Look Out for the Blimp That Doesn’t Blink

I’ve always wondered: What was the guy who invented bagpipes really trying to make?

Well, at least that wheezing, whining invention turned out to be merely irritating, not actually dangerous. Leave it to the Dr. Strangelovian schemers at the Pentagon, however, to come up with an invention that is both irritating and truly dangerous, as well as being a galloping rip-off of us taxpayers.

It’s a blimp. But not at all like the friendly “Snoopy” dirigible that MetLife deploys at various sporting events. This thing is 20 times larger and is designed to be an eye in the sky, floating12 miles above the Earth, to provide unblinking surveillance of whatever and whomever the authorities want watched, including you and me.

Unlike spy planes, the Pentagon’s unmanned super-snooper can “park” anywhere in the sky and stay focused on groups or individuals for days, months or years, capturing every second of their comings, goings and doings. With its giant antenna and sophisticated, high-definition radar system, it can monitor tiny details over a vast area, linking this unrestricted flow of information to government computers that form digital dossiers on those being watched.

“It is absolutely revolutionary,” gushed Werner J.A. Dahm, the Air Force scientist overseeing the project. “It is constant surveillance, uninterrupted.”

How joyous.

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Pusillanimity Plus Stupidity Equals More Wall Street Greed

Once again, we are faced with the question that has long bedeviled political analysts and barstool pundits everywhere: Is the pusillanimity of Democrats worse than the stupidity of Republicans?

The question arises because of a curious vote last week in the House of Representatives to restrict the bonus money going to those nimble-fingered financial whizzes at Wall Street firms being bailed out by you and me.

It was curious because there had already been a vote to do this in March. Back then, after we commoners learned that Merrill Lynch, AIG and others were merrily tossing million-dollar bonus checks to their top executives (even as they pleaded for Washington to rescue their sorry butts), a genuine populist furor swept across the country, sales of pitchforks spiked and Washington simply had to act.

We will “do everything we can to get those bonuses back,” promised President Barack Obama, who coolly explained that he was seething inside. Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley went further, barking that AIG’s bonus-grabbers should do the honorable thing. Return the money? No, fumed the senator, they should commit hari-kari. So, last month, the House voted overwhelmingly to reclaim the bonus money by putting a near total tax on it.

Then, however, pusillanimity and stupidity settled over Washington like a blinding fog. Let’s start with the Democrats.

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“Too Big to Fail” Is Too Big — Period

As skiers and backcountry hikers know, a whiteout is a blizzard that’s so intense that those caught in it can’t even see the blizzard.

That’s how I think of the Wall Street bailout now swirling around us. So many trillions of our tax dollars are being blown at the financial giants that we’re blinded by the density of it, unable to see where we are or know what direction we’re headed.

However, one way to get your bearings in this bailout blizzard is to focus on the central point that both the bailors (Washington) and the bailees (Wall Street) keep pounding as an irrefutable truth that everyone simply has to accept — namely, the institutions being rescued are too big to fail.

Even sheep know to flee when coyotes howl in unison — and we commoners need to confront the absurdity of this “too big” claim, which forms the rationale for the entire diversion of regular people’s money into rich people’s pockets. Wachovia, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Bank of America, AIG — omigosh, cried the Powers That Be, these behemoths are linked to every other behemoth, so if we don’t stuff them with tax dollars … well, we have no choice, because they’re just too big for the government to let fail.

Point No. 1: They have failed. They are kaput. It costs more to buy a snickerdoodle than to buy a share of Citigroup stock. AIG is 80 percent owned by you and I, the taxpayers. These once haughty outfits are insolvent — wards of the state.

Point No. 2: If they’re too big, why should we sustain them? Let’s be clear about something the establishment doesn’t want you and me to understand — these giants did not get so big and interconnected because of natural market forces and free-enterprise efficiencies. They amassed power the old fashioned way: They got the government to give it to them. In the past 20 years or so, they lobbied furiously to get Washington to rig the rules so they could latterly bloat … and float out of control.

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VIDEO: Hightower debates McCain on Afghanistan

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Obama’s Triple Surge Into Afghanistan

Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to war we go!

As President Barack Obama begins winding down the Bush war in Iraq, he is building up his own war farther east. We’re told that it will be a new, expanded, extra-special American adventure in Afghanistan, involving a vigorous surge strategy to “stabilize” this perpetually unstable land.

The initial surge will add 17,000 troops to the 36,000 already there. Then, later this year, there is to be a second troop surge of another 17,000 or so. This mass of soldiers is expected to be deployed to a series of new garrisons to be built in far-flung regions of this impoverished, rural, mostly illiterate warlord state that is ruled by hundreds of fractious, heavily armed tribal leaders. We’re not told how much this escalation will cost, but it will at least double the $2 billion a month that American taxpayers are already shelling out for the Afghan war.

The extra-special part of this effort is to come from a simultaneous “civilian surge” of hundreds of U.S. economic development experts. “What we can’t do,” said Obama in an interview last Sunday, “is think that just a military approach in Afghanistan is going to be able to solve our problems.” To win the hearts (and cooperation) of the Afghan people, this development leg of the operation will try to build infrastructure (roads, schools, etc.), create new crop alternatives to lure hardscrabble farmers out of poppy production and generally lift the country’s bare-subsistence living standard.

What Obama has not mentioned is that, in addition to soldiers and civilians, there is a third surge in his plan: private military contractors. Yes, another privatized army, such as the one in Iraq. There, the Halliburtons, Blackwaters and other war profiteers ran rampant, shortchanging our troops, ripping off taxpayers, killing civilians and doing deep damage to America’s good name.

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Wall Street Arrogance Meets Washington Meekness

Citigroup, once the world’s largest financial conglomerate, has fallen so far down that you can buy a share of its stock today for less than it costs to use one of its ATM machines.

A few days ago, however, Citi caused investors’ hearts to go pitter-patter with joy when it loudly trumpeted that it had operated at a profit in January and February. It just goes to show you what enterprising Wall Street financiers can achieve through hard work, creativity, perseverance — and about $45 billion in taxpayer bailout funds. Think how much larger the profit could’ve been if only taxpayers had done more!

Well, for that, look to American Insurance Group. AIG, the global insurance colossus, is the reigning King of Bailout Nation, having pocketed four bailouts in the past six months, totaling $170 billion.

This was necessary, we’re told, because the insurer’s cocky, unrestrained “financial products” division provided trillions of dollars worth of exotic insurance policies to cover even more exotic investments being made by big banking houses. AIG’s assumption in writing these policies was that there’d be few if any claims made on them. Whoops. Last year, as banks began crashing, the claims started pouring into AIG, which didn’t have the money to pay them off.

The insurer instantly became the poster boy of Wall Street’s “Too Big to Fail” movement, and Washington started shoveling on the cash. Where are our billions going? That’s “proprietary information,” AIG execs told Congress, the media and the taxpayers. Excuse me, hotshot, but our bailout money gives the American public 80 percent ownership of your company. As Rep. Carolyn Maloney told New York Times columnist Gretchen Morgenson: “We are the proprietors now. Taxpayers own the store, and we should be able to see the books.”

Right she is! But both AIG and its federal overseers in the Obama administration are stingy with such details, stiffing the paying public’s obvious right to know.

On March 15, We the People were slapped again with AIG arrogance, learning after the fact that top executives were paying about $100 million in bonuses to the very same geniuses in the financial products division who broke the company. Without awarding bonus pay, explained the honchos, some of “the best and brightest talent” might leave. You don’t need a big nose to smell that garbage, do you?

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Fighting Back in America’s 30-Year Class War

David Brooks was upset. You can tell when this conservative and rather-professorial columnist for The New York Times gets upset, because his words almost sag with disappointment — you can practically hear the tsk-tsks and the heavy sighs in each paragraph. When most commentators on the right see things that offend them, they get snarling mad; Brooks gets sad.

What saddened Brother Brooks this time was Barack Obama’s budget. In a recent column, he noted that the $3.6 trillion total is “gargantuan” (we columnists are paid to make keen observations like that), but what really upset him was that the tax burden to finance universal health care, energy independence and other big initiatives in Obama’s budget “is predicated on a class divide.”

With heavy sighs, Brooks expressed great despair that “no new burdens will fall on 95 percent of the American people,” adding with a tsk-tsk that “all the costs will be borne by the rich and all benefits redistributed downward.”

Leaving aside the fact that such things as health-care coverage for every American and a booming green energy economy will benefit the rich as well as the rest of us, Brooks’ column was echoing a prevalent theme in all of the right’s attacks on Obama’s economic proposals: Class War! Indeed, the Times’ columnist even suggested (sadly) that Obama’s budget was fundamentally un-American: “The U.S. has never been a society riven by class resentment,” he sniffed.

Whoa, professor, get a grip! Better yet, get a good history book (Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” would be an eye-opening place to start). While our schools, media and politicians rarely mention it, America’s history is replete with class rebellions against various moneyed elites who act as though they’re the top dogs and ordinary folks are just a bunch of fire hydrants.

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Interview with Hightower in Buzzflash

There’s a fabulous interview on Buzzflash with Hightower that we couldn’t be prouder of– check it out:

Jim Hightower’s Tips on 21st Century Populism, and Obama’s Rare Opportunity — A BF Interview

BuzzFlash is a big Hightower fan. We’ve heard him speak several times and Jim’s got more Texas one-liners than LBJ after downing a bottle of Scotch, although we don’t suspect Hightower is a drinking man. He’s just a down home populist in a Twitter age. Not that Jim doesn’t know how to make an excellent use of the Internet to get his message across.

[…]

BuzzFlash: First off, as a native Texan, you must be celebrating George W. Bush’s return to your home state.

Jim Hightower: We’re all so very excited. He’s in his little ghetto in Preston Hollow and we’re totally sure that he’ll not be bothering us here in Austin or any other part of Texas.

BuzzFlash: What happened to his Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford?

Jim Hightower: He keeps insisting that he’s going to go back and forth to it pretty much as he did during the Presidency. His ranchero, as I call it, is a curious ranch in the sense that it has no cattle on it. That’s kind of rare in Texas to have a ranch but no livestock whatsoever on it. And in fact, of course, he built that in 1999 when Karl Rove was trying create an image for him as the cowboy president. But Laura doesn’t like the ranch, so I don’t think he’s going to be spending a lot of time there either. Maybe he’ll spend time at the library, I guess, reading his book.

Read the rest of this interview on Buzzflash!

© Jim Hightower. Photos by Jay Harris and Beth Wilson.