To Obama

[anthropositor]

President Elect Obama lamented the other day that he no longer could use his Blackberry due to security concerns.  He felt that he was being isolated in a Presidential bubble which only allowed access to him to the powerful elite. 

Never in my life have I heard any previous President express any concern about that.  That makes me even more enthusiastic about him.  It has been nearly a half century since I have been so optimistic about a President. 

Think of it.  A leader who is not only smart, but who is actually really concerned about the thoughts and views of the plebeian citizen.  He needs a source of open public letters to him that do not get stuck in the labyrinth of the executive branch.  One that he can pop into whenever he has a few minutes to spare, and take the pulse of normal people to leaven the views of the effete power elite which traditionally smother the President from day one. 

Now he has that source.  A blog for public letters to him, not just from Americans, but from citizens of the world.  This man is no divider, he is a Uniter.  This is the man who can lead us on the Long Nights Journey Into Day.

http://toobama.blogspot.com/
Happy Thanksgiving to the people of the world, and may peace be upon us all!

 

[Bamawing]

What a beautiful idea!

I want to tell him something... do I have to have a blogger account? How can I put a letter in? *hopeful*

This is a darn good idea...

[andyb]

What a beautiful idea!

I want to tell him something... do I have to have a blogger account? How can I put a letter in? *hopeful*

This is a darn good idea...

I think so too Bama!

oh look - 'too Bama' ==> 'toobama' ==> 'to Obama'

this is a good omen methinks 

andyb

[Uncle Matt]

oh look - 'too Bama' ==> 'toobama' ==> 'to obama'

Hmmm....™©

[anthropositor]

I'm thinking of all the chatter about a President.  The talking heads on the tube. the net, all the media.  I too have, on occasion in the past, spoken an obliquely critical comment with a clue as to whom I could be referring.  Better to talk about ideas, policies, solutions.  But prior to now, I have never directly addressed a President.  Actually, even now, I have addressed the President Elect. 

I, for  one, intend to choose my subject matter and words with care.

[anthropositor]

Yes Bama, to post I believe you need a Blogger account.  But you can certainly bounce your idea or perspective off of us here, and I'll share my perspective with you.

I personally intend to confine myself to subjects that may not be well represented by his inner circle, or about which I may hold a minority view.

Let me give an unrelated historical example.  Back in the JFK days, the Bay of Pigs invasion didn't work out.  I think the President was infected by a certain "can do" gung ho, hawkish perspective presented by a great many of his advisers. 

These advisers included one hawk, General Curtis LeMay, who was without a doubt, the most aggressive man I ever met.  I doubt that there were any decisions which JFK ever made which troubled him more than that unmitigated disaster. 

But from my frame of reference, in retrospect, horrible though the outcome of that fiasco was for those involved, it may have been the tipping point that caused JFK to reject the recommendations of LeMay and the other hard liners in the Cuban Missile Crisis which followed so soon afterward. 

We may all be alive today, indirectly because of our defeat in the Bay of Pigs.  The President became more cautious from then on.  Caution is the better part of valor.

[Bamawing]

Hm.

I love this idea so very much, and I really want it to grow and mushroom and generally get to where Mr. Obama is getting 100s of notes a day. To that end, I'm not sure that Blogspot is the best place to do this, since it's really designed to have one person do most of the writing, and a comparatively small group of registered members to reply.

I wish I knew more about computers... what I would really love to see is an individual domain called www.toobama.org, with a large field for entering text and a capicha to prevent spammers. It would need a nice search function. I thought about an organization system, but letters are typically so multi-topical that I don't think it would be worth the effort.

I'm thinking something similar to www.sorryeverybody.com (did you ever check that out? I think you would have agreed with the basic premise).

[anthropositor]

When I first came up with the notion for my first blog, Eureka Ideas Unlimited, http://eurekaideasunlimited.blogspot.com/ I had hopes of starting a think tank of wider scope than the one here in my own rural neighborhood.  I didn't really seek the attention of search engines and all the wandering spiders.  I wasn't even putting things in the tag section at the bottom of each post.  Frankly, I am so inexpert with computers, I was surprised I even got it up and running at all.  So, attempting to make a virtue out of my incredible computer ignorance, I rationalized that I wanted to see whether word of mouth alone would spread the news all by itself.  Heh, heh.  I found out. 

Probably less than a hundred responses, and hardly an original idea or spark of imagination in the bunch.  I even, experimentally put up an attractive greeter, since I know I am not the only egghead with a keen eye for feminine pulchritude.  I got a little flack from some ladies over that, probably just before they applied their own lipstick and makeup, and dyed their hair an interesting but entirely unnatural color.

Just a few months ago, I set up another blog, Anthropositor's Posts, http://anthropositorsposts.blogspot.com/ with the purpose of trying to pull together some of the better of the few thousand posts I have scattered throughout the net, to the extent that I was able to hunt them down.  I thought that, at the very least, my grandchildren would be able to learn something of the odd old coot who was their grandfather.  This time I have decided to put some keywords down in that tag line, to see if that makes any difference in readership and response.  So far, to little effect. 

But now, with the To Obama effort, if I can learn tricks to increase the exposure to the netizen population, or to convert it from a Blogger site to a dot org or some other sort of domain, or any other means to draw public attention to it, I will be receptive to trying just about anything.  And I will do it as soon as anyone informs me of good ways I might go about it, that I am able to comprehend.

Because one of the defects of Blogger is that there is apparently no way to make a post "sticky" and stay on top, I intend that my first post will be the only actual post on the blog, and that anything additional I might say to President Obama will be amid the other messages directed to him in the "Dear Mr. President" comment section.  Any ideas could be put on this thread (best), or private messaged to me here (second best), or corked into a bottle and thrown into the ocean (worst).  I am now going to go dump some of my mail to optimistically make room for whatever comes in.  Then I will go to the link Bama provided to see what it is all about.
Anthropositor

[anthropositor]

Looking at the link that Bamawing provided, it is far more casual and less substantive that what I am aiming for with To Obama.  There is certainly a place for such a light hearted and celebratory approach, and it is certainly in the mainstream tradition of the internet as it exists.

But I am hoping that people who contribute their thoughts to
http://toobama.blogspot.com/ will treat it as the opportunity to seriously address a specific choice of one of the sobering array of issues facing the incoming President; an issue which the writer has given some careful thought to, and has a solution or some sense of direction about.  Try to think of it as if it were a brief (potential) audience with the President.  If you have nothing to say other than "Hey Prez, I think u r neato!" perhaps your message would be better suited to Jabber.com.  If there happens to be a Jabber.com, my apologies.

I touched on the subject of my second letter on To Obama here earlier.  The more I thought about it, I thought that it really had to be at the top of the list for a President to keep in mind.


Dear Mr President (elect)

My policy on this public conduit to you will be to deal with a single issue in each of my messages, and to make my comment brief and succinct. And to the extent that I am able, not to engage in partisan rhetoric.

Unlike my two other blogs, in which my articles are sometimes whimsical or even contentious, here I will focus on those things I believe it might be easy to lose sight of amid the trappings and seeming power of your office. 

One of the most difficult tasks you will face is to fight the illusion that, because of the immense resources that can be brought to bear by the various agencies at your disposal, that the information you are provided is more complete, accurate, straightforward and unambiguous than it actually is.

The clearest historic exammple was the Cuban Missile Crisis, not only the closest the world ever came to total destruction by the hand of man, but where blind luck played as big a part as any of tactics or strategy by two implacable opponents so seriously at ideological odds with one another.

If there is any point of time in history that would be most advantageous for you to dwell on in detail, this is the one.  The evidence is so absolutely clear and overwhelming that sheer luck was decisive in the outcome.

True, we can look at many other points in history in which mistakes, calculated carefully and with perhaps the best of intentions, brought us to monumental disaster.

But never before in recorded time has there been such a clear and public example of cataclysmic disaster being brought about, not by the two world leaders and their retinue of trusted advisors but by potential errors of field commanders not in a position to see anything but a fragment of the larger picture.  A single commander of a submerged nuclear submarine, unable to surface to see what was happening, could easily have interpreted the explosions of depth charges around him as nuclear war already having commenced.  He, or a dozen other anonymous men in other distant points, could very easily have jumped to the world's final conclusion. 
Anthropositor

[anthropositor]

I suppose one of the defects of making a one post blog in which other letters in the comment section imclude my own additional perspectives to the President, is that the tracking systems may see only the single entry and register the blog as totally inactive.

On the good side, no one has yet posted any really strange notions, not well founded in real reason or logic.  For myself, I also want my earliest remarks to be the things of higher priority.  I doubt that I or anyone else is going to trump nuclear mischance as item one on the agenda.  And I see no reason to rehash many of the subjects of the talking heads and partisan opinion.  Got to go.  More later.

[anthropositor]

Over the past half year I have used the phrase "Ponzi scheme" several times.  Early on to warn of the dangers of MultiLevelMarketing and other multiproduct distribution companies.

In recent months though, my reference has been to the entire economic sector, and to the agencies in place, supposedly, to regulate them.  The original big bailout, now about half spent, may have actually prevented a very rapid meltdown of the whole system, worldwide.  We can't actually really know.  We still see the banks getting all this budget money and sitting in it.  Not the purpose intended. 

We hear politicians of all stripes and stars, suggesting mildly that if these huge banks and investment firms go belly up and the government transfuses them with the life blood of the collective citizens, that perhaps the CEO's and other rank and ranking company officers that ran the institutions into the ground should not continue to bleed the companies further with such huge bonus packages, stock options and other Golden Parachutes.

I must admit, I have no patience for this.  These prime movers have gutted and vandalized their own economic engines, and even now, continue to suck great value out, even as our government representatives are pumping in resources which do not in fact exist.

No intellectual gobbledygook to disguise it.  No "the liquidity of the public sector is compromised."  We are broke.  Printing money simply devalues what is out there.  Prices will rise in response.  We all know this.  Numbers of the abjectly poor continue to rise explosively, and the range of disparity between the richest and the poorest has never been greater.  These are the conditions that brought about the first abortive attempt at a communist revolution (France).  And what do we do?  We say to these movers and shakers, these planners who ushered in this crash in actual value,  "Okay, you can still eat cake, but please take smaller pieces."  The only problem is, there are only crumbs on the plate. 

Apparently the rationale is, we need these guys.  They are the only ones clever enough to get us out of the mess we are in.  The truth is, they have little interest in getting the rest of us out of our mess.  They are quite content to go after the last of the crumbs on the plate they can scramble for, and keeping an eye on the stale cake they have stashed for the hard times they know are ahead. 

We do not need these guys.  Their expertise has been our downfall.  And the reasoning is now to keep them in place for the repairs?  Pardon me, but that is ridiculous!

 

[anthropositor]

Speaking more on Ponzi Schemes.  In the past few days, we have heard about a "new" scandal.  Bernard Madoff, previous chair of NASDAQ, and perhaps one of the biggest of all the individual movers and shakers, has been arrested by the FBI.  He has been unusually frank about having been responsible, for years and years, for a Ponzi Scheme which may well be The Black Hole of all such schemes ever perpetrated and orchestrated by a single individual.  Reportedly, FIFTY BILLION DOLLARS.

And the people he swindled?  Many of them were the very biggest funds in the industry.  Many were managing holdings of international scope.  Over the years, there were alarm bells periodically going off that caused concerns among some hedge fund people, but the regulators were hopelessly behind the curve.  It is just astonishing, the opacity of a system that allows a single criminal to get away with such a crime for so long.

Now let us just look at a few of the details.  He has been charged with a single count of securities fraud.  If the reports I hear are accurate, he can be sentenced to twenty years and get a five million dollar fine.
His bail alone is twice that!  Ten million dollars.  He is free right now.  Imagine being able to just write a check for ten million dollars, and remain free to continue to live high on the hog for the many years this whole thing can be stretched out in court.

There is no way to track how many hundreds of millions of dollars have been salted away in secret accounts throughout the world.  No way to recover even a penny on the dollar for all the individuals and institutions that have been wiped out.

So let us see how this is likely to play out.  The guy is seventy.  Let's say he gets the twenty years and the $5,000,000 fine.  He writes the check for the fine, and with good behavior, blood time and work time, he gets out in a little less than ten.  Am I the only one who finds this a very odd way to run a justice system?  With a few hundred thousand on the prison books, this fellow can continue to live like a king inside.

Allow me to refresh your memory on a previous incident.  Back in the early nineties, Ivan Boesky, involved in Insider Trading, took several hundred millions of dollars out of the collective pockets of thousands and thousands of investors.  I don't think there has ever been a full and accurate accounting.  He did about three years, and near as I can tell, gave to the government something on the order of $100,000,000 in fines.  I have seen no reports on what infinitesimal fraction of that might have been returned to any of the victims.  As far as I can tell, there was no actual restitution.  The courts were simply paid off.

This was a major scandal at the time.  Front page news for a long time.  Today, with what has been going on just in the past few months, this story of a few decades ago would hardly raise eyebrows.

And this is why our corporate, banking and investment warlords feel so comfortable with business as usual.  We have already given the banks about half the $700,000,000 in the bailout package.  The instructions were, get this money out there and working to shore up the economy.  But it is clear that they have not yet done it, and have no immediate plans to do so.  They are sitting on it.  A third of a trillion in "free" money.  There is no rhyme, no reason to this at all.

Just as there will never be an accurate or complete accounting in Boesky's case (he now manages his remaining unknown millions in La Jolla, California), or in today's Madoff case, a financial Black Hole following on the heels of several other Black Holes.  No one will ever sort out how much money he stole.  He couldn't even tell you himself.  Not even within a few billion.  It is all just too complicated, and has been going on for at least a decade and a half.

And throughout all that time, his reputation, and that of his firm, managed to remain pristine, until his arrest a few days ago.  And I haven't heard exactly how many minutes or hours he actually spent in jail before the $10,000,000 bail was posted.

Meanwhile, we have another two million plus "serious criminals" in jail with mandatory minimum sentences.  Not to mention at least triple that number under one form or another of "close supervision," (parole or reporting probation).  By far, the greatest bulk of the prisoners behind bars are there for so called substance abuse related crimes.

It is an often repeated platitude that we are a government of law.  Not so.  We are a government of convoluted statutes, often without any merit at all.  Nothing resembling justice arises out of our legal system.  We can do little about it.  The corruption has gone on for far too long, and is entirely too complex for anyone to sort out.

The gravest danger for all governments is not just the loss of confidence in the monetary, lending and investment systems that we are collectively experiencing.  These are just the most obvious of the symptoms.  What goes far deeper is the loss of confidence in the judiciary, and our representatives at every level.  This is the kind of demoralization that brings about anarchy and revolution.

The banks, the sub prime mortgage industry, the investment firms, and the government(s) collectively are a malignant cancer permeating human society.  And up near the very top, just as complicated and uncontrollable, is the Health Industry, blithely breaking budgets the world over.

A final thought.  Most of us think the sub prime mortgage crisis that we have seen is the bulk of the real estate crisis.  Not even close.  It is only the tip of the iceberg.

[anthropositor]

Someone in town asked me why the above never made it over to the To Obama blog. 

The answer is, it is news on everyone's lips, including all of the President Elect's cabinet, close advisers and staff.  I have no creative ideas that would help our next leader deal with this additional shock to our financial system of, for instance, the Madoff fifty billion dollar Ponzi scheme, coming so fast on the heels of all the other crises of the past frw months.

Even my perception that there is a more important element to the financial meltdown than just the prevention of the immediate and intense crushing collapse of the system is not news to any astute observer.

Recall FDR with the resounding statement, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."
He was, of course, speaking of the entire nation.  He was also trying to quell the sense of panic which had set in so deeply.

But, with all due respect to Mr. Roosevelt, he was literally in his own bubble of power and incredible affluence, in which he had been immersed every day of his life.  He could perceive the hardships of the people as an intellectual exercise but certainly not as a palpable, visceral reality. 

He himself and the members of his family, had never had to scratch for his existence, nor had they ever been exposed to any of the hardships that he only read about in the newspapers.  His sense of unusual entitlement, privilege and the permanency of his own wealth and security was never threatened. 

He was, for lack of a better word, effete, as most of our Presidents have been.  His extreme privilege made him pretty blind to what privation was all about.  He had never personally starved.  He had never gone without shelter.

He had never eaten chunks of road kill, cooked over an inverted coffee can with hoarded spices, salt and pepper sprinkled on from a Bull Durham tobacco sack. 

He never ate the weeds or crawled under a piece of stray tarpaper to shelter from a winter rain.  And if he ever did have any such emergency for even the shortest time, he knew with certainty that it was the emergency that was the transient, not himself.  He knew that, in the end, he would still be on top.  There is no way he, or any of his retinue could have survived even a few months as a hobo during those harsh times.  He was above it all.

Yet, when leaders do come to power whose roots were in poverty, there is no guarantee that they will take their sensitivities with them into the higher realm.  Somewhere along the line, in their rise to power, the empathy gets lost.  A certain ruthlessness can sometimes come to be.  Supreme leaders stop thinking in terms of individuals.  They become States Men and only large groups of people, and systems for regulating and regimenting them become the entire focus  To my mind, this is one of the very worst aspects of any government.  Unfortunately, it seems an almost universal trait in national governments everywhere.

My agnostic prayer is, Let it not be so with Obama.  Let him find the way to protect the lowest and least among us, rather than just bolstering the power of the state, the institutions, the bureaucracies, all the vested special interests, the lobbyists, and the other key players in the Plutocracy; the professions of Medicine and Law and Theology and Government, and the vast mechanisms which have allowed them to amass such great influence over every aspect of our lives.

I can lose my house within months.  I can have faith in the law and the courts.  There is considerable evidence that that faith is not even remotely well founded.  The law works much better for those with the most resources.  By design.

It does not matter much to me that Obama became a Senator in such an obviously and historically corrupt state.  A dozen other states are in a photo finish for the position and the rest do not lag far behind.

I did not hold his wealth against JFK, nor how his father made that wealth.  I was as inclined to like JFK as I am to like Obama.  But I certainly never harbored the illusion that JFK had much empathy for the common man.  Nor am I of the opinion that he never made a pact with any questionable people to get elected.  Indeed, my personal view is that it was a Cabal of unlikely allies, some of whom felt betrayed after the election, that participated in his demise.  (And it is worthy of note that Illinois and elements of organized crime were pivotal in his victory).  Politics doesn't absolutely need to be such a filthy business.  It just generally is.

I only have flashes of knowlege of other National politics.  Sometimes things jump out at me though.  Catherine Gun of Britain comes to mind.  What a courageous leaker and whistle blower she was!  And now, a half decade later, few people here or in Great Britain hardly know the great risks she undertook.

Such an odd thing though.  She turns herself in and confesses to violating the Official Secrets Act.  In spite of her confession, her case was ultimately dismissed, much later, for lack of evidence.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining.  In the absence of a First Amendment, this is a good result.  Even so, that is a pretty odd outcome. 

By whatever expedient actions this all came about, a tip of my hat not only to her, but especially to those within the government who were responsible for not sending her off to prison as they could have. 

But getting back to the Great Depression, and even much later, mid century, the disenfranchised, jobless and homeless were called bums, hobos. 

And they were held to be less than human by law enforcement, the courts, and by the general population whose circumstances were somewhat better,

People used to pour drain oil and other waste substances on edible food at the town dump so that starving bums would not be drawn so readily to the more edible tidbits of garbage. 

These poor vagabonds were not people with rights that could be enforced.  They posed a risk to normal people.  They were vagrants, desperate people, wastrels, They were a danger to those around them, who were their "betters."  They were a fugitive kind.

Now we have Obama.  He may not have come from great hardship, but he came from relative hardship.  Missing father, struggling mom and grandmother.  There is at least a chance that this man will have greater empathy for the plight of the common man than most of his posh predecessors.

But there is danger as well.  Now he is going to be the President.  Already people all around him are treating him as if he is the most powerful man on Earth.  And with all the trappings of the power of his office, it would be very easy for him to come to the conclusion that he is.

This is why I took it as such a good sign, that he could feel himself to be "in a bubble," in danger of being isolated from all but the influential, the connected, the ruling class.

We think of ourselves more and more as being a classless society than we once did.  Surely there are less apparent class distinctions.  But they still abound. 

The gravest danger is that Obama will not be able to hold on to the vision which brought him to the Presidency.  How does one deal with power and all the expedient compromising situations that come roaring at him at full speed?  New and unexpected crises every day.  Soon the plight of the millions is seen as insoluble.  Not a thing is currently being done for individual citizens caught in the maw of this crisis.  All thought is now directed to saving the economic institutions, and the elite aristocracy which has brought us to this state.  Meanwhile, the heads of these very same fatted and failed institutions are still able to syphon off the last of the lifeblood of their institutions, even while the taxpayer is made to transfuse new blood into the remaining husks of these decadent, badly run, and shortsighted failed companies.

This is much more than a financial crisis.  It is a confidence crisis.  Many rights eroded in the course of the war.  No, they didn't just erode.  They were stripped from us.  Here again, most of us never even saw it happen.

We were told the new wiretap rules were only going after terrorist networks, but these same new rules also facilitated the fall of a governor engaged in illicit sex, and another peddling a Senatorship.  Whatever you might think of these individuals, they are not terrorists.  But the new war powers brought them to ruin. 

We seem to have lost our way when it comes to the protection of our liberties, property rights, human rights, and even our rights to privacy. 

In the U.S., does anyone have a guess what year we lost the biggest part of our right to privacy?  In my opinion, one particular year was the real death knell, beside which all other years pale by comparison.

I was born during the very last gasp of the Great Depression, but even in my teen years, during the fifties, many of these attitudes from the Great Depresion persisted.  The war began when I was a baby for the U.S. but preparations had been going on for some time.  After the war ended, we went immediately into the cold war and the Korean Conflict. Then the cold war just continued on and got weirder year by year, until that almost climactic year of 1962.   

I would prefer not to have this sense of deja vu.  Maybe that's why I come back to the riddle, what was the year Americans lost the most privacy?  Compared to the potential oblivion of 1962, that is a lot easier to contemplate.

[anthropositor]

Another thing that probably won't be added tp the To Obama blog, but might be added to the Anthropositor's Posts blog once I have given it a bit more thought.

It has to do with the Madoff scandal and the ruin of a great many lives, and how this fellow, by all appearances. is being coddled because of his great influence and wealth. 

The last news story I saw on the tube said he was under "house arrest" in his seven million dollar Manhattan apartment and the story closed with a view of a surveillance car parked out in front of the building, apparently 24 hours a day to make sure he doesn't go out for a bagel or a little jaunt to a country without an extradition treaty with the U.S., who would accept him for a million dollars a month rent. 

I frankly do not believe all the trouble he seems to have had coming up with the pocket change ten million dollars he needed to bail out of jail.  My guess is, he has something on the order of a hundred million stashed in safe havens spread around the world. 

It is, I suppose, on Christmas, not the best day to say this, but this man has for well over a decade, known exactly what he was doing in causing the destruction of the investments of many thousands of people.  He truly is the Grinch whole stole Christmas, and was the proximate cause of the death of another.  Let me explain.  Perhaps it will give a Federal Prosecutor an idea.   

Another recent news story of a French money manager in New York strikes me as being quite tragic.  He apparently lost in the neighborhood of a billion and a half of the money entrusted to him by his investors.  But I did not get the impression that he was a crook.  Simply that he was another of the victims of this monumental Ponzi scheme of all Ponzi schemes.  He was victimized by his own confidence in this Grinch of a scoundrel. 

Yet, he apparently felt himself to be so responsible for the welfare of his clients, that capital punishment, self inflicted, seemed his only course of action.  There is, to my mind, a certain nobility in his action.  A nobility I do not detect in Madoff.  While I am not a believer in capital punishment, perhaps in this case, the Russian style of giving him a gun with a single bullet and a little privacy with which to consider the possibilities open to him might not be entirely out of line.

The truth is that, for perhaps the first time ever, we have a Ponzi scheme which may literally impact the lives, not of thousands of people, but of millions, and yet this fellow, as far as I can tell in any of the news, is not even required to wear an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet, and is sipping mint juleps served by his butler in his seven million dollar apartment.

Now, I am not a lawyer, thank goodness, but it strikes me that a death occurring during or as the result of a felony can be held to be murder.  Now, as I said, I am opposed to capital punisment.  I am also almost as old as this con man, so I know that even ten or fifteen years could be a life sentence for him.

And I also know that in the strange twists and turns of the law, although he has, in effect, actually confessed, he is not actually guilty of anything until the judge or jury actually finds him so.  But of what possible solace is this for his vast numbers of victims?  I think what is happening in this case is not just demoralizing for everyone, involved or not, it encourages even more of this sort of wrongdoing.

Consider our entire banking industry.  We (our elected legislators) just gave them more than two thirds of a trillion dollars, with the explicit instructions to get that money in circulation to quell the emergency in the economy. 

They have already taken possession of half the money.  They are not lending it.  They are not sure what is going to happen next, so they are playing it safe. 

And they can't be stopped.  They can't be punished for dragging their feet.  And they can't be fprced to return the money because no actual safeguards were written into the bill. 

Collectively, the bankers have just fleeced the nation out of seven times what Madoff stole, and did it with the full complicity of our legislators.. Of what use is the framework of law?  By what reasoning does it make sense that these bankers just get to keep the money, when they have not carried out their end of the bargain?

And as for our legislators.  I have heard several admit that they did not even carefully read the two hundred page bill that they voted into law.  The ones I have heard have admitted read only summaries prepared by their staffs.

When such a bill becomes law, we are all obligated to pay for it, and yet our legislators can't be bothered to read two hundred pages? 

Oh yeah. I forgot to mention, they just voted themselves a hefty pay raise while the rest of the country, and the world economy is going into the dumper.  I'll bet they read every word of that bill with all the lawyerly skills they could muster. 

These are things which ultimately lead to ideas of revolution.

I do not understand the reasoning, considering almost all of our legislators are lawyers, that they cannot read 200 pages of law and make sense out of it.  Perhaps, if they were required to certify that they read every word of every law enacted, we would wind up with more intelligible laws, with less earmarks and other pork barrel money squandering features, stated much more briefly and simply.

If Obama solves this problem, he deserves all the faith that so many of us have placed in him. 

[andyb]

Just to lighten the mood slightly if I may?

I was watching the Andrew Marr Show recently on BBC1, and The Corrigan Brothers were the guest act singing their song "There's No-one as Irish as Barack o'Bama"

There's a version on Youtube here:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=4Xkw8ip43Vk

Here's the lyric if you want to singalong:

O'Leary, O'Reilly, O'Hare and O'Hara
There's no one as Irish as Barack O'Bama
 
You don't believe me, I hear you say
But Barack's as Irish, as was JFK
His granddaddy's daddy came from Moneygall
A small Irish village, well known to you all


Toor a loo, toor a loo, toor a loo, toor a lama
There's no one as Irish As Barack O'Bama


He's as Irish as bacon and cabbage and stew
He's Hawaiian he's Kenyan American too
He’s in the white house, He took his chance
Now let’s see Barack do Riverdance


Toor a loo, toor a loo, toor a loo, toor a lama
There's no one as Irish As Barack O'Bama

It seems we truly have a multi-national President in the White House - not only is Barack American but his roots go back both to Kenya and Ireland.

This from Wikipedia:
'The song celebrates the Irish ancestry of the President-elect of the United States, Barack Obama, whose roots have been traced back to Moneygall in County Offaly, Ireland in the 19th century. Moneygall has a population of 298 people. Obama had previously remarked, "There's a little village in Ireland where my great-great-great grandfather came from and I'm looking forward to going there and having a pint," prompting the Irish Taoiseach Brian Cowen to invite him to do so.'

andyb

[loureed]

I am really pleased that Americans voted democrat and for obama. I have been putting off visiting a country  with an oppressive regime  for the past 8 yrs . but i now feel that my conscience wouldn't be too bothered by a visit.

It also suggests that a majority of Americans are not racist anymore  which is good news for the majority of humans who are blessed with skin tones...

I am a bit concerned that he has said and done apparently nothing to impose sanctions , excommunicate , tell off... the country of Israel   for its war crimes , racism,  murder and generally bad behaviour towards the Palestinian brothers and sisters and their lawfully elected government. ... i might never visit America ... lol america probably wouldnt let me in.............

[Bamawing]

I watched the inauguration today... I cried through the whole thing; I'm so happy.

Loureed, where are you from? *all curious*

[loureed]

Hi
I'm  from London England,   " where are you from ?" is a gang member greeting in London  ,and is usually followed by a nasty assault if you respond that  you are from the wrong neighbourhood.
What does *all curious * mean?

[totalfolly]

What does *all curious * mean?

There's no emoticon for curiousity.    It just means she wonders where you reside.

totalfolly

[CalamityJane]

For my part, living just across the "strait" from the USA, today was a day filled with joy, and hope for a new bright star. A new beginning with great promise for the future, not just for North America, but for the all peoples.

We will see as his work unfolds.

Jane