On the upcoming 30th anniversary of the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan...

I think this was a terrible and heinous act on the part of Hinckley...for missing the heart, lungs, and other vital organs that would have done the job properly. I also want to excoriate the idiot for doing it for all the wrong reasons--to impress Jody Foster, a lesbian. In addition to that, it gave Reagan a second term since Americans are sentimental assholes who cry at a John Williams string-swell on command like Pavolv's fucking dogs.

In addition to that addition of their house of cards, that of the myth-makers, I want to say that we need to face that fact that President Reagan--the construct--was so fucking dumb he couldn't even be assassinated correctly or impressively like President Kennedy, McKinley, or Lincoln, and had no idea he'd been shot for several minutes since he was barely sentient, like the people that voted for him. Hey, at least Booth had some kind of ideology and some reasons that made more sense, Lincoln really did act like a dictator during the American Civil War.

And McKinley? He was in the pocket of the Trusts and the Monopolies, people like Rockefeller and Carnegie. Kennedy? We don't even know why he was fucking whacked. It's a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, rolled into some club papers, and smoked by some fucking hippies somewhere...

Throbbing Gristle's April 25/26th, 2009 Chicago shows

“We aren’t interested in show business, so shut the fuck up.” --Genesis P. Orridge

I had the extreme pleasure of seeing both sets of the April 25th show in Chicago this year. There were several Chicago musical "luminaries" there--most incognito--but I recognized a few here-and-there, just as I had at Psychic TV's 2004 Empty Bottle gig where I literally bumped into Genesis P. Orridge on the way out the front door for a smoke.

The Logan Square Auditorium concerts were the first time that TG had ever played the windy city on what was a four city tour (major ones only) of the United States. The last time Gristle played America, that rough beast heading towards Bethlehem was...residing in the White House, but that era's finally coming to a screeching halt as many of us suspected it would. America looks-the-grimier for it, maybe we'll avert ecological catastrophe, maybe not, but besides ourselves, we'll know who to blame: industrialists, and not the kind that play concerts. Logan Square Auditorium is a pretty old room and it was becoming apparent just a few minutes into the set that the structure of the building was never going to be the same, ever again. If you loved extreme music, this was going to be your night, and I spotted people in "Coil," "Can," "Kraftwerk," and even "Popol Vuh" (the last three being "krautrock" groups) t-shirts, something I'm certain to never see again in one place.

You didn't need to be on drugs to feel your consciousness being altered at the show, it was riveting, devastating, and in a way that's beyond rare. From the first set, which was an improvised soundscape to the late Derek Jarman's "In the Shadow of the Sun" (1980) made expressly for the group to score, to the second, comprised of a mix of oldies and new material, it was very much as the accounts of TG had always said they were: they were so powerful that they will change your consciousness forever, a completely immersive and subversive experience all around. Nietzsche said that there were only two Christians: "Jesus and St. Francis." Many have said that there was only one industrial group ever, Throbbing Gristle, and I would be hard-pressed to disagree with them. There's an unmistakable feeling when one bears witness to artistic truth, and like some kind of religious experience, it's irrefutable, and likewise, immutable. The occasion was truly historic, like having the good luck of catching the Velvet Underground.

The speaker columns were possibly some of the tallest I've ever seen and with every air-molecule vibrating violently, and the sensation within the crowd was akin to what it must be like to swim in a pool of jello, you could literally feel your innards moving. Beyond that, there was the sensation of something much bigger than the people creating the music, the sounds, and the people witnessing it, something you cannot put a price tag on, nor something you can sully with money. It was a shared and communal experience.

The link below will take you to a downloadable file of the second set, enjoy (or don't). Play at as high a volume as possible. It won't be exactly the same, but it should give you a pretty good idea of what it was like. TG allowed audience members to come into the Logan Square Auditorium without any searches. Read the quote above, and it will all make sense. Public music is public. You put it out there, or you do not, because once it is out there, it's no longer entirely yours. If money is all an artist is concerned about, it's no longer about the music or connecting with people anymore, it's just more business-as-usual, over-the-counterculture, commodified and dead at your door. Downloads don't seem so evil after that, but please support your favorite artists anyway.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/zmw4ndwkozk/Throbbing%20Gristle%202009-04-26%20Chicago.rar

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_8Q7mOnn-8

Thank you Sen. Jim Webb for introducing the "The National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009"

WWW--Virginia Senator (and former Governor) Jim Webb has introduced a bill to create an 18-month commission to evaluate our criminal justice system "from top to bottom," noting that it's "a national disgrace," which is being euphemistic. The bill was introduced yesterday without much fanfare and is reputed to be "quietly supported" by the White House. This bodes very well for the prospects of the legislation and the timing of its introduction is purposeful and serious.

Republican Senators Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) support the bill, and many others in the Senate are likely to follow.

But I believe he cares (amazing, isn't it?), and that he's doing something to reverse the damage of the Reagan era, an era where millions have been incarcerated under the failure known as the "war on drugs," really a racialist war on people. It should be remembered that our drug laws began as "race laws" and have continued this pattern of abuse that's reflected in American criminal justice statistics. Worse still, when Reagan closed our state-run mental health facilities, it threw the mentally ill onto the streets of American cities, then swept many of them into prisons to be housed with violent offenders. No society calling itself civilized would let this specific act of social negligence continue any longer.

Senator Webb notes on his Senate web site:

Why We Urgently Need this Legislation:

• With 5% of the world's population, our country now houses 25% of the world's reported prisoners.

• Incarcerated drug offenders have soared 1200% since 1980.

• Four times as many mentally ill people are in prisons than in mental health hospitals.

• Approximately 1 million gang members reside in the U.S., many of them foreign-based; and Mexican cartels operate in 230+ communities across the country.

• Post-incarceration re-entry programs are haphazard and often nonexistent, undermining public safety and making it extremely difficult for ex-offenders to become full, contributing members of society.

• 
  

Webb's social statistics are both shocking and solid, they check out, but we can assume that those who have enriched themselves through unconstitutional forfeiture, private prison building and ownership, investors in privatized prison labor that targets drug offender populations specifically for exploitation, sundry drug police equippers, and the rest of the drug war scum are going to fight this very hard. Bring it on.

I think these exploiters of social misery (who lamely call themselves "heroes") will lose their fight and that the tide has already turned against them and their allies inside and outside of Congress and the courts. Check Senator Webb's page and read the legislation, it's almost revolutionary in the best sense of the word, it's in the best spirit of America.

The Republicans are going to fight this and lose. They and police lobbyists who shouldn't have a right to lobby Congress for anything are going to keep saying what they always have: "If only we had more funding, we could win this!" With the funding we've given them, they should have been able to win WWII several times over. Yet--oddly--the victory never comes for the war that never ends. It's been said over and over that we could stamp-out the usage of illicit-drugs in America, but that it would take the creation of a police state to do it. That's what the advocates of continuing the war on drugs are suggesting in so many words. Their time is ending, now.

That's all the change I need to believe that real change is coming to America. Future generations might say that the National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009 was when America's "domestic" Cold War began to thaw. Let freedom ring, and let it ring true for us all. Legalization is coming, public statements to the contrary.

Senator Jim Webb's "National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009" page (with a link to its text and supplements): http://webb.senate.gov/email/criminaljusticereform.html

Winner of the "Oops! I Spoke Too Soon!" Award, Dr. Francis Fukuyama

"The distant origins of the present volume lie in an article entitled “The End of History?” which I wrote for the journal The National Interest in the summer of 1989. In it, I argued that a remarkable consensus concerning the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a system of government had emerged throughout the world over the past few years, as it conquered rival ideologies like hereditary monarchy, fascism, and most recently communism. More than that, however, I argued that liberal democracy may constitute the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and the “final form of human government,” and as such constituted the “end of history.” That is, while earlier forms of government were characterized by grave defects and irrationalities that led to their eventual collapse, liberal democracy was arguably free from such fundamental internal contradictions" --Dr. Francis Fukuyama, in his introduction to his book, The End of History and the Last Man, 1992.

Yes, what a moron he was and is, but that's a given. Fukuyama's been spreading the love since 1992. Would he really know democracy if it bit him?

But even at that time, it was becoming obvious through developments of the successful Zapatista uprising, the subsequent rise of the "anti-globalization movement," the "Battle for Seattle," the rise of an unending proactive antiwar movement, new forms of resistance and theory arising throughout the globe to neoliberalism (notably in South America in the last decade where it has been rejected almost entirely), and so on, that Professor Fukuyama couldn't have been more wrong. He still is wrong, as is his wont, and he isn't going to be satisfied until he has no reputation left but that of a laughingstock. Mission accomplished--time to retire along with George Lucas.

Fukuyama was defending himself even when his book version of The End of History was released, with the author even going as far as to use Marx and Hegel as a shield in the above introduction. That they posited some "end-point" to human social and political evolution--the evolution of ideology--is well known. On this point, he's correct, and he shold have enjoyed being right, at least for once. Yet, Marx and Hegel were never so brazen, ignorant or insolent as to claim when that end-point time would actually come, and it's clear from their writings that it would probably take centuries, if not millennia. Never mind all that: someone's paying the bills, and it's good business to agree with oneself.

No, Marx and Hegel weren't being paid by a bunch of rich capitalists (although the factory owning Engels could fit into that category, he was headed in another direction...) to be one of the shrill voices during the fall of a global power (the Soviet Union) lauding the invincibility of another global player (American style economics, themselves). People like Limbaugh, Gingrich, and Fukumaya were drunk on their short-lived "victory" over the ending of the Cold War and their plans to take Capitol Hill "permanently," if not the White House. Sober minds in the Kremlin warned, ominously, that the United States would fall as a power after the Soviet system. They were right, and now we find ourselves where they were twenty years ago: Afghanistan. The warning signs have been flashing for decades, but never so brightly as now. But power is tone deaf.

As should be common currency by now, power corrupts, and that was the voice speaking from the well-fed yob of Fukuyama back in the 1980s-90s. His utterances in the present historical moment don't show any sign that he, his class (academic historians of all sorts), or those he serves, have lost any of their lust for power for its own sake. That he's looking like even more of an ribald ass now than he did at the time of 9/11 is a given. When you don't have the truth on your side, you resort to jargon and jingoism, and that's about all that Fukuyama and the so-called conservative side of the fence ever had besides the willingness to use barbarous violence to impose neoliberal/Reaganist capitalism on the rest of the world. You lie, rhetorically, throwing out the words "Liberty, Fraternity, Equality," and other myths regarding our way of life.

What does any of that have to do with "liberal democracy"? Nothing, it's just rhetoric on their part, and the new president surely shares many of their assumptions. But things have changed.

Now that America's dominance is slipping--most importantly, on the economic side--it appears that history is far from over, not even by a longshot. At best, Fukuyama's writings on whether the historical development of ideologies have ended are political-philosophical tracts written by a conservative hack on the payroll. In the future--if we're left with one thanks to people like them--they'll make for a very humorous read.

If you've actually ever read Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, you know that one of the central tenets of the book is that all nations have their time at the top, but that history deems there is a time when that dominance ends economically. Contrary to what many are saying, America doesn't have to suffer under this cycle--quite the contrary. Without all the unnecessary expenditures revolving around an empire, the average American will have lifted a very heavy lodestone from their neck. As a result of the ending of empire, illegitimate control over their lives by domestic elites will be severely weakened. The power structure in America is under serious threat, caused by their own hand.

What comes next is the groundswell of people demanding a better life, which isn't always a pretty or even tidy affair.

This is why we saw the passing of so much repressive legislation under Bush II and why most of it isn't going away anytime soon. Far from being a "coup," American elites are doing their best to hold onto power, and castles have a dramatic way of falling (watch your heads). History is over? Tell that to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan and tell it to the average American solidier or military contractor on the ground. They might point to the dead and ask, "What's that?" Dr. Fukuyama should be taken on a tour of our torture and rendition facilities to ask inmates whether they think "history has ended," and he might also take a tour of South America today and ask the leaders of those nations whether they think history has ended.

He isn't likely to get a positive answer, but probably more than a few laughs at his expense again. Laughter is the summation of his legacy. Fukuyama realized this--belatedly--in his boring and lie-ridden October 4th, 2008 oped piece titled, "The End of America Inc.":

All this suggests that the Reagan era should have ended some time ago. It didn't partly because the Democratic Party failed to come up with convincing candidates and arguments, but also because of a particular aspect of America that makes our country very different from Europe. There, less-educated, working-class citizens vote reliably for socialist, communist and other left-learning parties, based on their economic interests. In the United States, they can swing either left or right. They were part of Roosevelt's grand Democratic coalition during the New Deal, a coalition that held through Lyndon Johnson's Great Society in the 1960s. But they started voting Republican during the Nixon and Reagan years, swung to Clinton in the 1990s, and returned to the Republican fold under George W. Bush. When they vote Republican, it's because cultural issues like religion, patriotism, family values and gun ownership trump economic ones. ("The End of America Inc.," Newsweek, 10.04.2008)

In other words, the right has used cultural flashpoints as phony issues to sway a healthy chunk of American workers away from servicing their own economic and political interests. Europeans tend towards the left because of centuries of struggle by the average person, two devastating world wars that made it clear that a lasting peace could only come through social justice, better educational systems and traditional systems and networks of resistance that have no analog in the US, and because there was an incredible loss of faith coming from the fall of the traditional monarchies after the wars of the 20th century. America has experienced little of this, partly due to how young it is as a nation. If it's broken, don't fix it.

Like America's business class, the Monarchies had used religion as a weapon to control the masses, and they fell. Again, America doesn't have the same historical experiences, but these things have a way of playing-out similarly, these all being human systems of social organization rather than ones from Mars or Jupiter. Once the Monarchies were delegitimized, religion fell into disfavor throughout many parts of the European Continent. It's quite possible that the same could happen here, and for similar reasons.

In the 1980s and 1990s, it was the job of people like Dr. Fukuyama to drive people away from working towards their own interests by deceiving them with false invocations of patriotism, religion, "family values," and sundry other Shibboleths. That no longer works when the system crashes under its own in-built paradoxes, and the public correctly moves towards the left (or, more accurately, away from authoritarian thinking) because it's natural to do so in the "correction" part of this historical cycle. If there are no corrections, there is no recovery, a word to the wise who are wishing very vocally that President Obama's economic stimulus plan fails--then what?

Ultimately, the only thing Fukuyama could do in the fall of 2008 was to finally start covering his ass, and to do it as substantially as he could manage. How sweet it was of Newsweek to pay him for his services rendered. He might want to convert it into non-perishable foodstuffs and gold. Do he and his ilk really believe in anything at all besides power? Unfortunately, yes. We might find that at the heart of Reaganism there always contained more than a hint of the death wish and nihilism, especially when power isn't achieved, is under serious threat, or is lost altogether. False conservativism's implicit logic can be found in the writings of Dr. Fukuyama, a logic that offers no future at all.

"The End of America Inc.," Newsweek, 10.04.2008:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/162401/page/1

The Return of Throbbing Gristle, and the death of Reagan and Thatcherism

WWW--On April 25th, I'll be going to see industrial pioneers, Throbbing Gristle in Chicago. Not everyone knows who they are, but they are essentially the creators of "industrial culture" and beyond. For years-and-years all I've been able to do is read about them and lament that I never got to see them perform live since their last show was in San Francisco in May 1981.

But several years ago, they finally decided to put things from the past aside--all the slights, issues, and arguments--and regrouped, doing a few shows in London, then throughout most of Europe and parts of the rest of the globe.

It's hard to describe the sound of TG, but an old college acquaintance put it best when he wrote, "TG is like a drug...you either like it or you don't." I don't just like TG, I love them. Having seen PTV3 in 2004, this is going to be part of a surprisingly fulfilled wish list.

When TG broke-up in May 1981, the Reagan revolution was in its infancy. England was suffering under the same kind of marketplace fascism, and as they've been a virtual economic satellite of the United States ("51st State"!) since the late-1970s, we've had a shared fate as cultures. Groups like TG have been that much needed antidote to obsolete conventional wisdom and thinking, a genuine part of our Western counterculture.

TG ended where Reaganism began. Now TG begins anew as Reaganism ends, dies. As above, so below, so mote it be. The final show in Chicago will be in a Presbyterian church, it couldn't be more fitting. Welcome back.

President Obama so far

Washington D.C.--What can I write other than, "So far, so good"? Rather than stupidly cow-tow to a disgraced Republican minority, the President is moving forward rapidly towards fixing some of the mess left by them and not worrying himself with the petty obstructionism that they're known for. Welcome back to minority status, and get used to it.

That the GOP has no vision that's going to help the average American is now understood by the majority. What do they have against the Democratic version of the stimulus bill? It's not what you're being told: $125 billion for our schools, a tripling of the education budget, more insurance coverage for the unemployed, and even some new moves towards progressive taxation not seen since before Ronald Reagan.

That this is an end of Reaganism is now assured, and today, the new President has signed no less than three executive orders protecting and supporting the right of Americans to organize unions in the workplace. That would never have happened under Clinton, Bush I & II, or even Jimmy Carter. For over a generation the Democratic Party had lost its way and suffered from an identity crisis. Perhaps that time is over, but it's still a wait-and-see. But for now, the Democrats are doing what they haven't in ages, namely acting as though they actually won.

This writer is sitting-back and allowing the new President to make his best attempts, to let him succeed or to fail. Nobody should want him to fail, but the GOP is still intent on self-destruction--we should oblige them in this and also step-back and allow them to do so. The first hundred days of any administration are crucial, and he deserves every chance to fix the mess created by rampant deregulation under the Republican Party. Why are they acting so boldly?

One answer is that they have the Justice Department back again. Time to use it to enforce the laws of the land again, which means prosecutions of Bush II administration members who have clearly broken the law. First on the list would be former Vice President Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and former AG Alberto Gonzales for authorizing torture, and that's just for starters.

A message to Senate Republicans

We're on to you. Even your base is on to you. Soon, very soon, the economy is going to take an even greater hit and we're going to place most of the blame where it belongs: with you, the GOP. This isn't to say that we don't understand the Democratic Party's role in this crisis--we do--but first things first, since you're the greatest single threat to peace and stability.

Your unending insistence on deregulation that gave us the current economic crisis, to the gerrymandering and disenfranchisement of the poor, of Black Americans, and of homeless veterans, to your illegal war predicated on a lie, you time is ending.

Not only that, but we're coming for you with the legal system, with the courts. That time is coming soon. Observers like myself have waited for the day when the American public had no other choice but to deal with you, the real terrorists, the real internal criminal threat to the security and prosperity of the average person worldwide.

There won't be any more copping-out, no more cable television, no more shopping, no more, over, done. Without runaway consumerism to divert the public's attentions away from the real problems and the glaring inequality, you don't have much left except force.

That force will work for a short time, and then the public will stop tolerating it and absorb it in the groundswell that's coming--as it should--spontaneously, not directed from above. We know that the most extremist elements of the political world will label self-defense as "terrorism," just as they have so many time in the past, but it's not going to work. Why? You can't even accomplish what you want effectively, with any lasting-impact, which is a blessing.


You have:

--Increased the power and size of the federal government in ways you never wanted to, thank you.

--Created an economic crisis that's sure to place you back firmly as the minority political party for another fifty years, thank you very much.

--Run a cha-cha line of corruption into our courts and jails that would shock the citizens of the worst banana republics in this hemisphere.

--Far too many candidates and incumbents who appear to have very serious sexual issues such as pedophilia and closeted homosexual urges, as well as serial-adultery and the solicitation of prostitutes.

--No ideological foundation left as a party, the reason for this belated-move towards "conservatism" (a faux-version) in the auto "bailout," really a loan, but being misreported by your allies in the media.

--No morals, no beliefs, and no soul.

--The markings of criminals in almost every respect.

--To be broken-up as a national party due to endless criminal behavior,
an aversion for rehabilitation, and a lack of remorse.


After all the masks and excuses are used up (coming tomorrow), there will only be the reality of what held this American order together all along: the threat of naked force.

This time, it's going to meet up with a sociological explosion mightier than all the atomic weapons on earth, and it will lose. See you in 2010 when the playing field has changed even further away from your agenda, and hope many of you aren't sitting in prison at that time.

And don't think for a moment that we didn't notice you throwing loans to the auto industry to your lame duck president, since he's on his way out. You're next. Even the rednecks are getting sick of you and your shit and Black Americans are going to continue voting regardless of your efforts. Unions are going to be making a comeback, and most of the economy is going to become nationalized.

"Sunny Von Bulow dead after 28 years in coma"

WWW--I'm underwhelmed, except that it's the exact same length of time America has been in a coma. It cost a minimum of half-a-million to maintain her body every year. That's a waste of money, a total waste that could have helped the living. By all accounts, she was dead before the coma...just ask Klaus. I hear he's a real hoot at a party, a great conversationalist with an aristocratic sense of humor.

Why should we trust former Salomon Brothers banking investor Michael Lewis?

"But what has been the experience of the Russian socialist movement up to now? The most important and most fruitful changes in its tactical policy… have not been the inventions of several leaders and even less so of any central organizational organs. They have always been the spontaneous product of the movement in ferment… In general, the tactical policy of the Social Democracy is not something that may be 'invented'. It is the product of a series of great creative acts of the often spontaneous class struggle seeking its way forward." --Rosa Luxembourg, "Leninism or Marxism," 1904.

New York City, New York--As you can imagine, this guy exists in a strange place as a former investment banker, now turned business journalist and author.

Lewis wrote Liar's Poker in 1988-89, a book that many are now going to say was very prescient upon its release just 19-years-ago. It isn't.

Time flies when you're having fun.

Just a few hours ago Lewis was hawking his newest book on CNN, those scions of bad taste and oversimplification and over-concision. CNN's talking necks were having their lovefest with Lewis over how credible and wise he is. Is he? I don't think so, and as low as my opinion of the public is, I believe we all knew the crisis was coming. That said, I think the feelings that mainstream journalists and writers harbor within their breasts eclipse my own intense misanthropy and ambivalence towards the average American, let alone humanity. These journalists and pundits believe that they have the answers and the rest of us are too stupid to understand things as well as they do because they were educated to think that way.

Their elitism comprises a truly delusional contention: "We have all of the answers, so shut-up and let us drive." Paradoxically, it's "ordinary" people who tend to save the day throughout human history when the politicians, the businessmen, and the intelligensia have failed everyone (as is their wont, they can't help themselves). We clean-up the mess, and we're doing it right now on Wall Street. Listening to the public on-occasion might help.

Those who could have prevented the current economic crisis were the root of the problem and still are, though their own collective fall is coming soon. Instead of just blaming borrowers who defaulted, we should also be asking, "Who allowed it?" and "How many of the loans were even legal?" We know the sales of the bundled securities were not, it was a matter of fraud and deserves further investigation. Some are occurring right now. Many of us raised the alarms, but we know oversight and the enforcement of key regulations over the financial sector weren't going to be expedited under the Bush II administration and GOP dominance.

The financial and business sectors were told that they could do whatever they wanted up-to-a-point and that nobody was going to be watching. Who told them that? The negligence in not enforcing these administrative laws is corruption, contrary to the comments of the apologists. Is Lewis one of them? Like CNN and the rest of the dying media, he won't discuss the corruption, and I'd like to know why.

So, what did Lewis have to say on CNN? That this economic crisis "wasn't the result of corruption" (what else?) or outright dishonesty, but that it was a result of delusional behavior predicated on--don't laugh--everyone "doing the right thing" on Wall Street. This is an incredible statement in the current context, but at least he sees the writing on the wall--things will never be the same and the old Wall Street is dead. However, as you can imagine, the assertion that "everyone did the right thing" made no sense to these eyes and ears, and I predict that these assumptions of his and the rest of them on Wall Street are headed rapidly towards the dustbin of human history.

No, according to Lewis, it was "conflicting interests" that caused the current financial crisis, which again, points to corruption. The banks and mortgage leders have been ripping each other off, and now they won't lend amongst themselves. Right, greed and dishonesty. Lewis seems to be arguing for transparency--granted--but he still clings-to the same old faux-values of Wall Street. Like a lot of people on television and politics, he said a lot without saying much at all, so I switched over to Anthony Bourdain, a man with an attitude I admire, then switched-back again to feel the numbing-pain of boredom for kicks, it's a real rush.

Lewis went on making some bizarre statements that "corruption wasn't a factor" in the crisis--it was generally that the system that ran the financial markets was predicated on illusions and mass-delusional psychology. No kidding? How did that happen? Who made them think they could keep doing the same wrong things without it coming-back to haunt them later? In many cases, themselves, silly. After all, the (wo)man who hears God is usually listening to their own voice.

Additionally, Lewis has written and spoken elsewhere that these financial institutions and their CEOs simply "didn't know what they were doing." Fancy that. No argument here, I don't think that they ever did know what they were doing or ever will. The past economic order and its faulty assumptions were systemically wrong, inefficient and top-heavy with that favorite word of Libertarians, conservatives, and the GOP: bureaucracy. Forget government, the corporate world has them beat on redundancy. The managerial class itself has amply displayed their greed and dishonesty over the last 30 years, therefore it shouldn't surprise anyone that we ended-up where we are today.

It took others to create this mess, there was a lot of enabling from every sector, such as investors who were clamoring for greater and greater dividends, irresponsible borrowers of every class, and so on. But the runaway borrowing was allowed. Like my former employers--a small retail outfit that's sure to close soon--the speculators and financial institutions only knew how to ride an economic boom that's part of the traditional boom-and-bust cycle of our flawed economy, much like a Gold Rush. Eventually, inevitably, the veins run out and the towns die. But a lot of the public was either apathetic from years of being beaten-down, or they bought into it (and boy, didn't they?). Not everyone got on-board, just enough to wreck things.

Let's be honest: this was also fostered by that "invisible hand" of pro-business legislation passed by politicians who know better, not just the misbehavior of Wall Street. This is also known as "deregulation," but far-be-it for anyone to criticize the sacred, the inviolable St. Ronald Reagan and his Maoist cult that hijacked traditional conservatism in the 1980s. That's over now, but this greed-based stupidity allowed the markets to run amok for over two decades because the folks in Washington know who's really boss, and it's not them, it's the business and financial community and ownership.

Like my former employers, these clowns got a taste of power and lost their minds thinking that they were untouchable, that they were God. Their bulging-guts and the fact that they defecate daily (phew! you don't wanna know) should have been all the reminder they needed that they weren't. Now they're all finding-out the hard way, which is where my well-earned schadenfreude comes in...

Beyond my own feelings of glee over the suffering of scoundrels, Lewis isn't saying anything new here at all (which he accuses others of doing in the Conde article). Writer Charles Mackay dedicated three of his sixteen chapters of "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" to financial-bubbles titled "The Mississippi Scheme," "The South-Sea Bubble," and "Tulipomania." Mackay's book was originally published in 1841, at a time when Karl Marx was an unknown doctoral student. What did Marx do when he couldn't find a job in academia because of his radicalism? He became a journalist. Life is like that sometimes, and he would be a part of the failed Revolution of 1848 that gripped Europe.

Sure, Lewis is making-the-rounds this week promoting his newest book, and one can assume the crisis will be a windfall for him as some kind of "prophet," but he's not one. Anyone paying attention could have seen this crisis coming, but like all bad relationships, we ignore the problems because we want something out of the deal. I'm no exception. Lewis might be totally sincere about all of this, but he still appears to have held the same assumptions until very recently that the now-fallen Wall Street order would keep going on, almost endlessly. Did he actually believe before October of last year that this could continue indefinitely?

At some point, I gave up waiting for the end. There was no scandal or reversal, I assumed, that could sink the system. Then came Meredith Whitney with news. Whitney was an obscure analyst of financial firms for Oppenheimer Securities who, on October 31, 2007, ceased to be obscure. On that day, she predicted that Citigroup had so mismanaged its affairs that it would need to slash its dividend or go bust. It’s never entirely clear on any given day what causes what in the stock market, but it was pretty obvious that on October 31, Meredith Whitney caused the market in financial stocks to crash. ...This woman wasn’t saying that Wall Street bankers were corrupt. She was saying they were stupid. ("The End," Conde Nast Portfolio, December 2008 issue)

The problem is that there is such a thing as insider trading and white collar crime. This sounds a lot like the reactions from mortgage institutions who blamed whistle-blowers and auditors for uncovering the losses they were hiding from the rest of the world. No, Lewis isn't "blaming" Whitney in some malicious way, I just think he still has the same viewpoints that he held (and are still held on Wall Street, even now) when he was an working for an investment bank from 1985-to-1988.

I don't doubt that the main-thrust here is generally correct, but Lewis makes his argument too narrow, and I suspect him of trying to divert attention away from the fact that corruption and the proverbial "cooking of the books" has also played a role in all of this. But there are worse sins that he barely touches-on: the role of authoritarianism within corporate American, never mind just the financial sector.

The real bottom-line that he does hint at in his article is that brings of bad news weren't going to be rewarded on Wall Street, he gets this right. This is authoritarianism-in-action. These private tyrannies are akin to fascism in their internal cultures, playing-off underlings against one another in what's euphemistically referred to as "competition," but what it really constitutes is the Roman practice of "divide-and-conquer." They hold our families hostage for their own ends. Their endless problem? Reality and the spontanaeity of average people, and the eternal desire for liberty and innovation.

While some have done the bidding of their bosses--even to the point of breaking-the-law--we've also had whistle-blowers of every stripe during the Bush II era, an unprecedented wave of them. That doesn't mean fighting these "masters" has or will be easy, nobody ever said it would be. Doing what's right doesn't have immediate gratification if it has any at all.

Who would broach the "conventional wisdom" of a financial boom by pointing-out the inconvenient fact that a company's assets were becoming rapidly-devalued when they're going to be punished for it? Again, while Lewis doesn't necessarily "blame" Ms. Whitney for simply telling the truth about Citibank, he does assign her with the strange credit of causing "the market in financial stocks to crash." That's blaming the messenger, the same argument proffered by the culpable on Wall Street. It's a bizarre viewpoint that probably underscores the general tendency among the "players" to stay as far away from the core realities as possible while pretending that they actually are brave enough to stare into the abyss. Is it conscious? Sometimes, but it's really about the limitations of their own worldview and the fact that they're unable to "step outside of the box."

Lewis was just a low-level drone at Salomon Brothers just 20-years-ago. The next year he was getting a lot of back-slapping over Liar's Poker. At the age of 28, Michael Lewis was a millionaire from his time at Salomon Brothers and a book that sold very well for a first-time author. He was riding a wave of his own, reaping from a post-crash boom. Strangely, he was viewed as a whistle-blower when he wasn't, which he admits in the new article.

His take on the crisis, and the market crash of 1987 is simultaneously right and wrong:

The public lynchings of Gutfreund and junk-bond king Michael Milken were excuses not to deal with the disturbing forces underpinning their rise. Ditto the cleaning up of Wall Street’s trading culture. The surface rippled, but down below, in the depths, the bonus pool remained undisturbed. Wall Street firms would soon be frowning upon profanity, firing traders for so much as glancing at a stripper, and forcing male employees to treat women almost as equals. Lehman Brothers circa 2008 more closely resembled a normal corporation with solid American values than did any Wall Street firm circa 1985. The changes were camouflage. They helped distract outsiders from the truly profane event: the growing misalignment of interests between the people who trafficked in financial risk and the wider culture. (ibid)

To be fair, Lewis doesn't think he was all that prescient back in 1989 and that all he was doing was reporting his firsthand account of his time on Wall Street and its culture. Fair enough. But he's also significantly more well-off than the average American and doesn't hold a lot of the same values as the rest of us because of this. He attended Princeton University before his brief tenure on Wall Street, so he wasn't ever hurting as most working-class Americans have. No, he came from privilege, he got rich in decadent 1980s, and still holds the view that "greed is good." How exactly is this any different from the core cultural problem not only on Wall Street, but one that has crawled its way to Main Street? He holds the same values as the crooks, he's hardly any different from them in his values and attitudes.

Sometimes, you can be so close to the fire, you can't see anything else beyond the leaping flames.

Holding the contention that there was no systemic corruption on Wall Street in the creation of this crisis isn't going to fix anything, and Lewis appears to be just as guilty as the individuals that stopped real reform after the market's crash in 1987, the very period that he came up in.

Is Lewis bullshitting us as he did all those investors he claims to have during his time at Salomon Brothers? No. He's been kidding himself and the rest of us as a result of his own delusions--delusions he still shares with the players on Wall Street. It took a Princeton education to accomplish that and a lot of rationalizing, something he still appears to excel at. Shudder that the new president-elect came to us from Harvard and taught Constitutional law there for a time. These people are simply wrong and don't really know what they're doing to the rest of us, and they don't tend to care either. What they care about is power.

I'm not a Marxist, but he was right that, inevitably, capitalism will fall. The fall might be here, but no man can say with any certainty what hour or what day it will come. The killer awoke before dawn, he put his suit on.

Charles Mackay's Extraordinary and Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852 Ed.): http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=wEoPAAAAIAAJ&dq=Mackay+Extraordinary+Popular+Delusions&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=3IikCBls75&sig=C2_mOnrUQj4h80N38mZJ_4kl948&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=11&ct=result

Karl Marx's 1841 Doctoral Dissertation, "The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature": http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1841/dr-theses/index.htm

"This is the End, beautiful friend. This is the End, my only friend, the End": http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom?tid=true#page1

"Our beloved Nancy Reagan is in the hospital." --John McCain

WWW--McCain mentioned this for no apparent reason during the final presidential debate, just underscoring again-and-again that he's living in the past. That's right, she's yours, not ours, and those of us with a clue would never refer to Nancy Reagan as "beloved." Not even for when she pressed her ignorant husband to say something about AIDs while he was still president. He eventually did, but it was too late.

Those who refer to Ronald Reagan and his wife in such terms have an agenda in saying such wildly ridiculous drivel. If they care at all, it's because he irresponsibly deregulated so many industries that they and their superiors got rich. Absurd. I know, but I'm...just...jealous. Of what, I have no idea.

Palin quotes Ronald Reagan during the VP debates

WWW--That's great, and it was from a Chamber of Commerce-backed LP that Ronnie made during the wonderful 1950s when white Americans were "free" from much social-interaction with those frightening black people.

It was Ronald Reagan who said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream; we have to fight for it and protect it, and then hand it to them so that they shall do the same, or we’re going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free.

That's great to Alaska Sarah, a former beauty queen and now GOP cheerleader and little woman poised to take the throne in case the daddy-figure croaks in office (good chance there). The Apocalypse is nigh if McCain wins, so drink-up (I don't endorse the use of drugs, but do what you have to do).

She wouldn't lie, would she? She wouldn't be part of trying to take our freedoms away, would she? Get real. The real would be tyrants are inarticulate. She wins that one hands-down, but does she admire Wagner? She wouldn't even know who he was or that he inspired Hitler. Does she know of the myth of Faust? Doubtful. Has she ever read Herman Melville and understood his message? Also doubtful. Can she have any comprehension of her obvious vacuuousness? No. Does she even know what "detente" or "mutually assured destruction" means? Nope. Even Reagan did, that's how far we've fallen in the age of the little man (and woman).

Perhaps we're headed towards that moment where all will be one, as in the Hermetic mythology (and countless others) where the higher and lower orders join to become one, immobile, unmovable, and unchanging. Sound horrible? It's the end-point of most spirituality and religions, just not my own. Reagan was that grandfatherly old Shibboleth pushed on us by the business and finance community who reassured us as he took our rights, our jobs, and anything else he and his backers could get their hands on, so what does that make Palin? The smothering Mother of Death, of course, the shadow of the good, nurturing mother. Why? Why does there have to be a reason? Probably because it would get her off.

Reasonable people know there would be no hope of constructive change under her stewardship of government and that things would only worsen, identity politics aside. Never underestimate human perversity, we crave disaster, we want catastrophe to fall upon us. It simply is. Palin has a right to invoke "the great communicator," however. He initiated this mess that we're all in right now and many of the same criminals in the Bush II administration served under him.

Neoconservatism's daddy Grover Norquist served under Reagan, as did Donald Rumsfeld and several top staffers who have also served under George W. Bush. This was never a mistake or a coincidence, and Congress allowed these many appointments to pass, they authorized them. Palin is just the symptom of a much larger contagion rooted in the human condition. Reading this, one might make the mistake that I believe "all is lost." Hardly. This is a new beginning where an old order is falling-away.

Creatures like Palin tend to come out during such times, and must be taken down any way possible, but they also possess human perversity. They are mortal, they are as weak as any of us, merely being propped-up temporarily by social forces, only to return to the dust from whence we all came. Like the rest of us, these "great men" (and women) are as insignificant as a speck in the limitless reaches of the abyss. Curiously, they yearn to return to the primordial ooze that they deny we originate from, a paradox. Life is like that sometimes, yet I have a very real hope and excitement at the possibilities in all of this.

AP: "Bush says government role essential to ease crisis," as the death of extremist conservatism forces Norquist into hiding

"We are trying to change the tones in the state capitals-and turn them toward bitter nastiness and partisanship."--Grover Norquist, stating a political modus operandi that's lost its effectiveness among rednecks.

Washington D.C.--Mission accomplished. Yet the GOP slithered into the White House and Congress saying (yep, especially when Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House): "Government is bad. Government isn't the answer to our problems--it is the problem. " Except that it isn't, the business community is the real problem.

Then, there's this extremist wacko named Grover Norquist, who said we should shrink government "to the size that we [the business and financial sectors] can drown it in the bathtub," and that tax cuts are an absolute, even if it means we cannot fund things. Congratulations, Mr. Norquist, the mess you always wanted to create is here, and it's about to bite you and your ilk in-the-ass.

The market is crashing thanks to runaway financial deregulation that the GOP and her backers wanted and there was nary a Democrat in Congress to effectively oppose it. You're correct--GOP--this shouldn't be a partisan issue since both major parties are to blame for the current mess:

"This is a pivotal moment for America's economy," Bush said in his most extensive remarks this week on the crisis. He said that a financial contagion that began with low-quality home mortgages had "spread throughout our financial system" and frozen many financial transactions.

The president said the federal government should interfere in the marketplace "only when necessary," and that this is one of those times. "Given the precarious state of today's financial markets, and their vital importance to the daily lives of the American people, government intervention is not only warranted, it is essential," he said. ("Bush says government role essential to ease crisis," AP, 09.19.2008)

You want fries with that? Now he and the rest of the parrots in the GOP are going to start backtracking by saying, "We only meant there are a few cases where government intervention in the economy is necessary," which is just going to exacerbate the public's anger at them. This is because everyone knows that it's their fault, their mess, and we're bailing them out of it. It's the death of conservatism.

Who got bailed-out? Why, the crooked financial institutions and major shareholders, that's who. Not homeowners, not the unemployed--not anywhere that it's going to create a long-term fix of the economy, to stabilize it and to make it sustainable. All they've done in Washington D.C. and the right wing think-tanks is to buy some more time before the elections. Too late. But sustaining the situation until the elections are over is exactly what both parties have in mind.

Talk, talk, talk, and almost no walk for the public at all. That was always part of the plan for the so-called "neoconservatives" and the rest of the holders of "conventional wisdom" regarding the economy--a group more closely-related to extremist Libertarianism than anybody wants to admit. Their goal has been to keep the government from providing any social services or relief to the working-class, relegating it to servicing defense contractors, the corporations and the banks, and little else. John McCain tows this line, and regardless of what he might contend, he will have to raise taxes. He's also not going to be ending Roe v. Wade anytime soon either, but that's another fish to fry for another time.

It's a twilight moment for the followers of the Mystery Cult of Grover (sexy name, no?) Norquist: they've gotten what they wanted all along, but now the political-costs are mounting in ways they never imagined. Their only way out of their current catastrophe of objective-reality colliding with their Alice in Wonderland economic, antisocial, and political philosophies which have hit that wall that was always waiting for them at the end is to lie and to hide.

You see, here's the problem for anyone who would give Norquist and his "leave us alone" coalition any credence: if you want social services after a natural disaster, if you want bail-outs of your financial institutions run on hokum and paradox, your wars, money for schools, municipal-spending, roads, airports, highways, drinkable water, breathable air, police, a National Guard, a competetive workforce, a future and an actual society--you have to pay taxes, and taxes naturally rise over time. There is no solution to this problem except progressive taxation, namely taxing the wealthiest and making them pay their share as part of social responsibility in a civilized nation.

This peculiarly American idea that "you don't have to pay taxes" is utterly wacko in its scope and conviction, and is not only self-serving rubbish, but has no objective merit whatsoever. This is why we're seeing the bailouts under one of its greatest presidential-adherents. If it was true at all, we wouldn't see these bailouts.

Oh yes, John McCain is going to keep saying "we shouldn't be doing this," and most Americans will agree, though they actually mean it.

But what do you suggest as an alternative? Norquist doesn't have one, though some Keynesian Democrats are already suggesting New Deal style progressive taxation of the rich. Conversely, Norquist and his ilk still want to defund all government at all levels, and while he's getting his wish, it's clear that he and the other adherents of their ridiculous pseudo-ideology intuitively understand that the fallout from a public that expects government services isn't going to tolerate the kind of world they want. Ugly confrontations are coming soon.

If you go to Norquist's site, "Americans for Tax Relief," you'll see that there isn't one article, link, or comment directly addressing the recent bailouts of IndyMac, AIG, the demise of Lehman Brothers and JP Morgan's buyout of Bear Stearns, the nationalization (that's Socialism, folks, the kind that Libertarians and so-called "conservatives" think is alright) of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Bank of America buyout of Merrill-Lynch, or any of the other lending institutions that were allowed to take things this far over the cliff. If Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have proven anything at all it's that privatization doesn't work, especially when it's unregulated by government agencies with real oversight powers.

But that's what regulations are for, so we won't mention the obvious fact that they--neoconservatives and wackos like Grover Norquist--birthed this unprecedented crash by creating the proper preconditions for it, actually demanding it for years. It couldn't have happened without incredibly powerful backers, however.

In 1997, Reason magazine fawned over Norquist in an interview that makes plain his Libertarian credentials:

... Reason: You have worked with the Libertarian Party in the past. When and why?

Norquist: In the 1978, '79, and '80 races I ran a group called the Tax Action Coalition. Ed Clark [the 1980 L.P. presidential nominee] was the chairman. I've found that Libertarian Party activists make the best tax activists because they never get involved in the silly questions about which tax is preferable. They understand that the total tax burden is the total amount of freedom taken away from you, and it needs to be reduced as quickly and as completely as is humanly possible.... ("Happy Warrior: Republican AgitatorGrover Norquist on building a 'leave-us-alone' coalition," Reason, Feb., 1997)

No questions here, but the Libertarians have to be loving the presidency and Congress of George W. Bush right now, since he's hitting all of their notes. But hey, they want to legalize pot...and vigilantism, more runaway deregulation where corporations can poison and exploit you with impunity (and not pay taxes at all), where children shoot their parents with easily-available assault rifles, and where we're left with a nation where basically no law and order exists anymore. Sounds great, right? I didn't think so either.

Segments of the public will swallow some of this out of fear and stupidity, but in the end, the New Deal programs and protections are holding-strong. But what's Norquist's reaction to all of these bailouts? We don't know. As expected, he's going to have to do a lot of back-peddling, flip-flopping, and being cagey, common traits of this era of the elevation of the little man coming to power politics (and the predictable abuse of the term "genius" when the economy is running "strong").

Grover Norquist was the designer and architect of the Bush tax-cuts that came in 2001, a rollback of the New Deal's progressive taxation that kept our economy reasonably stable for over five decades--the same amout of time that the GOP couldn't achieve concurrent majorities in Congress.

That should tell you something: as the WWII generation has died-off, the lessons that they learned over 70 years ago have been going with them. "Victory" leaves Norquist in a strange place that he never expected--what to do next.

As anyone could have predicted, wacked-out little men like Grover Norquist will have to take their brand of snake oil to the state and local levels where the tax-crunch is being felt the strongest. Their chances at making any real inroads are very poor. The public also expects social services at these levels, yet another byproduct of the New Deal policies that continued their expansion into the Johnson years. The expectation of social services being provided by the federal goverment have become engrained into the public mind and aren't going-away.

But it's always 1928 to the GOP and her allies on the far-right, and that's saying something in one of the more right wing nations of the developed world, the red-haired stepchild called America. And so Norquist and others have decided to keep below the radar down at the state level as their handiwork explodes at the national level.

Isn't it great to agree with oneself? Yes it is, so the Big business-backed right wing has created the Caesar Rodney Institute in Delaware.

Norquist was their for the birth:

"What we're really stressing is policies that give people the ability to exercise individual initiative and to take personal responsibility for it," said Bergh, a Brandywine Hundred mathematician and economist, who is an information technology consultant. "Those are the kind of things that will lead a government that is very open and appropriately limited. We want government to be outcome-focused."

He said the organization wants to build bridges between the political parties.

Norquist said Delaware was in need of an independent research and education think tank like the Pioneer Institute in Boston, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Midland, Mich., and the Goldwater Institute in Phoenix, Ariz. Mackinac pushes individual choice and free markets, said Michael Jahr, spokesman for Mackinac.

"Ideas communicated with other people that are dramatized and explained can change the world. That's why the Caesar Rodney Institute is important," Norquist said. "You can change the world from Delaware." ("Free-market advocates open for business," Delaware Online, 09.17.2008)

We'll be sure to keep it isolated to places like Delaware, but thanks for the warning. Their rhetoric all sounds reasonable until you realize that they don't actually mean it when they speak about accountability for all. If they did, they'd be out defending their past-arguments on how the economy should be run (no regulation by the "mean old government" with their inconvenient "laws" and "regulations").

Freaks like Norquist aren't doing any defending, and it's a telling admission of defeat--not that any journalists are going to be confronting them on it anytime soon, just another byproduct of a dying pseudo-ideology and economy.

The fixes aren't going to have a long-lasting impact without--say it--greater regulation of the financial and business sectors of the economy, and more laws to do so if required. Taxes are also going to be raised, especially for the wealthiest. It's coming. Without this logical rise in tax- revenues, the entire American--and "global"--economy will go into total insolvency. Some pundits and supporters of Norquist have crowed over the years that this is exactly what the plan was: bankrupt the government to get them off-the-backs of the average American, namely wealthy businessmen and bankers. Toronto writer Jeff Berg notes:

Another winner in this battle of ideas over very big money are those like Grover Norquist whose self-professed goal over the last two decades has been to “shrink it down to a size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” It being the U.S. government. The only way to do this of course is to bankrupt it first. Reagan had a good go at it but his “legacy” has been left in shade by the outsized profligacy and recklessness of Bush and Cheney. As he has so very often Gore Vidal turned the most memorable phrase about this tickets unerring abilities: “Everything Bush touches turns to poo like King Midas in reverse.” ("the Banks Get Their Presidential Pardon-You and I Bail Out Wall Street," GNN.tv, 09.18.2008)

The problem with Berg's argument is that all of this undescores the failures of the current conservative ideology and its application. What next? Where's all the crowing over their "great victory"? There is none, because there is no "great victory," only an underscoring that their so-called "ideology" doesn't work in the real world. What they want and have gotten only leads us towards another crash, another bank failing and having to be bailed-out--then what? What next?

Then the banks and business and tech sectors have everything...and the global economy collapses, and all of that capital they've hoarded is now worthless. Perhaps we can assume they advocate a police state after that, since it's the only thing that would save them and the remnants of their wealth and power. "Conspiracy"? Hardly, this was all a mainstream deal, policy.

Granted that there is no other choice in nationalizing these private lenders and brokers, but remember that the bailouts and the resultant debts and social spending will all have to be serviced through a pronounced progressive taxation and a solvent government. These extremist elements aren't going to get their way in this area, and many of them don't genuinely want to. Without those preconditions, none of the current economic order works or is possible at all, what with its predictable and cyclical excesses.

Of course, there will be a lot of grumbling over the inevitable rise in taxes. None of it will matter.

But what could we expect if taxes weren't raised on the wealthy? A crash that would eclipse 1987's, and would likely compete with 1929. Nobody knows, ultimately, but it won't be good. And so now you know why extremists on the right want to pretend it's 1928 forever: They're nuts. They have no clue, and neither do those who stupidly believe a word they write or say.

Most of this mindless insanity begins with the Reagan administration (under which Norquist served as an adviser), but its cultural and political-roots go far back to the asinine resistance to the New Deal back in the 1930s. Soon, very soon, people will begin a decades-long cursing of Norquist, Rove, Bush, and all the rest, just as they did with the impotent and inactive Herbert Hoover. Frankly, I'm enjoying the show and all of the scrambling--and I haven't even mentioned the mounting-debt from the wars in the Middle East.

"Free-market advocates open for business," Delaware Online, 09.17.2008: http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080917/BUSINESS/809170353/1003

"Happy Warrior: Republican AgitatorGrover Norquist on building a 'leave-us-alone' coalition," Reason, February, 1997: http://www.reason.com/news/show/30147.html

The utterly wacko Fifth columnist "Americans for Tax Reform": http://www.atr.org/

"Bush says government role essential to ease crisis," AP, 09.19.2008: http://enews.earthlink.net/article/top?guid=20080919/48d323c0_3ca6_15526200809191995788214

The 1980s: "You're just jealous."

1980s A'murka--The only thing to miss about the 1980s is that the nightmare had only begun, that Reagan's policies wouldn't hit us until right before he left office in 1987, around the time of that other stock market crash.

Then, there was the lurid-spectacle of Iran-Contra going on in the backdrop of all of this, where Reagan and his group in the basement of the White House ran a secret government to pay for an illegal war in Nicaragua that involved gun-running and maybe even some drug trafficking. Who said any of it ever ended? Look at how much heroin is flowing out of Afghanistan since we got there. It was virtually extinct under the Taliban.

When we accuse Venezuela of "not cooperating in the [our] war on drugs," we're only underlining our own "extralegal" (illegal) activities. Why do you think there are so many banks in Panama capital city? That darned Chavez, I tell ya.'

Yet, Chavez is really just jealous, so we won't trouble our minds with him.

By the end, Reagan looked as empty, haggard, and intellectually vacant as the current system does today. That's because he was--as writer Paul Slansky put it--"An actor was playing the president." Little has changed since then, except for the observation that in-retrospect, Reagan faked it better as a former Hollywood actor. By the end, Reagan looked like he did when he first entered office: a washed-up, sad little man who also happened to be senile. Regardless of how much Reagan comforted us with his grandfatherly voice of authority, he wasn't FDR, and his time in office was a disaster. Like now, it was an embarrassing time to be an American.

When you criticized the way things were in the 1980s you were either called a communist, being "political" (whatever that meant), and the catch-all, "You're just jealous."

That's right. You're...just...jealous.

It has an incredible ring of intelligence, no? I didn't think so either. "I'm just jealous," I would say to myself as a mantra for yucks, walking home from high school hoping I wouldn't be mugged. There was an incredible logic to the phrase that still escapes me, but I think sometime in the 1990s I figured out what all those smart people were trying to tell me: "Matt, sell your soul for some poorly-made petrochemical consumer products that are going to be out of fashion in ten years like us, you're making us look bad." No thanks, I'm full.

Therefore: "You're just jealous." Got it? Me either! OK, so the other part I figured out was that if you have a lot of money, people become jealous of you and want to be exactly like you. That's right, even that balding problem and your inability to achieve an erection. Or, you know, things like holding the opinion that "Top Gun" was the best movie of all time, ever. I mean ever. And they also say that Randy "Duke" Cunningham was "framed." These accusers were just jealous, especially when the Dukester man proclaimed that "I never smoked marijuana," so how bad could he be for taking bribes and demanding hookers as payment for defense contract earmarks? You're...just...jealous. Got it now? See how easy that works?

It's really simple--if you criticize the way things are in America, you're just jealous and we're going to keep stonewalling you with this yammering catch-phrase until you say 'uncle.' Yeah, that was the eighties, just a smothering conformism that choked-out all light. Somehow, there were still good movies and really original underground music then. I don't know how, but these cultural sparks did a good job of hiding themselves until I heard the Butthole Surfers one fateful night in the fall of 1986 (their cover of "American Woman").

Don't get me wrong, I'd already heard PiL, DEVO, Killing Joke, and the Talking Heads by that point. As you can imagine, all this countercultural stuff...well, it made me feel--jealous. I was as confused as one of those screw-ups in a Jack T. Chick comic book.

Jealous? Today? No-no-no, we're not jealous. Alright, maybe just a tad, but we'll get over it and pull-up our bootstraps...shit, no, that's not going to work any more. We must nationalize our banks and scrap our speech on the economy that had all that "free market" B.S. peppering it, and our conservative smokescreen just isn't cutting it these days, so it's spent. Welcome to the inevitability of Socialism.

Poor, you don't need to be jealous no more, we'll all be equal in the leveling. They're gonna be playing "St. James Infirmary" in the streets of America again, and we'll all be jealous together. America has gone too long without a spectacularly public tarring-and-feathering. That time has come because we're obviously just that jealous.

The Nader/Gonzales campaign on the current economic downturn and Black Monday

September 15, 2008 www.votenader.org www.officialnaderstore.com

On this momentous Monday, September 15, 2008, we make a simple request. Donate $15 to Nader/Gonzalez. The prudential choice for 2008. We woke up this morning early. Turned on C-Span radio. And heard Brian Lamb quoting Ralph Nader. From years ago. With Ralph warning about extravagance, recklessness, and excessive compensation on Wall Street. Warning years ago about the undue influence of Fannie and Freddie on Democrats and Republicans alike. Warning about the failure of our government to protect small investors. Throughout his career, Nader has strong been a strong advocate for due diligence. For protecting shareholder rights. For prudential regulation. And strict oversight of the markets. While the Democrats and Republicans have bent to the whims of their corporate masters and Wall Street's bottom line imperatives. Nader has been steadfast in his advocacy for safety, regulation, and protecting the little guy. Unfortunately for the nation and for investors, his warnings have gone largely unheeded. On this momentous Monday, as we watch the fallout from the failed policies, greed and extravagance of the corporate political class unfold, we make this simple note. Due diligence, prudential regulation, and strict oversight of the markets -- Nader-style -- would have gone a long way to averting the disaster currently hitting Wall Street. Instead, it was short-term fast and dirty profits, muzzled politicians, and throw caution to the wind. And so now, the American people are learning the hard way about the consequences of a reckless corporate dominated political economy. But thanks to your hard work, we are in a position to give America a choice in November. For prudence. For strict oversight. For regulation. Right now, we're in the stretch drive of our $80,000 fundraiser -- to help fund our get out the vote drive. To get Ralph Nader into the presidential debates. To let the American people know that they don't have to settle for corporate rule. There will be a choice in November. But first, we need to reach $80,000 by September 17th. We're at $50,000. We have three days to reach $80,000. We haven't missed one fundraising goal yet. And we don't plan to start now. So, please, drop $15 now on Nader/Gonzalez. Help shift the power. From Wall Street and the corporate giants. Back into the hands of the American people. Together, we are making a difference. Onward to November The Nader Team

The Interior Dept. Sex-for-Contracts Scandal: Standard Operating Procedure?

Denver,Colorado/Washington D.C.--From where I'm standing, especially looking at some of my own research into the subpoenaed Verizon records from the Palfrey defense, I'd say yes. The morons involved in this scandal handle the royalites--in-the-billions--of drilling and mining operations on public lands. That means our lands, the public's.

The alleged transgressions involve 13 former and current Interior Department employees in Denver and Washington. Their alleged improprieties include rigging contracts, working part-time as private oil consultants, and having sexual relationships with - and accepting golf and ski trips and dinners from - oil company employees, according to three reports released Wednesday by the Interior Department's inspector general. ("Sex, drugs, and oil," AP, 09.10.2008)

It only went on for several years, and the investigation only took two years after the Interior Dept. employee called it in. Oh yeah, and the GOP-controlled Justice Department refuses to prosecute some of the players.

It seems this is what the GOP means when they obsess over "drilling." Who said it had to be exclusively "offshore" anyway? The names of everyone involved should be published on billboards everywhere, and the next administration should prosecute every single one of them. Why not? The Justice Department did it to every woman they could rook in from the DC Madam's escort service.

Nobody cared about their dignity--it should be significantly less-so with these betrayers of the public's trust...or is it tryst? Considering that these individuals were soliciting sex-for-contracts, why no RICO charges as with Ms. Palfrey? I think we all know the reasons why, writ large in the coverage. The IAG's report cites 28 year (when Ronald Reagan and his Interior Secretary James Watt oozed into office) veteran and head of the Denver MMS (Mineral Management Service) office, one Gregory W. Smith as a major offender, having sex with subordinates, and the one the Justice Department refuses to prosecute. Why? Perhaps because if he started blabbing, we'd start hearing tales of bipartisan corruption surrounding the activities of his office. Don't expect a serious investigation.

Of course, if John McCain wins, nothing will happen (same with Obama). Small wonder the terrorists "hate us for our freedom"--if it means this, I hate us for our freedom too. Are they guilty? My opinion is a qualified "yes," but that's more based on what's already happened under this administration and Congress already.

Give them all fair trials, but I would imagine the smoking guns are everywhere, which is why a number of them quit so as to avoid prosecution. Luckily, someone in the Justice Department has their back in some cases. Shame, and you can't put lipstick on Mark Foley, it's just too creepy. Yeah, we killed-off and marginalized the Native Americans for this. What we get afterwards will be well-earned if we allow it to continue.

Whores: http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/10/news/economy/oil_officials.ap/index.htm?postversion=2008091015

The Ghost of Reagan and Governments Past: The House Moves to Secret Session to Discuss FISA Revisions and the Issue of Retroactive Immunity

Washington D.C.--Remember that these sessions were suggested by the Republicans, and not the Democratic leadership of the House. It only takes one member of Congress to call a closed-door session, however, so a proxy for the rest of the GOP helps to avoid many embarrassments. But the Democrats have agreed to do so, with reservations on the degree of secrecy from such lights as Dennis Kucinich (D-Oh.).

Some of this begins with Iran-Contra, the last time that the House was forced to convene a closed-door session to debate the criminal acts of another Republican presidential administration in another time. Michael Jackson's "Thriller" was taking the world by storm, and the Cold War was being preheated in the Reaganite microwave to keep war-profiteering bellies full. The more things change, the more they stay the same, especially when Congress refuses to hold criminal administrations accountable. Precedents get set, and Americans cannot be blamed for assuming it was all by-design, because it was.

At this very moment, the House is meeting in a closed-door session to discuss the issues surrounding the conflicting versions of the Protect America Act amendment to FISA and the issue or retroactive immunity for the lawless telecommunications companies who aided in widespread and illegal wiretapping. Tonight, they're all looking at declassified records regarding the warrantless NSA surveillance program initiated by the Bush administration in 2002. But what's it all really about? One could easily assume that members of the House don't want us all to know.

After the events of September 11th, 2001, the White House was handed extraordinary powers by Congress and a panic-stricken American public, yet the surveillance program itself was kept a secret until its disclosure by the New York Times in December of 2005. The Times had been sitting on it for over one year, at-the-behest of the Bush administration which had urged the publication to bury the story, or "blood would be on their hands." Again-and-again, the White House and the GOP have resorted to the use of fear in their political strategy, even outside of public scrutiny--which is what we're seeing tonight.

President Bush vowed to veto the House Democrats' version of the terrorist surveillance bill, saying it would undermine the nation's security. House leaders said they would vote on the bill Friday, just before taking a two-week recess. The bill would then have to be approved by the Senate. Bush opposes it in part because it doesn't provide full, retroactive legal protection to telecommunications companies that helped the government eavesdrop on their customers without court permission after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. ("House to Close Its Door for Spying Bill," AP, 03.13.2008)

Go ahead and veto it, we all know that the House Democrats scored incredible political capital by refusing to reconcile their version of FISA amendments with the Senate's version (PAA). And that's correct kids, the last time a closed-door session happened was in 1983 when the Reagan administration was caught violating the Boland amendment, passed by Congress on December 8, 1982, which made it illegal for the White House to provide covert and overt military aid and training to the counterrevolutionary "Contras" in Nicaragua. The public and the legislative branch became aware of Reagan's backing of the illegal war by the press of that time when it was found that the CIA had mined Nicaraguan harbors.

The legislative branch cut all funds and barred any further funding by the executive branch to the extralegal contras--hence the need to illegally sell military-parts and arms to Iran, and the need for international money-laundering (players of the Randy Cunningham scandal such as Mitchell Wade--and possibly even Kyle D. Foggo--were involved in Iran-Contra. It's possible that another one was one Thomas Kontogiannis, alleged to be a CIA money-launderer). There was possibly even involvement in drug-trafficking (cocaine). Congress at that time had already been aware of this activity in 1982, hence the need for passage of the Boland amendment back in the "good-old-days" when there were still a few checks and balances being practiced...well, at least the occasional noble act by the Democrats. It wasn't enough, and the Reagan administration just kept breaking-the-law. None of this escaped Congress at the time.

In short, the Boland amendment made any secret or overt aggression supported by the Reagan administration in Nicaragua against the populist Sandanistas illegal under American law, a crime. But Congress did as much as it could to avoid doing much except covering its ass. By 1988 it was essentially over, and the Congress of that time gave-in by not impeaching Ronald Reagan. While the independent counsel's investigations went into the 1990s, pardons by the administration of outgoing President George Herbert Walker Bush gutted an already feeble inquiry. Most of the expediters of this not-so-secret war were given a light slap on the wrist, as was presidents Reagan and Bush I. Tonight's closed-door session is simply another case of keeping the public outside of policymaking, and in-the-dark about our legal rights and our history. We have a right to know.

Congress knew about similar activities like Iran-Contra as early as 1982, but hid it from the public and dragged-their-feet with the investigations. As with the excesses of Watergate and Reagan, they're once again trying to save the storied office of president, rather than truly reforming it. It's either a mistake in their thinking, or many of them are complicit and share the same policy-goals of the Bush administration--inaction makes this so by-default. It makes them all complicit unless they stood-up like Dennis Kucinich has, like Patrick Leahy has, and as Russ Feingold has. The rest are de facto criminals, and in many cases de jure.

The Republicans led the charge on this count with Iran-Contra, but they couldn't have done it without the Democrats with their fundamental inaction and apathy. When it came time to hit the president with the law, the majority of incumbents at that time stood-down and let them get-away with violating the law and the Constitution. A dangerous precedent was allowed to stand, just as it will for so many crimes of the Bush administration in our current era. It took exactly four-years from the passage of the Boland amendment for the appointment of Lawrence E. Walsh as the independent counsel by then-Attorney General Edwin Meese III, in an eerie echo of the irregularities in the Bush Justice Department. What's old is new again.

Without the guarantees of the Constitution of the United States, Americans are no-longer Americans anymore. Again-and-again, the GOP endangered the security and liberties of the American public in order to grab as much power in-the-wake of 9/11 as they humanly could. In so many instances, they have cried "partisan politics" when they are in-fact the worst offenders in this area of political misbehavior. But a quick peek at the hows-and-whys of closed-door sessions is in order:

“Secret” or “closed door” sessions of the House of Representatives and Senate are
held periodically to discuss business, including impeachment deliberations, deemed to
require confidentiality and secrecy. Authority for the two chambers to hold these
sessions is implied by Article I, Section 5, of the Constitution.

Both the House and the Senate have supplemented this clause through rules and precedents. Although secret sessions were common in Congress’s early years, they were less frequent through the 20th century. National security is the principal reason for such sessions in recent years. Members and staff who attend these meetings are prohibited from divulging information. Violations are punishable by each chamber’s disciplinary rules. Members may be expelled and staff dismissed for violations of the rules of secrecy. Transcripts from secret sessions are not published unless the relevant chamber votes to release them during the session or at a later time. The portions released then may be printed in the Congressional Record. ("CRS Report for Congress, Secret Sessions of Congress: A Brief Historical Overview [.pdf], 11.03.2005)

One could argue that current Republican incumbents (for now) are playing with all of our rights in-order to minimize the damage of a rogue and criminal presidential administration to their party--this assertion is patently wrong if they are doing so. Congressional Republicans have stood nearly to-the-man (GOP women are men too, a SCUM auxiliary) behind the Bush administration on every point, every questionable move, and every unconstitutional measure and bill.

There has been very little deviation from this behavior--having its own echoes on the Democratic side of the aisle--even with a minority of them getting cold-feet after the 2006 midterm washout. With the Democratic gains in credibility from not allowing a rush in the reconciliation of the FISA amendments, it's just possible that they're beginning to understand what it takes to have the public behind them: integrity, and more than just lip-service when it comes to upholding the Constitution.

The 2005 CRS Report on Closed-Door Sessions:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/secrecy/RS20145.pdf

The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) on Iran-Contra:
http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/execsum.htm

"House to Close Its Doors for Spying Bill," AP, 03.13.2008:

http://enews.earthlink.net/article/top?guid=20080313/47d8b4d0_3ca6_15526200803131737478508