G.Anderson, you got it right.
Too-Big-to-Fail = Too-Big-to-Begin-with.
Break up the big banks and insurance companies.
Not to punish them, but to increase competition.
Use the 1985 AT&T breakup as a model.
Use the trust-busting of 100 years ago as precedent and inspiration.

The Obama administration missed it’s chance to do much of anything real with the
economy. The too big to fail banks, that are getting bigger each day, are destroying this
country with their greed. Unless, they are broken up and, and those who run them are
put in Irons then then the Yuan will replace he dollar.

There is no recovery, only heaps of B.S., heaped higher and higher, while the
government is run by those who caused this mess and keep on causing it every day.
They expect he American people to keep bending over for them. The think they can
keep on manipulating the people with their running dogs in the media.

How many people are going to be living on food stamps? 42, million, 62 millions, 75,
million? And when the people can’t feed their children because the bankers have sold
all the grain to the Chinese communists, what do you think life in this, country will be
like. When gas goes to 4, 5, 6, 7, dollars gallon, collapse won’t even begin to define the
economy.

The banks must be broken up. It is the only way to restore Democracy. Starting with the
Fed.

During the Health Care Reform debate, the top executives from the Health Insurance companies, a few of whom were Obama’s personal friends, were invited to WH to discuss their ‘demands’ on the new Health Insurance Reform Act.

Fast forward to this morning, Sunday Jan. 9th. A woman was on C-SPAN to discuss the hopw the health insurance reform would affect us.

She touted the new rule that disallowed companies from denying persons with pre-existing conditions and how good that was for us and how the Insurance companies fought it.

Here’s how they fought it.  It doesn’t come into effect until 2014.

Meanwhile, a friend of mine in Chicago, a self-employed lawyer who left the corporate world to do community work and provide representation for people needing an advocate in some Labor disputes, while struggling to build a practice is also struggling to find health insurance coverage.  She has high blood pressure and high cholesterol readings.

She has been denied coverage by all the companies she’s approached so far.  She’s about to try the last one available, Aetna, but says they have prices for coverage that hover around $1,000 a month, $12,000 a year.  She simply cannot afford that.

These are truths about this shell game. 

Single payer and the public option were brushed away in the discussion on C-SPAN.  All insurance company goons are pointing at the loony Tea Partiers as the opposition.

Joe Klein of Time magazine said this morning that we need to set aside discussions by the broadcast MSM that promote input from so-called knowedgeable policy wonks.

In other words from the the ones who promte and support wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Iran say, “If we can’t get around the truth, let’s dazzle ‘em with our bullshit.

The way it works is that all cases of government-corporate abuse are brushed under the table and just not reported.

Because they got the dough re mi.

Sirota asks “Which is reality? Does money play a major role in
human behavior—and specifically in both economic and political
decision-making? Or does money play no role at all? It simply
cannot be both at the same time. So which is it?”  He comes down
on the side of its power, a wise observation. 

It is hysterically funny if it weren’t also hysterically sad. Sirota does
not like contradictions (who does?), and is having a journalistic fit
over it.  Yet that is the entire resume to become a politician.  Isn’t It? 
I thought it was a political commandment to offer with one hand and
take with the other. 

He does excellently describe the picture rather precisely though.  Sigh.

“All contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law.”
—Theodore Roosevelt

I continue to believe that major Campaign Finance Reform is the only rational first step for those of us who feel $$$$$ is the corrupting factor in National (and State) politics.

      Though it seems an obvious point of departure as a first step toward expression of a unified movement toward sane governance only the ACLU represents the idea in my State.

      Mr. Sirota writes good pieces but D.C. thugdom and corruption is static. How many times can the stench of the Washinton corpse be placed on the table before citizens act.

In order to have even a prayer of changing the Washington rules we must move, first, to publicly financed campaigns and, second, to strict rules on who can lobby (there should be a permanent ban on office-holders quitting/retiring and coming back as lobbyists and a three year waiting period for office-holders to take a job with a company that lobbied them when they were an elected official) with staffers being required to wait, at the very least, for three years after termination before they can engage in any sort of lobbying.  Third, similar rules, as regards employment/lobbying/representation, should be crafted for the military.

If we could accomplish these three things we might have a chance of averting the on-coming disaster.  However, to mention any of these things immediately identifies one as kookier than any tea-partier and a probable “socialist” (whatever that is) easily allowing the system to shunt one aside in favor of the “normal” voter.  Since this is the case, and since we appear to be on the express elevator to hell, the question becomes not whether one should move to the country but how soon?

It used to be called bribery. It was considered a bad thing. Quaintly, at that time, it was held that every citizen’s vote counted the same, and anyone trying to make his desires more influential than the next guy’s was a dirty rat, even a criminal.
Thankfully, in these enlightened times, we understand that we shouldn’t allow rif-raf to dictate national policy, and that the best way to ensure that the advice that comes from the best people is accepted by government, is to have people vote with money.
Now we no longer have those old laws that used to tie the hands of the people who do great things. Our heroes are free to act, without all the rif-raf hanging around their ankles, dragging them down.

(I want to get into writing schoolbooks for Texas. What do you think so far?)

TAOWALKER: You bet!! What is “normal” in an Insane Asylum. Sirota describes the actions of the criminally insane in D.C. as if the consequences of their diseased actions hasn’t already decimated the population at large. I don’t know where the road to recovery will begin (PJKRAUS)but real acceptance that loons and thugs are indeed in control of our destiny might begin the change in conversation we all need.

    HELP REFUSING COMPLAINERS (INFINITYZERO) incapable of action or change (and we’re all guilty)afraid and alone praying that it won’t be them losing their home, job, family, mind. HOPIUM addicts, T.V. numb in mind waiting for permission to live. Perhaps (ITW) (RAYLAN) we need a new definition of what “stupidity” is. “Intellectuals” we hope, can define and clarify the “truth” but the corrupt actions and insane nature of actual D.C. thugdom should be enough to waken even the bovid. Something else is happening and Sirota’s article is proof. A bell has already sounded. The World has seen all this before but there is a new and as yet still undefined reality in play. We and D.C. thugs are in a no-mans-land between Worlds. I’m not a magic chrystals and little pink angels guy but our best struggles here only hint at the new tongue, language, thought and relation to Soul that defines the future. All measures and counter-measures are now antique. Perhaps, for a time, simple awe is our best strategy.

That’s assuming, isn’t it, (see “robertbeal”‘s post below) that the “Boomers,” subjected as they’ve been all their half-lives to a relentless regime of CONtrived neoteny (intentionally “arrested” development), have actually attained, or can ever attain, their genuinely organic adulthood.  This is NOT a “moral” criticism of them or their CONdition.  It is to suggest, however, that there’ve been and are and will likely persist and multiply exponentially, actual observable biological effects and CONsequences of their having been the involuntary guinea pigs in a “global”-ist experiment.

Designed to reveal the potential efficacy of various technologies and techniques employed to retard the natural growth and development of Human Beings, with a view to first getting them to behave like just another kind of livestock, and then managing them as such (in perpetuity) for the benefit of “self”-selected “owners,” the experiment has borne its desired poisoned ‘fruits.’  The Baby Boomers never grew-up at-all, in any organically functional respect.  Having failed (miserably) to mature, they have only aged.

It only remains to be seen now whether our Living Arrangement can survive their monstrous “impact” with sufficient Organic Integrity remaining to recover-from its increasingly destructive effects.

HokaHey!

See David’s new book for a treatment of the burden shifting and defunding that has defined boomers’ adult lives.

http://www.amazon.com/Back-Our-Future-Now-Our-Everything/dp/0345518780?SubscriptionId=0JJEH4PKQM4ZHS8QY102&tag=thehuffingtop-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0345518780

Incipient Stupidity has come to roost in the political machine. It is the tool of corruption of course, since rationality and intelligence are seldom the enemy of honesty. I can’t say they never serve the interests of power, since the intelligentsia has now sold out to them. But that’s the intellectuals colluding with the bovine for the sake of deceiving the populace.
I’ve given up trying to make sense of the so-called policies of left right or center. It’s all about self-interest and greed which is exactly what got us into this mess to begin with.
Nothing has to make sense - it just has to make money.

Never thought I’d say that, but I also never
thought a flake like Boner would be Speaker and an
idiot like Palin might be President.
*********

Yeah, I said that about Ronald Reagan in 1980 and again about Newt Gingrich in 1994 and again about George W. Bush in 2004…I’ll never underestimate the stupidity of the American electorate again.

Orange-skinned people and idiots have the same “rights,” and the same crying need for “self”-esteem, as everybody else CONfined to the virtual world-o’-hurt.  David Sirota can, with perhaps a straight-face, offer-up yet another glimpse into the other side of the looking-glass.  Surely “peterjkraus,” out of the goodness of his heart, will allow the “boners” and “bimbos” their turn at the helm of the pirate-ship of state.

Sirota’s apparent working-assumption, however, that there is still some “normal” world, peopled by sensible “individuals” living regular lives, against which the supposedly “bizarre” characteristics of its back-of-beyond counterpart will still stand-out as anomalous, itself just doesn’t seem to hold-up anymore.  The “global”-ist insanity (Would that it were no worse than mere inanity.) has now gone, well….“global.”

For someplace that hasn’t stopped making sense, anybody still more-or-less inclined to do so might look here in Indian Country….Land of the FREE and Home of the WILD.

Hokahey!

“Which is reality? Does money play a major
role…in both economic and political decision-
making?”

The answer is obvious. It’s called corruption, and
very few politicians aren’t.

The also very obvious consequence is that many of
us who have voted in every election will no longer
do so. More and more, it shows itself to be a huge
waste of a couple of good hours.

Never thought I’d say that, but I also never
thought a flake like Boner would be Speaker and an
idiot like Palin might be President.