The Real Legacy of Ronald Reagan Part 2

The man behind the myth sheds a lot of light on why there is a need for a myth in the first place. If you go into the Capitol Rotunda, you will find a statue of this man who broke the laws of the very body where this statue is housed. What kind of person was the man who busted air traffic controller’s unions, enabled the deregulation that caused the Savings and Loan implosion and whom was busted lying to the American people about the Iran Contra affair and why does he deserve to have history rewritten in his favor?

Despite his belief that Biblical End Times prophecy should influence policy, (he once called the Soviet Union “Gog”) he and his wife were devout believers in Astrology. Astrology, is frequently derided by many Fundamentalists as witchcraft, but Ron and Nancy get free passes because they have so enabled the social conservative agenda. Nancy took it so seriously that she ordered dedicated phone lines to be installed in the White House and Camp David so she could never be without the wisdom of the zodiac.

The President of the United States had his wife’s personal astrologer go over his itinerary and change it so that everything was optimized for the best influence of the Zodiac. Chief of Staff Don Regan was ordered to confer with Nancy regarding which days were best for the President’s activities. According to Joan Quigley’s memoirs, this belief in superstition was taken to seriously that the announcement of Anthony Kennedy for the Supreme Court was coordinated by a man with a stopwatch to insure that the man hit the correct moment!

This belief in superstition was echoed in the most powerful commander-in-chief of armed forces in the world believed completely in End Times eschatology. A man with the power to bring about Armageddon was a believer in Astrology and was quoted in the December 1983 issue of People magazine as saying-

"Theologians had been studying the ancient prophecies -- what would portend the coming of Armageddon-- and have said that never, in the time between the prophecies up untiI now, has there ever been a time in which so many of the prophecies are coming together. There have been times in the past when people thought the end of the world was coming, and so forth, but never anything like this."

This attitude was reflected in his Administration as well, His Secretary of the Interior James Watt, a man whose job it was to preserve the environment for future generations once said, “I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.”

But Reagan was very much a believer in hands off management. His job was not to lead. It was to use his movie star media savvy experience to sell an agenda to the American people while posing in front of a flag, reciting humorous stories, and reading a speech off a teleprompter. And he was given a pass by the press on that for most of his time in the White House.

Understand that Reagan had been shot while in office only 69 days. The press initially went easy on him. The public sympathy towards their leader was similar to what happened to George W. Bush after 9-11. The press took it easy on him when it should not have. The Executive Branch of the U.S is so powerful that it should never be given a free pass from inspection simply because pundits say that now is the time to rally around our leader.

But it makes sense that if a leader is basically hands off to an agenda that increases the deficit that was such a dire concern in the 1980 campaign, deregulates the S&Ls so that his contributors can have high yield no risk investments, increases defense contractor handouts, violates a law regarding funding terrorists in Central America with US taxpayer money, and empowered the Mujahadeen and Osama Bin Laden, elevate a War on Drugs that savagely curtails our legal rights, if you benefit from any of these policies, then the man is a hero who deserves his name on an airport.

That’s the reason behind the retelling of recent history. The powers behind the throne, the think tanks, the real Washington elite had a perfect sock puppet in Ronald Reagan. However horrible the policy, he can look the camera in the eye, justify it in focus group selected words which some speechwriter wrote that he reads convincingly off of a teleprompter.

He could even lie through his teeth to the American public regarding breaking the law and not be held accountable. On November 19, 1986, Ronald Reagan held a press conference regarding selling Tow and Hawk missiles to Iran. He said “…We only sold a few missiles” (more than 2,000 were sold), “We don’t condone shipments to 3rd parties…”, (Israel shipped the missiles), “The missiles were not sold to get back hostages…”(They were sold for that and to fund the Contras) and “We are trying to promote a dialogue with Iranian moderates…” (This was Khomeni’s regime. The moderates were either dead or in jail!)

Two months later, when testifying in front of the Tower Commission on this matter, he specifically acknowledged approving the arms sales. Two weeks after that he tried to reverse that and say his prior statement was erroneous. He was even caught accidentally reading his own notes on evading questions aloud into the record. He said under oath while looking at his notes “If the question comes up at the Tower Board meeting, you might want to say that you were surprised.”

Ronald Reagan could get away with saying that South Africa had stood with us during every war we’ve ever been in. They were actually on the other side during a war Mr. Reagan had fought in himself. He allowed an invasion of Beruit, then ran away while accusing his political opposition of cowardice. He escalated the Nixon era policy of a War on Drugs that serves to imprison people cruelly instead of treating their addiction.

He pardoned W. Mark Felt and Edward Miller for authorizing FBI agents to break into VietNam protesters’ offices without a warrant (small government behavior? I don’t think so!)

When he was running for office he said-
-“All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk."- Burlington Free Press, 15 Feb 1980
-“History shows that when the taxes of a nation approach about 20 percent of the people's income, there begins to be a lack of respect for government... When it reaches 25 percent, there comes an increase in lawlessness.”- Time magazine, 14 Apr 1980
-"Because Vietnam was not a declared war, the veterans are not even eligible for the G.I. Bill of Rights with respect to education or anything."- Newsweek magazine, 21 Apr 1980
-"Trains are not any more energy efficient than the average automobile, with both getting about 48 passenger miles to the gallon."- Chicago Tribune, 10 May 1980
-"Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation. So let's not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emissions standards from man-made sources."- Sierra magazine, 10 Sep 1980
-"I have flown twice over Mount St. Helens. I'm not a scientist and I don't know the figures, but I have a suspicion that one little mountain out there, in these last several months, has probably released more sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere than has been released in the last ten years of automobile driving or things of that kind."- Time magazine, 20 Oct 1980

Each of these statements is provably false and he was elected anyway. That might explain why Donald Trump isn’t concerned about being the Birther candidate!

The man obviously existed in a delusional fog completely divorced from reality. But he could read a speech in front of a teleprompter and make the nation feel that gaps in these falsehoods were not important, we’re being protected from the Soviet’s Evil Empire by him and his cronies.

I think that is the reason behind the recent Jan 21st Time Magazine cover stating Obama loves Reagan! Obama admiring this man and contributing to his myth, shows the current Chief Executive’s true colors. He has no problem letting the country be run by interests who did not or will not vote for him. As long as he can read a speech from a teleprompter and make us feel good about the worst ideas Washington elitists come up with, he has every reason to think he can repeat what Reagan did with a sluggish economy and low approval ratings.
But the bias in the news media is not liberal. If it was Reagan and Bush II would never have been given the free passes they were. I can’t see Obama making the deliberately false statements like Reagan did during the coming campaign and getting away with it.

Admire the political ability of Reagan or his handlers if you must. But as a person and a President, he was sorely lacking. How does Reagan, a proven senile, superstitious, delusional old fool, deserve his name on an airport, much less having history rewritten in his favor?

The Real Legacy of Ronald Reagan Part 1

We failed to learn from the Savings and Loan Scandal of the Reagan era and so we repeated the error with the Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom scandals. We failed to learn from those scandals and so we repeated the error with the Housing Bust and the current Great Recession. Even now people are indulging in Revisionist history and working to ensure another financial fiasco while rolling back the meager financial reforms enacted by Congress. For the sake of our country and future generations, let’s set the record straight regarding the Reagan years!

On October 15, 1982, Ronald Reagan signed the Garn St. Germain Depository Institutions Act into law. This act turned small Savings and Loan Lenders known as “thrifts” into something they were never designed to be, private mints for speculators. The resulting scandal and bailout cost the US taxpayer over $1 trillion dollars (hardly fiscal responsibility!). One of the chief lobbyists behind getting it passed was Fred Thompson, current prospective Republican candidate. The language used in selling this abomination to the American people included “…to revitalize the housing industry by strengthening the financial stability of home mortgage lending institutions and ensuring the availability of home mortgage loans." That was what Ronald Wilson Reagan had to say about the bill.

You see, although one man may be held up as a symbol for an era, the sentiment, the work, and the cultural meme always go beyond any one single person (Reagan had nothing to do with the Enron, Tyco, and World Com scandals). Fred Thompson is currently a prospective candidate for the Republican nomination. And should he get in I have no doubt we’ll go through this deregulation looting and bailout cycle all over again. It is what the “Reagan Revolution” has given us!

But if we take a closer look at the Savings and Loan Scandal we can see a pattern of behavior emerging in the activities of the leadership during Reagan’s time and the behavior of the leadership today. I can see at least five similarities between the current Washington culture and the Reagan era people who bought S&Ls, put money into bad investments and got bailed out by the taxpayer. You will find a need in both cases to-

1.Deregulate and allow speculators to steal whatever they can get away with.
2.Lie to investors regarding risks.
3.Bribe Legislators.
4. Keep the public in the dark.
5.Have no one punished even when busted red handed.

Taking these gifts from the Reagan Administration one by one-

1. Deregulate and let speculators to steal whatever they can get away with.

This bill allowed Charles Keating, a hardcore social conservative, to buy Lincoln Savings and Loan and make it part of his Land Development Firm, American Continental Corporation. He could then put the assets of the S&L towards high risk investments that were insured with taxpayer money. The deal was one of virtually no risk (thanks to Reagan’s government intervention) and potentially high yield.

During the last housing boom, banks were allowed to sell portions of the loans called CDOs to themselves in order to keep prices up. During 2006 and 2007, CDOs of one bank frequently purchased slices of other CDOs of the same bank. AIG Insurance Corporation required an $85 billion dollar bailout in 2008 because they were the ones insuring these CDOs.

And that’s not even touching on the deregulation poster child- Jeff Skilling’s Enron!

We learned nothing from history after the S&L crash and Enron so of course we were doomed to repeat them recently.

2.Lie to investors regarding risk.

Part of what Charles Keating did is he masked his massive financial losses with financial schemes like speculative grade or “junk” bonds. Keating sold $250 million of Lincoln Junk Notes mostly to seniors. His salesmen told them that these speculative bonds (that had rows an rows of dilapidated condos in Texas that were going to make good on them) were federally insured! That was a lie. Some of these pensioners paid for trusting Charles Keating in one of the worst possible ways, elderly poverty after they had saved all of their lives.

In the years of the Housing Bubble, seniors were also targeted for reverse mortgages. Predatory lenders, aggressive marketing, and fraud perpetrators were finding seniors and inflicting elderly poverty on them. The sub prime mortgage market was targeting seniors with reverse mortgage scams and a lot of people wound up losing their homes. It worked like this, you are a senior who is cash poor but equity rich. Along comes a subprime lender, with a flashy sales pitch, willing to loan you more than your house is worth. Sounds like a good deal, huh? The thing is there is evil hidden in the contract and when your house equity drops in value, the loan changes into something you cannot afford to pay.

The Senate has just reported that Goldman Sachs “systematically misled clients, sold them financial instruments it knew to be junk, bet against them and profited off of their losses…”They have had 21 Billion dollars in a strategy which inflated earnings for them as housing assets were inflated and then shorted them in order not lose, all the while selling the CDO backed assets like “Timberwolf 1” to investors.

We did not tighten the regulations enough regarding deceptive advertising and full financial disclosure (have you read that credit card agreement lately) after the S&L fiasco. So we, of course, repeat history. And elderly poverty is such an ugly mark of a failed civilization, that it’s appropriate to stop and say, “Thank You, Ronald Reagan!” when we see examples of this failure.

3.Bribe Legislators

Banking regulator Ed Gray was mailed an anonymous video of S&Ls bad investments that were costing the taxpayer hundreds of millions. In response, Grey did his job and started cracking down on these fast buck schemes. Keating reacted by having legislators whom he was backing heavily, known as the Keating 5, to put pressure on Ed Gray to not do his job and leave Charles Keating alone! Alan Cranston, John Glenn, Donald Riegle, Dennis DeConcini and John McCain each received anywhere from $34K to $112K from Keating and Company. Later, when questioned whether or not his contributions influenced the Senators, Keating said, “I certainly hope so!”

One of the few examples of something good coming out of the current mess we are in is the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Elizabeth Warren was and still is making enemies from in and out of Congress in both parties while trying to do the sane responsible thing. Insuring what went on merely a few years ago regarding sub-prime lenders and banks playing fast and loose with the rules and crashing the economy is a worthwhile and noble goal.

Is it really plausible, that given the history of the Keating 5 and the way things work in Washington, that Rep. Spencer Bachus can receive $1,069,313 from commercial banks, $108,000 of that from JP Morgan Chase, and $83,000 of it from Bank of America, and still be an entirely neutral and objective commentator when he says, “You have a lot of discretion and a lot of power, but I see very little accountability,” regarding Elizabeth Warren and the new CFPB? He has no problem with huge amounts of discretion, a lot of power and little accountability when it comes to JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America!

The same thing is going on now that went on before in the 80’s under Reagan and make no mistake. Corrupt Legislators intend to undo or underfund the minor changes the CFPB will implement so that the people paying them can continue to their looting and ultimately have the taxpayer bail them out for even more money. We have not learned from history.

4. Keep the public in the dark

Brother to one President and son of another, Neil Bush, took an unpaid but prestigious position on the Silverado S&L Board of Directors. He voted to approve loans and credit to William Walter and Kenneth Good, (his partners in other ventures). The two wound up stiffing Silverado for $130 million dollars. Good gave Neil Bush a $100,000 loan with no requirement to pay it back. As all of this was becoming public, there was a lot of pressure to not close it down coming from the Reagan Administration (which had George H.W. Bush-Neil’s father as Vice President). In fact the regulator was specifically told not to close down Silverado until after the 1988 election. If a prospective President’s son is in a venture that costs taxpayers millions and he gives orders to slow down an investigation and closure of a lending institution, that would seem to be something the public should be aware of and hopefully act upon.

In 2008, when a former member of the Keating 5 running as the Republican candidate for president announced that the economy is still fundamentally strong on the day when the stock market took its worst hit in history, there was no keeping financial mismanagement out of the election news. What was unsettling was that both candidates announced their support for a proposed $700 Billion dollar bailout with no conditions on how the money was to be spent. There was no choice between the two candidates that were going to win. We couldn’t even get a clear answer as far as how the money would be spent. Your choice was between Candidate A, who backed the $700 Billion dollar blank check and Candidate B who was going to whine about having write a $700 Billion dollar blank check but was still voting for it.

Oh, the guy behind the $700 Billion dollar figure was Henry Paulson, former Goldman Sachs CEO! That’s the same Goldman Sachs just busted by the Senate for preying on unwitting investors.

We did nothing to fix the problem of lack of transparency in these transactions after the S&L crash, and so of course, history repeated itself. Even now, with their hand caught in the cookie jar, they continue to spend millions on think tanks and PACs to insure nothing changes. This is all a gift of the “Reagan Revolution”!

5.Have no one punished even when caught red handed.

Neil Bush was eventually ordered to pay millions to the government and wound up only paying a mere $50K. That would still leave him $50K in the black from that “loan” from Kenneth Good, if Republican supporters did not pay his fine. Silverado’s collapse cost the taxpayer $1.3 billion.

Charles Keating was convicted and sent to jail, but in 1996 his convictions were overturned on a technicality.

As of this date, there have been neither prosecutions nor convictions in the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Citibank, Merrill Lynch, UBS, or Goldman Sachs.

The only person imprisoned as a result of the Reagan era Iran Contra Scandal was Bill Breeden, who stole a street sign in Odon, Indiana, which was named after Admiral John Poindexter. He held it hostage for a “Ransom” of $30 Million, the amount of money that had been transferred to the terrorist army the Contras.

We need to stop this hero worship of Ronald Reagan right now. I’m all for renaming that airport and putting a statue of a pregnant woman being shot in the back by a Contra in front of Reagan’s statue in the Capitol Rotunda. Ignoring the record of what happened during the Reagan Administration and embracing a false history of those years only insures that history will repeat itself. And Reagan, although dead, is continuing a long tradition of deregulating and allowing speculators to steal whatever they can get away with, allowing white collar criminals to lie to investors regarding risks, enable systemic bribing of Legislators keeping the public in the dark, and having no one punished even when busted red handed from beyond the grave.

In Defense of Nellie Oleson

Bullying has been making headlines in recent months and as loathsome as practice as it is, we should not forget that the worst bully of all is the system itself. Both the education system and the industrial capitalist system which it is preparing worker drones for is more fearsome by far than anything a single individual can do. To illustrate my point, I’d like to reference an iconic bully from literature and TV, Nellie Oleson.

When Laura Ingalls Wilder, mother to Libertarian icon Rose Wilder Lane, wrote her series of books based on her experiences growing up in Walnut Grove, she used a composite character Nellie Oleson to represent 3 girls with whom she had rivalries as a child. Nellie Owens, who was the daughter of the local merchant, Genevieve Masters who was tall blonde and spoiled with beautifully tailored clothes, and Stella Gilbert who was Laura’s rival for Almanzo Wilder’s affections were combined to form Nellie Oleson-the bully of Walnut Grove and nemesis of young Laura Ingalls.

The schoolhouse of Walnut Grove is very different from the windowless halls of education we call our schools today. For starters, Laura learned and taught in an area that preceded “The Education Trust”, a group of people who took it upon themselves to organize most educational administrative jobs in the U.S. around 1917. With representatives from Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the National Education Association, their chief end, according to British evolutionist Benjamin Kidd, “was to impose on the young the ideal of subordination.”

So you see, as reprehensible as Nellie Oleson’s actions were, they were just small potatoes. The Education Trust was looking to impose a subordination on generations youngsters far in excess of anything that Nellie Oleson or her 3 real life counterparts could ever dream of in their most sadistic fantasies. And as we look into the large scale bullying of a system that has it’s stated purpose of preventing the “problem of overproduction” we see that this group wanted to create the next generation of workers competing for favor of management. This could only be accomplished with the systemic mass psychological campaign that billed itself as mass schooling.

The Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project was a top down bureaucratic effort to reform schooling after 1967. Consider that this is the world a great many of today’s adults (your humble author included) were born into, and consider that this document was anti-democratic monstrosity, which would focus on undermining anything productive that students would do with their school time (pointless busywork from your least favorite teacher had it’s origin here) while simultaneously changing the system of discipline to one where the teacher was virtually powerless to maintain order.

So, of course, when a heartbreaking video of a young girl showing cards stating how miserable she is when going in for her daily torment at the place where she goes for education goes viral we feel a need to do something. And therein lies a dilemma. What has been done so far as top-down bureaucratic solutions to educational problems does not have a good record!
If the current system is able to create bullies by keeping schoolwork irrelevant and preventing classroom discipline, it can reverse it’s own actions and policies if it truly wishes to do something about bullies!

And it is very important to keep in mind that bullying is not limited to schoolyards. You can be bullyed as an adult. I recently read an article in randi.org (the James Randi Educational Foundation’s website) that accurately labeled the characteristics which makes a bully as a combination of narcissism and entitlement. I’ve had quite a few skirmishes as an adult with people who are best described as entitled narcissists.

Wonderful things happen when adults stand up to entitled narcissists!

What better description of Hosni Mubarek or any tyrant other than a very entitled narcissist. The people of Egypt stood up for themselves at no small cost of life and limb and deserve our support as do the people of Tunisia, Libya, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Afghanistan!

The brave people of Wisconsin just had a bout with an entitled narcissist who found his way to the Governor’s mansion. To their credit, the people stood up and Scott Walker recently had to admit to Congress that his plan was to give away public resources to cronies while using a balanced budget as an excuse to break the backs of unions.

If you have not stood up to a bully as a child, you will find doing it as an adult very difficult. Would Laura Ingalls have written what she did if she did not go through the crucible of confronting Nellie Olson as a child?

Do not forget that today’s bully is tomorrow’s victim and vice versa. I know of a case where a young relative’s acquaintance, a drug dealer, star athlete and all around bully, had overturned his car while intoxicated and was now a quadriplegic. That was five years ago. She (my young relative) was hard hearted towards him at the time. She felt that he deserved that fate and was relieved that he was no longer a malevolent force at her school.

Over time, the kid has probably developed some humility. Over the course of his life, he will probably run into a nurse or caregiver that has a feeling of narcissism and entitlement. Then it will be his turn to be on the receiving end of bullying. None of his victims from year before will be around to witness it, but they will have moved on to a point where yesterday’s bullies are of no consequence.

And rest assured, it does feel like crap to be bullied. But in the process to do something about bullying, let us keep in mind that we don’t want to empower the biggest bully of them all. It is a system that has nothing but contempt for the individual. And it has stated in its origins that they “…shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science.” In Arthur Calhoun’s 1919 “Social History of the Family”, he anticipated a point where the child passes from its family and into a “community of experts”. He also voiced hope that in time we’d see public education designed “to check the mating of the unfit”.

Is high school’s structure making more sense to you now? Is the lack of success when it comes to increasing our educational standards a surprise? The Educational system itself was put forward and advanced by entitled narcissists who were way more malevolent than Nellie Oleson or her 3 real life counterparts. In the process of protecting small children from bullies, there is a danger that we cave into the worst bully of them all.

Any sabre rattling about the state “doing something” about bullying should go be met with extreme skepticism! As much as I feel for the children on the receiving end, they are often twice victimized. Victimized by bullies whom the teachers can’t control because the teachers hands have been tied and by the underfunded understaffed system itself. After all, when it comes to subjugating children, breaking their will and making their lives miserable, I’m sure the people whose policy it is to do just that hate competition!

Yellow Journalism, yellowcake, and yellow-bellied cowards.

The coverage of the Japanese Nuclear crisis was a journalistic disgrace for the most part. The most sensationalistic elements ruled the headlines as day after day passed and heroic progress in averting a meltdown was being made. When the Press behaves like this it shoots itself in the foot along with the public it supposedly serves! The Right is unforgiving once the story is settled and then they don’t have to make things up about a liberal bias!

One of the pivotal events in bringing about the Spanish American War was the behavior of William Randolph Hearst and the New York Journal. A routine inspection of a cabin that was carrying an actual spy, Senorita Clemencia Arango, (who was carrying secret papers) turned into an officially sanctioned sexual assault on an American woman that needed to be avenged by military intervention in Cuba when it was reported on by Hearst’s New York Journal! When the Maine was destroyed on top of this, Hearst needed no actual evidence to accuse the Spanish of firing on one of our battleships. The result of this Yellow Journalism was War.

Of course, decades later, in 1976 US Admiral Hyman Rickover concluded publicly that the fire on the Maine was caused by spontaneous combustion of a coal bunker, a common occurrence in the Ironclads of that time. Thus a long tradition of Yellow Journalism in the lead up to any military action by the US was ushered into by William Randolph Hearst and the New York Journal.

All of this was decades before the same formula was applied with Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction and the exploitation of 9-11 for huge military contractor profits! There was actually a long history of this manufactured consent in the twentieth century. It is only recently it has reached monstrous perfection in both the spheres of the mainstream news media and the Right Wing opinion echo chambers.

During that time a CIA agent named Valerie Plame was outed as such in retaliation for her husband's acts in exposing a supposed sale of yellowcake uranium to Saddam Hussein in Niger as a forgery! The press at the time never made a priority of discovering just who forged these documents and why. Instead, it vilified Joseph Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame. It was a member of the Right Wing opinion factory, Robert Novack, who ultimately was shown to be responsible along with I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby for this cowardly petty act.

Also in the run up to the war where New York Times journalist Judith Miller was reporting that Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, vouched for the existence of Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. She used circular logic in verifying facts that came from the same source, Ahmed Chalabi, with the Pentagon. Mr. Chalabi was paid over $2 million dollars of our tax money for intelligence regarding Saddam Hussein during the 90’s and not one piece of information he gave was ever shown to be true.

The poor journalistic standards would be funny to watch at a distance if innocent servicemen and civilians did not pay for these grotesque bungles in the both the Spanish American War and the Iraq War!

Which brings us to the poor news coverage in today’s headlines! Specifically I wish to address the sensationalistic coverage of the Japanese Nuclear Crisis! When we have been in urgent need of information on what has been going on at the reactors themselves, we’ve been given worst-case scenario headlines. And rest assured the subject of potential meltdowns is very serious. When we are given headlines designed to manipulate us with fear it does a disservice to this extremely serious subject!

The pattern that has emerged is an apocalyptic headline or series of headlines, but information in the story itself and from the various international atomic agencies monitoring the situation indicating that the situation is in fact under control although the risk of having a nuclear wasteland on the northeast coast of Japan for the next dozen decades or so is actually very real and needs to be treated as such.

Japanese workers on the ground doing their very best to restore power despite the dangers to themselves personally deserve to have the world know their names and stories. For all the press I’ve seen regarding this incident, I still don’t know one name.

But contrast the headline of this story-“High Radiation in Food,” (http://www.thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=178438 Tap Water) with the information actually inside the article- “government spokesman Yukio Edano noted that even if a consumer were to drink the contaminated milk for a year, the radiation level would be the equivalent of one hospital CT scan.”

And contrast the headline- Japan Nuclear Accident Poses Crisis for Worker Safety (http://www.latimes.com/health/la-sci-quake-radiation-workers-20110318,0,5659183.story) with the words “That level of exposure raises the chances that workers will eventually die of cancer by 1 percentage point, according to John Boice, a cancer epidemiologist at Vanderbilt University and radiation safety expert.” Although the text of the article rightly gives credit to the men who are spent their time drilling and training for such an emergency, you wouldn’t know it from the headlines. Even in the article itself they admit –“Experts are focusing their concern on nuclear workers because the general population's exposure to radiation around the Fukushima Daiichi plant has so far been minimal.”

They don’t specify who the “experts” in question are. It smacks of the sleazy “some say” technique at Fox News. That technique is a shortcut for the editor to insert his own opinion into the story when they use words like that and don’t come clean about just who the experts are and who the Some is in “some say”!

And this is the Mainstream News media! The hacks who infest marginal information outlets have been much worse. For example, this website, economiccollapse.com (http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/27-signs-that-the-nuclear-crisis-in-japan-is-much-worse-than-either-the-mainstream-media-or-the-japanese-government-have-been-telling-us) citing no direct sources says that “We are not just talking about a repeat of Chernobyl.We are possibly talking about "many Chernobyls". The author then proceeds to link to every panicking news story he can find.

It is the exact opposite of the approach taken by Voice of America’s non sensational but nonetheless accurate story-
(http://www.voanews.com/english/news/Japan-Continues-Efforts-to-Cool-Quake-Damaged-Reactors-at-Nuclear-Plant-118226759.html)
Those people in the hack story’s links that where evacuating by air where actually exposing themselves to more radiation than if they were staying put! Last paragraph of the article says..."observers call the radiation fears by those in Tokyo an overreaction, noting those returning home overseas would be exposed to higher levels during the high-altitude flights than if they stayed put."

Oh and if you are actually concerned about nuclear plants and radiation here stateside to the point where you are using this crisis to reevaluate our existing nuclear plants pleas keep in mind that coal ash produces more radioactivity than nuclear plants! http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste . Not to worry, If Massey Energy’s Don Blankenship can get away with safety violations and a mine collapse he’s going to continue to fill our skies with more radiation than this Japanese crisis produced for years to come!

Although as of this writing the crisis seems to be under control, it does seem worth noting that these were 40 year old reactors due for decommission and they endured a 8.9 earthquake, a tsunami, hydrogen explosions without a meltdown. And that was in no small part due to the courage and sacrifice of the well-trained workers who risked an early death in order to avoid that meltdown!

When news editors follow the motto “If it bleeds, it leads” or even worse have an axe to grind, they shame their profession and scare the public needlessly. In the case of the Spanish American and Iraqi Wars, it cost servicemen their lives. In this case we are right on the verge of another military action (we don’t follow the Constitution and have Congress declare war anymore!) Whether or not you agree with our participation in this UN action against Ghaddafi, you must admit that it serves the purpose of diverting our attention from the sensationalist panicking coverage of a serious event in Japan.

Personally I find it to be a cowardly maneuver to scare us while misinforming us and then change the subject!

Hitler once said, “The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it.” It is similar with that tool of the state and industry, propaganda. In an age where Yellow Journalism is the norm, too many otherwise good journalists and editors give in to the temptation to-“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.” (Another Hitler quote which we see the modern proof of nightly in Beltway Talking Points on Fox News and AM Talk radio)

The mainstream media’s recent coverage of the Japanese Nuke Crisis has proved itself to be no better. But it need not stay this way!

William R. Hearst’s main rival, Joseph Pulitzer, indulged in Yellow Journalism as well. But he eventually renounced it and turned his New York World into a model standard for journalistic excellence.

Come back to us Joseph Pulitzer, we need you! At the very least, the standards you inspired need to return!

Scott Adams’ “Noprivacyville”, Anarcho Capitalism’s Utopian Dream or Blueprint for Hell on Earth?

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert recently put forth a thought experiment regarding a society where no one enjoys privacy. He puts forward a number of anti-individual ideas and it can be argued that we are trending towards them already. But it is an utopist notion doomed to failure because it fails to take into account human nature.

I heartily urge everyone to read “noprivacyville” http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/noprivacyville/ by Scott Adams. He puts forward the idea of a city with everything tracked and zero privacy. He starts with an idea an insurance company has to install GPS tracking devices on cars in exchange for lower insurance rates. He extrapolates the concept to envision an entire society run in this manner, which unfortunately, looks as if some unlucky city, country or society will experience sometime in the not too distant future.

Among the utopist notions that he can see are lower crime since no criminal would dare defy the omniscient masters, less police needed to catch speeders since the car reports its own violations, a more efficient health care system because guesswork has been removed, cheap public transportation since the inefficient routes could be eliminated fast, and an end to “confusopolies” (pricing plans which rely on confusing the customer would not be tolerated).

And in all fairness to Mr. Adams, he does admit that this is a thought experiment. He is not advocating it. He is using his thought experiment to contemplate the price we pay for our privacy and concluding that it is expensive.

But when I look at another utopist concept, “Anarcho Capitalist” concept put forward by many Libertarians, it seems that this “noprivacyville” might put that in the grasp of a collection of oligarchy minded societal engineers who wish to create a perfect city. A society with no government but which everything is owned by private entities, is possible only if we get rid of personal privacy.

Allow me to explain further with a modern example. Take a casino floor, everything is owned by a private entity. There is no expectation of personal privacy. The expectation is the opposite. People know they are being watched. And if you don’t like being watched, you are welcome to leave. And it functions in many ways as a government. It has its own currency (chips), it’s own police force (Security), it’s own economy, housing, shops and it’s own factories (Slots, Games, Hotel, Restaurants and kitchens). And it is privately owned and subject to the whims of the marketplace. Every one of these functions would still need to be performed in a society. But if these are done by corporations en masse, these functions are going to be run in a manner that is in the corporations best interests. That means your personal privacy goes bye-bye!

And it is exactly because it is privately owned; there is no expectation of privacy! In a casino, if you are causing trouble, you get taken to a Holding Room and asked to leave (if you are really being a problem, then you wait for the police). And is exactly here that the Anarcho Capitalist Utopian Dream of an entirely privatized society starts falling apart!

It gets down to what are know as externalities! An externality is a fee or penalty that exists outside of the economic equation. A good example is when Bechtel privatized the water rights for Bolivia, the thirst and misery of the Bolivian people who couldn’t even save rainwater for their own use was an externality as was the revolution that ensued because of this policy.

Taking the casino Holding Room example. As it stands now, whatever happens to the person who is detained by Casino Security and then arrested by the police is external to the equation. The fellow is off property and that’s all that matters. Scott Adams admits to a similar dynamic in his piece. He says “Bad workers would end up voluntarily moving out of the city to find work. Imagine a world where your coworkers are competent.”

And where is he to go if there is nothing but similar private entities that do not want him on their property because they believe he is an incompetent troublemaker? If he lives in Noprivacyville other entities know his past and can want nothing to do with him once the information is shared. What’s more, since it is their property and there are no courts to appeal the matter, he can be arbitrarily evicted, have his job terminated, have liens put against him all before he gets home! All of this is external to the precious equation of a perfect Anarcho Capitalist society.

But the fellow in question still needs food, water, housing, sex, and warmth during winter wherever he winds up. Getting rid of privacy did him no good whatsoever!

Time and time again, whether it is Bechtel’s causing a revolution in Bolivia, Enron’s causing rolling blackouts while joking about senior citizen’s eating cat food, or Banks selling CDOs to themselves and causing the Great Recession, we find that externalities upset the precious equations which free market advocates passionately swear by.

Engineers make mistakes. Things often work very different in reality compared to the drawing board and the lab. When confronted with the mistakes and catastrophes, the response is invariably some version of “Er, it’s not supposed to work like that!” And utopias are very difficult to engineer!

I work in casino surveillance, so I have a unique personal perspective on all of this. I can say from personal experience, on the casino floor people know that they are being watched and commit crimes anyway. “Who would try it?” Scott Adams asks, given that the “few criminals who make that mistake would be easy to round up”. The answer is anyone who thinks that they had a reasonable chance of getting away with it. That’s one of the reasons that the Death Penalty is a bad joke as a deterrent. Prisons are not filled with people who thought they would get caught. They are filled with people who thought they had the system aced and could get away with whatever they’re in there for.

And there is the other dynamic regarding security and surveillance departments, they never turn a profit! Any benefit they have to a corporation is measured negatively in what was prevented or deterred. And when budget time comes around, it’s those departments that never turn a direct profit like Engineering, Security, and Surveillance that are first on the chopping block.

Gathering all of this data does no one any good if the staff isn’t there which can interpret it and act on it. I’ve already witnessed expensive slot monitoring systems installed and people who should be acting on the data just pretending to look at it. Or maybe they where never trained to interpret it. The creator of Dilbert, Scott Adams is well aware of the lack of competence issues in the workplace. That’s why he stopped with the concept as a mere thought experiment. As of this date, March 20 2011 http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-03-20/ , he had the insight to say in today’s strip the “a deep understanding of reality is the same thing as laziness” and backed it up with “You ever see a statue of Buddah jogging?” And he had one of the characters falsify data on reliability statistics by randomly typing numbers on a spreadsheet!

There once was a little girl in Russia named Alissa Rosenbaum whose family owned a pharmacy. A bunch of utopist nasty people took her family pharmacy away and made it state property because they had a vision of a utopia. Well, to make a long story short she never forgot that, moved to Paris, started writing, then moved to Hollywood, then hit it big with her work. So big that she eventually started a philosophy circle in NYC whose protégés included the future Federal Reserve Chair whose dedication to deregulation helped bring on the current financial crisis! Just as the utopian collectivist dunderheads who stole the Rosenbaum family pharmacy wound up creating Ayn Rand, so too would their Libertarian counterparts wind up creating monsters we can not forsee if Noprivacyville ever becomes a reality!

Based on my personal experience invading people’s perceived yet nonexistent privacy, I don’t think that an Anarcho Capitalist Noprivacyville would keep its promises. I don’t think that Scott Adams does either. The sacrificing of privacy would neither deliver on nor be worth the supposed benefits of lower crime, health care efficiency, increased workplace competence, and an end to confusopolies.

Promises to make the “trains run on time” should be viewed with extreme skepticism no matter who stated them!

What if they threw an Election Year smear campaign and nobody watched?

The campaigns for the 2012 contest to see which part of the Republican/Democrat Uniparty will pocket the most bribes as they sell out their fellow citizens had begun. The thing that will be different this time is the effect of the horrid Citizen’s United decision on a General Election. But how does the public fight back against that much Manufactured Consent?

In January 2010, Chief Justice John Roberts directly violated his promise to the Senate and the people not to engage in judicial activism and excreted the Citizen’s United Decision on the American Electorate. This resulted in the funds being spent to influence elections by outside groups, meaning not directly by campaigns, being increased to a ridiculous extreme. The Center for Responsive Politics estimates that the top 10 Special Interest Groups in the 2010 Election Cycle, 8 of which are Conservative (Chamber of Commerce, Club for Growth, NRA and American Future Fund among them), spent 160 Million on this Mid Term Election. The total amount for all groups was over $481 million spent on running ads, making phone calls, distributing literature and other activities.

I’m writing this from Nevada, one of the worst hit states during the recession. Outside groups spent $1,659,583 to support Democrats (mainly Harry Reid) and $6,573,603 to defeat Democrats in the 2010 mid terms.

And the ads coming directly from the campaigns were horrendous enough to begin with. You know the ones, they start with “ I’m a bought and paid for stooge of corporate interests and I approved this message”. Indeed, Sharon Angle looked a camera in the eye and claimed that she never said there was a need to “phase Medicare and Social Security out” when we could look at a clip of her saying exactly that 2 commercials later. The irony of living in a society which claims to have to cut state’s budgets for misguided notions of austerity but can still spend over 8 million dollars to influence an election in a single state while real unemployment is at Depression era levels and direct lies are being flung around is not lost on me.

And there was another relevant issue regarding these horrible outside campaigns. In no small sense they are really outside campaigns! Foreign corporations are being allowed influence in our elections because of the Citizen’s United decisions. Although there is a section of the law 2 US Code 441e that prohibits foreign nationals from contributing to election efforts, there is also a loophole in the law. There is nothing stopping a foreign national from coming here and starting a corporation (which because it was organized in the US is a domestic corporation) and using his financial power against the interests of the American people in our own elections.

And if you think that this ownership and influence from outside the US is a trivial matter please consider that not only is the BP oil spill still a recent memory we are not over, but…

The embarrassment to the state of Wisconsin we all know as Scott Walker recently had a cozy relationship with a foreign security firm, Wackenhut. Wackenhut, by the way is the same company that was caught red handed with homosexual hazing while guarding our embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. While in charge of the Milwaukee County Court House, Scott Walker decided to fire the public employees represented by a union and replace them with UK owned Wakenhut non-union employees (one supervisor was an ex-felon) because of a “budget emergency”. The whole thing was a mess which cost the taxpayers more money after the decision was reversed and the guards replaced and it didn’t save the taxpayer anywhere near what was being claimed. It actually cost them $430,000!

And if we allow this trend to continue, things will only get worse. The 2012 estimates for continuing this trend are enough to make any US Citizen/Voter/Taxpayer nauseous. The lowball estimates are close to $500 million. What can do in the face of this evil? What course of action do We, the People have against $500 million dollars spent to usurp our elections and extract the wealth of this country legally and legitimately by domestic and foreign corporations?

The answer I would like to propose is easier than we might think. It is along the lines of something we are doing naturally. It involves avoiding advertising. Think of how natural it is to switch channels during an election when you hear the words “I’m a pawn of private tyrants and I approved this message.” Specifically, I’m talking about BOYCOTTING not only as many lying political advertisements but all advertisements (as much as humanly possible).

What advertisers do whether it is a good product, bad product, or sleazy politician is try to expose them to as many eyeballs as possible. If we were to just simply not look at these ads, they don’t get our eyeballs. But if we punish the regular advertisers who are right beside the sleazy campaign liars, we could possibly bring market pressure to ending the monstrous political status quo which has been evolving since Jan 24,2010. It’s like the holy wraiths at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. If we refuse to look at them, they can’t hurt us!

Now to be sure, the candidate or side that spends the most does not always win. Although these outside groups spent $2.8 million to defeat Blanche Lincoln and she lost, they spent $6.7 million to defeat Harry Reid and he won. Although it can be demonstrated that the spending does not cause the win (This has been demonstrated by Freakanomics Stephen Levitt http://liberation.typepad.com/liberation/2007/05/freakonomics_th.html) candidates that spend the most often do win. One of the bigger reasons that accusations of Obama being a Socialist are laughable is the large amount of corporate donors whom contributed to Obama for America http://www.nndb.com/org/684/000167183/. Scroll down that list and see how many CEOs and CFOs you find. The main reason that he needs to solicit their help is the cost of running a Presidential campaign! And rest assured, they expect payback for their investment!

And campaigns are indeed expensive. Here in Nevada, Sue Lowden, the woman whom Sharon Angle defeated to win the Republican nomination, is still trying to pay for her failed campaign. She has debts in excess of $1,000,000. http://www.lvrj.com/news/campaign-debts-dogging-lowden-117390293.html?ref=293 She is worth somewhere between $50 and $200 million, but is hoping the people she owes money to will accept one of her chickens in barter. Had she won and was a sworn in as a Senator right now, do you think she would have any trouble finding some organization in Washington that would take care of those campaign debts for her? If some corporation, foreign owned or not, would donate towards American Action Networks $26 million dollar financing of sleazy attack ads, then they would cough up some money to help out a new Senator.

I think that it would be a great thing if all of it was wasted money and an educated informed citizenry capable of critical thinking decided elections!

The beauty of a boycott of advertisement until the General Election is over is that it can turn all of that into wasted money. And the purveyors of this harmful intellectual sludge are often the same people responsible for stuff like “Where’s the Beef?”, the Old Spice Guy, and Geico Caveman. If we can bring down the percentage of eyeballs that turn into customers, then those advertisers are naturally going to put pressure on their sleazier peers to stay out of our elections.

The fact that so many candidates require a hard sell to convince the electorate that they are not bought and paid for cronies of behind-the-scenes well-financed power players is very telling in and of itself. Whether it is a cruddy used car, a heart clogging fast food meal, or a politician who is a prostitute to tyrannical private power, the crappier the product the harder the sell is required to get people to buy it. All we need to do to thwart this is turn the TV off, switch the channel, leave the room or in the case of internet video, shrink the window and turn the sound off until the commercial is over!

But we also have let advertisers know that these merchants attempting to sell us a foul and putrid product are costing them and the good products our eyeballs!

Couch Potatoes of the World Unite, we have nothing to lose but the Old Spice Guy!

Until Boehner and Cantor will cut the F-35, everything they utter is manipulative drivel!

As long as it is a US taxpayer/citizen that has been victimized by a big insurance company, Boehner and Cantor are nonstop in their deficit hawk Red-Baiting rhetoric. When it comes to Social Security and Medicare they are sadistic with glee at worsening the lot of their impoverished fellow citizens. But, when it comes to a $382 Billion airplane that the Defense Department does not want, but is made by big employers in their districts, they are not only just as “tax and spend” as any Democrat, but they do so at the expense of our National Security.

Meet the F-35 joint strike fighter. Not only does it come with a $382 Billion price tag, but part of that is $450 million dollars for a spare engine for each plane! And the Pentagon does not want it!
Per Defense Secretary Robert Gates, “…American taxpayers are spending $28 Million dollars a month, for an excessive and unjustified program that is slated for termination.”
Production of this fighter has already been plagued with cost overruns and delays. Indeed, details of this new Stealth fighter have already been hacked and thus might be obsolete. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124027491029837401.html
So why is Boehner forcing them to take it anyway? It could have something to do with the fact that most of the spare engines are slated to be built just outside of John Boehner’s district in Ohio! And Rolls Royce, who gets another huge piece of making this unwanted expensive engine, just built a giant factory in Cantor’s district in Virginia.
This blatant brazen hypocrisy would be funny if Boehner and Cantor weren’t proposing budget cuts that negatively impact food inspection, NOAA (our weather service), and NNSA (National Nuclear Security Administration).
The NNSA is important because the deliberate logical fallacy that Elitist Inside-the-Beltway Conventional Wisdom would throw back in our face is an Appeal to Fear. Appealing to Fear is a very powerful tool when it comes to manipulating the gullible and manufacturing consent. It has been used often lately; the fact that there are jihadist terrorists and Muslim extremists who want to kill us and are hiding among various civilian populations is used to justify blind subservience to the military-industrial complex.
When the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945, it didn’t just force Japan into a surrender that they were desperately seeking anyway. The advent of atomic energy as an offensive weapon changed the nature of warfare forever. Understand that the leaders of nations back through ancient history would periodically invent a reason (sacred honor, broken treaties, holy mandate, etc.) to wage war and rearrange the boundaries on a map at the expense of human life and suffering. When the bomb dropped in 1945 and we were looking at Mutually Assured Destruction, the nature of warfare changed. The planners of these wars realized that if nations challenged each other in the old conventional way the next time might just be the last.
The F-35 is designed to replace the F-16, A-10, F/A-18 and AV-8B. But our enemies are not building aircraft and engaging in dogfights. They are living in civilian populations and waging warfare from the shadows of those populations. If the Pentagon is saying that it’s already obsolete and they want to go with other options for a fighter why make them take something expensive and unwanted?
The mission of the NNSA is to monitor nuclear fuel and keep it out of the hands of any terrorists. A small cell of 19 jihadists willing to kill themselves for their religious beliefs was able to inflict a historic wound on this country almost 10 years ago. You can imagine what an organized larger band might do if it had access to nuclear fuel.
So even if the Appeal to Fear was valid, Boehner and Cantor take money away from the most effective method of dealing with the threat we face from jihadist enemies and give it to something designed to replace aging aircraft whose details have already been leaked.
John Boehner is currently getting predictable mileage for his stand against Social Security and Medicare in the name of “fiscal responsibility” at the same time he is attempting to get away with this con job. He as declared that cuts to Social Security and Medicare the table when it comes to coming budget cuts. Eric Cantor does feel entitled to keep a pork barrel Defense project for Rolls Royce, but he is silent on the subject of making the US citizen/taxpayer stay in the workforce for more years before claiming benefits for which they have paid into their entire lives.
The incompetence and corruption of the Bush Administration ultimately had no other use than political capitol for Barack Obama. Just as he got into power and used that capitol to back up Wall Street’s worst gamblers, so are Boehner and Cantor using the political capitol they got from the Tea Party to continue to tax and spend and make sure poor working citizen/taxpayers have to make due with less.
They are hypocrites. They are liars.
There is no reason to believe a word that Boehner or Cantor says!