Month: November 2011

Some Insights into the Greek Debt Crisis

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First, it appears that George Papandreou’s suggestion as to a referendum scared the hell out of the (Conservative New Democracy Party) to the degree that it has forced them to support the bailout, which they had maintained for political advantage.

So I’m beginning to wonder if this was a ploy to defuse the opposition’s well ……… opposition ……… to the debt deal.

The other thing that I find interesting is that both Greek PM George Papandreou and opposition leader Antonis Samaras were roommates in college, specifically at Amherst College, in Massachusetts.

They, like many other world leaders (Benazir Bhutto, Radcliffe ’73, and Mikheil Saakashvili, Columbia George Washington University, come to mind) are the sons and daughters of their countries elites and products of the American post-secondary education, where they hang with the future Wall Street banksters and multinational executives.

It comes as no surprise then that they support the neo-colonial policies that devastate their countries, because they have been thoroughly inculcated in the belief systems of their de facto colonizers, and so for a (small) slice of what is extracted from their countries, they mortgage their countrymen’s futures.

It’s not limited to US Colleges, we find similar things with other leaders and Oxbridge in the UK, particularly amongst former British possessions in Africa.  (See Mugabe, Robert)

So what these countries are left with are battles between two groups of willing participants in the raping of their countries who are just fighting for the spoils.

It’s no wonder that people are drawn to populists like Hugo Chavez, who are little more than punks.

I’m beginning to think that our current international norms for finance and economics are about as effective in making the world better as leeches and bleeding were for syphilis.

The Big Picture is that the Current International Regime is Anti-Democratic

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That is the big picture of the fact that Greek PM Papandreou started pushing for a referendum on the Greek bailout, and was forced to back down under international pressure.

When we look at both international financial policy, and international trade policy, it is predicated on the idea that ordinary people will never support these policies, because they are simply too stupid to understand the bigger picture, and see that these policies are too their benefits.

What the very serious people don’t understand is just why the ordinary people don’t like this.

The fact is that we are dealing with tribal issues, and the people at the top, the ones who make these policies, have very little meaningful interaction with the people who actually produce the stuff that makes the economy work.

They go from the equivalent of Phillips-Exeter to Harvard to Wall Street to Washington to Wall Street to Washington to Wall Street to Washington ………

The reason that people don’t support these policies is because they see the effects on their lives of the policies that favor multinational corporations and mega-banks, and these effects are negative, while the policy makers, who roomed with the banksters and the executives to be at college, simply have no clue as to how the other half (actually 99%) lives.

The fact that this has been aggressively sold for decades, and a society which embraced the Snuggie® with open arms has rejected these policies.

While it is true that the commons are not universally correct, the fact that the public has continued to be extremely skeptical despite a full court press does seem to indicate that there is a disjoint between the conventional wisdom and the reality.

After all, we have advertising firms that could sell snow to Eskimos with a 6 month campaign.

Not Enough, But a Step in the Right Direction

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The European Central Bank, in the first meeting since Mario Draghi replaced the clueless Jean-Claude Trichet as president, the ECB has chosen to cut rates.

Seeing as how the whole world, and in particularly the increasingly desperate cluster f%$# that is the Euro Zone, are in the the midst of a liquidity crisis/debt overhang where cheap money won’t do much.

That being said, the fact that Draghi did not wait a few months in order to save face for the ECB, and that he’s actually warning of an upcoming recession indicates that he is a bit more of a “reality based” than your typical central banker, who typically only give a sh%$ about inflation.

It should be noted that this is actually a significant departure from prior ECB policy, because Draghi appears to be sending a message that he will, at least temporarily ignoring the (under the current circumstances absolutely absurd) 2% inflation target.

It’s Jobless Thursday

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And initial claims are below 400,000 for the first time in over a month, with the less volatile 4-week moving average falling slightly from 406,500 to 404,500, continuing claims falling by 15K to 3.68M, but extended and emergency claims rose by 39.9K to 3.68M.

The number is still too damn high. This is still too high to presage any sort recovery in the job market.

Tomorrow’s monthly jobless figures from the DoL should give us some more detail.

An Interesting Solution to the Problem of Phishing and Hacking:

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A web master has come to the conclusion that the first step in managing this sort of activity is to, “block all traffic from China:

I run quite a few few websites and blogs and my solution to this problem was first to BLOCK all traffic from China, I allow nothing, nada, zip from China based IPs. From my personal experience 100% of China’s internet traffic is hacking attempts, email SPAM and phishing. I have never encountered a single China access that could be considered positive.

Blocking China has solved about 80~90% of the problem. The second thing is to block specific domains and IPs from Russia, Romania, Brazil, Taiwan, Korea, Poland and may other ex Soviet Satellites. I can’t block all access to these countries because there is about 90% of legitimate traffic and the 10% left are probably compromised computers being used as proxies/bots for China.

I tried to find the original source for this and a quick google indicates that there are a significant number of web masters who are beginning to consider this as a first step for web security on their sites.

Obviously, I am not a webmaster, but I’m wondering just how wide spread this phenomenon is.

You Know, Occupy Wall Street Is Beginning to Look More and More Like Tunisia or Egypt…

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And not just because Tunisians are drawing satirical comparisons with the Arab spring, making comments about “recognizing the American Transitional National Council,” on Barack Obama’s Facebook page.

It appears that law enforcement has been directed to crack down on the Occupy Wall Street movement, with the recent crack downs in Oakland, Portland, and Tulsa, with what was clearly brutality in the cases of Oakland and Tulsa.

Additionally, it appears that the NYPD, realizing that their previous thuggery has served to help the movement to go viral, has become more sophisticated in its tactics by herding drug addicts and the homeless to Zuccotti Park in an attempt to  disrupt the New York protests.

When this is juxtaposed with the general strike in Oakland today,  it really is beginning to seem a lot more like the Arab Spring, though whether it is Tunisia or Bahrain remains to be seen.

I will say that one protest, the occupation of Obama’s chairman of the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness and GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt’s front lawn brings back memories of the protests on chancellor’s Joe Duffy’s front lawn at UMass over the maze.*

I also came across an interesting take on the whole movement, that it is a proxy for a primary challenge to Obama:

Like a major national primary against a sitting-though-unpopular president, this movement is sending a signal to the existing elites. Change and deliver on a new social contract, or else. It isn’t clear what “or else” means. Perhaps this is signifying a collapse of older institutional arrangements, or a breakdown in belief in existing authority structures. Perhaps this is the first of many large-scale civil disturbances, and a spark that will lead the establishment to solidify its authoritarian impulses. Maybe the training of tens of thousands of people around the world in nonviolent non-electoral means of challenging power, the legitimization of protest, the introduction of new areas of contention like the role of the Federal Reserve, and the re-mainstreaming of figures like Noam Chomsky and the promotion of people like Naomi Klein and Chris Hedges are signifying a larger shift in our political culture. It’s too early to know.

One of the bitter ironies about the Obama administration is that they have successfully seized control of the Democratic Party apparatus to a degree that I’ve never seen, which makes primarying him, even as a symbolic gesture, is off the table, and, much like water finding a path of least resistance, Occupy Wall Street seems to an alternate path.

If this is the case, then what appears to be the strangely incoherent decision making process of Occupy Wall Street makes sense, because the Obama administration’s apparatus is best defined as very bright control freaks, and this sort of decentralized decision making is something that is calculated to make their little hardwired politico brains explode.

The alternative to this unwieldy process would be the almost certain co-opting of the movement.

*There was a chain link fence erected as a sculpture at UMass in the 1970s, and a frequent activity of students until the late 1980s was to get drunk and wander through the maze. After a decade of drunks bumping into the walls, it was falling apart, and the administration wanted to demolish it. This resulted in a storm of protests, culminating in protests on the Chancellor’s lawn, and the administration agreed to replace the sculpture, rather than demolishing it.

Trust the TSA, Episode XLVIX

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It turns out that their airport scanners cause cancer:

On Sept. 23, 1998, a panel of radiation safety experts gathered at a Hilton hotel in Maryland to evaluate a new device that could detect hidden weapons and contraband. The machine, known as the Secure 1000, beamed X-rays at people to see underneath their clothing.

One after another, the experts convened by the Food and Drug Administration raised questions about the machine because it violated a longstanding principle in radiation safety — that humans shouldn’t be X-rayed unless there is a medical benefit.

“I think this is really a slippery slope,” said Jill Lipoti, who was the director of New Jersey’s radiation protection program. The device was already deployed in prisons; what was next, she and others asked — courthouses, schools, airports? “I am concerned … with expanding this type of product for the traveling public,” said another panelist, Stanley Savic, the vice president for safety at a large electronics company. “I think that would take this thing to an entirely different level of public health risk.”

…………

Research suggests that anywhere from six to 100 U.S. airline passengers each year could get cancer from the machines. Still, the TSA has repeatedly defined the scanners as “safe,” glossing over the accepted scientific view that even low doses of ionizing radiation — the kind beamed directly at the body by the X-ray scanners — increase the risk of cancer.

“Even though it’s a very small risk, when you expose that number of people, there’s a potential for some of them to get cancer,” said Kathleen Kaufman, the former radiation management director in Los Angeles County, who brought the prison X-rays to the FDA panel’s attention.

…………

As for the TSA, it skipped a public comment period required before deploying the scanners. Then, in defending them, it relied on a small body of unpublished research to insist the machines were safe, and ignored contrary opinions from U.S. and European authorities that recommended precautions, especially for pregnant women. Finally, the manufacturer, Rapiscan Systems, unleashed an intense and sophisticated lobbying campaign, ultimately winning large contracts.

(emphasis mine)

You have to love the Security Theater Industrial Complex.

This ain’t about keeping us safe, it’s about extracting money from the 99% for the benefit of the 1% by creating an atmosphere of unreasoning fear.