If the powers of Congress are not exercised, it's likely the President will exceed his. In the end, I think the biggest loser is our system of laws, because once one President proves he can circumvent limitations on his authority, future Presidents will likely abuse theirs. Our credibility as a nation also suffers, as troops and military interventions become pawns in domestic political squabbling, or the very loyal, underpaid people like Valerie Plame defending our nation get outed by draft-dodgers sitting in the White House.
Many Americans think we can impose accountability on our elected officials by un-electing them. Without any system to call for new elections, once elected, public officials are fully seated and protected for up to six years. This means an incumbent will have little to fear on the political front, unless of course they're conduct is so egregious as to call into question their integrity in some public forum, like we've seen Blagovich or his appointee Roland Burris. These people are doomed by the court of public opinion.
Typically the mass media fixates on itself. It does have the power to expose wrongdoing at the highest levels, but this isn't where it is at its best. The corporate-owned media is the most effective when it chooses NOT to expose illicit behaviors. Nowhere was this clearer than the preferential treatment for Bush, all the way from the handling of his National Guard services, to the softball-lobbing Jeff Gannon, up and through the uncontested lies and propaganda that led to the Iraq war.
Enough of all that. Bush is gone, although the media culture that helped promoted him is as intact, though battered. Corporate media are going bankrupt, including the Chicago Tribune owned by Sam Zell. The New York Times has to put its headquarters up for collateral. General Electric, once led by Bush ally Jack Welch, parent of the Donahue-firing NBC network, has seen its stock drop below $7/share.
I'd love to attribute all these failures to these companies role in sugar-coating the case for Iraq, or the pro-Zionist, pro-Republican positions of the media moguls. Often the internet is given as a cause of the on-going malaise in print media. In reality, it's a combination of lower quality news, poor management, and the recession.
I've criticized the quality of news content here on this blog for years now. Gross mismanagement by the mass media is a major reason why I write.
Intuitively, people have come to distrust corporate media, or at least trust Internet-based sources more. Most quality content comes from a willingness to expose the truth, whatever the price. I'm of the opinion that people like dirt, particularly on bad corporations. Investigative reporting went out when newsrooms were forced to act as independent profit centers, which meant they needed to turn a profit on their advertising and couldn't afford to alienate sponsors.
The dumbing-down of news content reflects a larger deficiency among Americans in their understanding of economic matters. This diminished capacity makes Americans vulnerable to misinformation multiplied by the echo chamber that is the mass media. The result could be inflated expectations in regard to what to expect in the coming crisis, or misunderstandings of what the Fed has and will do to the purchasing power of their money, already down over 96% since its creation in 1913.
If Obama can't produce miracles, he'll likely be a one-term president. Conscious of the bully pulpit he now inhabits, Obama has issued a stream of bold pronouncements. Methinks he may have exceeded his ability to deliver on his promises.
A hallmark of no accountability is overconfidence. It won't take long sitting at the television screen watching CNBC to find someone who is convinced we've hit bottom. So many of these people exist that CNBC seems capable of calling on them indefinitely, as the markets tank and prove the optimists wrong time and time again.
How often must I hear about the fictional happy ending to a nightmare that won't end? How much lower must the Dow go before people begin to assume that the future may be more about the realization of our worst dreams rather than some good nightmare? It's only then that we'll begin to survey our situation and make changes we desperately need to make, in our monetary system, and with our political system, and perhaps above all, in our willingness to communicate with each other about what matters most. Regardless of where we stand on issues, Americans need to lose their fears and come together in order to face the challenges of our era.
Americans are by nature optimists, which is why we don't want to face our fears. Easier it is to deny their existence. Denial is a typical behavior for addicts, and so I guess you could say we've become hung up on our infallibility, and have come to consider ourselves less prone to failure than other peoples, or more able to control our destiny and thus overcome challenges that would doom lesser people to oblivion.
We'd better watch ourselves now. The consequences of not questioning the solution being proposed could worsen the situation. Our credit money system is all about the constant and unsustainable expansion of credit. We really need to exercise restraint, but our government's solution is to pour more debt on the already debt-soaked rags of our softening economy. We simply can't borrow our way to prosperity.
On Tuesday I listened to Geithner and Bernanke. Both are anticipating huge deficits, increasing the federal debt to 60% of GDP within a few years. The rationale for the spending is to save us from too little growth, from the consequences of a problem essentially caused by too much borrowing to begin with. [It's my opinion that speculation by the overleveraged investment companies, coupled with de-regulation and easy money policies of the Fed, caused the current crisis.]
Follow the money, they say. It's now flowing to the companies that did the most to wreck themselves and the economy. How can we justify pouring more money on them? We've failed to hold them accountable for the money they've received in the first round of the TARP bailout. Our government didn't attach enough strings, or demand enough for our money.
Even now, no one is holding the government accountable for the failure of the previous bailout to work. Government policy and corporate interest have become one, at least with the banking industry. Inverse socialism has been used to describe a government subordinate to economic interests.
Many Americans think we can impose accountability on our elected officials by un-electing them. Without any system to call for new elections, once elected, public officials are fully seated and protected for up to six years. This means an incumbent will have little to fear on the political front, unless of course they're conduct is so egregious as to call into question their integrity in some public forum, like we've seen Blagovich or his appointee Roland Burris. These people are doomed by the court of public opinion.
Typically the mass media fixates on itself. It does have the power to expose wrongdoing at the highest levels, but this isn't where it is at its best. The corporate-owned media is the most effective when it chooses NOT to expose illicit behaviors. Nowhere was this clearer than the preferential treatment for Bush, all the way from the handling of his National Guard services, to the softball-lobbing Jeff Gannon, up and through the uncontested lies and propaganda that led to the Iraq war.
Enough of all that. Bush is gone, although the media culture that helped promoted him is as intact, though battered. Corporate media are going bankrupt, including the Chicago Tribune owned by Sam Zell. The New York Times has to put its headquarters up for collateral. General Electric, once led by Bush ally Jack Welch, parent of the Donahue-firing NBC network, has seen its stock drop below $7/share.
I've criticized the quality of news content here on this blog for years now. Gross mismanagement by the mass media is a major reason why I write.
Intuitively, people have come to distrust corporate media, or at least trust Internet-based sources more. Most quality content comes from a willingness to expose the truth, whatever the price. I'm of the opinion that people like dirt, particularly on bad corporations. Investigative reporting went out when newsrooms were forced to act as independent profit centers, which meant they needed to turn a profit on their advertising and couldn't afford to alienate sponsors.
The dumbing-down of news content reflects a larger deficiency among Americans in their understanding of economic matters. This diminished capacity makes Americans vulnerable to misinformation multiplied by the echo chamber that is the mass media. The result could be inflated expectations in regard to what to expect in the coming crisis, or misunderstandings of what the Fed has and will do to the purchasing power of their money, already down over 96% since its creation in 1913.
If Obama can't produce miracles, he'll likely be a one-term president. Conscious of the bully pulpit he now inhabits, Obama has issued a stream of bold pronouncements. Methinks he may have exceeded his ability to deliver on his promises.
A hallmark of no accountability is overconfidence. It won't take long sitting at the television screen watching CNBC to find someone who is convinced we've hit bottom. So many of these people exist that CNBC seems capable of calling on them indefinitely, as the markets tank and prove the optimists wrong time and time again.
How often must I hear about the fictional happy ending to a nightmare that won't end? How much lower must the Dow go before people begin to assume that the future may be more about the realization of our worst dreams rather than some good nightmare? It's only then that we'll begin to survey our situation and make changes we desperately need to make, in our monetary system, and with our political system, and perhaps above all, in our willingness to communicate with each other about what matters most. Regardless of where we stand on issues, Americans need to lose their fears and come together in order to face the challenges of our era.
Americans are by nature optimists, which is why we don't want to face our fears. Easier it is to deny their existence. Denial is a typical behavior for addicts, and so I guess you could say we've become hung up on our infallibility, and have come to consider ourselves less prone to failure than other peoples, or more able to control our destiny and thus overcome challenges that would doom lesser people to oblivion.
We'd better watch ourselves now. The consequences of not questioning the solution being proposed could worsen the situation. Our credit money system is all about the constant and unsustainable expansion of credit. We really need to exercise restraint, but our government's solution is to pour more debt on the already debt-soaked rags of our softening economy. We simply can't borrow our way to prosperity.
On Tuesday I listened to Geithner and Bernanke. Both are anticipating huge deficits, increasing the federal debt to 60% of GDP within a few years. The rationale for the spending is to save us from too little growth, from the consequences of a problem essentially caused by too much borrowing to begin with. [It's my opinion that speculation by the overleveraged investment companies, coupled with de-regulation and easy money policies of the Fed, caused the current crisis.]
Follow the money, they say. It's now flowing to the companies that did the most to wreck themselves and the economy. How can we justify pouring more money on them? We've failed to hold them accountable for the money they've received in the first round of the TARP bailout. Our government didn't attach enough strings, or demand enough for our money.
Even now, no one is holding the government accountable for the failure of the previous bailout to work. Government policy and corporate interest have become one, at least with the banking industry. Inverse socialism has been used to describe a government subordinate to economic interests.
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