From Salon:
"I am under a lot of pressure to not diagnose PTSD"
A secret recording reveals the Army may be pushing its medical staff not to diagnose post-traumatic stress disorder. The Army and Senate have ignored the implications
-by Michael de Yoanna and Mark Benjamin
Apr 7, 2009
Gary Kamiya Is Off Today
The Devil, strike that, the culture made me do it!
Gary Kamiya strikes out today with his piece on cop killer Richard Poplawski.
The sub-headline asks "amid the deafening din of the right wing's anti-government rhetoric, how extreme is (Poplawski)?"
Kamiya should have stopped at the editor's sub-headline in his 1,100-word piece.
Kamiya's internally incoherent argument is a brew of sloppy reasoning with a misreading of Hobbes' social contract theory thrown in.
Kamiya attempts to connect rightwing killer, anti-Semitic nut-job Poplawski to rightwing, mainstream nutty political culture.
Writes Kamiya:
To begin with, the social contract theorist Thomas Hobbes believed in the necessity of a strong state—a society in which protection and security triumphs over individual will—lest the individuals' lives be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". (Leviathan, yuck!).
Yet, Kamiya identifies Hobbes with the right-libertarian's skepticism of state and police power. If Kamiya has read Leviathan, he didn't understand it.
Myself I share the libertarian's skepticism of state power [this skepticism is healthy if one beleives in a classical liberal democracy], though I don't own or particularly value guns.
Feared Obama, So Poplawski Killed Three Cops
Kamiya writes of Poplawski, "He is responsible for his action. You can't tar every conservative because a pathological murderer shared some of his or her core beliefs."
Right, so what then does a pathological murderer have to do with the rightwing, whack culture? Not much.
But Kamiya tries to insinuate a causal connection: Feared Obama because of Rush and Fox , so Poplawski killed three cops.
Is Kamiya saying that Rush, Fox and the like are also anti-Semitic, like Poplawski? That they advocate killing cops so Obama does not take their guns, like Poplawski?
Kamiya instead lamely suggests that "they have encouraged and helped to create a pathological right-wing subculture in which free-floating hatred of 'the government'", qualifying his earlier admonition that you can't tar conservatives with a whack like Poplawski out of existence.
So the rightwing are political culture polluters, says Kamiya. Maybe then we should police and outlaw these culture polluters, right?
Look, Rush and Fox are slime because they have little regard for liberty, care about power and not people, and their political rants are poorly reasoned. But in this regard of uninformed, poorly reasoned polemical tracts, they have a friend in Gary Kamiya today.
- via mal contends
Gary Kamiya strikes out today with his piece on cop killer Richard Poplawski.
The sub-headline asks "amid the deafening din of the right wing's anti-government rhetoric, how extreme is (Poplawski)?"
Kamiya should have stopped at the editor's sub-headline in his 1,100-word piece.
Kamiya's internally incoherent argument is a brew of sloppy reasoning with a misreading of Hobbes' social contract theory thrown in.
Kamiya attempts to connect rightwing killer, anti-Semitic nut-job Poplawski to rightwing, mainstream nutty political culture.
Writes Kamiya:
As his friend, Edward Perkovic, told the Associated Press, Poplawski feared 'the Obama gun ban that's on the way' and 'didn't like our rights being infringed upon.'Hobbes Loved the State
Such obsessions don't come out of a vacuum. Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the GOP have been whipping up hatred and fear of Obama and 'liberal Democrats' for years. Joined by the National Rifle Association, which has run false and irresponsible ads claiming that Obama is planning to take away Americans' guns, they have encouraged and helped to create a pathological right-wing subculture in which free-floating hatred of 'the government' mixes with a maniacal fetish for guns. Poplawski is the diseased fruit of that ugly tree. ... Theirs is a Hobbesian world in which law enforcement cannot be trusted to stop criminals. Hence their favorite slogan, 'When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.' Poplawski proudly subscribed to that belief.
To begin with, the social contract theorist Thomas Hobbes believed in the necessity of a strong state—a society in which protection and security triumphs over individual will—lest the individuals' lives be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". (Leviathan, yuck!).
Yet, Kamiya identifies Hobbes with the right-libertarian's skepticism of state and police power. If Kamiya has read Leviathan, he didn't understand it.
Myself I share the libertarian's skepticism of state power [this skepticism is healthy if one beleives in a classical liberal democracy], though I don't own or particularly value guns.
Feared Obama, So Poplawski Killed Three Cops
Kamiya writes of Poplawski, "He is responsible for his action. You can't tar every conservative because a pathological murderer shared some of his or her core beliefs."
Right, so what then does a pathological murderer have to do with the rightwing, whack culture? Not much.
But Kamiya tries to insinuate a causal connection: Feared Obama because of Rush and Fox , so Poplawski killed three cops.
Is Kamiya saying that Rush, Fox and the like are also anti-Semitic, like Poplawski? That they advocate killing cops so Obama does not take their guns, like Poplawski?
Kamiya instead lamely suggests that "they have encouraged and helped to create a pathological right-wing subculture in which free-floating hatred of 'the government'", qualifying his earlier admonition that you can't tar conservatives with a whack like Poplawski out of existence.
So the rightwing are political culture polluters, says Kamiya. Maybe then we should police and outlaw these culture polluters, right?
Look, Rush and Fox are slime because they have little regard for liberty, care about power and not people, and their political rants are poorly reasoned. But in this regard of uninformed, poorly reasoned polemical tracts, they have a friend in Gary Kamiya today.
- via mal contends
Crisis Resources
Some sites for insights on the Crisis:
- Paul Krugman's Blog (NYT)
- Matt Taibbi's piece in Rolling Stone (March 2009)
- The Atlantic: The Quiet Coup (May 2009)
- WhiteHouse.Gov
- Nation Magazine Financial Meltdown 101
- Robert Shiller's Homepage
- Nouriel Roubini's Global EconoMonitor
- Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality with Both Hands
- Paul Krugman's Blog (NYT)
- Matt Taibbi's piece in Rolling Stone (March 2009)
- The Atlantic: The Quiet Coup (May 2009)
- WhiteHouse.Gov
- Nation Magazine Financial Meltdown 101
- Robert Shiller's Homepage
- Nouriel Roubini's Global EconoMonitor
- Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality with Both Hands
The Nation's Meltdown 101
From the Nation Magazine:
As the world faces economic collapse and citizens struggle to figure out where to go from here, The Nation has assembled this special section as an online guide to the crisis, drawing largely from Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover (Nation Books) by Katrina vanden Heuvel and the editors of The Nation.Check out the Nation's Meltdown 101.
Aggregating highlights from Nation events and providing an overview of the crisis, this page will feature videos from public forums; relevant podcasts; and a curated selection of The Nation's most illuminating articles about the financial meltdown.
Apr 6, 2009
S&L Crisis Reformist: Gov-Industry Cover-Up Is Huge
Update: Black's response can be read at Black's response to bloggers.
William K. Black, senior regulator during the 1980s S & L crisis and associate professor of economics and law, says the government understates the immense scale of exotic financial products fraud and is lying about the current health of our financial system to prevent a meltdown.
Confidence is oxygen, pointed out Warren Buffett last October. I keep up my hope that Obama is simply rolling out the recovery program (and sparing us all the details) so as not to scare the hell out of everyone, thinking that the immediate effects of the recovery ought to be different than a shock-and-awe campaign. But secrecy doesn't exactly work well nor should it in democracies, right?
A rolled-out truth and outright lying don't work at all, in Black's view. Here's an excerpt from his interview with Bill Moyers broadcast last Friday night. About the scariest stuff on the crisis I have read yet:
William K. Black, senior regulator during the 1980s S & L crisis and associate professor of economics and law, says the government understates the immense scale of exotic financial products fraud and is lying about the current health of our financial system to prevent a meltdown.
Confidence is oxygen, pointed out Warren Buffett last October. I keep up my hope that Obama is simply rolling out the recovery program (and sparing us all the details) so as not to scare the hell out of everyone, thinking that the immediate effects of the recovery ought to be different than a shock-and-awe campaign. But secrecy doesn't exactly work well nor should it in democracies, right?
A rolled-out truth and outright lying don't work at all, in Black's view. Here's an excerpt from his interview with Bill Moyers broadcast last Friday night. About the scariest stuff on the crisis I have read yet:
WILLIAM K. BLACK: ... What would happen if after a plane crashes, we said, 'Oh, we don't want to look in the past. We want to be forward looking.' Many people might have been, you know, we don't want to pass blame. No. We have a nonpartisan, skilled inquiry. We spend lots of money on, get really bright people. And we find out, to the best of our ability, what caused every single major plane crash in America. And because of that, aviation has an extraordinarily good safety record. We ought to follow the same policies in the financial sphere. We have to find out what caused the disasters, or we will keep reliving them. And here, we've got a double tragedy. It isn't just that we are failing to learn from the mistakes of the past. We're failing to learn from the successes of the past.
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: In the Savings and Loan debacle, we developed excellent ways for dealing with the frauds, and for dealing with the failed institutions. And for 15 years after the Savings and Loan crisis, didn't matter which party was in power, the U.S. Treasury Secretary would fly over to Tokyo and tell the Japanese, 'You ought to do things the way we did in the Savings and Loan crisis, because it worked really well. Instead you're covering up the bank losses, because you know, you say you need confidence. And so, we have to lie to the people to create confidence. And it doesn't work. You will cause your recession to continue and continue.' And the Japanese call it the 'lost decade'. That was the result. So, now we get in trouble, and what do we do? We adopt the Japanese approach of lying about the assets. And you know what? It's working just as well as it did in Japan.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah. Are you saying that Timothy Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, and others in the administration, with the banks, are engaged in a cover up to keep us from knowing what went wrong?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Absolutely.
BILL MOYERS: You are.
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Absolutely, because they are scared to death. All right? They're scared to death of a collapse. They're afraid that if they admit the truth, that many of the large banks are insolvent. They think Americans are a bunch of cowards, and that we'll run screaming to the exits. And we won't rely on deposit insurance. And, by the way, you can rely on deposit insurance. And it's foolishness. All right? Now, it may be worse than that. You can impute more cynical motives. But I think they are sincerely just panicked about, 'We just can't let the big banks fail.' That's wrong.
BILL MOYERS: But what might happen, at this point, if in fact they keep from us the true health of the banks?
WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, then the banks will, as they did in Japan, either stay enormously weak, or Treasury will be forced to increasingly absurd giveaways of taxpayer money. We've seen how horrific AIG -- and remember, they kept secrets from everyone.
Geithner Looks to Make Banks Lend and What Else
Update: Do read William K. Black on The Prompt Corrective Action Law, and Black's interview on the Bill Moyers show.
Geithner: We Won't Hesitate to Change Management at Banks; banks will lend or the bankers will be out of a job.
An increasing number of Americans will judge the policy addressing the banking crisis on the basis of how Americans are affected. Odd.
See Noam Chomsky on the economy and democracy. Plan is recycled Bush/Paulson. We need nationalization and steps towards democratization.
"When the Associated Press sent journalists to interview bank managers, investment firm managers, and asked them what they'd done with the TARP money [Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)], they just laughed. They said 'it's none of your business, we're private enterprises. Your task, the public, is to fund us, but not to know what we're doing. But the government could find out.'"
Much of the American public, veering into populism aka democracy, sees the financial managers as the incarnation of the voracious mafia chief, Fausti 'the Fist' Dellacava, in Jimmy Breslin's I Don't Want to Go to Jail.
The Fist often simplified questions over the allocation of resources by decreeing, "Give me all the money."
Geithner: We Won't Hesitate to Change Management at Banks; banks will lend or the bankers will be out of a job.
An increasing number of Americans will judge the policy addressing the banking crisis on the basis of how Americans are affected. Odd.
See Noam Chomsky on the economy and democracy. Plan is recycled Bush/Paulson. We need nationalization and steps towards democratization.
"When the Associated Press sent journalists to interview bank managers, investment firm managers, and asked them what they'd done with the TARP money [Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)], they just laughed. They said 'it's none of your business, we're private enterprises. Your task, the public, is to fund us, but not to know what we're doing. But the government could find out.'"
Much of the American public, veering into populism aka democracy, sees the financial managers as the incarnation of the voracious mafia chief, Fausti 'the Fist' Dellacava, in Jimmy Breslin's I Don't Want to Go to Jail.
The Fist often simplified questions over the allocation of resources by decreeing, "Give me all the money."
Apr 4, 2009
Pride
Pride, In the Name of Love (U2)Support the Southern Poverty Law Center and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
"I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: 'A time comes when silence is betrayal.' That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam."
"... Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter -- but beautiful -- struggle for a new world. This is the callling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history."
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City, one year before his assassination.
Apr 3, 2009
Prosecutors Gone Wild
John Farmer, the attorney general of New Jersey from 1999 to 2002, has a piece in today's New York Times entitled "Prosecutors Gone Wild" that lists a few of the more egregious cases of misconduct from prosecutors nationwide:
We ask again who is policing the prosecutors: It ought to be we.
In 2007, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit took the extraordinary step of ordering the release of a convicted Wisconsin state employee during oral argument; it then reversed her federal conviction, which had been based on the government’s overreaching application of the 'theft of honest services' corruption statute. She later said that the United States attorney [Steven Biskupic], who had been appointed by President George W. Bush, offered her leniency if she would cooperate in a case against the governor, a Democrat [Jim Doyle] in a tight re-election campaign.
We ask again who is policing the prosecutors: It ought to be we.
'Unbridled capitalism doesn't work'
Joseph Stiglitz, Roubini, Krugman: All agree that we have not even hit bottom yet.
From Der Spiegel, by way of Salon:
Joseph Stiglitz: "It's going to be bad, very bad. We're experiencing the worst downturn since the Great Depression, and we haven't reached the bottom yet. I'm very pessimistic. Governments are indeed reacting better today than during the global economic crisis. They're lowering interest rates and boosting the economy with economic stimulus plans. This is the right direction, but it's not enough."
From Der Spiegel, by way of Salon:
Joseph Stiglitz: "It's going to be bad, very bad. We're experiencing the worst downturn since the Great Depression, and we haven't reached the bottom yet. I'm very pessimistic. Governments are indeed reacting better today than during the global economic crisis. They're lowering interest rates and boosting the economy with economic stimulus plans. This is the right direction, but it's not enough."
Apr 2, 2009
Salon Looks at 1960s Civil Rights Movement
Lauren Hermele has a photo essay on 1960s civil rights veterans in Salon. Great stuff.A lot of the people comprising the civil rights movement have names that history will not record.
And quite a few live in Wisconsin today.
Registering voters, demanding jobs, risking their lives, enforcing democracy; that's what they did.
Today's Republican Party, like Wisconsin attorney general J.B. Van Hollen, and know-nothing GOP bloggers still don't get why so many were incensed by last year's voter suppression efforts. It's likely that they never will.
The American civil rights movement lives on today, knowing that they changed the course of history and stood up for their brothers and sisters.
Some were killed, blinded for life, maimed, but they put their bodies on the line against racists and know-nothings and we salute them today.
Obama as TR and Project Manager
David Broder says Obama is flexing his muscles now in the roll out of the recovery.
Let's hope so, but we should understand this the project is a roll out.
Obama can't just do everything at once, if he fails or is delayed (the GOP just might obstruct) then it's over.
This project, by political necessity, needs to rolled out. Economic necessity makes it a crash project.
Let's hope so, but we should understand this the project is a roll out.
Obama can't just do everything at once, if he fails or is delayed (the GOP just might obstruct) then it's over.
This project, by political necessity, needs to rolled out. Economic necessity makes it a crash project.
Apr 1, 2009
Roubini: No Quick, V-Shaped Recovery
But no inflation either, says Roubini.
From TechTickers:
Politically, a growing chorus of political analysts see a populist reckoning at home, one that Republicans will absurdly try to appropriate. In Europe, Obama and Brown Urge United Action on Economy while protesters there hang bankers and financial speculators of exotic products in effigy.
From TechTickers:
As we noted earlier, Nouriel Roubini of RGE Monitor actually has a surprisingly non-apocalyptic forecast for the economy: The first quarter of this year will mark the worst rate of decline, and the outlook will gradually improve from there.
We'll still be in a recession through 2009, says Roubini (in contrast to most economists, who think the economy will be growing nicely by Q4). But then, finally, the economy will begin to recover.
But what will this recovery look like? Will it be the V-shaped rocket launch that some bulls are looking for?
No.
Politically, a growing chorus of political analysts see a populist reckoning at home, one that Republicans will absurdly try to appropriate. In Europe, Obama and Brown Urge United Action on Economy while protesters there hang bankers and financial speculators of exotic products in effigy.
Kill That Virus-Worm
The folks at Conficker Working Group are helping. Go to:
http://www.confickerworkinggroup.org/wiki/pmwiki.php?nANY.RepairTools
http://www.confickerworkinggroup.org/wiki/pmwiki.php?nANY.RepairTools
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