Monday, May 25, 2009

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Craig Newmark: Doing more then just remembering war vets Top
Folks, it's important to remember the fallen today, and then every day, follow through to help out the veterans among us . The folks at the Iraq & Afghanistan Veterans of America do that every day. They helped get the new GI Bill passed, helped end stop-loss, and now work on stuff like advance funding for the VA. You can also help regarding Troops' Charities I'm working with IAVA, committed by joining their board.
 
Alberto Ibargüen: At Stake: The Future of Getting News to Americans Top
This week, under the leadership of Sen. John Kerry, the Senate's Commerce Committee opened hearings on the future of journalism and the role of information in supporting American democracy. The hearings are timely, in light of a technological revolution that threatens the newspaper and broadcast news industries and raises questions about the quality of democracy if there is no widely shared, reliable local news. For the first time in the history of the republic, high school students can more easily learn about swine flu or the crisis in Darfur than about corruption in city government or decisions by the local school board. Until recently, the circulation area of a newspaper -- or the reach of a local television or radio signal -- roughly coincided with the physical boundaries of cities and counties from which we elected mayors, school boards and members of Congress. All politics was local and so was daily news coverage. It was news that was shared generally -- connecting neighbor to neighbor, paid for by the relationship between advertisers and customers. Our information systems helped define American communities and helped give them individuality and character. Those systems have changed. The new systems are digital, mobile and not bound by geography. The citizen is a user of information more than a passive consumer. Mine is not a lament for the past, which excluded many, especially women and minorities, from the main pages of newspapers and the evening news. I welcome the democratization of media and its possibilities. The question is not how to save the traditional news industry, but how to meet the information needs of communities in a democracy so that people might, as Jack Knight used to put it, "determine their own true interests.'' The stunning clarity of the First Amendment, that Congress shall make no law abridging five basic freedoms -- including free speech and free press -- should inform every action government takes in this arena. Nevertheless, there are least four areas where congressional action might properly and significantly support our national transition to a better, digital world. First, nothing Congress can do is as important as providing universal, affordable digital access and fostering its adoption. If the future of democracy's news and information is online, then we must ensure everyone is online, and bring technology training, digital literacy and higher quality networks to our local communities. Three great divides block this goal. They are economic, geographic and generational. In an age where entry-level jobs require online applications, access must be generally available and affordable. Rural areas are notoriously underserved and should be a focus of government concern. Age is the third great divide. Groups like AARP are focusing on this issue and could be willing partners in training and outreach. The $7 billion allotted in the federal stimulus for universal digital access is a smart, initial investment. But it is not nearly enough to ensure universal access. The establishment of a federal bank or cooperative to advance the digital connection of America is an important concept. Additionally, support should also be given to media literacy programs to help citizens become more sophisticated media users. Second, times of great change are times for experimentation. The federal government could support open-source, digital experiments through universities or other not-for-profit organizations that would share knowledge for the benefit of all. A MORE USEFUL WEB The Knight Foundation has supported experiments like Spot.us, the MIT Media Lab, the World Wide Web Foundation and Everyblock, each looking for ways to make the web more useful and locally relevant. We also support online news organizations that provide citizens with news about their communities, like Voice of San Diego, MinnPost in Minnesota, and ChiTown Daily News in Chicago. Information about these and many other experiments can be found at www.knightfoundation.org. Other foundations have seriously engaged in this area and more are joining. But foundation-supported investments are small by comparison to what government could do. Thirdly, Congress could adjust current laws. Newspapers and broadcast face great challenges but continue to provide a news service of incalculable value in a democratic society. Congress might review existing intellectual property laws to ensure fairness, and anti-trust laws to enable newspapers to collectively negotiate with large information aggregators that currently pay little or nothing for information originating from news organizations. Congress might also seriously encourage the creation of not-for-profit or limited-profit, local news organizations. They might also provide incentives for the conversion of for-profit news businesses into nonprofit, community-based, mission-driven organizations. By relieving profit pressures, these measures might help as society continues to figure out what's next. Finally, Congress should push for an enhanced role for public media. PUBLIC MEDIA 2.0 Public media reaches the entire nation. That has enormous educational, news and security implications. The Obama transition team discussed a concept they called ''Public Media 2.0,'' an approach that would make PBS and NPR more inclusive and engaging of their audiences. Allowing these organizations to meet their local news potential would be a great service to the nation. We are living in a moment of extraordinary creativity. We will be a nation of media users, not consumers. We're going from the information model of one-to-many, of ''I write/You read'' to many-to-many, made possible by technology. Before Gutenberg, the monks copied illustrated manuscripts and were the keepers of information. Long after Gutenberg, during the Renaissance, society more or less figured out how to handle information. Today we are again living in those uncertain in-between years, when Gutenberg's technology broke the old rules and allowed something new called literacy. It would be wrong for Congress to determine what news and information gets to our citizens. I believe the Senate knows and understands this. But the inquiry Senator Kerry has begun should be the starting point of great and serious action by Congress, leading to the encouragement of experimentation to enable markets to find their way, to promote the evolution of public media 2.0, and, most urgent of all, to provide affordable, digital access to every American. More on Technology
 
California Braces For Supreme Court Ruling On Proposition 8 Top
California's Supreme Court on Tuesday will issue its ruling on whether the state's gay-marriage ban will stand, but the decision likely won't mark the end of the highly divisive matter. More on Gay Marriage
 
Richard N. Haass: Dissent Is as American as Cherry Pie Top
The following is a commencement address I delivered today to the graduates of Oberlin College. Congratulations to everyone in the Oberlin class of 2009 -- but also to your friends and teachers and, above all, your parents. I don't know if it took a village to get you where you are today, but I expect it took a great many people giving a great deal. I am both happy and surprised to be with you today. I am happy because commencements are happy occasions. People sitting here are no doubt happy for different reasons, but happy all the same. It is best to leave it at that. At the risk of being un-Oberlinian, we don't need to deconstruct and analyze every positive emotion until we can no longer recall just why we felt good about something. I am also, as I said, surprised to be with you. President Krislov, you may not know what I am about to say, but my connection to Oberlin was a close call. It was the summer of 1969, and several months after graduating high school I was still waiting to find out if Oberlin would take me. I was anxious, because I'd been rejected from all but one of the other schools I had applied to. It was so bad that one school rejected me twice. In the end, Oberlin did take me, although it did so with what might be described as finite enthusiasm. Reportedly, the admissions director at the time grew tired of the deliberations, threw up his hands, and exclaimed, "What the hell, one more won't matter." I am confident in saying that Oberlin did more for me than vice versa. I took a fantastic class in religion, which led me to archaeology, which got me to the Middle East, which led me to international relations, which launched me on my career. So don't worry if you don't know what comes next or after next. I arrived here 40 years ago. It was a time of intense protest. Vietnam was the dominant issue of the day. It was May 1970, the end of my freshman year, when the United States sent troops into Cambodia in an effort to interrupt North Vietnamese supply lines. Campuses across the country rose in protest. At nearby Kent State, four students lost their lives in a confrontation with National Guardsmen. Kent State closed, and many of its students made Oberlin their temporary home. If my memory serves me right, we never took finals that year. Somehow, both we students and the College survived. I expect that many of you did more than your share of protesting during your years here. For better or worse, though, your years of campus protest are likely to be mostly or entirely behind you. But protest is not behind you. You will always be a part of organizations where you find yourself disagreeing. So what I want to talk about today is what I've learned about protest, about how to register dissent, about when to stay and fight, when to concede, and when to move on. Let me turn back nearly seven years. It was early July 2002, and I went to meet Condoleezza Rice, President George W. Bush's national security advisor, in her West Wing office. I was seeing Condi in my capacity as director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff. As usual, I prepared on a yellow pad a list of the half-dozen or so issues I wanted to discuss during what normally was a thirty- or forty-five-minute meeting. At the top of my list was Iraq. For several weeks, those on my staff who dealt with Iraq and other Middle East issues had been reporting they sensed a shift, namely, that those at their level working at the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and under Vice President Dick Cheney (all of whom favored going to war with Iraq) were sending signals that things were going their way. I did not share this enthusiasm for going to war. I believed we could take other steps that could deal satisfactorily with the challenges posed by Saddam Hussein. I also feared that going to war would be much tougher than the advocates predicted. My related concern was that it would take an enormous toll on the rest of American foreign policy at the precise moment in history that the United States enjoyed a rare opportunity to shape the trajectory of international relations. I began my meeting with Condi by noting that the administration seemed to be building momentum toward going to war with Iraq and that I harbored serious doubts about the wisdom of doing so. I reminded her that I knew something about this issue given my background in the Middle East (I didn't mention Oberlin in particular but maybe I should have) and my role in the previous Bush administration, where I was the senior Middle East advisor to President George H.W. Bush during the Gulf war. So I asked her directly, "Are you really sure you want to make Iraq the centerpiece of the administration's foreign policy?" I was about to follow up with other questions when Condi cut me off. "You can save your breath, Richard. The president has already made up his mind on Iraq." The way she said it made clear that he had decided to go to war. This was eight months before the March 2003 start of the conflict. I was taken aback by the blunt substance and tone of her answer. Policy had gone much further than I had realized -- and feared. I did not argue at that moment, for several reasons. As in previous conversations when I had voiced my views on Iraq, Condi's response made it clear that any more conversation at that point would be a waste of time. It is always important to pick your moments to make an unwelcome case, and this did not appear to be a promising one. I figured as well that there would be additional opportunities to argue my stance, if not with Condi, then with others in a position to make a difference. Also accounting for my uncharacteristic reticence was the fact that my own opposition to going to war with Iraq was muted. At a recent dinner with two close friends, I had said I was 60/40 against initiating a war. My opposition was not stronger because of my assumption (derived from the available intelligence) that Iraq possessed both biological and chemical weapons. I also believed that if we went to war we would do so as we had in the previous Gulf war -- with considerable international and domestic support as well as with enough forces and sensible plans. Had I known then what I know now, namely, that there were no weapons of mass destruction and that the war would be carried out with a marked absence of good judgment and competence, I would have been completely opposed. Still, even then, I leaned against proceeding, fearing it would be much more difficult than predicted given both the ambitious aims and the complex reality that was Iraq. I was hardly the first U.S. official ever to be in a position of disagreeing with his bosses, and I will not be the last. Dissent has been hailed as noble and necessary by our leaders. It was none other than President Dwight Eisenhower who said that Americans should "never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion." And it was former Senator J. William Fulbright who said that "in a democracy, dissent is an act of faith." This is all well and good, but in my experience, dissent tends to be more honored in the abstract than in practice. Joseph Heller captures this reality all too well in his wicked 1979 political novel Good as Gold . Ralph, a presidential aide, tells a job applicant that "this President doesn't want yes-men. What we want are independent men of integrity who will agree with all our decisions after we make them." Dissent is difficult. It can constitute a real dilemma for the person who disagrees. On one hand, you owe it to your conscience and your bosses to tell them what they need to hear rather than what they want to hear. Speaking truth to power is actually a form of loyalty. It is the best and at times only way to make sure that government (or any organization) lives up to its potential. Other the other hand, though, no matter how good the advice, there will be times when it is resented or rejected. It may be on the merits; it may be politics or personalities. Sometimes, smart people just see things differently. It doesn't matter. As in baseball, no one gets a hit every time he comes to the plate; indeed, you are considered a star if you only fail two out of every three times you come to bat. So what should you do when you are ignored or overruled? One option is to continue challenging the prevailing wisdom or preference. There is a real risk, though, that you will be shut out or just ignored. To switch sports metaphors, the making of policy in government or any organization has something in common with football. Activity at any time during a game is concentrated on the part of the field near the line of scrimmage. It makes little sense to position yourself in the far end zone if you want to be a factor. Much the same holds for policy. If all the interest and attention is focused on one set of questions, it is usually of little or no value to place yourself totally outside the debate and raise concerns that are judged to be irrelevant or questions that are deemed to be settled. For me this dilemma was anything but an abstraction. The decision to attack Iraq was arguably the defining decision of George W. Bush's presidency. I thought then and I think now that this was not a war of necessity. Viable alternatives existed. This was a war of choice. And I thought the Iraq war was the wrong choice. In such situations there are several options. One option in principle that to me was not an option in practice was to leak my objections to the media or to try to otherwise undermine the policy. This is not dissent but disloyalty. More broadly, dissent is not about breaking the law or infringing the rights of others. If one does break the law, he or she should pay the price, as Thoreau clearly understood. And dissent should not come at the expense of the rights of others. This, too, is an American tradition and, I would like to think, an Oberlin tradition as well. Another option was to continue to argue against the war in Iraq after a decision was all but made to go ahead. I did some of this but not a lot. While it may have made me and other skeptics feel better, it would have reduced any influence we might have had on planning for the war and its aftermath. There are times you have to let go and move on, and this was one of them. In this case, moving on meant focusing on how the war would be planned and fought. I advocated for involving the Congress and the United Nations in the decision-making and planning. I calculated I could still influence important aspects of the policy if not its core. There is a danger in this. It is easy to be seduced by proximity to power or money or privilege. It is easy to rationalize when in reality you become little more than an enabler. One way to avoid this danger is to resign. Leaving is in many ways the most dramatic form of dissent. Putting aside personal reasons (health, finances, family) there are two potentially valid, policy-related reasons for resigning. (Neither of these, by the way, is the peculiarly British tradition of resigning when something goes wrong on your watch. It may not have been your fault, and even if it was, you may still be able to do more good than harm by staying.) One reason to resign is because you disagree fundamentally with a major decision. Several people resigned from the National Security Council staff over the Nixon administration's May 1970 decision to expand the Vietnam war into Cambodia, the decision I referred to earlier in describing this campus 39 years ago. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance resigned in 1980 over President Carter's decision to use force to try to free the American hostages being held in Iran. Several relatively junior foreign service officers resigned over the lack of a robust American response to Serbian brutality in Bosnia in the 1990s. Iraq obviously constituted a major issue, and although I disagreed with the thrust of U.S. policy, I did not resign even though many people then and since thought I should have. My reasoning was straightforward: I was 60/40 against going to war. No organization could function if people left every time they lost out on a 60/40 decision. Had I known then what I know now, that Iraq no longer possessed weapons of mass destruction, it would have become a 90/10 decision against the war, and in that circumstance I would have left had President George W. Bush gone ahead all the same. But that was not the situation as I understood it. In time I did leave, however. Candor requires I admit I was open to leaving. This relates to the second set of grounds for resigning, namely, a pattern of decisions that makes clear you have little in common with your colleagues. I was losing far more arguments than I was winning inside the administration, not just on Iraq, but on Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, climate change, the Israeli-Arab conflict, and the International Criminal Court. I was someone who favored diplomacy and collective efforts in an administration that was at best suspicious of such approaches and often flat out opposed. Adding to the frustration was the fact that I was frequently called upon to defend in public and to foreign officials policies that I opposed. Cordell Hull, FDR's secretary of state, described himself to a friend as "tired of being relied upon in public and ignored in private." I empathized all too well. On many occasions I had to rebut to outsiders precisely the arguments I myself had put forward inside the U.S. government. That this occurs on occasion is inevitable and part of what any professional must expect to deal with. But when it becomes the norm it is time to consider whether what you are doing makes sense. So let me sum up. Dissent will be and should be part of your lives. This country was born of dissent (the Revolutionary War), defined by it (the Civil War), and changed profoundly by it. The labor, suffrage, and civil rights movements as well as the anti-Vietnam protests all come to mind. Dissent is as American as cherry pie. It is also as Oberlinian as... tofu. Whatever you choose to do, wherever you choose to do it, you owe it to your bosses and your conscience to be intellectually honest. Still, think through when it is worth dissenting and how to go about it. Resigning is not always the right answer, though you need to consider it if the differences are large in scale or number. Staying where you are and trying to influence decisions from the inside may be the best option, but be sure you are making a positive difference. Practice your right of dissent, but tolerate and encourage it for others, too. Congratulations on reaching today, and good luck on every day that follows. Thank you for this opportunity and the honor of sharing this important day in your lives with you.
 
Andy Ostroy: Dick Cheney is America's #1 Terrorist Top
During the eight miserable years of the Bush administration, then-vice president Dick Cheney lied, deceived and stretched the truth as he and the president sought to ram their extreme right-wing war-mongering agenda down our collective throats. And heaven help anyone who got in their way: "If you're against the president and his policies, you're unpatriotic and rooting against America." "If you're against the Iraq War, you're against the troops." And now in the face of President Obama's plan to shut down the controversial prison at Cuba's Guantanamo Bay, Cheney's classic irresponsible and reprehensible partisan rhetoric is running on overdrive . He's an un-lean, mean 24/7 Obama-bashing machine who's giving us "If you're against the Bush/Cheney torture and Gitmo policies you're rooting for the terrorists." This posturing is beyond despicable. And if it's at all possible, he's an even bigger dick than ever. What Cheney's trying to do, and perhaps successfully, is set the stage so that in the event a terrorist attack does occur again on U.S. soil, he and the other shameless partisan hacks can place the entire blame on Obama's reversal of several Bush/Cheney "enhanced interrogation techniques" such as waterboarding. As a precursor to that, Cheney's ratcheting up the rhetoric that Obama is a weak commander-in-chief, incapable of keeping America safe. Forget the fact that the worst terror attack occurred on Bush/Cheney's watch. Forget the fact that it was eight years between the first and second World Trade Center attacks, yet the Busheviks boasted of anti-terror success after just 6 or 7 years as if passing that mark somehow meant the threat was beyond us. Forget the fact that just three months into his presidency Obama deftly ordered Navy snipers to kill Somali pirates who had held an American cargo ship captain hostage. But as in the past, the truth doesn't matter to Cheney, as he marches on to redeem himself from his perch as the most unpopular vice president in history. Now let's consider the concerns about closing Gitmo. LA mass murderer Charles Manson has been locked away for almost 40 years in a California maximum security prison. Other serial killers like John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahlmer and Ted Bundy, or the Oklahoma terrorist Timothy McVeigh, also rotted in the United States prison system before they were either executed or killed by fellow inmates. The deranged "Son of Sam" killer David Berkowitz is serving a life sentence without parole. And locked away in a high-tech prison in Florence, Colorado, known as the toughest slammer on Earth, is Unibomber Ted Kaczynski and radical Islamic terrorists Ramzi Yousef, Zacarias Moussaoui and shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Guess what? Not one of these butchers have busted loose. But according to Cheney's convoluted, disinegnuous logic and rationale, no matter how many innocent people these evil monsters have killed, maimed and tortured--and there are thousands--they must be a bunch of pussies to be incarcerated for so long without successfully escaping in the grand Houdini-like fashion that Cheney would like us to believe will occur if we close the controversial jail and import the suspected terrorists into America's prisons. C'mon people, nothing could be more idiotic. It's ludicrous to think the United States government lacks the overall resources to securely imprison Gitmo's detainees. Are we really supposed to believe that somehow these prisoners will ultimately end up walking the streets of small-town America? Are we really supposed to believe that while Manson, Kacynski, Yousef and countless other murderous beasts rot like caged animals in U.S prisons, this new breed of Gitmo uber-terrorist is too strong, too wily, too dangerous to be incarcerated on American soil? The suggestion that we can't transfer and successfully imprison Gitmo's detainees is not only preposterous, it's offensive to any American with even half a brain. This is simply another shameful Republican politicization of one of America's darkest days. It's a desperate attempt by a near-dead, fear-mongering party to once again lie to the American people about a threat that doesn't exist. Fear, fear and more fear. Where have we seen this routine before? And if Dick Cheney truly wants to keep the country safe from terrorists, he should stop trying to scare the crap out of everyone. He's the worst terrorist of all. More on Dick Cheney
 
Stewart Acuff: Take Action to Support Bakery Workers at Stella D'oro! Top
Our friends at BCTGM asked us to pass along info about this critical campaign, please take action. In the Bronx a group of bakery workers are locked in a death struggle with a private equity firm (Brynwood Partners, www.brynwoodpartners.com) over Stella D'oro cookie company which is emblematic of the travails working class Americans have gone through at the hands of the money men. The story of their struggle and what it says about the challenges facing the Obama Administration's efforts to preserve working families living standards is reported in an article posted on the Private Equity Buyout Watch (http://www.iuf.org/buyoutwatch/) sponsored by the IUF, the global union federation for workers in the food, tobacco, hospitality and catering industries and in agriculture. "Buyouts, Bread Sticks, Biscotti - and Challenges for the Obama Administration" tells the story of the 136 workers on strike for over nine months at the Stella D'oro bakery at West 237th Street in the Bronx. Members of BCTGM Local 50, they "are a microcosm of working America, as diverse as the neighborhood. Stella D'Oro is also a microcosm of what's been happening in corporate America for the past two decades - and what urgently needs to be fixed." Stella D'oro, which was once an iconic, national, premium Italian-style biscuit brand, was also once a successful family-owned firm acquired by RJR Nabisco, then taken over by Kraft when RJR Nabisco broke up (in the wake of the disastrous KKR LBO). Stella was run into the ground by its corporate overseers, then dumped to private equity earlier this decade when Kraft began to dispose of "non-core" assets under pressure from Wall Street. Workers there have been represented by the Bakers' union since 1964. Apparently the PE guys see the modest union contract of the older, experienced work force as a good target for their next round of pillaging. In the first round, the company disposed of its unionized route sales drivers by outsourcing distribution to a non-union company. This time, Stella's new owners have gone directly at the workforce, ignoring the National Labor Relations Act and demanding steep wage and benefit cuts with no opportunity for the workers and their union to bargain. The National Labor Relations Board, after the usual delay and indecision issued a "refusal to bargain" complaint charging the company with violating the law. The case only went before a federal judge last week; American labor law is so broken that it may take years for justice to prevail. Corporate mismanagement, predatory private equity, the destruction of an iconic brand and now an attempt to destroy the livelihoods of modest working families, the story at Stella D'oro pretty well sums up all that's been happening over the past two decades with the financialization of the food and manufacturing sectors generally. The workers and their union, an affiliate of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union, AFL-CIO have decided they have had enough. Their strike has been strongly supported by the Bronx community and the New York labor movement. They have taken their struggle to the luxurious offices of Brynwood Partners in Greenwich, CT and to the home of Brynwood Partner and Stella D'oro chairman Hendrik Hartong III, son of former Pittston coal CEO and Brynwood founder Henk Hartong Jr. Through snow and ice, holidays and Spring blossoms, the workers have held the line in the Bronx. And, like working families in Michigan, Ohio and elsewhere across America, they look to Washington to see if anything will be done to stop the predators. IUF's interest is not only in the travails of affiliated cookie workers in the US, but also in the devastation caused by speculators in the global food industry. Based in Switzerland, with affiliates across the planet, IUF (http://www.iuf.org/) has been tracking private equity and its shenanigans longer and better than most...with a global perspective. IUF was among the first to raise the alarm among European workers about what private equity would do to their companies. And like much of the world, they are wondering if the Obama Administration will take serious steps to curb the US-based speculators who have helped bring the global economy to its knees. Author and Buyout Watch editor Peter Rossman knows what he is writing about. He has been an adviser to the Party of European Socialists (EU grouping of Social Democratic and Labour parties) on private equity buyouts, is co-author of A Workers Guide to Private Equity Buyouts (which you can read through IUF's buyoutwatch site: http://www.iufdocuments.org/buyoutwatch, and a regular contributor to the Nation in the 80's/90s on developments in Eastern Europe. Washington's continuing embrace of hedge funds and private equity (manifest in Treasury's plan for partnering with them to buy toxic assets at inflated prices), the apparent indifference to struggles like that at Stella, plans to close US plants and increase imports as part of auto restructuring raise some important questions about what is being done to protect (or not) workers at the lowest of the grass roots. Meanwhile, in the Bronx, 136 workers continue to take a stand. They need your help and support. So do working families across the US. Email Henk Hartong and Brynwood Partners at huppsv@brynwoodpartners.com or info@brynwoodpartners.com. Tell them to go back to the bargaining table and negotiate a fair agreement to preserve the living standards of their loyal employees!
 
John Standerfer: A Crazy New Way to Balance the Budget Top
The current California budget crisis, while troubling in its own right, is merely a dress rehearsal for what the entire country will be facing in the next decade. California is showing us that even governments with economies larger than Span, Mexico or Canada and with such world class assets as Silicon Valley and Hollywood are not immune to dire financial straits. Unlike the global credit crisis, California's problems do not originate from complex Mortgage Backed Securities, Credit Default Swaps or other complex derivatives. Like so many of its residents, California is simply trying to spend more money than it earns. As has been pointed out innumerable times in personal finance advice columns, there are two simple ways to resolve this issue, increase income (raise taxes) or reduce spending (cut services). Unfortunately, neither of these is deemed politically "palatable", which is the real crux of the issue. The current political environment in both Sacramento and Washington makes it virtual political suicide to vote for any meaningful increase in income or reduction in spending as the offender would be crucified in the next election cycle as the "candidate who voted against saving infants' lives" or "who voted for tax increases that caused working class people to lose their homes". The flip side of this scenario is that the intelligent legislators will simply do nothing. If there's never a budget presented with cuts for children's health care then you can't be accused of increasing spending or cutting health care. If there's never a proposal for tax increases, you can't be accused of raising taxes or not balancing the budget. The best move politically is to do nothing and blame your lack of inaction on the opposing political party; it's an undefeatable strategy that has been adopted by the majority of the legislators. To break this logjam of complacency, we need a new way of allocating government money. The current structure of passing large bills that represent an entire budget with each line item having a percentage increase or decrease over the previous year is irreconcilably broken for the reasons enumerated above. Instead, we need to move to an affirmative style of budgeting where each representative is able to actually represent their constituents and allocate their tax dollars to the programs that are important to them. Here is how it works: at the beginning of each budget cycle, 50% of the estimated revenue (minus required interest payments) would be allocated to the House of Representatives and 50% to the Senate. The total dollar amounts allocated to each chamber would then be equally divided among the members. For example, if the total estimated revenue was $3 Trillion, then the Senate would receive $1.5 Trillion and each Senator would receive $15 billion to allocate. Each member is then free to allocate their percentage of the revenue on whatever programs they (and their constituents) see fit. Since all programs would have an initial budget of $0, if no legislators allocate any money to ethanol subsidies, then they would cease to exist. If less money than is currently being spent was allocated to Social Security, then benefits would decrease; the same with defense and every other program. Furthermore, each member would have an actual record of how they felt their constituents wanted money to be used and that record could be easily reviewed, which makes voting decisions simpler in the next election cycle. Additionally, programs with minimal support would die a natural death without forcing a majority of members to vote against them. Also, this would allow for a more nimble federal budget as it would be completely reallocated on a yearly basis. Feel we should support electric cars? Encourage your representative to allocate $2 million of your district's money to electric car tax breaks. Disappointed that your fiscally conservative candidate did not appropriate any money toward paying down the debt? Vote them out. What happens if there's an emergency and we need to spend more than we generated this year? Require a 2/3rds majority to borrow from next year's allocation and then spend the money in the same way. In the case of the recent stimulus bill, that concept would have given each member of Congress the ability to spend (or save - by paying down debt) their district's percentage of the money we're borrowing. This new way of allocating taxpayer's money would provide voters with significantly more transparency into what their representatives in Washington are doing and force legislators to actually make decisions annually about what money is spent on instead of hiding behind the status quo, both of which would be a welcome change. It may also be our best hope at staving off a California type crisis at the national level. More on House Of Represenatives
 
Zombie Banks Still Walk Among Us: CNN Top
Small banks facing severe loan losses and in need of capital continue to operate, indicating a reluctance on behalf of regulators to shut them down. More on Financial Crisis
 
Arianna Huffington: Everyone Agrees We Need to Reform Wall Street... Just Like After Enron Top
Remember how during the 2008 campaign there came a moment when candidates hoping to win the White House realized they had to declare that, like Obama, they were all in favor of "change"? Hillary did it . McCain did it . So did Romney . Giuliani too . In the same way, today everyone agrees that we need reform of our financial system. Even Wall Street knows it is inevitable. So the question becomes: are we going to get real reform or are we going to get the DC version of "reform"? For a snapshot of what DC reform looks like, take a look at the 26-page memo that Frank Luntz put together to show Republicans how to kill health care reform. Here is his unequivocal advice: "You simply MUST be vocally and passionately on the side of reform." The trick, he says, is to "be for the right kind of reform" -- ie the kind of reform that doesn't reform anything. We've seen this movie before, just a few years ago. Back then the stars of the show were Enron, Tyco, Global Crossing, and WorldCom. After their orgy of greed and fraud was exposed, everyone suddenly demanded reform. But what we got instead were window-dressing changes and band-aid legislation. And the prevailing philosophy that the free market would regulate itself was, in effect, allowed to remain in place. Indeed, it was given even freer rein. So now it's déjà vu all over again. You know the drill: first comes the shock, then the outrage, then a few high-profile show trials, then the punishment of a few culprits, then some half-measure reforms, and then we all move on... until it starts again. Right now we find ourselves in the middle of that cycle. The financial bandits believe that if they just lay low for a bit, the storm of outrage will blow over. They can just wait it out, feed the people a few Luntzian reformist scraps, and then return to the party. And they may well be right. As we wait for the Obama administration to announce its plan for comprehensive reform of the financial regulatory system, the signs don't look promising. For starters, the rise in the stock market (even though anyone who knows anything knows that it says next to nothing about the real economy) has taken the edge off the sense of crisis and the need for fundamental reform. Second, Tim Geithner is still running the show. During a recent interview with the Washington Post , Lois Romano asked him about "the fault lines" that led to the economic meltdown. "Who do you think bears the greatest responsibility?" she asked. "Is it the banks for pushing these loans? Is it the consumer for borrowing over their means? The regulators?" In his answer, Geithner spread the blame around, but there was one glaring omission: the regulators. Not a good blind spot to have when you are in charge of reforming the regulatory system. As Calculated Risk put it : "Either Geithner misspoke or he still doesn't understand what happened -- and that is deeply troubling." Equally troubling is Geithner's continued reliance on the guidance of the Wall Street players who led us into the mess we're currently in. Isn't that like sticking with the travel agent who just sent you on a vacation to hell? But that is apparently what Geither did when formulating the plan to regulate over-the-counter derivatives that he rolled out on May 13th. According to a document leaked to Bloomberg News , Geithner's plan bore a marked resemblance to a plan drawn up by Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, and Barclays, and sent to the Treasury department in February. According to financial analyst Brad Hintz, the banks' plan seeks "to protect their profitable market conditions." What a surprise. So, should we be worried that the banks' relentless attempts to game the system will undermine Geithner's professed desire to create "a robust regime of prudential supervision and regulation"? Not according to Treasury spokesman Andrew Williams, who assures us that the banks' proposal "had little impact on our final result." In the same way that campaign donations never have any impact on public policy, I suppose. One of the biggest challenges facing Obama's economic advisors is deciding how to overhaul the way Wall Street is regulated. Do they consolidate agencies? Reshuffle responsibilities? Create additional agencies? Blow the whole thing up and start over? At the moment, the administration seems to be leaning towards giving the Fed more regulatory power -- perhaps even folding the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission into a new, super-sized Fed . The idea of bringing together the hodgepodge of regulatory agencies is a good one. We certainly don't need companies being able to shop around for the most clueless regulatory agency, as AIG did when it placed itself under the not-very-watchful eye of the Office of Thrift Supervision. But is the Fed, which just delivered an epic failure in both its monetary policy and regulation of banks really the best choice to become our top financial watchdog? And it certainly shouldn't be the SEC, which was so weakened during the Bush years that it is now too far gone to be saved -- even by a good commissioner like Mary Schapiro. Just how bad things are at the SEC was made jaw-droppingly clear in an astonishing report on the agency released earlier this month by the Government Accountability Office. Reading it, the idea that Bernie Madoff got away with what he did for so long becomes less surprising than the fact that there was only one Bernie Madoff. To call the SEC a cesspool of incompetence, inefficiency, ineptitude, and disorganization would be an insult to cesspools everywhere. Click here to read the gory details, which TPM's Moe Tkacik sums up as "scenes from the ninth circle of financial bureaucracy" wherein the SEC is featured "in an absurdist Office Space comedy about how the crisis happened." The media are often an enabler of the transformation of real reform into DC "reform." An editorial in Saturday's Los Angeles Times offers a particularly egregious example of this. It might as well have been written by industry lobbyists (the way many "reform" bills are). Let's start with the subhead: "Stung by the excesses of the financial services industry, Congress is striking back." Actually, it wasn't Congress that was "stung" by those "excesses" -- it was the entire world. And why is regulation of out-of-control markets "striking back"? It gets worse: "Rather than trusting market forces, Democrats in Congress and the administration argue that unbridled capitalism has victimized consumers." Who wrote this, the "teaparty" organizers? Glenn Beck? Since when do things like setting ground rules and demanding transparency mean you no longer believe in "market forces"? Apparently, according to the LA Times , the call for reform is now a "backlash" in which "Democratic majorities in Congress" are going to "clip the financial industry's wings." And this is bad because reform means "raising costs and limiting the freedom of savvy investors and borrowers." Really? I wonder just how many of those "savvy investors" made money in, say, 2008, when they were blissfully free of all the wing-clipping regulations the LA Times is so afraid of? Not many -- and that's because all investors, savvy and non-savvy alike, are victimized when the entire financial system is destabilized. In fact, I believe I've heard something about the crisis affecting the LA Times , too. The closer we get to actual reform, the more hysterical the debate surrounding it becomes. The banking and financial industry's pushback becomes more desperate; the turf wars between entrenched agencies trying to keep their power become more heated; the mainstream media's habit of internalizing bad faith arguments in the name of "balance" becomes more pronounced; and the public interest loses out to the interests of the established financial/political class. But it doesn't have to. It all depends on whether the political will to implement real reform exists -- or can be created. Without it, we'll get more tough-sounding-but-ultimately-toothless "reform" that allows the cancer of greed and corruption plaguing our financial and political systems to continue to spread. Please join me on Facebook and Twitter . More on Timothy Geithner
 
Mike Tyson Daughter Exodus Injured, Accidentally Hanged Herself UPDATED Top
***UPDATE: SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO REPORT*** TMZ reports that Tyson's young daughter Exodus is on life support after she was found hanging by a cord. --- ***UPDATE: SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO REPORT*** Fox's Phoenix affiliate confirms that Mike Tyson's four-year-old daughter Exodus is in critical condition at St. Joe's Hospital after she was found hanging by a cord. Her seven-year-old brother alerted their mother after finding her in distress and Exodus was rushed to the hospital. Read more details from Fox here , and watch their video report below. --- ESPN, citing media accounts from Phoenix, reports that Mike Tyson's young daughter Exodus is in critical condition after accidentally hanging herself. ESPN quotes a police officer, in remarks to a radio station, saying that the young girl had been watching television with her room in a brother with exercise equipment and somehow ended up choking herself. The girl's mother administered CPR before the paramedics got there. Tyson was not thought to have been at home at the time and was rushed to hospital after the incident. More on Sports
 
UN Security Council condemns NKorea nuke test Top
UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. Security Council swiftly condemned North Korea's nuclear test on Monday as "a clear violation" of a 2006 resolution and said it will start work immediately on another one that could result in new sanctions against the reclusive nation. Hours after North Korea defiantly conducted its second test, its closest allies China and Russia joined Western powers and representatives from the rest of the world on the council to voice strong opposition to the underground explosion. After a brief emergency meeting held at Japan's request, the council demanded that North Korea abide by two previous resolutions, which among other things called for Pyongyang to abandon all nuclear weapons and return to six-party talks aimed at eliminating its nuclear program. It also called on all other U.N. member states to abide by sanctions imposed on the North, including embargoes on arms and material that could be used in its nuclear and ballistic missile programs and ship searches for banned weapons. In an AP interview in Copenhagen, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon deplored the test as a "grave violation" of council resolutions and called on the council in a statement to send "a strong and unified message" aimed at achieving the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and peace and security in the region. Ban, who is South Korean, urged the North "to refrain from taking any actions which will deteriorate the situation." Leaders in the United States, European Union and Russia also offered quick and pointed criticism. Even China's foreign ministry joined the chorus of disapproval, saying it "resolutely opposed" the test. "North Korea is directly and recklessly challenging the international community," President Barack Obama said in a statement. "North Korea's behavior increases tensions and undermines stability in Northeast Asia." In Brussels, the EU's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, denounced the test as a flagrant violation of Security Council resolutions. Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin, the current Security Council president, made clear in a statement that the council's condemnation was only an initial response, and that more will follow. He said it was too early to give any specifics. "The members of the Security Council have decided to start work immediately on a Security Council resolution on this matter," he said. U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice said the 15-member council agreed that work on the new resolution will begin Tuesday. "What we heard today was swift, clear, unequivocal condemnation and opposition to what occurred," she said. France's deputy U.N. ambassador Jean-Pierre Lacroix said France wants the new resolution to "include new sanctions ... because this behavior must have a cost and a price to pay." Japan's U.N. Ambassador Yukio Takasu, a non-permanent council member, said his country was pleased that the rest of the council agreed there should be a new resolution. But he noted that sanctions imposed against three North Korean companies after Pyongyang's missile test in April obviously had no effect. "So therefore I think we really have to think very carefully what will be an effective way to deal with this kind of behavior," he said. "We have to do something more, and the question is what is more." Churkin was asked whether Russia viewed the nuclear test as more serious than the North's launch of a missile in April. "This is a very rare occurrence as you know, and it goes contrary not only to resolutions of the Security Council but also the (Nuclear) Nonproliferation Treaty and the (Nuclear) Test Ban Treaty," he replied. "We are one of the founding fathers _ Russia is _ of those documents, so we think they're extremely important in current international relations. So anything which would undermine the regimes of those two treaties is very serious and needs to have a strong response." Before the council meeting, the five permanent veto-wielding members of the council _ the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France _ met behind closed doors for over an hour with the ambassadors of Japan and South Korea. North Korea claimed the underground nuclear test Monday was much larger than one it conducted in 2006, which led to the first U.N. sanctions resolution. Russia's Defense Ministry confirmed an atomic explosion occurred early Monday in northeastern North Korea and estimated that its strength was similar to bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II. After the council rebuked Pyongyang for its April 5 rocket liftoff, which many nations saw as a cover for testing its long-range missile technology, North Korea announced it was quitting disarmament talks and restarting its atomic facilities. The six-party talks, which began in 2003, had involved North Korea, South Korea, Russia, China, Japan, and the United States. ___ Associated Press Writers John Heilprin and Jan M. Olsen contributed to this report from Copenhagen. More on North Korea
 
Mel Gibson Baby CONFIRMED: Girlfriend Expecting This Fall Top
LOS ANGELES — Mel Gibson shared some baby news on Jay Leno's final week as "Tonight" show host. Gibson's publicist Alan Nierob said the actor confirmed during the show's taping Monday that his girlfriend, 39-year-old Oksana Grigorieva, is pregnant. A phone message left with an NBC spokeswoman was not immediately returned. The news comes only six weeks after Gibson's wife filed for divorce. The 53-year-old Oscar winner has seven children with wife Robyn, but the couple has been separated for almost three years. She cited irreconcilable differences in her April 13 divorce petition to end their marriage of 28 years. Leno's finale is Friday on the late-night show he's hosted since 1992. He'll start a 10 p.m. show this fall. More on Celebrity Kids
 

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