What do John Lynch and Bob Odell have in common, other than they are both elected public officials in the State of New Hampshire, a public corporation? Is it just a co-incidence that John Lynch, a Democrat, went out of his way to endorse the candidacy of Bob Odell, a Republican, in 2008 for a seat in the New Hampshire Senate, or does their serving together on the board of a private corporation, Jobs for America's Graduates,(JAG) founded in 1980 and headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, just down the road from Odell's marketing firm, Odell, Simms and Associates in Falls Church, suggest a commonality of interest that should concern us?

Certainly, JAG boasts a stellar membership, from Lincoln Almond, former Governor of Rhode Island to Mark Warner, Senator from Virginia. But the Board of Directors, on which Lynch and Odell serve with such other luminaries as Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security and Major General Poythress, who's currently a candidate for governor in Georgia, is perhaps more telling.

True, the title of this diary is a bit hyperbolic and not factual. Indeed, "cleaning up" isn't even meant in the same sense as "hot shot"--i.e. as in "making a killing." Moreover, the Google has 116 million entries for "cleaning up." You'd almost think everybody was doing it.

Johann Hari, writing in The Nation, would say "not so fast." He's discovered a whole lot of people whom he accuses of having sold out by taking money from groups that make messes and then doing nothing about getting them cleaned up. It's a persuasive argument, but I don't think it's right. Hari seems to think it's the money's fault.

In The Wrong Kind of Green, Hari asks:

Why did America's leading environmental groups jet to Copenhagen and lobby for policies that will lead to the faster death of the rainforests--and runaway global warming? Why are their lobbyists on Capitol Hill dismissing the only real solutions to climate change as "unworkable" and "unrealistic," as though they were just another sooty tentacle of Big Coal?

I suppose that second question cleverly implies the answer to the first. Just to make sure the reader gets the message, Hari continues:

Groups like Conservation International are among the most trusted "brands" in America, pledged to protect and defend nature. Yet as we confront the biggest ecological crisis in human history, many of the green organizations meant to be leading the fight are busy shoveling up hard cash from the world's worst polluters--and burying science-based environmentalism in return.

He makes out as if this is something new. In fact, it's been pretty clear that organizations such as the League of Conservation Voters and the Natural Resources Defense Fund are focused, as their names imply, on a steady-state, on keeping the environment as it is, polluted with man-created wastes. And, while it may have started out as an unanticipated benefit, their effort to set artificial limits on development, at the same time serves to increase the dollar value of the lands that are left for even more intense development.

That's what the Columbia Journalism Review says. The collapse of Wall Street has not been well covered by the traditional press. Perhaps traditionalists are just incredulous. Anyway, the failure is being dissected here, albeit by a professor of economics. Which accounts for his insistence that the problem lies in financial institutions not having followed the rules. Economists are all about following rules, even when they have been proven not to work -- i.e. produce the desired result.

Anyway, not being an economist and having no reputation to maintain or lose, I can simply conclude that it's the effort to control the economy with money that's the problem. Money, now that it's no longer related to a quantifiable and measurable material, is a pure figment of the imagination--like the printed word. The only effect it can have on the trade and exchange of things is if the money is withdrawn from circulation. Then it would be like locking away all the letters of all the alphabets and letting only a handful of scribes use them. People would still be able to share information, but the speed and distance of its distribution would be less. Same for our paper currency. Electronic currency is even harder to use as a lever. And in neither case does it serve to regulate in the sense of increasing or decreasing the volume of transactions with any specificity. Wall Street has lost control. That's why it resorted to flailing and playing--the equivalent of self-abuse.

We are all aware that tumors, even if they are benign, are an impediment to individual well being. Growths are anti-social. And yet, in recent decades we've been persuaded that growth is good.

Now the results are out and, in at least three areas, there's no question that growth is an sign of social failure. The first indicator, only because we've been aware of it the longest, is the growth of landfills. More and more of what we Americans produce and purchase ends up at the dump; some of it even before it's used. Indeed, much of our production is aimed to be disposed of--disposable. As if the mountains of waste weren't already high enough. And I won't even go into "storage facilities," replicating like mushrooms all over the countryside -- way stations to the dump for the stuff we think we might eventually actually want.

The nation is drowning in stuff. The question is why? Why have we been persuaded to accumulate more and more stuff we don't actually want, and certainly don't need? My ancient house guest tells me it's because stuff, unlike people, doesn't disappoint. Stuff doesn't run off with your best friend. Stuff isn't fickle. On the other hand, the old curmudgeon is even now discovering that when people have people, they don't need stuff. That's something the tea party people seem to be discovering, as well. While that does not bode well for the resurgence of our supposedly consumer-driven economy, consumption is not a healthy condition. So, the tea parties may actually be a sign of healing.

More Reflection on the Sea Island Debacle. When Bill Three was interviewed for a profile in 2003, just before the demolition of the old Cloister Hotel started, he explained

"The banks almost pay you to borrow money today,"

as to where the money was coming from.

That was the same bank, Synovus, which started out paying my mother about five thousand dollars a year interest on the Certificates of Deposit she bought with her life's savings (she died in 2005, aged 98) and then had reduced that to less than a thousand a year by the time they were "almost" paying Bill Three to take the money. If the extent to which our seniors have been defrauded of their life savings hasn't been covered much in the press, it's probably because the Federal Reserve Bank lowering interest rates to near zero was/is being blamed for an apparent flood of money that nobody wanted to use, and nobody has yet figured out what to do about them. It's sort of like being in a car with a drunk driver racing down a mountain. There's nothing to do but hang on for dear life. (I say "apparent" because it turns out that the flow of money to Main Street had already slowed to a trickle by 2003 and federal loans were being doled out to make up for banks that didn't lend).

SOURCE: Senator Leahy email

Today we begin the process of undoing the great harm done by a narrow majority on the U.S. Supreme Court in its recent Citizens United v. FEC decision. I just returned from our first Senate Judiciary Committee hearing focused specifically on how, in light of the Court's misguided decision, we can protect our political process from excessive corporate spending.

The Founding Fathers crafted a Constitution and adopted a Bill of Rights to guarantee the fundamental rights of the American people, not corporations. After all, corporations are different from individual citizens. They do not have the same rights, morals, or motivations. They cannot vote. They are legal constructs designed to conduct commerce, nothing more.

The differences between people and corporations are obvious, and they were not lost on the great Chief Justice John Marshall when he wrote in 1819 that, "A corporation is an artificial being ... the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it..."

As I've tried to describe in previous essays on torture, it seems pretty clear that torture is essentially a deprivation of rights--what organisms need to function and survive. That it's not well recognized is evidenced by the fact that deprivator--i.e. the agent of deprivation--isn't even listed as a word in common English dictionaries. Deprivation might as well be a force of nature, like inundation or circulation, not subject to human direction or intervention. And that, no doubt suits the deprivators just fine. Agency without responsibility is always attractive, especially when the results are negative.

Monopolies are bad. Monopolistic enterprise is self-destructive, but corporations have figured out how to achieve immortality. They just declare bankruptcy from time to time, leave all their obligations behind and go merrily on their way.

For clarification of the issue, The Daily Show is incomparable.

I don't, typically, hog the front page with blog posts. However, Gregg prompts me to make an exception and use the tools that will provide exposure of his posturing for the longest period of time.

That’s a lot of allusion to fit in one title, but it’s all necessary to be included. “The disappeared,” of course, refers directly to the practice in some parts of the Americas to simply take inconvenient people out of circulation by spiriting them away without an explanation to anyone–public officials, friends, colleagues or family members. But, while some people have been concerned that the provisions for long-term detention in the Patriot Act might be a harbinger of people being similarly disappeared in the U.S., what I want to focus on is the long-term and on-going effort to downgrade and dilute the singular entity our constitutional government is designed to protect, the person.

“American” is, primarily, a geographic designation. It does not differentiate between citizen, native, resident or temporary visitor. Indeed, the Constitution obligates the United States’ agents of government to serve all persons within its jurisdiction–i.e. where the law applies–equally. Indeed, whether that means that the Constitution follows the flag when our agents of government are active in foreign lands is a matter of current judicial dispute. In this context, the central and southern continents may not have the explicit reference in their laws and traditions to the singular importance of the person. But, that public officials have perceived themselves challenged by apparently inoffensive individuals and “disappeared” them, is evidence of the significance of the person.

Economists are a peculiar lot as social science goes. Perhaps because their subjects actually handle material things, economists have decided that the trade and exchange of goods and services is only economic, if they can count it. Moreover, because keeping track of money is easy, economists have further simplified their field of inquiry by restricting their analysis to transactions mediated by money.

If money doesn't change hands, an exchange doesn't count. Which, in economist speak, means that the economy of a particular region or population is "undeveloped." From which it seems fair to conclude that the primary objective of "economic development," at least from the economist's perspective, is to remedy a stumbling block and facilitate their ability to count and account for what's going on. Whether people are actually better off using money than when they're engaged in subsistence farming is beside the point. It does, perhaps, explain why the evidence suggests that they're not.

What follows is an explanation of how the transfer of the American people's assets into the pockets of a few is carried out--what I have taken to calling "Deprivation Under Cover of Law", for the simple reason that it's all legal.

As someone who tried to rally Florida voters behind Michael Dukakis in 1988, I was already able to claim, when 1992 rolled around, to have "been there and done that."

I had good reason by '88 to be done with Reagan/Bush, having seen, first hand, how "revenue sharing," which Republicans routinely decried, was being used by those self-same Republicans to bribe the electorate when election time rolled around. That's right. Grants for wastewater treatment plants we'd been planning and waiting for for years (to serve all the people who were moving South to where it's cheaper to survive and not risk freezing to death) had been held up to use as a bribe.

We were supposed to be grateful that Washington was giving us some of our money back. And I resented that.

Dukakis came and went in '88. Or rather, he never did show up in our part of the state of Florida. His campaign organization wouldn't even let us put a generic "Vote Democratic" jingle on the radio to get out the vote.

Oh, give me a home where the Buffalo roam

Where the Deer and the Antelope play;

Where seldom is heard a discouraging word,

And the sky is not cloudy all day.

I am going to go out on a limb here and opine that Charlie Cook, political pundit and "indispensable" columnist for the National Journal would not want to be living on the range. And not just because his name is Cook and the joke is stale. No, Charlie Cook is definitely into delivering discouraging words. In the January 30 th version, he hangs his report on President Obama giving himself the modest grade of B+ for his first year in office.

Since I don't much like people putting words in my mouth, I normally avoid doing it to others. On the other hand, given the GOP commitment to

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"

it's very likely that the theme team of Boehner and Cantor were after being done to; that the point of their missive to the White House was just to trade insults. But, their forgetting that to assume is to "Make an Ass of U and Me" was an unusual error, given that the GOP is known for being particularly adept at word games.

This is making me feel as if I'm inventing a new game: "How many clichés can you use to define a conservative?"

Aside from making asses of u and me, Boehner and Cantor's missive is based on premises that are factually false:

1) that the President develops legislation,

2) that starting over does not involve going backwards,

3) that the American people's choice in 2008 was unclear.

This would explain why they sent out the following. Perhaps they also assumed it would not be read.

Deprivation of rights under color of law is a well-recognized, if not frequently prosecuted crime. Indeed, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has a comprehensive explanation and some interesting statistical data, including a list of the most common categories in which these crimes occur:

• excessive force;

• sexual assaults;

• false arrest and fabrication of evidence;

• deprivation of property; and

• failure to keep from harm.

However, that's not the topic I want to address today. I want to focus on what I call "deprivation of rights under cover of law." But, first it seems important to consider what "deprivation" means.

Dan Pfeiffer, White House Communications Director, wrote on the White House blog that

Let's be clear: Sen. Shelby is preventing qualified nominees who will help protect the American people from being confirmed. He’s not alone, though. This is just the latest example of this kind opposition for opposition’s sake that the President talked about earlier this week.

Which is accurate, as far as it goes, but really just a symptom of a bigger problem.