b, have tried to email you, with news not so good, but aol says your letterbox full

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Sep 10 2008 20:16 utc | 3

just sent one off to you r’giap
xo

Posted by: annie | Sep 10 2008 20:21 utc | 5

I think your statement is the absurd one, Annie. It proves $cam’s point. You don’t think the Dems were complicit in any of that? Clinton repealed Glass-Steagall, for Christ’s Sake, and you elected him under the supposed auspices of Democracy. It’s not Democracy. It’s Plutocracy made to look like Democracy, and so long as people look to our electoral process as the answer, we’ll keep sliding precipitously to our doom.

Posted by: Alicia | Sep 10 2008 20:29 utc | 7

news not so good…
Dear Christopher, peace be with you my friend….

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Sep 10 2008 20:59 utc | 9

fyi, i do not believe we live in a democracy so i am certainly not going to be defending EITHER party in this regard. furthermore, the dems being the supposed party backing the only socialist programs we are supposed to have, education, social security etc they are doing a completely ineffective job at standing up to the task.
furthermore what is wrong w/ people who can’t debate without resorting to strawmen and conjuring orifices.
for god’s sake people if you have a point, just make it!

Posted by: annie | Sep 10 2008 21:31 utc | 11

I made my point after I asked you a question that you interpreted as a strawman. You are the one that called Spyware’s comment absurd, and the funny thing is, you didn’t understand the comment. He’s not saying the Repubs make functioning Democracy stick, he’s saying that Democracy doesn’t work as witnessed by our scam of a political system, and the Repubs are masterful at selling, and working, that scam of a system, witnessed by the link you provided when calling his analysis absurd.
Why do you see Rethugs everywhere you look, Annie? It’s ironic that you keep throwing out the strawman label since you turn people who aren’t even your opponents into Rethug strawmen so you can berate and belittle them.
Spyware was insulting the Repubs, and you rode his ass about it. Thankfully, you clarified your position in #11. I agree with your sentiments per that post.

Posted by: Alicia | Sep 10 2008 22:41 utc | 13

alicia,
good point about Clinton repealing a law which had protected us from predatory banking, the wiki article says the industry spent some 200 million the last year to get it repealed after working on it for two decades. obviously there were tremendous profits to be made if that kind of investment was warranted.
don’t know how long you have been visiting here but you can be certain of one thing, no politician is loved around here. Clinton is attacked and exposed in the same way cheney/bush is or reagan or any of the others. even my pick for the most decent president in my lifetime, James Carter has been roundly criticized.

Posted by: dan of steele | Sep 10 2008 22:47 utc | 15

Much food for thought here, if you can open to it…
The 2008 US Election is Not About the Issues.

The title of this piece is not an original statement, it’s actually a direct, and verifiably real, quotation from Rick Davis. Rick Davis, believe it or not, is a (currently still employed) campaign manager for John McCain. The response I’ve seen has mostly alternated between disbelief and cheering victory — my Democratic friends took that quote as a tacit admission of failure on behalf of the McBush campaign. I’m here to say that it’s not: Rick Davis was telling the truth.
Welcome to post-reality.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Sep 10 2008 23:13 utc | 17

“I’m John McCain and I approve this message.”
I’ve been looking at a few recordings and its the same voice over.
He could be dead for all we know.
Here’s a scenario. Shortly after mid October, McSame announces he is too ill to continue, hands the ball to Mooseilini (I love that) Palin, she picks another Cheney for VP, and its Bush One all over again. How long before we have a theocracy?
JESUS IS COMING!
OK. I’m drinking now!

Posted by: Diogenes | Sep 10 2008 23:47 utc | 19

“What are we on about here: politics or personalities”
I think we’ve reached a point in this campaign where the distinction is gone, as well as the distinction between personification and facts. The M/P campaign have been outright lying for two weeks on the facts. The media in its lame way have pointed out some of the facts that prove beyond a doubt they are lying (specifically the bridge issue). No matter they continue on with the same lie everyday as if to substantuate that the metaphor “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality.” as a concrete matter of fact that can willfully trump actual hard evidence. The situation then moves beyond a world of facts and proof and into one of personalities. And corrupt, serial lying sociopathic, and murderous personalities that will not only recognize facts, but gleefully flaunt and prosper in their ability to deny them.
The democrats having lost the ability to argue points based on facts have to face up to either slinking back into their den of impotence and false respectability (and loose another election) or recognize that they have no other alternative but to attack McCain/Palin directly and without mercy on the personal level. They really need to destroy them. Before they are allowed to destroy us.

Posted by: anna missed | Sep 11 2008 0:53 utc | 21

This is just a furball thrown out there, but the Eskimos perfected close living conditions by using **humor** instead of invective to chide a person drifting apart,
humor to keep them for going insane in the Long Dark, probably, then more humor at
the onslaught of the Great White hungering for gold and oil, humor at their English
schools, their raping priests, humor at substitution of rancid hamburger for walrus meat, humor at the introduction of drugs, alcohol and prostitution, humor at metal snowmachines replacing dogsleds, at diesel gensets replacing blubber lamps, humor at melting sea ice, and the rising rates of youth suicide, disease, hopelessness …
Anyway, the quickest way to put Palin in her place as an Alaskan is to just make fun of her, and not ‘lipstick on a pig’ fun, but the kind of fun your own friends make of you when you take yourself seriously, or the kind of fun your coworkers make of your behind your back. Strip club fun! Bawdy house fun! Lip smacking fun!
Anyway, long drink, short joke, jujutsu, way of the falling leaf, make fun of her!
Heckle her! Howl before she makes her point! Moon her! Shout out biting sarcasms!
Otherwise we’ll have some White Condi Rice for president, then it’s emigrate or die!
Speaking of which, has anyone done the math yet? At what point do US deficits and credit.cons laid onto the back of the public general fund start to exceed the tax rate in say, Canada, where they have free health care? I mean, think of your kids!
American kids wearing Saudi dog collars, barking in Mandarin at the Gates of Hell.

Posted by: Frisco Alive | Sep 11 2008 4:32 utc | 23

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act also known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act (repealed the Glass-Steagall Act). rethugs all. they had been pushing for years. hideous. millions in lobbyists.
from thomas.gov

Mr. WELLSTONE. I thank the Chair.
Mr. President, before I start, since my remarks will be critical and hard hitting, and, I believe, will marshal considerable evidence for my point of view about this financial modernization act –and I rise to speak in strong opposition to S. 900–I congratulate Senator GRAMM for his political skill. I do not mean this in a cynical way. Cynicism is not my style; it is not the way I approach public service. He has been very skillful in his work, and as a Senator, I pay my respects to his considerable ability.
I rise in strong opposition to S. 900, the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999. S. 900 would aggravate a trend towards economic concentration that endangers not only our economy, but also our democracy.
S. 900 would make it easier for banks, securities firms, and insurance companies to merge into gigantic new conglomerates that would dominate the U.S. financial industry and the U.S. economy.
Mr. President, this is the wrong kind of modernization at the wrong time. Modernization of the existing confusing patchwork of laws, regulations, and regulatory authorities would be a good thing, but that’s not what this legislation is about. S. 900 is really about accelerating the trend towards massive consolidation of the financial sector.
This is the wrong kind of modernization because it fails to put in place adequate regulatory safeguards for these new financial giants the failure of which could jeopardize the entire economy. It’s the wrong kind of modernization because taxpayers could be stuck with the bill if these conglomerates become “too big to fail.”
This is the wrong kind of modernization because it fails to protect consumers. It allows banks, insurance companies and brokerage houses to share personal information about consumers’ credit history, investments, health treatments, and buying habits. It weakens requirements for banks to invest in their own communities. It will result in higher fees for many customers and price gouging of the unwary. And it will squeeze credit for small businesses and rural America.
…..
Global financiers are given the green light for ever-greater concentration of power. Few remember the reason for those firewalls: to curtail the spread of the sort of panic from one financial segment to another that helped lead to the Great Depression. But today’s lust for global giantism has swept aside the voices of prudence.
And what about the lessons of the Savings and Loan Crisis? The Garn-St Germain Act of 1982 allowed thrifts to expand their services beyond basic home loans. Only seven years later taxpayers were tapped for a multibillion dollar bailout.
I’m afraid we’re running the same kind of risks with S. 900. These financial conglomerates may well be tempted to run greater risks, knowing that taxpayers will come to their rescue if things go bad. In a letter to me earlier this week, Professor Bob Auerbach of the LBJ School wrote, “Taxpayers should be notified that [S. 900] substantially increases their risk on the $2.8 trillion in federally insured deposits for which they are liable.”
…
And what about the lessons of the Asian crisis? Just recently, the financial press was crowing about the inadequacies of Asian banking systems. Now we’re considering a bill that would make our banking system more like theirs. The much-maligned cozy relationships between Asian banks, brokers, insurance companies and commercial firms are precisely the kind of “crony capitalism” that S. 900 would promote.
If we want to locate the causes of the Asian crisis, I think we have to look at the reckless liberalization of capital markets that led to unbalanced development and made these economies so vulnerable to investor panic in the first place. The IMF and other multilateral financial institutions failed to understand how dangerous and destabilizing financial deregulation can be without first putting appropriate safeguards in place.
World Bank Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote last year about the Asian crisis: “The rapid growth and large influx of foreign investment created economic strain. In addition, heavy foreign investment combined with weak financial regulation to allow lenders in many Southeast Asian countries to rapidly expand credit, often to risky borrowers, making the financial system more vulnerable. Inadequate oversight, not over-regulation, caused these problems. Consequently, our emphasis should not be on deregulation, but on finding the right regulatory regime to reestablish stability and confidence.” We claim to have learned our lessons from the crisis in Asia, but I’m not so sure we have.
So why on Earth are we doing this? And why now? For whose benefit is this legislation being passed? Financial services firms argue that consolidation is necessary for their survival. They claim they need to be as large and diversified as foreign firms in order to compete in the global marketplace. But the U.S. financial industry is already dominant across the globe, and in recent years has been quite profitable. I see no crisis of competitiveness.
….
I don’t see very much protection for consumers in S. 900, either. Banks that have always offered safe, federally insured deposits will have every incentive to lure their customers into riskier investments. Last year, for example, NationsBank paid $7 million to settle charges that it misled bank customers into investing in risky bonds through a securities affiliate that it set up with Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. S. 900 makes nominal attempts to address these problems, but in the end I am afraid this legislation is an invitation to fraud and abuse.
….
In reality, S. 900 reflects the same priority of interests as financial consolidation itself. It offers a little something for everybody in the financial services industry. It is a Santa’s wish list for the big banks. It gives enough to securities firms and the insurance industry to keep them on board. But it basically has nothing to offer for low-income families, nothing for rural and minority communities, and very little for consumers.
This should not be surprising. I don’t think it is a mere coincidence that finance, insurance, and real estate spend more than any other industries on congressional campaigns and lobbying on Capitol Hill. This is a reformer’s dream issue. There is no one-to-one correlation, of course; their influence is felt at a systemic level. And I have congratulated some of my colleagues on their political skill. But I do not think it is a coincidence that the finance, insurance, and real estate interests spend more than any other industries on congressional campaigns and on lobbying Capitol Hill. Last year, they shelled out more than $200 million on lobbying activities, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and they have made more than $150 million in campaign contributions since 1996.
….
The bigger these financial conglomerates get, the more influence they have over public policy choices. The bigger they get, the more money they will have to spend on political campaigns. The bigger they get, the more lobbyists they will be able to amass on Capitol Hill. And the bigger they get, the more weight they will carry in the media.
I am going to repeat that.
The bigger these financial conglomerates get, the more influence they are going to have over public policy choices. The bigger they get, the more money they will have to spend on political campaigns. The bigger they get, the more lobbyists they will have to amass on Capitol Hill. And the bigger the more weight they will carry in the media.

cheneyco provided the nail in the coffin.

Posted by: annie | Sep 11 2008 5:17 utc | 25

@25: jesus, annie, no wonder they crashed him.
and the spitzer op-ed provides the context for his timely prosecution.
and sarah appeals to the lowest common denominator, triggering effective preconditioned responses in the half-awake electorate.

Posted by: Lizard | Sep 11 2008 5:43 utc | 27

Thanks for posting Wellstone’s speech to the Senate, Annie. He’s someone for whom I could have voted. There are very few like him, if any, left, at least in the Senate. Obama is no Wellstone…not even close. Obama is just another Clinton. He’s the other side of the same coin. He’s the tag team partner of the Rethugs in this charade of a wrestling match where the outcome is predetermined, and we take the fall. The parties no longer represent us, if they ever did, instead they represent the Plutocracy, as they represented the Oligarchy in Madison’s day.
Maxcrat, I will not engage in exceptionalism when it comes to Clinton merely because he ran on the Democratic ticket. He has no party affiliation. His allegiance is to the power of the Plutocracy. The arm band is merely aesthetic. I mean, Hillary was a Goldwater Girl once upon a time.
Dan, I used to think that about Carter until I read Howard Zinn, who backs his implications up with solid, irrefutable facts. Here’s a taste of what I mean.

The presidency of Jimmy Carter, covering the years 1977 to 1980, seemed an attempt by one part of the Establishment, that represented in the Democratic party, to recapture a disillusioned citizenry. But Carter, despite a few gestures toward black people and the poor, despite talk of “human rights” abroad, remained within the historic political boundaries of the American system, protecting corporate wealth and power, maintaining a huge military machine that drained the national wealth, allying the United States with right-wing tyrannies abroad.
Carter seemed to be the choice of that international group of powerful influence-wielders—the Trilateral Commission. Two founding members of the commission, according to the Far Eastern Economic Review—David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski—thought Carter was the right person for the presidential election of 1976 given that “the Watergate-plagued Republican Party was a sure loser…”
Carter’s job as President, from the point of view of the Establishment, was to halt the rushing disappointment of the American people with the government, with the economic system, with disastrous military ventures abroad. In his campaign, he tried to speak to the disillusioned and angry. His strongest appeal was to blacks, whose rebellion in the late sixties was the most frightening challenge to authority since the labor and unemployed upsurges in the thirties.
His appeal was “populist”—that is, he appealed to various elements of American society who saw themselves beleaguered by the powerful and wealthy. Although he himself was a millionaire peanut grower, he presented himself as an ordinary American farmer. Although he had been a supporter of the Vietnam war until its end, he presented himself as a sympathizer with those who had been against the war, and he appealed to many of the young rebels of the sixties by his promise to cut the military budget.
In a much-publicized speech to lawyers, Carter spoke out against the use of the law to protect the rich. He appointed a black woman, Patricia Harris, as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and a black civil rights veteran, Andrew Young, as ambassador to the United Nations. He gave the job of heading the domestic youth service corps to a young former antiwar activist, Sam Brown.
His most crucial appointments, however, were in keeping with the Trilateral Commission report of Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, which said that, whatever groups voted for a president, once elected “what counts then is his ability to mobilize support from the leaders of key institutions.” Brzezinski, a traditional cold war intellectual, became Carter’s National Security Adviser. His Secretary of Defense, Harold Brown, had, during the Vietnam war, according to the Pentagon Papers, “envisaged the elimination of virtually all the constraints under which the bombing then operated.” His Secretary of Energy, James Schlesinger, as Secretary of Defense under Nixon, was described by a member of the Washington press corps as showing “an almost missionary drive in seeking to reverse a downward trend in the defense budget.” Schlesinger was also a strong proponent of nuclear energy.
His other cabinet appointees had strong corporate connections. A financial writer wrote, not long after Carter’s election: “So far, Mr. Carter’s actions, commentary, and particularly his Cabinet appointments, have been highly reassuring to the business community.” Veteran Washington correspondent Tom Wicker wrote: “The available evidence is that Mr. Carter so far is opting for Wall Street’s confidence.”
Carter did initiate more sophisticated policies toward governments that oppressed their own people. He used United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young to build up good will for the United States among the black African nations, and urged that South Africa liberalize its policies toward blacks. A peaceful settlement in South Africa was necessary for strategic reasons; South Africa was used for radar tracking systems. Also, it had important U.S. corporate investments and was a critical source of needed raw materials (diamonds, especially). Therefore, what the United States needed was a stable government in South Africa; the continued oppression of blacks might create civil war.
The same approach was used in other countries—combining practical strategic needs with the advancement of civil rights. But because the chief motivation was practicality, not humanity, there was a tendency toward token changes—as in Chile’s release of a few political prisoners. When Congressman Herman Badillo introduced in Congress a proposal that required the U.S. representatives to the World Bank and other international financial institutions to vote against loans to countries that systematically violated essential rights, by the use of torture or imprisonment without trial, Carter sent a personal letter to every Congressman urging the defeat of this amendment. It won a voice vote in the House, but lost in the Senate.
Under Carter, the United States continued to support, all over the world, regimes that engaged in imprisonment of dissenters, torture, and mass murder: in the Philippines, in Iran, in Nicaragua, and in Indonesia, where the inhabitants of East Timor were being annihilated in a campaign bordering on genocide.
The New Republic magazine, presumably on the liberal side of the Establishment, commented approvingly on the Carter policies: “. . . American foreign policy in the next four years will essentially extend the philosophies developed … in the Nixon-Ford years. This is not at all a negative prospect…. There should be continuity. It is part of history….”
Carter had presented himself as a friend of the movement against the war, but when Nixon mined Haiphong harbor and resumed bombing of North Vietnam in the spring of 1973, Carter urged that “we give President Nixon our backing and support-whether or not we agree with specific decisions.” Once elected, Carter declined to give aid to Vietnam for reconstruction, despite the fact that the land had been devastated by American bombing. Asked about this at a press conference, Carter replied that there was no special obligation on the United States to do this because “the destruction was mutual.”
Considering that the United States had crossed half the globe with an enormous fleet of bombers and 2 million soldiers, and after eight years left a tiny nation with over a million dead and its land in ruins, this was an astounding statement.
One Establishment intention, perhaps, was that future generations see the war not as it appeared in the Defense Department’s own Pentagon Papers—as a ruthless attack on civilian populations for strategic military and economic interests—but as an unfortunate error. Noam Chomsky, one of the leading antiwar intellectuals during the Vietnam period, looked in mid-1978 at how the history of the war was being presented in the major media and wrote that they were “destroying the historical record and supplanting it with a more comfortable story… reducing ‘lessons’ of the war to the socially neutral categories of error, ignorance, and cost.”
The Carter administration clearly was trying to end the disillusionment of the American people after the Vietnam war by following foreign policies more palatable, less obviously aggressive. Hence, the emphasis on “human rights,” the pressure on South Africa and Chile to liberalize their policies. But on close examination, these more liberal policies were designed to leave intact the power and influence of the American military and American business in the world.
The renegotiation of the Panama Canal treaty with the tiny Central American republic of Panama was an example. The canal saved American companies $1.5 billion a year in delivery costs, and the United States collected $150 million a year in tolls, out of which it paid the Panama government $2.3 million dollars, while maintaining fourteen military bases in the area.
Back in 1903 the United States had engineered a revolution against Colombia, set up the new tiny republic of Panama in Central America, and dictated a treaty giving the United States military bases, control of the Panama Canal, and sovereignty “in perpetuity.” The Carter administration in 1977, responding to anti-American protests in Panama, decided to renegotiate the treaty. The New York Times was candid about the Canal: “We stole it, and removed the incriminating evidence from our history books.”
By 1977 the canal had lost military importance. It could not accommodate large tankers or aircraft carriers. That, plus the anti-American riots in Panama, led the Carter administration, over conservative opposition, to negotiate a new treaty which called for a gradual removal of U.S. bases (which could easily be relocated elsewhere in the area). The canal’s legal ownership would be turned over to Panama after a period. The treaty also contained vague language which could be the basis for American military intervention under certain conditions.
Whatever Carter’s sophistication in foreign policy, certain fundamentals operated in the late sixties and the seventies. American corporations were active all over the world on a scale never seen before. There were, by the early seventies, about three hundred U.S. corporations, including the seven largest banks, which earned 40 percent of their net profits outside the United States. They were called “multinationals,” but actually 98 percent of their top executives were Americans. As a group, they now constituted the third-largest economy in the world, next to the United States and the Soviet Union.
The relationship of these global corporations with the poorer countries had long been an exploiting one, it was clear from U.S. Department of Commerce figures. Whereas U.S. corporations in Europe between 1950 and 1965 invested $8.1 billion and made $5.5 billion in profits, in Latin America they invested $3.8 billion and made $11.2 billion in profits, and in Africa they invested $5.2 billion and made $14.3 billion in profits.
It was the classical imperial situation, where the places with natural wealth became victims of more powerful nations whose power came from that seized wealth. American corporations depended on the poorer countries for 100 percent of their diamonds, coffee, platinum, mercury, natural rubber, and cobalt. They got 98 percent of their manganese from abroad, 90 percent of their chrome and aluminum. And 20 to 40 percent of certain imports (platinum, mercury, cobalt, chrome, manganese) came from Africa.
Another fundamental of foreign policy, whether Democrats or Republicans were in the White House, was the training of foreign military officers. The Army had a “School of the Americas” in the Canal Zone, from which thousands of military leaders in Latin America had graduated. Six of the graduates, for instance, were in the Chilean military junta that overthrew the democratically elected Allende government in 1973. The American commandant of the school told a reporter: “We keep in touch with our graduates and they keep in touch with us.”
And yet the United States cultivated a reputation for being generous with its riches. Indeed, it had frequently given aid to disaster victims. This aid, however, often depended on political loyalty. In one six-year drought in West Africa, 100,000 Africans died of starvation. A report by the Carnegie Endowment said the Agency for International Development (AID) of the United States had been inefficient and neglectful in giving aid to nomads in the Sahel area of West Africa, an area covering six countries. The response of AID was that those countries had “no close historical, economic, or political ties to the United States.”
In early 1975 the press carried a dispatch from Washington: “Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger has formally initiated a policy of selecting for cutbacks in American aid those nations that have sided against the U.S. in votes in the United Nations. In some cases the cutbacks involve food and humanitarian relief.”
Most aid was openly military, and by 1975, the United States exported $9.5 billion in arms. The Carter administration promised to end the sale of arms to repressive regimes, but when it took office the bulk of the sales continued.
And the military continued to take a huge share of the national budget. When Carter was running for election, he told the Democratic Platform Committee: “Without endangering the defense of our nation or commitments to our allies, we can reduce present defense expenditures by about 5 to 7 billion dollars annually.” But his first budget proposed not a decrease but an increase of $10 billion for the military. Indeed, he proposed that the U.S. spend a thousand billion dollars (a trillion dollars) in the next five years on its military forces. And the administration had just announced that the Department of Agriculture would save $25 million a year by no longer giving free second helpings of milk to 1.4 million needy schoolchildren who got free meals in school.
If Carter’s job was to restore faith in the system, here was his greatest failure—solving the economic problems of the people. The price of food and the necessities of life continued to rise faster than wages were rising. Unemployment remained officially at 6 or 8 percent; unofficially, the rates were higher. For certain key groups in the population—young people, and especially young black people&8212;the unemployment rate was 20 or 30 percent.
It soon became clear that blacks in the United States, the group most in support of Carter for President, were bitterly disappointed with his policies. He opposed federal aid to poor people who needed abortions, and when it was pointed out to him that this was unfair, because rich women could get abortions with ease, he replied: “Well, as you know, there are many things in life that are not fair, that wealthy people can afford and poor people cannot.”
Carter’s “populism” was not visible in his administration’s relationship to the oil and gas interests. It was part of Carter’s “energy plan” to end price regulation of natural gas for the consumer. The largest producer of natural gas was Exxon Corporation, and the largest blocs of private stock in Exxon were owned by the Rockefeller family.
Early in Carter’s administration, the Federal Energy Administration found that Gulf Oil Corporation had overstated by $79.1 million its costs for crude oil obtained from foreign affiliates. It then passed on these false costs to consumers. In the summer of 1978 the administration announced that “a compromise” had been made with Gulf Oil in which Gulf agreed to pay back $42.2 million. Gulf informed its stockholders that “the payments will not affect earnings since adequate provision was made in prior years.”
The lawyer for the Energy Department who worked out the compromise with Gulf said it had been done to avoid a lengthy and costly lawsuit. Would the lawsuit have cost the $36.9 million dropped in the compromise? Would the government have considered letting off a bank robber without a jail term in return for half the loot? The settlement was a perfect example of what Carter had told a meeting of lawyers during his presidential campaign—that the law was on the side of the rich.
The fundamental facts of maldistribution of wealth in America were clearly not going to be affected by Carter’s policies, any more than by previous administrations, whether conservative or liberal. According to Andrew Zimbalist, an American economist writing in Le Monde Diplomatique in 1977, the top 10 percent of the American population had an income thirty times that of the bottom tenth; the top 1 percent of the nation owned 33 percent of the wealth. The richest 5 percent owned 83 percent of the personally owned corporate stock. The one hundred largest corporations (despite the graduated income tax that misled people into thinking the very rich paid at least 50 percent in taxes) paid an average of 26.9 percent in taxes, and the leading oil companies paid 5.8 percent in taxes (Internal Revenue Service figures for 1974). Indeed, 244 individuals who earned over $200,000 paid no taxes.
In 1979, as Carter weakly proposed benefits for the poor, and Congress strongly turned them down, a black woman, Marian Wright Edelman, director of the Children’s Defense Fund in Washington, pointed to some facts. One of every seven American children (10 million altogether) had no known regular source of primary health care. One of every three children under seventeen (18 million altogether) had never seen a dentist. In an article on the New York Times op-ed page, she wrote:
The Senate Budget Committee recently . .. knocked off $88 million from a modest $288 million Administration request to improve the program that screens and treats children’s health problems. At the same time the Senate found $725 million to bail out Litton Industries and to hand to the Navy at least two destroyers ordered by the Shah of Iran.
Carter approved tax “reforms” which benefited mainly the corporations. Economist Robert Lekachman, writing in The Nation, noted the sharp increase in corporate profits (44 percent) in the last quarter of 1978 over the previous year’s last quarter. He wrote: “Perhaps the President’s most outrageous act occurred last November when he signed into law an $ 18 billion tax reduction, the bulk of whose benefits accrue to affluent individuals and corporations.”
In 1979, while the poor were taking cuts, the salary of the chairman of Exxon Oil was being raised to $830,000 a year and that of the chairman of Mobil Oil to over a million dollars a year. That year, while Exxon’s net income rose 56 percent to more than $4 billion, three thousand small independent gasoline stations went out of business.
Carter made some efforts to hold onto social programs, but this was undermined by his very large military budgets. Presumably, this was to guard against the Soviet Union, but when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Carter could take only symbolic actions, like reinstituting the draft, or calling for a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics.
On the other hand, American weaponry was used to support dictatorial regimes battling left-wing rebels abroad. A report by the Carter administration to Congress in 1977 was blunt, saying that “a number of countries with deplorable records of human rights observance are also countries where we have important security and foreign policy interests.”
Thus, Carter asked Congress in the spring of 1980 for $5.7 million in credits for the military junta fighting off a peasant rebellion in El Salvador. In the Philippines, after the 1978 National Assembly elections, President Ferdinand Marcos imprisoned ten of the twenty-one losing opposition candidates; many prisoners were tortured, many civilians were killed. Still, Carter urged Congress to give Marcos $300 million in military aid for the next five years.
In Nicaragua, the United States had helped maintain the Somoza dictatorship for decades. Misreading the basic weakness of that regime, and the popularity of the revolution against it, the Carter administration continued its support for Somoza until close to the regime’s fall in 1979.
In Iran, toward the end of 1978, the long years of resentment against the Shah’s dictatorship culminated in mass demonstrations. On September 8, 1978, hundreds of demonstrators were massacred by the Shah’s troops. The next day, according to a UPI dispatch from Teheran, Carter affirmed his support for the Shah:
Troops opened fire on demonstrators against the Shah for the third straight day yesterday and President Jimmy Carter telephoned the royal palace to express support for Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlevi, who faced the worst crisis of his 37-year reign. Nine members of parliament walked out on a speech by Iran’s new premier, shouting that his hands were “stained with blood” in the crackdown on conservative Moslems and other protesters.
On December 13, 1978, Nicholas Gage reported for the New York Times:
The staff of the United States Embassy here has been bolstered by dozens of specialists flown in to back an effort to help the Shah against a growing challenge to his rule according to embassy sources.. . . The new arrivals, according to the embassy sources, include a number of Central Intelligence Agency specialists on Iran, in addition to diplomats and military personnel.
In early 1979, as the crisis in Iran was intensifying, the former chief analyst on Iran for the CIA told New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh that “he and his colleagues knew of the tortures of Iranian dissenters by Savaki, the Iranian secret police set up during the late 1950s by the Shah with help from the CIA.” Furthermore, he told Hersh that a senior CIA official was involved in instructing officials in Savaki on torture techniques.
It was a popular, massive revolution, and the Shah fled. The Carter administration later accepted him into the country, presumably for medical treatment, and the anti-American feelings of the revolutionaries reached a high point. On November 4, 1979, the U.S. embassy in Teheran was taken over by student militants who, demanding that the Shah be returned to Iran for punishment, held fifty-two embassy employees hostage.
For the next fourteen months, with the hostages still held in the embassy compound, that issue took the forefront of foreign news in the United States and aroused powerful nationalist feelings, When Carter ordered the Immigration and Naturalization Service to start deportation proceedings against Iranian students who lacked valid visas, the New York Times gave cautious but clear approval. Politicians and the press played into a general hysteria. An Iranian-American girl who was slated to give a high school commencement address was removed from the program. The bumper sticker “Bomb Iran” appeared on autos all over the country.
It was a rare journalist bold enough to point out, as Alan Richman of the Boston Globe did when the fifty-two hostages were released alive and apparently well, that there was a certain lack of proportion in American reactions to this and other violations of human rights: “There were 52 of them, a number easy to comprehend. It wasn’t like 15,000 innocent people permanently disappearing in Argentina…. They [the American hostages] spoke our language. There were 3000 people summarily shot in Guatemala last year who did not.”

Carter-Reagan-Bush: The Bipartisan Consensus

Posted by: Alicia | Sep 11 2008 12:57 utc | 29

Alicia @ 29:
Excellent article – thanks.
voting is a pretense, and it will bring just more of the same. It’s an illusion of false hope and mitigates us from hitting rock bottom, and like a drug addict, we have to hit that bottom before we can make any meaningful change. I agree, but what, given current conditions, would rock bottom look like? The American voter is increasingly looking like a separate species from her/his counterparts in other democratic states in very alarming ways, not least in terms of the amount of pure and unadulterated shit they are willing to accept as pure gold. This level of mass delusion – and a good part of that is self-delusion – cannot be sustainable without catastrophic implications for the society as a whole. I used to rant about ‘culture’ even three years ago, but that’s long gone. And as someone who was a student in London in the ominous year of 1984, when we were all cursing Thatcher as Big Brother incarnate, I can say that the Mrs T regime was a socialist paradise compared to the USA today. Still, Orwell’s record as a prophet is better than Nostradamus: he was only 24 years off in his reckoning…

Posted by: Tantalus | Sep 11 2008 13:49 utc | 31

You bring up a good point, Annie! And let me add that the GOP is more socialist on private and religious matters, whereas Democrats are more social-minded on public and economic matters. Put differently, the GOP is less libertarian on private and religious matters, whereas democrats are less libertarian-minded on public and economic matters.

Posted by: Cynthia | Sep 11 2008 15:09 utc | 33

I spend a fair few months a year in Perth, Western Australia. We have a home there. We have several homes there. We rent them to people. Its a boom town. A gold rush town. Dripping with money—or should I say: debit. Let me give you a picture of some of my neighbours in one of the choicer suburbs: Mt. Lawley. Not one—some. Just because a man lives in a big house, with a couple of SUV’s parked in the driveway together with a power speed boat. Just because a man has his own swimming pool and a couple of Rottweiler’s to patrol it. Just because his kids get taken to school each morning by a uniformed courier. Just because he has heavies in black suits coming and going all day and late into the night. Just because he totally avoids, ignores and bears contempt towards his neighbours does not mean he is only playing the rôle of a successful businessman-entrepreneur and law abiding citizen. Even a cursory glance (if you should ever manage to get one) will tell you he is very strange and somebody you would do well to avoid at all costs. Stay out of his way. Don’t get mixed up with him in any circs. To most of us, like myself, who read about the U.S. in the newspapers. Who watch about it on TV. Who go to websites like this and trade views about it—and who from time to time fly to the US for business or to see relatives there it is to our minds very much like this strange and menacing neighbour of ours I’ve just described. The feeling is one of great unease. That here is a country that is very strange, odd, abnormal—even dangerous and a place that most other nations would do well to avoid at all costs. But cannot.

Posted by: Spyware | Sep 11 2008 17:03 utc | 35

The US election this time round, is, my friends, a full blown parallel, fictitious reality.
It is a TV soap, or narrative the college types would say, with audience participation.
Hopefully, it will show Americans, and others, firstly, that politicians have no beliefs of their own, and that their own honor, probity, wisdom, knowledge, intelligence, is immaterial. They simply do what they or their advisors feel is most appropriate or popular within the position they are occupying.
That might be supporting free medical drugs and condemning rape; or it might be green energy or less taxes – anything, resting on their perception of popular opinion, lowest common denominator thereof.
They are figureheads, fawning flunkeys, low level personalities concerned only with one thing – potential votes. They want to win in these dumb contests, and that makes them even more pliable. All this particularly so in an implicit, and now openly, one party system, which maintains a division to create the illusion of choice and ‘belonging.’
It is a slice n dice marketing game, one shoe or tire company trying to be cooler than another. Naturally, many of the spokesmen, pols, are at least somewhat sincere, it is contrary to human nature to have no allegiances, to not believe anything one says is stressful and can’t be kept up in the long run. And just like for Joe and Mary 6, their opinions, stances, positions, are formed by what others tell them. They need friends, allies, support, admiration, feed-in to continue.
Saddam used to get 98% of the vote. Saak got less (that is mandatory!) – 96% if I recall correctly. In the US, and say France (both Republics), at the end there are two candidates who each get half of the 96. Big deal.
Secondly, that the media (particularly TV) are not hapless goons chasing audiences (though that counts) but part of the ruler, or elite, etc. class or group, depending on one’s preferred terminology – no matter how independent they look on paper – is evident.
They hold the key for swaying, manipulating or forming public opinion, day in day out, as Americans and others spend *a full time job* in viewing time, on the average. Reality is what is presented on the TV, that’s all folks.
Their power is so tremendous they keep it hidden, downplay it, they prefer a low profile, occult control is very effective… They like to moan about revenues, explaining they have to appeal to all, giving the old ‘balanced viewpoint’ shit, multiplying minor initiatives to keep ppl watching, and playing the classical role of the middle-man. (_We report, you decide._)
Their interest is in being the controlling arm of the financial and military elites, but sub rosa, always keeping clean hands, a respectable, often bemusedly puzzled, entirely fake attitude, outside of the arena, neutral, etc. They play both sides without difficulty, because of their stranglehold. They are completely unprincipled, all of them, and only always sway towards the winner, as that is where their bread and butter lies. They create the join between the public and the elites, coordinating it from A to Z.

Posted by: Tangerine | Sep 12 2008 15:52 utc | 37

@37
I have to say that I agree with what you write, but have this sinking feeling that it really doesn’t matter what we think, or believe. this is real, this is now and way too many people are content to play the game, watch the show, cheer for “their” guy or gal. the PTB have been careful enough to keep those that count comfortable and beholding. There can not be any change until life becomes unbearable for a lot of people and it has to touch the lesser nobles too…not just the serfs.
what we are seeing over the last 7 years or so is merely a bunch of extremely crude and greedy people taking their turn at the trough….the country bumpkins of the world if you will. those who use the wrong fork for dessert and stick the napkin into their collar. I suspect they are being pushed out by the serious people and being replaced by someone with a little more class and who won’t argue in front of the servants.
at any rate, there really is nothing any of us can do about the situation as it is. If we were to gain any traction among our fellow slaves we would soon be neutralised, in one way or another. If anyone were foolish enough to try violence you can be sure they would go down very quickly. Our fellow citizens would heartily cheer the executions and really have come to love the tough rogue cops brought into our culture by Rambo, Dirty Harry, and the vigilante played by Charles Bronson. How we cheer torture and regularly call for turning some distant place into glass.
lest anyone think I am an America hater I must confess that I find these sentiments throughout Europe as well as my limited travels to other foreign lands. too bad that band of monkeys that developed into homo sapiens did not come from the bonobos…screwing is really a lot more fun than killing when you get down to it.

Posted by: dan of steele | Sep 12 2008 18:05 utc | 39