Oh, My God

It's official. Mitt Romney does not like you if you:

are Latino (immigrant);
are Black;
like Medicare;
believe in Social Security;
have a government job;
don't have a job;
feel responsible for others;
would like help from others when life is hard;
believe that a woman is in charge of her own body and life;
believe you are "entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it."

The man has no concept of community, no concept of charity beyond his Mormon Church, no concept that life can hit you with a random blow, no compassion for others hit with a random blow.

Sometimes, Mr. Romoney, shit happens to someone that ain't their fault. Americans believe that we are stronger when we pull together, extend a hand, provide opportunity for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Too bad you believe "he who grabs, gets."

Romoney is so insulated by his wealth, inherited and accumulated  by gaming the system (then shipped to Swiss Bank accounts and hidden– can you spell "tax cheat?"), that he feels anyone who is not rich doesn't have the same guarantee of opportunity that he does.

He scorns 47% of the country, saying they believe themselves to be "victims."

After his buddies at Goldman Sachs crashed the economy with dubious deals by playing "casino" with our mortgage payments, after millions of Americans were thrown out of work  because of economic forces OVER WHICH THEY HAD NO CONTOL and lost their homes and their insurance and their future, Ri¢hie Ri¢h Romoney says they consider themselves "victims" and expect handouts.

And yesterday, he and that tight-assed VP candidate, the cold, calculating narcissistic liar Paul Ryan, said the Federal Reserve shouldn't try to jump start the economy because we hadn't been hit hard enough, hadn't suffered enough over the last five years.

America! Wake up! It IS class warfare and they started it! Working men and women are losing! The 1% have contempt for the 47%! They have all the money and they own our Congressmen (that's you, Rep. Greg Walden of Oregon) and are buying our legal system.

Romney is owned by gamblers (real ones – not just Goldman Sachs) and polluters and New York bankers and drug companies and insurance companies. They want to make economic serfs out of us!

Romney has admitted it. Finally, something comes out the man's mouth we can actually believe.

Paul Ryan is Washington insider!

Can it be true? Paul Ryan has never had a job outside of Congress?

Paul Ryan has never met a payroll, never been in the "market place" he so blithely advocates for others? Never not had government perks? It's astounding!

Can it be true this man has never been in the private sector but has been paid out of our tax revenues his ENTIRE ADULT LIFE?!? If so, this is the best argument ever made for retroactively downsizing government.

No wonder Paul Ryan has so little compassion – he came of age in Washington D.C. He was born on third base, says he hit a triple, then tells everyone else coming to the plate that they should bat without a helmet. What gall. What hypocrisy.

He believes in Ayn Rand but leaves out that atheism is the core of her philosophy, which is baking a cake without adding flour. Or eggs. He says we cannot afford compassion as a country and really, it's a sign of weakness. Does this staunch Catholic think he is quoting Jesus!?

He makes up a silly budget fiction about how to give more money to the rich while cutting food and hospitals and schools for the poor. Then he says Democrats are divisive?! This ego-driven wanker even lies about his time in marathons. He's never even run in Oregon's rain!

Paul Ryan's budgets are a sleight of hand, his "everybody-on-their-own" philosophy heartless in this time of hardship, his adherence to "free markets" uninformed. Ryan is as ambitious as Mitt Romney and just as bogus.

Jail the Bankers

Look, take exception to the source, if you want. But read it. Then this.

Then download the report itself. Just Google: Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse. It was written by a bipartisan Senate committee.

Okay, you don't have to read all 650 pages of that. But download it anyway, so that when someone spouts off that it's just Rolling Stone or The New York Times, you can prove it is far more than that.

Lloyd Blankfein and Daniel Sparks and David Viniar and Thomas Montag should be given their day in court. If 12 of their peers determine they should go free, that's fine, then free they should be. But America needs them to stand trial.

Do this despite your temptation to give in to causistry, your desire to bury outrage by pretending 'it's impossible to know" and "in whose opinion?" Or worse, "It's just too hard."

C'mon, get off your ass and be an informed citizen, just like Thomas Jefferson said. That does not mean Fox News. There is such a thing as truth. Do what you need to do to learn what that is in the "market place of ideas." It's your job as a citizen, and you have been underemployed for too long.

Read it, do a little more digging, and form your own opinion. Then do something. But don't ignore it. You have ignored it for too damn long, and look where we are today because of that.

The Oligarchs

And what manner of government do you term oligarchy?

A government resting on a valuation of property, in which the rich have power and the poor man is deprived of it.

... The accumulation of gold in the treasury of private individuals is the ruin of timocracy; they invent illegal modes of expenditure; for what do they or their wives care about the law?

... And then one, seeing another grow rich, seeks to rival him, and thus the great mass of the citizens become lovers of money.

... And so they grow richer and richer, and the more they think of making a fortune the less they think of virtue; for when riches and virtue are placed together in the scales of the balance, the one always rises as the other falls.

... And in proportion as riches and rich men are honoured in the State, virtue and the virtuous are dishonoured.

... And what is honoured is cultivated, and that which has no honour is neglected.

... And so at last, instead of loving contention and glory, men become lovers of trade and money; they honour and look up to the rich man, and make a ruler of him, and dishonour the poor man.

... They next proceed to make a law which fixes a sum of money as the qualification of citizenship; the sum is higher in one place and lower in another, as the oligarchy is more or less exclusive; and they allow no one whose property falls below the amount fixed to have any share in the government. These changes in the constitution they effect by force of arms, if intimidation has not already done their work.

... And this, speaking generally, is the way in which oligarchy is established.

Yes, he said; but what are the characteristics of this form of government, and what are the defects of which we were speaking?

First of all, I said, consider the nature of the qualification. Just think what would happen if pilots were to be chosen according to their property, and a poor man were refused permission to steer, even though he were a better pilot?

You mean that they would shipwreck?

Yes; and is not this true of the government of anything? ... This, then, will be the first great defect of oligarchy?

... And here is another defect which is quite as bad.

... The inevitable division: such a State is not one, but two States, the one of poor, the other of rich men; and they are living on the same spot and always conspiring against one another.

... Another discreditable feature is, that, for a like reason, they are incapable of carrying on any war. Either they arm the multitude, and then they are more afraid of them than of the enemy; or, if they do not call them out in the hour of battle, they are oligarchs indeed, few to fight as they are few to rule. And at the same time their fondness for money makes them unwilling to pay taxes.

How discreditable!

And, as we said before, under such a constitution the same persons have too many callings—they are husbandmen, tradesmen, warriors, all in one. Does that look well?

Anything but well.

There is another evil which is, perhaps, the greatest of all, and to which this State first begins to be liable.

What evil?

A man may sell all that he has, and another may acquire his property; yet after the sale he may dwell in the city of which he is no longer a part, being neither trader, nor artisan, nor horseman, nor hoplite, but only a poor, helpless creature.

Yes, that is an evil which also first begins in this State.

The evil is certainly not prevented there; for oligarchies have both the extremes of great wealth and utter poverty.

True.

But think again: In his wealthy days, while he was spending his money, was a man of this sort a whit more good to the State for the purposes of citizenship? Or did he only seem to be a member of the ruling body, although in truth he was neither ruler nor subject, but just a spendthrift?

As you say, he seemed to be a ruler, but was only a spendthrift.

May we not say that this is the drone in the house who is like the drone in the honeycomb, and that the one is the plague of the city as the other is of the hive?

Just so, Socrates.

And God has made the flying drones, Adeimantus, all without stings, whereas of the walking drones he has made some without stings but others have dreadful stings; of the stingless class are those who in their old age end as paupers; of the stingers come all the criminal class, as they are termed.

Most true, he said.

Clearly then, whenever you see paupers in a State, somewhere in that neighborhood there are hidden away thieves, and cut-purses and robbers of temples, and all sorts of malefactors.

Clearly.

Well, I said, and in oligarchical States do you not find paupers?

Yes, he said; nearly everybody is a pauper who is not a ruler.

And may we be so bold as to affirm that there are also many criminals to be found in them, rogues who have stings, and whom the authorities are careful to restrain by force?

Certainly, we may be so bold.

The existence of such persons is to be attributed to want of education, ill-training, and an evil constitution of the State?

True.

Such, then, is the form and such are the evils of oligarchy; and there may be many other evils.

Very likely.

Then oligarchy, or the form of government in which the rulers are elected for their wealth, may now be dismissed ...Let us next proceed to consider the nature and origin of the individual who answers to this State

... And when he has made reason and spirit sit down on the ground obediently on either side of their sovereign, and taught them to know their place, he compels the one to think only of how lesser sums may be turned into larger ones, and will not allow the other to worship and admire anything but riches and rich men, or to be ambitious of anything so much as the acquisition of wealth and the means of acquiring it.

Of all changes, he said, there is none so speedy or so sure as the conversion of the ambitious youth into the avaricious one.

And the avaricious, I said, is the oligarchical youth?

Yes, he said; at any rate the individual out of whom he came is like the State out of which oligarchy came.

... He is a shabby fellow, who saves something out of everything and makes a purse for himself; and this is the sort of man whom the vulgar applaud. Is he not a true image of the State which he represents?

He appears to me to be so; at any rate money is highly valued by him as well as by the State.

... Do you know where you will have to look if you want to discover his rogueries? ... You should see him where he has some great opportunity of acting dishonestly, as in the guardianship of an orphan.

... It will be clear enough then that in his ordinary dealings which give him a reputation for honesty he coerces his bad passions by an enforced virtue; not making them see that they are wrong, or taming them by reason, but by necessity and fear constraining them, and because he trembles for his possessions.

... The man, then, will be at war with himself; he will be two men, and not one; but, in general, his better desires will be found to prevail over his inferior ones.

... For these reasons such an one will be more respectable than most people; yet the true virtue of a unanimous and harmonious soul will flee far away and never come near him.

... And surely, the miser individually will be an ignoble competitor in a State for any prize of victory, or other object of honourable ambition; he will not spend his money in the contest for glory; so afraid is he of awakening his expensive appetites and inviting them to help and join in the struggle; in true oligarchical fashion he fights with a small part only of his resources, and the result commonly is that he loses the prize and saves his money.

... Can we any longer doubt, then, that the miser and money-maker answers to the oligarchical State?

There can be no doubt.

Plato, "The Republic"
380 B.C. or so.

(apologies to the author for extracting 'relevant' text)

From a "mobster" in Oregon

The other day Eric Cantor, Republican Majority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, accused me and many others of being part of a "mob."

“I, for one, am increasingly concerned about the growing mobs occupying Wall Street and the other cities across the country,” Cantor said. (Read it here).

The same day Cantor was saying that, I was on Wall Street in the middle of a noisy, orderly demonstration. The people around me were claiming to be part of the 99%, that the top 1% should pay more taxes. I was talking with an out-of-work logger and a member of the Tea Party. It was surprising how much we had in common.

Oh, did I mention "my" protest happened on Wall Street in Bend, Oregon?

In Washington, Rep. Cantor, in an effort to pit Americans against Americans, said "Believe it or not, some in this town have actually condoned the pitting of Americans against Americans.”

What a perfect example of double speak. Wall Street (New York) banks pillaged retirement accounts and burned the jobs of those of us on Main Street through reckless and illegal acts; politicians bought-and-paid-for by those banks and others cut taxes for the rich and made profiteering easy for giant corporations through special interest legislation. Cantor should not be talking about "pitting Americans against Americans." He's been there and done that.

Just the opposite is true among the "mobs" toward which he would whip up a fear response. Americans are coming together in recognition that business as usual is a power grab, and men like Cantor are the grasping fingers.

The top brass of Goldman Sachs should be sent to prison. There should be true competition in the market place for pharmaceuticals. There needs to be true campaign finance reform that can't be overturned by three conservatives and two weasels on the Supreme Court. To say this is not divisive. To do so is to be an American.

That is what was amazing about the "mob" gathered in Bend, Oregon on the first Friday of October. The logger, the Tea Party activist and the Liberal all agreed on many of these things. Americans are being united, not divided, by being part of this "mob."

Heads up, Mr. Cantor.

Bank reform and Golden Sacks of crap

Too big to fail is just what it means: any financial reform that leaves standing commercial institutions that are "too big to fail" is doomed.

Any reform that fails to bring these monsters down to a size where they can be controlled, instead of them controlling us, fails to protect the American wage earner.

And just to be clear, breaking up the giant oligopoly banks is about as "free market" a policy as we can envision. Government is not the enemy of business, but it is a referee and protector of the market. When one player, like Goldman Sachs, becomes so powerful that it can successfully manipulate the economy in which it plays, the market is broken and needs reform.

Large investment banks command an horrific percentage of corporate profit in the U.S. (as opposed to our beleaguered and important community banks, the ones that would provide loans to you and me if Chase and company had not sucked up all the dollars). Read more here.

They buy and sell politicians of each major party with a stroke of a pen. They send their minions to work for the regulators. They profit from our hardship.

It is time to recognize that, like the oil and rail monopolies of the past, large investment banks need to be brought down to a size that would allow for greater competition, more transparency, and to allow the market to punish any them, even with failure, for bad decisions. They need to be broken up and a stable, competitive market restored.

The current proposed legislation does not go nearly far enough.