Saturday, March 27, 2010

The familiar hatred in the faces of Teabaggers

All too familiar to me....and sickening, like the thud of police batons bashing flesh and bone.

In the faces of Tea Party shouters, images of hate and history
By Colbert I. King
Saturday, March 27, 2010; A13



The angry faces at Tea Party rallies are eerily familiar. They resemble faces of protesters lining the street at the University of Alabama in 1956 as Autherine Lucy, the school's first black student, bravely tried to walk to class.

Those same jeering faces could be seen gathered around the Arkansas National Guard troopers who blocked nine black children from entering Little Rock's Central High School in 1957.

"They moved closer and closer," recalled Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine. "Somebody started yelling, 'Lynch her! Lynch her!' I tried to see a friendly face somewhere in the crowd -- someone who maybe could help. I looked into the face of an old woman and it seemed a kind face, but when I looked at her again, she spat on me."

Those were the faces I saw at a David Duke rally in Metairie, La., in 1991: sullen with resentment, wallowing in victimhood, then exploding with yells of excitement as the ex-Klansman and Republican gubernatorial candidate spewed vitriolic white-power rhetoric.
People like that old woman in Little Rock, the Alabama mob that hounded Autherine Lucy, the embracers of Duke's demagoguery in Louisiana, never go away.

They were spotted last weekend on Capitol Hill under the Tea Party banner protesting the health-care-reform bill. Some carried a signs that read "If Brown [Scott Brown (R-Mass.)] can't stop it, a Browning [high power weapon] can." Some shouted racial and homophobic epithets at members of Congress. Others assumed the role of rabble, responding to the calls of instigating Republican representatives gathered on a Capitol balcony.

Tea Party members, as with their forerunners who showed up at the University of Alabama and Central High School, behave as they do because they have been culturally conditioned to believe they are entitled to do whatever they want, and to whomever they want, because they are the "real Americans," while all who don't think or look like them are not.

And they are consequential. Without folks like them, there would be no Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity or Pat Buchanan. There would never have been a George Corley Wallace, the Alabama governor dubbed by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Diane McWhorter in a 2008 Slate article as "the godfather, avatar of a national uprising against the three G's of government, Godlessness, and gun control."

Hence, an explanation for the familiarity of faces: today's Tea Party adherents are George Wallace legacies.

They, like Wallace's followers, smolder with anger. They fear they are being driven from their rightful place in America.

They see the world through the eyes of the anti-civil rights alumni. "Washington, D.C." now, as then, is regarded as the Great Satan. This is the place that created the civil rights laws that were shoved down their throats. This is the birthplace of their much-feared "Big Government" and the playground of the "elite national news media."

And they are faithful to the old Wallace playbook.

McWhorter wrote how Wallace, in a 1963 speech to the political arm of Alabama's Ku Klux Klan, "referred to the recent bombings in Birmingham against prominent black citizens, citing the lack of fatalities as proof that the 'nigras' were throwing the dynamite themselves in order to attract publicity and money."

Fast-forward to today. Note the pro-Tea Party conservative commentary debunking last weekend's racist and homophobic slurs as a work of fiction and exaggeration strictly for political reasons. Noticeable, too, is the influence of George Wallace, Limbaugh, Beck and their followers on outcomes.

The angry '50s and '60s crowds threatened and intimidated; some among them even murdered. That notwithstanding, Americans of goodwill gathered in the White House to witness the signing of landmark civil rights laws.

Schoolhouse doors were blocked, and little children were demeaned. Yet the bigots didn't get the last word. Justice rolled down like a mighty river, sweeping them aside.

They insulted, abused, lied and vandalized. Still, President Obama fulfilled his promise to sign historic health-care reform into law by the end of his first term.

Those angry faces won't go away. But neither can they stand in the way of progress.

The mobs of yesteryear were on the wrong side of history. Tea Party supporters and their right-wing fellow travelers are on the wrong side now. It shows up in their faces.

kingc@washpost.com

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Is Financial Reform dead?


I mean is this it? 
Is this all there is; more b.s from the nightmarish junction where our elected officials interests meet with those of corporate America and the peoples' interests get run off the road in a fiery crash....the next one, just around the corner if real financial reform is not accomplished.

Time to start writing your elected officials. If that doesn't work, we will have no choice but to mount our own campaign against the corporate world's worst offenders.

We cannot back down now. This is also the hellish junction where our concerns meet those of some on the right. We can hurt these sociopaths of privilege if we want to badly enough. I hope to heaven it doesn't come to that, but if it does, depriving them of their drug of choice is better than throwing brick bats through windows

Derailing Help for Consumers

Washington

Why should there be any significant opposition to the creation of an independent agency with strong powers of enforcement to protect consumers from exploitation by banks, mortgage companies, auto dealers and other purveyors of credit?

The dragons lurking in the fine print of some credit agreements are enough to give you heart failure. Payday loans, for example, typically carry annual interest rates in the vicinity of 400 percent. Or look at the lineup of fees, penalties and interest rates on your credit cards and overdraft privileges. Don’t even start on mortgage abuses. That would take too long, and it’s too depressing.

We’re talking here about exploitation run wild. The Mob, which used to have a stranglehold on loan-sharking, can only look on with envy.

So I guess it’s understandable that the financial industry and other big-money interests are all but hysterical in their opposition to the Consumer Financial Protection Agency that has been proposed by the Obama administration as part of its overall reform of financial regulations. You’d hardly expect the people rifling the pockets of middle-class Americans and the poor to be happy about an agency with oversight and enforcement authority homing in on their nefarious and wildly profitable activities.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is spending millions trying to prevent the agency from ever seeing the light of day.

The antiregulatory mania of the past three decades and the stagnant wages of most American workers during that period have left families at the mercy of an increasingly predatory financial sector. As a briefing paper by the progressive think tank Demos noted:
“An increasingly strapped middle class became the ideal consumer for banks: highly reliant on loans for paying for the basics of family life; savings easily depleted by emergency events such as an illness or home repair; a paycheck-to-paycheck budget easily leading to overdraft fees and payday loans.

“Consumers were less and less able to avoid any one lender’s high fees, penalties and interest rates because of government’s newfound willingness to approve financial industry mergers.”

Ordinary Americans need someone on their side in the wild world of consumer credit. The big companies have their accountants and economists and lawyers and lobbyists and trade associations, and their good buddies on Capitol Hill — all of them figuring out new and better ways to separate consumers from their money. But as Elizabeth Warren has asked again and again: Who is looking out for the consumer?

The answer is no one. Consumers have to navigate the treacherous credit terrain on their own, often with the equity in their homes or their life’s savings at stake.

Ms. Warren, a bankruptcy expert, Harvard professor and head of Congressional oversight for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, came up with the idea of a consumer financial protection agency. It would shield individuals and families from the deceptive practices and outright fraud that is rampant in the credit industry. As Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary put it, “This agency will have only one mission: to protect consumers.”

But the proposal, bombarded with criticism from corporate interests with enormous stakes in the status quo, is already being weakened. A bill that emerged from the Senate banking committee this week provides for a consumer protection agency that would be housed in the Federal Reserve, which would limit its independence somewhat.

More important, the bill would allow bank regulators from outside the agency to veto the agency’s rules under certain circumstances. That’s a recipe for undermining the agency’s effectiveness.

Heather McGhee, the director of Demos’s Washington office, noted that the Senate bill would also prevent the agency from enforcing its own rules in the case of certain smaller lenders. “So what’s being left out,” she said, “are the smaller payday loans, private student lenders, debt collectors, auto title loans, and so forth.”

When you allow so-called smaller businesses to escape enforcement of consumer protection rules, you encourage the creation of companies and other entities that are just small enough to escape the enforcement threshold. And that’s where the bad practices will flow.

An interesting concept at work here is the notion that consumer protections that work too well would end up hurting the “safety and soundness” of the nation’s financial sector. (That’s the reason the Senate bill provides for bank regulators to have a veto over the proposed agency’s rules under some limited circumstances.)

“Safety and soundness” is a euphemism for profitability. What’s really being said is that when the profitability of the big banks and other financial agencies and institutions are in conflict with the fair treatment of consumers, it’s the fair treatment of consumers that has to give way.

Now would be a good time to start putting that notion to rest.

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company


There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Here we go; more GOP money grubbing

HEALTH CARE

The Repeal Campaign

Last Tuesday, President Obama signed his landmark health care overhaul -- the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act -- into law, making it the most extensive social legislation enacted in decades. The President said that with his signature, the law provides "the core principle that everybody should have some basic security when it comes to their health care." "Today we are affirming that essential truth, a truth every generation is called to rediscover for itself, that we are not a nation that scales back its aspirations," Obama said. However, shortly after this monumental event, political grandstanding from Republicans in both federal and state governments began to take shape. Within minutes of Obama's signature, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) filed suit in federal court challenging the law and on the same day, 13 other Republican state attorneys general filed a separate federal lawsuit against the new law, arguing that certain provisions violate the Constitution. And in Congress, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) introduced legislation to repeal the President's signature agenda item. Yesterday, the President invited congressional Republicans to try repealing the law. "Go for it," he challenged them. Indeed, Obama has reason to be confident because Republicans in Congress are unlikely to succeed in repealing the Affordable Care Act, and the lawsuits filed by the states' attorneys general have little legal backing.

GOP REPEAL EFFORT 'A SYMBOL': Not only did King and DeMint introduce legislation to repeal the health care overhaul, but many Republicans have also said that repealing the law should be part of the Party's campaign platform for this year's midterm elections. (And of course, Fox News has been eager to promote it.) "Repeal and replace will be the slogan for the fall," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said this week. While some Republicans like Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) have favored only a partial repeal, many others, like Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), want to revoke "the whole thing." However, neither of those two scenarios have any chance of panning out. In fact, some key players in the GOP are candidly acknowledging that their colleagues' new big agenda is mere political gamesmanship. "What you have to do is be politically honest," said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. "If the Republicans win a majority in the House and Senate next year, they will not be able to repeal the bill. The president would veto it," he said. Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) said the repeal effort "is more of a symbol." "[Obama] would never sign a repeal law," Kyl said, adding, "We don't have the votes to get it passed right now. We're not going to waste our time on that." Seeming to recognize this reality, other conservatives such as former Tennessee senator Bill Frist, former New York City mayor Rudy Guiliani, and former Bush speech writer David Frum have all cautioned against the repeal campaign.

NO CHANCE FOR STATES' CASE: In their lawsuit, the attorneys general claim that the requirement in the new law that all Americans purchase health insurance "'represents an unprecedented encroachment on the liberty of individuals' and violates several parts of the Constitution, including the taxing power and the clause allowing Congress to regulate interstate commerce." Cuccinelli argued that the insurance mandate violates the Constitution because "at no time in our history has the government mandated its citizens buy a good or service." However, this claim is false. As Center for American Progress Policy Analyst Ian Millhiser noted, "President George Washington signed the Second Militia Act of 1792, which required a significant percentage of the U.S. civilian population to purchase -- at their own expense -- 'a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack'" in case the President ever called them to serve. Other legal experts have said that the states' lawsuits don't stand a chance in court. "It would be surprising if the (Supreme Court) says Congress can't regulate people who are participating in the $1 trillion health-care market," said Stanford University Law School professor David Freeman Engstrom. "The lawsuit probably doesn't have legs both as a matter of precedent and as a matter of common sense." Speaking of the penalties for not carrying health insurance, University of Texas Law School professor Sanford Levinson said that "[a]s a technical matter, it's been set up as a tax. ... The argument about constitutionality is, if not frivolous, close to it."

A WEAK ARGUMENT: To support their argument, the attorneys general cite two cases as examples of the Supreme Court striking down a law for going beyond Congress' power to regulate commerce: United States v. Lopez -- where the Court struck down a law banning the act of bringing a firearm in a school area -- and United States v. Morrison -- where the Court stuck down a portion of the Violence Against Women Act. But as Millhiser has noted, "What these cases have in common is that the laws at issue involved activity that was far less economic in nature than the purchase of health insurance. Neither carrying a gun nor committing an act of violence involves a sale, a market, or an exchange of something of value." Indeed, other state officials appear to recognize the lawsuit's thin grounding. Gov. Jim Doyle (D-WI) told his attorney general in a letter that his request to sue would be denied. "The lawsuit you suggest is a frivolous and political attempt to thwart the actions of Congress and the law of the country," he wrote. As the Wonk Room's Igor Volsky noted, "At least 4 of the 13 AGs are running for higher office (either Governor or Senator) and the rest are up for re-election. Their suits are designed to rally political support, not lay down new legal doctrine." "I will not waste taxpayer dollars on a political stunt," said Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway, who added that this "gimmick may be good 'tea party' politics, but it's based on questionable legal principles." Georgia's attorney general has also refused to file suit, but Republican Gov. Sonny Purdue plans to sidestep his AG, claiming that "Georgia's state constitution allows the governor to act as attorney general if the elected attorney general fails to carry out the wishes of the governor." And in Nevada, GOP Gov. Jim Gibbons has asked Attorney General Catherine Cortez-Masto to join the lawsuit, but Cortez-Masto's office "said she was waiting to see what kind of changes the reconciliation bill makes before settling on a final decision."
There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Quarter of Republicans Think Obama May Be the Anti-Christ

 
Americans have some extreme views of President Obama, with a new controversial survey suggesting that 40 percent of adults believe he is a socialist, and about a quarter of survey participants thinking the president is a racist, anti-American and even doing things Hitler did.

The whammy: 14 percent of Americans say President Barack Obama may be the Antichrist. When split by political party, 24 percent of Republicans and 6 percent of Democrats viewed the nation's leader in this way.

The results come from an online Harris Poll involving 2,320 adults who were surveyed online between March 1 and March 8 by Harris Interactive, a market research firm. Respondents were read each of 15 statements and asked whether they thought they were true or false. The sample of people was selected from among roughly 4 million people who agreed to participate in Harris Interactive surveys and are given "modest incentives," according to Harris. The results were then weighted to reflect the composition of the U.S. adult population. [Infographic Compares Views]

The accuracy of the poll has been questioned widely in the blogosphere. Polls are never free from error, with sampling bias and question types leading to flaws. Online polls, in particular, raise questions about bias.

"The thing about sampling is no sample avoids bias," said Humphrey Taylor, chairman of the Harris Poll, Harris Interactive. "The question is can you identify and correct for the biases that are in there. We have a sizable team that does that and nothing else."

Here's the percentage breakdown of respondents' views of President Obama:
  • 38 percent say he wants to take away Americans' right to own guns.
  • 32 percent say he is a Muslim.
  • 29 percent think he wants to turn over the sovereignty of the United States to a one world government.
  • 29 percent think he has done many things that are unconstitutional.
  • 27 percent say he resents America's heritage.
  • 27 percent say he does what Wall Street and the bankers tell him to do.
  • 25 percent say he was not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president.
  • 25 percent say he is a domestic enemy that the U.S. Constitutions speaks of.
  • 23 percent say he is a racist.
  • 23 percent say he is anti-American.
  • 23 percent say he wants to use an economic collapse or terrorist attack as an excuse to take dictatorial powers.
  • 20 percent say he is doing many of the things that Hitler did.
When broken out by political party, results showed some stark differences. For instance, the majority of Republicans believed the president is a Muslim and a socialist, while around 40 percent believe he is a racist, someone who resents American heritage and "wants terrorists to win."

Forty percent of Republicans, compared with just 15 percent of Democrats, think Wall Street pulls his strings.

When Harris' Taylor saw the results he told LiveScience he was "flabbergasted. I would've guessed the numbers would've been a lot smaller than that."

He added, "It means that very large numbers of people are misninformed not only about President Obama but many things in modern life."

No Kidding. I am not the least but surprised. Isn't anyone paying attention?

The findings lend support to, and in fact were done to verify, themes in John Avlon's new book "Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America" (Beast Books, 2010).

"This poll should be a wake-up call to all Americans about the real costs of using fear and hate to pump up hyper-partisanship," Avlon said after reviewing the findings. "We are playing with dynamite by demonizing our president and dividing our country in the process. Americans need to remember the perspective that Wingnuts always forget - patriotism is more important than partisanship."

While extreme, there's a chance some respondents weren't even sure what a Muslim is, for instance. Research reported in 2008 suggested Americans have inaccurate views of Muslims: Many think the Islamic religion is associated with violence and religious extremism, and perhaps even terrorism. In addition, seven in 10 Americans in that study admitted they know very little about the Islamic religion.
This story was updated at 12:35 p.m. ET to include details about the polling methodology.

LiveScience.com chronicles the daily advances and innovations made in science and technology. We take on the misconceptions that often pop up around scientific discoveries and deliver short, provocative explanations with a certain wit and style. Check out our science videos, Trivia & Quizzes and Top 10s. Join our community to debate hot-button issues like stem cells, climate change and evolution. You can also sign up for free newsletters, register for RSS feeds and get cool gadgets at the LiveScience Store.

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

The Catholic Church: The Victim?

This is not something cooked up by the media, American or otherwise. 

I knew about this long before there was anything in the press. 

Working in addiction you hear it all.

By NICOLE WINFIELD, 
Associated Press Writer Nicole Winfield,
Associated Press Writer 
  Fri Mar 26, 5:15 am ET 
 
VATICAN CITY – Revelations that the Vatican halted the investigation of a Wisconsin priest accused of molesting some 200 deaf boys have eerie echoes in Italy, where 67 deaf men and women accused two dozen priests of raping and molesting children for years.

Only now — a year after the Italian case became public — is the Vatican directing the diocese to interview the victims to hear their testimony about the accusations, The Associated Press learned Thursday.

The two cases are the latest in a burgeoning abuse scandal on both sides of the Atlantic that now threatens to tarnish the papacy itself. The office charged with disciplining clergy was long led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, and a church prosecution in the Wisconsin case was stopped after an appeal to Ratzinger.

The Vatican strongly defended Benedict on Thursday and denounced what it said was a concerted campaign to smear him and his aides for a problem that Rome insists is not unique to the Catholic Church.

Benedict's actions have been marked by "transparency, firmness and severity in shedding light on the various cases of sexual abuse committed by priests and clergymen," the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano said in a front-page article.

It lashed out at what it said was a "prevailing trend in the media" to ignore facts and spread an image of the Catholic Church "as if it were the only one responsible for sexual abuses — an image that does not correspond to reality."

No one said that it was only the Catholics, it goes on in every church and in every religion for pedophilia is not limited to class, creed or color.

The Vatican was responding to the release of documents, first reported by The New York Times, that showed how the pope's former office told a Wisconsin bishop to shut down a church trial against the Rev. Lawrence Murphy, a Milwaukee priest accused of molesting some 200 deaf boys from 1950 to 1975.

Murphy died in 1998, two years after Ratzinger first learned of the accusations, and more than 20 years after they came to the attention of the Milwaukee diocese.

While the Vatican has not directly addressed the Italian abuse case, first reported as part of an AP investigation last September, it bears marked similarities to the allegations brought in Wisconsin.

Both involve some of society's most vulnerable: deaf children for whom the admonition "never tell" is easy to enforce because they have difficulty communicating. And in both, the major priority of church officials grappling with how or whether to discipline accused predators appeared to be protecting the church from scandal.

In a signed statement last year, the 67 former pupils at a school for the deaf in Verona described sexual abuse, pedophilia and corporal punishment from the 1950s to the 1980s. They named 24 priests, brothers and lay religious men at the Antonio Provolo Institute for the Deaf.

While not all acknowledged being victims, 14 of the 67 wrote sworn statements and made videotapes, detailing abuse, some for years, at the hands of priests and brothers of the Congregation for the Company of Mary.

One victim, Alessandro Vantini, told the AP last year that priests sodomized him so relentlessly he came to feel "as if I were dead."

"How could I tell my papa that a priest had sex with me?" Vantini, 59, said through a sign-language interpreter. "You couldn't tell your parents because the priests would beat you."

The bishop of Verona, Monsignor Giuseppe Zenti, initially accused the former students of lying. However, after one of the accused lay religious men admitted to sexual relations with students, the bishop ordered an internal investigation. It found some abuse occurred, albeit a fraction of what had been alleged.

Advocates for the victims, however, said the diocese investigation was fatally flawed because no one interviewed the former students.

Last summer, the diocese forwarded its files to the Vatican office that prosecutes sex crimes by clergy, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It was headed for years by Ratzinger, who issued a 2001 directive that requires bishops to report suspected clerical abuse cases to the Vatican, but makes no mention of calling police.

The Vatican studied the file but took no action until Feb. 15, when Cardinal William Levada instructed Zenti to interview the former students to determine if any action should be taken against the priests, diocesan spokesman the Rev. Bruno Fasani told the AP.

In his letter to the Verona church authorities, Levada said Ratzinger's old office, which he now heads, had reviewed the files about the alleged abuse and "considers it opportune to proceed" with interviews of the former students.

Fasani said the diocese maintained that it did not interview the alleged victims because they never made a formal complaint to the bishop. The diocese also said it didn't know how to contact them, even though they are all members of a Verona deaf association with ties to the church-run school.

Marco Lodi Rizzini, a spokesman for the accusers, scoffed at the suggestion that the diocese didn't know how to reach the former students. He said he spoke with Zenti twice about the accusations and sent the victims' testimonies about the abuse to the diocese last year.

He said the former students were more than happy to speak to investigators. "Better late than never."

Fasani said the diocese was now forming a team to conduct the interviews after receiving instructions from Levada.

"This is a shameful thing. We never received a formal complaint," he insisted. "It was never formally presented to us."

Vantini and other alleged Verona victims are due to appear on state-run RAI television on Friday to tell their stories.

Benedict also has come under pressure over a case dating back to his time as archbishop of Munich, in his native Germany, three decades ago.

The Munich archdiocese has said that Ratzinger was involved in a 1980 decision to allow a priest who had been accused of abusing boys, the Rev. Peter Hullermann, to be transferred there for therapy.

However, Ratzinger's then-deputy, Gerhard Gruber, said earlier this month he took full responsibility for a subsequent decision to allow the priest to return to pastoral duties. Hullermann was convicted in 1986 of sexual abuse during a later posting.
 
The New York Times reported Friday that the future pope was copied in on a memo saying that the priest would quickly be returned to pastoral work, and that church officials could not rule out that Ratzinger read it.
By Laurie Goodstein and David Callender
updated 9:42 a.m. ET, Sat., March. 27, 2010

They were deaf, but they were not silent. For decades, a group of men who were sexually abused as children by the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin reported to every type of official they could think of that he was a danger, according to the victims and church documents.

They told other priests. They told three archbishops of Milwaukee. They told two police departments and the district attorney. They used sign language, written affidavits and graphic gestures to show what exactly Father Murphy had done to them. But their reports fell on the deaf ears of hearing people.

This week, they learned that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, received letters about Father Murphy in 1996 from Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland of Milwaukee, who said that the deaf community needed “a healing response from the Church.”



The Vatican sat on the case, then equivocated, and when Father Murphy died in 1998, he died a priest.

“That man should have been in prison for a very long time, but he was lucky,” Steven Geier, one of Father Murphy’s victims, said Thursday.
“What about me? I wasn’t supposed to touch girls. What gave him the right to be able to do that? Father Murphy constantly thought about sex with children, and he got away with it.”

Victims complained in 1950s
 
Young victims of sexual abuse are often so confused, ashamed or traumatized that they wait years to report the violations. Some never say a word. One of the remarkable aspects of the Father Murphy case is that young victims began alerting the authorities in the mid-1950s, when sexual abuse was hardly even a part of the public vocabulary.

In his ranch house in Madison, where he lives with his wife, Ann, and two dachshunds, Mr. Geier said through an interpreter that he entered St. John’s School for the Deaf in St. Francis, Wis., when he was 9.

His father had helped build a Catholic church in rural Dane County, and his aunt was a nun. His family wanted him to get a good education in a Catholic school.

Mr. Geier, now 59, said that between the ages of 14 and 15, starting around 1965, Father Murphy molested him four times in a closet at the school. The priest, a hearing man fluent in sign language, said that God wanted him to teach the boy about sex but that he had to keep it quiet because it was under the sacrament of confession. Mr. Geier said he felt sick.
“First thing in the morning,” Mr. Geier said, “we took communion, and as he passed out the communion wafers, I thought about how many boys did he touch with those hands and all of the germs, all of the filth of his hands.”

Priest did not listen
Father Murphy may have molested as many as 200 boys while he worked at the school from 1950 to 1974, according to the accounts of victims and a social worker hired by the Archdiocese of Milwaukee to interview him.

Mr. Geier said he first tried to tell the priest at his home parish in Madison, where he served as an altar boy, in 1966 when he was just 16. But the priest, he said, told him he did not want to hear about it, and to just forget about it. He told another priest while he was still a teenager, and yet a third priest years later, after he married.

That priest, the Rev. Tom Schroeder, 72, who led Masses for the deaf in Madison from 1970 to 1992, said in an interview Friday that he remembered Mr. Geier’s telling him about Father Murphy.

Father Schroeder said that he told a nun, who told another nun who was a dormitory supervisor at St. John’s, but that the supervisor did not believe it and nothing ever came of it.

“I assumed that if enough people told her, she would finally believe it,” Father Schroeder said.

Internal church correspondence unearthed in a lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and given to The New York Times, which made it public it this week, included a letter from the Rev. David Walsh, who served as a chaplain for the deaf in Chicago, saying that teenage students at St. John’s had told him in the late 1950s about Father Murphy’s abuse.

CONTINUED : Abuser sent on retreat, then returned
1 | 2 | Next

It's time to resist....

......those who are really creating the trouble in this country.

Let's start with the banks. Move your money from the big banks to smaller community banks. Leave them with fewer assets, since they have decided to do nothing to help clean up the mess they mostly created.

Cut up as many credit cards as you can. Find a way to pay them off. Keep one for emergencies and remember what the definition of emergency is. Keep the credit allowance as low as possible. Just enough to cover emergencies that aren't already covered in some other way.

Two Right-Wing Billionaire Brothers Are Remaking America for Their Own Benefit



By Jim Hightower

March 20, 2010 "
Lowdown" -- Despite a constant racket from the forces of the far-out right (Fox television's yackety-yackers, just-say-no GOP know-nothings, tea-bag howlers, Sarah Palinistas, et al.), the great majority of Americans support a bold progressive agenda for our country, ranging from Medicare for all to the decentralization and re-regulation of Wall Street. Indeed, in the elections of 2006 and 2008, people voted for a fundamental break from Washington's 30-year push to enthrone a corporate kleptocracy.


Yet the economic and political thievery continues, as the White House, Congress, both parties, the courts, the media, much of academia, and other national institutions that shape our public policies reflexively shy away from any structural change. Instead, the first instinct of these entities is to soothe the fevered brow of corporate power by insisting that corporate primacy be the starting point of any "reform." Thus, when Washington began its widely ballyhooed effort last year to reform our health-care system, step number one was to announce publicly that the monopolistic, bureaucratic insurance behemoths that cost us so much and deliver so little would retain their controlling position in the structure. Likewise, Wall Street barons who crashed America's financial system were allowed to oversee the system's remake--and (Big Surprise!) the same top-heavy structure and shaky practices that caused the crash are being kept in place.

In other words, the foxes who ate the chickens keep being put in charge of designing the new hen house--so nothing really changes. 

This is more than frustrating, it's infuriating --and it's debilitating for our democracy. As a fellow said to me about the lack of real changes in national policy during the Clinton presidency, "I don't mind losing when we lose, but I hate losing when we win."

Why does this keep happening to us, and who's doing it? It's not merely a matter of too many fickle and pusillanimous politicians--they're the on-stage actors in this drama, but not the producers, not the ones behind the scenes plotting to thwart the people's democratic will. Who, specifically, are these plotters, and how do they impose their narrow agenda of self-interest over the public interest?

These crucial questions for our democratic republic are the focus of this Lowdown, and they'll be a recurring topic in future issues. After all, to achieve genuine grassroots power, we have to know the full dimensions of the plutocratic powers we're up against. Most Americans are totally unaware of these interests, which have attained a dangerous reach by quietly embedding themselves (and their self-centered worldview) much more deeply in our society's governing institutions than they want us to realize. So let's take a peek at them, beginning with a look at the intricate web of power woven by a huge corporation you've probably never heard of, even though your consumer dollars are financing its right-wing political agenda.

Anonymous Inc.

It's none of my business, but maybe you have Northern tissue on your toilet roll. You might also buy Brawny paper towels, Dixie paper cups, and Vanity Fair napkins. Maybe you have clothing that owes its clingy and comfy stretchiness to Lycra, and perhaps you have a Stainmaster carpet or a Solarmax couch in your home.

All of these well-known brands are owned and produced by a global conglomerate that deliberately tries to stay little known: Koch Industries (pronounced "coke"). Based in Wichita, Kansas, Koch is also a major producer of oil, gas, timber, coal, and cattle. It's a petroleum refiner, too, as well as a manufacturer of asphalt, chemicals, polyethylene plastic, nitrogen fertilizers, cement, and lumber products. It owns or controls some 4,000 miles of pipelines, including a piece of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. And, in a poetic bow to its desire for anonymity, Koch also owns Teflon.

With 70,000 employees in 60 countries, this publicity-shy giant is America's second-largest privately owned corporation. Being private means it makes very few disclosures about its finances and operating practices, but we do know that it has sales topping $100 billion a year, which means it is bigger than such corporate giants as Verizon and Morgan Stanley.
 


The Billionaire Brothers
 

Charles and David Koch, who control this family-owned empire, are tied for a spot as the 19th-richest billionaire in the world, according to a 2009 ranking by Forbes. Each brother has a net worth of $14 billion, just below the wealth held by four heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune. Charles, 73, and David, 68, boast of being "self-made" billionaires. Actually, that's a fib, for they had a little help from Daddy. Fred Koch, who died in 1967, started his name-sake business after inventing a method of turning heavy oil into gasoline, and his sons got a leg up on their climb to billionairedom by inheriting Fred's company.

They also inherited something else: a burning ideological commitment to right-wing politics. How right wing? In 1958, Daddy Fred helped found the John Birch Society.

Following in those footsteps, Charles and David have used the wealth they draw from Koch Industries to fuel a network of three Koch Family Foundations. During the past three decades, these "charitable" foundations have set up and financed a secretive army of political operatives dedicated to achieving the brothers' antigovernment, corporate-controlled vision for America. This stealth force includes national and state-level think tanks, Astroturf front groups, academic shills, university centers, political-training programs, fundraising clearinghouses, publications, lobbyists, and various other units useful to Charles and David's ideological cause.
This army's effort is effective because it is comprehensive, well funded, coordinated, and focused on a longterm political strategy. Contrast that to the progressive movement, which largely consists of underfunded, unconnected groups and hops from battle to battle with little or no strategic planning.

Koch's wicked web
 

For some three decades, there's been a steadily increasing flow of think-tank studies, legislative proposals, articles, books, corporate lawsuits, citizen petitions, and other efforts to push for the deregulation of most industries and the privatization or elimination of government functions. These extremist ideas have never had strong public support, yet they've moved from the back burner of American policy in the 1970s to the red-hot front burner in the Bush years--and today we're paying the price for the adoption of these concepts at all levels of government, from privatization of local water supplies to the deregulation of Wall Street.

The different pushes to implement this antigovernment ideology have come from a wide assortment of seemingly independent groups and individuals, creating a sense of broad public demand for a libertarian corporate kingdom in America. However, when you examine those pushing this dog-eat-dog ethic, chances are you'll find that they have one thing in common: funding from the Koch fortune.

The three Koch family foundations discreetly refrain from publishing the recipients of their beneficence, but some progressive watchdogs (see Do Something) have dug into the dense IRS reports that foundations must file, giving us a glimpse of the extensive right-wing web spun by this one oil family. The Kochs are not the only funders, of course--such other far-right family foundations as Bradley, Coors, Olin, and Scaife are also major players. But the size, scope, strategic purpose, and secrecy of the Koch investments make the brothers worthy of special attention. The following list by no means covers the entirety of their network (they've put money into hundreds of groups), but it'll give you a sense of their reach into every nook and cranny of public policy.

Charles and David are not idle check-writers--they're actively involved in the creation and running of this interconnected web of political influence and hold top positions in many groups. For example, David is board chairman of Americans for Prosperity and is on the boards of the Cato Institute and Reason Foundation, while Charles (who founded Cato in 1977) is chairman of the Institute for Humane Studies and a director of the Mercatus Center.

The focus of most political groups is to influence candidates, lawmakers, agency heads, and reporters at the top of the system. But these two brothers have been executing a concerted plan for more than 30 years not only to influence those at the top, but also to go much deeper. They spend freely on dozens of ideologically grounded, right-wing groups to influence schoolteachers and high-school curricula, state and federal judges, lawyers and legal scholars, conservative policy thinkers and media producers, city-council candidates and local party activists--and their aim is to shove the country's national debate to the hard right, discombobulate the public's progressive wishes, and alter government policies to advance corporate interests generally and the Kochs' own interests specifically.

Here is a profile of just one of the Koch tentacles: Americans For Prosperity. AFP, the third-largest recipient of Koch foundation largesse, is the brothers' overtly political unit. Essentially, it is a front group for mass-producing front groups. Much like McDonald's churns out Big Mac franchises, AFP can pop out a grassrootsy-looking, cookie-cutter political operation on demand.

It has a $7 million annual budget that supports dozens of GOP operatives and former corporate PR veterans, all standing ready to assemble, fund, staff, and package a hot-to-go front group for any issue that comes up. Its menu includes such garnishes as hoked-up studies, alarmist talking points, deceptive attack ads, divisive hate messages, celebrity and religious endorsers, and a menagerie of media stunts.


AFP was launched by David Koch in 1984 as Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), a moniker it used until switching to its present name in 2003. It refuses to disclose its list of donors, but when it was known as CSE, about 70% of the $18 million it spent came from the Koch foundations. There's no reason to think that AFP is any less of a Koch-funded operation today, and David, as one of its top officers, continues to be actively engaged in directing the organization's work.

And what a piece of work it is.

Start with Tim Phillips, brought in to be AFP's president and Koch's point man in 2006. As a longtime Republican campaign director and Washington lobbyist for corporate interests, Phillips earned a reputation as one of the GOP's "Mr. Nasties," in the Karl Rovian mold.

His credits include helping George W. Bush win the pivotal 2000 GOP primary in South Carolina by spearheading a smear campaign that used images of John McCain's adopted daughter from Bangladesh to claim that he had fathered a black child; helping Saxby Chambliss defeat incumbent Democratic Sen. Max Cleland (a highly decorated Vietnam vet who lost both legs and an arm in that war) in the 2002 Georgia election by creating a TV ad linking the Democrat to Osama bin Laden and claiming that he lacked the courage to fight terrorists; and working with super-sleaze corporate lobbyist Jack Abramoff in 1998 to stir up evangelical churches in opposition to a labor-law reform that would've ended the brutal exploitation of Chinese girls and young women enslaved in sweatshops on the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth. (Phillips rallied evangelicals by asserting that many of the Chinese workers "are exposed to the teachings of Jesus Christ" while on the islands "and return to China with Bibles in hand, so Congress should not interfere.)

At AFP, Phillips has the Kochs' deep pockets and political network at his disposal to take on a broad range of right-wing corporate causes. While the organization has 23 state "chapters" and immodestly bills itself as the nation's "premier grassroots organization," it has only 8,000 actual members, is totally controlled by corporate money, is headquartered in Washington, D.C., and is run by the exact same kind of professional political insiders it pretends to detest.

Consider the boisterous "tea bag" rebellion. No one professes more hatred for the two-party, business-as-usual political system in Washington than those angry Americans who're caught up in the tea-bag rallies. Yet unbeknownst to most of the mad-as-hellers who have showed up, it was AFP's Republican-tied lobbyists and political functionaries who cynically financed, organized, and orchestrated the very first tea-bag protest. AFP has steadily coopted the tea-bag faction to make it a front for the corporate agenda, and many of the tea-bag groups have devolved into subsidiaries of the Republican party. Indeed, AFP has become the Astroturf-To-Go Store, fabricating and spreading fake grassroots organizations all across the country. It was especially busy during the 2008 presidential campaign and in the first year of Obama's presidency. Here are a few recent AFP-manufactured campaigns on major public-policy issues:
  • PATIENTS UNITED NOW. The website for PUN (odd choice for an acronym, huh?) proclaims, "We are people just like you." However, that statement is true only if you're one of the people working as paid political hacks for AFP. PUN is nothing but a shell created by AFP's laissez-faire corporate extremists. The goal of this front group is to kill legislation that would restructure the rip-off health-insurance industry so real patients can get fairly priced, quality care. In addition to running farcical, antireform TV ads under PUN's name, the AFP-directed effort has included a "Hands Off My Health Care" bus tour. Its message wasn't subtle--a giant bloody hand was painted on the side of the bus, and a speaker traveling with the group repeatedly compared the Democrats' health-reform plans to the Holocaust.
  • HOT-AIR TOUR. During the past two years, people in 40 cities have been greeted by the sight of a 70-foot-tall hot-air balloon drifting over them. It heralded the arrival of a barnstorming tour to expose "the ballooning costs of global warming hysteria." This stunt had a just-folks veneer on it, but it was another AFP production--after all, as owners of the largest privately held oil corporation, the Koch brothers have a special interest in spreading denial about the existence of climate change. AFP ran ads mocking proponents of fossilfuel regulations as elitist brats more concerned about their "three homes and five cars" than about the jobs of working-class families (an incredible rhetorical gusher from a privileged billionaire like David, who lives the high life in Manhattan, where he hobnobs with the richest elites at society galas, while also owning a mansion in Aspen where he can curl up in luxury and sip fine wine from his collection of 5,000 vintage bottles). Perhaps he was tipsy on some of those grapes last fall when he attended an AFP summit of tea-party leaders and personally embraced the histrionics of a climate-denial film that accuses such leaders as Al Gore of wanting to bring back "the Dark Ages and the Black Plague."
Among AFP's other fronts are: FREE OUR ENERGY, which clamored during the 2008 election season to open up our seashores and national parks to oil drillers; NO STIMULUS, which tried to rev up the tea-party network last year to kill Obama's economic-recovery plan; and SAVE MY BALLOT, yet another "grassroots tour," this one to rail against a proposal to stop corporate intimidation of workers trying to unionize (AFP paid Joe the Plumber to front this smear campaign).

Out of the shadows

It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you--and they are! "They" are the corporate powers that collect our consumer dollars and then, as hush-hush as possible, use that money to finance their interlocked array of right-wing foundations, think tanks, "scholars," media sparklies, political personalities, and other fronts. What the Kochs and their ilk are out to get is nothing less than America's commitment to the Common Good, colluding to kill such egalitarian proposals as Medicare for all, green-energy jobs, workplace democracy, decentralization of capital, and clean elections.

They pose publicly as enlightened industrialists. David Koch, for example, is an MIT-educated chemist and an enthusiastic evolutionist who has given $20 million to the American Museum of Natural History (which then--I kid you not--named its dinosaur wing after him). Yet David the Enlightened cynically pays groups to nurture ignorance and exploit it for his political gain, including paying to bus angry and confused people to "citizen" rallies and town-hall meetings where they literally end up shouting themselves red-faced in support of his corporate interests over their own.

While such elites as the Kochs are a tiny minority of Americans, they've surreptitiously skewed our public debate, agenda, and policies to their self-serving agenda by instilling a totally false supposition within the mass media and both major parties that a volatile majority of people has a broad distrust of anything public and views government as the enemy. Thus even Democrats shrink from attempting anything more audacious than incremental reforms, meekly courting vituperous Republicans and corporatists who obviously are out to gut any forward-thinking changes.

Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the new book, "Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow." (Wiley, March 2008) He publishes the monthly "Hightower Lowdown," co-edited by Phillip Frazer.

© 2010 Hightower Lowdown All rights reserved.
An Unaccustomed Truth: American Commander Admits Afghan Atrocities PDF Print E-mail
Written by Chris Floyd   
Saturday, 27 March 2010 01:16
Well, John the Baptist after torturing a thief
Looks up at his hero the Commander-in-Chief
Saying, “Tell me great hero, but please make it brief
Is there a hole for me to get sick in?

-- Bob Dylan, "Tombstone Blues"

One can only assume that the regular editors of the New York Times were all out at a party, or left early for a weekend in the Hamptons, or something -- but somehow, the paper published a front webpage story that stated -- without the usual thousand excuses and extenuations -- that American troops are routinely slaughtering Afghan civilians at checkpoints. What's more, the story unequivocally ties the civilian killings to the "surge" ordered by the noble Nobel Peace laureate, Barack Obama.

Here's what the Times says:

American and NATO troops firing from passing convoys and military checkpoints have killed 30 Afghans and wounded 80 others since last summer, but in no instance did the victims prove to be a danger to troops, according to military officials in Kabul.

And what is the paper's authority for this astounding admission of atrocity? Not the usual "unnamed sources" or "senior official in a position to have knowledge of the situation," but none other than Obama's hand-picked commander on the Af-Pak front, General Stanley "Black Ops" McChrystal his own self:

“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat,” said Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who became the senior American and NATO commander in Afghanistan last year. His comments came during a recent videoconference to answer questions from troops in the field about civilian casualties.

Let's repeat the much-media-lauded general's statement again: “We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat." Now, what would the authorities say if you or I shot "an amazing number of people who have never proven to be a threat?" Why, they would call us murderers -- even mass murderers. Yet this is precisely what "the senior American and NATO commander in Afghanistan" has just declared, on videotape.

The story goes on to make the extraordinarily straight -- and indisputable -- point that these wanton killings of civilians who have never even "proven to be a threat" is fanning the very "insurgency" (which is the Beltway term of art for any resistance to American military presence") whose quelling is the ostensible reason for the Laureate's "surge" in the first place:

Failure to reduce checkpoint and convoy shootings, known in the military as “escalation of force” episodes, has emerged as a major frustration for military commanders who believe that civilian casualties deeply undermine the American and NATO campaign in Afghanistan.

Many of the detainees at the military prison at Bagram Air Base joined the insurgency after the shootings of people they knew, said the senior NATO enlisted man in Afghanistan, Command Sgt. Maj. Michael Hall.

“There are stories after stories about how these people are turned into insurgents,” Sergeant Major Hall told troops during the videoconference. “Every time there is an escalation of force we are finding that innocents are being killed,” he said.

The story even states plainly that the official figures of admitted killing of unthreatening civilians -- already unconscionably high -- might not be the true extent of these atrocities:

Shootings from convoys and checkpoints involving American, NATO and Afghan forces accounted for 36 civilian deaths last year, down from 41 in 2008, according to the United Nations. With at least 30 Afghans killed since last June in 95 such shootings, according to military statistics, the rate shows no signs of abating.

And those numbers do not include shooting deaths caused by convoys guarded by private security contractors. Some tallies have put the total number of escalation of force deaths far higher.

A spokesman for the Afghan Interior Ministry, Zemary Bashary, said private security contractors sometimes killed civilians during escalation of force episodes, but he said he did not know the number of instances.

The story also presents an example of one slaughter of civilians, and shows how it leads directly to the rise of resistance against the American military presence:

One such case was the death of Mohammed Yonus, a 36-year-old imam and a respected religious authority, who was killed two months ago in eastern Kabul while commuting to a madrasa where he taught 150 students.

A passing military convoy raked his car with bullets, ripping open his chest as his two sons sat in the car. The shooting inflamed residents and turned his neighborhood against the occupation, elders there say.

“The people are tired of all these cruel actions by the foreigners, and we can’t suffer it anymore,” said Naqibullah Samim, a village elder from Hodkail, where Mr. Yonus lived. “The people do not have any other choice, they will rise against the government and fight them and the foreigners. There are a lot of cases of killing of innocent people.”

Finally, the story depicts McChrystal -- again, the handpicked commander of the commander-in-chief -- stating flatly when it comes to the widely ballyhooed "counterinsurgency doctrine" that is supposedly now governing the military occupation of Afghanistan, the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing. In other words, it's a full-scale, four-star FUBAR:

More recently, General McChrystal moved to bring nearly all Special Operations forces in Afghanistan under his control. NATO officials said concern about civilian casualties caused by these forces was partly behind the decision, along with the need to better coordinate units and ensure that local commanders were aware of what was happening.

One unit could be doing counterinsurgency, while another carried out “a raid that might in fact upset progress,” General McChrystal explained during the videoconference.

Beyond the bare facts reported by the story -- i.e., the top American commanders acknowledge that their forces are killing scores of innocent civilians who pose no threat to the occupiers, and that their own incompetent policies are actually breeding more hatred and resistance -- there is also the astonishing circumstance that we have a story on the Laureate's "good war" in Afghanistan that is almost entirely nothing but bare facts.

Of course, the story appeared late on a Friday, and will no doubt disappear down the memory hole in short order. (What, you think the Sunday talk shows will be filled with heated discussions about "McChrystal's astounding admission"?) Still, I must admit that when I read the piece, I honestly did a double-take; I thought it was a hoax -- or perhaps a hack. Not because the story seemed implausible -- but precisely because it didn't, and because it was shorn of most of the self-serving, empire-justifying bullshit that surrounds accounts of the "Peace Prize Surge."

Again, just think of it, let it sink in, attend to the word of the commander: “We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat." Again: “We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat." Again: “We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat."

Again: what do you call it when innocent, unarmed, defenseless people who "have never proven to be a threat" are gunned down in cold blood? What do you call such an act?

GOP Responsible For Hatred and Violence

Surprise, Surprise.......

Union Chief: GOP Fueled Healthcare Vote Violence

In the hours leading up to the Sunday's climactic healthcare reform vote in the House, congressional Republicans helped foment an atmosphere that helped spark a subsequent rash of violence that's struck at Democrats who supported the legislation, according to the leader of one of the nation's oldest and largest organized labor organizations.

"When I was at the Capitol on Sunday, I saw Republican lawmakers come out onto balconies and egg on hateful crowds like giddy teenagers, waving signs and chanting to fire up the protesters," says Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO. "They set the foundation for a dangerous climate, and they must take the lead in stopping it."

Like other unions, the AFL-CIO played an active role in pushing to enact healthcare reform.

So-called "tea party" demonstrators protested loudly outside the Capitol last weekend lawmakers geared up for a final series of votes that saw the reform legislation narrowly approved and sent to President Obama. Obama signed the bill into law Tuesday at a packed ceremony in the East Room of the White House.

Some conservative protesters resorted to directing racial and homophobic slurs at Democrats even in the run-up to Sunday's vote, including insults to Reps. John Lewis of Georgia and Barney Frank of Massachusetts. An African-American, Lewis was nearly beaten to death during the Civil Rights movement while Frank is openly gay. Both have been strong proponents of healthcare reform.

The violent backlash against healthcare reform supporters only has spread since, as at least 10 Democratic lawmakers have reported vandalism, death threats and other intimidation. These representatives reportedly have been offered Capitol Police protection usually only afforded to congressional leadership.

Incidents have included a brick thrown into Rep. Louise Slaughter's New York district office; a shattered door at Rep. Gabrielle Gifford's office in Tuscon, Ariz.; and a gas line cut at the Virginia home of Rep. Tom Perriello's brother. A tea party activist posted the brother's address by accident, thinking it belonged to the congressman, along with a suggestion that reform opponents "drop by" to show their displeasure over the healthcare vote.

"In America, thankfully, we all have the right to make our voices heard. We in the labor movement are no strangers to protest and civil disobedience," Trumka says. "But many of the chants and signs I heard and saw were those of an ugly mob, not participation in the political process.

"Racial and homophobic slurs, death threats and guns have no place in civil discourse. Nor should differences of view on abortion rights and funding lead to name-calling and violence," he adds.

Nor are the outbursts of violence from healthcare reform opponents are not just "par for the course" for controversial decisions, according to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.).

"We've had a lot of serious disagreements on tax bills, on war and peace, and other matters. And I haven't seen the level of, frankly, threats or anger, or threatening of violent acts that I've seen recently," Hoyer tells CBS News. "I think in part it's because the rhetoric that has been utilized with respect to this bill is far beyond, I think, legitimate debate."

The leadership of both parties have a role to play cool a situation which is sparking the violence.

"I think all of us in leadership need to make it very clear to the American public, very few of which I think are participating in such acts on either side, we need to make it very clear that that's unacceptable in a democracy," Hoyer adds.

Friday, March 26, 2010

Ever Play Monoploy and Loose?

Oh, yes you have. Recently.


INDEPENDENT THINKER REVIEW OF THE MONTH
Each month, BuzzFlash is privileged to have top-ranked talk show host Thom Hartmann review a progressive book or DVD exclusively for BuzzFlash. See other DVDs and progressive premiums at the BuzzFlash Progressive Marketplace.
Thom Hartmann's Review -- Exclusively for BuzzFlash -- for March 2010:


"Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction"

By Barry C. LynnReviewed by Thom Hartmann
This book is about power.  It documents how practices that were illegal at the opening of the Reagan administration have not only been legalized but used extensively to consolidate economic and political power in a way that threatens our very republic.  It’s almost impossible to overstate its importance.

Most adults in America have, at one time or another in their lives, played the game Monopoly.

Monopoly started out as a game invented by Elizabeth Magie and patented in 1904 (she sold her patent to Parker Brothers in 1935 for $500, and they incorporated it into the modern Monopoly game, which was patented that year by Charles Darrow).  The goal of the game is to buy up every business and property available, and through the monopoly ownership of all business and rents, over time bleed every other player into poverty.

Magie was a political activist who wanted to create a way to inform the average person of how concentration of ownership of property and aggregation of rents over time would lead to the concentration of wealth in a few hands with the rest of the population experiencing widespread poverty.  Today people like Mitt Romney and T. Boone Pickens play the game in the real world, impoverishing real people and destroying real businesses while taking all the cash they can for themselves.
           
As Barry C. Lynn (no relation to Barry Lynn of Citizens United for Separation of Church and State) writes in meticulous detail, the free enterprise of the founding era of this nation has, twice in our history, morphed into a cancerous economic state.  Monopolies are not free enterprise, they’re not even good capitalism.
           
When one particular set of cells in a body rise up and decide to take to themselves all the nutrients in the body, growing without limit while robbing every other organ and cell of its necessary nutrients, we call that cancer.  When it happens in a political and economic system, it’s called monopoly.
           
This is only the second time in American history when we’ve faced such a concentration of wealth and power, of business and money, and of the political control that flows from it.  The previous time was in the late 1800s, when J.P. Morgan came to dominate most of the American business landscape (Lynn notes that it was called “Morganizing” back then, instead of “private equity companies” or “M&A artists”), competing with a small handful of oligarchs like J.D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.  When Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901, he set out to break up these cartels, earning himself the moniker of “Teddy the Trustbuster.”  But his efforts were flawed (he believed in a top-down strategy, as did FDR), and the result is that today’s monopolies are even more toxic than the ones of his day because these new ones are worldwide in their influence, and have largely captured our political processes.
           
Reagan brought the modern era into being by suspending enforcement of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, and Clinton and both Bush presidents refused to go back to enforcing the Sherman Act and other similar laws, both leaving in place and advancing the agenda of the Reagan Revolution corporatists.  Obama has made tentative noises about enforcing the Sherman Act, but taken no serious action.
           
If America is to survive economically and politically, Lynn suggests, we must break up the modern day monopolists and return opportunity and wealth to local communities and small businesses.  His book is both shocking and prescriptive, an essential read and an important addition to your library.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times bestselling Project Censored Award winning author and host of a nationally syndicated progressive radio talk show. You can learn more about Thom Hartmann at his website and find out what stations broadcast his program. You can also listen to Thom over the Internet.
THOM HARTMANN'S INDEPENDENT THINKER REVIEW OF THE MONTH FOR BUZZFLASH


There is nothing civil about civil wars!