For the past few nights, we've showed you clips of Bill O'Reilly's big interview with President Obama. Our producers counted a total of 72 interruptions by the anchor. Perhaps fittingly, Jimmy Kimmel Live provided a cartoon version of their sit-down, with O'Reilly as Gargamel. No word yet on the President's response to being Smurfed.
Did Arianna Huffington just sell out her fellow progressives? In the literal sense, she undoubtedly has: The sale of Huffington Post to AOL for $315 million (including a large pile of cash going to Huffington herself) means this powerful liberal voice is formally joining the "corporate media" its writers have long disparaged. There are also some indications that she has sold out in the ideological sense and committed the Huffington Post to joining the mainstream media - the evil "MSM" of "HuffPo" blogger ire. Announcing the deal, she and her new boss went out of their way to say that the new Huffington Post would emphasize things other than the liberal politics on which the brand was built. AOL Chairman Tim Armstrong said he thinks "Arianna has the same interest we do, which is serving consumers' needs and going beyond the just straight political needs of people." Huffington agreed, boasting that only 15 percent of her eponymous site's traffic is for politics (that's down from 50 percent a couple of years ago), and she emphasized that politics is just one of two dozen "sections," including a new one devoted to covering divorces. "It's time for all of us in journalism to move beyond left and right," Huffington said Monday on PBS's "NewsHour." "Truly, it is an obsolete way of looking at the problems America is facing." That is almost exactly what Huffington said in 2000, when she was making her last ideological transformation, from a conservative Republican into a liberal icon. "The old distinctions of right and left, Democrat, Republican, are pretty obsolete," she told Fox News then. It's a stock line for Huffington, but if she and Armstrong are taken at their word, they are planning a radical reshaping of what had become an important voice for liberalism and a gleeful participant in the left-right game. "It can no longer be denied: the right-wing lunatics are running the Republican asylum and have infected the entire country and poisoned the world beyond," Huffington wrote in her 2008 book, "Right is Wrong ." This transformation should come as no surprise to anybody who has followed Huffington's remarkable career. Greek-born and Cambridge-educated, she has always been on the move ideologically, from her early squabbles with feminism to her role as a minister with the new-age Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness, from her membership in Newt Gingrich's brain trust to her stint as populist activist - all before her greatest act, the Huffington Post. I say this with admiration. Huffington deserves every one of those millions she'll be paid by AOL for creating this online sensation. She was once derided as "the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus" because of her many well-connected friends, but Huffington has earned her place as one of the extraordinary personalities of our time: an entrepreneur and writer who is always chasing the next big idea, wherever it is on the ideological spectrum. Yet this is also why Huffington and her Web site are unlikely to remain as they were. Anybody who expects her to continue as a reliable voice of the left is a poor student of Huffington history. I first came across Huffington in 1995, when she was working at Gingrich's Progress and Freedom Foundation, preaching social consciousness to fellow conservatives. She railed against "big government" and pronounced: "We do our part and God meets us halfway. That's why I'm a conservative." That version of Huffington called for strict immigration restrictions. She favored Bill Clinton's resignation and floated the rumor that a former ambassador had been buried in Arlington because Clinton had slept with his wife. By that time, she had already had many ideological meanderings, beginning with a book called "The Female Woman" (seen as anti-feminist) and continuing to a biography portraying Picasso as a misogynist (seen as a feminist tract). She had also been heavily involved in campaigns by her then-husband, a Republican, for the House and Senate. But in the late 1990s, Huffington began to reinvent herself. She covered the '96 political conventions for Comedy Central with Al Franken. She broke with Gingrich. She disparaged Bob Dole. She promoted Warren Beatty for president. She published a book favoring campaign finance reform. In 2000, she hosted a "shadow convention" protesting both parties. She later explained the "transformation" of her political views by saying the right had "seduced, fooled, blinded, bamboozled" her. That's crazy talk. Nobody bamboozles Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington. If anybody was fooled, it was those who believed she would be a more enduring progressive than she was a conservative.
As a new era of media mergers and acquisitions unfolds—in the aftermath of the federal approval of the Comcast/NBCU deal—AOL’s $315-million purchase ofHuffington Postought not come as a surprise.
Media companies, old and new, are rethinking and repositioning in order to grab pieces of a future that will be more digital and less analog, more dynamic and less ponderous, more opinonated and less obsessed with a balance that never was achieved. But this is about a lot more than AOL and Huffington Post. Indeed, it’s about a lot more than media companies and their millions—make that billions. This deal and arrangements like it approach fundamental questions of producing journalism when traditional sources are revenue are drying up, and go to the heart of much broader debates about how citizens will get the information they need to engage in a democratic process that is now far from functional.
Huffington Post, with 25 million monthly visitors, seems to “get” the new age. And AOL, now delinked from the Time-Warner omnibus, is looking to brand itself as the content source for news junkies in a twenty-first century that will have fewer newspapers and traditional broadcast news sources and more digital destinations. It’s been a struggle, and AOL has lost a lot of money in recent years. The company was looking for a bold move.
So, now, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong says he’s cut the deal with Arianna Huffington — editor-in-chief, co-founder and “face” of the popular news and opinion site—and her team in hopes that the the arrangement “will create a next-generation American media company [that] will embrace the digital future and become a digital destination that delivers unmatched experiences for both consumers and advertisers.”
That’s the sort of thing media moguls say when they acquire a “media property.”
But Huffington Post is not just any media property. It’s a place where prominent progressives blog and where millions of Americans get news, information and ideas that tend toward the left.
So is Huffington Post still going to be Huffington Post?
Huffington, whose conversion from conservative commentator to outspoken critic of the Bush-Cheney administration made her a hero with much of the left, says things will stay the same. And her new position, as president and editor-in-chief of AOL’s “TheHuffington Post Media Group”—which will take in all of AOL’s content sites, including Patch, Engadget, TechCrunch, Moviefone, PopEater, MapQuest, Black Voices and Moviefone—should give her the authority to maintain her vision.
But the pressure will be on to generate revenues—the great challenge for web-based news operations. Huffington Postreportedly made $31 million last year, which is a lot of money, but not nearly as much as will be expected from an entity for which AOL just paid more than ten times that amount. So Huffington’s marketing skills, which are considerable, are already very much on display. “Our readers will still be able to come to TheHuffington Post at the same URL, and find all the same content they’ve grown to love, plus a lot more—more local, more tech, more entertainment, more finance, and lots more video,” she says.
The more reassuring message actually came in a memo to Huffington Post bloggers that was sent Monday morning.
It read:
“We are writing with some very exciting news. As you will see if you click on the HuffPost home page, The Huffington Post has been acquired by AOL, instantly creating one of the biggest media companies in the world, with global, national, and local reach—combining original reporting, opinion, video, social engagement and community, and leveraged across every platform, including the web, mobile, and tablets.
“Central to all of this will be the kind of fresh, insightful, and influential takes on the issues of the day that you and the rest of our bloggers regularly deliver. Our bloggers have always been a very big part of HuffPost’s identity—and will continue to be a very big part of who we are.
“When the Huffington Post launched in May 2005, we had high hopes. But we would have been hard pressed to predict that less than six years later we would be able to announce a deal that now makes it possible for us to execute our vision at light speed.
“The HuffPost blog team will continue to operate as it always has. Arianna will become editor-in-chief not only of HuffPost but of the newly formed Huffington Post Media Group, which will include all of AOL’s content sites, including Patch, Engadget, TechCrunch, Moviefone, PopEater, MapQuest, Black Voices, and Moviefone.
“Together, our companies will have a combined base of 117 million unique U.S. visitors a month—and 250 million around the world—so your posts will have an even bigger impact on the national and global conversation. That’s the only real change you’ll notice—more people reading what you wrote.
“Far from changing the Huffington Post’s editorial approach, our culture, or our mission, it will be like stepping off a fast-moving train and onto a supersonic jet. We’re still traveling toward the same destination, with the same people at the wheel, and with the same goals, but we’re now going to get there much, much faster.
“Thank you for being such a vital part of the HuffPost family—which has suddenly gotten a whole lot bigger.
“All the best, Arianna, Roy, David, and the HuffPost Blog Team”
So what’s the bottom line? It’s reasonable to trust Arianna Huffington when she says she wants to build on the strengths of Huffington Post. It’s also reasonable to trust the Wall Street–insider analysis that says: “Of course, if AOL does try to soften the strident talk, then HuffPo suddenly diminishes in value. Its readers love it because they’re getting what they want—a strong, outspoken force to counter the well organized and well funded conservative movement in the media.”
The struggle in the months and years to come will be to strike a smart balance between bottom-line, journalistic and, yes, political demands. That’s never easy. The history of big-budget online news and opinion ventures includes more stories of failure than success—as Bob McChesney and I detailed in our book,The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Over Again (Nation Books).But as we noted in the HuffPost section of the chapter on new media: “While Huffington is sometimes portrayed as being out to strangle newspapers—a prospect that a New Yorker cartoon famously portrayed—she is in fact a passionate believer in journalism who thinks she might yet be able to teach newspapers how to save themselves, most likely on the web rather than in print, but Huffington is not the sort to rule anything out. And in a moment when newspapers are cutting, she’s hiring.”
Huffington said when we were writing our book: “All of us increasingly have to look at different ways to save investigative journalism.”
If, with AOL’s resources, she is able to hire more, if she and her team are able to produce more serious content and if they can identify some of those “different ways to save investigative journalism,” it is possible to imagine that the AOL–Huffington Post deal could mark a turning point in the debate about the future of journalism. That’s a lot of “ifs…”
Huffington’s challenge, a huge one, will be to remove the uncertainty and create a pro-journalism, pro-democracy digital future that is dramatically different, and dramatically better, than what big media combinations have produced up to now.
While in Congress, Rep. Grayson served Florida’s 8th Congressional District from 2009-2011. Dylan regards him as one of “the most vocal and aggressive critics of the crony capitalism, corporate communism, and large institutional interests perpetuating their existence at the expense of an increasingly large percentage of the American people.”
We caught up with Rep. Grayson and asked him about the his take on Obama’s handling of Egypt, the potential financial consequences of America’s overextended foreign policy and military, the Federal Reserve audit, and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.
Before we get to the interview, please watch one of Rep. Grayson’s finest moments on YouTube:
DYLAN: Welcome to Episode #28 of Radio Free Dylan. We are joined today by Representative Alan Grayson, former Representative of Florida’s Eighth Congressional District, serving from ’09 to 2011 and one of the most vocal and aggressive critics of the crony capitalism, corporate communism, call it what you want but basically large institutional interests perpetuating their existence at the expense of an increasingly large percentage of the American people, there appears to be a political theme around the world where the wealthy use their money to purchase political protection from the government in order to become wealthier in the process, instead of generating wealth by creating value for other human beings, you generate wealthy by extracting that either directly or indirectly from the vast majority of your countrymen — and Congressman Grayson it is a pleasure to have you here.
REP. GRAYSON: Thanks very much for having me.
DYLAN: I want to get to Federal Reserve audit, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, foreclosure and fraud. But before we do that, what is your perspective on American foreign policy in the Middle East — specifically its exclusive support of all sorts of oppressive dictators with secret police, abusing and picking people up, running mafia style economies where you’ve gotta be a member of the party in order to get a business permit? At the same time claiming to be an advocate of democracy in the Middle East — I call it “democracy hypocrisy,” and I am of course referring to Egypt.
REP. GRAYSON: Well I’m in favor of a four-letter foreign policy — MYOB, mind your own business. I think that covers just about any interaction that we need to have with other countries. This idea that we can micromanage our foreign relations, and micromanage the lives of other independent people, I thought that went out with colonialism.
DYLAN: How then do you get there? In other words if you look at American foreign policy right now as defined by George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld in the hours and weeks following 9/11 and everything really having been derived from that grand architecture, how do we even begin a path toward a new foreign policy whether it is your version or anything else?
REP. GRAYSON: Well we begin that task by bringing our troops home. We don’t need to occupy two other countries 8000 miles from our shores, and it has cost an amazing tremendous amount of harm both in dollars and in blood. There was a study that was done a couple of years ago of troops returning to the United States from Iraq. The study found that 15% of all the troops come back from Iraq with permanent brain damage. I am not talking about headaches, I am talking about things that you can see on a CAT scan — and it is permanent. Now we’ve had almost two million Americans serve in Afghanistan, in Iraq. It means, if you do the math, that we’ve heard about a quarter of a million young Americans permanently scared for life for brain damage — and for what? And why do we need to spend four trillion dollars pursuing the war in Iraq? How is that necessary? We are a country now with a net worth about 50 trillion dollars. We spend 8% of all the wealth accumulated over the course of two centuries. And we dropped into the sands of Mesopotamia. It just doesn’t make any sense. We have to bring the troops home — and we have to mind our own business.
DYLAN: What do you see as the greatest political barrier to moving in that direction?
REP. GRAYSON: I think the greatest political barrier is the fact that the right wing keeps throwing up “leaders,” so called “leaders” to prove, I think they have to prove their manhood by invading and lording it those foreign people. And that was basically what was happening with George W Bush. He know that he was AWOL from service for over a year, and he felt that he could somehow cover that up and make up for it by invading two other countries.
DYLAN: And what would you suggest is the best political tactic to fight a dynamic like the one you’ve just described, where you have a phenomenally insecure political faction that is looking to prove its relevance by murdering innocents far away from it, with other people’s money and gun and children?
REP. GRAYSON: I think just talking about the truth, I think that the truth shall set us free. If we keep pointing out the unbelievable harm, not just to the people whose company we occupy but also to us. The unbelievable harm that they suffer and we suffer, who knows, maybe later that will become unacceptable.
DYLAN: As the truth comes out — how do you suggest the American people and the American government reconcile the realization that their tax dollars, forget the wars for a second or at least set them aside — I shouldn’t suggest that you forget them, but set them aside for the moment — and the American people are being forced to confront the fact that their tax dollars have been, are and will continue to be used to finance oppressive dictators who deprive their people of democracy in a way that it is not that unlike Saddam Hussein where secret police, spies and beatings in the lumberyard for anybody who is picked up. Except how do we invade one country who abuses it’s people while we bankroll other countries that do the same thing just because their foreign policy is different?
REP. GRAYSON: Well listen what it all comes down to is there is a military industrial complex that has been dictating our foreign policy for two generations. Is it really any surprise when you take the largest army contractor, the president of the largest army contractor and you make him Vice President? Is it really any surprise that you end up in two wars?
DYLAN: But that doesn’t address the overall implications for crumbling US foreign policy, as our own allies exhibit the same behavior as our enemies.
REP. GRAYSON: Well, I think actually our allies have been trying to restrain people like George W. Bush now for as long as they’ve seen this conduct on our part. It was a close question whether even Britain would join us in the war in Iraq. Virtually nobody else did. We ended up with 100,000 American troops — they were at one point 150,000 American troops — a small number of British troops and something like 800 troops from Poland. So I think our allies have been trying to restrain this impulse that the military industrial complex has to line their own pockets by occupying one foreign country after another and engaging in endless war to this point to no avail. I mean it is safe to say that our European allies and our allies of the Far East would be far happier if we weren’t destroying ourselves through this endless military spending which reached almost a trillion dollars last year. A trillion dollars in one year. We have roughly 6, 7% of our total income last year devoted to military spending. They would be much happier if the US government were more restrained and the military spending was not so much that it actually almost equaled the rest of the world combined. We spent five times as much as China; we spent 10 times as much as Russia. The only people even come close to us in military spending are actually our allies. So what’s the point? Are we fighting to invade France and England next? Why are we doing this?
DYLAN: Take a momentary break. We will return with former representative of Florida, Congressman Allan Grayson out of the eighth congressional district. If you want to talk about lining your pockets, stick around because there is no better way to line your pockets than to run a bank particularly when you can take all your bad loans to the Federal Reserve when things go awry. We will be back after this.
—-BREAK——
DYLAN: We are back with representative Alan Grayson, former representative of Florida’s Eighth Congressional District serving from ’09 to 2011. I want to switch gears to something that you did A tremendous amount of work on, and admirably so — I want to try to get a handle on the rampant theft that is the guts of the America’s finance and try to establish even a remote sense of fairness in terms of a massive tax payer subsidized system, that in fact does not serve its purpose — banking — as a pretty simple function and one that we don’t have very good version of, unless you are in charge of the bank. What were you proudest of in your first term serving this country when it came to dealing with the financial system?
REP. GRAYSON: Well first exposing the utter incompetence of many of the people in charge. My five minute examination of Elizabeth Coleman, the Inspector General of the Fed, where I asked her, the Fed handed out a trillion dollars in the last 18 months, “who got it?” And the answer was “I don’t know.” That video has become the most watched congressional video in history. 3.4 million people have downloaded and seen, it and according to YouTube, they’ve watched the whole thing and I think watching in horror, to understand that our government is so out of control and specifically the Federal Reserve is so out of control that these unelected officials could hand out a trillion dollars and not even know who got the money. And I think that after that it became clear and that examination and other related examinations, we had a series of oversight in 2009. I t created a tremendous support that allowed us to finally break through and after almost 100 years, conduct the first independent audit of the Federal Reserve thanks to my alliance with Dr. Ron Paul where he lined up all the Republicans and I lined up two thirds of the Democrats and we were able to finally push this through in the face of tremendous resistance from the Fed and frankly from the Obama administration as well.
Tim Geithner said when it was time to finish the bill on financial reform, he told people that his highest priority was to make sure – and this is the bill that was supposed to save America — to keep us from having a bail out — make sure that we didn’t have a total collapse of the economic system.
He said that his highest priority was to make sure that there was no auditing of the Fed! (laughs) So, in the fact of that kind of resistance, we were able to win and win big. I mean we have now the first independent audit and nothing really bad has happened so far. People were saying well if you audit the Fed, the economy will collapse. Hasn’t happened yet and I think that people are going to realize the Fed should be a responsible government body just like every other government body. We need to look behind the curtain and find out exactly what’s going on.
DYLAN: What do you think Tim Geithner is so afraid would be found?
REP. GRAYSON: I don’t know but I am sure that Tim Geithner didn’t want the Fed audited because Tim Geithner didn’t want Tim Geithner audited, he worked for the New York Fed, led the New York Fed for years before he became Treasury Secretary — and frankly it sounded a bit self serving to me that he said that. DYLAN: And what do you and not just you but I’ll add Dr. Ron Paul to it — what do the two of you think was so important about auditing the Fed?
REP. GRAYSON: Well, what I think we are going to find is something that we’ve already have a little taste of here and there, which is that the Fed has made an enormous deals with entities like Citibank on terms that were completely unfair to the taxpayers. We got a little shred of information about that because one of those deals happened to be one involving the treasury, it has to be a released to us and we found that the Fed had assumed $238 billion dollars of liability from Citibank on mortgage back securities in exchange for nothing. I think we are going to find more deals like that and people are going to scratch their heads and say why are we doing this? Why are we allowing our money to be used in the secret bailouts of three or four or five or six institutions without people even finding out about it except for the fact that we pass this legislation to help to find out. The fed has been out of control now for quite a while and helping its friends at the expense of the rest of us.
DYLAN: And why are we doing that? Why are we – why have we accepted a system in your opinion that allows a relatively anonymous, highly secretive group of people to provide infinite access of money to people who not only create no apparent value but creates lots of apparent loss?
REP. GRAYSON: Because the banking system and the bankers, the people in charge of the system have created this meme that the Fed can do no wrong and it has to remain independent of everybody and everything. It is almost as if they believe that the Chairman of the Fed is the Wizard of Oz and it’s not true. I mean the Fed has the authority to create money but it should not have the authority to make the kind of deals that we’ve been seeing where they create massive liability off the books of their favorites while small community banks and small businesses suffer and get nothing. At one point we demonstrated that they had – lent so much money to the Central Bank in New Zealand that it corresponds to $4,000 for every single person in New Zealand. Wouldn’t it be nice if the Feds can extend that kind of credit to Americans?
DYLAN: The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission spent $8 million investigating the largest financial crisis in America since the crash and the Great Depression in the late 20s and the early 30s, the results of that $8 million investigation were not published until after the Bank Reform Act was passed, which struck me as peculiar that you would conduct an investigation with a very modest budget — which I will get back to in a second — and then not release the investigation until after you’ve decided what the new laws are. Is that typical where you will investigate and audit and get all the information but you make the law before you get the information and then you put the report after, is that typical?
REP. GRAYSON: Well no, and I think it is a sign of something that is very sad it is the politicization of everything. One of the more interesting things about that report is the minority, the so called “minority views,” the dissenting views in that report – that probably held up report past the point when it was actual, would have been able to contribute to legislative effort that we all engaged in. I don’t know how anybody can look at the crash of 2008 and decide that what we really need is more deregulation. But if you read the minority view, that’s exactly what the right wing members of this commission kept pushing, and it’s delusional. We’ve known since the 16th century that you can’t have a banking system without regulation, it collapses! It booms and then it busts almost immediately. If you don’t believe me, ask the bankers of Venice. But, and yet we have this free market fundamentalism that has placed its minions all through the government, all through journalism, all through everywhere in life that people actually can form opinions and make decisions, and the result of that we cant come up with something like this, a post-mortem of the greatest financial disaster of the past 60 years without that becoming politicized as well.
DYLAN: Is it because – do the free marketeers, the advocators of sort of thing in your analysis because I am sure it is unknowable, but, do they advocate for no rules for banking which is entirely predicated on rules because — I am not selling obviously an airplane or a hamburger and haircut or a newspaper or teaching a class or anything — all I am doing if I’m a banker is creating risk and so if the business is I get to get rid of all my risk by transferring it to the Fed or Fannie, Freddie whoever it is, obviously I am going to do that until I blow the place to smithereens. And banking, if you understand banking at all, is a distinctively different business undertaking than every other free enterprise business in the world. It is a facilitator of enterprise. It is not an enterprise. Do those people in your opinion not – are they incapable of making that distinction? Do they not care? It has confused me as a journalist where I thought everyone understood, if you played Monopoly, the banker is not a player on the board for a reason. How do you explain the failure to make any of that distinction to between banking and the rest of all industry in the business?
REP. GRAYSON: I think that these people have been blinded by ideology. They’ve bought this whole idea that any regulation is bad regulation, hook, line and sinker without realizing that you can’t even have banks unless you have a regulatory system. There has to be reserve requirements, there has to be audits like every other business to start with they have to have a fair set of books then if it’s a public company get reported to the shareholders. And yet they think — that the only rule that they actually believe in is caveat emptor, and the only law that they believe in is the law of the jungle. You can’t have a banking system or any other financial system or for that matter any other economy when everybody is at war with everybody else and there are no rules. It’s not possible.
DYLAN: Couple of last questions and then I will let you go. One thing that came out in the FCIC report and Bill Greider did a great job of highlighting this — was the explicit introduction of known to be fraudulent mortgages. They have been audited by Clayton Holdings which is one of the bigger auditing firms if not the biggest auditing firms of these documents. They were knowingly and knowingly insofar as they had been reviewed by Clayton Holdings, then installed inside of investments and sold to pension funds, et cetera et cetera, where then the banks would go out and buy insurance on that that obviously paid a lot of money when the government stepped in to bail out AIG who was one of the big insurers.
How is it that after the Great Depression, there were blue sky laws that said it is illegal to sell a worthless piece of paper as if it is stock in the company if its just Alan Grayson and Dylan Ratigan have gone downtown with a piece of paper with their names on it and they are selling it for money even though there is actually no business. We created laws to prevent people from doing that sort of thing. And yet we found here that mortgages that have been deemed by some official authority — an auditor in this case — as nonconforming, will not get paid back, noncompliant with illegal investment standards for you, American pension fund, for you American mortgage buyer, Fannie Freddie etcetera, and then the FCIC comes out, shows that these fraudulent mortgages were being packaged and sold by Goldman, Deutsche, Morgan, the list goes on and yet, we have yet to see a single meaningful fraud investigation. I mean these guys makes Bernie Madoff look like Romper Room.
REP. GRAYSON: Well that’s right, and what it comes down to is they have been protected by one thing and one thing only which is prosecutor discretion. There is no doubt in a situation like that that people committed crimes, but in order to prosecute them for that you need to have a prosecutor who is willing to do it. And that is something that seems to have eluded us in the past, I guess, three years now. I am not only blaming the Obama administration, if the Bush administration had its head on straight they would have prevented a lot of these things from happening to start with.
But the President Obama administration said at the beginning, we are going to look forward and not back and therefore in the process of making that decision basically let these crooks off the hook.
DYLAN: And what does that sort of decision make, I call Obama the “turn the page president” whether it is war crimes, banking crimes or anything else, is there a point where the decision not to prosecute blatant crimes that are destructive to society really starts to breach the public trust with the government just because the President doesn’t really want to deal with the mess?
REP. GRAYSON: It’s actually worst than that. The same people who were committing fraud and crimes at Bear Stearns, they are now committing fraud and crimes at Bank of America, at Goldman Sachs and other institutions, because it turns out that crime does pay. It turns out that if you steal a large amount of money that leads to the collapse of your institutions, there’s jobs for you somewhere else.
And the old saying is those who forget history is going to repeated; well those who don’t punish the wrongdoers are doomed to repeat it as well. And that is the real problem; the problem is not only that it offends your sense of justice or my sense of justice to see people who destroyed enormous amount of wealth, staggering amounts of wealth, 15% of our entire national net worth in 18 months. The people who did that — it annoys me and annoys you that these people get off the hook but worse than that it scares me and it probably scares you too because we know it can happen again.
And you know, last time we had a margin of error, okay — last time most people in this country were not broke. This time it is different. This time, people are already at the edge. They’re already hanging at the edge of the cliff. So if we have we another economic downturn because the same crazies are doing the same things that they were doing, at different institutions under a different name — it is all over.
DYLAN: I couldn’t agree with you more. I guess the other thing that does strike me though is at a time when — and I don’t care what size the government is — big, small, I think it’s a moronic argument — but we know we need an effective government, an effective at administrating and advocating basic simple rules of fairness and one that can win the trust of the vast majority of the population to honorably, or at least attempt honorably, to administrate its simple rules of fairness and there are certain things that only the government can do. Like make banking law. We can go down that list.
And to the extent to which the meme that the government cannot be trusted to do anything is reinforced to do anything, originating with Reagan — wow much does it cripple our ability as a country to transition through an immense period of transition? The likes of which again we haven’t seen — I mean think again obviously the Hoover Dam, the Eisenhower road project, those major undertakings in this country. Do you honestly think Congressman that you could win the confidence of any meaningful coalition for any major public investments for any public kind in this country? Am I wrong to think that the imbedded distrust of the government whether it is the Blackwater boondoggles or the banking giveaways or the wars that that corrodes the basic trust in the government to do anything good or even that works?
DYLAN: Well you are right, I know a little bit behind in my reading and I happen to pick up a magazine from the time of the GM bailout. And I read through it and I was very surprised and sort of disheartened to see that the gist of what people were saying in supposedly neutral mainstream media at that time was how awful it would be to have the government in charge of GM and Chrysler because they are going to make silly cars that nobody would want to buy. And bear in mind, this is at the tail end of an experience that had gone on for what — 30 years or more that Michael Moore has documented and detailed — where the US orderly essentially committed suicide or for long extended period of time.
So you would think that after experience people would be saying, gee, maybe big business doesn’t know everything, maybe big business isn’t always right but instead we got that little song playing in our head that Reagan put there saying “the government is always wrong, government is always wrong.” So people were attacking the government investment in GM to save those tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands jobs in the United States rather than attacking the cause of that, which is a fact that those people in charge in GM were incompetent and the same thing is true of people at Bear Stearns and the same thing is true of the people at Enron. Either incompetent or dishonest or both. When you see that happening in one organization after another after another all through corporate America, you wonder why people incessantly attack the government. When banks were collapsing left and right, the mail was still being delivered on time. What does that tell you?
DYLAN: Last question, whether you are serving in the United States Congress or not, you are a well-versed and well-educated man, you are a young man and you are a man of immense passion, and a very strong point of view and capacity to deliver impactful blows in the advocacy or the things that you believe most passionately in. Which is an extraordinary long way of my asking you, what are you going to do next to keep having an impact on American culture, American policy and the future of America’s development and eternal quest for fairness?
REP. GRAYSON: I don’t know but I will tell you that one of my personal heroes is Howard Dean because Howard Dean came within a few inches of the Presidency, and didn’t make it in a way that must have had some serious effects on his point of view of the kind of person he was and what he meant to the world. And after he lost and had gotten knocked down, he dusts himself up, picks himself up and gave the Democratic Party through his work with the DNC a majority in the House and in the Senate and ultimately the White House. So maybe there is no second act in America life or maybe there is, we will just have to see.
DYLAN: Well it will be a loss to the public discourse in this country not to be hearing your voice in some meaningful and consequential form, and I am honored to be able to have the opportunity have this conversation with you, and look forward to hearing and seeing your next act may be Congressman.
REP. GRAYSON: Thanks — you’ve done so much with your show to show people the truth and that’s a hard thing to come by these days.
DYLAN: Thank you Congressman.
REP. GRAYSON: So, God bless you for that.
DYLAN: Thank you so much we are pushing for the same team one way or the other. Representative Allan Grayson, former representative of Florida’s Eighth Congressional District serving 09 through 11. His next act still to come.
So before I let you go, I think its important to observe what we just learned in that conversation. Or at least we are able to get that much more of a focus on and I really want to just hammer this one point. Whether it is for political convenience, whether because he believes it’s the right way to be, or whether it is because he doesn’t know what else to do, the “turn the page” concept of the Presidency that Barack Obama brought into the room in the context of massive theft and massive torture and war crime over the previous eight years, or whether it is the ongoing decision to continue to push beyond whatever the news of the day may be into some sort of false forward narrative on the belief that accountability for multi-trillion dollar theft torture, murder or anything else like that in some ways does not require the investment, the judicial investment, the prosecutorial investment to deal with it because it is inconvenient to Barack Obama, and its not what he wants to do, is a doomed strategy in my opinion.
How long this will go, I do not know. But the peril from a behavioral-economic stand point of going with a “turn the page” concept for a group of people that continue to be deprived of resources and suffer the consequences of a pattern of unfairness in our tax code, banking system, health care system, educational system and trade policies is one that does not end well.
Let us all hope that as we all have our own awakenings about our own values and the way that we deal with our world, that this President and his advisers come to similar awakenings before it is worse than it is now. I don’t ever believe it will be too late. But boy, I sure wish we could get on with the business of fixing things instead of being in the business of pretending things are fine if we can just move along and go with the president. It is a coward’s way out — and this is not a cowardly country. We will talk to you next time.
You can’t miss it these days, the “Americans Against Food Taxes” commercial. The one in which a maternal-looking actress pushes a shopping cart while griping that Washington is “trying to control what we eat and drink”—by taxing soda and other sugary soft drinks. Lovingly placing a huge bottle of pop on the checkout conveyor, our heroine delivers her kicker line:
“Government is just getting too involved in our personal lives.”
(AAFT, by the way, calls itself a “coalition of concerned citizens – responsible individuals, financially strapped families, small and large businesses;” according to SourceWatch, published by the Center for Media and Democracy, it’s merely “a front group funded by the beverage industry. We’re shocked—shocked.)
Anyway, the No Sugary Soda Tax lady is royally pissed over Big Government’s intrusion into her shopping cart, and her right to fatten up her kids with Mountain Dew. Just as Sarah Palin is steamed over Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity initiative, a Kenyan Socialist Muslim attack on our God-Given right to heart disease, stroke and having our diabetic legs amputated as the Founding Fathers intended. Also.
With the Health Care Reform debate, the ascendancy of the Tea Party and all its corporate enablers, we’ve heard a lot of anti-Big Government bloviating over the past couple of years, culminating in the Great Midterm Shellacking of 2010. “Death panels,” “pulling the plug on Granny,” “Keep your Big Government hands off my Medicare and Social Security” (a statement so breathtakingly stupid on so many levels, where do you begin?).
And there’s always that evergreen, the NRA’s “Keep your hands off our guns.” Or “Keep your hands off our high-capacity ammunition magazines used only for mass murder.” Yes, for the ever more extreme rightist Republicans in Congress, Big Government (read Barack Obama, Reid, Pelosi et. al.) is your enemy.
There is one topic, however, on which the GOP’s anti-government zealotry takes a little ideological sabbatical: Reproductive rights. Granted, I miss a lot, but I’ve not yet heard archconservative Republicans shout, “Keep your hands out of my uterus!”
Doesn’t have quite the same ring, I guess. Perhaps it’s since some main sponsors of Congress’ current tsunami of anti-choice legislation, like Rep. Chris Smith, from my native state of NJ, and Rep. Joe Pitts, of Pa., do not, to my knowledge, possess uteri.
In any event, the GOP House is keeping its promise to address our nation’s joblessness crisis by…focusing on eliminating abortion.
Protecting zygote rights.
To paraphrase the “No Tax on Sugary Soda Lady,” Big Government is getting way too involved in the most private aspect of a woman’s personal life.
It’s happening at the national level, and in states all across the country. And much of it arises from the evangelical Religious Right, whose application of unyielding, unquestioning, fundamentalist Christianity to government represents totalitarianism in its purest form. (And this goes for all faiths in all nations). At least when it’s forced on those who don’t share their beliefs.
And so for any pro-choicers—especially young women—who chose to sit out the 2010 Midterms (after all, you could have been watching Bristol Palin on Dancing With the Stars that Tuesday night), well, elections have consequences.
Two of the new GOP bills, HR3 (Smith) and HR358 (Pitts) have sparked special outrage. HR3, the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortions Act, caused a firestorm over language that redefined rape and incest. Even more heinous, if possible, is HR 358. The so-called “Protect Life Act,” is an amendment to the 2010 health care reform law modeled on the so-called Stupak Amendment, an anti-abortion provision pro-life Democrats attempted to insert into HRC. Those of us who oppose 358 call it the “Let Mommy Die” act: The bill would allow hospitals, on “moral” grounds, not only to refuse a life-saving abortion to a dying woman, but also refuse to refer her to another provider.
Somehow, this can be construed as “protecting life.” Then I guess we should have given Ted Bundy the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
(As an aside, it’s worth noting that between 1990 and 2008, the number of American women who die in childbirth annually rose from 12 to 17 per 100,000 live births)
HR 3 and the even more ghoulish 358 are violent—perhaps fatal— Big Government assaults on women’s bodies. But they’re only the most outrageous weapons in the GOP attack. This from Talking Points Memo’s Brian Beutler:
“The GOP’s plan to ban tax-payer money from funding abortions includes giant tax hikes for businesses. More specifically, it would eliminate tax incentives on employer-provided health care benefits if those benefits cover abortion as a medical procedure.Supporters of the bill say those incentives essentially constitute federal spending on abortion….Republicans, says Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) are trying to limit “private choices by private individuals and businesses in the private insurance market.”….Ultimately, the impact of tax like the one in the Republican legislation would likely be to phase out abortion coverage in the private insurance market… “The Republicans in the House are proposing tax hikes because they don’t like a health plan a private-sector business chooses,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA). “What they want to do is essentially make abortion unavailable.”
Not as sensational as Let Mommy Die, but effective, nonetheless.
Last night, Rachel Maddow aired the profoundly moving tale of Wyoming state legislator Sue Wallis—a Republican in the reddest of states—who opposed an anti-choice bill that would have required doctors to inform abortion patients that they could view ultrasound images of their fetuses before the procedure. Wallis gave an impassioned floor speech telling her personal story. Here’s the AP summary of her comments:
“I’m going to tell you a couple of things that are none of your damned business,” Wallis said as she addressed the committee.Wallis said she’s been pregnant five times and has given birth to three children. She said she lost one baby two weeks before it was due to be born and once underwent an abortion, something she said she had never before revealed in public. Wallis said proceeding with the abortion was the best decision she ever made. She said she has spent time counseling young women and said they already know what the implications of abortion are when they visit a doctor.
As Wallis’ Republican colleague, Lisa Shepperson, also declared on the floor of the Wyoming House:
“When I go to the doctor, it is the most private thing you can imagine. I want myself, I want my husband, and I want my doctor there. I don’t want any government.”
I don’t know what kind of soda Reps. Wallis and Shepperson drink. But I do know that anti-choice tyranny is forcing its Kool-Aid down the throats of American women.
by Steven Ertelt | Cheyenne, WY | LifeNews.com | 1/26/11 4:13 PM
The Wyoming state House has defeated a bill that would allow the 90 women who get abortions ever year in the Cowboy State see an ultrasound of their unborn baby beforehand. The rejection is another sign the fiscally conservative Republicans in the state legislature are no pro-life advocates.
The House voted 32-23 against the bill, sponsored by pro-life Rep. Bob Brechtel, a Casper Republican who is frequently the sponsor of much of the pro-life legislation brought up in the Wyoming legislature over the years.
Brechtel said women deserve to know full information about the development of their unborn child before an abortion — information they are not usually given beforehand. He said he wanted women to know about “the haunting question, and the torture and pain that can be inflicted, especially during late-term abortions,” during debate on the state House floor.
“I’m going to stand strong for the defense of life, and at least try to help people understand where we’re injuring women and certainly damaging families and children,” he said after the vote, according to an AP report.
Rep. Sue Wallis, a Republican who said she had had an abortion in years’ past and who is one of the most vocal abortion advocates in the state legislature, publicly opposed the bill as she has other pro-life bills to help women.
Rep. Lisa Shepperson, another pro-abortion Republican, also spoke against the bill. She is one of many Republicans who voted against the measure that went down to defeat in a GOP-controlled legislature. That upsets Becky Vandeberghe, the head of the pro-family group WyWatch.
She told LifeNews.com today her group “is very disappointed in the 24 Republicans who did not deem it appropriate to support the most basic pro-life legislation put before the legislature. Planned Parenthood’s foothold in Wyoming politics only gets stronger with each defeat that the Republican legislators encourage.”
Vandeberghe commended Brechtel “for his efforts to protect a women’s right to information prior to a surgical abortion in Wyoming. His continued efforts to defend women and the sanctity of life in the form of HB0118 Abortion-Information for Decision was greatly appreciated by the thousands of pro-life families in Wyoming.”
She said her organziation would “continue to support this and similar legislation in the future. We hope pro-life Wyoming families will engage in the legislative process”
The group will continue to recruit and train pro-life candidates for office.
