October 2008 archive

From Market Watch:

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday that American International Group Inc. … agreed to freeze payments under its former chief executive’s contract. Cuomo sent a letter to current CEO Edward Liddy confirming that AIG will freeze any payments under ex-CEO Martin Sullivan’s $19 million contract, and will not make payments out of $600 million in compensation and bonus pools of AIG’s financial products subsidiary. Cuomo said that taxpayers should be repaid before any executives and that new executive pay structures should eliminate improper incentives

Not sure that freezing means the CEO will never get any money, and it is also unclear to me whether all of the executives at AIG will have their bonuses frozen as well.

Finally, I question what it means to say “taxpayers should be repaid” — at this point the bailout plan is so murky, the phrase seems meaningless to me.  Will our taxes go down?  Will we all get checks in the mail?

What a circus.  Send in the clowns.  Oh … don’t bother.  They’re here.

Martha Davis Ph.D., a Clinical Psychologist and a Visiting Scholar at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, has produced an important new documentary, Interrogation Psychologists: The Making of a Professional Crisis”. The film premiered at a conference entitled “The Interrogation and Torture Controversy: Crisis in Psychology,” held at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Center on Terrorism in New York City on September 12, 2008.

Dr. Davis describes the documentary:

“In 2005 the American Psychological Association endorsed the participation of military psychologists in detainee interrogations. This policy incited a firestorm of protest within the profession and around the world, but APA officials held fast, contending that the involvement of psychologists insured that interrogations were safe, ethical and effective. With interviews of experts and documentation of communications between APA and government officials, “Interrogation Psychologists” traces the origins of the policy and why the APA risked massive defections for it. The search leads to the emerging field of national security psychology, which has far-reaching implications for intelligence gathering operations and U.S. treatment of prisoners of war.”

1. Despite the rhetoric blatant lies and distortions from the McCain campaign and other Republicans, McClatchy Newspapers report, Obama’s tax plan is not socialism.

   Favoring higher tax rates for the wealthy than for the less fortunate isn’t socialism, and if it is, then the U.S. has been a socialist country for nearly a century, under both Democrats and Republicans.

   “The answer is clearly no, Senator Obama is not a socialist,” said Paul Beck, a professor of political science at The Ohio State University. “We’ve had a progressive tax system for some time, and both Republicans and Democrats have bought into it.” …

   Socialism involves state ownership of the means of economic production and state-directed sharing of the wealth. America’s democratic capitalist system is neither socialist nor pure free market; rather, it mixes the two, and it has at least since the progressive income tax was introduced 95 years ago. Under it, the wealthy pay higher income tax rates than those who are less fortunate do. It’s a form of sharing the wealth.

   Government intervenes in U.S. “free markets” all the time. The deduction that homeowners get for mortgage interest is one form, for it subsidizes housing. The Pentagon procurement that sustains U.S. defense contractors such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics is another.

   For that matter, President Bush and many other Republicans, including McCain, backed a massive federal government rescue of ailing financial institutions this fall, one that’s committed more than $1 trillion so far to “private” banks, even taking partial state ownership of the nine biggest…

   Conservatives often charge that Democrats are engaging in “class warfare” when they want to raise tax rates on the rich – McCain and Palin have used the phrase to attack Obama – but they rarely find such fault when tax cuts disproportionately benefit the wealthy.

2. The Seattle Times reports the U.S. is run by Wall Street “crooks,” Nader says in Seattle.

   Every agency of the federal government is controlled by corporate power, independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader told reporters before a public speech at a packed Town Hall Seattle on Tuesday evening.

   Nader said the U.S. is essentially a “plutocracy” (government by the wealthy), run by “speculators and crooks” on Wall Street. He offered as evidence the $700 billion financial-rescue package that Congress approved, which, he said, rewards “deceivers” for the “looting and swindling.” …

   Tuesday night, Nader called for the prosecution of those on Wall Street responsible for the current financial crisis.

Four at Four continues with news from Afghanistan, Iraq, and concerning the 18 threats to beluga whales in Alaska.

The liberal media is just goin’ positively goofy today about the $150,000 worth of clothes the Republican National Committee bought for me.  Well, gosh, what were they supposed to do?  Those nice men at the RNC didn’t want me goin’ around naked!  And I would look pretty stupid if Tina Fey looked better than me every week.  I’m not about to be caught lookin’ stupid, that’s for gosh-darn sure.  Besides, the Democrat Party does this kinda’ stuff all the time.  Why, I heard that Barack Obama spent $542,000 to have his ears pulled away from his head for that “liberal Harvard elite” look.

But let me address this directly without the filter of the liberal media.  First, I don’t plan to keep those clothes.  I’m going to donate them to charity.  You see, like all good Christian people I like to spread the wealth arou . . . errr, ummm, I like to help those less fortunate than myself.  So I’ll be giving all those clothes to the Salvation Army, where poor folks can go in and get something nice to wear whenever they have to give a speech in front of 10,000 people.

Historian and activist political scientist Howard Zinn talks with Paul Jay about the election, his perception of the meaning of the choice between McCain and Obama it presents for the future of America, and the pitfalls and opportunities that lie ahead.

Zinn says: “…vote against McCain, vote for Obama. Even though Obama does not represent any fundamental change, he creates an opening for a possibility of change. Obama will not fulfill that potential for change, unless he is enveloped by a social movement, which is angry enough, powerful enough, insistent enough, that he fills his abstract phrases about change with some content. We need direct action, because only that kind of indignation is going to have some affect on the people in Washington.”

October 22, 2008 – about 11 minutes