Real News Network’s Paul Jay talks with Sony Kapoor, Managing Director of Re-Define (Rethinking Development, Finance & Environment), an international Think Tank promoting financial system reform.

Kapoor metaphorically compares the actions of Wall Street and the US Finance Industry to the psychology of alcoholism and drunk driving, and the actions of the people charged with regulating the industry with the reactions of people in denial living with alcoholics, and concludes that another crash is likely inevitable.

WASHINGTON-Citing a desire to gain influence in Washington, the American people confirmed Friday that they have hired high-powered D.C. lobbyist Jack Weldon of the firm Patton Boggs to help advance their agenda in Congress.

Known among Beltway insiders for his ability to sway public policy on behalf of massive corporations such as Johnson & Johnson, Monsanto, and AT&T, Weldon, 53, is expected to use his vast network of political connections to give his new client a voice in the legislative process.

Weldon is reportedly charging the American people $795 an hour.

“Unlike R.J. Reynolds, Pfizer, or Bank of America, the U.S. populace lacks the access to public officials required to further its legislative goals,” a statement from the nation read in part. “Jack Weldon gives us that access.”

“His daily presence in the Capitol will ensure the American people finally get a seat at the table,” the statement continued. “And it will allow him to advance our message that everyone, including Americans, deserves to be represented in Washington.”

The 310-million-member group said it will rely on Weldon’s considerable clout to ensure its concerns are taken into account when Congress addresses issues such as education, immigration, national security, health care, transportation, the economy, affordable college tuition, infrastructure, jobs, equal rights, taxes, Social Security, the environment, housing, the national debt, agriculture, energy, alternative energy, nutrition, imports, exports, foreign relations, the arts, and crime.

Sources confirmed that Weldon is already scheduled to have drinks Monday with several members of the Senate Appropriations Committee to discuss saving the middle class.

[snip]

Though Weldon has only been on the job for three days, legislators have already seemed to take notice.

“Before today, I’d actually never heard of this group,” Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) told reporters. “But if Jack says they’re worth my time, I’ll take a look and see if maybe there are some areas where our interests overlap.

read it all here…

All across Europe recently there have been wave after wave of co-ordinated general strikes and massive demonstrations showing a solidarity and a unity across unions representing different kinds of workers in different countries, different levels of skill, against austerity proposals by governments, that put to shame the levels of public street activism in the US and Canada.

Fresh off a summer lecturing in Greece and France, economist, author, and Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Richard D. Wolff, well-known for his work on Marxian economics, economic methodology and class analysis, Yale University Ph.D. in Economics, and Professor at The New School University in New York City, gives his analysis on the massive European mobilizations and strikes. He also compares the US movement to the European one, and find the European workers to be much more advanced in their struggle.

This extraordinary unity is all built around a central demand which can be conveyed by their chief slogan: we are the working people who produce the profits, the goods, and the service of the capitalist economy; we are not going to pay for its crisis. And that’s really the central demand, that if the banks and the corporations and the speculations produced a crisis that working people had no role in-and I want to remind viewers that in Europe they didn’t even have the mortgage kind of crisis in European countries that we had here; it was a crisis of the banking sector, the financial, large corporations, and so on-the demand of the people is, we are not going to be made to pay. You’re not going to solve this economic crisis by having the government borrow money, throw the money at the banks and the big corporations, bail them out, and then make the mass of people pay by cutting government payrolls, by cutting government services, all those things called austerity.

Real News Network – October 05, 2010

European Workers Distance from US Through Action

Richard Wolff: European workers say they won’t pay for crisis while US counterparts talk of ‘One Nation

(transcript below)

They are unfeeling metal monsters. They’ve taken over the world. They have us surrounded. They’re everywhere. They remorselessly kill and maim more people every year, at least in North America, than all the terrorists ever dreamed of in all the worst nightmares sold to us by politicians, and in all the wars going on around the world.

They are bankrupting our economy and destroying our planet. They show no respect for human life. There’s a good chance one or more of them will kill you or someone in your family soon, if they haven’t already done so.

They are dirty bombs that have polluted and poisoned the entire earth. Besides our homes, they consume the largest part of our disposable income, and produce the largest portion of the personal debt carried by most people.

Yet over the past century they have become our life. We can’t live with them. But we can’t live without them, it seems.

BP and the Feds have fooled America and the entire world into thinking the BP Gulf Oil Spill is over, that the beaches are clean and that the seafood is safe, and everything is OK.

Titled “The Gulf Oil Spill isn’t over!” here’s a little bit of mournful Louisiana blues to tell the real story.

Hat tip to Alexander Higgins who for months on his blog has been collecting every bit of news you can imagine about the BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil catastrophe.

“The Edge… There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.” — Hunter S. Thompson

Leading up to the 1994 midterm elections, Bill Clinton’s job approval measured by Gallup was 46%. The Democrats subsequently lost 53 seats in the midterms that year.

Barack Obama’s presidential job approval for the last week of September was 44%. Historically in any midterm year with a president with a job approval below 50%, his party has suffered major midterm losses.

Congressional job approval measured by Gallup for the last week of September was 18% – the lowest congressional approval measured by Gallup going back through 1974.

Leading up to the 1994 midterm elections, Congressional job approval measured by Gallup was 23%. Again, the Democrats subsequently lost 53 seats in the midterms that year.

Gallup’s generic ballot – simply asking registered voters which party they plan to vote for – was tied for the last week of September at 46% for each party. Galllup’s historical data indicates that when the generic ballot is tied, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to turn out at the polls.

29 Sept. 2010 | Gallup’s Editor-in-Chief Dr. Frank Newport reviews four key indicators of midterm election results – all of which suggest the Democrats are likely to lose a significant number of House seats in November:

I and many others, including Michael Moore the other day, have many times stressed that the only way the Democrats can turn things around and not only save themselves but the country too in November is to start producing progressive results.

Obama and the Democrats have a month. I’d suggest they get busy.