TF News, Action and Analysis

From Black Box Voting
October 8, 2008

“You may have read about this, and Black Box Voting has sent an ELECTION ALERT about this. Here are the details and what to do about it:

THE PROBLEM: ‘Straight party voting’ on voting machines is revealing a bad pattern of miscounting and omitting your vote, especially if you are a Democrat. Most recently (Oct 2008), a firm called Automated Election Services was found to have mis-coded the system in heavily Democratic Santa Fe County, New Mexico such that straight party voters would not have the presidential vote counted. Straight party voting is allowed in 15 states. Basically, it means that you can take a shortcut to actually looking at who you are voting for and instead just select a party preference. Then the voting machine makes your candidate choices, supposedly for the party you requested.

Additional details follow, but first: PROTECT THE COUNT:
1) NEVER CHOOSE THE STRAIGHT PARTY VOTE OPTION, because it alerts the computer as to your party preference and allows software code to trigger whatever function the programmer has designed.
2) SEND THIS INFORMATION OUT TO AS MANY PEOPLE AS YOU CAN, blog it, root n’ toot it out there to get the word out…”

Click here for the full alert

From Empire Burlesque, by Chris Floyd
October 9, 2008

“The idea of ‘victimless crimes’ has been around for a long time, but the ultra-modern 21st century has given us a bold new concept: perpetratorless crimes. This is by now a familiar dynamic: Outright, undeniable crimes are committed, often very heinous ones — mass murder, military aggression, torture, vast financial corruption and fraud, warrantless spying, egregious violations of the Constitution — but somehow, no one is actually responsible for them. They just sort of, you know, happened, all by themselves. The most we can possibly do about these crimes is to conduct a non-binding ‘investigation’ — preferably by a committee of ’serious’ Establishment figures — who will then offer suggestions on how to avoid such unseemly situations in the future. Of course, most of the time it would be too ‘divisive,’ too ‘partisan,’ to do even that much. But in any case, you certainly can’t prosecute anyone for these crimes. (This innovative concept only covers crimes in which powerful people might be involved, of course. Any ordinary person remains subject to the full weight of the increasingly draconian law — although, if said ordinary person was commiting crimes at the behest of powerful people, the application of the law can suddenly become miraculously light, or even non-existent.)…

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From Huffington Post, by David Sirota
October 19, 2008

“Remember how Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson promised full transparency in spending the $700 billion bailout money? And remember how bailout opponents predicted that the failure to mandate such transparency would allow all sorts of Halliburton-style shenanigans? From the looks of the first private contracts issued by the Treasury Department, it looks like the bailout opponents were correct. As flagged by BailoutSleuth.com, Paulson is blacking out the sections of government contracts that spell out how much private firms will be paid for their services in administering taxpayer money. Here’s a page from the compensation part of a contract with Bank of New York, which has been hired to do some of the bookkeeping (because, of course, the Bush administration is happy to privatize that function):…

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From CommonDreams, by Jim Lobe
October 22, 2008

“The ‘American Dream’ of upward social mobility appears to have emigrated from its birthplace in the United States to northern Europe, according to a major new report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on the growth of economic equality over the past 20 years. Of its 30 member states, most of which are also members of the European Union, the United States has the largest gap between its wealthiest and poorest households after Mexico and Turkey, according to the report, ‘Growing Unequal?’, which was released at OECD headquarters in Paris Tuesday. That gap has grown particularly large in the U.S. since 2000 — that is, under the administration of President George W. Bush - according to the report, which found that the gap between the U.S. middle class and the wealthiest 10 percent has also increased…

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From A Soldier’s Perspective, by Roman General
October 5, 2008

“I have striven to not become political w[h]ere this blog was concerned as the message here is of great importance to me, our troops and veterans. I will always do my best to not spout my political views here, other than w[h]ere legislation and actions concerning issues of PTSD and aid to our veterans and soldiers… I will never think that having the regular military deployed within our borders is a good idea. The executive orders of the last two years have set the ground work for a military ‘intervention’ as prescribed and interpreted by the commander in chief and answerable to no one, absolute power has been consolidated. When has this ever been a good idea? As the laws stand right now, one man can say ‘I invoke marital law’ and commandeer the country bypassing and foregoing any judicial or congressional oversight. Without having to explain or a clear indication of a threat to its citizens except to ’say’ that a national security issue has arisen. It sets an extremely bad preceden[t] and mechanism for our own troops to be used against its citizens… Do we really have confidence in the benevolence of our leaders in Washington to act in our best interest? Huh, hello, the bailout!”

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From Amandla Publishers by Vijay Prashad
October 21, 2008

“Chinese factory managers have cut their orders for raw materials. The Baltic Exchange Dry index has plummeted. Currencies climb up and down, but the stock exchange indices look like the altimeter of an aircraft in freefall. Stock markets across the planet look to the Central Banks of Euro-Land and the U. S. for some guidance, and then shy away, taking cover under the flimsy shields of their own governments. The Sovereign Funds of the Gulf States prefer to park their substantial petro-dollars into their own infant stock exchanges, since they have already burned their fingers in New York and London.

Part I: Wealth’s Apostles. Petrified by the imminent collapse of the entire financial architecture, the Finance Ministers of the Group of Seven (G7) countries hastened to Washington for an emergency meeting, summoned to their Rome, to find a quick solution. The smiles that littered the faces of the ministers in their February meeting in Osaka were absent. Instead, they reverted to type. America’s Henry Paulson had a pinched nose in the official photograph, as he frowned toward the camera as it to say, get this over with, and get me out of here. Two of the men in the room had been bred in the left, only to have walked right-ward: Britain’s Alistair Darling, once a 4th Internationalist and now another Scotsman for Brown, walked around with the typical smug look of New Labour, while Italy’s Giulio Tremonti, once of the Italian Socialist Party and then of Berlusconi’s disreputable Forza Italia, walked around at a forward angle, as if to display his eagerness to please with his body’s slant. Tremonti, at least is an intellectual, one who has perversely adopted some of the anti-globalization rhetoric to smash the remnants of Italy’s social wage…”

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From Truthdig, by Chris Hedges
October 20, 2008

“Our oligarchic class is incompetent at governing, managing the economy, coping with natural disasters, educating our young, handling foreign affairs, providing basic services like health care and safeguarding individual rights. That it is still in power, and will remain in power after this election, is a testament to our inability to separate illusion from reality. We still believe in ‘the experts.’ They still believe in themselves. They are clustered like flies swarming around John McCain and Barack Obama. It is only when these elites are exposed as incompetent parasites and dethroned that we will have any hope of restoring social, economic and political order. ‘Their inability to see the human as anything more than interest driven made it impossible for them to imagine an actively organized pool of disinterest called the public good,” said the Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul, whose books ‘The Unconscious Civilization’ and ‘Voltaire’s Bastards’ excoriates our oligarchic elites.”

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From SmirkingChimp, by David Michael Green
October 18, 2008

“With apologies to Churchill (who owed a few of his own): Never have so many been so wrong about so much. There are few things you’d less rather be right now than a conservative/regressive, and that is why. It’s like the old Firesign Theater bit: Everything You Know Is Wrong. ‘Dogs flew spaceships! The Aztecs invented the vacation! Men and women are the same sex! Our forefathers took drugs! Yes! That’s right! Everything you know is wrong!’

And, what’s worse, everybody knows it except you. America is turning decisively away from its tragic thirty-year experiment with Reaganism-Bushism, and for very good reason. Regressives have ruled the country more or less unabated (Democrats, the supposed carriers of the liberal torch, were during these last three decades either frightened, centrist or irrelevent - and usually all three at once). Moreover, during the last years especially - the Cringe Decade - the right was particularly forceful, particularly unfettered, particularly successful at having its way, and particularly arrogant in the self-righteous belief in its authority on all things. Once small problem, though…”
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From CounterPunch, by Mike Whitney
October 16, 2008

“We are in the midst of a major historic turning point, equivalent to the emergence of neoliberalism under Thatcher and Reagan.” – Robert Pollin

Robert Pollin is a Professor of Economics and founding Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Among his recent books are Contours of Descent: U.S. Economic Fractures and the Landscape of the Global Austerity (Verso, 2003) and (with Stephanie Luce) The Living Wage: Building a Fair Economy (The New Press, 1998).

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From SmirkingChimp, by Justin Podur |
October 15, 2008

“Writers on financial or economic matters rarely see the need to explain the basics of the field or justify them at the best of times, let alone in the middle of unfolding crises. What are these ‘financial instruments’ - futures, options, and swaps? What are they for, and how did they increase the dangers of what occurred? What is the relationship between finance and the ‘real economy’? What exactly is wrong with that relationship? Events move so quickly that stories discussing them rarely stop to explain the basics. Luckily, there are occasionally exceptions. A book by Eric Briys and Francois de Varenne, The Fisherman and the Rhinoceros: How International Finance Shapes Everyday Life (Wiley, 2000…) teaches how the financial economy works and explains why it is such a great thing. At the time their book was published, the stock market collapse of 2003 had not yet occurred, and nor had the collapse of Enron, the Iraq war, the oil and food price crises, and the current mortgage meltdown…The authors…provide a rare and wonderful thing: a clear, confident explanation by practitioners of ideas and attitudes which, when implemented, proved unambiguously disastrous.”

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