Katherine Gun: a British former government employee, faced two years imprisonment in England for the “crime” of telling the truth. She was charged with leaking an embarrassing U.S. intelligence memo indicating that the U.S. had mounted a spying “surge” against U.N. delegations in early 2003 in an effort to win approval of the Iraq war resolution

Michael Schwartz: professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on US business and government dynamics. His latest book is called War Without End; the Iraq War in Context.

Glenn Greenwald: previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator and now a Contributing Writer at Salon.com

Jason Leopold: investigative journalist. He writes for the online publication The Public Record.

Free Speech Zone

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Jim Moore: Emmy-winning former television news correspondent and the co-author of the bestselling book, Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential.

Brent Budowsky: From the mid-1970’s to 1990 Brent Budowsky served in senior Congressional Staff positions including Legislative Assistant to former U.S. Senator Lloyd Bentsen, and Legislative Director to Representative Bill Alexander, then Chief Deputy Majority Whip. He now writes for the Hills Pundit’s Blog.

Cliff Schecter: political commentator and journalist. His blog is called The Political Carnival. His latest book is called “The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don’t Trust Him and Why Independents Shouldn’t”.

Ari Melber: is The Nation’s Net movement correspondent, and a writer for the Campaign 08 blog at thenation.com as well as a writer at washingtonindependent.com.

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Judith Plank: has volunteered to foward your emails regarding the wallstreet bailout to members of congress.  Send your comments to jpcats@cal.net

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Robert Parry: founder of ConsortiumNews.com.  His new book is called “Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush”.

Robert Dreyfuss: freelance investigative journalist whose work appears in The Nation, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, The American Prospect, and other progressive publications.  His work also appears in the new blog “Dreyfuss Report“.

Danny Schechter: television producer, independent filmmaker, blogger, and media critic who writes and lectures frequently about the media in the United States and worldwide. Check out his blog at Mediachannel.org.

Mark Winston Griffith: community economic justice activist, journalist and Senior Fellow in Economic Justice at the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy.

Brad Friedman: self-described election integrity muckraking journalist jerk. You can read his blog at Bradblog.com.

If you would like to make a contribution in honor of Sarah Palin, here’s the link to the Planned Parenthood website:
>https://secure.ga0.org/02/pp10000_inhonor

You’ll need to fill in the address to let people know where to send the ‘in Sarah Palin’s honor’ card. I suggest you use the address for the McCain campaign headquarters, which is:

1235 S. Clark Street
1st Floor
Arlington , VA 22202

Patty Sharaf: works as a Producer/Director as well as a sound engineer for network news, sports and entertainment.  Her latest film is “Murder? Spies & Voting Lies”.

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So I woke up this morning, flipped on the tube, and there was our NeoCon-in-chief, trying to restore confidence in the markets.  Flanked by his E-Con team of Bernanke, Paulson and Cox, he announced a new episode in the Wall Street soap opera.  The plan is kinda fuzzy, but the bottom line isn’t:  the federal government will assume responsibility for all the bad mortgages in our financial system, relieving a galaxy of irresponsible financial institutions of the knotty problems they created while the Republicans promoted their no-regulation no-enforcement policies the last 7+ years.

He lectured me that this is not the time to talk about how we got into this mess.  But if we don’t look at the causes, then the workout plan will be based on the same philosophies and principles (sic) that led to the meltdown; likewise, I’ve heard no accurate estimate of the extent of the losses–so how prudent is it to write a blank check that could go as high as a trillion dollars.  Bush also warned that this unlimited corporate bailout should be fast-tracked through Congress without amendments–so taxpayers will be soaked to protect fat cats while Democratic efforts to throw a few bones to working families (unemployment extensions, food stamps, relief for high gas and heating oil prices) will be thwarted.

Well, there goes health care reform and universal coverage.  It’s pretty clear that wars and Wall Street will choke the budgets for years to come, and if Obama wins, the Bush legacy will preclude the domestic initiatives that the campaign was about until a month ago.  As Naomi Klein has eloquently explained in Shock Doctrine, this is Disaster Capitalism in all its glory.  Can we get some of that great advice from the Chicago School, coupled with loans from the World Bank that require that we bust unions and open our markets?  I guess we already took care of those last two points.  Once again, while Tom Frank would argue that the “wrecking crew” has demolished the surplus and healthy economy Bush inherited, this is all consistent with the Grover Norquist plan to reduce the size of government and structurally prevent social spending by lowering taxes and and running it into the ground.

As Bono once said, “Fucking brilliant”.

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Thursday, John McCain, the small government maverick reformer guy, proposed a whole new agency to rescue America’s bad loans from the good lenders who never imagined their hot paper would go up in smoke as Americans lose up to 40% of their home equities.  The “Mortgage and Financial Institutions Trust” which he acronym-ed as “MFI” but looks more like M-FIT or MisFit to me.

Deja vu: The Resolution Trust Corporation was created in the 1980’s to take over all of the failed Savings and Loans, hand off the viable parts of the portfolios to a small group of industry insiders, then break up the rest, fire lots of employees and stick taxpayers with the bill in a lump sum.  It helped cover up embarrassing cases like Neil Bush and Silverado in Colorado, which cost us more than $2 billion and Neil kept the change.

Then there was McCain’s pal from Phoenix, Charlie Keating, who gave lots of money to senators including McCain and 4 others, including Democrat Alan Cranston of California.  McCain was the most special of the 5, since his wife Cindy was a partner with Keating in a shopping center deal. The 5 got caught pressuring regulators to go easy on Keating, and were disciplined by the Senate.

Charlie Keating was originally from Cincinnati, and was a classmate of my father’s in high school.  I went to the same school, and Keating donated an olympic sized indoor pool to the school.  He had an ego that size, and his son was a champion swimmer.  Charlie learned his tricks from Carl Lindner, a Cincinnati mogul who owns banks, a retail dairy chain, and Chiquita bananas.  He is a major Republican donor, which is a good investment in Ohio and has made him important to GOP leaders.

Lindner set Keating up with Lincoln Savings in California, and Keating moved to Phoenix to build a resort hotel called The Phonecian.  Steve Pizzo is co-author of “Inside Job”, the definitive book about the S & L saga, and called Keating a financiopath.  The signature crime at Lincoln was the sale of junk bonds to the elderly in the lobby of an S & L, where they thought they were dealing with insured investments.  Keating kited millions of dollars scammed from little people, and gave some of it to Mother Theresa and some to John McCain.

So McCain, who opposed bailouts on Monday, by Thursday has whipped up a new mausoleum for financial crimes, bailing out corporate crimes and failures with tax dollars.

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