Restore The Balance: Our ‘Economy’

   Just finished reading All The Devils Are Here... back to back with The Hellhound of Wall Street ... kind of a nice way to get a flavor of the 1933 Pecora Hearings (Senate Banking Committee Hearings on the who, what and why of the Great Depression vis-a-vis the behavior of Wall Street) and Joe Nocera’s and Bethany McLean’s comprehensive take on the “floating crap game” of Wall Street in the three decades leading up to the Great “Recession” beginning in 2008.

 

   It is very much worth the effort to read both works--probably start with the Depression era hearings – it’s a real cliff-hanger as to whether there were actually going to be any real, substantive hearings, as it was the final weeks of the lame-duck session of Congress between the election in 1932 and the changing of the guard, Hoobert Hever to FDR, in March, 1933. Pecora was brought pretty much by chance, in the very last days of the session.

    He subpoenaed Charlie “Sunshine” Mitchell, the president of City Bank, which I think actually was the predecessor to the spelling-challenged Citi Bank that, along with Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, AIG, Merrill-Lynch, Golden Sax, ... who am I missing? helped us all out of the money we used to have in paychecks, mortgages, pension and health insurance plans. And ol’ Charlie, it turns out, was taking $1mm in a pay package, as well. Charlie had set up a stock-manufacturing arm in parallel with the banking arm--so, a brokerage and a bank-for-broke. Had branch banks and branch brokerages all over the US (kind of the Merrill-Lynch paradigm). And pretty much just like the 1980s, 90s and Naughts, when the big “investment” (meaning “gambling casino”) banks started to act like they had deposits and brokerages at the same time.

   In both the 1920s and 1930s, the banksters (and the word was popular back then, too, it appears), advertised to beat the band that they were the experts, people could rely on them, trustworthy, knowledgeable, offered only the best, soundest investments, etc.  Back then, without an SEC and Glass -Steagall (Glass was one of the senators on the Banking Committee then) and with a population not in the least educated about the ways of the Wall Street Casino, it was pretty easy to fool almost all of the people all the time.

     The basic problem was that the bank execs put themselves first, were using people's deposits, and people's stock and bond purchase proceeds to make themselves richer.

     Which is basically what happened all over again in Great Depression II. And of course, in the 1930s, the banks howled like crazy that they didn't need any stinkin’ regulations--just as they had been for, what, since the Reagan Administration. The market will regulate itself, Alan Greenspan and the other folks from Golden Sax, etc., kept insisting.  And when Congress and the White House (legislative & executive branches) let these Wall Streeters slip their leashes, what happened? Same, same as in the Roaring 20s. Self-dealing, bubble pumping, etc.

    Having two of these massive depressions in a row – despite the 80 year gap of sort-of stability –should probably teach us that:

1. Banksters in particular have a propensity -- and intensity -- for pelf. Not that they're completely off the charts with the rest of humanity, but they like to play with money, especially OPM (other people's money), and be at the spot where money changes hands, so they can take a chunk of every transaction. They’re gamblers.
2. Banksters’ promises of self-regulation, fiduciary duty, morality, good character ... are just so much hot air, unless there's a cop on the beat.
3. Like other human beings, banksters will lie when it suits them, shade the truth when it suits them. If they can get away with it. And, as gamblers, they’ll probably thrive on the frisson of perhaps getting caught.
4. Letting people who have a particular passion for money and gambling with it run the economy without complete transparency, complete disclosure, regulations and regulators, etc., is stupid. Burn us once, shame on you; burn us twice, shame on us. So, while I was not alive during the Great Depression I, Hellhound brings one up to speed in telling the tale of Ferdinand Pecora. And All the Devils nicely gathers together all of the pieces of Great Depression II.

   The overall behavior of the banksters in Great Depression I was pretty much replicated in Great Depression II, our current depression. But with computers, global communication, cell phones, the internet, etc., things got a whole heckofalot more complicated. (I think The Big Short (Michael Lewis)) gives a more understandable description of some of the very complicated deals--the credit default swaps in particular, but All the Devils is pretty good on the topic as well (I'm just a little bit slow on these matters, and Lewis includes how much it cost to buy a CDS.

    Perhaps the most important lesson I draw from these two Depression books (I think we're in another Depression, as unemployment (or "labor underutilization," as the Bureau of Labor Statistics has now euphemised it),) is that unless we choose a different method of allocating our tax money, it is irresponsible for us to leave it in Washington's hands. Our new goal should be to keep our money under local control. Either in our own wallets, or within the state coffers, remembering that it is far simpler to get to the state capitols of the 50 states than it is for most of us to get to Washington, DC.

    And how we go about managing to keep our money local is the subject of my Work-In-Progress, HEY? or Had Enough Yet? at the web log titled Don't Marry: Incorporate!

   The idea is simple enough: Every person (and every couple, every family) is, at the core, a business. All of us are, at the broadest reach, in business to take care of ourselves, to exchange our capabilities, in the form of goods and services, for some medium of exchange – money comes to mind – and as we go about conducting our business, we seek to make a profit, come out ahead of the game. It is a profit-making enterprise. And we should recognize that, and all conduct our lives as business corporations.

    If that seems too strange a concept, I remind you that our very own Supreme Court has now held that corporations are people too, despite all the limitations and challenges faced in being a person and doing what a person does by the simple 25# sheet of paper that is the corporation-- the corporate charter. The corporate charter has only four corners, four edges, and two sides. It has no muscles, no opposable thumb and fingers with which to sign documents. It can't go swimming, or even take a shower, without disintegrating, and so on. But, despite all of those challenges, in the US at least, a corporate charter is to be treated as a "person".

    So the obvious corollary to this is, People are Corporations, Too. And as you start to think about it with me, it's not such a strange or outlandish concept.

    Particularly as families, we have educational programs, we perform work of all kinds, we use transportation, we have our own cafeteria, our own corporate headquarters. We provide uniforms for our corporate officials, sickness care, sometimes health insurance. We sub-contract the training of our youngest officials, for which we are assessed property taxes, etc. And, as corporations, vis-a-vis the states and the federal government, we can, on our 1160 federal tax forms, take deductions, and/or give capital treatment (amortization; depreciation) for our expenses, our equipment, and so on--all the reasonable and necessary expenses faced by a going corporation.

Verrrry Interesting. Pay attention, Viet Vets, Iraq Vets, Afghanistan Vets

Here's a nifty little writeup from January 2000 Volume 69, Number 1, of the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, by Gary J. Rohen M.S., of "Exercise 'Baseline,' Training for Terrorism."

Drawing upon composite profiles of likely domestic terrorists, the the group developed characters of four disgruntled Vietnam War veterans. The characters possessed a military background in special operations or health service and supposedly had met and formed friendships at veterans events and shared their views on the failure of the government to acknowledge and provide medical care for veterans exposed to Agent Orange and Gulf War Syndrome (GWS). Additionally, they each had children who suffered from GWS symptoms. Because of their backgrounds and beliefs, the characters [those "four disgruntled Vietnam War veterans] demanded immediate government acknowledgment of GWS and paid medical treatment for veterans and their families. (I'm wondering why the four Viet vets have "children who suffered from GWS symptoms"--unless they followed their patriotic fathers into the military and were old enough for Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL)--or was it "Iraqi Mistaken Military Operation w/ Ridiculous Acronyms, Like" (or IMMORAL)?

Does this remind anyone of the memo from the Denver, CO office of the FBI shortly after 9/11/2001, I think it was, that gave tips to people about what to watch out for in spotting "terrorists" in our midst? A couple of the tips were about "people who keep referring to the US Constitution," and "people who keep demanding their rights" or "insisting that they have rights" or "insisting that they have constitutional rights." And of course we know from real live history that the Pentagon and the Veterans Administration waffled, denied, stonewalled for YEARS on Agent Orange, and ditto Gulf War Syndrome (and a little bit less on Traumatic Brain Injury and Battle Fatigue, Shell-shocked (now known as Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome--could also be called the SSBDADOFCAOIPALFUBIP--pronounced "Ess-bee-dad, off-ca-oipal-foobip", or the Shell-Shocked By Death And Destruction Of Friends, Children And Other Indigenous Persons And Lastingly F****d Up By It Problem).

Here They Go Again, the FBI, using the fact that someone has:

1) Fought in an illegal war or two, (i.e., is a veteran who did not dodge the draft, who actually enlisted and "served their country")

2) Returned home injured, poisoned, sick,

3) And is asserting this or her enumerated right to

a) Speak

b) Peaceably assemble, and even (gasp!)

c) Petition his/her government employees for a redress of grievances. (Remember, we're the boss of them, not them of us. Or we could put it like my kids used to, around bedtime, "You're not the boss of me, Meng!!!" Seems like the appropriate Constitutional response to those claiming to be "the authorities," is actually built into our genes. Like the bumper sticker has it: Question Authority.

For reference: First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

(Don't forget to remember, as older we grow and newer forget, that because of our insufficient number of troops and/or incompetent leadership (or a combo of both) in the March 19, 2003 invasion of Iraq, from the Unitary Liar-In-Chief on down, we allowed the looting of something like 1,000 ammo dumps in Iraq, by caravans of pickup trucks, etc., which provided an arsenal of enough conventional explosives to make enough roadside bombs, land-mines, booby-traps and other "improvised explosive devices" to last the "insurgents" for thirty or forty years, I'd estimate. And it's these bombs, artillery shells, mortar rounds, small arms ammo, detonation chord, blasting caps, plastic explosive (etc.)—just plain old conventional ordnance (Weapons of Group Destruction), that have been doing 75% of the work of killing or maiming our troops. Troops who’re forced to ride around in glorified tin-can death-traps (Humvees, even “up-armored” Humvees — are still vertically flat-sided and flat-bottomed horizontally death traps, because they take the FULL force of blasts from below and rifle-propelled grenade blasts from the sides), because there still aren't enough "MRAPs" (V-hulled, bomb-deflecting armored personnel carriers) so that NO soldier ever has to leave base in the glorified thin-skinned boxy jeeps called Humvees.)

I'm almost afraid to note that the Preamble to the Constitution sets up the relationship between “We the People” and our government this way: “We the People of the United States…do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

The deal was that, the people in the aggregate, have all the power and, to form a federal republic (not a democracy, guys ’n’ gals--never was and never will be a “democracy”), We the People of the States United delegated just some of our power to that new government (or gummint).  By the way, the late Howard Zinn, both in person and in his A People's History of the United States, suggested that both the Preamble and the Bill of Rights were just window dressing, to prettify the formation of a government large enough and decentralized enough to put down any further Shays’ or Whiskey Rebellions. On the other hand, hey, the words are right there in plain sight, so  we might as well try to make the best of them, while they're still there.

Anyway, we are a  r e p u b l i c.   Period. Not a democracy. The closest we get to living in a “democracy” is in the direct election of Representatives and Senators to the House of Representatives & Senate, or generally, “Congress.” The gerrymandered election districts, of course, essentially nullify any given voter's impact. And the rigged voting machines, the illegally purged registered voters' lists, etc., further reduce voter choice.

Back to the FBI Terror Theater Script: Notice the characterization of the so-called malefactors, evil-doers, the roles of the “terrorists” who are to be cast for these "war games." Who are they? Guys who have served in the military. Or veterans, as we are sometimes called. [This characterization, or rather, demonization, of veterans seems to fit with the overall effort to disarm the American populace, with extra attention given to men (and women) who have actually been trained to use, and have practiced using, said firearms.

So, as in that Denver pamphlet, “You can tell a terrorist if he insists that citizens have rights” (when I find it, I'll post it here), we see the FBI working up a mock “exercise” (but they've REALLY built little bombs to distribute rabies, ’cuz we FEAR it), with FEMA, local hospitals, police, fire-emergency crews, local ambulance folks--built around Veterans who are petitioning their government for a redress of grievances--that is, characterizing as “terrorists” people who assert their constitutional rights against those in their own government who wish to abridge those rights.

Whoa, Nelly!!! What is wrong with this picture? Who is it that's attempting to ABRIDGE the constitutional rights of a veteran? Who is it that's using, in a public exercise involving governmental and quasi-governmental personnel a cast of “fictional” Vietnam Veterans who replicate all the NON-fictional veterans who were FOBARed-over, in real life, real people, real Pentagon, real Vets' Administration, by these NON-fictional Agent Orange poisonings, Gulf War I poisonings (maybe chemical agents, undoubtedly depleted uranium in artillery shells that were stored in the Gulf soldiers' tanks, that burst into radioactive dust for the soldiers to breathe when they inspected each enemy tank, howitzer, truck, jeep that had been hit by our depleted-uranium ammunition to make certain their job was done.

Imagine the gall it would take on the part of a government official (in this case, our author, our Mr. Gary J. Rohan, M.S.) to use a situation in which "our" government has provably wronged our own veterans, to label those wronged veterans, even in a "fictional" exercise, as Terrorists.  

[As an aside, this is nothing particularly new. I read in The Medusa File, by Craig Roberts, © 1997 (in Part III, "The Boys We Left Behind"—about 80 pages'-worth), that our military left behind, knowingly, some 25,000 soldiers in WWII, held by the Russians, similar numbers, held by Russia, from the Korean "UN peace-keeping exercise," US pilots shot down during the cold war, pilots shot down over North Vietnam (sightings as late as 1992), in Laos & the Soviet Union. There was an episode of the BBC's "Foyle's War" on the forced repatriation of Russian POWs, held in the UK, in exchange for Allied POWs. Roberts reports on a a bit of the prisoner exchange in Reisa, May 25, 1945, of 3,000 Allied POWs for 3,000 Russian POWs. After the newsreel cameras were stopped and as the Allied POWs were boarding their trucks, the Russian POWs were marched a little way to a quarry and machine-gunned to death.

Is it that our FBI/Gov't officials know that the wars they start are wrong? And that people who die in them, or return alive but maimed from them, or poisoned, or their reproductive system damaged, will be really pissed off? And is it that they know the returning veterans will be EVEN MORE PISSED OFF if their grievances go ignored, stonewalled, unanswered? Are they just itching for these angry citizen soldiers to "go off" like the Bonus Marchers did during the Depression, peaceably assembled in Washington to demand their promised WWI bonuses--so they can call them all "terrorists" and mow 'em down with machine guns?
Why wouldn't our "law enforcement" (or is it "law avoidance" and "law-breaking"?) officials use "radical Muslims" as their fictional terrorists? Already, before 2000 when this exercise was prepared (at least according to the pub date above), there had been the embassy bombings in Africa, the hostage-takings in Iran, the bombing attempt on one of the three WTC buildings that were taken down on 9/11/2001. Why use as "examples" or "characters," the very soldiers who were being denied care for their war-induced maladys? Should they have never served in the military? Should all of our soldiers just get up and go home if they're characterized as "terrorists" because of the way their own government responds to them, treats them? Remember the Walter Reed Army Hospital scandals?

Remember that Rumsfeld, Cheney & Bush were trying to do these wars "on the cheap" (except for hiring Halliburton and their other Military-Industrial-Legislative Complex buddies to do, for four and five times the cost of having our own soldiers do it)?

Are they creating situations that WILL piss us all off, so that they can call us "terrorists" for saying so out loud, for writing about it, for petitioning for a redress of the conditions our own government is causing that are making us pissed off? Smells like a set-up to me. Howzabout to you?

--------

And just as a little desert, a "lagniappe," for you, if you will, there's this paragraph from the "exercise":

…From a psychological perspective, the general public almost universally recognizes and fears rabies, adding to the scenario’s reality. In addition, a technician working with bomb experts devised, produced, and tested a realistic, practical delivery system at the FBI Academy. Each delivery device contained liquid rabies, placed in 20-ounce soda bottles and separated by a contoured freezer pack containing plastic explosives, all of which was packed inside a soft, six-pack-size beverage cooler. The device used a blasting cap and a standard antipersonnel mine to generate a charge. Upon command detonation, the device would release an aerosol mist of the deadly rabies virus.

So, the FBI Academy has plastic explosives ready to hand? Has “standard antipersonnel mines” ready to hand? Has “devised, produced and tested [this] realistic, practical delivery system at the FBI Academy?”

I sure as hell don't have such things ready to hand. Do you? And I was trained in ammunition storage, although, because I could type, I spent all my time as a clerk, and actually never saw an ammo dump in all my months of service.

Which makes me wonder, just who are the folks we should be labeling as "terrorists" here? Engaging in "exercises" which use devices that "the general public almost universally recognizes and fears"? (This would include all the participants in the exercises, we can safely assert.)

So, really: Who are the terrorists here? Seems like our government. Once again. And this was BEFORE all the "color alert status," the long-after-the-fact announcements of "terrorists arrested, their really, really, really scary terrorist plot short-circuited."

(Remember how Cheney and Bush, Ashcroft and Gonzales and Rice insisted that all the torture bore fruit, that "ticking time-bombs" were discovered. But they can't prove it to us because the documents are "classified," and would "harm national security" if revealed.)

Seems to me this is all horse pucky, barnyard animal product. Or, to use a shorter word: Lies. Once again.

Seems to me that these boys (and a girl or two--Rice and Christine Todd "Ground Zero Air is Safe To Breathe" Whitman) need to be put on trial for their lies, for the illegal wars they started.

And at the same time, we need to begin the public federal trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, or KSM, the survivor of 166 almost-fatal drownings. To convict KSM, the prosecution, our government, will have to prove just who is behind the 9/11/2001 attacks; who planted the explosives in World Trade Center Tower #7, #2 and #1, at the very, very least.

Does anyone think these events are NOT linked? This is double-plus un-good. I'm just sayin'.

What's the Preamble Party? II

   The Preamble Party is right now my Party-of-One.

  It occurred to me that, as I was working on my Preamble Project--to get school children and municipal, state & federal officials to recite the 52 words of the 1st sentence of the US Constitution, more commonly referred to as the Preamble, the Preamble itself made a fairly decent political "platform" to stand on.


Here's how it goes:

We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

This sentence serves two purposes: The first, to establish the power structure of the new Republic; that is, We the People have in the aggregate all the power, and only some of which did we imagine that we were delegating to the new government (particularly since governments through the ages have richly deserved the rotten reputations they earned).


The second: to set out a mission statement, a set of instructions from We the People to our new government. Had the framers of the Constitution had a PC and PowerPoint, the Preamble would have just fit in the strictures folks usually share about PowerPoint slides--namely, no more than six bullet points on a slide.


And here they are. We set up the Constitution in order to:

• form a more perfect Union
• establish Justice
• insure domestic Tranquility
• provide for the common defense
• promote the general Welfare and
• secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity

If our officials actually achieved these objectives, I thought that'd be a pretty good thing.


Our early forebears were suspicious of governments, even, or perhaps more so, the government they were setting up with the Constitution. First, there were those who did not want a federal government at all. Maybe a federation or confederation of loosely allied neighboring territories.


But the Federalists, those who wanted a federal, national government, held firm. The doubters then insisted that there be a Bill of Rights, without which they would not ratify the Constitution.

However, some others pointed out that there was a real danger in creating such a list, unless it was 100 per cent inclusive, of any and all rights to be specifically retained by the people as beyond the reach of the government. They might have argued, sure, we're provided for freedom of the press, but if we forget to add freedom of radio, freedom of telephone, freedom of television? What then.
There's that common law rule of interpretation that goes, expressio unius est exclusio alterius--the expression of one thing means the exclusion of others, or even all others--like, you were making your list, you had your chance to put everything on it you wanted, but you left this item off, so obviously you weren't intent on retaining this particular right.


James Madison had to admit that this was the only cogent argument he'd heard about why having a set of enumerated, listed, rights was a dangerous thing. But he had a solution: To say in the Bill of Rights that "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."


 This became the Ninth Amendment.


But  then comes the problem the American Civil Liberties Union uses as its slogan--which is "ACLU--Because Freedom Can't Protect Itself."  That is, the Unenumerated Other Rights can't define themselves. You might paraphrase the old Lamont Cranston radio show (via Flip Wilson) to say, "Who knows what other rights lurk in the minds of man? The Shadow do."


Who, for example, is going to take on listing the unlisted, enumerating the unenumerated?  What legislator, what judge, what member of the Supremes is going to take that on? I think one sitting judge, Rob't Bork, called the Ninth "an inkblot" that no one could hope to decipher, as he was being interviewed by the Senate Judiciary committee. Not a good sign for the Ninth.


Well, SCOTUS Justice Arthur Goldberg took it on in the 1965 case Griswold vs. Connecticut, and he found that privacy in the bedroom, as it's often put, is one of those unenumerated rights. Mind you, this was the bedroom of a married male and female, and they wanted to use condoms not as prophylactics but as family planning equipment.  Nothing unconventional or extraordinary. And Goldberg's was only a concurring decision, joined by one other jurist (if memory serves).


But what other unlisted rights d'you think lurk in the minds of man and woman? Privacy, the right to be let alone by our government, or gummint, as I like to call it, seems to be one obvious candidate.  Access to the best current means of communication without let or hindrance would seem to be another.  


Note that speech, letters and the press were the height of technology when the Bill of Rights was/were written. But then came the telephone (telephony is regulated, you may notice). And Radio. And TV (both regulated, as our forebears feared (that is, if you don't list it, you loose it). Then cable, satellite, microwave/WiFi and, ta daaa, the Internet & computers.


Of course, it's not like we have clear sailing even on the enumerated rights, like the right to be:

"secure in [our] persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, [which right] shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. Fourth Amendment.

You remember the hubub about wholesale (not retail, but wholesale--much cheaper that way) warrantless wiretaps a few years ago. That enumerated right was violated, despite the Constitution saying it "shall not be violated." The Bill of Rights can't defend itself. (Did I hear a "No doi?" from the peanut gallery?)

Take the one I ran into last week--"freedom to peaceably assemble and petition" (First Amendment). I wasn't allowed to ask my fellow senior citizens in the Woburn senior citizen center to sign my nominating petitions. I didn't have any grievance to redress before I got there, but of course I do now, so the city solicitor is having a sit-down with the center director to see what they can work out in terms of "supporting and defending the US Constitution." (That oath thing that public officials take before some of our delegated power is bestowed upon them--often called "being sworn in".)

Getting back to the enumerated, quite specific Fourth Amendment: A couple of years ago, author James Bamford wrote The Shadow Factory, a "long read" (formerly known as a book) about the National Security Agency (the NSA, formerly known as No Such Agency--a pretty secretive, but huge, outfit. Bamford wrote that, by about January or February of 2002, the NSA had gotten the secret cooperation of all but one of our major telecommunications companies to put "splitter boxes" on the fiber-optic trunk lines. Meaning "fiber-taps" that duplicate every bit--every binary digit, every 0 and every 1 of every communication that goes over the fibers--and sends it down to some humongous computer-disk-farms somewhere in Texas, to be data-mined "for security purposes."

This would include any and all traffic over the lines, copper, microwave transmission, fiber-optic, cellular, etc. From phone calls to highway toll transponders, email, medical records, library records, credit card purchases, all Internet activity of any type, from Skype to YouTube to Facebook to Google. The only hold-out was the CEO of USWest, who, after refusing to cooperate, was brought up on charges of insider stock trading. Absent an investigation, one can only speculate whether this legal tsouris was "post hoc, ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this (a logical fallacy, it's called).

I haven't heard anywhere whether these splitter boxes have been removed, assuming Bamford was correct about their installation. But given that the next administration that came into office has kept many of the same illegal practices in place (Guantánamo is still open for business, I can't be too sure--though apparently not for waterboarding and other torture; the President claims a non-existent "secrecy privilege" as did his predecessor. And this so-called secrecy privilege has been asserted, in every instance I believe, to prevent government officials from being held accountable.

 It is hard for me to understand all the effort goes into obstructing most of these investigations, when the President can free any convict with the stroke of a pen. Yes, there might be political consequences (that is a euphemism for "someone might lose the next election"), but is it really just all about keeping salary, power, perqs and pensions?

I can see a point in stone-walling the torture cases where death has resulted from the torture; the count is at about 120 men and boys who died under torture. Now, those crimes carry the death sentence (18 USCode §2441). But the President can pardon even those sentenced to death. He just can't unimpeach anyone (which is, I suppose, why Speaker Pelosi amended the Constitution by herself to rescind the process of impeachment. You'll remember that she infamously, or famously, declared her Constitutional Amendment this way: "Impeachment is off the table." or "Impeachment is not on the table." Simple. Very domestic. Kinda' folksy, grandmotherly 'n' all that. But there's a whole paragraph in the Constitution that goes into some detail on several options for amending the Constitution. (Article V). And the Speaker of the House standing up in front of a lot of microphones and TV cameras, etc., and just saying "Impeachment is off the table" is definitely not among them.


(And of course Goldman Sachs is still running the Treasury department, as it did with Clinton, then Bush II and now this administration. Maybe it's true that you should put thieves in charge of catching thieves, as they know the ropes. But that doesn't fill me with domestic Tranquility. Howabout you? Like, is that the best we can do in this country? What's that French line? The more we choose, the more things mem? Hafta look that one up, but not while I'm typing. Breaks the chain of thought.)

Hmmm.  Now, where was I? Short-term memory goes first.

Oh well. So that's a bit about The Preamble Party, how it grounds and leads into the Constitution (which every office-holder at the federal and state level (and even in some cities--Waltham councilors take the federal oath as do state officials, but Watertown councilors do not. And of course the President has his own special oath, set out in the Constitution--if only the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court could remember how the heck it goes. (I sure hope he looks things up when he's deciding cases, but I'm not sure now, given the fact that the majority can't tell the difference between a person and a piece of paper (a corporate "charter" in this instance). I mean, gee whiz, dad, the emperor's decision doesn't have any clothes on. Maybe that's why it's Untied Citizens vs. the FEC?

bw

A Couple of flyers to answer the "But I don't know you. Who are you?" question

There is this relatively short WhoAmI two-page flyer.

And this somewhat longer Memo2Voters.

One of the more difficult concepts for folks to grasp, especially with the putative candidate within hand-shaking distance, is that the phase the Nov. 2 election is in now for independent candidates is the "Get 2,000 signatures of registered voters from your congressional district so that you can have your name put on the ballot" phase.

It's only after someone's name is actually on the ballot that a registered voter, on election day, can actually go into a booth and vote for or against those individuals on the ballot.

A good measure of how completely frustrated and turned-off and angry at "that government in Washington" is, IMHO, how intensely some folks grill your's truly--"Are you honest?" "Why should I trust you?" "How long have you lived here." "Oh, since 1980? Well, then you're one of us!"

One young woman this evening [Sunday, July 11] challenged me with this hypothetical, saying that if I answered her correctly, she would consent to sign my nomination papers.

Here's the hypothetical: "Say, for instance, that outside this place there was something going on, like chaos. What would you do?"

"Well," I answered," if the police had not yet been called, a 911 call, I would do that. Then I'd look to see what the situation was, how dangerous, the level of violence, tools of violence, and assess whether there was something constructive I could do with the tools at hand, or the better part of valor was to hunker down or flee.

In Vietnam, of course, we had a good number of tools at our disposal for 'managing chaos'--an M-14 rifle (it was the early days, and only supply sergeants of Ammo battalions got the lighter M-16s--though they were less reliable, they were lighter to carry) and in our unit, both officers and non-coms carried pistols, the better to do our job of inventorying our ammo dump. We could use mortars, machine guns, call in artillery rounds, helicopters, tanks, even fighter jets. But in a civilian setting, there are fewer options and the organization is not at all wired to a command structure.

As she seemed unsatisfied with my answer so far, I continued, "But let me suggest this from my civilian past. One thanksgiving holiday we were driving from Manhattan to the Finger Lakes region of NY State, going up Route 17, the "Quickway," as it was called. There was a blizzard promised, and when we got to the Poconos, it hit. The State Police closed Route 17 and had all the traffic exit onto the side-roads.  A huge traffic jam ensued.  I was driving and, from about 30 cars back, could see that there was a crossroad up ahead without benefit of traffic light, police or troopers. So I asked my late father-in-law to take the wheel, while I got out and hiked up to the intersection and directed traffic, letting three or four cars go in one direction, then the same number from the other. After a while, the family car got through the intersection, I hopped in and we were on our way again.  Is that the kind of chaos you had in mind?" I asked the woman.

"No. You can't just go out and direct traffic unless you have a license. You have to be trained to do that," she replied, and seemed genuinely offended that I had the temerity to have done something "so illegal." Though she claimed never to have been in a blizzard, she did hail from California and had a good bit of experience with traffic jams (in France one would call them Marmalade's de Traffique, given the amount of Citroen in the mix, but I didn't mention that).

This young woman also, as she expatiated on the topic of criminal intent, y'know what I'm sayin', insisted that trained psychologists and police officers could determine the state of mind of anyone they came across, by virtue of that training. They could tell, for example, if a person were having criminal thoughts, were thinking about committing a crime, and could thereby decide to arrest that person.

 I took out my handy-dandy pocket-sized Constitution (What's that, she asked. I told her it was the Constitution, the rest of the document that followed after the the 52-word first sentence I've based my party on--the Preamble--and I read to her the Fourth and Fifth Amendments to our Constitution, but she remained convinced that "trained people" could assess anyone's state of mind. It's just common sense, y'know what I'm sayin', she insisted. And this from a young citizen of no easily identifiable ethnic group.

My take is that she was clueless in California, and coming to Cambridge (this was in another nearby city, but it doesn't start with a "C") wasn't going to have an ameliorative effect.

I left our discussion with the uncharacteristic (for me) thought that maybe some people should not be allowed to vote.  Good grief, Charlie Brown. What's happened to our schools in the three-score years since I attended?

Looks like my call for a Home Ec. for boys and girls--real business economics--needs to be augmented with training in law, the Constitution, and our history--along the lines of the late Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States--1492 to the Present.

What's the Preamble Party?

  The Preamble Party is my notion of how elected officials, who take an oath to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic," should guide their conduct while in office (ideally, all the time, for all of us).

   Here's the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution:

   “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

    First off, this brief, 52-word sentence that begins the US Constitution, succinctly establishes the relationship between We the People and our government. Namely, We the people formed it, ordained it, established it--and delegated only some of our power to the government.

    The Federalists noted that only when one held, as a governing philosophy, that the people were supreme, could one countenance a system in which there were federal, state and even local governments. This follows from the Declaration of Independence as well, noting that governments exist only with the consent of the governed. In our case, our federal government was CREATED by "the governed," and our elected minions are instructed, by the six clauses of the Preamble, to exercise  their delegated power to:

  1) form a more perfect Union,  (this one has not been easy, what with the Civil War, women's suffrage, Prohibition's passage and repeal, red-state/blue-state shenanigans, etc.)

  2) establish Justice,  (nor has this been a slam-dunk; I think it's still largely aspirational)

  3) insure domestic Tranquility, (ditto; I rarely have a sense that we're Tranquil in these United States)

  4) provide for the common defense, (if wars were fought by our country's elected leaders--as duels between first the Presidents of feuding powers, then a duel between the survivor of the first duel and the next-in-line (in our case, President, vice-President, Speaker of the House, Senate Majority leader, and so on down the line of succession--then I predict we would have no wars),

  5) promote the general Welfare, (we're good at making the rich and powerful more rich and more powerful, at tending to the needs of the Corporatocracy, the Military-Industrial-Legislative-Intelligence Complex, the Wall Street Casinos, but we can't seem to figure out how to do "the greatest good for the greatest number"), and

  6) secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity. (From time to time, we get a little taste of these Blessings of Liberty, but they're by no means "secure" to ourselves. And they are DEFINITELY not secure for our children and grandchildren.  Maybe Lloyd Blankfein's offspring are assured a secure future, as he claims to be "doing God's work," as he stiffs the rest of the country. But this "god" of his is most assuredly named Mammon--the god of cupidity, concupiscence and greed).

     From such men as Blankfein, Summers, all of the Goldman Sachs, Citibank(s), Morgan-Chase, AIG crowd that populate the White House regardless of what party is in office (these chaps are like the Vicar of Bray, who boasted that "Whatsoever king shall reign, I'l be the Vicar of Bray, Sir"—it's a song worth learning) we can only expect to be taken to the cleaners, the wealth of our nation mulcted by these amoral multi-national gamblers.

   No Preamble Party platform would be complete without the concomitant reminders about the People's Power placed in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. These two amendments, the last two in the Bill of Rights, ratified December 15, 1791, notify the government that there are other rights retained by the people, and that powers not prohibited by the Constitution to the states, are reserved by the states and the People.

    And it has been a struggle to enforce the Ninth Amendment particularly: 

       The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

   Most of us can generally agree that We the People did not delegate to the federal or state governments control of our bodies, our privacy, our ability to use, unfettered by government, the best means of communication currently available. Back in 1789, that was speaking and the printing press. And correspondence by US Post.  Then came radio (which got regulated), TV (ditto), cable (not so much--you can swear on cable), the telephone (subject to wiretaps), cellular phones (subject to satellite and other eavesdropping), and now the Internet (the fiber optic cables of which were, according to James Bamford, completely and thoroughly and permanently tapped with "splitter boxes" by early 2002. The splitter boxes essentially make a duplicate of every bit (bit, as in "binary digit") of communications traffic that flows over the trunk lines of all US carriers and foreign lines that pass through the US (which is why nations on the shores of the Indian Ocean and in the Far East are building their own fiber optic undersea trunk lines, to avoid the permanent eavesdropping of the US carriers. Bamford wrote in The Shadow Factory (about the NSA--National Security Agency) that all of this duplicate traffic is routed to a huge, huge "disk farm" somewhere in Tejas.  Our only remaining privacy is the fact that there is so incredibly much data traversing the trunk lines that it can't all be looked at. But the NSA and its contractors are working hard to build new computers & software to blast through this bottleneck, this glut of information.

Barack Hussein Obama, 44th President (elect)

Well, we have to revise this earlier comment of relief that Obama was elected.


The "great weight" has once again settled atop us all alike.


Obama needs to be ferocious in defense of his campaign promises.
These include:
Universal health insurance. See the article in the September issue of Atlantic Monthly magazine--How the health care system killed my father.


An investigation of 9/11/2001. We haven't had one yet. This needs to be undertaken by either a special prosecutor, or by, say, the Attorney General of NYState or Massachusetts, or the District Attorney of New York City and/or the AG of Virginia or the District Attorney of Arlington County (or Commonwealth Attorney, however the state designates the prosecutors.


So the weight was lifted only briefly. Too bad, so sad. Your Dad. (The reply to the postcard from the profligate son in college, "Dear Dad...No mon, no fun, Your son."


So, strike these remarks:

"May I say that it's as if a great weight has lifted, with this 2008 presidential election of ours?

What an astounding event.

I'm even hearing echoes of my inky-dinky campaign slogan--Restore the Balance -- floating around in the æther, digital and analog.

So what balances need restoring?  My hope list, agenda, really did fit on the front and back of a business card. With one blank line left over.

Well, that didn't work!

By the time the deadline for filing nominating petitions rolled around (29July08) I had collected a grand total of 160 "bankable" signatures, just a few shy of the 2,000 a candidate for congressional office needs to get on the ballot as an independent.

Not that incumbent (for 32 years, consecutively) Ed. Markey would register the least frisson of concern were I to make the ballot — I'm sure he fully expects to expire in office when he's in his late 90s or more, but at least there should be some simulacrum of debate, a soupçon of (where's an s-word? Aah…) sparring.  (Who was it that claimed the pen is mightier than the s-word?)

I'm thinking that I didn't even come close (to making the ballot).

One John Cunningham (in the hirsute tradition of so many males these days--like Henry M. Paulson, Jr. and his deputy Neel "Cash & Carry" Kashkari, namely, bullet-headed-bald) has made it to the ballot as a Republican--he promises to be "a Ron Paul Republican"--that is, adhering to the reality-based US Constitution.

And for a guy with a campaign-on-a-shoe-string, John did pretty well, getting about one third of the vote from the 32-year-long Democratic party incumbent.

 But, except for the purpose of maintaining gridlock in the statehouse by filling the governor's slot with a Republican, citizens in Mass are about as Democratic as it goes.

However, come 2010, [the good lord willin' and the creek don't rise], I plan on getting started when the petitions become available--in February.

I've also learned the distinction between “encouragement” and “support.”

And I think I've also sussed out of the salmagundi the significance of the concept "free pizza" as figuring in the nominating petition collection operation. And I know how to make pizza, sauce, substrate & all.