USA's War against the Dollar

1907: Financial Panic, 1914: The Great War; 2007: Financial Panic, 2014: ...

2012-09-11T14:49:00.000-07:00

As the fumes from the Party conventions dissipate, leaving us with the certainty that no one knows what's going on, and that no one really cares to talk about the profound paucity of ideas, the realization dawns that, despite all the talk of the similarity of the current economic malaise to the Great Depression, the real similarity is to the less well-known, but even more devastating, Panic of 1907.

That destruction was so comprehensive, the pillaging of the economy by a handful of manipulative speculators on Wall St., dubbed robber barons, so complete, that in order to stave off future collapses of the entire country's financial system, the Federal Reserve was created and fractional reserve banking invented.

Now, according to the only other Republican presidential candidate, besides Romney, with any following, Ron Paul, we're to believe that the Fed, far from keeping us from financial ruin, has instead, via its policies of encouraging the very financial speculation it was originally instituted to prevent, is so intertwined with the interests of a small fraction of the population, known as Wall St., that Mr. Paul insists it should be, needs to be, abolished.

This prospect is so frightening, its implications so destabilizing, that it has relegated Mr. Paul to the backwaters of Party politics. Like all gold standard advocates, his messianic zeal for the barbaric relic leaves his financial acumen somewhat suspect. Like abolishing the US military, no matter how attractive a prospect that might be, doing so would crash the economy ... period. The fact that the economic engine that would rise Phoenix-like from the ashes to replace it, would arguably be healthier, more robust, and far less dangerous than one that's based on an arms sales for all-war, all-the-time system that inevitably ends up in the hands of well-connected financial elites, it appears abolishing the current one would indeed be advantageous. But because the entire economy is completely leveraged on the back of "defense", even a reduction in War spending would plunge the US, and therefore the entire world, economy, into an intractable deflationary depression as artificially-stoked demand plummets.

I would argue that abolishing the Fed would have the same result. Therefore, for the same reason, it too, will not happen.

Which brings us to the topic of this post, which is that, with all the wringing of hands about the end of the world being forecast for 12/21/2012, the much more auspicious date, to me, is August 2014.

Having previously believed that the New Millennium resembled the inter-war years of 1918-1939, I have come upon, usually by accident, several excellent books written about and during those times; not histories, but historical fictions such as Upton Sinclair's "World's End" series, or Richard Hughes' trilogy The Human Predicament (including "The Fox in the Attic", and "The Wooden Sheperdhess"), or Anne Nelson's "Red Orchestra", and Hans Fallada's "Every Man Dies Alone ". Despite that, I've subsequently come to the conclusion that Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "August 1914" more closely describes the factors that will plunge us into another orgy of destructive madness. For, as the title of Sinclair's series suggests, just as the flip answer to "Is there life after death?" is, "Yes. Just not yours", the coming cataclysm isn't an Armageddon-imagined End of The World, but just the end of Ours.

Some of the reasons I believe this are because we're so different, some because we're now the same as the Russians in terms of our attitudes and geopolitical position in the world, ie, because we're so similar. For an example of the first, on page 12 Solzhenitsyn declares, "There was only one accepted attitude towards war: that it was a sin". You can see how different we are now. War is no longer considered a sin, so that it is no longer considered evil. This means that now, trying to oppose evil people, "you can't fight them, because evil people always support one another; it is a source of their strength", as is a citizenry that can be convinced that War is a Cakewalk. "Evil, selfish men are more self-assertive than the good and loyal ones; it is always they who try hardest to show off their false loyalty and their pretended abilities" (p530). Something that is never more true than when the ultimate act of evil is simply considered another "option on the table".

"The moral double standard of war ended as though a twist of the knob on a pair of binoculars had abruptly brought the situation into proper focus: war was something that was waged by two different sets of uniforms - total war would have exceeded the bounds of common humanity" (p312). Now, of course, it's the only kind of War there is: Total War, Total Evil. Shock and Awe campaigns explicitly target the civilian populations, because we no longer feel bonds of common humanity, even with our fellow citizens; we're not allowed to: "There's no such thing as Society" as Margaret Thatcher so churlishly stated. There is only Me.

Always, we also tell ourselves, "the Lord sees that we have taken up arms not from martial ambition or for the sake of vain earthly glory but for a just cause - to defend the integrity and safety of our divinely protected Empire ... ", or whatever raison du jour we use to convince ourselves. Since, even as the strains of Empire threaten to dissolve our entire country, most of its denizens refuses to accept the fact that The US Empire even exists.

And whereas in WW1, the 1864 Geneva Convention on wounded stated that hospitals were to be regarded as neutral, that they would neither be fired upon nor captured, and were obliged to take in wounded from both sides; that hospital personnel enjoyed immunity and were at all times free to remain at their posts or to leave; that a private house which took in a wounded man was also afforded the protection of the Convention" (p393), one of the first targets in the invasion of Iraq were the hospitals. And anyone taking in an "insurgent" to tend their wounds was excoriated, along with their entire extended family. Even reporters were not safe. Indeed, if not embedded, were fair targets for elimination.

Now, how we are the same, is in the manner in which the populace is separated from those who make the actual decision to employ our "Warriors", so whereas the Russian people felt that: "they should have just said a Requiem mass for that Archduke Franz Ferdinand, after which the three emperors of Germany, Austria, and Russia could have drunk a glass of vodka at the wake and forgotten the whole affair" (p72), they were instead plunged into a debacle so cataclysmic it changed their world forever.

For if "the War Minister (or Commander-in-Chief) himself boasted that he had not read a single military textbook in the 35 years since he had left the university why should anyone else bother to exert himself? What was to be gained by a show of zeal? The ladder to success was so arranged as to encourage the ascent of slow-witted men who did what they were told, rather than those with brains and independence of mind. If you ever were to think for yourself or acted on your own initiative, then you would be forgiven not even your successes, and if you failed, you would be eaten alive" (p122).

And the fact that "Russia was inexhaustibly strong, even if she was governed by a pack of fools" (p128), does not make one more comfortable about the US's hegemony of military muscle. Because, "... only that closed fraternity of Gen Staff officers and perhaps a handful of engineers as well, were conscious of the fact that the world, and Russia with it, was moving invisibly, inaudibly, and imperceptibly into a new era; that the entire atmosphere of the planet - its oxygen content its rate of combustion, the mainspring pressure in all its clocks had somehow changed. All Russia, from the imperial family down to the revolutionaries naively thought that they were still breathing the same old air and living on familiar ground. Only a handful saw that the stars themselves had moved into a new conjunction" (p130), and that handful, because obedience is prized over intelligence, will remain relegated to the other side of the moat that protects the leaders from the citizens they represent.

But the most telling sign is the fact that the delusions of not one, but both sides seem to be part of the American psyche. So whereas we see the parallel to Germany in the fact that "the German army was the most powerful army in the modern world", the army it opposed was characterized by the statement: "Plan!?" There was something un-Russian about the word. What plan?" (p256). Scarily, BOTH of these apply to the modern US.

We saw this demonstrated in Iraq, where, "Crackling, the smoke and flames consumed the abandoned wealth, the now useless products of ingenuity and labor, and the fiery voices hissed and groaned. All was now lost, they said: chaos and hatred were come, and the old life was gone forever"(p352), yet, "our troops turned out to be not only oblivious of proletarian ideology but to lack even a spark of class consciousness. Even the most elementary economic slogans, calling forth changes that would be to their direct advantage, seemed incapable of penetrating their thick skulls. The stupidity and submissiveness of these men were enough to make anyone despair" (P383). "Men! Firm and decisive in war they might be, but in nothing else ... (p399), how well the army trained them in two years - and how surley it ruined them for the next twenty."

No. The almost innocent atmosphere in which the world strolled into WW1 is gone. Only the geopolitical and economic similarities are striking and foreboding. The ruling class, with a distinct distaste for the hoi polloi they lord over, don't realize that once "this is war, there's no way to shake oneself free of it" (p529). Instead they consider it a profit opportunity, and a possible boon to the economy. Separate from their countrymen, their fortunes safely stashed in foreign countries, and their chalets ensconced in what they believe to be safe global nooks, the current -day Ruling Class resembles that of the pre-WW1 Emperors more than they do the pre-WW2 rulers, who felt constrained by the sovereign state of which they were citizens. If anything they more closely resemble the infamous personage who's quoted as saying "L'Etat? C'est moi". What could possibly go wrong?

Electrickety: The Don of the Ion Age.

2012-09-06T16:41:00.002-07:00


			A coaled future few shun.

AS posted in July: New Delhi (CNN) -- India suffered its second massive power failure in two consecutive days Tuesday, depriving as many as 600 million people -- half the country's population -- of electricity and disrupting transportation networks for hours.

That's almost 10% of the world's population.

In the US, just last year in San Diego, though few remember, "The Great Blackout of 2011 gridlocked traffic, closed schools and canceled flights. Electricity wasn’t fully restored until days later, when the problem had appeared to be caused by a maintenance project gone awry near Yuma, Ariz.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) launched a joint inquiry into the lapse, which is common for major energy outages. Spokespeople for both agencies declined to speak for this article, but in a report released last month, the two agencies noted that a major power outage in the Southwest in February was caused by two main factors: unpredictable weather and the unreliability of the grid."

It's come to pass that just as the only thing predictable about the weather is its unpredictability, the only thing reliable about the grid is its unreliability, never more so than when hit by an unpredictable weather event.

Yet even beyond that, the slowdown in the monsoon rains in India did not happen overnight. It was days ... weeks into the unpredictable pattern that the predictable slowdown in the hydrological flow feeding its hydroelectric dams slowed so severely it curtailed the utility's ability to provide electric current. The current needed to drive India's businesses, so we have the impact of climate change directly channeling the slowed flow of current to the slowed flow of currency, as business output grinds to a halt, dropping the value of the rupee.

The currency depends not on the past, but on the current, current, see?

Proving that, like revenge, Electricity is best when served coaled.

Yet even as the supply and infrastructure for delivering the juice grows ever more rickety and unreliable, the utter dependance on it, especially as computers and the internet get woven into everyday habits, becomes more and more intractable, the possibility of existence without it, more unthinkable.

The lack of AC alone would kill millions in a year.

What this all suggests is that the way we've generated and delivered electricity in the past is not a good paradigm to follow for the future. As tornadoes and hurricanes get stronger and more widespread, as derechos completely take vast swathes of the country by surprise and rip up an installed base of infrastructure that was supposed to pay itself off over its projected lifespan of 20 years, but is gone in an hour, what we need to consider before rebuilding becomes more complex, and the chances that we'll get a ROI (return on Investment) worth the money invested becomes harder to fathom.

Risk is rising in all our systems, and their ability to transmit untenable stress from one system to another is the other thing that efficiency brings us. As Efficiency increases, the Robustness of a system decreases, leaving it more and more vulnerable to catastrophic failure. Increased likelihood of concatenating failure is built into the system as a weak link in one has repercussion on all dependent and interconnected sytems, bringing collateral damage that can be so severe as to impact the collapsing structure's ability to recover.

Fukushima comes to mind.

The method in which the satellite, Dawn, was powered to one of the solar systems largest asteroids, Vesta, was via an ion engine. Using electric fields to accelerate a beam of positively charged xenon ions, which shoot out of the aircraft at 90,000 mph, the spacecraft didn't have to carry but a ton of fuel on its 1.7 billion mile voyage.

This is what we need on earth. To look at he planet as more as what we're turning it into: a place inhospitable to stability and unsuitable for long range plans. By looking at the problems of our home planet with the same eye that we use to solve the dilemmas of interplanetary travel, the exigencies of our planet can be turned into the providers of our juice, such that lightening is harnessed, local solutions are implemented, backup systems are designed to be usable so that they can be used and abused on a periodic basis, so that when we need them they'll actually function.

Because the coaled truth is, we can't go on doing as we've been doing. Not from a lefty, feelie, don't hurt the plants, mentality, but from a hard-nosed look at the realities that are changing right before our eyes as the rug's pulled from under our foetus.

Cross-hatching is an artistic method whereby two sets of parallel lines are drawn such that they intersect each other at an angle. If you look at the diamonds formed via their intersection, you would be overwhelmed contemplating the complexity of drawing them all singularly. The diamonds are like the future we're faced with. What we lack is courage, leadership, insight. As watching the two political conventions reminds us, the first series of lines is there. How we cross them is still up to us.

The Red (Party) Menace: They Razz Putin as Fools Rush in

2012-08-31T14:21:00.000-07:00

Pulled from the AP wires and published by the Washington Post:

MOSCOW — Sergei Sokolov, the Soviet defense minister fired by the Politburo after a German teenager landed his plane on Moscow’s Red Square in the 1980s, died in Moscow on Friday. He was 101.

As pointed out in my post of 8/23/2008:

On May 28, 1987: Mathias Rust took off from Helsinki, and, flying at low altitude to avoid radar detection, landed a small, single-engine plane in Moscow's Red Square.

This caused considerable embarrassment to the Politburo, and within a year the entire top echelon of the Soviet military was replaced.

And as Condynasty Rice reminded us last night:

On September 11, 2001, airline jets slammed into NYC's largest towering skyscrapers and into the Pentagon itself, killing thousands and wreaking havoc in not only those cities but to the airline industry and the economy as a whole. Not one government person lost their job. The head of the National Security council was promoted; the bloated Pentagon budget swelled to catastrophic proportions; Afghanistan, the country that we had armed and made hospitable as a haven for terrorist activity was taken over by those same organizations that had made the attacks possible, and, having set the same trap for ourselves that we had, with much braggadocio as highly publicized in "Charlie Wilson's War", laid for the former Soviet Union, sprang it on ourselves.

This last fact was brought up by Clint Eastwood last night, as he asked the gathering of crypto-fascists known as the RNC whether it wouldn't have been wiser to ask Russia before swooping down on Afghanistan like an avenging angel bent on retributive justice.

Condoleeza Rice, the National Security Adviser when that band of Saudi's crashed planes into NY's twin towers, delivered a speech to the RNC advocating a return to the Bush days of unaccountability and government by plausible deniability. Demonstrating how America's Red states have surpassed even the Soviet Red State apparatchiks in placing Party membership above the interests of the country.

So as Republicans continually shift the blame for the economic woes of the US onto the shoulders of President Obama we need to remember a few salient facts:

The complete lack of accountability for their actions, or lack thereof, makes the moniker of "The Red Party" for the GOP more appropriate than most realize, as they have adopted all the worst attributes of the Red Menace they so ardently warned us about, and into which they've apparently morphed.

The only American attack on the US mainland since the war of 1812 occurred under their watch, by a group to whom, less than 5 months previous, they'd given $45million.

Bush's presidency left America more dependent on foreign sources for its energy resources than any preceding president. So whereas KGB Putin, like the first CIA Bush, was the head of the Secret Service, unlike the Bushes, Putin made his country not only energy independent, but the world's largest energy producer, while the crony capitalist Bush policies left the United States more and more dependent on reserves from the very State from which the attacks emanated.

When Ronald Reagan took office, Russia's energy industry was on the verge of collapse and America's was flourishing. Through the machinations of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice putsch, that situation was entirely reversed.

Like the Taliban, the Mormons are a small, weird cult of the country's major religion, and one to which the GOP's presidential hopeful gives more money to than to the country he espouses to love. This is so that it can surreptitiously carry out his agenda, as it so remarkably demonstrated with its support of Prop 8 in California, a state of 38 million people that has the tiniest Mormon minority.

The Bush regime like his father's and RReagan increased Federal spending, via deficit spending for the same reason Jeb Bush did in Florida: to achieve their agenda without much voter resistance, as they wouldn't be footing the bill. Then redirecting the monies of their rich buddies to buy safe, triple-A rated government bonds, issued to fund those deficits, protected by the full faith and credit of the US Treasury.

Bush then presided over, and in fact engendered, the worst financial panic in American history. A panic that took the entire globe to the brink of complete economic collapse.

Bush, not Obama, was the first President to double the National debt, and not from stimulus programs to help put working Americans back to work, or to extend unemployment compensation that his disastrous administration made necessary by its catastrophic economic policy of funneling larger and larger mountains of debt into the war machine while simultaneously, relieving his buddies of the responsiblity of sharing any of the burden protecting their investments entailed by passing the largest tax cut to the haves and the have-mores ever.

As speaker after speaker at the RNC blamed President Obama for the plight of the US economy today, not one of them pointed out that every OECD economy on the globe is still trying to fight their way back to solvency because the economic devastation brought onto countries around the world by the disaster known as the Bush Presidency is so pervasive, the perversion of the economic system so intractable, that only Iceland's response of abrogating payment on their insane level of debt has had any ameliorative effects. A response the GOP uncompromisingly rejects.

There is absolutely no GOP plan, nor was there a discussion of one, as to what to do differently than Obama, in order to move the economy out of the hopeless quagmire into which they've driven it. On the contrary, every single one of their policy boondoggles only promises to bring more premature death to more and more Americans, and then to export their death machine to wreak havoc on burgeoning populations worldwide.

This is the price we pay for having let a criminal enterprise run the country for eight years. The prospect of doing so again within such a short time frame is truly frightening. Do we really believe in American exceptionalism so much that we'll prove we're so exceptional we'll reinstate madmen who wish for nothing so ardently as the destruction of their fellow countrymen? That would be exceptional indeed.

Auto May Shun in Car Nations.

2012-08-30T12:27:00.001-07:00

In a new entry at his blog, gregor.us, Gregor MacDonald dares to bring up an unmentioned reality in his post entitled, "The Demise of the Car".

As hordes of cyclists take over San Francisco and other city's streets, entire economies collapse, the earth's atmosphere undergoes radical change, millions of people get slaughtered, and billions in property damage, eco-system destruction, neighborhood deterioration and demise spreads to country after country, the single most relevant cause of all this chaos, the automobile, is blithely ignored.

Instead a pervasive silence is maintained as all criticism of this monstrosity is muted and any suggestion that maybe the car isn't the solution, but is instead, in a $95/bbl world, the problem, is repressed. Not a word is uttered as the US presidential election cycle enters its last lap, as the social and political implications for the new reality that huge swaths of the population will be left stranded in suburbs with no mean of conveyance gets absolutely no attention: zilch, da nada.

But the truth is, no matter how you feel about global warming, whether it's anthropogenic, simply not occurring, tomorrow's problem, it is not the reason for the fact that The USA can't continue this way. It is instead, economic. The economics of the US, as it's been altered to serve as little more than a conduit of cash into the surfeit of savings called the fortunes of the rich and infamous, can no longer follow the paradigm of the past.

Simply taking the cost of healthcare insurance, at $12,000 a year per person, highlights the problem of a continued automoted existence. As a larger and larger portion of pre-taxed earnings goes, not to 401's or mortgage payments, but to insurance that in more and more cases, pays nothing until after the payers have ponied up $5,000, and offers no choice, no matter how much the Republicans foam at the mouth about "freedom" (remember this has nothing to do with the ACA or President Obama: it's a dynamic that's been in place long before his presidency), the percentage of people's incomes left for discretionary purchases shrinks more and more each year.

Wages are not stagnant, they are decreasing in all the OECD countries, even as fuel prices escalate, food prices rise inexorably, and transportation costs, infrastructure maintenance, to get the fuel and the deluge of imported autos onto our shores in the first place, in order to sell them, make the Car once again the province of the rich.

This changes the role of the auto from an economic boon to a parasitic leech on economic growth. Far from helping the economy grow, dependence on it becomes like health insurance: counted in GDP figures as reflective of growth in the economy, when in fact it is subtractive from it. Having the entire population reduced to slaves of their machines, somehow surprisingly, doesn't increase their wealth, any more than having a chronic infection increases their health; it decrease it: it is a cost of living that drains the vitality out of every other aspect of the economy the way disease drains health from a human being.

But this will not be talked about, although it is THE most important fact we need to realize if we want to even begin to solve our many intractable problems. Although it is only a machine, its hold on the public's mind is so great, its attractiveness so bewitching, that no amount of suffering, environmental degradation, hunger, poverty, or broken bodies will change their attitude.

So while I hail Mr. Macdonald for saying the unspeakable, he is quite wrong. We will watch everything else be destroyed right in front of our eyes, but will never, ever, even conceive of the possibility that the Car can have anything but positive effect on human happiness and prosperity. Like hapless parents the world over, we will spend our entire lives devoted to the care of what is (supposedly) most precious, only to blithely throw them the keys and watch the fruit of all our labor drive away to join in the carnage.

Retributive Justice and its Disconnects.

2012-08-28T15:52:00.003-07:00

In Stendahl's "The Charterhouse of Parma", the Duchessa is warning her Prince about involving another kingdom in solving an internal dispute. She pulls from the shelves a volume of Fontaine's fables and opens it to "The Gardener and the Lord of the Manor".

In the fable, a hare is proving an intractable pest, so the gardener goes to the lord for help, which he rendered, much to the gardener's distress:

They mounted their steeds for the storming the garden :
Tho' much he begrudged them this wasteful carousal,
At least the conclusion he hop'd some reward in.

They leveled the hedge which surrounded the place,
And in dash'd at once all the pomp of the chase.

But now 'twas his fate to contemplate with pain

The horses' hoofs tearing each bed and each border ;
The work of a twelvemonth was labour in vain —
Here herbs, flow'rs, and frames lie in fatal disorder !

O'er the wreck of his hopes his eyes mournfully pass.
And he views in despair the sad fragments of glass !

" I find," said poor Jacques, " I was strangely mistaken.
" The hare to be sure— these kind sportsmen have caught
" her,
" But they've drank up my wine, ate my fowls and my
" bacon,
" Destroy 'd all my garden, and tousled my daughter !
" Thro' the year should ten hares all my pot-herbs devour,
" They will do me less harm than my friends in an
" hour!"

This was the same dynamic we were privy to in New York as the police force demonstrated the same cluelessness in gunning down nine innocent people in trying to stop a murderer who was already done, finished, going home now.

The NYPD mowed down so many people the initial reports called it one more mass shooting by another crazed gunman. Well. It was certainly a mass shooting. And it was certainly crazed. But it wasn't by a lone gunman. The crazed part of the mayhem was all done by the police department, as they demonstrated their commitment to protect and serve.

By pouring resources into security forces, armaments, 24-hour surveillance and total disregard for privacy or citizen's rights, the Police State we've created has, like the Lord of the Manor in Fontaine's fable, and the NYPD, trampled underfoot the very thing it was engaged to protect.

But unlike the Gardener, we won't have learned our lesson, because we've don't know what's been destroyed, despite the fact that we've just had so clearly demonstrated to us the fact that those 9 injured people were never in danger from that gunman. Every one of the gunmen who shot them, however, are back on the streets ready to protect and serve them again tomorrow. Never fear.

Thanatron Man: The Dr. Kevorkianesque Presidential Campaign

2012-08-23T17:09:00.001-07:00

In my Nov 13, 2008 post: http://lewterrorboy.blogspot.com/2008/11/yes-there-is-theythey-ar-e-rich-and.html, I quoted Frederick Townsend Martin, a self-styled aristobrat:

"We are not politicians or pubic thinkers; we are the rich; we own America; we got it, God knows how, but we intend to keep it if we can by throwing all the tremendous weight of our support, our influence, our money, our political connections, our purchased senators, our hungry congressmen, our public-speaking demagogues into the scale against any legislature, any political platform, any presidential campaign that threatens the integrity of our estate."

We have seen this proven to us over and over again, and accept it. We accept Palin and Sanctorum as demagogues, Ryan and Richgringo as hungry Congressmen, McCain and McConnell as purchased Senators, and shrug our collective shoulders, resigned to the fact that that's how the system works.

But to have one of them, in the person of Willard M. Romney, WMR (Weapon of Mass Reductions-in-force), actually run for the presidency on the strength of his flair for destroying jobs while enriching himself from the salaries of those millions therefore thrown out of work, (many forever), requires a whole new level of contempt for the public that even Frederick Townsend would have been hard-pressed to conceive of.

Having made a killing with other people's money via LBO's, the WMR can remind his followers that they're mere pawns in a game that seeks to maximize profits off their backs, while making him and his dynastic family rich beyond the pale. It's as though the CEO of Anheuser-Busch showed up at an AA meeting to laugh at all the poor slobs who made him rich while they, the weakling, misfits, and losers, lost thier self-respect, their families, and their jobs.

"Vote for me, I helped make you what you are today. You'd have never hit bottom and destroyed your life nearly so thoroughly if not for my constant efforts to thrive on your weakness and passivity."

As the over-caffeinated assembly's cheers rock the room he exhorts them further:

"Your broken families, smashed cars, public puking, and hours of senseless arguing have only enriched me and mine, and for that I'm truly grateful. But we're not done yet! I can take you down to even lower levels of debasement, plunge you into even deeper bouts of melancholy and despair, wrack you with greater levels of pain and remorse than you've dared to dream of, all while assuring that none of those TEA-totalers are ever allowed to vote again.

So put me in office, and I'll put you in re-hab: that's one promise this candidate intends to keep!"

The crowd goes wild, falling over their chairs in a stampede for the chance to shake the hand of the man who can promise them ruin, but, like the anointed royalty he believes himself to be, comport himself with proper decorum to buttress their faith in a vicarious ascendancy over their self-inflicted, Corporate-enabled debauchery.

It's just People helping other people.

The Bucks Won't Clear.

2012-08-21T11:34:00.000-07:00

"Sometimes... money costs too much." IRA

(Reuters) - The crew of an Air France plane that was re-routed via Damascus on Wednesday asked passengers how much cash they could stump up after Syrian authorities refused credit card payment to refuel the aircraft, the French airline said on Thursday.

And why shouldn't they? Given the treatment of Iran that's been brought to the forefront by the Standard Chartered's Iranian deals the last few weeks, would you trust that your payment, even should Air France honor their bill, get processed before similar economic sanctions are imposed on Syria's government? With France arming the rebels against the Regime, they're lucky they didn't just shoot them down. Of course, that would be considered an act of War, whereby supplying arms to the "freedom fighters" whose numbers have been reported to include both Taliban and al-Qaeda, is merely pro-democracy.

Which brings to my mind the question of what is Cash? My bank's statement each month tells me how much I have in checking accounts, my financial statements say how much are in money market mutual funds, and they always refer to it as "cash". But is it? As the passengers on Air France learned, it's not. Cash is only what you have in the form of paper money. As the impetus for changing all transaction into electronic blips subject to the whims of a small cartel, it becomes clear that what is meant by cash, and its relation to money, is quickly changing right under our feet, like the sculptures at Sand World. We have built a beautifully intricate structure of perplexing complexity. But by using impaired collateral as the foundation upon which these sand dollars are dependent, should the winds of change blow ever so slightly, the dunes bury all.

As long as there was some relationship between the productive capacity of the economy and the dollars held by its banking system the value of money, and its interchangeability with cash, was fairly well insured. But that relationship has been systematically eroded. Changing the gold standard to one of exchange rates based on the reserve currency of the dollar, and structuring the purchase of oil such that it must be purchased with dollars changes the entire dynamic of the interchange of wealth.

Although used for centuries as currency, gold and silver were'nt of the same value not simply because gold had more luster, but also because it wasn't used as much as a commodity, whereas silver, like oil, was/is. And although oil has value only when it's burned, gold's is intrinsic, hence its disdainful moniker as a "barbaric relic". But Jairam Ramesh's coining of the term Chindia demonstrates that more than 2 billion of the world's citizens hold gold as a substance worth owning and amassing for its value, not only for its beauty, but as portable, exchangeable, wealth.

Currently here, in the US, a commercial exhorting citizens to trade in their gold for cash sponsors an enthusiastic customer gushing: "I got $1500 for my junk jewelry". But anything that not only stores value, but increases its value over time, is anything but junk. It, unlike the housing base, the productive capacity of the economy, or the extractable resource of oil, all of whose value has diminished dramatically over time, specifically, since the turn of the century when gold was valued at $275/oz, and has soared to more than $1650/oz, reflects a dramatically changing dynamic that Central Banks the world over have pretended to ignore.

The reason for this ignore-stance is that the CB's wish to retain control of the relative value (ie, exchange rate) of the world's currencies, independent of their real value vis-a-vis each other. This keeps the ascendancy of the OECD nations assured, as the rest of the world has no choice but to exchange their ringgits and bahts for dollars to purchase the engine oil for their economies. This can still be purchased with electronic "cash". But more and more the US and its vassal economies make it clear that this leaves your electronic cash hostage to the whims of the ruling elite who can stop or deter its flow because they feel your Sovereignty doesn't include the right to develop an industry they deem only they should hold the monopoly on.

So cash is trash when it can go in a flash, your teeth will gnash.when under the lash, the stash against a crash is proved to be mash.

Thus does the use of it as a weapon undermines its use as a currency, as it forces those pushed outside the system to use barter, which, by eliminating the need of banks as middlemen, reduces the (constantly escalating) cost and facility of doing business, which, since that is the only function of cash, undermines its value, even though its exchange rate can still remain the same.

A sail on a choppy current's sea: "Assault, sphere brutish, is not in our wars, but in our delves into imperialism."

Sheik's peer.

The Wizard of Ozterity

2012-08-17T09:57:00.000-07:00

Hare of the Dogged.

As the laissez-faire economics of the Republicans gets codified with the selection of Ryan, making R&R the official stance of the GOP, it leaves some wondering what the implications are of having a Prez who's stated belief (I almost said "who believes", but who knows what he actually feels about anything?), is for the government to become zombi-fied, where all those on the Federal payroll simply collect their paychecks and do nothing, as that's how government works best: By getting out of the way of the private sector, thereby allowing it to wreak whatever havoc on the economy that'll make them more prosperous while it pushes the pee-ons (trickle-down, baby) further and further into intractable debt-slavery.

But although they prefer to liken themselves to that ebullient, great communicator, Ronald Reagan, the self-styled economic miracle dubbed by the Maestro as "The Great Moderation", occurred, not during RR's tenure in the White house, but during GW's. That was when the real RailRoading of the economy came into full bloom.

So then, what was moderated? At the beginning of the Bush presidency, by using his own numbers, I calculated that the National Debt (as opposed to the annual budget deficit) would approximately double such that should he serve 2 terms, it would grow to equal the GDP by the time he left office, and I was damn close to being accurate. It grew from under $5trillion to close to $10trillion. However, the really important dynamic was the rate of growth of those annual deficits vis-a-vis the growth of the GDP, and this legacy, which still remains, had the unstoppable force of a juggernaut.

From 2001 through 2008, an economy, described by GW himself, as robust and resilient when he took office, stagnated and finally crashed to the ground, very nearly bringing the entire global financial system with it. That was a direct result of the "small government" policies of the GOP, premised on the concepts of individual accountability, less government (accountability, as the motto of the day became plausible deniability), and the owning of property, as well as, internationally, full spectrum domination. The deficit, as percentage of GDP, consequently mushroomed from around 1.5% to close to 7%: close to a 5-fold blossoming of debt so astounding, that a Central Banker referring to such a period as "Moderation", great or otherwise, was nothing short of breath-taking..

This rate of debt growth was so alarming, that as early as 2003, 450 economists, including ten Nobel Prize laureates, signed the Economists' statement opposing the Bush tax cuts, sent to President Bush stating that "these tax cuts will worsen the long-term budget outlook... will reduce the capacity of the government to finance Social Security and Medicare benefits as well as investments in schools, health, infrastructure, and basic research... [and] generate further inequalities in after-tax income."

Hello!? That was the plan, so where's the problem? This is exactly what Grover Norquisling had already stated was the GOP's agenda, and still is the GOP's agenda. So the R&R R&R are inviting us to vote for is a return to the policies that very nearly destroyed our entire world. Instead of offering any solutions or ideas, the TEA bag component of the party being very decidely against anything so radical as thought, they offer something they already know will work: drinks on the house.

Like a drunk after one of his sprees, with a really frightful hangover that keeps him all day long with hair unkempt, mouth tasting sour, jaw out of joint, their whole ambition is just to get out of bed late, crawl to the mirror and groan at the sight of the wreck they've made of things, then drag through the day so that, unable to make up their minds whether or not to do any work, by the time they do, the day is lost. This throws their disposition so out of kilter it attracts a lot of lazy bums who won't let go of one's elbow, so you get to tippling in spite of yourself, haunting all sorts of dives, and wind up getting pinched. Then end up pawning your new shoes to get back on your feet.

But instead of calling ourselves stupid for drinking like that, for letting ourselves get so blindly intoxicated on our own home-brew, the GOP solution is to go on another binge. What do you expect? They don't know what they're doing. You can't get mad at them, it wouldn't help a bit. You know how it is when men get drunk They could kill their own father and mother, invade a country or two, and not remember a thing about it. Frat boys gone wild. Who can blame them for a little irrational exuberance?

So while Ryan's plan of physical fitness allows him to boast of a robust buffness, the one for fiscal fitness is simply re-hashed rhetoric. The return of Nibelung economics with the immortal, dynastic rich ensconced in their Valhalla besotted with their own grandeur while Gotterdammerung's flames, that were dampened with ashes thrown on them during the GOP hiatus, will be allowed to flame up once again burning everything they lick into a cinder. Oh well. If that's the price it costs to have a Free Market, Free Enterprise, cascades of cash as Free Speech, then by all means, let freedumb wring.

Spellbound Speaking Truth to Power.

2012-08-16T11:09:00.000-07:00

There it was again, a listing of "save the planet" items, that included "Speak truth to Power" . But what does that mean? Exactly who in power does the author think is unfamiliar with how it works? Those who suggest doing so will somehow solve the world's problems are, methinks, somewhat deluded.

In Hitchcock's "Spellbound", starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck, along with Leo G. Carrol, with some great artwork in the dream sequences by Salvador Dali, Ingrid's character "Speaks truth to power". She reveals that she has discovered the fact that the murderer she's been searching for in order to vindicate her boyfriend/patient, Gregory Peck, on trial for the murder, is none other than her boss, played by Leo G.

She explains to him, steno pad and pencil in hand, the rather brilliant path she's used to come up with her conclusion, at the end of which she looks up, only to see him pointing a pistol, which he's pulled from his desk drawer, at her head, as he suavely intones, "And exactly what did you suppose I was going to do with this information? Say well done? Bravo! for your exceptional sleuthing ability"?

She explains to him that he is not going to shoot her. Shooting her would only point at him and complicate an already intractable situation, she tells him, as she slowly edges to the door, opens it, and leaves him alone. As the door closes, we're treated to a view of the gun as it changes direction and points at Leo G, and then we hear the sound as the pistol fires and Leo G shoots himself instead of her.

But life is not the movies. Power is not going to turn the gun on itself (except unintentionally, or at least unpredictably, in a maneuver called War, but that's another topic), but is instead going to go after, and silence - usually by destroying - you.

Like Ingrid, we're besotted by our naive belief in justice and democracy, and as it slowly dawns on us how reality really works, we are so mesmerized by our own prowess at pulling back the veil and seeing the men behind the curtain, that we become excited by our virtuosity and wish to "Speak Truth to power", to let it know that we know, as though that'll set everything straight and the chastised rich will bow to the dictates of the law once more.

However, like the title in "Spellbound", there's nuance and subtlety missed by the casual observer. In the movie, Gregory Peck is transfixed whenever he sees tracks, such as those left by skis in snow, and its Ingrid's job to discover why. Because of this, the audience is led to assume that the title refers to his underlying psychosis, which of course, it partially does. But its other meaning is more subtle and delicious. It suggests that the same self-induced blindness that inhibits Peck from seeing the truth that feeds his psychosis, also keeps Ingrid, who's his psychiatrist, from seeing her vain need to unfold her discovery to the one person who will most appreciate her cleverness. So despite the fact that he's also the one most endangered by it, and has already proven himself quite capable of eliminating inconvenient people, she remains undeterred by the obvious peril revealing her findings will put her in. Instead, as though bound by a spell, she can't stop herself from putting her life in danger for the thrill that exposing him right to his face will give her.

We are just as Spellbound when we believe that speaking truth to power will illuminate anything for them. All it does is prove that we're not cut from the same cloth as the duped hoi polloi on whom their new-speak and mass propaganda works. But our showing this changes nothing. Try as we might, and hard as it is to swallow, the hoi polloi cares nothing for the truth. To paraphrase from another film, they "can't handle the truth", don't want to know it, as it confers responsibility for the machinations of the economic system and political corruption onto them. They therefore prefer decidedly not to know.

This leaves us, like Ingrid, with no one to go to when we are bursting with the excitement of discovery, who can really appreciate the virtuosity of our minds, the subtlety of our perceptions, or the finesse we've used to bring transparency to a deliberately opaque mystery.

So please, congrats on whatever nugget of truth you've managed to sift out of the constantly flowing stream of disinformation with which we are continually deluged. But don't inveigle me with such simple-minded rostrums and self-serving maxims that do nothing but re-enforce the fantasy that if we could only show what's wrong with "the System", everybody could just patch it up and all will be hunky dory. It won't be.

Commsumerism

2012-08-15T09:34:00.000-07:00

Star Wars and Air Strikes forever: All We Love is War.

2012-08-14T10:44:00.000-07:00

All We Love is War.

(War, war, war)
(War, war, war)
(War, war, war)

There's nothing that's your due that can't be won
Nothing you can sting that can't be stung
One thing you can say so you can learn to allay the shame:
It's freeeeeedom!

There's nothing you can fake that can't be played
No one that you crave who's not enslaved
Nothing you can do but you eschew that for you it's crime:
It's freeeeeedom!

All we love is war (Wa wa wa-wa-wa)
All we love is war (Wa wa wa-wa-wa)
All we love is war, war
War is all we love

(War, war, war)
(War, war, war)
(War, war, war)

All we love is war (Wa wa wa-wa-wa)
All we love is war (Wa wa wa-wa-wa)
All we love is war, war
War is all we love.

There's nothing you can sow that isn't sown
Nothing you can seed that isn't cloned
There's nowhere you can flee once you've been tagged an Enemy
It's freeeeeedom!

All we love is war (Wa wa wa-wa-wa)
All we love is war (Wa wa wa-wa-wa)
All we love is war, war
War is all we love.

All we love is war; bomb your neighbor now
All we love is war, incendiary
All we love is war, war

War is all we love (Wa wa wa-wa-wa)
War is all we love (Wa wa wa-wa-wa)
War is all we love
War is all we've loved.

We Are the World.

2012-05-01T14:44:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, May 1, 2012
According to http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/04/armada-masses-near-iran/: "The U.S. Air Force is quietly assembling the world’s most powerful air-to-air fighting team at bases near Iran. Stealthy F-22 Raptors on their first front-line deployment have joined a potent mix of active-duty and Air National Guard F-15 Eagles, including some fitted with the latest advanced radars. The Raptor-Eagle team has been honing special tactics for clearing the air of Iranian fighters in the event of war."

They go on: The fighters join a growing naval armada that includes Navy carriers, submarines, cruisers and destroyers plus patrol boats and minesweepers enhanced with the latest close-in weaponry..

Paragraph after paragraph of hubris-tic and over-testosteroned hype and salivating adoration for the daunting array of warplanes and the pilots that fly them, is then all wrapped up with a hypocritical, "Let's hope they won't be needed".

But, as per Madeleine Albright's war-mongering quip, "What good's all this military might if we can't use it?", we no longer care whether the hyper-armed military force representing the epitome of technology, democracy, and capitalism are the agents of a promising future, nor do we bother to hold it responsible for the unspeakably malevolent outcomes of its past debaucheries; neither do we give the slightest consideration to the fact that the development of the most heinous of our armamentaria were produced under the mask of subterfuge, entirely ripped away, that the Soviets were developing them too.

Which was pure rubbish. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, it has become increasingly manifest, and therefore assiduously ignored, that the manufactured chimera of a Soviet threat, was not a goad, but a deterrent, to full-blown Imperial Dominance of the US over every quasi-nation on the planet. (Technically, there are no other nations, for what is a nation without Sovereignty?).

The fully-exposed lie laid bare for all to see, is that the US Military's ascendancy has not merely continued unabated. It has accelerated to such a degree that the constant economic Keynesian stimulus that it unabatedly delivers to the exhausted machinery of international dollar hegemony has destroyed any hope that economic recovery is possible under the present Central Bank regime.

"Let's hope they won't be needed" is merely the current phrase du jour to pretend the unrest isn't stoked and underpinned by the Military's mirror image, the increasingly mindless intelligence of the Secrecy Services: The CIA, DIA, NSA, TSA, DHS, and other agencies so secret that, here, in our Open Society, we've never even heard of them.

Yet all the secrecy is completely unnecessary. For it is to keep knowledge of the machinations of our Democracy, not from our enemies, but from our own citizens that this secrecy is maintained. Whether the bombing of Cambodia, the Iran-Contra deals, or the WMD lies perpetrated to the UN, it is the American people who the secrecy is maintained to fool; everyone else already knows. And this latest war-mongering is no different.

It is only the US citizens who are so ignorant so as not to apply the very rules by which they judge others to themselves. Because, just as we had been at war with Iraq all through the Clinton administration, flying sorties over the sovereign airspace of Iraq to maintain a no-fly zone, (which per Secretary of defense, Robert Gates, as enunciated during the run-up to the Libyan invasion, IS an act of War) without anyone really knowing it, so now, the current amassing of this military armada in the neighborhood of a State which we have made no secret of itching to attack for decades, means, using the logic and justification of pre-emptive strike ideology, we are already at War with Iran. It's just that, once again, we simply don't know it, as Iran has yet to make a violent response to any of several US provocations.

Because US citizens just refuse to wake up to the fact that they are always and everywhere at War with everyone. It is called Full Spectrum Domination, or waging war to maintain the peace, and per Sheldon Wolin's "Democracy, Inc", in the Post-Soviet milieu of inverted totalitarianism, it matters not who or what Party is ensconced in the White-wash House. The machinery of a technology-besotted, militarized fascism are already installed. It matters not whose at the helm.

It is now always simply a matter of when, and against whom, the process of extermination is to begin anew. We still call it "War" only to put a gloss of humanism and a veneer of purpose, other than our own aggrandizement, onto it. There is no such thing, since the development and use of the atomic bomb as a US War. There is only a policy of extermination of whichever people we have deemed to be our current enemy.

Slave Nation: "Corporations are People, too, my friend".

2012-04-24T09:25:00.000-07:00

It's being bandied about that Fox Views is acting horrified that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi wants to amend the Constitution. However, there is no reason to amendment the constitution, Ms. Pelosi.

When Mitt Romney says, "Corporations are people, too, my friend", he's admitting that, while at Bain Capital, he bought and sold other people (corporations are people) as though they were property. However, the 13'th amendment to the US Constitution specifically states that "causing or threatening to cause financial harm to any person—i.e., "using financial control over a person" is against the law (which an LBO does; it is a leveraged buyout, the buying of someone against their will, by coercion).

By proclaiming that Corporations are people, we are Constitutionally forbidden from buying and selling them as though they were chattel, thereby rendering every Stock Market transaction illegal.

We don't need a constitutional amendment; we need an Abolition Movement to halt the buying and selling of people, my friend.

In "Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Sparked the American Revolution", Alfred and Ruth Blumrosen document how in 1771 the American master of James Somerset, a negro slave, attempted to send him out of England to be sold. Abolitionists pleaded on his behalf, and, in a famous judgment on 22 June 1772, Judge Mansfield declared that slavery was odious and unknown to common law. Somerset was given his freedom.

The logic of this was not lost on Plantation owners of the South who knew that the independence of their Colonial Rule was granted under the stipulation that "No Colonial government may pass a law repugnant to the English Constitution", which, it was now undeniably apparent, slavery most certainly was.

The Blumrosens argue, rather convincingly, that it was this judgement that was the genesis of the First American Civil War, now referred to as the American Revolution.

When the apparent nominee for the Top Executive position in these United States glibly champions the buying and selling of people, my friend, it sends an undeniable challenge to all Freedom Lovers and Defenders of Liberty to free all those enslaved persons by enforcing Constitutional Law and bringing a halt to the buying and selling of people so flagrantly conducted in that last bastion of the Slaveholders: Wall St.

We shall not go Barack to the future.

Mr. Obama: TEAR DOWN THIS WALL ST.!

Making the World Strafe for Democracy.

2011-09-12T12:49:00.000-07:00

The Tarot's "Exploding Tower".

While riding in a ferris wheel, Harry Lime tells Rolo Martins about how lucrative and creatively stimulating War is in Orson Welles' "The Third Man", thus perfectly summarizing the future trajectory of the US War Machine.

While the nation wrapped itself in a mourning shroud and oozed self-pity, that extreme unction, it prefers to ignore the fact that the snail-like War Machine has been used to slime its way into involving the Nation in perpetual Nobel Peace Prize Wars.

Published today in the Guardian, in an interview on 9/11/2011, Jimmy Carter stated : 'We never dropped a bomb. We never fired a bullet. We never went to war'. How Rolo, and soooo not for the US. Instead, we put Harry Lime into office in the person of Ronald MacDonald Reagan, to declare "It's morning in America" and commence with fulfilling his Imperial ambition of making the world a secure place for the US Air Force to Strafe for Democracy..

And so began the build-up of unsustainable and unpayable Federal debt, the beginning of the undermining of Social Security and handing over the keys to the Nation's treasures to a handful of plutocrats, the end of any resemblance of truth by replacing it with an Orwellian Newspeak that would cynically alter any press release, political platform or Federal program into doing the opposite of what it was purportedly created to do.

This was a well-tested formula we learned by heart from those we declared to be our enemies: the Nazis and the USSR. As stated in the final novel, "The Return of Lanny Budd", of Upton Sinclair's towering achievement, his "World's End" series, Lanny Budd observes "the curious Soviet practice of telling the most bare-faced and obvious lies and maintaining them in spite of any facts offered in rebuttal. Was it an assertion of their ego, that truth was whatever they chose to make it? Was it a consequence of their denial of the existence of any moral law? Or was it just an expression of their contempt for their opponents? They would tell you a lie and then laugh in your face - not because they thought you believed it, but because you were foolish enough not to understand that they were superior to both the truth and you. Because you were foolish enough to believe that there was actually any such thing as truth in the world! Because you were inferiors, doomed to early extinction , and it didn't matter in the least what you believed about anything! That was really the way they felt, and lying to you was part of the process of your extermination. They, the new Master Class, the future possessors and rulers of the world, yielded to nothing - not even the truth!" (p383)

That this is the entire Karl Rove, GW, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Palin/Bachman/Perry Republican party strategy cum attitude has become increasingly, blatantly, unabashedly demonstrated again and again, yet the oh-so complicit Democrats remain silent time after time.

That's how we ended up with an administration that declared a War on Terror after we were bombed during the Iraq War. A Bush War that was transpiring all during the Clinton Years, and, although it was barely reported on in the US press, was still in full swing during the first year of the Bush fils regime. Because instating and maintaining a no-fly zone over Iraq for more than a decade is an act of War. A fact admitted to, not only by our closest allies, but by our own State Department, as they made evident while debating whether or not to institute a no-fly zone over Libya. This fact is also maintained by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates (Bush's Pentagon Chief!) who calls the imposition of a no-fly zone an “act of war”.

Why language means something, and why the above facts are important, it needs to be recalled that the reason for the second land invasion in the Iraq War was not only to search for WMD we knew not to be there, but because the Bush/Cheney Axis claimed that Saddam had a hand in the attack perpetrated on the US mainland on 9/11/2001.

Whether we believed such propaganda is not what's important here. The administration professed to believe it. And the Master Class feels so safely ensconced in the cocoon of their lies, so sure that they are superior to both the truth and you, that Cheney restates this not only in his book, but in interviews given since its publication. That means that the Bush administration's stated belief is that the attack perpetrated on the US mainland on 9/11 was an act of War by a sovereign entity with which we were already at War, and not a terrorist attack. But, as demonstrated by the ridiculous success of the media circus over the weekend, they preferred that the US citizenry saw it as an unprovoked assault, leading it into an indulgence of its puerile fantasy that said attack came unprovoked, unwarranted, and unexpected. It was none of these.

But "... lying to you is part of the process of your extermination". And believing those lies, so as to indulge a maudlin self-pity that enshrines our own magnificence, makes us a participant in those lies, and the voluntary participants in our own extermination, which, with the planned eventual elimination of Social Security and Medicare, and therefore you, proceeds apace.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/11/president-jimmy-carter-interview
http://blogcritics.org/politics/article/gates-libyan-no-fly-zone-would1/page-2/

Unmentionables.

2010-08-17T10:03:00.000-07:00

The Great Recession ....how is that different from a mild depression?

Double-dip recession.... how is that possible when we've not come out of the first dip?

Oil prices: the more the price of oil increases, the faster anthropogenic climate change accelerates. Burning oil, even hi-sulfur oil from Citgo, is, in the Northeast, being replaced by burning wood in fireplaces as the price of oil has doubled, with barely a comment, in the past year. The ensuing particulate pollution from an ancient fuel source being used by a modern-sized population is having catastrophic consequences as the soot covers snow in the Arctic drastically reducing its albedo factor. Meanwhile, coal, the next dirtiest fuel, is burned in prodigious quantities in both China and the US to generate electricity.

Peak Oil Production: if peak oil production is, as many, in fact, most economists, from Ben Bernanke and his doppelganger, Ben (Franken) Stein, to Paul Krugman, to Nouriel Roubini, it is simply not taken into any account by any economist, were not a factor in the above problems, why is it that the largest burners of fossil fuels don't burn oil in preference to coal? And not by happpenstance, but by policy preference, even as they argue about Cap and Trade?

Unemployment = 9.5%, no it = 22.5%, no it = 9.5% ... which do you believe? Which do you feel is real?

Banks made their outrageous profits only by deceiving their clients and customers and issuing "products" they then sold to suckers. This is called hucksterism, in a folksy milieu, fraud in a legal framework. This is all our banks have left to make profits from. This is all the government has left to collect taxes from. Do you feel recovered yet?

Recovered is also a term used in upholstery. In the present context it is that meaning that is more descriptive of our current economic recovery. Throw a TARP over it and hope that that recovery will fool people into thinking that something has essentially changed when nothing has, even though the economy is in dire need, by its own definitions that were promulgated and forced upon lesser, developing economies for decades, of restructuring, ie a SAP (Structural Adjustment Program) for the saps who believed in ever escalating property values, even as wages atrophied and the industries under-girding the economy that was supposedly supporting those valuations, was dismantled and systematically moved overseas in a matter of decades.

An economy recovered via a TARP being thrown over it has no hope of recovering in the medical sense of systemic health being restored.

I remember that when I was a wee child our family had a sand bank in the back yard. This is the concept most people have, left over from the days of the gold standard, of a bank: a Place of stored value, full and protected. The more people realize that it is neither full nor protected, and the more they realize that there is, in fact, risk involved in putting their dollars in said depositories, risk for which they are completely uncompensated for, the less they will be inclined to keep said dollars in the hands of banksters determined to take the value of their money and transfer it to that of their shareholders. Something they are, as Corporations operating under the auspices of the United States of America, required to do.

Remember, in ruling for the Ratings agencies of Moody's and STandard Poor's and Filth's, oh, I mean Filch, no, Fitch's, whatever, the third one, the Supreme Court called their rating service protected by the 1'st Amendment's free-speech clause (even though you had to pay to hear it), which means the banks can sell you any product, the insurance companies write any policy (see MBIA's claim that the insurance against Vallejo's default wasn't really insurance, or AIG's Insurance for CDO's with no capital allocated to cover losses, again entire business models completely based on Fraud, backed by the full faith and credit of the US Treasury ... YOU), so if they rated a security AAA, and you bought it, and it turned out to be junk, toxic waste, valueless, the ratings agency can not be held libel for you believing that they provided the service you paid them to.

If that's true of a mere ratings agency, a Bank, whose losses are covered by the FDIC, their gambling debts back-stopped by the Central Bank, which has access to the full vaults of the Treasury and the pockets of the Taxpayer, whereas their bondholders and investors are made whole by duplicity and chicanery, is held even less accountable. Literally, as the Accounting firms that audit them merely change the rules under whcih Bank holdings of collateral are valued. All under the auspices of those very same banks.

This will be money kept quite literally "on the sidelines", as it is pulled out of the banking sector completely and be stored in a safer place under the mattress, a rock in the backyard, in knickknacks bought specifically because they have a nook in which cash can be sequestered where it is deemed safer.

It may not in fact BE safer in any of those places. However, the one thing the banking industry has succeeded in doing is convincing the public of banking's untrustworthy nature. The one thing the free market now understands is that the banksters, by dint of the very free-market dictum they promulgate, are, the public is finally coming round to, under no rubric to return money to its depositors. That is unless there happens to be some remaining when they're through with it. Once deposited in their virtual vault, it ceases to be yours, but is from thereafter, theirs.

The cynical trickle of trickle-down economics, is beginning, but not in the way it was envisioned. It is already showing signs of turning into a torrent as billions are being pulled out of, not only mutual funds, but simultaneously from money market funds and savings accounts. It is not just paying down debt and deleveraging that we are witnessing. There is a loss of trust in our financial institutions more profound than anything I've ever witnessed, not by the underclass, who never really trusted them to begin with, but by the complacent, somnambulant middle classes who have been roughly shaken from their American dream of security to the stark reality that they are to be skewered on the altar of Free Market Economics. They are slowly waking up to the fact that they are the Isaacs to the Free Market's Abraham. Trusting children held in Bernanke's hand that has stayed their execution for the moment, but it is still poised, glistening blade in hand, ready to deliver the deathblow, as the same forces that brought Free Markets reforms to Russia, decimating that population and trimming it by the millions, delivers the same fate to the middle class of the good ole USA.

That is why, Mr. Bernanke, the head of a Corporation, a private Corporation, can by mere fiat, declare the value of your money worthless, the risk of your losing it negligible and pay you zero, da nada, zilch, while paying his wholly-owned subsidiaries, the Federal Reserve Banks (again, private institutions beholden to no one but their shareholders), a premium by giving them dollars for nothing which they can then use to buy Treasuries, effectively taking money from the public to shovel it by the boatload into the vaults of banks to pay for the bad loans they reaped enormous bonuses to make, but for which they'll never be paid back.

Those loans, even after the dog-and-pony-show of the Obama stress tests, are worth far less than what the institutions claim they are worth. To such an extent that the whole process is called extend and pretend. Again, we come up to that word that encompasses so much of the westerner's mindset. Fraud. That is all extend and pretend is a catchy phrase for: Bank Fraud. On a global, international scale. And not just fraud in the parlor sense of the word, FRAUD in all caps, not only running throughout the system but, more accurately, running the system. The fumes of fraud, by the pronouncement of bankrupt Central Bankers and insolvent Governments worldwide, including the IMF and The World Bank, is all that 's keeping the globalized financial system from undergoing a shuddering cataclysmic collapse.

"Consumer protection", whether presided over by Ms Warren, or Ralph Nader, is something forced down the throats of Corporations, not because they're big bad she-devils, but because that's what their charter demands of them. If a product, such as tobacco, kills your customers, kills those in the vicinity of your customers, including their children, degrades the soil in which it's grown, costs the State billions upon billions in healthcare costs, and costs other industries, oftentimes right across the street, an additional billions of dollars in lost productivity and health-related costs, that, legally, is not your problem. Your shareholders are richer. And that's a plus, because in the taxes collected, the government is richer (or used to be), so the only entity capable of stopping your killing spree is profiting from it along with you.

Shumpeter trumpeted that the soul of Capitalism is Creative destruction. "Creative" is an adjective, a modifier. The essential sense is therefore that Capitalism = destruction. First of nature, then of societies, as in its latter phases it cannibalizes what has been previously wrought.

But, as any scientist knows, each conversion loses energy in the conversion to heat. Capitalism depends on a store of wealth that it can vulturize. Upon the "discovery" of the Americas, it had an entire two continents to feed upon and suck the value out of. The product, in terms of energy, most amenable to extraction and utilization to energize the business environment was, of course, gold, and then silver. Once that was sucked dry, the next target was, naturally, soil, which went hand-in-hand with slavery, and then it was is oil.

The rate of extraction of oil was so great, however, that, as predicted by M. King Hubbert, it reached its peak barely 100 years after it's discovery, necessitating a revamping of the entire economy to accommodate such a seismic shift. That was the entire nature of the so-called Reagan Revolution. To rejigger the economy to enable it to extract the value built into it over a generation, that had been meant to serve a larger portion of the economic pie to a larger swath of the population, and instead slowly suck that investment away from the public whose toil paid for it into the hands of a few oligarchs, the upper class, who , since they were the Owners, could be better entrusted with it.

Part and parcel of this plan was ultimate destruction of the Soviet Union. The access to its enormous oil reserves, with the arrival of Peak Oil in the US, could no longer be foregone. Detente was for the sissified Left. In a race against time during which the huge sucking sound was not just the jobs being moved to third world economies that Ross Perot warned about, but the sucking of the insatiable thirst for oil in the US that must be satisfied. And the place to get those reserves was in Central Asia. And the behemoth that stood astride that particular piece of geography was the USSR.

That Russia is now the Number One oil producer in the world, replacing the US, which was the Number One oil producer in the world when Nixon started detente with the USSR, is not an accident.

Obama, like his predecessor, insists that we must wage constant War to maintain the peace. What he's really saying, is that since unrestrained Capitalism = Destruction, and the most efficient engine of destruction = War. Capitalism = Constant War.

To further prove this thesis, merely go back to the definition of entropy, the basic law under which the entire universe must bend. It claims that all matter and energy tend from a state of higher concentration to one of chaos. So an economic system that dictates that all people should tend to their own selfish needs and ignore others, pushes that tendency to chaos towards its ultimate solution: the chaos of War.

That is what the reality of America translates into. The American Dream, in its real atavistic dreams and puerile fantasies embraces and ultimately worships the nihilistic testosterone-drenched trappings of an overly-militarized Capitalist War Machine. It's baked into the cake.

That is the final unmentionable. Like the economic collapse before it, it will supposedly arrive unbidden to our shores. Who could have foreseen that turning every country inward toward jingoistic exultations of their own Superiority and contempt for International Law could result in Nation against Nation? But when citizen is turned against citizen the only thing that unites them is a common hatred of "the other". And united we will stand.Because the haves and the have-mores know all they have to do is present a common enemy and the have and know nothings will rally to their side and gladly give up everything, their life, their liberty and their pursuit of happiness, just so long as they can know they're depriving some alien of it.

The Spoils.

2010-08-10T10:23:00.000-07:00

At a time when workers' pay and benefits have stagnated, federal employees' average compensation has grown to more than double what private sector workers earn, a USA TODAY analysis finds. What the data show:

•Benefits. Federal workers received average benefits worth $41,791 in 2009. Most of this was the government's contribution to pensions. Employees contributed an additional $10,569.

•Pay. The average federal salary has grown 33% faster than inflation since 2000. USA TODAY reported in March that the federal government pays an average of 20% more than private firms for comparable occupations. The analysis did not consider differences in experience and education.

•Total compensation. Federal compensation has grown 36.9% since 2000 after adjusting for inflation, compared with 8.8% for private workers.

"The data are not useful for a direct public-private pay comparison," says self-serving Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, "the compensation gap reflects the increasingly high level of skill and education required for most federal jobs".

Speculation went through a bad period for a moment, but the rapidity of transformation, the frenzy for enjoyment, the blindness to expense that is crushing the economy is shaking out the cautious in Washington. Just like Municipalities that find themselves face to face with crushing deficits will not hear of prudence, of economy, of a calm and respectable existence, the Federal Government prefers to keep up the useless luxury and real penury of the new financial innovations whence can be derived colossal fortunes, coming into being each morning to be swallowed up at night.

Passing from adventure to adventure, the Capitol now possesses only the gilded facade of dried up capital: promissory notes consisting of a broken promise and insincere "sorry". In this period of meagerness and madness, Enron, Donald trump, Bear Stearn's, and Lehman's did not risk their future with greater rashness, nor march straighter towards every folly and every trick of finance than now does the Capitol, yet Colleen Kelley can say with a straight face that "the compensation gap reflects the increasingly high level of skill and education required for most federal jobs".

The fortunes being made that are the offspring of those federal jobs, in this "free mark-it-up" economy seem to be at their zenith. They blaze in the midst of ever-swelling homeless populations like a colossal bonfire. The appetites let loose by the Bush tax-cuts for the rich can be satisfied with the shamelessness of triumph amid the sounds of crumbling cities as fortunes are built up in six months. Washington has become a sheer orgy of gold and trophy women. Vice, coming from on high, flows through the gutters, spreads out over ornamental waters, shoots up in the fountains of the public gardens to fall down again upon the roofs in a fine, penetrating rain.

And at night, when you commute to your suburb, it seems as though the Potomac drew along with it, through the sleeping city, the refuse of the town: crumbs fallen from the tables, bows of lace left on couches, false hair forgotten in cabs, dollars that have slipped out of brassieres and jockstraps. All that brutality of desire and the immediate satisfaction of an instinct flung into the street bruised and sullied. Then, amid the feverish sleep of the apparently unskilled, uneducated workers of the private sector, and even better than during its breathless quest in broad daylight, you can feel the unsettling of the brain, the golden and voluptuous nightmare of a city madly enamored of cash and flesh.

There, the Treasury, embedded in its center, yawns like a Neo-Classical alcove, large enough to accommodate the amorous exploits with trillions of dollars. Here is fortune bloomed and insolently displayed. It spends money madly on pure folly; handfuls of bills flung out the window, the reserve emptied each evening to its last nickel, filling again every night, no one knows how, and never supplying such large sums as when Hank Paulson pretended to have lost the keys.

Only with such a backdrop can the conditions exist for a government that for more than a generation has claimed that it needs to get out of the way to let the private sector do its work, then claim that that same feckless, know-nothing institution that is sloughing off all its most sacred trusts and important responsibilities onto the private sector, justify its dazzling salaries by stating that that same private sector is poorly educated and is sorely lacking in skills.

If consistency is indeed the hobgoblins of little minds, Colleen Kelley must need a crane to carry hers.

Wordplay

2010-07-30T08:52:00.000-07:00

S.E.C. Charges Wyly Brothers With $550 Million Fraud ... Wyly brothers....would you invest with them? Plus they're from Texas, the largest criminal enterprise in the country. Like expecting to get balanced views from someone who calls themselves Fox News.

Would you entrust Madoff with your money?

If, as Einstein said, "Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe", where do you suppose the twerp that imposes ZIRP on the economy is trying to lead us? Zero interest rate policy = zero compound interest = zero growth.

Military-Industrial complex. Since we've systematically taken out the industrial, what it leaves us with is not complex; it's simple, it's The Military.

Market bull while a China shops: Let the arrogant behemoth snort and thrash itself to exhaustion. Since the 9/11 attacks, the US government has done more to destroy US democracy and the US military more to undermine US security than anything any ragtag bunch of virgin-ravager-hopefuls could have dreamed of.

Climate change: The most efficient way to slow down CO2 growth is to slow down its largest perpetrator: Cap that Trade. The elimination of the mere 5% of the global population that consumes in excess of 20% of the fossil-burning, CO2-spewing fuel heating the planet, leaves plenty for the rest of us. Most of the US's citizens haven't made that calculation. Most of the rest of the world has.

Go Ogle Google: The clamor over internet privacy and google spying on everybody is truly mind-numbing when the marching orders of the firm to its employees is right there in its name: Go Ogle.

Homeland Security: People thrown out of their homes and off their land in ever-increasing numbers have no security.

Land of the free: By far the largest prison population on the planet. By both sheer magnitude and percentage of its population.

Home of the brave: Where we conduct war in the Stealth of night against civilian targets and use Predatory, unmanned aircraft to carry out war by assassination.

Build America's Bonds: a borrower is slave to the lender. BAB'll on.

The Krugman's "Nospeak"

2010-07-27T12:44:00.001-07:00

IN this week's The Institutional Risk Analyst's article on government malfeasance, they started with a quote from "Words", an article by Anthony Judt published in the July 15, 2010 issue of The New York Review of Books. In it he states that "Rather than suffering from the onset of "newspeak," we risk the rise of "nospeak..."

In his championing of this new genre of obfuscating journalism, The Krugman has been proving himself the master ever since the onset of the financial crisis, but with this week's piece entitled, "Who Cooked the Planet?", he outdoes himself.

Here we have the loudest proponent of Central Government stimulus, all but standing on this desk and yelling More, More, More!, accusing his Washington counterparts of greed and cowardice. The reason? They, (and he singles out John McCain here for special chastising, as he's "a man willing to sacrifice his principles, and humanity’s future, for the sake of a few years added to his political career") are not taking enough action on climate change legislation.

But Krugman's just doing the same thing as the Senator he disparages. Every job created in the US economy creates an energy hog. It enables another American to trundle up to the energy trough and burn more energy, support an energy-voracious, out-of-control military machine and stoke oil companies to more hazardous areas of discovery and extraction. It is completely hypocritical to yell coward at the Congress (not that he's not right) while simultaneously yelling more stimulus.

The danger that the world will continue down its insane path to humanity's self-inflicted demise comes not from climate-change-denying fools like McCain and his idiotic presidential running mate. They're politicians. Their self-interest, corruption, hypocrisy and use of "nospeak" to assure they never get caught in a lie, by simply never actually saying anything, are all in their job description.

The Krugman, however is supposedly an economist and a journalist (although, with that clownish buffoon Ben Stein writing for the same paper and claiming the same credentials, it's hard to hold anybody to account anymore) , and the job of both those titles is to elucidate the issues for the public, not becloud them by spouting nonsense.

The answer to The Krug's question, "Who cooked the Planet?", is an undeniable, "We did". Call it "The Washington Consensus", "The End of History", "Globalization", "The American Dream", whatever you like, but you can't foist your energy-intensive, carbon-spewing, winner-take-all-and-the-rest-be-damned, capitalist model of resource extraction and capital accumulation-cum-creative destruction onto our entire earthly sphere, bringing our freedoms to them at the point of a gun, and then demurely ask "Who cooked the Planet?" It's like asking "Who Cooked Fallujah?" Gee, I wonder? Who do you think that could've been? Must've been those guys Greed and Cowardice. It sure as hell wasn't me.

Instead, by pretending to be incensed at the Congress while simultaneously demanding that the same Body stimulate the very economic model that's brought the globe to this hazardous state, and pretending that there's no connection between the two, The Krug shows himself to be just another man willing to sacrifice his principles, and humanity’s future, for the sake of a few years added to his "journalistic" career.

TGIF: Timothy Geithner is Fatuous

2010-07-23T08:03:00.000-07:00

While watching Charlie Rose interview Timothy Geithner the other night, I felt my cheek smart as Geithner gave me a resounding slap.

"The government doesn't create jobs", he told Mr. Rose.

There sits the Secretary of the Treasury, one of the plum positions in the federal bureaucracy, some would say it is the highest post in the President's cabinet, yet the holder of it doesn't consider it his job. That explains so much of what goes on in government. Like any slap in the face, it smarted, but it also left an afterglow, a tingling sensation reminiscent of pleasure as I remembered my post of 8/23/2008, entitled:

GM Drives itself off a Cliff.

In that post I reminded us of the fact that,

"On May 28, 1987, Mathias Rust took off from Helsinki, and, flying at low altitude to avoid radar detection, landed a small, single-engine plane in Moscow's Red Square.

This caused considerable embarrassment to the Politburo, and within a year the entire top echelon of the Soviet military was replaced.

On September 11, 2001, airline jets slammed into NYC's largest towering skyscrapers and into the Pentagon itself, killing thousands and wreaking havoc in not only those cities but to the airline industry and the economy as a whole. Not one government person lost their job."

But, now I see. No one lost their job because, as TG states, the government doesn't create jobs, so quite logically, no one in the federal employ is expected to perform a job function. Their positions are mere sinecures. How else to explain the Secretary's remark? His entire career has consisted of government positions, which, he can sit there and declare on national television were not jobs, which must be the truth, since, instead of falling out of his chair, the journalist Charlie Rose didn't even blink an eye.

Now doesn't that explain everything? Now there's logic to how Reagan can fire the entire staff of striking FAA employees for demanding more money, but after 9/11, GW fired nary a one for not noticing jet planes completely changing course and flying for 45 minutes, heading straight for the twin towers and the pentagon. Well, to lose one Twin Tower is unfortunate, but to lose two sounds like carelessness. For such carelessness, anyone in the private sector would be sacked and never find a job again. But now I see. As long as their keeping the chair warm, and dutifully taking their paychecks, Government sinecure-holders are safe from worry of dismissal, because, unlike a job, they have no actual responsibilities.

That's how Timothy Geithner can sit there, never having held down a job in the private sector, and even as government is the largest employer in the country, and regurgitate his Wall St. buddies' mantra that government doesn't create jobs, with one statement, making all federal, state and city employees, into little more than thieves, leaving the US in a worse state than the USSR was in. There, "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us" was the paradigm-du- jour. Here, they don't even have to pretend to work and they get not only better pay and access to union membership they get health care services, pension plans and no worries about peremptory dismissal, all by taking part of the earnings of the poor slobs who do have jobs, but who get none of those benefits. Instead they have to work at least five months of the year in order to provide those benefits to all those who don't.

No wonder everyone wants to get a federal sinecure.

No wonder China has been threatening for many months to replace the dollar as the world's reserve currency.

No wonder our largest creditor thinks American debt should be downgraded to junk.

Thanks for setting us straight Timmy. We can't wait to see how you "fix" the GSE's. But I'm sure it'll be to make sure those hard working stiffs pay even more for the housing of those who rake in more money than they can ever dream of making. Because don't forget, all those poor working stiffs, not only have to pay for all those sinecured positions, they also have to pay to guarantee their homeowner loans, and to pay for their mortgage interest deductions that they make on their over-valued homes, kept at that overpriced value by the illegal machinations of your partner at the Fed.

Just think. Between the two of you (yes just 2 of those federal sinecures, and not the highest paying, either), that's half a million bucks. And over you, Mr. Geithner, must be kept careful watch, because you're a well known tax cheat (http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/geithner-choice-for-treasury-questioned-on-his-tax-returns/).

Match Point, An American Tragedy: As the Gulf Burns

2010-04-28T11:21:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Rhys Meyer's character in Woody Allen's "Match Point" starkly illustrates one of the writer/director's own quips: "...His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy". A phrase that, not coincidentally as it turns out, is also a spot-on description of Clyde Griffiths, the sad, rather pathetic protagonist in Theodore Dreiser's novel of murky emotions and desperate greed, "An American Tragedy".

Although Wikipedia says the movie "borrows heavily" from Dreiser's novel, the more accurate phrase would be, "unabashedly lifts" the entire plot and, via some adept manipulations, modernizes it and makes it adaptable to Mr. Allen's medium of choice.

In Dreiser's novel, Clyde Griffiths is not only related to someone in the higher echelons of society, he even closely resembles his cousin, making his initial employment as a drudge unacceptable to his uncle who encouraged him in his move from Chicago to upper state New York, and employs him, as well as his own son, in his Company. That leads to Clyde's promotion to floor manager, overseeing a workforce composed almost exclusively of women, the rule being, one must not fraternize with the lovely ladies over whom you preside.

Naturally one of the delectables proves irresistible to Griffith's lonely romantic yearnings. And Rhys-Meyers is a perfect Clyde Griffiths, only Allen puts the forbidden fruit out of reach by casting her as the fiancee of his future brother-in-law. From there it's by now almost stock:

The seduction, the pregnancy, the insistence on the part of the woman to have his illegitimate baby, the phone calls, the threatened exposure, the murder, which, as commented on by the police, appeared so haphazardly planned as to make it seem like he wanted to get caught, the police's discovery of a diary kept by the murder victim of which the murderer was ignorant, the confrontation with the authorities, the investigator's confidence that our erstwhile hero is in fact our killer.

But this is not to criticize or harangue Mr. Allen for his uncredited lifting of Dreiser's character and plot, but more to marvel at his directorial handling of Jonathan. For we are confronted here not with the same person who appears in "The Children of Huang Shi", but instead with the word made flesh, as Dreiser's Clyde Griffiths appears, as if produced by alchemy, in the cool, bland exterior of Rhys-Meyers, hiding an amoral, materialist, impassioned pretender to wealth who sees nothing in the upper class personality that makes them any more deserving than himself of all the riches and luxuries they take for granted, but which will always, unless he connives to make it so, remain out of his purview.

No. For me, what caught my eye and made for a strange (stretched?) analogy, was the similarity between Mr. Allen's reaching back into the past for a vehicle on which to ride into the future. The reason I say stretched, is because it made me wonder if there wasn't an analogy there of the current Fed. By placing an "expert", in the form of Bernanke, at its head who was a student of the Great Depression, and who fancied himself capable of steering the economy as though it were a car, it was fancied he could orchestrate an economic crash, (blandly referred to as "demand destruction", in economists' parlance), in order to slow global growth (and therefore escalating oil consumption), but one from which we could emerge badly shaken, but not severely injured.

But why would he want to do that?

For that we must not only believe the DOE and United States military's Joint Forces Command's projections of future oil production, and its inability to meet projected oil demand, but also realize the utter dependency of the globalized industrial economy, not only on cheap energy, but on that cheap energy coming, in large part, from petroleum and its byproducts.

This was an alarm that was sounded by none other than Dick Cheney in the late 90's, yet not mentioned once during his 8-year tenure in the Bush White House. Because then, before it came to light that the reserves expected in the Caspian basin simply were not there in anywhere near the quantities that had been rosily predicted, Cheney believed peak oil production was something that was in a faraway future.

But by the turn of the century all that had changed. To those, such as Cheney, who had an insider's knowledge that Peak Production was rapidly approaching, it was/is tantamount that the public know nothing about it. Because if peak oil production's imminence were known to the public, it would have the same profound effect on their knowledge of the crimes of the Bush Administration, the Financial industry, and the rest of the Superclass, as the Police's discovery of the murdered woman's Diary in both "The American Tragedy" and Allen's "Match Point".

Namely it would lay bare the fact that, just as in the financial industry, where risk has been surreptitiously collectivized, and profits privatized, the risks associated with the onset of peak oil have been SUV'd onto a hoodwinked public that believes the black gold 'll flow forever, encouraging them to take on more and more debt, believing in a glorious future that will pay for it, and keeping the bank accounts of the Superclass expanding, when all along, that smug band of Oligarchs is fully aware that the party's nearing its climax and the oil-filled punch bowl's about to be taken away, leaving the hoi polloi holding a bag of empty promises and unpayable debt.

So unlike Dreiser's American Tragedy, which concludes with the long trial and execution of the murderer, Woody Allen's ending has him getting off scot-free, with someone else taking the blame for his crime. That is how the denouement of our own American Tragedy will end, with those believing that the oil would flow forever, being blamed, like those who took out subprime loans, for their own credulity, and those who blatantly lied to their face not only flaunting their riches, but, just as Wall St is doing now, patronizingly sneering at the rest of us for being stupid enough to let them. Match point and SET.

The Financier: Goldman Sacks and Pillages.

2010-04-21T09:15:00.000-07:00

The Finance Seers predict we lose.

In an article entitled, "A Backlash in Europe Has Politicians Calling for a Goldman Ban", the WSJ writes that Goldman Sacks and Pillages "is in danger of losing business with a key group of clients as a result of the fraud allegations it faces: governments in Europe and the U.S."

Reading that reminded me of something:

In Theodore Dreiser's epic tome "The Financier", he tells the story of Frank Cowperwood, a not-quite-rags to riches tale of a banker's son who deciphers the financial subtleties of Philadelphia's city Treasury in such a way as to work its mechanism to provide him, and those in government who aid and abet him, with a substantial fortune, lifting them out of a humdrum, and for some, marginal, existence, into undreamed of luxury (well, not quite undreamed of).

Dreiser explains how the city of Philadelphia allowed the Treasurer to lend quite freely from the City coffers to certain brokers and dealers that sold the City's debt, and how our hero, Cowperwood, by manipulating the market on 'change, was able to get the City's debt to sell at par, whereas before his manipulation, it could be brokered for 80% at most. This legerdemain left the Treasurer breathless and quite agog at the Wunderkind he'd unearthed. And because the Treasurer was allowed to make loans at no interest, since, for some reason, the city allowed the banks which it used as depositories to return any amounts allocated without paying interest on it, the more Frank Cowperwood could leverage the amounts loaned to him, the more money he could make, and instead of paying the City the interest, he could pay the Treasurer, say 2%, and everybody's happy with no one the wiser.

So for years Cowperwood ransacked the Treasury's funds, buying up streetcar lines, setting up dummy corporations and using wealth to create more wealth, not of course, for the Commonwealth, even though it was in fact the source of his success, but always as it ever is, to pad his own pocket and those he knew in government who were allowing his defalcations to occur.

He became more and more extended, using larger and larger loans to buy up more and more of the public's property for his own use, using the very same public's funds, until one day in 1871 the City of Chicago caught on fire, and the entire financial district was transformed overnight into a smoldering pile of ash.

Now up to this point Cowperwood's ascendancy did not go unnoticed amongst the city's denizens, but because "all of the papers were so closely identified with the political and financial powers of the city they did not dare to come out openly and say what they thought. It would not be good for Philadelphia, for local business, etc, if they were to make a row. The fair name of the City would be smirched. It was the same old story."

Because the devastation in Chicago was so complete, it resulted in a concatenating failure of insurance companies reaching as far as Philadelphia and exposing the huge risks sloughed onto the public by the profit-hungry banks and brokers ... it was a time "when all the little rats and mice were scurrying for cover because of the presence of the great, fiery-eyed public cat somewhere in the dark, and only the older and wiser rats were able to act."

However, while the Treasurer's face "was grayish-white, his lips blue", Cowperwood never lost his head; that "thing called conscience, which obsesses and rides some people to destruction did not trouble him at all. Good and Evil? Those were toys of clerics, by which they made money... Something - he could not say what - it was the only metaphysics he bothered about - was doing something for him" (as he went about doing God's work?).

Yes, in the parallel that's evident here, the citizen is now, thanks to our illustrious Supreme Court that bestows on an amoral fictitious entity the same rights but none of the responsibilities of a person, Goldman. The Goldman's that is indeed culpable of all the same crimes as Cowperwood, but will pay none of the penalties - you cannot send a Corporation to jail, which is where Frank Cowperwood ends up, as does the Treasurer, both of whom are thrown under the bus by the true reigning financial powers of the City, who walk away unscathed.

Before he passes sentence on our feckless duo, the judge addresses the Treasurer thus:

"The misapplication of public moneys has become the great crime of the age. If not promptly and firmly checked, it will ultimately destroy our institutions. When a republic becomes honeycombed with corruption its vitality is gone. It must crumble upon the first pressure.

"In my opinion, the public is much to blame for your offense and others of a similar character. Heretofore, official fraud has been regarded with too much indifference. What we need is a state of public opinion which would make the improper use of public money a thing to be execrated. It was the lack of this which made your offense possible.

"The people had confided in you the care of their money... a high and sacred trust. You should have guarded the door of the treasury against everyone who approached it improperly. Your position as the representative of a great community warranted that."

Hopefully you've noticed that those words, although in much need of today, are not being, and will not be, uttered. Instead, the head of the Central Bank is running the Fed's balance sheet the same way that Citi and other TBTF institutions ran their books: like a SIV, and doing so aided and abetted by the very Treasury that's disregarded its "high and sacred trust", and has, instead of "guarding the door against everyone who approached it improperly", has flung it open to be ransacked by fraudsters and embezzlers.

And, now that the WSJ, which was one "of the papers that were so closely identified with the political and financial powers of the Citi that they did not dare (care) to come out openly and say what they thought (knew), for years after the malfeasance that they trumpeted as American Exceptionalism so loudly during the boom, comes out to throw Cowperwood, oops, I mean Goldman's, under the train to hide their own and government's and OUR involvement in this confederacy of dunces' dance that even the Citi's Prince couldn't sit down from until the FED stopped playing the music.

Yes the FED. Because, without the backing of gold, it is only the full faith and credit of the Sovereign state of the US Government that backs our dollar. Banks are no longer the independent financial institutions that we all like to keep on pretending that they are: they are mere vassals of the Fed, completely lacking in resources until the Fed waves its magic wand and creates them. This while they crow about "free markets" and "entrepreneurship", as they work to undermine both.

City officials then, government officials on all levels now, were completely enmeshed in the financial legerdemain taking place. "The Financier" should be required reading in every high school in America. Instead we have them reading "The Great Gatsby" and "Grapes of Wrath", illustrating the perpetrators and the victims, leaving our students without a clue of the methods used by the Gatsbys of the world against the Judds. These methods are brilliantly and clearly set out in Dreiser's book, which, if read, would prevent the Superclass from using the same old tricks with no one the wiser, except the Chairman of the Fed who instead can stand in front of the citizens and claim he never saw it coming and still get re-appointed.

While everyone's playing "Monopoly", Benron Bernankie knows that the real action is the game of "Risk", namely, how to hide it so you can dupe others into taking it on unbeknown to themselves: it used to be called fraud, now it's called "financial innovation".

And by perpetrating it the agents of the federal government, agents to whom we pay generous salaries in order to keep temptation at bay, have squandered the trust of the world (but not ours: Bernanke, Summers, Geithner, Rubin ... all still in power) and you will reap the whirlwind because of their treachery, while they, as with the Goldman case, will use sleight of hand to slough the blame onto their agent, that, as in Greece, merely did their bidding, making them the richer and us the poorer.

Atlas Mugged: Playn'd Brand of EconTerrorism.

2010-04-20T08:28:00.000-07:00

In an article posted on Yves Smith's (author of "Econned") blog, "Naked Capitlism", written by Marshall Auerback, entitled: "Troubles in the Eurozone - Will the contagion affect the US?", he states that, "The President should be using his position of influence, and his considerable powers of oratory, to change public perceptions and explain why these deficits are not only necessary, but highly desirable in terms of sustaining a full employment economy."

Oh please. There is no such thing as a "full employment economy", and if there were, the Fed (and consequently Central Banks all over the globe, specifically, the ECB) has been actively promoting a monetary policy completely at odds with full employment, a policy it cogently refers to as anti-inflationary.

So what Mr. Auerback is suggesting is that the President should jettison any scruples he has and simply come out full-bore with complete lies.

What the financial crisis and its relatively benign effects on the Asian economies should be teaching the West is that industrial mass-production is now completely at odds with industrial mass employment and engenders suppressed wages via cross-border wage-arbitrage. Both India and China have huge reservoirs, (as measured in hundreds of millions) of forced-labor, poverty-stricken, homeless waifs working 12-hour days and mired in interminable hopeless poverty and life-crushing endless toil, that serve as human energy reserves. This is the New Economy the Neo-Liberal regime has fostered and - behind closed doors, as they face the specter of peak-oil production - embraces.

Public and private debt sustainability has exploded as a serious issue in advanced economies, most notably in the eurozone’s countries of Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain—but also in many larger OECD economies, including the U.S. and Japan. These issues stem primarily from a loss of competitiveness, high wage growth and labor costs which outstrip productivity, a nefarious Banker cabal, and undisciplined (to put it kindly) fiscal policies. All of which grew to staggering, unsustainable excesses during the very years the US was attacking sovereign nations in order to bring them our Friedmans (Milton, Thomas and George).

As we celebrate the 40'th anniversary of Earth Day, we should look at the sobering consequences of forcing a Capitalist society to pay for the externalities of their industries' behavior: it drives those industries off-shore where they can influence central governments better. It is no coincident that it was Nixon that "opened the door to China" the same year he instituted the first Earth Day. A dictatorship beholden to the Capitalists for its economic growth, and therefore preferring to shoot its citizens down in full view of the world to letting them think they have the least iota of voice in what "their" government does is much more in keeping with Freidman-ite economic planning than any so-called Democracy does.

So by using workers' pension savings to relocate industrial production to economies that use the power of their totalitarian regimes to suppress wages, ignore environmental degradation and their attendant costs, and consider health burdens to a coughing, asthmatic population to be the burden of the workers, we've shown that a blighted life-expectancy is more desirable than years of no-growth agricultural hard toil and poverty. The way we've seen the Atlas Mugged by Globalization is in no way accidental.

So it should be abundantly clear, from the actions of the Fed and by the Health Industry debates, that the radical Capitalism advocated by the Friedman School of economics that has driven the West for the last generation has no room in it for housing, Health-care coverage, nor education for a middle-class society. All the dynamics of the so-called innovative Neo-liberal regime are toward ensconcing a self-appointed elite class over the rest of society whilst draining the output of Labor into their own off-shore, tax-sheltered bank accounts. So that contagion he speaks of, it should be quite clear, has already occurred; but it went the other way around.

This is what Mr Auerback believes the President should indenture our children to preserving by "using his position of influence, and his considerable powers of oratory". With such claptrap is the road to war paved.

Obama Hitches a ride on Volcker's Vagon.

2010-02-03T08:36:00.000-08:00

Since I couldn't put it better myself, I thought I'd use Clive Crook's logic (yes, a financial reporter who's name's Crook ... who says there's no irony left?):

"Suppose Goldman Sachs were to comply with the Volcker rule by relinquishing its bank status (which it adopted after the crisis was upon us, with the authorities' blessing, to avail itself of the full range of assistance). When the next crisis comes round, would the Treasury be able to let Goldman fail? The Lehman experience answers the question. Lehman was not a commercial bank. If Goldman, having reverted to non-"bank" status, could not be allowed to fail, what would the Volcker rule have achieved?"

Precisely. Even as President Obama mouthed the terms of the so-called "Volcker Rule", the obvious uselessness of it, to anyone who followed the shenanigans at Treasury and the Fed during the denouement of Le Debacle could clearly see, it was nothing, did nothing, changed .... absolutely ... Nothing. As stated in the preceding paragraph, Goldman Sacks America was already a non-bank, they changed its status specifically so that they could inject taxpayer funds and put the American taxpayer and the US's Sovereign credit-rating at risk and then to underwrite the outsize bonuses and salaries that the executives at Goldman's had, yes, literally Sacked, leaving the Company without the necessary capital base to adequately cover their insatiable greed-driven speculative bets.

And now with a nod and a wink, the President stands in front of the country and purports to indemnify the system against a recurrence of the crisis by doing no more than putting us back to the situation where these sharks can again run free to maul and savage the financial system for their own aggrandizement while simultaneously debauching the very system on which their feeding frenzy depends. This is the height of cynicism, as it depends, not only on the government simply pretending it's doing something, but on the reliance on an utterly stupid electorate.

It does for the financial "industry" what stumblebum Benron Bernanke's doing over at the Fed for the housing industry: propping up a failed Ponzi scheme to re-energize profits so as to enhance federal revenues (all those bonuses are most assuredly NOT tax-deductible).

In Charles Dickens' "Martin Chuzzlewit", when called upon to paint the American Eagle and asked how he would do so, responds, "I should draw it like a bat for its short-sightedness, like a bantam for its bragging, like a magpie for its honesty, like a peacock for its vanity, like an ostrich for its putting its head in the mud and thinking nobody sees it....

....and like a phoenix for its power of springing from the ashes of its faults and vices and soaring up anew into the sky!"

But right now our Phoenix is teetering on the brink of insolvency, like so many other municipalities and States in the country, who also depended on constantly growing tax revenues from property owners who overpaid for houses they were assured would keep going up in price. Government on every level, as well as businesses, shamelessly betrayed the American people in order to pad their own pockets. This is the paradigm which Obama's desperately trying to resusitate. The only place tieing us to Volcker's Vagon will get us is Barrack to the Future.

War: The American Way of Life That's not Negotiable.

2010-02-02T06:07:00.000-08:00

The U.S. Senate has voted to raise America’s statutory debt ceiling to $14.3 trillion. The national debt now equals the GDP, and is growing at a much faster pace. This will force the Treasury to borrow more money to both service existing debt and pay for this year’s $1.3 trillion annual deficit. With Ben Bernanke confirmed for another four-year term as destroyer-in-chief of the U.S. dollar, the plan of the Maestro is apparent by looking through "The Eyes of Laura Wiemar":

Adapted From Richard Hughes, "The Fox in the Attic": (italics mine)

Consumption has always to be paid for. Their War has been very conspicuous consumption but there has been virtually no war-taxation to pay for it on the nail. Thus there was nothing really mysterious about this present exhaustion into outer space of every last cent's worth of new value as fast as it was created: this was a kind of natural, belated capital-cum-income levy - though levied now not equitably by any human governance but blindly, by the Market itself. Of this rationale however the sufferers had no inkling. They could not understand their suffering, and inexplicable suffering turns to hatred. But hatred cannot remain objectless: such hatred precipitates its own THEY, its own someone-to-be-hated. In a hell devoid of real ministering devils the damned invent them rather than accept that their only tormentors are themselves and soon these suffering people will see everywhere such devils, consciously tormenting them: Jews, Communists, Capitalists, Catholics, Cabbalists, Homosexuals - even their own elected government. Millions of horsepower of hatred have been generated, more hatred than the real situation could consume: inevitably it'll conjure its own Enemy out of thin air.

The author's writing about Germany between the Wars. This is what "The Maestro" Greedsphan (a la Pitt in England during the first American Civil War, also known as The Revolutionary War) and GW conjured up. The price would be paid, but not by taxation; and when the pound of flesh was being exacted it would be by inchoate forces few would understand or correlate with the method devised for paying for the Iraq misadventure, and would fit in nicely with the Bush mantra of "plausible deniability". Because, although "the sufferers would have no inkling" of what has befallen, the Fed and the Bush administration knew exactly what the reasons were for this inevitable exacting of the pound of flesh overdue an economy bent on consuming the products of an impoverished work force whose own consumption was kept dampened by the totalitarian grip of a Centralized Government an ocean away. This strategy went hand-in-hand with the "cakewalk" fantasy of the Iraq War. So people's reaction tended to be 'as if' they were now at war rather than 'that' they were at War: almost more appropriate to make-believe than to belief.

This same paradigm of neglecting any form of planning or reining in of consumption, but instead stoking it, will have the same dire effects on the economy that the Wars are having: wringing reality out of it by catastrophe, so that no one will have to be held accountable. This is what conservatives mean by let "Freedom" wring. As the Chinese economy, where manufacturing accounts for 40% of GDP, continues to grow at 10% per annum, ours continues to shrink, while using 4 times their energy input in terms of just oil burnt, meaning that, whereas the Chinese have a balance of productivity vs consumption, the USA has a declining ratio, wherein the percentage of energy inputs into the economy produces less and less currency-earning production, ie, leaving no means to pay for increasing energy consumption save by borrowing. No one in Congress or the Executive has said one word as to how to redress this mushrooming imbalance. It is simply not discussed, because, as both The Bush and Obama administration have declared, "The American Way of Life is not Negotiable". What that assures is that the car-driven, militarized economy, in which there are no real civilian employees, as all aspects of the economy are suborned to militarization, will not even bother pretending to disguise itself any longer: without continued and escalating levels of Military expenditure, the US economy smashes into the brick wall erected by stoking global overcapacity and continued workforce impoverishment.

The similarity to the financial meltdown can be made apparent by using an analogy to the USAIR aircraft that was forced to land in the Hudson River. Just as the pilot, using his goose down control, could've kept the geese from flying into his engines, but didn't bother, as he believed himself astute enough, and his engines powerful enough, to not have to consider such trivialities as a flock of fuckin' geese, so Bernanke, at the helm of the world's economic engine, believed its resiliency so strong, and his own stewardship so masterful, that his "subprime crisis can be contained" attitude convinced him to steer right into the turbulence.

Then, having brought the economy to its knees, without wrecking the ship and killing all the passengers, he considered himself to have "Saved the World". But it is precisely that attitude which caused us to fly blindfolded into danger in the first place, and although we've survived the calamity, we have not emerged unscathed, only he has.

And now, so sits the Military. Coyly referring to our gargantuan War Machine as "defense", we brashly drive it through barbed wire, over Sovereign States, through International Law, oblivious of any weakness, as any deviation from The American Way is simply "Not Negotiable". Then when the inevitable blowback comes, we are already prepped in the language of Hate. The They only awaits an explosion our own policies will cause, but that will have the plausible deniability we've come to love almost as much as ourselves.

AIG: Americans' Income's Gone. Now THAT's Class Warfare.

2010-01-29T10:14:00.000-08:00

Following President Obama's speech, we heard the usual Republican accusations that the President was provoking "Class Warfare". But isn't that what the USA's vile version of Capitolism is? Can't even the tunnel-visioned GOP see that the Supreme Court had just crowned The Superclass's victory with their adjudicated laurels by granting money the status of speech, the Corporations with the status of "persons", and then declaring that said persons could not be constitutionally limited in their "speech", ie spending?

The true captured nature of the Democratic Party, in not crying this blatant contradiction from the rooftops, is thus made manifest.

Meanwhile, even as the Supremes call money speech, and the near collapse of a number of financial institutions, brought about by the Superclass's reckless asset-striping, and insane leveraging and transformation of the Fed into a shill for their mantra of "housing prices never go down", resulting in the near-collapse of the entire global financial system and unrepairable damage to the reputation of the US banking system, and leaving the working class without jobs, the secrecy behind the decision to bail out AIG is allowed to fester.

Free speech is now sacrosanct for the Corporations, but the rest us have to pay for it . Just as the "Free"market, means one in which the Superclass gets to arrange the economic system so as all its profits flow to them, they decide what is free speech and what is not. And, as the revelations about the legerdemain and financial shenanigans that went into the federal government commitment of billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars into making good AIG's speculative bets on debauched financial instruments they still cynically refer to as "securities", is most decidedly what is not. To get that information is going to cost plenty.

David Reilly at BusinessWeek in an article entitled: Secret Banking Cabal Emerges From AIG Shadows, and referenced on http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/, details the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's role in what many in Congress believe was the New York Fed’s involvement in the attempt to cover up AIG buyout details and obfuscate the identities of the parties who benefited.

But we are at War. Pursuant to the Patriot Act, any citizen, or newspaper, that gives solace to the enemy, (and investigating the financial system that supports the Corporations that provide the wherewithal to support the troops and provide the armament for them to kill our "enemies", is doing exactly that), is suspect at best; treasonous, if they persist. So Corporate bribes, now considered free speech, since they grease the wheels of commerce and helped bring the system from the brink of global financial collapse, are most definitely under the rubric of "National Security", no matter how you cut it.

Get used to it. Americans' Income's Gone. And if you try to expose exactly why, you may just find out how, although physically incapable of actually being a patriot, a Corporation is much better situated to put on a Patriot act than an individual trying to do his patriotic duty and expose the malfeasance of those who can afford legions of lawyers to line up against him.

So in a sense the Repugnicans are correct. When one side has been so thoroughly routed, the War is over. And because the War's over there is no longer a Class War, so President Obama is inciting Class Warfare by rubbing salt in the wounds of the completely prostrate losers, since the Superclass has already won, and there's nothing the other side can do but utter a feeble denouncement of "no fair".