MATTHEWGOODONLINE

Well, it’s done. The House of Representatives has voted 263-171 in favour of the $700 billion dollar bailout plan.

Now that it’s over I suppose there’s one of two things that Americans can do.

1) Read today’s headlines and then carry on with their lives, which many will do given that they have their own daily survival to worry about.

2) Remain vigilant and make an effort to hold their representatives accountable if those on Wall Street that were responsible for the crisis eventually profit from it, which is certainly not out of the realm of possibility.

Congress will vote tomorrow whether to back a Senate revision to the proposed $700 billion dollar economic bailout package. The President, as always, continues to play the fear card, claiming that it is an issue that goes beyond Wall Street and that the House Of Representatives has a responsibility to average Americans to support the deal and thus instill a sense of stability. Of course, the House’s rejection of the initial bailout plan was very much aligned with public sentiment, something that the White House continues to overlook.

In today’s Guardian, historian Howard Zinn provides commentary with regards to the crisis which is noteworthy…

“This current financial crisis is a major way-station on the way to the collapse of the American empire. The first important sign was 9/11, with the most heavily-armed nation in the world shown to be vulnerable to a handful of hijackers.

And now, another sign: both major parties rushing to get an agreement to spend $700bn of taxpayers’ money to pour down the drain of huge financial institutions which are notable for two characteristics: incompetence and greed.

There is a much better solution to the current financial crisis. But it requires discarding what has been conventional “wisdom” for too long: that government intervention in the economy (”big government”) must be avoided like the plague, because the “free market” will guide the economy towards growth and justice.

Let’s face a historical truth: we have never had a “free market”, we have always had government intervention in the economy, and indeed that intervention has been welcomed by the captains of finance and industry. They had no quarrel with “big government” when it served their needs.

It started way back, when the founding fathers met in Philadelphia in 1787 to draft the constitution. The first big bail-out was the decision of the new government to redeem for full value the almost worthless bonds held by speculators. And this role of big government, supporting the interests of the business classes, continued all through the nation’s history.

The rationale for taking $700bn from the taxpayers to subsidise huge financial institutions is that somehow that wealth will trickle down to the people who need it. This has never worked.

The alternative is simple and powerful. Take that huge sum of money and give it directly to the people who need it. Let the government declare a moratorium on foreclosures and give aid to homeowners to help them pay off their mortgages. Create a federal jobs programme to guarantee work to people who want and need jobs and for whom “the free market” has not come through.

We have a historic and successful precedent. Roosevelt’s New Deal put millions of people to work, rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, and, defying the cries of “socialism”, established social security. That can be carried further, with “health security” – free health care – for all.

All that will take more than $700bn. But the money is there. In the $600bn for the military budget, once we decide we will no longer be a war-making nation. And in the swollen bank accounts of the super-rich, by taxing vigorously both their income and their wealth.

When the cry goes up, whether from Republicans or Democrats, that this must not be done because it is “big government”, the citizenry should just laugh. And then agitate and organise on behalf of what the Declaration of Independence promised: that it is the responsibility of government to ensure the equal right of all to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.

Only such a bold approach can save the nation – not as an empire, but as a democracy.”

There’s only one word for it, and I wish it were more eloquent, but clusterfuck is it.

The US Presidential race has been hijacked by the financial crisis, there’s no questioning that. John McCain wants to delay the upcoming Presidential debate because of it and Obama doesn’t. How their disagreement will play out in the minds of voters is anyone’s guess. There is no doubt that the American public has been so consumed by fear over the last week and a half that delaying a Presidential debate might seem acceptable to many. If it does occur, Wall Street will have succeeded in screwing over the American public twofold – once financially and once democratically.

The focus on the financial crisis has also helping to limit the damage caused by the McClain campaign’s latest blunder…

“Sarah Palin met her first world leaders Tuesday. It was a tightly controlled crash course on foreign policy for the Republican vice presidential candidate, the mayor-turned-governor who has been outside North America just once.”

[…]

“Before Palin’s first meeting of the day, with Karzai, campaign aides had told reporters in the press pool that followed her they could not go into meetings where photographers and a video camera crew would be let in for pictures.

Bush and members of Congress routinely allow reporters to attend photo opportunities along with photographers, and the reporters sometimes are able to ask questions at the beginning of private meetings before they are ushered out.

At least two news organizations, including AP, objected to the exclusion of reporters and were told that the decision to have a “photo spray” only was not subject to discussion.”

No questions – that’s understandable being that I probably own t-shirts that have a better understanding of the current geopolitical landscape than she does (not to mention ones that are more well traveled) - and she’s running to be the Vice President of the United States.

But that’s of little concern. She’s got a whole month to be coached by some of the best Republican foreign policy minds out there - and look at what a terrific job they’ve done over the last seven and a half years.

Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur of Ohio’s 9th District lays it out on the floor of the House in plain English…

And, for kicks, a video that you probably don’t want to see. Just a hunch, but I don’t think God wants to see it either.

While I may not agree with him on most social issues, nor am I an advocate of the Libertarian movement (I consider it a convenient and thinly veiled excuse for selfishness), I do wholeheartedly agree that Dr. Ron Paul is the ONLY politician in the United States Government who understands the true nature of our economy and what we are facing. He was also the ONLY politician who could have perhaps gotten us out of this epic and overwhelming morass… (although, odds are he would have taken a 7.62 round to the temple had he tried, as the world banking conglomerate dictates and controls pretty much everything down to what you had for breakfast this morning, but I digress…)

Regardless of who wins the presidential election, Dr. Paul should be consulted on how to fix our economy… Dr. Paul was loudly derided by those in his own Republican party, who chose to laugh at him instead of listen to him… while the Democrats saw little use in bringing the ideas of the “enemy” into the fold…

Understand that what has transpired the past few days is nothing compared to what is coming down the pike… A few band-aids on a mortally wounded patient won’t heal it or save its life… the best we can hope for is that it will slow the warm arterial spray and buy some time… time in which the problem will get worse… and worse…

Think of it as a coiled spring, a boiling pot… the harder you push down the more violent the eventual explosion…

You can’t put a fire out with gasoline… and you cannot print yourself out of debt…

I invite you to watch the video on the link below…

Dr. Paul tells it like it is…

In the documentary 11th Hour, former CIA Director James Woolsey, of all people, makes a very important point with regards to the correlation between consumerism and industrial opportunism and the ability to affect change in a very short period of time given what are traditionally viewed as ‘exceptional circumstances’.

Woolsey’s point of reference was the transformation of the US auto industry into an industrial mechanism with which to produce aircraft, tanks, and a variety of other military necessities during the early stages of America’s involvement in the Second World War. That transformation took, believe it or not, merely six months. Put into context, if the disastrous environmental reality that we are currently facing was seriously addressed by government, the implementation of alternative energy use, that being non-carbon based energy (fossil fuels), could be introduced in a very timely fashion. It would also create jobs, which would replace those lost in the transformation. The only loser in that transformation would be the corporate oil sector, which possesses such enormous influence that, in truth, they are largely responsible for the inability, or unwillingness, of government to act. Ultimately, greed has become the foremost factor in the inability to seriously implement alternative energy sources that would significantly impact the amount of damage that fossil fuels do on a daily basis.

Of course, many economists will argue tooth and nail that such a transformation would be disadvantageous. But that supposes that the economy is of greater significance than the environment. The only problem with such logic is that economies can grow; as can populations and the waste they produce. The environment, on the other hand, cannot expand to match it. It is a limited and immovable thing, and therefore unalterable with regards to meeting the demands of economic growth.

In the last half of the twentieth century the world’s population has grown faster than at any other point in human history. In fact, during that period it has increased so much that that increase alone constitutes a figure greater than the population of the planet at any time prior to the industrial revolution. During that increase, the primary source of energy used by the population of the planet has been carbon based – which includes everything from food production to transportation to the production of electricity.

For the majority of human history our species relied on available sunlight for energy. But since the discovery of fossil fuels, we have become wholly dependent on an energy source that is not only unsustainable, but also catastrophically damaging with regards to its impact on the environment. Thus, we now find ourselves in an era in which we are forced to make a very important choice – to either disregard the realities of that dependency and its ramifications or to address our dependence on fossil fuels and work to eliminate it.

In the end, and despite our intelligence, our species may very well constitute nothing more than a global parasite, one that, having been given the chance to grow and consume the benefits of its host may very well find itself the author of its own destruction because of it. Given that, it should also not be overlooked that despite the damage caused, our host will outlast us, no matter how superior we believe ourselves to be. It has, in the billions of years of its existence, seen life forms come and go, and to think that we are somehow immune to that natural eventuality is, perhaps, the primary reason that we refuse to alter our perspective.

Of course, there are those that faithfully believe that a higher power created the world and that what we do to it doesn’t matter because is it, in the end, part of a greater divine plan. There is little that can be said to such individuals regarding this subject, only that if a divine plan does exists, our eventual demise is a part of it, and that the endurance and eventual reconstitution of the natural world is as well. Unless, that is, God’s plan is to also destroy the natural world in the process.

You are not divisible from everything around you. You are not separated from air, water, sunlight. You take in and give out, you flow and are sometimes soft, sometimes hard, and are bright or dim as occasions pass in life. And life, precious and fleeting, teems from every angle your eyes fall upon, even those manifest from the minds of living human beings- in forms of concrete, steel, wood. It is all around you, inside you, and also beyond you in its creation, its unfolding, and its passing.

You will awake and you will fall asleep like most living creatures, and you will dream. You speak and are spoken to, think and react, and you do so in ways you cannot truly understand. Ways which transcend you through causes and effects which stretch far and deep, imperceptibly penetrating the reaches of time and space, beyond microscopes and telescopes and ice cores.

You are small. Even a drop of water in the enormous ocean dwarfs you. The power in one ray of sunlight overwhelms even the smartest of nuclear engineers. You are miniscule, a fleck of dust in a sea of sands that sweeps across history and envelopes you easily. When we fly in an airplane over the earth we don’t see the people in given cities, but just the mark of what they’ve done and are doing. The flickering lights of progress, the carved paths of roads which take us to and from our dreams to our lives, and back.

Yet you are just unique enough to make a difference in what happens, just unique enough to change the course of everything, particularly when you work with others to do so. Gandhi once said “Almost everything you do will seem insignificant, but it is important that you do it.”

We are a point in human existence where the smallest differences we make, when understood in the context of the mosaic of all life on this planet, clearly have the greatest impact- and we will be able to see this impact precisely because we can already see the impact of such actions so far. They have the greatest impact because the mechanisms and methods by which we live are so clearly linked with the processes of life on this planet.

The entire contruct of modern life is so easily connected with the natural world, even in the most abstract of terms. The choices as a consumer are directly linked with global consequences, such that one can, with a little thought and care, make clear differences in lifestyle which have environmental impact. Since we cannot remove the mechanisms that drive our ways of life directly, we can change the way they operate, how they are powered, and the ways in which they are improved. To transform our wasteful culture into a sustainable one would be quite simply the greatest achievement the human race has obtained.

Incredibly, despite our rapid growth and the lengths to which we’ve gone to procure them, we have believed the earth too big to change so rapidly, so significantly, so negatively.

So then, seeing it for ourselves, do we contain the voracity of spirit, the belief in ourselves and each other to change things likewise justly for our future?

You are not divisible from everything around you. You are what’s happening, what has happened and what will happen. You are both responsible for and will be judged by yourself and the world you live in.

The question is not when will we finally know enough to do something about what’s happening, but rather when will we act on what we already know?

A suicide bombing has killed a women and wounded nine others in the Israeli town of Dimona. Nothing can justify such an action, not even what has befallen Palestinians in Gaza because of the recent blockade, though I am sure that was the impetus. While some might think it justifiable, I’ll not condone such actions; just I do not condone the Israeli blockade and the miserable sufferings that it has caused, which is something considering conditions in Gaza prior to its institution. It should also be pointed out that the attack was not the work of Hamas, but rather that of Fatah’s military wing.

President Bush has unveiled the largest budget proposal in US history - $3.1 trillion dollars. As one might expect, the national security budget is being increased while other areas are being deceased, such as healthcare programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Today the Pentagon is also revealing its 2009 budget which, if approved in its entirety, and when adjusted for inflation, will be the largest of its kind since the Second World War.

The situation in Chad continues to deteriorate.

The legal team representing Canadian Guantanamo detainee, Omar Khadr, have asked that the charges against him be dropped. Khadr was only 15 years of age when he was taken into US custody, which, given precedents, made him a child soldier at the time. France has also recently claimed that the case against Khadr is suspect because of that very reason. US military prosecutors disagree, of course, claiming that Khadr ‘conducted surveillance in civilian clothing’ and that he was not a member of any recognized force, but rather a terrorist organization.

A US Surge in Afghanistan may be in the works.

The US Military has killed nine civilians during operations south of Baghdad. An internal investigation is, of course, underway, which will, as is usually the case, lead to nothing more than an apology and monetary compensation. Local witnesses claim that the death toll was, in fact, higher, and that a significant number of them were members of a single family.

There is new emerging evidence that Philip Zelikow, the head of the 9/11 Commission, had to ‘go through Karl Rove’ despite the fact that the inquiry was passed off as being independent of White House scrutiny.

Lastly, tomorrow is Super Tuesday. Should be interesting.

I would write something critiquing the President’s State Of The Union address last night, but it was filled with the same sort of nonsense that the last seven have been, so.

One exception was, of course, his focus on the economy, which is in the toilet for numerous reasons, amongst them the enormity of six consecutively increased defense budgets, only parts of which are actually represented by the figures made public.

I’ll be honest, I never thought to live to see the day when our dollar would once again be stronger than the greenback, but here we are. Interestingly, the last time that it was the United States was also engaged in a foreign conflict.