Letters to the Editor
Baldie McEagle
Published Letters: 992 Editor's Choice: 3
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Excuses
[Read the article: Consequences for ignoring congressional subpoenas: None]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This week, it's the sudden need for the Dem clowns to get on the juicy "bipartisan" Economic Stimulus bandwagon. OOH, a photo-op with Our Glorious Leader! (Maybe he will massage me!)
What will it be next week? And will our hapless Charlie Browns ever learn that the football never stays put no matter what Lucy says?
It's almost as though these are the same people who in high school believed that anyone outside their bubble environment really gave a shit whether they worked on the Yearbook Committee. I knew such suckers at the teat of authority then, and I have no doubt they are now running the country and running Congress and the Democratic Party. They are desperate to stay in this game they have devised and taken over, and stay "winners." Yet their game is as corrupt as baseball, and their success is worth the same as that of any doper who has been caught and humiliated. They just don't know it.
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What Scooter meant
[Read the article: Consequences for ignoring congressional subpoenas: None]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Nobody is going to buck executive privilege when it's clear to all parties that the USAs serve at the pleasure of the President.
You all thought he meant "US Attorneys."
He meant "the United States of the Americas."
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Beautiful
[Read the article: Consequences for ignoring congressional subpoenas: None]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It is like putting something off until tomorrow and then hoping tomorrow never comes, or shitting in one hand and wishing in the other and seeing which one fills up faster.
I bow to you, Chris Sinnard.
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The State Secrets Act of 1999
[Read the article: Jay Rockefeller's unintentionally revealing comments]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Sure we have one. Here it is:
http://www.era.int/domains/corpus-juris/public_pdf/estonia_state_secrets_act.pdf
Oh, wait, that's Estonia!
Never mind. We'll get one eventually. Got to keep up with the ... Joneses?
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Kit Bond slanders the Troops
[Read the article: Jay Rockefeller's unintentionally revealing comments]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]We've paid billions of dollars for decades to make our armed forces the best in the world, able to take on any threat no matter how daunting.
And Kit Bond says a bunch of suicide bombers could kick their asses?
I'd be pissed if I were them.
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Quibble
[Read the article: Ask Pablo]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]A soda can isn't really "used" for just a few minutes. Its function is to store soda. Consumption of the soda is what takes only a few minutes.
And that's not to excuse the can. How silly we are to put so much effort into storing and distributing sugar water. The finger points to the corporations who manufacture and market the soda for their profit, regardless of any costs (and false "responsibilities") pushed onto states, consumers, and the world around us. To me, this is like allowing mining on public land. If they paid for the effects of their products' manufacturing and distribution and disposal, Coke and Pepsi would be unprofitable with their current business model.
This is an issue that transcends aluminum vs plastic.
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The businessman's idealism
[Read the article: Enemies everywhere]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You can see how, in a world where the market is choked by various forms of autarky, state control, and protectionism, one might develop an almost religious fervor for the potential for positive good represented by the marketplace. After all, the market brings people together; it gives widely different people what they want, at the right price. The lion can sell groceries to the lamb, and both walk away happy. Few institutions have that power. More than that---the true open market determines the true value of everything: whatever the market will bear. It's almost magical.
The trouble is that the market is ruled by, among other things, a kind of bell curve in which overt and plainly visible (usually quite clumsy) state controls on the left, which diminish the efficiency of the marketplace, are countered on the right by the almost invisible (literally "private") controls of the rich, which also diminish the efficiency of the marketplace. What we call a balanced market, they call socialism or something similar; what they call a free market, we call Enron.
(As an example of these invisible forces, take milk. I almost said "the fascist can sell milk to the hippie." But in fact, any milk sold by the "fascist" would be unacceptable to the "hippie"---not because of politics per se, but because milk produced by large corporations would be rejected as overprocessed and unhealthy, because it is. And that's because the state fails to do its duty to control the real quality of milk. Because ...)
It's natural to idealize what is not allowed. If religion were suppressed, we would romanticize religious idealism. But it's been many decades since the global market has suffered from being too far to the left of the peak of the curve. So what are these people complaining about? Well, we're not far enough to the right of the optimum, that's what. The optimum benefits too many market participants---they want it to benefit only them. And their power is already such that they bend the US government to their will.
They are sustained by their paranoid myths, born in the 1960s and brought into adult society by Reagan.
How long will such created myths live? One can only hope that the clumsy dictatorship of the Bush maladministration creates as many powerful and lasting memories as did the Depression and Stalin's USSR, and at some point the pendulum (sorry to mix metaphors) will move back toward the top of the curve.
In the meantime, we need to find ways to expose the invisible forces that control the market, and export those methods to the media and the public sphere. I'm talking about things like how the Fed is more interested in bailing out Wall Street than in bailing out its victims. Most people don't notice this discrepancy between government mission and government action because it's too technical. And the technocrats all are too attracted to power and riches to defy the forces that warp the American economy and American politics together.