Madoff Was A Piker — America’s Big Banks Are a Far Larger Fraudulent Ponzi Scheme | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet

Moyers Journal: Madoff Was A Piker — America's Big Banks Are a Far Larger Fraudulent Ponzi Scheme | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet.

I have said this for years. To have believed all the hype over the last fifteen years one would have to believe in magic. Most of the wealth in this country as calculated by the dollar value of all notional currency is inherently false. Call it inflation, call it fraud, it is not real. All pension plans derive their ability to pay from current production regardless of notional contributions. We have an 18th century cash drawer mentality for a economy that is mismatched to that era’s ethos. If that fundamental contridiction is not addressed we will revist this again, the burst bubble, and want in a land of plenty.

It’s Always Hysteria with Some People

The economy is bad, but in no way comparable to the Great Depression. Think 1974 or ’82. Though I respect Mr Obama, I do not support the current policy on helping the economy. It is money-centric games. We need to fight deflation, true. But this current imbroglio is a phenomenom of money and not actual productivity. People need jobs, housing, food. Get that in order, regulate phoney baloney financial manipulation, and that fixes most of our troubles. Careening from one financial scheme to another is no way to fix the economy.

DNC Blasts Boehner For Claiming GOP No Longer Plans To Legislate

The GOP doesn’t deserve the attention it gets. But the Media turn everything into a horse race. The GOP are counter productive lunatic traitors to our country. A pox on them!
More on Video
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Primer on the Subrime Meltdown

http://docs.google.com/TeamPresent?docid=ddp4zq7n_0cdjsr4fn&skipauth=true

Dollar Hegemony Imperilled

America, albeit not all Americans, have benefited from the Dollar as the world reserve currency. The organizational structures and peace that follwed WW2 by definition favored the US. That other nations benefited too, is indisputable yet we benefited most: and many nations suffered under that regime. It may be past time that the post WW2 system can be saved, if that is the case, it is a certainty that it is all the US;s own fault. More and more people and politicians are becoming aware and interested in a solution to the situation. Here is an article in that regard. Suffice to say that military adventurism, and a complete lack of fiscal prudence over a long time brought us here. And lets not blame Keynes, who like Adam Smith and many other thinkers had their theories and writings reduced to some flippant maxim.

Right Doubling Down On Ayn Randism

There are some good comments already. My own 2 cents is that Randinans and Marxists both in common require that human nature changes in order to work. Not too likely I think.
More on Barack Obama
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Worst Week Ever: Republicans Unhinged

I can hardly wait for the further slaughter the GOP will suffer in 2010. Becoming not just the minority party, but a minor party. If the 2008 was the GOP’s Stalingrad, then 2010 will be their Kursk, the death ride of the GOPWaffe, for you historical buffs. Essentially the GOP has decided they weren’t Rightwing enough, consequently they will be slaughtered in 2010 barring unforeseen developments.
More on Michael Steele
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Financial Follies: Is the Fed Encouraging Credit Card Company Foot-Dragging?

The financiers all know, or know of each other. Additionally there is an extreme bias toward capital and away from labor. The Right is never concerned about “moral hazard” when high stakes white collar theft is the issue.
More on Economy
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The Credit Card Debt Crisis: The Next Economic Domino

Oh, and look for a collapse in commercial real estate real soon.
More on Economy
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Lets Start Fixing the Economy, Thoughtfully

We have the rare opportunity to change our economic paradigm, from one designed in the 18th century and tinkered with, to a new 21st century model. Our entire method of raising, allocating, and spending has to become more democratic. We have suffered from severely overcapitalizing our economy as a whole since industrialization. We need to reevaluate what and which function are public and which are private.

Example: the car industry, as a model going forward. Presupposing an affirmative need for this industry in our country, the Federal government should do these things
1. Create a unit at the Commerce Dept. that can buy publicly traded securities. 2. Buy Chrysler, Ford, and GM, lock stock and barrel. 3. Separate the assets and liabilities. 4. The former corporate liabilities to be parceled out to agency sub units for debt liquidation, pension guaranty. and federal employee health insurance. 5. Determine approximately how much of a car industry America needs and retain a total number of plants and employees to do it. The federal gov’t retains ownership of the plants which are then leased by the companies. 6. The restructured, lean companies are each offered to the public through an IPO, whose proceeds are then used to fund the agencies ongoing activities.

This can be done with airlines, other critical industries, and renders moot anti-trust issues, as the new owners, the feds, can contractually obligate companies to some behaviors. Additionally long term planning instead of quarter by quarter stock manipulation becomes a vehicle of real value production.

Marching Thru Georgia

The conflict in Georgia as described in the news is without context or background. First, here’s a linguistic map of the area.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Caucasus-ethnic_en.svg

The Ossetian’s are culturally related to Persians, the Georgians are Orthodox Christians. The Ossetia’s and Georgians have not gotten along, for a very long time, going back to the wars between Rome/Byzantium and Parthia/Persia. So, this goes way back, old old hatreds. Russian troops have done in Ossetia, the same thing we have done in Kosovo. Just as Tibetans want to be free of China, Ossetian’s want to be free of Georgians. As do the Abkhaz people, in the other area of “Georgia” that wants self government. The Ossetia’s know independence is unsustainable, but they prefer the remote and light hand of Russia to the close and heavy hand of Georgia. Let it go.

Georgia is physically as close to Russia as Cuba is to the U.S. The Russians appreciate our interference in Georgia probably as much as we appreciate their interference in Cuba. The United States has no national interests in Georgia; Russia does. Push comes to shove, we won’t go to war for Georgia and should therefore not indicate or imply that we would, it makes the Georgian’s take excessive risks. The oil pipeline doesn’t rise to a national interest of ours, it was never realistic to begin with, because it was predicated on a straight line graph prediction that Russia would remain at the nadir of power similar to the late 90’s.

Straight line predictions are almost never right, and Russia was bound to recover, as it has done before. Students of Russian history know that in 1917, Russia government collapsed the country fell apart in chaos, revolution and civil war. Twenty Eight years later in 1945 they were the greatest land power on the planet. They had beaten the vaunted German Wehrmacht and planted their flags in nine capital cities. They conquered Manchuria and Korea, a territory as large as Western Europe in around three weeks. This easily surpasses the early Wehrmacht success in Poland and France. And they stopped. And they proved reasonable over Finland. Russia will have Abkhazia and Ossetia, the real question is will they have Georgia proper too. Russia wins any fight over that.

We Americans need to take stock, of our true national interests and the real world. The nonsensical chest thumping since the fall of the USSR has cost us a lot. Missed opportunities, unproductive ill will, diminution of goodwill, and failure. The fall of the USSR and its meaning has not sunk in too many in the U.S., I’m looking at you Dick Cheney, but that is its own blog topic. Our attempts to apply a different standard to our actions than the actions of other countries is pointless feel good rhetoric. Our national geographic and historical ignorance serve us ill. NATO has got to pull back to Western European countries only, in this I include the Baltic States, Finland, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Croatia, and exclude Turkey and Greece. See, the funny thing is we are actually less powerful, not more powerful with the USSR gone. Against the USSR/East bloc we could assert ourselves with cheap nukes. Against a chaotic world, we can only assert ourselves with infantry, and we don’t have nearly enough, not remotely. The stink of our foreign policy failures is rife. Let’s not further add to the list.

The Legacy of President Wilson

Wilson’s legacy is multi-faceted, with each of the pieces bad. 1. Going to war without a vital interest at stake. 2. Elevating abstract ideals, over real world empiricism. 3. Double-think: expanding segregation while speaking of national self determination, democracy, and freedom. 4. Unconstitutional imprisonment and silencing of dissenters. 5. Refusing to acknowledge failure, as though reality can be influenced in such a manner. There is more, but time and space are limited. The current President comes right out of the Wilsonian vision, or as I call it, delusion: John McCain too. Barack Obama seems a practical man, a pragmatist and an optimist too. Time will tell.