View From Another Front
Posted: Tuesday, May 22, 2012 - 11:44
It has begun to dawn on even the most ardent of President Obama’s supporters that there is a gap between what he said he would do as a candidate in 2008, and what he has done since his election. “Gap” might not be the right word. It is a chasm in which you could lose a continent.
He promised to close Guantánamo Bay. It is still there, along with who knows how many secret “rendition centers” where U.S. laws against torture do not apply. Worse, his administration has produced a new rationale for indefinite detention without trial.
He promised to clean out the lobbyists, but they still own Washington.
Candidate Obama promised transparency and access by the media and public to the deliberations of his administration. Instead, his...
Posted: Wednesday, April 25, 2012 - 11:14
It’s not much in the news in the U.S., because people might get the wrong idea about all the good things austerity can do for a nation, but Greece is falling apart and democracy is dying there. Some will argue that democracy is not doing all that well in the U.S., but Greece points to how bad it can get. Shops are shuttered, beggars wander aimlessly, hospitals report rising and alarming rates of suicide and mental illness. The Orthodox Church in Athens reports a food emergency and children starving.
In order to protect the banks and bondholders from losses on the debt they piled on Greece — much of it artfully concealed in complicated transactions that misled investors and even European regulators — the Greek people no longer have a...
Like state and municipal financial officers across the nation, Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel is charged with the stewardship of a lot of other people’s money, including more than $41 billion in pension funds of Ohio workers.
Two weeks ago he announced plans to remove Bank of New York Mellon and State Street Bank as custodians of those funds, and transfer that responsibility, and business, to JP Morgan and CitiBank.
In a written statement, Mr. Mandel cited allegations of fraud against the present custodians as the basis for his decision. But his alternative leaves a lot to be desired. The new custodians, JP Morgan and Citibank, are at this moment themselves the target of numerous lawsuits and legal actions on the part of state attorneys...
Posted: Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - 08:31
Filed Under:
Activism
Activism
There have been times in which the human spirit soared and civilization flourished: the Athenian democracy, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and Age of Reason. The last two led to the epoch changing declaration sent forth from Philadelphia to the world in 1776, and the creation of modern western democracy. Seasons of light. But there are also seasons of darkness. We are in one now.
This is an era in which the powerful exploit the powerless with ruthless impunity — grasping, gouging, cheating and stealing, using and abusing. Democracy was thought to be a check on the descent of humankind into another dark age, but it has not worked out that way.
Democracies, we have learned, can be subverted and devolve into oligarchic tyrannies....
Posted: Wednesday, March 14, 2012 - 11:05
Perhaps like you, I’m on the mailing list of all sorts of organizations, whether I particularly agree with their stated purposes or not. MoveOn is one of those. It’s one way to keep track of what’s going on in American politics and government.
I just received another invitation to a MoveOn event, this one urging me to a rally in Bensalem Township this week, to “join us in calling on President Obama to stand with the 99 percent and take on the housing crisis.” The invitation goes on to explain that “President Obama has the opportunity to be a homeowner hero — by pushing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to reduce mortgages to their fair market value. This will help millions of underwater homeowners and help get our economy back on track.” It left...
Posted: Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - 08:15
Let’s have some fun, get out the crystal ball and predict the future of the Republican and Democratic parties.
The GOP is easy. It doesn’t have a future. This is not because its leading candidates for president are (in order) hopelessly artificial, a religious fanatic and a swollen vanity — although that doesn’t help, of course. The death of the GOP can be read not in a crystal ball, but in the tea leaves, or more precisely the demographics. Demographics are destiny, and the GOP has for decades been the party of the old, white America. And it is going.
Now, as I am one of those — an older, white American, descendent from the German and English speakers who first settled most of the original American colonies — you might think I find this...
Posted: Monday, February 27, 2012 - 09:46
Almost 70 years after the victory of democracy in Western Europe, and two decades after Eastern Europe loosed itself from the grip of Soviet totalitarianism, the people of the continent are threatened by another assault on self-government. But no foreign army threatens their hard won rights or prosperity.
The threat instead is the far smaller but equally menacing army of the global banking cartel — the parasites in pinstripes.
The prime ministers of both Italy and Greece are bankers, appointed not elected, and put in power by the threat of the cartel: that it will withhold credit and plunge those nations into social chaos unless they pay off existing credit — and plunge themselves into social chaos. These are debts the cartel encouraged...
Posted: Wednesday, February 22, 2012 - 09:57
In an agonizingly disingenuous oped, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently made the case that America urgently needs a “second” political party. His argument is that the GOP has become so “captive to conflicting ideological bases” that there can be no agreement on basic policy issues within the party that is sufficient to form a majority with which the Democrats — a “real” political party — can do the nation’s business. Here “we” are, Friedman worried, six months from the GOP nominating convention, and still no agreement on its candidate for president. A real political party, Friedman suggests, would be like the Democrats and have these things settled by now.
Rubbish.
How did the Democrats achieve the unity and cohesion that...
Posted: Wednesday, February 1, 2012 - 18:29
The tidal wave of home foreclosures is still rolling across the United States, devastating families and entire communities. By most reports, there are over a half-million homes sitting vacant, and more on the way.
A blog site that could only have been written by an Obama administration flack laments this “bleak” situation, but gives America the “good news” of the future.
“The Obama administration and independent federal regulators are formulating plans to sell government-controlled foreclosed properties to investors who would bring them onto the rental market. The aim is to reduce the number of vacant homes which depress housing prices and burden the economy while meeting an increasing demand for rental homes.”
In other words, having...
Posted: Friday, January 20, 2012 - 08:41
You expect it in the Third World — the poor and undeveloped nations of Africa or South America. As you walk the city streets, dressed for business, beggars will approach and, well, beg. But there is a limit to what you can do, and there are defenses you can employ. Defense No. 1 is to avoid eye contact, keep moving and look purposeful. You can pretend you don’t see them. Sunglasses are helpful, for avoiding eye contact.
But I didn’t have sunglasses last week, and I wasn’t in a strange country. I was in my country, Harrisburg, walking between appointments on the streets around the Capitol. But I might as well have been in Haiti. In the space of an hour, my colleague and I were approached five times and asked for alms.
Being well brought up...