Muttering Jam

A Greg Palast Investigation from Democracy Now! - Goldman Sachs v. Occupy Wall Street:

2011-10-27T19:02:00.000-04:00

Occupy EVERYTHING

2011-10-17T17:45:00.000-04:00

Call out the instigators
Because there's something in the air
We've got to get together sooner or later
Because the revolution's here, and you know it's right
And you know that it's right

-- "Something In The Air" - Thunderclap Newman

Send in the clowns

2011-10-16T10:24:00.000-04:00

courtesy WMxdesigns.

Bert Jansch 1943-2011

2011-10-08T11:21:00.001-04:00

I first heard Bert Jansch when I was 16, and his music has never been far from my ear since. While I never got to see him perform as much as I would have liked, those times - both solo and with the original Pentangle - remain magical musical moments that I will never forget. Bert died on Oct. 5, after a long battle with cancer. To quote Neil Young: "He is a hero of mine, one of my greatest influences. Bert was one of the all-time great acoustic guitarists and singer songwriters." He will be dearly missed.

Click here to listen to Bert singing "Running From Home" from 1965.

Occupy Wall Street: Why are they here?

2011-10-04T19:14:00.001-04:00

Why Are You at Occupy Wall Street from rumur on Vimeo.

We've got to get this woman into the Senate!

2011-09-21T15:20:00.002-04:00

CEO Pay Exceeds Company Tax Bill at Major Corporations

2011-08-31T20:41:00.002-04:00

Town Hallers Embarrass Rep. Over Bush Tax Cuts

2011-08-29T19:53:00.001-04:00

And in that vein, is it any surprise that two GOP Congressmen have been caught creating "watch lists" of constituents who've asked tough questions at town hall meetings? According to Thom Hartman "Two Republican Congressmen – Dan Webster from Florida and Tim Griffin from Arkansas – have been caught creating what appear to be 'watch lists' of constituents who’ve asked tough questions at previous town halls – and then distributing these lists to supporters to investigate and question these constituents’ intentions and affiliations. The list features the names and pictures of six Floridians – including some pictures pulled from Facebook and other sources. Staffers of Congressman Griffin were seen handing out these lists to attendees of a recent town hall event in what appears to be an effort to intimidate others from asking similar tough questions. As in – if you ask a question the Congressman doesn’t like – you’ll end up on one of these wanted posters, too. One person on the list is a cancer patient who asked Congressman Webster what might happen to people like her under the Republican budget proposal. Another person is a 66-year-old Vietnam veteran who upon hearing he was on the list said, 'I think it’s pretty weird. Someone asks a legitimate question, and all of a sudden somebody’s got a dossier on you. It’s the type of thing they’d do in old Russia.'”

Three Charts to Email to Your Right-Wing Brother-In-Law

2011-08-29T18:39:00.005-04:00

Dave Johnson, Campaign for America's Future: "Problem: Your right-wing brother-in-law is plugged into the FOX-Limbaugh lie machine, and keeps sending you emails about 'Obama spending' and 'Obama deficits' and how the 'Stimulus' just made things worse. Solution: Here are three 'reality-based' charts to send to him. These charts show what actually happened."
Read the Article.

The numbers in these first two charts come from Budget of the United States Government: Historical Tables Fiscal Year 2012.

And, now (drum roll please), how about that socialist, job-killing stimulus?

Billionare Koch Responds to Buffet, Refuses Call for Shared Sacrifice

2011-08-22T20:08:00.006-04:00

Monday 22 August 2011

by Lee Fang, ThinkProgress

America’s current tax system forces people making $50,000 a year to pay a higher rate than hedge fund managers making $2.4 million an hour. Warren Buffett penned an op-ed last week declaring that America’s super-rich have been “coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress.” Lamenting the numerous tax loopholes and special breaks afforded to billionaire investors, Buffett noted that in his entire career, even when capital gains rates were as high as 39.9 percent, he never saw anyone “shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain.”

Charles Koch, head of the massive petrochemical, manufacturing, and commodity speculatingKoch Industries corporation, has responded to Warren’s call for shared sacrifice: “No Thanks.” In a statement to right-wing media, Koch states:

Much of what the government spends money on does more harm than good; this is particularly true over the past several years with the massive uncontrolled increase in government spending. I believe my business and non-profit investments are much more beneficial to societal well-being than sending more money to Washington.

Koch’s “non-profit investments” include the group founded by his brother David, “Americans for Prosperity” (formerly known as Citizens for a Sound Economy). As ThinkProgress first reported, AFP was one the first and most well-resourced drivers of the anti-Obama so-called “Tea Party” movement. Koch-funded Tea Party events have featured speakers comparing health reform to the Holocaust, and in some cases have sponsored rallies with leaders of the “birther” conspiracy theory.

Among the Koch brothers’ other non-profit investments include far-right conservative think tanks dedicated to cheerleading the war in Iraq, spreading anti-science propaganda, and smears claimingthat the poor do not really suffer. Koch has given money to educational initiatives, but in exchange for control over academic freedom that simply furthered Koch’s political beliefs. These “investments” at best advance Koch’s political ideology and at worst misinform American voters. Either way, they are hardly a replacement for “government spend[ing]” on things like food assistance and basic medical service.

According to Forbes, the Koch brothers have seen their wealth rise $11 billion in recent years, making the Koch brother among the richest in the country by being worth around $22.5 billioneach. Much of those profits, however, are due to soaring gas prices and the fact Koch Industries has avoided compensating the public for one hundred million tons of carbon pollution the company produces each year. Other Koch companies also receive significant taxpayer subsidies, despite Koch’s supposed opposition to government spending. This company is among the country’s top sources of carcinogenic chemicals and air pollutants.

America has been good to Charles Koch, providing an environment where his family has made billions. But Koch doesn’t want to give back, especially through more taxation. His charitable foundation, which gives largely to right-wing organizations that support his politics and Koch Industries’ business interests, still only donates about $12 million a year — 0.05 percent of Koch’s net worth. If higher rates were imposed on the super-rich, would Koch retreat to the family’s fabulous mansions, like this one in the Hamptons, aboard its fleet of private jets in a John Galt-inspired temper tantrum? Or would they act like any respectable businessman, and continue to make a profit without complaining?

Originally published on ThinkProgress

Where I am

2011-07-18T14:25:00.005-04:00

Far away. Why does the homeland always look like an insane asylum when I am outside of its borders?

Van Jones 'Rebuild the Dream'

2011-06-25T10:50:00.001-04:00

EXCLUSIVE: Image of God!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2011-06-19T09:28:00.004-04:00

Never let it be said that we stalwart bloggers at Muttering Jam don't have the right connections!

Given the prevalence of right wing Republicans throughout recent history claiming that God has spoken to them, if not outright supporting their candidacy, we have obtained a genuine photo of God, who has been residing in a Ted's Shed in western Tennessee.

Claims by Neanderthal rock and roller Ted Nugent to be God's son have not been substantiated.

Everything I Know About Justice I Learned from Superman

2011-06-15T18:31:00.006-04:00

I am an unrepentant comic book geek. Comic art, or sequential art, as Will Eisner - one of the founding fathers of the comic book industry - called it, marries the visual and the literary in way that I continue to find compelling (although for me, bad comic book scripting can never be redeemed by the even the finest comic book artwork).

Comic books have been an on again/off again pursuit in my life, and the medium has changed as our world has changed. By and large, comic books have gotten edgier, grittier and sometimes even cynical. Even that icon of the comic book world, the super-hero, has become more relativistic.

As noir as super hero comics can get these days, the concept of justice is still as basic a part of the super-hero universe as it was way back in 1938 when Superman first lifted an out-of-control locomotive over his head in Action Comics # 1. In a recent issue of Superman, the first meeting of Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne, the respective secret identities of Superman and Batman, is imagined. Neither yet knows of the other’s alter ego. And one of the first exchanges between them is their respective concepts of justice. “That’s what justice is all about,” says Clark, the eternal Boy Scout in Batman’s eyes, “ – keeping the scales equal, making sure that no one can take advantage of another.” “No,” says the Dark Knight, “justice is about punishing evildoers. Justice is about avenging a crime.”

Two very different views of justice. One – that of leveling the playing field. The other, Batman’s “eye-for-an-eye,” is to my mind more the kind of justice that ensures a never-ending cycle of continuously amplified violence, one that “makes the whole world blind,” as Gandhi reportedly said. By this I do not mean to imply that there is only a relative scale of evil in the world. Only that to synonymize vengeance with justice runs the risk of perpetuating evil.

The irony of comic super heroes and the media industry that grew up around them starting in the 1930’s is that they were the inventions of a caste of Americans born of out of injustice, almost to the last, the sons of immigrants who fled persecution in Europe, Jewish kids for the most part, many of them misfits in their own communities. As Gerard Jones says in “Men of Tomorrow,” his sublime history of the industry: “They were all two or three steps removed from the American mainstream but were more poignantly in touch with the desires and agonies of that mainstream than those in the middle of it.”

An even further irony of the early comic book industry was its penetration by organized crime, similar to the mob’s infiltration of labor unions during the same time period.

Many of these men (for it was a male-dominated vocation) would face further injustice as their creations were wrested from them, and they found themselves denied a slice of the large pie served up by licensing and movie adaptations for their characters. Several fought long, debilitating battles in court that spanned decades to earn themselves a few years of material comfort late in life, as well as some credit for their creativity.

To their credit, neither Superman nor Batman, despite their varying perspectives on justice, has ever taken a life. That is their commonality, and despite their obvious polarities, in the pages of the funny books, they are each other’s most trusted peers, though at times with mutual ambivalence. Both are, without a doubt, quintessential expressions of the light and the dark elements that run through the American psyche and inextricably surround the American concept of justice. As one comic book blogger said: “Superman is how America sees itself; Batman is how the world sees America.”

It is noteworthy that despite Superman’s extraordinary powers, and Batman’s vigilance, not to mention the plethora of other super-heroes that populate their universe, that injustice persists in their world. Not even the combined might of the Justice League of America and the Justice Society of America can bring about a world free of injustice.

So what about our world? One not without heroes at times, albeit none of the Spandex-clad meta-human variety. Sadly, the scorecard is not so great.

Michelle Alexander is an associate professor of law at Ohio State University, and the author of the book "The New Jim Crow." She writes in the current issue of Yes! Magazine:

“Our prison population quintupled in a few short decades for reasons that have stunningly little to do with crime or crime rates. Incarceration rates—especially black incarceration rates—have soared regardless of whether crime was going up or down in any given community or the nation as a whole. Mass incarceration has been driven primarily by politics—racial politics—not crime. As part of a backlash against the Civil Rights Movement, our nation declared a 'War on Drugs' that has turned back the clock on racial progress in the United States. Although people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites, African Americans have been targeted at grossly disproportionate rates. When the War on Drugs escalated in the mid-1980s, prison admissions for African Americans skyrocketed, nearly quadrupling in three years, then increasing steadily to a level in 2000 more than 26 times the level in 1983. In some states, 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison have been African American.

“As a nation, we’ve been encouraged to imagine that this war has been focused on rooting out violent offenders or drug kingpins, but that is far from the truth. Federal funding has flowed to those state and local law enforcement agencies that boost dramatically the sheer number of drug arrests. It’s a numbers game. That’s why the overwhelming majority of people arrested in the drug war are the ‘low-hanging fruit.’

“Once branded a criminal, people enter a parallel social universe in which they are stripped of the rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement. The old forms of discrimination—employment and housing discrimination, denial of basic public benefits and the right to vote, and exclusion from jury service—are perfectly legal again. In some major American cities, more than half of working-age African American men are saddled with criminal records and thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. These men are part of a growing undercaste—not class, caste—a group of people, defined largely by race, who are relegated to a permanent, second-class status by law.”

Just this past week, we in South Florida were served up a flagrant example of a two-tiered justice system, as the scion of a wealthy family was allowed by a judge to essentially buy his way out of serving a prison sentence for killing two men in a hit and run incident. It was then further reported that the defendant’s lawyer was involved in the presiding judge’s campaign for her appointment to the bench!

In 1995, a Stanford educated economist, Dr. David Korten, who had served in Vietnam as an Air Force officer, taught at Harvard, then spent two decades in Asia and Africa with USAID, wrote a book called “When Corporations Rule the World.” In this book, he painstakingly detailed the rise of huge multi-national corporations and the ever-increasing influence and power they were exerting on governments all over the world, forging policy and legislation that served only their interests, their agenda facilitated by three multi-lateral institutions: The World Bank, The International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization. Korten called for a reawakening of civil society and formation of civic networks to counter the anti-democratic excesses of corporatocracy, the blueprint for which he has continued to promote in his subsequent books.

Sixteen years later, Korten’s warning seem prescient, as our own Supreme Court ruled last year in the landmark case Citizens United vs. The Federal Election Commission that corporate funding of independent political broadcasts in candidate elections cannot be limited. At the same time, a number of state governments have launched the fiercest attacks on workers rights in decades.

And meanwhile Charles and David Koch, the third generation scions of the largest privately-held corporation in America, have been pumping millions of dollars into mass-producing fake grass-roots organizations all across the country that manufacture all sorts of deceptive advertizing and media stunts meant to halt any legislation that would inconvenience their corporate agenda.

Two months ago, in the 900th issue of Action Comics, Superman made an unexpected declaration. “I’m tired of having my actions construed as instruments of U.S. policy,” Superman told the president’s national security adviser. “Truth, justice and the American way – it’s not enough anymore,” he proclaimed. “The world’s too small. Too connected.” He then makes the decision to go before the United Nations and renounce his American citizenship.

Imagine that. Superman, the Last Son of Krypton, finally a citizen of the world. Will he now stand for the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all? We cannot have these things in a world debased by greed, hate, racism and poverty. Sadly, as Supes has his epiphany, we in the real world seem to heading down a slippery slope of ever increasing injustice. We won’t get away with it for too long. As poet and agrarian activist Wendell Berry reminds us: "Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do."

The sad, sorry truth in about 2 minutes

2011-06-14T17:31:00.003-04:00

Robert Reich explains the economic malaise in terms so simple even Sarah Palin could understand it.

State of the Union

2011-06-05T08:45:00.000-04:00

Ban political spending by military contractors

2011-05-27T18:23:00.000-04:00

Taxpayers Subsidize Big Oil, World's Most Profitable Industry

2011-05-20T22:02:00.002-04:00

Rinaldo Brutoco and Madeleine Austin, World Business Academy:
"US oil companies earn about $3 billion in profits every week, yet get $4 billion in taxpayer subsidies every year. In the first quarter of 2011, Big Oil's profits were up 38 percent from the first quarter of 2010.... The industry's outsize profits didn't stop it from squealing like a stuck pig over proposals to trim $2 billion from its annual subsidies and use the revenue to reduce the deficit by about $21 billion over ten years. The oil companies tried to characterize the end of their subsidies as a 'tax hike,' despite growing and widespread recognition across the political spectrum that tax breaks are just another form of government spending." Read the Article

The web of one

2011-05-17T21:14:00.004-04:00

Moveon.com's Eli Pariser presents an alarming observation of how the internet may be personalizing the information flow in such a way as to create a bubble of tailored output around each and every one of its users. Presented at the TED conference.

His book on the topic, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You, is out this week — help make it a hit here.

If you order the book here, all of Eli’s proceeds from this post will go to MoveOn.org Civic Action.

Here’s what author Bill McKibben has to say about it: “You spend half your life in Internet space, but trust me—you don’t understand how it works. Eli Pariser’s book is a masterpiece of both investigation and interpretation; he exposes the way we’re sent down particular information tunnels, and he explains how we might once again find ourselves in a broad public square of ideas. This couldn’t be a more interesting book; it casts an illuminating light on so many of our daily encounters.”

The revolving door

2011-05-13T21:01:00.003-04:00

Republican FCC Commissioner Who Approved NBC Merger Becomes Comcast Lobbyist

Nadia Prupis, Truthout: "Republican FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker will leave her position with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in June to serve as senior vice president of government affairs with Comcast-NBC. The news follows a high-profile, $30 billion merger of Comcast and NBC earlier this year, which gave Comcast 51 percent of the stake in NBCUniversal (NBCU) and ownership over the majority of the network's channels, including CNBC and Bravo, as well as the Universal Pictures movie studio. Baker voted to approve the merger. While reviewing the deal, Baker objected to the FCC's efforts to create conditions for the merger and called for reforms to the commission's review process, stating that it had taken too long and imposed excessive stipulations on Comcast-NBC."

Read the Article

A stash of pornography was found in the hideout of Osama bin Laden

2011-05-13T17:59:00.004-04:00

By Mark Hosenball and Tabassum Zakaria WASHINGTON Fri May 13, 2011 12:22pm EDT

(Reuters) - A stash of pornography was found in the hideout of Osama bin Laden by the U.S. commandos who killed him, current and former U.S. officials said on Friday.The pornography recovered in bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, consists of modern, electronically recorded video and is fairly extensive, according to the officials, who discussed the discovery with Reuters on condition of anonymity.

As Josh Holland of Alternet says: "I don't quite get why people are surprised at this development. I will be shocked when a conservative religious fundamentalist is found who's not a total perv."

The media is spinning this little morsel like there's no tomorrow, no doubt with the complicit approval of our intelligence/propaganda apparatus. Whatever. Ultimately, it is no more bemusing than Newt Gingrich pretending to be about family values.

Koch Brother Buys the Right to Interfere in Faculty Hiring at Florida State University

2011-05-13T13:11:00.002-04:00

Kris Hundley, The St. Petersburg Times: "A conservative billionaire who opposes government meddling in business has bought a rare commodity: the right to interfere in faculty hiring at a publicly funded university. A foundation bankrolled by Libertarian businessman Charles G. Koch has pledged $1.5 million for positions in Florida State University's economics department. In return, his representatives get to screen and sign off on any hires for a new program promoting 'political economy and free enterprise.'"

The Kochs already have our legislature and our governor. Might as well colonize the ivory tower. These guys must be stopped.