Oldguy Speechifies the Crowd.

Oldguy gave his first political speech Saturday. On a beautiful fall afternoon he had the crowd of near a hundred that showed up for a "Support the President" rally chanting, laughing, clapping and cheering. It went well enough that WCTV grabbed the Oldguy for another interview. It didn't air Saturday, didn't check the tv on Sunday, but an article appeared on their site.

The speech is now up on YouTube in four parts:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

I gotta admit, it was a lot of fun.

About That Plutonomy.

In a "plutonomy", according to Citigroup global strategist Ajay Kapur, economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few.

This is from a Citigroup memo in 2006. A blogger on DailyKos picks up on it - it's worth the read. There's no question that this is what we're now saddled with.

BTW, you gotta love a title like, Stopping Banks From Fleecing, Looting, Scamming, Robbing, Swindling, Tricking, Cheating, Conning, and Generally Ripping Us Off, and begins with,

In the last several years we have all been fleeced, looted, robbed, swindled, thieved, tricked, cheated, scammed, exploited, ponzied, stung, conned, extorted, ripped off and bankrupted by the banks and other big financial companies.

Finally, William K. Black, Associate Professor, University of Missouri, St Louis has an interesting piece, How the Servant Became the Predator, Finances Five Fatal Flaws.

The financial sector harms the real economy.

Even when not in crisis, the financial sector harms the real economy. First, it is vastly too large. The finance sector is an intermediary -- essentially a "middleman". Like all middlemen, it should be as small as possible, while still being capable of accomplishing its mission. Otherwise it is inherently parasitical.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-k-black/how-the-servant-became-a_b_318010.html

Second, the finance sector is worse than parasitic. In the title of his recent book, The Predator State , James Galbraith aptly names the problem. The financial sector functions as the sharp canines that the predator state uses to rend the nation. In addition to siphoning off capital for its own benefit, the finance sector misallocates the remaining capital in ways that harm the real economy in order to reward already-rich financial elites harming the nation.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-k-black/how-the-servant-became-a_b_318010.html

FYI, the Real Economy is the trading of actual goods and services. The Financial Economy or financial sector deals in abstractions of that called money, stocks, bonds, and a plethora of exotic inventions generically called derivatives, or what is commonly referred to as Wall Street.

Tonight on Jeopardy there was a clue, "A criminal that charges exorbitant interest" and the question was, "What is a loan shark?" I like to tell people that when I was young, the "exorbitant interest" rate the loan sharks charged that was against the law was twelve percent. What are the rates on your credit cards. Twenty four percent? Thirty? I've read of those rates.

Glenn Beck, Rodeo Clown

He said so himself. "I'm a rodeo clown."

Tonight I saw a car with a sticker on the back with the "Don't Tread on Me" flag. Beck's followers are using this as some sort of symbol of their rebellion - so I got the point, they were an example of a Beck disciple.

With this in mind I began to wonder what these people should be called, with Beckites coming to mind. But upon further thought I think we should start referring to these people as Beckys, or Bekkies. I'm letting it rhyme with Trekkies on purpose, although I do feel a twinge of conscience for doing it to the Trekkies, who are a harmless bunch. I don't think that about the Beckys.

But getting back to the clown, I find it interesting that Beck likes the metaphor. Ever been to a rodeo? They have them on TV. We took the kids to one once in the old Astrodome. One of the events that you see is bull riding. A rider tries to stay on this big, strong, surprisingly quick and flexible bull with one hand for something like eight seconds - which ain't easy and probably feels like an eternity. But should the rider get bucked off before the eight seconds or jumps off after, there's a real possibility that the bull, pissed off because this animal was on its back, sees it now on the ground and takes off after it, intending to do some damage to the source of its discomfort. So it's been called, "the most dangerous eight seconds in sports."[

This is where the rodeo clown jumps in. It's his job to get the attention of the bull and direct it towards himself and away from the rider so that the rider can scoot to safety. The clown then scoots his own butt to safety before the bull can do him some damage. He's there to save the rider's life and limb from harm.

If Beck's the clown, then it seems the American people are the bull he's trying to get the attention of, away from the rider who is the source of the irritation, the ones causing our discomfort, the big money boys.

OMG. I've Gone Viral!

Holy smoke! Check it out. The Oldguy's tete-a-tete with his congressman, Jack Kingston, over health care has hit the bigtime:

Here I am at ThinkProgress.

Then Huffington Post picked it up.

Rock on!

Single Payer Now!

Packing Heat at Obama's Town Halls

You've seen the pictures:


There's more here and here.

After they shot Dr. Tiller, I wanted to say to them, "Put the gun down. Take a step back and take a deep breath."

Finally. someone beside me is getting a little concerned about this:

“I’ve been worried for some time, even before the events surrounding these health care town halls,” Rich told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Wednesday. “It began during the campaign, where people were shouting ‘treason’ and worse about Obama at Palin rallies — and, essentially, no one in the Republican Party would condemn it. … It’s just been stepping up ever since then.”

--- snip ---

“I think we have a problem,” Rich stated. “This has been going on for too many months. It always seems to happen when there’s a new liberal group taking over. It’s not coincidence that the militias started up again in the 1990s when Clinton came in — or, when Kennedy came in, the right-wing stuff in the early 60s.”

“It’s shocking to me that very few Republican leaders have really condemned this kind of activity,” Rich stated sharply. “In fact, they’ve sort of encouraged it.”

I remember all the right wing bruhaha after Waco. I paid attention to their stuff and even went to a rally in Marietta, Georgia and met Linda Thompson. I liked their view of the Constitution and distrust of government.

However, all their credibility with me went out the window over the last eight years and the Bush administration. None of these people raised an eyebrow when Bush was shredding the Bill Of Rights and saying the Constitution was "a god-damn piece of paper." They said not a word when the Bushistas were tapping our phones, disappearing people, torturing others, and in all ways throwing any semblance of fidelity to freedom out in the trash as "quaint" relics of the past.

So they can keep their partisan outrage. And by the way, I faced this kind of attitude forty years ago in an SDS meeting. It was just after the national guard had shot the students at Kent State and some idiot in the meeting was talking about how we needed to start getting guns. Being from Detroit and having seen them shut down the city in '67, bringing in tanks and armored personnel carriers with fifty caliber machine guns, and they were not reticent to use them, I thought any talk of arming ourselves was ludicrous.

The real lesson of Waco was that the government will in no way allow any challenge to its authority in an armed fashion. It will crush it like an ant.

\

I Confronted My Congressman Today

A week ago I learned that my congressman, Jack Kingston (R-GA-1), was coming to hold a town hall in my hometown to talk about healthcare - a subject near and dear to my heart. I'm familiar with Jack, seeing him on Bill Maher and the different cable shows, but I did a quick check of the congressman's website to check his position. Of course he's against government take over of health care, but I felt something had to be said.

Over 300 people showed up for the town hall. Since this is a very conservative area, most of the crowd looked like it was on Jack's side. Almost immediately after sitting down a petition was passed to me that was "AGAINST SOCIALIZED HEALTH CARE" or something like that. Half the crowd were seniors, which I mean over 65, so I was interested how they would approach the Medicare issue, and since this is a military town there are a lot of former military who love their TriCare.

Jack came in to a standing ovation, and after a couple laudatory introductions he got up and went through a bullet point presentation about the health care problem, at least from his Republican talking points, which were echoed on occassion from the crowd. Then he opened up the meeting, and for the next thirty minutes or so, half the commenters were in support of government sponsored health care.

I thought there might be ten minutes left when I stood to be called on. I knew I might get a minute, maybe stretch it to two, but also simple boldness can go a long way. Anyhow, the congressman called on me, and it went something like this:

Congressman, I'm so happy to have you here today so I can relate to you my situation and my thoughts.

You see, January 15 last year - 08 - I had to go to the emergency room at the medical center because I was bleeding. Two days later, I had a colonoscopy, and when the doctor came in the first words out of his mouth were, "I'm sorry. It's cancer." (This landed rather heavy on the crowd as I was a bit emotional in remembrance). On January 25, I had surgery and they removed fifteen inches of my large intestine along with a tumor the size of a tangerine that was a millimeter from breaking through the intestinal wall. Thank God, it had not spread and I stand here today. I have nothing but praise and gratitude toward the people at the medical center, they saved my life.

(About this time some handed me a mike, and I saw a TV camera pointed my way)

But congressman, I had a friend that was in the same boat as I - a computer guy and business was drying up. By the time he got the care he needed it was too late and we buried him early this year.

You see he did not have health insurance and neither did I - I was trying to cobble together two or three part time jobs and bootstrap a business.

Jack tried to get the floor back and sympathize with the loss of my friend, but then he pissed me off. He said something like, "But you're alive. This is how great our health system is, you got care" and he was being rather condescending about it. Now the adrenalin is rushing, and I still had the mike, so I said,

Yes, congressman, but now I'm functionally bankrupt, and half of my income goes to my medical bills and the credit card debts I incurred during that time.

You don't get back to work the following week after surgery like that. Not even the following month, or three months. It was nine months before I could say I was beginning to feel myself again. I knew my time was up, but I held the mike and I had to say what I came to say:

As I see it, it's the insurance companies that are standing between us and our healthcare. These companies are reaping billions in profits, paying ceo's like Bill McGuire of United Health Care, one of the largest insurance companies, 1.7 billion in compensation. Billions are having to go to "investors" with names like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, while they deny claims and practice that horrible recission refusing to pay when people need it most. Cut out the fat at the top and for no more money than we're paying today we can cover everyone.

This is when the crowd turned and started booing. I could barely hear them as I was focused on Jack, and I could see them coming for the mike. Had to get this out:

Five billion dollars has been spent over the last ten years lobbying congress by these companies. Lately a million and a half a day has been added. Billions are being spent on ads against government run health care not to mention campaign contributions. My question to you congressman is:

Are you on our side or with the insurance companies?

There was a little bit of an uproar going on, but wouldn't you know it, Jack quickly changed the subject. But I had said what I came to say.

The TV station interviewed me afterward. She actually asked if I was for "socialized medicine". I explained how I took issue with her characterization. that socialized medicine was like the VA system, the government owns the hospitals, and the doctors, etc are government employees. What I'm advocating is turning the entire population into one giant pool. She didn't use that. My quote she used:

We do need to revamp the health care in this country. I mean, we may have the best health care in the world, especially if you're a millionaire and a billionaire. They can get whatever they need. But most of us are not.

I guess that's okay too.

A Plea To My Neighbors

I'm composing this as a Letter to the Editor in my local paper. It's long so it will probably be several.

I've been listening to this so-called "debate" about health care and I have been appalled at the misinformation, disinformation, distortion, outright lies and manipulation going around. To be frank, most of the junk is coming from the Republican Party and conservative talk, but really, they are just acting as conduits for the health care industrial complex. Lord knows how much Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly and their ilk are being paid to spread the corporate word.

What we do know is that over the past ten years the so-called health care industry has spent over five billion dollars lobbying congress. That's five hundred million a year or more than a million dollars per congress critter per year. That's also five billion dollars they did not spend on health care for patients. Over that same time the CEO's of these companies have also walked away with billions, most infamously William McGuire from United Healthcare Group, who personally collected a cool one billion seven hundred million dollars in compensation when he retired, so he bought a 136 foot yacht and called it "The Golden Parachute". Exactly what did he produce to deserve those riches?

You see, to channel these fortunes into their own pockets these executives were telling their employees to to deny payment, delay care, and outright canceling or rescinding policies that people had paid on for years, using the excuse of so-called "pre-existing conditions" - like the woman whose policy was rescinded when she needed treatment for breast cancer because she was treated for acne when she was sixteen. Many people have experienced "Treatment Denied" or "Claim Denied" from insurance companies, or other techniques to not pay out. Employees are rated on how much they deny care and huge bonuses are paid to more senior managers. It is in everyone's financial interest in the insurance company to deny care. The phrase, "death by spreadsheet," was coined for a reason. Even when the health crisis doesn't result in death, it can result in bankruptcy. Sixty percent of bankruptcies are now caused by medical debt. Seventy five percent of those thought they had insurance until they needed to seriously use it.

The insurance company public relations firms are complaining about how awful it will be to have government bureaucrats between us and our doctors. But I'll take the government bureaucrat any day whose mission is to get me health care over the corporate bureaucrat whose job depends on denying it. As much as any serial killer, mafia, or gang of terrorists, these companies, executives and stockholders are directly responsible for the death and misery of countless thousands.

Above the five hundred million being spent as usual on lobbyists, there's still plenty of cash to hire an additional three hundred fifty former congress ritters and their staffs to draw on the personal connections these people have with present members of Congress. They're paying out something like one and a half million dollars a day extra for these people, an average of four thousand dollars per person per day. Pretty good pay in this economy. This figure does not include the "campaign contribution" bribes being made. Could there be any greater evidence that our government has become the wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America, and that our representatives are simply corrupt. Do you think these people are ever going to act in our interest?

Which brings us to our esteemed congressman, Jack Kingston. I went to the congressman's website to see what his position was in all of this. Needless to say, he was against reform. Government take over of health care, he calls it. Yet he'll not tell you that the top three industries contributing to this cycle's campaign chest are Insurance, Lobbyists, and Health Professionals, or that his single largest campaign contributor is Aflac. You don't think this affects his stance in any way, do you?

Congressman Kingston, along with a number of other Republicans are touting a study by the "non-partisan" Lewin Group that says if a public option is included in the health care bill that one hundred fourteen million Americans are going to "lose their coverage." At least that's what the congressman claims in bold, red and underlined lettering. One wonders why he didn't go all the way to the hysteric ALL CAPITALS AND EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!!!!!! So he want's you to think he's saying one hundred fourteen million will be without insurance – maybe you. When one actually reads the report one realizes that people are migrating from private plans to the public plan actually increasing the gross number insured. It's flat out deception on the part of the congressman.

Finally, who is the Lewin Group? About thirty seconds on the web and we find that the Lewin Group is a subsidiary of Ingenix, a company that produces software that's designed to limit insurance company payouts. It was so good that it was bought by United HealthCare Group. Early this year United Healthcare had to pay a four hundred million dollar settlement with the federal government for fraud related to that software. So this criminal company (that compensated a ceo one point seven billion dollars) has a subsidiary company putting out a report designed to make us fear a government run health insurance plan. What's amazing is that they're not even subtle about it.

Connecting Some Dots

About two or three weeks ago an article came out in the Rolling Stone that had those "far lefties" talking, and not much anyone else, especially the MSM and right wing blather machine - no, not a peep out of them about it. He pegs Goldman Sachs as primary contributor to all the latest bubbles and bursts, and on back to the Crash of '29. I think the piece talks about the extent of Goldman Sachs "alumni" that have gone on to various high level government or other bank positions, like former Secretary of the Treasury, Hank Paulson, the man that worked out that seven hundred billion dollar bailout banks got from the government last fall. Quite a lot of that money found its way into GS coffers, not just directly, but also through the billions that went to AIG.

Now, check this out: The FBI arrested this russian guy that was a computer programmer at GS. It seems this russian guy downloaded some very proprietary software that GS was using. The money quote comes from Assistant US Attorney Joseph Fracciponti to a federal magistrate judge:

The bank has raised the possibility that there is a danger that somebody who knew how to use this program could use it to manipulate markets in unfair ways.

I'm sorry. What did he just say?

The bank has raised the possibility that there is a danger that somebody who knew how to use this program could use it to manipulate markets in unfair ways.

Let me see if I have this right: Goldman Sachs has the FBI arest this russian guy, Sergey, for downloading some software of theirs that can "manipulate markets in unfair ways". Yeah, really, you sure wouldn't want someone else out there that could "manipulate markets in unfair ways". Hell, they just might "manipulate markets in unfair ways". No siree. That ole software that can "manipulate markets in unfair ways" needs to stay right there at Goldman Sachs. Because Goldman Sachs people are honorable people that would never think to "manipulate markets in unfair ways", would they?

Hmmm, as Lewis Black might say, "ARE YOU F**KING KIDDING ME?"

In related news,

The Federal Reserve warned on Thursday that a growing congressional threat to curtail its independence would destabilise markets and raise the cost of servicing US debt for “current and future generations”.

This is about Ron Paul's legislation to audit the Fed, but, excuse me, did the Fed just threaten our grandchildren? ARE YOU F**KING KIDDING ME? Goddamned banksters threatening the government and the citizens of the United States? And nothing subtle about it, like frikkin' mafioso. I'll bet this doesn't percolate up into the MSM.

The SHTF* warning level has been raised to orange, contingeny planning is warranted.

Peace and good luck.

\
*SHTF = Sh*t Hits The Fan

The U.S. Government: Wholly owned subsidiary of Corporate America.

As if we needed any more proof that our present government is truly wholly bought and sold by the corporations and the wealthy, even with the election of Barak Obama, 350 former congresscritters and staffers have been hired by the healthcare industry to lobby 535 present day congresscritters regarding the healthcare reform legislation. They say they are spending $1.4 million a day for these new hires - really temps, but not bad pay in this economy. It works out to four thousand dollars per lobbyist per day. Of course this does not count how much moolah is being promised to the various congresscritters for said congresscritters next campaigns. They used to call them bribes and the politicians who took them corrupt. Now they call them campaign contributions and the politicians representatives and senators.

The last time they got into this sort of thing we got Medicare Part D, the prescription drug benefit that was a big kiss to the pharmaceutical industry by mandating that the government had to pay retail (as opposed to Canada which buys wholesale from the same companies.) It's also designed to go broke. Unless the legislation has a good public option, not one that is designed to fail to show how "government care" doesn't work, it won't be worth spit to us. Of course you already know my view. Why we're talking about anything other than Single Payer is because of the health insurance companies dominance of the media and congress. Polling shows that anywhere from 72 to 80% of Americans want at least a public option, if not outright single payer. There should not even be a question.

But that's not the situation we find ourselves in, is it? This is how it boils down to me: I can't get healthcare without going broke because somebody else wants to get rich. Sorry but I don't see anything good or right about that.

As has been said for so long, our government operates as of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations. This is not metaphor or hyperbole, but cold reality. It is no longer of the people, by the people and for the people. What was set up to be a democratic republic is now a corporatocracy. A silent coup has been executed and the very foundations of government have been altered.

\

Biznezz

Biznezz: After the fall of communism in Russia, that's a term that grew up among the oligarchs and mafia describing in what they were now engaging. It carried more than a hint of corruption, something dark that wears the cloak of respectable business. That's what business has become in America. I don't know if it ever was anything else, but it certainly is now. Business has insinuated itself into areas that it has no business, and I've seen over my lifetime what I like to refer to as the businessization of America, but biznezz will do.

For example, the health insurance industry, or health payment industry, and all those thieving CEOs, can just go away. The bastards make a fortune and live the very high life by denying medical payment, and thus medical care, that can often lead to death, and act like it's some sort of divine right. Screw 'em. We turn everyone in the US into one big insurance pool and join all the other civilized countries in providing health care to all of its citizens.

Lately I've been listening to a podcast called Deconstructing Dinner. It's produced out of Vancouver, but it's entirely applicable to the US. It gives a lot of great information on how things work in the industrial food supply system, and basically how bad it is for us, but certainly makes a few people very rich. At the same time it gives examples of people that are trying to do something about it, taking matters into their own hands to ensure a safe and healthy food supply.

Only Because Its Being Talked About - Healthcare Part I

We don't have much in the way of health care in the US. What we have mostly is sick care. Most of us only use the medical system because we need it because something has gone wrong. If it is health care, where is the care, the outgoing concern from health care providers, to keep us healthy?

I got really pissed at the doctor I was going to for a few years. It became obvious that he didn't give a damn about me, would come buzzing through checking the stats out and try to be out in five minutes, for which he charged my insurance a hundred sixty five dollars, or me sixty five when I lost the insurance. The practice actually dropped me when I was struggling financially. People have a hard time believing me when I say I got fired by my doctor.

There's something very wrong in making a fortune off of other people's misery and sickness. It's totally parasitic. I don't have a problem with a doctor making good money. It takes a lot of smarts and hard work to do it. But I do take issue with someone who is only in it for how much they can gouge out of you. The leaders in this category are the health insurance companies.

The health insurance companies are parasites. They produce nothing. They are leaches and vampires - maggots. They feed off of sickness and death. They are not in existence to provide health care. They exist to make money, and pay their CEOs huge amounts of compensation. We don't need them. All we need to do is turn the entire country and population into one large insurance pool administered by a federal agency that answers to the voters.

Going Green in Support of Mousavi

Someone thought we ought to go green in support of the protesters and supporters of Mousavi in Iran, so here you are. We'll see how long this lasts.

The large demonstrations against the obviously fraudulent election returns really put Americans to shame. The best we can do are the hokey "Tea Parties."

The Titanic Has Hit the Iceberg, Think Its Going to Right Itself?

The entire paradigm that has dominated the twentieth century is beginning to collapse here in the good ole USA. Economic systems dependent on growth have maxed out on resources and are beginning to fall apart. What the economy has just experienced is a symptom. Basically, the late twentieth century American economy is crashing on the shoals of history. It's for the best as far as I'm concerned.

There are two factors that are global in nature and absolutely out of our control that dominate the world. The first is Peak Oil, which I've written about before. The civilization that grew out of the industrial revolution, the one that we live in today, requires amounts of energy that are astronomical. This energy is obtained by the burning of fossil fuels: oil, coal, and natural gas. Up until now it's been relatively cheap. It's about to get much more expensive, then much harder to obtain, until finally there's not enough left and it's so hard to get that it's not worth it. The time until then was thought to have been centuries when I was growing up, now it's considered in decades.

It's not just energy that fossil fuels are used for. Look around you right now and become aware of the things that are plastic or synthetic fiber like nylon. That's oil. Most pharmaceuticals are synthesized from oil. Very importantly, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and such are made from fossil fuels. Our entire agricultural system is based in the use of these things on the land. Without them, agriculture as we know it is in a heap of trouble.

The second major force is global climate change brought on by global warming amped up by greehouse gasses such as carbon dioxide. Atmospheric carbon dioxide was about 270 parts per million (ppm) prior to the industrial revolution. The say 350 ppm is a serious point. We now stand at 386 ppm.

It's not as if this is going to happen tomorrow, although I am concerned about the overall economy in the months to come, but I'm thinking that we need to be checking out the lifeboats.

These Xtians Are Not Only Crazy, Now They're Getting Dangerous

As a follower of the teachings of Jesus, I resent people like this Scott Roeder, and others like Randall Terry and all the other anti-abortion jerks, that posture with that veneer of righteousness. Truly Jesus spoke of this ilk,

You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men's bones and everything unclean. ²⁸In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness. (Matthew 7:27-28)

I won't even give them credit for being beautiful on the outside. Anyone with a lick of discernment can see the darkness of these folk. They posture themselves as defenders of the "pre-born" when they couldn't give a rat's ass about the baby. Just ask them, can we get prenatal care for the fetus? can we ensure the mother has a good place to live and raise the child? can we make sure she has an good diet? can she get proper medical care? They're answers: no, no, no, and hell no.

But even before we get to that, just what business is it of their's? What is their skin in the game that they can demand anything? Bottom line is they think it gets them brownie points with God. These people no more know God than Osama bin Laden.

Check out this American Taleban, Lou Engle, praying over The Huckster, Mike Huckabee, and twice admitted adulterer, three time married, recently converted to Catholicism, Newt Gingrich (who obviously hasn't reached the part in the catechism where he learns one of the seven deadly sins (the kind that get you sent to hell) is gluttony, not to mention pride and avarice, let alone greed; oh dear Newt, study hard). This was at some kind of Xtian rally.

Did you catch where Engle calls for acts of Christian martyrdom? What he means is that people like Scott "The Executioner" Roeder are actually martyrs for Jesus. In other words, he's calling for more acts of the like of Roeder. More people shoot more doctors, and you go down as a martyr for the cause of Christ, they say. Roeder admits that there are others like him. What's particularly creepy is that most of the audience seems to be young people. I don't think Engle's going to do the deed himself, but he says somebody should.

This is no different than what Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, or Islamic Jihad or any other lameass terrorist group does. Having failed in the court of public opinion they now turn to force. They have the audacity to cloak themselves as some martyrs to the faith while they kill. All the while Engle is out there inciting them on. People of God, Army of God? Puh-lease.

These people are Xtian terrorists. They are utterly dangerous. And Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich are pallin' around with them.

/

Capitalism

Check out this series of articles over at Huffington Post. A good money quote:

Personally, I think capitalism is simply a concept that does not, in the long run, work. It's like communism -- it looks good on paper.

A "capitalist" is someone who makes a living not from their own labor, but from their money, their "capital." See, that's why it's called "capitalism," and not "laborism," or "hardworkism." Interest, dividends, stock sales -- not work. If you work for a living -- even if it's intellectual work, and you need that paycheck to live -- you are a worker. (Middle class is just a worker with a mortgage.) "Oh, what about the hairdresser on the corner! What about the mechanic down the block!" Well, what about 'em? If you own a business that you have to work at to make a living, you are an owner/operator, a self-employed worker. Let me say that again: If you own a small business that you have to work at you are not a capitalist! Sorry to shout, but for some reason people have a hard time with that one. The hairdresser, mechanic and the rest are owner/operators, living on their labor, and if they stop working they fail. Workers.

Most Americans are not capitalists. They might want to be capitalists, but no matter how much you, or that hardworking barista, that well paid techno-nerd, small farmer, or gangsta rapping bank teller may want to be capitalists, you are not capitalists. You are workers.

It goes on to give a nice critique of capitalism. A quick, concise read.
/

Eureka

I turned to MyBetterHalf the other day and said,"Honey, I think I know what I want to do when I grow up. She looked up at me, smiled and said, "That's good."

Two years ago I finally got around to actually listening to what environmentalists were saying, and it didn't take me long to realize that at least most of what they were saying was true and jumped on the Green Movement bandwagon. Since I had pretty much decided what I was trying to do and the business I was trying to start just wasn't really going to get off the ground, I figured I could look at what sort of job I could create for myself that was green oriented.

It was then that I read Bill McKibben's book, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and The Durable Future. Here's a quote from a reviewer of the book,

McKibben assails the core capitalist precept: that more is always better. While this was a good principle for nineteenth century societies scrabbling up the early rungs of the development ladder, he says that in a world outstripping its energy resources and facing global warming, a different ethos about the scale and structure of production has to be adopted — one that can help us live within our means (including developing giants like India and China).

But living within our means doesn’t imply that we have to return to the poverty of our pre-industrial forebears. It can also mean living better. In fact, McKibben says that growth without limits doesn’t makes us happy or satisfied. He points to studies in the new field of “hedonics” that claim that after a certain basic basket of needs is filled, the correlation between happiness and money disappears. Americans are the most affluent, but the least content people in the advanced industrial nations, according to these studies. Europeans, who consume about half the resources we do, far outstrip us in reported “well-being.”

McKibben says one difference may be that Europeans place a higher value on local community. Like the philosophy of “deep ecology,” which promotes the idea that humans need to experience a deep connection to the natural world in order to be happy, McKibben says that people need “community” to attain satisfaction. And they must use “technologies of community” to achieve it. Such technologies are locally based, promote direct connections between producers and consumers, and tend to be small-scale, although they can be integrated into a much larger network. They shift the balance away from globalization and toward localism in production and distribution.

There was something in the book that resonated deeply with me. The natural question becomes, how do we put something like this into practice. I look at the small southern conservative town that I live in and see plenty of people that have been thinking about some of these things. There are a number of people that that are very environmentally conscious and many that would like access to good, fresh, locally-grown food. I was even getting in touch with people that wanted to organize a co-op. They expressed they'd wanted to do this for quite some time, it was just that nobody had the time. I said I 'd give it a whirl, but then I got rudely interrupted.

It came about as I was recuperating that I planted my first garden. It was pretty successful for a newbie and I began eating fresh veggies straight out of the garden. Vegetables that actually had a taste to them. The potatoes that we dug out of the ground had a tecture that bordered on creamy. Tomatoes that weren't like biting into some sort of bland water balloon. You really can't get any better than that.

The real issue of course, is the economics of it. While an acre of land farmed "organically" is more productive to an acre farmed conventionally, it requires more labor. It was hard to get the numbers to a point you're getting somewhere. Then along came a revelation: something called permaculture. Although I may refer to it as The Answer, it is at minimum a very key component in the rebuilding of our local economies and the establishment of communities of such that McKibben talks about. The economics move into the permaculturists favor. Sounds good to me.

Do a google and some reading about it and we'll talk more next time.
/

The Local Economy.

Whenever local people/politicians talk about economic growth for my small southern city, in the next breath they will talk about bringing companies to the city to provide jobs. The biggest advantage is the cheap labor force. Special tax breaks for the company also get involved. The plus side to this is the cash injected into the local economy from outside in the form of wages gives a net gain to the economy.

On the other side of the equation, the big box retail stores that come here are a net drain on the local economy. The stores are in the business of making a profit, which means more money must come into them than they leave, which means money flows out of the local economy through them. These stores are dependent on distribution chains that spread around the world. Dollars spent at Wal-Mart not only make their way to Bentonville, Arkansas and the Walton families pockets, but most go all the way to China. Good for the Chinese. Us? Not so much.

Also, in a very real way, we are dependent on these stores to feed, clothe and supply a myriad of other things for us. If they stopped, for whatever reason, where would that leave us?

If we keep our dollars circulating in the local economy we will all benefit. It would be of much greater benefit to our local economy if we were to move to a more locally oriented and sustainable economy, dependent on ourselves and our own talent and labor.

/eom

Resist or Become Serfs

I know this economic stuff can be really depressing, and I'll get back to my Alley Garden Updates soon, along with some other cool things that may develop, but sometimes people connect the dots in such a way as you go, Oh... my... God...

Chris Hedges has this article at Truthdig called Resist or Become Serfs:

America is devolving into a third-world nation. And if we do not immediately halt our elite’s rapacious looting of the public treasury we will be left with trillions in debts, which can never be repaid, and widespread human misery which we will be helpless to ameliorate. Our anemic democracy will be replaced with a robust national police state. The elite will withdraw into heavily guarded gated communities where they will have access to security, goods and services that cannot be afforded by the rest of us. Tens of millions of people, brutally controlled, will live in perpetual poverty. This is the inevitable result of unchecked corporate capitalism. The stimulus and bailout plans are not about saving us. They are about saving them. We can resist, which means street protests, disruptions of the system and demonstrations, or become serfs.

Boy, that can sure stick a pin in one's optimism.

The corporate state, and the political and intellectual class that served the corporate state, constructed a financial and political system based on illusions. Corporations engaged in pyramid lending that created fictitious assets. These fictitious assets became collateral for more bank lending. The elite skimmed off hundreds of millions in bonuses, commissions and salaries from this fictitious wealth. Politicians, who dutifully served corporate interests rather than those of citizens, were showered with campaign contributions and given lucrative jobs when they left office. Universities, knowing it was not good business to challenge corporatism, muted any voices of conscience while they went begging for corporate donations and grants. Deceptive loans and credit card debt fueled the binges of a consumer society and hid falling wages and the loss of manufacturing jobs.

--- snip ---

“Bankrupt corporate capitalism is on its way to bankrupting the socialism that is trying to save it,” Nader added. “That is the end stage. If they no longer have socialism to save them then we are into feudalism. We are into private police, gated communities and serfs with a 21st century nomenclature.”

He ends with this cheery picture.

A furious and sustained backlash by a betrayed and angry populace, one unprepared intellectually and psychologically for collapse, will sweep aside the Democrats and most of the Republicans. A cabal of proto-fascist misfits, from Christian demagogues to simpletons like Sarah Palin to loudmouth talk show hosts, who we naively dismiss as buffoons, will find a following with promises of revenge and moral renewal. The elites, the ones with their Harvard Business School degrees and expensive vocabularies, will retreat into their sheltered enclaves of privilege and comfort. We will be left bereft and abandoned outside the gates.

How much of this is plausible? All too much of it for my comfort.

/eom

If You Can Take It

There's been a number of good articles come out that I haven't had time to blog about (along with the fact I had a good post going when my computer bluescreened).

Let's start with an article titled, The Two Documents Everyone Should Read to Understand the Crisis,

As a white-collar criminologist and former financial regulator much of my research studies what causes financial markets to become profoundly dysfunctional. The FBI has been warning of an "epidemic" of mortgage fraud since September 2004. It also reports that lenders initiated 80% of these frauds.¹ When the person that controls a seemingly legitimate business or government agency uses it as a "weapon" to defraud we categorize it as a "control fraud" ("The Organization as 'Weapon' in White Collar Crime." Wheeler & Rothman 1982; The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One. Black 2005). Financial control frauds' "weapon of choice" is accounting. Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime -- combined. Control fraud epidemics can arise when financial deregulation and desupervision and perverse compensation systems create a "criminogenic environment" (Big Money Crime. Calavita, Pontell & Tillman 1997.)

The FBI correctly identified the epidemic of mortgage control fraud at such an early point that the financial crisis could have been averted had the Bush administration acted with even minimal competence. To understand the crisis we have to focus on how the mortgage fraud epidemic produced widespread accounting fraud. [emphasis mine - OG]

I get really suspicious when people keep copping to "incompetence." It can hide much more nefarious motives.

These two documents are enough to begin to understand:

• the FBI accurately described mortgage fraud as "epidemic"
• nonprime lenders are overwhelmingly responsible for the epidemic
• the fraud was so endemic that it would have been easy to spot if anyone looked
• the lenders, the banks that created nonprime derivatives, the rating agencies, and the buyers all operated on a "don't ask; don't tell" policy
• willful blindness was essential to originate, sell, pool and resell the loans
• willful blindness was the pretext for not posting loss reserves
• both forms of blindness made high (fictional) profits certain when the bubble was expanding rapidly and massive (real) losses certain when it collapsed
• the worse the nonprime loan quality the higher the fees and interest rates, and the faster the growth in nonprime lending and pooling the greater the immediate fictional profits and (eventual) real losses
• the greater the destruction of wealth, the greater the (fictional) profits, bonuses, and stock appreciation
• many of the big banks are deeply insolvent due to severe credit losses
• those big banks and Treasury don't know how insolvent they are because they didn't even have the loan files
• a "stress test" can't remedy the banks' problem -- they do not have the loan files

Wired has an article about this Chinese economist David X. Li,

For five years, Li's formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.

His method was adopted by everybody from bond investors and Wall Street banks to ratings agencies and regulators. And it became so deeply entrenched—and was making people so much money—that warnings about its limitations were largely ignored.

Then the model fell apart. Cracks started appearing early on, when financial markets began behaving in ways that users of Li's formula hadn't expected. The cracks became full-fledged canyons in 2008—when ruptures in the financial system's foundation swallowed up trillions of dollars and put the survival of the global banking system in serious peril.

David X. Li, it's safe to say, won't be getting that Nobel anytime soon. One result of the collapse has been the end of financial economics as something to be celebrated rather than feared. And Li's Gaussian copula formula will go down in history as instrumental in causing the unfathomable losses that brought the world financial system to its knees.

Isn't that special...

The damage was foreseeable and, in fact, foreseen. In 1998, before Li had even invented his copula function, Paul Wilmott wrote that "the correlations between financial quantities are notoriously unstable." Wilmott, a quantitative-finance consultant and lecturer, argued that no theory should be built on such unpredictable parameters. And he wasn't alone. During the boom years, everybody could reel off reasons why the Gaussian copula function wasn't perfect. Li's approach made no allowance for unpredictability: It assumed that correlation was a constant rather than something mercurial. Investment banks would regularly phone Stanford's Duffie and ask him to come in and talk to them about exactly what Li's copula was. Every time, he would warn them that it was not suitable for use in risk management or valuation.

In hindsight, ignoring those warnings looks foolhardy. But at the time, it was easy. Banks dismissed them, partly because the managers empowered to apply the brakes didn't understand the arguments between various arms of the quant universe. Besides, they were making too much money to stop.

And isn't that what it's all about?

"Li can't be blamed," says Gilkes of CreditSights. After all, he just invented the model. Instead, we should blame the bankers who misinterpreted it. And even then, the real danger was created not because any given trader adopted it but because every trader did. In financial markets, everybody doing the same thing is the classic recipe for a bubble and inevitable bust.

Yeah, they deserve all that money because they're such frakkin' geniuses.

Li has been notably absent from the current debate over the causes of the crash. In fact, he is no longer even in the US. Last year, he moved to Beijing to head up the risk-management department of China International Capital Corporation. In a recent conversation, he seemed reluctant to discuss his paper and said he couldn't talk without permission from the PR department. In response to a subsequent request, CICC's press office sent an email saying that Li was no longer doing the kind of work he did in his previous job and, therefore, would not be speaking to the media.

It's probably nothing.

I was commenting on The Quiet Coup, when my computer bluescreened,

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.

It's worth the read.

Sleep Well.

/eom

Infinite Debt

Thomas Geoghegan (pronounced ja-hay-gun) has an article in Harper's called Infinite Debt: How Unlimited Interest Rates Destroyed the Economy. He was on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now show last Tuesday. You hear it or read the transcript here. It's well worth the time.

It reads, quote, “no amount of New Deal regulation or SEC-watching could have stopped what happened…The problem was not that we ‘deregulated the New Deal’ but that we deregulated a much older, even ancient, set of laws.” The article goes on to say, quote, “We dismantled the most ancient of human laws, the law against usury, which had existed in some form in every civilization from the time of the Babylonian Empire to the end of Jimmy Carter’s term.”

And who came after Carter? Why, yes, that would be Saint Ronnie of the Ray-Gun. He refers to a SCOTUS decision in 1978: Marquette National Bank v. First of Omaha Service Corp.

Sure, that’s the Brown versus Board of Deregulation for the financial sector. The case—Justice Brennan, of all people, opinion said that banks that operate—out-of-state banks that were subject to the National Banking Act of 1864, signed by President Lincoln in the middle of the Wilderness Campaign, effectively preempted any state regulation capping the interest rates of those banks when they sent their credit cards in from out of state. Now, back in 1864, banks in Delaware weren’t operating out in Nebraska or handing out credit cards across the country, and there was no such thing as Visa or MasterCard.

The effect of this was that the big national banks were not subject to any state usury law, because the Banking Act of 1864 had no interest rate cap on it, not contemplating the kind of situation that we’re in today. And in effect, this sealed what had been a trend throughout the country, which is lifting these interest rate caps for banks and giving consumers easy credit on the premise that they would just pay tons and tons of interest so that the banks were protected if the loan weren’t repaid. In fact, the banks had incentive to hand out credit cards and hope that the loans would not be repaid, because the interest rates on these credit cards were so high.

So the capital in this country began to shift in the financial sector. That’s why the financial sector began to bloat up. That’s why we ended up, by 2006, having a third of all profits going into the banks and the financial firms and not into the real economy.

This is nothing less than the banksters waging economic war, class war, on the rest of us.

I feel one of the reasons I am in favor of the bailout of the auto industry is, aside from all the other reasons, a sense of guilt that we set up all the returns in this economy in favor of financial firms and really disinvested from industry. And even worse, we began to turn industry into a banking itself. General Motors, General Electric began to operate banks, because that’s where they made the big profit, in the loans to consumers, uncapped interest. It’s a very destructive situation.

And this isn’t some left-wing progressive critique circa 2009. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, warned how important it is to have interest rate caps on the financial sector, or all the money will gush into there and out of productive uses. Keynes, in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, the great classic, 1936, has a little chapter at the end saying, “Yes, we have deficit spending. I’ve got this way of getting out of the Depression. By the way, we’ve got to keep the interest rate caps on the banks.”

...Many economic historians, see history as nothing but a turf war between three groups: the manufacturers, workers and the bondholders, or the financial sector. So where does labor fit in in all of this? People lost the ability to get wage increases and got the ability, an incredible ability, really unknown in previous times, to get credit cards with which they had high rates of interest. So, unable to get wage increases, people—or unable to get union cards, really, people got credit cards and began running up these great debts, which addicted the country to high rates of return in the financial sector, so that people were kind of spending their way out of the real economy, pushing more and more money, by the fact that they were going into debt, into this virtual financial sector economy. So, really, the inability of people to raise their own wages and the incredible ease with which they could get credit instead helped create this flow of capital out of manufacturing and into finance. You know, we, the little people in this country, helped finance the bloating up of this financial sector and really the downsizing of our own jobs in the real economy. We sent the signals, you know, to investors to put money into the financial sector and not into the manufacturing sector.

Check it out.

/eom

The Big Takeover.

If you haven't seen Matt Taibbi's The Great Takeover in Rolling Stone, it is absolutely must read.

You gotta love an article about the Wall Street mess that begins,

It's over — we're officially, royally fucked.

And goes on to,

The best way to understand the financial crisis is to understand the meltdown at AIG. AIG is what happens when short, bald managers of otherwise boring financial bureaucracies start seeing Brad Pitt in the mirror. This is a company that built a giant fortune across more than a century by betting on safety-conscious policyholders — people who wear seat belts and build houses on high ground — and then blew it all in a year or two by turning their entire balance sheet over to a guy who acted like making huge bets with other people's money would make his dick bigger.

That guy — the Patient Zero of the global economic meltdown — was one Joseph Cassano, the head of a tiny, 400-person unit within the company called AIG Financial Products, or AIGFP. Cassano, a pudgy, balding Brooklyn College grad with beady eyes and way too much forehead, cut his teeth in the Eighties working for Mike Milken, the granddaddy of modern Wall Street debt alchemists. Milken, who pioneered the creative use of junk bonds, relied on messianic genius and a whole array of insider schemes to evade detection while wreaking financial disaster. Cassano, by contrast, was just a greedy little turd with a knack for selective accounting who ran his scam right out in the open, thanks to Washington's deregulation of the Wall Street casino.

It goes on to explain collateralized debt obligations (CDO) and credit default swaps (CDS),

In its simplest form, a CDS is just a bet on an outcome. Say Bank A writes a million-dollar mortgage to the Pope for a town house in the West Village. Bank A wants to hedge its mortgage risk in case the Pope can't make his monthly payments, so it buys CDS protection from Bank B, wherein it agrees to pay Bank B a premium of $1,000 a month for five years. In return, Bank B agrees to pay Bank A the full million-dollar value of the Pope's mortgage if he defaults. In theory, Bank A is covered if the Pope goes on a meth binge and loses his job.

Secondly, Cassano was selling so-called "naked" CDS deals. In a "naked" CDS, neither party actually holds the underlying loan. In other words, Bank B not only sells CDS protection to Bank A for its mortgage on the Pope — it turns around and sells protection to Bank C for the very same mortgage. This could go on ad nauseam: You could have Banks D through Z also betting on Bank A's mortgage. Unlike traditional insurance, Cassano was offering investors an opportunity to bet that someone else's house would burn down, or take out a term life policy on the guy with AIDS down the street. It was no different from gambling, the Wall Street version of a bunch of frat brothers betting on Jay Feely to make a field goal. Cassano was taking book for every bank that bet short on the housing market, but he didn't have the cash to pay off if the kick went wide.

He goes on to talk about Phil Gramm, the scumbag former senator from Texas, who led the charge in 1999 with two pieces of legislation that effectively overturned the safeguards put in place by FDR to prevent this sort of nonsense.

In the 10-year period beginning in 1998, financial companies spent $1.7 billion on federal campaign contributions and another $3.4 billion on lobbyists. They quickly got what they paid for. In 1999, Gramm co-sponsored a bill that repealed key aspects of the Glass-Steagall Act, smoothing the way for the creation of financial megafirms like Citigroup. The move did away with the built-in protections afforded by smaller banks. In the old days, a local banker knew the people whose loans were on his balance sheet: He wasn't going to give a million-dollar mortgage to a homeless meth addict, since he would have to keep that loan on his books. But a giant merged bank might write that loan and then sell it off to some fool in China, and who cared?

The very next year, Gramm compounded the problem by writing a sweeping new law called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that made it impossible to regulate credit swaps as either gambling or securities. Commercial banks — which, thanks to Gramm, were now competing directly with investment banks for customers — were driven to buy credit swaps to loosen capital in search of higher yields. "By ruling that credit-default swaps were not gaming and not a security, the way was cleared for the growth of the market," said Eric Dinallo, head of the New York State Insurance Department.

You really should read it.

As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.

The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.

"But wait a minute," you say to them. "No one ever asked you to stay up all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what's left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell clerks. Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?"

But before you even finish saying that, they're rolling their eyes, because You Don't Get It. These people were never about anything except turning money into money, in order to get more money; valueswise they're on par with crack addicts, or obsessive sexual deviants who burgle homes to steal panties. Yet these are the people in whose hands our entire political future now rests.

Good luck with that, America. And enjoy tax season.

\

AIG Guy Quits. World Goes On...

The New York Times printed a resignation letter from a guy at AIG, one Jake DeSantis, who worked in the Financial Products Division, heading units in "equities and commodities," that earned the company $100 million in profits.

I take this action after 11 years of dedicated, honorable service to A.I.G. I can no longer effectively perform my duties in this dysfunctional environment, nor am I being paid to do so. Like you, I was asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of a sense of duty to the company and to the public officials who have come to its aid. Having now been let down by both, I can no longer justify spending 10, 12, 14 hours a day away from my family for the benefit of those who have let me down.

The profitability of the businesses with which I was associated clearly supported my compensation. I never received any pay resulting from the credit default swaps that are now losing so much money. I did, however, like many others here, lose a significant portion of my life savings in the form of deferred compensation invested in the capital of A.I.G.-F.P. because of those losses. In this way I have personally suffered from this controversial activity — directly as well as indirectly with the rest of the taxpayers.

Poor baby... Let down by Suits and Politicians, imagine that. At least he didn't claim to be working when he said he spent ten, rwelve, fourteen hours away from his family. Excuse me? What do you think the rest of us do out here? We're all pretty much working those kind of hours and I guarantee we are making no where near that kind of money. My guess is that he still has well into seven figures in his portfolio.

I am disappointed and frustrated over your lack of support for us. I and many others in the unit feel betrayed that you failed to stand up for us in the face of untrue and unfair accusations from certain members of Congress last Wednesday and from the press over our retention payments, and that you didn’t defend us against the baseless and reckless comments made by the attorneys general of New York and Connecticut.

You expected your management to back you up? What planet have you been living on? Talk about living in a privileged bubble!

So what am I to do? There’s no easy answer. I know that because of hard work I have benefited more than most during the economic boom and have saved enough that my family is unlikely to suffer devastating losses during the current bust. Some might argue that members of my profession have been overpaid, and I wouldn’t disagree.

No shit Sherlock! You don't think all those hefty paydays aren't directly related to the mess we're in? You admit, you're set, you have a lot of money saved up. It wasn't from "hard work" that got you that money. It's from skimming the profits that working people deserved. Most of us aren't as fortunate, and WE'RE NOT TO BLAME EITHER!

What a whiner!!! Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, Mr. DeSantis.

And if people in your "profession" are feeling fear, WELL THEY SHOULD! You should get down on your knees at night and thank God that we aren't socialists or communists or whatever the right wing and other Suits like yourself want to call us. If we were, you wouldn't be afraid. You'd be dead.

\

This is Not Good

China, who is probably the largest holder of US dollars is going to be pushing to move away from the dollar as the default world reserve currency.

Right now, all nations need to have dollars in their reserves mostly to pay for oil which is denominated in dollars. It was one of the reasons they attacked Iraq - Saddam was moving to get paid in euros. Iran has also talked about this publicly, which is one of the reasons for the bad press.

If this happens, we're talking about bigtime inflation, which may actually mitigate against it, it may not be possible now without huge affects hitting the worldwide economy.

\

Yep, the World Has Changed

You all remember how things were back a few years ago?  I'm afraid we'll be thinking how good those days were some years from now.

I'm not holding out any hope that the old paradigm is going to return.  It really can't, because like the Soviet system there's a fatal flaw in the theory, but it's only going to go kicking and screaming every step of the way.

The last thirty years have shown us just what happens when you let Wall Street, so-called "free enterprise", run things.  When Wall Street crashed the system big time resulting in what we now call the First Great Republican Depression, we got a president that took on the banksters of his day, overthrowing their power and implementing policies that favored working people greater than has ever been seen in this country. In his acceptance speech to the Democratic Convention in 1936, his "Rendevous With Destiny" speech, FDR spelled out what he considered the greatest threat to the nation that he was calling on Americans to turn back:

I cannot, with candor, tell you that all is well
with the world. Clouds of suspicion, tides of ill-will and intolerance
gather darkly in many places. In our own land we enjoy indeed a
fullness of life greater than that of most nations. But the rush of
modern civilization itself has raised for us new difficulties, new
problems which must be solved if we are to preserve to the United
States the political and economic freedom for which Washington and
Jefferson planned and fought.

That very word freedom, in itself and of
necessity, suggests freedom from some restraining power. In 1776 we
sought freedom from the tyranny of a political autocracy - from the
eighteenth-century royalists who held special privileges from the
crown. It was to perpetuate their privilege that they governed without
the consent of the governed; that they denied the right of free
assembly and free speech; that they restricted the worship of God; that
they put the average man's property and the average man's life in pawn
to the mercenaries of dynastic power; that they regimented the people.

Since that struggle, however, man's inventive genius
released new forces in our land which reordered the lives of our
people. The age of machinery, of railroads; of steam and electricity;
the telegraph and the radio; mass production, mass distribution - all
of these combined to bring forward a new civilization and with it a new
problem for those who sought to remain free.

For out of this modern civilization economic
royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon
concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of
corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and
agriculture, of labor and capital - all undreamed of by the Fathers -
the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal
service.

There was no place among this royalty for our many
thousands of small-businessmen and merchants who sought to make a
worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were
no more free than the worker or the farmer. Even honest and
progressive-minded men of wealth, aware of their obligation to their
generation, could never know just where they fitted into this dynastic
scheme of things.

It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged
princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached
out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism
and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new
mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their
property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the
problem that faced the Minute Man.

The hours men and women worked, the wages they
received, the conditions of their labor - these had passed beyond the
control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial
dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the
small-businessmen, the investments set aside for old age - other
people's money - these were tools which the new economic royalty used
to dig itself in.

Those who tilled the soil no longer reaped the
rewards which were their right. The small measure of their gains was
decreed by men in distant cities.

Throughout the nation, opportunity was limited by
monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great
machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted.
Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged
enterprise, not free enterprise.

An old English judge once said: "Necessitous men are
not free men." Liberty requires opportunity to make a living - a living
decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man
not only enough to live by, but something to live for.

For too many of us the political equality we once
had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small
group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control
over other people's property, other people's money, other people's
labor - other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer
free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of
happiness.

Against economic tyranny such as this, the American
citizen could appeal only to the organized power of government. The
collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election
of 1932 was the people's mandate to end it. Under that mandate it is
being ended.

The royalists of the economic order have conceded
that political freedom was the business of the government, but they
have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They
granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to
vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect
the citizen in his right to work and his right to live.

Today we stand committed to the proposition that
freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is
guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal
opportunity in the market place.

These economic royalists complain that we seek to
overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is
that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American
institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they
seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness
they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as
always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not
subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the
over-privileged alike.

Welcome back.

\

What's a Trillion Dollars, Daddy?

Check out this graphic on what a trillion dollars looks like.

/

The Prez Hits It Out of the Park.

Well, President Obama just knocked one out of the park with his first “State of the Union” address before the entire government of the United States, IMHO. Well, not quite. Attorney General Eric Holder was the “Designated Successor”. He’s the one, that in the line of succession would become president if something catastrophic happened. So he’s out of DC at some undisclosed location (which somehow does not sound nearly as ominous as when it was applied to Dick Cheney). I took note that he acknowledged the mucky-mucks that were there then turned and spoke directly to the American people. A few highlights:

The concern is that if we do not re-start lending in this country, our recovery will be choked off before it even begins.

It’s the bankers that have the capital and are not lending. Are they trying to sabotage Obama’s recovery plans? I laugh when I hear the right-wingnuts say we’re socialists. I’ve even told people, if we were socialists the bankers wouldn’t have testified before Congress, they would have been shot before Congress. I had a doctor agree with me.

Already, we have done more to advance the cause of health care reform in the last thirty days than we have in the last decade. When it was days old, this Congress passed a law to provide and protect health insurance for eleven million American children whose parents work full-time.

He got a standing ovation from the Democrats on this, but none of the Republicans stood, and I don’t think they even applauded, and I thought, Yeah, I hope someone’s getting a picture of this, how they’re disgusted about providing healthcare to children. How can you not say they’re simply heartless bastards?

I also know that nearly a century after Teddy Roosevelt first called for reform, the cost of our health care has weighed down our economy and the conscience of our nation long enough. So let there be no doubt: health care reform cannot wait, it must not wait, and it will not wait another year.

Impressive. He’s putting it on the table now. He’s going for it, I think: national health care. Teddy Roosevelt first called for universal health care in the US. If he’d mentioned Truman, then it would have been for sure. He might as well, he’s as popular as he’s ever going to be.

That is why it will be the goal of this administration to ensure that every child has access to a complete and competitive education - from the day they are born to the day they begin a career.

I think he’s talking about college. The US should have free education through all levels at all times. It’s called investment in human capital. Something the so-called “free market” has been woefully lacking in since it’s ascendancy under Reagan.


And there was a lot more. I can’t believe how flat and god-awful Bobby Jindal sounded afterwards. Not to mention the fact he was spouting the same nonsensical Republican ideology and policies that have brought us to the edge of the abyss in the first place (if indeed we aren’t over the edge already and merely slowly picking up speed). If this is what the Republican Party is becoming, all I can say is, Bring It On…

/

Credit Crisis Made Simple

This is pretty good.

/

Republican Liars

I’ve had snippets of stuff for some days now and haven’t had the time to tie it together, so you’re getting the raw feed, so to speak:

It bothers me that Republicans and conservatives get to spout any old bullshit and wild-ass ideas and are never brought to account for the blithering idiots they are by the major media. From watching these people on TV, and listening to them on the radio for years now, it has become painfully obvious to me that most of them have no clue about what it is they are trying to pontificate. So imagine how horrifying it is to listen to their words being echoed by people you know and are close to. Aaaaaaaagggghhhh!!!!

The thing that ticks me off about the Republicans/conservatives is that they can flat out lie to us, try to revise history, and just generally have a very loose relationship with reality and real morals, all the while hypocritically posturing themselves as the righteous, responsible and truthful.

The Big Lie that they are pushing now is that Roosevelt and the New Deal did not get us out of the depression, that it was World War II that did that. Let’s look at a graph of GDP, a measurement that they like to use as a barometer of the economy:



What do we see when we deal with the real world and the actual facts of history? We see GDP peaked in 1929 when the stock market famously crashed. The Republican Hoover followed eight years of the Republican Coolidge. You see that GDP consistently went down for the next four years until 1932. By then, there was twenty-five percent unemployment and the people threw the Republicans out and brought the Democrats and Roosevelt in.

We see the New Deal begins and GDP climbs consistently for the next five years, exceeding 1929’s GDP by 1936. In other words, the Depression ended in 1933 since GDP began growing again that year, and continued until 1937. If you want to consider the Great Depression the trough of the graph of GDP over time, then it was over in 1936. The Republican Hoover took it to the low point, the Democrat Roosevelt brought it out.

Then, you have some Republicans pointing to 1938. Yeah, there was a down tick. Why? Because Roosevelt let himself get bamboozled by Republicans into cutting taxes and spending and the result was a recession in 1938. Roosevelt quickly reversed himself and growth resumed through 1941 and the beginning of World War II.

Even if one concedes the point of World War II getting us out of the First Republican Great Depression, what was the war but an enormous public works project? And here’s the real kicker, even though GDP goes up throughout the War, average people felt a lowering of their standard of living due to rationing and other shortages.

So then, anyone that tries to spout this stuff is either ignorant or lying. If it’s ignorance here are the facts of the case. You are no longer ignorant. To continue is to lie.

The question is why is this getting any play in the Media?

/

A Picture of Our Current Situation.

Check out this graph that shows employment losses over all the recessions since World War II. Check out the trajectory of the current one. That does not look good.

Don't ever forget. This has been brought to you by the Republicans, Wall Street and the Media. They totally rejiggered things from the time I grew up and ran it off a cliff. I see no reason they should get to keep their ill-gotten gains. It has been a scam from the beginning, and they are still trying to run the scam. If you hear someone say liberals are the cause of this, realize they are lying and the only reason they are saying it is to somehow benefit their own pocketbook at the expense of yours.

Not Three Weeks In

Not even three weeks have gone by and the neo-fascist Republicans are revealing they are going to make Obama’s life as miserable as possible. They are going to try to obstruct and undermine anything that he tries to do and blame the failure on him. Also, I have no doubt that the Bushistas have left some time bombs for him.

Check out Paul Krugman’s columns. Krugman is last year’s Nobel prize winner in economics and as far as I can tell has a real handle on what’s going down, and what had been happening over the last eight years to his great horror. Another guy to check out is Ravi Batra at Southern Methodist University. These were voices saying no, the fundamentals of the economy are not sound. In fact, there’s some serious erosion going on and you know what happens when the house is built on sand.

Make no mistake. We are on the edge of the Second Great Republican Depression, if not already beyond the point of no return. The reason we are here is due to the unraveling of the protections that had been put in place under Roosevelt (FDR) to prevent a rerun of the thirties, and the implementation of a cockamamie economic theory. Beginning with Reagan and on through the latest Bush, Clinton included, the safeguards against this sort of thing were taken away. And now they’re shocked, shocked they tell you, that gambling had been going on.

It shows what little honor these bastards have. Frankly, we owe them no respect. These people are no friends to people like you or me. It is a testimony to the power of the propagandistic control of the media, and the people’s complacency, that these people are not only not in chains or worse, but are out there free to make our lives even more miserable. In some very real ways, our lives and Obama’s life are intertwined, and our and the success of our children and grandchildren are all intertwined with his success. If he fails, just where do you think that is going to leave us?

Which brings us to the arch-blowbag himself, Rush Limbaugh. He flat out said, “I hope he fails.” He’s actively having his dittoheads call their representatives and senators and tell them to be against this stimulus bill, and so the calls are running like a hundred to one against. I called my senators offices in DC Friday and told them I wanted them to support the President. God, I loved saying that to my Republican senators, I want you to support the President, with great emphasis, with great relish on the word, President. Saxby Chambliss’s office was respectful. It hung in the air like a lead balloon at Isakson’s.

If Obama fails, what do you think is going to happen? Do you think it will get better or get worse? If Obama fails, it means things will get worse. It will not only be worse for us, but for our children and grandchildren. Rush Limbaugh has as good as said to me that he hopes my life, and the lives of my family, my wife, my mother, my brother, my in-laws, my children and grandchildren get worse. He’s saying that to all of us out here in the normal world that he hopes our lives get worse. And all the while he gets richer and richer.

I welcome the idea that Rush Limbaugh is the de facto leader of the Republican party. Every Republican needs to have him hung around their necks like a dead, sticking, rotting albatross. I think I’ll call my senators back and ask if they’re going to stand with the President or with Rush Limbaugh. If the Republican Party wants to whittle itself down to the size of dittoheads, it’s fine with me. Rush’s great stats are that he gets something like fifteen million people who might tune in to his show sometime during the five days he’s on. Hardcore dittoheads are much less. My guess is at least three fourths of Americans think Rushie is totally full of shit.

By the way, just what is someone who actively works against the American government and people? Weren’t they the ones just saying this to us? As far as I’m concerned Rush Limbaugh has crossed the line.

/

It's a New Year!

Blogger is giving me a hard time with cutting and pasting all of a sudden - won't let me post.

It's been nearly a month since my last post. It was a wonderful holiday with all the immediate progeny in attendance, which we grandparents get great joy from. I wish we could could include more of the immediate family, but most are fifteen hundred miles or so away. Both my family in Michigan and MyBetterHalf's family in Boston had some snowy and frigid weather - and they're still being subjected to it.

I've made it a goal this year to try to wrap my brain around the Chinese concept of chi. First, I'm trying to get some grasp of feng shui. I have four books spread out across my kitchen table, and a number of sites bookmarked. I'm into it far enough to learn there are different schools of feng shui - which really gets a neophyte like me confused.

All agree, though, that the place to start is to get rid of clutter. I'll only state the obvious to those that know me and MyBetterHalf when I say we're a couple of pack rats (You never know when you might need such-and-such... I'll get back into those old clothes as soon as I drop off these pounds I've put on... How can you have too many books?... Know what I'm sayin'?)

Our first step was easy. There's an old shed out back that we've been using as our own private dump since we moved in here. In fact, there was junk left by previous tennants. We hauled off five hundred pounds to the city dump. I cleaned out the shed, cleansed it, and moved a lot of stuff from the side of the house and my back porch out to it. This made my back door, which I use quite a bit, more open.

We're working on our bedrooms and den/study/workshop now. We also have opportunity to paint the whole house. In other words, our whole house, our immediate environment is having a makeover. With everything we do I feel better and like I have more energy, more chi. From what I can tell this is what feng shui is all about.

\stay tuned