Howard Zinn sez

“From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country – not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society – cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.”

-Howard Zinn, from his 1994 memoir, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train”

When in doubt...

Wakey wakey. Time to pick up a newspaper

Back to the poorhouse: End of 2010 required reading

 <Via Huffington>

The Poorhouse: Aunt Winnie, Glenn Beck, And The Politics Of The New Deal
An employee of Associated Charities, a private organization dedicated to alleviating poverty in the District of Columbia, met an old black woman carrying a basket of cinders near the dump in Southeast D.C. on a bitterly cold day in December 1896.

The woman "could not give street and number, but could 'fotch' the agent to her place," according to a case study labeled "Aunt Winnie" in one of the organization's annual reports from near the turn of the century. "Old age, with a heavy load on top and a strong wind blowing, made the walk a trying one. At last the 8x10 cabin was reached. In it was a stove in many pieces held together with wire, a bedstead with rags for mattress and rags for covering. From the leaky roof the floor was wet through and through."

Aunt Winnie, the report said, had no income save the 50 cents she made every two weeks for taking in wash. In summertime she raised herbs and greens, but in winter she "suffered for food and fuel." Her children had all been sold away to slavery, and a nearby niece was too poor to offer any support. Her neighbors helped, providing money for the stove and cot, and a "colored friendly visitor was found to carry broth and other comforts to her." The neighborly charity wasn't enough to persuade the agent, who was essentially a private sector version of a social worker, that the old woman should be on her own.

"In the fall of '98 agent asked her to go into the almshouse, but she would not consent. During the storm in February '99, she was kept from perishing with a great effort.

GO HERE NOW--->Finish the article

This WikiLeak coming up is going to be fucking UNBELIEVABLE

 Can't wait for this!  Crooks & Liars sez that Bank of America is panic-buying domain names in preparation for the upcoming BofA WikiLeaks releases:

According to Domain Name Wire, the US bank has been aggressively registering domain names including its board of Directors' and senior executives' names followed by "sucks" and "blows".
For example, the company registered a number of domains for CEO Brian Moynihan: BrianMoynihanBlows.com, BrianMoynihanSucks.com, BrianTMoynihanBlows.com, and BrianTMoynihanSucks.com.

The wire report counted hundreds of such domain name registrations on 17 December alone. They were acquired through an intermediary that frequently registers domain names on behalf of large companies, says the report.

Bank of America has reputedly established a 'war room' to draw up strategy and rebutt [sic] allegations likely to emerge from the publication of thousands of internal documents by WikiLeaks.

Buzzkill for your holidays

Robert Reich
America Attacks its Education System
Over the long term, the only way we’re going to raise wages, grow the economy, and improve American competitiveness is by investing in our people — especially their educations.

You’ve probably seen the reports. American students rank low on international standards of educational performance. Too many of ours schools are failing. Too few young people who are qualified for college or post-secondary education have the opportunity.

I’m not one of those who thinks the only way to fix what’s wrong with American education is to throw more money at it. We also need to do it much better. Teacher performance has to be squarely on the table. We should experiment with vouchers whose worth is inversely related to family income. Universities have to tame their budgets, especially for student amenities that have nothing to do with education.

But considering the increases in our population of young people and their educational needs, and the challenges posed by the new global economy, more resources are surely needed.

Here’s another reason why the $858 billion tax bill — including a continuation of the Bush tax cuts to the richest Americans and a dramatic drop in their estate taxes — is so dangerous. By further widening the federal budget deficit, it invites even more budget cuts in education, including early-childhood and post-secondary. Pell Grants that allow young people from poor families to attend college are already on the chopping block.

Less visible are cuts the states are already making in their schools budgets. Because these cuts are at the state level they’ve been under the national radar screen, but viewed as a whole they seriously threaten the nation’s future.

Here’s a summary:

    * Arizona has eliminated preschool for 4,328 children, funding for schools to provide additional support to disadvantaged children from preschool to third grade, aid to charter schools, and funding for books, computers, and other classroom supplies. The state also halved funding for kindergarten, leaving school districts and parents to shoulder the cost of keeping their children in school beyond a half-day schedule.

    * California has reduced K-12 aid to local school districts by billions of dollars and is cutting a variety of programs, including adult literacy instruction and help for high-needs students.

Not Krugman AGAIN...

Better grab the bottle Wild Turkey before digging in here. This bastard can ruin your day in a fast minute.

When the financial crisis struck, many people — myself included — considered it a teachable moment. Above all, we expected the crisis to remind everyone why banks need to be effectively regulated.

How naïve we were. We should have realized that the modern Republican Party is utterly dedicated to the Reaganite slogan that government is always the problem, never the solution. And, therefore, we should have realized that party loyalists, confronted with facts that don’t fit the slogan, would adjust the facts.

The Crisis of Capitalism

Ewwww. Long video. Short attention span? Hit the 'Pause' every 3 minutes so you can pick the lint out or something. And resume.


<Thanks AMERICAblog>

Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL) sez:

 

"In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks."

These would be the same Republicans...

 ...who demanded a $700 billion tax cut for the rich?

Assholes.

Republican senators blocked Democratic legislation on Thursday that sought to provide medical care to rescue workers and residents of New York City who became ill as a result of breathing in toxic fumes, dust and smoke from ground zero. The 9/11 health bill, a version of which was approved by the House of Representatives in September, is among a handful of initiatives that Senate Democrats had been hoping to approve this year before the close of the 111th Congress....
In a vote largely along party lines, the Senate rejected a procedural move by Democrats to end debate on the 9/11 health bill and bring it to an up-or-down vote; 60 yes votes were needed, but the move received only 57, with 42 votes against. Republicans have been raising concerns about how to pay for the $7.4 billion measure.

Bush Tax Cuts at a Glance

Compare and contrast: How much $ taxpayers at different income levels would get from the Democratic plan, which was to simply extend the cuts for income under $250,000, and the Republican plan, which was to extend the cuts for everyone:

 The term "tax cuts for the middle class," was coined by some Democrat and it's mostly bullshit. The left side of the chart shows that the "tax cuts for the middle class" also cut taxes on the rich. A family earning $750,000 a year would pay lower taxes on the first $250,000 of their income. The question has never been whether only middle-class workers should get a tax cut. It's how much income the tax cut should cover.

Krugman again. That usually means trouble

The fact is that one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it’s doing the governing.

--Paul Krugman, New York Times, 11/22/10:


Paul Krugman examines Alan Simpson’s recent comments about how excited he, Simpson, is about the prospect of a government shut down or, as Simpson puts it, a “blood bath in April.” Why, Simpson sounds just like a teenager waiting for the next Michael Bay film! “And boy, the blood bath will be extraordinary,” he says.

Sociopaths like Alan Simpson belong in a straitjacket - not in some TV studio spewing bile. Ditto for Newt.

Buzz Kill for this week

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Exclusive - Bethany McLean & Joe Nocera Extended Interview<a>
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Rally to Restore Sanity

Sorry to disrupt your precious daydream. This shit is going on whether you are awake or whatever.

Reading assignment!

 Excellent piece from Dissident Voice

 When Fascism Masquerades as Populism

With its reliance on corporate money and financial contributions by the wealthy, the U.S. electoral system provides movement in only one direction: to the right. Traditional liberals lack the financial wherewithal to compete against free market fundamentalists. Corporations do not fund candidates who would regulate them and hold them accountable to the people. The electoral system is useless as a tool for the expression of traditional liberalism or progressive reform.

Capitalism does not empower people; it gives primacy to capital. Like the corporation, money is a legal fiction that allows bankers and financial institutions to create phantom wealth from nothing. It gives rise to privatized banking cartels and to the Federal Reserve which controls the money supply and loans it at interest to the government and to people. In effect, this gives bankers control of the government and our cultural institutions.

Free market fundamentalism was elevated to the status of religion decades ago by Milton Friedman and his disciples at the Chicago School of Economics. Its adherents regard the market as a holy oracle that takes precedence over man and nature, the diviner of social and economic status, a force more primal than the laws that govern the motion of planetary bodies and the formation of distant nebulae.

Tiabbi: Courts helping banks thrash homeowners

From the November 25, 2010 issue of Rolling Stone

The foreclosure lawyers down in Jacksonville had warned me, but I was skeptical. They told me the state of Florida had created a special super-high-speed housing court with a specific mandate to rubber-stamp the legally dicey foreclosures by corporate mortgage pushers like Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase. This "rocket docket," as it is called in town, is presided over by retired judges who seem to have no clue about the insanely complex financial instruments they are ruling on — securitized mortgages and laby rinthine derivative deals of a type that didn't even exist when most of them were active members of the bench. Their stated mission isn't to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity.

They certainly have no incentive to penetrate the profound criminal mysteries of the great American mortgage bubble of the 2000s, perhaps the most complex Ponzi scheme in human history — an epic mountain range of corporate fraud in which Wall Street megabanks conspired first to collect huge numbers of subprime mortgages, then to unload them on unsuspecting third parties like pensions, trade unions and insurance companies (and, ultimately, you and me, as taxpayers) in the guise of AAA-rated investments. Selling lead as gold, shit as Chanel No. 5, was the essence of the booming international fraud scheme that created most all of these now-failing home mortgages.
Finish reading article - Matt Tiabbi - Rolling Stone