America for Sale!

When the U.S. Supreme Court declared corporations human beings, they also made it possible for anybody with the cash to spend as much of it as they could afford to buy politicians. No questions asked. And in perfect secrecy, except of course the candidates would know who they'd sold their souls to. But politicians at the federal level never worry about that. They've already hocked their souls just to get to where they are.

Sometimes, however, we get a glimpse of who's paying what to whom. Robert Reich, the former Clinton White House official, unveiled some of the big buyers earlier this week. Take a look to see who's keeping company with whom.

More Dirty (Congressional) Linen:

In another Washington Post exclusive, we learn about sixteen lawmakers who have earmarked "tax dollars to companies, colleges and community groups where their relatives work as salaried employees, lobbysts or board members."

Just because it's not illegal doesn't make it right.

Read the story here.

The People Who Own the Tea-Party:

The Washington Post recently ran a story on the Koch brothers, the people who are financing the grass roots groups collectively known as "The Tea-Party." The story reads like an encyclopedia on corrupt corporate behavior. The irony that a grass roots movement can so easily be bought out by a corporation should not be missed by even the slowest learners.

A Crack in the Empire?

Leave it to the Britts to make a scandal out of a scandal sheet. Rupert Murdoch's media empire, built on porn and the juicy tidbits about the lives of the high and mighty that we regular human beings love to discover about our superiors, has been scrambling to hold down the fort as his kingdom has come under attack.

His media chiefs have been caught bribing cops and politicians, tapping into the phones of a former prime minister and the royal family, and even snooping on a dead child. And now they're resigning and being arrested.

King Rupert issued a statement recently, apologizing for the bad behavior, in, of course, one of his newspapers: "[W]e are determined to live up to the expectations of our readers, colleagues and partners."

Well, Rupert, old boy, you were already doing that.

(See The Washington Post story.)

Why Is It … ?

Why is it that the Feds can go after online gambling, but not one person in the international banking scandal that brought down half the world's economies is even being investigated?

Don't get me wrong. I'm no friend of online gambling. I don't even support the idea of state run lotteries. But come on, folks, nothing has been more criminal in the area of economics than the banking scandals, and there isn't even one case being investigated?

One is left to suppose that if banks are too important to fail bankers are too important to charge when they commit criminal behavior. Important how? Because they contribute too much money to politicians?

We had no trouble going after the criminals in the savings and loan fiasco twenty years ago. Why not now?

Buying Votes:

Just how corrupt is the U.S. Government? Eric Lipton at The New York Times reports on the scam many congressmen use to sell their influence: they set up charities that seek donations from businesses and others seeking to influence their votes, then they vote to grant themselves special dispensations to allow exceptions in congressional ethics rules. Is it any wonder that Republicans preach low taxes, stating that charities will do the jobs we expect government to do?


The School Reform Boondoggle:

Robert Samuelson addresses the failure of school reform in today's Washington Post. Samuelson points out that although much has been tried since 1971, nothing has proven effective, regardless of which political party's proposals have been tried. He points out the fallacy of placing a great teacher in every classroom. As my high school senior English teacher pointed out to me many years ago, there are no great teachers, just great students.

Why Southerners Hate Government:

Shaila Dewan reports in today's New York Times on the economic situation in Jefferson County, Alabama, where government corruption, ineptitude and political infighting have bankrupted the county, bringing human services of all sorts to a near halt. If you want to understand the southern perspective, this is a good place to start. By the way, the practice of slavery continued in this county well into the 1920s, sixty years after the Civil War. Black males were continuously rounded up in Jefferson County by the sheriff, on flimsy charges, jailed, and then "rented" to the northern owned coal and steel industries that boomed with the cheap labor in the early part of the twentieth century.

Have You Traded in Your Clunker for Cash, Yet?

Is the "Clunkers for Cash" program a runaway success or a program that has gone off its hinges? The house had to approve more cash yesterday because so many people are trading in their 16 mpg sport utility vehicles for 18 mpg ones. Am I missing something here? (See The New York Times' story.) I thought the idea was to boost mileage, at least get everyone driving vehicles that have 25 mpg ratings and preferably higher. The savings a two or three mile-per-gallon increase can easily be wiped out through just a small amount of extra driving.

This is what happens when you bounce a $25 million check:

All afternoon yesterday the news was filled with the story coming out of New Jersey. Who could pass this one up when some of the 44 people arrested were rabbis and three others were city mayors? According to The New York Times, the governor said, "The scale of corruption we're seeing as this unfolds is simply outrageous and cannot be tolerated." Please note the strategic use of the word "scale." Think your community is immune to corruption? My guess is that it's the scale that's keeping it under wraps.

How to make money on Wall Street even in the worst of times:

One way to do it is to begin with a large pot of gold right from the get-go. You start buying up stock in a company, which in turn causes the price to go up. Then you sell the stock when other investors start to chase the stock whose price you're driving up.

There are two tricks to this. One, you have to have money to begin with, and two, you have to do the buying and selling very fast before other investors catch on to the manipulation. Investors have a new weapon in the arsenal to aid with the latter: super high speed computers running clever algorithms that do the decision making for them. They can buy and sell within milliseconds, manipulating the market place faster than the eye can blink.

Interestingly, the value of stock now has little if anything to do with the actual value of the companies they represent. (Read The New York Times' story.)