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 Yea there is so much money behind keeping America in outdated pathetically old and backwards technology in every category it is not funny.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?

Real Terrorism vs. Financial Terrorism

Within days of some terrorists flying some airplanes into buildings our government leapt into action passing legislation to restrict American freedoms so fast it is obvious that all of this legislation was sitting on the shelf waiting for the opportunity to be implemented. The Patriot Act was obviously a pre-conceived piece of legislation that had broad backing of industry and right wing elements of the US government for some time. It passes with flying colors, even overwhelmingly by the more liberal members of the government who bent over and allowed themselves to be bullied into passing the legislation less they be deemed “un-patriotic or un-American” during this knee-jerk time of American history.

Yet TWO YEARS after the first major financial firm’s collapse (Bear Sterns) and 18 months after the rest of the market’s collapse as a result of what could be called “financial terrorism”, the domination of the market by unregulated risky and toxic financial derivatives traded, financed and created by unregulated and regulated financial institutions alike, with abandon and with no sense of respect or responsibility to the financial system or lives of people who would be affected by their reckless actions, we have yet to have ONE IOTA of regulation passed to address this run-amok unregulated toxic industry.

In fact, this very industry is betting Billions of Dollars with financial derivatives designed to “pay out” if the finances of the nation of Greece collapses. Yet no-one is asking, “Who is going to pay out on these derivatives if Greece truly collapses and will the actions of these gamblers in Greece’s debt create winners and losers and another market tsunami that will inevitably result in Greece becoming the first domino in a cascade of nations which will ultimately have their finances also collapse under the pressure of these financial speculators?”

It seems clear to me who “owns” Washington and it is not the citizens of the United States, but the “corporate super citizens” who have our government in their pockets and have just been give the green light to spend an unlimited amount of money buying and selling the individual legislators who make the rules in this nation.

I don’t give a damn about the finances of Greece. I do give a damn about the lack of governance in the US and the rising fascist, corporate domination of the structure with which Americans now live and will be increasingly living under in the future.

I also 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.

TED and the disconnect between American Intelligentsia and the WAR

The time has come to recognize America is in crises. The Crises is not a financial one. It is not a political one. It is not a moral one. It is not a health crisis. America’s crises is one of a total disconnect between those who are fortunate enough to live in a constant 72 degree environment; attend well endowed schools; make their way through to higher education; take well paid positions in corporate America or government; have access to first class health care; and otherwise lead financially secure lives, and the masses, the other 70% of the nation who lives from poverty to working / middle class. These are the folks who make up our enlisted military, manufacturing work force, retail front liners, service sector personnel, maintenance / trades persons and transportation folks. They are the backbone of our nation and they increasingly live totally different lives with a totally different set of rules from the 30% who have access to those things that make what is commonly referred to as a First World lifestyle.

Our nation is at WAR. In fact we are in TWO WARS!! American’s intelligentsia / privileged classes are NOT at WAR. They are NOT connected in any way to the wars we are fighting other than through their pocketbook indirectly via their government’s expenditures. They know / knew the wars we are now in were / are knee jerk reactions to a lucky strike by some determined folks who came up with a plot to cause a brief mayhem in the US. None of these people truly believe in either one of the pointless wars we are now engaged in. The intelligentsia did not vote for G. W. Bush. They did not support his wars. There might have been a few moments after September 11, 2001 where all people in America, regardless of socioeconomic background felt a solidarity, like they were all on the same bus together for a moment and no way to get off. Very soon after this brief moment, the intelligentsia desired in intellectual approach to resolving what were obviously major grievances by other human beings on the planet to US policies around the world. They thought perhaps the point was made by these radical terrorists and we should wake up and learn about what we were / are doing to cause such a radical display of hatred.

Then there was the response of the government they did not vote for. A division of Americans (and the world for that matter) purposefully orchestrated in simplistic, pathetically rudimentary terms, “You are with us or you are against us.” Why should the intelligentsia fight the idiots who were making decisions at the time? Why should they bother stopping a couple of insane wars? Their way of protesting was to not participate. Focus on education. Keep oneself in the privileged class. That guarantees you don’t have to be a part of the WAR, the DEATH, the DESTRUCTION. They could live their lives with clear conscience, learning and becoming part of the “machine”, the same “machine” that IS what the destruction of the World Trade Centers were all about, but turned a blind eye. They stopped short of finding out why the attack happened and forcing some kind of global reconciliation. That was not accepted thinking so why should they pursue it? Why should they push back against the “machine” be it the “war machine” the “corporate machine” the “think tank machine” the “PR machine”? What was / is there to gain?

So here we are. I am frustrated daily by this reality. I attended a dinner party recently in Texas where folks there were all involved in the emerging “social media” phenomena that has been sweeping the Internet for some time now. They had written books, developed on line marketing strategies, built businesses around Internet 2.0 and otherwise managed to make a living out of various business or technology skills. It was great fun being around such folks for an evening until it hits me as I sit amongst them that they don’t have a care in the world about what is going on half way around the world in a couple underdeveloped countries full of sand or rocks where people live in mud huts in mountains. Why should they? They have no “skin in the game” so to speak. After a while I just get nauseas. America is falling further and further behind on just about every technology available to man except that geared toward destruction and here I am sitting around a bunch of people who really think they got their shit together cause they can scrape out a few dollars form the economy and build nice houses. They are clueless. Most of America is clueless. Strange thing is, the rest of the world is not so clueless. They are just fine with having a bunch of idiots form some other country fighting wars they see no point to other than as a training ground for their own militaries. In a way, that is really all these wars are. Neither nation had / has any technology to create war. Neither nation had / has any productive means to employ technology necessary to create war. Neither nation even has the wherewithal to govern themselves let alone create the massive organizations necessary to wage war.

I read this in a news bulletin recently:

…Afghanistan, killing seven Americans, the agency (CIA) has carried out 11 drone missile strikes in Pakistan's tribal-area militant strongholds in the most intensive drone warfare program to date. The Times said the reports did not mention many, if any, civilian casualties in the campaign, which reportedly have killed about 90 people suspected of being militants. The newspaper said the strikes included a Jan. 6 bombing on a North Waziristan mud fortress that killed 17 people and a South Waziristan assault that killed at least 20 people.

Note the words “mud fortress”. Yes, the idiot Americans are waging “war” against people who live in “mud fortresses” in 2010!

From edinformatics.com: The MQ-1 Predator is a system, not just an aircraft. The fully operational system consists of four air vehicles (with sensors), a ground control station (GCS), a Predator primary satellite link communication suite and personnel. The Predator's infrared camera with digitally enhanced zoom has the capability of identifying the heat signature of a human body from an altitude of 3 km (10,000 feet); they carry 2 Hellfire or 2 Stinger Missiles.

As of late 2007, producing one Hellfire cost about $68,000 each, the Predator itself costs somewhere around $5-8 Million each and with ground support, computer guidance gear, satellite and other necessary infrastructure a mission with one of these armed drones is quite and undertaking. So, it is always good to know we are spending all of these resources and technology to destroy “mud fortresses”.

So why do I digress from my original point to these mundane details about drone attacks? Because this IS where the story lies. Because America’s intelligentsia has removed itself from all involvement in our crazy two “wars” this kind of thought process is being lost. Had anyone really thought about the pure insanity of expending over $1.5 Trillion in highly advanced military and personal resources to wage war against people who live in “mud fortresses” perhaps we would remove ourselves from such madness.

There is another very troubling issue at hand with respect to the last 8+ years of pointless wars. That is nobody is trying in any concise way to explain exactly what the hell we are trying to “accomplish” with these wars. There is no defined objective. I would argue the main reason is these are NOT wars at all. They are military exercises designed to train our next generation of military fighters in various terrain using the latest weaponry. In addition, we had the opportunity to rid ourselves of stockpiles of older munitions that would have required quite expensive and painstaking disassembly to make room for the latest generations of weapons. The fact that people who live in “mud fortresses” have been so effective in creating real opposition has been our biggest headache and in our insane, pointless, destructive, inhumane, genocidal “wars” against these unindustrialized people we have managed to “create” an entire generation of hardened, battle worn, determined men who would like nothing more than see the US implode under it’s own weight and they are all to willing to push it along.

So back to the question, what are we trying to accomplish with these wars? Intelligentsia really does not give a hoot. As long as they are able to go about their trendy little lives, creating fun little “social entrepreneurial” businesses and build their little houses they are just fine with leaving the “point” of these multi-trillion dollar wars to the idiots who wage them. But I care. I lived the first 2/3 of my life with the “cold war” a daily feature of the news. I remember being indoctrinated with the propaganda of the Great Big Evil Empire determined to “bury” the West. That big lie was pushed down my throat for 20 years AFTER there was any real threat to any western nation from what we know now was the most dysfunctional, technologically backward, impoverished, and down right intoxicated “empire” that ever existed. They only “existed” because an entire ecosystem had evolved around the need for their existence. Any threat to the West was extinguished from the day they built a wall to hold their own citizens in. The failure to see this reality by the general populace at the time was something history must ask itself even more than how humanity managed to allow a supposedly advanced society managed to eliminate over 6 million human beings of a particular religious / ethnic group. To think or have thought that an “empire” that had to wall it’s own citizens in would somehow become a threat to anyone outside of those walls is / was a mystery only capable of being propagated by use of all the resources of mass media and miss-education possible at the time.

That “Cold War” ended two decades ago and what do we have to show for it? We are spending more now on our military than any time during the Cold War. We are being killed and killing more people than during any time of the Cold War outside of the Vietnam and Korean wars, neither of them which were “won”. Our “superior” economic system is in shambles. Our “superior” political models are completely incapacitated, impotent, dysfunctional and destructive to the rights of the citizens they have been sworn to uphold. Our entire physical infrastructure is in decay. We have ¼ of the manufacturing base we had during the Cold War. We have had a completely stagnant or declining standard of living for the past 3 decades, two of which were After the Cold War. And these are just our own issues. What happened to the hundred million or so people living in the “nations” of the Soviet Union that have gained their independence? The intelligentsia does not know, care, give a damn obviously. They never did. As I write this article, the first full, post Soviet Union generation is completing high school, entering the university or the workforce. They are full of hope and possibility while the economic system they were told was their salvation is in ruins. They are looking at massive unemployment, dysfunctional governments with no power to help their nations predicaments. They are looking at the West and saying, “I am here. I am what you fought for ½ a century for. I am the future of my nations possibilities. Here I am.” But nobody is listening. The number of people leaving those countries is staggering (see article below for example). They are failing nations. What did we do after we “won” the Cold War? Nothing. No “Marshal Plan”; No organized assistance to help them build solid government structures with individual, political and economic freedom; No strategy to help them retool their decadent manufacturing base so they could effectively sustain their economies. Western businesses went about their usual ways, steal what you can, buy or disassemble any potential competitive threat, lend until you create desperate poverty, create concentrated global dominance over their economy, exploit their labor, turn them into consumers of Mc Multi-national Oligopolistic chemically induced products.

Then find another “enemy” to justify the Military Industrial Welfare Complex to justify handing over trillions of dollars of the citizens current and future hard earned money to the wealthy, powerful, controlling, big brother corporations who are slowly but surely propagating the next fascist revolution in America. The intelligentsia be damned.

That article from the Express in the UK:

MOLDOVANS WILL WIN RIGHT TO LIVE IN BRITAIN

Moldovans at a rally in their capital, Chisinau.
Tuesday February 2,2010
By Nick Fagge (The Express, UK)
A NEW wave of immigration from Eastern Europe edged closer last night after Romania promised to fast-track a back-door route into Britain.
Tens of thousands of citizens from Moldova – Europe’s poorest country – will soon be granted rights to live and work in the UK and other EU states as part of a controversial Bucharest policy offering Romanian citizenship.
Romanian President Traian Basescu reaffirmed his earlier pledge to offer EU rights to Moldovans, due to historical links, during a state visit to the impoverished former Soviet state last week.
And he announced the creation of a new citizenship agency to fast track the one million applications the Romanian government has already received to go alongside a new nationality law granting citizenship in just five months.
He said: “The government will issue an emergency decree to set up a special Nationality Agency granting Romanian citizenship.”
Moldovans do not need a visa to live or work in Romania but prize a EU passport for the right to travel to richer states such as the UK to seek work.
However last night there was growing anger that Romania will release a new influx of migrant workers. Sir Andrew Green of Migration Watch UK described the Romanian policy as “outrageous”.
He said: “It’s high time the EU addressed the issue of who is entitled to an EU passport.
“At present it’s entirely in the hands of individual governments who can reach bizarre decisions, often for internal political reasons.
“The Romanians, Greeks, Spanish and Italians all seem to dish out passports to a wide range of people with historical, often tenuous, connections to their countries.”
UKIP Euro MP Nigel Farage said: “Any pretence that Britain can control its borders, or that immigration can be contained while we stay in the European Union is destroyed by this revelation.”
War Moldova was part of Romania until 1940 when it was annexed by the Soviet Union. It gained independence in 1991 and 80 per cent of the four million population is ethnic Romanian. However, Moldova is now Europe’s poorest country. Eighty per cent of the population struggles to survive on less than £1 a day (well really more like £15/day. I think the rooky that wrote this was using stats from Mongolia or Mozambique). And nine out of 10 young Moldovans plan to leave the country, according to a UN report.
Some 600,000 Moldovans already work abroad in Britain and other parts of Europe – legally and illegally. More than a million eastern Europeans came to the UK after Britain opened its doors to the so-called A8 countries – Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovenia – when they joined the EU in 2004.
Tens of thousands more came from Romania and Bulgaria after they became EU members in 2007.

Porsche Bonuses to Employees Pale what was paid to CEO

Catching up on October news, I re-read an article I put aside about Porsche paying out bonuses to employees for 2009. The headline in the FT read "Porsche pays out bonuses to its workers" Nice huh? Well one quickly finds out the total bonus was Eur1,100 per each of it's 12,500 employees or Eur14 Million. The single "golden parachute" paid to it's exiting CEO, Wendelin Wiedeking, who left the company near bankruptcy, was Eur50 Million. 50 Million for one guy who nearly put 12,500 people out of work with his reckless behavior and we celebrate some bonus going to employees?

I have come to realize how flatly unjust the economic system we have is. When the CEO clubs of the world are raking $40 to $400 for every $1 paid to rank and file workers, the math really adds up. I would presume that many workers in many industries would have fully funded pensions and fully funded insurance if so much cash were not being stolen by the guys who run the companies that employ them. Theft is the only way to describe the outlandish pay packages awarded to each other. To argue somehow nobody would be willing to do these jobs without the pay is completely BS. People ran companies 30 years ago when the discrepancy was only a quarter of what it is today.

I also am nagged by the fact that I read every week the stock sales of "insiders" of major corporations in the US. In one recent listing of filings, the top 20 companies where insiders sold stock, the dollar value was $270 Million dollars worth. There were 64 people in this batch meaning the average amount raised by the 64 executives was about $4.2 Million each. These guys still hold substantial amounts of stock in their companies. This was just a recent filing of insider sales. This kind of thing happens all the time. Executives get "awarded" paper that can be sold for millions of dollars later. For what?

According to an article published in August 2009 by Emmanuel Saez "The top 1 percent incomes captured half of the overall economic growth over the period 1993-2007". This "income" is real income, real money in the banks of these folks. We talk about "money" being "lost" in the stock market etc. Well, the stock market "values" stocks at what people are willing to pay for them. This does not mean that at any one time the market is really worth the sum of all the stocks times what people are willing to pay because that much money does not "exist" at any one time to buy all the stock if everyone who held the stock wanted to sell. Witness what happened to the $600 Trillion derivative markets when nobody wanted to buy all of the sudden. Who has that much money to buy all that paper? Nobody.

So the "suckers" who loose money in the stock market paid hard cold cash for paper that became worth considerably less. But on the other end there are folks who are being "given" this same paper and being allowed to eventually "sell" it for cold hard cash to any willing sucker who will buy it. On any given day in the stock market a few thousand shares of any one company being sold are not even noticed but over time the cumulative effects of all this paper being "sold" by "insiders" adds up to real money, Tens of Billions of Dollars a year of real money going from the accounts of those who "bought" the stock (401k's, State Pensions etc.) to the accounts of those who "sold" it without ever having to "buy" it in the first place (or can buy it at a fraction of what they sold it for due to options valuations).

So 50% of the money "earned" in the US goes to 10% of it's people and all 12,500 workers combined at Porsche got 28% of the Bonus of one man. That is something to celebrate, yea they got bonuses! Let's party.

It is easy to see how completely out of wack our economic system has become and how absolutely unequal the US has become. We are in the same league as Brazil, Zambia, Venezuela, Uganda, Swaziland, Rwanda, Philippines, Mozambique, Guatemala... You get the picture.

GM Uses Off Shore Money to Bail out Daewoo

I found a good example (one of many) of how a regular business that was / is supposed to "produce" real products got so tied up with derivatives that the losses on the derivative bets alone have "bankrupt" the company.

GM rescued one such company in October with a cash injection of over $400 million. This from a company that has received billions of dollars in support by the American taxpayer. It is good to know that GM is only being audited by the Treasury for it's US operations isn't it? If they have $2 or $3 or $5 billion in the bank overseas, that just does not matter, they should only be shutting down the US operations without taxpayer help not overseas operations right? Keep them Koreans, Chinese, Indonesians, Brazilians or whoever employed cause for whatever reason, they can make money there, just not here in the US, the "previously" largest auto market in the world.

Yea, those poor folks at Daewoo (which was already 50.9% owned by GM) somehow managed to loose their "entire equity base", or lets say all of their cash / money / operating capital, you know, everything they need to pay bills with, by Won2,300bn of currency derivatives losses. That is nearly $2 Billion. What in God's name was an auto company doing with that kind of derivative exposure? With GM's 50.9% they basically "ran" the company right? Who the hell was running GM International operations at the time? Why wasn't he fired? Seems nobody was fired. Isn't that typical? Other major stake holders in Daewoo, Korea Development Bank, Shanghai Automotive of China and Suzuki had nothing to say. Hmm, well according the the FT article, Korea Development bank was Daewoo's largest lender. Think they were on the other side of that currency trade? This kind of information is just not available or talked about now is it?

What is almost comical is that Korea Development Bank (KDB) is asking for GM Daewoo to "share technology licenses for vehicles the jointly developer". Share with who? What the hell is that all about? China? I don't think KDB is going into the auto business any time soon, or do they own a substantial stake in some Chinese auto firm and want the technology to make cars in China? This is all a big mess. For Daewoo's largest creditor to make demands that are contrary to the interest in the company they own the stake in just does not make sense.

I still want to know what Daewoo was doing with Currency Derivative exposure that would allow them to loose $2 Billion and I want to know who bankrolled the trade and who was on the other side and why weren't a bunch of people fired?

Not much to ask...

Asia and Corruption Moving West

I think over the past 25 years I have been attentive to corporate / government governance, the same 25 years of the US's very rapidly evolving relationship with the economies of Asia, I have frequently thought American business / politics was learning some lessons from Asian business / governance.

The biggest lesson we seem to have learned is how to steal, lie, cheat and otherwise rake as much money out of our "system" be it corporate oligopolistic industries where CEO's have effectively stolen billions from the ever increasing "profits" of non competitive oligopolies or political figures figuring out how to transfer billions of dollars to their well connected "welfare" buddies or themselves through various creative "ventures".

Reading in the FT today about the $34 Billion (yes $34 Billion) of "misused funds in government accounts" in China reminds me that we still have a little way to go but not far, we are definitely catching up.

You can read the entire article here.

South Korea Propaganda Still Strong

I read an article today entitled "South Korean comics warn of North’s threat" in the FT. I lived in S. Korea in 1984/5 while working for the US Air Force. I was flabbergasted by the regular routine of "news" shown on TV that kept the South Korean population in constant fear of the North's impending invasion.

Not having lived there now for 25 years, my guess from this article is after the first democratic elections there in 1987, the overt propaganda by the state died down and from that time South Koreans have been able to concentrate on creating an industrial nation with international companies and first rate technology instead of being beaten down by authoritarian regimes with threats of the boogie man from the north.

So I was quite amused, surprised, disappointed and baffled when I read this article about comics created to "re-educate" the youth in South Korea about the "threat" to the north. The only "threat" from the north in Korea is that the people there will someday rise up and overthrow their dictatorship and over run the south to get out of the hellhole of the north.

It is high time that the South stops propagandizing about the north as a threat. If the north decided to "invade" the south tomorrow, the main fear would be that after an initial surge, the military of the north would immediately turn on their despotic leaders and reverse the incursion back on the north. They would then proceed to hang the leader and his cronies.

The south would have a huge humanitarian mission on its hands unlike anything that has been witnessed in the last 50 years. They would need billions of dollars of international support to manage the influx of refugees and to invest in the north to begin to bring them back from the dark ages.

So why the new comic book now? The only thing about North Korea I am 100% sure of is it's importance to the United States as a "strategic partner". Yes, you read that correctly. North Korea is one of our most important strategic allies in East Asia. Without their despotic leaders, nuclear games, authoritative government and repressed population, we would have no good reason to have 35,000 or so troops plus the major contingent of military "advisors" in the South to hedge ourselves against the real reason those troops are there, China. The ignorant, ethnocentric and paranoid powers in Washington still have 19th century mentalities towards world power and politics and "fears" of China emerging as a power that would somehow undermine US "dominance" in the world.

Truth be told, our ignorant, paranoid and ethnocentric Washington power circles are single-handedly destroying our prominence on the world stage as I write this. History will show that during one of the most important times in modern development, where the world is witnessing the emergence of secondary nations to economic relevance and power, Washington was busy spending trillions of dollars in pointless wars waged against people with no education or industrial capacity whatsoever. We are defeating ourselves before any real challenge has begun and South Korea is continuing to play a part in the internationally destructive role Washington has set up for itself and it's soon to be poverty stricken people.

Banks Paying Back What?

I have been reading about the banks "paying back TARP" and "regaining their freedom" from the Government reigns for some days now with disdain for what is being "sold" to us by the media as a "payback" of money injected into the banks during the "crises" in 2008.

There is still a major crisis. The pittances the banks are paying back are only part of the total sum of what the Fed / Government has done and is still doing to back these institutions. They should remain under supervision for everything they do and their management should be under salary caps. If they don't like it they should all go to work with hedge funds, the unwieldy banking institutions they run broken apart with their retail, banking, insurance operations etc. regulated and their trading arms closed or spun off to the pigs in the Hedge Fund industry (which should be regulated or shut down as well but for now this is highly unlikely).

I would like to remind you that besides the deregulation of banking in 1999 which was done to rubber stamp the mega Citycorp merger with Travelers our legislative body also deregulated leverage rules for leverage "not using bank deposits" as stated in a January 2009 Time Magazine article:

Regulators have long had a lower capital requirement on loans that are not backed by deposits. But in 2004, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) removed rules that capped leverage at 15 to 1 for investment-banking firms like Goldman Sachs. That allowed the firms to vastly expand their lending activities without raising a single new dollar of capital. One big backer of the rule change was reportedly former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who was then Goldman's CEO. By that time, the regulatory separation between investment banks and traditional banks had long since been removed, so traditional banks such as Citigroup and Bank of America shifted more and more of their lending operations to their investment-banking divisions, and leverage took off. By the end of 2007, many banks were lending $30 for every dollar they had in the vault. "Changing the net-capital rule was an unfortunate misjudgment by the SEC," says former SEC official Lee Pickard. "It's one of the leading contributors to the current financial crisis." (See who else is to blame.)

Now what is interesting is the "not raising a single dollar of capital" part. They could just go about doubling down on leverage. The "banking" industry had convinced our impotent and incompetent legislators as well as the idiot running the Fed at the time, Greenspan, that banks had installed sophisticated "risk management" tools that would allow them to manage this escalated leverage. I remember reading with amazement the monthly or quarterly updates by "investment banks" on Wall Street on how much capital they could "loose" or was “at risk” in a single day given information they had on hand and risk management practices in place. The numbers had grown to the hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases. These were "day" trading risks.

Back to the point, the Fed agreed not only to the injection of cash into the large money center banks in 2008 (agreed with the Treasury) but also to accept all kinds of before unheard of collateral against borrowings from the Fed. In addition the Fed, in bailing out some institutions like City, Bear Sterns, BoA and AIG agreed to assume hundreds of billions of dollars in losses on "assets" removed from their books that were "locked up" in the credit crises. These institutions alone account for nearly $500 Billion in "guarantees" against bad debts / assets on their books (well off books as well for technical / accounting purposes). Plus there is another $300 Billion PLUS that has been borrowed by financial institutions from the markets with implicit guarantees under the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program.

In addition the Fed just started it's $1.8 Trillion program to "become" the commercial paper industry, a Trillion and a half has been allocated to buy mortgages from the banks and GSE's, another Trillion program to buy consumer loan-backed securities called TALF, and $300 Billion in outright "injections" by the fed done through bond purchases from the banks.

As I write this, Goldman still has about $20 Billion on it's books it borrowed under TLGP so as far as I am concerned any PIG Institution that still has guaranteed money on it's books is the same as having the money injected directly. They were able to borrow at ridiculously low rates by having the direct guarantee of the government, hence they should be highly regulated until they are COMPLETELY CLEAN of any support by the government.

Oh, well that is not really possible now is it? The government "being" the mortgage market, consumer credit market, commercial backed mortgage market, commercial paper market etc. In other words, none of these intuitions could even continue to function under anything like "normal" market conditions without the FED putting about $7 Trillion in support out there. You can see some of the numbers here.

So, basically, I can say “The Hell with them all”. They so totally ruined the financial system they should not be “free” to do anything without heavy government regulation until this entire mess is cleaned up. So where are the Chiefs going to go if the entire finance industry is heavily regulated? Guess they will just have to accept “government” salaries like doctors in a government health plan until they can learn to “walk” on their own again. Alternatively they could all go to the hedge fund industry until some government with a spine shuts that worthless unregulated industry down completely.

For a little comedy check out this 12 part short video series on the Fed.

For very extensive analysis of Fed workings through the crises check this out.

End of Support for President Obama

From this moment forward I am categorically removing my support for President Obama. The tripling of troops in Afghanistan under his watch has absolutely destroyed my faith in him as an independent thinker, diplomat, and logical man, a president who has the best interest of the citizens of America in mind.

The US has spent over a Trillion Dollars on the “war” in Iraq. (A nation about the size of California) Let me remind you, Iraq is, was and never has been a “war”. When we “invaded” Iraq, they had no standing army (only the president’s “guard” which was basically in place to keep the bully, Saddem Hussein, in power), no standing air force and no standing navy. They had been through over 10 years of embargo. Iraq was nothing more than a training exercise for our military, a large adrenaline surge for troops and to train the next generation of our military (not to mention a great way to dump piles of legacy munitions sitting around in storage depots).

Like any people who resent being invaded, Iraq has been fighting back with whatever means they have and we know what the result has been. Thousands of American solders killed, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and militants (Iraq version of “freedom fighters”) killed. What for? Did you ever loose sleep worrying about the “Iraq Threat” on the US? Of course not, cause there is and never was one.

Can you give me an example of what a Trillion Dollars spent in the State of California would look like? Can you give me an example of what $350 Billion would look like? We spent at least that much “rebuilding” Iraq, yet they still have no reliable electricity, water or reliable means of communications to show for it. Oh, but lets not forget, the multitude of American companies, well connected to the government, who hire high paid lobbyist, consultant firms, and give lavishly to our legislators, directly and indirectly in the many creative ways created over the years to pay your congressman or senator without putting it directly in their pocket. Lets not forget the benefits to our military leaders who are ushered into the private sector with tremendous benefits after leaving service as payment for helping the American Military Establishment (Corporate Welfare to the highest degree) win contracts.

So that was Iraq. Now we have Afghanistan, another nation comparable in size to one American state, this time Texas. The latest move by President Obama puts nearly 100,000 troops in Afghanistan. Yea, Afghanistan, a rocky arid nation with little “official” standing army, no navy, no air force and no technology, nearly no industrial productive capacity at all, and they are largely uneducated. Does this sound like a nation with the capacity to harm or otherwise threaten the US? They cannot even “create” a gun let alone any more sophisticated “devise” capable of harming another individual let alone another nation.

So lets look at the “real enemy” over there headed by Osama Bin Laden (if he is in fact still alive, it is also worth noting he is not an “issue” any longer), a bunch of folks who have idealistic reasons to oppose the US. I must say I don’t disagree with their “political” reasons to oppose us. They want the US off of Muslim soil. So be it, get off of their soil. Let them live like it is the 6th century if that is what they want to do. Rational people will leave and go to other countries just as all the talent has left Africa, and used to (still do to some extent) leave Latin American nations, and leave South Asian nations and former Soviet Nations for better opportunity not under repressive regimes in their own nations (although Bush and now Obama seem to be learning more from the oppressive nations on this plane then from any ideologically free thinking ideas of the past). Being on their soil serves us no purpose. The oil in the Mid East is worth nothing in the ground. They have no other natural resources. They will sell it. Fine. What are we doing there? They have no technology. We (Western nations with technology) sell them what they need to take the oil out of the ground, transport it, refine it and ship it. You name it. They are completely unable to even exploit their only resource without the Western Nations and their technology. So what do we have to worry about? We will get paid. Secondly, they have nothing useful to do with all the money they make on oil sales without the West again. They cannot build anything without raw materials, western finished materials, tools, machines etc. They cannot invest the cash in anything worthwhile in the Middle East so they buy stakes in Western companies where they can benefit from the technology and innovation and wealth creation of the nations around the world that produce things other than oil.

What it the heck would any rational person be doing on land that is opposed by a growing bunch of radical religious folks when the land has no productive value to us whatsoever?

Now that “enemy”, yea, a bunch of guys have some rudimentary schools where they “teach” ignorant poverty stricken men from around the region how to bomb stuff and ideologically oppose Western culture. Well, we pretty much do the same thing, only with technology. We create “enemies”, the “evil empire” the “axis of evil” the “cancer of the Taliban” (as Pres. Obama put it, which really burns me up). We have to create enemies so we (power) can justify the half trillion a year in direct military spending and the other billions in indirect military spending. This is about American Money, not enemies; American Power Circles, not Taliban; American imperialism, not threat.

A bunch of guys with the equivalent of a few hundred thousand dollars, some flight training and some box cutters has created war in 2 nations and expenditures per capita not matched since a world war!! Can you imagine if someone would have said to you 10 years ago, that after a couple prior attempts, some guys would manage to actually take down a couple of tall buildings in NYC and after that America would spend over $2 Trillion Dollars and engage themselves in a decade “war” with 2 nations that together are about the size of California and Texas using hundreds of thousands of American military and civilian personnel, cause the deaths and maming of US and allied troops triple the number of people killed in the NYC take down, cause directly or indirectly around 500,000 civilian and insurgent (justified insurgents I might add) deaths in the invaded countries? (I could go on but you get the point.)

I could discuss all of the idiot decisions made by our prior government lead by a president with the intellect of a door knob but it’s all out there. One more rant will not solve anything. However, I will not, will not, will not support a man that sold such a rational line of diplomacy during his run for power but after taking power the result is his selling (or attempting to sell) a decision to escalate the “war” in Afghanistan. There is no justification. I don’t care what his “advisors” said; he is not seeing the world clearly any longer. I don’t know what “deal” he made to get into the White House but it is obvious that “power circles” have the better of him and he does not have the backbone or no longer has the incentive to do what is right for American citizens and our Nation. Better put, he obviously has GREAT incentive to do what is wrong.

If you want a nice round up of his decision (not nearly complete but what do you expect from 9 minutes of media?) check out this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDmen_2yoQY

For information on the land sizes of the nations involved you can see the US at
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0108355.html
And the world at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_area

As for me, I am signing off my support for President Obama in a Great Big Way and I encourage you to do the same. This man is no longer representing me.

Peace.

The Future of "Aid"

I read this article in the FT in August. I kept it. I have been talking about how Africa will be re-colonized by the middle of this century for some time, not the same way as in the last century or two, but in a new way, one involving control through production and resource allocation with people in place to make this possible being both local and from the colonial powers.

You may wonder what an FT article about how 45% of US Aid to Pakistan gets "distributed" to "well paid consultants" or other specialists overseeing international aid instead of to the "project" that the Aid was meant to benefit, has to do with colonizing Africa.

The answer is simple. The US Government is yet again attempting to install a kind of overriding system to track every dollar in the latest "stimulus" money. I say "again" because some years ago this type of tracking system was supposed to be in place at least in the military, yet there is still an extreme amount of waste and fraud in every dollar the Defense Department spends, mostly because all of this spending is still controlled by "people" who know how to abuse the cash and of course much of the Defense Department spending is nothing but Welfare for well fed contractors and pay backs for whatever folks are due big contracts to bail them out of the latest financial mess enveloping our nation.

Anyway, the time has come for a direct Aid system that is completely divorced from the "Aid Machine" of consultants, ex-peace corp inbreds, grant writing professionals and other "non-profit" do good organizations that scour the world looking for "projects" to fund and other ways to scrape cash from the aid budgets coming out of Washington. All US Aid should be generated from request of the people who would directly benefit from the aid in the country where it will be granted. Yes there are many models for how this could be accomplished but suffice to say, direct request from the people / nation needing the aid and who will be responsible for implementing the program is paramount.

All grants should have a "formula" based on a set of parameters, like the size of the grant, the intensity of the project, the purpose etc. where "management" of the grant as a portion of expense is built in along with other guidelines. The people submitting the grant request would in fact be able to work with these "formulas" and argue their percentages etc. when such flexibility is warranted.

All grants should be distributed electronically. There should never be "cash" until actual designated expenses are distributed and only where non-electronic forms of payment are necessary. Every dollar should be tracked to the final recipient and every final recipient should have a direct role to play in implementing the program the grant is for.

The entire "industry" in Washington of people who make a living scraping as much money as possible from every US Aid dollar should be put out of business. I live in this town and although I don't "run" regularly in circles of these folks, I have and do run into them relatively often. I have yet to meet ONE person in this US Aid "industry" who I would say is qualified to go to another country and tell folks there how to do anything.

I live in a city that sold its above ground rail system to GM for $1 and it was promptly dismantled; a city that has no pedestrian friendly public areas to partake in civil discourse (with the exception of the "Mall" and surrounding National Park, areas which are not where the "citizens" of this city live, work and play); a city where the public education system from K through University is so poorly able to accomplish it's task it looses 50% of its students; a city that has just experienced a building boom but assumes there will never be young adults with children ever living here, hence no regulations to make anything suitable for children; a city that still dumps vast amounts of it's raw sewage into the adjacent waterways; a city that has plenty of "affordable housing" as long as you don't mind being mugged, shot or otherwise harassed for living there; a city that pays out vast amounts of money to developers and corporations to bring "national retail" to its center yet fails to provide reasonable cost municipal parking to serve the majority of its residents un or under served by public transportation to get there; a city that has the highest percentage of administrators per-capita in the US running everything from it's metro transportation service, fire and police service to public administration getting paid over $100,000 a year and who do absolutely nothing; a city with inadequate or unreliable medical facilities for a vast number of its residents; a city with crime and incarceration rates that are more comparable to a developing drug lord nation. I could go on. I have not event touched the city from the Federal level yet, the corruption, incompetence, waste, crime, war etc. created by our national government.

There are these people who actually think or have been led to think they can help someone in another country do ANYTHING! It astounds me. Most people when I bring this up are politely offended when I simply ask them "What qualifications do you have that make you think you have the ability to implement anything to improve the lives of folks in another part of the world when you are a of this country, which is such a complete mess and is responsible for more death, destruction and terror around the world than any other one or group of countries combined?"

Enough said.