Abhorrent Anniversary Gifts

Chances are you forgot to buy a present again this year, after all, anniversaries are hard to remember. What with the aftermath of that whole another former Disney girl goes off the rails thing, the release of another copy of a phone that'll make your life better and the anticipation of another brown people massacre, you could be forgiven for forgetting given the buzz surrounding Miley's strange twerking, Apple's chain jerking and Obama's postponed berserking. As if that weren't enough, there's always America's monthly mass shooting, the release of a video game glorifying said killing while looting or some kind of sporting event featuring flag saluting or home team rooting. Yes, it seems the official narrative of the Great Recession™ has sanctified September 15th, 2008 as the day the GFC (Global Financial Crisis™) began with the failure of Lehman Brothers. On cue, the distraction industry inundated those still paying attention with a slew of stories to perpetuate this myth, ranging in theme from the horror of the meltdown to how it couldn't have been predicted to hagiographies of those who saved us from even greater disaster and how the world of finance has changed since, thus ensuring it couldn't happen again. Nearly all miss the point and couldn't be more wrong as all we had to do was open up the newly released Fortune 400 list of richest Americans to see the cause, how nothing's changed and that the worst is yet to come.

Though many will be cheered and applaud the newest Fortune list, the inequality in wealth that it illustrates was not only the disease at the root of the crisis but a sure sign that like a malignant cancer it is metastasizing. Hooray! Bill Gates is still the richest man in America and passed Carlos Slim to reclaim the #1 slot in the world. Mark Zucherberg's wealth jumped almost $10 billion to get him back into the top 20 so you can rest easy, all those hours you've spent on Facebook weren't wasted. Warren Buffet, the Oracle of Omaha, had the biggest dollar gain while some schmoe named David Duffield, co-CEO of some outfit called Workday had the biggest percentage rise. All told, the wealth of the richest 400 in America climbed from $1.7 trillion to $2.02 trillion in a single year making them worth more than such economies as Canada, Mexico and Russia. Hooray that is until you realize where this mind-boggling wealth is coming from and for that all you had to do was notice what stock prices did this September 18th when the Fed announced it was going to continue its $85 billion monthly bond buying program, AKA quantitative easing 3, AKA printing money to buy assets from banks at book value instead of  market value, AKA providing a massive tax payer subsidy to the stock market.

Fortunately for the attention span challenged, the past couple of weeks have also seen a couple of other reports highlighting the financial situation of the rest of the country. The US census bureau's report on income and poverty was full of sobering stats, but the most telling were regarding poverty and median income leaving people angry, disgusted and frustrated. Now, I'll grant you the fact that these statistics are subject to manipulation and often don't compare well over time, but the raw numbers are shocking in themselves. The poverty rate remained above 15%, some 46.5 million people; meanwhile children are the poorest group, 21.8% (the highest in the industrial world) or 16.1 million children under 18, and the younger, the poorer as 25.1% of kids under 5, the years of greatest brain development, were poor. Meanwhile, the median household income was unchanged from the previous year, not so bad in itself until you notice this means the household that falls in the exact middle of the income range, with half the families in the country earning more and half less, earns less than they did in 1989, a quarter century of stagnation.

These details are important when one wants to discuss inequality as many free market believers will close their ears upon hearing the word as visions of Marxist hordes coming to take away their money flash before their eyes. Ironically, the previous two paragraphs illustrate Marx's theories to a tee as the former shows how well capital is doing while the latter paints a grim picture of labour's situation. As America's 2nd richest man, the aforementioned Oracle, said "[t]here's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." It's not my purpose today to get into the nitty-gritty of this war, you can check out how it was waged here, here, here, here, here or here, but to look at the conscious choice we made five years ago to continue the slaughter along with how and why things will continue to get worse if nothing is done to stem the tide.

Back to our anniversary. It's five years ago and we've been told the financial world is on the verge of collapse with the implication that there will be mass panic as bank machines refuse to spit out cash, credit lines seize up and pension plans crumble. Not only were bankers and brokers about to start jumping off window ledges, supermarkets soon to run out of food and grandma sure to freeze to death, but horror of horrors, we wouldn't be able to get the new iPhone 2.0! If anybody was to blame besides bankers it was Bush; Dubya had messed up the country and it was time for a change, brand America was due for an overhaul. Lo and behold, there was an election coming, contested between an old white guy who wanted to bomb Iran and a young, black, hip, handsome, debonair, peace loving constitutional law professor. Many (myself included) were blind to the fact that Obama was just another marketing stunt that changed the packaging but not the substance. At the same time he was surrounding himself with an economic team sure to carry on past policies favouring Wall Street and the rich, men such as Emanuel, Geithner, Bernanke and Summers, he had an all-star marketing team including a Facebook founder, a social secretary and David Axelrod who ensured the public wouldn't notice that Goldman Sachs was his campaign's biggest private contributor. Every tool in the marketing arsenal was used to create and sustain the Obama brand from the perfectly calibrated logo to viral marketing, product placement, infomercials and brand alliances.

Yes we can hope and change was nothing but cover for the great con job of the past five years. Sure, My administration," the president added, "is the only thing between you [bankers] and the pitchforks." Yes, the new president would be the greatest reformer since Franklin Roosevelt, the press sold it and the public bought it. Obama the socialist was coming to take away not only the wealth of the rich but everyone's, a fear so strong it spawned the Tea Party. The ultimate irony though is that despite all the noise, vile and bile directed against him by the rich, Obama left their great money making machine pretty much intact as he told the bankers behind closed doors "[y]ou guys have an acute public relations problem that’s turning into a political problem. And I want to help…I’m not here to go after you. I’m protecting you…. I’m going to shield you from congressional and public anger." Help and shield he did, enabling the greatest transfer of wealth, from the bottom up, in history.
Obama played the populist card when he had to with the help of the star-struck press. Stories of the president hauling in the heads of the 13 largest financial institutions to explain their actions and justify their sky-high salaries and bonuses were peppered with quotes to justify our faith: "

While millions were losing their homes and jobs, trillions were pledged to prop up the rich, the banks and corporations. TARP's $700 billion was quickly followed by trillions in loans and guarantees to the likes of McDonald's, Harley Davidson and UBS, $1.75 trillion in bond purchases in 2009 for QE1, $600 billion more the following year in QE2, another $400 billion of mortgage purchases in 2011 during 'Operation Twist' and of course the now-always-taper-threatened-in-order-to-allow-insiders-to-profit QE3, the monthly $85 billion in purchases. This back door bailout also includes six years of artificially low, near zero interest rates and the implicit guarantee that the government will step in and save them if necessary. Meanwhile, while the government plays back door man to the rich, we play the cuckold, getting screwed over, footing the bills and getting left out in the cold, some literally, thanks to the never-ending debt ceiling budget battles this profligacy along with Dubya's wars and 30 years of tax cuts for the rich have led to. The enormous shift in power away from labour has allowed capital to further squeeze jobs and wages from the lower and the middle classes. As late as 1980, economists believed labour's share of national income was pretty much fixed, but since that time it has slowly dwindled (not just in America). More money is flowing to corporate profits (and thus shareholders, ie. capital) than ever before while an ever larger slice of the smaller pie left to labour is being served to those at the top of the income scale. The result is obviously growing inequality.

Which brings us to another recently released study of note, Emmanual Saez's 2012 US inequality report, Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States. Sadly, it brings no surprises, only confirmation of the suspicions of those paying attention; inequality is getting worse, itself no surprise as inequality feeds on itself in a vicious circle. After a brief drop immediately following the GFC, thanks in large part to policies that could have no other result, the top 1% of income earners have captured 95% of the income gains in the first three years of the so-called recovery, leaving America's income distribution more unequal than any time since records have been kept. The proportion of income going to the richest decile broke through the 50% mark for the first time ever while that going to that top 1% increased from 19.65% to 22.46% in just one year. In case you're wondering, the share going to the top 0.01% jumped from 4.32% to 5.47%, the largest percentage increase since 1927-1928. However, this inequality is dwarfed by that of wealth, perfectly encapsulated by this video. But wait, so what, right? Some people win, some lose, that's the way capitalism works.

Right. But wrong. Huh? Well, the thing is, capitalism and thus society works better when inequality isn't so severe as can be seen in many ways. The first and most obvious is to look at the history of income distribution, the chart above that practically forms, in the words of Robert Reich, a suspension bridge. Before a new standard was set last year, inequality had peaked in 1928 and then again in 2007. It's no coincidence the Great Depression followed the former in 1929 and the GFC followed the latter in 2008 as the majority of the population simply don't have enough purchasing power necessary to maintain a consumer economy. Worse, epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pinkett convincingly demonstrated the link between inequality and a wide range of social ills such as teenage births, homicides, obesity, lower educational achievement, drug use, mental illness and infant mortality rates in their book The Spirit Level. Not only do they show the link, they dispell the "correlation is not causation" complaint by showing the same effects between countries as well as within countries finding the same correlation among the 50 US states.

Perhaps most ironically of all, as America moves its way up the inequality charts, the most American story of all, the rags to riches, Horatio Alger, land of opportunity parable, slowly dies. As "The Great Gatsby Curve" illustrates, the more unequal the economy, as measured by the GINI index, the more closely children's income is tied to that of their parents. The US already has one of the lowest earning elasticities (how much a father's income affects their offspring's) in the developed world, and as it becomes more unequal this affect will only worsen. Social mobility has become a thing of the past in much of America, the chances of someone born into the lowest economic quintile in Atlanta has a 4% chance of reaching the top 20%. One study suggested that the loss of life from income inequality in the US in 1990 was the equivalent of the combined loss of life due to lung cancer, diabetes, motor vehicle accidents, HIV infection, suicide and homicide.

The reason for the negative economic and social effects of inequality is bundled up with why the phenomenon seems to feed on itself, getting worse and worse. Inequality increases economic insecurity for those at the bottom while transforming wealth into political power for those at the top. The proletariat, er, the 99%, er, well, the majority of us are forced to fight for fewer jobs, which pay less and offer less security, thus upping the stress. The official unemployment rate may be down but the labour-force participation rate is also down, at a 35 year low, as new jobs haven't kept up with population growth. The jobs created are paying less on average, with less hours than those lost in the GFC. Those who kept their job have most likely had their hours and benefits cut and are probably earning the same or less as five years ago but are happy now just to have a job. If you don't have a job you are shamed as being lazy, someone gaming the system, a taker (or skiver for you Brits) coasting on the beneficence of the rich. These makers (yeah, there's a British version too, strivers), ensure the only legislation that passes protects their power and/or expands GDP, like blowing brown people up, creating a crazy health care system centered on insurance or passing new free trade deals such the upcoming TPP which will lower wages for 90% of workers.

There were of course a couple other significant anniversaries that have passed in the past couple weeks that illustrate the corrosiveness of inequality on empathy and imagination: 9/11, both the 12th and the 40th and Occupy Wall Street's 2nd. Whether created or not, the only answer to the fear that was produced by the terrorist strikes in America a dozen years ago could ever be blowing stuff up as not only does it enrich those buying the election but also because those at the top are no longer able to understand the Other. Mirror neurons, which allow us to get into the heads of others, seem to reflect better for the powerless but much worse for the powerful. In simpler terms, the rich and powerful have less empathy helping explain the results of a study last year showing the rich are more likely to lie, cheat and even take candy from children. Amassing great wealth breeds an arrogance made even more harmful given the with us or against us atmosphere of the GFC and war on terror. Worse, those in power thanks to their wealth know they won't need to sacrifice anything as only poor people's children fight and die in wars. Thus the public ignores both the epidemic of returning GI suicides and the near doubling of suicide rates in the past 10 years for the general public aged between 50 and 59; used up by war and used up by the GFC.

The CIA helping Pinochet take out Allende in Chile in 1973 turned another possible socialist success story (I know there haven't been any yet) into a laboratory for the Chicago Boys to study free market economics. Ever wonder where economists got their field research to test and try to prove their wacky theories? Chile was the real ground zero. Allende's mistake was trying to give the wealth of the nation back to the people when everyone knows mulinational corporations are the only actors rational enough to control it properly. Er, wait, that's right, thanks to folks like Gary Becker, people are rational actors constantly making rational economic choices in a world of equal knowledge and power as we make our way through a world filled with attempts to alter our decision making process, ie. advertising. How is that supposed to work again? Wouldn't it be great if we all really did have equal information and power to make this fiction possible? Oops, that sounds like socialism, sorry guys. By the way, why didn't many people notice that John Kerry met with Henry Kissinger, a man intimitately involved with the events of September 11th, 1973, on September 11th this year to discuss Syria?

In What Money Can't Buy, Michael Sandel puts forward the argument that without realizing, debating or noticing it we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. What was once a tool for organizing productive activity has become a way of life allowing market values to usurp moral values. Particularly in America, but more and more around the world thanks to austerity, market values have penetrated every part of our world, from education to politics, health to war. Students are paid to get good grades, admissions to elite universities are auctioned and the whole idea of education has been transformed from gaining knowledge into job training. The arts, philosophy and non-financially lucrative scientific fields are shunned in favor of finance, public relations and programming. With student loan debt of almost $30,000, the average graduate can't afford to believe in anything that won't get them a well paid job. Seems like slavery to me but instead economic freedom is being able to bet on people dying by buying people's life insurance; the gamble lies in the higher payoff the sooner the insured die.

Obscene wealth and growing inequality have separated us from each other creating an ever growing empathy deficit. It's not only gated communities, private beaches and exclusive restaurants anymore as barriers are being thrown up all around us. Sports have traditionally been about competion but also about bringing people together, be they teams, cities or nations, societies large and small. As recently as 1980, we'd go to a ball game at a stadium named for a public figure where one would rub shoulders with Joe Six pack and Richie Rich as tickets prices ranged from a couple of bucks for bleacher seats to a few dollars for the best seats in the house and root for our home town heroes. Today we go to InsertCorporation™ Stadium, segregate ourselves according to wealth to the bleachers, box seats or luxury boxes, to cheer for a team threatening to change cities if their owners aren't granted more public concessions, made up of free agents who change teams for raises of tens of millions. While there, we're as likely to be discussing transfer fees and salary cap restructuring as we are ERAs or wins and losses. An institution that was a source of civic pride and social glue has been transformed removing a bond that held us together, in the words of Sandel -

In fact, for most of the twentieth century, ballparks were places where corporate executives sat side by side with blue-collar workers, where everyone waited in the same lines to buy hot dogs or beer, and where rich and poor alike got wet if it rained. In the last few deades, however, this has changed. The advent of the skybox suites high above the field of play has separated the affluent and the priviliged from the common folk in the stands below.

As for Occupy, another potential source of human contact and feeling of community, well thanks to the wilting of the collective imagination, how you view it solely depends on where you get your news. They might have just been a gang of smelly hedonists looking for a good time as evidenced by their lack of a coherent message or the nudge that awoke a glimmer of public consciousness to the problems of inequality. The reason for the ferocity of both the media propaganda machine and the coordinated nationwide military style attacks on the movement was the importance of convincing people, particularly those who would be activists, that there's no hope to change anything, thereby creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Rather than entering the humanities to expand their minds, today's youth, the imagination of tomorrow, are streaming into the indoctrination machine. In 2006, just before the GFC, 25% of graduating seniors at Harvard, 24% at Yale and a mind blowing 46% at Princeton were starting their careers in financial services. The creation and maintenance of a reality where everything is only about profit and there's nothing else to believe in.

No wonder wealth reduces compassion. The self interest needed to survive in a system of such extreme inequality not only drives financially measurable crimes from petty theft to hiding $32 trillion in tax havens forming a fraction of the tax evasion industry or pseudo-financially-measurable-for-bank crimes such as laundering terrorist money and world wide interest rate manipulation, it rips at the fabric holding societies together. Gun nuts are right, it's not just guns that kill people, it's a system that glorifies greed driving people over the edge. American exceptionalism in terms of inequality is becoming as dangerous to itself as their military version is to the world yet strangely much of the world seems to want to emulate their uniqueness. Chilean economist Manfred Max Neef has claimed that "[t]his economy can go on no longer…because it has become absolutely criminal…this economic model is killing more people in the world than all the armies put together" and has proposed an economic crimes tribunal to mete out justice. He's also part of the King of Bhutan's General Assembly working to develop a new economic paradigm based on well-being, happiness, ecological stability, adequate distribution of wealth and intelligent use of natural resources. Basically, the opposite of what we do now so it must be worth a shot. 

Chances are, however, nothing much will come of it as most people are trapped in a never ending cycle, forced to work to simply survive and are voiceless in a world where power only listens to money. We were given the opportunity five years ago to change the world for the better but were instead fed a pipedream of hope and change. It seems a type of madness to try sustain a broken system, our current suicidal economic model of infinite growth, in a manner that seems designed to fail, but that's just what's happening. Budgets need to be cut when it's spending that goes to the needy, yet the US government continues to subsidize the rich to the tune of over $1 trillion per year. Capital is winning the struggle with labour, whose spending drives the economy. Left with so little, labour can simply survive, not thrive. In 1947, labour's share of US nonfarm business income was 65%, in 2000, 63%; in 2013 it's 57%. This shifts about $750 billion annually from the workers to the rentiers. The age of austerity offers little hope for today's youths, burdensome tuition indebtedness, worklessness, homelessness and powerlessness, virtually guaranteeing mass shootings will become a daily occurrence, in fact America's almost there already. If only this infection was contained to the US it may not be so bad but in a study of 22 other advanced countries it was found labour's share of income fell from 73% in 1980 to 65% in 2011, a trend occurring in poorer countries as well.

Perhaps the decades of shared prosperity in America from WWII until the late 70's that created a thriving middle class was simply a historical fluke due to unique circumstances, after all, most of human history has featured but two classes, the aristocracy and the peasants. We've forgotten the battle that took place in order to create the institutions that enabled this historical anomaly known as the middle class and are passively allowing the system to be dismantled as we stare blankly into our propaganda screens, be they TV, tablet or telephone. The tension is all around us; politically, partisanship rules the day as the likes of Citizens United has made the voice of the few louder than the many; economically, finance rules the day as the rentiers extract rents from the rabble; socially, we've become zombified by those aforementioned screens, disillusioned by a dollarocracy masquerading as democracy and indebted by an economic system that forces you to borrow to eat, sleep, learn or even get sick. The World Economic Forum (you know, those rich guys who meet in Davos every year) listed severe economic disparity at the top of their Global Risks 2013 report. President Obama was forced to admit that "[t]he folks in the middle and at the bottom haven't seen wage or income growth, not just over the last three, four years, but over the last 15 years," only to have it suggested later in the same interview that "[m]aybe a president just can't stop this accelerating inequality?".

This is exactly what the elite want us to believe, that no one can do anything about inequality, that it is a natural occurrence that 'incentivizes' effort. What if we could show them that even their lives would be better in a more equitable society? Woah! Wait, if you could do that what would the cognitive dissonance of working against their own self interest do to their brains? The same thing that should happen to the rest of us when we realize the neoliberal fairy tale of supply side, trickle down economics is just that, a fable, and scream the emperor has no clothes. Bankers shouldn't earn more than teachers and nurses, four members of one family shouldn't have more wealth than the combined wealth of just under the 50 million poorest American families and resources need to be allocated to those who are forced to start behind others. Intuitively, absolute poverty causes negative health and social outcomes, but unfortunately it is slightly less so regarding inequality leading to the 'so what' attitude of so many. Yet, 'status anxiety' or insecurity seems real enough in a society that places people in a hierarchy which increases competition for status and causes stress, leading to poor health and other negative outcomes such as the falling life expectancy of poor white women in the southeast of America, surprise, where inequality is highest. Too bad we seem to have lost our empathy, otherwise we might try to do something about it. Well, at least tell your friends to go see this movie -

Corpocracy and the Seven

When a legislator no longer represents our beliefs, we can vote them out of office; likewise, when presidents screw up, the people can kick them out the next time they go to the polls (or they can even be impeached by the legislators); but what do we do when the third branch of government messes things up by issuing rulings that will ultimately steer the nation in the wrong direction? Well, if you're Pat Robertson (yes, he of the Haitian deal with the devil quote), you can have a chat with your god to get things changed; if your the Ecuadorian Congress, you can just replace the whole lot; maybe you'll get lucky and they'll be convicted of, "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors" deemed serious enough by Congress to constitute impeachment; but most likely all we can do is wait until they retire or die. Almost no matter how bad they mess up, they've got jobs for life.

While this job security is supposed to insulate them from the temporary passions of the public, it has also had the effect of allowing them to assert their ideological beliefs in making decisions which have had disastrous results. Perhaps the most infamous case was that of Dred Scott in which the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS from here on) ruled that people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves, or their descendants, whether or not they were slaves, were not protected by the Constitution and could never be citizens of the United States. The decision written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney is regarded as the single worst decision in the history of the court, ruining the reputation of the Chief Justice and leading the nation to the Civil War. As recently as 2000 SCOTUS decided to put an idiot king in the White House, with the same predictable result, war. Ironically, that 2000 decision may have been motivated by soon to be retiring Sandra Day O'Connor wanting to have her replacement named by a Republican president, thus maintaining the conservative composition of the court we still have today. Now that's powerful, better than 4 out of 5 dentist recommend testimonial propaganda! Chief Justice Taney died a vilified, penniless and broken man for his role in keeping the Republic under the control of slaveholders and bitterly dividing the nation; only time will tell if today's Chief Justice, John Roberts Jr. will also go down in infamy as the man who completed the transformation of his nation into a corpocracy.

In a 5-4 decision the court ruled in favor of Citizen United and overturned a variety of campaign finance laws enacted over the past century. For example, it nullifies part of a century-old statute known as the Tillman Act (1907), which barred corporations from using treasury funds to engage in the political process. It also vitiated similar prohibitions imposed on unions after World War II. Moreover, the decision invalidates part of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (McCain-Feingold) that prohibited certain types of ads within 60 days of a general election and 30 days from a primary. (Supreme Court Opinion). Bottom line: Both corporations and labor unions may now use their general treasury funds to pay for unlimited independent expenditures, including advertisements, for or against candidates at any time. Free speechers cheered while civil liberty advocates jeered. The reason that those happy with the ruling are so rests on three premises, all of which we can intuit or show to be false.

One: Corporations are people and are therefore entitled to free speech protection. An odd  transfer propaganda technique but still easy to argue away, both intuitively (duh, um, people die, love, shit, breathe, have a conscience and compassion; corporations, not so much) and legally. The legal basis rests on a ruling made by the SCOTUS in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company in 1886. While the court's actual ruling in the case was uncontroversial, (something about fences along train tracks - seriously) the court reporter added his own thoughts to the headnote. Wackiness, begin your work:

Headnotes are a short summary of the opinions, facts and arguments of each case the court rules on that precede the United States Reports (the books that tell the legal community about the courts decisions). These headnotes are "not the work of the Court, but are simply the work of the Reporter, giving his understanding of the decision, prepared for the convenience of the profession". The court reporter that day, J.C. Bancroft Davis, a former railway president (hellooo? conflict of interest anyone!) wrote in part: "The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does." Voila, while the court specifically didn't want to make a ruling on the 14th amendment, any mention of which is absent from the ruling itself, corporations have enjoyed the same rights as people under the 14th ever since. Not being a constitutional scholar maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like a pretty flimsy thin basis for corporate personhood.

Two: Money is speech. Really? Do I have to tell you why it isn't? OK, here goes. It should be enough that it sounds like something an amphetamine junkie like Ayn Rand would say but it goes deeper and unfortunately once again turns on a constitutional SCOTUS ruling. It was 1976 and this time it was Buckley v. Valeo in which the SCOTUS upheld a federal law which set limits on campaign contributions, but ruled that spending money to influence elections is a form of constitutionally protected free speech, and struck down portions of the law. The court also stated candidates can give unlimited amounts of money to their own campaigns (thus your Ross Perots, Michael Bloombergs, Mitt Romneys and their ilk). The suit arose after the first serious attempt by Congress to regulate campaign contributions and spending after the Nixon impeachment passed  despite a Ford veto. The plaintiffs claimed the legislation was in violation of the 1st and 5th Amendment rights to freedom of expression and due process, respectively. The court agreed. Again, easy to show how this is wrong on so many levels.

To those ideologues who would champion this decision as protecting the free speech I can only ask: "What can possibly be the purpose of the First Amendment other than to allow all voices to be heard in the marketplace of ideas?" With their vast resources, corporations will now be able to dominate that marketplace, ensuring that theirs is the loudest voice, effectively silencing opposing voices - precisely what the First Amendment was designed to foil. Even more egregiously, when we're not talking about corporations or the rich the court has no problem limiting speech. In the last few decades, the conservative justices dominating the court have limited speech rights for demonstrators, students, and whistle blowers; you still famously can't scream Rush is a fat, latinboyOxyContinlovingprick in a crowded theater, or fire; while they may be more annoying than political ads, Hare Krishnas had their right to distribute leaflets taken away. Try to exercise your right to speech in America without spending dollars and you'll often times find yourself behind bars. Repeatedly, the court has told us that some speech is more important than others.

Three: In their ruling, the majority somehow clung to the emperor's new clothes contention that corporate campaign cash has had no pernicious impact on public policy. "Independent (political) expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority in the recent ruling. Alice in Wonderland had nothing on this corporations are just plain folks propagandist thinking. While the delusional will argue to the contrary, the evidence clearly indicates that money influences the way elected officials vote, so by giving those with more money the ability to 'speak' in unlimited amounts, they are ipso facto being given a more powerful vote than the poor.

Maybe they didn't notice the whole Wall Street bailout, it was pretty easy when "they [the banks] frankly own the place [congress]". House members who voted for the $700 billion bank bailout received 54 percent more campaign contributions from banks and securities firms than House members voting against the bailout. That is an average of $231,877 in bank contributions received by each House member voting "Yes", $150,982 for each member voting "No." Is there any wonder that big oil is already one step ahead of any sustainable energy project? Want to keep the National Weather Service from sharing the weather forecasts with the people? It'll cost about $7,750 to get a senator to introduce a bill to end "socialized weather" so that private firms like Accuweather can repackage government data and sell it to the public. Wanna influence the health care bill? It's pretty cheap and easy jedi reverse-Reagan name-calling propaganda, with the Cadillac name change from welfare queen to insurance plan. Well, that or about $400 million over the first 9 months of last year would buy you as much influence as the health care lobby. If only we could visually see the influence of 'speech' on the outcome of legislation? Or perhaps we tire of health care, cough, telecom immunity, where House Democrats who flipped their positions to favor immunity for telecom firms received an average of 68 percent more money from ATT's, Verizon's and Sprint's political action committees, compared with Democrats who remained opposed to immunity. That's $4,987 to each Democrat who opposed immunity and $8,359 to each Democrat who flipped positions to favor telecom firms. The brainwashed are sold that this latest ruling will encourage 'transparency' and 'leveling the playing field', some wishful card stacking propaganda, as if by some luck the market will distribute the money to candidates and lawmakers equitably. Or, maybe the Supremes have an ulterior motive: they want to show the world what happens in the extreme case by opening the floodgates to the highest bidder wins in order to how evil it is in order to justify the coming end of business buying government through a constitutional amendment. Yeah, and I've got some real estate in Florida to sell you.


Learn more here and here and here, then raise your voice "NO"

It truly makes one wonder what the effect of 30 years of the Reagan revolution has had on the brain of most conservatives who are lauding this decision as a victory for free speech. It was a Republican president, Teddy Roosevelt, who was so worried about the power of the trusts (yes, corporations were mere trusts of states then) that he called for public financing of elections and told Congress, "All contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law." He didn't get all he wanted but he did get the Tillman Act which has now been gutted. Founder and fourth Chief Justice John Marshall once referred to the corporation as an "artificial being, invisible, intangible"; and Thomas Jefferson, warned almost two centuries ago that America must "crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."

In order to catch a glimpse of the Pandora's Box that this ruling has opened, one need look no further than the connections to the case; the people who brought it to the court and what they have done in the past:


And a taste of a couple of the adds these men have made offer a sneak peak of what's to come this November:


Or, this one. Um, I guess we'll call that the fear of our propaganda septet.

So, as we enter the age where we'll no longer have the senator from Iowa or the congressman from North Dakota, but the senator from Wal-Mart and the congressman from Goldman Sachs, a couple more small details. No limits exist to prevent foreign corporations from contributing to the kitty, nothing to prevent one of Osama bin Laden's relatives running any anti-energy self-sufficiency ad they want, as long as it's clearly labeled brought to you by Freemont Group. Lastly, and most ominous of all, what I see happening is that more often than not, corporations won't even have to spend a penny, as the mere threat of launching attack ads will be enough to influence members of Congress to behave like the good patsies they have been paid for to be, legalization of what will in fact become weapons of blackmail and bribery in the hands of the lobbyists of the greedy and powerful. Oh, and before we in the rest of the world begin to feel too smug about the superiority and cleanliness of our democratic systems, a couple of caveats. The Prime Minister of Canada, the one who can't really be as creepy as he appears, Stephen Harper, tried himself to loosen the financial restrictions for political campaigns in the true north strong and free just a few years ago. The rest of us, well, we shouldn't forget that for the past few decades, instead of looking inwards at what's wrong with the country, the US usually looks for scapegoats (usually using the bandwagon propaganda technique to drum up support) and decide that they don't like us practicing our own kind of government. (Sorry, look at me using the glittering generality and seventh technique)

If you made it all the way here, pssst, here's where I got the Dred Scott idea, from where else, duh?

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A Pact With Which Devil?

"Good fortune will elevate even petty minds, and give them the appearance of a certain greatness and stateliness, as from their high place they look down upon the world; but the truly noble and resolved spirit raises itself, and becomes more conspicuous in times of disaster and ill fortune."
- Plutarch

Well, it took just over 206 years, but Haiti has finally climbed to the top of the world's most cursed nation charts. Ever since rising up and defeating the forces of Napoleon to become the first nation to grow out of a slave revolt, gaining independence on January 1st 1804, it has become a place where the apocalypse wears the trappings of the norm. It's one of those places that seems to be dealt one disaster after the other. The big question is how can the death-toll resulting from a 7.0 earthquake that stuck near Port-au-Prince, the same magnitude that hit Northern California in 1989 killing 63 people, be well on it's way to surpassing 100,000?  Is it as Pat Robertson said because the Haitian people "got together and swore a pact to the devil"? Why is it that Rush Limbaugh is forced to vacation on the eastern half of Hispaniola to find luxury resorts and not worry about getting AIDS from young boys? The truth of why we owe the poorest nation in the western hemisphere all the help we can is written in the pages of history and unfortunately is indeed a witches' brew of politics, economics and natural disaster.

While Rush claims the latest disaster in Haiti is simply a made to order excuse for Obama to improve his image with the "light-skinned and dark-skinned black community", comments such as his are intended to obfuscate the problem of racism that has been the cause of much of Haiti's ills. There is good reason why much of the world owes Haiti more than just their taxes . It's hard to imagine, but at the end of the 18th century Haiti, or Saint-Domingue as it was known then, was considered by many to be the most valuable colonial possession in the Americas, referred to as the Pearl of the Antilles. Unfortunately for the French, their revolution in 1789 also resonated throughout the Caribbean. The Jacobins' cry of "liberty, equality and fraternity" was taken up by rebels on the island and the "Black Jacobins" were born as the slaves rose up in 1791.

"My decision to destroy the authority of the blacks in Saint Domingue (Haiti) is not so much based on considerations of commerce and money, as on the need to block for ever the march of the blacks in the world."
- Napoleon Bonaparte

The Haitian Revolution didn't follow a standard script. Out of the uprising came a self-educated slave named Toussaint L'Ouverture who emerged as the revolution's leader through skill on both the battlefield and in the complexities of politics. Realizing the greed of the competing imperial powers and that the ongoing European war would drain their strength, L'Ouverture consistently outflanked his adversaries. In a complex web of emancipation, guerrilla warfare, alliances and broken promises involving the three major colonial powers, France, Spain and England, the end result was Tousaint dead in a French jail in the Jura, having been tricked by Napoleon and 100,000 of the 500,000 blacks and 24,000 of the 40,000 whites inhabitants dead. The new leader of the rebels, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, proclaimed the nation's independence January 1, 1804 after defeating Napoleon's brother in law General Charles Leclerc and 43,000 French troops at the Battle of Vertieres on November 18, 1803 and reverted the name to its former native monkier - Haiti; it became the first independent nation in Latin America, the first post-colonial independent black-led nation in the world, and the only nation whose independence was gained as part of a successful slave rebellion.

"Dear me, think of it? Niggers speaking French"
- US Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan

And what was America's role in all this? Well, nothing short of the Louisiana Purchase. America's 3rd president was in office, Thomas Jefferson, a man afraid of his own shadow due to its dark appearance (though he had no problem with the darker female outline). Regarding the prospect of a free black nation he said: "If something is not done, and soon done we shall be the murderers of our own children." Alarmed that a slave uprising may spread north he threw his support behind the upstart French leader, Napoleon Bonaparte, in his quest to reassert French rule of his prized Caribbean possession. So when Napoleon asked Jefferson if the United States would help a French army traveling by sea to St. Domingue, Jefferson replied that "nothing will be easier than to furnish your army and fleet with everything and reduce Toussaint [L’Ouverture] to starvation." Of course his word proved to be as worthless as his morals when he learned that Napoleon planned on moving his forces to the North American mainland, basing a new French empire in New Orleans and settling the vast territory west of the Mississippi River. The rest is, as they say, history, without resupply and dealing with a determined enemy as well as an hitherto unknown threat, a pesky female mosquito carrying yellow fever (taking Leclerc's life along with 20,000 of his men), Napoleon's forces were routed and he was eventually forced to sell the Louisiana territories for a song in order to raise a new army to deal with the British.

So, it seems America, France, Spain and Britain owe the impoverished nation a little help, but why does Venezuela seem so prepared to lend a hand? It must be an evil plot to establish a foothold for Chavez' anti-American screed outside of Cuba in the area, right? Nope, it's called historical debt, debt for their freedom from slavery in which Haiti played a crucial role. After initial success in New Grenada (Colombia today) and Venezuela, Simon Bolivar was eventually pushed out by royalist forces in his quest to liberate South America from the Spanish oppressors. After first being denied help in Jamaica, El Liberator found support from Haiti and its president Alexandre Petion who granted him asylum and helped in outfitting him for his triumphant return to Caracas on his way to becoming the liberator of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Panama and founder of Bolivia. In return for six schooners and a sloop - 250 men, mostly officers, and arms for 6,000 troops, Petion's only request of Bolivar was the freedom of all slaves in the countries that Bolivar was going to set free.

Sadly, independence hasn't been a smooth ride for Haiti. One wonders how different things may have turned out if Tousaint L'Ouverture had been allowed to lead the nation into its new era, perhaps they may have even achieved some sort of stability. Instead, Haiti has lurched from one leader to the next, suffering 32 coups, along with one disaster followed by another - in the span of 30 days in the fall of 2008, Haiti was hit by four hurricanes and tropical storms. The newborn nation quickly learned that being the first free black state wasn't exactly a passport to diplomatic acceptance. Isolated internationally during its national infancy, Haiti wasn't recognized by the Vatican until 1860 or the US until 1861; even Simon Bolivar turned his back on them, refusing to invite Haiti to the Congress of Panama, saying "The government regards with repugnance the idea of treating Haiti with the same etiquette generally maintained between civilized nations". In order to gain conditional French recognition and to gain relief from the embargo enforced along with Britain, Spain and the US, Haiti was forced to pay reparations of 150 million francs in gold (about $20 billion today) and a 50% reduction in import duties in 1825 to compensate for French slave losses. By the turn of the 20th century, 80% of the national budget was going to pay off the loan and its interest - the country was locked into the role of perpetual debtor nation.

"I wrote Haiti's Constitution myself, and if I do say it, it was a pretty good little Constitution."
- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Meddling in internal Haitian affairs has continued unabated to the present day. Beginning in 1860, the waters around Haiti were the home for over 50 years of gunboat diplomacy as Germany, France, England and the U.S. competed for influence. Between 1849 and 1913, US Navy ships entered Haitian waters 24 times to "protect American lives and property". This led to the first US invasion and ensuing occupation of the island in the early days of WWI in 1915 on the pretext of subduing bandits threatening American property and fears that Germany might occupy the island. The result turned out to be 19 years of often brutal occupation. While there, the assistant secretary of the Navy in the Wilson administration, a certain Franklin D. Roosevelt, took the opportunity to write a constitution for the people of Haiti. It only got worse post WWII as the US threw its support behind Haiti’s (and one of the world's) most notorious president, Francois Duvalier, known as Papa Doc, in the 1950's through to his son, Jean-Claude, or Baby Doc, in the 70's. The evil perpetrated by their regime with their Tonton Macoutes is almost beyond compare. "During his first four – and bloodiest — years in power, Papa Doc received $40 million from Washington, much of it in the form of outright gifts. The U.S. even went so far as to send Marines to protect this regime from any popular movement that might threaten its rule." Oh, and then we come to Aristide.

Who knows if the US directly orchestrated the coups (yes, plural) to remove the twice-elected president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, winner of the first free and fair election, what is important is to view the events in context. The nation had survived 30 years of brutality under the Duvalier family, a time that witnessed around 30,000 political opponents eliminated. Enter Aristides, a slum priest in a land of right-wing death squads, trumpeting a message of liberation theology, a message the Reagan brain trust declared less Christian than Communist. "US policy," they said, "must begin to counter (not react against) . . . the 'liberation theology' clergy."

The moment Aristides won over 2/3 of the vote on December 16th,1990 in a field of 12 represented the second great shift away from imperial power in Haiti and therefore the wheels of regime change turned their focus once again to the western third of Hispaniola. The administration of Bush I turned to funding the opposition and the military. Declassified records now make it clear that the CIA and other US groups helped to create and fund a paramilitary group called FRAPH, which rose to prominence after the first military coup that ousted Aristide in September 1991, six months into his five year term. A more brutal version of the Macoutes rose, known as the zinglando, terrorizing in an era when thousands of civilians were killed and hundreds of thousands fled overseas or across the border into the Dominican Republic.

For the next three years Haiti was run by military-civilian juntas as ruthless as the Duvaliers. With the nation immersed in anarchy and violence, and a flood of refugees trying to float stateside, the Clinton administration had Aristides reinstalled with the help of 20,000 marines in 1994. Moving quickly this time, Aristides abolished the army who had overthrown him. Yet, before much else could be accomplished, fate once again stepped in. Events outside of Haiti's power once again moved against the country as Republicans gained control of Congress that same year, sealing her doom as the senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman was now Jesse Helms and House Speaker Newt Gingrich ensuring that the flow of US help would slow to a drip. Even though previously promised aid dried up, the country managed to limp to a successful transition of power when Aristide's 5-year term expired as Rene Preval was elected in December 1995. Future catastrophe was foreshadowed as Aristides was accused of rigging parliamentary elections, something frowned upon by the US if your name isn't Karzai, and encouraging armed groups of his supporters in the absence of an army.

In 2000 he became president once again in elections boycotted by the opposition. Amid all the accusations of abuse the country was once again hit by a triple whammy from the outside world: the UN cut back its mission, the EU suspended its aid program and of course Dubya came to power in the US. The new administration blocked all forms of assistance, including World Bank loans, a policy of economic strangulation that reflected the longstanding anti-Aristide views of the Republican Congress. The result was disastrous. From 2000-04, Haitians sank deeper into poverty, and their government became dysfunctional setting the scene for yet another coup. The example of the four promised loans from the Inter-American Development Bank (the IDB) for health, education, drinking water and road improvement paints a picture of the politicization of aid. The US asked to block the loans until the electoral disputes had been resolved. Yet even after all eight of the senators in question were out of office, the freeze on aid remained in place throughout Aristide's tenure. The State Department later claimed that the freeze was decided on by a consensus of the members of the Organisation of American States in something called the Declaration of Quebec City. Yet somehow the declaration is dated April 22nd 2001, and the letter from the US representative asking that the loans not be disbursed was dated April 8th. To quote the conclusion of one of the few journalists to find this scandal worthy of inquiry, ‘it would seem that the effort became concerted after it was made.’

The officially disbanded army along with murderous paramilitary groups seized control of much of the country forcing Aristides to request international aid. France agreed to help on the condition he step aside while the US declined to help in the absence of a "political solution". By failing to send troops earlier, the United States effectively gave a green light to the second coup d'etat against Aristides, despite having intervened a decade earlier to reverse the first one. Finally, on the night of February 29th, 2004, a team of US Navy Seals kidnapped him and his wife and they woke up 20 hours later in Africa, where they remain in exile, trapped without passports, to this day.

Of course this latest natural disaster would have occurred no matter what happened in the past. Yet, it is the economic policies of the rich towards the impoverished half island which have exacerbated the situation in Haiti - as always, it comes down to the dollar. Remember as you watch the relief efforts controlled at gunpoint by a foreign aggressor army that Haiti had been reduced to dependence on aid organizations for almost every function usually paid for and controlled by the government. 10,000 private organizations perform supposedly humanitarian missions in Haiti, however many projects seem to serve the people administering the projects as much of the money flows back stateside and American pockets. A nation is made to be dependent in may ways.

Rice, that most basic of foodstuffs provides the clearest example. Haitian import of US grown rice increased from 0 to 200,000 tons between 1980 and 2000 making the nation of 7 million the 4th largest importer of US rice. Coincidentally, per capita income has dropped from around $600 in 1980 to $369 today over the same time. Why? Under IMF tutelage, the nation learned it is better to have farmers move into the slums of Port-au-Prince to fight with laid-off government employees for 30 cent-an-hour jobs in sweatshops owned by U.S. clothing manufacturers. Additionally, through a series of structural adjustment programs, beginning in the 1980s, the IMF encouraged Haiti to adopt some of the lowest tariffs in the Caribbean. The predictable outcome was an explosion of urban slums such as Cité Soleil, Bel Air and Martissant, scenes of food riots in April 2008 (resulting in another ousted prime minister), where building conditions helped amplify the death toll of the past week to tsunami-like numbers. In November 2008, after a school collapsed in the wealthy district of Pétionville, the Mayor of Port-au-Prince estimated that 60 per cent of the city's buildings were shoddily built and unsafe. If the presidential palace couldn't hold up, it was clear what would happen to shacks built on the hillsides. Free market theories of comparative advantage were applied to justify the structural changes in the economy causing massive human suffering while American rice growers receive subsidies through a wide variety of mechanisms. Well, at least American Rice Inc. got rich.

In overthrowing me, you have done no more than cut down the trunk of the tree of the black liberty in St-Domingue - it will spring back from the roots, for they are numerous and deep.
- Toussaint L’Ouverture

For the same reason American soldiers disappeared from Haiti after 9/11, the world's attention has been drawn to the prosecution of the 'global war on terror'. Therefore no one even notice the story in 2006 when it was claimed that the US had caused the 2004 coup. (Read the 11-pages that we all missed in the NY Times!). While trying to impose democracy as far away as Afghanistan and Iraq, Dubya did another finish-what-daddy-started, this time in Haiti, mostly with the help of groups like the International Republican Institute playing the Haitian role of Blackwater. While the head of Blackwater just had his men rape and kill, the Institute's leader in Haiti, Stanley Lucas, an avowed Aristide opponent from the Haitian elite, was a little more subtle, counseling the opposition not to work with Aristides, fermenting the inevitable coup. Active in 60 countries they saw their federal financing nearly triple in three years, from $26 million in 2003 to $75 million in 2005. Meanwhile, there is never any slack in the financial noose tightened tag team style as the $125 million that Haiti gets each year from the States (as of 2000) is contingent on a passing grade from the IMF. Again, context: Haiti's government, which serves 8 million people, has an annual budget of about $300 million, comparable with a US city of just over 100,000.

Yet, at a time when the focus after a natural disaster should be on relieving suffering and curing the political and economic ills that have plagued Haiti since its inception, it'll be voodoo and the devil that has gotten Haiti in the minds of many. Of course if by voodoo you mean racism and the devil the western powers you couldn't be more on target. It's not just wacky billionaire American televangelists blaming these demons, it's also Spanish clergymen (sorry, Spanish only), Archbishops of York, and NY Times journalists. Limbaugh will spew hate to turn the tables of blame on those that look to help a persecuted people and all the while Naomi Klein's prophesized Shock Doctrine will be used as a tool to further entrench failed neoliberal economic therapy. The Heritage Foundation wasted no time in issuing a statement calling for economic 'reform' in Haiti to be tied to the aid now flowing into the country (the original has since been taken down and replaced with this lighter version). Well, I've seen a memo for the financial elite who are to blame for making this disaster a thousand times worse than it needed to be: Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase combined have set aside $47 billion for bonuses; Haiti's annual gross domestic product in nominal terms - $7 billion.

Well, that's it, a bonus for those of you who made it this far, Stewart ripping on some real devils. Don't forget to check the Amazon stripe on the side, I've updated it with some works by Haitians and a Chomsky about Haiti. Plus a little music to carry you to the next post.

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Because I said so!

Interesting yet disturbing trend in the media, maybe it's not new, perhaps I'm just isolated enough out here in Poland to miss these things. I left North America when Fox just showed the Simpsons and football. Seems to be that if you say something loud enough and get a couple of people to repeat it, it becomes true, no matter how preposterous the statement. Better yet, bundle a whole bunch of lies together and throw them out there knowing that the public just doesn't have the patience to untangle them and extract the truth.

The most stunningly false I have heard of late is aimed at disabling president-elect Obama's economic recovery plan even before he takes office. It is that Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal program didn't work and in fact worsened the Great Depression. Of course this is nothing but a pre-emptive attack on Obama's economic stimulus package, designed to soften up the opposition. This claim offends on two levels: first, it's a lie, and second, it follows the inept taxing a spending ways of the current Bush administration. Just say it, especially on TV, and it becomes reality for many. Oh look, here's one from "Fox" News:

Of course there is always a grain of truth to the lie. Not all of the New Deal policies were successful. Also, unemployment did rise momentarily when the economy hit another rough patch in 1937 and 1938, but the fact is that the unemployment rate dropped from 23.6% in 1932 to 14.6% in 1940, the largest percentage drop in history (before America entered the war; it would drop to 1.2% by 1944). Still, people can say things like this (jump to about 4:30 if you can't handle watching the whole thing):

"It's in the books!" I love it, and people eat it up, it must be true, he said it's in the books.

Of course it would be funny if it weren't so sad that all this talk falls on the heels of the greatest economic disaster that America (and maybe the world) has ever seen, the eight years of Bush II. Dubya inherited a budget surplus of $128 billion and a deficit of $5.7 trillion, the Congressional Budget office projected a $5.6 trillion surplus between 2002 and 2011; instead Obama will inherit at least a $10.6 trillion deficit and an impossible to exactly measure budget deficit, somewhere in the range of $750 billion. It's all really unknown though as the government's behavior in the last few months has been completely ad hoc, no one knows exactly what is owed anymore. Fanny May/Freddie Mac alone represent a debt of $5.4 trillion that the government has taken on in reality. Even before the latest craziness, the Bush administration successfully pushed through two massive, inequitable rounds of tax cuts and a 59% increase in spending. All this in a growing economy! Now, after round one of the economic 'plan' to pull the nation out of recession, the one where the banks and the rich benefit from $750 billion in expenditures, the neoliberals are preparing the ground to fight any further government spending which might help the rest of the population.

Now that I think about it, this isn't new at all, it's just a continuation of the lies from the last eight years. You can't blame the right I suppose, after all, it has worked for Dubya and his cronies. Based on the results of “uranium from Africa” you can eventually convince the public to go to war. Many people even still believe that Al-Qaeda was in Iraq prior to the occupation. You can open a torture funfair in Guantanamo as long as you keep repeating that "we don't torture". Say we've won a war by repeating "Mission Accomplished". Perfect the art of unsigning by removing yourself from the International Criminal Court and the Kyoto Protocol along with becoming the world champion signing statement signer (signing bills into law, but taking out the bits he didn't like). In a climate such as this has it been a surprise to anyone to see the whole house of cards that was the financial system come crashing down? Big government may not always be as efficient as the free market, but it's pretty pathetic to see the attempts of the right to discredit a plan that brought order to the chaos of the depression. The New Deal brought the FDIC, restoring faith in the banking system, the Glass-Steagall Act to regulate bank speculation (the repeal of which was a major contributor to the current crisis), the Federal Securities Act to require full disclosure of stocks being sold along with the creation of the SEC to regulate stocks purchased on margin - is any of this starting to sound familiar? It wasn't all spend, spend, spend either. Austerity measures such as the Economy Act actually saved money to help pay for some of the new programs. Of course there was more, most notably the creation of social security and the end of prohibition.

The parallels between today and 1929 are obvious. While the New Deal was an experiment, the biggest mistake made by FDR was that he didn't go far enough, allowing the economy to slip back into recession in 1937-38, creating the basis of the neoliberal argument that it wasn't the New Deal but WWII that brought about the end of the depression. Economic historian JK Galbraith argued that the US economy “in the twenties had opened its hospitable arms to an exceptional number of promoters, grafters, swindlers, impostors, and frauds. This, in the long history of such activities, was a kind of flood tide of corporate larceny.” It's all happening again and the right would have us stop at giving away money to the banks and the rich, when what America needs is a better New Deal not another World War.