All Jobs Programs are not Created Equal

Brad Hicks does a great job comparing two of the three major jobs programs of Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

...FDR, congressional Republicans lead by Harold Ickes, and right-wing Democrats lead by Al Smith were wrong in exactly the same way that Barack Obama, congressional Republicans, and the Democratic Leadership Council are wrong right now. The Public Works Administration did its job. It did it under budget. It wasted not a single dollar. It attracted not a single critic. And it created almost no jobs. In 1933, it turned out that there just plain weren't that many legitimate government jobs that weren't being funded already. As Ickes took his sweet time coming up with more, lest he be criticized for wasting taxpayer money, he found out that there also weren't a whole lot of companies out there begging for the chance to bid on PWA contracts. They weren't crazy about the contract stipulations, and they weren't all that interested in retooling and reorganizing their entire corporate structures to service contracts there were guaranteed to end as soon as the Great Depression ended. As an anti-poverty, anti-violent-revolution government program, the Public Works Administration was an unvarnished, absolute, indefensible disaster. Period. End of story. Nobody even tries to defend it any more; its supporters just pretend it never happened, so they can recommend the same thing the next time without anybody knowing it's been tried before, because by their politics, it's the right thing to do whether it works or not.

And along about the time that Roosevelt was about to lose his temper over this, the First Lady talked him into talking to a very successful social worker named Harry Hopkins, who only wanted a few minutes of the President's time so he could ask one question. He showed the President figures (that he later showed Congress) showing that there were about 3.5 million Americans in 1933 who were heads of households between the ages of 18 and 64 that no employer was going to hire, no way, no how, not for any amount of money, and he asked: "Can you give one legal reason why we can't just hire those people ourselves?" The thing is, he got that estimate of 3.5 million people by going through the state-by-state lists of people who were already on the dole, people who were already receiving some kind of charitable or government cash hand-out because they weren't working. And what Hopkins realized was that not only did the American people deeply resent those people for taking money and doing nothing all day, the recipients weren't any happier about it, either: they wanted to work. So FDR shoe-horned a program through Congress, first as pilot program called the Civil Works Administration, to raise about $1200 (1933 US dollars) per year per unemployed head of household: $1000 per worker per year for wages, $24 per worker per year for administrative costs, the rest for hand tools and raw materials for whatever projects he could make up. To get CWA funding, a job had to be something that no corporation was interested in providing, and that no government agency was interested in funding, and it had to be as labor-intensive as possible (see photograph above right).

Conservatives in both parties hated it. And still do. And campaigned hard against it in the 1934 congressional primaries. Al Smith's right-wing Democrats convinced FDR that if he kept the CWA, it would cost him his majority in Congress, so he shut it down after only four months. In that four months, CWA workers had already built 1,000 rural airports, built 40,000 school buildings, built or resurfaced a quarter-million miles of roads, and laid twelve million miles of sanitary sewer lines, some of the first sewer lines laid in most counties. In four months. Right-wing Democrats and anti-tax pro-corporate Republicans screamed bloody murder about all the money that the CWA was "wasting," but (and this is a point I'll come back to again) we're still using almost all of that stuff today. 75 years later, those "worthless" "make-work" projects are turning out to be some of the most valuable stuff the government had done in its first 150 years of existence. So contrary to what the right-wing Democrats in Congress were telling FDR he "needed" to do to "save" the 1934 congressional elections, terminating the CWA turned out to be the least popular thing he did as President, and as soon as the elections were over, on voter mandate, FDR brought it right back again, rammed it through Congress again as the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

Only this time it had full funding, and a Congressional and Presidential mandate to try to hire every single one of the roughly 3.5 million unemployed, non-disabled, work-aged heads of household in America. And in almost no time at all, they came as close as makes no difference, getting to 3.3 million, on one simple philosophy: you tell us whatever it is you "do," and we'll find you a job doing it. Those jobs paid very nearly jack squat; nearly all WPA workers ended up living with their whole families in roughly 8" x 10" or so rooms in improvised "boarding houses," spare rooms leased out by people who were house-rich but cash poor, trying to save their homes, tenants with no control over the menu of the meal plan it came with and shared use of a single bathroom (or maybe just an outhouse and an outdoor water pump) with 3 to 8 other families. Nobody lived well on the WPA, but nobody starved either. On the other hand, nobody worked terribly hard, either, and I know this one from a very personal source: my paternal grandfather was a WPA veteran.

Grampa Hicks was himself a right-wing anti-tax anti-communist Democrat of the American Liberty League school, and he hated the WPA with a fiery passion for the entire rest of his life. It was from him I first heard the joke: "How many people does it take to do one WPA job? Three. One on his way to the bathroom, one on his way back from the bathroom, and one leaning on the shovel pretending to work." But here's the funny thing. You know what Grampa Hicks was before the Great Depression? He was a bum. A mostly-unemployed unskilled laborer on the rare occasions he had a job, a street brawler and small-time crook, a chronic alcoholic and wife-beater who spent most of the 1920s in jail...

But you know what? There's a funny thing about that, something I'm pretty sure Grampa Hicks never thought about. First of all, if it weren't for the WPA, we Hickses would still be bums. Grampa Hicks was desperate to get out from behind that wheel barrow and that shovel, but was too drunk to do plumbing. So he took to hanging around when the electricians were running wire, and managed to get himself a totally useless job as a sort of human Vice-Grip. "Here," says the skilled electrician who was himself out of work, yelling over to my grandpa because the WPA wouldn't spring for proper tools, "you there -- hold these two wires together while I tape them together." By following that guy around and watching over that guy's shoulder, Grampa Hicks taught himself basic electrical wiring. And when the WPA was over, he was able to lie with a straight face to employers that he was a skilled electrician, and that got him his first real job, one his son learned from him, and that I learned from my dad that paid my way through college: electrical sign erector, IBEW local 1.

But never mind how much difference those "pointless" National Guard armories made to my family, there's something even bigger that Grampa Hicks didn't know. We're still using almost every single one of those buildings. I saw an article a while back (citation lost, sorry) by an architecture student who'd gotten curious about what ever happened to all those National Guard armories, so he got some grant money and went on a national tour. And what he found was that in almost every single rural town in America and even in most suburbs, those "ridiculously over-built" armories were the first truly solid building ever built there. And because they were "ridiculously over-built," they're still in use...

I don't think you can come up with a single dollar of WPA spending that actually counts as wasted, not a single WPA "make-work" project so pointless and stupid that we didn't get our money's worth out of it, especially if you count all the on-the-job job skills training it gave the 8 or 9 million people who went through the program. And that's even if you don't factor in the analysis of very serious historians who question whether or not American "G.I.s" would have fought so hard or so well to save the world from 1941 to 1945 if they had been as resentful, and as starving, as they were in 1930. But no, the blunt fact of history is that if the truth were ever told about the WPA, if the truth hadn't been being smothered in lies by the same political factions that opposed it at the time all the way up to this very day, everybody would know what the WPA proved as inescapable facts. No dollar of government spending is wasted, if it does a job that nobody else was going to do and it builds something that lasts...

Imagine making things that last. No wonder all the Reptilicans hated it.

Of course, they had another jobs program the lizards liked better. But Brad has another thing or two to say we should all listen to first:

...Ronald freaking Reagan himself briefly campaigned on it, calling it "Workfare:" if you can't find a job, we'll make you one, whether you like it or not. But he didn't even get sworn in before the same pro-corporate Republicans and right-wing Democrats convinced him to drop it, to instead concentrate on cutting taxes for corporations as his only unemployment-fighting measure. No, there is now, just as there was in Franklin Roosevelt's time, a bipartisan consensus of the elites in this country that the way to put Americans back to work is that taxes must be cut on investors and corporations. We are, apparently, supposed to ignore the last thirty years of history, which teaches us that every tax cut we pass and every subsidy we grant to big corporations will be used to hire robots or to move jobs overseas. No, this time we're supposed to believe it will be different and this time they really will use that money to make more jobs. Trust them on this, they say. And just as in Roosevelt's day, the exact same political coalition of big-corporation Republicans and big-corporation Democrats insist that if that won't do the job fast enough, then what we need are even more public-private partnerships. And ironically, even Barack Obama, who very nearly lost his political career early on because he was caught on the fringes of Tony Rezko's financially corrupt public-private partnership, one that Barack Obama had gotten for him, somehow hasn't learned that it's public-private partnerships and tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, not government make-work programs or benefits for the unemployed, that are the real welfare cheats. Being a Harvard graduate who grew up under the steady drumbeat of pro-corporate propaganda about how evil the WPA was, he's still talking up the need for more public-private partnerships like Harold Ickes' old Public Works Administration.

So I figure the odds at roughly 4 to 1 that he's going to screw up the unemployment situation in America, at the very least doing nothing to help it, and quite possibly making it worse by funding the elimination of yet more American jobs, because that's exactly what the new President and his cabinet officers are talking about doing, lately. Sadly, these are even better odds than we would have had under either Clinton or McCain, neither of whom would have even considered anything but public-private partnerships. Obama will, I think, at least think about it. But I don't think he'll do anything but try to set up another PWA. Which is a damned shame. Because what we really need is another WPA.

And Ronald freaking Reagan got shot shortly after taking office, putting Poppy in charge- and keeping him in charge for the next 12 years, too.

Poppy preferred and still prefers another jobs program that does seem to have all the bipartisan centrist support. The government has been using this program ever since FDR. Originally effective, it has turned into a bloated corrupt beast that makes the PWA seem quite effective.

You know the name of this beast: the Long War.

It's a jobs program the Reptilicans and DINOcrats are still advocating, because it keeps the rabble scrabbling and in their place.

Flawed Vessels Where They're Going

William Pfaff:

...while ex-Sen. Daschle is a reputed expert on health systems, he has also, since leaving the Senate, made a quarter of a million dollars as speaker, consultant and adviser to private health insurance and health care companies.

Does anyone think that, as secretary of health and human services, he would have recommended a new system that cuts out the private health insurance industry? The insurance companies are the ones that killed Hillary Clinton’s health proposals eight years ago. Where do you think the money goes that makes American health care the most expensive in the world? It’s not going into nurses’ salaries.

Nor are taxes a problem if you are going to be secretary of the treasury. “Whoops,” Timothy Geithner says, “how can I have overlooked 30 grand?” (Or maybe even a little more.) Maybe you can overlook it if you are a central banker or work for Goldman Sachs; I’m not in a position to know. Anyway, Secretary Geithner already is confirmed.

This is a serious matter, jokes aside. Is there anyone prominent in Washington who is not hopelessly entangled with big—really big—corporate money, that links him or her to certain industries or partisan positions?

Maybe not. Years ago, I used to rant that the only solution would be to require fixed and equal unpaid political campaign time on national and local broadcasting, and ban other paid political advertising. It’s the money for televised political campaigns that has turned Washington into a den of legalized larceny.

But then Washington has always been Another Place, as the Obamas are finding out. They are from Chicago, which has Serious Weather (more than three feet of snow a year). On one of their first days in the White House, less than an inch of snow fell on Washington and all the schools were closed. The president had Malia and Sasha underfoot.

He suggested to reporters that Washingtonians get a grip on themselves and find a way to cope with such crises. Since then, the snippy Washington comment has been that Washington snow is different; and that if the Obamas don’t like it in Washington, they can go back to where they came from...

That is the way the Masters of the Universe think as the substance of their reality dissolves around them. Any rescue that changes how they've always ruled is no rescue. When you live on Olympus, you eat the food of the gods, or be consigned to Hades.

Just ask Jimmy Carter.

Refocus through a twisted lens

The Ministry of Truth starts off with the popular line:

BAGHDAD — This is what victory in the war in Iraq was supposed to look like: Fifteen million Iraqis voting in free and fair (largely) elections, emerging from their polling stations with their purple-stained fingers in an atmosphere that was free (largely) of intimidation or violence...

The secular Iraqis (largely) won, we're told, except, which we're not officially told, where they didn't

One would suppose that would (generally) be the case with of course the exceptions that of course prove the rule.

The Ministry of Truth is pleased.

The Ministry of Love prepares to expand its affections as soon as they can work out the supply lines.

Plastic Men

Lambert picks up that the CIA is about to expand its role on the Homeland front in their War on Terra.

Obama and his National Security advisor James L. Jones are considering making the whole National Security schtik more elastic under the advice of John O. Brennan, CIA veteran under Bu$hie and currently Obama's presidential adviser for counterterrorism and homeland security.

Greenwald doesn't like Brennan much:

...there is Brennan's December 5, 2005 appearance on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, in which he vehemently defended the Bush administration's use of rendition -- one of the key tools to subject detainees to torture:

JOHN BRENNAN: I think over the past decade it has picked up some speed because of the nature of the terrorist threat right now but essentially it's a practice the United States and other countries have used to transport suspected terrorists from a country, usually where they're captured to another country, either their country of origin or a country where they can be questioned, detained or brought to justice. . . .

MARGARET WARNER: So was Secretary Rice correct today when she called it a vital tool in combating terrorism?

JOHN BRENNAN: I think it's an absolutely vital tool. I have been intimately familiar now over the past decade with the cases of rendition that the U.S. Government has been involved in. And I can say without a doubt that it has been very successful as far as producing intelligence that has saved lives.

MARGARET WARNER: So is it -- are you saying both in two ways -- both in getting terrorists off the streets and also in the interrogation?

JOHN BRENNAN: Yes. The rendition is the practice or the process of rendering somebody from one place to another place. It is moving them and the U.S. Government will frequently facilitate that movement from one country to another. . .

Now, you can split hairs and say that defending rendition isn't defending torture, and you can say that America doesn't torture, to which one can only assert there is overwhelming evidence that some Amerikans- and people who profess to work for Amerika- surely do.

This individual surely approves of whatever you call it.

What are these "free elections" of which you speak?

If you thought America had no choice in 2008, look at what the Israelis have to choose from.

If Greed is Good then Madoff is a Moral Man

Rich gets it again:

...There are simply too many major players in the Obama team who are either alumni of the financial bubble’s insiders’ club or of the somnambulant governmental establishment that presided over the catastrophe.

This includes Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary. Washington hands repeatedly observe how “lucky” Geithner was to be the first cabinet nominee with an I.R.S. problem, not the second, and therefore get confirmed by Congress while the getting was good. Whether or not this is “lucky” for him, it is hardly lucky for Obama. Geithner should have left ahead of Daschle.

Now more than ever, the president must inspire confidence and stave off panic. As Friday’s new unemployment figures showed, the economy kept plummeting while Congress postured. Though Obama is a genius at building public support, he is not Jesus and he can’t do it all alone. On Monday, it’s Geithner who will unveil the thorniest piece of the economic recovery plan to date — phase two of a bank rescue. The public face of this inevitably controversial package is now best known as the guy who escaped the tax reckoning that brought Daschle down.

Even before the revelation of his tax delinquency, the new Treasury secretary was a dubious choice to make this pitch. Geithner was present at the creation of the first, ineffectual and opaque bank bailout — TARP, today the most radioactive acronym in American politics. Now the double standard that allowed him to wriggle out of his tax mess is a metaphor for the double standard of the policy he must sell: Most “ordinary Americans” still don’t understand why banks got billions while nothing was done (and still isn’t being done) to bail out those who lost their homes, jobs and retirement savings.

As with Daschle, the political problems caused by Geithner’s tax infraction are secondary to the larger questions raised by his past interaction with the corporations now under his purview. To his credit, Geithner, like Obama, has devoted his career to public service, not buckraking. But he still has not satisfactorily explained why, as president of the New York Fed, he failed in his oversight of the teetering Wall Street institutions. Nor has he told us why, in his first major move in his new job, he secured a waiver from Obama to hire a Goldman Sachs lobbyist as his chief of staff. Nor, in his confirmation hearings, did he prove any more credible than the Bush Treasury secretary, the Goldman Sachs alumnus Hank Paulson, in explaining why Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail while A.I.G. and Citigroup were spared.

Citigroup had one highly visible asset that Lehman did not: Robert Rubin, the former Clinton Treasury secretary who sat passively (though lucratively) in its executive suite as Citi gorged on reckless risk. Geithner, as a Rubin protégé from the Clinton years, might have recused himself from rescuing Citi, which so far has devoured $45 billion in bailout money.

Key players in the Obama economic team beyond Geithner are also tied to Rubin or Citigroup or both, from Larry Summers, the administration’s top economic adviser, to Gary Gensler, the newly named nominee to run the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and a Treasury undersecretary in the Clinton administration. Back then, Summers and Gensler joined hands with Phil Gramm to ward off regulation of the derivative markets that have since brought the banking system to ruin. We must take it on faith that they have subsequently had judgment transplants.

Obama’s brilliant appointees, we keep being told, are irreplaceable. But as de Gaulle said, “The cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men.” You have to wonder if this team is really a meritocracy or merely a stacked deck. Not only did Rubin himself serve on the Obama economic transition team, but two of the transition’s headhunters were Michael Froman, Rubin’s chief of staff at Treasury and later a Citigroup executive, and James S. Rubin, an investor who is Robert Rubin’s son.

A welcome outlier to this club is Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman chosen to direct Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. But Bloomberg reported last week that Summers is already freezing Volcker out of many of his deliberations on economic policy. This sounds like the arrogant Summers who was fired as president of Harvard, not the chastened new Summers advertised at the time of his appointment. A team of rivals is not his thing.

Americans have had enough of such arrogance, whether in the public or private sectors, whether Democrat or Republican. Voters turned on Sarah Palin not just because of her manifest unfitness for office but because her claims of being a regular hockey mom were contradicted by her Evita shopping sprees. John McCain’s sanctification of Joe the Plumber (himself a tax delinquent) never could be squared with his inability to remember how many houses he owned. A graphic act of entitlement also stripped naked that faux populist John Edwards.

The public’s revulsion isn’t mindless class hatred. As Obama said on Wednesday of his fellow citizens: “We don’t disparage wealth. We don’t begrudge anybody for achieving success.” But we do know that the system has been fixed for too long. The gaping income inequality of the past decade — the top 1 percent of America’s earners received more than 20 percent of the total national income — has not been seen since the run-up to the Great Depression.

This is why “Slumdog Millionaire,” which pits a hard-working young man in Mumbai against a corrupt nexus of money and privilege, has become America’s movie of the year. As Robert Reich, the former Clinton labor secretary, wrote after Daschle’s fall, Americans “resent people who appear to be living high off a system dominated by insiders with the right connections...”

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Pravda is stridently asserting today (again) that Greed Is Good, calling in a perfesser from New York University's Stern School of Business, a former partner of Goldman Sachs.:

...bonuses tend to be based on how well the individual is seen to be developing. As employees progress, their compensation is based less on individual performance and more on their role as a manager or team leader. For all professional employees the annual bonus represents a very large amount of the person's take-home pay. At the middle levels, bonuses are set after firm-wide, interdepartmental negotiation sessions that attempt to allocate the firm's compensation pool based on a combination of performance and potential.

Forget the market, swindling billions from the government- repeatedly- is more than enough excuse for billions in bonuses, right?

"Show me the money"

What money?

...Remarks as Delivered by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, The Pentagon , Monday, September 10, 2001

..."we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions"...

They tell me the robber barons can't track their bailout money, either.

Of course, it's a complicated story but one you should read if you want to know just how deep the rabbithole goes.

A letter to the Masters of the Universe

It's been the Worst Decade for Wall Street Evah-



Just in case no one's told you, Marie Cocco will:

...The reason you are such a big story is that you’ve stolen our money. Or at least that’s how most of the country sees it. First you broke just about everything you touched: mortgages, 401(k)s, the kids’ college accounts, and even the employers who provide paychecks—the chump change that middle-class America counts on while you live high. Then we had to bail you out.

You think those auto executives looked bad when they appeared shocked, shocked to find that Congress didn’t really appreciate their traveling in corporate jets to come and beg for their bailouts?

Well, no one hates Detroit as much as they hate Wall Street. At least the Big Three make something people need to get to work and take their kids to soccer and pick up the groceries. What, exactly, do they do with a derivative?

A derivative is a financial vehicle designed to drive off with your money.

That much people, except the financiers, understand.

They still see themselves like this when the rest of the world sees them like this

$4.7 billion a year of shaping hearts, minds, and other organs

Message in your InBox from bullshit.mil, via Cryptogon:

...over the past five years, the money the military spends on winning hearts and minds at home and abroad has grown by 63 percent, to at least $4.7 billion this year, according to Department of Defense budgets and other documents. That's almost as much as it spent on body armor for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2004 and 2006.

This year, the Pentagon will employ 27,000 people just for recruitment, advertising and public relations — almost as many as the total 30,000-person work force in the State Department...

Does this mean filtering their spam is a terrorist act?

Maybe so.

...on Dec. 12, the Pentagon's inspector general released an audit finding that the public affairs office may have crossed the line into propaganda. The audit found the Department of Defense "may appear to merge inappropriately" its public affairs with operations that try to influence audiences abroad. It also found that while only 89 positions were authorized for public affairs, 126 government employees and 31 contractors worked there.

...Another audit, also in December, concluded that a public affairs program called "America Supports You" was conducted "in a questionable and unregulated manner" with funds meant for the military's Stars and Stripes newspaper.

The program was set up to keep U.S. troops informed about volunteer donations to the military. But the military awarded $11.8 million in contracts to a public relations firm to ...drum up support for the military at a time when public opinion was turning against the Iraq war.

The audit also found that the offer to place corporate logos on the Pentagon Web site in return for donations was against regulations...

"They very explicitly identify American public opinion as an important battlefield," says Marc Lynch, a professor at George Washington University...

So if the American public refuses to support the official Pentagon storyline, does that make us enemy combatants?

...In 2003, for example, initial accounts from the military about the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch from Iraqi forces were faked to rally public support...

The fastest-growing part of the military media is "psychological operations," where spending has doubled since 2003...

In Afghanistan, for example, a video of a soldier joining the national army shown on Afghan television is not attributed to the U.S. And in Iraq, American teams built and equipped media outlets and trained Iraqis to staff them without making public the connection to the military.

Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, director of strategic communications for the U.S. Central Command, says psychological operations must be secret to be effective. He says that in the 21st century, it is probably not possible to win the information battle with insurgents without exposing American citizens to secret U.S. propaganda...

The danger of psychological operations reaching a U.S. audience became clear when an American TV anchor asked Gen. David Petraeus about the mood in Iraq. The general held up a glossy photo of the Iraqi national soccer team to show the country united in victory... It was U.S. psychological operations that had quietly distributed tens of thousands of the soccer posters in July 2007 to encourage Iraqi nationalism...

In 2003, Rumsfeld issued a secret Information Operations Roadmap setting out a plan for public affairs and psychological operations to work together. It noted that with a global media, the military should expect and accept that psychological operations will reach the U.S. public...

In February, the Army released a new eight-chapter field manual that puts information warfare on par with traditional warfare.

The title of an entire chapter, Chapter 7: "Information Superiority."

"...I can tell you there wouldn't be a single American disappointed with anything that we've done that might be out there, that they don't know about," says Col. Curtis Boyd, commander of the 4th PSYOP Group, the largest unit of its kind. "Frankly, they probably wouldn't care because maybe they are safer as a result of it..."

And if they are disappointed, obviously they aren't real Amerikans, but insurgents who need to be fought.

Like Greenwald, of course:

...The Pentagon claim that recently popped up as Obama moved to close Guantanamo -- that 61 released detainees have "returned to the battlefield" -- has been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked. Nonetheless, CNN's Wolf Blitzer, as part of a fear-mongering segment on closing Guantanamo, just mindlessly repeated the Pentagon claim (and he even added the scary detail that 25 of those 61 "recidivists" have perpetrated an attack in the last 10 months). As Media Matters notes, establishment journalists are repeatedly reciting the Pentagon's recidivism claim without an ounce of skepticism, without even noting the ample disputes surrounding this claim.

The reason defenders of Bush policies rely on such patently fallacious "reasoning" (if X precedes Y, then it means X caused Y -- where X = torture/Guantanamo and Y = no Terrorist attack) is because they know that these media stars have neither the ability nor the inclination to devote even a molecule of critical thought to what they're being told.

A billion dollars buys a lot of credulity in the main$tream.

The Brightest and the Best

A Comedy, Tonight

A not-so-funny thing happened on the way to economic recovery. Over the last two weeks, what should have been a deadly serious debate about how to save an economy in desperate straits turned, instead, into hackneyed political theater, with Republicans spouting all the old clichés about wasteful government spending and the wonders of tax cuts.

It’s as if the dismal economic failure of the last eight years never happened — yet Democrats have, incredibly, been on the defensive. Even if a major stimulus bill does pass the Senate, there’s a real risk that important parts of the original plan, especially aid to state and local governments, will have been emasculated.

Somehow, Washington has lost any sense of what’s at stake — of the reality that we may well be falling into an economic abyss, and that if we do, it will be very hard to get out again.

It’s hard to exaggerate how much economic trouble we’re in. The crisis began with housing, but the implosion of the Bush-era housing bubble has set economic dominoes falling not just in the United States, but around the world...

Ah, globalism.

The economic collapse is an inside job.

They have ways

cosanostradamus suggests the Pentacle Pentagon doesn't dig this "end the war on terror" talk.

Army Gen. Jack Keane is a busy man for a retired guy. At 66, most retirees, especially those with fat government pensions, would be taking it easy. Instead, "Old Blood & Treasure" is into taking the reins of power away from the lawfully elected President of the United States of America. Keane pretended to be installing democracy in the Middle East, but he seems to be looking to overthrow it here. The only question is, will it be a bloodless coup?

Has it been so far? Evidence suggests otherwise.

"The collapse is 9/11 part 2"

Also an inside job [tip o'teh tinfoil to Uncle $cam].

Just sayin'.

No Prayer of Recovery

Monkeyfister:

GET THE WORK DONE THAT NEEDS TO GET DONE, and FUCK the Republicans.

Obama:

“No matter how much money we invest or how sensibly we design our policies, the change that Americans are looking for will not come from government alone,” Mr. Obama said. “There is a force for good greater than government.”

I am beginning to wonder whether a man who seriously thinks the White House office for religion-based programs ought to be expanded is capable of sensibly designing policies.

It certainly wasn't the case when Bu$hie was Der Decider. Has something changed to make a bad decision a good one?

Mr. President, the change that has damaged this country has come precisely from the failed policies of our government, and we elected you to change those policies.

Don't give us this "will of God" crap. God doesn't borrow money from the Chinese daily to finance war so the rich don't have to be taxed. God doesn't give blank check bailouts to bank CEOs who financed His electoral campaign.

Be vewy, vewy, afwaid

via Cryptogon:

...look at a list of U.S. State Department notices on the U.S. Embassy site for Japan.

This person said to look at the notices dated 09/07/01 and 09/10/01. Obviously, those were just before The Big Day.

...a brand new Worldwide Caution was just released on 2 February.

I thought, “There aren’t too many World Wide Cautions, but maybe it’s a coincidence,” and left it at that.

But today, ...this interview with Cheney about how “the terrorists” are going to use nuclear or biological weapons against a U.S. city if the torture industrial complex was to scale itself back a bit...

Obviously, knowledge of what some criminals want to do doesn't depend on torturing others.

Cheney is really evil. Can we just hand him over to the Hague for war crime prosecution? This kind of thing more than anything else points to the collaborative corruption of the DINOcrats, who refuse to prosecute their Reptilican brothers.

Obama is no FDR. He's an LBJ.

Even the main$tream is picking up on it:

...Obama's desire to begin a "post-partisan" era may have backfired. In his eagerness to accommodate Republicans and listen to their ideas over the past week, he has allowed the GOP to turn the haggling over the stimulus package into a decidedly stale, Republican-style debate over pork, waste and overspending. This makes very little economic sense when you are in a major recession that only gets worse day by day...

If only the Republicans had a Nixon, supported in the shadows by the Bu$h family Empire , in the wings.

Oh, wait a minnit-

NeoRovian Rahmism?

Digby spotted this piece of idiocy that might have been planned by Karl Rove- or his DINOcrat soulmate:

...I wrote the other night about that Blue Dog ass Jim Cooper and how he stuck the shiv into Obama and the stimulus. And I noted this important piece by Mike Lux about Cooper's important role in the tanking of the Clinton health care plan in 1994.

Well, guess what? He's being discussed as the replacement for Daschle at HHS, which is only slightly less ludicrous than the silly idea of Newt Gingrich in the job.

Jim Cooper is an enemy of universal health care. He will, howver, work to ensure that the insurance industry and the Big Pharma gets more of your tax dollars...

There are dozens if not hundreds of smart, sincere, dedicated and experienced MD/ PhD/ MPH types around the country qualified to run Health and Human Services. Why exactly does it require a politician? I mean, if you actually want an administrator to do something instead of figurehead it.

The answer, of course, is that our government is owned by people who want figureheads, not real heads, in titular charge.

It's like Chris Hedges says. If this keeps up, it's not going to be okay (thanks, Avedon):

...Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism and the Constitution while cynically manipulating internal levers to subvert and thwart democratic institutions. Political candidates are elected in popular votes by citizens, but they must raise staggering amounts of corporate funds to compete. They are beholden to armies of corporate lobbyists in Washington or state capitals who write the legislation. A corporate media controls nearly everything we read, watch or hear and imposes a bland uniformity of opinion or diverts us with trivia and celebrity gossip. In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi fascism or Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to politics. “Under inverted totalitarianism the reverse is true,” Wolin writes. “Economics dominates politics—and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.”

...The basic systems are going to stay in place; they are too powerful to be challenged.. This is shown by the financial bailout. It does not bother with the structure at all. I don’t think Obama can take on the kind of military establishment we have developed. This is not to say that I do not admire him. He is probably the most intelligent president we have had in decades. I think he is well meaning, but he inherits a system of constraints that make it very difficult to take on these major power configurations. I do not think he has the appetite for it in any ideological sense. The corporate structure is not going to be challenged. There has not been a word from him that would suggest an attempt to rethink the American imperium...

Not if he doesn't want his bodyguards to walk away from the car the way they did on that day in Dallas in 1963.

...in inverted totalitarianism consumer goods and a comfortable standard of living, along with a vast entertainment industry that provides spectacles and diversions, keep the citizenry politically passive...

There has not been an effort to rethink anything by anyone except the people outside of the Village, and of the things Obama promised to rethink- like the war, like accountability- most are becoming subverted to the Clintonista/ Poppy Bu$h visions of Centrism Obama encountered as he became embedded in the Village culture.

Change? The Cheney-Bu$h NeoCon has been replaced by the Obama-Clinton-Bu$h NeoLiberal, and honest conservatives and honest liberals are equally dismissed as the radical fringe.

Centrism, a mask for Corporatism, is the real enemy.

They can find you

They have the technology.

Just because the Internet has broken down geographic barriers, don't assume that Google doesn't care about geography.

The company plans to launch software called Latitude on Wednesday that lets mobile phone users share their location with close contacts. Google hopes it will help people find each other while out and about and to keep track of loved ones...

Just remember, Big Brother loves you.

Shameless and Blameless.

Like any other large swamp dwelling reptile.

Robert Scheer:

It is instructional that only one of the three tax-challenged Obama appointees has survived public scorn to retain a high position in the new administration. Oddly enough, it is Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the man who will collect our taxes, whose career has not been stunted by his failure to pay them.

What makes Geithner so special? The answer, provided by everyone from the president to the media pundits, is that his services are indispensable because he has the expertise in regulating markets needed to preside over the most massive government intervention in the economy. Are they kidding?

Both in his years in the Clinton treasury and as chair of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, Geithner has been paving the way for a runaway Wall Street. Nor has he changed his ways, as was evidenced once again last week with his appointment of Mark Peterson, a Goldman Sachs vice president and lobbyist, to be his top aide. Peterson had lobbied strenuously for precisely the deregulation that the Obama administration now concedes needs reversing. It was confirmation that Goldman Sachs runs the Treasury Department—no matter which party is in power...

Meanwhile, the financial meltdown continues to be Mission Accomplished for the Right Thinking Amerika, a.k.a. the military-industrial complex:

Wind and solar power have been growing at a blistering pace in recent years, and that growth seemed likely to accelerate under the green-minded Obama administration. But because of the credit crisis and the broader economic downturn, the opposite is happening: installation of wind and solar power is plummeting...

or

Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) — citing “obstacles” such as the economy, energy legislation, Iraq and Afghanistan, and the deficit — said at a conference today that health care reform is unlikely to happen this year. As Finance Committee Chairman, Baucus plays a key role in pushing through health care legislation...

or

WASHINGTON — Senator Judd Gregg, named by President Obama on Tuesday as the choice for commerce secretary, once supported eliminating the department he is to lead. He differs with his boss-to-be in favoring oil drilling on the coast of an Alaska wildlife refuge. He promotes a lighter touch with China than does the president. And he disagrees with him in backing private accounts for Social Security...

When you lay down with large reptiles, Mr. Obama, you had best expect to be a bed time snack.

But, you know, Obama is treating this $eriously:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is expected to impose a cap of $500,000 for top executives at companies that receive large amounts of bailout money, according to people familiar with the plan.

Executives would also be prohibited from receiving any bonuses above their base pay, except for normal stock dividends.

Executives at companies that have already received money from the Treasury Department would not have to make any changes...

How harsh. Obama is a bailout Nazi: No more billion dollar bonuses for you! One is enough!

And Wall Street is really into some pouty kabuki about this, too:

...“That is pretty draconian — $500,000 is not a lot of money, particularly if there is no bonus,” said James F. Reda, founder and managing director of James F. Reda & Associates, a compensation consulting firm...

Mr. Reda said only a handful of big companies pay chief executives and other senior executives $500,000 or less in total compensation. He said such limits will make it hard for the companies to recruit and keep executives, most of whom could earn more money at other firms.

“It would be really tough to get people to staff” companies that are forced to impose these limits, he said. “I don’t think this will work.”

Yes, it would be so hard to get people willing to lose everyone else's money in a socially correct way for $500,000 a year.



The more things Change, the more they stay the strange.

Post-War Reconstruction

I imagine the Iraqis are very impressed about how that all worked out for the Japanese these days.

Simple answers to difficult questions

Why is Obama putting a Social Security privatizer in charge of the Commerce Department?

The trend of the data would suggest the explanation that he's stealing it, of course, in a non-partisan way.

Glad to help you clear that one up, Lambert!

In another good post, Newberry points out that the Village drools over Obama as George Herbert Walker Bush's second term:

...Obama, in their view, could be the perfect Democratic President: spend on term cleaning up Bush's fiscal mess, his foreign policy mess, cram down Democrats on their favorite program, force people to buy health insurance at an enormous profit to insurance companies, and then be washed away by a corporate Republican who goes back to tax cuts for the wealthy.

It is a job that Barack Obama is eager to do. Having taken 4 off the table - as in "what does 2+2=, assuming that 4 is off the table?" - in every major policy area, what is left is minor fixes and minor changes to policy. He is willing to do enough about the middle class and suburbia, such as subsidies for home buying - which, you will note, the suddenly purist free traders of Washington DC are not uttering a peep about, despite the fact that we don't import subdivisions from China or Europe - so that the middle class does not rebel against being bled dry, and enough about civil liberties so that no one is in danger of having their passports revoked. He is willing to put competent people in charge, which means that Ivy and sub-Ivy league types are not behind graduates of fundamentalist degree mills for positions of authority. He is willing to do enough about global warming so that the flatheads don't feel bad. But he is not willing to sheer away the 13% or so of American GDP that is horrendously misallocated.

Thus, restrictions on executive pay are off the table, repealing the Bush cuts early is off the table, thus giving more time to profitize and smuggle the money out, comprehensive health care is out, thus keeping 5% of GDP flowing to insurance companies, really cutting the military is out, just shifting it from one war to another.

What this means for progressives is very simple: this progressive revolt is over, dead...

This, for those of you not paying attention, or self-spinning yourselves into dizziness, is Old Politics. Old Politics is top down, with information gathering and the patina of responsiveness to produce "buy in." Small groups get small things. The people who run those small groups get to continue to live the life they like, by harvesting donations from their small group of donors who have made a particular issue "their" issue. The small groups are happy, and they support the large initiative. Buying support for pennies on the dollar. Obama is merely doing this on the left.

Old Politics rapidly annoys the public, because they both have the large issues go against them, and they seem small issues decided by "the extremists on both sides." They thus blame "the extremists on both sides" for the erosion of American opportunity. It would be like a drunk switching between water and club soda to mix with their hard liquor, seeing this as change. The reality of course is that the top down system, itself, is the problem. Revolts against top down come in the form of "bottom up" generating the next group of small issue activists to be harvested in turn by the next party in power. Social conservatives are energized by social liberals, social liberals by social conservatives. Resource exploitation is energized by environmentalism, environmentalists by resource exploitation. Military people by war opponents. Back and forth it goes in a dynamic equilibrium which is, none the less, stable. The core - protecting the financial infrastructure and super-elite - remains in place. Faith by Science, Science by Faith. In each case the irrelevancies of packaging are focused on. Coke. Pepsi. Pepsi. Coke. Which has more vitamin C in it?

Why, the Kool Aid, of course, Stirling.

Petraeus Caesar has the lean and hungry look

dday notices him stalking off from the White House in a Bizzaro Shakespearean melodrama:

...the Gates-Petraeus plan was to reclassify combat troops as "support troops" to get around that little status of forces agreement mandating set withdrawals of US forces. Apparently Obama wasn't willing to risk American credibility in that shell game.

Of course, Petraeus is trying to circumvent his commander-in-chief, which I believe they call insubordination...

...The assertion that Obama's withdrawal policy threatens the gains allegedly won by the Bush surge and Petraeus's strategy in Iraq will apparently be the theme of the campaign that military opponents are now planning...

Kristol, who has never met a disaster he wasn't responsible for, has his own neocon fantasy agenda of keeping troops in the region to teach Arabs a lesson and enable them to fight in the 8 or 9 other wars he keeps in a list on his Blackberry. And the people who have been wrong about every foreign policy situation for decades upon decades are certainly not the people to listen to about "collapse."

As for Petraeus, it was clear that he was nothing more than a political animal for a while. He figured that his public stature was such that the President of the United States would have to take orders from him. And now he wants to use the media, which is enamored of him, to exact a price on Obama for disobeying him. Maybe he should just declare for 2012 now.

You could see this clash between the military and the young President coming. They don't like taking orders from lowly Democrats and they don't mind undermining their superior officer to make their point.

...By the way, defense spending will increase by 8% in the 2010 FY budget and unnamed sources at the Pentagon are pissed because it's 10% less than what they asked for, portraying this increase as a spending cut. It never stops.

The main danger with Petraeus Caesar and his sycophants is they will do something like what the military did to Jimmy Carter in Iran. Which is what I believe is called "treason", but will be cast by the highest and most need-to-know circles at the Pentacle Pentagon as the highest form of Patriotism.

The Post-Modern Platform

Bob Herbert:

...“What people didn’t yet fully comprehend was that the overall disaster, the sinking of New Orleans, was a man-made debacle, resulting from poorly designed levees and floodwalls.”

And the spectacular rush-hour collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, which killed 13 people, was not enough to get us serious.

Not even the terrible economic downturn that has gripped the country — a downturn that could be eased by a truly big-time surge of infrastructure investment — has been enough to get the leaders of the country to do the right thing.

We’re rushing to bail out the banking industry for what? What kind of country will we have once the bankers are fat and happy again? The U.S. will still be a nation with a pathetic mid-20th-century infrastructure struggling to make it in a dynamic 21st-century world. It’s a blueprint for sustained national decline.

The reason to seize this particular moment to move with a laserlike focus on the infrastructure is because of the desperate need to stop the advancing rot, and because rebuilding the infrastructure is a phenomenal source of employment...

When you juxtapose this tremendous national need with the wholesale destruction of employment that has occurred over the past several months (and that is expected to continue for some time), you have to wonder why President Obama and Congressional leaders are not moving with extraordinary quickness to put together an infrastructure investment program that is both vast and visionary.

Instead, we have infrastructure spending in the Democrats’ proposed stimulus package that, while admirable, is far too meager to have much of an impact on the nation’s overall infrastructure requirements or the demand for the creation of jobs...

The big danger is that some variation of the currently proposed stimulus package will pass, another enormous bailout for the bankers will be authorized, and then the trillion-dollar-plus budget deficits will make their appearance, looming like unholy monsters over everything else, and Washington will suddenly lose its nerve.

The mantra (I can hear it now) will be that we can’t afford to spend any more money on the infrastructure, or on a big health care initiative, or any of the nation’s other crying needs. Suddenly fiscal discipline will be the order of the day and the people who are suffering now will suffer more, and the nation’s long-term prospects will be further damaged as its long-term needs continue to be neglected.

We no longer seem to learn much from history. Time and again an economic boom has followed a period of sustained infrastructure investment. Think of the building of the Erie Canal, which connected the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. Think of the rural electrification program, the interstate highway system, the creation of the Internet.

We’re suffering now from both a failure of will and of imagination...

Among other things, Mr. Herbert, we are suffering from a $ystem that is designed to deliver everything and everyone into the hands of the robber barons.

As Amerikan as Wal-Mart Springsteen

Bailed-out Bank of America spent $10 million on Super Bowl party.


"We have our mercenary reasons of course"

Wherein the Boss jumps the shark.

Birds of a Feather

Flock together.

Just sayin'.

Friedman Rules

Krugman:

Question: what happens if you lose vast amounts of other people’s money? Answer: you get a big gift from the federal government — but the president says some very harsh things about you before forking over the cash.

Am I being unfair? I hope so. But right now that’s what seems to be happening.

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about the Obama administration’s plan to support jobs and output with a large, temporary rise in federal spending, which is very much the right thing to do. I’m talking, instead, about the administration’s plans for a banking system rescue — plans that are shaping up as a classic exercise in “lemon socialism”: taxpayers bear the cost if things go wrong, but stockholders and executives get the benefits if things go right.

When I read recent remarks on financial policy by top Obama administration officials, I feel as if I’ve entered a time warp — as if it’s still 2005, Alan Greenspan is still the Maestro, and bankers are still heroes of capitalism.

“We have a financial system that is run by private shareholders, managed by private institutions, and we’d like to do our best to preserve that system,” says Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary — as he prepares to put taxpayers on the hook for that system’s immense losses.

Meanwhile, a Washington Post report based on administration sources says that Mr. Geithner and Lawrence Summers, President Obama’s top economic adviser, “think governments make poor bank managers” — as opposed, presumably, to the private-sector geniuses who managed to lose more than a trillion dollars in the space of a few years...

In normal times, banks raise capital by selling stock to private investors, who receive a share in the bank’s ownership in return. You might think, then, that if banks currently can’t or won’t raise enough capital from private investors, the government should do what a private investor would: provide capital in return for partial ownership.

But bank stocks are worth so little these days — Citigroup and Bank of America have a combined market value of only $52 billion — that the ownership wouldn’t be partial: pumping in enough taxpayer money to make the banks sound would, in effect, turn them into publicly owned enterprises.

My response to this prospect is: so? If taxpayers are footing the bill for rescuing the banks, why shouldn’t they get ownership, at least until private buyers can be found? But the Obama administration appears to be tying itself in knots to avoid this outcome...

Will there at least be limits on executive compensation, to prevent more of the rip-offs that have enraged the public? President Obama denounced Wall Street bonuses in his latest weekly address — but according to The Washington Post, “the administration is likely to refrain from imposing tougher restrictions on executive compensation at most firms receiving government aid” because “harsh limits could discourage some firms from asking for aid...”

Dr. Krugman is exactly right here. So? The government eats the bank. Problem solved.

Not likely, though. Predictably the Wall Street Pravda is in deep disinformation and denial mode from everything ranging from the New Deal to closing Gitmo.

Cosmic Questions

Why do all the big blue Masters of the Universe attract the women in the tight spandex and leather?

It's one of those things I will never understand.

Appetizers

Mr. Fish

Hacking Up Furballs

The New York Pravda's big cat doesn't see why Obama won't make the Masters of the Universe give their bonuses back.

The New York Pravda is itself a furball in the bear's belly.

"This is allowed?"

Not only allowed. Encouraged.

Big Brother's Big Mouth

Father Tyme notices an interesting inadvertant admission of capabilities the Company makes as part of a gee-whizz NASA promo.

Watch the video until the end. If you weren't already aware of this, you might get a surprise.

Military Intelligence

Carlin the Great was correct.

...The term Jumbo Shrimp has always amazed me. What is a Jumbo Shrimp? I mean, it's like Military Intelligence - the words don't go together, man.

You can not make this stuff up, but you can cut it off

The Wall Street Pravda editorial page comes really close to trying to explain the birds and the bees to the Masters of the Universe, but gets all storky in the face of the myths of their own NeverNeverland:

..after President Obama denounced Wall Street bonuses as "shameful" on Thursday, the way was clear for the rest of the political class to pour gasoline on the bonfire being prepared for the offending bankers. Senator Chris Dodd, former "friend" of mortgage banker Angelo Mozilo, ranted that the Treasury should somehow confiscate the bonuses.

Senator Claire McCaskill rolled out legislation to put a compensation cap of $400,000 on executives whose firms receive bailout money. She also proposes creating a court to restrain their "massive self-indulgences." The Senator from Missouri then spoke of "a bunch of idiots on Wall Street." Insofar as the Congress is blithely waving more than $800 billion of cats-and-dogs "stimulus" spending into the air, the American people can be forgiven for asking who are the greater fools.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has begun a formal investigation into the bonuses and the negotiating details of Bank of America's takeover of Merrill Lynch. In short, Mr. Cuomo is putting BofA head Ken Lewis and Merrill's John Thain in the legal crosshairs. Watching this spectacle, Mr. Obama should consider that there may be a price for letting the populist flames burn out of control during a deep recession.

In our experience, political nuance has never been the strong suit of Wall Street executives. John Thain's year-end bonuses to Merrill Lynch executives, whatever their rationale, reflected an acute case of political tin ear. If the excesses of his office-decorating take this Wall Street practice the way of the dodo, we won't weep.

Yet the hard truth remains that whether on Wall Street or across the American business landscape, compensation levels are a business judgment made under the pressure of competition. The "idiots" notwithstanding, Wall Street has lots of highly talented financial minds and mobility among firms based on compensation is routine.

If Congress is going to start setting legal limits on salaries and bonuses in the U.S., it is going to drive talent out of Bank of America and these other banks and into institutions without such limits, perhaps abroad. The same goes for Attorney General Cuomo's implied threat of prosecutions...

Sweet Cthulhu's slimy tentacles, let the bastards walk. Please. And slam the damned door on their backsides on their way out.

These geniuses did a damned good job of destroying democracy here in the USA for eight years under Bu$hie. When it became obvious their republican water bearers were lepers to the America they prey on, they did a damned good job of buying the democrats. They've walked off with billions- maybe trillions, we'll never really know- of shareholder, investor, and taxpayer money.

They're trying to sabotage any government rescue of anyone else.

They're destroying this country.

Let the bastards walk. Before we really get French.



Not that there's anything wrong with that in this case. It's just once this stuff starts, it's kind of hard to stop.

It's because these people lie

We came to that conclusion quickly with Bu$hie.

Why is it so hard for liberal progressives to reach it concerning the Oborg?

WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner picked a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist as a top aide Tuesday, the same day he announced rules aimed at reducing the role of lobbyists in agency decisions...

[via Avedon via the Heretik]

It's the Hope and Faith bit of the Oborg song and dance. It's an old Sith Lord mind trick that seems to work every time. The really bad part is how the Unibama acts and talks like he doesn't understand the trick himself.

In hard times people turn to religion

This is the main reason why the religions would ensure hard times are here to stay.

"Pennies for the people, pounds for the powerful."

Stirling Newberry has figured it out:

The centrists get it. This political fight is between the "centrists" and the people. They want it all, they want it all, and they want it now. Liberals have to get bupkis before Obama gets a single Republican vote. If liberals were smart, they would draw the line here and tell President Obama that if he makes more concessions, they walk, and he gets nothing from them and will have to govern as a Republican from here on in. Last time that happened was NAFTA, and the Democrats are still smarting over how long they were out of power. So it won't happen now. So America, bend over and lube up, because you are about to feel the Unity Pony...

The UnDraft is Here for You "Volunteers"

They can't form a draft without making Barry a.k.a Lyndon Baines Obama. But they can suck in people who "volunteer" for other Service.

Defense Department Establishes Civilian Expeditionary Workforce
By Gerry J. Gilmore
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Jan. 27, 2009 – The Defense Department is forming a civilian expeditionary workforce that will be trained and equipped to deploy overseas in support of military missions worldwide, according to department officials.

The intent of the program “is to maximize the use of the civilian workforce to allow military personnel to be fully utilized for operational requirements,” according to a Defense Department statement.

Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England signed Defense Department Directive 1404.10, which outlines and provides guidance about the program, on Jan. 23.

Certain duty positions may be designated by the various Defense Department components to participate in the program. If a position is designated, the employee will be asked to sign an agreement that they will deploy if called upon to do so. If the employee does not wish to deploy, every effort will be made to reassign the employee to a nondeploying position.

The directive emphasizes, however, that volunteers be sought first for any expeditionary requirements, before requiring anyone to serve involuntarily or on short notice. Overseas duty tours shall not exceed two years.

Employees in deployable-designated positions will be trained, equipped and prepared to serve overseas in support of humanitarian, reconstruction and, if absolutely necessary, combat-support missions.

The program also is open to former and retired civilian employees who agree to return to federal service on a time-limited status to serve overseas or to fill in for people deployed overseas.

Program participants are eligible for military medical support while serving in their overseas duty station.

All participants will undergo pre- and post-deployment medical testing, including physical and psychological exams.

Defense civilians reassigned from their normal duty to serve overseas will be granted the right to return to the positions they held prior to their deployment or to a position of similar grade, level and responsibility within the same organization, regardless of the deployment length .

Families of deployed Defense Department civilian employees shall be supported and provided with information on benefits and entitlements and issues likely to be faced by the employee during and upon return from a deployment.

Defense civilian employees who participate in the expeditionary program shall be treated with high regard as an indication of the department’s respect for those who serve expeditionary requirements.

Expeditionary program participants’ service and experience shall be valued, respected and recognized as career-enhancing.

Participants who meet program requirements would be eligible to receive the Secretary of Defense Medal for the Global War on Terrorism.

See Defense Department Directive 1404.10 [.pdf]

[tip o'teh tinfoil to Cryptogon]

What is this "Recession" of Which You Speak?

For some, 2008 was a very good year:

Despite a drop in its fourth-quarter earnings and collapsing oil prices, Exxon Mobil, the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, still managed to set a record as the most profitable American corporation ever last year...

“Exxon kept its head when everyone else was going crazy going to alternatives and drilling more,” said Mr. Flynn, at Alaron Trading. “But Exxon knew after every boom comes a bust and focused on the future.”

Of course, being just plain evil helps one hell of a lot, too.

Global Bust-Out

Organized crime, Al-Qaeda, or Al-CIAda?

It's time for a little Shock Doctrine of our own

Krugman is correct, and many of the Oborg have the idea now too:

...Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, has declared that “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Indeed. F.D.R. was able to enact Social Security in part because the Great Depression highlighted the need for a stronger social safety net. And the current crisis presents a real opportunity to fix the gaping holes that remain in that safety net, especially with regard to health care.

And Mr. Obama really, really doesn’t want to repeat the mistakes of Bill Clinton, whose health care push failed politically partly because he moved too slowly: by the time his administration was ready to submit legislation, the economy was recovering from recession and the sense of urgency was fading.

One more thing. There’s a populist rage building in this country, as Americans see bankers getting huge bailouts while ordinary citizens suffer.

I agree with administration officials who argue that these financial bailouts are necessary (though I have problems with the specifics). But I also agree with Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who argues that — as a matter of political necessity as well as social justice — aid to bankers has to be linked to a strengthening of the social safety net, so that Americans can see that the government is ready to help everyone, not just the rich and powerful.

The bottom line, then, is that this is no time to let campaign promises of guaranteed health care be quietly forgotten. It is, instead, a time to put the push for universal care front and center. Health care now!

The health care industry still has jobs. Some form of single payer national policy would be a great way to make sure it kept generating jobs and kept American workers working.

Disequilibrated Planet

In case you forgot because of all the snow this winter



There are also big changes going on in the far north

...Temperatures are rising in the North Atlantic, and the permafrost soil in Siberia, Canada and Alaska is softening. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Arctic is subject to "stronger and faster warming than any other region."

Arctic animal and plant species must adjust to far more extreme changes than elsewhere -- or face the threat of extinction. It is not surprising that the polar bear has become a symbol of climate change.

People also live in the Arctic region. The Inuit are the ancestral settlers of the north. They number about 100,000 and are scattered across Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Siberia. Their familiar habitat is sinking as the permafrost soil softens.

Some stand to benefit from the end of the ice era. As if awakening from a deep sleep, the five nations bordering the Arctic -- the United States, Russia, Canada, Norway and Denmark -- are already grasping for new riches:

* As the wheat farming zone shifts farther to the north in Siberia, the Russians are looking forward to rich harvests.

* Farmers in Greenland recently began growing potatoes and broccoli, making the territory less dependant on shipments from the south.

* US aluminum producer Alcoa plans to build a huge aluminum smelter near Greenland's capital city, Nuuk. Hydroelectric power from melting glaciers will provide the electricity for the plant.

* As the ice melts, previously impassable shipping routes become navigable. Large amounts of money and effort are already being poured into expanding ports like Murmansk, Churchill and Hammerfest.

* Most of all, the Arctic is releasing unimagined amounts of resources, especially oil and gas, but also various ores.

...From the pragmatists' standpoint, the Arctic Ocean is opening up at just the right time. Exploding prices are fueling an onslaught on the riches of the North. The British-Dutch energy conglomerate Shell, for example, spent a record sum of $2 billion (€1.4 billion) for licenses in the Chukchi Sea north of the Bering Strait.

Energy multinational BP recently spent $1 billion (€700 million) for oil exploration rights in the pack ice in Canada's Mackenzie River estuary region. A $16.2 billion (€11.3 billion) pipeline will connect the new energy-producing region with areas to the south. The Danish company DONG Energy A/S began collecting seismic data in Disko Bay on the west coast of Greenland.

A forecast issued by the US Geological Survey (USGS) in July has ignited both fascination and greed. For the first time, the agency provided a detailed estimate of the Arctic region's oil and gas potential. The USGS concludes that the region north of the Arctic Circle holds the equivalent of 412 billion barrels of oil, or close to one-quarter of the world's undiscovered but technically reachable oil and gas reserves. This is significantly more than proven reserves in Saudi Arabia...

The newbies in Michigan all complain about the winter because we've had a few subzero nights.

Ten thousand years ago there were wooly mammoths and a polar ice cap down to the Ohio River.

...While an ice sheet on Antarctica began to grow some 20 million years ago, the current ice age is said to have started about 2.58 million years ago. During the late Pliocene the spread of ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere began. Since then, the world has seen cycles of glaciation with ice sheets advancing and retreating on 40,000- and 100,000-year time scales called glacials (glacial advance) and interglacials (glacial retreat). The earth is currently in an interglacial, and the last glacial period ended about 10,000 years ago. All that remains of the continental ice sheets are the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets...

Nobody notices that of the native American flora, bald cypress survives winter cold down to -35^oF. Their old growth forests are in the swamps of Louisiana- but you can grow them just fine in Michigan, too. It's just the last forests in Michigan got wiped out by the kilometer of ice 20,000 years ago.



Not to dismiss the seriousness of sudden global warming. but swinging the pendulum the other direction could be equally or more disasterous as well.

The Accountability President

What is this "recession" of which you speak?


Smiling, happy people

WASHINGTON -- Government officials seeking to revamp the U.S. financial bailout have discussed spending another $1 trillion to $2 trillion to help restore banks to health, according to people familiar with the matter...

Obama's Ba$e is going to love that with no strings attached.

The banks should not get one cent more from the taxpayers without total transparency, total control, and total accountability of how the money is spent by the Treasury.

But should and will are two very different animals.

Hold the cards close when you've got all the aces

The Moon suggests that Obama has no Afghanistan strategery, but I don't think that is the case at all.

I'm with Antifa:

...The war in Afghanistan has nothing to do with Afghanistan. It has only to do with war. Any war. Anywhere. Any reason at all will do.

It's a jobs program.

From Congress to Pentagon to Defense Industry . . . the old double play. The money flows by the hundreds of billions, keeping industry busy, keeping materiel flowing, keeping campaign coffers full, keeping jobs going in every single Congressional District in the nation. This sacred bastion of money and power behind the American government and American nation is the true shadow government. No American President will ever be permitted to shut it down...

Opium is also a great source of financial liquidity. The Amerikan banks want a capital flow from somewhere.

Ideas are another dangerous thing they have in the chocolate-making countries

Avedon is really pissed after reading Sam Stein and you probably will be too.

...Three days after receiving $25 billion in federal bailout funds, Bank of America Corp. hosted a conference call with conservative activists and business officials to organize opposition to the U.S. labor community's top legislative priority.

Participants on the October 17 call -- including at least one representative from another bailout recipient, AIG -- were urged to persuade their clients to send "large contributions" to groups working against the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), as well as to vulnerable Senate Republicans, who could help block passage of the bill.

Bernie Marcus, the charismatic co-founder of Home Depot, led the call along with Rick Berman, an aggressive EFCA opponent and founder of the Center for Union Facts. Over the course of an hour, the two framed the legislation as an existential threat to American capitalism, or worse.

"This is the demise of a civilization," said Marcus. "This is how a civilization disappears. I am sitting here as an elder statesman and I'm watching this happen and I don't believe it..."

I like her comment:

...France. Where everyone gets good healthcare. My, that's just absolutely barbaric, isn't it?

Jude has the right idea, although that will probably get him on the "no-fly" list if DHS ever figures out his real name.

Kinetic Analysis

After a quiet solstice period Swedish Meatballs Confidential is back, pointing to some of the best psyops in the main$tream. And still not work safe.

And pointing to some surprising veritas among the Faithful Christian Scientists:

...Meanwhile, kinetic is moving in other directions, too. "Afghanistan's kinetic action" was the somewhat cryptic headline on a piece the other day in Stars and Stripes, the independent news source for the US military community.

The lead was a little more enlightening, if not heartening: "Taliban fighters have turned increasingly to roadside bombs and other deadly tactics to combat U.S. soldiers and other NATO-led troops in southern Afghanistan, military officials say."

With such a grim story, no wonder there was a resort to euphemism.

By contrast, a "nonkinetic" operation is one with no shooting or bombing.

Thus the Navy Times quoted Vice Adm. Bill Gortney, commander of 5th Fleet and Combined Maritime Forces, on efforts to combat piracy off the coast of Somalia: "The most effective measures we've seen ... are non-kinetic..."

Unfortunately, those non-kinetic solutions don't make money for the Gipper, do they?

In difficult economic times we must prioritize:

...Five programs account for half of the growth in weapons spending, Gates said. The five programs are Boeing’s Future Combat Systems; General Dynamics’ and Northrop Grumman’s Virginia-class attack submarines; Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter; the Pentagon’s primary satellite-launch program, which is an effort shared by Lockheed Martin and Boeing; and a multi-contractor program to destroy the U.S. stockpile of chemical weapons.

It's a no-brainer what gets cut out of that list.

No Liquidity Problem

Where has all the opium related money been going since the War on Terror went to Afghanistan?

It's going to come as no surprise (to some), also via Cryptogon and the Reuters news agency:

The United Nations’ crime and drug watchdog has indications that money made in illicit drug trade has been used to keep banks afloat in the global financial crisis, its head was quoted as saying on Sunday.

Vienna-based UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa said in an interview released by Austrian weekly Profil that drug money often became the only available capital when the crisis spiralled out of control last year.

“In many instances, drug money is currently the only liquid investment capital,” Costa was quoted as saying by Profil. “In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system’s main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor.”

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime had found evidence that “interbank loans were funded by money that originated from drug trade and other illegal activities,” Costa was quoted as saying. There were “signs that some banks were rescued in that way.”

Profil said Costa declined to identify countries or banks which may have received drug money and gave no indication how much cash might be involved. He only said Austria was not on top of his list, Profil said...

Unfriendly Natives

Brits Shoot at UFOs, Ex-official Says
January 27, 2009
United Press International

LONDON -- A former official with the British Ministry of Defense said military pilots in the country have been shooting at UFOs since the 1980s.

Nick Pope, former head of the Ministry of Defense's UFO project, said UFOs have been fired upon but none have been brought down or captured by the Royal Air Force, The Daily Telegraph reported Monday.

"There was a faction in the MoD who said 'We want to shoot down a UFO and that will resolve the issue one way or another,'" Pope said. "We know of cases where the order has been given to shoot down -- with little effect to the UFO."

Pope said pilots only fired upon UFOs in cases where the objects appeared threatening.

"In the case of UFOs, whether the object is causing a threat is very much a pilot's judgment call. The public won't know unless it comes down in a heavily populated area," he said.

[tip o'teh tinfoil to Noah]

One wonders if there's a difference between little and no effect.

Another thing: if the Brits have been doing it since the '8os, we've been doing it since the Battle of Los Angeles.



One wonders about the effect, and just how little it is still today.

The silence speaks volumes.

The obvious question and equally obvious answer

Over at The New York Pravda today, Bob Herbert asks it...

...it was Phil Gramm, John McCain’s economic guru, who told us last summer that the pain was all in our heads, that this was a “mental recession.”

The truth, of course, is that the country is hemorrhaging jobs and Americans are heading to the poorhouse by the millions. The stock markets and the value of the family home have collapsed, and there is virtual across-the-board agreement that the country is caught up in the worst economic disaster since at least World War II.

The Republican answer to this turmoil?

Tax cuts.

They need to go into rehab.

The question that I would like answered is why anyone listens to this crowd anymore. G.O.P. policies have been an absolute backbreaker for the middle class. (Forget the poor. Nobody talks about them anymore, not even the Democrats.) The G.O.P. has successfully engineered a wholesale redistribution of wealth to those already at the top of the income ladder and then, in a remarkable display of chutzpah, dared anyone to talk about class warfare.

A stark example of this unholy collaboration between the G.O.P. and the very wealthy was on display in the pages of this newspaper on Jan. 18. The Times’s Mike McIntire wrote an article about the first wave of federal bailout money for the financial industry, which was handed over by the Bush administration with hardly any strings attached. (Congress, under the control of the Democrats, should never have allowed this to happen, but the Democrats are as committed to fecklessness as the Republicans are to tax cuts.)

The public was told that the money would be used to loosen the frozen credit markets and thus help revive the economy. But as the article pointed out, there were bankers with other ideas. John C. Hope III, the chairman of the Whitney National Bank in New Orleans, in an address to Wall Street fat cats gathered at the Palm Beach Ritz-Carlton, said:

“Make more loans? We’re not going to change our business model or our credit policies to accommodate the needs of the public sector as they see it to have us make more loans.”

How’s that for arrogance and contempt for the public interest? Mr. Hope’s bank received $300 million in taxpayer bailout money.

The same article quoted Walter M. Pressey, president of Boston Private Wealth Management, which Mr. McIntire described as a healthy bank with a mostly affluent clientele. It received $154 million in taxpayer money.

“With that capital in hand,” said Mr. Pressey, “not only do we feel comfortable that we can ride out the recession, but we also feel that we’ll be in a position to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves once this recession is sorted out.”

Take advantage, indeed. That, in a nutshell, is what the plutocracy is all about: taking unfair advantage.

When the G.O.P. talks, nobody should listen. Republicans have argued, with the collaboration of much of the media, that they could radically cut taxes while simultaneously balancing the federal budget, when, in fact, big income-tax cuts inevitably lead to big budget deficits. We listened to the G.O.P. and what do we have now? A trillion-dollar-plus deficit and an economy in shambles.

This is the party that preached fiscal discipline and then cut taxes in time of war. This is the party that still wants to put the torch to Social Security and Medicare. This is a party that, given a choice between Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, would choose Ronald Reagan in a heartbeat.

Why is anyone still listening?

Because the Ba$e still owns all the ears in Washington, Bob. It's not simple "fecklessness". It is simple "corruption".

I'm glad I could clear that one up for you.

Happy Trails to You

There wouldn't be a government agency trying to do covert climate change now would there?

It's not like there aren't people advocating it either.

But believe it, real experts say it's a really bad idea. Not that's ever stopped a private contractor with an inside to a covert government agency that thinks it knows best.

Perspective from the Ice Age: La Niña

It's quiet. Too quiet.



Developing La Niña conditions are likely to continue into Northern Hemisphere Spring 2009.

During December 2008, negative equatorial sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies strengthened across the central and east-central Pacific Ocean (Fig. 1). Correspondingly, the latest weekly SST index values were -0.3°C in Niño-1+2, -0.9°C in Niño 3, -1.1°C in Niño 3.4, and -0.7°C in Niño 4 (Fig. 2). The subsurface oceanic heat content anomalies (average temperatures in the upper 300m of the ocean, Fig. 3) also became increasingly negative as below-average temperatures at thermocline depth strengthened in the central and eastern Pacific (Fig. 4). Convection remained suppressed near the International Date Line, and became more persistent near Indonesia during December. Low-level easterly winds and upper-level westerly winds also strengthened across the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Collectively, these oceanic and atmospheric anomalies reflect the development of La Niña.

Nearly all of the recent forecasts for the Niño-3.4 region indicate a continuation of below-average SSTs through the first half of 2009, with at least one-half predicting La Niña conditions throughout the period (Fig. 5). While the magnitude of cooling remains uncertain, NOAA’s official La Niña threshold (3-month average of the Niño-3.4 index less than or equal to -0.5°C) is expected be met at least through January-March 2009. Therefore, based on current observations, recent trends, and model forecasts, La Niña conditions are likely to continue into the Northern Hemisphere Spring 2009...

When polar ice melts it takes a lot of heat out of the environment to melt it.

Most of the global warming observed has taken place at the poles. It can be easiest observed in the summers, which are warmer at the higher latitudes than ever measured before. Also, with the increased melting of both the thinner transient ice and the permafrost ice in the summer, more open water is exposed in the winter. In the past, this water was insulated under ancient ice. It takes a lot of heat out the environment when it freezes in the winter darkness.

Plus, over the last year the sun has been unusually quiet, causing a cooling effect.

That seems to have recently ended.

Greenhouse warming is real. In fact, some greenhouse warming allows life to exist here. It's just dangerous when unchecked.

But it's not a simple relationship at all. We live under a variable star. Over the last 5 million years or so the world's had about 5 ice ages, where the sun's activity got low enough to allow the arctic ice cap to extend as far south as the ohio river. Similarly it got active enough to melt all that ice, which is pretty incredible if you think about it.

If global warming alone got serious enough to melt the ice cap it would cause pretty incredibly destructive turmoil.

But a new ice age with a mile of ice over Michigan? Or Manhattan?

The point of this is not to stop our efforts to curtail CO₂ emissions and human-caused global warming. The point of this is, however, that we should be very reluctant to fight global warming by interfering with the insolation of the planet. We can't predict what we might need in the future.

On Deep Racketeering

If you want to understand what has happened to Wall Street and the American economy, you need to read the Deep Capture explanation, outlined with links here.

If there was ever a crime that cried out for RICO, this is it.