Consistency

Some experts reproducibly have the wrong idea possibly because they reproducibly have their own agenda. Their idealism is a cover to mask their own self-interest. Take the NeoCons, for example. In fact, take them very far away if you can.

Frank Rich:

...Perhaps the most surreal aspect of our great Afghanistan debate is the Beltway credence given to the ravings of the unrepentant blunderers who dug us into this hole in the first place.

Let’s be clear: Those who demanded that America divert its troops and treasure from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2002 and 2003 — when there was no Qaeda presence in Iraq — bear responsibility for the chaos in Afghanistan that ensued. Now they have the nerve to imperiously and tardily demand that America increase its 68,000-strong presence in Afghanistan to clean up their mess — even though the number of Qaeda insurgents there has dwindled to fewer than 100, according to the president’s national security adviser, Gen. James Jones.

But why let facts get in the way? Just as these hawks insisted that Iraq was “the central front in the war on terror” when the central front was Afghanistan, so they insist that Afghanistan is the central front now that it has migrated to Pakistan. When the day comes for them to anoint Pakistan as the central front, it will be proof positive that Al Qaeda has consolidated its hold on Somalia and Yemen...

...Along with his tribunes in Congress and the punditocracy, Wrong-Way McCain still presumes to give America its marching orders. With his Senate brethren in the Three Amigos, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, he took to The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page to assert that “we have no choice” but to go all-in on Afghanistan — rightly or wrongly, presumably — just as we had in Iraq. Why? “The U.S. walked away from Afghanistan once before, following the Soviet collapse,” they wrote. “The result was 9/11. We must not make that mistake again.”

This shameless argument assumes — perhaps correctly — that no one in this country remembers anything. So let me provide a reminder: We already did make that mistake again when we walked away from Afghanistan to invade Iraq in 2003 — and we did so at the Three Amigos’ urging. Then, too, they promoted their strategy as a way of preventing another 9/11 — even though no one culpable for 9/11 was in Iraq. Now we’re being asked to pay for their mistake by squandering stretched American resources in yet another country where Al Qaeda has largely vanished.

To make the case, the Amigos and their fellow travelers conflate the Taliban with Al Qaeda much as they long conflated Saddam’s regime with Al Qaeda. But as Rajiv Chandrasekaran of The Washington Post reported on Thursday, American intelligence officials now say that “there are few, if any, links between Taliban commanders in Afghanistan today and senior Al Qaeda members” — a far cry from the tight Taliban-bin Laden alliance of 2001.

The rhetorical sleights of hand in the hawks’ arguments don’t end there. If you listen carefully to McCain and his neocon echo chamber, you’ll notice certain tics. President Obama better make his decision by tomorrow, or Armageddon (if not mushroom clouds) will arrive. We must “win” in Afghanistan — but victory is left vaguely defined. That’s because we will never build a functioning state in a country where there has never been one. Nor can we score a victory against the world’s dispersed, stateless terrorists by getting bogged down in a hellish landscape that contains few of them.

Most tellingly, perhaps, those clamoring for an escalation in Afghanistan avoid mentioning the name of the country’s president, Hamid Karzai, or the fraud-filled August election that conclusively delegitimized his government. To do so would require explaining why America should place its troops in alliance with a corrupt partner knee-deep in the narcotics trade. As long as Karzai and the election are airbrushed out of history, it can be disingenuously argued that nothing has changed on the ground since Obama’s inauguration and that he has no right to revise his earlier judgment that Afghanistan is a “war of necessity.”

Those demanding more combat troops for Afghanistan also avoid defining the real costs. The Congressional Research Service estimates that the war was running $2.6 billion a month in Pentagon expenses alone even before Obama added 20,000 troops this year. Surely fiscal conservatives like McCain and Graham who rant about deficits being “generational theft” have an obligation to explain what the added bill will be on an Afghanistan escalation and where the additional money will come from. But that would require them to use the dread words “sacrifice” and “higher taxes” when they want us to believe that this war, like Iraq, would be cost-free.

The real troop numbers are similarly elusive. Pre-emptively railing against the prospect of “half measures” by Obama, Lieberman asked MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell rhetorically last week whether it would be “real counterinsurgency” or “counterinsurgency light.” But the measure Lieberman endorses — Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s reported recommendation of 40,000 additional troops — is itself counterinsurgency light. In his definitive recent field manual on the subject, Gen. David Petraeus stipulates that real counterinsurgency requires 20 to 25 troops for each thousand residents. That comes out, conservatively, to 640,000 troops for Afghanistan (population, 32 million). Some 535,000 American troops couldn’t achieve a successful counterinsurgency in South Vietnam, which had half Afghanistan’s population and just over a quarter of its land area.

Lieberman suggested to Mitchell that we could train an enhanced, centralized Afghan army to fill any gaps. In how many decades? The existing Afghan “army” is small, illiterate, impoverished and as factionalized as the government. For his part, McCain likes to justify McChrystal’s number of 40,000 by imbuing it with the supposedly magical powers of the “surge” in Iraq. But it’s rewriting history to say that the “surge” brought “victory” to Iraq. What it did was stanch the catastrophic bleeding in an unnecessary war McCain had helped gin up. Lest anyone forget, we still don’t know who has “won” in Iraq...

There you go again. The facts have a liberal bias. Much, much more there, so read it all.

Speaking of flatlanders who never met a war they didn't like, go read little Tommy Friedman's piece in The New York Pravda on Peace(keepers). I really think anyone delivering little Tommy's speech should wear the finest Sebacian leathers to keep NeoCon kewl.

Simple Answers to Important Questions

Have Banks No Shame?

Not as long as they've got all your money.

Peacekeeper

Greenwald:

...far more important than the lack of actual accomplishments are some of the policies over which Obama has presided that are the very opposite of peace.

Yes, but you have to remember, the Decision was made February 1.



Besides, would you put the sudden brakes on the war machine if your Afghanistan commander ran assasination squads for Dick Cheney?

A funny thing happened on the way to the abattoir

No, really, it's dynamite:

...To give a peace prize to the commander-in-chief of a war machine now churning its way through the populations of three countries (Iraq/Af-Pak), with innumerable black ops, lightning raids and drone shots on the side .... to a man who even as we speak is deciding just how he wants to kill even more civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan ... a man who has enthusiastically embraced as "an extraordinary achievement" one of the most heinous and barbaric acts of military aggression since Hitler rolled across the border into Poland ... a man who blusters about leaving "all options on the table," including the use of mass-murdering nuclear weapons, to bully other nations into compliance with American wishes ... to give a peace prize to such a man, while all over the world, there are men and women who have devoted their entire lives to non-violence and reconciliation, many of them suffering imprisonment, torture and ruin for their efforts ... well, like I said, it's beyond words.

But it's good to see that the spirit of arms merchant Alfred Nobel -- purveyor and profiteer of death and destruction -- is being honored so perfectly with today's award...

Perhaps this all falls in the realm of telling a lion he's a nice kitty so he won't look at you when his stomach growls. It does seem the Euro thing to try to modify unspeakable behavior with this prize. At least one good thing likely comes of this: Petraeus Caesar and his Dog of War McChrystal are pissed.

Barry O. gets the Nobel and Petraeus gets his prostate rotor rooted.

Oh well, there's no reason for the Dog of War to worry.

No, really: Barack Obama just used his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech to reiterate his threats against Iran.

War is Peace, baby. That's Change you can Believe in.

"...and all you see is people rushing by you, on their way to the trains that are taking them anywhere but here."

My working hypothesis for the 21st Century is that the robber baron oligarchs are in the business of producing a post-industrial world where the Ruling Class has all the technology and 99(+)% of humanity simply subsists in serfdom.

It's so much easier to control- and to stay on top if you're the kind of brain-dead and soul-dead oligarch Skull & Bones seems to be graduating.

It's the only explanation that makes any sense.

Tiabbi:

...The old-style, Soviet-perfected, Living Color-referenced Cult of Personality was a kind of irrational hero-worship in which the Great Leader would be credited with everything from the invention of the threshing machine to big band jazz to low crime and high fertility rates. He never served in battle, but he was a military hero whose medals clinked during parades. The essence of the Cult of Personality was its knee-jerk irrationality and its pervasiveness.

There was absolutely no reason to think Joe Stalin would know anything about poetry or literature, or agriculture or history, and no rational reason why people would want him to be an expert on these things, but millions of people loved the idea that he was an authority even there. You had to be out of your freaking mind to want to think of Stalin as the world’s greatest poet, but there were such people. Lots of them.

It’s sort of the same, only in reverse, with all of this anti-Obama stuff. There are plenty of rational reasons to disapprove of the Obama administration. There are plenty of curious policy decisions in his history already and he has already drawn plenty of real ideological lines in the sand that people looking to whine about something could whine about, if they so chose.

But instead of that, the opponents of Barack Obama seem determined to make a villain out of him almost solely on the basis of his completely innocent and irrelevant behaviors. Instead of bitching at him for things like giving away billions of dollars via his Public-Private Investment Program — a natural rallying cry for conservatives, you would think — they’re constantly getting on his balls about stuff that has no relevance to anything at all, much less the conservative-liberal divide. It’s almost as though the haters have an emotional attachment to the notion of Obama as being guilty of and responsible for everything, from bad weather to the lack of good movies outside of District 9 to the flattening out of Brandon Webb’s sinker...

...follows this:

I found most of the content of Moore’s movie horrifying. It was also striking to me that the theme he is addressing here, i.e. the rapid peasant-ization of most of the country, is basically a taboo subject for every other major media outlet in the country. The vast majority of our movies are either thinly-disguised commercials for consumer products (Law Abiding Citizen), remakes of old shows and movies designed to transport us back to the good old days when life was better (i.e. Fame) , or gushy nerf-tripe with no hard edges crafted to serve as escapist fairy tales for stressed-out adults wanting to dream of happy endings (Love Happens).

What we call a “good movie” is usually also escapism, and sometimes even also a nostalgic remake, it just happens to be well-done and expertly directed, with great production values and acting performances...

But we’re living in a time of extreme crisis almost nothing on TV or in the movies is designed to get us thinking about how to fix our problems. If anything, most of the stuff on TV is designed to jack up our anxiety level without offering any solutions except the short-term fixes of buying and eating — witness the endless reality shows in which ordinary people slave away and scheme against each other for weeks on end for a 1 in 12 shot at a (pick one) modeling job/date with a non-deformed, non serial-killing person/chance to be shouted at by Donald Trump.

Now that stuff is cynical and monstrous. It is my sincere hope that the people who are producing these programs will someday be tried and executed by war crimes tribunals at the Hague.

At least Michael Moore is getting us talking about the right topics...

Athenae picks up on this thread:

...the crazy teabag rage has come from a vague sense...that our lives are not what we think they should be.

Frank Herbert once said an Emperor provides many opportunities for his subjects to fail.

That crazy rage is there to motivate you to live the way the $ystem wants you. That crazy rage is blinding you to the real Wolf. You want to not get eaten?

Calm down, find your target, take aim, and fire.

The worst that could happen? The big bad wolf takes you before you get your bearings, but that's going to happen anyway if you keep your eye on the gadflies.

Inquiring Minds Want to Know:

Does Obama Get It?

...The Beltway crowd and the Einsteins of high finance who never saw this economic collapse coming are now telling us with their usual breezy arrogance that the Great Recession is probably over...

...Mr. Obama, in an interview with The Times, gave short shrift to the idea of an additional economic stimulus package, telling John Harwood a few weeks ago that the economy had likely turned a corner. “As you know,” the president said, “jobs tend to be a lagging indicator; they come last...”

In 2008 the Bu$hCo banksters insisted there was no recession, 'cause, you know, their fudged jobs data said there wasn't. The Oborg, not content to simply lie about the job data, have moved to simply denying it means anything.

Now that's Change you can disbelieve in!

Because, you know, they lie.

Just like Bu$hCo. In fact, one can't help but wonder if they're related somehow.

Sadie Baker, via Avedon:

Obama's central dilemma is that he ran, if not as an outright progressive, at least by making enough progressive noises now and then to win the support of progressives. He would not be in office without them.

But his intent is to govern as an anti-progressive. For reasons I cannot fathom, his team has decided to try to use the frame of "fragility" to thread this needle.

To wit: he can't end the wars because the Republicans will call him names if he does. He had to cut a backroom deal with Big Pharma on healthcare reform because otherwise they would run mean commercials. He had to give Wall Street a blank check, with no strings attached, because otherwise they might hurt him.

You see the problem? When your stated agenda conflicts with your real agenda, you need to come up with a plausible reason for why you keep things that are the opposite of what you said you wanted. That's understandable, you want to keep the rubes on the reservation.

But why weakness? Why do they think it's a good idea to tell everyone the reason he doesn't do what needs to be done is because he's weak? That's a huge mistake that is going to catch up with them...

Why? Because you don't ask why weak people lose.

You accept what Beck and Rush had been saying all along, if you're not inclined to think too much, and the next bankster shill wins the $election.

Pirate Equity

All legal, too.

This has happened time and time again over the last ten years:

For most of the 133 years since its founding in a small city in Wisconsin, the Simmons Bedding Company enjoyed an illustrious history.

Presidents have slumbered on its mattresses aboard Air Force One. Dignitaries have slept on them in the Lincoln Bedroom. Its advertisements have featured Henry Ford and H. G. Wells. Eleanor Roosevelt extolled the virtues of the Simmons Beautyrest mattress, and the brand was immortalized on Broadway in Cole Porter’s song “Anything Goes.”

Its recent history has been notable, too, but for a different reason.

Simmons says it will soon file for bankruptcy protection, as part of an agreement by its current owners to sell the company — the seventh time it has been sold in a little more than two decades — all after being owned for short periods by a parade of different investment groups, known as private equity firms, which try to buy undervalued companies, mostly with borrowed money.

For many of the company’s investors, the sale will be a disaster. Its bondholders alone stand to lose more than $575 million. The company’s downfall has also devastated employees like Noble Rogers, who worked for 22 years at Simmons, most of that time at a factory outside Atlanta. He is one of 1,000 employees — more than one-quarter of the work force — laid off last year.

But Thomas H. Lee Partners of Boston has not only escaped unscathed, it has made a profit. The investment firm, which bought Simmons in 2003, has pocketed around $77 million in profit, even as the company’s fortunes have declined. THL collected hundreds of millions of dollars from the company in the form of special dividends. It also paid itself millions more in fees, first for buying the company, then for helping run it. Last year, the firm even gave itself a small raise.

Wall Street investment banks also cashed in. They collected millions for helping to arrange the takeovers and for selling the bonds that made those deals possible. All told, the various private equity owners have made around $750 million in profits from Simmons over the years.

How so many people could make so much money on a company that has been driven into bankruptcy is a tale of these financial times and an example of a growing phenomenon in corporate America.

Every step along the way, the buyers put Simmons deeper into debt. The financiers borrowed more and more money to pay ever higher prices for the company, enabling each previous owner to cash out profitably.

But the load weighed down an otherwise healthy company. Today, Simmons owes $1.3 billion, compared with just $164 million in 1991, when it began to become a Wall Street version of “Flip This House.”

In many ways, what private equity firms did at Simmons, and scores of other companies like it, mimicked the subprime mortgage boom. Fueled by easy money, not only from banks but also endowments and pension funds, buyout kings like THL upended the old order on Wall Street. It was, they said, the Golden Age of private equity — nothing less than a new era of capitalism.

These private investors were able to buy companies like Simmons with borrowed money and put down relatively little of their own cash. Then, not long after, they often borrowed even more money, using the company’s assets as collateral — just like home buyers who took out home equity loans on top of their first mortgages. For the financiers, the rewards were enormous.

Twice after buying Simmons, THL borrowed more. It used $375 million of that money to pay itself a dividend, thus recouping all of the cash it put down, and then some.

A result: THL was guaranteed a profit regardless of how Simmons performed. It did not matter that the company was left owing far more than it was worth, just as many people profited from the mortgage business while many homeowners found themselves underwater.

Investors who bought that debt are getting virtually nothing in the new deal.

“From my experience, none of the private equity firms were building a brand for the future,” said Robert Hellyer, Simmons’s former president, who worked for several of the private equity buyers before being asked to leave the company in 2005. “Plus, the mind-set was, since the money was practically free, why not leverage the company to the maximum?”

Indeed. Why not drive down the freeway at 120 miles per hour?

Why not completely destroy the ability of the nation to make anything if you can have your cushy beach house on Long Island? And another on Hilton Head? And another on the Gulf?

Why worry about all the people you've ruined? All the investors whose life savings you gamed into your pocket? People who thought naively that investments were good for the country, because they provided the capital industry needed to make this the strongest and the freest country on earth?

You've got yours. You've made the deals.



Let's take a bit of salt from an old salt of low fantasy and lower parody:

"Better were the days when mastery of seas came not from bargains struck with eldritch creatures... but from the sweat of a man's brow and the strength of his back alone. You all know this to be true! "

Arr, but how many equity pirates would break a sweat for profit when they could sell or steal a soul?

Switch and No Bait

Jane Hamsher calls the way the insurance privateers are going to get your tithe:

...It doesn't make any sense -- Harkin says there are 54-57 votes for a public option. That's a clear majority. And it would certainly pass the House. No, the only reason to pass a bill without a public option is if the White House doesn't want one. But who is going to let the public know? Who is going to make the announcement that there will be no public option? Who's going to take that political hit?

The White House doesn't have the stomach for it. They want someone else to take the hit...

There are certainly Democrats in the Senate who have said that they won't support a public option, but so far nobody has stepped forward to say they'll join a Republican filibuster to stop it. Nobody wants that hot potato alone.

But they have to do something, because if a public option winds up in the Senate bill, it's going to be damn impossible to get out of there.

So the best model, the safest model (relatively speaking) is one of distributed responsibility. Some group (say, a "gang") stepping forward to announce that they have arrived at an agreement that everyone can live with, some abomination that makes the insurance companies happy and has some code language in there for "triggers." They'll present it as a "solution," and won't mention that the "problem" only exists because they're willing to join with the GOP in a filibuster but won't say so. Then nobody will point out the obvious -- that anyone who is willing to do this should lose their gavels immediately. That's how we'll know everyone is on board, despite their angry rhetoric...

You know, at some really deep visceral level these crooks have got to hate being so transparent.

The More Things Change...

the more they stay the strange.

Frank Rich:

...you have to wonder what some of the Obama era’s most moneyed and White House-connected lobbyists were thinking as they preened before a Washington Post reporter recently for two lengthy articles. We’re not even nine months into the new administration, yet these swaggering, utterly un-self-aware influence peddlers seem determined to prove that nothing except the party affiliations has changed in the Beltway’s pay-for-play culture since Tom DeLay. If these lobbyists were stocks, I’d short them...

DINOcrats and Rethuglicans go together like fundamentalists and scientologists, if you ask me...

... Barack Obama promised a change from this revolving-door, behind-closed-doors collaboration between special interests and government. He vowed to “do our business in the light of day” — with health care negotiations broadcast on C-Span — and to “restore the vital trust between people and their government.” He said, “I intend to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over.” That those lobbyists would so extravagantly flaunt their undiminished role shows just how little they believe that a new sheriff has arrived in Dodge.

In his scathing Wall Street Journal column on The Post articles last week, Thomas Frank crystallized the gap between Obama’s pledge and this reality. “There is something uniquely depressing about the fact that the National Portrait Gallery’s version of the Barack Obama ‘Hope’ poster previously belonged to a pair of lobbyists.” That’s no joke: It was donated by Tony and Heather Podesta.

Obama’s promise to make Americans trust the government again was not just another campaign bullet point; it’s the foundation of his brand of governance and essential to his success in office. At the first anniversary of the TARP bailout of the banks, we can see how far he has to go. Americans’ continued suspicion that Washington is in cahoots with powerful interests in joints like Tosca is contributing to their confusion and skepticism about what’s happening out of view in the battle over health care reform.

The public is not wrong. The administration’s legislative deals with the pharmaceutical companies were made in back rooms. Business Week reported in early August that the UnitedHealth Group and its fellow insurance giants had already quietly rounded up moderate Democrats in the House to block any public health care option that would compete with them for business. UnitedHealth’s hired Beltway gunslingers include both Elmendorf Strategies and Daschle, a public supporter of the public option who nonetheless does some of his “wink, wink” counseling for UnitedHealth. The company’s in-house lobbyist is a former chief of staff to Steny Hoyer, the House majority leader. Gephardt consults there too.

But it’s not as if the Republicans now have the public’s back. DeLay may be reduced these days to violating public taste rather than the public trust on “Dancing With the Stars,” but back on Capitol Hill, his successors keep the K Street faith. In their campaign to kill the public option, G.O.P. leaders often cite data from the Lewin Group, a research company, which has projected that 88 million Americans might quit their private insurance plans if given a government alternative. (The Congressional Budget Office puts the figure at the far less earthshaking 10 to 11 million.) Lewin, which repeatedly insists it’s still a nonpartisan outfit, was actually bought by a subsidiary of UnitedHealth in 2007. The Huffington Post reported in August that John Boehner and Eric Cantor — who use Lewin’s findings to scare voters about a “government takeover” of health care — are big recipients of UnitedHealth campaign cash.

Next up will be the overhaul of financial regulations. With job seekers now outnumbering job openings 6 to 1 in America, many still wonder why most of the big-dog culprits who helped speed the national meltdown — from lying and gambling bankers to shyster subprime mortgage packagers to executives at delinquent ratings agencies — have not shared their pain. In his speech marking the anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ failure, Obama chastised Wall Street for having taken irresponsible risks. But of course it is already back doing exactly that.

Meanwhile, we’re hearing of behind-the-scenes Congressional softening of perhaps the most promising component of the White House’s modest financial regulatory package, a Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Real-estate brokerages are being exempted from its purview, and banks will not be required to offer “plain vanilla” mortgages. As in health care, the question of what the White House will really fight for in financial reform remains open. While the ostentatious daily predators’ ball at Ristorante Tosca is a bad omen, we don’t know yet whether that omen is for the lobbyists, or the Obama administration, or both.

This is history that the president still has the power to write. It will be written in the bills he will or won’t sign into law. We can only hope that he learned an important lesson from his stunning failure to secure Olympic gold for his political home of Chicago last week. If the Olympic committee has the audacity to stand up to a lobbyist as powerful as the president of the United States, then surely the president of the United States can stand up to the powerful interests angling to defeat his promise of reform.

If he wants to, that is.

Socialism for the Masses

Spocko notes the teabaggers think flu shots are the gateway to Obamacare and/or Hell.

Quite a few of these people will win the Darwin Award if they skip the seasonal and the H1N1 flu shot.

In fact, basically every medical advance in the last 50 years has been due to work funded by the National Institutes of Health.

So if these folks find themselves with cancer, or heart or vascular disease, or respiratory or kidney problems, or stroke, or virtually any of a long list ailments that trouble people, I do not think they can in good conscience seek medical care.

After all, it's socialism, right?

The Bait and Switch Recovery

There are sincere Democratic Villagers that are trying to tell the One and his advisors they've got it all wrong.

Robert Reich:

Oct. 2, 2009. Unemployment will almost certainly be in double-digits next year -- and may remain there for some time. And for every person who shows up as unemployed in the Bureau of Labor Statistics' household survey, you can bet there's another either too discouraged to look for work or working part-time who'd rather have a full-time job or else taking home less pay than before (I'm in the last category, now that the University of California has instituted pay cuts). And there's yet another person who's more fearful that he or she will be next to lose a job.

In other words, 10 percent unemployment really means 20 percent underemployment or anxious employment. All of which translates directly into late payments on mortgages, credit cards, auto and student loans, and loss of health insurance. It also means sleeplessness for tens of millions of Americans. And, of course, fewer purchases (more on this in a moment).

Unemployment of this magnitude and duration also translates into ugly politics, because fear and anxiety are fertile grounds for demagogues wielding the politics of resentment against immigrants, blacks, the poor, government leaders, business leaders, Jews and other easy targets. It's already started. Next year is a midterm election. Be prepared for worse.

So why is unemployment and underemployment so high, and why is it likely to remain high for some time? Because, as noted, people who are worried about their jobs or have no jobs, and who are also trying to get out from under a pile of debt, are not going to do a lot of shopping. And businesses that don't have customers aren't going to do a lot of new investing. And foreign nations also suffering high unemployment aren't going to buy a lot of our goods and services.

And without customers, companies won't hire. They'll cut payrolls instead.

Which brings us to the obvious question: Who's going to buy the stuff we make or the services we provide, and therefore bring jobs back? There's only one buyer left: the government.

Let me say this as clearly and forcefully as I can: The federal government should be spending even more than it already is on roads and bridges and schools and parks and everything else we need. It should make up for cutbacks at the state level, and then some. This is the only way to put Americans back to work. We did it during the Depression. It was called the WPA.

Yes, I know. Our government is already deep in debt. But let me tell you something: When one out of six Americans is unemployed or underemployed, this is no time to worry about the debt.

When I was a small boy my father told me that I and my kids and my grandkids would be paying down the debt created by Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Depression and World War II. I didn't even know what a debt was, but it kept me up at night.

My father was right about a lot of things, but he was wrong about this. America paid down FDR's debt in the 1950s, when Americans went back to work, when the economy was growing again, and when our incomes grew, too. We paid taxes, and in a few years that FDR debt had shrunk to almost nothing...

This also happened during the Clinton years to the Reagan debt. Of course, Summers and the Clintonites immediately started blowing their own bubble which Bu$hie expanded tremendously. There were things about that recovery it seems the Company didn't like. Full employment meant that skilled workers could bargain for higher wages. Given the state of the economy then, though, there was no reason to deny them that.

It produced an independent-minded workforce that couldn't be controlled easily.

The current Recovery is based totally on the view of the banksters, who are using their best to inflate another speculaive bubble based on access to the U.S. Treasury. Job insecurity makes a population easier to control. Debt-ridden workers don't want to rock the boat.

Debt-ridden workers don't want to assume more debt, either, which in the final analysis makes a speculative market much harder to establish since the average worker can't throw two cents in the betting pool.

It would seem this latest market bounce would be designed to do just one thing. Pare down the richest 1% of Amerika that owns 90% of everything down to 0.5% or so.

Fools and Their Money and the Great White Whale

Alice Schroeder:

Oct. 1 (Bloomberg) -- If you owned stocks and gold and had to sell one, which would it be?

The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index has gained almost 60 percent since its low on March 9. Gold is near a record price. I know a fair number of people who would keep the gold.

I’ve never been a gold bug myself. They get no respect. They are associated with survivalists, conspiracy theorists and nutcases. They are always looking for the hyperinflation that never comes. Gold bugs pay a premium over the metal price for gold and silver coins on the notion that they will need the currency, come the Apocalypse...

On the other hand, the relationship between gold and financial crises goes back centuries. In the aftermath of the credit-bubble bust, we confront a Moby Dick-size pile of leverage and the question of whether this is inflationary or deflationary. So it’s worth considering what the price of gold may be telling us.

Leverage is a broad term that covers the complete history of finance, which all boils down essentially to the same structure: debt secured by assets. You give me a cow, I give you a piece of paper. Later innovations are simply variations of obligations secured by assets.

So a simple explanation of bubbles is that they form whenever someone creates a rationale to increase obligations too far beyond the level justified by the assets, regardless of the form of the asset or obligation...

Some now blame consumers’ disinclination to spend and get the economy going again on banks’ newfound reluctance to lend. To the contrary, we are in the midst of a deflationary trend that is temporarily being masked by inventory restocking and free lunches like “cash for clunkers.” Consumers are done with borrowing. They will keep fueling the deflation by going through their attics and garages to find stuff they can sell on EBay to raise cash.

That’s because consumers have figured out that it was all a big head-fake from the Federal Reserve. Real incomes haven’t grown in years. Manufacturing and, increasingly, service jobs are still moving overseas. The Treasury is trying to pump the economy back to a high-water mark that was phony to begin with, and doing so in the face of a savings rate that is going up...

The Treasury will succeed in printing enough money to forestall severe deflation. Even so, dollars will keep flowing out of the U.S. to other countries as the trade gap widens. Only when we start creating more jobs and higher earnings can this dynamic reverse. The question is, when will that be?

Enter the gold bugs. They aren’t just betting on inflation, as is the conventional wisdom. Gold has a wicked history of being an unreliable inflation hedge. It has, though, at times been a haven against sudden currency depreciation.

In all the talk of inflation because the Treasury is printing so much money versus deflation because it may not print enough, there is one type of inflation that is rarely discussed. This is the mega-inflation caused by a sudden currency devaluation. Currency is like any financial innovation, an obligation secured by assets. When the obligation is perceived to have increased far beyond the level justifiable by the assets, which in this case make up a country’s economy, a bubble has formed.

As in any bubble, those who recognize this need to act well in advance. Historically, governments have taken action to prevent currency flight when the owners of a severely overvalued medium of exchange start selling so much that it adds to the pressure on its price. They make private purchases of gold illegal, or tax the exchange of currency.

Right now, the American economy is worth less than the value implied by the market value of its obligations. How much less, no one knows. But gold bugs will tell you, privately, that this is why they are buyers. Might as well stock up, they say, before gold becomes a controlled substance...

But It's Not Fascism When We Do It

Glenn Greenwald:

... Isn't it so interesting how the phrase "Patriot Act" was the symbol of everything Democrats claimed to find so heinous during the Bush years, but now that there's a Democratic President, Senate and Congress, it's absolutely certain that the Patriot Act will continue, and civil libertarians are reduced to hoping that there may be some tiny modifications to it, and even that's highly unlikely?

Highly unlikely and totally unsurprising.

Pot meets kettle and calls it

...a terrorist.

But what the Hell.

It's better than talking about $25 trillion paid and earmarked to the banksters so they can continue to treat the worldwide economy as their own private casino, right?

The Audacity of Diversion

What to make over all the saber rattling at Iran over the last week? Doubtless the Iranian people are suffering under their theocrats and their autocrats who steal elections from other theocrats. Yet doubtless the international trade sanctions and the Special Ops trying to infiltrate their borders from both sides cause some suffering too.

The whole timing of all the terrorist cells that got set up stung uncovered by the FBI last week was interesting too. Two of them were planned and baited by the Feds for foolish muslim kids with chips on their shoulders. The other was an arrest of an alledged sleeper who had visited Pakistan but somehow had no incriminating evidence of actually trying to build the bombs they accused him of having. Except the word of the Feds, of course.

Chris Floyd had a really good say about this:

...Iran was building a new nuclear enrichment facility, as it is allowed to do by international treaty. The United States and several other Western countries knew about the facility for years. The facility, which is still months away from completion, is not designed to enrich uranium to weapons grade. Iran is not required to inform the IAEA about any new enrichment plant until six months before the plant goes into operation. There is some quibbling about a codicil that was meant to require Iran to give extra early notice; but this was never ratified by the Iranian legislature, so Iran is in compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty which it signed and ratified years ago. (As opposed to such already nuclear armed American allies as India and Israel.) The facility was not secret, it can't build bombs, it is not even finished, and it has no nuclear material in it.

Er, that's it. But upon this paper-thin foundation, a vast fortress of sinister bullshit has been erected by the "progressive" American president and his laughable lapdogs in London and Paris. The long-known presence of a unfinished, non-weaponized, treaty-compliant building is now being presented to the world as a burning reason to impose harsh new sanctions on Iran -- harsh to the point of outright acts of war, such as an embargo on shipments of gasoline and other fuel products to Iran. And of course, our coddled, padded, well-protected War Party hacks have seized upon this non-event to bay even louder for oceans of Persian blood to slake their thirsts -- or bolster their faltering manhoods, or do whatever it is that the thought of foreigners being slaughtered in great numbers far, far away does for pathetic little wretches like Lindsey Graham, Joe Lieberman and the Whole Sick Crew...

...note what is likely to be a side issue, but an interesting one nonetheless -- the timing of these "revelations."

As we all know, Barack Obama and his Europuppies meant to make a big show of sword-waggling at the opening of the oh-so-momentous G20 summit in Pittsburgh. Iran beat them to the punch by formally notifying the IAEA of the new facility before the summit, but in any case, the "Iran crisis" served its purpose for the Masters of the West: it covered up the fact that they actually had nothing whatsoever to say about the ostensible theme of the summit -- solving the global economic collapse. If the "Iran crisis" had not sucked up all the media oxygen, these "leaders" might have had to explain why they have given trillions of public dollars to the perpetrators of the economic collapse, while letting millions upon millions of their citizens slide into jobless, homeless penury. They would have had to explain why they are taking nothing but the most ineffective, cosmetic measures to rein in the hyper-greed of the oligarchs. And they would have to admit that their only plan for addressing the crisis in the future is to do more of the same: giving the elite even more public money to use as they please.

But all the economic questions were blown away by the ever-sexy talk of war. And of course, all the hoo-rah about a new war also distracted from the White House dithering over the old, failing war in Afghanistan. It's the oldest con trick in the book: distracting the sucker while you pick his pocket.

So hold on to your wallets, rubes.

Stanley A. McChrystal has the ear of the One. And Stanley's backers own Barry's loans.

Apologist to the Dead

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) is to all appearances a real Democrat in a Congress full of DINOcrats:

...Yesterday, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) said the Republican health care plan is “don’t get sick,” and if you do get sick, “die quickly.” After offering those facetious and sadly accurate remarks, Grayson came under criticism from Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), who demanded that Grayson apologize on the House floor. Speaking to reporters this afternoon, Grayson said, “Yes, it was tongue-in-cheek. I’m surprised I have to explain that, but that’s the way it goes these days.” He added that he’s “not taking any of it back” and will “stand by what I said.” When asked if he would apologize, Grayson offered this response:

“I would like to apologize,” he said. “I would like to apologize to the dead.”

Citing a statistic that 44,789 Americans die each year because they don’t have health insurance, Grayson said, “That is more than ten times the number of Americans who died in the war in Iraq, it’s more than ten times the number of Americans who died on 9/11. …It happens every year.”

Grayson added in another apparent dig at the GOP, “We should care about people even after they are born.”

Grayson apologized one last time.

“I apologize to the dead and their families that we haven’t voted sooner,” he said.

Just make sure you have a public option or even a single payer plan for everyone and not a private insurance mandate, Mr. Grayson.

Future Combat No More

The Company has decided to bring its high tech toys home, because using them in combat might get someone accused of a war crime.

Better to use them on Amerikans:

...No longer the stuff of disturbing futuristic fantasies, an arsenal of “crowd control munitions,” including one that reportedly made its debut in the U.S., was deployed with a massive, overpowering police presence in Pittsburgh during last week’s G-20 protests.

Nearly 200 arrests were made and civil liberties groups charged the many thousands of police (most transported on Port Authority buses displaying “PITTSBURGH WELCOMES THE WORLD”), from as far away as Arizona and Florida with overreacting…and they had plenty of weaponry with which to do it.

Bean bags fired from shotguns, CS (tear) gas, OC (Oleoresin Capsicum) spray, flash-bang grenades, batons and, according to local news reports, for the first time on the streets of America, the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD).

Mounted in the turret of an Armored Personnel Carrier (APC), I saw the LRAD in action twice in the area of 25th, Penn and Liberty Streets of Lawrenceville, an old Pittsburgh neighborhood. Blasting a shrill, piercing noise like a high-pitched police siren on steroids, it quickly swept streets and sidewalks of pedestrians, merchants and journalists and drove residents into their homes, but in neither case were any demonstrators present. The APC, oversized and sinister for a city street, together with lines of police in full riot gear looking like darkly threatening Michelin Men, made for a scene out of a movie you didn’t want to be in.

As intimidating as this massive show of armed force and technology was, the good burghers of Pittsburgh and their fellow citizens in the Land of the Brave and Home of the Free ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Tear gas and pepper spray are nothing to sniff at and, indeed, have proven fatal a surprising number of times, but they have now become the old standbys compared to the list below that’s already at or coming soon to a police station or National Guard headquarters near you. Proving that “what goes around, comes around,” some of the new Property Protection Devices were developed by a network of federally-funded, university-based research institutes like one in Pittsburgh itself, Penn State’s Institute for Non-Lethal Defense Technologies.

· Raytheon Corp.'s Active Denial System, designed for crowd control in combat zones, uses an energy beam to induce an intolerable heating sensation, like a hot iron placed on the skin. It is effective beyond the range of small arms, in excess of 400 meters. Company officials have been advised they could expand the market by selling a smaller, tripod-mounted version for police forces.

· M5 Modular Crowd Control Munition, with a range of 30 meters "is similar in operation to a claymore mine, but it delivers...a strong, nonpenetrating blow to the body with multiple sub-munitions (600 rubber balls)."

· Long Range Acoustic Device or "The Scream," is a powerful megaphone the size of a satellite dish that can emit sound "50 times greater than the human threshold for pain" at close range, causing permanent hearing damage. The L.A. Times wrote U.S. Marines in Iraq used it in 2004. It can deliver recorded warnings in Arabic and, on command, emit a piercing tone..."[For] most people, even if they plug their ears, [the device] will produce the equivalent of an instant migraine," says Woody Norris, chairman of American Technology Corp., the San Diego firm that produces the weapon. "It will knock [some people] on their knees." CBS News reported in 2005 that the Israeli Army first used the device in the field to break up a protest against Israel's separation wall. "Protesters covered their ears and grabbed their heads, overcome by dizziness and nausea, after the vehicle-mounted device began sending out bursts of audible, but not loud, sound at intervals of about 10 seconds...A military official said the device emits a special frequency that targets the inner ear."

· In "Non-lethal Technologies: An Overview," Lewer and Davison describe a lengthy catalog of new weaponry including the "Directed Stick Radiator," a hand-held system based on the same technology as The Scream. "It fires high intensity ‘sonic bullets' or pulses of sound between 125-150db for a second or two. Such a weapon could, when fully developed, have the capacity to knock people off their feet."

· The Penn State facility is testing a "Distributed Sound and Light Array Debilitator" a.k.a. the "puke ray." The colors and rhythm of light are absorbed by the retina and disorient the brain, blinding the victim for several seconds. In conjunction with disturbing sounds it can make the person stumble or feel nauseated. Foreign Policy in Focus reports that the Department of Homeland Security, with $1 million invested for testing the device, hopes to see it "in the hands of thousands of policemen, border agents and National Guardsmen" by 2010.

· Spider silk is cited in the University of Bradford’s Non-Lethal Weapons Research Project, Report #4 (pg. 20) as an up-and-comer. “A research collaboration between the University of New Hampshire and the U.S. Army Natick Research, Development and Engineering Center is looking into the use of spider silk as a non-lethal ‘entanglement’ material for disabling people. They have developed a method for producing recombinant spider silk protein using E. coli and are trying to develop methods to produce large quantities of these fibres.”

· New Scientist reports that the (I'm not making this up) Inertial Capacitive Incapacitator (ICI), developed by the Physical Optics Corporation of Torrance, California, uses a thin-film storage device charged during manufacture that only discharges when it strikes the target. It can be incorporated into a ring-shaped aerofoil and fired from a standard grenade launcher at low velocity, while still maintaining a flat trajectory for maximum accuracy.

· Aiming beyond Tasers, the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency, (FY 2009 budget: $1B) the domestic equivalent of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), plans to develop wireless weapons effective over greater distances, such as in an auditorium or sports stadium, or on a city street. One such device, the Piezer, uses piezoelectric crystals that produce voltage when they are compressed. A 12-gauge shotgun fires the crystals, stunning the target with an electric shock on impact. Lynntech of College Station, Texas, is developing a projectile Taser that can be fired from a shotgun or 40-mm grenade launcher to increase greatly the weapon's current range of seven meters.

· "Off the Rocker and On the Floor: Continued Development of Biochemical Incapacitating Weapons," a report by the Bradford Disarmament Research Centre revealed that in 1992, the National Institute of Justice contracted with Lawrence Livermore National Lab to review clinical anesthetics for use by special ops military forces and police. LLNL concluded the best option was an opioid, like fentanyl, effective at very low doses compared to morphine. Combined with a patch soaked in DMSO (dimethylsufoxide, a solvent) and fired from an air rifle, fentanyl could be delivered to the skin even through light clothing. Another recommended application for the drug was mixed with fine powder and dispersed as smoke.

· After upgrades, the infamous "Puff the Magic Dragon" gunship from the Vietnam War is now the AC-130. "Non-Lethal Weaponry: Applications to AC-130 Gunships," observes that "With the increasing involvement of US military in operations other than war..." the AC-130 "would provide commanders a full range of non-lethal weaponry from an airborne platform which was not previously available to them." The paper concludes in part that "As the use of non-lethal weapons increases and it becomes valid and acceptable, more options will become available."

· Prozac and Zoloft are two of over 100 pharmaceuticals identified by the Penn State College of Medicine and the university's Applied Research Lab for further study as "non-lethal calmatives." These Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), noted the Penn State study, "...are found to be highly effective for numerous behavioral disturbances encountered in situations where a deployment of a non-lethal technique must be considered. This class of pharmaceutical agents also continues to be under intense development by the pharmaceutical industry...New compounds under development (WO 09500194) are being designed with a faster onset of action. Drug development is continuing at a rapid rate in this area due to the large market for the treatment of depression (15 million individuals in North America)...It is likely that an SSRI agent can be identified in the near future that will feature a rapid rate of onset..."

Please read the original for its links.



Don't be too surprised if there are some anomalous responses to that last one, Company boys.

But maybe that's planned, too.

When one looks long into the void

...you might find it looking right back.

Frank Rich:

...Analogies between Vietnam and Afghanistan are the rage these days. Some are wrong, inexact or speculative. We don’t know whether Afghanistan would be a quagmire, let alone that it could remotely bulk up to the war in Vietnam, which, at its peak, involved 535,000 American troops. But what happened after L.B.J. Americanized the war in 1965 is Vietnam’s apocalyptic climax. What’s most relevant to our moment is the war’s and Goldstein’s first chapter, set in 1961. That’s where we see the hawkish young President Kennedy wrestling with Vietnam during his first months in office.

The remarkable parallels to 2009 became clear last week, when the Obama administration’s internal conflicts about Afghanistan spilled onto the front page. On Monday The Washington Post published Bob Woodward’s account of a confidential assessment by the top United States and NATO commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, warning that there could be “mission failure” if more troops aren’t added in the next 12 months. In Wednesday’s Times White House officials implicitly pushed back against the leak of McChrystal’s report by saying that the president is “exploring alternatives to a major troop increase in Afghanistan.”

As Goldstein said to me last week, it’s “eerie” how closely even these political maneuvers track those of a half-century ago, when J.F.K. was weighing whether to send combat troops to Vietnam. Military leaders lobbied for their new mission by planting leaks in the press. Kennedy fired back by authorizing his own leaks, which, like Obama’s, indicated his reservations about whether American combat forces could turn a counterinsurgency strategy into a winnable war.

Within Kennedy’s administration, most supported the Joint Chiefs’ repeated call for combat troops, including the secretaries of defense (McNamara) and state (Dean Rusk) and Gen. Maxwell Taylor, the president’s special military adviser. The highest-ranking dissenter was George Ball, the undersecretary of state. Mindful of the French folly in Vietnam, he predicted that “within five years we’ll have 300,000 men in the paddies and jungles and never find them again.” In the current administration’s internal Afghanistan debate, Goldstein observes, Joe Biden uncannily echoes Ball’s dissenting role.

Though Kennedy was outnumbered in his own White House — and though he had once called Vietnam “the cornerstone of the free world in Southeast Asia” — he ultimately refused to authorize combat troops. He instead limited America’s military role to advisory missions. That policy, set in November 1961, would only be reversed, to tragic ends, after his death. As Bundy wrote in a memo that year, the new president had learned the hard way, from the Bay of Pigs disaster in April, that he “must second-guess even military plans.” Or, as Goldstein crystallizes the overall lesson of J.F.K.’s lonely call on Vietnam strategy: “Counselors advise but presidents decide.”

Obama finds himself at that same lonely decision point now. Though he came to the presidency declaring Afghanistan a “war of necessity,” circumstances have since changed. While the Taliban thrives there, Al Qaeda’s ground zero is next-door in nuclear-armed Pakistan. Last month’s blatantly corrupt, and arguably stolen, Afghanistan election ended any pretense that Hamid Karzai is a credible counter to the Taliban or a legitimate partner for America in a counterinsurgency project of enormous risk and cost. Indeed, Karzai, whose brother is a reputed narcotics trafficker, is a double for Ngo Dinh Diem, the corrupt South Vietnamese president whose brother also presided over a vast, government-sanctioned criminal enterprise in the early 1960s. And unlike Kennedy, whose C.I.A. helped take out the Diem brothers, Obama doesn’t have a coup in his toolbox.

Goldstein points out there are other indisputable then-and-now analogies as well. Much as Vietnam could not be secured over the centuries by China, France, Japan or the United States, so Afghanistan has been a notorious graveyard for the ambitions of Alexander the Great, the British and the Soviets. “Some states in world politics are simply not susceptible to intervention by the great powers,” Goldstein told me. He also notes that the insurgencies in Afghanistan and Vietnam share the same geographical advantage. As the porous border of neighboring North Vietnam provided sanctuary and facilitated support to our enemy then, so Pakistan serves our enemy today.

Most worrisome, in Goldstein’s view, is the notion that a recycling of America’s failed “clear and hold” strategy in Vietnam could work in Afghanistan. How can American forces protect the population, let alone help build a functioning nation, in a tribal narco-state consisting of some 40,000 mostly rural villages over an area larger than California and New York combined?

Even if we routed the Taliban in another decade or two, after countless casualties and billions of dollars, how would that stop Al Qaeda from coalescing in Somalia or some other criminal host state? How would a Taliban-free Afghanistan stop a jihadist trained in Pakistan’s Qaeda camps from mounting a terrorist plot in Denver and Queens...?

It's not supposed to. Without such plots- often planned and assembled for unwitting dupes to incriminate themselves- the Company rapidly looses all justification for its police state.

One sincerely hopes these analogies with Kennedy soon stop. One suspects they will as it becomes more apparent the One in the hands of McChrystal (i.e., the right hand of Petraeus Caesar) is more like LBJ in the hands of a Westmoreland with better media saavy.

"Zombies with iPhones"

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Tea Partiers Advise G20 Protesters
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

Kevin Flaherty gets it:

...Sign waving is not resistance. Sign waving is part of the problem in the same way that voting is part of the problem. How’s that Change working out for the Obama supporters? (Some of those bozos are already talking about how they’re going to get it right in 2012…)

In the few video clips of the G20 protests that I watched, I saw a bunch of zombies with iPhones, running around like chickens with their heads cut off, as the Legion of Doom tested out its new sonic weapons and tear gas lobbing skills.

WTF is the matter with these people? Where does someone get the idea that the way to deal with Darth Vader is to wave a sign at him? Maybe a few, “Fuck the police” tweets will do the trick? Send out invites to join revolutionary sign waving groups on Facebook?!

While I vote regularly I am under no illusion it will resolve anything. While I blog regularly I don't see it resolving anything either.

...The U.S. is no longer a country. It’s a company town. If waving signs at the company’s goon squad just makes people look stupid, what does twitbooking about it amount to?

Here are some other ideas:

Eliminate your debt. Take your money off the table. Stop buying stuff that you don’t need. Live well on very little. Grow your own food. Participate in alternative and/or outlawed food economies for what you don’t produce yourself. Barter, or use cash. Support people who do good work. Finally, draw a line in the sand. Don’t tell anyone where that line is, or what the consequences will be if it’s crossed. Don’t wave a sign about it. Don’t twitbook about it. Let the fascists figure it out the hard way.

A nice trick if you can do it. You can say that effectively in the bush in New Zealand. Or until recently maybe in Montana. Nowhere else in the Empire can this apply. Other kinds of zombies go after you here.

Amerika is the diverse salad bowl of the zombie state.

One must be more resourceful to live in the belly of this beast.