A Locke on Limbaugh

The very idea of “The United States of America” was based on the radical ideas of the Enlightenment and the philosophy of liberal Philosophers like John Locke. Locke believed that all people are “reasonable” and “moral” and born with fundamental rights that transcended government; these rights were as basic as breathing and eating. Locke’s theories were based on the idea of natural law, natural law being the observation of nature’s cycles such as the seasons and life cycle of people, wild creatures and plants. Locke believed people have a right to life, liberty and property and these rights were part of the natural law to which all people are entitled.
Opposing Locke’s ideas were the Conservatives of the time who were concerned about maintaining the status quo. For Kings, Queens and Emperors to embrace Locke would be to give up some control over the masses, however, worse than that, was the idea that the people were entitled to certain rights over which there would be no discussion. Locke further believed that Government was based on a contract with the people and that the contract was necessary to establish order. The contract between the People and the Government that was drawn up in the United States of America is our Constitution and it is the blueprint that defines our basic governmental structure while safeguarding our rights, the rights to which we are entitled by virtue of our humanity not by virtue of citizenship. Locke believed that if people employed reason, they would arrive at a comparative and workable form of government. Locke further believed that people have the right to break their contract if the government fails to uphold their natural rights. The Framers of our Constitution liked this idea and built in a system to elect a new government from time to time in order to keep those in power aware that the people can and will vote them out if their government fails to uphold their natural rights.
The great good fortune for the American people is that we have had Reasonable people in the past (Jefferson) reading the great Liberal philosophers, like Locke, and putting their ideas into the creation of one of the world’s greatest social experiments, The United States of America. Liberalism was established in America. Individual freedoms such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and religious freedom were written into the Bill of Rights. These rights were disturbing to the European monarchs because they were seen as destabilizing and in any event, the monarchies did not want to give up their total power and control over the people.
More than ever we need voices of reason to speak for conservatives and liberals alike, especially today, when so much is at risk. What we do not need are voices that speak, masquerading as informed opinion, leading well intentioned listeners to vote against their own self interests. Reflecting on what Liberalism has contributed to the formation of the United States, and how it has kept us from embracing the ideas of installing a monarchy or a dictator at different times in our history we are currently faced with the following blather in juxtaposition to John Locke:

Steve Benen, Washington Monthly writes:
“Rush Limbaugh told his listeners that he was asked by "a major American print publication" to offer a 400-word statement explaining his "hope for the Obama presidency." He responded: "So I'm thinking of replying to the guy, 'Okay, I'll send you a response, but I don't need 400 words, I need four: I hope he fails.'
(interruption) What are you laughing at? See, here's the point. Everybody thinks it's outrageous to say. Look, even my staff, 'Oh, you can't do that.' Why not? Why is it any different, what's new, what is unfair about my saying I hope liberalism fails? Liberalism is our problem. Liberalism is what's gotten us dangerously close to the precipice here. Why do I want more of it? I don't care what the Drive-By story is. I Hope Obama Fails.' Somebody's gotta say it."Limbaugh uses Liberalism three times in three sentences and we still don’t know what he is talking about. There are some who accept Limbaugh’s own private definition of “liberalism” (whatever it is) with all of his political and social biases versus a more studied historical perspective. Don’t let the uninformed grab the microphone and build a following based on misunderstanding, fear, and a distortion of history without ever having to publicly explain or defend their positions in a moderated debate of ideas on a person to person basis; Limbaugh should be called-out and made to explain his definition of liberalism and how he arrived at it.

Steve Benen closed his piece by saying: “No, I don't think Americans have to root against the country. If Obama fails, we fail. If his presidency falls short, there are negative consequences for all of us. This is the opposite of patriotism.”
Limbaugh is the opposite of Locke; Locke is relevant

A Decisive Election - A new National Course

In case no one has noticed the election was for change. The voters swept out the Neocons and elected a more liberal government. Most voters rejected the politics of “Swiftboaters”. This election was about issues like the war, the economy and healthcare. The election results were 365 electoral votes to 173 electoral votes, 66.7 million votes to 58.2 million votes, or 53% voted for Obama to 46% for McCain. The score says that voters were fed up and voted for change. Why? Consider the following.
The following is what we have to repair just to get back to where we were January 2001:
The elimination of the ABM treaty; it is gone (kept us from nuclear war since Eisenhower) The Kyoto treaty is unworkable because of the aversion to honest science; the resulting effects of global climate change are punishing our nation and the world. The entire Mideast and their moderate populations no longer trust us. We have grated against all of our European allies. Habeas Corpus is gone, rolling back our rights 700 years to the Magna Carta. The budget surplus is gone, even bigger deficits are back and what do we have to show for it? We torture people like the bad guys do; not torturing people made us better than the bad guys. The CIA/ Plame episode deliberately and publically exposed one of our own agents to divert attention from the Niger yellow cake lie! A pre-emptive war at a cost of 12 billion dollars a month has resulted in over 4000 US military dead, 1,000,000 Iraqis dead, 40,000 US military seriously wounded, and 9 million Iraqis seriously wounded. National security (ports, chemical factories) is a myth, our military has been pushed to the breaking point, and they struggle to get medical help. Support the troops means what? The jobs recovery is nonexistent, trickle-down never worked after trillions in tax cuts. The US is in debt and in the midst of a nasty rescission. All of that and 46% of the contry thought that this was the way our government should work?
The majority of the voters want to change the way the country works and the voters want the country repaired.
To begin with, how about thinking of ourselves as Americans? Why is it more important to be identified with one party or the other. We are all Americans, we are all patriots. We have to set a new course with new priorities. Has anyone spent 5 minutes thinking about what they want the government to do? Where do you want your dollars spent? What are your priorities? By talking about priorities we may come to realize how much we have in common rather than how different we are...

Here is my list in order of priority: Where is yours?

Essential Services at Home (USA)
Safety (police and fire)
Public education (tied with safety)
Single payer health insurance (for everyone)
Social Security
Clean air, clean water
Research for alternative energy sources
Protect the (environment) i.e., natural barriers (Like the wetlands off New Orleans)
Fund pure research projects in the Nations Universities
Expand public transportation systems
Bring back the draft for military or national service

Essential Foreign Spending (Contribute our share)
Fund the program to collect every loose nuke in the former Soviet Union
Fund the programs in the UN to provide health, food and education services to the world’s poor
Fund programs in the UN for peace-keeping missions supported by the UN

Non Essential Spending (eliminate)
Corporate subsidies

Now, get busy talking about things that really matter; make your voice heard and insist on your priorities. Let’s get a discussion going on spending priorities.

Meltdown for Dummies or Why is Socialism OK for Wall Street?

There is a simplistic explanation circulating among the conservative camp about poor people being the cause of the market meltdown because they bought houses they could not afford and defaulted on their mortgages. If you believe this then you are misinformed. The idea that a few thousand poor people who cannot make mortgage payments are capable of bringing down a world economy is simplistic to the absurd and intellectually dishonest. The present meltdown is a result of deregulated banks and securities firms selling bundled mortgages as commodities which morphed into a host of exotic financial derivative products that revalued bundled mortgages many times over. Current estimates value the cumulative total of derivative products flowing from repackaged mortgages at approx 48 to 1. These financial acrobatics increased the perceived market value of the mortgages in question to greater than the GNP of the planet. (Yes, the entire world). The creation of this market was done under the watchful eyes of Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, Arthur Levitt, Ben Bernanke and Current Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, not exactly a platoon of liberals.
How does a mortgage become a derivative and why didn’t the Government stop it? “The radical banking deregulation legislation that McCain pushed so aggressively is what legally enabled those he condemned recently as “the Wall Street bankers and brokers who got us into this mess”. Have McCain supporters never heard of Phil Gramm, the man McCain picked to co-chair his presidential campaign, who sponsored the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act—both of which made legal, for the first time since the Great Depression, the credit swaps and hybrid instruments at the heart of the Wall Street scams?” (Robert Scheer, Truthdig.com)
The peak year for mortgage generation including sub-prime mortgages was 2004. The Federal Reserve is supposed to regulate corporate reserves to limit the growth of credit, but the Structured Investment Vehicles (SIV’s) created by Wall Street were one method to get around this rule. More leverage also meant more risk for the bank. This is all part of what's called the Shadow Banking System, meaning it gets around existing regulations. It was deregulation that led to the huge growth of the shadow banking system. In 2004 Wall Street successfully lobbied the Securities and Exchange Commission to loosen regulations on how much they could leverage against their capital reserves. This allowed the companies "to invest in the fast-growing but opaque world of mortgage-backed securities, credit derivatives, a form of insurance for bond holders; and other exotic instruments, according to the New York Times. The only real oversight left in place was self-policing by the investment banks themselves to determine if they were putting investors at risk.” (AlterNet.org, Gupta, Arun).
The trail leading to destruction of the international economy begins with the repeal of Glass / Steagall an act passed by Congress in 1933 that prohibited commercial banks from collaborating with full-service brokerage firms or participating in investment banking activities. Arun Gupta says that Wall Street’s goal was to figure out ways to increase profits while avoiding liability. There is a difference between structuring an investment to limit liability and structuring a series of investments to avoid liability. The street was moving everything off book to Structured Investment Vehicles to get around the rules of leveraging.
Gupta describes Wall Street as practicing wizardry in that they turn a debt (a mortgage) into a security (a stock). This is referred to as a Mortgage Base Security (MBS). The commercial bank sells the MBS to an investment bank. The mortgage payment finds its way to the holder of the Mortgage Based Security (MBS). The fee that the commercial bank charges the investment bank is approx. $1000 a mortgage. As you can see, this has to be a volume game or it’s not worth doing. The bank bundles hundreds of mortgages together, calls them securities; they then get rating companies to have the mortgages assured by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Bush administration was and is having trouble with the economy and job creation. In 2004 they saw the low interest rates and the rising value of the real estate market as a way to enhance the stock market. It was the Bush administration that pushed for broader acceptance of Sub-prime loans back in 2004.
The Sub Prime chapter begins here in earnest. Sub-Prime means that the loan is a higher risk but the investment returns are higher for lenders. Here is where the whole scheme comes off the tracks. Bundles of AAA rated mortgage backed securities (MBS) are sliced up and blended with BBB and or lower rated Sub Prime Mortgage Backed Securities. This product is called a Tranche. The purchaser of a Tranche may be a Hedge Fund, Pension Fund, Investment Bank, Money bank, or a Central bank. Something emerged called Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO) where the banks are again using the same debt (your mortgage) as collateral to back up the purchase of the Tranche. To give the illusion of limited risk Credit Default Swaps (CDS) another product is a kind of insurance against default.
What you see happening here is for example, $40 billion in mortgages after leveraging is a potential liability of $1.6 trillion. The final chapter played out when the oversupply of housing spurred by apparent investment opportunities, and consumers using their house equity as a bank fell down like a house of cards. The real estate market got soft. ARMS (adjustable rate mortgages) reset to home owners, who were now, because of falling prices, upside down on the value of their houses. Financial institutions had nowhere near the cash reserves needed to cover all of the guarantees and insurances against failure because of the leveraged investments that had assumed a perpetual rise in housing prices.
The deregulation myth says that the market is self regulating and that Government has no place in their business. I beg to differ; the current meltdown is exhibit “A” in our case for oversight and regulation. It was the plethora of exotic and unworkable financial products that the market created to get around regulation that ultimately failed and melted down the economy. It was by no means the little guy who bought a house using an ARM because he was sold on the idea that the value of the house would go up and he could always cash out on the plus side of the deal.
Governments can’t run on air and the taxpayers cannot and should not bail out scoundrels. I see a corporate tax increase on financial business, and I see more regulation and oversight for investment companies. There has been enough corporate socialism for financial firms; it’s time we started to take care of the citizens of the USA. McCain is a big business socialist. Obama is working for middle class Americans - he is the choice.
Source http://www.alternet.org/workplace/102672/

Republican Mess Requires House Cleaning

It's time for Democratic values to lead the way

Looking back over the last eight years the landscape is littered with financial, military and social rubble. Americans deserve better than the false choices that are presented by Republican ideologues. We don't have to choose between freedoms in the Bill of Rights and the War on Terror. We don't have to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here. These foolish "retail patriotisms" divide the country. While we are fighting about all of these divisive ideas, the Bush administration chips away at our hard won freedoms, like taking away habeas corpus. McCain will continue that tactic of wiping out our rights.Out of one side of his mouth McCain tells us our troops are fighting for our liberties on the battlefields of Iraq, and from the other side of his mouth he votes yes to take away our liberties on the floor of the Senate. We lose our troops over there, and our liberties over here; something is really screwed up with this picture.

Obama has the better tax plan. His plan will provide help where it is needed the most; it will help those at the lower end of the earnings scale. We are already upside down on property values due to the slumping real estate market. Reject the Bush tax cut. While you are voting, elect leaders focused on helping Main Street not placating Wall Street. Sweep out of office those who speak against financial regulation - vote for Obama.


Speaking of Wall Street, stocks are melting down and will be years in recovering. Business will take a hit because of the current credit restrictions, and shoppers are pulling back and being more cautious and frugal. All because of the conservative’s deregulation myth, that markets are self correcting. The republicans forgot to tell you that some market corrections are train-wrecks.

We continue to send ten billion dollars a month to Iraq which is already sporting a price tag in the trillions. (What is today’s reason for being in Iraq?) How do we support the world’s biggest most expensive military if McCain wants to excuse the top 5% wealthiest from paying taxes? His answer will be the same as Bush, cut Medicare and Social Security so he can keep sending $10 billion a month to Iraq. McCain’s plan is not acceptable. The Iraqis want us to leave, let’s get out and put that 10 billion to work over here.


Why should we excuse the top 5% wealthiest in our country from paying more taxes?
Bush said that a tax cut would stimulate business - that was 7 years ago …. Where is the new business? Where are the new jobs? Where is the prosperity? The Reagan years are over; there is no valid trickle down model. Promise the masses tax cuts but don’t mention that the tax cuts do not include payroll taxes which are what the vast majority of Americans pay. The Tax cuts it turns out are for corporations,on capital gains paid by successful investors and inheritance taxes paid only by multi-millionaires.

A vote for republicans will guarantee the social rubble is going to include no single payer national health care, reduced Social Security, and Medicare benefits. Add to that reduced funding for education at the local level and for college tuition; that will be part of the price of staying the course, and that will be the price of four more years of Republicans in the White House.
It’s time for a change: Vote for Obama.

A Maverick by Any Other Name is a Republican

John McCain is a Republican cut from the same cloth that brought you the last eight years. Just to review the facts: Eight years ago there was a three Trillion dollar surplus that the Republicans inherited. What has been their stewardship with that inheritance? Not only is it gone, but the next administration inherits one of the biggest deficits in our history. The current deficit is expected to be 400 billion, add to that an additional 700 billion proposed by the current Bush administration to buy their way out of bad fiscal policy and the deficit is over a trillion bucks. We were told 7 years ago the three trillion dollars surplus would be returned to Wall Street and would create jobs. I believe this is referred to as the trickle-down theory. The tax cuts went to the top one percent of the nation’s wealthiest. In spite of the unprecedented tax-cut this Republican administration has presided over the worst job-creation performance since Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression. Wouldn’t it be great to have that 3 trillion back? Now, McCain wants to give the oil companies 3 billion in tax breaks.
Security is supposed to be a natural strength of the Republican Party; the facts say otherwise. This administration was asleep at the switch prior to 9/11. Rice was inept as was the entire Bush team and the result was 19 nut cases walked, unchallenged, through a joke airport security system, high-jacked 4 planes simultaneously and succeeded in killing 3000 people. This happened after repeated warnings to the Bush administration from people like Richard Clarke who had served in several Republican administrations.
We went to war in Iraq, illegally, which had nothing to do with 9/11 after leaving the capture of Bin Laden to another day. As of this writing, “another day” is not here yet. McCain is still fixed on Iraq; he wants to “win”. Win what? Saddam is dead, the country is destroyed. Bush said: “. When the Iraqis stand up we will stand down” The Iraqis have had an election and the president of Iraq has asked the Americans to leave and let the Iraqis sort out their problems, Neither Bush nor McCain wants to leave Iraq. Both want to continue to spend 10 billion dollars a month occupying a country we have been unable to control for 5 years. Make no mistake about it, the surge did not work, what worked was the Anbar Sunni Arabs got fed up with the vicious Al Qaeda elements and took them out. That has been the fate of Al Qaeda in every country they have been in; they have been ousted by the local people because they are vicious killers.
Remember this: John McCain was one of the Keating 5. These were the people who precipitated the saving and loan debacle in the early 90’s and cost the American taxpayers 125 billion dollars to bail out failing US banks. More recently McCain chose as his campaign finance advisor Phil Gramm, who slipped in a 250 page time bomb into legislation back into the 90’s which culminated in the current financial disaster we find ourselves in. McCain does not show good judgment in finance and in national security.
Finally, John McCain’s choice of a VP is an insult to the American people. To have such a narrow minded and inept person a heart-beat away from the presidency should be a disqualifier in and of itself. Certainly, the rest of the world thinks Americans are stupid for electing George Bush twice.
We cannot afford another 4 years of the same bad government. John McCain is a republican and he believes in no government regulation, if you like the current financial mess we are in then he is your guy and he will provide more of the same. Maverick my foot, nice try McCain, but we know you are a republican just like George W. Bush we don’t need a maverick we need a leader. Vote for Obama.

Eliminate The Middleman

THURSDAY, APRIL 10, 2008

Eliminate The Middleman

One thing became painfully obvious watching this week's House / Senate hearings on the Iraq occupation, the wrong people were being questioned. Instead of General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker it should have been President George W. Bush, V.P. Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in front of the legislative committees. Make no mistake about it, any military personal that have opposed either going in or staying in Iraq are gone. Whatever his feelings about Iraq, Petraeus is the wrong guy to ask about the larger questions surrounding the Iraq mess namely, what are we going to do now? In the USA, the military reports to the civilian government they are given a job and they follow orders. Petraeus makes the tactical decisions concerning the occupation; the overall strategy is put together at the Pentagon and the White House.

While we agonize over the tactics and mistakes made in Iraq, our attention is diverted from the larger question: Why are we there? What were the reasons to trade 4000 American lives, hundreds of billions of dollars and the American reputation of rule of law for the preemptive invasion of Iraq? These are the central questions that have never been answered. Iraq played no role in 9/11, Iraq was an enemy of Al Qaeda, Iraq was not a military threat to the United States or it's neighbors and Bush and Cheney knew it before the invasion.

Why are we in Iraq? Is staying in Iraq all about defending Republican ideology, decisions and policy no matter that the reasons given for a preemptive strike all turned out to be non-existent? "Are the Republicans so invested in the original decision to invade Iraq that they won't even consider whether the United States would be better off winding down this commitment, relieving our military of the war's enormous burdens and redirecting our foreign policy. (E.J. Dionne The Road to Nowhere)"

Let's start asking the tough questions, but more importantly, lets make sure we are asking the right questions to the right people.

Time to Recalibrate Our Compass: We Are Drifting in Dangerous Waters

Why did we attack Iraq in March of 2003? Here is what we were told: Iraq has or will have nuclear weapons very shortly and use them against its neighbors and possibly the U.S. Iraq has or will make chemical weapons and use them against its neighbors. Iraq has or will make biological weapons and use them against its neighbors. Saddam Hussein is a threat to the United States and his neighbors. Saddam has killed thousands of people who opposed him. He is a ruthless dictator who is a threat to the region. Iraq is the central war on terror. If we don’t fight the terrorists over there then we will have to fight him over here in the streets of the United States. The build up to the Iraq attack was always and still is presented in the context of September 11, 2001. Iraq was presented as an imminent threat. For an entire year before the war every time 9/11 was mentioned by the president Iraq followed in the next sentence and the American people heard 9/11 and Iraq and assumed that Iraq was either responsible for or was involved in the 9/11 catastrophe. It simply was not true. Iraq had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or 9/11. Iraq an imminent threat? – Iraq, that had no navy –Iraq, that had no air force- Iraq, whose army was decimated by the 1993 Gulf war – Iraq, whose military equipment was still in shambles from the 1993 Gulf war an imminent threat? Ridiculous and the congress the news media and the people bought it …

That was the compass course from Jan 2002 to March 2003; Iraq is a threat to its neighbors and is or may be a threat to the United States the most powerful nation on the planet. Several months before the invasion of Iraq Hans Blix and his UN team of inspectors were in Iraq looking for Weapons of Mass Destruction. Saddam Hussein granted them full unconditional access to every location in Iraq. The inspectors went to the locations that Donald Rumsfeld said WMD were known to be. Not only were physical weapons not discovered, there was no radioactive trace of nuclear material found after using the most sensitive detection equipment available. In short there were no Nuclear WMD. Fast-forward four and half years and the full force of US expertise and free access to every inch of Iraq and still no trace of hidden WMD. I am sure that if the United States had found any evidence of nuclear weapons no matter how insignificant, it would have been a page one story. If Hans Blix could not find WMD then why did we order him out, stop the search and attack Iraq? Good question, you will have to ask George Bush or Dick Cheney but don’t expect to get an answer.

It turns out that the Iranians were never sure if Iraq had WMD. Because of the threat that it might be true Saddam’s Iraq was able to keep the much larger and more powerful Iranians in check. That was a plus for the U.S. and Israel. Just before the war started former Ambassador Joseph Wilson published his open letter to America exposing a lie told in the previous State of the Union Address that Iraq had sought to buy Yellow Cake from Niger. Yellow cake is processed, powered, uranium and it was alleged that it could be refined into weapons grade material for a bomb. Fearing an investigation and the possible exposure that the yellow cake statement in the State of The Union Address was false Dick Cheney’s office exposed Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame, a covert CIA agent. She had been working with a special CIA unit to stem the flow of WMD. The Wilsons became the story (that’s what you do when you want to divert attention from the facts of a case); Joe Wilson was accused of lying about his findings and of misrepresenting the facts that had been presented in his op-ed piece. The Republican-run Senate Intelligence Committee made derogatory claims about Wilson’s honesty in a report issued about the WMD controversy on July 7, 2004. (Parry Neck Deep 263). However, the official CIA report said that the (CIA) research analysts believed that the Wilson report supported their (official) assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to sell uranium to Iraq. . (Parry Neck Deep 263).

No WMD but we had attacked Iraq with a vengeance. First there was Shock and Awe a brutal display of force that blasted buildings in the middle of Baghdad, inadvertently, but non-the-less, killing thousands of civilians. In-fact, to date over one million innocent Iraqi civilians have been killed and 10 million wounded. These casualty numbers are made up mostly of women children and old men. But why are we there? There were no WMD and given the ferocious reaction by the administration to Wilson, Plame I will speculate that they did not believe Saddam to be the military threat he was presented to be much less a nuclear power. It is all about oil. It is the belief of this administration that to conquer the Mid East by military force is justified by our need for oil. If it was wrong for Iraq to invade Kuwait for oil, then why is ok for us to invade Iraq for oil? (So much for Christian values and morality).

So what is all this about supporting the troops? We all support the troops. I want every one of them home right now and home in one piece. There have been 3,848 US Military deaths and 10 times that many American wounded in an occupation that will never end. This administration has gotten every dime it ever asked for, it got every troop it wanted, I have not heard one disparaging remark about one troop ever (except from Rush Limbaugh). So when the reason for the war gets more than a little cloudy because it went from imminent threat to WMD, to regime change, to creating a democracy to fighting the war on terror, to the central war on terror, to Iran and if any of you dare to question the motives for the war then you are unpatriotic and not supporting the troops. The amazing thing is we are so divided by partisan ideology we buy all of this stuff. Who are we fighting, each other?
Its time to look at the direction this country is headed; it is time to check our moral compass Do you really feel its necessary to have over 3,848 military dead and 40,000 wounded for Exxon Mobile or any other multinational corporation? If you have gotten this far though the article then you know that a war in Iraq was unnecessary it did not have to happen; we had more power before we used our power, now we have less power and fewer options. I say that the Iraq war is a loser, and we are lost at sea with this commander-in-chief because he does not have a compass, and he may yet start another war in Iran and why will that be necessary?