Pet Politician, Anyone?

A friend of mine opined a few days ago that we should all give up on this country as of last Thursday when the Supreme Court reversed the McCain-Feingold Act on campaign finance reform. As a result, corporations, unions, and special interest groups with deep pockets are now free to use their funds to promote "their" candidates right up to the election day. No longer are the candidates required to include "I am so-and-so, and I approve of this message" verbiage in those ads (a more appropriate message now would be, "I am so-and-so, and I my vote was purchased by such and such corporation"). Personally, I think what has happened in the country for the past 12 months has been good in that it allowed us to see clearly what is what and who is who. Now we KNOW for a fact that our government is there to protect the interest of the financial elite, not the citizens; now we KNOW for a fact that any wars we may be waging are wars strictly for valuables, not values; and now we will KNOW clearly who exactly bought up our elected officials. I am not sure that knowledge is power in our case, but it is certainly better than ignorance and illusion.

Anyway, just today I came across a cartoon which I loved and which summarizes all of this nicely. Enjoy!

Common Sense Helps Smell Corruption

How can you tell when officials have accepted bribes? Easily, actually. You just need to use the power of observation and some common sense. Just like my favorite Agatha Christie's character, Miss Marple, who has spent all of her life in a tiny English village, yet by drawing analogies between the most mundane observable human behaviors, she is capable of solving very intricate crimes.

Say, if you know that your neighbor did not inherit any family wealth, has a home-maker wife, works as a city building inspector, and yet drives a new Lexus and takes 3 vacations abroad every year, you can safely suspect that he takes bribes. Or if a city zoning commission which gives you a lot of grief and denies your petition to extend your deck by ONE FOOT because it will then be encroaching on the 3 yards easement around a sewer line, quickly approves a commercial development despite protests from neighbors, environmental groups, violation of existing zoning restrictions and exorbitant costs involved in moving roads and other infrastructure items - you can be reasonably sure that members of the zoning commission were ECONOMICALLY ENCOURAGED to make the decision in favor of this big developer.

Consider a couple more cases from our recent history as a country. BHG (bovine growth hormone) was approved by the FDA in 1993 as safe for cows after just THREE MONTHS of conducting studies. The BHG is passed to cow milk and milk products which we in turn consume. There have been studies linking this hormone to increased rates of human cancer. The hormone is BANNED EVERYWHERE in the developed world: Europe, Canada, New Zealand - you name it. Is it reasonable to assume that our own FDA was - mmm- economically encouraged to find it safe to use? You decide. I have stuck with hormone free milk products ever since, and I suspect that the FDA authorities have done the same in their personal life.

But maybe FDA is always quick to approve new and questionable treatments and additives? Let me think... Say, a chicken pox vaccine had been developed and administered in Japan for 14 years with an excellent record of safety, yet our own FDA refused to allow it on our market as being "unsafe" and "unproven" till 1996. Could it possibly be that manufacturers of the vaccine just stubbornly refused to grease the palm? Or that there were no special interest groups behind the vaccine to encourage the FDA to even study the issue (patients obviously are not a special itnerest group, or a group of interest to the FDA). Now the unanimous consensus is that there is a considerable economic impact from administering this vaccine, not to mention lives saved, and days of agony for parents and children.

Other "knee-jerk" quickly adopted policies with disastrous consequences for the country in general were, without a doubt, the Clinton-pushed NAFTA and Bush-pushed Free Trade with China. The speed of passing those sweeping changes speak loud and clear of corruption. The result of those policies were millions of US jobs lost, the almost total destruction of many American manufacturing in many areas, but multi-billion profits for corporations. If you are interested in details on how Bush willingly sold out his fellow Americans to special interest groups in his deal with China, read this summary. Incidentally, I am not sure that the Wall Street bailout was really a case of corruption. Well, in a way it was, but I don't think there was a financial payback to the architects of the bailout. I think their reward is that they are still alive.

What I am saying is that we don't even need to know the details of the shenanigans going on to KNOW that corruption is taking place. Common sense and power of observation is all it takes. If it looks like corruption, smells like corruption, and feels like corruption - in most cases, it IS corruption.

So what are our choices when we smell corrution? Just like the picture at the top of the post says, you can say nothing and hold your breath, or you can pray silently. I would say, prayer is our best strategy now.

$320,000,000 DAILY FUEL BILL for the Marines alone in Afghanistan

I came across a most interesting column by Paul Craig Roberts, an economist who used to be one of the masterminds of Reaganomics serving as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Ronald Reagan. He held a number of high and prestigious academic positions, is an author of numerous books, and as a persona non grata in the American mass media, he can be called an American dissident. He was awarded Legion d'honneur, the highest French Order, by French President Francois Mitterrand. You can read the text of his column from which I borrowed the title of the today's post here. In it, he discusses how needs of the US citizens are thrown under the bus by our government which minds almost exclusively interests of the financial elite, and of the military-industrial complex. (For example, we the people are being charged $400 per GALLON of fuel used by our troops in Afghanistan, and we spend those gallons like there is no tomorrow while arguing with straight faces that we do not have enough money for the national health care.)

On the other hand, here is a permanent link to the list of all of his columns.

I consider myself lucky to have discovered such a distinguished, well-informed and intelligent source of information and interpretation of the current situation.

P.S. My Russian-speaking readers can read an excellent in-depth interview with Paul Craig Roberts to a Washington, DC - based correspondent of a Russian news site slon.ru here.

Share Ware Reform Coming Soon

We are getting used to being bombarded every day with news like "unexpectedly new homes sales drop," "unexpectedly unemployment claims rise," "unexpectedly consumer confidence takes a sharp drop," etc. I wrote about this a few weeks back and opined that only idiots would not have expected those things to happen. I will tell you what else you can expect happening unexpectedly in the near future: a share ware software reform will be undertaken by the Congress.

Why now? It is quite simple. The Recording Industry Association of America has been trying for years to make the Congress pass the law restricting or making illegal the peer-to-peer file sharing which was digging into their profits. To no avail. That is until now. Last week a junior staff member of the Congress ethics committee (the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct) saved onto his home hard drive details of the investigation against members of the defence appropriations committee. He had a file-sharing software on his home computer, and did not realize that this makes those documents available for others to download. As a result, this secret document was leaked to the press.

Basically, it is not an earth shattering document for anybody who expects the "unexpected." It just shows that the ethics committee is investigating members of the House Appropriations Committee's defense subcommittee who have steered earmarks to clients of the lobbying firm which paid tens of thousands of dollars to those politicians' election campaigns. The exact list of names and donation amounts can be found here.

Same old, same old. Corrupted politicians accept bribes (and lobbying is a legalized form of bribing, don't kid yourselves) in exchange for contracts delivered to the donors. Defense contractors are usually the biggest beneficiaries, so some politicians even forgo their more prominent ranks on other subcommittees in order to get on the defence subcommittee where the money is, you know.

The only piece of news is really that this share ware software now touched too close to home, and that is why I anticipate the Congress to pass some legislation banning it pretty soon.

Should Ben Bernanke keep his job?

Here is a good article from The Guardian to the point: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/aug/03/ben-bernanke-us-economy

From what we have seen so far, I would love BB not awarded with the continuation of his contract, but really put in jail, along with Alan "Greenstud" - they could keep company to their collegue-crook Bernard Madoff. I am afraid, on the grand scheme of things, Mr. Madoff was less detrimental to this country than those two buddies.