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An Open Letter to President George W. Bush

From Robert A. Letcher, PhD

President George W. Bush
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20500

Mr. Bush (or whoever reads this for/to you):

For many months, I have been searching for words to convey my contempt for you, without giving you reason to have me sent to Guantanamo for waterboarding (not that you’d need a reason, apparently). Read more

The Potential Progressive Mandate*

by David Sirota

I appeared on CNN’s Larry King Live last night to discuss both the state of the campaign here in the swing state of Colorado, and the potential for a massive progressive election mandate on Tuesday. You can watch the clip here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKzP97dqnnk

In the final weeks of this campaign, John McCain has been telling America that this is a contest between his own neo-Reaganism and Barack Obama’s supposed socialism. And the result is McCain not only losing ground in traditional blue states, but also in traditional red states like Colorado. Read more

We Don’t Care, We Don’t Have To

by Larry Sakin

We are approaching final countdown for the 2008 elections this week, and the blurry mainstream media has been all agog over Republican Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin showing her $150,000 slip. It is a perfect follow up to the wasteful spending insurance giant AIG displayed with their $300,000 resort conference taking place after the federal government bailed them out of their financial pain. Tsk, tsk, tsk- those republicans and corporate behemoths sure can plunk down the dough to aggrandize themselves.

What the press missed is the millions of dollars that went into campaign contributions for the presidential nominees of both parties, in both industry donations and corporate sponsorship of this summer’s party conventions. According to the website www.opensecrets.org, of the $240 million in donations Senator Barack Obama has accounted for, twenty-five percent or $60 million has come from lobbyists, corporate law firms, commercial banks, Wall Street, real estate interests and yes, insurance companies including AIG. Read more

Why I am Voting for Obama

by Lorenzo A. Canizares

In a few days the nation will be selecting a new President. For the sake of our nation I hope it is Barack Obama.

The last eight years could be considered for a great number of Americans a national disaster. Nothing has been done right. The economy has tanked following the rule of logic. Expenditures galore thanks to two wars, and good jobs leaving our shores; while revenues shrank thanks to tax cuts to the very wealthy and a shrinking middle class that relies on credit to hold onto their former standard of living.

John McCain proposes more of the same Bush policies. He will continue the tax cuts to the very wealthy while increasing taxes on the middle class and the working poor through his health care plan. McCain, as candidate of the Republican Party, will certainly be more prone to cut even more in programs that benefit children, elderly and the poor. But, the main reason to avoid McCain like the plague is that he doesn’t seem to have learned any lessons from the past eight years. He claims to be anti-Bush, but his essence is the same or worse. His selection of Sarah Palin for Vice-President is now recognized by the vast majority of Americans as a major mistake. The Palin selection clearly shows that McCain is more interested in partisan delight than in the well-being of the nation. It should remind Americans of “Brownie” as head of FEMA during the New Orleans debacle. Read more

SS John McCain Sinking - Ice Queen tells him to puck off

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

John McCain can’t catch a break this week.

The market crashes had eased off, and while the slumping economy remained, by an overwhelming margin, the top concern of voters, the sense of panic had eased.

Until the day before yesterday, when market crashes resumed. This time, it was in response to data coming out that showed an economy grinding to a halt. It didn’t help that today is the 79th anniversary of the Crash of ‘29, or that next Friday – four days before election day – is a “triple witching hour” on Wall Street – a Friday, on the last day of the month, in October. Rarely has the calendar, investor superstition and economic reality formed in such a grand planetary alignment. McCain isn’t going to get any breaks from the economy. Read more

On the importance of doing the math

by Robert A. Letcher, PhD

Eventually, and to the regret of many Americans, someone has to do the math. And, it appears, to the regret of many American presidential candidates, a variation of this folk “wisdom” applies to them as well.   With the clock running out on the third Presidential debate, and only enough time left for one more question, the moderator finally asked a question about education in a way that led to a discussion of science education. Better late than never, I guess, because, in the end, Presidents do have to do the math policy – and the science policy, and the engineering policy, and the Education policy that prepares people to be and carry out all of those policies. Read more

Preparing the Cover Story for the Theft of the Election

by Anthony Wade

Two weeks to go and the machine is starting to prepare the narrative for how it is possible that John McCain won the 2008 Presidential election. With every poll showing an Obama lead of anywhere from 10-14 points for the past few weeks, suddenly today the Associated Press announced a new poll that shows the race in a dead heat. Nonsense. With the backdrop of the Kennedy-Palast reporting on how the GOP has already started the systematic theft of the election this poll today is just the coverage they need to pretend that the results of a McCain victory will be legitimate. If McCain does indeed go on to steal the election, no doubt his supporters will point to this bogus poll to refute the other polls. Read more

What Caused the Financial Crisis and What Can We Do About It?

by Jeanmarie Simpson

The US economy is a gigantic, extremely intricate organism. The current financial crisis was not caused by a single factor but by many layers of responsibility that must be assigned to many entities. Read more

Redesigning Democracy

by Robert C. Koehler

Two seconds of radio news was enough — suddenly the 2008 presidential campaign collapsed around me in an unrecognizable heap of consumer politics as I ate breakfast.

“Redistribution of the wealth,” John the Candidate was saying. “That’s one of the tenets of . . . socialism.”

This was maybe the ten thousandth time I’d been whacked with that and similar Cold War-era words in the last couple weeks, and the surrealism buildup — the sheer weight of all this empty rhetoric and mock horror, the waste of money and air time and newsprint, the overwork of my own revulsion mechanism, but most of all my exhausted sense of urgency that the nation has serious troubles that need immediate attention — came out in a groan of paralyzing despair. Read more

The Ugly Underside of an Ugly Underside

by George Thomas

Talk about concussion patients beating their heads against a wall!

Whole industries and trade relations were established around it.  Once, when wars were fought largely between societies of different language and culture, the victorious side took slaves from among the beaten.  It has always been a matter of us vs. them.  Drive into many small towns in your own country and observe the suspicious stares, or the studied averting of eyes as the guy at the gas station takes his time giving the outsider his change. Read more

Next Page »

• Letter to the Editor: Good Cars need Good Teams - by R. A. Letcher, PhD

  Good cars need good teams -- designers, engineers, line workers… and learning-oriented managers by Robert A. Letcher, PhD [Author’s note: I submitted the following as a letter to the editor of The New York Times, after that paper carried an article under the headline, "To Fix Detroit, Obama Is Said to Drop Plan for ‘Car Czar’", 02/15/2009.] It is widely accepted that you can't win a horse race without a good horse. Of course, it helps to have a lot of money and a good plan for spending it. But, you still need a good horse. The authors reminded me of this when they wrote: “The companies’ plans are required to show progress in cutting long-term costs as a condition for keeping their loans.” I doubt GM and Chrysler can win this most important "automobile race" merely by having better accountants and more muscular negotiators: they still need a good "horse". That means the companies will have to show that their teams can still design and build cars that people are drawn to buy and willing to pay for: winners. I doubt they can. The problem isn't that they didn't know how to; it's that they don't know how to break out of the group-think that ensnarled them, their managers, their whole organizations, decades ago. I would be more optimistic, had the government also required the companies to include plans for transforming themselves into learning organizations. Aye, there’s the rub: learning entails risk-taking, not “yes people”.

• Bob's Bail Out Plan by bobl-tlm

  

• Fiscal Therapy - Getting the economy back on its feet, giving taxpayers a break, saving your retirement fund and your kid's college tuition? Done. And it won't cost you a penny.

  For years now, whenever I've been invited to lecture students on how our tax system works, I have asked a simple question: What is the purpose of the United States of America? The most common answer, be it at prestigious universities, elite prep schools, rural community colleges, or crowded urban high schools, is this: To make people rich. This should come as no great surprise. For anyone born after, say, 1970, the world has been shaped by Ronald Reagan's remaking of government's relationship with private interests—a vision of lower taxes, less regulation, and maximum economic leeway for those at the top. In this view, the pursuit of wealth is the warp and weft of America; everything else will follow. By contrast, the preamble to the Constitution tells us the nation's reason for being in 52 words that can be reduced to six principles: society, justice, peace, security, commonwealth, and freedom. Individual riches don't make the list. They are a product of American society, not its guiding purpose. Progress, then, must begin with a return to the best of the values that created this Second American Republic—one born, it's worth remembering, from the failure of the Articles of Confederation, whose principles (weak government, unfettered capitalism) found their resurrection in the economic policies of the past three decades.

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  read more at Mother Jones

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• How Do You Like Deregulation Now? graphic politics by Dicky Neely

  

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