Author: Brian

Excellent economics blog, Dr. Housing Bubble.

The psychology is already changing.

During the debates, I was watching CNN with their little audience meter on the bottom and the quickest way from the middle to the top was bashing Wall Street. Some issues took time to work up or down but whenever someone said “corporate greed” or “Wall Street speculators” the bar shot up.

This is class warfare folks.

We are seeing a generational system collapsing and many cannot confront the idea that their ideology was so utterly wrong.

10 Reasons how this Bailout Fails the Middle Class American Worker.

One.
The legislative report, filed by one of Alaska’s most respected and nonpartisan prosecutors, states with absolute clarity that as governor, Palin violated the Executive Branch Ethics Act, which prohibits any official from seeking to “benefit a personal interest.” She, her husband and her aides tried on nearly 20 separate occasions to induce Mr. Monegan to fire her former brother-in-law.

The wording of the report’s conclusion could not be plainer — namely that “impermissible pressure was placed on several subordinates in order to advance a personal agenda, to wit: to get Trooper Michael Wooten fired.”

Two.
“I’m very, very pleased to be cleared of any legal wrongdoing, any hint of any kind of unethical activity there. Very pleased to be cleared of any of that,” Sarah Palin told reporters. “If you read the report, you’ll see that there was nothing unlawful or unethical about replacing a cabinet member.”

Whitewash, rinse and repeat.

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Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. – Bill Waterson, Calvin and Hobbes

Not on the radar but very important, because 100s of billions of our dollars are at stake.

McCain has done more than any other member of Congress to shape the laws governing America’s casinos, helping to create “423 casinos across the country.” [Story at Salon]

Read this twice:

Gambling is a multi-billion dollar drag on the economy, not the moneymaking boost touted by supporters.

Cash merely changes hands from bettors to casino owners, creating no products or anything else of value.

If the estimated $100 billion now spent annually on gambling went into the marketplace instead, economic models show it would generate more than $300 billion for the nation’s slumping economy.

…also would save hundreds of billions in costs to society stemming from gambling addictions, bankruptcies and crime that studies show increases when casinos open.

[link Science Daily]

More than $300 billion wasted on bandits we can see.

Detroit Free Press, where it matters:

Joe the Plumber?
October 15, 2008

You could see how eagerly John McCain brought up “Joe the Plumber” Wednesday night, as an example of how Barack Obama’s tax plan would hurt working people.

McCain said “Joe” was a voter Obama encountered in Ohio this week. He was fretting Obama’s election because after some 20 years working for a business, he was now in a position to buy that business, and didn’t want to pay higher taxes.

But what an absurd example.

As Obama pointed out, his tax plan will equate to a reduction for some 95% of working families, and for any business that makes less than a quarter million dollars a year.

If “Joe” has done well enough to buy a business that’s doing that well, is he really the type of voter we should be worried about? People are losing their jobs. Losing their houses. Seeing their retirement and college savings evaporate.

McCain made his anecdote worse by trudging out the coded “Obama is a socialist” canard, saying he wanted to “redistribute” Joe’s wealth.

It’s a shame that McCain, once a Republican with real ideas of his own, has sunk to poorly told sob stories.

Average health care policy in USA is $12,000 per year says Obama. McCain says it’s $5,800. McCain’s rebate is $5,000 plus tax on the remainder. There are few regulations and little agreement. What will happen?

Center for Global Development reveals America is worth it.

“This is the best estimate of real income per capita in the United States since 1820. Over these years we had violent financial crashes of various types, bank panics, piles of recessions and a huge depression, many foreign wars and one enormous domestic war, had a central bank and didn’t, were on the gold standard and weren’t, had governments topple in scandal and multiple leaders assassinated, and what did it all amount to in the medium to long run? In per-capita income terms: Nothing. The overall trend does not bend or shift. Every bad year was followed by a good year that returned us to trend. The US average growth rate of real per capita incomes over the last 190 years has been 1.8% a year, and the same rate over the last 10 years has been…. 1.8% a year.”

Crisis? Not If We Take a Long View

Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane. – Philip K. Dick

Australia Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has lashed out at the world’s big banks.

He hit out at failures in lending standards, risk management and corporate governance in major institutions around the world.

“In fact, obscene failures in corporate governance rewarded greed without any regard to the integrity of the financial system.”

“These failures weren’t limited just to businesses on the margins of the financial system. They happened in our major global financial institutions – the Wall Street investment banks that were the pillars of the global financial system.”

Mr Rudd says the system has been reduced to panic and pushed to the brink resulting in a comprehensive failure of “extreme capitalism”.

“As a Government and as a nation we must respond to the twin evils which are at the root of this malaise – greed and fear.”

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.”

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.

When we first govern to deceive, deception loses importance. Until we vote.

William Timmons, the Washington lobbyist who John McCain has named to head his presidential transition team, aided ‘an influence effort‘ on behalf of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to ease international sanctions against his regime. …agents of Saddam Hussein’s government.

Another Basement Cheney

McCain’s own staffers had early concerns that appointing Timmons could prove detrimental.

Timmons declined to comment for this story.

An office manager who works for him said that he has made it his practice during his public career to never speak to the press.

Never speak? Move into White House?

William F. Buckley Jr.’s son who owns 1/7th of the conservative rag New Republic endorses Barack Obama. The Washington Post noted he is “the latest right-leaning pundit to be slammed by his side for criticizing or breaking with John McCain.”

In his embrace of Obama, Buckley quoted his father as saying, “You know, I’ve spent my entire lifetime separating the Right from the kooks.”

The matter of justice and prosperity took place in our country during the entire Twentieth Century up until the 1980s. – NPR

Pound for Pound, All Life Uses Same Amount of Energy

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]

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.

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.

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.

“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

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

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]

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?”

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.

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.

• 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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