Saturday, March 29, 2008

poligirl gets Karita Hummer's Golden Pen award for "Government's New American Manifesto"













Winner of Karita Hummer's Silver Pen Award




Cross-posted from EENR Blog

http://www.eenrblog.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=622


Government's New American Manifesto (+)
by: poligirl
Thu Mar 27, 2008 at 06:31:05 AM EDT

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(posted from an earlier rendition, but it is, in this political climate, timeless, unfortunately for us...)

I have been thinking lately about that old quote from Nobel prizewinning author Sinclair Lewis: "When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

Thinking in terms of the past several years of the Bush 43 Administration, I can't help but draw many parallels; from the claims of "compassionate conservatism" to Bush consistently trotting out his faith, as a way to reassure that we're on the side of the angels and being led by a guy who is a really devotedly religious fellow. And we all know about the patriotism, or lack thereof, that has been regularly employed in an attempt to stifle any dissent. "Wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." How easy it would be to take over this country simply equipped with well-crafted and sellable rhetoric...

Like several of my fellow citizens, many Democrat or Libertarian, but Republican as well, I worry that what began in the name of "protection" of our "homeland" has evolved, blatantly and more rapidly as time goes on, into a raw power grab consolidating ultimate power in a "unitary executive," which is essentially a fancy name for a king.
poligirl :: Government's New American Manifesto
So have we come full circle as a country? From throwing off the chains of oppression by a monarch and attempting our experiment of a free republic to letting a new "monarch" take over our republic just a mere 231 years later? What does that say about us? What does that say about our fear, which seems to be guiding our reactions to this usurpation? What does that say about how much we've let the terrorists (both constitutional and otherwise) take from us?

I would be forced to conclude that perhaps we are coming full circle; there is still some time left to stop the procession towards monarchy again (and by using "monarchy" I am using the nicer word, even though tyranny may be a more apt description at this point.) It is also clear to me that the citizens in this great country don't care to exercise the advanced citizenship we are afforded; we simply don't care; as long as we are getting ours, we have a collective "it doesn't affect me" attitude. Most people won't realize that anything is different until they are told that they can't do or have something. But by the time this happens, it will be too late to rectify without some sort of coup or revolution.

By letting our government have carte blanche because of our own indoctrination that the downfall of the country can ONLY come in the form of violence and physical destruction, we have given them tacit approval to remake the fabric of this country that the founding fathers so carefully wove for their grand experiment. The reason for the separation of powers was specifically to prevent one branch from becoming the main power branch. The theory of the "unitary executive" is a theory proposed by conservatives who clearly don't truly buy into the "strict constructionist" ideal, though many of them do claim to be proponents of so-called "original intent." Being a proponent of a "unitary executive" and a subscribing to "original intent" or "strict constructionist" views are contradictory at best and hypocritical and nefarious at worst.

Even the theory of "original intent" is conclusive that the framers put all into the constitution that they (in collective agreement) thought suitable and necessary to guide the nation. Nowhere in there is anything close to a "unitary executive." That is unless you are a judicial "activist." And it would be the height of hypocrisy for those who have so vocally claimed that they are "original constructionists" and have railed against judicial "activism" to back such a brazenly "activist" reading of the constitution. If they do, they are simply political opportunists, and not worthy of leadership positions, including positions on the Supreme Court.

Clearly, to me, the terrorists are winning and must be laughing as we not only make just about every mistake we possibly can regarding the Middle East, but as we sit silently by while the powers that be attack, surreptitiously, the very fabric of our nation. The million dollar questions are how much damage has been irreversibly done already and how much more will be done before the citizens of this country WAKE UP!

Like the quote from Sinclair Lewis at the beginning: "When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

We need to WAKE UP!

Friday, March 28, 2008

TJ Colatrella, Winner of Karita Hummer's Silver Pen Award for "Solution to Sub Prime Mortgages Peg them at 2-3% Above Prime..!"







TJ Colatrella, Winner of Karita Hummer's Silver Pen Award



Cross-posted from Daily Kos

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/3/27/13355/3932/687/485457

"Solution to Sub Prime Mortgages Peg them at 2-3% Above Prime..!"
by TJ Colatrella
Thu Mar 27, 2008 at 11:19:33 AM PDT

I have the solution to the Sub Prime Mortgage Crisis...

It's a simple fair real solution which will avert many millions of American families from losing their homes causing an even greater housing crisis and devastating negative downward pressure on the rental market, which is already limited and badly inflated..

It also saves the American Tax Payer from bailing out either the banks and lending institutions and or the borrowers who are subjected, I feel unfairly to a very mean spirited negative group who care more to see these folks homeless and traumatized through eviction than what's best for not only these poor folks our fellow Americans, but also our nation in this crisis..

* TJ Colatrella's diary :: ::
*

As you see in the title the plan and what is undeniably the solution is to simply Peg these Sub Prime Mortgages at 2 to 3% above Prime the Prime Lending rate that is..and forgive all penalties these home owners are subjected to to date 1/2 of which are illegal as has been widely reported..and is record..

We are facing a true financial and housing crisis due to the unbridled greed and dishonest lending practices that were so common and proliferated in the real estate market which rewarded Realtors and Mortgage brokers for directing and enticing many of these would be home owners into these unscrupulous Mortgages which were predestined to cause these folks to not be able to meet it's ridiculous escalating interest rates after a short period..these are what are referred to as unconscionable or to contain "Unconscionable Clauses.."

Implementation of this simple fair not just plan but solution must still be worked out but one big factor and part of it is to not give these lending institutions or banks a huge multi-billion dollar bail out and this could be eventually nearly 1/2 a Trillion dollars before it's all sorted out I have read and heard as much as $480 Billion or more just due to the Sub Prime part of our current economic crisis which will prove to be a depression for 60-80% of Americas before if it ever runs it's course..

As many of the economic indicators are no longer really applicable to the national or personal prosperity the statistics will not reflect as you may realize they all ready do not to your personal economic reality...

Now all this plan takes to save millions from 20-30 million Americans from the potential 8.8 homes which may be foreclosed upon from creating a sea of homeless wanderers displaced persons refuges within America reminiscent of the depression of the 1930's and the dust bowl days of Woody Guthrie and Tom Joad and Joe Hill..

It may take an act of Congress or even a process of court decisions let's remember the FBI is already investigating 13-23 brokers of these mortgages..lenders etc..as I have heard and has been reported..

So if there was as is more than likely actual real criminality to many even most of these Sub Prime Mortgages this bad paper which is being used to bury these folks beat them down to their knees with interest rates now from 11-14% even higher with penalties that are nothing less than medieval..as have so many of our economic policies become as McCain professes pure Calvinism in all it's worse aspects if not the law of the sea or Deuteronomy..economics..

So remember as you hear all this talk and wringing of hands over all these foreclosures and it is a potential 8.8 million of them we are talking about not just the 2.4 million this year or 4 million they talk about but in the end as these other mortgages accrue blossom into the lethal flowers that they were designed to become it is 8.8 million households million of families 20-30 million American who will be effected if not more..

That these is a Simple Fair Solution that would not cost any Tax Payer ant money but would do the right and fair thing for our nations good and in our nations best interest..and that is...

Peg the Sub Prime Mortgages at 2-3% Above Prime and forgive all Penalties to Date..!

Simple as that..!

Alan Beans's "Throwing Jeremiah down the well" receives Karita Hummer's Silver Pen Award






Winner of Karita Hummer's Silver Pen Award




Reposted from Friends of Justice Word Press:

http://friendsofjustice.wordpress.com/2008/03/24/throwing-jeremiah-down-the-well/

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Friends of Justice
Throwing Jeremiah down the well

March 24, 2008 at 5:28 pm (Uncategorized)

Last year, the Jena saga revealed a disturbing perception gap between white and black Americans. The controversy sparked by brief snippets from the sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright provides another indication that black and white Americans have a fundamentally different understanding of the great nation we all call home.

Bill Kristol’s column in today’s New York Times typifies the response of white America. Kristol refuses to expose himself to the African American perspective on either the past or the present. The state of race relations is quietly and consistently improving, he suggests, largely because black and white America don’t talk much.

I guess that’s why Kristol printed Charlotte Allen’s “Jena” story in which Alan Bean comes off as a self-promoting race baiter, black America’s concerns about equal justice are dismissed out of hand, and the revisionist history cobbled together by Jena Times editor, Craig Franklin is swallowed whole.

Message: it’s okay to have a national conversation about race so long as conservative whites do all the talking.

Like all preachers, Jeremiah Wright sometimes gets his facts wrong. The US government didn’t invent AIDS to cripple blacks and gays as some, including Wright and Bill Cosby, have asserted. The well-worn notion that crack cocaine was introduced into poor African American communities to neutralize the poor black people is also a gross simplification of a complicated story. Poor people are uniquely vulnerable to contagions of every kind; gross economic and educational inequalities have consequences.

So where does this tendency to demonize white America originate, and why are black and white Americans so quick to believe the worst about one another?

The answer, my friend, isn’t blowing in the wind; it’s hidden in the pages of history books–not the sort of history-lite we encounter in school history classes, I’m talking about the work of serious historians willing to face sober facts.

White America has an insatiable desire to be lied to about race and racial history. Black America hungers and thirsts for the truth, no matter how painful it may be. If black preachers and intellectuals sometimes exaggerate white transgressions, their white counterparts are inclined to minimize and deny.

A few days ago, at the conclusion of a charming ceremony in Grand Prairie, Texas, I became an American citizen. As I recall, 362 newly minted Americans left the building gripping little American flags and precious citizenship documents.

We sang God Bless America and the Star Spangled Banner and we repeated the Pledge of Allegiance with hands held over our hearts. I choked up on more than one occasion–this is powerful stuff, even for a Canadian transplant. While we waited for the ceremony to begin, I read every word of the little pamphlet containing the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights that I had been given.

The America described in these materials is an experiment in freedom, equality and justice. The America referenced in the course of the citizenship ceremony was quite different. This America is a mighty empire. “You will soon be a citizen of the most powerful nation in history,” one speaker told us, “Isn’t that awesome!”

Well, yes, it is awesome. But for lovers of liberty, it is also a bit frightening. I did my doctoral dissertation on W.O. Carver, professor of missions and world religion at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville between 1898 and 1954. Carver frequently lamented that with each major war, America’s standing army had increased in size and influence and the flame of American liberty was left to burn a wee bit lower. Power and liberty have never been on good terms.

American exceptionalism, the idea that America is God’s last and best hope to the world, is a staple of white America civil religion. White America conveniently forgets what black America remembers all too well. Hence the racial perception gap revealed, this time, in the reaction to Jeremiah Wright.

Those of us who read our Bibles on a regular basis cannot be surprised by the tone of Wright’s comments. He sounds a great deal like his namesake, the biblical prophet. Consider this brief excerpt from the 38th chapter of Jeremiah:

. . . Jeremiah was saying to all the people, “Thus says the LORD, He who stays in this city (Jerusalem) shall die by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence; but he who goes out to the Chaldeans (the Babylonians) shall live; he shall have his life as a prize of war, and live. Thus says the LORD, This city shall surely be given into the hand of the army of the king of Babylon and be taken.”

The response was immediate:

Then the princes said to the king, “let this man be put to death, for he is weakening the hands of the soldiers who are left in this city, and the hands of all the people, by speaking such words to them. For this man is not seeking the welfare of this people, but their harm.” King Zedekiah said, “Behold, he is in your hands; for the king can do nothing against you.” So they took Jeremiah and cast him into the cistern of Malchiah, the king’s son, which was in the court of the guard, letting Jeremiah down by ropes. And there was no water in the cistern, but only mire, and Jeremiah sank in the mire.”

Does any of this sound familiar? Listen to Jeremiah Wright’s comments in their entirety and you will understand why Barack Obama chose to sit under his teaching. Wright is a man of loving compassion who preaches like a prophet only when harsh circumstance demands it.

This is why Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, Texas will be honoring Rev. Wright on March 29th. The Divinity School is on the campus of Texas Christian University. The University has washed its hands of the affair. Free speech is one thing, a university spokesperson says, but the university would not be so reckless as to hand an award to a person as controversial as Jeremiah Wright.

The Divinity School, to its credit, has resisted the temptation to throw Jeremiah down the well, even though several graduates say they are prepared to renounce their alma mater over the matter.

“Contrary to media claims that Wright preaches racial hatred,” Brite representatives say, ”church leaders who have observed his ministry describe him as a faithful preacher of the gospel who has ministered in a context radically different from that of many middle class Americans.

In refusing to throw this latter day Jeremiah down the well, Brite Divinity School has maintained its commitment to biblical authority. Handing the award to a lesser, but less controversial, candidate would have been tantamount to trampling on the cross of Jesus Christ–another outspoken prophet who suffered for his candor.

The specific accusations flung at Jesus by false witnesses were intensely political: claiming that he, not Caesar, was the true King of the Jews, and threatening to tear down the temple in Jerusalem. Like the sermons of Rev. Wright, the words of Jesus were cherry picked from their original context, yet his accusers were essentially right–the preaching of Jesus has always constituted a grave threat to the Roman Empire . . . and to every other empire that has ever existed.

These insights are standard fare among biblical scholars, but they become rank heresy when they enter the pulpit. There are exceptions of course. No one excoriated Billy Graham for saying that if God didn’t judge America he would have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah. But then, Graham was talking about sexual sin, not racial sin. href=”http://www.lipmagazine.org/~timwise/NationalLies.html” mce_href=”http://www.lipmagazine.org/~timwise/NationalLies.html”>Tim Wise has recently pointed out, white Americans have a curious understanding of their national history. We don’t deny the fact of slavery or Jim Crow or community lynching, we just don’t like to be reminded of these things and often speak as if they did not exist.

The white conservative historical narrative describes a glorious and godly nation striding majestically from glory unto glory as brave white people founding a brave white nation. As a practical matter, black people don’t enter this story until the mid 1950s, and it has been straight downhill ever since. Black people, the white conservative narrative states, are whiners. While they should be thanking their luck stars for the slave ships that carried them to such a wonderful place, they insist on bringing up ancient indignities and rehearsing lamentable anachonisms. We have moved beyond racism, the white conservatives say–end of story! People like Jeremiah Wright who insist of stirring the turds of history are whiners, at best, and traitorous terrorists at worst.

In America, we bury the losers and move on.

No empire built on myths, however glorious, can long survive. Those who refuse to learn the lessons of history, as the wise man said, are doomed to repeat them.

Last week, a woman in Washington DC directed my attention to a book on “Sundown towns”, all-white communities that have historically excluded black people, often with signs reading, “Nigger, don’t let the sun go down on you in this town.”

My research into the history of Tulia, Texas made me familiar with the concept. James W. Loewen (a blessed exception to the white stereotype I have been developing) has built a career around unearthing unpleasant bits of Americana (I first stumbled across his work in the excellent, Lies my teacher told me.) This review of Dr. Loewen’s book on Sundown towns provides an excellent primer on the kind of historical detail white Americans studiously ignore.

Barack Obama has accused his pastor of holding a static view of America–a nation that does not and cannot grow and mature. There is a modicum of truth here. For most black Americans, the latter half of the 20th century was a time of significant, even sweeping, change. This is why Bill Kristol thinks black folk should shut up and move on.

Unfortunately, for the least fortunate 20% of black America, change, though undeniable, has not always been for the better. If suburban nirvana is the American heaven and prison is our version of hell, the poorest Americans are moving in the wrong direction and people of color have been disproportionately affected.

I am not suggesting that Barack Obama emphasize this point–not if he wants to be elected; but somebody needs to say it. The inequities of the present are firmly anchored in the past. Ergo, if we refuse to talk honestly about the past, ain’t nothin’ gonna get better no time soon.

In times of crisis we inevitably haul our prophets out of their muddy prisons. As the hand of God continues to scrawl across the American wall, we may soon find ourselves turning to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and his spiritual kin, for guidance.

Alan Bean, Friends of Justice

Note from Publisher for this repost: Karita Hummer

This post was selected to be reposted, and given the Silver Pen award, because it reminds us so well, so articulately, of what Jeremiah Wright has been so rightfully angry about, all these years: the duplicitous two Americas. Alan Bean rightly lauds the Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, Texas for their plan to honor Rev. Wright for the totality of his teachings and sermons. It would behoove us all to listen to Rev Wright's sermons with an open eye and ear, so we can truly comprehend the plight of the other America which still lives in the shadow of the more affluent America. Essentially, Rev. Wright was decrying the two Americas, and so should we.

Karita Hummer
Edwards Democrat

Sunday, March 9, 2008

BruceMcF wins Karita Hummer's Golden Pen Award for Excerpt from "Burning the Midnight Oil for the Coalition Change Strategy"






Winner of Karita Hummer's Golden Pen Award



Re-posted with the permission of BruceMCF

Excerpted from: Burning the Midnight Oil for the Coalition Change Strategy Hotlist
by BruceMcF, Sat Mar 01, 2008 at 09:09:25 PM PST
Midnight Thought

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/3/2/0925/71795/758/467064

The core of the progressive populist coalition change strategy is the Blue-Green coalition. That must be the core, for many reasons, some of which I've mentioned, and some of which, good lord willing and the creek don't rise, I'll get to.

However, while that is a necessary part of the coalition change strategy, it is by no means sufficient. A coalition change strategy must be broad based. Working in the interest of the coalition must be a dominant political strategy, with the extra time and trouble of working out differences with coalition partners clearly worth the trouble.

And that means that everyone in the coalition must see the benefits of being part of the group ... and that means that the coalition is far more robust if it has more than two main members.

And now I run into a tremendous problem, which is that the radical right reactionaries that captured the Republican Party have so soiled and muddled the public discourse that I have no name I can come up with for the third member of the progressive populist coalition strategy for change.

I want to say "Republican Nationalist", except that the phrase "Republican Nationalist" brings to mind policies of sacrificing the national interests of the United States to the selfish interests of the Militarism Industry and of transnational corporations working as rapidly as they can to ensure that they are economically independent of the United States.

That is, if you say "Republican Nationalist", it brings to mind the policies of destroying the Republic and undermining the future prospects of the Nation.

However, as a proxy for that, there is a term that we have been using. This is the term for those who see that the people claiming that Fighting Wars Makes a Country Strong are the same people who see nothing troubling about the United States being Energy Dependent for the first time since British Colonists first starts occupying the eastern seaboard of North America.

That is, when we say "Energy Independence", it is far more than just a way for Greens to say to Blue Collar Workers, "here's a growth industry for you where you can make things that do things". It is far more than just a way for Blue Collar Workers to say to Greens, "If you support the development of a New Energy Economy, we are certainly willing to support it being a Sustainable Energy Economy".

Its more than an ploy to get ecologically sustainable jobs.

Its also a Nationalist policy in the most progressive possible sense of the word ... in the sense of taking care of our nation, and seeing to it that we are not staking our future on decades of War for Oil.

Step back and look where the current Resident's policy have placed us: they are trying to build a police station on top of the second largest supply of oil in the world. Given what they are and what they stand for, trying to build a police station on top of the second largest supply of oil in the world is just about all they can do.

But its not for us that they are doing that. They are doing it for the transnational corporations, because exploiting more and more natural resources to make more and more cheap, pointless crap to sell to more and more jaded customers is what they know how to do. Its how they make money.

And that is, after all, what a transnational corporation is ... a large group of people spread across multiple countries all pledging allegiance to a pile of money.

And our nation?

Our national economy outside the top 10% has been stagnant, in terms of income, for the entire Bush "recovery" ... and since we will lose ground during the recession, that means that we will start the next "recovery" from a lower point than we started the last one.

That stagnant income has been pursued as deliberate policy, under the heading of "fighting inflation", which means fighting wage increases ... and that is not wage-cost increases, which is wage increases faster than productivity growth, but any wage increase at all ... because if all wage increases can be suppressed, then corporations can snare all of the productivity increase for themselves, instead of sharing it roughly 50/50 as in the Fifties and Sixties and Seventies.

And to cover up for that stagnation, while still generating additional market demand, we had a process of encouraging people to borrow against equity ... and, of course, in that process, the deeper we were, in effect, borrowing on one credit card to pay off another, the more it became necessary to "loosen standards" to rationalize more and more reckless lending ... and now our financial system faces a massive meltdown, which has only just started, and which could mire us in recession for years, rather than months.

And one consequence of that stagnation was to create an "economic draft" for the Volunteer Armed Forces, and those economic draftees are now sacrificing their blood in defense of the interests of transnational corporations and against the interests of their own nation.

Don't read this wrong ... a bulwark of Political Liberty in a Democratic Republic is an Army that does not pass judgment on the strategic decisions of the political leadership. So I am not suggesting anything about the honor of the service of Soldiers and Sailors and Marines and Airmen - all blame lies squarely with those in the political leadership who betray the interests of those they were elected to serve in the interests of the corporations who elect to be the high bidders.

But that is a dissonant policy. There is no helping it. True Patriots must see the folly of staking our nation's strategic future on an exposed salient, lying between a federalizing Europe, a Russian oligarchy riding high on rising oil revenue and an ascendant China. It is very much as if Hancock had arrived on the first day of fighting at Gettysburg and decided that Barlow's Knoll must be taken and held at any cost.

And so Energy Independence is the flag we raise to rally those who see their nation's treasure ... worse, their nation's interest ... and, of course, worst of all their nation's fighting men and women, sacrificed to corporate greed, and corporate inertia.

The leaders of government are anxious. They were sent by Captains of Yesterday's Industries to keep watch over the institutions of government, and make sure that the people do not interfere.

But the tide of history is running against them, and it becomes harder and harder to hide the canyon dividing their noisy boasts of a jingoistic patriotism and the craven betrayals required by their vain efforts to turn back that tide.


Midnight Oil - Bedlam Bridge
In this city with no footpath
there's a building with no people
There is crime and gun decisions
There's a street of heat and hawkers,
there's a house of hope drifters
There's a gang that shoots then listens
There's a place that knows no poverty,
a town without pollution
There's a soul with good intentions
There are canyons full of movie stars,
churches made of metal
There are mountains made of muscle
We have leaders who are anxious,
we have captains not courageous
Captains tumbling into madness
...