Excellent performance by the 'Broadway Cast' of 'HAIR'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n4bSTvsWvM
Forming new policy on Piracy, specifically Somalia.
1) Clarify (to Somalis and the world) WHY those 3 pirates lost their lives: The US was willing to negotiate and requested that if the pirates were given safe passage to shore, that those leaders on land would allow the US to arrest those 4 pirates - a standard expectation for their criminal act in International waters. With that request denied, and by attempting to send in reinforcements to the pirates, they left the US little option, but to take military action once the opportunity was available. As a result those 3 pirates paid the price of their criminal actions with their lives. The blood and burden falls to the Somali leaders that failed to cooperate. Criminal acts MUST be punished and addressed. Policies of lawlessness serve no one in the international community. Such policies break down the opportunities for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness around the world.
2) Remind them that the US and other countries are NOT their enemy. We did not ask to be attacked nor our vessels and citizens to be held for ransom. Our ships are traveling through International waters that are open to anyone. If Somalis wish to dispute that, then lets bring it to the table and try to reach an agreement on what is and is not acceptable and where the lines may need to be drawn.
3) Let them know that we understand some of the concerns that may have led to the rise of piracy in Somalia, specifically dumping and environmental abuses that have affected the fishing in that area. Again, let's bring those concerns to the table and establish fair rules and policies for that area that will be bound by all international countries that use those shipping routes.
4) Work with the existing Somali 'government' and offer international aid to try to address the root cause of the issues: poverty, economic breakdown, lawlessness, etc. Find diplomatic solutions that can improve our relations and establish a trust-based relationship that fosters support against criminal activity internally and externally. In addition to expecting them to address their internal turmoil, We should offer to defend them against unjust acts as well. Ultimately, they need to establish a working government entity that has influence and is accepted by their people. Request assistance from the international community to help Somalia rebuild.
Side notes: Many nations in Africa suffer at the hands of those who hold guns or machetes. Power is establish by brute force and constant tribal warfare ensues. Any successfull progress we make in Somalia may be helpful in establishing justice and better governments across that continent, one nation at a time. Africa needs to be addressed by the international community and internally by other Africans.
Somalia is just one of many places that need to be addressed in the years to come. However it is currently a good place to start. To counter terrorism and lawlessness in the region, we MUST address the social-economic woes. Otherwise, anything else is a band-aid at best. If Al-qaeda makes strong roots there, it will only be harder to resolve later on. NOW is the time.
In some ways, the issues we face in the middle east may have been exported to Africa, much in the same way the Islamic religion was exported to Africa hundreds of years ago: via Yemen. Perhaps we need to work on relations there as well.
5) Come to an agreement with Somali leaders and the international community on the immediate piracy taking place. Decide on what is the best method to address this issue as we strive towards improving the root causes(above). Allowing the piracy to continue as-is is not acceptable. However perhaps we can come to an agreement or 'cease fire' as we work on other positive change in the region. Without such an agreement in place, military actions taken by international bodies to free their people/ships taken hostage will result in anger and may disrupt peaceful efforts to resolve the problem. However at the same time, make it clear ransom money will no longer be paid. Pirates will be captured and held accountable individually. An eye-for-an-eye is also not an acceptable policy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us-TVg40ExM
I'm fed up.
I'm tired of seeing articles and new reports from FOX News, claiming to be fair and balanced, yet smell anything but that. They range from subtle jabs to outright heavy punches, often pitting a 'heavyweight' Republican against a 'lightweight' Democrat intentionally to give the Republican the edge and final word on the discussion before they cut away or before the FOX host interjects, primarily on the side of the GOP.
While it is clear FOX News is part of the GOP propaganda machine, they still try to pass themselves off as 'fair and balanced'. Cut the act FOX News, you are neither. You have a specific agenda, to forward the efforts of the GOP. Period.
Your wide marketshare of the nation's news and entertainment may give you an edge in terms of viewership, however that fact should also remind viewers of current events where corporate greed has spread rampantly across our nation. FOX fits that mold, only they not only want money, they want to use their media power to influence the direction of this country.
The problem with this is their current alignment with the GOP. While the Republican party was never the enemy of the common American, the current Republican party and their twisted efforts should be deemed a threat. Aside from the failed policies of the past 8 years, they continue to hang onto failed idealogy that places the importance of the market and Capitalism over the best interests of the American public and our Democracy.
Their recent arguments reak of partisanship, finger-pointing, and intentionally misdirect our people away from the policies that the Obama Administration is trying to put forth. I'm sorry, but our country IS in a war. An economic war that requires the strength of all Americans to rally behind the President to solve this problem, much as we have done in our past during WWI and WWII.
In a time of properity (economic peace), the GOP might have something worthy of a good discussion. Unfortunately their current agenda is so obvious and apparent. Instead of coming across as being genuinely concerned for the average Joe, they use the average Joe as a tactic to further their agenda.
Much of their philosophy and tactics are based on the Karl Rove mentality of divide and conquer, used during G.W. Bush's campaigns and for the past 8 years. Heck, even FOX News has hired Karl to be an advisor on thier 'News'/entertainment shows.
If only the Republican Party dropped much of the garbage they picked up along the way over the past 8-12 years, they might returns to their roots and re-image themselves. Right now, they are part of the problem, not the solution. Every word that comes out of them, aside from a select handful of Republicans, reaks of the Karl Rove tactics and misaligned view that Capitalism can operate without the proper checks and balances in place. If we have learned nothing in the past several years, it is that the nature of mankind will seek power and greed over what is right.
This doesn't mean I agree 100% with Democrats. This means that while we NEED the opportunity and economic strength of Capitalism, we also NEED the checks and balances of our Democracy to protect the interest of the common man and woman. The interest of Democracy should not choke Capitalism, and Capitalism should not dominate without proper checks and balances to prevent abuse. It is that balance we need to seek.
In the meantime, FOX News needs to realign themselves. Putting the economic power of corporate influence behind our media has only proven to corrupt their message. Our news should be unbiased. It is very sad that many of our new organizations maintain a certain bias and political preference (ABC, NBC, etc). We need objectivity. We need true fair and balanced reporting.
Republicans need to re-invent themselves. The GOP is too entangled with the corrupt examples of capitalism and power. They're afraid to let go and realign themselves. They shouldn't let their egos and the power of the corporate entities cloud their judgement. They need to let it go and move on. It has put them at odds with the American people.
Many Democrats need to re-evaluate themselves as well. In their efforts to stand up to the corrupt dominance of the Republican party, they themselves have taken extreme measures that put them at odds with the best interests of this country.
The time for change is now. We need to fix that which has strayed and get back on track.
Geithner & Bernanke need to read these articles. I don't pass them on as a way to bash their efforts or criticize them. I feel the points made in these articles are worth evaluating:
Ben Bernanke Is Still Stuck in the 1930s
Posted Mar 16, 2009 03:47pmEDT
by John Carney
Amid growing concern about a populist backlash against banks and Wall Street, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke appeared on “60 Minutes” over the weekend to explain recent financial rescue efforts.
When asked about whether letting Lehman Brothers collapse last year was the right move, Bernanke replied: "There were many people who said, 'Let 'em fail.' You know, 'It's not a problem. The markets will take care of it.' And I think I knew better than that. And Lehman proved that you cannot let a large internationally active firm fail in the middle of a financial crisis. Now was it a mistake? It wasn't a mistake for the following reason: we didn't have the option, we didn't have the tools. All the Federal Reserve can do is make loans against collateral," Bernanke said. In other words, it wasn't my fault.
From The Business Insider, March 16, 2009:
Today's crisis isn't a replay of the problem in the 1930s, but last night's 60 minutes interview with Ben Bernanke made it clear that our central bankers don't understand the distinction. Bernanke's academic career was spent studying the policy responses to the Great Depression. His analysis suggests that the Fed made two errors:
· Central banks allowed the money supply contract sharply. "Price fell. Deflation. So monetary policy was, in fact, very contractionary. Very tight– during that period," he said last night.
· They permitted bank failures. "And then the second mistake they made was they let the banks fail. They didn’t make any strong effort to prevent the failure of thousands of banks."
The first point, about money supply, is a rather orthodox position that was popularized by the University of Chicago's Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz in their book "A Monetary History of the United States." They argued that in the 1930s, the country and the Federal Reserve were faced with a liquidity crisis in the banking sector. As banks failed, depositors panicked and bank runs began. This led to a cycle of bank failures.
"If the borrowers hadn't withdrawn cash, they [the banks] would have been in good shape. But the Fed just sat by and did nothing, so bank after bank failed. And that only motivated depositors to withdraw funds from banks that were not in distress," Schwartz explained in an interview with the Wall Street Journal several months ago.
Notice that there is a subtle--but extremely important--difference between Schwartz's analysis and Bernanke's. In Schwartz's view, healthy banks were failing due to a liquidity crisis. This could have been prevented by adding more liquidity. For Bernanke, even the failure of unhealthy banks should have been prevented. This is a serious departure from the historical precedent.
Bernanke's approach is premised on the idea that there will be a crisis if you don't rescue a failing firm. But there's no evidence for that. In fact, Bernanke's approach probably makes the problem worse. If bank runs were caused by an inability of depositors to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy firms, Bernanke's approach is actually creating this same confusion.
"The market knows when a firm isn't sound," Schwarts told William Cohan in a separate interview. "And if the Fed didn't behave as if every failing firm is too big to fail, then it would permit the exit of firms that weren't really viable and the market would recognise this as a just decision. It's not the job of the Fed to be intervening to help such firms. People are knowledgeable. They knew that there were troubles with Lehman."
"If they're going to go into the business of rescuing every failing firm," Schwartz said, "we won't have a capitalist system . . . People are responsible for the decisions they make. If they've made wrong decisions, lost money and don't have the funds to operate, well, it's time to leave the market. And that's what the Fed's responsibility is, not to shore up firms that have no reason to continue."
Way back in October we described this approach as fighting the last depression while ushering in the next one. Unfortunately and depressingly, it seems that Bernanke is immune to evidence or argument on this subject.
Fighting The Last Depression While Ushering In The Next One
John Carney
Oct. 16, 2008, 1:52 PM
So why isn't the bailout working? They say generals are always fighting the last war. Now Ben Bernanke, who was a financial historian before he became a World Saver, may be fighting the last depression. Unfortunately, our current economic crisis is not like the one we faced in the 1930s. It's almost its photographic negative. Policies designed to avert the last depression may actually be prolonging this crisis.
In the Great Depression, banks that were otherwise solvent, if not entirely healthy, were being brought down by panic driven bank runs and a lack of liquidity. That truly was a liquidity crisis. The Federal Reserve had it within its power to support the banks by adding liquidity but it refused to do so. Since then an academic consensus has developed around the theory that it would have been better for the Fed to take an active role in preventing the crash of solvent financial institutions.
Our problem is very different. As we've seen from the wreckage of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch, many of our financial institutions are insolvent. They aren't healthy victims of bank runs. They are ailing institutions barely kept alive by frantic rounds of capital raising. The lessons of the Great Depression simply don't apply here. In fact, we're probably making things worse. Allowing insolvent institutions to fail and requiring worthless and worth less assets to be fully written down would provide transparency to the market. Instead, we're dedicated to the post-Lehman proposition of "Never Again." The various programs of our government continue to obscure asset pricing and conceal insolvency. This means that you can't trust the market to tell you which firms are failing.
Twisting the arms of bankers to lend to institutions that may be insolvent is a recipe for deepening the crisis. We've just been through a period of malinvestment--we spent too much borrowed money on junk. Borrowing more to spend on junk only digs us in deeper.
Bank lending won't get going again until trust in the markets can be restored. Fighting a Great Depression era problem probably won't help. More transparency, which means more write-downs and failures, is probably necessary if we're going to get through this. Unfortunately, we're still sailing in the opposite direction.
Mariam Makeba - Soweto Blues
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTj4qjC4akM
Press to watch
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2eHqctEPJE
THERE IS A METHOD TO HIS MADNESS. OUR PRESIDENT B. OBAMA HAS DONE MORE FOR OUR COUNTRY IN ONE MONTH THEN ANY OTHER PRESIDENT. SO I'M GONNA TAKE ONE MINUTE OF MY TIME TO THANK HIM AND SUPPORT HIM ALL THE WAY. SO HERE IT IS (THANKYOU PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA!!!) AND YOU CAN COUNT ON MY SUPPORT. DOING SOMETHING RATHER THEN NOTHING IS WHAT SEPERATES US FROM THE ANIMALS. AMERICA IS EXPERIENCING A VERY HUMBLING TIME IN ITS HISTORY BUT WEV'VE HAD IT TO GOOD FOR TO LONG AND MAYBE SOMETHING GOOD WILL COME OUT OF THIS. MAYBE THIS WILL BRING FAMILIES TOGETHER WE HAVE BECOME A CULTURE OF EVERYONE FOR HIMSELF AND THATS JUST NOT RIGHT. WE NEED TO GATHER OUR MORALS BACK UP AND JOIN THE ONE FOR ALL AND ALL FOR ONE CLUB CALLED THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!!!!
RANDY OF MI.....
ACME Missionary Baptist Church
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BttL4iY_V0M
This performance is a tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mx-pfZDVm0Y
I heard he sang a good song, I heard he had a style, and so I came to see him and listen for a while...and there he was this young boy, a stranger to my eye. Strumming my pain with his fingers, singing my life with his words... Roberta Flack
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpNdMIAnKko
Dionne Warwick music video...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnbA_vjCR8w
This song fits the times we're in. Originally performed by - Fontella Bass-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXSocE_M1G4
Curtis Mayfield - We Got To Have PEACE
click to watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QglEbgON9o
All I got to say is that Obama has to be real carefull I feel that there are very evil people out there and if he tries to take away there money they will try to get rid of him. They may try to drum up some kind of stupid charges or even worse. I honestly believe they allowed him to be president just to satisfy our needs. So that they can keep our attention off of whats really going on and for all we know Obama, Clinton and the whole bunch may already be apart of the grand plan. And for those of you who haven't figured it out yet the biggest transfer of wealth went on right in front of our eyes while we were watching Obama they raised the price of a barrell of oil to 150.00 dollars and spent trillions of dolllars. Foriegn companies gave suit cases of money to people in our goverment for u.s. contracts. Our most secret plans and weapons are already in the hands of our enemies. Our banking system is the most corrupt in the world we are spending money we don't even have wait till the Chinees and the Japanees find out that we couldn't pay them back even if we wanted to. Lets just say they think were on the up and up and they really think we can pay them back and then something happens and they want there money and there is none. Then what? WORLD WAR (3). AND OUT THE WAR COMES THE NEW WORLD ORDER A ONE WORLD ONE GOVERMENT WORLD. But at the end of it all untill we get rid of greed and we fix the hunger problem we will always have problems. When you really think about it all you need is love and if the people of this crazy world could come together and take care of each other so that all men no matter what color there skin is could have a home a means for feeding there families. When you really think about it why do we need borders why do we care about what we look like we are all Gods children no matter what you call him whether you believe in religion or mother nature it doesn't really matter does it. We got to get rid of money it is the root of all evil.
WOW WHAT A MOUTHFULL!!!! WELL YOU GUYS PROBABLY THINK I'M CRAZY BUT HAVE A MERRY CHRISTMAS ANYWAY!!! AND TRY TO REMEMBER WHAT CHRISTMAS IS REALLY ABOUT.
Remember a year or two ago they said that they lost 100 million dollars of re-costrustion money in transport from here to Iraq. After you are sworn into office Sen. Obama I would like you to create a website where the general public can go and find out where we are spending our tax dollars. We as Americans have a right to know. I saw on the news the other day that a German company called Seimans I'm not sure if that is spelled right was found guilty and had to pay a bunch of money in fines for bribeing people with suitcases of money to get goverment contracts. Who are these people? All I'm trying to say is that in the last decade our goverment has spent trillions of dollars and on what. I am sure that I'm not the only one who wants to know where this money went. Are we going to let Bush and his CRONIES get away with the biggest crime in the in the history of the United States. I guarentee that if we took a closer look we would find all kinds of wrong doings going on in Washington. I mean lets be real look at the people that ran for President, all we could find was a handfull of people with a clean enough record. Nothing against Obama I have been on Baracks side from day one. But you would think that in the U.S. we'd have thousands of people Qualified to run for President. just like this latest scandal going on, on wall street right now how does one person have the ability to rip off 50 billion dollars from everyone. I THINK THERES A WHOLE LOT OF GUILTY PEOPLE OUT THERE. And I think it's time to end this mess even if it means we have to start all over again cause this game is over!!!!!
Merry Christmas!!! Randy
Well to all my friends who worked so hard to get Barack Obama elected President of the United states of America. Lets throw the politics aside for a minute or at least long enough to give me a chance to wish you and all of your families a very Merry Christmas or depending on your religion I would like to at least wish you all a Happy New Year!!!!! And I would like to also say thanks and Happy Holidays to everyone and may God Bless You ALL!!!!
MERRY CHRISTMAS TO EVERYONE AND TO EVERYONE A HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!
RANDY M.
Federal courts in Pennsylvania have dismissed Berg's lawsuit. Federal courts in Ohio and Washington state have rejected similar lawsuits. Allegations raised on the Internet say the birth certificate, showing that Obama was born in Hawaii on Aug. 4, 1961, is a fake. But state officials in Hawaii say they checked health department records and have determined there's no doubt Obama was born in Hawaii. I'm sorry if you think that I am paranoid but I just don't trust the goverment.
I personally think that the bank failures, the recession and especially the oil prices were all fake and brought on by a bunch of greedy people who care absolutly nothing about us poorer people they figure every once in a while if they throw us a bone it will keep us satisfied.
My hopes are that Barack Obama can see through these people and if he keeps his promises and starts from the bottom up then we will know that he is on our side but if he goes back back to the same old thing we will know that they got to him. By they I mean the people with the money and power to actually move and shake the world people like (the Rockefellers,rothchilds and other people who are in control of the most powerful companies of the world like bill gates and warren buffet and even the pope yes these are the same people who send hundreds of lobbiest to the white house every year. Barack Obama is a uniter and thats just what we need because if this recession turns into a depression the poor will eat the rich and the rich won't be hard to find because they will be the only peoplE with the lights still on. All I am asking is that we all keep our guards up and stand behind our newly elected PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA!!!
THANKS FOR YOUR TIME. RANDY
P.S. ALWAYS REMEMBER THANKS TO BUSH THEY ARE WATCHING YOU!!!
THE LIVING TREE 'live' Shirley Bassey
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7zLYpE1_2A
Does anyone know why the Supreme Court is looking at Barack Obama's Birth Certificate. I heard that there is a group of people out there, it might even be the Bilderbergers that are BEHIND THE HOLE THING. They are trying to proove that Obama wasn't born in the U.S.A. AND THAT WOULD MEAN THAT HE COULDN'T BE PRESIDENT. Because the law states you have to be born in the U.S. to be president. Does anyone have any info?
And just for your own info look-up the words bilderberger, trilateral comission and the commitee for foriegn relations and see what you think.
Were not done yet Randy
