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I consider this a Radical Gumbo, with many varied ingredients making more than the sum of its parts. We are no-holds barred, passionate and not overly PC here. Yes, Liberals can have Fangs. Jump in and be part of the cutting edge!
Twenty months after the financial meltdown of 2008, the U.S. congress is moving ahead with its financial system reform. In the following weeks, the Senate and House bills will be combined. While many details are still to be ironed out around issues like derivatives and consumer protection, it is clear that the legislation will not break up the massive banks that are blamed with the crisis. President Obama says the legislation will ensure the U.S. taxpayers never again bailout Wall Street, but Public Citizen's David Arkush says that until the banks influence on Capitol Hill is broken up or countered, there is no way to guarantee an end to bailouts.
Real News Network - May 29, 2010 Banks still the powerhouse in DC
David Arkush: Bank lobbyists outnumber reform lobbyists 11 to 1 on derivatives legislation alone
Just got this relayed by e-mail from the ETC Group, a biotech, agribusiness, and conservancy watchdog group out of Canada and the US. Just another way in which the arrogance of the Class of Entitlement is running roughshod over the rights and welfare of the 'ordinary' people of the Planet.
ETC Group
News Release
20 May 2010
www.etcgroup.org
Synthia is Alive ...and Breeding: Panacea or Pandora's Box?
As Craig Venter announces lab-made life, ETC Group calls for Global
Moratorium on Synthetic Biology.
In a paper published today in the journal Science, the J. Craig Venter
Institute and Synthetic Genomics Inc announced the laboratory creation of
the world's first self-reproducing organism whose entire genome was built
from scratch by a machine.(1) The construction of this synthetic organism,
anticipated and dubbed "Synthia" by the ETC Group three years ago, will
stir a firestorm of controversy over the ethics of building artificial life
and the implications of the largely unknown field of synthetic biology.
Panacea, or...? According to today's publication, "Synthia" could be a boon
to second-generation agrofuels making it - theoretically - possible to feed
people and cars simultaneously. The article further suggests that Synthia,
or synthetic biology, could help clean up the environment, save us from
climate change, and address the food crisis. "Synthia is not a
one-stop-shop for all our societal woes," disputes Pat Mooney, Executive
Director of ETC Group, an international technology watchdog based in
Canada. "It is much more likely to cause a whole new set of problems
governments and society are ill-prepared to address."
Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me.
In the jingle jangle morning I'll come following you.
Republicans have a Tambourine Man. His name is Limbaugh. He's a psychopath, but that doesn't bother Republicans, they admire psychopaths. Democrats have a Tambourine Man. His name is Obama. He panders to psychopaths every chance he gets, but that doesn't bother Democrats, pandering to psychopaths is what they do. They call it Centrism.
I remember Election Night 2008, I remember the hope so many progressives had that evening, but that evening's empire of hope has turned into sand, vanished from our hands, left us blindly here to stand but still not sleeping. Who can sleep? Who can sleep when war crimes won't be prosecuted, when Gitmo won't be closed, when there'll be no withdrawal from Iraq, when the war in Afghanistan will go on and on and on, when we're all on a one way trip on Wall Street's magic swirling ship, when our senses have all been stripped, when our hands can't feel to grip, when our feet are too numb to step, when there's nothing left to do but watch the boot heels of Karma grind what's left of this country into dust.
My weariness amazes me, I'm branded on my feet. I have no one to meet, and this ancient empty street's too dead for dreaming . . .
Independence Hall is just a relic from America's forgotten past. Democracy is gone, it's vanished into the foggy ruins of time.
The plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty used to say, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door."
Now it says, "Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here."
We got the Bush Regime, arguably the most incompetent, corrupt and outright-treasonous Administration in American history. A regime so reckless, savage and gleefully bestial that it made the career-Nixon-hating Hunter Thompson actually pine for the good old days of Tricky Dick: "I miss Nixon. Compared to these Nazis we have in the White House now, Richard Nixon was a flaming liberal."
And, like Nixon, it is more than likely that not a single one of the smirking traitors who nearly wrecked this country will ever spend a day in jail. Instead they remain lodged in our flesh like so many ricin pellets, oozing their poison into our national bloodstream, waddle from one fawning audience to another, worming their way into major media outlets, or dispatching their degenerate children and underlings out into the world the keep their poison pumping.
They soiled our good name, bankrupted the country, shredded the Constitution and kicked the crutches out from under the global economy on their way out the door, and while it is sometimes hard to focus on them through the flames of the world they set on fire, we must.
America could have had justice.
But America didn't get justice.
America got Hopey McChange, who said he wants to look forward, not backward. Who said there must be no "retribution", no "vengeance", no "payback", who said the era of "divisive partisanship" must end.
Four score and twenty betrayals ago, when Barack Obama was busy posturing as a transformational leader, when he was busy promising government of the people, by the people, and for the people, he spoke of the core values progressives have always believed in as the solution to America's problems . . .
That spirit of looking out for one another, that core value that says I am my brothers keeper, I am my sister's keeper, that spirit is most evident during times of great hardship, but that spirit can't just be restricted to moments of great catastrophe. Because as I stand here and look out at the thousands of folks who have gathered here today, I know that there's some folks who are going through their own quiet storms.
Hurricane Ike had just hit the gulf coast of Texas, Wall Street was about to implode, the foundations of the economy were crumbling, Americans everywhere were losing their jobs, their homes, their last remnants of trust in the government . . .
All across America there are quiet storms taking place. There are lives of quiet desperation. People who need just a little bit of help. Now, Americans are a self-reliant people, we're an independent people. We don't like asking somebody else to do what we can do ourselves, but you know what we understand is that every once in awhile, somebody's going to get knocked down.
Every once in awhile . . .
Yes, and every once in awhile, the sun comes up. Then, every once in awhile, it goes down again.
Low income Americans get knocked down every day, middle class Americans get knocked down every day, seniors on fixed incomes get knocked down every day. Republicans knocked them down for 30 years, and now Barack Obama and that gang of corporate enforcers that used to be the Democratic Party are doing it. A punch in the face is a punch in the face. Analyze that, Beltway Republicrats. When Americans are flat on their back all the time, they don't give a damn whether the fist that knocked them down was a Republican fist or a Democratic fist. A corporate fist is a corporate fist. Whistle past that graveyard, Obamabots. Have an "ideologue" diary contest, fill that wreck list of yours with "ideologue" ravings and let's all see who can clap the loudest.
Over at Mindfully.org you can find hundreds of big and small literary and informational treasures for those interested in peering through the veils of darkness that the media does it's best to pull over our eyes with all of their well practiced smoke and mirrors.
One such is in the Political/Social category. An article titled Beyond Voting about the limits of electoral politics, that is particularly relevant this year.
Here's an excerpt, but the entire thing is worth a close read, and some intense discussion or at least much thought, IMHO...
Roughly speaking we can distinguish five degrees of "government":
(1) Unrestricted freedom
(2) Direct democracy
(3) Delegate democracy
(4) Representative democracy
(5) Overt minority dictatorship
The present society oscillates between (4) and (5), i.e. between overt minority rule and covert minority rule camouflaged by a facade of token democracy. A liberated society would eliminate (4) and (5) and would progressively reduce the need for (2) and (3). . . .
...
In representative democracy people abdicate their power to elected officials.
The candidates' stated policies are limited to a few vague generalities, and once they are elected there is little control over their actual decisions on hundreds of issues - apart from the feeble threat of changing one's vote, a few years later, to some equally uncontrollable rival politician.
Representatives are dependent on the wealthy for bribes and campaign contributions; they are subordinate to the owners of the mass media, who decide which issues get the publicity; and they are almost as ignorant and powerless as the general public regarding many important matters that are determined by unelected bureaucrats and independent secret agencies. Overt dictators may sometimes be overthrown, but the real rulers in "democratic" regimes, the tiny minority who own or control virtually everything, are never voted in and never voted out. Most people don't even know who they are. . . .
In itself, voting is of no great significance one way or the other (those who make a big deal about refusing to vote are only revealing their own fetishism). The problem is that it tends to lull people into relying on others to act for them, distracting them from more significant possibilities. A few people who take some creative initiative (think of the first civil rights sit-ins) may ultimately have a far greater effect than if they had put their energy into campaigning for lesser-evil politicians. At best, legislators rarely do more than what they have been forced to do by popular movements. A conservative regime under pressure from independent radical movements often concedes more than a liberal regime that knows it can count on radical support. (The Vietnam war, for example, was not ended by electing antiwar politicians, but because there was so much pressure from so many different directions that the prowar president Nixon was forced to withdraw.) If people invariably rally to lesser evils, all the rulers have to do in any situation that threatens their power is to conjure up a threat of some greater evil.
Last week we heard Peter Dale Scott, former Canadian diplomat and University of California at Berkeley Professor, and author of Drugs, Oil, and War (2005), The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (2007), The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11 and the Deep Politics of War (2008), talk with Paul Jay of The Real News in the The Deep State, A Powerless President, The CIA, Afghanistan, And Heroin, the first and second parts of a multipart series about the corrupted mindset in Washington that chooses who becomes president, and about the war machine that co-opted Obama into his escalation of a drug-corrupted war in Afghanistan.
Scott also talked about an "iceberg" analogy of US politics in which which "the visible part, the public politics, or, if you like, what goes on in the public state, is only a small percentage of the totality of what's going on, a lot of this is not subject to the restraints of the Constitution at all"
Here in part 3 of the series Scott again talks with Jay, this time about something much more sinister that permeates American political reality penetrating and corrupting much deeper than the normal military-industrial complex we've read about in the past - about the fact that the way to succeed in Washington has become to support the next use of the war machine to attack its next chosen target - about privatized intelligence services creating for profit wars, representing a private business that has become a form of permanent government - and concludes that the only way he can see out of the mire is that "We have to pull back from the two-party system and start a new kind of politics. We have to essentially build a new kind of civil society in America. And this is not easy, and I'm not confident that it will happen. The most likely thing to happen is that America will just go into decline from overextension the way that Britain went into decline from overextension before it".
To give you an example of how powerful they are, when it was clear that the intelligence about Iraq [had] been skewed and we went in because of weapons of mass destruction that weren't there. And they commissioned (Science Applications International Corporation) SAIC to investigate what went wrong. And SAIC came up with a report that didn't mention that some of the key people who had been saying that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction had been saying that it would be necessary to deal with him militarily were people who were in fact working for SAIC. So when you give a private corporation the job of seeing whether we should go to war against a country, and then you give that same private corporation the job of finding out why false information was given, you can see that there has been a very, very deep corruption of the process of gathering and analyzing intelligence in Washington and SAIC.
JAY: Who are some of the individuals you referring to?
SCOTT: If you don't mind, I'm going to read from an article by Donald Barlett that you already quoted from. This was David Kay, who was on the committee, and this is what he said in 1998 to the Senate Armed Services Committee, that Saddam Hussein, quote, "remains in power with weapons of mass destruction," and that, quote, "military action is needed." Wayne Downing, a retired general and proselytized for an invasion of Iraq, stating that the Iraqis, quote, "are ready to take the war ... overseas. They would use whatever means they have to attack us." Both of these men, David Kay and Wayne Downing, worked for SAIC. And so a decent analysis of what went wrong would have pointed to the fact that we were relying on people who had, really, a profit motive. I'm not saying that they did all of this thinking only of profit; I'm saying that they were totally part of this dominance mindset that I'm talking about, and they know that the way to succeed in Washington is to support the next target, the policy for the next use of the war machine.
JAY: Now, Robert Gates, Obama's secretary of defense, used to be part of SAIC as well. Is that true?
SCOTT: Was on the board of directors of SAIC, yes. And, you know, for that matter, Mike McConnell was with Booz Allen Hamilton.
JAY: So, given the Obama administration, again, promises of a new mindset, has the role of SAIC and these kinds of companies changed in any way?
SCOTT: No. See, this is why I talk about deep politics.
(Perfection! ~This got bumped in just minutes, followed by lots of equally worthy essays, so I am promoting it to make sure it gets the views it soundly deserves. ~ But scroll people, lots of quality today! - promoted by Diane G)
This is the Democrats' story. It's a story of consequences, it's a story of tragedy, it's a story ripped from the pages of history and stained with the blood of the innocent.
There are no characters in it and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces.
No We Can't has been a recurring theme of this story. When Obama got elected, No We Won't replaced it. We haven't seen any change, change has been consumed in a firestorm of corruption.
Enjoy your stay in Dresden.
Welcome to Hell.
Greetings from Slaughterhouse Five . . .
In Slaughterhouse Five, Billy Pilgrim . . .
went to the New York World's Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. He asked himself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was his to keep.
When we ask ourselves about our present, the answer is staring us in the face. It's as narrow as the tunnel vision of our "leaders", it's as deep as the corruption that oppresses us, it's as empty as our future and none of it is ours to keep.
Billy Pilgrim must have attended a White House strategy meeting right after the Inauguration . . .
I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living.
It's pretty clear what the result of that meeting was. Wonderful new lies. Because of those wonderful new lies, 30,000 American soldiers are crawling into the quagmire of Afghanistan, like the big, unlucky mammals they are. 40,000 Americans will die in 2010 because of inadequate healthcare, like the big, unlucky mammals they are. More Americans will lose their jobs, lose their savings, and lose their homes, like the big unlucky mammals they are.
When the harsh truth scares the fuck out of the big unlucky mammals of this degraded species, too many of them swallow the lies, it's they only way they can go on living.
So it goes.
So it will always go unless Americans overcome their fear, unless progressives start getting serious, unless we take support for this criminal government off the table and put civil disobedience on the table.
When Obama needed the votes of progressives to get elected, his message was Change We Can Believe In. But now that he no longer needs us, now that he has power, he has a very different message for progressives . . .
That blunt message is echoing from one end of the Beltway to the other, from the White House to Capitol Hill, it's echoing from K Street to Wall Street and across the corporate media airwaves. Corporate power must not be challenged. Don't even think about it. Byron Dorgan got the message. Chris Dodd got the message. Robert Wexler got the message. We all got the message.
2 AM and she calls me 'cause I'm still awake,
Can you help me unravel my latest mistake?
I don't have to tell you what her latest mistake was, I don't have to tell you when she made that mistake, I don't have to tell you because she wasn't the only one who made that mistake. 100 million other Americans made the same mistake on November 4, 2008, they believed the lies, they voted for liars and frauds and career criminals up and down the ballot.
So here we are.
"Pragmatic" progressives tell us we can't jump the track, the corporate media tells us we're just cars on a cable, the "Christians" tell us life's like an hourglass, glued to the table, so go to church unless you want to be damned to Hell for eternity like the Muslims and the Jews and the heathens in Africa and Asia. Well we've seen this movie before, we know who the killers are, we know who the victims are, we know who the warmongers are, we know who the hypocrites are, we know how it ends, we know how it always ends, but no one can find the rewind button, no one can ever find the rewind button.
public regarding many important matters that are determined by unelected bureaucrats and independent secret agencies. Overt dictators may sometimes be overthrown, but the real rulers in "democratic" regimes, the tiny minority who own or control virtually everything, are never voted in and never voted out. Most people don't even know who they are. . . .
Last week we heard Peter Dale Scott, former Canadian diplomat and University of California at Berkeley Professor, and author of Drugs, Oil, and War (2005), The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (2007), The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11 and the Deep Politics of War (2008), talk with Paul Jay of The Real News in the 
