Down a whole new rabbit hole

Chris Floyd points out the problem with one of the Serious folks hopping on the Obandwagon into advisory roles:

Just to be clear, Barack Obama's brand-new foreign policy advisor, Colin Powell, wants you to know that he continues to support the decision to launch a war of aggression against Iraq in March 2003 -- an act that, according to principles established by the United States and its allies at Nuremberg in 1945, is a war crime punishable by death.

In fact, the only thing that Powell -- the wise and steady statesman, the "grown-up," the "moderate" -- can find to criticize in the conduct of the war he helped launch is the fact that it wasn't savage enough to begin with...

I'll let you read on- it gets better.

Then there's his impetuous- but again Serious VP'date:

..."Mark my words," the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. "It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

"I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate," Biden said to Emerald City supporters, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities. "And he's gonna need help. And the kind of help he's gonna need is, he's gonna need you - not financially to help him - we're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right..."

Oh, I wouldn't say that. You can pretend to be as moderate as you want, but you look pretty Right to me.

Priorities of Diversion

The FBI can't be bothered with financial fraud investigations because it's too busy eavesdropping on anti-war Catholic nuns.

Result: Bu$hie's Boom was a really good time to do the loan shark thing.

...So depleted are the ranks of the F.B.I.’s white-collar investigators that executives in the private sector say they have had difficulty attracting the bureau’s attention in cases involving possible frauds of millions of dollars.

Since 2004, F.B.I. officials have warned that mortgage fraud posed a looming threat, and the bureau has repeatedly asked the Bush administration for more money to replenish the ranks of agents handling nonterrorism investigations, according to records and interviews. But each year, the requests have been denied, with no new agents approved for financial crimes, as policy makers focused on counterterrorism.

According to previously undisclosed internal F.B.I. data, the cutbacks have been particularly severe in staffing for investigations into white-collar crimes like mortgage fraud, with a loss of 625 agents, or 36 percent of its 2001 levels.

Over all, the number of criminal cases that the F.B.I. has brought to federal prosecutors — including a wide range of crimes like drug trafficking and violent crime — dropped 26 percent in the last seven years, going from 11,029 cases to 8,187, Justice Department data showed...

Justice Department data, which include cases from other agencies, like the Secret Service and Postal Service, illustrate the impact. Prosecutions of frauds against financial institutions dropped 48 percent from 2000 to 2007, insurance fraud cases plummeted 75 percent, and securities fraud cases dropped 17 percent.

Statistics from a research group at Syracuse University, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, using somewhat different methodology and looking only at the F.B.I., show an even steeper decline of nearly 50 percent in overall white-collar crime prosecutions in the same period.

In addition to the investigations into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the F.B.I. is carrying out investigations of American International Group and Lehman Brothers, and it has opened more than 1,500 other mortgage-related investigations. Some F.B.I. officials worry privately that the trillion-dollar federal bailout of the financial industry may itself become a problem because it contains inadequate controls to deter fraud...

Deter fraud?

The bitter truth is that the agents in the field had a good bead on 9-11 before it even happened, but that the white collar criminals that own Washington called the dogs off the hunt.

There really just aren't that many people out for the Islamic Jihad joy ride. So to make up for the difference, justify their budget, and help their political enablers, the Feds decided to lean on all those traitorous liberals instead. Besides, Dear Leader sez the Constitution's just a piece of paper, anyway.

Derivatives

The op-ed page of The New York Pravda finally sees the shape of the beast slouching its way into town:


Holdings of the Carlyle Group, via nutsandvolts

By now everyone knows that reckless and even predatory mortgage lending provoked the financial meltdown. But bad lending did not stop there. The easy money also fed a corporate buyout binge, with private equity firms borrowing huge sums to buy up public companies and pay themselves big dividends.

The process was much like a homeowner who borrowed big for a house and then refinanced to pull out cash. In corporate buyouts, however, the newly private company was left with the fat loan, while the private equity partners got the cash.

In keeping with the mania of the era, banks lowered their lending standards as they competed fiercely to make buyout loans. Lenders also did not worry much about being repaid, because they made money by slicing and dicing the buyout loans and selling them off in pieces to investors.

All of this means that the country needs to brace for yet another round of trouble: a potentially sharp increase in corporate bankruptcies. This time, government officials and Congress must not be taken by surprise.

So far relatively few companies have gone bust. But that is not necessarily a hopeful sign. Instead, loose lending has very likely allowed many troubled companies to postpone a day of reckoning — but not forever.

Under the lax terms of many buyout loans (deemed “covenant lite”), borrowers could delay payments, say, by issuing i.o.u.’s in lieu of payment or adding the interest to the loan balance rather than paying it. But when the loans come due and need to be repaid or refinanced, terms will no longer be so easy. The likely result will be defaults and bankruptcies.
'

Carlyle Group fund distribution, again via nutsandvolts

A rash of corporate bankruptcies would obviously be very bad news for employees and lenders, and for stockholders at troubled public companies, like the carmakers. It could also rock the financial system anew.

As with mortgages, huge side bets have been placed on the performance of corporate debt via derivative securities, like credit default swaps. Derivatives are unregulated, so no one can be sure how widely a big or unexpected default would reverberate through the system.

Various measures indicate elevated default risk at a range of businesses, including retailers, media companies, restaurants and manufacturers. A survey released this month by the Federal Reserve and other regulators is especially sobering.

It looked at $2.8 trillion in large syndicated corporate loans held by American banks at the end of June. Compared with a year earlier, the share of loans rated as problematic had risen from 5 percent to 13.4 percent...

You know, American banks aren't the problem holders of the quadrillion dollars of derivatives in question. American banks, despite the manipulations of the Clinton-Bu$h years, still had a few rules. But never fear. An Amerikan bank now runs is your government.

Anti-American Activities

Financial workers at Wall Street's top banks are to receive pay deals worth more than $70bn (£40bn), a substantial proportion of which is expected to be paid in discretionary bonuses, for their work so far this year - despite plunging the global financial system into its worst crisis since the 1929 stock market crash, the Guardian has learned.

Staff at six banks including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are in line to pick up the payouts despite being the beneficiaries of a $700bn bail-out from the US government that has already prompted criticism. The government's cash has been poured in on the condition that excessive executive pay would be curbed...

The sums that continue to be spent by Wall Street firms on payroll, payoffs and, most controversially, bonuses appear to bear no relation to the losses incurred by investors in the banks. Shares in Citigroup and Goldman Sachs have declined by more than 45% since the start of the year. Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley have fallen by more than 60%. JP MorganChase fell 6.4% and Lehman Brothers has collapsed.

At one point last week the Morgan Stanley $10.7bn pay pot for the year to date was greater than the entire stock market value of the business. In effect, staff, on receiving their remuneration, could club together and buy the bank.

In the first nine months of the year Citigroup, which employs thousands of staff in the UK, accrued $25.9bn for salaries and bonuses, an increase on the previous year of 4%. Earlier this week the bank accepted a $25bn investment by the US government as part of its bail-out plan.

At Goldman Sachs the figure was $11.4bn, Morgan Stanley $10.73bn, JP Morgan $6.53bn and Merrill Lynch $11.7bn. At Merrill, which was on the point of going bust last month before being taken over by Bank of America, the total accrued in the last quarter grew 76% to $3.49bn. At Morgan Stanley, the amount put aside for staff compensation also grew in the last quarter to the end of August by 3% to $3.7bn.

Days before it collapsed into bankruptcy protection a month ago Lehman Brothers revealed $6.12bn of staff pay plans in its corporate filings. These payouts, the bank insisted, were justified despite net revenue collapsing from $14.9bn to a net outgoing of $64m...

[tip o'teh tinfoil to Chris Floyd]

The Barbie the Barbarian Republicans know how to end all this class warfare.

...Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) attacked the patriotism of Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), based on his alleged relationship to former Weather Underground member William Ayers and the values of Obama’s former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. “I’m very concerned that he may have anti-American views,” said Bachmann. “That’s what the American people are concerned about.”

She then went further, suggesting that all liberal views — held by people such as Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, professors, and all Americans who identify themselves as “liberals” — are “anti-American.” When host Chris Matthews, stunned by her remarks, asked Bachmann how many people in Congress hold anti-American views, she responded, “You’ll have to ask them.”

Bachmann called on the media to conduct investigations into the anti-American activities of members of Congress, similar to Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s discredited House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in the 1950s. “I think people would love to see an exposé like that,” she claimed...

Sarah Palin knows the real Amerika are all McCainiacs as is we're told the real Virginia, not the parts where all the people live.

It's good to know some Americans are a little alarmed by the Amerikans who consider them traitors. It seems like about a century and a half ago the country was pretty geographically split along lines like this. The difference now is the split is nothing like geographical.

You can put your mind into the ass end of nowhere no matter where you live. You can find people intentionally living in this different world where Rush and Savage and Hannity are the Prophets whether you're in San Francisco, or Nashville, or Kennebunkport.

Well, maybe not Kennebunkport. There, the Fox News crew and brownshirt clones aren't considered Prophets. They're just the hired help.

What's good for Kennebunkport is good for Amerika

The Company has Chosen. It's Obama, until the amnesia sets in. It's good for business. It's bound to give Jeb Bu$h a chance in 2012.

Thinking conservatives: MIAs of the GOP
Paranoid, rage-driven, xenophobic nuts are taking over the Republican Party.
Rosa Brooks
October 16, 2008

...One by one, the nation's more reputable conservatives have been edging away from the Republican presidential ticket. It started with John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. Thinking conservatives -- as of a couple of months ago, there were still a few left -- were distinctly underwhelmed. In the New York Times, David Brooks chastised McCain for "throw[ing] away standards of experience and prudence" by picking Palin. In the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer said Palin was "not ready" for prime time. David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, complained that Palin had "thoroughly -- and probably irretrievably -- proven that she is not up to the job." In the National Review, conservative columnist Kathleen Parker said Palin was "clearly out of her league" and urged her to "bow out."

For liberals initially alarmed by McCain's brief post-convention poll bounce, this was fun. And as conservative disdain spread to the whole GOP ticket, the fun got even funner.

In the Washington Post, George Will slammed McCain for his "fact-free slander," "substitution of vehemence for coherence" and "boiling moralism." On MSNBC, former Reagan speechwriter and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan admitted that she's not sure who she'll be voting for this November: "Ahh. Umm. I'm thinking it through."

Then -- more fun -- some conservatives began to actually endorse Barack Obama. Wick Allison, a former publisher of the National Review, wrote that today's brand of conservatism "has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse. ... Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history."

Christopher Hitchens, who has spent the last five years deriding the Democratic position on Iraq as that of "the surrender faction," endorsed Obama too, concluding "the Republican Party has invited not just defeat but discredit this year, and ... both its nominees for the highest offices in the land should be decisively repudiated."

Whee! Incredibly, the fun continued. Christopher Buckley, National Review columnist and son of conservative icon William F. Buckley, also endorsed Obama: "Obama has in him ... the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. ... And so, for the first time ... I'll be pulling the Democratic lever in November." For his pains, Buckley received hundreds of vituperative e-mails from former admirers on the right. Effectively, he said Tuesday, he's been "fatwaed by the conservative movement." He resigned from the National Review...

Obviously, Poppy doesn't like Junior's friends.

Even Fat Tony's Court has lost patience with their clumsy attempts to rig the $election.

WASHINGTON — The United States Supreme Court on Friday overturned a lower court’s order requiring state officials in Ohio to supply information that would have made it easier to challenge prospective voters. The decision was a setback for Ohio Republicans, who had sued to force the Ohio secretary of state, a Democrat, to provide information about database mismatches to county officials...

Clearly, if the $upremes won't back the McCain-Palin campaign to steal the $election, they are in serious trouble. Maybe Fat Tony doesn't like the idea of a Fourth Branch without Family connections.

However it falls out, the Rethuglicans aren't alone in trouble.



Beluga whales are now placed on the endangered species list, and of course Sarah Palin objects.

Nice timing, that. She might as well come out against puppies and kittens in an attempt to gain a monopoly on adorableness.

The fat lady hasn't quite sung over Mc$ame's attempt to gain the Oval Office, but the Business Party clearly is unsettled by the vision of Todd Palin attempting to Dom the Fed in the same hallways where Junior choked on pretzels and Slick Willie ordered pizza.

The Neo NeoCon

The more we can Change the more we stay the $ame...

Glenn Greenwald:

Here's an exchange from the chat held by The Washington Post's Dana Priest today (emphasis in original):

Evanston, Ill.: Hey Dana, why does McCain keep saying that Russia committed unprovoked aggression against Georgia? Nobody outside of America believes that. Why won't anyone call him out on that?

Dana Priest: The person who would need to do that is Obama and he doesn't do that -- or a lesser version of that -- because, I suspect, he does not want to look weak vis a vis a resurgent Russia.

At first glance, this seems like a fairly ordinary point, but while the general pattern is far from new, it is still quite remarkable. One of the two major presidential candidates is repeatedly lying to the American public about one of the most significant geopolitical events of the year. The other candidate has adopted the lie because doing so is more politically expedient than refuting it.

As a result, the vast bulk of the American citizenry has a completely false understanding of a war that took place this year between our "stalwart ally" and our New/Old Scary Enemy (namely, that the New Scary Enemy launched an unprovoked attack on our sweet and innocent democratic ally). That lie is then used to depict the New Enemy as a Grave Threat and to justify proposed NATO membership for the victimized ally, an extremely dangerous policy which all four major candidates, with varying degrees of qualification, fundamentally endorse (thus further eliminating any discussion, debate or dissent over it)...

...The war-supporting, basically neoconservative Washington Post Editorial Page just posted its endorsement of Obama for President -- one issued "without ambivalence. " It heaps praise on McCain ("There are few public figures we have respected more over the years than Sen. John McCain") but notes that "the choice is made easy in part by Mr. McCain's disappointing campaign, above all his irresponsible selection of a running mate who is not ready to be president." Along the way, the Editorial includes this bit of standard inanity about Georgia:

But Mr. Obama, as anyone who reads his books can tell, also has a sophisticated understanding of the world and America's place in it. He, too, is committed to maintaining U.S. leadership and sticking up for democratic values, as his recent defense of tiny Georgia makes clear.

Obama has assured the establishment that he is one of them and largely endorses its fundamental values. His position on Russia-Georgia was probably an important part of that effort. As indicated, one can question whether establishment support of that kind is necessary or desirable (and one can question the extent to which Obama will govern in accord with his campaign persona/rhetoric), but it is Obama's willingness to take positions like this which have enabled him to secure that approval.

Can you say "Set Up"? The Company views Obama as simply clearing the way for Jeb Bu$h in 2012. You know Jeb, the smart Bu$h.

McCain has always annoyed the Bu$hies, and they view this $election as their final humiliating send-off to a man who's obviously too ill to be preznit. Can you say "Invited Onward"?

What was this "Recovery"?

It isn't just people in Michigan that notice we've been in a Recession ever since Bu$hie stole $election 2000.



Of course, that 3% upswing is an average of what happened to 95% of America and the 5% of Amerika that's Bu$hie's Ba$e.

Pravda has to acknowledge this time on the merry-go-round has been a little different:

... Income for the median household — the one in the dead middle of the income distribution — will probably be lower in 2010 than it was, amazingly enough, a full decade earlier. That hasn’t happened since the 1930s. Already, median pay today is slightly lower than it was in 2000, and by 2010, could end up more than 5 percent lower than its old peak.

...every recent recession has brought an effective pay cut of somewhere between 3 and 7 percent for the typical family. The drop typically happens over a period of about three years, lasting longer than the recession officially does, as pay fails to keep up with inflation.

The recent turmoil — the freezing up of credit markets, the fall in stock markets, the acceleration of layoffs — has made it unlikely that the coming recession will be a particularly mild one.

“The biggest hit will be in 2009,” Nariman Behravesh, the chief economist of Global Insight, a research and forecasting firm, told me, “and it probably won’t be until 2011 until we see any kind of pay gains.”

What will make this recession different, no matter how deep or shallow it is, is that it’s following an expansion in which most families received little or no raise. The median household made $50,200 last year, slightly less than the $50,600 that the equivalent household earned in 2000, according to the Census Bureau. That’s the first time on record that income failed to set a new record in an economic expansion.

Why has it happened? There is no single cause...

...ah, yes, again the perpetrator-less crime $cam. At least Pravda has the story right.

It's an Act of God your Betters are dumping on you, that the $ystem has eaten your complete retirement nest, and if you try to do anything about it, you are engaging in Class War and the $tate will put your name on the Terrorist watch list.

[tip o'teh tinfoil to Lambert]

Magical Thinking

So The New York Pravda today posted summaries of the economic thinking of the two presidential figureheads candidates.

If you want to call it thought, anyway.

Meanwhile, the market seems to be swinging back up on the news that Uncle Sugar has sweetened the deal



The Journal does have the integrity to point out when the greatest upwards swings have occurred:



[tip o'teh tinfoil to Peter of Lone Tree]

For that matter, the Dark Wraith and associates appear to my mind to have legitimate doubts about the real consequences of all the economic responses being postured. After all, this isn't really socialism, the government acting as a resource for the people. It's fascism, with the Company using the resources of the people and privitizing the government.

And I'll let the Master of the Dismal Science deal with the Enlightened Globalism of Nobel Laureate K'thrugman.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

State of the Morons

Bob Herbert is beginning to sound a little pissed:

...The idea that the U.S. won’t even properly develop the skills of young people who could perform at the highest intellectual levels is breathtaking — breathtakingly stupid, that is.

The authors of the study, published in Notices of the American Mathematical Society, concluded that American culture does not value talent in math very highly. I suppose we’re busy with other things, like text-messaging while jay-walking. The math thing is seen as something for Asians and nerds.

Meanwhile, the country is going down the tubes. Felix Rohatyn, who helped lead New York City out of the dark days of the 1970s fiscal crisis, had an article in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books (with co-author Everett Ehrlich) lamenting the sad state of the U.S. infrastructure. Most Americans are oblivious on this issue. We’re like a family that won’t even think about fixing a sagging, leaky roof until it collapses on our heads.

New Orleans was nearly wiped from the map in the Hurricane Katrina nightmare, and 13 people were killed when a bridge in Minneapolis broke apart during rush hour, hurling helpless motorists 60 feet into the Mississippi River. Neither of those disasters was enough of a warning for us to think seriously about infrastructure maintenance, repair and construction.

Could these types of disasters happen again? They’re going to happen again. Mr. Rohatyn reminds us that nearly 30 percent of the nation’s bridges are “structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.”

We haven’t even got sense enough to keep an eye on the water we drink. Citing a report from the American Society of Civil Engineers, Mr. Rohatyn and Mr. Ehrlich write: “Current funding for safe drinking water, amounts to ‘less than 10 percent of the total national requirement.’ ”

A country that refuses to properly educate its young people or to maintain its physical plant is one that has clearly lost its way. Add in the myriad problems associated with unnecessary warfare and a clueless central government that wastes taxpayer dollars by the trillions, and you’ve got a society in danger of becoming completely unhinged.

This is about more than the election of a president in a few weeks. The American people have to decide what kind of country they want.

Do they want one in which the top 1 percent hauled in more than 21 percent of all personal income in 2005? Do they want a country in which, as my former colleague at The Times, David Cay Johnston, has noted: the tax system “now levies the poor, the middle class and even the upper middle class to subsidize the rich”?

Do they want a country in which their democratic freedoms are eroded by a deliberate exploitation of their fear of terrorism, and their earning power is diminished by a crippling dependence on foreign oil?

No, they want to see who's going to be Amerika's Top Model, or Dancing With the Stars, or the latest Amerikan Idol. They want to feel good about themselves without the work-out and diet. They want a candidate they can believe in, instead of a candidate they can evaluate.

Apparently unable to afford the bottle in front of me approach, reel Amerikans seem to be opting for the frontal lobotomy:

...In some ways, Ms. Palin seems like a 2.0 version of George W. Bush — not the deeply unpopular president, but the plain-spoken and energetic campaigner who rose as a political talent in Texas and solidified his appeal in the 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns. Hers, like his, is a with-us-or-against-us message, as when Ms. Palin pledges total solidarity with “good, hard-working, patriotic Americans.”

“For a campaign that says it’s all about the future,” Ms. Palin said to a mix of applause (for her) and boos (for you-know-who) in Richmond, “do you notice that our opponents sure have spent a heck of a lot of time looking to the past and pointing fingers? You look to the past because that’s where you find blame, but we’re joining you and looking to the future, because that’s where you find solutions.”

“America, doggone it, unfortunately we’re deep in debt, and Barack Obama would put us even deeper in debt,” she added a few minutes later. “We’ve got to reverse this. America, we cannot afford another big spender in the White House.”

Ms. Palin’s speeches do not acknowledge that looking at past mistakes is one way to avoid making those mistakes again. And her addresses gloss over some uncomfortable details, like that the most recent big spender in the White House is the Republican now there.

Ms. Palin also rarely ends up in the weeds of policy details on the economy, health care or Iraq. When it comes to generalizing, she can muster awfully strong passion, as in discussing Mr. McCain’s ability to get out of a jam.

“He’s got the guts to confront the $10 trillion debt that the federal government has run up,” Ms. Palin said in Virginia Beach as Mr. McCain looked on with a stiff smile, “and we will balance the budget by the end of our term.”

If there are holes in logic or a lack of specifics in Ms. Palin’s speeches, her audiences tend to fill the absence with gushing affection.

“She’s intelligent, she’s adorable and she has the audacity to speak her mind,” said Ray Gilson of Corapeake, N.C., who attended the Virginia Beach rally. “I’ve never loved a politician like I love her. I want her to be president someday.”

Her mind, now that's real entertainment.

Open Door, the Key, and the Gate

Waiting in the Outer Darkness- or suburb of Anchorage inhabited by white Republicans.

Is there a difference?

Moonlight and Cricketsong

Spirit Warriors for a Death Cult

Check it out...

Bruce WIlson has some questions.

Public Access

b:

...For the next ten years the U.S. will have no human access to space as the Space Shuttle will be retired and no domestic substitute is available.

The U.S. will rent access through Russian capabilities. The revenue from that will increase Russian capabilities.

Fine with me.

How will the U.S.A. First crowd react to that?

Prediction: relatively little reaction. For one thing, their dog-whistlers are not tuned to that pitch. The idea of the Company is that lasers are about to make missiles obsolete, and who really expects the Rooskies or Team Xinhua to do anything we aren't?

Meanwhile, the Black Ops division of the Pentacle Pentagon will continue its covert space program. As will the Rooskies and Team Xinhua, because after all, they're doing all the skull work and the heavy lifting. Space science will be totally abandoned, which is what the Christian Reconstructionists want- until it becomes a politically expedient panic button once again.

Cult Follower

Chris Floyd nails it again:

...Beginning with Margaret Thatcher's election in 1979, government after government -- and party after party -- fell to the onslaught of an extremist faith: the narrow, blinkered fundamentalism of the "Chicago School." Epitomized by its patron saint, Milton Friedman, the rigid doctrine held that an unregulated market would always "correct" itself, because its workings are based on entirely rational and quantifiable principles. This was of course an absurdly reductive and savagely ignorant view of history, money and human nature; but because it flattered the rich and powerful, offering an "intellectual" justification for rapacious greed and ever-widening economic and social inequality, it was adopted as holy writ by the elite and promulgated as public policy.

This radical cult -- a kind of Bolshevism from above -- took its strongest hold in the United States and Britain, and was then imposed on many weaker nations through the IMF-led "Washington Consensus" (more aptly named by Naomi Klein as the "Shock Doctrine"), with devastating and deadly results. (As in Yeltsin's Russia, for example, where life expectancy dropped precipitously and millions of people died premature deaths from poverty, illness, and despair.)

According to the cult, not only were markets to be freed from the constraints placed on them after the world-shattering effects of the Great Depression, but all public spending was to be slashed ruthlessly to the bone. (Although exceptions were always made for the Pentagon war machine.) After all, every dollar spent by a public entity on public services and amenities was a dollar taken away from the private wheeler-dealers who could more usefully employ it in increasing the wealth of the elite -- who would then allow some of their vast profits to "trickle down" to the lower orders.

This was the cult that captured the governments of the United States and Britain (among others), as well as the Republican and Democratic parties, and the Conservative and Labour parties as well. And for almost thirty years, its ruthless doctrines have been put into practice. Regulation and oversight of financial markets were systematically stripped away or rendered toothless. Essential public services were sold off, for chump change, to corporate interests. Public spending on anything other than making war, threatening war and profiting from war was pared back or eliminated. Such public spending that did remain was forever under threat and derided, like the remnants of some pagan faith surviving in isolated backwaters.

Year after year, the ordinary citizens were told by their governments: we have no money to spend on your needs, on your communities, on your infrastructure, on your health, on your children, on your environment, on your quality of life. We can't do those kinds of things any more.

Of course, when talking amongst themselves, or with the believers in the think tanks, boardrooms -- and editorial offices -- the cultists would speak more plainly: we don't do those things anymore because we shouldn't do them, we don't want to do them, they are wrong, they are evil, they are outside the faith. But for the hoi polloi, the line was usually something like this: Budgets are tight, we must balance them (for a "balanced budget" is a core doctrine of the cult), we just can't afford all these luxuries, sorry about that.

But now, as the emptiness and falsity of the Chicago cargo cult stands nakedly revealed, even to some of its most faithful and fanatical adherents, we can see that this 30-year mantra by our governments has been a deliberate and outright lie. The money was there -- billions and billions and billions of dollars of it, trillions of dollars of it. We can see it before our very eyes today -- being whisked away from our public treasuries and showered upon the banks and the brokerages.

Let's say it again: The money was there all along.
Money to build and generously equip thousands and thousands of new schools, with well-paid, exquisitely trained teachers, small teacher-pupil ratios, a full range of enriching and inspiring programs.

Money to revitalize the nation's crumbling inner cities, making them safe and vibrant places for businesses and families and communities to grow.

Money to provide decent, affordable and accessible health care to every citizen, to provide dignity and comfort to the elderly, and protection and humane treatment for the mentally ill.

Money to provide affordable higher education to everyone who wanted it and could qualify for it. Money to help establish and sustain local businesses and family farms, centered in and on the local community, driven by the needs and knowledge of the people in the area, and not by the dictates of distant corporations.

Money to strengthen crumbling infrastructure, to repair bridges, shore up levies, maintain roads and electric grids and sewage systems.

Money for affordable, workable public transport systems, for the pursuit of alternative sources of energy, for sustainable, sensible development, for environmental restoration.

Money to support free inquiry in science, technology, health and other areas -- research unfettered from the war machine and the drive for corporate profit, and instead devoted to the betterment of human life.

Money to support culture, learning, continuing education, libraries, theater, music and the endless manifestations of the human quest to gain more meaning, more understanding, more enlightenment, a deeper, spiritually richer life.

The money for all of this -- and much, much more -- was there, all along. When they said we couldn't have these things, they were lying -- or else allowing themselves to be profitably duped by the high priests of the market cult. When they wanted a trillion dollars -- or three trillion dollars -- to wage a war of aggression in Iraq, they found it. Now, when they want trillions of dollars to save the speculators, fraudsters and profiteers of greed in the global market, they suddenly have it.

Who then can believe that these governments could not have found the money for good schools, health care, and all the rest, that they could not have enhanced the well-being and livelihood of millions of ordinary citizens, and helped create a more just and equitable and stable world -- if they had wanted to?

It's getting clearer what they want, as much as they pretend they're just being forced by circumstances beyond their control to take it all.

Via Bag News Notes, meet the face of the man who wants to run Palin's Fourth Branch of government:



He's not swayed by all that "just and equitable world" talk. He'd fightin' sinners. Gettin' rich by the Grace of God while he's at it, too.

Mike Madden:

...Todd Palin was getting copied on e-mails dealing with official state business. He had already helped write the state budget, gotten involved in personnel matters and called up lawmakers when he -- or Sarah Palin -- had a bone to pick with them. Apparently Palin's inner circle figured they better include him on messages about pending legislation or ongoing controversies, too. The First Dude's involvement in Palin's efforts to get her ex-brother-in-law fired from the state police force have now earned him a subpoena from the Legislature, and he also allegedly intervened to have John Bitney (a former friend) fired from the state payroll for having an affair with the ex-wife of one of Todd Palin's buddies. The Washington Post reported last week that the Palins billed the state $1,371 for Todd's airfare to Washington, when he joined Sarah Palin at a National Governors Association conference, and for the whole family to fly around Alaska watching him compete in the Iron Dog snowmobile race.

In the Palin administration, Todd appears to have had an unusually strong role, the extent of which remains unclear. He is not on the state payroll and was never elected -- but the First Dude has crossed over from the standard-issue supportive political spouse to something far more influential, weighing in on policy and political matters in ways that few observers seem to understand. His apparent influence in his wife's administration -- some in Alaska have referred to him as the "shadow governor" -- has raised questions about whether a Sarah Palin vice-presidency would hand the same type of backstage power to Todd, and what that might mean in the running of the U.S. government...

In Sarah Palin's political profile and governing methods, critics see a direct political heir of George W. Bush. And Todd Palin's behind-the-scenes strength is one way in which Palin's Juneau administration appears to mirror that of Bush and Cheney -- with its proclivity for secrecy and cronyism. Sarah Palin has used a private e-mail address on most of the e-mails her husband was copied on, and reportedly was advised by aides that such nonofficial communications could be protected from potential subpoena. Legislators and political insiders in Alaska say a small circle of trusted Palin aides keep most decisions and deliberations close to the vest, with Todd Palin among them. These maneuverings may sound quite familiar, if you recall Bush staffers using private Republican National Committee e-mails instead of whitehouse.gov accounts, or the faith George Bush has put in trusted advisors to work closely with him in private, even when they don't seem up to the job...

Democratic Les Gara, a state representative in Alaska, says that Palin is too detached from the job to do it well. "I do not believe that she's paid enough attention to the details of policy and how government works and the issues facing the state to run the nation," Gara says. "It's not her lack of experience -- I think a smart person who's really engaged and really curious can be in national office [without experience]. It's the lack of curiosity on the day-to-day workings of government that I've got the concern about."

Todd Palin, the man owned by BP, the Alaskan Separatist and Joel's Army member. Soon to be running a Fourth Branch of Government near you, in an administration that can't be bothered to fund anything but Wall Street and the D.o'D.

The Computer Ate Your Retirement

Sure, blame it on the AIs:

...The Wall Street geeks, the quantitative analysts (“quants”) and masters of “algo trading” probably felt the same irresistible lure of “illimitable power” when they discovered “evolutionary algorithms” that allowed them to create vast empires of wealth by deriving the dependence structures of portfolio credit derivatives.

What does that mean? You’ll never know. Over and over again, financial experts and wonkish talking heads endeavor to explain these mysterious, “toxic” financial instruments to us lay folk. Over and over, they ignobly fail, because we all know that no one understands credit default obligations and derivatives, except perhaps Mr. Buffett and the computers who created them.

Somehow the genius quants — the best and brightest geeks Wall Street firms could buy — fed $1 trillion in subprime mortgage debt into their supercomputers, added some derivatives, massaged the arrangements with computer algorithms and — poof! — created $62 trillion in imaginary wealth. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that all of that imaginary wealth is locked up somewhere inside the computers, and that we humans, led by the silverback males of the financial world, Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson, are frantically beseeching the monolith for answers. Or maybe we are lost in space, with Dave the astronaut pleading, “Open the bank vault doors, Hal.”

As the current financial crisis spreads (like a computer virus) on the earth’s nervous system (the Internet), it’s worth asking if we have somehow managed to colossally outsmart ourselves using computers. After all, the Wall Street titans loved swaps and derivatives because they were totally unregulated by humans. That left nobody but the machines in charge...

It's the software's fault! Even better, Pravda comes up with this little shell game:

Read this excerpt and then I’ll tell you who wrote it:

But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. ... Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

Brace yourself. It comes from the Unabomber’s manifesto.

Yes, Theodore Kaczinski was a homicidal psychopath and a paranoid kook, but he was also a bloodhound when it came to scenting all of the horrors technology holds in store for us...

Here's some news, Mr. Dooling. If the geeks are smart enough to write the software that runs the global financial networks, so smart that you can not figure where it all went, they are smart enough to hide where they're stashing the money from you.

Garbage In, Garbage Out, sir. Don't blame it on the shell. It's the hawker running the shell game that's stealing your money.

Thinking the unthinkable

Is it October Surprise time, yet?

It seems in this $election we keep having multiple Surprises in October, and none of them are turning out the way the Company seems to want. The stakes keep getting higher.

Hence, this video.

The bottom line is, it's likely survivable if you are unhurt in the first 5 minutes. But you have to do the right things. Watch the video, carefully. It's only 20 minutes long.

A bit of biographical information about the speaker:

"Dr. Irwin Redlener spends his days imagining the worst: He studies how humanity might survive natural or human-made disasters of unthinkable severity. He's been an outspoken critic of half-formed government recovery plans (especially after Katrina).

After 9/11, Irwin Redlener emerged as a powerful voice in disaster medicine -- the discipline of medical care following natural and human-made catastrophes. He was a leading face of the relief effort after hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and is the author of Americans at Risk: Why We Are Not Prepared for Megadisasters and What We Can Do Now. He's the associate dean, professor of Clinical Public Health and director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health.

His parallel passion is addressing the American disaster that happens every day: millions of kids living without proper health care. He and Paul Simon are the co-founders of the Children’s Health Fund, which raises money and awareness toward health care for homeless, neglected and poor children."

Bringing Out the Brownshirts

Frank Rich discusses the flailing Rethuglicans' latest tactics- ones that would get them arrested by Homeland Security and Secret Service if they were Democrats aimed at Bu$hie.

Not that these tactics are particularly working.

Still, the Democrats and America need to educate Amerikans on who really supports Terror: the financial and political base of the Republican party.

Long Distance Parboil

Non-lethal of course- unless they keep it turned on you for longer than 15 seconds...

It's been a very long time coming. As we've previously reported, there have been calls to deploy the Active Denial System in Iraq going back to 2004. But it's always been delayed for legal, political, and public relations reasons. Anything that might be condemned as torture is political dynamite. Interestingly, the version being bought is not the full-size "Version 2," but a containerized system known as Silent Guardian, which Raytheon have been trying to sell for some time. They describe Silent Guardian as "roughly 1/3 the size and power of the other Active Denial Systems," and quote it's range as "greater than 250 meters." The larger system has a range somewhere in excess of 700 meters.

Silent Guardian weighs a shade over 10,000 pounds all up, and will be mounted on an "armored ruggedized HEMTT [Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck]."

The announcement arrives on the same day as a new report [.pdf] from less-lethal weapons expert Dr. Jürgen Altmann that analyzes the physics of several directed energy weapons, including Active Denial, the Advanced Tactical Laser (used as a non-lethal weapon), the Pulsed Energy Projectile (a.k.a. "Maximum Pain" laser) and the Long Range Acoustic Device (a.k.a. "Acoustic Blaster").

Dr. Altmann describes the Active Denial beam in some detail, noting that it will not be completely uniform; anyone unlucky enough to be caught in the center will experience more heating than someone at the edge. And perhaps more significant is his thorough analysis of the heating it produces -- and the cumulative effect if the target does not have the chance to cool down between exposures. In U.S. military tests, a fifteen-second delay between exposures was strictly observed; this may not happen when the ADS is used for real.

"As a consequence, the ADS provides the technical possibility to produce burns of second and third degree. Because the beam of diameter 2 m and above is wider than human size, such burns would occur over considerable parts of the body, up to 50% of its surface. Second- and third-degree burns covering more than 20% of the body surface are potentially life-threatening – due to toxic tissue-decay products and increased sensitivity to infection – and require intensive care in a specialized unit. Without a technical device that reliably prevents re-triggering on the same target subject, the ADS has a potential to produce permanent injury or death. "

But non-lethally, of course! Soon to be deployed at a civil disturbance near you! I find it hilarious that these weapons were first publically disclosed in 2000 by a usenet hoaxer.

Already Fixed

"A lot of Europeans wonder: Why are Americans so crazy, they keep reelecting this guy?” Well the answer is, we don’t! They keep stealing these elections! And they stole it in 2000, they stole it in 2004, and they’re all set up to steal it again!" - Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on BBC Television Newsnight.

Understatement

Meanwhile, Big Brother is using his Global War on Terra and sooperseekrit eavesdropping capability for pretty much what we expected all along:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Congress is looking into allegations that National Security Agency linguists have been eavesdropping on Americans abroad.

The congressional oversight committees said Thursday that the Americans targeted included military officers in Iraq who called friends and family in the United States.

The allegations were made by two former military intercept operators on a television news report Thursday evening.

A terrorist surveillance program instituted by the Bush administration allows the intelligence community to monitor phone calls between the United States and overseas without a court order -- as long as one party to the call is a terror suspect.

Adrienne Kinne, a former U.S. Army Reserves Arab linguist, told ABC News the NSA was listening to the phone calls of U.S. military officers...

who were talking about "personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism."

David Murfee Faulk, a former U.S. Navy Arab linguist, said in the news report that he and his colleagues were listening to the conversations of military officers in Iraq who were talking with their spouses or girlfriends in the United States.

According to Faulk, they would often share the contents of some of the more salacious calls stored on their computers, listening to what he called "phone sex" and "pillow talk..."

Ya sure ya betcha I know what scares me.

Honest Mistake

From the same people who brought you the straight talk express.


John Amato has the details.

Don't believe it? After the Republicans steal this again, they'll loudly claim it never happened, and accuse you of hating Amerika if you point out that it did.

White collar political crimes are perpetrator-less crimes:

...This is by now a familiar dynamic: Outright, undeniable crimes are committed, often very heinous ones -- mass murder, military aggression, torture, vast financial corruption and fraud, warrantless spying, egregious violations of the Constitution -- but somehow, no one is actually responsible for them. They just sort of, you know, happened, all by themselves.

The most we can possibly do about these crimes is to conduct a non-binding "investigation" -- preferably by a committee of "serious" Establishment figures -- who will then offer suggestions on how to avoid such unseemly situations in the future. Of course, most of the time it would be too "divisive," too "partisan," to do even that much. But in any case, you certainly can't prosecute anyone for these crimes.

(This innovative concept only covers crimes in which powerful people might be involved, of course. Any ordinary person remains subject to the full weight of the increasingly draconian law -- although, if said ordinary person was commiting crimes at the behest of powerful people, the application of the law can suddenly become miraculously light, or even non-existent.)



The New York Times points us to yet another of these perpetratorless crimes. In fact, the venerable Gray Goose -- sorry, Gray Lady -- of American journalism acts as close accomplice of a crime wave that seems to strike nationwide every two to four years: the deliberate and illegal disenfranchisement of millions of citizens, almost all of them the poorest and most marginalized in American society.

After eight years of a veritable Ossa of evidence of gamed, thrown, fixed and finagled elections, this week the NY Times bestirred itself to notice that something might possibly be amiss in the nation's electoral process. A headline writer topped the story with weakest possible statement of the undeniable truth: "States' Actions to Block Voters Appear Illegal." And you can bet your bottom dollar (as it falls through the bottomless pit of the Beltway bailout banditry) that if the New York Times deigns to acknowledge even the "appearance" of some mischance in the divinely ordained machinery of the Establishment, the actual rot is very far gone indeed.


Thus the thoroughgoing disenfranchisement of eligible voters -- as many as three million in 2004, as Greg Palast has noted -- has finally spilled into the paper's sacred precincts. The first paragraph puts in plainly:

Tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law, according to a review of state records and Social Security data by The New York Times.

Hard to put it more plainly than that: voters in key states are being disenfranchised in violation of federal law. In other words, a very serious crime is being committed, a bloody shiv job to the heart of the democratic process.

Wow! Wonder who could be behind such a brazen and dastardly crime -- a crime that benefits very powerful people seeking even greater power? Why, no one, of course! Here's the very next paragraph of the story:

The actions do not seem to be coordinated by one party or the other, nor do they appear to be the result of election officials intentionally breaking rules, but are apparently the result of mistakes in the handling of the registrations and voter files as the states tried to comply with a 2002 federal law, intended to overhaul the way elections are run.

You see? It just sort of, you know, happened. And even though these open violations of federal law -- i.e., crimes -- are affecting likely Democratic voters "disproportionately," the Times says, they are not being directed by anyone toward any particular aim. Nope. It's just some kind of strange repeat of this really weird thing that happened back in 2004 and 2000, when the same kind of people were tossed from the voting rolls by the multitude...

Still, if we prosecuted the criminals behind this, Someone might have to declare martial law, and we wouldn't want that, would we?

The Threat is Here

Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) said on the House floor that members of the House were told in private that if they didn't vote for the bailout bill, martial law would have to be imposed.

I think you need to take 30 minutes to listen to this.

I like this comment:

...Stage-managed

On all sides

Reknowned feminist using the same language that survivalist Project Merlin 2k8 guys use

Lucifer and Ahriman grappling in the Ruined City of the Old Gods...

She might be right, but somehow she sounds like Al Gore advising kids to civil disobedience at new coal plants.

Hear a Mockingbird, anyone?

Motivation and Opportunity

Mark Crispin Miller sees it all real clear:

...They approved this choice, because Sarah Palin is quite willing to promote the Christianists' apocalyptic program with a brazenness, and comprehensiveness, unprecedented in the history of American political campaigning. Her disparate crackpot policies are all expressions of the same extremist creed. There are, of course, all her Levitical sexual proscriptions: no abortions even for those women who've been raped (or raped by their own fathers); no sex education; no condoms. There are her incremental steps to Christianize the public schools: her moves against their secular librarians; her readiness to get Creationism into the curriculum. And then there is her mad anti-environmentalism: her tacit eagerness for further global warming, and, therefore, her passion for oil-drilling everywhere; her opposition to clean water legislation; her willingness to see the polar bears die off; her letting hunters gun down wolves and bears from low-flying planes, etc. All such reckless policies derive from an apocalyptic wish to see the planet die, so that Lord Jesus will come back here, and start kicking ass and taking names. (Palin's pastor holds that He will set up his command post in Alaska.)

None of this insanity appeals to anyone outside the Christianist community, which is no larger than it was when Bush tried to "save" Teri Schiavo from "judicial murder"--or when he was anomalously "re-elected" by those legions of fictitious "values voters." The choice of Sarah Palin, therefore, surely was not based on any rational calculation of some real electoral advantage; for that ferocious bloc is far too small to pull that off, no matter how firm their conviction that God wants them to.

In fact, the only way that Palin and her doddering partner can prevail in this election is by stealing it, as Bush and Cheney did (both times). Certainly the ground has been prepared for yet another stolen race, Bush/Cheney's party having made enormous strides in sabotaging our election system (while the Democrats just sat there, whistling). Now, from coast to coast, it's far more difficult (for Democrats) to register to vote, and far more difficult (for Democrats) to cast their votes, while countless (Democratic) voters have been stricken from the rolls, through purges carried out by the Department of Justice.

Thus Bush's government has legally diminished the electorate (the Roberts Court approving every step). Meanwhile, the regime also continues to suppress the (Democratic) vote illegally, either through voter "caging" prior to Election Day--or, far more effectively, by fiddling with the numbers electronically at every level, and/or simply dumping countless names (of Democrats) from the electronic voter rolls, and/or putting far too few machines in (Democratic) polling places, and/or disinforming (Democratic) voters as to when and where to cast their votes, and/or simply scaring (Democratic) voters into staying home...

[tip o'teh tinfoil to Avedon and the King of Zembla]

All in the Family

As in Capo Bastone...

Darth Paulson promotes an apprentice. Unsurprisingly, it's one he's promoted before.

...meanwhile...





How 'bout that bailout rescue payoff?

Dennis:

... “This was the largest single act of class warfare in the modern history of this country,” Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, who led the fight in the House against the bailout, told me by phone from Cleveland. “It is a direct attack on the American people’s ability to be able to stabilize their homes and their neighborhoods. This single vote will define the careers of everyone. We are back to taxation without representation, to markets that are openly rigged.”

“We buried the New Deal,” he said of the vote. “Instead of Democrats going back to classic New Deal economics where we prime the pump of the economy and start money circulating among the population through saving homes, creating jobs and building a new infrastructure, our leaders chose to accelerate the wealth of the nation upwards. They did so in a way that was destructive of free-market principles. They ripped away all the familiar moorings. We are in an uncharted sea where the traditional roles of the political parties are being switched. The Democrats have unfortunately become so enamored and beholden to Wall Street that we are not functioning to defend the economic interest of the broad base of the American people. It was up to the Republicans to protect not just a so-called free market but the American taxpayer and attempt to block this. This is an outrage. This was democracy’s Black Friday...

“We face a perfect financial storm,” Kucinich warned. “The elements are the deficit spending for the war of 3 to 4 trillion dollars, the trillion and more tax cuts, the war itself and the lack of serious investment in the country. We are being hollowed out. We are going to see more unemployment and more people losing their homes. With $700 billion we could have made a real investment in the country, in jobs, in infrastructure and in homes. Instead, we got robbed...”

Fireworks over Sudan

It could be a kiloton blast.

...For the first time, astronomers have found an object on a certain collision course with Earth. Fortunately, it is so small it is not expected to cause any damage, burning up in the atmosphere somewhere above northern Sudan in the wee hours of Tuesday morning. It may, however, produce a brilliant 'shooting star'.

The space rock, dubbed 2008 TC3, was first spotted on Monday in a survey by the Mt Lemmon Observatory near Tucson, Arizona.

Its brightness suggests it is no more than about 5 metres across – so small it will likely be destroyed in the atmosphere, says Andrea Milani Comparetti of the University of Pisa in Italy.

Rocks of such size are thought to hit the atmosphere every few months, says Steve Chesley, an astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

"The event is not unusual – what is unique is that it's been predicted beforehand," Milani told New Scientist. "This is the first time we see something arriving, compute that it's going to impact, and announce it is going to impact before it happens."

The rock is due to hit the atmosphere above northern Sudan on Tuesday at 0246 GMT. It will be travelling from west to east, and may be visible from a few hundred kilometres away.

The meteor it produces is likely to be spectacular. The rock will release about 1 kiloton of energy in the atmosphere – the equivalent of a low-energy nuclear bomb, says Milani. But it's not clear whether it will do so all at once or over a longer period, perhaps lasting a minute or so.

It will hit the atmosphere at an angle of 20°, so "it will make a long trail in the atmosphere", says Milani. "But we cannot honestly predict how long it will be. [The rock] might end up quite far – above the Red Sea or Saudi Arabia – or it might explode and disappear sooner."

If it disintegrates all at once, it would produce a bright flash of light and a loud sonic boom, says Chesley.

This space rock is so small it is unlikely to cause any damage. "The only concern is that [the explosions] might be interpreted as something else, that is man-made explosions. Thus in this case, the earlier the public worldwide is aware that this is a natural phenomenon, which involves no risk, the better," Milani's team wrote on a popular astronomy listserv...

National Security Derivatives Las Vegas

So how much of the fuzzy quadrillion in fantasy securities ravaging the world's economies are due to this?

...President George W. Bush has bestowed on his intelligence czar, John Negroponte, broad authority, in the name of national security, to excuse publicly traded companies from their usual accounting and securities-disclosure obligations. Notice of the development came in a brief entry in the Federal Register, dated May 5, 2006, that was opaque to the untrained eye.

Unbeknownst to almost all of Washington and the financial world, Bush and every other President since Jimmy Carter have had the authority to exempt companies working on certain top-secret defense projects from portions of the 1934 Securities Exchange Act. Administration officials told BusinessWeek that they believe this is the first time a President has ever delegated the authority to someone outside the Oval Office. It couldn't be immediately determined whether any company has received a waiver under this provision.

The timing of Bush's move is intriguing. On the same day the President signed the memo, Porter Goss resigned as director of the Central Intelligence Agency amid criticism of ineffectiveness and poor morale at the agency. Only six days later, on May 11, USA Today reported that the National Security Agency had obtained millions of calling records of ordinary citizens provided by three major U.S. phone companies. Negroponte oversees both the CIA and NSA in his role as the administration's top intelligence official.

White House spokeswoman Dana M. Perino said the timing of the May 5 Presidential memo had no significance. "There was nothing specific that prompted this memo," Perino said.

In addition to refusing to explain why Bush decided to delegate this authority to Negroponte, the White House declined to say whether Bush or any other President has ever exercised the authority and allowed a company to avoid standard securities disclosure and accounting requirements. The White House wouldn't comment on whether Negroponte has granted such a waiver, and BusinessWeek so far hasn't identified any companies affected by the provision. Negroponte's office did not respond to requests for comment.

Securities-law experts said they were unfamiliar with the May 5 memo and the underlying Presidential authority at issue. John C. Coffee, a securities-law professor at Columbia University, speculated that defense contractors might want to use such an exemption to mask secret assignments for the Pentagon or CIA. "What you might hide is investments: You've spent umpteen million dollars that comes out of your working capital to build a plant in Iraq," which the government wants to keep secret. "That's the kind of scenario that would be plausible," Coffee said.

William McLucas, the Securities & Exchange Commission's former enforcement chief, suggested that the ability to conceal financial information in the name of national security could lead some companies "to play fast and loose with their numbers." McLucas, a partner at the law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr in Washington, added: "It could be that you have a bunch of books and records out there that no one knows about..."

Ya think?

Goldman-$achs Amerika, again.

[tip o'teh tinfoil to Jack Riddler]

Of course, once fraud becomes the industrial standard, it's only a matter of time before the Professionals take a hand in the game- assuming they haven't been dealing the cards all along:

Japan's powerful yakuza organised crime syndicates are mounting a widespread assault on the country's financial markets that may have left hundreds of listed companies riddled with mob connections.

In a surprisingly stark admission, the National Police Agency (NPA) says that it is locked in a battle for the economic soul and international reputation of Japan.

Police investigations suggest that the yakuza have become voracious traders and manipulators of listed Japanese shares, and, via a network of about a thousand apparently legitimate front companies, occupy big positions on the shareholder registers of many companies that may not even be aware of the connection.

According to one veteran expert on the yakuza, the new activities of the nation's largest crime syndicates have effectively turned the mob into the biggest private equity firm in Japan...

With a $700 billion rotating bankroll, doubtless Paulson's already been made several offers he could not refuse.

[tip o'teh tinfoil to Cryptogon]

Quiet Sun, Cool Summer, and Cold Murder

The summer was an unusually quiet one on the surface of our star prolonging the solar minimum phase of the solar cycle.

...Our Sun has shown few active regions -- that house even fewer associated sunspots -- for over a year now, and such a period of relative calm is quite unusual. What is well known is that our Sun is in a transitional period between solar cycles called a Solar Minimum, where solar activity has historically been reduced. The stark lack of surface tumult is unusual even during a Solar Minimum, however, and activity this low has not been seen for many decades. A few days ago, however, a bona-fide active region -- complete with sunspots --appeared and continues to rotate across the Sun's face. Visible above, this region, dubbed Active Region 1002 (AR 1002), was imaged in ultraviolet light yesterday by the SOHO spacecraft, which co-orbits the Sun near the Earth. Besides the tranquility on the Sun's surface, recent data from the Ulysses spacecraft, across the Solar System, indicate that the intensity of the solar wind blowing out from the Sun is at a fifty year low. Predictions hold, however, that our Sun will show more and more active regions containing more and more sunspots and flares until Solar Maximum occurs in about four years.

Cool being a relative term, of course. It means we only had the second lowest level of Arctic ice in history.



You can only imagine what a really active, hot summer would do...



Still, according to Our Dear Dominatrix, not to worry, this is perfectly normal End-Times weather, and will allow her friends to Drill, Baby, Drill all the better.

Wormhole into the Dominion Reconstruction Universe

Bob Herbert notes that Palin lives in a very different bubble of the multiverse than you or I- but neglects to point out not of the people that pull her strings.

How do a tiny minority of people force a worldview on one of the largest and most powerful nations in the world over the objections of the majority? The same way they always have.

Chris Floyd:

...You've seen the news. You know the score. The House of Representatives has now completed the economic terrorist attack inflicted on the American people by the nation's elite.

The bailout bill -- or as Arthur Silber more rightly terms it, the "Extortion Bill" -- is already law, thanks to the Democrats in Congress, and to Barack Obama, who spent the day working the phones and twisting arms to make sure the $700 billion bonanza for the filthy rich passed without any more of the hiccups that held it up earlier this week.

The plan that Obama made his own -- despite its origins in the poison kitchen of the Bush White House -- is far worse than the version voted down on Monday. Every reputable economic expert says that the plan is unworkable; it will not solve the problems at the root of the current economic crisis, but will only make them worse. It entrenches many of the fraudulent practices that led to the meltdown in the first place, and rewards the perpetrators for their misdeeds with a gargantuan amount of public money, which they can now use to carry on largely as before, albeit with a few new toothless "oversight" mechanisms operated by their own Wall Street cronies, and their bribed-and-bought hirelings on Capitol Hill.

There were many viable, reasonable, eminently centrist alternatives to the radical, plutocratic Bush-Obama scam -- alternatives which would have been politically palatable to a broad spectrum of the electorate. One of the best ones of this ilk that I've seen was outlined in the eminently mainstream Washington Post earlier this week by two eminently respectable Yale economists. (You can find it here.) There were many other such practical and effective plans offered by reputable experts, any one of which could have gone a long way toward protecting ordinary citizens now exposed by the meltdown, supporting the banks, and stabilizing the markets -- all without effecting one of the largest single redistributions of wealth since the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917.

None of these plans were considered or debated or even mentioned, not even for a single moment, by the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate. Instead, they joined the Republican leadership and the Bush Administration in repeating, over and over, the Big Lie that there was NO OTHER CHOICE but some basic version of the unworkable Bush plan. The Democrats -- led by Barack Obama -- not only threw a political lifeline to the most despised president in American history (in the middle of an election year!), they deliberately took ownership of a measure widely rejected by the American public -- a class war weapon of mass destruction whose malign effects will reverberate through American society for years, perhaps generations to come.

Why have they done this? Why would they do such a thing? Why would they commit such an egregious offense against their own people, when they could have very easily NOT done it, and had the near-unanimous support of the American electorate in standing up to the Bush plan and choosing some other completely mainstream alternative?

You already know the answer. It's because they do not serve the American people. They serve a very small yet brutally powerful ruling class. And this elite wanted the Bush-Obama extortion plan, and no other, to make sure their power and privilege were not unduly threatened by the debacle that their own monstrous greed and fraud have made...

Read the whole link. Chris sees this clearly.

And now that the Companies have unlimited access to the Treasury, the transformation from Republic to Empire will be complete. Obama has just written off the 2008 $election- but his bubble of the multiverse will remain secure. Until they have no further need for him, anyway.

Silly Question

Avedon knows why, but asks the rhetorical: Why did these people get in behind such an obvious con?

That's an easy kwetchin.

Because they made a lot of money off of it, too.

Oh, yeah, and for the good of Amerika.

The Senator from MBNA met the Governess from the CNP last night.

He won the debate, but she let the Fourth Branch Companies know they have a place in the Treasury as long as she can be their Cover Grrl.

Viva la Fourth Branch of Government

During the debate between the Senator from MBNA and the Governess from the CNP, Matt Corley picked up on an unsurprising but nonetheless alarming statement:

PALIN:...Of course, we know what a vice president does. And that's not only to preside over the Senate and will take that position very seriously also. I'm thankful the Constitution would allow a bit more authority given to the vice president if that vice president so chose to exert it in working with the Senate and making sure that we are supportive of the president's policies and making sure too that our president understands what our strengths are. John McCain and I have had good conversations about where I would lead with his agenda...

our founding fathers were very wise there in allowing through the Constitution much flexibility there in the office of the vice president. And we will do what is best for the American people in tapping into that position and ushering in an agenda that is supportive and cooperative with the president's agenda in that position. Yeah, so I do agree with him that we have a lot of flexibility in there, and we'll do what we have to do to administer very appropriately the plans that are needed for this nation. And it is my executive experience that is partly to be attributed to my pick as V.P. with McCain, not only as a governor, but earlier on as a mayor, as an oil and gas regulator, as a business owner. It is those years of experience on an executive level that will be put to good use in the White House also.

IFILL: Vice President Cheney's interpretation of the vice presidency?

BIDEN: Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous vice president we've had probably in American history...

That settles that, doesn't it? Sarah Palin's not only the puppet of the Christian Reconstructionists of the CNP. She's the stalking horse for the Companies, determined to keep the Fourth Branch of Government covert, and in charge.

Contempt for the Non-Delusional

Sirota suggests that insanity is the real policy of the Company:

...I'm dead serious about this, as is former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill today.As Bloomberg News reports, O'Neill said the $700 billion Paulson plan is "crazy" with potentially "awful" consequences for the economy. "Doesn't this seem like lunacy to you?" he asked.

Well, yes - actually it does, and not just to me, but to many of the nation's leading economists, financial analysts, business journalists, and investors. Many of these people say this bailout could actually make this situation far worse, and many of them also have terrific, commonsense, and historically proven ideas about how to structure an economic rescue package (the newest one is from The Nation's William Greider). Indeed, most bailout proponents (like Paul Krugman) acknowledge this plan will likely be unsuccessful and that the public advocates for it haven't explained how it will work. Yet, many of those proponents - especially those in Congress - say they support it anyway because of the ultimate ideology of the truly psychotic: Namely, that somebody has to do something, no matter what that something is. They are pulling the classic move we saw during the lead-up to the Iraq War - officially supporting it, but also giving speeches of skepticism so they can cover their asses with "I told you so" haughtiness in the future (and please, don't even try to justify this bill as a respectable bargain - spending 5 percent of our entire economy - $700 billion - in exchange for a few admirable renewable energy tax credits is not a good deal...I've heard of thinking minimally, but that's thinking microscopically).

And yet, the political system seems totally immune - even hostile to - basic sanity. O'Neill and Joseph Stiglitz, both bailout critics, are top advisers to Barack Obama on this bailout issue, but the Democratic nominee keeps insisting that it is unpatriotic to oppose this bill. John McCain is even crazier - saying that the bill is going to "put us on the brink of economic disaster" right after he voted for it. And worst of all, both Obama and McCain are insisting that the bill just hasn't been sold properly as a "rescue" instead of a "bailout" - the implication being that public opposition is borne out of stupidity rather than sanity.

O'Neill says part of the problem is that those running the asylum in the media and in the halls of Congress have little direct contact with the sane world. "I honestly don't think they really understand it and they're so much in a bubble that it's impossible to penetrate it," he said.

So as the House prepares to vote Friday on this bailout, the public has to burst through that bubble. Republican Sen. Bob Bennett (R) - a bailout supporter - has already inadvertently given us our marching orders. On MSNBC this week, he said the determining factor in whether this bill passes the House will be phone calls to House members' offices. So it's time to sign this CAF anti-bailout petition and then get on the phone to your Member of Congress and tell them loud and clear: America is a Democracy... and that means rejecting this bailout bill once and for all.

Glen Greenwald notes that the pundit trust of Darth Paulson isn't shared by many of the less public experts.

Maybe this has something to do with it:

...Where to begin? Oh how we long for the Glory Days when the Steve Pearlsteins had their Supreme Wisdom honored and never had to hear anyone talking back:

First, an enormous number of Actual Economists -- as opposed to newspaper columnists -- vigorously oppose the bailout. Professor Nouriel Roubini called it a "disgrace" and has repeatedly argued it will not alleviate the crisis: "the plan does nothing to resolve the severe stress in money markets and interbank markets that are now close to a systemic meltdown."

Second, all sorts of other Actual Experts -- not just Pearlstein's idiot-readers and moron-left-wing-bloggers who have the audacity to object -- have argued that this plan won't work, is deeply unjust, and that far better and more equitable alternatives exist.

Just today, in Pearlstein's own paper, Jonathan G.S. Koppell and William N. Goetzmann of the Yale School of Management argued that a far preferable solution is to have the government pay off all delinquent mortgages -- which would transform the toxic waste into solid instruments and would prevent people from having their homes foreclosed -- the very plan Pearlstein's reader advocated which provoked such snotty scorn. Many other ignorant, ill-informed morons have had the temerity to argue that other proposals were superior to the bailout, including George Soros (recapitalize the banking system) and Actual Economist Brad DeLong (nationalize under-capitalized institutions). One of the leading blogger-opponents of the bailout has been Duncan Black, an Actual Economist with a Ph.D. in Economics from Brown. And Actual Economist Dean Baker wrote earlier this week:

How do we go about getting the banks in order? Almost every economist I know rejects the Paulson approach and argues instead for directly injecting capital into the banks. The taxpayers give them the money and then we own some, or all, of the bank. (That's what Warren Buffet did with Goldman Sachs.)

Pearlstein -- and so many other bailout cheerleaders -- scorns those same concerns as grounded in stupidity and ignorance when they come from the ugly, loudmouth, teeming, insubordinate masses who refuse to obediently bear the massive debt being tossed on their backs.

Third, just today I interviewed former New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston -- who, unlike Pearlstein, didn't beat his chest and boast that he "won a certain prize" for his journalism, though he did -- and Johnston condemned what he called the "atrocious" journalism on the financial crisis, and said "there's an enormous amount of just wrong reporting going on." In particular, Johnston documented the fear-mongering taking place among TV journalists that has plainly put the public into the state of submissive panic that Pearlstein wants them to be in, whereby -- exactly as was true for Iraq, eavesdropping, the Patriot Act and a whole host of other measures -- they come to be convinced that they better unquestioningly and immediately submit to the dictates of the political and media establishment, they better relinquish any belief that they should question what they're being told, lest they suffer imminent, inevitable, catastrophic doom...

...As Johnston pointed out, letting Lehman fail eliminated a Goldman competitor, while Paulson's decision to save AIG -- in debt to Goldman for $20 billion -- likely saved Goldman. The fact that Paulson's decision to save AIG was made in consultation with Goldman's CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, raises obvious, pressing questions for anyone who is not a blindly gullible establishment-worshiper. As Actual Economist Dean Baker said about that episode:

Did Goldman's influence with their ex-CEO make a difference in Paulson's decision? I have no idea, but this thing stinks. Can you imagine if clerical workers losing their homes got to sit around with bankruptcy judges deciding the fate of their mortgages? It doesn't work that way where the rest of us live.

It is impossible to exaggerate the corruption of this Wall Street crowd.

And then there is the fact that Paulson was leading Goldman when it was a leader in the very reckless derivatives wreaking such havoc, and it was Paulson who continuously insisted for the last two years that there was no housing crisis and that the market was correcting itself. The deep public distrust of our Government and the establishment which Pearlstein serves is profoundly rational and well-informed...

Obviously rational and well-informed opinion and action will let the Terrorists win.

With that in mind let me introduce a new Playah on the Market: StrategeryCapital Management LLC, "Putting your money where our mouth is."

Belaboring a Done Deal

It looks like the Congresscritters are bound and determined to hand over their Ring of Power to Darth Paulson anyway.

As long as Pelosi doesn't ruffle their feathers by reminding the thugs it's all their fault.

But not to worry, it's not like he won't give all that money over to China or Dubai or anything.

Let's see: $630 billion + $700 billion= a new palm-tree shaped peninsula in the UAE you could see from the space station... back from when we could afford it...

The Futility of Fighting Fire with Fire

Professor Smartass wants to use the Company's methods on the Companies:

* No assumption of innocence, especially for execs at companies seeking bailouts. If you buy or sell something that isn't a tangible product or service for a living, you are a danger to society. The less an average person can understand what it is you buy and sell, the greater danger you are to society. If you doubt that, watch the documentary THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM about Enron.

* No fourth amendment rights to restrictions on searches. If they get the cash, we get to dig through their trash--their personal trash. And bank accounts, phone records, or anything else that would tell us where the money went.

* Likewise, no fifth amendment right against self-incrimination. We should use every means at our disposal to find out what they know about money laundering, hiding assets, and which politicians and regulators are on the take. There has been some great advances made in lie detection technology in the last decade. Brains scans can determine if someone is lying with 100% accuracy, and even if they won't speak, they can detect whether or not someone recognizes a photo or some other stimulus. We should give those technologies their first real world test.

* Forfeiture of property beyond what they stole or scammed. This requires borrowing the forfeiture rules from the War on Drugs, were if they find one pot seed in your carpet, they'll take your car or house even if it was from someone who was housesitting for you. If forfeiture is supposed to be a deterrent to drug dealers, it should be equally effective on these equally greedy bastards.

* Pre-emptive military strikes on countries that harbor Wall Street types and their assets. We cannot wait for the United Nations to act against the Cayman Islands, Seychelles, and Lichstenstein. We must strike before the economic terrorists can move their assets to another safe haven. We cannot wait for the final proof that could come in the form of a Great Depression.

* Torture. If torture works on ideologically motivated prisoners as the Bushies claim, imagine how much more effective it will be to get off-shore account numbers from some pampered trust fund baby. Hell, you wouldn't even have to strip them naked. Just take away their valets and they won't know how to put their own clothes on.

* Access to attorneys. If they can contact an attorney, they could use code words or even facial expressions to give approval to shift assets to different shell corporations or off-shore accounts.

* Renditions. It is very likely that even the Americans most hurt by these assholes won't have the stomach to waterboard or sexually assault a banker, broker, or hedge fund manager. Therefore, we should consider outsourcing this work to a country that has a better track record of dealing with oligarchs run amok: Russia. It would also help stabilize relations after the Bush administration & McCain's saber-rattling in their direction.

Prison sentences could also be outsourced. Imagine how much we could save on gaurds, food, health care, and accommodations if we store these assholes in CHINA.

Alas, Bu$hCo has proven, despite their press, that these methods do not work.

For example, we now have more soldiers in Iraq than the original "surge" called for, but incidents like this still happen daily. Although, to be fair, they're rushed off the front page as soon as Dear Leader wakes up in the morning- by about 10 AM.

You fight fire by depriving it of fuel, and in this case, the way to fight what the Company has done to the economy is by stringent regulation and a revival of the New Deal. That, and sending the white collar criminals running Wall Street and Washington to the slammer.