The United States sticks to the dollar but the rest of the world no longer wants it. The two kinds of assets wealthy Americans and foreigners least want to hold are shares in U.S.-based companies. The fall of the dollar wipes out any conceivable market gains. Ditto dollar-based bonds, including U.S. Treasury debt.
CARACAS, Venezuela - Venezuela will seize several gold mining concessions that previous governments granted private operators, in a bid to supplement falling oil prices with proceeds from state-controlled gold, President Hugo Chavez said Saturday.
Chavez named no specific contracts or companies to be affected, but his mining minister has vowed to next year take over the nation's largest mine, Las Cristinas, which is operated by Canadian mining company Crystallex International Corp.
"We are taking back some concessions that former governments have given, and whose permits are still held by some rich people," in order to reduce public reliance on oil, Chavez said. Venezuela relies on oil for 94 percent of exports and roughly half its federal budget, making it unlikely that the country's largely undeveloped gold reserves could compete.
But Chavez said Venezuela must "increase the country's income through non-oil exports," including its world-famous cacao and products from recently nationalized steel and cement companies.
BUT WOULDN'T THAT BE UNCONSTITUTIONAL? WOULDN'T THAT BE ILLEGAL?
SO WHAT? WHO CARES?
President Bush may think his auto bailout spared his legacy a bad mark. In fact, it leaves America to be haunted by the precedent of an executive who unilaterally spends the people's money without the legal authority required by our Constitution.
Barry Cooper, a former Texas police officer with eight years of specialty in drug interdiction, first made waves when he released the film "Never Get Busted Again," a how-to guide for evading police drug seizures.
Austin, Texas-based Cooper's latest project is not nearly so benign, and will likely generate for the former drug warrior an army of enemies in law enforcement.
'KopBusters' is a reality TV program that aims to sink crooked officers.
"KopBusters rented a house in Odessa, Texas and began growing two small Christmas trees under a grow light similar to those used for growing marijuana," claims a release from NeverGetBusted.com "When faced with a suspected marijuana grow, the police usually use illegal FLIR cameras and/or lie on the search warrant affidavit claiming they have probable cause to raid the house. Instead of conducting a proper investigation which usually leads to no probable cause, the Kops lie on the affidavit claiming a confidential informant saw the plants and/or the police could smell marijuana coming from the suspected house."
"The trap was set and less than 24 hours later, the Odessa narcotics unit raided the house only to find KopBuster's attorney waiting under a system of complex gadgetry and spy cameras that streamed online to the KopBuster's secret mobile office nearby.
"The attorney was handcuffed and later released when eleven KopBuster detectives arrived with the media in tow to question the illegal raid. The police refused to give KopBusters the search warrant affidavit which is suspected to contain the lies regarding the probable cause.
"It is not illegal to grow plants under a light in your home but it is illegal to lie on an affidavit and plant drugs on a citizen. This operation was the first of its kind in the history of America. Police sometimes have other police investigating their crimes but the American court system has never dealt with a group of citizens stinging the police. Will the police file charges on the team who took down the corrupt cops? We will keep you posted."
Cooper's "Never Get Busted Again" was a runaway success, the sales of which serve as financial support for this most recent project.
"The drug war is a failed policy and the legal side effects on the families are worse than the drugs," Cooper said to the Dallas Observer in early 2007. "I was so wrong in the things I did back then. I ruined lives." The Raw Story
One of the best tests for determining whether a financial columnist or a professional economist is a Keynesian is to examine his views on personal spending. If he favors an increase of personal spending as a means to stimulate the economy, he is a Keynesian. He may not call himself a Keynesian, but he is a Keynesian.
John Maynard Keynes believed that an economy could become a self-reinforcing economic depression because the general public saved too much money. He believed that the key to economic growth is not productivity, but rather spending. He did not believe that the price system is a reliable system of resource allocation. For example, he did not believe that the interest rate is a price that allocates investments and savings. He believed that it is possible that many people in the economy can save money by hoarding currency – not depositing it in a bank, where it is immediately lent. This, he said, undermined the interest rate's role in equating savings and investments.
First, this observation is irrelevant in a world in which almost all currency is either deposited in a bank account or sent abroad, where it functions as a currency for black markets.
Second, hoarding currency pressures sellers to reduce prices. This acts as an incentive for people to buy more goods and services with their currency. The supposed excess of supply then disappears. Holding currency is a means of thrift. This thrift produces a positive result: lower prices and therefore greater purchasing power for the currency. This process was disparaged by Keynes as a liquidity trap. It was no trap. It was a benefit for holders of currency.
Keynes and his disciples had a solution to the liquidity trap: increased government spending and monetary inflation. This debases the currency, forcing hoarders to spend. The process by which this was accomplished, worldwide, was World War II. In the name of the war effort, every nation authorized its central bank to inflate.
This is what they are all doing again, in our Keynesian world, in which hardly anyone in the West hoards currency. Central banks are inflating. Governments are running huge deficits. Gary North
There are many varieties of libertarianism alive in the world today, but Rothbardianism remains the center of its intellectual gravity, its primary muse and conscience, its strategic and moral core, and the focal point of debate even when its name is not acknowledged. The reason is that Murray Rothbard was the creator of modern libertarianism, a political-ideological system that proposes a once-and-for-all escape from the trappings of left and right and their central plans for how state power should be used. Libertarianism is the radical alternative that says state power is unworkable and immoral.
"Mr. Libertarian," Murray N. Rothbard was called, and "The State's Greatest Living Enemy." He remains so. Yes, he had many predecessors from whom he drew: the whole of the classical-liberal tradition, the Austrian economists, the American antiwar tradition, and the natural-rights tradition. But it was he who put all these pieces together into a unified system that seems implausible at first but inevitable once it has been defined and defended by Rothbard. The individual pieces of the system are straightforward (self-ownership, strict property rights, free markets, anti-state in every conceivable respect) but the implications are earthshaking. Once you are exposed to the complete picture – and For a New Liberty has been the leading means of exposure for more than a quarter of a century – you cannot forget it. It becomes the indispensable lens through which we can see events in the real world with the greatest possible clarity. Read the rest... Lew Rockwell
EGG CZAR, CAR CZAR, ENERGY CZAR, EDUCATION CZAR...
WAIT A MINUTE! WHAT COUNTRY IS THIS AGAIN?
In 1966, the price of eggs rose to a level that President Lyndon Johnson judged, God knows how, was too high. There were two culprits -- supply and demand -- and Johnson's agriculture secretary told him there was not much that could be done. LBJ, however, was a can-do fellow who directed the U.S. surgeon general to dampen demand by warning the nation about the hazards of cholesterol in eggs.
Johnson, the last president with a direct political connection to Franklin Roosevelt, was picked by FDR in 1935 to be Texas director of the New Deal's National Youth Administration. Two years later, Johnson came to Congress, a rung on the ladder that led to glory as Egg Czar. Today, with Washington experiencing a Roosevelt revival, Johnson's spirit, too, goes marching on as the federal government permeates the economy with politics.
President Bush will unilaterally obligate the United States. Neither the Senate (pursuant to its constitutional role in ratifying treaties) nor the House will have any say. While the reduction of the Senate and House to ciphers in national security matters through executive agreements flouts the Constitution, it has become as commonplace as the rising and setting of the sun. It is no longer news.
If the Senate does not reassert itself, its treaty power will disappear like the Cheshire cat. Even major arms control agreements will become unilateral executive exercises. An empire will have replaced a republic.
REPORT: U.S. MILITARY MAY HAVE TO QUELL DOMESTIC VIOLENCE FROM ECONOMIC COLAPSE!
Deepening economic strife in the US could lead to civil unrest and violence that would require military intervention, warns a new report from the US Army War College.
"Widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security," writes Nathan Freier, a 20-year Army veteran and visiting professor at the college.
Freier's report has merited some concern as it comes alongside revelations that the Defense Department has assigned a full-time Army unit to be on-call for domestic deployment.
What are the odds that Krugman has actually read any Garrison, Hayek, Horwitz, Mises, Salerno, Rothbard, Selgin, Robbins, or White?
I'd estimate ... none.
Let's look at it. Krugman tells us directly he doesn't have the stomach to waste his time with economics written in prose, especially economics written "in the past". And I can't say I've ever picked up a trace of evidence Krugman has actually read the work of Hayek or Garrison or Mises or Horwitz -- and I've spotted a great deal of evidence that he has not.
I think we should take Krugman at his word. He's attacking a[n] economic construction he doesn't know, hasn't studied, and doesn't understand. And he's disparaging economists whose work he hasn't read, hasn't studied, and could care less to understand.
And the evidence of Krugman's deep ignorance and academic malpractice is staring us in the face. Greg Ransom
Ludwig von Mises writes tragedy in the language of political economy. There is in Man the very principle of frustration. Once, and perhaps for the first time, he [Man] did find the right way.
Beginning with the optimistic social philosophy of 18th-century liberalism he discovered the solutions of the free market, free competition, free private enterprise — that is to say, capitalism — and how at the same time to put government in its place.
After that he had only to go in a straight line toward a world of peace and unlimited plenty. For a while he did go in a straight line and there was the 19th century, in which political freedom and material well-being advanced together, inseparably and wonderfully...
But the government, which he had put in its place, began to overtake him, offering to do him good and to help him on his way. Little by little he accepted its friendly offices, thinking as he did so that government was something he imposed upon himself and therefore controlled, whereas he was to learn all over again that government is a natural and living thing, like an organism, with powers of self-extension. Offering only to help him on his way to a new free world of unlimited well-being it was really all the time hostile to anything he was doing for himself, because the more successfully he managed his own affairs, especially his economic affairs, the worse it was for the prestige of government. Read the rest... Garet Garrett
As always, I am stunned by Krugman's latest blog post . Check this out, and note that this is his entire post:
Readers have been correcting me for saying “niggling nabobs of negativism” in this post. Yes, I know the original (written by my former colleague William Safire.) But “niggling” is better for the current situation.
Here’s how I see it: the opponents of a strong stimulus plan don’t really have an alternative to offer. They don’t even have a really coherent critique; as Brad DeLong points out, if you believe that a surge in private spending would raise employment — and even the critics agree on that — it’s very hard to explain why a surge of public spending wouldn’t have the same effect.
The critics are instead mainly engaged in a series of minor complaints, aka niggles; FDR didn’t do so well, the statistical evidence ain’t so great, you can’t trust government, etc., etc..
So niggling nabobs it is.
Do you understand how crazy this is? To give context, Tyler Cowen has been repeatedly arguing lately that proponents of stimulus have not made the case that it has ever actually, you know, WORKED. That's what Krugman means by "FDR didn't do so well, the statistical evidence ain't so great, etc."
Notice that the two biggest case histories to "prove" the need for a huge stimulus right now, ARE EXAMPLES WHEN HUGE GOVERNMENT STIMULUS EFFORTS WENT HAND-IN-HAND WITH ECONOMIC DISASTER. Everyone got that? Clearly FDR was more of a Krugmanite than, say, Warren Harding or Calvin Coolidge, and yet the depression under FDR was much much worse than any previous one.
By the same token, what the Japanese tried in the 1990s was far from libertarian liquidationism, and it went hand-in-hand with the "lost decade."
Now Krugman et al. have responses here. E.g. both Hoover and FDR idiotically raised taxes during the 1930s, so it wasn't textbook Keynesian fiscal stimulus. And Japan didn't credibly promise large price inflation (to get adequate negative real interest rates) as Krugman recommended, so his prescriptions weren't fully tried.
But Tyler's point (and I'm paraphrasing) is that Krugman et al. are just excusing apparent FAILURES of pump priming to kickstart the economy out of recession. OK fine, so give us one good example WHERE IT ACTUALLY WORKED.
The Adjusted Monetary Base provides evidence of the Fed’s seriousness beginning at the time of the bailouts. A narrow measurement of money supply, the monetary base reflects the Fed’s Open Market operations. It consists of currency and commercial bank reserves with the Fed, so-called “high powered money” that is the basis for lending many times over in the fractional reserve banking system. It provides a clear look at Fed policy.
"The neocon world has been rocked by recent events at AEI. Numerous neocons told me that a vicious purge is being carried out at AEI, spearheaded by vice-president for foreign and defense policy studies, Danielle Pletka. There can be no doubting that change is afoot at AEI. Recently, Michael Ledeen and Reuel Marc Gerecht have departed AEI. Joshua Muravchik is on the way out as well. Other scholars face possible eviction." Raimondo
... HAVE JUMPED FROM $2 BILLION TO $559 BILLION SINCE AUGUST!'
When the banks begin to feel more comfortable with expanding the volume of their conventional loans and investments, they will have more than $550 billion on hand to employ for that purpose. The multiplied effect of such a vast amount of lending, as newly created deposits make their way through the fractional-reserve banking system, portends a gargantuan increase in the money stock and hence a correspondingly enormous jump in the general price level. As the public responds to the acceleration of inflation by reducing its demand for cash balances, the increased velocity of monetary circulation will contribute to even more rapid price inflation.
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During recent months, the Fed has flooded the banking system with reserves, which the banks have chosen to accumulate as (legally) excess reserves, rather than using the funds to add to the volume of their outstanding loans and investments. The Fed’s recently adopted policy of paying a small rate of interest on bank reserves accounts for some of this accumulation, but the amount is so gigantic that it seems much more likely that the banks have greatly increased their assessment of the risk involved in lending and investing as usual and therefore have chosen the lower yielding but less risky alternative of accumulating more and more reserves. Since August, the amount of excess reserves has risen from $2 billion to $559 billion. A graph of this astonishing development shows an abrupt transition from a virtually horizontal line (approximately zero excess reserves for decades) to a virtually vertical line (a quick jump of $557 billion in three months).
So far, this explosive increase of reserves has had only a small effect on the growth of the money stock as measured by the conventional monetary aggregates, such as M2, although the rate of growth of the monetary aggregates is beginning to increase substantially, as shown in this graph...
At matters now stand, by far the greater threat is rapid inflation, notwithstanding the ongoing recession. When the banks begin to feel more comfortable with expanding the volume of their conventional loans and investments, they will have more than $550 billion on hand to employ for that purpose. The multiplied effect of such a vast amount of lending, as newly created deposits make their way through the fractional-reserve banking system, portends a gargantuan increase in the money stock and hence a correspondingly enormous jump in the general price level. As the public responds to the acceleration of inflation by reducing its demand for cash balances, the increased velocity of monetary circulation will contribute to even more rapid price inflation. Robert Higgs The Independent Institute
THE YEAR WAS SO WEIRD THAT VOTERS ELECTED A PRESIDENT WHO - DESPITE THE SKEPTICS WHO SAID IT COULDN'T HAPPEN - WASN'T A BUSH OR A CLINTON!
How weird a year was it? Here's how weird:
O.J. actually got convicted of something.
Gasoline hit $4 a gallon -- and those were the good times.
On several occasions, "Saturday Night Live" was funny.
There were a few days there in October when you could not completely rule out the possibility that the next Treasury secretary would be Joe the Plumber.
Analysts estimate that from about 10% to 26% of all retailers are in financial distress and in danger of filing for Chapter 11. AlixPartners LLP, a Michigan-based turnaround consulting firm, estimates that 25.8% of 182 large retailers it tracks are at significant risk of filing for bankruptcy or facing financial distress in 2009 or 2010.
In the previous two years, the firm had estimated 4% to 7% of retailers then tracked were at a high risk for filing.
I was talking with some friends over the Christmas holiday break and they were commenting on how lucky we are that we live in a free country where we have the liberty and the opportunity to live our lives the way we want and are not controlled by the government like in other countries.
So I started thinking about a particular day of mine a couple months ago:
I woke up in the morning in my FHA (Federal Housing Administration) approved home that was built in accordance with USDOE (Department of Energy), FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission), and numerous CFRs (Code of Federal Regulations).
I went to the bathroom to clean up for work. I showered with soap, shampoo and other toiletry products that have been approved for me by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) using water that meets federal EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) quality standards.
I took my morning vitamins which had to be approved by the FDA.
I went downstairs to eat breakfast foods that had to be approved by the FDA and listened to my morning radio programs which are regulated by the FCC (Federal Communication Commission)...
As recession fears cause the nation to embrace greater state control of the economy and unimaginable federal deficits, one searches in vain for debate worthy of the moment. Where there should be an historic clash of ideas, there is only blind resignation and an amorphous queasiness that we are simply sweeping the slouching beast under the rug.
With faith in the free markets now taking a back seat to fear and expediency, nearly the entire political spectrum agrees that the federal government must spend whatever amount is necessary to stabilize the housing market, bail out financial firms, liquefy the credit markets, create jobs and make the recession as shallow and brief as possible. The few who maintain free-market views have been largely marginalized.
Taking the theories of economist John Maynard Keynes as gospel, our most highly respected contemporary economists imagine a complex world in which economics at the personal, corporate and municipal levels are governed by laws far different from those in effect at the national level. Read the rest...
'TIS THE SEASON FOR MY ANNUAL LIST OF ECONOMICS-related books worth giving -- or better yet, getting -- as gifts. Works on the economic crisis are of special interest this year. Unfortunately, my inner Grinch won't let me recommend any from the raft of those recently published -- because all deal with economic crises superficially. But I can recommend seven books -- two titles I've cited previously that are indispensable for understanding 2008's dismal economy -- plus five others, including a highly topical critique of democracy from an economic perspective, and even a novel written by an economist.
I once called Gene Callahan's Economics for Real People (2002) the "best antidote I know to the numbing effects of the standard textbooks on economics." It's also an antidote to the widespread myth that the 2008 recession resulted from an excess dose of laissez-faire. This book provides the best introduction that I know to Austrian business-cycle theory (what Callahan dubs "ABCT"), originally developed by Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek. Barrons
What seems to spook people now is the possibility that everybody in charge of everything is a fraud or a crook. Legitimacy has left the system. Not even the the legions of Obama are immune as his reliance on Wall Street capos Robert Rubin, Tim Geithner, and Larry Summers seem tainted by the same reckless thinking that brought on the fiasco. His pick last week for chief of the SEC, Mary Shapiro, is already being dissed as a shill for the Big Bank status quo. In a few days we'll discover what kind of bonuses are being ladled out by the remaining Wall Street banks with TARP money and a new chorus of howls will ring out.
This is very dangerous territory. In dollar terms, the numbers being applied to the various problems are so colossal -- trillions! -- that the death of our currency seems assured.
When legitimacy erodes, anything goes. Nothing is respected including rules and personalities. The center doesn't hold and the new vacuum there is a tumultuous place. The same crisis of authority and legitimacy is spreading from nation to nation now. Soon, China will contend with a discontented army of the unemployed. Greece has been in an uproar for two weeks. Belgium's government just collapsed. Trade barriers are going up. Exports are falling away. The world's energy markets are not immune to these disorders. I would expect problems with the currently seamless supply lines that bring America two-thirds of the oil we use. Even a mild disruption of oil supplies could attach an anvil to the ankle of an economy already falling off a cliff.
Last week’s WSJ carried an op-ed from SEC Chair Christopher Cox, “We Need a Bailout Exit Strategy.” The op-ed was nothing special (mostly defending the SEC, of course, though there was a nice Hayekian line about “decentralized decision-making, in which millions of independent economic actors make judgments using their own money, [resulting] in the wisest allocation of scarce resources across our complex society”). What caught my eye was the headline, which suggests a connection between the bailout and the Iraq war, a connection I’ve been meaning to write about.
Remember how journalists felt deceived by the Bush Administration about the war? President Bush said that Saddam Hussein was a “grave and growing threat,” and the media repeated this line. Colin Powell showed pictures of the mobile weapons trailers and the New York Times reprinted them with enthusiasm. When the Administration’s claims proved false, the mea culpas began. Judith Miller resigned in disgrace. Never again, the media cried, will we be used as house propaganda organs. And yet, once the financial crisis began, the exact pattern was repeated. Bernanke and Paulson say there’s a “credit freeze,” that the financial sector is on the verge of collapse, that they alone know what to do — so that’s what the newspapers print. No time to investigate, to interview anyone outside the government, to hold these claims up to any critical scrutiny. If high officials say credit markets are frozen, that only “bold action” from the Treasury, the Fed, and Congress can prevent total meltdown, then that’s the way it is. Virtually every news report on the crisis followed the official script. It’s as if the financial reporters from the Times, the WSJ, the Washington Post, CNN, etc. were embedded with the Treasury. News reports have been little more than government press conferences. Shame, journalists, shame!
Why Oh Why, as Brad DeLong would say, can’t we have a press corps that investigates, rather than simply repeating what the government asserts? Peter Klein
PROTECTIONIST DOMINOES ARE BEGINNING TO TUMBLE ACROSS THE WORLD!
Russia has begun to shut down trade as it adjusts to the shock of Urals oil below $40 a barrel. It has imposed import tariffs of 30 pc on cars, 15 pc on farm kit, and 95 pc on poultry (above quota levels). "It is possible during the financial crisis to support domestic producers by raising customs duties," said Premier Vladimir Putin.
Russia is not alone. India and Vietnam have imposed steel tariffs. Indonesia is resorting to special "licences" to choke off imports.
The Duma is widening the treason law to catch most forms of political dissent, and unwelcome forms of journalism. Jury trials for state crimes are to be abolished. Yevgeny Kiseloyov at the Moscow Times said it feels eerily like December 1 1934 when Stalin unveiled his "Enemies of the People" law, kicking off the Great Terror.
The omens are not good in China either. Taxis are being bugged by state police.
Another aspect of journalists’ remarkably credulous and fatuous attitude towards policymakers is their view that rhetoric, not substance, is what matters. Hence the constant references to the Bush Administration’s “dedication to free-market principles,” its “aversion to regulation,” its “belief in letting markets work by themselves.” This is of course sheer balderdash and piffle, virtually the reverse of the truth. Bush and Paulson and Greenspan and their clique are “free marketeers” in the same way (to borrow from A. J. Jacobs) that Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant. They adopt the language, and some of the form, of market advocacy without any of the content. The Bush Administration was already, before the “financial crisis,” the most economically interventionist since LBJ; it now ranks with Hoover and FDR as the most aggressively anti-market in US history. Greenspan and Bernanke expanded the money supply like none before; Bush and Cheney borrowed and spent trillions to finance overseas adventures; the Federal Register added pages at a record-setting pace; now the banking and automobile industries have become GSEs. Lassiez-faire, indeed! (BTW can anyone name a specific act of “deregulation” that contributed to the financial crisis? Gramm-Leach-Bliley? No way. And GLB was under Clinton, as was the infamous WGFM. What specific regulations, e.g. on hedge funds or mortgage-backed securities or executive compensation, did the Bush Administration oppose?)
And yet, there was Juan Williams on yesterday’s Diane Rehm show explaining, matter-of-factly, how Bush and Paulson had allowed their “free-market ideology” and “resistance to regulation” to “commitment to the idea that the market works itself” to lead the nation into ruin. Williams may be a good news reporter, but he has the political-economy understanding of a fifth-grader. Does it ever occur to these “watchdogs” to investigate what government officials actually do, rather than simply repeat what they say? Peter Klein
We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.
There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth. Visit the site
One other thing it did was put renewed scrutiny on the Iraqi justice system and how it treats its detainees. That scrutiny is likely to be increasingly uncomfortable as Zeidi’s brother, the first family member permitted to see the journalist in jail, reports of his torture in the hours after his arrest.
The report also throws into doubt last week’s “apology” letter, which brother Uday al-Zeidi insists Muntadar wrote against his will after his torture. Prime Minister Maliki’s subsequent claim that Zeidi “confessed” that the mastermind behind the intricate plot (the sum total of which consist of removing his shoes and throwing them as hard as he could at the President’s head) was an unnamed militant known for slitting throats is likely to also face further doubts amid the allegations. AntiWar.com
Justin Raimondo, the editorial director of Antiwar.com, discusses his article “Beware the New Globalism,” the shift in U.S. empire from Bush’s unilaterism to Obama’s multilateralism, how the economic meltdown is only the latest justification for global regulation, the appeal of smaller and more efficient regional governments, the likelihood of increased international cooperation on Iran sanctions and intervention in Africa under the Obama administration and how the U.S. is eschewing a democratic republic in favor of plutocratic socialism. Anti-war.com
As I wrote yesterday, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Ask almost any high school science teacher and they will tell you that life on earth would not be possible without carbon dioxide. The process by which the sun’s rays interact with carbon dioxide produces all the things that grow in the earth, which are then converted by living things into the calories they need to sustain themselves. Do you remember the word “photosynthesis”? What it amounts to, Ceci, is that when you take a breath, you convert oxygen into carbon dioxide, which you exhale into the atmosphere. Plants and trees and grass do not breathe oxygen. The Creator arranged for them to breathe in the carbon dioxide that you exhaled, and convert it to oxygen, which means as long as the cycle continues, you will be able to breathe. And so will all the animals and all the birds and all the reptiles and all the insects and all the fish. Carbon dioxide does you no good, or bad, when you inhale it, although is part of the gaseous mixture you do inhale. Unless there is zero relative humidity, which never happens, you also are breathing in water molecules that contain hydrogen. Your body recognizes the CO2 and expels it along with the new CO2 created when the oxygen you do inhale oxidizes the carbs you have eaten, courtesy of photosynthesis. It is not good to inhale a gaseous mixture containing oxygen, carbon dioxide and tars and nicotine, because as the Surgeon General warns, such a mixture can cause cancer. But the CO2 is definitely not part of that warning. Read the rest...
The Mark Felts of this world want to use the media as a weapon against their enemies.
Mark Felt, the senior official at the FBI who was the highly placed informant or Deep Throat who famously leaked information during the Watergate scandal, died this week. His nickname, drawn from a pornographic movie of the day, has since become a generic term for well-informed anonymous source...
His motives for directing Woodward and Bernstein towards the links between the White House and the Watergate burglars were two fold. After 30 years at the FBI, Mr Felt had expected to succeed J Edgar Hoover as its director when he died in 1972 and was enraged to be passed over for the job by President Nixon's nominee Patrick Gray III.
There was more at work here than the frustrated ambition of one man. Mr Felt's secret revelations to Mr Woodward were part of a general counterattack by US government law enforcement agencies against President Nixon who had been trying to place his own men in charge of them. The FBI man was not alone. A striking aspect of Watergate was the sheer quantity of leaks damaging to Nixon coming from all parts of the government, from the CIA to the Internal Revenue Service...
At the height of the scandal over the Watergate break-in, Mr Felt found nothing strange in ordering nine equally illegal burglaries of the homes of friends and relatives of members of a left-wing splinter group. Crucial he may have been to the downfall of Nixon, Deep Throat was scarcely a single-minded opponent of the obstruction of justice. More... Patrick Cockburn
THERE ARE NOW MORE SLAVES ALIVE ON THE PLANET THAN AT ANY TIME IN HUMAN HISTORY!
Standing in New York City, you are five hours away from being able to negotiate the sale, in broad daylight, of a healthy boy or girl. He or she can be used for anything, though sex and domestic labor are most common. Before you go, let’s be clear on what you are buying. A slave is a human being forced to work through fraud or threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence. Agreed? Good.
Most people imagine that slavery died in the 19th century. Since 1817, more than a dozen international conventions have been signed banning the slave trade. Yet, today there are more slaves than at any time in human history.
And if you’re going to buy one in five hours, you’d better get a move on. First, hail a taxi to JFK International Airport...
WAS PATTON THREATENING TO TELL SOME INCONVENIENT TRUTHS?
Why was Patton going to resign? What secrets did he take to his grave?
Why was the driver of the truck in his accident spirited off to London without being questioned?
Why did Patton die after he had begoun to recover form his injuries?
Why was there no autopsy on his body?
George S. Patton, America's greatest combat general of the Second World War, was assassinated after the conflict with the connivance of US leaders, according to a new book.
A new report by the U.S. Army War College talks about the possibility of Pentagon resources and troops being used should the economic crisis lead to civil unrest, such as protests against businesses and government or runs on beleaguered banks.
“Widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security,” said the War College report.
The study says economic collapse, terrorism and loss of legal order are among possible domestic shocks that might require military action within the U.S.
International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn warned Wednesday of economy-related riots and unrest in various global markets if the financial crisis is not addressed and lower-income households are hurt by credit constraints and rising unemployment.
U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., and U.S. Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., both said U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson brought up a worst-case scenario as he pushed for the Wall Street bailout in September. Paulson, former Goldman Sachs CEO, said that might even require a declaration of martial law, the two noted.
The Media keep telling us that Madoff is the biggest financial scandal of all time: NOT EVEN CLOSE!
"While Madoff has managed to mangle at least $50 billion, there is another Ponzi scheme with trillions in unfunded liability: the U.S. Social Security System. No matter how many times Paul Krugman declares that SS is safe and sound, it is not.
Most people don't realize that SS actually is a "legal" Ponzi scheme, made legal because the government has declared it so. Nonetheless, the principle of SS is that of the chain letter in which people pay in, other receive the benefits, and it works only as long as others are there to pay in more money.
At the beginning, the ratio was about 20 payees to one person receiving benefits, but the numbers have changed to where it now is about 3 and 1. This is an ominous trend, and I suspect that in the end, the government will simply print the money, as it has done in other situations.
So, my recommendation is for Obama to appoint Madoff to head the SS Administration, as he already is experienced in putting together Ponzi payments." Bill Anderson LewRockwell.com
US commanders have long requested additional forces to fight insurgents
The chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff says up to 30,000 extra troops could be sent to Afghanistan in 2009, almost doubling the US presence.
"Some 20 to 30,000 is the window of overall increase from where we are right now," Adm Mike Mullen said.
The timeframe of deployment has also been shortened, with reinforcements set to arrive by summer at the latest.
On Friday, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates ordered the deployment of a combat aviation brigade by spring.
There are currently 31,000 US troops in the country, 14,000 of whom are part of the 51,000-strong Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf). BBC news
A crumbling economy, more than 2 million constituents who have lost their jobs this year, and congressional demands of CEOs to work for free did not convince lawmakers to freeze their own pay.
Instead, they will get a $4,700 pay increase, amounting to an additional $2.5 million that taxpayers will spend on congressional salaries, and watchdog groups are not happy about it.
In the beginning days of 1789, Congress was paid only $6 a day, which would be about $75 daily by modern standards. But by 1965 members were receiving $30,000 a year, which is the modern equivalent of about $195,000.
Currently the average lawmaker makes $169,300 a year, with leadership making slightly more. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) makes $217,400, while the minority and majority leaders in the House and Senate make $188,100.
DON'T BLAME ME! I DIDN'T VOTE FOR THE R's OR THE D's....
AMERICANS WILL SOON OWE MORE THAN THEY ARE WORTH!
Financial Statements Show Approximately $56.4 Trillion in Federal Obligations Prior to Recent Bailouts, Market Declines, Compared to $56.5 Trillion in Household Net Worth!
NEW YORK (Dec. 15, 2008) - The sum of America's liabilities and other financial commitments now exceeds the collective net worth of its citizens, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation has calculated using the latest official data. Growth in the government's unfunded promises for social insurance programs such as Medicare, combined with a drop in Americans' net worth due in part by lower home equity values, is causing this unprecedented milestone.
The Foundation's calculations are based primarily on the new consolidated federal financial statements as of September 30, 2008 which do not reflect the additional toll taken by more recent market declines, bailout packages, and record October and November deficits.
Police Get The Wrong House In Galveston, Allegedly Assault 12-Year-Old Girl
Wed Dec 17, 2008 at 12:37:01 PM
It was a little before 8 at night when the breaker went out at Emily Milburn's home in Galveston. She was busy preparing her children for school the next day, so she asked her 12-year-old daughter, Dymond, to pop outside and turn the switch back on.
As Dymond headed toward the breaker, a blue van drove up and three men jumped out rushing toward her. One of them grabbed her saying, "You're a prostitute. You're coming with me."
Dymond grabbed onto a tree and started screaming, "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy." One of the men covered her mouth. Two of the men beat her about the face and throat.
As it turned out, the three men were plain-clothed Galveston police officers who had been called to the area regarding three white prostitutes soliciting a white man and a black drug dealer.
All this is according to a lawsuit filed in Galveston federal court by Milburn against the officers. The lawsuit alleges that the officers thought Dymond, an African-American, was a hooker due to the "tight shorts" she was wearing, despite not fitting the racial description of any of the female suspects. The police went to the wrong house, two blocks away from the area of the reported illegal activity, Milburn's attorney, Anthony Griffin, tells Hair Balls.
After the incident, Dymond was hospitalized and suffered black eyes as well as throat and ear drum injuries.
Three weeks later, according to the lawsuit, police went to Dymond's school, where she was an honor student, and arrested her for assaulting a public servant. Griffin says the allegations stem from when Dymond fought back against the three men who were trying to take her from her home. The case went to trial, but the judge declared it a mistrial on the first day, says Griffin. The new trial is set for February.
"I think we'll be okay," says Griffin. "I don't think a jury will find a 12-year-old girl guilty who's just sitting outside her house. Any 12-year-old attacked by three men and told that she's a prostitute is going to scream and yell for Daddy and hit back and do whatever she can. She's scared to death."
Since the incident more than two years ago, Dymond regularly suffers nightmares in which police officers are raping and beating her and cutting off her fingers, according to the lawsuit. Griffin says he expects to enter mediation with the officers in early 2009 to resolve the lawsuit.
We've got calls in to the officers' lawyer; we'll let you know if we hear something.
Update: This is from the officers' lawyer, William Helfand:
Both the daughter and the father were arrested for assaulting a peace officer. "The father basically attacked police officers as they were trying to take the daughter into custody after she ran off."
Also, "The city has investigated the matter and found that the conduct of the police officers was appropriate under the circumstances," Helfand says. "It's unfortunate that sometimes police officers have to use force against people who are using force against them. And the evidence will show that both these folks violated the law and forcefully resisted arrest."
Bernard Madoff's alleged $50 billion fraud is another interesting example of the limits of governments to enforce their own rules. As this opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal argues,in spite of the huge increase in the SEC’s budget since the fall of Enron (from $377m to $900m) and its army of staff devoted to enforcement, they didn’t notice that perhaps the most successful hedge funds manager was a fraud (when many people in the industry suspected as much).
In the current times, there is little hope that governments will take notice of their own failures, and draw the right conclusions. SEC failures give credence to Peter Boettke’s project on anarchy. Anarchy as a Research Program should be high on the Austrian agenda. The more rules governments must enforce, the less they will be able to do so adequately. Instead, one should rely on the incentives people have to successfully enforce the arrangements they themselves establish or on the reputation of others to enforce those arrangements. As the WSJ puts it:
The fact is that the only people who seem to have taken concrete action to protect investors from Mr. Madoff are private research shops like Aksia LLC. Its analysts did the real work of figuring out that Mr. Madoff's claimed investment strategy couldn't be happening at the volumes he claimed to be trading. Likewise, it was the short sellers who first blew the whistle on Enron, while the SEC was clueless and the firm's auditors were asleep.
The SEC not only aims at stopping activities that are generally legitimate and desirable, but when there are cases of actual fraud, the SEC can’t stop them. The SEC is another agency that should be abolished. Again, one can only agree with the WSJ and prepare for more useless public spending:
There's a lesson here for investors and Congress. Instead of shoveling more money and power to the regulators who already had plenty of both, let's take care not to overregulate the people who actually warned about Mr. Madoff's miracle returns. Law enforcement is useful in punishing wrongdoers after the fact, which will deter some crooks. But expecting the SEC to prevent a determined and crafty con man from separating investors from their money is no more sensible than putting your life savings with a Bernard Madoff.
Just two months after the twin towers fell, the armies of the Northern Alliance marched into Kabul. The Taliban fled.
The triumph was total in the "splendid little war" that had cost one U.S. casualty. Or so it seemed. Yet, last month, the war against the Taliban entered its eighth year, the second longest war in our history, and America and NATO have never been nearer to strategic defeat.
So critical is the situation that Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in Kandahar last week, promised rapid deployment, before any Taliban spring offensive, of two and perhaps three combat brigades of the 20,000 troops requested by Gen. David McKiernan. The first 4,000, from the 10th Mountain, are expected in January.
With 34,000 U.S. soldiers already in the country, half under NATO command, the 20,000 will increase U.S. forces there to 54,000, a 60 percent ratcheting up. Shades of LBJ, 1964–65. Afghanistan is going to be Obama's War. And upon its outcome will hang the fate of his presidency. Has he thought this through?... Pat Buchanan LewRockwell.com
No doubt, the president and his financial advisors definitely need to hear from an advisory council on financial literacy. Establishing such a group in the eighth year of horrendous growth of the warfare-welfare state, in the eighth year of a federal lavishness that makes the dead czars of Russia look as careful as dear Tonya Zhivago in winter after the revolution – well, that’s just George being George, I guess...
In 2008, the Washington Times reports that federal spending went up 25% before the more obvious credit and financial sector meltdown, before the two trillion dollars the Federal Reserve made available to recipients who shall remain a mystery, and before the $850 bailout bill and other known bailouts...
As I read the article, I got more and more confused, not being overly familiar with official government Ponzi schemes. I mean, I know they exist, of course. The Times also explains "The deficit in fiscal 2008, which ended Sept. 30, was $454.8 billion, up from $162.8 billion in fiscal 2007. The deficit itself is expected to be about $1 trillion in fiscal 2009."
Nearly every day brings new reports of the collapse of a large financial institution or the impending bankruptcy of a major company. Plans for bailouts and government intervention are in the air. Even those who profess devotion to free enterprise have wavered. Are we not faced with an emergency that calls for immediate action to "save" capitalism? Faced with this situation, we need to be more resolute than ever in defense of the free market, with no government restrictions whatever. If we do not defeat these measures, we face grave danger. The record of National Socialist Germany during the 1930s shows how quickly government intervention leads to full-scale socialism. Ludwig von Mises warned of this many years ago...
Other signs pointed to a radical program as well. Ferdinand Zimmerman, who worked as an important economic planner for the Nazis, had been before their rise to power a contributor under the pen name Ferdinand Fried, to the journal Die Tat, edited by Hans Zehrer, and a leading member of a group of nationalist intellectuals known as the Tatkreis. Fried strongly opposed capitalism, analyzing it in almost Marxist terms. In an evaluation of Fried’s book Das Ende des Kapitalismus (The End of Capitalism), for a possible English translation, Isaiah Berlin referred to "an unconditional acceptance of Marxio-Sombartian premisses with regard to the death of individualism, growth of mass production, collectivism, etc., and from these the natural conclusion is drawn that since collectivism is coming anyway, it might as well be dealt with efficiently and fairly by being converted from Trust-collectivism into State-ownership of the means of production. All this of course is the German Social-Democratic Marxism. . ." (Letter from Isaiah Berlin to Geoffrey Faber, January 4, 1932, in Isaiah Berlin, Letters, 1928–1946, Henry Hardy, ed., Cambridge University press, 2004, pp. 638–39.) Wilhelm Roepke wrote a devastating contemporary criticism of Fried, now available in translation in his Against the Tide (Regnery, 1969). One of the best scholarly accounts of Fried’s views, which includes some discussion of his activities under the Nazi regime, is in Walter Struve, Elites Against Democracy: Leadership Ideals in Bourgeois Political Thought in Germany, 1890–1933, Princeton University Press, 1973)...
What, then, would be Hitler’s economic policy? Would he impose the "unalterable" program or would he follow a restrained, pro-business course? In fact, he did neither. His policy was rather one of improvisation in response to the immediate situation. (A. J. P. Taylor controversially argued in The Origins of the Second World War that this was also true of Hitler’s foreign policy.) But in so acting, he illustrated a key point that Mises often stressed: any intervention in the free market necessitates further interventions, because the initial measure will fail to achieve its goals. If the interventions continue, full state control of the market will rapidly ensue. The end result will be not capitalism, but socialism. As Mises put it: "All varieties of interference with the market phenomena not only fail to achieve the ends aimed at by their authors and supporters, but bring about a state of affairs which – from the point of view of their authors’ and advocates’ valuations – is less desirable than the previous state of affairs which they were designed to alter. If one wants to correct their manifest unsuitableness and preposterousness by supplementing the first acts of intervention with more and more of such acts, one must go farther and farther until the market economy has been entirely destroyed and socialism has been substituted for it." (Human Action, Mises Institute, 1998, p. 854.) Exactly this process took place in Germany after 1933. As Adam Tooze has noted, Hitler in 1932 indicated his interest in job creation programs, and this of course required government spending. But once in power, his interest shifted from job creation to rearmament. This required even more government spending; and armaments rapidly increased. "The Nazi party did not adopt work creation as a key part of its programme until the late spring of 1932, and it retained that status for only eighteen months, until December 1933, when civilian work creation spending was formally removed from the priority list of Hitler’s government. . . [Work creation] was in sharp contrast to the three issues that truly united the nationalist right . . . the triple priority of rearmament, repudiating Germany’s foreign debts and saving German agriculture. . . It was Hitler’s action on these three issues not work creation that truly marked the dividing line between the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich." (Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction, Viking, 2006, pp. 24–5. Tooze’s book is the most comprehensive recent account of Nazi economic policy.) The Chicago School economist Burton Klein, in Germany’s Economic Preparations for War (Harvard University Press, 1959), long ago pointed out that Germany in 1939 did not have enough arms to launch a world war: German armaments were sufficient only for smaller conflicts...
It has been a work years in the making, but finally the Study Guide to the Scholar's Edition of Ludwig von Mises's Human Action, is available. You can order the handsome volume here, and — as we've come to expect — the Mises Institute is generously providing the entire book free for download here.
We hope that this new guide makes Mises's magnum opus less intimidating. Each chapter of the guide starts with a summary of the chapter from Human Action, broken down not just by section but also down to the italicized subheadings in Mises's text. Then, the study guide has a section on Why It Matters, in which the chapter is placed in context, either historical or even within the book itself. (While writing the guide, I discovered that the progression of the chapters in Human Action, as well as their arrangement into Parts, was much more methodical than I had realized during previous readings.) Robert Murphy
Dick Cheney, in an exclusive interview with ABC News, took exception to former presidential adviser Karl Rove's contention that the US would not have gone to war if available intelligence before the invasion had shown Iraq not to possess weapons of mass destruction. Cheney noted that the only thing the US got wrong on Iraq was that there were no stockpiles of WMD at the time of the 2003 invasion. "What they found was that Saddam Hussein still had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction. He had the technology, he had the people, he had the basic feed stock."
The vice-president should re-check both his history and his facts. Just prior to President Bush's decision to invade Iraq, the UN had teams of weapons inspectors operating inside Iraq, blanketing the totality of Iraq's industrial infrastructure. They found no evidence of either retained WMD, or efforts undertaken by Iraq to reconstitute a WMD manufacturing capability. Whatever dual-use industrial capability that did exist (so-called because the industrial processes involved to produce legitimate civilian or military items could, if modified, be used to produce materials associated with WMD) had been so degraded as a result of economic sanctions and war that any meaningful WMD production was almost moot. To say that Saddam had the capability or the technology to produce WMD at the time of the US invasion is a gross misrepresentation of the facts.
THE NEW YORK TIMES: UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR IN TORTURE
NOW THAT IT'S TOO LATE, THEY EDITORIALIZE AS FOLLOWS:
"A prosecutor should be appointed to consider criminal charges against top officials at the Pentagon and others involved in planning the abuse."
JUST THE FACTS:
Most Americans have long known that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were not the work of a few low-ranking sociopaths. All but President Bush’s most unquestioning supporters recognized the chain of unprincipled decisions that led to the abuse, torture and death in prisons run by the American military and intelligence services.
Now, a bipartisan report by the Senate Armed Services Committee has made what amounts to a strong case for bringing criminal charges against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; his legal counsel, William J. Haynes; and potentially other top officials, including the former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.
The report shows how actions by these men “led directly” to what happened at Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan, in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in secret C.I.A. prisons.
It said these top officials, charged with defending the Constitution and America’s standing in the world, methodically introduced interrogation practices based on illegal tortures devised by Chinese agents during the Korean War. Until the Bush administration, their only use in the United States was to train soldiers to resist what might be done to them if they were captured by a lawless enemy.
The officials then issued legally and morally bankrupt documents to justify their actions, starting with a presidential order saying that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to prisoners of the “war on terror” — the first time any democratic nation had unilaterally reinterpreted the conventions.
THE FEDERAL RESERVE: THE BERNIE MADOFF OF GOVERNMENT
Simple before and after analysis demonstrates that the Federal Reserve Bank has been a failure. In the century before the Federal Reserve Act, wholesale prices fell by 6 percent; in the century after they rose by 1,300 percent. Maximum bank failures in one year before 1913 were 496 and afterward, 4,400. During the 1930s, inept money supply management by the Federal Reserve Bank was partially responsible for both the depth and duration of the Great Depression.
As Bob Higgs and others have argued in recent weeks, the claims being made by various government officials that we are in a credit crunch/crisis don't seem to hold up to the empirical data generated by the Fed an other places. A story from Reuters this morning finally gets this argument into the broader media, based on data from the financial services consulting group Celent. (HT: Jeff Tucker)
Reuters reports the head of Celent saying about US policymakers, especially Paulson: "I don't think they're fabricating stuff but what I think they are doing is taking the situation of a handful of institutions and generalizing that to the market as a whole, incorrectly."
That's a point I've made in class several times this semester: perhaps Paulson and others generalized a crisis from looking at the troubles faced by the institutions they knew, namely the big Wall Street investment banks. If the crisis really isn't there, then these bailouts look more and more like early Christmas for lots of folks.
However, the more cynical version is "Paulson lied, private ownership died."
I just happen to come across this entry of mine from just about a year ago. Can I get some partial credit in Pete's Cassandra poll?
One worry is that even in this world, a monetary inflation that did not show up as significant price inflation due to a productivity increase that offset the upward pressure on prices would go unnoticed as the price level remains the official gauge of inflation.
Another worry is that we'll see more sector-specific "booms" thanks to unwarranted credit expansion, possibly due to a regulatory intervention that distorts interest rates and the risk-return trade-offs in those sectors. The S&L crisis might fit this story in some ways and so might the housing bubble.
However, the bigger problem at the moment is the moral hazard issue the Fed has created via the housing market. Jerry O'Driscoll has a nice piece in the November Freeman that makes the argument that the "Greenspan doctrine," whereby monetary policy makers cannot detect asset bubbles but can detect their collapse and should offset their fallout, led mortgage lenders to believe that their actions were risk-free because the Fed would inject funds to bail them out. Well guess what we're seeing right now? Having created this precedent, what is to stop other sectors from figuring their losses will get bailed out as well? The result of this might well be both serious micro distortion directly and inflation more generally. Both the gold standard and free banking would be unable to create this moral hazard problem.
Dec. 16 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve cut the main U.S. interest rate to as low as zero for the first time and shifted its focus to the amount and type of debt it buys, seeking to revive credit and end the longest slump in a quarter- century.
The Fed “will employ all available tools to promote the resumption of sustainable economic growth and to preserve price stability,” the Federal Open Market Committee said today in a statement in Washington. “Weak economic conditions are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate for some time.” Read the rest...
This newsletter, published from 1969–1984, was edited and mostly written by Murray N. Rothbard (all unattributed articles are by him). It contains some of his most fascinating writing on politics, freedom, history, war, the libertarian movement, and the movies ("Mr. First Nighter"). Thanks to Walter Block and the Mises Institute for making this archive possible.
Over and over again, we are told that there are 47 million uninsured Americans. My own simple-minded Senator, Ben Cardin of Maryland, just wrote me an e-mail note attempting to justify the Children's Health Insurance Program with the opening sentence of "Currently, more than 47 million Americans lack insurance coverage and approximately 9 million of the uninsured are children." Then he and many others claim that health care is too expensive for Americans.We are to uncritically assume, and it appears that most of us do, that the 47 million uninsured Americans are uninsured because they cannot afford adequate or even inadequate health insurance.But, worst of all, this is a play upon our good nature and our concern for the welfare of other Americans, which is supposed to imply that if we wish to be a good person, we must be willing to consent to a partial enslavement of all of us and an extensive enslavement of health care professionals so that 47 million desperately poor Americans will have health care. Charles R. Anderson
TWENTY SECONDS AGO YOUR HEART AND BREATHING STOPPED! A DOCTOR AND NURSES RUSH TO YOUR BEDSIDE...
You see, the weird thing is that you may have flatlined, be “clinically dead”, but you’ve been watching the whole thing from the ceiling. As soon as your heart stopped, you just drifted out of your body and found you could float anywhere. You feel incredibly well, bathed in bright light, suffused with a deep sense of peace and knowing that, at last, it all makes sense. Some of your dead relatives are here and, behind you, there is a tunnel from which the light floods down. Perhaps you can see Jesus at the far end of it, or Muhammad or Krishna. The chaos at your bedside is interesting, amusing even, but trivial. Death, you now know with absolutely certainty, is an illusion.
NDEs are so common, so vivid and so life-transforming — survivors frequently become more compassionate, religious and serene as a result of what they experience — that scientists, philosophers, priests, psychologists and cultists all want a piece of the action.
Those "non-lethal" devices that Rudy Giuliani and other evildoers made millions promoting.
They are marketed as non-lethal weapons that allow police to capture suspects or criminals without causing any permanent harm.
Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and businessman Bernard Kerik made millions selling the idea to police departments across the country.
But Tasers have killed more than 400 people since 2001, according to a new study commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.
Police departments across Canada began banning use of Tasers by their officers after the report found that Tasers deliver more power than the manufacturer says is possible.
BILLY KRISTOL: GO HOME TO THE DEMOCRATS, WHERE YOU BELONG!
Every conservative in America seems to be commenting on William Kristol's recent "Small Isn't Beautiful" column in the New York Times.
I figured I ought to weigh in. I suspect I spend more time than any other conservative pundit actually watching small government at work and defending it. If I'm not in Trenton watching the knuckleheads screw up local government, then I'm usually out on the road writing about someone who is the victim of the aforementioned knuckleheads.
Thus when Kristol writes that "conservatives should think twice before charging into battle against Obama under the banner of 'small-government conservatism,'" I find myself scratching my head. "Small-government conservatism" is a redundancy. There isn't and cannot be any such thing as its putative opposite, "big-government conservatism." That's an oxymoron. If government is big, then it's by definition not conservative...
In fact, the Times did for the Iraq War what William Randolph Hearst's paper did for the Spanish-American War. Like the Times itself, Kristol got everything wrong about that war. He has just been slower in acknowledging it. Both views are essentially liberal. As for the conservative commentary on the war, it comes from either traditional, or "paleo" conservatives like Pat Buchanan or libertarians like Lew Rockwell.
The Times wouldn't dream of giving such characters real estate on their opinion pages. It's far easier to hold Kristol up as a conservative so they can point at him and in effect say: "See? When it comes to foreign policy these conservatives are even dumber than we liberals."
Sorry, you Manhattan sophisticates, but Kristol is your creation. Don't pin him on us provincials. We are much more amenable to the only definition of conservatism worth mentioning:
"I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution ... or have failed their purpose ... or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is 'needed' before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should be attacked for neglecting my constituents' 'interests,' I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty, and in that cause I am doing the very best I can."
That was of course Barry Goldwater, the 1964 GOP presidential contender. And of course Kristol gets in the obligatory dig at Goldwater, as neocons tend to do. They love to argue that conservatism has changed since his time.
Nonsense. Conservatism hasn't changed since Washington, let alone Goldwater. It will always be about keeping government close to those governed.
Or as Goldwater also said, "A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away."... Paul Mulshine
Of course it would hardly do to consider a report [.pdf] from a congressional committee the last possible word on a past event or series of events. What makes a report this week from the Senate Armed Services Committee last Thursday of special interest is that it was bipartisan in nature, with no minority report, issued jointly by Senators Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat, and John McCain, who's back to being a Republican senator from Arizona after having lost the presidential election (perhaps to his secret relief?). Even relatively non-controversial reports often carry minority reports, sometimes amounting to nuance, sometimes in sharp opposition to the conclusions of the majority report. But there was no stated dissent on the committee...
But the Armed Services report knocks that one into oblivion: "The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody," it reads, "cannot be simply attributed to the actions of a few 'bad apples' acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees."
As the Post's Joby Warrick and Karen DeYoung put it, "The report is the most direct refutation to date of the administration's rationale for using aggressive interrogation tactics – that inflicting humiliation and pain on detainees was legal and effective, and helped protect the country. The 25-member panel, without one dissent among the 12 Republican members, declared the opposite to be true." The Senate panel concluded that the administration's torture policies and the controversies that arose when they were no longer secret "damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority."...
Many people have a completely understandable desire to see those who brought such dishonor on our beloved country charged with appropriate crimes and taken on a visible perp walk before facing juries of ordinary Americans. One doubts that such plans are near the top of President-elect Obama's priority list, although rumblings may come from Congress. Whether those ever come to fruition or not, we who were most suspicious of the Bushies have been vindicated, and administration defenders and apologists have been debunked and discredited (yet again).
Unfortunately, the early critics are still likely to be passed over, when bookers for most cable news programs turn to their Rolodexes or Blackberries, in favor of those who were wrong from the beginning and have been wrong consistently ever since. Such are the wayward ways of what we laughingly call the "mainstream" media. Alan Bock
Did you, too, get that frisson of déjà vu when you first heard about the bank bailout and its rationale? If you don't hand over untold trillions of dollars in the next five minutes, the economy is going to explode. This was how the PATRIOT Act got rammed through Congress in record time, before anyone had a chance to even read the voluminous bill, surrendering what's left of our liberties and giving the president dictatorial powers: give us your freedom, or else the terrorists are going to blow the country up. This was also how the Bush administration and its neoconservative amen chorus whipped up war hysteria against Iraq: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Unless we invaded Iraq immediately, we were told, Saddam would unleash his legendary "weapons of mass destruction" – yes, even against the continental United States.
The methodology at work here might be called the Dershowitz Principle, after America's most famous theoretician of torture, who maintains that what qualifies as torture is defensible in an extreme situation. That is, when life suddenly morphs into a Jack Bauer-like scenario, in which the clock is ticking and you have to torture the evil terrorist or else they'll l blow up the White House, Capitol Hill, and the corner grocery for good measure.
WAIT'LL YOU SEE THE ALT-A AND OPTION ARMS RESET...
... OH, BOY!
The abyss is deeper than most people think because there is a second mortgage shock heading for the economy...
What hasn't hit yet are Alt-A and option ARM resets, when homeowners will pay higher interest rates in the next three years. We're at the beginning of a second wave.
"Well, the sub-prime is, was approaching $1 trillion, the Alt-A is about $1 trillion. And then you have option ARMs on top of that. That's probably another $500 billion to $600 billion on top of that," Whitney Tilson says. Asked how many of these option ARMs he imagines are going to fail, Tilson says, "Well north of 50 percent. My gut would be 70 percent of these option ARMs will default."
"How do you know that?" Pelley asks.
"Well we know it based on current default rates. And this is before the reset. So people are defaulting even on the little three percent teaser interest-only rates they're being asked to pay today," Tilson says.
"THIS IS FROM THE WIDOWS, THE ORPHANS AND THOSE WHO WERE KILLED IN IRAQ," HE SHOUTED
Soles of shoes are considered the ultimate insult in Arab culture. After Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled in Baghdad in April 2003, many onlookers beat the statue's face with their soles.
In the mythology of modern liberalism, the New Deal is Olympus and Roosevelt is Zeus, yet not a single one of his thunderbolts hit its mark, as Garrett reminds us in The American Story. The New Deal “never did restore employment. It never did restore the national income,” and it took the “miraculous timeliness” of a military build-up before the Depression was banished from our shores. Peacetime work projects were in short supply because local governments didn’t want the maintenance costs of more schools, stadiums, and airports. But a huge national defense program was all right with conservatives and delighted liberals, who were agitating for war with Germany and Japan. The money spigot was opened, as all welcomed a boondoggle with a patriotic gloss that provided jobs and maintained an inflationary “equilibrium.” As Obama’s New Deal crashes and burns on these same peaks, one can’t help but think that military Keynesianism might well be his last resort, on the grounds that anything—including war—is preferable to deflation. The American Conservative
I continue to be amazed at the talent and perspicacity of our Great Leaders and their distinguished staffs. Certainly, the outgoing Bush people deserve no end of credit for the job they have done, decidifying, ramificationizing, and war-pacifying the world, all while investing all of their good faith and credit in the American cargo cult at home. I know most of the rest of us certainly wouldn’t have been capable of so much, with so little.
The incoming body appears to be fleshed out, plump and gleaming, a holiday goose of a government for the next four years. But who’s counting? Clearly, no one in government practices the fine art of mathematics, and indeed Washington, D.C. remains a happy place – compared to places everywhere else that are not Washington, D.C...
Lenin expected a withering away of the state – and clearly, in that expectation he was a genius on par with our Great Leaders today. Instead, what withers is the passive mass of gentle sheep that we recognize as the American populace.
It is our collective tendency to forgive our government its excesses, its incredible stupidity and vice, and to look to it for security and leadership that is withering. For every American who thanks the military for "giving us freedom" or forgives it for destroying their family in a training mission or a selected occupation, there are ten more who are becoming enraged and beginning to stand separate from the flock...
It may not hit you the same way, but it sure raised the wattage of the lights in my world. I turned to Wikipedia for a few details and didn’t need to even page down to see all that I needed.
Members, leaders, and prophets of cargo cults maintain that the manufactured goods ("cargo") of the non-native culture have been created by spiritual means, such as through their deities and ancestors, and are intended for the local indigenous people, but that, unfairly, the foreigners have gained control of these objects through attraction of these material goods to themselves by malice or mistake.
Now let me rewrite that passage from the standpoint of politicians, reporters, most academic economists, executive branch administrators, and quite a few heads of corporations:
Members, leaders, and prophets of the government-regulated economy cults maintain that the manufactured goods (productive economy) of the Free Market have been created by spiritual or ideological means (Gaia or egalitarian socialism/Keynesian-monetarist policy, respectively), and are intended for the cult’s members, but that, unfairly, the Free-Market capitalists have gained control of these objects through attraction of this wealth to themselves by malice and greed.
Like Cargo Cultists in New Guinea, truly these people don’t know any better. Even highly placed and widely quoted professional economists are as ignorant of the source of economic wealth as were stone age tribesmen whose first contact with technology was with people landing airplanes in the jungle.
The cultists’ spending on (or cheering for) the bailouts, stimulus payments, and infrastructure "investments" is based on the belief that it is money that causes economic prosperity, just like cargo cultists thought that if they built straw models of airplanes and recreated airstrips the "cargo" would return. Read the rest...LewRockwell.com
I'm Really Gonna Miss Systematically Destroying This Place
By George W. Bush
Oh, America. Eight years went by so fast, didn't they? I feel like I hardly got to know you and methodically undermine everything you once stood for. But I guess all good things must come to an end, and even though you know I would love to stick around for another year or four—maybe privatize Social Security or get us into Iran—I'm afraid it's time to go. But before I leave, let me say, from the bottom of my heart: I can't think of another country I would've rather led to the brink of collapse.
Boy, oh boy, if these Oval Office walls could talk. Seems like it was only yesterday that I started my first term despite having actually lost to Al Gore by more than a half million votes. Hmm. We were all so young and peaceful then. Gosh, gas was still under $2 a gallon! On my watch it peaked at more than twice that. Never getting it up to $6 or ideally $7.50 will be one of my few regrets when I leave office... The Onion
"I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, to discover that there's gambling going on in this Casino..." "Your winnings, sir". "Thank you."
"Yesterday, while reading the story about Illinois governor Blagojevich, a central question went through my head. I am sure it was not the question most of Boobus Americanus was asking: Who were the people he was offering to sell the vacant U.S. Senate seat to? Instead, I was wondering whom in the criminal enterprise we call government had he crossed? After all, political offices within our government have been bought, sold, stolen, influenced and tampered with since before the word democracy was first uttered. Need I mention the 2000 and 2004 elections, electronic voting machines, hanging chads and the dictates of the Supreme Court?" LewRockwell.com
Gigantism is the handmaiden of modernity, or so we have been led to believe. In literature, future utopias are almost always characterized by a world government, on the grounds that presumably the people of earth have evolved beyond the narrow confines of nationalism and ethno-cultural particularities. Everybody wears a white tunic or body-stocking and flies around on jet-packs. Conversely, literary dystopias habitually depict a world riven by savagery and decentralized politico-economic units, e.g., The Shape of Things to Come, by H.G. Wells, in which an aspiring world government of technocrats battles the medieval remnants of local warlords. "We are the world"-ism is rife in liberal circles, and World Federalism has long been a cult, albeit a very small and uninfluential one, on the Left.
However, the world government idea is – I predict – going to gain new traction in the coming years, and this is especially on account of the economic crisis currently roiling world markets. The problem, they'll tell us, is global: world markets need to be regulated (for our own good, of course), and therefore what we need is "global governance," the catch phrase that has been coined by the policy wonks pushing this project. Indeed, we are already hearing calls for One World from such august publications as the Financial Times, whose foreign affairs columnist, Gideon Rachman, starts out his piece thusly:
"I have never believed that there is a secret United Nations plot to take over the U.S. I have never seen black helicopters hovering in the sky above Montana. But, for the first time in my life, I think the formation of some sort of world government is plausible."
Disarmed in advance – skeptics of globalism are, after all, lunatics who see "black helicopters" in the sky (over Montana, no less!) – we are invited to entertain the idea of a world government that "would involve much more than cooperation between nations. It would be," exults Rachman,
"An entity with state-like characteristics, backed by a body of laws. The European Union has already set up a continental government for 27 countries, which could be a model. The EU has a supreme court, a currency, thousands of pages of law, a large civil service and the ability to deploy military force.
"So could the European model go global? There are three reasons for thinking that it might." read the rest-- Raimondo
I received your email which I believe you refer to the “Winds Code” story which I read in the New York Times on Sunday, December 7, 2008, based on a news release of the National Security Agency written by NSA “court historians.”
The story is NOT news. The “Winds Code” was introduced in the Congressional Investigation of 1945-46 in an attempt by Congress to divert attention from American success in solving the Japanese naval codes prior to Pearl Harbor. American newspapers and radio networks carried the story in November 1945.
The “winds code” was issued by the Japanese Foreign Office, not the Imperial Japanese Navy. The Foreign Office, certain the Allied nations would cut off communications, planned to use hidden word phrases in their world-wide news broadcasts aimed at Japanese Embassies and Consulates world-wide. Example “East wind Rain” in the weather report during the short wave news broadcast meant war with America; East wind North meant war with Russia. Ralph T. Briggs, a U.S. Naval intercept operator at Station “M”, Cheltenham, Maryland, intercepted the “Winds Code” broadcast on December 4, 1941, numbered the report and sent it to headquarters in Washington, D.C. The numbered report of Briggs is missing from U.S. Navy files.
While the Foreign Office report certainly revealed Japanese war intentions, the Japanese Navy also used a hidden war phrase: Niitaka Yama Nobore 1208, which translated meant “Climb Mt. Niitaka on December 8, 1941″ (Tokyo time). This radio message originated by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander in Chief of the Imperial Navy and was intercepted by Station “H” in Hawaii. Yamamoto transmitted the Niitaka message on December 2, 1941, in the hidden word phrase, according to testimony during the Congressional Investigation 1945-46. RADM Edwin Layton, who was Admiral Kimmel’s intelligence officer said the message was received in Hawaii in the hidden word system.
The Imperial Japanese Army also had a hidden word phrase. I have not seen the message, but it reportedly was “The Black Kite will fly on December 8, 1941.”
Daily Article by David Gordon | Posted on 12/9/2008 12:00:00 AM
[New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America. By Burton Folsom, Jr. Threshold Editions, 2008. Xvi + 318 pages.]
Readers of The Mises Review will not be surprised to learn that Folsom considers the New Deal a failure. Nevertheless, even those already familiar with such books as John T. Flynn's The Roosevelt Myth will find Folsom's book valuable. Folsom advances new and important arguments.
His anti–New Deal verdict is hard to dispute: levels of unemployment at the end of the 1930s remained at depression levels. In May 1939, Treasury Secretary Henry J. Morgenthau Jr., one of Franklin Roosevelt's best friends, testified before the House Ways and Means Committee: "I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started… And an enormous debt to boot" (p. 2). When he spoke, unemployment exceeded 20 percent. Further, and here Folsom has absorbed the pioneering research of Robert Higgs, not even the onset of World War II ended the Depression. True enough, unemployment ended; but this was only because of the draft. Absent this military slavery, there is every reason to think that Roosevelt would have continued to struggle with unemployment... David GordonMises.org
Wow. So George Lucas had enough self-knowledge to ask someone else to help direct and write the parts of the Star Wars prequels where there were, like, actors talking and stuff.
But, alas, not enough to ask a second person after the first turned him down.
In a previous post, I asked (partially in jest) if I had gone into the wrong profession, because the performance of economists before and during this financial crisis has been so abysmal. It's not even that we disagree on how to fix things; we can't even agree on what's wrong. (For example, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok are having serious disagreements over whether there even is a "credit crunch," and Alex Tabarrok and I are having serious disagreements over whether there even is serious liquidity injection occurring.) The icing on the cake was the recent announcement by the NBER that the US has been in recession for the last twelve months. And as the news story explained, in the prior two recessions, the NBER couldn't make up its mind until after the recession was over.
However, sometimes my self-deprecating humor backfires. From the comments, it appeared some readers thought that I was beating myself up over this. Au contraire. I have known we were in a recession--whether "official" or not--for quite some time. In fact, I have been amused that when I write op eds for various outlets, my editors would strike out comments where I say "especially in the midst of a recession" or such. (BTW, they stopped doing that months ago. They are more attuned to reality than the NBER.)
And, as a token for those who cherish falsifiable predictions, I want to remind everyone of my October 2007 article entitled, "The Worst Recession in 25 Years?" which itself was based on my July 2007 forecast (pdf) in which I wrote:
From 2001 – 2004, the Federal Reserve enacted a cheap credit policy, resulting in a negative inflation-adjusted fed funds rate throughout the period. This artificial monetary stimulus—not seen since the Carter Administration—has sown the seeds of a contraction that will hit by 2Q 2008. The concerns of an asset bubble in real estate and (to a lesser extent) the stock market are entirely justified. Though not always a harbinger of bad times, the recent current account deficits also provide a clear warning.
Since I have been so apologetic on this blog for my early teasing of Peter Schiff's views on international trade, I thought I should at least balance it out by pointing out when I was dead-on. # posted by Bob Murphy @ 8:42 AM From Bob Murphy's blog
As details emerge about who was responsible for the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last week, the evidence points to a militant group and network of associates that can be linked to a number of intelligence agencies, including the ISI, the CIA, and MI6. Jeremy R. Hammond Information clearinghouse.info
Thomas J. DiLorenzo in his recent defense of Walter Block regarding the "apology" given by Loyola College of Maryland has laid out the reality of modern higher education, but while much of his interpretation of the actions of the Duke faculty during the Duke Lacrosse Non-Rape, Non-Kidnapping and Non-Sexual Assault Case is accurate, there is more, much more to the story. To understand what happened requires that one understand the realities of college campus life, the censorship and outright thuggishness that now reigns at many places.
Tom writes about the radical takeover of the modern academy:
This (Political Correctness) has all been in place for at least twenty years now in academe, so that "the officially oppressed – designated race and gender groups – know that they weren’t subject to the standards and rules set for other students." Thus, some students at Loyola College and elsewhere are taught that rather than engaging campus speakers in civilized conversation and debate, if the speakers challenge any of their cherished PC platitudes the thing to do is to wage a smear and slander campaign against the speaker. "College officials point to the hurt feelings of women and minorities as evidence that a violation must have occurred," writes John Leo. "[H]urt feelings are trump cards in the contemporary campus culture." It is a culture, in other words, that teaches college students to behave like infants...
His explanation is partly true, but really does not go deep enough into the real insidious nature of what happened at Duke. First, the infamous "We’re Listening" advertisement in the April 6, 2006, Duke Chronicle was signed by about 10 percent of the Duke liberal arts faculty, with the departments concentrated into the "identity studies" groups such as "Women’s Studies," and "African-American Studies." (Like the "Economics Department" sponsorship of the "apology" for Block’s comments, not all members of the Duke English Department actually supported or signed the letter, and some clearly were against what their colleagues were doing.)... Bill Anderson LewRockwell.com
The downturn is following a path so predictable, day by day, that people who comprehend the business cycle don’t even need to read the news. You can intuit what will happen next because it’s happening like a textbook case – even as it is reported with a continued sense of surprise.
Press reporting on the downturn has been like reports from a committee that knows nothing about gravity, but which has nonetheless been assigned to watch what happens when you drop objects from high places.
They keep filing surprised reports about how the objects fall – what a bizarre and unwelcome turn of events – and then they conjure up ways to keep this from happening through some outside intervention. They recommend bailouts, spending, programs, controls, and inflation.
You just want to get their attention and explain: what you are observing is part of the structure of reality itself, and there is nothing you can do to stop it. You can cover your eyes, put up fancy mirrors, turn somersaults, speculate and talk and decry all you want. But in the end, the downturn is a necessary and inevitable response to the previous boom. It must be allowed to continue on its course. Lew Rockwell
THEY REALLY WOULDN'T TRY IT... THEY'RE NOT THAT CRAZY, RIGHT?
OR ARE THEY?
Crazy enough to use eminent domain to buy mortgage-backed securities?
Steve Liesman has reported it TWICE in the last hour on CNBS, so here you have it:
"Administration officials are allegedly considering using eminent domain to buy up MBS, with the justification for doing so being invocation of "national security".
Folks, if that's anything other than some nutball flying untethered off the reservation in DC I will go officially on record right here and now as saying that a Depression worse than the 1930s has just been assured.
WASHINGTON - Congressional Democrats are drafting legislation that would give the teetering Detroit automakers at least $15 billion in emergency loans next week and grant the government broad authority to manage a massive restructuring of their operations.
The proposal, which could be put to a vote in Congress as soon as Tuesday, would establish a seven-member "auto board" of Cabinet officials and a chairman to be appointed by President Bush to oversee both the short-term loans and a long-term effort to restore the faltering industry to profitability.
SORRY IF I MISSED YOURS... AND IF YOUR WROTE IN NOVEMBER, I PROBABLY DID MISS YOURS!
MILLIONS! - okay, THOUSANDS! - would you believe HUNDREDS? - of emails to Charles through this site disappeared! Never received, Never read!
Almost every email sent in November was lost. The problem seems to have been fixed now. We have identified the corporate culprit responsible for the screw-up and are considering an appropriate penalty. Maybe we'll testify against their federal bailout!
I read every email and appreciate hearing from you!
IF ONLY AMERICAN LAW APPLIED TO THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT!
Even as the U.S. government was torturing people, the U.S. government was prosecuting the son of Charles Taylor, the former ruler of Liberia, for torturing political opponents of his father's government. The U.S. government did not employ the Yoo torture memo to justify Liberia's use of torture against those who wished to overthrow the Liberian government or commit terror against it. The U.S. government's position is that Liberia's government had no right to use torture to defend itself. Only an "indispensable nation" such as the U.S. has the right to torture people who are imagined to threaten it.
If only American laws applied to the American government. Then the criminals who have been in charge for eight years could be prosecuted for their extreme violation of United States laws. But, of course, the great, moral American government is far above the law. American law only applies to dispensable nations. America is not answerable to law, not to its own law and not to international law. U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey affirmed that the U.S. government is above all law when he told the Senate Judiciary Committee that there would be no investigation or prosecution of those Bush regime officials who authorized torture and those who carried out the sadistic acts.
The American government, the government of the great, indispensable nation, has a free pass. The strong do what they will. The weak suffer what they must.
COMPARE WHAT U.S. FISCAL AND MONETARY AUTHORITIES ARE DOING TO WHAT THE REICHSBANK WAS DOING IN THE 1930'S...
The public is attempting to reduce debt and save, but the government is thwarting that by planning to increase its debt. High debt is the hallmark of the political economy of a strong national government.
The Federal government is preparing to spend far greater sums than now, in the process expanding its deficits to unimaginable heights. The Fed seems unworried by that and/or prepared dutifully to monetize a goodly share of those debts. The public is attempting to reduce debt and save, but the government is thwarting that by planning to increase its debt. High debt is the hallmark of the political economy of a strong national government.
The government has thrown about $6 trillion into the stew. The Fed has thrown over $1 trillion into it. Instead of a short and sharp recession followed by a recovery, our central bank and deficit-spending political economy is giving us a prolonged and deep depression. Business is thrown into confusion and uncertainty. Investors run for safety. The bad loans remain hidden and submerged within banks and other institutions. This paralyzes lending. The weak companies and poor managements that should be quickly cleaned out instead are given taxpayer money. With public debt rising, the interest costs of the national debt rise. Capital that should be going to healthy enterprises is diverted to government and to zombie enterprises.
Here's the essential common core of hatred and destruction in the doctrines of Communism, Nazism, and Environmentalism. Only the concretes differ, not the fundamental principle of hatred for human life and happiness.
Communism: The pursuit of individual self-interest causes monopolies, depressions, and exploitation of workers by capitalists. It must be replaced by self-sacrifice for the benefit of the working class and the Socialist State. Capitalists and landowners must be exterminated for the benefit of the proletariat.
Nazism: The pursuit of individual self-interest causes racial impurity, national decline, and exploitation of German workers by Jewish capitalists. It must be replaced by self-sacrifice for the good of the Aryan master race and the National Socialist State. Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs must be exterminated for the benefit of the German Nation.
Environmentalism: The pursuit of individual self-interest causes global warming, acid rain, and ozone depletion. It must be replaced by self-sacrifice for the good of other species—our "fellow biota"—and for the good of the planet, under the auspices of international treaties and a nascent Global Socialist State: the UN. Most of the human race must be exterminated for the benefit of exploited species and the planet. (This is what the environmentalist “extremists” already openly say. The “moderates” merely want to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 90 percent and thereby reduce the American standard of living to that of a third world country, with a third world country’s infant mortality and life expectancy.)
SAY NO TO RECYCLED COMMUNISM AND NAZISM. SAY NO TO ENVIRONMENTALISM.
CONDI COUNSELS CAREFUL CONSIDERATION: A CURIOUS CROCK
As rage coursed through India after the Mumbai terrorist bombings, Condoleezza Rice, the Bush administration's Secretary of State, flew to India and cautioned the Indian government on avoiding a knee jerk and counterproductive response. She warned the Indians that "[a]ny response needs to be judged by its effectiveness in prevention and also by not creating other unintended consequences or difficulties." This lecture is laughable after the Bush administration's over-the-top reaction to 9/11 was to declare a massive global war on terror; create a fictional and cartoonish "axis of evil"; and invade and occupy two Muslim countries – all of which actually fueled Islamist terrorism worldwide. (Given these same facts, the US criticism of Russia's temporary invasion of one-third of Georgia in response to that nation's initiation of hostilities in South Ossetia, which killed Russian soldiers, was equally drenched in hypocrisy.)
And the disproportionate US response to terrorism continues. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently warned that the United States will face its biggest threats not from aggressive nation-states, but from guerrillas and terrorists in "failed states." To combat these threats, the Department of Defense has just raised such "irregular warfare" to equal status with conventional warfare. It apparently just dawned on the Pentagon's leadership that most of the wars fought by the United States during the post-World War II period have been such low level conflicts... Ivan Eland Antiwar.com
George W Bush would not have ordered the invasion of Iraq if the intelligence had shown that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction, according to his former chief adviser and closest confidant.
Karl Rove made the claim as the president's inner circle launched an unofficial "Bush legacy project", with their old boss preparing to leave the White House next month.
The final mission on behalf of President Bush is reportedly being spearheaded by two trusted member of his Texan kitchen cabinet - Mr Rove, the architect of his two White House election triumphs, and Karen Hughes, his former communications chief.
They have been meeting senior figures in the current Administration to discuss how to "roll out the president's legacy", according to Stephen Hayes, a prominent conservative commentator and Vice-President Dick Cheney's official biographer.
Part of that strategy is to "set the record straight", a senior Republican strategist told The Sunday Telegraph, and Mr Rove's assertion on Iraq appears to have been an opening salvo in that campaign. He is the most senior White House insider to state so firmly that the president would not have gone to war had the intelligence been different.
The claim was immediately dismissed by Mr Bush's critics, who argue that his administration was intent on toppling Saddam and deliberately manipulated intelligence about Iraq's weapons programs simply as a pretext for the invasion... The Telegraph
Early this morning, an estimated 300 militants used a rocket-propelled grenade to flatten the gates of the Port World Logistic Terminal compound outside of Peshawar, and by the time they left a guard was dead and 106 vehicles had been torched, mostly humvees bound for US forces in Afghanistan.
Shortly afterwards, the nearby Faisal depot was attacked, destroying another 60 vehicles bound for Afghanistan. It is unclear if the same group attacked both compounds. The United States described the attacks as “militarily insignificant.”
That's the response from the "antiwar" wing of the Democratic party to Obama's Iraq sellout...
Antiwar voters, who put Obama in office, are about to get screwed – and their alleged spokespersons, at least amongst the left-wing punditariat, are bending over with alacrity.
Recently, UC-Berkeley economist J. Bradford Delong posted a blog post [be sure to read this whole thing] in which he rails against Ludwig von Mises. Apparently, he was introduced to the work of Mises by Joe the Plumber who recommended Mises’s The Theory of Money and Credit as “important reading for these troubled times”. Truth be told, The Theory of Money and Credit is important reading for anyone who wants to understand monetary theory, regardless the state of the economy.
Apparently, however, Prof. DeLong was less than impressed with the book. In fact, he declares that it is “completely bats--- insane”. He suggests that we start reading at page 416, and provides quotes that apparently he believes are the “highlights”. Upon reading DeLong’s very lengthy block quotation, a few things stood out to me. First, there were ellipses everywhere, indicating that DeLong was ignoring sections of text. Whenever I see ellipses, I try to check the source. After all, it is not difficult to take “Fiat money is a standard that should not be adopted by any country, regardless its economic system” and make it “Fiat money … should … be adopted by any … economic system”, or “[M]oney … should not be adopted…”.
AS WE SAY HERE... THERE ARE NO DIFFERENCES BETWEEN R's AND D's
Right-Wingers and Neocons Love Obama's Cabinet Appointments
As Barack Obama's opus, Team of Rivals, continues its rolling debut, the early reviews are in and the "critics" are full of praise for the cast:
"[T]he new administration is off to a good start." -- Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell.
"[S]uperb ... the best of the Washington insiders ... this will be a valedictocracy -- rule by those who graduate first in their high school classes." -- David Brooks, conservative New York Times columnist
"[V]irtually perfect ... " -- Senator Joe Lieberman, former Democrat and John McCain's top surrogate in the 2008 campaign.
"[R]eassuring." -- Karl Rove, "Bush's brain."
"I am gobsmacked by these appointments, most of which could just as easily have come from a President McCain ... this all but puts an end to the 16-month timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, the unconditional summits with dictators, and other foolishness that once emanated from the Obama campaign ... [Hillary] Clinton and [James] Steinberg at State should be powerful voices for 'neo-liberalism' which is not so different in many respects from 'neo-conservativism.'" -- Max Boot, neoconservative activist, former McCain staffer. Read the rest Alternet.org
FAST-FORWARD TO AN ADULT EDUCATON CLASS IN DETROIT NOT TOO MANY YEARS FROM NOW. THE PROFESSOR SCANS THE CLASSROOM...
"And The Great Economic Meltdown beginning in 2008? Who can describe its causes?" he asked, peering pleasantly through thick, round spectacles. Under different circumstances he might have even been liked.
"Freedom of the press," said an ambitious girl. "Uncontrolled, sensationalist media panicked the bourgeois investors." The Professor nodded approvingly, and off in a corner his note-taker made a positive mark next to the student’s name.
"Yes, Internet," he shivered. "All chaos and pornography. No control in those days. In late 2008, a radical Internet magazine called Lew Rockwell-dot-com published a joke. It wrote that the American Secretariat of Finance was cutting interest rates to zero, so why not cut them more than zero – then government would pay people to borrow. But the American government fell for the joke."
"In 2009 America’s Minister of Money, a man named Mr. Paul Sen, ran out of ideas. He borrowed until lenders called it quits. He printed billions of paper dollars and issued more and more bonds that eventually nobody wanted. His no-good money was too rough for toilet paper – that is my joke. Then he misunderstood and cut interest rates below zero. Why?"
"Stupidity," said a red-haired boy determined not to repeat his beating of last spring.
"Correct!" said The Professor. "He had only two strategies. Either borrow and spend or spend and borrow – that’s another small joke of mine but it will not be on the exam. The American Green-Buck Dollar was so inflated that nobody wanted it. Then Mr Sen actually paid them to borrow more and more. Not workers, he just paid rich people, government cronies."
"Sen said paying people to borrow was cheaper than throwing money out of helicopter owned by Chief Mandarin of the Federal Preserves System, named Dr. Beani Burbanki. And, amazing thing, he was not joking," the teacher added.
Nearly two pounds of still-green plant material found in a 2,700-year-old grave in the Gobi Desert has just been identified as the world's oldest marijuana stash, according to a paper in the latest issue of the Journal of Experimental Botany.
A barrage of tests proves the marijuana possessed potent psychoactive properties and casts doubt on the theory that the ancients only grew the plant for hemp in order to make clothing, rope and other objects.
"As the euphoria of the Obama cult builds toward a climax and the pundits declaim the advent of Something Big, it's the small changes that concern me, particularly those that touch directly on my job, which is to sniff out the War Party wherever it is presently burrowed. The election of Barack Obama has been the signal for many of them to migrate like fleas from the carcasses of the campaigns they attached themselves to and hop on the warm body of the new administration, which presents a rather large target. It's a new day, and in the age of Obama, the War Party's battalions are massed on the ostensible Left. Now that's the kind of change I can believe in." Raimondo
NOTE FROM CHARLES: Maybe it's the same thing that happened with millions of missing White House emails...
MILLIONS! - okay, THOUSANDS! - would you believe HUNDREDS? - of emails to Charles through this site disappeared! Never received, Never read!
Almost every email sent in November was lost. The problem seems to have been fixed now.
We have identified the corporate culprit responsible for the screw-up and are considering an appropriate penalty. Maybe we'll testify against their federal bailout!
I read every email and appreciate hearing from you!
We are now hearing ominous warnings about imminent deflation. Checking the welcome page at AOL this morning, I see that the lead item in the financial news section heralds "The Looming Threat of Deflation." This headline encapsulates two highly problematic ideas. The first is that deflation would necessarily be a bad thing. The second is that deflation is likely to occur in the near term.
That deflation is always and everywhere a bad thing—not simply a bearer of bad news but bad news in itself—is now an almost universal article of faith among mainstream economists and financial commentators. Clicking on the scary headline, I opened an article by Ted Allrich, who is described as "the founder of The Online Investor and author of the book Comfort Zone Investing: Build Wealth and Sleep Well at Night." Allrich's article, which does nothing to alter my belief that most investment "experts" are simply charlatans, encapsulates virtually every untutored and fallacious idea you've ever encountered in regard to deflation... Robert HiggsMises.org
The Mumbai massacre comes at a time when the U.S. is about to switch battlefields in its avowedly "generational" war on terrorism, from the Middle East to South Asia. As we move our forces eastward into Afghanistan and, inevitably, Pakistan, the events in Mumbai light up the geopolitical landscape like lightning at midnight, prefiguring a new and even bigger quagmire than the one we're supposedly leaving behind in Iraq. Forget the differences between Sunnis and Shi'ites. That's so yesterday. What we're dealing with now, in the Pakistani-Indian rivalry, is a true war of civilizations, pitting Muslims against Hindus.
India's 9/11: that's what they're calling it, and the pattern fits in certain ways, particularly when it comes to forewarnings. In the aftermath of the biggest terrorist attack in U.S. history, it came out that the U.S. government had received intelligence that might have led it to be more vigilant or take certain preventive measures. In the case of Mumbai, however, the warnings were quite specific: the Indians were apparently informed that an attack from water-based terrorists on Mumbai hotels – including the Taj Hotel, where much of the action took place – was imminent. The most telling detail is no doubt the fact that the Indian police simply ran for cover, although what this tells us is hard to believe. Can it really be true that so specific a warning could have been ignored? Raimondo
President George W. Bush will be sorely tempted to pardon himself, Vice President Dick Cheney, his inner political and national security circles, and others for complicity in torture, illegal surveillance, perjury, obstruction of justice, or contempt of Congress.
The suspected crimes relate to waterboarding; the CIA's destruction of interrogation videotapes; extraordinary rendition to countries with known histories of torture; Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act violations for five years; flouting congressional subpoenas for testimony or documents; and, incredible statements from then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales about the firings of nine United States attorneys. The seriousness of the crimes is enhanced because alleged or suspected perpetrators are or were high-level government officials...
A far less drastic constitutional measure is available to Congress, however, to deter pardon abuses in the waning weeks of his presidency: namely, a statute that compels the president to testify fully under oath before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees to justify pardons for a designated class of former or current high-level executive branch officials. Sunshine is the best disinfectant. The proposed legislation finds a strong precedent in President Ford's Sept. 8, 1974, testimony under oath before a House Judiciary subcommittee to explain the Nixon pardon. The chief difference is that Ford volunteered to testify. He was not compelled. Bruce Fein Washington Times
"A NEW WAR IS EXACTLY WHAT THE MUMBAI TERRORISTS KILLED FOR AND DIED FOR."
WILL THEY GET THEIR WISH?
President Bush should pray New Delhi does not adopt his Bush Doctrine of preventive war or the Cheney Doctrine: "Even if there's just a 1 percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it is a certainty." For war in the subcontinent between India and Pakistan would be a calamity and a triumph for the terrorists across what Zbigniew Brzezinski has called the "Global Balkans."
... Wounded and enraged by the atrocities of 9/11, America lashed out, first at Afghanistan and the al-Qaeda source of the conspiracy, then at Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attacks. Thus did the Bush administration disunite its nation and forfeit its mandate.
For India to lash out at a Pakistan that was not complicit in the Mumbai crimes against humanity, but harbors elements within that are guilty and are celebrating, would be as great a mistake.
India and Pakistan both have a vital interest in no new war.
But a new war is exactly what the terrorists killed for and died for.
THE U.S. DOLLAR CANNOT SURVIVE THE MASSIVE RED INK...
THE GREAT HEGEMON IS BANKRUPT!
When the Soviet government released its Eastern European "captive nations," the U.S. government promised not to recruit the Baltic and Eastern European countries for NATO membership. The U.S. government pledged that NATO would not be brought to Russia's borders. There would be a neutral zone between the Western military alliance and Russia. The American government broke this promise as quickly as it could, bringing former constituent parts of the Russian empire into the American empire.
Last October, Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, went to Lithuania to give a guarantee to the Baltics of U.S. military intervention in the event of a Russian attack.
The only other way Washington can finance a new arms race with Russia is to cancel Social Security and Medicare and repudiate its massive foreign debts.
When the dollar collapses, the image of a strutting Washington as "the world's only superpower" will evaporate. The evil that is the American government will find itself at war with its own people and those of the rest of the world.
100 YEAR TREASURIES... YEAH, GOOD IDEA! I'D LIKE TO BUY SOME OF THOSE...
NOT!
Dec. 2 (Bloomberg) -- BlackRock Inc.’s Peter Fisher said the U.S. Treasury should consider selling 100-year bonds to ease the federal government’s borrowing costs as it faces a budget deficit expected to top $1 trillion.
“If you issued a 100-year bond and had principal and interest pay down smoothly over the last 50 years, you create a great borrowing device for the Treasury that would let us move this hump of borrowing over the generational retirement that’s coming up,” Fisher, managing director and co-head of fixed income at BlackRock in New York, said in a Bloomberg Radio interview.
The Treasury last month tripled its estimate of planned debt sales in the final three months of the year to a record $550 billion as it attempts to fund bailouts for banks and fiscal stimulus programs to jump start economic growth. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson told a conference in Washington Nov. 17 that the U.S. will issue some $1.5 trillion worth of Treasury securities in the fiscal year that began Oct. 1.
ICELANDERS SET A HIGH STANDARD FOR AMERICANS... STORM CENTRAL BANK!
WE COULD USE THE RAVENS HERE, TOO!
Thousands of Icelanders marked the 90th anniversary of their nation's sovereignty with angry protest Monday, and several hundred stormed the central bank to demand the ouster of bankers they blame for the country's spectacular economic meltdown.
... Icelanders threw taunts, the occasional egg and acts of political theater at a government many now hold in contempt.
Much of the protest — held on a wind-swept hill overlooked by a statue of Iceland's first Viking settler, Ingolfur Arnarson — had a distinctively Nordic flavor. One protester threw meat and cheese onto the lawn of nearby Government House, encouraging the ravens to come and whisk the government away.
"The U.S. military expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe, according to Pentagon officials.
The long-planned shift in the Defense Department's role in homeland security was recently backed with funding and troop commitments after years of prodding by Congress and outside experts, defense analysts said.
There are critics of the change, in the military and among civil liberties groups and libertarians who express concern that the new homeland emphasis threatens to strain the military and possibly undermine the Posse Comitatus Act, a 130-year-old federal law restricting the military's role in domestic law enforcement." WaPo
Gee, do you really think this could undermine the Posse Comitatus Act? Let me think...
... BUT I'M SURE THE AUTHORITIES KNOW WHAT THEY'RE DOING!
If we add in the Citi bailout, the total cost now exceeds $4.6165 trillion dollars. People have a hard time conceptualizing very large numbers, so let’s give this some context. The current Credit Crisis bailout is now the largest outlay In American history.
The $4.6165 trillion dollars committed so far is about a trillion dollars ($979 billion dollars) greater than the entire cost of World War II borne by the United States: $3.6 trillion, adjusted for inflation (original cost was $288 billion).
