Motley Blog

Today is the day traditional broadcast TV was supposed to end. Commenting on what was the finest broadcast civic programs, Meet the Press, since the sudden death of long time host Tim Russert seems salient.

Sure, MSNBC still has some thought provoking coverage, but it's not part of the strictly 'public' sphere, it;s paid cable. David Gregroy is just not up to the job - more glib and self-satisfied than Mark Lauer on what was once the best, politically practical, critical program in this country.

Is this the corporate future that Welch, married to a mergers and aquisitions attorney for most of his tenure as president, has in mind for us?

He should be ashamed. MTP was a quality organization and you couldn't keep up a tradition of independent journalism? I guess you, and yours, know best. Or at least you think you do.

I for one disagree. The running of our nation is everybody's business and it is the responsibility of the Press to insure we are all involved, and educated. You and your fellow NYC primadonna punks and your DC lobbyists either need to pay off the deficit and then leave.

You may well think you are better than everyone else, but all you have done is make yourself into no account gutter trash.

BTW, first hit on Google about 'Meet the Press' whose URL doesn't start with msn also doesn't like Gregory, but for different reasons.

New York City vs. Washington D.C.

Ten business days from now, April 5, Microsoft will be holding a virtual 'special' olympics on the servers of the MS network. (The 'real' event was originally founded by Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Schwarnegger's Mother In Law, on the proposal of a Chicago Educator)

**Please note - ridicule of this particular brand of abusive degenerate is not only allowed, but encouraged. Boos will suffice, but if you have personally had your life endangered by these individuals all restraints are removed, per the US Constitution.

I take offense at the New York City financiers and Washington D.C. regulators who cooked up the ripoffs of millions of investors and employees being portrayed as the best and the brightest. The fact that they now seek to continue their illegal activities via a ponzi scheme against my generation on the US Treasury is more than outrageous.

These folks may well have graduated in the upper portions of their Ivy League classes, but they have chosen to apply their intelligence to enrich themselves not by improving the world buy by stealing from it.

Perceptions of Bernard Madoff as a member of the Jewish Committee at this particular moment are interesting. Certainly there is anti-semitism, but there is also condemnation from within the Jewish world as well.

I did a google search on the subject, perhaps most interesting was a story in the Huffington Post from an outsider about Madoff's exclusively Jewish Club in Palm Beach, Florida (December, 2008)- a retirement area for many wealthy New Yorkers.( And, perhaps as an example of the divine hand at work, also home to many of Madoff's victims.

Here's the google for 'Bernard Madoff Jewish Community', for some of the rest.

From January 11, 2009:

Harsh Reality in the Age of Obama, #1

Paul Krugman has a timely NYT column on deficit spending, and how it **might** be okay. (If it works!)

Krugman's right on the debt numbers, but besides the additional political hazards he mentions there may be others.

1. The U.S. Housing market has not yet, definitively, found its bottom. Foreclosures resulting from the meltdown of a year ago are just now hitting the pipeline. Home equity loans have been a source of money that has been used to 'stimulate' the economy for quite awhile now - in a period when America's relative economic competiveness is declining. This a borrowed money is not on the government books, but it definitely does effect the overall financial 'credit rating' of the United States.

2. Subsidizing housing (and commercial property!) values with the deficit is a downward feedback loop. Spending deficit money to prop up the equity of property owners will not work, long term.

3. Who are we bailing out? If we pour good money after bad supporting the very people and practices that created the problem in the first place at the expense of honest blue collar America we are subject to a spectrum of problems, of which the least may be political.

In economic theory positive thinking has been proved to be directly related to economic performance. Positive or negative expectations are self fulfilling, but not as some elected leaders would like to believe are they the only thing that matters.

So, on this 9/11, 2009, let's take a look at our mental economic twin towers - are they standing tall or collapsing in a pile of dust? What will it take for our perception of economic details to reset with reality?

September 11 should stay as a day of reflection on the operation of our financial markets. As such I wonder if the massive removal of senior Financial professionals due the World Trade center disaster was a factor in the collapse of the financial markets last year?

Could it be that professional integrity was so concentrated in the industry that a single disaster removed the ability for the profession to self-regulate itself, to keep it's 'penis' in its pants?

Could be, but who knows?

I am reminded of my first publication, a compilation of research on the subject of Socially Responsible Investment - on the heels of an administration occupying expansion of my alma mater's pioneering South African divestment.

The Hampshire College Report on Socially Responsible Investment

Ed. by Doug Tooley,

April 1983.

Preface
In 1976, Hampshire College bacame the first school in the country to divest from companies in South Africa. This opened the door for us to a much larger idea, that of using investments to reflect our ethics instead of those of the capitalistic ideology.

Don't Follow Me I'm Lost

by Richard Rushfield

2009

At the height of the Reagan revolution author Richard Rushfield chose to attend the most prestigious radical institution of higher learning, Hampshire College. This book is his story, and the story of the allied group of artists, producers and marketers that was the Supreme Dicks. It was a coming of age in a moment of political and artistic zen, the time between punk and grunge in the musical world.

The Supreme Dicks were the sperm that fertilized the egg that would become the Universe of Nirvana, Sonic Youth, and Dinosaur Jr, and, as a side project, create the first X fueled raves.

In this book RR skewers the pinnacles of the corrupt and hypocritical NE establishment with humor blending Sean Penn in 'Fast Times at Ridgemont High' and Hunter S. Thompson. His words are filled with the freshness and perspective of a west coaster wandering free in the strict class society of the east coast.

Rushfield leaves the titans that used Hampshire College, and the Dicks, to forge the abusive corporate and political tool of Nifong political correctness sleeping under the bridge with recently released Priest pedophiles.

You however, will walk away laughing, with a buddha smile of enlightenment and individual empowerment that will carry you through whatever the bastards may throw your way.

Available at Amazon and other booksellers.

(A mea culpa: I was a friend of the group in its early days - I believe I was the one who started calling the civilian security force as a prank, a 'theme' that apparently persisted after my departure from the campus.)