My son was talking to me as I was perusing the blog Wall Street Jackass, and he asked if everyone on Wall Street was a jackass.
I told him, “No, they have janitors there too.”
Category: Philosophy
Some Insights into the Greek Debt Crisis
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
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.
Seen on Facebook
Deep Thought
The AFA and the rest of the anti-gay bigots should understand something: You do not want to f%$# with Clint.
H/t Bob Eggleton
Quote of the day
On the virtues of conceding points to your opponent at the start of negotiations:
It’s a case study in the perils of offering concessions to your opponents before negotiations have begun. And it will force Democrats in both chambers, but particularly in the Senate, to decide whether to pass a proposal comprised of measures Obama’s backed in the past, even though they’ve been cherry picked to essentially constitute a Republican piece of legislation. If Senate Dems block the measure, Republicans will accuse them of wanting to pick political fights instead of passing Obama jobs legislation. If Dems pass the measure, and Obama signs it, the GOP can cite it as evidence that they’re not simply standing in the way of action on the economy.
Go Read the Shrill One
So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.
Go read the rest.
As an aside, the reaction of the 1% does not reflect the positions of people who feel that they truly deserve their prestige and power.
Deep down, they know that they are parasitic frauds, and they are terrified at being exposed.
Deep Thought
I got nothing add here:
Don’t Let the Door Hit Your Ass On the Way Out
Golf clap on your way out!
Bill O’Reilly is mad about potential tax increases, and he’s threatening to go Gault, and quit his job at Fox News.
Hell if higher taxes can make him shut the f%$# up, raise my taxes too.
It’s money well spent.
I’ve Been Saying This for Years, But Who Listens to Me
I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!
POGO has reviewed cases where private contractors have assumed government functions, and in the overwhelming majority of the cases (33 out of 35) federal employees were cheaper than contractors:
Executive Summary
Based on the current public debate regarding the salary comparisons of federal and private sector employees, the Project On Government Oversight (POGO)[1] decided to take on the task of doing what others have not—comparing total annual compensation for federal and private sector employees with federal contractor billing rates in order to determine whether the current costs of federal service contracting serves the public interest.The current debate over pay differentials largely relies on the theory that the government pays private sector compensation rates when it outsources services. This report proves otherwise: in fact, it shows that the government actually pays service contractors at rates far exceeding the cost of employing federal employees to perform comparable functions.
POGO’s study analyzed the total compensation paid to federal and private sector employees, and annual billing rates for contractor employees across 35 occupational classifications covering over 550 service activities. Our findings were shocking—POGO estimates the government pays billions more annually in taxpayer dollars to hire contractors than it would to hire federal employees to perform comparable services. Specifically, POGO’s study shows that the federal government approves service contract billing rates—deemed fair and reasonable—that pay contractors 1.83 times more than the government pays federal employees in total compensation, and more than 2 times the total compensation paid in the private sector for comparable services.
Additional key findings include:
- Federal government employees were less expensive than contractors in 33 of the 35 occupational classifications POGO reviewed.
- In one instance, contractor billing rates were nearly 5 times more than the full compensation paid to federal employees performing comparable services.
- Private sector compensation was lower than contractor billing rates in all 35 occupational classifications we reviewed.
- The federal government has failed to determine how much money it saves or wastes by outsourcing, insourcing, or retaining services, and has no system for doing so.
POGO’s investigation highlights two basic facts about outsourcing government work to contractors. First, comparing federal to private sector compensation reveals nothing about what it actually costs the government to outsource services. The only analysis that will shed light on the true costs of government is that of contractor billing rates and the full cost of employing federal employees to perform comparable work. The Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan recently completed a fundamental study of costs, and found that, in certain contingency operations, although savings resulted from hiring local or third-country nationals, military and civilian employees cost less than hiring American contractors.Second, the federal government is not doing a good job of obtaining genuine market prices, and therefore the savings often promised in connection with outsourcing services are not being realized. The argument for outsourcing services is that, by outsourcing services on which the government holds a monopoly, free market competition will result in efficiencies and save taxpayer dollars. But our study showed that using contractors to perform services may actually increase rather than decrease costs to the taxpayers.
The big growth in the use in contractors began under the 1st Bush administration with his Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, being at the vanguard of such efforts.
And then he went to run Halliburton, where he got millions to help them get billions of the slush funds that he set up.
Private contracting was never about saving the taxpayer money, it was about two things: reducing the capabilities of the government (because guvment is ebil), and creating an opportunity for corruption and graft.
It turns out that there are some unlikely voices who might agree, specifically Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Diane Feinstein* and new CIA director David Petraeus, are calling for drastic reductions of the use of contractors by the intelligence community:
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who chairs the Intelligence Committee, pointed out the broken promise at a hearing Tuesday, noting that the intelligence community is not living up to a commitment to reduce private contractors by 5 percent a year.
“We had an agreement in 2009 to reduce [intelligence community] contractor numbers by 5 percent a year, but it’s clear that progress has not been maintained and sufficient cuts are not being made,” Feinstein told a joint-hearing of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees to assess progress in U.S. intelligence gathering and analysis over the last ten years.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence reported that “core contractors,” meaning those who directly augment the government’s intelligence staffs, accounted for 23 percent of the total intelligence community workforce, down only 1 percent from the year before, Feinstein pointed out.
………
One week into his new role as CIA director, David Petraeus testified Thursday that contractors are at the top of his list of potential cuts in the new era of belt-tightening.
“Contractors – we’re looking very hard at that as one of the areas we can achieve some savings,” Petraeus said, recognizing the fact that many contractors have been devoted partners and have died in service to their country.
Nice to see some of the PTB getting a clue on this.
*Full disclosure, my great grandfather, Harry Goldman, and her grandfather, Sam Goldman were brothers, though we have never met, either in person or electronically.
Osama bin Laden Won
OK, it’s the 10th anniversary of 911, and looking back, I can draw no other conclusion.
As a result of the events of that day we are:
- Embroiled in two ruinously expensive wars, neither of which has any meaningful end in sight.
- Have no money for even the most basic infrastructure.
- Have set up a state security apparatus that is structured, and frequently functions, as the core pillar of a police state.
- Have convinced the generation after mine that the idea of a unipolar world, with US military and Hegemony is foolish.
- Has turned us into torturers.
- Has set to policies that create more terrorists.
- Has massively expanded and radicalized, the right wing.
I would suggest that anyone who hasn’t read Eric Frank Russell’s magnum opus Wasp, in which a man is sent to be an agent provocateur on the planet of an empire at war with Earth, and his mission is not to collect intelligence or do damage, but rather to provoke an overreaction by the authorities:
“Phew!” Mowry raised his eyebrows.
“Finally, let’s consider this auto smash. We know the cause; the survivor was able to tell us before he died. He said the driver lost control at high speed while swiping at a wasp which had flown in through a window and started buzzing around his face.”
“It nearly happened to me once.”
Ignoring that, Wolf went on, “The weight of a wasp is under half an ounce. Compared with a human being its size is minute, its strength negligible. Its sole armament is a tiny syringe holding a drop of irritant, formic acid, and in this case it didn’t even use it. Nevertheless it killed four big men and converted a large, powerful car into a heap of scrap.”
………
“However,” Wolf went on, “the problem becomes less formidable than it looks if we bear in mind that one man can shake a government, two men temporarily can put down an army twenty-seven thousands strong, or one small wasp can slay four comparative giants and destroy their huge machine into the bargain.” He paused, watching the other for effect, continued, “Which means that by scrawling suitable words upon a wall, the right man in the right place at the right time might immobilize an armoured division with the aid of nothing more than a piece of chalk.”
The country has changed, and none of these changes to our benefit, and none of them were really required, but rather the product of mindless over-reaction.
We are those drivers in that doomed car.
The Term for This Is Chillul Hashem*
In this case, it’s “Rabbi” Moshe Zigelman, who is refusing to testify in a money laundering and tax evasion trial:
As U.S. District Judge Margaret Morrow contemplated federal law from her bench Wednesday morning, more than a dozen ultra-orthodox Jewish men with yarmulkes and sidelocks looked on in the courtroom. One held open a gilt-edged, elaborately embossed copy of the Shulchan Aruch, a book of Jewish law, tracing lines of the Hebrew text with his finger.
Appearing before the judge was Rabbi Moshe Zigelman, a 64-year-old devout Hasid who was refusing to testify before a federal grand jury, citing an ancient Jewish principle that forbids informing on other Jews.
Zigelman was ordered to testify in a tax-evasion case involving his Brooklyn-based Hasidic sect Spinka. He had earlier invoked the same principle, known as mesira, when he pleaded guilty to his part in the scheme in 2008 but refused to cooperate with authorities or testify in trial. He was sentenced to two years in prison.
What was going on here is that they were accepting “donations”, which the donors declared on their taxes, and then, after taking about 10-20% vigorish, they funneled funds back to the donors via an Israeli bank.(Wiki here)
First, lets be clear that clergy privilege does not apply here. This creep was a co-conspirator, not someone providing counseling.
What’s more, according to Shmarya Rosenberg’s excellent analysis, as well as those of normative Jewish scholars, mesira does not apply:
There are textbook exceptions to mesira even for those who hold that mesira applies in a democracy.
One of those exceptions is when the government knows certain people are guilty but needs testimony from one of them or another Jew to convict or capture the others. (In other words, there is a difference between speculation and knowledge.
Another exception is when refusing to give the government the information makes it seem as if Jews (or Orthodox Jews) do not follow or respect the country’s laws.
Hasidim use mesira to hide crimes and to enforce order in their communities.
It has nothing to do with the original intent of the mesira law, which was meant to save Jews from unjust punishments meted out by antisemitic governments, and from the unscrupulous Jews who used informing to hurt business opponents and social enemies, to extort them, and to gain favor from antisemitic government officials.
But in a democracy like the US, the fear of antisemitic unjust punishments does not apply.
The law of mesira would then only apply to spiteful informing done to settle personal grudges and the like, and it would not apply if the government was already convinced the subject is guilty.
In Rabbi Moshe Zigelman’s case, the government already knows Zigelman is guilty of money laundering, and it has already put the Spinka rebbe and others in prison. And it knows there are dozens, if not hundreds, of other co-conspirators, and it knows many of their names.
This is actually far more charitable than I would be.
Zigelman is not just a witness, he is an active co-conspirator, who is using mesira to cover his own corrupt tuchas.†
It is also, of course a Shanda before the Goyim, in that it allows the antisemites of the world to claim that Jews consider themselves above the law and cover up for each other.
This makes a mockery of the concept of Or LaGoyim,‡, which stipulates that Jews are to be held to higher standards, and not cover up each others corruption.
*Literally, a ““Desecration of God’s Name.”
†Ass.
‡Light unto the nations.
Pimping My Brother’s Blog
That’s the Chicago Way
My older (and even hairier, as unbelievable as it seems) brother segues off my report of the Republican party in Gabrielle Giffords district raffling off the same sort of gun that she was shot with to observe that this behavior will get worse unless their opposition goes after the for this:
What I found interesting was one section of a quote here that Miller made about the reactionary bloc, who he described as being:
“…’my way or the highway’ wing of the GOP who don’t pay much thought to the political fallout [emphasis added] from their actions…”
This is a “curious incident of the dog in the night-time” (The Silver Blaze).
There is no fallout.
There is no a concerted campaign to broadcast and hammer this sort of actions, despite the fact this tactic has been so successful for the reactionary bloc.
Where are the adds from the DNC, MoveOn, and rest of the ‘progressive’ community calling this out, pointing out that this sort of behavior is the core of the political right.
It is the same point that Sean Connery makes in The Untouchables.
I share his pessimism that, “this idea doesn’t seem to percolate through the skulls of people who think community organizing, or triangulation, or patronage is the peak of politics. So we drift on unarmed.”
Until we find people who understand the idea that all negotiations stem from perceived power, and Barack Obama is not one of these people, we will continue to have the “Adults in the room” held hostage by the terrorists.
Deep Thought
What Bill Maher Says…
Quote of the Day
I just realised that plenty of mainstream US Democrats, having spent the last however long castigating people to the left of them for perceiving some progressive tendencies in the government of Fidel Castro, are now reduced to supporting the re-election of a President who imprisons people without human rights in Cuba, but who has made excellent advances in the field of bringing healthcare to the poor.
It’s like reading The Onion. I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry, though I think that any improvements on bringing healthcare to the poor is over stated.
F%$# You Barry
As you may or not be aware, the Obama administration has regular meetings with liberal groups, it’s called “Common Purpose”, but it’s better known as the “Veal Pen”.
It’s basically used to ensure that they don’t do anything of value, ever, because the Obama staffers are control freaks, and because they are too busy pandering to reactionaries.
Well, things got a bit stroppy at the last veal pen, and so a senior administration official blamed liberals for Obama’s craven surrender:
Yesterday, Sperling faced a series of questions about the White House’s concessions on the debt ceiling fight and its inability to move in the direction of new taxes or revenues. Progressive consultant Mike Lux, the sources said, summed up the liberal concern, producing what a participant described as an “extremely defensive” response from Sperling.
Sperling, a person involved said, pointed his finger at liberal groups, which he said hadn’t done enough to highlight what he saw as the positive side of the debt package — a message that didn’t go over well with participants.
There is always the excuse that it’s just one person it’s not representative of the administration attitudes, but you hear this sort of crap over, and over, and over again from members of the administration, including one Barack Hussein Obama.
Basically, it’s always liberals fault, and they hate those uncouth hippies, and they know that if they punch them hard enough, that everything till turn out well.
H/t Americablog.
Quote of the Day
I feel about this the way I feel about people who keep grizzly bears and gorillas and tigers as pets. They keep animals that outweigh them as pampered houseguests, feeding them raw salmon and steak and putting cute little collars on them and sh%$, and then are ABSOLUTELY SHOCKED when their “best friends” get bored one day and eat their faces.
(%$ mine)
She was noting that David Frum is shocked, absolutely shocked, that the modern Republican party has been taken over by the insane fringe that they have pandered to for decades.
The question was never “if” but when the inmates would seize the asylum.
Note that Frum is what passes for a deep thinker from the ‘Phants.
Here’s a Bit of Etiquette for All You Pie Flingers
If you are going to fling a pie at some rich pig as a way of publicly taking them down a peg, the preferred, and traditional, pie is a cream pie, but you should include both a crust and a filling, even if the latter is just whipped cream (kind of lame).
That being said, I do not approve of the actions of comedian and political activist Jonathan “Jonnie Marbles” May-Bowles, who flung a pie tin full of shaving cream at Rupert Murdoch when he was testifying before Parliament. (His wife deflected the projectile, that’s love … and good reflexes)
Mr. May-Bowles, if you are to fling a pie at Rupert Murdoch, make it a real pie.
How the Russians Develop Weapons
The Russians have now successfully test-launched their Bulava missile:
Russia successfully tested on Tuesday its new Bulava intercontinental missile which Moscow aims to make the cornerstone of its nuclear arsenal over the next decade.
The Defense Ministry said the 12-meter long Bulava, or Mace, fired from a submarine near Russia’s border with Finland, successfully hit its target some 6,000 km (3,370 miles) away on the peninsula of Kamchatka in Russia’s far east.
“The launch was successful in all respects. The Bulava missile delivered its warhead to the target area in the Kura testing site in the Kamchatka Peninsula region,” spokesman Colonel Igor Konashenkov told Interfax.
The Bulava, which will face four more trials this year before being introduced into service this year or next, had failed half of its previous fourteen trials, calling into question the expensive missile program.
The program was never in serious question.
The Russians do missile testing: test, fix, test, fix.
Americans just do tests to validate their analysis, we operate under the assumption that our missiles will, after a few decades of simulation and systems analysis will work perfectly out of the box.
One of these methods is faster and cheaper, but it is not ours, and catches serious problems early enough that when you do catch a stinker, you don’t have so much invested in your techno whiz bang that you cannot abandon it.