Month: September 2008

[International Herald Tribune] Judges around the world have long looked to the decisions of the United States Supreme Court for guidance, citing and often following them in hundreds of their own rulings since the Second World War.

But now American legal influence is waning.

Of course it is.

For one high one day we put ’em in jail for life, I thought today. For destroying millions of families, they don’t come to a committee.

McCain’s Enron Loophole? The S&L Crisis? The Dot Bomb? Help me out here.

Earlier, Stupidity And Greed Slid To Thieving, I posted “When the crisis subsides, an inquiry is needed.”

When this saga is through there should be a tribunal of inquiry. Then we can be told what needs mending, and whom to take out and shoot.

There is so much ahead. Very much ahead. Look at The Big Picture.

Should we hold executives accountable?

Of course we should. One thing that is becoming overtly clear throughout this entire debacle is that the leadership of these banks is utterly incompetent.

We’re talking about a handful of the highest paid executives who not only presided over money losing corporations (which alone should be grounds for termination without a parachute), but these halfwits presided over the rapid, unglamorous *deaths* of their corporations and had no knowledge that they were doing so until it was far too late.

the-end-of-american-capitalism-as-we-knew-it
At the venerable Financial Times, William Buiter, Professor of European Political Economy, London School of Economics, indicts American executive management:

If financial behemoths like AIG are too large and/or too interconnected to fail but not too smart to get themselves into situations where they need to be bailed out, then what is the case for letting private firms engage in such kinds of activities in the first place?

The international press is on fire. Paper after paper is indicting the USA. Headlines in this country are muckraking more and more. Woodward says, Bush was strutting in the White House, “We’re going to save the world for Democracy,” but he’s not strutting anymore.

Nothing like it in my lifetime. We’ll see if it’s just taking opportunity during a poor crisis. If it lasts a month or two, I’d say history has already happened. Just one example:

I used to rule the world
Seas would rise when I gave
the word
Now in the morning I sleep
alone
Sweep the streets I used to own

The leverage party’s over for the masters of the universe. Shed a tear. When you trade pieces of paper for other pieces of paper instead of trading them for real things, one day someone wakes up and realizes the paper’s worth nothing. And Lehman Brothers, after 158 years, has gone poof in the night.

We’re witnessing the passing of more than a venerable firm.

We’re seeing the death of a culture.

Obama said, [AP] “This is not a time for fear and it’s not a time for panic. In the next 47 days you can fire the whole trickle-down, on-your-own, look-the-other way crowd in Washington who has led us down this disastrous path.”

My gosh, people, a Vice President of the United States of America is carrying ‘the briefcase’.

How much Armageddon are you praying for?

Where is Sarah going to show us foreign policy experience? Not to the Naval Academy. Not to Carlisle. Not even to the offices of the National Review.

She’s off to wave a banner in a protest against Iran!

Palin plans to visit UN and join protest of Iran

“As for foreign policy, you know, I think that I am prepared,” she said at a town-hall-style meeting with McCain. “And I know that on Jan. 20, if we are so blessed as to be sworn into office as your president and vice president, certainly we’ll be ready. I’ll be ready. I have that confidence. I have that readiness. And if you want specifics with specific policy, or countries, go ahead and you can ask me. You can even play stump the candidate, if you want to.

Sarah Palin, a believer and advocate of Israel, will speak at the rally. We will have signs for you to pick up on-site as a demonstration of support that will be seen by the leaders of the nations coming to the UN, and by the world as they watch on the news. Rarely do we have such a strategic opportunity to show the world that we believe in God’s word, and are willing to place our time and our money on the line to be present and counted on the side of Israel!

…as they watch on the news
…money on the line
…in God’s word

Her frontispiece says, “Governor Palin believes that the danger of a nuclear Iran is greater than party or politics,” said the spokeswoman, Tracey Schmitt. “She hopes that all parties can rally together in opposition to this grave threat.”

I can see it now.
Fifty major cities. Five hundred thousand in the streets. Signs waving. Chants. Angry pods of young men. Women weeping over the beaten. Sarah’s prayer march goes off without a hitch.

Where’s Jimmy Carter when you need him? He’s got some experience along these lines.

Well?
Got one better?

“But it sounds like he got a little carried away, because yesterday, John McCain actually said that if he’s President, he’ll take on the – quote – “ol’ boys network” in Washington. I am not making this up. This is someone who’s been in Congress for twenty-six years – who put seven of the most powerful Washington lobbyists in charge of his campaign – and now he tells us that he’s the one who will take on the ol’ boy network. The ol’ boy network? In the McCain campaign, that’s called a staff meeting.“

What do they call a McCain staff meeting? The ol’ boy network.
What do the call McCain’s ol’ boy network? A staff meeting.

McCain Attacks Wall Street Greed
83 Wall Street Lobbyists Run His Campaign

Obama’s video at DemWatch
Full text of speech here.

When chaos seeks relief:

“Nothing that is being done here is against God’s law,” the voice said.

The green hoods appeared busy, and one of them stood up. He held the man’s severed right hand in the air, displaying it for the crowd. He was holding it up by its middle finger, moving in a semicircle so everyone could see. The handicapped and the women. Then he pulled his hood back, revealing his face, and he took a breath. He tossed the hand into the grass and gave a little shrug. I couldn’t tell if the pickpocket had been given any sort of anesthesia. He wasn’t screaming.

NYTimes, The Forever War
tip to noLadder

I’m so not stunned.

Sarh Palin linked electoral success to prayer of Witch Hunter.

The pastor Sarah Palin says helped her to become Governor of Alaska founded his ministry with a witchhunt against a woman he accused of causing car accidents through demonic spells.

Before running for governor, Mrs Palin described how Muthee ‘laid his hands’ on her at one of at least 10 visits to Sarah’s Wasilla Assembly of God church.

In footage of her speech, she is seen saying: “As I was mayor and Pastor Muthee was here and he was praying over me, and you know how he speaks and he’s so bold. And he was praying “Lord make a way, Lord make a way.”

The Christian Science Monitor reports Muthee launched six months of fervent prayer to identify the “source of the witchcraft”, a local woman called Mama Jane who ran the Emmanuel Clinic.

Her alleged involvement in fortune-telling and the fact that she lived near the site of a number of fatal car accidents led Pastor Muthee to publicly declare her a witch responsible for the town’s ills.

Given the financial crisis, Taliban Palin puts an entirely new spin on Voodoonomics. The witch hunter who “prayed over” Sarah to help her become governor is invited back to Wasilla too.

Look, any winged readers, spiritual longing is part of humanity, but our garden is rot if folks hear inner thunders and torch other folks out of town.

Our government is rot if it’s a church, for then we have no civil ground. Learn your lessons. Sarah Palin’s beliefs are legitimate because we are free, but illegitimate if near the command of America.

My gosh, people, a Vice President of the United States of America is carrying ‘the briefcase’. How much Armageddon are you praying for?

We know so little about the rich.

Underpinning financial credit is an absolute function of government and one that has not changed since the birth of capital. It clearly needs constant redefinition. When this saga is through there should be a tribunal of inquiry. Then we can be told what needs mending, and whom to take out and shoot.

The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins says: Stupidity and greed slid into thieving.

The short essay is bent British, but with cutting style, “When the crisis subsides, an inquiry is needed.”

Who are they? Where are they now? They said it could not happen again. They said they were masters of the universe. They had conquered history itself and had that wily monster quivering at their feet. There would be no more crashes, no more recessions, no more booms and busts, just moonbeams and rainbows and jam for tea.

If the mistakes that have collapsed the world’s financial markets had been made by statesmen and had led to war, there would be corpses swinging from lampposts. If they had been made by generals, they would be falling on their swords. If they had been made by judges or surgeons or scholars, some framework of professional retribution would be rolling into action. But those responsible for our finances can apparently vanish into the forest like Cheshire cats, leaving only gold-plated grins. Not for them a Hague tribunal or a Hutton inquiry. They are not just good at shedding risk – they shed blame.

Another analyst in the UK puts it well. “It is about the corporate mindset that makes risk political, a struggle between managerial egos rather than a simple balance of good bets versus dangerous gambles.” Carl Mortished continues. “The regular supply of cash is a problem for investment banks, but it is not the root of the problem. …tribe of pinstripes loose to play in the mortgage derivative markets, with catastrophic results. It is the difference between …joint and several liability.

What is striking is that in today’s so-called economic democracy there are no democratic financial rules, no social rules, no trust. A powerful and rich minority can fleece the vast majority…

Oh, the British style:

It is quite true to say that the failure of the various banks and institutions was more or less based on the lack of probity. Someone must have thought just maybe once, that amassing such massive debt was not a good move but then the bonus either monetary or stock eased the trouble brow.

Free market falsehoods, Reaganomics rolled over
The American bent on the coin, Paul Farrell at MarketWatch writes, “Road to big bucks paved with bubbles, meltdowns and big bailouts. But more about that in a minute, because this rapidly unfolding drama is a runaway train with fast-breaking news driving a plot choking on greed, arrogance and incompetence.”

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat:
“We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.

“You must be,” said the Cat,
“otherwise you wouldn’t have come here.”

“The greatest constraint on your future liberties may come not from government but from corporate legal departments laboring to protect by force what can no longer be protected by practical efficiency or general social consent.” – John Perry Barlow

A provocative quote!

Now the rest of the story…

A Saudi-Arabian cleric has declared that according to Islamic law, Mickey Mouse is “one of Satan’s soldiers”, a corrupting influence that should be killed in all cases. The fatwa commands each mullah of Islam that “both household mice and their cartoon counterparts must be killed.”

A visibly angry John McCain replied emphatically today stating, “This abuse of copyright law and patent law is the the single greatest threat facing the West. Dozens of alphabet soup agencies are in a position to deal with this matter, my friends, but we spend too little time these most important of questions.

Full Text Transcript of McCain’s speech below jump

‘My fellow Americans,
‘What’s Disney Corporation to do?

‘We have known for a long time, I’ve been saying this since I was first elected, this murderous threat is the lingering effects of decades of tyranny and centuries of tension. Yet year after year Washington trips over itself, failing to make critical decisions in the heat and fog of political battle, and nothing is done.

‘Not in my Administration I promise you, my friends. I immediately sat down with executives of the Disney Corporation and my top security advisers asking them to define their objectives and what they plan to do about this fatwa on Mickey Mouse. I don’t want vague Capitol Hill language but clarity and the decisiveness I’ve been known for since I first arrived in this great city.

‘So, what I want to do today is take a little time to describe what I would hope to have achieved at the end these long Mickey Commission deliberations. I cannot guarantee I will have achieved these things. I am presumptuous enough to think I would be, but not so much that I believe I can govern by command. Should I forget that, Congress will, of course, hasten to remind me. The following are conditions I intend to achieve. And toward that end, I will focus all the powers of the office; every skill and strength I possess; and seize every opportunity to work with members of Congress who put the national interest ahead of partisanship, and any country in the world that shares our hopes for a more peaceful and prosperous world.

‘We all know the necessity for “stronger” copyright and patent laws to protect the property rights of this great American nation. What they won’t tell you publicly in Washington, and, Ladies and Gentlemen, I include my good friends in the Republican Party when I say this, what they won’t stand up and demand, is when a good American such as Disney Corporation acquires a property right to a product that is a precious property right that includes the use of that product and the way that product is used. The world must know by now that our American producers and manufacturers own an historic property right to make the product, sell the product and instruct as they wish how and when their product is to be used, in all cases, and as they see fit, to control the product post-sale. I don’t give a damn what any mullah thinks about that or what copyright law and patent law has been.

“I’m saying to any mullah that purchases Mickey Mouse or smuggles him across our unprotected borders into their desert nations, Mickey will not be harmed while this Maverick is in office. This deprives our economy and our good content producers alike.

Thereby I am authorizing today that Disney Corporation is to join with Blackwater to chase these aggrandizing criminals to the gates of hell and put an end to this mullah influence once and for all. That’s enough for now, Ladies and Gentleman. I’m sure the Democratic Congress will seek to change the law to try to benefit the Consumer Lobby and I’ll worry about at another time. Thank you.

---

John Perry Barlow (born October 3, 1947) is an American poet, essayist, retired Wyoming cattle rancher, political activist and former lyricist for the Grateful Dead. He is also known to be a cyberlibertarian,[1] and was one of the founding members of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. [wiki]

The 1936 Commodity Futures Exchange Act, and more in years after, placed limits on traders and the houses and financiers that backed them. These laws limited imbalanced, tricky or shadowed positions on regulated exchanges. Not so today. John McCain with his sidekick Phil Gramm let the cowboys get on the bull, the Enron loophole, the arena cheers, swaps and derivatives are hawked on the midway, the noise of the free market rodeo is heard around the world. Riding too high too long, one falls, another falls, a few marketeers lose leverage, entire bunkhouses of riders bite the dust, no player stays up to the bell, not producers, not end-users, not consumers, and too many packagers and speculators just fell off the bull, chewing the dirt. And taxpayers now ‘bear’ the cost. 🙂

The street is darkened and quiet. Gamblers fondle lost paper not worth the ticket they bought. The rodeo candles a few hobo and stragglers. The dandy in their bowties try to jester a few to stay the night. But the countryside is forlorn.

For this, most of the old stock and clown crew won’t show their faces in town. Many have been run out and the rest hide under ‘a bush’. The shrink of Wall Street and collapse of our pensions, our mortgages and equity, our budgets and cash. For this, those snarky fellows who fell to the ground, and McCain and his plain-cloth woman, are daring again to seek the highest office in the land!

To achieve their next folly, millions are spent to loft fibs and lies over our good country and suppress honest discussion on heralded deregulation and the free boys they let play on the Street – players that couldn’t finish their ride in our rodeo, and while falling off, crippled the ‘bull’ and busted the gate.

Of course it’s not one loophole that let rootin’ tootin’ revelry tear up our townships. For at least three decades of relentless tinkering away of organized, regulated, rational limits and laws, a few have drumbeat us into allowing a culture of untethered financiers and deal makers. 1-beat Free. 2-beat Markets. 3-beat Bad. 4-beat Government. The Wall Street bull is wounded and we’ve been beat bare. 🙂

Don’t you dare think about putting McCain in office. Any frontier town and all its cowhands would tar and feather him and posse all his allies, even if they had to rove to Colorado Springs to corral his foreman and strawbosses too.

Doldrum industry and currency stagflation after the post-WWII boom was scary stuff. Inflation was high and a mortgage could cost 17% each year. Rolling into Washington in the 80s, proposals to stimulate markets by loosening restraints and encouraging innovation were sensible suggestions that turned our efforts to new enterprise, new alliances and new financial tools. The economy turned. Applause. The saloon poured whiskey for the newcomers. The flag billowed around the world. We kicked the old timer regulators out of Washington and sold the ranch to these free marketeers and their deregulation preachers.

Campaigning in red white and blue today, a sly new game is in town, the Leave Us Bandits Alone game, same tune with a different beat., familiar free market melody, a downbeat on deregulation, a backnote on innovation or private sector. But it’s louder, almost a chant, Drill, Drill, Drill, shrill at times. Near our fireside, their stories are of faraway conquests and dedicated heroes, and spooky ghost stories of guns and gays, and God with hymns before bedtime.

We buy the apple pie but go to bed hungry.

Enough. Thirty years is enough. We have let loose cults named corporations where the only rule is libertine.

Obama will close the Enron Loophole and in the first good steps of this century, his administration will move America toward principle, reason and restraint in our markets, a sensible compromise between tradition and the future.

Real tradition and a real future, not Norman Rockwell blips and doomed portents from the outback pulpit .

1. “We must reform requirements on all regulated financial institutions,” Obama says.
2. “We must strengthen capital requirements, particularly for complex financial instruments like some of the mortgage securities and other derivatives at the center of our current crisis.
3. We must develop and rigorously manage liquidity risk.
4. We must investigate rating agencies and potential conflicts of interest with the people they are rating.
5. And we must establish transparency requirements that demand full disclosure by financial institutions to shareholders and counterparties.
6. As we reform our regulatory system at home, we must address the same problems abroad so that financial institutions around the world are subject to similar rules of the road.”

Now that’s how to really ride a bull.

The rest of us? We’ll throw the old bums out of Wichita, er, Washington.

Sarah Palin’s schedule is a flurry of talking point briefings and travel to loyalist campaign stops as she and her handlers prepare for upcoming mainstream media exposure and interviews.

Campaign directors are also responding to Barrack Obama’s ad and criticism in the press that John McCain is behind the times on technology. John McCain as well has admited to limited knowledge of computers and email, referring to himself as “a computer illiterate”.

To assist the 72 year old presidential candidate adapt to the modern world, McCain arrived at the Navy’s Rapid Immersion Program (RIP) in Maryland today saying, “I have always felt the ingenuity of the American worker along with today’s strong fundamentals in the economy will take us through any challenge.

“I pledge to you, my friends, the alphabet soup of Washington bureaucrats will no longer hamper American business or stand in the way of the good people that have developed impressive products such as this iPod I’ve heard so much about.”

---

Did McCain invent the Blackberry?
According to McCain’s senior economic policy adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, recently chief economist for President Bush, McCain helped create the Blackberry, the iPod and ‘the Google’.

Asked what work John McCain did as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that helped him understand the financial markets, the candidate’s top economic adviser wielded visual evidence: his BlackBerry.

“He did this,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters this morning, holding up his BlackBerry.

“Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce Committee.

“So you’re looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that’s what he did.”

Senior McCain aide Matt McDonald said. “This was obviously a boneheaded joke by a staffer.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

McCain’s lack of principle and honor:
Block the Alaska Legislature on a technicality.

Oh, and what about this. Last week the McCain camp put our Governor in a bizarre position. They told her to file an ethics complaint against herself! Yup, again after her VP nomination. Too weird? What’s behind this move? You guessed it. Lawyers.

To create the legal argument that the Legislature cannot investigate government misconduct, the McCain team has had her file a complaint against herself before something called the State Personnel Board. That’s a 3 member group of Republican Gubernatorial appointees – that, if it started this week, wouldn’t get an investigation done, and reported to the public, until after the November election.

Karl Rove In Alaska?

An ethics complaint against herself?
Republican Gubernatorial appointees?
I wonder if his statesmanship and diplomacy in trade, or war, will be as ingenious.

Who can deal with government misconduct? You and me.

Palin’s Press Plane
To keep the VP candidate away from us, she stays in first class and the press behind the curtain. No questions. No answers.

Search a little. AP and major news organizations are not allowed in her press corps, period.

I can see the McCain presidency right now.
He’s pouting behind the podium while Palin preaches to Putin and Karl Rove & The Bowties dance on TV, guys and gals, the mission is accomplished, the war is won and Wal-Mart is running a sale, watch out for the surge.

Breaking News!
[MFNews Agency – September 15, 2008]
Archaeologist finds human footprint in dinosaur fossil.

Sarah Palin stepped on John McCain!

A Sarah Palin Repent! The End is Near story.

It’s the duty of bloggers to dig, dig, dig.

Many bloggers are archeologists too. Palin supporters are searching for dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them to prove Sarah is right about creation.

In the meantime, other bloggers have dug up news about Palin’s Revelations.

I first saw this scrubbing of Sarah Palin, gee whiz, enough mullah to be re-named Taliban Palin, in UK’s The Guardian but Alaska bloggers and Salon are first on the web citing Phil Munger, author of Progressive Alaska and a notable local musician who has often dealt with Sarah Palin.

[He] says that Palin also helped push the evangelical drive to take over the Mat-Su Borough school board. “She wanted to get people who believed in creationism on the board,” said Munger, a music composer and teacher. “I bumped into her once after my band played at a graduation ceremony at the Assembly of God. I said, ‘Sarah, how can you believe in creationism — your father’s a science teacher.’ And she said, ‘We don’t have to agree on everything.’

“I pushed her on the earth’s creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she’d seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them.”

Munger also asked Palin if she truly believed in the End of Days, the doomsday scenario when the Messiah will return. “She looked in my eyes and said, ‘Yes, I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my lifetime.’”

Salute to Alaska Bloggers
Mudflats adds: “As the days go by, more and more brave and principled people are standing up and speaking out. Every time someone does, it involves some measure of courage. Alaska is a small town, and opinions that go against the powers that be are not always welcomed. Everyone in that room last night recognized that suddenly, speaking out about Sarah Palin has become an act of sobering and great importance.”

William Blake, I think it was Blake, said wars will go on as long as there are grumpy old men. I think he also said grumpy old men keep fighting their wars in heaven, and we go to war on earth for these too.

I laughed when I found this article about Georgia and Ukraine, and I expect the news applies to many of the territories and new states south of Russia.

Why is John McCain eager to put Americans in the Caucasus, under Russia’s nose? He says it’s to protect people and keep them free… but “there won’t be any Georgians or Ukrainians in the not-too-distant future”.

Washington’s two favorite beacons of liberty happen to be the two countries with the world’s fastest rate of population decline.

By mid-century they will have barely half as many inhabitants as they do today, and half of those who remain will be elderly.

Four Fastest-Shrinking Countries in the World

Population ,000s	2005	2050	% change
Ukraine	46918	25514	-46%
Georgia	4473	2575	-42%
Belarus	9795	5746	-41%
Moldova	3877	2330	-40%

Source: United Nations

As much as grumpy old John McCain wants to control as much of the Caucasus as possible, to free the people from Russia and all that, see McCain Makes War With Russia, there soon won’t be much of any population in the region to worry about. Oh, maybe it’s the oil and minerals his corporate lobbyists want.

We should ask McCain if he’s another grumpy old man who wants war! It’s our kids that will die for his lobbyists.

A floating resort in the Caribbean for anyone left in the region might be cheaper and less deadly than more trillion dollar a year wars. We should leave the matter to younger and pleasant folks. Go Obama!

The articles begs us took look at what a REAL Foreign Policy expert has to say.

Who are these countries, and why are they there? They don’t seem to want to be there much longer. The late Sam Kinison’s “World Hunger” routine comes to mind:

You want to help world hunger? Stop sending them food. Don’t send them another bite, send them U-Hauls. Send them luggage, folks. Send them somebody like me. I’ll walk out there. Send a guy that says, “Hey, you know, we just drove 700 miles with your food and we realized there wouldn’t BE world hunger if you people would live where the FOOD IS! YOU LIVE IN A DESERT!! UNDERSTAND THAT? YOU LIVE IN A ***** DESERT!! NOTHING GROWS HERE! NOTHING’S GONNA GROW HERE! Come here, you see this? This is sand. Nothing grows in this *****. Here, eat some of. Taste it. You know what it’s gonna be 100 years from now? IT’S GONNA BE SAND!! YOU LIVE IN A ***** DESERT! We have deserts in America, we just don’t live in them, *****!

McCain said in two different newspapers that he bought his daughter Meghan McCain a Toyota Prius. In the NYTimes he insisted, “I ought to know the name of it; I paid for it.”

On WXYZ-TV Sunday John McCain confessed “…actually she bought it, I believe, herself.”

Lying. It’s the battery, stupid.

The Unregulated Age of Gilt,
Thanks and Good Bye.

You too John McCain and your sidekick Phil Gramm

I’ve had a few Wall Street or Eurodollar projects over the years. One involved ex-Foreign Sec of USSR at $250m with Shell Oil and other players. I noticed a specialists framework even if super-rich or at the top, a very aggressive crowd of often bright but narrowly focused dealmakers. All the civil behavior was there, charm at times though usually typical bullies. In the main, goals of investment sector players seem almost entirely acquisition and prize driven – an extremely potent drug and not well regulated.

The deregulation days of the last 30 years has been a too-fun sandbox, many yachts and island cabins, many women taken, but not-so-much is left in our communities, on the streets; this ended at LBJ. Now the Street will join Government as scorned and societally inept leaving global states and larger banks, a few great firms and oligarchs too, to flex their muscle.

Will the real Reagan Era finally be understood?
Wall Street Crisis Culmination Of 28 Years Of Deregulation.

No one cog in the federal government’s machine of financial regulation let down the country by failing to prevent the latest shakeout on Wall Street. The entire system did.

“They just haven’t done a particularly good job,” said James Barth, a senior finance fellow at the Milken Institute, a nonpartisan research group based in Los Angeles.

“None was willing to end the financial revelry.”

I think we’ll see a long period of consolidating powers as many of the loose and libertine are swatted down or reigned in. At the end, the shape of world powers will be different. It’s likely I think this period will be writ as the poor legacy of Bush, yet it’s a culture that done it not one self-aggrandizing crowd. The group we’ll see next, maybe with relief, I heard one pundit say today, is All The King’s Horses and All The King’s Men.

As time goes toward the mid-term, I think the USA will accept a cooperating and invigorating role in the global holonomy – groups of stable vector bundles 🙂 – as city by city revises its economy and firms weave true value. The silver lining of the so-called Crash of 2008 is that the neocon revivalists are dead in the water, and good riddance.

Plain language indictment of Wall Street here at Asia Times.

In Mao’s day, Party officials were forced to work in the fields as if to force empathy into the leadership classes. Imagine! Suits in the ghetto before their next promotion! It’s empathy that’s needed in leadership on all levels. There’s no doubt this could re-start and re-define an entirely new era of Trickle-Down Economics.

In getting, get understanding.
For me, I wanted to build a balanced person, able across disciplines, with a broad sense of true wealth. I was struck by Robert Heinlein’s character Lazarus Long. There will be many unemployed leverage and trade pro’s learning to do a few more things too.

A man should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

What if they gave a civilization and nobody came?

There is nothing complicated about finance.

It is based on old people lending to young people. Young people invest in homes and businesses; aging people save to acquire assets on which to retire. The new generation supports the old one, and retirement systems simply apportion rights to income between the generations. Never before in human history, though, has a new generation simply failed to appear.

Palin Insensitive. Palin Incompetent. Palin Incapable.

Sarah Palin’s Alaska doesn’t produce enough heating fuel, gasoline, diesel and aviation fuels for its own people!

Milk is as much as $11. Energy costs skyrocket. Native Alaskans are in great pain and the government says, ‘Please don’t move to our cities’. Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Department of Energy intervene.

Alaska Daily News:
“We need immediate relief. I don’t want to see all the young people and families leave to live in Anchorage and leave the elders behind in the village.”

The cost of fuel has risen to as much as $9.25 a gallon for diesel/heating oil in Kokhanok, a village on Lake Iliamna.”

All of the oil companies in Alaska were invited to participate in helping rural residents. So far only one has offered any help.

“This has reached a critical point to where we will now have decide if we are going to feed our young or keep them warm,” said Ron Hoffman president and CEO of the Association of Village Council Presidents.

I’m for a new bridge in Alaska, a bridge for oil executives from ice floe to ice floe.

McCain nixed funding the national low-income fuel assistance program, saying his attention is on “whatever is necessary to help people meet literally incredible challenges this winter.”

Oil is spending more than $2 million dollars a day to influence public policy and opinion – including $12.2 million in the six months of Newt Gingrich’s “Drill Here, Drill Now” campaign. McCain received nearly $1 million dollars flip-flopping to support offshore drilling.

Reminds me that oil companies skirted paying royalties for offshore drilling rights, $11 billion, because the federal government was bought off with, well, skirts, and a little cocaine. [Wall Street Journal]

Literally incredible!

I never go anywhere without voter registration forms, I don’t run voter drives, I AM a voter drive.

DocJess says:

When I was in Texas last week, I brought 10 forms, and signed up 5 voters – 4 when I stopped for directions at a construction site (my directions were really, really bad, and this was FAR out in the country) and a waitress one night at dinner. Five Obama votes Texas might not have had otherwise. And yes, it even matters in a red state.

So get out there — give that other $5. Give that hour. This is YOUR campaign and YOUR country. And this is how we win.

Whoa up!

The Pentagon’s cubicle mercenaries

During the George W Bush years, American war fighting has been privatized and the Pentagon largely turned over to corporate contractors, hired guns, hired hands, private cubicle mercenaries and private sub-contracting warriors, who raked in US$151 billion in 2006. What’s left is “a Pentagon bloated almost beyond recognition and crippled by its dependence on private military corporations”. – Frida Berrigan

A professor of international relations and political science at San Francisco State University and the author of Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy looks deeper than media experts.

Analysis – a warning to voters – picked up at Asia Times:
McCain’s actions have been nothing short of provocative…

“Few people in the American political class have contributed more to provoking possible military escalation with Russia than Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain.

“McCain’s main foreign policy adviser and spokesperson, Randy Scheunemann, is a former registered lobbyist for the Republic of Georgia… strongly anti-Russia line… insisting that the United States should move forward with missile defense in the region… regardless of the negative consequences…

The McCain-led International Republican Institute, an international wing of the National Endowment for Democracy, was involved in training and financing the revolutionary opposition [in territories south of Russia]…

Holding neo-conservative political beliefs, these American lobbyists see conflict with US national interests: McCain had come to the region with his conclusions already formed.

McCain’s IRI presented its activities as a support of elections and the democratic process, but in reality it was biased in favor of [pre-selected candidates]…

During the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, McCain was again on the frontline.

Russia has always been presented by McCain in an extremely negative light, and as deserving of only a hard-line response. Assisted by the American media, the Republican Senator never missed an opportunity to blame Russia for everything that was going wrong in the former Soviet region and outside. It was following McCain’s statement warning of “a creeping coup against the forces of democracy and market capitalism”.

McCain’s disdain for Russia’s view was clearly revealed during a Republican debate on the US missile defense system when he said “I don’t care what [Vladimir Putin’s] objections are to it.”

Putin has replied in general in an interview by France’s Le Figaro newspaper, noting unofficial agitation from American citizens in the region, and saying the “U.S. spoiled our relationship and should fix it.”

I expect improvement in those relationships. They spoiled them, so they should fix them.

You know, in Lincoln’s time, a political figure of the day, the then Secretary of State, said that we always prefer relationships with Russia to relationships with all other European states, at least because Russia always wishes us well.

Of course, a lot has changed since then. Our relationships have been determined by various factors in different periods. However, whenever the world faced a global crisis, Russia and America have always emerged together.

That does mean something. It means that, during global crises, common interests prevail over certain differences. This was the case in World War One and World War Two. We in Russia never forget that, and we would like our American partners to remember that too.

McCain may be restrained
The analysis ends with an interesting point, America!

“Some have suggested that, if he is elected president, McCain may be restrained in his further actions toward Russia. American institutions and the heavy burden of responsibility for maintaining peace and stability in the world may indeed encourage him to try diplomacy rather than belligerent rhetoric and hot-headed actions in Eurasia.

“But there is also the possibility that McCain will do what he says, and chose steps leading to a military escalation with the second largest world nuclear power.”

Thomas Friedman:

Of course, we’re going to need oil for many years, but instead of exalting that – with “drill, baby, drill” – why not throw all our energy into innovating a whole new industry of clean power with the mantra “invent, baby, invent”?

Why would Republicans, the party of business, want to focus our country on breathing life into a 19th-century technology – fossil fuels – rather than giving birth to a 21st-century technology – renewable energy? As I have argued before, it reminds me of someone who, on the eve of the IT revolution – on the eve of PCs and the Internet – is pounding the table for America to make more IBM typewriters and carbon paper. “Typewriters, baby, typewriters.”

Fundamentalism may be anarchy, a re-post for the times.

Religious and political radicalism is not imported from the Middle East.

Olivier Roy at Eurozine asserts from the Institute for Human Sciences that religious revival among Europe’s Muslims reflects many of the dynamics of contemporary American evangelical movements.

No surprise then that, instead of being tolerant and liberal, it is a movement based on dogmatism, communitarianism, and scripturalism.

“This explains the affinities between American Protestant fundamentalism and Islamic Salafism: both reject culture, philosophy, and even theology in favor of a scriptural reading of the sacred texts and an immediate understanding of truth through individual faith, to the detriment of educational and religious institutions.”

“Today, we see forms of religious revival leading to the “born again” phenomenon, in other words, people are born again into their religion [ but not the tradition of their religion]. It is perhaps the most striking phenomenon of contemporary religiosity in all denominations.

“What we have is …two totally different trends: one is the crisis of religions as institutions and cultures, the other is the return of religiosity.

“The return of religiosity acts against religion.”

It seems that fundamentalists may be religious but without religion. They haven’t the deeper wisdom of tradition nor the restraint of community, are often isolated even among others, and are carrying few of the shared principles of a religion.

Without a practice of community and without religious organizations to help make sense of spiritual longings, today’s fundamentalist makes private demands, a loudening voice of unrestrained individualists. Without a structure of fellowship and tradition, fundamentalists may be the modern anarchist demanding radical political favors.

We can hope that over a longer period, there may be a deeper want. Religion is a fellowship and joining of traditions, but today’s fundamentalist seldom reflects the aspirations of the whole and rejects the fellowship of the traditional church, synagogue or mosque, which are abandoned over the last decades.

In a siege of personal ambition and arcane belief, fundamentalism may be repelling against isolation and separateness. Alone in a stadium church or a rural congregation or alone along a street, religiosity in politics may be less a spiritual movement than an effort to force culture to deal with alienation.

Seeking to create so-called spiritual governments, railing against the state, and arguing against secular culture, fundamentalists are demanding that our state and culture serve their selfish interests.

And why not they choose anarchy? Only true church, true community and true government restrains the libertine.

Took awhile too.

The Vinegar Spectrum and the Acerbic Electorate,
an election year rant on
Couch & Cab Broadcasting and the Carnival Church.

This is city boy poetry best read aloud, flick the lights baby, nix the glare, nap later, hear this ink, cat, this is expresso mainlined at the tabloid throat of Republican engineering of our elections. This speech is hip, sphere peering, an eye over the pollster penthouse on their eagle’s nest and an ear too far to hear their rap.

Against our cities, Red States are under radio and it’s rage, television and it’s terror, where change is backward and the future is doom, a hairdo lock on brazen congregations, and Republicans put them there. As the years go by, polyester DJs at high power towers skipping the ionosphere, linen Preachers at neon pulpits of the Satellite Wildwood, tweed Candidates in hallway of the Pork Seasons Resort, silk Developers in the limousines of link chain industries, counting recliners where days are slow and persecution remains in compounds of poverty already sold to the Bought.

A recent internal Republican poll found that 30 percent of their likely voters shop at Wal-Mart at least once a week with a 56 point Republican edge of Wal-Mart women and 64 percent of men in the group for McCain.

In the Republican pewsuit of demographics, the only reach the Republican Party has organized in its history is the terrible wee avarice they parade to denominations of the fearful, their showcase of cameo demons on the alter of the purse and the coin, a tax table choir of paycheck jingles, bowtie jingo, logo limbo, me too voodoo, slogan lotto, fraudulent kudos and felonious salutes to the am-fm militia and television’s seeramic army, the group for McCain, sculptured earwax under a propaganda hill in a wilderness we cannot protect.

Men too bold for honor strut the spectrum these many years, stained our airwaves in the electoral spittoon, cheap humor, short pride, quick bully, permanent pathology and war, not security nor diplomacy nor sensibility nor community nor prosperity nor civility nor mobility nor warmth on their muddy plank, it is their sneer of pride, genius for applause, wit of scorn, casino pollsters snarking oil’s balm in snakes of tilt-up campaigns in a mall of lies.

Our Kilroy is not safe, cannot be, was never, is not behind America’s gates, but hour by hour is penetrated by microphones taunting skulls across dry Nevada to Wyoming, crude Alaska, Oklahoma and Texas, the pew’s manure onto Dakota and Montana in waves of hatefulness across the plains, stalking Iowa, Nebraska, frequencies of bile billow our flag, fresco of gluten judgment and starch dominance, a white knuckle winter across the South, the Republicans police their privy dominance to proffer veneer homesteads to drive-by pioneers that will bring to the polls rural Americans the Republicans have driven to paranoia, cynicism and distrust.