Cash Mundy knows the Value of a Dollar

How to mount a linux initrd or other cpio archive

2011-07-26T16:17:00.000-07:00

I wanted to take a look at what was inside my initrd images to see what modules they had, and figured out they were gzipped cpio archives (recent Debian system). First I unzipped it, then extracted it, and decided that I really should just be able to mount it with -o loop. Didn't figure that out yet, but I found a program

called archivemount which works well, just like mount but for archives.

The Gnome archive manager, when I clicked on the initrd, couldn't deal with the fact that it was both gzipped and and archive, but if unzipped, would display it nicely.

A page with the above info didn't appear prominently in search results; thus, for your viewing pleasure, this one.

Nokia bets on Linux in iPhone battle: sources | Technology | Reuters

2009-08-26T07:20:00.000-07:00

Nokia bets on Linux in iPhone battle: sources | Technology | Reuters Been watching Maemo with interest for a while. It is Debian based, as is OpenWRT (I’m connecting via a DD-WRT repeater, but only because the crappy post-Cisco Linksys router only has 2MB Flash). http://maemo.org/intro/ Maemo could turn out to predominate over Android in the long term, especially for larger devices, given that Android at the application level is limited to the Dalvik java-variant engine, whereas Maemo appears to support both QT and GTK, and can be coded for in at least c, c++ and python, meaning it is pretty wide-open. If it makes the jump from Nokia into the mobile ecosystem at large, it could become quite interesting.

Raw Story � Spitzer: Federal Reserve is ‘a Ponzi scheme, an inside job’

2009-07-26T08:44:00.000-07:00

Raw Story � Spitzer: Federal Reserve is ‘a Ponzi scheme, an inside job’

Inside The Great American Bubble Machine : Rolling Stone

2009-07-15T11:21:00.000-07:00

Inside The Great American Bubble Machine : Rolling Stone: "The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."

Do You Know Where Your $2 Trillion Has Gone?

2009-05-21T13:02:00.000-07:00

action.firedoglake.com | Fed 1207:

Do You Know Where Your $2 Trillion Has Gone?
Since 2008, the Federal Reserve has loaned trillions of dollars in bailout money but refuses to tell Congress where it went. Legislative action is needed.
The Federal Reserve Transparency Act would give the GAO the authority to audit the Federal Reserve and report its findings to Congress. The bill was written by Rep. Ron Paul and has 165 cosponsors, mostly Republicans.
Democratic Congressman Alan Grayson is now working to get Democratic cosponsors for this bill (see Grayson's letter here).
If you think that it's time to bring some transparency to our financial system, please endorse the bill and Rep. Grayson's letter by adding your name to the list.

Google's Rubin: Android 'a revolution' | Digital Media - CNET News

2009-05-21T05:00:00.000-07:00

Google's Rubin: Android 'a revolution' | Digital Media - CNET News

There's probably like a royal flush of openness, where you can lay your cards on the table and say (pointing) "open, open, open, open, open," it's the guy with the most open that's going to win.
I think we're that. I think that we have an open ecosystem, we have an open-source platform, we chose the right license, there are no viral aspects, it's absolutely 100 percent free, it's complete, it's everything you need to build a phone. When you add all that stuff up, all those ingredients, potentially--I think the jury's still out--we can make a really successful product.

The Googlies clearly get it. Bye Bye MSFT, Symbian, all the other crappy proprietary phone software that lets you do very little, badly. Done. History.

Notes on tweaking the kernel for the G1 HTC Dream

2009-05-16T06:52:00.000-07:00

Warning: Work in progress

First, here is a handy little script for kernel-building and testing: export ARCH=arm export CROSS_COMPILE=arm-eabi- export PATH=$PATH:$PWD/jdroid/prebuilt/linux-x86/toolchain/arm-eabi-4.3.1/bin:/$PWD/jdroid/out/host/linux-x86/bin

I have a directory, android, in which is rooted the android sources, the SDK, various other odds and ends, and this script, called 'env', which I use as . ./env After doing that, I can just to 'make -j2' in the kernel-tree and have the right things happen, and fastboot and adb and so forth are in my PATH. I keep a copy of ramdisk.img there and put my built kernels, so I can try them out easily with fastboot boot zImage-2.6.27-stripped ramdisk.img

There appears to be a bunch of cruft built into the kernel wasting memory. This could just be the case for the JesusFreke build I pulled the config from, but probably most of it came from the vanilla Android. There is for example to reason to have both ext2 and ext3 compiled in (ext3 is backwards-compatible). Once 2.6.29 builds, there will be no excuse for anything but ext4, which again can mount ext2 and ext3 (via 'mount -t ext4').

Unfortunately the Wifi code appears to come from HTC as a binary module, and more unfortunately it uses symbols defined in the SLAB allocator (there is an option for a SLOB allocator which would probably be much more appropriate), and even more unfortunately is built with preemption debugging code, requiring the whole damn kernel have either preemption debugging or preemption tracing, neither of which anyone but kernel debuggers want. From include/linux/preempt.h: #if defined(CONFIG_DEBUG_PREEMPT) || defined(CONFIG_PREEMPT_TRACER) extern void add_preempt_count(int val); extern void sub_preempt_count(int val); #else

This latter is probably because I am using the HTC radio release for the Android Developer Phone (ADP). Hopefully they turn this cruft off for the G1 (I added PREEMPT_TRACER as the lesser evil and it still bloated the kernel a whole bunch).

... Oh bloody hell, the thing apparently hung trying to boot with PREEMPT_TRACER. Let's try DEBUG_PREEMPT instead...

I'm going to move this thread to my Google Site which is maybe a better place for it.

ah rolled mah very own kernel fur mah fone

2009-05-14T21:32:00.000-07:00

I actually rut mah fone a few days ago. Just now I finally managed to build a kernel for it. The Android system source (hereinafter '...') (not to be confused with the SDK) comes with kernel source, but by default uses a pre-built image instead of compiling it. First thing one needs to do is follow the link above and install the source.

Then one needs to follow this Building for Dream link and do what it says.

The kernel source tree comes in various different flavors, at present including 2.6.2[579]. 2.6.29 wouldn't build for me, but 2.6.27 did and booted and runs. You select a version by editing the .../.repo/local_manifest.xml file which you installed while getting ready to build your dream.

Note that these are not vanilla kernel sources: there is a lot of source in .../arch/arm/mach-msm which is not in the vanilla tree. I was able to build and load a plausible kernel from the vanilla tree, but it didn't run.

One must get a .config file and put it at the root of the kernel tree. Get it from your phone (/proc/config.gz) either by way of your SD card or by something like adb pull /proc/config.gz config.gz; gunzip config.gz adb will be in .../out/host/linux-x86/bin/ which you can add to your path via cd .../out/host/linux-x86/bin/; export PATH=$PATH:`pwd`.

Assuming you have gotten the source, you must add .../prebuilt/linux-x86/toolchain/arm-eabi-4.3.1/bin to your path, since you won't be building with generic gcc.

When everything is in place, one goes into the kernel tree and does make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-eabi- oldconfig then make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-eabi- all The kernel image ends up being "zimage" in kernel/arch/arm/boot

Having built the kernel and the rest of the source, one can use fastboot to load the kernel image and a ramdisk by doing something like cd /out/target/product/dream fastboot boot .../kernel/arch/arm/boot/zImage ramdisk.img which is as far as I have gotten so far. I'll worry about installing kernels later.

Ah rut mah fone

2009-05-14T21:27:00.000-07:00

So I finally rooted my G1. Why have a phone running Linux if you can't get a root shell on it? Now I can "tether" it (use it as a Wifi router with 128-bit WEP). It's quite quick with 3g. T-Mobile understandably doesn't want people doing this too much, since it would swamp their net, so I won't abuse the privilege, but being able to get a fast connection anywhere I can get a 3g connection could be handy at times.

This guide was helpful.

At Annual Meeting, Pro-Israel Group Reasserts Clout - NYTimes.com

2009-05-05T17:51:00.000-07:00

At Annual Meeting, Pro-Israel Group Reasserts Clout - NYTimes.com:

"More than half the members of the House and Senate attended Monday night’s dinner, which featured the group’s “roll call” in which the lawmakers all rise. It is a conscious — and effective — effort to demonstrate the group’s influence on Capitol Hill."

They should make them wear yarmulkas, face a wall and pray. They should all have to convert to Judaism, or be run out of office! The idea of someone in the government who might not be loyal to Israel, it makes my blood run cold! I get shpilkus!

Apple sued over iTunes workaround discussions | Apple - CNET News

2009-04-27T17:06:00.000-07:00

Apple sued over iTunes workaround discussions | Apple - CNET News Fuck Apple! They've gotten to be as bad as Microsoft used to be, maybe worse. I hope people quit buying their stuff and send them down the tubes. Death to AAPL!

Bruce Perens - A Cyber-Attack on an American City

2009-04-23T07:30:00.000-07:00

Bruce Perens - A Cyber-Attack on an American City: "That attack demonstrated a severe fault in American infrastructure: its centralization. The city of Morgan Hill and parts of three counties lost 911 service, cellular mobile telephone communications, land-line telephone, DSL internet and private networks, central station fire and burglar alarms, ATMs, credit card terminals, and monitoring of critical utilities. In addition, resources that should not have failed, like the local hospital's internal computer network, proved to be dependent on external resources, leaving the hospital with a 'paper system' for the day."

The Quiet Coup

2009-04-16T15:13:00.001-07:00

The Quiet Coup - The Atlantic (May 2009)

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.

IRA: AIG is a Ponzi Scheme

2009-04-02T09:26:00.000-07:00

From the Institutional Risk Analyst:

AIG: Before Credit Default Swaps, There Was Reinsurance

....

AIG was a Ponzi scheme plain and simple, yet the Obama Administration still thinks of AIG as a real company that simply took excessive risks. No, to us what the fraud Bernard Madoff is to individual investors, AIG is to the global financial community.

....

The key point is that neither the public, the Fed nor the Treasury seem to understand is that the CDS contracts written by AIG with these various non-insurers around the world were shams - with no correlation between "fees" paid and the risk assumed. These were not valid contracts as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Geithner and Economic policy guru Larry Summers claim, but rather acts of criminal fraud meant to manipulate the capital positions and earnings of financial companies around the world.
Indeed, our sources as well as press reports suggest that the CDS contracts written by AIG may have included side letters, often in the form of emails rather than formal letters, that essentially violated the ISDA agreements and show that the true, economic reality of these contracts was fraud plain and simple. Unfortunately, by not moving to seize AIG immediately last year when the scandal broke, the Fed and Treasury may have given the AIG managers time to destroy much of the evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

Geithner’s Dirty Little Secret

2009-03-30T16:14:00.000-07:00

Geithner’s Dirty Little Secret By F. William Engdahl, 30 March 2009

US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has unveiled his long-awaited plan to put the US banking system back in order. In doing so, he has refused to tell the ‘dirty little secret’ of the present financial crisis. By refusing to do so, he is trying to save de facto bankrupt US banks that threaten to bring the entire global system down in a new more devastating phase of wealth destruction.
The Geithner Plan, his so-called Public-Private Partnership Investment Program or PPPIP, as we have noted previously (In German: Obamas Rettungsplan für die Banken: keine Lösung, sondern legaler Diebstahl), is designed not to restore a healthy lending system which would funnel credit to business and consumers. Rather it is yet another intricate scheme to pour even more hundreds of billions directly to the leading banks and Wall Street firms responsible for the current mess in world credit markets without demanding they change their business model. Yet, one might say, won’t this eventually help the problem by getting the banks back to health?

Not the way the Obama Administration is proceeding. In defending his plan on US TV recently, Geithner, a protégé of Henry Kissinger who previously was President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, argued that his intent was ‘not to sustain weak banks at the expense of strong.’ Yet this is precisely what the PPPIP does. The weak banks are the five largest banks in the system.

The ‘dirty little secret’ which Geithner is going to great degrees to obscure from the public is very simple. There are only at most perhaps five US banks which are the source of the toxic poison that is causing such dislocation in the world financial system. What Geithner is desperately trying to protect is that reality. The heart of the present problem and the reason ordinary loan losses as in prior bank crises are not the problem, is a variety of exotic financial derivatives, most especially so-called Credit Default Swaps.

In 2000 the Clinton Administration then-Treasury Secretary was a man named Larry Summers. Summers had just been promoted from No. 2 under Wall Street Goldman Sachs banker Robert Rubin to be No. 1 when Rubin left Washington to take up the post of Vice Chairman of Citigroup. As I describe in detail in my new book, Power of Money: The Rise and Fall of the American Century, to be released this summer, Summers convinced President Bill Clinton to sign several Republican bills into law which opened the floodgates for banks to abuse their powers. The fact that the Wall Street big banks spent some $5 billion in lobbying for these changes after 1998 was likely not lost on Clinton.

One significant law was the repeal of the 1933 Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act that prohibited mergers of commercial banks, insurance companies and brokerage firms like Merrill Lynch or Goldman Sachs. A second law backed by Treasury Secretary Summers in 2000 was an obscure but deadly important Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. That law prevented the responsible US Government regulatory agency, Commodity Futures Trading Corporation (CFTC), from having any oversight over the trading of financial derivatives. The new CFMA law stipulated that so-called Over-the-Counter (OTC) derivatives like Credit Default Swaps, such as those involved in the AIG insurance disaster, (which investor Warren Buffett once called ‘weapons of mass financial destruction’), be free from Government regulation.

At the time Summers was busy opening the floodgates of financial abuse for the Wall Street Money Trust, his assistant was none other than Tim Geithner, the man who today is US Treasury Secretary. Today, Geithner’s old boss, Larry Summers, is President Obama’s chief economic adviser, as head of the White House Economic Council. To have Geithner and Summers responsible for cleaning up the financial mess is tantamount to putting the proverbial fox in to guard the henhouse.

The ‘Dirty Little Secret’

What Geithner does not want the public to understand, his ‘dirty little secret’ is that the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act in 2000 allowed the creation of a tiny handful of banks that would virtually monopolize key parts of the global ‘off-balance sheet’ or Over-The-Counter derivatives issuance.

Today five US banks according to data in the just-released Federal Office of Comptroller of the Currency’s Quarterly Report on Bank Trading and Derivatives Activity, hold 96% of all US bank derivatives positions in terms of nominal values, and an eye-popping 81% of the total net credit risk exposure in event of default.

The five are, in declining order of importance: JPMorgan Chase which holds a staggering $88 trillion in derivatives (€66 trillion!). Morgan Chase is followed by Bank of America with $38 trillion in derivatives, and Citibank with $32 trillion. Number four in the derivatives sweepstakes is Goldman Sachs with a ‘mere’ $30 trillion in derivatives. Number five, the merged Wells Fargo -Wachovia Bank, drops dramatically in size to $5 trillion. Number six, Britain’s HSBC Bank USA has $3.7 trillion.

After that the size of US bank exposure to these explosive off-balance-sheet unregulated derivative obligations falls off dramatically. Just to underscore the magnitude, trillion is written 1,000,000,000,000. Continuing to pour taxpayer money into these five banks without changing their operating system, is tantamount to treating an alcoholic with unlimited free booze.

The Government bailouts of AIG to over $180 billion to date has primarily gone to pay off AIG’s Credit Default Swap obligations to counterparty gamblers Goldman Sachs, Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, the banks who believe they are ‘too big to fail.’ In effect, these five institutions today believe they are so large that they can dictate the policy of the Federal Government. Some have called it a bankers’ coup d’etat. It definitely is not healthy.

This is Geithner’s and Wall Street’s Dirty Little Secret that they desperately try to hide because it would focus voter attention on real solutions. The Federal Government has long had laws in place to deal with insolvent banks. The FDIC places the bank into receivership, its assets and liabilities are sorted out by independent audit. The irresponsible management is purged, stockholders lose and the purged bank is eventually split into smaller units and when healthy, sold to the public. The power of the five mega banks to blackmail the entire nation would thereby be cut down to size. Ooohh. Uh Huh?

This is what Wall Street and Geithner are frantically trying to prevent. The problem is concentrated in these five large banks. The financial cancer must be isolated and contained by Federal agency in order for the host, the real economy, to return to healthy function.

This is what must be put into bankruptcy receivership, or nationalization. Every hour the Obama Administration delays that, and refuses to demand full independent government audit of the true solvency or insolvency of these five or so banks, inevitably costs to the US and to the world economy will snowball as derivatives losses explode. That is pre-programmed as worsening economic recession mean corporate bankruptcies are rising, home mortgage defaults are exploding, unemployment is shooting up. This is a situation that is deliberately being allowed to run out of (responsible Government) control by Treasury Secretary Geithner, Summers and ultimately the President, whether or not he has taken the time to grasp what is at stake.

Once the five problem banks have been put into isolation by the FDIC and the Treasury, the Administration must introduce legislation to immediately repeal the Larry Summers bank deregulation including restore Glass-Steagall and repeal the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 that allowed the present criminal abuse of the banking trust. Then serious financial reform can begin to be discussed, starting with steps to ‘federalize’ the Federal Reserve and take the power of money out of the hands of private bankers such as JP Morgan Chase, Citibank or Goldman Sachs.

Everex XT5300T CPU Upgrade

2009-03-25T17:08:00.000-07:00

My Everex XT5300T (the same beastie more or less is sold by OCZ as an OCZNBAN17DIYA) came with an Athlon 64 X2 TK-53. I just dropped in a Turion TL-62. I decided to note this because when I started considering trying this, Everex had nothing useful to say about it, and what little I could find on the net seemed to indicate that it either couldn't be done, or that a faster chip would probably run too hot. Hopefully other interested parties will find this post and be thereby heartened in their quest.

Let me first note that I tried a Turion RM-70. It's a nice-sounding chip, but not backwards-compatible. AMD should really call it something other than a Turion.

The Athlon TK series are sort of dumbed-down Turion TLs: they have 512K L2 cache instead of 1024K, and the TL-62 at least has five settable speeds (800 1600 1800 2000 2100), whereas the TK-53 just has three (800 1600 1700). Also, according to Wikipedia, the TK series don't support AMD-V, which probably means they are no good for virtual machines.

Judging by what baud-rate a kernel compile looks like (for those who remember back to things like 1200-baud terminals), it is quite a bit quicker, more than one would expect from an extra 400Mhz (x 2) of CPU. I figured the cache would make more of a difference than the clock speed. Another nice thing is that I've got two OCZ DDR-800 sticks in this thing, which with the old cpu, memtest86+ saw as 340MHz (DDR-681). The new chip turns them into 420MHz DDR-841. Definitely a quicker box, well worth the trouble.

The OCZ version of this laptop is a DIY thingie, meaning you are meant to finish it to your own satisfaction. While they ship it with the TK-53 cpu, they have a very nice DIY Handbook which shows not only how to add memory and disk, but also how to change the cpu. I picked up some Artic Silver Ceramique themal paste for about $2.50 and a Turion Tl-62 for $55, both from Ebay.

I was worried I might have a cooling problem (the TK-53 is listed as a 31 Watt TDP chip and the Tl-62 is 35 Watt TDP) but the Tl-62 is running if anything cooler than the TK-53 (the high-grade thermal paste may be helping with that). Judging by how cool the TL-62 is running, I'm sure I could get away with a TL-64 (not worth switching to go from 21.Ghz to 2.2 Ghz), and maybe anything up to a TL-68. If anyone tries anything faster than a TL-62, please let me know your results.

The exact chip I have is the TMDTL62HAX5DM. The DM is a later stepping than the DC, so that may be a factor in how hot or cool it runs, but probably not.

"We are nowhere near a solution to the crisis"

2009-03-08T21:19:00.001-07:00

FT.com / Columnists / Wolfgang Munchau - An L of a recession – reform is the way out

We are nowhere near a solution to the crisis. After committing errors of omission, global leaders are now producing errors of commission. The Americans dream about a return to a world of credit finance consumption while the Germans dream about assembly lines. In an L-shaped world, these are nightmares.

Reuters: Setback for America’s pro-Israel hawks

2009-03-08T09:49:00.000-07:00

Setback for America’s pro-Israel hawks By: Bernd Debusmann ....

Signs are that its influence might be waning under the administration of President Barack Obama. Does that mean the days of unquestioning American support for Israel are coming to en end? Probably not.

But the furious reaction to Freeman’s appointment from some of the most fervent neo-conservative champions of Israel points to considerable concern over the possible loss of clout.

....

In the 60 years since its establishment on May 14, 1948, Israel has been by far the largest recipient of U.S. assistance, military and economic, in the world, according to the Congressional Research Service. Aid has been running at around $3 billion a year since 1985, a sizable sum for a country with a population smaller than that of New York City.

Cut off their aid, completely. We don't have the money to waste supporting a country of Neo-Nazis anymore. Enough already with the Nazraelis.

Touch Book fixing to take a bite out of the big AAPL?

2009-03-02T16:15:00.001-08:00

Always Innovating: Introducing the Touch Book

Netbook reloaded

Until now, all netbooks were engineered the same way: Power-hungry Intel Atom, ugly case, and outdated 90's OS. Our goal: To achieve a breakthrough in both architecture and design. The result: a revolutionary device that works as both a netbook and a standalone tablet thanks to a detachable keyboard and a 3D touchscreen user interface.

Me to Always Innovating via their question form:

Hi, I'm going to watch-and-wait a bit on the Touch Book, but if you were publicly held, I'd be looking to invest.
Just add a radio to the thing and you have a "Cell Book". Maybe GSM radios will be available as dongles the way wifi and bluetooth are now.
I think you folks might be able to burst AAPL's bubble, and I hope you do.
I paid about $300 for a used G1. These days I use it without a SIM chip as a micro-tablet so I can read news in bed. Wonder how the Touch Book would work for that.
Interesting. I'll be paying attention.

Always Innovating to me:

We're definitely considering a GSM radio in the future, but right now our focus is getting the first generation out the door.

Google's face recognition: Just Plain Creepy

2009-02-28T09:47:00.001-08:00

Technology Review: Face Recognition: Clever or Just Plain Creepy?

This real-name tagging is what makes Google's face recognition so creepy. Remember, all these photos aren't on your computer: they're on Google's server. And because e-mail addresses are unique, Google could use the tagged photos from all its Picasa users to create a global database matching photos to e-mail addresses. Doing so would not even violate Google's privacy policy, so long as Google only uses this information to make its service "better" and does not make the database generally available.

But what's really unsettling about Google's service is that it doesn't just stop at your friends. Before you know it, Google is asking you to identify all those other faces in your photographs--the people standing in the background, the faces in the crowds, even the faces on posters. This is certainly keeping with Google's corporate mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." But is that what we really want from a photo-sharing website?

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI): After seven years of war, will more troops help us achieve our strategic goals in Afghanistan?

2009-02-18T17:16:00.001-08:00

The Raw Story | Not so fast on Afghanistan, top Democrat warns

"We must target Al Qaeda aggressively, and we cannot allow Afghanistan to be used again as a launching pad for attacks on America," he added. "It is far from clear, however, that a larger military presence there would advance these goals."

IRWIN KELLNER: Mass-transit transit fares should be eliminated, not increased

2009-02-18T07:30:00.001-08:00

Mass-transit systems taking wrong turn - MarketWatch

That's a damn good idea that I've had for a long time. A tax should be added to gasoline so everyone driving is paying for someone to ride the same distance on mass transit.

Muammar Qaddafi: The Mideast's one-state solution

2009-02-16T15:44:00.000-08:00

The Mideast's one-state solution

Really pretty moderate, sensible-sounding stuff.

The Mideast's one-state solution

By Muammar Qaddafi

Thursday, January 22, 2009

TRIPOLI, Libya:

The shocking level of the last wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence, which ended with this weekend's cease-fire, reminds us why a final resolution to the so-called Middle East crisis is so important. It is vital not just to break this cycle of destruction and injustice, but also to deny the religious extremists in the region who feed on the conflict an excuse to advance their own causes.

But everywhere one looks, among the speeches and the desperate diplomacy, there is no real way forward. A just and lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians is possible, but it lies in the history of the people of this conflicted land, and not in the tired rhetoric of partition and two-state solutions.

Although it's hard to realize after the horrors we've just witnessed, the state of war between the Jews and Palestinians has not always existed. In fact, many of the divisions between Jews and Palestinians are recent ones. The very name "Palestine" was commonly used to describe the whole area, even by the Jews who lived there, until 1948, when the name "Israel" came into use.

Jews and Muslims are cousins descended from Abraham. Throughout the centuries both faced cruel persecution and often found refuge with one another. Arabs sheltered Jews and protected them after maltreatment at the hands of the Romans and their expulsion from Spain in the Middle Ages.....

Me to Facebook: Get Lost!

2009-02-16T13:02:00.000-08:00

The Consumerist, by way of Slashdot, is telling us that Facebook has decided they have perpetual total rights to anything you put on their site, including your own picture, even if you delete your account. I don't think so. I never agreed to that. I'll give them a few days to climb down, then delete the account and get ready to join the inevitable class action suit.

Debian 5.0 (Lenny) out

2009-02-16T12:10:00.000-08:00

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/16/debian_lenny_review/ I've tried other distributions from time to time over the decades, usually when I've manage to trash my filesystems, but always come back to Debian. The core of a distribution is package management, and the Debian system (apt on top of dpkg) is the only one that actually works well in a reasonable amount of time. None of the other ones I've tried come close. Sorry RedHat etc.: if y'all would just ditch your inferior package-management and adopt the Debian way, I'd give you another try. Package management doesn't matter for someone who just wants to install from a disk and then let it sit except for maybe light security upgrades and so forth. I stay right on the bleeding edge, so package management is important for me. Ubuntu is apt-based because it is Debian-based. I don't see how Ubuntu could survive if Debian quit. I tried it repeatedly but their attitude is very MSFT: they know best and you will do things their way or else. If you're running Ubuntu, you'll probably eventually switch to Debian or throw in the towel and submit to AAPL or MSFT (less and less difference between them). Debian is by no means perfect, but their extremely conservative philosophy (I have to run Debian/experimental just to have even a chance of trashing my FSs or otherwise having some fun) compensates to some degree for what I see as the main deficit of Free Software as opposed to corporate products: good release engineering. Face it, testing and bug-hunting are boring and not at all sexy, so it is not surprising it is harder to get people to do it for free than the more flashy aspects of hacking. The Linux Kernel has serious ongoing bugs (I've documented a few) which are simply ignored, probably because working on new features is more fun. I keep an eye on things like Haiku because I think Linux has been around long enough that it might be succumbing to the inevitable accumulation of dead wood at the top of the food chain, creating an opening for a fresh start. But Debian already runs (to some degree at least) on kernels other than Linux, and I think it will survive longer than the Linux kernel does. Of course, MSFT and (according to some reports) AAPL manage to remain bug-ridden even with a paid cast of thousands. There are apparently some things even money can't fix.

Android > Symbian MSFT OSX etcetc. Apple doomed.

2009-02-15T16:16:00.000-08:00

Ultimi Barbarorum: Do Androids Dream of Apple-Blackberry Crumble?

So here’s a post about something micro: I think Apple has blown it in the handset market, and the collapse is coming soon. You will recall my (rather insane and obsessed) contention that the iPhone may well blow Apple up, but was and is the only way they have to play a weak hand. Also, subsequently, my admiration of the actual phone, their amazing initial sales and my guess that Apple had a window to build scale in handset markets. Well, they did precisely nothing with their window and now, I suspect, it has closed. They may be toast. Except they and their fanboy analysts don’t know it yet.

I decided about five years ago that what happened to PCs when the IBM-PC came out would happen to cells. Anyone remember trash-80s? The CP/M operating system? Altair? Imsai?

If ATT hadn't retarded the spread of Unix by ten years or so by dog-in-the-mangering it via their license, MSFT would either be nothing or much less than they are. I was using an X-windows precursor and Unix on a machine with 512K of ram clocking at about 1MHz back in the early 1980s. I figured that what with Stallman's GNU and Linux finally having freed Unix, the commoditized standard-architecture cells would be running some Unix variant (that's what OSX is: BSD Unix on top of the Mach Microkernel with a nice GUI on top, the latter being Apple's claim to fame, aside from basically hijacking some open source [which the GPL license GNU and Linux have should prevent]).

I've got a G1. It is basically an ugly prototype. The software is what counts. I put the 1.1 upgrade on it and the progress is impressive, and I expect that to accelerate as interest grows.

Symbian, one of the ugliest messes I've run across, is dead dead dead. Palm has seen the writing and is apparently switching to some kind of Linux. MSFT being basically like a cockroach, their crap will be hard to eliminate, but I think in five or so years cells running anything other than a Unix variant (or maybe Haiku or some other upcoming free software OS) will be have already been history for a year or so.

[Update] More signs of doom for AAPL and MSFT:

Nvidia Tegra: Not just Windows, Android too

Folklorica de Argentina (Music)

2009-02-15T11:17:00.000-08:00

.:::Santiagomanta:::. You can listen either via the website or via playlist links. They are in Santiago del Estero, ground zero for this kind of Argentinian music. I can't wait to get back. Never been to Santiago del Estero, but I may go someday just because of the music.

James Saft at Reuters: Nationalization by autumn, bank on it | The Great Debate |

2009-02-13T17:54:00.000-08:00

Nationalization by autumn, bank on it

All in all, it’s a bit like watching a man trying to eat a steak without using his teeth.

Obama's Justice Department backs Bush secrecy on renditions suit

2009-02-10T08:35:00.000-08:00

The Raw Story | Obama's Justice Department backs Bush secrecy on renditions suit: "'Eric Holder’s Justice Department stood up in court today and said that it would continue the Bush policy of invoking state secrets to hide the reprehensible history of torture, rendition and the most grievous human rights violations committed by the American government,' Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU, said in the same release. 'This is not change. This is definitely more of the same. Candidate Obama ran on a platform that would reform the abuse of state secrets, but President Obama’s Justice Department has disappointingly reneged on that important civil liberties issue. If this is a harbinger of things to come, it will be a long and arduous road to give us back an America we can be proud of again.'"

Some Linux kernel hacks-in-progress

2009-02-06T21:36:00.001-08:00

I've been doing a bit of playing with Linux kernel cpu-frequency control. Two patches so far; both still need work. http://sites.google.com/site/cashmundy/linux-kernel-stuff

How to get RC33 on your G1 without the wait

2009-02-06T16:34:00.000-08:00

How to get RC33 on your G1 without the wait

I didn't even need to use my USB cable. Downloaded it with the phone browser (went into /sdcard/downloads), then used Linda File Manager to rename it to update.zip and move it (via cut and paste) to /sdcard. I've already made it to the first reboot without any problems.

1) Go to https://android.clients.google.com/updates/signed-PLAT-RC33-from-RC30.f06aa9b3.zip with phone browser (just search for 'android 1.1 update) if you don't want to type in the link above.

2) Do rename and cut-and-paste as above.

3) Power phone down.

4) Reboot to recovery console by holding Home and Back and (meaning the white "house" key and the red "hangup" key) until you get past the initial G1 logo and the recovery icon comes up.

5) Type Alt (the Alt key), then l (letter "L", lowercase).

6) Type Alt, then s (letter "S", lowercase).

That's it. I'm now running Android 1.1. Now, in Settings/About-Phone, there is a System-Updates option, so I will probably never have to do this again. Cool.

Best thing is, I did this with no Sim card. I'm back to using my Nokia 6133 (which I hacked into a 6131 so I could use Gmail and the Opera browser (the software the 6133 comes with is Absolute Shit, and Nokia is Dead Meat if they keep their shitty software (I'm going to buy puts on them next time they run up at all) because my 6131 is better at being a phone than the G1, and I have no 3G anywhere near me at present. I use the G1 as a very small netbook. Don't need no stinkin' Sim card for that.

Brad Setser: Follow the Money � Blog Archive � More to worry about … the US downturn looks to be getting worse when it should be getting better

2009-02-06T09:20:00.000-08:00

Brad Setser: Follow the Money � Blog Archive � More to worry about … the US downturn looks to be getting worse when it should be getting better: "Unfortunately, the fall in US industrial production is approaching the worst falls in the post-World War 2 data set. Some recessions in the past produced a sharper initial fall. But in an average post-World War 2 recession, the economy would be recovering by now — not getting worse. If things don’t improve, the current fall may match the biggest fall in the post war data. And remember, industrial production wasn’t exactly booming during the boom years of this cycle; it took an awful long time for industrial production to top its 2000 levels …"

Synchronised depression

2009-02-06T08:24:00.000-08:00

FT Alphaville � Blog Archive � Synchronised depression: "Synchronised depression"

The OECD has published its latest set of leading indicators. They’re not great. But you don’t need us to tell you that. Here’s Albert Edwards:

The OECD have just released their latest leading indicators. Amid mounting optimism of investors that the global economy is bottoming, these data suggest no such thing is occurring. Indeed they are catastrophically weak. Of particular interest in this context is the leading indicator for China (chart included, but also see website). It is suffering one of the biggest collapses of all the lead indictors that the OECD monitor. This suggests no imminent recovery is at hand there . Indeed as per my recent note, and despite the hopes of many in the markets the data confirms the prospects of continued recession.

Unanimous Consent

2009-01-31T22:22:00.001-08:00

The American Conservative -- Unanimous Consent

When Israel acts, Congress applauds. No debate required.

By Glenn Greenwald

....

AIPAC’s enthusiasm was unsurprising since the text of the resolution could easily have been written by the Israeli government. Every sentence was framed exclusively from the Israeli perspective, each clause grounded on the premise that Israel was 100 percent just. Not a word of criticism or even reservation. On the contrary, Berman’s resolution praised Israel for its humanitarian conduct of the war—even as the UN accused Israel of possible war crimes and the Red Cross vehemently complained about the IDF’s impeding of medical and other humanitarian services. Most notably, the resolution expressed unyielding American dedication to the “welfare” of Israel, both in general terms and with regard to this war.

....

Though the resolution was nonbinding, it was not inconsequential. At a time when worldwide disgust was at its peak, the U.S. made Israel’s war our war, its enemies our enemies, its intractable disputes ours, and the hostility generated by Israeli actions our own. And we emboldened Israel to continue.

Nazraelis killed civilians including children waving white flags

2009-01-28T08:57:00.001-08:00

McClatchy Washington Bureau | 01/27/2009 | Israeli troops killed Gaza children carrying white flag, witnesses say

"The evidence we've gathered in two of the cases so far is exceedingly
strong," said Fred Abrahams, a senior researcher with Human Rights
Watch working in the Gaza Strip. "All the research so far suggests they
shot civilians that were leaving their homes with white flags."

The Nazis are back, but now they are Nazraelis pretending to be Jews! Would a real Jew do this? Would my Jewish grandfather? Would the Jewish guy I eat raw fish with all the time do this? Not so much... I don't know what these Nazraelis are, but I won't call them Jews, out of respect for my grandfather and all my Jewish friends. To think that we fought the Nazis, and now they're back and we're backing them! For shame!

The universe may be a giant hologram

2009-01-16T17:33:00.001-08:00

Our world may be a giant hologram - space - 15 January 2009 - New Scientist

So what would it mean it if holographic noise has been found? Cramer likens it to the discovery
of unexpected noise by an antenna at Bell Labs in New Jersey in 1964.
That noise turned out to be the cosmic microwave background, the
afterglow of the big bang fireball. "Not only did it earn Arno Penzias
and Robert Wilson a Nobel prize, but it confirmed the big bang and opened up a whole field of cosmology," says Cramer.
Hogan is more specific. "Forget Quantum of Solace,
we would have directly observed the quantum of time," says Hogan. "It's
the smallest possible interval of time - the Planck length divided by
the speed of light."
More
importantly, confirming the holographic principle would be a big help
to researchers trying to unite quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory
of gravity. Today the most popular approach to quantum gravity is
string theory, which researchers hope could describe happenings in the
universe at the most fundamental level. But it is not the only show in town.
"Holographic space-time is used in certain approaches to quantising
gravity that have a strong connection to string theory," says Cramer.
"Consequently, some quantum gravity theories might be falsified and
others reinforced."

It also would seem to support the idea that the universe is not fundamental but is manifested and determined by something along the lines of Platonic Ideals or the causal plane, a dream in the mind of Lord Brahma, a mental process or spiritual plane perhaps connected with Jung's Collective Unconscious, God and so forth. "God" not by any means to be confused with the Judeo-Christian-Islamic notion of God, which when stripped of all the nice rhetoric is in practice nothing but a tarted-up tribal fire-demon or somesuch cosmic joke, but the Real Thing, the Tao, which cannot be named, cannot be told, which we could comprehend perhaps nearly as well as a virus could speak French.

Reuters: Great Depression jobs parallel may not be far flung

2009-01-09T10:18:00.001-08:00

Great Depression jobs parallel may not be far flung | U.S. | Reuters

....

As many as 25 percent of Americans were unemployed during the days of bread lines that symbolized the Depression, but that figure is more than three times the current 6.7 percent unemployment rate, the economists say. Even the most pessimistic estimates only foresee the rate rising barely above 10 percent.
"We are in a very, very different place than the U.S. economy was in the 1930s," James Poterba, president of the National Bureau of Economic Research told a recent Reuters Summit.
Or are we? Figures collected for Reuters by John Williams, from the electronic newsletter Shadowstats.com, suggest that, while we are not there yet, the comparison is not as outlandish as it might initially seem.
By his count, if unemployment were still tallied the way it was in the 1930s, today's jobless rate would be closer to 16.5 percent -- more than double the stated rate.
"I expect that unemployment in the current downturn, which will be particularly deep and protracted, eventually will rival, if not top, the 25 percent seen in the Great Depression," Williams said.

Norwegian doctor: Israel intentionally targeting civilians

2009-01-05T22:45:00.001-08:00

The Raw Story | Norwegian doctor: Israel intentionally targeting civilians

"Just a little bit more than an hour ago, the Israelis bombed the central food market in Gaza City and we had a mass influx of about 50 injured and between 10 and 15 killed," said Gilbert, on the phone with Sky News.

An important part of the Zionist/Neocon whispering campaign has been about how we have "shared values" with Israel and the Zionists, unlike those nasty A-Rabs who target civilians and so forth. Of course, we were to understand that after 9-1-1, the "new Pearl Harbor" they were so eager for, "everything was different" and our "shared values" with Israel now included torture, waging aggressive war, targeting civilians (while vigorously denying doing so, of course for an important part of our new "shared values" is "waging war by deception") and other things we hung Nazis for at Nuremberg before "everything was different.

I have no "shared values" with those people, neither the Zionist/Neocons (pretty much the same people) or their Chistian "useful idiots". I hope they rot and burn in Hell.

Madoff Front-man even ripped off his Bulgarian cleaning lady

2009-01-04T08:40:00.001-08:00

Avellino 123108

A Nantucket summer resident with ties to disgraced Wall Street financier Bernard Madoff has been accused of defrauding his island house cleaner of her life savings.

Frank Avellino, who owns a $10 million Nantucket estate on Cliff Road, was sued Monday in Nantucket District Court by his house cleaner, Nevena Ivanova, who alleges that she handed over $124,000 to Avellino in 2006 which he now claims has been entirely lost.

CNN: US weapons 'killing innocent civilians' in Gaza

2009-01-03T09:14:00.001-08:00

The Raw Story | CNN: US weapons 'killing innocent civilians' in Gaza

"Precision guided bombs are only precision in that they hit the target they are aimed at," Starr explained. "We're getting these civilian casualties. These weapons are supposed to be used for a country's self-defense. Israel, obviously, believes this is its self-defense against Hamas, but you see these civilian casualties. That's not why the US sells weapons abroad -- for the killing of innocent civilians."

One good reason for not selling or (in reality) giving weapons to kill civilians is that according to the principle of retributive justice, every man, woman, child, cat and dog in the USA becomes a legitimate target for reprisal attacks. Thanks a lot, Zionists.

Michael Scheuer (formerly known as "Anonymous") new work on the Islamists on Asia Times

2008-12-28T22:52:00.001-08:00

Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs

His books were good, his articles are good. He's always worth reading. He discusses how the Iraq Attack allowed ultra-extremist Saudi-supported Salafist al-Queda-associated jihadis to spread thru Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and on into Palestine and Israel. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

McClatchy: Was 2008 the beginning of another Great Depression?

2008-12-28T09:13:00.001-08:00

McClatchy Washington Bureau | 12/28/2008 | Was 2008 the beginning of another Great Depression?

Good article. Good question.

Obama should give David Duke a Cabinet Position

2008-12-23T04:35:00.001-08:00

The Raw Story | Frank get 'post-partisan depression' over Warren inauguration invite

Rep. Barney Frank, the only openly gay member of Congress, feels that president-elect Barack Obama has made a "serious mistake" in asking pastor Rick Warren to deliver the inaugural invocation.....

Rev. Rick Warren leads a southern California mega-church, and is author of the multi-million selling self-help book, "The Purpose Driven Life." Warren and his congregation were instrumental in supporting Proposition 8, a ballot measure passed in Nov. which banned gay marriage in the state.

Obama has maintained that his inclusion of Rev. Warren is part of his efforts to bring separate groups together around common causes.

"That dialogue is part of what my campaign is all about," said the President-elect.

Obama's right. We should all embrace his new spirit of inclusiveness and diversity (except of course where gays and lesbians are concerned). And in order to show that he's not just the stereotypical gay-bashing black male and only appears to be a black male, he should invite David Duke to his inauguration, or maybe make him ambassador to Austria or something. I heard him interviewed by Michel Martin, who I really like, and I had to give them both high marks for the interview: they baited each other in a genteel sort of way but they kept it civil and interesting. Obama appears so determined to let the Neocons and Bible-Beaters and Wall Street ~~Ponzi-schemers~~ financiers we thought we defeated in the last election snatch victory from the jaws of defeat that he should probably give Duke a Cabinet position dealing with race relations or equal opportunity or something.

FW Engdahl: Federal Reserve sets Stage for Weimar-style Hyperinflation

2008-12-22T09:36:00.001-08:00

Hyperinflation

In the period from August 1929 until he left office President Herbert Hoover oversaw a 43-month long contraction of the US economy of 33%. Barack Obama looks set to break that record, to preside over what historians could likely call the Very Great Depression of 2008-2014, unless he finds a new cast of financial advisers before Inauguration Day, January 20. Required are not recycled New York Fed presidents, Paul Volckers or Larry Summers types. Needed is a radically new strategy to put virtually the entire United States economy into some form of an emergency 'Chapter 11' bankruptcy reorganization where banks take write-offs of up to 90% on their toxic assets, that, in order to save the real economy for the American population and the rest of the world. Paper money can be shredded easily. Not human lives. In the process it might be time for Congress to consider retaking the Federal Reserve into the Federal Government as the Constitution originally specified, and make the entire process easier for all. If this sounds extreme, perhaps revisit this article in six months again. [emphasis added]

Hr. Engdahl tends to be right. Just check his writing over the last year and compare it with the consensus view at the time of writing.

Karl Rove Rap-Sheet: Add Murder to Treason and Sedition

2008-12-22T09:09:00.001-08:00

The Raw Story | GOP consultant killed in plane crash was warned of sabotage: report

Arnebeck said that he received confidential information that Republican operative Karl Rove threatened Connell and his wife if Connell told all that he knew.

Since the plane crash is being investigated by the FAA, and Bush is still in the White House, any evidence will be destroyed, but maybe once Obama is in the coverup can be exposed. Not that I really expect Obama to do anything about any of this, so probably not. The Banana Republicans have already gotten away with massive treason and sedition; what does another murder or two matter? As for Rove, he'd already hang ten times over if he was ever brought to justice, so he has nothing to lose. Offing anyone who might testify against him is just good business.

Let the hangings begin

2008-12-18T06:57:00.001-08:00

The Raw Story | Prominent neoconservative: 4,000 Americans 'had to die'

"My position is that it's regrettable that any Americans died. And it is regrettable that they had to die, but I believe they did have to die," said Gaffney. "The threat we did know about is the chemical capability Saddam Hussein used against his own people.... The danger was that inaction could have resulted in the death of many more Americans than 4,000."

Since Gaffney does not appear to have had a government position, perhaps he is just more of an Israeli spy or unregistered foreign agent and should be shot or deported. Cheney is without a doubt guilty of high treason. Bush is too retarded to hang, but his administration was rife with high treason, the penalty for which at least used to be hanging. If was good enough for the Nazis at Nuremburg, it's good enough for the Neocon traitors.

Feds to Old People and U$D to Reality: Get Lost!

2008-12-17T11:27:00.001-08:00

Bloomberg.com: Worldwide

Dollar Falls Most Against Euro Since 1999 Debut on Fed’s Rate

By Jamie McGee and Michael J. Moore

Dec. 17 (Bloomberg) -- The dollar declined the most against the euro since the 15-nation currency’s 1999 debut and sank to a 13-year low versus the yen as near-zero interest rates and rising budget deficits led traders to abandon the greenback.
The greenback extended its drop against a gauge of currencies of six U.S. trading partners, falling 11 percent from a 2 1/2-year high reached Nov. 21. Investors including hedge funds reversed bets that the dollar will appreciate to minimize losses as the end of the year approached, traders said.
“This move is historic,” said Russell LaScala, New York- based head of North American foreign exchange at Deutsche Bank AG, the world’s biggest currency trader. “It’s just going to keep going until the last bit of pain stops. I would not be shocked to see $1.50.

Surprise, surprise! Dollar already going down the tubes. Who knew?

The Feds have decided to destroy the value of the dollar to ~~protect the market capitalisation of their friends at GS, CITI, BAC etcetc~~ Save the World! Old people on fixed incomes will just have to eat cheaper pet-food. Lucky for them, soon Chinese pet-food will be unaffordable, so they might not get poisoned. And all those low-wage workers for whom deflation would be their first real pay-raise in decades can get lost too. Old people, poor people, U$D debt-holders: Get Lost!

Wonder what will happen to the value of the dollar when the rest of the world figures out that not only are we deliberately hyper-inflating our currency as an alternative to default, but we also consume more than anyone else, have more debt than anyone else, and produce less per capita of anything of value (meaning forget financial services, Hollywood crap, etc.) than anyone else except maybe places like Somalia?

Clusterstock: Time For A Gas Tax

2008-12-11T09:26:00.001-08:00

Time For A Gas Tax

I've been saying this for months. Henry Blodget wants a price target of $4 and not to start it until 2011. I would set a nearer-term target of $3 and start drifting the price up to that target immediately, then start raising the target to $4 and beyond. Gas below $2/gallon is just plain stupid. Let's get it back up to at least $2.50 by the summer before people start thinking of anything over $2 as being high.

The target should work as a price-band, using tax cuts and even short-term subsidies to smooth out price-swings. Economic actors can't be expected to act rationally and efficiently when the price of oil can be anywhere between $25 and $250/barrel.

Measures, up to and including public flogging, would have to be taken to ensure oil companies didn't simply push their profit-margin up to reach the target price.

The money raised by this tax could be used for things like bailing out the automakers while turning them more into mass-transit makers, upgrading rail roadbed and building more, including urban light rail, and so forth. This could fit nicely into Obama's infrastructure plan while actually adding a funding source other than the Chinese and other creditor-nations.

F William Engdahl: NATO scuttles US plan to encircle Russia

2008-12-08T20:16:00.001-08:00

As any student of WWII history knows, the war against Germany mostly took place in Russia, Western Europe being a sideshow and US participation a laudable afterthought. If not for General Winter and the T-34, Germany and Japan would have divided Eurasia and Africa and here in the US only the ocean might have saved us. Whether one likes Russia or not and whatever their government happens to be, they are right up there with Vietnamese as people one should absolutely not start trouble with. Anyone who tells you otherwise is just plain stupid, like for example George W. Bush and the horse he rode in on. The French, Chinese and US can tell you what happens if you mess with Vietnam, and the French and Germans can tell you all you need to know about messing with Russia. Much better to have them as friends than enemies.

Me, I'm hoping the pirates in Somalia and the Strait of Malacca mess with the Russians. They won't fuck around with hand-wringing and whine about human rights and so forth. They'll zorch them, their familes, their friends, their homes and their whole fucking countries until it stops, and despite all the clucking and tut-tutting, the world will be a better, happier place. We have enough problems without stinking pirates from non-nations. Historically, human rights have never applied to pirates. String 'em up from the yard-arm; it's just that simple. Or mine their ports and cluster-bomb their cities. Whatever does the job.

Same goes for the Pakis that hit Mumbai. Give Pakistan a reasonable chance to deal with it, then toss a little nuke into their 'tribal area' if they need some motivation,something small but very dirty, render a valley uninhabitable forever. Enough already of these Stone-Age savages in this 'tribal area'. It might make a suitable worldwide nuclear waste repository and toxic-waste dump. Fuck'em.

Asia Times Online :: Central Asian News and current affairs, Russia, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan

..... Translated into real political language, Washington has undergone a stunning setback in its agenda of encircling Russia with NATO. Despite the fact that president-elect Obama retained Bush Administration Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and named a person to be Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who has strongly supported bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, key European NATO members, led by Germany and France, blocked what must be a unanimous membership decision. .....

Dream on, White Trash. Go back to your Fuhrer-bunkers and drink your Kool-Aid: you're done

2008-12-02T05:13:00.001-08:00

McClatchy Washington Bureau | 12/02/2008 | Palin shows she's still got star power in Georgia

Hey Bible-Beaters: You're done. When the Latino vote went for Obama, it was over for you. I'd suggest you leave the country and move to some fascist redoubt for your last stand, but ever since Apartheid fell, the Bible Belt was about it. Alaska, maybe? Anyways the Latino percentage of the electorate is only going to get bigger, and they are basically decent people, meaning they will always vote against your candidates. You're done; it's over; you lose.

McClatchy Washington Bureau

Posted on Tue, Dec. 02, 2008

Palin shows she's still got star power in Georgia

Liz Fabian | Macon Telegraph

last updated: December 01, 2008 04:09:03 PM

Sarah Theus blew her perfect attendance record at Porter Elementary to go Monday to see Sarah Palin in Perry.

The 11-year-old from Macon wore a hot pink "Sarah" headband that caught Palin's eye as she took the stage at a rally for Senator Saxby Chambliss on the eve of the run-off.

"Our candidate did not win the election but she won our hearts," said Sally Theus, Sarah's mother, who gave in to her daughter's begging to attend the rally.

Theus drove down to Perry with her sister-in-law Tammy Hawkins and 9-year-old niece Hailey Hawkins, who missed a day at Covenant Academy.

They were the first to arrive at the Miller-Murphy-Howard building of the Georgia National Fairgrounds and Agricenter in Perry about four and a half hours before the Alaska governor was expected to speak.

"We wanted the girls to see a fine, upstanding, Christian woman with five kids and a good career," Tammy Hawkins said. "We just wanted them to see you can succeed."

The men seemed to have slightly outnumbered the women in the crowd as chants of "Saxby, Saxby, Saxby" filled the room and got Palin's attention.

"Saxby," she echoed while nodding her head. "You betcha," she said to a roar of cheers. While comics have stereotyped Palin's phrases and dialect, the Republican vice presidential candidate's voice and message ring true for conservatives.

Korean War veteran Chuck Griggers of Macon said he came down to see what he called the "conservative side of the so-called Republican party."

"I saw the what-you-call the middle of the road in McCain," Griggers said. "But this gal, she has the moral standard to breathe new life into the Republican party."

Neal Cowan of Warner Robins said he doesn't stand up for more than an hour waiting for just anybody.

"Now she's something," Cowan said of Palin. "Just a fresh face. I think she will hang in there and do what she says she'll do."

Pam Sena drove her 7-year-old granddaughter from Locust Grove to see the young girl's role model. Morgan Sena took it hard when McCain-Palin lost the election, Pam Sena said. Her granddaughter thought Palin should have been at the top of the ticket.

When asked why the youngster thought Palin should be president, Morgan turned her eyes to the ceiling as she considered her response. Her shoes wobbled as she perched on the metal railing of the barrier behind the press platform while she thought.

"She's good," Morgan said softly and then added, "Cause she's pretty."

Others in the audience found Palin's principles just as attractive. Palin's smiling face adorned a campaign button on Mary Kimberly's red sweatshirt with "America" emblazoned across the chest.

"We like Palin because she's pro-life," said Kimberly, of Macon.

"I think she's the average American," Pam Sena added. "She's your Josephine the plumber or Sarah the fisherman."

Red, white and blue painted signs on the stage drew applause with their printed punchlines: "Read my lipstick - vote for Sax", "Keep your Change" and "Palin-Chambliss 2012".

After Palin left the room, Sarah Theus and her cousin Hailey Hawkins were giddy with excitement. They carried Palin's autographs as they left the room in their over-sized pink sweatshirts.

"She touched this," Sarah said with a fresh signature on her pink fleece "Sarah" headband.

"She touched my finger. She touched my finger," Hailey said while jumping up and down.

The 9-year-old hunter hadn't been this excited since she killed her third wild hog over the Thanksgiving holiday.

Now Hailey's mother hopes Palin's appearance will help her daughter continue to aim for success in the future.

Spitzer targeted for takedown by Feds? House Financial Services Committee wants to know.

2008-11-26T12:21:00.001-08:00

Congressional Panel Seeks Inquiry on Roots of Spitzer Scandal - NYTimes.com

November 26, 2008

Panel Asks How Inquiry Began on Spitzer Banking

By DANNY HAKIM

ALBANY — Eight months after a federal investigation into a prostitution ring brought about the downfall of Gov. Eliot Spitzer, the question persists in some circles: Was the federal government out to get Mr. Spitzer?
No evidence has surfaced to support such an assertion, and the prosecutor in the case has said that politics played no role in the pursuit of Mr. Spitzer, a Democrat. But that has not put to rest suspicions, expressed on left wing blogs, that Mr. Spitzer, a zealous pursuer of Wall Street wrongdoing who some thought could one day be president, had been singled out.
Now, a congressional committee is pursuing what would be the first public examination of the events that prompted the initial inquiry into his bank transactions, which showed he was sending money to a front company for Emperor’s Club V.I.P.
The House Financial Services Committee intends to take up the matter early next year and tentatively plans to hold hearings that could include testimony from the United States Treasury’s law enforcement unit, along with Mr. Spitzer’s bank, North Fork, and HSBC, a bank used by a company connected to the prostitution service.
“The question was: Why were they looking for this? Is this political retribution?” said Representative Michael E. Capuano, a Massachusetts Democrat and a member of the committee who has been critical of the increased scrutiny of banking transactions, which increased greatly under the passage of the Patriot Act.
“It raises questions in my mind that he may have been targeted for political purposes,” he said, adding that he had no evidence that suggested as much. ....

One of Mr. Spitzer’s last appearances in Washington was before a subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee — a hearing on bond insurance.

It was on that trip that Mr. Spitzer stayed at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, where he had the encounter that would lead to his resignation a month later.

Of course they "assassinated" him. It was obvious at the time.

8500: The New 9000

2008-11-25T08:50:00.001-08:00

I've sold all of my calls and loaded up on puts. I love dead-cat bounces, but this dog don't hunt. Massive federal bailouts of bankrupt banks: good for a bounce, but no way to run a country. Go ahead and keep it bouncing, Fed Boys, 'cause you're going to get about a third of all the cash I'm raking in anyway.

Boo Hoo, White Trash: You Lost! Time to hide in your Bible-Bunkers and tornado-bait trailer-parks!

2008-11-25T05:09:00.001-08:00

Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs

.... During the presidential campaign, most of the country seemed to have accepted the possibility of an African-American president, with the possible exception of a narrow band of the nation that stretched in an arc from southwestern Pennsylvania across the deep south to Oklahoma.

This area, (along with parts of Republican Senator John McCain's Arizona and most of governor Sarah Palin's Alaska) were the only parts of the country that voted more Republican than in 2004; these places will suffer the culture shock of having to accept a president who looks nothing like their favorite NASCAR racing hero.

Although this is not really the change I'm talking about, it will also be a welcome difference that government policy in all matters of science policy, from stem-cell research to the search for intelligent life in the universe, will no longer have to be vetted by focus groups comprised of high school graduates bused in by Karl Rove from the Bible-belt megachurches....

Obama's one-trick wizards

2008-11-25T04:43:00.001-08:00

Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs

....
The one-trick wizards of Wall Street had one idea, which was to ride the trend and pile on as much leverage as credulous investors and crony regulators would allow. It has gone pear-shaped, and those who didn't cash out early along with the cynics are poor. Fortunately for them, Obama will let them play with the budget of the US federal government for the next four years.

Failed financiers run the Obama transition team. It used to be that the heads of great industrial companies got the top Cabinet posts. Now it is the one-trick wizards. After George W Bush fired former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who had run Alcoa, the last survivor of the species was Vice President Dick Cheney, the former CEO of Halliburton. Obama's bevy of talent comes from finance. American industrialists have become figures of ridicule, like the pathetic chief executive of General Motors, Rick Wagoner, begging for a government loan. ....

For a quarter of a century, the inbred products of the Ivy League puppy mills have known nothing but a rising trend in asset prices. About the origin of this trend, they were incurious. The Reagan administration had encountered a stock market in 1981 trading 50% below its the long-term trend. Reagan restored the equity market to trend by cutting taxes, suppressing inflation and easing some regulations. The private equity sharps were fleas traveling on Reagan's dog. They simply rode the trend with the maximum of leverage. ....

That explains how a Washington political operative like Rahm Emanuel, now Obama's chief of staff, who studied ballet rather than balance sheets, could earn a reported $16.2 million in two-and-a-half years at Wasserstein Perella, the mergers and acquisitions boutique. At the height of the bubble, Bruce Wasserstein's firm sold out to Germany's Dresdner Bank for the fairy-tale sum of $1.6 billion. Even the crumbs from Wasserstein's loaf could make a Chicago politician rich.

Without leverage, the clever folk around Barack Obama are fleas without a dog. None of them invented anything, introduced an important new product, opened a new market, or did anything that reached into the lives of ordinary people. They wore expensive cufflinks, read balance sheets, exercised regularly, sat on philanthropic boards, and assumed that their flea's ride on the Reagan dog would last forever.

All they knew was leverage, and now that the world is de-levering, they are trying to put leverage back into the system. One almost can hear Mortimer Duke, Don Ameche's charcter in Trading Places, shouting, "Now, you listen to me! I want trading reopened right now. Get those brokers back in here! Turn those machines back on!"

Of course, nothing excludes the possibility that Obama's team will come up with something constructive. But there is no reason to expect a drastic change from the crisis response of the same sort of people (starting with Treasury Secretary Paulson) in the Bush administration. They will bail out incompetent, failing firms and drop money from helicopters and call it a stimulus package. And it will turn out no better than it did for the humiliated Republicans.

What Barack Obama Needs to Know About Tim Geithner, the AIG Fiasco and Citigroup

2008-11-24T20:10:00.001-08:00

Institutional Risk Analytics

The only way to deal with this ridiculous Ponzi scheme is bankruptcy. The way to start that healing process, in our view, is by the Fed emulating the FDIC's treatment of DSL, withdrawing financial support for AIG and pushing the company into the arms of the bankruptcy court. The eager buyers for the AIG insurance units, cleansed of liability via a receivership, will stretch around the block.

By embracing Geithner, President-elect Barack Obama is endorsing the ill-advised scheme to support AIG directed by Hank Paulson et al at Goldman Sachs and executed by Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke. News reports have already documented the ties between GS and AIG, and the backroom machinations by Paulson to get the deal done. This scheme to stay AIG's resolution cannot possibly work and when it does collapse, Barak Obama and his administration will wear the blame due through their endorsement of Tim Geithner

Sounds like all that Big Money Money paid to Rahm Israel Emanuel and others is going to turn out to be a good investment. The US will end up bankrupt and in default, but by then the usual suspects will have cashed out of their bailout-rescued investments and moved into Swiss francs and gold. I got more puts today, on GS XOM and CVX, and on MSFT just because I hate them. I'm making money like crazy off of this mess of waste, fraud and corruption. I just need to remember to get it all out of USD before the plug gets pulled.

"....a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $720,000."

2008-11-12T17:13:00.000-08:00

The End

by Michael Lewis Nov 11 2008

The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong.

Found this via Clusterstock. Lots of great quotes in this, a good read.

“The single greatest line I ever wrote as an analyst,” says Eisman, “was after Lomas said they were hedged.” He recited the line from memory: “ ‘The Lomas Financial Corp. is a perfectly hedged financial institution: It loses money in every conceivable interest-rate environment.’ I enjoyed writing that sentence more than any sentence I ever wrote.” A few months after he’d delivered that line in his report, Lomas Financial returned to bankruptcy.

In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $720,000.

“With all due respect, sir,” Daniel told the C.E.O. deferentially as they left the meeting, “you’re delusional.” This wasn’t Fitch or even S&P. This was Moody’s, the aristocrats of the rating business, 20 percent owned by Warren Buffett. And the company’s C.E.O. was being told he was either a fool or a crook by one Vincent Daniel, from Queens.

Truth to tell, there wasn’t a whole lot of hand-wringing inside FrontPoint either. The only one among them who wrestled a bit with his conscience was Daniel. “Vinny, being from Queens, needs to see the dark side of everything,” Eisman says. To which Daniel replies, “The way we thought about it was, ‘By shorting this market we’re creating the liquidity to keep the market going.’ ” “It was like feeding the monster,” Eisman says of the market for subprime bonds. “We fed the monster until it blew up.”

I've just started reading that "1421" book about how the Chinese discovered the world. Apparently even back then they liked to sell their goods cheap and on easy credit to their trade partners, who were thus kept indebted and presumably also hooked on the nice cheap cobalt-blue porcelain and so forth. Maybe the Chinese invented "feeding the monster". I wish they would learn Spanish before they take over the world. Spanish, while not the most beautiful-sounding language (neither is English by any means) has the remarkable advantage of having an exact correspondence between how it is spelled and how it sounds (excepting my beloved Argentines, who have to do everything in their own style including speak Spanish). There are plenty of highly intelligent people who sound like idiots if they write anything because they are not wired to remember the arbitrary and capricious, not to say cruel and unusual, relation of lack thereof between spoken and written English (I do have such hardware, but would much rather have hardware suitable for Quantum Gravity that Goddamn English spelling). Chinese, being a tone-system language and not even standardised within China as far as I know, is singularly unsuitable for the role of universal language (except for the fact that billions of Chinese already speak it, of course). I suspect that Western Barbarians such as myself are lacking the hardware to properly learn Chinese even had I been born there. So please learn Spanish, Chinese, before you take over what is left of the world after the current bunch of schmucks get done f*cking it up.

MI6 Hiring

2008-11-08T18:42:00.001-08:00

Operational Officer - jobs from exec-appointments.com One of many reasons I love FT.com... Where else would I see MI6 job postings?

Salary on application London, and Worldwide Operational Officer MI6 Become an Operational Officer at MI6 and you’ll be faced with a career opportunity like no other. We’re looking for impressive, experienced professionals with political curiosity, an international perspective and the qualities to collect and assimilate secret foreign intelligence. Do so and you’ll help the Government protect the UK’s security, stability and prosperity. MI6 exists to tackle threats to the UK including terrorism, regional instability, the proliferation of weapons and drug trafficking. We look for resourceful, adaptable, impactful people from the widest possible range of UK cultures and backgrounds. There are three types of Operational Officer. Our Case Officers plan and carry out secret operations overseas. The Targeting Officers build up intelligence pictures of different areas of interest and identify potential target agents. Finally, our Reports Officers, based mainly in London, assess, validate and deliver intelligence to the Government. They’re all roles in which you can have a major impact on the UK – and develop a fascinating, long-term career. If you think you have the qualities we’re looking for, please click on 'Apply Now' Please note, we only accept applications from British citizens. You should not discuss your application with anyone. job ref OO Apply Now

Obama the first Jewish President?

2008-11-08T17:11:00.001-08:00

Rahm Emanuel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia From his Wikipedia page:

Emanuel has been described as a “strong Israel partisan”^[26] and a “convinced Zionist” and “prominent figure in the US Jewish lobby.”^[27] A strong supporter of AIPAC, he personally introduced fellow Chicagoan Barack Obama to the organization's directors during the 2008 presidential campaign.^[28] A November 2008 article claimed that while expressing empathy for Palestinians, Emanuel has explicitly condemned their leaders.^[29]

Who Is Rahm Emanuel? Clusterstock.com tells us that in addition to representing AIPAC, Rahm Israel Emanuel is the biggest recipient of Big Money money. What a surprise. Big Finance, AIPAC, and his middle name literally is "Israel". Let's just quit having elections here and let the Knesset pick for us. Save a bunch of time and money that way.

It was clear that Hilary would have been at least as rabidly Zionist a president as Joe Lieberman, and McPalin needs no comment. It looks like a choice regarding Middle East policy was never on the ballot except for the third-party candidates, and never will be. I voted for Obama, but I sure am glad I didn't give him any money or put much effort into him. To be fair, Rahm Israel Emanuel doesn't sound completely rabid: he apparently supported the Oslo peace process. But give me a break here: Obama's first pick is a guy whose middle name is Israel, has or had dual US-Israeli citizenship, volunteered with the IDF during the first Iraq Attack, has Israeli family and spends his summers there, and is awash in Big Money Money, and about whom there is considerable chatter linking him to Mossad... Really, I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried... I would have left the country in a hurry if McPalin won, and now my wait-and-see attitude is already moving towards concluding there really is no alternative for the US but bankruptcy and implosion in the service of our various enemies and masters, foreign and domestic, so I think I'm still out of here, just in a more leisurely fashion.

Let the Big Three bite the Big One

2008-11-08T16:46:00.001-08:00

Don't Do It, Obama. Don't Save Ford (F) And General Motors (GM)

Instead of giving these shitheads money to build more fall-apart guzzlers, let's allocate the money for mass transit projects like light rail and so forth and then see if the Big Three can manage to contribute. Oil will be heading back to $200/barrel once economies recover if not before. The last thing we need is more cars. We need mass transit, and it should be subsidised so that everyone driving is also paying for someone to ride mass transit for free. Otherwise the whole country crashes when oil goes over a certain price: no more food in supermarkets, nothing, over and out.

Down with Utah!

2008-11-08T16:39:00.001-08:00

Utah faces boycott after Mormon work for Prop 8

Utah faces boycott after Mormon work for Prop 8
By BROCK VERGAKIS, Associated Press Writer
Friday, November 7, 2008
(11-07) 16:32 PST Salt Lake City (AP) --

Utah's growing tourism industry and the star-studded Sundance Film Festival are being targeted for a boycott by bloggers, gay rights activists and others seeking to punish the Mormon church for its aggressive promotion of California's ban on gay marriage.

It could be a heavy price to pay. Tourism brings in $6 billion a year to Utah, with world-class skiing, a spectacular red rock country and the film festival founded by Robert Redford, among other popular tourist draws.

I think this is a great idea, and should be generalised to include Alaska and all the deep-red states, which tend to be backwards economically as well as in other respects. Let's drive the Bible-thumping bastards into bankruptcy! Send the Bible-beaters back to their bunkers and put The Fear into them so they never emerge to plague the rest of us again!

'Serious concerns' over Lieberman's future

2008-11-06T16:29:00.001-08:00

The Raw Story | Reid: 'Serious concerns' over Lieberman's future

Get rid of him. If the Republicans don't want him, send him to Israel. It's clearly really his country more than the US anyway.

Maxing out the plastic

2008-11-02T17:21:00.001-08:00

Broke Consumers Hit Credit Cards For A Few Last Pennies

From Clusterstock:

Spending plunged in Q3, and it's likely to continue to get worse. Why?
Because U.S. consumers are broke, and the number of folks eager to lend
us money despite this condition has gotten a lot smaller.
We were broke in 2000, but we were able to borrow money to spend by
tapping the "equity" in our houses. Now we can't tap that equity
anymore (because it's gone), so we've moved on to credit cards. Lenders
are wising up to this, though. And then where's our spending money going to come from?

Soros: America must lead a rescue of emerging economies

2008-10-29T09:36:00.001-07:00

FT Alphaville
....

The US must show the way in protecting the peripheral countries against a storm that has originated in the US, if it does not want to forfeit its claim to the leadership position. Even if Mr Bush does not share this point of view, it is to be hoped the next president will – but by then the damage will be much greater.

...Yeah, what he said... Soros is cool. Let's hope Obama offers him an important very senior post.

On Fire

2008-10-28T19:49:00.001-07:00

Humans made fire 790,000 years ago: study | Science | Reuters

Humans made fire 790,000 years ago: study
Mon Oct 27, 2008 9:34am EDT
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A new study shows that humans had the ability
to make fire nearly 790,000 years ago, a skill that helped them migrate
from Africa to Europe.

Some decades ago, I had a personal relationship with Fire perhaps akin to that some claim to have with Jesus. This was not the result of premeditation or volition: the organisation of my consciousness moved from its normal mental-egoic intellectual configuration to one dominated mostly by some combination of Jung's Intuitive, Feeling and Sensing functions. During this period I spent a great deal of time in the mountains and along rivers and so forth, and often felt moved to build and gaze a fire. I had experiences involving the Salamander and many others in general conforming to mystical traditions I had a complete lack of exposure to. It was as a result of these experiences that I read a great deal of Jung and eventual found my way to Michael Washburn, whose "Ego and the Dynamic Ground" provided a very satisfying intellectual framework enabling me to try to sort of get my mind around what I had wandered into.

This was all some decades ago, and these days I am thinking much more about Money in the broad sense than anything mystical, but I never either explained or dismissed that most intense period of my life.

Reading that human fire-making goes back about 800 thousand years, it struck me that that should be long enough for evolutionary processes to have created a biological basis for the archetypes related to Fire. Subjectively, constellation of an archetype is perceived as contact with something not only independently existent, but more real than reality itself, so to speak. I remain agnostic on the question of whether for example there is a God, elemental spirits, the Old Ones and the Other Side, or whether experiences of these things are just externalisations of basic human psychic hardware developed during millions of years of evolution.

And now back to Money. While I remain agnostic about the reality of the King of the Salamanders (the damn things are like cats: each one will give you to understand it is the King of them all, the One True Salamander [and I will note that the Old Testament God Jehovah is to me nothing more than a Fire Being with delusions of grandeur: a jealous, passionate angry and above all hungry being]), my opinion of the today's Big Bounce is that I will be shopping for put options tomorrow.

The Fund must act to protect emerging markets

2008-10-25T12:33:00.001-07:00

FT.com / Comment & analysis / Comment - The Fund must act to protect emerging markets

The Fund must act to protect emerging markets

Hear Hear! And the writer is a senior Citigroup manager, no less. I have the impression that Citi has been one of the leading financial houses in exploiting the developing world, so they may be mostly concerned with protecting their investments, but perhaps there is some real concern for "the victims of financial stress that is both not of their making and is beyond their control."

By William Rhodes
Published: October 23 2008 19:26 | Last updated: October 23 2008 19:26

....
After the resolution of the crises of the 1980s and 1990s, many emerging markets implemented key reforms, pursued prudent macroeconomic policies, strengthened banking and financial institutions and built up significant central bank reserves. In spite of their reforms, many of these countries have been caught in the downdraft of this credit crisis. They are the victims of financial stress that is both not of their making and is beyond their control. It could affect their real economies. The situation is deteriorating; these countries should not be left adrift. It would be imprudent to risk undermining the efforts in the Group of Seven leading industrialised countries to stabilise conditions by allowing the strains in emerging markets to evolve into an acute situation. Now is the time to act.
....
The lesson of the Latin American debt crisis and Asian financial crisis is that mechanisms must be put in place rapidly to shore up these vulnerable markets. The International Monetary Fund must assume a leadership role as it has in the past.

The writer is Citigroup senior vice-chairman; chairman, president and CEO of Citibank and first vice-chairman of the Institute of International Finance

Block the Vote:Will the GOP's campaign to deter new voters and discard Democratic ballots determine the next president?

2008-10-22T18:17:00.001-07:00

Block the Vote : Rolling Stone

Block the Vote

Will the GOP's campaign to deter new voters and discard Democratic ballots determine the next president?
ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. & GREG PALAST
Posted Oct 30, 2008 11:10 AM

<br>

....

In state after state,
Republican operatives — the party's elite commandos of
bare-knuckle politics — are wielding new federal legislation
to systematically disenfranchise Democrats. If this year's race is
as close as the past two elections, the GOP's nationwide campaign
could be large enough to determine the presidency in November. "I
don't think the Democrats get it," says John Boyd, a voting-rights
attorney in Albuquerque who has taken on the Republican Party for
impeding access to the ballot. "All these new rules and games are
turning voting into an obstacle course that could flip the vote to
the GOP in half a dozen states."
Suppressing the vote has long been a
cornerstone of the GOP's electoral strategy...

Well, there they go again... Expect the mother of all stock-market crashes if they manage to steal this one: should be good for about minus 3000 on the dow by following Friday.

ACLU questions Army unit’s NorthCom role

2008-10-21T13:27:00.001-07:00

ACLU questions Army unit’s NorthCom role - Navy News, opinions, editorials, news from Iraq, photos, reports - Navy Times

The American Civil Liberties Union is questioning the use of an
active Army brigade as an on-call federal response force within the
U.S., arguing that the military is barred from any role in civilian law
enforcement and that the force could be used to help the Pentagon
conduct domestic surveillance.
On Tuesday, the ACLU filed Freedom
of Information Act requests with the Pentagon and Department of Justice
asking for “any and all records” related to the decision to align the
unit under U.S. Northern Command, which is responsible for homeland
defense of the U.S., and the “ongoing and possible use” of the unit,
“including but not limited to contemplated functions; duties;
surveillance activities; and relationship to existing civilian agencies
or personnel or the National Guard.”
The ACLU FOIA request cites a Sept. 30 Army Times online story,
“3rd Infantry’s 1st BCT trains for a new dwell-time mission,” and a
U.S. Army North news release, as its sources for the information.
....
The assignment, the ACLU said, “raises important
questions about the longstanding separation between civilian and
military government within the United States — a separation that dates
to the nation’s founding and that has been reiterated in landmark
statutes, most importantly, the Posse Comitatus Act.”

"The banks simply DONT HAVE THE MONEY TO LEND."

2008-10-20T18:16:00.001-07:00

FT Alphaville

Time for the Darwinian flush
Oct 20 08:41
by Paul Murphy

Highlights from the latest Hayman Advisors letter to clients (i.e. the text in full):
October 14, 2008
‘The ultimate result of shielding man from the effects of folly is to people the world with fools.’ Herbert Spencer
What’s Next? It is the “what’s next” that scares us the most.....

"The US consumer is finally broke."

2008-10-20T18:07:00.001-07:00

Why This Recession Will Be A Doozy

Why This Recession Will Be A Doozy

Henry Blodget | Oct 19, 08 10:22 AM

The last recession was mild. The stock market and corporate profits tanked, but consumer spending--long the major engine of the US economy--danced merrily on through. In recent decades, it has ever been thus: bearish analysts and strategists have been underestimating the voracious spending habits and resilience of the US consumer for 50 years.
Unfortunately, at risk of invoking the four most expensive words in the English language, "this time it's different." This recession, to quote the great Julian Robertson, will be a "doozy."
Why?
Because the US consumer is finally broke. For thirty years, we piled on debt and then spent almost every new penny we got. This borrowing spree was made possible by a smorgasbord of no-money-down lending products and ever-appreciating asset prices. Unfortunately, the situation has now changed. The lenders who created those products have now been demolished, and asset prices are falling fast. And this is leaving American consumers with no choice but to cut back.

How finance, insurance, and real estate lobbyists bought a bailout

2008-10-17T12:36:00.001-07:00

The American Conservative -- Fire Sale

I really like these Paleocons. Conservatives trashing McCain, the Hanke-Panke bailout, lobbyists: what's not to like? Keep it up and they might give conservatives a good name.

How finance, insurance, and real estate lobbyists bought a bailout.

By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

There was little in the federal bailout bill that most Americans could wrap their arms, much less their minds, around. What did strike a chord—and one of the rare notes of consensus—was that greedy executives of failed institutions should have to give up their high salaries and golden parachutes before getting a life raft from Uncle Sam.

But the CEO’s needn’t be too alarmed. The $2 billion their industry has invested in Washington politicians over the last 20 years will likely bring healthy returns. Pesky details like “who” and “how much” to penalize were kicked down the road or left wide open for interpretation—nothing a few fat friends on the right committees and a team of crack lobbyists can’t handle.

"highly likely that John McCain suffers from Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

2008-10-17T12:29:00.001-07:00

The American Conservative -- Head of State

Is there more to John McCain’s rage than just bad temper? A psychotherapist puts the candidate on the couch.

Yeah, he's a whacko. Notice on the debates how he is really having trouble finding words? His brain hurts, we'll just have to have it out.

Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude... Congratulations! Hear Hear! Huzzah! Krugman for SecTreas or Fed!

2008-10-13T09:34:00.001-07:00

I would have just put a comment on his blog, but there are so many (18k) they turned them off. Let's hope Obama has a top job waiting for Paul "The Man" Krugman!

Economics 2008

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2008

"for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity"

Paul Krugman

Copyright © Princeton University
USA
Princeton University Princeton, NJ, USA
b. 1953

“The United States is now, in some very general sense, bankrupt”

2008-10-12T22:17:00.001-07:00

FT Alphaville » Blog Archive » Kemp: “The United States is now, in some very general sense, bankrupt”

Kemp: “The United States is now, in some very general sense, bankrupt”
Here is a radical proposal from John Kemp, the former Sempra Metals economist, who seems to have had enough “resting” between jobs. His provocative ideas would appear to apply to the UK as well as the US.
First take a deep breath, and recall President Franklin Roosevelt’s wise advice that there is nothing to fear but fear itself.
Then let’s admit something painful: The United States is bankrupt, in the sense that it’s assets (housing stock, corporations and cash flow, plant and machinery) are now worth much less than its liabilities (in the form of mortgage-backed securities, other debt and loan instruments). In particular, large parts of the housing stock are now worth much less than the owners paid for them, and less than the outstanding value of the mortgages, or the collateralised bonds that have been issued against them.

It is a longish article, and worth reading, so I won't quote bits of it here. He has an interesting global sort of mark-to-market plan to deal with the situation.

The battle lines drawn:There is an all-out war going on between the United States and the EU to define the future face of European banking.’

2008-10-12T21:59:00.001-07:00

Hr. Engdahl appears to be leaning towards deciding that the economic collapse is part of a long-laid plan by the usual suspects. I'm inclined that way also. I think it is possible that their plan has gotten away from them, rather like a biological weapon spreading beyond the target population. What Warren Buffett called financial weapons of mass destruction may turn out to be just that.

Behind the Panic: Financial Warfare and the Future of Global Bank Power

Behind the Panic: Financial Warfare and the Future of Global Bank Power

By F. William Engdahl

Global Research, October 9, 2008

....

There is serious ground to believe that US Goldman Sachs ex CEO Henry Paulson, as Treasury Secretary, is not stupid. There is also serious ground to believe that he is actually moving according to a well-thought-out long-term strategy. Events as they are now unfolding in the EU tend to confirm that. As one senior European banker put it to me in private discussion, ‘There is an all-out war going on between the United States and the EU to define the future face of European banking.’
In this banker’s view, the ongoing attempt of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and France’s Nicholas Sarkozy to get an EU common ‘fund’, with perhaps upwards of $300 billion to rescue troubled banks, would de facto play directly into Paulson and the US establishment’s long-term strategy, by in effect weakening the banks and repaying US-originated Asset Backed Securities held by EU banks.

Using panic to centralize power
As I document in my forthcoming book, Power of Money: The Rise and Decline of the American Century, in every major US financial panic since at least the Panic of 1835, the titans of Wall Street—most especially until 1929, the House of JP Morgan—have deliberately triggered bank panics behind the scenes in order to consolidate their grip on US banking. The private banks used the panics to control Washington policy including the exact definition of the private ownership of the new Federal Reserve in 1913, and to consolidate their control over industry such as US Steel, Caterpillar, Westinghouse and the like. They are, in short, old hands at such financial warfare to increase their power.
Now they must do something similar on a global scale to be able to continue to dominate global finance, the heart of the power of the American Century.

....

Paulson seems to have learned from his White House mentor. As co-chairman of Goldman Sachs according to a New York Times account, in 1998 he forced out his co-chairman, Jon Corzine ‘in what amounted to a coup’ according to the Times.
Paulson, and his friends at Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase, had a strategy it is becoming clear, as did the Godfather of Asset Backed Securitization and deregulated banking, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, as I have detailed in my earlier series here, Financial Tsunami, Parts I-V.
Knowing that at a certain juncture the pyramid of trillions of dollars of dubious sub-prime and other high risk home mortgage-based securities would come falling down, they apparently determined to spread the so-called ‘toxic waste’ ABS securities as globally as possible, in order to seduce the big global banks of the world, most especially of the EU, into their honey trap.
They had help. In recent testimony under oath by Mr Lynn Turner, Chief Accountant of the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) testified that the SEC Office of Risk Management which had oversight responsibility for the Credit Default Swap market, an exotic market worth nominally some $62 trillions, was cut in Administration ‘budget cuts’ from a staff of one hundred down to one person. Yes, that was not a typo. That’s one as in ‘Uno.’
Vermont Democratic Congressman Peter Welsh queried Turner, ‘... was there a systematic depopulating of the regulatory force so that it was impossible actually for regulation to occur if you have one person in that office? ...and then I understand that 146 people were cut from the enforcement division of the SEC, is that what you also testified to?’ Mr. Turner, in Congressional testimony replied, ‘Yes…I think there has been a systematic gutting, or whatever you want to call it, of the agency and it's capability through cutting back of staff.’

....

It now would appear that the Paulson strategy was to use a crisis—a crisis that was pre-programmed and predictable as far back as 2003 when Josh Bolten became head of OMB—when it exploded, to panic the more conservative European Union governments into rushing to the rescue of US toxic waste assets.
....
If the allegation of pre-planned panic, a la the Panic of 1907 is accurate, and it is a big if, then the plan worked…up to a point. That point came over the weekend of October 3, coincidentally the national unification holiday of Germany
....
The battle lines drawn
What has emerged are the outlines of two opposite approaches to the unfolding crisis. The Paulson plan is now clearly part of a project to create three colossal global financial giants—Citigroup, JP MorganChase and, of course, Paulson’s own Goldman Sachs, now conveniently enough a bank. Having successfully used fear and panic to wrestle a $700 billion bailout from the US taxpayers, now the big three will try to use their unprecedented muscle to ravage European banks in the years ahead. So long as the world’s largest financial credit rating agencies—Moody’s and Standard & Poors—are untouched by the scandals and Congressional hearings, the reorganized US financial power of Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase could potentially regroup and advance their global agenda over the coming several years, walking over the ashes of a bankrupt American economy made bankrupt by their follies.
By agreeing on a strategy of nationalizing what EU finance ministers deem are ‘EU banks too systemically strategic to fail,’ while guaranteeing bank deposits, the largest EU governments, Germany and the UK, in contrast to the US, have opted for what will in the longer run allow European banking giants to withstand the anticipated financial attacks from the likes of Goldman or Citigroup.
....
By initiating state partial nationalizations across the EU, and rejecting the Berlusconi/Sarkozy bailout scheme, the governments of the EU, interestingly enough this time led by the German, are laying a more sound foundation to emerge from the crisis.
Stay tuned, it’s far from over. This is a fight for the survival of the American Century which has been bvuilt since 1939 on the twin pillars of American financial dominance and American military dominance—Full Spectrum, Dominance.
....

F. William Engdahl is author of the book, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (Pluto Press Ltd) and Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (www.globalresearch.ca) He may be contacted through his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.

Exploring the worst-case scenario

2008-10-12T21:16:00.001-07:00

Exploring the worst-case scenario | Reuters

Exploring the worst-case scenario
Sun Oct 12, 2008 3:10pm EDT
By Emily Kaiser
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The global economy is drawing closer to a dangerous downward spiral and time may be running out for world leaders to find a way to stop it before it inflicts lasting damage.
Economists are beginning to warn of a depression-like cycle where an inability to obtain credit stalls growth, triggering more defaults and still tighter lending terms. Governments have unveiled one unprecedented move after another in the past three weeks to boost confidence and get banks back in business, yet so far nothing has been able to arrest the fall.
The world's richest nations agreed on Friday to do whatever it takes to restore normal order to credit markets that have essentially shut down, choking off the flow of money to borrowers who normally would have no trouble obtaining loans.

That seems to be the key. Either they get credit moving very soon, or critical mass is reached and a chain reaction of insolvency starts.

I am presently in Brevard, NC, in the large area of the southeast of the US that was very short on gasoline for a few weeks and essentially completely out for at least a few days or a week, a story that was conspicuously under-reported. Gas is back and has been for some time, and prices are now dropping to national norms (I saw $3.15/gallon today), but roads, stores and restaurants are eerily quiet. Doesn't look like there will be a big xmas sales season in these parts.

"With no desire to exaggerate, this might be considered the financial pre-conditions of a depression," Citigroup economist Steven Wieting wrote in a note to clients.
"Evidence suggests credit rationing is inhibiting day-to-day activities for many firms, with a harsh and worsening backdrop for consumers," he said. "Sadly, some risk exists that financial events could still unfold like a proverbial 'dam break.' This might leave policy-makers treating very serious and lasting damage to the financial system, rather than preventing further erosion."

Critical mass and meltdown or not. Even if not, extensive damage has already been done.

CONSUMER SPENDING CAVES
Since the bankruptcy of investment bank Lehman Brothers and government rescue of insurer AIG (AIG.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) in mid-September, U.S. consumer confidence has tumbled almost as sharply as stocks, and spending has slowed dramatically.

All those retail stores that make two thirds of their money in xmas-season sales? They're gone. Shorting them will be a one-way bet if there is still anything left to short. Since the stuff they are selling mostly all comes from China, it won't directly hit what manufacturing there is in the US, but it should be obvious that seasonal hiring will be low to non-existent except perhaps at Mall Wart and the other major hawkers of the cheapest junk from China that helped dig the debt part of this whole. Then in January if not before, massive layoffs of retail workers is a given. More defaults on consumer debt, more foreclosures, giant sucking sound.

Consumer spending accounts for two-thirds of U.S. economic activity, so if it remains weak, the economy would surely sink into recession, dragging much of the world with it.

What's with this 'would'? The economy is in recession, whatever the fake government stats say. Consumer spending will continue to slow even if the banking system is saved and the credit markets restart. As bone-dumb as many Americans are, judging by recent Presidential elections, they are not about to run out and spend everything they can right after a stock market crash that now ranks with and may exceed the crash of 1929. It will take six months or a year of stability after a halt to foreclosures and bankruptcies before non-essential expenditures regain favor. It's just that simple.

The bigger risk is that it reinforces and deepens the credit crunch.
Banks are already reluctant to extend credit, primarily because they are paying the price for previous lending mistakes. As that slows economic growth, companies are cutting jobs, which in turn means more people may miss payments on mortgages, credit cards and auto loans, driving up bank losses and forcing them to clamp down even harder on lending.
Once that cycle gets going, it is difficult to stop.

It is already going. The question is just if it has gone critical or not.

Lena Komileva, head of G7 market economics at Tullett Prebon in London, said there was a risk policy-makers would have to "start again from scratch" if they cannot quickly turn investor sentiment around.
"If this scenario were to unfold, governments would have to effectively nationalize the entire flow of funds in G7 economies and start lending directly to businesses and consumers. Surely, they can do better than this," she said.

Can they? We should know soon. The FT headline is Scramble to avoid collapse. Seeing that headline at FT means it will be a very near-run thing if the radical measures described work, and no great surprise if they don't. In that event, what would be left other than a worldwide program of massive liquidity support (printing money) and direct provision of credit? And then if that doesn't work, it's just plain over and time to let the thing run its course as quickly as possible and make plans for a rebuilding, and most importantly restructuring, of the world economic system.

Soros: The game is out.

2008-10-12T20:33:00.001-07:00

Soros sees end of US-led globalized market system | Markets | Bonds News | Reuters

Soros sees end of US-led globalized market system
Sun Oct 12, 2008 3:03pm EDT
By David Morgan
WASHINGTON, Oct 12 (Reuters) - Billionaire investor George Soros predicted on Sunday that the financial crisis would mean the end of a U.S.-led market system that has dominated the global economy with debt and deregulation since the 1980s.
"Globalization, America as the center of the globalized financial markets, was sucking up the savings of the world," Soros said in a CNN interview.
"This is now over. The game is out. It does mean a very serious adjustment for America," added Soros, a staunch backer of the Democratic Party.

No big surprise, but Soros saying it makes it sort of official.

As world leaders rushed to help banks weather the crisis that has sent stocks into steep decline, Soros blamed the turmoil on the faith in market forces that began under President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher a generation ago.
The notion that markets are self-correcting led to a massive expansion of debt financing that culminated in the sub-prime mortgages that epitomized the easy-money mentality at the root of the disaster, he said.
"This belief became the dominant creed. And this, then, led to the globalization of markets, the deregulation of markets and the increased use of leverage and all the financial engineering," Soros said.
"This whole enormous construct is built on false conceptions," he added. "You can go a very long way. But in the end, reality rears its ugly head and that's what happened now."

Indeed. Reagan and W: a bankrupt ideology, and a legacy of bankruptcy. "Why did they hate America SO MUCH?"

Jeffrey Sachs, special adviser to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and director of the Earth Institute at New York's Columbia University, appeared to agree with Soros.
"The age of Reaganism is over," Sachs said in a separate CNN interview. "The no-regulation, low-taxes (philosophy) has broken the back of our economy. We now have to get serious about reconstructing normal government that pays its way and a normal financial sector that's properly regulated."
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's embrace of the same "market fundamentalist ideology" has made the Bush administration slow to respond to the crisis, said Soros, who blamed Paulson for not saving the Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers from bankruptcy.
"That's what actually kind of unleashed the current phase of meltdown," he said.

I guess if Hank had had a $700mn options position in LEH instead of GS, things would have been different.

Soros said U.S. authorities could effectively address the crisis by recapitalizing banks, first with private money, and restructuring home loans to minimize foreclosures. (Additional reporting by David Lawder, Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

Which is what Soros and everyone else worth listening to has been saying all along, more or less. But the Bush crime family and their hired hands were too busy looting the Treasury to save the US from bankruptcy. It appears they are making the right moves in Europe, and may start in the US; it should be clear within a few days if it is too late or not.

Feds listen to Roubini for a change, will support commercial paper market: this may actually help.

2008-10-07T08:13:00.001-07:00

FRB: Press Release--Board announces creation of the Commercial Paper Funding Facility (CPFF) to help provide liquidity to term funding markets--October 7, 2008

From the Feds:

Press Release

Release Date: October 7, 2008
For release at 9:00 a.m. EDT

The Federal Reserve Board on Tuesday announced the creation of the Commercial Paper Funding Facility (CPFF), a facility that will complement the Federal Reserve's existing credit facilities to help provide liquidity to term funding markets. The CPFF will provide a liquidity backstop to U.S. issuers of commercial paper through a special purpose vehicle (SPV) that will purchase three-month unsecured and asset-backed commercial paper directly from eligible issuers. The Federal Reserve will provide financing to the SPV under the CPFF and will be secured by all of the assets of the SPV and, in the case of commercial paper that is not asset-backed commercial paper, by the retention of up-front fees paid by the issuers or by other forms of security acceptable to the Federal Reserve in consultation with market participants. The Treasury believes this facility is necessary to prevent substantial disruptions to the financial markets and the economy and will make a special deposit at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in support of this facility.
The commercial paper market has been under considerable strain in recent weeks as money market mutual funds and other investors, themselves often facing liquidity pressures, have become increasingly reluctant to purchase commercial paper, especially at longer-dated maturities. As a result, the volume of outstanding commercial paper has shrunk, interest rates on longer-term commercial paper have increased significantly, and an increasingly high percentage of outstanding paper must now be refinanced each day. A large share of outstanding commercial paper is issued or sponsored by financial intermediaries, and their difficulties placing commercial paper have made it more difficult for those intermediaries to play their vital role in meeting the credit needs of businesses and households.
By eliminating much of the risk that eligible issuers will not be able to repay investors by rolling over their maturing commercial paper obligations, this facility should encourage investors to once again engage in term lending in the commercial paper market. Added investor demand should lower commercial paper rates from their current elevated levels and foster issuance of longer-term commercial paper. An improved commercial paper market will enhance the ability of financial intermediaries to accommodate the credit needs of businesses and households.
Commercial Paper Funding Facility (CPFF) Terms and Conditions (57 KB PDF)

2008 Monetary Policy Releases

They are actually doing something! Maybe they don't want to crash the economy after all.

The Fed did nothing over the weekend, then announced ineffectual measures: Depression more likely.

2008-10-06T16:55:00.001-07:00

RGE - The Fed keeps on wasting time while the mother of all bank runs is underway

Nouriel Roubini | Oct 6, 2008

Last Friday I pointed out in my “Financial and Corporate System is in Cardiac Arrest: The Risk of the Mother of All Bank Runs” that we were at the point of a risk of a systemic financial meltdown with the beginning of the mother of all bank runs: stock markets gave a vote of no confidence to the Senate passage of the TARP legislation (equities down 4% on Thursday) and to the House passage of the legislation on Friday (equities down 3% after the passage of the bill in the House). At the same time last week money markets, interbank markets, credit markets were all imploding with all interbank spread at new all time highs, credit spreads going up through the roof and the roll-off of the financing – via commercial paper – of the corporate system.

....

Indeed by last week a mother of all bank and non-bank runs was underway and even a well designed and well implemented TARP (let alone the poorly designed one passed by Congress) could not address the problem of a short term liquidity panic and run.

And with the liquidity and credit and banking crisis hitting European financial institutions this severe crisis was becoming global last week. I then suggested that only radical and urgent action could stop this mother of all runs such as the following ones:

....

- direct Fed lending to the corporate sector via Fed buying the commercial paper that corporates are not able to roll over; and possibly even lending to state and local governments that are a now also facing a roll-off of their maturing short-term liabilities.

That's pretty much what I said here. Guess it wasn't such a crazy idea after all. One of the primary purposes of government is to keep essential services going. If that means government has to provide credit, then it provides credit. It's just that simple, folks.

- a coordinated 100bps reduction in policy rates by all major advanced economies central bank and, possibly, even some emerging market economies central banks;

Since the crisis of confidence and liquidity was becoming more virulent over the last few days and during the weekend in Europe one would have expected a radical response over the weekend along the lines suggested above by the Fed and other central banks. After all Bernanke stated on Friday that the Fed would do whatever was necessary to deal with the liquidity crisis.

Instead the Fed did nothing over the weekend (before the crucial opening of markets in Asia and Europe) and then announced steps this morning that don’t even start to address the liquidity problems of the financial system....

So the Fed wasted an entire weekend announcing nothing and then announced this morning a set of modest steps that does nothing to address the ongoing silent run on banks and the non-silent run on the short term liabilities of non-banks and of the corporate sector. This at a time when the markets was expecting – given the Friday statement of Bernanke – such radical and urgent policy actions. So no wonder that Asian and European equity markets collapsed at their Monday opening and no wonder that US equity markets are down 5-6% today (as of mid-day). So the time to move is now or, better, it was yesterday or a week or a month ago. Any further delay may lead to an implosion of the financial system and serious damage to the corporate system tilting a severe economic recession in a much more grave economic depression.

Now we are back to the incompetence-or-intent question. I think incompetence is becoming less and less plausible with each passing day, and the possibility that the Bush thugs are deliberately destroying the economic system more plausible. The proximity to the election cannot be ignored, yet this seems to be hurting McCain; could the economy be crashed rapidly enough to create a state of civil disorder or some other pretext for indefinitely postponing elections? Or perhaps they are simply conducting a scorched-earth policy, with the side benefit that they end up with what money is left and can buy all classes of assets for next to nothing, meaning they end up owning the country regardless of who is President.

More Bank, Less Bucks: A Four Point Plan for the Rescue from Institutional Risk Analytics

2008-10-05T21:59:00.001-07:00

These guys really seem to make sense. I'm no expert in this stuff, but they have a straight-out plain-spoken common-sense way of talking that makes me think they are down-to-earth people who really know their stuff.
Also I like that guy in the suit looking out the window on their website. Reminds me of Detective Columbo, which seems appropriate.

Institutional Risk Analytics

More Bank, Less Bucks: A Four Point Plan for the Rescue
October 6, 2008

"Public opinion made [Herbert Hoover] the villain of the Great
Depression. In fact, the 31st president was a visionary -- but a hopelessly
inept politician… Until early 1931, midway through his presidency, Hoover had
waged a vigorous offensive against the Depression. International events pushed
him back onto the defensive. His overriding goals became damage control and even
national economic self-preservation, as it became clear that the Depression was
not just another cyclic valley, but an historic watershed. Hoover came to
believe that the root cause of the Great Depression was the Great War."

Don't Blame Hoover

Stanford Magazine

David M. Kennedy

Jan/Feb 1999
Watching the financial rescue legislation grind along to
a conclusion reminds us that democracy is not meant to be efficient or pretty.
The end result also makes us think of how our ancestors dealt with the
Great Depression. We think not of FDR, who most Americans associate with the
solution via the New Deal, but of President Herbert Hoover, a tragic figure but one of the
greatest technocrats to ever hold the office of the presidency
Hoover knew what was happening in the country in the early 1930s. He created many of the mechanisms that would be used to deal with it, including the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. But due to
poor communications and other factors, Hoover could not marshal sufficient
resources to act effectively. We've written about the attempts by Hoover to
negotiate with Henry Ford in the days leading up to the collapse of the Detroit
banks in early 1933 in a past issue of The IRA ("How's My Bank or Why One Rating Just
Isn't Enough"), but by then Hoover had been fighting the Depression for over three years. He wrote in the third volume of his memoirs, The Great Depression:

"If we had possessed adequate banking laws and a sound
financial system, we should never have needed the Reconstruction Finance
Corporation, the Home Loan Banks, and the half dozen other government props to
credit, which we were compelled to introduce later on… Our whole economic system
naturally divides itself into production, distribution and finance. By finance I
mean every phase of investment, banking and credit. And, at once I may say that
the major fault in the system as it stands is in the financial system… In this
system I am not referring to individual banks or financial institutions. Many of
them have shown distinguished courage and ability. One the contrary, I am
referring to the system itself, which is so organized, or so lacking in
organization, that it fails the primary function of stable and steady service to
the production and distribution system. In an emergency its very mechanism
increases the jeopardy and paralyzes action of the community… That it has been
necessary for the government, through emergency action to protect us (while
holding a wealth of gold) from being taken off the gold standard, to erect
gigantic credit institutions with the full pledge of government credit to save
the nation from chaos through this failure of the financial system, that it is
necessary for us to devise schemes of clearing-house protections and to install
such temporary devices across the nation, is full proof of all that I have said.
That is the big question. If we can solve this, then we can take in hand the
faults of the production and distribution systems - and many problems in the
social and political system. But this financial system simply must be made to
function first."

It doesn't surprise me that they like Hoover. Seems right, somehow.

Here's our suggestion as to how to get the job done to
maximum effect for financial institutions and the larger economy.
First, the Treasury should become a market maker in both the assets and equity of solvent financial institutions. By being prepared to purchase illiquid assets, guarantee same or buy preferred equity
from solvent financial institutions, the Treasury can immediately put a floor
under viable but liquidity constrained financial institutions that are being
driven into default.

Assuming, of course, that there is no plan afoot to drive them into default and/or into the gaping maw of Citi Bank of Goldman Morgan. They are obviously less cynical than I am. I applaud their optimism and practicality.

Second, the Treasury should display all of the assets held by the rescue fund in real time. Each day, the Treasury should conduct an auction for all of the assets in the fund. It is up to the discretion
of the Treasury whether to accept or reject any bid, but the aggregate results
of the daily auctions should also be published in real time, thereby creating an
indicative market for pricing these assets. Likewise, any preferred equity sold
to any financial institution participating in the program should be displayed in
real time and put up for bid. As former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan said of the
GSEs several years ago, everything that can be sold should be sold - but at a
price that suits the objectives of the Treasury

Touchingly optimistic. Real-time transparency. Maybe if Obama wins and his transition team is running the show, otherwise fuggedaboudit. Still, even if they are dreaming, by providing one of many preferable alternatives to the Hanke-Panke plan (which were never to my knowledge mentioned in the media or in Congress), and now that the H-P heist has taken place, providing a sort of critique-in-advance of its implementation, they are fighting the good fight.

Third, while the Treasury needs to run the market process, the FDIC should be given overall authority to manage the assets acquired or preferred equity purchased by the Treasury that is not immediately
sold. The FDIC has the operational experience and personnel to act as general
contractor for the Treasury, and in turn can direct the work of the tens of
thousands of FDIC personnel, other regulators and contractors from the top
accounting, consulting, forensic and IT services firms around the world who
already are being marshaled behind the FDIC's bank resolution efforts.

I'm definitely with them here. I have no use for the Hanke-Panke crowd at this point, but have nothing against the FDIC. Let them run the show, and maybe the odd hundred-billion here and there will be saved from falling into the pockets of Friends of Hank.

Fourth, the whole point of this legislation is to use the credit of the US to buy time to resolve troubled assets, but the Treasury should not be shy about hitting a reasonable bid or making its fiscal operations aggressively
transparent and inclusive. By letting the markets begin to operate
under the aegis of the Treasury as market maker, it is possible to reverse the
current deflation in asset values and public confidence.
In order to achieve this end, limitations on short selling against financial institutions need to be removed. The best way to discipline unsafe and unsound short selling activity is to enforce existing rules on capital and margin requirements, or tighten same, as with the proposal by theState of New York to begin regulating the sales of credit default swap protection against hedged positions starting January 1, 2009. Once the Treasury creates a capital backstop behind the major banks, the pressure from short-sellers will lessen.
For the continuous auction process to function, the Treasury
and the participating institutions need to see both the longs and the shorts.
Likewise, whatever compromise approach is used by the SEC to modify the
accounting treatment of assets under the fair value accounting rule should be
reflected in the Treasury's auction process. That way we're all on the same
page, yes?

Yes. Definitely.

It may strike some of you as odd for The IRA to be urging the
government to buy equity in private banks, but as we have argued in numerous
venues over the past several weeks, the probable realized loss rates facing US
banks in the next four quarters are well above 1989-1991 peak levels. The US
government can get involved now, in a way that keeps the majority of assets in
nominally private hands and encourages private capital to participate, or we can
recapitalize these banks in a receivership at 100% public expense. We think the
choice is obvious from a financial and public good perspective.

Just plain-speaking common sense.

As Hoover reflects in his memoirs, the problems facing the US
financial system then and today are practical, not political. If the next
President and the next Treasury Secretary want to fix the economy fast, make the
asset purchase program favor the sale of new equity first, then asset
guarantees, then finally the outright purchase of bad debt at significant
haircuts. The amount of public expenditures under an
equity-focused program will be less because instead of increasing the negative
weight of collapsing leverage, we can again make leverage our friend and help
expand bank balance sheets and the economy via new public and private equity
infusions.

This sounds like a good long-term plan. I'm not sure it addresses the acute crisis in the credit markets, or rather lack thereof, but maybe it does. I'm no expert, in fact I'm very much learning as I go along, but if I understand the situation correctly a lot of otherwise perfectly viable business are going to start hitting the wall soon, missing their payrolls and falling behind on payables (and seeing the same thing happen to their receivables), if they can't get the affordable commercial paper that they live on. I imagine there are some businesses run by people like me who hate debt so much that they always have piles of liquidity available for normal operations, but probably not many. So while keeping some of the banks alive is all well and good, it is pointless if they don't immediately start providing normal credit both to businesses and individuals. If they won't,then to Hell with them. Any systemically essential enterprise, whether it provides credit, water or electricity, should be seized and government-operated as an emergency measure if they are threatening public health, wealth or stability.

This may sound farfetched and probably is, but when you think about it, every corporation and taxpayer already has an account with the Feds, so the Feds could simply grant credit directly to individuals to pay their mortgages and to businesses to maintain their operations, and simply make the funds disbursed a long-term-payable debit on their tax accounts. Call it whatever you want, it may be preferable to the oncoming wave of bankruptcies and defaults that appear inevitable unless credit flow is resumed. Not that I like the idea, because governments are generally relatively inept compared to well-run enterprises (but there are some areas such as health care where efficient government operation has a much better cost-benefit profile), but given the alternative it's worth a try.

Unless of course the alternative, an "economic Pearl Harbor" as Warren Buffett called it, is the culmination of a plan rather than an unforseen consequence of unrestrained greed. We should know within the next month or so.

Gasoline on the fire

2008-10-05T20:23:00.001-07:00

Shanghai drops as trading resumes, while Tokyo dives - MarketWatch

Shanghai drops as trading resumes, Tokyo slumps

Nikkei hits lowest level since May 2004, Hang Seng loses 3.5%

By V. Phani Kumar, MarketWatch

Last update: 10:47 p.m. EDT Oct. 5, 2008

HONG
KONG (MarketWatch) -- Asian markets tumbled Monday amid concerns about
a raging global financial crisis. Japanese shares were down sharply --
with banks falling hard, and Sony Corp. moving below a five-year low --
and Shanghai-listed stocks dropped as trading resumed after a week-long
holiday.

"The fact that the [U.S. bailout package] has gone through hasn't seen
a freeing up of the credit markets, and because that hasn't happened,
people are wondering what else the government can do now," said Andrew
Sullivan, a sales trader at Main First Securities in Hong Kong.

The Hanke-Panke Plan at work: gasoline on the fire. And last I heard, Hank isn't going shopping for junk assets for six weeks, meaning past the election. I guess his purchases are not expected to make Republicans popular.

If the Feds are going to do anything useful, it looks like they have a week, maybe two but probably not, to do it. It looks like the plan is just to keep City Bank of Goldman Morgan going, let everything else crash, then give the overlord-approved survivors lots of cash to buy everything else up at five cents on the dollar.

It looked like Wells-Fargo was among the favored few (Warren has a big stake in it, but maybe he's not really part of the ruling clique), but with the Feds apparently trying to force the Citi takeover of Wachovia despite WFC making a much better offer which may also cost less or no government money, one has to wonder: why do they hate America so much?

Sudden outbreak of democracy baffles US pundits

2008-10-05T12:38:00.001-07:00

Sudden outbreak of democracy baffles US pundits • The Register

....

The outrage isn't the spooky part. The really odd thing is that if you had to rely on the mainstream US newspapers and TV channels - and nothing else - you'd wouldn't know something remarkable was happening. Which is that the Treasury Secretary's Bailout Plan had united parts of America who spend most of their energy hitting each other over the head, in common opposition to the proposal.

....

Conservatives, libertarians, and lefties all raised objections to the Bailout for very sound reasons of their own. The idea that the state should bail out feckless private enterprises offended both conservatives and libertarians, who take moral responsibility seriously. The left wanted their traditional adversaries put in jail, not given a gift of new lease of life with the public's money.

....

All this was reflected on political sites, forums and blogs - but not a hint of this sentiment was expressed by the professional media. So when Congress rejected the Bill on Monday, America's punditocracy expressed its shock. It also reported that the markets were "astonished" - the markets being presumed to have a better grasp of what American citizens want than American citizens themselves.
All week, the media had refrained from comment that might embarrass the political class. In fact, the first professional column I read which was reflected the true feelings of many US citizens around me was written from 3,500 miles away and published in London's Sunday Times.

....

Ouch! Your democracy is hurting my consensus
But even after Monday's vote, the cream of America's pundits couldn't quite face up to what had happened. For example, Thomas Friedman retreated further into his fantasy world, from which he could only radiate disbelief:
We’re all connected. As others have pointed out, you can’t save Main Street and punish Wall Street anymore than you can be in a rowboat with someone you hate and think that the leak in the bottom of the boat at his end is not going to sink you, too. The world really is flat. We’re all connected. "Decoupling" is pure fantasy.
There's a man who's a prisoner of his metaphors. Leaping from "we're all connected" (vaguely... somehow) to "you can't let banks fail" is a jump that can only be made if you think your metaphors have astounding metaphysical properties. Maybe Friedman really believes this. Who knows?
Or take David Brooks, who usually poses as the champion of the proles, except when the proles do something he doesn't approve of. He called the Congressional vote "The Revolt of the Nihilists." The dissenting Congressmen, Brooks wrote,
... showed the world how much they detest their own leaders and the collected expertise of the Treasury and Fed. They did the momentarily popular thing, and if the country slides into a deep recession, they will have the time and leisure to watch public opinion shift against them.
You could see what Brooks really objected to was the natural order of things was being upset - how dare people question "expertise"? Or leaders? People don't know what's good for them. (But of course, David does...)
And to confirm that what really peeved (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/30/opinion/30brooks.html?em) him was voters getting uppity, he concluded:
What we need in this situation is authority.
Actually, what we need is an open, rational, and democratic debate about a range of choices - and that's something the political and media elites united to oppose last week.
The media had done all it could to keep awkward questions off the air.

....

The media's role is simply one of providing comfort and propaganda. Tremors in the micro niches are reported in great detail. But when a political earthquake takes place, the media can't even recognise it. It's literally beyond description - the words aren't in their vocabulary.
The result has left us disenfranchised. The same comforting propaganda that reduces people to a convenient aggregation of demographic labels, is quite useless at divining their intentions, when they are so forcefully expressed.
But clearly, now, the era where politicians, journalist and political marketing experts propped each other up is over, and the internet has helped enormously to destroy their power. The micro-marketing is now junk; the court journalism is superfluous, and deep alliances that the elites tell us are unthinkable and impossible( such as between libertarians and parts of the left) will surely emerge.
As I write, however, the Bailout that Americans don't want is returning, this time weighed down with pork barrel sweeteners for everyone from NASCAR track owners to environmentalists. A few minutes ago, it passed: so 21st Century America's brush with democracy may have been a brief experiment.
But wasn't it fun while it lasted? ®
Thanks for your comments - mail 'em in here (mailto:andrew.orlowski@theregister.co.uk?subject).

The Battle Plan II: Sarah "Evita" Palin, the Muse of the Coming Police State

2008-10-04T21:31:00.001-07:00

Naomi Wolf: The Battle Plan II: Sarah "Evita" Palin, the Muse of the Coming Police State

Scharansky divided nations into "fear societies" and "free societies." Make no mistake: Sarah "Evita" Palin is Rove and Cheney's cosmetic rebranding of their fascist push: she will help to establish a true and irreversible "fear society" in this once free once proud nation. For God's sake, do not let her; do not let them.

There has been a plan in the works for a very long time to bring down the U.S. economy

2008-10-04T19:44:00.001-07:00

"Grand Larceny" on a Monumental Scale: Does the Bailout Bill Mark the End of America as We Know It?

by Richard C Cook

Global Research, October 2, 2008

....

Every reputable economist commenting on the bill opposes it, including NYU’s Nouriel Roubini, who says the plan is "totally flawed." He says the plan is:

"a disgrace: a bailout of reckless bankers, lenders, and investors that provides little direct debt relief to borrowers and financially stressed households and that will come at a very high cost to the US taxpayer."
My own view is that the plan is worse than that: a crime; grand larceny on a monumental scale.
Here’s why: We know that the debacle started with homeowner defaults on subprime mortgages and that it has now spread to other types of mortgages as foreclosures spread. We know that the unhealthy use of subprime mortgages started during the Clinton administration, as did the bundling and sale of these mortgages into mortgage-backed securities sold in the financial markets.
What has not been reported is that the Bush administration turned these acts of reckless lending into a national program of mortgage fraud. Soon after George W. Bush became president in 2001, meetings at the White House between Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and administration officials became more frequent. According to mortgage industry insiders I have interviewed, direction soon began to come down from the banks to mortgage brokers to falsify borrower income information to allow them to qualify for loans that were otherwise out of reach.
The FBI has investigations underway to prosecute some of these cases of mortgage fraud. But they are not reaching above the brokers’ level. The FBI is not gaining access—or at least they have not reported it publicly—to information about collusion at the political level or at the level of the banks which provided the leveraged funding for mortgage money.
But at the time the housing bubble was inflating, no one was watching. Note that when Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson testified before the Senate Banking Committee last week, he said he was shocked to learn when assuming office in June 2006 that no federal agency regulated mortgage lending. Rather this was an area left to the states.
What Paulson did not say was that when the states attempted to intervene, they were blocked by the Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. In a February 14 article in the Washington Post written before he resigned, New York governor Eliot Spitzer wrote:

"In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formal opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks. The federal government's actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state banking superintendents, actively fought

Supporting evidence, including actual briefs filed in support of Eliot Spitzer (in my opinion possibly targeted with a honey-trap operation and taken down because of his inconvenient truths), can be seen at the Center for Responsible Lending.

But at the time the housing bubble was inflating, no one was watching. Note that when Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson testified before the Senate Banking Committee last week, he said he was shocked to learn when assuming office in June 2006 that no federal agency regulated mortgage lending. Rather this was an area left to the states.
What Paulson did not say was that when the states attempted to intervene, they were blocked by the Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. In a February 14 article in the Washington Post written before he resigned, New York governor Eliot Spitzer wrote:

"In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formal opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks. The federal government's actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state banking superintendents, actively fought the new rules. But the unanimous opposition of the 50 states did not deter, or even slow, the Bush administration in its goal of protecting the banks. In fact, when my office opened an investigation of possible discrimination in mortgage lending by a number of banks, the OCC filed a federal lawsuit to stop the investigation."
Why did the Bush administration do this? The only possible answer is that it had every intention of producing the housing bubble, one that had the effect of not only inflating the cost of homes and real estate but also pumping billions of dollars of borrowed cash into the economy through mortgage and home equity loans.

Emphasis on intention is the author's, not mine.

.....

What happens next?
Well, it is already happening. In the post-bubble era there will be no more economic engines for the American economy. A long term recession and depression are inevitable, and they are expected by those in the know. In fact, there has been a plan in the works for a very long time to bring down the U.S. economy, and it will be happening over the coming months.
This is why the government is also preparing to implement martial law, or something close to it, in case public unrest breaks out. We will likely also see a clampdown on free speech, the right to protest, and use of the internet. Federal facilities are being prepared all around the country to backstop state prisons and local jails that are already bursting at the seams.
This is the plan, so people need to begin to take whatever measures they can to cut their cost of living, get out of debt, and protect themselves and their families.

Richard C. Cook is a former U.S. federal government analyst, whose career included service with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury Department. His articles on economics, politics, and space policy have appeared in numerous websites and print magazines. His book on monetary reform, entitled We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform, will soon be published. He is the author of Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age, called by one reviewer, "the most important spaceflight book of the last twenty years." His website is www.richardccook.com. Comments or requests to be added to his mailing list or to purchase his special report on the 2008 election may be sent to EconomicSanity@gmail.com.

Wanted for High Crimes and Misdemeanors including Election Fraud: Karl Rove. Bounty of $100,000 paid.

2008-10-04T19:27:00.000-07:00

VELVETREVOLUTION.US :

Today, VR offered a $100,000 reward for information from whistleblowers who have knowledge of election related criminal activity by Michael Connell, Randy Cole, Karl Rove and others.The full ad will be published this week in the Akron newspapers and you can see it here. The information must result in a conviction.

Git'em! Hang'em high, the treasonous dogs!

Hey Asian and Arab Creditors: the $10 Trillion will never get repaid. Just so you know.

2008-10-03T19:18:00.001-07:00

National debt topped $10 trill this week: The Swamp

The Gross National Debt

by Frank James

There were no fireworks so a lot of people probably missed it. We even forgot to mention it here on The Swamp when it happened though we saw the reports. Anyway, on the last day of September, the national debt hit $10 trillion plus.

President Bush signed legislation in July that raised the debt ceiling to $10.615 trillion. Meanwhile, the financial bailout legislation passed by the Senate last night would raise the debt ceiling further to $11.315 trillion.

From the desk of H-Ross Parot:

OK now, Chinese people? Great to see you in space. Enjoy the Moon and Mars: looks like you'll have them all to yourselves. But now, see, about that $10 trillion? See, you need to understand that the US is like a drunk who just got throwed out of the bar for the last time. See now, he owes everyone including the bartender as much money as they would loan him, and they were already sick of him picking fights with everyone his bookie Wolfowitz sicked him on, and finally he ran out of money, credit and booze and just fell over and they threw him out in the parking lot and he's just a-lyin' there in a big puddle of puke, and of course Wolfowitz is long gone, probably in Taiwan by now.

Now, y'all can go on "loaning" him money as long as you want, but you need to understand, in case there is any doubt, that what you're really doing is giving it to him. I mean, let's get real here, Chinese people: when was the last time you got paid back by a drunk lying in a puddle of puke in the parking lot?

Anyways, the Olympics were great, your spacewalk was great, and I'm sure you'll do at least as good a job of running the world as we did. Probably a lot better. I mean, y'all have been around for like five thousand years, so you must be doing something right.

Oh, and sorry about the $10 trillion or whatever it is now (meaning more). Looks like we're just tapped out for the next hundred years or so.

The American financial Superpower crumbles before our eyes.

2008-10-03T16:34:00.001-07:00

Financial Tsunami: The End of the World as We Knew It

by F. William Engdahl

Global Research, September 30, 2008

As the details of the present crisis reveal, there are huge ideological fault lines making for chaos and a potential meltdown of the Laissez Faire financial system. That present system, which was built on the back of Wall Street financial and banking deregulation since 1987 when Alan Greenspan, a devout follower and close friend of radical individualist Ayn Rand, became Wall Street’s man at the Federal Reserve for almost 19 years, is over now with the failure of the Henry Paulson $700 billion bailout scheme.

They passed the new deep-fried version today, but it is irrelevant, except that by increasing the supply of treasuries, which are already absorbing liquidity fleeing MM and other deposit accounts which fund commercial paper, it will worsen the current credit freeze. $700bn worth of gasoline on the fire, to save Hank's $700mn in Goldman options.

Governments worldwide now face no alternative but to begin the painful process of putting the financial genie back in the bottle and re-regulating an out-of-control financial system. The failure of the UK Government and the US Government to address that fundamental issue is behind the present crisis of confidence.

A brief look at history

The Great Depression in Germany in 1931 began with a seemingly minor event—the collapse of a bank in Vienna, Creditanstalt, that May. For readers interested in more on the remarkable parallels between that crisis and that of today, I recommend the treatment in my earlier volume, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order.

....

The rest is history, the tragic history of the greatest most destructive war of the 20th Century, with all the suffering that ensued. At that time in history, the American banking elite saw itself, despite a stock market crash and Great Depression in America, as standing at the dawn of a new American Century.

The decline of the American Century

Today, in 2008, some 77 years later, a German Finance Minister stands before the Bundestag announcing the end of that American Century. Today the German government encourages a fusion of Dresdner with Commerzbank. Today Deutsche Bank, which some years ago acquired Bankers Trust in New York in a merger wave, appears to be in a stronger position than its American counterparts as Wall Street investment banks, some more than 150 years old as the venerable Lehman Bros., simply vanish in a matter of days. The American financial Superpower crumbles before our eyes.

....

The business of taking deposits and lending by banks had been split during the Great Depression from the business of underwriting and selling stocks and bonds—investment banking—by an act of Congress, the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. The law was passed amid the collapse of the banking system in the United States following the bursting of the Wall Street stock market bubble in October 1929.
That Glass-Steagall act was a prudent attempt by Congress to end the uncontrolled speculative excesses of the Roaring Twenties by New York finance. It established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to guarantee personal bank deposits to a fixed sum that restored consumer confidence and ended the panic runs on bank deposits.
In November 1999, after millions spent lobbying Congress, the New York banks and Wall Street investment banks and insurance companies won a staggering victory. The US Congress voted to repeal that 1933 Glass-Steagall Act. President Bill Clinton proudly signed the repeal act with Sandford Weill, the chairman of Citigroup.

The repeal allowed commercial banks such as Citigroup, then the largest US bank, to underwrite and trade new financial instruments such as Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS) and Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) and establish so-called structured investment vehicles, or SIVs, that bought those securities. Repeal of Glass-Steagall after 1999, in short, enabled the Securitization revolution so openly praised by Greenspan as the "revolution in finance." That revolution is today devouring its young.

....

Paulson’s impressive interest conflicts

The actions of Treasury Secretary Paulson since the first outbreak of the Financial Tsunami in August of 2007 have been directed with one apparent guiding aim—to save the obscene gains of his Wall Street and banking cronies. In the process he has taken steps which suggest more than a mild possible conflict of interest. Paulson, who had been chairman of Goldman Sachs from the time of the 1999 Glass-Steagall repeal to his appointment in 2006 as Treasury head, had been one of the most involved Wall Street players in the new securitization revolution of Greenspan. Naming him to head the Government agency now responsible for cleaning up the mess left by Wall Street greed and stupidity was tantamount to putting the wolf in charge of guarding the hen house as some see it.

....

In mid September, in between other dramatic failures including Lehman Bros., and the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Paulson announced that the US Treasury, as agent for the United States Government, was to bailout the troubled AIG with a staggering $85 billion. The announcement came a day after Paulson announced the Government would let the 150-year old investment bank, Lehman Brothers, fail without Government aid. Why AIG and not Lehman?

What has since emerged are details of a meeting at the New York Federal Reserve bank chaired by Paulson, to discuss the risk of letting AIG fail. There was only one active Wall Street banker present at the meeting—Lloyd Blankfein, chairman of Paulson’s old firm, Goldman Sachs.

Blankfein later claimed he was present at the fateful meeting not to protect his firm’s interests but to ‘safeguard the entire financial system.’ His claim was put in doubt when it later emerged that Blankfein’s Goldman Sachs was AIG’s largest trading partner and stood to lose $20 billion in a bankruptcy of AIG. Were Goldman Sachs to go down with AIG, Secretary Paulson would have reportedly lost $700 million in Goldman Sachs stock options he had, an interesting fact.

....

Power and greed are the only visible juice driving the decision-makers in Washington today. Acting in the long-range US national interest seems to have gotten lost in the scramble. As I wrote last November in my Financial Tsunami five part series on the background to today’s crisis, all this could be foreseen. It is what happens when elected Governments abandon their public trust or responsibility to a cabal of private financial interests. It will be interesting to see if anyone in Washington realizes that lesson. Whatever next comes out of Washington, however, one thing is clear, as reflected in what German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück told the Bundestag. This is the end of the world as we knew it. The American financial Superpower is gone. The only important question will be what and how will the alternative be.

F. William Engdahl is author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (Pluto Press Ltd.) and Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (www.globalresearch.ca). He may be contacted through his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.

LIBOR bid only, no offer; a scramble for cash - really really scary; The Treasury Tarp plan is an irrelevance

2008-10-03T13:57:00.001-07:00

RGE - Financial and Corporate System is in Cardiac Arrest: The Risk of the Mother of All Bank Runs

Nouriel Roubini
|
Oct 3, 2008

It is now clear that the US financial system - and now even the
system of financing of the corporate sector - is now in cardiac arrest
and at a risk of a systemic financial meltdown. I don’t use these words
lightly but at this point we have reached the final 12th step of my
February paper on “The Risk of a Systemic Financial Meltdown: 12 Steps to a Financial Disaster” (Step 9 or the collapse of the major broker dealers has already widely occurred).

LIBOR bid only, no offer.
Commercial paper market shut down, little trading and no issuance.
Corporations have no access to long or short term credit markets -- hence they face massive rollover problems.
Brokers are increasingly not dealing with each other.
Even the inter-bank market is ceasing up.

We are indeed at the cardiac arrest stage and at risk of the mother of all bank and non-bank runs....

Last time Americans were sold on an imminent threat requiring unchecked executive authority, we got a bloody quagmire

2008-10-02T23:01:00.001-07:00

The American Conservative -- Fourteen Days

As we go to press, Congress is poised to give Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson 5 percent of our GDP to make the worst possible investment. He wants taxpayers to take out Wall Street’s trash—and pay $700 billion for the privilege.

Sound familiar? Last time Americans were sold on an imminent threat requiring unchecked executive authority, we got a bloody quagmire. Now the rush is on again. Congress is balking at the massive outlay, but Representative Average, from the 4th district of Wherever, is a little fuzzy on how derivatives work. So when the Fed chairman and Treasury secretary say that if he doesn’t play along, it’s economic Armageddon—don’t forget that the election is just two months away—he’ll give them what they want.

Our friends at The Nation have discovered a kind of socialism that they don’t like, the kind that involves banks. Give the leading magazine of the Left points—it’s right about bailouts that nationalize risk while keeping profits private. William Greider calls this “Goldman Sachs Socialism,” though it turns out he favors outright communism over Paulson’s puny measures: “Washington should literally take control of the banking and finance sector and employ its emergency powers to oversee and direct these private, profit-making enterprises.”

Who’s to blame for the unfolding financial crisis? According to many conservatives, poor black people and, of course, Democrats.

National Review Online indicts President Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act for the meltdown. The CRA emboldened community organizers—like you-know-who—to force banks to make loans to uncreditworthy minorities, you see. Terry Jones of Investor’s Business Daily blames Clinton’s “multicultural housing policy” and his mandates to increase home ownership among blacks and Hispanics.
Nothing excuses politically correct credit, but did community organizers really force lenders to infect all financial markets by repackaging their bad mortgages into securities? Did poor blacks invent credit default swaps?

The neocons are a treasonous pack of swine, but these paleo-conservatives at The American Conservative Magazine seem like a pretty decent bunch of folks on the whole. I'm mostly more in agreement with The Nation, and it is nice to see it regarded cordially by the paleo-cons. I've long since concluded that if there is any hope for the US, it lies in an alliance between the Left and paleo-cons (Ron Paul, for example) with an agreement to disagree on things like socialised medicing and so forth and settle such issues once the country is saved from the neocons and the Fascists for Jesus and the like.

Nouriel Roubini: Wash, rinse, repeat, lose your house: a universe-eating financial black hole.

2008-10-02T21:58:00.001-07:00

Nouriel Roubini:

I was today on a webcast conference call organized by RiskMetrics together with Barry Ritholtz and Zach Gast.

The events of the last few weeks say we’re one accident away from a systemic financial meltdown,” says Roubini. He points to previous accidents that nearly caused a universe-eating financial black hole: Bear Stearns in March, Fannie and Freddie in July and Lehman and AIG a couple of weeks ago. “We’re seeing the beginning of a silent run on the shadow and traditional banking system,” he says. “There’s a generalized panic” in the financial markets.

“We are literally one step away from collapse of entire financial system and even the corporate system.”

Barry Ritholtz:

This is shaping up to be a “generational bear market,”not a typical bear market. We have a severe recession, with a credit
crunch. We’re just starting to see the effects of credit on the real economy.

“My concern is what disaster are we gonna be dealing with 3, 4, 5 years from now that will be the consequences of giving Wall Street’s most reckless players a pass?”

Zach Gast at RiskMetrics:

There are loans still sitting, overpriced, on bank books. When you
move away from fair-value accounting, people lose confidence in your
numbers and it gets harder to get capital. Moving away from mark-to-market accounting, as the banking sector seems anxious to do, will be a net negative for banks.
“Many institutions would be insolvent if we fully fair-valued their assets,” says Gast.

This bailout is probably best for the money center banks. They’re the ones holding trading securities. They’ve already taken the hits to
earnings. This hurts the regional banks and others still holding assets at cost basis. Setting a lower market price will hurt their capital
adequacy in “a big way.

What a surprise. Good for the money-centers (Citi Bank of Goldman America), makes the smaller fish more digestible. Is it just that the Bush-Neocon Crime Gang will keep on looting even if the building is on fire, or something more? 9-1-1 was really essential to them, "a latter-day Pearl Harbor", without which they couldn't have executed the long-planned attacks on Iraq and the Constitution; is the current decompensation of the financial system, accompanied by massive consolidation in banking and concentration of wealth, yet another essential Pearl Harbor?

McCain Doesn't Matter (He's going to die soon anyway). Palin Fronts for Fascist Four.

2008-10-02T14:43:00.001-07:00

The Progressive Curmudgeon®

Finally, the choice of Palin makes some sense; not much, but some. Yet it was clear right from the start that McCain was doing somebody’s bidding in choosing an unknown lightweight governor to be his running mater. It turns out that the esteemed doyens of the right wingnut fringe of the Republican Party – Norquist and his once all-powerful “Americans For Tax Reform,” James Dobson’s hate-mongering “Focus On The Family,” Roger Ayles and his Republican talking point network Fox News, and Karl “Bush’s Brain” Rove – did the choosing. Talk about king makers or, in this case, queen makers. McCain managed to go through the motions of “interviewing” Palin but, apparently, he had as much say in the process as I did.

The golden age for the rich should end

2008-10-02T14:09:00.001-07:00

FT.com / Home UK / UK - This is the ‘1979 moment’ for casino capitalism

The golden age for the rich should end. Those who have led us into this mess must pay heavily towards the price of recovery. At the moment, to take one example, the bill for each UK taxpayer for bank rescues is around £5,500 and rising. The message to those taxpayers and those in other countries affected must be “never again”. Our system must be rebalanced towards financial institutions providing capital for productive investments in sustainable development and towards greater equality.

"There are almost 10,000 foreclosures a day now...."

2008-10-02T13:56:00.001-07:00

Crisis spreads as bailout focus on House | Reuters

"There are almost 10,000 foreclosures a day now, and between 1 and 2 million adjustable rate mortgages are due to adjust upward in the next year," said Timothy Canova, a monetary policy expert at Chapman University School of Law. "Without help for the bottom of the pyramid, Wall Street will be back next year asking for another trillion dollars.

AFTER THE UNCERTAINTY: MORE UNCERTAINTY

The bailout plan, equivalent to some $2,300 per American, is intended to reinvigorate credit markets that have frozen as financial institutions, staggered by failed mortgages, focused on preserving capital.

A group of House Republicans led opposition to the bill on Monday over criticism it put the government at the center of a problem that capital markets had created and could still fix.

Many Americans also opposed the $700 billion rescue plan because of objections across the political divide, including criticism that it would bail out powerful bankers without doing enough to help families struggling to hang on to their homes.

The Senate added tax cuts for families and businesses and an increase in bank deposit insurance in a bid to win broader support for the bill. Monday's House vote was 228-205, requiring a net gain of 12 votes for it to pass.

Rep. Steny Hoyer, the House Democratic leader, said calls from voters to representatives had been running 6-1 against the bill before Monday's failed vote but were now closer to 3-1 against.

Insurers Next?

2008-10-02T13:41:00.001-07:00

Investors jittery after Sen. Reid insurer comment | Reuters

US SWAPS-2Y spread hit record as stocks end sharply lower | Markets | Markets News | Reuters

Five-year credit default swaps on MetLife Inc (MET.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz)
rose to 11.5 percent upfront, or $1.15 million a year to protect $10
million of debt, plus $500,000 in annual premiums, according to data
from Markit Intraday. The swaps had closed at 514 basis points on
Wednesday.
Hartford Financial Services Group's (HIG.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) swaps rose to 10.5 percent upfront from 520 basis points.

Why DO they hate America SO MUCH?

2008-10-02T10:51:00.001-07:00

In a comment in nakedcapitalism , Francois said:

What the current administration is doing to America international image and position is literally horrendous.

Quite. Note that in another recent post, an excellent analysis by FairEconomist make it clear that the Hanke-Panke plan will help Bank of Goldman City and so forth, and accelerate the destabilisation of the economy.

The whole situation is quite reminiscent of the run-up to the Iraq war. In that case, the debate was limited by the neocon strength in government and the media to a decision between invading Iraq immediately and waiting five minutes and then invading them; other options such as not invading Iraq at all were ignored or ridiculed: the wisdom received from the neocon overlords was that such an idea was not fit for polite society.

In this case, despite severe criticism and plausible proposed alternatives from Soros and so many others, the debate is limited to passing the Hanke-Panke scam or being responsible for the end of life as we know it. Other options are simply ignored. The Senate puts another hundred billion and another few hundred pages on the pig, but fish, chicken and beef are simply not on the menu: there is not enough time to consider doing anything other than completing the destruction of the economy of the United States, adding a nice coup de grace to policies that appear designed to have produced exactly the present crisis situation.

In both cases, a crisis is manufactured and used as an excuse to do great damage to America and of course others also, with normal democratic processes curtailed and precedents set for dictatorial executive power.

One must ask oneself:

"Why DO they hate America SO MUCH?

StrategeryCapital Management LLC

2008-10-02T10:00:00.001-07:00

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Strategery is a way for you to be more patriotic. Supporting this fund is an American duty. Many people have already taken to wearing a green, red, and blue ribbon to symbolize and broadcast their support for this newest American institution.

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"Why I DO Care about John McCain’s Gay Chief of Staff"

2008-10-01T11:51:00.001-07:00

[Greta Christina] Why I DO Care about John McCain’s Gay Chief of Staff | Blowfish Blog

First, in case you haven’t seen the story yet: John McCain’s Chief of Staff, Mark Buse, is gay.
With a reported penchant for multiple partners, and a sling in his home to boot. (In, of all places, his closet. Sometimes the irony is just too obvious.) The story broke on the BlogActive site of the legendary Mike Rogers, who has given Buse the not so coveted Roy Cohn award “for working against the interests of the lesbian and gay community while living as a gay man.” And it’s corroborated by Michelangelo Signorile.

Well. Another right-wingnut Bible-beater with a sling in his closet. Or fellow-traveler of same. Whatever. I'm sure he and Palin will get along just fine.

Aside from showing that McCain is an old man in a hurry who will do anything to get elected and not a principled maverick, it also shows that he's a fool. Selling himself to the Zio-Cons and Christo-Fascists and forgetting to ditch his special friend along the way? Now that's just plain bone-dumb, proof that he's just not up to the job.

Socialism

2008-09-21T07:39:00.000-07:00

From the desk of H-Ross Parrot Now, before I get started, I just want to clear one thing up: a lot of people keep talking about how this is Socialism. This is a major and serious misconception. See, with Socialism, you get things like, for example, Socialised Medicine (notice the "Socialised" in "Socialised Medicine", which is a clue in case y'all are wondering). OK now stay with me here, people. Here's the hard part, so take a deep breath first: with Socialism, you fork over a whole bunch of your money to Big Government, and in return, you get things like Health, Education and Welfare (which has a ring to it, don't it? Health, Education and Welfare). OK now, I know that was hard, but stay with me here: in America you give a whole bunch of money to Big Government, and you get basically nothing in return, or maybe ten cents on the dollar or something. You sure as heck don't get Health or Education, and the Corporations make out better on the Welfare angle than anyone else. So all these bailouts and such and letting Hank declare himself a God are not socialism, because all y'all will get in return is a whole extra big pile of debt (which will be defaulted on anyway so you don't really need to worry about that except for when all your money also becomes worthless afterwards and a single Freedom Fry in France will cost you one hundred million dollars or just a pound of any other recyclable paper. OK now, are y'all still with me? Any questions? Y'all get the Not Socialism part? The basic message remains the same: Obey! In other news: See here, now, it's just like I said: Alien Banksters! He talks about other stuff too, but trust me on this, Alien Banksters are behind it. .... What happened on September 18-19 took years of preparation, capped by a faux ideology crafted by public-relations think tanks to be broadcast under emergency conditions to panic Congress - and voters - right before the presidential election. This seems to be our September election surprise. Under staged crisis conditions, Pres. Bush and Treasury Secretary Paulson are now calling for the country to come together in a War on Defaulting Homeowners. This is said to be the only hope to "save the system." (What system is this? Not industrial capitalism, or even banking as we know it.) The largest transformation of America's financial system since the Great Depression has been compressed into just two weeks, starting with the doubling of America's national debt on September 7 with the nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.....

Mozilla: redesign or die!

2008-09-20T10:03:00.000-07:00

OK, I've just had to kill my browser and email, destroying about 15 minutes of work-in-progress, because the piece-of-crap Flash plugin went into a forever() loop, which it does so very very often, and so I had to kill the whole mess off. This happens at least once a day on average. OK, now, Mozilla, meaning Firefox and Seamonkey and all that, I hate to be the one to break this to you but, basically, your code sucks, bless yer heart. I went into the Mozilla source years ago and it was the most godawful giant mess of C++ I'd ever seen. So many templates and overloaded crap and what have you that it was impossible to tell what would actually happen if you moved the mouse or anything, except that it would be a lot. Way too much. Maybe things have improved. I doubt it. OK, now, so along comes Google, and they say, "Why, this is really stupid. This mess should be compartmentalised into processes, so one bad apple don't spoil the whole bunch." That's Philosophy, by the way. Descartes or someone said that first. OK, now stay with me here, folks. I know this is complicated, but basically it comes down to this: Mozilla, trash your whole basic design if necessary, but firewall them stinkin' plugins into separate processes, or maybe threads if that will suffice (but I doubt it) or you're toast. History. You can go hang around with Mosaic and Netscape and the other Ghosts of Browsers Past, because all your bases are belong to Google Chrome, which I plan on switching to just the very first minute that a pre-alpha starts working on Linux, OK? I mean, Google already knows everything about me even before I do anyway, so why mess with middlemen? It's just that simple, folks.

Cassius Mundus on Industrial Civilisation

2008-09-19T21:51:00.000-07:00

I would like to note one of the fundamental determinants of current social, political and financial structures, which may receive too little consideration: that they are fundamentally industrial and technical in nature, and could not exist without our present state of industry and techne. This was noted by John Keegan, I think in his book on War One, in which he referred to the industrialisation of warfare: how the machine gun was essentially industrial killing, mass destruction instead of mass production. I'm sure it has been much discussed elsewhere. I state no conclusions or proposals here other than to suggest that industrialisation and computerisation are profoundly fundamental to things ranging from this blog as a means of communication to current political systems, including but not limited to Marxism, Capitalism and Fascism. Any plan, platform or project for the future will instantiate within this context, which can be expected to continually alter towards greater technical capacity, with unpredictable effects.

Bulletin from the National Bureau of Standards

2008-09-19T21:47:00.000-07:00

Bulletin from the National Bureau of Standards Negative numbers are banned in the United States with immediate effect. Or ye'll walk the plank. Positive integers are deprecated, an only a damn sea-lawyer would use'em anyway. Irrational and Imaginary numbers are now the Official Numbering Systems (ONS) of the United States. Capn's orders and no back-talk. An announcement from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing regarding changes to the currency of the United States will follow. Pieces of eight, me buccoes, pieces of eight! BULLETIN/USNBS/EOT/ARRRRRRRRR