If Only The Whole World Was Watching

Sixteen cops were arrested Friday in NY and charged with ticket fixing. In addition to the more than 300 doctored ticket summonses involved, the indictments also include taking bribes related to drug dealing, hiding an assault, and leaking classified info. In response 100 cops and their Union leaders showed up at the Bronx Courthouse in Protest.

Carrying signs that mimicked what the mayor had said about the length of time it had been going on, many made the argument that “It’s a courtesy, not a crime”, and that this was the way business was done in the NYPD, saying it was part of the “NYPD Culture”.

While it is not clear that the protestors that showed up represent the entire force—it was after all an investigation maintained by the Internal Affairs Bureau (IAB) of the NYPD—it is very clear that the Union leadership is coming out hard saying the charges are illegitimate. When asked about the charges NYPD Benevolent Association Leader Pat Lynch said, “I say to them, in every profession there's professional courtesy," Lynch said. "In every profession your coworkers look out for you. I say they do that in their jobs. It's just a courtesy."

The head of the Union which now arrests OWS protesters for the nefarious crime of staying on the sidewalk indicates that he feels it’s only fair to have two sets of rules, one for his members and one for the public at large.

Interesting…

Multiple news outlets also reported that the demonstrating officers made demeaning and racially charged remarks to people in line nearby applying for welfare benefits.

This is not to indict the force of nearly 30,000 officers en masse, but the recent developments clearly indicate there are issues with at least some members, and those difficulties extend at least in some cases to contempt for the community which NYPD “serves and protects” as well as the law itself.

Seeing What is Left After All This Right

Hopefully, the country has gotten smarter after seeing their intentions.

You think so, Mark? I am asking sincerely. 20 years ago Romney, or at least the positions he claims to have would have been considered conservative. Today's conservative wants to dismantle the EPA, outlaw abortion, and cut taxes for the rich in ways that even Reagan would not have tried. They want an electrified fence and belittle each other for any policy of another candidate that espoused an ounce of human decency. Poor old Herman Cain comes out and says that a woman that is raped should have the choice to get an abortion though he would be personally opposed, and he is hounded by his opponents into an extreme position. Americans complain that they don't like the candidates, but in 1968, we had Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, and McGovern competing for the dem nomination.

On the Republican side the conservative Nixon beat the East Coast Rockefeller. In Vietnam & Chile Nixon was pure evil, and domestically he was a creep, but he also created the EPA, signed the first Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and signed off on OSHA, not to mention opening relations with China, and initiating détente with the Russians and signing the Ballistic Missile treaty. While running racially divisive campaigns in the south, Nixon also signed off on affirmative action programs at the federal level and supported the ERA. His record is to the left of Obama’s in most areas except foreign policy. Of course, he was a kook and a crook, but in exactly what ways has Obama led us into a more just progressive agenda. He has been stymied no question, but he has brought some of that on himself, by being astoundingly timid.

The whole country knows that Bush ran us into a ditch. If do-overs were allowed most Americans would judge Bush incapable of handling the office. But a scant three years later there is an enormous appetite to support far right candidates that would only provide more of the same, albeit with perhaps greater brain power.  Bush set that bar very, very low.

Polls, smolls, by the time we get to Election Day it will be a 51-49 vote, or maybe 52-48, and a very tight electoral college vote. I don't think we have learned s***, and that makes Americans the problem at least as much as our politicians.

It's My Rule Never to Lose My Temper Until It Would Be Detrimental to Keep It. Sean O'Casey

I have ignored the other candidates because other than Romney they ain’t going nowhere, although I had hoped we would have “the devil is in the details” Bachman to kick around for a bit longer.

I am not going to get into a back and forth on tax policy. Everyone knows the system is rigged to service special interests. My bottom line is that this gets better when we find some way to wring the obscene amount of money out of the electoral system. I would love to see the OWS crowd start banging that drum.

As long as Koch and others can find malleable boobs to carry their water arguing that dollars equals speech there will always be Herman Cain’s around. But the debilitating corruption in the system, which has to a great extent created this hard-right hard-left world we now operate in has affected both parties in very sinister ways.

Maybe it will never get better, I don’t know. I keep watching for that solitary figure, that political figure that shies from neither the poor or the well to do. We hoped Obama would be that leader that would make us want sacrifice and get us on a more correct path.

You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, "Why not?” George Bernard Shaw wrote it, but Bobby Kennedy ran on it. What did we get? Two parties arguing over what levels to subsidize the out of control conglomerate of insurance companies and the medical establishment. 50 million uninsured and the dems want to solve it by giving the insurance companies, that already exert too much control, even more power and wealth while the other party essentially says f*** them, offering no real solution to the crisis. Good things were in the bill I won’t argue that, but the real deal is how the lobbyists will mold the final execution—IF we ever get that far—and as we can see with the with the reregulation of Wall Street money talks and B*S* walks.

But I digress…

Cain has engaged in religious bigotry, proposed a tax policy which has a catchy name, but which everyone knows (including the entire republican field) would further exacerbate the transfer of wealth in America (just a huge problem in the US and around the world for that matter), and because he has shamelessly shilled for wealthiest and most powerful and had the unmitigated balls to blame the country’s problems on the unemployed, immigrants and so forth. He is not new. He is just the last in line. I didn’t like it in 1980 and I sure as hell don’t like it now.

The elements of this story are imaginary, but we all know there are millions like this. There is an unemployed mother of two. She has two kids and is trying to raise them well. Every day she makes decisions between rent & food, maybe medicine for an asthmatic boy, or clothes for a teenage daughter trying to find her way through the first year of middle school. The rich f*** millionaire that arrogantly sits back and says defiantly on national TV that her struggles are her fault, and that the fat bastards on Wall Street had nothing to do with her circumstances or millions of others with similar stories, deserves all the outrage any of us can muster. His statement is wholly and completely immoral.

The debates have shown the dark underbelly of the body politic. We have seen boos for a gay soldier, religious right nut-jobs cheering for the execution of 200-plus in Texas, and people shouting out that a hypothetical guy with no health insurance deserves to die if he gets sick and cannot pay for a doctor. None of the candidates, most especially Romney have acquitted themselves particularly well, each time standing in stony silence or claiming they couldn’t hear what was said, never once challenging the thuggery behind it all. And now we have this figure joking about executing desperate aliens on the border with electric fencing. Actually he said he was joking, but did want the electrified fence.

Yet they all court the religious right, god fearing people who are so happy with an eye for an eye, but ignore the teachings to feed the hungry, and care for the least among us. I am not particularly religious, but those on the religious right that claim all this in the name of some distorted God are neither religious nor right.

$5 bil is proposed for disaster relief. Now they argue for fiscal restraint, but a few years ago they were authorizing 5.0 bil a week to prosecute two wars, one of which was certainly engaged in for wholly unethical reasons.

So yeah, I’m spitting mad. At the moment Cain is the flag bearer for this whole parade of sycophants and criminals, so he gets all my bile. To speak to that with moderation- to me at least- his cowardly. Perhaps we cannot change all this, but we start by calling that which is immoral exactly what it is. I hope the bastard lives to be a hundred, I could care less, but I oppose everything he and those like him stand for.

Herman Cain is Brilliant!

Just check this copyrighted article from the North Star Writers Group dated Sept-01, 2008 in which in his own words Cain presents his prescient views on the state of the economy. This was written two weeks before the bankruptcy of Lehman and the whole spiral of AIG, Freddy & Fannie, TARP, etc.

Herman Cain:

“Once again, when Democrats don’t like the facts, they just ignore them with the help of the mainstream media.

“On August 26, Investor’s Business Daily reported data from the Internal Revenue Service showing that the average U.S. income had increased every year for five straight years through 2006...

“The following day, Sen. Joe Biden declared in his vice-presidential acceptance speech that ‘John McCain thinks that during the Bush years we’ve made great progress economically, I think it’s been abysmal!’ Great progress or abysmal, you make the call…

“... The supposed failure of Bush’s economic policies has been a constant theme of the Democrats since the 2006 elections, when the Democrats regained control of the House and Senate by convincing enough of the voters that the economic sky was falling, and that the war in Iraq could not be won. Based on all of their convention speeches, they plan to continue those themes right through Election Day on November 4.

“They are counting on a gullible and uninformed electorate to win the White House and a larger majority in Congress.”

Seven weeks later on Oct-20,2008, Cain wrote a second article for the Northstar Writer’s Group. This article, also copyrighted by Cain, offered full throated support for the creation of the TARP program enacted Oct-08, 2008 and signed into law by Bush. This legislation the soul of the US government’s efforts to protect those too big to fail while letting thousands lose their homes and millions fall into unemployment and poverty, is at the heart of WHAT OWS anger is about. TARP was first installment of $300 billion in what would become a multi trillion aid effort. The programs, too timid in their execution and too top heavy in their formulation, did save US & world from economic catastrophe, primarily be propping up big banks, Wall Street trading firms, insurance giants, and the auto companies, but left millions more in dire financial straits. The inequitable distribution of those monies along with the certain knowledge that tax payer monies used to bail out these firms is now being used to lobby to weaken regulations to prevent this sort of calamity again is what OWS all about.

Cain both suggested that the potential for catastrophe was small, and then weeks later came out in favor of the TARP bailout funds. The Tea Party types, initially outraged by the bail outs, now hold Cain as their champion. The level to which we are ill informed even with the multitude of information and media outlets available to us is truly stunning. And the speed at which Tea Party has been coopted by big biz interests and the conservative repub machine is mind boggling.

Herman Cain:

“Earth to taxpayers! Owning stocks in banks is not nationalization of the banking industry. It’s trying to solve a problem.

“The unprecedented financial crisis has caused the Treasury of the United States to take unprecedented measures to help solve the problem of frozen credit and cash flow for U.S. businesses.

“Most of us had dreams of what we wanted to be when we grew up as children. Some of us wanted to grow up and become a fireman, a policeman, a doctor, a nurse, a lawyer, a teacher, an actor, an engineer, a writer, a dancer, a chef or any number of other professions.

“But some of us wanted to own a bank because that’s where the money is!

“Wake up people! Owning a part of the major banks in America is not a bad thing. We could make a profit while solving a problem.

“But the mainstream media and the free market purists want you to believe that this is the end of capitalism as we know it. It is not for several reasons that they have conveniently not explained.”

I would love to see Cain make this speech again. Perhaps at tonight’s debate.

Post Script: Cain did defend his posture on TARP. Socialism is only really bad and can only really be called that when the government uses its resources to help the poor. TARP was crisis management. That's a whole different deal!

Herman Cain Defends America

Herman Cain is catching up with Bachman in the loonie kazoonie department. Last night on Jay Leno he again “clarified” remarks on his the Sharia law and the prospects of Muslim Americans joining his cabinet or administration. Many state legislatures have passed bans against Sharia law, including some where the percentage of Muslims is microscopic. Most of the republican candidates have also gone “on record” in their opposition to Sharia law as well, all too happy to jump on an unconstitutional McCarthyite bandwagon which demonizes all Muslim Americans in a least common denominator chase for conservative votes. There is of course zero chance that Sharia law will be incorporated into the laws of any state or the federal government.
But Cain tried to do them one better by saying that he would not appoint a Muslim in his administration and telling Christiane Amanpour that “I get upset when the Muslims in this country, some of them, try to force their Sharia law onto the rest of us.”

Though Cain later apologized to Muslim groups, he has continued to spout his anti-sharia law rhetoric on the campaign trail. The issue came up with Jay Leno last night.
After Leno suggested the position “didn’t seem very American” Cain clarified his remarks. "I wanted to drive home the point that there are peaceful Muslims, and then there are those that want to kill us. And I basically, when I was asked that question, I did answer, would you appoint a Muslim, and I said no. I was thinking jihadist, and I did not qualify that point, but I qualified it later." Oh, so now I understand, he did not mean to cast all Muslims in the role of terrorists for the chance to chase votes, what he was really saying was that he would not appoint a jihadi terrorist-- “those that want to kill us”-- to his cabinet. Apparently some of other candidates think it would be OK. Well, that is very clear and does not sound like pandering to the Tonight show audience at all.

In fairness, not all of the republicans are xenophobic hotheads. Chris Christie appointed a Muslim Judge, Sohail Mohammed, a lawyer with long history of defending the civil rights of those in his community, like civil rights lawyers have done since the founding days. Few remember that as a lawyer John Adams defended a British Soldier in a capital case long before he was a founder, but I digress.
Forced to defend the nomination at a town hall meeting Christie said, “If it is disqualifying for the bench to be an Arab-American in New Jersey who represents innocent people and gets them released, then this isn’t the state I believe it is,” Christie said. “I’ve known this man for 10 years. He’s a good, decent American and New Jerseyan, he’s an outstanding lawyer, and he deserves the opportunity to be on the bench. I am proud to have nominated him.”

If Christie refused to take the “not one dollar in taxes for ten dollars in spending decreases” pledge as all the others have done, and actually proposed policies designed to unite rather than play to the narrow minority it might have been interesting. As Tom Friedman wrote today, it would have likely forced Obama into a more conciliatory centrist posture. As a liberal that is pretty sick of that posture, I am not sure that would have been a good thing, but I do think this campaign would have been much more about ideas than slogans.

Now we’re stuck with a Texan that can put a sentence together, a patrician New Englander that hates most the policies he himself proposed and authorized while Governor of Massachusetts , Ron Paul, and a cast of wing nuts, extreme in their positions, bizarre in their statements, safely unelectable. And Herman Cain. At least we know he will not appoint any “people that want to kill us” to his administration. Whew… That was close.