The Penguin Bar

Our so-called leaders are bad enough, but it gets almost worse at the level of the American public, who of course also bear the burden of choosing these abysmal presidents, on top of their own crimes. These latter include utter negligence in maintaining the gift of American democracy, complete laziness in the most basic of civic duties, mass corruption of social, political and personal values, and a reliance upon every form of cheap magic or distraction to avoid basic personal and civic responsibilities.

And, always, it’s about having everything. At once. For nothing. The same idiots who have been seduced by cigarette-money-sized tax cuts for themselves, used to justify a massive slashing of the burden once carried by the rich, are now bitching as government services implode. The New York Times is reporting that citizens of Arizona – one of the most regressive states in the union – are now unhappy because their highway rest stops have been eliminated due to the state’s fiscal crisis. I just want to grab these people and shake them by the shoulders, politely suggesting to them that next time they have to pull over in the desert sands between Tucson and Phoenix and squat by the side of the road, they might want to give a thought or two to all the money they pissed away in another desert, this one in Mesopotamia. Likewise, people are now also starting to whine about schools closing and prisoners being released from jail, also because of budget slashing. And I just want to ask those bright folks whether they still think all those tax cuts for the already outrageously wealthy plutocracy were such a good idea in retrospect, after all.

via The Regressive Antidote – To Hell In A Handbasket.

The wealthy countries repeatedly find new ways to screw Africa. They're purchasing the fishing rights and denying locals the rights to fish the sea or selling more guns or owning profitable enterprises that ought to be owned locally. In this case, buying fertile land and denying it to locals is sick. The local governments aren't much better for allowing it but the countries to the north appear to have forgotten about their disastrous colonial legacy.

This is another example of the new wave of colonialism that is blocking Africa from making progress. Even worse, part of what is driving the effort is fuel. How many more examples like this do we need to see before people stop using food growing land to generate fuel? Instead of encouraging this, it's time to tax the hell out of these plans that are taking food away from people.

via AMERICAblog News: Rich buying farm land and water rights in Africa while locals go hungry.

Econned is the story of how our financial system has become a mass ruse, allowing Wall Street and the largest banks to become predatory, treating their clients as lambs to be fleeced and fatted calves to be slaughtered. It is the story of how a very small group of people gained complete control over the American, and much of the global economy, driving it into the ground, then walking away with trillions of more dollars, while the economy remains on life-support.

via Archein: Econned.

In recent days, conservative media figures have been sounding the alarm, attacking President Obama and the Department of Justice DOJ for employing lawyers who previously represented terrorism suspects or supported their legal arguments in their private practices. It really is just the latest case of Bush-nesia, in which media conservatives block all memory of the Bush administration in an attempt to tar the Obama administration with politically motivated, half-baked smears.The fact that President Bush's DOJ also hired lawyers who represented terror suspects hasn't fazed right-wing media shills.

via Media Matters: Bush-nesia strikes again in smear against Obama, DOJ | Media Matters for America.

The Vatican was today rocked by a sex scandal reaching into Pope Benedict's household after a chorister was sacked for allegedly procuring male prostitutes for a papal gentleman-in-waiting.

Angelo Balducci, a Gentleman of His Holiness, was caught by police on a wiretap allegedly negotiating with Thomas Chinedu Ehiem, a 29-year-old Vatican chorister, over the specific physical details of men he wanted brought to him. Transcripts in the possession of the Guardian suggest that numerous men may have been procured for Balducci, at least one of whom was studying for the priesthood.

The explosive claims about Balducci's private life have caused grave embarrassment to the Vatican, which has yet to publicly comment on the affair.

via Vatican hit by gay sex scandal | World news | guardian.co.uk.

LOL – gotta love it. Ah, the irony!

Stonewalled by Madonna's posse, local media outlets are taking a closer look at the Material Girl's charity work ostensibly directed at helping kids in Brazil's favelas.

The story from blogger Monica Bergamo at Folha Online connects readers to the Brazilian office of the globalist Kabbalah Centre, the same Kaballah Centre whose Rabbi Eliyahu Yardeni told a BBC reporter that the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust brought their downfall upon themselves because they didn't use the Kabbalah. Apparently in his studies, Rabbi Yardeni had some difficulties sorting out the differences between Arbeit Macht Frei and Kabbalah Macht Frei.

Failure of the Success for Kids program to fulfill requests for substantive details for their “pilot project” involving a radical educational methodology called Social Emotional Learning (SEL) comes at a bad time for Madonna, who has raised about $8 million dollars for the scheme and has a high dollar concert series set for Rio later this year. The Brazilian media is on an anti-corruption crusade linked to the start of the presidential election campaign.

via Eric Ehrmann: Brazil’s Bloggers Follow The Money: Madonna’s ‘Favela Fund’ Linked to Kabbalah Centre.

Wouldn’t it be great if American government could finally operate in a more bipartisan fashion?

No, as a matter of fact, it wouldn’t.

Bipartisanship is all the rage now, for three reasons, each of which is as abysmal as it is absurd.

The first is that the Republicans, having given the country a wee taste of their politics these last years and decades, were shown to the exit door by the American electorate in two election cycles in a row. Now, completely bereft of power except by means of every reprehensible delaying and blocking tactic imaginable, the Great Obstructionist Party is whining at every opportunity about the need for bipartisanship. But this is an almost entirely foreign concept for them, since, when they had control of the government, they simply rammed their agenda down the throats of everyone on the horizon, including historic allies of the United States, and even – as with Bush’s prescription drug bill – members of their own party in Congress. If they were running over the French and Germans and even Congressional Republicans, needless to say they didn’t hesitate to make frequent road-kill of Democrats, without so much as a fleeting glance in their rearview mirrors.

Thus, all the newfangled talk about bipartisanship is simply another in a series of ploys which seek to cripple the Democrats from doing what one would normally expect a party to do once it had won control of the government. Namely, govern.

via The Regressive Antidote – Bipartisan Is Just Another Word For Nothing Left To Win.

All that is changing now. Actually, it’s been changing for thirty years, but now it’s really crashing down hard. During the middle part of the twentieth century a literal new deal was struck in American society, in which for the first time the masses would get a moderate share of the pie and the fantastically wealthy would be reduced in economic stature to being merely hugely wealthy. But, after a while, the greediest amongst us decided they’d had enough of that tough bargain and, circa 1980 or so, the empire struck back. The American plutocracy hired Ronald Reagan and his party to undo the provisions of trade, labor, tax and welfare state laws that propped up the newly created middle class, and the ground underneath most Americans’ feet has been eroding ever since. It was actually much worse than what people thought all along, because much of the pain for the middle class was eased by sending wives to work earning a second income, and stealing from their children via budget deficits.

Now comes the triple whammy of the apocalypse, as the products from these policies come home to roost in a serious way. First, deregulating everything in sight so that the rapist class could have its unfettered way with all of us has produced the inevitable reckoning with reality now screening in your neighborhood as “The Great Recession”. Second, the unsustainable pattern of profligate borrowing has become – go figure – unsustainable, and we are now seeing the beginning of serious movements toward reeling back spending on popular government programs, just when they are needed most. And third, the structural changes that have been promulgated over the last three decades leave most Americans poorly positioned to even hope for a path to economic recovery. Roughly speaking then, the middle class have been tossed out of the plane, their primary parachute was defectively fabricated by a deregulated corporation trying to save money on production, and their emergency chute was stolen out of the pack and sold on the black market called Wall Street.

via The Regressive Antidote – Lead, Follow, Or Get Out Of The Way.

Excellent read – as usual from David Michael Green.

The folks at the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics offer a novel way to look at the nearly $3.5 billion spent to lobby Congress and federal agencies last year: About $1.3 million was spent on lobbying for every hour lawmakers met in 2009.

Lawmakers in both chambers spent a total of 2,668 hours in session last year, the center said, citing congressional records. That was a busier-than-usual schedule for Congress, which tackled an aggressive agenda that included health-care legislation, climate-change proposals and plans to impose new regulations on banks and Wall Street. None of those bills has become law yet.

via Washington lobbyists earn $1.3 million an hour – On Politics: Covering the US Congress, Governors, and the 2010 Election – USATODAY.com.

Late in January, the book publisher Macmillan told Amazon it wanted to raise the prices of its books sold through the online retailer. Amazon made clear it wanted to continue to set prices for Macmillan’s books, as it does for most books it sells.

To make sure the publisher understood it was serious, Amazon cut the links that enable people to buy Macmillan’s books via Amazon’s Web site. For more than a week, you could still see Macmillan books on Amazon; you just couldn’t order one.

Even though the two companies have since struck a truce, the showdown should deeply concern anyone who cares not merely about the health of this vital industry, but about concentration of political power in America.

What should concern us foremost is not that Amazon’s managers believe they — rather than the people who write and edit our books — have a right to set the price for books. It is that Amazon’s managers believe they have consolidated sufficient power — the company sells as much as 80 percent of all ebooks, for instance — to enforce their will by cutting off the public’s access to a publisher’s books.

via Corporate giants have too much power – CNN.com.