The Desolation Angel - An Idiot's Ravings at the Ragged Edge of the American Century

Independence Day Weekend

2009-07-05T09:13:00.009-04:00

Sunday July 5, 2009

. . . . .Gooood Morning! Welcome to the second half of the year, and to the annual weekend birthday celebration that we call Independence Day.

. . . . .Hope you've enjoyed a barbecue or two, some sun and some time with friends and family.

. . . .Take the time to catch up on the last few columns, they're all down below. There's all the normal exploration of the current news around politics, the economy, the national electrical grid, some work on human evolution and A.I. the normal eclectic mix.

. . . .The most important news of the day isn't Caribou Barbie, though that's near the top. The most important news comes out of Iran. The Mullahs have declared the election "illegitimate", a very serious setback for Ahmadenijad and Ayatollah Khameini.

. . . .The second most important news, that of North Korea firing seven missles off on July 4th, may on the surface seem important. But really it isn't. (1) Their missles have the annoying habit of basically just falling into the Sea of Japan and (2) anyone, anyone at all who thinks that if China believed that North Korea was about to piss in the pool, considering China's stature as the world's largest economy, and it's growing strenth and it's positioning itself to become the world's dominant superpower, (watch, the Yuan will replace the U.S. Dollar as the International Reserve Currency this month) is truly a mouth-breathing idiot. Follow the money, that's what counts. So, no, North Korea will never present a true threat, China's not gonna let that happen.

. . . .On ABC's "This Week with George Stephanolous Vice-President Joe Biden made an admission that will probably, bar the last item below, be one of the most discussed statements of the week: "We misread how bad the economy really was". My question is - how could you? Nobel Prize winning economists tried telling them before the stimulus package was presented just how large in size it had to be, and tried telling them afterwards that the package just plainly wasn't large enough to jumpstart the economy.

Host George Stephanopoulos pointed out that "a lot of people were saying that you needed to do something bigger and bolder" when it came to the stimulus package. He named New York Times columnist Paul Krugman as one example. There are many others.

The prize-winning Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz not only warned that the stimulus was too small during its construction, the day after Obama signed it into law he predicted how its shortcomings would make themselves apparent.

"I think there is a broad consensus but not universal among economist that the stimulus package that was passed was badly designed and not enough. I know it is not universal but let me try to explain. First of all that it was not enough should be pretty apparent from what I just said: It is trying to offset the deficiency in aggregate demand and it is just too small," Stiglitz said. "The shortfall in state revenue [is] probably in the order of 150 to 200 billion dollars a year. And the states have balanced budget frameworks so if you follow the newspaper you know the drastic problems that California and New York are in, these are really serious problems and because of their balanced budget frameworks they have to reduce their spending... if their income comes down. So that would be a negative stimulus of 150 to 200 billion unless there is federal aid. And the stimulus package there was a little of federal aid but just not enough. So what we will be doing is we will be laying off teachers and laying off people in the health care sector while we are hiring construction workers. It is a little strange for a design of a stimulus package. You ask, why do you want to hire construction workers and fire teachers. I don't know what is the rationale behind that."

Stiglitz was joined by a whole host of liberal economists -- from the University of Texas' James Galbraith to Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research -- who warned that the stimulus package inexplicably underestimated the size of the crisis.

Several weeks after the stimulus passed, economist Nouriel Roubini, known affectionately as Dr. Doom, made the case that the administration's approach to stabilizing the economy lacked an effective international component.

"You have to have a set of concerted, coherent policies done not just by the U.S. but by Europe, Japan, China and everyone else," he said. "The credit crunch is just massive. One thing that's needed is much more aggressive monetary easing. The second dimension is that you need much more fiscal stimulus -- in the countries that can afford it -- that is front-loaded. The U.S. [stimulus package] is $800 billion, but only $200 billion is front-loaded. Of that $200 billion [in stimulus] this year, half of it is tax cuts. That's going to be a waste of money, because people are not going to spend it."

In mid-June, weeks before the latest round of poor job numbers came out, U.C. Berkeley professor and former Clinton administration official Brad DeLong was arguing that "the Obama administration's federal fiscal stimulus programs are on the low side of what is appropriate by a substantial margin."

"This is the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression and the standard tools of expansionary monetary policy are tapped out and broken right now," he wrote.

The day that June's job numbers came out, meanwhile, Nassim Taleb, principal of Universa Investments and author of 'The Black Swan,' offered a far more grim interpretation of what was transpiring, though one relatively consistent with what he had said in the past.

"We're in the middle of a crash," said Taleb during an appearance on CNBC. "So if I'm going to forecast something, it is that it's going to get worse, not better."

Certainly Krugman himself has aired his share of skepticism. In late June, he reminded his readers that his early concerns had not been misplaced.

"[S]ome of us warned about what might happen: if unemployment surpassed the administration's optimistic projections, Republicans wouldn't accept the need for more stimulus," he wrote in the Times. "Instead, they'd declare the whole economic policy a failure. And that's exactly how it's playing out. With the unemployment rate now almost certain to pass 10 percent, there's an overwhelming economic case for more stimulus. But as a political matter it's going to be harder, not easier, to get that extra stimulus now than it would have been to get the plan right in the first place.

This past week, meanwhile, he declared once more that the Obama stimulus plan, while "better than nothing" needs to be supplemented with something more.

To be fair, the process of economic forecasting is, as Taleb noted in his CNBC segment, an inherently tricky proposition. In October 2008, for instance, Roubini was arguing that the government needed a $400 billion stimulus package, which ended up being just more than half of what the Obama White House settled on.

But among those who were sounding the loudest alarms about the potential inadequacies of the economic recovery plan, the consensus seems to be emerging that more now needs to be done. Later in his ABC segment, Biden - who is responsible for overseeing the stimulus - was asked if a second package was in the offing. No, he replied, without dismissing the possibility outright. "I think it's premature to make that judgment. This was set up to spend out over 18 months. There are going to be major programs that are going to take effect in September, $7.5 billion for broadband, new money for high-speed rail, the implementation of the grid -- the new electric grid. And so this is just starting, the pace of the ball is now going to increase."

. . . .All it takes is the barest recollection of freshman year college Econ 101 to remember that to keep an economy moving, when private investing bottoms out or dries up, then public investing has to take up the slack. It didn't take a genius to look at what was occurring when the false bubbles created by Reagan's signing of Garn-St. Germain back in 1982, creating the first false bubble, and his breaking of the first union, PATCO; the artful and deceitful Clinton recrafting of Bush 1's North American Free Trade Agreement which further gutted American manufacturing and hastened outsourcing, and began the largest transfer of wealth in history as money began flowing out of the United States to China & Venezuela, then the Bush 2 years of Paulson completely deregulating the banking industry to allow them to buy into AIG's Joseph Cassano's craps table bid with heretofore unknown derivative securities to see what was going to happen. There was no money, there never was any money, it was built on a pile of sand and once the first part of the foundation went, it was easy for the remainder of it to keep on sliding.
. . . The stimulus package needed to be much, much larger. On a percentage basis, it needed to be equal to the WPA or CCC, back in 1933-1939 in order to do much good. Instead, the idiots who want to see this nation destroyed started their fucking "tea parties", much to the delight of all those rich elites around them who make $250,000 a year or more. The incoming President Obama signs into law the largest tax cut in history, asks those criminals who have been moving their money offshore and into tax havens to start ponying up for what this Nation has given them, what they stole from working people, and those who got the tax cuts take to the street to protest it. God, no wonder the rich think everyone is a sheeple, they got Joe the Plumber, and mind slaves just like him, to do their dirty work for them again.

. . . .On CNN's State of the Union with John King this morning, one of this country's most decorated soldiers, and respected Republican elder statesman, Colin Powell stated very clearly and factually that Rush Limbaugh's comments, both past and recent, demonstrate very clearly and "are evidence that the Republican Party still has a problem with race."

. . . . .So, back at it. And of course, you know the Angel just is going to dig right into Sarah Palin, and her surprise resignation as the Governor of Alaska.

. . . . .Let me start right off by saying that, in my opinion, the estimable Ms. Palin has done more to set the image of women in American politics back singlehandedly than any other woman in recent history. She reinforces the stereotype of being erratic and unable to handle pressure, and not being suited for a top job.

. . . .Bear in mind that we are talking about someone who couldn't even complete a full term as the Governor of a State that has essentially the same number of citizens as Columbus, Ohio.

. . . . .It's like the mayor of Albuquerque quitting their term early to help spread their message on a "national stage". WTF????

. . . ..Her resignation letter was a long-winded, rambling piece; grammatically incorrect, random punctation and capitalization throughout. Her resignation speech was the same, and her Facebook message yesterday was the same, rambling and incoherent. So typical of the extreme fundamentalist Right wing of her party; no facts, no substance, no coherent logical argument. All ephemeral hyperbole, with the issuer of the same a victim of some nefarious liberal source. Cognitively dissonant. All 3 can be checked at the links provided. In each case, she tied her resignation to a "higher calling". We'll talk more about that later.

. . . . . . There have been a number of reaction pieces in the last 24 hours; so. . .on to some of those first:

. . . . . .Geoffrey Dunn:

Anyone who is in any way surprised by Sarah Palin's announcement today that she will not be seeking re-election, and, even more significantly, is stepping down as Governor of Alaska, has not been paying close attention. The signs have been everywhere.

Palin has absolutely zero interest in running the State of Alaska. She steadfastly refused to live in Juneau after her first year there, had the gall to charge the state for residing at her home in Wasilla 600 miles away, and she basically mailed in her performance as the state's top administrator during Alaska's most recent legislative session. She has alienated virtually all the key legislators in her own party -- that's right, Republicans -- and had failed to move any key legislation forward since her return to Alaska from the national campaign trail last November.

In fact, her bizarre appointment for Attorney General, Wayne Anthony Ross, was rejected nearly unanimously by the state legislature -- a first in Alaskan history. Even in respect to energy policy, her supposed bailiwick, she has been categorically ineffective. When I asked those in-the-know what role Palin had played in putting together the recent pipeline deal between TransCanada and Exxon, their response was simple: "None."

None. That about sums up Palin's accomplishments as Governor of the Last Frontier.

The evangelical right can wallow in denial all they want about Palin being victimized by liberals or Democrats or even George Soros (some illiterate wingnut recently tried to link me to him), but the fact is that most of the people with really bad things to say about Palin -- from John McCain's staff to conservatives in Alaska -- come from the Republican Party. The charges of a left-wing conspiracy are so ridiculous as to be absolutely absurd.
Some pundits have said that Palin's resignation is out of character. Hardly. Don't forget that she resigned from her last statewide office -- that as chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. Sarah Palin is a quitter. She fancies herself something else. But, in the end, she quit her position at AOGCC and she has now quit her governorship. That's two-for-two at the statewide level. In Wasilla, there was nearly a recall launched against her as mayor. Trouble and turbulence have followed her everywhere.

More importantly, there are rumors in Alaska that more Ethics Act charges are in the works and that there is also a more serious Federal investigation focusing on Palin during her tenure as mayor in Wasilla and the building of her home and a sports complex in Wasilla, long speculated to have been linked. It's the one very touchy subject whenever you bring it up in the MatSu Valley. As someone who is writing a book on Palin, I can attest to the fact that there are always rumors flying about her, not all of them true, but this seems like a real possibility, especially given the timing of her announcement today.

Palin also has a multi-million dollar book project for Rupert Murdoch that she needs to complete in time for a spring release. That's some serious cabbage, and there were grumblings in Alaska about the book deal as well. There will be other lucrative, high-visibility media options for her shortly down the road. Don't be surprised to hear of one of those popping up soon. This frees her up to reach for the gold ring without her minions being able to register any complaints. In that respect, it's a logical move.
All of the recent public donnybrooks have taken their toll: First the article by Todd Purdum in Vanity Fair and then the even nastier revelations of emails leaked by the McCain campaign which showed her to be an utter liar regarding her husband Todd's membership in the Alaska Independent Party. Even the seemingly innocuous interview in Runner's World, with its bizarre, braggadocio boast of her having more endurance than Obama, revealed her penchant for duplicity at every turn: the assertion that an injury she had sustained while jogging in Arizona had been kept top-secret, a contention thoroughly disputed by the inimitable Mudflats.
One of my favorite lies spewed by Palin today in yet another poorly scripted speech was that she campaigned for governor "four years ago...," when she, in fact, ran for governor three years ago and held her position for little more than two-and-half years. It's the little lies she always tells, the twists of truth, the distortions. Four years sounds like nearly a full term; three feels incomplete. So why not just call it four?

For all her projected toughness, Palin loves to play the victim. "Political operatives descended on Alaska last August, digging for dirt," she whined, implying that her problems are from out-of-state (yet another big lie). "Over the past nine months I've been accused of all sorts of frivolous ethics violations..." It wasn't quite Richard Nixon's "Checker's Speech," but it was close. In her own awkward vernacular, the Governor was essentially saying to Alaska, "You won't have Sarah Palin to kick around any more."

. . . . .Read the rest of the piece here.

. . . . . .Paul Begala, well-known CNN contributor and analyst:

I wish Hunter S. Thompson had lived to see this.

As Hunter said, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." Sarah Palin makes Mark Foley, the congressman who sent filthy emails to pages look almost normal. She makes David Vitter, the senator who was hanging out with hookers, look almost boring. She makes Larry Craig, caught hitting on a cop in a men's room, look almost stable. She makes John Ensign, the senator who was having an affair with a staffer, look almost humdrum (and compared to the rest of the GOP whack-jobs, he is). And she makes Mark Sanford, the governor with the Latin lover, look positively predictable.

It was an almost impossible mission, but in resigning from office with 17 months to go in her first term, Sarah Palin has made herself the bull goose loony of the GOP.
Let's stipulate that if there is some heretofore unknown personal, medical or family crisis, this was the right move. But Gov. Palin didn't say anything like that. Her statement was incoherent, bizarre and juvenile. The text, as posted on Gov. Palin's official website (here), uses 2,549 words and 18 exclamation points. Lincoln freed the slaves with 719 words and nary an exclamation; Mr. Jefferson declared our independence in 1,322 words and, again, no exclamation points. Nixon resigned the presidency in 1,796 words -- still no exclamation points. Gov. Palin capitalized words at random - whole words, like "TO," "HELP," and "AND," and the first letter of "Troops."

Gov. Palin's official announcement that she is resigning as chief executive of the great state of Alaska had all the depth and gravitas of a 13-year-old's review of the Jonas Brothers' album on Facebook. She even quoted her parents' refrigerator magnet. (Note to self: if one of my kids becomes governor, throw away the refrigerator magnet that says: "Murray's Oyster Bar: We Shuck Em, You Suck Em!") She put her son's name in quotations marks. Why? Who knows. She writes, "I promised efficiencies and effectiveness!?" Was she exclaiming or questioning? I get it: both! And I don't even know what to make of a sentence that reads:

*((Gotta put First Things First))*

Ponder the fact that Rupert Murdoch's Harper Collins publishing house is paying this, umm, writer $11 million for a book. Ponder that and say a prayer for Ms. Palin's editor.

I'm no latter-day Strunk & White, just a guy who was struck by Palin's spectacularly rambling and infantile prose. It bespeaks a rambling and infantile mind. But perhaps not. Perhaps this is all a ruse. Perhaps Gov. Palin wants us to believe she's an intellectual featherweight who is slightly shallower than an actor on High School Musical. Maybe she's trying to throw us off the trail.

Naah. A lot of people thought that about George W. Bush. He couldn't be so block-headed, they said. He couldn't be as childish and churlish as he came off. Oh yes he could. And so, too, might Ms. Palin be as vapid and puerile as her inane statement suggests.

. . . .Read the rest of the piece here.

. . . .Cenk Ugyur, of the Young Turks:

There is a lot we don't know about Sarah Palin's decision to resign. But there is one thing we do know: She thought it was politically damaging.

No one announces good news late on Friday before Fourth of July weekend. That is someone who is trying to bury bad news as much as possible. With Michael Jackson and Mark Sanford stories still lingering around, everyone on vacation, and as little reporters working as possible, she releases this bombshell. That's someone who obviously thinks what she is doing is not going to help her, at least in the short term.

. . . .Read the rest of that piece here.

. . . . . From Michelle Goldberg, conservative blogger and commentator, and especially insightful into Sarah's ties to Alaskan Independence Party, a violent secessionist group. (For me, personally it was her two keynote addresses to their convention that provided the proof for me that she is a traitor, guilty of treason, and should now be in Leavenworth and not in the Governor's mansion in Alaska).

On the face of it, it seems preposterous that Palin might think she could maintain any political credibility at all after walking away from her job simply because she has her eye on bigger things. But Palin has long had an almost dementedly inflated sense of her own destiny. In one of the most quoted passages of Todd Purdham’s eviscerating Vanity Fair profile of Palin, he writes that, in traveling through Alaska, several people told him that, in trying to understand their governor, “they had consulted the definition of ‘narcissistic personality disorder’ in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.” Said disorder, Purdum points out, is marked by “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy.”

As a description of Palin, that sounds about right. It also sounds about right as a description of Newt Gingrich, Mark Sanford, John Edwards, and maybe even Bill Clinton. There is nothing new about politicians who are staggeringly egotistical and heedlessly dishonest, politicians with fantastic reserves of self-righteousness and self-pity but a shriveled capacity for loyalty. But we don’t usually see this particular kind of craziness in women. Palin is the rare female politician who is as much a megalomaniac as her male peers. Maybe more.
By the time she’d emerged on the national stage, her confidence—had had a unique chance to grow and flower.
But it also metastasized into deluded arrogance. Palin’s public statements have been full of petty, easily refutable mendacity, delivered with the vehemence of a compulsive liar. Purdum’s piece reveals one tiny but telling incident, in which Palin told McCain aides that she and her husband had been without insurance of any kind in the early years of their marriage. “Checking with Todd Palin himself revealed that, no, they had had catastrophic coverage all along,” Purdum writes. “This sort of slipperiness—about both what the truth was and whether the truth even mattered—persisted on questions great and small.”

On Thursday, CBS News had a small scoop revealing a similarly cavalier attitude towards the truth. After McCain’s chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, rejected a request by Palin to reply to a report that her husband, Todd, has been a member of the secessionist Alaska Independence Party, Palin came forward with a preposterous excuse, like a teenager trying to explain away the incriminating smell of liquor—or a governor trying to cover up a mysterious jaunt to Buenos Aires. Secession, she insisted—despite all available evidence—is not part of the party’s platform, and besides, Todd “was only a 'member' bc independent alaskans too often check that 'Alaska Independent' box on voter registrations thinking it just means non partisan. He caught his error when changing our address and checked the right box. I still want it fixed." A clearly exasperated Schmidt wrote back that secession is the AIP’s “entire reason for existence. A cursory examination of the website shows that the party exists for the purpose of seceding from the union. That is the stated goal on the front page of the web site. Our records indicate that todd was a member for seven years. If this is incorrect then we need to understand the discrepancy. The statement you are suggesting be released would be inaccurate.”
The Alaska governor shares the personality flaws of many of her male peers, but by all accounts she doesn’t express them via the preferred method of politicians like John Edwards or Mark Sanford—by being sexually reckless. The United States has grown more blasé about sex scandals post Bill Clinton, but they remain more damaging than, say, dishonesty, greed, or naked incompetence.

Her seemingly irrational faith in herself might not be totally misplaced, especially if other Republicans keep self-destructing at their current rate. That’s because while Palin is unhinged, so is much of her competition. Politics has always attracted the deeply screwed up, but our current political system seems to do so more than most. Perhaps that’s because healthy people looking to make their mark on the world don’t want to subject themselves to the inquisitorial media attention or crushing vapidity of modern campaigning. The gloriously sane Barack Obama is the exception that proves the rule—watch people wonder at his unfeigned affection for his family, the fact that he doesn’t seem desperate for praise. Success in our politics often requires a voracious, antinomian egotism, a sense that rules are for others.

The Alaska governor shares the personality flaws of many of her male peers, but there’s no evidence she express them via the preferred method of politicians like John Edwards or Mark Sanford—by being sexually reckless. The United States has grown more blasé about sex scandals post Bill Clinton, but they remain more damaging than, say, dishonesty, greed, flakiness or naked incompetence.

Palin may have gone rogue on John McCain, had public feuds with her grandson’s teenage father, turned on loyal aids, flubbed interviews, spent tens of thousands of other people’s money on clothes, told countless lies and now walked away from her responsibilities, but as far as we know she hasn’t cheated on her husband. If congenital narcissists dominate our politics, Palin may still be just the narcissist the GOP needs.

. . . .Over at the conservative Daily Beast, they rounded up the 11 most popular theories circulating for her resignation. Find 'em here.

. . . .Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski positively ripped her in a statement released from her office, telling her "You abandoned our State" read it here,

. . . .Karl Rove, the Architect (love him, or hate him, he is a political genius) had this to say on Sunday morning on the official Republican Mouthpiece station, Fox News:

"I think it hurts. It's also unclear what her strategy is. Again, she said she wanted to lead effective change outside of government. Well, now people will be saying what is it you mean by that and how are you demonstrating effective leadership for change around America? I'm like Governor [Mike] Huckabee. I'm a fan of Sarah Palin's, but the effective strategies in politics are ones that are so clear and obvious that people can grasp it."

. . . . It was very apparent throughout the interview that Karl Rove was no fan of this move of Palin's and was quite cold about it.

. . . .The rumors from inside her camp are that it's been potential Republican rival Mitt Romney and his camp who have been circulating the rumors about her ethics problems, and not the "liberal bloggers".

. . . .As well, another Republican potential candidate, Mike Huckabee, had this to say on the Right wing appartus Sunday morning entertainment revue "Fox News Sunday":

"In a primary this is going to be an issue she'll have to face. Will she be able to withstand the pressure?"

. . . .Here's what I know about Sarah Palin. She's a hypocrite and a liar, she's a completely self-absorbed, venal, narcissistic, mean personality. She gave the keynote address, twice, to a group that advocates for the secession of the state of Alaska from the United States, by violence. Her husband was a member for 7 years. She is a member of a church who welcomes in a man who proclaims himself a "witch doctor", a human being claiming the ability to do what other humans cannot, a human being who claims god-like powers, and she belives him. She consistently attacked Barack Obama on a personal level, tying him to terrorists, casting doubt on his citizenship, and consistently implying that he was a Muslim, on the campaign trail, whilst he did not, and allowed her to demonstrate her complete and utter inability to grasp the job of Vice-President during her televised debate and she now has turned into a a pathetic whiner, a thin-skinned loser who can throw it out there, but isn't willing to take it, with the most direct criticism of her coming from within her own party, her own State, and from within the group of people who were attempting to inform her and help her with the information and facts she needed while she was running for Vice-President of the United States. Her lawyer says that she is exploring legal action against bloggers and the media. This from a wing of the party that screams about the Fairness Doctrine. Her particular brand of Fascism, her Christian Nationalism is a complete betrayal of the sacrifices of millions of men and women who have fought and died for the ideal that is the American Experiment, still grandly and successfully moving along after 234 years. This is a country that embraces diversity of opinion and viewpoint, as the Founding Fathers intended and Palin is the antithesis of that, a narrow-minded, not very bright bigot, who will use position and power to punish if the offender hasn't acted in accordance with her restricted belief system. Just ask her ex-brother-in-law or her daughter's Baby Daddy, or his family. She's not very bright, and I don't want someone like that anywhere near the nuclear launch codes. Her particular brand of Christianity calls for Armageddon and the Rapture, neither of which I want for my children, and there is, per the United States Constitution, absolutely no place in the structure of our government for the mixture of religion and politics, no place whatsoever. The Constitution guarantees that.

. . . .Outta here

. . . .Got your back

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. This rodeo is a one-way ticket, and no one gets out alive, no one. We don't get to dictate terms and circumstances around how the ticket gets punched, and we don't know when it's coming. This ain't no dress rehearsal. Change your world, change yourself and change the world at large.

The Desolation Angel

Independence Eve

2009-07-03T09:37:00.000-04:00

Friday July 3, 2009 Independence Eve

. . . .Told you there'd be new music! (grin!!)

. . . .Today's column is in two parts: This morning's comes first.

. . . The jobs numbers are dismal. Period.

. . . .Krugman, in the New York Times this morning:

O.K., Thursday’s jobs report settles it. We’re going to need a bigger stimulus. But does the president know that?

Let’s do the math.

Since the recession began, the U.S. economy has lost 6 ½ million jobs — and as that grim employment report confirmed, it’s continuing to lose jobs at a rapid pace. Once you take into account the 100,000-plus new jobs that we need each month just to keep up with a growing population, we’re about 8 ½ million jobs in the hole.
And the deeper the hole gets, the harder it will be to dig ourselves out. The job figures weren’t the only bad news in Thursday’s report, which also showed wages stalling and possibly on the verge of outright decline. That’s a recipe for a descent into Japanese-style deflation, which is very difficult to reverse. Lost decade, anyone?
Wait — there’s more bad news: the fiscal crisis of the states. Unlike the federal government, states are required to run balanced budgets. And faced with a sharp drop in revenue, most states are preparing savage budget cuts, many of them at the expense of the most vulnerable. Aside from directly creating a great deal of misery, these cuts will depress the economy even further.
So what do we have to counter this scary prospect? We have the Obama stimulus plan, which aims to create 3 ½ million jobs by late next year. That’s much better than nothing, but it’s not remotely enough. And there doesn’t seem to be much else going on. Do you remember the administration’s plan to sharply reduce the rate of foreclosures, or its plan to get the banks lending again by taking toxic assets off their balance sheets? Neither do I.
All of this is depressingly familiar to anyone who has studied economic policy in the 1930s. Once again a Democratic president has pushed through job-creation policies that will mitigate the slump but aren’t aggressive enough to produce a full recovery. Once again much of the stimulus at the federal level is being undone by budget retrenchment at the state and local level.
So have we failed to learn from history, and are we, therefore, doomed to repeat it? Not necessarily — but it’s up to the president and his economic team to ensure that things are different this time. President Obama and his officials need to ramp up their efforts, starting with a plan to make the stimulus bigger.
Just to be clear, I’m well aware of how difficult it will be to get such a plan enacted.
There won’t be any cooperation from Republican leaders, who have settled on a strategy of total opposition, unconstrained by facts or logic. Indeed, these leaders responded to the latest job numbers by proclaiming the failure of the Obama economic plan. That’s ludicrous, of course. The administration warned from the beginning that it would be several quarters before the plan had any major positive effects. But that didn’t stop the chairman of the Republican Study Committee from issuing a statement demanding: “Where are the jobs?”
It’s also not clear whether the administration will get much help from Senate “centrists,” who partially eviscerated the original stimulus plan by demanding cuts in aid to state and local governments — aid that, as we’re now seeing, was desperately needed. I’d like to think that some of these centrists are feeling remorse, but if they are, I haven’t seen any evidence to that effect.
And as an economist, I’d add that many members of my profession are playing a distinctly unhelpful role.
It has been a rude shock to see so many economists with good reputations recycling old fallacies — like the claim that any rise in government spending automatically displaces an equal amount of private spending, even when there is mass unemployment — and lending their names to grossly exaggerated claims about the evils of short-run budget deficits. (Right now the risks associated with additional debt are much less than the risks associated with failing to give the economy adequate support.)
Also, as in the 1930s, the opponents of action are peddling scare stories about inflation even as deflation looms.
So getting another round of stimulus will be difficult. But it’s essential.
Obama administration economists understand the stakes. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, Christina Romer, the chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, published an article on the “lessons of 1937” — the year that F.D.R. gave in to the deficit and inflation hawks, with disastrous consequences both for the economy and for his political agenda.
What I don’t know is whether the administration has faced up to the inadequacy of what it has done so far.
So here’s my message to the president: You need to get both your economic team and your political people working on additional stimulus, now. Because if you don’t, you’ll soon be facing your own personal 1937.

. . . .The most important piece you'll read all year comes to you this morning from Matt Taibbi over at Rolling Stone magazine, it's found in print issue 1082-83 and on the web at their site and it's been copied all over the Web, the following are excerpts from it. I need to make sure that credit is given where, in this case, mountains of credit are due. I'd like you to read the following piece in full, and attempt to digest it. This one goes way, way beyond conspiracy theories, and puts some solid fact behind what's been happening to your money, not just this year, but for a very, very long, long time, and is probably the most controversial article written in a couple of years:

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
Any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.
The basic scam in the Internet Age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. Companies that weren't much more than pot-fueled ideas scrawled on napkins by up-too-late bong-smokers were taken public via IPOs, hyped in the media and sold to the public for megamillions. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out 50-story windows and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.
It sounds obvious now, but what the average investor didn't know at the time was that the banks had changed the rules of the game, making the deals look better than they actually were. They did this by setting up what was, in reality, a two-tiered investment system — one for the insiders who knew the real numbers, and another for the lay investor who was invited to chase soaring prices the banks themselves knew were irrational. While Goldman's later pattern would be to capitalize on changes in the regulatory environment, its key innovation in the Internet years was to abandon its own industry's standards of quality control.
Goldman's role in the sweeping global disaster that was the housing bubble is not hard to trace. Here again, the basic trick was a decline in underwriting standards, although in this case the standards weren't in IPOs but in mortgages. By now almost everyone knows that for decades mortgage dealers insisted that home buyers be able to produce a down payment of 10 percent or more, show a steady income and good credit rating, and possess a real first and last name. Then, at the dawn of the new millennium, they suddenly threw all that shit out the window and started writing mortgages on the backs of napkins to cocktail waitresses and ex-cons carrying five bucks and a Snickers bar.
And what caused the huge spike in oil prices? Take a wild guess. Obviously Goldman had help — there were other players in the physical-commodities market — but the root cause had almost everything to do with the behavior of a few powerful actors determined to turn the once-solid market into a speculative casino. Goldman did it by persuading pension funds and other large institutional investors to invest in oil futures — agreeing to buy oil at a certain price on a fixed date. The push transformed oil from a physical commodity, rigidly subject to supply and demand, into something to bet on, like a stock. Between 2003 and 2008, the amount of speculative money in commodities grew from $13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of 2,300 percent. By 2008, a barrel of oil was traded 27 times, on average, before it was actually delivered and consumed.
The history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled-dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates. By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibillion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden-parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman.
But then, something happened. It's hard to say what it was exactly; it might have been the fact that Goldman's co-chairman in the early Nineties, Robert Rubin, followed Bill Clinton to the White House, where he directed the National Economic Council and eventually became Treasury secretary. While the American media fell in love with the story line of a pair of baby-boomer, Sixties-child, Fleetwood Mac yuppies nesting in the White House, it also nursed an undisguised crush on Rubin, who was hyped as without a doubt the smartest person ever to walk the face of the Earth, with Newton, Einstein, Mozart and Kant running far behind.
Rubin was the prototypical Goldman banker. He was probably born in a $4,000 suit, he had a face that seemed permanently frozen just short of an apology for being so much smarter than you, and he exuded a Spock-like, emotion-neutral exterior; the only human feeling you could imagine him experiencing was a nightmare about being forced to fly coach. It became almost a national cliché that whatever Rubin thought was best for the economy — a phenomenon that reached its apex in 1999, when Rubin appeared on the cover of Time with his Treasury deputy, Larry Summers, and Fed chief Alan Greenspan under the headline the committee to save the world. And "what Rubin thought," mostly, was that the American economy, and in particular the financial markets, were over-regulated and needed to be set free. During his tenure at Treasury, the Clinton White House made a series of moves that would have drastic consequences for the global economy — beginning with Rubin's complete and total failure to regulate his old firm during its first mad dash for obscene short-term profits.
After the oil bubble collapsed last fall, there was no new bubble to keep things humming — this time, the money seems to be really gone, like worldwide-depression gone. So the financial safari has moved elsewhere, and the big game in the hunt has become the only remaining pool of dumb, unguarded capital left to feed upon: taxpayer money. Here, in the biggest bailout in history, is where Goldman Sachs really started to flex its muscle.
It began in September of last year, when then-Treasury secretary Paulson made a momentous series of decisions. Although he had already engineered a rescue of Bear Stearns a few months before and helped bail out quasi-private lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Paulson elected to let Lehman Brothers — one of Goldman's last real competitors — collapse without intervention. ("Goldman's superhero status was left intact," says market analyst Eric Salzman, "and an investment-banking competitor, Lehman, goes away.") The very next day, Paulson greenlighted a massive, $85 billion bailout of AIG, which promptly turned around and repaid $13 billion it owed to Goldman. Thanks to the rescue effort, the bank ended up getting paid in full for its bad bets: By contrast, retired auto workers awaiting the Chrysler bailout will be lucky to receive 50 cents for every dollar they are owed.
Immediately after the AIG bailout, Paulson announced his federal bailout for the financial industry, a $700 billion plan called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and put a heretofore unknown 35-year-old Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari in charge of administering the funds. In order to qualify for bailout monies, Goldman announced that it would convert from an investment bank to a bank-holding company, a move that allows it access not only to $10 billion in TARP funds, but to a whole galaxy of less conspicuous, publicly backed funding — most notably, lending from the discount window of the Federal Reserve. By the end of March, the Fed will have lent or guaranteed at least $8.7 trillion under a series of new bailout programs — and thanks to an obscure law allowing the Fed to block most congressional audits, both the amounts and the recipients of the monies remain almost entirely secret.
Converting to a bank-holding company has other benefits as well: Goldman's primary supervisor is now the New York Fed, whose chairman at the time of its announcement was Stephen Friedman, a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. Friedman was technically in violation of Federal Reserve policy by remaining on the board of Goldman even as he was supposedly regulating the bank; in order to rectify the problem, he applied for, and got, a conflict-of-interest waiver from the government. Friedman was also supposed to divest himself of his Goldman stock after Goldman became a bank-holding company, but thanks to the waiver, he was allowed to go out and buy 52,000 additional shares in his old bank, leaving him $3 million richer. Friedman stepped down in May, but the man now in charge of supervising Goldman — New York Fed president William Dudley — is yet another former Goldmanite.
The collective message of all of this — the AIG bailout, the swift approval for its bank-holding conversion, the TARP funds — is that when it comes to Goldman Sachs, there isn't a free market at all. The government might let other players on the market die, but it simply will not allow Goldman to fail under any circumstances. Its edge in the market has suddenly become an open declaration of supreme privilege. "In the past it was an implicit advantage," says Simon Johnson, an economics professor at MIT and former official at the International Monetary Fund, who compares the bailout to the crony capitalism he has seen in Third World countries. "Now it's more of an explicit advantage."
Fast-forward to today. It's early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs — its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign — sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs.
Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm's co-head of finance.) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion- dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an "environmental plan," called cap-and-trade. The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that's been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.

. . . .You can read the same piece here, but there's also a series of videos and interviews with Matt as well.

It never rains where you need it to

2009-07-01T12:12:00.007-04:00

Mid-week updates

. . . . . So, the new Wilco album came available on Tuesday. If you ordered it from their website, it was most likely delivered yesterday too, and you can download the entire album as an MP3 too, for free, for placing the order. The demand was so high yesterday, that it crashed their server for 12 hours. When I get back into a position to, I'll put a couple of the tracks in the playlist.

. . . . .You have to be from the Midwest and from the era of the '70's to remember the Michael Stanley Band. Well, Michael is still at it, and there's still a lot of members of the old MSB, in his new backing band. Michael was just as good as Bob Seger, or John Mellencamp, and still is, he just never got the breaks they did, and we all know how much I love those two. They worked their ass off night after night on the road, and in the studio and did it their own way. Michael worked just as hard, it just didn't lay out that way for him. After all, how many people out there can say that their first backing band on their first studio album was a then unknown Joe Walsh and the James Gang? Anyhow, at Michael's website, you can order his new album, along with one from Bob Pelander, his keyboard player, and Jonah Koslin, his guitar player. I'll put a couple of those up too.

. . . .'S matter of fact, I've taken it far too easily on all of your ears. It's time for music that you've not heard, from people that may or may not have heard from, with track that you're guaranteed not to have heard. Look out, next week is the mid-summer tracks you've never heard festival!

. . . .Jeez, I love it when the ever-so-studious, intelligentsia on the Right forms it's normal circular firing squad. The squabble now is over the article in Vanity Fair on Sarah Palin. The epitome of being a Republican apologist and hack, Bill Kristol, accuses Steve Schmidt, the McCain campaign manager of being one of the top McCain aides who questioned Palin's mental stability during the campaign. Schmidt, firing back immediately; "I'm sure that John McCain would be President today if only Kristol had been in charge. After all, his management of Dan Quayle's public image as his former chief of staff still takes your breath away."

. . . .OK, OK, get over it, Al Franken got seated today. It was a constitutional process, and it's over now. What's also over is every one of Harry Reid's excuses with a full 60 seats now. Every damn excuse is gone, it's time for them to get busy. It's not the President's job to vote, pass legislation, craft it. That's their job, now get it done Harry, it's the Dems turn now, let's see what you can do.

. . . .It really doesn't matter in the end. It was a Republican majority House and Senate during the Bush administration that ran up the largest deficit in history that we're now dealing with.

. . . In the end, that doesn't matter anymore either, here in the land of short attention span theater and complete lack of knowledge of even history from 5 years that people stunningly present every day.

. . . .The most fun about it? Fox News and it's cast of entertainers has become absolutely insane over it. Talk about writhing in agony, these guys are doing a better job of acting than a 4th grader that really doesn't want to go to school today. You lost, it runs in cycles, the Repubs will have their chance to continue screwing all of us, and they were doing such a good job of it, again.

. . . .Even more fun than that is when the cast of drooling morons actually puts themselves on tape proving what kind of fascists they are. Check this one here, where Rupert Murdoch's CEO for News Limited, the holding corp for Fox News, Roger Hartigan, labels writers, columnists and bloggers like me "political extremists" and laments the fact that we aren't rounded up and thrown in prison like in China and Burma. Too bad bitch, this is America, not your Fourth Reich.

. . . .I will freely admit to being a drooling fanatic for Rescue Me on FX networks with Denis Leary as Tommy Gavin. Last night's episode, from the moment that Tommy was sitting alone, drinking, and talking to his dead son, his dead brother, his dead cousin and his dead Dad was from that point on, one of the finest stretches of acting and television that I'd seen in a long, long time. It was absolutely brilliant, and impossible to explain. If you've never watched it, check out the rerun of this week's episode on Friday night at 11 PM.

. . . .Dept. of truly weird shit: Check this video of a weird alien blob out here from a cam that was mounted on a sewer snake down in North Carolina. Yes, it's real, and it's not faked. The alien freaks came out of the woodwork on this one, since it so much resembles the blob from the movie "The Blob", and the Utilities Department down there has their own explanation. I'll let you watch it first, and I'll tell you what their explanation was further down.

. . . .Dept. of even truly weirder shit: Scientists have discovered a mega-colony of ants, a species called Argentinian ants. When I say mega-colony, I'm talked about an inter-related colony that extends to every continent on Earth; like the a 3,700 mile long colony in Europe along the Mediterranean; one that extends 560 miles up the California coast; one that runs the entire coast of Japan. And, genetically, they're all interrelated. What that means is that they're not aggressive towards one another, and won't kill another colony, they're all basically one colony. They're growing. Catch the whole story here at the BBC.

. . . .The world's 8th largest economy shut do wn this morning and is bankrupt. I'm talking about the state, that by itself, was the world's 8th biggest economy, larger than most countries on Earth. California is bankrupt, and out of business. Guess what? Poof! It's gone.

. . . . .Geez! Enough already. I mean, it's pretty obvious that South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford got the fuck of his lifetime from this Argentinian woman, he's waxed poetic about it enough. Can we move on? Please. Either divorce your wife and go back to getting great blowjobs, or not, but get back to governing. What does getting laid have to do with being a Governor? Hunh? After all, the Republican Party is full of Mark Sanfords, and has a long history of them:
Newt Gingrich -two affairs, two divorces
John McCain - affair on disabled first wife, followed by a divorce, then marrying Miss Moneybags
Rudy Guiliani - divorced from his first wife, married, an affair, then a truly nasty divorce
Fred Thompson - affair, divorce
Rush Limbaugh - too many marriages to mention, (4 total), but there weren't affairs, he's the exception to the rule. No one wants to bang the sweaty windbag, methinks there's a lot of dollar signs in women's eyes when they meet him.
And let us not forget, the most famous South Carolinian of them all, Strom Thurmond, who was absolutely the kinkiest of the lot - The "affair" with his black maid, which resulted in a daughter for one of the most famous foes of integration and a true Son of the South. Oh, by the way, the word "affair" is in quotes since the maid was 15 at the time. Or there was his mistress, who was on Death Row, in a South Carolina peniteniary.

Now, between those gems and Sanford, 2006 to 2009 gets really confusing, what with Vitter, Larry Craig, Ensign, et al. One of TPM's readers sent in this helpful flow chart.

. . . The point here is simple. It's pretty damn hypocritical of the Republican Party to call for him to step down.

. . . .And no, I haven't forgotten Bill Clinton's sexual hijinks in the White House with Monica Lewinsky, the First BBW, but we are talking about a man that Paula Jones wouldn't screw. Nor can I leave the other Democrat, John Edwards, out. His shit stinks on that one big, but, these two compared to the above list? It makes the lot of them calling for Clinton's impeachment look, like what it was, sheer hypocrisy.

. . . The rest of the world's attention and the media's focus may be on Michael Jackson, but mine isn't. Mir Hossein Mousavi has asked Iran's protestors to keep going, and called Ahmadenijad's and Khameini's government "illegitimate", to continue to defy an "unlawful Iranian regime" in defiance of the High Cleric, who stated that no more opposition to the election results, or questioning of them, will be allowed. Coverage here.

. . . .Farewell Karl Malden, see you on the other side. If all you remember of Karl is him and Michael Douglas in The Streets of San Francisco you're missing it. Try renting On The Waterfront and watch he and Marlon Brando together.

. . . .In the Congressional investigation that is ramping up to probe the Bank of America-Merrill Lynch deal that Paulson pushed through last September, a very suprising internal GOP memo is being circulated that directly takes on George W Bush and attacks his handling of the economy. The folks at WhoRunsGov have obtained copies of the memo, and you can read the whole piece at the jump here.

An internal GOP memo prepared to brief some House Republicans as part of an ongoing probe into the Bank of America-Merrill Lynch deal takes direct aim at an unlikely target: Former President George W. Bush.
The memo directly blames Bush’s handling of the economic meltdown,. . . . .
“The financial crisis of 2008 had its roots primarily in ill-conceived government policies,” reads the memo. It was prepared by Republican staffers to advise GOP members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on how to handle a recent hearing on the government’s role in Bank of America’s purchase of Merrill Lynch.

. . . .Krugman the Nobel prize winning economist who,along with Noriel Roubini and Mark Zandi called all of this right as far back as 2006, and were derided and laughed at then, on economic recovery, on ABC News, and the same thing that he's reiterated all along, that the Obama Administration got it wrong, and needed to go for a much, much larger stimulus package the first time around to jumpstart the economy:

"The fact of the matter is that the unemployment rate is much worse than the administration contemplated or that most people expected," Krugman told ABC News. "So the economy is much weaker than we thought it'd be, meaning, in fact, it could use more stimulus."
"I'm trying to move the public debate in a better, more sensible direction," Krugman said. "There were not a whole lot of voices at least in the public eye saying what a lot of economists had concluded, which was that the Obama stimulus plan was, if anything, too small."
"The last two recessions were both followed by prolonged jobless recoveries when industrial production and GDP rose, but the unemployment rate continued to rise," he said, "We're almost certainly headed for another patch like that this time around which means that we need the economic support more than ever."

. . . . . How bad is it? The map below from the United States Dept. of Labor shows it.

. . . .For more in-depth investigation of the roots of the economic crisis, and the current political scene, you can't beat Matt Taibbi's work in Rolling Stone. Check out this week's print edition for a great piece on Goldman-Sachs and their contribution to the fiasco. It's not in the web edition yet.

. . . .Watch your credit card statements closely. In anticipation of the sweeping Credit Card Reform Bill that was passed, signed into law and will take effect next January, credit card issuers are screwing you, the holders. Interest rates are being raised, fees are being put on them that never existed and credit limits are being lowered. Chase, Citi and Bank of America being the worst offenders right now.

. . . . On my everlasting topic of upgrading the grid; the cheapest, fastest, best thing we could do right now to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and put some money back in our pockets and get some jobs going now for people who need them. It's also what we need to do, and it's a fundamental need, before we ever think about other energy sources, of changing the grid around, of trying to integrate "green" or "new energy". It's that fragile, it's in that bad a shape, and it's the weak link in the whole plan, from Matthew Wald at the New York Times:

Adding electricity from the wind and the sun could increase the frequency of blackouts and reduce the reliability of the nation's electrical grid, an industry report says
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation says in a report scheduled for release Monday that unless appropriate measures are taken to improve transmission of electricity, rules reducing carbon dioxide emissions by utilities could impair the reliability of the power grid. The corporation is the industry body authorized by the federal government to enforce reliability rules for the interlocking system of electrical power generation and transmission.

. . . .And on the future of us, human beings, this one in from Wired. Up in Canada, they're starting to sell a "second generation" biofuel. An ethanol made from agricultural residue that would otherwise be discarded or trashed. There's still a lot of advances to be made in biofuel, and if we'd only smarten up and get our vehicles switched over to biodiesel, which would make for a great use for old french fry oil, or get ourselves switched over to natural gas powered vehicles. We lead the world in natural gas fields. Otherwise, we participate willingly and gladly every day in the greatest transfer of wealth in human history, gladly lining the pockets of countries who would gladly see us gone the day we can't buy their oil anymore.

. . . . Outta here

. . . .Got your back

. . . . Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. This rodeo is a one-way ticket, and no one, no one gets out alive. We don't get to dictate the terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched, so it's not about yesterday, or tomorrow. It's not about regret and guilt, or hopes and dreams. This ain't no dress rehearsal, it's about right fucking here, right fucking now.
Change your world, change yourself, and change the world at large. This is the sight, the sound, the words and the record of me changing my life. What have you done for yourself lately?

The Desolation Angel