Dancing In The Dark

The Federal Reserve moved Wednesday with other major central banks in a co-ordinated dance affecting world monetary policy. In the co-ordinated move with the Chinese Central Bank, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank, and the central banks of Britain, Canada and Switzerland, the United States Federal Reserve shared in a new version of QE2, easing the liquidity requirements to to the Euroepan Central Bank for European banks as a whole. Apparently to avoid, in times of dependency, world-wide runs on all banks. Just as European banks are dumping European government debt.

The Chinese government on Wednesday evening unexpectedly reversed its year-long move toward tighter monetary policy which had been aimed at curbing inflation which still persists. Weakening economic growth has now replaced inflation as the top worry in China, with the dramatic fall in exports to Europe announced within the past thirty days. The Chinese announcement to buttress the financial system, a particular surprise because the central bank usually announces moves on Friday evenings, came after the Shanghai stock market had slumped 3.3 percent on worries that the government might not act. The reduction in the so-called reserve requirement ratio – an important step to encourage banks to resume lending – came after the central bank had in 2011 increased interest rates three times, and raised the reserve requirement ratio six times.

In a speech in San Francisco Fed’s vice chair, Janet Yellen, on Tuesday underscored “the urgency of strengthened international policy cooperation”. She said that “the global economy is facing critical challenges.” The Federal Reserve then acted Wednesday morning with other major central banks to increase the availability of dollars outside the United States, reflecting a growing concern about the fallout of the European debt crisis. Banks outside the euro zone have been cutting their lines of credit to those inside the zone, as the United States was about to embark on a new stress test of its lenders which includes contingency planning against further disruptions in Europe. It would not be be surprising if the planned new stress testing would provoke American banks to cut their exposure to their euro counterparts, further exacerbating European funding problems.

It’s a wonderful life. As QE2 sails to Europe, on the back of the Federal Reserve Bank. The terms of the revised agreement announced by the Federal Reserve Wednesday reduces to 0.5 percentage points an existing premium of one percentage point, cutting the cost nearly in half. A most recent loan to the Euroepan Central Bank which had carried an interest rate of 1.08 percent, now would cost 0.58 percent.

Xia Bin is a member of the Chinese Central Bank who had said one year ago that U.S. quantitative easing amounted to “uncontrolled” money printing. The academic member of the Chinese central bank, Xia Bin had been quoted this week as saying a crucial part of China’s fine-tuning of monetary policy is to differentiate reserve requirements between banks. He is probably not as well tuned in as Janet Yellin, at least concerning reductions in the reserve requirement ratio.

Visual Web Search

Newly Engineered European Bailouts

“We are in the middle of a crisis. It is not over. It is to be taken seriously, but it is centrally an American crisis.” – German Finance Ministry spokesman Torsten Albig on September 15, 2008.

Economic physics. Can you spell C R A S H? The Great Depression was all about a crash. Credit markets dried up after The Crash on Wall Street. Secular declines, market trends which head in the opposite direction, follow crashes in long time frames anywhere from five to twenty-five years. With all the earmarks of deflation now setting in, in Europe.

WHILE EUROPE SLEPT

“At this stage, we’re quite confident.” – A spokesman for the French Finance Ministry, who said that French banks and French government debt agency, Agence France-Tresor, are not in danger from the market turmoil in the U.S. on September 15, 2008

The system. European banks have become pretend banks, with no money. Across Europe, according to Autonomous Research, loans to banks exceed their deposits by 6 percent. Among French banks, loans exceed deposits by 19 percent. In Greece, they swamp deposits by 32 percent.

THREE YEARS AFTER

On Saturday, Finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 called on European leaders to deliver a comprehensive plan to address the European continent’s deepening sovereign-debt crisis. On Wednesday, representatives of the European Union had told European banks that they need to raise more capital to protect themselves against losses on sovereign debt, or politicians will do it. The G20 meeting included non-European countries who have pushed Europe to speed up the plan taking shape among euro-zone countries to address the euro crisis, with the scramble to save the euro and prevent Greece’s debt woes from spreading. Ah, I think they have not been reading the papers about the monetary wars.

About the market dynamics which serve as the regulator out of control world of currency. The Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome on currency which came to all currency out of monetary wars. The current euro crisis was such an after-effect. After the dollar has eroded forty percent over the past decade, the recent rise of the dollar over the past sixty days has itself been a cause of worry in the United States? To whom? Do you need further proof that a weak currency is inflationary than a trip to the grocery store?

If you believed the experts – and I do not – the cause of the bubble which began hissing in 2008 was sub-prime loans, as the political spin doctors in Washington were able to point fingers at bankers rather than at this monetary policy set by the Federl Reserve Bank and the Treasury Department.

It was a world where governments levy taxes not to finance its operations, but to give value to its fiat money as sovereign credit instruments. French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde in June 2010 had said that budget consolidation is “priority No. 1” for most G-20 members, as Timothy Geithner at the conclusion of the June 2010 G20 meeting expressed concern over the confidence in the system.

The current [euros?] crisis marks the end of an era of credit expansion based on the dollar as the international reserve currency. We are now in a period of wealth destruction. The system is broken.” — George Soros

Can you spell C R A S H? That is what wealth destruction is all about. Less concerned about the loss of buying power for their own citizens, a lot of nations pursue a policy of a weak currencies, hoping that will help their exporters. Especially in monetary wars which have funded the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with no rise in taxes leveled on an American public over the past ten years.

As the European debt crisis threatens to halt an anemic global economic recovery, and efforts to deliver a plan to address the crisis dominated discussion at the G20 Paris talks. here is recent discussion over direct exposure of the U.S. financial system to the countries under the most pressure in Europe, with little regard to the indirect exposure. Last week, officials at Morgan Stanley worked overtime trying to calm investors about the bank’s $39 billion in exposure to French banks at the end of last year, not counting hedges and collateral. The total amount of insurance written do not reflect other offsetting trades that bring down these banks’ actual exposure significantly. For investors, the challenges in trying to assess the true exposures are real. At the end of the week, Morgan Stanley appeared to have relieved some investor fears over its exposure to Europe. (Some analysts argue that the amount today is far lower than $39 billion.) Therefore investors have to trust that the institutions are being appropriately rigorous .

“Many of the risks in these institutions are maddeningly hard to plumb, and open to a range of interpretations as banks reduce their exposure to a possible loss by the amount of collateral they have collected from a trading partner. Is the collateral that has been supplied to secure derivatives contracts solid? Is the bank valuing it properly? Can it be located quickly?” asks Gretchen Morgenson. How about in a deflating European economy, when there is no money being loaned?

Monetary war. After the Bank of England announced, in a desperate effort to stave off a new credit crisis and a UK recession, it would pump more money into the economy, the cost of borrowing sterling for three months in the London interbank market fell Friday, its first drop since June 8. Meanwhile, the cost of borrowing dollars and euros for three months in the London interbank market rose last Monday. Ten days ago the Bank of England had announced a fresh round of quantitative easing to stimulate economic growth, meaning it will print an extra GBP75 billion of cash to buy bonds. Data from the British Bankers' Association showed the three-month sterling LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate) falling to 0.95875% from 0.96000%. The spread between the three-month dollar LIBOR and the three-month overnight index swap rate–a barometer of banks' willingness to lend–widened to 30.4 basis points from 30.2 basis points Thursday. The euro rate rose to 1.50375% from 1.49563% Thursday, while the three-month dollar rate rose to 0.39111% from 0.38778%.

European banks now have become pretend banks, with no money. Across Europe, according to Autonomous Research, loans to banks exceed their deposits by 6 percent. Among French banks, loans exceed deposits by 19 percent. In Greece, they swamp deposits by 32 percent, writes Gretchen Morgenson.

This is why, writes Gretchen Morgenson, it is becoming such a problem for European banks that so many short-term lenders are declining to renew when loans come due. Money market funds, traditionally big investors in short-term paper issued by European banks, have been reducing exposures. A recent Fitch Ratings report shows that for the two months ended July 31, the 10 largest United States prime money market funds pared their holdings in European banks by 20.4 percent, in dollar terms. In the same period, the funds cut their exposure to Italian and Spanish banks by 97 percent.

But these money funds, with total assets of $658 billion, held $309 billion in debt obligations issued by European banks. That’s equivalent to 47 percent of these funds’ total assets. “We’re seeing a lot of the same things in the markets that we saw in the Lehman era,” Carl B. Weinberg, chief economist at High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, N.Y., told Gretchen Morgenson.

“The economic performance of euro zone countries is diverging at a fast clip,” writes Fred Norris of the New York Times, “when financing became hard to get for many exporters, and customers slashed orders.” The divergence is caused by the battle of deflation with inflation, in the long recognized monetary wars. The trend in countries like Germany is continuing for countries whose economies are in decent shape, though the recovery in trade in other European nations appears to be over. “The issue now is a simple one – the buyers cannot afford what they used to buy, writes Fred Norris. “Imports have returned to pre-crisis levels in Italy and France, as well as much more dramatically in Ireland, Portugal and Spain”— the largest nations forced to seek bailouts.

Pretend banks in a pretend world of union. These European nations have no more unity, never had union, like so many couples living together in sin. And when the going gets tough, a lot more people getting going or just tossed out.

Carl B. Weinberg outlined to Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times what he sees as the major risks which fall into two categories. “Outside the U.S., we never really resumed credit growth since 2009,” he said. “Another hit now would bring credit down and impose a huge squeeze on small businesses throughout Europe and over here also.” Of the two areas of major risk, explained to Gretchen Morgenson, one is the potential for losses incurred by financial institutions that wrote credit insurance on European government debt and the European banks which own so much of that paper. The other major concern is the likely economic hit as banks in the euro zone curb lending significantly. A crucial mechanism linking financial players in the United States to the problems in Europe involves credit derivatives contracts. Carl B. Weinberg expects credit around the world to become even scarcer.

Accounting rule makers even disagree about the right way to approach the manner in which an institution offsets its winning and losing derivatives trades to come up with a so-called net exposure. Standard setters in the United States allow an institution to survey all the contracts it has with a trading partner and compute exposure as the difference between winning trades and losing ones. The Bank for International Settlement, Gretchen Morgenson point out, has a different standard for European banks.

“Stock investors have a bad habit of dismissing problems in the credit markets until it is too late. Make no mistake: the troubles of Europe and its debt-weakened banks will imperil the United States.” For many, it is no longer a question of whether but WHEN Greece will default on its government debt. “Back in the summer of 2007, the stock market was roaring, despite obvious problems in the mortgage market,” writes Gretchen Morgenson.

When credit is the air that business breathes. All over the world. In China, Cheng Siwei, head of Beijing's International Finance Forum and a former deputy speaker of the People's Congress, said interest rate rises and credit curbs to cool overheating were inflicting real pain on thousands of companies used by local party bosses to fund the construction boom. "The tightening policy is creating a lot of difficulties for local governments trying to repay debt, and is causing defaults," he told a meeting at the World Economic Forum in Dalian. "Our version of subprime in the US is lending to local authorities and the government is taking this very seriously."

If he had been correct about the United States in 2008, when Willem H. Buiter then of the European Institute, Professor of European Political Economy, London School of Economics and Political Science said that there “was little doubt, in my view, that the Federal authorities will choose the inflation and currency depreciation route over the default route,” his theory would seem to apply to the Eurpean Union. “Together will the foreseeable increase in actual government liabilities because of vastly increased future Federal deficits, this implies the need for a future private to public sector resource transfer that is most unlikely to be politically feasible without recourse to inflation. The only alternative is default on the debt.” He now works for Citibank.

And about those credit derivative that got AIG into the bailout. Still they are sold, unregulated, without requirements for companies to post reserves like the state regulated insurance industry. And speculators can really play games in such markets, with so little supervision. When the next bubble pops, the credit derivative folks with their Ponzi scheme will be the only people left with money.

Of course those European regulators did not address their own problems. In the words of Gretchen Morgenson, ""ONE troubling aspect of the euro zone crisis is just how large the European banks’ sovereign debt holdings are. "At many institutions, the positions dwarf what American institutions held in mortgage-related securities, for example, when compared to book values. Why? Regulators encouraged European banks to hold huge amounts of European government debt by letting them account for these investments as if they posed zero risk. — and that meant the banks didn’t need to set aside a single euro in capital against those holdings. Now, according to an analysis by Autonomous Research, 43 large European banks hold debt in troubled sovereigns that is equal to 63 percent of those institutions’ book values. Adding to the peril is that these banks are funded primarily by short-term investors, like buyers of commercial paper, rather than by depositors, as is more often the case with American banks. This was the same problem faced by Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, which collapsed after short-term lenders fled in panic."

Economic union was not true union. And in the age of the divorce, in the sign of the times, the custody battle was foreseeable in this failed relationship issue, involving credit cards.

“The average life span of the world’s greatest civilizations has been two hundred years … and once a society becomes successful it becomes arrogant, righteous, overconfident, corrupt, and decadent … overspends … with costly wars. Wealth inequity and social tensions increase. And society enters a secular decline.” –Marc Faber

http://www.homeboy-industries.org/donate.php

Gradual Appreciation

Monetary wars: On Tuesday the U.S. Senate considered a vote on al bill which threatens China, unless it revalues its currency, with broad-ranging sanctions, while ignoring a whole host of other factors in the Chinese economy which distort price signals, beyond currency. Some here, like Senator Charles Schumer, apparently think that the US still has the broad power which the national economy provided following World War II. Proposed by New York Senator Chuck Schumer, the motivation in this legislation has more to do with an upcoming national elecction of the ongoing recession, and less to do with Chinese inaction. Over the past twelve months, China actually has allowed the renimbi to gradually appreciate by 5.2% which means Chinese goods are at least 10% more expensive than one year ago. The intent of the Senate bill was directed at persistent high unemployment in the States. The Senate bill would likely damage U.S. relations with Beijing, said China’s Vice Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai.

The yuan appreciated to 6.3486 per dollar, the strongest level since China unified the official and market exchange rates at the end of 1993. With mounting concerns about China’s growth, fears of yuan depreciation could spark outflows of speculative funds. Setting the official yuan-dollar exchange rate at a record high signals a commitment to letting the currency rise, forestalling destabilizing capital flight. Amidst speculation policy makers will tolerate gains after the United States accuses China of undervaluing its currency, at moments like this Beijing often will attempt to guide the yuan higher to take the ire out of complaints from trade partners – in a little exchange-rate diplomacy. When you sat on billions in reserves, you had a few monetry moves to make from your quiver.

The strategy in Beijing was one of gradual appreciation. Tom Orlik of the Wall Street Journal writes, don’t bet on a change in China’s exchange-rate strategy. Since the the end of June, the Hang Seng China Enterprises Index has fallen 35 percent. “Yes, China heads into the possibility of a second global downturn with more problems than it did the first,” writes Orlik, “but markets have gotten ahead of themselves.” China’s main weaknesses are its dependency on exports and a real-estate bubble.

A weaker dollar does continue to boost investment demand in commodities. The yuan’s rebound came after data earlier this month showed a continued expansion in manufacturing activity in China. The strength in the yuan comes despite the Chinese central bank’s efforts to guide its currency slightly weaker after a week-long public holiday, with mounting Chinese domestic inflation. The larger-than-expected increase in Sep U.S. payrolls reduced recession concerns. After a week-long holiday, with resumption of trading, the Shanghai Stock Index fell to its lowest level in sixteen months on speculation the government will maintain tighter monetary policy. The euro rose to a one-week high against the dollar after German Chancellor Merkel said European leaders will do “everything necessary” to ensure that banks have enough capital, and after the European Commission said it will make proposals in the coming days on possible coordination of bank recapitalization in the EU. One day after German Chancellor Merkel and French President Sarkozy said they will deliver a plan to recapitalize European banks and find a “durable” solution for Greece’s debt load by the November 3rd Group of 20 summit, no details have been provided. Promises, promises, by those new Romantic European leaders who were supposed to be expanding the bailout fund for those in the euro zone, who use the euro. That had been the content of the July 2011 agreement by leaders who now were in largely inconclusive talks. The July agreement did require unanimous approval from member state parliaments, though Slovakia, along with Malta, had yet to approve it. With a vote on the matter due in the Slovakian parliament Tuesday, on Monday the Slovakia governing coalition failed to reach a compromise on an endorsement.

Relationship issues. In the age of divorce, the G20 nations, seeing but not knowing what the commitment issues involved. Other Asian stock markets advanced on optimism that European leaders will resolve the region’s debt crisis and boost the earnings outlook for Asian exporters, despite Fitch Ratings downgraded of Italy’s and Spain’s credit ratings at the close of the Friday’s market.

When the World Was Flat

This week in football. Like had happened to all of the intercollegiate conferences over the past fourteen months in the States, off the agenda is any public discussion of the possible break-up of the euro zone , the nations using the euro for their currency. Having lost lost confidence in their European counterparts, banks in the US have started shutting European banks out of inter-bank funding markets. Speaking of globalization, eh Thomas Friedman?

In the 2011 playdowns of World Series Kick the Can, more immediately kicking Greece out was not to be spoken of. Of the European Union. Out loud.

The world was playing as if the eurozone was in some kind of neutral transition, unaware that the game was now in penalty time. In a less sophisticated continent, this would be just another week of “kick the can” from the road from one G7 weekend in Marseille along to the Wroclaw meeting of the ‘‘Eurogroup’’ finance ministers which followed seven days later, with all of the potential “irrational exuberance” by fans that their country would not be affected, and that they hoped to continue as always. If the goalkeeper stood up to expectations.

Speaking of hooliganism, the Finns are demanding “collateral” for any new loans to Greece from the central bail-out fund; the Austrians are against the Finns. Tim Geithner was there cheer-leading, urging EU policy-makers to avoid “loose talk,” in playing their variety of kick the can, with so little body contact for which Eurpean ice hockey used to be famous. Angela Merkel may only win a German vote at the end of September with opposition support, while some of her own coalition MPs in particular are fiercely opposed to taking on such a bottomless commitment to the size of the Eurozone nations. And Slovakia does not vote on the bailout until December. As one on Geithner’s team said at Marseille, “Seventy-five per cent of the dark things happening in the world economy are because of the eurozone.”

Divorce Greek-style. European Commission President José Manuel Barroso said that it was time to look at a mechanism to break apart the euro zone. So with the supposedly increased muscle since July of the European Financial Stability Facility – the central bail-out fund – the action requires parliamentary approval for each member nation’s contribution, which still is by no means a certainty. Almost as taboo as the notion of dismantling the currency itself, LIBOR rates have risen over the past thirty days, as the European Central Banks’ dollar funding scheme to stave off the onset of another credit crunch demonstrates a coming fear in credit markets. And the air around Europe provided by credit markets seemed to be polluted, seizing-up the international banking system, one day soon. Yields on Greek debt, Spanish debt, Portuguese debt, and Italian debt continued to climb. After the discussion of ‘‘euro bonds’’ – central borrowings effectively on the back of the Germans to fund all eurozone member governments – was so far from agreement.

The European Central Bank has reported an up-tick in deposits from eurozone banks, an indication the banks feel more secure with deposits in central banks than lending to one another. “To stop financial contagion and manage the bankruptcy of the Greek government, you need to support the banking system. It’s the only solution, and it is appropriate to use European Financial Stability Facility funds,” said Jan Bureš, an economist with Československá Obchodní Banka.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the Luxembourg prime minister presiding over the Eurogroup, called at least for “verbal discipline,” if no other economic discipline. With global central bankers’ support and Amerrican cheerleading, Europe started this week trying on the surface to work as a team. “Of course, it’s not easy to speak now about increasing the funds available in that mechanism, and it will take some time.”

Bank bailouts in Europe in 2011. Bailouts for banks which dull motivation for a bank to invest responsibly. A reasonable solution, and maybe the only solution to debt contagion, “another bailout raises the specter of moral hazard, the idea that in the same way bailouts for governments decrease the motivation for responsible state spending, wrote the Prague Post. “What’s more, if governments bail out banks, it could result in sending those governments into debt.”

Mutual distrust in the times of monetary wars. Visible mistrust in the LIBOR rate since the failure of Lehman Brothers.

As a new credit crisis once again infects the economy, in a stair-step process through industries until debt is destroyed and a more sustainable economic foundation takes root. Starting with Greece, spreading to the financials in French banks, engulfing even Germany. When all those European nations were in this together. And eventually all that globalization sung about at the start of the decade, eventually phases through retail, technology companies in the United States, and the creditor in China. As commodities begin to fall, signaling deflation in Europe. I wonder now what the asking price for Durty Nelly’s, the oldest pub in Ireland, in the middle of no where. It had been ten million euros in January 2010.

Back home as another NFL season got underway after a labor dispute, with the NBA still on strike, each political party is still playing kick the can over American debt. And those in the know had worries from belief that European banks are sitting on crippling losses on their government bond holdings. And in this version of sport, it was like watching the NHL All-Star game, with so little close checking by so many participants. And US government officials were heard in Marseille seeking to shift blame for America’s domestic performance onto the influences from Europe.

Search The Web

When Spring Turns to Falls

With investment in the country valued at $19.4 billion in 2009, with additional exports to Syria estimated to be $1.1 billion in 2010, the Russian government dispatched Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov to Damascus last week to urge Syrian leader Bashar Assad to halt “violence” against protesters, and implement promised political changes, The Moscow Times reports today.

Russian firms have quite a presence in Syrian involving infrastructure, energy and tourism, along with lucrative arms contracts. So, Russia has blocked efforts by the European Union and United States to impose punitive measures through the United Nations, after a “crackdown” on unrest since March. Russia also has rejected U.S. and European calls for Bashad Assad to step down. “Russia is categorically against any interference, especially military, in the internal affairs of a country,” Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov said Tuesday in response to e-mailed questions to the Moscow Times. “Efforts to resolve the problems in Syria through outside force would provoke utter chaos in the Middle East.”

This “utter chaos” has already resulted in the death of 2,200 Syrian demonstrators, according to United Nations estimates. But there is a lot at stake in Syrian, a Soviet-era ally, for Russia. Russia maintains its only military facility in the Middle East with its Tartus naval base in the Mediterranean. In January 2011, oil-producer Tatneft, based in Tatarstan, had announced it would spend $12.8 million drilling exploratory wells near the Syria- Iraqi border.

With a staff of 80 Russians on the ground, Stroitransgaz has been working in Syria for more than 50 years. Nikolai Grishenko, director of Sovintervod, compared today’s protests to the 1980s civil unrest in Syria, which the government “successfully” crushed at the price of up to 25,000 dead and wounded civilians. With a 20-person team in Aleppo, Grishenko added his belief that Assad was a “decent man.”

According to data from the Moscow Defense Brief, there are more than $4 billion in active arms contracts between Syria and Russian capital, including MiG-29 fighters, Pantsir surface-to-air missiles, artillery systems and anti-tank weaponry. The Arab Spring has already put at risk an estimated $10 billion worth of business contracts Russia had with Gadhafi’s regime in Libya.

The Russians are having as bad a year as the Minnesota Twins.

href=”http://alphainventions.com/rank?=http://baseball91.wordpress.com” target=”_blank”>
Blog Networking in Real-time Search The Web

Domestic Surveillance Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act

There are at least sixteen agencies in Washington which have since September 2001 been involved in domestic and international intelligence. In one of these agencies, concerning how the Obama Administration is interpreting parts of the Patriot Act, the Director of Legislative Affairs for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence says that it is “difficult to answer” whether the government has the right to track Americans’ location through cellphones for intelligence purposes, according to a letter sent to Congress on August 11th.

In response to questions presented by Senator Mark Udall (D-CO) and Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who asked in a letter to the the Office of the Director of National Intelligence whether the intelligence community has the authority to collect geolocation information on American citizens, Kathleen Turner, the director of legislative affairs for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, responded that the government is still defining its “view of the full contours of this authority and will get back to you.”

As the senators asked just where such authority might come from, the response from the director of legislative affairs for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was that though the amount of evidence that can be collected and the procedures required to get it haven’t been settled yet, “the government has some authority to collect cell phone mobility data under appropriate circumstances.” So how many people in the U.S. have had their communications reviewed under authority granted by 2008 legislation, amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act? The response of the director of legislative affairs for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was, “It is not reasonably possible to identify the number of people located in the United States whose communications may have been reviewed.”

As the Obama Administration has been in practice over 1466 days.addressing these issues, this response was disingenuous. How can this “Hope and Change” government still be defining its “view of the full contours of this authority.” If it is not reasonably possible to identify the number of people located in the United States whose communications may have been reviewed, how was it possible for law enforcement to identify the people whose communications they selected to review? It might be difficult to justify whether the government has the right to track Americans’ location through cellphones for intelligence purposes, it might be difficult to rationalize actual domestic surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, but it should not be difficult to answer the question after 1466 days executing the law. This was one sign an arrogance had developed after 1466 days, not much different than the arrogance of the previous administration.

Didn’t the legislative branch know the day-to-day effort of protecting the liberty of the American public on these shores? Or didn’t the executive branch see the irony of a nation, which now fought foreign wars to export democracy and freedom at a cost of $193 million dollars per day, spying at home on its own citizens? Or didn’t the electorate see the real reason for the ongoing cost of cheap money, to finance the wars without a tax increase? As the value of the currency was diminished forty percent over the last ten years.

Concerning all of the cost of war, when Senator Ron Wyden from Oregon had also the same above questions to an attorney from the National Security Agency earlier this week, he received a similar answer. However the attorney from the NSA indicated that his intelligence community would be working on a better response before the first meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee in September. The NSA attorney seemed wise enough to recognize the full contours of contempt of Congress, where arrogance of one branch of government was a still a crime.

Blog Networking in Real-time

The Powers That Be

Nervous.  Nervous.  It was a nervous week in St. Paul.  The 4500 delegates have gone home, with the national media.  The barriers are being removed.  More than 800 people were arrested overall, including some 17 journalists and innocent bystanders. 

 

“You’re always going to have demonstrators,” said Maria Cino, who has been to every Republican National Convention since the early 1980s. “Most of the delegates inside the convention didn’t even know what was going on outside.” 

 

Most of the national television media did not either. 

 

The lack of coverage of the four hour clash during the last night on the streets of St. Paul, not broadcast to the nation, was a story? Were there not enough protesters to justify a real story?  Was it about the numbers?  

 

Were their televised stories true or not?  Comparing 1968 to 2008 and the coverage then, were there not enough numbers?  Were there not enough protestors?  Were there not enough broadcasters?  In Iraq, were there not enough troops?  Had not enough Americans died?  Had the cost of the war not made this an issue?  Was it just about ratings?  Were these television people true journalists.  Was it about commercial time and sponsors? 

 

What had changed in the the creeds of the news division of the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company?   What had changed in 40 years?  These were national television stations, under the authority of the FCC.  And if they did not care, why should the American public?  Why should anyone tune in?

 

Was the creed of CBS News, ABC News, NBC News about revealing the truth and transparency?  Where was the Public Broadcasting System?  Where was C-span? 

 

Conventions could be seen as a national retreat, to reflect on identities.  Instead the platforms of the two parties are not focused on.  Who care about creeds, if there were any creeds left?   

 

There was a tension between the known and the unknown.  I for one was nervous when the reporting was muted.  Of blackouts.  Or when there was no reporting. 

 

On Thursday evening at sunset, a volley of 24 shots was heard in the vicinity of the capital building as authorities battle demonstrators, with at least 2 helicopters in the distance, with 2 more audible overhead.  All this, audible by me.

 

The last 4 shots appeared to have been closer to the Cathedral of St. Paul, which had concluded by 20:18.  There was no live coverage of the goings on.  Bushville, where at least 100 of these demonstartors are staying in tents, was about 7 blocks from where all this was happening.  None of this was picked up by the traditional television media as a national story.   

 

Was there a sense about political conventions, in Washington, in New York, of just going through the motions?  That this was just an exhibition game?  That conventions were just a commercial?  How did a news division of CBS, ABC, NBC, PBS, go about presenting stories?  Were George Stephanopoulos, Jeff Greenfield put into roles as cheerleaders rather than reporters, analysts?  Were they instructed to ignore protestors like they were fans who tried to enter the playing field?  The RNC was just a halftime show of a football broadcast in prime time? 

 

I think the websites of the protesters this week raised a valid question about what the “S” stood for in CBS.  Was it the “system?”  There was a story here.  It was missed.  Where was journalistic integrity this week in St. Paul?  Why were there young anarchists who had lived through the most affluent times in all of history?   

 

The tension between the known and the unknown.  And the reporting was muted.

The convention was over.  I was now gonna read both Bob Woodward’s new book as well as Naomi Wolf’s book, The End of America, which takes a historical look at the rise of fascism and, according to Wikipedia, outlines the 10 steps necessary for a state to take control of individuals’ lives:

• Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy. 
• Create secret prisons where torture takes place.
• Develop a paramilitary force not answerable to citizens.
• Set up an internal surveillance system.
• Harass citizen groups.
• Engage in arbitrary detention and release.
• Target key individuals.
• Control the press.
• Treat all political dissent as traitorous.
• Suspend the rule of law. 

Bob Woodward’s new book indicates that the president conceded: “This war has created a lot of really harsh emotion, out of which comes a lot of harsh rhetoric. One of my failures has been to change the tone in Washington.”  

I was gonna also be checking the tone on my telephone.  

 

Those Positions In Naked Shorts

Law and Order were based on faith, mood and assumptions. Order was challenged, when faith in the system was lost. In Middle America we assumed there was transparency on Wall Street, based on the Truth. We assumed there was transparency based on goodness. When you had such an unfair system of compensation that came from managing corporations with workers, where gigantic salaries rested on the backs of workers, how could you the mood remained unchanged?

The novel of the 20^th century, Sophie’s Choice, really was a story about a great looking Polish woman who was living in Brooklyn after the war.  She had spent the war years working for a commandant in a concentration camp.  It was all about the times that she lived in.  She had two kids.  The commandant wanted her to sleep with him, in return for saving one of her two kids.  Sophie’s choice, on the surface, was about what child she wanted to save.  But the novel was really about evil.  It was about what had created the environment.  It was as much about what happened in those times, the banality of evil.  It had taken years for the environment to be created, choices made over the ten years before.  And Sophie never appreciated what the temperature of those times had created.

In Germany they gave preference to the Aryan race. This week the U S government showed preference to stockholders.  AIG was rescued.  Bond-holders, always affected by the yield of U S treasuries, bit the bullet.  The dollar soon would be in free fall.  Currency traders had to have made a killing this week, as the U S Dollar fell by a full cent in one 24-hour period this week.  Someone was being favored by these decisons.  When a ship was sinking, decisions had to be made as to who would be saved. Salvation.  Sophie’s Choice was really about a theme of salvation.

Since May 2008, treasury yield have been sliced nearly in half, at one point on Friday.  The market closed at a yield of 2.18%, in a recovery if I am reading the chart right of 27.4%.   Treasury markets reflect decisions.  The following stories were posted yesterday.

 

“NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Treasurys plunged Friday, sending yields on benchmark notes up by the most in at least two decades, amid investor relief that the U.S. government is planning a broader solution to the financial crisis.”

“SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — A tumultuous week for financial markets was capped Friday with the closure of Northfork, W.Va.-based Ameribank Inc., the 12th U.S. bank closure so far this year.”

“NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Rates on three-month Treasury bills, among the most popular assets for investors seeking quality amid market turmoil, rose back above 1% Friday. The rate had dropped to as little as 0.02% earlier in the week as companies ranging from Lehman Brothers to American International Group and Goldman Sachs came under pressure and fear grew that the country was headed for a depression. On Friday, rates rose by the most in at least 20 years after the U.S. government announced a broader plan to solve the financial crisis, including propping up money market funds and buying financial institution’s bad assets.  The rate had dropped to as little as 0.02% earlier in the week as companies ranging from Lehman Brothers to American International Group Goldman Sachs came under pressure and fear grew that the country was headed for a depression. On Friday, rates rose by the most in at least 20 years after the U.S. government announced a broader plan to solve the financial crisis, including propping up money market funds and buying financial institution’s bad assets.”

For now, salaries of professional ballplayers and the performers on Wall Street the same as they have for the last ten years.  These gods remained above the fray, elevated to their heights sometime by natural power, other times by performance enhancement drugs.  The system had been skewed, law if not order, to favor those in power.  The gods of Wall Street for the most part now owned sports franchises, compensated their athletes as they were compensated, not as mortals. The end justified the means.

In the aftermath of September 11th, in the days of the War on Terror, we still assumed there was not evil on Wall Street, no self-interest.  Leaders know to speak of socializing losses, after privatizing gains.  Financial instruments, derivatives, were left to operate clandestinely, like the CIA, without regulation amidst all of this. Unchallenged, more risk was taken in this shadow financial system.  Unchallenged, untested, ballplayers or rogues took more risk in their Game of Shadows (SEE book by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams), in this shadow financial system. What was the name of the book by those journalists from San Francisco who covered the BALCO story, and Barry Bonds?

Now there was talk of a revolution coming in the financial markets, if not to these performers, financially supported by the 3500 lobbyists in Washington, for both parties. 

There was a new form of fascism in the stories this week. That is if “fascism” was a word about comforts, with government offering instruction how all of us could live easier. Government was now deciding who would be saved, which among us would be rescued. The free market was being replaced. But it did not really all recently start with those positions in naked shorts.  Those naked shorts just revealed, without fear, what had been there all along.

In other news, Austrian authorities say a small earthquake set off a large World War II-era bomb in the garden of a Vienna home yesterday. No one was injured in the explosion.  But the affects of history were felt for years.  

 

 

Blog Networking in Real-time

ABOUT THOSE CASH MACHINES

The revolution is here in the financial markets.  There was never a new paradigm.  In a crisis of debt the best action is to pay off debt completely.  That is how you win back a credit rating.  Those are the cardinal rules.  And the cardinal rule of savings might be the real solution.  You can no longer create wealth in this environment with leveraged borrowing.  Big money realizes that in a deflation, you need cash to keep going, to keep your business in operation.  In the new era of deflation accompanied by low interest rates, you want cash.  Hence the coming sell-off in stocks, to raise cash to support an income stream over time.

Alan Sloan wrote a piece in Fortune about market sentiment, without stating the obvious, that the fundamentals are unchanged.  The problem is debt.  You need cash.  You want cash. 

It was ten years ago in August that the Russian government ended up defaulting on $40 billion dollars in obligations. There was a “Minsky moment” with the Russian financial crisis at the time  when debt-heavy investors all rush to market with their assets at the same time, triggering de-valuation and ultimately a liquidity crisis.

Hyman P. Minsky was an economics professor at Washington University. Minsky believed there was an “inherent instability” in unchecked capitalism at its core, which in turn led to “recurrent bubbles or stampedes or over-exuberance.” He believed that finance was the bloodstream of the economy, and any poison entering it soon would pollute the whole system. Instability was not an aberration in finance. “He pretty much just harped on the fragility of the financial system and the economy. It was the greatest curse because here was this guy harping on this thing nobody believed. I had to labor under his tutelage, and I wasn’t sure I believed it either,” University of St. Thomas economics professor Mel Gray told a MinnPost reporter. 

The Minsky model of the credit cycle has five stages: displacement, boom, euphoria, profit taking, and panic.

George Magnus, senior economic adviser to UBS AG in London, is credited with coining the term the “Minsky moment,” describing the point at which credit supply starts to dry up even to sound borrowers and the central bank is obliged to intervene. In August 2007, Magnus said that moment had arrived. While equity markets have stabilized temporarily in anticipation of a Fed loosening, credit markets “remain deeply troubled,” he said.

“It is apparent to me that Washington’s attempt to bail out banks and brokers will do nothing but add to consumer debt, weaken the US dollar, and literally waste $700-plus billion dollars which could have gone to more productive uses. Since the markets blew up in the summer of 2007, Paulson and Bernanke have tried one thing after another to stimulate lending and restore confidence but nothing has worked for more than a brief period. For the past 14 months Paulson and Bernanke have thrown hundreds of billions of dollars of fed assets into the market, yet lenders still won’t lend.”

Alan Sloan, in a piece in Fortune this week. And the revolution is here. The panic phrase. Some $1.2 trillion in home equity was borrowed against from 2002 to 2007, says the public- policy group Demos in New York. Those days are over. The downward pressure is in place on housing.” Deflation was coming to a theater near you. And not just in real estate.

Market sentiment might be temporarily sustained but the fundamentals are unchanged. The problem is debt. According to Richard Russell, “From what I see, the markets are telling us to prepare for hard times and a global spate of the worst deflation to be seen in generations. This is why gold has been sinking, this is why stocks have been falling — big money, sophisticated money, is cashing out, raising cash, preparing for world deflation.”

The fear is what has been presented as a credit problem, one on liquidity, essentially turns into one of solvency; solvency among homeowners, builders, mortgage providers and financial institutions. My fear with infusion of money is the day if eventually arrives when he government that prints money stays solvent. Germany in the 1920s.

So why, with the “bailout,” a concentration on credit markets? To build more? If this was a revolution, why do we need more Burger Kings, more Lowes, more strip malls, and more new houses? What does leadership not understand? With the past credit binge in the last 20 years, there are too many strip malls and stores. Why, especially in a recession? In the new world order, it was all about paying off what you wanted to keep. Expansions were followed by contractions.

In a deflationary environment, people have an incentive to put off spending. The profit motive is diminished, and the economy weakens. Government has few tools to stop deflation.

Posted on August 23, 2007 by Gwen Robinson: “The immediate focus is on short-term funding, financing flows and counterparty risk. This week, three-month US Treasury bills touched 2.99 per cent, compared with a yield of 5 per cent a month ago. Investors are avoiding securities collateralised against or invested in mortgages. This ‘Minsky moment’ is not yet over – interest rates in the US and perhaps elsewhere will come down sooner or later. The path ahead is littered with losses, lawsuits, and greater regulation.

But what about the economic consequences?, asks George Magnus.

In Magnus’s view, two main propositions define the outlook: “First, the flight from debt in this downswing may be as potent as the rush towards it on the upswing”. It is most likely, he warns, that the reduced availability of cheap credit is going to lead to a sharp reverse in US spending on goods and services and assets.

Second, “current credit cycle concerns are about solvency, not liquidity per se, as was the case in 1998, after which the world economy recovered quite promptly”. This time, the problem is about solvency among homeowners, builders, mortgage providers and financial institutions, he notes.

Added to these worries is an increase in the cost of capital, a cyclical switch from building up debt to rebuilding savings and probable declines in consumer and business confidence. It is hardly surprising , then, that Magnus’s conclusion is that all this suggests “the business cycle is going to get quite rough.” (end of Gwen Robinson’s post from August 23rd, 2007.)

That Minsky Moment has lingered on and on, since Ms. Robinson’s post. It was two weeks ago yesterday that Hank Paulson and Ben Benacke had convened a meeting on Wall Street at the close of the business weeks. UBS economist Larry Hatheway pithily observed about that meeting in a note to clients yesterday: “Put differently, if a (quasi) private sector solution was in the offing this past weekend, then Secretary Paulson and New York Fed President Tim Geithner invited the wrong financiers on Saturday-Sunday.” He invited
the top executives from Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, J P Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and other financial companies.  Larry Hatheway’s view was that the nature of the on-going de-leveraging, in which declining asset values, debt reduction and asset sales reinforce one another, called for additional intervention by government. Hadn’t that intervention come and failed over the last 12 months?

The revolution is here in the financial markets. And no one knew what to do.

Charles Kindleberger, the MIT professor, leaned heavily on Minsky’s work. Kindleberger, the author of
Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, wrote that cash generated by their assets no longer is sufficient to pay off the mountains of debt they took on to acquire them, which prompted lenders to call in their loans. “This is likely to lead to a collapse of asset values,” Mr. Minsky wrote. Forced to sell even their less-speculative positions to make good on their loans, markets spiral lower and create a severe demand for cash. It is all about cash.

http://www.homeboy-industries.org/donate.php

. 

Remembrance Day

On Remembrance Day, there is still a poignant remembering overseas of the cost to Europe. War had a way to bring home the present day cost of risk appetites.

Social mood. Political campaigns. Financial fate. Markets go up and they go down, even in the age of austerity, as in the age of conspicuous consumption. By understanding history, humanity has the power to change history. War, and the way we live our lives.

We live in a world that has perverted the concept of remembering people. The media had a cheap story to fill the airwaves now on each September 11th and November 11th. In Europe they still called it Remembrance Day, where the people remembered the war dead and not the military. I was in London on this day in 2000. “Flanders Field.” Armistice Day was not a promotion for the armed services or to be used by the National Guard to recruit the mostly local youth, a lot like those pro football players and their fans in town who “root for laundry,” as Jerry Seinfeld reminds his audience. The living athletes of combat. Cannon fodder. The human cannon fodder, used too often in the name of nationalism. The “National Guard” that had been perverted by public policy to become an invading army in Iraq, and maybe one day in Afghanistan? Today was supposed to be a day about the individual people lost to war, not about the uniform worn. At the end of the Great War, in 1919, because of the missing bodies to bury, the November 11th observance was introduced, with a two minute silence. Unbearable mourning continued long after a war was over. Today was supposed to be a day about peace. About real people gone.

Reusse & Company this morning. How does an interview of Major General Larry Shellito of the Minnesota National Guard relate to November 11th and Armistice Day? A day about peace!. Armistice Day was about turning swords into plowshares. November 11th in Europe was Memorial Day, not for the military industrial complex, as Dwight Eisenhower called it, but about individuals compelled to go to war in the name of government and nationalism who died in service. And the people who went, that the world would one day be a better place.

The“National Guard” that had been perverted by public policy to become an invading army in Iraq and in Afghanistan? How had it happened? The “National Guard” that had replaced the all volunteer army. And why? Since September 11, 2001, the U .S. has deployed troops in 33 countries, according to Major General Larry Shellito. Why? And about the expense of all this? Was the Department of Defense any different than that vote on health care. Which was not at all about health care but health care insurance, and paying for all of this. Without much discussion at all about the real issue of health care. How many MRI machines were needed in a community. Without a discussion of preventative medicine. Why did local kids need to be dispatched to 33 countries in the last 8 years? And where was the discussion on all of this? About the use of “The National Guard?”

No one asked why. Elections have been spun to be one long drone of an argument between two sides. The two sides that had long ago quit communicating, in a world that was unable to find much in the way of meaning. If you thought that television and radio were sounding boards on the issues of the day, then your moderators had become nothing more than game show hosts.

In a current world without conscription, in a world of voluntary service, somehow the message was getting across about the glamor of swords. And now a word from the sponsors.

I am not sure why Major General Larry Shellito of the Minnesota National Guard was invited on Armistice Day of all days to be a guest. On morning radio, on Reusse and Company. I did not listen long to the remainder of the show. I don’t think there was a discussion of what happened when you take the young and place their lives in peril, in places where they are seen as the enemy. In some of the 33 places. Thirty-three places. Invading armies? An invitation to the major general as a guest by the same guy who wrote today on his blog:

“Pro football players were merely mercenaries moving through a city for the purpose of collecting a large paycheck. There would be replaced by a different group of mercenaries in a few years, and the foolish fans would cheer for them for no reason other than the appearance of their jerseys.” So wrote Pat Reusse today.

In the civilian world, leadership has to be re-earned in each generation. By sons who followed fathers and grandfathers. In attempts to try to see the future through the past. My grandfather won a purple heart in World War I. He paid a price for his medal every day for the rest of his life. It was more than what combat had done to his hearing. The life expectancy of those Woodrow Wilsons was always so much shorter than the soldier.

“Be careful when you break horses that you don’t break their spirit too.”

If sons and daughters took the time to try to understand history, humanity had the power to change history. In Minnesota, people spent more time contemplating the NFL than they did the deployment since September 11, 2001 of U .S. troops in 33 countries. We thought more about the people there than we about the dollars it had also cost for them to be there. And not many folks were asking why. Or why this was done under the auspices of “The National Guard.”

There was a cost to all of this. In a world of voluntary and involuntary thrift, with personal savings and public policy focused on taxing. In a world where voluntary service could fast become involuntary, as government officials induced borrowing rather than pay now these out of pocket expense. The single greatest risk as the equilibrium between asset classes remains a seismic shift in currency markets. What was this defense policy doing to the U.S. dollar? When a currency holds a nation together, and “the economy — perhaps society at large — assumes more, not less, risk as a function of the path of our attempted fix,” writes Todd Harrison. A Congressman from Tennessee cited Albert Einstein’s belief, in a joint hearing chaired by Senator Kent Konrad from North Dakota, that the greatest power on earth was not atomic energy but compound interest, in this case as a threat to the future of America.

Counting the cost. On Remembrance Day, there is a perversion to discuss the engines of financing as much as there is to discuss the success of recruitment as Major General Larry Shellito of the Minnesota National Guard was asked. In a nation that just no longer discussed war.

On Remembrance Day, there is still a poignant remembering overseas of the cost of war. It is seen in the streets of London. In America, Armistice Day was politicized, used as a photo opportunity by politicians hoping to remain an elected official for an entire career, and calling it Veterans’ Day. It was not longer remembered to commemorate the War To End All Wars. About the real people gone. Except in a Europe, which continues to manifest the loss of one generation, of its best and brightest. Watching the scenes this week at the Brandenburg Gate, and seeing the difference in the caliber of leaders 4 generations later, wondering if Europe had ever recovered from void of the War to End All War. Counting the cost.

It must have seemed really heroic to fight in The War To End All Wars.

Blog Networking in Real-time

Visual Web Search

Declarations of Bankruptcy

With the Wednesday anniversary of the $787-billion package of tax cuts and spending in the Recovery Act, in defense of the stimulus, President Obama said, “One year later, it is largely thanks to the Recovery Act that a second Depression is no longer a possibility.” Democratic and Republican leaders in Washington marked America’s legalized corruption by sniping at each other. Bankrupt after 8 years of the leadership of George Bush, Republican lawmakers stepped up their attacks on what was the Paulson-Bush stimulus plan, calling it wasteful and ineffective.

From an article by Simon Johnson in the Atlantic, America’s Legalized Corruption

“The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.”

From the transcript of Frontline on February 16, 2010:

“We didn’t truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market,” says Brooksley Born, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC] — an obscure federal regulatory agency — who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country’s key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis.

“They were totally opposed to it,” Born says. “That puzzled me. What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?”

They being the same people advising the current president. Then Assistant Treasury Secetary Lawrence Summers, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, as well as Alan Greespan heading up the Federal Reserve. And who did Timothy Geithner worked for through this all? As Henry Paulson got his start working in the Nixon White House; was it for Erhlichman or Haldeman? He learned under the best of hatchet men.

It had taken 40 years of the media making us all world experts, and this expertise along with the lobbyists had bankrupted American government. It was why I felt uncomfortable having my retirement accounts with Fidelity, with Merrill Lynch, with Morgan Stanley. They all had hijacked the government of the United States, through the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.

One year later, President Obama was sounding a lot like George Bush, announcing victory in Iraq. Or Henry Paulson and Ben Ben Bernanke, with their similar pronouncements all along, when the Bush Administration on July 13, 2008 rescued Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, or Bear Stearns. When that second Depression “was no longer a possibility.”

The Congressional Oversight Panel, chaired by Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, warned on the same anniversary date that it remains “deeply concerned” that commercial loan losses could jeopardize the stability of many banks, particularly the nation’s mid-size and smaller banks. Highlighting yet one more hurdle for this country’s fragile economy, a wave of commercial real estate loan failures could threaten over the next few years America’s already-weakened financial system. The Congressional Oversight Panel was formed as part of oversight for the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Blog Networking in Real-time

Those Tea Parties

In his book, “The Three Trillion War,” Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and co-author Linda J. Bilmes state that the total economic impact of the Iraq War may be $4 trillion or more. And that was before the United States escalated things in Afghanistan.

Former White House economist Lawrence Lindsey was fired as economic adviser to President Bush partly because of his estimate of the dollar cost of the Iraq war. In an excerpt of his own book in Fortune magazine five years after, Lindsey wrote his projections were partly right. “My hypothetical estimate got the annual cost about right. But I misjudged an important factor: how long we would be involved.” Mr. Lindsey also stated his belief that one reasons the administration’s efforts were so unpopular was the choice not to engage in an open public discussion of the consequences of war, including its economic cost.”

Congressional Democrats had predicted the Iraq war would cost about $93 billion, not including reconstruction. Peter R. Orszag, director of the Congressional Budget Office, said, “It’s clear that operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have gone on longer and have been more expensive than the projections initially suggested,”

So far this has been a tax-free Iraq War, and not included in the Congressional Budget, as I recall a piece that was written in 2002. According to an item that ran on the MSN news page, the cost was carried over. I see little media coverage since that time indicting where the war shows up in the president’s budget.

William Nordhaus from Yale University wrote in the New York Review of Books in December 2002 in an article entitled “The Economic Consequences of War,” about the the long-term management of the economy, with the management of planning cycles. “The fabulous Nineties—with soaring stock market, falling unemployment, declining defense spending, budget surpluses, and bubbly optimism—were followed by the Bush administration which made no serious public estimate of the costs of the coming war. The public and the Congress are unable to make informed judgments about the realistic costs and benefits of the upcoming conflict when none are given. Particularly worrisome is the promise of postwar occupation, reconstruction, and nation-building in Iraq. If American taxpayers decline to pay the bills, this would leave a mountain of rubble and mobs of angry people in Iraq and the region. Closely related is a second syndrome, frequently found in past conflicts, of entering war prepared militarily but not economically. The finances of the nation have deteriorated sharply since George W. Bush took office. The annual federal budget has deteriorated by $360 billion from the spring of 2001 to the fall of 2002, and, even with a short war, budget deficits are likely to mount in coming years. The Bush administration has not prepared the public for the cost or the financing of what could prove to be an expensive venture.”

Nor has the Obama Administration. Market participants, wrote William Nordhaus in “The Story of the Bubble,” at this point do “remember how they lost $6 trillion on absurd and wildly overvalued speculations. A similar exuberance is unlikely to recur in the near future. More likely is an economy in which large federal budget deficits lead to cuts in existing civilian programs and doom critical priorities such as comprehensive health care.”

That tax-free Iraq War, as conceived by the Bush White House, was one ongoing economic consequences of war. There was now the subsequent tax-free Afghan War. These wars would soon change American history. Would you like to come over for tea?

Blog Networking in Real-time

The Deceit in the Decade of the Aughts

My sister reported this week that the accident which my mother had had two years ago driving to a post-season baseball game, a rear-end accident, really was not my mother’s fault. Because it seems, my sister was driving. I have not inquired yet of the reasons why the deception. I did not recall if the accident was two or three years ago, only that it was during the Bush Administration when the Twins were playing Oakland, and Frank Thomas had hit a home run to decide the outcome that day–game one of the opening post season.

There has been a lot of deception around the past few years. About bailouts. And banks and money laundering. In an era when an American government was not all that different than the Mexican government. In an era when we wondered which Heisman Trophy winners had received payment, and who was using steroids, in post season baseball which allowed a wild card team to go the farthest in the post season, for an extra round of television ratings. In the decade of war which started over weapons of mass destruction.

The Bush Administration talked only about the upfront costs of the War in Iraq which mostly were handled still five years after the war began by emergency appropriations. By the time we went to war, costing $12 billion a month but not in the budget, Bush and Congress — even though the United States already had a massive deficit—cut taxes. So the war had to be funded by more borrowing. And thus the low interest rate policy and quantitative easing.

So budgets seemed to have, because of the War on Terror, mostly hidden items. So that the collapse of the banks was blamed on sub-prime loans, but when the fault lies also with the votes of Congress to go to war in Iraq, based on the theory of weapons of mass destruction which had never existed. Funding of war is now running at a monthly $16 billion if you include Afghanistan.
All of these wars, with quantitative easing and little or no economic sacrifice. The hallucinations back home about the war in Iraq. The war in Afghanistan. Or the drug wars. Easy money. And banks laundering the money to fund it all. And all the costs hidden in the defense budget, and for national security, in the war on terror which my Congressperson, prior to 2006 “shoulder to shoulder” with Mr. Bush, has witnessed over her ___years. Though I think she has been around since the 1990s, I will have to look. Apparently, like my mother across the river, she even had approved of bailouts.

In elections when no one asks about the deception. Journalists do not ask— perhaps more conscious than ever about the financial condition over the precipice of their own employer— when they are allowed to question candidates during the debate. If any of these television news people were journalists.

Yeah, my sister reported this week that accident which my mother had had two years ago when, it seems, my sister was actually driving. It was time to inquire the reasons why the deception. Because the deceptions were becoming a way of life here. Overall, according to a new report from the Congressional Research Service, the U.S. has spent $1.1 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Between 2009 and 2010, the average monthly expenditure of the war in Iraq fell $1.8 billion to $5.4 billion. While in Afghanistan, monthly expenditure was $5.7 billion, up 63% compared to the unhidden expenses in the prior year’s budget. And if it was anything like when the Shriners’ convention came to town, or with the Super Bowl when politicians promised a seven-fold spending result for each dollar expended, in the derivative world with no real regulation, was this war costing $7 trillion? On top of the bailouts? Two years later?

My mother called in the wake of the news about all of her deceit in this auto accident. She wondered if I wanted to attend a meeting with her at Wells Fargo Bank on Monday. Yeah, the bank which had acquired Wachovia. Wachovia, with all of the bad sub-prime loans which still are not resolved. Wachovia which made a lot of money, hundred of millions, in money laundering for drug lords in Mexico. But she liked her banker, who seems like a nice guy.

A lot like the subsequent president, my mother still has not spoken about all of the deceit in the two or three years since the car accident. Maybe I had become like too many Congressmen and Congresswomen, and I don’t want to know. In the case of the accident, I don’t think the deceit involved more than the family circle. All I knew was it was really was not my mother’s fault, just a tap, and no one believed that the other driver was injured, or if she really had more than $200 in damage.

I don’t understand a lot these days. About how it became some how a cause of patriotism to die upholding the wars of deceit. Too many have not inquired the reasons for the wars of deceit. Some attribute the cost to the War on Terror. The ones which have allowed wiretaps and water torture, encroaching upon the highest ideals of the Founding Fathers.

Mostly I think we had allowed ourselves to be deceived. By institutions. Academic ones. Religious ones. Political ones. By people who seemed like nice guys. Older popes. Even Pulitzer Prize winning economists from Princeton, telling us how to avoid a decade long depression, without ever looking at all this deceit around.

The anger at Mother Church. The one based in Rome. At all the deceit. With all of his complicity, why this pope had gone to the United Kingdom at this point in history. Accepting an invitation from the queen, herself a head of state and head of a religion. A Protestant herself, inhabiting castles and ivy towers. As the Irish could just hang their heads. About why this guy was in charge. And why did he not just go away? But when the same electorate would choose his successor. As the Irish could just hang their collective heads.

Yeah, my sister reported this week that accident which my mother had had two years ago, when it seems, my sister was driving. And my mother bailed her out. This sister does not drink. Or so we think. A lot like that original bailout vote which failed, the accident happened at mid day. And a lot like Republicans and the Democrats, I was not quite ready to forgive either of them. As Obama and Congress — even though the United States already had a massive deficit from the wars stemming from deceit— were in discussions once again about continuing the tax cuts. And when it also seemed patriotic to fund such wars. Because now everyone needed jobs.

While the Jews around the world were getting ready for the Day of Atonement this weekend, I was not quite ready. In a world with less and less belief, I still needed a few more weeks.

Blog Networking in Real-time

Trying to Make It Through the Motion Detector

Attributing the higher number to increased border enforcement, workplace enforcement and use of fingerprints to identify illegal immigrants in state prisons and local jails, under the expansion of the Secure Communities program, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced Wednesday 392,000 illegal immigrants were deported from the U.S. in fiscal 2010, with half of deported immigrants in the last fiscal year convicted of crimes. “We have deployed unprecedented infrastructure, unprecedented technology, unprecedented manpower,” Napolitano said. Hmmm?

Politicians manipulating the fears of an electorate, showing false results to justify tax increases? With half of those deported were not just arrested but convicted of crimes, how tough was it to detect illegals amongst us? How does the boast of increased border enforcement apply to the manipulation of statistics, in the budget of Homeland Security which seems to have replaced the INS budget. The Secure Communities program, the referenced “unprecedented infrastructure,” has gone from 14 jurisdictions in 2008 to more than 660, as the bureaucracy grows. Why did the prison systems not have a program to begin with to identify who was in the country legally in the first place?

Blog Networking in Real-time

America’s Dollar, With Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome

There was silence all around us, about the currency we used. It was the silence over who we think who we are, as a currency appreciated. The silence came with a belief in false strength, as if it was something that I had done.

Travel internationally and see it in a people. While a weaker currency was inflationary, no one who used the currency within the borders seemed to appreciate what was happening, in the view of the rest of the world over value. Or over judging values.

When currency policy was used to finance war, so that not many citizens thought about the war. There was a silence all around us. About war. Until tax cuts affected road maintenance. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But someday soon. In the United States, the silence all around us was about war. Until tax increases came, or otherwise the currency would become worthless. No matter how many dollars we saved for retirement.

There was a silence all around us. In political campaigns. About war. And about the cost of war. When currency policy was used to finance war. The past unfunded costs, and the ongoing present costs. Which were affecting currency. Every day. When state government had no control over the erosion of currency. While the electorate seemed to only build new stadiums, drink beer and watch NFL football. An electorate with a loss of consciousness, if not just the beginning stages of dementia in a once booming generation.

The power to regulate currency was left to the market, as the Fed and the Treasury secretary had spent their tools to control the cost of money. Only after Congress had already approved of war. The elected representatives. With interest rates, banks were allowed to have some control of cost of money. In a world market fighting deflation.

The silence all around us was from the seemingly powerless, in whatever currency was used. Except come election day. An electorate, as one clinical symptom of depression, continued to be unable to focus. Perhaps as a result of battle fatigue, or one stage of a national Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, the missing focus was on the cost of war. It was not just soldiers that would have to live the remainder of their lives with this Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.

In a once booming American generation unable to focus beyond a counted cost of 50,000 American lives, with no attention to the 2 million Asians who lost their lives. It was not just surviving soldiers that had had to live the remainder of their lives with this Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, and the loss of focus. In a once booming American nation once with a currency with the power to regulate governments in Southeast Asia, or to go to war in Iraq. A nation that had not learned the affects of war on currency that took twenty years to overcome, beyond the loss of life.

The United States was a nation, after both Democrat and Republican administrations, with a sub-prime belief in false strength of currency that was used to somehow bring Bin Laden to justice, with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. My own considerable fear, with this Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and the loss of focus after September 2001, was about a weaker currency which was hyper inflationary, in the soon to come future that would affect a nation for twenty more years. Or the reverse policy would be uncontrolled deflation, like the policy followed in Japan, where elected political leaders could only watch the affect of monetary policy adrift. Or the decade after the Great War in Europe that saw ongoing deflation, with a contagion that spread to these shores.

The drones of both Democrat and Republican candidates with post traumatic stress, and not really caring any more about the cost of these foreign wars –the wars lost sight of under the cover of TARP rescue of banks that no one had really protested against. It’s the war, stupid. It’s the stupid cost of war.

Blog Networking in Real-time

Blog Networking in Real-time

The State of the Union: A New Director of Pork

ST. PAUL, Minn. – Minnesota health executive Lois Quam will lead the $63 billion Global Health Initiative which President Barack Obama in 2009 committed to the program at the U.S. State Department, over six years, aimed at helping developing nations provide more aid for prenatal and postnatal care, improve nutrition, and fight disease. This appointment reunites Quam who had been in the 1990s a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton on Hilary Clinton’s health care task force. A State Department spokesman confirmed Wednesday that Quam will be executive director of the initiative under Secretary of State Clinton.

Lois Quam,of St. Paul is a former UnitedHealth Group executive who co-founded a health consulting firm last year. She was one of the executives who worked under Dr.Bill McGuire grossly enriched by the backdating of hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of stock options at UnitedHealth Group, the private insurance company whose shareholders have been getting rich off the invasion of disease that threatened people’s lives, for which approximately 70 million took out their health insurance. The exit compensation of McGuire was alleged to be around $1.1 billion, when he immediately stepped down as chairman and director of UnitedHealth Group due to his involvement in the employee stock options scandal.

There is something wrong with this picture. As government leaders work to manipulate people, worldwide under the auspices of the United State State Department. No mention is made in the story if the $69 billion is directed at American citizens overseas, and the issues in their lives of prenatal and postnatal care, the nutrition, and disease on foreign soil.

She is married to Matt Entenza, a former state lawmaker who wanted to be governor of Minnesota but unsuccessfully failed in a primary election for the Democratic-Farmer-Labor nomination for governor in 2010. He was not the endorsed candidate of the party. It was alleged that Ms. Quam financed his campaign.

No mention has ever been made about the issue of clawback for the undue profits that came to the team of UnitedHealth management. Clawback is now being used, under a provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, against those who unduly profited in their investments with Bernie Maddoff.

Always The Tumult in Egypt

The Promise Land.

The tumult in Egypt. Always the tumult in Egypt. And elsewhere.

Wanting immunity. After the worst drought in 130 year around Russia and the Black Sea region, damaging winter planting along with the summer harvest, the Canadian drop in wheat productions, and a surprising reductions in harvest totals from parts of the United States, the cost of food was up. The cost of tea would soar in 2011.

Wanting immunity from soaring food costs. In Tunisia. In Jordan. In Egypt. Maybe you were one of the 30,000 Brits vacationing in the warmth of an Egyptian resort this January. And your vacation was over, but it was not exactly a joy ride to the Cairo airport to get home. And even if you got to the airport in Cairo, to find out that most of the workers had left to protest the government of Hosni Murabek, a guy whose name you could never quite remember the pronunciation until singing “Waltzing Matilda.” And the airport brought back images of the Super Dome post Hurricane Katrina.

Wanting to get back home, with some kind of new-found urgency. From the region of the Promise Land. But where you arrived there to the resort with a growing concern over the price of petroleum, the price of food had set these people off. And they believed in some kind of different God that seemed to hate foreigners. Or maybe it was a fear based upon some kind of wealth which made people act so foreign. Maybe not unlike the distrust in China of foreigners. Over history. When leaders have been so cruel to their people. In Tunisia, in the city of Tunis, at least 219 people were killed and 510 injured in ongoing rioting, with one synagogue burned. This week.

Wanting immunity. And getting inoculated… against Yellow Fever. The diphtheria tetanus, or pertussis shots. Seeking anti-dotes for malaria.

The questions what a westerner was doing carrying a gun. Either at the U.S. Embassy or when driving around, when guns were disallowed at airports. In Lahore, Pakistan, many questions have been left unanswered, including exactly whether who would qualify for diplomatic immunity. Whether as a CIA agent, a security contractor, a journalist, or NGO worker. With questions why he had been carrying a gun and if he used it in self-defense.

The old fashioned missionary. Whether religious or economic. Exporting a system of some kind. A system of belief. With a belief in money. And always the tumult, with the lack of clarity which fuels media speculation. About the future.

Just wars. Economic justice in times of war and peace. Or just some measure of freedom with your money. Hedge funds. Betting with hedge funds, and the price of coffee. As more and more people in China and all the world began to drink coffee. And speculators sent their money there to try to profit.

Mass famine…Always the tumult in Egypt. Since the time of Joseph.

Unraveling the tale. Egypt and its tumultuous history. The plagues. Always the plagues in Egypt. And how to avoid death.

Overthrowing the Egyptian monarch in 1952 began in the runup to World War I, with the German Empire of Kaiser Wilhelm contributing to the agitation of numerous anti-British movements (which would be his cousins of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in Buckingham Palace) of secular political ideologies along with various degrees of Islamic movements. Because during World War I, the British declared Egypt their protectorate, shouldering the entire burden of the war as the Ottoman Empire crumpled. By drafting Egyptian men, occupying Egypt with British troops, dissatisfaction with British rule soon spread amongst all classes of the population. In the period between the two world wars, these agitated groups coalesced into the Baath Party, other associated reform groups, as well as the Muslem Brotherhood, along with other revolutionary groups, all coordinated by German intelligence, nurtured by renewed Jihadism with exposure to the 20th century concepts of nationalism and liberalism. Over several weeks of demonstrations and strikes spanning the Muslim and Christian divide by civil servants, merchants, workers, religious leaders, students and peasant became a daily occurrence bringing normal life across Egypt to a halt.

Independence for Egypt granted by the British was at this point provisional; British forces continued to be physically present on Egyptian soil. As to the method how this regime came to power, with the outbreak of World War II, these associated elements –the Baath Party, the Muslem Brotherhood, et al – were supported not only by Axis powers but by the United States and the Soviet Union, countries both opposed to continuing the British Colonial Empire as a corrupt puppet of the British in the way of police, the palace, the political parties. Due to the continuing British occupation of Egypt, many Egyptians including Egyptian King Farouk were disposed towards Germany and Italy during World War II. Egypt remained officially neutral despite the presence of British troops, until the final year of World War II. Contributing substantial political, psychological, ideological and logistical along with moral support, the Soviet Union and the United States backed the Free Officers Movement, formed by a group of reform minded officers who lived in poverty. And it was the Free Officers Movement which led the overthrow of Egyptian King Farouk in 1952.

Then came the pain of men, dealing with women. Over issues of power, outside the home. When every women was the queen in the home. Fathers letting sons deal with mothers, until the age of puberty. In the Middle East. About the time when the Muslim Brotherhood began to shave. Beset with a generation gap, as the oldest and formally organized opposition, The Muslim Brotherhood currently cannot define the role of women in leadership, or concepts of outside power. Outside the home. So the Muslim Brotherhood has over the years failed to attract many new members, with its old ideas. Young men just quit having vocations? It sounded oh so catholic. Maybe because young men were attracted by the beauty of independent women. The Brotherhood has lost in Egypt much credibility in recent years, despite remaining the country’s largest group. A Country of Old Men, after allowing itself to be co-opted by the Mubarak government, in a place where their leader was now 83-years old.

The lack of leaders. In the world that we had known which was slowly dying. At this point in time, beyond the royal military. Asked to lead, in a world that most Egyptians did not understand, other than staving off hunger for another year. In a world where few of us understood where world leaders were leading us. But still we were getting inoculated. And humming “Waltzing Matilda,” wondering how long Hosni Murabek would be at the dance. As the world looked on at the hunger.
Visual Web Search

Visual Web Search

Rebellion

The new year was about fear. And moving stories that grabbed the heart. Stories not necessarily ending in freedom.

There seemed to be a lot of rebellion going on in the new year. When the world itself makes us at time move. As the Mayan calendar which ruled the world of Chinese horoscopes over a 26,000 year astrology cycle (the Precession of the Equinoxes) had us all coming to an abrupt end by around Christmas 2012. Or in the belief of the Mayans, the Sumerians, Tibetans, and Egyptians, precisely on December 21, 2012.

Fear always had moved people who mostly never wanted to be changed, This year, fear was stealing people’s money and independence. Fear moved those in power. Revolutions were about movements. When those who lived in pain organized in movement. Over the price of food, or over currency, for people in parts of the world which needed oil to move.

When movement was no longer an elective, for people caught up in hunger and fear. And how it was fear moved a story. It was why people read –looking not so much to be changed but for some wisdom about the world. Perhaps about the coming new world, and how to outfox it, beginning on December 21, 2012.

When inequality threatens stability. The use of language used by the media in this decade to describe current events is interesting. Particularly over the increasing use of the term “Insurgents.” Counter-insurgency involved “action taken by the recognized government of a nation to quell a rebellion against a constituted authority.” Has anyone ever asked why the rebellion in the first place, against a constituted authority? And authority “constituted” by who?

The way brains are wired. When inequality threatens stability. Inflicting more than just pain….but homicide. When you waged organized homicide called war, and society accepted it. And when you controlled a school system that ingrained how brains were wired. And the numbers bear out that a lot of young people believed they were fighting in defense of the United States by waging war in Afghanistan. Counter-insurgency action taken by the recognized government of a nation….constituted by who? And if the rebellion in a foreign land was thought to be unjust, who had made the determination and why had the US government selected this particular land, of all the places, to fight over? When you had a neighbor like Pakistan, supposedly an American ally, who was aiding and abetting the rebellion.

When inequality threatens stability, and homicide was waged against you. As pro-democracy uprisings spread across the Middle East, Saudi Arabian princes were feeling increasingly isolated. And the Omaha World Herald was getting around to sending their own reporter to Afghanistan where it is difficult to impossible to make a distinction between an insurgent, a supporter of a non-combatant insurgent, and an entirely uninvolved members of the population. Apparently the publisher thought a story was going to be breaking out in Afghanistan. Soon.

And consequently because of that war, my country has been spending $193 million per day fighting in foreign lands, not really counting the cost, aiding and abetting in a counter-insurgency action taken by a recognized government, and these young people were willing to sacrifice their lives.

When you controlled a school system that ingrained how brains were wired on how to recognize legitimate governments, maybe someone was confused as to the geography –thinking Afghanistan was located next to Egypt or Tunisia. But counter-insurgency operations have often rested on a confused, relativistic distinctions. And in such a secular world, when a school system had ingrained how brains were wired on how to recognize legitimate governments, and maybe someone was confused as to the geography…or very concerned about their reporters’ safety as Islamists rebelled against a constituted authority in some kind of world-wide movement. So maybe exporting “democracy” to a parts of the world which had never had the experience, without checks and balances, without a respect for the dignity of a minority, was not such a good idea.

When you waged organized homicide called war, and the majority in a society accepted it. The way brains are wired, when inequality threatens stability. Never counting the true enduring stress syndromes, in the ecology of the soul, with all the post traumatic stress which came into people’s lives, people’s homes, after war, in representative democratic republics. In stories not necessarily ending in freedom

There seemed to be a lot of rebellion going on in the new year. In the age of globalization, when everybody on earth seemed to want to make some kind of contribution. Republicans exporting “democracy” to a parts of the world which had never had the experience, and now Democrats in the name of hope, if not change, because their brains are wired that way. Not counting the cost. Where inequality threatens stability. When the preeminence of the US dollar was no longer stable, and with its instability, we had now exported the problem elsewhere. To China, and those OPEC nations. All the rebellion resulting from the unrecognized monetary wars, to fund the counter-insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. When inequality threatens stability.

.

Visual Web Search

A New Chapter in World Terror

With all of the speed shown by the American presidents following Hurricane Katrina, or by British Petroleum to their own oil spill, is it a surprise highly radioactive water has spilled into the ocean from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex which has been spewing radioactivity since March 11th? Meanwhile, over the past three weeks Barack Obama announced the start to the third U.S. war in the Muslim world since September 11th. Maybe because he considered it “women’s work,” he even left it to his Secretary of State — who has announced she will not be returning for any new term after 2013 — to make the pronouncement of American airstrikes while she was in Paris. At the same time, the French president was claiming credit for leading airstrikes against Moammar Khadaffi when a few months ago he wanted to do more business with Kadaffi’s Libya.

At least Nicolas Sarkozy is cognizant of a cosmic crisis. It was Sarkozy who before he gets back home to address a burqa ban, called for a meeting of the G20 to meet the nuclear meltdown issue, while the American president and his secretary of state worried about a cosmetic pimple called Libya. The world was losing time, if not hope, with an American administration which had promised change, but escalated the military effort in Afghanistan which was inherited. And radio-active isotopes would soon be sailing the world’s oceans, as Democrats and Republicans worried about global warming, and Sarkozy got ready to see into the faces of all of his constituents.

The US military was busy assisting in looking for bodies, which might be good practice for what is to come, with the nuclear fallout into the seas. It might be time to look for some leadership from China, where the glamor of television stars might be in its infancy.

The Fukushima

The nearly four-year rally in the yen versus the dollar would seem to be over. It had nothing to do with the policy announced by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geinther over the past two years. Rather, this atomic power incident of March 1th will have an affect on the strength of the yen which would headed down prior to today’s 7.4 earthquake in Japan.

The yen was trading at 84.05 per dollar early on Tuesday when Eisuke Sakakibara, a former senior finance ministry official, said the yen would weaken in the coming months, possibly beyond 90 to the dollar. Initially, the yen had soared following the tsunami, on speculation Japan would repatriate funds for reconstruction, which prompted the G7 to intervene, to knock the exchange rate lower.

Japanese Prime Minister Kan asked the European Union on Monday for a calm response to Japanese imports, as four of the six reactors at the Fukushima plant are considered volatile.
The exact source of the radiation leaks remains unknown. In a desperate attempt to stop radioactive leaks, Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) engineers who operate the plant have used sawdust mixed with newspapers along with polymers and cement in a failed attempt to seal a crack in a concrete pit at reactor No.2. To trace the source of the problem on Monday, powdered bath salts were used to produce a milky color in water to find the source of the leak. In an attempt to prevent radioactive silt drifting out into the sea, TEPCO spokesman said it was also planning to drape a curtain into the sea off the nuclear plant, as well as building tanks to hold contaminated seawater.

TEPCO workers are giving their lives as they try to rescue the world from further disaster.
With radiation emitted at more than 1,000 millisieverts an hour in both the water and air, a worker who enters the basement of the turbine building would top their annual radiation exposure quota in just 15 minutes.

“If the current situation continues for a long time, accumulating more radioactive substances, it will have a huge impact on the ocean,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said.
On Monday, the process of release of more than 10,000 tons of “Less contaminated water”– about 100 times more radioactive than legal limits – into the sea was begun, to free up more storage space for water which had much higher levels of radioactivity.

Experts say the clean-up will take decades. As the spent nuclear fuel in Fukushima has been damaged by sea water, recycling it probably is not an option and transporting for disposal elsewhere of spent fuel, which will decay and emit fission fragments over several thousand years, is politically unlikely, given the likelihood opposition.

Damage from the Fukushima nuclear crisis, “with the subsequent power shortage,” said Eiji Hirano, former assistant governor of the Bank of Japan, “will last for several years. There’s a strong chance Japan’s economy will contract in the current fiscal year.”

“The situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant remains,”said Denis Flory, head of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency nuclear safety department, at a news conference in Vienna, “very serious.” As the Japanese leaders request a calm response.

Visual Web Search

Justice in Pakistan

When you are busy as a Republican or a Democrat, whether in a congressional campaign or a presidential one, you did not have a great deal of time to sit and study history. When there were wars going on and campaigns to arrange every two years.

The White House didn’t notify the Pakistani government in advance, over what the people within the Pakistan leadership long had known about the location of the bin Laden compound forty miles north of Islamabad. Pakistani troops did not participate in the secret operation which sound to be out of a Daniel Silva novel.

In the wake of the announcement of the new head of the CIA, in just a few days later, comes news of the death of Osama bin Laden. In the wake of the news this year about the killing of two Pakistanis by a CIA operative. With an awakening at that point about Pakistan’s history. The one which the New York Times had covered in their Sunday Magazine two years ago. It pretty much explained why Pakistan would shelter bin Laden.

With a history of the last twenty five years. When Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s army chief of staff had been Zia ul-Haq, who not only deposed prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto but crushed all opposition and introduced into the country’s public life — especially into the military — a quite new element of evangelical piety. When the military took over a country, not unlike in Egypt. Perhaps with the same attitude to the outside world, which could be found in Russia and China. When the stranger was always distrusted. Because of the mystery of the Russian soul. Or whatever place of birth from where a man, a woman, was from.

In a short time after the incubation of this Pakistani nation, Zia ul-Haq, a true believer, empowered religious societies and political parties in a bid to foster a new national ideology, where previous rulers — themselves religiously moderate — found Islam only convenient. A nation founded, different than Hindu India, based somehow on belief. “Since 1947, Pakistan understood itself, and organized itself, as a national-security state with strong cold-war ties to the United States. This clear idea of establishment of a nation came from of soldiers and bureaucrats and soldiers in its founding in 1947, with an identity as one as a refuge for South Asian Muslims away from an India bent on subsuming the new country back into the ‘Hindu raj.’ Because the tenure of Zia ul-Haq coincided with the CIA war on the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, Pakistan today was so different. Zia’s military and intelligence officials had been the ones who controlled the Afghan mujahedeen, doled out their American funds, and sometimes history catches up with current events,” wrote the New York Times.

Twenty-five years later, current President Asif Ali Zardari lost an important supporter when the Christian governor of the country’s most populous state was shot dead by a member of his own police guard. Admiral Mike Mullen, the Obama administration’s point man on Pakistan policy, told Pakistani General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, a previous director-general of the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate – Pakistan’s military equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency – that the CIA would not reduce drone strikes until Pakistan launched a military operation against the Haqqani network in Pakistan’s tribal areas. So American policy with the drones is to drive the Taliban deeper within Pakistan. And it seems safe to conclude the Pakistan army, which runs the country and supports the Taliban, does not care about anyone or anything except Muslims. And it was tough to be in such an alliance.

So in the same city with a Pakistani military base and military academy, with a Pakistan army which runs the country and supports the Taliban, why would you give prior notice to Pakistani General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, a previous director-general of the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, that you were coming to get bin Laden?

The great American weakness had always been this desire to be friends with everyone. It had taken ten years to discover that the Pakistani army does not care about anyone or anything except Muslims? All a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had to do was read the New York Times’ article, “Can Pakistan Be Governed? And Is Asif Ali Zardari The Man To Do The Job?” The real answer is, no. The real answer is that Pakistani General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani ruled the country, that there the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate was working, like V.S. Naipaul once warned about all of Pakistan, for the sole interests of Mecca.

The underlying difference about the adherents of Islam seemed to be an affirmation about “how we are different,” with little interest in helping anyone who is not Muslim. After the Cold War, with the hope that finally, in a free world, fervent true believers could empower religious societies and political parties. And bin Laden had helped set off a revolution in that part of the world.

Beware of the viability of alliances in any Pakistani partnership, which denied advances in their own society, in their belief in an ascetic way of life, with the evangelical Muslim piety which army generals seemed to like, to direct attention away from the misery on earth, in the hellhole of Pakistan, when the hellhole seemed to be everyone’s fault except their own.

The troubling part about the announcement of bin Laden’s death was the association of the new American ideal in the old EYE FOR EYE concept of justice; that somehow it was just to to invade the sovereignty of a nation which refused to recognize justice itself, not unlike the way Egypt or Libya had been ruled; that the old clan behavior on concepts of power–whether it was the Haqqani or the Klu Klux Klan — was never to be changed. And that the ideals of the United States did not really differ much from the piety of Pakistani generals.

The troubling part about the announcement of bin Laden’s death was the failure to recognize the National Security concerns. Because the issue was not much different than what had existed in the Cold War. As the rich feared the poor, and all the chaos in the ensuing rebellion of the poor. Because Pakistani General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani knows, as perhaps bin Laden had long ago come to understand, Pakistan cannot be governed? And Asif Ali Zardari is not the man to do the job. There is no human who seems to have the gifts to rule over the post-Cold War rebellion in Pakistan, Libya or even Egypt. In a culture where bribes have always flourished, along with an anger about the state of the world, and all of its every day misery, which is exhibited in an envy toward Europe and the United States over the state of the missing union in the Moslem world. In the new world order with the sixteen agencies addressed toward National Security. Towards a part of the world that demanded passports and birth certificates, when the stranger was always distrusted.

The United States might have been well advised to let bin Laden exist in his suburban house, and to quietly poison his water supply, rather to pursue the Big Bang Theory of the intelligence department. But the populace liked to be excited by the illusions of their own leaders –the ones who could not keep state secrets too long, with elections coming soon –wherever this was leading to. With the drones to drive the Taliban deeper within Pakistan.

Yes, finally justice in Pakistan. Two years after their own wrestling over supreme court appointments, as Asif Ali Zardari worried about rebellion in the streets, now the issue of justice in Pakistan was a world concern. Only Pakistani General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani did not need the ISI to tell him any more what information was being given to the United States, as the war in Afghanistan continued. How soon would Pakistan be at war with the US?

As the Taliban came closer to home, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States Hussain Haqqani said on Saturday that on May 3, 2011 Afghanistan and the US will hold trilateral talks to resolve the Afghan conflict, denying media reports about Pakistan advising Afghanistan against cooperation with the US. In this New Age Crusade of Muslims against the west in Afghanistan, just as the Afghans had fought against the Russians when American foreign policy somehow supported the locals. “The key thing is that all three players — the United States, Afghanistan and Pakistan — understand that the way forward is: we have to defeat some people in Afghanistan and we have to engage certain people,” Haqqani said. In the charade called the Afghan War where American soldiers had to wonder why they had enlisted.

POST SCRIPT: Pakistani General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani reportedly said that Pakistan would reconsider its relationship with America in the event of another similar operation, in the aftermath of bin Laden’s killing. Yeah, like an American would ever marry a second Pakistani woman after seeing what happened the first time, in the clash of cultures. When you had been paying too much alimony for much too long. In this arranged marriage.

POST SCRIPT II: In the wake of this news in the aftermath of the death of bin Laden, comes the story this week that the German spy agency BND announced that it would not release thousands of files on Adolf Eichmann. Some documents suggest the German spy agency BND was using Adolf Eichmann as an informant – suggesting that both top-level Nazi officials and many lower-level operators escaped justice for reasons of national interest, convenience, or public embarrassment – and that Germany always knew of Eichmann’s whereabouts. As one of the masterminds of the Final Solution, Adolf Eichmann fled and lived in exile under his own name in Argentina after the war until he was captured and brought to trial by Israeli authorities in the 1960s.

This news comes upon the earlier release of a 900 page report commissioned by the German Foreign Minister in 2005, “The Office and the Past: German Diplomats in the Third Reich and the Federal Republic,” about the Foreign Ministry’s Holocaust involvement. According to this report, German diplomats were much more deeply involved in spying on Jewish emigrants from Germany abroad to actively contributing to the mass murder of Europe’s Jews until 1945. “The German Foreign Ministry collaborated with the Nazis’ violent politics and especially assisted in all aspects of the discrimination, deportation, persecution and genocide of the Jews,” said Eckart Conze. This news about Eichmann would suggest that nothing within the German Foreign Ministry had ever really changed in 1945, even though Germany allegedly had “taken an honest and painful look at its past.”

Visual Web Search

Every Man in This Village IS a Liar

Watch the “Charlie Rose Show” to witness the pretensions in the reporting on the Arab spring. In looking to present a meaning of the system, television journalists too often along the way produce and disseminate culture, reproducing only the values of that culture, instead of being the voice of the Truth for working class people home from work.

There was real irony of people at Duke University, talking about multiculturalism, wrote Camile Paglia. An irony like the strategy the United States has used to advance its anti-democratic policies in Latin America and in the Arab World in the age of television. Look only at the continuation of the School of the Americas under one administration to the next, with the School for the Americas exporting instruction in torture. Not at all unlike American foreign policy in the Middle East.

“Propelled by the beginning of the Cold War and the US strategy to suppress all forms of real and imagined communist-leaning forces around the world, in contrast with its actual anti-democratic policies around the world,” writes Joseph Massad.

When the Cold War ended, the United States has insisted on marketing itself always as a force for global democracy. In line with the public relations campaign. “Between the billions spent on repressing the Arab peoples and the millions spent to explain academically and in the American media the need to repress them, this two-pronged US strategy in the region since World War II has been coming apart at an accelerated rate since January 2011, a development that continues to cause panic in the Obama White House and,” writes Joseph Massad, “manifests in the incessant fumbling of his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, who is much despised across the Arab world.”

“Arab culture and Islam are spoken of the way race was once spoken of in India,” writes Nir Tosen. “In order to make the revolutions in Tunisia and especially Egypt seem non-threatening, the nonviolent tactics are emphasized while the many acts of violent resistance to regime oppression are completely ignored.” By the Charlie Roses of television. Telling us all from New York.

Iran continues to feel under siege by the West and Israel, sitting at the epicenter of a geopolitical struggle between two battling regional worldviews, according to Sharmine Narwani, a senior associate at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University – after having endured four rounds of economic sanctions by the UN Security Council. One “bloc” in the geopolitical struggle consists of many of the autocratic male leaders now being swept away in the Arab Spring who were comfortable with the existing US and Israeli hegemony in the Middle East, writes Sharmine Narwani; the second bloc is is the Iran-led “Resistance Bloc” which embraces regional and national self-determination, seeking to end this foreign hegemony. According to Western diplomats and experts, Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard dominates foreign policy for the countries of the Middle East and maintains close relationships with the highest levels of Mukhabarat, the Syrian intelligence service, and Syrian security branches. With the emergence of the Arab Spring in Bahrain and Yemen, the wave of reform threatens Saudi Arabia’s dominance – Iran’s biggest regional foe – and fundamentally shifts the regional balance of power toward the the Iran-led “Resistance Bloc”. The anti-Iran bloc extends its aversions to Tehran’s closest allies in Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas – while keeping a tight lid on other regional players such as Iraq, Qatar, Oman, and even Egypt and Lebanon. To justify violent actions against their own populations, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait and Yemen have pulled out the “Iran card,” while the Iranian government, with external political pressures mounting – both regionally and internationally, but with no mention of the role of women – does its utmost to promote an image of domestic unity and stability, putting rumors of internal strife to rest. Expect the tensions between the two blocs to result in further crackdowns and political maneuverings.

Television journalists too often also perpetuate the dominant ideology, instead of building a counter narrative with any kind of vision of different perspective. Watch as Charlie Rose and his intellectuals center their perspective on serving the interests of power and gaining proximity to it, aligning their beliefs and priorities with those of the state. Journalists depict the Middle East to their Western audiences with what French scholar Francois Burgat termed as “the facade intellectual”, whose role in society is to confirm already-held Western notions, beliefs, preconceptions, and racism regarding the “other.” See the organic intellectuals of the ruling class represent power as the functional tools for a bourgeois ruling class. As the American public for the most part misses the simmering hatred in the Arab world for Israel, Europe, and the United States. Perhaps about the manner of depiction. Not at all unlike how Duke students went blindly to school around all the surroundings built by slavery.

Those in power know the truth, but they just don’t care. Read Megan Stack’s book, Every Man in This Village IS a Liar. Journalism is about speaking not to those in power, but reporting on the truth. By disseminating illusion, instead of the Truth, a narcissism had become entrenched in the American narrative. When a generation tried to believe in its own culture, like a false art.

So what had happened to meaning? What had happened to institutional meaning? What happens when the medium had lost credibility. In the attempt to reproduce values, with an American narrative, the meaning of its institutions was lost, to the audience. Government, in the age of bailouts, with their own audience. More and more the disbelieving audience, swimming in the culture.

The Art. What happens to self-determinism when there was no “there” there, in the false art of the American narrative on television – in the art of television news from the American Broadcasting Company to Public Broadcasting System, confirming the already-held Western notions, beliefs, and preconceptions?

Journalism. Trying to piece it all together. With words and language to try and get your arms around something. Something invisible that had happened today. Or yesterday. For an audience. The meaning of the art of journalism. For an audience. The culture. The art. With another form of bailout, of Saudi princes and other autocrats. Just as Queen Elizabeth tries this week to amend her life, and that of her ascendants, with the Irish. In her public acts of contrition, as head of the Anglican Church, for the sins of the last two hundred years. About what happens to the power of government, over issues of self-determinism, when government spent so much time on issues of security and defense.

The meaning of incredulous art. In producing art, in trying to reproduce values, and failing, comes loss of meaning and a loss of trust. As television journalism tries to disseminate “culture” and meaning of the system, to the system. For an audience. In the American narrative. Perpetuating for an audience the once dominant ideology. For the “Too Big To Fail” generation which now tries to believe in its own culture, like a false art. What happens to meaning from the bubbles of falsehood, when the medium had lost credibility. What happens to currency of working class people. When money too often reproduce the values of a people.

Trying to piece it all together. The meaning of art, and the art of government. What happens to government and systems of governments which spent so much time disseminating illusion? What happens to governments which spent so much on security and defense? What happens to journalists speaking not to those in power but reporting on the truth?

Producing our values, American media always want to fit events in the region, writes Nir Rosen, into an American narrative. Like the recent assassination of Osama bin Laden. And local news was all about a local narrative directed to the national events. And even those Duke University grads swallowed all the pretensions that the audience was fed. Until the few distinct American values were eroded beyond recognition.

When Every Man in This Village IS a Liar , the art of journalism is about speaking not to those in power who know the truth, but reporting truth to the unwashed masses that they might one day pass something on. An audience empowered to move humanity forward. Even the people who never seemed to care.

Night after night, not unlike those Islamc clerics elsewhere, television journalists perpetuate the dominant ideology, of THE American perspective. It had somehow become the mantra of the theology in the Land of the Free. In 2011, Americans were learning again that the rest of the Free World, in its various degrees, did not see and believe in the mantra. In the world of cable television, the rest of the world no longer subscribed to the theology of the networks. On matters of self-determinism.

Visual Web Searchhttp://baseball91.wordpress.com/2008/09/29/the-whole-world-is-watching/

Fairness at the Fairgrounds: Causes of Riot in Milwaukee

Milwaukee, Wisconsin is witnessing its own Arab Spring-like summer. Marauding black kids at the fairgrounds after sunset Thursday night started by beating up each other, police said, before turning on Caucasian families leaving the Wisconsin State Fairgrounds. Investigators reported that the African-American kids had gathered in West Allis in the perimeters of the fairgrounds and had not been enjoying the offerings of the fair. Thirty-five people were arrested either by fairground police, West Allis Police or Milwaukee Police. And a lot of people were injured.

Afterward, one blogger from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel wrote that these homegrown terrorists needed to be stopped. “It bears repeating that the vast majority of African-Americans in Milwaukee are good, hardworking people, and that members of all races interact every day with mutual respect. Though I suspect plenty of these kids grew up with poverty, violence, unsafe neighborhoods, lousy parents or other challenges, forget about blaming society as the responsibility for this thuggery lies with the perpetrators.”

Again and again and again, there was a communication to white Milwaukee, as racial incidents kept happening. There was a public relations nightmare Thursday night for the Wisconsin State Fair, with Truth buried in the story about the community of Milwaukee. If these incidents of race-related violence keep happening. The “mob attack” was not an isolated incident, after similar occurrence at a Summerfest hip-hop show this year, along with the Riverwest looting and racially motivated beatings last month as a group of seventy-five to one hundred black youth disturbed traffic before moving across a bridge west to the Riverwest neighborhood where “ransacking” and robberies of two gas stations by the mob took place. These youths are trying to force the issue – the truth about life in Milwaukee. There had been in the recent past similar “wilding which forced the Greek festival to move out of its northwest side neighborhood, after the late Riversplash too was hobbled by violence.” The issue with all of the stages of life when a community was truly hobbled by violence for a spell, was denial, anger, and fear. In arriving at the acceptance of what was the community standard.

Now the institution of the State Fair, writes the blogger from the Milwaukee Journal, “is left to pick up the pieces, to try to focus back on fun.” Not that they care, but “the thugs had to know that they were damaging the reputation of a beloved institution.” When the issue was really over the acceptance or rejection of institutions.

Yes, black kids at the fair started by beating up each other, police said, and these “kids may not realize that the damage they’re causing may be inflicted mostly on themselves in the long run, as doors close and attitudes harden,”writes the Journal-Sentinel blogger. I have slightly modified his conclusion. About when normal day-to-day life returns, and the morning silence begins with issues of trust. In everyday relationships. At home. In neighborhoods. Maybe that’s the whole point. When so many of its loved ones are silently suffering, there are all of these beloved institution. In a land of plenty, there was this American Pollyanna image of county fairs as a midsummer oasis of fun, food and farm animals. And nowhere were people asking how the social institutions, which helped developed attitudes and behavior, had let the African-American community down. Over hunger and the acceptance of hunger. Or over what was missing in the black community about American life, as seen on television. How many were kids of single moms? The missing nurturing part which came from home-cooking, not just the suggested minimum daily vitamin requirement. These kids who had not been enjoying the offerings of another fair. There are all of these beloved institution, but why should these kids care, if no one truly cared about them? Especially an African-American president? Perhaps like their own fathers. With all of this lip service by communal leaders everywhere, where was this caring about a fair pursuit of happiness? For everyone.

Again and again and again, the problems were left to a new generation of single moms to try and discover the answer in their own homes, because the community seemed to be failing. And as the new immigrants with the same black skin seemed to demonstrate, it was not an issue of skin color but the issues of the community standard of care for each other. And deaf community leaders, letting these grandkids of Motown and Blues musicians rap — without any idea mentioned any more of love in the pursuit of the truth about it all.

http://carmenpampafund.org/

http://carmenpampafund.org/

Visual Web Search

Cell Coverage in Bullpen of Saint Louis

Some background, on the communication problem between Tony La Russa with his bullpen. Twelve months ago, the St. Louis Cardinals fired bullpen coach Marty Mason, the longtime right-hand man of pitching coach Dave Duncan. John Mozeliak’s move was one indication why there had been hesitation on the part of Tony LaRussa to announce his return to manage this year. On only a one year contract.

In the eighth inning of pivotal game five of the World Series, Tony La Russa explained that twice the bullpen “didn’t hear Jason Motte’s name– did not get Motte” up to warm up. “I don’t know if it was noisy…probably real noisy. They just didn’t hear the second time.”

Twelve months ago, Marty Mason had been replaced as bullpen coach by Derek Lilliquist, who since 2002 was in the organization, previously working as pitching coordinator at the team’s Jupiter, Florida spring training headquarters as part of injury rehabilitation. Lilliquist had moved into the dugout during the entire run in September 20111 which earned a wildcard spot, as pitching coach Dave Duncan took a leave of absence due to his wife’s health. Lilliquist’s job duties had never involved talking on the bullpen phone until this season.

There has been tension within the Cardinal organization ever since Walt Jocketty’s firing as general manager. Tony LaRussa still was having to address the different philosophy of owner Bill DeWitt and the other members of the organization to the press, it was said in 2010, on questions about the relationship between the Cardinals’ minor-league development and the club’s major-league coaching staff. And it was getting more and more personal.

Twelve months ago general manager John Mozeliak demoted longtime La Russa confidante Barry Weinberg –Cardinals head trainer since 1998– to assistant trainer, reversing roles with Greg Hauck who was promoted to head athletic trainer. Weinberg had also worked during La Russa’s 10-year term in Oakland as part of his overall sixteen seasons as Oakland A’s head athletic trainer for 16 seasons.

So last night, when asked the sort of procedure when you call down to the bullpen, as to who gets the word, and how do the convey it, Tony said: “The bullpen coach hears it, and like he heard Lynn.”

LaRussa said he wanted right-hander Jason Motte in a matchup with Texas’ right-hand-hitting Napoli, so he called down to the bullpen, but coach Derek Lilliquist misunderstood his instructions. According to the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch:
Question: ‘He heard Lynn?”
Answer: “Yeah. That’s why Lynn got up…and I went out there. I thought it was Motte …and they were yelling at me as I went out. I didn’t hear them. It wasn’t Motte. So I saw Lynn, I went, ‘Oh, what are you doing here?’”

When LaRussa signed his one year contract for the 2011 season, it was the makeup of his coaching staff which was believed to be the final detail in his decision whether he would return. Was it with his eyeglasses on or off that LaRussa had said twelve months ago that 15 years is a long time for one manager in “one place,” that the organization might benefit from “freshness”?

The Cardinals were an organization which had fired Jocketty, fired Marty Mason –Mason had worked under La Russa for the 12 seasons after working as a Triple-A pitching coach from 1997-1999 — demoted Weisberg, and had a manager whose contract was up in two week.

Bobby Valentine attributed a major mistake to the move by Tony LaRussa, though the ongoing power struggle within the organization — unchanged since that departure of Walt Jocketty — showed up in the call to the bullpen last night, and might have determined the champion of the World Series. Tony LaRussa never really let those kind of mistake happens. Though he has said he would never manage another team after the Cardinals, the timing might be right for White Sox Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf to pull the plug on his general manager and hire a new White Sox general manager. According to two team sources, meetings at the conclusion of the World Series will involve Jerry Reinsdorf, a few front office executives, new manager Robin Ventura and his coaching staff, and only a few selected scouts. The timing seems right for Reinsdorf to bring back his one-time manager to Chicago. To take some of the Theo spotlight back to the southside.

Ten Years of Central Bank Policy

Quantitative Easing as one grand conspiracy with the ongoing central bank policy?

We were living in the information age—or too much the disinformation age? There was a difference between legitimate economic growth and debt-induced demand. The failed leadership of not just a Republican president and a Democrat president, but a Congress that over ten years passed the bailout, passed the Patriot’s Act, and has funded without a rise in taxes the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And with the monetary policy which has funded these wars, on the backs of all economies which used the hegemony of the US dollar, was it intervention or manipulation with monetary policy, to get a party re-elected? Someone left the cake out in the rain, and it took so long to make it, it took so long to bake it, and we’ll never have that recipe again.

The dishonesty of it all. All of this liquidity created by going into debt, at below two percent interest, in the aftermath of September 11, during the invasion of Iraq and into the election, as this Fed took historic fiscal and monetary strides on the back of the bubble, with this cheap money policy. TrimTabs tracks liquidity flows in the market, and the source of approximately $600 billion net new cash which had lifted the market capitalization overall by $6 trillion in 2009 could not be identified from traditional players by TrimTabs. The money, Charles Biderman said in a statement, had not come from retail investors, foreign investors, hedge funds or pension funds. It was more than eighteen months ago when Charles Biderman, chief executive of TrimTabs Investment Research, said, “We cannot identify the source of the new money that pushed stock prices up so far so fast.” So market manipulations by governments? Charles Biderman did admit he held no evidence of market manipulation, though he had his suspicions. Who was manipulating the market? When such manipulation by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department clearly was illegal.

Home equity loans. All the speculators and the scalpers on e-bay. Clearly there was manipulation of one market– the real estate market — which all began with the Fed’s monetary policy. So how many other markets were manipulated?

The Federal Reserve chief knows that the stock market is the world’s largest thermometer. What happens to journalists who center their perspective on serving the interests of power and gaining proximity to it, aligning their beliefs and priorities with those of the state. People who speak not to those in power but report on the truth? Did you trust themselves strategic partners who sponsored the broadcasts? On cable networks? Did you know that the paradigm set up had arranged for Fox Sports Networks to get $48 million per year direct from your cable company? The cable system approved by local governments. The governments like in the city of Minneapolis which had a mayor promoting — after the horse was out of the barn — another new stadium.

The dishonesty of it all. What happens to governments which spent so much on security? But quit regulating with the power vested in commissions? The television media, its sponsors, and all of the many spin doctors living close by with an ability to provide and package information, filter unwanted noise and offer dynamic real-time insight – all in the context of total transparency–as a precursor to the next generation. The lobbyists. American media always want to fit events in the region into an American narrative.

The only difference, writes Todd Harrison, “between intervention and manipulation is one of advanced communication. When the Bank of Japan telegraphs their actions and buys yen, it’s intervention. If they don’t communicate their actions, then it’s manipulation. It’s a subtle yet important distinction that is the difference when discussing central bank policy.” He wrote in 2005, “In particular, I’m concerned that one of two things must happen in the years ahead. Either the US dollar must further devalue, as it has to the tune of 25% since 2002, or asset classes will deflate in synch. I’m unsure if these are mutually exclusive events but we’ll likely jockey between the two as we figure it out. I will also offer that the greenback will serve as a proxy of isolationism as America delicately dances through a difficult war and sets protectionist policies in place.” That dollar is now down forty percent.

Instead of building a counter narrative with any kind of vision of different perspective, journalists too often perpetuate the dominant ideology. In my locale, the NBC affiliate is leading the news each night with stories about building a new billion dollar stadium for the Minnesota Vikings – with government money. As the elites of the world, the top one percent, owns almost 40% of all wealth in the United States, as compared to 13 percent twenty-five years ago.

What happens to government and systems of governments which spent so much time disseminating illusion? It had been the media which had produced too much of the present day “values” as opposed to those who could critically resolve problems.

When You Absolutely, Positively Needed it Overnight: Overnight Millionaires

With less than a six percent chance to make it to the big leagues, three of the following were made millionaires over night. Of course by waiting until the last minute before the August 15th deadline, these three guys lost out on interest of more than $4,000, at five percent interest, if not a year closer to their own development as big league players. If they truly really were big league players, where the average salary was somewhere between two million to three million dollars per year.

Here is the list of draftees of the Minnesota Twins, the round signed for in parentheses, along with the amount signed for, in a year where all 30 major league ball clubs spent approximately $228 million in draft bonuses:

SS Levi Michael (1) $1.175 million, last minute sign before senior year.
3RD Trevr Harrison (1), $1.05 million, out of high school, last minute sign.
RHP Hudson Boyd (1) 1 million, out of high school, last minute sign.
RHP Madison Boer (2), Oregon; $405,000, native of Eden Prairie, MN signed right away.
LHP Corey Williams (3), Vanderbilt reliever; $575,000, after missing much of last season with a shattered kneecap, a 5.64 ERA in 24 appearances. Signing at end of July double the slot.
RHP Matthew Summers (4), Cal-Irvine, hard-throwing pitcher, 9-2 with a 1.90, wanted $500,000 to sign out of high school as a pitcher but $100,000 to sign as an outfielder. Unknown amount signed for.
INF Tyler Grimes (5), Wichita State; 30 errors in 329 chances in 2011.
LHP Jason Wheeler (8), Loyola Marymount, 6-4 with a 3.84 ERA as a 6-foot-8 junior, last minute sign, 2010 Northwoods League pitcher of the year (8-1 with a 1.35 ERA last summer for the St. Cloud River Bats). How much do those signing at this point of a season want to play? The minor league season has less than 3 weeks left.
C Matthew Koch (12), Loyola Marymont, 313/.357/.483 this season

Described by scouting director Deron Johnson as a switch-hitting 20-year old college shortstop with speed, Levi Michael signed for $1.175 million, $86,000 above all the discussion of slots. Selected 30th overall, junior INF Levi Michael appeared in 65 games in 2011 for the University of North Carolina, batting .289 in 242 at-bats with 22 extra base hits, five home runs and 48 or 49 RBI. These are million dollar statistics? In 2010, Michael appeared in 60 games, with a .346 average and 76 runs scored. So his performance diminished over the last twelve months, as well as his own private hopes of player development missing the 2011 season, setting him one season behind his own contemporaries. He must have a really bad agent, if he can play the game. And I heard about a bad performance in the College World Series. Not exactly a jump on my back Kirby Puckett type.

Power-hitting third baseman Trevor Harrison, a 50th overall pick from Tustin High School in California, reportedly signed for $1.05 million.

Righthanded pitcher Hudson Boyd, a 55th overall pick as a right-handed starter from Bishop Verot High School in Florida, who once attended school directly across the street from the Twins’ spring training complex in Fort Myers, reportedly signed for $1 million.

All these guys who have a six percent chance to get to the big league asking for big league bonuses to sign. It was the system, from the free agency draft. What did a big league club have to budget to sign these guys the first time?

There was a lot of money in baseball over the last ten years. And what was the legacy built? By players like Mike Jacobs, who made it to the big leagues. Mike Jacobs was given his unconditional release by the Colorado Rockies after testing positive for Human Growth Hormone. Their press release said, “There is no place in baseball for such substances, and we have and will continue to do what we can to eliminate them from our game.” Mike Jacobs was leading the Triple-A Colorado Springs affiliate of the Rockies’ in home runs (23), doubles (30) and runs batted in (97). The 30-year-old first baseman did receive a 50-game suspension by MLB, should anyone elect to pick him up. In a 2005 call up by the Mets, Jacobs hit 11 home runs in 30 games. He was soon traded to Miami for Carlis Delgado before the 2006 season. Jacobs did hit 32 home runs for he Marlins in 2008 when he was traded at season’s end for Leo Nunez. He made $3.25 million playing for Kansas City in 2009, being used primarily as a DH, hitting 19 home runs. He was released following the 2009 season by Kansas City. The validity of his first 80 home runs are in question for this confessed cheater who played six seasons in the major leagues, with diminishing performance based upon the statistics, earning in his big league career $5.27 million, playing with the New York Mets, Florida Marlins and Kansas City Royals.

How could there ever be any remorse by those in the front office about having to let these one-time prima donnas go some day when they did not measure up, 94 percent of the time? Was it a wonder that the people working in the front offices today, as described in Pat Gillick’s Hall of Fame speech, had little deep concern for guys like Mike Jacobs, who should be scorned by anyone who ever played the game professionally — like a priest might hold scorn for a colleague who tarnished his profession — and maybe little deep concern for each other.

Blog Networking in Real-time

The Downgrade

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer: “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” About a rolling depression. As James Fallow wrote five years ago, “As it comes to the old parties, the story boils down to this: in the age of television, Democrats can’t win except when everything is handed to them or goes their way, while Republicans can’t govern without breaking the bank.”

Seaworthy vessels do not sink. There are boat inspectors who check out sinkability of those vessels. Likewise, the sole job of credit-rating agencies like Moody’s Investment Service, Fitch Rating and Standard & Poor’s is to gauge creditworthiness. As market concerns about France’s triple-A credit rating increased, shares in French banking stocks plunged Wednesday on renewed market jitters over their exposure to Greek debt. “If the maturity of Greek government bonds is extended to 2024, this could mean further depreciation of the assets of French banks that are exposed to Greek debt,” said the trader, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Société Générale SA was trading down 17% at €21.61, as spokeswoman for Société Générale said, “”We categorically deny all market rumors.”

Loan demand, wise men and women argue, is so, those low interest rates won’t go higher anytime soon. So the downgrade by Standard and Poor’s of U. S. debt logically means a shift in credit quality. The rules of the game have not changed, only the grading system. “If the AAA is no longer AAA, then everything else has to get downgraded,” Edward Dempsey explained.

The credit-rating agencies whose sole job is to gauge the creditworthiness of bonds, all reiterated that France has a stable outlook, with an unchanged triple-A credit rating. France’s credit rating was thrust into the spotlight Monday when cost of insuring its debt against default spiked. Amidst concerns France may be the next triple-A-rated sovereign to suffer a credit downgrade, as another leader came unexpectedly back from holiday to call a meeting with key cabinet ministers along with Bank of France governor Christian Noyer, President Nicolas Sarkozy sought to defend France’s credibility, saying France will do whatever it takes to ensure meeting its deficit-reduction targets.

Not long ago, consumers leveraged their homes to maintain a lifestyles in an era of limited wage growth. Subsequently the U.S. government took on debt to bail out the economy. However the U S government now collects less tax revenue than in did in 2008, yet its debt is trillions higher. The current scenario witnessed falling income levels and rising debt levels worldwide. Something has to give.

“They know,” Edward Dempsey writes, “which is why they are desperately trying to create inflation… to pay that debt back with cheaper money.”

In France, new concerns were triggered that the government may turn to banks to help reduce its deficit. During the latest round of global sell-off, changes were implemented to the Euro currency bloc’s bailout mechanism, along with a new bailout package for Greece. Before a July 21st summit, France’s minister for European Affairs had said initiatives weighing a tax on banks to resolve the Greek debt crisis would be discussed, though no mention was ever made in the conclusions of that summit.

In China, money meanwhile continues to flow in, as the government reported on Tuesday that consumer prices jumped 6.5% in July, its fastest pace in three years. With all these other export-dependent Asian economies, since Friday’s downgrade by Standard & Poor’s of the credit rating of the United States, foreign investors have been unloading shares in Korea – Asia’s fourth-largest economy attracting so much capital in recent years, heavily dependent on exports, accounting for roughly more than half of the country’s GDP. Those foreign investors hold about one-third of the market’s total capitalization in Korea. How long before China feels the affects of a recession which is in transition toward an European Depression?

On August 3, the Obama administration released its own eight-page national strategy for countering domestic violent extremism.

Blog Networking in Real-time

FOOTNOTE on how to mess up a baseball organization.
http://www.stltoday.com/sports/baseball/professional/article_eb8ffce2-a988-5bb2-8912-3b789f3aad56.html

Blog Networking in Real-time
Search The Web