The problem with oratory skills

Noam Chomsky doesn't put any value in polished oratory skills, a point he made clear in an interview he gave Nigel Farndale at Telegraph.co.uk:

I am no Barack Obama,’ he says to me now. ‘I don’t have any oratory skills. But I would not use them if I had. I don’t like to listen to it. Even people I admire, like Martin Luther King, just turn me off. I don’t think it is the way to reach people. If you are giving a graduate course you don’t try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.’
What does Chomsky think of Obama?
I take it he didn’t buy into Obama’s message of hope and change. ‘Elections in the United States are expensive extravaganzas run by the public relations industry. The PR people looked at the polls and picked slogans accordingly. ‘Did you know Obama won the best campaign of the advertising industry in 2008? It was politicians being marketed as a product, like toothpaste. What does that have to do with democracy? If you read his statement you find yourself asking what was the hope? What was the change? These were empty words.’

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Time to really focus on the banks

At The New Republic, James K. Galbraith argues that "The financial crisis in America isn't over. It's ongoing, it remains unresolved, and it stands in the way of full economic recovery."

To restore the rule of law means first a rigorous audit of the banks and of the Federal Reserve. This means investigations—Representative Marcy Kaptur has proposed adding a thousand FBI agents to this task. It means criminal referrals from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, from the regulators, from Congress, and from the new management of troubled banks as they clean house. It means indictments, prosecutions, convictions, and imprisonments. The model must be the clean-up of the Savings and Loans, less than 20 years ago, when a thousand industry insiders went to prison. Bankers must be made to feel the power of the law in their bones.
I agree with much of what Galbraith says, although he wants to give the ratings agencies a free pass, which is, in my view, outrageous. If the ratings agencies had bothered to inspect even a few loan files, they would have seen the exploding ARMs triggered by 2 or 3 year teaser rates and the scant or non-existent documentation. A huge percentage of subprime loans were guaranteed to fail. It add insult to injury that the ratings agencies are successfully (so far) invoking the First Amendment to defend their incompetence and fraud.

Continue ReadingTime to really focus on the banks

Successive debunkings of our conceits

There's a straightforward reason we "expelled ourselves from Eden." At heart, we are searchers and explorers, and we seek meaning, among many other things. "CallumCGLP" is the self-identified person who added these beautiful excerpts from Carl Sagan's audio-book, Pale Blue Dot to some new visuals. The result is inspiring:

Continue ReadingSuccessive debunkings of our conceits

Fair Elections Act gets a push

This push to fair elections should be the only issue, until it is passed. We can't even have political conversations anymore, certainly not in Congress, and the dysfunction is largely driven by huge sums of private money from large organizations that are corrupting our law-makers. Thus, it was good news to hear of a new push to campaign finance reform:

In a push to implement a publicly-financed election system and curb moneyed interests in politics, a pair of good-government groups is launching a television ad campaign with a noteworthy price tag. Common Cause and Public Campaign, two organizations known for exposing the murkier influences on legislative and electoral processes, are staking $8 million to try and burnish Congress with the willpower to pass the Fair Elections Now Act. And they're willing to spend as much as $15 million on their campaign-season gambit.
What is the essence of meaningful campaign finance reform? Bill Moyers explains: Dick Durbin gives the insider's point of view.

Continue ReadingFair Elections Act gets a push