblivion, observing a phony Harvard Wall Street Washington D.C. geek liar hustle the people on a bunch of moribund rhetoric and age old sales tactics--dashed with more than a little postmodern reverse racism--that he would actually benefit them, despite all the evidence and experience in the world that shows he most assuredly will not.

You can see it all over him, from his record, to his words, to his eyes.

Snake oil.

Simple.

The Americans deserve the leaders they get.

That much is obvious.

My work remains done and through.

A little more sweeping up for good manners and measure and off to the highlands I go.

Hunter's Moon

Hunter's Moon
Travel Moon
Dying Grass Moon
Moon Of Falling Leaves
Kindly Moon
Blackberry Moon
Moon When The Quilling And Beading Is Done
Blood Moon

With Usura Hath No Man A House Of Good Stone

Now that we're truly entering historical territory, I don't even have the meager time needed for this the weakest most uninspired uninspiring field of candidates ever, with a beg for pardon to Mr. Ralph Nader. Presidential campaigns are nigh on the apex of the agenda, but a later dream job was economist and it never hurts to make up for lost time.

One thing's for sure, I'm going to watch this frigger like a hawk. When the Federal Reserve chairman's body language is that of a condemned man and the news reports one of four mammals endangered, who's to say the whole shot isn't on the line?

So as it happens, pardon the considered silence.

Godspeed,

Et Tu, Obama

Dennis Kucinich on the Democrats’ Bailout Betrayal

by Chris Hedges

The passing of the $850-billion bailout pulled the plug on the New Deal. The Great Society is now gasping for air, mortally wounded, coughing up blood. It will not recover. It was murdered by the Democratic Party.

We are on our own. And don't expect any help from Barack Obama and Joe Biden, who lobbied hard for the bill and voted for it. Ignore their rhetoric. Look coldly at the ballots they cast against us. We, as citizens, have only a handful of representatives left in Washington, most of whom were left sputtering in rage and frustration on the House floor. The sad irony is that some of them were Republican.

"This was the largest single act of class warfare in the modern history of this country," Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, who led the fight in the House against the bailout, told me by phone from Cleveland. "It is a direct attack on the American people's ability to be able to stabilize their homes and their neighborhoods. This single vote will define the careers of everyone. We are back to taxation without representation, to markets that are openly rigged."

"We buried the New Deal," he said of the vote. "Instead of Democrats going back to classic New Deal economics where we prime the pump of the economy and start money circulating among the population through saving homes, creating jobs and building a new infrastructure, our leaders chose to accelerate the wealth of the nation upwards. They did so in a way that was destructive of free-market principles. They ripped away all the familiar moorings. We are in an uncharted sea where the traditional roles of the political parties are being switched. The Democrats have unfortunately become so enamored and beholden to Wall Street that we are not functioning to defend the economic interest of the broad base of the American people. It was up to the Republicans to protect not just a so-called free market but the American taxpayer and attempt to block this. This is an outrage. This was democracy's Black Friday."

Obama arrived on the Senate floor Brutus-like to thrust a knife into the back of the working and middle class. He lobbied hard for the bill. He did so, according to some who met with him on Capitol Hill, because he feared that if he opposed the bailout and it triggered a market collapse it could cost him the election. Better to placate the thieves on Wall Street than stand up for the masses of enraged and swindled citizens.

Obama's betrayal is the betrayal of the Democratic Party. The Democrats gave us the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, which ripped down the firewalls that were put in place by the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act. The 1933 act, designed to prevent the kind of meltdown we are now experiencing, established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC). It set in place banking reforms to stop speculators from hijacking the financial system. With Glass-Steagall demolished, and the passage of NAFTA, the Democrats, led by Bill Clinton, tumbled gleefully into bed with corporations and Wall Street speculators. They achieved fundraising parity with the Republicans. They used institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as a welfare gravy train. The Democrats, including Obama, are as compromised as the Republicans.

Obama's voting record in the Senate is in line with the corrupt Democratic mainstream, including Biden, who works on behalf of corporations and especially the credit card industry. Obama knows where power lies in the United States. It is not with the citizens, who with ratios of 100 to 1 pleaded with their representatives in Washington not to loot the national treasury to bail out Wall Street investment firms. Power lies with the corporations. These corporations, not us, pick who runs for president. You cannot be a candidate without their blessing and money. These corporations, including the Commission on Presidential Debates, a private corporation, determine who gets to speak and what issues candidates can or cannot challenge, from universal, not-for-profit, single-payer health care to Wall Street bailouts to NAFTA. If you do not follow the corporate script you become as marginal and invisible as Ralph Nader or Bob Barr or Cynthia McKinney. 

Obama has always served his corporate masters. He opposed Rep. John Murtha's call for immediate withdrawal from Iraq and supported continued funding for the war. He voted in July 2005 to reauthorize the Patriot Act. He did not support an amendment that was part of a bankruptcy bill that would have capped credit card interest rates at 30 percent. He opposed a bill that would have reformed the notorious Mining Law of 1872, which allows mineral companies to rape federal land for profit. He did not back the single-payer health care bill HR 676, sponsored by Kucinich and John Conyers. He advocates the death penalty and nuclear power. He backed the class-action "reform" bill-the Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA)-that was part of a large lobbying effort by financial firms, which make up Obama's second-biggest single bloc of donors. CAFA would effectively shut down state courts as a venue to hear most class-action lawsuits. Workers, under CAFA, would no longer have redress in many of the courts where these cases have a chance of defying powerful corporations. CAFA moves these cases into corporate-friendly federal courts dominated by Republican judges. 

Obama's support for the bailout, however, is his most egregious betrayal. He had a brief, shining moment to prove he could lead, to capitalize on a popular revolt that cut across the political spectrum. He never attempted to address or mobilize the aspirations and passions of the vast majority of Americans. He was as craven, servile and cowardly as the party he represents. He returned to the campaign trail after Friday's vote as a slick and polished sales representative for our corporate state, telling us to calm down and accept the inevitable. 

"Some of the most powerful speeches against this were given by members of the Republican Party who are on the political right," Kucinich said. "They did a superb job in poking holes in the underlying assumptions of the bailout. They say what they believe. Give me somebody who says what they believe and I can figure out how to get them to a new place. When people say one thing and do another it is very hard to be able to move a debate."

So let us honor, in our moment of defeat, the handful of elected officials who valiantly defied their party leaderships in the House to stage a remarkable revolt that at first succeeded. Kucinich is one. There were others-Brad Sherman, Marcy Kaptur, Peter DeFazio, Lloyd Doggett and Robert C. "Bobby" Scott. They are about all that is left of the old Democratic Party, the party that once looked out for the poor and the working class. Send them a note of thanks. They deserve it. And if you live in their districts make sure you get to the polls in November. They did not sell you out.

"We had two take-it-or-leave-it propositions and the second one was worse than the first," Kucinich said, referring to the plan that came loaded with pages of tax cuts. "Tax cuts are antithetical to a bailout. We never solved the problem. There were never any hearings on the bill. This premise, that we could prop up the stock market with a $700-billion investment and create some liquidity, was flawed. The problem is that banks do not want to loan to each other. It is not a liquidity problem. Banks are afraid they are going to collapse in short selling. There is a war going on between security firms and banks. Banks are under assault. They are not loaning. The dynamic is driven by the Accounting Standards Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Fed."

The root of the financial crisis, as critics of the bailout plan point out, is that millions of homeowners cannot pay their mortgages. The bailout, as the market decline on Friday following the vote illustrated, does not address the crisis. It solves nothing for the 10 million Americans who face foreclosure. It solves nothing for the growing numbers of unemployed and underemployed. It may well be the equivalent of tossing $850 billion of taxpayer money (including $150 billion in tax cuts) into a furnace and watching passively as our economy continues its plunge.

"We face a perfect financial storm," Kucinich warned. "The elements are the deficit spending for the war of 3 to 4 trillion dollars, the trillion and more tax cuts, the war itself and the lack of serious investment in the country. We are being hollowed out.  We are going to see more unemployment and more people losing their homes. With $700 billion we could have made a real investment in the country, in jobs, in infrastructure and in homes. Instead, we got robbed."

Obama Has Always Served His Corporate Masters

Obama has always served his corporate masters. He opposed Rep. John Murtha's call for immediate withdrawal from Iraq and supported continued funding for the war. He voted in July 2005 to reauthorize the Patriot Act. He did not support an amendment that was part of a bankruptcy bill that would have capped credit card interest rates at 30 percent. He opposed a bill that would have reformed the notorious Mining Law of 1872, which allows mineral companies to rape federal land for profit. He did not back the single-payer health care bill HR 676, sponsored by Kucinich and John Conyers. He advocates the death penalty and nuclear power. He backed the class-action "reform" bill-the Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA)-that was part of a large lobbying effort by financial firms, which make up Obama's second-biggest single bloc of donors. CAFA would effectively shut down state courts as a venue to hear most class-action lawsuits. Workers, under CAFA, would no longer have redress in many of the courts where these cases have a chance of defying powerful corporations. CAFA moves these cases into corporate-friendly federal courts dominated by Republican judges. 

Obama's support for the bailout, however, is his most egregious betrayal. He had a brief, shining moment to prove he could lead, to capitalize on a popular revolt that cut across the political spectrum. He never attempted to address or mobilize the aspirations and passions of the vast majority of Americans. He was as craven, servile and cowardly as the party he represents. He returned to the campaign trail after Friday's vote as a slick and polished sales representative for our corporate state, telling us to calm down and accept the inevitable.

           ~ Chris Hedges, TruthDig.com

 

Your Civic Duty To Vote Third Party

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.