Thin links tonight, I have media today and should have been in bed hours ago. Please fill in what I missed in the comments section.
Blood-sucking flies clue to zebra’s stripes BBC
Lizard survives washing machine spin Telegraph (hat tip furzy mouse)
Should Plastic Bags Be Banned? New York Times
The science fiction effect Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
A Suit Airs Debate on Organic vs Modified Crops New York Times (hat tip reader John L)
Brazilian government files lawsuit against Twitter Raw Story (hat tip furzy mouse)
Greece Talks Stall as Venizelos Heads to Brussels Bloomberg
For Greece a tear, for Brussels a blush Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Insight: The dark side of Germany’s jobs miracle Reuters (hat tip reader May S)
Chinese inflation jumps to 4.5% Financial Times. Seen as New Year related, stay tuned.
Chinese electricity consumption smacked? MacroBusiness. Ditto.
FBI “Communities Against Terrorism” Suspicious Activity Reporting Flyers Public Intelligence (hat tip furzy mouse)
Elected as a Democrat, Now Governing the City Like a Republican Governing (hat tip reader May S) Wonder where they got that idea from?
ROMNEY-GEDDON! MITT’S FOREIGN POLICY TEAM RUN BY ULTRA-NEOCON LOONS & FAILURES ITCHING FOR NUCLEAR WAR WITH IRAN Max Blumenthal, eXiled
Don’t put venture capital at risk John Gapper
Local currency in Bristol, UK can be used to pay taxes MoslerEconomics (hat tip Lambert)
Chief defends mortgage fraud task force Financial Times. Notice the spokesman is from the DoJ, not Schneiderman?
LES MISERABLES: SOCIAL SECURITY Dale Coberly, Angry Bear. This is ugly.
The world of finance needs a shame culture Jonathan Ford. It actually needs a guilt culture, but shame would still be great progress.
David Graeber’s Debt: My First 5,000 Words (a review) The New Inquiry (hat tip Lambert)
Why Wall Street Should Stop Whining Matt Taibbi
Antidote du jour (by Sompob Sasismit):
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The Graeber review is a must.
Skippy… a world begging the question, if only it could. Why?
Thank you. Yes. It’s a fantastic review. My son-in-law-to-be keeps mentioning folks like Graeber. After his prodding, and that review, I might actually have to read him. Seriously.
Looking at making a small loan to a local farmer (seed money, literally!). Will read this book first.
John L and YVES – Where does Catherine Austin Fitts come into this picture?
Who got TOTAL credit for *discovering* DNA, until the whole truth was told?
LBR, thanks for the name which lead me to this: The looting of America http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9dGHuRExiM
Excellent stuff.
Check this out too: http://www.l2020.org/index.php?page=investing-opportunities
JohnL, thanks for tracking this down. Great links.
Loving David Graeber’s book.
An aside: the saga of Maiden Lane II shows exactly why we should not bail out TBTFs in the first place:
http://financeaddict.com/2012/02/the-saga-of-maiden-lane-ii/
FA, thanks for the link. Will someone do an *Inside Job* doc on Maiden Lane II? The PERVERSE name, *Maiden Lane II* is no doubt a tell, that tips the hand of the racketeers for those *in the know*. Just hilarious, isn’t it? These grifters really enjoy their games for insider profits. Time to bust Black Rock.
In the FT article, Lanny Breuer claims there has been 2100 prosecutions of the recent mortgage crisis which puts it on par with the S&L crisis. He’s got some cajones!
I’d love to see Bill Black’s response……. (who is looking mighty spit and polished and professional these days)
LucyLulu, is Bill Black looking Presidential for the camera?
He must appeal to Everyamerican, including the ladies thrilled by the White Knight under the kliegl lights. Still, nothing can disguise his deep humanity.
O.K., let’s go back to:
BILL BLACK/SUSAN WEBBER 2012: for WE the PEOPLE the USA
Chris Hedges: Secretary of State
Let Bill, Susan, and Chris work out the best combination for We the People: The United States of America.
*Clan Robertson*
How about Tom Engelhardt for Sec’y of State and maybe allow Hedges a post as … something else.
Blunt, I think Hedges would make a much tougher and shrewder Secretary of State. He’s gotten his chops from deep, bitter experience, including as a war correspondent. His integrity is solid and deep, and foreign powers would comprehend this. He’s make a good match with Black as CEO. Tom Englehart as Press Secretary?
Catherine Austin Fitts would be a no-nonsense Chief of Staff. You can’t get much past her.
Grad student deconstructs the Burrito Bandito take-out menu:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/grad-student-deconstructs-takeout-menu,85/
Sh*t happens: Mysterious ‘manure foam’ causes pig farms to explode
http://grist.org/factory-farms/sht-happens-mysterious-manure-foam-causes-pig-farms-to-explode/
Cue Santorum jokes.
“Greece Talks Stall as Venizelos Heads to Brussels”
I read that first as “vuvuzela”
and thought they must be getting serious now, but that it was tantamount to an act of war…
http://www.vuvuzela.fm/
See, and I was wondering why Venezuela was interested in the Eurozone talks. :-P
And I was wondering what football fans did in the off season. Silly me.
Re: Dark Side of Germany’s jobs …
There are working poor here – and their numbers should be substantially lower than the number of lower middle class Americans who are stocking shelves at the big box and one pay check away from disaster, one rush to the hospital away from bankruptcy.
And the minimum wage canard needs to be banned from NC – the US has a minimum wage and masses of working poor. Germany has a broad consensus on QUALIFIKATION, that it is necessary, that it should be available to everyone, and that the state should pay for it. Minimum wage laws were not necessary because billions were being invested in making sure that everyone was either qualified or in the process of being qualified for a profession that paid an acceptable wage. This consensus has been weakened and there are more individuals who either fail to obtain qualification or choose not to obtain qualification and they are often victimized by the lack of wage regulation on the part of the state.
Similarly the 1 euro job is a canard – anyone who has been placed in a 1 euro job qualifies for non-wage benefits that a big box worker dreams about, i.e. health insurance (including dental), parental leave, as many as 25 days of vacation per year, plus subsidized further qualification opportunities.
bmeisen (of porcelain fame?), unlike our unfree enterprise system since the 1970’s–when MBA hot-shots took over the Corporations, fired their betters, and externalized costs to boost their income–the German system at least includes the people as people, and not just as *units* of production. Moreover, the people’s health care system and educational system are run as public utilities, whence the people are healthy and well-educated, giving a good ROI to the “government” as workers in industry. While in America:
“They don’t give a F#%K about you. They don’t care about you at ALL! at all, at all. … And now they want your PENSIONS! your Social Security!” (George Carlin, clips on YouTube and selected clips at http://www.moveon.org).
Do you see the difference?
I also enthusiastically recommend the Graeber book Debt: The First Five Thousand Years.
It provides a much more useful context in which to contain what we are seeing these days
I too recommend Graebe’s book. The picture of the next 5, 50, 500, or 5000 years is not so clear, however (not that this was the purpose of the book, I hasten to add).
Re Gentically Modified Organisms in your food:
Retailers like Whole Foods, and wholesalers like United Natural Foods Inc., continue to push “natural” products at a premium price, while, in effect slowing down the growth of organics with their near market monopoly. In fact, the majority of products sold and distributed by Whole Foods Market and UNFI are not certified organic, but rather so-called “natural.” Meanwhile, independent and cooperative grocers often offer more certified organic products at competitive prices… However, the annual $50 billion natural food and products industry is threatening to undermine the organic movement by flooding the marketplace with conventional products greenwashed with “natural” labeling =
“conventional-with-a-green-veneer.” Natural products are routinely produced using pesticides, chemical fertilizer, hormones, genetic engineering, and sewage sludge. “Natural”,”all-natural,” and “sustainable,” products in most cases are neither backed up by rules and regulations, nor a Third Party certifier. These are label claims that are neither policed nor monitored.
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/642/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=27537
Organic comes in various strengths.
The strongest and most thoroughly vetted is Oregon Tilth. Oregon based companies and others that choose to use it, like many of Costco’s outstanding organic products, are certified by Oregon Tilth.
Next in quality is CCOF, or California Certified Organic Farmers. It covers CA companies and is much better than what is light years further down in quality, which is
“USDA Organic”, a national label that is still far better than conventional, (the government was going to allow irradiated food, sewage sludge fertilizer, etc. until the largest comment in history from outraged citizens made them back down).
Finally, the weakest organic standard is ‘Quality Assurance International’. This is a large set of profit seeking middlemen that hires foreign inspectors to “guarantee” that food has been raised to exacting organic standards. Whole Foods uses them to “guarantee” that their Chinese raised produce is organic.
Thank you.
The information has been posted before and it is good to see it posted again.
Question Du Jour concerning Mother Nature:
Can Mother Nature sue for libel with the ways the word ‘natural’ has been abused?
Anyone interested in representing her?
Something people seem to forget all the time.
Mother Nature DOESN’T CARE!
That’s why the world is full of pain. Mother Nature is not a sweet, soft-hearted, little old lady from Pasadene who just uses her car once a week to go to church. Mother Nature does what she does and doesn’t care if it hurts and will be here after the human race has required a reset of Planet Gaea still doing what she does. She doesn’t care if a species of wasp immobilizes a caterpillar with its venom so its young will have fresh meat to eat after they hatch and devour it alive (slowly). She doesn’t care about the terror an antelope feels just before a lion disembowels it. She doesn’t care about millions starving in famines in China or the Ukraine — or in Oklahoma, for that matter.
Starvation in the Ukraine was a deliberate policy of Joseph Stalin who forcefully shipped the food to the new industrial cities east of the Urals. This is why the Ukranians were delighted to cooperate with the Germans in helping to destroy the Communists.
Except that most Ukrainians (outside of western Ukraine) did not collaborate with the Nazis; western Ukraine never experienced the famine, as it was part of the Polish Second Republic at that time.
Interestingly, pre-WWII Ukrainian nationalists saw the Second Republic and not the Soviet Union as a bigger threat to “Ukrainianness”. Like many other nationalists, the nationalists were by and large more interested in the idea of “Ukraine” than they were in the fates of actual Ukrainians, and the Soviet Union had a “Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic” and tolerated the Ukrainian language and education, whereas Poland did not.
For that matter, I.V. Stalin is still remembered fondly by many Ukrainians to this day.
I live in Ukraine. I have had many discussions with old people in Ukraine would make the blood of NCers run cold.
Nor does God (by reverse proxy) I might add. Nature is nature. I set the universe up so that you were free to do as you do. Where did you end up? Now that’s YOUR problem/satisfaction, isn’t it? Don’t like how it turns out after all , huh? Change your choices, ignorant bitchez! I, after all, gave you free choice to do as you do in the first place. Stupid humans! Stop blaming your creator and start blaming your creation! Dumb fucks!
GOD
It’s true she doesn’t care about humans.
Does she care about herself though? Any evidence one way or the other?
Income for local farmers versus income for
megacorporations?
More important than yield, from the farmer’s perspective, is income, and here organic is clearly superior. The 30-year comparison showed organic systems were almost three times as profitable as the conventional systems. The average net return for the organic systems was $558/acre/ year versus just $190/acre/year for the conventional systems. The much higher income reflects the premium organic farmers receive and consumers pay for.
But even without a price premium, the Rodale study found organic systems are competitive with the conventional systems because of marginally lower input costs.
Importantly, the Rodale study, which started in 1981, found organic farming is more sustainable than conventional systems. They found, for example, that:
. Organic systems used 45 per cent less energy than conventional.
. Production efficiency was 28 per cent higher in the organic systems, with the conventional no-till system being the least efficient in terms of energy usage.
. Soil health in the organic systems has increased over time while the conventional systems remain essentially unchanged. One measure of soil health is the amount of carbon contained in the soil.
http://www.thestarphoenix.com/business/story.html?id=5462520
I know that this is confusing and people try to do the right thing when they spend money. If anything, this shows the advantabes of supporting your local farmers market where you can find fresh organic produce.
Big corporate ownership of organic producers
http://www.certifiedorganic.bc.ca/rcbtoa/services/corporate-ownership.html
Here’s the best organization to learn about organic food and the latest news
http://www.organicconsumers.org/
Fortunate to be able to buy the majority of what I eat from local farmers or fishermen I know personally. Never going back.
Peter Van Buren has an essay — Silent State; The Campaign Against Whistleblowers in Washington — at TomDispatch.com this morning that is superb in style and substance.
charles, thanks for the link to Tom Dispatch. The piece says that they have “an organized strategy” against whistle blowers. Isn’t this what used to be called “a conspiracy” when the world spoke English that was not intentionally corrupted for political *spin*?
O.K., I’ll say it: It is a conspiracy against whistle blowers, dissenters, etc. And it has been a long time in the making, with special thanks to the Neocon Masters from the University of Chicago. Read all about it:
“THE IDEOLOGY OF TYRANNY: Bataille, Foucault, and the Postmodern Corruption of Political Dissent” by Guido Giacomo Preparata (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)–a work of impeccable research.
See especially Chapter 8: “The Tomb Raiders of the Postmodern Right: Junger’s Anarch, the Neocon, and the Bogus Hermeneutics of Leo Strauss.”
Doesn’t this information jibe with the War Profits goal of the founder of the University of Chicago, still carried out by Agent Obama as Commander in Chief? Think about it.
“Conspiracy” — please find its definition at a time before the meaning of words was high-jacked for profit, in Webster’s Second International or the O.E.D. for a lasting impression of the full meaning of the word.
It’s a conspiracy.
The tiny conspirators speak in ultrasound, but you know them by what they have done.
MyLess, “By their fruits you shall know them.” Still true.
Mr. Sereno;
I read today that Roger Boisjoly, the Morton Thiokol engineer who repeatedly warned against trying to launch the Space Shuttle in cold weather has died at 73. That mans’ story is a textbook case in how whistle blowers are ignored and punished; especially when they turn out to be right and people die as a result. See also Feynmans’ dissenting appendix to the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident Report in which he gives a cogent analysis on how bureaucracies enable disasters. “Brazil” here we come!
Brazil, when stars were entertaining June,
We stood beneath an amber moon
And softly murmured someday soon…
We kissed and clung together
Then – tomorrow was another day
The morning found us miles away
With still a million things to say.
And now, when twilight dims the skies above
Recalling thrills of our love
There’s one thing I’m certain of…
Return, I will, to old Brazil.
Brazil, when stars were entertaining June,
We stood beneath an amber moon
And softly murmured someday soon…
We kissed and clung together
Then – tomorrow was another day
The morning found us miles away
With still a million things to say.
And now when twilight dims the skies above
Recalling thrills of our love there’s one thing
I’m certain of… Return, I will, to old Brazil.
Simply loveley!
Oh! now you made me do it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=291QciJA2Wo
Skippy… Jack I’m frighted…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLynM-GI_Mk&feature=related
this is a professional relationship.
skippy, thanks. The prophets of film have warned us, and warned us, and warned us, standing on the shoulders of Orwell and Huxley. Kubrick, Giliam, et al. What they predict seems as inexorable as the tide.
Les Mis: SS:
Yikes. This is an ugly story. Yet some of the commenters seem to think that making people pay back old support debts (to the state, no less, since their kids are long since grown) is “justice.”
Where is their outrage against anyone larger than the tinest fig on the tree? I think it’s a form of learned helplessness: we can’t stop Big Finance from taking everything we own, so let’s turn our sights onto the feeblest amongst us.
PQS, yes, that is exactly *How It Works* — and by design. History shows that the people in the ghetto tend to rob people in the ghetto.
Oh, think London’s underworld in *Oliver Twist*.
Yves: here‘s a response by Graeber to Hedges’s uninformed rant from a few days ago.
I don’t mean this as a counter argument but I wish Graeber had also addressed the question of agents provocateurs.
That was one of Hedge’s better pieces.
Re the Matt Taibbi article on Wall Street whining. Yes, it’s a problem when the “Big Swinging Dicks” lose dimension, since they won’t attract Top Golddiggers as in the old days. And, OMG, how will the quants get laid if anything compromises HFT?
Isn’t it clear by now? It’s just *older* Beavis and Buttheads that rule Wall Street. And, yes, it’s all about getting laid, still.
From the lizard link: A rare lizard survived a 3,000-mile flight in a freezing cold luggage hold only to then be put through the wash by an unsuspecting holidaymaker.
Sounds like this lizard needs no Noah’s Ark.
Maybe he’s trying to defy God.
Chinese electricity dropped 7.5% in Janaury.
I assume that is in comparison to January 2011 and not December 2011. That’s today’s journalism. You put it with it.
I have heard stories of Chinese workers not returnig from their New Year break. Are they striking? Is that widespread in the Shenzhen area?
If 7.5% drop can not be explained by the Chinese New Year alone, what is the normal drop one should expect? It’s not mentioned in the article.
For Greece a Tear, AEP mentioned PASOK support at 8pc.
Is it possible, theorectically, for an entity or a person to have negative support – minus 50%, say, for example?
What does minus 50% mean? 50% of the people polled hate that entity or person?
Who (or what) was the first in history to receive a negative support number?
What is the most negative (I wont’ say highest negative as that is confusing) support number on record?
In general, people today have less shame today than 100 years ago.
And rightly so. What’s wrong with wearing shorts in a 5 star hotel or sandals on the airplane? Underwear at the Academy Awards Cermony? Why not?
Unfortunately, it seems that that no-taboo attitude has infected areas where a sense of shame should still be functioning.
“Should Plastic Bags Be Banned? … Or will it merely annoy shoppers and harm factories that use recycled bags to make things like fence posts?”
Is this the future? Where we’re not allowed to stop producing waste, for the sake of the poor recyclers?
When the Bessemer steel process was invented, an essential part of the process was feeding it scrap iron, and as it grew in popularity, it quickly used up all the scrap, which became more valuable as a result. Imagine if a law had mandated producing iron and giving it away free just so it could be scrapped cheaply for the steelmakers!
The 1952 science fiction satire The Space Merchants, by Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth, poked fun at a future society in which people were forced to consume “for the sake of the economy”. The nonsense they mocked is alive and well today.
Might need to ban paper bags as well, unless they are tree-haters.
That’s nothing. Read Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. CO2 from fire extinguishers is contributed to “the company” so it can sell soda. Since everyone owns a stake in “the company” no one is willing to see it fail, even if it kills them.
Yves will not like this. A parasite carried in cats’ feces, Toxoplasma gondii, might be rewiring our brains. It could contribute to car crashes, suicides, and mental disorders such as schizophrenia. Time to send the Abyssinian home?
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/03/how-your-cat-is-making-you-crazy/8873/1/
oh, is fairly old news, or a rehash of a story from a few years ago. Yeah, sounds really macabre, but bankers running loose are much worse. ;)
…and bankers use the whole world as their sand box…
This is an issue with indoor/outdoor cats, not indoor cats. Mine are indoor cats.
Don’t forget the ammonia in cat urine.
Ever hear of the LISA complex?
“Life Is Servicing Animals”.
Forgot to add, a good outdoor wire enclosed cat run with a door that is easy to use and a warm place using waste heat from under the refrigerator solves all kitty conflicts.
So does toxoplasmosis explain my Dad’s (literally) insane cat?
BTW, she is an indoor cat, but nutty as a fruitcake and getting weirder and weirder as she get older.
Cops & Robbers; Constitutions & Space Cowboys
The economy is crashing because the “lost generations” have one-upped the boomers, by avoiding taxation all together and maximizing credit consumption. Some can learn by observing, many have to learn by making mistakes themselves. Crashing an empire by starving it is a step above the prison mentality, but not much, because there will always be an empire. Sometimes, especially with kids, you have to let them learn the hard way, that harming others, retribution, does not help self, and the best way to stop productive adaptation is to sit in judgment.
Taxation becomes arbitrary, capricious, and malicious over time because there is no way for one person, or a small group to represent the interests of each individual, and an economy is an aggregate of individual efforts and outcomes (learning to skate reduces the reduction). And because the empire is a body of gravity with historical momentum, agency cannot impede it.
The function of agency is to deliver the simple-stupid, least common denominator historical, stuff as efficiently as possible, so individuals may focus on the work at hand, charting a course to the future. At the end of an empire cycle, the economy runs exactly backwards. That armature is like flipping a log, end over end. We wind the clock, to give the empire time, for a purpose.
The body works for the brain, which works for the spirit. THEN the spirit works for the brain, which works for the body. Agency works for us and we work for God, each in our own way. Agency shorts to DC and gets replaced. That is empire History. The point of a constitution is to give agency notice of the condition for replacement. It’s the exit door.
We begin to observe the empire’s half life / curve with the incidence of criminal prosecution. Economies are systems, with distributions of results. On the closed side, there is only the illusion of individual behavior (accounting flips the reduction loss to a gain). Agency makes ignorant assumptions and slots participants into available outcomes. The greater the incompetence of agency, the more prisons it builds to house its “errors,” hiding the ability to learn from its mistakes. As its momentum of gravity builds, criminals are created to feed it, in a positive, supply-side feedback loop. America calls the kettle black.
Even the best cop is a weasel by nature under such conditions in that he must willfully ignore the behavior of fellow tax farmers. The productive arteries harden, financial cancer takes off, the system begins to implode, and the tiniest of “bugs,” pneumonia, fells it directionally, by constraining its oxygen/intelligence.
Because the aging empire now penalizes creative intelligence, and generational reproduction heavily favors replication, the process is self-adjusting relative to individual discretion to abandon the system. The empire increasingly penalizes kids through arbitrary non-conformance laws to the end of exclusion and churn, and its own destruction, assuming that kids have no recourse to the something-for-nothing ponzi economy, to which they are implicitly and then explicitly enslaved.
If you examine population growth over empire time, what you see as outcomes is more adaptive participants having children in the beginning. What you don’t see is the increasing intelligence of the immeasurable exodus at the end. The empire gets dumber with scale, relying upon relatively fewer, more irrational decisions on its path to tyranny. Little calculus is required to both establish agency intent and the profit in its replacement.
Of course the empire faithful fail to see what’s coming until the curve and cliff suddenly appear before their nose, which, due to time to perception and momentum, leaves them stranded in mid-air, above the abyss. It’s an integral/derivative process. Whether an empire lands on a bridge, a roadway, or falls is entirely democratic. All the ignored votes are suddenly counted. The State sells bonds against God’s lottery and fails every time.
Trust is implicitly profitable. Only the empire insurance salesman attempts to argue otherwise. At the end of the empire cycle, the faithful are all insurance salesmen, selling to each other, trapped in prisoners dilemma by their own psychology, aggregated and reinforced by the duplicity of History, in a black hole. At this point, agency may get the simple sh** done, pay us each $3.6M for the current cost of raising a family, or be replaced. We are quite capable of doing all three ourselves.
In God We Trust; all others pay cash. Are you of God? Do you seek the unknown? Eating the empire’s fruit, recognition of good vs. evil, from the tree of knowledge, instead of learning from original sin, is an individual choice, aggregated. Why do you suppose the bully pulpit demands allegiance? Why would it tell you to fear God, the unknown, unless it has something to fear? Fear is a poor foundation for an economy. It fails every time.
Absent intelligence, humanity subjects itself to the tyranny of gravity, with or without an empire. The empire is a timing mechanism. The value of family is timeless, and priceless, because it is the mechanism through which God has granted us the cosmos in which to play. Silly rabbit; tricks are for kids. The turtle is the finish line, the alpha and the omega.
With the Supreme Court Act of granting Corporate individual free speech, after eviscerating it to the individual, first in the Family Law prototype, and then through the body to perfection in the Patriot Acts, and the immediate participation of both Congress and President, agency has placed its full weight on the side of preserving non-performing assets, against the income producers. The stage is set, and we all now watch the final act in the empire’s revolving sh**-show.
There is checkers and there is chess. Agency should stick to its knitting as designed. Who do you think designs the technology that keeps empire time? Clint Eastwood is a great actor and director, but playing the part in a movie doesn’t make him a Space Cowboy does it? Good luck selling GM as American political ingenuity (used car salesmen auctioning diapers in a coliseum built for the occasion).
Why would we allow the idolatwits lost in a desert of their own making control our future? That would be pretty damn stupid.
That’s beautiful writing, poetic and deep.
Might I suggest you read it aloud before hitting “submit”?
A shout out to Naked Capitalism from JHK. Cool.
http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/02/all-screaming-id-no-brains-no-honor.html
Honor. I used to think it was a bullshit word. But today, honor and intellectual fearlessness are the only things I value.
The stories both here and with the mortgage settlement posts show that the three great economic powers: the US, Europe, and China are not only deeply troubled, but probably fatally so. Official denial even as economic, and societal, fundamentals continue to deteriorate.
Brooklyn Public Library
Activism in America: Investigating Occupy Wall Street
Feb 12 2012 1:30PM
Central Library, Dweck Center
Todd Gitlin (The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election) discusses the Occupy Wall Street protests. Stacey Patton reflects on African American participation in OWS and Occupy the Hood.
Even though he isn’t exactly an MMT guy*, I like Chris Martenson. He sees things pretty clearly.
http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/chris-martenson/why-our-currency-will-fail
Check out the fraud chart in the middle of the piece. It sums it ALL up.
As fraud increases exponentially, we are exponentially less predisposed to prosecute it.
Call it the ExportLand Model of Fraud.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_Land_Model
Look at the charts for Egypt and Mexico. Same country, basically. The only difference, Egypt used their –now gone!– oil revenues to pay for food. Without them, Egypt will know starvation.
On the other (similar) hand, Mexico uses their –soon to be gone!– oil revenues to buttress their crumbling government. Without them, the already troubled nation of Mexico is sure to disintegrate.
*Chris does want to spend trillions on infrastructure. What’s up with that? To my way of thinkin,’ that is the essence of MMT. I would like to see Martenson interview Mosely or Mitchell (or Smith!), that would be interesting.
“Congress insider trading ban wins huge House support”: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-16971170
I know, I couldn’t believe it either. Am I wrong to be skeptical?
Matt Taibbi’s missed the real story for once. Dodd-Frank isn’t going to stop the next Credit Crash. Not in the slightest because the solutions don’t answer the real problem of the owners of short-term money-claims panicking over the latest bankster whizz-bang fraud.
http://www.nomurafoundation.or.jp/data/20111014_Morgan_Ricks-PPT.pdf
… the government of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner seems poised to back the full decriminalization of illegal drugs for personal use.
Kirchner for Reefers? http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/decriminalizing-drug-use-in-argentina-is-a-correction-to-bad-policy/?src=recg
Matt Taibbi says Yves Smith is right about the settlement:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/why-the-foreclosure-deal-may-not-be-so-hot-after-all-20120209
Taibbi is honorable man. He can be forgiven –most readily forgiven– for momentarily allowing hope to cloud objective judgement.
That he so quickly and unequivocally admitted his mistake, only makes him a better man in my eyes.
he got over the sun shot from last week, as predicted.
seriously, it was a bitch for a few days, you could hardly grasp your own thoughts.
I’m not kidding but it seems like I am.
Speaking of honorable men, Glenn Greenwald blasts liberals! Again!
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/08/repulsive_progressive_hypocrisy/singleton/
Damn, it ain’t easy being a liberal these days. I think I need to redefine my political proclivities.
Should I call myself a Socialist? Or do Socialists sellout in droves, too, whenever they get a chance to bow down to a Supreme Leader?
I know National Socialists do, but how bout plain old Socialists?
I have never seen an animal or fish choked to death by a paper or cloth bag. Nor have I ever seen a paper bag hanging in a tree for months at a time. Paper bags don’t produce toxins when they burn or break down into miniscule shards that last for a lifetime.
Paper bags can be made from recyled paper and are recyclable. Plastic bags are not.
Soldiers die for the oil and gas for plastic bag production.
Paper bags are not perfect but they are the best thing out there.
Nicely argued.
I’m convinced. It’s no more plastic for this kid.
Paper bags can’t be used repeatedly for a long time.
Cloth bags can. Plastic bags can.
Paper bags don’t well in the rain.
Cloth bags can. Plastic bags can.
People need to hang on to their cloth bags and their plastic bags. Don’t throw them away.