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Read the following quote carefully. Then, read it again, and if necessary, again.

“Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”

This one sentence makes up Section 8 of the financial package presently being debated by Congress. It’s a bill to spend around $700billion bailing out Wall Street, but this one sentence means its a bill that goes much further than that.

This one sentence will pass massive power to the Executive Branch. It will allow Treasury Secretary Poulson to sit down with Wall Street executives and connive how they will divest themselves of their bad debts, at taxpayer’s expense, while ensuring their own financial futures remain secure. They can do so with no oversight authority, meaning no-one will know the details of what they decide, and even if it does become known, there’s absolutely nothing anyone can do about it.

This one sentence is yet another nail in the lid of the coffin that holds the corpse of US democracy.

Are Americans going to allow this to happen? Probably. Right now, they’re so scared of losing their pension funds and 401Ks they’ll happily agree to anything.

America, you’re about to be sold down the river yet again by a band of crooked bankers and financiers who are about to take you for seven hundred billion dollars.

It time to stand up and be counted. It time to say “NO!” to Section 8.

Filed under: Fleecing America

Given the state of the world today: conflagrations and uprising in various parts of the globe; the recent hotel bombing in Pakistan proving al Qaeda is still alive and flourishing, despite woefully inadequate measures by western governments to kill them off; the economic crisis threatening to further destabilize the planet; global warming wreaking its own particular blend of havoc, more than ever it’s necessary for our media to present an honest and informed face.

Without honest, truthful, news reporting, unembellished by the stark, emotion-raising headlines more suited to Hollywood blockbuster dramas, we are unable to form frank opinions and adapt our thinking to take account of the true nature of what is happening in this world we all inhabit.

For the last week or so, media news has informed us North Korea is restarting its nuclear program, frozen a few months ago with much fanfare and demolition of a cooling tower. Now, it seems, nasty, wicked North Korea has renegaded on its promises, raised a digit at the West, and is rebuilding its nuclear facilities.

It’s unlikely many Americans viewed it, after all it is broadcast between 5.00 and 5.30 each morning in the US, but BBC World News from London announced this morning, as one of its major headlines:

“NORTH KOREA HAS REMOVED UN NUCLEAR WATCHDOG SEALS FROM A KEY ATOMIC FACILITY”

It wasn’t until some twenty minutes later that the program cut to a reporter at the IAEA headquarters in Vienna who informed us:

“Mohammed El-Baradei says the North Koreans have asked the IAEA to remove their seals and surveillance equipment at Yongbyon. They said they wished to run reprocessing test work which, they said, wouldn’t involve nuclear material.

This information was only received this morning and its understood the seals and equipment are still in place.“ [my bold]

This gross error by the BBC (who were in fact only echoing earlier reports from other media outlets) is a typical example of the sloppy journalism now rampant even among the more respectable of news media. We’ve come to expect hideous distortions, frequently outright lies, from the likes of Fox News, CNN, and even BBC America’s evening news show, which from its inception has aspired to the sensationalist format of its US counterparts.

The BBC brags it’s World News program reaches “276 million homes in more than 200 countries and territories around the world”.^[1]Given that many people switch on for the headlines before dashing off to work in the morning, how many heard the BBC’s headline announcement, but missed the later clarification?

It happens so frequently – a blazing headline broadcast to the world, before any attempt is made at verification – one has to wonder: is it becoming deliberate?

^{[1] BBC Press Office “BBC World News” April 2008}

Filed under: Media hype

Finally, on NBC News last night, the question of who’s to blame for the financial meltdown was addressed by CNBC’s Dylan Ratigan.^[1] I waited for the final condemnation of government departments hand-in-glove with corporate commerce; the greedy CEO’s gorging themselves fat on the sub-prime mortgage market, while those they conned live in homeless shelters, or with relatives, as their houses are repossessed.

I waited in vain:

“So, who’s to blame? We all are. From the moms and pops who took advantage of the low minimum payments on their credit cards to grow their business, to trillion dollar institutions. If you thought you could reap the rewards of easy credit without the consequences, this is the proof that you can’t.”

According to Ratigan, our benevolent government has stepped in to buy up all the bad debt, so banks can continue lending us – the people – the money we need.

It seems the government is blameless; the companies involved in creating the sub-prime mortgage crisis, innocent. We, the people, are at fault for daring to desire a small slice of the very large financial cake being consumed by these fatcats of industry and politics.

We should have refused the mortgages they offered. We should have insisted on not owning our own home. Those ‘already approved’ credit cards they force through our letterboxes every day should have been ignored. They didn’t really want us to take up their offers of credit, they were only pretending – apparently.

Our philanthropic government isn’t really using our hard earned taxes to bale out Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, and now all the other financial institutions fallen victim to their own avarice; George W Bush is paying for it all out of his own pocket. At least, that’s how it would appear listening to Dylan Ratigan.

Ratigan, looks a well-heeled sort of guy. No doubt he lives in a fine house, lacks for little other than, perhaps, a private jet, and is buffered from the financial meltdown by a fat salary from CNBC. He’s probably the sort of American who blames the victim in cases of rape. In this instance, he’s certainly accusing the victims of the crime, rather than the perpetrators.

To coin good old American phraseology, Mister Ratigan is AN ASSHOLE.

^{[1] “What brought the US economy to the brink? (video) NBC Nightly News, September 19th 2008}

Filed under: Corporate mouthpieces