Touchy Subjects

Political Voices // William K. Black

 

William Black has been very good at explaining the fact that the foxes have been in charge of our hen house and they have been robbing it mercilessly. Our problem seems to be that many believe we can keep on going making our profits without ever paying attention to these facts. It’s like, yes, Al Capone is in charge of Chicago, but  why be worried because we can still make our current profits…

I wrote the following in response,

The TV show "COPS" is about police tracking down and arresting, on camera, various petty criminals like drug pushers, thieves, and scam artists. It's not a TV show about the administration of justice. What we know from William Black, and others, is that the people at the top of the political system, the ones who control it, get away with white collar crime. The power boys are not similarly beaten up by the police. This makes the police "thugs in blue." They are just the hired thugs told to keep the less fortunate in line. It's like how Capone kept the peace in his neighborhoods so that he could better get away with the crimes he was carrying out hidden away.

The problem isn't just that letting white collar criminals get away gives the poor ideas that they too can get away with crime. The system is told to step on those people. This is why the real cops are not discouraged from beating the shit out of people in those examples filmed by bystanders. The leadership wants the little people to know that the criminal behavior of the rich should not be a license for them to "have at it."

The corruption involving letting white collar criminals off to steal again causes the corruption of the system of criminal justice. Letting some people be above the law destroys the rule of law.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/08/real-reason-sec-has-been-shredding.html

Political Voices // Cenk Uygur

I’ve been looking around the intertubes trying to find strong political positions that provide ideas or arguments that I find interesting and provocative. One has been Cenk Uygur whom I’ve seen on his “The Young Turks” internet show. He has been strong on explaining and coming out with “progressive” positions on several issues, particularly the war, the economy, and on Obama.

Here is a quote from a piece he wrote about Obama,

Can anyone name Obama's principles? Something he will not bend on? A progressive priority he will defend to the end?

Does Obama even think of himself as a progressive? He once pointed to a glass half-filled with water and told Sen. Bernie Sanders, "That's the problem with you progressives. You see this as half-empty." You progressives?

But does anyone think that the guy who hired Tim Geithner, Rahm Emanuel, Larry Summers, William Daley, Peter Orszag, Ben Bernanke, etc. is remotely progressive? If you looked throughout the whole country, could you find more conservative, establishment Democrats? Barely, if at all. And, of course, some of those guys aren't even Democrats.

But finally, it isn't just us on the "professional left" pointing this out. After yet another unconditional surrender in the debt ceiling talks, he's hit his tipping point. Just go talk to any group of liberals in the country and see if half of them aren't incredibly pissed off at him. I do it all the time and their whispers of discontent has grown into a cacophony.

Finally, nearly every progressive commentator is talking about his profound weakness, if it even is that and not something worse (some have started to question whether he even wants to win on progressive issues or if he is fundamentally conservative).

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/08/09/1004913/-Obamas-Tipping-Point?showAll=yes&via=blog_504835

And below, I have found some snippets of his rants…

 

Political Voices // Ron Paul as thirteenth floor

The problems with Congressman Paul are not well understood. There’s been no real discussion of what he believes or has to say. The problem for the usual pundits on the Mainstream is that they really cannot talk about the issues that Paul is raising for fear that they will attract supporters from those people who have not heard much about him.

The claim that he is unelectable is supported, most likely, by the unstated presumption that the big money boys, i.e., those who support the likes of Obama and other super-heroes,  won’t give him any money and don’t agree with his policies. Furthermore, there is some reason to think that Paul’s consistency makes him unwilling to be bought off.

So, it is curious that Paul gets good numbers and the pundits ignore him. The comedians, however, are willing to point out obvious things.

The Daily Show - Indecision 2012 - Corn Polled Edition - Ron Paul & the Top Tier
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Political Voices // Rep. Ron Paul

Again, remember that our basic understanding of ourselves involves various metaphorical accounts of reality. That is, our lives are like the cave dwellers. Our lives are like the zombies driven by their insatiable hungers or the commands of their voodoo masters. Or, relevant particularly in politics, is the idea that we are like kids on a playground run by a bully. These metaphors organize our thinking, yes, in ways that have made sense to us. So, the one about the playground tells us about relationships between the weak and the powerful. It talks about the wealth of nations. It talks about justice and whether there could ever be any, and what it would amount to.

Another metaphor, much like the playground one, talks about how society is about chickens and foxes. The chickens and foxes agree to live in a chicken coop, and organize their relations around the running of the coop. Of course, the chickens are concerned to protect themselves from marauding  packs of foxes, so, in order to protect themselves from the unknown alien foxes they make deals with the more familiar pack of foxes that are always hanging around their own flock of chickens. This is how the foxes are put in charge of the chicken coop. They are charged with protecting the chickens therein.  But, the security foxes still get hungry. And so, every once in awhile, they take down one of their own chickens. Over time the chickens notice that members of their flock have been turning up missing. They are there one day, and gone the next. They suspect that security is not very good. The foxes employed by the coop are somehow falling down on the job. So, it is suggested that the problem with security, and probably with all the other difficulties the chickens have had, is that they have relied too much on the chicken coop and the security and the roof over their heads that it has provided. It is furthermore suggested that each chicken should take care of its own security. They would be more conscientious, as they would be protecting themselves. And, if they provided their own shelter, they would not be stealing resources from every other chicken. Being rugged individualists would be a better deal all around. In this way, the chickens were persuaded to do away with the chicken coop itself and the programs it had been providing the chickens.

I take it this is the program of Rep. Ron Paul and the libertarian movement that he supports. Just as Paul is for limited government, the chickens came to believe in minimizing the activities of the chicken coop.

The problem is the foxes.  The expansive coop came about because the foxes were hungry and they like to eat chickens. Even when the foxes employed by the coop did their job and kept stray foxes away from the chicken coop, the employed foxes every once in awhile ate a chicken themselves. Foxes eat chickens. This situation will not be solved by getting rid of the chicken coop and making the chickens in this flock more self sufficient. The foxes will still be emboldened and empowered to eat them.

But Libertarians and many in the GOP who aren’t on the side of the foxes themselves, are persuaded that they can survive the foxes even if they get rid of the chicken coop that has been protecting them for so long.

The question we need to ask ourselves is whether libertarianism and Rep Paul’s program of getting rid of the expansive chicken coop a.k.a., our government, is what we need to do in the face of foxes. We believe in there being these foxes. We have made the coops to protect us from them. How can we be assured that individual chickens, such as we are, will be able to survive the onslaught of foxes in packs.

But, here is Rep Paul talking about his own chances,

And here is Charles Davis talking about the differences between Paul and Obama,

Who is the Real Reactionary?

Ron Paul: More Progressive Than Obama?

By CHARLES DAVIS

Ron Paul is far from perfect, but I'll say this much for the Texas congressman: He has never authorized a drone strike in Pakistan. He has never authorized the killing of dozens of women and children in Yemen. He hasn't protected torturers from prosecution and he hasn't overseen the torturous treatment of a 23-year-old young man for the “crime” of revealing the government's criminal behavior.
Can the same be said for Barack Obama?

Political Voices // Max Keiser

My friend asked, “What’s new in the world?”

My response, “The world is still ruled by Mafias. There’s nothing new about that.”

The news is often trivial in comparison to what is happening in the big picture. This is how the MSM, our journalists, get away with not talking about some of the most significant features of the world. If there’s nothing changing about how the Mafias control our lives, then there’s nothing newsy about it, and so, they don’t have to talk about it. In the same way, The fact that people resort to force to get important things  done is such a commonality, that this fact is not discussed.

The Keizer piece below has Max and Stacy talking about how the American people have depended on the American dollar being the world’s reserve currency. Max is telling us that this will soon change. In fact, he says, it has already changed in that, for instance,  China already trades with many countries in its own currency in bilateral deals with those countries, and avoids the American dollar altogether by doing so. The American economy will experience massive changes, so says Max, when the world’s economic leaders acknowledge that the dollar cannot be the world’s currency any longer.

Max is saying, among other things, that the American people have allowed themselves to be ignorant of what has been going on because they could afford to. Now, because of the hollowing out of the American economy, the people will be forced to confront some of these facts. They will be forced to confront the fact that the rich powers-that-be are still the powers,  but, they are no longer under their protection. That is, the rich of America no longer need the bulk of the American population so the population will no longer be protected from the stresses that have long existed in other parts of the world.

So says Max and Stacy,