It's somehow fitting that the €600 million giant glass and steel new airport terminal in Dublin opened on the very day the army of technocrats sent by the IMF and EU arrived to take over Ireland. A white elephant to symbolize how quickly a Celtic Tiger can be transformed into one of the PIIGS. Floating in and out of the international news stream I keep seeing the financial world in terms of a dystopian fairy tale where the bad guys always come out winners while the public is left to pick up the tab and we never seem to learn the moral. The Big Bad Wolf outwitted the littlest of the pigs earlier this year which forced the rest to scurry to a house made of wood while the Greek straw hut went up in flames. This week saw Ireland give up its wooden shack offered by the nationalization of her banks' debt as the growing storm forced her to surrender independence to Mother Europa and her IMF advisers. In Europe it's two PIIGS down and three to go, Portugal, Spain and Italy, meanwhile much of the western world is also looking for a brick house to give us shelter from the storm.
Ireland's path to financial purgatory has been predictable. Greece's problems came from many sources, rapacious banks taking advantage of financial rubes, politicians on the take and of course the MSM's favourite scapegoat, the lazy, sponging, early-retiring, Greek workers. Ireland's problems stem from one source - greed. Both the banks and the public were caught up in a collective euphoria brought on by the belief that shiny new buildings and playthings meant perpetual growth and wealth for all. A pot o' gold at the end of every rainbow. Ireland became an economic success story between 1994 and 2007 as GDP growth regularly touched 10% a year with the boom ascribed to reasons as varied as the success of U2 to the legalization of contraceptive sales in 1979. More prosaically, economists generally credited the rise of the Celtic Tiger to a combination of EU development funds and low corporate taxes with a global shift to a knowledge-based economy for which the Irish education system was ready to provide the skilled workforce all at a time of strong global expansion. The sudden success soon turned to hubris; while the main proponents of unconstrained financial globalization may have been American, it was Irish (as well as other European) banks that really became too large relative to their economies, taking risks that paid off big in boom times but exploded in their faces when the rainbow faded. As long as new Starbucks were being opened on Dublin's Grafton Street, it didn't seem to worry anyone that it had become the fifth most expensive street in the world.
When the inevitable financial crash came a couple years ago, it was the Irish who unsurprisingly woke up with the biggest hangover as they had partied harder than everyone else. Seems even property prices have to follow the laws of gravity and unfortunately the country had staked its future on Newton being wrong. In a decade, housing prices quadrupled making for a painful drop. Compounding matters, like many governments around the world, the decision was made to save the banks at the expense of the country, by guaranteeing the Irish banks' debt for two years. An excuse could be made acting as they did in the midst of a crisis, but extending the guarantee to the end of the year in September was inexcusable. The government gambled that the credit market somehow hadn't noticed that the six debt-guaranteed banks (Anglo Irish Bank, Allied Irish Banks, Bank of Ireland, Irish Life and Permanent, Irish Nationwide and EBS) had been hemorrhaging billions of euros a month and lost the bet. If it were only the Irish with anything to lose, the EU and the world may have stood by and watched the stuck pig bleed herself to death, however, not only do foreign banks have a huge stake in Irish debt, the remaining PIIGS financing costs are also tethered to Ireland's woes.
And so it was that Irish sovereignty was traded for another shot at providing bankster security. Even though the government was fully funded until the middle of next year, bondholders of Irish banks realized their security window could close anytime after the new year and therefore began a vicious attack on Irish bonds, bidding up the spreads versus German rates, stoking fears in the credit market. The tragicomedy was scripted from the moment the EU bailout fund was created after the Greeks ceded their sovereignty earlier this year. Ireland following suit was a self-fulfilling prophecy - when was the last time that available credit wasn't used? Those squeals of protest that a bailout wasn't needed we heard from the Irish Prime Minister, or Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, were drowned out in the media by those who insisted it was needed in order to maintain confidence in the debt market. Somehow it passed as normal that a country can be forced to take a bailout to pay the debts of profligate banks. Ireland had to be convinced they needed help but families trying to feed their kids wouldn't need much arm twisting. Instead, welfare will be slashed, public health services will deteriorate, children, the disabled and the elderly will lose the already inadequate services that afford them some hope and dignity. But the €100 billion that is owed by the Irish to German banks and the €109 billion owed to British banks will be secured.
Instead of the banks borrowing money from the European Central Bank at one per cent interest to fund their operations, the Irish public will borrow it for them at perhaps five per cent. The banks and their corporatist enablers have done a masterful job, not of banking, but of keeping the public confused and therefore impotent to do anything. The possibility of senior bondholders actually sharing in some of the cost of the bailouts by taking a haircut isn't even mentioned, funny, seeing as default risk is priced into the cost of debt for the borrower. No, the lenders are allowed to keep any profits they got from taking too much risk but are exempt from taking any losses when they actually occur. Such a situation creates moral hazard where financial institutions seeking to increase profit simply turn up the risk knowing full well that if their bets go sour, governments will step in and save them. Private gains and socialized losses, but, only for the banks. Now that's capitalism!
More than two years into the financial crisis and were still uncovering the filth and rot at the core of the world's financial system. The Irish case may be magnified in scale relative to its population but those that caused their banking collapse have doppelgangers all over the world and none of them will ever feel an ounce of guilt for what they've done. The names and acronyms of destruction may change but it's those in the know, on the take or at the table who are able to feed at the trough of asset bubbles created and fed by the banks who the public will be paying to support for years, as much as €200 billion in Ireland alone with a population of 4.5 million (and shrinking again) - €44,444.44 a head! This mass delusion was enabled by a culture of greed and avarice which glorifies the rich regardless of their social cost. Most of those who gorged themselves walk the streets free, able to enjoy the fruits of their deception. Bernie Madoff was no worse than Seán Quinn who built a pyramid scheme of CFDs which allowed him to control 25% of Anglo-Irish Bank only to see it inevitably collapse when the stock price went south. ASIC, the Australian SEC, describes CFDs, or contracts for difference, as "much riskier than a flutter on the horses or a night at the casino" much like psychopaths who recognize no limits and ignore the damage they do to others; CFDs continue to be traded and psychopaths continue to walk the streets and run our most powerful and influential institutions.
Seán FitzPatrick, former chairman of Anglo-Irish, a man who hid hundreds of millions in loans to himself, oversaw the bank which established a precedent of reckless lending the other banks were forced to follow in order to keep pace so as not to lose market share and thus see their stock price plummet. Ah, the irony. No longer seeing themselves as bankers but risk seeking entrepreneurs, in their eagerness to woo property syndicates the banks became both the lenders of equity and providers of debt in the same deals, resulting in absurd loan to value exposure of up to 100%. Even once it was clear the game was up and the government had stepped in to save them, the banks continued to deceive everyone around them hoping to continue the party a little longer. A stream of false information has been fed to the very entity created to take the non-performing loans off the banks' hands, NAMA, meaning the extent of damage the banks have done may take years to figure out. The incestuous relationship between banksters and government is most blatant in the US but Ireland has its own government protected "Golden Circle" who will escape punishment as the details of their deception are impenetrable to the normal person and so will become fodder for legend and lore, circular transactions being better than fairy tales at putting the public to sleep.
So, once again, who cares? When Greece was taken over six month ago at least it made the cover of the newspapers. This time, unless you were paying attention, you might not have even noticed that Ireland is now being run by EU and IMF bureaucrats. Trouble is we should care, but can't seem to bother. Even if someone does dare to bother, here's what we supposedly know: Ireland is not Greece and Greece is not Ireland, Spain is not Greece and of course Portugal is not Greece, and obviously Spain is neither Ireland nor Portugal so it follows that Neither Spain nor Portugal is Ireland. Thanks, but that's exactly how much the financial ministers and their puppet master banksters want us to know, because we are all destined to become Greece and Ireland soon enough. After all the public has already forgotten how the Spanish opposition leader was calling on his country to follow Ireland a short three years ago or that today's Polish prime minister wanted his country to emulate the Irish model at the same time. Next on the list is Portugal. Again, meh, whatever, it's just Portugal. That's when things get interesting however, as next on the list will be Spain and that's when we learn that in addition to TBTF, Too Big To Fail, there is such a thing as TBTB, Too Big To Bail.
Unsurprisingly, the wolves are already circling, bond holders smelling fresh kill wasted no time in turning their attention to the next victim. Spain's sovereign bond spreads over German Bunds hit euro-era highs the day after markets were supposedly pacified by the Irish takeover. What a shock! Set to steepen Ireland's economic nosedive is the new round of austerity measures, a condition of the EU/IMF rescue package. Huh? But surely cutting €15 billion out of the economy should help, right? Nope. Just look at the negative market reaction, they noticed what the first round of austerity two years ago did to the country, when the Irish tightened their belt while the rest of the world opted for stimulus spending. Having already raised taxes and cut salaries for nurses, professors and other public workers by up to 20 percent last time, round two will see even deeper cuts, making one wonder just where economic growth needed to balance the books will ever come from. Just a taste of some of the demands to come from their new masters, as the IMF/EU have demonstrated in offering what they try to spin as advice, like cuts to health and the railway, in exchange for life sustaining installments of the Greek bailout.
It's easy enough to keep the public numb with an overload of information, caffeine, sugar and pornography for awhile, but will we all simply roll over and keep taking it? Chances are we will as the public has barely lifted a finger as governments on both sides of the Atlantic have bent over backward to make sure their banking buddies earn every penny on their wagers while the public has paid the price of their losses through bailouts paid for by doubling down on debt and 'austerity measures'. A debtcropper society is being created as the biggest transfer of wealth ever seen from the bottom up occurs while, like sheep to the slaughter, most continue to march in step to their banking masters. Political opportunists try to convince us that we should blame the euro or even the poor for the financial meltdown when it's clearly a corrupted system of risk and reward that is at fault. Our financial fairy tale has turned into a horror movie where a zombie population is manipulated into supporting zombie banks operating thanks to zombie governments of zombie nations. So should we take to the streets in protest? Write an angry letter to the editor? Write another blog post or better yet, start a Facebook protest page? Sit around waiting for a real life Tyler Durden? No, the only thing these people understand is money and the power it gives them, so the only way to limit their power is to take away their weapon, cash. December 7th I'll be in line to take my money out of the bank, hopefully joining thousands around Europe and maybe the world taking part in Pearl Harbor commemorations that will try to sink the banks instead of the Pacific fleet. Sparked by an interview given by former Manchester United footballer Eric Cantona, Bankrun2010 hopes to dent the money creation power of the world's most corrupt. The more who join in, the more likely they'll at least hear our voice. After all, thanks to the US Supreme Court, money is speech.
Well, it seems there are some folks out there a little brighter than me who have figured out that it's impossible to convince people that their 140 character attention spans are limiting their ability to understand the world and are instead trying to speak to them in a way they can follow. Nothing better than a little rap to explain the economic battle between John Maynard Keynes and F.A. Hayek:
Now that so many have been lulled into a false sense of security that the lifeboats have saved us from the great recession and QE2 has left port, those two wacky old-timers are back at each other:
Aaaah, yes, non-rhyming rap never sounded worse, lucky we're still spending like drunken sailors. Maybe we'll get away from it and let this explain part of the solution. In case you missed it, the first Story of Stuff is here.
Were you confused about the sailing references earlier? If so, sorry, don't worry, here's a video to explain quantitative easing from the people who helped explain the Tea Party:
What's that you say? You need more? Worried that it all seems to be turning into a game to see how much of the wealth pie the rich will grab before we notice? Well, in keeping with today's easy on the blogger theme, here's the first of 23 videos explaining what a corporation is thanks to thecorporation.com:
Too bad they seem to be the only team in the last game left in town, so you might as well join 'em. Me, I'd prefer to try find another town, choice is what democracy was supposed to be about after all, no? (H/T: Self-Evident)
You asked me once, what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.
It seems like just a couple of years ago that there was an election in the US to distract the public from the problems at hand. What's that you say? There was. Right, I forgot that part of a system more and more coming to resemble a perfect machine to enrich a plutocracy until its cataclysmic implosion was the perpetual election cycle with its two-party false left-right paradigm to shift blame from one to the other giving the public the illusion of choice. In case you missed it, the mid-term elections are fast approaching in the United States of America, so this month a special edition of wingnuttery devoted to the ten wingnuttiest candidates put forward by the two-party tagteam that ensures nothing ever gets done. Blame ping-pong is a tool in the doublethink toolkit where left is right and right is left as neoliberals and neocons are mortal enemies that have the same agenda. Remember, it was a Republican president named Nixon whose first act as commander-in-chief was to sign the act that created the Environmental Protection Agency and a Democrat with a foreign sounding name who was going to close Guantanamo and end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was Clinton who oversaw the final implementation of the financial industry's takeover of the economy while it was Reagan who raised taxes four times, including the largest corporate increase in history.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that certain concepts cannot be understood by those who use another language was a low point in science. Scholars took the hypothesis as valid without any evidence to support the claims and made fantastic assertions, from linking certain Native American languages with an intuitive understanding of Einstein's concept of time as a fourth dimension to the tense system of ancient Hebrew determining the nature of Judaism. Another bullet was added to the scientific disbeliever arsenal and research on the topic was abandoned for decades falling to the domain of science fiction. Yet much like the work of those writers, truth can be found in the theory; words may not prevent us from having certain thoughts but they do oblige us to think about space, time, colours, objects and people a certain way. Our language effects how we construe events, reason about causality, count, perceive and experience emotion, choose to take risks, and even the way we choose our spouses and professions.
Oh, and who to vote for in elections. So let's look at some of the choices Americans will have November 2nd with a little help from some language from Orwell's 1984 as the words chosen will have a bigger impact on the decision making process than any silly issues. It's a diverse crew but veins of Orwellian commonality can be mined, mostly doublethink and newspeak that seeps into the flow of media bobblehead chatter. Law is important to most, but unfortunately the Biblical kind has more influence on their thinking and actions than the scientific or, you know, legal ones. Many want to abolish the federal department of education, even going so far as calling for the end of public schools altogether as they are "socialism in education" and see universal health care as an Obamanation for introducing more socialism into the equation. Simalakama is an Indonesian word which seems to mean a situation which forces someone to make a decision where each possible option leads to a negative outcome, more or less the idea of Catch-22 given to us by Joseph Heller in the book of the same name. American democracy promises choice and freedom but seems to only give us the discretion to choose the least bad option.
Christine O'Donnell GOP candidate for the Senate in Delaware. In the interest of brevity (ha!) it's easiest to start with Christine as she not only checks all the right-wingnut candidate boxes this year - Palin endorsed, Tea Party supported white female (yes, female) Christian - but also wouldn't be the least bit out of place in science fiction, from JRR Tolkien to JK Rowling. She wouldn't have lied to protect Anne Frank from the Nazis because god would have provided a way for her not to practice deception. One moment she's denouncing erudition as elitism, the next she's lying about her Oxford education. Sometimes she wants us to forget her youthful fascination with incantation and Buddhism repudiation or even how her Italian indoctrination saved her from becoming a Hare Krishna thanks to meatball glorification. She sides with creation over evolution, finds taxation an unnecessary complication, thinks spending money on AIDS research and teaching kids about safe sex is a funding misallocation and even claims the spread of the disease is thanks to condom distribution. Her lack of comprehension of anything requiring the slightest bit of cognition was highlighted by her warning about the scientific creation of "mice with fully functioning human brains". Yet her lasting contribution to the Orwellian dystopia will be her promotion of a further than right wingnut view of goodsex, where the only sex considered acceptable is married heterosexual sex for the exclusive purpose of procreation without any other lustful waste such as masturbation.
Next up is Sharron Angle, Republican candidate in Nevada, hoping to beat out current senate majority leader Harry Reid. If she walks like a duck and talks like a duck, speaking without thinking, well, she must be fluent in duckspeak. Running in a high profile race, even when her statements are slammed for being ungood, they become good as her wacky proclamations are like duck calls to the press, so even once she goes back on a claim they have the tendency to push the envelope of possibilities. In the kakotopian future she's helping bring about, Flip-flop Angle can be thanked for her one-time belief in privatizing Veterans Affairs, dismantling Social Security (here then here) and dismissing unemployment benefits as welfare. She's a doubleplusgood duckspeaker when trying to whip up Oceania's hate for Eurasia and Eastasia, America's hatred of socialism and Islam. Entitlements are turning government into god violating the first commandment. She responded to a question about "Muslims wanting to take over the United States" by decrying the fact that Dearborn, Michigan and Frankford, Texas were governed under Sharia Law. Um, not only is this not true but Frankford went out of existence in 1975! Her ads blatantly play on fear of Mexicans crossing the border then tries to deflect criticism by saying that Hispanics look like Asians to her and that she's far more concerned about the Canadian border. She wants to take the US out of the UN, shut down the IRS, ban alcohol and if she doesn't get her way she believes the people should "secure the blessings of liberty" using 2nd amendment remedies. Sounds like this lame duck is nothing but a quack:
Rand Paul, Tea Party driven upset Republican nominee for the Senate in Kentucky. Featured here a few weeks back thanks to his propensity for giving speeches with anecdotes from the days of the Weimar Republic in Germany that preceded Hitler's Third Reich. Stories about workers pushing wheelbarrows of cash home from work as they were paid twice a day in a vain attempt to keep up with hyperinflation serve as his warning for the American workers' future if she continues down her current path. The first round of quantitative easing (QE - lovely newspeak for oldspeak printing money) was a reckless attempt to jump start the economy by pumping banks full of money which many feared would cause a Weimar repeat. Didn't happen, the hyperinflation or the jump start, so it seems we'll have QE2 in both finance and on the seas. Remember that the Tea Party movement may have begun from the floor or the NYSE a month after Obama’s inauguration when CNBC’s Rick Santelli directed his rant at the ordinary American "losers" defaulting on their mortgages, and at those in Washington who proposed bailing the losers out. Funny how he never mentioned the bank bailouts were Bush-initiated, a two for one of false blame, Democrats and the poor.
Newspeak, doublethink and outright lies are used by those who would have us believe poor people who couldn't afford houses are to blame for the recession instead of the banks who are still being given all the support from the Obama administration. Orwell's Miniplenty in today's economy is the financial industry, not the false flag accusation of Obama's socialist regime. Making up lies about the stimulus package, which possibly saved the economy, and pejoratively labeling it the bailout stimulus to conflate the negatively viewed bank bailout in people's minds distracts us from the real problems of a debt based economy. Bailouts cause moral hazard and are doomed to make matters worse and fail, period. They enabled an industry of rent-seeking parasites to bet on and profit from its own crash. Even today as we learn the banks were cheating on the paper work, losing others then hiring folks off the street to become robo-signers in order to repossess homes more quickly (even taking some from people who never had a mortgage) the pyramid scheme is being supported by the government to prevent crash and panic.
If only there were an option besides voting for a party who has been in control of the executive and legislative branches of government for the last couple of years as this has been going on or one dedicated to making it even worse. Instead we have a false choice seen as freedom that makes us slaves to pick between bad and evil. Rand out Rands Ayn Rand, to whom he's devoted, in his hatred of government, except when they're paying his bills. The doublethink required to be a (Ayn) Randian Christian allows him to be a libertarian unless you're the wrong religion, railing against unfounded claims of foreign money being used to build cultural centers but having no problem when it's used for election spending by the Chamber of Commerce. Instead of teaching the lesson from the financial crisis that our freedom is slavery to the debt-based consumer society, Rand rants about an administration whose spending is somehow suddenly out of control instead of taking the time to explain that we, just as he has, have been praying to false idols of false belief.
All of which makes it hard for even good politicians to maintain their seats when there are candidates like Ron Johnson, again Senate, again Tea Party powered (TPP?) Republican, this time in the land of Cheeseheads, Wisconsin. Johnson doesn't really set himself apart from at least a few dozen other candidates for this list in that he hasn't had to publicly defend himself against dabbling in blood rites or dressing up like a Nazi. Johnson makes the list because he doesn't seem to know anything outside of the plastic business while his opponent seems to be a semi-decent representative of his electors but will be voted out of office because he's from the gubmint. Democratic Senator Russ Feingold voted against confirming Tim Geithner as Treasury secretary, citing Mr. Geithner’s personal tax issues. He cast unpopular votes against popular spending programs such as the prescription-drug benefit for seniors. He opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement, the war against Iraq, deregulating banks and, nine years later, bailing them out. Personal liberty? He was the only senator who voted against the misguided Patriot Act in 2001. To add to what should be a near spotless Tea Party resume, he even supported gun rights. Yet, his opponent is ahead because he proudly proclaims that he doesn’t "think this election is about details". Johnson seems to be counting on the voters going with bellyfeel, just like he does with climate change, blindly enthusiastically going with sunspots.
Joe Miller Republican Senate candidate in Alaska. In a huge surprise, the Alaskan political scene is messed up and it's not all Sarah Palin's fault. No, in a state where 40% of the economy comes from government aid and residents get paid by the government to live there, the people are mad as hell at...the government. "Unemployment has never been lower; there is no housing crisis; banks are solvent. We just got Permanent Fund Checks — and, boy, are we pissed off!" Their rage has been translated into a unique opportunity to choose from three candidates with party support, a Democrat, a Republican and a Tea Bagger. Well, to be clear, it's a choice between a name with a D beside it, Scott McAdams, an R, the Tea Party powered Republican nominee Joe Miller, or they'll have to write in Lisa Murkowski, the Republican incumbent who was beaten in the primary. The biggest obstacle pundits are predicting for Murkowski is that voters who want to choose her will have to come close to spelling her name correctly, enough to show intent, and, well, many Americans aren't all that bright. Ever try to read comment threads anywhere? You know the commentator is American when 'lose' becomes 'loose'.
Yet Joe is just a typical teabagger. His favourite word is 'unconstitutional', a label he slaps on child labour laws, social security, medicare, unemployment (except when it benefits him) and the minimum wage even though he doesn't seem to understand the document. While wrapping himself in the constitution he had hired goons, his Thinkpol, handcuff a reporterasking questions at a public event. Taken together with Joe's admiration of the former East Germany's border securityBig Brother Is Watching You posters can't be far behind. Truth is teabaggers have unwittingly allowed themselves to be manipulated by a bunch of carpetbaggers. The Koch brothers, Glenn Beck and Carl Rove will sit back and reap the rewards of a supposed grassroots movement that is set to establish a sizeable caucus to push its agenda in the House and the Senate. Just as their father was a founding member of the John Birch Society, the Kochs were instrumental in funding this astroturf backlash against what they see as a liberal government threatening their right to destroy the planet for profit. Beck has been given a Faux News platform to sow fear through lessons in rewritten history to enrich himself by fleecing the ignorant. The shadow of Carl Rove is spreading like a cancer due to the Citizen United decision metastasizing as prognosticated with a flood of untraceable money; a modern day Minitrue falsifying the past to manufacture truth, disseminating propaganda to spoon feed the semi-literate under a cloak of invisibility. This repressed movement primarily composed of Medicare recipients who object to "government-run healthcare" are being led under the banner of libertarianism to back some of the most anti-choice politicians ever to run for such major office. On issues such as phosphate bans they've been manipulated to believe they don't need to know the actual facts behind an issue because they can simply substitute their paranoid hostility towards liberals for understanding. By giving up any sense of shared responsibility as citizens towards the common good, many have been duped into choosing the freedom of slavery to the richest tenth of one percent.
Alvin Greene Democrat for the senate South Carolina. This guy came from so far out of right field that for a while it was believed his primary victory had to be a Republican plot. Greene makes the list because like most of the others here he has no actual campaign policies to advocate but unlike them he is unemployed, lives in his dad's basement (so of course no campaign office), did no fundraising or campaigning to gain his parties nomination in the primary and is facing a felony obscenity charge. Maybe Big Brother is right and we should fear ownlife as this basement dweller allegedly walked into a computer lab on the University of South Carolina campus, sat down next to a student and asked her to look at his screen, which showed a pornographic website. When told it was offensive, Camille McCoy, a 19-year-old rising sophomore, claims Greene simply laughed and said "Let's go to your room now".
Only in South Carolina could Jim Demint who is running for his second term against Greene be the less worse candidate. Demint played Tea party kingmaker and lent Republican incumbents conservative street cred for much of the primary season. His theocon views would have Big Brother in your bedroom as he reasserted his belief that gays and unmarried, sexually active women should not be allowed to teach. Just women mind you, yee-haw! Remember, this is the state where Nikki Haley is trying to replace Mark Sanford in the governor's house. She had to deny an affair with a blogger to make her electable in the eyes of voters who voted for a man who told everyone, including his wife, he was hiking the Appalachian Trail while he was in South America. Somehow he wasn't impeached, I guess it's because he paid back the $3,300 he took to visit his mistress in Argentina. But that would be admitting you..., well, others were fired, so I guess censure's enough!?!
'Crazy' Carl Paladino, gubernatorial candidate for New Jersey, er, I mean New York. Easy to make the mistake as Carl seems more the Jersey mob boss type, actually, more an enforcer, as he opened up his campaign threatening to "clean out Albany with a baseball bat". He wants to send welfare recipients to prisons for joycamp where they can take lessons in "personal hygiene". Yet another in a line of holier-than-thou right wingnut hypocrites when it comes to sex, he made an issue of pornographers and perverts but sent dozens of porn filled emails that included some chick on horse bestiality mixed in with African tribal rituals captioned "Obama Inauguration Rehearsal". Crazy was at the center of what were the strangest political attacks of the season until the Aqua Buddha story was dug up. He had charged that his rival Andrew Cuomo had multiple "paramours" that were being ignored by the press, forgetting that he was the unfaithful candidate. His memory was somehow triggered by a NY Post editor questioning Crazy's source which caused him to threaten to "take [the reporter] out" if he didn't stop stalking his illegitimate ten-year old daughter. To clean up that mess, Crazy figured it was a good idea to tell the voters that his rival's "prowess is legendary". In an odd twist, Carl later claimed that Cuomo didn't have the cajones to face him in an open debate. Er, um, I'm assuming he knows you need them to have legendary sexual prowess, right?
Yet I would pity poor Paladino if it weren't for the danger he represents. He was a broken man onstage during the governor's debate surrounded by a loony squad. He seems to have been a sacrificial lamb in the radical right's cause, a political loss-leader to expand the frontiers of acceptable dialogue. Carl just isn't politically polished enough to get away with expressing his neanderthal thinking on what he doesn't understand. Right-wingnuts see progressive attitudes towards other religions and lifestyles as a liberal plot to make hatred a form of crimethink patrolled by a politically correct thought police. Their anger is usually aimed at 'government' in general, whatever the location or officials in charge but more likely to claim minorities like gays, Latinos and Muslims as collateral damage. The mad-as-hell crowd in America, still not seeing any solid economic recovery on the horizon, will lash out at any convenient scapegoat. In order to wipe the slate clean for endorsing comments comparing an Orthodox Jew political rival, to "Hitler" or an "Antichrist", Crazy gave a speech to a group of Orthodox Jews in which he said he didn't want children "brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option -- it isn't." Having stepped in it again, Paladino figured he'd go on the Today show in order to register his disgust with gay pride parades only to wake to morning headlines that read "Carl Rages Against Guys in Speedos, Gay Grinding". D'Oh!
Linda McMahon is running as a Republican for senate in Connecticut, yes Vince McMahon's wife. Yes, the WWF's, er, sorry panda bears, I mean WWE ringleader. Tea party reasoning says, why not? She successfully ran a business that entertained white, gun-toting, NASCAR before Faux News watching, gap-toothed, anti-intellectual, get the gubmint's hands off everything except a woman's body types. Seeing as she is light on policy but must be electable because she's a business woman, let's look at the business of hillbilly mesmerizing a little closer. WWE's choice to manufacture most of its licensed products in China and Pakistan is blamed on America's corporate tax, but what can she blame on having so many of her Stateside workers die before 50 in the last ten years? World Wrestling Entertainment, an empire built killing wrestlers and working rednecks into a froth, then expanded to bring teenagers to a different froth through programming with prestigious partners such as the “Girls Gone Wild” franchise, has allowed the McMahon family to achieve the American dream, including a self-financed Senate campaign and a yacht named Sexy Bitch. In a recessionary environment where she had to lay off workers, McMahon took home $46 million which was lucky as she's spent $22 million of it in the primary alone and said she would spend "what it would take" to be elected. Of course she has tried to spin this spending as a good thing, not having to take money from special interest, though she has spent hundreds of thousands lobbying for millions in tax breaks.
The $50 million price tag on a government seat was made peddling violence and misogyny to kids as well as the South while helping enable steroid abuse to kill her employees. Orwell's Prolesec couldn't have devised of a less mentally nutritious prolefeed, one that leaves the addict hungrier than before, seeking ever greater spectacles of gore and violence, panem and circenses run amok. In a world of iPads and Blackberries competing for our attention by feeding us an ever thicker stream of information we are paradoxically able to digest less and less. Lacking effective strategies to deal with the onslaught, it's easy to become distracted and unfocused, an easy target for those who would tell us how to think. Yet the exercise of freedom requires focus and attention which is constantly being divided by tweets, texts and tits. From Facebook updates to Glee Gone Wild this information candy has caused a hypoglycemic fit for which the insulin seems to be fear and hate. Huh, in such a world, seems the perfect senator's own daughter would describe her this way:
Carly Fiorina's Republican primary victory in California promised wackiness judging by her primary campaign ads that featured possessed sheep. The lady who personally almost took down Hewlett Packard is trying to take Barbara Boxer's senate seat. Her tenure as CEO at HP saw her fire 28,000 people while the stock price fell 50% before rebounding 10% the day her firing was announced. For her failure, she was given a $21 million golden parachute which is financing her campaign. Of course, if there is a state where someone like Fiorina might appeal to voters, it would be California - look ma, still no budget. A place where billionaire gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman responded to Nanny-gate accusations (hiring an illegal immigrant housekeeper) by blaming her opponent Jerry Brown, her husband, Gloria Allred, the Democratic party, her staff - basically everyone besides herself. Better to spin than to admit fault. Seems she had picked up the spinning habit years earlier, paying off employees to duck battery charges as well as getting in early on Goldman Sachs offerings as an investor (yes, known as spinning) thanks to her position as corporate director giving her both insider stock deals and now campaign donations. If California chooses Meg, maybe the governator really will be back:
Carly and Meg are the elite who Palin and Gingrich should be warning against but instead they serve Miniluv to help inflict misery, fear, suffering, and torture in war, business and politics on brown people, the poor and liberals. We idolize the rich for making the rest poor in a world where class composition is strikingly similar to Orwell's Oceania, where 2% of the population were part of the inner party, today's gilded class, sitting above the outer party and us proles. We are kept safe by being told to be afraid and that our freedom is better protected by giving up a little in exchange. Minipax has convinced us that war is peace so ending a decade long war with no other purpose than killing brown people wasn't even a possibility that the commander-in-chief could even consider. Iraq isn't even an issue anymore and the war in Afghanistan is just an afterthought rebranded as Af/Pak. The New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post all refuse to use the word "torture" to describe waterboarding, beatings, and sleep deprivation of prisoners, adopting instead the government-approved phrase "enhanced interrogation techniques".
It's a world of doublespeak in which escalation in war is a 'surge', prisoners are 'detainees', assassinations are 'targeted killings', health care leads to 'death panels' while 'death taxes' replace estate taxes and somehow a 60,000 barrel-a-day undersea oil eruption is nothing but a 'leak'. We fight a war on drugs in order to further marginalize minorities while ignoring the fact that three times more veterans under 35 died back home in California than in the theatres of war in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2005 and 2008. Seems Fiorina shares more than a love of outsourcing and cutting jobs with the Koch brothers, they are also working in support of Proposition 23 part of their war against progressivism; in this fight misinformation is a weapon of mass destruction. Here she is in friendly territory, yep, Faux News, does she answer a question? Try to get the 4:13 point at least:
West Virginia’s Republican candidate for the Senate is lucky politics isn't baseball or he'd have struck out long ago. John Raese lost to Jay Rockefeller back in 1984 during the Reagan Republican landslide, then lost the Republican gubernatorial primary in 1988 to scandal plagued Arch Moore and then lost when he ran for the senate again in 2006, this time by almost 30 points despite spending $2.2 million of his own money. Well, Raese is back for another kick at the can, running against popular Governor Joe Manchin in a special election to fill the last two years of the term of the late Jim Byrd who had held it for over 50 years. Raese is the face of the Republican Tea party that wants to take America back further than FDR's New Deal and Teddy Roosevelt’s Square Deal, all the way to the heady days before there were laws on wages and hours, environmental concerns and debilitating economic concentration. His electoral success, and states future, hinges on how successfully Minitrue has rewritten the past and whether the public has been dumbed down enough to swallow his blackwhite platform hook, line and sinker.
Sadly, pathetically, impossibly, this list just scratches at the surface of the rot that is democracy in the US, the home of the brave and land of the free to choose between bad and evil every couple of years. Many of these wingnuts ballot foes more than fit the bad bill; Richard Blumenthal, the Democratic senatorial candidate running against McMahon in Connecticut, repeatedly implied in public speeches that he had fought in the Vietnam War, though he’d served only stateside. In this iniquitous two-party world, however, the thought of voting for a third party candidate, even when clearly the superior choice, is dismissed out of hand by most as a sure way to hand the most hated choice victory. We didn't even get to the House of Representatives where the likes of Outlaw Motorbike Club fan Allen West, batshit crazy Michelle Bachmann, SS-loving Rich Iott and Pornosec provider Ben Quayle (yes, son of Dan) are running under the GOP banner as are senate candidates such as Marco Rubio and Ken Buck and gubernatorial hopeful, bike-fearing Dan Maes.
The ancient Greeks ignored Aristophanes warnings of the tyrannical assault on democracy as their civilization was crumbling around them just as America will ignore the obvious warning signs and bring about a repeat of 1994 bringing them, and us in their wake, closer to Nineteen Eight-Four. In this age of a fantastic proliferation of information, instead of being empowered we've been enslaved by a corpocracy whose power has somehow been reinforced by the crisis they brought about as a self-censoring media has stood impotently by or worse, done their dirty work. Facts are dismissed as bias attacks or ignored altogether as intelligence is elitist and asininity is divinity in a warped real world version of high school. Google and entire elections are for sale to the highest bidder as inconvenient facts simply disappear down the memory hole as a modern day Syme sits at his keyboard working on a new edition of the newspeak dictionary. Welcome to Room 101, or not...
Way back in time, before there was Twitter, before the perpetual recession had come, in 2007 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had a mere $2 billion in lending commitments on its books. Two billion. Avatar made that in seven weeks. That's the monthly increase in the cost of the Afghanistan war this year. From its inception at Bretton Woods in 1945, the fund had been transformed from an instrument to promote and facilitate trade between its member nations into an object of hate, letters spoken together with derision from Bangkok to Buenos Aires. Well, here we are in a world of two billion tweets a month with much of it stuck in near economic depression where the IMF has $195 billion in loans on its books. This week central bankers and finance ministers from around the world are gathering at IMF headquarters in Washington DC for the IMF and World Bank annual meeting and they'll be on their best behaviour. You see, with about $900 billion at its disposal, the IMF has been charged with saving liberal capitalism.
It's a mixed up muddled up shook up world as we stumble headlong into the second decade of the 21st century but what I'm finding hardest to swallow is the rejuvenation of the IMF's image. There was a reason it only had a couple of billion in loans a few years back; it had lost its legitimacy in the international community. It had morphed from a cold war tool to support dictatorships in South America into a neo-colonial boot across the throat of Africa before becoming a purveyor and destroyer of capitalist dreams beyond the Berlin Wall and finally the instigator of global economic turmoil even further east. By first denying credit to elected governments led by 'left leaning' types such as Allende, Goulart or Ortega who may not have followed Washington's orders then supplying it to dictators that overthrew them, the likes of Pinochet, Branco and Samosa, the IMF was a good soldier in the fight against the Red Menace. Countries such as Senegal have found they are better off following the Beijing Consensus to Washington's nasty version. Privatization and market liberalization that was gonna make everyone rich following the collapse of the commie regime was unleashed without the proper legal framework (read: government institutions, is that irony?) bringing the world Russian billionaire oligarchs, some of whom managed to move to London to buy football teams before the Putin authoritarian backlash. Others languish in prison. The last bit of credibility seemed to evaporate with the steam from hot money that poured into the opening of financial and capital markets ordered by the IMF as a remedy to East Asia's downturn in 1997 transforming a hiccup into worldwide crisis.
It's no coincidence that the three biggest debts on the IMF's books as of August 2010 belong to Romania, the Ukraine and Hungary each owing over $11.7 billion, almost six times the total of outstanding loans three years ago. October 3rd saw the 20th anniversary of the reunification of East and West Germany which heralded the triumph of capitalism over communism, good over evil, opportunity over captivity. Some 8% of the world's population that had lived under the Soviet Communist system traded in one form of enslavement for another as IMF experts marched in to preach the gospel of a new religion, market fundamentalism, as a substitute for the old, Marxism (Well, a twisted Leninism/Stalinism/Gorbachevism?). For the western powers (ie. the banksters) the sudden opening of an untapped, unregulated market was a once in a lifetime opportunity as it lacked the most fundamental building blocks of efficient markets such as anti-trust laws or property rights. This lack of government regulation allowed those who knew which vodka to buy Yeltsin (answer: any) to prosper as most of the population suffered. Americans saw shock therapy through the lens of Reagan's victory putting a McDonald's on Red Square while the reality was the percentage of Russians living in poverty using the $2 standard skyrocketed from 2% in 1989 to 23.8% less than a decade later. The IMF brought Mercedes traffic jams to Moscow but 40% of the country now had to live on less than $4 a day.
The IMF was created to smooth financial crisis when they occur yet seems to have been the cause of political and economic disease as often as the cure. Yes, Virgina, there have been other crises before this latest one and they are coming ever more frequently, powerfully and lingery. That's not a word, but they tend to drag on, with recoveries marked with ever less, and painfully slow, job creation. Our hopes for recovery are resting on the drug dealer of debt that turned many of us into junkies in the first place as much of the world is relying on the IMF pit bosses to keep the casino open. The next crisis is already written into the loopholes lobbied into the financial regulation bill in the US. The last not yet complete judging by ever widening bond spreads in Europe which highlight the uselessness of trying to save the euro by propping up PIGS with more debt and occasionally issuing reports on their progress to soothe jittery markets. An optimist will say the protests in Seattle in 1999 or the street battle in 2001 in Genoa may have lit the fire under the IMF to change its ways. But it seems just the names have changed in this truly grim fairy tale where only the banks get paid as we double down on SDRs instead of structural adjustment loans and implement austerity programs in place of job cuts.
Not being able to know who the bad guy really is helps keep us interested in the story and allows the cycle of crisis to continue. The Greeks, banks, Irish, Al-Qaeda and the government all played a role in putting us in a situation where cuts are going to be necessary along with tax hikes but the biggest baddie in the financial press these days seems to be China. Sure, China's on board, what with the G20 and now a Special Advisor to the Managing Director at the IMF, their cash is needed, but the boss is still European and Canada has a bigger vote than Russia, or Brazil and Mexico combined. The US still has a veto power with over 16% of the vote, as major policy decisions require a supermajority of 85%. For these past 20 years much of the world has gone along with what the IMF prescribed, often having no choice, accept or perish, but there has been growing evidence that there might be another path to choose and many are taking it.
About ten before the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1978 the Chinese government began making economic reforms that have brought in a hitherto unknown combination of mixed ownership, basic property rights, and heavy government intervention. On the surface, what distinguished this new capitalism seemed to be the level of government intervention. While this is true, what surprisingly sets Washington and Beijing apart is flexibility. While America opts for nostalgia and ideology instead of pragmatism and progress, the winning model of capitalism is being made in China, like so much else in the world these days. A two-party political system is no better, in fact worse, than a one-party state when both parties are under the control of lobbyists and one of them is bought and paid for by a major media outlet. Whereas the neoliberals and neocons invade nations financially and militarily through loans and bombs in order to exploit their resources, the Beijing Consensus simply builds them infrastructure in exchange for their riches. Roads and hospitals for copper and rare earth metals. Risk capital instead of lives. Seeing the game slipping away, the west, America in particular, is trying to find a scapegoat, blaming the winner for playing the game better.
So we'll continue hearing a lot about the yuan (renminbi? still don't understand the difference) being undervalued while not criticizing too directly as we're still offering the open hand of the G20. After all, it'll be good to spread the blame when things fall apart. The Chinese understand that it wasn't American style management skills that made the US the global economic leader for the past century but a combination of luck and directing the resources of the country in a productive manner. Think of the big money makers of the past century and their connection with government. From the direct to the indirect in the big picture and in the details. Militarily not only conquering markets that needed to be rebuilt after winning world wars or friendly invasions but also directly employing and educating soldiers along with buying and selling all those weapons of war. Boeing, General Electric and Haliburton anyone? All this spending and the hydrogen bomb gave a head start to the computing industry and even gave us the internet. Detroit wouldn't have had the run it did if an interstate system hadn't been built to handle all those cars criss-crossing the continent. There's no secret to China's success, it's much the same recipe America used when it understood that since market forces cannot even do something as simple as finance home mortgages it shouldn't be trusted to restore and maintain full employment, reduce global imbalances or prevent the destruction of the environment while preparing for a future without fossil fuels. China's doing it while somehow being both more overt and less conspicuous. Not wasting energy pretending to be what it's not at home and forcing their ideas on others abroad.
The success of the Chinese approach to modernization has struck the developing world as attractive and the developed as amazing. As the calls to control deficits grow louder and governments are told to cut more jobs, raise retirement ages and lower subsidies while bailing out banks, the Chinese will keep building the things we need and using the proceeds to fund the debt the IMF has ensured we're addicted to. While Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's in person offer of support to Greece (obviously in exchange for market access) was being gratefully accepted, the head of the IMF issued ominous warnings of a currency war being waged by those Chinese. In Europe the cracks are growing as "You can't have a monetary union without a reasonably coordinated fiscal policy" - Orwellian for a true supergovernment from that same IMF director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. It gets worse in America where most of the public has been convinced that all things government or intellectual are bad - insert your own Palin 2012 vice presidential nominee here and imagine the outcome. Richard Nixon is attributed Milton Friedman's misquote that "We are all Keynesians now" after breaking the gold standard and reluctantly accepting John Maynard's economic ideas. The IMF was built upon that economist's ideas but I get the feeling that the next great shift in economics will have most of us saying "We are all Chinese now".
Part-time recluse, part-time rockstar,full-time ranter. Paying the bills teaching English in the wild west of capitalism.
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Ireland's path to financial purgatory has been predictable. Greece's problems came from many sources, rapacious banks taking advantage of financial rubes, politicians on the take and of course the MSM's favourite scapegoat, the lazy, sponging, early-retiring, Greek workers. Ireland's problems stem from one source - greed. Both the banks and the public were caught up in a collective euphoria brought on by the belief that shiny new buildings and playthings meant perpetual growth and wealth for all. A pot o' gold at the end of every rainbow. Ireland became an economic success story between 1994 and 2007 as GDP growth regularly touched 10% a year with the boom ascribed to reasons as varied as the success of U2 to the legalization of contraceptive sales in 1979. More prosaically, economists generally credited the rise of the Celtic Tiger to a combination of EU development funds and low corporate taxes with a global shift to a knowledge-based economy for which the Irish education system was ready to provide the skilled workforce all at a time of strong global expansion. The sudden success soon turned to hubris; while the main proponents of unconstrained financial globalization may have been American, it was Irish (as well as other European) banks that really became too large relative to their economies, taking risks that paid off big in boom times but exploded in their faces when the rainbow faded. As long as new Starbucks were being opened on Dublin's Grafton Street, it didn't seem to worry anyone that it had become the fifth most expensive street in the world.
Seán FitzPatrick, former chairman of Anglo-Irish, a man who hid hundreds of millions in loans to himself, oversaw the bank which established a precedent of reckless lending the other banks were forced to follow in order to keep pace so as not to lose market share and thus see their stock price plummet. Ah, the irony. No longer seeing themselves as bankers but risk seeking entrepreneurs, in their eagerness to woo property syndicates the banks became both the lenders of equity and providers of debt in the same deals, resulting in absurd loan to value exposure of up to 100%. Even once it was clear the game was up and the government had stepped in to save them, the banks continued to deceive everyone around them hoping to continue the party a little longer. A stream of false information has been fed to the very entity created to take the non-performing loans off the banks' hands, NAMA, meaning the extent of damage the banks have done may take years to figure out. The incestuous relationship between banksters and government is most blatant in the US but Ireland has its own government protected "Golden Circle" who will escape punishment as the details of their deception are impenetrable to the normal person and so will become fodder for legend and lore, circular transactions being better than fairy tales at putting the public to sleep. 
and 
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given to us by Joseph Heller in the book of the same name. American democracy promises choice and freedom but seems to only give us the discretion to choose the least bad option.
beyond the Berlin Wall and finally the 
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