"Equal' T- shirt design by Damian Mann

It could mean “Equal, Equality, Equal Rights”
It could mean “Sum or sum of it all
It could be “We’re all the same”
It could mean whatever you want it to mean.

I was thinking about the “Happy Face” buttons , the Peace sign, and simple logos like that.

You can call such ideas a lot of things. “False” or “untrue,” for example, would work. But a lot of reporters characterized Perry’s performance in positive terms. In today’s New York Times (9/9/11), Michael Shear writes that Perry

made clear in his first national appearance that he would campaign as an unabashed Southern conservative who is unafraid to speak bluntly, would double-down on controversial statements and planned to shrug off the concerns of the Republican establishment.

Shear later added that “Perry did not back down Wednesday night from his assertion that Social Security was a failure, even in the face of direct criticism by Mr. Romney.”

“Unabashed,” “unafraid,” not backing down–these are all more or less positive descriptions.

Likewise, on NBC Nightly News (9/8/11), Andrea Mitchell said: “Perry proved he could throw a punch and take one. And he was unapologetic about attacking Social Security as a monstrous lie.”

So he’s not only a fearlessly blunt speaker, he’s also an unapologetic punch-thrower. This is the kind of coverage the Perry campaign would probably pay for. Yes, there are pieces here and there that point out that, you know, Social Security isn’t actually a massive scam. On the other hand, Washington Post liberal Ruth Marcus writes today (9/9/11): “On the substance, Perry’s point about Social Security-as-Ponzi scheme has some grounding in reality.” She gets around to criticizing him, but that’s a lot of ground to cede to a falsehood.

As Greg Marx notes at CJR, the media designation of certain pieces as “factchecks” is strange because one might logically conclude that run-of-the-mill articles don’t dwell on checking the facts of politicians (a conclusion that would largely be a correct one). He points to a CBS News piece on Perry and Social Security that quotes other Republicans disagreeing with his stance. Readers are apparently being asked to believe either Karl Rove or Rick Perry on the issue. That’s a lot to ask of anyone.

Okay, first things first. I don’t think republicans are serial killers, provocative title notwithstanding. It’s just that the other day I had something seemingly completely unrelated to politics pop in my head that drew an analogy between the infamous murderer of women, Ted Bundy, the republican party and who they look out for.

So, stay with me. I promise this will make sense by the time I’m done.

Most of you probably don’t remember the NBC film from 1986 called The Deliberate Stranger starring Mark Harmon of NCIS fame as Ted Bundy. At the time, it was pretty well thought of although it has largely been confined to the faded annals of TV movie history.

However, there is one scene from that telepic that has always stuck with me. Near the end of the film as the prosecutor is making his closing argument, he brings out a blackboard and a piece of chalk. He then takes the long round edge the piece of chalk and makes a thick straight line across the board. After doing so, he begins to discuss the evidence the state has against Mr. Bundy. With each new article of information he erases a portion of the line until the line disappears completely. The point being that when you stack up all that is known about the case against Mr. Bundy, you can only conclude that there is no reasonable doubt as to whom committed the murders of at least 30 women in the 1970′s.

Now you’re probably thinking, “Okay, that’s interesting, but what does it have to do with the GOP?” On the face of it, nothing. However, if you apply the Ted Bundy Chalkboard Test to the republican party and whose interests they represent, you get a similar result.

At this point, I want you to imagine that blackboard and that long, thick, straight line all the way across it. Now, I want you to think of the different groups of people in our country who make up the population of the United States.

Let’s start with racial minorities. Do you think that republicans stand for the rights of Mexicans, Latinos, Asian Americans, African-Americans, or Native Americans? No, you say? Well, I agree. They are anti-affirmative action, anti-immigrant, and even anti-civil rights. Okay then, let’s mentally erase a pretty good portion of that line.

Now let’s look at the ladies. Who doesn’t like women? Didn’t we all come from one? Well, the GOP opposed Lily Ledbetter, are anti-choice, and for the most part prefer their women of the Stepford variety (see Cindy McCain, Michell Bachmann, and whoever Newt’s latest wife is). I’m thinking we can erase some chalk off the board.

How about gays and lesbians? Sure, I know there is such a thing as gay republicans, but their existence baffles me. Here is a party that fought hard to sustain DADT, bends over backwards to keep gays from marrying, and in some cases compares their lifestyle to that of practitioners of beastiality (this means you, Rick Santorum). Don’t get me wrong, I understand the idea of not being a “one issue” voter, but what if that issue is essentially your right to exist? Time to remove some more chalk.

Then there’s senior citizens. A group of people whom are dependant upon Social Security and Medicare to sustain not only their health and home, but their very dignity. The GOP’s current front-runner thinks Social Security is a “Ponzi Scheme.” And there so-called fiscal genius, Paul Ryan, wants to replace Medicare with a coupon. Eraser, please.

Lastly, let’s look at the Middle Class and the poor. Have you ever seen a party less concerned with those making less than 250K per year? They want no investment in schools, teachers, the building and repair of roads and bridges, any extension of unemployment rates despite the current state of the economy. And that’s what they think of the working class. If you’re poor, well you better get a helmet, not that you could afford one. They want to kill Medicaid, drug test those on welfare (even though it would cost more to do so and the rate of addiction among the under class is not appreciably higher than that of those above the poverty line), cut back food stamps, force poor women to have children and then leave them out in the cold, and those are just the programs I can think of off the top of my head. Looks like we got a whole lot more chalk to get rid of on our line.

But hold on, we still have a little line left! Who are those people? What group of individuals could possibly be left after we have completed our Ted Bundy Chalkboard Test? It’s not much, just a sliver of very stubborn calcium carbonate that will not bend to the will of our eraser.

If you haven’t guessed by now, the next time you watch a republican debate, wait until they scan the crowd. All those people cheering on the Governor of Texas’ death penalty record (243 and counting, yo!). All those with their expensive haircuts, brooches, and dresses and suits. You know, rich older white people. For the most part, the stale, the male, and the pale. And let’s not forget the rich, the very very rich. That’s who makes up that 2%. That is who the republican party represents. And somehow, that ever so thin line of remaining chalk has convinced nearly 48% of the rest of us that there is somehow some reasonable doubt about this party’s intentions towards the rest of us. It is nothing less than a fatal combination of alchemy and ignorance.

Once again, I’m not suggesting that the GOP is filled with craven lunatics like Ted Bundy. I mean, come on, they actually have a little chalk left on the board, whereas poor Ted was left with absolutely nothing at the end of the prosecutor’s closing argument.

I suppose they should be proud.

Read the article here:

Oh yes America was such a moral place in the past

The mortgage crisis began in 2006 and it’s all President Obama’s fault—at least according to Fox News host Sean Hannity. Hannity recently blamed Obama—“his policies, his economic plan, his fault”—for the mortgage crisis, ignoring who was actually president (that would be George W. Bush) as the housing market slipped.

Hannity’s is just one example of the selective memory and historical revision frequently on display in the conservative movement. Right-wing pundits, politicians and pseudo-historians are nibbling away at objective historical truths to rewrite history for present-day purposes, and hardly any topic is off-limits: glorifying the “Reagan Revolution” to children, sugarcoating the Jim Crow South and revising textbooks to offer a favorable view on Phyllis Schlafly—among many others.

Below, read about eight ways in which conservatives try to rewrite, sugarcoat or ignore aspects of American history.

1. Michele Bachmann on the founding fathers and slavery. Propelled to the front of the Republican field after her victory in the Iowa straw poll, Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann’s historical views are notoriously error-prone. In one her infamous gaffes, she said the founding fathers “work[ed] tirelessly to end slavery” (in fact, George Washington, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves) and that John Quincy Adams was a founding father—he was born in 1767.

Bachmann was a research assistant to John Eidsmoe for his 1987 book Christianity and the Constitution: The Faith of our Founding Fathers, in which Eidsmoe wrote, “The church and the state have separate spheres of authority, but both derive authority rom God. In that sense America, like [Old Testament] Israel, is a theocracy.” And at a conference, Eidsmoe outlined his belief in church/state separation: “The church’s responsibility is to teach biblical principles of government and to drive sinners to the cross…. The function of the state is to follow those godly principles and preserve a system of order.” Bachmann has praised Eidsmoe as “absolutely brilliant. He taught me about so many aspects about our godly heritage.”

2. Secession was fine, dandy and legal. Texas Governor and Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry is fond of pro-secession comments; in 2009, he joked that “we can leave anytime we want. So we’re kind of thinking about that again.”

In his dreams. In fact, these attempts at humor sidestep what secession actually leads to: a nullification crisis, a Civil War, hundreds of thousands of casualties and the federal government as the victor anyway. And secession is illegal. In 1866 the Supreme Court ruled in Texas v. White that Texas’s ordinance of secession was “absolutely null.”

Perry isn’t the only Republican to make such comments. Congressman Zach Wamp alluded to secession and Georgia’s Senate passed a secession-related bill in 2009.

3. Forgetting September 11? Conservatives have an uncanny ability to misremember when the September 11 attacks occurred. In July, Fox News host Eric Bolling said “we were certainly safe between 2000 and 2008 — I don’t remember any terrorist attacks on American soil during that period of time.” (In his “apology,” he accepted no blame: “Yesterday, I misspoke when saying that there were no US terror attacks during the Bush years. Obviously, I meant in the aftermath of 9/11, but that is when the radical liberal left pounced on us…. thank you liberals for reminding me how petty you can be.”)

A surprising slip came from ex–New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. In January 2010 he claimed that “we had no domestic attacks under Bush.” In December 2009 Mary Matalin made the outrageous claim that Bush inherited the attacks from Bill Clinton. In November 2009 Bush’s ex–Press Secretary Dana Perino said “we did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.”

4. Mike Huckabee’s “Learn Our History.” Mike Huckabee’s cartoon history series is whitewashing American history. While claiming to engage children in an easy-to-digest format without “misrepresentations…historical inaccuracies, personal biases and political correctness,” personal biases somehow make an appearance. Each video is produced with consultation from Learn Our History’s “Council of Masters;” one “Master,” Larry Schweikart, is the author of 48 Liberal Lies About American History, including “Lie #45: LBJ’s Great Society Had a Positive Impact on the Poor.”

In a DVD on the “Reagan Revolution,” viewers are invited to “journey to a time when America suffered from financial, international and moral crisis:” Washington, DC, 1977. A knife-wielding African-American man demands “gimme yo’ money!” Ronald Reagan’s arrival—against triumphant music playing and a caption reading “one man transformed the nation…and the world”—changed all that for the better, the DVD suggests.

5. The New Deal did harm. Anti–New Deal views have long reverberated among Republicans. Bachmann blamed FDR for turning a recession into a depression by passing “Hoot-Smalley Tariff” (never mind that it’s Smoot-Hawley and it was passed three years prior to Roosevelt’s inauguration). And a barrage of recent books, including FDR’s Folly, by Jim Powell of the Cato Institute, and Amity Shlaes’s The Forgotten Man, blame FDR and the New Deal for prolonging the Depression. Newt Gingrich has praised The Forgotten Man, with its anti-stimulus message, as a blueprint for a return to “Whig-style free-market liberalism.”

6. David Barton. An amateur-turned-“historian,” Barton is the founder of WallBuilders, a pseudo-historical organization “with an emphasis on the moral, religious, and constitutional foundation on which America was built,” says its website. One of his revisions insists that John Adams claimed that government cannot exist without the Holy Ghost. In his presentations of the subject, Barton misunderstands Adams’s mocking statement about fervent believers in the Holy Ghost as historical truth, omitting succeeding sentences wherein Adams describes those beliefs to be “Artifice and Cunning.”

Barton’s claims about the religious roots of the country have been debunked from academics, even from Christian colleges. John Fea, chair of the history department at Messiah College, wrote, “Barton claims to be a historian. He is not. He has just enough historical knowledge, and just enough charisma, to be very dangerous.”

7. Texas Textbook Revisions. Last year the Texas Board of Education revised public school textbooks, expanding discussion of Ronald Reagan at the expense of public figures like Justice Sonia Sotomayor, omitting reference to Thomas Jefferson as an Enlightenment thinker in favor of Protestant leader John Calvin, and offering favorable views on Senator Joseph McCarthy, women’s rights opponent Phyllis Schlafly and the Heritage Foundation.

Many historians opposed the changes—but the board voted along party lines to approve of the revisions. Nearly 5 million Texas students live with the result.

8. Jim Crow wasn’t that bad. Last December, Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi sugarcoated Jim Crow–era Mississippi, saying of his native Yazoo County, “I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” and, “You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders.”

In reality, 1960s Mississippi was 42 percent black, of which only 2 percent were registered to vote, according to the nonprofit African-American Registry. Civil rights activists were murdered and students rioted against integration. “Not bad” indeed!

* * *

Conservatives’ view of history is either a warm, patriotic tale of American exceptionalism or a tale of Big Government oppression. It glides over or misrepresents progressive triumphs like the New Deal or Great Society and ignores unpleasant episodes like the Jim Crow era. Only studying the United States’ “best hits” ignores the contributions of minorities, labor and other groups.

“Historians constantly challenge each other, and understandings of the past evolve (for whatever reason),” William Link, a professor of history at the University of Florida, told The Nation. “But these people are different in that they aren’t really reality-based and don’t have much standing or credibility among scholars.”

For American youth—particularly those subjected to revised textbooks in Texas—the political revision of history may have important consequences. Imagine a future when children know about the contributions of Phyllis Schlafly but not César Chávez, have heard of the “Reagan Revolution” but not the Bush recession. “It can pollute the educational process,” Link said. “A good education involves a search for truth and understanding. To an extraordinary degree you have to validate what you say with evidence…. that’s the accepted professional standard.

You know, I’ve studied history, I’ve read about America and you know something, if it weren’t for liberals, we’d be living in a dark, evil country, far worse than anything Bush could conjure up. A world where children were told to piss on the side of the road because they weren’t fit to pee in a white outhouse, where women had to get back alley abortions and where rape was a joke, unless the alleged criminal was black, whereupon he was hung from a tree and castrated.

What has conservatism given America? A stable social order? A peaceful homelife? Respect for law and order? No. Hell, no. It hasn’t given us anything we didn’t have and it wants to take away our freedoms.

The Founding Fathers, as flawed as they were, slaveowners and pornographers, smugglers and terrorists, understood one thing, a man’s path to God needed no help from the state. Is the religion of these conservatives so fragile that they need the state to prop it up, to tell us how to pray and think? Is that what they stand for? Is that their America?

Conservatism plays on fear and thrives on lies and dishonesty. I grew up with honest, decent conservatives and those people have been replaced by the party of greed. It is one thing to want less government interference and smaller, fiscally responsible government. It is another thing entirely to be a corporate whore, selling out to the highest bidder because the CEO fattens your campaign chest. They are building an America which cannot be sustained. One based on the benefit of the few at the cost of the many. The indifferent boss who hires too few people and works them to death or until they break down sick. Cheap labor capitalism has replaced common sense. “Globalism” which is really guise for exploitation, replaced fair trade, which is nothing like fair for the trapped semi-slaves of the maquliadoras. In the Texas border towns, hundreds of these women have been used as sex slaves and then apparently killed,the FBI powerless to do anything as the criminals sit in Mexico untouched by law.

For the better part of a decade, the conservatives made liberal a dirty word. Well, it isn’t. It represents the best and most noble nature of what America stands for: equitable government services, old age pensions, health care, education, fair trials and humane imprisonment. It is the heart and soul of what made American different and better than other countries. Not only an escape from oppression, but the opportunity to thrive in land free of tradition and the repression that can bring. We offered a democracy which didn’t enshrine the rich and made them feel they had an obligation to their workers.

Bush and the people around him disdain that. They think, by accident of birth and circumstance, they were meant to rule the world and those who did not agree would suffer.

Liberal does not and has not meant weak until the conservatives said it did. Was Martin Luther King weak? Bobby Kennedy? Gene McCarthy? It was the liberals who remade this country and ended legal segregation and legal sexism. Not the conservatives, who wanted to hold on to the old ways.

It’s time to regain the sprit of FDR and Truman and the people around them. People who believed in the public good over private gain. It is time to stop apologizing for being a liberal and be proud to fight for your beliefs. No more shying away or being defined by other people. Liberals believe in a strong defense and punishment for crime. But not preemption and pointless jail sentences. We believe no American should be turned away from a hospital because they are too poor or lack a proper legal defense. We believe that people should make enough from one job to live on, to spend time on raising their family. We believe that individuals and not the state should dictate who gets married and why. The best way to defend marriage is to expand, not restrict it.

It was the liberals who opposed the Nazis while the conservatives were plotting to get their brown shirts or fund Hitler. It was the liberals who warned about Spain and fought there, who joined the RAF to fight the Germans, who brought democracy to Germany and Japan. Let us not forget it was the conservatives who opposed defending America until the Germans sank our ships. They would have done nothing as Britain came under Nazi control. It was they who supported Joe McCarthy and his baseless, drink fueled claims.

Without liberals, there would be no modern America, just a Nazi sattlelite state. Liberals weak on defense? Liberals created America’s defense. The conservatives only need vets at election time.

It is time to stop looking for an accomodation with the right. They want none for us. They want to win, at any price. So, you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?

– If Texas were not in the Union, the Democrats would currently have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate — or at least they would once Al Franken gets seated. This is because, in a 98-seat Senate, only 59 votes would be required to break a filibuster.

– If Texas were not in the Union, the Republicans would operate from a significantly weakened position in the House, since the net 8-vote advantage their congressional delegation gives them in the state (they have 20 seats to the Democrats’ 12) is by far their largest.

– If Texas were not in the Union, George W. Bush would never have become President in 2000 — not because he’d be constitutionally ineligible (Bush, despite his Texas twang, was born in posh New Haven, Connecticut). Rather, he wouldn’t have had enough Electoral Votes to defeat Al Gore.

– If Texas were not in the Union, Barack Obama would have won the Electoral College 389-147 instead of 365-173 (note that there are two fewer votes total, because there would be two fewer Senators). The vast majority of Texas’ electoral votes would be redistributed to lib’rul states like California (which would go from having 55 electoral votes to 59) and New York (34 rather than 31):

By NEDRA PICKLER – 1 day ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday threw out a lawsuit questioning President Barack Obama’s citizenship, lambasting the case as a waste of the court’s time and suggesting the plaintiff’s attorney may have to compensate the president’s lawyer.

In an argument popular on the Internet and taken seriously practically nowhere else, Obama’s critics argue he is ineligible to be president because he is not a “natural-born citizen” as the Constitution requires.

In response last summer, Obama’s campaign posted his Hawaiian birth certificate on its Web site. But the lawsuit argues it is a fake and that Obama was actually born in his father’s homeland of Kenya, even though Hawaiian officials have said the document is authentic.

“This case, if it were allowed to proceed, would deserve mention in one of those books that seek to prove that the law is foolish or that America has too many lawyers with not enough to do,” U.S. District Judge James Robertson said in his written opinion.

The lawsuit didn’t even use Obama’s legal name but called him “Barry Soetoro,” the name he went by while attending elementary school in Indonesia. It’s one of many that has been filed claiming Obama is ineligible to serve as president.

Robertson ordered plaintiff’s attorney John Hemenway of Colorado Springs, Colo., to show why he hasn’t violated court rules barring frivolous and harassing cases and shouldn’t have to pay Obama’s attorney, Bob Bauer, for his time arguing that the case should be thrown out.

Defying a major blizzard, students plan to take the Capitol by storm, with more than 2,500 ready to be arrested. Read story at NewsCloud.

Neely’s comprehensive account runs to roughly 15,000 words. It was compiled by law students at the University of California at Davis and can be accessed here. Three things struck me in reading through the account.

First, Neely and other guards had been trained to the U.S. military’s traditional application of the Geneva Convention rules. They were put under great pressure to get rough with the prisoners and to violate the standards they learned. This placed the prison guards under unjustifiable mental stress and anxiety, and, as any person familiar with the vast psychological literature in the area (think of the Stanford Prison Experiment, for instance) would have anticipated produced abuses. Neely discusses at some length the notion of IRF (initial reaction force), a technique devised to brutalize or physically beat a detainee under the pretense that he required being physically subdued. The IRF approach was devised to use a perceived legal loophole in the prohibition on torture. Neely’s testimony makes clear that IRF was understood by everyone, including the prison guards who applied it, as a subterfuge for beating and mistreating prisoners—and that it had nothing to do with the need to preserve discipline and order in the prison.

Second, there is a good deal of discussion of displays of contempt for Islam by the camp authorities, and also specific documentation of mistreatment of the Qu’ran. Remember that the Neocon-laden Pentagon Public Affairs office launched a war against Newsweek based on a very brief piece that appeared in the magazine’s Periscope section concerning the mistreatment of a Qu’ran by a prison guard. Not only was the Newsweek report accurate in its essence, it actually understated the gravity and scope of the problem. Moreover, it is clear that the Pentagon Public Affairs office was fully aware, even as it went on the attack against Newsweek, that its claims were false and the weekly’s reporting was accurate.

Third, the Nelly account shows that health professionals are right in the thick of the torture and abuse of the prisoners—suggesting a systematic collapse of professional ethics driven by the Pentagon itself. He describes body searches undertaken for no legitimate security purpose, simply to sexually invade and humiliate the prisoners. This was a standardized Bush Administration tactic–the importance of which became apparent to me when I participated in some Capitol Hill negotiations with White House representatives relating to legislation creating criminal law accountability for contractors. The Bush White House vehemently objected to provisions of the law dealing with rape by instrumentality. When House negotiators pressed to know why, they were met first with silence and then an embarrassed acknowledgement that a key part of the Bush program included invasion of the bodies of prisoners in a way that might be deemed rape by instrumentality under existing federal and state criminal statutes. While these techniques have long been known, the role of health care professionals in implementing them is shocking.

Neely’s account demonstrates once more how much the Bush team kept secret and how little we still know about their comprehensive program of official cruelty and torture.

from Information Clearing House

Majority Leader Harry Reid
(202) 224-3542

Majority Whip Dick Durbin
(202) 224-2152

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi
(202) 225-0100

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer
(202) 225-4131

House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn
(202) 226-3210

The message:

“The Republicans have zero credibility on the economy.”

Paraphrase President Obama:

“Please reject the Republican theories that got us into this mess in the first place.”

And for Senator Reid:

“Make the Republicans stand and filibuster if they want to filibuster. No cloture votes!”

Madoff’s
fall has planted the seeds of suspicion. We now doubt those we have
done business with for years. The presumption of trust is gone.

Dcember 20, 2008 “The Nation” — – The
news of Bernard Madoff’s $50 billion fraud has hit the investor/401(k)
class as nothing else — not the fall of Lehman Brothers, not the death
of Bear Stearns, nor the string of insolvency announcements of one
household name after another. Madoff is the blow that did it.

That
Madoff took some of the members of the centimillionaire club to the
cleaners is not what caused the shock. It is the damage done to so many
smaller investor/savers, so many pension funds, so many charities. You
do not have to be one of Madoff’s victims to be affected. Madoff, his
own businesses aside, was a major figure in the world of investments,
of stocks and bonds and securities and exchanges. If the former chairman of Nasdaq is a crook, whom do you trust?

Madoff
has sown the seeds of suspicion everywhere. He has caused us to doubt
men and women with whom we have done business with for years. There is
no way of knowing if someone is a con artist. The presumption of trust
is gone.

Business
depends on trust, trust of all kinds. Trust that when you place an
order with a broker he or she will get you the best price, trust that
your investment or retirement adviser is not getting an under-the-table
kickback to put your old age money into a shoddy annuity.

Trust
is the indispensable element in all businesses. Contractors depend on
subcontractors to get the job done when they say they will; retailers
depend on distributors to deliver on time; lawyers are trusted to meet
filing deadlines, steel fabricators are expected to get gigantic
trusses to the building site exactly when they are needed. Doctors are
expected to put patients’ interests above money considerations; parts
manufacturers are relied on to deliver on time to the factory. Business
runs on trust, and Bernard Madoff has busted it.

So the Wall Street Journal says to its readers, “Could your investment manager be another Bernard Madoff?…
if someone like Mr. Madoff can be accused of running a $50 billion
Ponzi scheme, can investors anywhere sleep easy? Ordinarily, when you
are picking an investment manager or financial planner, you’re given
some common-sense advice. Avoid managers who are unknown, or
unregulated, or come without good referrals, or haven’t been in the
industry long. But none of this would have saved you from Mr. Madoff.
‘This guy had oodles of referrals, at the highest levels,’ notes Duane
Thompson, a managing director at the Financial Planning Association in
Washington. ‘He was [former] chairman of Nasdaq. He’d been in business
since 1960. ”

Fear, confusion and mistrust have been amplified by the absence of government supervision, regulation or policing. The Securities and Exchange Commission admits it did not do its job.

With
the closing down of the old-time pension system, millions of employees
were forced into 401(k)s requiring knowledge of finance, bonds, stocks,
weird-sounding investments and tax law. They have had to make
investment decisions effecting their future with no government
protection against misrepresentation, legal traps laid for them and the
small print obfuscation financial institutions practice on their
customers. The result is the heart-wrenching situation
for millions who fear that they will be living out the last decades of
their lives counting their food stamps and hunting for bargains in the
used clothing bins.

The
Madoff swindle puts the spotlight on the collapse of the 401(k)
retirement plan. The United States is the only advanced nation without
a complete retirement system.

For
401(k)s to have worked, a bull market or at least a flat market was
necessary. It was an unreliable gamble from the git-go, an arrangement
that would fall to pieces when next the market crashed.

Madoff
and the crash underline the powerlessness of the millions. As a matter
of principle, the Republicans defended the unregulated lawlessness that
enabled a Madoff to run his swindles. As for the Democrats, sometime in
the Clinton era they sold their party to Wall Street and now they have
Chuck Schumer to make sure it stays sold.

It remains for President-elect Obama to void the deal and break his party free to help those who have nowhere else to look.

I Didn’t Vote For Obama Today