All I’ve got to say is “Yes!”

One story in Thursday’s New York Times pleased me a great deal. Let me say that more strongly: “I took great pleasure from one story in Thursday’s New York Times.”
by Charlie Leck

Here’s the headline to a story in the New York Times, by Ashley Parker, that just really pleased me: “Little to Show for Cash Flood by Big Donors!”

I made that neat move that Tiger Woods makes after he sinks a 35 foot putt to win a golf tournament; that is, I pumped my fist with great vigor into the grand space of emptiness before me.

“Yes!” I shouted with great exuberance. “Yes!”

Sheldon Adelson was one of the big losers! The New York Times calls him “the biggest single donor in political history.”

“Yes!”

It appears that Mr. Adelson supported eight candidates “with tens of millions of dollars” through Super PACs. All of them lost on Tuesday!

“Yes!”

Karl Rove was the organizational genius who pulled all these mega-rich folks together and tutored them on how to funnel their money – perhaps as much as 300 million dollars – into various Super PACs that would then spend the money on behalf of the chosen conservative candidates. Rove has egg on his face today – egg that covers up completely that shit-eating grin that normal spreads across his kisser.

“Yes!”

One of those mega-millionaires spent approximately 100 million of her own dollars dollars on her own campaign. Linda McMahon, a Republican from Connecticut, spent the money on her own candidacy for the U.S. Senate. She lost!

“Yes!”

“The bulk of that outside money came from a relatively small group of wealthy donors, unleashed by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which allowed unlimited contributions to super PACs. Harold Simmons, a Texas industrialist, gave $26.9 million to super PACs backing Mr. Romney and Republican candidates for the Senate. Joe Ricketts, the owner of the Chicago Cubs, spent close to $13 million to bankroll a super PAC attacking Mr. Obama over federal spending.

“Bob Perry, a Texas homebuilder, poured more than $21 million into super PACs active in the presidential race and the Senate battles in Florida and Virginia, where Democrats narrowly prevailed. A donor network marshaled by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire industrialists and conservative philanthropists, reportedly sought to raise $400 million for tax-exempt groups that are not required to disclose their spending.”

“Yes!”

“‘Unlimited contributions and secret money in American politics have resulted in the past in scandal and the corruption of government decisions,’ said Fred Wertheimer, the president of Democracy 21, a watchdog group. ‘This will happen again in the future.’”

“Indeed!”

On Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal, a piece written by Karl Rove placed the blame for the election loss on a number of malefactors; like, Hurricane Sandy (it’s possible we could identify that culprit more precisely as God), the editors of the nation’s major and influential newspapers (e.g., the New York Times, the Washington Post and the LA Times), that working stiff who captured Mitt Romney on a cell phone video talking about the 47 percent he didn’t care about, dirty tricks by Obama’s campaign and Mitt Romney (of course). Rove accepts none of the blame.

In a tweet on Wednesday, his royal hindass, Donald J. Trump wrote: “Congrats to @Karl Rove on blowing $400 million this cycle. Every race @CrossroadsGPS ran ads in, the Republicans lost. What a waste of money!”

“Yes!”

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Bill Moyers and Howard Zinn

A nephew of mine, who is on the staff of Boston University, sent me an extraordinary video. I tell you, as I introduce it, I know I have never written a more important blog!
by Charlie Leck

Bill Moyers and Howard Zinn are two of a few guys who, during my life, I have admired so very much!

Certainly you are all familiar with Bill Moyers and his extraordinary accomplishments as a journalist! Moyers mixes wisdom and remarkable humor as well as any man I’ve ever read or listened to. He writes and lectures as well as any journalist and much better than most. I know no man or woman in broadcast journalism who is as committed to integrity. Moyers has a passion for justice and truth that is totally immense!

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you know about my deep respect for Zinn, the author of The Peoples History of the United States. I’ve written here about the book a couple of times and quoted from it often. It always stays at the ready on my desk.

Recently, a nephew of mine, who is the Director of Foreign Student Affairs and Studies at Boston University, emailed me a video that he thought I might appreciate and enjoy. It was of Bill Moyers’ appearance last week as a speaker at the Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture at Boston University, where Zinn had been a professor of Political Science before his death.

It is not a short video clip. It is a thorough and complete reproduction of Moyer’s lecture at Boston University just last week. In the spirit of Zinn, Moyers deals with the current American economy and looks at its causes and continuing devastating effect on ordinary people as Howard Zinn might have looked at the subject – from the view point of the people impacted by these hard times.

If you want to understand a new possibility about this economic crash and how the American business community might not be all that interested in ending these problems, you might want to watch and listen to this lecture.

Moyers raises the question: “Do the super-rich need the rest of America?” Do they even care? Do they need to end economic bad times?

Has America become a plutocracy? If you don’t know what that is, pull out your dictionary because it vitally important we understand what is happening in America and what this last election was very much about. If you can’t spare the entire time to listen to Moyers, at least go to about the 28 minute mark and listen for 10 or 15 minutes about what has happened in America. Then, please understand that the only way we shall deal with these plutonomists is to rise up as a people and retake our nation through the ballot box – throwing out the selfish and cruel politicians who represent, in reality, only the wealthy.

Radical? You will call it that UNLESS you go ahead and listen to the argument that Moyers makes: “Plutocracy and Democracy don’t mix!”

He introduces us to the book, The Mendacity of Hope, by Roger D. Hodges, who, in this book, explains what happens when “…the private ends of a narrow faction succeed in capturing the engines of democracy.” I know I am going out to purchase that book today. Here’s a Washington Post review of it.

The lecture and Bill Moyers held me spell-bound for 70 minutes. If you care to understand the frightening plutocratic movement that has taken over America, you really ought to listen to it and then, as Howard Zinn might say, rise up! For, we are the people!

Here’s where you’ll find it…

Have a note pad at the ready as you listen and watch, and take notes. Then, put the notes somewhere where you’ll constantly see them. They will move you to get involved in the 2012 election.

At the beginning of his lecture, Moyers quotes the closing words from Howard Zinn’s last book, The Bomb.

“We must act on what we feel and think, here and now, for human flesh and sense, against the abstractions of duty and obedience.”

I know I must! I cannot stand aside and allow what the founders of modern conservative politics plan for America. The shadow party, invented by Karl Rove and his disciples, has taken over America and democracy is endangered.

“We are losing our democracy to a different system,” warns Moyers.

Now, if for a second, you think you’ve not got 70 minutes (a 45 minute Q&A follows it) to sit and watch such a lecture, I will beg you to give up a couple of television shows or a football or basketball game and come to grips with what is happening to America. You will never be politically the same. You will understand how America has been fooled and how it has lost its sense of government “for, by and of the people.”

“…even the Tea Partiers, when they wake up and realize they have been sucker-punched by the very people who have funded them, are going to be madder than hell.”

If you do watch this lecture, I beg for your comments about it!

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Solution to America’s Political Log-Jam

Has it always been like this?
by Charlie Leck

A good friend wrote a long email to me in response to a number of my blogs about the dominance of politics in the federal legislative process these days. He posed a convincing argument that it “has always been thus so.” He used the process of appointing Supreme Court Justices as his prime example. He pointed to nominees all the way back to Abe Fortes during the Lyndon Johnson administration and G. Harold Carswell by President Richard Nixon. He also points to the Senate hearing over the appointment of Clarence Thomas by President George H. W. Bush (or George the First, as I like to call him).

I wasn’t nuts about my friend’s reasoning here. Abe Fortes was turned down by the Senate for reasons that went way beyond political. Fortes had some serious skeletons in his closet and even the strength and power of Lyndon Johnson could not save the nomination. Carswell’s appointment by Richard Nixon was an extraordinary mistake. Carswell had a history of supporting segregation and he wasn’t very strong on women’s rights either. His rejection by a highly pressured Senate (45 to 51) went far beyond partisan politics.

I don’t get my friend’s point about Clarence Thomas. Certainly there was a very contentious battle in the Senate over his nomination, but there ought to have been; and the vote did come down to straight political lines and that was too bad. However, I remember the Thomas hearings with great clarity and there was genuine hand-wringing and gut-wrenching on both sides of the aisle during those hearings. Thomas should not have been nominated. The Senate had to decide about embarrassing the President by rejecting him or allowing a candidate with a questionable moral history to take a seat on the highest bench in the land. In the end, there was great torment among a good number of Republicans who voted for Thomas. His confirmation was one of the silliest and bleakest moments in American political history.

Remember, the recent appointment of Sonja Sotomeyor to the Supreme Court was approved by several members of the Republican Party.

Yet, these briefs moments of political bi-partisanship do not change my argument.

To make my point one more time, the sharpness of political division that we are witnessing in America today has no historical precedent in this nation. This has become the standard modus operandi in Congress and in elections to national office.

President Obama has unsuccessfully tried to break down this system in order to fulfill his dream that would establish a Congress that really works for the people and not for political parties. Blame is to be placed pretty evenly on each side of the aisle and the current log-jam looks like it will not be broken up in the next decade. My argument several blogs ago was simply that the current political mood is one created under the direction of Karl Rove during the George W. Bush (George the Second) administration.

Karl Rove is a name that history will remember and I don’t believe history, in its judgments, will be very kind to him.

It is more interesting for me to consider how history will treat Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. He has a sharp and informed legal mind. He writes well. He is philosophically unyielding and unbending. Yet, he is an angry and tormented man. He has been on the bench for nearly twenty years and is yet to ask a single question during the legal presentations before the justices. Is that normal? A few of his dissents, such as the one that argues that cruel and unusual punishment does not apply to prisoners, leave me shaking my head in disbelief.

I remain adamant on my point that America has never in its history been as strongly and unyieldingly partisan in its politics as it is at this particular moment. I was naïve enough to believe that Obama might bring some light to Washington and change the current system, but I was emphatically mistaken. The Republican intention has been made clear. It is too embarrass the President and to make sure he cannot be reelected.

This has happened before in American politics, but never to the cruel and perplexing extent that it happens now.

Put simply, political parties are too powerful and have too much sway in determining who will run and who will win in American politics. Legislators, who want to get reelected, are afraid of crossing the Party even though they may, at times, disagree with a stance the Party has taken.

Perhaps the solution to this is strict and harsh term limits so that legislators will not always be worrying about reelection. I like the idea of a limit of two terms for Senators and three for members of the House.

Crash

I wrote a blog yesterday, for posting today, that got whacked by my computer. It won't open, as a computer message tells me, "because there are problems with the contents." I'll take that as a sign. It was pretty sarcastic and Karl Rove probably doesn't need any more bashing – or, more precisely, you don't need to read any more Karl Rove bashing. The whole point was that this effete failure has the nerve to call Senator Obama an elitist. Can you imagine?

Tomorrow I hope to post a blog about education among minorities in America. I've read hundreds of pages of reports, analysis and opinions of which I'm trying to make some sense. This is a serious situation. It's going to take something revolutionary to deal with the problem. [Charlie Leck]