Jake's Word Re: Consolidation of Wealth (Fascism, Racism & Oligarchy)

[Jake Berry's response to Jack Random's "Consolidation of Wealth" - posted on Pacific Free Press 10/14/08 and reprinted below.]

The past few days I've been turning current events over in my head. I kept to returning to Plato's description of oligarchy in The Republic. Plato's experience was with the city state so his description and analysis is based on that model, but the fundamentals remain. He had seen how Athens had slipped from democracy to tyranny to oligarchy and mixtures of all of these, accompanied by periods of chaos. He was not encouraged by what he witnessed in any of these forms.

Before I could put any of my thoughts down though I received your latest: "Consolidation of Wealth." It covers the territory better than I could have hoped and goes further, it offers solutions. Indeed we have been living under increasing levels of corporate fascism since the end of World War II. The military-industrial complex should have been disassembled after the war, along with many of the foreign entanglements. Instead the government went in the other direction and extended its integration with corporate culture into all levels of society. The situation now has been allowed to fester into a global malignancy. The so-called bailout is really just a matter of the corporate masters demanding a fee from the government they purchased. Unfortunately the middle class that buys from and thus enriches corporations also pays most of the taxes so it amounts to paying the same master twice. This kind of thievery inspired the war that severed the American colonies from England.

Add to that the rise in hatred we are witnessing at political rallies. It's an old hatred. The civil rights legislation of 1965 disenfranchised the bigotry and other forms of hatred that had been an integral part of southern statecraft for 100 years. That hatred found a welcoming embrace in the Republican party which had been up until that time the party of big money – a strange and horrible price to pay for taking a step toward equality for all citizens. Until now however the hatred has remained cloaked in various disguises and given names like social conservatism and Christian fundamentalism when in fact it is neither of these things. In reality nothing has changed. The other is always met with suspicion and ultimately despised merely because it is other. Even if that other is nothing more than skin pigmentation or a name it will not be tolerated.

This is a volatile combination - multi-national corporations and ethnic hatred. It is in fact the manifestation of the very thing many Americans say they fear in the Middle-East. It is always the secretly guilty that demand the harshest punishment for the guilty. Big money plus hatred. We saw what that produced in Germany under the Nazis. And no southerner of European ancestry with a conscience forgets for a second the joy some took in hearing the news of the assassination of MLK, Jr. We live with the stains of segregation, poll taxes, and lynchings. All enforced by a combination of wealthy elite and ethnic hatred.

The question before us now is do we want to continue in a direction in which this kind of morality, by whatever name, becomes the dominant feature of American society?

This election should have been about wars of aggression, economic stagnation and human rights and at least two alternative approaches to the resolution of those problems. Instead it has become a referendum on the power of massive amounts of money, debt, and hatred. It prevents the candidates from addressing the real problems and prevents the media from asking questions regarding those problems. Perhaps that is precisely what was intended by our masters. The same ones that brought us patriotic bankruptcy and self-righteous war.

I hope, deeply and sincerely, that we will have a chance to apply some of the solutions you recommend. I would love to see them in action. Are the American people capable of taking that course or will the descent continue? The results of the election alone will not be the answer, but they will indicate whether or not we are willing to even try.

Thanks so much for continuing to keep our eyes open and focused on the real issues at a time when the appearance of reality has been co-opted as a consumer object. Rave on.


Jake Berry - Author of Brambu Drezi, Liminal Blue and other works of extraordinary lucidity.


JAZZMAN CHRONICLES. DISSEMINATE FREELY.

CONSOLIDATION OF WEALTH:
LONGTERM SOLUTIONS TO THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

By Jack Random

There is always opportunity in catastrophic events. To financier J.P. Morgan, the stock market crash of 1907 was an opportunity to consolidate wealth and power, thus undermining the antitrust and monopoly busting policies of Theodore Roosevelt.

The market crash of 1927 leading to the Great Depression paved the way for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, a legacy of responsible government regulation, social security, unemployment benefits, public works and labor rights, but it also served as an opportunity for further consolidation of corporate power and wealth.

The cataclysm of World War II exposed the dangers of imperial monarchy (Hirohito’s Japan), corporate fascism (Mussolini’s Italy) and the susceptibility of democracies to the politics of fear at a time of crisis (the rise of the Nazi Party in the German Republic), but it also gave rise to the powerful and corrupting force of the military-industrial complex.

Over the years leading to the current economic crisis we have forgotten altogether too many lessons of the past. We have forgotten that the innovations of the New Deal were not the temporary fixes of an ailing marketplace but systemic reforms designed to prevent the conglomeration of circumstance that inevitably resulted in past cataclysms from engulfing us again.

Instead of building on the foundation of the New Deal we have gradually allowed our corporate behemoths to tear it apart brick by brick until even Social Security and Medicare are openly challenged by politicians pretending to represent their voting constituents.

Meantime, the consolidation of wealth has marched on unabated and its power to dominate the political process has been zealously protected by both major political parties and the most anti-democratic Supreme Court in modern history – a court that has repeatedly struck down meaningful campaign finance reform on the specious constitutional grounds that corporate contributions are protected “free speech.” (This from justices who never tire condemning “legislating from the bench.”)

We would do well to recall that the ongoing federal bailout of private financial institutions began with those deemed “too big to fail”: Bear Stearns and American International Group. How sweet it must be for corporations to reach that lofty status without the stigma of a government sponsored enterprise – the designation that so offends John McCain and his Free Marketeer compadres when discussing mortgage giant Fannie Mae (originally a government agency created in the New Deal) and its cohort Freddie Mac.

Beneath the radar, while we were dazzled by the hundreds of billions floating away in the Treasury’s bailout package, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler were also awarded bailout funds for a bargain $25 billion – presumably too big to fail. Now GM is poised to gobble up Chrysler (if they don’t someone else will) and the Big Three will be down to two.

It was the Free Marketeers who cried out loudest against the bailout yet it was their philosophy (embraced by both major parties in an unrivaled if under-publicized era of bipartisan agreement) of corporate free reign and the dismantling of market regulation that led to the breakdown. The Marketeers made a great show of condemning what they like to call corporate socialism (they voted against it before they voted for it) but what is happening today is by no means socialistic (it’s a bailout, not a buyout); it is rather the deadly combination of runaway capitalism and corporate fascism.

What else can you call a system that allows corporate giants to reap unconscionable profits on a foundation of imaginary assets and when the time comes to pay the piper, they reach out their hands to go on the public dole: Too big to fail?

Few would deny that the system is rigged and that the government is controlled by corporate interests: That, ladies and gentlemen, is a textbook definition of Mussolini’s fascist state.

Despite the dramatic surge on Monday’s opening session, most Americans are coming to terms with the fact that we are only at the beginning stage of a great upheaval. The phenomenal rise in the marketplace may signal that the hemorrhaging has been abated but the crisis is not over.

It is a clear indication, however, that governments remain a powerful force in the global economy – even more powerful than the corporate conglomerates they are called upon to rescue. That power is fortified by the ability of nations to achieve international cooperation and coordination at a time of crisis.

It is critical in the days and years ahead that governments retain that power and achieve greater independence from corporate influence.

The crisis in the financial markets required a massive infusion of capital – an infusion so massive it could not be provided by any single nation. But the broader economic crisis goes much deeper than the housing bubble and mismanagement of the financial sector.

What led us to the edge of economic collapse were the policies of free market fundamentalism. It created ever-larger international corporations answerable to no one. It decimated government regulatory authority. It all but destroyed organized labor by allowing corporations to exploit work forces anywhere in the world where labor rights and living wages did not exist. In its zeal for ever-increasing profits, it created financial assets where none in fact existed. It created a pyramid Ponzi scheme where those at the top could escape with obscene profits before the inevitable implosion.

In its short-term, profit oriented vision it neglected to see the obvious: That by stealing wages and benefits from ordinary workers they were destroying the foundation of the real economy. They were destroying the middle class, the working people, the consumers of goods.

In September 2001, after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, our president told us to go shopping and have faith that those in power would do the right thing. We now know how bad that advice was.

While we whipped out our credit cards as if it was an act of patriotism, our president committed us to perpetual war in two nations, neither of which had attacked us (no, Al Qaeda was not an agent of the Afghan government).

Whatever your opinion on the wars, that strategic decision left us weaker both politically and economically. The current crisis in the financial markets, however it is resolved in the short term, will also leave us weaker (by at least a trillion dollars and counting) and therefore less able to deal with the next crisis.

If we do not take the necessary measures to ensure it will not happen again, it inevitably will – and next time it will be much worse.

Rebuilding the government’s regulatory authority is necessary but it is not enough.

Public works (reconstructing bridges, roads, public buildings, dams, mass transit) to put the people to work is essential but it is not enough.

Tax relief and incentives for working people and small businesses, as well as extended unemployment benefits, is important but it is not enough.

Removing corporate control of the electoral process is critical but it too is not enough.

In order to affect the systemic changes that will enable us to avert a future and inevitable collapse, we must address the role of labor in the global economy and the consolidation of wealth that unwisely places too much responsibility in too few hands.

On the one hand, we must take the lead in asserting the fundamental rights of labor on a global scale. This will require the same kind of international agreement that we have seen come together to rescue financial institutions.

Of equal importance, we must re-assert the antitrust policies that characterized the Teddy Roosevelt era. International corporations with no inherent interest in the public good should never be allowed to grow so large that they cannot be allowed to fail. That is not how the free market is intended to function.

As this financial crisis plays out, the consolidation of wealth accelerates: Wells Fargo absorbs Wachovia, Bank of America absorbs Merrill Lynch and Countrywide Financial, JP Morgan absorbs Bear Stearns, GM absorbs Chrysler, on and on.

To appreciate the dangers of this consolidation (and the diminished competition that comes with it), imagine that a school decided to house all its students in a single large room: When one student catches the flu, the school shuts down.

To a large extent, that is what happened in this financial train wreck: They were all drinking from the same well, all breathing the same toxic air, all sharing the same house and they all caught the same disease.

Jazz.

JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). THE CHRONICLES HAVE BEEN POSTED ON NUMEROUS CITES OF THE WORLDWIDE WEB, INCLUDING THE ALBION MONITOR, BELLACIAO, BUZZLE, COUNTERPUNCH, DISSIDENT VOICE, THE DAILY SCARE, THE NATIONAL FREE PRESS AND PACIFIC FREE PRESS. SEE WWW.JAZZMANCHRONICLES.BLOGSPOT.COM.

OBAMA VS. MCCAIN, ROUND II: Ali Vs. The Raging Bull

By Jack Random


Against a backdrop of shifting polls favoring Barack Obama, an economic crisis and a sharp increase in personal attacks from the camp of candidate John McCain, the second presidential debate was billed as an opportunity for McCain to fight back hard and dirty.

It was supposed to be McCain’s Jake “Raging Bull” LaMotta against Obama’s “Sugar” Ray Robinson.

Obama not only lived up to his part but transcended, conjuring the image of The Greatest, floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee, but McCain came out stumbling, plenty of rage but without direction, flailing like an overmatched club fighter, holding in the clinch and hitting nothing but air.

The only surprise of the evening came early when McCain asserted that as president he would order the Treasury to purchase and renegotiate troubled mortgages, an authority embodied in the recent bailout and an idea recently floated by Hillary Clinton, Barney Frank and Obama himself.

The proposal sounded altogether too New Deal for McCain’s Free Market ideology (indeed it was the founding concept of Franklin Roosevelt’s Home Owner’s Loan Corporation) but his base supporters need not have feared. The devil is in the details: Homeowners would qualify if the could prove they were creditworthy at the time of the original loan. If they were worthy of the loans in the first place, the market would not have exploded like an over inflated balloon. Moreover, McCain’s deal is tilted to the lenders, paying full value for worthless mortgages.

It is another reminder that we cannot trust a card carrying, lifetime Free Market fundamentalist to deliver a fair deal. You wouldn’t buy a second used car from the man who already sold you a lemon.

Upon further review, McCain’s proposal was ill conceived, poorly thought out and wrought with problems – not the least of which is that it runs contrary with his philosophy of government. That McCain would even float the idea is a measure of how desperate he has become in the waning days of this campaign.

While Obama discussed his own efforts to alert the Treasury and the Federal Reserve concerning the looming crisis in unsecured mortgages, McCain moved on to his villains of choice: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation). He ushered us back to 2005 and the curious case of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act sponsored by Senators Chuck Hagel, John Sununu and Elizabeth Dole. The bill was not a serious legislative effort as it contained a poison pill: provisions that eliminated numerous governmental regulatory functions and replaced them with a regulatory corporation (the fox guarding the henhouse).

It died in committee as intended and John McCain signed onto it months later as political cover for the crisis to come.

It is worth noting that Fannie Mae was originally a government institution founded by the New Deal. Had it remained so, lacking an incentive to inflate profits by nefarious means, Fannie Mae would have stood as a firewall against the crisis in the mortgage markets. Instead, it yielded to the pressures of unregulated greed.

We would do well to return Fannie Mae to its original form and purpose.

Choosing not to linger on his legislative foresight, McCain sprinted on to familiar ground: His rant against legislative earmarks, curiously omitting the usual reference to the DNA of grizzlies. (It turns out he voted for that legislation.) Obama replied that while he agreed with earmark reform, it would have no impact on the current economic crisis.

Obama laid out his priorities: Energy first, Health Care second and Education third. McCain said he could do it all. Incredibly, he was willing to freeze all spending and cut Social Security but the one thing he would never cut was military expenditures.

Obama described a vision of a green economy and public works to rebuild our infrastructure, creating millions of good jobs, while McCain extolled the virtues of small business and nuclear energy.

On the theory that if you repeat an assertion loud and long enough people will eventually believe it, McCain charged that Obama would raise taxes (like Herbert Hoover!) and Obama made it clear that he would lower taxes for all but the very richest of Americans.

Obama advocated health care as a right of each and every citizen while McCain, who appeared never to have given it a thought, declared it was a responsibility. Obama noted that de-regulation would do for health care what it did for the financial markets.

On foreign policy, Obama advanced a doctrine of diplomacy, alliance building and moral responsibility while McCain invoked Teddy Roosevelt and seemed to suggest that “victory” on any terms, at any cost, was the only objective worthy of an imperial nation.

One should note that Teddy Roosevelt, in addition to his military heroics, was a trustbuster and an advocate of strong government regulation at a time of runaway greed.

On every front, on every issue of importance to the American people, only one man on the stage at Belmont University showed the breadth and depth of knowledge, the even temperament and precise thinking required to be President of the United States in the troubling times ahead.

When McCain conjured the memory of Herbert Hoover, the antithesis of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, it was not Obama we pictured; it was McCain.

When the final bell sounded and the contest came to a close, the Raging Bull quickly retreated to the privacy of his dressing room (presumably to treat his wounds). His opponent lingered, sharing the moment with the people who witnessed it, enjoying a sense of common cause.

He had gone the distance and he was still dancing. It was a performance worthy of The Greatest of All Time: Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.

None but the most hardened loyalist was surprised with the verdict.

Jazz.

JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). THE CHRONICLES HAVE BEEN POSTED ON NUMEROUS CITES OF THE WORLDWIDE WEB, INCLUDING THE ALBION MONITOR, BELLACIAO, BUZZLE, COUNTERPUNCH, DISSIDENT VOICE, THE NATIONAL FREE PRESS AND PACIFIC FREE PRESS. SEE WWW.JAZZMANCHRONICLES.BLOGSPOT.COM.

NOTE: DISSEMINATE FREELY.

NOTE: I have noticed some strange happenings on the Web. Formerly open posting sites have become proprietary. Links are taken down. Restrictions are enacted. Others have noted such things as well. Have you? Has censorship come to the free media?

Mansel: Poetry Corner

Limed In Restraints


from the beginning it was a prayer through
clenched hands
a beaten mouth so foreign to the words
as to wild the myrrh
for so blinds a man thus comes the vision
of a sense once used for locating the light

blood and rage, only standing still, eroding
only what was a part of the greater good

that a downturned eye could last in a room
of allegiance is to set fire to a ravine where
the many have gathered to follow the few

I put my hands to the window and began to
tremble, the passage of Purgatory to the
burden of the families of a criminal,

government becoming the intercourse upon
which we joust on the way down to the
rocks below



- Chris Mansel

Jake's Word: Brand America

As America continues to become a brand name citizens disappear, their
only value deriving from how much they are able to consume.
Mindlessness, Empty stimulation from a billion screens assaulting all
senses at all times everywhere. There is only noise where humans used
to be. Vacuity. Vanity of vanities. Every mouth is open. Every head is
empty. No one left alive can hear the scraping wind. Outside is gone
all to satellite waves and wires. No body but static.

Mansel: Poetry Corner

On An Island (for Jake Berry)


Robinson Jeffers on a loading dock,
blinded in pain takes questions from
reporters but answers in verse

"my predisposition is not to elect
but to persuade, to rise and like
the editor's note befall a certain
uncertainty, the common ailment
of life against the cliff, politics..."

his shoulders shrink and haggard
he returns to the steps from whence
he came and in a moment of clarity
the press is genuinely moved..

if not a community.


- Chris Mansel

Jake's Word Re: A New Deal for the 21st Century

[Jake Berry's response to A Jazzman Chronicle, reprinted below.]

We were talking about clarity in explanation a few days ago. Your latest makes the issues as clear as they could possibly be. The situation is grim, the solution is a bitter pill and finally, we need some reason to hope that circumstances will improve.

FDR's great gift was the gift of hope. The New Deal did not end the depression, but it gave people hope. It gave people jobs who had given up on finding work. It gave the nation focus and determination to survive. My grandfather was in the Navy when word came of FDR's death. He said the whole base fell silent and everyone wept. Can you imagine that kind of response to the death of a politician now?

Indeed, Hoover has been on our mind's lately. A man as qualified for the presidency as any that ever held the office. Yet when he needed to apply his ample intelligence to governing he stood on the premise of the absence of governing while the economy and the hopes of a vibrant nation crumbled around him, fell into shanty towns, Hoovervilles.

The failures of the Bush administration are so numerous and near absolute that they inspire hopelessness on every level. However, we can point to two major mistakes that may become the Bush legacy. First, when the sympathy of the entire planet was with us, when virtually every nation supported our need to heal and recover, the Bush administration, openly and repeatedly lied in order to instigate a war of aggression. The failure here was one of bad government. Second, while the economy slid from stagnation to recession the administration did nothing. When it became obvious that even his corporate base was in trouble, again he did nothing. This was a failure of no government at all.

It's a matter of sound judgment. When to act and when to show restraint. George W. Bush has failed as miserably as president as he has failed at everything else he has attempted to do with the exception of drunken revelry. And John McCain has voted to support him 90% of the time. What does that say about McCain's judgment? And just to make sure we understood how lousy his judgment was he nominated a vice-presidential candidate that appears to be even less capable of grasping the complexities of the office than Bush.

Obama by comparison rose to national recognition because he was a great organizer. We certainly need a bit of that right now. Since the President's oath of office demands that he uphold the Constitution, who would know better how to do that than someone who taught constitutional law for more than a decade?

Democrats and Republicans alike hesitate before the urgent demands of Bush's Treasury Secretary. Who can blame them? Their constituents pay the price for listening to Bush's lies with the loss of their jobs, their homes and their very lives.

What we need now is hope. At one time it might have been audacious to suggest that hope was the medicine. Now it seems abundantly clear. It was clear to Barack Obama years ago. If this nation has any hope, we will have to pin it on him. Not to cure our problems, but to inspire us and offer pragmatic, reasoned leadership.

The electorate needs to exercise a bit of sound judgment.

Thanks for keeping the flame alive.

Best,
Jake

[Jake Berry, Poet and author of Brambu Drezi, Liminal Blue and other works...]



JAZZMAN CHRONICLES. DISSEMINATE FREELY.



A NEW DEAL FOR THE 21ST CENTURY:
HERBERT HOOVER VERSUS FDR

By Jack Random


The economy is in meltdown. Most of us have begun to recognize how serious the crisis is. Inaction – the dominant policy of the Bush administration – is no longer viable. The institutions of finance are one or two steps from wholesale implosion. Even the corporate cheerleading squad sometimes known as the mainstream media is using the D word: Depression.

We know how we got here: Runaway capitalism, dismantled government regulation, unbridled greed. Twenty years of conservative economic theory applied to the American economy. Twenty years ignoring the lessons of the Savings and Loan Crisis, the Enron scandal, the west coast energy crisis, the technology bust, on and on.

We know that the government is largely to blame. We know therefore that the government is unlikely to accept what must be done to right the balance and set our economy back on firm ground. They would prefer to write a check from the American taxpayers and pass the buck to future generations but the threat of systemic collapse will not go away so easily.

The Bush administration shamelessly pimped the concept of home ownership to every working man and woman in America at a time when real wages were down and debt was rising. They enabled the markets to finance home mortgages through accounting tricks – apparently never thinking that the bills would come due on their watch. They replaced an economy that once produced real value with an Enron Ponzi Scheme.

The question becomes: Where do we go from here?

On the short term, an infusion of capital is required. We can all agree that the heart of the current collapse is the housing market. We can agree that millions of Americans were given loans that they could not afford and that should never have been given.

The short-term solution is to make those loans good by restructuring them and giving them the backing of the United States Treasury.

We have heard the same conservative ideologues who preached deregulation from every pulpit decry with rare venom the very thought of helping the foreclosed. Like Herbert Hoover in his direst hour, they plead with us never to forgive the individual who dared to believe that she or he could own a home.

There was a time in this country when you could trust the bank or the mortgage company to give you a fair deal. Why would any responsible institution offer a loan that could not be repaid? The answer is they would not; only a crook would conspire to steal your limited savings and leave you without a prayer.

If you are fortunate enough to have bought a home on a workingman’s wages, you know that you are dependent on the broker representing you. At the escrow signing, hundreds of papers in the foreign language of legalese are paraded before your dazzled eyes. You are asked to sign here, initial there and when it is over, you can only hope that the papers say what you think they say.

If anyone deserves to be forgiven it is the hapless individuals who reached for the dream the president the held out to them at every opportunity. Let them stay in their homes if they have not been foreclosed. If they have already lost their homes, let them find a new beginning with a roof over their heads and hope in their hearts.

In the parlance of those now promoting the great bailout, by helping them we are helping ourselves. We are even helping the unscrupulous lenders who almost broke the system but that is an unfortunate necessity.

Of course, what we do in the short term will make little difference if we do not restore balance in the system. The price of unfettered greed is rigorous regulation. We do not need a new bureaucracy to achieve this goal; we need a president dedicated to the cause.

Despite an apparent eleventh hour conversion, John McCain is not the man for the job. He has spent his entire career equating government regulation with socialism – a concept he holds beneath contempt. He is gambling that this is a temporary crisis. He will revert to his roots the moment he takes office.

Regulation is necessary but it is not sufficient. It will not restore balance for the working class will remain bridled by debt and unable to sustain a consumer-based economy.

We need new jobs. We need a green economy. We need a massive workforce to rebuild our aging infrastructure and, more importantly, to create a twenty first century infrastructure. In the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, we need public works. We need them more than ever because they provide jobs that cannot be outsourced and they are long overdue.

Beyond public works, we confront a monumental problem that FDR could never have imagined: the outsourcing of American jobs in a globalized economy. The obvious answer is fair trade. American workers can compete and win on a fair playing field but no one can compete with slave labor. The masterminds behind this new economy have built corporate profits by exploiting the cheapest possible labor overseas and simultaneously undermining labor in our own country.

That is why Americans are buried in debt. That is why we cannot sustain our standard of living. Only when labor standards and fair wages are built into the trade formula will this impoverishment of the working class end.

In 1932 the American people faced a clear choice: Herbert Hoover stood firm for individual responsibility. Translation: He would not lift a finger to help the people at the bottom of the chain, the people who had lost their homes, their jobs and their life savings. In recognition of the grave economic reality of the Great Depression, he was willing to help the banks but the people were on their own. It was a 20th century version of: Let them eat cake.

Franklin Roosevelt had a different approach: Lift up the people with public works, relief and social security. He understood that the only way to lift the nation out of its deep hole was to rebuild its foundation from the bottom up.

In this fundamental sense, the choice we now face is equally clear: McCain is Hoover and Obama is FDR.

In light of the economic crisis before us, I would like to see Barack Obama rename his cause for the final weeks of this campaign: A New Deal for the 21st Century.

That would make it clear who he is standing with, what he is fighting for, and the principles that will guide his actions as we move forward in these dark and troubled times.

Jazz.

JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). HE IS A COLUMNIST FOR THE NATIONAL FREE PRESS. SEE WWW.JAZZMANCHRONICLES.BLOGSPOT.COM.

Jake's Word re: The Blame Game, Part Two

(A response to Jack Random's The Blame Game - Part Two, The Trillion Dollar Gambit: Corporate Socialism. Reprinted below.)

If only one - one - a number that even George W. Bush can count in his sleep - if only one of the so-called pundits, experts and economists spoke or wrote with the clarity and precision that you employ the people of this nation might actually wake from their media induced stupor and take action.

The problem is that I don't think any of the experts can see the situation as clearly as you do. Or perhaps they are being paid too well to see beyond the veil of phony finances that have been the pillar of fat that has supported this fictional economy since it was sold lock, stock and barrel during the first oil crisis.

There are some of us that remember it all too well because just as we were learning to drive and getting our first cars we found ourselves in long lines waiting to pay double or triple what we would have paid only a few months before. Nixon, for his crimes, was trying to dodge the law by manipulating the justice system. He was pulling remedies for the economy out of his back pocket that only Stalin or Castro would have dreamed of before him. Price freezes. A free-market, anti-communist was making executive decisions in all directions like a dictator. Congress was reeling. This man after all had just been re-elected by a huge margin. Not until the evidence was so obvious that it had become common currency did they act. Too little and too late.

By the time he left office Nixon had cut a deal with Chairman Mao that opened the door to economic prosperity - for China. About that same time the standard of living in terms of real dollars and wages, genuine wealth, peaked for the middle class. The rich continued to get richer and the poor could continue to make do with the scraps, but for the majority the grand promise of post-war prosperity hit a wall. It has never recovered.

There was the boom of the 80s in which the national debt sky rocketed to pay the price of rockets and bombs for a cold war that could only become hot at the expense of the end of the world.

The taxpayers had to pony up for that one during the first Bush administration. Bush himself paid with the loss of the election. The neocons never forgot that lesson. They determined to invent a new set of lies for the New World Order.

Enter The Project for a New American Century where the likes of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz laid plans for the invasion of Iraq, the domination of the Middle East by force and the extension of Pax Americana (the term is used in one of the articles at their website).

Meanwhile the Clinton administration witnessed the longest economic expansion in the nation's history. Never mind that it was financed by an explosion of cheap, and often worthless, imports and the wildest level of speculation that Wall Street had ever seen. Suddenly it seemed the budget was balanced and everybody wanted to take credit.

Credit is the key word because that was how the whole thing was financed. Internet companies were making billions of dollars based on what their profits would be in the future. Every new retirement plan added a 401(k) option. We'd become a nation of gamblers. When the Treasury Department informed the President that many of the CEOs salaries were based on this kind of speculation and that it was in fact illegal, Clinton chose not to enforce the law. Why rain on his own parade? Especially at a time when he was being impeached by a Republican congress for things that had nothing to do with government, the economy or anything else that would have effected the future of any family in the U.S. outside his own.

By the time the towers fell and revealed the staggering amount of corruption that fueled companies like Enron and MCI, the dim-witted son of the former president had seized the oval office on the backs of a cabal of his father's friends including those Pax America fellows.

Eight years on and we hear an ironically familiar song from that administration. This time they are warning us of a complete economic meltdown. Suddenly, the crisis is obvious. Even the opposition party is scrambling to get in line to vote in favor of the solution. No one wants to be left to blame when the world comes to an end - whether it be an immediate and inevitable assault by terrorists or the collapse of every financial institution in the country. Such is the price of deceit. The first time around we were told a lie and we, and the future generations, will pay at least a trillion dollars for it. Now they come from another direction asking for another trillion.

Should we believe them? Indeed as you make so clear, what happens if the Chinese government, the EU and the others who are financing this debt decide to collect the debt sooner than we are able to repay it?

A few years ago Gore Vidal said that one day the debt collectors would come for their money and the American Empire would be over.

Death always comes too soon. No matter what age, you'll always ask for another day. Not today, perhaps next month or next year, any time but now.

The corporate elite and the government they bought with our money are telling us today is the day unless we pay up. Why should we believe them? Simple. Just as before the question hangs over us - what if they are right? We won't know until the money has been committed, the election is over, and everyone at the top of the heap is once again raking in profits at historic levels. Whether those profits are here, in China, India, Europe or all over the world makes no difference to them.

Thanks again for yet another in a long, powerful string of essays that keep us on our toes with eyes wide open.

Peace,

Jake Berry

(Author of Brambu Drezi, Liminal Blue and other works of extraordinary insight.)



JAZZMAN CHRONICLES. DISSEMINATE FREELY.



The Blame Game – Part Two
THE TRILLION-DOLLAR GAMBIT:
CORPORATE SOCIALISM

By Jack Random


On September 19, 2008 the government announced what amounts to a trillion dollar bailout of the corporate empire. It was denounced in some quarters as corporate socialism.

Corporate socialism is an oxymoron. What kind of socialism nationalizes the debt of private enterprise without nationalizing the profits? What kind of socialism assumes liability without assuming assets?

Whatever this is it is not corporate socialism.

Overnight the national debt grew by a trillion dollars – from 9.6 to 10.6 trillion.

What happened?

The ultimate dream of the Adam Smith Free Marketeers, an unconstrained and deregulated marketplace, ran us straight over a cliff. Rather than sit and watch tragedy unfold as their philosophy mandates, they have chosen to enact the largest government intervention since Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.

This time, instead of infusing the economy with capital from the ground up, they are robbing the victims (all of us) to save the Robber Barons.

All the economists agree it is necessary and there is no alternative. I would feel more secure if all the economists saw this crisis approaching.

What happens next?

Having transferred a trillion dollars of debt from private corporations to the government, it is the government that is now at risk. The implications are profound.

Our exploding debt is being financed by foreign nations including China, Japan, India, Saudi Arabia and the European Union.

For the first time in our history we have handed the fate of the nation to another country and we all know who it is: China. The same China that steals our jobs, depresses our wages and displays such a disturbing lack of government regulation that Chinese industries have sought to increase profits by adding a toxic chemical to baby formula and lead to the paint on toys for tots.

We cannot trust China to do what we have failed to do (regulate our industries) but we have no choice. They own us. It is unlikely for now that China will bite the hand that feeds them but if the debt continues to mount, they will have no choice. Nothing in China’s history suggests that they would hold on to a drowning man.

The markets soared on the news of the great government bailout – as well they should. We have removed risk from the marketplace. It is a phenomenon that violates the essential core of a free market economy. Suspending the practice of selling short (betting on a stock to go down) is also against the tenets of a free market. Installing brakes on sell orders during a fall (after a 1987 crash) is also antithesis to the free market ideal.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (enacted after the Bush infected Enron scandal) sought to bring transparency and accountability to corporate accounting. Applied to the current crisis, it actually might have helped but it was also against the free market mandate, which is why it was never enforced by the Bush regime.

So it seems the free market is not so sacrosanct after all. Wall Street likes a fixed market: Heads we win, tails you lose. We are all regulators now. Government intervention will be employed with reckless abandon whenever the corporate giants come calling.

It is an outrage that the American people must pay a second time for this trillion-dollar train wreck. We paid once with our homes, our home values, our defaults and our debt. (Is this what the president meant when he asked us to go shopping after 9-11? Remember the president’s Ownership Society?) Now we will pay again and the bills keep coming.

It was a failed strategy of the corporate elite that caused this crisis and it was never intended to benefit anyone but their own. This is the nastiest part of this nightmare scenario: The guilty party has been richly rewarded for grossly irresponsible behavior.

It seems the only guilty party we can hold responsible is the “free-trade-free-market” politicians. They too have profited from this disaster. Contributions came with the package.

This means you: John McCain.

If you have ever witnessed your local politicians swooning over “deregulation” or trumpeting the virtues of “free trade,” it is time to give them what we can only dream: early retirement.

We don’t know where it ends but we do know who got us here.

Jazz.

JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). HE IS A COLUMNIST FOR THE NATIONAL FREE PRESS. SEE WWW.JAZZMANCHRONICLES.BLOGSPOT.COM

Mind of Mansel: Could it be?

**

"What looks like politics, and imagines itself to be political, will one day unmask itself as a religious movement."

- Kierkegaard

Could it be that the choice of Joe Biden for VP, could turn out to be as bad a choice as Eagleton in 1972 for McGovern? Could it be that the polls running neck and neck could have been demolished for good by a different choice, and not Hillary Clinton? Could the Democratic party finally move to the left? Do the footsteps of gravediggers really fill convention halls after the chairs have been put up?

- Chris Mansel

Mind of Mansel: Insubordination

**

leaving the way, returning to the burning
found in nature, cited here as turning
what you gonna do when your dialectic
has gone the death of animals, a waste
of strength

when you envisage a region scattered
of revolt, the only obstinacy crumpled pages
mercy on the projection of terrifying innocence
my wounds run deeper, they animate an
antisocial expenditure not separated by loss

degradation is the common convulsion shredding
in three colors: red, white, and blue.


- Chris Mansel

Mind of Mansel: Right Down To Hell

(for Jack Random)


they were carving up the meat the other day
trying to get the bread to look the other way
they divested the spreads to fit the knives
but appetites could never keep up with their eyes
and just now before you go and condemn the tray
the salads and forks will get involved or so they say

dancing men grow impaled
split right down to hell
on the eye of the needle
right down to hell

I can't find humanity though I looked in the mirror today
It was a brick wall against where I used to pray
there was gnashing of teeth as they led me by flashlight
stepping over the bodies that had washed up overnight
laughing dying eyes always implies I'm going insane
I'm looking for the obscuriity of Zarathustra in
a presidential campaign

dancing men grow impaled
split right down to hell
on the eye of the needle
right down to hell


- Chris Mansel

Jake's Word: No Country!

The following lines are from the narration of the opening scenes of No Country For Old Men I think they speak powerfully as a metaphor for the current state of the union:

The crime you see now, it's hard to even
take its measure. It's not that I'm afraid
of it.

I always knew you had to be willing to
die to even do this job - not to be
glorious. But I don't want to push my
chips forward and go out and meet some-
thing I don't understand.


You can say it's my job to fight it but
I don't know what it is anymore.


...More than that, I don't want to know. A
man would have to put his soul at hazard.


... He would have to say, okay, I'll be
part of this world.


The question before us is, do we want to be a part of this world? A world where enormous sums are squandered, tossed around like plastic chips, cast to the wind, along with the savings, homes and hopes of hard working, honest people. A world where violence, manipulation and double-dealing are the means most often used to get the country the resources it needs to continue at it's present rate of consumption.

I don't want to be a part of a world like that. Not because I'm a righteous man, but because I'm as evil as any other man and as susceptible to greed and selfishness. At some point you have to say, "Enough. I won't be a part of this. This is not my country and these are not my people."

I will live here because I was born here, but I will not participate in a spectacle that is a bald-faced lie, a bold charade the opposite of what it is supposed to be. This is the last election. Democracy's last chance in these states for as far as the eye can see. Should the people shirk democracy I do not want to bear witness to the consequences. I have seen enough already. There must be more to do with my time, my mind, my soul than engage this malevolence day in and day out. I'll make it my business to attend to my business and may God damn the poor m*therf*cker that stands in my way. That is the American way, right?

Election Day. See you there. Bring a torch.


Jake Berry (author of Brambu Drezi and Liminal Blue)

Jake's Word: How much does it take?

Today two more banks crash and burn. How much does it take?

Obama is no savior, you don't get saviors out of elections. I'm not sure you get them at all. But his election at the very least would signify to the world that the voters in the U.S. have not gone completely insane. Polls outside the U.S. show a vast majority worldwide in favor of Obama, in favor of anything but a continuation of the last eight years, or worse. McCain's election would be yet another message to the rest of the world that the majority of registered voters in the U.S. are unconcerned about them. Not a good message to send when so few are consuming so much of the world's resources while many starve or die from disease or war that are a direct result of this nation's selfishness. How's that for family values?

I'm truly concerned that the only alternative come next year may be the outright rejection of all political institutions. The result may be a global revolt against all governments. The big problem with that is that revolutions are invariably followed by a reign of terror, tyrants, dictators and political homicide in the thousands or millions.

It's either that or a new dark age. One authority over all.

It's sad to think that a handful of people who normally pay little or no attention to politics will make a decision that seems casual to them, but will have such far reaching consequences.

In Alabama and California the race is over. It's like waiting to see the end. Or as Wayne says in his song "Old Pompey," "which day does Judgement Day fall on this year."

Jake Berry (author of Brambu Drezi and Liminal Blue)

Jake's Word re: McCain 4 Change!

(Response to a Jazzman Chronicle: Notes from The Inner Circle - reprinted below.)

There is an old maxim among conservatives - kill the beast. The idea being, as Reagan said in his first inaugural address, that government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem. Most Americans did, and still do, agree with that. But the statement does not go nearly far enough. It is in fact a ruse. Most of those that heard Reagan utter those words believed him to be saying that he would lower taxes and remove the government's meddling in their lives - which were two of the campaign promises he had made. But that is only part of the story and therein lies the ruse. If you deprive the government of its powers and excesses you must also delete the other powers in the land. Namely, large corporations and other large concentrations of wealth. If you fail to do this then the people are left with no recourse at all, no means by which to express the redress of grievances that the Constitution guarantees. That is the open secret. Dismantle government, but leave the other powers in tact to act without restraint – the neoconservative doctrine.

Indeed, they are "closer now than ever to realizing [their] agenda." Even the military is being sold. As much as half of the foreign military presence in Iraq is in the hands of private companies. From the meals soldiers are being served to "security" forces like Blackwater, it's paid for by the U.S. taxpayer, but responsible to private companies and stockholders.

On the other hand when the banks that hold almost two-thirds of the mortgages in the country squander their resources through unscrupulous business practices and very nearly collapse, who saves them? Why, the government of course. This means that anyone who holds a mortgage with Fanny Mae or Freddy Mac faces the prospect of losing their home to the government should they have to default on loans that were tricky to navigate from the start and only became more so as interest rates rose and the economy continued to falter. Does a government with a lien on two-thirds of the mortgages in the U.S. sound like less government? Well, it's hard to say at a time when there is so little distinction between government and private corporations. Who owns what and who owes what to who and what happens if the payments can't be made?

The plot thickens. Take a look at the 401k you've been depositing money in since the heady 1990s. Your returns haven't been returns at all over the past seven years, they've been liabilities. You keep sending a portion of your hard earned dollars to a broad range of corporations that are taking your money and giving you less than nothing in return. Less than nothing. Take a look at the companies guilty of unscrupulous business and then take a look at the companies you are financing. You'll see many of the same names in both places. Let me make this as clear as mud. You send your money to companies who then steal the homes of their customers through subprime loans (to use the most reported issue as an an example). When the customers, and you may be one of them, are unable to pay, the companies grab the properties. But when enough homes go into foreclosure the company collapses and the government using taxpayers dollars picks up the tab. Do you see what is happening? We are paying thieves to rob us blind. Money keeps going out of your pocket into the pockets of people who are far richer than you. And this happens precisely because those people are unethical, even criminal.

Is there a solution? Can the tide be turned? What happens if you drop your 401k and therefore stop sending your hard earned dollars to these large corporations? The stocks will slip, the economy will continue to slide. What happens if you stop buying gasoline? The oil companies lose profit and begin to crumble. Will they adapt and offer a form of sustainable fuel? They say they would be unable to do that in the short term (meaning between now and 2020).

Did you believe in the American dream, the one they taught us about in school? Work hard, apply yourself and you will succeed. Make honesty, loyalty and fidelity your creed and you will be rewarded. How has that worked out for us? Look around. Look at the for sale signs in front of homes. Look at how much you are paying for health insurance compared to the service you are receiving. The money keeps flowing up, up, up.

Welcome to America. A brand name for a global corporation whose substance is as thin as the phony money and sub rosa contracts it is printed on. This is the world we all invested in. We paid to create these very conditions and we are still paying. Every time we buy anything, pay our mortgage, fill up our tanks we are investing in a con game that is raping the world, devouring resources faster than they can be produced, and making a small handful of people so powerful that not even they know the limits of that power.

Welcome to America. Welcome to twilight. It's difficult to discern one thing from another. Something is happening here, but we don't know what it is.

Is it too late already? I don't know. But two months into next year we'll be living with a new executive in charge of brand America and we'll find out if this is the twilight before dawn or descent into a long cold night.

Perhaps 2000 was the last election – the point at which representative government slipped away from us forever. Perhaps 2008 is the last election. One day soon we will know. I for one would like to be able to look back and say that at least I cried out against the night.


Jake Berry (Author of Brambu Drezi and Liminal Blue.)



JAZZMAN CHRONICLES. DISSEMINATE FREELY.



NOTES FROM THE INNER CIRCLE:
McCAIN-PALIN 2008!

By Jack Random


On the occasion of a successful Republican National Convention, it is an appropriate time to take stock of our progress as Americans dedicated to real and systemic change.

It is with cautious optimism that I declare: We are closer now than we ever have been to realizing the objectives for which we have worked so hard over the course of the last fifteen years.

When we set out on this venture, few could have imagined success would come so soon and with so little resistance. Indeed, we could not have anticipated the ease with which we have moved our hidden agenda along on its path to fruition.

After the utterly predictable failure of President Bill Clinton’s first one hundred days (universal health care and gays in the military – who were they kidding?), we sent in Dick Morris to turn the liberal Democrat around. To our astonishment, we found a chief executive not only willing but eager to sell out. Clinton’s sudden embrace of all things conservative was so convincing we did not have to worry about a second term. We made him a millionaire overnight and the president cherished his new role as a darling of the corporate elite.

Clinton became the perfect setup man on both the domestic and foreign policy fronts but we still needed a break to prevent Al Gore with his progressive economic and environmental agenda from delivering a setback (how great we will never know) in 2000. Monica Gate, lame politics (don’t campaign in Tennessee and don’t send Bill to Arkansas), Joe Lieberman (the fox in the hen house), a butterfly ballot, Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris and Warren Christopher in Florida sealed the deal.

The United States Supreme Court handed us our greatest victory. We knew we could count on George to steer the ship of state straight into the rocks: Corporate deregulation, unprecedented tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, runaway Free Trade, pimping the principle of home ownership, dismantling federal agencies: What could go wrong?

We knew our president would never change course no matter how disastrous his policies would prove. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

We had the vaunted Neocons in place (a brain trust so radical and out of touch that even Reagan would have nothing to do with them) and a compliant corporate media to paint them as the Knights of the Last Order – wise and infallible beyond reason.

Still, we needed a trigger – a catastrophic event that would ignite a chain of endless war to swallow our resources and bury us in insurmountable debt. Along came September 11, 2001.

Let the world know we were not the moving force behind that tragedy nor do we know who was yet it cannot be denied that it was the accelerator that pushed our mission into hyper drive. Thanks to the 9-11 Commission that like the Warren Commission in another time and space, we may never be able to determine the full extent of the crime or those complicit in its perpetration. What we know we can only surmise from a cost-benefit analysis: Like the old gumshoe detective said: Follow the money. It is however neither in our interest nor in the interest of our government to uncover the sordid truth.

It is ironic that our detractors so often accuse us of being godless and without faith. If there is a divinity overseeing human events, it is clearly on our side.

The feckless John Kerry was never truly a threat in 2004. With the Rove-Bush voter fraud and disenfranchisement machine fully operational, only a landslide would have put the result in question. The Massachusetts senator did everything he could to throw the election to his opponent. Was he working for us? We’ll never tell!

Of course, not everything has gone as we planned. We did not intend for the Democrats to gain control of Congress in the midterm elections. With a strong mandate to end the war and redirect our economic policies, we faced a potential threat. However, once Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced that impeachment was off the table we realized that the Democrats would fall into line. They would settle for symbolic opposition and make an appeal for an even larger majority in the next election.

As long as we can keep forty-one members of the United States Senate in Republican hands (with Lieberman as a buffer), Congress will remain stymied and will ultimately go along with whatever the White House wants.

Everything now depends on the presidential race.

Six months ago none would have speculated that a Republican would stand the slightest chance of gaining four more years of the same policies that have brought the new American empire to the very brink of economic and military collapse.

But here we are: Less than two months before election day, the old warrior (whom rumor has it once displayed alarming bouts of independence) has pulled out every card in the Karl Rove deck and stands one tantalizing step away from realizing the ultimate ambition. Even better, if the old warrior should fall midterm, the young lady from Alaska (who knows less about economics and foreign policy than her mentor has forgotten) would rise to the highest power in all the land.

Either way, we can rest assured that all current trends will continue unabated. There will be wars and more wars. Military expenditures will double and quadruple even as the national infrastructure continues to crumble. Jobs will be exported at an accelerated rate, wages will continue to decline, prices will rise and home foreclosures will reach epidemic proportions.

As bank after bank fails and people line up on the streets for shelter and food, panic will take hold. Common working people with families to feed and care for will be living in public parks and police will bang heads. Soldiers will abandon their posts and angry mobs will surround the institutions of government.

Congress will finally act but it will be too late: A worldwide depression, global economic collapse, institutional failure and mass chaos.

The ultimate and final victory, that eternal blank slate that allows the world to begin again:

One hundred years of anarchy.

Dream it and make it so!

Jazz.

JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). THE CHRONICLES HAVE BEEN POSTED ON THE ALBION MONITOR, BELLACIAO, BUZZLE, COUNTERPUNCH, DISSIDENT VOICE, THE DAILY SCARE, THE NATIONAL FREE PRESS AND PACIFIC FREE PRESS. SEE WWW.JAZZMANCHRONICLES.BLOGSPOT.COM.

RE: McCain: Where's the Beef?

[Jake Berry's response to "The Search for Policy in McCain's Appeal" by Jack Random. Reprinted Below.]

Essay after essay you keep nailing it! The neo-cons are completely transparent in their quest for permanent rule. If they can slip McCain in and he can last for a few years, maybe a full term or more then electing the vapid beauty queen will be easy. The are working for an additional 12-16 years in control of the executive and therefore judicial branches. If they can manage that and keep the people divided among themselves enough to keep the legislative in check or completely submissive they will be able to complete their agenda: the dismantling of the government in favor of a figurehead government that enacts the will of the ruling class. Welcome to the new dark ages.

Regardless of Obama's politics, he is not McCain. This means he is not the chosen vehicle of the powers that be. The skinny kid with the funny name is all that stands between the U.S. and the ascent of a new type of American fascism. There has been a tendency toward this kind of oligarchy since the beginning (the anti-sedition laws under Adams and Wilson, for example). We are perilously close to the end of daylight. The only thing that would awaken the populace in large enough numbers should this election go to McCain would be a great depression.

Only a few thousand people in two or three states will likely make that decision for us. How can anyone remain undecided at this point? It makes you wonder whether or not the majority really wants representative government. Perhaps they prefer a strong central authority accompanied by HDTV and all the amusements they can consume.

I hope that this is cynicism. I fear that it is realism.

Jake Berry (jakebridget@bellsouth.net)



JAZZMAN CHRONICLES. DISSEMINATE FREELY.



THE SEARCH FOR POLICY IN McCAIN’S APPEAL:
NOT A PENNY’S WORTH OF DIFFERENCE

By Jack Random


Stand up for the wealthy and the ruling elite!

Stand up and fight for lower corporate tax rates!

Stand up for the policies that have placed the nation at the precipice of disaster!

Stand up and fight for oil and coal!

Stand up for labor exploitation!

Stand and fight for the right to work at lower wages!

Stand up for nuclear waste!

Stand up for privatization of Medicare and Social Security!

Stand up and fight to put my finger on the trigger of nuclear extinction!

Listening to John McCain at the Republican National Convention, you would have thought he was opposing eight years of catastrophic Democratic rule. His call to arms should be answered in kind:

Where is the beef?

John McCain says he is his own man. He says he marches to his own beat. He says he stands up to corporate interests. He says he is a different kind of Republican.

He says a lot of things that the Bush-Rove-McCain team believes will win him votes but if we look at his policies, there’s not a dime, not a nickel, not a thin copper penny’s worth of difference between John McCain and George W. Bush.

Those who have been searching McCain’s slogans for real policy reform have consistently come up empty. After his much ballyhooed speech, the search goes on.

TAX POLICY: RENEW BUSH CUTS, CUT CORPORATE TAX RATE.

McCain’s advocacy of making the most inequitable tax reform in history permanent – the Bush tax cuts that have contributed so much to our current economic crisis – is at once hypocritical (he opposed them as recently as three years ago) and an obvious pander to the corporate elite. His proposal to cut the corporate tax rate by ten percent seems reasonable enough until you look under the hood.

As McCain so often pontificates, America has the second highest corporate tax rate in the developed world. What he does not say is that our internationally based corporations rarely if ever pay them.

“You may have heard: U.S. corporations face one of the highest income tax rates in the world…so that what comes through is the assertion that corporations pay too much in taxes. This is simply untrue if your basis for comparison is the developed world. The truth is that while the 35% corporate income tax rate is high indeed, the creativity and global reach of U.S. corporations make them among the most lightly levied. Between 2000 and 2005, U.S. corporate taxes amounted to 2.2% of the GDP. The average for the 30 mostly rich member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development was 3.4%.”

(Igor Greenwald, “The Invisible Hand: High Corporate Tax Rate Is Misleading.” Smart Money, January 25, 2008.)

So the reform in McCain’s tax cut policy is nothing more than a slight of hand – the same old Bush-Rove tactic of “Let’s not and say we did.” Corporations are not clamoring for lower tax rates because they don’t pay them. Still, it’s nice for them to know McCain cares.

ENERGY POLICY: OIL DRILLING, NUKES, COAL.

As an afterthought to McCain’s energy policies, he promises to increase spending on solar and wind power. This is one of the Bush-Rove favored tactics. It is the nature of a growing nation combined with the inflationary trend of currency that if we do nothing at all spending will grow. This is why Bush can claim to have spent more money on [fill in the blank] than any president in history.

The truth is: Like Bush, McCain will give tax incentives for renewable energy research to oil companies who will spend a large chunk of it on television commercials.

The cry of “Drill Now!” at the RNC is nothing more than a propaganda campaign. Unless we have found a way to economically steal Canadian and Russian oil reserves from the North Slope of Alaska (we have not) there is not an expert in the world who will claim that drilling will have any significant impact on energy dependence or the cost of gas.

The idea of safe nuclear energy is a myth that has tragically been embraced by both major parties and they ought to know better. Watch the unfolding events in France as they struggle with dying rivers, toxic land and poisoned drinking water. The million-year problem of nuclear waste will not go away. How long will it be acceptable to bury our poisons in other people’s back yards before we accept that nuclear energy is not the answer?

The same holds for the myth of “clean” coal. To the extent that sequestration is possible, it would be so expensive that hamsters generating power on a spinning wheel would be more viable.

The Bush-McCain-Rove people know these realities but they do not care. When push comes to shove, they will scrap the adjective and give us all the dirty coal our lungs can suffer.

Pollution? Climate change? Let’s not and say we did.

EDUCATION REFORM: CHOICE = PRIVATIZATION.

Of all the lies the Bush-Rove-McCain team promotes, this may be the most insidious. Under the draconian measures of No Child Left Behind, public schools are beginning to resemble assembly lines. Test scores are up but inspiration, creativity and adaptability are lost.

It is a losing game. The idea is and always has been to transfer public funds to private schools where the righteous can teach young minds the virtues of Republican values. Why is it no one ever asks why private schools are not subjected to the same rigorous testing standards as the public schools? Private schools bolster their results the same way Bush did in Texas: By removing students who hurt the bottom line.

As for the idea that education is the answer to our economic troubles, that is a down and dirty lie. Tell us what jobs we can prepare for that will not be subject to the exportation of labor under the mandates of global free trade?

TRADE POLICY: FREE TRADE.

Recently, Dell Computers announced they were closing down their manufacturing centers, laying off thousands of workers, with the intent of contracting out their manufacturing operation. Translation: They will export those jobs to other countries where workers have little or no rights and are paid slave wages. The stock went up on a down day.

That is free trade in a nutshell: It ought to be called a corporate free ride. The global economy has been used to institutionalize labor exploitation in underdeveloped nations. The cost is born by workers in developed nations in the form of lower wages, loss of labor standards and cutting unions out of the process.

Where does John McCain stand on trade and labor rights? Somewhere to the right of J.P. Morgan. He has never voted against a Free Trade agreement.

“I'm the biggest free marketer and free trader that you will ever see.” (Republican Presidential Debate, December 12, 2007.)

McCain has vehemently embraced “right to work” laws that are nothing but a scheme to outlaw union organization in the workplace. Even in the hard times we are now facing, he voted against raising minimum wage and against extending unemployment benefits.

HEALTH CARE: PRIVATIZATION.

When you peel back the rhetoric and strip away the phony compassion, the Bush-McCain-Rove policies always come down to privatization. If they had their way, they would privatize Social Security, education and Medicare. McCain supported Bush’s failed initiative to begin a privatization plan for Social Security. He voted to cut Medicare funding and opposed reauthorization and funding for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

His proposal for health care reform would reclassify health care premiums as taxable income. Is that really the kind of reform America wants? Reminiscent of the gas tax holiday, he would hand out tokens in the form of tax breaks while giving a free hand to private insurance companies.

Anyone who believes that the party of rugged individualism, the party that is fundamentally opposed to social services, the party that still believes the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a communist conspiracy, will reform Medicare to the benefit of the people is delusional.

If it were in their power, they would scrap all domestic programs and let the chips fall.

BALANCING THE BUDGET: EARMARKS.

Another of the tricks exploited by the McCain-Bush-Rove machine is that they will speak of small matters in a manner that makes them seem important. McCain has claimed that he could save $100 billion overnight by eliminating the add-on expenditures known as “earmarks.” When pressed, the McCain campaign had to admit they invented the figure.

(Michael Dobbs, The Fact Checker: “McCain’s Fantasy War on Earmarks,” Washington Post, 5/23/08).

If McCain is serious about eliminating this congressional tradition – one that is often used in legislative negotiations – then he is dreaming. If not, he is posturing.

When you examine McCain’s reputation as a Maverick, it is 90% fluff. He postures a lot but when it comes down to action, he generally goes along for the ride.

The most moving part of McCain’s convention speech was the telling of his experience as a Prisoner of War in Vietnam. It was moving to hear a proud man admit that the enemy pushed him until he broke. It is sadder still when you realize that the party he represents in this race for the White House has done the same: They pushed him until he broke. No longer will he speak out for compromise on immigration policy or tolerance for gays and lesbians. No longer will he oppose a tax cut policy favoring the elite at a time of war. No longer will he stand strong against torture and for the Geneva Conventions. The new John McCain knows his limitations and plays his part.

What McCain sacrificed to become his party’s nominee for president was whatever remained of his integrity and individuality.

The Maverick, if he ever truly existed, is long dead. What remains is the typical Bush-Rove politician.

Why mess with a winning formula?

Jazz.

JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). THE CHRONICLES HAVE BEEN POSTED ON THE ALBION MONITOR, BELLACIAO, BUZZLE, COUNTERPUNCH, DISSIDENT VOICE, THE DAILY SCARE, THE NATIONAL FREE PRESS AND PACIFIC FREE PRESS. SEE WWW.JAZZMANCHRONICLES.BLOGSPOT.COM.

SARAH PALIN: Church Lady Meets Fargo

Let’s be honest: The Republicans would have cheered a lip synch performance by Milli Vanilli on the third night of the National Convention, a crowning of the unknown Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska as the vice presidential nominee. Anything short of a tumble into the orchestra pit was destined to be hailed a triumph.

The good news is: Sarah Palin can read a script. She was better than any of the speakers preceding her (primary losers) and vastly superior to John McCain’s preferred candidate in turncoat Senator Joe Lieberman. Unlike the miserable bore Lieberman played for Al Gore in the year 2000, Palin took to the traditional role of attack dog like a gator takes to swamps. She delivers every demeaning, misleading and outright venomous attack with a smile to her admiring family, as they cradle their mystifyingly quiet babies.

The bad news is: She opened herself up to attacks in kind. She throws punches like Sonny Listen but we still don’t know how she takes one. They called her Sarah Barracuda in high school but this ain’t no pick up game with the girls. This is the big leagues.

While we’re being honest, let’s all acknowledge that she’s not all that. We’ve seen Obama and Sarah Palin is no Obama. She did all right for a feisty first address but her vocal quality invites comparisons somewhere between the Church Lady of the old Saturday Night Live and a character from the Coen brothers’ Fargo. Do they really talk like that in Alaska? She has a peculiar facial expression in which she scrunches her nose as if the subject of her discourse is so foul she cannot bear the stench.

Comedians will have a great time as long as she lasts on the national stage. (Bring back Tina Fey!)

Moreover, the biographical sketch we were provided by Republican operatives has already begun to unravel. She collected tons of pork barrel dollars for a community of seven thousand people. How does that wash? She supported the Bridge to Nowhere before she opposed it. She has shown a vindictive streak that plays out in her politics. She invokes God in political discourse. She is intolerant of those who do not conform to her notion of God’s plan.

It is becoming clear that the Republican Party tabbed her as an up and comer early on. They sent an operative to take over the local politics of a little Alaskan town. The big money came down the pike and everyone was happy. The operatives shaped her, worked her and helped her formulate policies. They told her to oppose the Bridge to Nowhere. They told her to take a stand against earmarks – even though she made it her business to collect them as mayor and as governor.

I doubt anyone thought she was being trained for this year’s presidential election but here she stands, ready or not. Like a sandlot phenom, she came out hitting. Now we’ll find out if she can hit a curve ball.

Jazz.

Mansel: The Deadliest Convention

McCain makes his way through the bowels of the Straight Talk Express and dodges silk stockings dripping on his suit and buckets of ammo from assault rifles being kicked around on the floor by staffers. It's a new day on the campaign trail with target practice at protesters and an interview with Rush Limbaugh all by 7:00 am.

CNN has forgotten all about the death and destruction of the hurricane and focused solely on the pregnancy of Sarah Palin's teenage daughter. If she was from the south there could be the comparisons to Britney Spears but in Alaska it's a different story.

As global warming takes center stage alongside teen pregnancy each bitter slice of ice that falls down into the frigid waters off the coast of Alaska it's like John McCain has fallen into the Deadliest Convention of his life.


- Chris Mansel

Mansel: McCain in Utah

Circling the Democratic Convention center in Denver, Colorado in an unmarked Chevy van is John McCain. With no other people with him, his short little arms making wide turns at intersections, spitting out the window and listening to an audiobook of Mein Kampf read by Tom Selleck, he thinks of ways to combat the enthusiasm that Obama has brought to his campaign. Suddenly the van blows a tire and McCain is on foot. A young man picks him up but the young man does not recognize the older man in the BYOB baseball hat.

McCain ends up at a dormitory in Utah reading the Koran with a mixed up youth who has been hoarding AAA batteries for a bomb to blow all the hair off his snoring roommate. Whenever McCain tries to get up to leave, the young man waves a G.I. Joe at McCain and quotes from the Koran in a low voice.

A quick call to Lieberman could end it all but who will his running mate be?


- Chris Mansel

Mansel: McCain's Secret Obit

From the unreleased obituary,

Here lies John McCain, former babysitter to Joe Lieberman, who became senile after losing the vice-presidency in 2008. Lieberman who in a death pact blackmailed McCain into dressing as Richard Nixon and waltzing into the room and announcing like William F. Buckley that each day had begun at least a dozen times. McCain also has to read Mein Kampf to Lieberman while crouched over a portrait of Prescott Bush.

- Chris Mansel

Mind of Mansel: McCain Top Ten

The John McCain Top 10

1. It is said that McCain has begun refusing meat in order to sharpen his teeth.
2. John McCain never sodomized a rubber chicken dinner he didn't like.
3. When it comes to medication on the campaign trail John McCain sets his sights on pharmaceutical cocaine and human growth hormone.
4. John McCain is banned from Howard Johnson for urinating polling results onto linen napkins.
5. In Chicago recently John McCain appeared in a publicity photo dressed as a cheerleader with a gland condition.
6. John McCain believes a bungled execution is a good execution.
7. McCain thought a guillotine was a new hybrid.
8. Once during a game of billiards John McCain was heard to shout, "Chalk it, like they do in Saigon!"
9. When asked if he would pardon any African-Americans when in office McCain replied why has Obama committed a crime?
10. Lynne Cheney's new book is called, Laura: The Prostrate Years.


- Chris Mansel

Jake's Word re: The Devil Down in Georgia

[Response to Jack Random's "The Devil Down in Georgia" (below).]

Absolutely. This is the best possible circumstance for the neocons. The war against terrorism is difficult to perpetuate endlessly because the public grows tired of fighting a vague, invisible, uncertain enemy. But the majority of the U.S. public remembers the Cold War very well and that makes it easier to sell. It involves certainties. Russia, drunk with new wealth and a new epoch of Czars, has recovered from its experiment with liberal democracy and reasserts itself as a superpower once again. The neocons must be ecstatic. This is the global politics they trained in and understand so well. It is the philosophical heart of the Project for a New American Century. Both the leadership in Moscow and Washington are well aware the game is back on and they settle in for the deep freeze behind mountains of wealth.

Indeed, what could Saakashvili have been thinking? I find it hard to believe he could be so ignorant of history, of the crimes of the Bush administration or the eagerness of Russia to reassert itself. Perhaps he is deeply invested in the military-industrial complex. Perhaps he is willing to sacrifice the safety of his own citizens in order to be part of the new front line - an egomaniacal delusion in which he is a heroic political soldier for democracy.

As usual, the bottom line is the bottom line and the price is paid in human blood. Human sacrifice by any other name is still barbarous and the 21st century barbarians could not be more obvious.


JAZZMAN CHRONICLES. DISSEMINATE FREELY.


THE DEVIL DOWN IN GEORGIA:
Resurrecting the Cold War

By Jack Random


“In the 21st century nations do not invade other nations.”

Senator John McCain, August 13, 2008


It is inconceivable that a major candidate for president of the United States of America should be unaware that the government he wishes to lead began the 21st century with a foreign policy of aggressive war and military domination christened by the invasions of two sovereign nations.

When that candidate is a long-standing political front man for the Neoconservative brain trust that authored the policy (Project for a New American Century), it strains the last fibers of credulity. For a man who considers himself a foreign policy expert, Senator John McCain has taken his place alongside our brash lame duck president as an embarrassment to the nation.

Is he demented? Does he consider our actions in Afghanistan and Iraq incursions, diplomatic overtures or simply humanitarian assistance?

As Vladimir Putin might say: If Iraq is an incursion then Russia’s actions in neighboring Georgia are little more than a firm handshake.

Not to be outdone, our president took a respite between vacations to issue a warning reminiscent of a former era but it played more like a bullied child: If you don’t stop now, I’m not going to be your friend any more!

One of the more fascinating aspects of the American response has been substituting references to Georgia with Iraq and Russia with America. Consider transcriptions of these gems from the mouth of our clueless leader:

“[Iraq’s] sovereignty and territorial integrity must be respected. [Washington] must live up to its commitment to withdraw its invading forces from all [Iraqi] territory.”

This one does not require transcription:

“Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century.”

Are John McCain and little George reading from the same script?

What is most puzzling in this conflict is the behavior of Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili who triggered the Russian response by taking military action in South Ossetia. The reaction was as predictable as the salivation of Pavlov’s dogs but Saakashvili seems perplexed that America and her allies have not rushed to his government’s defense.

Is the man insane? Did he really think that America, with its forces bogged down in two major occupations, was eager to start another war with Russia on the Russian border?

If he is not a madman then someone made promises they had no intention of honoring.

If Saakashvili has not yet awakened to the fact that he and his nation are sacrificial pawns in this game of international chess, he soon will. His mentor-ally in the United States wasted no time pushing through a missile defense agreement with Poland – a move that every objective observer knows is not directed at Iran or “rogue states” but at Moscow.

Not content with the damage they have already done to America’s standing in the world, the neoconservative horror factory still in charge of our foreign policy (along with their profiteering allies in the military industrial complex) have used the waning days of the Bush White House to put in place the necessary elements for a return to the Cold War – a war that was never cold and cost millions of innocent lives culminating in Vietnam.

Are we safer now, Mr. President?

Pay no attention to the ravings of John McCain. He is not president and his ignorance in critical matters of foreign policy is so profound it numbs the mind. We are not going to war on the Russian border. We will not severe the primary source of Europe’s energy supply. We will not risk a military confrontation between nuclear powers to bolster the government of Mikheil Saakashvili.

We are not completely insane.

We will however return to the insanity of an arms race – nuclear and otherwise – pitting us against the Russians with the Chinese content for now to sit this one out.

If the policies of intimidation and confrontation continue, there will be wars with nations such as Georgia and Ukraine serving as our proxies.

There will be blood and there will be blood money for corporate mercenaries and arms dealers.

The devil has come to Georgia but he is not Vladimir Putin. Russia is only acting as we would act if a major foreign power came to our border – as we would have if the Soviets had not backed down when they attempted to plant missiles in Cuba circa 1962.

No. The devil down in Georgia wears the familiar mask of the Neocon. The names behind the mask are Wolfowitz, Perle, Bolton, Abrams, Kristol, Khalilzad, Bush, Cheney and McCain.

They have bankrupted the nation, morally and economically, but they have profited perversely from the effort. They have never lost hold of the dream that is the world’s nightmare.

They will not stop pushing until we reach the endgame of world domination or mass annihilation or both.

Rest assured, if we allow the Project for a New American Century to move forward, the world will awaken, all but a few of our allies will peel away, and America will stand and fall alone.

Jazz.

[See “John McCain and the Project for a New American Century” by Joseph A. Palermo, The Huffington Post, June 18, 2008.]

Jake's Word: The Case for Impeachment

[In response to "The Case for Impeachment" by Jack Random. Posted 8/15/08 by Newsdaily Canada and Buzzle.com.]

Beautifully, persuasively stated as always. If we only had representatives in government who possessed such talents, and such conviction.

Instead the show business of news goes on. The Edwards affair totally irrelevant yet there it is with more coverage than the war in Georgia, or yet another glaring crime by this ridiculous administration. Does nothing inspire the wrath of the American people anymore? Or are those crumbling towers so fixed in our memory as an inspiration for hatred of the "other" that nothing else makes an impression?

This afternoon I saw John McCain addressing the issue of the war in Georgia. I'm sure you saw it as well. His position was completely predictable of course, but one statement stunned me. He actually said these words, "In the 21st century one nation cannot invade another." The level of doublethink required to make such a statement requires a degree of denial that beggars the term. It made all the more obvious that McCain will continue and possibly intensify the policies of the most criminal administration in U.S. history.

On the other hand, Obama can make that very same statement and not contradict himself. He has opposed the Iraq war all along.

There is also the issue that Iraq has a $70 billion surplus while the U.S. sinks in debt in no small part due to that war. If the Iraqi people and government want the U.S. to leave, if they are financially prospering, what rationale would possibly serve as an excuse to stay?

I do not know what kind of president Barak Obama would be, but one thing is clear, he would not be the same president as John McCain and a continuation of the ongoing criminal enterprise in the nation's highest office. If the citizens of the U.S. cannot see this by now then they are truly living in a state of delusion from which they are unlikely to awake until the U.S. is no more.

Jake Berry

Newsdaily Canada: http://Newsdaily.ca.

Buzzle.com: http://www.buzzle.com/articles/the-case-for-impeachment-the-crimes-of-george-bush.html

Mind of Mansel: Overhead

french lanterns swinging, whaling songs
echoing down whiskey bottles too long
betrayal blowed from waves to the skies
the ship disappeared from one's own eyes
set your oars overhead this labyrinth's closed
hell is is coming as the great beast blows


ecstasy came as a hovering cloud of dust
spraying out like a filth over most of us
duck and cover or you'll parch and rust
you must keep up with our bloody lust
hold your hands overhead this wars cold
hell is just the tip of the horned beast coat


the Bastille was covered in ice so they said
the veteran wrote in blood from his head
crawled like a worm to the mailing bin
was arrested for mailing his thoughts in
hold your hands overhead this plea is out
where it ends is left in some grave doubt

Chorus:

Overhead, overhead
faith will linger but its not dead


- Chris Mansel

Mind of Mansel: McCain's Long Campaign

The Next Best Thing To Being Him

A new documentary is set to hit store shelves in a few days which features a haggard John McCain alongside a thousand mourners in India weeping then popping out a cell phone and saying into the camera, "Bipartisan or not, it's been a long campaign. That's why I depend on Verizon Wireless." The camera cuts to a surging skyline of pouring rain in the distance and off camera you can hear McCain shout, "Mud in my damn shoes, get me out of here!"

- Chris Mansel

Ode to Jesse Helms

"...between the legs hung the entrails; the vitals appeared, with the foul sack that makes excrement of what is swallowed."

Dante: Inferno, Canto XXVIII


Ah, but those words come to mind when reading of the death of Jesse Helms. Bring them forth, the limousines covered in the filth of the day. Riding on the rims, on the side of the highway, escorted by the Hell's Angels, the far right. The Minute Men down from the valley of good shooting, the natural lifers, the recent win for the NRA, let 'em gather and celebrate the death of one of their own.

- Chris Mansel

AN ALTERNATIVE PROPOSAL: SOLAR ENERGY

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has called for an incentive program in which the government pays half the cost of installing solar panels on homes (10 Million Solar Roofs Act of 2008). While useful and a dramatic improvement on the status quo, the proposal still requires the homeowner to make a significant investment at a time when money is tight. An alternative proposal would be to have the government provide solar panels on houses and other structures free of charge by renting the roof space in exchange for energy savings. There is no reason the program cannot be extended to other spaces (such as parking lots) public or private.

Taxpayers would provide the funding and reap the benefits of lower energy costs as well as cleaner air. The government would assume the responsibility of maintenance and improvements as technological advances allow. With the price of oil at an all time high and showing no signs of abating, the substantial initial costs would soon be transformed into a perpetual dividend.

There is no reason such a proposal need wait for the federal government. It can readily be implemented at the state or local level funded by selling bonds with a compelling return. The social benefits and economic return on such an investment is compelling indeed. In fact it is the only kind of investment that makes sense in these trying times.


Jazz.

THE AGE OF RECKONING

We are living in an age where the consequences of past mistakes and excesses are coming to account. We have squandered our resources and attempted to hand the debt to future generations but the bill is due now and we can only pay by suffering foreclosure, homelessness, foregoing medical care, on and on. We have filled our atmosphere with the toxic wastes of the industrial age and now we suffer an endless chain of "natural" catastrophes from drought and fires to hurricanes and tornadoes, on and on. We have globalized the economy without globalizing labor and now we watch the decline of the working class both here and abroad. The decline of the working class is the decline of the consumer which will inevitably drag down the corporate beast responsible for the disaster. We have gone to war for oil and accelerated a rise in the price of gas, the price of food, the price of everything that requires fuel to produce and deliver goods to market. On and on.

We have lived under the delusion that our debts could be passed on but the Age of Reckoning is here. We cannot escape it. We must pay and future generations will pay as well.

Fear and Loathing on McCain's Pierrepoint Express

This campaign is one for the books if that book was soaked in the blood of a child whose first word was gut and last was duck. John McCain is playing catch and release with the truth so bad that the fish are just swimming by the boat, a trail of excrement clogging up the Straight Talk Express exhaust. Every redneck in the country, and some in San Juan it seems are sending in letters to McCain and including racial slurs which McCain greedily answers and some he even includes in press releases.

McCain is searching, through Google and Ancestry.com to find the descendants of Pierrepoint, the famed British hangman because he plans to open an Abu Ghraib in Puerto Rico after he gets elected. He's consulted with Donald Rumsfeld who still holds court in a Denny's in Pennsylvania off the main interstate. The cells will have four foot deep holes at the center to coil the chains which will be iced. Uniforms of the day will be blood mesh and there will be no windows.

McCain is not trying to quell any of the rumors and even trying to add to them as the wire reports come in. It is said he has begun calling reporters at home not unlike Lyndon Johnson used to call editors to try and get everyone to back his message. Just recently he called in Rev. Dobson to commit some of his underage followers to hold signs outside a rally supporting McCain but not in Denver. It's too soon for that.

- Chris Mansel

Mansel: Fundraising A Centimeter At A Time

Coveted by the undead a John McCain fundraising letter it is said can cure the most unruly sores in the after-life. Just rubbing it onto lesions garnered after a life of cruel acts against animals and mutual fund embezzlement will get you a lesion down from 6 cm to 5 cm almost immediately as reported recently in the Washington Times.

The Reverend Sun Yung Moon has begun a direct mailing program to all of his known aliases to receive as many as he can, stockpiling if you will for the afterlife, so he can anticipate those centimeters now. Worry will get you every time.

- Chris Mansel

Mansel: Divine Comedy on an Iowa Night

"Keep in thy memory what thou hast heard against thyself," the Sage bade me "but now give heed to what is here."

- Dante, The Divine Comedy: Inferno


Iowa

The skies darkened over Iowa as Air Force One departed. Residents turned to the ghostly mounds of garbage that used to be family heirlooms that were now artifacts of a time gone by. Wading through water the television news crews returned to the safety of Motels in the dry areas surrounding the damaged region and to their respective markets and remarked about the drop in the polls of Senator McCain. A man who has finally been allowed to return to the street where he has lived his whole life puts a gun to his head but stops as a large plane flies overhead. It's nightfall in Iowa again.

- Chris Mansel