Fact-esque

Coming Apart: Mourning in America

There are so many cliches and well-worn similes that one hardly knows which to use. The "House of Cards"? The "Falling Dominos"? The "Chickens Coming Home to Roost"? The "Iceberg Metaphor"?

Well, whichever nod to ancient wisdom is your favorite, they all apply. The illusions on which the Age of Bush is based are coming apart at the seams. From every possible direction, ugly realities are forcing themselves into the florid dreams of conservative optimists and turning them into fetid nightmares.

As anyone with a lick of sense knew they would.

ELECTIONS

Scott Horton has been following the Don Siegelman story for months on his blog, No Comment at Harper's and has developed a near-airtight case that the former Alabama governor was railroaded by Karl Rove, who ordered that Siegelman be prosecuted on corruption charges just before the election to make sure the incumbent Republican gov won.

For all that time Horton and a few other blogs (including my humble self once or twice) were the only ones interested in the story. Now that's all changed. As the pendulum swings - drastically - away from the GOP version of life and truth and actual truth starts to emerge, more previously too-busy-to-bother reporters are jumping on the bandwagon, perhaps remembering at last why the became reporters in the first place.

For instance, the WaPo's Christopher Lee has finally brought the festering Siegelman Saga to the pages of one of America's two biggest newspapers with a piece on the way Bush-appointed Chief of the US Office of Special Counsel (OSC) and party political hack Scott Bloch interfered with a Justice Dept investigation of the way the Siegelman corruption case was handled.

on Oct. 11, OSC chief Scott J. Bloch ordered the case file be closed immediately, saying that he had not authorized it, seven career employees wrote in an internal draft memo made public last week.

"After concerns are expressed that OSC simply cannot close a file without conducting an investigation into theses [sic] allegations, the TF [task force] is directed to not further investigate this case and to wait for further instructions from the Special Counsel," the employees wrote in the document dated Jan. 18.

That episode and others detailed in the 13-page memo illustrate how the controversial Bush appointee, whom critics on Capitol Hill and elsewhere have accused of political bias and managerial misconduct, frequently has been at odds with top career staffers over which cases should be pursued by the principal office protecting federal whistle-blowers and policing partisan politicking in the federal workplace.

(emphasis added)

Is there anything unusual about such behavior from Bush-appointed officials? Of course not, not to readers of this blog and others in the left blogosphere, certainly. But to readers of major media, this is all brand, spanking new.

Last week, FBI agents raided Bloch's home.

Bloch, whose office and home were raided by FBI agents Tuesday in connection with a probe of his activities, repeatedly has denied staffers' requests to investigate cases they believed deserved scrutiny, the memo shows. At the same time, Bloch has launched aggressive, politically charged investigations into executive branch agencies that career staffers considered either overly broad or largely unrelated to the office's jurisdiction.

The memo, addressed to Bloch, offers "deeply troubling new evidence of Bloch's misuse of his office," said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, or POGO. The nonprofit watchdog group obtained the document and made it public last week on its Web site.

Nearly 5 years ago, in a long post about voting irregularities, I quoted a graf from Britain's Independent (in those days, we had to go overseas to find the truth in a newspaper).

Most suspect of all was the governor’s race in Alabama, where the incumbent Democrat, Don Siegelman, was initially declared the winner. Sometime after midnight, when polling station observers and most staff had gone home, the probate judge responsible for elections in rural Baldwin County suddenly “discovered” that Mr Siegelman had been awarded 7,000 votes too many. In a tight election, the change was enough to hand victory to his Republican challenger, Bob Riley. County officials talked vaguely of a computer tabulation error, or a lightning strike messing up the machines, but the real reason was never ascertained because the state’s Republican attorney general refused to authorise a recount or any independent ballot inspection.According to an analysis by James Gundlach, a sociology professor at Auburn University in Alabama, the result in Baldwin County was full of wild deviations from the statistical norms established both by this and preceding elections. And he adds: “There is simply no way that electronic vote counting can produce two sets of results without someone using computer programmes in ways that were not intended. In other words, the fact that two sets of results were reported is sufficient evidence in and of itself that the vote tabulation process was compromised.”

Nobody cared then. What a difference 5 years and an unbroken record of failures makes.

ECONOMY

I've written a lot about how much trouble the pension systems are in this country, about how corporations eager to falsify their lousy stats underfunded their pension programs figuring they could always a) put it in later or b) simply refuse to pay the pensioners what they were owed. Unfortunately that game, it turns out, reached into public pension funds, too, and the downturning economy threatens the retirements of a lot of govt workers, including if not especially, First Responders.

How did the public entities decide to handle it? Run mainly by Republicans, and following the example of the highest officers in the land (also Republican), how do you think? They cooked the books.

The funds that pay pension and health benefits to police officers, teachers and millions of other public employees across the country are facing a shortfall that could soon run into trillions of dollars.

But the accounting techniques used by state and local governments to balance their pension books disguise the extent of the crisis facing these retirees and the taxpayers who may ultimately be called on to pay the freight, according to a growing number of leading financial analysts.

State governments alone have reported they are already confronting a deficit of at least $750 billion to cover the cost of the retirement benefits they have promised. But that figure likely underestimates the actual shortfall because of the range of methods they use to make their calculations, including practices that have been barred in the private sector for decades.

Local governments use these same techniques for their pension funds and face deficits that further contribute to what some investors and analysts say may be shaping up to be a massive breach of faith with a generation of public employees.

Once the safest investments in the nation, now public employee pensions are going to be rocked by the same stupid techniques used by and sold to them by greedy corporate lawyers, gutless accountants, and all the Republican shills who convinced them everything was going to be alright because it was "morning in America". Nobody told them you spelled it "mourning".

POLITICS

As a result, the GOP can't catch a cold. And they remain so disconnected and clueless that they think inviting Dick Cheney down is going to help a struggling Pub candidate.

Since losing 30 seats and their 12-year stranglehold on power in 2006, House Republicans have kept asking themselves the same question: Can it get any worse?

On Tuesday, they may get another answer they won't like.

With lots of help from Washington -- including more than $1.3 million in campaign cash and a last-minute visit by Vice President Cheney -- Mississippi Republicans are desperately trying to retain a congressional seat in one of the most reliably conservative districts in the nation.

"Can it get worse?" Can Republicans get any dumber? Duh.

What kind of sense of reality does it show when a GOP struggling against its own administration invites a VP even less popular than the president down to a campaign that's on the edge of the anti-Bush abyss? Are they trying to destroy themselves? Or are their heads so firmly buried in the sand they think those earthworms are voters?

You know, when it all starts to go bad, you can't buy a break. And it couldn't happen to people who deserved it more.

Corpo's Get States to Subsidize Low Wages

We've said I dunno how many times that Wal-mart is the leader in scamming taxpayer money, getting city, county, and state govts to pay for things they ought to be paying for themselves. We've pointed out the way Wal-mart goes after tax abatements; gets cities to pay their water, sewage, and electricity bills; has counties or states pay to build the roads leading into and out of WM Superstore parking lots, and so on. We've detailed how their refusal to a) provide reasonable health insurance to their employees, or b) pay them enough to buy reasonable health insurance for themselves. In fact, so many Wal-mart employees are paid so little that it's not uncommon for them to have to go on Welfare or apply for food stamps.

Well, WM has successfully taught these scams to the rest of the US corporatocracy.

Wages have been flat or even losing ground ever since Reagan. At the bottom of the income scale, that means we have a lot of workers making so little they're still below the poverty line. This is what corpo's like Wal-mart want. Why? Because then someone else - you and me, the taxpayers - will have to supply the missing wages. So, reports the NYT today, a lot of states are doing just that.

Over the last two years, officials in Arkansas and at least a dozen other states have announced plans to extend the safety net — through monthly cash payments — to thousands of low-income workers struggling to gain a foothold in the work world.

Most states focus on people who have left welfare for low-wage jobs. Officials believe that the programs, which typically combine several months of cash assistance with career counseling, health insurance and subsidized child care, will help low-wage workers weather family illnesses and cash shortages and deter them from cycling back onto the welfare rolls.

You know what would help them "weather" that stuff even better?

A LIVING WAGE.

I'm not going to offer a lot of props to the states for doing this because a) they don't really have much choice unless they want to go back to the Great Depression of the 30's, and b) they're doing exactly what the corporations want them to do: subsidize their employees' wages so the corpo's can report higher profits and pocket more $$$. With corporations able to take so much advantage of so many Pub-passed tax loopholes that many of them pay NO TAXES AT ALL, virtually all of the expense will be born by non-corporate taxpayers. You and me.

Because now that they've forced local govts to, in effect, pay a portion of what they ought to be paying their workers, CEO's will now start screaming about how their personal taxes are too high. With any luck, they'll be able to bamboozle a business-friendly Dem president into lowering the taxes of the rich even further than Bush (always with the threat of "we'll take those jobs to Indonesia if you don't do what we want" behind it).

What do they want from us? Michael Parenti said it years ago:

• All of the rewards and none of the responsibilities
• All of the resources and none of the burdens
• All of the profits and none of the expenses
• All the benefits of taxation without having to pay any actual taxes

And they're getting it.

The Bubble Is a Bubble After All, Paul: Bush Props Up the Price of Oil

I don't usually disagree with Paul Krugman's economic assessments but when I do it's normally because he's left something out. In his op-ed today, it's a beaut.

In the course of arguing why he thinks the "oil bubble" isn't a bubble at all but "the result of fundamental factors, mainly the growing difficulty of finding oil and the rapid growth of emerging economies like China," one of his primary arguments against the bubble is:

the initial balance between supply and demand would be broken, replaced with a situation in which supply exceeded demand. This excess supply would, in turn, drive prices back down again — unless someone were willing to buy up the excess and take it off the market.

(emphasis added)

While not stating it explicitly, Krugman's unspoken assumption is that there isn't anyone willing to do that. Unfortunately, he's wrong. There is someone: George W Bush.

Bush has refused, despite repeated urging, to stop buying oil & gas for the National Reserve. He continues to stock the NR even though we have more oil in reserve than ever before in our history and even though we've had to pay the highest price for it in our history. In times past when the price of gas went too high, presidents (including Nixon and Clinton) have (first) stopped buying it for the NR and (second) released some of the Reserve to force the price of gas downward again or at least stabilize it.

Bush, the oil man, is doing neither of those things. Instead he buys and buys, paying higher and higher prices, and refuses to release any of it. It is a policy that would be considered insane anywhere else, and has puzzled a lot of otherwise intelligent people, but the answer is really pretty basic.

Krugman has missed this somehow, but Bush is single-handedly making his oil buddies richer and richer by being the key ingedient in maintaining an oil bubble: he'll buy all the excess at whatever outrageous price Exxon or Chevron (Girlfriend Condi was on the BOD of Chevron and has a tanker named after her, remember) wants to charge him (I mean, us) and take it off the market by sticking it in the Reserve.

Makes sense now, what he's doing, doesn't it?

The only way speculation can have a persistent effect on oil prices, then, is if it leads to physical hoarding — an increase in private inventories of black gunk. This actually happened in the late 1970s, when the effects of disrupted Iranian supply were amplified by widespread panic stockpiling.

Paul, your only mistake is in looking for "panic" buying. No, there isn't any. That's because the "physical hoarding" is being done calmly and in cold blood waaaay under the radar by an unscrupulous US president using taxpayer money to fund the largest stockpile of oil in the world with the easily identifiable purpose of keeping the profits of the oil industry in the stratosphere.

And he's still buying.

WSJ Thinks Dems Will Lose If They Help People Instead of Bankers

Via Kevin Hayden at The American Street, a WSJ political piece by two writers who think the Democrats are risking their political necks if they help bail out stricken/abused/scammed homeowners the way they bailed out the merchant bankers and mortgage-lending con artists who created this financial crisis. It's their thought process that baffles me. Why would Americans in trouble object to helping Americans in trouble? Well....

The Democrats in Congress and the party's presidential candidates frame the issue as doing at least as much for beleaguered homeowners as the government is doing for Wall Street. The White house and most House Republicans counter this amounts to using taxpayer money to reward bad behavior.

The Republican protests are striking a chord with some Americans who are paying their mortgages on time or who didn't buy more house than they can afford.

Kevin suggested that this is like not saving a person choking on a chicken bone because they "really should have learned to chew and swallow properly." I'd amend that.

This is like stuffing a chicken bone down some guy's throat until he starts to choke, demanding a free bucket of wings from the management because the guy took all yours, then refusing to allow anyone to Heimlich the guy because he should have known better than to let someone stuff chicken bones down his throat in the first place. And besides, the other diners won't like him getting "special attention."

The only "some Americans" this nonsense could possibly be "striking a chord with" are those same Americans profiting from the choking. The reporters' own numbers show that.

A Gallup Poll in late March found that 56% of Americans favor government intervention to prevent people from losing their homes because they can't pay their mortgages, while 42% oppose it. The partisan divide was sharp: 58% of Republicans opposed intervention; 71% of Democrats and 55% of independents supported the idea.

Only Republicans, who are demographically richer and more secure, favor the idea by over half - and let's face it, 8% is a pretty slim margin. It means a full 42% of Pubs think the homeowners ought to be helped out, a number that would have been unthinkable in, say, Newt Gingrich's heyday.

In fact, to their credit, though the lede was more than a little slanted and not very well supported by the numbers, writers Sudeep Reddy and Elizabeth Holmes quote quite a lot of Pub dissent from their conclusion.

Even some voters who support a government rescue are uneasy about haste. "I don't think we can just stay hands-off," says Walt King, a mechanical engineer from Downers Grove, Ill. "The people who got sucked into this are not capable of making calculations about whether they could afford this." But Mr. King, 62, who says he is likely to vote for Sen. Barack Obama, is wary of a rushed political response. "I don't know what the answer is," he said. "The election year is not a year to pray for objectivity."

***

At least some McCain supporters agree. Says Scott Downing, 39, a McCain supporter from Michigan: "If you can bail out banks for billons of dollars, you can set up a program on a family-by-family basis."

You'd think so. But isn't it interesting how determined the WSJ was that Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs get bailed out, how determined that the Fed pour its resources into failing banks and lenders? The WSJ didn't say then, "Oh, we shouldn't reward bad behavior and let Bear Stearns go belly-up." They didn't say that. No no. Then it was "Help them! Help them! Give them money or they'll take us down with them!"

No, it wasn't until the banks had squeezed $$$300BIL$$$ out of the Treasury to boost their bottom lines and the Dems started threatening to send $$$ to people who weren't bankers that the whole ugly "bad behavior" meme surfaced and started getting passed around the RWNM (of which the WSJ has long been a leading element). It goes like this:

In WSJ territory, when Bankers exhibit "bad behavior" (like mortgage scams, lying to loan customers, falsifying records, etc etc etc), it should not only be rewarded but they should be encouraged to continue behaving badly. When people make a mistake or get hornswoggled or ripped off, we should be punished and the money given to...the bankers.

Good gravy Marie.

Bush: President of Saudi Arabia?

The WaPo's Steven Mufson wrote a courageous piece for today's Business section in which he unveils the real reason for the Bush Bribe (read: "stimulus package").

Since Congress and Bush unveiled an economic stimulus package Jan. 24, the price of the OPEC basket of crude oil has jumped by $32.51 a barrel, raising the cost of U.S. oil imports enough to offset the entire stimulus package over the course of the year.

(emphasis added)

Aaah! Now that makes sense - an oilman president giving people money they will have to spend on oil. Marvy.

To cap off the deal, the Oil Emperor is taking a trip to - where else? - Saudi Arabia where he will be accepting the thanks of oil sheiks for his work increasing their already staggering oil revenues through first his continued buying of oil at the highest prices ever for the National Oil Reserve even though the US already has more oil in "reserve" than ever before in its history, and then by this "stimulus" scam, which has allowed them to raise their prices more than $30/bbl since he announced it in the full expectation that American consumers will now have the money to afford to keep buying gas at the sheiks' absurdly high rates.

Tell me again, I forget. Which country is Bush the president of? America or Saudi Arabia? Cause he's doing a damn good job with one of them. With the other, not so much.

Barney's Bill in Trouble Already

As predicted - although a bit earlier than predicted - Barney's Bill, the one that wants to be the first one to bail out homeowners rather than bankers, is already, a day later, in trouble.

The bill, which passed the House on Thursday, is quickly becoming a casualty in a battle between the Bush administration, which says it opposes any taxpayer bailout that would only further encourage risky lending practices, and Democrats who say that homeowner assistance is the only way to contain the damage to the broader economy.

Despite pledges by the White House and Democrats to work together, the bill produced partisan recriminations the day after it passed the House.

With the unerring instinct of a suicidal lemming, Bush is determined not to be seen helping anyone but bankers. The latest Bush excuse comes from WH PR hack Tony Fratto: “Taxpayers shouldn’t be taking on the risk of foreclosure.” No, even though we're talking about the foreclosures of actual taxpayers as opposed to taxdodgers. Taxpayers, according to the Bush Admin, are there to bail out the investor class, not the middle class and certainly not the *ugh* lower classes who were taken in and bamboozled by the aforementioned investor class of merchant bankers.

There must be a way for this Admin to embarrass itself that it hasn't yet found but I'm beginning to wonder what that might possibly be.

Meanwhile, the bill goes to the Senate Democrats for processing, specifically Chris Dodd's Senate Banking Committee. Chris says it's up to Dick Shelby.

Senator Christopher J. Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat who heads the Banking Committee, said Friday that he was hoping to quickly complete negotiations with the ranking Republican on the committee, Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, and have the committee vote on a measure next week.

“We’re getting very close to a compromise but I can’t promise it will happen,” Mr. Dodd said. He said any measure that did not have Republican support would almost certainly fail.

So there you have it. Dodd - who really ought to know better - is leaving it all in the hands of a Republican Senator who is hip-deep in the mess Dodd wants him to help clean up. You and I both know what Dick's answer will be: whatever the mortgage industry and conservative ideologues want it to be. And neither group likes this bill. Conclusion: Barney's Bill is dead.

But it's our own fault, us taxpayers. We had the nerve to ask for help from the govt that took our money and gave it to the people who got us in trouble. Since when do ordinary taxpayers get bailed out by the taxes they, after all, paid? That money, as Bush made perfectly plain the very first month of his presidency, is for non-tax-paying corporations and the rich. We don't get Penny One unless we yank it out of their grasping fingers with pliers.

"We Want It All!"

With Bush's Bribe (translation: "stimulus" checks) on their way to people's mailboxes, the snatch-and-run crowd of corporate retailers are offering a great deal: they'll issue you a store credit card if you open it using your whole check.

Sears has started a “stretch your stimulus check” campaign. Supervalu, the grocery chain, is promoting a “watch your refund grow” program, and Kroger is calling its stimulus gift cards “a powerful new financial tool.” All three companies offer shoppers a 10 percent bonus if they buy a gift card with their checks.

Domino’s Pizza is also offering a “recession-busting” special of three pizzas for $12. “While you’re feeding the economy with your special refund check, let it feed you back,” the company said in a news release promoting the offer. Home Depot is encouraging customers to buy energy-efficient products, like compact fluorescent bulbs, to save money.

(emphasis added)

Note that they offer you NOTHING while demanding you give them not 10% or even half but all your "rebate" check. They're not offering a lower interest rate or special sale prices or money back or any of the usual enticements. Yes, they're pairing their open greed with exhortations to "save money" but they'll be doing that with everyone pretty soon. There's nothing extra here, no incentives or inducements or prizes. Just naked greed: "We want it ALL!"

Of course, while they want to be greedy, they certainly don't want to be perceived as greedy.

Some retailers say they are aware they are walking a fine line, and do not want to appear insensitive to their customers’ financial worries.

“You’ve got to be careful that you don’t seem like you’re, what I call, like a buzzard,” said Evan Anthony, vice president for corporate marketing and advertising at Kroger. “But you build customer loyalty when times are tough.”

You "build customer loyalty" by convincing them to give you all their money in return for nothing? Really? Who do these people think they're kidding...apart from themselves? Just ask Wal-mart. The leader in bad taste, tricks, and employee/customer rip-offs knows a PR nightmare when it sees one, and with a passle of bad press already on its plate is having no part of this scam.

Stephen Quinn, Wal-Mart Stores’ chief marketing officer, said he was skeptical of any offers that required shoppers to commit their checks to a gift card for just one store.

“Anything that locked in their money at one store is not appropriate” for Wal-Mart, he said. “Putting $600 on my gift card greatly enhances the chances that you will spend the money with my store. But we do not want to encourage any behavior that might be considered irresponsible.”

No, of course not. Especially not if it's going to add broken limbs to the two black eyes their reputation is already sporting.

But give them credit - at least in this one instance, they knew when to quit. That's more than can be said for the other corporate chains involved in this sneak attack.

Don't fall for it.

Barney's Mortgage Bill Passes House

Well, glorioski, Sandy! They had the vote on Barney Frank's bill yesterday and it passed with - be still my beating heart! - 39 GOP Reps voting for it! Who woulda thunk the Republicans had that many pols with some sense left? Or is that the raunchy smell of fear in the air?

The House yesterday approved an ambitious plan to rescue hundreds of thousands of homeowners at risk of foreclosure by helping them trade exotic loans with rapidly rising monthly payments for more affordable mortgages backed by the federal government.

Bucking a White House veto threat, 39 Republicans joined Democrats in supporting the bill, the centerpiece of a broader housing package that represents Washington's most aggressive response to the nation's housing crisis. The measure aims to unfreeze mortgage markets by expanding the Federal Housing Administration's reach and strengthening mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It also would create a $7,500 tax credit for first-time home buyers to try to boost sales and slow plummeting home prices.

The GOP stalwarts who didn't care to be sensible promptly dragged out what is clearly the new RWNM TP and attacked - you guessed it - the victims. How predictable (*yawn*) and lame can you get?

GOP House leaders blasted the bill as a bailout for speculators and irresponsible borrowers.

Oooh. Did you catch the latest nuance? They've included "speculators" in the argument even though "speculators" cannot possibly legitimately include any of the entities helped by this bill. But it, you know, sounds better than blaming just the victims all the time. It sounds like you're trying to be fair. It sounds like you're apportioning responsibility equally to both sides.

Except for one tiny difference, hardly worth mentioning.

You've already bailed out the biggest speculators with $$$Gigantic Bucks$$$ - $300B all told - while you've been reluctantly doling out pennies to the victims of the speculators' shenanigans.

Well, never mind, ducky. Don't worry your pretty little head about it. Richard Shelby will make sure this never gets past the Senate.

Mortgage Broker/Senator Will Make Decisions About...Mortgage Lenders

Well, why not?

He has made millions as a title insurance executive, landlord and real estate developer in this college town, where the economy, despite trouble nationwide, is still growing nicely. Now, as a United States senator, with the mortgage mess fueling a national economic slowdown, Richard C. Shelby has more say over the revamping of housing finance laws than almost anyone else in Congress.

Shelby was one of the turncoat Southerners who switched from the Democratic party in '94 to give the GOP their first majority. He was also the guy who encouraged Newt Gingrich to make his first speech as the new House Speaker an open invitation to Big Business. Said Newt to his new Reps, "We're going to invite into this chamber the leaders of the biggest corporations in the country and ask them what they want us to do for them. Then we're going to do it."

Newt's bald announcement that as the leader of the new Republican majority he was handing over the responsibilities of Congress to corporate CEO's and letting corporate lobbyists write the laws the Congress would then dutifully pass went largely unnoticed by the general public at the time it happened but it was prophetic enough - that's exactly the way Newt ran his fief from that day on. And Richard Shelby was usually right beside him, urging him on.

Shelby is, was, and always has been one of those conservative ideologues who believe that, aside from the military stuff, govt's only legitimate role was in helping him to get richer than he already was. He has lived by that maxim, preached it, and passed it along to a new generation of stuffed shirts and fat bellies. So if you think a little thing like an incredibly HUGE conflict of interest is going to keep him from protecting his wealth and his ability to grow it, think again.

[A]s the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, he is using his clout and the Democrats’ slim majority in the Senate to help determine what gets in, or almost as important, what is left out, of legislation.

***

Mr. Shelby said in an interview his business dealings posed no conflict.

“It doesn’t affect me at all. I’m going to put the interests of the nation first,” he said. His stubbornness over housing laws, he said, stems from his free-market philosophy and opposition to using tax dollars to bail out people who acted recklessly. “We can’t bail out everything,” he added.

Of course not. Except you certainly can bail out - and you voted to bail out - Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, and the entire construction industry. Your industry. Nothing then about the "recklessness" of developers who tricked people into buying homes for more than they were actually worth or conniving with mortgage brokers - like yourself - who thought up unethical, marginally legal mortgage schemes you then lied about to prospective customers, schemes that were aimed at low-income first-time buyers with no experience of bank loans who didn't know how to read mortgage fine-print. You never called that behavior "reckless" even though it was so reckless it's threatening to bring down the entire economy.

But there are at least some people Dicky Baby isn't fooling any more with his faux-downhome "I'll do what's best for the country" routine. See, as far as Dicky Baby is concerned, he is the country, so whatever is good for him personally (read: financially) is ipso facto good for the country. Those of us who've been mauled the last 8 years by untrammeled greed and illegal corporate scams, why, we've been "reckless" and deserve zippo.

“Senator Shelby would have prevented anything going through that the industry was not happy with,” said Representative Brad Miller, Democrat of North Carolina, who has pushed legislation to crack down on predatory lending, an effort that has stalled in the Senate in part because of Mr. Shelby’s reservations. “That’s the sense from all the people who are involved in the issue.”

(emphasis added)

And they're all right. Shelby's out for himself and the "good of the country" can go hang itself on a wire hook as long as he gets his.

Makes you wonder if Alabama - which has been hit pretty hard by the Bush Recession Shelby's buddies in the mortgage and merchant banking business did so much to bring about - is, like, proud of what he's doing to the country in their name.

War Profiteers Dodge Taxes

It isn't bad enough that we're mired in an illegal war, or that our privatization-crazy administration is paying - on the cuff - $$$BILLIONS AND BILLIONS$$$ to private corporations to do...well, in many cases we're not exactly sure what they're getting paid to do. Custer Battles was paid several $$MIL$$ apparently for re-painting a few fork lifts at Baghdad Airport. It's not bad enough that those corporations charge us twice for work they did - badly - once (or not at all), or that our soldiers are dying in substandard, unsafe buildings thrown together by private contractors whose only rule of thumb is "I want every penny possible in my pocket. Scrimp, cheat, steal, kill if you have to."

No, none of that is enough for the war corpo's or the Bush Administration. The NYT editorial board notes today that those war profiteers aren't paying taxes, either.

Congress is finally moving to shut one of the more egregious forms of Iraq war profiteering: defense contractors using offshore shell companies to avoid paying their fair share of payroll taxes. The practice is widespread and Congressional investigators have been dispatched to one of the prime tax refuges, the Cayman Islands, to seek a firsthand estimate of how much the Treasury is being shorted.

No one will be surprised to hear that one of the suspected prime offenders is KBR, the Texas-based defense contractor, formerly a part of the Halliburton conglomerate allied with Vice President Dick Cheney. According to a report in The Boston Globe, KBR, which has landed billions in Iraq contracts, has used two Cayman shell companies to avoid paying hundreds of millions in payroll, Medicare and unemployment taxes.

(emphasis added)

Are you surprised? No, me neither. In fact it's exactly the sort of scumbag slime-act I'd expect from Dick Cheney's old company. The fish, as they say, rots from the head. (Blind trust, my ass.)

It isn't bad enough that our young men and women have to die to protect the obscene profits of oil companies and the shady machinations of Dick Cheney's friends. It isn't bad enough that Iraqi children have to die, mangled and bloody, to make it safe for Custer Battles and KBR and Paul Bremer and Bechtel and Blackwater to skim profits, double-bill, overcharge, and otherwise rake off illegal or at least unethical $$millions$$ of our tax money from our pockets that used to be kept in our Treasury for us.

No, they want to double-dip: take the money from our taxes and then duck paying taxes of their own.

Let's see, now... 

Will the Bush Administration fight the Congress' attempt to stop this travesty? Will the DLC/BD Alliance in the Senate seek to protect thier corpo sponsors by preventing the House from passing this bill?

Does the Pope shit in the Vatican?

Bush Corrupts the FEC - Again

I couldn't leave without noting that the Bush penchant for election-rigging got even more obvious this week. The NYT editorial board took him to task today, and the substance of what he's trying to pull won't be news to long-time readers.

The White House is removing a member of the Federal Election Commission for standing up for clean elections, while trying to install another member whose specialty is keeping eligible voters from casting ballots. The Senate, which must confirm nominees, should insist that President Bush appoint commissioners with a proven record of supporting voting rights and fair elections.

Yes, they should. But they won't. I'll leave you to guess why.

Bush is president only because, leave us never forget, he stole both presidential elections. The dirty tricks played by GOP operatives under Karl Rove (will Karl apologize for his evil on his deathbed, too, a la Lee Atwater, long after the damage has been done? who cares?) were wide-spread and mean-spirited, as befits the party and the man they were in aid of. Katherine Harris (who will be back to chicken-dancing for hire any day now) purged the Florida voter rolls of blacks, Ken Blackwell (a black man himself, so the rumor goes) played shuffleboard with black voting places and dumped carloads of black (Democratic, natch) ballots in landfills from Cleveland to Toledo, and Saxby Chambliss had electronic help turning Democratic votes into GOP ones. So this is, I suppose, relatively minor if typical:

Mr. Bush is purging the current F.E.C. chairman, David Mason, presumably because he was responsible enough to challenge the funding machinations of Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign. Mr. Mason shocked his fellow Republicans by notifying Mr. McCain that he might run afoul of the law by switching from public funding to private donations once he secured the party’s nomination.

The White House proposes to replace Mr. Mason with Donald McGahn, a Republican warhorse. F.E.C. commissioners are expected to be aligned with a party — one of the new Democratic nominees is a staff member of Senator Charles Schumer of New York — but Mr. McGahn has a particularly partisan background. He was the party’s Congressional campaign counsel — and the ethics lawyer for Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader from Texas who left office under multiple clouds.

(emphasis added)

I mean, in the Bush presidency the Federal Elections Commission has been a joke anyway. Of the six members, two have resigned and the other two Bush didn't bother to replace when their terms were up. There are only two members left, which makes the FEC, as the NYT puts it, "inoperable". If Mason is chugged under the collapsing Bush dam for the heinous crime of daring to charge a Republican with campaign financing shenanigans - which is, as we all know, the right of GOP candidates everywhere - and replaces him with this...hack...the FEC won't be a joke but a travesty of a disaster of a catastrophe of a joke.

Bush will have what he wants: an FEC that will turn a blind ideological eye to massive GOP vote fraud and attack the Democrats for non-existant voter fraud. If McCain can't win the election on his own hook - and it's perfectly obvious he can't - then maybe Bush's FEC can make sure Pub Ops can steal it for him.

Unrelated But Interesting

Thomas Nephew has The Picture The Media Doesn't Want You to See.

fafnir explains how Iraq and the GWOT qualify as emergencies.

Crandall Canyon Deaths "Were Preventable"

Rep George Miller's House Committee on Education and Labor (for which our old friend Jordan Barab now works) just released a report on their investigation of the Crandall Canyon mine disaster, and guess what? It was way preventable.

The general manager and possibly other senior staff at the Crandall Canyon Mine near Huntington, Utah, where 9 miners died in August 2007, hid information from federal mining officials that could have prevented the disaster and should face criminal charges, according to a Congressional investigation whose results were released Thursday.

***

The deaths were avoidable, the 150-page report said, because five months before the August disaster in the north section of the mine, a similar collapse had occurred in a southern section, offering clear “red flags” indicating that the mine was unstable.

Rather than informing federal mining officials about the March collapse, the report said, the mine operator cleaned up the site and went on with work in a nearby section.

(emphasis added)

Now, just to be fair, let me ask the question:

Does anyone here think that MSHA Chief Richard Stickler is going to bring any charges whatever or even assess significant - strike that - some kind of fines and penalties against mine owner Bob Murray?

Anyone?

No?

Damn.

$300Bil for Troubled Homeowners? Veto It, Of Course

It's been a pretty well-kept secret apparently but Barney Frank's new bill wants to give the FHA (which will no longer be Bush's FHA by then) about $$$300B$$$ with which to help get most of the people who will be facing foreclosure in the next few years enough help to maybe keep their houses and prevent the housing market (currently going under for the 2nd time) from tanking altogether.

Oddly, I found this buried at the end of a different story at the NYT, a story about Maxine Waters' new bill to funnel $$15B$$ to cities and towns for use in renovating (for their own use presumably) properties that have been foreclosed on.

House Democrats defied a veto threat from President Bush on Thursday as they approved a bill that would provide $15 billion to the states to buy and spruce up foreclosed properties.

The bill, sponsored by Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, would make federal money available in loans and grants for the rehabilitation and eventual sale or rental of blighted properties. The measure is one of two major housing initiatives being pushed by Democrats despite the stated opposition of the president.

Bush has, of course, vowed to veto both bills. He wants to veto Waters' bill because it's - say it with me, children - too expensive (*snort*). But dig the reasoning for vetoing Barney's bill:

President Bush has vowed to veto the Frank bill if it reaches him in its present form, on the ground that it would assist lenders and borrowers who have acted irresponsibly.

(emphasis added)

Right. Getting scammed by crooked lenders and unethical merchant bankers is "acting irresponsibly". The lenders and bankers who did the scamming were, naturally, not. They were merely, you know, being crooked lenders and unethical merchant bankers and we should all have known better than to trust that they were dealing off the top of the deck. Certainly it's no part of govt's role to make sure that crooked lenders and unethical merchant bankers are punished for "acting irresponsibly". I doubt that Bush could even make a case proving that cheating your customers is unethical. He probably thinks it isn't.

But to return to the real news: after bailing out the construction industry, Barney is, after all, going to try to pass a bill to help normal people gypped out of their homes by crooked lenders and unethical merchant bankers. The question isn't "Can he get it passed?" The question is: "Can he get it past his own party leadership in the Senate?"

Fannie Mae: Loss of $$$2BIL$$$ Cheers Wall St

How's that again?

The Washington Post, where they love Bush's war but they're not so sure about his economy:

Fannie Loses $2.2 Billion As Home Prices Fall

Fannie Mae, one of the main sources of mortgage funding and a barometer of the housing market, yesterday reported that home prices fell faster than it expected during the first quarter, contributing to a $2.2 billion loss for the company.

The company had been predicting that the toll from defaults and foreclosures would worsen this year, and yesterday it revised its forecast to predict even higher credit losses ahead.

The loss came as the strain of the recent credit crunch continued to roil the housing and finance industries. Yesterday, the Swiss banking giant UBS reported an $11 billion quarterly loss and said it would cut 5,500 jobs. Meanwhile, the Legg Mason investment firm lost more than $250 million in its fourth quarter as it set aside money to support its money-market funds.

Fannie Mae and its federal regulator responded to the deteriorating situation by announcing steps that could strengthen the company and the housing market -- or put the finance giant in an even deeper hole.

Now the NYT, which also loves Bush's war but thinks the economy is swell, too, if everybody would, you know, not PANIC!

Fannie Mae Wins Cheers Despite Loss

Fannie Mae, the nation’s largest buyer of home loans, gave investors little reason to cheer Tuesday, announcing a $2.2 billion quarterly loss and a dividend cut, and warning of steeper losses ahead.

But investors celebrated anyway, bidding up the stock 9 percent, to close at $30.81.

Their optimism stemmed from the belief that Fannie Mae is in a position to pick and choose among the best and safest loans currently in the marketplace. The company, which buys mortgages from banks and other lenders, announced it would raise $6 billion in new funds to purchase additional loans and shore up a listing balance sheet.

“As the market recovers, we will be a prime beneficiary,” Fannie Mae’s president, Daniel C. Mudd, said in a conference call with analysts Tuesday morning. When the housing market finally stabilizes, the company will “feast” on the mortgages.

Like zombies "feast" on dead flesh? or vampires "feast" on blood?

Wall St, like any vamp, looooooves a blood bath. They sort of look at it as a Filene's Bargain Basement Sale. I guess. I mean, that's the vibe I get from the NYT. Why, the deeper and faster the economy tanks, the more they think it proves, once again, that The Bush is a financial genius. Why, the man has saved the economy by destroying it! Just wait 'til those bargains hit the shelves next year!

It's obscene, a little, thinks the more cautious WaPo. I mean, you know, baaaad things are happening here and they're getting worse. Sometimes it seems the end isn't in sight, that the bottom is in fact bottomless. Doesn't that, like, bother you?

But the NYT, perfectly reflecting Wall St's eternal optimism in the face of catastrophe (especially a catastrophe it helped to bring about), shouts, "Nay Nay, naysayer. 'Tis but a drop in yon bucket, a flash in ye pan, a mere bump in the highway to Prosperity and Wealth."

Yes. Well. Unfortunately, friend, that "bump" is the sound your body makes when they run over it on the way to their Prosperity. Try to remember as the wheels squash your noggin flat as an old raccoon that you're but sacrificing yourself for the greater good.

Theirs.

Now. Don't you feel better?

Spying on the Gitmo Lawyers

Here we go again.

Lawyers for detainees at Guantanamo are claiming that virtually every conversation they have with their clients is being monitored.

In interviews and a court filing Tuesday, lawyers for detainees at Guantánamo said they believed government agents had monitored their conversations. The assertions are the most specific to date by Guantánamo lawyers that officials may be violating legal principles that have generally kept government agents from eavesdropping on lawyers.

“I think they are listening to my telephone calls all the time,” said John A. Chandler, a prominent lawyer in Atlanta and Army veteran who represents six Guantánamo detainees.

Several of the lawyers, including partners at large corporate law firms, said the concerns had changed the way they went about their work apart from Guantánamo cases. A lawyer in Chicago, H. Candace Gorman, said in an affidavit that she was no longer accepting new clients of any type because she could not assure them of confidentiality.

The new filing, by the Center for Constitutional Rights, came in a 2007 lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act in which Guantánamo lawyers are seeking records to determine whether they have been targets of surveillance.

The Bush Administration's answer? Oh, come on. You know it already. You can recite it with me, in unison and with 4-part harmony:

The Justice Department declined to comment Tuesday. But in a legal response in March, its lawyers said they could neither confirm nor deny that detainees’ lawyers had been targets of such surveillance “because doing so would compromise the United States Intelligence Communities sources and methods.”

(emphasis added)

Translation: Doing so would compromise Bush's ass.

This sleezoid attempt to slime out from under having to own up to unConstitutional behavior its own otherwise tame SCOTUS has already rejected not once but TWICE comes at the same time that the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties is about to hear from ex AG John Ashcroft and ex-Bush Lawyer John Yoo in (get this) "voluntary" testimony about the decision to support torture as a new American interrogation technique. (What the hell - Keifer Sutherland does it all the time on 24 and nobody thinks anything of it.)

Not only that, they're getting ready to play The Subpoena Game with Cheney COS David Addington, who will no doubt ignore the subpoena after which the House will ignore the fact that he ignored it.

Altogether this should be an interesting few weeks for the Emperor. Wonder just how far his approval rating can fall now that he's even losing the end-timers? Stay tuned.

Health Insurance Co's Look For Higher Profits Despite Bush Recession

Health insurance corporations have been, next to energy and pharmaceutical corpo's, enjoying the highest profits of any economic sector. Now that the Bush Recession is beginning to affect the middle class and not just us low-incomers, it's getting harder to maintain those profits as more companies jettison their health programs and more people are making less money. In a "free market", of course, this would mean that health insurance premiums would go down. Are they? Well, um, no, actually.

The economic slowdown has swelled the ranks of people without health insurance. But now it is also threatening millions of people who have insurance but find that the coverage is too limited or that they cannot afford their own share of medical costs.

Many of the 158 million people covered by employer health insurance are struggling to meet medical expenses that are much higher than they used to be — often because of some combination of higher premiums, less extensive coverage, and bigger out-of-pocket deductibles and co-payments.

With medical costs soaring, the coverage many people have may not adequately protect them from the financial shock of an emergency room visit or a major surgery. For some, even routine doctor visits might now take a back seat to basic expenses like food and gasoline.

“It just keeps eating into people’s income,” said James Corbin, a former union official who works for the local utility in Tucson.

(emphasis added)

Everything keeps eating into people's shrinking incomes, and the investor class still won't give an inch. Remember the Collins family? This is typical:

Zena Collins knew she had a serious problem when she could no longer afford electricity.

The mortgage payment on her Gaithersburg house had jumped about $500, to $2,000 a month, not counting taxes and insurance, after her adjustable interest rate increased. When she bought the house in 2000, she was a pension administrator. By the time her company decided to cut her job, she was bringing home $5,200 a month. In April 2006, she managed to secure a similar job -- but not a similar salary. So there she was, earning less but paying more for her house. And that's when the lights went out.

"I simply could not do it," she said. "I was sitting there with battery-operated lights and showering with cold water."

That's who the corpo's are determined to get more money from - the same people they're determined to pay less to. This kind of corporate behavior isn't what one expects during a serious recession - that prices keep going up even though incomes are diving ducks and inflation is supposedly under control. Something's got to give here, and the only thing that's clear at this point is that it ain't gonna be the corporations.

They're hanging tough, raising their prices in the teeth of lower incomes and assuming, I suppose, that they've got everybody over a barrel. But the outcome isn't that tough to predict. Older folks with higher medical expenses will bankrupt the system as the younger folks who don't use it as much abandon the system altogether. We're looking at millions more uninsured than we've seen up to now simply because with their income doing a vanishing act, nobody can afford health insurance any more. It's hard to figure the health corpo's rationale.

Mr. Corbin said that under their employer’s health plan, he and his co-workers are now obliged to pay up to $4,000 of their families’ annual medical bills, on top of about $1,600 a year in premiums. Five years ago, they paid no premiums and were responsible for only about $2,000 of their families’ medical bills.

“That’s a big jump,” Mr. Corbin said. “You’ve just lost a month’s pay.”

And with health insurers raising premiums whenever you use your insurance, you'll what? Stop using it, naturally.

[T]he soft economy is making some insured people hesitant to get care they need, reluctant to spend a $50 co-payment for an office visit. Parents “are waiting longer to bring in their children,” said Dr. Richard Lander, a pediatrician in Livingston, N.J. “They say, ‘The kid isn’t that sick; her temperature is only 102.’ ”

This is a recipe for disaster, and the oddest thing about it (in some ways) is that the insurance companies are cutting their own throats by not cutting their premiums. They're driving people out when what they need to be doing is drawing more people in, expanding the payment pool. That has historically been the way insurance works - and the way it makes money. Now they seem to want everybody out, even the younger, healthier folk who are less of a drain.

Nor does the corporate fad of reducing or eliminating health care benefits for their employees make a helluva lot of sense in times like these. In fact none of it makes much sense until you realize that corporations have been training themselves for 30 years NOT to look past the next quarter. If they're making money now and they're projected to make money for the next 3 months, nothing changes. If they're projected to lose money over the next 3 months, they raise their prices. The long term effects of their decisions get little or no attention. Nobody is studying them. Nobody cares.

This is one of the hardest things to accept and understand about the way modern US corpo's work. There is a strong myth dating from the post-WW II period that all American businesses think - and plan - far in advance, that they're setting up the next 10 years of growth and stability. The reality is very different.

No, they aren't. They're looking at the next 3 months and refusing to look at the 3 months after that until it, you know, gets here. They are systemically short-sighted. It's engrained in their thinking, their procedures, and their accounting.

They think small.

The results have been painful. Health insurance corpo's looking for higher and higher profits without bothering to look at the overall economic picture are bankrupting their customers and offering less and less in return.

Experts say that too often for the underinsured, coverage can seem like health insurance in name only — adequate only as long as they have no medical problems.

“There’s a real shift in the burden of health care to people who happen to be sick,” said Paul B. Ginsburg, the president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, a research group in Washington.

And here, at last, we begin to see what the insurance companies laughingly call "a strategy": now they want people who are sick because those people will pay whatever they have to pay as long it's below the amount they would be paying without insurance. This is a whole new area of profit-taking. Instead of charging everybody 10% of their medication cost, you charge just the sick - what? 80%? 70%? What will the traffic bear?

That's the motto of health insurers today, apparently: "As much as you can get away with."

Bankers Drag Feet on Mortgage Modifications

Everybody has been assuming that eventually the merchant bankers who wound up owning the paper (at cut rates) on all those tricky mortgage deals from all those mortgage lender scammers would have to start bending or watch their intransigence pull down the whole economy.

But they haven't. They have stubbornly refused to give up any portion of their supposed "earned income" despite pleas and threats from all sides, and with the media buying wholesale a bunch of soft-soap from Elaine Chao's tame statistics dept and Wall Street's infamous positivity brigade, they're beginning to think they'll be able to slide away from yet another near financial disaster without suffering any serious consequences. As a result, they continue to defy logic and econ 101 as they go out of their way to make it tough on homeowners who need to modify their absurd contracts.

President Bush, Congress and banking regulators are counting on loan modifications, which involve changing the terms of a mortgage, to prevent millions of people from losing their homes. Lenders say they are stepping up efforts to modify loans. But housing counselors and attorneys say it is a painstaking process that few homeowners can navigate on their own.

"We are all in some cases hitting a brick wall," said Diane Cipollone, attorney and director of the Sustainable Homeownership Project at Baltimore-based Civil Justice. "The response time is months -- months -- to get a workout, and the workout is often unaffordable."

There are conflicting data on how many borrowers are getting permanent loan modifications, such as a reduction in debt, rather than temporary solutions, such as repayment plans that will bring down the level of their delinquency. Decreases in debt are especially rare, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. Some borrowers settle for short sales, in which they sell the home at a loss and are forgiven the debt.

(emphasis added)

These guys had to be fed $$$Billions$$$ - of our money - to keep them solvent after dozens of them either kicked the bucket or found their feet poised to do so at any moment, but they have nevertheless steadfastly refused to give up so much as a penny of their potential profits to lighten the pressure on the economy until and unless they are forced to at the point of a gun. Instead, they are hanging on like Scrooge to every shilling, content to watch the destruction as long as they get theirs.

This is what comes of coddling bankers. They become dependent on govt hand-outs, and because they're so sure they'll always be bailed out, they continue to follow the same flawed policies that got them in trouble in the first place. They can rely on a govt check so they get lazy, shiftless. They stop looking for new work or figuring out how to fix old mistakes, and they just keep on sucking at the govt's teat.

If we don't reform corporate welfare, this drain on the public pocketbook will simply continue until the country and its Treasury are bankrupt.

Reform corporate welfare and get these lazy bums back to work.

Conservative CEO Solves Poverty & Racism: "Get Rid of Rev Wright" (Updated)

One hardly knows what to say about an opinion this stunningly clueless. Perhaps - I'm trying hard to give him the benefit of the doubt - Mr MacDougal has been living in a bubble at the bottom of the ocean since the age of 5. But no such luck. He's an oil man. Been aboveground at least since 1969 when as a venture capitalist, he.... Well, let him tell it since he's so proud he put it in as the very first two grafs of his official bio:

Mr. MacDougal became Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Mark Controls Corporation in September 1969 when he and a group of venture capital investors assumed control of the company. Mark Controls has been a leading manufacturer and installer of building management systems and services, and a manufacturer of flow control equipment for the petroleum, process and power industries.

During Mr. MacDougal’s tenure as CEO, the investors achieved more than a sixteen-fold increase, with the stock rising from $10 per share in 1969 to the equivalent of more than $160 per share in October 1987 (adjusted for splits). Investors experienced growth of over 17% per year compounded (including dividends) over the eighteen-year period. Prior to Mr. MacDougal’s joining the company, Mark Controls lost money in six of the ten preceding years (1960-1969), but then grew to be ranked #687 in the “Fortune 1000” and was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In October 1987, he turned over CEO responsibilities to a long-time partner and became Honorary Chairman of the Board of Mark Controls.

Naturally this history makes him the perfect choice to chair the Illinois Governor’s Task Force on Human Services Reform, his chief claim to fame in this area being that he reduced Illinois' welfare rolls by 87%. He called it "moving them into self-sufficiency" but all he really did was cut them off.

This makes him an expert, I guess, and the Washington Post gave him op-ed space so he could explain to us that the reason for poverty and racism is Obama's buddy, the Rev Wright. Viz:

Consider the corrosive effect Wright and others like him have on their communities as they rob thousands of listeners of the American dream: hope that through their hard work they can have better lives.

***

With powerful rhetoric, Wright has asserted, for instance, that white America sees black women as useful only for their bodies. If this is the message you got from your mentor, would you expect that you could succeed? Would you try very hard, if at all?

***

Through my work with the Illinois governor's task force on human services reform and its efforts to reduce welfare dependency, I have encountered misguided community "leaders" like Wright who tell their followers, for example, that the job market is stacked against them and that the jobs that are available aren't good enough -- that they are entitled to more. The underlying message: You can't win because of who you are, regardless of what you do.

***

I also recall a conversation I had during a visit to the maximum-security prison in Joliet, Ill. As I sat in the library there, talking with three men about why they were incarcerated, one man said: "Look around this room -- almost everybody here is black. This is white man's genocide. You put us in here to keep us down." Where would this 20-something black man, or other relatively uneducated young people, get such an idea? From the vitriol spewed by the Rev. Wrights of this world.

And so on.

This op-ed by an American CEO is a brilliant example of why successful businessmen and loudmouthed, disconnected-from-real-life conservative ideologues should never EVER be put in positions of political power. When it comes to anything except making $$$ and providing simple-minded prescriptions for complicated problems, they're idiots. MacDougal's boneheadedly simplistic explanation for poverty? Why, it's "perceived victimization".

Each year the federal government spends hundreds of billions of dollars -- specifically, more than $10,000 per poor person for welfare, Medicaid, the earned-income tax credit, job training and food stamps. Put another way, taxpayers are doing their share. We need to work together to help people move from dependency to self-sufficiency. No one, especially spiritual leaders who ought to be lifting people up, should provide rationales for escaping individual responsibility by encouraging perceived victimization.

Mr MacDougal, silver birth-spoon clamped tightly between his teeth, is just positive that the reason black people have a tough time is a difficult economy and their own exaggerated sense of themselves as victims brought about by a "dependency" on govt handouts and the "vitriol spewed" by black preachers who are too uppity for their own good. After all, life is tough for everybody.

A community "leader" in Miami's Overtown neighborhood, for instance, told me that he counseled unemployed people not to work on nearby construction projects because racist employers abused them. Pressed for an example of such abuse, he cited an employer's failure to pay overtime for Saturday work. Two blocks away, more than a dozen homeless men were camped out under a bridge. Yet a man who was supposed to be guiding people was counseling against working.

Life isn't fair for people of any skin color.

*sigh* No, Gary. First, he was counseling against working for a rich guy who didn't want to pay them what they'd earned, who probably wanted them to work Saturdays for free, like at Wal-Mart. And second, you asked him for a form of abuse and not paying somebody what you owe them because their skin is the wrong color IS ABUSE. You brain-dead fathead.

What Mr MacDougal needs is a few years getting arrested for DWR (Driving While Rich) and having deals go sour because he has brown eyes instead of the blue preferred by investors and managers. Then he needs to get arrested for driving in the wrong neighborhood and convicted of dope smuggling because the cop who arrests him doesn't care if he's got a prescription for that bottle of pills or not, and neither does the judge or Mr MacDougal's overworked legal aid defense attorney, who pled him guilty on the grounds that even though the police had no proof the drugs were illegal, neither the jury nor the judge is going to believe they weren't because MacDougal is a Scot and the Scottish are always guilty.

But as silly as it is to put a snowball like MacDougal on a panel of "human services" experts, it is a horrendous disservice on the part of the WaPo to give him a whole page to spout off on. Why don't they just hire David Duke to write about how to improve race relations in America and be done with it?

My greatest fear is that Barack Obama is going to see this moron as someone willing to reach across the aisle, someone willing to compromise, someone non-partisan who believes, as does BO himself, that "[a] positive mind-set is at least a start toward success," and put him in the Cabinet at HUD or HEW. You think Alphonso Jackson was a disaster?

Oy.

UPDATE (May 8, '08): TMiss at The Mississippifarian writes a much better and more on-point rant about MacDougal's blockheadedness, and uncovers the secret messages in his op-ed.

Jeez, what kind of community leader tells people not to work for lawbreaking corporate thugs? Just guessing, but this sounds like a $10/hour, no benefits job as a day laborer, breaking your back for less money than the chiropractic bills awaiting you in middle age.

Life isn’t fair for people of any skin color.

Translation: corporate CEOs like me fuck over white people too, so why do blacks think they’re special?

Don't miss the rest.

Homeland Security: "Home of Terrorists in US Is...Boise!"

I kid you not. I can't make this stuff up....

An Army of Rats Desert the Sinking Ship

Uh-oh.

Until now, Shirley Morgan had always been the kind of voter the Republican Party thought it could count on. She comes from a family of staunch Republicans, has a son in the military and has supported Republican presidential candidates ever since she cast her first ballot, for Richard M. Nixon in 1972.

But this year Mrs. Morgan exemplifies a different breed: the Republican crossing over to vote in the Democratic primary. Not only will she mark her ballot for Senator Barack Obama in the May 6 primary here, but she has also been canvassing for him in the heavily Republican suburbs of Hamilton County, just north of Indianapolis — the first time she has ever actively campaigned for a candidate.

“I used to like John McCain, but he’s aligning himself too closely with what Bush did, and that’s just not what I want for this country,” Mrs. Morgan, who is 56, said when asked to explain her rejection of the presumptive Republican nominee.

Dum dah dum-dum.

Local Republican Party leaders in Indiana concede the attraction of the Democratic candidates to some of their party members. And interviews with roughly a dozen Republican voters in central Indiana suggest that they are driven mainly by concerns about the economy, with discontent over Bush administration policies driving their involvement in the Democratic race.

“Much as I like John McCain as a war hero, I am fearful he does not have the depth of experience to fix the economy,” said Darlene Boatman, 62, a just-retired sales clerk who favors Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. “We’re all struggling here to make ends meet. I haven’t had health care coverage in about 10 years and jobs are fewer and farther between. The economy is my biggest concern, and I think Hillary has the best understanding of how to pull off the recovery we need.”

GOP-er? Get your lifeboat registration while they're still available.