Changing Places

Jiang. Leader;military general, to take, to hold.

The quality of the leader determines the quality of the organization.

A leader who lacks intelligence, virtue, and experience
Cannot hope for success.

In any conflict
The circumstances affect the outcome.
Good leaders can succeed in adverse conditions,
Bad leaders can lose in favorable conditions,
Therefore, good leaders constantly strive to perfect themselves,
Lest their shortcomings mar their endeavors.

When all other factors are equal,
It is the character of the leader that determines the outcome.

Deng Ming-Dao, Everyday Tao

___

A good thing to think about when deciding how you want to vote for our next president, and look at the results of the last seven years.

We face a coming time of upheaval and crisis. How we choose our leaders during this time is important, and will set the course of this country for the next century. What direction do we choose to move? Forward, with vision and strength, reaching out to the world to help through the coming difficult years, or inward, closing down, alienating our allies, hardening our enemies with weapons and strong words rather than weakening our enemies by being the shining city on the hill that reaches out to its neighbors, its friends and says, “Come, join us, live with us in peace and harmony. We will fight together with you to weaken the enemies that threaten us, but to all who come to us with peace, we are your friends and will support your efforts. Your religion is not our enemy, your nation is not our enemy, and we will not take your nation from you. We will let you make the choice to live in peace with us, and share our wealth with you. Tell those who fight us that we wish to make peace.”

That’s the America I want to live in. Not one that rewards its wealthiest, but supports its weakest. Not one that hoards the wealth of the world to those privileged few who use our armies to enrich themselves, but the America that shares its greatness and wealth and knowledge with the world.

We built this Internet. We use it to speak with everyone in the world we can reach. We shared it with everyone, without limits, without control.

We are the music-makers
And we are the dreamers of dreams
Wandering by lone sea-breakers
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world forever, it seems.
..
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

– Arthur O’Shaughnessy

Is our American dream dying, moving into fascism and repression, or are we going to reignite that wonderful, real American spirit, not the fake one that the rich and powerful use to try and manipulate and oppress us?

We are the ones who get to decide. Especially you, who are younger than me. My generation is polarized, divided between those who already have but want still more, and those of us who know we have far, far, more than we could ever possibly need, and want only to share our wealth, our knowledge, our experience and our riches with the entire world.

We built you this Internet, children. It is our last, best possible gift to you. Please, use it wisely, tell your friends that they can make this the next, greatest generation of Americans the world has ever seen. We want you to be loved, admired, looked up to and blessed for the rest of the your lives by the entire world. We do not want you to be scorned, sneered at, ruled by a smirking leader who says like “Who cares what you think?”. We want you to pick strong, courageous leaders who can make this country great in the eyes of the world again.

I am only one voice, I am only one small person here sharing my hopes and dreams for the two wonderful people I have helped to bring into this world and raise. I do not want them killed in a senseless war to lead to wealth for a group of rich people who think they own this earth. I want them to live in a free, happy, open, giving and renewed country. I want a society where everyone knows their basic health is assured and their needs met, where those who have are willing to share, and the “have mores” are not the “base” for a president that promises them even more riches, but are the endowers of great foundations again and the saviors of the world from its medical and societal problems.

I want my kids to be able to walk anywhere in this world and be surrounded by friends and strangers who smile and thank them for being Americans, for being the best hope and strength of this entire planet.

That is my small little dream.

What’s yours?

No One But Us
by Annie Dillard

There is no one but us.
There is no one to send,
Nor a clean hand,
Nor a pure heart
On the face of the earth,
Nor in the earth
But only us,
A generation comforting ourselves
With the notion
That we have come at an awkward time,
That our innocent fathers are all dead –
As if innocence has ever been –
And our children busy and troubled,
And we ourselves unfit, not yet ready,
Having each of us chosen wrongly,
Made a false start, failed,
Yielded to impulse
And the tangled comfort of pleasures,
And grown exhausted,
Unable to seek the thread,
Weak, and involved.
But there is no one but us.
There never has been.

From the book Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard

I don’t think Dubya is in any position to compare anyone to Nazi appeasers.

How Bush’s grandfather helped Hitler’s rise to power | World news | The Guardian

George Bush’s grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.

The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator’s action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Here is the original, pre-Hallmark, Mother’s Day Proclamation, penned in Boston by Julia Ward Howe in 1870:

Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise all women who have hearts,
Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears
Say firmly:
“We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands shall not come to us reeking of carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We women of one country
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.
From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says, “Disarm, Disarm!”
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice!
Blood does not wipe out dishonor
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war.
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions.
The great and general interests of peace.

Yeah, I want to be a rich woman so my husband can sponge off me too, like John does off Cindy, and all my rich friends could give him money so he can help them keep oppressing women and minorities. How will we ever get rich so our husbands can just travel around the country spouting inane idiocies?

McCain opposes equal pay bill in Senate

“I am all in favor of pay equity for women, but this kind of legislation, as is typical of what’s being proposed by my friends on the other side of the aisle, opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems,” the expected GOP presidential nominee told reporters. “This is government playing a much, much greater role in the business of a private enterprise system.”

The bill sought to counteract a Supreme Court decision limiting how long workers can wait before suing for pay discrimination.

It is named for Lilly Ledbetter, a supervisor at the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.’s plant in Gadsden, Ala., who sued for pay discrimination just before retiring after a 19-year career there. By the time she retired, Ledbetter made $6,500 less than the lowest-paid male supervisor and claimed earlier decisions by supervisors kept her from making more.

The Supreme Court voted 5-4 last year to throw out her complaint, saying she had waited too long to sue.

Democrats criticized McCain for opposing the bill.

“Senator McCain has yet again fallen in line with President Bush while middle-class families are falling by the wayside,” Clinton said in a statement following the vote. “Women are earning less, but Senator McCain is offering more of the same.”

Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Karen Finney said: “At a time when American families are struggling to keep their homes and jobs while paying more for everything from gasoline to groceries, how on Earth would anyone who thinks they can lead our country also think it’s acceptable to oppose equal pay for America’s mothers, wives and daughters?”

McCain stated his opposition to the bill as he campaigned in rural eastern Kentucky, where poverty is worse among women than men. The Arizona senator said he was familiar with the disparity but that there are better ways to help women find better paying jobs.

“They need the education and training, particularly since more and more women are heads of their households, as much or more than anybody else,” McCain said. “And it’s hard for them to leave their families when they don’t have somebody to take care of them.

“It’s a vicious cycle that’s affecting women, particularly in a part of the country like this, where mining is the mainstay; traditionally, women have not gone into that line of work, to say the least,” he said.

One of my most favorite blogs EVHAR has returned!! Woot! Go enjoy….

Fafblog! back to save the universe.

It’s time for another edition of BARACK OBAMA: THE FINAL THROES! Last week Giblets revealed the dangerous levels of pussification inherent in Obama’s bowling skills and orange juice consumption while exploring the damage done by persistent rumors that the senator is secretly black. But this latest scandal has doomed the Obama campaign more than any dooming doom that has doomed it before, because this time Obama has Insulted America by saying that poor people in impoverished rural areas are somehow “bitter” about being poor and impoverished. For shame!

Well Giblets knows the real Americans of the heartland, Barack Obama. He has flown over them and driven past them and grimaced amiably in their direction on the way to hotel rooms on numerous occasions, and in that time he has come to appreciate their primitive yet unique culture. These salt-of-the-earth folk don’t need your condescending liberal elitism to tell them how they feel! They need Giblets’s condescending conservative elitism to tell them how they feel! These people aren’t “bitter.” Far from it! America’s impoverished working class are a chipper and cheerful lot, prancing and scampering about their foreclosed homes and crumbling industrial sectors with a spirit of adorable pluckiness, smiling and laughing through their unemployment and their black lung disease like a pack of hardscrabble leprechauns!1 And Giblets is sure they are outraged to hear Barack Obama imply otherwise - just as he is sure they are even outraged-er to hear Obama scorn their honest midwestern folkways, mocking the simple beauty of their long, proud tradition of recreational possum-killing and their homey, heartfelt gay-bashing! Well Giblets has a long if purely theoretical love of our nation’s yahoo population and their mysterious ways, and would be proud to join them himself were he not so busy wiping their hideous yokel-germs off him with copious quantities of hand sanitizer.

I’ve got your offering right here for you, McCain…

For Obama and McCain, the Bitter and the Sweet

So much for the liberal media.

John McCain and Barack Obama both appeared before the nation’s newspaper editors yesterday. The putative Republican presidential nominee was given a box of doughnuts and a standing ovation. The likely Democratic nominee was likened to a terrorist.

At a luncheon for the editors hosted by the Associated Press, AP Chairman Dean Singleton quizzed Obama about whether he would send more troops to Afghanistan, where “Obama bin Laden is still at large?”

“I think that was Osama bin Laden,” the candidate answered.

“If I did that, I’m so sorry!” Singleton said.

“This,” Obama told the editors, is “part of the exercise that I’ve been going through over the last 15 months.”

Bitter, are we?

The past few days have left a bad taste in the mouth of the Democratic front-runner. In his worst gaffe of the campaign, he asserted (in San Francisco!) that Middle Americans have turned to God and guns and against immigrants because they are “bitter” about their economic lot.

That let Hillary Clinton and McCain portray Obama as a member of the effete elite, alongside John Kerry (Turnbull & Asser shirts) and John Edwards ($400 haircuts). Regular gal Clinton (Wellesley ‘69, Yale Law ‘73, family income $109 million since her husband left the White House) even made the point by tossing back a shot of Crown Royal at a bar in Indiana on Saturday night.

To shed the elitist label and regain his common-man credentials, Obama picked an inauspicious venue — the annual gathering of the media elite, the American Society of Newspaper Editors. The result is likely to make the Democrat even more bitter. On the same day, the two media darlings of the presidential election cycle came to address their base — and McCain easily bested his likely opponent.

McCain’s moderators, the AP’s Ron Fournier and Liz Sidoti, greeted McCain with a box of Dunkin’ Donuts. “We spend quite a bit of time with you on the back of the Straight Talk Express asking you questions, and what we’ve decided to do today was invite everyone else along on the ride,” Sidoti explained. “We even brought you your favorite treat.”

McCain opened the offering. “Oh, yes, with sprinkles!” he said.

Sidoti passed him a cup. “A little coffee with a little cream and a little sugar,” she said.

Too bad they didn’t ask Sprinkles about that G.I. education bill he refuses to support….

Oh, and McCain? I’ve got your pony right here, too:

Think Progress

Appearing on Hardball’s “College Tour” today, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) was asked about the recent offensive led by the Iraqi government in Basra. Admitting that the performance of Iraqi soldiers was poor (at least 1,000 deserted), McCain claimed the rest of the forces did “pretty good”:

In full disclosure and frankness and candor and straight talk, the Maliki movement to Basra had a very big downside to it. As you know, we saw a thousand police and military desert their posts. But the rest of the military did a pretty good job, did a pretty good job. We did secure the port of Basra. Maybe I’m digging for the pony here.

How sad to see Obama attacked by the effete intellectual snobs of the media….

You know, I’m not a rural voter, but I’m bitter. About 80% of America is pretty bitter about politicians right now. Why should anyone deny it? And why should anyone deny that the Republicans have run on God, guns and gays for the last however many years, scaring them into voting against their best interests on a continuing basis over things that nobody is actually threatening them about? Nobody is going to take away their guns, or ruin their marriage in any way they can’t do themselves, or tell them not to worship whatever God they choose. These are non-issues. Get over it already.

Obama wants to talk about the issues that matter to people. Instead Clinton and McCain and the media turn this into yet ANOTHER attack. Voters are “bitter” because we never hear about what matters, these asshats just keep going after each other about stupid things they say. C’mon, cut us all a break and let’s talk about how to un-screw-up our country already. Honestly, without the idiocy.

More from Robert Reich:

I was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, 61 years ago. My father sold $1.98 cotton blouses to blue-collar women and women whose husbands worked in factories. Years later, I was secretary of labor of the United States, and I tried the best I could – which wasn’t nearly good enough – to help reverse one of the most troublesome trends America has faced: The stagnation of middle-class wages and the expansion of povety. Male hourly wages began to drop in the early 1970s, adjusted for inflation. The average man in his 30s is earning less than his father did thirty years ago. Yet America is far richer. Where did the money go? To the top.

Are Americans who have been left behind frustrated? Of course. And their frustrations, their anger and, yes, sometimes their bitterness, have been used since then — by demagogues, by nationalists and xenophobes, by radical conservatives, by political nuts and fanatical fruitcakes – to blame immigrants and foreign traders, to blame blacks and the poor, to blame “liberal elites,” to blame anyone and anything.

Rather than counter all this, the American media have wallowed in it. Some, like Fox News and talk radio, have given the haters and blamers their very own megaphones. The rest have merely “reported on” it. Instead of focusing on how to get Americans good jobs again; instead of admitting too many of our schools are failing and our kids are falling behind their contemporaries in Europe, Japan, and even China; instead of showing why we need a more progressive tax system to finance better schools and access to health care, and green technologies that might create new manufacturing jobs, our national discussion has been mired in the old politics.

And from Mark Thoma at Economist’s View:

The working class has been largely ignored by this administration, save a few tokens when elections are near, and that’s what the questions ought to be about. What do each of the candidates plan to do to change the conditions that led to Americans being “more pessimistic about their situation than they have been for more than a quarter century”? How many times has McCain flip-flopped on economic policy? Does he have any plans at all to address these problems (beyond wishful thinking), or will he follow in this administration’s footsteps on (the lack of) domestic policy? But no, instead, we get this drivel. The public has not been well served by a press that seems, as I watch CNN, to spend more time picking out their clothes than they do preparing to talk about issues, and they aren’t even the worst offenders. I shouldn’t be surprised, it happens every four years, but I hoped for better. I’m afraid old politics still works.

Bernanke: economic woes nothing like Depression | Reuters

The current economic slowdown is nothing like the Great Depression of the 1930s, in part because the U.S. Federal Reserve is far more proactive, Chairman Ben Bernanke said on Thursday.

Bernanke, whose academic studies have focused on the Great Depression, said during that era the central bank allowed banks to fail, prices to fall and the money supply to contract, which contributed to the protracted slump.

“We now know the lessons from that,” Bernanke told the World Affairs Council. “We are certainly going to make sure that the financial system remains in good functioning order.”

My husband and I were talking about this, and noting that during the depression, three generations typically already lived together in one home, and usually only one or two of the men were working outside the home, or everyone worked the farm.

Today, we have typically three houses between three generations, and both husbands and wives working. Or we did. The collapse into one house has started — my husband’s parents already live with his sister, for health reasons and economic reasons. My good friend in L.A. is about to be forced to move back in with family if he cannot find a job soon.

In my own family, by the time I was 22 I had graduated college and had my own apartment, and worked all the way through college as well. Now, My 22 year old son is in community college, as is my 18 year old son, and only the 18 year old works, at a job with a friend of mine, at minimum wage. It is difficult for them to find jobs that mesh well with their school schedules, which are limited by class availability. Plus, there are seniors working minimum wage jobs to have health benefits, which limits job availability for the youngest in the work force. Right now we have the lowest level of teen employment since — you guessed it, the great depression.

As families collapse back into a single home, it won’t be like the great depression, but it certainly won’t be like the good times of the 90s, either. Most families now are making slightly less in terms of real dollars than they were in the 70s — and that’s with both parents working.

When I was 26, my husband and I bought our home, our “starter” home, which we still live in. Today, most of our 20 something friends and son’s friends can’t afford a home, and many of our 30 something friends still rent rather than own a home. We chose to stay in our home as we got older, since it is way more affordable than buying a larger home. Today, the Senate is choosing to bail out homeowners who bought more house than they could afford, and the home builders who built too many homes with a large tax break. And we wonder why people haven’t been more fiscally responsible, after years of cheap interest rates and “teaser” rate loans. We watch the big banks and CEOs get their bailouts, and wonder if we were stupid to actually only buy what we could afford.

So Ben, you might not think things are so bad, and comparatively, they are not — my parents’ families both had kids farmed out during the summers during the depression, quite literally, to work the farms and so they would be fed. We aren’t there and will probably not get to that point. But the economic costs of the mistakes of the last seven years are being felt by most Americans. I only hope this time they are smart enough not to be taken in by those who serve the rich and well off, and elect leaders who will truly support the well being of all Americans.

You think you are being responsible in your actions Ben, but you’re not. You’re just taking us further down the rabbit hole of the lack of personal, corporate and governmental responsibility. We need to end this socialism for the rich, and get back to taking care of ALL Americans.

We can’t afford to do less.

In other words: we were conned.

FT.com | Willem Buiter’s Maverecon | The Greenspan Fed: a tragedy of errors

During his years as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan’s statements reflected a partial (in every sense of the world) understanding of how free competitive markets based on private ownership work. This partial understanding also guided his actions as monetary policy maker and financial regulator.

Mr Greenspan consistently saw but half the picture when it came to what makes competitive market capitalism work. He recognised the central roles of greed, self-interest and competition. He failed to appreciate the complementary roles of non-strategic/non-opportunistic forms of altruism, solidarity and cooperation. Both competition and cooperation must be monitored and regulated, lest they become predation and collusion respectively.

Chairman Greenspan emphasized self-regulation, spontaneous order and the disciplining effect of reputation. He failed to appreciate the essential role external or third-party (i.e. state) enforcement of laws, rules and regulations. He did not understand the weakness of reputational concerns as an enforcement or self-discipline mechanism ensuring good behaviour, when credible commitment is limited at best in a world with short horizons and easy exits.

He failed to appreciate the essential role external/third-party (i.e. state) enforcement of laws, rules and regulations, and the indispensability of collective action when faced with the threat of the breakdown of trust and confidence.

Alan Greenspan’s period as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System represents to me the nadir of central banking in advanced economic-financial systems during modern times. While monetary policy was only mildly incompetent, the regulatory failures were horrendous. The US and the world economy will pay the price for Mr Greenspan’s misjudgements and errors for years, perhaps decades, to come.

By overselling, at home and all over the world, the virtues of American-style transactions-based financial capitalism and light-touch regulation, Mr. Greenspan has done more to harm the cause of decentralised, competitive market-based financial systems based on private ownership, than even Charles Ponzi.

The spectacular failures, first in 1997/98 and then in 2007/08, of the global tests of Mr Greenspan’s theory that global financial markets do not require global regulators and that even national regulators should use only the lightest of touches, did more to discredit financial globalisation and competitive market systems based on private ownership generally than any event since the 1930s.

Or, as my kids would say, “The cake is a LIE!”

Let them eat cake. | The Agonist

Iraq is the attempt to use the capital advantage of the US military to acquire the bottleneck resource of oil. It is bottleneck resources, those things which it is more expensive to shift the supply curve downward, than others. The capital advantage is not essentially American, but is the result of the leaving to the US the monopoly of global super power status. As such, it is an asset which is intrinsically linked to the position of the dollar.

The economic theory of the Bush was that the US would sell mortgage backed paper, and acquire the oil to expand the supply of this mortgage backed paper by invading Iraq and keeping the supply of oil at the point where expansion of mortgage backed paper, an exportable form of capital, was sufficient to pay the continuing trade deficit. It was not a good idea, but it was the best idea that stupid people could execute on. The coalition of the stupid was just large enough to dominate government, and since they knew that they would not do well in a smart economy, they were willing to break any law, destroy any principle, and make others pay any cost to make the Dumbconomy going. The linkage between cheap money, cheap oil and cheap land, on one hand, and invasion of Iraq on the other hand cannot be clearer. The invasion allowed both a huge spigot of government money to be poured into very specific sectors, and allowed setting interest rates far below what they could have been. These combined to prop up demand for sprawling outwards.

However, stupid people die stupid deaths. Iraq has been run by very stupid people. While not at the level of World War I bad generalship, an essential economic reality eluded them. That reality is that since the fight was over oil, the cost of that oil in military conflict would rise, inevitably, to the cost of buying the oil in the first place. Instead of seeking real military victory, the coalition sought a fake one, and used bribes to present a better face on the progress of occupation of Iraq than was the case. As we have seen from the recent Basra uprising, the shia militias understand that their acceptance of the current state of affairs is a very valuable thing, and they can, and will, at any time those bribes ebb in value, be able to attack critical points of the government. The United States, has, in effect, surrendered to the rebel forces, and pays them tribute to keep the situation in Iraq politically viable here at home - billions for tribute, but not one cent for victory. Since the children of the people who made Vietnam a disaster are now in charge of the US government, for however long it lasts, they are willing to do whatever it takes to remain in denial about their own catastrophic incompetence. Since it is more important for the current opposition party to be able to eat small greasy hors d’œvres than to govern the country - the believe if they back into power they can do less for everyone and have more freedom to just hand money to their friends - this current status will not be challenged. A few hundred dead soldiers, two hundred billion dollars of direct expenses and half a trillion in bail out costs are all to be paid by someone else.

The failure of Iraq was inevitable then, because it was a no brainer theory, and that meant it had to be run by people without brains. And so it was.

And not just water lines. All our infrastructure is starting to crumble around us. For what the stupid war is costing, we could fix our infrastructure AND fund alternative energy programs, and reboot our economy at the same time.

But no, we have idiots still in charge of the country…. sigh.

US Water Pipelines Are Breaking - New York Times

Two hours north of New York City, a mile-long stream and a marsh the size of a football field have mysteriously formed along a country road. They are such a marvel that people come from miles around to drink the crystal-clear water, believing it is bubbling up from a hidden natural spring.

The truth is far less romantic: The water is coming from a cracked 70-year-old tunnel hundreds of feet below ground, scientists say.

The tunnel is leaking up to 36 million gallons a day as it carries drinking water from a reservoir to the big city. It is a powerful warning sign of a larger problem around the country: The infrastructure that delivers water to the nation’s cities is badly aging and in need of repairs.

The Environmental Protection Agency says utilities will need to invest more than $277 billion over the next two decades on repairs and improvements to drinking water systems. Water industry engineers put the figure drastically higher, at about $480 billion.

Water utilities, largely managed by city governments, have never faced improvements of this magnitude before. And customers will have to bear the majority of the cost through rate increases, according to the American Water Works Association, an industry group.

Engineers say this is a crucial era for the nation’s water systems, especially in older cities like New York, where some pipes and tunnels were built in the 1800s and are now nearing the end of their life expectancies.

”Our generation hasn’t experienced anything like this. We weren’t around when the infrastructure was being built,” said Greg Kail, spokesman for the water industry group. ”We didn’t pay for the pipes to be put in the ground, but we sure benefited from the improvements to public health that came from it.”

He said the situation has not reached crisis stage, but without a serious investment, ”it can become a crisis. Each year the problem is put on the back burner, the price tag is going to go up.”

From my good friend John Pierce:

So, Fed Reserve Board Chair Ben Bernanke calmly
reassures the Joint Congressional folks yesterday and
the Senate today that there’s only a weak possibility
we could suffer a recession here in a couple of
months, but we’re not in such now…

Uh-huh. Here’s an idea, Benny. Both you and Treasury
Secretary Henry Paulson get your lardy rumps laid off,
right frickin’ now, and instead of receiving any
severance you both have to find brand new jobs. Then,
we’ll see just how rosy your vision is, and how brave
you are. And maybe we could lay off our fabled Decider
and his Shotgun, too.

I’ve said it tiresomely. We’ve been in a recession
since at least JULY 2007. I’m living proof of this
economic slump.

Resilient economy my desperate for work ass!

Johnny

Best hopes for a new, wonderful job for you very, very soon, my friend…..

You’ve done enough damage.

No, really - we’ve had enough!

Stirling states the economic case for regime change….

Party Like It’s 1926 | The Agonist

Bernanke has now allowed brokers to borrow directly from the Federal Reserve, and created a series of instruments which, in effect, allow the creation of money based on speculatively held money. Bernanke’s moves in the last few days have, in effect, created a new basis for the US currency. It is one that has been building for some time. That basis is the value of stocks held. This was visible by the “Poor Pound” thesis: that priced in independently generated currencies, the American stock market has been remarkably flat.

This change was inevitable, and predictable. Sooner or later the American Dollar must be based, in a global economy, on the global evaluation of our production. However, the question, as with every previous monetary order, is whether the pieces fit together. Presently, they do not.

The reason they don’t is because there is no narrow channel which keeps the powers that be from leaning too far in one direction. There is no consequence for those temporarily in power from simply spewing dollars in every direction, and letting those that they do not like pay the costs. That is what is happening now, the coalition of farmers and oil men that held Bush in power, are doing very well. The defense contractors have made out very well, and those that loan money to the government are doing well. Those that are being bailed out have seen their share of national wealth and income skyrocket.

The key is not re-regulation, but a Nash equilibrium, a state where no group can unilaterally improve its position at the expense of others. This state is the challenge for the next administration. It will require a fundamentally different political order, as the great overturns of monetary basis in the past have been based on different constitutional orders to both create, and navigate, the narrow channel which their monetary system rests upon.

The pieces must interlock to the regulation of the financial system, and they must end the disequilibrium where the wealthy can dump risk on others, and take the profits for themselves.

This is one of my early Tao postings, from November 2004.

_______________________________________________________

Beginners acquire new theories and techniques until their minds are cluttered with options.

Advanced students forget their many options. They allow the theories and techniques that they have learned to recede into the background.

Learn to unclutter your mind. Learn to simplify your work.

As you rely less and less on knowing what to do, your work will become more direct and more powerful. You will discover that the quality of your consciousness is more potent than any technique or theory or interpretation.

Learn how fruitful the blocked group or individual suddenly becomes when you give up trying to do just the right thing.

Tao of Leadership

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I think a lot of people are running around with cluttered minds these days. We worry about what to do about the direction the country has taken, we worry about how best to deal with personal situations in our lives, we worry about work, way too much. Perhaps the way to unclutter our minds is to stop worrying and start taking more direct action. Talk to the people around you, find out their real concerns and help them find some answers. Take your own problems and solve the ones you can, without worrying about whether you are creating the optimum solution. Get out of your head for a while and take a walk somewhere full of nature.

For me, my uncluttering spot is in my garden. I go outside and wander in the garden for a bit, and find myself feeling better about things. No matter what worries and concerns I have, they are small compared to a day full of sunshine and flowers and growing things. It helps living in San Diego where I can almost always count on a beautiful sunny day.

I think Americans really have a disease about getting things right, though. We want to live in the right house, drive the right car, send our kids to the right schools, live the right moral values. Yeah, sure we do. But how many people do you know who are simply happy with their lives? How many don’t worry about having enough money, even though we are among the richest people on the planet? Do you hear many people saying, “I have enough, I think I’ll just relax this year and not work too much?” No, we just go on with our disease, not realizing that if we stopped caring about having the right things and living the right way, our lives would be so much easier and better.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve come to focus on what is left. What’s left of my life, where I would like to go, what I would like to see, how I would like to live. Not what other people think is right, or even what I may think is right, but the things that are left out of most people’s lives. Beauty, simplicity, artful living instead of filling our houses with cheap crap. Time spent learning and growing instead of watching TV or spending yet another day working at jobs we hate to buy more stuff we don’t need. Why can’t America be about spreading fun and laughter instead of spreading war and trying to control everything? We have enough, people. Let’s learn to enjoy it, instead of wanting more. Unclutter our minds, our houses, our lives, and let’s learn to live again. Let’s share a new American dream - one about making life fulfilling again instead of filling our gas tanks, bellies, and houses full of crap.

Talking Points Memo | Unfit for Duty

Josh Marshall:

The idea that fighting jihadists in Iraq or policing the country’s sectarian and ethnic disputes is the calling of this century is one that is belied in virtually everything we see in flux in today’s world and which seems certain to affect us through the rest of our lifetimes and our children’s.

It is very difficult to draw practical lessons from history. But one of the closest things to a law is that military power is almost always built on economic might. And the former seldom long outlasts the latter. Indeed, countries with sound finances have routinely been able to punch over their weight — great Britain and the Netherlands during different periods are key examples. So fiscal soundness even over the medium term is much more important than any particular weapon system or basing right.

Then you step back and see the huge number of dollars we’re pouring into Iraq, the vast mountains of capital being piled up in China, the oil-fueled resurgence of Russia, the weakness of the dollar (not only in exchange rate but in its future as a reserve currency), the rising tide of anti-Americanism around the world. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything from John McCain that suggests he’s given serious consideration to any of these issues, except as possible near term military challenges — i.e., is China building a blue water navy to challenge the US, Russian weapons systems, etc.

Candidly, I do not think I’ve heard sufficient discussions or solutions to these challenges from my preferred candidates. But neither has the myopia that McCain has about Iraq. Or the willingness to spend — how else to put it — like a drunken sailor in that country at the expense of everything else now going on in the world.

Hillary Clinton has stipulated to McCain’s qualifications as Commander-in-Chief; and Obama, implicitly, does the same. But his record actually shows he’s one of the most dangerous people we could have in the Oval Office in coming years — not just because he’s a hothead in using the military, but more because he seems genuinely clueless about the real challenges and dangers the country is facing. He’s too busy living in the fantasy world where our future as a great power and our very safety are all bound up in Iraq.

And the rich are still not paying for this war. Our young men and women in the services are paying their all for it, though.

Lies and more lies, almost 4000 young American lives gone, tens of thousands of young Americans injured, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead and injured, millions of Iraqis who have fled their homes. And Bush calls this “worth it”. Worth what? The neocon dream of empire, the ridiculous oil profits, the billions to war contractors? Worth it. To whom, Mr. Bush — not to the American people or the Iraqi public, that’s for sure.

Economics Blog : The Double Dissent: Dallas’s Fisher and Philadelphia’s Plosser

It seems if your a business you just drive up to the FED ATM without a card and take your money - no problem. If you have a home and ask for 60 days to try and come up with a solution to save it, they want three hundred pages of information and then tell you no way. I’m an Iraq veteran whose unit was activated 4 times for there and keeping a regular job was not an option as my employers wouldn’t tolerate the abscences despite laws to the contrary. I have a number of medals for bravery but no home for my family, Ironically JP Morgan Chase has it now and they are just agents for Deutsche Bank. Now, it looks like I may be called up again to go to Iraq. Before all this I was as stable as iron. Not anymore, health problems and homelessness is my reality, with a family on the streets. and a projected return to Iraq. I guess I fought for nothing! America’s not my dream anymore, it’s someone else’s and I just don’t understand it. I’ve done everything by the book with honor and yet it’s been a diaster. I’m pretty well done at 21.
Comment by Fred Martinez - March 18, 2008 at 7:20 pm

Neo-conservative thought has been shown to be a failure at everything else it has attempted - now it is destroying our financial system. Long, hard ride down is ahead, people. The market is now into a dangerous game of Liar’s Poker.

Rattling Apart: Captain Carnage and the Bear | The Agonist

In 2001, as soon as he was made the economic advisor to Bush, I stated repeatedly that Ben Bernanke would be made the Federal Reserve Chairman after Greenspan, and that he would be a disaster. This was based on a reading of his academic work, which was, essentially, a series of attempts to prove that such a neo-conservative system could avoid the collapse that lead to the Great Depression. No Great Depression, no FDR. No FDR, no situation where the rich would have to accept regulation and restriction in return for bailing out. In essence the first problem is the “Great Contraction.” The United States and other nations, to attempt to re-impose the Gold Standard after allowing it to lapse for the First World War, had to at a certain point accept prices at the new levels, or had to dramatically reduce the money supply. They chose the later, creating a massive contraction of the money supply. This was done in the face of a downturn, because it was feared that a downturn would lead to easy money, and this to hyper-inflation of the kind witnessed in Germany, or very high inflation, as seen after the First World War. For them, coming after a two generation period where deflation was the norm during the classical gold standard and the consolidation of the first Conservative Era, globally, inflation was a horror.

Bernanke and others, argued that the Great Depression was not in any way a structural event, but strictly a macroeconomic monetary event. That strictly macroëconomic policy measures could have been used to effect the bailout. There were two major intellectual problems. One of them is the point where monetary policy is “pushing on a string.” Or what Bernanke called “the zero point”. The “bold” steps turn out to be the same sort of maneuvers used in the first decade of this century: finding deep pockets and hiding the losses.

Bernanke’s failures begin as economic advisor to the President and continue in his time on the Federal Reserve. The culminate with his failure to either deal with the liquidity crisis, or to face inflation head on. By allowing the housing bubble, and the financial bubble built on it, to explode he set up the very circumstances. By dragging his feet on raising interest rates, and then by ignoring the expanding monetary crisis, Bernanke has set the stage where neither he, nor anyone else, is in a position to act. With a President who is content to give imaginary orders to imaginary armies, there is no center of power that can move. It also indicates that the opposition party has made a series of gross miscalculations about the situation, believing the rhetoric that things were going well, and that they were getting the best deal they could. They were facing people who were bluffing all the way, and are now realizing that there is no rush to give way on anything.

The “slow” rate raising campaign was a double disaster, it neither headed off inflation nor did it keep credit easy enough. This is because the problem was not the level of interest rates, per se, but what we were spending the money on. As many, many, many commentators, many, many times have pointed out, the US was consuming too much, and exporting too little. The Neo-Conservative happy monsters said that this could go on for ever, giving other people our paper for their oil and goods.

While it is possible that we will emerge from this functional, the likelihood is that we are going to see a continued fall for the next 9 months, as the crisis deepens, a die hard illegitimate executive burns his last brands on our skin, and a feckless opposition folds its cards over and over and over again, allowing ordinary people to bear the brunt of the continued contraction.

We are riding this bucket down a ways farther, because there is nothing to right the equilibrium, and without the stimulus from war spending, on which we are so dependent, there will be no pick up in business activity soon. There will be some increased exports, but not sufficient to take the place of the cratering of housing.

What needs to be done? Re-regulation is obvious. Making the Fed serve elected policy makers is a no brainer. Restating numbers to prevent the white washing of bubbles is essential, a public sense of ownership of the financial system as part of the “high ground of the economy” seems essential. Firing Ben Bernanke is a pink do this to day post it note.

But most essentially there needs to be a change in the basis of money, simply because the obvious stability of real estate assets in the United States will no longer be enough.

So, Republicans can’t even handle their own money, and taxpayers are supposed to trust them with their money?

I don’t think so.

Not even a second sign-off. I’ve NEVER worked for an organization that didn’t require at least two signatures to transfer money. Ever. This is not just fraud - it’s organizational stupidity.

NRCC Treasurer Accused of Campaign Fraud

The former treasurer for the National Republican Congressional Committee transferred as much as $1 million in committee funds into his personal and business accounts, officials announced today, describing a scheme that could prove to be one of the largest campaign frauds in recent history.

For at least four years, Christopher J. Ward, who is under investigation by the FBI, used wire transfers to funnel money out of the NRCC and into other political committees he controlled, then shifted the funds into his own personal accounts, the committee said.

“The evidence we have today indicated we have been deceived and betrayed for a number of years by a highly respected and trusted individual,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), NRCC chairman.

The committee also announced that it had submitted to banks five years of audits and financial documents allegedly forged by Ward, some of which were used to secure multimillion-dollar loans. It is a violation of federal bank fraud laws to obtain loans through false statements; such crimes are punishable by up to $1 million in fines and 30 years in prison.

Prior to today, the committee had not acknowledged that any money was missing. It announced Feb. 1 that it had discovered “irregularities” and had called in federal investigators to pursue a fraud case.

Robert K. Kelner, a lawyer with Covington & Burling, which has been hired by the committee to oversee a forensic audit, told reporters that at this point he could say for certain only that Ward had diverted “several hundred thousand dollars” in unauthorized payments dating to 2004. However, he said that the year-end report filed with the Federal Election Commission in 2006 overstated the NRCC’s actual cash on hand by $990,000.

That might be the upper level of how much money Ward allegedly skimmed from NRCC coffers, but Kelner said forensic auditors need to keep “drilling down” to determine how much was inappropriately taken and how much might have been the result of sloppy bookkeeping.

Kelner said that Ward had the sole power at the NRCC to use wire transfers to shift money into any accounts he wanted. “He was able to get a wire transfer without getting a second sign-off,” Kelner said.