Through the Glasses Darkly

What if the between-the-lines Republican message (don’t be afraid, there will be no real change) is the true illusion?

By SLAVOJ ZIZEK

When the hero of John Carpenter’s 1988 They Live puts on a pair of weird sunglasses that he has stumbled upon in an abandoned church, he notices a billboard that once invited us to a Hawaii beach holiday now simply displays the words:

“MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” Ad copy on another billboard — this one for a new color TV — says, “DON’T THINK, CONSUME!”

The glasses, then, function as a device for the critique of ideology. In other words, they enable him to see the real message lying beneath the glossy, colorful surface.

What would we see if we were to observe the Republican presidential campaign through such glasses?The first thing would be a long series of contradictions and inconsistencies:

• Their call to reach across party lines — while waging the cultural war politics of “us” against “them.”

• Their warning that the candidates’ family life should be off limits — while parading their families on stage.

• Their promises of change — while offering the same old programs (lower taxes and less social welfare, a belligerent foreign policy, etc.).

• Their pledge to reduce state spending — while incessantly praising President Reagan. (Recall Reagan’s answer to those who worried about the exploding debt: “It is big enough to take care of itself.”)

• Their accusations that Democrats privilege style over substance — which they deliver at perfectly staged media events.

The next thing we would see is that these and other inconsistencies are not a weakness, but a source of strength for the Republican message. Republican strategists masterfully exploit the flaws of liberalism: Its patronizing “concern” for the poor that is combined with a thinly disguised indifference toward — if not outright contempt for — blue-collar workers, and its politically correct feminism that is usually combined with an underlying mistrust of women in power. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was a hit on both counts, parading both her working-class husband and her femininity.

The earlier generations of women politicians (Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and even, up to a point, U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton) were what can be referred to as “phallic” women. They acted as “iron ladies” who imitated and tried to outdo male authority, to be “more men than men themselves.”

Writing in Le Point, a French weekly, Jacques-Alain Miller, a follower of the late French philospher Jacques Lacan, pointed out that Palin, on the contrary, proudly displays her femininity and motherhood. She has a “castrating” effect on her male opponents, not by being more manly than them, but by sarcastically downgrading the puffed-up male authority. According to Miller, Palin instinctively knows that male “phallic” authority is a posture, a semblance to be exploited and mocked. Recall how she mocked Sen. Barack Obama’s work as a community organizer.

Palin provides a “post-feminist” femininity without complexity, uniting the features of mother, prim teacher (glasses, hair in a bun), public figure and, implicitly, sex object, proudly displaying the “first dude” as a phallic toy. The message is that she doesn’t lack anything — and, to add insult to injury, it was a Republican woman who realized this left-liberal dream. It is as if she simply is what left-liberal feminists want to be. No wonder the Palin effect is one of false liberation: “Drill, baby, drill!” Feminism and family values! Big corporations and blue collars!

So, back to Carpenter’s They Live. To get the true Republican message, one should take into account not only what is said but what is implied.

Where we hear the message of populist frustration over Washington gridlock and corruption, the glasses would show a condoning of the public’s refusal to understand: “We allow you NOT to understand — so have fun, vent your frustration! We will take care of business. We have enough behind-the-scenes experts who can fix things. In a way, it’s better for you not to know.” (Recall Vice President Dick Cheney’s hints at the dark side of power, as he successfully orchestrated an expansion of presidential executive power.)

And where the message is the promise of change, the glasses would show something like this: “Don’t worry, there will be no real change, we just want to change some small things to make sure that nothing will really change.” The rhetoric of change, of troubling Washington’s stagnant waters, is a permanent Republican staple. (Recall former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s populist anti-Washington rise to power in 1994.)

Let us not be naïve here: Republican voters know there will be no real change. They know the same substance will go on with changes in style. This is part of the deal.

Four years ago, Sen. John Kerry lost because he was President Bush with a human face. Today, Sen. John McCain is Bush with a lipsticked face. It’s a rhetorical lipstick of “No bullshit!” When Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt, author of the bestselling On Bullshit, was asked which U.S. politician breaks out of the predominant bullshitting, he named McCain — and thereby tragi-comically missed a key point. Talking straight, displaying no-bullshit honesty, can be the cleverest form of bullshitting, a mere populist pose.

What if, however, the between-the-lines Republican message (don’t be afraid, there will be no real change) is the true illusion, not the secret truth? What if there really will be a change? Or, to paraphrase the Marx brothers: McCain and Palin look like they want a change and talk like they want a change — but this shouldn’t deceive us, they might very well accomplish a change!

Perhaps this is the true danger, since it would be change in the direction of “Country first!” and of “Drill, baby, drill!”

Luckily, as an electoral blessing in disguise, a sobering thing happened to remind us where we really live: in the reality of global capitalism. The state is planning emergency measures to spend hundreds of billions of dollars — if not $1 trillion — to repair the consequences of the financial crisis caused by free-market speculations.

The lesson is clear: The market and state are not opposed. Indeed, strong state interventions are needed to keep markets balanced.

The initial Republican reaction to the financial meltdown was a desperate attempt to reduce it to a minor misfortune that could easily be healed by a proper dose of the old Republican medicine (a proper respect for market mechanisms, etc.). In short, the Republicans’ between-the-lines message was this: We allow you to continue to dream.

However, all the political posturing of lower state spending became irrelevant after this sudden brush with the real. Today, even the strongest advocates of diminishing the excessive role of Washington accept the necessity for a state intervention that is sublime in its almost unimaginable quantity. Confronted with this sublime grandeur, all the “no bullshit” bravado was reduced to a confused mumble. Where, today, are McCain’s steely resolve and Palin’s sarcasm?

But was the financial meltdown really the awakening from a dream? It depends on how the meltdown will be perceived by the general public. In other words, which interpretation will win? Which “story” about it will predominate?

When the normal run of things is traumatically interrupted, the field of “discursive” ideological competition opens up. In Germany in the late ’20s, Adolf Hitler won the competition for the narrative that explained to Germans the reasons for the crisis of the Weimar Republic and the way out of it. (His plot was the Jewish plot.) In France in 1940, Marshall Petain’s narrative, that France lost because of the Jewish influence and democratic degeneration, won in explaining the reasons for the French defeat.

Consequently, the main task of the ruling ideology is to impose a narrative that will not put the blame for the meltdown onto the global capitalist system as such, but on, say, lax legal regulations and the corruption of big financial institutions. Against this tendency, we should insist on the key question: which “flaw” of the system as such opens up the possibility for — and continuous outbreaks of — such crises and collapses?

The first thing to bear in mind is that the origin of the crisis is a “benevolent” one. After the dot-com bubble exploded in the first years of the new millennium, the decision across party lines was to facilitate real estate investments to keep the economy growing and prevent recession. Today’s meltdown is the price paid for the United States avoiding a prolonged recession five years ago.

The danger is that the predominant narrative of the meltdown will be the one that, instead of waking us from a dream, will enable us to continue to dream. And it is here that we should start to worry — not only about the economic consequences of the meltdown, but also about the obvious temptation to reinvigorate the “war on terror” and U.S. interventionism in order to keep the economy running.

Anti-democratic nature of US capitalism is being exposed

NOAM CHOMSKY

Fri, Oct 10, 2008

Bretton Woods was the system of global financial management set up at the end of the second World War to ensure the interests of capital did not smother wider social concerns in post-war democracies. It was hated by the US neoliberals – the very people who created the banking crisis writes Noam Chomsky

THE SIMULTANEOUS unfolding of the US presidential campaign and unravelling of the financial markets presents one of those occasions where the political and economic systems starkly reveal their nature.

Passion about the campaign may not be universally shared but almost everybody can feel the anxiety from the foreclosure of a million homes, and concerns about jobs, savings and healthcare at risk.

The initial Bush proposals to deal with the crisis so reeked of totalitarianism that they were quickly modified. Under intense lobbyist pressure, they were reshaped as “a clear win for the largest institutions in the system . . . a way of dumping assets without having to fail or close”, as described by James Rickards, who negotiated the federal bailout for the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1998, reminding us that we are treading familiar turf. The immediate origins of the current meltdown lie in the collapse of the housing bubble supervised by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, which sustained the struggling economy through the Bush years by debt-based consumer spending along with borrowing from abroad. But the roots are deeper. In part they lie in the triumph of financial liberalisation in the past 30 years – that is, freeing the markets as much as possible from government regulation.

These steps predictably increased the frequency and depth of severe reversals, which now threaten to bring about the worst crisis since the Great Depression.

Also predictably, the narrow sectors that reaped enormous profits from liberalisation are calling for massive state intervention to rescue collapsing financial institutions.

Such interventionism is a regular feature of state capitalism, though the scale today is unusual. A study by international economists Winfried Ruigrok and Rob van Tulder 15 years ago found that at least 20 companies in the Fortune 100 would not have survived if they had not been saved by their respective governments, and that many of the rest gained substantially by demanding that governments “socialise their losses,” as in today’s taxpayer-financed bailout. Such government intervention “has been the rule rather than the exception over the past two centuries”, they conclude.

In a functioning democratic society, a political campaign would address such fundamental issues, looking into root causes and cures, and proposing the means by which people suffering the consequences can take effective control.

The financial market “underprices risk” and is “systematically inefficient”, as economists John Eatwell and Lance Taylor wrote a decade ago, warning of the extreme dangers of financial liberalisation and reviewing the substantial costs already incurred – and proposing solutions, which have been ignored. One factor is failure to calculate the costs to those who do not participate in transactions. These “externalities” can be huge. Ignoring systemic risk leads to more risk-taking than would take place in an efficient economy, even by the narrowest measures.

The task of financial institutions is to take risks and, if well-managed, to ensure that potential losses to themselves will be covered. The emphasis is on “to themselves”. Under state capitalist rules, it is not their business to consider the cost to others – the “externalities” of decent survival – if their practices lead to financial crisis, as they regularly do.

Financial liberalisation has effects well beyond the economy. It has long been understood that it is a powerful weapon against democracy. Free capital movement creates what some have called a “virtual parliament” of investors and lenders, who closely monitor government programmes and “vote” against them if they are considered irrational: for the benefit of people, rather than concentrated private power.

Investors and lenders can “vote” by capital flight, attacks on currencies and other devices offered by financial liberalisation. That is one reason why the Bretton Woods system established by the United States and Britain after the second World War instituted capital controls and regulated currencies.*

The Great Depression and the war had aroused powerful radical democratic currents, ranging from the anti-fascist resistance to working class organisation. These pressures made it necessary to permit social democratic policies. The Bretton Woods system was designed in part to create a space for government action responding to public will – for some measure of democracy.

John Maynard Keynes, the British negotiator, considered the most important achievement of Bretton Woods to be the establishment of the right of governments to restrict capital movement.

In dramatic contrast, in the neoliberal phase after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s, the US treasury now regards free capital mobility as a “fundamental right”, unlike such alleged “rights” as those guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: health, education, decent employment, security and other rights that the Reagan and Bush administrations have dismissed as “letters to Santa Claus”, “preposterous”, mere “myths”.

In earlier years, the public had not been much of a problem. The reasons are reviewed by Barry Eichengreen in his standard scholarly history of the international monetary system. He explains that in the 19th century, governments had not yet been “politicised by universal male suffrage and the rise of trade unionism and parliamentary labour parties”. Therefore, the severe costs imposed by the virtual parliament could be transferred to the general population.

But with the radicalisation of the general public during the Great Depression and the anti-fascist war, that luxury was no longer available to private power and wealth. Hence in the Bretton Woods system, “limits on capital mobility substituted for limits on democracy as a source of insulation from market pressures”.

The obvious corollary is that after the dismantling of the postwar system, democracy is restricted. It has therefore become necessary to control and marginalise the public in some fashion, processes particularly evident in the more business-run societies like the United States. The management of electoral extravaganzas by the public relations industry is one illustration.

“Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business,” concluded America’s leading 20th century social philosopher John Dewey, and will remain so as long as power resides in “business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda”.

The United States effectively has a one-party system, the business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats. There are differences between them. In his study Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, Larry Bartels shows that during the past six decades “real incomes of middle-class families have grown twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working-poor families have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans”.

Differences can be detected in the current election as well. Voters should consider them, but without illusions about the political parties, and with the recognition that consistently over the centuries, progressive legislation and social welfare have been won by popular struggles, not gifts from above.

Those struggles follow a cycle of success and setback. They must be waged every day, not just once every four years, always with the goal of creating a genuinely responsive democratic society, from the voting booth to the workplace.

* The Bretton Woods system of global financial management was created by 730 delegates from all 44 Allied second World War nations who attended a UN-hosted Monetary and Financial Conference at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods in New Hampshire in 1944.

Bretton Woods, which collapsed in 1971, was the system of rules, institutions, and procedures that regulated the international monetary system, under which were set up the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) (now one of five institutions in the World Bank Group) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which came into effect in 1945.

The chief feature of Bretton Woods was an obligation for each country to adopt a monetary policy that maintained the exchange rate of its currency within a fixed value.

The system collapsed when the US suspended convertibility from dollars to gold. This created the unique situation whereby the US dollar became the “reserve currency” for the other countries within Bretton Woods.

Noam Chomsky is professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His writings on linguistics and politics have just been collected in The Essential Chomsky, edited by Anthony Arnove, from the New Press. This article appeared first in the New York Times

© 2008 The Irish Times

The 700 Billion Dollar Question… THAT THESE ASSHOLES NEED TO FUCKING ANSWER 

THIS IS COMPLETE BULLSHIT!

Using the shock doctrine, Wall Street and Washington’s wrecking crew aim to get the most expensive free lunch in American history

By DAVID SIROTA

             

If a museum in the next superpower nation ever commemorates the decline of the last great superpower, it will make the two-and-a-half page bill introduced this week the center of the display.

Just as they do today at the National Archives’ Declaration of Independence exhibit, tourists in the future—perhaps in Beijing, perhaps somewhere else—will line up to see a framed draft of this week’s White House legislation demanding Congress surrender its power of the purse, and give an unelected appointee—in this case, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson—the power to hand over $700 billion of taxpayer money to “any financial institution,” “without limitation…on such terms and conditions as determined by [him].” In a nation priding itself on separating powers between the branches of government, the bill explicitly states that decisions by Paulson may not even “be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”

Whether the bill passes or not, the drafting of it—even the mere thinking of it—is the single most clear sign that all of the major tenets of American democracy are on the auction block these days: from constitutional checks and balances, to legislative and judicial oversight to electoral accountability itself.

In the immediate aftermath of what could be the starting gun of a second Great Depression, the public this week will face a wave of propaganda from Washington. Using the same playbook that succeeded in passing the Patriot Act and the Iraq War authorization with almost no questions, politicians will inevitably invoke love of country, fear, loathing and red-alert emergency—all designed to ram this bill into law as fast as possible, with as little scrutiny as possible. Put in book terms, we will see Thomas Frank’s wrecking crew using Naomi Klein’s shock doctrine to justify a bigger free lunch than David Cay Johnston ever imagined.

Here are five key questions we should all be asking:

1) What will prevent the bill from allowing both parties to use the guise of purchasing worthless mortgages to further enrich their largest campaign donors?

Other than a top-line limit of $700 billion, the White House proposal includes not a single reference to how much taxpayers can be forced to pay private investment firms for their worthless mortgages. To the untrained eye, the omission may seem like a minor oversight, but it is almost certainly deliberate not just as a power grab, but in its potential to convert the Treasury Department into a Tammany Hall graft machine with international reach.

Paulson came directly to government from Goldman Sachs, and with these new powers, he could posture as the 21st century’s Boss Tweed, completely free to pay inflated prices for those mortgages as a means of financially rewarding his former Wall Street colleagues who created this mess. And in his initial round of interviews this weekend, he made barely any effort to stem concerns that this is precisely his plan of action. When asked how he would “decide what to buy and what to pay,” he stumbled through an evasive answer, saying “Well, we’re going to have some professional asset managers and some real experts working with us, and we’ll use a — you know, we’re working through the processes.”

Sure, he would have to report semiannually to a presumably Democratic Congress. But that offers almost no safeguard either, as Democrats are just as awash as Republicans in campaign contributions from the companies that would benefit from government overbuying.

Since the deregulatory splurge of the 1990s began, the financial industry has donated almost $600 million to both parties—splitting their donations almost 50-50. That includes an astounding $9.8 million to Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, and $6.8 million to Republican nominee John McCain. On top of that is another $500 million dollars in lobbying expenditures in the last decade.

Thanks to the proposal’s omissions, those expenditures could generate a $700 billion return on worthless mortgage investments—well above the 100-to-1 ratio of return on investment that lobbying expenditures typically reap corporate clients in Washington. Alas, in the Halliburton age, such government-corporate profiteering would be anything but rare.

2) How are Americans and investors supposed to feel confident that the crisis will be solved, if the very people who engineered the crisis are being relied on to solve it?

McCain and Obama are campaigning hard on the concept of “change,” and both are playing that message off the Wall Street meltdown. Yet, in brandishing their “change” credentials on economic issues, both are relying on the same cadre of Wall Street and Washington insiders who engineered today’s crisis.

According to Mother Jones, McCain’s campaign is run by at least 83 staffers who have recently lobbied for the financial industry. Their clients included AIG, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Citigroup, i.e.. all the major corporations that caused the financial implosion, and who stand to gain from the bailout.

Likewise, McCain’s economic guru is Phil “nation of whiners” Gramm. He is the vice-chairman of the investment bank UBS, which according to the Politico.com wrote down “more than $18 billion in exposure to subprime loans and other risky securities and is considering cutting as many as 8,000 jobs.” As a Texas senator, Gramm spearheaded Congress’s radical deregulatory agenda in the 1990s, including authoring the bill repealing the Glass-Steagall Act (i.e., the Depression-era law preventing consolidation that many experts say could have prevented, or at least softened, the current emergency).

Obama, meanwhile, has long relied on Gramm’s boss, UBS chairman Robert Wolf, as one of his top economic advisers and fundraisers. Worse, during his emergency meeting to discuss the crisis last week, five of the nine people he said would be directing his response have played a role in the crisis they claim expertise in fixing. They are:

** Former Clinton Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin (now an executive at Citigroup, which is embroiled in the meltdown) and Lawrence Summers, who the Politico notes both “supported and helped negotiate the bill [repealing Glass-Steagall].”

** William Daley, the Clinton administration architect of corporate-friendly trade pacts like NAFTA and now a top official at J.P. Morgan Chase.

** Gene Sperling, the top economic adviser in the Clinton White House that deregulated Wall Street.

** Paul O’Neill, the former Bush Treasury Secretary, who despite occasionally criticizing the White House, is a lockstep conservative on economics.

Other than Joseph Stiglitz, Obama included not a single progressive, nor even one of the many visionaries like economist Dean Baker, who has for years been predicting exactly this kind of meltdown. Indeed, the one major labor-affiliated economist officially affiliated with his campaign, Jared Bernstein, “was not part of the crisis meeting,” according to the Washington Post.

Just as the media establishment still grants more credibility to humiliated Iraq war proponents than the original—and now vindicated—war critics, both party standard-bearers are telling Americans that the best people to solve the economic conundrum are those who had a hand in creating it. How, exactly, should this fox-in-the-henhouse situation inspire any confidence in Americans or investors that our political leaders are serious about fixing the problem?

3) How is this meltdown a failure of “oversight” if it has almost nothing to do with illegality?

Most politicians and pundits are bewailing the lack of “oversight” that allegedly led us to the brink of disaster. The rhetoric suggests that the real perpetrators were negligent regulators failing to enforce—or “overseeing”—existing laws. And while there’s certainly a bit of that, CBS’s Bob Schieffer said it best when he reported that, “This is not the work of those who broke the law, it is the work of those operating within the law—those who pushed the law to the limit, making loans the law allowed but common sense dictated should not have been made.”

Substituting a debate about “oversight” for a debate about regulation isn’t merely a semantic error, nor a harmless accident. It allows incumbents to avoid culpability for their votes that gutted existing regulations and helps challenger candidates make a deceptive argument claiming the only change necessary is the specific officeholder, not the system of free-market fundamentalism itself. They get to make a self-servingly partisan case while eschewing the wrath of their regulation-averse business donors.

Crushed, of course, is the potential election mandate. Candidates elected on pledges to beef up “oversight” have only to staff agencies with new faces to fulfill their campaign promises, rather than doing the hard work of passing much-needed new laws.

4) When did a crisis suddenly mean that giving away taxpayer cash to campaign donors is laudably apolitical, but spending taxpayer money on taxpayers is inappropriately “political?”

During initial meetings with Congress about the bailout, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson rejected “calls to include tighter regulations, corporate reforms or limits on executive compensation as part of the measure,” according to the Associated Press. He also stated his opposition to using a fraction of the money to help homeowners struggling with their bills, shore up the social safety net, or stimulate job growth through public infrastructure spending.

Almost universally, his position was praised by lawmakers and reporters as a judicious and apolitical one worthy of bipartisan praise. At the same time, demands to make sure taxpayers get something for their money were labeled unacceptably “political,” divisive and extraneous.

“What you heard last evening is one of those rare moments, certainly rare in my experience here, is Democrats and Republicans deciding we need to work together quickly,” Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd gushed to the New York Times after meeting with Paulson.

Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace praised the White House proposal as “clean” and berated those who he said were trying to “Christmas tree” the bill with relief for homeowners, prompting Sen. John Kyl (R-Ariz.) to enthusiastically agree.

“There is a crisis in our country,” Kyl said. “We’ve got to come together as House and Senate, Democrat and Republican, and deal with this crisis as Americans, for the American people, and not try to bring on all of our political agendas.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) echoed the sentiment, telling Politico.com that he does not want the bailout to become a vehicle for other “partisan plans and pet projects.”

This framing comes directly from the financial industry itself. The Wall Street Journal reports that congressional leaders are already meeting with lobbyists from the nation’s largest banks, securities firms and insurers “whose message to lawmakers was clear: Don’t load the legislation up with provisions not directly related to the crisis, or regulatory measures the industry has long opposed.”

So, handing over $700 billion of taxpayer money to Wall Street speculators with no conditions whatsoever is now so supposedly apolitical that reporters and politicians take offense at any suggestion otherwise. Meanwhile, proposing to better regulate Wall Street or help ordinary citizens in exchange for that bailout is an unacceptably partisan “political agenda” inappropriate at a time of “crisis in our country”—as if the wage, housing, and health care crisis afflicting workers, homeowners and families is far less critical to the national welfare than the crisis hitting millionaire speculators.

5) How are we going to pay for this?

In the Bush age of unending deficits, even considering affordability strikes some as silly and old fashioned. But we’re talking about adding $700 billion to the national debt—or $2,000 for every man, woman and child in America. Moreover, if, as bailout proponents say, the ultimate goal of a bank rescue is to keep the credit markets liquid and interest rates under control, then adding $700 billion to the interest-rate-exacerbating national debt seems an odd economic analgesic, to say the least. This is to say nothing about the insanity of responding to what is inherently a debt crisis by simply firing up the national credit card and incurring more debt.

To date, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is the only lawmaker who has laid out a specific plan to both re-regulate the financial markets and responsibly finance a bailout. He proposes to impose a 10 percent surtax on those making over $500,000 a year, raising roughly $300 billion. “The people who can best afford to pay and the people who have benefited most from Bush’s economic policies are the people who should provide the funds for the bailout,” he said.

How that fiscal conservatism is met on Capitol Hill will expose the real motives—and interests—behind the bailout package.

It’s Capitalism, Stupid!

Tuesday, September 23 2008 @ 07:03 PM CDT

Contributed by: Oread Daily

Oh the poor, poor rich.

Resistance to the Wall Street bailout is beginning to increase.

Some are asking, why do the rich get corporate socialism while the rest of us are stuck with the dregs of capitalist system in decay? Why is no one talking about welfare Cadillacs now?

IT’S CAPITALISM STUPID!

“The financial crisis on Wall Street has New York’s well-to-do reeling. The people who fuel the area’s economy with their spending on art, fashion, cars, restaurants, plastic surgery and other luxe goods and services are starting to cut back once-lavish budgets. As a result, those who cater to their every whim — from nanny agencies to jewelers to yacht builders — are seeing clients tighten their belts on expenses from the millions to the thousands.”
- By Ellen Gamerman, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan and Francine Schwadel in Sep. 20, 2008, Wall Street Journal

Oh the poor, poor rich.

Resistance to the Wall Street bailout is beginning to increase.

Some are asking, why do the rich get corporate socialism while the rest of us are stuck with the dregs of capitalist system in decay? Why is no one talking about welfare Cadillacs now?

Already protests of the $750 billion proposed rescue of the rich plan have occurred from Los Angeles to Burlington, Vermont.

In LA Alvivon Hurd from ACORN told the local ABC affiliate, “I hope Congress does the right thing. I hope that they don’t okay it, and I hope they let them sink in their own muck.”

Trouble is all those Congress folks have been playing in the same much as the rich Americans they represent.

In Miami, site of another protest, Onial Merceus lost his North Miami home to foreclosure Tuesday. No one came to bail him out. At the protest Wander Adderly of Fort Lauderdale told the Miami Herald, ”If they can bail out AIG, they can help bail us out of the foreclosure crisis.”

Thing is Onial and Wander aren’t rich enough to get bailed out.

Truth of the matter is governmental and business leaders haven’t a clue as to what to do about the latest capitalist crisis. They are putting huge bandaids on a system in need of a complete overhaul at least, and elimination at best.

Wealthy Democrats and Republican leaders are lost in a quandary of bailout soup. They all tout the “free market” until it hits them and their rich buddies in their wallets, then suddenly the market is too free.

Gerald Celente Founder/Director, The Trends Research Institute, is well respected for his track record of picking business, consumer, political, and economic trends before they come to pass. Celente predicted an economic 9/11 more than a year ago (of course, my wife predicted it long before that). Celente says the worst is yet to come. He has little use for this federal bailout and writes about it in a piece in the Hudson Valley Press:

“On the evening of September 18th 2008, the American democratic system was replaced by a financial dictatorship.”

What was billed as a “Federal Bailout” was nothing less than a bloodless coup. The Wall Street Gang had taken over the White House and control of Washington. Congress promised not to resist, and pledged to pass legislation as demanded.”

…Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, spearheading the coup, sought unrestricted authority to spend the nation’s money as he saw fit. The first order of business by the Economic Czar was to take trillions of dollars of bad debt from crumbling investment banks and insurance companies and transfer it to the backs of already debt-burdened citizens.”

…In simple language, with cameras rolling, in broad daylight, the American public was robbed blind. This wasn’t a magic show. There were no hidden tricks or sleights of hand. “We want this to be clean, we want this to be quick,” demanded the Economic Czar. “We need to get this done quickly, and the cleaner the better,” intoned President Bush, with the urgency of his “smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud” logic he used as a pretext to invade Iraq.”

…Presidential candidate Barack Obama promised to “fully support” the plan and called on Congress to take “immediate action.” Republican challenger John McCain said he would further review the proposal before passing judgment while Congressional leaders from both parties have signed on with their support.

Americans were told they would have to pay to rescue the very companies whose unregulated greed, fraud and recklessness had created the crisis in the first place. Considered nobodies by the authorities, the people had no voice and had no choice.”

Anybody heard tell of the long dismissed REVOLUTION lately.

The following is from Indypendent.

Get Out the Pitchforks and Lighted Torches: Protest at Wall St. This Thursday at 4 p.m.
By John Tarleton

There is a polite debate going on Inside-the-Beltway as well as on the presidential campaign about how exactly to give away the $700 billion that Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is demanding as a bailout for the bankers and financiers who presided over last week’s economic meltdown. What hasn’t been visible is the shock and outrage that much of the public is feeling over this proposed looting of the public treasury. That, hopefully, will change on Thursday afternoon at 4 p.m. when protesters plan to gather (see announcement below) at Bowling Green Plaza, just south of Wall St.

With the world famous financial district as a prop and the eyes of the national and global media on us, those of us who live in New York can make visible the anger and concern so many people and we can do so at a strategic moment as Congress appears set to pass legislation by the end of the week before adjourning for the fall campaign season.

There is no central group organizing this event. But as the call to action that began circulating Monday afternoon noted, “Do whatever you can – make and distribute your own flyers, contact all your groups and friends. This crime is without precedence and we can’t be silent! What’s the point of waiting for someone else to organize a protest two months from now, long after the crime has been perpetrated?”

ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THURSDAY’S PROTEST

When: 4pm Thursday, September 25!
Where: Southern end of Bowling Green Park, in the plaza area
What to bring: Banners, noisemakers, signs, leaflets, etc.
Why: To say we won’t pay for the Wall Street bailout

Everyone,

This week the White House is going to try to push through the biggest
robbery in world history with nary a stitch of debate to bail out the Wall
Street bastards who created this economic apocalypse in the first place.

This is the financial equivalent of September 11. They think, just like
with the Patriot Act, they can use the shock to force through the
“therapy,” and we’ll just roll over!

Think about it: They said providing healthcare for 9 million children,
perhaps costing $6 billion a year, was too expensive, but there’s
evidently no sum of money large enough that will sate the Wall Street
pigs. If this passes, forget about any money for environmental protection,
to counter global warming, for education, for national healthcare, to
rebuild our decaying infrastructure, for alternative energy.

This is a historic moment. We need to act now while we can influence the
debate. Let’s demonstrate this Thursday at 4pm in Wall Street (see below).
We know the congressional Democrats will peep meekly before caving in like
they have on everything else, from FISA to the Iraq War.

With Bear Stearns, Fannie and Freddie, AIG, the money markets and now this
omnibus bailout, well in excess of $1 trillion will be distributed from
the poor, workers and middle class to the scum floating on top.

This whole mess gives lie to the free market. The Feds are propping up
stock prices, directing buyouts, subsidizing crooks and swindlers who
already made a killing off the mortgage bubble.

Worst of all, even before any details have been hashed out, The New York
Times admits that “Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it,”
and its chief financial correspondent writes that the Bush administration
wants “Congress to give them a blank check to do whatever they want,
whatever the cost, with no one able to watch them closely.”

It’s socialism for the rich and dog-eat-dog capitalism for the rest of us.
Let’s take it to the heart of the financial district! Gather at 4pm, this
Thursday, Sept. 25 in the plaza at the southern end of Bowling Green Park,
which is the small triangular park that has the Wall Street bull at the
northern tip.

By having it later in the day we can show these thieves, as they leave
work, we’re not their suckers. Plus, anyone who can’t get off work can
still join us downtown as soon as they are able.

There is no agenda, no leaders, no organizing group, nothing to endorse
other than we’re not going to pay! Let the bondholders pay, let the banks
pay, let those who brought the “toxic” mortgage-backed securities pay!

On this list are many key organizers and activists. We have a huge amount of
connections – we all know many other organizations, activists and
community groups. We know P.R. folk who can quickly write up and
distribute press releases, those who can contact legal observers, media
activists who can spread the word, the videographers who can film the
event, etc.

Do whatever you can – make and distribute your own flyers, contact all
your groups and friends. This crime is without precedence and we can’t be
silent! What’s the point of waiting for someone else to organize a protest
two months from now, long after the crime has been perpetrated?

We have everything we need to create a large, peaceful, loud
demonstration. Millions of others must feel the same way; they just don’t
know what to do. Let’s take the lead and make this the start! 

Tuesday , September 23, 2008

By Allison Barrie     

Baggage searches are SOOOOOO early-21st century. Homeland Security is now testing the next generation of security screening — a body scanner that can read your mind.

Most preventive screening looks for explosives or metals that pose a threat. But a new system called MALINTENT turns the old school approach on its head. This Orwellian-sounding machine detects the person — not the device — set to wreak havoc and terror.

MALINTENT, the brainchild of the cutting-edge Human Factors division in Homeland Security’s directorate for Science and Technology, searches your body for non-verbal cues that predict whether you mean harm to your fellow passengers.

It has a series of sensors and imagers that read your body temperature, heart rate and respiration for unconscious tells invisible to the naked eye — signals terrorists and criminals may display in advance of an attack.

But this is no polygraph test. Subjects do not get hooked up or strapped down for a careful reading; those sensors do all the work without any actual physical contact. It’s like an X-ray for bad intentions.

Currently, all the sensors and equipment are packaged inside a mobile screening laboratory about the size of a trailer or large truck bed, and just last week, Homeland Security put it to a field test in Maryland, scanning 144 mostly unwitting human subjects.

While I’d love to give you the full scoop on the unusual experiment, testing is ongoing and full disclosure would compromise future tests.

• Click here for an exclusive look at MALINTENT in action.

But what I can tell you is that the test subjects were average Joes living in the D.C. area who thought they were attending something like a technology expo; in order for the experiment to work effectively and to get the testing subjects to buy in, the cover story had to be convincing.

While the 144 test subjects thought they were merely passing through an entrance way, they actually passed through a series of sensors that screened them for bad intentions.

Homeland Security also selected a group of 23 attendees to be civilian “accomplices” in their test. They were each given a “disruptive device” to carry through the portal — and, unlike the other attendees, were conscious that they were on a mission.

In order to conduct these tests on human subjects, DHS had to meet rigorous safety standards to ensure the screening would not cause any physical or emotional harm.

So here’s how it works. When the sensors identify that something is off, they transmit warning data to analysts, who decide whether to flag passengers for further questioning. The next step involves micro-facial scanning, which involves measuring minute muscle movements in the face for clues to mood and intention.

Homeland Security has developed a system to recognize, define and measure seven primary emotions and emotional cues that are reflected in contractions of facial muscles. MALINTENT identifies these emotions and relays the information back to a security screener almost in real-time.

This whole security array — the scanners and screeners who make up the mobile lab — is called “Future Attribute Screening Technology” — or FAST — because it is designed to get passengers through security in two to four minutes, and often faster.

If you’re rushed or stressed, you may send out signals of anxiety, but FAST isn’t fooled. It’s already good enough to tell the difference between a harried traveler and a terrorist. Even if you sweat heavily by nature, FAST won’t mistake you for a baddie.

“If you focus on looking at the person, you don’t have to worry about detecting the device itself,” said Bob Burns, MALINTENT’s project leader. And while there are devices out there that look at individual cues, a comprehensive screening device like this has never before been put together.

While FAST’s batting average is classified, Undersecretary for Science and Technology Adm. Jay Cohen declared the experiment a “home run.”

As cold and inhuman as the electric eye may be, DHS says scanners are unbiased and nonjudgmental. “It does not predict who you are and make a judgment, it only provides an assessment in situations,” said Burns. “It analyzes you against baseline stats when you walk in the door, it measures reactions and variations when you approach and go through the portal.”

But the testing — and the device itself — are not without their problems. This invasive scanner, which catalogues your vital signs for non-medical reasons, seems like an uninvited doctor’s exam and raises many privacy issues.

But DHS says this is not Big Brother. Once you are through the FAST portal, your scrutiny is over and records aren’t kept. “Your data is dumped,” said Burns. “The information is not maintained — it doesn’t track who you are.”

DHS is now planning an even wider array of screening technology, including an eye scanner next year and pheromone-reading technology by 2010.

The team will also be adding equipment that reads body movements, called “illustrative and emblem cues.” According to Burns, this is achievable because people “move in reaction to what they are thinking, more or less based on the context of the situation.”

FAST may also incorporate biological, radiological and explosive detection, but for now the primary focus is on identifying and isolating potential human threats.

And because FAST is a mobile screening laboratory, it could be set up at entrances to stadiums, malls and in airports, making it ever more difficult for terrorists to live and work among us.

Burns noted his team’s goal is to “restore a sense of freedom.” Once MALINTENT is rolled out in airports, it could give us a future where we can once again wander onto planes with super-sized cosmetics and all the bottles of water we can carry — and most importantly without that sense of foreboding that has haunted Americans since Sept. 11.

Allison Barrie, a security and terrorism consultant with the Commission for National Security in the 21st Century, is FOX News’ security columnist.