More OpenSecrets.org

Hey Obama, you're number one!
(Data taken from OpenSecrets.org at 9:15pm, Nov 12, 2008)

Finance/Insurance/Real Estate: Top Recipients
Top 20 Recipients
Rank Candidate Office Amount
1 Obama, Barack (D) Senate $27,866,622
2 McCain, John (R) Senate $25,177,854
3 Clinton, Hillary (D-NY) Senate $18,888,564
4 Romney, Mitt (R) $13,656,977
5 Giuliani, Rudolph W (R) $13,522,309
6 Dodd, Christopher J (D-CT) Senate $5,786,368
7 Richardson, Bill (D) $3,472,962
8 Coleman, Norm (R-MN) Senate $2,186,923
9 Edwards, John (D) $2,144,162
10 Thompson, Fred (R) $1,941,899
11 McConnell, Mitch (R-KY) Senate $1,863,004
12 Warner, Mark (D-VA) $1,729,151
13 Cornyn, John (R-TX) Senate $1,722,942
14 Biden, Joseph R Jr (D-DE) Senate $1,634,298
15 Baucus, Max (D-MT) Senate $1,496,165
16 Sununu, John E (R-NH) Senate $1,439,060
17 Paul, Ron (R-TX) House $1,341,072
18 Huckabee, Mike (R) $1,325,031
19 Rangel, Charles B (D-NY) House $1,291,044
20 Durbin, Dick (D-IL) Senate $1,255,620


For Auto manufacturing? Only number 4?
Maybe a bailout would get you to number one?

Automotive: Top Recipients
Top 20 Recipients
Rank Candidate Office Amount
1 McCain, John (R) Senate $1,011,998
2 Romney, Mitt (R) $469,930
3 Giuliani, Rudolph W (R) $369,666
4 Obama, Barack (D) Senate $349,550
5 Clinton, Hillary (D-NY) Senate $294,916
6 Knollenberg, Joe (R-MI) House $180,700
7 Levin, Carl (D-MI) Senate $162,849
8 Buchanan, Vernon (R-FL) House $156,920
9 Cornyn, John (R-TX) Senate $148,141
10 Graves, Sam (R-MO) House $134,900
11 McConnell, Mitch (R-KY) Senate $113,600
12 Thompson, Fred (R) $106,150
13 Coleman, Norm (R-MN) Senate $92,958
14 Bee, Timothy (R-AZ) $92,500
15 Huckabee, Mike (R) $88,900
16 Richardson, Bill (D) $87,300
17 Pryor, Mark (D-AR) Senate $74,200
18 Paul, Ron (R-TX) House $70,488
19 Dole, Elizabeth (R-NC) Senate $66,431
20 Baucus, Max (D-MT) Senate $64,850

Palin says she might run for high office again

Quotes From the AP, my comments in italics:

WASILLA, Alaska (AP) — Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin says she wouldn't hesitate to run for the presidency in four years if it's God's will, even though she never thought Campaign 2008 would be "as brutal a ride as it turned out to be."

The US version of the Taliban: Christian fundamentalism. People who validate their behavior outside of themselves and their society via the idea of God. There is NO accountability for actions validated this way. "God told me to" (and its variant, "God's will") remains a terrifying sentence.

"I think the economic collapse had a heckuva lot more to do with the campaign's collapse than me personally," the governor said in an interview broadcast Tuesday on NBC's "Today" show.

She may be ambitious, but she is uneducated. "heckuva?" I'll bet she winked when she said it.

"I'm like, OK, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I'm like, don't let me miss the open door," Palin said in an interview with Fox News on Monday. "And if there is an open door in '12 or four years later, and if it is something that is going to be good for my family, for my state, for my nation, an opportunity for me, then I'll plow through that door."

Why not, "like," just walk through the door? Maybe God will be ok with NOT "plowing" through it. The thought of someone like this even running, with a chance, is terrifying.

Rewards for corporate irresponsibility

Decades of economic (and environmental) irresponsibility and failure to look to a future where gasoline might not be affordable have helped along the collapse of the auto industry in the US, GM in particular. While making offensive and grossly decadent vehicles for the consumption of the American market (morbidly obese vehicles such as Hummers), they were not ready for a market that would turn on them. And now they want the government to pay for their irresponsibility. They (the auto corporations) don't want to be regulated by the government, but they want to be paid by them. This is all so incredibly abhorrent and absurd. Where would the money really go? They say it is about the workers, but it seems more about the bottomline for the bigs on top.

In 1979 when the government loaned money to Chrysler, it brought about the creation of SUVs and mini-vans. Let's hope this time would not be about dressing up old styles with 30 mpg, re-tooling to make "efficient" SUVs and vans, but about creating a new generation of vehicles that will truly have a low-impact on the environment.

You can read about it the proposed auto bailout in the Washington Post.

Obama's Acceptance Speech

It was very powerful.

If only I could believe.

Hopefully he will show me. However:

He stated about his campaign: "It was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give five dollars and ten dollars and twenty dollars to this cause."

I think it was a few more dollars than that.

Nice to see all the universities on the list.

But meet your corporate keepers as well:

From OpenSecrets.org
as of tonight:

University of California $909,283
Goldman Sachs $874,207
Harvard University $717,230
Microsoft Corp $714,108
Google Inc $701,099
JPMorgan Chase & Co $581,460
Citigroup Inc $581,216
National Amusements Inc $543,859
Time Warner $508,148
Sidley Austin LLP $492,445
Stanford University $481,199
Skadden, Arps et al $473,424
Wilmerhale Llp $466,679
UBS AG $454,795
Latham & Watkins $426,924
Columbia University $426,516
Morgan Stanley $425,102
IBM Corp $415,196
University of Chicago $414,555
US Government $400,819

Orientalism and Ideology in the Chess World

“…Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious ‘Western’ imperialist plot to hold down the ‘Oriental’ world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of ‘interests’…” –Edward Said, Orientalism, p12.

Orientalism, and its inherent colonialist and racist views, continue to be distributed throughout texts and activities (or perhaps we should say ideas, objects, texts, and “lived relations”) in both conscious and unconscious ways. One arena that has caught my attention recently has been in the chess world.

Jan Gustafsson in New In Chess magazine (2008/5, p16), gave an apparent quote, about the relationship between chess grandmaster Arkady Naiditsch and his second, where Naiditsch supposedly said, “Negro, you work for me. I call you whenever I want and you show up immediately!” Gustafsson, a talented grandmaster himself, wrote a letter apologizing two issues later, “…I quoted Arkady Naiditsch using the word ‘negro’ talking to his second. It has been brought to my attention that this word is used as a racial slur. I want to apologize to the readers of New In Chess who may have taken offence and especially to Arkady, who never said this in the context I implied.”

In this apology, we are given no real understanding about the original use of the word “negro” in the article, just that the “context” was not what was “implied.” The question then remains: In what context was it actually said? It doesn’t matter: It should not have been said. Such power structures as stated are abhorrent to begin with; to use any ethnically specific designation in such a way to show a particularly oppressive power structure relationship is just a furthering of the distribution, and the continuation of colonialist ways. Gustafsson’s “apology” is only pointed to those “who may have taken offence” when it should just be a flat out apology to all.

In the same issue that Gustafsson apologizes in, we see another example: Viktor Kortchnoi’s analyses of his drawn game against Wang Yue. Korchnoi was part of a losing team against Yue’s winning team. In fact, Yue scored a remarkable 8.5/10 at the tournament, and former world champ candidate Kortchnoi scored 2.5/10. One-half point of that 2.5 that Kortchnoi scored was the draw against Yue. During the analysis of the game New In Chess (2008/7, p82) after Yue’s 36th move, Kortchnoi writes, “A literate European player would never produce such an ugly move!!” (yes, two exclamation marks) and gave Yue’s move a question mark. It may very well have not been a good move, but in Kortchnoi’s framing of the statement we see the world clearly divided into two realms: “literate European player[s]” and Others. Somehow Kortchnoi’s half-point is better than Yue’s half-point? We see how such an Orientalist view by someone as Kortchnoi works to minimize the successes of such an incredibly talented player as Yue through the analyses and designation as not-European. And at the same time, such language attempts to minimize Kortchnoi’s failures.

It is time for the chess world to look at itself more closely and examine the ideologies it is suppporting and distributing.

Ideology as "lived relations"

From Terry Eagleton's Ideology:

"No radical who takes a cool look at the tenacity and pervasiveness of dominant ideologies could possibly feel sanguine about what would be necessary to loosen their lethal grip. But there is one place above all where such forms of consciousness may be transformed almost literally overnight, and that is in active political struggle. This is not a Left piety but an empirical fact. When men and women, engaged in quite modest, local forms of political resistance, find themselves brought by the inner momentum of such conflicts into direct confrontation with the power of the state, it is possible that their political consciousness may be definitively, irreversibly altered."

Fear, people, fear!

Fear.

The best control of the masses.

Even better than television.

Journalist Car Bernstein keeps it going. After such great journalism with Bob Woodward, he goes into fear brokering. Instead of looking at the failings of the system, instead of looking at the election loser Al Gore, he attacks freedom of choice.

Friends, history has spoken: Al Gore lost.

If he had chosen to re-enfranchise progressives, he would've won.

But he didn't.

So Al Gore lost.

Yes, there were other factors (voter fraud), but don't blame freedom.

Blame Gore's campaign.

An intelligent and insightful man, Gore would've been a great President.

But he ran a flaccid campaign of centrist values.

So he lost the progressive vote.

Read Bernstein's fear mongering and decide yourself if you should move right to the center.

Moving center:

1) Supports the corporate oppressors and destroyers of people, and the environment.

2) It leads to oppression.

3) It keeps you oppressed.

Fight oppression. Don't buy the framing of the one party that poses as two.

**********************

Voter Beware: Of Ralph Nader
Car Bernstein
November 1, 2008

The game of "What If?" history is almost always a useless, speculative exercise - and always definitive on the question of Ralph Nader in the presidential election of 2000, and the history of the world thereafter.

What if Nader hadn't gotten a passel of votes in Florida? Al Gore would have been elected President - there would have been no need for a Florida recount, among other things; and the world would have been a very different place than it is today.

(Continued on link above.)

Election thoughts...Bailout Truth...more...

Found this at:
TruthDig.com

“This was the largest single act of class warfare in the modern history of this country,” Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, who led the fight in the House against the bailout, told me by phone from Cleveland. “It is a direct attack on the American people’s ability to be able to stabilize their homes and their neighborhoods. This single vote will define the careers of everyone. We are back to taxation without representation, to markets that are openly rigged.”

“We buried the New Deal,” he said of the vote. “Instead of Democrats going back to classic New Deal economics where we prime the pump of the economy and start money circulating among the population through saving homes, creating jobs and building a new infrastructure, our leaders chose to accelerate the wealth of the nation upwards. They did so in a way that was destructive of free-market principles. They ripped away all the familiar moorings. We are in an uncharted sea where the traditional roles of the political parties are being switched. The Democrats have unfortunately become so enamored and beholden to Wall Street that we are not functioning to defend the economic interest of the broad base of the American people. It was up to the Republicans to protect not just a so-called free market but the American taxpayer and attempt to block this. This is an outrage. This was democracy’s Black Friday.”

The author, Chris Hedges, continues in his own words:
"Obama’s voting record in the Senate is in line with the corrupt Democratic mainstream, including Biden, who works on behalf of corporations and especially the credit card industry."

***************

People are buying the line that the Democrats are offering hope. Here's what I think leading up to the election:

If Sarah Palin being selected by McCain tells you how he works: What does the selection of Biden tell you about how Obama works?

What segment of our society has been mostly affected by Biden's War on Drugs? (Wars are really on people, right?)

What other war has Biden supported?

What corporations are behind Biden?

The oppressed once again end up supporting their corporate oppressors and think it is going to be different this time. They buy the false promises presented in ideological posturing.

(Bill Clinton brags about making more millionaires than Bush. I heard him say it at the Obama rally in Florida. This is how we should be judged?)

They've promised health care reform before. And gave up on it.

Instead of progressives being re-enfranchised, they've been convinced to compromise and move right towards the center. (I.e. give up on true health care reform.)

Political radicalism is dead in the youth.

The parties have beaten them down.

The centrists have won.

The youth now say: Better to have voted centrist and won, than to have voted for ideals and have lost. Reinforcing the binary myth of this country. Reinforcing the binary into the future, ignoring the false consciousness behind it, and the consequences into the future. Reinforcing the myth that a complex society can be represented by two options. Buying it, and allowing it to continue.

What happened to fighting with radicalism?

The radical vote has been bought by the false promises of corporate run politics in which the binary poles are each funded by the same money sources.

And *Yes*, Obama is way better than McCain, and certainly better than what we have. Yet they both cater to fear, teach you to fear the other.

Ideology, as Terry Eagleton says, is still at work in today's world. Yet we don't really address it, question it, fight its oversimplifying doctrines. We just replace it with other oversimplifying doctrines. And we've only got two to choose from.

But truly, I believe our form of (fake) capitalistic ideology (really more of a corporatocracy...I thought I made it up, but then I googled it...) has run its course. So, hey, I'll be a radical, or whatever. Expressive, and hopefully somewhat aware of my ideology, and I will keep pointing out, as I see it, the failings of the ideology of our political system, not just the ideology of each of the two parties. But the failure and inability of a corporate controlled two party system to represent a complex society.

In this small town, I'm considered an outsider for my politics.

The few almost progressive Democrats want to frame my non-Obama (non-McCain) vote as a vote for McCain.

But to frame a non-Obama vote simply as being a vote for McCain is demeaningly reductionistic...My vote is much more than that. And maybe even somewhat well researched, thought-out, and incorporates my lived-experience.