The movement just wants to elect one party over another when both are equally to blame. Voting for one over the other is a diversion that will not fix anything. Here are a couple ways to see through Tea Party falsehoods:

1. They blame Obama for our problems when we have been following the same economic approach since 1980. After 12 years of un-admitted recession, President Regan ushered in a new approach using, tax cuts, deregulation and massive federal spending to turn things around. This new CUT & SPEND economy favored financial sectors, creating the age of paper entrepreneurs and the bailouts needed to sustain them.

Remember these bailouts: Penn Central, Lockheed, Chrysler, Braniff, LTV, Storage Tech, Texaco, White Motors, the HUD scandal, the Savings and Loans scandal? How many times does the taxpayer have to pay for Republican and Democratic duplicity in these thefts?

No President since Regan has significantly altered the freedom of these adventure capitalist. And no one, not even the Tea Party, is talking about doing it now. Cut & Spent got us into this mess, yet remains our only economic idea.

We should be angry and want to do something serious about it. But blaming Obama for the bailouts that Bush started to save a faith-based financial system created thirty years ago is sure sign that the Tea Party either doesn’t understand what is going on or doesn’t want it to change.

2. They favor one party of the other. No one has any idea how to fix the system. Both Republicans and Democrats are equally responsible for creating and maintaining this thirty year dream of unregulated financial markets. Voting one party in over other will do NOTHING to address our situation. Replacing one bailout artist with another will NOT help the country. This is perhaps the most pernicious falsehood of this party; they parade as status quo as change.

3. They have no ideas and offer no ideas on how to fix the system. They very actively support some candidates over others (always R over D) but have no concrete actions or principals on how to fix the an investment system with abstracted ownership, a focus on short terms returns and dependence of ever more complex mathematic formulations. Until we have a something to replace cut & spent, some way to de-emphasize the importance of financial markets in our lives, we will remain beholden to financial slight-of-hand artists. And the Tea Party will remain a false front for the money men.

So go to your local Tea Party meeting and ask them what policies think will fix our system? And don’t take “vote Republican” as a sufficient answer.

This story, or the lack of a story, surrounding this bold face lie was a formative moment for They Say Nothing! Tired of  watching major distortions slip by unquestioned, we started calling out what we see.  This short video celebrates what we are about and reminds us that the UN weapons sanctions in Iraq actually WORKED.

“The decay that happened in the Iraqi weapons programs was a function of the sanctions…”

Charles Duelfer, Special Adviser to the CIA on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction

The US government is busy entangling our nation in a struggle with Iran. Our government has only come up with only two approaches to Iran – containment or military confrontation.  We think collaborative engagement on economic and security issues would be the most productive way forward, but anything is better than fighting.  Military action will have horrific results for Americans and Iranians alike.  So this video is also indented to remind us that despite what the Bush Administration said (faithfully repeated by the media), the UN weapons sanctions against Iraq worked.

And we should remember that they worked for in the near future, we just may have to shout down a TV full of defeatists whose only answer is to drop more bombs.

I don’t think so.  Check out this bit of fun that tries to point out just how tired these new ideas sound.

The music is from Balkan Beat Box.

The house of card is finally falling.  You got to hand it to the financial wizards who built the shaky structure so high and kept it growing for 28 years.  But it is collapsing and it is time that we play grown up and admit that we have no idea when it will end.

President Bill Clinton is just as guilty as Regan and both Bushes.  In 1980, we gave control of our economy, and in many ways our country, to Wall Street.  We all knew it but we liked our the little scraps of easy money that came our way.  So none of us really complained and now we will all pay the price.

We can take our country back but it starts by being strong enough to admit our stupidity and then we must stop listening to the thieves standing in front of us with their hands out.  In 1980, we were told that cutting taxes on the rich would unleash economic productivity that would run through every industry and trickle down to us.

The tax cuts did produce new capital investment but not in factories or research, not in wages, education or retooling, not in roads, airports or levees, but in assets.  The free flowing cash was invested according to how companies looked on paper this quarter.

Market pressure was long been a factor in our economy but the slush of loose funds created a frenzy of new investments. And it worked – prices went up making more money that fueled the next investment.  It seemed like the perfect machine, always growing, always going up.  Except that the rising assets didn’t always or even often correspond to real growth on the planet. How much of the perceived success was real?

The Dow Jones Industrial Average stands around 8,500 today, but what should is actually be? 10,000? 7,500? 5,000? 2,500?  No one really knows but it could easily be 3,000 – 4,000 points lower.

The Dow started the 1920s at 100.  After peaking at 380 and bottoming out around 36, it rose back to 100 and began a long slow rise to 200 by 1950.  Then the US experienced two decades of expansive growth where the US made 40% of almost everything bought on the plant.  A truly incredible period of growth in the real economy and correspondingly, the Dow rose  to 1,000.

The 70′s were tougher – two oil crisis-es, high inflation, paying the financial cost of a long bloody war – the Dow fluctuated but made no real progress.  Then 1980 arrived with the hopeful, inspiring, free-trading President Regan.  The rich were freed from reality and the resulting money party pushed the DOW  from 1,000 in 1980 to 10,000 in 2000.

It rose only 800 points in the 50s and 60s. Yet in the 80s and 90s, when we didn’t make or build nearly the same amount, it rose 9,000 points? Why? What accounts for this explosion?  Computing certainly accelerated the growth of wealth but not by a factor of 10.

I suspect that the growth was primarily the fictitious manipulations of financial assets – paper profits created by self-interested pencil pushers trading with other pencil pushers.  But they couldn’t do it alone; we have been willing participants. Their schemes many of their harebrained have failed but we always been there to bail.  Kevin Phillip’s list of bailouts:

• 1982-86 US Treasury relives currencies in Mexico, Argentina and Brazil so their collapse won’t hammer US banks.
• 1984 – $4 Billion to Continental Illinois Bank
• Late 1980s – Fed gave undisclosed millions to 350 banks that later failed.  Bail out gave big depositors time to get out.
• October 1987 – Fed floods market with cash after Wall Street has single biggest loss
• 1989 -1992  – $250 billion to pay for the cash stolen during the Savings and Loans scandal.  A handful of the thousands of thieves did a jail time .
• 1990 -1992  – $1.8 billion to Bank of New England and $2.3 billion to Citibank.  Interest rates were also cut to let banks rebuild their balance sheets.
• 1994 – 1995 – Mexican Peso bailout – again to protect US banks from asset devaluation.
• 1997 – Asian currency bail out – Fed gave $200 billion to IMF to keep currencies afloat.
• 1998 – Long Term Capital Management – Hedge fund that is “too big to fail” bailed to keep others from falling as well.
• 1999 – Y2K Liquidity – Fed gives liquidity to banks to safeguard from any Y2K crises.  The cash mostly used to push the NASDAQ bubble higher.

This year we are giving away the biggest bailouts of all and no matter how many we give, hands show up for more.  It is time we stopped faking ourselves and admit that we have no idea how much any of this paper is worth and we may be at the end of a thirty year bubble that we should lance.

So far President-Elect Obama has appointed the same ol’ boys who got us into this mess.  Clinton was a voodoo market player just like Regan and Bush before him. Trading made-up values does not work in the long run and hopefully President-Elect Obama realizes that the financial guys don’t know what is going on. They no longer trust each other, which means we shouldn’t trust them.

We haven’ quite lost our shirt, but it is thin and ugly.  It is time to tear it off and throw it away.

The US taxpayer, through the Federal Reserve, has already paid the Wall Street Banks more than enough to cover the sub prime debt.  Last $700 Billion is over the top of the $850 Billion of bad debt that we have already bought.  Yet buying this bad debt has done nothing to open the credit markets.  What is going on? 

Is it just the lack of trust that Lehman Brothers triggered in foreign lenders when, one day before going under, they pulled all their foreign assets to pay American banks?  Are the Wall Street banks just taking everything they can get?  Or is the problem of the derivatives markets really much bigger than anyone will say?

I certainly don’t know enough to say for sure, but it is clear that President emergency meeting this  weekend will still not directly address the economic slow down.  The meeting will focus on the helping the banks but do nothing to help people so that the banks will actually lend our tax money back to us. 

There are not plans to discuss debt reduction, bankruptcy reform, no progressive tax reform – in other words, the banks will get is left of our money and we gets to suck eggshells.   

We are being ripped off.  Write your bank, write your congress person and tell them to help the people, not only the Wall Street banks.

This seemingly innocuous economic news could have huge implications for American security. One of the overlooked factor leading to 9/11 is the poverty and hardship across Saudi Arabia and Yemen (countries of origin for the nineteen attackers). We should remember that before 9/11 the price of oil had been very low for years and people country that depends on the handout of oil proceeds was hurting.

Prices spiked immediately after 9/11 allowing for cash payments to stretch much deeper in Saudi Arabia buying off a great deal of anger. It has been an unsaid success of the Bush Administration keeping prices high to keep the fanatics (many assume they should get paid to pray) happy.

But if prices have reached so high that inflation is throwing the system out of whack, we could see anger rising and the US is likely to bear the brunt of their resentment. We have been kept safe by removing our military from Saudi Arabia and the high price of oil. The first is safe as we are not going back into Saudi Arabia stirring up that hornets nest of anger, but we need to find a solution for the economic problems as well.

Among the many topics brushed over in President Bush’s State of the Union Address last night was a call to allow the phone companies to continue helping the government spy on the American people. The use of “believed” reveals how untrustworthy the government can be.

“Congress must pass liability protection for companies believed to have assisted in the efforts to defend America.”

We all know the phone companies work with the government to monitor communications. The President had just said as much by asking for the law to be extended, so why obfuscate in the next sentence? Why can’t he admit the phone companies are monitoring American phone calls? If the phone companies are acting within the law, why do they need liability protection?

Perhaps he isn’t sure whether or not they have actually helped? Does our government really expect us to let huge corporations carte blanche to collude with the government? Are a handful of radicals really such a threat that we should our phone companies pass anything we say to the government? How many Americans trust either their phone carrier or the government with that? How many Americans really think giving us some liberty is worth it, especially when all we need?

3000 candidates were excluded from Iran’s March parliamentary election for having records. “Alireza Afshar, head of election headquarters, did not elaborate on what kind of record they had.” This legal technique is slightly better than having the Guardian Council strike candidates for no reason as they did to 1,300 in 2004. But this is precisely the kind of top down control that will keep Iran on its confrontational path.

With inflation and unemployment rising in Iran have many people looking for change. Many Iranians also disagree with their government’s willingness to provoke Europe and the US. The people of Iran should be allowed to speak and I hope the international community will pay see this act as:

1. The repression of popular opinion by a minority government concerned about maintaining control

2. Evidence that Iran is NOT a country of ‘religious radicals’ or “beyond reason” but rather peopled by a proud, educated populace interested in a making a living in a peaceful world.

The best way for Iran to achieve its political and economic ambitions is to listen to the will of its people and allow the free expression of their economic and political aspirations. For the people of Iran, as do the people of the United States, remain the best hope for their country.

The Democrats have a great opportunity to stand tall and lead the country with a clear vision of a bright future. And it starts with refusing to drop the renewable provisions from the new energy bill. The issue is too important to our economy, our security and our future.

This energy bill is the first step in building the next economy, we can’t afford to wait any longer. We either start investing in the new tools needed to build the our further, or we trust the old payoffs to keep working. We trust the big oil companies to keep finding new sources of oil and us to find ways to pay for it.
Democrats must to fight to save both the increased CAFÉ standards and the renewable electricity standards. For how can any of them run on the environment and renewable energy if they let this drift by with a large public struggle? This is about a commitment to leadership and the time to act is now:

1. The industry will productively use the help
2. The country is ready for the idea
3. This is the last energy bill before the election

Read the rest of this entry »

The senate rolled over yesterday and will allow the Federal Government to listen to anything it wants for 45 days. Big Brother has his wish; the ‘law’ is being twisted to fit the governments wish to watch, not just terrorists, but everyone who disagrees with it.

We have seen past Administrations abuse this power and now we are watching both the Administration and the Congress abuse this power. The people are once again pushed aside for being compliant and unaware. Our freedom is being taken from us week by week. If freedom is ever to ring in this land again, it will be up to us to make if happen for the very of the elected bother to protect us.