NC public service alert. Many readers were unhappy with how shabbily CNBC treated Neil Barofsky during an interview earlier this week. Reader Claire made this suggestion:
Google “CNBC contact Squawkbox” and it takes you to a form where it asks for a name and email address and then you can submit a comment to CNBC.
Unlike NPR’s form (which doesn’t allow any profanity) and which asks if your comment is positive, neutral or negative, you can submit uncensored comments to CNBC (with unlimited profanity) so you can let the CNBC talent know what you really think of them.
Not that anyone’s likely to read it, but you never know.
I once submitted a comment to CNBC in which I accused Joe Kernan of being a pimp to the banksters, and the next day he wrote me back and said I belong in jail.
In addition, this is Steve Liesman’s e-mail address: steve.liesman@nbcuni.com
Nation Celebrates Full Week Without Deadly Mass Shooting Onion (Lambert)
Foxy Ladies Atlantic (Lee S)
WHAT MAGAZINES DO YOU MISS THE MOST? Joe Romenesko (Lambert). I miss the Economist of the 1980s.
The bizarre, unhealthy, blinding media contempt for Julian Assange Glenn Greenwald, Guardian (p78)
How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis Foreign Policy (Scott A)
China’s slowdown can no longer be masked by cooked economic data Sober Look
China injects more liquidity MacroBusiness
China Confronts Mounting Piles of Unsold Goods New York Times (furzy mouse)
In Vietnam, Growing Fears of an Economic Meltdown New York Times (Joe Costello)
Europe marches into recession MacroBusiness
Odds of Global Recession Are 100%: Marc Faber CNBC (furzy mouse)
Whatever Happened to Iraqi Oil? Greg Muttitt, TomDispatch
Higgins Tea Party smackdown goes viral Irish Times (disgruntled observer)
Republicans eye return to gold standard Financial Times. OMG, they are looking crazier by the minute. Furzy mouse highlights ‘Republicans Eye Return to Gold Standard’ Mark Thoma
Reagan-appointed judge: Deregulation advocates made a fundamental mistake Raw Story. Posner has been saying stuff like this of late, but this is clearer than some of his earlier remarks.
ICE agents sue own agency over deferred deportations USA Today (furzy mouse)
Elite Public University Gives Up On Climate Science In Response To Not-So-Elite Public University’s Campaign To Smear Its Former Climate Scientist Moe Tkacik, Firedoglake. Long form treatment at Das Krapital.
Will the Unemployed Really Find Jobs Making Robots? Richard Bookstaber
Romney’s Management Fee Conversions Victor Fleisher (Willard Mitt Sutton). Romney is looking like a tax cheat. Quelle surprise!
Moody’s Rental-Home Bond Grades May Be Restrained By Data Limits Bloomberg (Tom A). This is the first good news I’ve seen on the housing front in a long time. Moody’s says they might not be able to give nice ratings (like AAA) to securitized rentals, and that this is a data problem, not a deal structure problem. Lordie, they might actually have learned something from the RMBS/CDO mess.
The Death of Sunny Sheu Truthout. We posted on this over a year ago, but good to see this appalling story getting some media attention.
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lambert here:
D – 17 and counting*
“It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair.” –Oscar Wilde
Montreal. Manifestation, August 22: “Most journalists on twitter were conservatively estimating around 25,000, with gusts up to 50,000, while CUTV estimated 80,000 and CLASSE’s official estimate was 100,000. In my opinion, the crowd was over 100,000. A tightly packed crowd which takes between forty-five minutes and an hour to pass a given point, and stretches like a giant snake around most of downtown, is to me clearly in excess of 100,000. [I]t was an overwhelmingly large crowd which occupied much of the downtown core for several hours and sent a crystal clear message to politicians and voters alike. The movement is very much alive” (photo, though not of crowd).
RNCon. Hurricane watch: “12:15pm UPDATE: Scott has indicated that, at this point, he doesn’t anticipate that the convention will be canceled. Local, state, federal and RNC officials are meeting regularly to decide what to do.” Hurricane watch, Weather Underground: “I put the odds of an evacuation occurring during the convention in the current situation at 3%.” … Teebee: “ABC, CBS and NBC are planning to air only one hour of coverage from Tampa during each of the final three nights of the R convention. Problem is: The GOP convention runs four nights, beginning Monday and featuring Ann Romney’s speech.” … Teebee: “[Political coverage this year] can drive viewers away, as ABC learned when it looked at the minute-by-minute ratings of “Good Morning America” and saw that people sometimes tuned out when political news was shown.” …. Police state: “About 60 agencies will convene at this secret [sekrit] location during the RNCon Convention, working side-by-side to improve communication. Each agency, including the FBI, will have a separate command center for its decision-making. So far, the FBI has not gathered information of planned terrorist attacks during the convention, [FBI’s Steven Ibison] said. ‘At this point, it’s just the [which? Sovereign citizens? Putzes] anarchists’ criminal activity.'” All this for something the networks won’t give more than an hour to. … Police state: “”FBI and (Homeland Security) assess with high confidence anarchist extremists will target similar infrastructure in Tampa and Charlotte, with potentially significant impacts on public safety and transportation,” according to the law enforcement alert.” As opposed to non-anarchist extremists, I suppose.
AK. Fracking: “[Great Bear’s President Ed Duncan told a committee of the Alaska State Senate] that the key to continued production in a fracturing operation is a labor intensive continuation of drilling new wells to replace rapidly declining previous wells.” … Extractive economy: “Measure 2 on the August 28th primary ballot would reestablish the Alaska Coastal Management Program. The federal Coastal Zone Management Act allows states that adopt an approved coastal management program to have greater input into development decisions along their coastlines.”
AZ. Water: “Gilbert has put two top administrators on leave and launched an internal investigation after officials discovered fluoride has been withheld from part of the town’s water supply for at least 13 months. Gilbert voters approved fluoridation 12 years ago after a heated debate on the controversial issue, and the task of adding the cavity-fighting chemical fell to Public Works Director Lonnie Frost [now on leave], whose wife Shelley had led the opposition against fluoride. Fluoride apparently had been withheld from the North Water plant beginning around the same time three new Town Council members were elected and sworn in; at least two have direct ties to the conservative ‘tea party’ movement.” Make up your own jokes!
CA. Rentcropping: “A campaign that calls itself “Home Is Where the Vote Is” [here; here] will launch an eight-state crusade to mobilize the folks who are underwater on their mortgage – they owe more than their home is worth.”
FL. Discouraged workers: “In a speech last month, [Scott] bragged, ‘The number of people on unemployment has gone from 568,000 to 320,000 people.’ Of course, 250,000 of those people had been tossed off the rolls because they had exhausted their benefits. ” … Police state: Palm Beach buys a 9-ton armored personnel carrier, calls it a rescue/emergency/communications vehicle.
IA. Fundraising appeals: “You want loyal Rs to ‘defend liberty’ by supporting the IA GOP’s efforts to get [ME]’s Ron Paul delegates into Tampa? I can’t imagine the IA Ds asking me for money to make sure delegates elected halfway across the country were able to wave the flag at the 2008 DNCon.” There’s your problem…
MI. ObamaCare: Gov. Snyder is abandoning setting up a state-run health insurance exchange system after repeatedly failing to convince fellow Rs to authorize [it]. Instead, the governor will pursue a joint partnership with the federal government to create an online portal for customers to shop for health insurance.”
MO. Akin: “To withdraw at the later date, Akin would need to obtain a court order. He also would be required to pay ‘any printing or reprinting costs’ of ballots.” … Akin: “[H]igh-profile R leaders conveyed that Akin was an unacceptable choice. It seems unlikely that many of [Rs] will vote for Ms. McCaskill. But if 20 percent of Rs vote Libertarian instead, or just skip the race, she’ll be a heavy favorite.” …. Akin: “[Akin] flew to Tampa to meet with members of the Council for National Policy, a secretive coalition of powerful conservative and evangelical leaders, activists, and donors.”
NY. Fracking: “The viability of shale gas production in New York may hinge on a critical policy question: Will chemicals regulated as hazardous material when shipped to well sites and injected into the ground be regulated as hazardous waste when they flow back out?” … Fracking: “The biggest mystery surrounding the opening day of the New York State Fair [was] where the formal opening ceremony would take place. The presence of large numbers of anti-fracking protesters saw the Governor bypassing the normal gathering near the front gate and the speeches. Instead, a brief ribbon cutting followed by a quick fairgrounds tour, with protesters in tow.” ….Public records: “Franklin County legislators approved a plan that will give south-end county residents easier access to records from the clerk’s office, for a fee. She proposed in the letter that customers [citizens] pay $300 quarterly for the service.” A subscription service for public records?! … Austerity: “Schenectady could become the next hot spot in the municipal finance crisis sweeping across upstate New York.”
OH. Voting: “Issue 2 would establish a 12-member commission to draw the state’s legislative and congressional districts, a process now controlled by elected officials. Voters First [filed suit, claiming] the approved [Issue 2] ballot language is incomplete. The wording, for example, omits any references to requirements that the commission draw fair districts that reflect the political preferences of Ohio voters.” … Fracking: “Niles joined Weathersfield Township trustees on Wednesday, passing a resolution to ban all injection wells in the city and township. That includes the proposed site off state Route 169 next to Niles Commerce Park. [I]ltimately it’s up to ODNR to approve or reject the permits. [Resident: ] ‘ODNR has never denied a permit in their history. If they deny this permit, it’ll be the first.'”
OR. C’est normal: “[Kevin Cameron,] the OR House R leader who abruptly stepped down last month says he did so in part because of concerns that the public would find out that he and a handful of other R lawmakers had visited a topless bar.” Suggesting where some Tampa streamers should set up shop…
TN. Gaffe: “[The email:] ‘I don’t give a rat’s ass what the black caucus thinks. [State Sen] Jim Summerville.’ In the subject line: ‘Please share this response with your colleagues.’” And they did, they did! … Coal: “The TVA is liable for damages caused when one of its containment dikes failed, dumping 1 billion gallons of coal ash sludge onto the community of Watts Bar Lake, TN, a federal judge ruled.” The dike’s “slimes layer” failed, a great metaphor.
TX. Handmaid’s Tale: “A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that TX did not act unconstitutionally when it moved to expel Planned Parenthood from a health and contraceptive care program for low-income women.” … Pipelines: “Lamar County Court-at-Law Judge Bill Harris ruled TransCanada could be considered a ‘common carrier’ and use eminent domain to condemn a section of [Julia Trigg Crawford’s] land for the Keystone XL pipeline.” … Legacy parties: “Chuck McDonald, whose public relations firm has R mega-donor Harold Simmons and his low-level nuclear waste dump as one of its biggest clients, is spinning off time and effort for D U.S. Senate nominee Paul Sadler [against Ted Cruz].” Nice to see McDonald “has some place to go.”
VA. Corruption: “Since cost overruns with a jail expansion and new animal shelter came to light, many [Chesapeake] residents say they have lost trust in how elected officials are spending their tax dollars. City Council members, in turn, say they have lost trust in the city staff for not being upfront about the problems.”
WI. Corruption: “Farley pretended to represent a Chicago firm seeking a long-stalled county financial contract and said the firm wanted to know, ‘What can we do to put it on the agenda?’” … Handmaid’s Tale: “A lineup of prominent state and national pro-life speakers, including Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, had their ‘Abortion is not health care’ message shouted down in Madison Tuesday, with exchanges between opposing sides at one point nearly coming to blows.” …. Shelters: “‘If you have things spread all over the city, it’s hard to get things done,’ [Daniel Callahan] says. ‘Especially when you’ve got backpacks and bags you’re carrying around with you.'” Contrary to conventional wisdom, it’s hard work to be poor.
Robama vs. Obomney watch. Legacy parties: “The FBI and Miami-Dade police have opened separate criminal investigations into the campaign of a D congressional candidate who, vendors say, was aided by GOP Rep. David Rivera.” And D McCaskill gives $2 million to R Akin. Quite a year.
Outside baseball. What it Takes (99¢ Kindle): “Realized this week that “What It Takes” is the movie “SAW” for politics…. The process slaughters these guys.” … Civic engagement: “Your interests may be predator control or music in schools or traffic calming on your street. It doesn’t matter. Just identify the biggest problem in your community — however you define that community — and start trying to fix it.” … Words matter: “Please get it straight: the concern is about ‘polling place Photo ID restrictions’ not ‘Voter ID’.” …. Charters, the awesome Diane Ravitch: “When vouchers are celebrated [e.g.], the subject of test scores is irrelevant. When public schools are condemned, the subject is always test scores. Wonder why.” … Versailles: “In the first year, Orenstein said, [the Disney] princesses brought in $300 million. A decade later, the princesses were a $4-billion-a-year industry, with more than 26,000 princess-related products on the market.”
Grand Bargain™-brand Catfood Watch. Medicare: “10 percent said they would support major reductions in Medicare to reduce the deficit and nearly 50 percent would go along with minor reductions.” Not one penny!
The trail. Carville: “Shorter 2010: Rs, energized by the Tea Party and stoked by fear, turned out their base. Ds, absurdly disappointed that simply electing Barack Obama didn’t solve all our problems, stayed home in droves to ‘send a message.'” No more absurd than insulting your base. … Medicare, swing states, polls: “After more than a week of frenzied campaigning on the issue, Medicare ranks as the third-most crucial issue to likely voters in Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin — behind the economy and health care, according to new Quinnipiac University/New York Times/CBS News polls of the three swing states.”
Romney. Ryan: “It’s a nation in debt, in doubt, and decline. We want to get back to the American idea that opportunity society with a safety net, a society of growth, of opportunity, of upper mobility.” Nice declension, but it’s upward mobility. You’re gonna have to study them, you’re gonna have to know them. …. Teebee: “A Romney campaign ad accusing Obama of underhanded tactics is the first to change undecided voters’ views, a U.S. university study indicates.”
Obama. Fault lines: “Here are six campaign fault lines: 1. The Insiders vs. The Outsiders; 2. Washington vs. Chicago;3. Obamaland vs. Joe’s World; 4. Obama vs. other Democrats; 5. Obama ’08 vs. Obama ’12; 6. Family vs. Politics.” Interesting tropes, at least. “Obama candidly told those gathered, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), to reorient their priorities — from them to him.” Emphasis mine. … Less cowbell, Charles Pierce: “[No] matter how correct the president is about the destructively goofy ideas coming from the other side, it doesn’t hide the fact that, for too many people, many of [Obama’s] policies seem to be happening somewhere else to somebody else. I’d like to hear him give one speech on the current economic crisis in which he doesn’t mention The Deficit at all.” … Big Dog to hit the trail: “Obviously, President Clinton has extraordinary credibility on these issues of how you build a strong economy,” the official said.” I thought Clinton was a racist. Did I not get the memo?
* 17 days until the Democratic National Convention ends with Boston cream pie for everyone on the floor of the Bank of America Panther Stadium, Charlotte, NC. 1 2 3 4….
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Antidote du jour (herman sniffles):
108 comments
Comments are closed.
After reading lambert’s links about wisconsin and a small crowd shouting down speakers at a gathering, I just wonder why ideas about free speech only seem to apply the ones doing the shouting, while they do not respect the rights of free speech of others….
again…
http://www.postcrescent.com/article/20120817/APC010402/308170294/Protester-spits-Romney-supporter-during-Grand-Chute-event-story-video-?odyssey=tab%7Ctopnews%7Ctext%7CFRONTPAGE&gcheck=1&nclick_check=1
and again…
http://freedomeden.blogspot.com/2011/06/walker-special-olympics-protests.html
(I suppose that the readers will now enlighten me on this question…)
It’s not about denying the pro-lifers their rights to speak – it’s about refusing to be silent in a public space when an attempt is made in that space to loudly make controversial if not slanderous claims. Your attempt to confuse a criminal act – denying someone the right to speak – with a refusal to remain silent in public is indicative of the fact that discourse in the US exhibits broadly dysfunctional features.
bmeisen,
Ahhh, so that is how you justify it. THat would be one thing if it was in regards to Akin’s stupid comments. However, it is something that I have seen employed again and again and again everytime that someone from the ‘other side’ tries to say anything over the past few years. To heck with an open forum and a vigorous but honest exchange of ideas. Just shout down the other side and claim that’s how democracy should look. It appears like that tactic will be utilized enforce over the R convention. Be proud!
I think there are better tactics to be had than shouting down, but that depends on what your goals are.
1. If your goal is to “fire up the base” and decoy women into voting for the signer of Executive Order 13535 this year, then go for the tribal option and shout away.
2. If your goal is to assault one of the ideological underpinnings of conservative thought, then you don’t shout, you ask questions. For example, the Republicans are going to support a Fetal Personhood amendment in their platform. (It’s so nice to see them going for it and saying what they really believe.) One might ask Rs a lot of questions about that, starting with the morning after pill and moving on to ectopic pregancies. However, one might ask Ds what they believe, and where Obama’s going to find a “compromise” between Fetal Personhood and treating women as fully human, at all times. One might reason that the Ds don’t want that question asked. Hence the shouting.
That’s an interesting position you have. It isn’t possible for fetal personhood and a woman to be “fully human” at the same time?
I assure you my pregnant wife is fully human, and her 7 month old fetus that could likely be viable if born today, and listens to mommy’s voice and kicks his older sister when she leans on mommy’s stomach is a definitely a person.
There should be a way to use scientifically identified points on the fetal development timeline to determine when fetal personhood exists. One point would be when the earliest possibility exists for Viability outside the womb with currently available health care. Another would be at the earliest possible initiation of the “quickening” of the fetus.
I’m just throwing out some legitimate compromise points to talk.
When you beat on the extreme views to prove youre point it only prooves your argument isn’t very strong.
By the way I’m not a republican. They are idiots who have devolved to pushign a gold standard they don’t believe in just to prevent Ron Paul supporter chaos at the republican convention.
I’m just throwing out some legitimate compromise points to talk.
The points you made are controversial to no one but pro-lifers. The “compromise” was made in 1973. The number of pregnancies terminated in the 2nd and 3rd trimester are a vanishingly small percentage of the whole and usually for very good reasons (the mother’s lifelong disability or death, or nonviable fetus). At least, people other than pro-lifers consider these to be good reasons.
You are using “personhood” in a vernacular way, not the very technical legal way in which the law will interpret it. This is the loophole right-wing extremists exploit to restrict the rights of fully adult people to make decisions about their health care and the very personal decision to beget offspring.
We are now talking about whether zygotes with 32 cells have more rights than fully grown adult people. This is the ultimate point of “fetal personhood”. Since, after all, people with kidney failure aren’t allowed to forcibly requisition the kidneys of their family members, and neither are “fetal persons” able to requisition another person’s body for their life support. The debate left you far behind.
but.. but…
Which begs the question; .. when can we abort?
Love
well, I’d say that if we’re going to be logical then every egg and every sperm needs to be protected as a potential person.
So picking on the ladies is underplaying the scope of the crime. Jacking off is tantamount to the murder of billions of persons.
Just sayin’
Hey, this fetal personhood bill — is it going to legally define person, and will this wipe out corporate personhood? I’ll be waiting…
As I understand it, personhood has not been defined, it’s just been judicially (and based on a clerk’s headnote error, to boot — 1886 Santa Clara County vs Southern Pacific RR) granted to corporations, no legislative hands at all touching it, and actually not the court’s then either, just the clerk’s (an ex-RR president). It’s funny/stupefying the lengths the Supreme Court will go to rather than admit the error.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Clara_County_v._Southern_Pacific_Railroad#The_headnote
2. If your goal is to assault one of the ideological underpinnings of conservative thought, then you don’t shout, you ask questions. LS
Such as “Didn’t the early Catholic Church allows abortion up until ‘The Quickening (40 days after conception?)’?”
“The quickening” does not occur 40 days after conception. Quickening refers to when fetal movement is first perceived by the mother. 40 days after conception the pregnancy is still in the embryo stage.
According to Wikipedia, for first-time mothers quickening is typically experienced at 18–20 weeks. For other mothers it happens at 15–17 weeks.
It doesn’t appear that anyone commenting on this has any connection to Paul Ryan or to what’s been going on in Wisconsin, or has tried asking Paul Ryan a question lately. People have tried politely asking Paul Ryan questions. And time and again, he has ignored or belittled them, or straight-up lied right to their faces. I saw videos of him meeting with citizens, some of whom probably voted for him–stoic, Midwestern men who don’t show their emotions who had probably never met with a politician, but had became quite concerned about policy proposals which would directly affect them. And they started to get visibly pissed off when he kept lying to them, and they knew it. Once the shit started to hit here, he avoided his office and refused to meet constituents. He limited citizen access to him to a “townhall meeting” or two (actually, I don’t know that there was more than one), and people had to pay to get in. Anyone paying attention to any of that, much less experiencing it/being affected by it personally, would understand the desire to shout in that smug face. It’s all well and good to think you’d be above that sort of thing if you haven’t been his constituent or lived in Wisconsin in the last year-and-a-half.
http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-830332
My governor is Paul LePage.
Culture in Decline | Episode #1 “What Democracy?” by Peter Joseph
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTbLslkIR2k&feature=plcp
“Peter Joseph is asking the questions and proposing the possible solutions that we should be demanding from the elected leaders of this crazy world. His brilliant analysis of this ridiculous system we’re operating under is one of the most important voices for change in this generation.”
– Joe Rogan
Thanks Rene. Peter Joseph is a great spokesperson for change. Loved it. Were those credits at the end a spoof? Soros and the Rockefeller Fdn together at last? Or a prediction? I didn’t see Greenpeace – the only organization whose rationale I believe in.
Your welcome, Susan. Yes, the credits at the end were most likely a spoof. Soros is a manager for the transnational revolutionary oligarchs… Rockefeller is the oligarchy! No? In regards to organizations like Greenpeace, it is important to look at who is the CEO and who is on the board. Amnesty International and WWF, for example, are co-opted by the oligarchs.
Peter Joseph is very eloquent and his films are very well made. Hopefully, he will come together with Alex Jones and have an exchange of minds or something like that. Personally, I think that America is such a big country, it should have enough room to house at least 5 or 6 heroes at the same time :-)
The CNBC assault on Barshovsky is reminiscent of the Japanese big business lobby Keidanren and the MOF attack on former PM Miyazawa exactly 20 years ago when he tried to intervene in the failed financial system. But at least those Japanese actors were working for themselves. The CNBC crew are little more than barking dogs.
Here’s the link to Neil Barofsky on CNBC for those that haven’t seen it:
http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000110979&play=1
Cheat-crimogenic cultural capture – link
I really feel for the Europeans, this is a severe shot to trust in the ‘testing system’. Cheaters cheated, freely. Till the US swept in. Sweet timing stateside: Buzz of The-Law-at-work, not by forensic analytics, but the possibility of non-analytical postives, i.e. testimony by cohorts. I wonder how trolled the commentary exhonerating Lance Bewitching Armstrong is. Sport crime vernacular is a great inroad to momentum of memes to wash together strong rumor/opinion/adulation with the quiet courage of witness testimony of implicated cohorts, test the stain-resitance of ‘national/heroic/authority against the legitimacy of the pike. How much follow through? (If the forensics of testing is jigged and most any rider fixed, to whom the podium? What a flumox for the French) How much clawback?
Cause it’s all about greater efficiency. sarc
(His bully/cheat offence to culture just dessert near justifies a quiet, still, spot in the hyperbole which is Gitmo. Excess Livestrong administative fees, ack, unsarc.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/24/sports/cycling/lance-armstrong-ends-fight-against-doping-charges-losing-his-7-tour-de-france-titles.html?pagewanted=2&hp#comments
What magazine do I miss the most? Arthur. They were the best of their moment in time. Yellow Silk. Granta of the 90s (damn they were sharp). History and Theory, during its first decade (a scholarly journal, but still, paper between covers), just the best of its kind, ever; it’s pomo faux now, mostly. Playboy of the 70s; no matter where you looked there was something worth your time. Economist of the 80s _was_ particularly good, though.
On the Economist of the 1980s–
Funny we’re agreed. I was living in Cambridge, MA at that time, and beginning my ascent from poverty to disaster in the dot com bubble, but never mind that.
Every week, I would go to Harvard Square, buy the Economist at Out of Town News, go to Au Bon Pain, buy a caffe latte, and read it (thereby presaging the behavior of goateed, Starbucks-infesting hipsters in the 90s, but never mind that either).
The Economist of that time really opened my eyes to the world, what we now call (I guess) globalization. It changed me from being a provincial.
And I especially loved (modulo what we now call neo-liberalism) the editorial philosophy: Anonymous writers without bylines meant that the content was the focus. No celebrity writers at the Economist. Nurturing the “magazine” was the primary goal.
You went to the ABP for latte instead of the Coffee Connection?
I miss Factsheet Five. Now, that was essential reading.
Hah, I’ve been in both in my one Boston Summer; I’m mostly a Left Coast Guy for a generation now. Connection would have been my regular, but they had their uses. Peet’s Coffee in Berkely was in front of either despite that they had no seating, in my experience . . .
I watched Clemens pitch about tightest baseball game I’ve ever seen in person putting the Sox into the postseason all by himself in ’88, back before he went on juice and sold his head to keep his wallet clutched to his cold, sweaty heart. Yes, things are much less interesting now . . . .
“Surfer” from the 1970s.
Each photograph was a living dream of wonder and transcendence.
I couldn’t care less about the writing. I don’t know if anybody actually read it at all. I preferred the ads. Mostly board wax and custom boards, skateboards and silk-screened T-shirts with logos like “Avalon” or “Malibu”.
Visual tales of strange far away places where waves built up 7 or 8 or 9 feet in blue thunderous tubes under a yellow sun and you could rip them up and down like a madman.
That’s a great visual, and secondarily a great point: specialty mags have a disproportionate impact on ones conscousness and state of ‘like.’ I’ll say my _favorite_ ‘periodical’ ever was the Bill James Baseball Abstract in newsletter form, fantasticaly interesting prose stylist doing analytic work about three magnitudes better than anyone. And the Brain/Mind Bulletin, which I needn’t describe but was inordinately fond of.
Yes, magazines take me back. No pixelated creation will ever equal them. Contentwise, yes, quite possibly. But the experience of handling, scanning, sifting through their fully dimensional wholes, no; that won’t be replicated in our diminished (if much less expensive) Timid Small World.
MAD magazine of the late sixties, early seventies.
Honestly, the current issues seem just as good, I’m just starting to look a bit idiotic and immature when I buy it at the store.
Posner is one of the bigger rats to leave the sinking ship that is (or was) conservatism. But he’s done his job well for the 1%. His garbage “law and economics” movement, attacked so well by Ian Shapiro in his book “The Flight From Rationality in the Human Sciences” has been nothing but the legalization of theft by the rich. Now, as he looks back on the smolderin wreckage of the economy and democracy he helped so much to destroy, he’s feeling guilty and sees the need for a fast exit.
And how can someone be called brilliant who couldn’t understand that we regulated economic activity precisely becuase of the effects on our entire society? How can anyone with his education live in Chicago and not know the history of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”. Either this is one of the lamest excuses from a true moral coward, or we hae to seriously reassess whom we call brilliant and how we select entrants to our supposedly great schools like my own alma mater, The University of Chicago.
As Croesus so wisely advised, “Judge no man happy until he is dead.”
Without knowing his history, I found Posner candid. His (now obvious) observation that market forces can operate only when there is a market wouldn’t have stopped the Reagan era and Clinton deregulators because they were convinced there was a market. Somehow they thought that the financial “market” would control the financiers and big capital through supply and demand! Nevermind that they create money out of thin air. It’s not like wheat and apples. Even wheat and apple markets are corrupted with the spillover by derivatives which are just more unregulated finance. So why not change your former thinking? I liked his swipe at that idiot Scalia re the Constitution, “It’s very old.” Etc. It’s scary to think about all the delusions we operate under.
Hi, Susan!
Phony contrition is still a lie; and the Reaganomics and “law and economics” crowed told many of those back in the late ’70s and ’80s when I was in college at Chicago. Back then I liked the sound of their arguments too, but by the close of the ’80s and a little reivew of history, the emptiness of their arguments was glaring. Still they poured it on then as they do now, putting the “selfish” in “self-interest”.
Read Shapiro’s book and then think about Posner’s own history. For me, ending his career with an “oops! my bad” just isn’t enough.
“His (now obvious) observation that market forces can operate only when there is a market wouldn’t have stopped the Reagan era and Clinton deregulators because they were convinced there was a market.”
Of course there is a market, because “the market is natural.”
We know this because this is axiom #3 from Joe Kernen’s book, Your Teacher Said What?!: Defending Our Kids from the Liberal Assault on Capitalism, which he wrote with his 5th grade daughter Blake.
And which I just looked up on Amazon thanks to our public service announcement above. It was also conveniently blurbed by Paul Ryan:
“This book will help renew your faith in free markets, restore the commonsense value of fiscal responsibility, and pass these principles on to future generations of Americans at a time when they are needed most.” –Representative Paul Ryan, (R-Wisc.)
Markets work when things decay. Money and IP don’t decay .
From the FTarticle about the gold standard:
A return to a fixed money supply would also remove the central bank’s ability to offset demand shocks by varying interest rates.
Ludicrous. From the time it set up operations in 1914 until Nixon pulled the plug on the dollar’s official gold convertibility in August 1971, the Federal Reserve made frequent and vigorous changes in its discount rate.
The Fed also changed reserve ratios and stock margin loan limits to influence economic conditions.
In no way do I advocate such economic central planning. But to claim that the gold standard will tie the planners’ hands from influencing interest rates is flatly contradicted by decades of history.
It looks like the FT has gone down the same drain that the 1980s Economist did, serving more as a diffuser of pro-government agitprop than a serious journal of financial economics.
Besides being stupid a gold standard is fascist. Why should government have to buy gold to create government money? Cui bono?
I second.
Neil Barofsky is a very impressive guy.
Such articulate self-restraint.
How can he do that? iT’S incredible. I’d have blown up after 2 minutes and sharply said, “Look, how many morons does it take to run a financial TV show? Is it just you all, or do you have a whole team of morons that feed you questions? What am I even doing here? Can the people who watch a show like this even read? If a banker told youze gize that the north pole is now in Indiana, would you believe it?”
I guess that’s why he’s on TV and I’m in the NC Peanut Gallery.
I almost turned it off except for the hot blonde, because she was hot, but she seemed to get a little more sane as time went by. I think she had potential. Maybe it was due to a feminzing influence, but that may be too sentimental,
This is the problem that every individuated consciousness encounters when confronted by a hive mind. It encounters an aggression and a form of inchoate violence, like the fat dude crossing his arms and raising his voice to a slightly aggressive pitch, that was a tell, and I think this is something prompted not so much by dissension with any inherent logic in the discussion, but by a primal fear of individuation itself. A primal fear of that unknown country, where the individual is cast off from the mob and thinks and acts from a higher level of more fully conscious awareness.
Best peanut gallery in the world!
Yes it is.
Totally!
Quite astute, Craazy.
This is a really impressive peanut gallery, most of the time.
I was very impressed by Barofsky’s composure and that he didn’t descend to the level of what’s-his-face. It was pretty clear that they hadn’t read his book and were probably only poorly briefed about it — but the first thing that went through my mind was Upton Sinclair’s dictum that you can’t get someone to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. I mean, the points he was making were really elementary. The second thing was that regardless, Barofsky’s discussion was still too nuanced for the kind of show they are running. And that now I kinda want to read his book.
I couldn’t get past that either craazyman.
After the second time that heffalump POS interrupted him I kept wondering if that tie was a clip on.
What maybe got lost in that dialogue, or maybe I can’t seem to remember over the years of countless fraud and scandals, was where did that TARP money go to ?
It seems to me one of the reasons why lending was tight was the banks were taking this TARP money and…? Loading up on commodities ?
Buffering their capital reserves to pass Timmy’s stress tests and not lending out. They really never went toward their goal of supporting toxic assets as the FRB had already instituted a number of programs designed to do just that.
Scary was watching the blonde talking head pounce on the notion that GMAC (Ally) was anything other than an automotive bailout. It almost sucked the air from the room, she was quick.
Ally has cast off ResCap into bankruptcy, there’ll probably be no serious enquiry as to any transfer of funds between Ally and ResCap.
Timmy is selling any and all TARP assets at rock bottom, close out, going out of business speed, and hopefully pressing the GSEs sweep ALL quarterly profits into Treasury.
When you are $20 Trillion +/- in the hole, isn’t referring to yourself as the “Treasury” a bit of a misnomer ?
random thoughts and observations for this am
re: Whatever Happened to Iraqi Oil?
Iraq’s south oil exports head for record in August
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/20/iraq-oil-exports-idUSL6E8JKAYB20120820?feedType=RSS&feedName=rbssEnergyNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+reuters/USenergyNews+%28News+/+US+/+Energy%29
(oil cos cutting separate deals with the kurds)
Dear rjs;
That last comment was the best part. “Oil cos cut separate deal with the Kurds.”
There you see the future of world governance. Split up political entities into smaller and smaller segments until the only remaining ‘power’ players are the business and financial hubs.
As for the Kurds though, watch out for the Turks. They have a long standing antipathy towards ‘Kurdistan’ in any guise. Don’t be surprised to see some sort of ‘Joint Offensive Against Terrorists’ in that region involving Turkey, Iraq, and Iran one day.
I’ve been thinking that too.
so, the chinese consumer is not as stupid as Congress. ouch, that has got to hurt…
to protect and serve nonperforming capital, and the middle class, if it serves capital, in a police state, birth to school to drugs to prison to death…
from the perspective of the looking glass, you have a fulcrum or a pendulum, on time or in time, integral or derivative, unkown or known, labor or capital, etc or etc. you are or are not the and gate. you may decouple at will; capital cannot. the best the empire can do is hide behind make-up.
of course capital is insecure, irrationally seeking security in numbers. of course it will employ Family Law to kidnap your children, the school system to brainwash them, and jail to deter them, in an effort to keep you in time, instead of on time.
you cannot choose your parents, but you can choose to work intelligently, with spirit. before you run off, half-cocked, think about the demographic equilibrium required for your application. 2 kids ensures bipolar positive feedback, but all couples cannot have 5 kids.
ignore nature and it will ignore you, until it doesn’t.
This is worth watching again if you haven’t already to noticed how the appointed imprimatured brains for the status quo are TO BE respected -in this case -being paid for number of words published.
Hendry has since promised his clients to stay away from media which he admits doesn’t bother him -as well it shouldn’t.
Hendry’s performance like so many in his class of workers (I mean that seriously) who can think clearly and put it on the line every day are not usually visible in the media. That’s why this is a special treat. Jeffrey Sachs especially comes across like the phony he is -unaccustomed to anything other than bullying and torturing his graduate students (if he shows up) into believing his economics metrics prove something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DN_eZHxa8Q
Even though this is not CNBC or their ilk; here, the same ‘ethics’ prevail. Who’s in who’s out, whose ideas must be respected, and who can be dismissed -loudly if possible -to please those ‘higher powers’ always watching their appointed over paid media minions; over paid to keep them in line.
If we respond to rudeness and bad manners by yelling insults and obscenities, how are we different from those we seek to correct? This will improve them?
Better to do something constructive, or at least civil in its style.
Dear Jesse;
This is indeed a point of contention.
My experience has been that there are some groups and affiliations that simply hide behind civility, while busily working away at whatever their pet agenda is.
The basic assumption of ‘civilized discourse’ is a shared respect for rational debate. I would posit that these ‘agitators’ had finally realized that their opponents were deaf to debate; the hallmark of authoritarian thinking.
Lots of political movements in the past had to eventually give up on words and turn to deeds. A certain New World political entity comes to mind.
Malviolo: “Come, let us to the Law.”
Eutope : “Why sayest thou this?”
Malviolo: “It was ever thus; refined persons resort to speech, the base turn to clods.”
“Some people don’t deserve the compliment of rational argument.”
“Civility” is the tyrant’s greatest tool. One would never accuse Barack Obama of incivility, huh? One might accuse the smug bastard of war crimes, of shredding the Constitution through NDAA and his Orwellian war on whistleblowers, terror and drugs.
But one would never acccuse him of incivility.
And we’re supposed to take our lessons from that?
I’ll pass.
Fuck Obama. Vote for Jill Stein or Rocky Anderson or Virgil Goode or Gary Johnson or… or… or…
A.B.O.O.R. – anyone but Obama or Romney
“Some people don’t deserve the compliment of rational argument.”
“Civility” is the tyrant’s greatest tool. One would never accuse Barack Obama of incivility, huh? One might accuse the smug bastard of war crimes, of shredding the Constitution through NDAA and his Orwellian war on whistleblowers, terror and drugs.
But one would never accuse him of incivility.
And we’re supposed to take our lessons from that?
I’ll pass.
Fuck Obama. Vote for Jill Stein or Rocky Anderson or Virgil Goode or Gary Johnson or… or… or…
A.B.O.O.R. – anyone but Obama or Romney
For King and Country.
I don’t accept “civility” as a value; it’s a rhetorical stance, like any other; implying that I do accept civility as a tactic.
Asking questions is civil, and often works a lot better (for a desired outcome) and shouting or snark (and I’ve done a lot of both in my time).
“and shouting of snark” . . .”and” = freudian slip?
:)
The Onion piece was a bit premature, alas.
Multiple People Shot, 1 Dead Near Empire State Building
… and 19 people were shot in Chicago. http://touch.chicagotribune.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-71939340/
… but retail rather than wholesale. Just another night …
Rather deceptive headline on the Reuters site: “10 shot, two dead near New York’s Empire State Building”. Reading into the story, the “10 shot” were as a result of police shooting at the gunman and hitting bystanders. Wonder what Mayor Mike will have to say about that.
Sooner or later gun violence will result in a shootout between gun carrying civilians attempting to protect themselves from the bad guys. The government identify these deaths as noncombat.
I’m just wondering if you know how profound your comment is.
Wow. Going postal in an era of over reactive policing.
“The two officers and Mr. Johnson were about eight feet apart.
One law enforcement official said that based on the preliminary investigation, it appears that most or all of the bystanders were struck by one of the 16 police bullets – or fragments or ricochets from those rounds – that were fired by the two officers who confronted Mr. Johnson.”
The guy is 8 feet away, and the cops hit 8 people. Is it some kind of rule? One person per foot?
The NYPD never ceases to amaze me.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/nyregion/several-people-shot-one-fatally-outside-empire-state-building.html
“The guy is 8 feet away, and the cops hit 8 people. Is it some kind of rule? ”
Hey, practice makes perfect, gotta practice sometime !
lol
Ward of taxpayers, AIG, reportedly deploying TARP dollars for conspicuous consumption at the office — with abandon. Unlimited Starbux every day at work is pretty amazing, along with regular golf outings mid-week (all expenses reimbursed, natch), and more.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/perks-galore-lucky-workers-bailed-out-aig-article-1.1143347
captive employees
It seems faculty are leaving UVA in droves. Things must be really bad if they think that VCU would be a better place to park compared to UVA.
Got a link on UVa “droves”? I remember that talking point during the putsch, but the number of actual departures one could count on the fingers of one hand (albeit they were prominent faculty members IIRC).
That animal in the picture is a flying squirrel. Being nocturnal (note the large eyes) makes them good pets for people who stay up all night and sleep all day. You used to be able to buy them in Florida pet shops, but now they are protected.
Thanks. I wondered how a baby rabbit got up a tree. It’s too cute to be a regular tough-guy squirrel.
Politico is priceless. “some of Obama’s toughest problems” :
– illegal mass evictions?
– wilful killing of noncombatants and hors de combat detainees?
– pandemic looting and tunneling by financial institutions?
– institutionalized trading in influence and abuse of function?
– Convention Aginst Torture Articles 12 and 16?
– serial aggression?
– loss of the state’s residual legitimacy?
– collapse of an economy based on extortionate debt peonage?
No.
– Michelle Obama’s image.
– messaging on health care reform.
I love Politico for what it is, and not for any imagined qualities…
When China masters the technique for mass-producing ghost cities cheaply, she will start exporting them all over the world.
That’s my guess of how they will get out of their problem.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-18680217
I guess the Onion’s spook headline “Nation Celebrates Full Week without Deadly Mass Shooting” was a little premature. Our daughter just called from NYC, where she traveled yesterday, to assure us she was okay. I wish the same could have been said for the people who were shot.
Coverage. Irony can be really, really painful.
Mark Thoma’s repost of 1996 Krugman on the illogic of gold was good. I can’t help thinking that the big R pr to appoint a gold commisar is only meant to cajole Ron Paul’s delegates away.
It’s like the Republicans, for some reason, have been unleashed this cycle. They can finally just say what they believe and go for it. Fetal personhood? Check. Gold standard? Check. And so forth. I suppose debtor’s prisons and making slavery a matter of “state’s rights” can’t be far off. With the Democrats devising the appropriate sugar coating for everything, of course.
* * *
Drags the Overton Window right again, with Obama and the Dems cheerfully following along. I still think Romney’s just a hedge, and Obama’s in, but the 1% win either way.
A gold standard would replace government counterfeiting of private money with private counterfeiting of government money.
It would also preclude Steve Keen’s universal bailout so as to lock in relative wealth disparity.
A gold standard is stupid and fascist. It just shows how bad our current money system is that it is even considered?
Lambert,
I’ve been thinking about the R’s. It seems like the right time for that party to be taken over! It’s platform is held by what, about 15%? of the population? That leaves a lot of people who must be awfully upset. I know the convention is uparmed to the teeth but it’s time for a good old fashioned Republican riot! This may be what the FBI means by anarchists.
Thanx for the update on Sunny Sheu. Golia must have the dirt on the entire NYPD and then some. Also speaking of crime going free: thanx for Victor Fleischer’s audit of Mitt’s and Bain’s illegal practice of claiming management fees as capital gains. I hope there are followups to both of the above.
I also liked Rick Bookstaber’s Will the Unemployed Really Find Jobs Making Robots? No. Robots will make robots. Unless we dispense with efficiency. But who will argue with the Japanese robot that can debone a chicken in a tenth the time? Just us chickens?
“MI. ObamaCare: Gov. Snyder is abandoning setting up a state-run health insurance exchange system after repeatedly failing to convince fellow Rs to authorize [it]. Instead, the governor will pursue a joint partnership with the federal government to create an online portal for customers to shop for health insurance.”
the state of michigan legislature is far more wacky than the governor. remember, this is the state that brought u bart stupak.
re: Foxy Ladies, Atlantic
“There you are, a renowned expert on nuclear proliferation/ immigration policy/the Middle East, obliged to regard yourself in the mirror and ask: Will I really go on national television looking like a cross between Captain Jack Sparrow and a waitress from Hooters?”
Yes, yes you will.
“this is Steve Liesman’s e-mail address: steve.liesman@nbcuni.com”
LoL. Post that on Zero Hedge and he’d need a new address…
re:IA. “Fundraising appeals: “You want loyal Rs to ‘defend liberty’ by supporting the IA GOP’s efforts to get [ME]‘s Ron Paul delegates into Tampa? I can’t imagine the IA Ds asking me for money to make sure delegates elected halfway across the country were able to wave the flag at the 2008 DNCon.” There’s your problem…”
I’m no libertarian, but I still hope Ron Paul disrupts the stupid totalitarians’ g-d convention.
The American economy is going nowhere. Europe is tottering on the brink, and China is softening. It seems like a year or two now that I have been writing those lines or lines very similar to them. It’s like a slow train wreck. A really, really slow train wreck. Just because it’s slow doesn’t mean it won’t happen. This is not like some paradox of Zeno of Elea where we never really get there.
It might be useful to start charting out possible scenarios for when the crash actually occurs. I think this is why I am so harsh toward Establishment liberals, as well as liberal economists and bloggers. Both in the economics and the politics this has been coming on for 4 years now. Yet during the whole of that time, they have dithered and ignored. We chronicle at sites like this one the daily toll of kleptocracy, wealth inequality, and class war, but liberal economists continue to act as if the problem is bad actors and not a bad system. Even economists like Bill Black don’t plomb the depths of the criminality involved. None conceive of it as an elite problem, that is not some in the elites but the elite system itself. Meanwhile the liberal bloggers signed up with Obama and the Democrats on their illiberal version of healthcare. And despite being screwed over and fundamentally betrayed on it, they never held Obama and the Democrats to account, and that was 2 1/2 years ago.
Since then we have had a few developments like the Occupy movement but it never really gelled or built to a size to be an effective political movement. And there has been Jill Stein, but without a mass movement behind her, her candidacy is marginal. But elsewhere there has been little movement. Liberal economists still won’t address the real economy anymore than their neoclassical counterparts. Liberals never broke with the Democrats. There has been no organization, no building of an alternative to the Democrats, no creation of an effective, even nominal, opposition to them.
By now liberal economists should have had a solid, elaborated theory and history of kleptocracy. They should have taken the offense against their quack colleagues. Politically, there should have been some progressive opposition candidates in the 2010 elections. And by now candidates in all districts and a viable Presidential candidate in this election cycle. Instead we have nothing. Liberal economists continue to critique bits and pieces of the world’s economic landscape and give advice about what Obama or Merkel “should” do. And politically, except for Stein’s marginal candidacy, nothing.
In light of this, I really think I haven’t been harsh enough. We have never had that much time to deal with the problems we have. Yet our “A team” liberals have wasted literally years and still haven’t taken the first steps on what needs to be done. The result is that the train wreck continues and our political scene is dominated by Robama and Obomney.
Hugh,
This is also my experience. There is not a clear, liberal explanation of what is happening economically which has gained wide currency. People are so scared and confused. People are angry but everything is jumbled about that anger. It appears mostly directed at other citizens, not where it belongs.
I’ve been struck by how deeply the idea that if you lost your job or house, etc. it’s your fault remains, even after 2008. Both my extremely conservative neighbors and the socialist party members in my area have told me that people who lost their house were just lazy, bought too much house and by god, now WE all have to pay for it. The fact that two groups of people who should hold widely disperate views of this situation, completely agree upon it, tells me something is terribly wrong.
The sense of doom is everywhere but the idea of what is going wrong seems all bizarre, not reality based. We need liberals to tell the truth. Too many aren’t. That is shameful and it must change, right now.
I remember when you started commenting on NC. I had just been here for about a year and had read lots of stuff that made sense of the world-for-the-first-time. Not that I was an intellectual virgin; I had always been skeptical. But then I read you in your critique of Bill Black and I thought you had not been patient enough with him. I still believe he is the only man we have operating within the legal system as a professional who could effectively prosecute the financial criminals. But now I am beginning to agree with you that the system, both legal and professional, is not working. It is almost an undeniable fact.
In large part, there is no consensus among liberals with respect to what Merkel “should” do.
Personally, I believe that Merkel should do what’s best for the average German. This would translate into an EXPLICIT warning to the ECB that it has no right to monetize debt.
Other “liberals” believe in this ill-fated, democracy-supressing construct known as the Eurozone. They believe that the collective “Eurozone” is more important than the quaint “nation-state”. Therefore, they have no problem with debt consolidation leading to a United States of Europe.
Drones at the RNC!
http://www.emptywheel.net/2012/08/24/dear-johns-remember-the-government-doesnt-destroy-incidentally-collected-intelligence/
Suggested link.
I usually go to the Drones for the best ‘buzz’ at any big to do.
The Starvation Phase for Egypt is about to begin.
http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE87M05020120823?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+reuters/AFRICATopNews+%28News+/+AFRICA+/+Top+News%29
Peak oil is a bitch.
Didn’t take long for the global oligarchy to hit back at Morsi, for having fired their boy Tantawi.
Possible grave of King Richard III found under a parking lot.
http://news.yahoo.com/could-englands-king-richard-iii-lie-under-car-121230081.html
Fitting if it were a handicapped stall…
ultimately, they must have a negative feedback circuit to nature, which only you can provide, no if your and gate is compromised. the equilibrium will depend upon your time distance to capital when you complete the initializing circuit.
Yves, I hate GS as much as the next guy, but that FP link is a bullshit hit piece full of innuendo and fluff but devoid of any facts or substance. I would have thought someone like you would see through that.
Maybe I’m naive, but I’d like to understand how banks can actually game the food market. Surely at some point someone has to take delivery, right? The banks sure as hell don’t want to. If the banks as speculators are driving up prices, and don’t want to take delivery, they need to find a buyer for all that wheat. If you claim the price is above what it should be, then someone who actually needs the wheat, like a food producer, won’t be willing to pay that price and the bank will lose money. So how does it work?
The number of future contracts can exceed the physical quantities available by 10, 20, or more times. This paper volume because it is so much larger than the physical volume determines price. Non-commercial financial traders like Goldman can trade these back and forth among themselves jacking up the price. When it comes time to settle, they can take delivery and store, roll the contract over to the following month, or settle it for cash.
Effectively what they are really doing is distorting the price and taking a cut of the action in the market.
up until the 70s, we had an agreement for the ac business cycle. capital had a superintendent and labor had a superintemdent. labor agreed to accept the middle class for 50% trade union membership. with the dc computer, capital felt it could replace labor with Fed monetary policy. labor has since lined up the capital dc black hole with nature.
Madison homeless- The city ‘leaders’ don’t want to help homeless people or help them get back on their feet. They just want them to vanish. There’s a plot of land on East Washington that was supposed to be a grocery store but has been empty for years and there are no plans for it; the city won’t let homeless people camp there. They won’t let them stay warm on these air vents by the city-county government building anymore. They have no problem spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on authoritarian institutions that are more about behavior control and keeping track of them than it is about helping them.
The way that Madison liberals treat the homeless tells you everything you need to know about them. They don’t give a fuck about anything but reveling in their privilege. Even when they do something charitable it’s just to make themselves look benevolent.
Their philosophy seems to be that if you make homelessness as unpleasant as possible, there will be more incentive not to be homeless. Homeless people are an example, a tool that capitalism uses to keep you working harder for less wages and shutting your mouth if you know what’s good for you.
the only thing you missed was the addictions of the hypocrite benevolents and all the profit made by the non-profits turning over the soil.
re How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis:
He who withholds grain, the people will curse him, but blessing will be on the head of him who sells it. Proverbs 11:26
I guess Goldman wishes to be cursed? Or to test God?
while I’m at it, another reason I still love Canada is that the women there put product out the door with men at the same pay, instead of trying to justify “equivalent” pay for pushing paper to justify the dead weight of their bosses. of course the Proctor & Gambles are destroying the work ethic up there just as fast as they can.
Shooting from the hip, because I haven;t read around much, but the Samsung ruling is a bi of a shocker, isn’t it? Not that the US legal system is supposed to be fair and unbiased, these days…
What is truth? An abstract noun, of a logical construction, philosophers should stay away from this and stick to something their own size, something small.
“Truth” is whatever the 0.01 say it is.
I’m walking along the edge of a cliff chatting with one of the peasants (a typical 99 percenter, full of good will, naive, gullible, trusting).
He’s all worked up about something, going on and on about the latest news item, whatever bullshit we had Ezra Klein and Company feed them in the latest news cycle. It doesn’t take much to keep the peasants occupied.
Suddenly I feel an impulse to push him over, which I promptly do. I acted on impulse, but I certainly intended to push him over, and may even have devised a little ruse to achieve it.
Yet even then I did not act deliberately, for I never (stopped to) ask myself whether to do it or not. For a member of the 0.01, pushing a peasant over a cliff is like breathing.
So there he is, the peasant’s lying there dead, at the bottom of the cliff. Is it even “true” that I pushed him over?
Not unless I say it is. He must have slipped and fallen.
Ha ha ha
We are the Peter Pinguid Society, we are the 99.9 percent.
Of course that last line should be:
We are the Peter Pinguid Society, we are the 0.01 percent.
“we are the 99.9 percent. ”
A fatal error, Sirrah Peter.
Good up-to-date documentary on the Assange/Wikileaks caper from Australia’s ABC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=u2EaE80TiiQ
I left a comment on the “Will the Unemployed Really Find Jobs Making Robots?” blog post by Richard Bookstaber which has not been published (needs review):
Labor saving technology and increase efficiency is nothing new, it’s been happening a long time. In fact, all of human history consists of almost nothing but the gradual improvement of the human condition as the results of improvements of technology.
What’s new (or actually repeating after an absence) is the concentration of the BENEFITS of increased efficiency into the hands of very few people. CEO and C office income have risen explosively in the last decade despite the clear evidence that these same people had little to nothing to do with creating or implementing this very same technology i.e. the pay of those people actually creating increased efficiency has been frozen since the late seventies. Indeed, it’s quite common now that CEOs and C office income increases while the company is going bust.
This complete argument about “robots” displacing workers is a SHAM meant to distract from the real problems of de-regulation, lax or no enforcement of existing regulations, the complete failure of corporate “governance” and the greed of a few which has resulted in the destruction of the American and the world economy. Workers are, and have always been very good about learning the skill sets required to get the work done. History has shown us that for every worker displaced by technology other opportunities quickly take the place of the older job. This is not about robots any more than ancient workers were displaced by the invention of the wheel, it’s about greed, fraud, corruption used to increased the concentration of wealth into the hands of very few ultra rich crooks.
correction to “NY. Fracking: “The viability of shale gas production in New York may hinge on a critical policy question: ”
Should read “NY. Fracking: “The viability of shale gas production in New York may hinge on a critical policy question: Will the State require its citizens to ingest known radioactive alpha-emitters in fracking-polluted drinking water, at some level, to increase govt. funding ? Internal exposure required. “
The New York Times piece on Vietnam’s property meldown gived incorrect information on the country’s population. It’s 85.8 mln according to the Vietnamese census of 2009, with growth rate of 1.05% per year, well at most it’s 88 to 89 mln now. The CIA world fact book’s number is 91.5 mln. Why, is that a mistake or what ?