Admittedly I have not been following the junior senator much while I've been away. Fortunately, Contrapositive has. He finds this Moneywatch item written by popular financial commentator Jane Bryant Quinn:
Stop Senator Collins! She Wants to Cut a Key Investor Protection from the Reform Bill
... Last week, devious brokers found their champion. Collins proposed an amendment to the reform bill, to exempt from fiduciary duty brokers who sell only mutual funds, variable annuities, and certain closed-end funds. Furthermore, the Securities and Exchange Commission could expand the exemption to brokers selling other products packaged by their firms. ...
Wow, what intense, biting criticism from a very mainstream source. It reflects how burned the small investor has been in the financial meltdown by the sharks that view us as little more than plankton in the sea.
Posted by The Owl on May 20 at 09:59. Filed under: Economy
In my memory, the sequence of events was (1) finished my stat. mech. final; (2) my undergraduate career was over; (3) Mount Saint Helens blew up. Seems like yesterday.
This time it's Europe and it's a trillion dollars from the people's wallet so that a rotten financial system can cover its bets. I wonder how many times the public hide can be tanned so that the emperors can keep wearing their finery.
The people of Greece seem to have taken the only rational action.
Posted by The Owl on May 10 at 22:41. Filed under: Economy
Cover art from ``Pete Hamill's Murder at Kent State University,'' 1970 Flying Dutchman spoken word album narrated by Rosko
GOV. JAMES RHODES: We are seeing here at the city of Kent, especially, probably the most vicious form of campus-oriented violence yet perpetrated by dissident groups. They make definite plans of burning, destroying and throwing rocks at police and at the National Guard and the Highway Patrol. This is when we're going to use every part of the law enforcement agency of Ohio to drive them out of Kent. We are going to eradicate the problem. We're not going to treat the symptoms. And these people just move from one campus to the other and terrorize the community. They're worse than the Brown Shirts in the communist element and also the Night Riders and the vigilantes. They're the worst type of people that we harbor in America. And I want to say that they're not going to take over a campus.
REPORTER: How long do you expect to keep the Guard at Kent?
GOV. JAMES RHODES: I'll answer that -- Until we get rid of them.
Ohio Governor James Rhodes interviewed on May 3, 1970, excerpted from the documentary "Kent State: The Day the War Came Home," directed by Chris Triffo, produced by Ron Goetz; and broadcast on Democracy Now! in 2005.
And here is an excerpt from Nat Hentoff's liner notes in the 1970 Flying Dutchman spoken word album ``Pete Hamill's Murder at Kent State University''.
America -- Spring, 1970 -- must have seemed a land of madness to, let us say, a citizen of Copenhagen watching on television what we were doing to ourselves. Let alone what we kept doing -- and keep doing -- to others in Vietnam, in Cambodia, and God (or is it the Devil) knows where else and how soon.
America -- Spring, 1970 -- was witnessing a further dimension of madness. We were killing our own children. Officially. Men wearing uniforms, carrying and using guns issued to them by the state, were murdering the young. At Kent State. In Jackson, Mississippi. And by the time you read this, perhaps at other places....
...The Mobe Marshals -- as police tear gas began during the end of the day in May, after Cambodia and after Kent State, when the Army of the young had again come to Washington -- the Mobe Marshalls, Pete Hamill writes, ``intervened with the only weapon they had: their bodies. They formed a line between the young and the police, arms locked, tears running down their faces from the gas, holding on, choking, trying to hold back the rushing tides of blood and anger.''
Unless millions of us organize -- and stay organized -- after Kent State and Cambodia and Jackson -- there will be no holding back those tides.... There is not that much time left. Those other voices -- hawking ``bums'' and ``impudent snobs'' -- still have the power to make many, many Kent States and many, many Jacksons. They are beyond understanding but they are not yet beyond the democratic processes if we implement those processes and tell them -- in numbers they cannot ignore -- to stop the killing, stop the madness.
There is not that much time left.
This all has an eerie echo to today, but without the Mobe Marshals and their bodies. America is making today horror on a major scale in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. But all this hardly produces a bleat of disobedience. In fact killing is celebrated with cheering and applause for a Vice President's unseemly performance of blood spitting.
Young, Hentoff, Hamill all are still with us, often stirring things up a bit. But are "millions of us" ready to stop war through "democratic process"?
Jake Tapper ran a pretty good show today on ABC This Week. I credit him for digging up that quote and displaying it for the interview with Napolitano and Salazar. Tapper as well did an excellent job of waving BP's disingenuous government filings, which claimed preparedness for a "worst-case" spill, in the face of BP America Chairman and President, Lamar McKay .
I think it's also time to double down on skepticism about Obama's promotions of "building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country." What'll it be next? A Chernobyl-sized release of radioactivity from one of these "safe, clean" plants?
Posted by The Owl on May 02 at 12:02. Filed under: Energy
Maine Owl is a news, comment & nature photography blog. The Owl is proprietor. He is a long-time peace & justice activist now residing in the Bangor, Maine area. Ms. Owl occasionally blogs here as Tammy. Our team also is enhanced by Gerald, formerly of Turn Maine Blue and now of the smashing blog Dirigo Blue.
