Singularity

Let It Go

2009-11-22T18:29:00.004-05:00

...The assassination of John F. Kennedy, the thirty-fifth President of the United States, took place on Friday, November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, at 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time (18:30 UTC) in Dealey Plaza. Kennedy was fatally shot while riding with his wife Jacqueline in a Presidential motorcade. The ten-month investigation of the Warren Commission of 1963–1964, the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) of 1976–1979, and other government investigations concluded that the President was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald who himself was murdered before he could stand trial. This conclusion was initially met with support among the American public, but polls conducted from 1966 show as many as 80% of the American public hold beliefs contrary to these findings...

Got to love that phrase "... initially met with support among the American public".

Which American public is that of which you speak, sir?

Bill Hicks got this right:

If you've got a couple hours, you might check this out:

Yet another squamous acolyte

2009-11-22T15:49:00.001-05:00

... convinced he will be eaten last.

The Low Spark of High Heeled Warfighters

2009-11-22T13:35:00.003-05:00

There's always a new sound playing across the land, and if 'merikans didn't have the attention span of a goldfish they might remember where they heard it before:

...Culture is politics. Palin is at the red-hot center of age-old American resentments that have boiled up both from the ascent of our first black president and from the intractability of the Great Recession for those Americans who haven’t benefited from bailouts. As Palin thrives on the ire of the left, so she does from the disdain of Republican leaders who, with a condescension rivaling the sexism they decry in liberals, belittle her as a lightweight or instruct her to eat think-tank spinach.

The only person who can derail Palin is Palin herself. Should she not self-destruct, she will doom G.O.P. hopes of a 2012 comeback. But the rest of the country cannot rest easy. The rage out there is larger than Palin and defies partisan labeling. Her ever-present booster Continetti, writing in The Weekly Standard, suggested that she recast the century-old populist outrage of William Jennings Bryan by adopting the message “You shall not crucify mankind upon the cross of Goldman Sachs.” If Obama can’t tamp down that rage across the political map, Palin will at the very least pave the way for a demagogue with less baggage to pick up her torch.

Of course, the banksters are getting hip to that rage, since it's bad for their bottom line. But just in case they haven't, or aren't ready to spend the bucks to deal with it, the Editors of Pravda, a Company organ if there ever was one, have been kind enough to write it on the sidewalk for them:

...It is widely and correctly understood that Wall Street, with Goldman as a leader and with regulators in thrall, helped to inflate and profited from a credit bubble that burst and cost tens of millions of Americans their jobs, incomes, savings and home equity. American taxpayers continue to stand behind the bailouts and other government interventions that have stabilized the financial system, including Goldman, enabling the firm to post blowout profits in 2009 and to set aside $16.7 billion for bonuses so far this year.

Goldman does not see it that way. It says it never really needed government aid to survive the financial crisis. In that telling, taxpayer dollars have not helped to generate its post-crash profits, and anger over bonuses is jealousy over the good fortune of others.

That is absurd. Goldman has repaid its initial $10 billion bailout allotment, but that is only a sliver of its taxpayer support. The firm was paid $12.9 billion, for example, in the bailout of American International Group, and a report by the bailout’s inspector general refutes Goldman’s claim that it did not need the money. Perhaps the biggest continuing prop is that the government clearly considers Goldman too big to fail, which means that taxpayers are on the hook if Goldman faces the abyss again...

That's assuming, of course, that Goldman-Sachs doesn't only face the abyss when it's a profitable scenario to face the abyss. This is one vampire squid big enough to face down whatever looks back out at them. After all, it's got the Treasury behind it.

One speculates that there are other government organs backing, or ready to back, this club of boys from Yale et alia. For your consideration, the Company shareholders float another screed from the sidewalk for the Skull and Bones crowd that bother to glance at the gray lady, just in case the reality of it all hasn't sunk in:

...Wall Street banks are under regulatory pressure, and come election time, if unemployment is still above 10 percent and Wall Street is still paying itself big bonuses, lawmakers’ wrath might force broader pay curbs, tougher restrictions on what banks can do, or even a break up of the biggest banks.

They are already losing business because of their toxic reputations. One recent Goldman deal, for instance, to buy cheap assets from Fannie Mae, the hobbled mortgage lender, was blocked by the Treasury because it couldn’t be seen to be helping Wall Street benefit once again from the crisis. Critics say the negative media chatter is dragging on their share price.

Now, the main securities industry trade organization has hired Brunswick, a powerhouse public relations firm, to burnish the banks’ image, and banks are urging their staffs to cut down on conspicuous consumption and are canceling Christmas parties in an attempt to turn the reputational tide.

It is a tough brief, even for Manhattan’s skilled public relations industry. Last week, New York State’s comptroller reported that Wall Street profits this year are on track to exceed the record set at the height of the credit bubble. So what to do?

The Pravda Editors have their list of suggestions. But one is certain there are other disinformation specialists with the Company who might take an active interest in making sure the bankrollers of the war machine keep their tentacles into everything. After all, aside from the Old Ones of Wall Street the black hole of endless war has been the most efficient money sink we have.

They have something to teach each other.

It Lives

2009-11-21T20:36:00.001-05:00

Pay No Attention to that Repo Man Behind the Curtain

2009-11-21T13:43:00.002-05:00

The Great Recession is Over!

The Way It's 'Pozed to Be

2009-11-21T12:17:00.003-05:00

Bob Herbert doesn't get the program:

In many ways, it’s like a ghost town. It’s eerily quiet. Driving around in the middle of the afternoon, in a city that once was among the most productive on the planet, you see very little traffic, minimal commercial activity, hardly any pedestrians.

What you’ll see are endless acres of urban ruin, block after block and mile after mile of empty and rotting office buildings, storefronts, hotels, apartment buildings and private homes. It’s a scene of devastation and disintegration that stuns the mind, a major American city that still is home to 900,0000 people but which looks at times like a cross between postwar Berlin and the ruin of an ancient civilization.

Detroit was the arsenal of democracy in World War II and the incubator of the American middle class. It was the city that taught mass production to the rest of the world. It was a place that made cars, trucks and other tangible products, not derivatives. And it was the architect of the quintessentially American idea of putting people to work and paying them a decent wage. It’s frightening to think seriously about what we’ve allowed to happen to this city and what is now happening to the middle class and the American economy as a whole...

...The popular narrative of what happened to Detroit contains a great deal of truth but its focus is too narrow to account for the astonishing decline of this former industrial colossus. Yes, there were the riots of 1967, and white flight; and political leadership that was not just shortsighted but at times embarrassingly incompetent and corrupt. And, yes, the auto industry was a case study in self-destruction.

...Detroit was still viable enough for the Republican Party to hold its convention here in 1980, when it nominated Ronald Reagan. And it was not the riots, but the devastating recession of the early ’80s that really knocked the city senseless. “That’s when the place really cracked,” said Mr. Shaiken, “and that was about aggressive globalization and the lack of an industrial policy, not the riots.”

Detroit and its environs are suffering the agonies of the economic damned because of policies, crafted at the highest national and corporate levels, that resulted in the implosion of crucially important components of America’s manufacturing base. Those decisions have had a profound effect on the fortunes not just of Detroit, or even Michigan, but the entire U.S. economy.

“We’ve been living with the illusion that manufacturing — making things — is so 20th century,” said Mr. Shaiken, “and that we could succeed by concentrating, for example, on complex financial instruments while abandoning the industrial base that sustained so many American families.”

The idea that the fallout from the wrongheaded economic concepts of the past 30 or 40 years could be contained, with the damage limited to the increasingly troubled urban areas while sparing prosperous suburbia, has now proved as phony as Bernie Madoff’s fortune. Americans, whether they live in big cities, suburban towns or rural areas, need jobs, and when those jobs are eliminated (for whatever reasons — technological advances, globalization) without being replaced, the national economy is guaranteed at some point to hit a wall...

And, of course the pillaging continues even though you're more likely to hear about who shot whom in the hood than what the white men in suits are doing here:

...Detroit Mayor Dave Bing is struggling to save his city from fiscal calamity. Unemployment is at a record 28% and rising, while home prices have plunged 39% since 2007. The 66-year-old Bing, a former NBA all-star with the Detroit Pistons who took office 10 months ago, faces a $300 million budget deficit—and few ways to make up the difference.

Against that bleak backdrop, Wall Street is squeezing one of America's weakest cities for every penny it can. A few years ago, Detroit struck a derivatives deal with UBS (UBS) and other banks that allowed it to save more than $2 million a year in interest on $800 million worth of bonds. But the fine print carried a potentially devastating condition. If the city's credit rating dropped, the banks could opt out of the deal and demand a sizable breakup fee. That's precisely what happened in January: After years of fiscal trouble, Detroit saw its credit rating slashed to junk. Suddenly the sputtering Motor City was on the hook for a $400 million tab...

The rape of America coninues. Of course, real 'merikans don't just lay back and accept it. They join in and spread the violence around in a way the locals won't object to boiling the frog nice and slow.

Mr. Herbert, since you keep coming up to the board with the right figures, let me add it up for you. It's not your fault you don't get it. There is some forethought to what's going on in America and the world.

Chaos is the plan.

You Think? They certainly didn't

2009-11-20T21:57:00.002-05:00

What does one say?

U.S. Fears Iraq Development Projects May Go to Waste

What, all those schools where KBR painted all the windows might not be used? All those museums they allowed to be looted won't be visited? Or maybe

...a cutting-edge, $270 million water treatment plant in Nasiriya that works at a fraction of its intended capacity because it is too sophisticated for Iraqi workers to operate, to a farmers’ market that farmers cannot decide how to share, to a large American hospital closed immediately after it was handed over to Iraq because the government was unable to supply it with equipment, a medical staff or electricity...

But never worry. Dick Cheney's sure the money to build all these went into good hands.

Cuddles with the Squids

2009-11-20T06:14:00.004-05:00

Krugman:

... the A.I.G. rescue was part of a pattern: Throughout the financial crisis key officials — most notably Timothy Geithner, who was president of the New York Fed in 2008 and is now Treasury secretary — have shied away from doing anything that might rattle Wall Street. And the bitter paradox is that this play-it-safe approach has ended up undermining prospects for economic recovery. For the job of fixing the broken economy is far from done — yet finishing the job has become nearly impossible now that the public has lost faith in the government’s efforts, viewing them as little more than handouts to the people who got us into this mess.

About the A.I.G. affair: During the bubble years, many financial companies created the illusion of financial soundness by buying credit-default swaps from A.I.G. — basically, insurance policies in which A.I.G. promised to make up the difference if borrowers defaulted on their debts. It was an illusion because the insurer didn’t have remotely enough money to make good on its promises if things went bad. And sure enough, things went bad.

So why protect bankers from the consequences of their errors? Well, by the time A.I.G.’s hollowness became apparent, the world financial system was on the edge of collapse and officials judged — probably correctly — that letting A.I.G. go bankrupt would push the financial system over that edge. So A.I.G. was effectively nationalized; its promises became taxpayer liabilities...

...these seemingly safe choices have now placed the economy in grave danger.

For the economy is still in deep trouble and needs much more government help. Unemployment is in double-digits; we desperately need more government spending on job creation. Banks are still weak, and credit is still tight; we desperately need more government aid to the financial sector. But try to talk to an ordinary voter about this, and the response you’re likely to get is: “No way. All they’ll do is hand out more money to Wall Street.”

So here’s the real tragedy of the botched bailout: Government officials, perhaps influenced by spending too much time with bankers, forgot that if you want to govern effectively you have retain the trust of the people. And by treating the financial industry — which got us into this mess in the first place — with kid gloves, they have squandered that trust.

Whether or not this was timid restructuring or an actual criminal collusion may become evident on the progress of this lawsuit.

Nov. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Bank of America Corp., UBS AG and JPMorgan Chase & Co. were sued by a California public utility over claims they rigged sales of municipal derivatives and shared illegal profits through kickbacks.

The lawsuit, filed by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, is based on federal and state antitrust claims. It alleges Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America and more than a dozen other banks conspired to pre-select winners of municipal derivative auctions, coordinated their pricing, and accepted kickbacks disguised as fees from co-conspirators.

The allegations resemble those made by a U.S. grand jury in New York last month, according to the lawsuit filed Nov. 12 in federal court in Sacramento. CDR Financial Products Inc. founder David Rubin and two employees of the Beverly Hills, California- based company were indicted for allegedly accepting kickbacks on investments sold to local governments. CDR is also named as a defendant in the Sacramento case.

The banks engaged in “allocating customers and markets for municipal derivatives, rigging the bidding process by which municipal bond issuers acquire municipal derivatives, and conspiring to manipulate the terms that issuers received,” according to the lawsuit...

Not everyone in the government is owned by the vampire squid, but if this lawsuit is dismissed it is possible those that matter are.

The Hitchhiker's First Rule

2009-11-19T22:12:00.002-05:00

Don't panic.

The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.

The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.

The allegations raise serious questions about the accuracy of the organisation's latest World Energy Outlook on oil demand and supply to be published tomorrow – which is used by the British and many other governments to help guide their wider energy and climate change policies...

[tip o'teh tinfoil]

Said underestimate if you care to dig it out.

...The fear is that panicky markets can cause enormous damage – panic-buying that prompts fights over resources, which in turn could lead to power cuts in some places and other such mayhem. But so far in facing this huge challenge, our political/economic system seems unable to cope with reality. We are forced to carry on living in an illusion that we have so much time to adapt to post-oil that we don't even need to be talking or thinking much about what a world without plentiful oil would look like. Reality has become too dangerous...

A simpler answer is that those who would rule are making and plan on making a killing as the last drops of fossil fuel are burned and the greater portion of humanity is consigned into a post-industrial neo-feudal existence.

On the Aristocracy of Aversion

2009-11-19T06:22:00.002-05:00

First, via Lambert and The Big Picture , Goldman Sachs has discovered a way to protect itself and the right sort of people against H1N1.

Second, check out what Catherine Austin Fitts has to say about the relationship of the stock market to the popsicle index. Among other things, it's tasteful, enjoyable, detailed, and very readable...

Acid Seas

2009-11-18T21:34:00.004-05:00

This is another reason why blocking the sunlight is an idiot answer to carbon pollution:

The Earth’s oceans, which have absorbed carbon dioxide from fuel emissions since the dawn of the industrial era, have recently grown less efficient at sopping it up, new research suggests.

Emissions from the burning of fossil fuels began soaring in the 1950s, and oceans largely kept up, scientists say. But the growth in the intake rate has slowed since the 1980s, and markedly so since 2000, the authors of a study write in a report in Thursday’s issue of Nature.

The research suggests that the seas cannot indefinitely be considered a reliable “carbon sink” as humans generate heat-trapping gases linked to global warming.

The slowdown in the rise of the absorption rate resulted from a gradual change in the oceans’ chemistry, the study found. “The more carbon dioxide the ocean absorbs, the more acidic it becomes and the less carbon dioxide it can absorb,” said the study’s lead author, Samar Khatiwala, a research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University and a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

“It’s a small change in absolute terms,” Dr. Khatiwala said. “What I think is fairly clear and important in the long term is the trend toward lower values, which implies that more of the emissions will remain in the atmosphere.”

To calculate the slowdown, Dr. Khatiwala and his collaborators created a mathematical model using tens of thousands of measurements of seawater collected over the past 20 years, including temperature, salinity and the presence of manufactured chlorofluorocarbons as a reflection of industrial activity.

They then worked backward with the data to create a formula that estimated the accumulation of human-generated carbon dioxide in the oceans from 1765, the opening of the industrial era, to 2008.

Even as human-generated emissions of carbon dioxide increase, the oceans’ uptake rate growth appears to have dropped by 10 percent from 2000 to 2007, Dr. Khatiwala said.

The last major research effort to measure industrial carbon uptake in the oceans was published in a 2004 Science study led by Christopher Sabine.

His methodology was different but arrived at similar conclusions.

Dr. Sabine used carbon dioxide measurements taken by more than 100 cruise ships to come up with a single figure: the oceans’ total industrial carbon uptake until 1994.

Dr. Khatiwala’s approach provides estimates of ocean carbon storage for every year from 1765 to 2008...

Apocalypse wow

2009-11-17T21:22:00.002-05:00

When the self proclaimed experts get their facts wrong, it's no wonder people just have a hard time understanding what to think.

It's hard to take professional bloviators seriously. So let me engage in some amateur bloviating. Although, unlike President Gore, I actually have a professional degree in a biological science.

Fact: carbon dioxide pollution damages the environment above and beyond global warming. Think acidification of the oceans. Think destruction of global fisheries, and coral reefs, and interuption of the role of the oceans as a sink for carbon emissions that will only accelerate the damage.

Fact: greenhouse effects due to carbon dioxide are dangerous depending on what the Sun is doing. During active solar years, you have things like Katrina and the endless parade of hurricanes we saw every summer in the first half of this decade. But we've had an abnormally extended solar minimum for the last 3 years- and no real hurricanes to hit the United States to speak of this year.

Hypothesis: the greenhouse effect of the current high carbon dioxide atmosphere might drown the coasts in normal years of solar activity but block the development Ice Ages during extended quiet times for the sun. That is one awful tradeoff. It is no justification for the carbon emissions of industrial socieies. High CO₂ is dangerous. It should be controlled and lowered through biogenic fixation.

Think trees.

Unfortunately, the check bounced

2009-11-15T21:23:00.002-05:00

"...You Can Take That To The Bank"

Just like the promise for single payer, and others, one supposes.

But that's in the budget, right?

2009-11-15T18:08:00.002-05:00

It's nice to know Obama is making a bipartisan effort to save money.

I am sure Diane Feinstein and Joe Lieberman are going to call for a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq as part of the effort to cut costs...

Majority Rule Depends on Who is the Majority

2009-11-15T17:32:00.002-05:00

Avedon notes that a difference exists in the way things work now than when Der Decider was in the Oval Office with his Reptilian Congress.

CA Berkeley:

The Roll Call reporter this morning on CSPAN with Rep. Jan Schakowsky D-IL, Steven Dennis, called the silent filibuster that we have seen this session the new normal. This completely dismissed the idea that the majority should rule. Does that reporter hate freedom?

This places the tactic of one Senator rising to object to the motion to proceed to anything in the Senate as the way it is always going to be.

Not a delaying tactic.

The new normal...

Until the Reptilians rule is a little more overt, again, anyway.

Schrodinger's Guilt

2009-11-15T16:20:00.000-05:00

Just go read Fafnir.

Still in Denial of Why We Fight

2009-11-15T06:03:00.002-05:00

Frank Rich can't- or won't- put his finger on Amerikan motivations in Afghanistan, but highlights the logical inconsistencies of the hawks:

...the mass murder at Fort Hood didn’t happen in isolation. It unfolded against the backdrop of Obama’s final lap of decision-making about Afghanistan. For all the right’s jeremiads, its own brand of political correctness kept it from connecting two crucial dots: how our failing war against terrorists in Afghanistan might relate to our failure to stop a supposed terrorist attack at home. Most of those who decried the Army’s blindness to Hasan’s threat are strong proponents of sending more troops into our longest war. That they didn’t mention Afghanistan while attacking the entire American intelligence and defense apparatus in charge of that war may be the most telling revelation of this whole debate.

The reason they didn’t is obvious enough. Their screeds about the Hasan case are completely at odds with both the Afghanistan policy they endorse and the leadership that must execute that policy, including Gen. Stanley McChrystal. These hawks, all demanding that Obama act on McChrystal’s proposals immediately, do not seem to have read his strategy assessment for Afghanistan or the many press interviews he gave as it leaked out. If they had, they’d discover that the whole thrust of his counterinsurgency pitch is to befriend and win the support of the Afghan population — i.e., Muslims. The “key to success,” the general wrote in his brief to the president, will be “strong personal relationships forged between security forces and local populations.”

McChrystal thinks we might even jolly up those Muslims who historically and openly hate America. “I don’t think much of the Taliban are ideologically driven,” he told Dexter Filkins of The Times. “In my view their past is not important. Some people say, ‘Well, they have blood on their hands.’ I’d say, ‘So do a lot of people.’ I think we focus on future behavior.”

Whether we could win those hearts and minds is, arguably, an open question — though it’s an objective that would require a partner other than Hamid Karzai and many more troops than even McChrystal is asking for (or America presently has). But to say that McChrystal’s optimistic — dare one say politically correct? — view of Muslim pliability doesn’t square with that of America’s hawks is the understatement of the decade.

As their Fort Hood rhetoric made clear, McChrystal’s most vehement partisans don’t trust American Muslims, let alone those of the Taliban, no matter how earnestly the general may argue that they can be won over by our troops’ friendliness (or bribes). If, as the right has it, our Army cannot be trusted to recognize a Hasan in its own ranks, then how will it figure out who the “good” Muslims will be as we try to build a “stable” state (whatever “stable” means) in a country that has never had a functioning central government? If our troops can’t be protected from seemingly friendly Muslim American brethren in Killeen, Tex., what are the odds of survival for the 40,000 more troops the hawks want to deploy to Kabul and sinkholes beyond?

About the only prominent voice among the liberal-bashing, Obama-loathing right who has noted this gaping contradiction is Mark Steyn of National Review. “Members of the best trained, best equipped fighting force on the planet” were “gunned down by a guy who said a few goofy things no one took seriously,” he wrote. “And that’s the problem: America has the best troops and fiercest firepower, but no strategy for throttling the ideology that drives the enemy — in Afghanistan and in Texas.” You have to applaud Steyn’s rare intellectual consistency within his camp. One imagines that he does not buy the notion that our Army, however brilliant, has a shot at building “strong personal relationships” with a population that often regards us as occupiers and infidels.

In a week of horrific news, it was good to hear at the end of it that Obama is dissatisfied with the four Afghanistan options he has been weighing so far. The more time he deliberates, the more he is learning that he’s on a fool’s errand with no exit. After Karzai was spared a runoff last month and declared the winner of the fraud-infested August “election,” Obama demanded that he address his government’s corruption as a price for American support. Only days later the Afghan president mocked the American president by parading his most tainted cronies on camera and granting an interview to PBS’s “NewsHour” devoted to spewing his contempt for his American benefactors.

Matthew Hoh, a former Marine and, until recently, a State Department official in Afghanistan, could be found on MSNBC on Thursday once again asking the question no war advocate can answer, “Do you want Americans fighting and dying for the Karzai regime?” Hoh quit his post on principle in September despite the urging of colleagues, including our ambassador there, Karl W. Eikenberry, that he stay and fight over war policy from the inside. But Hoh had lost confidence in our strategy and would not retract his resignation. Now he has been implicitly seconded by Eikenberry himself. Last week we learned that the ambassador, a retired general who had been the top American military commander in Afghanistan as recently as 2007, had sent two cables to Obama urging caution about sending more troops.

We don’t know everything in those cables. What we do know is that American intelligence continues to say that fewer than 100 Qaeda operatives can still be found in Afghanistan. We also know that the Taliban, which are currently estimated to number in the tens of thousands, can’t be eliminated. As McChrystal put it to Filkins, there is no “finite number” of Taliban, so there’s no way to vanquish them. Hence his counterinsurgency alternative, which could take decades, costing untold billions and countless lives.

Perhaps those on the right are correct about Hasan, and he is just one cog in an apocalyptic jihadist plot that has infiltrated our armed forces. If so, then they have an obligation to explain how pouring more troops into Afghanistan would have stopped Hasan from plotting in Killeen. Don’t hold your breath. If we have learned anything concrete so far from the massacre at Fort Hood, it’s that our hawks, for all their certitude, are as utterly confused as the rest of us about who it is we’re fighting in Afghanistan and to what end.

This confusion results from the denial that we could be fighting for anything beyond petrochemicals, opium, fat Pentagon contracts, and imperial ambition. These are the great unspoken constants of Amerikan foriegn policy. They will only get you washed from the pages of Pravda if you speak them there...

No Surprise At All

2009-11-14T07:35:00.003-05:00

In two recent posts at Consortium News, Robert Parry reviews the recently released data that shows both how the Gipper couldn't have won one without some collusion of the Company and Iran and the extent to which the Village will go to make all seem to be Business as Usual.

Such was the situation in late 1992 as America reached an important turning point for whether the people would get to understand their recent history or not. A bipartisan House task force wanted to debunk allegations that Ronald Reagan’s campaign in 1980 had sabotaged President Jimmy Carter’s negotiations with Iran about freeing 52 Americans, who were taken hostage 30 years ago this week.

That alleged act of treachery, making Carter look weak and inept, set the stage for Reagan’s landslide victory on Nov. 4, 1980, exactly one year to the date after the hostages were seized. But the suspicions about this so-called October Surprise case only reached a critical mass in 1991-92 after several years of disclosures about the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scheme.

Despite Republican denials about any secret pre-election 1980 dealings with Iran – and the anger that the allegations drew from influential neoconservatives in the Washington press corps – a House task force was created to examine the case, although without much enthusiasm and mostly with an eye toward debunking the suspicions...

As Parry outlines, they did this quite effectively, and in doing so re-wrote a significant chapter in the history of the empire.

Only the DINOcrats Could Kill Social Security

2009-11-13T22:11:00.002-05:00

Yes, it figures that Feinstein and Lieberman working together could actually whack the third rail of American politics:

...Senators from both parties on Tuesday put new pressure on Speaker Nancy Pelosi to turn the power to trim entitlement benefits over to an independent commission.

Seven members of the Senate Budget Committee threatened during a Tuesday hearing to withhold their support for critical legislation to raise the debt ceiling if the bill calling for the creation of a bipartisan fiscal reform commission were not attached. Six others had previously made such threats, bringing the total to 13 senators drawing a hard line on the committee legislation...

...Among its chief responsibilities would be closing the gap between tax revenue coming in and the larger cost of paying for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits...

Congress is under pressure to raise the cap on what the federal government can borrow by mid-December. If the debt ceiling is not raised above its current $12.1 trillion mark by then, the government will exceed its borrowing limits and will be forced to default on the debt. Economists have warned that the inevitable result would be a lowering of the U.S. credit rating, triggering substantial increases in the interest rates the government is already paying.

Raising the debt ceiling has become one of a handful of “must-pass” pieces of legislation Congress regularly considers without the usual partisan posturing, and often without much debate.

But before Tuesday’s hearing was over, Sens. Conrad, Gregg, Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), George Voinovich (R-Ohio) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) publicly vowed to vote against raising the debt ceiling if a budget reform commission bill doesn’t come along with it...

Cry "Havoc!" and unleash the dogs of default.

As Cruickshank says:

...Cuts in Social Security and Medicare will not only ripple through the economy in the form of reduced spending, they'll also ripple through younger generations, who will fill the gap lost by the cutting of government benefits with money out of their own pockets to help their elderly relatives make ends meet and get the treatment they need.

Feinstein is embracing Hooverism, putting Democratic gains at risk, and threatening to make our economic crisis permanent. Of course, in doing so she's merely going with the flow in both DC and Sacramento, so it's not like she's some kind of outlier...

No Wood for eReptile Disorders

2009-11-13T21:14:00.005-05:00

You could say it's tit for tat for the Stupak among us:

...I have a moral objection to paying for any kind of erectile dysfunction medicine in the new health reform bill and I think men who want to use it should just pay for it out of pocket. After all, I won't ever need such a pill. And anyway, it's no biggie. Just because most of them can get it under their insurance today doesn't mean they shouldn't have it stripped from their coverage in the future because of my moral objections...

...Many of the men who are prescribed this medication are on Medicare, so I think it should be stripped out of that coverage as well...

Drying Up the Netroots Left

2009-11-13T06:29:00.005-05:00

Over at Firedoglake they're joing Kos in encouraging progressives to stop sending money to the Democratic National Committee.

Over the DNC's refusal to back gay rights more strongly.

Well. That's a good cause, because let's face it, gays deserve every right to be able to openly love and marry and be as miserable as everyone else.

But. Obama still supports the Endless War on Terra unquestioningly, sends half measures to prop up the economy that only help the banksters, refuses to really regulate the banksters, and sets up Trojan Horse health plans that allow the banksters to tax everyone without the middleman of the Feds, thus aiding and abetting endless global suffering and yes, death. He continues the whole time to spout obvious soporific lies about Hope and Change.

And all that doesn't make the Democratic netroots organize to do anything but ban the commenters who point it out.

But not supporting people's rights to hump anyone they please who wants to be humped, that makes Kos and Jane mad enough to do something.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

More Meat for Moloch

2009-11-12T20:26:00.002-05:00

Only 34,000 more!

What you didn't know about the War.

Not a jobs program at all

2009-11-12T06:20:00.002-05:00

Despite the conventional wisdom of the Company pundits by their own petard they get the hoist:

There is a major national ad campaign, funded by the oil industry and other usual suspects, to convince the public that measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and slow global warming will result in massive job loss. This ad campaign warns of slower growth and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, possibly even millions of jobs, if some variation of the current proposals being debated by Congress get passed into law.

In fact, standard economic models do show that measures designed to reduce GHG by raising energy prices will lead to some cost in terms of slower economic growth. And slower economic growth implies fewer jobs, although the impact will almost certainly be less than indicated in these scare stories.

However, the oil industry’s scare stories about job loss are never put it in any context. In these models, any government measure that interferes with market outcomes almost by definition reduces efficiency, leading to less economic growth and fewer jobs. Efforts to slow global warming fall in this category, but so does almost everything else and many items in the everything else category have a much larger impact.

For example, defense spending means that the government is pulling away resources from the uses determined by the market and instead using them to buy weapons and supplies and to pay for soldiers and other military personnel. In standard economic models, defense spending is a direct drain on the economy, reducing efficiency, slowing growth and costing jobs...

Measure to slow greenhouse gas emissions by investing in development of carbon-neutral solar based renewable energy resources most certainly don't increase job loss. Far from it. Carbon emissions can be reduced without increasing the cost of fuel at the pump, which will skyrocket in cost anyway as the oil reserves are depleted.

Because, you see, the government does do somethings quite well: manage peer-reviewed research, for one thing. The NIH, for example, has been and will continue to be an engine for biotechnology and biomedical innovation that has nothing to do with an imperial war machine.

But this war?

...A few years ago, the Center for Economic and Policy Research commissioned Global Insight, one of the leading economic modeling firms, to project the impact of a sustained increase in defense spending equal to 1.0 percentage point of GDP. This was roughly equal to the cost of the Iraq War.

Global Insight’s model projected that after 20 years the economy would be about 0.6 percentage points smaller as a result of the additional defense spending. Slower growth would imply a loss of almost 700,000 jobs compared to a situation in which defense spending had not been increased. Construction and manufacturing were especially big job losers in the projections, losing 210,000 and 90,000 jobs, respectively.

The scenario we asked Global Insight to model turned out to have vastly underestimated the increase in defense spending associated with current policy. In the most recent quarter, defense spending was equal to 5.6 percent of GDP. By comparison, before the September 11th attacks, the Congressional Budget Office projected that defense spending in 2009 would be equal to just 2.4 percent of GDP. Our post-September 11th build-up was equal to 3.2 percentage points of GDP compared to the pre-attack baseline. This means that the Global Insight projections of job loss are far too low.

The impact of higher spending will not be directly proportionate in these economic models. In fact, it should be somewhat more than proportionate, but if we just multiple the Global Insight projections by 3, we would see that the long-term impact of our increased defense spending will be a reduction in GDP of 1.8 percentage points. This would correspond to roughly $250 billion in the current economy, or about $800 in lost output for every person in the country.

The projected job loss from this increase in defense spending would be close to 2 million. In other words, the standard economic models that project job loss from efforts to stem global warming also project that the increase in defense spending since 2000 will cost the economy close to 2 million jobs in the long run...

Why, yes, there are some jobs created due to the war. Building trucks, for example. But those jobs are a pittance compared to the resources squandered and the better jobs that can never come to exist because of an endless war.

He Obviously Didn't Get the Memo

2009-11-11T22:08:00.002-05:00

Or maybe he doesn't realize Washington is owned by the Company and led by Robert Gates for Poppy's Yale class.

...The U.S. ambassador in Kabul sent two classified cables to Washington in the past week expressing deep concerns about sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan until President Hamid Karzai's government demonstrates that it is willing to tackle the corruption and mismanagement that has fueled the Taliban's rise, senior U.S. officials said.

Karl W. Eikenberry's memos, sent as President Obama enters the final stages of his deliberations over a new Afghanistan strategy, illustrated both the difficulty of the decision and the deepening divisions within the administration's national security team. After a top-level meeting on the issue Wednesday afternoon -- Obama's eighth since early last month -- the White House issued a statement that appeared to reflect Eikenberry's concerns.

"The President believes that we need to make clear to the Afghan government that our commitment is not open-ended," the statement said. "After years of substantial investments by the American people, governance in Afghanistan must improve in a reasonable period of time."

On the eve of his nine-day trip to Asia, Obama was given a series of options laid out laid out by military planners with differing numbers of new U.S. deployments, ranging from 10,000 to 40,000 troops. None of the scenarios calls for scaling back the U.S. presence in Afghanistan or delaying the dispatch of additional troops...

...the cables from Eikenberry, a retired four-star general who in 2006-2007 commanded U.S. troops in Afghanistan, have rankled his former colleagues in the Pentagon -- as well as Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, defense officials said. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, has stated that without the deployment of an additional tens of thousands of troops within the next year, the mission there "will likely result in failure."

Eikenberry retired from the military in April as a senior general in NATO and was sworn in as ambassador the next day. His position as a former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan is likely to give added weight to his concerns about sending more troops and fan growing doubts about U.S. prospects in Afghanistan among an increasingly pessimistic public and polarized Congress...

...The ambassador also has worried that sending tens of thousands of additional American troops would increase the Afghan government's dependence on U.S. support at a time when its own security forces should be taking on more responsibility for fighting. Before serving as the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Eikenberry was in charge of the Afghan army training program...

...Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates have backed a major increase in U.S. forces to drive the Taliban from populated areas and provide Afghan security forces and the government the space to snuff out corruption and undertake development projects. They have argued that only a large-scale counterinsurgency effort can produce a strong Afghan government capable of preventing the country from once again become an al-Qaeda haven...

...The most ambitious option Obama received Wednesday calls for 40,000 additional U.S. troops, as outlined by McChrystal in his stark assessment of the war filed in late August.

Military planners put the additional annual cost of McChrystal's recommendation at $33 billion, although White House officials say the number is probably closer to $50 billion. The extra troops would allow U.S. forces to attempt to take back and hold several Taliban havens in the southern and eastern regions of Afghanistan.

One compromise option put forward by the Pentagon, with the backing of Gates, would deploy an additional 30,000 to 35,000 U.S. troops -- fewer than McChrystal's optimal number to carry out his strategy -- and rely on NATO allies to make up the 5,000- to 10,000-troop difference...

Nothing like a compromise that gives you 90% of what you want up front, is there, Mr. Gates?

And Hillary? She's doing for the antiwar progressives what her hubby and Larry Summers did for the economy when they torpedoed Glass-Steagall exactly ten years ago.

Taking Away Your Name

2009-11-11T06:17:00.002-05:00

The assimilation of No. 6 into the Village is complete:

...Jim Caviezel, who played Jesus in “The Passion of the Christ” and also appeared in “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “The Thin Red Line,” is cast as No. 6. He still has not seen the original version of “The Prisoner” for fear of absorbing too much of McGoohan’s bravura performance...

McGoohan cast his entire fortune from being the star of "Secret Agent" into "The Prisoner", which BBC soon took off the air despite its popularity.

These days, the Village has grown.