October 16, 2015

Things are pretty sad over on the other side of the democratic campfire

They are delusional, IMO; a dead heat poll result, more than a year before the election, for their candidate who has dropped from a peak of 66%...and they are deliriously happy.

I'm going to invest in Kleenex futures, and stock up on screw top wine for the after-party. Maybe after a 6-12 month reign by Bernie, they will be reconciled....and we can get Elizabeth Warren to step up and be the first woman president!

October 16, 2015

Michael Perelman: The Essential Handbook for Engineering an Unequal Society

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/10/michael-perelman-the-essential-handbook-for-engineering-an-unequal-society.html

...The architecture of inequality must be carefully constructed. As the founding fathers of the United States clearly understood, democracy must be kept in check. For this purpose, they invented the Electoral College to prevent the president from being elected by popular vote.

To ensure an effective electoral system, an obsequious media must be skilled in drowning the public with a flood of misinformation to maintain a constant level of fear to make them more likely to side with the CS (corporate system).

Knowing that the media is not currently up to the job of managing the electoral system, even with a generous flood of money from the CS. In order to protect the WEM, sophisticated methods are required. Gerrymandering almost essential by placing groups of people, too ignorant to understand that WEM, in districts where their votes will be inconsequential.

Now we get to a more important part of the architecture: the legal system. For example, courts in the United States agreed that corporations are people, deserving all the rights of an upstanding citizen. Moreover, the electoral system insurance that the appointment of judges will be restricted to those people who are sincere believers in the WEM. Their role is essential because some legislators get out of hand and create abominable regulations that undermine the efficiency of WEM. Some benighted members of the judiciary are too lackadaisical to rule these regulations as unconstitutional. For that reason, CES must offer very lucrative employment to the regulators who are intelligent enough to see the wisdom of WEM. Consequently they ignore the foolish regulatory structure....

October 16, 2015

INTRODUCING THE BLOG: Naked Capitalism – Your Ammunition in the War for Information

...Increasingly, if you want to get and hang on to a middle class job, that job will involve dishonesty or exploitation of others in some way. Industries such as finance have seized and held onto larger and larger proportions of the economy. The same disproportionate growth can be seen in financialised healthcare and finacialised education. Naked Capitalism has broken story after story of how these businesses have demonstrated a near-endless capacity for scandal, fraud and wrongdoings of every conceivable sort.

If we were to say that it is the “corporations” which are exploiting people, that would be wrong. “corporations” are not people. It is the people – you might be one of them too – who work in the corporations who are exploiting others.

From my experience, some who work in such exploitative enterprises do so willingly, with full knowledge of what they are doing. It is a regrettable human trait. Societies limit such harmful tendencies by placing justified restrictions on individuals and individual acts. It is relatively easy to identify an individual causing harm and deal with them appropriately. It is, unfortunately, much harder to identify and restrict the activities of groups of people when they can hide behind the veneer of innocence provided by a large, successful business.

For those of us who are increasingly appalled by the moral decay exhibited by some of our most powerful private sector operators which, naturally, lack any sort of democratic – public – accountability or oversight, we quickly learn that attempting to effect change from within is usually a futile gesture...

CONTINUES AT: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/10/clive-naked-capitalism-your-ammunition-in-the-war-for-information.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

October 16, 2015

Matt Taibbi: Hillary Clinton Must Think We're Ignorant About How Awful the Big Banks Are By VL Baker

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/matt-taibbi-hillary-clinton-must-think-were-ignorant-about-how-awful-big-banks-are?akid=13578.227380.kb2Ww7&rd=1&src=newsletter1044143&t=7


Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone writes that Hillary is "counting on America's ignorance about the 2008 crash"...It's the bankers who are pulling the strings.

At the Democratic Debate, Anderson Cooper asked a question about how to curb the excesses of Wall St. Here is what Hillary said:



Here Hillary tries to get the banks off the hook and make you look at that shiny object out in the distance. It's clear she has no intention of reinstating Glass-Steagall or of trying to curb the financial sector's abuses.


Of course, Barney Frank after being a part of regulating banks in congress, now is working for the banks, making tons of money and daring congress to do anything about it.



Bankers bankroll Hillary's campaign, so while it may seem that she's trying to gain employment representing the American people, it's the bankers who are pulling the strings.

Read Taibbi's entire piece. As usual, he breaks things down so that anyone can understand how Hillary's solution to Wall St. abuse leaves the US (and the world) vulnerable to another major economic disaster.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/hillary-clintons-take-on-banks-wont-hold-up-20151014

October 16, 2015

The Growing Frustration (and panic) of the 1%

Well, it was a tightly planned, top-down campaign. All the key people were in place, all the deals prearranged. All the lessons from last election's failure were learned, and big chunks of ugly cement (political) barriers erected, to drive the cattle to their inevitable conclusion: coronation of the queen.

There's only one thing that the Hillites and the political operatives forgot: America is not a monarchy. It is a representative democracy. And Americans are not cattle; they are getting sick and tired of being treated like cattle by the likes of Hillary and her supporters, masters and bankers.

*************************************************************
Some of the 1% were wary from the start of Bernie's campaign. They surveyed the entire field of potential candidates, and quickly came to the conclusion that their scheme of world domination was about to explode in many directions from multiple causes, and losing control of the White House would be the last straw. But they had no suitable figurehead in the pipeline. Their last GOP quarterback "W" had done everything they asked, and as a result, both the economy, the local political scene, and the global situation were destroyed. They hadn't reckoned on Third World blowback or the inability of things to repair themselves without institutional support.

Then they tried the Manchurian Candidate ploy, with Penny Pritzker supplying the figurehead: Barack Obama. Things when from horrible to nearly as bad. The 1% split between the greedy and the fanatical, and started duking it out.

The less-alert, less-watchful portion of the 1% indulged themselves with "vanity" candidates and religious overthrow. But now, even they are beginning to see the writing on the wall. I am waiting for them to coalesce around the best of the worst on the GOP side. I don't think they can trust Hillary enough to come over to her side, but I do think that the grassroots GOP will come over to Bernie, for lack of an alternative amongst the GOP. After all, why settle for a phony revolutionary, when you can get a real one?

**************************************************************

Lucy in Charles Schulz's Peanuts might proclaim:

"Nobody should be kept from being a queen if she wants to be one. It's undemocratic!"

But Hillary will never be Queen of America. The minute she was crowned, America would cease to exist, probably forever. Hillary plays for keeps, and so do her bankers.











We have our knight and protector of the poor, doing battle with evil, injustice, and power-madness. Let us be worthy of him.

October 16, 2015

The Drone Papers

https://theintercept.com/drone-papers

The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret documents detailing the inner workings of the U.S. military’s assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The documents, provided by a whistleblower, offer an unprecedented glimpse into Obama’s drone wars.

SECTIONS:

The Assassination Complex BY Jeremy Scahill

The whistleblower who leaked the drone papers believes the public is entitled to know how people are placed on kill lists and assassinated on orders from the president.

A Visual Glossary BY Josh Begley

Decoding the language of covert warfare.

The Kill Chain BY Cora Currier

New details about the secret criteria for drone strikes and how the White House approves targets.

Find, Fix, Finish BY Jeremy Scahill

The tip of the spear in the Obama administration’s ramped up wars in Somalia and Yemen was a special operations task force called TF 48-4.

Manhunting in the Hindu Kush BY Ryan Devereaux

Leaked documents detailing a multi-year U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan reveal the strategic limits and startling human costs of drone warfare.

Firing Blind BY Cora Currier, Peter Maass

A secret Pentagon study highlights the chronic flaws in intelligence used for drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia.

The Life and Death of Objective Peckham BY Ryan Gallagher

For years Bilal el-Berjawi traveled freely from the U.K. to Somalia under the watchful eyes of intelligence services. Then the U.S. killed him with a drone strike.

Target Africa BY Nick Turse

To reduce the “tyranny of distance,” drones fly from bases in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Navy ships.

Glossary: The Alphabet of Assassination

A guide to the acronyms, abbreviations, and initialisms used in The Drone Papers.

Documents

Small Footprint Operations 2/13
Small Footprint Operations 5/13
Operation Haymaker
Geolocation Watchlist

THE LINK POSTED ABOVE TAKES YOU TO LINKS TO ALL THESE SECTIONS. PREPARE TO SPEND SOME TIME, AND HAVE YOUR HAIR STAND ON END

October 15, 2015

In Serious Gaffe, Sanders Treats Opponent with Dignity and Respect (SATIRE!) By Andy Borowitz

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/in-serious-gaffe-sanders-treats-opponent-with-dignity-and-respect?mbid=nl_101415_Borowitz&CNDID=26139401&spMailingID=8154993&spUserID=MzkxMjA1MjAwODQS1&spJobID=781936678&spReportId=NzgxOTM2Njc4S0

In a major slip that may prove fatal to his Presidential ambitions, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont treated his principal opponent for the Democratic nomination with dignity and respect on Tuesday night...Calling it a gaffe of historic proportions, many political insiders were still scratching their heads Wednesday morning over Sanders’s bizarre decision to act toward his opponent as if she were a fellow human being.

“I chalk it up to pressure,” the political strategist Harland Dorrinson said. “Sanders has never been on such a big stage before, and in the heat of the moment he cracked and behaved with nobility.”

“It was one of those moments where everyone in politics was like, ‘What was he thinking?’ ” Dorrinson added.

Carol Foyler, a veteran political operative, said that Sanders has one more debate, “at the most,” to prove that his respect gaffe was just that—a regrettable but forgivable slip of the tongue, not to be repeated.

“Bernie Sanders’s behavior towards Hillary Clinton Tuesday night has raised some grave questions about him in voters’ minds,” Foyler said. “If he treats people with decency and civility now, what kind of President would he be?”

INDEED, THE MIND BOGGLES!

October 15, 2015

Brazil Supreme Court Freezes Impeachment Efforts Against Dilma Rousseff

Government supporters accuse the opposition of trying to oust President Dilma Rousseff through a parliamentary coup.

Brazil's Supreme Court issued an injunction Tuesday, freezing efforts by opposition parties and the embattled head of the lower house of Congress to begin impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff.

The speaker of the lower house Eduardo Cunha insisted that he would continue to review impeachment requests despite the injunction.

"The decision on impeachment requests is a constitutional prerogative I have and it is not being questioned. I continue to have this prerogative and I will use it," said Cunha who himself is under investigation by Brazilian authorities for money laundering.

At issue is the constitutionality of the impeachment process. As speaker of the lower house, Cunha has stated that he has the power to decide the steps and introduced a document several months ago to this affect. Pro-government law makers believe that any process should follow Brazilian law number 1.079 / 1950, which outlines the legal means to address allegations of wrongdoing by state officials. The Supreme Court agreed with a petition submitted by a lawmaker from Rousseff's Workers Party that current efforts by Cunha to single-handedly proceed with impeachment should be frozen as it could violate the constitution.

This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address:
"http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Brazil-Supreme-Court-Freezes-Impeachment-Efforts-Against-Dilma-20151013-0034.html". If you intend to use it, please cite the source and provide a link to the original article. www.teleSURtv.net/english

October 15, 2015

Now that we've had a little time (and dinner) to talk and think about the first debate...

Personal note:

I have a client who listened to all 21 CD discs with Hillary's biography. She watched the debate Tuesday night, and while she approves of Hillary still, she ALSO approves of Bernie.

This tells me that:

1) Bernie is a real contender
2) Disappointed Hillary supporters won't feel too badly about voting for Bernie.

The opposite is true for us on the Bern, I suspect. We would be throwing our principles in the trash, voting for Hillary because Bernie didn't get the nomination. I'd have to think really hard, and either become more cynical and let her win, or become more ruthless with the dummies in the nation and let them live with another miserable failure GOP president.

I know that I for one do not consider Hillary a real contender, if only because she has nothing, no moral or ethical principle, to guide her course (except greed, she's still got lots of that).


Bernie's strength reaches across to the loyal opposition. If we get enough disenchanted GOP to crossover and vote for Bernie in the primary, so that he gets the nomination; and the crossover vote comes out for him in the general election, then we will have made history worthy of our Founding Fathers and Mothers. We will have our revolution, and it will clean out both parties and all the public offices and appointments. All without firing a shot (god forbid there should be shots fired!).

Here's wishing us a peaceful, ballot-driven revolution!

October 14, 2015

Well, the NYTimes is in the bag...and in the wrong!

Who Won and Lost the Democratic Debate? The Web Has Its Say By ALAN RAPPEPORT

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/15/us/politics/democratic-debate-hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-biden.html

Bloggers, commentators and the Twitterati quickly weighed in on the first Democratic debate, scoring the winners and losers. Hillary Rodham Clinton was the clear victor, according to the opinion shapers in the political world (even conservative commentators).

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont won some points for his integrity, while the others — Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland; Jim Webb, the former senator from Virginia and secretary of the Navy; and Lincoln Chafee, the former Rhode Island governor and senator — were mostly viewed as having missed their chance.

Some suggested that another loser was the man still deciding on a run, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., as Mrs. Clinton appeared to be formidable. Others disagreed.

“I’m still amazed the other four candidates made Hillary Clinton come off as the likable, reasonable, responsible Democrat.” — Erick Erickson, the conservative radio host

“Hillary Clinton won. She won because she’s a strong debater. She won because Bernie Sanders is not. She won because the first Democratic presidential debate focused on liberal policies — and not her email scandal or character.” — Ron Fournier, The National Journal

Everyone onstage at Tuesday night’s debate had something to prove.

“One impression from Tuesday night’s Democratic debate: Vice President Joe Biden has no rationale to step into the race. If he’s been waiting until after this first prime-time test to see if Hillary Clinton collapsed, he must have seen for himself that she crushed it.” — Fred Kaplan, an author who writes about military issues and policy for Slate

“Hillary was (astonishingly) much more likable and personable than everyone’s favorite crazy socialist uncle. She had few to no cringe-inducing moments. She deftly threw red meat to the base when presented with the opportunity without saying anything that would hurt her in the general.” — Leon H. Wolf, Red State, a conservative blog

“It was, without question, the climax of the debate. Hillary Clinton was defending herself against email allegations, when Bernie Sanders came to her rescue. In doing so, he not only demonstrated the decency that is the hallmark of his campaign, but also proved that he’s no ordinary politician.” — Brian Hanley, The Huffington Post

“Hillary Clinton won because all of her opponents are terrible.” — Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker

“The former governor of Maryland needed a moment in this debate to break out of the 1 percent crowd. He didn’t get one. Oddly, O’Malley sounded the most like a politician of anyone on the stage even though he is the only one who has never spent any time in office in the nation’s Capitol.” — Chris Cillizza, The Washington Post

“Intense and brooding. Had trouble getting in the mix or finding a resonant voice on issues, even in his foreign policy wheelhouse. Frequently expressed frustration about a lack of talk time, coming across as griping and grumpy.” — Mark Halperin, Bloomberg Politics, labeling Mr. Webb the debate’s biggest loser

“Perhaps the biggest loser was the man who was not there — Vice President Joe Biden. While his draft committee ran a powerful ad showing the person and his values in Mr. Biden’s own voice, the fact is that Mrs. Clinton was just commanding tonight. Mr. Biden has to decide now and not kick the can down the road because of deadlines. I don’t see how he chooses to run now.” — John Zogby, the pollster, who writes at Forbes

“There is a very real opportunity for Joe Biden to enter the race after this first debate. Just like respondents in last night’s pre-debate focus group, people were deeply affected by Draft Biden’s emotional ad urging Biden to run. After watching the ad, 20 people indicated that it made them want Biden to run — just after seeing the ad.” — Chris Kofinis, whose company, Park Street Strategies, conducted a focus group of 39 undecided Iowa Democrats

“Cruel to say but true, Chafee’s ‘I’d just been appointed to my dad’s Senate seat, I was confused’ answer will join ranks of disastrous replies.” — James Fallows, The Atlantic



HAS ANYONE COUNTED THE AUDIENCE APPLAUSE? I THINK BERNIE WON THAT HANDS DOWN....AND HILLARY TRYING TO HANG BERNIE ON GUNS IS STUPID. SHE'S TRYING TO CHIP AWAY AT HIS LEFT, AND HE'S EATING THE ENTIRE AMERICAN BUFFET RIGHT BEFORE HER EYES!