Antisense Propaganda

Why are Americans such Assholes? Part-III

2012-02-04T09:18:00.002-05:00

Some Americans have a rather an unusual definition of liberty and freedom: you are free to do what you are told.

Say you decide to visit the sunshine state of Florida, like so many Canadians every year. In fact, it is approximated that as many as 3.1-million Canadians visit the state every year. According to news sources:

Canada is Florida’s single largest international tourism market, accounting for three per cent of visitors. Americans make up 88 per cent, while other international visitors contribute nine per cent. Tourists spend more than $60 billion in the state each year.

So you would think that the locals would be very keen on making as receptive a welcome to persons from outside the state as possible. Of course, if you think this, you've never been anywhere in the American south. Consider the following news bulletin posted about a rather unstable but not unusual character assaulting a set of Canadian tourists.

Floridian sicks police on "terrorist"

"What's that, some kind of foreign licence plate? Yeah, that guy's definitely a terrorist."

That's what Joseph Tarochione thought when he spotted a set of white-and-blue Ontario plates on a car in Florida, apparently.

On January 31, the 73-year-old Homosassa, Florida man dialed police, said he was with the Department of Defense and asked them to inspect a vehicle belonging to a Canadian tourist for bombs, reports News 13.

Tarochione had used his own vehicle to force the Ontario car off the road and into the parking lot of a strip club, where he held the, um, suspects until officers arrived.

Problem is, Tarochione is not actually with the Department of Defense. And the tourists were not terrorists. Just Canadians. No bombs.

That doesn't mean firepower wasn't involved. When police searched Tarochione's car, they found a .22 Magnum handgun, a .22 long rifle revolver, a 16-gauge shotgun and ammunition.

Good thing he didn't try to use any of them during his "arrest." No one was harmed during the incident.

Tarochione was later arrested and jailed for impersonating a law enforcement officer.

This is what a decade of bogus furore and incendiary political machinations aimed at those who happen not to pray to ole' glory and pontificate on a daily basis the virtues of the American hedgemon produces. Given that only one third of Americans even own a passport, it isn't surprising that the nation is filled with xenophobes. What I find appalling about these assholes, is their use of violence against anyone they consider remotely different than themselves.

Again, it's just another example of how Americans view themselves and rest of the world.

Feasting on Ecocide!

2011-10-15T06:59:00.001-04:00

Over the past decade, countries across the world have been discussing the profound damage that has been occurring through deep-sea fishing. The Pew Environmental Group has been tracking the situation:

Since 2004, the international community, through the United Nations (U.N.) General Assembly, has called on fishing countries and regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs) to urgently act to protect deep-sea life. Beginning in 2006, U.N. resolutions that outlined a plan to safeguard this fragile biodiversity passed. Many governments supported an outright moratorium on high-seas bottom trawling, but countries operating deep-sea vessels instead promised to take action to make fisheries more sustainable and protect vulnerable marine ecosystems. Ultimately, they agreed to conduct a formal assessment after a few years to determine how well the resolutions had been implemented.

Preliminary findings released in June 2011 by the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition (DSCC), "highlight serious failures by countries and Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs) in efforts to protect vulnerable deep-sea biodiversity and high seas fish species."

Research conducted by scientists and published in the journal Marine Policy are recommending a complete halt to all deep sea fishing. Instead of permitting industrial fleets from disrupting these extremely delicate aquatic ecosystems, scientists are further recommending that fishing be confined to more productive coastal fisheries nearer to consumers.

The following summary from Eurekalert outlines the problem:

Life is mostly sparse in the oceans' cold depths, far from the sunlight that fuels photosynthesis. Food is scarce and life processes happen at a slower pace than near the sea surface. Some deep-sea fishes live more than a century; some deep-sea corals can live more than 4,000 years. When bottom trawlers rip life from the depths, animals adapted to life in deep-sea time can't repopulate on human time scales. Powerful fishing technologies are overwhelming them.

"The deep sea is the world's worst place to catch fish" says marine ecologist Dr. Elliott Norse, the study's lead author and President of the Marine Conservation Institute in Bellevue, Washington USA. "Deep-sea fishes are especially vulnerable because they can't repopulate quickly after being overfished."

The deep sea provides less than 1% of the world's seafood. But fishing there, especially bottom trawling, causes profound, lasting damage to fishes and life on the seafloor, such as deep-sea corals, these experts say.

Since the 1970s, when coastal fisheries were overexploited, commercial fishing fleets have moved further offshore and into deeper waters. Some now fish more than a mile deep.

"Because these fish grow slowly and live a long time, they can only sustain a very low rate of fishing," says author Dr. Selina Heppell, a marine fisheries ecologist at Oregon State University. "On the high seas, it is impossible to control or even monitor the amount of fishing that is occurring. The effects on local populations can be devastating."

The Washington Post has a good article discussing the topic and revealing the moral cowardice of the Europeans in reigning in their colleagues in Portugal, Spain, France, and Denmark from destroying these ecosystems.

Third world America: Highland Park, Michigan

2011-10-15T06:05:00.001-04:00

Is America the richest country in the world?

Ostensibly the claim is made that America is the greatest country in the world. A continental nation with global commercial centers, successful manufacturing sectors, a productive workforce, and over 8.4 million households with assets greater than 1-Million dollars (excluding their primary residence). According to Bloomberg News, more than 600,000 persons became millionaires in America in 2010.

However, the rest of the country has not been so lucky and many areas remain mired in debt and socio-economic decline. The state most exemplifying changes in America's fortunes has been Michigan. Due to the state's dependence on the automotive industry, Michigan never recovered from the initial dot-com recession of 2001. For the totality of the decade of the zeroes, the state shed jobs, businesses, and people. Middle class union jobs that were the backbone of the economy were slashed. The net result was depression level cut-backs in government spending at the municipal and state level. With decreased taxes, municipalities cut services; including essential services like police, fire-fighters, and ambulances.

An example of this freefall into urban dystopia is the current city of Highland Park. The small city of eleven thousand lies encapsulated by Detroit and has witnessed a population decline of 33% since 2000. Until 1995 it was the former home of Chrysler Automotives, which contributed to nearly 50% of the city's tax base at the time. The decade of the zeroes was particularly harsh to metropolitan Detroit and cities like Highland Park.

In a recent Detroit News article, DTE energy was removing street lights, of which 1,400 have already been extracted, as part of "of a settlement that allowed the city to avoid paying $4 million in unpaid bills going back several years."

Residents of the city are unhappy that basic utilities and services, such as luminating city streets and the front of business locations will not be available. The Detroit News elaborates:

"After they took the street light from in front of my business, someone climbed onto my roof and stole an air conditioning unit," said Bobby Hargrove, owner of Hargrove Machinery Sales on Oakland Avenue, who also claims a police officer asked him for money to beef up his protection. "I feel like I'm being punished — I've always paid my bills on time, but they took the street light anyway."

So this is where America stands. Broken urban landscapes bereft of basic amenities and services that people had a century ago. Welcome to third world America.

Quote of the Day: Chomsky on Resistance

2011-10-15T00:55:00.001-04:00

Actually, during this entire crisis, I thought one of the most astute comments was a two-sentence comment by Marwan Muasher. He’s a former high Jordanian official who’s head of Middle East research for the Carnegie Endowment. He said, "There’s an operative principle in the Middle East." He said, "The principle is, as long as people are quiet and passive, we’ll do whatever we like." That’s a general principle of statesmanship that applies here, too. As long as people are quiet and passive, we’ll do whatever we like. Now, of course, if they stop being quiet and passive, we’ll have to adjust somehow. Maybe they’ll even throw us out, but we’ll try to hang on as much as we can. And that’s what we see going on in the Middle East. That’s what we saw going on in Latin America. It’s what we see right here.

- Professor Noam Chomsky, speaking to Amy Goodman at DemocracyNow on the Middle East revolutions earlier in 2011.

Chart of the day: increased incidence of natural disasters

2011-10-15T00:23:00.000-04:00

(h/t The Big Picture)

The chart is provided by Re Munich and it indicates the growth of natural disasters over a period covering 1980-2011. Insurance companies have an inherent self-interest in understanding the dynamics of disruptive natural events and how those events will have an impact on their business. The data presented in the above graph is unequivocal in showing that climate change related events are rapidly increasing. The scientifically illiterate right wing, uneducated masses, and corporate naysayers affiliated with the petrochemical industry can all continue to spout rubbish, but the facts speak for themselves. Consider that earthquakes and other geophysical events have stayed constant during the 30 year period, while storms, floods, and extreme temperature events have all increased geometrically over the same period. This isn't God flushing the toilet on humanity; this is humanity self-destructing.

It appears from this graph, that we are looking at a doubling time of 15 years. Under this time scale, things will become extremely difficult for most of this planet shortly.

We have passed the point of no return. What people should learn to accept is that we as a civilization and species have collectively failed to organize ourself to rectify a problem that twenty years ago we all understood, but lacked the courage to tackle. By kicking the problem down the road and listening to the greedy or stupid, we have condemned ourselves to a world that will nominally have substantial levels of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which will disrupt agricultural production; increase droughts, fires, mass population movements, cause mass extinctions of other species; encourage conflict and warfare over resource scarcity; and eliminate possibly billions of humans.

You go girl: Elizabeth Warren redux

2011-10-14T01:02:00.003-04:00

The faux Elizabeth Warren in this satirical send-up is almost as awesome as the real deal!

(h/t Crooks and Liars)

It's obvious that those in the press and in the corridors of power will attempt to pressure her to pursue a milquetoast agenda, but given the way the economy is going and the profound disconnect between the ruling plutocrats and the citizens of the nation, it seems to me that any politician willing to challenge the status quo and expose the fraud mongering in congress will have the support of the majority of people across America.

The Democratic Party has learned that sending up another corporate stooge, like that of Massachusetts AG Martha Coakley, to fight for the seat held by liberal lions such as Edward M.Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy is a losing proposal. The Hartford Informer described Coakley's loss to Scott Brown -in the most liberal state in the United States of America- as nothing less than "one of the biggest failures of a political party and a candidate in recent history."

Coakley's campaign was by all accounts pathetic. Her arrogance in assuming that regardless of her opponents position and the national trends that the citizens of Massachusetts would elect her. Weeks prior to the election she was slumming with corporate benefactors, instead of engaging citizens and letting them know that Kennedy's legacy and liberal vision would continue in her advocacy.

On the other hand, Elizabeth Warren has shown the country that she believes in what she preaches. Her position at Harvard University in researching consumer bankruptcies and as the central figure most responsible for the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, provides a firm example of what intelligent, dedicated, and responsible liberalism can accomplish.

***
Additional posts by this blog on Elizabeth Warren are below:

Elizabeth Warren: TARP Watchdog
Elizabeth Warren: The banks are jerking us ALL!
Elizabeth Warren takes the reigns of the CFPB
Warren on how to save the Middle Class

Roubini says double-dip too!

2011-10-06T00:02:00.001-04:00

On the other hand, Paul Krugman isn't talking about double-dips, but a decade long depression.

I've got an expanded blog article titled "Recession Watch: one dip, two dips, ... we all fall down", which includes current macroeconomic data on America's descent into recession and opinions on what this all means by Krugman, Roubini, Joe Stiglitz, and Ken Rogoff.

None of this should be a surprise to those paying attention, but I suspect most people -as usual- aren't.

Quote of the day: Krugman on the coming storm

2011-10-05T23:35:00.001-04:00

The austerians have brought us to the brink of a vast disaster. A recession in Europe looks more likely than not; and the question for the United States is not whether a lost decade is possible, but whether there is any plausible way to avoid one.

- Paul Krugman, "Defeatism"

Chomsky on the Wall St. protesters, Bin Laden, & Israel

2011-10-05T20:25:00.000-04:00

In this interview with Russia Today (RT) television Noam Chomsky discusses three main topics:

The current protests occurring in New York across from Wall Street and spreading throughout the world
The legal framework and international norms associated with kidnapping, torture, and murder
The current international versus American-Israeli perspective on the emergence of a Palestinian state.

For the most part I think what Chomsky has to say is true.

Criticisms leveled by Chomsky regarding economic matters and the control of the legislative process by corporations has been shown by this recent depression to have been wholly correct. America's political system is so badly broken that not even the greedy politicians can claim that the system works for anyone other than Goldman Sachs.

***

What I found disappointing about this interview is Chomsky's rather weak argument that America is a lawless country because it assassinated Osama Bin Laden, invaded the sovereign nation of Pakistan, then dumped Bin Laden's body at sea. Unlike a great number of person on the left, Chomsky has never claimed that there were grand conspiracies at work during the 9-11 attack. What he does do is make the rather odd legalistic argument that everyone under American jurisprudence is entitled to the claim of being "innocence" until found guilty. That statement is true, but misleading. Bin Laden was never after 9-11 a conventional criminal. Rather, Bin Laden was the leader of an international organization whose purpose was to engage in terrorism that indiscriminately killed as many people as possible to draw America into a wider conflict in the Middle East. Bin Laden freely admitted and repeatedly boasted of his multiple attacks on American assets abroad and on 9-11. If we are talking about US law, under public law 107-40, the US Congress authorized the president of the United States “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” Equally, under international law the UN charter provides nation states the right to use lethal force in individual and collective self-defense.

Second, Chomsky makes the error of claiming that the assassination has inflamed Pakistan's civilian population and enraged the quasi-military rulers of the state, thus exacerbating US-Muslim tensions and further destabilizing the Middle East. What Pakistan or its illiterate masses thinks about American killing of Taliban or Al Qaeda leaders on their territory is irrelevant. Pakistan exists because the United States for decades has been propping up this little Islamic wasteland run by kleptocrats and military dunces. The country is a failed state that exists as the central exporter of international terrorism across the world. What has become completely evident after the assassination is that individuals within Pakistan and its government have been hiding and protecting Bin Laden for years. Given the overall lawlessness and criminal actions of the Pakistani state, there is little reason anyone should consider anything that this country wants as legitimate.

Chomsky further states that Obama has become even more reckless than Bush in using drone attacks on targets. The problem with this statement is that is exactly what Obama didn't do when he sent military personnel to kill Bin Laden. Today Bin Laden's family members that were hiding with him in Pakistan are alive and not dead. Something that Bin Laden's victims cannot claim.

I for one am in complete agreement with UN General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon, who said

“The death of Osama bin Laden … is a watershed moment in our common global fight against terrorism…Personally, I am very much relieved by the news that justice has been done.”

For all his faults, President Obama did the right thing and all civilized people should applaud his actions, instead of trying to score cheap rhetorical points in defending the indefensible.

Harper's stooges in full jester mode

2011-10-04T17:53:00.001-04:00

Every election politicians claim that only they can protect us the people from the vicissitudes of corruption inherent in their opponents. Invariably these same turkeys turn out to be the exact charlatans that they castigate while shaking down votes on the campaign trail. Two items last week highlighted this fact.

The first item involves Peter MacKay, Harper's current Minister of Defense. According to the Globe and Mail,

MacKay outranks almost all his cabinet colleagues when it comes to using federal government executive jets, racking up more than $2.9-million in flights on the Challenger planes in the past four years.

Senior politicians are requested to use commercial aircraft whenever possible.

Despite protestations by the Prime Minster's Office and Conservatives that the millions of dollars used by MacKay were in services of his official duties, the record tells a different story. National Defence records show that 35 flights arranged for Mr. MacKay over a period of four years ran nearly 250 hours in total. None of these trips involved Afghanistan and only ten of the trips involved international travel.

Perhaps believing that he was a senior executive of a multinational corporation that actually generated private sector jobs and wealth and thereby deserving of such benefits, civil servant MacKay was found to have also used the exclusive jets to ferry him around from his vacation destinations.

Defence Minister Peter MacKay took a Challenger jet at a cost of about $40,000 to fly out of Newfoundland two summers ago after getting a $16,000 helicopter ride from a fishing lodge to the airport.

The entitlements these politicians think they deserve for doing such a lousy job is appalling. However, the financial profligacy of Mr. MacKay is countered by John Baird in the arrogance and pettiness department.

Baird, who is now Minister of Foreign Affairs in Harper's new cabinet, was found to have requested, in violation of official policies on branding, that his business cards be in English only, embossed with gold trim, listing only his name without reference to the Lester B. Pearson building, which houses the department of foreign affairs, and no reference to Canada!

What this incident indicates is how shallow these characters in the Conservative party are. Baird didn't want his name eclipsed on his business card by the lettering of the word Canada; the same country these assholes claim to be patriots and defenders of. The removal of Pearson's name is yet another example of their contempt of Canada's rich liberal history and an indication of how little they actually care about the country they claim to represent.

Portraits of a declining empire: Wall St. edition

2011-10-04T15:58:00.000-04:00

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

- John F. Kennedy

***

Photographs of protesters during the recent occupy Wall Street movement September/October 2011 and in the last photo, a simple suggestion to the folks who created the financial crisis of 2008. (source: C.S. Monitor)

As in the case of previous protests against the corporate state, the police were brought in to reign in any wider public criticism of the elite. Police more interested in protecting the criminals who instigated the Great Recession than in supporting the constitutionally sanctioned free-speech of protesters, brought out their truncheons, pepper spray, and paddy wagons, to disrupt protests consisting of no more than a few hundred people. I briefly discussed the nature of this struggle for democracy and incipient fascism in an earlier post.

The movement, if it can even be called that, is now expanding across America and the world. News reports indicate that, "More than 100 cities have clocked in under the “Occupy” moniker." MIT professor and lawyer Nicholas Ashford states the following:

It’s not just a matter of people being “mad as hell and not taking it anymore,” he says. “It’s more crucially the dawning realization that the US economy was always built on quicksand, and that our current dismal state is not the anomaly, but the reality.”

With the global depression unfolding across the northern hemisphere (i.e. Europe, Japan, and North America) the elite -who have suppressed earlier protestation from across the political spectrum- are realizing that they no longer have the ability to hide their incompetence and perfidy. While the election of Barack Obama was meant to assuage popular discontent in 2008, his mediocre performance and constant willingness to capitulate to the interests of big business (i.e. financial industry versus main street bail-out, health care insurance, protection of the banks and oil companies, and expansion of the Afghan conflict) have alienated much of his liberal base and emboldened the unhinged statists on the right.

Violent and unsettling times await us all as the plutocrats pull up the drawbridge and attempt to prevent the restless masses from engaging in retribution to their greed and criminality.

What she just said...

2011-10-04T00:42:00.000-04:00

Occupy Wall Street protestor using something other than a manila colored pizza box to denounce the corrupt state of affairs that is now America's corporate plutocracy.

***

The topics inveighed by the left are vast and given the MSM's collusion in disseminating propaganda and controlling the public narrative on subjects of interest to the corporate state, usually very little coherent messaging makes it into the public consciousness. However, people across the world, not just in authoritarian countries, are protesting en mass to the reckless and destructive practices of our authoritarian and/or corporate overlords. Unlike the bullshit machine during the Iraq invasion where the venal and pliant press stenographed the Bush imperium's falsehoods on Iraqi mushroom clouds and fantastical weapons of mass destruction, the fruits of our economic discord are apparent for all to see. The nations of the world are sliding into a new period of stagnation and decline. Unemployment, social mobility, declining wages, and reduced prosperity are evident for all to see. While society crumbles, multinational corporations are sitting on trillions of dollars of liquid capital, financial houses are given nearly unlimited protection by the state for their incompetence, and the wealthiest beneficiaries of the past 30-years of deregulation and financialization of western economies bemoan any increase in their tax rates.

The elite are firmly aware that for them to stay in power demands that the masses are fully unaware of how dire a situation they are in. Institutional propagandists denounce the protestors as "dangerous" and predicated on mob rule. Many are asking what the objectives of the movement are about (psst... its about greedy stupid bankers and their congressional whores, motherfucker!). Daniel Indiviglio at The Atlantic is already calling the protests a waste of time, given that they are unfocused, the financial industry owns congress, and of course the big lie, that America really, really needs behemoth "to big to fail" monstrosities like Bank of America, Citibank, or Goldman Sachs, because as he states, the rest of the economy is just useless unproductive crap. To enforce the objectives of the corporate state, NY city police department was more than happy in assaulting, brutalizing, and arresting innocent civilians who exercised their first amendment rights. This is nothing new for the NYPD, which has a long record (i.e. the 2004 Republican presidential election convention) of crushing pubic dissidence and violating the civil rights of protestors.

Many people realize the system is fundamentally rigged against them and the composition of the protestors and their supporters reflects this fact:

The crowd—while represented widely in the media as white, liberal college kids—is surprisingly diverse, including raging grannies, street kids, union workers, professors, ex-bankers, longtime activists, human rights lawyers, Native American band members and ex-military. Political views span the spectrum, from anarchist to right-wing libertarian—complicating efforts toward any kind of unifying objective or mantra.

Chris Hedges, Pulitzer prize winning journalist and author, had this to say about the occupation:

The real people who are scared are the power elite. Of course, they’re trying to make you scared and us scared. But I can tell you, having been a reporter for the New York Times, that on the inside they’re very, very frightened. They do not want movements like this to grow, and they understand on some level — whether it’s subconscious or, in other cases, even overt — that the criminal class in this country has seized power.

I am not optimistic that any particular resistance to the corporate state can succeed in changing the current trends. If history is a guide, it is more likely that the people will turn on those protesting and disclosing the rampant corruption, rather than on their own imbecile leaders. As long as people remain confused, uneducated, and ignorant to the current situation, the crypto-fascists, corporate fraud-mongers, and militarists driving policy will remain in the driver's seat.

Andrew Sullivan on McGinness' Palin book

2011-09-20T18:40:00.000-04:00

Andrew Sullivan, who for the past three years has been denouncing the sustained lies and bizarre cult of Caribou Barbie has a few key words about Sarah Palin in regards to Joe McGinness' new book on her titled "The Rogue".

it remains, in my view, deeply relevant to this country's institutions that we fully investigate and understand how a delusional, unstable, ignorant, vicious unknown came to be selected by a tiny group of people with no serious vetting to be potentially one heart beat away from the presidency of the US. The magnitude of that error should make anyone who cares about this democracy worry. Palin is different - less qualified than anyone in history, shielded from press scrutiny, able to get away with constant lies and absurd stories because of a cowed press, terrified of being called "liberal."

- The Daily Dish, "Unattributed Crap"

Stiglitz on stimulating the US economy

2011-09-18T20:21:00.000-04:00

Joseph Stiglitz, professor of economics at Columbia University, former Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank, and recipient of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Award in Economic Sciences, offers some sound advice to the American political system in how to stimulate the US economy.

He points out the obvious:

First, we must dispose two myths. One is that reducing the deficit will restore the economy. You don’t create jobs and growth by firing workers and cutting spending. The reason that firms with access to capital are not investing and hiring is that there is insufficient demand for their products. Weakening demand — what austerity means — only discourages investment and hiring.

He asks, "How do we get America back to work now?"

The best way is to use this opportunity — with remarkably low long-term interest rates — to make long-term investments that America so badly needs in infrastructure, technology and education.

We should focus on investments that both yield high returns and are labor intensive. These complement private investments — they increase private returns and so simultaneously encourage the private sector.

Helping states pay for education would also quickly save thousands of jobs. It makes no sense for a rich country, which recognizes education’s importance, to be laying off teachers — especially when global competition is so fierce. Countries with a better educated labor force will do better. Moreover, education and job training are essential if we are to restructure our economy for the 21st century.

The advantage of having underinvested in the public sector for so long is that we have many high-return opportunities. The increased output in the short run and increased growth in the long run can generate more than enough tax revenues to pay the low interest on the debt. The result is that our debt will decrease, our GDP will increase and the debt to GDP ratio will improve.

He also considers the possibility of raising taxes and using that income to invest in the country to stimulate the economy.

Increasing taxes at the top, for example, and lowering taxes at the bottom will lead to more consumption spending. Increasing taxes on corporations that don’t invest in America and lowering them on those that do would encourage more investment. The multiplier — the amount GDP increases per dollar spent — for spending on foreign wars, for example, is far lower than education, so shifting money here stimulates the economy.

There are things we can do beyond the budget. The government should have some influence over the banks, particularly given the enormous debt they owe us for their rescue. Carrots and sticks can encourage more lending to small- and medium-sized businesses and to restructure more mortgages. It is inexcusable that we have done so little to help homeowners, and as long as the foreclosures continue apace, the real estate market will continue to be weak.

The banks’ anti-competitive credit card practices also essentially impose a tax on every transaction — but it is a tax with revenues that go to fill the banks’ coffers, not for any public purpose — including lowering the national debt. Stronger enforcement of antitrust laws against the banks would also be a boon to many small businesses.

Europe's inverted socialism

2011-09-18T19:08:00.001-04:00

And most Northern Europeans also seem to believe that the bailouts have gone to lazy Southern Europeans. In fact, their purpose has been to shore up the fragile Northern European financial systems. German banks are among the weakest in Europe; some of them (especially the state-owned landesbanks) are effectively bankrupt. If they were forced to mark down their Southern European debt, they might well collapse in a heap, and the European financial system could grind to a halt. Just as in the United States, the real impact of the European bailout has been to shore up the continent’s banks – not to help the continent’s debtors. The recent downgrading of two of France’s most important banks, due to their holdings of Greek debt, reminds us of how exposed Northern Europe’s financial systems remain. And rumors of a recent IMF report that European banks are over $270 billion short of the capital they need to confront their current problems served to drive the point home.

- Jeffry Frieden, "Europe's Lehman moment"

Europe's financial problems have escalated to the point where a world-wide contagion has become again possible. Economists and international leaders are sounding alarms that have rarely been spoken in unison, since the inception of the 2008 financial crisis. Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, said "We have entered into a dangerous phase of the crisis." Her words come at a point where the Greek debt crisis appears to be reaching its climax. Moody's Investors Service downgraded two of France's top banks, Societe Generale and Credit Agricole, stating that it had concerns about the two banks funding and liquidity profiles, due to their exposure to Greek debt. A recent analysis indicates that 43 large European banks hold debt in the PIIGS equivalent to 65% of the book value of those institutions. Gretchen Morgenson of the NY Times explains the current situation:

Some of these [European] banks are growing desperate for dollars. Fearing the worst, investors are pulling back, refusing to roll over the banks’ commercial paper, those short-term i.o.u.’s that are the lifeblood of commerce. Others are refusing to renew certificates of deposit. European banks need this money, in dollars, to extend loans to American companies and to pay their own debts.

As a result several central banks have mounted a coordinated effort to inject US dollars into the financial system to stimulate market confidence. The Guardian newspaper elaborates:

The Bank of England joined the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Swiss National Bank and the Bank of Japan on Thursday to announce that they would flood money markets with dollars over the coming months.

Gus Faucher, director of macroeconomics at Moody's Analytics, states "The big question is: is this enough in the short term to get us to a longer term solution? There is a potential for a really huge financial crisis in Europe. Things are bad now, but they could get a lot worse."

Many observers are looking at the current European situation and seeing similarities between Lehman Brothers demise and the 2008 crisis.

Adding to the peril is that these banks are funded primarily by short-term investors, like buyers of commercial paper, rather than by depositors, as is more often the case with American banks. This was the same problem faced by Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, which collapsed after short-term lenders fled in panic.

Economist Barry Eichengreen says that, "The euro’s survival and, indeed, that of the European Union hang in the balance." He says long term proposals on restructuring Europe's sovereign debts are not of immediate concern, rather the continent needs to act decisively in stabilizing its banks. The European Financial Stabilty Facility (EFSF) and even the IMF should be used to re-capitalize Europe's weak banks. The second move should be to give Greece sufficient room to maneuver by asking its creditors to relax its fiscal targets. Third, governments need to end this futile dalliance with austerity and proceed with stimulus projects that would create real growth. He states, "Without growth, tax revenues will remain stagnant, and the capacity to service debts will continue to erode. Social stability, similarly, depends on it."

Economist Paul Krugman at the beginning of this week had some serious words for European governments. He states, "We’re not talking about a crisis that will unfold over a year or two; this thing could come apart in a matter of days. And if it does, the whole world will suffer" Likewise, he is telling Europe to use the ECB to continue buying up Spanish and Italian debt to contain the risk of default. The moral argument for inaction or worst punishing Europe's peripheral nations and the Mediterranean nations of Spain and Italy, will drive the continent -if not the world- into another economic abyss.

The reality is Greece's debt problems have been growing and not diminishing over the past two years. The country is not in any position today or in any foreseeable future to repay the totality of its debt. Under the current regime imposed on the country, Simon Johnson a former IMF chief economist concludes that "The tax revenue needed to service [the Greek] debt would burden businesses and households for decades – enterprising and productive people will move their fortunes and their futures elsewhere in the euro area or to the United States." Throwing billions of dollars at the nation, only to prop up banks in the northern economies of Europe and hoping that the situation will be resolved at a later date, has now been shown to be an unfeasible and irresponsible position. Europe needs to first stabilize its banking sector immediately and then proceed in an orderly default of Greece's debt. An unorderly default will plunge the entire Eurozone into chaos. Spain and Italy will face unprecedented pressure, whereas the remaining nations of Portugal, Ireland, and Greece may well face economic collapse.

Texas sized Climate Change!

2011-09-17T15:11:00.001-04:00

Reports from NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, N.C. indicate that the heat waves encountered in the USA during the months of June, July, and August, represent the second warmest summer.

The press release indicates the following:

Excessive heat in six states -- Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana -- resulted in their warmest August on record. This year ranked in the top ten warmest August for five other states: Florida (3rd), Georgia (4th), Utah (5th), Wyoming (8th), and South Carolina (9th).The Southwest and South also had their warmest August on record.
Only nine of the lower 48 states experienced August temperatures near average, and no state had August average temperatures below average.
An analysis of Texas statewide tree-ring records dating back to 1550 indicates that the summer 2011 drought in Texas is matched by only one summer (1789), indicating that the summer 2011 drought appears to be unusual even in the context of the multi-century tree-ring record.
Texas had its driest summer on record, with a statewide average of 2.44 inches of rain. This is 5.29 inches below the long-term average, and 1.04 inches less than the previous driest summer in 1956. New Mexico had its second driest summer and Oklahoma its third driest summer. New Jersey and California had their wettest summers on record with 22.50 inches and 1.93 inches, respectively.
Based on NOAA's Residential Energy Demand Temperature Index, the contiguous U.S. temperature-related energy demand was 22.3 percent above average during summer. This is the largest such value during the index's period of record, which dates to 1895.

Recession Watch: one dip, two dips,... we all fall down

2011-09-17T14:26:00.003-04:00

The trend lines are undeniable; the US economy is heading into another recession. Debate between economic analysts entail whether what is occurring is an entirely new recession, a double-dip recession, or the continuation of even larger economic contraction that began initially with the 2008 financial crisis (which some would argue is an extension of the 2001 recession) and has properties that are unlike previous recessions. Each of these arguments have some validity in explaining the current situation, but all conclude that this new decline, while not likely to be as severe as the 2008 crisis, will last longer in duration and given the current political weaknesses of the major industrial nations, be more difficult to mitigate.

Leaving aside the debt crisis and economic malaise that is occurring in Europe for the moment or the possible hard landing that has been predicted about China and the entailing risks these situations pose to the global economy, America's economic position is clearly weak.

First, the jobs position is dismal. Last month, zero jobs were added and only a fraction of the jobs necessary to compensate for population growth alone have been achieved in the previous four months. The NY Times summarizes:

Over the last 50 years, every time that job growth has been as meager as it has been over the last four months, the economy has been headed toward recession, in a recession or in the immediate aftermath of one.

The collapse of job creation is not about businesses fearing regulatory uncertainty, creeping hyper-inflation, or the need for further tax-cuts to stimulate big businesses already bloated corporate coffers, but rather it is due to insufficient aggregate demand. People without jobs, people forced to take inferior paying jobs, people concerned that they may lose their jobs, people forced to subsidize their spouse, adult children, parents, and/or relatives, and people loaded with debt, aren't engaged in making major purchases, because they can't afford to. Consider the following:

But the latest indicators suggest that even if the economy does not continue to worsen, it appears to be too weak to add enough jobs each month — roughly 125,000 — even to keep pace with population growth. Anything less, and the share of the population that is employed will continue to fall.

The stimulus program offered by Mr. Obama was insufficient to meet the full demands of the financial crash of 2008. This blog has been saying for the past three years (here, here, and here) that the weak recovery was an illusion. Joseph Stiglitz said back in 2009 that, "We need a larger and better designed stimulus." Paul Krugman has been waging a public policy crusade to convince the public that a second more robust stimulus is needed. President Obama, instead of listening to these and similar minded economists, decided to split the difference and offer everyone a little of what they wanted: a little bit of tax cuts and some stimulus over a couple years. The problem was that while averting a more severe recession, it failed to create enough power to re-inflate the economy to pre-recessionary levels. Now that the stimulus dollars have been used, the economy is drifting back into negative territory and with a recalcitrant Republican dominated House of Representatives, there is virtually no chance that anything of substance being passed.

Other indicators such as GDP, consumer confidence, consumer consumption, factory employment diffusion index, and housing are all trending downwards. Volatility in the market place, with abundant talk of debt crises across the western hemisphere, has investors and business worried. Last month Asian banks cut credit lines to French banks. Central banks across Europe, Japan, and America have made the unexpected move to offer dollars to European banks to ensure liquidity.

What had been in 2008 a financial crisis has migrated into a sovereign debt crisis. Nouriel Roubini expands:

We are running out of policybullets. The policymakers don't have monetary bullets; they don't have fiscalbullets; they cannot even backstop their own financial system. That's why it'smore scary than a year ago, two years ago, or three years ago -- when we hadall these policy bullets. Now we are running out of them.

***

Ken Rogoff, Harvard professor and former chief economist at the IMF, has said, "the real problem is that the global economy is badly overleveraged, and there is no quick escape without a scheme to transfer wealth from creditors to debtors, either through defaults, financial repression, or inflation." As a result, Rogoff points out that many policy makers have badly misunderstood the overall problems associated with this second great contraction, as he puts it. He offers the suggestion that, "If governments that retain strong credit ratings are to spend scarce resources effectively, the most effective approach is to catalyze debt workouts and reductions."

Solutions to both individual and national debt problems should be addressed as follows:

For example, governments could facilitate the write-down of mortgages in exchange for a share of any future home-price appreciation. An analogous approach can be done for countries. For example, rich countries’ voters in Europe could perhaps be persuaded to engage in a much larger bailout for Greece (one that is actually big enough to work), in exchange for higher payments in ten to fifteen years if Greek growth outperforms.

Another approach offered by Rogoff to reduce the painful deleveraging process and years of unnecessary slow growth, would be for central banks to pursue a policy of moderate inflation of 4-6% for several years.

At this stage, none of the policies suggested by Stiglitz, Krugman, Roubini, or Rogoff appear on the table in either Washington DC or the capitals of Europe. Instead of sustained and ambitious solutions, we are left with blathering idiots telling us of austerity programs that will magically generate confidence, while keeping away the terrible bond vigilantes. The incompetence and stupidity of our leaders is nearly blinding.

Quote of the day: Tom Ricks on Fox News

2011-09-17T05:54:00.000-04:00

I think Fox may be the most destructive force in American society nowadays,basically pouring poison into the stream of our political discourse.

- Tom Ricks, "Fox News Scoop!"

As this blog has been discussing for years, the function of the media is not to inform, but to deform reality for the benefit of the ruling class. In this context, the nature of the news is by definition propaganda and its value, just as Pravda was during the years of the Soviet Union, is to leave the audience with a specific perspective that benefits the powerful. In the USSR it was the communist party; in the USA it is the broad swath of business interests, including the military-industrial-surveillance complex, big-pharma, big-agri, the financial industry, the energy/chemicals sector, and Health care/insurance industry. Fox News serves the interests of these people and is, as Ricks points out, a source of outright fraud that contaminates civil discourse with purposefully designed falsehoods and innuendo that plays into the biases and bigotry of their audience.

I found it interesting when Dick Cheney was vice-president, that he wanted the television in his hotel suites preset to Fox news. Did that mean that he wanted to know what the minions were watching and thus assess the adequacy of his disinformation machine personally? Or did it mean that Cheney was uninterested in hearing other perspectives of news, other than the one he and his cohorts had created? Fox News represents the convoluted intersection of corporatism and government sponsored deceit. This disinformation channel, because it wasn't interested in news but in pushing perspective, became a juggernaut in the decade of the zeroes. The conventional framework of left and right politics has broken down. As a result, no longer is the prevalent conflict between liberals and conservatives. Instead, the struggle for America has become a battle between an inverted form of totalitarianism, defined by corporatism, and the free flow of information espoused by those interested in democracy.

There are those who feel that if a person is given sufficient and credible information, they will invariably choose the most rational argument. The fact that religion, debunked political ideologies, and failed economic models persist amongst the majority of Americans, suggests that this line of thinking is false. Many people don't want to know the truth. They want to be lied to and given ridiculous and fictitious narratives that make their lives tolerable. The majority of the world want to exist under what Nietzsche described as a slave ethic. A world where they are the constant victims, where forces external to themselves are always punishing them and depriving them of their just deserves. In the minds of American conservatives, Fox News is their secular conduit to the outside world. They can justify their ignorance and prejudices through presented falsehoods and manufactured realities, while all the time marching to the beat of their corporate masters.

Posts from the moral center of hell

2011-09-16T13:04:00.000-04:00

Over the past few days a number of commentators have expressed awe at the indecency and depravity of the Republican party and its core constituents in applauding the notion that the state has no obligation to ensure the well being of it citizenry in the event of unforeseen medical catastrophe.

During a televised debate between candidates for the Republican Party presidential nominee, CNN host Wolf Blitzer asked Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), given that he was a practicing medical doctor, as to what obligation does the state have to an individual who chooses not to pay for medical insurance but falls ill. Ron initially evaded the question and gave the standard "right to choose" and "liberty" blather that economic libertarians like to preach. When Blitzer pressed on and asked if the man should be left to die, the crowd erupted in "Yeah!"

This is the party that always calls itself moral and Christian. This the party that goes around the nation demanding an end to abortion. Ron Paul himself has claimed that abortion is nothing less than murder. This is the same party that rammed through congress a bill that would have stripped Terri Schiavo's husband from deciding on her welfare, given her vegetative and unconscious existence, and making her a ward of the state. This is the same party that was shrieking over the evils of Obamacare and the horrors of death panels and socialized medicine, in the run up to the 2010 congressional midterm elections. Yet when faced with the opportunity to show some decency and Christian charity, they reverted to their true character.

Republicans aren't just an amoral political force. They are a dangerous cancer on humanity. Their war-mongering, anti-intellectual, anti-environmental, and hyper-religiosity founded on evangelical bigotry of all persons who do not share their immediate goals, has been shown to be lethal to those of us not living in Dixie.

US Poverty Rate at 15-year high

2011-09-15T13:04:00.003-04:00

Rotting from the inside out, is how I'd best describe the current circumstances.

The US census bureau came out this week with some further data that shows that the decade of the zeroes was a bust for most people. The NY Times summarizes:

With the country in its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, four million additional Americans found themselves in poverty in 2009, with the total reaching 44 million, or one in seven residents. Millions more were surviving only because of expanded unemployment insurance and other assistance.

Professor Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard, states in this second article, “This is truly a lost decade... We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we’re looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s."

Everyone was quite happy when they were making a bit more and the music played on; even if the top 1% were making multiples at the time. Now the day of reckoning has arrived and people are awakening to the real morning in America. Less opportunities, less income, more social inequality, a middle class in decline, and a federal government that is completely owned and bought for and by corporate interests. This is the rancid fruit of thirty years of Reaganomics.

The specific details provided by the article, show that the nation is in decline.

Last year, about 48 million people ages 18 to 64 did not work even one week out of the year, up from 45 million in 2009, said Trudi Renwick, a Census official.
According to the Census figures, the median annual income for a male full-time, year-round worker in 2010 — $47,715 — was virtually unchanged, in 2010 dollars, from its level in 1973, when it was $49,065, said Sheldon Danziger, professor of public policy at the University of Michigan.
The period from 2001 to 2007 was the first recovery on record where the level of poverty was deeper, and median income of working-age people was lower, at the end than at the beginning.
22 percent of children are in poverty, the highest percentage since 1993.
For a single adult in 2009, the poverty line was $10,830 in pretax cash income; for a family of four, $22,050.

Given that the Great recession will continue for years, perhaps even throughout this current decade, poverty rates will increase, social unrest will occur, and political mayhem may well ensue in the years to come, unless serious and coordinated changes are made.

Sarah Palin sacrificing herself for interracial harmony!

2011-09-15T10:42:00.000-04:00

Could I have been wrong all these years, that Caribou Barbie (aka Sarah Palin) is actual not a racist and loves (really loves!) other people and races?

News reports based on the yet unreleased book by Joe McGinniss titled "The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin" claims that Palin has a fetish for black men, has used illicit drugs, and has had marital affairs. It has been suggested by Caribou Barbie that Mr. McGinniss, -who was invited to live in Sarah Palin's neighbor's house and observe the Palin family- is a pervert and maybe even a pedophile! As everyone knows, Sarah doesn't pull punches when this hockey mom with lipstick gets angry.

Sludge like this is better left in the pages of tabloid newspapers, preferably owned by arch-douche bag Rupert Murdoch. There are probably far more damaging and news worthy stories about Palin, which has been richly covered elsewhere. However, my contempt of Palin and the entire faux-populists and deranged crypto-fascists of the Tea Party movement demand me to at least bring to light these allegations.

McGinniss has some choice words about Palin that have raised my eyebrows:

He describes in the book "that Palin had a sexual ‘fetish’ for black men and had a one-night stand with Miami Heat player Glen Rice while dating future husband Todd Palin. Rice is said to have confirmed the encounter to the McGinniss."
States that Palin "married her husband only after being impregnated, saying that her first child, Track, was born eight months after the wedding."
Palin engaging with Brad Hanson, her husband’s one time business partner, in a six-month affair that lead to the dissolution of the two men's snowmobile dealership.
Palin furthermore has in the past used marijuana and cocaine

Some of these things are pretty lame, while others are just typical low class shenanigans. The whole black men fetish I find amusing. It's awfully cold up there in Alaska and a piping hot thick drink of black goodness is maybe what she really needs.

***

Really though, I think more attention should be given to a documentary that is currently being shown at the Toronto International Film Festival, called "Sarah Palin - You Betcha." The documentary, profiled in the Guardian newspaper, is by British film maker Nick Broomfield, who says that Palin "represents the forbidden in a weird and mischievous way" to the minds of evangelical Christian men in the Republican party. People who are most knowledgeable of her, describe Palin as "dangerous", a "sociopath" and "disrespectful to intelligence".

The Guardian article summarizes Palin in a more coherent manner:

[Broomfield] has her down as a political opportunist who'll simply try to fill any power vacuum – a theory that fits neatly with the portraits offered of her as an overgrown prom queen, a beauty pageant back-stabber (there's some great footage of her puffing on a flute during Miss Alaska 1984, a dead spit for Rula Lenska) who thrives on gossip and vendettas and formulates policy with populist short-sight. Any allegiance to intellectual or fiscal ideologies is flaky at best. Her erratic decision-making meant she left Wasilla with a £22m deficit after her stint as mayor, then, as state governor, slapped an enormous tax on oil companies in Alaska. "She got that through with Democrat support," says Broomfield. "Most of the Republican party were against it."

The dangerous stupidity of this woman and her equally imbecilic followers should not be underestimated.

Krawcheck Down at BofA

2011-09-08T04:19:00.003-04:00

I'm not a finance specialist, so I didn't know who Sallie Krawcheck was until today. According to her online resume, she has had a fairly storied career given that she is only 46. Until this week she held the position of Chief Executive Officer at Merrill Lynch. Previously, she was formerly CFO at CitiCorp and Chairman and CEO of Citi's Global Wealth Management.

In an article on her and BofA in the NY Times Dealbook, it states that Ms. Krawcheck distinguished herself early in her career

as a stock analyst, covering securities companies. Early on, she made headlines with some of her bold calls, notably upsetting Wall Street executive Sanford I. Weill when she criticized the acquisition of Salomon by his firm the Travelers Group. Shortly after Alliance Capital Management purchased Bernstein in 2000, she was named chairman and chief executive.

My first thought, was how does someone at that age usurp so many people within the dog-eat-dog world of finance to achieve so many senior positions at such an early age? What happened to all the people who were in their 50's and 60's at the time she received her postings, who had been working in the industry before her? The situation leads me to ask, what is it that these people are doing that is so valuable in these executive suites? According to published articles on her, she was profiled in Fortune magazine titled, "Looking for the last honest analyst." Krawcheck was brought into Citigroup in 2002 when its former chief Sandy Weill wanted to clean up the reputation of its tarnished Salomon Smith Barney division. As Citigroup's CFO she used to work just down the hall from the company's former CEO Charles Prince, who was forced to resign his position at the end of 2007 as the credit crisis from the housing market emerged. In an article in Fortune magazine in 2006, a year prior to the start of the Great Recession, she said, "The consumer doesn't seem stretched. I wouldn't bet against U.S. consumers. They're pretty rational folks." That statement as we know today, four years into the Great Recession, is just rubbish.

Maybe this line of thought isn't germane to the actual point of this post, but the personality based politics of these financial firms strikes me as odd.

The point of this post is that Bank of America after hiring Krawcheck just two years ago has decided to terminate her. Zerohedge blogger is calling her the first sacrificial lamb to be used by Bank of America in its attempt to re-organize its top management. Consider this section of the NY Times article on the restructuring:

Since her arrival, the wealth management group has posted steady results, even as the broader market has been battered by billions of dollars in losses. In the second quarter, the division earned $506 million, down slightly from the previous period, but up from $329 million in the second quarter of 2010.
In particular, the Merrill Lynch brokerage force has been a surprising bright spot for the troubled bank, increasing its client base since the 2009 takeover by Bank of America.

Does firing the the head of one of the few divisions that does make money for the organization make sense to you? I suppose it does if one assumes that Merrill's wealth management division no longer operates for the primary benefit of its clients, but for the shareholders of Bank of America instead. Felix Salmon thinks:

that wealth management at BofA, then, is going to act a bit like dialup revenues at AOL: a steady and dependable revenue stream, in long-term secular decline, which can be used to fund investments in the rest of the business.

Whatever is going on at BofA suggests that this overstuffed Frankenstein operation is heading for even more serious problems than is currently being discussed publicly. More than just management changes need to be imposed on this To-big-to-fail loser. The entire beast needs to be cut up and sanitized for the good of the global economy.

Quote of the day: Taibbi on Obama

2011-09-07T20:35:00.000-04:00

Listening to Obama talk about jobs and shared prosperity yesterday reminded me that we are back in campaign mode and Barack Obama has started doing again what he does best – play the part of a progressive. He's good at it. It sounds like he has a natural affinity for union workers and ordinary people when he makes these speeches. But his policies are crafted by representatives of corporate/financial America, who happen to entirely make up his inner circle.

I just don't believe this guy anymore, and it's become almost painful to listen to him.

- Matt Taibbi, "Obama and Jobs: Why I Don't Believe Him Anymore."

The political left which vaulted Mr. Obama into the White House has all but given up on him delivering anything remotely resembling his promises as a candidate in 2007 and 2008. The standard argument by centrists and those still on the Democratic party kool-aid, is that he has delivered substantial results and has been hamstrung by Republican opposition in going further. I find this argument absurd.

A firestorm was unleashed amongst the political left when Prof. Drew Westen in an NY Times Op-ed, described Obama's failure to articulate a cogent and realistic picture of the political landscape in the dreary days of January 2009 and ask Americans for collective sacrifice. This is a man who was voted by a majority of Americans to turn the country around after eight horrible years under the Bush administration. He was a given an unequivocal mandate to enact liberal and far-reaching changes. None of that has happened. Instead we have seen a massive capitulation to business interests, the expansion of the Afghan war, and a constant rejection of liberal stances and policies in favour of Republican talking points, which include low-taxes, reduced regulations, slashing government jobs, and anti-growth austerity economics. Mr. Obama was willing only a month ago to increase the age of retirement and slash Medicare benefits for the elderly to appease the Republicans in the debt-ceiling debate.

The only reason much of the Democratic base hasn't completely abandoned him, is that the Republican label is so toxic and filled with so many morons, racists, homophobes, crony-capitalists, and religious nutters, that it is impossible not to prefer him over his opponents.

***
Further posts expanding and justifying my thoughts on Mr. Obama's tepidness are included below:

My open letter to Mr. Obama last year is here
Robert Reich's comment on Mr. Obama as a centrist leaning politician is here
A critique of Mr. Obama's support for the Bush Administration's torture program (here and here).
Daniel Elisberg, noted whistle blower and source of the Pentagon Papers, condemns Mr. Obama's pro-corporatist agenda here.
Eliot Spitzer on Obama's first year is here
Ralph Nader on Obama's early failures and capitulations (here, here, and here)

A decade of hell and the fall of America

2011-09-07T07:15:00.003-04:00

The above chart (h/t Economist's View, "How long will it take for the economy to recover?") issued by the CBO describes what should be the central discussion amongst Americans.

While the developed world was on summer vacation, the economies of Europe and America have begun to decline in an alarming fashion. Europe is scrambling to stabilize its weak perpherial economies. The march of the PIIGS has expanded to the point where Spain and Italy are no longer just question marks. European banks are seeing formidable potential losses arise from sovereign debt issues. Credit is tightening up and these same European banks are looking to national governments and the EU for assistance. Indecision amongst Europe's prominent leaders and a growing populist revolt across the continent have contributed to growing unease in the markets. The breakup of the entire European economic union and the failure of the Euro currency is now seriously being considered.

In America, zero jobs were added to the economy last month. Growth for the second quarter (Q2-2011) was revised to 1% (annualized). Financial institutions like Bank of America are in trouble and Warren Buffett has again been brought, as the non-governmental creditor of last resort, to prop up the ailing bank. The Republicans have inflicted serious damage to the American economy, in their traitorous advancement of no-taxes and no-growth governance. Obama is floundering in his dismal attempt to appease his corporate backers, while carving out a middle path for his own election.

The above chart should make you terrified. Although the rose-colored glasses of 3.5% annual growth is being portrayed, it is the green line with 2.5% growth that is most alarming. The difference of 1% means that America effectively will lumber along for the next decade with little to no growth, unemployment will remain obscenely high, structural unemployment and a permanent underclass will arise, the deleveraging process will take longer, and governments will be unable to adequetely deal with further social or economic problems effectively. This is the best case scenario we are working with at the moment, taking into account the data and Rogoff and Reinhart's post-crisis modelling.

Now consider that the world heads into a protracted recession, with China crashing shortly afterwards -taking those countries like Canada and Australia that have been dependent on commodity exports with it- and you've got a recipe for global armageddon. The world stops growing and economies across the planet try to dig themselves out of this hole. Here too the data suggests as in the case of the Asian and Latin American crises, that a ten year window will be required to get back any reasonable trendline. The implication is an entire generation of workers see reduced income, mounting debt, and insufficient job opportunities. How are these countries going to pay for the benefits sold to the baby-boomer generation, when the children of the boomers are unable to find long-term jobs and thus fund those liabilities?

We have come to the end of the line. All the major economies of the world are now posed to fall and in that cataclysmic descent, we shall venture hopelessly through a decade of stagnation, decline, and possible collapse.

Sino-Forest faces more scrutiny

2011-08-29T12:37:00.003-04:00

The beleaguered Chinese forestry company Sino-Forest has had its ratings withdrawn by Standard and Poor's (S&P) today subsequent to news that its Chairman and Chief executive Alan Chan has resigned. S&P states that the charges laid against Sino-Forest are most likely true and as such, it is forced to de-list. Moody's Investors Service on the other hand has cut Sino-Forest's rating "to Caa1 from B1 and warned it was continuing its review of the company for further downgrade."

This blog earlier wrote an article describing the underlying fraud and failures of corporate governance associated with Sino-Forest. In the days ahead there will be plenty of finger-waving at the company and its managers. The fact that corporate fraud is involved is hardly new. The tool most used by white-collar criminals is accounting gimmickry to conceal nefarious activities that enrich the owners and/or management. I have written previously on the wide-spread corruption within China and prevalent ethos of fraud within America's most vaunted institutions, such as AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Big Pharma, and Moody's. The fact remains that China is learning from the Master, the United States of America, when it comes to engaging in corporate malfeasance.

The questions that need to be addressed are:

Are any rating agencies actually capable of rating any company's true credit worthiness?
Why are accounting agencies constantly failing to detect this level of deception?
Why aren't agencies such as the the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) given more resources and talent to investigate and prevent systematic corruption within its jurisdiction?
Why aren't Canadian governments more vigilant in prosecuting corporate criminals?
Why aren't US governments more vigilant in prosecuting corporate criminals?
Why are so few white-collared criminals prosecuted and furthermore found guilty in both Canada and the USA?

Only once the public begins to ask and demand answers to these questions, will substantial change occur.

The other Sarah Palin movie

2011-08-27T21:53:00.003-04:00

Sarah Palin (aka Caribou Barbie) and her entourage of semi-literate Alaskan troglodytes are now the subject of another movie. Unlike the celebrated bizzaro-land movie called "The Undefeated" (apparently no one has told her that she lost 2008 election), there is a documentary at this year's Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) documenting the actions of everyone's favorite candidate/beauty contestant. The documentary is called "You Betcha!" which sounds just about right.

It doesn't surprise me that the dismally educated people in middle-America still gravitate to her beauty pageant veneer and fixate on her "us against them" nostrums. After all, these populist shibboleths have existed since popular uprising have existed (yes... what the Romans have done for us lately!) and have a constant fan base regardless of who is in office. The problem with this half-wit, is that she actually thought being a politician was just a little more than being a B-rated celebrity and all those fans of hers, weren't just buying a ticket to indulge in the latest Republican merry-go-round ride. She has zero policy credentials on any subject of relevance, whether that be foreign policy, America's global hegemony, the financial industry, or cost structure and delivery of social services like Medicare.

As a candidate Palin was so dismally incompetent on a national level that within a few weeks of the public becoming aware of this hockey-mom with lipstick, the McCain-Palin ticket started to tank with independent voters, women, and moderate Republicans.

While she was a positive force leading up to the 2010 mid-term elections for the Tea Party crowd, the problem that arose was that Palin wasn't always willing to follow the Republican script and would too often improvise. An example of her idiocy was her over-the-top media retort that erupted subsequent to Congresswoman's Giffords' attempted murder earlier this year. Since that incident Palin's numbers have been in decline.

My take on the great American grifter is that she would really love to run for president, but isn't too keen on all that policy stuff and book-learning; like most of her fans. She clearly loves the attention and the not insignificant pocket change that her and first-dude Todd have managed to pull in since abandoning the Alaska people for a staring role in this week's TLC re-run. However, the media has already moved on to observe the craziness of Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and almost as verbally irresponsible Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX).

So like any good huckster she now moves from state to state, trying to locally re-invent herself, while trying to boost her flailing popularity nationally. I think she will self destruct at some point and hopefully she will take as many Republicans with her in the process.

Dick Cheney unrepentant in having destroyed America

2011-08-27T17:52:00.006-04:00

Richard Cheney, the 46th vice-president of the USA, is about to release his memoirs next week titled, "In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir.

According to a CBS News/New York Times poll conducted when Dick Cheney left office in January 2009 his approval ratings (13%) were less than that of George W. Bush's (22%). At their departure both men received historic disapproval ratings and continue to be considered by the majority of Americans as having failed to improve America. The Bush presidency is highlighted by some of the following:

advancing the unconstitutional notion of a unitary presidency
repeated and consistent withdrawal from international treaties and agreements
pushing through the civil rights destroying PATRIOT act
massive and illegal wiretapping and spying on American citizens
using torture upon seized enemy combatants and prisoners of war
the failure to prevent the 9-11 attack on New York City and the Pentagon
failing to adequately neutralize Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda's terrorist network
pursuing the Iraq war under bogus pretenses and then failing to contain the regional civil war
the abandonment of New Orleans and its citizens after Hurricane Katrina
allowing the housing bubble to expand and eventually cause the financial collapse of 2008
promoting corporate-written legislation that bolstered special interest profits
promoting a laissez-faire regulatory framework that allowed corporate crime to exponentially grow throughout his two terms
advancing the interests of oil and gas companies and rejecting sustainable and renewable forms of energy production
denying climate change was occurring
doubling the national public debt
cut taxes for the richest Americans, while expanding the deficit
cut national science and engineering budgets to pay for his wars and tax cuts
limited scientific investigations on subjects deemed controversial for religious supporters, such as stem cell studies and environmental assessment studies
preventing any international agreement that would prevent rises in global warming gases, which in the end may possibly be his greatest failure if even conservative predictions about climate change prove true

Cheney undoubtedly represented the very worst elements of the Bush administration. Although Bush's approval didn't collapse until after Katrina, Cheney's approval amongst most Americans was in the gutter early into his first term. His approval was constantly in the twenty-percent area and never improved. He represented to his base an unapologetic statist who wanted to project American hegemony to its fullest level. Cheney famously stated that "deficits don't matter!" He was responsible for pursuing an energy policy that promoted America's addiction to foreign fossil fuels. And as former Secretary of Defense, he was very familiar with the nature of the Pentagon machinery and sought to project America's military power domestically and across foreign shores.

To the rest of America, Cheney represented a Machiavellian operator. With his over-the-top rhetoric, war making bravado, riddiculous claims that 3rd world nations with 2nd rate militaries were a threat to America, and his continuous scowl, the public turned on this crypto-fascist.

Reviews of Cheney's memoirs indicate a man who controlled both the president and policies of the Bush presidency in it early years. During the infamous 9-11 attack, Cheney states, despite clear lines of command set forth in the constitution, that it was him and neither Bush nor Rumsfeld who was in command of immediate operations. At that moment in history, Cheney made it clear that the president of the United States had been unofficially deposed and that he had assumed all the controls of commander-in-chief.

The NY Times review of the book further highlights a man who is completely unrepentant of his actions. The Times describes the book as being

often pugnacious in tone and in which he expresses little regret about many of the most controversial decisions of the Bush administration — casts him as something of an outlier among top advisers who increasingly took what he saw as a misguided course on national security issues.

So it is clear that as Cheney's policy failures mounted, George W. Bush and others in the Bush administration became progressively unwilling to accept Cheney's worldview and provocations. In the end, the rift was so great that Bush himself was unwilling to even grant full pardon to Cheney's Chief of Staff I. Lewis Libby for his acts of lying to prosecutors in order to protect Mr. Cheney.

What we know is Mr. Cheney is on his last legs and death is hunting him. This book is an attempt by a dying man to justify his evil by throwing sand in our collective faces. I'm sure Ozymandias would have done the same.

Sino-Forest just another example of Chinese fraud

2011-08-27T14:41:00.001-04:00

According to news reports (NY Times and Toronto Star), the once highly traded Chinese forestry company Sino-Forest has come under the examination by the Ontario Securities Commission for "fraudulently inflating its revenue and exaggerating the extent of its timber holdings."

The story follows a general trend that has become all too normal. Corporations attempt to inflate their earnings and value through shady accounting and off-sheet intermediaries. The purpose, just as in other notable cases, is to exploit ignorant investors into the next so-called big thing.

In Canada, the obvious comparison is Bre-X, a Canadian mining company that claimed that it discovered copious reserves of gold within Indonesia, during the mid-90's. Independent investigations into the company's claims found that their initial findings were falsified. The collapse of Bre-X lead to billions of dollars in losses for institutional investors, including $45 million for the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement board, $70 million of the Quebec Public Sector Pension fund, and $100 million for the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan. No criminal charges have ever been laid in this debacle.

The American corollary is of course Enron, the company that defined the roaring 90's and the incipient corporate crime wave that has made a complete mockery of Anglo-American capitalism. It was discovered that the company had created numerous offshore entities that were used "for planning and avoidance of taxes, raising the profitability of a business." The totality of the expansive fraud committed by management and energy-traders resulted at the time the largest Chapter-11 bankruptcy in the history of the USA, the collapse of the accounting firm Arthur Anderson, and the introduction of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.

In the case of Sino-Forest, in June 2011 it was described by Muddy Waters Research, an investment research firm, that the company was a “multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme” that was “accompanied by substantial theft.” In addition,

A reporter for The Globe and Mail of Toronto subsequently spent two weeks visiting various properties ostensibly owned or controlled by Sino-Forest and its subsidiaries. It proved to be a trek that frequently led him to nonexistent addresses and empty offices. Like Muddy Waters, the newspaper also found evidence that Sino-Forest had greatly inflated the size of its forestry assets.

The accountants of Sino-Forest, Ernst Young Canada, at this moment are conveniently being given distance from the fiasco, by being allowed to claim "geographical and cultural differences" in understanding the Chinese market. Given that Sino-Forest's management and operations are all in China, it raises the question whether Canadian accountants and regulators have the competence and ability to protect investors from unscrupulous foreign operations.

According to Forbes magazine, the SEC and PCAOB have been reviewing companies that operate in China but are traded in American markets and have found similar situations.

In the past six months alone, more than 25 New York-listed Chinese companies have disclosed accounting discrepancies or seen their auditors resign. In the process, questions have been raised about the strength of governance and financial oversight at many small-cap Chinese companies. In the past year, Nasdaq and NYSE Euronext have halted trading in the shares of more than 20 small and micro-cap Chinese companies. Five Chinese companies have been de-listed.

As bad as corporate governance is in North America, the Chinese are considerably worst in providing independent and qualified directors. In the case of Sino-Forest, none of the directors had any experience in the forestry industry or competentence in risk management.

As for Canada, it is obvious that the Ontario Securities Commission is clearly incapable to adequately investigating all the corporate crime that potentially exists under its mandate. Richard Powers, a business law professor at the University of Toronto, has stated that situations like Sino-Forest will force regulators to evaluate the, "practice of letting companies acquire dormant shell companies to list on the stock exchange." Until governments get serious about giving teeth and muscle to financial regulators, fraud -whether it emanated domestically or via foreign nationals- will only continue to persist to the detriment of the market as a whole.

Quote of the day: Shiller on economic delusions

2011-07-24T03:16:00.000-04:00

Economists who adhere to rational-expectations models of the world will never admit it, but a lot of what happens in markets is driven by pure stupidity – or, rather, inattention, misinformation about fundamentals, and an exaggerated focus on currently circulating stories.

- Robert Shiller, "Debt and Delusion"

Quote of the day: The Price of Deceit

2011-07-17T03:44:00.001-04:00

When you build up large stocks of mistrust and ill will, nothing can happen for a very long time. But when something does happen, it’s much quicker and much worse than anybody could have anticipated. The markets might not be punishing the US government at the moment. But the mistrust and ill will is there, believe me. And when it appears, it will appear with a vengeance.

- Felix Salmon, The damage already done by the debt ceiling debate.

Under blood red skies...

2011-06-08T02:44:00.000-04:00

Photograph of Puyehue volcano, near Osorno in southern Chile.

Courtesy of NewScientist.

Quote of the Day: On the deluded masses

2011-06-08T02:16:00.002-04:00

When people hold certain ideological beliefs strongly enough, no amount of facts will get in their way. If you believe that the current deficit is the result of excessive government spending (passed by Democrats, even though they only controlled Congress and the White House for four out of the past thirty years*), no pile of charts will be big enough to convince you otherwise — just like if you believe that tax cuts increase tax revenues, that the deficit has produced high interest rates, or that Barack Obama was born on Mars, no amount of evidence will convince you otherwise.

- James Kwak, "Who Created this Mess"

I've been struggling with this matter in the past few weeks.

Personal growth and development necessitates that each of us occasionally review and validate the overarching ideas that govern our worldview. When dealing with religion, politics, and cultural issues, we are dependant on our limited educational and personal experiences and not hard empirical fact. However, one would assume that most people when presented with facts that contradict prevailing opinions about the world, they would then tact and reassess their stances. All too often though in this age of modern stupidity -as in the example on the right with regard to global warming and taxes or on the left with regard to the utility of the welfare state- people not only reject legitimate criticism and facts, but engage in buttressing their own faltering delusions.

The above quote, highlights the issue in America surrounding some of the more pedestrian claptrap that manifests itself as serious discussion in the media. It seems despite the ease with which people can look up facts on the internet and access knowledge, the less some people are interested in thinking.

Quote of the Day: Nick Clegg on opposition to AV

2011-04-21T18:01:00.002-04:00

When the vested interests of the old, tired, establishment of politics and the media are so opposed to a reform – turning so personal about it – you know there is something worth fighting for. It is a desperate attempt to defend the indefensible – the old politics of tribalism backed by dinosaurs on all sides of the political spectrum. It is the attack on people working together for the national good that is so dismal.

- Nick Clegg, Leader of the Liberal-Democrats (UK); Guardian newspaper

It has been nearly a year since the coalition government was formed in Britain. The Conservative Party, lead by David Cameron, and the Liberal Democrats, lead by Nick Clegg, formed a coalition to bridge the fact that no one political party had gained sufficient seats in Westminster to hold the confidence of parliament, after the 2010 elections. Things have not gone well amongst the ranks of Liberal Democrat supporters, and the biggest challenge advocated by the party -alternative voting mechanism- appears to be withering.

So few people in any line of politics are willing to say the obvious fact that our current political systems are badly broken and those who talk dismissively about change, are the same persons who exploit that existing system to their maximum political advantage. I have spoken briefly on what I think are some of the impressive qualities of Nick Clegg in previous posts. Unlike either the corrupt Labour Party or post-Thatcherite crony-capitalists of the Conservative Party, Mr. Clegg has denounced the Iraq war (here and here), embraced environmentalism (here), and made some of the largest changes to Britain's security-state apparatus, promoted by Labour, to make government accountable to the true sovereign; the people (here).

The fact that so many voters will act with such myopic thinking in opposing the alternative voting system, in order to simply punish the Liberal Democrats for aligning themselves with the Conservatives, only proves that most people are not only unable to think rationally, but are petty to the point of being sadomasochistic.

Rise Up Canadians...

2011-04-17T21:38:00.007-04:00

Exactly!

Canadians used to pride ourselves at being more versed in the nuances of global affairs and politics than our American brethren to the south. Politics, like hockey, has been a constant in our lives. The general population across the nation has always been aware of the pretentious and duplicitous musings of politicians and has punished those engaging in American styled demagoguery; until now.

In the above election ad, Michael Ignatieff discusses the level of apathy and disinterest in politics that has taken hold of Canadians. Some have referred to the above full throated stance as his Howard Dean moment. Maybe? However, we should remind ourselves that Dr. Dean was attacked from multiple flanks for standing up for beliefs that were fundamentally democratic and liberal. What those in opposition are really saying is that they want their team, the blue team, regardless of competence or adherence to accountablity, to win; even if it means jettisoning democratic values and principles to do so.

I think this is exactly what accountable government and liberal democracy is all about. As I've said before, Mr. Ignatieff's performance as Leader of the Opposition has been at best wanting. However, this call-to-arms of all Canadians to bring down the corpulent and criminally negligent Conservative party of Canada is what needs to be said. Every voter needs to carefully understand what is at stake to our democracy, if Stephen Harper and the Conservative party dimwits are elected to run the government again.

Where's my Government Subsidy!

2011-03-31T23:31:00.001-04:00

I too wish the benevolent hand of government largess would visit me. Subsidies, bailouts, and friendly handshakes as the taxes of the minions are redirected into my coffers.

Why shouldn't I with my friendly neighborhood politician be able to run a business model solely predicated on how much I can extort out of the public?

Why care about customer relations, effective management, cost-controls, and all those petty matters, when I can have a member of the legislative branch simply re-write the laws so I don't have to pay taxes, don't have to concern myself about environmental or labor laws, and don't have to worry about those things that all those small people have to.

Banks, energy companies, utilities, telecommunications, military industrial, surveillance state, big pharma, private education, corporate agriculture,... etc, all feeding handsomely at the trough.

Stephen Harper and the Abuse of Power

2011-03-16T17:09:00.003-04:00

I'm loathe to affiliate myself with Mr. Ignatieff, who has in my opinion been one of the most incompetent leaders of Canada's Liberal party in years. Given how bad things have been since Jean Chretien was pushed out of office, that is not an insignificant matter.

However, I cannot stand Mr. Harper and all the faux-patriots and ignoramuses of the Canadian Conservative Party. Their deceit, incompetence, indifference to the truth and their slavish want for power and authority over the lives of Canadians, is unbearable. Why the opposition parties haven't been taking the boots to the crotches of these so-called conservatives is beyond my understanding. Everyone knows Harper is a thug. So why then engage in a strategy where they play the role of the village idiot who gets his ass kicked every morning by the town bully.

If these right-wing wannabe crypto-fascists want to go medieval on us, the people, then I have no problem with the opposition parties dragging Harper's bloated and corpulent carcass across the television screen.

Quote of the Day: Sanctioning American Torture

2011-02-11T14:42:00.005-05:00

Between the political obstacles to criminal prosecutions, and the willingness of the courts to dismiss civil lawsuits whenever the government invokes the "state secrets" privilege, we essentially have a class of people operating in our intelligence services who are not bound by the law in any meaningful sense when it comes to actions they take in the line of duty. They're promoted rather than sanctioned when they act out of line, eliminating even any internal incentive to play by the rules.

- Adam Sewer, The American Prospect

h/t Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish, "Torturers: Failing Upwards"

Fighting for the liberation of mankind: Egypt 2011

2011-01-28T14:34:00.000-05:00

Why are Americans such assholes?

2011-01-16T22:14:00.001-05:00

The above billboard was in Tucson, Arizona!

Gawkler reports:

A reporter in Arizona tells us, "KNST tells me they took that billboard down at 9:30 a.m. Monday morning." Not quite quick enough to beat the internet.

If images and statements associated with violence didn't have anything to do with what recently happened in Tuscon, why did they take the sign down? Shouldn't these same people re-double, in fact "re-load" their campaign against the evil liberal empire and stand their ground in their honest attempt to sell hatred and violence to the indolent and ignorant?

When are Americans going to stand up to the extremists in the right and label those who pursue a violent and nihilistic vision of politics as the real "anti-Americans!"

Stating the Obvious about Tuscon and American Politics

2011-01-12T18:53:00.002-05:00

In fact, there is no balance—none whatsoever. Only one side has made the rhetoric of armed revolt against an oppressive tyranny the guiding spirit of its grassroots movement and its midterm campaign. Only one side routinely invokes the Second Amendment as a form of swagger and intimidation, not-so-coyly conflating rights with threats. Only one side’s activists bring guns to democratic political gatherings. Only one side has a popular national TV host who uses his platform to indoctrinate viewers in the conviction that the President is an alien, totalitarian menace to the country. Only one side fills the AM waves with rage and incendiary falsehoods. Only one side has an iconic leader, with a devoted grassroots following, who can’t stop using violent imagery and dividing her countrymen into us and them, real and fake. Any sentient American knows which side that is; to argue otherwise is disingenuous.

- George Packer, "Arguing Tuscon"

(h/t Kevin Drum, MotherJones.com, "Quote of the Day: No, Both Sides Aren't Equally Guilty")

Andrew Sullivan on "The Rhetoric of the Right"

2011-01-12T13:44:00.003-05:00

I am not horrified by the rhetoric and love of violence on the far right because I have some attachment to the Democrats. I am horrified because it is horrifying, because for years now, this kind of thing has become commonplace at the very top of the conservative political apparatus, and because the invocation of violence in a political context is inherently corrosive of democratic values. When you add to this a party committed to the use of military force as almost a first option, and to torture as a legal method of interrogation, it is irresponsible not to worry about where this is headed.

- Andrew Sullivan, "The Rhetoric of the Right"

I profoundly agree with his analysis.

Paid partisans in the corporate media, want us to accept the incredulous claim that the right-wing is simply engaging in vociferous arguments to further democracy and freedom of speech. They make the equally absurd claim that this hatred and climate of intolerance is bi-directional and Mr. Obama, himself, has been a conduit for the current atmosphere. Their immediate response was to call all criticism of their daily vitriol "stupid." Their second act was to feign victimization and demand that all further insinuations stop, because it's starting to hurt their feelings that people may actually see them for the depraved and immoral sociopaths they are.

For the greater part of two decades, there has been proclivity on the right to dehumanize their opponents and marginalize any criticism of their complicity in debasing the public sphere. I have listed numerous cases (here, here, and here) arising in the past two years, where America's right-wing, in a petulant hissy-fit, demands that the world conform with their unstable worldview. The ultimate result will be that the nation will continue its current decline, will eventually falter in a fatal manner, and will end up as every empire that has existed before it.

Quote of the day: Gabrielle Giffords on language

2011-01-11T15:38:00.003-05:00

"They really need to realize that the rhetoric and firing people up, and, you know, even things for example, we're on Sarah Palin's targeted list, but the thing is, that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gunsight over our district. When people do that, you gotta realize there's consequences to that action."

- Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D, AZ), March 2010 in response to Sarah Palin's crosshairs graphic.

The "Hammer" sentenced to the Slammer!

2011-01-11T14:57:00.001-05:00

Tom Delay, former Republican majority leader, was sentenced yesterday to three years imprisonment for his involvement "for illegally plotting to funnel corporate contributions to Texas legislative candidates." The Washington Post has a complete report on the sentence. Additional discussion of Republican party corruption can be found in these previous posts: here, here, and here.

Delay to the very end complained he was an innocent man, who was simply doing what everyone else was doing. Maybe that's the problem Tommy! All you assholes up on the hill are doing everything, but what you're supposed to be doing; which is being public servants engaged in running the government on behalf of the people and not the corporations.

Consider what Texas prosecutors had to say about Delay and Delay's request that he only be subject to probation and community service.

"Conservative values . . . are supposed to include obeying the laws of the state and taking personal responsibility," [Lead prosecutor Gary] Cobb said. If DeLay received only probation, Cobb warned the judge, he would "wear that probation" like Jesus and call himself a martyr.

A colleague, prosecutor Steve Brand, separately claimed at the hearing that probation would not only send the wrong message to other members of Congress, but would signal to working-class citizens that DeLay was treated lightly just because he wore "a suit and a tie." He said that DeLay's repeated claims in a recent memoir that he did nothing improper were "the equivalent of a 'screw you' to the system."

Delay's unethical behavior and institutional corruption serve as a reminder as to the true nature of the system of governance that exists in Washington. Although his arrest, prosecution, and sentencing are a small victory against the forces of corruption. The beast still lives on with venal politicians -on both sides of the aisle- doing the bidding of their paymasters, lobbyists flooding the hallways of congress, a revolving door between government officials and businesses, and an electoral system that is hijacked by both parties.

Krugman on the toxicity of American Politics

2011-01-10T16:28:00.003-05:00

Paul Krugman talks about the toxic atmosphere created by the right-wing and their corporate supporters in the media, that has lead America to this current and deadly state of affairs. In the article he exposes the primary source for the vitriol.

The point is that there’s room in a democracy for people who ridicule and denounce those who disagree with them; there isn’t any place for eliminationist rhetoric, for suggestions that those on the other side of a debate must be removed from that debate by whatever means necessary.

And it’s the saturation of our political discourse — and especially our airwaves — with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence.

Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be “armed and dangerous” without being ostracized; but Representative Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the G.O.P.

He realizes that Fox News and Rush Limbaugh provide people who watch and listen to them exactly what they want; an endless stream of drama, in which they play the victim in their own pretentious and morally debased theater of the absurd. However, that does not imply that just because the obscene can be monetized, that it should be given public disclosure.

But even if hate is what many want to hear, that doesn’t excuse those who pander to that desire. They should be shunned by all decent people.

This tragedy, isn't about limiting free speech. This is about dangerously ignorant people, pursuing an ideology that demands the liquidation and elimination of all opponents and persons, who do not faithfully adhere their warped and deranged version of reality. Krugman summarizes the critical conceit in this whole sordid affair.

It’s important to be clear here about the nature of our sickness. It’s not a general lack of “civility,” the favorite term of pundits who want to wish away fundamental policy disagreements. Politeness may be a virtue, but there’s a big difference between bad manners and calls, explicit or implicit, for violence; insults aren’t the same as incitement.

If there are those who do not believe the above, then they should ask what countries and explicitly, what Western democracies, allow their media and politicians to engage in such lawless behavior? The answer is that no Western European nations nor countries like Australia, Canada, or New Zealand, would tolerate the type of incitements to public violence as what routinely occurs in America. On the other hand, third world countries with limited experience in democracy, failed nations engaging in sectarian conflict and ethnic cleansing, and countries like Venezuela and Iran, which are subsumed in managing their population through class and ideological warfare, are the ones in which America's political landscape most resembles.

John Boehner, keeping it classy.

2011-01-09T19:18:00.003-05:00

Republican congressman, John Boehner (R-OH) has been sworn in as the Speaker of the House of Representatives. As all Republicans, he is committed to keeping it classy, just as it was when he was a regular congressmen and dispensing tobacco lobbyist checks to his fellow congressmen on the house floor.

Consider what Matt Taibbi, at Rolling Stone magazine, had to say about this indolent corporate shill and cocksucker:

Boehner suggested that by voting for Obamacare, [Steve] Driehaus "may be a dead man" and "can't go home to the west side of Cincinnati" because "the Catholics will run him out of town," Driehaus began receiving death threats, and a right-wing website published directions to his house. Driehaus says he approached Boehner on the floor and confronted him.

"I didn't think it was funny at all," Driehaus says. "I've got three little kids and a wife. I said to him, 'John, this is bullshit, and way out of bounds. For you to say something like that is wildly irresponsible.'"

Driehaus is quick to point out that he doesn't think Boehner meant to urge anyone to violence. "But it's not about what he intended — it's about how the least rational person in my district takes it. We run into some crazy people in this line of work."

Driehaus says Boehner was "taken aback" when confronted on the floor, but never actually said he was sorry: "He said something along the lines of, 'You know that's not what I meant.' But he didn't apologize"...

(h/t Brad DeLong's blog)

Sarah Palin, accomplice in mass murder!

2011-01-09T17:39:00.006-05:00

Is this a reasonable graphic? Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who remains in an induced coma, didn't think so when asked about the above graphic issued by Palin, which implores Republican supporters to "reload" and keep pursuing their Democratic Party opponents. In fact, the local Arizonan Republican candidate to oust Ms. Giffords did far more than Caribou Barbie. He actually had a gun rally, where they said "Remove Gabrielle Giffords from office, shoot a fully automatic M-16." (ref. below)

Again, this type of inflammatory rhetoric isn't coming from fringe elements and outliers, this is coming from Party leaders, and no less than a former Vice-Presidential candidate of the USA herself.

If the above isn't sufficient to validate the depravity of these so-called Christians, consider what another Republican candidate and Tea party-backed congresswoman Michele Bachmann had to say on the subject:

Controversial Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) said this weekend that she wants residents of her state "armed and dangerous" over President Barack Obama's plan to reduce global warming "because we need to fight back."

Whether these politicians believe what they are saying or are merely ginning up the facile minded dunces of the gun-totting "kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out" crowd is irrelevant to me. They are inciting political violence to achieve political aims. That and that alone is what the last decade has been all about: the war and struggle against violent extremism and terrorism!

Neither their words nor actions have been misconstrued by anyone to be merely metaphorical. They themselves clearly defend their stance as a violent defense against Washingtonian corruption and capitulation to liberalism. The only question left, is when is the Department of Justice going to start applying the laws uniformly and start sending Republicans to enjoy the warm sunshine and if Dick Cheney can be believed, excellent health care, in Guantanamo, Cuba?

Personal Accountability, the American right wing edition.

2011-01-09T13:52:00.011-05:00

So this is what's left of the American political landscape?

Six dead, including a federal judge, a Pastor, three senior citizens, and a nine year old child. A member of congress in critical condition, recovering from an attack that sent a bullet through her head and across her brain. And another fourteen wounded.

Unlike those members of the mainstream media (MSM), who profit from the endless vitriol of the Republican party and unbalanced right-wing demagoguery as illustrated above in Caribou Barbie (aka Sarah Palin), reasonable and educated people are aware of the diminution of decency in the theater of American politics and the impact of that endless stream of vituperative speech on the nation as a whole. Consider what Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, had to say on this matter.

When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government... The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on this country is getting to be outrageous and unfortunately Arizona has become sort of the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry.

He did not say that this was the act of one deranged lunatic. Rather, he cast a wide net on the media, the vast array of bigoted and self-serving members of the political establishment, and those who support these debased opportunists in the general public.

The vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business ... This has not become the nice United States that most of us grew up in.

As others have pointed out, this is the standard model for conservatives when they are not in power. Kevin Drum of MotherJones magazine describes the counter-cyclical response of the conservative electoral base during these periods:

If you elect a liberal Democratic president, you get this kind of reaction from middle class conservatives. In FDR's day you got the Liberty League. JFK inspired the growth of the John Birch Society. Clinton got the conspiracy-minded talk radio crowd. And Obama has the tea parties...

In the 30s it was opposition to the New Deal. For the Birchers it was communism. For the Clinton-haters it was the culture wars... while today's is the deficits/socialism message.

While it is true that in each period there was a distinct reaction to the policies of liberals and the Democratic party, the current regularity and pervasiveness of these attacks, which do not emanate from fringe groups, but from mainstream corporate sponsors, Republican party members across the nation, and prominent media personalities, indicates that the nation has moved into a political atmosphere that so toxic with rancor and lies, that it cannot be dismissed or quelled.

Let's review a few of those hyper-patriots who are so fond of invoking Jefferson's "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" quote.

Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano (D), recently was the recipient of an incendiary package
Governor Martin O'Malley (D) of Maryland, was also the intended recipient of two packages that detonated at a federal postal center injuring some workers.
Nevada Senatorial candidate and Tea Party favorite, Sharron Angle, stated that the public had the option of dealing with an out-of-control Congress through "Second Amendment remedies." The terminology is right-wing code for the assassination and murder of federal officials.
Several other Republican candidates declared that the "violent overthrow" of the US government may be necessary in the event that they did not win the 2010 midterm elections.
Byron Williams, a former felon, planned "to target individuals at liberal nonprofit the Tides Foundation and the ACLU." He injured two police officers in a highway shoot-out, when police attempted to apprehend him for erratic driving. In interviews after his arrest, Williams claims that he was directly inspired by Glenn Beck, Fox news celebrity, to seek retribution.
Gregory Giusti pleaded guilty to repeatedly threatening House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- including threatening to destroy her California home -- because he was "upset with her passing the health care law." The perpetrator's mother indicates that he was motivated by friends and Fox News.
President Obama has seen a 400% increase in death threats from the public compared to George W. Bush. According to reports, America's first black President "is the target of more than 30 potential death threats a day and is being protected by an increasingly over-stretched and under-resourced Secret Service"
July 2009, Neo-Nazi James von Brunn, launched an attack on the US Holocaust Memorial Museum that killed security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns
May 2009, Minuteman off-shoot group leader, Shawna Forde, murdered a 9-year old girl and her father in Arizona, in an attempt to finance their militia operations.
May 2009, Abortion provider, Dr. George Tiller was murdered at his Church by an anti-abortion activist, who had belonged to an anti-government militia group that believed that virtually all existing modalities of government in the USA were illegitimate. Dr. Tiller was shot point-blank in the head. He had been a subject of violent militant and religious fanaticism since 1998.
April 2009, a local Florida man killed and wounded several Chilean students involved in a foreign exchange program. The killer was an active member of the Republican party who had espoused murdering immigrants to his neighbours.
February 2009, in a suicide attack aimed directly against the IRS, a Texan man flew a single engine plane into the side of an Austin, Texas IRS building. The incident led to the killing a of a single IRS employee and injury of several others.
Tennessee white supremacists planned to murder then Presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2008 and engage in the mass murder of black people.
July 2008, a lone gunman attacked Knoxville Unitarian Universalist Church in Tennessee, killing two patrons and injuring another seven. The gunman, Jim David Adkisson, stated: "he had targeted the church because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country's hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of major media outlets."
Eric Robert Rudolph, a right-wing Christian militant was responsible for the 1996 Atlantic Olympic bombings, the bombing of a Georgia abortion clinic, the bombing of lesbian nightclub in Atlanta, and a second abortion clinic bombing in Alabama, which killed a policeman working as a security guard and seriously injured nurse Emily Lyons. Rudolph was assisted by like-minded sympathizers, who facilitated his evasion of police for more than five years.
April 1995, the Oklahoma city bombing was conducted by right-wing militants Timoty McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and Michael Fortier, who were seeking retribution against the federal government for their involvement in the 1990's FBI sieges of Ruby Ridge and Waco, Texas. According to Wikipedia, the blast claimed 168 lives and injured more than 680 people. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a sixteen-block radius, destroyed or burned 86 cars, and shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings. The bomb was estimated to have caused at least $652 million worth of damage.

When it comes to the demented actions and words of right-wingers, they can never be held responsible, because in their mind they are the victims. Like Palin and the propagandists at Fox news, they are never to blame for the climate of fear, hate, and ignorance that has arisen. It's those dirty, hippie liberals, who are out to undermine the "real Americans," which are to blame.

***

UPDATE: Conservatives have already criticized and asked for the resignation of Sheriff Clarence Dupnik for his castigation of conservative rhetoric and theatrics. As usual, the right-wing is ramping up the propaganda by saying that it is the amoral liberal press that is painting them - the same people who have been marching around the country attending presidential speeches, congressional rallies, and health care debates with handguns and publicly attacking anyone who may disagree with them for the past two years- as the bad guys!

Robert Reich on Obama's Centrism

2011-01-08T08:29:00.002-05:00

If you widen the lens, the public is being sold a big lie — that our problems owe to unions and the size of government and not to fraud and deregulation and vast concentration of wealth. Obama’s failure is that he won’t challenge this Republican narrative, and give people a story that helps them connect the dots and understand where we’re going.

- Robert Reich, UC Berkeley Professor, "Obama the Centrist Irks a Liberal Lion"

Quote of the Day: Felix Salmon on the Plutocrats

2011-01-06T04:26:00.004-05:00

When it comes to US plutocrats, most of them are very similar to the Russian oligarchs who seized their country’s natural resources — they’re bankers and hedge-fund managers who seized their country’s financial resources. They produced no goods, and they created no jobs — quite the opposite. And so it makes sense for Americans who have lost their jobs and their hope to reclaim those financial resources, through mechanisms like a wealth tax or a financial transactions tax. The Silicon Valley elite would happily pay such things. And if the angry bankers went off to destabilize some other financial system, they wouldn’t actually be missed.

- Felix Salmon, "How to deal with the plutocrats"

America's bankers, partying like it's 2007!

2011-01-04T01:23:00.001-05:00

They're back on top of the world!

The same lot who who nearly destroyed the global economy, are back to their old habits and spending preferences. The New York Times reports on the behavior of the denizens of Wall Street and the chieftains of American commerce.

Two years after the onset of the financial crisis, the stock market is recovering and Wall Street’s moneyed elite are breathing easier again. And this means in some cases they are spending again — at times cautiously, but sometimes with a familiar swagger.

The article lists that business is booming at plastic surgery salons, buyers are "pouring" into art auctions, high end restaurants are flooded with patrons, and there is a bidding war for summertime rentals in the Hamptons. Given what their friends in Washington have done for them, the top earners believe their own economic situation is secure and are confident that their corpulent existence will not be interrupted soon.

It is precisely because of this behavior why we will continue to suffer crisis after crisis, until the whole wretched state collapses. Unlike rational people, who assess their moral failings, personal faults, and actions that have hurt greater society, these people are sociopaths who are never held accountable for their actions. Their only devotion is to the mighty dollar and indulging in materialistic shit.

Just consider some of their "efficient" economic activity:

Ms. Killoran, who runs a Brooklyn-based insurance company, says that over the last two years she cut her annual spending on cosmetic surgery in half, to about $3,000. She is now spending at pre-2008 levels. “I have to meet a lot of people, and this is part of investing in myself,” she said.

Or this tidbit of stupidity:

A Morgan Stanley trader recently tried to hire a dwarf for a bachelor party in Miami, asking the dwarf to meet him at the airport in a “Men in Black” style suit, according to e-mail exchanges.

At the end of the they day, the moneyed elite couldn't fucking care less about you. As George Carlin said, "They don't fucking care about you! They don't fucking care!"

Have basic services such as police, firefighting, and ambulance services in your city have been cut because of state and municipal fiscal problems? This isn't a problem for those Americans living in gated communities with private security and emergency health services. Stop wasting their time, because there's a sale at Barney's they have to attend.
If you lived in NY city and wondered why your roads or sidewalks weren't recently cleared of snow so you can go to work, you can thank Mayor Bloomberg for cutting services and refusing to tax the these rich motherfuckers; out of fear that they may move the whole industry to New Jersey or Hoboken, PA!
Your employer cut your wages and benefits, stopped making 401k payments or nuked your pension, or forced you to pay more for health care insurance. Not a problem for the folks vacationing in multi-million dollar homes in the Hamptons. Get a second job you bum!
Lost your job because these fucktards were scheming with other high-end crooks and blew up the economy in the process. Hey freeloader, talk to the hand, because they pay taxes too; although one has to go back decades to find a time when they were paying less.
Can't afford to send your kids to university! Serves them right for wanting to attend those bastions of fucking liberalism. Bloody hippies and communists!

This is the antithesis of a just and fair society.

Wachovia Bank accused of facilitating Ponzi scheme

2011-01-03T22:27:00.001-05:00

In my books, Wachovia is a poster child for banking malfeasance and fraud. In a previous post, I discussed Wachovia's involvement in laundering drug money from Mexican gangs. This particular situation forced the bank to forfiet $110 million dollars in profit associated with the money laundering operations and pay another $50 million in fines to the government.

McClatchy press has an article, where one,

George Theodule lured hundreds of people to invest with him, using his heritage, a network of churches and his radio show as bait, the bank through which he operated his massive Ponzi scheme looked the other way, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court this month.

Between 2007 and 2008, Theodule manipulated investors from Florida, Georgia, and New Jersey to deposit money in so-called investment clubs. The majority of those duped out of their investments were "working-class Haitian Americans who lost everything on the promise they would be guaranteed returns."

The lawsuits are pursued by a Miami based firm on behalf of Mr. Thoedule's clients. The basis of their lawsuits is that Wachovia should have "determined that the transactions Theodule was conducting were inconsistent with any legitimate business." The article points out that WaMu, Mr. Thoedule's former bank, discerned that his activities were not proper.

Federal regulations require banks to know the true identities of their customers and their customers' businesses, and banks must have systems in place to counter money laundering, said Kevin Mukri, spokesman for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The regulations are extensive...

Banks must verify the source of money coming into accounts, monitor transactions and determine if they are suspicious -- and report them and if necessary close down the accounts.

This isn't a matter of managerial oversight or the incompetence of employees within Wachovia. This was standard operating procedure for this bank, which has shown on multiple occassions it was more than happy to deal with criminal enterprises as long as they were getting part of the action.

The revolving door between Government and Big Business

2011-01-02T01:04:00.001-05:00

The New York Times reported earlier in December that Peter Orszag, Obama's first budget director, joined Citibank's investment banking group as a vice chairman. Mr. Orszag joins a long list of former White House officials who have moved from government and into the board room's of America's largest corporations.

Mr. Orszag’s actual duties are murky at best. He is expected to draw on his deep knowledge of public sector financial issues and his experience overseeing the federal budget to counsel Citi’s clients on various policy actions. He is also expected to be something of a corporate rainmaker.

The Economist magazine evaluates the transaction and considers the entire situation an unsuitable arrangement that enforces perceptions of Washingtonian corruption.

Not only is the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street unseemly, its frictionless gliding action suggests corruption is built right into the interface between our government and our great profit-seeking institutions.

James Fallows over at The Atlantic magazine is quoted by the Economist and relays is own thoughts on the matter.

But in the grander scheme, his move illustrates something that is just wrong. The idea that someone would help plan, advocate, and carry out an economic policy that played such a crucial role in the survival of a financial institution—and then, less than two years after his Administration took office, would take a job that (a) exemplifies the growing disparities the Administration says it's trying to correct and (b) unavoidably will call on knowledge and contacts Orszag developed while in recent public service—this says something bad about what is taken for granted in American public life.

When we notice similar patterns in other countries—for instance, how many offspring and in-laws of senior Chinese Communist officials have become very, very rich—we are quick to draw conclusions about structural injustices. Americans may not "notice" Orszag-like migrations, in the sense of devoting big news coverage to them. But these stories pile up in the background to create a broad American sense that politics is rigged, and opportunity too.

The system as I have elaborated in a number of previous posts (ex. here, here, here, here, and here) is corrupt. Here is a man with all the necessary knowledge on how to circumvent and manipulate whatever limited and existing impediments there are and will use that to his new employer's maximum benefit. Robert Rubin, former Treasury Secretary under Clinton, joined Citibank to become a senior adviser and board member, with a $10 million a year paycheck with no management responsibility. Carlos Gutierrez, a former commerce secretary under President George W. Bush, will join Citibank alongside Mr. Orszag, "to counsel Citi’s clients on various policy actions."

It is clear that the government is run by persons whose only interest is in using government to get rich quickly. We need to stop wasting our time asking whether the system is broken; it is. The real question is how much worst is it going to get before the whole corpulent mess implodes?

Why Big Business hates Obama

2011-01-01T22:04:00.006-05:00

Obviously when the S&P 500 index has rebounded by almost 50% in the time that Obama has been president, the only thing left to do is publicly blame him for all the horrible and destructive socialist policies he is pursuing. After all, how else can someone explain that "American companies just had their best quarter ever, earning profits at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion in the third quarter." Deutsche Bank has stated that corporate profits per worker have rebounded to nearly an all-time high in the period. In addition, the banking industry, oil companies, and health insurance companies, all companies with extensive lobbying operations, are all likely to break profit records for 2010.

How this comports with the general narrative that Obama and the Democrats have created a climate of legislative uncertainty is unclear. American businesses are now as or even more profitable than they were before the start of the great recession. The only intelligent answer is that Obama's policies have greatly benefited big business, while it has done little to significantly reduce unemployment and mobilize those people whose jobs have been offshored into gaining new skills and meaningful careers.

Percentage of Canadians using the US health care system

2011-01-01T21:51:00.007-05:00

The objective of this chart is not to cheer-lead on how great the Canadian health care system is; relative to European systems it's mediocre. Rather, the chart is meant to illustrate that most Canadians aren't willing to spend vast sums of money on American health care that is comparable to what they are already receiving through a publicly taxed system. Although a substantial number of Canadians do annually make their way into American hospitals for health care, for the majority it is for services that are not obtainable or easily performed within Canada and which is paid for by the patent's provincial government.

The Commonwealth Fund conducted a study earlier this year on 19 industrialized nations; including Australia, Canada, several European nations, and the USA. The results were:

the U.S. [ranked] 19th in infant mortality, 15th in preventable mortality and 14th in the use of electronic medical records, all despite spending far and away the greatest percentage of GDP on health care. Relative to other comparable countries surveyed, the U.S. has the greatest incidence of medical and prescription errors, highest emergency room waiting times and ranks near the bottom in duplicate medical tests. The U.S. spends 7.3% of its health dollars on administration and insurance, compared to just 1.9% in France, 2.6% in Canada, and 3.3% in the UK.

Furthermore, the study concluded that Canada spends slightly more than half of what America does per capita for health care, yet reaches similar if not better overall results in terms of quality, access, efficiency, equity, and overall citizen health.

On the Banality of Evil: A Psychiatric examination of Hermann Goering

2010-12-31T23:58:00.001-05:00

Scientific American Mind has an interesting article on the post-war psychiatric examination of Hermann Goering; Hitler's deputy and president of the (Nazi) Reichstag.

The article summarizes the work of American psychiatrist Dr. David Kelley, who spent extensive time interviewing and evaluating Hermann Goering and other high-ranking members of the defeated Nazi government. His analysis ran contrary to the allies own propaganda, which stated that Nazi's were "madmen" and insane.

[Kelley] believed that Goering and his cohorts were commonplace people and that their personalities "could be duplicated in any country of the world today"... In other words, the Holocaust and the war's other heinous crimes were the products of healthy minds.

The implications are not trivial. For example, many of the events that have occurred as a result of America's own war against global terrorism can also be explained, not as the act of mentally deranged "bad apples," but of people seduced by their own power and thus willing to erase the boundaries of accepted behavior and engage in barbarism. The obscenities employed in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, at black-site torture centers across the world, and even in America's own domestic prisons, are examples where seemingly normal people can deviate from established rules of conduct and pursue grotesque and monstrous criminality in the name of the state and ideology.

Ritholtz on the rise of the Corporatocracy

2010-12-31T22:11:00.003-05:00

Over the past 30-years both Republican and Democratic parties have drifted from their traditional positions towards extreme stances. Throughout this period pro-corporate policies that catered to the balance sheets of multinationals and those with enough cash to pay-to-play, have defined the legislative agendas of both federal and state politicians. Left-wing political activists, like Ralph Nader, have been calling Washington D.C. "corporate occupied territory" for the past two decades. Consider the following:

The revolving door between corporate officers and government employees has become the norm.
A study conducted in 2005 by Public Citizen found that from 1998, "43 percent of the 198 members of Congress who left government to join private life have registered to lobby."
Politicians have become indentured servants to special interest groups and major lobbyists in the financial/insurance industries, the military-industrial complex, the energy/ chemicals sector, big-pharma, corporate agricultural, and the communications/ electronics industries.
Legislation is often written directly by lobbyists and submitted to congressmen and state legislators for direct approval. Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, told The Atlantic magazine, "The average American doesn't realize how much of the laws are written by lobbyists... It's shocking how the system actually works."
"Corruption, in its institutional sense, denotes the degeneration of republican forms of government into despotism, and typically comes about when the private ends of a narrow faction of citizens succeed in capturing the engines of government." (Harper's, Speak, Money, Oct. 2010)
The Brookings Institute calls "The 5-4 conservative majority decision in Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission that struck many decades of law and precedent [to] likely go down in history as one of the Supreme Court's most egregious exercises of judicial activism." The Roberts court, "dismissed the legitimacy of laws... equated the free speech protections of individuals and corporations in spite of countless laws and precedents that insisted on meaningful differences."
A USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll taken Dec. 16-18, 2005 found that 49% of American adults say they believe "most members of Congress are corrupt."
The Republicans K-street project, was a project by now convicted former congressman Tom Delay to coerce lobbying firms to "hire Republicans in top positions, and to reward loyal GOP lobbyists with access to influential officials."
Super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, was sentenced in 2006 for conspiracy, fraud, and tax evasion related to his lobbying efforts

Barry Ritholtz, CEO of FusionIQ (an investment firm) and primary blogger at The Big Picture tells his readers that:

In 2009 and 2010, I learned that Corporate America took over the political process via their exhaustive lobbying efforts. What was once a Democracy is now a Corporatocracy... Politicians do the bidding not for the people, but for the corporate establishment. Those people who want to blame the barking, snarling government for all the woes of the world do not want you to look further up the leash to see who is giving the commands. These corporate apologists pretend to be philosophers, but in reality they are mere Fellatrix, bought and paid for by their lords and masters.

We've reached a turning point. When growth was evident, jobs were available, and cheap accessible credit abounded, everyone was happy and willing to keep dancing to the same tune. Now that the bill is past due and we're looking at decade of low growth or worst, investors and everyday persons on both the right and the left are seeing the system for what it is. Ritholtz acknowledges that we were warned by the founding fathers, Eisenhower on the military-industrial complex, and countless other critics about the perils of what philosopher Sheldon Wolin has described as inverted totalitarianism.

The corporate state does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader. It is defined by the anonymity and facelessness of the corporation.

The viciousness and lawlessness of the corporatocracy knows no bounds. Like Orwell's 1984, those in control have no interest in the betterment of mankind or pursuing nationalistic agendas, they are solely interested in power for power's sake. And in the polluted materialistic cesspool that is modern existence, that power is obtained through the collection and amassment of wealth and money.

A Government for, by, and of the Corporations

2010-12-31T07:01:00.011-05:00

Bloomberg News has an end of the year article ("Out of Lehman's Ashes Wall Street Gets Most of What It Wants") and an interview with its lead author, Christine Harper, on the subversion of the financial industry reform and the underlying power of the banks over Washington DC's political class.

The past two years have seen the worst economic turn down in the American economy since the Great Depression. The origins of this downturn emanate nearly exclusively from America's financial industry, which manipulated legislators in the 1990's to abandon historic safeguards and firewalls and then engineered novel methods to expand and grow their balance sheets. The result was a global recession that destroyed trillions of dollars worth of capital, reduced nations like Iceland, Ireland, and Latvia into economic wastelands, and has crippled growth across the Western world. However, in that same period, the same institutions that caused so much damage and harm to the world have grown richer than ever.

The last two years have been the best ever for combined investment-banking and trading revenue at Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, 56, and his top deputies are in line to collect more than $100 million in delayed 2007 bonuses -- six months after paying $550 million to settle a fraud lawsuit related to the firm’s behavior that year. Citigroup, the bank that needed more taxpayer support than any other, has a balance sheet 14 percent bigger than it was four years ago.

The article elaborates on how the Obama administration, from its very inception, was uninterested in challenging the banks. The inclusion of former Clinton era deregulatory stalwarts, like Lawrence Summers, and persons directly responsible for the financial crisis, such as former president of the Federal Reserve bank of NY, Timothy Geithner, lead Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the IMF, to conclude “that the banks were going to get a free pass." Reformers were politely ignored and persons that significantly challenged the status quo "were dismissed as unrealistic, misinformed, advancing ulterior motives or damaging to U.S. competitiveness."

The too big to fail (TBTF) banks are now even bigger and the legislation crafted by congress is incapable of deterring these monopolies from engaging in even more disastrous swindles. Meaningful changes, such as the re-introduction of Glass-Steagall or even what became known as the Volcker Rule, which would "ban proprietary trading at regulated banks and prohibit them from owning hedge funds and private equity funds" was water-downed, gutted, and then abandoned altogether.

Attempts to reign in the excessive salaries and bonus structures at the big banks were immediately defeated by representatives from both the corrupt Republican and Democratic parties.

71 percent of Americans said big bonuses should be banned this year at Wall Street firms that took taxpayer bailouts, and 17 percent said bonuses above $400,000 should be subject to a one-time 50 percent tax. Only 7 percent of the respondents said they consider bonuses a reflection of Wall Street’s return to health and an appropriate incentive.

Even though a clear majority of citizens wanted the plutocrats pay to be cut for their egregious mishandling of the economy, congress in collusion with the robber-barons would have none of it.

To ensure that none of their paid whores in congress would go off message or engage in populist pandering, lobbying efforts during the 2010 election period were thrown into overdrive.

The biggest financial companies increased their spending on lobbying in the first nine months of 2010 as they sought to influence the legislative outcome, according to Senate records. JPMorgan’s advocacy spending grew 35 percent, to $5.8 million from $4.3 million, while Goldman Sachs’s jumped 71 percent to $3.6 million.

The Dodd-Frank Act for financial industry reform was eventually passed, but:

The law won’t prevent lenders with federally guaranteed deposits from gambling in the derivatives markets, though it will place restrictions on some types of contracts and require more transparent trading and central clearing. It does little to solve the danger posed by leveraged firms reliant on fickle markets for funding.

Two decades of legislative changes have given the banks and the financial industry everything they wanted; yet that was not enough. Today every American citizen, through the generosity of their political representatives in Washington, is forced to subsidize the incompetence and greed of the bankers. In return you, joe-public, are given a moribund economy, marginal economic growth, reduced benefits, no retirement, a society with high structural unemployment, and the comforting thought that all those rich motherfuckers on Wall St. are enjoying their vacations in the Hamptons on your dime.

Casino Jack Movie Trailer

2010-12-31T03:11:00.000-05:00

BofA forecloses despite not a single payment missed!

2010-12-31T02:47:00.001-05:00

The illegal and criminal machinations of the American banking industry continues to be exposed on a daily basis. Consider this latest hor d'oeuvres that the media has overlooked.

[Bank of America] earlier this month notified Shock Baitch and his wife Lisa (Friedman) Baitch that foreclosure action will start today – Christmas eve – unless the couple agrees to put their home up for a forced sale. As of Thursday night Bank Of America has not backed down from its foreclosure threat.

Why?

Because another unit of Bank of America erroneously reported to credit agencies that the family was seeking a loan modification, ruining their credit rating and as the result putting their mortgage into default.

All this is happening even though the bank – after admitting it erred and sent a letter of apology in September – handed this case to a special unit at Bank of America that is charged with dealing with severe customer issues. It promised to notify the credit reporting agencies that the couple were not deadbeats, but were good credit risks.

This isn't some South Florida wasteland, where automated robosigners operating 24/7 are churning out bogus legal documents without any oversight. The case in example is in Hartford, Connecticut, the historic international center of the insurance industry and thus a city and state steeped in the rigors of proper accounting and legal procedures. As Barry Ritholtz of the "Big Picture" blog stated on this subject:

This is not about keeping deadbeats in their homes, as a few idiots and liars have asserted. The corporate sympathizers who are too busy fellating the bank to recognize what is going should be ignored. This is about fundamental property rights and the Rule of Law in the United States — nothing less.

Listen to what the homeowners in this particular case have to say about the useless bags of corrupt corporate shit that is Bank of America:

“Bank of America lied and submitted fraudulent information to the credit bureaus and now I am literally and financially paying for it,” Baitch said. “I looked into help with a consumer counseling service, but we can’t participate because our income is too low to meet the payment requirement. I looked into bankruptcy, but we have too much equity in the house. I cannot meet the minimum payments now on the credit cards and may have to default. I am in a situation that I should have never been in since [the bank] destroyed our credit and ability to refinance. All our debt should have been consolidated and I should have positive cash flow monthly not negative.”

Where is the great socialist Barack Obama on this matter? According to the press, the Obama administration is very, very mad at the perceived fraud undertaken by the banks, but on the other hand "the administration had yet to find anything fundamentally flawed in how large banks securitized home loans or how they foreclosed on them."

Well, Mr. Obama, I have for you a very real and obvious case of how the banks foreclosure process is fundamentally flawed and illegal. So while critics bloviate about the man's so-called socialist policies, he continues to carry water for the banks and refuses to hold his biggest corporate donors accountable for the their illegal behavior.

Chillout Session: Dogs of War

2010-12-31T01:30:00.004-05:00

Quote of the Day: On the Rise of Statism

2010-12-29T04:23:00.001-05:00

After the excesses of the Bush Administration, the failure to prosecute those within it who committed illegal acts, President Obama's claim that he is empowered to order the extra-judicial assasination of American citizens far from any battlefield, the treatment of Bradley Manning in custody, TSA's recent behavior, the growth of the DEA, the expansion of the surveillance state, and the bipartisan stamp of approval on indefinite detention – among other things! – the federal government has shown itself to be the most likely entity in American life to behave abusively toward American citizens.

- Conor Friedersdorf, "Who Is It That Shuts Down Dissent?"

NYT's Book Review of Matt Taibbi's "Griftopia"

2010-12-29T03:28:00.007-05:00

The New York Times Sunday Book Review looks at Matt Taibbi's newest publication "Griftopia"

The reviewer summarizes the book with the following:

In “Griftopia,” a relentlessly disturbing, penetrating exploration of the root causes of the trauma that upended economic security in millions of American homes, Taibbi argues that what unfolded was far from accidental. Rather, the nation suffered the equivalent of a hostile takeover of key areas of its commercial life by investment banking houses, while regulators and members of Congress abdicated their responsibilities either because they were influenced by campaign cash or because they believed the fairy tale that unsupervised markets always work best. The result, Taibbi asserts, was a thieves’ paradise — Griftopia.

Taibbi takes on the zombie lie, pushed by right-wing hacks, that the banks were forced to sell subprime mortgages to poor people and that Fannie Mae and Fredie Mac were the root causes of the crisis.

Taibbi persuasively dismisses the argument that the financial crisis was caused by poor people with a taste for real estate, delineating how Wall Street eagerly handed out mortgages to anyone with a pulse, and then used the home loans as the material for a far more lucrative enterprise — the exotic investments known as derivatives. The derivatives market depended upon a steady supply of mortgages. But when too many of the bets went bad, Wall Street persuaded the Treasury to construct bailouts that Taibbi describes as a “labyrinthine financial sewage system designed to stick us all with the raw waste and pump clean water back to Wall Street.”

The book attacks the mindless Tea-Party movement, calls Alan Greenspan the biggest asshole in the universe, delves into America's bubble machine typified by the original vampire-squid, Goldman Sachs, and considers how Obama's health care initiative is nothing less than a boondoggle for the toxic-sludge dealers in big-Pharma and the nickle-and-dime kleptomaniacs in the so-called insurance business. As emotionally cathartic as it is to find someone who will call the biggest thieves and crooks on the planet, what they truly are. It is Taibbi's constant attack on the enterprises of American capitalism, those revered and sacrosanct temples, in which he viciously and relentlessly dismantles and exposes as being little more than high-end criminal rings, that is most satisfying.

An excellent read. I hope someone was generous enough to put it under your Christmas tree.

Obama, bagman for Bush's torture adventures

2010-12-28T01:27:00.007-05:00

McClatchy Press has an excellent summary, through Wikileaks, of the Machiavellian maneuvers made by the Obama White House to undermine both international law and justice.

This blog has in the past described how the administration of Barack Obama over the past two years, has given "support and comfort" to the torturers and fiends of the Bush junta (here, here, and here). A number of prominent political and legal commentators have equally concluded that Obama, his AG, and members of his administration are now as culpable as their predecessors in concealing acts of torture, manipulating foreign governments to forsake investigations of American criminality, and failing to vigorously uphold constitutional prerogatives in prosecuting those who have violated domestic laws and international treaties, to which America is signature to.

In 2009, the Obama administration sent Republican Senator Mel Martinez to Spain to cajole the Spanish judiciary into abandoning investigations lead by Spanish magistrate, Baltasar Garzón into six Bush lawyers who laid, "the foundation for abuse of detainees in the months following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks." The Spanish investigations concerned Alberto Gonzales, who described parts of the Geneva conventions "quant" and "obsolete" after 9-11; Bush lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee; David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney's counsel; William "Jim" Haynes, Defense Department General Counsel; and Doug Feith, a Pentagon undersecretary who handled policy issues for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

The Spaniards were not swayed and told Martinez and the American ambassador to Spain, that "The independence of the judiciary and the process must be respected.'' Michael Ratner, a civil rights attorney affiliated with the Center for Constitutional Rights, states that "The U.S. prides itself on our own independent judiciary... But here you have the hypocrisy of the U.S. government trying to influence an independent judicial system to bend its laws and own rules.''

The timeline of the above diplomatic maneuvers coincides with Obama's attempt to marginalize Bush's crimes:

But by the time Spain's Association for the Dignity of Prisoners filed the torture complaint that U.S. diplomatic circles found so troubling, the Obama White House was resisting calls to set up a Truth Commission or assign a special prosecutor to examine the legal framework that set up Guantánamo and permitted "enhanced interrogation techniques'' that included waterboarding high-value detainees.

"Generally speaking, I'm more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards," Obama said on Feb. 9, 2009.

How Mr. Obama, a man who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, could become protector and defender of his predecessor's criminality, will be an issue that historians will grapple with for decades. The emotional cheers of "change you can believe in" lie exposed as election based propaganda, told by the architects of Empire to confuse the guilible masses into believing that their opinion actually matters.

Americans Negotiating with Taliban Impostor!

2010-12-27T01:32:00.004-05:00

Over and over, the impression given by our marginally elected politicians is that they and their well educated bureaucracy, if given enough time and effort are capable of implementing effective leadership and results across the globe. The Afghan war is a typical example, in which we the citizens of the West have been promised that the country would be modernized and made safe from the Taliban.

Despite nearly a decade there, neither NATO nor America seems capable of winning a war against a fifth rate nation. Why is that? The reason might have something to do with the type of people who we have running the show over there. Consider this and file it under "My God, they can't be this Fucking Stupid!"

According to international newspapers, both NATO and America have been negotiating with an impostor who claimed to be a high ranking Taliban commander.

NATO and Afghan officials said they held three meetings with the man, who traveled from in Pakistan, where Taliban leaders have taken refuge.

The fake Taliban leader even met with President Hamid Karzai, having been flown to Kabul on a NATO aircraft and ushered into the presidential palace, officials said.

The episode underscores the uncertain and even bizarre nature of the atmosphere in which Afghan and American leaders search for ways to bring the nine-year-old American-led war to an end. The leaders of the Taliban are believed to be hiding in Pakistan, possibly with the assistance of the Pakistani government, which receives billions of dollars in American aid.

That's right. The US government, including Gen. David Petreaus the US Senior military commander in the region, was commenting on the progress they were having in negotiating with... a fucking impostor! The impostor who for months was taking their money and pretending to be interested in halting the Talban's offensives in Afghanistan against NATO troops. According to others:

The man may have been a Taliban agent. “The Taliban are cleverer than the Americans and our own intelligence service,” said a senior Afghan official who is familiar with the case. “They are playing games.”

Brilliant! At this point any statements made by anyone in any Western government can be considered useless. We are fighting semi-literate tribesmen, who have no formal military training, no firm logistical support lines, no long term financing for their guerrilla campaigns, and no discernible resources; other than that provided by the duplicitous and corrupt Pakistani. Yet we are being told that the war will last for another five years! Send Biden, Obama, and every member of congress and their adult relatives to do a tour of duty in Afghanistan and this war will end tomorrow.

The continued ascent of the surveillance state

2010-12-26T23:41:00.008-05:00

Recently Dana Priest and William Arkin of the Washington Post published another chapter into their ongoing investigation of America's secretive information gathering operations. In the past series, they discussed the emerging nexus between corporate entities, clandestine information services, and the government. A system so large that "Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications." No single entity within the government is capable of understanding the totality or scope of the enterprise; not even the president's own top officials on the subject.

The most recent chapter to this story, involves the involvement of state and local police agencies. Across the nation terrorism task forces have been created to capture information related to domestic threats that may arise in each jurisdiction in America. The federal government has provided grants to this regional governments and police forces to purchase high-end military surveillance systems and communication networks to monitor and manage local populations. In those cases where no terrorism related activities are identifiable, the new task forces are used to monitor criminal classes and/or any person or group the state deems of interest.

The most contentious aspect of the government surveillance lies in the collection of data on individuals who are completely innocent of any wrongdoing. A Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, or SAR, has been established to collect data (personal, commercial, financial,...etc) upon any person the state determines suspicious. Unlike the conventional system, where the state does not have the right to collect and horde every minuta of data about your life, the new terrorism laws and surveillance state network, casts a wide net.

As of December, there were 161,948 suspicious activity files in the classified Guardian database, mostly leads from FBI headquarters and state field offices. Two years ago, the bureau set up an unclassified section of the database so state and local agencies could send in suspicious incident reports and review those submitted by their counterparts in other states. Some 890 state and local agencies have sent in 7,197 reports so far.

The objective of the system is to amass as much information on each person within the United States as possible. The federal state has had a long and sordid history of monitoring, infiltrating, and undermining civilian populations engaged in nothing less than constitutionally sanctioned criticism of government practices. The following examples confirm the misuse of the current security state powers:

In Virginia, the state's fusion center published a terrorism threat assessment in 2009 naming historically black colleges as potential hubs for terrorism.
From 2005 to 2007, the Maryland State Police went even further, infiltrating and labeling as terrorists local groups devoted to human rights, antiwar causes and bike lanes.
And in Pennsylvania this year, a local contractor hired to write intelligence bulletins filled them with information about lawful meetings as varied as Pennsylvania Tea Party Patriots Coalition gatherings, antiwar protests and an event at which environmental activists dressed up as Santa Claus and handed out coal-filled stockings

In America, the public has generally accepted the rise of the surveillance state. Trivialities such as civil liberties, the abuse of constitutional freedoms, the invasion of individual privacy, and the monitoring of lawful public assemblies, are glossed off by the mainstream media and the population as minor irritants that only affect those swarthy and obviously guilty dark-skinned persons with funny names. Glenn Greenwald expands on this asymmetric information relationship:

One of the hallmarks of an authoritarian government is its fixation on hiding everything it does behind a wall of secrecy while simultaneously monitoring, invading and collecting files on everything its citizenry does. Based on the Francis Bacon aphorism that "knowledge is power," this is the extreme imbalance that renders the ruling class omnipotent and citizens powerless.

The cabal of corporate fascists has extended its tentacles into every aspect and function of every person in the nation. Big brother is not just a metaphor, he is the state.

Airport Security: protecting the state's right to abuse you

2010-12-26T01:21:00.003-05:00

According to news reports from ABC news' Austin, TX affiliate, a middle aged woman was assaulted by TSA employees, dragged out of Austin airport, and arrested by local police for refusing to allow the state to physically examine her breasts. Unless I'm your physician or a law enforcement official who has probable cause to believe that you are engaged in a criminal act, groping a woman's breasts in public is considered sexual assault. Under America's authoritarian regime, the state in the name of national security has the right to sexual assault any woman: your wife, mother, sister, or daughter, in the name of protecting the nation from overheated and dangerous tities.

Claire Hirschkind, fourth amendment rights proponent and the perpetrator of this heinous act of civil disobedience, stated to the press that the basis of her actions was that "she [was] a rape victim [sic] who has a pacemaker-type device implanted in her chest." The news report outlines the events:

Hirschkind was hoping to spend Christmas with friends in California, but she never made it past the security checkpoint.

"I can't go through because I have the equivalent of a pacemaker in me," she said.

Hirschkind said because of the device in her body, she was led to a female TSA employee and three Austin police officers. She says she was told she was going to be patted down.

"I turned to the police officer and said, 'I have given no due cause to give up my constitutional rights. You can wand me,'" and they said, 'No, you have to do this,'" she said.

Hirschkind agreed to the pat down, but on one condition.

"I told them, 'No, I'm not going to have my breasts felt,' and she said, 'Yes, you are,'" said Hirschkind.

When Hirschkind refused, she says that "the police actually pushed me to the floor, (and) handcuffed me. I was crying by then. They drug me 25 yards across the floor in front of the whole security."

I have been criticising the absolute uselessness of this entire "fear-mongering" and civil liberties denying exercise for sometime. In an earlier blog ("Will this scanner make my penis look bigger?"), I discussed the limited value to subjecting persons to invasive an qualitatively ineffective screening practices. Civil libertarians and consumer advocates have entered lawsuits and issued numerous complaints about the virtual strip-searching of innocent civilians (examples here, here, and here). The ACLU has also been warning people, for much of the past year, as to the authoritarian over-reach of airport screening procedures:

what was formerly voluntary is now mandatory... this is the classic way that invasive technologies reach us: the authorities make them as palatable as possible to get the public to swallow them (they’ll say it’s "voluntary," or "applied only in certain cases," and tell you it’s chock-full of privacy protections). Then once they’re accepted, they become more and more intrusive in all the ways the ACLU always warns against.

Ralph Nader wrote to President Obama earlier in 2010, to ask him to consider the potential public health risks entailing the exposure of millions of citizens to ionizing radiation through the employment of not fully tested technology at the nation's airports. He further elaborates on previous mistakes made by the government in pushing unsound technology:

It was wasteful enough for the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) to install the “puffer” security devices at U.S. airports and then withdraw them because they were found to be “unreliable” at a cost of $30 million to taxpayers. Now, a far larger amount of taxpayer money is being spent on these scanning devices by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which claims it is not obligated to observe the Administrative Procedures Act.

Prior to the American Thanksgiving holiday season, a national debate proceeded on the absurdity of the entire "junk-touching" process. Even this limited outcropping of sensibility has been revealed to be little more than political posturing and an attempt by right-wing media to publicly embarrass the Obama administration. Glenn Greenwald explains:

I have no doubt -- none -- that if there were a Republican President in office now, these very same people would not only be defending the TSA in the name of Staying Safe, but maligning critics as Privacy Fetishists, Civil Liberties Extremists, and Friends of The Terrorists... In the other corner, we have the Democrats, who -- in perfect unison -- would be screaming bloody murder about these methods and waving the Flag of Civil Liberties if George W. Bush were still President, as they would smell partisan advantage from doing so. But since it's Barack Obama who is President, they are -- with a few exceptions -- meekly raising concerns, though more often acquiescent to the TSA when they aren't outright supportive.

Of course, all this is to protect you the feeble minded and easily scared public. In the original ABC article discussing Ms. Hirschkind, fellow passenger Emily Protine says it all, "It's unfortunate that that happened and she didn't get to fly home, but it makes me feel a little safer." Safer from what? Another ABC News story discusses the case of Houston businessman Farid Seif who accidentally brought a loaded gun in his carry on luggage and evaded detection. Despite assurances that airport safety is better than ever, field research tells a completely different story.

Experts say every year since the September 11 attacks, federal agencies have conducted random, covert tests of airport security. A person briefed on the latest tests tells ABC News the failure rate approaches 70 percent at some major airports. Two weeks ago, TSA's new director said every test gun, bomb part or knife got past screeners at some airports.

How is that nearly ten years after Sept-11, people with firearms are walking aboard airplanes in their hand luggage? Yet we are told that by radiating large segments of innocent people with ionizing radiation and subjecting people to invasive search practices will make us all safer.

Why WikiLeaks matters in this age of Chinese Democracy

2010-12-06T01:42:00.008-05:00

In Spain, the WikiLeaks disclosures have dominated the news for three days now. The reporting has been led by the level-headed El País, with its nationwide competitor, Público, lagging only a bit behind. Attention has focused on three separate matters, each pending in the Spanish national security court, the Audiencia Nacional: the investigation into the 2003 death of a Spanish cameraman, José Cuoso, as a result of the mistaken shelling of Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel by a U.S. tank; an investigation into the torture of Spanish subjects held at Guantánamo; and a probe into the use of Spanish bases and airfields for extraordinary renditions flights, including the one which took Khaled El-Masri to Baghdad and then on to Afghanistan in 2003.

- Scott Horton, "The Madrid Cables"

Within the elite political classes and global mainstream media, there is a rising anger and palatable contempt of Wikileaks' periodic information dumps. The information to date has not been on the scope of the Pentagon Papers. As Fareed Zakeria said in Time magazine, "The Pentagon papers revealed that the U.S. engaged in a systematic campaign to deceive the world and the American people and that its private actions were often the opposite of its stated public policy." The information clearly has shown governments across the world, be that autocratic or supposedly democratic, to have engaged in deceit, deception, and propaganda to achieve their own statist objectives. Many in the MSM yawn and say that everything posted has been known. Perhaps, but the MSM certainly didn't do their job in actively verifying those known suppositions. Others, like CNN's Wolf Blitzer are filled with rage that anyone would dare to willingly examine the state secrets of the American Empire without first getting the state's tacit approval; like how him and all the other "respectable" laggards of the MSM do.

One commentator has said, "The difference between WikiLeaks and other media organizations is that WikiLeaks is doing its job properly." Statist leaning politicians and right-wing bloggers on the other hand, are issuing their typical belligerent and illogical fatwas on WikiLeaks. Despite an obvious understanding of the role of freedom of the press and in the case of America, the first amendment of the US constitution, we have the following verbal flatulence.

Newt Gingrich, former Republican speaker of the US House of Representatives stated that Juilan Assange of WikiLeaks, "deserves to be hunted and executed" and held as an "enemy combatant."
Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told NBC's David Gregory Sunday that Assange is a terrorist.
Caribou Barbie (aka Sarah Palin) suggested that Assange deserved the same treatment as terrorists and insurgents.
Sen. Lieberman (I-CT) has asked American companies to not assist WikiLeaks disseminate the data. To date, Amazon.com has pulled WikiLeaks from its servers, PayPal has stopped donations, and a Seattle based company Tableau Software removed data visualizations published by WikiLeaks to Tableau Public.
Tom Flanagan, a professor at the University of Calgary and former advisor to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, half-jokingly called for Mr. Obama to assassinate Mr. Assange.
National Review's Jonah Goldberg asked, "Why wasn't Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago?"
The same politicians who demanded that America illegally invade Iraq and permanently occupy Afghanistan, now claim that that WikiLeaks will have blood on its hands.

When the White House, the Pentagon, or any other agent of the government willingly passes "state secrets" to the press, such as in the lead-up to the Iraq war through the NY Times' Judith Miller or in the outing of CIA WMD investigator Valerie Plame, the same voices are silent. When official court stenographer for the Bush White House, Bob Woodward, distributes state secrets in his books, in the way that teenage girls spread gossip, the mainstream press is agog with effuse praise.

On another level, the entire WikiLeaks criticism is typical of the fundamental contempt that the political and media class has for democracy, transparency, and government accountability. Governments do not want anyone to understand how incompetent and criminal they are in their everyday blunders. The American government has shown an extreme and persistent proclivity to lie to its citizens, to disseminate false information to the press and public, and conceal their criminal actions to further its own statist objectives. They and their paid cultural managers want a population engaged in the trivial and the irrelevant. A public that is aware and actively demanding accountability is an unacceptable situation for those leading the American Empire Project.

We are living in an age of Chinese Democracy, where the our imperious leaders tell us we are free to do as we are ordered. The government continues to classify more and more of its activities behind the shield of state secrets, while maximizing its surveillance of innocent people through both legal and illegal means. This is why WikiLeaks matters. The lies that lead to the invasion of Vietnam, the falsehoods that attempted to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the evasion of responsibility surrounding the regulatory framework that lead to the Great Recession, the concealment of war crimes committed by US soldiers and CIA functionaries, the erosion of civil liberties and freedom... etc. are all reasons why whistle-blowers like WikiLeaks matter to functioning democracies.

Dubya is Threatened with Arrest if He Visits London, UK!

2010-12-05T23:31:00.008-05:00

From Scott Horton's blog over at Harper's comes this exquisite piece of news, from the city of London's conservative Mayor. I usually do not repost entire posts of others, but this succinct and insightful post is too valuable to not be shared in its totality. Bold print has been added by me.

London’s Tory mayor, Boris Johnson, has some strong words of caution for former president George W. Bush: if you come to Europe to promote your book, pack heavily and be prepared for a long stay. In fact, you may “never see Texas again.” As he sees it, Bush’s book and statements he has made in efforts to market it constitute admissions of serious crimes.

Initial reports about Bush’s autobiography did not go over well in Europe, and Britain’s new Conservative government was particularly eager to push back against suggestions that their conservatism had any resemblance to the Bush variety. Bush insisted this his decision to use waterboarding and other torture techniques kept Britain safe. But British Conservatives are having none of it:
In the case of the three men waterboarded on Bush’s orders, British ministers are not aware of any valuable information they gave about plots against Heathrow, Canary Wharf or anywhere else. All the policy has achieved is to degrade America in the eyes of the world, and to allow America’s enemies to utter great whoops of vindication. It is not good enough for Dubya now to claim that what he did was OK, because “the lawyers said it was legal”.
As Johnson sees it, the torture debate is ultimately about America’s claim to leadership in the world and the Bush team’s sullying of the nation’s reputation:
How could America complain to the Burmese generals about the house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, when a president authorised torture? How can we talk about human rights in Beijing, when our number one ally and friend seems to be defending this kind of behaviour? I can’t think of any other American president, in my lifetime, who would have spoken in this way. Mr Bush should have remembered the words of the great Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who said in 1863 that “military necessity does not admit of cruelty”. Damn right.

***

I have been saying this for years. In yesterday's blog on Republican corruption, I stated that it is only a matter of time before someone in the Bush junta is ensnared and eventually prosecuted for international legal problems arising from their years of legal misconduct. Whilst America's media glosses over the fact that both Dick Cheney and George W. Bush have admitted to ordering torture, people around the world are looking carefully at the decider's words and movement and evaluating the possibility of bringing him or his henchmen in front of a magistrate to explain themselves in court.

What we have also seen is that Mr. Obama has made substantial efforts to collude with the former administration in shielding and protecting them from domestic and international prosecutions. Andrew Sulivan states in his blog that the most recent WikiLeaks information dump, "reveal an extraordinary effort by the US embassy and the Bush and Obama administrations to cajole, pressure, redirect and try to rig legal cases that could reveal the war crimes of the previous administration." Both administrations are bound by the pirate's ethic of evading responsibility and accountability for any action they or their Jolly-Roger-like counterparts may engage in. The Obama administration is now culpable in the crimes of his predecessors, and needs to explain their actions, at the very least, to the voters who demanded change that they could believe in.

Sen. Sanders on the Greed of the Plutocrats

2010-12-05T18:36:00.001-05:00

Republican Corruption Tales...

2010-12-05T04:06:00.002-05:00

In the past two weeks, two particular incidents have occurred that crystallizes the level of corruption and nepotism within the ranks of America's conservative party and big business interests.

The first involves the man who came to represent Republican corruption across America during the 2006 election; former Texas congressman and majority house leader Tom Delay. In 2005, Delay known on the Hill as "the hammer" for his harsh lobbying and legislative practices, was indicated for money-laundering and evading Texas anti-corruption laws. Two weeks ago, a jury in Austin, Texas, after 19-hours of deliberations found him guilty.

The NY Times reports on the case:

The verdict ends the latest chapter in a long legal battle that forced Mr. DeLay to step down. The trial also opened a window on the world of campaign financing, as jurors heard testimony about large contributions flowing to Mr. DeLay from corporations seeking to influence him, and about junkets to luxury resorts where the congressman would rub shoulders with lobbyists in return for donations.

Delay was initially charged for violating Texas campaign finance laws, but prosecutors realizing it would be impossible to convict him under these terms decided to prosecute him under a 1903 law, in which Texas prohibited corporations from giving money to candidates directly or indirectly. The details surrounding Mr. Delay participating in a transfer of money from private donors to his PAC to Texas candidates have never been in question. What the jury determined though is that Delay actively engaged in flouting state laws to subvert democracy and manipulate state elections in favor of Republican candidates.

***

The second case involves another No.2 man amongst the conservative machine. Charges of international corruption have been made against the man most responsible for the invasion of Iraq, the institution of torture as American foreign policy, and extending a regulatory framework that led to the greatest economic collapse in American history since the Great Depression; former Vice President Richard "go fuck yourself" Cheney!

Prior to becoming Dubya's VP, Cheney was Chairman of the Texas based energy services company Haliburton. According to reports in the press, Cheney will be "indicted in a Nigerian bribery case as part of an investigation into an alleged $180 million bribery scandal." The charges stem from the systemic bribery amongst Nigerian custom officials on behalf of Royal Dutch Shell Plc., one of the world's largest oil and gas company's. The charges have furthermore, lead Interpol to issue an arrest warrant for him.

The likelihood of Dick Cheney being extradited to Nigeria or a foreign court is zero. However, the fact remains that the world of tomorrow will be a very different place than it currently is and all the imperial might will not protect all of the members of the Bush junta into perpetuity for the domestic and international crimes they have committed. Just as Henry Kissinger is unable to visit numerous countries for his involvement in multiple cases of state terrorism and criminality, so will these people be forced to limit their visits to states who have an independent judiciary that does not take matters such as, crimes against humanity lightly.

GOP's memo to America's unemployed: Drop Dead!

2010-12-05T02:23:00.001-05:00

Stephen Pearlstein, business columnist for the Washington Post, recently wrote an enormously useful post in which he takes apart the Republican stance on the economy, the Federal Reserve, and the current unemployment situation across America.

He first establishes the governing philosophy of the party of 'no' since the mid-term elections:

Only two weeks after the midterm election, it seems clear that the 2012 campaign has begun. For too many Republicans, the aim is to politicize policy, trash the institutions of government and intimidate anyone who might disagree with their radical ideology.

The Republican party's public mantra has long been low taxes, smaller government, and accountability. If anyone can find a Republican that has pursued this trifecta consistently while in congress I'd like to know, because the reality is that they have pursued low taxes for corporations and the very rich, while irresponsibly failing to engage in concomitant spending cuts. Conservative economist Milton Friedman said, "for the government to spend is for the government to tax." So, despite their claims, what Republicans are actually doing is shifting the tax burden, "explicitly or implicitly to tax somebody, either in the present or the future, either directly or indirectly, to pay for that purchase." They counter that that is not true, because the tax-cuts magically pay for themselves. Again, this supply side voodoo-economics, has been shown to yield either no or minimal value to the economy and therefore do not pay for themselves. For example, analysis of George W. Bush's tax cuts indicate that it produced an insignificant level of economic growth during his presidency. Hence, this is just the attempt of one group of people to evade paying taxes and force another group to subsidize their excesses.

Pearlstein recognizing the fallacy of the Republican tax-cut and spend mantra, estimates the impact of not extending the Bush tax cuts to small cash flow-through businesses and people earning beyond $250,000.

The macro view, from the forecasting firm Macroeconomic Advisers of St. Louis, is that not extending tax cuts for high-income households would reduce gross domestic product growth by - drumroll here - two-tenths of one percent in each of the next two years. And the difference in the unemployment rate? A whopping one tenth of one percent!

The impact of letting the richest people in the country pay the same taxes on the top tier of their income, as what they were paying during the Clinton administration in regards to the overall economy, is virtually negligible.

Regardless of the context, the same failed policies are trotted out as a panacea to every economic situation. And here is where the standard argument becomes exceptionally ugly. Knowing that their policies have failed and have lead to the harshest economic downturn since the Great Depression, Republicans are demanding that not only that their rich-friends, who have been on a tax vacation for the past decade, not be further taxed, but that those who are unemployed "drop dead." In their devious minds, they are now attacking the Federal Reserve for pursuing monetary policies that leads to full employment. Whereas these same miscreants didn't attack the Fed when it was bailing out their fat-cat friends on Wall Street and creating a firewall of secrecy that concealed the extent of the criminality between big business and the government when Republicans were in power. Their hypocrisy is endless.

Get sick; drop dead.
Need help in paying for a family member's health care; let them drop dead.
Need to upgrade your skills at college to get a job; drop dead.
Cannot find a job and you've used up your savings; drop dead.
Need help preventing foreclosure on your home; drop dead.

Obama's failure and the floundering of the American economy is their ultimate objective. In their minds the death of the American dream is their stepping stone back into power. Republicans are traitors to everything that the country is supposed to represent.

Charlie Rose interviews Charles Ferguson of the "Inside Job"

2010-12-04T21:42:00.004-05:00

http://www.charlierose.com/view/content/11321

The above link is to a recent interview (29 November 2010) between Charlie Rose and Charles Ferguson who produced the well reviewed documentary on the origins of the financial collapse of 2008 and the subsequent global bailout of the financial industry by governments across the world.

He states specifically, "the film is about the systemic corruption of the United States by the financial industry and the consequences of that systemic corruption."

In the interview Ferguson makes it clear that the corruption of America and its legislative and regulatory processes are profound. He makes the case that much of what happened would not have occurred if the businessmen behind these monolithic investment banks were not so incompetent and blinded by greed and the US government had not abdicated its role, as an agent for fairness, in properly regulating the whole industry. The actions taken by the government was to save the banks and the elite bankers, while allowing the rest of the population to fend for itself. The bankers, with the exception of Lehman Brothers, were not made to make any sacrifices.

Ferguson further contends that "massive criminal fraud" was undertaken. Despite the nauseating proclamations by the financial industry and their media stooges, it is clear that both government and the largest corporations in America engaged in what may stand as the largest criminal event of the past quarter century. The reality is that none of these people, given the political climate and entrenched corruption of government, will be held accountable for their actions in destroying trillions of dollars of wealth, eliminating millions of jobs, and pushing families off the cliff. When ordinary people lose their health care, lose their homes, lose their life savings, and end up destitute, the same people who caused this mayhem will snicker and call the rest of the population parasites!

I've said it numerous times on this blog, that only when people recognize the true nature of corporations in their society and begin to combat the force of coruption through monied politics, will things change.

Flow Chart of human hookups, first-dates, and relationships

2010-12-04T20:07:00.001-05:00

I'm not sure how accurate any of this data actually is, but it's interesting just to think about in the idle spaces of own existence.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/.a/6a00d83451c45669e2013489aeda81970c-popup

(h/t to Andrew Sullivan's the Daily Dish)

Things I found interesting:

5.4% of people die without ever getting married.
56% of people claim to be unhappy with their sex lives (Forget viagra and other boner drugs! I see an opening here for subscription based tantric sex lessons offered at the local Learning Annex!)
Largest reason for breakups is a loss of interest (that seems accurate based on my own experiences)
22% of people worldwide have engaged in infidelity (again, based on hereditary disease profiles I've reviewed that seemed entirely correct)

Arizona's indulgence with the banality of evil

2010-12-04T03:26:00.002-05:00

I have been for some years awed by the grotesque indecency and outright evil that presents itself as the norm in the low-tax geezer-vista that is the state of Arizona. Many will recognize the ongoing battle between locals and illegal immigrants. My disgust does not entail this well discussed legal tussle and the underlying racial animus prevalent across the state. Instead, I'd like to draw attention to the mindset and legislative behavior of the state's Republicans, who with their tax-free and minimalist government ideology have created a perfect example of the banality of evil.

I came across this example in the NY Times of the lengths many of the well-heeled denizens of the state will go to, in order to protect their personal fortunes from the local taxman. Consider the following:

“Arizona is seeing more of the traditional battle of the generations...between some retirees who want taxes — including school taxes — kept low, and most parents who want better support for the schools their kids attend.”

Patrick Flynn, the president of a homeowners group in Troon, AZ in 2007, states that he has no qualms about education, he "just does not like the idea of paying for it." In this particular exhibition of generational greed and malice, the residents of the district created a bogus local school district with no schools, teachers, or students to prevent their property taxes from being raised. Families with children must pay adjacent districts to have their children participate in schooling. As a state senator explains, “The whole purpose of this was to avoid taxes on their million-dollar homes.”

In an earlier post titled "The young must die so Geezers can pay low taxes" I explained how the Governor of Arizona planned to eliminate health coverage for 47,000 low-income children. In the name of fiscal austerity the legislators gladly abandoned their most vulnerable citizens so that these modern day Merchants of Venice wouldn't have to worry about wasting their well earned shekels on youthful vermin. The fact that the elderly receive federally subsidized Medicare and have no worries about paying for health care costs is an irrelevance to these hypocrites. Racial bigotry is used by the citizens of the state to claim that most of the children were the offspring of illegals, who shouldn't be receiving benefits regardless.

What has drawn my particular ire today though is another instance of greed masquerading as fiscal rectitude. The NY Times has a horrible story of how Arizona legislators have stripped citizens belonging to the state Medicaid program from having life-saving transplants. Persons who for whatever reason that were waiting for a liver, lung, or other tissue were told to drop dead by their own representatives.

When Alan Grayson, the former congressman for Florida, said in 2009 that the Republican plan for health care reform was, "Don't get sick. That's right, don't get sick." The MSM and Republicans bemoaned his rhetoric and yet evidence is abundant that he was absolutely correct. On the floor of the House of Representatives, Grayson offered this scathing critique of the Republican party's program for health care

According to this study, “Health Insurance and Mortality in U.S. Adults” which was published two weeks ago, 44,789 Americans die every year because they have no health insurance. That’s right, 44,789 Americans die every year, according to this Harvard study called “Health Insurance and Mortality in U.S. Adults.” You can see it by going to our website, grayson.house.gov. That is more than ten times the number of Americans who have died in the war in Iraq.

It’s more than ten times the number of Americans who died in 9/11. But that was just once: this is every single year. That’s right: every single year. Take a look at this. Read it and weep. And I mean that – read it and weep because of all these Americans who are dying because they don’t have health insurance.

The state of Arizona offered this pathetic rational for why the government was serving poor and sick citizens a death sentence:

State Medicaid officials said they recommended discontinuing some transplants only after assessing the success rates for previous patients. Among the discontinued procedures are lung transplants, liver transplants for hepatitis C patients and some bone marrow and pancreas transplants, which altogether would save the state about $4.5 million a year.

While many states in the union have reduced or eliminated aspects of health coverage during the Great Recession, Arizona once again goes the extra distance to condemn their citizens to the vagaries of market-based health care; i.e. pay or you fucking die! The cruelty and lack of any resemblance of ethics of these people is mind-boggling.

The behavior of all levels of government in Arizona is one of maximizing short term financial gains for their most well off citizens, while brutally undermining the health, education, and well-being of large portions of their population. How is it that the richest country in the world has a health care system that is on par with second-rate industrial nations? The justifications of the proponents of this lot are always anchored to some bizarre notion of moral indignation that others are getting a free ride, while they -the greediest generation, who never sacrificed, never went to war in the name of democracy and freedom, and who had their entire lives subsidized from birth- continuously demand others do without, what they loudly proclaim is their deserved entitlement.

Brazil recognizes Palestine as an independent nation

2010-12-04T00:36:00.003-05:00

Brazil is Latin America's superpower. For the past decade it has been part of the BRIC group of emerging markets that has grown at an impressive rate compared to the nearly stagnant and tepid grown witnessed respectively in Europe and the USA during the same period. Today, Brazil is the 8th largest economy in the world, with a GDP $1.57 Trillion (USD). It has a large and diversified economy with agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and service sectors.

Today, according to the Washington Post (via the Associated Press), Brazil is formally recognizing Palestine as an independent and autonomous nation state based on 1967 borders.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva... sent a letter to Abbas on Dec. 1, saying Brazil recognizes Palestine and hopes that the recognition will help lead to states of Israel and Palestine "that will coexist peacefully and in security."

With the so-called peace process continuously undermined by Israel's gimmickry and bad-faith negotiations on the part of the USA for much of the past decade, there is little reason to believe that there will ever be an independent Palestine under the current settings. Brazil's recognition therefore is an interesting and potentially thorny issue for Israel. The PLO formally declared Palestine as independent state in 1988 and at least 102 other nations also recognize it as such. There are another 44 states, that have some form of informal recognition of the PLO or the PNA in governing the Israeli controlled occupied territories.

If the rest of the world realizes that Israel has no intention of ever surrendering the occupied territories over to an independent Palestinian government, then it is likely more Western countries will follow Brazil's stance.

Quote of the Day: Chomsky on the Financial Fraudsters

2010-11-22T20:18:00.000-05:00

The capitalist class in the ’50s was sort of part of a social contract. It was part of the tenor of the times… Changes have taken place since then… In the financial institutions, which by now dominate the economic system, the management level repeatedly acts in ways which will destroy their own institutions if it’ll increase their benefits, and benefits are not small. You know, you take a look at the revenue of, say, Goldman Sachs – a very high percentage of it just goes to payment of management and bonuses. There was a time traditionally – say, GM in the 1950s – it was trying to develop a consumer base that would be loyal and lasting and they were thinking in terms of an institution that would remain and grow and thrive in the society. By now, a lot of the investment firms – bankers, hedge funds – are perfectly happy to destroy what they’re in and come out with huge, tremendous benefits. That’s a new stage of capitalism.

- Noam Chomsky on today's Casino-capitalists. (link: h/t Felix Salmon)

Matt Taibbi talks about the Tea Party, Palin, & the Banks

2010-11-17T17:52:00.002-05:00

I really hope if you have an opportunity to watch Eliot Spitzer on his CNN news-talk show, Parker-Spitzer. The man always impresses me when he's debating friend or foe, with his enormous knowledge of governance, financial affairs, and the inherent corruption that exists between government and big business. There really isn't any other show on the MSM cable channels, in America at least, that I think is worth watching. Even if you're into liberal talk shows, MSNBC's lineup tends to be a little repetitious and self-serving when it comes to engaging in substantive issues.

The above video post is another with Matt Taibbi, who grouses on the media obsession with Caribou Barbie and the Tea Party movement, the criminality of the banks, and the incompetence of Tim Geithner and Alan Greenspan. Spitzer and Taibbi unleash a real pummelling on the ass-clowns of casino-capitalism!

Matt Taibbi explains the Financial sector's hold on Democrats

2010-11-17T07:26:00.006-05:00

I personally think the reason Rick Sanchez got cut from CNN was that he rubbed some of the MSM top honchos the wrong way during his time at the anchor desk. Populism is fine for the plutocrats when it works to their advantage, as in the case of the ignorant and deranged Tea Party advocates. However, when discussions of the collusion between those at the top of the economic pyramid (i.e. the banks) and government officials begin, which leads to the magnification of the nexus of institutional corruption, the grand-poobahs get antsy.

Consider the above video with Sanchez and Rolling Stone magazine contributor and author Matt Taibbi, where the discussion veers into understanding the basis of the 2009 financial sector bailout pursued by the Obama administration. In it, Sanchez makes the connection that Washington DC is effectively corporate controlled territory. He notes that Goldman Sachs and other bankers wield inordinate levels of power over the legislative and executive branches and control the system through campaign contributions to both parties and the installation of their people into key government portfolios. There was no requirement for Obama to bring people like Larry Summers, who had been an architect of the deregulatory fiasco of the 1990's that lead to this current economic malaise, into the fold. There was no requirement to appoint Tim Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury or to re-appoint Ben Bernanke, other than it appeased the poobahs on Wall Street.

For all the talk of change, the Obama administration made sure that corporate America knew that the new sheriff in town was going to be the same as the old one. They let it be known that "Greed was still good," and regardless of how the economy reacted, all the merry sociopaths, looking down at us little people from the glass towers in the Financial District, would still get all their bonuses that would allow them to feed their insatiable want for coke, hookers, and good times.

All this nonsensical talk that Obama is somehow a socialist is the musings of truly stupid people. The facts are plain to see that this administration is not terribly different than any of its Republican or Democratic predecessors. The facts are also clear that it is the greedheads at the top of the financial food chain who have been the winners for the past 30 years. When the next economic calamity arises in the near future, we'll see who gets saved again and who the ignorant masses will blame for it.

The Other Fame Monster

2010-11-13T13:33:00.005-05:00

I'm not a twelve year old girl, so I'm not really sure what Justin Bieber is about. Although, I understand he's an androgynous teenage singer from Ontario, Canada. Regardless, an interview in today's Guardian newspaper illustrates that perhaps the concept of young people manufactured to be a global media stars without the benefit of having a strong family framework, probably isn't very good for the developing child. To illustrate consider the following excerpt:

A few days after the Sunrise incident, Justin was in New Zealand, being interviewed by a presenter with a strong Kiwi accent. He asked Justin if Bieber was the German word for basketball.

"German?" Justin asked.

"German," said the interviewer. Justin looked blank-faced. "German," said the presenter. "You know? German."

"I don't know what that means," said Justin.

"Here," said the interviewer, showing him the word German written on his card.

"I don't know what that means," said Justin. "We don't say that in America."

It's one thing not to be able to understand multi-varable calculus at the age of 14 or not to have a grasp of global political forces driving the Basel III accord even if you're much older, but not to know what Germany is?

I'm sorry, but the child is clearly a moron, just like his backwater and hick parents. Where do these assholes come from? Britney Spears, Lindsey Lohan...etc, they're all white-trash morons whose money-grubbing parents catapulted them into a world in which these children barely understand and clearly in the case of the latter two stars, unable to cope with. Teenage actors, singers, and entertainers rarely do well in life. Education is one of the ways that allows these young people to make better decisions and hopefully salvage themselves in the upcoming years, when their lives start to disintegrate around them. However, if you read the Guardian's article, it's pretty clear there's not much in this kid's head and what education he's getting is useless.

Galbraith on why the Democrats lost the Election

2010-11-08T03:19:00.002-05:00

The original sin of Obama’s presidency was to assign economic policy to a closed circle of bank-friendly economists and Bush carryovers. Larry Summers. Timothy Geithner. Ben Bernanke. These men had no personal commitment to the goal of an early recovery, no stake in the Democratic Party, no interest in the larger success of Barack Obama. Their primary goal, instead, was and remains to protect their own past decisions and their own professional futures.

James K. Galbraith, professor of economics, offers his summation on why the Obama administration and the Democrats in congress, failed to obtain better results in last week's election.

A few commentators, like Kevin Drum over at MotherJones.com, do not believe that even if Obama had pursued a strategy where the economy was this Administration's central objective, that the Democrats would be substantially better off. Given the people who Obama sought consul from, it seems entirely correct to me that the Democrats would still have lost the house of representatives to the Republicans with such a strategy.

As a corollary to Drum et al's sentiment, Galbraith elaborates in his opinion piece that Obama upon entering office had a limited understanding of economics, and coupled with a desire to pursue a centrist-right policy that maintained the status quo as much as possible, through the appointment of Clinton leftovers and Wall Street yes-men, he essentially abdicated the mantel of being an agent of change and became an enabler of of Wall Street's mismanagement.

The obvious conclusion is that if Obama had pursued, as soon as he arrived in office, a bank nationalization program or something more similar to what the British engaged in and what the Swedes did in the early 1990's, he would have been able to dismantle the banking-congressional lobbyist nexus and create national banks capable of effectively lending money to both businesses and the American public a short time after. Make no doubt that the process would have been bloody, but through inflicting maximum pain on the management and shareholders of the corrupt banks and insurance companies -something that was universally desired by the American public- Obama would have consolidated his record of being a giant-killer and a vanguard for the "little guy."

Instead, the timid and frustratingly feeble performance of Mr. Obama and his pro-business acolytes in the White House, have left his administration and the Democrats vulnerable to attacks from multiple fronts and potentially dead in the water for the next two years.

Glenn Greenwald on why the Democrats lost

2010-11-07T05:01:00.000-05:00

With that strategy, the Democratic Party now reaps what it has sown. Its message and identity are profoundly muddled, incoherent, unclear, uninspiring, and self-negating. Worse, its policies are mishmashes of inept half-measures that, with a handful of exceptions, produce little good for anyone (other than Wall Street, the Pentagon and other corporate interests). They are perceived as -- and are -- beholden to Wall Street, special interests, and the corporations they vowed to confront. They are without any ability to confront the massive unemployment crisis and financial decline the country faces. And as a result of all of that, they lay in shambles. Anyone who can survey all of that and cheer for the strategy which Democrats have been pursuing -- let's build our majorities by relying on GOP-replicating corporatist Blue Dogs -- or who thinks that this election loss happened because "Democrats are too liberal," resides in a world that has very little to do with reality. And that's true no matter how many times they repeat the simplistic snippets of exit polls to which they've obsessively attached themselves.

Glenn Greenwald in a blog post at Salon.com, takes on MSNBC commentator Lawerence O'Donnell in his assertion that the Democrats lost because they are too "liberal" and the country simply prefers "conservative" candidates and governance.

Over the past decade, I too have excoriated those who babble about the fundamental divide between philosophical and political liberalism and conservatism in America. The terms in themselves are inexhaustibly used incorrectly by both sides to impugn their opponents and distort the overall discussion. Virtually no credible conservative government has existed at the federal level in the past forty years in America. Ronald Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, and Dubya were pro-corporatist presidents who advanced statist agendas. Government under each of these men was widely expanded; the national debt ballooned; war and the invasion of numerous countries in violation of international law was conducted; treaties were maligned and rejected at whim; established precedents in US constitutional law were regularly dismissed and abrogated with presidential approval; corporate take over of the executive and legislative branches was perfected under Republican rule over these decades. At what point did the fanatics of conservative causes rally against these changes?

The pro-corporatist Democrats have always used the excuse that they could not execute a liberal agenda, that was and is favored by a majority, because of the stalking horse of conservatism amongst the population. People now realize that because of gerrymandering, corporate donations and special interest meddling, and a two-party system that invalidates third party politics, that there is very little that they themselves can do to upend and change a system. America has for the past decade not been a democracy, but a plutocracy governed by people who are servants, not to the constitution or the people, but to multinational corporations: including bankers, insurance companies, the military-industrial complex, oil companies, and a bevy of special interests that are more than willing to bribe politicians into executing their agenda.

O'Donnell represents the liberal version of a cultural manager; a person who nonchalantly bemoans the tyranny of the left-wing of the Democratic party, but refuses to address the perennial failure and Pavlovian response of the Democratic party hierarchy in pursuing Republican-light policies once they are elected. Clinton was elected to improve the economy, introduce health care, and end the brutal twelve years of Republican mismanagement. Instead, he pursed a strategy of triangulation and capitulated to conservative policies of energy and financial deregulation, which has left the American economy broken and on unsound footing. Obama in the face of aggressive citizen support has sought legislative capitulation to the banks, big oil, big-pharma, insurance companies, and the Military-Security state. Obama's claims which he made during the 2008 election, of attacking special interests and the oligarchs appear little more than pleasant lies told to naive children.

Gretchen Morgenson: Untangling The Complex Foreclosure Mess

2010-10-27T19:20:00.001-04:00

Gretchen Morgenson, who writes a must-read weekly column in the NY Times business section goes on NPR to discuss the complete mess the banks and mortgage lending agencies have gotten the entire American economy into, through their initial mortgage securitization programs and now with their shady and illegal foreclosure practices. To underline the severity of this situation, all 50 states have launched criminal investigations into the unsavory foreclosure activities committed by the banks. Ms. Morgenson, unlike the hacks at the Wall St. Journal's op-ed pages, is an intelligent and informative journalist, who has been at the forefront in explaining the Great recession and the corpulence underlying America's corporate misdeeds.

NPR begins with the following introduction:

Since the housing bust two years ago, when millions of homeowners fell behind on their loans, the foreclosure industry has grown into a multibillion-dollar business. To deal with the thousands of defaulted loans needing to be processed, banks relied on thousands of temporary employees who often had little experience and training to handle the foreclosure paperwork.

This resulted in many mistakes being made throughout the foreclosure process. Reports of sloppy documentation — including the questionable notarization of documents, the loss of key paperwork needed to begin foreclosure proceedings and missing paperwork on original mortgages — temporarily halted foreclosure proceedings across much of the country in early October. It also triggered at least five separate federal investigations into the ways mortgage lenders have handled foreclosures.

The entire broadcast can be heard or downloaded here.

The degree of duplicity, fraud, and ineptitude exhibited by the major players in this decade long fiasco, should make everyone who has a stake in the viability of the American economy, to demand that everyone -politicians, corporations, bankers, loan agents, bond rating agencies, economists, and homeowners- all pay a severe penalty for engaging in what is likely the world's largest instance of criminal fraud. Nothing else is acceptable, because these same devious pick-pockets will only re-emerge emboldened and unleash another wave of catastrophe upon the financial world if left unpunished.

Glaxo Guilty of Selling Tainted and Defective Drugs

2010-10-26T21:19:00.004-04:00

GlaxoSmithKline, a British pharmaceutical company, has been forced to pay $750 million (USD) "to settle criminal and civil complaints that the company for years knowingly sold contaminated baby ointment and an ineffective antidepressant."

The case was initiated by a former employee and whistle-blower who sought penalties against the company. The NY Times elaborates on the nature of the crimes at their Puerto Rico facility:

This was GlaxoSmithKline’s premier manufacturing facility, producing $5.5 billion of product each year. But Ms. Eckard [the whistle-blower] soon discovered that quality control was a mess: the water system was contaminated; the air system allowed for cross-contamination between products; the warehouse was so overcrowded that rented vans were used for storage; the plant could not ensure the sterility of intravenous drugs for cancer; and pills of differing strengths were sometimes mixed in the same bottles.

Instead of heeding FDA warnings about QA/QC inadequacies of the facility and their own internal people's advice, GlaxoSmithKline either ignored and/or dismissed concerns. Ms. Eckard, who was initially sent to lead "a team of 100 quality experts to fix problems," was stonewalled by management and then dismissed once she began to demand that products be recalled. She will now earn for her part in the whistle-blower case, "$96 million from the federal government, and she will collect additional millions from states."

The circumstances surrounding this particular case are unlike previous situations.

Nearly all previous cases against the industry involved illegal marketing. This is the first successful case ever to assert that a drug maker knowingly sold contaminated products.

Whereas in the past, big-pharma was tagged for deceptive marketing and off-label sales tactics, GSK engaged in the willful and knowing dissemination of tainted, ineffectual, and potentially dangerous drugs to the public. This failure of both GSK and the American government to regulate the company is another indictment of the laissez-faire deregulatory approach that highlighted the conservative dogma prevalent in the Bush years. Furthermore, it decimates any specious arguments that importation of Canadian drugs are a threat to consumers.

Given that the profit sources for big-pharma are waning and that numerous lawsuits have been asserted against big-pharma for misleading patients and "defrauding federal and state governments" the entire health care bills pushed through by both the Bush and Obama administrations reeks of corruption. These companies are clearly unable to actually provide quality drugs that benefit people. So instead of ramping up their R&D base to find new drugs, they fire scientists and engage in legislative trickery to extend the patent life of their already questionable drug performers and push onto the market products that are ineffective and potentially lethal. These people are just evil. Sick and dying people shouldn't have to worry about whether their doctor is in collusion with the drug company to push a useless product upon them. Patients shouldn't have to worry if FDA "approved" medication is actually effective or instead going to make them more sick or even kill them.

Is this all America is about? Lying, cheating, and using the government to swindle dying people out of their life savings. While congress subsidizes big-pharma, agriculture corporations, the military-industrial state, and bails out the banking industry for the umpteenth time, what are you getting? Maybe you can find it in your bonus that comes in the form of less take home pay, less benefits, less social mobility, more hours working, or more of your taxes going to maintain the lifestyles of corporate lobbyists and the "masters of the universe"-crowd.

Wake up people!

Take the red pill people, and fucking wake up!

***

This blog has previously dissected and listed other areas of fraud and corruption by big-pharma:

Novartis fined $422 Million
Big-Pharma, perennial fraud-mongers
Pfizer on eminant domain and corporate welfare (NY Times)
The corruption of university bio-medical research (NY Times)

Open Advice to President Obama

2010-10-24T17:15:00.004-04:00

Dear Barack,

I know you don't care what I think, with all those high-paid clowns dispensing all that brilliant strategy to you on how to piss-off those loser hippies who funded, supported, and fought for you across America in 2008, but here it is.

You're a bit like Bubba, in that despite all those flowery speeches about hope or being from a place called hope (who can get it straight anymore) you've given over the past few years, we really don't know what you believe. I mean, the nihilists and brain-dead masses think you're a Marxist Fascist with ties to Kenyan revolutionaries. I don't know what that means either, other than interpreting it as an odd way to just call you a nigger. I've never really thought you were the second coming of FDR, but you were a better option than the Queen corporatist Madam Clinton. People liked what you had to say and what you represented, but back then it mostly was about voting against eight hard and dismal years under the Bush junta. However, you waffled and instead of steamrolling what remained of the right wing yahoo's and pushing through a progressive and liberal agenda, you coddled and capitulated to their bizarre demands. Let's recap:

Did exactly what Bush said he would do in ending the Iraq war; that being leaving 50K troops to babysit the Shia thugocracy in Baghdad.
Escalated the Afghan war, which everyone has already admitted is lost.
Caved into special interests in the health care bill, by eliminating the public option and preventing the importation of drugs from Canada.
Created a health care bill that would force individuals to purchase lame health care coverage and subsidise the crooked insurance companies.
Pushed through a special debt committee, filled with right-wing ideologues and hacks demanding that Social Security be privatized under the guise of bi-partisanship.
Bailed out your friends and big-donor buddies in the banks, but left the rest of the nation submerged with debt and ever-expanding (and now illegal) foreclosures
Failed to prosecute any of the major players in the Bush junta for war crimes, crimes against humanity, violations of the Constitution, and numerous illegal acts and unethical behavior
Advanced the post-911 security-surveillance state to new levels
Advanced the military-industrial complex in the face of mounting debts and limited resources
Let Israel make a complete mockery of you, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and your entire administration relating to the Palestinian issue
Allowed the minority blue dog Democrats to dictate the terms of major legislation, so they could retain their congressional seats (which as every poll indicates, they won't)
Put in charge Ken Salazar as Secretary of the Interior, effectively creating what others have referred to as Bush's 3rd term with respect to governmental regulation and resource management of public assets
Colluded with BP to lie to the public on the scope and severity of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

People who voted for you, in the deluded belief that government could mend it ways, are looking at a moribund economy, a Democratic Party that is incapable of defending themselves against corrupt Republican and Tea Party slander, and a crypto-fascist uprising funded by the same assholes whose jobs and balance sheets you saved from complete Armageddon. A lot of people said early on that you were playing three-dimensional chess and were way smarter than the rest of the dolts on the Hill. It's pretty clear that not only don't you have game, but you're really not as bright as those Harvard and Columbia degrees might imply.

So Barack, if you want to do something meaningful, do yourself a favor and grow a couple, because this nonsense you've been pedalling for the past 21-months is getting tired and no one is going to vote for you if you keep selling the same recycled shit that Bush left behind on the White House's going-out of business sale in November 2008.

Fuck-you very much.

The Lifer.

Barry Ritholtz tells consumers to sue the banks

2010-10-14T13:33:00.003-04:00

Barry Ritholtz, who blogs at The Big Picture, tells everyone who may have encountered or been harmed by the blatant and unequivocal fraud orchestrated by the banking and mortgage lending industry, to file criminal charges against the relevant parties, demand local AG's pursue litigation, and engage the media/political classes to expose the situation further.

If you have been in any way personally harmed by the illegal actions of any bank, law firm, process server, or loan servicing agency, you MUST file criminal charges.

If your home was broken into by a firm to change the locks illegally, that is breaking and entering, and conspiracy. If the wrong bank filed a foreclosure action, if the wrong house was foreclosed upon, its time to go criminal prosecution route.

Go to the local police department, fill out the requisite forms. Then go to your District Attorney’s Office or County Prosecutor’s office, and ask to speak to someone in charge. Tell them you want to prosecute. You can also contact your state Attorney General about the same. Follow up with written letters, that you send you your local newspaper and the NYT, WSJ, USA Today.

If any local DAs balk — some will know bank execs from the political groups and golf courses — let them know you will keeping a written record of all of this, and you plan to make sure that their opponent in the next election knows all about their bank coddling ways. When they stammer, hammer them about their opponent’s interest in who is and isn’t a bank bitch.

Corporations that get free speech rights also have liability for their own criminal actions. Its way past time we start forcing those responsibilities to have some meaning.

This is not about keeping deadbeats in their homes, as a few idiots and liars have asserted. The corporate sympathizers who are too busy fellating the bank to recognize what is going should be ignored. This is about fundamental property rights and the Rule of Law in the United States — nothing less.

In my previous post, I advocated the identical strategy. Unless people want to be disenfranchised, abused, and perennially molested by the corporate degenerates on the street and their paid henchmen in congress, then the only recourse left is the courts.

Ralph Nader on the Foreclosure Mess

2010-10-12T11:24:00.002-04:00

Ralph Nader, America's pre-eminent consumer advocate, posts an article relating to the current foreclosure mess and the banks wholesale evasion of legal practices arising from the securitization process.

He begins by saying:

This time the big banks and mortgage servicing companies, with their long, one-sided fine print contracts, may have outsmarted themselves. The newspaper headlines and the network television news are blazing news of the erupting fraudulent foreclosure process. This long-overdue coverage is generating public visibility and suddenly hundreds of thousands of foreclosures may be questioned due to what one commentator delicately called “flawed paperwork.”

He then outlines the mortgage-securitization chain through which, "The matrix of interconnected fine print contracts became too routinely robotized." Meaning, that the banks disregarded specific requirements, such as notarization, to save themselves money and accelerate the repeated sale of these mortgages to investors across the globe. Nader quotes the Washington Post on this matter:

“mortgages were created, and sold, sliced and diced, packaged and repackaged so quickly that financial firms had neither the time nor the patience to file paperwork in local courthouses as the loans were traded. By using MERS, lenders were able to reassign loans quickly and cheaply but often the chain of ownership was not accompanied by an official paper trail. …These problems contributed to the use of flawed and fraudulent paperwork, including backdated assignments and forged documents.”

The only reason any of this is coming to light is because consumers were willing to challenge the bankers in court and force them to confirm that they were in fact eligible to serve foreclosure upon those persons home. It is only when people stand up for themselves and challenge institutional corruption and the status quo, will real changes be made to the system. Voting for these corporate stooges in congress won't help. Only by hitting the greedheads in their pocket and forcing them to defend themselves in court will the marauding pirates of casino-capitalism be held at bay.

Foreclosure Fraud: Case Example from Florida

2010-10-11T19:44:00.002-04:00

Despite protestations from Wall Street bankers and their crooked henchmen in congress, massive criminal fraud has been exposed in the ongoing housing foreclosure fiasco. Major mortgage dealers, such as GMAC, Bank of America, and Ally Financial Inc. have stopped foreclosure proceedings across the country out of concern of their standing in the situation. As has been apparent for more than a year, much of the fine details surrounding exact ownership of individual homes is either incomplete or missing, given the widespread securitization process. In order to evade actual laws, the banks simply used third party intermediaries to generate missing documentation and bogus signatures out of thin air. To us layman that's called fraud.

In the following egregious case, Bank of America foreclosed on a Florida man's home in which the bank didn't even have a mortgage for! As usual, the bank disregarded the customer's complaints for months until the local press became involved. Once confronted with their incompetence and potential criminality, they then issued their standard "our mistake" line of bullshit.

If Americans don't demand that every person, banker, and entity involved in this massive fraud scheme are sent to jail and banned from ever working in the industry, then the country is no more a nation of laws than any other third world shit-hole bereft of a transparent system of government and independent judiciary.

Lauderdale man's home sold out from under him in foreclosure mistake
September 23, 2010
By Harriet Johnson Brackey, Sun Sentinel

When Jason Grodensky bought his modest Fort Lauderdale home in December, he paid cash. But seven months later, he was surprised to learn that Bank of America had foreclosed on the house, even though Grodensky did not have a mortgage.

Grodensky knew nothing about the foreclosure until July, when he learned that the title to his home had been transferred to a government-backed lender. "I feel like I'm hanging in the wind and I'm scared to death," said Grodensky. "How did some attorney put through a foreclosure illegally?"

Bank of America has acknowledged the error and will correct it at its own expense, said spokeswoman Jumana Bauwens.

Grodensky's story and other tales of foreclosure mistakes started popping up recently across South Florida. This week, GMAC Mortgage, one of the nation's largest mortgage servicers and a major mortgage lender, told real estate agents to stop evicting residents and suspend sales of properties that had been taken from homeowners in foreclosure. The company said it might have to "correct" some of its foreclosures, but was not halting those in process.

In Florida courts, which have been swamped with foreclosure cases for several years, mistakes "happen all the time," said foreclosure defense attorney Matt Weidner in St. Petersburg. "It's just not getting reported."

And the legal efforts required to resolve a foreclosure mistake are complicated. "Unwrapping it is like unwrapping Fort Knox," said Carol Asbury, a Fort Lauderdale foreclosure attorney. "It's very difficult."

The process is under increasing scrutiny, as Florida's court system struggles with the mountain of cases that have resulted from the housing crisis.

Grodensky said he spent months trying to figure out what happened but said his questions to Bank of America and to the law firm Florida Default Law Group that handled the foreclosure have not been answered. Florida Default Law Group could not be reached for comment, despite several attempts by phone and e-mail. Grodensky said he has filed a claim with his title insurance company, but that, too, has not resulted in any action.

It wasn't until last week, when Grodensky brought his problem to the attention of the Sun Sentinel, that it began to be resolved.

"It looks like it was a mistake in communication between us and the attorneys handling the foreclosure," said Bauwens.

Krugman on the Limits of American Exceptionalism

2010-10-10T05:43:00.003-04:00

Paul Krugman compares America's current mortgage morass, associated with the unfolding home ownership and foreclosure fiasco, to that which was encountered during the Asian financial crisis.

After the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998, it was often said that a key barrier to recovery was the uncertain state of property rights: so much debt had been run up during the boom, and there had been so many defaults in the bust, that it was no longer clear who owned anything. Plus, these countries lacked clear legal procedures, and in general suffered from insufficient rule of law. All this was said, of course, in a tone of superiority: we Americans had solved such problems.

He also states, America's mortgage crisis dwarfs anything that occurred in Thailand and Indonesia by orders of magnitude.

The crony-capitalists and casino-players on Wall St. have made a mockery of America's international reputation as a safe and secure center of investment. Gimmickry, sleight of hand agreements, unequivocal fraud, and legislative and regulatory arbitrage were all employed by the MBA ass-clowns in the banking and mortgage industry to secure profits for themselves without taking into account the long-term risk to either their businesses or the nation. The end result will be a decade of lost growth for America and given that somewhere within that same period another potentially catastrophic economic collapse may occur, based on historic trends and the belief by many economists that an even larger shock lies in wait given the failure of most governments to adequately address the root causes of the great recession, capitalism as we know it today may collapse.

Afghan Civilian Killings Amongst the Worst Yet

2010-10-08T05:49:00.003-04:00

The NY Times has another article on the morass that has unfolded in Afghanistan, involving "a drug-addled Army unit" that killed Afghan civilians for sport and posed "for pictures with victims and [took] body parts as trophies."

The article outlines the various prosecutions that have arisen from combat related conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade.

Some cases gained a measure of notoriety, including a rape and multiple killing in Iraq in 2006 that resulted in lengthy sentences for several soldiers. The Marine Corps, too, has dealt with high-profile cases, like the killing by Marines in 2005 of 24 Iraqis in Haditha — though prosecution efforts in that case largely collapsed.

But a case being heard before a military court at Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Seattle could surpass all that have come before in the two wars.

The case has received little coverage in the broader American press. Human rights organizations and legal authorities publicly recognize that bringing forward successful prosecution of criminal acts committed by soldiers in conflict zones is difficult due to the often spartan evidence and limited cooperation from civilian populations.

“The large majority of civilian harm in both Iraq and Afghanistan takes place during legitimate military operations,” said Sarah Holewinksi, executive director of the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict. “But because of very poor record keeping on the part of all the warring parties, we really don’t know who has been harmed, how many have been harmed and how they have been harmed.”

In this particular case though, video and photographic evidence created by the perpetrators and their own statements to military investigators strongly support the prosecution's claims. If convicted, it is certain that none of these men will ever see freedom again.

***

Previous blog entries that I've made on this subject are here, here, and here.

Possible Causes of Honeybee Colony Collapse Found

2010-10-08T04:42:00.003-04:00

US scientists associated with the US Army and the University of Montana, have ascertained a possible cause for the annual decline in honeybee colonies in the USA.

To contextualize, the phenomenon is not unique to the United States and has been found to be affecting bee populations across the globe for a number of years. In 2004, apiarists started to discover that large portions of their colonies were either dying or not returning to their hives. Substantial losses year-over-year both in North America and Europe, have lead to a concerted global effort to ascertain the causative agents behind this situation. Francis Ratnieks, a biologist at University of Sussex in Brighton, has stated in Wired magazine that there is no single rational at the global level, why bee populations are in decline. He elaborates that honeybees are "probably dying for all kinds of different reasons from loss of their foraging grounds to increased exposure to global pathogens." Pesticide usage, monoculture agricultural practices, urban sprawl, and climate change are also a few of the other causes that investigators have looked at to understand why bees are in decline.

The NY Times is reporting that American scientists, utilizing military research tools, have identified a fungus and virus pair that is present in 100% of all colony collapse cases evaluated in their labs. Their findings suggest that "both the virus and the fungus proliferate in cool, damp weather, and both do their dirty work in the bee gut, suggesting that insect nutrition is somehow compromised."

The article reports on the host-parasite interaction:

“It’s chicken and egg in a sense — we don’t know which came first,” Dr. Bromenshenk said of the virus-fungus combo — nor is it clear, he added, whether one malady weakens the bees enough to be finished off by the second, or whether they somehow compound the other’s destructive power. “They’re co-factors, that’s all we can say at the moment,” he said. “They’re both present in all these collapsed colonies.”

The mechanisms that the fungus-virus pair is utilizing to undermining the bee populations is yet to be determined.

Still unsolved is what makes the bees fly off into the wild yonder at the point of death. One theory, Dr. Bromenshenk said, is that the viral-fungal combination disrupts memory or navigating skills and the bees simply get lost. Another possibility, he said, is a kind of insect insanity.

Further research into this phenomenon is necessary to understand a means of preventing future outbreaks. However, we also know as in a case study in Britain where changes have been made to enhance the natural environment of bumblebees, such as "putting in pollen and nectar-rich flower margins to fields, growing red clover hay meadows and rotating the grazing of animals on land," that immediate improvements in the health of local bees could be achieved.

Quote of the Day: US Military Spending

2010-10-06T04:30:00.004-04:00

[T]oday, with the Soviet Union gone, we account for most of the world's defense spending -- 54 percent in 2009, according to a recent report. That's right: There are 195 countries on planet Earth, and if you added up the military spending of the 194 of them that aren't the United States, you'd still have less than what we are spending.

- Paul Wildeman at the American Prospect on "Our "Hollowed Out" Military"

As is usual, the typical ass-clowns of the military-industrial complex, in this case neo-conservatives and perennial war-mongers Bill Kristol and company are defending the bloated, corrupt, and unsustainable Pentagon and surveillance state budgets. None of these so-called "conservatives" care anything about fiscal soundness or the long term viability of the nation.

Republicans continuously bloviate that about the necessity of spending cuts, including medicare and social security, but never discuss how to trim the real beast: war making. This issue more than any other underlies the hollowness of the entire American conservative movement. All their major gripes: big-government, intrusive state powers, accountability, preventing government waste and corruption, and the distorting force of foreign interventions and wars, that would be anathema to the explicitly stated wishes of the constitutional framers; are all thrown out the window. America can be a declining military superpower or it can be a vibrant democracy, but it cannot be both.

(h/t Andrew Sulivan's Daily Dish, "More than half the world's defense spending")

Please Mind the Gap!

2010-10-06T03:45:00.003-04:00

The above chart culled from a posting at Kevin Drum's MotherJones blog, illustrates what has been discussed substantially since the inception of the 2008 global financial meltdown, but has not been widely understood amongst the general population. If growth averages at or below 2% for the remainder of the decade, unemployment will remain nearly twice at which it was during the 1990's and much of the 2000's. Similar to Japan's continuing economic malaise, America appears to entering a period of turbulence in which as much as 10-years of marginal or no economic growth will occur.

Both Harvard's Ken Rogoff and Yale's Robert Shiller have also discussed the likelihood that neither America nor much of the Industrialized world will return to pre-recessionary growth levels within the short term. Based on Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart's 2009 research on economic crisis's over the past 800-years, they state that a "slow, protracted recovery with sustained high unemployment is the norm in the aftermath of a deep financial crisis." Given the weak stimulus package introduced by the Obama administration and the ascent of austerity economics amongst many European nations, there is no reasonable chance that on either side of the Atlantic unemployment will reside, economic output will markedly increase, or that the fiscal situation will improve by 2012.

Shiller notes that in Rogoff and Reinhart's examination, the following rates are derivable:

median annual growth rates of real per capita GDP for advanced countries were one percentage point lower in the decade following a crisis, while median unemployment rates were five percentage points higher.

With the introduction of further uncertainty, whether through China's economy crashing or other yet to be determined causes, the world is faced with grim economic prospects for the foreseeable future.

Elizabeth Warren Lays Down Some Principles

2010-10-01T03:48:00.002-04:00

Felix Salmon reports that Elizabeth Warren is off and running with the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), by laying down regulatory principles, rather than conventional "thou shall not" rules of operation. In his post, he expands on the difference in her approach to regulating versus the conventional approach used by the banks and their slimy lobbyists within the DC Beltway:

The fact is that it makes perfect sense for a consumer-protection bureau to regulate from the point of view of the consumer, rather than from the point of view of bank managers. Warren’s simple questions are good ones, and they’re hard to capture with rules. If banks provide valuable products to consumers, then consumers will value them. If, on the other hand, banks create products which are designed to prey on human foibles, then consumers will come to believe, in Warren’s words, that “dealing with banks is like handling snakes – do it long enough and you’ll get bit.”

If Warren can continue making in roads by challenging the financial industry in cleaning up their act and creating a long-lasting framework to the benefit of consumers, the Democrats may have a real contender for delivering the "Change" that Obama himself has failed to deliver.