Motley Blog

Today is the day traditional broadcast TV was supposed to end. Commenting on what was the finest broadcast civic programs, Meet the Press, since the sudden death of long time host Tim Russert seems salient.

Sure, MSNBC still has some thought provoking coverage, but it's not part of the strictly 'public' sphere, it;s paid cable. David Gregroy is just not up to the job - more glib and self-satisfied than Mark Lauer on what was once the best, politically practical, critical program in this country.

Is this the corporate future that Welch, married to a mergers and aquisitions attorney for most of his tenure as president, has in mind for us?

He should be ashamed. MTP was a quality organization and you couldn't keep up a tradition of independent journalism? I guess you, and yours, know best. Or at least you think you do.

I for one disagree. The running of our nation is everybody's business and it is the responsibility of the Press to insure we are all involved, and educated. You and your fellow NYC primadonna punks and your DC lobbyists either need to pay off the deficit and then leave.

You may well think you are better than everyone else, but all you have done is make yourself into no account gutter trash.

BTW, first hit on Google about 'Meet the Press' whose URL doesn't start with msn also doesn't like Gregory, but for different reasons.

New York City vs. Washington D.C.

Ten business days from now, April 5, Microsoft will be holding a virtual 'special' olympics on the servers of the MS network. (The 'real' event was originally founded by Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Schwarnegger's Mother In Law, on the proposal of a Chicago Educator)

**Please note - ridicule of this particular brand of abusive degenerate is not only allowed, but encouraged. Boos will suffice, but if you have personally had your life endangered by these individuals all restraints are removed, per the US Constitution.

I take offense at the New York City financiers and Washington D.C. regulators who cooked up the ripoffs of millions of investors and employees being portrayed as the best and the brightest. The fact that they now seek to continue their illegal activities via a ponzi scheme against my generation on the US Treasury is more than outrageous.

These folks may well have graduated in the upper portions of their Ivy League classes, but they have chosen to apply their intelligence to enrich themselves not by improving the world buy by stealing from it.

Perceptions of Bernard Madoff as a member of the Jewish Committee at this particular moment are interesting. Certainly there is anti-semitism, but there is also condemnation from within the Jewish world as well.

I did a google search on the subject, perhaps most interesting was a story in the Huffington Post from an outsider about Madoff's exclusively Jewish Club in Palm Beach, Florida (December, 2008)- a retirement area for many wealthy New Yorkers.( And, perhaps as an example of the divine hand at work, also home to many of Madoff's victims.

Here's the google for 'Bernard Madoff Jewish Community', for some of the rest.

From January 11, 2009:

Harsh Reality in the Age of Obama, #1

Paul Krugman has a timely NYT column on deficit spending, and how it **might** be okay. (If it works!)

Krugman's right on the debt numbers, but besides the additional political hazards he mentions there may be others.

1. The U.S. Housing market has not yet, definitively, found its bottom. Foreclosures resulting from the meltdown of a year ago are just now hitting the pipeline. Home equity loans have been a source of money that has been used to 'stimulate' the economy for quite awhile now - in a period when America's relative economic competiveness is declining. This a borrowed money is not on the government books, but it definitely does effect the overall financial 'credit rating' of the United States.

2. Subsidizing housing (and commercial property!) values with the deficit is a downward feedback loop. Spending deficit money to prop up the equity of property owners will not work, long term.

3. Who are we bailing out? If we pour good money after bad supporting the very people and practices that created the problem in the first place at the expense of honest blue collar America we are subject to a spectrum of problems, of which the least may be political.

In economic theory positive thinking has been proved to be directly related to economic performance. Positive or negative expectations are self fulfilling, but not as some elected leaders would like to believe are they the only thing that matters.

So, on this 9/11, 2009, let's take a look at our mental economic twin towers - are they standing tall or collapsing in a pile of dust? What will it take for our perception of economic details to reset with reality?

September 11 should stay as a day of reflection on the operation of our financial markets. As such I wonder if the massive removal of senior Financial professionals due the World Trade center disaster was a factor in the collapse of the financial markets last year?

Could it be that professional integrity was so concentrated in the industry that a single disaster removed the ability for the profession to self-regulate itself, to keep it's 'penis' in its pants?

Could be, but who knows?

I am reminded of my first publication, a compilation of research on the subject of Socially Responsible Investment - on the heels of an administration occupying expansion of my alma mater's pioneering South African divestment.

The Hampshire College Report on Socially Responsible Investment

Ed. by Doug Tooley,

April 1983.

Preface
In 1976, Hampshire College bacame the first school in the country to divest from companies in South Africa. This opened the door for us to a much larger idea, that of using investments to reflect our ethics instead of those of the capitalistic ideology.

Don't Follow Me I'm Lost

by Richard Rushfield

2009

At the height of the Reagan revolution author Richard Rushfield chose to attend the most prestigious radical institution of higher learning, Hampshire College. This book is his story, and the story of the allied group of artists, producers and marketers that was the Supreme Dicks. It was a coming of age in a moment of political and artistic zen, the time between punk and grunge in the musical world.

The Supreme Dicks were the sperm that fertilized the egg that would become the Universe of Nirvana, Sonic Youth, and Dinosaur Jr, and, as a side project, create the first X fueled raves.

In this book RR skewers the pinnacles of the corrupt and hypocritical NE establishment with humor blending Sean Penn in 'Fast Times at Ridgemont High' and Hunter S. Thompson. His words are filled with the freshness and perspective of a west coaster wandering free in the strict class society of the east coast.

Rushfield leaves the titans that used Hampshire College, and the Dicks, to forge the abusive corporate and political tool of Nifong political correctness sleeping under the bridge with recently released Priest pedophiles.

You however, will walk away laughing, with a buddha smile of enlightenment and individual empowerment that will carry you through whatever the bastards may throw your way.

Available at Amazon and other booksellers.

(A mea culpa: I was a friend of the group in its early days - I believe I was the one who started calling the civilian security force as a prank, a 'theme' that apparently persisted after my departure from the campus.)

I am so proud of the American legal system. Why, without it, we'd be just another corrupt third world Country with the super rich and the very poor masses - with nothing to keep us all in line but reactionary right wing gangs roaming the countryside...

The stock market is plugging along, showing consistent gains - even while the total number of foreclosures go up (don't forget to count all the mortgages delayed in the name of 'mitigation') and so does unemployment (don't forget all the folks dropping off the 'official' statistic).

Sure, Goldman Sachs has a minor civil action against them, but if we hadn't bailed them out they'd be rightly bankrupt, not the new owner of a shattered economy - with a stock market buoyed by TARP bailout funds.

Do we have a Bull Market now, or just another taxpayer financed 'Pump and Dump' scheme waiting for the next round of Pension Fund and individuals to sucker up?

Bull Market? How about a Bull**Shit** Market?

Dan Pink prepares a great summary about what really motivates the creative class. It leans to the left a bit, but bases that argument on an MIT study. Just my cup of Tea!

FWIW, the effect documented here may well be what it takes to end a recession. Certainly learning to be happy with zero dollars is not a bad thing.

Respect for difference of opinion is the foundation of the Constitution, and what is sorely missing in America these days.

Much of the freedom in historical America has been through having a Western Frontier which allowed for the practice of those values, even if they were violated regularly in the Eastern Cities, and pre-civil rights South.

Even though that freedom existed only for northern and western white males, it did exist and the progress it produced was real.

It is a sad historical fact that the fruit that was the civil rights movement of the 60's coincided with the partisan political divisiveness of the Vietnam War and the final days of the frontier in the west. That tragic coincidence continued through the end of the last chapter of the frontier, the completion of the the oil pipeline in Alaska in 1977 and the Corporatist takeover of the economy by Reagan 80's investment bankers and lawyers. (FWIW, the folks running our economy now were sniffing coke at Studio 54 and fostering an continuing alcohol dependency at the time.)

The key to the success of the Libertarian Party, and the future of America is more than just a good PR strategy to counter the likes of the Rachel Maddow attack on Rand Paul on his primary victory in Kentucky early this summer, on civil rights grounds - it is also the Parties ability to include the left - i.e. non-violent anarchists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_and_violence).

Consider this, what if the white male business America had embraced racial diversity without the need for a civil rights act in 1964?

Running to the government to protect your business is every bit as much an entitlement failure as the so-called 'welfare state'. The hard fact is that if you believe in the free market you **must** be okay with the fact that one of your employees will, one day, out compete you.

Relying on the Judicial Branch of government to create a barrier for your employees to compete by de facto creating a Corporatist Caste system in America contains every evil of Socialism, and more - witness today's America.

One thing this non-violent, limited government, Constitutional Anarchist believes in is the separation of powers among the branches - removing all 'officers of the court' from the legislative and executive branches of government, in as speedy a fashion as practical.

Since the 60's the left has evolved the law to deal with discriminatory abuse - this is a good thing, but misapplied under the direction of the courts. The cycle of abuse is a dangerous thing - in a 21st Century context the American Constitution is designed to prevent exactly that in its protections of individual rights.

There is nothing wrong with determining a persons economic value to society **in part** through governmental decree, including judicial findings of abusive behavior.

It is a true tragedy that it is the abused who becomes the abuser, and in a broader context this is what has happened in America, in the partisan employment spheres of the private right and the public left - under the control of our legal system.

And make no mistake, those individuals that make up our legal system are not victims tragically recreating a cycle, they are fully intelligent humans that have made a conscious choice to abuse via third party for their profit, and sexual control freak.

It is a fact of life that we are not all equal, for the Constitution, and America, to continue to evolve, survive, and succeed, we must do this on merit - and for no other reason.

There are many in right wing America that are using the economic situation they created in failing to realize the competitive economic global environment they operate in to create legions of new members to a financially disenfranchised class. The fact is that it is exactly these people, and these people only - who deserve a government determination of degeneracy - the worst of them no better than a homeless level 3 sex predator.

The word 'nigger' manifests a historical shame in America, never mind the attempts of those that have bought the Tea Party to re-instill racial politics. It is a word we should perhaps not let die - it is a hard fact of life that the human race does produce scum - we just need to make sure it is done justly.

And FWIW, our current legal system can't even manage it's own responsibilities, let along those of the other branches of government AND the entire corporatist economy.

The legal profession has created a monolith - that monolith is most certainly NOT comprised soley of scum, if though led by it. It is however bankrupt - with the responsibility lying along a continuation in direct reverse proportion to position.

There are those that would make it a crime in America today to be poor. But responsibility goes with authority, not the other way around, and if you aren't able to bear the same, you shouldn't be in the game.

Got a problem with that, Nigger?

In what now appears to be prophetic Ralph Nader penned a piece defining 'Corporate Socialism'. The article was originally published in 2002 in the Washington Post.

Here's an excerpt; point number one:

Consider the following assumptions of a capitalistic system:

1) Owners are supposed to control what they own. For a century, big business has split ownership (shareholders) from control, which is in the hands of the officers of the corporation and its rubber-stamp board of directors. Investors have been disenfranchised and told to sell their shares if they don't like the way management is running their business. Nowadays, with crooked accounting, inflated profits and self-dealing, it has proven difficult for even large investors to know the truth about their officious managers.

Here's the full text.

I was an active member of the Nader Campaign in 1996, about the same time as the more conservative local Seattle Commons issue - which some perceived as politically inconsistent. I would beg to disagree - and would hope that the best of the right and left would agree with above, and only the worst, disagree.

In a recent post analyzing some of the curious sexual politics behind the recent repeal of Ronald Reagan's policy of homosexual discrimination I touched on the desirability of avoiding all sexual politics in every workplace. Doing this would actually be the outcome of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' if it were literally enforced, and not merely a media spun euphemism for discrimination also attributed to Bill Clinton.

Consider, if you will, the sexual politics of those Clinton years - where the right wing disrupted the government and nearly overthrew it with nothing more than gossip about consensual sex - under the leadership of Southern History Professor Newt Gingrich as a newly anointed Speaker of the House.l