"The US Navy, a Global Force for Good"

I am posting this letter to my Senator today.  I feel this topic will come alive very soon internationally...  For the Record: 

Dear Senator Mikulski,

I was watching the FX channel this evening with a Spider-man movie and a short commercial popped up from the US Navy.  There was a quote in the short commercial announcement that went like this, verbatim: "The US Navy, a Global Force for Good"

This is the most disturbing message I have heard come out of the mouth of the military in my lifetime.  This sounds like a commercial message by the defense industry, NOT an official message from the Navy. 

1) I would like your office to find out who funded this message.

2) I would like to know if it was in fact the US Navy, where in the Constitution of the United States, our Navy has a mandate to be a "Global Force for Good"

3) If it was not the Navy, why the defense industry would be representing themselves as the US Navy without any disclaimer indicating the funding came from some organization other then the US Navy.

In my entire lifetime I have not heard a more alarming statement come from the mouth of a branch of the US Military.  I served myself form 1983-1987 in the US Air Force and did not in any way consider myself a "Global Force for Good" but instead saw our role as maintaining stability in parts of the world during what we called the "Cold War Era".  Since the end of that Era I have asked myself many times why we still represent ourselves around the world in the same light and how long it will take us to bankrupt ourselves doing it, when we have absolutely no formidable opponent with any capacity whatsoever to produce the kind of war fighting machinery we produce every year in this country.

But that is an issue for another discussion.

For the time being, I would like to know where this message came from and why / how the organization can justify this message within the context of our constitution and I would like an answer within the month.

Sincerely,

The Pope Has it Right

This article is interesting. The Pope is reiterating something that has been obvious for years, that with 8 billion people on the planet, there no longer exist any use to humanity for trillions of dollars sloshing around the globe with nothing but a profit at all cost motive.

Still, half of the links to the statement I searched had been removed...

Fix The Deficit?

I don't know if you ever ran across this from the New York Times on how to fix the American Government's budget problems http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic.html?choices=hm101bqx

But you can see by taking proposals right "off the shelf" (where many a forgotten bill resides) any "idiot" can solve the deficit. I am telling you man, the reason the dollar does not collapse and people run for the hills is smart people know the entire deficit could be solved in a minute. Outside of the right wing rhetoric, Americans are simply NOT taxed nearly as much as their counterparts in the "developed" world. Trillions of dollars are written off, and there exist so much waste and inefficiency in American government and all government spending (incompetence reeks in all levels of American government), that any reasonable corporate manager could cut 30% off direct government spending in a weekend and outside of the "press" and the people who are let go from their government "jobs" (in quotes cause many government workers do 40% work at best) the overall population would not feel a thing.

It is always amusing that when Presidents like GWB were in office, they essentially told EPA, FDA, Energy, SEC and entire financial regulation apparatus etc. to lay off businesses and allow businesses to "self regulate", that business had become "sophisticated" enough to resolve problems, set safe guidelines etc. in ways that would not harm growth etc. Well we all know that is hogwash, but it makes a good speech and sounds great, but it simply does not work.

However, if this is the way of governing or the attitude by the Right, then why did GWB never lay off one government worker? Why did he not revamp agencies, put in hiring freezes, reduce staff in areas where he felt there was over regulation? In my lifetime, if I am correct, it was Clinton, not Bush I or Bush II or Reagan that ever actually "shrunk" the rolls of government workers and the workers in industry tied to the Defense industry after the "end of the cold war". Every republican president in my life dramatically increased government spending!! GWB was the worse!!

Anyway, you can see the results of my choices. Just make the changes you want. Whether you are left of center of right of center it takes about 15 minutes, yea 15 MINUTES, to solve the budget crises, in your living room, with no lobbing industry spending $3.5 Billion Dollars beating at your door each year... Give it a try... Most of the impotent, incompetent "legislators" we have would serve our nation better planting rice in the California dessert.

Dexia and the Second Bailout: No lessons learned

OK, the time has come for some real riots. I mean, after learning of Dexia recently and reading this article in the NY Times this weekend, my stomach actually hurts.

This is the 2nd bailout for Dexia in 3 years and this one is the equivalent of another AIG, not only in scale but in principal, where the government IE; taxpayers, are literally being called upon not to protect their savings in a regulated financial institution, what their tax dollars should be doing when needed (and the financial institution be allowed to fail), but to make counter parties in unregulated derivatives whole!!! The same old names come up, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Commerzbank etc. as taxpayers are put on the hook for another 90 Billion Euros on top of the massive bailout that took place in 2008 of the same bank during the original financial crises.

I am sick, I am nauseous, I am bleeding inside, I want to Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Washington, DC, Occupy Belgium, Occupy France, Occupy the planet until these kinds of "deals" are stopped.

These are the actions of our governments that got the Occupy movement started and it is high time we find a way to put an end to them now.

The Pension Fund Mess and the Media's Lousy Reporting

I read this article today in the NY Times. The Little State With a Big Mess

It was another lousy, shallow, baseless bleed heart about a politician having to deal with bankrupt pensions... So I wrote these few words in response to the author and share here.

Hello Ms. Walsh,

I have read quite a number of articles about the financial mess many states, cities and municipalities are in over the past few years. What I have not read until now, with the exception of the occasional town or municipality that engages in outright fraud, is any decent reporting of the mechanisms that have lead to the financial mess they are in.

I never read about the move of states, cities and municipalities to dramatically increase the salaries of officials in government and government funded organizations like education institutions in the late 1990's to "compete" with the "dotcom" induced high flying salaries paid during that era's economic bubble. I have not read about how, unlike industry, when this bubble burst governments did not ratchet down those exuberant salaries and maintain them to this day. I have not read about how governments wasted or spent unwisely the billions of dollars doled out by the Federal Government after 9/11 to "upgrade" police and other emergency services leaving higher long term costs burdens to the local governments after a short term shot in the arm by the Federal Gov. I have not read about the tremendous waste of opportunity by state, city and local governments to bank the exorbitant amount of money they were taking in during the first decade of this century while the real estate bubble was in full steam and how they unwisely spent it, often on frivolous items and higher salaries while allowing their infrastructures to fail and pensions to go unfunded. I have not read about the dramatic shift in public pension funds during this same bubble to feed tens of billions of dollars into the unregulated hedge fund industries as Wall street ran out of suckers and reached out to pension funds and their low salary incompetent managers as easy takers to fuel the casino going on in the global debt markets. I have not read enough about how many of these local governments became little AIG's by being coaxed into short term funding obligations with long term insurance against rising interest rates which not only did not materialize but "cost" money when these government entities had to pony up money to meet calls against their worthless contracts and how this plays into their financial woes.

In essence, I have not read anything anywhere about the reason America's incompetent governments at every level from county, municipality, city and state (and federal) seem to know nothing about basic economics of running a government, how our education system fails to teach anything about our economic system and how this plays into the ignorance of our electorate and governments alike. I have read nothing about how the financial mess so many governments are in got to where it is in the first place and how much of that reason is directly related to their pension funds investment decisions. I have not read how the financial meltdown on Wall Street as a whole has affected the returns on the pension funds and how many of the pension funds were duped into worthless investments during the Wall Street bubble. I have not read anything about how perhaps our Federal government should have been more interested in securing the savings of Americans and the soundness of their pensions instead of bailing out the Casino operators on Wall Street who already banked nearly $3.5 trillion of profits from the debt induced bubble that took place from the early part of the century till the collapse in 2008.

All I read about is what you and others in your industry have written here, politicians speaking to angry pensioners (um, that is American Citizens who have done an honest days work all their lives while living in modest means) about how they are going to have to take the hit from what? Maybe from all of the things I mention above that are NEVER spoken about on these pages or any other pages in any cohesive way that lays out the reality that at the end of the day; the average working Joe is constantly getting reamed in this global, finance driven economy run by people with an 19th century mindset at best; that all money is for the taking, no matter how you do it; that we still live in an barbaric economic reality and all the attempts by all the people over the last century and a half to make sure working people are respected like the decent human beings they are, are moot when casino economics and corrupt national governments are capable of taking it all away inside of a few years.

How about getting a little creative and insightful next time, it is about time!

Open Explanation: Occupy Wall Street

I wrote this letter to Timothy Lavin of Bloomberg after reading this article by Amity Shlaes. It combines two recent ideas of mine in one letter to try and open a dialog on my take of the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon.

Hello Timothy,

As editor of the opinion column at Bloomberg I would like you to think about the Wall Street protesters from a couple angles and perhaps seek understanding of what is going on from these perspectives.

1) From the economic perspective, that the free economic system has at some point over the last 30 years reached a point of diminished returns to the population it "serves". All advanced industrial economies are facing the same "problem" whereas corporate entities have gone through a mass consolidation, using their capital to consolidate verses investment in new productive output. This consolidation has resulted in mega corporate entities that maximize profit by reducing competition and stifling innovation. I would estimate that nearly 70% of consumer dollars are spent on goods and services at companies that operate as oligopolies in their respective industries where two or three (perhaps 4-5 in some areas) companies control any particular industry per geographic area including production, distribution and sales channels. The consolidation of industries has also concentrated wealth in the hands of fewer companies and people and this wealth is not being put to productive use.

The last decade of this wealth concentration played out in the financial industry whereas the money concentrated in the hands of the few was and is being put to "work" in speculative gain through financial instruments. The proliferation of unregulated pools of money like hedge funds and speculative private equity companies provides a real tangible look at what happens when such concentration of wealth proliferates. Unfortunately so much money has flowed into these non productive uses of capital, real investment has all but ceased to exist in mature economies. Unfortunately as well, is the reality that when these speculative uses of capital go haywire in the hands of people who over leveraged their balance sheets, massive amounts of money is "lost" or better put transferred from the "real" savings of the citizens when regulated financial institutions leverage these savings to offer credit to unregulated institutions that imploded due to overly leveraged balanced sheets and speculative practices.

The bail out of regulated financial institutions (and the conversion of speculative financial to regulated financial institutions) so they to could get "bailed out" was nothing short of the largest transfer of "wealth", the savings of the American people (and citizens of other developed nations), to the speculative, unregulated markets, the world has ever seen. The "real" savings that were "lost" were replaced by sovereign debt, basically the people have had their own money "replaced" after the regulated financial institutions had transferred it to the speculative unregulated markets, and been give a big IOU. All people of the advanced industrial world are now paying interest indirectly on their own money that was essentially "stolen" from them through the process of regulated financial institutions lending it to speculators who took pools of capital from the corporate elite and gambled a reckless way by "creating" financial instruments based on real assets and liabilities valued at over 50 times the true underlying assets / liabilities. When this system of reckless gambling failed and the underlying capital that existed was wiped out then replaced on the backs of taxpaying citizens we (the Occupy Wall Street crowd) have the impression, correctly so, that the government is working on behalf of the wealthy and corporations, not it's citizens.

All this evolution in economic activity derives its origins from the premise that "capital" simply found no more productive uses in the advanced nations where it was created and hence it found it's way to speculative uses instead of productive uses. My guess of the point where our vastly unregulated free market system reached a diminished point of returns to the population it "serves" was somewhere in the late 1970's, about the same time that real incomes stagnated in the US and have remained fairly constant or declined since (with the small exception of the latter 1990's when capital was invested in productive use due to the opportunities created by the evolution of the Internet / networks). Any productive use of capital from that point forward was transferred overseas to "developing" economies where production is cheaper and growth in those economies from a basic level of need still attainable, where all basic level of material needs had been satisfied in the advanced economies. (Note: China is currently doing both productive investment and speculation on such an tremendous scale their implosion in the next 12-18 months will rock the globe.)

Europe manages to slow this migration of capital somewhat through stiffer regulation and a later stage of development due to the destruction of WWII. However over that past 15 years or so they have increasingly modeled their economies after the freer economic model of the US and the EU and common currency has escalated that trend. Japan and German and a few island nations are somewhat exceptions in that both nations continued to invest in productive output as they lead in the manufacture of advanced industrial products and machine tools that make production possible elsewhere.

2) The second area is more directly related to the people who are involved in the protest movement. This is the first generation of people to grow up with computers and the Internet in their homes. It only takes 10% of this population of young people, who found the Internet to be an enlightening source of information to create a major national movement. These young people, many of who have completely lost faith in the institutional framework of our political and economic system, have "self educated" via the Internet and have learned to shun the institutional "learning" that is propagated in our public school system, a system that has failed to keep pace with the leaning abilities of our young people and failed to keep pace with the evolution of our economic / political system at hand, instead continuing to focus on the social cohesion aspects of learning that has propagated in our public education since the early to mid 20th Century.

These young people see public education for what it is and seek to acquire "real" knowledge through understanding the world around them as it exist today. They can easily find information on everything from ecology, environment, politics, war, economy, power, industrial processes, history, current events, governments, foreign policy etc. from their home and increasingly share that information with others and through that process develop deeper and more comprehensive understandings of the world around them. Each person is free to focus on the aspects of learning that interest them most and share and communicate with like minded people. All of them ultimately share common goals, though in different areas, that changes need to be made for the common good. You will see issues all over the map, from industrial food process and it's effects on human populations and the lack of regulation and tainted "research" spewed out by universities funded by the companies that exercise such practices to global economic theft and manipulation by pools of capital that seek to turn every resource on the planet into a speculative instrument and exploit these instruments with abandon while answering to no legitimate governmental organization from where these pools of capital originate.

The failure of established institutions to recognize what is going on with these young people is to their detriment. This movement is global. Whether it is 5%, 10% or 15% of the population of young people all over the world that are involved in this movement, have educated themselves and are impassioned to change the world around them is irrelevant. The fact is that this change is coming and failure to recognize it for what it is is dangerous and irresponsible. When one educates themselves, there is a different dynamic that takes place. They feel empowered by their knowledge. This is very different than the indoctrination education received at public schools and higher learning institutions. You have to understand this or you will fail to understand what is going on.

In addition, when one looks at the issues / demands / concerns of these people, they are reasonable, attainable and achievable while protecting a capitalist system of economy and democratic form of government. The establishment will still have it's place and the institutions that exist today will continue to exist. There is no call for their destruction. There is a call for their humanization. This must be recognized. The greed with abandon, reckless capitalistic tendencies of corporations constantly seeking advantage by cheating, deregulation, theft and outright fraud will have to end. Yes, capitalism is ugly, human evolution is ugly, existing on a harsh planet can be ugly, but we humans have not choice, we pick what works best for us and so far capitalism and democracy have served better than any other alternative till now. Yet, in the 21'st century, the practices that have lead to consolidation of power and wealth in the hands of the few by corporate entities that seek to operate irrespective of the well being of the people they serve, the environment they exploit or the policies they extol to their own benefit must change sooner rather than later.

To point a finger at these young people and attempt to understand what they are trying to achieve through any other lens is to fail. The establishment will try to resist change, protect their advantage, protect their profits etc. but until they understand profit is still possible even giving ALL of the demands of these young people, they will fail to get the point and do more harm then good trying to resist them.

Sincerely,

Worth Reading

This article, posted on AlJezeera, is an excerpt from a recent essay by Noam Chomsky and is worth reading in it's entirety.

The tail end of the article which applies directly to the state of politics in the US is most powerful and is quoted here:

Privatising the planet

While Grand Area doctrine still prevails, the capacity to implement it has declined. The peak of US power was after World War II, when it had literally half the world's wealth. But that naturally declined, as other industrial economies recovered from the devastation of the war and decolonisation took its agonising course. By the early 1970s, the US share of global wealth had declined to about 25 per cent, and the industrial world had become tripolar: North America, Europe, and East Asia (then Japan-based).

There was also a sharp change in the US economy in the 1970s, towards financialisation and export of production. A variety of factors converged to create a vicious cycle of radical concentration of wealth, primarily in the top fraction of 1 per cent of the population - mostly CEOs, hedge-fund managers, and the like. That leads to the concentration of political power, hence state policies to increase economic concentration: fiscal policies, rules of corporate governance, deregulation, and much more. Meanwhile the costs of electoral campaigns skyrocketed, driving the parties into the pockets of concentrated capital, increasingly financial: the Republicans reflexively, the Democrats - by now what used to be moderate Republicans - not far behind.

Elections have become a charade, run by the public relations industry. After his 2008 victory, Obama won an award from the industry for the best marketing campaign of the year. Executives were euphoric. In the business press they explained that they had been marketing candidates like other commodities since Ronald Reagan, but 2008 was their greatest achievement and would change the style in corporate boardrooms. The 2012 election is expected to cost $2bn, mostly in corporate funding. Small wonder that Obama is selecting business leaders for top positions. The public is angry and frustrated, but as long as the Muasher principle prevails, that doesn't matter.

While wealth and power have narrowly concentrated, for most of the population real incomes have stagnated and people have been getting by with increased work hours, debt, and asset inflation, regularly destroyed by the financial crises that began as the regulatory apparatus was dismantled starting in the 1980s.

None of this is problematic for the very wealthy, who benefit from a government insurance policy called "too big to fail." The banks and investment firms can make risky transactions, with rich rewards, and when the system inevitably crashes, they can run to the nanny state for a taxpayer bailout, clutching their copies of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.

That has been the regular process since the Reagan years, each crisis more extreme than the last - for the public population, that is. Right now, real unemployment is at Depression levels for much of the population, while Goldman Sachs, one of the main architects of the current crisis, is richer than ever. It has just quietly announced $17.5bn in compensation for last year, with CEO Lloyd Blankfein receiving a $12.6m bonus while his base salary more than triples.

It wouldn't do to focus attention on such facts as these. Accordingly, propaganda must seek to blame others, in the past few months, public sector workers, their fat salaries, exorbitant pensions, and so on: all fantasy, on the model of Reaganite imagery of black mothers being driven in their limousines to pick up welfare checks - and other models that need not be mentioned. We all must tighten our belts; almost all, that is.

Teachers are a particularly good target, as part of the deliberate effort to destroy the public education system from kindergarten through the universities by privatisation - again, good for the wealthy, but a disaster for the population, as well as the long-term health of the economy, but that is one of the externalities that is put to the side insofar as market principles prevail.

Another fine target, always, is immigrants. That has been true throughout US history, even more so at times of economic crisis, exacerbated now by a sense that our country is being taken away from us: the white population will soon become a minority. One can understand the anger of aggrieved individuals, but the cruelty of the policy is shocking.

Targeting immigrants

Who are the immigrants targeted? In Eastern Massachusetts, where I live, many are Mayans fleeing genocide in the Guatemalan highlands carried out by Reagan's favourite killers. Others are Mexican victims of Clinton's NAFTA, one of those rare government agreements that managed to harm working people in all three of the participating countries. As NAFTA was rammed through Congress over popular objection in 1994, Clinton also initiated the militarisation of the US-Mexican border, previously fairly open. It was understood that Mexican campesinos cannot compete with highly subsidised US agribusiness, and that Mexican businesses would not survive competition with US multinationals, which must be granted "national treatment" under the mislabeled free trade agreements, a privilege granted only to corporate persons, not those of flesh and blood. Not surprisingly, these measures led to a flood of desperate refugees, and to rising anti-immigrant hysteria by the victims of state-corporate policies at home.

Much the same appears to be happening in Europe, where racism is probably more rampant than in the US One can only watch with wonder as Italy complains about the flow of refugees from Libya, the scene of the first post-World War I genocide, in the now-liberated East, at the hands of Italy's Fascist government. Or when France, still today the main protector of the brutal dictatorships in its former colonies, manages to overlook its hideous atrocities in Africa, while French President Nicolas Sarkozy warns grimly of the "flood of immigrants" and Marine Le Pen objects that he is doing nothing to prevent it. I need not mention Belgium, which may win the prize for what Adam Smith called "the savage injustice of the Europeans."

The rise of neo-fascist parties in much of Europe would be a frightening phenomenon even if we were not to recall what happened on the continent in the recent past. Just imagine the reaction if Jews were being expelled from France to misery and oppression, and then witness the non-reaction when that is happening to Roma, also victims of the Holocaust and Europe's most brutalised population.

In Hungary, the neo-fascist party Jobbik gained 17 per cent of the vote in national elections, perhaps unsurprising when three-quarters of the population feels that they are worse off than under Communist rule. We might be relieved that in Austria the ultra-right Jörg Haider won only 10 per cent of the vote in 2008 - were it not for the fact that the new Freedom Party, outflanking him from the far right, won more than 17 per cent. It is chilling to recall that, in 1928, the Nazis won less than 3 per cent of the vote in Germany.

In England the British National Party and the English Defence League, on the ultra-racist right, are major forces. (What is happening in Holland you know all too well.) In Germany, Thilo Sarrazin's lament that immigrants are destroying the country was a runaway best-seller, while Chancellor Angela Merkel, though condemning the book, declared that multiculturalism had "utterly failed": the Turks imported to do the dirty work in Germany are failing to become blond and blue-eyed, true Aryans.

Those with a sense of irony may recall that Benjamin Franklin, one of the leading figures of the Enlightenment, warned that the newly liberated colonies should be wary of allowing Germans to immigrate, because they were too swarthy; Swedes as well. Into the twentieth century, ludicrous myths of Anglo-Saxon purity were common in the US, including among presidents and other leading figures. Racism in the literary culture has been a rank obscenity; far worse in practice, needless to say. It is much easier to eradicate polio than this horrifying plague, which regularly becomes more virulent in times of economic distress.

I do not want to end without mentioning another externality that is dismissed in market systems: the fate of the species. Systemic risk in the financial system can be remedied by the taxpayer, but no one will come to the rescue if the environment is destroyed. That it must be destroyed is close to an institutional imperative. Business leaders who are conducting propaganda campaigns to convince the population that anthropogenic global warming is a liberal hoax understand full well how grave is the threat, but they must maximize short-term profit and market share. If they don't, someone else will.

This vicious cycle could well turn out to be lethal. To see how grave the danger is, simply have a look at the new Congress in the US, propelled into power by business funding and propaganda. Almost all are climate deniers. They have already begun to cut funding for measures that might mitigate environmental catastrophe. Worse, some are true believers; for example, the new head of a subcommittee on the environment who explained that global warming cannot be a problem because God promised Noah that there will not be another flood.

If such things were happening in some small and remote country, we might laugh. Not when they are happening in the richest and most powerful country in the world. And before we laugh, we might also bear in mind that the current economic crisis is traceable in no small measure to the fanatic faith in such dogmas as the efficient market hypothesis, and in general to what Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, 15 years ago, called the "religion" that markets know best - which prevented the central bank and the economics profession from taking notice of an $8tn housing bubble that had no basis at all in economic fundamentals, and that devastated the economy when it burst.

All of this, and much more, can proceed as long as the Muashar doctrine prevails. As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.

OccupyWallStreet

Ok, I am totally committed to the OccupyWallStreet movement in all of it's forms. I took a bus to NYC on 18 September to experience it first hand. I had to return home on the 19th but if I could right now, I would be living in Zuccotti Park. This movement is the BEST thing that has happened from a political action standpoint IN MY ENTIRE LIFE!! And I am over 40.

I watched this nation oligopolize itself just in my lifetime. I have my degree in economics and I ran a business for 15 years, dealing with the reality of a shrinking availability of everything from a smaller number of suppliers in every industry around me, every industry!

But I have to laugh and I mean just laugh my head off when I watch a video like this: http://bit.ly/nr8vZx

Only in America can you hear a woman the size of three repeatedly use words like "austere" or "squeezing" or complain about not getting a meal, or the "meds" that are likely needed due to the obesity of the woman talking etc. America is one big dichotomy! It is like no other place on the planet.

We have near 40% of our population clinically "obese" and completely unaware of the industrial processes that bring them the lowest grade, highest toxicity "food" in the industrial world. We have near pandemics on health issues associated with the food consumed in this country and it's effects on the increasing sized population.

Us people that live in the cities that are also chosen as places to live by the global elite know that we are becoming a "police state" in every definition of the world. Those of you who are living elsewhere, good luck, buy guns because if the elites nor their capital are there, the "state" that is there to protect you will be bankrupt and unable to provide basic protection from the hoards of ignorant bible bouncing self immolation idiots that have the biggest influence in the second and third tiers (worlds) of American life.

Yes, I could go on, but don't listen to me rant, just stay on top of Occupy Wall Street and get your education there. I just rant from time to time. And it has been a while. But Occupy Wall Street has gotten my blood flowing again and I intend to go back to posting my ideas and thoughts instead of just tucking them away thinking it really does not matter. Maybe it does after all.

Best!

Your Data

I remember when google.com launched. I ran a business and was on the road during the day. Listening to NPR I remember the intellectual elites all babbling at the mouth about this great new search engine. I tried it. It was good. I did not become a "google clone" however but stuck with my current variety of web search / email services.

I remember about a year or so later when all those intellectual elites learned that google had kept all of their search records tucked away and was using that data for whatever purposes they felt necessary. They were up in arms. Lawsuits, congressional inquiries, you name it. How stupid the intellectual elites really are.

Now of course we know that google uses EVERY bit, byte, stream of data, conversation, global document that is publicly available to run it's business and record, disseminate, parse and use to its financial advantage. That is what a business does. How else could they be the largest search engine and not charge it's users for the privilege?

But what many don't know is how the "security apparatus" here in America is increasingly looking to the googles and facebooks out there to operate their increasingly police state tactics. This article is interesting, not because of the fact that any idiot knows any decent investigative officer or federal investigative agency would use the resources of these monster networks, but that they are increasingly requesting that these network owners do exactly opposite what the intellectual elites have requested: They want the owners to capture MORE information from their users and keep that information LONGER and allow more access to that data from the security apparatus, not only in the US but in other nations as well.

Here is the article: http://on.msnbc.com/rgEeMi

Enjoy.

PS; this site is owned by google as is youtube and many other sites you may not realize... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google

What's Wrong With American Media?

Here is a perfect example of the complete ignorance of America being highlighted by America's pathetic small minded ignorant corporate influenced Media. Check this out.

To even insinuate that switching to energy efficient bulbs is somehow bad or a move in the wrong direction is completely insane. A "politically correct do gooder issue" is the quote from Republican Representative Joe Barton.

So why do Americans get pathetically ignorant "reporting" on an issue that has already been adopted by 400 million Europeans? Think energy companies, power companies, suppliers of power, coal / energy producers... Yea there is so much money behind keeping America in outdated pathetically old and backwards technology in every category it is not funny.

Another example of this realty is straight energy efficiency of our vehicles. In Europe the average MPG is 40.5 miles to gallon. Average! In the US it is 22.5 MPG. There are a dozen vehicles in Europe that get over 55 Miles per Gallon! Those that get 40+ include luxury vehicles and other mid-sized sedans, contrary to the message Americans are hit with by the powers in the energy industry keeping America stuck with the most energy inefficient passenger vehicles available in any industrial nation on the planet, that energy efficiency only means tiny dangerous cars. Look at one example, the Ford Focus. In the US, Americans were recently being sold the car with 9 year old engine technology while in Europe they have been enjoying a very fuel efficient version for a long time using leading edge engine technology. Read this article for example.

We are all living here in America under the umbrella of oligopolistic companies controlling 70% of what we consume in various industries while those same companies continue to fight to keep their low grade garbage on the market to boost their profit margins to the detriment of all Americans from the quality of what they buy, to the treatment of Americans like Guinea pigs with respect to our industrial taxpayer subsidized food supply, to the lack of energy efficient products which have resulted in Americans continuing to be the largest global polluters and most wasteful energy consumers to the ignorance and dumbing down of our corporate controlled media.

You would think with so many people in so many nations rising up to throw out their corrupt, lying and propaganda spewing leaders Americans would wake up and do the same. Maybe our time will come.

The Mulit-Trillion Dollar Scam

I read this article today on Marketwatch and later in the Journal about how "publicly traded" Wall Street financial companies doled out $135 Billion in compensation for 2010, over the $128 Billion in 2009. Well with nearly $2 Trillion in "non publicly traded" hedge funds and another $2 Trillion in private equity, it is safe to say the wonderful regulated and unregulated financial world scraped out somewhere around $500 Billion in "compensation" in 2010, a "recovery" year for the economy in the developed world.

So where does all this money come from? Well, most of it from the economy, um, people who put their money in the banks, retirement accounts, hand over to the profits of the oligopolies that control their access to 70% of everything they buy (and since their spending is 70% of the economy that is big money). Those are the same banks that "lost" all of their money in 2008. Of course the government (Fed, Treasury etc.) just "created" all the money again and "put it back" into the system so those financial institutions would not disappear (oh, those poor citizens will be paying interest on this "created" money for like a millenia). But what if they did disappear? Then surely people would be asking questions like, "Where did all the money go?"

It baffles me TO NO END why Americans are so stupid to not ask this question in the first place. Why, they are completely ignorant of the economic system that they live under, the economic system that allows them to go to the grocery store, buy a computer, drive a car, earn money etc. They just look at their 401k statement and see they lost tens of thousands in value but NEVER think if they multiplied that by millions of people and all that "wealth" disappeared, it must have gone somewhere. Now they may be looking at those same statements and be saying, "The money has come back." But do they ever think "where did the money come back from?" Could the money have just re-appeared?

My conservative estimate is that from 2002 - 2010 somewhere around $3.2 Trillion dollars has been "removed" from the financial wealth of average people in the US and other conned countries by these "financial" institutions, regulated and un-regulated alike. Do the math. Think about it. (Then add the $1.5+ Trillion their ignorant government has "spent" on frivolous "wars" against people who live in mud huts)

This very good article I also read today from Caixin Online is a very good article in many ways. Mostly in its basic description that we have a completely dysfunctional financial system right now. The regulated, unregulated and federal financial institutions are all completely dysfunctional. Money has for some time now NOT flowed to productive uses in developed nations (esp. the US) but to asset chasing schemes, and these schemes all function like one giant casino. But, nobody really understands this that I know or speak to on a daily basis, nobody!

The collapse of a few nations' governments this year will start a snowball effect that if nothing else, should wake people in the developed economies up to the fact that even though they do not live under brutal dictatorship regimes, they still live under brutal economic criminals who have stolen their future, with their government's blessing, and when they are banging on the door of their local banks trying to get their worthless money out while a tiny regiment of people are parading around in guarded steel boxes with seemingly no connection to the hardships they are going through, maybe, just maybe they will wake up and overthrow their governments to.

A Billion Dollars

I recently was asked what I would do if I had a Billion Dollars. I had to rant:

I am so glad you ask this question. I wonder what kinds of responses you get. You know, there was a time in the late 1990's when I would take my friends for walks around Alexandria or Georgetown and talk to them about what they were seeing. I would make them aware that at that time, during the immense amount of money flowing into technology, with N. VA building massive businesses like AOL, UUNet, Nextel, PSI Net and hundreds of others, they would never see the kind of wealth they were seeing at the time again potentially in their lifetimes. I would share stories of Dot Com start up CEO's giving away hundreds of millions of dollars to start research facilities, universities, even one guy that granted $500 million to the state of Mississippi to help them get off the bottom of the list in America in education. It was incredible.

And I would ask my friends and those I met, "What would you do if you could accomplish something, anything, and money was not an object?" I never got a real answer. They only people doing anything really over the top with what seemed like unlimited money were the guys recreating Paris, Venice, NYC, and Rome in the dessert of Nevada in a place called Las Vegas. Yea, sad isn't it. Like "Back to the Future" where Biff runs the show and everything in town becomes a casino (which is exactly happened in the first decade of 21st Century), the lowest common mentality becomes the dominant force in life. Meanwhile, start up companies burned out. Their great ideas could not take off when the vast majority of America was still getting Internet through dial up.

California and other western states were being held hostage by energy traders who exploited the decrepit state of power delivery in this country to rake taxpayers out of billions. Their company also collapsed, it was called Enron. And in the course of 10 years, from the early 1990's, 50% of Americans were all convinced to buy trucks (relabeled SUV's to make them palatable to consumers) and reverse 15 years of declining per-capita energy use just as some doorknob of a president was about to start a major war that would nearly bankrupt anyone with a truck that got 14 miles to the gallon.

So, why, in a nation so rich, where we have somewhere near 1,000 billionaires, do the average people sit with $13 trillion in debt they will have to pay from their hard earned money for the next 100 years and absolutely NOTHING to show for it? No high speed, convenient, affordable rail systems connecting towns and cities, a crumbling infrastructure of roads and bridges across the country, water and energy delivery infrastructure that is falling apart with much of it 3/4 of a century old or older, telecommunications networks that leave us at the bottom of the list of developed nations, no national health system, the vast majority of Americans falling further behind on the economic scale, and a loss of an average of 200,000 production oriented jobs a year for the last 10 years.

So what would I do with a $ 1 billion?

a) Get the hell out of this country and go live in a civilized advanced nation somewhere

b) Work my ass off to replace all the idiots that legislate this country and replace them with people who have a backbone and are willing to set us on a course of prosperous First World Nation instead of turning us into some kind of banana republic with big guns and a loud mouth.

Yea, that is what I would do. You?

State of the Union, Do I Sense Frustration?

Sometimes I listen to the State of the Union speech, mostly I read it. I like reading anything that carries importance. It is better internalized and I see the nuances to the writing. This year I noticed a kind of frustration evident in a choice word used in the speech. Now, I know our President must be very dissatisfied with the garbage "Health Care Reform Bill" which in my opinion should be trashed as a watered down document not worth the paper it is written on, and that goes to for the bill that was supposed to reform our broken financial system. That bill is even worse. It does nothing to address the root cause of the financial meltdown. But without going into detail here, I sensed the President's frustration when I read this:

We should have no illusions about the work ahead of us. Reforming our schools, changing the way we use energy, reducing our deficit — none of this will be easy. All of it will take time. And it will be harder because we will argue about everything. The costs. The details. The letter of every law.


Of course, some countries don't have this problem. If the central government wants a railroad, they build a railroad, no matter how many homes get bulldozed. If they don't want a bad story in the newspaper, it doesn't get written.

The word "problem" should have been "process". To use problem is to imply that the messy democratic process is a problem and that dictatorship is preferable to solving problems.

It should be noted that this was a very poor choice of a word here.

Stormy Weather

I was reading an article today about the difficulties faced by travelers during the recent snowstorms in the NE US and it occurred to me that the success the airlines have had in recent years with what appears from the outside observer to be extreme efficiencies in how they schedule flights, how many flights, what times, how to get occupancy loads over 80% consistently etc. is also responsible for some of the extreme difficulties faced by travelers who had 2-3 day delays in their schedules.

It seems that the entire industry from the FAA with it's often outdated technology barely able to keep up with the growth in traffic to the airports themselves having to completely reconfigure (many of them after substantial investment with an entirely different type of travel experience in mind) the terminals after 9/11 and are just barely able to service passengers in secure areas. Airports have lagged in investment in additional gates and are basically functioning on the edge of capacity. Then there is the airlines who have invested in reservation and scheduling systems that allow the most efficient booking of passengers using the same "just in time" philosophy exercised in the manufacturing industry where they are able to tweak the number and frequency of flights to match the demand of passengers to fascinating accuracy. I personally have not been on so many flights that were at least 85% full then in the last few years. It is a far cry from the days when scheduled flights would be 30% full and airlines would occasionally "break" a plane so they could combine the passengers from an earlier flight that was dismally empty with one that was at a later time.

So with all players in air travel operating at capacity / maximum efficiency we are faced with the reality that any "breaks" in the chain can and will cause total "production" to stop very quickly. Weather has that ability and over time, the passenger experience has degraded ever more as the industry constantly squeezes out "costs" of production.

Of course this reality came to a head back in the spring of 2010 when the Senate finally passed some legislation to address the treatment of passengers by the industry in cases when planes are stuck on the tarmac for hours (which makes absolutely no sense to me why this even happens). From this article the outline of the bill is:

-Require airlines to provide passengers with food, potable water, comfortable cabin temperature and ventilation, and adequate restrooms while a plane is delayed on the ground.
-Require airlines to offer passengers the option of safely deplaning once they have sat on the ground for three hours after the plane door has closed. This option would be provided every three hours the plane continues to sit on the ground.
-Require airports and airlines to develop contingency plans for delayed flights to be reviewed and approved by Department of Transportation. The bill also allows the DOT to fine air carriers and airports that do not submit or fail to comply with contingency plans.
-Direct the DOT to create a consumer complaint hotline so that passengers can alert the agency about delays.

What is amazing and telling of our impotent leaders in Washington is how simple this bill is, but to get such a simple (basically worthless when you consider it does absolutely nothing to alleviate the problem in the first place) bill passed it took THREE YEARS!! Yea, three years to pass a few lines saying people flying on planes had to be treated like human beings, but only if they are stuck on a plane.

In the case of a weather related airport shutdown, it is OK that people have to wait 2 1/2 hours for some lousy fried chicken and ration simple supplies like toilet paper while their baggage sits on a stranded plane. Oh, but to create any type of infrastructure and or rules to deal with human beings when they are stranded at an airport for whatever reason would be to create inefficiencies in the "system" and add cost to everyone involved so NEVER expect that to happen. The lobbing will be so intense against it our impotent, bought off government will never go in the direction of protecting it's citizens over the corporate sugar daddies. Expect to be treated evermore like industrial cattle in an ever efficient cog to get you where you are going at as little expense as possible and the highest profit as possible regardless of the impact on your humanity in the mean time.

Helmut Schmidt

From an excerpt at interview at Marketwatch.com

Schmidt: One of the weakest points in the global economy is that there is no control of the behavior of financial managers. You can divide mankind into three categories. In the first category are normal people like you and me. We may have once stolen an apple from a neighbor’s trees when we were boys, or we may have taken a bar of chocolate from a supermarket without paying for it. But otherwise we are dependable, normal human beings. Then secondly you have a small category of people with a criminal character. And thirdly you have investment bankers. That includes all the dealers and the deal makers. They all sail under different names, but they’re all the same.

I love this interview. After saying there is no leader in Europe strong enough to counter American influence he commits a sleight on America by saying:

...But I would say that, in general, Europe lacks leaders. It lacks people in high positions in the national states or in the European institutions with sufficient overview of domestic and international questions and sufficient power of judgment. There are a few exceptions such as [Prime Minister Jean-Claude] Juncker of Luxembourg, but Luxembourg is a bit too small to play a substantial role...

...If there was a president in Washington and he wanted to drop the atomic bomb on Tehran, the Europeans would be strong enough to say: “We are not part of it.” Right now, no one is strong enough in Europe to be in that position...

You get it? "If there was a president..." Yea you get it, he puts Obama in the same category with other European leaders, leaders without full understanding of the emergence of global money folks, "investment bankers", if you will. I prefer to call them parasites, unregulated, global parasites. He is more gentle with his language.

Gotta love this stuff.

Broken Financial Market

I have a desire to completely do away with “unregulated markets” of all kinds and “unregulated financial derivatives” of all kinds. In a world with over 6 Billion people, highly interconnected and mutually destined to live the same fate, there no longer exist any positive human element to Trillions of Dollars swathing around betting for or against any asset class or created asset class with the sole objective of raking as much money out of the global financial system as possible irrespective of the consequences of their actions on the lives, destinies or wellbeing of the human beings their actions touch.

These unregulated institutions function outside of the regulatory structures of any nation, global governing body, or regulated institutions, answer to no person or persons in any jurisdiction with which they operate and seek to make money irrespective of their impact on the human beings they may have positively or negatively. They need to be eliminated or regulated. They need all funding by regulated financial institutions to be terminated. Their products need to be liquidated. We need them no more.

All 401k accounts should go to cash now and stay in cash until the government fixes our vastly broken "free market" system. With thousands of people employing ever sophisticated technology with the sole purpose of taking as much cash out of the "free markets" and putting it in their pockets (clearly 60-80% of all volume in the "regulated markets" is being dictated by institutional traders, unregulated money), it is unwise for any hard working American to even contemplate putting money into this very broken system. I fear a entire generation of poverty stricken retirees within the next 5 years once again asking for a federal bail out of their worthless retirement accounts.

Lawmakers Cash In

There is nothing like a major reform bill to bring in the cash. Besides the fact that nothing in the way of financial reform has yet to emerge from Washington over two year from the collapse of Bear Stearns, the past few months have been a free for all money raising orgy as lawmakers head into election season. The financial lobby has uncorked all the expensive wine and is pouring it down to escape regulation of their industry gone amuck.

I just read this clip from a Reuters article:

U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi may wait until after the Memorial Day holiday to name negotiators to a bipartisan committee to resolve differences between House and Senate legislation to crack down on Wall Street, party aides said on Friday. Senate leaders are expected to appoint their conferees on Monday, Top U.S. Democratic lawmakers said they saw little difference between Wall Street reform bills passed by the House of Representatives and Senate and believe it will not take more than a month to reconcile the two.

Yea, its just two short sentences but they say it all. Drag this thing out to some time in June, maybe 4th of July so we can rake in lots more cash. The entire bill is looking more like a side show, full of goons and other spectacles to make the public think something is getting done. Meanwhile, the efforts to prop up the markets until this thing passed has failed miserably.

If we could only get just a bit more cash...

Some really serious stuff on Goldman

Greenspan's Perception 1

I just started reading "The Age of Turbulence" by Alan Greenspan. I only got to page 14 of the introduction when I could not believe what I was reading. He says, and I quote, "The decline of real (inflation-adjusted) long-term interest rates that has occurred in the past two decades has been associated with rising price-to-earnings rations for stocks, real estate and in fact all income-earning assets. The market value of assets worldwide between 1985 and 2006 as a consequence rose at a faster than that of nominal world GDP... This created a Major increase in world liquidity. Stock and bond prices, homes, commercial real estate, paintings, and most everything else joined in the boom. Homeowners in many developed nations were able to dip into their growing home equity to finance purchases beyond what their incomes could finance." and he goes on to glow about the annual rate of growth of the world economy from 2000-2006 of 3.2% per head adding that "Market capitalism, the engine that runs most of the world economy, seems to be doing it's job well."

Now I get it. Greenspan gloats for pages in his introduction, not about the American economy, which in my eyes from 1985-2006 had about 6 years of real growth (from 1994-2000 roughly), with the rest of the period either in recession, stagnation or outright "borrowed money asset inflation" just as he says, with NO REAL UNDERLYING GROWTH OR PROSPERITY, just a wholesale transfer of what wealth there was to the hands of those who orchestrated that transfer, but about the "global economy". It does not matter that we in the US had a serious and deep recession in the early 80's that did irreparable harm to our economy, that this recession was followed by a debt fueled asset bubble not unlike we just experienced that collapsed fantastically in the late 1980's resulting in the near melt-down of the US financial system, followed by a stagnant period of about 5 years with anemic growth (remember "It's the economy stupid" in 1992), declining standards of living, an implosion of our cities with drugs, crime and exodus, and the whole sale moving of our "productive" capacity out of the nation (accompanied with the gutting of the American education system creating a couple generations of useless ignorant graduates who were slaves to carbon and isolated from any means of economic advancement).

Greenspan is a complete globalist. He should be tried and convicted of NOT PERFORMING HIS DUTY AS HEAD OF THE FED ACCORDING TO THE OATH HE TOOK. It is obvious as hell his perceptions are global, not national. What do you do when the guy who runs the Fed in the US runs it as if he is running the "world economy" and makes no attempt to hide the fact that he measures his success at the Fed based on the success of the "world economy" not the US economy.

I get it now, I really get it now. The powerful multinational corporations and the success of their ability to exploit the rest of the planet for their profits is and has for some time WAY trumped the Fed's priorities of real growth, low inflation and full employment in the US. I have known since my undergraduate days at the University of Maryland that some 85% or more of the US "currency" in circulation was outside of the US. Now I understand, when we have a Fed Chairman like Greenspan running the Fed, this is how he sees his role, the US is about 15% of the economy he controls monetary policy over. What ignorant fool would think the Fed cares more than that about the American economy.

If you think I am off base, just read Greenspan's own introduction to his own book. You will get it. I need not say more.

Worthless Consultants and Overpaid Corporate Heads

I have frequently stressed how amazingly incompetent many folks who run major corporations are. Often they are part of a "club" of folks who are offered various posts leading major corporations in various capacities because they are in this "club". I wouldn't mention how one becomes part of this club but obviously it means you have access to the largest pools of money in the nation, corporate profits, cash flows, stock etc. and can rake millions out of the system.

So, occasionally I find an article that demonstrates how these incompetent executives make decisions by hiring consultants to make decisions for them instead of making themselves because well, they are incompetent or they have lawyers that tell them if they can point to a "professional consultant" as the cause of their disastrous decision that will protect them or whatever...

Here is a quote from an FT article I read today:

Citigroup’s disastrous foray into complex securities before the financial crisis was partly based on the recommendation of outside consultants hired to advise the bank’s leaders, a former senior manager revealed.

In testimony on Wednesday to an inquiry into the turmoil, Thomas Maheras, a former co-head of Citi’s investment bank, lifted the lid on a move that led to more than $50bn in losses and forced the US government to bail out the company.

Mr Maheras said that, following a study by a consulting firm – said by people close to the situation to be Oliver Wyman – in 2005, Citi decided to ramp up parts of its fixed income business, including in collateralised debt obligations. Oliver Wyman did not respond to a request for comment.

“Based in part on a careful study from outside consultants hired by our senior-most management, the company decided to expand certain areas of our fixed income business that we believed at the time offered opportunities for long-term growth,” Mr Maheras told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which was appointed by Congress.

Citi’s decision came when it was led by chief executive Chuck Prince, a lawyer who had served as general counsel and had relatively limited capital markets experience.

Need I say more?