Month: November 2009

Yves Smith:

One of my many pet peeves is drug marketing. Even though Big Phama likes to tout how much it spends on R&D as a justification for high drug prices, it spends more on marketing as a percentage of revenues than it does on R&D.

Think about it: in what other industry are the margins high enough to support in person selling to small business?

Drug companies are masters of this art: …over 88% of the so-called ‘new drug applications’ in the last 10 years have not been for new drugs, but new uses for existing drugs, and to extend the patent on existing drugs.

Reagan, Reagan, Reagan:

Growth in per capita GDP from 1950 to 1980: 2.2 percent per year
Growth in per capita GDP from 1980 to 2007: 2.0 percent per year

Growth in family income from 1950 to 1980: 2.3 percent per year
Growth in family income from 1980 to 2007: 0.7 percent per year

John S. Reed, behind repealing the Glass-Steagall banking regulation, apologized in a Bloomberg interview. He also said the big banks, which he helped create, should be broken up.

White House:

For too long, lobbyists and those who can afford their services have held disproportionate influence over national policy making. The purpose of the President’s agenda to change the way business is done in Washington is to level the playing field to make sure that all Americans and not just those with access to money or power are able to have their voices heard and their concerns addressed by Washington.

We explained that in deciding to limit the ability of lobbyists to serve in government positions, including as members of agency advisory boards and commissions, we considered various arguments and counterarguments. We weighed the options, and considered the alternatives. In the end, we decided that while lobbyists have a right to petition the government, it would best serve the interests of a fairer and more representative democracy if we limited their ability to do so from special positions of privileged access within the government.

The result will be a Washington that is more reflective of all of America.

Slavoj Zizek:

In a crazy double reversal, capitalism won over Communism, but the price paid for this victory is that Communists are now beating capitalism in its own terrain.

What if democracy is no longer the necessary and natural accompaniment of economic development, but its impediment?

A $40 draw-and-release Power Generator recharges any mini-USB mobile gadget – cell phones, MP3 players, cameras, headsets or GPS. No batteries or power outlets required.

It could be that the notion the stock market is an accurate gauge of the domestic economy’s temperature is outdated.

Daniel Gross:

The rising U.S. stock market and a weak, slow-growing U.S. consumer sector aren’t really in contradiction. Given the large-scale trends transforming the global economy—and the role of large U.S. companies in it—it may be possible to have a sustainable rally in American stocks without a sustainable rally by American consumers.

Managing H1N1 during Hajj will be a very difficult matter.

Saudi Authorities are beefing up health care facilities that will be in place once the pilgrims arrive. The Saudi Health Ministry along with our CDC is setting up emergency operations at Mecca.

Pilgrims will be given face masks, sanitizing hand gel, and will be checked for fevers and other symptoms of the disease.

The Saudi Health Ministry has seven hospitals and 75 field health care centers, staffed with around 10,000 health service employees, in the areas where the pilgrimage rituals will conducted. But due to the concerns over N1H1 and other contagious diseases these facilities are to be increased.

11/08/2009

DALLAS – T. Boone Pickens, who has spent more than a year telling Americans the answer to their energy woes is natural gas, says the U.S. natural gas supply will probably dry up in about 30 years.

At that point, Americans will have to find some other technology to fuel vehicles, Pickens said during a speech last week at the University of Texas at Dallas.

“Natural gas is just a bridge,” Pickens said.

“Twenty-five, 30 years is what we’re going to get out of it,” he said. “Then you’ll have to get over to either fuel cells or battery. You’ll have to be on to some other transportation fuel by then.”

Pickens is predicting oil prices will rise to $300 a barrel in the next 10 years.

The Automatic Earth:

Capitalism might or might not work only if and when you could keep corporations out of the government. If you can’t, disaster is assured for everyone but the corporations.

Sure, not bailing out the broke banks would have been a start. It would, however, not have solved the problem, not even close.

The libertarian class claims that the issue is not capitalism or the free market. (After all, these are their deities.) For them the trouble all starts -and ends- with government and its rules and regulations.

But that’s precisely where the issue gets all mixed up. For one, the bail-outs are not the beginning of the sorrowful saga.

Allowing investment banks and securities firms access to taxpayer deposits, ref: the 1999 Glass-Steagall repeal (Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act), and liberating the derivatives trade, ref: the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act, are the two pieces of law that directly led to a situation in which banks were allowed both to 1) become as big as they are now (too big to fail) and 2) to leverage their bets as much as they have (which wiped out their capital).

And you don’t really have to be all that smart to realize that both acts are de-regulatory, and made the markets more, not less, free.

Now look around you and tell me what you see 10 years later.

In other words, the free market system has failed America miserably. Well, at least in this instance, and that by itself should raise very grave doubts about that system.

The term ‘denialism’ used by Michael Specter as an all-purpose, pop-sci buzzword, is defined by him as what happens “when an entire segment of society, often struggling with the trauma of change, turns away from reality in favor of a more comfortable lie”.

John Cleese:
“…in order to know how good you are at something, it requires almost exactly the same skills and aptitude as it does to be good at that thing in the first place.

“In other words, if you’re a really good tennis player or mathematician then you know how to tell how good you are. But it also means if you’re absolutely no good at something then you lack exactly the skills to realize your idiocy.

“It explains why so many idiots out there have no idea that they’re idiots.

“Yes. Take Sarah Palin — so many Republicans love her. I suddenly realized that in order to actually understand that someone is not very bright — or to be brutal, that they’re rather stupid — you really have to be more intelligent than them. Most Republicans aren’t smarter than Sarah Palin. It’s true.”

Little lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed
By the stream and o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

A science teacher says, “I think anyone who has even an iota of a chance to get involved in weaponry capable of destroying lives needs to know Keats, to know Blake. I’m not playing here. Who made the technologists, the politicians, the money class the gods?”

Message from the Gyre, by Chris Jordan

These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.

The Economic Policy Institute shows subprime lenders targeted racially segregated metropolitan areas.

In Britain, there are no long lines of people seeking swine flu vaccine. Doctor’s offices aren’t swamped with desperate calls. And there are no cries of injustice that the vaccine is going to wealthy corporations or healthy people who don’t really need it.

In North America, swine flu vaccination has largely been a free-for-all.

Saskia Sassen:

International economic power is less about north-south exploitation and more about the rising likelihood of global exploitation of all ordinary citizens by powerful extra-national economic forces that are beyond the reach of democratic processes…

Smart meters can also reveal intimate details about customers’ habits such as when they eat, what time they go to sleep or how much television they watch.

Arrogance produced from narcissism, the Republican ‘Contract With America’:

A number of economists, economic policymakers, regulators, and central bankers have attempted to explain away their failure to both foresee and mitigate the current financial crisis by asserting that no one saw it coming. The inference is that they cannot be held accountable for something so unusual, so extraordinary, and so unforecastable that that no one saw it coming.

Naked Capitalism:
Nobody Saw It Coming or Everybody Who Saw It Coming Was a Nobody?

Fred Pearce:

Most of the man-made nitrogen fertilizer ever produced has been applied to fields in the last quarter-century.

Artificial nitrogen washes in drainage water from almost every field in the world. It is as ubiquitous in water as man-made carbon dioxide is in the air. It is accumulating in the world’s rivers and underground water reserves, choking waterways with algae and making water reserves unfit to drink without expensive clean-up.

Of 80 million tons spread onto fields in fertilizer each year, only 17 million tons gets into food. The rest goes missing, washing into ecosystems. This is partly because the fertilizer is wastefully applied, and partly because the new green-revolution crops developed to grow fat on nitrogen fertilizer are also wasteful of the nutrient. The nitrogen efficiency of the world’s cereals has fallen from 80 percent in 1960 to just 30 percent today.

odograph:

The bottom line for me is that while we have an economic nature, it isn’t all of our human nature. What economics offers, in the best of times, is a perspective. If we choose to look at some decision economically, it gives us the tools. That’s a really good thing, but we can’t (or shouldn’t) reverse the perspective and try to look at all of human nature as economic.

Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered

I’ve seen lots of funny men;

Some will rob you with a six-gun,

And some with a fountain pen.

Jon Taplin:

I believe it’s going to take a new renaissance of rebellious artists, spiritual leaders and politicians to wake up the public to the reality of the real America. Glenn Beck has no solutions but to retreat to a fantasy world of the 1950’s. The truth is that for more than half a century Republicans and Democrats alike have been prisoners of the conventional wisdom propounded by Wall Street bankers, military contractors, the Chamber of Commerce and their academic neoclassical economics enablers. The result is a hollowed out economy with no manufacturing base for exports except in making weapons of mass destruction, dependent on financial bubbles to keep the party going.

Well, the party is over.

Anyone who thought that just electing Barack Obama was the solution to our problems, misunderstood the institutional power of the Establishment and their conventional wisdom.

Curitiba, Brazil:
“You have to keep things simple, and just start working … You have a lot of complexity-sellers in this life. We should beat them, beat them with a slipper,” said the 70-year-old former mayor of Curitiba, the world’s most environmentally friendly city.

Netherlands ‘among lowest cannabis users’.