Just Business

A restaurant worker arrives for her morning shift and discovers that the cooler had broken leaving the meat warm overnight and beginning to rot. She advises the manager who orders her to shut up and make the sandwiches. She refuses. Instead she calls the health department. The inspector confirms that the meat is rotten and not fit for consumption. Now she faces losing her job. Her last ditch hope? Her union.

There were no service-worker unions when Upton Sinclair wrote "The Jungle". No health inspectors either. As Sinclair described it, the food industry was "tens of thousands of cattle crowded into pens whose wooden floors stank and steamed contagion; upon bare, blistering, cinder-strewn railroad tracks and huge blocks of dingy meat factories, whose labyrinthine passages defied a breath of fresh air to penetrate them; and there are not merely rivers of hot blood and carloads of moist flesh, and rendering-vats and soup cauldrons, glue-factories and fertilizer tanks, that smelt like the craters of hell-there are also tons of garbage festering in the sun, and the greasy laundry of the workers hung out to dry and dining rooms littered with food black with flies, and toilet rooms that are open sewers."

You might think that we have seen the last of those dark days but thanks to the pressures of free market capitalism we have been steadily rushing right back.

"Over the past century, the increased centralization of our food production — accompanied by a growth in foreign food imports — has once again left our nation’s health at the hands of mostly unregulated food processors. Currently, the FDA has surprisingly little control over food safety: Our food industry is self-regulated, which means the FDA is not only incapable of demanding a recall of contaminated food products, but they also lack the power to punish the companies that produce such products. As a result, more than 350,000 Americans are hospitalized due to food-related illnesses each year," according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

A hundred years ago, or tomorrow at some fancy joint that refuses union labor, that brave sandwich-maker is too cowed to open her trap. Dozens sicken on rotten meat, one or two perhaps even die and having been a Pinko-Socialist Upton Sinclair knows why:

They were the Beef Trust-- "a gigantic combination of capital, which had crushed all opposition, and overthrown the laws of the land, and was preying upon the people.-- In a society dominated by the fact of commercial competition, money is necessarily the test of prowess, and wastefulness the sole criterion of power."

Think about that the next time you eat out and dip into that salsa or guacamole. If you start to feel queasy remember ... life is just part of doing business.

Swallowing Weak Tea

The saddest thing about the Tea Party Movement is that their gut instincts are right-- their government is bloated, corrupt and unresponsive. Unfortunately, their misguided glimmerings of history allows their rage to be exploited by the very interests that compound the dysfunction. Calling Obama a 'socialist dictator' is music to Wall Street ears.

"Society created its own organs to look after its common interests... [b]ut these organs, at whose head was the state power, had in the course of time, in pursuance of their own special interests, transformed themselves from servants of society into masters of society. It is precisely in America that we see best how there takes place this process of the state power making itself independent in relation to society whose mere instrument it was intended to be."-- Frederich Engels, March 18th, 1891 on the 20th anniversary of the Paris Commune.

Who knew the Tea partiers were actually heirs to libertarian socialists.

K Street

The K Street Project was launched in 1995, by Republican strategist Grover Norquist and House majority leader Tom DeLay to pressure Washington lobbying firms to hire Republicans in top positions.

Often referred to as the fourth branch of government, these D.C. lobbying firms have great influence due to monetary resources and the revolving door policy of hiring former government officials. "It is common practice for politicians to request money from lobbying firms for an exchange in better access to officials and to buy favoritism in policies."-- Source Watch

Business Lobbyists Write Legislation.

From Mother Jones: On August 7, thousands of state legislators and corporate lobbyists were scheduled to descend on Orlando, Florida, for the annual meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC.

While other lobbyists focus on the federal government, ALEC gives business a direct hand in writing bills that are considered in state assemblies nationwide. Funded primarily by large corporations, industry groups, and conservative foundations -- including R.J. Reynolds, Koch Industries, and the American Petroleum Institute -- the group takes a chain-restaurant approach to public policy, supplying precooked McBills to state lawmakers. Since most legislators are in session only part of the year and often have no staff to do independent research, they're quick to swallow what ALEC serves up. In 2000, according to the council, members introduced more than 3,100 bills based on its models, passing 450 into law.

"Politicians pushing a bill that would ban municipal competition for broadband asked to clarify, and rather than answer themselves, the politicians "turned to a Time Warner staff member and an attorney who represents the industry to speak on their behalf."

Freedom Works

The Tea Party movement owes its prominence to Freedom Works. Professing to be an advocate for 'liberty' and 'smaller government' Freedom Works is a front for corporate interests. It is chaired by former U.S. House Majority Leader, Republican Dick Armey who in 2004 "spoke glowingly of 'Rx Outreach,' a national mail order program for low-income people that had just been launched by Express Scripts Inc., a pharmacy benefit management firm based in Maryland Heights, Mo." At the time, FreedomWorks "had been working with Express Scripts' public relations firm, and a week later issued a news release praising Rx Outreach. Express Scripts says it plans to donate money to Armey's group, though it won't say how much or when."

In early 2005, Radio listeners in 15 states heard a broadcast appeal from former House Majority Leader Dick Armey asking them to help scuttle a bill designed to contain asbestos litigation. But at no time in the ad - made in his capacity as co-chairman of FreedomWorks did Armey disclose that he is also working as a lobbyist for Equitas, a British insurer that has lobbied to thwart the asbestos trust fund legislation. -- Source Watch.

Asked later that year why his Republican comrades were consuming so much more federal pork than the Democrats ever did Dick Armey replied: 'To the victors go the spoils.'

And 'we the people' are left with nothing but a bunch of old teabags.

Republican Hypocrites Feed at the Gov't Teat

Sen. Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama claims that President Barack Obama's stimulus plan is nothing but "socialism".

"We're going down a road where it's unchartered. We're going down a road to disaster. We've never seen this kind of spending - ever. There's got to be some other way better than what we're doing. Not the socialist way, but to try and get our free market working again."

Shelby proceeded to vote against the stimulus package. He was not, however opposed to procuring a big hunk of that socialist "pork" for Alabama.

Federal funds the senator has procured for his state since January 2009

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01/29/09
Shelby: Applications Available for Delta Regional Authority Grants
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01/28/09
Shelby Announces $317,188 for the University of Alabama at Birmingham
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01/23/09
Shelby Announces $ 54,600 for Town of Midway
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01/23/09
Shelby Announces $2.7 Million for the University of Alabama at Birmingham
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01/23/09
Shelby Announces $286,962 for Center Point Fire Department
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01/23/09
Shelby Announces $44,650 for Pittsview Volunteer Fire Department
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01/23/09
Shelby Announces $967,082 for Daphne Fire Department
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01/23/09
Shelby Announces $202,089 for Skinnerton Volunteer Fire Department
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01/23/09
Shelby Announces $25,120 for Fairview Volunteer Fire Department
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01/23/09
Shelby Announces $10,175 for Sprott Volunteer Fire Department
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01/22/09
Shelby Announces $1.2 Million for Geneva Municipal Airport
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01/22/09
Shelby Announces $2.1 Million for Dothan Regional Airport
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01/22/09
Shelby Announces $235,460 for Camden Municipal Airport
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01/22/09
Shelby Announces $1.4 Million for Mobile Regional Airport
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01/22/09
SCHUMER, SHELBY ANNOUNCE NEW LEGISLATION TO CRACK DOWN ON WALL STREET FRAUDSTERS
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01/16/09
Shelby Announces $60,000 for Magnolia Springs Volunteer Fire Department
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01/16/09
Shelby Announces Over $1.5 Million for Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport
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01/16/09
Shelby Announces $153,060 for City of Arab Fire Department
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01/16/09
Shelby Announces $67,029 for Collirene Volunteer Fire Department
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01/16/09
Shelby Announces $85,629 for Cottonwood Fire Department
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01/16/09
Shelby Announces $273,639 for Brewton Municipal Airpor
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01/16/09
Shelby Announces $324,622 to Baldwin County Airports
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01/16/09
Shelby Announces $355,870 to Coffee County Airports
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01/16/09
Shelby Announces $380,278 for Mobile County Airports
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01/16/09
Shelby Announces $352,926 to Henry County Airports
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01/16/09
Shelby Announces $28,000 for Alabama Historical Commission

The total funds for Alabama comes to well over $13 million and that is just for January, 2009. In November, 2008, Shelby appropriated over $14 million for programs in Alabama including more than $6 million for Alabama Head Start Programs.

Kit Bond: "Against" the Stimulus bill until he's "All for It"


They talk a good game but even the so called "free-market" Republicans no better than to risk a second Depression. From "Bits of News"

The First Hunger March

Empty is the cupboard,
no pillow for the head,
we are the hunger children
who cry for milk and bread.
We are the hunger children
who cry for milk and bread.
We are the worker's children
who must, who must be fed.

- song that was sang by children
at the gates of the White House, Thanksgiving Day, 1932, shortly before they were arrested

I'm spending my nights at the flophouse
I'm spending my days on the street
I'm looking for work and I find none
I wish I had something to eat

- the popular 'Soup Song' sung to the tune of 'My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean'

Local hunger marches started on April 1, 1931, when a large group of unemployed forced their way into the Maryland state legislature to demand relief. Later that month 3,000 turned out in Columbus, Ohio. In May 15,000 unemployed marched on Lansing, Michigan. By the end of summer there had been 40 hunger marches in states all over the country.

Despite this growing movement, it was business as usual in Washington. A few of the more bold Democrats proposed modest relief packages which Hoover immediately vetoed. It required someone outside of the two parties to take this movement to the next level, and that someone was Herbert Benjamin.

Herbert Benjamin was an unapologetic communist until his dying day. A few months before he had returned from Moscow where he had received training on organizing the unemployed.

Unlike Coxey's Army in 1894, this hunger strike would have 1,670 "delegates" rather than being a ragtag group. Columns of unemployed represented by all races would leave from Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, and St. Louis, and all arrive on December 6. Marches from the west coast would leave earlier and meet up in either Chicago or St. Louis.

Each delegate wore an armband that said "National Hunger March, December 7, 1931", which was the day that Congress would open for a new session. There were ten marchers to a truck as well as a smaller car that would run ahead looking for hostile crowds and/or police. While the media and local governments were extremely hostile to the marchers (Mayor Mackey of Philadelphia advised them to "pass by" his city. Hartford closed its streets to them), the public often turned out in large numbers to cheer them on and protect them from the local police. The marches were given $40 for all expenses, but frequently local communities would furnish them food and medical care free of charge, or at cost.

All of the columns reached Washington D.C. on December 6, as scheduled. Both the Hoover Administration and the media was in an uproar.

Three days later, however, 14 persons appeared outside the White House as "hunger marchers." In a cold drizzle they unfurled their banners ("Mr. Hoover, We Demand Food & Lodging," "Mr. Hoover You Have Money for the Entertainment of the Fascist Assassin Grandi."). Promptly the police pounced on them, arrested all 14 for parading without a permit.
[...]
Next day the U. S. Secret Service paid Leader Benjamin the compliment of taking his "hunger march" seriously and thus helping to publicize it throughout the land. Chief Moran declared that his sleuths had learned the march was really a Communist demonstration on a large scale. "Marchers" from all parts of the country would be brought to Washington in 1,144 trucks, 92 automobiles. They would be lodged and fed along the way. They would have medical attention. They would defend themselves with stones. They would be organized in military fashion. They would petition the President and Congress for relief for the jobless. They would make trouble. Only one thing in their plans did Chief Moran fail to ascertain and that was where the money was coming from to finance such a large undertaking. As usual, Moscow was publicly suspected.

"The marchers were of several races, mostly whites and negroes, but among them were several scores of yellow men from various climes. Many women appeared in the column."

- Daily Mirror

1,000 police showed up for the march, as well as 1,000 Marines, and an unknown number of secret service. Another 500 police were in the Capitol. Police were armed with shotguns and machine guns.

Vice-President Curtis sent out word that no marchers could enter the Capitol grounds carrying placards that were critical of the president. [Hmmm. Doesn't that sound a little familiar?] Congress refused to let them speak in the Capitol. Neither Democrat nor Republican heard their demands. In response the demonstrators sang the "Internationale". President Hoover also refused to see them. According to the Washington Herald, the marches who were arrested were beaten. The march then went to the AFL Headquarters to meet with President William Green, who promptly berated the marchers.

The first hunger march was over and the marchers left Washington. However, it had forced the media to actually report on the hunger problem in America, something it was loath to do. It also pushed Congress to propose relief legislation, which the Hoover Administration promptly defeated.

Fooling US Twice

Europe's neocons are abandoning the laissez-faire ship. From Spiegel Int: In a speech before the European Parliament on Tuesday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy suggested that European countries establish their own sovereign wealth funds to take ownership stakes in key industries.

"I don't want European citizens to wake up in a few months and discover that European businesses are now owned in capitals outside of Europe."

Sarkozy's use of the term "sovereign wealth funds" was deliberate. Most sovereign wealth funds are controlled by petrocash rich nations, like Russia and the Gulf states, and there are concerns they could go on a shopping spree and snap up Europe's tradition-steeped companies.

There is something to be said for tradition. While credit for steering the financial markets away from the Paulson poison pill has largely gone to the U.K.'s Gordon Brown, it was the Germans led by Angela Merkel who were able to move quickly and stem the debacle. You see the Germans remember what the pirate House of Morgan and his cabal of international thieves did to them in 1931 and unlike US they weren't about to be fooled again.

[the Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul writes that "the first three aims of the corporatist movement in Germany, Italy and France during the 1920s, those that went on to become part of the Fascist experience, were “to shift power directly to economic and social interest groups, to push entrepreneurial initiative in areas normally reserved for public bodies” and to “obliterate the boundaries between public and private interest.”]

The Germans remember the economic disaster that fomented the fury leading to WWII. For them "nationalization" is not a dirty word. It's about looking out for "your own":
As private banks falter under the financial crisis, state-owned Sparkasse savings banks are enjoying a flood of new business as Germans deposit their money in the institutions based on a traditional bank model.According to a survey conducted by the mass-market daily deposits at Germany's 443 savings banks have increased by more than 1 billion euros ($1.4 billion) in the past two weeks. The country's largest Sparkasse, Hamburg's Haspa, has reported new deposits totaling more than 500 million euros. Cologne's savings bank is also enjoying a sharp rise with 355 million euros in new deposits, reported on Friday, Oct. 10. --Deutsche-Welle

The German/English move forced Wall Street's hand-- "socialize US banks" or see depositors rush to invest in an array of Europe's government guaranteed banks. So much for the market's ability to "self-regulate".

What this current financial crisis should make transparently clear is that commercial contracts depend first and foremost on the contracts we commit to as a society. And yet, one senses that in this country that simple reality continues to be resisted. That every American did not fall down laughing when John McCain suggested that by offering tax-cuts to working people Barack Obama was practicing "socialism" only demonstrates how brainwashed we have become to believe that the rich produce wealth independently.

Fortunately there are still a few sane heads who have a grasp on monetary policy. The Paulson plan was justly criticized by those, like former Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill who simply called it ‘crazy.’ But their voices were largely drowned out by the market fundamentalists like Thomas Friedman and Phil Gramm, the neo-cons' true believers. It seems Americans are a very dogged lot once an idea has been drilled inside our heads, no matter how outlandish.

Eighty years ago this is what H. L. Mencken had to say about the attitude of the jury in the famous Scopes Trial: "the Fundamentalist mind, running in a single rut for fifty years, is now quite unable to comprehend dissent from its basic superstitions"

That is the intellectual rut that our financial leaders have left us to wallow in after thirty years of Reaganomics. As Andrew Lahde, the Santa Monica, Calif., hedge fund manager who made an 870 percent gain last year by betting on the subprime mortgage collapse, writes in his farewell letter to his investors: "Those who run our investment houses, banks and government-- the low-hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking,” he said of our oligarchic class.

“These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America.”

The End of the Trickle Down Era is not going to be pretty. As Chris Hedges reports in "The Idiots Who Rule America" after compelling the working class (by stifling wages) to borrow beyond their means, Washington's laissez-faire policy has left government largely impotent-- Which means everyone loses. Now real wages have dropped, the national treasury has been drained for speculative commercial interests, while consumption, the reliably profligate engine of our economy, is withering. September retail sales are tumbling, 160,000 jobs were lost last month, adding to the three-quarters of a million lost just this year.

In short-- the pain is just beginning. But we'll be damned as "Anti-American" if we dare whisper the words: "democratic socialism." Better to pretend the Great Depression never happened.