Category: Good Writing

It Appears that My Prescription for Europe is Not Completely Nuts

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Because Roosevelt Institute fellow Marshall Auerback thinks that the solution is to get Germany out of the Euro zone as well:

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Perhaps we’re looking at this the wrong way around: Given the continued German aversion to more broadly-based pan European style fiscal programs, which its populace continues to see as nothing but bailouts for lazy Mediterranean free-loaders, there is another way to solve the euro crisis.

Let Germany leave the euro zone.

Let’s leave aside the politics for a moment as there are many who believe that a German exit from the euro zone in effect means the end of the euro because a number of other countries would leave.

So consider this exercise solely from an economic context: The likely result of a German exit would be a huge surge in the value of the newly reconstituted DM. In effect, then, everybody devalues against the economic powerhouse which is Germany and the onus for fiscal reflation is now placed on the most recalcitrant member of the European Union. Germany will likely have to bail out its banks, but this is more politically palatable than, say, bailing out the Greek banks (at least from the perspective of the German populace).

I’m not sure if it is reassuring or terrifying that some people who actually know about this sh%$ are agreeing with me.

Fundamentally, the Euro, at Germany’s insistence, was constructed as a bankster’s paradise, and their actions since the meltdown have only made this worse.

Read the full article, and the comment thread, it’s good stuff.

Keith is Back

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Keith Olbermann has a special comment about the reactions to Michael Moore’s comments about the killing of Osama bin Laden.

While he disagrees with Moore, in that he [Olbermann] is OK with the idea that the US sent out a kill team with no real plans to capture of al-Qaeda’s founder, he finds the unrelenting attacks of Michael Moore’s character and patriotism by the Obama fanboi to be completely contemptible, and he notes the parallels to the attacks against people who questioned George W. Bush’s campaign of lies to get us to invade Iraq:

Some of us – not enough — questioned the official story in 2002 and 2003. But few of us who did so, had as much to lose as did Michael Moore. We were accused of “intellectual liberal hand-wringing” – even by supposedly liberal commentators on supposedly liberal television networks. We were dismissed, and demonized.

And to this day, even though Michael Moore was right, and George Bush was wrong, and even though Michael Moore was right, and Newt Gingrich was wrong, and even though Michael Moore was right, and John Boehner was wrong – to this day it is Moore who is demonized by the Republican Cult in ways that Bush and Gingrich and Boehner are not demonized by the American Left.

Instead, Moore, himself, now gets demonized in part, by the American left.

I want Michael Moore to question everything. I want him even to repeat the ten tweets he had in the aftermath of the killing of Bin Laden, in which he picked up on his theme from three years ago, when he told Larry King that the story that Bin Laden was living in caves, moving from one to the other, was palpable nonsense, that the only millionaire who willingly lived in a cave was Batman, and he only went there to change costumes.

I want Michael Moore, and every other Michael Moore, to remind us that, indeed, “Pakistan just couldn’t be seen as participating with us” and that, indeed, “the story has changed four times now in four days” and that, indeed, “As long as he wasn’t conducting terror, Osama Bin Laden alive served a purpose. Someone should just fess up: the war industry needs fear to make (money).”

Towards the end of his tenure at MSNBC, I thought that he had kind of lost his edge, but it appears that he’s back, and he’s right.

FYI, he is specifically calling out MSNBC commentator Ed Schultz, who has been an Obama fanboi for as long as I’ve followed who said, “The fact of the matter is, the intellectual liberal hand-wringing needs to stop in this country. People who voted for President Obama had to know he was willing to go anywhere at anytime to take out the world’s number one terrorist,” which is a truly contemptible attempt to squelch debate.

Between Schultz’s Obama man crush, and the unbearable inside-the-beltway conventional thinking wankfest of Lawrence O’Donnell, all I watch these days on MSNBC is Rachael Maddow.

I cannot wait for his new show on Current TV on June 20.

God Bless The Onion

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I really cannot add anything to the article, but it needs to be shared:

Budget Mix-Up Provides Nation’s Schools With Enough Money To Properly Educate Students

WASHINGTON—According to bewildered and contrite legislators, a major budgetary mix-up this week inadvertently provided the nation’s public schools with enough funding and resources to properly educate students.

Sources in the Congressional Budget Office reported that as a result of a clerical error, $80 billion earmarked for national defense was accidentally sent to the Department of Education, furnishing schools with the necessary funds to buy new textbooks, offer more academic resources, hire better teachers, promote student achievement, and foster educational excellence—an oversight that apologetic officials called a “huge mistake.”

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Read the rest.

Matt Taibbi is Wrong

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This Ain’t a “Pass the Popcorn” moment

Matt Taibbi notes that Eric Schneiderman, the New York State Attorney General is investigating irregularities in securitization of mortgage loans, and he is doing a happy dance at what looks like slam dunk at a real investigation, and prosecution, of the malefactors at the center of the financial crisis:

This investigation has the potential to be a Mother of All Nightmares situation for the banks for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the decision to go after the securitization process is a total prosecutorial bullseye. This is the ugly heart of the wide-scale fraud scheme of the bubble era. Again, the business model during this time was a giant bait-and-switch scam. Sleazy lenders like Countrywide and New Century first created huge masses of bad loans, committing every conceivable kind of fraud to get people into loans (from doctoring income statements with white-out to phonying FICO scores to engineering fake appraisals). They then moved the bad loans quickly to the big banks, which pooled them and chopped them up (this is the “securitization” process), sprinkled hocus-pocus math on them, and them sold them to suckers around the world as AAA-rated securities.

The questions Schneiderman will seek to answer are these: did the banks securitize loans they knew were fraudulent, throwing the rotten mortgages into the stew before serving them to customers? Did they also commit insurance fraud by duping the bond insurers (known as “monoline” insurers) into thinking the mortgages were not as risky as they really were? And did they participate in the fraud scheme on a more basic level by lending huge amounts of money to the Countrywides of the world, knowing that they in turn would immediately use that money to create the bad loans? In other words, did the banks finance the fraud in addition to brokering it?

(emphasis original)

He’s right on the basic facts, but he’s wrong on what happens next.

There very well may be a settlement, with no admission of wrongdoing, but in terms for real consequences towards the Vampire Squid and the rest of the universe on Wall Street, nothing meaningful is going to happen.

Either the Feds get involved, and block Schneiderman, or he gets destroyed like Eliot Spitzer was, or he, or the state of New York, gets bought off, but we are not going to see the laws applied to people like this, despite pervasive criminality involved, because we live in their world, and they just rent it back to us.

What Krugman Says

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He says what needs to be said on the debt ceiling negotiations:

According to Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, Mr. Obama has told Democrats not to draw any “line in the sand” in debt negotiations. Well, count me among those who find this strategy completely baffling. At some point — and sooner rather than later — the president has to draw a line. Otherwise, he might as well move out of the White House, and hand the keys over to the Tea Party.

Of course, since Barack Obama seems incapable of drawing such lines, I’m thinking that the only question will be whether or not the ‘Phants use lube before having their way with the American people.

Actually, the ‘Phants won’t use lube.

People With Way Too Much Free Time…

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Perusing what Uncle Ted called “a series of tubes,” I came across Think Tank: The Economics of Death Star Planet Destruction:

Lee
What’s the economic calculus behind the Empire’s tactic of A) building a Death Star, B) intimidating planets into submission with the threat of destruction, and C) actually carrying through with said destruction if the planet doesn’t comply?

Doesn’t the Empire take a huge economic loss from the lost productivity of an entire planet? They were presumably paying taxes and providing resources to the rest of the Empire. Presumably the loss of that planet’s output would have to be made up by increased output from other planets that were either slacking in productivity due to rebellion or threatening to rebel and withdraw from the Empire altogether. It doesn’t seem to make good economic sense.

McNeil
This is a pretty standard imperial tactic for dealing with rebellion. The Romans would do this in the eastern empire every once in a while. A city would become a hotbed of rebellion, threatening to pull other cities into the action. The Romans would wipe out that one city, no matter how wealthy (Palmyra comes to mind) to put any other potential rebels on notice. Kind of like a mastectomy. You lose one productive part of the body in order to keep cancer from spreading.

…………

Lee and Mcneil, along with Perich, Fenzel and Stokes (read the whole thing provide an interesting dialogue on economics and governance that is (I think) unintentionally a rather trenchant analysis of the current American imperial hubris.

Just read it.

If You Want a Good Primer on the F-35’s Electrical Power Systems…

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And the problems therein, go read Bill Sweetman’s latest on the latest problem with the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF).

Basically, it comes down to using bleeding edge technology, which, when juxtaposed with frantic weight reduction efforts, creates an absolute mess, just as it has with the failed bulkhead, the 360 degree vision system helmet and HUDless cockpit, etc.:

Another observation — relevant to future programs — is that the electrical problems (both this one and the AA-1 incident) have arisen from the use of a new system which, while it may have net advantages, is not core to the aircraft’s capability — you could in theory build a short-takeoff-and-landing stealth fighter without it.

The same goes for another headache area, the wide-field-of-view video helmet and HUD-less cockpit. The lesson may be that any innovations that fall into the nice-to-have rather than mission-essential capability should be low-risk when you incorporate them into the design.

In the larger picture, this is actually the alpha and omega of weapons development.

Too much whiz-bang for too much bucks.

On the 150th Anniversary of the Start of the Civil War……

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Here is a good survey of the lies that southerners tell about the war.

In addition to the normal lies, like it not being about slavery, it also reveals that the in almost all the states in question, a majority of the population did not want secession.

Instead, the process was manipulated by the slave holders to get the desired results.

The closer you look at it, the more the myth of the noble lost cause looks like a slimy con game played by the richest people in the south on the average person in the south.

Quote of the Day

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From a discussion thread on Matthew Yglesias post:

Jasper_in_Boston 1 day ago

Matt: the president’s rhetoric about the economy has been off key since, er, February 2009. This is nothing new. Instead of conservatives worrying that he’s a secret Kenyan Shariast, I think liberals should be worrrying he’s a Grover Norquist deep implant.

DonxWilliams 1 day ago in reply to Jasper_in_Boston

Not really — there are strong differences between Obama and Norquist.

For example, Grover Norquist thinks we have too many black people locked up in prison:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/04/08/MNVK1IS92I.DTL

Heh.

Jon Stewart Says It All…

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There Should be a Nobel Prize for This!

I really wish that I had half his wit.

I guess that this bit of genius is all about the fact that they are dealing with a very real sadness:  Glen Beck could make their writing a lot easier. 

When Beck was on a roll, they could finish writing the script by lunch, and adjourn to a coke infused orgy with transsexual prostitutes in the afternoon.

Or maybe they just played games on their iPhones in the afternoon.

Neil Barofsky Opening Up a Jar of Whup Ass on Timmy “Eddie Haskell” Geithner

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Yes, it’s from a week ago, but it’s a must read:

TWO and a half years ago, Congress passed the legislation that bailed out the country’s banks. The government has declared its mission accomplished, calling the program remarkably effective “by any objective measure.” On my last day as the special inspector general of the bailout program, I regret to say that I strongly disagree. The bank bailout, more formally called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, failed to meet some of its most important goals.

From the perspective of the largest financial institutions, the glowing assessment is warranted: billions of dollars in taxpayer money allowed institutions that were on the brink of collapse not only to survive but even to flourish. These banks now enjoy record profits and the seemingly permanent competitive advantage that accompanies being deemed “too big to fail.”

Though there is no question that the country benefited by avoiding a meltdown of the financial system, this cannot be the only yardstick by which TARP’s legacy is measured. The legislation that created TARP, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, had far broader goals, including protecting home values and preserving homeownership.

These Main Street-oriented goals were not, as the Treasury Department is now suggesting, mere window dressing that needed only to be taken “into account.” Rather, they were a central part of the compromise with reluctant members of Congress to cast a vote that in many cases proved to be political suicide.

Just go read the it.

I Don’t Know Whether to Laugh or to Cry

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I give up!

Jon Stewart riffs on the fact that while every right wing ratf%$# out there can say that unions are causing deficits, it appears that no one at all gives a damn that GE effectively paid a negative sixty percent income tax in 2010, while cutting US jobs and shipping them overseas.

Of course, there was but one thing that the Obama administration could do: Make GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt the chairman of a prestigious commission to explore how to create jobs in the United States.

I think that between a choice of laughing and crying, I will go with sleeping like a baby: I will wake up every few hours screaming.

The Obama Doctrine…

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Courtesy of Dan Nexon:

Humanitarian-intervention-against-militarily-weak-fossil-fuel-producing-countries-in-strategically-important-regions-that-are-also-located-near-many-large-NATO-military-bases-and-are-run-by-dictators-who-kind-of-piss-us-off-and-have-no-powerful-allies Doctrine

And he is right: This is not the stuff of grand strategy.

Here’s a Surprise

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Someone has discovered the handwritten notes of Dr. Bruce Jessen, a psychologist who helped design the CIA’s torture program, and it shows that the goal of the program was torture and the exploitation of prisoners. I would further add that the documents show that he knew that torture did not work, and simply produced false statements, which means that there was no purpose to the program beyond producing false propaganda:

Bush administration officials have long asserted that the torture techniques used on “war on terror” detainees were utilized as a last resort in an effort to gain actionable intelligence to thwart pending terrorist attacks against the United States and its interests abroad.

But the handwritten notes obtained exclusively by Truthout drafted two decades ago by Dr. John Bruce Jessen, the psychologist who was under contract to the CIA and credited as being one of the architects of the government’s top-secret torture program, tell a dramatically different story about the reasons detainees were brutalized and it was not just about obtaining intelligence. Rather, as Jessen’s notes explain, torture was used to “exploit” detainees, that is, to break them down physically and mentally, in order to get them to “collaborate” with government authorities. Jessen’s notes emphasize how a “detainer” uses the stresses of detention to produce the appearance of compliance in a prisoner.

But no prosecutions, because Barack Obama is too busy torturing his own whistle blowers.

Why Dr. Jessen still has a medical license is beyond me.

Read the whole article, it’s extensive and chilling.

Quote of the Day

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There has been a bit of discussion about whether or not economics is truly a science going around the economics blogs, and Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution makes what I think is the definitive comment on whether it is the dismal science, or just dismal:

I conclude that economics is not yet a science. Economics is more like a science when people do not care about the outcomes.