Sunday morning before Memorial Day. Out the front window things are quiet, ocean blue; no risk of drone attacks, car bombs or suicide bombers.
Memorial Day is a conflicted time for me. I want to celebrate the lives and duty of my namesake, friends destroyed in Vietnam, and local boy “Shorty” Millard, blown up in Iraq.
I think about them. What their lives would have been like. What pleasures and pains they would have had. How I might be like them.
What pulls me apart is the question of why they had to be wiped off the face of the earth.
WWII may have been worth it. WWI, Korea, Vietnam, Granada, Iraq, Afghanistan all should make no sense to a thinking person. The “Price of Freedom” is a clever foil for plutocrats, a flickering ember diverting from a darker truth.
How does anyone separate empathy for soldiers, civilians and children maimed, abandoned and killed from the contrived arguments for going to war in the first place?
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Unusual for me today I rode midday through Torrey Pines. Hot and sunny inland and marine layer within 500 yards of the beach. Heat on one side and cool mist on the other. Closeup it looks like this:
Then looking back from a bit inland you can see the ridge the first picture was taken from. Both are facing due west.
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When you go everywhere by bike you have to put a little more into it to keep your equipment in order. With me, because I ride in salt and sand most of the time, this is critical. I think of it much like it was 150 years ago when, traveling by horseback, one had to maintain and strap on a saddle, ensure the horse had been fed, watered, etc. Each morning I run through the same drill. Check the tire pressure, look for rocks or glass in the tires, clean and oil the chain, run through the gears and all else to make sure I make the 13.3 miles one way or the other. Here is the Torelli waiting for the routine:
Then I move to my garage desk and gather up the detritus from my working, reading, dithering of the night before:
Then I’m off into the commute ….
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[lifted from Daily Koz]
Throughout the financial reform debate, the finance industry has waged an unprecedented assault on the democratic process, spending an estimated $1.4 million per day to influence Congress and hiring 70 members of Congress and 940 former federal employees to lobby on their behalf.
The six biggest banks—Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo—account for a disproportionate share of this activity. In the two years since the first federal bailout of a big bank (Bear Stearns), these banks and their principal trade associations have hired over 240 former government insiders as lobbyists and spent hundreds of millions of dollars on an influence game designed to thwart reform, shape bailout programs and maintain their status as “too-big-to-fail” institutions….
link to the article and copy of the report
The lobbying spree is taxpayer-funded—it follows $160 billion in bailouts from Congress and trillions in cheap loans from the Federal Reserve. And as their influence has come to be viewed as increasingly toxic in Washington, the banks have shifted segments of their political activity to a “shadow lobby” that includes such front groups as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce….
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