Progressive Media Advocates
$9,897,708,003,650.45 is the current national debt jackpot and we all lose! Our country’s real owners the Congress said to its pretend owners, the voters, then the one’s propping up the economy, the Chinese, Saudis and Japanese investors buying up our debt and the those controlling the purse strings, the bankers lending to our businesses to [...]
In “Green the Bailout,” (New York Times, September 28, 2008, WK 11) Thomas Friedman argues that, confronting the crisis on Wall Street, “we don’t just need a bailout. We need a buildup. We need to get back to making stuff, based on real engineering not just financial engineering.” Citing an Indian-American immigrant friend, he argues [...]
I went to Orange County this Sunday to see if a church would deliberately jeopardize its tax-exempt status by endorsing or disparaging a person seeking elective office. It most certainly did. If we lived in a civil society, that church would be gone or the Supreme Court would have overruled the Internal Revenue Service. But [...]
Buddy, can you spare a Prozac? Oh, wait. This kind of depression won’t be cured with a pill. And a dime doesn’t buy as much today as it did in 1930. Watching the House vote on a package to rescue the economy fall apart this afternoon was as traumatic as seeing Wall Street brokers leaping [...]
At a time when millions of families know that they will be losing their homes to foreclosure, and when hundreds of thousands of people who would like to work to support their families, but can’t find even poverty-level, minimum wage jobs, it might be useful to spend a few paragraphs considering “Family Values.” It seems [...]
The first televised generational arm-wrestling match is over. For the right was John McCain, the Grand Ol’ Party’s Grand Ol’ Man. An Ol’ Dear at Ol’ Miss. I bet the GOP wishes that Old wasn’t their middle name!
“Daddy needs a new pair of shoes!” and the dice cubes fly. John McCain loves craps. It is routine for him to wager and lose $25,000 in a session as to play the “suspend the campaign and return to Washington to save the Bailout” gambit or petulantly select an unknown for vice president as the [...]
Shortly after the Katie Couric-Sarah Palin interview, a slew of reports hit the Internet assessing the VP candidate’s performance. Try as I might, I was hard pressed to find a single report that looked favorably on Palin’s delivery. Slate‘s Christopher Beam said that Palin resembled, “a high-schooler trying to BS her way through a book [...]
It never occurred to me that being on food stamps because you’re too poor to feed your family is unhealthy. But Robert Rector of The Heritage Foundation believes it is and thinks we should starve the wretches into submission. Rector says food stamps are not helping the poor, claiming that, “The majority of them are [...]
We have seen much hyperventilation of late about uncontrollable waves of less than fully white, non-English speaking immigrants inundating our southern borders, and hijacking not only our jobs, but our very culture. The Republican Party finds itself seriously split on the issue. The religious conservatives say that it’s just wrong to allow these illegal immigrants [...]
Living in the Eastern Time zone, it was well after midnight before I got to bed after watching the debate and flipping the dial to see what the Commentariat would pronounce as post-debate truth, wisdom, justice and The American Way.
You’d have to be on a media fast to have missed journalist/blogger/commentator David Sirota on TV (Stephen Colbert, CNN, Fox News[!]), radio (NPR, Pacifica) and in the pages of Newsweek and The New Republic earlier this summer. He was discussing his New York Times bestseller The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring [...]
I’m mixed. Who won? They both did. And didn’t. Here’s what strikes me about the opening round of presidential debate season: the one-liners, the facts (or not), the jabs, the international names and one mispronunciation, the energy, and the eye contact. Or in McCain’s case, the lack thereof. Among other things. I think John McCain [...]
I love Tina Allen, who was a personal friend and one of the deepest spirits I’ve ever met. I will hold her memory close.
The Bush bail-out plan is nothing more than a slap in the face of all working families. As Peter Dreier notes, “we have been here before—in the 1930’s Depression, when the entire economy collapsed, and in the 1980’s, when the savings-and-loan industry imploded.” It has been said that the definition of insanity is doing the [...]
McCain campaign manager Rick Davis (at left) seems to have truthiness problems. At least he cannot remember when or if he left the lobbying firm he was or is it still is a partner in. Jill Hazelbaker, the campaign’s communications director, said in an e-mail Tuesday that Davis “left” Davis Manafort in 2006. In a [...]
By nearly all accounts (except for the fervent Republican ideologues), the American economy is on the verge of collapse. Both Congress and Wall Street are very quick to shift the burdens of greed and decadence from the insolvent banks to the backs of the taxpayers through a $700 billion bailout. This expenditure is equivalent to [...]
“As a candidate, John (McCain) has become a walking disaster,” the distraught voice calling from a Washington suburb told me late Thursday night. “As much as I once believed in him, now I’m really worried he’ll be a disaster as president. Maybe even worse than Bush, if that’s possible.” The voice belongs to an old [...]
In and of itself, the fact that singer Clay Aiken finally came out as gay in People magazine means no more than if he had said he were right-handed or had blue eyes. In the larger sense, though, Aiken’s admission — hard on the heels of his new son’s birth — is extremely important. While [...]
The rhetoric of fear made its way into the election as still President Bush (for 111 more days) put on his serious face, stared into the camera, and lied to bail out his Wall Street pals just like he did for his oil buds six years earlier. They need us to buy into this Ponzi [...]
Tip 1: Grassroots Movement to give American Homeowners a bailout There is a grassroots and on-line movement to get Congress to give American homeowners the same kind of bailout they are giving Wall Street. Many people, including Whoopi Goldberg, Bill Clinton and others are asking for banks to write down subprime mortgages given during the [...]
At a news conference held a short time ago, a bi-partisan claque of Congressional leaders stood before cameras to declare, finally and with great relief, “We have a Pope bailout!” Let the puff of white smoke rise from the Capitol’s chimney. Except none of them said exactly what is in the deal. How much money [...]
I’ve finally found a positive quality Sarah Palin might bring to the vice presidency: She would be the first veep guaranteed to be witchcraft-free, thanks to Rev. Thomas Muthee. This would be a refreshing change from Dick Cheney who clearly is a warlock; it’s one of the few things that can explain adequately his darker-than-the-night [...]
Assuming that the Bush-Paulson Wall Street bailout gets changed drastically by the time it’s passed, we can all tip our hat to Mother Jones. With everyone on the Hill screaming about the power grab Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is trying to engineer, the magazine’s Nomi Prins deserves a deep thanks for noticing the really, really, [...]
A recent study of voter fears shows that a large percentage of white, Democratic voters won’t vote for Barack Obama because his is black. The study reprises patterns that have driven race relations in business and society since our earliest colonial days and continue to this day. Even while agreeing that Republican / McCain policies [...]
They say if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will jump right out. But if you put it into a pot of cozy, lukewarm water, and then slowly turned up the heat, it will just sit there, even as the water boils. It will then be too late for escape, [...]
“What will be the next thing that challenges us? That makes us work harder and go farther? You know, when smallpox was eradicated, it was considered the single greatest humanitarian achievement of this century. Surely, we can do it again. As we did in the time when our eyes looked towards the heavens, and with [...]
Troy Anthony Davis was granted a last-minute reprieve today, September 23, 2008, according to a report by Rusy Domin of CNN International. This morning, before going to work, Dick and I joined hands in prayer for the life of Troy Anthony Davis. He was scheduled to be executed tonight at 7:00pm ET in Georgia for [...]
Here we go again. As the Bush administration did with the Patriot Act and Iraq War resolution, Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke spent today trying to hustle Congress into new territory using the familiar administration tactic of hysteria. Fortunately, this time it looks as if more than a few members have read the fine print [...]
Norman Solomon: What a contrast between big-name journalists craven enough to toss the Fourth Amendment overboard and whistleblowers courageous enough to risk their lives for civil liberties.
Tom Hayden: We are edging closer to the neo-conservative dream of total conflagration in the Muslim Middle East. Despite only 11 percent public support for US military intervention in Syria, a reluctant President Barack Obama is being pushed into escalation.
Ed Rampell: This behind-the-scenes expose of the banksters and their nefarious high finance manipulations and machinations is a fictional, highly entertaining counterpart to Oscar winning documentary Inside Job, about Wall Street’s massive defrauding of the people — at taxpayer expense.
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A Comment Submitted by “Dixie Dawg”
Every Friday the LA Progressive features a comment that was particularly noteworthy. This week we are featuring a comment that was submitted in response to Sharon Kyle’s piece, “Six Degrees”. The writer goes by the moniker “Dixie Dawg”. Here’s Dixie — A comment by Dixie Dawg Excellent article, Sharon! You’re absolutely right in that we, [...]