I’m told the best thing about having a hearing aid is being able to turn it off; selectively, of course, around boring or annoying people. When someone wants to ask you for money. When you’d just like some quiet. There’s a switch. You have the power to tune voices out.

Which is what the media have been doing to the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

The demonstrators have said they want “economic justice.”

And inevitably a talking head will wonder: “What do they want?”

The demonstrators will say they want economic justice.

Then an anchor will say, “There’s not really a cohesive theme with these protesters.”

The demonstrators will march with signs that plainly read they want economic justice.

Then a reporter will offer: “There’s not really a central message permeating in the crowd.”

Yes, the media have gone “Grampa with a telemarketer” on Occupy Wall Street.

That hasn’t hindered the Occupiers from resonating with Americans. The protests have been growing. The movement has been growing. Occupy LA is down the street from my home. Their numbers have nearly quadrupled from the first week. They now count 253 tents at City Hall and have the blessings of the City Council to stay as long as they need. It’s hard to confirm reports of all the other Occupations, it’s rumored to be in the hundreds. I can verify 24 demonstrations across the U.S. where they are “occupying.” There could be dozens more by the time you read this. People from all walks of life are taking to the streets to cry out for “economic justice.”

Now the local news will report: “The demonstrators don’t have any specific unifying points so far.”

Former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill coined the phrase, "All politics is local."

Also, all politics is personal. The housing crisis took peoples’ homes. Families have been uprooted and kicked around by giant soulless corporations. There’s nothing more personal than putting a family’s furniture on the lawn. There’s nothing more personal than seeing “bank foreclosure” signs all in a row in your neighborhood. There’s nothing more personal than witnessing your community, already struggling in the last decade, thrown further by indecipherable market-speak terms like “derivatives” and “securitized mortgage bundles.”

And then there are the students: the victims of direct-to-consumer student loans. And, yes, it’s personal. Education prices have gone up but the federal loan programs’ maximum amount have not. So kids with no means to pay for college other than borrowing, are being forced into paying credit card-like interest on their education with loans that are non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, with no statutes of limitations, and can’t be refinanced. These students carry signs reading, “Debt is slavery.” It’s more like sharecropping, which is slavery while being told you’re free.

And there’s the unemployed. They’re the nation’s statistics now donning Guy Fawkes masks. They are the “lagging indicators” who are tired of being called lazy. They want to work and can’t. Those who can’t find work don’t care about the circular firing squad in Washington of everyone blaming everything on whatever side they oppose. For the unemployed, it’s also personal.

Politicians won’t take personal responsibility for the crisis – and so Occupy Wall Street has no choice but to be nonpartisan. Or just bipartisan in their frustration.

It’s the least partisan political movement I’ve witnessed. The phrase Glass–Steagall gets thrown around at Occupy Wall Street like the Volstead Act did at speakeasies. Glass–Steagall, was signed by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 and made much of what the banks did to tank the economy then (and now) illegal. The Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act also called Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 basically repealed Glass-Steagall. It was passed by a bi-partisan vote in the Republican-controlled Congress and was signed by Democratic President Bill Clinton.

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When Teddy Roosevelt first proposed a system of single payer insurance for the United States, it was popular and quite nearly a done deal. That is, until the AMA intervened and began a whisper campaign about how it would "socialize health care" and place patients under government control. During the 21st century battle for universal health care, President Obama was able to get the AMA on board with it, which is part of the reason it actually passed.

How did he do that? Well, part of the reason it worked is because the AMA has splintered into subgroups, sometimes according to specialty and other times according to political bent. One of the more prominent (and scary!) splinter groups is the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), of which Rand Paul is a member.

The AAPS just had a tea party on September 18th. Not only did Rand Paul attend, so did our favorite Nevada teabagger, Sharron Angle. And not only Sharron Angle, but Georgia's Paul Broun, also a doctor.

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Red Sox partner says CIA chartered his jet

By Gordon Edes

Phillip Morse, a minority partner of the Boston Red Sox, said Sunday that his private jet has been chartered to the CIA and confirmed that it had been flown to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where more than 500 terrorism suspects are held, as well as other overseas destinations.

But Morse said he was "stunned" by a report in Sunday's Chicago Tribune suggesting that the plane might have been used for "renditions," the controversial practice in which terrorism suspects arrested abroad have been forcibly returned to their native countries for interrogation...read on

It was rather sickening to listen to the high-and-mighty posturing of our 'representatives' browbeat ball players on the steroids matter while we are at war, the treasury is being bankrupted and unprecedented government corruption is happening right before their eyes. Listening to them sanctimoniously lecture baseball about its ethics and practices is especially ironic when one considers that their own ethics process has been de-fanged by the Tom Delay-led GOP.

There Are More Bankruptcy Filings During Conservative Presidencies Conservative Truths
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2003 the years where a Republican President was in office show a higher total rate of Bankruptcy Petition Filings than when a Democratic President was in office.

In 1998, when Democrat William Jefferson Clinton was President, the Total Number of Bankruptcy Petitions Filed was 1,429,459.

In 1999, when Democrat William Jefferson Clinton was President, the Total Number of Bankruptcy Petitions Filed decreased to 1,391,964.

In 2000, when Democrat William Jefferson Clinton was President, the Total Number of Bankruptcy Petitions Filed further decreased to 1,276,922.

In 2001, when Republican George Walker Bush was President, the Total Number of Bankruptcy Petitions Filed increased to 1,386,606.

In 2002, when Republican George Walker Bush was President, the Total Number of Bankruptcy Petitions Filed further increased to 1,505,306.

Source: 15-business.pdf No. 756

THE YEAR IN REVIEW

via Kevin Drum....I've been in a rotten mood lately, a feeling that I blame on the 109th Congress. Here's a summary of their first few weeks of activity:

• Passed: A tort reform bill that makes it harder for ordinary citizens to sue corporations who harm them.
• Coming soon: A bankruptcy bill that will make it harder for distressed workers to declare bankruptcy and will increase credit card company profits by an estimated $1 billion.
• Coming soon: A transportation bill that adds two unpaid hours onto the work days of short-haul and long-haul truckers.
• In progress: Changes to Social Security that will almost certainly include benefit cuts for current workers.
• In progress: Making permanent a set of tax cuts that primarily helps the upper class.

And it's only the middle of March. Can anyone name even one thing the Bush administration has done this year — or is proposing to do — that would benefit ordinary workers? Do they even pretend to care any more?

UPDATE: I'm informed that the "unpaid hours" amendment to the transportation bill failed to pass in the House and probably won't in the Senate either. I feel better already!

By The Associated Press The 74-25 roll call by which the Senate approved legislation making it harder for people to erase debts in bankruptcy. Voting ``yes'' were 55 Republicans, 18 Democrats and 1 independent.

Full list here

Jim Rogers, who cofounded the Quantum Fund with George Soros, attacks the bank bailout as "wrongheaded" and says most of the major banks are already bankrupt:

"Without giving specific names, most of the significant American banks, the larger banks, are bankrupt, totally bankrupt," said Rogers, who is now a private investor.

"What is outrageous economically and is outrageous morally is that normally in times like this, people who are competent and who saw it coming and who kept their powder dry go and take over the assets from the incompetent," he said. "What's happening this time is that the government is taking the assets from the competent people and giving them to the incompetent people and saying, now you can compete with the competent people. It is horrible economics."

[...] Goldman Sachs & Co analysts this week estimated that banks worldwide have suffered $850 billion of credit-related losses and writedowns since the global credit crisis began last year.

But Rogers said sound U.S. lenders remain. He said these could include banks that don't make or hold subprime mortgages, or which have high ratios of deposits to equity, "all the classic old ratios that most banks in America forgot or started ignoring because they were too old-fashioned."

Many analysts cite Lehman's Sept 15 bankruptcy as a trigger for the recent cratering in the economy and stock markets.

Rogers called that idea "laughable," noting that banks have been failing for hundreds of years. And yet, he said policymakers aren't doing enough to prevent another Lehman.

"Governments are making mistakes," he said. "They're saying to all the banks, you don't have to tell us your situation. You can continue to use your balance sheet that is phony.... All these guys are bankrupt, they're still worrying about their bonuses, they're still trying to pay their dividends, and the whole system is weakened."

Yep. The pointless bailout, the one that only postpones the inevitable, is embraced warmly by the Republican party while the one that actually provides a product and employs millions of working-class people is rejected. It's the blue shirts vs. the blue collars.

I posted yesterday that nuke-armed Pakistan is only a month away from bankruptcy. Now tiny Iceland looks like it might get there first.

Iceland has formidable international reach because of an outsized banking sector that set out with Viking confidence to conquer swaths of the British economy — from fashion retailers to top soccer teams.

The strategy gave Icelanders one of the world's highest per capita incomes. But now they are watching helplessly as their economy implodes — their currency losing almost half its value, and their heavily exposed banks collapsing under the weight of debts incurred by lending in the boom times.

... A full-blown collapse of Iceland's financial system would send shock waves across Europe, given the heavy investment by Icelandic banks and companies across the continent.

Iceland right now is apparently in a state of shock and gives a snapshot of what a depression with the Great in it will look like everywhere - "cafes were half-empty, real estate agents sat idle, and retailers reported few sales" says the AP.

And, just as Pakistan has begged the West for $100 billion to stave off economic collapse, Iceland has had to go cap-in-hand to a bigger power too. Only they've chosen the Russians - asking for a 5.4 billion loan to shore up the nation's finances.

That must be giving NATO planners conniptions. Loans like that, in the present climate, aren't going to come without strings and Iceland is the keystone in NATO's maritime defenses in the North West Atlantic, designed to keep Russian warships and subs containable in their home waters should the need arise.

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Economist's View: Bankruptcy for Lehman, Merrill Lynch sells to BofA, AIG in serious trouble. It looks almost certain that this week will be the one where we see the financial implosion in U.S. banking and brokerage that many have been expecting for some time.

distributorcap NY: The irresponsible, shoddy and pedestrian way the pundits and media use the results of polls to represent news, directly affects the tenor of the campaign.

No Rest For the Awake: A Native Alaskan perspective on Palin

Pruning Shears: This Week In Tyranny

The Mahablog: Teh Stupid, It Runs Our Country. More atrocities below...

ANNALS OF JOURNALISM: MSNBC's Brewer aired McCain attack ad without mentioning it was full of lies...Rachel's first exclusive...Frameshop's, Jeffrey Feldman on Bill Moyers...Try and put lipstick on these losers...Old habits die hard...Balz in the tank for the Psychogeezer, but a couple other WaPo reporters noticed the lies...More NYT false equivalence...Even Hactacular Howie is fed up with their lying...George Will attacks firefighters on 9/11, yesterday pretended that, like Palin, he doesn't know what the Bush Doctrine is...FUAX scrapes bottom...Lou Dobbs just loves to spread a little hate...NPR cannot find any pessimistic economists but push the GOP agenda on oil drilling...I thought James Carville was supposed to be a Democrat...It helps when you've got your own network

WARNING: Do not read this op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by Joe Lieberman if you have a heart condition or blood pressure issues, because I promise you, this will make you sick.

How did the Democratic Party get here? How did the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy drift so far from the foreign policy and national security principles and policies that were at the core of its identity and its purpose?

Beginning in the 1940s, the Democratic Party was forced to confront two of the most dangerous enemies our nation has ever faced: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In response, Democrats under Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy forged and conducted a foreign policy that was principled, internationalist, strong and successful.

This was the Democratic Party that I grew up in - a party that was unhesitatingly and proudly pro-American, a party that was unafraid to make moral judgments about the world beyond our borders. It was a party that understood that either the American people stood united with free nations and freedom fighters against the forces of totalitarianism, or that we would fall divided.

This was the Democratic Party of Harry Truman, who pledged that "it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."

And this was the Democratic Party of John F. Kennedy, who promised in his inaugural address that the United States would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of freedom."

This worldview began to come apart in the late 1960s, around the war in Vietnam. In its place, a very different view of the world took root in the Democratic Party. Rather than seeing the Cold War as an ideological contest between the free nations of the West and the repressive regimes of the communist world, this rival political philosophy saw America as the aggressor - a morally bankrupt, imperialist power whose militarism and "inordinate fear of communism" represented the real threat to world peace.

Beat. Head. Repeatedly. Against. Keyboard. But he only disagrees with us on one discrete issue, right, Harry? Glenn Greenwald:

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