I was La Paz, Baja California for 3 weeks. Tried to stay away from a computer as much as I could. I indulged in John Le Carré’s novel “The Mission Song”. Took plenty of time to relax and enjoy the people I know there.
The only thing I’ve noticed upon my return is over 400 spam messages on my blog. Leading me to conclude that I must have annoyed some zombie out there.
Like Gandhi said:
First they ignore you
Then they laugh at you
Then they fight you
Then they loose
Dumb blond short seller:
How long do you think a system can last where the agents or their “designees” are able and allowed to sell a segment of the market that they don’t have or own in order to manage public perception?
Perhaps the Mayan calendar is right about the end of a systemic world as we know it in 2012.
“They make us believe it’s capitalist and free market system.
We make them believe we buy it”
Swami ZYs1
Flight Rage Incident Reveals the Dark Side of Osteen’s ‘Prosperity Gospel’
By Barbara Ehrenreich, AlterNet.org
“For heartsick former supporters of John Edwards, this week offers an edifying tabloid alternative: the civil trial of Victoria Osteen, wife of megachurch minister and televangelist Joel Osteen, for assaulting a flight attendant. The issue was what is sometimes described as a “spill” and sometimes as a “stain” on the armrest of Mrs. Osteen’s first-class seat, which the flight attendant refused to clean up with sufficient alacrity because she was busy assisting others aboard. Although there is no evidence that the spill consisted of tuberculosis-ridden phlegm or avian flu-rich bird poop, Osteen was mightily pissed, allegedly pushing and punching the flight attendant and making such a ruckus that the Osteen family had to be removed from the flight.
I would be more sympathetic to the flight attendant, Sharon Brown, if she weren’t demanding 10 percent of Osteen’s fortune to compensate for injuries including a “loss of faith” and hemorrhoids somehow incurred from a frontal assault. But it isn’t easy being a flight attendant in this era of layoffs, pay cuts and packed planes — certainly not compared to being a millionaire on her way to Vail. Whatever dubious substance Victoria Osteen faced on that first-class armrest, she should have been able to derive some serenity from the fact that the church she co-pastors draws 40,000 worshippers a week and that her husband has been dubbed “America’s Most Influential Christian.”
“Recently Congress passed the American Housing Rescue and Foreclosure Prevention Act., also known as the Housing Bill. Its passage was lauded by many who are legitimately concerned about foreclosures and the housing market in our country’s economy. I was asked how I could vote against a bill to help American homeowners, but I found this bill to have more to do with helping big banks than helping average Americans.
The answer is that there is more to any bill than its name or the headlines surrounding it. If one only paid attention to bill titles, one could happily vote for almost any bill put to a vote on the floor. Titles do not tell the complete story of a bill’s provisions, and many titles are downright deceptive and come close to emotional blackmail of legislators. But we cannot afford to be fooled by fancy titles. The housing bill could perhaps be more aptly named The Big Banking Bailout at Taxpayer Expense Act as large sections of it were written by big banking lobbyists according to Evans and Novak reporter Tim Carney’s Capitol Hill sources. At least that title would be honest…”
We sent a copy of our essay “Religio and American Civil Religion” to Professor Emeritus of Sociology Robert N. Bellah at Berkeley, as a token of our appreciation for his seminal work on American civil religion for which we are indebted.
We are pleased and honored by his comments:
“Thank you very much for your paper on Religio and American Civil Religion. I found it most interesting and learned from it, both about Roman religion and about Bush’s version of civil religion.”
How to Put Karl Rove Away for Years
by David Swanson, davidswanson.org
“Common Cause recently advocated inherent contempt with this statement: “Under the inherent contempt power, the House Sergeant-at-Arms has the authority to take Karl Rove into custody and bring him to the House where his contempt case can be tried, presumably, by a standing or select committee. If he is found by the House to be in Contempt of Congress, he can be imprisoned for an amount of time determined by the House (not to exceed the term of the 110th Congress which ends the beginning of January 2009) or until he agrees to testify. The Supreme Court has recognized the power of the House to enforce its own subpoenas through the inherent contempt provision, stating that without it, Congress ‘would be exposed to every indignity and interruption that rudeness, caprice or even conspiracy may mediate against it.’ Before Congress asked the Justice Department to try contempt cases on its behalf, the inherent contempt power was used more than 85 times between 1795 and 1934, mostly to compel testimony and documents”.”
The Australian virgin
A very nice, innocent woman wants to get married, but she is only willing to marry a man if he has never had sex with another woman.
After several unsuccessful years of searching, she decides to take out a personal ad. She ends up corresponding with a man who has lived his entire life in the Australian Outback and he has no experience with women. She is very happy with him, and she feels that they are perfect for each other…
So, they end up getting married. On their wedding night, she goes into the bathroom to prepare for the evening. When she returns to the bedroom, she finds her new husband standing in the middle of the room, naked. All the furniture from the room is piled in one corner.
‘What happened?’ she asks.
‘I’ve never been with a woman’ he says, ‘But if it’s anything like a kangaroo, I’m gonna need all the room I can get!’
It’s amazing to see China embracing a capitalist market economy while the US government is nationalizing its banking industry and becoming more and more a socialist state.
The term “McCommunism” is taken from the article by Noami Klein entitled: “China Unveils Frightening Futuristic Police State at Olympics“
Fifty eight years after his death, George Orwell diaries are being posted posthumously on a newly created blog:
‘When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page’, wrote George Orwell, in his 1939 essay on Charles Dickens.
From 9th August 2008, you will be able to gather your own impression of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual piece of writing: his diaries. The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict…”
How Much Change Does Robert Rubin Believe In?
by Steve Weissman, truthout.com
“Robert Rubin..the very model of a modern corporate liberal, he moved with ease from the top of Goldman Sachs to become President Bill Clinton’s chief economic adviser and then secretary of the Treasury. Clinton had run as a populist on an economic platform created principally by Robert Reich, who became his labor secretary. But Rubin’s Wall Street “realism” quickly trumped Reich’s academic populism, and Clinton made the North American Free Trade Agreement his top priority over universal health care. He also eliminated the budget deficit left to him by the first Bush rather than rebuilding the nation’s already crumbling infrastructure, and went along with the economic deregulation that Phil Gramm was pushing in the Republican-led Congress.
To Rubin’s credit, eliminating the deficit helped fuel the prosperity of the Clinton years. To Rubin’s shame, the Clinton free trade agreements provided no safety net for American workers whose jobs went abroad, while the newly unregulated financial markets helped create the speculative crap shoot that led directly to our current economic woes.
Dubbed by Clinton the “greatest secretary of the Treasury since Alexander Hamilton,” Rubin left the administration and joined Citigroup, the nation’s largest financial conglomerate, whose very existence was made legal by the deregulation measures he had convinced Clinton to accept. According to The Wall Street Journal, Citigroup has so far paid Rubin more than $100 million to serve as chairman of its executive committee, and leaves him free to serve as a key economic adviser to Barack Obama. Even more telling, Rubin’s protégé, Jason Furman, now heads Obama’s paid economic staff and is expected to join Obama in the White House should he win in November.
Would a President Obama follow in Bill Clinton’s footsteps, listening more to Rubin & Co. than to Robert Reich, labor union leaders and the growing number of economic populists in Congress? If Obama does lean toward Rubinomics, I do not expect a whole lot of change I can believe in…”
The Heart of the Economic Mess
Robert Reich’s Blog
“The heart of the matter isn’t the collapse in housing prices or even the frenetic rise in oil and food prices. These are contributing to the mess but they are not creating it directly. The basic reality is this: For most Americans, earnings have not kept up with the cost of living. This is not a new phenomenon but it has finally caught up with the pocketbooks of average people. If you look at the earnings of non-government workers, especially the hourly workers who comprise 80 percent of the workforce, you’ll find they are barely higher than they were in the mid-1970s, adjusted for inflation. The income of a man in his 30s is now 12 percent below that of a man his age three decades ago. Per-person productivity has grown considerably since then, but most Americans have not reaped the benefits of those productivity gains. They’ve gone largely to the top.
Inequality on this scale is bad for many reasons but it is also bad for the economy. The wealthy devote a smaller percentage of their earnings to buying things than the rest of us because, after all, they’re rich. They already have most of what they want. Instead of buying, the very wealthy are more likely to invest their earnings wherever around the world they can get the highest return.
This underlying earnings problem has been masked for years as middle- and lower-income Americans found means to live beyond their paychecks. But they have now run out of such coping mechanisms. As I’ve noted elsewhere, the first coping mechanism was to send more women into paid work. Most women streamed into the work force in the 1970s less because new professional opportunities opened up to them than because they had to prop up family incomes. The percentage of American working mothers with school-age children has almost doubled since 1970 — to more than 70 percent. But there’s a limit to how many mothers can maintain paying jobs.
So Americans turned to a second way of spending beyond their hourly wages. They worked more hours. The typical American now works more each year than he or she did three decades ago. Americans became veritable workaholics, putting in 350 more hours a year than the average European, more even than the notoriously industrious Japanese.
But there’s also a limit to how many hours Americans can put into work, so Americans turned to a third coping mechanism. They began to borrow. With housing prices rising briskly through the 1990s and even faster from 2002 to 2006, they turned their homes into piggy banks by refinancing home mortgages and taking out home-equity loans. But this third strategy also had a built-in limit. And now, with the bursting of the housing bubble, the piggy banks are closing. Americans are reaching the end of their ability to borrow and lenders have reached the end of their capacity to lend. Credit-card debt, meanwhile, has reached dangerous proportions. Banks are now pulling back…”
Love & marriage:
Three women: one engaged, one married and one a mistress, are chatting about their relationships and decided to amaze their men.
That night all three will wear black leather bras, stiletto heels and a mask over their eyes.
After a few days they meet up for lunch.
The engaged woman: The other night when my boyfriend came over he found me with a black leather bodice, tall stilettos and a mask. He saw me and said, “You are the woman of my life. I love you.” Then we made love all night long.
The mistress: Me too! The other night I met my lover at his office and I was wearing the leather bodice, heels, mask over my eyes and a raincoat. When I opened the raincoat he didn’t say a word, but we had wild sex all night.
The married woman: I sent the kids to stay at my mother’s house for the night. When my husband came home I was wearing the leather bodice, black stockings, stilettos and a mask over my eyes. As soon as he came in the door and saw me he said, “What’s for dinner, Batman?”
We’re glad to read about bottom-up vs top-down theory, one that is close to our hearts, especially when it comes from Robert Reich a well known economist and a Washington DC insiders and form policy makers…
RGE Monitor, Nouriel Roubini
“On the U.S. EconoMonitor, the debate on the nationalization of the
mortgage market continued. Robert Reich argued that Obama’s bottom-up economic philosophy makes more sense in a globalized
What Bush and Batman Have in Common
by Andrew Klavan, New York TimesBrought to our attention by: truthdig.com
Our man in New York is having a VISION!
“Oh, wait a minute. That’s not a bat, actually. In fact, when you trace
the outline with your finger, it looks kind of like . . . a “W.”
There seems to me no question that the
Batman film “The Dark Knight,” currently breaking every box office
record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude
and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of
terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting
terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes
has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency,
certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency
is past.
And like W, Batman understands that there
is no moral equivalence between a free society—in which people
sometimes make the wrong choices—and a criminal sect bent on
destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly;
the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell…”
What does Klavan and Bush have in Common:
They’re both Wankers…
Several months ago to my great surprise and relief I stopped received spam on my main email account with AT&T.
And all of the sudden in the last few days I have been bombarded with spam again. I found out that the same thing happened to my colleague. Strange…
I was wondering if the fact that President Bush signed FISA into law and as a result granted immunity to the big telecoms companies for illegally spying on Americans and violating the Constitution had anything to do with this resurgence of spam?
Somehow I smell something fishy here.
Nightmare on Wall Street
Bill Moyers interviews William Greider
“Usury, to be clear about it, is rich people taking advantage of poor people by lending them money on terms that are sure to make them fail. All three of the great religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, had a moral prohibition against usury because they recognized that society can’t function like that. People of great wealth and their institutions like banks naturally have the power to overwhelm people of lesser means. And you can’t allow that in a decent society. It won’t survive…”
A Modest Proposal
by Ted Butler
“First and foremost, the banning of all short selling would undoubtedly cause a huge rally in the stock market, as an important source of selling pressure would disappear. Now some may say that this would be an artificial boost to stock prices, but I would counter that it was the cumulative effect of all past and open short selling that was an artificial depressant to stock prices. Any price boost would be the result of breaking that artificial price depressant.
Do not underestimate the great collective benefit that the banning of all short selling in all stocks would have to the many millions of investors who depend on the stock market for a good part of their savings and wealth. I’m talking about pensions and retirement accounts and the funds that provide for education and health care. Compare the benefit to all those tens of millions of investors of banning stock short selling versus the damage that might be suffered by the few thousand dedicated short sellers. This is about the greater good and the welfare of the country. We have many big problems that we can do little about in the short term. Banning all stock short selling is something that can be done easily and effectively, especially if there are no exceptions. By allowing no exceptions, enforcement becomes a breeze. Any short selling should cause a securities firm or individual to lose their license or be banned from trading. Nice and simple. No big government bureaucracy or taxpayer burden.
Second, stocks are legal assets and property, like real estate, or bonds or bank deposits. In just about every other asset and property, short selling doesn’t exist. Try selling a piece of real estate that doesn’t belong to you, and see how fast you go to jail. Selling something you don’t own, whether borrowed from someone else or not, is fraud, pure and simple. (For the purpose of this article I am using the first definition of fraud given by Wikipedia, namely, “In the broadest sense, fraud is a deception made for personal gain”).
Ask yourself this, why is selling something you don’t own fraudulent in every walk of life, except in stocks? Why isn’t it considered a fraud in stocks? The answer is because it has been going on for so long, that no one thinks any longer about why we allowed it to exist in the first place…
Please consider that any company that wants to issue new stock must adhere to rigid rules and disclosure requirements. Everything must be done in a very transparent manner. Yet short sellers take the money that buyers pay for shares and create new stock at will, on a completely unauthorized and opaque basis. Companies must disclose everything in order to issue shares, while shorts don’t disclose anything. That’s messed up. Banning short sales would end that. Why the managements of every public company don’t speak up against short selling is beyond me…
The unsuspecting legitimate buyer of shorted shares is purchasing, in a very real sense, illegitimate shares. If a buyer holds shares “issued” by a short seller, it may negate voting rights on corporate affairs, among other things. At a minimum, heavy shorting of any stock creates the incentive and raises the potential for dirty tricks, such as illegal rumor mongering, another issue the SEC has said it was pursuing. If heavy short positions didn’t exist, there would be much less likelihood of false negative rumors or bear raids. Banning short selling would eliminate a whole host of potential problems…
Undoubtedly, there are strong and entrenched interests in place that profit from the practice of short selling. From the short sellers themselves, to the lenders and borrowers of shares, to the brokers the execute the transactions, this is big business. They will lobby for the status quo. But I would ask you to step back and imagine that stock short selling never before existed, but was being proposed for the very first time. Try to frame the issues on that basis, starting with the question, “how can you sell a real asset that you don’t own, or worse, that belongs to someone else?”
