Author: Matthew G. Saroff

Krugman Nails It

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In accordance with Euro Zone requirements, France is taking steps to reduce its deficit.

The people who most strongly argue for “expansionary austerity”*, are criticizing Frances steps, and Paul Krugman rightly takes them to task:

Simon Wren-Lewis looks at France, and finds that it is engaging in a lot of fiscal austerity — far more than makes sense given the macroeconomic situation. He notes, however, that France has eliminated its structural primary deficit mainly by raising taxes rather than by cutting spending.

And Olli Rehn — who should be praising the French for their fiscal responsibility, their willingness to defy textbook macroeconomics in favor of the austerity gospel — is furious, declaring that fiscal restraint must come through spending cuts.

………

But the larger point here, surely, is that Rehn has let the mask slip. It’s not about fiscal responsibility; it never was. It was always about using hyperbole about the dangers of debt to dismantle the welfare state. How dare the French take the alleged worries about the deficit literally, while declining to remake their society along neoliberal lines?

It should be noted that Robert Mundell, known as the “Father of the Euro”, is also a big figure in supply side economics (aka Raganomics).

The Euro’s academic and intellectual roots are dominated by people who have the dismantling of the social safety net as one of their important goals.

It is therefore no surprise that they are prosecuting their agenda by using austerity as a tool to do this, but the people who have to live in the Euro are their victims.

*Much like sparkle ponies that sh%$ M&Ms, expansionary austerity does not exist.

Not Enough Bullets………

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In the New York City Mayoral primary, Bill De Blasio, the New York City Public Advocate, is leading in all the polls.

In fact, he is leading by enough that, in a 9 candidate race, he has a shot to clear the 40% requirement in a runoff, is rather telling.

It is heartening that in the home of Wall Street an unabashed liberal appears likely to be the next Mayor of New York.

One of his central proposals is to, “Increase the city’s income tax on wealthy residents earning over $500,000, from 3.86 percent to 4.41 percent,” (PDF) to fund universal preschool.

If you do the math, you will realize that this means an additional $2750.00 in taxes for someone earning a million dollars a year, basically chump change, particularly amongst the well to do in New York.

However, it appears the suggestion that the rich and very rich toss a few more pennies toward public resources has hurt the feeling of rich self absorbed assholes:

When New York mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio first proposed taxing the rich so every child in the city could attend all-day preschool, it was October and he had support from fewer than 10 percent of Democrats in polls.

 Now he leads the pack. And some of the wealthy New Yorkers who’d pay more under his plan say it bewilders and offends them.

Oh, it offends them, their delicate feelings are hurt.

F%$# that.

“It shows lack of sensitivity to the city’s biggest revenue providers and job creators,” said Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, a network of 200 chief executive officers, including co-Chairman Laurence Fink of BlackRock Inc. (BLK), the world’s biggest money manager.

I am so concerned that we are being insufficiently “sensitive” to the parasites from Wall Street.

E.E. “Buzzy” Geduld, who runs the hedge fund Cougar Capital LLC in the city and is a trustee of Manhattan’s Dalton School, where annual tuition tops $40,000, said de Blasio’s plan “is the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard” and “not a smart thing to do.”

Yes, because someone who can afford $40,000.00 for a year at private school, will be absolutely destroyed by a 0.55% increase in their taxes on income over ½ a million dollars a year.

De Blasio first presented his tax plan to a quiet audience attending his Oct. 4 speech to the Association for a Better New York, a real-estate developers’ civic group. He called on them, as some of the city’s wealthiest individuals, to provide about $532 million for universal all-day pre-kindergarten and after-hours middle-school programs.

About 20,000 of New York’s 68,000 four-year-olds get city-funded full-day pre-kindergarten classes, with 38,000 enrolled in three-hour programs and 10,000 in none. The added pre-K slots would cost roughly $342 million, de Blasio said.

It’s rather telling that George Soros has contributed to De Blasio campaign. I think that he earns a decent salary.

Additionally, that raving Bolshevik Ben Bernanke has endorsed increased pre-school and after school programs as well.

What a bunch or useless self-absorbed jerks.  I would call them schmucks, but a schmuck has a head.

Pass the Popcorn………

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Pass the Popcorn

The NRA has joined with the ACLU’s lawsuit against NSA surveillance of Americans. They are maintaining that it violates the law against maintaining a national gun registry:

The National Rifle Association has joined a lawsuit against the federal government’s sweeping surveillance program, claiming the collection of phone records and other data violates First Amendment rights and amounts to an illegal gun registry.

In supporting the American Civil Liberties Union’s lawsuit, the NRA on Wednesday filed a supporting brief arguing the National Security Agency’s datamining “could allow identification of NRA members, supporters, potential members, and other persons with whom the NRA communicates, potentially chilling their willingness to communicate with the NRA.”

The NSA’s phone database would let the government track whether gun owners called the NRA, gun stores, shooting ranges or others.
The brief also says the database “could allow the government to circumvent legal protections for Americans’ privacy, such as laws that guard against the registration of guns or gun owners,” thereby creating an illegal “national gun registry.”

The ACLU welcomed the gun group’s support.

As strange as it sounds, I welcome the NRA’s support as well.

This almost Makes Me Miss Condoleeza Rice

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Some times, the stupid just just overwhelms me.

Normally, it’s a group effort, but recently, John Kerry has been a on a particular reprehensible roll:

Secretary of State John Kerry told the House Foreign Affairs Committee today that he “often” agrees with New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, despite taking issue with his most recent column on the Syria conflict.

 ………

 “So with all due respect to Tom Friedman, Who is Most Often Correct, on this occasion, it is absolutely vital that we send the message and deteriorate his capacity,” Kerry concluded.

Seriously.

This almost makes me ………………

Hell, I need some better drugs to handle this sh%$.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen

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The owner of Lavabit, the now-shuttered secure email provider, has been told that he could be jailed for terminating his service:

The owner of an encrypted email service used by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden said he has been threatened with criminal charges for refusing to comply with a secret surveillance order to turn over information about his customers.

“I could be arrested for this action,” Ladar Levison told NBC News about his decision to shut down his company, Lavabit LLC, in protest over a secret court order he had received from a federal court that is overseeing the investigation into Snowden.

Lavabit said he was barred by federal law from elaborating on the order or any of his communications with federal prosecutors. But a source familiar with the matter told NBC News that James Trump, a senior litigation counsel in the U.S. attorney’s office in Alexandria, Va., sent an email to Levison’s lawyer last Thursday – the day Lavabit was shuttered — stating that Levison may have “violated the court order,” a statement that was interpreted as a possible threat to charge Levison with contempt of court.

This can be interpreted in two ways: Either they are threatening to jail him for fighting a broad subpoena in court, or they are threatening him because he shut down the service because he refused to run it as part of an ongoing and broad surveillance of his customers.

In either case, this is contemptible, even if it is nominally legal.

The Latest Snowden Release Does Not Surprise………

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It appears that people at all levels of the US government do not trust Pakistan:

The $52.6 billion U.S. intelligence arsenal is aimed mainly at unambiguous adversaries, including al-Qaeda, North Korea and Iran. But top-secret budget documents reveal an equally intense focus on one purported ally: Pakistan.

No other nation draws as much scrutiny across so many categories of national security concern.

A 178-page summary of the U.S. intelligence community’s “black budget” shows that the United States has ramped up its surveillance of Pakistan’s nuclear arms, cites previously undisclosed concerns about biological and chemical sites there, and details efforts to assess the loyalties of counter­terrorism sources recruited by the CIA.

Pakistan appears at the top of charts listing critical U.S. intelligence gaps. It is named as a target of newly formed analytic cells. And fears about the security of its nuclear program are so pervasive that a budget section on containing the spread of illicit weapons divides the world into two categories: Pakistan and everybody else.

The disclosures — based on documents provided to The Washington Post by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden — expose broad new levels of U.S. distrust in an already unsteady security partnership with Pakistan, a politically unstable country that faces rising Islamist militancy. They also reveal a more expansive effort to gather intelligence on Pakistan than U.S. officials have disclosed.

Not surprising.

We’ve heard this from a lot of different sources over the years.

For anyone to trust Pakistan, and particularly its military and intelligence services, would have to be a thoroughly deluded fool.

The Only Two Things You Need to Know About Larry Summers as Fed Chair

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Item 1: He’s controversial because he is such a horrifically bad choice:

The Washington Post’s Neil Irwin looked this morning at what he sees as the many reasons the upcoming nomination of a new Federal Reserve chair became a circus, unlike past low-controversy nominations.

………

But among Neil’s four factors, only one really matters at the margin: The White House appears poised to make a demonstrably bad choice for Fed Chair.

If Larry Summers withdrew himself from consideration, or the White House announced that it isn’t going to pick him, the circus tents would pack up and we could all go home. The Fed Chair race would become uncontroversial and boring again, Business Insider’s existence notwithstanding.

People oppose Summers for all sorts of reasons, but here are my two.

One is that while we don’t know exactly where he (or Janet Yellen) would lead on monetary policy, I suspect Summers shares the White House’s unhealthy lean toward tight money. It’s particularly hard to figure out what Summers would do since he’s not actually a monetary policy scholar.

The other is that I fear Summers would squander the comity and collaboration that make the Federal Reserve Board work, since he’s had a tendency to do that at other institutions he’s been tapped to lead.

Item 2: Wall Street, which has spent millions cultivating him, appears to be terrified at the prospect of Summers as Fed Chair:

The spreading expectation that President Obama will name Lawrence H. Summers to lead the Federal Reserve Board appears to be working against the central bank’s efforts to stimulate the economy.

The jitters even have some analysts betting that a Summers nomination could lead to slower economic growth, less job creation and higher interest rates than if the president named Janet L. Yellen, the Fed’s vice chairwoman.

Businesses raising money and people buying homes and cars all have faced higher interest rates in recent months as the Fed’s campaign to suppress borrowing costs has faltered. The rise in rates reflects optimism that the economy is gaining strength, and an expectation that the Fed will begin to pull back later this year. But a wide range of financial analysts also see evidence of a Summers effect.

Many investors expected that Ms. Yellen would be nominated to replace Ben S. Bernanke as head of the central bank, a choice that would have sent a clear message of continuity. Instead, investors are now trying to anticipate how Mr. Summers might change the Fed.

The unease is the product of a little information and a lot of speculation. Mr. Summers, a Harvard University economist who served for two years as Mr. Obama’s primary economic adviser, has said little about monetary policy in recent years. Investors are left parsing a handful of comments in which he has expressed some doubts on the benefits and concern about the consequences of the Fed’s policies.

“People don’t know what Larry might do,” said Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive of Pimco, the giant bond fund manager. “There’s a lack of a lot of information on Larry’s views. We don’t have enough information to make an assessment, just some second- and thirdhand accounts.”

Wall Street owns Larry Summers, but they don’t want him to be Fed Chair.

The only thing to argue for him is cronyism and corruption.  Seriously.

If Obama nominates him, I am calling both of my Senators bring up his role in Andrei Schleifer’s corruption in the market reforms in Russia.

Mission Creep Already?

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Now we have Barack Obama saying that “limited and proportional strikes” will create Freedumb:

President Barack Obama said Tuesday that “limited, proportional” military strikes against Syria would degrade President Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons capabilities and allow that nation to “free itself” from political conflict.

And we have John Kerry leaving an opening for boots on the ground:

Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday appeared to leave the door open to the U.S. deploying ground troops in Syria in the event the country “imploded, for instance.”

“In the event Syria imploded, for instance or in the event there was a threat of a chemical weapons cache falling into the hands of somebody else and it was clearly in the interest of our allies — all of us, the British, the French, and others. I don’t want to take off the table an option that might or might not be available to the President of the United States to secure our country,” Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, debating whether to authorize President Barack Obama’s punitive strike in response to a reported chemical weapons attack by the Assad regime.

Asked by Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), the ranking Republican on the committee, whether the secretary of state truly believed combat troops could be an option, Kerry walked the comment back by saying he was only “thinking out loud.”

Yeah, like that is reassuring.

This is so going to turn into a complete cluster-f%$#.

Your Syria Update

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Well, it looks like John Kerry is seriously in the running as the worst Secretary of State of the 2000s, and since this includes Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice, this is a considerable accomplishment:

Secretary of State John Kerry told House Democrats during a Monday conference call that they face a “Munich moment” as they weigh whether to approve striking Syria to punish Syrian President Bashar Assad for using chemical weapons, two sources with knowledge of the call told NBC News.

The phrase is a reference to the 1938 Munich Pact that ceded control of part of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany — a moment that history has harshly judged as an appeasement of Adolf Hitler that preceded World War II.

Seriously, invoking Hitler and Munich?  This from the man who once asked, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

This is absolutely loathsome, and typifies the attitude of the Obama administration, which has abandoned any sense of perspective and history on this subject.

That being said, it might be the most loathsome thing said over the weekend about this, because we have John McCain on the political scene:

Greg tweets:

On CNN just now, McCain says Congress overruling Prez on a national security matter would set dangerous precedent

This is total, complete, nonsense, and betrays a deep lack of understanding — or perhaps a lack of support — for the U.S. political system.

 To remind Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) of the basics of the Constitution: Congress and the president are co-equal. That’s true in general, and it’s true of “national security matters” in particular. The president is commander-in-chief, but Congress not only has the power to declare war, but also the responsibility for funding the armed forces, the diplomats and, well, everything else in the government.

It appears that John McCain cannot be bothered to read the Constitution, which vests the power to declare war exclusively in the hands of the legislative branch.

Additionally, the Obama administration, or at least the increasingly unhinged John Kerry has declared that, “Obama ‘has the right’ to strike regardless of vote.”

I am appalled. This is a position which is simply lawless, and makes a joke of both the Constitution and any Congressional vote.

I’m not sure what the vote is for, unless it’s just politics. (see pic)

Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever.™

H/t Living Blue in a Red State for the pic.

Obama Asks for Congressional Authorization for an Attack on Syria

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This is something that I did not see coming.

Presidents Nixon have been outright hostile to the application of the war powers act, so I expected that his speech yesterday would be to announce the start of 2-3 days bombing.

Instead, he announced that he would be submitting a proposal for a war powers act authorization:

President Obama put on hold Saturday a plan to attack Syria for its alleged use of chemical weapons, arguing that the United States had a moral responsibility to respond forcefully but would not do so until Congress has a chance to vote on the use of military force.

The announcement puts off a cruise missile strike that had appeared imminent, a prospect that had the region on edge and stoked intense debate in the United States, where many dread getting dragged into a new war.

Obama did not indicate what he would do if Congress rejects the measure.

Lawmakers are scheduled to return from recess on Sept. 9to begin what is sure to be a contentious debate about the risks of injecting the United States into a conflict in which it has few reliable allies and enemies on both sides of the front lines. The Senate will hold committee hearings on the proposed strike this week, Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) announced Saturday.

The decision to seek congressional approval for what the administration has said would be a short, limited engagement was a remarkable turn one day after Secretary of State John F. Kerry delivered an almost-prosecutorial case for military intervention. Obama made the decision Friday night following days of agonizing deliberations with members of his Cabinet, according to administration officials.

I think that Obama is aware of the politics of the situation here, and felt a need to distinguish himself from Bush’s foreign policy.

I think that his calculus is that Congress won’t be willing to deny the request and will grant him the authorization of use of military force (AUMF), because of the political consequences of the vote.

I think that this is a miscalculation. On the Sunday shows, members of Congress expressed a lot of skepticism about the AUMF.

In particular, they complained that it:

Leading lawmakers dealt bipartisan rejection Sunday to President Obama’s request to strike Syrian military targets, saying the best hope for congressional approval would be to narrow the scope of the resolution.

From the Democratic dean of the Senate to tea party Republicans in their second terms, lawmakers said the White House’s initial request to use force against Syria will be rewritten in the coming days to try to shore up support in a skeptical Congress. But some veteran lawmakers expressed doubt that even the new use-of-force resolution would win approval, particularly in the House.

“I think it’s going to be a very tough sell,” said Rep. Tom Cole (Okla.), who is often a key crossover Republican in compromises with the White House. For now, Cole said he is “leaning no” on approving any use of force against Syria.

His remarks came after a more than 2½-hour classified briefing that drew 83 lawmakers to the Capitol, GOP aides said. They flew in from across the country on 24 hours’ notice for a rare Labor Day weekend meeting. The briefing, run by five senior national security officials, began the administration’s all-out effort to win support for what Obama has said would be a limited strike against military targets to punish Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s regime for carrying out a chemical attack.

White House officials have less than two weeks to secure backing in the House and the Senate, which will not formally return from their regular end-of-summer break until Sept. 9. They are expected to then immediately begin debate on military authorization, with votes by mid-September.

………

Obama’s allies said the first order of business will be to work with the administration to redraft the resolution, which was sent to Capitol Hill on Saturday night and barely filled one page. It had no prescriptions for what type of military action could be carried out or its duration.

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), the dean of the Senate and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, told reporters that the resolution is “too open-ended” as written. “I know it will be amended in the Senate,” he said.

Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), a former chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said, “That has to be rectified, and they simply said in answer to that they would work with the Congress and try to come back with a more prescribed resolution.”

Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), a former Senate staffer who inspected chemical weapons attacks by Saddam Hussein’s government against its own citizens in Iraq in the 1980s, said he will push to add language that would limit the length of the mission and prohibit putting U.S. troops on the ground in Syria.

I think that the old Clinton hands remember how the AUMF vote in 1991 largely cleared the way for Bill Clinton in 1992, because the Representatives and Senators who voted against it were ruled out as a Democratic Presidential nominee by the conventional wisdom of the time.

I think that this is wrong.

First, we won’t have the sort of conclusive military victory that we had in Kuwait

Second, this is a different time, and the political equation has changed.  The current resident of the White House got there largely on his credibility of his opposition to “stupid wars.”

Voting against the AUMF, or voting to narrow it, is likely to be a requirement for any Congressional Democrat who wants to run for President in 2016.

I thing that there is a significant possibility that Obama will be handed the same sort of defeat that David Cameron did in the UK.

(AUMF request after break)

What the Russian Revealed About the T-50 at the MAKS Airshow

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RAM on the engine.


They have what appears to be a working head mounted display


The Kh-58UShE ARM (1,400-lb., Mach 4, range of 130 nm) fits in the weapons bay


The internal weapons bay is huge because of the widely spaced engines

Some are interesting as they relate to the aircraft, but there are also some details that might say a lot about potential Russian anti-stealth techniques. (Paid Subscription Required)

The ordinary:

  • They are developing an improved performance engine for the aircraft.
  • They will be applying radar absorbent material to the spinner and inlet guide vanes. (see pic)
  • They are integrating a helmet mounted display early in the process. The dual visor approach, where there is an inner visor for the display, and an outer one for glare and environmental protection.
  • They are looking at using thrust vectoring, counteracted by the aerodynamic controls, to reduce the rear aspect radar signature of the engine.

The more interesting:

  • The internal weapons bay can accommodate very large weapons, including ultra long range air to air and anti-radar missiles.

This is a statement of where they think that future war is going:

Also likely to be carried internally by the T-50 is the RVV-BD (long-range air-to-air missile), a modernized version of the Vympel R-37 that was designed for the MiG-31M Foxhound-B but never put into production. Its total external dimensions are within centimeters of the Kh-58UShE with wings folded. It seems likely that the T-50 forward bay has been designed around the minimum-risk RVV-BD, with the Kh-58 being modified to fit the same envelope.

Both weapons are long-range types. The Kh-58UShE is a 1,400-lb., Mach 4 weapon with a range up to 130 nm from a 65,000-ft. launch altitude, and the RVV-BD has a claimed maximum range of 110 nm against a head-on target. This indicates a different operational philosophy from U.S. stealth aircraft, for which a key principle has been to use stealth to permit the use of short-range, low-cost weapons.

Later in the article, they discuss updates to the radar suite (radar suits, actually) for the S-400 Triumph (SA-21 Growler), which incorporates multi-frequency band radars:

The 55Zh6ME comprises three truck-mounted radar “modules,” operating in metric (VHF), decametric (L) and centimetric (S) bands, all with active, electronically scanned array (AESA) radars. The VHF unit has an antenna area of 235 sq. meters (2,530 sq. ft.), carrying 168 VHF transmit-receive modules, and is claimed to be able to detect a target with a radar cross-section of 1 sq. meter at 510 km range and 30,000 meters altitude in jamming conditions. The radars can be deployed in 15 min., NNIIRT says.

 The new 55Zh6UME has a smaller VHF array (with a 430-km range under the same conditions) with an L-band AESA trailer-mounted on the same structure, facing the opposite direction.

I think that the Russians believe that increasing processing power allowing for the fusion of disparate sensors to reduce the effectiveness of stealth.

It’s likely that they are right.

Yes, Not Like Iraq at All………

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This just in, we have a news report that, the rebels were behind the gas attack in Ghouta.

Full disclosure, I know nothing of the news organization, MintPress News, though I am familiar with the work of one of the authors, Dale Gavlak, she’s done stuff for public radio, the AP, and Salon.

The assertion is that the Jabhat al-Nusra, received the weapons with the aid of Prince Bandar, the head of intelligence for the Saudi Arabia.

The connection between the House of Saud and Jabhat al-Nusra is well known, so it is not out of the realm of possibility that this could have happen.

Needless to say, I don’t think that this will delay the attack on Syria at all, because Obama is too concerned about his dick swinging over his “red line” comments, and so wants to maintain his “credibility.”

My guess is that it was Syrian government forces who did this, but I’ve yet to see anything that would justify us dropping missiles on them at this point.

The 4 page declassified report from the White House, which has basically no useful information in it at all, is after the break.

There is a Lot More to Come From Edward Snowden

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The NSA is now admitting that Snowden impersonated NSA officials to get his documents.

I think that this quote is particularly telling:

“Every day, they are learning how brilliant [Snowden] was,” said a former U.S. official with knowledge of the case. “This is why you don’t hire brilliant people for jobs like this. You hire smart people. Brilliant people get you in trouble.”

That comment won the Internet. 

More significantly, they still don’t know what Snowden got his hands on:

The NSA still doesn’t know exactly what Snowden took. But its forensic investigation has included trying to figure out which higher level officials Snowden impersonated online to access the most sensitive documents.

The NSA has as many as 40,000 employees. According to one intelligence official, the NSA is restricting its research to a much smaller group of individuals with access to sensitive documents. Investigators are looking for discrepancies between the real world actions of an NSA employee and the online activities linked to that person’s computer user profile. For example, if an employee was on vacation while the on-line version of the employee was downloading a classified document, it might indicate that someone assumed the employee’s identity.

The NSA has already identified several instances where Snowden borrowed someone else’s user profile to access documents, said the official.

This official called the damage a 12 on a scale of 10 to 12.

If you believe, as I do, that our society and our security have been harmed by the secrecy fetish of our state security apparatus, then this is an unalloyed good.

I Can Haz Metro Pass?

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Click for full size



Awwwww!!!!

The cutest commuters in the New York subway system shut down the Q and B lines for 2 hours:

A major crisis was averted in the subway Thursday on the fe-line.

Two skittish kittens, who have been named Arthur and August, were rescued by a pair of cops and an MTA worker in Brooklyn after their precarious presence near the third rail shut down service for about two hours and shook up the city’s usually stoic straphangers.

Transit workers spotted the furry duo along an open-air stretch of the B and Q lines near Church Ave. at 11 a.m., prompting officials to cut power to the tracks. A transit supervisor “tried to corral them,” but the felines were too fast, said a Metropolitan Transportation Authority spokeswoman.

The kittehs were rescued, and named Arthur and August.

Linkage

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You know, this ain’t in our HR manual:

Link