Striking a blow against fascism with commentary on current events, finance, economics, politics, music, art, culture and how to deal with our economic lives being bartered away by the elites who have our financial future all figured out: We'll be paying off their debts forever.
Cirze's World
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Conservative Animus
_________________
Conservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency of the subordinate classes. It provides the most consistent and profound argument as to why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, why they should not be allowed to govern themselves or the polity. Submission is their first duty, agency, the prerogative of the elite.
- Corey Robin
The Conservative Mind
_________________
“Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense.
Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”
- Winston Churchill _________________
“Imperial privilege is this strange ability on the part of the U.S. public to ‘shrug off’ the consequences experienced by people impacted by the direct and indirect result of U.S. militarism.”
— Ajamu Baraka
_________________
Current Readers
Politicus USA on GOP Fascism
_________________
The entire GOP apparatus is slipping toward fascism and millions of Americans have been indoctrinated to believe that the Bible none of them have read takes precedence over the Constitution none of them have read.
Eco Farm Shitakes, Squash, Kale - Cindi, Nicole & Eddie
Ukraine Disinformation Battle: Little Green Men, Hamsters and the Fog of War
________________
There has always been a gap in how media on both sides of the former Iron Curtain have reported world events, and it’s growing as the crisis in Ukraine escalates. It has become increasingly difficult to obtain reliable information from any side — west, east, or further east — about what is going on in Eastern Ukraine.
While powerful propaganda machines fill the public space with smoke and mirrors, one of the few facts that can be positively established in Eastern Ukraine is that the body count is steadily growing: a testament of just how easy it is for self-interested foreign powers to start, either intentionally or recklessly, a civil war in the heart of Europe. Continuing coverage is available at this link and this link.
Cirze's World
Red Roots Farm - Kristen & Jason - No Sprays/Delicious Veggies!
Fukushima, Japan Disaster Worsens and Spreads
________________
While the American reactor industry continues to suck billions of dollars from the public treasury, its allies in the corporate media seem increasingly hesitant to cover the news of post-Fukushima Japan. Continuing coverage is available at this link, this link, and this link.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Cirze's World
Paradox Farm - Goat Cheese Louise!
Blog Against Theocracy
(h/t Darkblack)
Cirze's World
Red Wolf Organics - Jordan & Sylvan sell basil, chard, peppers - 10% of Profits Support Syrian Refugees
My Blog Fights Climate Change
Cirze's World
Working hard at the Farmers' Market - Grand Hope Farm
Animal Rescue - Click Everyday!
Cirze's World
Paul Krugman:
I don’t think many people grasp just how raw, how explicit, the corruption of our institutions has become.
Yesterday I had a conversation with someone who, like me, spent most of the Bush years as a voice in the wilderness. And he pointed out something remarkable: although those of us who said the obvious — that the Bush administration was fundamentally monstrous — were ridiculed by all the respectable people at the time, at this point our narrative has become everyone’s narrative.
Cirze's World
Paul Craig Roberts:
_________________ US Media
_________________
"Anyone who depends on print, TV, or right-wing talk radio media is totally misinformed. The Bush administration has achieved a de facto Ministry of Propaganda."
"The uniformity of the US media has become much more complete since the days of the cold war. During the 1990s, the US government permitted an unconscionable concentration of print and broadcast media that terminated the independence of the media.
Today the US media is owned by 5 giant companies in which pro-Zionist Jews have disproportionate influence. More importantly, the values of the conglomerates reside in the broadcast licenses, which are granted by the government, and the corporations are run by corporate executives — not by journalists — whose eyes are on advertising revenues and the avoidance of controversy that might produce boycotts or upset advertisers and subscribers.
Americans who rely on the totally corrupt corporate media have no idea what is happening anywhere on earth, much less at home."
_________________ War On Terror
_________________
Roberts asked "Is the War on Terror a Hoax", and claims it has "killed, maimed, dislocated, and made widows and orphans of millions of Muslims in six countries". Roberts called the attacks "naked aggression" on civilian populations and infrastructure which constitute war crimes.
_________________ Republican Party
_________________
Roberts is seriously dismayed by what he considers the Republican Party's disregard for the U.S. Constitution. He has even voiced his regret that he ever worked for it, avowing that, had he known what it would become, he would never have contributed to the Reagan Revolution.
_________________ American Democracy and Oligarchy
_________________
Roberts has been increasingly critical of what he deems as the lessening of democracy in the U.S.; instead accusing it of being run by oligarchs by stating:
"The west prides itself that it is the standard for the world, that it is a democracy. But nowhere do you see democratic outcomes: not in Greece, not in Ireland, not in the UK, not here, the outcomes are always to punish the innocent and reward the guilty.
And that's what the Greeks are in the streets protesting. We see this all over the west. There is no democracy, there are oligarchies, some of these smaller European countries are not even run by their own governments, they are run by Wall Street... There is probably more democracy in China than there is in the west.
Revolution is the only answer... We are confronted with a curious situation. Throughout the west we think we have democracy, we hold ourselves up high, we demonize China, we talk about the mafia state of Russia, we talk about the Arabs and so on, but where is the democracy here?"
Roberts effectively announced his journalistic retirement. The article, published at Counterpunch.org, begins:
"There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest."
It proceeds to a bitter chronicle of the demise of American intellectual integrity, particularly that of financial journalists and economists. These have been thoroughly corrupted by monetary inducements to misrepresent and ignore what has been, in effect, the systematic dismantling of the nation's productive life, in the name of globalization.
He holds the members of his own journalistic profession largely responsible for abetting relentless outsourcing of American industry, thereby gutting the American middle class and effectively dooming the nation's future.
He describes his own ostracism from mainstream media access, the consequence of his relentless and unflinching criticism of the demolition process over the past decade. His column ends, "The militarism of the U.S. and Israeli states, and Wall Street and corporate greed, will now run their course. As the pen is censored and its might extinguished, I am signing off."
_________________
Cirze's World
Liberal?
"If by a 'Liberal' they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people — their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties — someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a “Liberal,” then I’m proud to say I’m a “Liberal."
John F. Kennedy, 1960
________________
Citizen's United
"[T]his Court now concludes that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. That speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that those officials are corrupt. And the appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy."
Why I was an atheist and anarchist in 1967-69
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An anarchist wants to bring down the "house" of the human world, because it
seems cruel and pointless and full of rules that constrain the best, or
purer i...
The BRICS challenge to US financial dominance
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The US is an imperial power. Unlike other former empires such as Britain,
France, Germany, and Belgium, it hides its imperial nature by various ways,
as Da...
Trump CEA Nominee: Stephan Miran
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From Politico today: Miran, who Trump noted worked as a senior adviser for
economic policy at the Treasury Department during the first Trump
administration...
Part II. Poems From Somewhere Near the Edge
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[image: States of Mind, The Farewells, Umberto Boccioni]
Saying goodbye
Part II. Poems From Somewhere Near the Edge originally appeared on
WhoWhatWhy
NFL Open Thread: My American Cousins edition
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The best thing you can say about the Falcons’s bizarre sequence of QB
decisions in the offseason is that the “draft Penix” part is looking
better: We’ve ...
An unpromising start
-
In addition to being denied his debt ceiling extension, Trump was also
repudiated when his daughter-in-law “withdrew” from consideration as
Senator from ...
Matt Gaetz Report to Be Released on Monday
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A source told CBS News the House Ethics Committee is expected to release
its report on former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) on Monday. Meanwhile, Gaetz
floated...
Ten Economic Questions for 2025
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Here is a review of the Ten Economic Questions for 2024.
Below are my ten questions for 2025 (I've been doing this online every year
for 20 years!). These...
What We Learned in 2024
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So, you wanna know what we learned this year? Well, I can take two
approaches here. Either I can be my usual sarcastic self and lampoon all
the ridiculous ...
Friendly fire
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“Ukraine drones target KAZAN. EU peacekeeper TRAP. Trump wants 5% NATO
spending. FICO to Moscow“ (Christoforou).Ha ha ha!!! “US Fighter Jet Shot
Down Over ...
Open Thread December 22 2024
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Yesterday, I awoke to find that we have a continuing resolution. I can’t be
certain that the F News coverage is the pest on the details, but it’s
pretty da...
Sunday Reading
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Nasty, Brutish, and Short — Heather Digby Parton on Trump’s honeymoon that
was over before the wedding. Back in 2016, the whole country was left in
shock w...
The Conversation -- December 22, 2024
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*Minho Kim* of the *New York Times*: "President *Biden *on Saturday signed
the spending package that allowed federal funds to keep flowing until
mid-Marc...
A Nation of Immigrants?
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Image by Tim Mossholder. Image by Tim Mossholder. Image by Tim Mossholder.
Image by Tim Mossholder. Image by Tim Mossholder. Image by Tim Mossholder.
Ima...
A Man, a Plan, a Canal--A Dumbfuck
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I’m sorry, Panama pic.twitter.com/WmUwtw5jpu
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 22, 2024
Just as with Canada, which Trump wants to be our 51st state or...
A month before Election Day, I predicted…
-
A month before Election Day, I posted this on Facebook: As the last three
days’ events around the failure of the Republicans and Trump to shape
Congress’s ...
The Chris Hedges Report: The Meaning Of Christmas
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In a case of tragic coincidence, the place most closely associated with the
uplifting story of Jesus Christ, Christmas and the teachings of the Bible
is ...
Links 12/21/24
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Links for you. Science: The great abandonment: what happens to the natural
world when people disappear? Are you a morning person? You may be a
Neanderthal ...
This Week In Techdirt History: December 15th – 21st
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Five Years Ago This week in 2019, the biggest copyright trolls were facing
some issues in court and trying new strategies, while the Sons of
Confederate Ve...
Weekend links 757
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The Breath of Creation (c. 1926–34) by Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn. • At
Wormwoodiana: “…Gresham was well-read enough to know that while magic can
be more than a Ma...
Cartoon: The Immigration Deal
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Political discourse in the U.S. has become difficult, if not impossible,
because right-wing views are so completely untethered from reality. I’m not
saying...
Trumpist Manifesto
-
*The Trumpist Manifesto*
We White Christian Nationalist Trump supporters are the most oppressed
group in the United States. Our sacred cause to rule t...
“Everyone Has Their Reasons.” -- Jean Renoir.
-
While we are not exactly seeing the Twilight of the Self-Righteous,
Liberal-Scolding Centrists, it is interesting to note that, having seen
their *"Fly ...
Holiday cheer.
-
*Happy Holidays field hands!*
Let's see what happens in the new year with this Elon Musk presidency. It
should be very interesting.
If you voted again...
SATURDAY: What the Sam Hill is megalomania?
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*SATURDAY, DECEMBER 21, 2024*
*We decided to give it a look: *Yesterday, we heard a throwaway comment
about "megalomania"—a comment directed at Elon Musk...
Regarding RPLA for Blogging
-
Just as a personal note, just got an email from the Florida Writers'
Association that they are making changes for the 2025 Royal Palm Literary
Awards, an...
Leatherface Reflects
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The world has been Surrealist for a hundred years, though the adjective
that people turn to in trying to describe their ever more pervasive feeling
of...
TMI Show Ep 43: “Trump vs. Fiscal Hawks”
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Trump 2.0 is still a month away and he’s causing chaos in Washington. After
negotiating a budget deal with the Democrats, DOGE master Elon Musk (either
a...
Yet Another Christmas Carol
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“The nation appears to be having a kind of moment involving a gross, naked
emperor and a bunch of people noticing this isn’t a nudist-friendly zone.”
— Jef...
Rebuilding America the Washington Monthly Way
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Reporting policy and politics and offering solutions. It's what we do. But
we need you.
The post Rebuilding America the Washington Monthly Way appeared ...
HAPPY HOLIDAYS
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Thank you for being here as we slogged through this year. I'll be away
until after Christmas, but please drop by while I'm away -- I expect
entertaining an...
Lost in the Realm of Reality
-
Lost in the realm of the valley of truth and the fact of the matter that
the movie has premiered, has screened, is over, is not over, is something I
don’...
The Core Skill Going Forward: Frugality
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*Speaking of lean years, it took the NASDAQ stock market index almost 17
years to recover its March 2000 high of 5,048. *
*The core skill going forward--f...
From now on our troubles will be out of sight
-
I don't care if he's doing it for the wrong reason. If Trump gets rid of
the debt ceiling, it will be good, because, as Dday says, "The Debt Limit
Shoul...
Trump and Elon: High on Their Own Supply
-
So have you heard the one about how Trump is suddenly opposed to the debt
ceiling and wants to get rid of it? Yep, yesterday he called for Congress
to ra...
A Year in Reading: Edwin Frank
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The book that held my attention through most of the year, that I went back
to again and again—perforce, it is a very long book—was Volume 1 of
Capital, t...
For the Record: Moldbuggery
-
Saw something yesterday that tempted me to go have a look at something
written by enemy of democracy Curtis Yarvin, the artist formerly known as
"Menciu...
Weekly Review
-
A company that made robots for children with autism announced that they had
run out of money and that parents should inform their kids that the robotic
f...
The Year of the Zealot
-
It was the best of years, it was the worst of years, it was a year of
brilliance, it was a year of buffoonery, it was a year of faith, it was a
year of inc...
The Meaning of Trump’s Victory
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This was a change election that was made amazingly close by voters wanting
the middle class to govern, not the richest and for women to have equal
rights. ...
Pardons and Open Thread
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I'm sorry I am so late with this new open thread. I had to get a few
stitches in my eyebrow (don't ask!). Anyway, I haven't seen the news other
than a he...
Health Care, Not Wealth Care
-
The New York City Police Department has just issued an urgent bulletin, warning
corporate CEOs that "kill lists" bearing their names and other information...
Affirmations for the Serious Knitter
-
As read on my knitting podcast for this week (at the 13:48 mark).
AFFIRMATIONS FOR THE SERIOUS KNITTER.
1. No housework until I have knit for f...
Armistice Day 11/11/24
-
(Click on the comic strip for a larger view.) In 1959, Pogo creator Walt
Kelly wrote: The eleventh day of the eleventh month has always seemed to me
to be ...
Republican Debates on China: A Political Compass
-
*MANY HAVE TRIED* to pin Trump to Heritage’s “Project 2025.” The Trump
campaign has not only refused to endorse Project 2025—they have refused to
endorse a...
It Can't Happen Here
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Trump has made his repeated promise to deport 20,000,000 minorities and
foreigners a central feature of his campaign. What does Trump intend to do
wi...
Maybe Not So Fast
-
I just got the estimate for the hosting on my other Blog,
Bustednuckles.com, for one year. With Wa state tax? A little over $900. I
can’t afford that so I ...
Clock
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Guest post by Sander O’Neil https://sanderoneilclock.tiiny.site/ This is a
follow up to this post
https://mathbabe.org/2015/03/12/earths-aphelion-and-perih...
Who Set Up The Hit?
-
It is now clear that Thomas Matthew Crooks was not acting alone last
Saturday when he shot President Trump at the Butler Farm Show Grounds in
Connoquonessi...
We Don’t Need A New Theory Of EVERYTHING
-
Though things have indeed changed since this video was produced, it still
makes the infinitesimally tiny point! “Luminous beings are we; not this
crude...
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Hello all,
It is with great sadness that I share with you the passing of our beloved
sister, Mother, and Grandmother, the individual that you all knew ...
4 bienfaits de l’huile de CBD
-
L’huile de CBD, issue du cannabis, est devenue un sujet de discussion
croissant dans le domaine de la santé et du bien-être. Ses propriétés
thérapeutique...
In Memorium
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Tom Degan
1958-2023
To all Tom’s faithful readers of the Rant, we are sad to announce that he
passed away on December 7th, 2023. Thank you so much for th...
Shadowproof Is Shutting Down
-
After eight years, we have decided that it is time to shut down
Shadowproof, but that does not mean that the independent journalism that we
fostered is c...
I Have Been To Heaven and Back
-
OBS chimed in on my post about mobility impairment. And therein my
capybaras, lies the tale. For early in fall, I had a swelling in my leg,
that I thought ...
Last Post, Please Read
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Good morning. This is Zandar's Dad. I am sorry to tell you that he passed
away over the weekend, peacefully in his sleep. Fortunately, his computer
was on ...
Media Say ... Gloom And Doom In China
-
The New York Times, and other western media, are running a 'doom and gloom
in Xi's economy' campaign. The latest entry is this piece: China’s Economic
Pain...
A Few Quick Announcements
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By James As I wrote a couple of years ago, I don’t post here anymore. I
just have a couple of updates for people who subscribe and may be
interested in my ...
This feed has moved and will be deleted soon. Please update your
subscription now.
-
The publisher is using a new address for their RSS feed. Please update your
feed reader to use this new URL:
*https://www.alternet.org/feed/*
Happy 2023 To All Of You
-
I have often come back here to try to write some sort of a conclusion to
the years of activity on this site, but have not figured out what, exactly,
to s...
November/December 2022 issue
-
Our November/December 2022 issue has been printed and is going out to print
subscribers very soon, and e-subscribers have already gotten their
electronic c...
END TIMES
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Half of yesterday's content was suppressed before it existed. There is no
point in producing content under such conditions. I Quit.
This post was unpubl...
Intersectional Pride Day
-
Today was Pride Day in NYC, and for the first time in two years, the march
was packed with participants... people were confident to step out during
this ...
What Is a Bayonet? Or, Who Wins & Who Loses?
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WD Ehrhardt: So I signed up, only to discover that being a man wasn’t all
it was cracked up to be, that men who are horribly mangled in battle really
do ...
Colin Kidd: Green Pastel Redness
-
With six conservatives on the nine-person court, Chief Justice John Roberts
knows that another prudent defection on his part will not be enough to save
Roe...
Trump = Roadkill
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Surely the facts are not in dispute A New York man upset with what he
perceived as Donald Trump’s threats to democracy was criminally charged on
Monday wit...
The War on Terror Is a Success — for Terror
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Terrorist Groups Have Doubled Since the Passage of the 2001 AUMF Nick Turse
It began more than two decades ago. On September 20, 2001, President George
W....
Merry Christmas! We Got You Some Fauxmosexuals!
-
Happy holidays, everyone. People seemed to enjoy last year's riff of D.W.
Griffith's 1909 silent melodrama, *A Trap for Santa*, so we did it again,
with ...
Test Article
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Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Curabitur interdum
libero pulvinar pretium sagittis. Nulla at sem sollicitudin, blandit neque
nec,...
Have You Heard Has a New Website
-
TweetHave You Heard has a new website. Visit us at
www.haveyouheardpodcast.com to find our latest episodes and our entire
archive. And be sure to check out...
Whether (and how) America can survive Trumpism
-
Georgetown Professor Thomas Zimmer joins us to talk about polarization and
extremism, and what insights American and world history provide as to
whether ...
Goodbye, Little Macho
-
Saturday was a year since my mom died from COVID. My sister and I got Macho
in the car, and we drove to the cemetery for the first time since her
burial. W...
Big Government Handouts
-
Recently, Elon Musk beat out Jeff Bezos for a 2.9 billion contract from
NASA to fly one of his magnificent exploding rocket ships to the moon. In
true Am...
Cancel Yourself
-
At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question:
Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge? Does a majority of the
population t...
American Carnage
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And crows will eat your eyes. -- Motörhead, *Traitor *
I promise that I don't intend to make a habit of breaking radio silence,
especially just a couple ...
Weird Op-Ed of the Day
-
Today's weird op-ed comes from DNI John Ratcliffe via the Murdoch-owned
Wall Street Journal.
China Is National Security Threat No. 1Resisting Beijing’s ...
‘Test & Trace’ is a mirage
-
Lockdown II thoughts: Day 1 Opposition politicians have been banging on
about the need for a ‘working’ Test & Trace system even more loudly than
the govern...
Saturday Emmylou Blogging
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Note: Blogspot has changed its template for posting and I can't make any
sense of it so this may be my last post. Sorry. Adios. Thanks to Fuzzy
Legends Arc...
Outbreak: Anatomy of a Plague
-
[ by Charles Cameron — scientific [precision meets human error in cases of
outbreak — with links to a terrific science thread by Palli Thordarson
@PalliTho...
Over-the-air television and the other America
-
If you’re an OTA viewer you’re feeding on cultural leftovers, quite
literally. If you’re not, your baseline cost of living is poverty line
times 1.5 or som...
The Immaterial Physical World
-
For centuries the prevailing western worldview has been built upon the
materialistic, mechanical model of Isaac Newton - a clockwork Universe
composed of...
They can save the world by @BloggersRUs
-
*They can save the world*
by Tom Sullivan
Climate activist Greta Thunberg, Time magazine's 2019 Person of the Year
has called on German industrial giant...
Stop the Madness! Sign this Petition!
-
Hello, fellow outraged citizen. Are you as outraged as we are? Have you had
enough? Are you one of those astute, sentient, breathing persons who has
not...
More Shoes More
-
So, like, always, because this is forever the only relevant part of the
shtick:
Yesterday was the last day that neither of us was 60 fucking years old. O...
Open Thread
-
[image: image of a purple sofa]
Hosted by a purple sofa. Have a seat and chat.
[*Note:* Liss is currently on hiatus for health reasons. There will be an
Op...
apologies for my absence
-
skippy, his co-bloggers and his followers are among my favorite people in
the world. real life has been challenging for me these last few years but i
got m...
Site Announcement
-
Hey, folks. So, we've passed the Rubicon on this site. We've done the final
migration of posts. This includes over 18,000 posts I've written over the
las...
Membership Drive
-
The Office of Strategic Services during World War II included in its
training courses for agents so-called OSS Steps to Recruitment, which
detail import...
The Fossil Fuel Globalists Ruining our Lives
-
Are You Ready for an Epoch Fail? Globalists Really Are Ruining Your Life
By John Feffer You know the story: the globalists want your guns. They want
your d...
Armistice Day...Every Family Has a Story
-
*[Gary Note: Blogging, of late, has been taking a back seat to life...which
is as it should be. But today **you're getting a pair of posts!**]*
==========...
Attacks on Afghan security forces kill at least 10
-
*Attacks on Afghan security forces kill at least 10: *
*In northwestern Badghis province, five officers were killed, including
Abdul Hakim, the police co...
Meanwhile in bizarro world…
-
This is a take so hot, it’s officially 2 Hot 2 Touch, by one Douglas Heye:.
Trump is uniquely positioned to cut a deal to prevent school shootings
Wait, do...
Apropos Of Not Much (Post-Prandial Rant)
-
So I read the latest over at Talking Points Memo on the slow-rolling
Republican “moderate” cave on the tax bill to Trump and the GOP’s I Got
Mine/Tongue-Ba...
Savage Minds is dead! Long live anthro{dendum}!
-
This will be the last post on the domain savageminds.org, but the site will
live on. It will live on both at this address (savageminds.org) where there
wil...
Trump-Branded Shit
-
From our partners at DownWithTyranny! -by Dorothy ReikNever one to bypass a
branding opportunity, Donald Trump has decided to increase and extend his
prese...
Bezmenov- West Capitulated to Communist Subversion
-
Communism is the Protocols of Zion in action. This excerpt from a crucial
1985 interview with KGB Defector Yuri Bezmenov throws our predicament into
stark ...
Day 166 and Counting
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Source: Getty Images Well, it's been a long 8 months since the election,
and an even longer 5-1/2 months since Trump officially became president.
It's be...
This blog is now closed...
-
...and I'm now blogging at http://www.ecosophia.net. All of the posts that
appeared here during the eleven-year run of *The Archdruid Report* will be
issu...
Love And Money: Marriage The McArdle Way
-
It's Valentine's Day and Megan McArdle's thoughts naturally turn to love,
which means money. Join me as I mock the woman whose rat-fucking is
screwing ...
When Scalia Beamed up!
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by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy
These flights are critical to the the government's crumbling cover up!
Without those flights, Bush and his murderous...
Surging
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*We're Number One*
*"A major military-led surge in U.S. aid to fight"* Ebola in West Africa
will soon begin. 3000 soldiers and probably more than $500 mill...
Occupy The Banks
-
I am so pissed off about what happened to the protesters UC Davis Police
Pepper-Spray Seated Students In Occupy Dispute (VIDEO) (UPDATES)
and the absence o...
Nickel and Dimed (2011 Version)
-
On Turning Poverty into an American Crime By Barbara Ehrenreich I completed
the manuscript for Nickel and Dimed in a time of seemingly boundless
prosperity...
Damon Galgut: The Impostor
-
Damon Galgut is one of those authors who justifies the existence of
literary prizes. Without its multiple shortlistings – Booker, Impac,
Commonwealth Write...
(If throwing a contribution Pottersville2's way won't break your budget in these difficult financial times, I really need it, and would wholeheartedly appreciate it. Anything you can afford will make a huge difference in this blog's lifetime.)
Fact or Fiction?
Wonder what Paul Craig Roberts thinks of this sham? Don't! Just watch the video below, and don't let his somewhat lackadaisical responses during the interview worry you about his political judgment now. He's so familiar with the situation and the population's miseducation that he's just as depressed (if not more so) than the rest of US.
Paul Krugman warns us (all of US and the rest of the world) that if we allow the weasels who did this to us to get away with it, we have only ourselves to blame for what they've got planned for us for the future. And it ain't pretty, friends. Not unless you've got a ticket out like they do.
The past three years have been a disaster for most Western economies. The United States has mass long-term unemployment for the first time since the 1930s. Meanwhile, Europe’s single currency is coming apart at the seams. How did it all go so wrong?
Well, what I’ve been hearing with growing frequency from members of the policy elite — self-appointed wise men, officials, and pundits in good standing — is the claim that it’s mostly the public’s fault. The idea is that we got into this mess because voters wanted something for nothing, and weak-minded politicians catered to the electorate’s foolishness.
So this seems like a good time to point out that this blame-the-public view isn’t just self-serving, it’s dead wrong.
The fact is that what we’re experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. The policies that got us into this mess weren’t responses to public demand. They were, with few exceptions, policies championed by small groups of influential people — in many cases, the same people now lecturing the rest of us on the need to get serious. And by trying to shift the blame to the general populace, elites are ducking some much-needed reflection on their own catastrophic mistakes.
Let me focus mainly on what happened in the United States, then say a few words about Europe.
These days Americans get constant lectures about the need to reduce the budget deficit. That focus in itself represents distorted priorities, since our immediate concern should be job creation. But suppose we restrict ourselves to talking about the deficit, and ask: What happened to the budget surplus the federal government had in 2000?
The answer is, three main things.
First, there were the Bush tax cuts, which added roughly $2 trillion to the national debt over the last decade.
Second, there were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which added an additional $1.1 trillion or so.
And third was the Great Recession, which led both to a collapse in revenue and to a sharp rise in spending on unemployment insurance and other safety-net programs.
So who was responsible for these budget busters? It wasn’t the man in the street.
President George W. Bush cut taxes in the service of his party’s ideology, not in response to a groundswell of popular demand — and the bulk of the cuts went to a small, affluent minority.
Similarly, Mr. Bush chose to invade Iraq because that was something he and his advisers wanted to do, not because Americans were clamoring for war against a regime that had nothing to do with 9/11. In fact, it took a highly deceptive sales campaign to get Americans to support the invasion, and even so, voters were never as solidly behind the war as America’s political and pundit elite.
Finally, the Great Recession was brought on by a runaway financial sector, empowered by reckless deregulation. And who was responsible for that deregulation? Powerful people in Washington with close ties to the financial industry, that’s who.
Let me give a particular shout-out to Alan Greenspan, who played a crucial role both in financial deregulation and in the passage of the Bush tax cuts — and who is now, of course, among those hectoring us about the deficit.
So it was the bad judgment of the elite, not the greediness of the common man, that caused America’s deficit. And much the same is true of the European crisis.
Needless to say, that’s not what you hear from European policy makers. The official story in Europe these days is that governments of troubled nations catered too much to the masses, promising too much to voters while collecting too little in taxes. And that is, to be fair, a reasonably accurate story for Greece. But it’s not at all what happened in Ireland and Spain, both of which had low debt and budget surpluses on the eve of the crisis.
The real story of Europe’s crisis is that leaders created a single currency, the euro, without creating the institutions that were needed to cope with booms and busts within the euro zone. And the drive for a single European currency was the ultimate top-down project, an elite vision imposed on highly reluctant voters.
Does any of this matter? Why should we be concerned about the effort to shift the blame for bad policies onto the general public?
One answer is simple accountability. People who advocated budget-busting policies during the Bush years shouldn’t be allowed to pass themselves off as deficit hawks; people who praised Ireland as a role model shouldn’t be giving lectures on responsible government.
But the larger answer, I’d argue, is that by making up stories about our current predicament that absolve the people who put us here there, we cut off any chance to learn from the crisis. We need to place the blame where it belongs, to chasten our policy elites. Otherwise, they’ll do even more damage in the years ahead.
At this point, Republican politicians are beginning to sound almost like wind-up toys when they complain about job-killing taxes and regulations that keep businesses from hiring. The media should at least do the Republicans and the public the courtesy of attempting to discern if these complaints make any sense. (McClatchy gets high marks for this effort.)
If the charges are true, then there are logical implications that can be explored. The media should be taking the time to see whether the evidence is consistent with Republican claims.
The tax side of the story is pretty simple. The Republicans are making things up.
We still have the Bush-era tax rates in effect. The wealthy are paying a smaller share of their income in taxes than at any point since the Great Depression. The tax rate on corporate profits is also hovering near a post-Depression low.
Some of the more inventive Republicans may claim that it is fear of higher taxes in the future that discourages hiring, but this doesn’t fly either. There is a huge amount of turnover in the labor market, especially in sectors like health care, retail and restaurants.
Even if employers were convinced that higher tax rates in 2013 and beyond would make it unprofitable to have more workers; that would hardly be a reason not to hire workers today. It’s a safe bet that ordinary turnover would allow them to reduce their workforce to the desired level long before the tax rates returned to their Clinton-era levels.
Of course we created 3 million jobs a year from 1996-2000. This makes it difficult to claim the Clinton-era tax rates would destroy jobs.
The regulation part of the story isn’t much stronger. It is not easy to find the flood of onerous regulations coming from the Obama Administration. The health care bill is the one Republicans most often mention. This will put additional restrictions on insurers and also require firms with more than 50 workers to either provide insurance directly or to pay a fee to contribute to their employees’ health care costs.
This one suffers from the same problem as the fear of taxes story. Suppose employers fear that the higher burden imposed by the bill will be a big cost when they first take effect in 2014. Why would this matter for hiring in 2011?
Furthermore, most large firms already meet the law’s requirement since they provide insurance to their workers now, and most small businesses are not close to the 50 person cutoff where the regulation takes effect. Why would these firms be constrained in their hiring by the ACA?
If anything, the ACA promises substantial cost-saving to many large firms, since Republican economists have been maintaining that companies will dump their employees on the exchanges created under the ACA. If they believe this employee dumping story, then this means companies will be looking forward to big savings when the law kicks in. Obamacare should then be leading to a big surge in hiring.
At the very least, if ACA is the big bad job-killing regulation that is scaring employers then we should see its biggest impact on the employers most directly affected. This would be either large firms that do not currently provide insurance or alternatively firms that are near the 50 employee cutoff that would be subject to the law’s requirements if they crossed the 50 worker threshold. Is there any evidence that these firms have curtailed investment and hiring? If the Republicans believed their “job killing” claims then they should have mountains of it.
It is also worth remembering that if firms would otherwise be hiring, but are prevented from doing so because of fears of taxes and regulation, then we should expect them to be hiring more temps and to increase the hours of their existing workforce. If this is happening, it sure isn’t showing up in the data.
Average weekly hours worked actually declined in the August data, and they are still below the pre-recession level.
The same is true of temp employment. Job growth in this sector has been stagnant for months and is nowhere near its pre-recession level.
These are the sorts of things that reporters should be looking at in assessing the claims of job-killing taxes and regulation. This is not a he said/she said. These are claims about the economy that can be verified.
However, if you believe in a magical, finger-clicker world where scientific evidence, let alone evidence that comes from evaluating data is equal to pure belief, maybe not.
Tens of millions of people are suffering from this downturn. It’s not fun and games. Reporters have a job here. The reporters that just copy down outlandish claims by politicians without making any effort to verify them should switch places with the one of the unemployed who would like to work for a living.
This article was published at Nation of Change. Please click on the link and give these guys some love.
And have you heard about those extremely unlikely black swan events? I read the book. If you really want to know what has been happening to your economic/financial life from a macro as well as a micro perspective, the author has more than a few words for youhere. You really should click on that link.
Editor's Note: Nassim Nicholas Taleb is Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University and the author of The Black Swan. Mark Spitznagel is a hedge-fund manager.
For the American economy – and for many other developed economies – the elephant in the room is the amount of money paid to bankers over the last five years. In the United States, the sum stands at an astounding $2.2 trillion. Extrapolating over the coming decade, the numbers would approach $5 trillion, an amount vastly larger than what both President Barack Obama’s administration and his Republican opponents seem willing to cut from further government deficits.
That $5 trillion dollars is not money invested in building roads, schools and other long-term projects, but is directly transferred from the American economy to the personal accounts of bank executives and employees. Such transfers represent as cunning a tax on everyone else as one can imagine. It feels quite iniquitous that bankers, having helped cause today’s financial and economic troubles, are the only class that is not suffering from them – and in many cases are actually benefiting.
Mainstream megabanks are puzzling in many respects. It is (now) no secret that they have operated so far as large sophisticated compensation schemes, masking probabilities of low-risk, high-impact “Black Swan” events and benefiting from the free backstop of implicit public guarantees. Excessive leverage, rather than skills, can be seen as the source of their resulting profits, which then flow disproportionately to employees, and of their sometimes-massive losses, which are borne by shareholders and taxpayers.
In other words, banks take risks, get paid for the upside, and then transfer the downside to shareholders, taxpayers, and even retirees. In order to rescue the banking system, the Federal Reserve, for example, put interest rates at artificially low levels; as was disclosed recently, it also has provided secret loans of $1.2 trillion to banks. The main effect so far has been to help bankers generate bonuses (rather than attract borrowers) by hiding exposures.
Taxpayers end up paying for these exposures, as do retirees and others who rely on returns from their savings. Moreover, low-interest-rate policies transfer inflation risk to all savers – and to future generations. Perhaps the greatest insult to taxpayers, then, is that bankers’ compensation last year was back at its pre-crisis level.
Of course, before being bailed out by governments, banks had never made any return in their history, assuming that their assets are properly marked to market.Nor should they produce any return in the long run, as their business model remains identical to what it was before, with only cosmetic modifications concerning trading risks.
So the facts are clear. But, as individual taxpayers, we are helpless, because we do not control outcomes, owing to the concerted efforts of lobbyists, or, worse, economic policymakers. Our subsidizing of bank managers and executives is completely involuntary.
But the puzzle represents an even bigger elephant.Why does any investment manager buy the stocks of banks that pay out very large portions of their earnings to their employees?
The promise of replicating past returns cannot be the reason, given the inadequacy of those returns. In fact, filtering out stocks in accordance with payouts would have lowered the draw-downs on investment in the financial sector by well over half over the past 20 years, with no loss in returns.
Why do portfolio and pension-fund managers hope to receive impunity from their investors? Isn’t it obvious to investors that they are voluntarily transferring their clients’ funds to the pockets of bankers? Aren’t fund managers violating both fiduciary responsibilities and moral rules? Are they missing the only opportunity we have to discipline the banks and force them to compete for responsible risk-taking?
It is hard to understand why the market mechanism does not eliminate such questions. A well-functioning market would produce outcomes that favor banks with the right exposures, the right compensation schemes, the right risk-sharing, and therefore the right corporate governance.
One may wonder: If investment managers and their clients don’t receive high returns on bank stocks, as they would if they were profiting from bankers’ externalization of risk onto taxpayers, why do they hold them at all? The answer is the so-called “beta”: banks represent a large share of the S&P 500, and managers need to be invested in them.
We don’t believe that regulation is a panacea for this state of affairs. The largest, most sophisticated banks have become expert at remaining one step ahead of regulators – constantly creating complex financial products and derivatives that skirt the letter of the rules. In these circumstances, more complicated regulations merely mean more billable hours for lawyers, more income for regulators switching sides, and more profits for derivatives traders.
Investment managers have a moral and professional responsibility to play their role in bringing some discipline into the banking system. Their first step should be to separate banks according to their compensation criteria.
Investors have used ethical grounds in the past – excluding, say, tobacco companies or corporations abetting apartheid in South Africa – and have been successful in generating pressure on the underlying stocks. Investing in banks constitutes a double breach – ethical and professional. Investors, and the rest of us, would be much better off if these funds flowed to more productive companies, perhaps with an amount equivalent to what would be transferred to bankers’ bonuses redirected to well-managed charities.
2 comments:
Why all the fuss about 9/11 when it isn't for another two months?
11/9?
We're in America, Tony!
Take care, brother.
S
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