Towards a Green Future

I get campaign emails from the McPalin campaign. Why? I enjoy discomfort and cringing. Very life affirming.

Anyhow - I enjoy the disclaimer at the bottom of each email the contains a fundraising plea to help defeat the "librul" media:

"Because the McCain-Palin Campaign is participating in the presidential public funding system, it may not receive contributions for any candidate's election. However, federal law allows the McCain-Palin Campaign's Compliance Fund to defray legal and accounting compliance costs and preserve the Campaign's public grant for media, mail, phones, and get-out-the-vote programs. Contributions to McCain-Palin Victory 2008 will go to the Compliance Fund, and to participating party committees for Victory 2008 programs." 

Just so you know - the Maverick (giggle) is using the donations to fund party building activities. NOT the campaign. You, the taxpayer, are paying for McCain's trainwreck of a campaign. Not that publicly financed campaigns aren't a good idea - they are.

That is all.

Carry on.

Canada is having an election too, in case you had not heard. Their candidate for Prime Minister, Elizabeth May, is polling at 10% currently, and will participate in the nationally televised debates.

It appears Canadians will get to hear more than just the pre-approved political participants.

Great article from the Christian Science Monitor:

http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2008/10/02/why-canada’s-green-party-is-finally-a-prime-time-draw/



Why Canada’s Green Party is (finally) a prime-time draw
Elizabeth May, the Green candidate, will make history by appearing in a nationally televised debate on Thursday night.

By Susan Bourette| Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor/ October 2, 2008 edition


TORONTO
One way or another, Canada’s Green Party leader Elizabeth May will make history this week.

The mother, lawyer, environmental activist, and native of Connecticut will be the first Green Party member to participate in national televised debates on equal footing with Canada’s mainstream party leaders.

The debates – in French on Wednesday and in English on Thursday night – are “make or break” events for a party long relegated to the fringes of Canadian politics. Despite Green Party success in Europe, Canadians have yet to elect a single Green member to Parliament.

Voter concern over high oil prices and climate change have thrust the environment into the center of Canadian politics. But political analysts attribute the party’s rise in the polls to Ms. May’s scrappy, off-the-cuff campaign style. She has a giftfor rhetorical thunder that seems to resonate with voters.

“She’s got lots of natural charisma,” says Karen Bird, who teaches Canadian politics at Hamilton’s McMaster University. “She seems to be a person of integrity who is down to earth. She’s not obsequious. She tells you what she really thinks and where she stands and I think a lot of people respond to that.”

Earlier this week, May said she planned to employ that “spontaneous, from-the-heart” approach to disarm her political foes in two debates (Wednesday night in French, Thursday in English) in which five party leaders will compete.

The debates give May a shot at establishing herself as a serious contender in the eyes of the Canadian electorate. Recent polls put the ruling Conservative Party within striking distance of forming a majority government. The once mighty Liberal Party, currently the official opposition, is sinking like a stone. The Liberal Party is polling last, for example, in British Columbia, behind the Tories, the left-leaning New Democratic Party, and the Greens. The most recent Press Harris-Decima poll has the Green Party polling at 10 percent.

At the heart of the May’s Green Party policy platform is a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by taxing polluters while doling out tax breaks to companies and individuals that reduce their carbon output. She campaigned this past week in a cross-Canada tour by train instead of by plane, a lower carbon-footprint form of transportation. She has not driven a car, according to media reports, in 20 years.

But May is also keen to stamp out the perception that the Green Party is a left-wing party full of treehuggers. Instead, she emphasizes a platform that is socially progressive with fiscally conservative ideas.

While the Green Party has a long history of electoral success in Europe, with strong representation in countries like Germany, Italy, and Ireland, the party hasn’t made significant inroads in North America.

In the 2006 Canadian federal election, the Green Party garnered 660,000 votes, or 4.5 percent of those cast.

May has her sights set on a much bigger piece of the pie this time around. She said this week that she hopes to win at least 12 seats in the election. Canadians head to the polls October 14.

But many observers are sceptical. Wilfrid Laurier University political scientist David Doherty says that despite the uptick in support, it’s unlikely that the Green Party will achieve a major breakthrough.

“Our electoral system isn’t exactly democratic,” Professor Doherty says. “It tends to punish smaller parties, while rewarding a winner who may not even have a majority of the votes.”

The “first past the post” or plurality system means that while everyone gets a vote, some votes effectively count more than others. The winner is the one who places first, not necessarily the candidate who receives a majority of votes. The electoral system tends to reward parties that are able to bunch their votes geographically. In 26 federal elections held since 1921, there have been 16 majority governments elected but only two that actually commanded a majority of the vote.

The way Doherty sees it, the Green Party may have a shot at winning three or four seats. But he adds that even if the party manages to double its popular vote from 2006, it may not win a single seat in Parliament.

May’s shot at expanding the party’s power in Parliament may have been further diminished Tuesday when Canada’s two most powerful environmental groups issued a call to its members to “vote strategically.” In other words, they are urging Canadians to support any party that will defeat the Conservatives. “We are nonpartisan,” explains Bruce Cox, executive director of Greenpeace Canada. “Our goal is to send a very clear message to voters. If you want real action on climate change, you must vote for anyone other than the party that we believe has the worst environmental plan for Canada going forward.”

By all accounts, May is undaunted by these obstacles as she heads into the debate. Her first triumph in this campaign was, in effect, to win a spot at the podium. Last month, two of the major party leaders balked at including May in the debate. However, facing a heated backlash from the Canadian public, they retreated, allowing May to join in.

May comes by her political passions honestly. She was born in Hartford, Conn., where her mother was an early antinuclear activist who campaigned for the Democrats alongside Bill Clinton. The family moved to Cape Breton on Canada’s east coast to open a restaurant in a schooner where May worked as waitress while still a teenager.

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Here is a sample, that more accurately reflects the true nature of the economy, after Wall Street got what they wanted (massive roll-back of regulation) which had it's inevitable consequence (financial instability coupled with rampant corruption).

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/09/22/rare-mlk-speech-on-c.html

"I say to you, this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live.
You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid.

You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab or shoot or bomb your house. So you refuse to take a stand.

Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at ninety.

And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.

You died when you refused to stand up for right.

You died when you refused to stand up for truth.

You died when you refused to stand up for justice.”

****************
That pretty much says it all.

mp3 of speech can be downloaded at http://www.archive.org/download/dn2002-1119/dn2002-1119-1_64kb.mp3   The quote above starts just past the 32 minute mark.

....on Obama's use of social networking technology to help his campaign.

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/21222/?a=f

Websites can be irritating, from 404 file not found errors, to bad design, to bad content - the irritation is there. Let me add one more gripe to the already long list:

Ad servers.

Every website, whether about Acorns or Zoroastrians, or anywhere in between is trying to make a buck selling ads on their site. Of course, these ads are hosted at other servers.

Tiny problem- about 30% of the time, the entire site won't load, or takes quadruple the time, because its busy loading up ads from servers in Thailand for organic pineapples delivered to your door!

Its enough to make one want to actually buy a paper-edition newspaper and read day-old news. GASP OF HORROR! There, I said it.

Found this interesting snippet on the interweb yesterday. In 2000 during McCain's "Black Baby" primary fight with then Governor George W Bush, McCain pulled out of the California GOP debate.

Link to article


02-28-2000

"With new polls showing his campaign dead in the water among California Republicans, Arizona Sen. John McCain has pulled out of a long-scheduled debate with Texas Gov. George Bush, set for Thursday in Los Angeles.

McCain campaign officials tried desperately yesterday to put the best face on their withdrawal, even as a new Field Poll showed Bush far ahead among likely Republican voters in the winner-take-all race for the state's 162 GOP delegates."

************
Does one other instance make for a trend? I will let you, the readers, decide. But, the general thought is that in a debate, it is usually the underdog that stands to benefit the most. McCain was in that position in 2000, and is in that position again against Obama in 2008.

Tune in to see if Barack has a buddy to talk with at the debate?

 Source: American Political Science Review Vol 58, No. 4, December 1994.

This confirms what I suspected all along. Negative ads/Attack ads serve only one purpose, to suppress voter turnout. This serves to reduce the electorate to two small, extremely partisan, cynical camps. The rest of America turns away in disgust. 

Can you blame them?

What's more - are you willing to be an agent of change to end this systematic threat to our democracy?

I'll start:

"I love conservatives and hope they turn out, participate, and vote, in vast numbers."

To all the alleged "liberals" that think the above statement is a problem, too damn bad. If you really want to make a difference, reach out to people who are disenchanted with politics, or think they don't matter.

http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/18/news/economy/rtc_speculation/index.htm?cnn=yes

.....and here's the next bailout.

Now, we taxpayers get to hold mortgage backed securities that may be worth something, or nothing, no one really knows.

Perhaps we need Congress to enact an "Idiot Tax" on:

1. Themselves, for repealing the regulations in 1999 that might have helped minimize this debacle. ( see my previous post on Glass-Steagelman)

2. The rich, and oh-so-very-clever financial whiz-kids that brewed up these financial instruments that nobody understands, or that have any relation to reality anymore.

For more info on the McKinney/Clemente campaign, go to: http://votetruth08.com/

If you look back a few months, I wrote that we would see more government bailouts- well here you go. Apparently, the government can bailout companies when they get in trouble, but not individuals. Because that would be........oh I don't know.......compassionate?

**************************


Breaking News Alert
The New York Times
Tuesday, September 16, 2008 -- 7:21 PM ET
-----

Fed to Give A.I.G. $85 Billion Loan and Take 80% Stake

In an extraordinary turn, the Federal Reserve agreed Tuesday
to take a nearly 80 percent stake in the troubled giant
insurance company, the American International Group, in
exchange for an $85 billion loan.

Read More:
http://www.nytimes.com/?emc=na

From my co-worker "Would you ever consider running as a Democrat?"

The answer: no.

I will support progressive democrats and greens, but I will not run as a democrat. Reasons are:

1. The party machinery (not necessarily candidates or the democratic grassroots) is addicted to special interest money and would not be warm to my idea of blocking out as much special interest money as possible from the electoral process.

2. I am in favor of instant runoff voting - which the democrats are not. It threatens their monopoly on power.

3. The US electorate needs more parties, more choices, and more accountability from their elected officials.

Class is starting.....adios!

I just read that in 2007, Livejournal was bought by an ally of Vladimir Putin. Great- a real defender of open speech, I'm sure.......ok, maybe nyet.

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/03/071603.asp?viewall=1

I'd like to thank the Congress for repealing the one piece of regulatory legislation that might have helped us avoid this meltdown.



In 1933, in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash and during a nationwide commercial bank failure and the Great Depression, two members of Congress put their names on what is known today as the Glass-Steagall Act (GSA). This act separated investment and commercial banking activities. At the time, "improper banking activity", or what was considered overzealous commercial bank involvement in stock market investment, was deemed the main culprit of the financial crash. According to that reasoning, commercial banks took on too much risk with depositors' money. Additional and sometimes non-related explanations for the Great Depression evolved over the years, and many questioned whether the GSA hindered the establishment of financial services firms that can equally compete against each other. We will take a look at why the GSA was established and what led to its final repeal in 1999.

Reasons for the Act - Commercial Speculation
Commercial banks were accused of being too speculative in the pre-Depression era, not only because they were investing their assets but also because they were buying new issues for resale to the public. Thus, banks became greedy, taking on huge risks in the hope of even bigger rewards. Banking itself became sloppy and objectives became blurred. Unsound loans were issued to companies in which the bank had invested, and clients would be encouraged to invest in those same stocks.

Effects of the Act - Creating Barriers
Senator Carter Glass, a former Treasury secretary and the founder of the U.S. Federal Reserve System, was the primary force behind the GSA. Henry Bascom Steagall was a House of Representatives member and chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee. Steagall agreed to support the act with Glass after an amendment was added permitting bank deposit insurance (this was the first time it was allowed).

As a collective reaction to one of the worst financial crises at the time, the GSA set up a regulatory firewall between commercial and investment bank activities, both of which were curbed and controlled. Banks were given a year to decide on whether they would specialize in commercial or in investment banking. Only 10% of commercial banks' total income could stem from securities; however, an exception allowed commercial banks to underwrite government-issued bonds. Financial giants at the time such as JP Morgan and Company, which were seen as part of the problem, were directly targeted and forced to cut their services and, hence, a main source of their income. By creating this barrier, the GSA was aiming to prevent the banks' use of deposits in the case of a failed underwriting job.

The GSA, however, was considered harsh by most in the financial community, and it was reported that even Glass himself moved to repeal the GSA shortly after it was passed, claiming it was an overreaction to the crisis.

Building More Walls
Despite the lax implementation of the GSA by the Federal Reserve Board, which is the regulator of U.S. banks, in 1956, Congress made another decision to regulate the banking sector. In an effort to prevent financial conglomerates from amassing too much power, the new act focused on banks involved in the insurance sector. Congress agreed that bearing the high risks undertaken in underwriting insurance is not good banking practice. Thus, as an extension of the Glass-Steagall Act, the Bank Holding Company Act further separated financial activities by creating a wall between insurance and banking. Even though banks could, and can still can, sell insurance and insurance products, underwriting insurance was forbidden.

Were the Walls Necessary? - The New Rules of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act
The limitations of the GSA on the banking sector sparked a debate over how much restriction is healthy for the industry. Many argued that allowing banks to diversify in moderation offers the banking industry the potential to reduce risk, so the restrictions of the GSA could have actually had an adverse effect, making the banking industry riskier rather than safer. Furthermore, big banks of the post-Enron market are likely to be more transparent, lessening the possibility of assuming too much risk or masking unsound investment decisions. As such, reputation has come to mean everything in today's market, and that could be enough to motivate banks to regulate themselves.

Consequently, to the delight of many in the banking industry (not everyone, however, was happy), in November of 1999 Congress repealed the GSA with the establishment of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which eliminated the GSA restrictions against affiliations between commercial and investment banks. Furthermore, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act allows banking institutions to provide a broader range of services, including underwriting and other dealing activities.

Conclusion
Although the barrier between commercial and investment banking aimed to prevent a loss of deposits in the event of investment failures, the reasons for the repeal of the GSA and the establishment of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act show that even regulatory attempts for safety can have adverse effects.

by Reem Heakal, (Contact Author | Biography)

Good Job Capitalism coupled with Corrupt Politicians

So, Lehman Brothers is dead, Merrill got absorbed, and AIG is on life support - maybe.

Lessons to be learned:

1. Unregulated capitalism will give you a boom/bust cycle

2. Unregulated campaign contributions by financial company special interests/PAC's to Congress will result in rollbacks of regulations put in place to avoid such meltdowns.

3. Something that doesn't smell good then promptly hits the fan.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/09/09/three_third_party_candidates_c.html

Coverage in the Washington Post! Much thanks to comrade Seth at the office for the tip-off on this one.

Unfortunately, Nader's people blew it when giving a quote - or the Washington Post just cherry picked something. 

"Up for discussion will be "the plight of third parties and the way they've been marginalized within the two party system," said Nader for President spokesman Marc Abizeid."

Christ on a pony. Good one Mr. Abizeid. Quit f-ing whining about the way third parties are marginalized, and talk about the way the two-party system marginalizes Americans.

Framing, moron, framing.

For your remedial politics class, I am going to assign you "Don't think of an Elephant!" by George Lakoff. Read it, then read it again.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/09/AR2008090903531_pf.html

Just so we're clear - when Obama uses the phrase "lipstick on a pig" it is a sexist attack on Palin. When McCain uses it, it's ok. When Palin uses it, it's ok.

Wow. It's getting deeper than I expected already! But, anything to distract us from real issues must be a good thing, right? I mean really, how boring would it be to debate the merits of McCain "DrillPlan 9000" energy strategy, and Obama's "CleanCoalNuclearFantasy with a dash of renewables" added for spice?

Considering the amount of special interest money from the energy companies flowing to both campaigns (see chart link in my previous post), I do not expect anything more than window-dressing when it comes to energy issues.

And both campaigns know this too - thus "LipstickGate." Because, at best, you will only get small, incremental change out of two corporate-dominated parties.

Happy Wednesday, comrades!

A great chart by opensecrets.org that tracks contributions to the two corporate funded parties by sector. Looks like the Democrats are really soaking it up this year! Of course, this does not bode well for voters..

http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/sectorall.php?cycle=2008

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/04/hundreds-of-protesters-arrested/

My favorite part......

"He added that some demonstrators had been arrested with bags of feces but told a reporter that those items were not available for viewing."

Save us from the protest-poo!

Seriously, the RNC has a right to run their convention, and it does appear that the protesters were assembled unlawfully. 

But what about the poo?

Maybe it's going to hit the DC area because of all the immorality here?

from Alert DC <alert3350@alert.ema.dc.gov> to Alert DC Users <rsan@alert.ema.dc.gov> date Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 11:34 AM subject Alert DC - Severe Weather Warning mailed-by alert.ema.dc.gov

hide details 11:34 AM (1 hour ago)

Reply

National Weather upgraded the Tropical Storm Watch to a Warning for early Saturday morning through Saturday afternoon. Expecting; 4 to 8 inches of rain and wind gust 40 mph for the Metropolitan Area, Including the District of Columbia.

Sent by DC HSEMA to e-mail, pagers, cell phones
Powered by the Roam Secure Alert Network

**************

Sounds like fun, doesn't it? Lucky me, I have mandatory orientation at GWU starting at 930am Saturday morning. Will bring umbrella, and hip-waders......and what else does one bring to a tropical storm?