UNDERNEWS: October 18, 2011

Reoccupying America

Bernie Sanders calls for boycott of major banks

Bank appointed Fed members oppose growth

67% of New York City voters support Occupy Wall Street's views. . . 87% say it's okay if they protest. . . 72% say (unlike the media) that they understand what the protest is about

Largest Benefactor of Occupy Wall Street Is a Mitt Romney Donor

Banks treat customers as criminals

Bo Diddley's son arrested at park named after his father

Protests abroad

• More

Now even Wall Street doesn't trust Obama

24 arrested for trying to close Citibank accounts

DC protest coincides with major building cleaners labor dispute

Why public banks work

UPCOMING
Nov 4 Demonstration against Koch group in DC
November 5 is bank transfer day

THINGS TO DO
Move your money
Organizing mass transfer to credit unions
Time for a general strike?
The Green Party alternative
Downloadable posters
List of credit unions when you're ready to leave your greedy bank
List of demands
How to send food and supplies to protesters
OccupyWallStreet
Occupations across U.S
Another occupation locator
Occupy Colleges Facebook page

ETC
Cellphone guide for protesters
Lousy laws used against protesters
Protesters have own library
Panic of the plutocrats
Lobby bucks pay off big time for banks
Mortgage lenders still fabricating documents
The party's over. What happens now?
Major crimes of our times
Greg Mitchell's live blog

Half of Americans favor legalizing pot

Gallup - A record-high 50% of Americans now say the use of marijuana should be made legal, up from 46% last year. Forty-six percent say marijuana use should remain illegal.

When Gallup first asked about legalizing marijuana, in 1969, 12% of Americans favored it, while 84% were opposed. Support remained in the mid-20s in Gallup measures from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, but has crept up since, passing 30% in 2000 and 40% in 2009 before reaching the 50% level in this year's Oct. 6-9 annual Crime survey.

Bank appointed Fed members oppose growth
Dean Baker, Huffington Post - The Federal Reserve Board has provided the basis for thousands of conspiracy theories in its near-100-year existence. These conspiracies have some basis in reality as can be seen by the Fed's recent moves on monetary policy. In the last two meetings of the Fed's Open Market Committee, the Fed's key decision-making body, the members appointed through the political process unanimously supported stronger measures to spur growth and create jobs. By contrast, three of the five voting members appointed by the banking industry opposed further action.

This extraordinary split has not received the attention it deserves. It suggests that the financial industry is using its power at the Fed to try to block the course preferred by the appointees of democratically elected officials of both parties.

Millions of shadow unsold homes affecting market

McClatchy - Officially, there are 3.5 million homes for sale nationwide. But there are millions more lurking in the shadows ¬ hidden neatly away on banks' balance sheets, stalled in foreclosure court proceedings or simply occupied by nonpaying owners as lenders wait months or years before taking action.

Clustered mostly in hard-hit cities and states, there are more than 4.5 million homes either owned by lenders or headed for foreclosure…

A McClatchy analysis of four years of foreclosure data and thousands of property records found record-high levels of shadow inventory in several housing markets across the nation.

Though real estate trade groups routinely leave these shadow properties out of monthly reports, their influence on home values has grown sharply in recent years.
Legal bribery update

Campaign Finance Institute - Romney and Perry are raising the bulk of their money from large donors. Perry, who started his campaign during the third quarter, received 80 percent of his money from donors who gave him the maximum amount of $2,500. Ninety-one percent of his money has come from donors who gave $1,000 or more.

53 percent of Romney's third-quarter money came from $2,500 donors. 74 percent came from donors who gave $1,000 or more.

At the other end of the GOP giving spectrum, Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul raised $7.2 million from donors who gave $200 or less in the third quarter. This was 58 percent of the small-donor money raised by all GOP candidates combined in the quarter. Cain's small donor support represented 60 percent of his individual contributions.

On the Democratic side, President Barack Obama raised more money in the third-quarter for his uncontested primary election campaign ($39.7 million) than Mitt Romney and Rick Perry combined.

Even more than in 2008, the President's campaign committee is being powered by small donors. Sixty percent of Obama's third-quarter funds came from donors who gave him $200 or less during the three month period. The Obama campaign actually took in less money ($8.7 million) from donors who gave $1,000 or more than did either Perry ($15.4 million) or Romney ($10.3 million). Two caveats about cross-candidate comparisons are in order, however: First, the President has helped raised over $40 million for the Democratic National Committee through the joint fundraising committee, Obama Victory Fund 2012. Most of this was from major donors. Second, large-donor supporters of Perry and Romney (and other candidates) are giving legally unlimited amounts to candidate-specific "Super-PACs", which can make unlimited independent expenditures.

Israeli correspondent takes on country's war mongering

Richard Grossman, Tikun Olam - Haaretz columnist Sefi Rachlevsky raises the quaint notion (in a country which honors democratic principle in the breach, if at all) that plans, of which many reputable Israeli military and security correspondents have begun writing in the past weeks, for an Israeli attack on Iran do not have a mandate, not just in Israel, but in America as well. Rachlevsky insists that the generals and intelligence chiefs man battle stations and do their duty to stop this disaster in the making:

"Each and every opponent of an attack within the defense establishment must therefore make it clear to the duo [Barak and Bibi] that they can't behave like this. It is not possible to endanger an entire nation for years via an underhanded, opportunistic maneuver - not in the dead of night; not by hastily convincing a few elderly rabbis; not in defiance of the entire defense establishment; not in defiance of all the past and present heads of the Israel Defense Forces, the Mossad, the Shin Bet security service, Military Intelligence and the Atomic Energy Commission; not in defiance of the United States; not when Ahmadinejad and his gang of messianists are growing weaker; not when there are signs of American measures in the wake of Iran's attempt to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington and the International Atomic Energy Agency's impending severe report; not when the clouds are about to burst [reference to oncoming winter, during which weather conditions prevent an Israeli attack]. Just plain no."

Banks treats customers as criminals

Fire Dog Lake - Over the weekend, as Occupy Wall Street protests escalated, the video of a woman arrested at a Citibank branch for trying to close her account shot through the blogosphere. It wasn’t the only example of people being denied the opportunity to close their bank accounts over the weekend. A Bank of America branch in Santa Cruz refused customer request to close their accounts in the same way, with the manager telling customers, “You can’t be a customer and a protester at the same time.”

This could be chalked up to some overzealous bank managers overreacting to protests. But a similar thing happened two months ago in St. Louis. Back in August, the group Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment , a bank accountability group, held a protest at a Bank of America branch in St. Louis. About 50 people went to the branch to peacefully close their accounts. How did the BofA branch react to this?

….That’s right, they brought in riot police and refused the group entry into the branch to take out their own money.

The world before and after Steve Jobs

BLAME IT ON THE VOICES

Stupid California prison official tricks

Gawker - Dwayne Kennedy has been in prison in California since 1990. Last year, he was finally granted parole. He was so very happy! He borrowed another inmate's contraband cell phone to call his family. "We were crying and praying" with joy, his sister says. And then?

California prison officials are keeping Kennedy locked up for an extra five years - costing taxpayers roughly $250,000 - because guards caught him with a contraband cellphone he says he borrowed to tell his family he had just been granted parole and was coming home... In Kennedy's case, using the cellphone derailed his parole bid and effectively lengthened his prison stay by at least five years. That's because a 2008 ballot measure extended the time inmates serving life sentences must wait for a new hearing when they are denied parole or their parole offer is revoked.

The good side of John Edwards

Because of his gross personal behavior - including the way he treated his ill wife - we have been embarrassed to say anything nice about John Edwards, whom we supported in 2008. Fortunately, Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post has come to our aid

Chris Cillizza, Washington Post - The former North Carolina senator, two-time presidential candidate and 2004 vice presidential nominee wrote his own political obituary with his marital infidelities and an ongoing investigation into campaign finance irregularities during his 2008 campaign.

But, Edwards has had considerable influence on the current positioning of his party on the national political scene.

Perhaps Edwards’ largest lasting legacy is his “Two Americas” speech, an address that perhaps best encapsulates the frustrations and anger coursing through the American electorate at the moment ¬ and one that President Obama would do well to read and adapt for his own 2012 re-election campaign.

Although Edwards had been giving some version of his “Two Americas” speech since late 2003, he drew national attention to it when he delivered it at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. It was so well received that he subsequently turned it into the centerpiece of his 2008 presidential bid. (You can read the full speech here.)

Joe Trippi, the lead strategist for Edwards’ 2008 campaign, said that as that campaign wore on the other candidates in the field did everything they could to embrace the rhetorical power of “Two Americas”.

At its heart, “Two Americas” was an economic populist paean ¬ driving home the sense that the distance between the haves and the have-nots was not only widening, but also that the system was somehow rigged to favor those with money and power.

“We have much work to do because the truth is we still live in a country where there are two different Americas,” Edwards said in the speech. “One for all of those people who have lived the American dream and don’t have to worry and another for most Americans, everybody else who struggles to make ends meet every single day. It doesn’t have to be that way.”

Edwards went on to offer a series of examples of the “Two Americas” from the health care industry to public education to jobs and the economy...

That appears to be the central animating principle of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement and the other gatherings it has spawned across the country and across the world. The “We are the 99 percent” slogan is, really, just another way of expressing the “Two Americas” message that Edwards put into common parlance in 2004.

Washington state plans to let cops, others monitor personal prescription drug use

Seattle Weekly -The Washington State Department of Health announced that it will soon begin a Prescription Drug Monitoring program that lets "health care providers, patients, law enforcement, and others" monitor records of drugs that have been prescribed to people.

Who are those "others"?

DOH provides this full list of people who can access the drug records.

--Persons authorized to prescribe or dispense controlled substances to provide medical or pharmaceutical care for their patients;

--An individual who requests their own prescription monitoring information;

--Health professional licensing, certification, or regulatory agency or entity;

--Local, state, and federal law enforcement or prosecutorial officials engaged in an investigation involving a designated person;

--Medical examiners and coroners for cause of death determination;

--Authorized practitioners of the Department of Social and Health Services or the Health Care Authority regarding medicaid program recipients;

--The director or director's designee within the Department of Labor and Industries for workers' compensation claimants;

--The director or the director's designee within the Department of Corrections for offenders committed to the Department of Corrections;

--Other entities under grand jury subpoena or court order;

--Personnel of the department for purposes of administration and enforcement of this rule or Chapter 69.50 RCW.

The reason for the program is apparently so law enforcement officers and health professionals can track and stop prescription drug abuse.

According to Robert Zielke, an attorney who represents pharmacists, however, the law is just another way for the government to peer into the lives of citizens, and furthermore it will be hell on the pharmacists tasked with "policing" drug records. "It's a few patients who are bad apples that are causing everyone's data to go into this databank," says Zielke. "The pharmacists will do more work with no compensation for it and will have to pass that cost along the way. It also opens them up to more liability. The government is prying into patients' lives for a limited benefit."

America has to learn how to manage its decline

Gideon Rachman, Financial Times - Recently I met a retired British diplomat who claimed with some pride that he was the man who had invented the phrase, “the management of decline”, to describe the central task of British foreign policy after 1945. “I got criticised,” he said, “but I think it was an accurate description of our task and I think we did it pretty well.”

No modern American diplomat – let alone politician – could ever risk making a similar statement. That is a shame. If America were able openly to acknowledge that its global power is in decline, it would be much easier to have a rational debate about what to do about it. Denial is not a strategy.... MORE

Herman Cain on Jesus

Herman Cain writing of Jesus in 2010 - The liberal court found Him guilty of false offenses and sentenced Him to death, all because He changed the hearts and minds of men with an army of 12. His death reset the clock of time. Never before and not since has there ever been such a perfect conservative.

Morning Line

The Review's moving average of recent polls

Obama in toss up with Romney & Cain for popular vote, still way ahead in electoral count
Cain & Romney tied
Electoral vote count: Obama, 212, GOP: 65

Major New Zealand oil spill

The best of Herman Cain

Cain wants to electrocute illegal immigrants

Cain's close Koch connection

Campaign manager was banned from Wisconsin politics

Sim City had 999 plan before Cain

Meet Herman Cain's 'economist'

ABC - Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain said the demonstrators are coming across as "anti-capitalism." ... "Don't blame Wall Street, don't blame the big banks, if you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself!" Cain said. "It is not a person's fault because they succeeded, it is a person's fault if they failed. And so this is why I don't understand these demonstrations and what is it that they're looking for."....

Herman Cain wants to impeach Obama

Herman Cain believes that allowing a mosque to be built in Tennessee is "an infringement and an abuse of our freedom of religion."

Herman Cain says he'll ask oil executives to advise him on which environmental regulations to eliminate

GOP presidential contender and former pizza executive Herman Cain . . promised the audience that as President, he would never sign pieces of legislation that are longer than three pages. . . . Under this bright-line rule, Cain wouldn’t have signed such landmark pieces of legislation as the Civil Rights Act, the Social Security Act, or the PATRIOT Act. In fact, he wouldn’t have even been able to sign the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which ran 114 and 18 pages, respectively. -Think Progress

Asked whether he would mind having gays in his cabinet, Herman Cain responded, "Nope, not at all. I wouldn’t have a problem with that at all. I just want people who are qualified, I want them to believe in the Constitution of the United States of America. So yep, I don’t have a problem with appointing an openly gay person. Because they’re not going to try to put sharia law in our laws."

America’s pols deserting climate change issue

Elisabeth Rosenthal, NY Times - In 2008, both the Democratic and Republican candidates for president, Barack Obama and John McCain, warned about man-made global warming and supported legislation to curb emissions. After he was elected, President Obama promised “a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change,” and arrived cavalry-like at the 2009 United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen to broker a global pact.

But two years later, now that nearly every other nation accepts climate change as a pressing problem, America has turned agnostic on the issue.

In the crowded Republican presidential field, most seem to agree with Gov. Rick Perry of Texas that “the science is not settled” on man-made global warming, as he said in a debate last month. Alone among Republicans onstage that night, Jon M. Huntsman Jr. said that he trusted scientists’ view that the problem was real. At the moment, he has the backing of about 2 percent of likely Republican voters.

Though the evidence of climate change has, if anything, solidified, Mr. Obama now talks about “green jobs” mostly as a strategy for improving the economy, not the planet. He did not mention climate in his last State of the Union address. Meanwhile, the administration is fighting to exempt United States airlines from Europe’s new plan to charge them for CO2 emissions when they land on the continent. It also seems poised to approve a nearly 2,000-mile-long pipeline, from Canada down through the United States, that will carry a kind of oil. Extracting it will put relatively high levels of emissions into the atmosphere.

“In Washington, ‘climate change’ has become a lightning rod, it’s a four-letter word,” said Andrew J. Hoffman, director of the University of Michigan’s Erb Institute for Sustainable Development.

Recovered history: Clinton's role in the housing disaster

As so often with his record, Bill Clinton has gotten a free pass on his role in the housing catastrophe. While he was only one factor, it was not an insignificant one.

Wikipedia - In accordance with the mission of Fannie Mae to enable home ownership by a greater proportion of the population, Franklin Raines, while Chairman and CEO, began a pilot program in 1999 to issue bank loans to individuals with low to moderate income, and to ease credit requirements on loans that Fannie Mae purchased from banks. Raines promoted the program saying that it would allow consumers who were "a notch below what our current underwriting has required" to get home loans. The move was intended in part to increase the number of minority and low income home owners. The Investor's Business Daily editorial staff has noted that the expansion of easy credit to home buyers with a lesser ability to pay them back was one of the major contributing factors to the subprime mortgage crisis…

In 1995, the [government sponsored enterprises] like Fannie Mae began receiving government tax incentives for purchasing mortgage backed securities which included loans to low income borrowers. Thus began the involvement of the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with the subprime market. In 1996, HUD set a goal for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that at least 42% of the mortgages they purchase be issued to borrowers whose household income was below the median in their area. This target was increased to 50% in 2000 and 52% in 2005.

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission reported in 2011 that Fannie & Freddie "contributed to the crisis, but were not a primary cause." GSE mortgage securities essentially maintained their value throughout the crisis and did not contribute to the significant financial firm losses that were central to the financial crisis. The GSEs participated in the expansion of subprime and other risky mortgages, but they followed rather than led Wall Street and other lenders into subprime lending.

The Glass-Steagall Act was enacted after the Great Depression. It separated commercial banks and investment banks, in part to avoid potential conflicts of interest between the lending activities of the former and rating activities of the latter. Economist Joseph Stiglitz criticized the repeal of the Act. He called its repeal the "culmination of a $300 million lobbying effort by the banking and financial services industries ... spearheaded in Congress by Senator Phil Gramm." He believes it contributed to this crisis because the risk-taking culture of investment banking dominated the more conservative commercial banking culture, leading to increased levels of risk-taking and leverage during the boom period.

Ralph Brauer, Progressive Historians, 2007 - Of all the New Deal legislation the GOP has sought to overturn, one that has always been at or near the top of the list is the Glass-Steagall Act. Ironically, a Democratic president repealed this for them…

Billionaire Sanford I. Weill, who according to Louis Uchitelle made "Citigroup into the most powerful financial institution since the House of Morgan a century ago," has what I call the Wall of Me leading to his office, which he has decorated with tributes to him, including a dozen framed magazine covers. A major trophy is the pen Bill Clinton used to sign the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, a move which allowed Weill to create Citigroup….

Just days after the administration (including the Treasury Department) agrees to support the repeal, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, the former co-chairman of a major Wall Street investment bank, Goldman Sachs, raises eyebrows by accepting a top job at Citigroup as Weill's chief lieutenant….When Bill Clinton gave that pen to Sanford Weill, it symbolized the ending of the twentieth century Democratic Party that had created the New Deal…

With the stroke of a pen, Bill Clinton ended an era that stretched back to William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson and reached fruition with FDR and Harry Truman. As he signed his name, in the whorls and dots of his pen strokes William Jefferson Clinton was also symbolically signing the death warrant of Liberal America and its core belief in the level playing field that had guided the Democratic Party…

As is often the case, the story of the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the growth of the subprime mortgage market that is now crumbling around us like a financial house of cards can be best be told by a graph:

If you think of this graph as the level playing field, notice how flat it was before Bill Clinton repealed Glass-Steagall, then notice how steep it has become. Those subprime loans amount to nothing more than an organized ripoff of millions of innocent Americans, with the steepness of the graph illustrating the how far the playing field has tilted.

FULL ARTICLE
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What we've forgotten about the New Deal
An excerpt from Michael Hiltzik’s new book, The New Deal: A Modern History.

During the years of the New Deal, America’s government built as it never had before¬or has since.The New Deal physically reshaped the country. To this day, Americans still rely on its works for transportation, electricity, flood control, housing, and community amenities. The output of one agency alone, the Works Progress Administration, represents a magnificent bequest to later generations. The WPA produced, among many other projects, 1,000 miles of new and rebuilt airport runways, 651,000 miles of highway, 124,000 bridges, 8,000 parks, and 18,000 playgrounds and athletic fields; some 84,000 miles of drainage pipes, 69,000 highway light standards, and 125,000 public buildings built, rebuilt, or expanded. Among the latter were 41,300 schools.

The transformative power of this effort is inestimable. The Tennessee Valley in 1933 was a quintessential backwoods region of “grim drudgery, and grind” in the words of its savior George Norris: beleaguered by floods, drained of its manpower by the siren call of the cities, the latent wealth of its river and lumber left fallow. The TVA of Norris and Franklin Roosevelt turned it into a land of plenty that called its workers home, put its natural endowments to productive use, and delivered to its residents the promise of a secure American middle-class lifestyle.

The Public Works Administration provided Harold Ickes with a larger construction budget than any American government official ever had received: $3.3 billion, more than 20 times the $150 million the government spent on public construction projects in 1929. Ickes was determined to make the most of it. The impression is accurate that he disbursed the money with the tightfistedness of a man spending from his own pocket; but there is no denying that he thereby ensured that it would create for the nation a greater patrimony.MORE

The F-word we're still afraid to use

Sam Smith

If you were an adviser to political candidates in a traditional democratic republic, here are a few things you probably wouldn’t suggest as key components of an election campaign:

- Continuing some of our longest, most expensive and least explainable wars.

- Responding to a jobs crisis by bailing out major banks but doing comparatively little in public works and other job creation programs.

- Spending huge sums to bail out these banks while spending comparatively little to help the large number of homeowners in trouble.

- Advocating cutting Social Security and Medicare, while leaving millionaire tax cuts unchanged.

- Acting as though environmental and climate crises don’t exist.

- Restricting citizens’ civil liberties

- Making it harder for them to download their favorite tunes.

- Passing legislation to send more jobs overseas in the midst of the worst jobs crisis since the Great Depression.

- Not only continuing a forty year old failed war on drugs but increasing the threats to those who try to end it through various reforms.

- Having the federal government interfere in public education, which has been – for nearly 200 years – a local matter.

- Jailing citizen protesters while letting a generation of criminal financial manipulators off the hook.

The fact that the foregoing nonetheless characterizes America today is indicative of the lack of democracy in this land and of the replacement of citizen consensus with the money and power of a select few, led by corporate behemoths.

In each of the foregoing, American policy is driven by the ability of major corporations to make large profits, whether it be defense contractors, hedge fund manipulators, the prison industry, the recording industry, outsourcing businesses, private education vultures, or the illegal drug trade (the only industry that doesn’t have to report its campaign contributions). And all reported to us by a monopolized media that reflects in its own nature the very evils it should be exposing.

There are several names for this.

One is fascism.

One needs to separate Hitler, Nazism and fascism. Conflating these leads the unwary to assume easily that all three are inevitably characterized by anti-Semitism, when in fact only the first two are. By avoiding this distinction we don't have to face the fact that America is closer to fascism than it has ever been in its history.

To understand why, one needs to look not at Hitler but at the founder of fascism, Mussolini. What Mussolini founded was the estato corporativo - the corporative state or corporatism. Writing in Economic Affairs in the mid 1970s, R.E. Pahl and J. T. Winkler described corporatism as a system under which government guides privately owned businesses towards order, unity, nationalism and success. They were quite clear as to what this system amounted to: "Let us not mince words. Corporatism is fascism with a human face. . . An acceptable face of fascism, indeed, a masked version of it, because so far the more repugnant political and social aspects of the German and Italian regimes are absent or only present in diluted forms."

Adrian Lyttelton, describing the rise of Italian fascism in The Seizure of Power, writes: "A good example of Mussolini's new views is provided by his inaugural speech to the National Exports Institute on 8 July 1926. . . Industry was ordered to form 'a common front' in dealing with foreigners, to avoid 'ruinous competition,' and to eliminate inefficient enterprises. . . The values of competition were to be replaced by those of organization: Italian industry would be reshaped and modernized by the cartel and trust. . .There was a new philosophy here of state intervention for the technical modernization of the economy serving the ultimate political objectives of military strength and self-sufficiency; it was a return to the authoritarian and interventionist war economy."

Lyttelton writes that "fascism can be viewed as a product of the transition from the market capitalism of the independent producer to the organized capitalism of the oligopoly." It was a point that Orwell noted when he described fascism as being but an extension of capitalism. Lyttelton quoted Nationalist theorist Affredo Rocco: "The Fascist economy is. . . an organized economy. It is organized by the producers themselves, under the supreme direction and control of the state."

The Germans had their own word for it: wehrwirtschaft. It was not an entirely new idea there. As William Shirer points out in the Rise and the Fall of the Third Reich, 18th and 19th century Prussia had devoted some five-sevenths of its revenue on the Army and "that nation's whole economy was always regarded as primarily an instrument not of the people's welfare but of military policy."

Another more complex example is Adolf Hitler. On many grounds, the analogy does not serve us well:

Germany's willingness to accept Hitler was the product of many cultural characteristics specific to that country, to the anger and frustrations in the wake of the World War I defeat, to extraordinary inflation and particular dumb reactions to it, and, of course, to the appeal of anti-Semitism. Still, consideration of the Weimar Republic that preceded Hitler does us no harm. Bearing in mind all the foregoing, there was also:

- A collapse of conventional liberal and conservative politics that bears uncomfortable similarities to what we are now experiencing.

- The gross mismanagement of the economy and of such key worker concerns as wages, inflation, pensions, layoffs, and rising property taxes. Many of the actions were taken in the name of efficiency, an improved economy and the "rationalization of production." There were also bankruptcies, negative trade balance, major decline in national production, large national debt rise compensated for by foreign investment. In other words, a hyped version of what America and its workers are experiencing today.

- The Nazis as the first modern political party. As University of Pennsylvania professor Thomas Childers explains, the Nazis discovered the importance of campaigning not just during campaigns but between elections when the other parties folded their tents. With this "perpetual campaigning" they spread themselves like a virus, considering the public reaction to everything right down to the colors used for posters and rally backgrounds. Knowing this, one can not watch the manic manipulations of the Republican presidential candidates without a sense of déjà vu.

- The use of negative campaigning, a contribution to modern politics by Joseph Goebbels. The Nazi campaigns argued what was wrong with their opponents and ignored stating their own policies.

- The Nazis as the inventors of modern political propaganda. Every modern American political campaign and the types of arguments used to support them owes much to the ideas of the Nazis.

- The suddenness of the Nazi rise. The party went from less than 3% of the vote to being the largest party in the country in four years.

- The collapse of the country's self image. Childers points out that Germany had had been a world leader in education, industry, science, and literacy. Much of the madness that we see today stems from attempts to compensate for our battered self-image.

So while many of the behaviors that would come to be associated with Nazis and Hitler - from physical attacks on political opponents to the death camps - seem far removed from our present concerns, there is still much to learn from their history.

We are clearly in a post-constitutional era; the end of the First American Republic. Depending on what day it is we can think of its replacement variously - ranging from an adhocracy to proto-fascism. But one does not need to know the end of the story to know that we headed at a rapid pace away from the extraordinary principles of American democracy towards the dark hole of power with impunity, to the sort of world in which, as Rudolph Giuliani has calmly asserted, "freedom is about authority."

For example, Article 48 of the constitution of the Weimar Republic stated, "In case public safety is seriously threatened or disturbed, the Reich President may take the measures necessary to reestablish law and order, if necessary using armed force. In the pursuit of this aim, he may suspend the civil rights described in articles 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124 and 153, partially or entirely. The Reich President must inform the Reichstag immediately about all measures undertaken . . . The measures must be suspended immediately if the Reichstag so demands."

It was this article that Hitler used to peacefully establish his dictatorship. And why was it so peaceful and easy? Because, according to Childers, the 'democratic" Weimar Republic had already used it 57 times prior to Hitler's ascendancy.

There are eerie similarities between Article 48 and the Patriot Act. When you add to this the remarkable incompetence of recent presidential regimes, the collapse of both traditional liberal and conservative politics, and the economic crises, it feels like a new Weimar Republic setting the stage for awful things we can not at this point even imagine. It may be that history has something to tell us after all.

Franklin Roosevelt certainly thought so. As he put it: “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group,”

If Franklin Roosevelt could use the word, you can, too.

Some of the above appeared in the Review in 2006

More on this topic
Clues your country may be turning into a fascist state

Myths about corporate takeover of global farmland

Guardian, UK- Say Oxfam researchers, it is one of the four great myths built up by governments and companies that most of the 100m hectares of land allocated in the last few years by governments in Africa and Asia to foreign agribusinesses, pension funds or speculators is "marginal" or little used.

"Despite claims to the contrary, investors target the best lands," say the researchers. "The large-scale projects tend to be located where most people live."

The second myth is that the projects will help bring food security and energy security. Research in Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, Mozambique, Senegal and Tanzania has found that most of the deals being struck are for export commodities, including biofuels and cut flowers.....

The third myth being encouraged by host governments is that the projects will create jobs. In fact, analysis of the contracts, shows that local employment generation requirements are absent from contracts and rarely materialize in practice. "Jobs appear to be few, short-lived, seasonal and low-paid….

The fourth myth is that the projects will bring tax revenues. What really happens, says Oxfam, is that governments "actually forfeit benefits by offering tax incentives in the race for investment finance......
House committee chair rakes in big bucks after being named to super junta

The Hill - House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) has raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions since his appointment to the deficit-reduction supercommittee in August.

Camp raised $705,000 in the third quarter of 2011, more than $475,000 of it after receiving an appointment to the supercommittee on Aug. 10, according to a report filed with the Federal Election Commission.
U.S. to pull all troops out of Iraq

Firedog Lake - The Associated Press reports that the Obama Administration has abandoned plans to keep military troops in Iraq beyond the December 2011 deadline. The Administration could not secure immunity from prosecution for its troops operating in the country, so they’ve decided to bug out instead. A substantial amount of personnel will remain at the US Embassy and some satellite diplomatic outposts in Iraq (in Basra, Irbil and Kirkuk), perhaps up to 11,000 foreign service officials, with another 5,000 private military contractors guarding them. There will be around 150 military personnel attached to the Embassy for protection and facilitating sales of armaments, but that’s standard practice around the world.

The Administration wanted a training force of 5-7,000 troops to stay in the country. But since they would be liable for prosecution inside Iraq if they committed a crime, they will be pulled out instead.

HOW TO TELL WHEN YOU'VE WON
THE OIL CONNECTION
HISTORY OF THE IRAQ WAR TOLD ENTIRELY IN OFFICIAL LIES

AL-JAZEERA
ANTI-WAR

Now even Wall Street doesn't trust Obama

Political Wire - It is no secret that the relationship between President Obama and Wall Street has chilled. A striking measure of that is the latest campaign finance reports," the New York Times reports.

"The imbalance exists at large investment banks and hedge funds, private equity firms and commercial banks... It could widen as Mr. Obama, seeking to harness anger over growing income inequality, escalates his criticism of the industry, after a year spent trying to smooth ties bruised by efforts to impose tougher regulations."

One example: "Employees of Goldman Sachs, who in the 2008 campaign gave Mr. Obama over $1 million -- more than donors from any other private employer in the country -- have given him about $45,000 this year. Mr. Romney has raised about $350,000 from the firm's employees."
Teaching for real: Introducing the hand shake
Matt Amaral, Teach 4 Real - For many years now I have been conducting a social experiment in the doorway of my classroom. The subjects of my experiment have been all shapes, sizes, and colors. Some limp, others drool, many of them have trouble writing down the correct day of the week most days of the week. But I have plodded along, even in the face of hardship and seeming defeat. Miraculously I have avoided contracting tuberculosis, lice, ring worm, and poison oak. Some may even call it the Lord’s work.

For the last five years, I have been teaching kids how to shake a hand.

Yup, I am bringing back the lost art of the handshake. Years ago, when I first began teaching, students tried all forms of greetings meant to say hello. Some came in for hugs, others used clenched fists to pound, and others went for the good ole handshake. The problem was, not a single one knew what a handshake is supposed to be.

Ninth graders to twelfth graders, boys and girls, gangbangers to skaters, there isn’t anyone who knows how to shake a man’s hand anymore. I get slaps, wipes, fingertip brushes, and straight-up misses. Some of the biggest toughest gang kids I know walk up to me on the first day of school and put a limp, wet fish in my hand so pathetic I feel like wiping off my hand after their poor excuse for a greeting. Good lord, it’s like they think saying hi is wiping grease of your fingers.

Years ago, I stood around in amazement as droves of these kids rubbed their hands along my palm day after day. Then, as is my custom, I started really flipping out.

“What in the hell was that?” I started yelling at Nortenos and Surenos alike. “Did you just wipe your hand on me? That’s messed up, you think I’m a napkin? What, you got some extra tamale grease in your fingernails? You call that a handshake?” They looked at me weird, and walked away.

Then I began doing what I do best: Teach.

Every SINGLE wet wipe I get in my doorway I now turn into teachable moments. “No,” I say. “Grab my hand, there you go, like that. Now squeeze it, no, not like an infant with the swine flu, squeeze my damn hand. Now, shake it and look me in the eye. That’s how you shake a hand!”

..The good ole handshake is one of those many interpersonal skills our younger generation is losing. Instead of talking to someone on the phone they text. They post on Facebook every thirty seconds or so every time they make a bowel movement, but their thumbs are so busy their lips don’t work right anymore. They don’t know how to give a proper greeting aside from “Wuzzup,” and dish out “handshakes” like fish flippers.

But these days in front of my classroom, things are looking up. We have less gang problems than usual, which always puts me in a good mood. We didn’t go through four principals last year, and three out of four administrators returned, which at my school is a miracle. And now, after years of fighting the good fight, I’m getting the payout.

Kids walk up to me now with a strong, open hand. They stop walking, and shake my hand. They take their time, shake it slow, squeeze a good amount to show me their strength, and look me in the eye. They greet me with an appropriate greeting, like “Hello,” or “Sir,” and I give them the same respect back. MORE

Matt Amaral is a writer and high school English teacher from the San Francisco Bay Area. His blog, Teach 4 Real is one of our favorites

Department of Good Stuff

ACTION
• Why public banks work
• Cleveland cops give protesters tents
BOOKS

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America. “We're seeing right now a titanic battle between the power of science and the power of money--and money is winning. This book explains why, and offers some pointers that might get us back on the right track.” - Bill McKibbon

Top Secret America The Rise of the New American Security State

A Plague of Prisons

The New Deal: A Modern History

Race to the bottom

Recent bottom crawlers

• 24 arrested for trying to close Citibank accounts
• Detective admits NY police plant drugs
• Ryanair plans only one toilet per plane
• Obama threatens media with jail time over medical marijuana
• Michael Bloomerg & Herman Cain for their anti-protest comments
• The police departments of NYC, Boston and the Iowa state police for their treatment of protesters
• Universities that are selling off their radio stations

California Medical Association calls for legalization of pot

British governent ignores official advice to decriminalize drugs

Why public banks work
Ellen Brown, Truthout -Publicly owned banks were instrumental in funding Germany's "economic miracle" after the devastation of World War II. Although the German public banks have been targeted in the last decade for takedown by their private competitors, the model remains a viable alternative to the private profiteering being protested on Wall Street today.

One of the demands voiced by protesters in the Occupy Wall Street movement is for a "public option" in banking. What that means was explained by Dr. Michael Hudson, professor of economics at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, in an interview by Paul Jay of the Real News Network on October 6:

|||| The demand isn't simply to make a public bank, but is to treat the banks generally as a public utility, just as you treat electric companies as a public utility.... Just as there was pressure for a public option in health care, there should be a public option in banking. There should be a government bank that offers credit card rates without punitive 30% interest rates, without penalties, without raising the rate if you don't pay your electric bill. This is how America got strong in the 19th and early 20th century, by essentially having public infrastructure, just like you'd have roads and bridges.... The idea of public infrastructure was to lower the cost of living and to lower the cost of doing business.||||

We don't hear much about a public banking option in the United States, but a number of countries already have a resilient public banking sector. A May 2010 article in The Economist noted that the strong and stable publicly owned banks of India, China and Brazil helped those countries weather the banking crisis afflicting most of the world in the last few years.

In the US, North Dakota is the only state to own its own bank. It is also the only state that has sported a budget surplus every year since the 2008 credit crisis. It has the lowest unemployment rate in the country and the lowest default rate on loans
Obama's new war
David Dayem, Firedog Lake - The Administration’s claimed legal justification [for the Ugandan intervention] comes from a law called the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009, originally sponsored by Russ Feingold. Human Rights Watch were among the endorsers of the bill. I’m not sure this is what they had in mind. The bill authorizes the President to “provide additional assistance” to the region affected by the LRA, but there is absolutely nothing explicit about the deployment of combat forces in that law. The Constitution reserves the power to declare war to Congress alone, and they did not do that in the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009. There’s a clause about “political, economic, military, and intelligence support” that I suppose is the thin reed upon which this all hangs. The signing statement by the President after passage of the law says absolutely nothing about the deployment of forces.

..I’m sure Joseph Kony is a horrible person, among all the horrible people in the world. The question is whether it’s worthwhile or wise for the United States to be constantly policing the world, sending out US troops and spending US money to do it. Second, this is really what was at stake with the Congressional debate over Libya. Some Constitutionalists argued that the President didn’t have the unilateral right to commit the US military to action in Libya, and in fact the House never passed any resolution authorizing force even after the fact. But nobody took the next logical step to try to shut down the US contribution to the NATO mission.

This furthers a long, slow decline whereby the President becomes a unitary executive in matters of foreign policy, even though Congress has explicit rights regarding war powers. If Congress fails to use them, it only emboldens the executive, who then feels free to inform Congressional leaders after the fact that he deployed troops to central Africa.
Hill GOP most anti-environmental in history
Huffington Post - In just the year since the GOP took control of the House, there have been at least 159 votes held against environmental protections -- including 83 targeting the Environmental Protection Agency -- on the House floor alone, according to a list compiled by Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

"Republicans have made an assault on all environmental issues," said Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the committee. "This is, without doubt, the most anti-environmental Congress in history."
Republicans prove God can't make up his mind
Bloomberg- Anita Perry explained how God had called her husband to run for president and is now testing Perry with a campaign in which the Texas governor is besieged by Republican rivals.

"We are being brutalized by our opponents and by our party," she said. "So much of that is I think they look at him because of his faith. He is the only true conservative. Well, there are some other conservatives, and they are there for good reasons. And they may feel like God called them too.”

As it happens, quite a few of them do.

According to Karen Santorum, Rick Santorum's wife, he, too, was called. "It really boils down to God's will," she said. "We have prayed a lot about this decision, and we believe with all our hearts that this is what God wants."

Michele Bachmann has said she regularly receives "assurance" from God about her direction, including running for office.

Frontrunner-of-the-Week Herman Cain has said that God pretty much insisted that the former pizza executive campaign for the White House. Cain, however, expressing a humility not much in evidence among the chosen few, does allow that it's not a dead certainty that God's plan includes a President Cain. "Whether that is ultimately to become the president of the United States or not, I don't know," he said. "I just know at this point I am following God's plan."

Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman, Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich appear to have mortal political consultants.

Great thoughts of Rick Santorum
Rick Santorum argued that single mothers were the “political base” of the Democratic Party, and that Republicans should work to lessen single motherhood in order to score political points against their Democratic rivals. The Democratic Party, Santorum said, relies on “single mothers who run a household” and have a “desire for government” as their voter base, and concluded that building “two parent families” is necessary “to reduce the Democratic advantage.”

Stats
Since 2009, the number of teens forgoing contraception when they bed a new partner has spiked 39 percent in the United States – and 111 percent in France. Among the reasons cited were not liking it and not having adequate access to it.

Furthermore
Thelonius Monk's advice to musicians, including, "Just because you're not a drummer doesn't mean you don't have to keep time."

Why a cornfield is not the best place to hide

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