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.

The face of real recovery You live in a cardboard box. It’s fairly spacious, a nice refrigerator crate. A step up from the computer boxes you used to rent from an escaped psychotic named Lou.Right now, you’re standing on the corner. You’re cold. Starbucks is staring you in the face. You want to buy a cup of coffee. You’ve only got 10-cents in your pocket. The coffee scent hits you each time the door is opened. People with those cups pass by, smiling, energized. You wish you were them.

You’re an addict. You’re addicted to Starbucks. And today, you’re fucked.

Until, he came along. He had an air of wealth. Blue suit, yellow tie, hair slicked back. He walked with vintage Michael Douglas swagger.

He sees you staring. He sees the change in your hand. He looks at the change, then turns back to the Starbucks, then meets your eye. This is a man who knows the price of a cup of coffee.

“Need some money?”

You explain you’re homeless. You’re cold. You need some Starbucks. You’re addicted. It’s a terrible thing, and you’ll get help one day, swear to god, but today you just need your fix. Look at my hands shaking. You feel sick.

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The National Review said that Wall Street’s poor performance this week indicates that Obama’s recovery plan needs adjustment. With all due respect, no conclusion should be drawn from Wall Street’s performance until we know more about WHY the numbers dropped.  Unfortunately,  your article offers little insight on this why.

• Did Geithner’s lack of detail somehow weaken faith in the market?
• Geithner plan of a plan was really just a stall tactic. Is Wall Street that impatient?
• Was it because Geithner promised to keep bailing out the big boys?
• Or was it because he was not specific about how much?
• Was it that the increased reporting in the plan means it will be harder to hide?

We need to know what Wall Street didn’t like in order to evaluate the plan and its reaction.  Similarly, the success of the stimulus plan – any stimulus – depends on getting credit moving again. We were all right to questions the detail of the stimulus plan (although we could have been much more thorough and constructive).

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I watched the first half of Secretary Geithner’s testimony to the Senate Banking Committee and my overall impression is that both sides of the committee are working well together. The media spouts that by-partisanship in 2009 died an early death but it was alive in these hearings.

The senators were respectful of the witness, each other, their time limits and the subject matter. It was one of the more informative and substantive committee hearings that I have watched. After 8 years of wimpy Senate questions and non-existent answers from the Administration, this made me feel better our Senate and my government.

Geithner’s plan does lack specificity and seems to be buying the Administration some time to make hammer out the details but I was pleased by some of the principles the Secretary outlined.

• Try to work with existing money
• Conduct a thorough analysis of the existing assets
• Work with a public / private fund (s) to create a market around these them.
• Tell the country what is happening with all the money we are spending
• Banks will have to prove that any new loans will actually help them loan money

The Treasury Department is also starting to report on the first $700 million and lettings us know who has it, how it was spent and the returns we are getting. New loans will have more reporting requirements with banks making regular, public reports on how funds are being used. This was some of the most welcome news coming out of Washington in a long time.

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The American People still don’t know what we bought when we bailed out the banks. We know that we paid too much for some of these assets, but are we going to find out what we actually bought?

Why are fighting about building schools when we are spending hundreds of billions and land and houses that we haven’t even looked at?  James K Gaibraith says that many of the assets we have looked at, third party investor would buy.

So why are we automatically keeping the banks afloat?  We have criteria for evaluating the health of banks and procedures for dealing with failed banks. Why don’t we use the system that we have in place?

President Bush should have done it. President Bush should do it but the NY Times said today that Treasury Secretary Geithner got his way and is going to keep the banks afloat.

The success of the stimulus plan depends and fixing the credit market, yet the new Treasury Department seems as unwilling to act as the previous one.  Here is the simple version

1. Evaluate the banks.
2. If a banks’ assets can cover its liabilities, we support it.
3. If the bank’s debt outweighs its “good” assets, we follow the existing procedures for insolvent banks.

This is a banking regulation decision, not a political one.  The long standing polices are the best way to deal with the bad debt and the outright fraud being committed with our money.

The expectation of the a federal bail out is only thing propping up some of these banks. And many of these banks then take our money and do whatever they want with it.  This is what Republicans, Democrats, the media and the people should be upset about.

So far, only the people seem to care.  The politicians say nothing. The media says nothing.

President Obama promised to conduct business in the “light of day” and yesterday and added that “transparency and rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.” This is a welcome break from the past 8 years in which President Bush operated in the dark.  The list of information kept from the people is ridiculous and even things President Bush promised to provide, like an open accounting of Iraqi oil sales, we never got.

We all know that knowledge is power and Presidents need to weild this power. But the President works for us.  All information he (or she) has is ours and each President must decide how much he can share with the people – how much he trusts the people. President Bush  didn’t trust us at all.  He didn’t involve us or even include us.  We were supposed to shop and leave everything to him.

No, thank you.  The people of the United States are ready, willing and able to play a more active role in our democracy. And we have the technology to do so.

Electing representatives still makes sense for we need professionals dedicating their full time efforts to the business of government, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t be involved.  President Obama made great use of the Internet to get his message out and organize people during the campaign. My hope is that he goes further and has us help collect data and make the tough decisions.

Will Congress really vote with  insurance lobbyist when the President’s website has documented 2.8 million cases of insurance-company fraud in the last 12 months and 73% of the site’s 24 million contributors support the President’s bill?  I think not.  And if they do, we will know, remember and vote accordingly.  Not because some Fox-hard ranted about it but because we collected the data and contributed our voices.

Imagine a place where you could report on illegal dumping, find out how to conclusively measure it and then contribute the data?  Imagine a place where soldiers could report each time Halliburton burns another $80,000 tax-payer-bought semi-trailer because a tire went flat?  Or a place where a truck driver could log how many consecutive shifts his boss forced him to drive?

My hope is that Obama continues to experiment with the Internet as a way to involve citizens. We have just begun to realize how sharing information can affect our government. An open gathering and evaluation system would be the opposite of Big Brother. As long as we control it, such a system would put more and more control in our hands. Such a system would allow us to take the great American experiment to new levels.

And we need such growth for that only the people of the US have the guts to make the tough choices between profit and responsibility.  The process will be messy and faulty but together we can go places that the cash pushers and their Congressional customers will never dare.

President Obama, please trust us.  Please include us.  We are ready to grow with you.

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.

Senator McCain was speaking in the heat of a debate and should be given a chance to adjust his statement, but telling the nation that our energy problems can be addressed by building more nuclear power plants is wrong and diversionary.  Of course, the Senator says gave the same “all of the above” blather that comes out of every politician’s mouth these days.

This is better than the head in sand approach taken for the last decade.  At least politicians are starting to pay attention to our growing energy / environmental crisis. Everyone seems to get that we need to make real changes if our economy is going to recover and stay strong into this century.  But the devils are in the details.

Republicans and Democrats are going to tell us that the “government isn’t in the business of picking winners.” Oh, except for when we build the railroads, the highways, state and local roads, sea ports, airports, nuclear power plants, and provide land, research money, military and diplomatic cover for the oil industry.  The government has ALWAYS picked winners and losers and it always will.

Any politician who says otherwise is just working for the old fashion winners who we picked so long ago that we all forgot.  Oil, gas and coal did us a plenty of good but their  time is over.  Time for a new champion and it is us, the people of the United States who get to pick – not the oil companies or the politicians squawking in their pockets.

With some simple policy adjustments, we could create a much more competitive market place that will unleash the pent up creative energy of this country.  We have so many people with good energy technologies and business plans.  If we give them a chance to compete, if we pick the 21st century, if we pick the future, there is no limit to how much we can achieve.

But if we just keeping picking the same old cronies (oil, gas, coal and nukes), then we can expect to keep sending our wealth to Canada, England, Mexico and Saudi Arabia.  It is our choice and we make it next month.  The truth is that neither candidate has been specific about how they will foster innovation.

Carbon Tax or Cap and Trade are two very workable ideas that have kicked around for a long time. Both would work.  We saw cap and trade work with Acid Rain.  Carbon Tax is transforming the European energy markets as we speak.  This is not a hard thing to wrap your mind around and yet neither candidate says anything about, nor does our oil fed media.

Once again, it is up to us.  Write the candidate of your choice and ask them what policies that will endorse to reshape our 20th century energy market to meet the challenges of the coming years.  And remember that the government always picks winners.  The currents winners did a great job. They helped us build a great nation economy and vast wealth, but like old ball players, they have lost a step and no longer see the ball well.  It is time for big change.

Claiming that paying taxes is unpatriotic sets a horrible example for a nation with as many military commitments and financial challengs as we face.  I hope the people of the US point out to this Gov. Palin that Americans support our troops with our taxes. Without taxes, our troops wouldn’t have armor for thier vehchiles or healthcare when they are injured.  We should also remind her that the support for education that she desires will come from taxes. 

We should also point out that getting the government out of commerical banks hair (thank you President Clinton for caving in to a Republican Congress) is what lead our present financial crisis?  There are many things to pick apart in this presidental campaign:

• Neither candidate has discussed how to build a  new energy market in the US
• Neither canidate has a credible description of what we face in Iraq, Afghanistan or Iran
• Neither candidate has demonstrated a through understanding of our financial situation

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When will it stop?  When will the US get journalist who actually know the background of the stories they write and follow them up with rigorous research and balanced reporting?  We continue to suffer under pundits posing as journalists.  Are they lazy to think things through? Are they bought off by one side or the other? Do they not know the difference between a press release and a news article? This country will not move forward until we ignore these lazy, corrupt ignoramuses and insist on real news.

Take for instance,NewsMax’s “Correspondent” Ronald Kessler’s article on the McCain / Obama tussle over Henry Kissinger’s suggested approach to Iran. Henry Kissinger has long supported talks with Iran and any honest review of this exchange might discuss what McCain was trying to achieve by simplifying his opponents opinion.  Or it might discuss draw out the differences between the three candidates suggested approaches to Iran.

But Kessler jumps on the partisan band wagon and assumes that McCain’s mischaracterization of Obama’s position is his actual opinion. It allows Kessler to delve right into free advertising for McCain but does nothing to clarify the difference between the two men and even less to address the difference between our two countries.
The nation is focused on this election and I would like to see our media focused on lifting the debate to help us deal with complex issues like Iran.  Instead we get writers who take our candidates simplistic positions and simplify them.

Anyone who has followed three men’s position on Iran would know that only one has consistently talked about bombing them, did a dance about bombing them. Obama and Kissinger have long been pushing negotiations, so no matter how their approaches may differ, Kissinger is closer to Obama than McCain.

Does Kessler let us know this? Does he explain their positions? No. He probably thinks seriously about our position on Iran, but you can tell from the lazy, flippant way he wrote this article.  Like Rush Limbaugh admits in private, “it’s just entertainment. It doesn’t mean anything.” Selling our country for a quick buck, thanks.