Glenn Greedwald previously was a constitutional law attorney in the US, he now spends his time as an author and a full-time blogger on Salon.com. If you’re looking for a sober, concise, and rational approach to today’s issues, such as terrorism and the health care debacle, you need look no further then Glenn’s writings on Salon.com.

I have read Glenn’s writings on Salon.com for about 4 months now and must say he is probably one of the most logical and intelligent thinkers on the internet . He’s currently doing a speaking tour and has been on The Rachel Maddow Show, Democracynow, and Dylan Ratigan’s show. I highly recommend checking out these videos as well as Glenn’s writings on Salon.com.

Glenn Greedwald on The Rachel Maddow Show

Glenn Greedwald on Democracynow

Glenn Greedwald on Dylan Ratigan’s show

Glenn Greedwald on MSNBC’s Morning Joe

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Noam Chomsky is an institute professor emeritus at MIT and political activistcritic. Although shunned by the main-stream media, Chomsky has continued to be a echoing voice of reason for the past 50 years.

Noam recently appeared on The Real News Network for a 4 part interview on the economy and democracy. During the 3rd part, Chomsky broke down the root of the problem with the US heath care system. Here is the video of the excerpt, as well as the transcript.

Watch the full 4 part interview

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Deregulation is at the heart of the current economic crisis. Unfortunately, we learned this lesson too late, due to the fact that our willingness to listen to the voices of reason has been nearly non existent since the 1980′s.

Thomas Geoghegan is a Chicago based lawyer and has recently written a article for Harper’s Magazine titled “Infinite Debt: How Unlimited Interest Rates Destroyed the Economy.” In his article Geoghegan explains the fine details of how our economy went from being based off of real interest on labor, to unreasonable interest on debt.

Thomas also recently did a interview on Democracynow.org where he explains more of his article and what he hopes the new Obama administration will do to help alleviate our current crisis. I highly recommend this video if you are interested in learning more about the types of deregulation that have plagued our economy since the 1960′s.

Voices of reasons are what we need, not politics and greed.

Watch Thomas Geoghegan’s interview on Democracynow.org

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This is the second session of a epic discussion on the way public opinion is shaped in America today.

There You Go Again: Orwell Comes to America invites historians, linguists, cognitive experts, journalists, government officials, and political consultants to assess the current state of public discourse — and journalism’s response to it. The panels explore the past, present, and future of deceptive political speech, and assess what can be done to bring more realism and honesty into the conduct of America’s public affairs. – http://www.mapdigital.com/orwell/

Part II. DECEIVING IMAGES: THE SCIENCE OF MANIPULATION

Speakers include

George Lakoff, Co-Founder and Senior Fellow, Rockridge Institute and the Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics, UC Berkeley ·

Frank Luntz, political pollster and consultant; author of Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear·

Drew Westen, professor of psychology/psychiatry and behavioral sciences, Emory University; author of The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.

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This is a short clip from a excellent speech by Noam Chomsky. This clip focus’s on Obama’s picks for his White House staff and some insight on to Obama’s plans with the country. You can view the rest of the video at Democracynow.org.

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Alan Greenspan, in an interview on Democracy Now, discusses the current issues of the Iraq war, Social Security, tax cuts, and his work as economic adviser under the Clinton, Bush, and GW Bush administrations. To view the complete interview, go to democracynow.org

Somewhere towards the middle of the interview, Noami Klein brought up that Bush administration tax cuts coincided conveniently with Greenspan’s advocacy for privatization of Social Security, Klein suggested that these policies must conjunct into some sort of ideology. In response, Alan Greenspan said:

Well, first of all, ideology is not what I hold. I try to learn what are the facts, and I let my opinions, judged on the facts, not by some preconception, which I regret is what ideology as a notion means.

So assuming that he doesn’t work from the “big picture” and that tax cuts along with privatizing Social Security were two different objectives, they certainly do generate an ideology whether or not Greenspan doesn’t want to be labeled… He is essentially calling for the scaling back of government within the economy and leaning towards the privatized sector rather than taxes. But let’s look at more that has built this case…

He has also worked as the head of the Federal Reserve during the Reagan administration, and during his time there, we saw the income inequality rise. The ratio between CEO pay and their workers rose 43 percent. Amy Goodman asked if Greenspan shared some of the responsibility through his policies of deregulation, privatization, and free trade.

Greenspan responds by saying the large factor of income inequality sprouts from a poor educational system in a economic time where demand for skilled labor increases the pay between skilled an unskilled laborers. He said in addition, that he wants to open American borders to bring in workers from foreign countries and hence, drive down the wages in order to lessen the gap.

Ok, the average left-winger would notice right away that CEO pay is not the same category as “skilled workers’ pay”. Skilled worker would be upper-middle class to upper-class range, meaning somewhere between 60K – 250K a year. CEO is the range of over 1 million dollars a year. So to say that us laborers will have to compete with foreign countries to lessen the gap of wages will only mean wage suppression without change in CEO pay. In fact, it would increase the gap between CEO pay and worker’s pay, no?

The second thing is that Greenspan doesn’t even talk about improving the educational system. Although personally, I think if everyone did receive a college education, it doesn’t mean everyone will start making more… the nature of capitalism doesn’t permit everyone to make the same amount. Greenspan blames poor education and prescribes opening the borders for wage competition.. doesn’t sound like public interest to me.

Noami Klein goes on to mention the IMF and its policies towards third world countries. She points out that the policies that Greenspan advocates are similar, and it has failed to lift the poverty in those countries. So his policies would not improve the conditions of the average worker in the US either. Populism was systematically removed by the CIA, and Greenspan cannot rest his argument to blame populism for the failures of the IMF’s policies.

According to Greenspan, the problem is in short-term gains that cause damage in the long run.

Greenspan, towards the end, asked if Naomi Klein was implying socialism or populism in the interview, and then finally asked, “…what are you changing in favor of?” Sounds like he does think rather ideologically himself.

Ideology can go two ways – it can sprout out of facts, experience, and idealism (in other words, the way it is now, and the way it could/should be); it can be a perspective that makes someone not surprised at some news stories. Or, it could be a doctrine that one adopts and filters everything through. Y’know… believing is seeing, right?

Klein is obviously the former definition, for she has a lot of facts in her research. In an interview where she asks Greenspan the questions, it is only the process to narrow down the questions to find out what he thinks on certain facts. He started getting defensive towards the end – a nightmare on his conscious resembling true public opinion?

The facts revealed by Greenspan himself… find out more details on the War on Iraq, his ideological policies, his book, and his actual accomplishments at work. He lowered interest rates before the sub-prime crisis, continues to advocate the sub-prime market, he sells contracts to private firms.. and more! In particular, see why! Go look it up on DemocracyNow.org, and think for yourself!

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This is a video from DemocracyNow with Ralph Nader speaking about what he thinks of Obama’s win and Obama’s selection of Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff.

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Strange how the top articles on Nader post-election give him such a bad rep. The majority of people who care to vote (which is about 45% of the country) think so lowly of him, especially after his challenging commentary towards Obama… Will Obama be an “uncle tom” or “uncle sam”?

Nader has been blamed for allowing another Bush term, is regarded as a “loser” for running 3 times for presidency, and should “get out of the way” when Obama is trying to pave the way for change. I have found many comments in response to these articles, and the most encompassing response I’ve found was posted by “Kim”:

“…In the state that decisively made Bush president over Gore (Florida), a poll of Nader voters was done to determine who they would have voted for had they not voted for Nader. 25% said they would have voted for Gore, 38% would have voted for Bush, and the rest would not have voted at all.

It is so easy to blame Nader for all of the failings of George W. Bush. How about blaming the millions of idiots who voted for him? How about blaming Gore for not being the candidate that people wanted? How about blaming the man himself for being the worst leader a “democratic” nation has ever seen? It was during the election between Gore and Bush that I first heard the phrase “voting for the lesser of two evils”, and “voting for the candidate you dislike the least”. In retrospect, we all wish that the election had gone a different way, but at the time, not many people liked either.

And all that Ralph Nader has done his entire career is work for a change that America needs. Look up vehicle safety standards and Ralph Nader… We wouldn’t have crash tests or air bags or safety belts were it not for him. All he wants is to make Americans completely independent from foreign oil while being environmentally savvy through the use of alternative fuels, give people a minimum wage that they can actually live on, ensure that ALL people have quality healthcare, and stop illegal wars that never should have been waged to begin with.

So go ahead and blame Ralph Nader for the problems that America faces now, after 8 years of failed policy, because it is easier to blame him than it is to blame the people truly at fault… The American people.”

I wanted to share this quote with you because I feel it important to at least combat some of the bad myths out there. Thank you “Kim” for posting, and I hope people out there will go look for themselves at what is going on.. and TESTIFY!

As for the “uncle tom” or “uncle sam” statement, I agree with Nader. Obama being the biggest receiver of corporate campaign money in US history, while appealing to the country by the color of his skin, he can be defined as an “uncle tom”. Obama, also a big supporter of increasing the military budget and Israel’s military occupation, can be regarded as an “uncle sam”.

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Introduction
With the failure of markets to factor in external costs, the government has to regulate the economy in order to maintain fair practice as well as uphold the common interest. The Great Depression during the 30s resulted in massive reforms within the economy in order to stabilize it’s boom-bust cycles, and gave the state more control over financial markets (ex: separating people’s savings accounts from the stock market, or drafting a charter on the savings and loan associations).

The recent trend in the agenda of the White House has been deregulation. And with that, now we are seeing recession and insecurity in the national economy. In fact, we find it historically all over the globe – check out the IMF and how it deteriorated Third World Countries’ development and policy autonomy. Look at the events that led up to the Great Depression. Look at foreign financial investment and how it makes one person wealthy by borrowing from a low interest-rate country and invest it into a high interest-rate country. Only the general public, working 40+ hours a week stand to lose. Capital controls are necessary for more reasons than one.

The recent trend of deregulation also goes hand in hand with the framework of Free Trade. This is important because many of our politicians lean towards this idea written by Adam Smith in the 1800s. Reviewing the economic history of America, its success is hardly due to Free Trade but more so with Protectionist policies. Not only does the market economy cause and fail to respond to recessions, we are now in a new era of capitalism, where we have corporations, globalization, and deficit spending. State intervention and regulation are necessary so that we ensure that everything valuable invested into this way of economic life does not go unstable.

And now here’s the article from Chomsky!

Markets have inherent and well-known inefficiencies. One factor is failure to calculate the costs to those who do not participate in transactions. These ‘externalities’ can be huge. That is particularly true for financial institutions.

Their task is to take risks, calculating potential costs for themselves. But they do not take into account the consequences of their losses for the economy as a whole.

Hence the financial market ‘under prices risk’ and is ‘systematically inefficient,’ as John Eatwell and Lance Taylor wrote a decade ago, warning of the extreme dangers of financial liberalization and reviewing the substantial costs already incurred – and also proposing solutions, which have been ignored.

The threat became more severe when the Clinton administration repealed the Glass-Steagall act of 1933, thus freeing financial institutions ‘to innovate in the new economy,’ in Clinton’s words –and also ‘to self-destruct, taking down with them the general economy and international confidence in the US banking system,’ financial analyst Nomi Prins adds.

The unprecedented intervention of the Fed may be justified or not in narrow terms, but it reveals, once again, the profoundly undemocratic character of state capitalist institutions, designed in large measure to socialize cost and risk and privatize profit, without a public voice.

That is, of course, not limited to financial markets. The advanced economy as a whole relies heavily on the dynamic state sector, with much the same consequences with regard to risk, cost, profit, and decisions, crucial features of the economy and political system.

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For those of us who’ve already seen Zeitgeist the movie, or are not holders of faith despite their parent’s upbringing, this movie does not bring anything new to the table. Bill Maher spends a lot of time to arrive at his conclusion – religion sounds like a fairytale to a rational man, and faith goes along the lines of psychosis… religion makes people submissive to leaders, and that’s a big threat in our politics today.

Ultimately, this movie has a particular audience. The audience who has already been down this path of questioning will find it long/entertaining, and the audience who is religious will not even watch past the first 5 minutes. Those who are in between, who call themselves ‘religious’ but don’t go to church, might find this insightful, as the questions he asks brings up a good way of approaching a mythology that captivates a lot of people.

There were a few good moments of hearing other people talk – for example a religious Senator whom Maher interviews, says a few things about politics in this country. Maher affirms with him that out of 10 commandments, there are only 2 that were relevant. So he poses this question, “what else should we add in order to make it relevant for today (such as don’t rape, etc)”, and the Senator doesn’t reply with anything…

These parts are similar to an Ali G interview – good shit. But you know, Maher isn’t Ali G in terms of style. Although in this movie, he questions both to prove a point as well as satisfy a curiosity, this movie was more like a written essay. He has his anecdote, his thesis, evidence, and commentary… then finally to a conclusion. I must say though, his choice in interviewees were pretty impressive, given both the accessibility as well as his public profile.

It was pretty entertaining at times because of this, but for the most part, it is difficult to get most people to talk about faith because they get defensive. Maher points this mechanism out – he says that it appeared most people will just say they know something is true because they “know it’s true” – hence, avoiding to answer further questions.

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