I Met the Walrus (an animated film with John Lennon)
July 9, 2008 5:54 pm

ZP Heller, Brave New Films

Back in 1969, 14-year-old Beatles fanatic Jerry Levitan snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in Toronto. Armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, Levitan convinced Lennon to do an interview.

38 years later, director Josh Raskin has created a hauntingly beautiful animated film using Levitan's original interview recording. Using the "Yellow Submarine"-inspired pen work of James Braithwaite and digital illustrations of Alex Kurina, "I Met the Walrus" perfectly encapsulates Lennon's prescient thoughts on politics and peace.

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Billionaires Are Gouging Your Grandparents
July 10, 2008 5:57 pm

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Too Big To Fail
July 12, 2008 5:58 pm

Jonathan Taplin, TPM Cafe

I wish I was "too big to fail". That's what all the talking heads in Washington and on Wall Street are saying about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Collectively they hold $5 Trillion in mortgages. So what is one of the possible outcomes of their problems in the next few weeks? A government bailout! Never mind that it would raise our total government debt by 50%. Never mind that both firms are leveraged to the level of criminal misconduct.

This is what we call Corporate Socialism--the privatization of profit and the socialization of risk and misconduct. Both our current President and Vice President are experts at this since their fortunes are owed completely to corporate socialism. In Bush's case, he was hired by Richard Rainwater to run the Texas Rangers with only one key job attribute: the ability to get the state to pay for the new baseball stadium. When Bush sold out to his buddy Tom Hicks (Clear Channel) he made $14 million on his $500,000 investment.

Dick Cheney is also a case study in the use of corporate socialism for private enrichment. As we have pointed out before, while Secretary of Defense, Cheney set up Halliburton and its KBR subsidiary in the military supply outsourcing business, and then went to work as Halliburton's CEO. For two years work he earned $30.5 million.

Cheney and Bush only have 5 1/2 months left to continue raiding the treasury to remunerate their corporate supplicants who are floundering. Who else is "too big to fail"?

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The Death of Reaganomics
July 13, 2008 5:59 pm

by: E.J. Dionne, Truthdig.com

The biggest political story of 2008 is getting little coverage. It involves the collapse of assumptions that have dominated our economic debate for three decades.

Since the Reagan years, free-market cliches have passed for sophisticated economic analysis. But in the current crisis, these ideas are falling, one by one, as even conservatives recognize that capitalism is ailing.

You know the talking points: Regulation is the problem and deregulation is the solution. The distribution of income and wealth doesn't matter. Providing incentives for the investors of capital to "grow the pie" is the only policy that counts. Free trade produces well-distributed economic growth, and any dissent from this orthodoxy is "protectionism."

The old script is in rewrite. "We are in a worldwide crisis now because of excessive deregulation," Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said in an interview.

He notes that in 1999 when Congress replaced the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act with a looser set of banking rules, "we let investment banks get into a much wider range of activities without regulation." This helped create the subprime mortgage mess and the cascading calamity in banking.

While Frank is a liberal, the same cannot be said of Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Yet in a speech on Tuesday, Bernanke sounded like a born-again New Dealer in calling for "a more robust framework for the prudential supervision of investment banks and other large securities dealers.".....

.....This is the third time in 100 years that support for taken-for-granted economic ideas has crumbled. The Great Depression discredited the radical laissez-faire doctrines of the Coolidge era. Stagflation in the 1970s and early '80s undermined New Deal ideas and called forth a rebirth of radical free-market notions. What's becoming the Panic of 2008 will mean an end to the latest Capital Rules era.

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Islam: Christian Fundamentalism's Antichrist Du Jour
July 13, 2008 6:00 pm

Richard Bartholomew, Talk2Action

....."the colonists saw Antichrist personified in everyone from native Americans to the Church of England. He looks at the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century, showing how such prominent Americans as Yale president Timothy Dwight saw the work of the Antichrist in phenomena ranging from the French Revolution to Masonry. In the twentieth century, Fuller finds a startling array of hate-mongers, such as the Ku Klux Klan, who drew on apocalyptic imagery in their attacks on Jews, Catholics, blacks, socialists, and others. Finally, he considers contemporary fundamentalist writers such as Hal Lindsey and a host of others who have found Antichrist in the sinister guise of the European Economic Community, feminism, and even supermarket barcodes and fibre optics."

Shoebat and Richardson, meanwhile, claim that the Antichrist will be a Muslim leader, and fundamentalist "prophecy experts" are increasingly willing to agree.

I wrote about Shoebat on Talk to Action last week, and I was afterwards contacted by Richardson on my blog. The subsequent correspondence demonstrates perfectly the intellectual dishonesty and opportunism at the heart of this latest fundamentalist Biblical interpretation.

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