Rad Geek People's Daily

(Via Sheldon Richman.)

From Zachary A. Goldfarb’s recent article for the Washington Post (2010-12-30) on that Left-wing radical Obama and his revolutionary socialist administration:

The president's recently departed budget director is joining Citigroup.

The New York Federal Reserve Bank's derivatives expert is joining Goldman Sachs.

And numerous investigators from the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission are joining Wall Street's top law firms.

The vast overhaul of financial regulations and the renewed intensity of investigations into white-collar crime has been a boon for regulators, prosecutors and financial policymakers looking to cash in on their government experience and contacts.

In recent months, prominent officials from the White House, Justice Department, SEC, banking regulators and other agencies, both federal and state, have been walking through the proverbial revolving door to join Goldman, Citi, other financial companies and top law firms in Washington and New York.

— Zachary A. Goldfarb (2010-12-30), Regulators are finding opportunities at firms looking for government experience, in the Washington Post

You might think that I am going to say that all this poses a conflict of interest for the regulators. (Certainly, that’s how the Washington Post puts it.) But I’m not going to say that. That’s the conventional way of talking about it, when it comes up, but the conventional way of talking about it is nonsense. There is no conflict, unless you believe some very unrealistic things about the interests of government (even a progressive government) and its politically-appointed regulators.

I don’t: there is no conflict; they were already all in this together. This is nothing more than business- and politics-as-usual, and the state-capitalist system is functioning exactly as designed.

See also:

• GT 2008-03-19: Small enough to fail

From Tom H. Hastings, The Invisible King, at truthout (2011-01-17):

You watch. Over the weekend and on Monday, the Hallmarked memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. will be sanitized and blackwashed until he is no more than a sentimental husk hoping that little children of all races will one day be able to play together. Then you’ll see shots of just that, as if to indicate, “Well, thanks, that’s all done, nice historical figure. Bye.” One of these years, they will probably launch the USS Martin Luther King Jr., a spanking new destroyer, or perhaps they will name a class of drone aircraft the “MLK Ground Dominators.”

But I am sure that if Dr. King were alive today, he would agree with all of my political objectives, including especially the most violent parts of my foreign policy agenda and all of my most accommodating moral compromises with the political status quo.

As a historical note on the rest of the article, King, SNCC, and other activists in the Freedom Movement certainly innovated and developed the understanding of nonviolent resistance beyond what Gandhi had done. But I don’t think it’s quite fair to Gandhi to say that he volunteered to help the British or stood aside without objection during Britain’s wars. Perhaps this is a fair summary of his attitude toward the Boer War, the Bambatha uprising, and World War I. But Gandhi’s thought was evolving throughout his life, too, and he later said that it was what he saw during the Bambatha war that really brought home the horrors of war and the need for a different approach. It is, in any case, not at all an accurate description of Gandhi’s attitude during World War II. It was in the midst of World War II that he drafted the Quit India resolution and called for non-cooperation with the British war effort. He also routinely criticized the Allied war effort as trying to defeat the Nazis by becoming as ruthless as they were. As a result, he spent 1942-1944 in prison, along with most of the rest of the Indian National Congress leadership, specifically for criticizing and calling for resistance against the War.

• The Eurie Stamps Investigation Goes Into Lockdown. Radley Balko, Radley Balko: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2011-01-17). Last week, Framingham, Massachusetts, District Court Judge Douglas Stoddart imposed a seal on the search warrants and return sheets for the raid in which police shot and killed 68-year-old Eurie Stamps. Stamps wasn't a suspect in the drug raid, and he was unarmed when he was shot. By impounding the… (Linked Tuesday 2011-01-18.)

• Poet Who Fought Femicide in Juarez Becomes Latest Victim – New America Media. newamericamedia.org (2011-01-18). Ni una más. (Linked Tuesday 2011-01-18.)

• Some drugs are more equal than others. Thoreau, Unqualified Offerings (2011-01-13). By Thoreau As a helpful guide to our readers, I have prepared a detailed classification scheme for illegal drugs: Class Ia:  The drugs that you used when you were young and wild.  Not as potent as today's drugs, and nothing to get judgmental about.  Sometimes worth getting a bit nostalgic… (Linked Tuesday 2011-01-18.)

Jason Hribal: A Message From Tatiana. www.counterpunch.org (2011-01-19):

My purpose was singular: I wanted to understand history from below. That fall, I took a research seminar on the Gilded Age, and the topic I chose to write about was the Toledo Zoo. It could have ended up being a standard history: the zoo and its directors, their curatorial…

Until the lions have their historians….

As it happens, I am a vegetarian, but I do not believe in philosophical doctrines of animal rights, and I’m not especially keen on the political programs of animal liberationists. But I do think that human treatment of non-human animals is an issue of very serious moral concern, and, as a matter of historical understanding, it’s important to keep in mind that the institutions for corralling and controlling animals have a structure and a history. And understanding the structure and the history isn’t just a matter of human social developments, or how human cultures go about trying to harness blind natural forces. It is a matter of trying to understand what animals have wanted and what they have done.

LOL: Judith Miller criticizes Wikileaks' Assange for not verifying his sources. Boing Boing (2011-01-18):

Why is disgraced former New York Times reporter Judith Miller not fond of Wikileaks and Julian Assange? “Because he didn’t care at all about attempting to verify the information that he was putting out or determine whether or not it would hurt anyone,” she said.

Sometimes I am genuinely surprised when the cognitive dissonance doesn’t make somebody’s head explode.