October 17, 2009 archive

Just a short while ago Docudharma reached 5 million page views (8:17 PM Pacific).

Thanks to all our members, readers, lurkers and seekers!  Yeehaw!

H/t AP photo

I’ve been waiting for this!! The Bernie Madoff story was good but I was waiting for a Wall Street arrest on someone who affected all of us. Billionaire Raj Rajarantnam may be that man. He, along with five others were arrested today for alleged insider trading.

The New York Daily News is all over this one.

A piggish hedge fund hotshot who ranks among the world’s richest men was charged by the feds Friday with making millions of dollars on insider-trading tips.

Raj Rajaratnam, the billionaire founder of the New York-based Galleon Group, was among six people charged in what federal prosecutors labeled the largest-ever hedge fund insider-trading case.

“The defendants operated in a cozy world of you scratch my back, I’ll scratch your back,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said at a news conference announcing the arrests.

Rajaratnam, who Forbes ranked as No. 559 on its 2009 list of the world’s billionaires, was snared in a $20 million insider-trading case touted by the authorities for its first-ever use of court-authorized wiretaps against Wall Street big wheels.

“They may have been privy to a lot of inside information, but there was one secret they did not know – and that was that we were listening,” Bharara said.

Crossposted at the Progressive Electorate. Please share a post with us!

There are three things that stand out when looking at the third party issue.  The first is the obstacles preventing progress are so overwhelming they seem insurmountable.  The second is they have no chance without campaign finance reform and election rule changes.  The third is the time is more ripe for a viable third party since they were effectively throttled in the mid nineteenth century.  

I checked out a book written by Micah Sifry, titled, “Spoiling for a Fight, Third Party Politics in America” (copyright 2002), which presents an excellent overview of third party history in this country, efforts by Ross Perot, John Anderson, Ralph Nadar, Bernie Sanders, and the problems and possible solutions for third party success.

http://books.google.com/books?…

“Public opinion surveys since the 1990s consistently have shown a high level of popular support for the concept of a third party. But in spite of such support for a third party, these parties face many obstacles. The most significant is the fear among voters that if they vote for a third-party candidate, they, in effect, will be “wasting” their votes. Voters have been shown to engage in strategic voting by casting ballots for their second choice when they sense that a third-party candidate has no chance of winning.”

However, if you want to get back at the democrats, especially those who’ve betrayed us.

“There is evidence that third parties can have a major impact on election outcomes. For example, a third-party candidate might draw more votes away from the candidate of the party more closely aligned with the position of the third-party candidate, thus enabling the other party to win the election – often without receiving a majority of the vote.”

Part of the problem is the inability of third parties to secure the experienced, prestigious candidates necessary for public attention.  

“There is a striking difference between the political backgrounds of major and minor party candidates. Nearly all (97.2 percent) of the 72 major party presidential nominees between 1840 and 1980 had held the post of president, vice-president, U.S. senator, congressman, governor, military general, or cabinet secretary. Less than 20 percent of the minor party candidates had attained these positions.  By now the reason for this disparity should be clear. The biases against third parties created by the single-member-district plurality system and ballot access restrictions, as well as their disadvantages in organization, resources, and media coverage, all effectively discourage qualified candidates from running under a third party label. Well-known, prestigious candidates know that a third party effort will be hopeless and can end their political careers. Only extraordinary circumstances will push established politicians (and voters) into a third party camp.”

Can you imagine if Obama had run as an independent, with enough money to present the same messages he did during his democratic campaign.   Can a third party get enough quality candidates and support that could counter the two party duopoly?

“All of these constraints, of course, are interrelated. The single-member-district plurality system discourages high caliber candidates from running outside a major party; if a weak candidate runs, he will attract few campaign resources, ensuring that most citizens will learn very little about him. This in turn reinforces the belief that the third party candidate cannot win, so citizens will not waste their votes on him. The weak electoral performance is self-perpetuating. People expect third parties to do poorly because they have always  done poorly, so only weak candidates run-and the cycle continues.”

Which brings it to us and people like us.

“Together these barriers, handicaps, and major party strategies raise the level of effort required for a voter to cast his ballot for an independent candidate. A citizen can vote for a major party candidate with scarcely a moment’s thought or energy. But to support a third party challenger, a voter must awaken from the political slumber in which he ordinarily lies, actively seek out information on a contest whose outcome he cannot affect, reject the socialization of his political system, ignore the ridicule and abuse of his friends and neighbors, and accept the fact that when the ballots are counted, his vote will never be in the winner’s column. Such levels of energy are witnessed only rarely in American politics.”

We are of the rare people.

The plutocratic two party system forced on the American people is a machine that may be too large to seriously challenge.  As Sifry stated in his conclusion, “There are no shortcuts”.  Creating a third party that can compete on the national stage and have influence on the key issues we face will take serious, long term efforts at the local and state levels resulting in elected candidates at all levels.  Without that, the corporate owned duopoly won’t be particularly concerned.  

The little joke about putting the interest’s name after a politician’s name instead of the state they’re from — Max Baucus (D-Wellpoint)– dates back to the muckraker era. Nowadays, however, the joke would be far more appropriate to replace the party affiliation and keep the state –Charles Schumer (Goldman Sachs-NY)

In fact, when you look at the Senate, with it’s binary seating arrangement, you may think you see Republicans and Democrats, neatly divided on each side of the isle. But I assure you this is merely an illusion. If you could see each senator’s real affiliation as a little sign above their heads, what you would really see is corporate logos bobbing up and down on the Senate floor.

The Democratic party is a myth. Not for us plebes out here in the real world. But the higher up the food chain you go, the less party affiliation means. By the time you reach the United States Senate, you are almost certainly, completely owned and affiliated with one of the big powerful interests or, most commonly, a combination of them.

How it really works is pretty simple. We have a Plutocracy. It is controlled by a small, handful of interests, or more accurately, assholes who have taken over our government by subversive means. They own almost everything, more than Michael Moore estimates and certainly more than the comical Forbes 500 suggests. And they control most of our most established institutions: almost all the main universities, think tanks, PR firms, defense organizations and of course, the mass media. They also control state and local governments all across the country.

But their main prize is the US government, especially the U.S. Senate. With few exceptions, each of your senators is a crook (most probably), an accomplice after the fact (maybe but probably a crook), or a useful idiot (unlikely).  

The way the Plutocrats use the two party system is like good cop, bad cop. The good cops are the Democrats, off to the rescue to appease the disgruntled masses. Except they always seem to have an excuse to fail – the evil Republicans. They would be the bad cops. They serve as a sledgehammer, constantly knocking the Overton Window to the right. Making it easier for the Democrats to fail.

It is all a charade. They all work for the same little group of asshole, mostly bankers and/or the oil and energy cartel. (the intersection of these groups is quite fascinating)

The exact song and dance act they perform on behalf of their clients, the Plutocrats, varies as needed. But regardless of the play, it’s almost always to the benefit of the Plutocrats. Of course, the greatest function the parties serve is to keep the public as evenly divided as possible. Think about this:

Ever heard the expression divide and conquer? How bout divide by 50% and conquer quicker? We have millions and millions of people. What are the odds of our population being so consistently, evenly divided for so long? Kennedy and Nixon, 1960, down to Chicago? How did Barack Obama’s approval rating drop to, surprise, 51%?

The function of the media is to set the debate, and keep the people evenly split. If one side starts to pull ahead, they get taken down a notch or two. This doesn’t require a conspiracy. It is almost automatic. But it is intentional.

It was almost exactly 40 years ago that Lewis Powell wrote his infamous memo – a call to arms for big business to get serious, take control of the American political and cultural centers, and RECREATE AMERICAN SOCIETY.

This is what we have seen. The deliberate, well funded, and quite successful re-engineering of American society to be selfish, short sighted, materialistic, and uneducated.

Congratulations. Look around.

The two party system is simply the means by which to turn the American public against itself while the Plutocrats pillage the common wealth. Remember the common wealth?

Forty years later, after the Powell Memo launched the greatest political campaign no one has even heard of, what have they accomplished? They have gutted this country.

We have been gutted. All of our common wealth, from infrastructure, schools, parks, government services, are all starved to death. Our communities, towns, cities are in ruin, complete with their own war zones.

Our families have been decimated, with unprecedented rates of divorce, domestic violence, unwanted pregnancies and teen suicides.

This was an attack. A full scale assault on our very way of life. And no one ever even knew it was happening. Well, no one except for the US Senate, much of the House of Representatives, and the last four presidents.

I will do anything within the framework of the US Constitution to stop this attack. What about you?