to be permitted public consideration. You shall be excised and
are hereby excused.
President Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: "Joseph Maizlish" <goodwork@igc.org>
To: "Ed Pearl" <epearlag@earthlink.net>
Sent: Tuesday, September 08, 2009 2:05 PM
Subject: Re: Taking the Movement Out of the Obama White House
Saidy makes a thought-provoking point.
How about this hypothesis:
To the extent that personal ambition predominates, the candidate or
person in office will be more amenable to the influences of those who
are also motivated by persona/class ambition rather than to the general
well-being. (Of course the person will use that amazing ability of
humans to fool ourselves and will get mixed up between her/his ambition
and the general welfare).
As for 9/11, the "inside job" was the 50 years of U.S.
government/corporate policies messing with the middle east that helped
provoke the attacks!
Joe
Ed Pearl wrote:
From: Anthony Saidy
Sent: Sunday, September 06, 2009 3:59 PM
It will soon come down to this: Obama's only purpose in life will be
re-election. Never has a progressive mandate been more quickly squandered. I
predict that Wed.'s big speech will advocate nothing more radical than
paying Big Insurance to cover the bare. -AFS
***
As we await the President's address tonight, here is a profile in
courage and essay of concern with which to measure the speech.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/opinion/03blumenthal.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
Eisenhower's Forgotten Warning and the Threat of Authoritarian
Currents in Our Politics
By Max Blumenthal,
NY Times Op-Ed: September 3, 2009
In this summer of town hall disruptions and birth-certificate
controversies, a summer when it seemed as if the Republican Party had
been captured by its extremist wing, it is worth recalling a
now-obscure letter from President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Although Eisenhower is commonly remembered for a farewell address that
raised concerns about the "military-industrial complex," his letter
offers an equally important — and relevant — warning: to beware the
danger posed by those seeking freedom from the "mental stress and
burden" of democracy.
The story began in 1958, when Eisenhower received a letter from Robert
Biggs, a terminally ill World War II veteran. Biggs told the president
that he "felt from your recent speeches the feeling of hedging and a
little uncertainty." He added, "We wait for someone to speak for us
and back him completely if the statement is made in truth."
Eisenhower could have discarded Biggs's note or sent a canned
response. But he didn't. He composed a thoughtful reply. After
enduring Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who had smeared his old
colleague Gen. George C. Marshall as a Communist sympathizer, and
having guarded the Republican Party against the newly emergent radical
right John Birch Society, which labeled him and much of his cabinet
Soviet agents, the president perhaps welcomed the opportunity to
expound on his vision of the open society.
"I doubt that citizens like yourself could ever, under our democratic
system, be provided with the universal degree of certainty, the
confidence in their understanding of our problems, and the clear
guidance from higher authority that you believe needed," Eisenhower
wrote on Feb. 10, 1959. "Such unity is not only logical but indeed
indispensable in a successful military organization, but in a
democracy debate is the breath of life."
Eisenhower also recommended a short book — "The True Believer" by Eric
Hoffer, a self-educated itinerant longshoreman who earned the nickname
"the stevedore philosopher." "Faith in a holy cause," Hoffer wrote,
"is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in
ourselves."
Though Eisenhower was criticized for lacking an intellectual framework
or even an interest in ideas, he was drawn to Hoffer's insights. He
explained to Biggs that Hoffer "points out that dictatorial systems
make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to
support such systems — freedom from the necessity of informing
themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous
complex and difficult questions." The authoritarian follower,
Eisenhower suggested, desired nothing more than insulation from the
pressures of a free society.
Alluding to Senator McCarthy and his allies, Eisenhower pointed out
that cold war fears were distorted and exploited for political
advantage. "It is difficult indeed to maintain a reasoned and
accurately informed understanding of our defense situation on the part
of our citizenry when many prominent officials, possessing no standing
or expertness as they themselves claim it, attempt to further their
own ideas or interests by resorting to statements more distinguished
by stridency than by accuracy."
It is worth noting, of course, that these Cold War exaggerations
weren't just a Republican specialty: John F. Kennedy was making a
supposed "missile gap" between the United States and the Soviet Union
a key element of his presidential campaign.
In closing his letter, Eisenhower praised Biggs for his "fortitude in
pondering these problems despite your deep personal adversity."
Perhaps it was the president's sense of solidarity with a fellow
soldier that prompted him to respond to Biggs with such care; and
perhaps it was his experience as supreme commander of Allied forces in
Europe that taught him that the rise of extreme movements and
authoritarianism could take root anywhere — even in a democracy.
Max Blumenthal is a senior writer for The Daily Beast and writing
fellow at The Nation Institute. His new book, Republican Gomorrah
(Basic/Nation Books) has just been released.
© 2009 The New York Times All rights reserved.
***
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23419.htm
Big Bucks for Bailout Barons
By Katrina vanden Heuvel:
"The Nation" --September 03, 2009
One year after the global banking system collapsed the Institute for Policy
Studies (IPS) 16th Annual Executive Excess report -- "America's Bailout
Barons" -- shows that the perverse system of executive compensation which
contributed to the financial meltdown is still thriving for top bailout
recipients.
President Obama had it right in April when he delivered his "economic Sermon
on the Mount " and said, "We cannot rebuild this economy on the same pile of
sand. We must build our house upon a rock." And, as the IPS report notes,
even earlier in the year Obama spoke out against excessive executive
compensation, saying, "In order to restore our financial system, we've got
to restore trust. And in order to restore trust, we've got to make certain
that taxpayer funds are not subsidizing excessive compensation packages on
Wall Street."
But the fact is we haven't learned -- or haven't acted on -- the lessons we
must heed if we're going to build a more just, sustainable economy that
works for the real economy rather than the Wall Street. The IPS report
focuses on the twenty banks that have received the most bailout money from
the federal government and shows that the banks and bankers are still acting
and being rewarded as if they are Masters of the universe -- abetted by a
government that is failing to take on the status quo.
Sure, some steps have been taken to rein in compensation for TARP
recipients -- but they are timid ones. And IPS's valuable report makes
clear, "Lobbying armies from corporate and financial trade associations are
energetically doing battle behind the scenes to keep even modest changes in
pay rules off the legislative table."
As a result historic inequality in pay is still prevalent and the neo-Gilded
Age tycoons are raking it in. According to the report, a generation ago top
execs rarely earned more than thirty to forty times the pay of the average
American worker. But now top execs make an average of 319 times more than
the typical worker. For the top twenty financial industry execs the divide
is even greater -- 436 times more than the average worker in 2008. In the
past three years, the top five execs at the twenty US financial firms
receiving the most Bailout Bucks took home pay packages worth a staggering
$3.2 billion -- an average of $32 million each. In 2008 those cats averaged
nearly $14 million each--even though their twenty firms laid off more than
160,000 people since January of that year.
While a new and smart economic populism has fueled plenty of talk about
compensation reform, good proposals haven't been seized. Senators Bernie
Sanders and Claire McCaskill tried to cap compensation for employees of
bailed-out firms so that it wouldn't exceed that of the President of the US,
$400,000. The amendment was passed but then stripped in conference
committee. In April, Progressive Caucus member and Chief Deputy Whip Jan
Schakowsky introduced the Patriot Corporations Act to extend tax breaks and
contracting preferences to companies that meet certain benchmarks, including
not compensating any executive at more than 100 times the income of the
company's lowest-paid worker. That bill has been referred to committee.
Hedge fund managers are still only paying 15 percent capital gains rate on
the profit share they get for managing investment funds rather than the 35
percent income tax they should pay. And unlimited amounts of executive
compensation are still shielded in deferred accounts--at an annual cost of
$80.6 billion to taxpayers--in contrast to the limits placed on income
deferred by normal taxpayers via 401(k) plans.
There is no shortage of opportunities to curb this unjust and unproductive
growth in unequal pay. As IPS senior scholar and Nation contributor Chuck
Collins put it, "Public officials in Congress and the White House hold the
pin that could pop the executive pay bubble.
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