Docudharma - Recommended Diaries

I'd rather be with you

Nada Lemming — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:16:25 GMT

The last few months have been very emotional personally. Waiting to see if I'm going to lose my home, get a day gig, lose the UI, maybe having the music career start back up, and watching my dog get old enough to have to make that final decision, it's been a roller coaster.

Add to that emotional baggage is the final straw for me with democrats, Obama, and last but not least, the GOS,all coming together last week in a craptastic display of hypocrisy, skullduggery, tomfoolery, and plain stupidity.

I've decided I'd rather be with you.
I could go on and on about how those other women mistreated me, but see, baby, that's why I love you so much. I don't even need to explain it to you. You already get it.

But since you asked, I will explain it a bit. See, after all these months of trying to believe, to suspend disbelief, she cheated on me again. Well, they both did. OK, all three of them. I call them the three sistahs of the apocalypse: Nancy, Harry, and Barack.

The thing is, I could see it coming, I knew they'd do it, and just because of a little slap n tickle in the back seat a year ago, I thought we could create magic again together, this one last time. I forgot that bitch Markos, what a backstabber that girl is! Whooo Hooo! Don't mess with her! So while it may have seemed that I was out of your life, I was thinking about you all along. Every time those other girls and I made Sweet Sweet Love.

I'd rather be with you: Bootsy Collins

Bootsy Collins - I'd Rather Be with You - The funniest bloopers are right here

I may be more foul than you would like, and I don't always follow the golden rule. And I wander sometimes. But I know what side of the bread the butter is on.

But one thing is always true when I settle here, I always feel at home. Not that you're the other woman, I left her today. Really! I mean it this time! She meant little to me, despite the word count and suggestive pictures on my Blackberry.

Updated for punctuation after hitting 'save' too early. Sorry for that, too, baby.

Life and Death and Consciousness

Edger — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 03:06:48 GMT

I woke up very early this morning, as I usually do, had a cup of coffee and something to eat, read and replied to a few essays and comments here, and then again as I usually do, went back to bed and slept for an hour or so.

It's become a habit for me to do this because I really enjoy the extremely lucid dreams I have while sleeping when I'm already rested and after eating.

The dreams I usually have at that time are so lucid they are literally worlds and realities indistinguishable in quality and "realness" from the world of daily life. I converse with people in them, can bang my knee against a wall, pet the cat, slam my fingers in a desk drawer, listen to music, in short they are experiential worlds as real as any other. As "this" one - the one we each find ourselves in at this moment.

Dreams, in other words, are real. They exist. They are as real as anything else.

So, "what is real", or "what is reality"?

Who knows?
There I was trundling along in my dream talking to 4 people, smoking a cigarette, and waiting for a cab we had called to arrive. The sun was shining on a warm summer day, there was traffic driving by on the road outside the building we were in, the parking lot was about 70 percent full.

The cab finally arrived and I watched it turn off the street and come across the parking lot towards us as I also watched the 4 people I was with walk down the stairs and across the lot towards it.

I started down the stairs, went out the door and walked across the lot myself. A couple of birds flew through my field of vision and landed in the trees at the edge of the road. A dog wandered by crossing my path as I walked towards the cab that the other people were sitting in by this time.

I got to the car, walked around to the side of it, reached out my hand and grasped the door handle, opened the door......

And was lying in bed with my eyes closed listening to traffic noises from down the street and feeling the pillow under my head and and the bed covers on me and the cool morning breeze come through the open window beside my bed, and Magic stretching and meowing quietly in her sleep on the chair in my room.

The transition was that fast, and I thought to myself "what just happened?"

WHAT just happened? The traffic noises and the cat sounds and the breeze and everything else I was now aware of had been there all along while I existed in that other just as real world that we call a "dream", but I was not aware of them until I suddenly was aware of them.

Did any of it exist? Most of us would I think say yes, but until I became suddenly aware of it it didn't exist as far as I knew.

How much of life are we not aware of at all until we are suddenly aware of it?

What does it mean to be aware?

What does it mean to become aware?

How many "realities" are we unaware of?

Is physical "reality" dependent on "awareness"?

Who opened the car door? Did he get in?

Story Untold

Nightprowlkitty — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:22:22 GMT

So we lost, didn't we.

Sure, there's no HCR bill signed yet, but we know the game has been fixed and we've been sucker punched.

Bad enough to get screwed by the Republicans for so many years. It's irritating, very irritating to get screwed by who we thought were our fellow Democrats.

So this is being a US citizen in the year Twenty-Ten.

Huh.

Even trying to be informed seems an impossible task, much less changing everything.

And to make it even more surreal, the very institutions, the members of which are riding a high tide of obscene wealth and power, are also crumbling as I type this.

It's chaotic!

So I look at these kids, these four kids who have wallked what they call the "Trail of Dreams."

These are four undocumented kids who are demonstrating how they are coming out of the shadows (you know, those shadows that 12 million of our brothers and sisters live in, over 2 million of them children).

These are their names and a little P.R. information about them for the Trail of Dreams website. First a joint statement by the four:

We are four students from Florida - Felipe Matos, Gaby Pacheco, Carlos Roa, and Juan Rodriguez - who were brought to the United States by our families when we were young. This is the only country we have known as home. We have the same hopes and dreams as other young people, and have worked hard to excel in school and contribute to our communities. But because of our immigration status, we've spent our childhoods in fear and hiding, unable to achieve our full potential. We walk in order to share our stories and to call on our leaders to fix the system that forces people like us into the shadows, stripping us of the opportunity to participate meaningfully in society.

And here's some blurbs about them individually::

Felipe Matos, 23
Felipe is ranked one of the top 20 community college students in the United States. In addition to his educational excellence, Felipe also found time to serve his peers as student government president of Miami Dade College. Born to a single mother in the slums of Brazil, Felipe was sent at age 14 to the United States, where he first dreamed of becoming a teacher. But though he has the intelligence and drive, his immigration status has prevented him from achieving this dream. Felipe has been accepted by Duke University and other top colleges, but he is barred from getting financial aid. He is currently studying economics in community college, but still hopes that one day he will be able to teach young people, because he believes education is the key to pulling people out of poverty.
Gaby Pacheco, 25
Gaby was declared a "gifted student" at a very young age and has since excelled at all levels of school. In the process of securing three education degrees at Miami Dade College, she has realized what she wants to do with her many talents and education: use music therapy as a communication tool to teach autistic children and adults. Gaby's parents brought her to the U.S. from Ecuador in 1993, when she was 7 years old. In 2006, federal immigration agents raided her home, and Gaby's family has been fighting deportation ever since. She has an AA in Music Ed. AS in Early Childhood education, and a BA in Special Education K-12.
Carlos Roa, 22
Carlos was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for his country: joining the military in a time of war. But like many other undocumented students, Carlos could not realize this or any other dream - a college education, a job as an architect - because of his immigration status. Carlos was brought to the United States by his family when he was only 2 years old. High school was difficult for him and, after his mother died from a 10-year battle with cancer, he began searching for community. He wrote an impassioned letter about how lost he felt, posted it on websites, and shared it with everyone in his network. In that process he found his fellow walkers, who helped him get into Miami Dade College where he is studying architecture. While happy to be in school, Carlos still worries that as an undocumented student he won't be able to put his education to use in a good job.
Juan Rodriguez, 20
Like many young people in Florida, the home of NASA, Juan grew up dreaming of becoming an aerospace engineer. His family brought him to the U.S. on a tourist visa from Colombia when he was 6 in response to threats to their safety in their homeland. Juan was a top student in school, but got discouraged when he realized that no matter how good his grades were or how many hours of community service he did, he could never realize his dream. Last year, Juan's step-mother helped him to finally become a U.S. resident. As the only walker that has legal residence and as a formerly undocumented student, he feels a special responsibility to help people understand both the challenges and the opportunities facing students like him. His new dream is to earn a degree in sociology from the University of Chicago so he can go to work improving communities and helping people directly.

These four 20-somethings represent millions of people, not just immigrants and their families, some documented, some not, but also organizers from around the country and the world and anyone who feels solidarity in their hearts and minds with basic human rights and human dignity over tyranny and injustice. It's a tent so big it makes the Democratic Party tent seem like a broom closet.

These are the people who, although completely disenfranchised from equal rights in the USA's society and culture, are the true source of hope in our world.

They have hope when right now I think hope is a big laugh.

There are so many of them!

If I look at them instead of at our corporation-owned politicians and their willing insiders, operatives and ignoramuses, the view is ... very different.

Their travels will culminate in the big D.C. rally on March 21 (there's a badge up on the upper righthand corner if you want further info). You can check out their interactive map and blog here .

Their walk takes them from Florida through Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and then to D.C.

They've already met President Obama, who was very encouraging to them.

So they have hope.

What they're asking for is pitifully inadequate and humbling to contemplate. They're willing to undergo stringent requirements most of us would shun, just to become citizens, to come out of the shadows.

And yet when I look at them rather than at our crumbling institutions and the liars who try to hide that reality, I feel just fine. They are, I guess, the healing antidote to the lame astroturf Sunsteinian confederacy of ignorance called the "coffee-party". LOL.

This is an essay which comes to no conclusion ... because the story is still untold.

HCR - Tiny whispered question in the dark.

AndyS In Colorado — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 03:24:05 GMT

This might be a short diary, and I hope you will forgive me.

You see, one thing bothers me. Columbo style, you might say. You might say it sticks in my craw. Makes me scratch my head in puzzlement. But in order for me to ask it in the most expansive possible fashion you might have to bear with me while I circle, apparently aimlessly, around to my question..

We see these problems in our country. Some of these problems revolve around accountability, others account to a systemic shafting of the middle class, and still others revolve around political will.

We have a country in which a Democratic Senator backtracks endlessly on basic oversight regulation for people who potentially stole or defrauded the American Middle Class out of billions or perhaps trillions of dollars. Yet this is the same country that will have bespectacled IRS Agents showing up at a car wash with threats and demands for 4 cents in back taxes.

(HT/Colorado Is the Shiznit).

We have a country in which the Attorney General's Office of the United States of America will spend lawyers, briefs, and endless uncounted dollars making sure that two people with the same dangly bits can't possibly join their lives together in a manner that might make them eligible for one cent of government benefits -- benefits their taxes paid for.

Yet we have this SAME country where, when even supposedly "respected" mortgage companies defraud millions and millions of home owners, nothing, apparently can be done -- our government, we are led to believe, is utterly helpless to hold them accountable.

We know that accountability does still exist in this country, for some people.

We know, for example, that if I were to go out, with a finger in my jacket, and hold up a liquor store for $50, I would be going to prison for a long long time.

Yet we have this country, that whispers, siren like in our ear -- "Just be a BIGGER criminal. Steal MORE. Then they won't put you in prison, they'll promote you to Secretary of the Treasury."

So, to my question .. I almost forgot!
You see, I am like 99% of Americans. I know what I read on the blogs, and I know what I'm told on TV, though, unlike many of those Americans, I know that what to believe and what not is an exercise in mass correlation.

We are being told that it's a done deal, that we need to pass "Health Care Reform" no matter how flawed it is.

Among other things, we are being told that they can and will fix it later. We are being told that something is better than nothing. I will believe this as soon as you tell me that ungulates have the capability to levitate, but let's say I believe this.

You see, among the more fatuous, and hard to understand, selling points for a bill that funnels billions of taxpayer moneys to insurance companies that commit fraud, is that there will be tough new regulations on what they can do.

They won't be able to charge egregious money anymore for junk insurance, we are told. They won't be able to deny people coverage for pre-existing conditions, they won't be able to drop people when they get sick.

Sounds good.

So, really, my only question is,

"Yeah? And who is going to make them?"

But on the other hand we have millions of Americans being told, you must buy insurance or else. And of course, if we can't afford it (according to the flawed ideas of the government about who's poor and who's merely "not well off"), well, then we'll get subsidies! Paid for by whom? By the rich? Don't make me laugh. These subsidies are going to be paid for by people very little less poor than the people to whom the subsidies are going.

Now I want to ask a "past performance is a virtual guarantee of future results" type of question:

When it comes to whether the government will enforce these putative and "tough" regulations of the murder by spreadsheet people, will anyone go to jail? If they get fined for not complying with these tough new regulations, will anyone even notice? Will any enforcement be done that the insurance companies, using their paid lackeys in Congress, will not stop if it gets in any way onerous?

On the other hand, when people start getting fined for not buying insurance, do you really think the IRS is not going to penalize the average everyday little American who can't afford it?

Pass the bill, Obama and Pelosi and the Democrats in Congress say, and it'll be great. Well, I wonder. Where accountability in this country is distorted and the worst white collar criminal miscreants are rewarded for their crimes, while most everyday Americans cannot escape the most vicious and punitive accountability no matter how mildly they fuck up, are they really so confident that it won't backfire? How could they be.

This is where Teabaggers come from. A government that is all about making the rich richer, and protecting them from all accountability, while pushing accountability downhill on all who peruse the concept.

Democrats have a basic misunderstanding with the nature of the American electorate at this time. Voters do not make what Democrats think of as "rational" decisions based on bad or worse. They make decisions based on questions that used to be put very succinctly in elections of yore.

Questions like "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?"

If you pass a Health Insurance Bailout Bill with punitive mandatory orders for ordinary Americans to pay money to people they despise, even with the best intentions .. that enforcement action on the other side won't be there. Because it isn't, and we have seen it. It's not there with Goldman Sachs, it's not there with AIG, it's not there with Wall Street in General.

Congress could even have the best possible intentions in passing a piece of shit bill, thinking it would be better than nothing .. but when these people get off scot free while the average American suffers, due to lack of executive accountability, it won't matter if they did it with the best intentions.

If that happens, and we know it will, for good or ill, whether wisely or not, the American people will kick your asses to the curb. Hard.

And how many forms am I going to have to fill out, and how many years am I going to wait, to get my subsidy if I just can't afford it?

Obama to veto intelligence budget if FBI Amerithrax case questioned.

Compound F — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:53:30 GMT

No one is satisfied with the FBI investigation into the anthrax terrorism case following on the heels of 9/11. Not Congress, not the National Academy of Sciences, not Lawrence Livermore Labs, not Sandia Labs, not the most prestigious scientific journal in the world, Nature, not Dr. Meryl Nass, not Glenn Greenwald, and not me.

Bush-hating Obama-bots, please explain why Obama wants to quash any new investigations into Amerithrax. With such determination that he would deny funding to the entire intelligence budget. Golly, I thought we were still in a state of national emergency concerning terrorism.

The terrorist threat that led to the declaration on September 14, 2001, of a national emergency continues. For this reason, I have determined that it is necessary to continue in effect after September 14, 2009, the national emergency with respect to the terrorist threat.

Obama will take away funding from all intelligence agencies just to prevent this case from being further investigated. Unprecedented transparency in government, my ass.

March 15 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama probably would veto legislation authorizing the next budget for U.S. intelligence agencies if it calls for a new investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks, an administration official said.
A proposed probe by the intelligence agencies' inspector general "would undermine public confidence" in an FBI probe of the attacks "and unfairly cast doubt on its conclusions," Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a letter to leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence committees.

And why the fuck is Peter Orzag of OMB even commenting on this? No one can now claim that terrorism is a budgetary waste, not after we have re-committed ourselves to inordinately expensive Bush-era war policies and re-declared national emergency states. Did Peter Orzag suddenly develop expert biological insights into bio-terrorism?

Maybe we can no longer afford "to keep Americans safe" from bio-terrorism, because of stupid wars and bailing out capitalist crooks. If so, just say so. We'll understand. We'll buy some fucking duct-tape and plastic.

Nope, doesn't smell like dead rats to me. We're officially back in "black helicopters" territory.
Update

I suppose Obama will denounce the Fox News story (Not a fucking chance):

Anthrax Letter Scientist 'Obsessed' With Bondage, Sorority

The government scientist blamed for the 2001 anthrax attacks was a secret cross-dresser who cultivated an obsession with bondage and blindfolding as well as the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, recently released FBI documents show.

Sweet tap-dancing jesus, forgive us for our trespasses.

Obama forced to pay attention to Dennis Kucinich

FreeSociety — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:08:37 GMT

Well..well.well. Guess who Barack Obama is finally paying attention to? Congressman Dennis Kucinich. Only not necessarily in a good way.

First, Obama chose the State of Ohio as his staged photo-op site for his last public Health Care Rally (apart from D.C. speeches), and guess who was onboard Air-Force 1? Dennis Kucinich. I'll bet Kucinich hasn't even been invited on Air Force 1 perhaps more than 2 or 3 times in his entire career.

But, then Obama put a plant in the audience to yell out "Vote Yes" right on cue, when Obama called out Congressman Kucinich's name.

The goal was to make it appear that RahmobombaMonopolyCare is just so overwhelmingly popular with the little people that Kucinich would have no choice but to drop his principled objections to the Corporate bailout bill, or otherwise face mutiny by his own district, and by his own supporters.

Well done bit of stage craft by Obama (he's slick), but the fact remains that progressives do not like this shabby excuse for "reform", once they are told what is in it (IRS forced mandates and enslavement to the Insurance Monopoly), and what is not going to be in it (cost control, competition, medicare expansion, public choice).

Here is the excerpt from the New York Times:

Mr. Obama is trying to use his presidential muscle and powers of persuasion to bring several Ohio Democrats around to voting for the health care bill.
One is Representative John Boccieri, a freshman who voted no last year when the House passed a bill that faltered in the Senate; his district is a short 15-minute drive from here, and yet he did not show up for Monday's rally. Another is Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, whose district includes Strongsville.
He caught a ride to Cleveland with Mr. Obama aboard Air Force One, but has said he is noncommittal about the bill that the Senate ultimately passed, which is now back before the House.
"Vote yes!" someone in the hall shouted when Mr. Obama introduced Mr. Kucinich.
"Did you hear that, Dennis?" Mr. Obama asked. "I was talking to Dennis Kucinich on the way over here," the president said. "I said: 'You know what? It's been such a long time since we've made government on the side of ordinary working folk, where we did something for them.' "
White House officials said Mr. Obama will spend the rest of the week working to bring votes like Mr. Kucinich's around, through private meetings and telephone calls.
Unlike moderate Democrats who oppose Mr. Obama's plan as too liberal and costly, Mr. Kucinich is opposed because he regards it as too conservative; he favors a single payer, government-run Medicare-for-all plan. In Strongsville on Monday, Mr. Obama made his pitch to the congressman publicly, in front of Mr. Kucinich's constituents, with a working-class appeal that the congressman might find hard to resist.

Now there is one sliver of news in all of this that caught my attention. That is the statement:

"Obama will spend the rest of the week working to bring votes like Mr. Kucinich's around, through private meetings and telephone calls".

Interesting....

I imagine that this means that Obama and Rahm Emanuel will be privately making various threats to Dennis Kucinich, and not making any good faith concessions to the genuine concerns that Kucinich has with the bill itself. This seems to be the modus operandi with Obama: always pressure the "left" to give up and comply with GOP-Lite policies, while not once ever attempting to pressure the Joe Liebermans, the Blanche Lincolns, etc. to move the other way, towards the progressive position.

But Kucinich has Obama now right where he wants him.
His vote has to be earned now, or Obama has to go find other votes somewhere else.

This is exactly the function that a progressive Congressman should be performing. It would be interesting to see if Kucinich's hold out worried Obama so much that he had to make a significant concession somewhere.

But I'm sure Obama will instead just issue threats (and then drop some bombs on Pakistan civilians and children), but Dennis Kucinich is playing out the process correctly here, when no one else will.

Words Mean Things: Fascism

gjohnsit — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:51:08 GMT

Along with "socialism", "fascism" has become one of the right-wing's favorite scare word to describe President Obama.
They use the word fascism with an assortment of other scary adjectives. For instance, we have "liberal fascist", "fascist socialist", "socialist fascist", "socialist/fascist/communist", and my personal favorite, "national socialist fascist communist".
According to one unscientific, online poll, 91% of conservatives were lumping Obama in with "Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin".

The problem for the right-wing is their complete and total ignorance of not only the meaning of the word "fascism", but also of the history surrounding this political and economic movement.

Il Duce, Redux?

The American Spectator jumped the shark and compared Obama directly to Mussolini. What surrounds these charges are what conservatives call "the nationalization of the banks", because that was supposedly how Mussolini started.
What can you say about a group of people that focus on the smallest, most irrelevant point of economics in order to prove a point that is obviously false?

For instance, Hillyer says "It first started with the take-over of the banks". Hillyer seems to have forgotten that Mussolini did a few things before that. Such as the March on Rome, i.e. Mussolini's de facto coup.
Has Obama organized a paramilitary organization of Blackshirts and launched a coup? And wasn't it President Bush that originally intervened in the banks, not Obama?

These are all rather simple and obvious mistakes by the right-wing and can be laughed off as simple ignorance of history. The real problem is that the right-wing doesn't seem to have any real understanding of what fascism is. They use it interchangeably with socialism, communism, atheism, and any other word that scares them.
Words mean things. If they didn't then you might as well be speaking random gibberish or "speaking in tongues". We can't have a real discussion unless we have an agreement on what the words actually mean.

Fortunately, there is a clear, historical precedence for fascism. So we can look at their actions and policies to see what defines fascism.

Qualifying a word

A lot of right-wingers like to equate fascism with socialism because the Nazis called themselves National Socialists. My reply to that is if self-imposed labels were "proof" of anything, then East Germany during the Cold War was a Democratic Republic, rather than the totalitarian, communist, puppet state that we remember it being.
Someone can label themselves anything they want to, especially politicians. It doesn't have to have any relationship with reality.

So if labels don't mean anything, then what does? My answer is that you judge a movement by three things: it's enemies, it's allies, and most of all, it's actions.

Enemies and Allies

The first Nazi concentration camp was at Dachau. The first 200 prisoners at Dachau were communists.

Dachau was not set up as an extermination camp to murder the Jews, but rather as a camp for political prisoners, mainly Communists and Social Democrats, who were opposed to the Fascist regime of the Nazis.

In August 1922, just a few months before the March on Rome, Mussolini's Blackshirts crushed an anti-fascist general strike. Mussolini had already made his opinions of the left-wing very clear.

"We declare war on socialism, not because it is socialist, but because it has opposed nationalism...."
- Benito Mussolini, 1921

It's true that Mussolini was once a socialist, but then Ronald Reagan was once a New Deal Democrat. The question isn't what they once were, but what they became.

At first, the Fascists [PNF] were concentrated in Milan and a few other cities. They gained ground quite slowly, between 1919 and 1920; not until after the scare, brought about by the workers "occupation of the factories" in the late summer of 1920 did fascism become really widespread. The industrialists began to throw their financial support to it. Moreover, toward the end of 1920, fascism began to spread into the countryside, bidding for the support of large landowners, particularly in the area between Bologna and Ferrara, a traditional stronghold of the Left, and scene of frequent violence. Socialist and Catholic organizer of farm hands in that region, Venezia Giulia, Tuscany, and even distant Apulia, were soon attacked by [Black Shirt] squads of Fascists, armed with castor oil, blackjacks, and more lethal weapons. The era of Squadrismo, and nightly expeditions to burn Socialist and Catholic labor headquarters had begun.
- historian Charles F. Delzell

As for Nazi Germany, they were more kind to the word "socialism", and as late as 1941 Hitler was still associating himself with it. However, Hitler kicked out the Black Front in 1930 and exterminated all the remaining leftists from the Nazi party on the Night of the Long Knives in 1934.
Like the fascists in Italy, the Nazis in Germany were given overwhelming support from the rich capitalist industrialists. All of them saw fascism as an effective answer to communism.

Without question, the fascists and communists saw themselves as mortal enemies. In fact, Mussolini met his end at the hands of communists. There was no overlap except for the sole fact that they both believed in using a totalitarian state to achieve their objectives. Their objectives were diametrically opposed and incompatible. There was a clear divide between their friends and allies.
To call someone a "fascist communist" is the equivalent of calling them a "pacifist warmonger" or an "atheist christian". The words make absolutely no sense together.

"If the communist party is the party of revolutionary hope, then fascism, as a mass movement, is the party of counterrevolutionary despair."
- Leon Trotsky

Actions Speaking Louder

While the list of friends and allies is helpful, the actions and policies is where the rubber meets the road.
Hillyer claims that the "first step" of Mussolini was the state financing for the banks. In fact, that didn't happen until 1926. Mussolini came to power in 1922. Starting in 1923 the Italian fascists passed such laws as:

* privatizing the life insurance industry
* suppressing the inheritance tax (aka the Death Tax)
* repealing the luxury tax
* slashing taxes on corporate executives by half
* opposed the municipalization of industries
* privatized the state telecommunication system
* suppressed all independent labor unions and outlawed strikes

In other words, the early fascists of Italy carried out most of the current Republican agenda.
Starting in 1927 the fascist policies turned more towards big government work programs. These include the draining of the Pontine Marshes, massive military spending, and building railroads, bridges, and dams. Tariffs were raised to protect domestic industry.

More than anything, fascists believed in corporatism and nationalism. To fascists, whatever they considered to be good for the nation trumped all other concerns. Individuals were just parts in a great machine, to used and disposed of as the state saw fit.

"The basic feature of our economic theory is that we have no theory at all."
- Adolf Hitler

Unlike the Italian fascists, the German Nazis were not nearly as focused on economics. Early on, the Nazis had many leftists-sounding proposals. Once in power they carried out many Keynesian-type public works programs - such as building the Autobahn and massive military spending.
However, like the Italian fascists, they immediately outlawed independent labor unions and banned strikes. Large companies were favored over small businesses.

The government pursued economic policies that maximized the profits of its business allies, and, in exchange, business leaders supported the government's political and military goals.[70] While other Western capitalist countries strove for state ownership. Nazi Germany transferred public ownership and public services into the private sector.

On the political side, fascism has contempt for democracy, despite manipulating it to get power. Fascism embraces violence against its enemies both internal and external, and takes a masculine, warrior mentality towards most issues.
Fascism believes that the proletariat is incapable of effectively ruling itself, and instead believed in rule by a merit-based aristocracy.

I'm not going to examine the policies of Italy and Germany after 1939 because once a nation goes to all-out war then its policies also trend towards the extreme. For instance, in both WWI and WWII America went to a system of rationing and suppression of suspected dissidents. These steps would not have happened without a state of war, and I believe that some of the steps Italy and Germany made after 1939 can be attributed to the state of war.

Being right for the wrong reasons

The conservatives in America have so many things wrong in their attempts to label Obama a fascist.
They ignore historical precedents. They take events out of context. They rewrite recent history (in this case, accusing Obama for subsidizing the banks rather than Bush). They even ignore commonly used definitions of the words.

Because of all these obvious fallacies its easy to ignore the irony, and the significance, that their comparison involving banking and fascism has some merit.

After the financial system collapsed in Italy in 1932, the government bailed out the banking system again by buying up its assets at inflated values through the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction. This has some resemblance to how the TARP program was originally designed to function. These assets were mostly businesses that were unable to pay their debts. By 1935, three quarters of all Italian business relied on the government for funding.

It's interesting to note that the Italian government didn't become a dominate factor in its economy by design, but by bailing out its failing state banks. The fascist government didn't nationalize any company.
What instead happened was a partnership between the capitalist companies and the government. Profits would be shared, but the taxpayer would suffer all the risk, much like the recently created PPIP Program is supposed to function for Wall Street.

Only through total and complete ignorance of history have the conservatives been able to prove their point in reverse.
Their warning that the Wall Street bailout was an indication that we are drifting too far to the left - and to fascism, is actually an indication that we are drifting too far to the right - and to fascism.

Coroner's report on Lehman: Terrifying fraud.

Compound F — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 04:53:16 GMT

Dylan Ratigan & Eliot Spitzer plainly explain the fraud that occurred at Lehman. Ratigan hands Spitzer collateral (a trash can), and Spitzer hands Ratigan cash. Lehman "pawned" its garbage in exchange for short-term loans to spruce up the quarterly books with "more cash, less trash." This is the "repo 105" fraud everyone is talking about since the release of the bankruptcy examiner's report. Please watch:

CEO Dick Fuld alone made half a billion bucks off this fraud. He remains a free man today. As Spitzer said, the accounting firm Ernst & Young, the Fed, and the Treasury were also involved in this fraud.

Ratigan: "This report comes just short of suggesting this is by no means an accident but instead one of the greatest crimes ever perpetrated by a group of people, and enabled by the US government."
And Spitzer concludes: "there is no doubt civil cases will be brought. We had a failure of CEO, the CFO, the accountants, and indeed the regulators, the Fed and the Treasury, that were inside these banks, and the question has to be asked: where were they?"

UCSD school of law professor Frank Portnoy says the "repo 105" fraud chapter of the bankruptcy examiner's report on Lehman is not even the worst revelation; rather that the Valuation of Assets section is "500 pages of utterly terrifying reading."

But an even more troubling section of the Lehman report is not Volume 3 on Repo 105. It is Volume 2, on Valuation. The Valuation section is 500 pages of utterly terrifying reading. It shows that, even eighteen months after Lehman's collapse, no one - not the bankruptcy examiner, not Lehman's internal valuation experts, not Ernst and Young, and certainly not the regulators - could figure out what many of Lehman's assets and liabilities were worth. It shows Lehman was too complex to do anything but fail.

In short, Lehman's own in-house "product control team," i.e., quality control accountants, were not able to put value on Lehman's assets and liabilities because they couldn't figure out the math. Instead, they punted, and used the friggin' trader's models to do the valuations on CDOs.

So much for independent vetting. Portnoy continues, astonished:

My favorite section describes the valuation of Ceago, Lehman's largest CDO position. My corporate finance students at the University of San Diego School of Law understand that you should use higher discount rates for riskier projects. But the Valuation section of the report found that with respect to Ceago, Lehman used LOWER discount rates for the riskier tranches than for the safer ones:
The discount rates used by Lehman's Product Controllers were significantly understated. As stated, swap rates were used for the discount rate on the Ceago subordinate tranches. However, the resulting rates (approximately 3% to 4%) were significantly lower than the approximately 9% discount rate used to value the more senior S tranche. It is inappropriate to use a discount rate on a subordinate tranche that is lower than the rate used on a senior tranche. (page 556)

It's one thing to have product controllers who aren't "quants"; it's quite another to have people in crucial risk management roles who don't understand present value.

Lehman's risk management team didn't understand "risk." The bankruptcy examiner found that many of the "asset tranches" were worth one-thirtieth (1/30th) of what Lehman claimed they were worth. Think about that in the context of Congress forcing mark-to-model rules on FASB, or rather, mark-to-fantasy rules that are in use today at all the bigger, failer institutions.

Portnoy concludes:

The Repo 105 section of the Lehman report shows that Lehman's balance sheet was fiction. That was bad. The Valuation section shows that Lehman's approach to valuing assets and liabilities was seriously flawed. That is worse. For a levered trading firm, to not understand your economic position is to sign your own death warrant.

Capitol Hill and the White House have zero appetite for any real financial reform or prosecution of criminal conduct, because it would reveal a horror show. The Fed and Treasury are up to their necks. Congress says that swift financial reform is "unrealistic," what with all that great health care passing, and such. Don't expect anything "Dodd-acious" to happen.

Fear of facing the real horror show of the American Way of Life is the existential crisis in everything we do. One way or another, the death warrants are signed and sitting in the vaults.

I'll give Ilargi the last word:

This present bag of Al Capones, except for a few carefully selected scapegoats (Dick Fuld: Tar and Feathers!), will never be brought to justice, because Eliott Ness wouldn't stand a chance in today's America, or London, Paris, or Tokyo. We just would like to believe he would, so much so that that very belief is actually aiding and abetting both the crimes and perpetrators. We don't want real life, we want the hologram. We tell ourselves: "but there's nothing I can do about it", and we use that statement as an excuse to let people like Dick Fuld and Tim Geithner walk all over our children's graves.
There's times when I think that perhaps the best thing that could happen to us is for our lives and dreams to be thrown off a cliff and see what survives the landing, we can't seem to wake up in any other way. You know, the sort of thing that sounds good in theory. But I can clearly see the suffering that would come with it, and I don't like it. Not one bit. Whatever we do, though, we must make sure of one thing. That we find back our moral fiber, and act on it.

Update: While I was writing this diary Bobswern posted a diary on Kos about some brewing Dodd-acious-ness. Bob does good work, but the US government has been utterly impervious to any real reform, and this attempt at "independence" of the Fed is just a drop in the bucket.

Update 2 good to resist, Greek edition:

A sane society might recognize the conflict of interest between the power-aspirations of a money-lending class and the public welfare -- doubtless the inspiration behind Jefferson's warning that banks are "more dangerous to liberty than standing armies." It is a very good question why matters of public finance should remain within the private sphere at all, even if this is beyond the scope of any one nation to resolve.

Why everyone here should support a Republican for Congress in MD-8

rossl — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 01:45:18 GMT

After the mess of the Bush years and the Republican idiocy in Congress, it's hard to imagine a situation in which a progressive would really, strongly support a Republican. But today is the day for me.

Murray Hill is just more than the typical candidate. Murray Hill represents something more than anyone could hope to represent. Young, an interesting background, and new to politics - these days, who wants to reelect an incumbent?

If you're not convinced, join me below the fold. I think even the most partisan Democrats out there will be convinced that Murray Hill is a great candidate.
Oh, did I forget to mention that Murray Hill is a corporation?

Murray Hill, Inc. has decided to run for Congress in the Republican primary in Maryland's eighth congressional district. This is just about as good as when those ficus plants ran for Congress.

Says the Washington Post:

After the Supreme Court declared that corporations have the same rights as individuals when it comes to funding political campaigns, the self-described progressive firm took what it considers the next logical step: declaring for office...
..."This really wasn't part of a marketing plan for ourselves," Hensal said. "It's an opportunity to see this court opinion play out to its logical conclusion."
In the meantime, Murray Hill is looking to franchise -- and found its first taker: Computer Umbrella of Sterling. The company is planning to run in Virginia's 10th Congressional District.

After all, if a corporation has the right to spend unlimited money due to their personhood, then why can't they actually run for office. I mean, if a person has a lot of money, they get listened to - and voted for, if they desire - even if their ideas are crap. Just ask Karl Marx about that.

So I'm not actually going to support Murray Hill Inc. beyond this diary, but this is a great idea. It's straight out of Ralph Nader's new novel, in which a bunch of corporations run for office.

The poor guy might not even be able to get on the ballot. You've got to be 25 to get into Congress and a registered Republican to get into their primary. But corporations get special rights already, so why not just give this aspect of elections to them, as well?

And check out their new ad.

Thoughts?

The World They Set On Fire

Rusty1776 — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 22:30:49 GMT

The plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty used to say, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

Now it says, "Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here."

Why did everything go to Hell so fast?

driftglass knows why, we ll know why . . .

We got the Bush Regime, arguably the most incompetent, corrupt and outright-treasonous Administration in American history. A regime so reckless, savage and gleefully bestial that it made the career-Nixon-hating Hunter Thompson actually pine for the good old days of Tricky Dick: "I miss Nixon. Compared to these Nazis we have in the White House now, Richard Nixon was a flaming liberal."
And, like Nixon, it is more than likely that not a single one of the smirking traitors who nearly wrecked this country will ever spend a day in jail. Instead they remain lodged in our flesh like so many ricin pellets, oozing their poison into our national bloodstream, waddle from one fawning audience to another, worming their way into major media outlets, or dispatching their degenerate children and underlings out into the world the keep their poison pumping.
They soiled our good name, bankrupted the country, shredded the Constitution and kicked the crutches out from under the global economy on their way out the door, and while it is sometimes hard to focus on them through the flames of the world they set on fire, we must.

America could have had justice.

But America didn't get justice.

America got Hopey McChange, who said he wants to look forward, not backward. Who said there must be no "retribution", no "vengeance", no "payback", who said the era of "divisive partisanship" must end.
I don't have to translate that for you, progressives have learned the hard way how to translate Hopey McChange Language into actual words with actual meanings. You know what he meant. So do the war criminals who set Iraq on fire, the Wall Street Ponzi Schemers who set the global economy on fire, the DOJ fascists who set the rule of law on fire, the Diebold criminals who napalmed the 2004 Election into a firestorm of fraud, the torturers at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo and hell only knows where else who torched the Geneva Conventions to ashes, and most of all, Bush and Cheney, who handed out blowtorches for 8 years to every halfwit RePug appointee in the entire federal government and smirked while democracy in America went up in flames.

Those criminals all heard him. They heard Hopey say no "retribution", no "vengeance", no "payback". They knew what that meant, they knew exactly what that meant, it meant they're home free, it meant they're above the law and always will be, it meant they can lodge even deeper into our flesh like so many ricin pellets, ooze even more of their poison into our national bloodstream, escalate their rampage against democracy, against human rights, against equality, against the truth, against reality itself.

What else needs to be said? About Hopey McChange. About his moral cowardice. About his obscene refusal to defend the Constitution and the rule of law. About his complicity in wars of aggression, in torture, in massive financial crimes against humanity.

The truth has indicted him. The truth has convicted him. Nothing can exonerate him. His guilt is manifest. Speeches cannot wash it away, charm cannot wash it away, the scheming of Rahm cannot wash it away, the prattling of Gibbs and Axelrod and Plouffe cannot wash it away, the clapping of Obamabots cannot wash it away, nothing can wash it away.

Anyone here, anyone on any progressive blog, any progressive anywhere who will not support a primary challenge in 2012 against Obama needs to walk away from their computer right now, find the nearest mirror, and look in it. They'll see a craven hypocrite looking back at them, a fraud, a "pragmatic" Russian Roulette player with a gun in their hand and a Lesser Evil bullet in every chamber.

Progressives pumping Lesser Evil bullets into their heads every election doesn't seem to be a very effective strategy. Progressives who have so many Lesser Evil bullet holes in their heads they need a calculator to count them all will call me a radical, but I think progressives should start pumping bullets into the Two-Party system instead. Truth Bullets. Reality Bullets. Third Party Bullets.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake and Wild Wild Left )

For Your Consideration: Attacking Back

TheMomCat — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 18:42:41 GMT

Jane Hamsher, again, says it quite eloquently when she calls out MoveOn.org for attacking Dennis Kucinich for sticking with his promise to not vote for a HCR bill that did not have a Public Option. Rep. Kucinich is being attack by the so-called "liberal" blogosphere that has now veered fo far right that it is unrecognizable to true progressives like Ms. Hamsher.

Last August, progressive groups including MoveOn, DFA and blogs across the country came together to raise over $430,000 for 65 members of Congress who pledged to vote against any health care bill that doesn't have a public option.
Now every excuse made by the President and Congress for not including a public option has crumbled. MoveOn is against Kucinich for keeping that promise, and far from supporting members of Congress who keep that pledge, the unions are them with primaries.
If George Bush had tried to pass a health care bill that was the worst blow to the right to choose since the passage of the Hyde Amendment 35 years ago, liberal groups would be screaming bloody murder.

I think this says quite a bit about the hypocrisy of the "Left"

I said "I find it odd that when it's down to Joe Lieberman's one vote, everybody shrugs their shoulders and says 'oh well, we just have to write the bill Joe wants, because what can you do, one vote.' And when it's Dennis Kucinich's one vote, which represents what 80% of the American people want, it's "lets crush Dennis Kucinich so we can give Joe Lieberman everything he wants." Somehow the argument keeps switching so that the corrupt deal that the White House negotiated with the pharmaceutical companies gets passed no matter what."

MoveOn, DFA and the "left" blogosphere are the new right.

Join Jane Hamsher's call to those members of congress who said they would not vote for this bill unless there was a public option, protects a womans' reproductive rights and show support for Dennis Kucinich, a true liberal with the guts to protect us from corporatists, the health care insurance and pharmaceutical companies companies.

65 Reps Took the Public Option Pledge: Will They Keep Their Word?

Pro-Choice Members of Congress Must Protect the Right to Choose in Health Care

Stand up for Fire Dog Rep. Kucinich

Help show Washington that it pays to stand up to corporate power. Donate $5 and let Fire Dog Dennis Kucinich know we've got his back for keeping his pledge to oppose any bill without a public option.

Do Or Die!

gottlieb — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:25:12 GMT

Our backs are against the wall. They laugh in our faces. They spit on our lives. They strip us of our dignity and scare us into servitude.

They break every promise. They lie through their teeth. They hate, they scorn and ridicule anyone not like them; rich, privileged, pampered and entitled. They claim to speak for us and represent us and work for our common good. But it is all the smoke and mirrors of backroom deals and pacts with the devil.

They have stolen our birthright and murdered our future. They have robbed us deaf, dumb and blind. They have left us for dead by the side of the road after they've trampled us with limos and battle-tanks. They have sucked us dry down to the marrow and demand we grind our bones into to dust to make potions, elixirs and brews to finance their eternal life of egregious vainglory.

They have taken freedom of choice and turned it into do or die. The last choice.

What will we do?

To fight back, we have to know our alien enemy. They are not like us. They do not feel what we feel. They do not feel our pain. They are cold-blooded killers. To them empathy is a number. To them we are an uncountable mass equation which requires no answer but force of arms. We are cockroaches overrun the plantation and their solution is extermination. To them there are two kinds of human beings; cockroaches and slaves. One is to be stomped under boot and the other worked to death with heavy labor and prison rations.

They have names; we have numbers. They have faces beamed into our propaganda machines with bright, sunny smiles full of satisfied self-aggrandizement for all they good they do for The People. But the people they mean is their own kind. We are a nameless, faceless mass of ankle-biting, whining, clueless buzzing insects who are unfit for self-government. We have to be herded, coerced and imprisoned within cages of limitation, low expectations and pipe-dreams of liberation by saints and saviors but never through our own efforts. We are meant to wait passively and suffer silently for an absent future.

They are a race of liars. They say one thing and do another. There motto is 'do as I say, not as I do.' They justify genocide in the name of freedom. They justify class-war in the name of self-evident truth. They justify injustice in the name of God.

They are a race of deceivers. Serpents in the garden who promise eternal life as they strangle the life-breath from your soul on the killing ground of despair, poverty, fear and loathing. They say we deserve our plight, our position of weakness, our hopeless situation because we are sinners who made the mistake of being born human into an inhumane world. They say "There but for the grace of God go I" as they step over your rotting corpse of the living dead, but they know there is no grace but that which is taken at the barrel of a gun. There is no God but the one they invented in their own image of greed, gluttony and jealousy.

They are a race of inhuman monsters in sheep's clothing. Predators. Vampires. Fallen angels of old who to this day lie, cheat and steal the souls of men to live on borrowed time. They are a race of hubris who believe they are heroes. They breed tragedy on a biblical scale and call it 'the way things are' or 'the will of God.' Their hands are tied not because they lack will, but because they will not. They make the choice every day to separate themselves into another race of being entirely by the Peterishly proud denial of their humanity. They believe their self-professed intelligence and wisdom raises them above their animal nature but instead drives them further into the image of the beast. Their glib confidence masks a heart of darkness.

So, our first understanding is though they look like us and talk like us and pretend to be one of us, they are not. They are an alien race whose only interest in us is what they can take from us; from money to blood to our soul-breath.

When we drive a stake through their hearts and they scream and cry like us, we cannot allow ourselves to be fooled. These are not monsters like the love-struck King Kong or the addle brained, softhearted Frankenstein. These are cold blooded murdering monsters and it us either us or them.

Indeed, we are the dragon slayers. We are the heroes of renown who fight against the dark powers. Zeus was a tyrant who wanted humankind enslaved in cold ignorance and Prometheus was the hero who gave us fire and knowledge. We are the rebel alliance who fight against the evil empire of corrupt power and recreational evil. We are the children of light who live and love in harmony with all that is, if only we choose. It is our duty and our moral responsibility to weed-out the two-faced creatures who dwell in the halls of power as sycophants and enablers of monstrous agendas. Equally, it is our destiny to vanquish outright monstrous, inhuman power itself and rid the world of alien invaders who cannot appreciate the beauty of life on Earth or enjoy the endless bounty of the creative imagination and the free will to do good which is the grace of God.

The choice is clear - us or them. There is no room for bi-partisanship in the face of evil.

The fight isn't between political parties but between political parties and humanity. Life is about Liberty and Justice for ALL.

Now is the time: Do or Die!