Via Ezra Klein:

Guest editorial by Ernest A. Canning

The radical-right agenda, hidden from so many of the uninformed, working class useful idiots (aka post-2008 "Tea Party" followers) was aptly described by Chalmers Johnson on the cover of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine as "a conspiracy to privatize war and disaster and grab public property for the rich few...[as part of] our headlong flight back to feudalism..."

In Meg Whitman, Wall Street, 'Billionaire Sociopaths' and the Media 'Substance Deficit', we cited a Pew Research Center study on how the campaign by America's political elites to ravage the middle class has, for "wide layers of the population," destroyed "faith in the US government to secure their most basic social needs." As we observed at the time:

Into this mix comes "Tea Party in Sonora": Ken Silverstein of Harper’s Says Arizona is Laboratory for Radical GOP Policies, a powerful, must-see segment of Democracy Now (video below) which exposes the bleak future, indeed the madness, in store for all of us if we permit the radical right to assert the same control at the national level that they have already secured in Arizona.

An eerily prescient 1944 New York Times op-ed written by Franklin D. Roosevelt's then-Vice President may have best described the ultimate goal of the hard-right agenda of those who now drive the so-called "Tea Party" in 2010...

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

As noted in today's Green News Report, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has ordered a new moratorium on exploratory deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere off the continental shelf of the U.S.. The new suspension may make prior court battles over the previous moratorium moot, even as questions linger concerning apparent conflicts-of-interest by the judge who originally heard the case.

Stating that he was basing his decision on "an extensive record of existing and new information indicating that allowing new deepwater drilling to commence would pose a threat of serious, irreparable, or immediate harm or damage to the marine, coastal, and human environment," Salazar sent a memo yesterday to Michael R. Bromwich, the Director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEM), directing him to issue new suspensions of deepwater drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS). The new suspensions, presuming they withstand another inevitable court challenge from the oil industry, will run through November 30 and apply to both the Pacific and Gulf Coast regions.

In revealing the new suspensions, Salazar announced...

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

"Fact, the world has divided into rich and poor as at no time in our history," warns Maude Barlowe, head of the Council of Canadians and a founder of the Blue Planet Project.

"Fact, global climate change is rapidly advancing, claiming at least 300,000 lives and $125 billion in damages every year," she says. "Called the silent crisis, climate change is melting glaciers, eroding soil, causing freak and increasingly wild storms, displacing untold millions from rural communities to live in desperate poverty in peri-urban centers. Almost every victim lives in the Global South in communities not responsible for greenhouse gas emissions and not represented here at the summit."

Speaking out as a counterpoint to last week's billion dollar, G-20 Summit, whose leaders she referred to as a "global royalty, who have more in common with one another than they do with their own citizens," and as leaders who came to Toronto with an agenda which offers "more of the bad medicine that made the world sick in the first place—environmental deregulation, unbridled financial speculation, unlimited growth, unregulated free trade, relentless resource exploitation, tax cuts for the wealthy, cuts to Social Security and a war on working people," Barlowe delivered a must-see, fact-filled condemnation of a bleak economic and ecological future that is at the heart of what she described as "savage capitalism."

The video and text transcript of excerpts from Barlowe's powerful "Savage Capitalism" speech, courtesy of the July 2nd, 2010 Democracy Now!, follow below...

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

“We now have the entitlement generation as CEOs. They just plain feel entitled to being wealthy as Croesus with no responsibility, no accountability. They have become literal sociopaths.” - William K. Black on Bill Moyers’ Journal

"When you're rich, they think you really know!" - "If I Were a Rich Man," from Fiddler on the Roof

Californians have been drawn within the cross-hairs of a propaganda blitz bought and paid for by Meg Whitman, the billionaire former CEO of eBay, who, since declaring her intent to run for governor in February, 2009, has already contributed $59 million of her own money to her "campaign" --- a one-sided political phenomenon which has seen a stealth candidate, with disturbing connections to Goldman Sachs, soar to the top of the polls because the electoral process has been emasculated by the absence of mandatory debates and meaningful investigative journalism...

It's up to the wingnuts. If they want to keep lying about Obama, then we'll do our best to set the record straight. If they want to bring up legitimate criticism, and there's plenty of it, then we'd likely join them, and we could all have an Obama bashing party together. But they're not that smart.

So as long as the wingnut media --- and thus, virtually the entire corporate media --- insist on using the people's airwaves to lie to the people (eg., Rush Limbaugh continues to repeat every day what a "complete failure" the economic stimulus package has been), I guess we'll just have to keep countering that phony message by posting the truth in order to try to offer some balance to the unending stream of lies from the GOP and their extremely effective mouthpieces across the near-entirety of the corporate media.

Rachel Maddow did the same last week in her lead-up piece to Obama's first State of the Union address, in which she brutally attacked the Administration's call for a partial spending freeze, even as the economy, thanks in no small part to Government investment, struggles to come out of its tailspin.

Before her critique however (which I hope you'll watch in full --- it's embedded below), she also pointed out the salient, indisputable facts of how responsible actions taken by the Obama Administration, whether you liked them or not --- and as opposed by virtually every single Republican in Congress --- have, in fact, with all of their many failings, helped shore up, and even reverse for now, what had been a near-death spiral by the time Obama finally took office.

Here are two charts from her report which highlight that point quite simply, and help to counter the loud, GOP-spun political/partisan nonsense echoed, naturally, by the gullible tea baggers...

[NOTE: Since Maddow's report last week, the GDP figures for the 4th quarter of last year have now been announced and the up trend continues. As her original chart included data only through the 3rd quarter of last year, we've augmented that original chart below to reflect the recently announced 5.7% growth in GDP for the 4th quarter of '09]:

Love him or hate him, or anything in between, recognition of the overall effect of the broad points of Obama's emergency economic policies --- quickly passed at an historic moment of looming disaster --- is due. At least along with any honest appraisal of those policies.

Maddow's entire report, both praising and critiquing Obama and those policies --- something known as "fairness and balance" --- can be watched below...

By way of offering a rather convincing counterpoint to Frank Schaeffer's editorial posted here earlier today, in which he asserted his opinion that Republican Scott Brown's reported win in MA last night for the U.S. Senate seat was the fault of "the ideological purist Left" who undermined Obama and the Democrats, a Research 2000 poll conducted last night after the election, surveying 500 Obama backers who voted in the Senate election and 500 backers who sat it out, would seem to suggest the exact opposite. (Much as almost all of you did in comments)...

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

A new movement, led by economist Robert Johnson, who previously served on the Senate Banking and Senate Budget Committees, is urging citizens to move their money out of the big banks, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo and into local community banks in order to “stop this toxic side effect of derivatives lobbying and ‘too big to fail’ lobbying" --- a move that is secure so long as the selected community banks are covered by the F.D.I.C. for deposits up to $250,000.

According to Johnson, who was interviewed recently by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, those four banks, along with Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, control 97% of the derivatives market:

The 01/04/10 Democracy Now segment on the Community Bank Movement follows below...

Guest essay by Ernest A. Canning

In "Beyond Afghanistan," I responded to President Obama's Dec. 1 Afghan escalation speech by quoting from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Beyond Vietnam" speech: "Somehow this madness must cease."

I directed readers’ attention to King’s assessment that our obsession with war and occupation was but a symptom of “a far deeper malady within the American spirit;" that our presence in Afghanistan and so many other conflicts over the past 60 years was not the product of a desire to insure our safety; that it was the product of a military-industrial complex and a U.S.-led, corporate Empire whose core purpose is to feed the insatiable greed of the privileged few.

In the short time since I wrote “Beyond Afghanistan,” we have witnessed an expansion of the absurd...

Guest essay by Ernest A. Canning

"Somehow this madness must cease."
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., "Beyond Vietnam" April 4, 1967.

On Jan. 18, 2010 our nation will observe Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, commemorating the extraordinary life of an intellectual and moral giant. The corporate media will fill the airwaves with excerpts of his uplifting August 28, 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech in which Dr. King called upon us to judge one another by the content of our character and not by the color of our skin. And, during that same holiday, the corporate media can be counted upon to ignore his April 4, 1967 "Beyond Vietnam" speech just as they have every year since the first Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in 1986.

Why? Because the egalitarian principles enunciated in "I Have a Dream" challenged only the now (largely) defunct Jim Crow regime.

While de facto, race-based economic inequality stubbornly remains as a vestige of slavery and Jim Crow, the elimination of de jure segregation posed no threat to the stark economic inequality created by an increasingly brutal form of U.S. capitalism and imperialism. It was the brutal reality of corporate Empire which led Dr. King, in "Beyond Vietnam," to describe his own government as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" --- a point which exposes the hypocrisy in that same government's celebration of the life of a man singularly devoted to non-violence.

If you have not read "Beyond Vietnam" in its entirety, you should. If you have, you should read it again, for Dr. King's message is as applicable today as it was then.

Particularly, as we deconstruct the empty words used by our Harvard-educated President to justify an escalation of what Robert Scheer aptly describes as a "War of Absurdity," and as we look "Beyond Afghanistan"...

Guest Blogged by DES

As we related in yesterday's 'Green News Report,' the federal auto-stimulus program Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS) --- popularly nicknamed 'Cash for Clunkers' --- launched this week in earnest. The program is intended to help spur consumers to trade in old gas guzzlers with a virtual cash rebate of up to $4500, in exchange for purchasing a car, truck, or SUV with better (even just slightly better) mileage. After compromising on an initially proposed $4 billion program, Congress approved $1 billion in funding for the program, to be paid directly to car dealers, with a deadline of November 1st to file the paperwork.

Well, not long after airtime yesterday, and just four days after the program began in full, 'Cash for Clunkers' appears to have been so wildly popular that it had already run out of money.

According to the New York Times, the Transportation Department had asked car dealers around the country to stop offering the rebate program while officials determine the next course of action. By late this morning, however, they report, the White House has issued a statement that the program will continue at least through this weekend. "There's apparently too many clunkers and not enough cash," the Times' Richard Change notes.

As of yesterday, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs had said the program was not suspended, as had initially been reported, and that the administration was "assessing the situation." He added, "all valid CARS transactions that have taken place to date will be honored." Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood is said to be working with Congress to discuss ways to increase funding to extend the wildly popular program.

With the rebates ranging from $3,500 to $4,500 --- dependent on the miles per gallon of the trade-in compared to the new car purchased --- the $1 billion in funding was intended to cover about 250,000 new cars. Dealers have been collecting applications for the rebates since July 1st, in advance of the publication of the final rules and qualifying vehicles on Monday. Although the Department of Transportation reports a backlog of applications waiting to be processed, they reported they had already received approximately a quarter million applications as of Thursday night.

UPDATE: The U.S. House passed a bill late Friday to provide an additional $2 billion in funding for the CARS program, by diverting funds from a Department of Energy loan guarantee program. The Senate is expected to act next week, although CNN.com reports the "bill will face tough opposition in the Senate."

I could use a toon break...

(Hat-tip, BRAD BLOG toon sherpa Pokey Anderson!)

Tesla Motors revealed its all-electric Model S sedan last week in Los Angeles. At half the price of its Roadster model, which was $109,000, the Model S will be priced at $49,900 after tax credits ($57,400 before such credits). "After factoring in savings on gas," Tesla points out, that's "comparable to a $35,000 Ford sedan," the New York Times reports. A blog item from the Times describes the Model S as "sleek, sporty and sexy."

Tesla hopes the price tag will come down to "less than $30,000," as the price "will presumably go down as the technology improves." They plan the manufactured version to get 300 miles to a single charge, with a 45-minute recharge time.

While the company has raised millions from private investors, they need still more to be able to set up a production plant, which they plan to do in Southern California. But, for the moment, they are waiting on federal loan programs, as the credit market has otherwise locked up, according to the Times.

In the meantime, Detroit's big three automakers are also asking for federal funds and, in advance of President Obama's announcement of plans for the auto-industry, he has reportedly demanded that GM's CEO step down. So let's add one plus one here...

I guess I'm just in the minority here, but I'm having a bit of trouble getting exercised about $165 million (just to put that into perspective, the movie sequel The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian had a budget of $200 million) in bonuses to AIG employees.

Yeah, it's a shame that approximately one-tenth of one-percent of the $144 billion made available to the company by the federal government in bailout monies went to such bonuses, but where is all the furor from public officials, media outlets and bloggers --- from both Right and Left --- over the 12 billions of dollars (with a "b") sent over to Iraq as pallets of cash (literally, shrink-wrapped $100 bills), which then simply disappeared into that trillion (with a "t") dollar rat hole without accounting or explanation?

Where is the outrage and accountability there? Nowhere.

How about the $4 billion (with a "b") that went to the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 to purchase privately made electronic voting systems which don't work and don't meet the federal standards it was claimed that they did?

It's curious, but not particularly surprising by now, the stuff that folks in Congress get selectively pissed off about, the stuff that media (both mainstream and blogosphere) go selectively wall-to-wall over, versus the stuff they don't.

You'll pardon me if I'm not particularly moved much at all by the latest round of AIG sturm-und-drang, hand-wringing, navel-gazing, finger-pointing and speechifying. Oh, and about the still-free bin Laden, and the still-free anthrax killer...well, don't get me started. Guess those things don't much matter.