“McCain Has Become A Walking Disaster.”

“As a candidate, John (McCain) has become a walking disaster,” the distraught voice calling from a Washington suburb told me late Thursday night. “As much as I once believed in him, now I’m really worried he’ll be a disaster as president. Maybe even worse than Bush, if that’s possible.”

The voice belongs to an old friend, someone I’ve known since the days when I lived in Chicago about 100 lifetimes ago.

Since the primaries, my pal has been on the staff of McCain’s campaign. For much of the campaign season, he and another long-time friend connected with the campaign – a woman I dated for a while when we both lived on the West Coast – have been providing me information about life inside the not-so-Straight Talk Express for a book I plan to write after the election. (Three friends inside the Obama campaign are doing the same thing.)

It’s almost midnight on Thursday, Sept. 25, and we’ve been speaking for nearly 45 minutes – I noted the time because he returned my call just as CBS News’ chief Washington correspondent and Face the Nation moderator Bob Schieffer was coming on The Daily Show to promote his new book.

In exchange for their cooperation, I promised each that nothing they said, or copies of documents and e-mails they provided me, would be published prior the election. But with the news events of the past week and McCain’s increasingly erratic comments and reaction to the economic crisis, on Wednesday I asked each if I could use some of what they’ve told or gave me now for an article. My former girlfriend agreed at once; my friend from Chicago took a day to think about it before calling me last night.

“It’s so bad around (the campaign), I’m thinking of resigning,” he continues. “McCain seems to have lost his way, Rick (Davis, McCain’s campaign manager) is making bad decisions because he’s desperate. I don’t know who made the Palin selection, maybe John but who knows, but she’s turned out to be a nightmare. Did you see her (Katie) Couric interview? Meanwhile, everybody’s running in 10 different directions trying to figure out some way to reverse the (poll) numbers.”

He adds sadly that internal polling shows McCain in even more trouble that the public polls reveal “because our core supporters are starting to question his judgement.”

My friend has been my access to and interpreter of the conservative movement since around the time of the Reagan years. Now, for the first time in the decades that I’ve known him, he sounds dispirited, dismayed and disappointed.

But mostly he sounds betrayed: “This isn’t what I signed on for.”

Throwing Dead Cats

The woman who was once my lover is working in a campaign office in one of the key swing states. She sounds no less dejected, perhaps reflecting the views of voters. “In the beginning, the office was jammed with people showing up to help every day. Now, there are some days when you can throw a dead cat and not hit a volunteer, there are so few of them.”

Why, I asked her on Thursday morning. Why are people who should be excited about their candidate losing their enthusiasm?

“Who knows?” I’m told in the throaty, Kathleen Turner, whiskey voice that’s played havoc with my libido across the decades. “Different reasons for different people. Mostly, though, I think it’s because he’s come across this week as indecisive, not knowing the facts, not appearing to be in touch. I suppose voters see that as not caring. Whatever. The faithful are losing faith.”

She points to McCain telling a television interviewer that he hadn’t read Treasury’s three page bailout plan a day or two after it was e-mailed to the road warriors – the travelling campaign staff – as a prime example.

“I sat there watching him and thinking to myself, ‘This isn’t happening,’” she recalls when we spoke for the second time yesterday. “Even if he didn’t read it, I can’t believe that somebody didn’t give him one or two talking points to use in a Q-and-A. He had to know it would come up.”

What about his decision to “suspend” the campaign to return to Washington?

“Nothing’s been ‘suspended,’” she replied. “We (people in the office) heard about it when a reporter called, hours later.

“Listen,” she goes on, working up a real head of steam. “At first I thought I was a brilliant political move. Take charge. Get in front of an issue he’s been behind on for two weeks. But then he lied to Letterman which turned John into a punch line. Turns out he stayed in New York to give a couple more speeches, met with a few donors, and took 22 hours to mosey down to Washington. Christ, an Amtrak local stopping in every village, hamlet and burgh doesn’t take that long.

“Overnight, he went from acting like a leader to appearing to be an opportunistic liar. Voters remember that kind of shit, especially the undecided.”

Saving John’s Ass

It’s now Friday morning and my friend in Virginia is calling from his cell phone en route to the office. The traffic noise is drowning him out so he closes the car window.

“The morning papers are blaming John for the bailout plan tanking,” he says. “Why the fuck didn’t he stay on the campaign trail and be getting ready for the debate? I’ve had 15 texts already on my BlackBerry … “

The one John invented, I interrupt asking in jest.

“Jesus fucking Christ, whatever made him say that?” my friend grumbles bitterly, referring to a conference call on Sept. 16 with reporters where economic advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin gave McCain credit for inventing the ubiquitous device. “Yeah, that one. Anyway, now people are trying to figure out how to pull John’s ass out of the fire.

“Go to the debate, don’t go debate. And what kind of a plausible explanation will play well for whatever he does.”

There’s a brief pause as my friend curses at someone cutting him off to run a red light on Wisconsin Ave.

“What McCain did was back himself into a corner. A politician never does that. Can you imagine Reagan or Clinton doing something so idiotic? If he doesn’t go, he looks bad because Obama will be debating an empty chair. If he goes, the last two days come across looking like a stunt.

“How do we save him from himself?”

How did the head office react at McCain’s announcement to suspend his campaign?

“Some people thought it was a brilliant way to finesse Obama, some thought it was a disaster waiting to happen, some just shrugged and went for coffee,” I’m told. “I mean, John’s on YouTube saying he doesn’t understand the economy and now he’s going to fix the most complicated piece of legislation in decades?”

I remind my buddy that Barney Frank described McCain’s action as “the Hail Mary of Hail May passes in the history of hails and the history of Mary.”

“There was a one-in-10 chance it might have worked,” he concedes ruefully, “and it still might. But so far, John has not been smelling exactly like roses.”

The campaign knew there were serious risks from the moment McCain and Davis came up with the idea, I’m told. For one thing, they thought they’d pushed Obama into a corner and he finessed his way around the manoeuvre. Then, they convinced a very reluctant White House to host a “summit meeting” which turned into a dog’s breakfast because the GOP went from backing a bi-partisan plan to tossing a totally new proposal on the table – hours after Republicans appeared at a joint news conference to announce a basic deal.

“I heard the Cabinet Room meeting went ballistic when Boehner said, ‘No deal, try this,’” he tells me. “Even the president was taken aback. Things got so rough, he had to shout to get some order in the room. Treasury and the Fed were pleading with Boehner not to screw things up at such a late hour.”

In fact, Politoco.com is reporting this morning that, after the meeting adjourned, Democrats went into the Roosevelt Room for a private discussion. Treasury Secretary Paul Paulson followed them and, on bent knee, begged Nancy Pelosi to keep her party on board. “I didn’t know you were Catholic,” Pelosi shot back, referring to Paulson’s genuflecting.

Apparently, someone saved McCain’s ass because by 11.30 EDT today, Politico was reporting that McCain announced he would, indeed, participate in tonight’s debate. As my two friends understood, Republicans realised the “debate later” concept was hurting McCain's campaign, and that he would look terrible if he didn't attend the debate while Obama sat alone onstage, answering Jim Lehrer’s questions.

The Other Shoe

Meanwhile, I’m told that many in the campaign seem to be waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Just before sending this article off, I received calls from both of my sources. While relieved that McCain has regained a bit of common – and political – sense, they’re each worried about what might happen next.

Lehrer has said that despite the foreign policy theme for tonight’s debate, he intends to open with questions about the economy and crisis on Wall St. Both McCain and Palin have looked bad on the issue since it broke. Polls show the nation already believes – by nearly 20 points – that Obama is better suited to fix the economy so anything McCain says will be measured from that perspective by viewers.

“It’s going to be hard for my guy to recover from what people already think about him,” The Voice tells me from her office. Adds my friend stuck in DC traffic, “I’m hoping he can run downfield and catch his own Hail Mary pass.”

Congress Passes Wall Street Relief Act of 2008

At a news conference held a short time ago, a bi-partisan claque of Congressional leaders stood before cameras to declare, “We have a bailout!” Let the puff of white smoke rise from the Capitol’s chimney.

Except none of them said exactly what is in the deal. How much money are we putting on the table? What kind of controls, other than some vague comments about an “oversight” group, is written into the measure? How much will compensation of Wall Street CEOs and other executives be regulated? Will besieged, hard pressed, home owners be spared from mortgage defaults and repossessions?

Who, besides Wall Street barons, will benefit from The Wall Street Relief Act of 2008?

Most importantly, since Hank Paulson – Goldman Sach’s $34-million a year guy at Treasury and a true man of Wall Street – is going bail us all out of the financial disaster visited upon us by Wall Street, exactly how will we know to whom he’s handing out our money, on what terms and at what price?

Details, son, just details. Mere trifles.

Trust us, they proclaimed solemnly. This is a good deal. We’ve saved America from disaster.

Trust us, the Congressional leadership said this afternoon, overlooking the fact that these were basically the same people who said “trust us” when they passed the (un)Patriot Act, the Iraq War resolution and the authorization for the NSA (and God only knows who else) to spy on all of us.

Once again, Congress drank the George Bush Kool-Aid. After all, he stood in the White House last night and used words like “Great Depression” and “panic” and calamity. So, Congress rolled over on its back and did the bidding of a man who us believed by less than 20% of America.

If you're ready to buy this deal from a trusted used war salesman like George W. Bush, his cronies on Wall Street and the panicky leaders of Congress then, as Joe Galloway said, I have a deal for you on a bridge to nowhere.

UPDATE: Sarah Palin: Witchcraft Free At Last!

After scouring the world's newspapers, I finally found one with front page coverage of Muthee-Palin witchcraft story. Unfortunately for American voters, it's in the United Kingdom's The Guardian:

www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/sep/25/sarahpalin.republicans

Sarah Palin: Witchcraft Free At Last!

I’ve finally found a positive quality Sarah Palin might bring to the vice presidency: She would be the first veep guaranteed to be witchcraft-free, thanks to Rev. Thomas Muthee.

This would be a refreshing change from Dick Cheney who clearly is a warlock; it’s one of the few things that can explain adequately his darker-than-the-night eight years in office.

A video went up on YouTube yesterday showing Muthee imploring Jesus to protect Palin from "the spirit of witchcraft." It would be hysterical if it weren’t so scary.



Best of all, Palin gave her own personal testimony to the power of Muthee’s prayers, saying publicly after she was elected governor what a dramatic effect he had on her election.



While maybe it’s time we have a vice president we know is free of witches and witchcraft, there’s a serious point being made here.

After the broadcast and cable network newscasts pelted us for days with the same 14 second clip of Rev. Jeremiah Wright giving a vitriolic sermon when Barack Obama wasn’t even in the church, why is it that we’ve barely seen Rev. Muthee laying his hands on Palin to protect her from witches – or her “testimony” in the Wasilla church to his purported power?

Why isn’t the footage leading every cable news segment, the way the Wright video did? Where are the bloviators speculating that this might end her chance of being elected, as they did with Obama? Why isn’t she giving a major speech to discuss witchcraft in American politics the way Obama responded to the Wright controversy by talking about race in America? How come no one is calling the video a “bombshell,” and wondering “what might come next?”

When the Rev. Wright controversy broke, somber publications such as The New York Times and The Washington Post gave it front page prominence. I’ve yet to see any coverage of the Muthee-Palin nonsense anywhere in either paper, not even a few column inches way in the back, wedged between wedding announcements and the obits.

Maybe it’s because the Muthee business is so ridiculous the video almost comes across like a Saturday Night Live sketch. Or a parody of an SNL bit. Maybe it’s because the news media doesn’t poke fun at the mentally unbalanced.

But, still, this is noteworthy stuff.

It can’t be that newspapers, magazines and networks “got religion” – pardon the expression – and turned serious in the months since the Wright tempest in a teapot bubbled and boiled. Rather, I suspect it’s because we’re seeing a prime time, front page, living, breathing, spell-casting example of just how frightened much of the media is of the right, and the religious right in particular. We’re also seeing the myth of the “liberal media bias” laid bare.

Mary Todd Lincoln and Nancy Reagan communed with the spirit world when their husbands were president, but neither woman ever ran for election. Sarah Palin wants to be Vice President of the United States.

Come to think of it, if she and McCain happen to win it might just be because there are witches and warlocks flying around on broomsticks after all. So much for the power of prayer. Still, I can't help wonder if religious "re-education" centers are too far behind.

The Bailout: The Really Small Print Is Really, Really Scary

Assuming that the Bush-Paulson Wall St. bailout gets changed drastically by the time it’s passed, we can all tip our hat to Mother Jones. With everyone on the Hill screaming about the power grab Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is trying to engineer, the magazine’s Nomi Prins deserves a deep thanks for noticing the really, really, teeny tiny, fine print in what Treasury sent to the House and Senate.

Prins alone seems to have discovered that the barely-discussed Sec. 6 of the newly-named Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, creates a never-ending bailout with the key phrase, "The Secretary's authority to purchase mortgage-related assets under this Act shall be limited to $700,000,000,000 outstanding at any one time." (Italics added)

What “at any one time” means when it’s not raining is simply this: If whatever the taxpayers buy turns out to be worth zero, nada, nothing, zip, then Ol’ Hank, Wall Street’s best friend in Washington, can buy up another $700-billion worth of junk to give the banks a second helping at the public trough. And so on ad nauseum until the public is left holding an expensive, empty sack while banks, insurance companies and other bailed out lenders profit from the crème de la crème they keep in their portfolio.

I’d love such a sweet deal! Who wouldn’t? No wonder financial services lobbyists – never shy before in publicly pleading for Congressional relief from this or that – have kept their mouth shut on the bailout.

Know something?

The TARP they’re trying to cover us with is misnamed; it should be called HAPASWEAT, short for the Hank Paulson Sweater because he wants to give us a warm and cozy feeling as he pulls the wool over our eyes.

Oh! Bama. Economy Propels Obama to 53%-42% Lead Over McCain.

A new ABC/Washington Post poll is reporting this morning that Barack Obama has seized the reins of economic discontent, vaulting over John McCain's convention gains by persuading voters he both better understands their economic troubles and can better address them.

Economic concerns, plus an Obama lead among those worried about their well-being, spells a lead for the Democrat: In a head-to-head-match-up he's now supported 52% to 43% among likely voters, the first significant advantage for either candidate among likely voters in ABC/Post polls.

The contest has shifted from a 49%-47% McCain-Obama race Immediately after the Republican convention, McCain led Obama by 49%-42%. But the bounce, on individual issues and attributes as well as in overall preference, is gone.

Fully 53% of registered voters in the ABC /WaPo study call the economy the single most important issue in the election, up 12 points in two weeks to an extraordinary level of agreement.

The public is cool to the bailout itself, underscoring economic uncertainty.

Eight in 10 are worried about the economy's future, with 50% saying they’re “very worried.” Personal concern runs high as well: 60% are worried about their family's finances. And 83% say the country is seriously off on the wrong track, back within a point of its record high – set just this June – in polls dating to early 1970s.

All these work for Obama.

He's recovered to a 14% lead over McCain in trust to handle the economy, and leads by 13% specifically in trust to deal with the meltdown of major financial institutions.

Obama leads by more, 57%-33%, in better understanding the public's economic problems.

Tellingly, after trailing by 17 points, he's pulled even with McCain in trust to handle a major crisis. And Obama holds wide margins in preference among likely voters most concerned about the economy.

Attention to the contest, meanwhile, is remarkable. Fully 91% of registered voters are following it closely and 55% "very" closely – both highs in ABC/Post polls dating to the 1988 presidential election.

The number of McCain supporters who describe themselves as "very enthusiastic" about his candidacy plunged to 34%, down from 46% after the Republican convention. A steady and far greater number of Obama's supporters remain very enthusiastic about their candidate, 62%.

In a related challenge, concern about the candidates' age is up: 48%, a new high, call it an important factor in their vote, and it hurts McCain: Those who call it important favor Obama by 2-1, 63%-32%.

Then there are white women. They're back to a dead heat now, precisely where they were in mid-July and a dramatic turnaround from June when they backed McCain by 16-points.

Shifts in other key swing groups are also striking.

• White Catholics have shifted from a broad post-convention preference for McCain, 57-38 percent, to a dead heat.
• Independents, likewise, went from +10 for McCain two weeks ago to +14 for Obama now. And married women, +11 for McCain on Sept. 7, are +5 for Obama now.
• Among other changes, there’s been a major swing to Obama in the Midwest. He’s now up there, 53%-40%, almost a complete turnaround from the 54%-43% McCain advantage on Sept. 7.

The shift toward Obama is not limited to economic issues: While he's gained the upper hand on the pre-eminent factor, others have moved along as well. McCain had led by 10 points in trust to handle the Iraq war; now Obama is +4. McCain's 20-point lead on terrorism is now an insignificant 4 points, the closest of the campaign.

And they're now even in trust to handle international affairs, back to July's result.

On personal attributes, Obama's turned a scant 6-point deficit on honesty and trustworthiness into an 11-point advantage.

Data and facts from ABC News.

Paulson, Bernanke, Try Hustling Congress

Here we go again.

As the Bush administration did with the Patriot Act and Iraq War resolution, Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke spent today trying to hustle Congress into new territory using the familiar administration tactic of hysteria. Fortunately, this time it looks as if more than a few members have read the fine print before committing us to a whole new level of disaster.

The meltdown is a prime example of what happens when the nation's leaders on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, on Wall Street and Main Street, hold government service in contempt. And who believe, amazingly, that "the market" is an alternate life form requiring no supervision or oversight.

Paulson spent a good part of the day telling Senator Dodd’s banking committee not to fret, not to worry, not to upset “marketplace forces.” Just show him the money today and tomorrow he’ll talk with Congress about nettlesome issues such as oversight, executive compensation, public ownership of bailed out institutions and so on. Watching Paulson reminds me of Wimpy, a 1930s-era cartoon character who kept telling waiters, “I’ll gladly pay you tomorrow for a hamburger today.” Except Wimpy never came back to pay.

According to the New York Times, Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio asked the former professor-turned-Fed chief, “Do you think Wall Street owes the American people an apology?”

Bernanke quibbled over word choice, ruminating that “Wall Street is an abstraction. There were many people who made mistakes, many regulators who made mistakes.” In other words, everyone was responsible so no one is responsible. That’s how the old Supreme Soviet did things as a hedge against anyone being tossed in the Lubyanka. Paulson dashed to Bernanke’s rescue, turning populist and saying, “I share the outrage … There’s a lot of blame to go around.”

If any apologies are owed, apparently we’ll get them later but we’re not sure from who or when we’ll get them – if at all.

Meanwhile, Bernanke and Paulson clearly lost sight of the fact that Wall St. as the "market' is simply human nature writ large, with all the greed and malign intent of the worst of all evil empires. Without regulation and oversight, anarchy ensues and it is always the little guy who pays the price.

Isn’t it funny that the same people who rail against "socialized medicine" wholeheartedly support socialized banking?

Well, I guess they've got theirs so who else matters?

Yet there is a ray of sunlight shining through the thunderheads. Like every other proposed condition on the bailout money, Paulson and Bernanke spent much of the day trying to convince Senators to set aside punitive measures for executives until after the bailout. But Sen. Dodd drew a line in the sand. Any bailout would “include executive compensation,” he said. “Count on it.”

And so it goes, as the great Linda Ellerby would say as her sign-off line. And so it goes.

Fiction Is Better Than This Reality

– Guest post by Denis Campbell, editor of VadimusPost.com

“What will be the next thing that challenges us? That makes us work harder and go farther? You know, when smallpox was eradicated, it was considered the single greatest humanitarian achievement of this century. Surely, we can do it again. As we did in the time when our eyes looked towards the heavens, and with outstretched fingers, we touched the face of God. Here’s to (toasting) absent friends, and the ones that are here now.”
- President Bartlett, The West Wing, Season 1, Episode 5

When the running dialogue in the real Presidential race gets too much to bear, I take a moment away from this computer screen and pop a DVD in from the fictional White House to chase my own higher angels and prayers of a new White House. I look past the slimy ads, liars, crooks, thieves, agendas, polls, speeches, SPIN, and see moments here of pure inspiration, emotion and a government as it should be versus the government as it today is.

The people in that show serve a higher purpose, truly focused on Country First as more than a slogan.

When at the end of this current DVD, Josh Lyman stops the President in the portico and simply says, “Mr. President, we talk about enemies more than we used to.” He simply replies, “yeah.”

And while it was clear the seeds for where we are today in this epic campaign’s seeming archetypal struggle of good vs. evil were planted long before 1999 when this episode first aired, indeed nothing in the political landscape looks as it did back in 1994 when the Gingrich Revolution first hit Washington, or earlier.

I watch this DVD and am taken back to early spring of 1973 and a week-long excursion to Washington DC as a 16-year old high school junior in the Close-Up program. There we met giants of politics, including a freshman senator from Delaware, now Vice Presidential candidate, on the subway between the Capitol and Senate Office buildings. We sat next to him and the late Senator Heinz from Pennsylvania. These gentlemen and they remain as such in my memory, stopped their conversation to converse with two young kids from Massachusetts.

We were young and the antithesis of cynicism. We had high ideals as we sat at the feet of Senator Burke listening to him challenge us in a way no politician has since though inspiring oratory, not knowing or caring he was at that time having a torrid affair with television’s Barbara Walters. Those sorts of things happened in private, were no one else’s business and were not the fodder of tabloid journalism or dramatic television self confessions to boost book sales.

The Watergate story was breaking furiously all week and we clamoured to the hotel newsstand for the next big revelation in the venerable Washington Post, now a shadow of its former self. There was no CNN or even much cable television so we read newspapers and read great writers and editorialists and this was just two short months after the President was re-inaugurated for a second term.

We had faith the truth would come out and indeed it did and he was shown the door a year later. We believed in justice and accountability. We watched as Attorney General Elliott Richardson resigned as U.S. attorney general when he refused, as directed by President Nixon, to fire the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal rather than take part in a cover-up.

Today, sadly, neither he nor Nixon would be gone because our own standards have so slipped so badly. As I watched Karl Rove pull the puppet strings in Texas for Bush 43 without a shred of dignity or decency, just how low can we go and what can we get away with, it was clear we’d not just lost our moral compass, it was thrown out with the trash.

And yet I always kept hope.

I lived in The Netherlands and was so inspired when Minister-President Wim Kok resigned on April 16, 1999, the day it became widely reported that Dutch UN Peacekeeping troops stood by and did nothing while the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of Muslim men and boys was carried out by Serbian troops.

That was a statement of honour that is much missing in today’s governance. If something bad happens on my watch, the buck stops here and I take personal responsibility. Sadly, I cannot see an American President ever again resigning unless frog-marched out of the Oval Office with a smoking gun in his hand, a dead body on the carpet.

Meanwhile, the current looting of the Treasury produced this e-mail in my box today:

Dear American Friend:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had a crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gramm, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transaction is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully,
Minister of Treasury
Henry Paulson

Denis Campbell edits a daily e-newsmagazine at www.vadimuspost.com.

From A Dog Named Checkers To The Looting Of America.

On today in 1952, Republican vice-presidential candidate Richard Nixon went on television to deliver what came to be known as the “Checkers” speech. Appearing on flickering, black-and-white sets across America, his wife seated next to him like the stage prop she’d play for the rest of Nixon’s life, he denied allegations of improper campaign financing. At stake was whether Nixon would remain on the GOP ticket with Dwight Eisenhower; at issue was a vicuna coat purportedly given to Pat and a dog supposedly given to their daughters by Republican Party bigwigs seeking favors.

A coat and a puppy! How quaintly innocent it all seems now.

Now, if all you came to offer a politician a coat, you wouldn’t get to take it off before being hustled out of the office and, oh, take that damn dog with you before it pees on the carpet. The whole point of Grover Norquist and Tom Delay’s brainchild, the K Street Project, was to lay tens of millions of slimy corporate dollars across the greasy monkey palms of the Republican Party and its greedy minions on Capitol Hill.

The McCain-Palin campaign is the K Street Project taken to its logical conclusion. It is managed, staffed and run by K Street men who made small fortunes from corporations seeking access to and favors from politicians. One look no further than Rick Davis, the campaign’s manager, who received $5-million from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

"The value that he brought to the relationship was the closeness to Senator McCain and the possibility that Senator McCain was going to run for president again," says Robert McCarson, a former spokesman for Fannie Mae. McCarson told the New York Times that while he worked there, Fannie and Freddie together paid Mr. Davis's firm $30,000 a month, which eventually totalled a handsome $2-million fee.

At the time that Davis was recruited by the two mortgage giants to run the Home Ownership Alliance in 2000, they were under pressure from private industry rivals and deregulation-minded Republicans who argued that the two companies' federal sponsorship gave them an unfair advantage and put taxpayers at risk. As a result, the financial service industry’s go-to guy on the Hill, John McCain’s BFF Phil Gramm, the two institutions were set free to become public companies.

In the end, of course, the de-regulate everything Republican Congress was right. Freddie and Fannie put taxpayers at severe risk but not because they were federally regulated. Instead, cut loose from their minders, Freddie and Fannie joined the Wall St. crowd hanging over the roulette wheels, tossing chips on every number in sight. Odd, even, black, red, it didn’t matter; the thrill was the action more than winning. Eventually, like all addicted gamblers, they – along with their playing partners on Wall St. – played away everything until they didn’t have enough money for a bus ticket home.

So Congress is sending money for a ticket. A whole lot of money for a whole lot of tickets, as it turns out.

But instead of insisting that the addicts agree to go to Gambler’s Anonymous meetings as the price of a free ride home, Hank Paulson – Morgan Stanley’s former $35-million a year man who now runs the US Treasury – says forget any conditions or restrictions or penalties for the not-so-repentant gamblers; just trust me with a trillion dollars, give or take, to straighten things out and I’ll deal with my former lunch club buddies.

Here’s the best part.

The way Paulson and the White House insist the be law written, Treasury alone would hire “consultants” to decide which lousy loans should be purchased, how much they’re worth, to whom they should be re-sold and at what price. Since Paulson wants to do this with no oversight by Congress, administrative agencies or court review, then clearly “consultant” means bankers and other Wall St. moguls. In other words, the people who screwed the pooch in the first place and need rescuing by Washington would be hired to decide which pieces of their toilet paper should be bought up and at what price.

And not Congress nor the courts nor any regulatory agency could override their decisions.

Shorthand: The Ponzi scheme artists who got us into this mess we’re all paying to clean up will make money off of us three more ways, besides the fees they got when they originally packaged, sold or bought the garbage loans. Now, they’ll get fees for untangling their own mess; fees for pricing and re-packaging the garbage being laid off on taxpayers; and, finally, fees for selling the new paper.

“Fees” doesn’t mean minimum wage.

Pres. Bush is said to be balking at some of the restrictions Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank – chairmen of their respective banking committees – are insisting be written into the law. Despite some jawboning, Bush doesn’t have any real choice but to go along with added provisions such as Congressional and regulatory oversight, homeowner relief and provisions such as controlling bonuses for executives of banks seeking help.

Why? Because if Bush refuses to sign the eventual measure, the good news is that no one will remember his Iraq disaster; the bad news is he will be remembered as the 21st century’s Herbert Hoover.

We sure have come a long way from when a vicuna coat and a puppy were major scandals.

New Michael Moore Film “Slacker Uprising” Free On-Line Tomorrow

If you didn’t receive the e-mail announcement or see anything in the media, Michael Moore is making his new film Slacker Uprising available for free all day on Sept. 23, beginning at midnight.

“It's also one of my contributions to help get out the vote November 4th,” Moore said in a letter to his e-mail list.

So, he’s giving “blanket permission” for anyone to download the film, e-mail it, burn it and “share it with anyone and everyone in the U.S. and Canada.”

The film premiered in Ann Arbor MI last Thursday, according to this news report.



There are four ways to download the film:

1. Blip.tv will provide standard resolution streaming, free of commercials and advertising.
2. Amazon Video on Demand will provide a high quality version of the above stream.
3. iTunes allows anyone to download "Slacker Uprising" on their iTunes, iPod, or Apple TV and view it either there or on a television.
4. Hypernia is providing bandwidth, servers and management to host "Slacker Uprising" online, it can be downloaded and viewed any time, or it may be burned onto a DVD.

The legendary, iconic filmmaker says, “I want to encourage you to screen this movie with large groups. I believe it will inspire our get-out-the-vote efforts at a time when we need to get millions registered in the next two weeks.”

Is National Masochism Causing The Tight Presidential Race?

We must be a nation of masochists.

While Americans pretend to be puritanical, Juan Cole notes at www.juancole.com we’re actually rabid masochists addicted to whips, leather and sadism. For example, a recent issue of Psychology Today reports large numbers of people are asphyxiated accidentally every year because they need to be choked to achieve sexual pleasure.

It is the only thing to explain tight poll numbers in the presidential race.

I don’t understand.

Republicans came to Washington in 2000 with a solid majority in both houses of Congress and on the Supreme Court, allowing them to steal the presidency. If you ever wanted to know what a pure Republican Party government unhindered by Democrats or anyone else might look like, this was the moment.

After being handed a large budget surplus by a Democratic president, they immediately ran up a gargantuan deficit. In the process, they doubled the national debt to $10-trillion. You don't run big deficits of $400-billion a year in good times according to John Maynard Keynes; you save deficit spending for a recession, when the economy needs a jolt.

If you're already racking up a big deficit every year in a good economy, you have no way of making a difference during a downturn except with a mega-deficit, destroying the value of the dollar.

Destroying Social Security

Remember that when he was president, Bill Clinton was talking about using the surplus to pay down the national debt or fix the looming crisis in Social Security.

But now, with the government already saddled with $10-trillion in debt and with another trillion and a half – give or take a few hundred billion – added to it last week, exactly how will Social Security be fixed?

It won't, or not if John McCain is elected. Republicans from Ronald Reagan to George Bush and McCain himself hate Social Security because people are still grateful to the Democrats and FDR for creating the program. Bush tried privatizing it and McCain helped with glee; clearly, they want to destroy it. Social Security is the main reason our elderly are not the poorest, most miserable section of society, as they were in the 1930s.

In 2000, many Republicans came to Washington with a crooked plan to use fraudulent methods to ensure that campaign financing went almost exclusively to them through super-lobbyists like Jack Abramoff. Grover Norquist’s K-Street Project aimed at guaranteeing big corporate dollars for the Republicans in exchange for giving corporations the right to write legislation affecting their industry. Laws governing pharmaceuticals were written by the pharmaceutical industry lobbyists, energy laws written by the oil industry, etc., and the Republicans just signed off on everything.

So Abramoff, Delay, the whole K-Street crowd, got busted in this slezy scam. Once upon a time, this would have haunted the scamming party for decades. But because Big Media is mostly Republican-owned, it just quietly subsided as a story.

It is not just that the rap sheet against Republican politicians is longer than the trans-Atlantic cable, it is that so much of the corruption took the form of a conspiracy.

Pirates Of Plunder

Both parties have people in them looking to get rich on the side. But the K Street Project wasn’t just about individual aggrandizement. It was about fixing the whole American system permanently to kow-tow to the super-rich without so much as a whimper. Worse, it was to punish – eliminate – the middle class.

After the 2002 mid-terms, even George W. Bush wanted to cut middle class taxes. But Cheney over-ruled him, insisting on another deep tax cut for the very wealthy. We won the mid-terms, Cheney said. This is our due.

"Our due?”

Cheney finally said aloud what everyone always suspected: The Republican Party is the party of the super-rich, the 3-million at the top of society who own 45% of privately held wealth. They would benefit by Republican rule, just like in Brazil.

Of course, there were other conspiracies by the pirouetting pirates of plunder.

There was the Iraq War, one of the great criminal conspiracies of modern times. In his new book, Angler, Barton Gellman relates how Dick Cheney lied to then-House Majority Leader Dick Armey before the vote on the war, telling him that Saddam's family was al-Qaeda and Saddam's evil scientists had made a suitcase nuke he’d hand to bin Laden. Weeping, Armey tells Gellman he deserved better than to be covered in horse shit by the Vice President of the United States.

Bush, Cheney and the Republicans took us to war against a country that had not attacked the United States; they killed or maimed 33,000 Americans; they turned a whole Arab Muslim country into a burned-out hulk, displacing millions and continuously bombing the very cities that they had conquered and occupied, killing and disfiguring.

They fed us propaganda with implausible lies about mobile biological weapons labs and Baathist al-Qaeda. Our journalists bought the snake oil hook, line and sinker, as did the public.

Electronic Roman Forum

Dozens of car bombs go off in Iraq every day, killing dozens at a time, and we are told by cable "news" bloviators it is "calm" now. It’s a vast, electronic, Roman Forum: Unbalanced celebrities and philandering politicians are fed to the lions before millions of cheering plebes by corporate moguls desperately hoping that the marks will not notice the pickpockets in the arena, relieving them of their purses.

This Washington crew thought nothing of inducing the press to out a covert CIA operative working against Iranian nuclear proliferation, Valerie Plame. Their culture of lies is such that they attempt to divert attention from all the phone calls to journalists by Scooter Libby and Karl Rove trying to get the press to print her name by saying they didn’t succeed.

Why is trying to inform the Iranians of the identity of a CIA field officer assigned to spy on Iran not an act of treason? After all, you can't inform the world without also informing the Iranians. Isn't the punishment for treason hanging? See anyone swinging by their neck?

The Republican Party conducted a vast illegal spying operation on Americans and foreign diplomats. We still don't know why exactly, and domestic political motivations cannot be ruled out.

They imposed on us the totally unpatriotic PATRIOT Act, gutting the Constitution. So, peaceful protesters at the RNC in St. Paul are actually charged with terrorism for exercising 1st Amendment rights in this Brave New World.

Meanwhile, bridges and levies are breaking and falling down everywhere because Cheney did not want to tax his billionaire pals to pay for upkeep on the country's infrastructure.

They so radically deregulated the banking system while removing any meaningful oversight, they came within hours of presiding over a 1929-style absolute meltdown of the nation’s entire financial structure. To cover the criminal activities of their cronies, they are now proposing to impose a fine of $1-trillion dollars on the middle class to ensure that their partners in crime receive $75-million golden handshakes while being held harmless for their misdeeds.

What’s To Decide?

And in the wake of the greatest and most sustained act of systematic plunder since the Mongol hordes appropriated the riches of everyplace in Asia from Beijing to Isfahan, the reaction of the supine, slave-like American voting public is to scratch their heads, having a hard time deciding if they would like more of the same.

Take Joe Castiglione. He is an independent voter in Grand Rapids who went to a McCain rally last week looking for answers about how to fix Michigan's economy. "If you look at Michigan, you're going to find people saying 'we've heard the speech, where's the answers,'" Mr. Castiglione, who said he’s struggling to decide whether to vote for McCain or Barack Obama, told McClatchy newspapers.

He said this on the same day as a report showed Michigan's jobless rate jumped to 8.9% in August. It was 7.2% last August. What can’t Mr. Castiglione figure out?

Despite his aristocratic prerogatives and high society connections, even the Marquis de Sade was brought down by a lowly maid who complained to police of his cutting her while having his way with her. In contrast to that plucky domestic servant, the American public appears to enjoy being lacerated, moaning with delight at each new act of abuse and abasement while gasping for air.

If you insist on bending over Nov. 4, I hope you enjoy pain. You’re going to be ecstatic.

What, Me Worry?

Over the past week, President Bush held a state dinner for Ghana's president, surveyed Texas hurricane damage, posed with Youth of the Year award finalists and met with Army General David Petraeus.

But, according to the White House web site, he’s publicly uttered roughly 300 words about the worst Wall Street crisis since the Great Depression, saying nothing much beyond the government is working to “reduce disruptions” in US financial markets. Maybe Dick Cheney hasn’t told Pres. Doofus the nitty-gritty so he doesn’t know what’s going on; maybe he knows but doesn’t care; maybe he figures that, at a Nixon-like 25% approval rating, why bother since no one will listen anyway.

So, instead of being out in front of the crisis to help the nation cope, Bush is shooting his best Mad Magazine “What, me worry?” grin as he avoids answering reporter’s shouted questions whenever he emerges from hiding to dash from the Marine 1 helicopter to a photo op. Yesterday, he did pop out of his hidey hole long enough to see his shadow and make a brief announcement that did nothing to calm either citizens or Wall St. before dashing back inside.

Oddly enough, it doesn’t seem as if the Wall St. titans at the center of the raging storm are much worried about what’s going on, either. As we proles down here in the lower depths hang on by our fingertips while our home values disintegrate, our 401(k) and IRA plans go down in flames and our futures turn from dim to bleak, not everyone is brooding. As often happens, it’s the perpetrators of the crisis who are coming away with their pockets stuffed with cash.

For example, Bloomberg reports that Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain and two former Goldman Sachs buddies he recruited a year ago stand to collect almost $200-million between them for the one year they ran the brokerage firm – into the ground, mind you – if they leave or are demoted after Bank of America completes its fire sale takeover of the flailing company. In other words, they’ll get paid a thick enough wad of money not to have to work ever again after destroying shareholder value and tossing thousands of people onto the street without jobs.

This is like a scene from the great Marx Brothers movie Animal Crackers, where Chico explains that he’s paid more for not playing a musical instrument in the band.

But Thain and friends aren’t even at the top of the potential list of winning failures. Tom Montag, a Merrill executive hired 30 days before the BofA takeover, will receive a $76-million check in severance pay. Nice going for a bad month’s work of helping turn a silk purse into a sow’s ear.

Meanwhile, ex-Bear Stearns President Warren Spector, who sold $382-million in stock before resigning in 2007 just as the fires of hell were starting to lick at the company’s foundation, was spotted dancing in the rain during a revival of the musical Hair staged in Central Park last month.

Let the sun shine.

Another McCain-Palin Lie: Their Health Coverage Plan Has Nothing To Do With Health Or Coverage.

Countdown’s Keith Olbermann is donating $100 to charity for every lie told by or on behalf of John McCain and Sarah Palin during the campaign. McCain invented the Blackberry? $100. Palin says she’ll help special needs kids but neglects to mention that she vetoed $250,000 for the Special Olympics? Another $100 from Keith. Every day seems to cost him another $100.

But this particular lie is so huge it ought to cost Olbermann a bundle because it’s worth a lot more than $100.

In late April, McCain rolled out what he called a universal health care plan which, it turns out, offers neither a health plan nor universal coverage. Instead, McCain’s approach should be dubbed “The Health Insurance Industry Relief Act” because it is a not-so-carefully disguised money grab, moving cash from the wallets of already hard-stretched working people to line the pockets of wealthy insurers.

The mainstream media hasn’t bothered going to McCain’s website to read the down-and-dirty of another of his “You get sick, my pals get rich” scheme. But New York Times columnist Bob Hebert finally did, prompting him to ask on Tuesday, “Has anyone bothered to notice the radical changes that John McCain and Sarah Palin are planning for the nation’s health insurance system?”

Apparently not, because no one seems to notice that McCain wants to require workers to pay taxes on the value of the health benefits paid by their employers. Say what? That’s right: Employees will not only continue to pay part of escalating premiums, but also a tax on the benefits. In return, McCain would give families a $5,000 tax credit, and individuals a $2,500 credit, to lure them out of employer plans and into the individual insurance market. McCain and Palin – both of whom are covered by lush government plans – hope people will forget that premiums are super high and scrutiny of health conditions is super tough for individual health policies in the private market.

As a result, in not reporting what the McCain-Palin plan is, the news media hasn’t mentioned that, for most people, the tax credit won’t buy much coverage, given sky high premiums. Nor have reporters written about the fact that the plan is worth a lot more to younger workers, who don’t get sick, than older ones who are more likely to get ill and thus pay more because of their age.

More critically, nowhere other than Hebert’s column has anyone realized that the McCain-Palin approach would eventually destroy employer-based coverage.

Herbert then connects the consequences of destroying the employer market with McCain’s plans for the individual market, writing that McCain wants “to undermine state health insurance regulations by allowing consumers to buy insurance from sellers anywhere in the country.” Allowing insurers to cross state lines will not lower insurance premiums but it will eliminate valuable protections many states give their residents in regulating insurance companies.

A study published in the health policy journal Health Affairs explains in detail what is likely to happen with McCain’s approach. Its conclusions: The number of people without health insurance will actually grow over time and increase a family’s costs for medical care.

This is just the opposite of what we’ve heard from McCain. It should cost Keith Olbermann another $100 donation to charity. Maybe editors, producers and reporters will take notice – but I doubt it.

Sarah’s Own Words: “I Don’t Do Black Guys.”

Long before Gregory Charles Royal became a judge on America’s Hot Musician, a talent competition airing in 200 US television markets, he was a hot, young jazz trombonist. Today, he remains a great musician but, more important, is another person confirming from first-hand experience that Palin has always been racist as alleged by numerous sources in my original article on her, Alaskans Speak: Palin Is “Racist, Sexist, Vindictive and Mean.

And he’s willing to be quoted by name.

Royal is incredibly talented. He received formal trombone training when he was 11 in the DC Youth Orchestra Program while simultaneously playing in Washington clubs with Roscoe Bowie's Message Band and Show. He also received principal trombone honors in the First American Festival of Youth Orchestras and, at 15, was the youngest member of the Howard University Jazz Ensemble. He toured with Al Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Slide Hampton and His World of Trombones and starred on Broadway as an on-stage musician in Five Guys Named Moe, which was nominated for two Tony awards. Along the way, Royal wrote and acted in It’s a Hardbop Life, the first play featuring an entire cast of jazz musicians, which debuted at the 2004 New York Jazz Festival.

He also performed with the Duke Ellington Orchestra for 10 years, from 1989 to 1999. In May, 1990, the orchestra was touring Alaska and played in Anchorage. While there, the 28-year old Royal and a small group of other musicians from the orchestra went into a fast food joint near the airport for a bite to eat.

“I saw a great looking young lady and, as lots of travelling musicians do, I struck up a conversation with her,” Royal recounted to me after my original piece on Palin was published. “She told me her name was Sarah.”

Royal admits he was hitting on her, a regular activity for most musicians, especially when on the road. The reason this particular conversation stuck in his mind is because she said that while she wasn’t much into jazz, she played the flute.

“This is why I remembered talking with her,” Royal states.

He told Sarah about talking about the Modern jazz Quartet as an example of not strictly jazz style music but could still be cool. “I was trying to keep the conversation going,” Royal says, “so I mentioned some of the musicians, including Percy Heath.

“She quickly let me know that Heath was her name too,” Royal recounts.

Royal claims that she mentioned going to school in Hawaii but did not say anything about being married or being pregnant. “I would remember that. Anyway, it was May 1990 and she was just a couple of months pregnant and wouldn’t have shown.”

Royal felt he was making progress with Sarah Heath and when a couple of his musician friends approached, he waved them off. “But she saw them and got weird.

“Sarah asked me if they were with me. I asked her what was up because she was obviously a little weird after seeing them,” states Royal, who has Native American blood in his ancestry, is fairly light skinned while his buddies were much darker.

"I don't mean any harm,” Royal says Sarah told him which is exactly what she meant, “but I don't do black guys."

“I said ‘I'm Black,’” Royal relates, to which Sarah replied with, “Well, you aren't really black. You’re like …"

Royal remembers her voice trailed off as if not knowing what to say next as the reality of the situation sunk in on her. “Then she got real confused and the conversation ended rather quickly and uncomfortably.

So how did this long-ago, failed pick-up come back to Royal’s mind some 18 years later?

“I followed the conventions but never connected Sarah Palin to the Sarah Heath I hit on,” he says, “because there was no physical resemblance and the last name was different. It was from watching an MSNBC story on her that I saw the photos and learned her family name.”

When the now-Sarah Palin uttered the immortal words, “So Sambo beat the bitch” to the hearty laugher of her luncheon companions during the primaries, it was merely an extension of what appears to be her lifelong views on race. When she thought Greg Royal was white, she seemed more than eager to make the beast with two backs with him; in an instant of learning he was actually black, she fumbled for words, and fled into the streets ‘lest she catch something from him.

At least we know she fits in naturally with the racist right wingnuts that infest the Republican Party, unlike her running mate who says whatever he needs to say at the moment to fit in with them. For whatever that’s worth.

Thanks, GOP, For Ruining An Economy As Your Friends Got Wealthy.

Back in 2001, I was warned that the world’s financial markets were heading towards disaster. The warning came from a lawyer whose law firm was helping create the instruments that began imploding a year ago and came tumbling down on Monday.

Until his death two years ago at age 83, Edwin A. “Eddie” Goodman, QC, OC, PC, was perhaps the most powerful deal-making lawyers in Canada. One afternoon in late 2001, I was lunching with Eddie at The Albany Club, the oldest of old boy hang-outs in Toronto where portraits of the numerous members who did a term or two as Prime Minister adorn the corridors.

“I don’t think anyone understands these goddamned deals we’re writing (finance and tax) paper for,” Eddie said while chewing on pieces of a rich Irish stew, bits of it spraying from his mouth as he talked. “They’re so fucking complicated it’d take years – maybe decades – of litigation to unwind them if any of them fall apart. And if they do collapse, they’ll bring down businesses and governments with them.”

We were talking about the raft of convoluted, intricate and highly specialized financial instruments that were becoming increasingly popular with institutional investors and traders from Bay St. in Toronto to Wall St., London, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Singapore.

From helping create the Toronto Blue Jays baseball team to having a lawyerly hand in every major commercial real estate deal in the country, nudging a reluctant Prime Minister Brian Mulroney into normalizing relations with China four years after Tiananmen Square and then bringing large and small Canadian businesses en masse to the mainland, to helping turn Four Seasons Hotels into a global luxury hotelier, Eddie Goodman left a massive mark on Canadian business and government from the end of World War II into early years of the 21st century.

In the process, he built what became one of Toronto’s most-powerful law firms. So, if Eddie said no one could understand the complex nuances of the financial instruments being created, then no one could. And he thought he knew the reason.

“These damn things are going to get sold and re-sold and then re-packaged so many times until no one is really sure who owns what, or what they own. I think that’s the whole point.” He paused briefly to wipe his mouth with a crisp, white, linen napkin. “Someone will get screwed because eventually, the whole fucking thing will collapse.”

As a person, Eddie was bothered by what struck him as a giant, unregulated, high risk game of three card Monty being created for global players who would have nothing much at risk in creating the underlying paper; as a lawyer, he knew it was his job to do the best he could for a client.

Eddie Goodman didn’t live long enough to see his dark premonition come true. But, as with many things during his truly remarkable life, he had a talent for seeing far over the horizon to know what was likely to come next.

Skip forward to Meltdown Monday. While President Bush and John McCain were blithely insisting that Wall St. was merely experiencing an “adjustment” and the “fundamentals of the US economy remain sound,” billionaire investor George Soros took a dire yet more realistic view, warning “We are just sailing into the storm.”

This explains why Fed Chairman Ben Bernacke – who happens to a noted scholar on causes of the Great Depression in his other life as an academic – is shuttling frantically between Washington and New York, or on the phone to his counterparts in Europe and Asia, as he desperately tries to keep what he must know is a house of cards from collapsing. But in doing so, Bernacke must feel like the Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, trying to hold back the relentless, pounding ocean.

Fact: Even though the Federal Reserve discount window is charging banks less than 2% to borrow money, banks are charging other banks more than 6% for overnight borrowing. What that means is that American banks don’t trust each other enough to lend money amongst themselves, even overnight, at close-to-Fed rates.

Fact: While American International Group was the largest insurer of mortgage-backed securities, the crisis that still threatens to bring AIG tumbling down despite a massive infusion of capital into the company by the Fed as a last minute, desperate move, to keep the firm afloat, there are dozens of other, smaller companies like AIG who have insured the value of paper that is worthless.

Fact: As lenders become increasingly skittish, many commercial borrowers – even those with good or decent credit histories – will find it impossible to obtain debt at affordable rates. From small and mid-sized business to cities or even states may not be able to raise debt. A flood of Chapter 11 filings are likely to hit the courts, beginning in perhaps six months.

Fact: As businesses contract in the wake of tight money, unemployment will rise. Consumer defaults on their credit cards and mortgage payments will balloon, putting even more pressure on banks. Many will have to be rescued or allowed to collapse. Housing prices will continue to decline, adding to the woes of people just staying afloat who will own homes worth less than they paid for them

Between now and Nov. 4, it is entirely possible that the past 30 years of deregulation, of letting business do what it wants without any reasonable government oversight, of believing that my wealth (if I had any) would trickle down into your pocket, will be exposed as the greatest Ponzi scheme even invented by man. While that bodes poorly for the nation, it may propel Barack Obama into the White House.

Before then, former US Treasury Secretary Robert Reich says, “This is the end of the middle of the beginning of the credit crisis.

“We created a kind of casino atmosphere,” Reich continues, “in which almost anybody and any bank could make a lot of money by going deeper into debt, by buying up all sorts of debt instruments, by selling securities to people who didn't even know what was in the securities. In this sort of atmosphere we were begging for some kind of crisis.”

If that is not harsh enough language for you, read what Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University, posted on his blog: “This will turn out to be the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and the worst US recession in decades.

“Hundreds of small banks with massive exposure to real estate will go bust,” he predicts. “Hundreds of US municipalities will go bust. Equity prices in the US and abroad will go much deeper into bear territory … This financial crisis signals the beginning of the decline of the American empire.”

As I wrote in The End Is Near For The Richest Poor Nation On Earth on Monday, the meltdown “marks the official beginning of the end of more than four generations of uninterrupted American prosperity.”

So thanks Ronald Reagan, much appreciated Bush 41, delighted to have known you, Bush 43. You must be so proud, Phil Gramm, the architect of deregulating everything financial and John McCain’s economic guru. And a special thanks to the yokels at the University of Chicago business school who created trickle down, supply-side economics back in the 1970s. All of you really smacked the donkey for the rest of us.

Europe Gets The Energy Issue While America Dithers On Climate Change

With little notice by the American media, the European Union is taking a major step of moving towards its goal of requiring that, by 2020, fully 20% of its energy come from renewable sources rather than fossil fuels.

Unfortunately, they left in biofuels, which are a distraction rather than a solution. The question isn't whether a resource is renewable; it is whether the energy puts more carbon into the atmosphere. Agribusiness doesn’t like it when people mention that the biofuel refining process requires more polluting energy than it produces clean fuel. So, biofuels make no sense from a “green” point of view. We need to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, not slow the rate at which we increase the amount.

By the same token, solar and wind don't add carbon to the atmosphere.

Still, Europe is a big chunk of the industrialized world. If it can make the true costs of fossil fuels apparent by leveling the playing field in favor of wind and solar, that will have a tremendous impact on innovation. There is a big danger that this new policy will give European solar firms a further leg up and leave the United States way behind, captive to Big Oil and Big Coal, with solar firms hobbled by Congress's hidden subsidies to the oil, coal and gas industry.

This is a sure-fire recipe for the US to end up a third world, pariah, country.

Solar is the more important part of the mix, since there is demonstrably enormous energy to be had from the sun if it could be captured efficiently, stored and distributed. But there is only so much wind power in the world although the US and Canada are blessed with an enormous “wind canal” stretching from Texas up through the Great Plains and into the Canadian prairies. As T. Boone Pickens points out repeatedly, it may be the easiest stretch of geography in the world to convert wind into energy.

At least the Europeans are not talking foolishly about “clean coal” as an environmental improvement, unlike in the US. Clean coal is as much of a myth as the unicorn. Nor are Europeans chanting "Drill now! Drill here!" and demanding poisonous oil be brought out of the tundra to create climate catastrophe.

Eve Ensler (The Vagina Monologues) On Sarah Palin

The unfortunate thing about Eve Ensler is that she wrote a famous play about vaginas. That is enough for any Fundamentalist to write her off but they are not her target. Her target here is other hockey moms who think she is just like them – not.

Ensler is an American playwright, performer, feminist and activist best known for The Vagina Monologues. She wrote this about Sarah Palin:

Drill, Drill, Drill

I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last night that she was a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar bears around their necks. I have a particular thing for Polar Bears. Maybe it's their snowy whiteness or their bigness or the fact that they live in the Arctic or that I have never seen one in person or touched one. Maybe it is the fact that they live so comfortably on ice.

Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.

I don't like raging at women. I am a Feminist and have spent my life trying to build community, help empower women and stop violence against them. It is hard to write about Sarah Palin. This is why the Sarah Palin choice was all the more insidious and cynical. The people who made this choice count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists.

But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices is antithetical to Feminism which, for me, is part of one story connected to saving the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.

I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous choices of my lifetime, and should this country chose those candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in so many areas that America may never recover. But what is equally disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the world. Unfortunately, this is not a joke. In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.

Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this as a metaphor. In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or evolves. She does not believe in global warming is melting of Arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God's plan. She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in Palin's view, is here to be taken and plundered. The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As she said herself of the Iraqi war, "It was a task from God."

Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion. She does not believe women who are raped and incested and ripped open against their will should have a right to determine whether they have their rapist's baby or not.

She obviously does not believe in sex education or birth control. I imagine her daughter was practicing abstinence and thus is a good example of how many babies abstinence makes.

Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library and has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an environment of ambiguity and difference. This is a woman who could and might very well end up President of the United States. She would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.

Sarah believes in guns. She has her own custom Austrian hunting rifle. She has been known to kill 40 caribou at a clip. She has shot hundreds of wolves from the air.

Sarah believes in God. That is of course her right, her private right. But when God and Guns come together in the public sector, when war is declared in God's name, when the rights of women are denied in his name, that is the end of separation of church and state and the undoing of everything America has ever tried to be.

I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold this election in our hands.

This vote is a vote that will determine the future not just of the U.S., but of the planet. It will determine whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we move towards dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence through invasion, undermining and attack. It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction. It will determine if money gets spent on education and healthcare or whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine whether America is a free open tolerant society or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and aggression.

If the Polar Bears don't move you to go and do everything in your power to get Obama elected then consider the chant that filled the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, "Drill Drill Drill." I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of destruction. I think of domination. I think of military exercises that force mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis, doubt, ambiguity or dissent.

I think of pain.

Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust between nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we call life?

Eve Ensler

The End Is Near For The Poorest Rich Nation On Earth

When I was a kid in Milwaukee, before we moved to Minneapolis, there was a guy who walked up and down Wisconsin Ave., the main drag, wearing a sandwich board proclaiming, “Repent! The End Is Near.”

Of course, he meant his warning in a “come to Jesus now” sort of way. But if the fellow is still alive, I hope he’s moved east and is walking through the canyons of lower Manhattan, warning that the financial folly of the past four decades is coming to an abrupt, potentially disastrous, end. You know things are really bad when The White House refuses to comment on a major business crisis, as happened yesterday when rumors that Lehman Bros. was tanking flew fast and furious around the world.

This morning, Lehman filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection but liquidation is almost a certainty. Then, Bank of America bailed out the very symbol of Wall Street, the ever-bullish on America Merrill Lynch, by acquiring it at a bargin basement price of $50-billion. The state of New York bailed out AIG today, as well, allowing the gargantuan insuror to borrow billions from subsidiaries so it could remain liquid. Coming on the heels of Freddie and Fannie being rescued by the Fed a few weeks ago and Bear Stearns being snatched from the edge of the abyss just before that, coupled with world oil prices falling almost as fast as the US dollar, and chaos looms.

Put bluntly, the end is near: Today marks the official beginning of the end of more than four generations of uninterrupted American prosperity.

You can thank Ronald Reagan and both George Bush’s for the country’s coming plight, and Bill Clinton for being an accessory after the fact, to the dramatically nasty changes that will befall the country over the next 18-to-24 months: A credit crisis such as the world has not seen since the 1930s, tight money forcing small and mid-sized companies out of business, large corporations cutting everywhere to survive, a massive increase in the unemployment rate, states unable to take care of ballooning welfare rolls because property tax collections are dropping as home prices keep declining.

And this may be only the beginning.

The Republican answer is predictable: Cut taxes even more for the wealthy, the people least affected by even a sharp downturn in the economy, and cut back programs to help those most affected. As recently as this weekend, John McCain was still touting his usual tax cutting bilge as the way to stave off the worst economic crisis in 80 years – that is, when he wasn’t lying about Barack Obama’s tax proposals.

McCain and Bush touted the strength of the financial markets today even as the major stock indexes tumbled and, this morning, that economic whizkid Sarah Palin blamed Wall Street's problems on too much regulation, ignoring the reality that it was a lack of regulation that created the sub-prime market which touched off this whole mess originally.

The good news is that, if they’re nimble enough, Democrats have been handed a golden opportunity to return to their New Deal roots and rescue the country at the same time.

The campaign can pivot in the Democrats favor if they go on the Give ‘Em Hell Harry Truman offense. In 1948, Truman kept asking voters, “How many times do you have to be hit over the head with a board before you realize who’s hitting you with it?” The question in 2008 is how long will voters let Republicans keep hitting them over the head?

Just look at what Reagan-Bush-McCain-onomics and its view of the world gave us:
• Banks and financial markets became so deregulated that they were able to literally steal money legally from the pockets of investors, home owners, small businesses and people who were easily duped even as what regulators remained were powerless to act to stop them.
• A yawning gap between have’s and have-nots in the US, where you are either rich as Croesus, desperately poor or clinging by your fingernails to a rapidly shrinking middle class.
• A tax code that rewards hoarding – and hiding – unearned income even as it punishes average, two-income families for working too hard; when Warren Buffet, one of the country’s richest men, says it’s criminal that his secretary pays a higher tax rate than he does, you know things are terribly askew.
• Billions are borrowed every week to spend on war while people at home die as bridges collapse for lack of money to maintain them, schools deteriorate to where the United States literacy rate is an embarrassment, and nearly one-fifth of the country lacks access to basic medical care because they are uninsured or underinsured.
• A rabid belief in so-called unfettered and free markets that hands out billions in subsidies to oil companies while almost nothing by comparison is spent on commercializing economic alternatives to the very thing – oil – that is destroying the planet. If unfettered free markets are such a panacea, then why do oil giants need lush tax subsidies?

So here we sit, the poorest rich nation on earth, doing everything we can to bring about our own demise.

It’s time for the Democratic Party and the Obama-Biden ticket to begin shouting from the rooftops, “Look what they’re doing to you! To us! It’s your Bill of Rights and your wallet and your life and your children’s future that they’re stealing from you, and they want you to vote for them so they can steal even more from you!”

It is time for Democrats to speak hard truth to the country, the way FDR did in 1932 when the nation was in as tight an economic bind as it is now, and in 1948 when Truman kept talking truth to voters about the Republican-controlled Congress. It is time to talk about what made America great: A level playing field kept in check by a government that blew the whistle when one side was taking advantage of the other.

It's time to "Give 'em hell, Barack!"

FOLLOW-UP: John McCain And Sarah Palin Are Liars

I was a guest this morning on the Inside Detroit with Mildred Gaddis show on WCHB radio. One of the callers was a woman who insisted Sarah Palin never supported the “Bridge to Nowhere.”

In response, I carefully noted the much-viewed and oft-circulated YouTube videos (including those appearing on Countdown with Keith Olbermann) of Palin stating her unequivocal, strong support for the bridge on a number of occasions.

The caller’s reply? “I just don’t believe it.”

This is what those of us working hard to ensure that Obama is elected and McCain sent down to ignoble defeat are up again. Apparently, to McCain supporters, not even seeing is believing.

No Laughing Matter.

My friend Susan and I have had long conversations throuhout the political season about how far too many liberal and progressive organisations spent far too much of their time talking to themselves and each other. Their advertising and other appeals forget that to make their point, they have to speak to a wider audience than just the already-converted.

Democrats seem to be making the same mistake this time around as they have in previous presidential campaigns. In today’s edition, New York Times blogger Judith Warner addresses the point in a way that should make everyone who wants to see Obama elected – and that includes the Obama campaign management – sit up and take notice. It may explain why the race seems to be so is tight and it's worth reprinting here.

No Laughing Matter
– by Judith Warner

“You can stand on my wagon, if you want.”

I tend, when I’m not in big crowds, to forget that I’m short. In Republican crowds, I find, I feel particularly small.

And dark. And unsmiling. And uncoiffed, unmade-up and inappropriately dressed.

For the McCain/Palin rally in Fairfax, Va, on Wednesday, the organizers had asked people to wear red. I – unthinkingly – had dressed in blue, which was somewhat isolating.

I was isolated, too, because, unable to find the press area in the crowd of about 15,000, I was out with the “real” people. Which meant that I could hear everything from the podium and from the onlookers around me, but could see nothing, not, at least, until the mom beside me stopped struggling to balance atop her Little Tikes wagon with two toddlers in her arms and another screaming at her feet, and offered me a go at the view.

(“It’s Sarah. Sarah’s going to be the vice president,” she had told the little girls, clad in their matching polka dot dresses. “Sarah Palin.”)

She was a nice woman. She told me history was in the making. She told me where to get lunch. She handed me back my reporter’s notebook when one of her almost-two-year-old twins, fixing me with a dark look of mistrust, took it away. “Liberal media, eh?” her solemn eyes glared. “Well, watch what you say about my mommy and Our Sarah.”

Do not think for a moment that I was being paranoid.

Fred Thompson had warmed up the crowd, his familiar old district attorney’s voice restored to full bombast, and he’d been in fine form, denouncing – to loud boos from the crowd — the “lawyers and scandal mongers and representatives of cable networks” (boos from the crowd) who were at that very moment descending upon Alaska looking for dirt on their Sarah.

“I hope they brought their own Brie and Chablis with them,” he’d said, to raucous laughter, as I willed myself to disappear, remembering, with a shudder, that my children had demanded Brie for breakfast only that morning.

I should have been finding this funny. My whole plan, after all, had been to write something funny this week about the whole Sarah Palin phenomenon. I’d arrived at an if-you-can’t-beat-’em-laugh-at-’em kind of a juncture, I suppose.

I’d planned to make attending the McCain/Palin event a silly sort of adventure. I’d invited a friend who has six kids to come with me. I figured funny things were bound to befall us in Palin-Land, where, collectively, we’d have eight children between us (a funny thought in and of itself.) A Harold and Kumar Escape from the Barracuda sort of storyline was the idea – until my friend, done in by one too many sleepless nights, declined to accompany me, and I had to venture off alone.

And, forced to make new friends on the spot, discovered that the Palin Phenomenon is no laughing matter.

Those who think that it is — well, as Thompson warned on Wednesday, “they’ve got another thing coming.”

I made my first friend on the shuttle bus that took us from a nearby mall, where we’d been instructed to park, to the field where the rally was held. She was from Leesburg, Va, an ardent McCain supporter, conservative and self-described “soccer mom,” who grew up in Pennsylvania among girls who went hunting with their Dads.

Sarah Palin, she told me, “just seems like a regular person.”

I did not argue with her. One does not argue when making new friends. And besides, we had so many other things to bond over. We talked about kids with issues. She had a son with A.D.H.D., cousins with Asperger’s and dysgraphia, and a nephew with autism. (“They’re lucky they live in New Jersey . New Jersey ’s pretty progressive,” she said.)

We talked about the moral vacuity of modern parenting. “I see extreme spoiling, self-absorption,” she said. “Constant bringing the kids up to love themselves without reflecting on how they affect others.” We talked about the disastrous lack of respect that children now show adults and institutions, and about the ways this lack of respect translates into a very ugly sort of lack of decorum and a lack of basic manners: “This 10-year-old, my daughter’s friend, she comes over and throws down a magazine with John McCain on the cover. ‘Here’s friggin John McCain,’ she says. ‘Let’s see what lies he’s going to tell now.’” She continued: “These 10-year-olds think they’re better than me. That they don’t have to say hello. That they think I’m beneath them.”

You go girl, I was thinking, in so many words, until the talk turned back to politics: “So often these kids that are so incredibly full of themselves, I find their parents are Democrats. The Democrats, they hate ‘us,’ the United States , but they love ‘me,’ that is, themselves,” she said.

I heard a lot more talk that day about the need for respect – and about arrogance and selfishness and about Democrats and liberals who think way too highly of themselves.

Fred Thompson on the liberal media: “This woman is undergoing the most vicious assault … all because she is a threat to the power they expected to inherit and think they’re entitled to.”
Businessman Scott Maclean on the Democratic Party: “Their attitude is: you don’t get it and they don’t expect you to get it because they’re smarter than you – and I hate that.”

I heard, repeatedly, a complaint about sterile individualism, about selfishness and the desire for a revalidated “us” – from John McCain’s boilerplate attack on “me-first Washington” to this curious reflection, from a mother of nine, on the field with eight of her children, on the question of whether she, like Palin, could ever imagine balancing the demands of her large family against a high-profile political career like Sarah’s.

“My daughter asked me, ‘Mom, would you do that if you had the opportunity?,’” she recalled, as the six-year-old in question looked on. “I said ‘I don’t know. Maybe she was born to do that. Maybe that’s the sacrifice she has to make to serve her country.’”

The daughter lifted high her hand-painted, flower-adorned Palin sign.

“She’ll really be a big step forward for women,” the mother said.

No, it wasn’t funny, my morning with the hockey and the soccer moms, the homeschooling moms and the book club moms, the joyful moms who brought their children to see history in the making and spun them on the lawn, dancing, when music played. It was sobering. It was serious. It was an education.

“Palin Power” isn’t just about making hockey moms feel important. It’s not just about giving abortion rights opponents their due. It’s also, in obscure ways, about making yearnings come true — deep, inchoate desires about respect and service, hierarchy and family that have somehow been successfully projected onto the figure of this unlikely woman and have stuck.

For those of us who can’t tap into those yearnings, it seems the Palin faithful are blind – to the contradictions between her stated positions and the truth of the policies she espouses, to the contradictions between her ideology and their interests. But Jonathan Haidt, an associate professor of moral psychology at the University of Virginia, argues in an essay this month, “What Makes People Vote Republican?,” that it’s liberals, in fact, who are dangerously blind.

Haidt has conducted research in which liberals and conservatives were asked to project themselves into the minds of their opponents and answer questions about their moral reasoning. Conservatives, he said, prove quite adept at thinking like liberals, but liberals are consistently incapable of understanding the conservative point of view. “Liberals feel contempt for the conservative moral view, and that is very, very angering. Republicans are good at exploiting that anger,” he told me in a phone interview.

Perhaps that’s why the conservatives can so successfully get under liberals’ skin. And why liberals need to start working harder at breaking through the empathy barrier.

© 2008 The New York Times Co.