Search This Blog

Search This Blog

Wikipedia

Search results

The Pentagong Show

The Pentagong Show
United State of Terror: Is Drone War Fair?

Friday, July 30, 2010

Wordplay

S.E.C. Charges Wyly Brothers With $550 Million Fraud ... Wyly brothers....would you invest with them? Plus they're from Texas, the largest criminal enterprise in the country. Like expecting to get balanced views from someone who calls themselves Fox News.

Would you entrust Madoff with your money?

If, as Einstein said, "Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe", where do you suppose the twerp that imposes ZIRP on the economy is trying to lead us? Zero interest rate policy = zero compound interest = zero growth.

Military-Industrial complex. Since we've systematically taken out the industrial, what it leaves us with is not complex; it's simple, it's The Military.

Market bull while a China shops: Let the arrogant behemoth snort and thrash itself to exhaustion. Since the 9/11 attacks, the US government has done more to destroy US democracy and the US military more to undermine US security than anything any ragtag bunch of virgin-ravager-hopefuls could have dreamed of.

Climate change: The most efficient way to slow down CO2 growth is to slow down its largest perpetrator: Cap that Trade. The elimination of the mere 5% of the global population that consumes in excess of 20% of the fossil-burning, CO2-spewing fuel heating the planet, leaves plenty for the rest of us. Most of the US's citizens haven't made that calculation. Most of the rest of the world has.

Go Ogle Google: The clamor over internet privacy and google spying on everybody is truly mind-numbing when the marching orders of the firm to its employees is right there in its name: Go Ogle.

Homeland Security: People thrown out of their homes and off their land in ever-increasing numbers have no security.

Land of the free: By far the largest prison population on the planet. By both sheer magnitude and percentage of its population.

Home of the brave: Where we conduct war in the Stealth of night against civilian targets and use Predatory, unmanned aircraft to carry out war by assassination.

Build America's Bonds: a borrower is slave to the lender. BAB'll on.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

The Krugmaniac's "Nospeak".


In this week's The Institutional Risk Analyst's article on government malfeasance, they started with a quote from "Words", a piece by Anthony Judt published in the July 15, 2010 issue of The New York Review of Books. In it he states that "Rather than suffering from the onset of "newspeak," we risk the rise of "nospeak ..."

In his championing of this new genre of obfuscating journalism, The Krugmaniac has been proving himself the master ever since the onset of the financial crisis, but with this week's piece entitled, "Who Cooked the Planet?", he outdoes himself.

Here we have the loudest proponent of Central Government stimulus, all but standing on this desk and yelling More, More, More!, accusing his Washington counterparts of greed and cowardice. The reason? They, (and he singles out John McCain here for special chastising, as he's "
a man willing to sacrifice his principles, and humanity’s future, for the sake of a few years added to his political career") are not taking enough action on climate change legislation.

But Krugman's just doing the same thing as the Senator he disparages. Every job created in the US economy creates an energy hog. It enables another American, whose carbon footprint will thence be 5 X's the size of the rest of the planet's inhabitants, to trundle up to the energy trough and burn more energy, support an energy-voracious, out-of-control military machine, and stoke oil companies to more hazardous areas of discovery and extraction. It is completely hypocritical to yell coward at the Congress (not that he's not right) while simultaneously screaming for more stimulus.

The danger that the world will continue down its insane path to humanity's self-inflicted demise comes not from climate-change-denying fools like McCain and his idiotic Palindromic running mate, Harass Sarah. They're politicians. Their self-interest, corruption, hypocrisy and use of "nospeak" to assure they never get caught in a lie, by simply never actually saying anything, are all in their job description.

The Krugmaniac, however is supposedly an economist and a journalist (although, with that clownish buffoon Ben Stein writing for the same paper and claiming the same credentials, it's hard to hold anybody to account anymore) , and the job of both those titles is to elucidate the issues for the public, not becloud them by spouting nonsense.

The answer to The Krugmaniac's question, "Who cooked the Planet?", is an undeniable, "We did". Call it "The Washington Consensus", "The End of History", "Globalization", "The American Dream", whatever you like, but you can't foist your energy-intensive, carbon-spewing, winner-take-all-and-the-rest-be-damned, capitalist model of resource extraction and capital accumulation-cum-creative destruction onto our entire earthly sphere, bringing our freedoms to them at the point of a gun, and then demurely ask "Who cooked the Planet?" It's like asking "Who Cooked Fallujah?" Gee, I wonder? Who do you think that could've been? Must've been those guys Greed and Cowardice. It sure as hell wasn't moi.

Instead, by pretending to be incensed at the Congress while simultaneously demanding that that same Body stimulate the very economic model that's brought the globe to this hazardous state, and pretending that there's no connection between the two, The Krugmaniac shows himself to be just another man willing to sacrifice his principles, and humanity’s future, for the sake of a few years added to his "journalistic" career.







Friday, July 23, 2010

TGIF: Timothy Geithner is Fatuous

While watching Charlie Rose interview Timothy Geithner the other night, I felt my cheek smart as Geithner gave me a resounding slap.

"The government doesn't create jobs", he told Mr. Rose.

There sits the Secretary of the Treasury, one of the plum positions in the federal bureaucracy, some would say it is the highest post in the President's cabinet, yet the holder of it doesn't consider it his job. That explains so much of what goes on in government. Like any slap in the face, it smarted, but it also left an afterglow, a tingling sensation reminiscent of pleasure as I remembered my post of 8/23/2008, entitled:

GM Drives itself off a Cliff.


In that post I reminded us of the fact that,

"On May 28, 1987, Mathias Rust took off from Helsinki, and, flying at low altitude to avoid radar detection, landed a small, single-engine plane in Moscow's Red Square.

This caused considerable embarrassment to the Politburo, and within a year the entire top echelon of the Soviet military was replaced.

On September 11, 2001, airline jets slammed into NYC's largest towering skyscrapers and into the Pentagon itself, killing thousands and wreaking havoc in not only those cities but to the airline industry and the economy as a whole. Not one government person lost their job."

But, now I see. No one lost their job because, as TG states, the government doesn't create jobs, so quite logically, no one in the federal employ is expected to perform a job function. Their positions are mere sinecures. How else to explain the Secretary's remark? His entire career has consisted of government positions, which, he can sit there and declare on national television were not jobs, which must be the truth, since, instead of falling out of his chair, the journalist Charlie Rose didn't even blink an eye.

Now doesn't that explain everything? Now there's logic to how Reagan can fire the entire staff of striking FAA employees for demanding more money, but after 9/11, GW fired nary a one for not noticing jet planes completely changing course and flying for 45 minutes, heading straight for the twin towers and the pentagon. Well, to lose one Twin Tower is unfortunate, but to lose two sounds like carelessness. For such carelessness, anyone in the private sector would be sacked and never find a job again. But now I see. As long as their keeping the chair warm, and dutifully taking their paychecks, Government sinecure-holders are safe from worry of dismissal, because, unlike a job, they have no actual responsibilities.

That's how Timothy Geithner can sit there, never having held down a job in the private sector, and even as government is the largest employer in the country, and regurgitate his Wall St. buddies' mantra that government doesn't create jobs, with one statement, making all federal, state and city employees, into little more than thieves, leaving the US in a worse state than the USSR was in. There, "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us" was the paradigm-du- jour. Here, they don't even have to pretend to work and they get not only better pay and access to union membership they get health care services, pension plans and no worries about peremptory dismissal, all by taking part of the earnings of the poor slobs who do have jobs, but who get none of those benefits. Instead they have to work at least five months of the year in order to provide those benefits to all those who don't.

No wonder everyone wants to get a federal sinecure.

No wonder China has been threatening for many months to replace the dollar as the world's reserve currency.

No wonder our largest creditor thinks American debt should be downgraded to junk.

Thanks for setting us straight Timmy. We can't wait to see how you "fix" the GSE's. But I'm sure it'll be to make sure those hard working stiffs pay even more for the housing of those who rake in more money than they can ever dream of making. Because don't forget, all those poor working stiffs, not only have to pay for all those sinecured positions, they also have to pay to guarantee their homeowner loans, and to pay for their mortgage interest deductions that they make on their over-valued homes, kept at that overpriced value by the illegal machinations of your partner at the Fed.

Just think. Between the two of you (yes just 2 of those federal sinecures, and not the highest paying, either), that's half a million bucks. And over you, Mr. Geithner, must be kept careful watch, because you're a well known tax cheat (http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/geithner-choice-for-treasury-questioned-on-his-tax-returns/).