"Now you don't talk so loud/Now you don't feel so proud/ About havin' to be scroungin' for your next meal"-Bob Dylan

It is not that the big banks themselves are "too big to fail".  They are too big because they can cause all of us to fail.  In the military terms, that tragedy is cleansed by the use of the innocuous sounding term, "collateral damage".

The problem is this: One is just as dead from collateral damage as from a targeted hit.

We launched BreakUptheBigBanks.com because the political power wielded by the big banks is incompatible with a functioning democracy.  Such political power renders regulation inadequate--we have already seen Congress bow to the will of the very people whom a year ago it rescued from oblivion.

-"I don't want these guys forced to take their shoes off in airport security lines with every one else" -CNBC commentator Melissa Francis on whether the bailed-out banks should provide private jets for their CEOs.

Thanks to the big banks, we are all in pain, a lot of it.  

We have lost our jobs and our homes and our children's teachers and our savings and our good names and our economic security.  To prevent it from being even worse, we have mortgaged our children's futures, provided those big banks with our tax money, and then seethed as they awarded themselves obscene bonuses.

And, after all this, we are going to "reform" them?  And, then they will become good little boys and girls, stop listening only to their shareholders and start showing care and concern for the country instead?

And, we are expected to rest our futures on that outcome, one that has never happened before in world history?

Us? No.

Newspapers are in trouble. Big, end-of-the-road death spiral big trouble. The Boston Globe was recently pulled off the market because its owners who shelled out $1.1 billion for the paper were a little upset at the $35 million offer plus assumption of some debt that they received.

This isn't pennies on dollars, this is pennies on hundreds of dollars. Nice.

One week ago today, Sigourney Weaver and Frances Beinecke went to Washington to show the ground-breaking movie, Acid Test: The Global Challenge Of Ocean Acidification. It's a great short film, well worth watching, with really incredibly scary conclusions about what will happen to the ocean, not in the distant future but in the next few decades.

The US Chamber of Commerce is up to its eyeballs in disgruntled members and as a membership organization, perhaps it will consider the incredible amount of damage it has done to is reputation by aggressively resisting climate change initiatives and legislation.

Sometimes it's hard to explain how the far-right and corporate lobbyists operate or how they view reality. It's much easier to understand their actions if you accept that first, they know the facts, but just choose, on the basis of business reasons, to completely ignore them and second, that they understand if they present, backed up with millions of dollars, absolute crap as fact, somewhere someone will believe them.

I was asked on the Mario Solis Marich Radio Show the other day about the climate change bill, and the opposition to it. As I told Mario, the strategy employed by the opponents of clean energy legislation is actually the same strategy that was employed by the tobacco industry, and the thinking behind the health care reform opponents.

People wonder why traditional media sources are failing. And while there are lots of reasons, one of them is that well, the product they are providing is, how does one say this, crap.