The Bush-Cheney-Rove Legacy - the gift that keeps giving.

To the credit of Great Wealth, we are on the eve of a "close" mid-term election. We are also witnessing the end of representative republican democracy (a poor means of conducting government, but which is superior to all alternative forms).

Unprecedented amounts of money (during a depression!) are pouring into this mid-term election. Because of a Supreme Court appointment by the previous administration, by one Judge's vote, we now have a system which permits corporations, and unidentified "persons", to electioneer. We have no idea who is funding the political ads, and MOST of them are factually misleading.

This de-regulation and privatization of public elections will live in infamy along other Bush era catastrophes:

(1) Appointing inexperienced and "political" judges.

(2) Tax cuts to the Super Rich - with ZERO economic benefit for anyone else.  The fact that the rich are richer while the middle class has collapsed, is the single achievement of the neo-Conservative take-over.

(3) Changing the laws so that "investment bankers" could destroy banking system. Glass-Steagal Act passed in the 1930's prevented banks from taking savings and putting money into investments with risk. The "new" (actually resurrected 1920's products) mortgage-backed securities, negative default swaps, and fraudulent investment "products" (literally toxic), destroyed the financial system.

(4) Oct 2008 tax payer bail-out for Wall Street -- unprecedented transfer of the risks to the public, providing yet another splurge of billion-dollar commissions to the bankers who had destroyed their institutions.

(5) Selling WMD to Iraq, then ignoring the UN inspection and attacking Iraq without a plan, leaving us with an un-winnable war, and the spectacle of rising religious intolerance and mass migration of refugees.

(6) Ignoring bin Laden in Afghanistan - repeatedly, and in spite of his large family, known relationships, and his control of a network of
(7) Ignoring terrorism until after 9/11,
(8) Ignoring deterioration of infrastructure with results such as the Katrina disaster,
(9) denying Global warming,
(10) destroying the civil justice system,
(11) making our schools the most expensive and least effective among nations,
(12) making our health care the most expensive and least effective among nations.
(13) starting with an income surplus, creating the biggest debt in history.

(14) Creating a hostility to independent journalists: Is it coincidence that in the Bush decade, journalists were increasingly singled out and killed by organized crime?  This global rise of tyranny reached its apex in 2009, with the murder of 76 journalists killed in connection with their jobs. Organized crime and right-wing militias became the biggest threats. After Obama took over, the murder rate plummeted. In 2010, the death toll was down 25% to 57.  Reporters without Borders, annual report from Paris.


(15) destroying the military - exhausting the Forces, and crippling the National Guard concept by pulling the citizen-soldiers out of their civilian employment for year-long war duty tours.

(16) privatizing the military and support services - Halliburton black no-bid "contracts" which guarantee huge profits to short-term fortunes while soldiers facing more risks have less to gain.

(17) Indifference to infrastructure - what utilities were not "sold" with corrupt discounts to private enterprises which promptly raised rates, were left languishing without maintenance and repair. Bridges, dams, highways, parks, water and power are all collapsing and deteriorating.
 
For the past couple years, many people have been working on this large hole which the Bush-Cheney-Rove Enron Halliburton cabal placed us into. 

Selected for Prosecution: Spitzer, Scruggs, Lerach - Conspiracy and Coincidence

After the shock of Dickie Scruggs' guilty plea for bribery, Eliot Spitzer's call-girl denoument, and the sentencing of Bill Lerach to prison for what was essentially capping, it is necessary to evaluate the implications. Is it coincidence that all three of these lawyers were "consumer advocates"? All three have caused real pain to the Fortune 500 billionaire CEO oligarchs. Now, they have been rendered harmless. Coincidence?

Half-way through the year 2008, as the Bush-Cheney-Rove term is expiring, we see the results of 7 years of prosecutorial efforts by the Executive Department coming to surface. They are now celebrating a trifecta in their twist on "tort reform".

You recall the Bush-Cheney-Rove appointment of foxes to guard the henhouse gates, the latitude given to the Lays and their Enrons (and other stratospherically-salaried CEOs), the purging of the Federal Attorneys General, the refusal to protect consumers, the failure to enforce environmental standards. Now add the selected prosecutions of Eliot Spitzer, Dickie Scruggs, and Bill Lerach which have all come to flower in the last year. Of course, all three of these successful advocates for public interests really did commit wrongdoing. But there is a quality of bogus-ness to the raft of "charges" they faced.

My instincts are to give little weight to Conspiracy theories, and to chalk up many events, without condemnation, to the arbitrary eruption of Coincidence. Is it just coincidence that three of our most powerful consumer attorneys are now neutralized?

There are three reasons to re-visit this question.

THE TOBACCO CASES. I am one who studied the "conspiracy" of Tobacco. I documented the "sweet heart" suits in 9 States in which Tobacco Companies paid a drunk incompetent lawyer (nine of them!) to sue themselves and obtain victories appealed to the Supreme Court of each State so that they would have "precedence" against any plaintiff.

THE JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY. I also documented 20 years of publications by the John Birch Society accurately reporting the misfeasance of selected Negro men and Jews, while failing to report any of their achievements. This is racism hiding behind a veil of "truth", and it shows the invidiousness of this form of hatred.

STATE BAR PROSECUTIONS. I am also reminded of the prosecutions against me. While the State Bar has yet to disbar any attorney who counseled the pirates of Enron in pillaging the consumers of billions of dollars, the State Bar has yet to prosecute any attorney representing a criminal CEO whose depradations were enabled by hordes of lawyers who set up the off-shore shell corporations. The State Bar has gone after dozens of naive and impoverished Sole Practitioners, while ignoring the stench of the dead horse of corporate malfeasance in the profession. When I was a hungry and poor attorney just starting out, the State Bar came after me. Their "complaining witness" actually stated in Deposition that "the attorney did nothing wrong" and "I have no complaint with him". I gave the State Bar transcripts which showed that a rich attorney, Wolf Stern, had perjured himself in court. I gave the State Bar records which showed rich attorneys had joined their clients and enabled criminal CEO's to pillage the public and shareholders. The State Bar elected not to prosecute.

The point is that the Prosecutor (State Bar, or Attorney General of any State or Federal Agency) has DISCRETION for who they go after and which laws they enforce.

When Bush-Cheney-Rove hijacked the Republican Party and stole the Presidency, one of their goals was to remove the exposure of the rich to law suits brought by the victims of their Big Business concept of "opportunity". They called this effort to close the court house door, "tort reform". Not content with merely appointing unqualified judges who shared their ideology, the cabal went after the leaders of the plaintiff's bar.

I realize Spitzer, Scruggs and Lerach were all culpable. When the State Bar prosecutor went after me, after 21 hearings, financially exhausted, I gave up and compromised with them. By contrast, when Big Business went after Ralph Nader -- with prostitutes, hush-money, offers to persuade the jury with bribes -- Ralph Nader spurned their efforts. He passed that test of being a righteous man and did not compromise with the nastiness and insinuations. Many others, they really DO take the low road, they fall and deserve their fall. And I fell, because I was naive and weak.

Still, there is some significance here. It is not coincidence that the corrupted Big Business targeted the top, the most successful, the billionaire attorneys of the plaintiffs' Bar. The robber barons at the US Chamber of Commerce who were in bed with Enron, WorldCom, and Philip Morris, must be thrilled. But it is more than that. They must be seeing the return on their investment in "tort reform" -- the program of Bush in going after the people who were fighting for the rights of the oppressed.

Sabotage and Terrorism

Suppose a terrorist decides to blow something up. Say a bridge, or a building that took years to build. And he blows it up and people get injured. He would be culpable. We would not hesitate to hunt him down and hold him responsible.

Suppose a terrorist runs for Congress. And he gets elected by promising to reduce taxes and the size of Government. However, instead of reducing the size of Government, he actually reduces its regulatory functions but increases its budget. He votes so as to cut funding for the repair and maintenance of a bridge, or a building. But he increases taxes and redirects tax money into the coffers of a "capitalist" company to do nothing at great public expense. (I have to put quotation marks around ANY "private enterprise" company which is set up to take money from the Government, because any company that takes public money while pretending to be engaged in private enterprise, is a scam.)

For example, say the company operated as a "power broker" like Enron--whose "service" did nothing but increase the cost of electricity without providing any other value or producing any product whatsoever. Or like one of VP Cheney's multi-national corporations. Halliburton buys fuel oil in Iraq and sells it to the US military for more than twice as much as fuel oil costs anyone else in Iraq--another company that actually offers no service and produces no product except to expense the Government.

Anyway, your terrorist Congressman, dismantles the infrastructure of this country, each Government Department at a time, by defunding the regulators. No one inspects the bridge, no one repairs the bridge....and because of Entropy, and because earthquakes, floods and droughts occasionally do occur, pretty soon the bridge just collapses. Or buildings burn down, or for lack of Air conditioning or plumbing repairs, it just becomes unusable.

Now, are we going to hunt down this terrorist? Hold him responsible for his deliberate acts? Can we fix blame and responsibility for his Votes, his grip on our Public Purse Strings? Hunt him down and hold him responsible. Hold his "leaders" responsible. Hold his voting machines responsible?

One after another of the Bush appointees have been found to be incompetent at best, and deliberately predatory in benefiting themselves at public expense. The fact that Kenneth Lay was not only the founder of Enron but a long-time family friend of the Bushes reveals the complicity of Bush in terrorism. Another one of President Bush's relationships is with a billionaire Saudi Prince. These relationship reveal the scale of Bush's complicity with predators. It is true that the Saudi royals and the Lays are not "suicide bombers", but they are effectively WORSE in terms of the billion-dollar damage they have caused.

What we did not know about the Hidden Hand of the Marketplace

Adam Smith, a professor of Ethics, coined the phrase "the hidden hand of the marketplace" to explain how the price for goods was set. He had observed that the activities of the wealthy were subsidized by the State, while the middle and lower classes were hardly supported at all in their activities, many of which were suppressed. THE WEALTH OF NATIONS. Anyway, the West and East India Trading Company has come a long way since 1776.

While Adam Smith did not actually invent "capitalism" or "socialism", and he did not advocate either a "free" market nor a "regulated" one, his description of the dynamics of human interaction has stood the test of Aristotles' unities -- time, place and action. And it appears now that we will always have both competition and paternalism, and both have their place. However, Adam Smith did not foresee the toll which Marketing would charge on the Market. Today, Marketing is an unrelenting, widespread, brilliant, and ruthless force. And it will have its way with all Sources of information -- it will corrupt the Government purse, violate the trust of Academia, and suck the will out of the Professions -- all on the way to influencing the mass consumer.

For example, Enron produced no product and offered no service, and yet it became the seventh largest corporate enterprise in the United States -- it positioned itself as a "marketing" entity, buying paper choses, artfully driving up the price, and then on the sale of the same thing at a higher price, claiming a "profit" for itself. Or rather, for its inner circle of pirates.

Did any economist remark the rapid, widespread and illegitimate electrical power market distortion? Did a single corporate lawyer report this violation of legal principle -- outright deception, fictitious partnering with fictitious off-shore entities, and fraud are all crimes the lawyers knew were occurring. Did a single government regulatory body -- across municipal, State, and Federal jurisdictions -- strip the pirates of their booty? The demise of Enron occurred as a result of the use of its "cover" to steal, and it collapsed internally. It even sought the protection of "bankruptcy" proceedings -- in other words, using legal cover and pretensions to the very end, to hide its own 60 billion-dollar fraud.

Marketing is wonderful. However, it is no longer "the music man" trumpeting instruments to keep the kids out of pool halls. Now it is bent and smart. Advertising is now a nasty piece of work devoted to taking the "choice" out of choice. For example, the Drug Industry: I used to love Merck. Just think of all those drugs they make that reduce our pain and heal our afflictions. Unfortunately, as the Vioxx litigation has brought to light, the Big Drug companies devote more billions to marketing than they do to developing new drugs. The "new drugs" they are making are not helping us -- they are killing us. Their new drugs are mostly for the side-effects their old drugs are giving us. The best "cough medicine" on the billion-dollar market, provides a little less help than a glass of water for a child with a cold.

So I am just getting to this Prediction: As Marketing takes over the Web, which it is and will, it will actively seek to prevent true facts from emerging. Google anything you want, the sites that will pop up are the ones that pay Google. Search engines will be bought and paid for as marketing tools. Nothing will survive which does not profit someone. This is not about food and shelter, this is about power.

Why People Hate Americans

The American People are entitled to feel aggrieved by the fact that millions of people in South America, India, Europe, Australia, Asia, and the Middle East (have I missed a continent?) now despise us. After all, most of us are simply the direct descendants of People From There.

There must be some basis for what is now almost universal hatred for Americans so extreme as to draw sympathy even for wealthy Arab syndicates and obviously pathetic "suicide bombers".

Is the hatred because "foreigners" hold The American People responsible for what the American Government does?

Foreigners of course have NO VOTE in American Elections. Apparently they have heard that The American People have this power, this "election" to choose the leaders in a Government limited by a Constitution which enfranchises the governed.

Perhaps The American People are directly responsible for the things done by those acting in their name.

In India, it was the US Government which forced Indians to buy electric power produced by a private company which dramatically raised the cost of their electricity. In Bolivia, it was the US Government which forced the residents of Cochabamba to buy water from a private company which dramatically raised the cost of their water. In Iraq, it was the US Government which took over security functions and "public utilities" and turned them over wholesale to private "American" [actually "off-shore"] companies.

The American People are paying the costs, but receive none of the credit, none of the profit, and none of the benefits. Our leaders have "privatized" the benefits at the expense of the Government.

The American People can see it domestically: In California, huge profits from selling electrical power produced at Government expense were "gamed" by private interests. Californians have been as helpless as Bolivians to do anything about it, but Californians do know it happened -- they see it every time they pay quadrupled electrical bills. Even "voting" -- throwing out Governor Davis and replacing him with Governor Schwartzenegger -- although it provided a refreshing and entertaining hope, did not change the "net" result. Off-shore private corporations -- run by executives who pocketed billions at taxpayer expense -- had already executed their planned "privatized" piracy.

However, it is hard for The American People to appreciate it when the same piracy happens in other parts of the world. And their own culpability is completely invisible to them -- the pressure which the US Government puts on other governments through its ministers and ambassadors on behalf of Enron, Haliburton, and "private" companies, is virtually invisible. The American People do not realize that foreigners hold the Voting Citizen responsible for the Government which plays such a major "influence" in the rest of the world.

The hatred will only increase. It will be the hatred of the increasingly disenfranchised. The hatred of people who are being taken advantage of. If a pirate jumps your ship and plunders your best stuff, and then uses it to buy things, you do not "envy" his possessions -- you believe deep down inside that what he stole remains your own.

Piracy is not a form of trade or an activity which should be encouraged. Taking over Government functions may enable a pirate to shift expenses and extract risk-free benefits, but this extraction is not the "profit" of a business. It is theft.

People hate Americans today, like never before. Why?