If walls could talk they’d be joking around on every late-nite show -- Week of March 1, 2010 notes
Date: 2010-03-08T00:00:00
Author: Edith Fletcher
Number of Views: 232
3/7 – If walls could talk they’d be joking around on every late-nite show – Week of March 1, 2010 notes
Just as we thought, campaign donors and earmark choosers are in bed together and you can hear them snoring in harmony in the next room. And it’s a “thin wall” between the givers and the getters says R. Jeffrey Smith in the Washington Post.
Companies say nay, the guys who pick the donees don’t know what earmarks the company wants to gather. They just pick them. And House Appropriations defense subcommittee members claim the same lack of concern in their choices of earmarks.
An aide to Subcommittee member Norm Dicks who was one with six others investigated and exonerated of allegations of selling earmarks to donors, said, they were “unaware of the substantial overlap between defense industry contributions to Dicks and his earmarks to contributors.” Besides, lawyers say you must show criminal intent on both sides to get at the problem.
But Sarah Dufendach, vice president for legislative affairs in Common Cause, says it’s hard because “investigators must find credible evidence of a quid pro quo between donations and earmarks, similar to the list of prices for legislative favors written by then-Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.) before his 2005 guilty plea to federal bribery and fraud charges.”
And how many Cunninghams have been caught and punished in the last few decades? Not many. The rest are still in their comfy beds.
3/6 -- A new “notion” on a new horizon -- Cha…cha…cha…changes – Week of March 1, 2010 notes
Democrat Kesha Rogers with ties to LaRouche is calling for Obama to be impeached as centerpiece of her campaign for Congress for the 22nd Congressional District of Texas, and on Tuesday she won the nomination of her party. “It was no stealth campaign,” says Chris Moran in the Houston Chronicle.
She posted an 18-foot banner with “Save NASA. Impeach Obama” on street corners. She shouted the message from a loud sound truck that plied the streets of the district and her Web site is running over with statements proclaiming her position and videos to back it up.
A Lyndon LaRouche sympathizer, she denounced London bankers as out to ruin US economy and global warming warnings as a threat. She raked O over the coals for “pissing on the legacy of President John F. Kennedy" to end NASA’s space program. In line with LaRouche aim to buck the establishment she is using the impeachment threat to push for an end to Wall Street bailouts and restore funds for manned-space travel.
“If anybody's serious about saving NASA or addressing this economic crisis, they're going to have to put this impeachment question on the table,” Rogers said.
Some Dems are appalled. Some GOPers were amused. All are noticing the “audacity” suddenly appearing on a different side of the coin.
3/5 -- Dear Editor, about that business license… -- Week of March 1, 2010 notes
It would have been refreshing if the Fayetteville City Council had stated in today’s Northwest Arkansas Times the primary reason for reestablishing a business license program. Most people would be fairly certain it’s to raise money at up to $64 per business in these uncertain economic times.
It’s okay. We understand the council’s need for money. Yet, claiming the license project is just for us little guys and not the city sounds like the old Washington, D.C. spin. We recognize the way officials have to tiptoe around an agenda nobody wants. But our costs are already burdensome.
The council gave us this to assimilate: “a database of what businesses are in Fayetteville makes it easier to promote them and generate marketing data.” But a handy promotional list probably could be bought for a lot less.
And the Chamber of Commerce’s manager of economic development Chung Tan says ”if we don’t know who they are, it’s very difficult to help them.” Though he did say some small businesses in homes might be exempted.
Thanks for caring, but many of us don’t want $64 worth of help in our modest endeavors, and to come up with a method of deciding what modest means, calls for a lot of political hassle. If we eliminate those making $10 per bag for picking up aluminum cans and others making $20 per for sewing hems, where does it stop and the licensing begin?
Or if it’s rental property, are three pieces below the limit and six pieces not? And what if three pieces bring in a lot more money than six? Looks like there are some annual forms to file in there somewhere.
We wonder, too, how you promote something bigger like a carwash. People either like a clean car or not and ads in Fort Smith aren’t likely to tempt them to come to Fayetteville looking for one.
You know, it almost feels like being forced to join a union and pay dues whether you want to or not. So hey, let us have an open shop as long as we can afford one. There are already enough closed ones.
Yours truly.
Edith Fletcher
3/4 -- How to spell the word for porcine meat – Week of March 1, 2010 notes
The U.S. jobs machine has been slowing down for decades and has been the source of many changes in the U.S. including people’s spending habits and their degrees of confidence. Reasons for the slowdown in jobs number about 5 according to Froma Harrop in the Houston Chronicle.
“The reasons: The decline of unions has let companies hire more temps and part-timers. Jobs continue to leave for lower-wage countries. Automation still supplants people with machines. America's immigration policies persist in displacing less-educated workers. And today's Wall Street demands instant profits, which labor costs eat into,” Harrop says.
Right now, we can add a sixth one. Temporary jobs due to end soon on short-lived pork projects in the “stimulus” bill. Seeing the signs of an even worse job market, people are spending less than they used to and saving more than they use to.
Some say 70 percent of the U.S. economic activity is driven by consumer spending. Some say it is only 40 percent or 50 percent. Either of these percentages are huge slices of the pie chart. The consumer is alarmed at the burden and doubts being able to carry it. And as the consumer goes, so goes the country.
You don’t spell pork with the letters j-o-b-s. It’s quite a different four-letter word than that. Put that in your pork pipe and smoke it.
3/3 -- Who’s afraid of the big bad Goldman Sachs? – Week of March 1, 2010 notes
Not Congress. Namby-pamby efforts to control dubious derivatives have been eviscerated in the House and Sen. Chris Dodd is not holding the line in the Senate.
The House bill requires derivatives to be traded on an exchange, BUT exempts half of the market from it. And Dodd abandoned the idea of a free-standing Consumer Financial Protection Agency and would put it in the Fed’s porous lap.
Along with the CFPA, derivative regulation will be anesthetized and stuck on a pin in a display case in the Federal Reserve – for the fate of all watchdog agencies in the U.S. – a butterfly collection with pretty wings -- and dead.
And Goldman Sachs is still free to be the global wrecking bar that tears down companies and countries willy-nilly. Old Scratch couldn’t ask for a better partner in sending people to hell. But Goldman doesn’t need any partners.
The latest Greek derivative case that Goldman actively engaged in, undermines the Greek economy, shakes up the euro and threatens the entire project for a united Europe.
Does Goldman Sachs care? Nope. It’s all in a day’s work. Less competition in owning the world.
People with any sense are afraid of them.
3/2 -- Who is the criminal in this sad story? -- Week of March 1, 2010 notes
Swiss Radical Party lawmakers try to protect Swiss banks’ protection of lawbreakers by asking the government to haul in Germany to the world court for trying to protect itself from lawbreakers
It looks like a protection racket at least for the Swiss banks. They are making money off criminals who stash money in their vaults to evade paying taxes at home.
The Swiss lawmakers didn’t like it when Germany bought a CD containing information about Swiss bank accounts that held financial data documenting Germans accounts. They claim that in doing so Germany broke international law and violated Swiss national security.
But what about Germany’s beef about tax evasion and that of several other countries in the same Swiss boat such as the United States? And who knows how much taxable money is hidden from these governments who need economic priming money in these hard times? To say nothing about their debts.
German authorities admitted buying the CD but declined to tell how much money they paid for it. Rumor has it that they paid euro2.5 million or $3.5 million in U.S. dollars. The sad side of the story is that the euro is worth 29 percent more than the dollar.
3/1 -- In this recovery are you a man or a mouse, a lamb or a lion? – Week of March 1, 2010 notes
If Americans had not received record-breaking amounts of welfare, unemployment checks and other benefits, U.S. household incomes would have dropped $723 billion last year. That’s more than 4 times the $167 billion drop reported by the Commerce Department last month. It was a record breaker.
For the first time since the Great Depression the American people “took more aid from the government than they paid in taxes,” says Patrice Hill in the Washington Times. And the recovery has a long way to go before “many Americans resume life as normal.”
And there’s the rub – what is normal? Is it a TV set in every room or one in every home, two cars per family or two bikes, pork or beans?
Do the power people think Americans will accept an L-shaped recovery like the Japanese people have for 20 years – no protests, no ousted politicians – just meek acceptance of a lower standard of living? The “lost decade” there is more like a lost generation.
The key to political self-preservation is no social unrest to threaten politicians’ extended sugar-tit sucking in office and long-lived enjoyment of the fruits produced by compliant people. Extended unemployment benefits and new “clunker” deals for refrigerators are just what the doctor ordered to keep ‘em quiet.
Do you agree? Or do you object? Is a new low-normal okay by you? Turn off the soaps and think about your vote. Are you a man or a mouse, a lord or a lackey, a rat or a piper, a lamb or a lion?
This March the first we should come in like a lion and stay that way. Only a lamb would take the shearing we are getting from this bunch of scissormen.
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