Global Warming? The Boston Globe Reviews The Scientific Data

JEFF JACOBY

Where’s the global warming?

By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | March 8, 2009

SUPPOSE the climate landscape in recent weeks looked something like this:

Half the country was experiencing its mildest winter in years, with no sign of snow in many Northern states. Most of the Great Lakes were ice-free. Not a single Canadian province had had a white Christmas. There was a new study discussing a mysterious surge in global temperatures – a warming trend more intense than computer models had predicted. Other scientists admitted that, because of a bug in satellite sensors, they had been vastly overestimating the extent of Arctic sea ice.

If all that were happening on the climate-change front, do you think you’d be hearing about it on the news? Seeing it on Page 1 of your daily paper? Would politicians be exclaiming that global warming was even more of a crisis than they’d thought? Would environmentalists be skewering global-warming “deniers” for clinging to their skepticism despite the growing case against it?

No doubt.

But it isn’t such hints of a planetary warming trend that have been piling up in profusion lately. Just the opposite.

The United States has shivered through an unusually severe winter, with snow falling in such unlikely destinations as New Orleans, Las Vegas, Alabama, and Georgia. On Dec. 25, every Canadian province woke up to a white Christmas, something that hadn’t happened in 37 years. Earlier this year, Europe was gripped by such a killing cold wave that trains were shut down in the French Riviera and chimpanzees in the Rome Zoo had to be plied with hot tea. Last week, satellite data showed three of the Great Lakes – Erie, Superior, and Huron – almost completely frozen over. In Washington, D.C., what was supposed to be a massive rally against global warming was upstaged by the heaviest snowfall of the season, which paralyzed the capital.

Meanwhile, the National Snow and Ice Data Center has acknowledged that due to a satellite sensor malfunction, it had been underestimating the extent of Arctic sea ice by 193,000 square miles – an area the size of Spain. In a new study, University of Wisconsin researchers Kyle Swanson and Anastasios Tsonis conclude that global warming could be going into a decades-long remission. The current global cooling “is nothing like anything we’ve seen since 1950,” Swanson told Discovery News. Yes, global cooling: 2008 was the coolest year of the past decade – global temperatures have not exceeded the record high measured in 1998, notwithstanding the carbon-dioxide that human beings continue to pump into the atmosphere.

Considering how much attention would have been lavished on a comparable run of hot weather or on a warming trend that was plainly accelerating, shouldn’t the recent cold phenomena and the absence of any global warming during the past 10 years be getting a little more notice? Isn’t it possible that the most apocalyptic voices of global-warming alarmism might not be the only ones worth listening to?

There is no shame in conceding that science still has a long way to go before it fully understands the immense complexity of the Earth’s ever-changing climate(s). It would be shameful not to concede it. The climate models on which so much global-warming alarmism rests “do not begin to describe the real world that we live in,” says Freeman Dyson, the eminent physicist and futurist. “The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand.”

But for many people, the science of climate change is not nearly as important as the religion of climate change. When Al Gore insisted yet again at a conference last Thursday that there can be no debate about global warming, he was speaking not with the authority of a man of science, but with the closed-minded dogmatism of a religious zealot. Dogma and zealotry have their virtues, no doubt. But if we want to understand where global warming has gone, those aren’t the tools we need

[Via http://mcauleysworld.wordpress.com]

New Home Sales In October 2009 Surge +6.2%

The U. S. Census Bureau announced on November 25, 2009 that sales of new one-family homes  surged by 6.2% in October 2009 over the previous month to 430,000 units. Regionally, results were mixed, with the West down -5.1%, the South up +23.2%, the Midwest down -20.0%, and the Northeast down -5.1%.

The inventory of homes for sale expressed in months of supply fell sharply to 6.7 months. This supply figure was at 11.1 months a year ago and peaked at 12.4 months in January 2009. Many real estate professionals consider 6-to-7 months of supply a “Normal” market.

This surge in sales is surprising in that the First Time Home Buyer Tax Credit was expiring on November 30, 2009, and buyers would have run out of time to buy a home and still close by the end of November.

Even though the Tax Credit was extended and signed by President Obama on November 6, 2009, it should take several weeks before the next batch of home buyers can get themselves geared up to buy a home.

So we would expect new home sales to fall in November, and probably even in December too before rising again in January.

See the full report: http://www.census.gov/const/newressales.pdf

[Via http://regisskeehan.wordpress.com]

Reflection 161: Civil Consciousness

(Copyright © 2009)

I trace the fall of natural religion to the removal of the rites of Dionysus from the Greek countryside to Athens early in the sixth century B.C.E. (before current era) when the tyrant Peisistratus founded an official Dionysiac feast. After that, the wisdom of synchronizing human activities with seasonal cycles of dieback and regeneration was replaced by effete, urban reenactments, many echoed in various liturgical calendars of today. Religious rituals persisted, but no longer moored to favorable growing conditions and the cycles of nature, they became matters more of superstition and convention than survival.

In the case of rural Dionysian rituals as transplanted to Athens, earlier ceremonies promoted human sensitivity to fertility and reproductive vigor of crops and soils through the flow of vital juices symbolized in the person of Dionysus himself. He was the embodiment, as W.K.C. Guthrie points out in The Greeks and Their Gods, “of not only wine, but the life-blood of animals, the male semen which fertilizes the female, the juicy sap of plants.” Earlier orgiastic rites mimicking the high drama of the year were replaced in the city by occasions for staging new tragedies, originally in honor of Dionysus, but soon deflecting his creative genius onto mere mortals who were awarded prizes for the fecundity—not of their juices—but their dramatic poetry.

Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides certainly deserved the acclaim, and every mortal should aspire to their level of creative achievement. But when people are content to serve as spectators of rather than participants in events, we run the risk of passively living through other people’s trials and adventures, which is not the same as forging lives of our own. If we do not live on the forefront of our lives, can we claim to be alive anywhere at all?

Migration of the human mind and spirit to urban centers led to a huge change in consciousness as emphasis shifted from the personal to the cultural. Citified human understanding wanted to housebreak the creative enthusiasm exhibited everywhere in nature as a kind of bad habit, so disciplined it to conform with culturally acceptable symbols and ideas. The former personifications of ritual energy released at appropriate seasons (in the guise of Dionysus, Attis, Adonis, Tammuz, Osiris, et al.), became characters in myths and stories rather than forces to be dealt with in everyday life. They served as cultural metaphors for what everyone might feel if they felt anything at all. As Guthrie writes, “The authorities of the Greek states . . . did not accept the barbaric stranger [Dionysus] without, in some cases at least, emptying his worship of its most characteristic content.” You could honor his antics from a safe distance without risking ecstasy, muddy feet, or mussed hair. Guthrie characterizes the result as “emasculation of his worship” by civil authorities in Athens.

In Seasonal Feasts and Festivals, E. O. James writes:

Greek tragedy or comedy began . . . as a religious service held at the festivals of Dionysus, in the country in December, in the city in March, and at the Lenaia in January. . . . But as it lost its seasonal character, by the third century B.C., the drama became secularized, very much as the medieval Mystery and Miracle plays were dissociated from the Church and lost their sacred significance and character when in the secularized versions they were enacted in the marketplace by strolling players.

My point is that when a culture’s practices control the minds of its members rather than the other way around—innate, natural consciousness expressing itself through cultural practices—then the primary purpose of membership in a tribe or larger group striving to live in harmony with its place on Earth has been subverted by top-down authority for the sake of its own power, wealth, influence, and position. We dress this transformation in positive guise as a means of becoming civilized, forgetting the price we pay in putting fetters on personal consciousness. The difference is similar to that between true democracy in opposition to self-serving monarchy, oligarchy, plutocracy, or other schemes by which the consciousness of the many is shaped by the will of a privileged elite.

Speaking of which, consider the case of Jack Welch. In keeping with the violence done to natural values by adoption of a medium of exchange in the form of a particular currency accepted throughout a culture (topic of my last post, Reflection 160: Of Two Minds), David Owen writes of Nell Minow’s realizing the import of the retirement agreement C.E.O. Jack Welch worked out with General Electric:

The agreement gave Welch not only millions of dollars but also free lifetime use of a company Boeing 737 and a helicopter; floor-level tickets for the Knicks; box seats for the Red Sox, the Yankees, and the Metropolitan Opera; exclusive use of a company Manhattan apartment; fresh flowers for the apartment; dry-cleaning and Internet service; tips for his doormen; home security systems for four residences that he owned; numerous golf-club memberships; and dozens of other perks and amenities. . . . Whereas less extravagantly compensated people often take pride in being able to make purchases from their earnings, [Minow] said, ‘If you are super-rich, that thrill is gone’ (“The Pay Problem,” The New Yorker, Oct. 12, 2009).

That’s what spectatorship leads to—a wholly cultural life. Welch’s perks kick-in only upon his leaving the company, proving, for the elite at least, there is life in the hereafter. The very model of a modern tycoon, Welch was gaming his company, his culture, and his planet for all they were worth, playing by city rules the whole time, supporting a lifestyle based not on personal, biological needs and values, but on money (the one value officially sponsored by his culture) to an extravagant degree of degeneracy. Such a life is a caricature of civilized man—all take and no give. With no respect shown the environment (here the Hudson River Valley) that makes life itself possible in the region, the river in this instance receiving G.E.’s waste stream laced with PCBs.

Speaking of cultural devils, members of Congress cease to represent their constituencies when they become members of political parties which intercede between them and their supporters. Here again, the cost of living a cultural existence is the cause, which renders the sound judgment of mere mortals null and void. Every Democrat in the Senate voted to move the healthcare debate to the floor, every Republican voted to keep it safely hidden where it was. As if humans came in two colors—red and blue—with no shades of purple in between. This is a crude example of lock-step consciousness, all members of each party hiding behind the same grimacing masks. Forcing the nuanced values of the people who elected them into either of two molds—pro or con—go or no-go.

In rural areas, people are generally taken as they are; in cities, they spend much of their time posing because, with their individual values stripped from them, they can only go through the motions of trying to make themselves attractive. Now over half of America lives in cities removed from the land, removed from personal values, removed from the mental acumen they began acquiring at birth. There are few self-made men or women left. It is easier to open yourself to your culture and let it take your soul. That is, let the aggressive, arrogant, and over-confident elite—the Jack Welches of the world—take over your mind so you come to believe in them and the values they serve. Where Dionysus stood for getting with nature’s program because human life depended on it, demigod Welch tells G.E., “Get with my program because my lifestyle depends on it!” and G.E. sees its duty and goes along, paying Welch by picking the pockets of its customers, shareholders, and workers.

Whatever your price, buy in to the system and let the magic happen. Pledge proper allegiance, sing the proper national anthem, pray to the proper gods and celebrities, buy the right clothes, mumble the right slogans, go to the right schools, root for the right teams, see the right films, vote the right ticket—you are one of Us! All it will cost is a lifetime of your personal earnings, originality, and self-respect. The main thing is to pay your dues to your culture. To be its creature so you don’t have to deal with the anxiety of thinking for yourself. If you live up to others’ expectations, your culture will see to it that Jack Welch gets his retirement package, leaving you free to live vicariously the rest of your days.

The alternative is to raze the corporations and cities where culture rules every thought and gesture. Visualize the scene. Smell the lust. Savor the greed. Then send everyone back to the country to become bumpkins again—fallible human beings who have to discover who they are the hard way without being sold the answer in advance. Ease back on culture, strive for individual integrity and personhood. Define your own projects and challenges for yourself. Come up with your own answers and solutions. Live your own life. Don’t subscribe to the same old views, don’t keep sending the same checks; forget paying your dues. Aspire to be more than just another member; be your own person. Become conscious again.

That way, when you die, it will be your own life you lose, not someone’s whose mind you have paid for, stolen, or enslaved.

[Via http://onmymynd.wordpress.com]

Singapore Industrial Production Rises On Strong Electronics Output

Industrial production in Singapore increased from the year-ago period in October, mainly due to a strong showing in the electronics sector, official data showed on Thursday.

The Singapore Economic Development Board reported that industrial output climbed 3.6% year-on-year in October, rebounding from the upwardly revised 6.3% decrease in the previous month.

Economists had expected output to grow 7.5%. Excluding biomedical manufacturing, industrial production climbed 4.3%, after a 4% decline in September.

Output in the electronics manufacturing sector, which has the largest share in overall industrial output value, surged 17.7% annually in October, much faster than the 2.4% increase in September.

 

Mots clés Technorati : Singapore Economy,fvtaiwan

[Via http://financeroom.wordpress.com]

Credit Card Crisis in China & India‏

There is a rise of another credit crisis, to be precise credit card crisis in China and India. The change of our mindset towards savings, consumption and defaulting in payments is giving rise to this new crisis, the impact of which cannot be underestimated. Can you believe that now one out of every five Indians default in payment of credit card dues, raising the NPA Levels to as high as 20%? Please read on to know more about this next credit crisis.

The Chinese have been traditionally considered as the thrifty lot who save for the future. And the wild western economies had a notorious reputation of being the ones that splurge. In short, while the Chinese saved over 40% of their income, Americans were happily binging on more than 90% of their income. But this was before the global economic meltdown. The trend is now seems to reversing. And we smell another crisis looming around the corner.

While the credit meltdown was most severely felt in the US; the rest of the world did feel the aftershocks. But the Chinese seemed to have missed the lesson riding on the pace of economic recovery there. While the US consumers have at least started trying to reverse their gigantic credit card debt, credit card issuance has risen by more than 32% over last year in China. The unemployed Chinese youth is piling up huge amount of debt on multiple credit cards. Guess on what? In order to spend on food and fun. And the poor Chinese parents are now being chased by recovery agents.

This is surely a bad news for China as well as the rest of the world. China is the biggest foreign owner of US treasuries and held around US$ 801 billion of that in September 2009. The figure was around US $ 1 trillion in March 2009. But now China is off-loading its dollar reserves. We agree that the dwindling significance of the dollar is one reason for this. But one cannot ignore the huge credit card debt that the Chinese are racking up. If China has to worry about its own debt, we wonder who will bail out the US?

The picture is not all that rosy in India as well. The 8% plus GDP growth rate, emergence of fancy salaries and fancier malls to spend them had made Indians quite a spend-thrift. Indians have collectively amassed over 25 million of credit cards by end of FY09. Average spending by an Indian on credit card has increased to Rs. 2,400 per month from Rs. 1800 per month in the last 2 years. According to Indian Cards Council (ICC), the non-performing assets (NPA) on these credit cards have grown four folds. They stood at 20% this year as compared to 5%-6% last year. Though the frequency of usage and the purchasing power of Indian credit card holders are lower as compared to international standards, the annual credit losses on cards in India were about Rs. 3,420 per active card while the same were Rs 3,070 per active card in FY09. Moreover, India also had a larger percentage (over 44%) of inactive cards as compared to economies like Australia (20%) and Singapore (25%).

No doubt, the situation is getting worrisome. The credit card companies are wary about the same. They earlier aimed at garnering maximum market-share by offering free credit cards but are now going slowly on new issuances. They are blocking inactive cards to reduce the costs of communication and billing. They are also restarting to charge an annual fee for such cards as this will ensure higher number of active cards. It is expected to trigger more usage only by credit worthy consumers. Blocking all the cards of multi-card defaulters is a welcome move to curb NPAs. Banks are also tying up with employers to deduct dues at the source for employees who have defaulted on credit card payments. We believe these steps will go a long way in nipping at the bud any credit card bubble that could evolve. Let us hope that we learn the lesson before it is too late.

(with inputs from Equitymaster)

[Via http://wisewealthadvisors.wordpress.com]

Obama's Science 'Czar' John Holdren Involved In Climategate Scandal

Dr. Tim Ball and Judi McLeod / Canada Free Press - November 24, 2009

Lift up a rock and another snake comes slithering out from the ongoing University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) scandal, now riding as  “Climategate”.

Obama Science Czar John Holdren is directly involved in CRU’s unfolding Climategate scandal.  In fact, according to files released by a CEU hacker or whistleblower, Holdren is involved in what Canada Free Press (CFP) columnist Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball terms “a truculent and nasty manner that provides a brief demonstration of his lack of understanding, commitment on faith and willingness to ridicule and bully people”.

“The files contain so much material that it is going to take some time t o put it all in context,” says Ball.  “However, enough is already known to underscore their explosive nature.  It is already clear the entire claims and positions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are based on falsified manipulated material and is therefore completely compromised.

“The fallout will be extensive as material continues to emerge.  Reputations of the scientists involved are already destroyed, however fringe players will continue to be identified and their reputations destroyed or sullied.”

While the mainstream media is bending into pretzels to keep the scandal under the rug, Climategate is already the biggest scientific scandal in history because of the global policy implications.

Link to entire article below…

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/17183

[Via http://stevenjohnhibbs.wordpress.com]

The Red Pill 2051 Podcast, Episode 3

In this episode, Erik and I discuss the Green Movement/Agenda. Along with the podcast, we’ve supplied links to the articles discussed.

The Green Agenda

Gore’s ‘carbon offsets’

paid to firm he owns

Talking ’bout their generation

India tells West to stop eating beef

Apocalypse fatigue: Losing the public on climate change

The Evolution Of An Eco-Prophet

In German Suburb, Life Goes On Without Cars

Click below to listen.

Direct Download

[Via http://theredpill2051.wordpress.com]

Contrasting the ECB with the Fed

Whether its year end book closing/profit taking and/or renewed doubts about the shape of recovery, asset markets have turned south recently.  Investor mood appears to be souring as risk aversion creeps back into the market psyche.  A string of disappointing US data releases over the last week including core retail sales, Empire manufacturing, industrial production, and housing starts, contributed to the reduced appetite for risk, resulting in a soft finish to the week for equity markets and a firmer USD.

Things are likely to take a turn for the better this week, however. Data will shed a little more light on the pace and magnitude of economic recovery and could result in some improvement in appetite for risk trades.  Despite an expected downward revision to US Q3 GDP, forward looking data on home sales, durable goods orders and personal income and spending as well as consumer confidence are likely to reveal increases.  In the Eurozone, data economic releases will paint a similar picture, including as an expected increase in the closely watched barometer of business confidence, the German IFO survey. 

At the least economic data will remove some, but by no means all doubts about a relapse in the recovery process.  There is no doubting the veracity of the recovery in equity and commodities prices. Central banks may not react uniformly to this and the policy impact could vary significantly.  Already it appears that the ECB is moving more quickly towards an exit strategy compared to the Fed.  Although ECB President Trichet highlighted that the crisis is far from over at the end of last week, the Bank announced tougher standards for asset backed securities used as collateral, indicating that the need to provide emergency support to banks is much lower than it was. 

Clearly the ECB wants to avoid letting the market become over dependent on the central bank and will look to implement measures to this aim.  In contrast, the Fed is showing little sign of beginning this process and at least one member of the FOMC, namely St. Louis Fed President Bullard, was quoted over the weekend advocating that the Fed keep its MBS buying programme beyond its scheduled close in March. Evidence of the contrasting stance is also reflected in the fact that the Fed’s balance sheet is expanding once again whilst the ECB’s is contracting.  As a result of firmer data and comments by Bullard the USD is set to go into the week under renewed pressure, albeit within well defined ranges.

[Via http://econometer.org]

The Pentagon Budget: Largest Ever and Growing

by Sara Flounders
First Published: Nov. 07, 2009 – International Action Center

On Oct. 28, President Barack Obama signed the 2010 Defense Authorization Act, the largest military budget in U.S. history.

It is not only the world’s largest military budget but is larger than the military expenditures of the whole rest of the world combined. And it is growing nonstop. The 2010 military budget–which doesn’t even cover many war-related expenditures–is listed as $680 billion. In 2009 it was $651 billion and in 2000 was $280 billion. It has more than doubled in 10 years.

What a contrast to the issue of health care!

The U.S. Congress has been debating a basic health care plan–which every other industrialized country in the world has in some form–for more than six months. There has been intense insurance company lobbying, right-wing threats, and dire warnings that a health care plan must not add one dime to the deficit.

Yet in the midst of this life-and-death debate on medical care for millions of working and poor people who have no health coverage, a gargantuan subsidy to the largest U.S. corporations for military contracts and weapons systems–a real deficit-breaker–is passed with barely any discussion and hardly a news article.

Physicians for a National Health Program estimates that a universal, comprehensive single-payer health plan would cost $350 billion a year, which would actually be the amount saved through the elimination of all the administrative costs in the current private health care system–a system that leaves out almost 50 million people.

Compare this to just the cost overruns each year in the military budget. Even President Obama on signing the Pentagon budget said, “The Government Accountability Office, the GAO, has looked into 96 major defense projects from the last year, and found cost overruns that totaled $296 billion.” (whitehouse.gov, Oct. 28)

Harry Madoff’s $50-billion Ponzi scheme, supposedly the biggest rip-off in history, pales in comparison. Why is there no criminal inquiry into this multibillion-dollar theft? Where are the congressional hearings or media hysteria about $296 billion in cost overruns? Why are the CEOs of the corporations not brought into court in handcuffs?

The cost overruns are an integral part of the military subsidy to the largest U.S. corporations. They are treated as business as usual. Regardless of the party in office, the Pentagon budget grows, the cost overruns grow and the proportion of domestic spending shrinks.

Addicted to war

This year’s military budget is only the latest example of how the U.S. economy is kept afloat by artificial means. Decades of constantly reviving the capitalist economy through the stimulus of war spending has created an addiction to militarism that U.S. corporations can’t do without. But it is no longer large enough to solve the capitalist problem of overproduction.

The justification given for this annual multibillion-dollar shot in the arm was that it would help to cushion or totally avoid a capitalist recession and could curb unemployment. But as Workers World Party founder Sam Marcy warned in 1980 in “Generals Over the White House,” over a protracted period more and more of this stimulant is needed. Eventually it turns into its opposite and becomes a massive depressant that sickens and rots the entire society.

The root of the problem is that as technology becomes more productive, workers get a smaller and smaller share of what they produce. The U.S. economy is more and more dependent on the stimulant of superprofits and multibillion-dollar military cost overruns to soak up a larger and larger share of what is produced. This is an essential part of the constant redistribution of wealth away from the workers and into the pockets of the superrich.

According to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, U.S. military spending is now significantly more, in 2009 inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was during the peak years of the Korean War (1952: $604 billion), the Vietnam War (1968: $513 billion) or the 1980s Reagan-era military buildup (1985: $556 billion). Yet it is no longer enough to keep the U.S. economy afloat.

Even forcing oil-rich countries dependent on the U.S. to become debtor nations with endless weapons purchases can’t solve the problem. More than two-thirds of all weapons sold globally in 2008 were from U.S. military companies. (Reuters, Sept. 6)

While a huge military program was able in the 1930s to pull the U.S. economy out of a devastating collapse, over a long period this artificial stimulus undermines capitalist processes.

Economist Seymour Melman, in books such as “Pentagon Capitalism,” “Profits without Production” and “The Permanent War Economy: American Capitalism in Decline,” warned of the deterioration of the U.S. economy and the living standards of millions.

Melman and other progressive economists argued for a rational “economic conversion” or the transition from military to civilian production by military industries. They explained how one B-1 bomber or Trident submarine could pay the salaries of thousands of teachers, provide scholarships or day care or rebuild roads. Charts and graphs showed that the military budget employs far fewer workers than the same funds spent on civilian needs.

These were all good and reasonable ideas, except that capitalism is not rational. In its insatiable drive to maximize profits it will always choose immediate superprofit handouts over even the best interests of its own long-term survival.

No “peace dividend”

The high expectations, after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, that billions of dollars could now be turned toward a “peace dividend” crashed against the continued astronomical growth of the Pentagon budget. This grim reality has so demoralized and overwhelmed progressive economists that today almost no attention is paid to “economic conversion” or the role of militarism in the capitalist economy, even though it is far larger today than at the highest levels of the Cold War.

The multibillion-dollar annual military subsidy that bourgeois economists have relied on since the Great Depression to prime the pump and begin again the cycle of capitalist expansion is no longer enough.

Once corporations became dependent on multibillion-dollar handouts, their appetite became insatiable. In 2009, in an effort to stave off a meltdown of the global capitalist economy, more than $700 billion was handed over to the largest banks. And that was just the beginning. The bailout of the banks is now in the trillions of dollars.

Even $600 to $700 billion a year in military spending can no longer restart the capitalist economy or generate prosperity. Yet corporate America can’t do without it.

The military budget has grown so large that it now threatens to overwhelm and devour all social funding. Its sheer weight is squeezing out funding for every human need. U.S. cities are collapsing. The infrastructure of bridges, roads, dams, canals and tunnels is disintegrating. Twenty-five percent of U.S drinking water is considered “poor.” Unemployment is officially reaching 10 percent and in reality is double that. Black and Latino/a youth unemployment is more than 50 percent. Fourteen million children in the U.S. are living in households below the poverty level.

Half of military costs are hidden

The announced 2010 military budget of $680 billion is really only about half of the annual cost of U.S. military expenditures.

These expenditures are so large that there is a concerted effort to hide many military expenses in other budget items. The War Resisters League annual analysis listed the real 2009 U.S. military expenses at $1,449 billion, not the official budget of $651 billion. Wikipedia, citing several different sources, came up with a total military budget of $1,144 billion. Regardless of who is counting, it is beyond dispute that the military budget actually exceeds $1 trillion a year.

The National Priorities Project, the Center for Defense Information and the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation analyze and expose many hidden military expenses tucked into other parts of the total U.S. budget.

For example, veterans’ benefits totaling $91 billion are not included in the Pentagon budget. Military pensions totaling $48 billion are stuck into the Treasury Department budget. The Energy Department hides $18 billion in nuclear weapons programs in its budget. The $38 billion financing of foreign arms sales is included in the State Department budget. One of the largest hidden items is the interest on debt incurred in past wars, which totals between $237 billion and $390 billion. This is really an endless subsidy to the banks, which are intimately linked to the military industries.

Every part of these bloated budgets is expected to grow by 5 to 10 percent a year, while federal funding to states and cities is shrinking by 10 to 15 percent annually, leading to deficit crises.

According to the Office of Management and Budget, 55 percent of the total 2010 U.S. budget will go to the military. More than half! Meanwhile, federal block grants to states and cities for vital human services–schools, teacher training, home-care programs, school lunches, basic infrastructure maintenance for drinking water, sewage treatment, bridges, tunnels and roads–are shrinking.

Militarism breeds repression

The most dangerous aspect of the growth of the military is the insidious penetration of its political influence into all areas of society. It is the institution that is the most removed from popular control and the most driven to military adventure and repression. Retired generals rotate into corporate boardrooms, become talking heads in major media outlets, and high-paid lobbyists, consultants and politicians.

It is not a coincidence that along with having the world’s largest military machine, the U.S. has the world’s largest prison population. The prison-industrial complex is the only growth industry. According to the U.S. Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than 7.3 million adults were on probation or parole or incarcerated in 2007. More than 70 percent of the incarcerated are Black, Latino/a, Native and other people of color. Black adults are four times as likely as whites to be imprisoned.

Just as in the military, with its hundreds of thousands of contractors and mercenaries, the drive to maximize profits has led to the growing privatization of the prison system.

The number of prisoners has grown relentlessly. There are 2.5 times more people in the prison system today than 25 years ago. As U.S. capitalism is less and less able to provide jobs, job training or education, the only solutions offered are prisons or the military, wreaking havoc on individuals, families and communities.

The weight of the military pushes the repressive state apparatus into every part of society. There is an enormous growth of police of every kind and countless police and intelligence agencies.

The budget for 16 U.S. spy agencies reached $49.8 billion in fiscal year 2009; 80 percent of these secret agencies are arms of the Pentagon. (Associated Press, Oct. 30) In 1998 this expense was $26.7 billion. But these top secret agencies are not included in the military budget. Nor are the repressive agencies of immigration and border control.

U.S. armed forces are stationed at more than 820 military installations around the world. This doesn’t count hundreds of leased bases and secret listening posts and many hundreds of ships and submarines.

But the more the military machine grows, the less it can control its world empire because it offers no solutions and no improvements in living standards. Pentagon high-tech weapons can read a license plate on a car from a surveillance satellite; their night vision goggles can penetrate the dark; and their drones can incinerate an isolated village. But they are unable to provide potable water, schools or stability to the nations attacked.

Despite all the Pentagon’s fantastic high-tech weapons, the U.S. geopolitical position is slipping year after year. Regardless of its massive firepower and its state-of-the-art weaponry, U.S. imperialism has been unable to reconquer the world markets and position of U.S. finance capital. Its economy and its industries have been dragged down by the sheer weight of maintaining its military machine. And as the resistance in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, that machine cannot match the determination of people to control their own future.

As the mighty U.S. capitalist economy is able to offer less and less to working people here in the U.S. , that level of determined resistance is sure to take root here as well.

Source: http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16181

 

Related:

US Military Spending vs. The World, 2008

DOCUMENTARY – Arsenal of Hypocrisy (59 mins.)

DOCUMENTARY – The New American Century (94 mins.)

Global Warfare USA: The World is the Pentagon’s Oyster

Pentagon Plans For Global Military Supremacy

Expanding the Afghan War: The West’s insatiable appetite for Global Military Domination

Timothy Geithner Pulled an Obama Tactic: Blame Bush

O’l TurboTax Tim knows his head is on the chopping block. Both Republicans and Democrats believe he should step down because the decisions he has made have been failures. Feeling the sharp metal axe on his neck, Taxcheat Tim reached into Obama’s playbook and grabbed a paged that has been played since January. That page is titled “When your policies fail, blame Bush.”

Yes, all the policies that Geithner implemented and have failed was due to former President Bush. Hey, Obama won’t take responsibility so why should Geithner? When will either one of these liberal asshats take responsibility for the policies they draw up?

The initial bailouts signed by Bush, and the associated Fed activity, are the main reason the financial markets stabilized. Only one-third of the money approved by this Congress, and Obama, had been spent by the time the recession ended. So technically Bush saved the economy.The Porkulus bill, and the “jobs saved or created” scheme, is Obama’s legacy

 

We are suffering under the ignorance of our national heritage

There was an excellent discussion about the concept of wealth redistribution at the Federalist Society on November 12, which was broadcast on C-SPAN. I really liked listening to Richard Epstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago. He put forward the perspective of Natural Law, which was the philosophy used by the Founding Fathers in writing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. What I particularly enjoyed was that he put forward the idea that the principles of working systems are pretty timeless. They may need slight modification from time to time, but the basic principles will most often remain the same. The principles of Natural Law are also timeless, because they address issues of human nature.

I also enjoyed the fact that he pointed out the ignorance of Jed Rubenfeld of Yale Law School, and that of Andrew Stern, who is the head of SEIU, when it comes to understanding how systems work. I appreciated the fact that Rubenfeld and Stern were there, because they were exemplars of the perspectives that dominate today, and I think such ignorance needs to be exposed and challenged.

Prof. Rubenfeld took a relativistic stance on all of the subjects discussed, and seemed to have trouble answering a question about the concept of rights.

Profs. Epstein and Rubenfeld spoke about wealth redistribution, but mostly from a legal standpoint. Mr. Stern argued from the standpoint of economic distribution, and he spoke from the perspective of what I’d call “an educated worker”. He said that unions were supposed to take wages out of competition so that workers could compete based on productivity and quality. That’s news to me. Everything I’ve heard about what actually happens with unions is that they stifle creativity (thereby reducing productivity), and reduce incentives for striving for quality since they tend to demand the imposition of wage scales, and restrictions on workforce flexibility (for example, making it difficult to reassign people based on abilities, or lay off bad workers). To me, the only positive impact that labor unions had historically was in incentivizing government and industry to improve workplace safety so that serious injuries and deaths were reduced.

Steve Forbes was also at this panel, and he made the constructive argument (I thought) that if you look at every significant downturn in the 20th century it was caused by the policy actions of some government entity. This is no less true of this last downturn.

What disappointed me about Stern’s arguments (and this was not unexpected) is that he ignored Forbes’s and Epstein’s arguments, I think because he couldn’t understand them. The old maxim has never failed me: If someone doesn’t understand something, they don’t think it’s important. All he understood was the historical narrative from a worker’s point of view. It’s just a guess, but I think he dismissed them because he thought of them as privileged, unaffected by the ups and downs of the economy.

I got turned off by Rubenfeld’s and Stern’s arguments, because neither of them could understand what Epstein was talking about, apparently, but they acted like he was the “impractical” one, stuck in his ivory tower. What Epstein kept pointing out was that their approaches just screw up people’s lives. They don’t solve anything. He laid out a consistent pattern through history, that the economy does badly when political progressives obtain power. Whereas Rubenfeld and Stern said, “We tried it your way (in the 1920s) and it didn’t work,” never questioning why the Great Depression happened. Stern dismissed any role by the Federal Reserve (historically it did have a role, and it’s admitted it). They blamed it all on laissez-faire economics.

Capitalism gets turned into a “whipping boy” when the economy goes into a downturn, and this reveals our collective ignorance about how systems work. We like capitalism when the economy is doing well. We hate it, and blame it, when the economy tanks. I know from my own experience that an understanding of economics is most advantageous when the economy is doing badly. It’s a good antidote to the feeling that nothing’s working, because in fact it is. There’s just a lot more friction in trying to get work or obtain credit. It also gives one an understanding that we should be cautious about tampering with our economic system. I mean that in the most generic sense. I’m not saying that our society’s economic regulatory structure should never be altered. I am saying that we should be careful about what regulations are imposed on it.

This panel discussion was an excellent presentation of contrasts in philosophy and conceptual understanding.

LOU DOBBS FOR PRESIDENT BRING CLOSURE TO THE OBAMA REIN OF TERROR

Lou Dobbs a true American Patriot who has been a long time champion of real issues in America is a man clearly suited for the White House. The integrity of a man such as Lou Dobbs would bring back faith , hope and integrity to the White House all of which have disappeared under the Obama administration as Americans watch their representation and rights disappear while the pre existing problems only grow as the President realizes the job is a little more detailed than community organizing and giving out free food. Lou Dobbs who recently left CNN has continued to address the real issues that impact middle America as well as suggesting real solutions Lou understands the problems and knows the solutions unlike Obama who understands neither.Lou has been both critical of Republican and Democrats as he simply cares about what is best for America as opposed to political party agendas as he has remained independent as opposed to Obama who is rubber stamping policies that he neither reads or understands nor does he have the best interest of our country at heart.We need real leadership and substance in the White House Obama is lacking in both while Dobbs has shown himself very capable.

Being Quango'ed into a Soviet State

 

The reason why western democracies have the highest standards of living in the world and why the Soviet Union and its satellites collapsed in economic ruin is that wealth creation is driven by private enterprise.

 

When the state owns and controls most of the economy the generation of new ideas and products withers. This causes public discontent because they are deprived of the things they need and which they can see being enjoyed in freer societies. The government which cannot face letting go of the control that it has grabbed from its own citizens can only respond by ever more interference in personal choice.

 

When the Labour Government came to power in 1997 about 33% to 35% of the British economy was owned and controlled by the government. That was an unacceptably high proportion and very damaging to the efficient development of wealth creating companies. The laws we have to control monopolies and to try to stop large corporations from completely dominating a market define an unacceptable monopoly as control of one third or more of a market. On this basis the British Government had a monopoly grip on our economy even in 1997. Since then the government stake in gross domestic product (GDP) has risen to nearly 45% and it is growing at an increasing rate.

 

According to Dominic Lawson in the Sunday Times there were almost 1,200 quango’s in 2001 costing £20 billion a year to run. By last year the cost of quango’s had risen to £34.5 billion a year. In just seven years the quango bill has risen by 75% at a time when inflation has only been around 2.5% and at the moment it is close to zero.

 

This government has taken the country into near bankruptcy. We have a national debt so huge that our grandchildren we be left with trying to pay it off and it is still increasing at a rate of £200 billion a year.

 

Desperate all the time to find more money to finance their lust for control, the government continually increases taxes. The recent increase in top rate income tax from 40% to 50% will actually produce almost nothing if not even reduce the tax take because high earners will move away, but an even more damaging consequence is that the decline of the wealth producing sector will accelerate. This is the road to collapse that killed off European communism twenty years ago.

 

We need to call a halt before we are all ground into destitution and subservience. A good start is to kill off the quangos.

Real Estate Investors On The Move, Steve M. Albers, ABR®, CDPE©, REALTOR®, RE/MAX Results, Eden Prairie, Minnesota

According to marketwatch.com , the number of people interested in investing in real estate has doubled since March as more folks are lured by low prices and the wide selection of foreclosures that can be bought on the cheap, according to survey results released this week by Move.com.

Just more than 12% of potential home buyers surveyed plan to purchase a home as an investment property compared with less than 6% who said the same seven months ago, the survey found. Of those interested in buying a foreclosure, 42% were investors. About 13% of those investors would turn their foreclosures into rentals, 11% would fix them up for resale and 17% said the houses would be used by a family member until the home could be sold for a profit, according to the survey.

Of all potential buyers interested in purchasing a home — both for investment and to live in — 25% said they want to buy a foreclosure.

They also plan on buying low and watching their purchase pay off in the next several years. Of the potential buyers polled, 58% said they expect to pay at least 20% less than market price for a foreclosure, and 39% said they expected a 25% or greater discount. Seventy-three percent expect their properties to appreciate 10% or more in five years; 28% expect their purchases to appreciate 20% or more during the same time.

The most popular reasons given for taking action now: concern that prices have hit a bottom and a desire to take advantage of bargains, according to the results.  About 1,000 people participated in the survey.

“This latest survey validates what many had hoped to see in the housing markets — affordable prices and ample inventories are restoring the appeal of real estate to investors while providing opportunities for first-time home buyers to enter the market,” said Move Inc.’s chief revenue officer, Errol Samuelson, in a news release. Move Inc. operates Move.com.

“In today’s environment, regardless of whether you’re an investor or interested in purchasing a home to live in yourself, residential real estate is a more attractive investment today for many than it has been in recent years.”

Members of the National Association of Realtors will likely be expressing similar sentiments when they meet this weekend in San Diego for their annual conference. Check in with MarketWatch throughout the weekend for the latest real estate news from the conference.

With the first-time home-buyer tax credit extended last week — and expanded to benefit certain move-up buyers too — this could be an unusually busy winter for home sales.

Written by, Amy Hoak, Real Estate writer

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For FREE Counsel and access to real estate inventory that is not yet available to the public, contact me today.

Steve M. Albers, REALTOR®, ABR®, CDPE©
Stephenson & Albers Real Estate Team
RE/MAX Results
(763) 229-9067  Mobile
steve@stevealbers.com

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Integrated Global Village!

The world will become an integrated global village that will fight war no more because to do so would not be productive and it would not be necessary because their will be enough of material wealth to go around and satisfy all the basic needs of all the people everywhere.
Science will rule, and nations and religions will fall to the wayside and no longer divide earthlings from one another.
Bigotry born out of tribalism will be a thing of the past and all ignorance promoted by ambitious opportunists that profit by exploiting the simple minded non thinking bigots of the world will become no longer possible inside an environment of social consciousness and world cooperation.
A world planned economy that is designed by social scientists to profit all of the people in the world without discrimination will replace the outmoded market economy that was designed to only profit selfish individual capitalist owners. The capitalist owners of the means of production will no longer be allowed to exploit the world population of those that work for a living.
I know that all of what I have written here will come to be, because it is the only thing that can come to be.

China in Transition, Part 6

China has become a tourist attraction. Everywhere you go, there is something new to see and do.  I learned recently that Disneyland is going to build a theme park near Shanghai.

We have visited the Great Wall several times over the years.  The areas of the Great Wall that we have been to are an hour or so out of Beijing. The most popular site is at Badaling.  The second choice, Mutianyu, is more dramatic. Since we have visited the Badaling section before, we decided to see Mutianyu in September 2008. It was worth it. This portion of the Great Wall runs along the ridge of a mountain range. Badaling, meanwhile, is in a mountain pass and there is a steep climb on the wall to reach the higher altitudes.

The best way to reach these sections of the Great Wall is by taxi or bus. After you get there, you will discover the usual tourist shops before you reach the wall. Since I enjoy looking for the rare find and love to haggle, I always spend time checking out this area.

At Badaling, there were real camels and horses you could pay a fee to sit on while having your picture taken.

 Once you reach Mutianyu, you have a choice to make—take a few hours to climb the mountain or ride a ski lift to the Great Wall in fifteen minutes. Getting back down is easy. Take the toboggan seen during the 2008 Beijing Olympics on network TV.

I’m sure that during Mao’s time as the leader of China, most Chinese would have never imagined what was about to happen.  China is changing fast. Every year, we return and discover new things.

On our way back, we stopped at a factory where we learned about the manufacturing techniques for brass vases decorated with a colorful porcelain coating and hand painted figures.  I bought a set of three small vases. They are yellow with a blue trim.  One has a blue dragon on it, the second a phoenix beside a chariot, and the third has running horses.  Since they are sitting on a bookshelf behind me, I’ve been spinning around to make sure I described them right. Each one is about the size of my hand.

 The Great Wall at Mutianyu

The real basis of the global economic crisis

Like fish stranded by a fast retreating tide, most mainstream economists, commentators and governments tend to be flapping around frantically and aimlessly, unaware of the real cause of their distress.  The  more cautious among them hope for a slow return of the tide;  most merely hope against hope that somehow, sometime, all will return to what it was.  It almost certainly will not.

Nobody saw it coming.  This is an oft repeated mantra about the global economic crisis, which is also — and equally erroneously — referred to frequently as a financial crisis.  But it is certainly true that most mainstream economists and commentators continued to talk up the economy even as the first serious signs of collapse became evident.  And most also tended to refer to it — at least initially — as a purely financial affair.

They did so out of an almost religious belief in the market and, in most cases, an obvious absence of knowledge about economic history.  Clearly blinded by the chimera of Stock Exchanges and the smoke and mirrors of booming futures and derivatives trading, they lost sight — if ever they had it — of the real productive economy.  Their god was profit and their church, the market.

So when the economic bubble began to deflate, punctured by what was an effective pyramid scheme based on sub-prime mortgages in the United States, they did not question church or deity;  the search was for individual sinners, those who had abused the rites and rituals that they believe guarantee profits ever after.  So instead of rational appraisals, there were frequent outpourings of dogmatic incantations and calls for regulatory patches to repair the sub-prime hole that had begun deflating the economic bubble.

And there is the continued insistence by any number of economists and commentators that the crisis could not have been foreseen;  that its precise cause and probable consequences still remain a mystery.  But this is simply untrue.  For 20 years and more, the warning signs have existed — and have been pointed out, although usually from the more radical margins of economic debate.

However, even that standard bearer of free market capitalism, The Economist magazine, warned in 1999 that the spectres of over-capacity and over-production were haunting the world economy.  A survey by the magazine of international demand, supply and capacity resulted in the conclusion that a time of glut leading to stagnation, was on the cards.

This was something that had been pointed out even earlier by the likes of economic historian Robert Brenner in the United States.  He was not alone.  Economic commentator T. N. Vance in the US was raising warnings in the 1950s and the so-called oil price crisis of 1973 led to a veritable flurry of analysis on the margins of economic debate, illustrating what probably lay in store.

However, these commentators and economists not only looked to productive capacity and the related sources of supply and demand in the world economy, they based their analysis on the much earlier work of Karl Marx and his collaborator, Frederick Engels.  In 1848 Marx and Engels wrote that the then relatively new capitalist economic system needed to expand its market globally;  it needed to “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere”.

It was a system, they wrote, that has “conjured up such gigantic means of production [that it] is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells”.  This, they maintained, would lead to crises and to “an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production”.

But the mass of free market praise singers grew as the world recovered from the barbarity and destruction of the second world war and a lengthy economic boom began.  The collective attitude of the praise singers was well summed up by economics Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson.  In 1970 he told a conference of his peers that the days of crises — of boom and bust — were over.  “The National Bureau of Economic Research has worked itself out of one of its first jobs, namely business cycles,” he claimed.

Three years later came the first crisis.  But it failed to dent the psuedo-religious belief in the market and the system as it existed.  Sinners were found:  the oil producers and their “artificial” lifting of the oil price.  What was needed was merely some adjustment;  there had apparently been too much tinkering with the market.

This attitude was summed by British Labour Party prime minister James Callaghan in 1976 when he said:

“We used to think you could just spend your way out of recession by cutting taxes and boosting government borrowing…that option no longer exists…it worked by injecting inflation into the economy.  Each time that has happened…unemployment has risen.”

Callaghan’s statement announced the turn away from what was known broadly as the Keynsian approach to that advocated by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, an  approach now labelled neo-liberal.  Thirty years later, neo-liberalism has been found wanting and, without apparent irony, history is now repeating itself:  the present British prime minister, Gordon Brown, has increased government borrowing and embarked on a policy of spending as a solution to recession.

But this begs the main question:  is this merely another recession/depression, one of the cyclical slumps inherent in the system, or is it something different?  The answer is probably both yes and no:  yes, it is one of the slumps inherent in the system and no, it’s underlying cause is no different from those preceding it.  However, it is by far the greatest crisis the system has suffered, the cumulative result of decades spent ignoring a growing and fundamental fault.

The economic history of the modern, capitalist, world is peppered with examples of booms and slumps, of struggles for economic supremacy by individuals and exploiting minorities in regions, countries and blocs.  All the while, productive capacity and the ability to manufacture more with less grew as mechanisation and the bloody history of colonial plunder replaced plantation slavery and the dehumanising horror of the workhouse.

Peasants and self-sufficient communities, driven off their lands by force or taxes, swelled the ranks of the sellers of labour who, at one and the same time, became the purchasers of the very products they helped to make, distribute or provide the raw materials for.  Their wages and conditions improved only after desperate and often bloody struggles.

However, there were always some employers who realised the link between the worker as producer and as consumer.  None more so than Henry Ford.  He had little regard for workers, but understood that the survival of the system demanded the ability to sell, at a profit, the products that the sellers of labour create — and buy.  In his 1922 autobiography he noted:

“…Our own sales depend in a measure upon the wages we pay.  If we can distribute high wages then that money…will serve to make storekeepers and distributors and manufacturers and workers in other lines more prosperous and their prosperity will be reflected in our sales”.

But he too did not foresee the looming absurdity of over capacity and over production that now afflicts almost every manufactured item, but is especially obvious in the textile, garment and motor vehicle industries.  Take vehicle maker Toyota, for example.  This year the company estimates that production will be more than 30 per cent below its current, 10 million units a year capacity.  It now contemplates reducing output by another 1 million vehicles.

Such reductions in capacity mean more and more unemployment and less and less purchasing power.  It also means tumbling prices as competition intensifies and this, in turn, leads, on a global basis, to a race to the bottom in terms of wages and conditions.

South Africa — and especially the garment centres of Cape Town and Durban — have already borne the loss of tens of thousands of rag trade jobs.  Vehicle makers and component suppliers in the Eastern Cape have also been badly hit and are gearing up for even more job losses.

So far, government and its “social partners”, business and labour, have responded with a policy framework that amounts to financial bailouts and short-term retraining at half wages for retrenched workers.  This is based on the almost certainly forlorn hope that there will be an economic revival in the short to medium term.

The hope is forlorn because the mircrochip revolution is continuing apace.  These slivers of silicon lie at the heart of vehicle assembly lines, televisions, cell phones, the national power grid and the automated machines in factory and home.  They make work faster, easier and cheaper, using less and less labour.

This technological advance could herald a world of plenty for all.  It could liberate humanity from drudgery and poverty and repair the destruction already wrought on the physical environment.  But it could only do so on the basis of collective action for the benefit of the majority.

Our present anarchic system of minority ownership, based competition and the need to accumulate increasing levels of profit in order to compete even more successfully, works against such a development.  There is already evidence of where this may lead:  to fortified islands — whether suburbs, cities, or regions — of affluence in a global sea of desperate poverty and increasing savagery.

So we are faced with a stark choice, not just nationally, but internationally:  start to transform radically the economic system to one based on co-operation, under collective, democratic control — or persist with the existing system of competitive, minority control, whether by individuals, companies or states.  It may amount to a choice between planetary survival or annihilation.

Congressional dunderheads screw up critical unemployment extension

H.R. 6867 is a seriously flawed piece of legislation, and it’s now going to require a redo.

Flawed unemployment extension legislation means potential “fix-it” bill, additional support

HR 3548, the unemployment extension bill that was signed into law by President Obama this past Friday, is meant to provide 14 weeks of federal extended unemployment benefits to all 50 states, with an additional extension of 6 weeks for people in high-unemployment states (with a 3-month average unemployment rate of at least 8.5%).

However, because the Senate took so long to act on the bill, the law as it is written makes it logically impossible for unemployed workers in high-unemployment states to file for the extra 6 weeks.

The law treats the additional 6 weeks as a separate extension, and one must first exhaust the 14 weeks before applying for the additional 6. Because of the filing deadline of December 31, 2009, there is simply not enough time left in the year for people to collect their 14 weeks. Congress has eliminated the usefulness of the extra 6 weeks in this legislation by making it literally impossible for anyone to collect the full 20 weeks – desperately needed in high-unemployment states (and, dare I say it, nationwide).

Because of this tiny little glitch, legislators are already talking about new unemployment extension legislation to come on the heels of that which was just passed, fixing this timeline illogicality and providing additional help as unemployment is expected to continue to increase into the double digits, having broken 10.2% up through October.

What do you think about this major mistake by Congress and the prospects of their fixing it soon and/or providing additional unemployment relief by the end of this year or early in 2010?

 

What do I think?

I think that Congress has it’s damned priorities screwed up, that’s what I think. And if the GOP’s behavior over the last three months is an indicator of future behavior, they’ll continue to add insult to injury and we won’t see a proper revision of this bill until late January early February. 

Congress just doesn’t get it. Millions of struggling, suffering Americans who are unemployed through no fault of their own are depending on these benefits to feed their families and keep a roof over their heads until the economy improves. They could care less about healthcare, they’re  just trying to feed themselves and survive an incredibly difficult and painful economic situation. 

 This bill was hobbled together like an afterthought, and it shows. End result: a bill that’s as full of holes as a block of swiss cheese.

The GOP held this critical bill up for weeks in the Senate, while unemployed families went hungry and lost their homes because they couldn’t make payments to landlords and mortgage companies. The behavior of the GOP regarding the passage of this bill was inexcusible and unforgivable, and make no mistake… voters are not going to forget the cruel and irresponsible indifference of the politicians who held up this critical emergency compensation come the next election cycle. 

Perhaps if  they had given as much time and attention to providing practical and timely assistance to hurting Americans as they’ve been giving to their precious  healthcare bill, they would have gotten it right the first time. 

 

 

Doing gods work?!?

Now, the bankers has gone not bankers, but bonkers…

They claim:  ‘We do god’s work’

The simple fact that he claims to be doing “gods work”, indicates he may need some tax-funded help of another kind.

Nip over to see for yourselves, as reported in the mail online…

They also defend the stance that their bonuses and other etravagances should be welcomed by the public.

At the same time, the very same public that has been fleeced for a nearly unlimited amount of money to bail out these bankers, and save them from their own highly planned “mistakes”, the very same “mistakes” that they have repeated over and over again, and gearing up to do yet again, while still recovering, are asked for understanding, and more money.

The way this has been done, begs the question:

Why is it that the banks, as a single industry, can be given what is effectively unlimited state guarantees, subsidies and other forms of backing, when NO OTHER industry or type of business, which is also begging on their bare knees for a bit of support, will get any? How can this NOT BE anti-competitive and a blatant violation of the EU competition laws, especially since the banks actively damages the rest of the business world as well as the people living within it, by its continous actions?

It is as if the bankers live in a parallel universe.

I guess my blog posts has removed my chances of ever getting a job within the banking sector, but would i miss it?
No.  I would like to keep my honor, and to be able to look people in the eyes with a straight face.

Healthcare, It's So Hot Right Now.

It’s everywhere. Every time you read or turn on the news there it is. Right there in your face. If you thought it was everywhere before, just wait. After last night’s House vote on the bill, it’s really going to be everywhere, while its fate is determined.

After spending pretty much all of my Saturday glued to C-SPAN and missing college football games, I have to say I’m rather disappointed. I’ve been asked repeatedly, “But Kirstie why are you disappointed?”

The answer I’ve given over and over is that I don’t believe the government should be running our health care system. As a young person, I’m apparently supposed to support a government take over. As a person with a pre-existing condition, who will no longer be on my Mother’s insurance come graduation in May, I should support this. Yet I don’t. I don’t and I will not.

I got into a “Facebook debate” with a friend of mine over this issue yesterday after posting a status that said ‘Call your representatives in DC and urge them not to vote for the healthcare bill! Kill the bill.’ Apparently this friend of mine is okay with higher taxes, because he believes it will help the economy and lower the deficit. I’ve been friends with this guy for years, but I don’t think he has done much reading up on this bill.

According to the Washington Post it will cost “$894 billion”, but I’ve read estimates that put it well over 1 trillion dollars. That’s not reducing the deficit as he has claimed it will do. The only way that can be paid for would be to raise taxes. Last time I checked, we are in the midst of an economic downturn. I’m no economist (or economics major for that matter) but I know that raising taxes and stripping citizens of more of their income is not going to help. An economy strives from spending. By raising taxes individuals will have less disposable income to spend and therefore the economy won’t be stimulated. Isn’t that economics 101? I should ask my younger brother. He’s taking that right now.

If you know me, then you know I am a fan of Sarah Palin. If you just gasped, I don’t blame you. A young, college-aged woman that likes Sarah Palin? This can’t be! Guess what? There are some of us. I read her thoughts on the passing of the bill and this stood out to me:

“This out-of-control bureaucratic mess will be disastrous for our economy, our small businesses, and our personal liberty.”

I have to completely agree with her. It will be disastrous as she says. How can I say that? Well, I live in a state that has a State run health care system. Google TennCare and you will know what I’m talking about. In my local paper the Knoxville News Sentinel an article came out about how this national plan would effect Tennessee. They wrote that it would cost the State between, “$570 million and $1.18 billion over the next five years.”

In case you don’t want to pop open another tab, I’ll give you a brief summary on our system. TennCare was started in 1994 as a model that the Federal Government could look at and use. The system was not prepared for the overload that occurred and the entire fiscal system in the state of Tennessee was in trouble. Our current governor Phil Bredesen tried to overhaul the system, when all he really did was reduce benefits and cut individuals from the program and slap a new name on it – Cover Tennessee. It has put the State of Tennessee into a hole that they are now trying to figure out how climb out of. Since Tennesseans are strongly against an income tax (bring it up and you will get an earful), budget cuts will occur with Education being one of the first things on the chopping block.

What is going to happen when a Federal program damages the economy? It’s only a matter of time if it passes. They will have to tell people NO. Those who supported this will be turned away and they won’t understand why. Not only that, we will be taxed to death for a failing system.

Don’t think I’m totally heartless now. I do believe that there should be better access to health care and that costs need to be controlled. However, that doesn’t mean that the government should rush in and run it. It has not worked on a State level, what makes them think they can run such a program on a Federal level? It is a disaster waiting to happen.

Now it’s wait time to see what happens with the bill going to the Senate. Like Sarah said,

“We’ve got to hold on to hope, and we’ve got to fight hard because Congressional action tonight just put America on a path toward an unrecognizable country.”

Democrats Approve Climate Bill ... Breaking Committee Rules

Breaking the rules, under the guidance of Barbara Boxer, Democrats on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee approved a climate change bill, without any Republicans present. Republicans wanted to discuss some details of the bill and reach a compromise, but as usual the Democrats will be forcing their will on something crucial and potentially destructive to the American economy without even considering all options:

By Richard Cowan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A controversial climate change bill cleared its first hurdle in the U.S. Senate on Thursday, allowing President Barack Obama to tout progress in the run-up to next month’s global warming talks in Copenhagen.

Democrats on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee ignored a Republican boycott and used their majority to approve the legislation that would require U.S. industry to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases 20 percent by 2020, from 2005 levels.

“I think this is a great signal for Copenhagen that there’s a will to do what it takes to advance this issue,” committee Chairman Barbara Boxer told reporters after her panel voted.

As always, the interests of the “international community” is more important than the interests of America.

more here

America the Betrayed. By Richard C. Cook

Via: Richard C. Cook.

If you want to get an idea of what America once was like, read the poems of Walt Whitman.  Whitman was born on Long Island in 1819 and grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. His family was poor, but even though he left school at the age of 11 he gave himself an education by reading and working in the printing shop of a newspaper until he gradually became a published writer. He worked as a teacher and news reporter and owned his own newspaper by the age of 20.

In 1848 Whitman was a delegate to the founding convention of the Free Soil Party. During the Civil War he worked as a nurse in Union military hospitals and held several government jobs, including interviewing Confederate prisoners for pardons. Some of his greatest poems came from his war experiences, including his famous elegy upon the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, “Oh Captain! My Captain!” His great collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, was self-published. He died a national hero in 1892 in Camden, New Jersey, where thousands of people came to pay their respects.

Whitman has always been viewed as a poet of the people, in contrast to the pretentious dandies from academia who have controlled official American culture for much of our history. He wrote of workmen, farmers, sailors, soldiers, lovers, criminals, and prostitutes.

In the text of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, he wrote of himself as, “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above men or women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest.” He had discovered a great secret, one that is known to everyone who is young at heart: that the free individual, always potentially a “kosmos,” stands at a much higher level in the scale of creation than any man-made collective.

Thus was Whitman a hero to the Beatniks of the 1950s who tried to rediscover an authentic American voice in the streets and on the roads and highways of this great land. The spirit of Whitman was surely present through the rebellion of the 1960s, when America’s young men and women rose up and fought the Establishment to stop the Vietnam War and bring civil rights to racial minorities.

The Establishment fought back with a vengeance and, through the most egregious betrayal in history, reduced the world’s greatest industrial democracy to the pathetic shadow of its former self we are today.

The first thing the Establishment did was destroy the industrial job base by shipping millions of good jobs to China and other Third World nations, where slave laborers could be forced to churn out consumer products at a fraction of the cost of similar work done by American workers.

Acting through the CIA and organized crime, the Establishment flooded the cities and college campuses with illegal drugs in order to rot the minds and souls of our youth.

They dumbed down education to the point where young people who graduate today know little and can do less of a practical nature. Vocational training is dead. A high school graduate is worth virtually nothing in the job market, and many college graduates are semi-literate and self-absorbed, often lacking backbone, skills,  or initiative. Some high school and college graduates are even drug addicts or alcoholics.

They turned the economy over to thieves from Wall Street and created a military machine that turns youth into murderers and assassins whose job it is to conquer the world for the fat cats of global capital.

They ruined the arts, literature, and music through crass commercialization, making it almost impossible for any real original creativity to be produced or communicated. The one bright light in this darkness is the internet, which is  being threatened by commercial suppression of freedom of expression by the ambitions of big communications companies. Thank goodness too for the rare creative genius like Michael Moore who has the courage to hold up a mirror to this deeply diseased society.

Then they wrecked people’s health with processed food and constant inducements to a sedentary lifestyle while pumping us full of dangerous vaccines and prescription drugs. They drummed it into everyone’s head that we are basically weak, ill, helpless creatures who can only survive by taking pills and making constant trips to doctors, hospitals, and clinics.

They induced us to fight over our possessions and freedoms in law courts with the aid of greedy lawyers in front of rapacious judges who have built up the largest prison population in the world.

They pulled money and credit out of the inner cities and rural areas leaving those segments of the nation and their populations to rot.

The list could go on and on and on.

Today we are in the midst of not just a recession but a terminal depression. Getting the banks to lend again so people can buy homes at what are still over-inflated prices or so they might compete with immigrants to get construction jobs through building of more useless office buildings or military bases is not a recovery. The “greening of America” is a myth. There is no resurgence of alternative energy investment or new public infrastructure apart from a few highway projects.

American family farming is practically dead and is under a new assault from speculators who are undercutting prices and forcing foreclosures. The local manufacturing sector never came back after the calamitous decline produced by the Paul Volcker recession of 1979-1983, when interest rates were deliberately raised to over 20 percent to kill off family-owned businesses so that global corporations could step in and take over. Since then we had the “Reagan Revolution” when the banks took over the economy, the Clinton dot.com bubble of the 1990s which crashed in 2000,  and the George W. Bush/Alan Greenspan housing bubble which blew up in 2008. Now Main Street lies shattered and shuttered as a result of the crimes and treacheries of the last 30 years.

True, there is a rebellion brewing, including a monetary reform movement that has attacked the power of the Federal Reserve, as well as a few progressive voices that call for a much larger economic “stimulus” than the Obama administration has seen fit to implement.

But is there any practical plan on the part of either political party or organized movement to restore America to what it once was–a place where ordinary people could live, work, learn, and flourish? The answer is a resounding “No.” Not a chance. And “Change You Can Believe In” hasn’t changed a thing. All it has done has been to produce another financial bubble, this time using huge amounts of public debt through the sale of U.S. Treasury bonds. Business is not growing and jobs are not coming back. The only thing that has gone up has been the meeting of military recruitment quotas.

This latest bubble will fail too, because money created through lending to float the prices of assets is not wealth. Rather wealth consists of goods and services produced by labor applied to natural resources. Those who provide the labor must be recompensed fairly.

So what is to be done? The answer is that nothing can or will be done, if by that you mean whether a political savior is going to come along to rescue our nation and its people from destruction.

In fact, what they are planning is to continue to throttle and enslave us with a predatory financial establishment and a military policy that is preparing the groundwork for World War III. The war will be fought with American troops against Russia and China, after which China will take over as the world’s policeman while this country disappears from the face of the earth. It’s the ultimate plan of the New World Order, the ones American politicians, financiers, military leaders, and academics bow down to.

It is time for each and every individual who values his or her own life along with the creative potential of the human spirit to begin to work with others to create a new nation and world. The government isn’t going to do it for us. Please believe me. This is not a system that can be reformed. It is a system that must be replaced. And it must be replaced by the ordinary working men and women who have been crushed, used, and abused during the past ugly half-century.

Americans, get to work. Call your friends and family together today and begin to figure out what to do. Start with 15 minutes of prayer and meditation. You will be shown the way from within yourselves. My own view is that setting up local currency systems, as many communities are now doing, is a good place to start.

Copyright 2009 by Richard C. Cook

Richard C. Cook is a former federal analyst who writes on public policy issues. His latest book is “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.” His website is www.richardccook.com.

Union members perfectly entitled to protest

In respect of the day of protest scheduled for this Friday and the general issues pertaining to the trade union response to events, members of trade unions are perfectly entitled to take a day of action and to protest on the streets of their capital city. Not only are they so entitled but they are perfectly justified in so doing. Every time one makes a point about, for example, NAMA or some other issue pertaining to the economy, Members on the Government side ask, perhaps justifiably, what is one’s alternative. Practically five minutes into a discussion on the subject, the refrain from Members on the other side is what is one’s alternative.

I ask those who criticise trade union members who are taking to the streets and considering industrial action what alternative do they propose. What alternative do they propose to people who can see their living standards have dropped and who can see no real stake in the future? The problem people have is there is no clarity and they can see absolutely no stake into the future regarding how these issues should be dealt with in budgetary terms. What alternative is proposed by those people who fill the airwaves with criticisms of trade unions being lunatics and everything else?

Internet Controls; Treaty Text "Secret" for "National Security" Concerns

Secret copyright treaty leaks. It’s bad. Very bad. The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama’s administration refused to disclose due to “national security” concerns, has leaked. It’s bad. It says:

• * That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn’t infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

   

• * That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet — and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living — if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.

   

• * That the whole world must adopt US-style “notice-and-takedown” rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused — again, without evidence or trial — of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.

   

• * Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM)

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/03/secret-copyright-tre.html

Redesigning Capitalism

Posted by Irresponsibility

A Salem News column on value got me thinking about the problem with capitalism. Proponents argue, rightly, that people are more motivated in a system where individual effort results in tangible individual reward. In that respect capitalism is clear-eyed: human beings are basically selfish. Even the most magnanimous-seeming social structures (like the nomadic Native Americans described in Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society) evolve to sustain the individual. Greater love hath no man than to lay down his life for a friend precisely because our biological imperative is animal selfishness. Where capitalism goes awry is in thinking of reward in a purely material sense. It only understands individual betterment in property terms. The very idea that holding property is inherently more desirable than not holding property is classical-capitalist to the core.

This is not natural or inevitable. It is a product of a flawed value system that can and must be changed. People only believe that their individual worth is intrinsically linked to their bank balances because they’ve been taught to believe it. A better, more functional system – one which wouldn’t rely on over-production, mass consumerism and the boom-bust market cycle – would recognise what we currently consider the “intangible” rewards of endeavour as actual awards. Under the existing regime a first-rate mechanic’s successful car repair has no value until he gets paid for it. Likewise, a beautifully-cut dress is of no value unless some corporation purchases the design and mass-produces it for mass-consumption. A hand-written note has no value because no one is paid for its production. And so on. The majority of the things we really need, the things that raise our lives above the level of Hobbesian gloom, are ‘worthless’ under the current system. No wonder people are depressed.

Out of torpor, lack of imagination or simple blindness, we soldier on. Some people tackle the business of making a living from what they love. It is a good impulse, but still a basically backward approach to the problem. Rather than turning what we love into money, we should order love and money correctly in the hierarchy of human needs. It is a Utopian task, but not impossible. (Anyway, what the fuck is the point of undertaking non-Utopian tasks? Why waste your energy fighting for something less-than-wonderful?) All it takes is to define, the thing itself as having value. It is a simple matter of semantics; an act of will. Our current socio-economic system was built on words and desire; it can be as-easily rebuilt. We must reassign value.

In this brave new world the smooth-running engine, the well-crafted phrase and the graceful sweep of a gown are inherently worthwhile. The financial consideration in rewarding the person who accomplished these tasks should be incidental and unimportant. If possible, dispensed with altogether. Then the reward for individual effort becomes the thing itself. The satisfaction of creation, the feeling of agency. It is wrong that a master craftsperson can achieve something unique and beautiful, yet feel worthless because no-one has deigned to assign a cash value to their creativity. Under a properly-run system of “capitalism” the capital accrued is personal satisfaction.

Forget the “need” for money. Correctly run, society can function in socialist-capitalist harmony. People, rewarded by the social importance placed in their creativity, will produce according to the idealised model of capitalism, that is always seeking to improve their product. Meanwhile, the government, need no longer expend energy on bullying its citizens into consumerist slavery, can devote itself to administering a social system that provides for the well-being and security of the state without interfering excessively in the private lives of citizens. Without the artificial socio-economic divisions driven by greedheads, people’s basic needs could be met with far less expense and effort than they are currently. Banning private home ownership would instantly eliminate the ruinous pressure to ‘get on the property ladder’. Long-term lease arrangements, rather than outright ownership, should be standard practice for anything that currently requires heavy credit to finance (e.g. cars and houses). Critically, all education, including higher-level, must be free and accessible. People must have ample opportunity to discover and develop their unique talents – otherwise the system doesn’t work. This means changing child-rearing arrangements and redefining ‘adulthood’ in non-economic terms. It means tearing up the current education system and breaking its cast-iron links to the industrial economy. It means rooting out our snobbery about various forms of creativity and replacing it with an all-inclusive ideal. It means understanding that a rubbish collector is as essential to society as an actor; a cleaner as valuable a person as a mechanical engineer. From that plane of wisdom, progress is possible.

Letter to the editor, 10.27.09

My following letter to the Daily Beacon, the U. of Tennessee’s student newspaper, appeared on October 27, 2009.

For an exemplary misunderstanding of economics, freedom, and human action, refer to Amien Essif’s October 19 column, “Resisting self-interest an act of freedom”.

 In order to understand the human world, we must first recognize that each and every person is responsible for his/her own actions.  External authorities can restrict individual actions, but cannot force individuals to act.  You picked up a newspaper today and began reading.  You are reading out of your own volition.  No government, no religion, no community, no party, no corporation, no family, no philosophy department, nor any other authority outside of yourself can force you to read this letter.  

 Human freedom is a fact that can only be escaped in the imagination, and Essif’s column is an escapist’s trip down the rabbit-hole.  He who will publicly complain about the restrictiveness of capitalism’s conveniences has strayed far from reality.

 Essif admonishes “private institutions whose first interest is making money–and I’m not talking about people.”  If he is not talking about people, he imagines the animate in the inanimate.  His column, however intriguing, becomes fictional when he asserts that corporations–and not the people within them–have any interests at all.  No corporation has ever had any interest that was not in fact a human interest.  Pick any corporation, and remove all of its human interests; you will then find it has no interests whatsoever.

 Essif says that “Nabisco, acting individually, can practically force me to buy a package of crackers.”  Forgetting the absurdity of this statement, let us examine reality.  What have the generally good, honest, hard-working people of the Nabisco corporation done?  They have fed the hungry, and they have done so by acting in their own interests.  Essif’s purchase of crackers, far from restricting his freedom, is evidence that his freedom is relatively unhindered by false authorities.

 The false authority Essif worships is the community, an entity incapable of thought or action.  So, predictably, all of his faulty logic culminates in the exaltation of communal living.  Communal life is simpler in the sense that it is less complex, but it is harder in the sense that it requires much more work.  To spend five minutes of labor on a pack of crackers would be impossible for a practicing communist, whose mere sustenance hangs often in the balance.  Essif should be free to go forth and live as he pleases, on a commune, but neither he nor anyone else should ever have the authority to force the restrictions of communal living on those of us who understand freedom and cherish it.

Respectfully,

Alex Winston

Junior in political science