Obama’s cavalcade of black vehicles had just entered the Ritz Moscow after midnight. The black ambulance was particularly ominous, but when I snapped a peak in the rear, the diaper preparedness seemed even more surreal… like the shear size of the security detail (dogs, metal detectors and a posse of about 1000 people).
30.7.09
Another lost opportunity to revert the police state we've become!
President Barack Obama, Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sergeant James Crowley toast at the start of their meeting in the Rose Garden of the White House, July 30, 2009.
Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
28.7.09
OPV
other points of view
Steve from Virginia
First things first; Obama's Presidency is completely compromised by Wall Street, Goldman Sachs and its Clinton retreads. There is little Obama can do 'more' to ruin his effectiveness.
Second, the so-called plan is just another bailout, this time to the Healthcare- Industrial Complex (HIC). Why does it need a bailout, other than because all of America's other industrial dinosaurs have gotten one? Because the HIC's business plan - bankrupting its customers - represents guaranteed bankruptcy for the complex.
It's going to happen anyway, good riddance!
The public mandate is unconstitutional; the government cannot compel an individual to buy a private product, it's an uncompensated taking prohibited by the 5th Amendment. The state cannot otherwise compel people to buy Aetna insurance any more than it can force through police power the purchase of Froot Loops, Diet Pepsis ... or Dodge Ram pickup trucks!
If I choose to go to Disney World that is my choice but the government cannot compel me to go there against my will.
Third, there is no such thing as 'insurance' - which is a way of rationing risk - if all risks must be accepted. Any economist knows this, including non- economists like me. See Willem Buiter:
http://blogs.ft.com/maverecon/2009/07/the-inevitable-socialisation-of-health-care-financing/
The Geithner/Bernanke method of subsidizing big business at every turn will fail here as it always has and always will. What do you want, Paul Krugman, a violent revolution in this country? All the lies under the bridge and a few more and the tree of liberty will again be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants. Enough with the 'E-Z Let's Feed Wall Street' solutions, they are becoming provocative.
One solution is to get Uncle Sam as far away from the system as possible; eliminate all subsidies! Let the HIC bankrupt itself. As doctors wives and kids get sick too, there will always be healthcare and medicine. The market will price it, too. Dirt cheap; Walmart prices.
Another alternative is for the Administration to send some people down to Cuba and copy their system:
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/latin-america-rising/1733
It works and it's cheap. What is wrong with that?
The system is obsessed with conceiving a better space shuttle and winding up with lemons. How about building a bicycle instead?
First things first; Obama's Presidency is completely compromised by Wall Street, Goldman Sachs and its Clinton retreads. There is little Obama can do 'more' to ruin his effectiveness.
Second, the so-called plan is just another bailout, this time to the Healthcare- Industrial Complex (HIC). Why does it need a bailout, other than because all of America's other industrial dinosaurs have gotten one? Because the HIC's business plan - bankrupting its customers - represents guaranteed bankruptcy for the complex.
It's going to happen anyway, good riddance!
The public mandate is unconstitutional; the government cannot compel an individual to buy a private product, it's an uncompensated taking prohibited by the 5th Amendment. The state cannot otherwise compel people to buy Aetna insurance any more than it can force through police power the purchase of Froot Loops, Diet Pepsis ... or Dodge Ram pickup trucks!
If I choose to go to Disney World that is my choice but the government cannot compel me to go there against my will.
Third, there is no such thing as 'insurance' - which is a way of rationing risk - if all risks must be accepted. Any economist knows this, including non- economists like me. See Willem Buiter:
http://blogs.ft.com/maverecon/2009/07/the-inevitable-socialisation-of-health-care-financing/
The Geithner/Bernanke method of subsidizing big business at every turn will fail here as it always has and always will. What do you want, Paul Krugman, a violent revolution in this country? All the lies under the bridge and a few more and the tree of liberty will again be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants. Enough with the 'E-Z Let's Feed Wall Street' solutions, they are becoming provocative.
One solution is to get Uncle Sam as far away from the system as possible; eliminate all subsidies! Let the HIC bankrupt itself. As doctors wives and kids get sick too, there will always be healthcare and medicine. The market will price it, too. Dirt cheap; Walmart prices.
Another alternative is for the Administration to send some people down to Cuba and copy their system:
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/latin-america-rising/1733
It works and it's cheap. What is wrong with that?
The system is obsessed with conceiving a better space shuttle and winding up with lemons. How about building a bicycle instead?
25.7.09
enforced stupidity has become an instrument of deliberate oppression
Patrice Ayme
Hautes Alpes
Not enough "folksy anecdotes" in the [Obama's] analysis of health care?
There is a deeper problem. And that is that enforced stupidity has become an instrument of deliberate oppression.
Talking heads in the media and their public have learned to be like children: they want to be told bed time stories, so that their tired little minds can go to sleep.
They cannot handle culture and logic, they are not trained for it. All what appeals to them is what would appeal to little children talking to each other, little anecdotes with a strong imaginary component.
As the Roman republic went down, culture and art went down, and they went down well ahead of the military and economic capabilities. Rome became idiotic first, and then , several decades later, it became completely incapacitated in all ways. Only then did the Huns moved in, from distant Mongolia.
Why did Rome become idiotic? Because the Roman republic had been kidnapped by the hyper rich "Senatorial" class. The hyper rich quickly learned that they ruled best over dummies, and bleating sheep. During the transition to generalized idiocy, those who refused to cooperate were killed. The philosopher and Consul Cicero, saw the hands he was writing with chopped off, and nailed to the Senate door. And that is not an imaginary anecdote a la Reagan. This atrocity was meant to impress those too willing to keep on writing down smart, progressive thoughts.
Finally the plutocracy mixed up with the theocrats, and any knowledge or thinking was denounced as an insult to "God". This episode is now called the Dark Ages. But it started with the rise of the stupid, paid by the hyper rich to extinguish culture and intelligence.
This is exactly what is going in the media today. The venality and stupidity of the "debate" on health care is deliberate, it is made to encourage stupidity, it teaches stupidity, it celebrates stupidity.
In truth, if anything should escape the profit motive, it is compassion. The obsession with profits and costs (not just the profits and costs of a financial, but also those of a legal, business, or marketing character) perverts the entire health care system in the USA. And not just for medical decisions.
For example, a peer reviewed article in Science Magazine explains that fewer and fewer drugs are brought to market (down to less than 30 from a peak triple this twenty years ago), because pharmaceutical companies are playing Wall Street. In truth MILLIONS of drugs could be brought to market, from natural products alone, says Science.
And so on. The health care insurance industry exists in a country such as France (with the best health care according to the WHO), but it does not insure the life threatening conditions' basic treatments. That is automatic (even for sick or hurt Americans who would happen to pass through France). Private health care in France insures only added comfort or plastic surgery type treatments. The moral position that an industry can thrive according to the modus operandi:"Your money, or your life!" is untenable in this civilization, and has been rejected in all advanced countries, except the USA.
At this point the extravagant portion of GDP given to those who profit financially from the bad health of others has become a strategic threat to the USA.
Wisely, Obama is gambling that he can defeat the stupidity head on, by rising the mental level of the debate. If he fails, the USA will keep on collapsing mentally, and the rest will follow. After all, the financial crisis, and the way it was solved (replenishing with public money, the private perpetrators themselves, without any strings attached) is the sort of idiocy that history shows change the fate of civilizations, and not for the best.
***
Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
Reference is on my site above, in the essay "To Sick to Care?", 21 July 2009.)
Hautes Alpes
Not enough "folksy anecdotes" in the [Obama's] analysis of health care?
There is a deeper problem. And that is that enforced stupidity has become an instrument of deliberate oppression.
Talking heads in the media and their public have learned to be like children: they want to be told bed time stories, so that their tired little minds can go to sleep.
They cannot handle culture and logic, they are not trained for it. All what appeals to them is what would appeal to little children talking to each other, little anecdotes with a strong imaginary component.
As the Roman republic went down, culture and art went down, and they went down well ahead of the military and economic capabilities. Rome became idiotic first, and then , several decades later, it became completely incapacitated in all ways. Only then did the Huns moved in, from distant Mongolia.
Why did Rome become idiotic? Because the Roman republic had been kidnapped by the hyper rich "Senatorial" class. The hyper rich quickly learned that they ruled best over dummies, and bleating sheep. During the transition to generalized idiocy, those who refused to cooperate were killed. The philosopher and Consul Cicero, saw the hands he was writing with chopped off, and nailed to the Senate door. And that is not an imaginary anecdote a la Reagan. This atrocity was meant to impress those too willing to keep on writing down smart, progressive thoughts.
Finally the plutocracy mixed up with the theocrats, and any knowledge or thinking was denounced as an insult to "God". This episode is now called the Dark Ages. But it started with the rise of the stupid, paid by the hyper rich to extinguish culture and intelligence.
This is exactly what is going in the media today. The venality and stupidity of the "debate" on health care is deliberate, it is made to encourage stupidity, it teaches stupidity, it celebrates stupidity.
In truth, if anything should escape the profit motive, it is compassion. The obsession with profits and costs (not just the profits and costs of a financial, but also those of a legal, business, or marketing character) perverts the entire health care system in the USA. And not just for medical decisions.
For example, a peer reviewed article in Science Magazine explains that fewer and fewer drugs are brought to market (down to less than 30 from a peak triple this twenty years ago), because pharmaceutical companies are playing Wall Street. In truth MILLIONS of drugs could be brought to market, from natural products alone, says Science.
And so on. The health care insurance industry exists in a country such as France (with the best health care according to the WHO), but it does not insure the life threatening conditions' basic treatments. That is automatic (even for sick or hurt Americans who would happen to pass through France). Private health care in France insures only added comfort or plastic surgery type treatments. The moral position that an industry can thrive according to the modus operandi:"Your money, or your life!" is untenable in this civilization, and has been rejected in all advanced countries, except the USA.
At this point the extravagant portion of GDP given to those who profit financially from the bad health of others has become a strategic threat to the USA.
Wisely, Obama is gambling that he can defeat the stupidity head on, by rising the mental level of the debate. If he fails, the USA will keep on collapsing mentally, and the rest will follow. After all, the financial crisis, and the way it was solved (replenishing with public money, the private perpetrators themselves, without any strings attached) is the sort of idiocy that history shows change the fate of civilizations, and not for the best.
***
Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
Reference is on my site above, in the essay "To Sick to Care?", 21 July 2009.)
16.7.09
economic orthodoxy vs. common sense
Paul Krugman:
Now, it’s bad enough to be jobless for a few weeks; it’s much worse being unemployed for months or years. Yet that’s exactly what will happen to millions of Americans if the average forecast is right — which means that many of the unemployed will lose their savings, their homes and more.
AnnS, from Michigan:
Problem: Too many people and not enough jobs that allow them to pay their ordinary living expenses.
1 out of every 6 people in the labor market are unemployed or underemployed (can only get part-time when they want full-time. And that number does not include all those workers whose hours have been cut by 1 or 2 or 3 days a month or whose wages have been cut.
The bulk of the jobs in the US do not pay enough to cover the cost of housing, utilities, car insurance, car purchase, health insurance, saving for retirement, saving for the kids to go to college .....and all the rest of the things that the talking heads and financial columnists say they should do. The average wage is around $17-18 an hour. The average hours worked are 33. That gives an average income of $30,030. Try using the median priced house at $175,000 on that income. Or paying for a non-group health plan at over $4800 + a deductible for an individual or $12000 + a deductible for a family.
A few weeks ago, on the same day that GM announced it was cutting 20,000 jobs that paid an average of $25-28 an hour plus comprehensive health insurance with a minimal deductible Walmart announced it was planning on hiring 20,000 new employees with its average wage of $9 -10 an hour and health insurance that very few employees can afford on their wages with a $1000+ deductible. That is a LOUSY trade in terms of the income of US households.
An economy based upon selling each other houses, selling each other mortgages and car loans and credit cards, selling each other cheap junk made in China is doomed to fail. The real estate, insurance, finance and retail jobs that have disappeared are NOT coming back since households do not, in fact, have the income to support all that spending and the endless credit if one could fog a mirror is gone and won't return. And the "Knowledge Economy" is a myth and a lie and a false image fed to the US public. There is no way that the US can 'corner the world market' on "knowledge. China and India have 8 1/2 times more people than the US, they have just as many smart people as a percentage of their population as does the US and numerically they have 8 1/2 times the number of smart people as does the US - and worst of all, their smart people will work for 1/10th or less of the amount paid to US workers. Globalization means an equalization in wages and incomes - and the US will get hammered. For incomes to equalize, China and India will go up exponentially and US incomes would have to fall by 75%.
Mechanization and computerization have reduced the need for workers. And now we have the problem of too many people in the US and in the world as compared to the amount of work that needs to be done by a human workers.
Answer: The Administration and the Congress Critters will take the unemployed seriously after there are repeated marches upon Washington which are somewhere between the Bonus Marchers of the spring of 1932 and set to on Bunker Hill. Until then, all the Administration and Congress will do is mouth platitudes and tell the unemployed to go back to community college and get a junk degree in fields where there are no jobs.
Now, it’s bad enough to be jobless for a few weeks; it’s much worse being unemployed for months or years. Yet that’s exactly what will happen to millions of Americans if the average forecast is right — which means that many of the unemployed will lose their savings, their homes and more.
AnnS, from Michigan:
Problem: Too many people and not enough jobs that allow them to pay their ordinary living expenses.
1 out of every 6 people in the labor market are unemployed or underemployed (can only get part-time when they want full-time. And that number does not include all those workers whose hours have been cut by 1 or 2 or 3 days a month or whose wages have been cut.
The bulk of the jobs in the US do not pay enough to cover the cost of housing, utilities, car insurance, car purchase, health insurance, saving for retirement, saving for the kids to go to college .....and all the rest of the things that the talking heads and financial columnists say they should do. The average wage is around $17-18 an hour. The average hours worked are 33. That gives an average income of $30,030. Try using the median priced house at $175,000 on that income. Or paying for a non-group health plan at over $4800 + a deductible for an individual or $12000 + a deductible for a family.
A few weeks ago, on the same day that GM announced it was cutting 20,000 jobs that paid an average of $25-28 an hour plus comprehensive health insurance with a minimal deductible Walmart announced it was planning on hiring 20,000 new employees with its average wage of $9 -10 an hour and health insurance that very few employees can afford on their wages with a $1000+ deductible. That is a LOUSY trade in terms of the income of US households.
An economy based upon selling each other houses, selling each other mortgages and car loans and credit cards, selling each other cheap junk made in China is doomed to fail. The real estate, insurance, finance and retail jobs that have disappeared are NOT coming back since households do not, in fact, have the income to support all that spending and the endless credit if one could fog a mirror is gone and won't return. And the "Knowledge Economy" is a myth and a lie and a false image fed to the US public. There is no way that the US can 'corner the world market' on "knowledge. China and India have 8 1/2 times more people than the US, they have just as many smart people as a percentage of their population as does the US and numerically they have 8 1/2 times the number of smart people as does the US - and worst of all, their smart people will work for 1/10th or less of the amount paid to US workers. Globalization means an equalization in wages and incomes - and the US will get hammered. For incomes to equalize, China and India will go up exponentially and US incomes would have to fall by 75%.
Mechanization and computerization have reduced the need for workers. And now we have the problem of too many people in the US and in the world as compared to the amount of work that needs to be done by a human workers.
Answer: The Administration and the Congress Critters will take the unemployed seriously after there are repeated marches upon Washington which are somewhere between the Bonus Marchers of the spring of 1932 and set to on Bunker Hill. Until then, all the Administration and Congress will do is mouth platitudes and tell the unemployed to go back to community college and get a junk degree in fields where there are no jobs.
6.7.09
on stimulus
Patrice Ayme
Hautes Alpes
Obama passed a pseudo stimulus package of around 800 billion dollars. Some of it was fake, such as the AMT adjustment (a standard part of the Fed budget), some was running in place: such as money sent to states that are cutting their own spending. Best example: 50 billion dollars of the Federal stimulus is sent to California, at the time when California state budget went into a deep freeze (thousands of California state projects were stopped, all employees were told to stay home, and not be paid one Friday out of two; starting July first, it's three days with no work and no pay, almost two months worth of salary, and work, a year, now reduced to zero, and the pitiful Obama stimulus cannot stop that non sense).
Moreover, the Obama "stimulus" spent so far is about 50 billion dollars. China's stimulus was about 500 billions, but three quarters of it has been spent, and it's on real infrastructure.
By comparison, Goldman Sachs, through TARP money sent to AIG, got a gift of 13 billion dollars from the proverbial "taxpayers", the government of the USA, in the name of the American People. Question: what does Goldman Sachs make? What employment does it support? For example, Boeing makes planes. Goldman Sachs makes transactions, as many as possible, and then extracts a cut for each.
When FDR was president the Federal budget was a very small part of GDP (this changed only with World War Two) . So FDR could do little, but to legislate very creatively and very boldly and intelligently, and all of that he did
Obama, by contrast controls a huge part of the GDP, but he gave it mostly to the dim witted foxes he put in charge of watching the hen house (see above: 50 billion stimulus, so far, 13 billion for Goldman Sachs alone, if not more through the central bank secret operations). Obama can do a lot, but, as long as he puts the profiteers in charge of not changing the system, all he can show is the profiteers profiteering again, as he boasts of regularly on TV, as if he accomplished something important. Well, maybe important to him.
Just two examples from France: the government there has decided to create a gigantic fast automatic 24/7 train in an immense eight connecting all four of Paris airports and business districts and central hubs. Cost: 50 billion dollars. Work on four new high speed train lines is proceeding. The high speed train line through the "metropolises" of the French Riviera (Marseilles-Toulon-Cannes-Nice) was decided this week. It will be underground a lot, so it's immensely expensive: 30 billion dollars. Next generation nuclear reactors are also being built. And so on. That is what one calls really stimulating.
Eco-nomy means house-management. It does not mean profiteering from the house. As long as Obama puts financiers (Summers, Geithner, and various other mental gnomes from Goldman Sachs) in charge of managing the house, they will keep on stealing it. that's all they know.
house-management is fundamentally not about money. Money helps to motivate the children, and keep tabs on their activities, but rather it's just a way to help, not the essence of the thing. The essence is productive work. It's for the People and its democratically elected government, guided by the deepest thinkers to decide that, it is not the business of the money swindlers. Such is Obama's mistake, and it could all end very badly, if he does not correct this in time.
I know someone with a PhD who works as an quality control inspector overseeing the Food and Drug Administration. She informed me an hour ago that all her portion of the overseeing system she works for will be cancelled in September. Meanwhile Mr. Obama is stimulating the Afghans by killing and terrorizing a lot of them. Change you can sneer by.
Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
Artie Gold
Austin, TX
The real question at this point is "will we get to 1937?"
A lot of the problem is that 9.5% unemployment is something we've seen before; a quarter of a century is but one generation. Yes, things are bad -- but to many, it's a restoration of "the way things are supposed to be" (hideous wealth distribution, the commoditization of labor and everything else). The big difference is that our expectations have changed to such a great extent. After all, the last time we saw unemployment at these levels it preceded a pair of decades of considerable growth (the second better shared than the first, to be sure -- and even then medians barely touched the pre-oil-shock levels).
Perhaps the first thing we need to do is to un-massage the unemployment numbers; if the "real" number were promulgated (is it 13%? 14%? more, using the pre-Reagan standard?) Of course, the "other side" would immediately demagogue that issue too -- happily comparing apples to oranges...
Yes, what must happen is to drive a stake through the heart of the trickle-down worldview that got us into this mess. There's a somewhat creepy predestination-type argument that keeps being made, that the whole problem was that people got loans who didn't deserve them -- indeed who were not WORTHY of them -- and THAT'S what brought things down.
No, dammit, the fact is that a consumer-based society coupled with a consistently upward-redistributable (read: "low tax") economy is, by its very nature, unsustainable.
Here's my prescription:
Raise the minimum wage by 30% over two years.
Institute a sharply progressive income tax for incomes over, say $400000, up to, say, 60% for incomes over 1500000 and 75% over 5000000.
Establish a living wage, at likely 150% of minimum wage; wages paid below that create a corporate tax liability of 25% of the difference (against profits).
Fund the shortfalls of the states.
Create a significant fund for very low cost loans for education.
Pass a reasonable form of Universal Health Care.
Might all this be inflationary? Yes. Most likely. Truth is, inflation has been artificially low for decades now. Capital has had its party. If we are dependent upon consumption, money has to be placed in the hands of those who will use it to consume.
When the party (finally) gets started -- and goin' pretty good -- *then* you take the punchbowl away. But not until we cut unemployment by half.
Look, I'm not an economist, nor am I an MBA (many of whom are wonderful people, but as a group -- in terms of their overall effect -- not so much). I am, however an observer of the scene and have been around the block likely a few more times than I have left. Still, it seems pretty obvious.
If we make the stated policy goal to eclipse the former high in real median income by 10% we'll be all right. Otherwise it's gonna be a long slog.
Zach
NY
Where is the economic stimulus going to come from the Obama administration? He's planning to increase government spending on all fronts therefore putting America more into debt, and plans to tax the productive in society even more, ignoring that the loathed big corporations are also big employers . What's this fantasy that the Cap and Trade tax, that will drain trillions of dollars from manufacturers, and that is going to make the price of everything increase, is going to create tens of millions of green jobs and provide cheap renewable energy for everyone? Some of this tax money will be given away to foreigners also? Everyone in America will be making wind turbines and solar panels and have a wind turbine and solar panel on their house? America's financial sector has swindled our 401K's, and these money shufflers still make criminal levels of income, for producing absolutely nada. With all this talk about deflation, why do the price of essentials like food, fuel, utilities, medical treatment and insurances keep going up? OK gas is down from a year ago but it's still high. I don't see prices dropping for consumables at places like Walmart either. What if foreigners start dumping the US dollar, China, Russia, Brazil, and South Africa would like to see an alternative global currency. If the rest of the world dumps and devalues our currency, printing more dollars will be necessary to buy the foreign manufactured goods we crave, increasing inflation. The blue states in particular are going bankrupt right now, California is the fiscal equivalent of a banana republic. To get ones house in economic order one must be sovereign over that house. What's this idea that the USA can continue to ignore it's national sovereignty and forever allow tens of millions of foreign nationals to uncontrollably enter our country, until our population hits half a billion in 40 years, and a billion before the century is out? What a great future for our grandkids, larger crowds of American consumers at Walmart. The only people I see getting wealthy in our future are politicians and other government employees and their media cheerleaders, and guess what, these folks don't do any real work or produce anything. I'm willing to wait 8 years for the Obama miracle to happen. It'll have to be a miracle as Bush and his buddies sold us all down the river. Let's see if the new guy isn't all talk. Progressives with 60 senators own this country now, let's see what you guys are made of.
pdxtran
Minneapolis
The first thing the Obama administration needs to do is stop pouring money into Afghanistan and Iraq, wars that were war crimes to begin with and are now being fought with no clear purpose in mind.
Then billions of dollars per month that are being spent on killing mostly innocent people and lining the pockets of corrupt private contractors can be used to meet our pressing domestic needs.
However, I fear that our Democrats are either complicit in this monstrosity of a war or are too chicken-hearted to withstand Republicans' cries of "Soft on terrorism!"
AnnS
MI
Obama is not FDR - not even close. He doesn't have a Harry Hopkins who shoveled money out the door for projects as fast as possible on the grounds that people needed work NOW because they eat ever day - and couldn't wait for work to buy food until the 'system' maybe might possibly recovered on its own.
Obama's advisers are so closely ties to and imbibed with the culture of Wall St one owners if they have ever deal with the regular median income household. Obama himself is a Chicago politician to the bone. The only difference between him and Richard Daley SR who knew where the bodies were buried in Chicago politics - and used that information - and whose mantra was to keep the voters happy by keeping the trash picked up and snow plowed is that instead of selling services to please the voters, he sells nice speeches and fine words which are not supported by backbone, grit, determination and a fundamental knowledge of how to make the legislative process work or where the bodies are buried among the Congress Critters. He is selling some phantasmagorical version of an alternative reality where everyone will play nice because he asks them to.
They will have to hurry to do something. By the U-6 unemployment data which shows 16.1% unemployed and underemployed ( and the number closest to the methods used to estimate unemployment in the 1930s) it is already late 1931 - early 1932 and moving fast to repeat the past.
I do not expect squat from Obama or his advisers. They are too timid in dealing with Congress, they are too inexperienced in dealing with Congress and Obama is simply too insipid and too unforceful with his focusing on vague ideas rather than the practicalities of getting things done. The only plus is that it would have been even worse if McCain had won.
Mehul Shah
Boston, MA
[Paul Krugman keeps asking for a bigger stimulus package] This is the guy who if you go back to his writings in 2001-2002 called for a housing bubble to offset the tech slump.
We all know how the artificial demand we pumped played out, and now Mr. Krugman is calling for more stimulus, more artificial aggregate demand pumping. Enough of this non-stop Keynesian bubble creation.....
This is not a partisan issue. We simply can't spend our way out of this mess. Let's take our bitter medicine and lay foundation for sustainable economic growth.
soso
Canada
Dear Economist Krugman, clearly you are trying to reason more, but most unfortunately, America has gone mad, perhaps permanently. Just read the headlines, many from NYTimes, your own paper, and tell us if you think otherwise.
New major offensive is mounted in Afghan; Iraq occupation continues.
Many, including a 12 year old boy captured, tortured, held at Gitmo.
700 billion annual defense budget, full of waste, rules the world.
Total jobless rate hits 9.5%, effective rate 18.6%, and still rising.
California and other states have, or are on the verge of bankruptcy.
South Carolina Governor prefers romantic adventure in South America.
50 million people with no health insurance, many more under insured.
The climate legislation reduced to meaningless in corporate Congress.
China is speeding ahead: Green Power Takes Root in the Chinese Desert.
WSJ reported today that “big pay packages” are back on Wall Street. Annual bonuses could reach 2007 levels, Goldman Sachs $700,000 each.
Well the root cause is now known = The Great American Bubble Machine
Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression.
Hautes Alpes
Obama passed a pseudo stimulus package of around 800 billion dollars. Some of it was fake, such as the AMT adjustment (a standard part of the Fed budget), some was running in place: such as money sent to states that are cutting their own spending. Best example: 50 billion dollars of the Federal stimulus is sent to California, at the time when California state budget went into a deep freeze (thousands of California state projects were stopped, all employees were told to stay home, and not be paid one Friday out of two; starting July first, it's three days with no work and no pay, almost two months worth of salary, and work, a year, now reduced to zero, and the pitiful Obama stimulus cannot stop that non sense).
Moreover, the Obama "stimulus" spent so far is about 50 billion dollars. China's stimulus was about 500 billions, but three quarters of it has been spent, and it's on real infrastructure.
By comparison, Goldman Sachs, through TARP money sent to AIG, got a gift of 13 billion dollars from the proverbial "taxpayers", the government of the USA, in the name of the American People. Question: what does Goldman Sachs make? What employment does it support? For example, Boeing makes planes. Goldman Sachs makes transactions, as many as possible, and then extracts a cut for each.
When FDR was president the Federal budget was a very small part of GDP (this changed only with World War Two) . So FDR could do little, but to legislate very creatively and very boldly and intelligently, and all of that he did
Obama, by contrast controls a huge part of the GDP, but he gave it mostly to the dim witted foxes he put in charge of watching the hen house (see above: 50 billion stimulus, so far, 13 billion for Goldman Sachs alone, if not more through the central bank secret operations). Obama can do a lot, but, as long as he puts the profiteers in charge of not changing the system, all he can show is the profiteers profiteering again, as he boasts of regularly on TV, as if he accomplished something important. Well, maybe important to him.
Just two examples from France: the government there has decided to create a gigantic fast automatic 24/7 train in an immense eight connecting all four of Paris airports and business districts and central hubs. Cost: 50 billion dollars. Work on four new high speed train lines is proceeding. The high speed train line through the "metropolises" of the French Riviera (Marseilles-Toulon-Cannes-Nice) was decided this week. It will be underground a lot, so it's immensely expensive: 30 billion dollars. Next generation nuclear reactors are also being built. And so on. That is what one calls really stimulating.
Eco-nomy means house-management. It does not mean profiteering from the house. As long as Obama puts financiers (Summers, Geithner, and various other mental gnomes from Goldman Sachs) in charge of managing the house, they will keep on stealing it. that's all they know.
house-management is fundamentally not about money. Money helps to motivate the children, and keep tabs on their activities, but rather it's just a way to help, not the essence of the thing. The essence is productive work. It's for the People and its democratically elected government, guided by the deepest thinkers to decide that, it is not the business of the money swindlers. Such is Obama's mistake, and it could all end very badly, if he does not correct this in time.
I know someone with a PhD who works as an quality control inspector overseeing the Food and Drug Administration. She informed me an hour ago that all her portion of the overseeing system she works for will be cancelled in September. Meanwhile Mr. Obama is stimulating the Afghans by killing and terrorizing a lot of them. Change you can sneer by.
Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
Artie Gold
Austin, TX
The real question at this point is "will we get to 1937?"
A lot of the problem is that 9.5% unemployment is something we've seen before; a quarter of a century is but one generation. Yes, things are bad -- but to many, it's a restoration of "the way things are supposed to be" (hideous wealth distribution, the commoditization of labor and everything else). The big difference is that our expectations have changed to such a great extent. After all, the last time we saw unemployment at these levels it preceded a pair of decades of considerable growth (the second better shared than the first, to be sure -- and even then medians barely touched the pre-oil-shock levels).
Perhaps the first thing we need to do is to un-massage the unemployment numbers; if the "real" number were promulgated (is it 13%? 14%? more, using the pre-Reagan standard?) Of course, the "other side" would immediately demagogue that issue too -- happily comparing apples to oranges...
Yes, what must happen is to drive a stake through the heart of the trickle-down worldview that got us into this mess. There's a somewhat creepy predestination-type argument that keeps being made, that the whole problem was that people got loans who didn't deserve them -- indeed who were not WORTHY of them -- and THAT'S what brought things down.
No, dammit, the fact is that a consumer-based society coupled with a consistently upward-redistributable (read: "low tax") economy is, by its very nature, unsustainable.
Here's my prescription:
Raise the minimum wage by 30% over two years.
Institute a sharply progressive income tax for incomes over, say $400000, up to, say, 60% for incomes over 1500000 and 75% over 5000000.
Establish a living wage, at likely 150% of minimum wage; wages paid below that create a corporate tax liability of 25% of the difference (against profits).
Fund the shortfalls of the states.
Create a significant fund for very low cost loans for education.
Pass a reasonable form of Universal Health Care.
Might all this be inflationary? Yes. Most likely. Truth is, inflation has been artificially low for decades now. Capital has had its party. If we are dependent upon consumption, money has to be placed in the hands of those who will use it to consume.
When the party (finally) gets started -- and goin' pretty good -- *then* you take the punchbowl away. But not until we cut unemployment by half.
Look, I'm not an economist, nor am I an MBA (many of whom are wonderful people, but as a group -- in terms of their overall effect -- not so much). I am, however an observer of the scene and have been around the block likely a few more times than I have left. Still, it seems pretty obvious.
If we make the stated policy goal to eclipse the former high in real median income by 10% we'll be all right. Otherwise it's gonna be a long slog.
Zach
NY
Where is the economic stimulus going to come from the Obama administration? He's planning to increase government spending on all fronts therefore putting America more into debt, and plans to tax the productive in society even more, ignoring that the loathed big corporations are also big employers . What's this fantasy that the Cap and Trade tax, that will drain trillions of dollars from manufacturers, and that is going to make the price of everything increase, is going to create tens of millions of green jobs and provide cheap renewable energy for everyone? Some of this tax money will be given away to foreigners also? Everyone in America will be making wind turbines and solar panels and have a wind turbine and solar panel on their house? America's financial sector has swindled our 401K's, and these money shufflers still make criminal levels of income, for producing absolutely nada. With all this talk about deflation, why do the price of essentials like food, fuel, utilities, medical treatment and insurances keep going up? OK gas is down from a year ago but it's still high. I don't see prices dropping for consumables at places like Walmart either. What if foreigners start dumping the US dollar, China, Russia, Brazil, and South Africa would like to see an alternative global currency. If the rest of the world dumps and devalues our currency, printing more dollars will be necessary to buy the foreign manufactured goods we crave, increasing inflation. The blue states in particular are going bankrupt right now, California is the fiscal equivalent of a banana republic. To get ones house in economic order one must be sovereign over that house. What's this idea that the USA can continue to ignore it's national sovereignty and forever allow tens of millions of foreign nationals to uncontrollably enter our country, until our population hits half a billion in 40 years, and a billion before the century is out? What a great future for our grandkids, larger crowds of American consumers at Walmart. The only people I see getting wealthy in our future are politicians and other government employees and their media cheerleaders, and guess what, these folks don't do any real work or produce anything. I'm willing to wait 8 years for the Obama miracle to happen. It'll have to be a miracle as Bush and his buddies sold us all down the river. Let's see if the new guy isn't all talk. Progressives with 60 senators own this country now, let's see what you guys are made of.
pdxtran
Minneapolis
The first thing the Obama administration needs to do is stop pouring money into Afghanistan and Iraq, wars that were war crimes to begin with and are now being fought with no clear purpose in mind.
Then billions of dollars per month that are being spent on killing mostly innocent people and lining the pockets of corrupt private contractors can be used to meet our pressing domestic needs.
However, I fear that our Democrats are either complicit in this monstrosity of a war or are too chicken-hearted to withstand Republicans' cries of "Soft on terrorism!"
AnnS
MI
Obama is not FDR - not even close. He doesn't have a Harry Hopkins who shoveled money out the door for projects as fast as possible on the grounds that people needed work NOW because they eat ever day - and couldn't wait for work to buy food until the 'system' maybe might possibly recovered on its own.
Obama's advisers are so closely ties to and imbibed with the culture of Wall St one owners if they have ever deal with the regular median income household. Obama himself is a Chicago politician to the bone. The only difference between him and Richard Daley SR who knew where the bodies were buried in Chicago politics - and used that information - and whose mantra was to keep the voters happy by keeping the trash picked up and snow plowed is that instead of selling services to please the voters, he sells nice speeches and fine words which are not supported by backbone, grit, determination and a fundamental knowledge of how to make the legislative process work or where the bodies are buried among the Congress Critters. He is selling some phantasmagorical version of an alternative reality where everyone will play nice because he asks them to.
They will have to hurry to do something. By the U-6 unemployment data which shows 16.1% unemployed and underemployed ( and the number closest to the methods used to estimate unemployment in the 1930s) it is already late 1931 - early 1932 and moving fast to repeat the past.
I do not expect squat from Obama or his advisers. They are too timid in dealing with Congress, they are too inexperienced in dealing with Congress and Obama is simply too insipid and too unforceful with his focusing on vague ideas rather than the practicalities of getting things done. The only plus is that it would have been even worse if McCain had won.
Mehul Shah
Boston, MA
[Paul Krugman keeps asking for a bigger stimulus package] This is the guy who if you go back to his writings in 2001-2002 called for a housing bubble to offset the tech slump.
We all know how the artificial demand we pumped played out, and now Mr. Krugman is calling for more stimulus, more artificial aggregate demand pumping. Enough of this non-stop Keynesian bubble creation.....
This is not a partisan issue. We simply can't spend our way out of this mess. Let's take our bitter medicine and lay foundation for sustainable economic growth.
soso
Canada
Dear Economist Krugman, clearly you are trying to reason more, but most unfortunately, America has gone mad, perhaps permanently. Just read the headlines, many from NYTimes, your own paper, and tell us if you think otherwise.
New major offensive is mounted in Afghan; Iraq occupation continues.
Many, including a 12 year old boy captured, tortured, held at Gitmo.
700 billion annual defense budget, full of waste, rules the world.
Total jobless rate hits 9.5%, effective rate 18.6%, and still rising.
California and other states have, or are on the verge of bankruptcy.
South Carolina Governor prefers romantic adventure in South America.
50 million people with no health insurance, many more under insured.
The climate legislation reduced to meaningless in corporate Congress.
China is speeding ahead: Green Power Takes Root in the Chinese Desert.
WSJ reported today that “big pay packages” are back on Wall Street. Annual bonuses could reach 2007 levels, Goldman Sachs $700,000 each.
Well the root cause is now known = The Great American Bubble Machine
Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression.
29.6.09
on the ethics of work and passion
Only in America one use so many words pretending to describe human reality without mentioning the "S" word (society).
In Mr. Douthat's National Review world, Americans live in a country "where pragmatic anxieties — think of the children! think of the mortgage! ..." In America I know, the pragmatic anxieties start with fears of losing one's job (60-70 hours a week of exploitation, terror and abuse) and health care. Strangely, this part of American reality, which Mr Douthat missed for some reasons (what can it be? what can it be?) destroys not only personal health, but any existing or potential relationships.
Anna
New York
It's more than just love. We've created a generation of Americans who've eliminated all the joy from their lives -- who believe that their purpose on Earth is to work hard to earn money to raise children who will work hard to earn money to raise children who will... you get the picture. But even ants can do that much. Surely there's more to life.
Paul G
Mountain View
In Mr. Douthat's National Review world, Americans live in a country "where pragmatic anxieties — think of the children! think of the mortgage! ..." In America I know, the pragmatic anxieties start with fears of losing one's job (60-70 hours a week of exploitation, terror and abuse) and health care. Strangely, this part of American reality, which Mr Douthat missed for some reasons (what can it be? what can it be?) destroys not only personal health, but any existing or potential relationships.
Anna
New York
It's more than just love. We've created a generation of Americans who've eliminated all the joy from their lives -- who believe that their purpose on Earth is to work hard to earn money to raise children who will work hard to earn money to raise children who will... you get the picture. But even ants can do that much. Surely there's more to life.
Paul G
Mountain View
26.6.09
on the ongoing conversation about (single payer) healthcare reform
If the Democrats and the President can't move forward on a healthcare plan that 70+% of the people support and are willing to pay taxes to have we can only conclude that the democratic form of government is a waste of time.
J L Schrader
Salem,OR
Back in the early years of the Clinton presidency, I just figured a large portions of Americans were ignorant.
Now I feel that they are stupid.
Why is it that Americans argue whether the best shape for a wheel is a triangle or a square, when the rest of the developed world has long ago figured out that the wheel is best when round?
Otto Von
Madison, WI
J L Schrader
Salem,OR
Back in the early years of the Clinton presidency, I just figured a large portions of Americans were ignorant.
Now I feel that they are stupid.
Why is it that Americans argue whether the best shape for a wheel is a triangle or a square, when the rest of the developed world has long ago figured out that the wheel is best when round?
Otto Von
Madison, WI
18.5.09
Can you reconcile these views on Pakistan?
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/05152009/watch.html
http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2009/05/18/world/asia/18nuke.html?s=3
Apparently, an US Army colonel seems to do just this, from Afghanistan, of all places:
“Unless Pakistan’s leaders commit, in deeds and words, their country’s armed forces and security personnel to eliminating the threat from militant extremists, and unless they make it clear that they are doing so, for the sake of their own future, then no amount of assistance will be effective,” Mr. Levin said.
Yes, Mr. Levin, you are indeed right. But, to eliminate all the militant extremists would require nothing less than a genocide, or at least the guantanamoesque internment of hundreds of thousands of sympathizers and followers for generations to come. Do you have the stomach for that, good Sir?
The Islamic fundamentalist movement is growing rapidly in that region, not shrinking, and the main reason is because of the perceived inequity and injustice of the system in which the so-called extremists live.
Pakistan has too many poor, hungry, jobless, and very misguided men, young and old, who are offered nothing from their secular government and everything from their religious zealots. Simply put, they're winning the PR campaign, in both deeds and words, as you so perspicaciously put it, Mr. Levin.
And we will never, never, never win them over with guns and bombs and death and destruction. We're merely pouring fuel into flames which are only going to get higher and higher... and more and more widespread.
This is serious business, Mr. Levin, and Washington needs serious, honest, and WISE solutions - not status quo geo-political maneuverings that are leading us in only one direction: nuclear holocaust.
Stop fighting them, stop killing them. You can't and won't kill them all, but the more you kill, the more sympathizers you create within their "mainstream" society, and one of these sympathizers just may someday be one of the tens of thousands of Pakistanis involved in their nuclear arms production.
Actually, it really is only a matter of time before the enemy gets his hands on the bomb. Throughout the course of history no weapon, no matter how big or small or how well-guarded, has been prevented from proliferating around the globe - humans love to kill each other far too much for that.
But nuclear warfare is a different kind of killing all together, isn't it now? It is the great equalizer, in the Cold War it was the even the perfect peacemaker, and today it is the slothfully surfacing nightmare, the slippery serpent that strikes when least expected. And millions and millions and millions will die, perhaps of their people, and perhaps of ours as well...
Unless, of course, we do the right thing. Come to the realization that western-style freedom and democracy will never take root in Islamic societies due to their religious doctrine... and then leave: militarily, politically, even economically. Just walk away... and dry them up so that they can't spend billions and billions of American dollars on the bomb, which they will surely pursue, no matter how much handshaking and grinning you politicians do.
Perhaps it's time we change our perception of the geo-political realities in the world and respond accordingly.
— Col. Michael Stone, Jalalabad, Afghanistan
What do you think, another setup?
http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2009/05/18/world/asia/18nuke.html?s=3
Apparently, an US Army colonel seems to do just this, from Afghanistan, of all places:
“Unless Pakistan’s leaders commit, in deeds and words, their country’s armed forces and security personnel to eliminating the threat from militant extremists, and unless they make it clear that they are doing so, for the sake of their own future, then no amount of assistance will be effective,” Mr. Levin said.
Yes, Mr. Levin, you are indeed right. But, to eliminate all the militant extremists would require nothing less than a genocide, or at least the guantanamoesque internment of hundreds of thousands of sympathizers and followers for generations to come. Do you have the stomach for that, good Sir?
The Islamic fundamentalist movement is growing rapidly in that region, not shrinking, and the main reason is because of the perceived inequity and injustice of the system in which the so-called extremists live.
Pakistan has too many poor, hungry, jobless, and very misguided men, young and old, who are offered nothing from their secular government and everything from their religious zealots. Simply put, they're winning the PR campaign, in both deeds and words, as you so perspicaciously put it, Mr. Levin.
And we will never, never, never win them over with guns and bombs and death and destruction. We're merely pouring fuel into flames which are only going to get higher and higher... and more and more widespread.
This is serious business, Mr. Levin, and Washington needs serious, honest, and WISE solutions - not status quo geo-political maneuverings that are leading us in only one direction: nuclear holocaust.
Stop fighting them, stop killing them. You can't and won't kill them all, but the more you kill, the more sympathizers you create within their "mainstream" society, and one of these sympathizers just may someday be one of the tens of thousands of Pakistanis involved in their nuclear arms production.
Actually, it really is only a matter of time before the enemy gets his hands on the bomb. Throughout the course of history no weapon, no matter how big or small or how well-guarded, has been prevented from proliferating around the globe - humans love to kill each other far too much for that.
But nuclear warfare is a different kind of killing all together, isn't it now? It is the great equalizer, in the Cold War it was the even the perfect peacemaker, and today it is the slothfully surfacing nightmare, the slippery serpent that strikes when least expected. And millions and millions and millions will die, perhaps of their people, and perhaps of ours as well...
Unless, of course, we do the right thing. Come to the realization that western-style freedom and democracy will never take root in Islamic societies due to their religious doctrine... and then leave: militarily, politically, even economically. Just walk away... and dry them up so that they can't spend billions and billions of American dollars on the bomb, which they will surely pursue, no matter how much handshaking and grinning you politicians do.
Perhaps it's time we change our perception of the geo-political realities in the world and respond accordingly.
— Col. Michael Stone, Jalalabad, Afghanistan
What do you think, another setup?
17.5.09
on Cheney's positions about Obama and torture
...even on the outside chance Cheney is right that torture, warrantless wiretapping and dismantling of habeas corpus make us safer.......so what?
Who ever promised it would be safe to be an American? It was not safe for the Founding Fathers or the colonists to wage revolution. It was not safe for Lincoln to fight for the Union. Do we really want to be the first generation of Americans to be too scared to stand up for the Constitution?
The Constitution only stands so long as Americans are willing to die for it. What Cheney proposes, an American populace with so little courage that they would cast aside the Constitution to save their necks, is the lowest form of treason.
— 10K walker, New York
George Lucas had it right when asked if Cheney was Darth Vadar. He responded that Cheney was more evil than Vadar, who had been turned to the dark side, but retained an awareness of of its evil. No, Cheney is that much darker, unambiguously evil figure---the Emperor of Evil himself. Cue the Death Star music!
— calyban, Fairfax, California
Cheney and Bush were bin Laden's most valuable force multipliers. I truly believe Cheney was mentally incompetent to serve in office, although that apparently put him right in the center of the Bell curve for GOP leadership.
For at least seven years, this country stopped being the United States, and became Vichy America. Until we take an honest accounting, the social, economic and political forces which took us there remain.
I'm not interested in retribution. I want to see us recover and thrive again. I want my media and airwaves back. I want corporate brand names erased from public places and bowl games. I want pharmaceutical companies to quit marketing and start discovering. I want banking to be boring again, and creative financing to be erased from the face of the earth. I want work and innovation to be the way we make a living.
I guess I want the Reagan revolution to be understood for the hubris it really was.
— Steve R, Phoenix, AZ
Cheney is behaving the way he is because he knows that he is culpable for America's use of torture. The only way to distract Americans from this simple statement of fact - and to escape indictment - is to wrap himself and his actions in patriotism.
How shallow, yet how effective. The discussion has shifted away from whether or not torture is wrong and criminal (it is) to whether or not we should torture people to protect our country (ironic).
I hope that Cheney's sleight of hand, which so effectively coerced us into the war in Iraq, is brought to light by the media, government investigations, and prosecutions.
— Pangaea, NYC
Power is so hard to give up. When you amass it like this it rots your mind and hardens your heart. I wouldn't be too shocked if I heard that Cheney ate his dogs for dinner the day our troops finally withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving his Halliburton stranded and his Brown and Root digging holes with their tongues for a so-called pipeline.
That presidency was all about fuel, and we are reaping those benefits with a 50-year-old infrastructure, a broken health care system, a retrograde education and rampant foreclosures.
Those were the easiest 8 years. No need to make improvements and become more cultured and open-minded. We were attacked and that was the end of progress.
We betrayed our grandchildren. We crushed their eco-system, stomped on two sovereign countries, then treated the Europeans like maggots. "Call them 'Liberty Fries!'" - was the rant of the day.
The 43rd Presidency was the oil industry commodity. Ironically, gas is cheap and we hardly manufacture cars worth driving with it.
But let's not be so pessimistic. Despite those Dark Ages of Bushisms, Cheneyisms and Cronyism, a brilliant man emerged, took over the White House, mended our economy, closed Guantánamo, befriended the Iranians and the Cubans and much much more. He even built a library dedicated to the first 100 days! And possibly placed those "radicals" like Tom DeLay and Gonzalez behind bars.
Power is so fleeting. Cheney is witless scared and has to come out and ruin the honeymoon for all of us. "We are so unsafe" , so exposed, so unprotected, it's as if the only friend he had in the world were a criminal: Scooter Libby.
But where is Cheney getting his intelligence?
— Jackie, Austin
Former Gov Jesse Ventura said it best on Larry King the other night - Give me a water board Dick Cheney and 1 hour and I will have Cheney confessing to the Sharon Tate murders - But I don't think it would take a hour - more like 1 minute
— Michael, Hastings MN
Who ever promised it would be safe to be an American? It was not safe for the Founding Fathers or the colonists to wage revolution. It was not safe for Lincoln to fight for the Union. Do we really want to be the first generation of Americans to be too scared to stand up for the Constitution?
The Constitution only stands so long as Americans are willing to die for it. What Cheney proposes, an American populace with so little courage that they would cast aside the Constitution to save their necks, is the lowest form of treason.
— 10K walker, New York
George Lucas had it right when asked if Cheney was Darth Vadar. He responded that Cheney was more evil than Vadar, who had been turned to the dark side, but retained an awareness of of its evil. No, Cheney is that much darker, unambiguously evil figure---the Emperor of Evil himself. Cue the Death Star music!
— calyban, Fairfax, California
Cheney and Bush were bin Laden's most valuable force multipliers. I truly believe Cheney was mentally incompetent to serve in office, although that apparently put him right in the center of the Bell curve for GOP leadership.
For at least seven years, this country stopped being the United States, and became Vichy America. Until we take an honest accounting, the social, economic and political forces which took us there remain.
I'm not interested in retribution. I want to see us recover and thrive again. I want my media and airwaves back. I want corporate brand names erased from public places and bowl games. I want pharmaceutical companies to quit marketing and start discovering. I want banking to be boring again, and creative financing to be erased from the face of the earth. I want work and innovation to be the way we make a living.
I guess I want the Reagan revolution to be understood for the hubris it really was.
— Steve R, Phoenix, AZ
Cheney is behaving the way he is because he knows that he is culpable for America's use of torture. The only way to distract Americans from this simple statement of fact - and to escape indictment - is to wrap himself and his actions in patriotism.
How shallow, yet how effective. The discussion has shifted away from whether or not torture is wrong and criminal (it is) to whether or not we should torture people to protect our country (ironic).
I hope that Cheney's sleight of hand, which so effectively coerced us into the war in Iraq, is brought to light by the media, government investigations, and prosecutions.
— Pangaea, NYC
Power is so hard to give up. When you amass it like this it rots your mind and hardens your heart. I wouldn't be too shocked if I heard that Cheney ate his dogs for dinner the day our troops finally withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving his Halliburton stranded and his Brown and Root digging holes with their tongues for a so-called pipeline.
That presidency was all about fuel, and we are reaping those benefits with a 50-year-old infrastructure, a broken health care system, a retrograde education and rampant foreclosures.
Those were the easiest 8 years. No need to make improvements and become more cultured and open-minded. We were attacked and that was the end of progress.
We betrayed our grandchildren. We crushed their eco-system, stomped on two sovereign countries, then treated the Europeans like maggots. "Call them 'Liberty Fries!'" - was the rant of the day.
The 43rd Presidency was the oil industry commodity. Ironically, gas is cheap and we hardly manufacture cars worth driving with it.
But let's not be so pessimistic. Despite those Dark Ages of Bushisms, Cheneyisms and Cronyism, a brilliant man emerged, took over the White House, mended our economy, closed Guantánamo, befriended the Iranians and the Cubans and much much more. He even built a library dedicated to the first 100 days! And possibly placed those "radicals" like Tom DeLay and Gonzalez behind bars.
Power is so fleeting. Cheney is witless scared and has to come out and ruin the honeymoon for all of us. "We are so unsafe" , so exposed, so unprotected, it's as if the only friend he had in the world were a criminal: Scooter Libby.
But where is Cheney getting his intelligence?
— Jackie, Austin
Former Gov Jesse Ventura said it best on Larry King the other night - Give me a water board Dick Cheney and 1 hour and I will have Cheney confessing to the Sharon Tate murders - But I don't think it would take a hour - more like 1 minute
— Michael, Hastings MN
8.5.09
Susan P. Koniak on Neel Kashkari
Last night Mr. Kashkari appeared on Charlie Rose for the full hour. Anyone who listened carefully would have been disabused of any illusion that the administration has a strategy or is competently managing this crisis. As Elizabeth Warren, Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for TARP, repeatedly says there are 3 options for dealing with the banks: 1) open-ended subsidization (and smushing the facts, the strategy Paul Krugman describes as the wait-and-hope-the-banks-heal-themselves strategy); 2) liquidation (Krugman's let-them-fail); or 3) restructuring (what most people, I think, mean when they use the term nationalization--a temporary government takeover, change in management, plan to get the bad assets off the books and reselling healthier banks into private sector).
Obama's Wall St. status-quo team has chosen option one open-ended subsidization without an exit strategy (except hope for an unlikely quick turnaround) and without an energetic, plan for reform that would fix what went wrong. Consider that the Fed and Treasury are intent on restarting the securitization markets without fixing ANYTHING about those instruments (there is much to fix) that makes manipulation of them easy, risk taking likely, and another calamity down the road.
Last night Mr. Kashkari's explanation for why option 3 (restructuring/temporary nationalization) was a non-starter amounted to this: Krugman and everyone else on the "outside"--all those not sitting in my chair or Geithner's or presumably Summer's--cannot possibly understand the "nuances" that make their "simple" solutions so unworkable. What nuances did he mention? Here are some examples: If you nationalize bank A or banks A,B and C, why not D or why wouldn't the market have a run on D fearing they'd be next? If the vague term "nationalization" means owning a majority of common stock, do we make all debt holders whole? Would the govt take on all liabilities too?
These are not "nuances," they are fundamental questions, one's anyone who advocates restructuring BEGINS with. More important, none of them are big bang theory difficult. The hardest thing about them is political. It's long past time Obama used those out-size political gifts of his to lead with honesty about the economy, hard choices and concrete (not rosy pronouncements). It's long past time he stopped trusting the architects of the current mess, like Summers and Geithner, and hunker down himself.
— Susan P. Koniak, Boston University School of Law
Obama's Wall St. status-quo team has chosen option one open-ended subsidization without an exit strategy (except hope for an unlikely quick turnaround) and without an energetic, plan for reform that would fix what went wrong. Consider that the Fed and Treasury are intent on restarting the securitization markets without fixing ANYTHING about those instruments (there is much to fix) that makes manipulation of them easy, risk taking likely, and another calamity down the road.
Last night Mr. Kashkari's explanation for why option 3 (restructuring/temporary nationalization) was a non-starter amounted to this: Krugman and everyone else on the "outside"--all those not sitting in my chair or Geithner's or presumably Summer's--cannot possibly understand the "nuances" that make their "simple" solutions so unworkable. What nuances did he mention? Here are some examples: If you nationalize bank A or banks A,B and C, why not D or why wouldn't the market have a run on D fearing they'd be next? If the vague term "nationalization" means owning a majority of common stock, do we make all debt holders whole? Would the govt take on all liabilities too?
These are not "nuances," they are fundamental questions, one's anyone who advocates restructuring BEGINS with. More important, none of them are big bang theory difficult. The hardest thing about them is political. It's long past time Obama used those out-size political gifts of his to lead with honesty about the economy, hard choices and concrete (not rosy pronouncements). It's long past time he stopped trusting the architects of the current mess, like Summers and Geithner, and hunker down himself.
— Susan P. Koniak, Boston University School of Law
view from the (in-)side
I am very afraid. As one of the people "in the trenches" (full disclosure, I am an attorney, and I represent numerous people who are trying to work out short sales with their mortgage holders), I can see where the banks are counting on making their profits. And, in my opinion, it is not a method that is moral, ethical, and may border on illegal. For example, one of the banks in the stress test (I will avoid using names, since I don't want to be sued) holds a first and second mortgage on one of my client's homes. The first mortgage is serviced by the bank for Freddie Mac, the second mortgage is held in house. We worked out an agreement for the first mortgage holder to take all of the net proceeds from the sale, less approximately $3,000.00, which they would allow the second mortgage to be paid. The second mortgage holder wants $10,000.00. The second mortgage holder has recommended that my client just make "a prepayment of principal of $7,000.00 on their mortgage, prior to closing" in order to accomplish this. The reason for this deception is that Freddie Mac has made it clear that as the primary mortgage holder, they are entitled to all of the money available first. Only after they are paid in full, will they allow the junior lienholders to get any money. That the second mortgage holder knows that what they are asking amounts to 1. a breach of the bank's fiduciary duty to Freddie Mac; 2. potential RESPA violations; and 3. potentially a fraud on Freddie Mac is obvious to me, since they will not put anything in writing! When I pointed out that their request bordered on bank fraud, they claimed not, and that they would get me their in house counsel's opinion to that effect. Never happened.
IMO, what is happening is that these negotiators are being given strict marching orders to get as much money out of the worthless second mortgages as possible (this is one of the banks that is required to raise additional capital). Quite possibly, they are given bonuses based upon the money that they collect each month, which naturally (just like the money they made for putting together risky deals) puts them in the position of making questionable decisions.
This is just more cards on top of the house of cards that is falling. We need regulation, and quite frankly, we need our President to appoint a special prosecutor to look into all of the fraud and deception that went on in the previous administration's oversight of the banking industry, and have people put in jail.
— pjpmgb, Destin, FL
IMO, what is happening is that these negotiators are being given strict marching orders to get as much money out of the worthless second mortgages as possible (this is one of the banks that is required to raise additional capital). Quite possibly, they are given bonuses based upon the money that they collect each month, which naturally (just like the money they made for putting together risky deals) puts them in the position of making questionable decisions.
This is just more cards on top of the house of cards that is falling. We need regulation, and quite frankly, we need our President to appoint a special prosecutor to look into all of the fraud and deception that went on in the previous administration's oversight of the banking industry, and have people put in jail.
— pjpmgb, Destin, FL
The Great Depression 2.0 to come later...
Perhaps this isn't the Great Depression 2.0, but really the Panic of 1907 2.0 with the Great Depression 2.0 to come later.
At this point, I've lost count on how many trillions of dollars we've given to financial institutions to cover for all their unorthodox investment practices.
What if we would have given those trillions to the bottom 75% of the people who paid income tax? It seems to me the surge in demand would have inflated asset values necessary to make the banks sound.
Ah, but that would have meant giving the median worker money. God forbid we do something like that!
The fundamental problem is the median wage has not gone up in 35 years, while GNP went up 150%.
There isn't enough real demand to help prop up asset values and there isn't enough demand relative to supply to allow investors to make reasonably good returns on orthodox investments.
Because the median worker hasn't gotten a raise in 35 years and GNP has gone up 150%, trillions and trillions of dollars have gone to the 'supply side' of the ledger of our society.
Those supply-siders are supposed to invest, we were told by Ronald Reagan and his ilk, in building factories, businesses and the like to create jobs for the rest of us. Those are the 'orthodox' investment practices.
But what happens when there is no demand? Do the supply-siders go off and build a factory anyway?
Of course not. They are driven by the desire to make good returns. This has two negative effects - it causes bubbles and it induces unorthodox investment practices.
Since their is no demand, supply-side investing rich start eye-balling the unorthodox investment practices they've been roped off from through regulation. Since building a factory won't generate a good return, they want to make payday loans, credit card loans, subprime loans and a host of other things they dream up.
Meanwhile, if some small segment of the economy comes along and starts generating decent returns, like say, a new technology, which brings with it its own latent demand and so reasonable returns, the 'supply-side' money rushes to it like moths to a light bulb, flooding that sector and thus creating a bubble.
Investment bubbles are a sign that society, the economy, have past the 'supply-side' saturation point. That's where we were in 1999 - when the supply-side was at least ten trillion dollars poorer than it is now.
In the mean time, because investors are rich and powerful and relentless at trying to get at unorthodox 'investing' the government eventually relents. Then its just a matter of time before the meltdown and/or implosion begins.
But it all goes back to the supply versus demand economics. When you have too much demand (inflation), supply-side bias policies make sense. Whoopee, then, lets give money to the rich! That was 1979. Such policies were played and should have been turned off by 1985. By 1987 we had signs of supply-side saturation, junk bonds, the savings and loan debacle and Black Friday (or was it Monday). By 1999 we were well past "supply-side saturation" and the bubbles and deregulation efforts confirmed all of this. Yet President Bush spent the next 8 years moving perhaps as much as another $11 trillion dollars over to the supply-side (now that's audacity!) like a drunk with a suicide bent. Making the situation worse. The financial bailout so far has been the same thing - giving more trillions of dollars to the same people Ronald Reagan began giving money to 29 years ago: the supply-side, investing uber-rich.
Throughout all of this I've heard no serious talk anywhere about demand economics - even though demand is the obvious problem.
Why?
Because that means giving more bargaining power (and thus money) to the average Joe at the expense of the investing rich. Gasp! The horror of that!
The average Joe doesn't have a powerful lobbyist working for him. He has only the ballot box which amounts to one day of influence every two years.
The problem today is the concentration of wealth in Wall Street has lead to the concentration of power there as well. The power is so great and so concentrated that neither Obama, nor Republicans, nor congressional Democrats can chance ignoring Wall Street very long, if at all, while they are willing to ignore Main Street with the possible exception of the first Tuesday of every other November. (A good dose of advertising, culture wars and false news hysteria can make half of Main Street forget where it's true interest lies anyway.)
Our economic problems won't end until median wages go up.
The Great Depression dragged on for 10 long years (in most developed countries it was over by 1935) in the United States. Then still, it took a world war to generate demand side economics. I'm not sure if even a world war would shake things up this time around.
This brings to mind a famous quote by Winston Churchill: "American's always do the right thing, after having tried everything else first."
Tim Kane, Mesa, Arizona
At this point, I've lost count on how many trillions of dollars we've given to financial institutions to cover for all their unorthodox investment practices.
What if we would have given those trillions to the bottom 75% of the people who paid income tax? It seems to me the surge in demand would have inflated asset values necessary to make the banks sound.
Ah, but that would have meant giving the median worker money. God forbid we do something like that!
The fundamental problem is the median wage has not gone up in 35 years, while GNP went up 150%.
There isn't enough real demand to help prop up asset values and there isn't enough demand relative to supply to allow investors to make reasonably good returns on orthodox investments.
Because the median worker hasn't gotten a raise in 35 years and GNP has gone up 150%, trillions and trillions of dollars have gone to the 'supply side' of the ledger of our society.
Those supply-siders are supposed to invest, we were told by Ronald Reagan and his ilk, in building factories, businesses and the like to create jobs for the rest of us. Those are the 'orthodox' investment practices.
But what happens when there is no demand? Do the supply-siders go off and build a factory anyway?
Of course not. They are driven by the desire to make good returns. This has two negative effects - it causes bubbles and it induces unorthodox investment practices.
Since their is no demand, supply-side investing rich start eye-balling the unorthodox investment practices they've been roped off from through regulation. Since building a factory won't generate a good return, they want to make payday loans, credit card loans, subprime loans and a host of other things they dream up.
Meanwhile, if some small segment of the economy comes along and starts generating decent returns, like say, a new technology, which brings with it its own latent demand and so reasonable returns, the 'supply-side' money rushes to it like moths to a light bulb, flooding that sector and thus creating a bubble.
Investment bubbles are a sign that society, the economy, have past the 'supply-side' saturation point. That's where we were in 1999 - when the supply-side was at least ten trillion dollars poorer than it is now.
In the mean time, because investors are rich and powerful and relentless at trying to get at unorthodox 'investing' the government eventually relents. Then its just a matter of time before the meltdown and/or implosion begins.
But it all goes back to the supply versus demand economics. When you have too much demand (inflation), supply-side bias policies make sense. Whoopee, then, lets give money to the rich! That was 1979. Such policies were played and should have been turned off by 1985. By 1987 we had signs of supply-side saturation, junk bonds, the savings and loan debacle and Black Friday (or was it Monday). By 1999 we were well past "supply-side saturation" and the bubbles and deregulation efforts confirmed all of this. Yet President Bush spent the next 8 years moving perhaps as much as another $11 trillion dollars over to the supply-side (now that's audacity!) like a drunk with a suicide bent. Making the situation worse. The financial bailout so far has been the same thing - giving more trillions of dollars to the same people Ronald Reagan began giving money to 29 years ago: the supply-side, investing uber-rich.
Throughout all of this I've heard no serious talk anywhere about demand economics - even though demand is the obvious problem.
Why?
Because that means giving more bargaining power (and thus money) to the average Joe at the expense of the investing rich. Gasp! The horror of that!
The average Joe doesn't have a powerful lobbyist working for him. He has only the ballot box which amounts to one day of influence every two years.
The problem today is the concentration of wealth in Wall Street has lead to the concentration of power there as well. The power is so great and so concentrated that neither Obama, nor Republicans, nor congressional Democrats can chance ignoring Wall Street very long, if at all, while they are willing to ignore Main Street with the possible exception of the first Tuesday of every other November. (A good dose of advertising, culture wars and false news hysteria can make half of Main Street forget where it's true interest lies anyway.)
Our economic problems won't end until median wages go up.
The Great Depression dragged on for 10 long years (in most developed countries it was over by 1935) in the United States. Then still, it took a world war to generate demand side economics. I'm not sure if even a world war would shake things up this time around.
This brings to mind a famous quote by Winston Churchill: "American's always do the right thing, after having tried everything else first."
Tim Kane, Mesa, Arizona
4.5.09
Condolezza Rice Doublespeak(s)
She's an academic at Stanford University, just as Douglas J. Feith at Georgetown. What are the Bush people doing to these universities?
17.4.09
on the state of financial affairs, stress tests and market rallies
I love it when people who should know better say stupid things. Professor Nicholas Bloom, for example. “We still don’t know the value of the toxic assets central to the banking crisis.”
Professor, there is no market for those assets. Their value is currently zero. Hence, the word “toxic”. No one has proposed a mechanism to remove their toxicity, because that toxicity is holistically contained in the design and structure of the instruments themselves. IT CANNOT BE REMOVED. Due diligence would have to be performed on each and every loan in each and every bundle that was securitized and sliced into bonds. A new, responsible rating would have to be applied to the parts and to the whole. The bond tranches, their prices and their promised returns would have to be reassembled, using the new ratings. Even if this were theoretically possible, lawsuits would prevent it.
Derivatives are a dangerous game. Deregulated, they quickly become trash. Business school professors need to start educating their students about this fact. Read Steinherr, Partnoy and Das.
Now, Geithner is desperately trying to inflate the value of these tumors from zero to some agreed-upon future market price by GUARANTEEING AGAINST LOSSES, and subsidizing leveraged risk. Therefore, ANY value the assets acquire will be artificial, while the fundamentals of the assets remain toxic. In other words, it’s short-term game time, again. This is beyond corrupt. It’s ‘pay no attention to the man behind the curtain’ time. Geithner is a fraud, committed to fomenting lies.
Most importantly, though, what the public is being prevented from doing is even examining the assets in detail, to see the nooks and crannies, the clever little options, be they American, Bermudan, or otherwise. We don’t know how many there are, or on whose books they lurk. That’s what the bailout of Bear was intended to prevent. Transparency. The failure of Lehman threatened to provide transparency, and the market reacted with horror.
But transparency is the only thing that will restore confidence and the only path to long-term health.
Lastly, false declarations of imminent recovery, like the one made by chief dissembler Larry Summers, or deceptive stress test results or earnings reports provoke the fear of missing the profit opportunity of a market bottom, and the bump up to the strike price that sellers desire to lock in gains. Banks are desperate for capital. Bear market rallies, with the government at your side, are useful in that regard.
— joe
Professor, there is no market for those assets. Their value is currently zero. Hence, the word “toxic”. No one has proposed a mechanism to remove their toxicity, because that toxicity is holistically contained in the design and structure of the instruments themselves. IT CANNOT BE REMOVED. Due diligence would have to be performed on each and every loan in each and every bundle that was securitized and sliced into bonds. A new, responsible rating would have to be applied to the parts and to the whole. The bond tranches, their prices and their promised returns would have to be reassembled, using the new ratings. Even if this were theoretically possible, lawsuits would prevent it.
Derivatives are a dangerous game. Deregulated, they quickly become trash. Business school professors need to start educating their students about this fact. Read Steinherr, Partnoy and Das.
Now, Geithner is desperately trying to inflate the value of these tumors from zero to some agreed-upon future market price by GUARANTEEING AGAINST LOSSES, and subsidizing leveraged risk. Therefore, ANY value the assets acquire will be artificial, while the fundamentals of the assets remain toxic. In other words, it’s short-term game time, again. This is beyond corrupt. It’s ‘pay no attention to the man behind the curtain’ time. Geithner is a fraud, committed to fomenting lies.
Most importantly, though, what the public is being prevented from doing is even examining the assets in detail, to see the nooks and crannies, the clever little options, be they American, Bermudan, or otherwise. We don’t know how many there are, or on whose books they lurk. That’s what the bailout of Bear was intended to prevent. Transparency. The failure of Lehman threatened to provide transparency, and the market reacted with horror.
But transparency is the only thing that will restore confidence and the only path to long-term health.
Lastly, false declarations of imminent recovery, like the one made by chief dissembler Larry Summers, or deceptive stress test results or earnings reports provoke the fear of missing the profit opportunity of a market bottom, and the bump up to the strike price that sellers desire to lock in gains. Banks are desperate for capital. Bear market rallies, with the government at your side, are useful in that regard.
— joe
7.4.09
On Larry Summers
From Glenn Greenwald writing for Salon this past weekend:
White House officials yesterday released their personal financial disclosure forms, and included in the millions of dollars which top Obama economics adviser Larry Summers made from Wall Street in 2008 is this detail:
Lawrence H. Summers, one of President Obama's top economic advisers, collected roughly $5.2 million in compensation from hedge fund D.E. Shaw over the past year and was paid more than $2.7 million in speaking fees by several troubled Wall Street firms and other organizations. . . .
Financial institutions including JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch paid Summers for speaking appearances in 2008. Fees ranged from $45,000 for a Nov. 12 Merrill Lynch appearance to $135,000 for an April 16 visit to Goldman Sachs, according to his disclosure form.
That's $135,000 paid by Goldman Sachs to Summers -- for a one-day visit. And the payment was made at a time -- in April, 2008 -- when everyone assumed that the next President would either be Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton and that Larry Summers would therefore become exactly what he now is: the most influential financial official in the U.S. Government (and the $45,000 Merrill Lynch payment came 8 days after Obama's election). Goldman would not be able to make a one-day $135,000 payment to Summers now that he is Obama's top economics adviser, but doing so a few months beforehand was obviously something about which neither parties felt any compunction. It's basically an advanced bribe. And it's paying off in spades. And none of it seemed to bother Obama in the slightest when he first strongly considered naming Summers as Treasury Secretary and then named him his top economics adviser instead (thereby avoiding the need for Senate confirmation), knowing that Summers would exert great influence in determining who benefited from the government's response to the financial crisis.
Enough said.
— Hilary Collins, PA
How are Lawrence Summers' relationships with DEShaw, other hedge funds and banks, different from Dick Cheney's relationships with Halliburton, the oil companies and the defense industry?
— Robert Henry Eller, Milan, Italy
Summers is just one of the academics who both fueled this 40 year ponzi scheme to make MBAs from elite universities like Hrvard and Penn Wharton school the kings of the world.
what did this lockstep army of academics get? money, tenure book deals but adulation fo the crowds. They wanted that time on the stage
The biggest disappointment of this entire meltdown is the duplicity and greed of colege proessors.
they committed the age old sin of lying to their students for personal gain.
shame
soon the entire extent of this corruption of university faculties will come to light.
it will include their complicity in the securitization of school loans, software deals, on line universities you name it .
but it was in their books that they lied about our american history our constitution our heritage that they had the most damage.
— Publicola, Philadelphia
Why shouldn't a brilliant, superbly-connected economist monetize his intelligence?
The real issue with Larry and with too many of Barack's brilliant team is that they are financiers - not industrialists. That's the first half of their problem.
Their fixes for companies and banks are to muck with their balance sheets.
What is needed are jobs. Well-paying. Private-sector (or, at least, at the public-private interphase - like utilities).
Nothing that's being done - other than flooding the economy with money to get people and companies to buy things - is retaining or creating jobs.
The second half of their problem is that they believe they can socially engineer. Green cars. Green energy.
Yet, they deliberately avoid looking at the most successful, economically validated, examples of each - both, actually, in Europe.
France, for nuclear energy.
All of Europe, for a simple gas tax.
Creating, on a large competitive scale, jobs where people make or do things that other people willingly buy and use requires an intelligence akin to - perhaps even beyond - investment banking.
The social engineering? They will figure out what they actually need to do shortly before the 2010 election.
Or shortly after.
— W in the Middle, New York State
All this was predicted and predictable
The insiders are still inside and the present administration policies will increasing reflect their desire to serve their real and future employers. Representation of Americans when it actually happens is just a coincidence or collateral damage to their real representation of themselves and the power elite.
During each and every American war (with the possible exception of the Revolutionary War when the new colonial government was broke) America's entrepreneurs, swindlers, thieves, crooks, connected insiders, elites, politicians and some military leaders did what they really do best: steal ill-gained wealth while America's fighting men and women sacrificed their lives for their economic benefit.
That ill-gained wealth made millionaires out of people who care little about American values, American soldier lives and less about whether America even survives. (A good example of the above is found in Chapter 18, Corruption-Stanton Replaces Cameron, Abraham Lincoln, The War Years, V. 1, Carl Sandburg, Harcourt, Brace & Company 1939.)
But similar information surfaced after WW I, during WW II and then almost continuously as the military-political complex became a major component of our economy. The war in Iraq is just the current version of those in power stealing as America's soldiers have their lives stolen.
So we will see more war cries from this administration (think North Korea and its little Freudian missile)about everything as we have done in the past. But these advisors, insiders, etc. are now double treasonous in that they seek to ensure their own economic advantage while America is at war.
The double treason is based on their their undermining the economic stability for their own self-interest of America as they undermine America's military success by allowing and permitting waste and corruption in the provision of war materials, poor contracting quality and no-bid contracting to favorites and friends.
Senator Henry Charles Van Wyck said during the Civil War:
"The soldier who, bourne down by disease and overcome with fatigue, is found sleeping at his post, you punish with death, while the miscreant who holds his festival at this carnage of blood, you treat with deferential respect. Do you say Government cannot banish treason and punish crime?"
His statement came after a detailed study of multiple cases of fraud, delivery of guns that misfired and blew off thumbs, of delivery of horses that were so sick and diseased that they had to be shot, both examples being sold to the government at above market or any reasonable competitive prices, where no one identified as being part of the fraud, misrepresentation and providers of unacceptable goods was punished. Little of the ill-gained wealth was recovered.
The innocent died and the phony patriots got rich.
Sound familiar? This particualr individual's economic self-interest and future is being guaranteed every day. But instead of a subway pass to get to Wall Street, he gets paid a fabulous salary and the deferential treatment mentioned by Senator Van Wyck.
In the past, America could afford a little inefficiency and waste. Now that pattern is putting the last nails in our coffin. 1% of the population owns over 35% of the total wealth of America and the top 25% owns over 85%. Not much left for the 80% who are losing their homes, jobs, medical care insurance and opportunties to go to college. And yet the greed goes unchecked and America's position falters.
Who is America's Nero? Who can even afford fiddle lessons? How many fires, floods, hurricanes and wars do we need to wake up?
Or do we just roll over and let the thieves have it all?
America's history is replete with commissions, studies and reports of this unpatriotic, immoral, illegal, undemocratic and damning practice during and after each war.
The Civil War was the turning point
— ed g, Warwick, NY
During each and every American war (with the possible exception of the Revolutionary War when the new colonial government was broke) America's entrepreneurs, swindlers, thieves, crooks, connected insiders, elites, politicians and some military leaders did what they really do best: steal ill-gained wealth while America's fighting men and women sacrificed their lives for their economic benefit.
That ill-gained wealth made millionaires out of people who care little about American values, American soldier lives and less about whether America even survives. (A good example of the above is found in Chapter 18, Corruption-Stanton Replaces Cameron, Abraham Lincoln, The War Years, V. 1, Carl Sandburg, Harcourt, Brace & Company 1939.)
But similar information surfaced after WW I, during WW II and then almost continuously as the military-political complex became a major component of our economy. The war in Iraq is just the current version of those in power stealing as America's soldiers have their lives stolen.
So we will see more war cries from this administration (think North Korea and its little Freudian missile)about everything as we have done in the past. But these advisors, insiders, etc. are now double treasonous in that they seek to ensure their own economic advantage while America is at war.
The double treason is based on their their undermining the economic stability for their own self-interest of America as they undermine America's military success by allowing and permitting waste and corruption in the provision of war materials, poor contracting quality and no-bid contracting to favorites and friends.
Senator Henry Charles Van Wyck said during the Civil War:
"The soldier who, bourne down by disease and overcome with fatigue, is found sleeping at his post, you punish with death, while the miscreant who holds his festival at this carnage of blood, you treat with deferential respect. Do you say Government cannot banish treason and punish crime?"
His statement came after a detailed study of multiple cases of fraud, delivery of guns that misfired and blew off thumbs, of delivery of horses that were so sick and diseased that they had to be shot, both examples being sold to the government at above market or any reasonable competitive prices, where no one identified as being part of the fraud, misrepresentation and providers of unacceptable goods was punished. Little of the ill-gained wealth was recovered.
The innocent died and the phony patriots got rich.
Sound familiar? This particualr individual's economic self-interest and future is being guaranteed every day. But instead of a subway pass to get to Wall Street, he gets paid a fabulous salary and the deferential treatment mentioned by Senator Van Wyck.
In the past, America could afford a little inefficiency and waste. Now that pattern is putting the last nails in our coffin. 1% of the population owns over 35% of the total wealth of America and the top 25% owns over 85%. Not much left for the 80% who are losing their homes, jobs, medical care insurance and opportunties to go to college. And yet the greed goes unchecked and America's position falters.
Who is America's Nero? Who can even afford fiddle lessons? How many fires, floods, hurricanes and wars do we need to wake up?
Or do we just roll over and let the thieves have it all?
America's history is replete with commissions, studies and reports of this unpatriotic, immoral, illegal, undemocratic and damning practice during and after each war.
The Civil War was the turning point
— ed g, Warwick, NY
27.3.09
on 401k
The 401Ks are the most painful manifestation of the Bush strategy as directed by wealthy interests in this nation to redistribute wealth back to turn-of-the-twentieth century standards of a bifurcated United States: the Rich and the Rest of Us.
Remember the first initiative of the Bush II regime: “Reform Social Security” - by privatizing it and essentially converting it to Wall Street managed 401 Ks. It failed. But, the chaos that ensued in the days that followed the attack on the World Trade Center allowed the Milton Friedman acolytes who bridged the Treasury (Greenspan) and the White House (Cheney’s cadre) to run the money out the back door by waging a $1Trillion enterprise in Iraq funded with artificially low interest. Sooner or later, the pressure would find its release in a second shock: decreased valuation by 42%. That is what Americans are suffering now in their equity holdings, mostly suffered in 401 Ks.
But, even those who attempted to manage their funds through bank and investment fund pools that advertised safe hedges, such a “Municipal Bond Funds” that were billed as “safer than owning individual bonds with the same tax advantages,” have seen their funds tank while those funds let money out via holding and trading ‘fees’ and pooled - largely unaudited claimed holdings that seem to have been stuck with a disproportionate share of bonds where municipalities are hardest hit by invisible shrinkage and non-enforced compliance reporting.
Meanwhile - the average Joe is being given the privilege of going into a talk-show driven rage over the AIG executive compensation bonuses totaling $65million. That’s a cheap scam considering the Republicans and their fellow tax cheats The Rich have skimmed at least $13 Trillion out of the rest of us.
The Republicans are depending on your continued stupidity in harping on about the ‘deficits for your grand children’ represented by the current propose budget. Those deficits will be their along with wars and misery if you don’t act. Look at the “War with China” story plants coming out of the Pentagon already.
It is time to realize that Murdock is the evil twin of Hearst and represents everything that Hearst was accused of and more. It is the unremitting propaganda that is delivered via Fox News as ‘free’ or ‘basic’ cable news throughout the trailer camp economy of middle America that is driving the ’story of the day’ of Rove politics and which robbed your 401K and then gave you “Joe the Plumber.” If you want to think about what to do about it - shove this budget and a rich tax down the throat of a fat, white, middle aged, millionaire, Republican today who insists that he has your ‘best interests and that of your little unborn granddaughter or son closest to his heart.”
— jwp-nyc
If I could have taken my 401k money when I stopped working and invested it in bigger first home, or a beach house, I’d have doubled my investment. But the laws require that it be “protected” by some custodian like Merrill Lynch or Lehmann Bros or Bernie Madoff or CitiGroup or….
Just as Jack said above, the managers profit, and we pay.
— Deb
401k’s are a basically a government requirement that workers hand over retirement savings to the crooks on Wall Street. The only way most workers can get an employer to contribute to their retirement is through these vehicles. The law MUST be changed to get rid of these things.
— Rob Levine
I clearly remember the days when fixed pensions converted to 401K plans. At the time, I was making about $24,000 a year and would have been fully vested in the company fixed pension scheme in another six years. ERISA meant my pension would have been protected even if my employer disappeared before retirement. The truth is that 401K plans were never set up to benefit workers, rich or otherwise. At the time, employers like the U.S. auto industry were screaming about being uncompetitive with Japan because of the burgeoning liability of fixed pension reserves . Workers like me were handed glossy brochures and told to pick our poison. And the rest is history.
— Retiring on air
Remember the first initiative of the Bush II regime: “Reform Social Security” - by privatizing it and essentially converting it to Wall Street managed 401 Ks. It failed. But, the chaos that ensued in the days that followed the attack on the World Trade Center allowed the Milton Friedman acolytes who bridged the Treasury (Greenspan) and the White House (Cheney’s cadre) to run the money out the back door by waging a $1Trillion enterprise in Iraq funded with artificially low interest. Sooner or later, the pressure would find its release in a second shock: decreased valuation by 42%. That is what Americans are suffering now in their equity holdings, mostly suffered in 401 Ks.
But, even those who attempted to manage their funds through bank and investment fund pools that advertised safe hedges, such a “Municipal Bond Funds” that were billed as “safer than owning individual bonds with the same tax advantages,” have seen their funds tank while those funds let money out via holding and trading ‘fees’ and pooled - largely unaudited claimed holdings that seem to have been stuck with a disproportionate share of bonds where municipalities are hardest hit by invisible shrinkage and non-enforced compliance reporting.
Meanwhile - the average Joe is being given the privilege of going into a talk-show driven rage over the AIG executive compensation bonuses totaling $65million. That’s a cheap scam considering the Republicans and their fellow tax cheats The Rich have skimmed at least $13 Trillion out of the rest of us.
The Republicans are depending on your continued stupidity in harping on about the ‘deficits for your grand children’ represented by the current propose budget. Those deficits will be their along with wars and misery if you don’t act. Look at the “War with China” story plants coming out of the Pentagon already.
It is time to realize that Murdock is the evil twin of Hearst and represents everything that Hearst was accused of and more. It is the unremitting propaganda that is delivered via Fox News as ‘free’ or ‘basic’ cable news throughout the trailer camp economy of middle America that is driving the ’story of the day’ of Rove politics and which robbed your 401K and then gave you “Joe the Plumber.” If you want to think about what to do about it - shove this budget and a rich tax down the throat of a fat, white, middle aged, millionaire, Republican today who insists that he has your ‘best interests and that of your little unborn granddaughter or son closest to his heart.”
— jwp-nyc
If I could have taken my 401k money when I stopped working and invested it in bigger first home, or a beach house, I’d have doubled my investment. But the laws require that it be “protected” by some custodian like Merrill Lynch or Lehmann Bros or Bernie Madoff or CitiGroup or….
Just as Jack said above, the managers profit, and we pay.
— Deb
401k’s are a basically a government requirement that workers hand over retirement savings to the crooks on Wall Street. The only way most workers can get an employer to contribute to their retirement is through these vehicles. The law MUST be changed to get rid of these things.
— Rob Levine
I clearly remember the days when fixed pensions converted to 401K plans. At the time, I was making about $24,000 a year and would have been fully vested in the company fixed pension scheme in another six years. ERISA meant my pension would have been protected even if my employer disappeared before retirement. The truth is that 401K plans were never set up to benefit workers, rich or otherwise. At the time, employers like the U.S. auto industry were screaming about being uncompetitive with Japan because of the burgeoning liability of fixed pension reserves . Workers like me were handed glossy brochures and told to pick our poison. And the rest is history.
— Retiring on air
24.3.09
On Geithner-Obama's plan
1) Obama's housing plan will not stop the avalanche of foreclosures, which means the toxic assets the taxpayers will be on the hook for will become more, not less, toxic. See my op-ed with Professor Geanakoplos, Matters of Principal (NY Times 3/5/09) and Congressional Oversight Panel's finding (3/6/09 p.32) both finding that negative equity --not addressed by Obama housing plan-- is the single best indicator of default. IMF report supports this position too. The data is just irrefutable.
2) Winstar! Both the President's housing plan and this new bank plan are based, not on legislation, but on contracts between the government and private actors.
Winstar is a Supreme Court case, coming out of the savings and loan crisis, which says that when the government enters into a contract with a private party to induce it to do x (here buy these assets), Congress cannot -- when the plan fails -- legislate to adopt a more sensible plan without being potentially liable for HUGE damages to the private parties whose expectations were thwarted. This case, a bad decision but one this conservative Supreme Court will stand by, puts executive agencies (those who write these deals with private parties) above Congress and in effect renders future elections to change policy near meaningless as it allows private contracts made by unelected agency officials to make legislation to change course too expensive to adopt (because it would require paying massive damages to compensate private folks who acted on the basis of the contracts about to be entered into to implement Geithner's plan and the near useless housing plan).
Winstar means that it is not just public bailout fatigue,as Paul Krugman says, that may prevent us from later adopting sensible policy. The costs of sensible policy are likely to become prohibitively high once we walk down this path of inducing private parties to "help" us out of this mess with the Geithner plan to be adopted today (and the housing plan, which also involves private contracts with the big banks, who are the servicers of most subprime mortgages).
A number of years ago, I wrote an article with David Dana, Asooc. Dean of Northwestern Law School, about the anti-democratic nature of Winstar and government policy implemented by private contract instead of legislation. The title was Bargaining in the Shadow of Democracy, published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, for anyone interested in learning more about the "tax" that the executive branch can levy on future Congresses by contracts that make future sensible legislation to costly to pass.
Susan P. Koniak, Professor of Law, Boston University
— Susan P. Koniak, Boston University School of Law
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Treasury puts in $1,000,000,000,000. (Looks bigger and more real when one types it out all the way.) It goes in as this: 12% straight up freebie by handing over the money to the banks in exchange for trash and 85% in low-interest non-rcourse loans.
Private investors put in $309,273,835,050 - 3% of the purchase price.
And what price do they pay for this toxic waste that the 'markets' can not value - or at least 'value' high enough so the banks are willing to sell?
The price will be whatever the PRIVATE investors decide - all by themselves to pay for it! Treasury doesn't have a thing to say about it.
And if it turns out that these mortgages really are toxic waste and the private investors bid too high? (And they will since Treasury wants them to bid as high as possible to get the banks to sell their trash.)
Oh well, not a problem. The loans to them are non-recourse and they can walk away and Treasury can't collect a penny from them and the taxpayers lose 85% of what was paid for the loans; the taxpayers lose thier 15% of direct money (now a grand total of 97% of the purchase price) and the investors are out their 3%.
This is NONSENSE! It is Paulson recyled and disguised to pretend that it is a public-private partnership.
Prof Krugman has frequently quipped that Paulson, Bernanke and Geithner suffer from the delusion that there "are no bad mortgage loans or assets - that there are only misunderstood - and thus undervalued -loans and assets" He is depressingly correct.
The markets have already put a price on these so-called assets - and that price is pennies on the dollar. This whole proposal is nothing more than an thinly veiled effort to hand even more taxpayer money over to insolvent - insolvent, not illiquid - banks and take junk that isn't worth even close to what these banks and the Bernanke/Paulson/Geithner want the value to be.
This is more robbery of the taxpayers to prop up walking dead insolvent banks.
Below is the real meaing of all the money that has been thrown at these banks and the financial ssytem:
"The government through bailouts, fiscal stimulus, monetary programs, and every other imaginable bailout has committed over $9 trillion to the cause. You know how many $50,000 a year jobs we can buy with that for one year? 180,000,000. Even with the $1.2 trillion committed by the Fed with the TALF and buying treasuries to lower the interest rate, we could have literally bought 24,000,000 jobs at $50,000 for one year. We could have put everyone back to work for the price of making mortgages go back down to 4% and giving Wall Street another crony capitalist present. "
And now Treasury wants to toss in another $1,000,000,000,000. That would create 20,000,000 jobs paying $50,000 a year!
And in the end, all this propping up of zombie banks won't matter even if they finally start being willing to lend. Aunt Tilly and Uncle Jake out in the real world are broke, busted and flat tapped out. They are in hock to their eyeballs. Household debt (not including mortgages) is now 140% of household income and it hasn't been that high since 1929...... Aunt Tilly and Uncle Jake can not afford to pay the debts they have now let alone borrow more money. And Tilly and Jake don't have a hope of their income increasing as their jobs have been shipped to China and India, their wages cut and their health insurance keeps going up and up. Retraining for a new job is a joke as the wages of college grads have been falling for the past 8 years since there are more college grads then there are jobs that require such education. The jobs in real estate, housing retail suppliers, construction, retail, insurance and finance are gone and are not coming back.
Obama is giving Larry 'Don't regulate the deriviatives market' Summers and Timothy 'I helped create the Paulson palns in '08' Geithner their heads and letting them plow ahead and put into effect the same nonsense proposed by Paulson just dressed up in new trimmings. Welcome to Republican-lite economics.....
We are toast.
— AnnS, MI
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Newspapers vs. Google vs. Newspapers… Back when I was a journalism student in college park (umd), Dr. Petrick told us someday we would get our newspapers over the tube and could even talk back to it. (!!!) The loss of a physical newspaper was expected. Good things about it, right upfront. No more black ink on your fingers, no more trees going down, no more gas used to deliver it.
Of course, it’s so much more than that. We lose editors. Editors who shape content, as in what gets on the frontpage (say, 911) and what gets buried (say, the holocaust through the early 1940’s). In full health, a big strapping paper was a big strapping news gathering machine, reporters stationed in far-flung places who knew the area they covered, the culture, and how it all might fit into the grand puzzle. But those types of correspondents have been drying up for at least the last decade, boiling down to the few hardboiled, the few embedded glams.
Worse, wire services have been bought up, shamelessly spun. UPI, now a Rev. Moonie operation. But et tu, AP? Faxes from the far right have been feeding Congress since the 90’s, posing and accepted as gospel. Rupert Murdoch’s Faux News now owns The Wall Street Journal. So the crud has been eating away at journalism in a big MRSA way. And, as science warns us, corporate pork farming is dangerous to humans.
Radio: deliberately dominated by the far right. Clearchannel bought up the majority of stations and the FCC changed the rules that protected us from such vultures. Who listens to it? Truck drivers, night watchmen… The ones who turn on FOX news when they get couch-wise with a brew.
And then we have THE INTERNET. Shiny! Ruled by their own thirst and hunger, individuals used it to sort through the dark wall of the Bush years. We got it right on 13 Myths because we could search and connect directly to sources. Some even connected to us. Sure, the Free Republic has its few, ready and eager to be part of the disinformed, willing to turn from truth and fair and good just so Jaysus might return to save them (and annihilate you)… But there’s also Talking Points Memo, which brought down Gonzo and helped George Allen bring his own veryself to ruin. Buzzflash has been tireless. Wateringholes formed from e-mailers who formed into e-lists… Because folks began checking things out.
Thank the gods, Google was there to search. But those searches, imho, have been harder to negotiate, less able to help penetrate the wall of late. Interested parties buy up search words, saturate and drown information. And — the biggest potential for suffocation — who chooses what stories go up on the google news page? That’s the power google is capable of having over news. The power of an editor.
Thus we become our own editor. And just at the time that the good old liberal arts education — which is what it takes to even begin to see your way to how things might connect; to begin to understand how much there might be involved in knowing, and in knowing that you can never begin to know all of it; the humility such knowing of your own limits which that necessary enlightenment might bring — our students have been taking business degrees. MBA’s. Pure tech…
I remember reading Reader’s Digest in a doc’s waiting room, a story about a insightful man in an ER who made a casual poetical comment — something from the Bard or maybe Moby Dick or Robbie Burns — to the tech who was taking his vitals. Next thing he knew, the psychiatric staff descended on him. Ignorant of his casual insightful aside, they thought he was suicidal.
Interesting turn of plot, all this. Who will write the history? Will any of it have existed at all?
— deborah conner