Month: October 2008

McCain wants to lower taxes for corporations.

HA!

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Most U.S. and foreign corporations doing business in the United States avoid paying any federal income taxes, despite trillions of dollars worth of sales, a government study released on Tuesday said.

The Government Accountability Office said 72 percent of all foreign corporations and about 57 percent of U.S. companies doing business in the United States paid no federal income taxes for at least one year between 1998 and 2005.

More than half of foreign companies and about 42 percent of U.S. companies paid no U.S. income taxes for two or more years in that period, the report said.

During that time corporate sales in the United States totaled $2.5 trillion, according to Democratic Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, who requested the GAO study.

The Heartbeat Error

Matthew Dowd, chief strategist for George W. Bush’s reelection, says Palin was a “net negative”. McCain “put somebody unqualified on that ballot and he put the country at risk, he knows that.”

Puffery with occasional numbers? Or numbers occasionally puffed?

Breakingviews.com is the world’s leading source of agenda-setting financial insight. breakingviews has 25 correspondents and columnists based in London, New York, Paris, Washington, San Francisco and Madrid. Our aim is to become the lingua franca for the global financial elite.

Go There, Oh Ye, Oh Ye Elite, for a Free Trial.

The last, and biggest, piece of the global rescue plan is now almost in place. In the past few days, we have seen all the major Western economies adopt the “Gordon Brown” plan for bailing out banks. One element involves ramping up capital ratios so that banks have a much fatter cushion to absorb both the past losses on distressed loans and the new losses they will suffer as the economy slows. A second vital element is guaranteeing medium-term borrowing, as that will allow banks to get off the treadmill of relying on overnight money which has to be repaid the next day. In all, over $3 trillion has been pledged globally for these two purposes – with the bigger chunk deployed for medium-term borrowing.

Unwashed point of view here.

Wreck our economy. Wreck our nation. Wreck our humanity.

One of the most important documents of the U.S. torture program has just become publicly available for the first time. This is the JTF GTMO “SERE” Interrogation Standard Operating Procedure, now posted on the website of the new documentary, Torturing Democracy. This document clearly specifies that the abusive interrogation techniques to be used at Guantamo [JTF GTMO] are based upon the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape [SERE] program.

The document is notable for its documentation of the extent to which abuse was bureaucratically standardized for routine use. [link to zMag]

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Stiglitz, don’t believe a word but read everything he says,

Virtually all the indicators look grim. Inflation is running at an annual rate of nearly 6 percent, its highest level in 17 years. Unemployment stands at 6 percent; there has been no net job growth in the private sector for almost a year. Housing prices have fallen faster than at any time in memory-in Florida and California, by 30 percent or more. Banks are reporting record losses, only months after their executives walked off with record bonuses as their reward. President Bush inherited a $128 billion budget surplus from Bill Clinton; this year the federal government announced the second-largest budget deficit ever reported. During the eight years of the Bush administration, the national debt has increased by more than 65 percent, to nearly $10 trillion (to which the debts of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae should now be added, according to the Congressional Budget Office). Meanwhile, we are saddled with the cost of two wars. The price tag for the one in Iraq alone will, by my estimate, ultimately exceed $3 trillion.

This tangled knot of problems will be difficult to unravel.

Reversal of Fortune.

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COME JANUARY, a new president will take charge of a nation diminished, assert the editors of the Boston Globe.

The nation needs a chief executive who has the temperament and the nerves to shepherd Americans through what promises to be a grueling period — and who has the vision to restore this country to its place of leadership in the world.

Such a leader is at hand. With great enthusiasm, the Globe endorses Senator Barack Obama for president.

GDP “measures everything… except that which matters.” – Robert Kennedy

“TEN minutes now I have been looking at this.
I have gone by here before and wondered about it.
This is a bronze memorial of a famous general
Riding horseback with a flag and a sword and a revolver
on him.
I want to smash the whole thing into a pile of junk to be
hauled away to the scrap yard.
I put it straight to you,
After the farmer, the miner, the shop man, the factory
hand, the fireman and the teamster,
Have all been remembered with bronze memorials,
Shaping them on the job of getting all of us
Something to eat and something to wear,
When they stack a few silhouettes
Against the sky
Here in the park,
And show the real huskies that are doing the work of
the world, and feeding people instead of butchering them,
Then maybe I will stand here
And look easy at this general of the army holding a flag
in the air,
And riding like hell on horseback
Ready to kill anybody that gets in his way,
Ready to run the red blood and slush the bowels of men
all over the sweet new grass of the prairie.”

Carl Sandburg, Ready to Kill

A story of women and their rights, from the 60s and today:

“Most of us need something to believe in – and it isn’t the end of history!”

Global influences are again at work as they were in the 60s. As was the case with the anti-Vietnam activists, the student radicals and women’s liberation movement, there is a plethora of organization and networks, of varying degrees of radicalism and with a dizzying, and occasionally incoherent, array of agendas for change.

Some are wedded to single issues, like reform of refugee policies or opposition to the proposed U.S. attack on Iraq; others have more encompassing objectives which envisage fundamental economic and social change. Neither then, nor now, do these groups represent majority opinion, although there are many “fellow travelers” and sympathizers who are not on the streets.

They are also subject to much the same derision and caricature by the mainstream media. Women who protested at the subordination of women were almost invariably characterized as “bra-burning, ball-breaking” feminists. Those trying to propose better ways to reduce global poverty and inequality and to protect the world’s environment are often dismissed as muddle headed, nave neo-luddites who cannot accept the inevitable.

Although this new movement is sometimes derided and labeled as “anti-globalization”, it is in reality, seeking to frame and answer the question – “what values should govern the global age”.

Demanding and negotiating:

There is another generation on the move, another generation searching for signs that their representatives recognise that there can be a better kind of world; that it is possible to change the structures that support and perpetuate inequality; that the obscene and now, very public, “asymmetry” of suffering and disadvantage is immoral and unsustainable; that the interests of corporations do not necessarily correspond to the public good; that we can live on this planet without destroying it; that war is not a solution, and that we cannot continue to operate as if death and destruction are tragic and intolerable in some place, but banal and unavoidable in others.

While there is likely to be much pain between these ideals and their, inevitably, partial realisation, belief in the possibility that the world can be a better place if we act in concert is the only force to propel us from the quiescent embrace of mediocrity and decay.

A brain knows only a brain?

…consider light itself.

It is reported to be an electric field combined with a magnetic field. If you have an electrical circuit, say with a battery, the battery supplies the electric field. Current (charges) moving in a conductor supply the magnetic field, which operates perpendicular to the electric field and both are perpendicular to the current vector.

Light is made up of electric and magnetic fields. It operates as vibrations in space. The human eye has receptors that are stimulated by those vibrations to produce colors. However, the interpretation of those signals is done at a deeper level in the brain. Quite obviously, without eyes, the human could not experience light as he/she does. It is the human mind that brings us all the theories on what light is and we should keep that firmly in mind. Other than those pathetic theories, we know nothing about light and the photons to which we refer are imaginary concepts of the mind. We have no idea what light is or where it comes from.

…”Einstein proved the particle-like behavior of light in 1905?.

I wasn’t talking about light I was talking about a beam of electrons. The initial question was about my understanding of photons to which I replied it wasn’t a lot. I also inferred that no one else knew a lot about photons either.

It wasn’t till 1925 that Heisenberg and Schrodinger foisted the concept of quantum mechanics on us. Einstein did not agree with a lot of it. It is in the modern field of QM that electrons are being compared to both waves and particles. Of course, they talk about cats in a box being alive, dead, or alive and dead (Schrodinger’s Cat). It’s that sort of mental bs I’m talking about.

There’s a danger with thought experiments in that you can miss the lies in them because the human brain has difficulty seeing its own bs. For example the thought experiment in which a twin leaves on a space craft at the speed of light, leaving his twin behind. On his return many years later, he is younger than the twin who was left behind.

It only takes a basic understanding of time to see the lie in that. Humans don’t age because of elapsed time, they age due to a biochemical process. Traveling at the speed of light wont affect that process, yet there are scientists who don’t understand that. They see time as a real entity that clocks measure. Standard clocks that are wound up are machines and have no relation to time, which is an illusion anyway.

The concept of photons is harmless enough but the more diabolical theories of QM need to be put away and some good research done. David Bohm was one of the leading authorities on QM and relativity and expressed a concern about that. He understood the distortions inherent in the human mind because he studied the mind and it’s operation as well as external phenomena. He suggested we’ve gone too far with our bs in physics and will need to step back and do better observation.

I’m not disputing reality, I’m disputing the ability of the human mind to interpret it. I did not claim that light or electricity had no existence, I was only claiming the human mind has distorted ideas about the reality of phenomena.

Time most definitely has no existence except as a concept in the human mind.

“So what dataset do you use?”

The Disabled American Veterans organization rates congressional representatives on their voting record for veteran-related issues.

John McCain, being a veteran and POW, should have a rating, right? Wrong. He, along with two others, has a score of 20 (out of 100). The others are Larry Craig and Michael Crapo. Only one representative has a lower score, Chris Cannon. He scored 0.

Obama’s rating is 80.

[tip j-walk]

If you knew better you could do better. – Sylvia Earle

Make up your global mind!

Everyone here is against the forthcoming War for Oil, but there the commonality ends.

Each clique brings its own beef:
the New Imperial Order,
food sovereignty,
water rights,
trade-union globalization,
debt relief,
immigration,
refugee camps,
child labor,
sweatshops,
world trade,
ethical finance,
genetic engineering,
blood diamonds,
the intifada,
racism,
gay rights,
AIDS prevention, and so on.

But no platform is forthcoming. Instead, networked anarchy reigns.

List right wing beefs here: You’d rather be wrong, because that way you’re the same, or you are wrong alone, you are killed, you lose your job.

epiphenomena: John McCain has surrendered his campaign to the same political fearmonger who smeared him out of the race in 2000. So long as there are reporters like Katie Couric out there stupid and desperate enough to let situations like this play out on their airwaves, the McCain camp can now create controversies out of thin air by arguing with itself on national television.

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The reason Rove continues to survive is the same reason that Johnnie Cochran was called a genius for keeping a double-murderer on the golf course — because this generation of Americans has become so steeped in greed and social Darwinism that it can no longer distinguish between cheating and achieving, between enterprise and crime, and can’t bring itself to criticize winners any more than it knows how to be nice to losers.

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• 2008 news reports that mention
  Obama and Ayers: more than 4,500.
• 2008 news reports that mention
  McCain and Liddy: fewer than 100.

Who’s Gordon Liddy?

To sum up: John McCain is “proud” of his “old friend” Gordon Liddy –an old friend who plotted to kill one of the most respected journalists in American history, and who urged listeners to kill federal agents and advised them on how to do so. McCain campaigned for Liddy’s son, and Liddy has even hosted a fundraiser for McCain at his home.

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These are the kinds of people who have been driving American political discourse for at least a generation. They are the strange, diseased lunatics who helped Sarah Palin rise to power.

They are dangerous and they must be marginalized. McCain’s proactive, wholehearted, and recent embrace of such fanatics, and their embrace of him, demonstrates once again that he does not have the seriousness of character, let alone judgment, to be president of the United States.

Or, for that matter, a senator.

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Get away from hot head media! Turn it off. These fools search for scapegoats to avoid apology.

Be thoughtful instead:

BILL MOYERS: We’re in a downward spiral.

GEORGE SOROS: We are in a downward spiral.

BILL MOYERS: How long will it go on?

GEORGE SOROS: Look the one thing that my theory says is that you can’t predict the future because the future depends on how you react to it. So if we do the right things then things will not — will be less painful. If you do the wrong things, they’ll be more painful. Now, so far we’ve been doing the wrong things. I very much hope that we’ll have a different government in a few months and they’ll be doing the right things.

BILL MOYERS: Well, don’t be shy. What do you think the new government should do?

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BILL MOYERS: Would this all be happening if we still had a strong sense of the social compact? I mean, our social safety net has been greatly reduced. The people have a real sense that the gods of capital have left little space for anyone else. People at the top don’t have much empathy for people at the bottom.

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If you want a long view, read something truly sour, The party’s over – our children won’t always be richer than us.

Journalists in China have discovered factories preparing promotional goods for the Republican 2012 Schwarzenegger-Palin campaign.

Hmmm… to children

may you believe deep inside that someone loves you,
may you have shelter and food, safe places inside and outside of yourself,
may you have the opportunity to fall down, to pick yourself up
without having to be told how to do it,
may you have the freedom to express all things without fear,
I blow a wish for love to come from many places so you can see its many forms,
may you learn peace and tolerance as you learn to disagree,
learn to find solutions that don't involve too much comprimise of your will
if it is true,
may you have arms to hold you
kisses for your cheeks and head
someone to tickle-wrestle
someone to love,
may you be spoiled just a little by a special friend,
may your caretakers set limits and teach boundaries,
may they know theirs as well,
understand that grown-ups are learning too,
may your dreams be nurtured
your nightmares quelled
your prayers heard
your hand held
your hair caressed
your stories listened to
your self appreciated
your body safe and
your spirit free

Obama has “served this country with honor, and he deserves our thanks for that.” – John McCain

Obama is “a decent, family man.” – John McCain

“I admire Senator Obama and his accomplishments and I will respect him.” – John McCain

“I want to be president of the United States, and I don’t want Obama to be,” he said. “But I have to tell you, I have to tell you, he is a decent person, and a person that you do not have to be scared as President of the United States.”

[link CNN]

It is not a crime to have a cold heart without a shred of compassion. – Sherlock Holmes

Government has a longstanding role in underwriting scientific research and regulating or (with less positive results) deregulating industries, government doesn’t really innovate, at least not in the sense of readying technologies for the marketplace and integrating those technologies into mainstream companies.

Capitalism to the Rescue?

No. Magic fails.

The U.S. has always prided itself on being the world’s undisputed leader in technological innovation. Since World War II foreign demand for aircraft, computers, automated tools and other products of American labs and workshops could be relied on to provide a fat surplus in the nation’s balance of trade. No more.

About 1978, Ronald Reagan failed.

It takes $20,000 worth of antidepressant pills to prevent one suicide.

National Bureau of Economic Research

Intimidation Matters:
The government’s hoops and moral judgment of Food Stamps makes people crazy.

Social and health costs greater than cost of food. [link]

The last President who was also a public servant?

Jimmy Carter, 30 years ago:

“We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.

All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.”

He says about George Bush and the economy:

“The economic situation is an entrenched problem. It is going to take years to correct what has been done economically,” Carter said, adding he hoped Democrat Barrack Obama would win and immediately improve Washington’s image in the world.

Eight years ago, the United States had a budget surplus, low inflation and a stable, strong economy, he said.

Carter said he was astonished that the United States now owed China “in the neighborhood of $1 trillion.”

Deregulation and what he called a withdrawal of supervision of Wall Street had encouraged irresponsible elements in the U.S. financial system, enabling banks to borrow 30 times their value.

Carter told reporters profligate spending, massive borrowing and dramatic tax cuts since President George W. Bush took office in 2001 were behind the market turmoil and economic crisis.

“I think it’s because of the atrocious economic policies of the Bush administration.” [Reuters]

The Palins’ un-American activities
Imagine if the Obamas had hooked up with a violently anti-American group in league with the government of Iran.

Palin’s radical right-wing pals
Extremists Mark Chryson and Steve Stoll helped launch Palin’s political career in Alaska, and in return had influence over policy. “Her door was open — and still is.”

Juicing up the ticket
Dishonest, cynical men put forward Sarah Palin for national office, but the truth emerges: The lady is talking freely about matters she has never thought about.

Now ask yourself:

Has anybody resigned, from either the public or the private sectors (overlapping so lavishly as they now do)?

Has anybody even offered to resign?

Have you heard anybody in authority apologize, as in: “So very sorry about your savings and pensions and homes and college funds, and I feel personally rotten about it”?

Have you even heard the question being posed? O.K., then, has anybody been fired?

Any regulator, any supervisor, any runaway would-be golden-parachute artist? Anyone responsible for smugly putting the word “derivative” like a virus into the system?

To ask the question is to answer it.

Ann Richards would say, “I told you so.”