Biden and Israel

Joe Biden's bewildering defense of the Butchers of Gaza are perplexing. His unconditional support of their war crimes, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, and the much debated genocide may very well cost him the election and America its democracy.

What is going on here?

Is Biden the first Jewish president? What does his familiar relationships, where three of his children were/are married to Jews, and inner circle filled with Jews/Zionists have to do with his decision making?

 Read in the Substack post: "Biden and Israel" by Maximilien Guerrero's blog "The World Engine".

Why are Americans such Assholes: Part IV

I don't know what it is about southerners, guns, and their inability to conduct themselves in a civil manner in public spaces, but once again I am forced to ask a simple, yet seemingly inexplicable, question: why are Americans such assholes?

Let's turn our attention to the rock star of dipshits; Florida.  Today, a retired police officer, not some greasy convict that just fell out of a state prison, but a former officer of the peace, decided he didn't like his fellow citizens texting activities in a movie theater, so he killed them.

Local News stated

Curtis Reeves Jr., 71, was charged with second-degree homicide in the death of Chad Oulson, 43, Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco said late Monday afternoon. The theater was evacuated and remained closed after the shooting, which occurred about 1:20 p.m. ET.

Oulson was shot in the chest after a verbal and physical confrontation with Reeves, and his wife, Nichole Oulson, was shot in the hand. Chad Oulson was pronounced dead at a hospital, and his wife was treated for non-life-threatening injuries.

I cede the point that the activity of others talking/ texting/ flashing her tits (although given that this is America there is an equal probability that man-boobs could have been involved) during the commercials prior to an actual movie is an affront to civilized cinema watching behavior.  I also know Florida has the death penalty and more so, that if you are a person of color, a member of a distinct ethnic or social minority, your death is just a routine statistic in America's infatuation with homicide.  However, the attempted murder of two innocent person over such issues is beyond comprehension.

Why are you bringing a loaded gun to a movie Deputy Dog?  Do you think someone is going to steal your popcorn?

Why are you arguing with people at a movie during a matinee?  Could you have used the lesser lethal action of simply moving to another set of seats?

The United States of Honey Boo Boo is a wasteland of semi-literate, small dicked retards, too juvenile to control their emotions and too stupid to realize what detestable human beings they and their nation have become.

Other fine installments to this worthy anthropological collection are:

Part 1 - Murdering a bicyclist and then leaving the scene of the murder to go to a party
Part 2 - Advertising hate after the attempted murder of a congresswoman and civilians
Part 3 - Florida Man attacks random tourists, because they look like potential terrorists

Charlie Rose interviews Guardian editors Alan Rusbridger & Janine Gibson

The methodology pursued by the mainstream American press on the matter of the NSA's global data mining operations has been to question the nature, psychology, and patriotism of  Edward Snowden, the leaker. Understandably, rather than discussing an abstract, unconstitutional and criminal operation that has Orwellian dynamics, those who manufacture consent would much rather the public consider irrelevant personal trivia. Similarly, reports in the American press about Julian Assange/WikiLeaks and Pvt. Bradley Manning typically have misidentified the actual topic at hand; that being deliberate government lies and state criminality conducted against their own citizens and foreigners.  So instead of zeroing in on the copious deceptions of the state, we are left with banal inquiries into the legitimacy of the data breaches.

The interview above with the Guardian's Alan Rusbridger and Janine Gibson is an example of this infuriating process.  While I think Charlie Rose has produced some wonderful and thoughtful interviews on many subjects, his line of inquiry into the motivation of Mr. Snowden belies deference to state propaganda.  The Guardian editors clearly articulate that there has been no evidence by either the US government or any other sources that these leaks have been harmful to anyone or the US government.

Is it really too much to have television journalists ask questions like:

• Why has this program been running, when the public clearly said it was unacceptable back in the middle of the decade of the zeroes?
• Why are members of the US Congress so woefully ignorant of the scope of these programs?
• What penalties shall be administered upon those members of the military and government, who have been lying to the public about these programs?
• Under what authority does the US government have in stealing all the private and personnel data of non-citizens not located within the United States? 
• Why does the US government continually prevent these programs from being adjudicated and subject to constitutional review, if they deem them truly legal?
• Why doesn't the press call those in government who lie to the public and engage in illegal behavior traitors?
• Why are private corporations used to such an extent in gathering and processing clandestine information?
• Why does the current US government engage in prosecuting and penalizing whistleblowers to the extent that they do?

As others have said on this matter, the only reason a universal monitoring program is in place is that the state believes its true enemy is its own citizens.

America's strange obsession with criminalizing abortion

A rather strange event has occurred in Indiana.  A severely unstable and pregnant woman attempted to commit suicide.  She survived, but her child died because of her actions.  Neither suicide nor abortion is illegal in the state of Indiana or in the USA; however, shortly after the incident, a state prosecutor charged the woman with murdering her fetus and attempted feticide.

The Guardian UK newspaper elaborates:

On 23 December 2010 Shuai became so depressed after she had been abandoned by her boyfriend – a married Chinese man who broke his promise to set up a family with her – that she decided to end her life. She consumed rat poison, and after confessing to friends was rushed to the Methodist hospital.

Doctors took steps to save her, but on 31 December there were signs that the baby, then at 33 weeks gestation, was in distress and a Caesarian was performed. On the second day of Angel's life the baby was found to have a massive brain hemorrhage and on 2 January was taken off life support.

Many countries in the world criminalize abortion.  Most Latin American countries routinely prosecute and incarcerate women who undergo treatment and doctors who perform abortions.  The moral argument is that a fetus is a person and subject to the same rights as an actual person.  However, by that same logic there is always two people involved in the gestation process: the mother and the child.  In the above case, we have a mentally unstable women who attempts to commit suicide and a child who was born prematurely but dies soon afterwards, because of the mother's actions.  The fetus was 32-weeks old when Shuai attempted suicide.

The Houston Chronicle reports that the woman's lawyers unsuccessfully attempted to have the charges overturned on the following basis.

Defense attorneys argued in court documents filed March 9 that prosecuting a woman based on the outcome of her pregnancy violates constitutional rights to due process and equal treatment and is cruel and unusual punishment.

Women's rights and legal groups have intervened in the case:

Several medical and women's rights groups, including the National Organization for Women and the National Alliance for Mental Illness, have filed friend-of-the-court briefs in support of Shuai, claiming that prosecuting Shuai could set a precedent under which pregnant women could be prosecuted for smoking or other behavior that might deemed a danger to their fetus. They said that could discourage women from seeking prenatal care.

The prosecution claims that they are only following the law and the three-judge appeals court stated that "Shuai had not proven that common-law immunity exists for pregnant women who harm their own fetuses".  So what does this really mean?

In America's southern and conservative states there has been an outbreak of prosecutions against mothers.  Rennie Gibbs of Mississippi was accused of murdering her unborn child.

Gibbs became pregnant aged 15, but lost the baby in December 2006 in a stillbirth when she was 36 weeks into the pregnancy. When prosecutors discovered that she had a cocaine habit – though there is no evidence that drug abuse had anything to do with the baby's death – they charged her with the "depraved-heart murder" of her child, which carries a mandatory life sentence.

In Alabama, Amanda Kimbrough a mother of three was was arrested at her home and charged with "chemical endangerment" of her unborn child.  Just prior she gave birth to a child that lived for nineteen minutes.  The basis of the prosecution was that she had taken drugs during the pregnancy; a claim she has denied.

"That shocked me, it really did," Kimbrough said. "I had lost a child, that was enough."
She now awaits an appeal ruling from the higher courts in Alabama, which if she loses will see her begin a 10-year sentence behind bars.

This bizarre infatuation of the religious and conservative right with women's reproductive organs and their individual liberties is appalling.  In Latin America, despite abortion's illegality, the abortion rate is higher than in either Western Europe or the United States.

In a region where there is little sex education and social taboos keep unmarried women from seeking contraception, criminalizing abortion has not made it rare, only dangerous. Rich women can go to private doctors. The rest rely on quacks or amateurs or do it themselves. Up to 5,000 women die each year from abortions in Latin America, and hundreds of thousands more are hospitalized.

If the objective of these prosecutoral zealots is to increase the welfare of newborns or reduce abortions, their mission will fail.  In the first case, anyone who thinks they may be subject to prosecution  just will simply get a legal abortion.  In the second case, as the evidence above shows, by creating legal barriers to abortion all you end up doing is forcing women into back alley clinics where their lives are jeopardized and where ultimately more deaths will occur due to a lack of proper medical supervision.

Quote of the Day: Wall St. Bankers & Fraud

A huge portion of Wall Street’s earnings were built around the model of ‘I’m going to bet against my clients. I’m going to regard my clients not as clients — and you can hear it in their language, but as counterparties.

- Edmund Clark, Chief Executive Officer Toronto-Dominion Bank, "No Trading for Dimon Principle With CEO Clark: Corporate Canada"

Further stories on Chinese Students Cheating

Over the past several years there has been a recognition that academic fraud amongst Chinese students has reached critical levels.  In the past five years, Chinese students have increased their undergraduate representation in American colleges from a mere 10,000 students to over 57,000.  While there is no reason to believe that the most successful Oriental students currently enrolled in North American schools engage in any of the documented modalities of fraud, sufficient data continues to accumulate that the average applicant is less than accomplished than what he or she is portraying.  For example, an article in the IHT titled "Sneeking into Class from China" points out the following:

Zinch China, a consulting company that advises American colleges and universities about China, published a report last year that found cheating on college applications to be “pervasive in China, driven by hyper-competitive parents and aggressive agents.

The consulting company told American colleges,

Our research indicates that 90 percent of recommendation letters are fake, 70 percent of essays are not written by the applicant, and 50 percent of high school transcripts are falsified.

Colleges in response are finding the following:

American college recruiters in China feel overwhelmed by the proliferation of cheating, lying, and fraud: Study abroad big business in China, and young Ivy League graduates write essays for Chinese applicants while many a Chinese public school fakes transcripts and recommendation letters.

In 2010 a Centenrary College, located in NJ, decided to shutter each of its satellite campuses in China and Taiwan, subsequent to discovering "rampant cheating among local student".  The extent of the fraud was so ubiquitous that the college was forced to

[withhold] degrees from all 400 Chinese-speaking students in its master’s of business administration programs in Beijing, Shanghai and Taiwan, said Debra Albanese, Centenary’s vice president for strategic advancement.

---
In 2009 the GMAT testing agency discovered a wide-spread scandal in which Chinese companies were collecting and selling GMAT questions online.  In response to that and a growing demand from Chinese students for the test, the testing agency has introduced a fourth part containing integrated reasoning questions, in addition to the current verbal and mathematical skills and analytic writing ability sections.  A NY Times article stated that the, "rise in applications to U.S. schools from overseas students has been accompanied by a reported rise in fraudulent credentials"  The new analytic section is meant to handicap memorization and assess the ability of the student to

synthesize information from multiple sources in order to solve complex problems... They also wanted candidates to be able to indicate what information was relevant, and not relevant, and to be able to evaluate which among a set of possible outcomes were the most likely.

---
Despite all these harsh criticisms and unfavorable reviews, China's institutions appears to be still very much centered around polices and practices that maintain acceptable levels of fraud and corruption.  The Economist magazine stated,

Scholars, both Chinese and Western, say that fraud remains rampant and misconduct ranges from falsified data to fibs about degrees, cheating on tests and extensive plagiarism.

This pervasive and continuous levels of fraud not only diminish the value of honest Chinese students who participate in Western universities -many of whom I personally knew to be excellent students- but leads one to question the entire system of data collection, research, and scientific publication that is present within China.

The implications of widespread academic misconduct could be great. Denis Fred Simon of Penn State University argues that growing evidence of fraud “calls into question the overall credibility of the entire scientific enterprise in China-and unfortunately feeds negatively into the related concerns about the safety of Chinese products and the integrity of information coming out of China.”

Whereas this slavish affection for deception will allow a few to prosper, eventually the system will collapse from the weight of fraud, incompetence, and indifference to empirical fact.

The Great Gatsby

When I was younger I never read any of F. Scott Fitzgerald's works .  Occasionally I'd come across references to his works and not think much of it.  Like most non-liberal arts students, I've yet to read most of the great classics and haven't motivated myself  or found the time to engage in understanding them.  I remember an episode, that is probably all too familiar, in the CBS comedy King of Queens, where Carrie takes time off to "find herself" and stakes out reading The Great Gatsby.  The episode ends with her never reading the book and her husband Doug, the clownish and portly parcel deliveryman, musing to Carrie, "don't you think the Great Gatsby was lost before he came a magician!"

The irony isn't in whether Gatsby was once lost or a magician, because on some abstract level both are true.  Instead, the irony resides in Gatsby's own devotion to a single cause and his need to re-create himself from a simpler and less glamorous past.  When prodded in the novel about being unable to "repeat the past", Gatsby retorts incredulously, “Why of course you can!”

Most people live their lives blinded to the opportunities and realities around them.  While they know there is an entire world of possibilities, they also know that pursuing those dreams is difficult and in the end, there is no more guarantee that pursuing those objectives will make them any more happy or successful.  So they compromise and accept certain realities and condemn themselves to much smaller lives; just like Carrie in the above example.  Gatsby on the other hand, has been on the other side of paradise, where the grass isn't greener, where the lights are dimmer, and hopes go unfulfilled.

With the upcoming release in December 2012 of Baz Lurhmann's film adaptation, there has been some discussion of this seminal work.  The Great Gatsby has been described as a story of "lasting power and beauty" that is rooted in "illusions and self-delusion."  Like America in both the roaring twenties -in which the story is set- and its current situation, the book is filled with the surfeit of wealth, tumultuous descents, and everyday violence.

America is now full of millions of bankrupt Gatsbys who bought their dream homes with no money down. Meanwhile, the derivatives market was the very embodiment of American fantasy and self-deception, built on as flimsy a foundation as Gatsby’s wealth. The promised gold of the Reagan years, burnished to a shine in the new millennium, has turned a grimy yellow.

It is precisely these attributes that made the story then and now so engaging.  The rise and fall of ambitious men who have seduced an even less sophisticated public on their perceived virtues.  An opportunistic elite too absorbed in extracting from society marginal gains, to understand the larger problems unfolding around them.  And, of course, a public incapable of fully engaging the world around them, but all too willing to blame others for any sleight that has befallen them. In each of the classes of people a central conceit is revealed: the moment an individual thinks that they are firmly ahead, they also become cognizant, for however a brief a moment, that the game has been rigged and that they've always been determined to be the loser. It may not be fair; it is not even remotely intelligent, but that is how the game of life is played.

Others have questioned whether Fitzgerald's story could ever be adequately brought to film.  Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic magazine discusses his thoughts on this issue:

As in so many of the books I love, I found the plot in Gatsby to almost be beside the point. Whenever I see it translated to cinema, the film-maker inevitably crafts a story of doomed romance between Daisy and Gatsby. It's obviously true that Gatsby holds some sort of flame for Daisy, but what makes the book run (for me) is the ambiguity of that flame. Does he really love her? Or is she just another possession signaling the climb up? I always felt that last point—the climb up—was much more important than the romance. 

As in all things, where the truth begins and the illusion of reality ends is not always a clear line.  Gatsby's successes and failures are driven by both factors.  What is certain, is that the recurrent theme that is portrayed in Gatsby remains a great lesson to us all in our own sometimes feeble attempts of improving ourselves.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning —
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

----
The first trailer from Warner Bros. Pictures.

Quote of the Day: On Plutocracy

The interests that would undermine government are strong and growing stronger, with rich individuals leading the charge.

- Simon Johnson (MIT professor and former chief economist of the IMF)  "Koch Brothers, The Cato Institute, And Why Nations Fail", The Baseline Scenario.

Why are Americans such Assholes? Part-III

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.

Third world America: Highland Park, Michigan

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

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.

You go girl: Elizabeth Warren redux

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

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

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

1. The current protests occurring in New York across from Wall Street and spreading throughout the world
2. The legal framework and international norms associated with kidnapping, torture, and murder
3. 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.

Portraits of a declining empire: Wall St. edition

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...

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

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

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.

Texas sized Climate Change!

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

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 policy bullets. The policymakers don't have monetary bullets; they don't have fiscal bullets; they cannot even backstop their own financial system. That's why it's more scary than a year ago, two years ago, or three years ago -- when we had all 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

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.