No Honor Among Thieves

Here is another example of how the thinking behind the Citizens United decision will keep our democracy safe:

In a Message to Democrats, Wall St. Sends Cash to G.O.P.

...this year JP Morgan Chase’s political action committee is sending the Democrats a pointed message. While it has contributed to some individual Democrats and state organizations, it has rebuffed solicitations from the national Democratic House and Senate campaign committees. Instead, it gave $30,000 to their Republican counterparts.

The shift reflects the hard political edge to the industry’s campaign to thwart Mr. Obama’s proposals for tighter financial regulations.

Nah, no buyoffs here. We're ALL free to send boatloads of money to the very same lawmakers who can feather our beds, aren't we? Just because most of us have less access to great piles of hard cash than others, and just because hard cash buys you a piece of the pork pie, doesn't mean large swaths of the electorate are shut out of the legislative process, does it? Nah, that's communist talk.
But if buying off the cat's paws in the Senate and House remains the venerable campaign status quo, then the recent CU decision will make the following scenarios all the easier:

Wall Street lobbyists say the financial industry’s big Democratic donors help ensure that their arguments reach the ears of the president and Congress. White House visitors’ logs show dozens of meetings with big Wall Street fund-raisers, including Gary D. Cohn, a president of Goldman Sachs; Mr. Dimon of JPMorgan Chase; and Robert Wolf, the chief of the American division of the Swiss bank UBS, who has also played golf, had lunch and watched July 4 fireworks with the president.

When is the last time you or one of your friends tried to have a meeting with your elected representatives? Did you sit down for hours-long discussions? Were you freely invited back again and again so your views could be aired and considered? Did you have little breakfasts with plenty of goodies, or a few rounds of golf on a private course? Were you ushered into the special rooms set aside for such meetings and waited on by the staff? Did you representative take your call as soon as he or she learned it was you?

That's what I thought. Well, here's your Teabagger Nation, your populist revolution, your standing up for the little guy:

Republicans are rushing to capitalize on what they call Wall Street’s “buyer’s remorse” with the Democrats. And industry executives and lobbyists are warning Democrats that if Mr. Obama keeps attacking Wall Street “fat cats,” they may fight back by withholding their cash...

...UBS’s political action committee has shifted its contributions, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. After dividing its money evenly between the parties for 2008, it has given about 56 percent to Republicans this cycle.

Most of its biggest contributions, of $10,000 each, went to five Republican opponents of Mr. Obama’s regulatory proposals, including Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, the ranking minority member of the Banking Committee.

The Democratic campaign committees declined to comment on Wall Street money. But their Republican rivals are actively courting it.

Senator John Cornyn of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said he visited New York about twice a month to try to tap into Wall Street’s “buyers’ remorse.”

“I just don’t know how long you can expect people to contribute money to a political party whose main plank of their platform is to punish you,” Mr. Cornyn said.

It wasn't "buyers' remorse" he was trying to tap into, you can bet on that. Is Cornyn actually trying to say these people---who boldly sucked the money out of the economy with their bad faith Ponzi schemes, beggared huge swaths of the middle and working class, and created the house of cards that collapsed the job market and resulted in the worst unemployment situation since the Great Depression---is Cornyn really saying these Burberry-suited carny barkers DON"T deserve to be punished? These regulations that Obama is considering, no matter how watered-down they may be, are aimed at preventing the re-occurrence of our recent financial meltdown and protecting the little guy on "Main Street", goals that the Republicans and their teabagger fifth column like to claim they are fighting for in the face of the Democratic party's rank pandering to the corporate elite. So why is it that when action is taken toward these ends, we see the Republicans lining up with their palms and their tongues out, practically orgasmic at the possibility of representing the very corporate community they took no end of delight in bashing while the TARP money and the subsequent bonuses were handed out?

Bring Out Your Dead....Horse

After years of near-hysteria, much of which has led to tragically avoidable outcomes, we finally get a definitive statement on the safety of the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine:

The British medical journal The Lancet yesterday offered a mea culpa of sorts for its role in launching a global vaccine scare. Its regrets come about 12 years too late.

The journal finally issued a full retraction of a study it ran in 1998 linking measles-mumps-rubella vaccines to autism. The paper, with Dr. Andrew Wakefield as lead author, sent British parents fleeing from inoculations and fed U.S. alarm over preservatives in vaccines.

Even in 1998, overwhelming scientific evidence showed vaccines to be safe. Yet the press-savvy Dr. Wakefield had been getting headlines for his research, and the Lancet's publication fed the controversy by giving him an aura of respectability.

Evidence of vaccine safety continued to build, but the Lancet stuck to its story through 2004, when it was revealed that Dr. Wakefield had been paid to conduct his study on children who were clients of a lawyer ginning up a lawsuit. Even then the journal offered only a partial retraction, saying it had been correct to "raise new ideas."

Meanwhile, Britain's child vaccination rates had plummeted to below 70% in some areas, down from more than 90% in the mid-1990s. The country has since suffered waves of measles outbreaks. In 1998 England and Wales had 56 cases; by 2008 the number was 1,370. In 2006, the first British child died of measles in more than a decade.

The Lancet decision came after the General Medical Council—Britain's medical regulator—ruled last week that Dr. Wakefield had acted "dishonestly and irresponsibly." The panel confirmed years of allegations that he had been untruthful about his patients and funding and had shown a "callous disregard" for the children—subjecting them to invasive and unnecessary procedures. Only with the GMC now considering whether to strip Dr. Wakefield of his license has the Lancet finally said it "fully retract[s] this paper from the published record."

I won't hold my breath waiting for the wave of media attention to this. More likely the usual suspects will continue along, endangering their own and everyone else, and their groundless paranoiac bullshit will entwine itself into the conventional wisdom for decades to come. After all, this is a country where the fact that H1N1 did NOT result in a medieval pile-up of corpses at doorsteps is taken as proof that we were lied to about the pandemic.

Eco-Friendly Republicans: No Idea Is So Bad It Can't Be Recycled

The Party of No is reviving its talking points on entitlements euthanasia again, so I thought it was a good time to revisit the good fight fought during Bush's unsuccessful attempts to pull the same trick. The P.O.N. sees in this current hysteria over deficits a perfect opening for another kill shot. (Almost redundant to mention that His Royal Obtuseness weighs in on this with typical ignorance.) Obama's overtures toward some spending reductions have been like blood in the water, and these sharks are starting to circle. Their suggestions are comedic, ideological, based on nothing more than John Birch-style contrarianism. It's important to familiarize ourselves with the truth, and shoot back with facts each time they level their lies at the media. Here are several posts I wrote during the uproar over S.S. in 2005. We won that fight. We really can't afford to lose it now.

Social Security Digest (12/16/04)

The great debate on Social Security is raging back and forth, and now Bush has fired his loudest shot over the heads of the bleeding hearts who want to see a safety net left in place. Below is a selection of some of the best and most concise readings on the problem from a liberal standpoint that I have seen so far.

First, an omnibus source of info in itself, check out The Social Security Networkwebsite, sponsored by The Century Foundation.

Krugman, with a general overview of why the arguments for change are false

Josh Marshall who warns us away from being sucked into making the financial risk/Wall Street argument and reminds us what S.S. was for in the first place: a safety net for old age that could not be touched by hard luck or hard times:

“This isn't about financing. It's about whether Americans get to keep Social Security, a program of guaranteed retirement insurance, which unlike the other key elements of a good retirement plan -- investments and pensions -- cannot be taken away.”

Michael Kinsley, on the contradictions inherent in the argument for change.

Quiddity with graphics

The Center for Economic and Policy Research, with a clear, simple, scientific analysis, with charts for clarification. CEPR's report makes these points:
1. Social Security is Financially Sound
2. President Bush's Social Security Cuts Would Be Large
3. Imaginary Stock Returns Don't Offset Real Benefit Cuts
4. Social Security is Extremely Efficient, Private Accounts Are Wasteful
5. Social Security Pays the Most to Those Who Need it Most
6. The Projected Shortfall is No Larger Than What We Have Seen In Past Decades
7. Young Workers Will Still See Much Higher Wages If Taxes Are Increased
8. The Bush Proposal Phases Out Social Security as We Know It

Update: Krugman checks in with a nod to The Century Foundation, referenced in the post above

Screw the Help (1/11/05)

Do people still know what it's like to spend a long day at work, every muscle aching from the job you're doing, and then to go home and collapse in a heap to try and rest up so you can make it through tomorrow, without the energy left to do much of anything else? Well you can be sure some people do.

But they aren't likely to be the ones sitting in the capitol pulling the strings on Social Security. I am sick to death of people without a clue as to what it's like working hard, underpaid physical labor, who sit around making pronouncements about what should be done with our money. When is the last time someone who worked with their hands went from the worksite to the House or Senate? When is the last time they sat on a thinktank or journalists' roundtable of "experts" to hold forth on what should be done with the little peoples' retirement future?

There's been a lot of discussion about the future of Social Security, but much of it betrays a blindness (or callousness) as to what many of the suggestions, if implemented, would mean in the real world. Many of those who would gut and destroy the system have no worries for their own futures, and the existence of that check each month is not going to make much difference to them either way. One of the worst suggestions being seriously considered by Republicans and open to compromise by the Democrats is the possibility of raising the retirement age to bring it in line with (let's face it, because they're the highest) white female longevity averages. But who really looks at what impact this could have?

Over at Brad DeLong's site, he quotes Irwin Stelzer of the Weekly Standard as having "some smart things to say about Social Security". "Smart" meaning, in part, that:

"Surely, extending the retirement age to reflect current longevity expectations should also be on the table."

Surely, no reasonable person with a 6 figure income, a portfolio to die for, and plenty of investments squirreled away offshore, anyway.

This was my response in DeLong's comments section:

"As long as the subject of raising the retirement age keeps coming up, let's talk about what that would mean for people whose work consists of hard physical labor, often with physical side effects that can be debilitating over a long period of time.
I never hear anyone discussing this, probably because the people debating it and most likely to write or influence the law on it themselves work mostly in offices where the hardest labor they encounter may be hauling a couple reams of paper, and the worst disabling injury may be carpal tunnel syndrome.
Getting to the average retirement age in one piece and still working can be a challenge to people who work in meat-packing plants, construction, domestic service, and similar work.
Many of these people are praying every day that their bodies will hold out. To move the retirement age even farther away from them is not only cruel, it is symptomatic of how alienated the governing and academic classes are from the people who create and support the infrastructures of their cushioned lives."

The question is now: Who will stand up for these people? Who is left to be their voice in the media, the government, and on the street now that the Democrats have abandoned human rights and justice for the sexy language of "moral values", and the Republican party has safely made the final transition to a completely plutocratic vehicle for the rich and powerful?

Hialeah Dreaming (1/15/05)

Yesterday, slacktivist's Fred Clark examined a piece written by Jonathan Rauch for the National Journal in which Rauch posits that the ultimate purpose behind the Repulican push to alter Social security is to re-engineer the public's perception of the duties of government and wean it from expecting social assistance for events which can be forseen.
Fred interprets Rauch as speaking for himself in calling SS "welfare", and then goes on to make a good case for why it isn't:

"Franklin D. Roosevelt was adamant, in creating Social Security, that the system was not welfare. To avoid that perception, or that accusation, he insisted that the flat-rate payroll taxes that fund the program be capped. Most Americans don't realize that there's a cap on payroll taxes because most Americans don't make more than $87,900 a year. Those who do, however, get a nice little tax break on their 87,901st dollar, and on every penny they earn beyond that... Well, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. You want to pretend it's welfare? Fine, let's pretend it's welfare. That means eliminating the cap on payroll taxes. And while we're at it, since this is a "welfare" program we're talking about now, let's keep in place the limit on new benefits for salary above that cap. This would be a fundamental change -- from social insurance to social welfare. And it would likely create a boom in creative new forms of non-wage (and thus nontaxed) income. But the resulting infusion of revenue would ensure the complete solvency of the program until long after the last-living baby boom widow was buried."

But after reading the NJ article, I'm not sure whether Rauch was agreeing with conservatives that it is a form of welfare, or whether he was putting that forth as part of an example of conservative argument against excessive interference with public life.

That doesn't mean there isn't plenty of fodder for exasperation in it, most especially regarding the comforting myths about class and human behavior with which it enfolds itself. These are assumptions that we see parroted in the press and on websites everyday in statements by administration officials, "experts" and opinion-hurlers, until sheer repetition gives them the sheen of truth. For instance:

That investment will naturally give higher returns than SS if one accepts the increased risks.
Well, sure, if you put your money into volatile stocks that can also offer the potential for bankruptcy if you guess wrong. If you want to safeguard your old age with stocks equivalent in safety to SS, you're going to find that they pay just about the same as SS, plodding along unsexily, day after day. But those safe bets are a lot less common than they used to be, as stocks get wilder and wilder.

That we need to encourage a "culture of saving and personal responsibility", improve work habits and reduce crime, and that SS privatization will do it.
Guess what? Crime is down, has been going down, and shows every indication of continuing to go down. In addition, Americans are working more hours, are more productive, and have less leisure than citizens of any other developed nation. They are kept at the grindstone by businesses that refuse to hire needed additional workers in order to save on wages and benefits, then overwork their existing workforces to make up for it. This is the reason business pushed so hard last year for a redefinition of the "supervisory" employee, so that rank and file workers could be made to work overtime without receiving the overtime pay they once did. As for class warfare, what do they know about it? Someone dares mention that the policies of the administration have consistently favored the wealthy and attacked the weakest among us, and the right-wing, in its best Orwellian language, boo-hoos that it's "class warfare". Someone once cited a peasant rebellion in Britain against a local lord that culminated in the rape and dismemberment of his wife and children in front of his eyes, after which he was roasted alive on a spit. That, said he, was class warfare. The fact that so many of us have sat slack-jawed in front of the television watching this parade of outrages every night and not lifted one finger to redress them, even on our own behalf, is the amazing thing, and the only thing that prevents any real class warfare from occuring.

That involvement of the masses in the ownership of their own investment funds will make them more like the average Wall Street habituee, and create millions more Republican-prone voters.
Oh, yes. And we'll just be rife with buying and selling, and merging and trading, and then we'll all hold hands and sing as the next right-wing extremist mounts the presidential throne. Hmmm. Old ladies with a pittance in fast-dwindling blue chips will suddenly feel solidarity with Warren Buffett? When's the last time these guys had to stretch a paycheck from one week to the next, or weighed the merits of spending more on one kind of cereal over another based on how long it would last or how many it would feed? How many leave bills or utilities partially- or unpaid from month to month to pay other, more pressing debts? How many haven't seen a movie or bought new clothes for months because the money just wasn't there? And how many put off the doctor, or dentist, because there are more important things to buy, and they'll just wait and see if the pain goes away by itself? And they think these people, because a change in SS frees up $100-$200 a month, are going to sink the extra into a pie-in-the-sky someday crapshoot? And even if they did, who is going to teach them how? The government itself, that can't even understand or control the consequences of its own economic decisions?

It would be wonderful if the social engineers and media loudmouths that hold forth so glibly on other people's lives would step outside and spend a little time living them. But as that isn't going to happen, I have my own proposal for applying their principles for SS change to the rest of the US budget: Let's take, say, the revenue for highways and transportation, and give it to the Secretary of the Treasury, and send him down to Hialeah to see if he can't double the national take before sending it along for disbursement to the states. If he loses, hey, that's what happens when you live in a Darwinian idyll of personal responsiblity.

It Seems We Stood and Talked Like This Before

Unfortunately, I can remember where or when. But there is still no having a discussion with these people.

More later.

Rich Trumka Understands

"The class war has been on, except my class has been losing."

This is one reason why I want to see this man run for president. Working class boy, manual laborer, college-educated, knows how to explain complicated ideas to everyday people, never forgot what it felt like to struggle to make a decent living for a family, and is on the side of the powerless. A powerful, charismatic leader with a down-to-earth demeanor and a sincere determination to break down the wall of the gated economic community, and understands how to deal with that community without being captured by it.

Those jumped-up pseudo-populists would never stand a chance.

And yes, I'm a union member, of the dreaded SEIU. I only wish the whole country could enjoy the benefits of being union workers, too.

Sick of It All

One day a hundred years from now or more, our descendants will look back on the Israeli treatment of Palestinians and of its own protesters, and will turn away in disgust. How amazing that the most horrendous acts of cruelty can be so completely expunged from the public consciousness before even surfacing. Almost as if it were 1939 again.

Disabled From The Neck Up

Megan McArdle is concern-trolling about the unfunded mandate that might be behind requiring parity in insurance for mental illnesses:

"Apparently, the administration has issued rules requiring parity for mental health treatment with other illnesses. They'll take effect July 1st. If you want to know why health insurance costs keep marching upward seemingly uncontrolled, this is why: mandating new benefits is always popular, and the government doesn't have to pay for them."

That's right. It's tough out there for an insurance company, what with all those record profits and sky-high CEO salaries. No, the government doesn't pay for those new mandates, Megan; those who pay the premiums do. But lest you think she's a heartless Randian sociopath, she assures you she has feelings:

"I am very sympathetic to the plight of the mentally ill. Unfortunately, most of the people who will tap the benefits are not severely ill people who need intensive care; they're people who are unhappy. Unhappiness is not a condition for which psychotherapy, or antidepressants, have been shown to be very effective. "

Granted, it was a very small, brief, and token assurance, though she did try. It's just that her Predict-O-Vision eyeballed all those undeserving benefit-tappers, and her Objectivism got the best of her. So here she is trying to refine her empathy:

"Update: Let me point out something which I thought was obvious--the private insurance market is not where you necessarily get insurance if you are severely mentally ill. Really severe mental illness, particularly schizophrenia, interferes with "normal life activities" like working or dating, and onset is typically in young adulthood. The more likely you are to have the social or financial resources with which to obtain private insurance, the less likely you are to have the kind of severe mental illness we're worrying about."

Let me just parse out this blockheaded, misinformed logic: what she is really saying is that mental illness can only be considered genuine if it is totally disabling, and if that's the case, why, you'd be one of those "lucky duckies" entitled to some other free lunch---say, SSI, or Social Security Disability, or, Medicaid, and you wouldn't really need private insurance, because the rich and employed don't get schizophrenia.

This is like saying that the only people who have real illnesses are those with physically disabling conditions, and they wouldn't really need private insurance because the safety net would take care of them, too. And what the hell does one's economic status have to do with whether one is likely to have severe mental problems? She is assuming here that mental illness divests one of all social networks and sources of income. Christ, Megan. If that's your idea of being "very sympathetic", I'm sure the local animal shelter can use your talents in the euthanasia room. This is the "unfunded mandate" that's got her knickers in a twist:

"About 140 million Americans in more than 450,000 employer plans will benefit from improved coverage, according to the administration.

Included among the rules that will take effect July 1 are:

□ Health plans for employers with more than 50 workers cannot charge a higher co-pay or deductible for treatment for mental health or substance abuse than for a visit to the doctor or medical specialist. There also is no separate deductible.

□ The plans cannot set restrictions on the number of visits or hospital days for mental-health and substance-abuse problems that are different than those for medical problems.

□ The plans must offer out-of-network benefits for mental-health and substance-abuse treatments as they do medical and surgical treatments.

However, the act does not require that a group health plan provide benefits for mental health and substance abuse. It also does not apply to issuers who sell health-insurance policies to employers with 50 or fewer employees or who sell health-insurance policies to individuals."

Yep, that's scary all right, but not nearly as scary as what passes for humanity in the pages of The Atlantic these days.

Farewell, Howard

Thanks to Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice for the notice:

" Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist who was an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam and whose books, such as "A People's History of the United States," inspired young and old to rethink the way textbooks present the American experience, died today in Santa Monica, Calif, where he was traveling. He was 87.

His daughter, Myla Kabat-Zinn of Lexington, said he suffered a heart attack."

During a lifetime of tiny men and moral midgets, Howard was a magnificent soul from youth. But even if he had not accomplished one thing but this, he would have still been a greater asset to our country than any of our elected politicians of the last 45 years.

Before Apple Was The Seed

As the tech crowd waits with breathless expectation over the announcement of Apple's new tablet, I want to throw in a plug for an amazing little netbook that has been around in beta form since last year, and is undergoing continual refinement. I've had my eye on this since before it came out, and think I will be buying it soon:

The Touchbook by Always Innovating.

A combination netbook and removable magnetic tablet, this little wonder uses the same kind of power as your cell phone:

"The Touch Book uses an innovative ARM processor from Texas Instruments that delivers the power of a traditional desktop computer but uses a fraction of the energy.

Like a cellphone, it is always-on, so there is no need to reboot each time. And without noisy fans and disk drives, it's completely silent, so it won't intrude on your inner space."

It runs for around 10 hours without charge, uses open sourcing and is modifiable, and the tablet can be removed from the keyboard as a stand-alone. It's $299 to buy the tablet alone, and $399 for the whole system. There is ongoing refinement that customers can tap into and download as upgrades are made. Personally, I think it's elegant and revolutionary, and would much rather put my money into real, customer-engaged entrepreneurship than into Apple's now massive (and expensive) industrial structure.

Update: A gander at the live blog on the Great Unveiling over at the New York Times reveals nothing that the Touchbook hadn't already got me excited about. Apple apps? I don't have any Apple devices now, so I have no investment in the subculture. It's a shame, though, that a tiny company like Always Innovating can't compete against such free advertising.

Great Moments in Revisionist Pecksniffery

Hitler was a liberal.

And dirty hippies are going to grind us under their jackboots.

That explains why Henry Ford, General Motors, the American investment banking community, Standard Oil, and the Bush family patriarch Prescott Bush, all supported Hitler's rise to power and did ongoing business with Nazi Germany, along with Germany's own big business corporations.

Because everyone knows how big business gravitates toward a philosophy that despises it. Rock on, revisionaries!

The Ignorant Cracker Defense

Via Josh Marshall, we find the Lt. Governor of South Carolina, who is running for the Governor's office, dog-whistling to his fellow trailer trash:

"GREENVILLE - Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer has compared giving people government assistance to "feeding stray animals."

Bauer, who is running for the Republican nomination for governor, made his remarks during a town hall meeting in Fountain Inn that included state lawmakers and about 115 residents.

"My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better," Bauer said."

Not only was his grandmother uneducated, it's clear she insured he stayed that way, too. This is his understanding of "welfare":

"He said government hasn't made requirements to make those receiving aid be more responsible.

"They can continue to have more and more kids, and the reward is there's more and more money in it for them."

Instead, he said, the government should place incentives in its welfare programs, such as providing child care so parents can work or receive education so they can break the welfare cycle.

Government continues to reward bad behavior by giving money to people who "don't have to do a thing," he said."

You see, this man lives in the Reaganesque world of welfare queens and lazy chicken-eating Negroes, so he missed 1996, when Clinton's welfare reform created the Temporary Aid to Needy Families program, which places limits on lifetime receipts of benefits, and requires parents to work or go to school in exchange for what benefits they receive. And since that program is highly individualistic by state, he must be unaware of his own state's requirements, which requires work and/or school, and which limit the receipt of aid to 60 months in an entire lifetime. Extensions of aid beyond the stated limit are only granted to heads of households who are disabled or caring for a disabled person, who are under 18 and still in high school,who are not themselves recipients of TANF or are caring for abandoned children, or who have no reasonable access to transportation or child care. Failing to comply with extension criteria means immediate termination of the case. Yet this lying sack goes boldly on with his lies, taking swipes as children who,through no fault of their own, must seek school lunch aid to ensure some nutritional adequacy in their diets:

"Later in his speech, Bauer said, "I can show you a bar graph where free and reduced lunch has the worst test scores in the state of South Carolina," adding, "You show me the school that has the highest free and reduced lunch, and I'll show you the worst test scores, folks. It's there, period."

If there are poor test scores. it could have something to do with his state's atrocious poverty rate, which, even before the great recession, was growing steadily. As early as August 2005, S. Carolina had an overall poverty rate of 15.7%, and a rate of 22.1% for its children, making it 12th highest among the 50 states. Of course, it would help if all these stray animals had jobs, but Bauer's state is currently showing a 20% unemployment rate for African-Americans, in a state that is 28.5% black. I guess they could bring back the sharecropper model and put all those school-lunch-eating little bastards to work. That's the kind of solution I have a feeling Mr. Bauer would find eminently satisfying. After all, he has plenty of cash. And he has no dearth of brazenness:

"Bauer said he shouldn't have used the "stray animals" reference. However, he said he knows his comments are politically incorrect, and he does not feel that he needs to apologize."

Fine work, Republicans. More of him and the Crackerbaggers will be ready to start up the lynch mobs again.

The Story Of Corporate Personhood

The arrival of corporate (juridical) personhood was not signaled in the actual court opinion, but the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad Company in 1886 made manifest the Court's unanimous assumption that corporations were protected under the 14th Amendment, in particular the clause that gave full rights to human slaves.

The county sought to be reimbursed for years of unpaid taxes, and was upheld in its quest by both local and state supreme courts. The Railroad appealed these losses to the U.S. Supreme Court, using a law that had been passed to enable freed slaves to get around the injustices of Southern courts. But even before the Court ruled, it agreed that it would not be looking at whether the Equal Protection clause applied to the Railroad, simply because it was understood amongst all the justices that the 14th Amendment did apply to corporations. Thus, although the decision did not specifically lay out the precedence for corporate personhood, the concept was inherent in the reasoning underlying it, and was cited by later Justices when referencing the concept. Here is Hugo Black in 1938:

"Four years later, in 1886, this Court in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394 , 6 S.Ct. 1132, decided for the first time that the word 'person' in the amendment did in some instances include corporations. A secret purpose on the part of the members of the committee, even if such be the fact, however, would not be sufficient to justify any such construction. The history of the amendment proves that the people were told that its purpose was to protect weak and helpless human beings and were not told that it was intended to remove corporations in any fashion from the control of state governments. The Fourteenth Amendment followed the freedom of a race from slavery. Jusice Swayne said in the Slaughter Houses Cases, supra, that: 'By 'any person' was meant all persons within the jurisdiction of the State. No distinction is intimated on account of race or color.' Corporations have neither race nor color. He knew the amendment was intended to protect the life, liberty, and property of human beings."

Now Glenn Greenwald is fielding comments that confuse what is Constitutional with what is ideologically acceptable, and in the course of it, has pointed out that the "liberal" dissenting justices do not quarrel with the concept of corporate personhood, and their dissent is not based on any rejection of it. He warns his commenters:

"Those same name-calling accusations were made frequently by commenters last night about those who think the First Amendment actually means what it says and can't be violated in the name of good results ("your absolutism and legalistic purity ignores the real-world problem of corporate influence"). The "rule of law," however, means that if the Constitution or other laws bar X, then X is not allowed regardless of how many good outcomes can be achieved by X. That was true for the "crisis" of Terrorism, and it's just as true for the crisis of corporate influence over our political process. Whatever solutions are to be found for either problem, they cannot be ones that the Constitution explicitly prohibits. That's what "the rule of law" means."

The problem with this line of thinking is that it assumes that the Constitution protects corporations based on their personhood. Greenwald himself seems to indicate this concept could be debatable ("But what isn't reasonable is to pretend that the 4 dissenting judges endorsed the idea that corporations have no First Amendment rights or that money restrictions don't burden free speech rights. All 9 justices rejected those views. Again, that doesn't mean those views are wrong...") but his remarks above also seem to buy into the view that it isn't.

Brown v Board of Education proved that prior interpretations--precedents!--once ruled Constitutional could be reversed, and it wasn't the only decision to do so. This Court is the same body, after all, that looked blandly upon slavery in its heyday and pronounced it constitutional. If we know anything about this third branch of our government, it's that it is as malleable to changing mores as the other two, and nothing that comes out of its machinery is infallible. Let's hope this ugly perversion of what was clearly meant to be a human right is someday made right.

Let's Have a Big Hand...

I am continually amazed by the creativity and artistry of the AT&T Global "hands" ads.


They are done by a huge agency, BBDO, which is in turn the subsidiary of an even larger holding company, Omnicom Group. When I first began seeing the ads I thought they were computer-generated, until I looked closer and could actually detect the tiny lines and folds of the human hands beneath the paint.


These are living paintings, trompe l'oeil taken to an organic extreme, and every time I see a new one, like the one now in February's Bon Appetit, I get as excited as a little kid. The artist, Guido Daniele, seems to channel the drafstmanship of his ancestor Da Vinci. There is real soul in, for instance, this elephant rendering:



He does elephants particularly well:



But he's gifted with birds, too:

Excising the Troublemakers

Greenwald lays out the Obama administration's long day's journey into the nightmare created by the Bush adminstration during the '00s:

Today, The New York Times' Charlie Savage reports:

The Obama administration has decided to continue to imprison without trials nearly 50 detainees at the Guantánamo Bay military prison in Cuba because a high-level task force has concluded that they are too difficult to prosecute but too dangerous to release, an administration official said on Thursday.

...Once that rationale is accepted, it necessarily applies not only to past detainees but future ones as well: the administration is claiming the power to imprison whomever it wants without charges whenever it believes that -- even in the face of the horrendously broad "material support for terrorism" laws the Congress has enacted -- it cannot prove in any tribunal that the individual has actually done anything wrong. They are simply decreed by presidential fiat to be "too dangerous to release." Perhaps worst of all, it converts what was once a leading prong in the radical Bush/Cheney assault on the Constitution -- the Presidential power to indefinitely imprison people without charges -- into complete bipartisan consensus, permanently removed from the realm of establishment controversy.

There are roughly 200 prisoners left at the camp, which means roughly 25% will be held without any charges at all. Using the administration's perverse multi-tiered justice system, the rest will either be tried in a real court, sent to a military commission or released...The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that the Military Commissions Act unconstitutionally denied the right of habeas corpus to Guantanamo detainees -- a principle the Obama administration has vigorously resisted when it comes to Bagram detainees -- but mere habeas corpus review does not come close to a real trial, which the Bill of Rights guarantees to all "persons" (not only "Americans") before the State can keep them locked in a cage.

This definition of "persons" has certainly seen plenty of plasticity in the last couple days. Perhaps since the Supreme Court has stretched forth its hand to shelter corporations under its wing by virtue of their "personhood", it may also choose to re-vist the definition as it applies to living beings. If the Obama Justice Department can get a ruling excluding actual humans from the definition, the destruction of the Constitution will be complete, and these troubling complaints will be put to rest along with their authors.

Nice work.

The Laughs Just Keep Coming

Because we don’t already live in a plutocracy brazen enough to satisfy the company men at the Supreme Court, we now have this, a decision rendered in part in favor of Citizens United over the FEC—and Bush’s FEC at that. CU didn't want to have to release the names of its donors in order to smear Hilary Clinton with the release of a propaganda film just before the primary. While the court agreed that CU needed to disclose its donors, it went further and gave the whole oligarchy a belated Christmas present:

Erin Miller:
Justice Kennedy writes for the Court...Reversed in part, affirmed in part, and remanded...Austin v. Mich is overruled...And so is the part of McConnell v. FEC that upheld the restrictions on independent corporate expenditures...In dissent, or partial dissent is Stevens, joined by Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Breyer...Thomas also filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part...The Court does uphold the disclosure requirements for organizations like Citizens United...Justice Stevens' partial dissent is 90 pages...The majority opinion by Justice Kennedy is 57 pages

Tom Goldstein:
Much will depend on the wording, but today's decision is a small revolution in campaign finance law...The Court's decision overturns the previously settled distinction between corporate and individual expenditures in American elections...We will link to the opinions as soon as they are available...The decision presumably applies equally to state and local elections, given that the Court recognizes a First Amendment right...And the ruling almost certainly applies to both corporate and union treasury funds.

Zachary Roth writes at TPM that the concept of personhood for corporations is at the heart of the ruling. Basically, this means that because Constitutional rights are granted to those who are legal persons, and because corporations are considered to have legal personhood, their right to buy off the electorate via a saturation campaign funded by bottomless coffers fed mostly by contributers who have no control over where their money is going has been deemed by these 5 lackies as a right to free speech. This, coming out of a political philosophy that has striven for years to ensure actual human beings are allowed no Constitutional rights, and a court where 4 of the 5 justices actually dissented from giving those rights to untried men. Can I tell you how deeply I have loathed this legal precedent, which has withstood the test of time and, since it was first conceived, has caused untold misery to untold numbers of real live persons? Well, the floodgates are open now, and let the games begin! The risible part of all this is how the unions get tagged along with corporations, as though the AFL-CIO could match blows with Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil, or ING.

Yes, it’s been an amusing week, alright. I wonder when some wise guy will come up with a Fouth Amendment defense to fend off the Freedom of Information Act?

Word

This nails it:

"As Darcy Burner put it yesterday: "Perhaps if the Democratic base doesn't show up to elect Coakley, party leadership should consider *trying to appeal* to the base." There's a reason it's called "the base" -- it's because it's the foundation of the party -- and, as the Republicans never forget, there is a serious cost to ignoring or spurning them.

As I note in my NYT contribution today, the reasons for the Democrats' failings generally -- and the Scott Brown victory specifically -- are complex, and shouldn't be simplified in order to declare vindication for pre-existing beliefs (Obama loyalists: it was all about Coakley!; right-wing Democrats: it's all the Left's fault!; Republicans: it's a rejection of liberalism!). But whatever else is true, the Left, as usual, has very little power, both within the Party and in general. Blaming them for the Democrats' failings is about as rational as the 2006 attempt to blame them for the collapsing Iraq War. The Left is many things; "dominant within the Democratic Party and our political discourse" is not one of them."

There's one other thing to weigh, as well: the Left's timidity. Only today, when a friend suggested she was ready to create a third party, I responded that the Dems could be turned around:

"Third parties diffuse our energy and reduce the chances of a win. What the teabaggers are doing is working to take over local Republican machines. This is what progressives should be doing with the Democratic party. We could call ourselves the "Black Cat" Democrats, after the anarchist symbol "No War but Class War"."

This was met with a resigned defeatism, implying that any attempt to re-make the Dems would be a futile effort. This is what we're up against. But why shouldn't we fight windmills? Why should we circle the wagons and just keep on keeping company with only others who think like us? When did a third party EVER result in a viable candidate (and I say that as someone who spent the first 2 decades of my voting life voting for 3rd parties). If we tried to establish a 3rd party, wouldn't we run up against the very same forces that would be arrayed against us inside the party, except that we would have about zero chance of gaining allies wlling to abandon it? Staying in the party and seeking to gently persuade the incumbents in hopes of gaining their cooperation would only waste our time. Staying in the party and making our voices heard, getting confrontational, and demanding a cost for our support, would get their attention and allow potential allies to remain "loyal" in a comfortably familiar milieu.

And FUCK the local kingmakers. They aren't God on the throne, and the only reason they think they are, is that no one challenges the idea.

One Word...

Reconciliation.

Enough with the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth.



Just shut the fuck up and do some goddamn work.

American Psycho

This story was broken by Scott Horton at his Harper's blog (in anticipation of publication) yesterday morning, picked up by Yglesias the same day, and systematically spread across the liberal web spectrum:

"...new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama’s young administration with crimes that occurred during the George W. Bush presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously—and may even have continued—a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.

Late in the evening on June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently...

None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners.

As news of the deaths emerged the following day, the camp quickly went into lockdown. The authorities ordered nearly all the reporters at Guantánamo to leave and those en route to turn back. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, then declared the deaths “suicides.” In an unusual move, he also used the announcement to attack the dead men. “I believe this was not an act of desperation,” he said, “but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”

Two years later, the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which has primary investigative jurisdiction within the naval base, issued a report supporting the account originally advanced by Harris, now a vice-admiral in command of the Sixth Fleet...

The NCIS report was carefully cross-referenced and deciphered by students and faculty at the law school of Seton Hall University in New Jersey, and their findings, released in November 2009, made clear why the Pentagon had been unwilling to make its conclusions public. The official story of the prisoners’ deaths was full of unacknowledged contradictions, and the centerpiece of the report—a reconstruction of the events—was simply unbelievable."

Yet a Google search of the story reveals almost no establishment press reports on this important piece. The NY Times buried it in "US News" so deeply you can't even find it once you leave the page it's on. The silence is so astounding that even the conservative-leaning Sully remarked on it. In the best American Gothic tradition, we continue to lock up our dirty secrets in the attic, and Aunt Edith at the Times and Brother Billy at the Post make sure the neighbors don't find out.

To read the entire 136 page report on which Horton based his story, click here. Maybe Eric Holder can now put his resources where his mouth used to be.

In Memory of Reverend King

I remember this:



Once upon a time even hate and ignorance was not enough to deter our leaders from doing what was right.

IOKIYAR for Health Insurance

David at Crooks and Liars writes that political clown car passengers Mitch McConnell, William Kristol, and Charles Krauthammer are predicting national Democratic health care reform will get its comeuppance in Massachusetts:

"The voters are aware it's a national referendum on the health care bill and Obama big government liberal programs."

Too bad they forgot that it was a Republican who gave MA its current insurance company welfare program, the same Republican many in his party are already expecting to be the presidential frontrunner in 2012. I wonder how he will explain his big government liberal program to the clown car?

Changes...

to the template are still in progress. Clueless me had no idea Haloscan was evolving into a paid service via Echo, so even though I get no to few comments, I was still taken aback when they disappeared from the posts. Oh well, back to Blogger commenting.

David Brooks Fixes Haiti

Amidst a voluminous body of work known mostly for its scrupulous cluelessness, this essay really must rise to the top of the junk heap. Who else would shift into finger-wagging gear during a crisis so epically tragic, and who else would be so undeterred by his own smug ignorance? Please people. How does he keep his job?

Helping Haiti

Madison Smartt Bell has traveled in and written about Haiti for 15 years, with tremendous discernment and empathy. In Mine of Stones, a piece that ran in the January 2004 Harper's just before Jean-Paul Aristede was unseated in a coup supported by the Bush administration, he wrote:

"I always wanted to do this or that when I came to Haiti, but I had learned that completely different things might ensue; it was necessary to accept those transformations, for a too stubborn insistence on one's own program-tet bef, as Haitian Kreyol succinctly has it, "bull head"-can be almost suicidal here. Better to yield up my own will and let the spirits lead. That was the main thing Haiti had taught me, and it was also a point that most of American officialdom seemed to miss."

I'm not sure what the spirits had in mind for Haiti on January 12, 2010, but what has to be done now is pretty clear, especially since it appears another quake occurred last night measuring 4.6 on the Richter scale, just 37 miles from Port-au-Prince.  Many quarters have been  supplying the names of relief agencies that need  funds, including my own employer, and when I got home from work last evening I found a heart-wrenching flyer in my mailbox from a neighbor up the street whose family in Haiti has not been found or heard from since the quake.  These are the agencies that Bell recommends:

The Lambi Fund of Haiti
Fonkoze
Partners in Health

Near and dear to my own heart is Doctors Without Borders. Their own website states:

"We are not providing water right now, but when we do, we will need to establish some water sources that are accessible and not contaminated. As a second step we will need to think about other strategies, perhaps drilling boreholes or water treatment - maybe treating salt water since it is by the ocean."

Anyone with those particular skills and resources could be of untold value to the rescue effort right now. International Action is there.

Bringing It Down A Few Dozen Decibels

It's not as if things haven't been happening, God knows, but after a lengthy vacation, I returned to work and have been digging myself out of a work hole ever since.  So even though no one reads this blog anymore (thanks to my intermittent posting and indifference to blog-whoring) I still feel the need to explain that right now I'm neck deep in other things, and want to put this up as an antidote to some of the silliness and tragedy of recent weeks.  We can all use a quiet village to relax in:



It makes a nice ringtone, too.

Re-Post: Wassail Your Troubles Away (12/31/05)

 And God knows there were plenty of troubles.

Here's to the old pagan tradition of wassailing the apple trees.  From the Sulgrave Manor website we read:

" Apple trees were sprinkled with wassail to ensure a good crop. Villagers would gather around the apple trees with shotguns or pots and pans and made a tremendous racket to raise the Sleeping Tree Spirit and to scare off demons. A toast was then drunk from the Wassail Cup. Wassailing was meant to keep the tree safe from evil spirits until the next year's apples appeared.

Oh apple tree, we'll wassail thee
And hoping thou wilt bear
For the Lord does know where we may go
To be merry another year
To grow well and to bear well
  And so merrily let us be
                                            Let every man drink up his glass
                                           And a health to the old apple tree
                                           Brave boys, and a health to the old apple tree"

And a number of other variations on this theme can be found around the net, here:

"A cider-soaked cake is laid in the fork of a tree and then more cider is splashed on it. The men fire their guns into the tree and bang on pots and pans while the rest of the people bow their heads and sing the special `Wassail Song`. This custom is said to ward off bad spirits from the orchard and encourages the good spirits to provide a bountiful crop for the following year.
In other traditions, the men of the village went out to the orchards carrying the wassail bowl, to alternately serenade and browbeat the apple trees. There were songs, dances and libations (for tree and man) until finally, in frustration, the trees would be threatened with the axe if they did not produce well in the coming year. A newspaper account of 1851 documents Devonshire men firing guns (charged only with powder) at the trees."

and here:

"It was apparently an old midwinter custom (old Christmas eve or old twelfth night or some such time) to get together in an orchard and drink cider or strong beer, possibly warmed and spiced, have a bonfire, fire shotguns into the tres 'to frighten off hte evil spirits', sing, and depending on local tradition carry out various customs, the most common of which was for a piece of toast on which some cider had been poured to be put nto the oldest tree 'for the robins'. "

and here:

"Wassail is an ale-based drink seasoned with spices and honey. It was served from huge bowls, often made of silver or pewter. The Wassail bowl would be passed around with the greeting, 'Wassail'.
Wassail gets its name from the Old English term "waes hael", meaning "be well". It was a Saxon custom that, at the start of each year, the lord of the manor would shout 'waes hael'. The assembled crowd would reply 'drinc hael', meaning 'drink and be healthy'.
As time went on, the tradition was carried on by people going from door to door, bearing good wishes and a wassail bowl of hot, spiced ale. In return people in the houses gave them drink, money and Christmas fayre and they believed they would receive good luck for the year to come.
The contents of the bowl varied in different parts of the country, but a popular one was known as lambs wool. It consisted of ale, baked apples, sugar, spices, eggs, and cream served with little pieces of bread or toast. It was the bread floating on the top that made it look like lamb's wool."

The recipe for making a wassail bowl found in The Joy of Cooking is about as authentic as you can get:

"WASSAIL
• 1 dozen apples
• 1 cup water
• 4 cups sugar
• 1 tablespoon grated nutmeg
• 2 teaspoons ground ginger
• 1/2 teaspoon ground mace
• 6 whole cloves
• 6 allspice berries
• 1 stick cinnamon
• 1 dozen eggs, whites and yolks separated and reserved
• 4 bottles sherry or madeira
• 2 cups brandy
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Core and bake apples for about 30 minutes, until tender but not mushy.
In a saucepan, combine water, sugar, nutmeg, ginger, mace, cloves, allspice berries and cinnamon and boil for 5 minutes. Let cool.
Beat egg whites until stiff, forming soft peaks, but not dry. Separately, beat egg yolks until light in color. Gently fold whites into yolks, using large bowl. Strain cooled sugar and spice mixture through sieve into eggs, combining quickly. In separate pots, bring sherry or madeira and brandy almost to the boiling point.
Incorporate hot sherry or madeira with the spice and egg mixture, beginning slowly and stirring briskly with each addition. Toward the end of this process, add brandy. Just before serving and while mixture is still foaming, add baked apples. Serve in a heat-resistant punch bowl or in individual mugs."

You can read a similar recipe with song and story here.

A couple years ago some friends and we sang and danced around the old man apple tree in our back yard (the "old man" being the oldest, largest of the trees), and we had a remarkably huge crop of fruit from all the trees the following summer.

While I can't recommend the activity for everyone, I enjoyed it immensely, and although the drink itself wasn't as tasty as I'd hoped for, it was an interesting exercise in reconnecting to the past.  But on this, the nub end of the old year and the brink of the new, I can't think of anything better than to wish you all better days and better luck.  As the old song says:

Love and joy come to you,
And to you your wassail too,
And God bless you and send you,
A happy New Year,
And God send you,
A happy new year.