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Banned
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Originally Posted by sprocket
You decrease the role of the federal government, and you decrease the likelihood that the people in office have the power to provide a benefit to the corporations that would have "donated" to them. If a politicians hands are sufficiently tied, he doesn't have the power to give corporate welfare.
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sprocket....the above opinion you posted....is an excellent example of why....even though Ron Paul uniquely....among any US politicians says....on national TV...exactly the same thing I have posted on these threads....relentlessly and tirelessly:
Quote:
...."So, Congressman Paul, and I'd like you to take 30 seconds to answer this, you're basically saying that we should take our marching orders from al-Qaeda? If they want us off the Arabian Peninsula, we should leave? (Laughter.)
You have thirty seconds to tell us why you're not a terrorist-loving, pro-jihadist tool of radical militant violent crazed bloodthirsty Islam and Osama bin Laden's best friend – go!
PAUL: "No! (Cheers, applause.) I'm saying – (laughter) – I'm saying we should take our marching orders from our Constitution. We should not go to war – (cheers, applause) – we should not go to war without a declaration. We should not go to war when <h3>it's an aggressive war. This is an aggressive invasion.</h3 We've committed the invasion of this war, and<h3> it's illegal under international law.</h3> That's where I take my marching orders, not from any enemy. (Cheers, boos.)".....
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<h3>.....I could not support a Ron Paul candidacy for US president....not in a million years....because I think that Paul and his supporters haven't a clue as to what is at stake today in America.....and they want to "deregulate" the remnants of control of the elite by the much larger majority of middle class to poor....by deregulating the restraints put on the practices of the elite.
The restraints that the elite have not already paid for lobbyists and "studies" and PR campaigns....and political contributions to repeal or to roll bacK,,,,
....And....they don't seem to recognize that it is the elite who paid the money to convince Paul's supporters to think what they think....and to believe what the wealthy elite spend the most to convince them of.....that politics is not about the forced...under the guise of the political process and the rule of law.....re-distribution of wealth and power....when the reality is....that the forced consolidation of wealth and power has been nearly ceded exclusively to the elite....and if you still think for yourself....it should be fucking obvious to you....but they have paid huge sums to convince you that they aren't using politics to force wealth and power from you to them...and THAT YOU SHOULDN'T WANT TO DO THAT EITHER: </h3>
Quote:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Mc...ism_TPOTM.html
Right-Wing Criticism
excerpted from the book
The Problem of the Media
U.S. Communication Politics in the 21st Century
by Robert W. McChesney
Monthly Review Press, 2004, paper
.....p103
The U.S. news media ... pays little direct attention to the political Left. The Left-not only genuine radicals but also mild social democrats by international standards-lies outside the spectrum of legitimate debate. What attention the Left actually gets tends to be unsympathetic, if not explicitly negative. Foreign journalists marvel at how U.S. left-wing social critics like Noam Chomsky, who are prominent and respected public figures abroad, are virtually invisible in the U.S. news media.
p105
[Bernard] Goldberg notes: "Edward R. Murrow's 'Harvest of Shame,' the great CBS News documentary about poor migrant families traveling America, trying to survive by picking fruits and vegetables, would never be done today. Too many poor people. Not our audience. <h3>We want the people who buy cars and computers. Poor migrants won't bring our kind of Americans-the ones with money to spend-into the tent.</h3>
p106
Russell Baker, legendary columnist for the New York Times, put the matter well in December 2003: "Today's topdrawer Washington news people are part of a highly educated, upper middle class elite; they belong to the culture for which the American system works extremely well. Which is to say, they are, in the pure sense of the word, extremely conservative.
p111
Right-Wing Political Campaign Against the Media
<h3>So why does the conservative critique of the "liberal" news media remain such a significant force in U.S. political and media culture?</h3> It certainly isn't the quality of the arguments. It is kept alive by hardcore political organizing. Launched in earnest in the 1970s by financial backers with deep pockets, conservative critics blamed the liberal media for losing the Vietnam War and for fomenting dissent in the United States. <h3>Pro-business foundations were aghast at what they perceived as the anti-business sentiment prevalent among Americans, especially middle-class youth who had typically supplied a core constituency. Mainstream journalism-which, in reporting the activities of official sources, was giving people like Ralph Nader sympathetic exposure-was seen as turning Americans away from business. At that point the political Right, supported by its wealthy donors, began to devote enormous resources to criticizing and intimidating the news media</h3> .40 This was a cornerstone of the broader campaign to make the political culture more pro-business and more conservative. Around half of all the expenditures of the twelve largest conservative foundations have been devoted to moving the news rightward. During the 1990s, right-wing think tanks, almost all of which were not established until the 1970s, were funded to the tune of $1 billion. By 2003, the Heritage Foundation had an annual budget of $30 million, 180 employees, and its own television studios in its eight-story Washington, D.C., headquarters.
p112
<h3>The campaign to alter the media has entailed funding the training of conservative and business journalists at universities and bankrolling right-wing student newspapers to breed a generation of pro-business Republican journalists.</h3> It has meant starting right-wing print media such as the Washington Times and the Weekly Standard and supporting existing right-wing publications such as the National Review, not only to promote conservative politics but also so that young journalists have a farm system to develop their clips. It also includes conservative think tanks flooding journalism with pro-business official sources and incessantly jawboning coverage critical of conservative interests as reflective of "liberal" bias. <h3>A comprehensive Nexis search for the twenty-five largest think tanks in U.S. news media for 2002 showed that explicitly conservative think tanks accounted for nearly half of the 25,000 think-tank citations in the news, whereas progressive think tanks accounted for only 12 percent.</h3> Centrist groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institution accounted for the rest. The pro-business Right understood that changing media was a crucial part of bringing right-wing ideas into prominence and their politicians into power. "You get huge leverage for your dollars," a conservative philanthropist noted when he discussed the turn to ideological work. A well-organized, well-financed, and active hardcore conservative crew is pushing the news media to the right. As a Washington Post White House correspondent put it, "The liberal equivalent of this conservative coterie does not exist." As Senate minority leader Tom Daschle commented in 2003, "We don't come close to matching their firepower in the media."'
<h3>To the general public the conservative critique is not packaged as an effort by the wealthiest and most powerful elements of our society to extend their power, weaken labor and government regulation in the public interest, and dramatically lower their taxes while gutting the public sector, aside from the military. To the contrary, this conservative critique, much like the broader conservative political movement, is marketed as a populist movement.</h3> It is the heroic story of the conservative masses (Pat Buchanan's "peasants with pitchforks") battling the establishment liberal media elite. In this righteous war, as spun by right-wing pundits such as Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Bill Bennett, and Sean Hannity, conservatives are the blue-collar workers (white, of course, though that is only implied) and self-made business leaders while the liberals are Ivy League snobs, intellectuals, hoity-toity limousine riders, and journalists who hold power. As one conservative activist put it, the contest over media is a "David and Goliath struggle."
p114
<h3>... a 2003 Gallup Poll found that 45 percent of Americans thought the news media were too liberal," while only 15 percent found them "too conservative."</h3>
p114
... the right wing of the Republican Party, typified by Reagan and now George W. Bush, has gained considerable political power while the Democratic Party leadership has become steadily more pro-corporate in its outlook. This means that editors and journalists who simply follow the professional code have much greater exposure through official sources to neoliberal and conservative political positions. <h3>The body of relatively progressive official sources used more frequently in the 1960s and 1970s is viewed today as irrelevant. The hallowed political center of officialdom has moved sharply to the right.</h3>
p115
... conservatives move easily in the corridors of corporate media. This conservative campaign has meshed comfortably with the commercial and political aspirations of media corporations. This is precisely what one would expect. Many prominent media moguls are hardcore, rock-ribbed conservatives such as Rupert Murdoch, John Malone, former GE CEO Jack Welch, and Clear Channel CEO Lowry Mays. Although some media executives and owners donate money to Democrats, none of the major news media owners is anything close to a left-winger. Journalists who praise corporations and commercialism will obviously be held in higher regard (and given more slack) by owners and advertisers than journalists who are routinely critical of them. <h3>Media owners don't want their own economic interests or policies criticized. Murdoch's Fox News Channel, which operates as an adjunct of the Republican Party, is an obvious example of blatant corporate shilling, but the point holds at other outlets, too. Punditry and commentary provided by corporate-owned news media almost unfailingly ranges from center to right. According to Editor & Publisher, the four most widely syndicated political columnists in the United States speak from the Right. TV news runs from pro-business centrist to rabidly pro-business right, and most newspaper journalism is only a bit broader. Perhaps most important, the explicitly right-wing media are now strong enough and incessant enough to push stories until they are covered by more centrist mainstream media.
The upshot is that by the early years of the twenty-first century the conservatives had won the media battle.</h3> The Washington Post's E. J. Dionne termed this a "genuine triumph for conservatives The drumbeat of conservative press criticism has been so steady, the establishment press has internalized it." <h3>By 2001, CNN's chief Walter Isaacson was polling conservatives to see how he could make the network more palatable to them.
</h3>
p116
A staple entrée in this diet is political talk radio-[Partisan radio went national in the late 1980s following the rise of satellite technology, toll free 800 numbers, and the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, which called on broadcast news to provide balanced viewpoints on social and political issues. Talk radio has not only stormed into prominence on the AM dial but it also "tends to run the gamut from conservative to very conservative," as one reporter characterized it. <h3>"There are 1,500 conservative radio talk show hosts," the conservative activist Paul M. Weyrich boasts. "The ability to reach people with our point of view is like nothing we have ever seen before. "59 The right-wing dominance of broadcasting is demonstrated by the shift of groups such as Reed Irvine's Accuracy in Media and Phyllis Schlafley's Eagle Forum.</h3> Back in the 1970S and 1980s they crusaded for the Fairness Doctrine-which required broadcasters to present contrasting perspectives on politics as a way to battle liberal bias on the airwaves; since the ascendance of Rush Limbaugh et al. these groups now oppose the Fairness Doctrine.
By 2003, a Gallup Poll showed that 22 percent of Americans considered talk radio their primary source for news, double the figure of 1998. Every city has its own local Limbaughs trying to outdo the master on the pro-Republican political Richter scale. The Republican National Committee has a Radio Services Department whose sole function is to provide daily talking points to feed "the voracious appetite of conservative talk show hosts. 1112 <h3>Even in the liberal college town of Eugene, Oregon, for example, a 2002 study determined that 4,000 hours per year of conservative Republican talk shows and zero hours of liberal Democratic talk shows were broadcast on the local radio dial.</h3> Were foreigners never to visit the United States but only listen to a steady diet of its radio fare, they might imagine that Americans were overwhelmingly on the right wing of the political spectrum, that George W. Bush won the 2000 election by a near unanimous vote, and that the average IQ of those opposing President Bush was around 40.
p118
Partisan Coverage in Peace and War
The average American cannot help but be exposed to the noticeable double standard in the treatment of politicians and issues in the media, depending upon party and ideology. The fate of Bill Clinton and George W Bush reveals the scope of the conservative victory. A Nexis search ... reveals that 13,641 stories focused on Clinton avoiding the military draft but a mere 49 stories featured Bush having his powerful father use influence to get him into the Texas Air National Guard instead of the draft .Clinton's comment about smoking marijuana but not inhaling made headlines and monologues for weeks. His small-time Whitewater affair justified a massive seven-year, $70 million, open-ended special investigation of his business and personal life that never established any criminal business activity but eventually did produce the Lewinsky allegations. Rick Kaplan, former head of CNN, acknowledged that he instructed his employees to provide the Lewinsky story with massive attention despite his belief that it was overblown; he knew he would face withering criticism from the Right for a liberal bias if he did not pummel it. "I think if you$ look at the way Clinton s been treated, former Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed said, "you'd be hard-pressed to say that the personal liberal ideological views of most reporters ... have somehow led to a free ride for Bill Clinton."
Bush, in contrast, had a remarkably dubious business career in which he made a fortune flouting security laws, tapping public funds, and using his father's connections to protect his backside, but the news media barely sniffed at the story. His questionable connections to Enron during his presidency-even at the height of the corporate scandal in 2001 and 2002-produced no special prosecutor and no media drumbeat for one to be appointed .61' His conviction for driving under the influence of alcohol barely attracted notice.
p124
As Paul Krugman noted in 2002;
In 1970 the top 0.01 percent of taxpayers had 0.7 percent of total income-that is, they earned "only" 70 times as much as the average .... But in 1998, the top 0.01 percent received more than 3 percent of all income. That meant the richest 13,000 families in America had almost as much income as the 20 million poorest households: those 13,000 families had incomes 300 times that of average families.
p125
In 2001, the International Labor Organization confirmed ... distressing long-term trend: workers in the United States were working more hours than they had for generations, and more than workers in any other industrialized nation, save the Czech Republic and South Korea. German workers, to give some sense of comparison, work on average 500 hours less per year-some three months' worth of 40-hour weeks!-than their American counterparts. All of this IS hardly conducive to civic participation.
p131
<h2>In the election cycle ending in 2002, a mere one-tenth of one percent of Americans provided 83 percent of all itemized campaign contributions, and the vast majority of these individuals came from the very wealthiest sliver of Americans.
p131
In this "wealth" primary ...96 percent of Americans ... never give a campaign contribution ...</h2>
p132
In the 1950s, corporations paid 25 percent of federal tax dollars; by 2001 the figure was down to 7 percent. Similarly, the marginal tax rate on the wealthiest Americans <h3>has fallen from 91 percent in the Eisenhower years to 38 percent by 2002.</h3>
p133
"There's no longer any countervailing power in Washington," former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich wrote in 2001. "Business is in complete control of the machinery of government." Bill Moyers concurs: "In no small part, because they coveted the same corporate money, Democrats practically walked away from the politics of struggle, leaving millions of working people with no one to fight for them. "
p166
Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy over forty years ago ...
It is sometimes argued that advertising really does little harm because - no one believes it anymore anyway. We consider this view to be erroneous. <h3>The greatest damage done by advertising is precisely that it incessantly demonstrates the prostitution of men and women who lend their intellects, their voices, their artistic skills to purposes in which they themselves do not believe...</h3>
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<h3>So, sprocket....you posted your opinion...and it does not contain any sign of recognition that the regulatory process was a reaction, to events like those described in the following quote boxes....because our great-grandfathers wanted to help us to avoid having to go through the consequences that they had to bear...in the aftermath of abuses that took place in the absence of oversight and regulation:</h3>
Quote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/bu...y/19shelf.html
Before There Was Enron, There Was Insull
Article Tools Sponsored By
By ROGER LOWENSTEIN
Published: March 19, 2006
.....By the Roaring Twenties, Insull was one of the country's foremost power brokers. He controlled utilities in 5,000 towns in 32 states, as well as a network of electrified railroads coursing out from Chicago......
....Samuel Insull, at any rate, was not the exception. What is surprising about his tale is how little, today, he is remembered.....
.....Insull recognized that electric power, like the automobile, had to be affordable and widely distributed. To keep prices fair, he advocated state regulation of monopolies, and seemed to epitomize the enlightened industrialist championed by Herbert Hoover. With a Babbitt-like belief in progress, Insull dispatched an army of employees to flog electric appliances and, just as relentlessly, his various companies' soaring shares.
Power for everyone was fine; power owned by everyone was another matter. The Jazz Age exposed gaping economic inequalities, and Midwestern Progressives increasingly called for public power, especially for rural communities where electrification lagged. Insull bitterly counterattacked, often by financing legislative allies. Exposure led to scandal and to accusations that he was fleecing his customers. Ineluctably, Insull caught the eye of an ambitious Eastern reformer, Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was seeking to fence in the "Power Trust" and Insull in particular.
Hubris is not the worst crime — merely the one that guarantees the surest retribution. And Insull's capital structure was more reckless than his politics. Addicted to debt, he pioneered a corporate form — the holding company — in which one company was literally stacked atop another. This allowed him to control an empire worth $500 million with only a tiny $27 million sliver of equity. Come the crash, some 65 of his enterprises were perched like the unlucky subjects of Yertle the Turtle: down they went. Insull fled to Greece, leaving 600,000 shareholders ruined. He returned to face federal prosecution and was likened to Al Capone.
The timing of Mr. Wasik's book would seem to be perfect. The Enron trial is headline news (take heart, Ken Lay; Insull beat the rap), and the Roosevelt-era law designed to avoid a recurrence of Insulls, the Public Utility Holding Company Act, was repealed only in 2005.
Drawing a contrast between Insull and today's corporate miscreants, Mr. Wasik observes that Insull's shoddy financial disclosures did not violate the porous securities laws of his day. Nonetheless, Mr. Wasik cannot quite bring himself to deliver an exoneration. Though he labels Insull a "scoundrel," elsewhere and often he sticks up for him as a well-intentioned businessman who was as surprised by the stock market crash as everyone else.
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Quote:
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insigh...ntentId=869862
Abstract: The bankruptcy of Enron Corp. has evolved into a scandal of enormous proportions involving allegations of fraud, corruption and unethical practices on the part of Enron’s corporate executives, members of its board of directors, external auditors, and high government officials in the USA. No doubt there will be many articles written about various aspects of the Enron scandal. The focus of this paper is on the relationships between Enron’s business model and the deregulatory phase of the American economy during the 1980s and 1990s. It is the argument of this paper that deregulation in the US electricity and natural gas industries fostered the creation of the Enron business model, and that this model was unsustainable, resulting in the demise of Enron Corp. Furthermore, while Enron can be viewed as an example of capitalistic excess, the paper reveals how the Enron business model developed as an American form of a public private partnership, similar to the types of public private partnerships that have been created in recent years in the UK. Investigating Enron as a public private partnership may help us to better understand the role of public private partnerships in contemporary capitalism and shed some light on the advisability of deregulatory schemes and the unintended consequences that can result from such schemes.
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Quote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/11/bu...rint&position=
January 11, 2005
Secrecy Stripped From Oregon Utility Sale
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON
The Texas Pacific Group, after fighting to keep secret 700 pages of documents about its proposed purchase of Portland General Electric, reversed course yesterday and said it would make the documents public. The decision came after an alternative newspaper, Willamette Week, obtained most of the documents for an article published last week.
Nearly every major economic interest in Oregon opposes the purchase, but until now these groups could say little about their reasons for joining consumer groups in opposing the deal because the Oregon Public Utility Commission issued a broad secrecy order at Texas Pacific's request.
Lawyers for the opponents and for consumer groups said that the documents showed that Texas Pacific used the secrecy order to mislead the public, an accusation that Texas Pacific characterized as false and unfair.
Texas Pacific, founded by David Bonderman, is a $13 billion investment fund based in Fort Worth that buys distressed companies. It plans to pay $2.35 billion, in a debt-laden deal, to acquire the Portland utility. click to show
The Oregon case has significance beyond Portland. It illustrates what consumer and industry lawyers in California, Texas and Washington said yesterday was a growing use of secrecy in utility cases to the detriment of ratepayers. It raises questions about moves in Congress to repeal a 1934 law that protects customers. And it illustrates the growing interest in electric utilities by leveraged buyout firms like Texas Pacific and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company in New York.
K.K.R.'s planned purchase of Tucson Electric Power was rejected last month by Arizona utility regulators, who ruled it was too risky for ratepayers.
Congress may vote soon on repealing the 1934 law, the Public Utility Holding Company Act, a move that opponents say would open the door to short-term speculators and distant owners with little interest in the long-term reliability of electric service. Texas Pacific has said that unless the Securities and Exchange Commission exempts it from that law, it will not complete the deal.
The 1934 law was adopted after one of the biggest business scandals of the Depression, the 1932 collapse of the Insull Trusts, a network of heavily indebted utilities that included Portland General Electric, which is now owned by Enron.
Dan Meek, the lawyer for the Utility Reform Project, a Portland consumer group, said that the Oregon Public Utility Commission grants secrecy orders on request, which he considers improper.
"It amounts to a government-sponsored dog and pony show for the utility and its allies to make their own case, unchallenged," Mr. Meek said, adding that even after opponents make important discoveries in closed-door proceedings "the public is not allowed to hear about it."
Bob Valdez, a commission spokesman, confirmed that requests for confidentiality had increased in recent years, an issue the commission will study this year.
The documents show that Texas Pacific may resell the utility in three years, The Oregonian reported on Sunday after Texas Pacific gave it some of the documents. Last week, Texas Pacific emphasized that it planned to hold on to Portland G.E. for up to 12 years.
Erik Sten, a Portland commissioner who wants the city to buy the Portland G.E.'s assets, said Texas Pacific's release of the documents threw doubt on the legitimacy of the secrecy order. Documents cannot be both "meaningful and in need of secrecy and at the same time not important, which is what Texas Pacific is now saying," Mr. Sten said. "Either the protective order was given too freely or Texas Pacific is now misrepresenting its due diligence to the public."
Texas Pacific said yesterday that the documents, which it has testified were developed for $7 million, were analytical and should not be considered as policy or plans.
Mr. Sten called for reform of the laws allowing secrecy in utility cases. "The idea that the public should grant a monopoly to a speculative firm without access to the business plans is unreasonable," he said. "Public bodies can only exercise judgment on behalf of the public when they have heard the public's opinion - and that opinion has been manipulated through false public statements."
The newly disclosed documents also contradict public statements by Texas Pacific that the most likely way it would dispose of Portland G.E. was through an initial public offering, said Jason Eisdorfer, a lawyer for the Citizens Utility Board, a consumer group in Portland.
The documents "show that they stand to make hundreds of millions of dollars more on a sale than on an I.P.O.," said Mr. Eisdorfer, who has seen the documents. He said Texas Pacific had a duty of loyalty to its investors, including the Oregon public employees' pension fund, to obtain the highest price. An initial public offering at a lower price makes no sense legally or financially, he said.
Texas Pacific has maintained that the documents are mere analysis and consultant opinions, and that therefore no contradiction exists. Yesterday, an organization representing major Portland landlords, the Building Owners and Managers Association, asked the commission to reopen testimony in the case.
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<h2>Ironic....dontcha think...that you and Ron Paul "worship" at the altar of the intent of the "founding fathers"...ten generations past</h2>....even in your rush to roll back or eliminate entirely the intent of your near contemporary elders...just three generations after they took what they learned when, "mistakes were made"....mistakes which wiped out fortunes built over many years....in just a few months or in a year...or two....or mistakes which fouled the air, the water, contaminated the environment with tetra-ethyl lead....in motor fuels for 60 years.....and other abuses wide in scope...too numerous to describe here?
Last edited by host; 10-27-2007 at 02:07 AM..
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