CHUMP GALORE : IS AMERICA'S ELITE FAIR TO THE RABBLE ?
Not so fast bucko !
”If the President Does It, That Means It’s Not Illegal” - Nixon
“What we have, in the last eight years, is not merely a case of individual and isolated law breaking. It's a declaration of war on the whole idea of a law itself, on the idea that our political leaders are constrained in any way by the limitations of the American people imposed through our Congress. The rule of law has essentially ceased to exist. And that I do think is quite new.” - GLENN GREENWALD
Bill Moyers should represent America’s common sense. The amicable, knowledgeable uncle that cuts trough non-sense to bring it down to verifiable facts and analyze them cold headed with the best of the nation at hearth.
This week’s program did just that, again, but the level of dismay with America’s political landscape seemed overwhelming. Words like, tragedy, were used as a matter of fact.
GLENN GREENWALD:
“We know that the president and his top aides have violated laws. The facts are indisputable that they've done so. And yet as a country, as a political class, we're deciding basically in unison that the president and our highest political officials are free to break the most serious laws that we have, that our citizens have enacted, with complete impunity, without consequences, without being held accountable under the law.”
“And when you juxtapose that with the fact that we are a country that has probably the most merciless criminal justice system on the planet when it comes to ordinary Americans. We imprison more of our population than any country in the world. We have less than five percent of the world's population. And yet 25 percent almost of prisoners worldwide are inside the United States.”
“What you have is a two-tiered system of justice where ordinary Americans are subjected to the most merciless criminal justice system in the world. They break the law. The full weight of the criminal justice system comes crashing down upon them. But our political class, the same elites who have imposed that incredibly harsh framework on ordinary Americans, have essentially exempted themselves and the leaders of that political class from the law.”
“They have license to break the law. That's what we're deciding now as we say George Bush and his top advisors shouldn't be investigated let alone prosecuted for the laws that we know that they've broken. And I can't think of anything more damaging to our country because the rule of law is the lynchpin of everything we have.”
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- WhiteNoise
- added this
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BILL MOYERS: Are we chumps?
EMMA COLEMAN JORDAN: Well, you know, that is a word I shrink from. But if I had to answer: in the colloquial, you betcha. Those are harsh words, but in this case I do believe advantage has been taken. And I'll leave it at that.
BILL MOYERS: Don't leave it at that because here's-
EMMA COLEMAN JORDAN: -no controls, no compliance requirements for the financial services industry for $350 billion. And so the fact, this chump term suggests that we are being taken advantage of. We're being taken advantage of because even as taxpayers are being asked to pay more and more, and more importantly, not this currently alive group of taxpayers but our children and our grandchildren are being asked to commit to repaying ever-larger amounts of money even as our foreign creditors are closing in on us and saying, "Hold up. You're gonna have to change your habits. We are not going to allow this to continue. We will not continue to subsidize this kind of profligate debt management.
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BILL MOYERS: One of the surprises I've learned in watching the hearings is that even the agencies that gauged the credit ratings of these loans were in on the fix, right? I mean, they were being paid by the companies whose risks they were supposed to evaluate. And it turns out they let us down, right?EMMA COLEMAN JORDAN: Oh, my god. That is the most critical - they're just a series of disasters. Let me just say, Fitch, Moody's, and Standard & Poor, I saw that testimony. It made my heart ache to hear the head of these companies being confronted with internal memoranda and e-mails saying, "We'll rate a cow." And they have no explanation for it.
BILL MOYERS: Right. Well, you make me think of Enron. Remember all of those scandals at the turn of the century, when the accountants were in on the fraud?
EMMA COLEMAN JORDAN: Yeah.
BILL MOYERS: Who can we trust now?
EMMA COLEMAN JORDAN: The raters were rating things that clearly did not warrant A ratings. In one of the hearings, I think it was Congresswoman Watson from Los Angeles who said, on the same day as one of the ratings agency gave a triple A rating to the city of Los Angeles, they gave a triple A rating to Lehman Brothers four days before they failed.
EMMA COLEMAN JORDAN: That is an indictment of the process. And, more importantly, those hearings revealed ratings shopping. That if I thought you were going to give me a bad rating, you're not hired. I'll go to somebody who'll give me a good rating. Well, that was characteristic of the Enron era as well, where accountants, they were shopping for accountants. And the business would be given to accountants who were more flexible.
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- WhiteNoise
- 12 months ago
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So these gatekeepers, the lawyers, the accountants, the credit rating agencies are crucial to the fair operation of markets. And it was the failure of the credit rating agencies that Alan Greenspan found surprising and disappointing that they didn't use self-interest to monitor risk.
BILL MOYERS: You have described a private sector in disarray and a public sector that's incompetent and out of touch. How do we not leave people feeling despair?
EMMA COLEMAN JORDAN: Well, the despair is going to be dissipated by action by citizens, like those people who went into the plant - Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago. People have got to stand up. They've got to demand accountability. And I believe frankly that this past election was the beginning of a process of standing up by citizens who were tired of being disappointed in what they were told about the reasons for going to war, who were tired of getting stagnant wages when the highest paid people in our economy were getting windfall compensation packages for failure. And they decided that… enough. They wanted a different way of political leadership.
And I believe that this era of accountability is not over. And our new president-elect will see from this nearly energized democratic, small "d," Republicans and Democrats and Independents, all insisting on his accountability. So he's unleashed a set of energies in the country that will hold him accountable as well.
BILL MOYERS: Emma Coleman Jordan, thank you very much for being with me again on the JOURNAL
EMMA COLEMAN JORDAN: Thank you so much, Bill, this has been wonderful as always.
REP. HENRY WAXMAN: Your company's now bankrupt, our economy is in a state of crisis, but you get to keep $480 million. I have a very basic question for you: Is this fair?
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- WhiteNoise
- 12 months ago
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The Idiots Who Rule America
Our oligarchic class is incompetent at governing, managing the economy, coping with natural disasters, educating our young, handling foreign affairs, providing basic services like health care and safeguarding individual rights. That it is still in power, and will remain in power after this election, is a testament to our inability to separate illusion from reality. We still believe in “the experts.” They still believe in themselves. They are clustered like flies swarming around John McCain and Barack Obama. It is only when these elites are exposed as incompetent parasites and dethroned that we will have any hope of restoring social, economic and political order.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081020_the_idiots_who_rule_america/
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- WhiteNoise
- 12 months ago
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HOW TO CREATE A NATION OF VILLAGE IDIOTS OR HOW THE CHUMP FACTORY OPERATES...
Forget Red vs. Blue -- It's the Educated vs. People Easily Fooled by Propaganda
Millions of Americans live in a non-reality-based belief system informed by childish cliches - they can barely differentiate between lies and truth.
We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and cliches. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities.
There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation's population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year. But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book.
http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/106551/forget_red_vs._blue_--_it's_the_educated_vs._people_easily_fooled_by_propaganda/
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- WhiteNoise
- 12 months ago
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i hope justice is served.........but i doubt it will be
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- dissimulator
- 12 months ago
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The real crisis in America is not the real bailout on Wall Street; it is what we’re doing with our children and our failure to invest in our human capital for the future. What is happening in our country, where a child is born into poverty every thirty-three seconds, and we have seen an increase in child poverty, 500,000 in the recent—in the last three years.
Half a million children between 2005, 2006, and that’s before the downturn in the economy; where we have a child who is born without health insurance every forty-one seconds, is neglected or abused every thirty-six seconds, is having a child every minute; and where we have got one in three black boys who are seven years old today who is going to go to prison in his lifetime, one in six Hispanic boys likely to go to prison in his lifetime, one in seventeen white boys to go to prison in his lifetime—we’re the world’s biggest jailer, and we’re spending three times more on incarceration than on public education per pupil—and where we’ve got ten percent of our—children drop out of school every ten seconds of every school day; and where 65 percent of all of our children are not reading at grade level in twelfth grade if they’ve stayed in school, and a half of them have not; and where over 80 percent of our black and Hispanic children cannot read at grade level in fourth, eighth or twelfth grade. The real economic downfall and the—is in these figures, and we have got to begin to get our heads screwed on straight and to begin to invest in the future and in our young people today.
We have seen, in effect, an ideological and economic coup d’etat over the last decade, where we’ve taken from the poor, taken from children, and given in massive tax breaks to the rich and in prosecuting several wars. And, you know, this is just—we are upside-down.
We have got to reset our moral compass. We have got to redirect our attention to our internal human infrastructure, because I am convinced that what we are failing to do today in educating our children, providing them very basic healthcare, is going to be a moral and economic Achilles’ heel that is going to topple America’s leadership in the world in the future. - MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN
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- WhiteNoise
- 12 months ago
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Whitenoise,
I agree whole-heartedly with what you say. However I question wether there are enough of us that truly understand what is at stake too change anything before it's too late.People are just too intellectually lazy to make an effort to understand that we are being attacked by our fellow Americans. Although they are Americans in name only.
I hope my fellow citizens prove me wrong but every day that passes causes me to fall further into despair.-
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- pissedoffinarkansas
- 12 months ago
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It is the Matrix red pill blue pill delima ;)
All about that pesky tree of knowledge that got the Christians booted out of eden...
"The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is; All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on. You could be in the Garden of Eden if you had just keep your fucking mouth shut and hadn't asked any questions." - Frank Zappa
I don't know how it works in other religions but I imagine the same principle applies for it is much easier to control village idiots than a nation of well educated & able to question electorate.
There is no prize insight indeed but the satisfaction of knowing & the awkward duty of resistance to our masters if one chooses to join humanity's rabble & macabre theater we are type casted to follow.
From Machiavelli's "Prince" to Edward Bernays & FOX the road map is explicit indeed and most just buy in the easy road to abuse. So yeah, I'm very disappointed in our so-called elite or masters...who isn't at this point ?
There is no quick or easy answer to this for we are all thorned apart by the suffering we witness, mostly to women & children the world over.
Humanism as well as the teaching of the best among us dictates not to do to others... you know the drill !
Let's start there... again & again & again... ;)
"It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate." - James Arthur Baldwin
Also...
"Remember there's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over." -Frank Zappa
Humor is the politeness of despair said the optimist !
PEACE & LOVE !
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- WhiteNoise
- 11 months ago
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”If the President Does It, That Means It’s Not Illegal” - Nixon
Not the only thing Nixon was DEAD WRONG about.
The US Constitution grants sovereignty to the PEOPLE. Every Supreme Court decision is premised upon that principle. and many decisions have expressly affirmed that principle.
Moreover, the 'powers' and the responsibilities of the office of President are specifically enumerated in the Constitution --Article II. There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in Article II that a SANE person could interpret as Nixon and Bush have so interpreted it.
Secondly, Article II, Section 4 lists several offenses for which the "President" may be removed from office. Clearly --the statement that "”If the President Does It, That Means It’s Not Illegal” is pure and utter GOP bullshit!
Worth repeating: BULLSHIT!
Here's Section 4:
Section 4. The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.
GOP lies about the Constitution are like a virus.
There is but ONE cure. READ THE CONSTITUTION.
If enough people did this, the GOP would NOT DARE try to bullshit you.
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"Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. 'We have a single system,' he wrote, and 'in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses.'" : Gore Vidal - The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
"...the concentration of power and the subjection of individuals will increase amongst democratic nations ... in the same proportion as their ignorance." Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America,
"America is the first empire to go from barbarity to decadence without going through civilization" - Oscar Wilde
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- WhiteNoise
- 11 months ago
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"If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.": Howard Zinn, historian and author
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- WhiteNoise
- 11 months ago
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One of the mistakes we make is calling them "incompetent". They are very competent. They may look incompetent, because they don't seem to be able to do what we hired them for. But they have no intention of doing what we hired them for. They get into a position of power, and do exactly what they came there for...to enrich themselves and their friends. Nothing more. They do it very well. We do ourselves a disservice until we recognize this.
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ABSOLUTELY !
It is, most of the time a simple criminal act & should be viewed as such indeed.
Specially true for the Bush cartel.They've going at it for sooo long now, with all the help they got from perverting our tools as the CIA, Supreme Court and all of OUR government !
"We’re not a democracy. It’s a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we’re a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy.” : Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General
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- WhiteNoise
- 11 months ago
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Least but not last, our VP. I could be wrong on the least.
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After tricky Dicky & Kissenger...
Cheney is an all time favorite in my CHILD CHEWING MONSTER pantheon indeed !Learn About Depleted Uranium From
The US Army's Expert on Depleted Uranium (DU) :
Nuclear Holocaust and The Politics of Radiation
www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2003/Rokke-Depleted-Uranium-DU21apr03.htmDepleted Uranium
www.gulfwarvets.com/du.htmExplaining How Depleted Uranium Is Killing Civilians, Soldiers, Land
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=6009-
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- WhiteNoise
- 11 months ago
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I've asked for this before, but never received it. Specifically, what are the high crimes and misdemeanors that Bush and Cheney have committed? Please, quit going on like everyone's in agreement and there's no room for discussion. What crimes? What's the basis for impeachment. What a bunch of fools. Oh, and that Smarmy Bill Moyers is not, and never has been, funny.
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- guidedtotarget
- 11 months ago
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Dear guidedtotarget,
Shouldn't you learn how to read or use Google before asking others for an education ?
The U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee has produced hard evidence of crimes and abuses committed by President Bush and his administration (breaking 26 specific laws). This report, "The Constitution in Crisis,"
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/constitutionincrisisThe 35 Articles of Impeachment
and the Case for Prosecuting George W. Bush
by Congressman Dennis Kucinich
http://feralhouse.com/titles/kulchur/35_articles_of_impeachment_the.php
http://impeachpac.org/Crimes against Humanity
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=theme&themeId=3The Bush Crime Family Tree
http://www.oldamericancentury.org/bushco/bush_crime_family.htmIn The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, Bugliosi presents a tight, meticulously researched legal case that puts George W. Bush on trial in an American courtroom for the murder of nearly 4,000 American soldiers fighting in Iraq
http://www.prosecutionofbush.com/BLOOD FOR OIL : BRING IT ON !
http://my.nowpublic.com/world/blood-oil-bring-itARE WESTERN LEADERS WAR CRIMINALS ?
http://my.nowpublic.com/world/are-western-leaders-war-criminalsDYING REGIME 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNuefnjwbJ0&feature=channel_page"Kid's heads are filled with so many nonfacts that when they get out of school they're totally unprepared to do anything. They can't read, they can't write, they can't think. Talk about child abuse. The school system as a whole qualifies. Go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts... " - Frank Zappa
