Google Destroying Blogspot?

or just making my life more difficult. We blogspotters have been forced onto an interface that looks more like Wordpress, which as far as I can tell is clunkier and gives us less control. I've considered migrating to Wordpress before – I could host my blogs on my own server and have greater privacy, etc. – but rejected it because the blogspot user interface was superior. Google has chosen to trash that advantage.

Testing image control and positioning with the image right.

Ok, maybe I can get used to this, but where the h*ll do I enter labels? 

Robert Cauble's Guy Debord

A little long, but a wonderful ride; via notbored.org.

Why "Getting Back to Normal" is Not an Option

Great article by Sara Robinson at Alternet, summarizing three important kinds of shift we may now face:

1. Per Joseph Stiglitz, we should stop waiting for the economy to "get back to normal"; it ain't gonna happen, because we face a once-in-a-lifetime shift in the basis for wealth creation, from a system based on manufacturing to one based on information. We have too many manufacturing workers and too few information workers. "Austerity and debt reduction will get us nowhere"; "[t]he current economic crisis is doomed to last exactly as long as we put off building [the workforce] necessary to the new information economy."


2. Per Thomas Homer-Dixon, empires rise and fall based on their control of the dominant energy supply, and the US also faces a shift from oil to renewables. He adduces evidence that no empire has ever survived such a shift, because "the reigning hegemons are always too deeply invested in the current system to recognize the change, let alone repond to it in time."
   
   
3. Per Gar Alperovitz, Jeffery Sachs, and Umair Haque, the real shift relates to the nature of our capitalist system. Haque identifies two kinds of good: those having "thin" value, typified by Big Macs, Hummers, and McMansions, tend to be artificial, unsustainable, and meaningless to anyone but the people who produce and consume them. Those having "thick" value tend to be sustainable and to have potential effects or uses that are moral or that multiply meaningfulness.
   
   Alperovitz points toward the growth in worker- or consumer-owned cooperative businesses and co-ops which, if continued, could result in a massive redistribution of labor and wealth. "America’s 30,000 cooperatives provide over 2 million jobs [, and t]he UN has declared 2012 to be the Year of the Co-Op, in recognition of the fact that nearly half the world’s population now belongs to cooperatives."

The sooner we let go of our assumption that going back to the way things were is desirable or even possible, the more we'll be able to help create the new world that's now arising.

Haiti: "Stop Them Before They Shock Again"

Obama: a Corporate Marketing Creation

John Pilger is an Australian journalist and documentary maker. He has twice won Britain's Journalist of the Year Award, and his documentaries have received academy awards in Britain and the US. You can see the rest of the speech here; remember to rate it up.



Please go rate this up on YouTube (click on the picture above). We cannot begin to hold them accountable, until we understand what they need to be held accountable for.

GREAT Article on AIG and the Bail-Out

in Rolling Stone.

(Seems like they and The New Yorker are among the few print media left in the U.S. doing real journalism anymore. Wonder if they're suffering as much as the print media owned/eviscerated by conservatives {i.e., most of the rest})?

Ongoing Consolidation of Organics in the Hands of Big Business

Great charts etc. here. Via HuffPo.

Could We PLEASE Get this Straight Re- AIG:

IT'S NOT THE BONUSES.

Ok, the bonuses are bad; but they're the LEAST of the problems with what's going on.

AIG is insolvent; it lacks assets or income sufficient to pay off its obligations to its existing creditors.

When you or I get into this situation, if we fail to file bankruptcy, our creditors can force us into it, to provide for an orderly liquidation of our assets and debts. We have to fully disclose all of both. Our assets are sold on terms reasonable under current conditions, and the proceeds are divided fairly among our creditors -- i.e., none of the unsecured creditors get 100% on the dollar owed them, but they all get the same percent -- there's no favoritism.

AND, if you or I get into this situation, NO new creditors come along to give us yet more money. New creditors are on notice that we're insolvent and, guess what, they don't lend us any more money! Our existing creditors can give us more or less time to try to work things out; but ultimately, THEY bear the brunt of their original and/or subsequently mistaken judgments -- not new creditors.

This is what should happen to AIG.

Instead, AIG is NOT in bankruptcy, because its existing creditors would like us taxpayers to step in as new creditors and throw enough new, bailout money into AIG so the existing creditors won't actually have to suffer any losses -- WE will be the losers, instead of them.

So, that's where our tax money's going: to save AIG's existing creditors from the consequences of their mistakes in acquiring debt obligations of AIG. THAT is what is happening right now.

The bonuses are TRIVIAL compared to the amounts being paid to AIG's existing creditors.

AIG is just a conduit. The real robbers are its creditors, Goldman Sachs -- surprise! -- being one of the biggest.

As usual, Elliott Spitzer's nailing it:

The Real AIG Scandal
It's not the bonuses. It's that AIG's counterparties are getting paid back in full.
By Eliot Spitzer Posted Tuesday, March 17, 2009, at 10:41 AM ET

Everybody is rushing to condemn AIG's bonuses, but this simple scandal is obscuring the real disgrace at the insurance giant: Why are AIG's counterparties getting paid back in full, to the tune of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars?

For the answer to this question, we need to go back to the very first decision to bail out AIG, made, we are told, by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, then-New York Fed official Timothy Geithner, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke last fall. Post-Lehman's collapse, they feared a systemic failure could be triggered by AIG's inability to pay the counterparties to all the sophisticated instruments AIG had sold. And who were AIG's trading partners? No shock here: Goldman, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, and on it goes. So now we know for sure what we already surmised: The AIG bailout has been a way to hide an enormous second round of cash to the same group that had received TARP money already.

It all appears, once again, to be the same insiders protecting themselves against sharing the pain and risk of their own bad adventure. The payments to AIG's counterparties are justified with an appeal to the sanctity of contract. If AIG's contracts turned out to be shaky, the theory goes, then the whole edifice of the financial system would collapse.

But wait a moment, aren't we in the midst of reopening contracts all over the place to share the burden of this crisis? From raising taxes—income taxes to sales taxes—to properly reopening labor contracts, we are all being asked to pitch in and carry our share of the burden. Workers around the country are being asked to take pay cuts and accept shorter work weeks so that colleagues won't be laid off. Why can't Wall Street royalty shoulder some of the burden? Why did Goldman have to get back 100 cents on the dollar? Didn't we already give Goldman a $25 billion capital infusion, and aren't they sitting on more than $100 billion in cash? Haven't we been told recently that they are beginning to come back to fiscal stability? If that is so, couldn't they have accepted a discount, and couldn't they have agreed to certain conditions before the AIG dollars—that is, our dollars—flowed?

More at Slate.com; see also Newsday.

The bonuses are just a diversion.

Re- the Death of Journalism

Excellent article in The Nation, by John Nichols & Robert W. McChesney (much more at the link):

"Our founders never thought that freedom of the press would belong only to those who could afford a press. They would have been horrified at the notion that journalism should be regarded as the private preserve of the Rupert Murdochs and John Malones. The founders would not have entertained, let alone accepted, the current equation that seems to say that if rich people determine there is no good money to be made in the news, then society cannot have news . . . .

"The founders regarded the establishment of a press system, the Fourth Estate, as the first duty of the state. Jefferson and Madison devoted considerable energy to explaining the necessity of the press to a vibrant democracy. The government implemented extraordinary postal subsidies for the distribution of newspapers. It also instituted massive newspaper subsidies through printing contracts and the paid publication of government notices, all with the intent of expanding the number and variety of newspapers. When Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s he was struck by the quantity and quality of newspapers and periodicals compared with France, Canada and Britain. It was not an accident. It had little to do with 'free markets.' It was the result of public policy.

"Moreover, when the Supreme Court has taken up matters of freedom of the press, its majority opinions have argued strongly for the necessity of the press as the essential underpinning of our constitutional republic. First Amendment absolutist Hugo Black wrote that the 'Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public, that a free press is a condition of a free society.' Black argued for the right and necessity of the government to counteract private monopolistic control over the media. More recently Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, argued that 'assuring the public has access to a multiplicity of information sources is a governmental purpose of the highest order.'

"But government support for the press is not merely a matter of history or legal interpretation. Complaints about a government role in fostering journalism invariably overlook the fact that our contemporary media system is anything but an independent 'free market' institution. The government subsidies established by the founders did not end in the eighteenth--or even the nineteenth--century. Today the government doles out tens of billions of dollars in direct and indirect subsidies, including free and essentially permanent monopoly broadcast licenses, monopoly cable and satellite privileges, copyright protection and postal subsidies. (Indeed, this magazine has been working for the past few years with journals of the left and right to assure that those subsidies are available to all publications.) Because the subsidies mostly benefit the wealthy and powerful, they are rarely mentioned in the fictional account of an independent and feisty Fourth Estate. Both the rise and decline of commercial journalism can be attributed in part to government policies, which scrapped the regulations and ownership rules that had encouraged local broadcast journalism and allowed for lax regulation as well as tax deductions for advertising--policies that greatly increased news media revenues."

Komfort Thru Kool-Aid

Dunno know 'bout you, but I'm keeping a close watch on Obama; and so far, his picks aren't totally reassuring.

When I was 10, I was best friends with Donna Drvaric, who, like me, liked to read.

My parents did a good thing when they chose to buy a tract home on a lot that backed onto Whitnall Park. The park is still there, in a suburb of Milwaukee, which had had a socialist government for many years and thus had stellar infrastructure (many socialists were, far as I can tell, and still are, about serving people – they created a great public school system {my highschool had everything from auto shop to 4th-year Latin, plus a calculus course that made my subsequent East Coast college calculus seem aimed at retards}, the best-designed freeway and other infrastructure in any city I've ever lived in, plus great public parks, among other things {I wish they'd taken a shot at health care}).

So anyway, on the border of my parents' yard and this really great park, I and my sis had located/enhanced what we called a fort but what I also thought of as a refuge. Boulders, trees, and a flat spot.

So during this one summer, Donna Drvaric and I regularly mixed up whatever combination of available Kool-Aid flavors we imagined might be most ambrosial (we had to complicate things); assembled selected fruit (we'd gotten the idea that fruit amp'd the luxury factor); gathered up our current reads and some comfy quilts; spread out in the leafy half-shade of our fort; and spent a decent number of summer days there, reading, eating fruit, and drinking Kool-Aid.

It was Donna's slightly older bro who intro'd me, in one afternoon, to both Love Potion No. 9 and Do Wah Diddy:



Check that drummer. Sorry, they f'd up the end; here are more versions, all enjoyable; but mysteriously, they all kinda f' the endings up:









Four decades later, when my mom was on her last cancer, I shot the pic below as she walked through our "fort" into the park.

Re- the Current Economic Crisis,

good summary of where we are, how we got here, and how to fix it, here (6:50 min.)

Just to Make Sure You Got It:

"It's class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn't be." -- Warren Buffet, CNN Interview, May 25 2005, suggesting we need to raise taxes on the rich.

Helpful Explanations Re- the Current Economic Crisis

(For an inspirational soundtrack for this post, click on the video in the post two below this one, titled "Human Anthem.")

In a recent Vanity Fair article, Nobel-laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz argues that we can't fix our problems unless we understand the causes. He identifies five crucial wrong turns taken during the last few decades:

1. Removing Walls Between Foxes and Henhouses. In 1999 Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, which had been passed in the wake of the 1929 crash in order to help prevent the same thing from happening again. It worked. The Act separated commercial banks, which were supposed to accept deposits and make loans based on prudent underwriting principles, from investment banks, which engage in organizing sales of riskier investments such as stocks and bonds. Repealing the Act and allowing banks to engage in both kinds of activities at once inevitably meant they would be under greater temptation and pressure to subject ordinary deposits to the much greater risks of equity investments directly or indirectly underwritten by the bank.

2. Installing a Fed Chair Who Favored Deregulation and Liquidity Injections. In 1987 the Reagan administration replaced Paul Volcker with Alan Greenspan. Volcker understood the need for regulation of financial markets and had successfully brought inflation down from more than 11% to under 4%. Greenspan believed markets are self-regulating, turned the money spigot on, and helped set the stage for a series of increasingly catastrophic asset bubbles.

Two other important deregulatory mistakes were the rejection of a call in 1998 by Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, for government regulation of credit derivatives, and the decision in 2004 to allow big investment banks to increase their debt-to-capital ratio (from 12:1 to 30:1, or higher) so that they could buy more mortgage-backed securities, thereby further inflating the housing bubble.

Regarding our current bubble, bear in mind that the big problem isn't the bad mortgages; it's the credit derivatives. Even if derivatives were regulated like stocks or bonds, they are the kind of equity investment that depositary institutions probably should not be investing in. Warren Buffet has described derivatives as “financial weapons of mass destruction.” Greenspan consistently sided with those who argued that any kind of oversight might interfere with “innovation” in the financial system.

3. Injecting Money into the Wrong Bodies. Tax-cuts, touted as an economic cure-all, were repeatedly enacted that mainly benefitted the upper-upper class. When "trickle-down" failed, instead of admonishing Congress, Greenspan pumped the economy up by lowering interest rates and increasing the money supply.

4. Faking the Numbers. After the collapse of Worldcom and Enron revealed serious problems with corporate accounting, Congress enacted the Sarbanes-Oxley Act; but while corporations have complained that the Act is too burdensome, in fact it didn't go far enough. A main deficiency identified by Stiglitz is that it failed to rein in "incentive" options granted to executives, which rather than incentivizing better management performance, as claimed, proved to incentivize further distortions in accounting.

The incentives for the rating agencies such as such as Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s are similarly distorted, since the rating agencies are paid by the companies they're supposed to rate, with the predictable result that their ratings suffer "grade inflation" so long as things are going well, to be downgraded only after the problems become obvious anyway.

I'd add, the government itself has also taken steps to obscure if not "fake" economic realities, by jiggering the ways in which inflation and unemployment statistics are measured, by completely ceasing to publish M3 money supply statistics, and by widely-suspected, increasingly-frequent stock market manipulation by the President's "Plunge Protection Team."

5. The Bush Admin's Response to the Current Crisis. Stiglitz writes, "Valuable time was wasted as Paulson pushed his own plan, 'cash for trash,' buying up the bad assets and putting the risk onto American taxpayers. When he finally abandoned it, providing banks with money they needed, he did it in a way that not only cheated America’s taxpayers but failed to ensure that the banks would use the money to re-start lending. He even allowed the banks to pour out money to their shareholders as taxpayers were pouring money into the banks. . . . If the administration had really wanted to restore confidence in the financial system, it would have begun by addressing the underlying problems—the flawed incentive structures and the inadequate regulatory system."

Quoting Greenspan during Congressional hearings this fall, Stiglitz concludes by observing: "The truth is most of the individual mistakes boil down to just one: a belief that markets are self-adjusting and that the role of government should be minimal. Looking back at that belief during hearings this fall on Capitol Hill, Alan Greenspan said out loud, 'I have found a flaw.' Congressman Henry Waxman pushed him, responding, 'In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right; it was not working.' -- 'Absolutely, precisely,' Greenspan said."

In a recent piece on counterpunch, freelance writer Mike Whitney agrees, and further explores how past policies -- including both deregulation and the creation of excessive monetary and debt liquidity -- have enriched the highest-income citizens at the expense of middle- and lower-income citizens. The entire piece is well-worth the read; but to include just one quote: "The bottom line, is that financialization, which rests on the twin pillars of easy credit and ballooning debt, creates an inherently unstable system which is prone to wild swings and frequent busts. Bernanke is trying to restore this system ignoring the fact that workers -- whose personal balance sheets are already bleeding red -- can no longer support it. . . . There is a historic mismatch between supply and demand that cannot be reconciled by Bernanke's market meddling. Workers need a raise; that's how demand is created."

The Beginning of the End of Artificially Good Times

From Bloomberg.

"A push by the richest U.S. universities to unload their stakes in private-equity funds is flooding the market, driving down prices for the world's best-known buyout firms.

"Investors led by Harvard University, which manages the largest U.S. endowment at $36.9 billion, may increase so-called secondary sales of private-equity funds to more than $100 billion during the next year, overwhelming available pools of capital. Interests in funds managed by KKR & Co., Madison Dearborn LLC and Terra Firma Capital Partners Ltd. all are being offered at discounts of at least 50 percent, according to people familiar with the sales.

"Crippled financial firms such as American International Group Inc. and bankrupt Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. are joining strapped endowments such as the ones at Columbia University in New York and Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, in trying to sell private-equity stakes. A deepening global recession that is crimping the value of buyout firms' holdings is forcing further price cuts in a market where buyers already are scarce.

“'There's a huge supply-demand imbalance,' said David De Weese, a general partner at Paul Capital Partners in New York, which manages $6.6 billion. . . .

“'I don't know of any institution that's not looking at its portfolio and saying, "What can we do?”' said Frank Morgan, a partner at Coller Capital Ltd., a London-based firm that invests in buyout and venture capital funds.

"One financial institution recently held discussions about selling more than $100 million in private-equity stakes in a fund run by New York-based KKR at a discount of about 50 percent, a person briefed on the talks said. A sale hasn't yet been completed. . . ."

Much more at Bloomberg.

Coupons: Buy a Toaster . . .

Bosses:

(Thanks apricotX; via thanks snarky!).

Why Paulson's $700 Billion Socialism for the Rich Won't Work -- and What WOULD

Proposed Market Regulatory Reform Irrelevant & Dangerous

If you're wondering how Treasury Sec. Henry Paulson came out so quickly with detailed proposals for a complete consolidation and overhaul of the five gummint agencies now responsible for oversight of various sectors of our financial system, you haven't done the homework I assigned -- watching the Naomi Klein interview embedded in my earlier posts and (here and here).

Senator Chris Dodd (D) might be wondering, too -- he's Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, and no one consulted him about the proposals.

Reuters reports, Dodd "said he welcomed the plan offered by . . . Paulson, but questioned its relevance in addressing falling home prices, rising foreclosures and the imminent threat of recession. . . . [Overhauling the regulatory system] 'doesn't relate to the issues we're grappling with,' Dodd said on a conference call. 'The failure of the administration to utilize the tools they've been given over the years . . . . That's the problem, not reorganization.'

" . . . Paulson on Monday issued a sweeping plan that calls for giving the Federal Reserve more authority over Wall Street . . . . Although the plan has been under development for many months, Dodd said he had not been asked for input on it. Noting that some of the ideas in the Paulson plan have been under discussion for years, Dodd said reorganizing the government was not the problem." More here.

I.e., in my view, the problem is not that the Federal Reserve needs more power, but that we've eviscerated the protections put in place after the market crash of 1929: the enforcement capabilities of bank regulators and the SEC, S&L regulation, and the Glass-Steagall Act.

The Wall Street Journal reports, "'It reads like amateur hour and it's because none of those guys ever worked in a regulated, chartered bank,' said Camden Fine, president and chief executive of the Independent Community Bankers of America . . . . 'A bunch of guys from Wall Street decided this was going to be their proposal.' . . . Large financial-services companies have had a seat at the table as Treasury crafted its plan . . . . " More here.

Others reviewing the details of the plan are even more concerned. Mike Whitney writes that, though the proposals are being billed "as a 'massive shakeup of US financial market regulation,' . . . [we should not] be deceived. [They] are neither 'timely' nor 'thoughtful' . . . . In fact, it's all just more of the same free market 'we can police ourselves' mumbo-jumbo that got us into this mess in the first place. The real objective of Paulson's so-called reforms is to decapitate the SEC and increase the powers of the Federal Reserve. . . . "

"If Paulson's plan is approved in its present form, Congress will have even less control over the financial system than it does now, and the same group of self-serving banking mandarins who created the biggest equity bubble in history will be able to administer the markets however they choose without the annoyance of government supervision. That's exactly what Treasury Secretary and his pals at the Fed want; unlimited power with no accountability." More here; see also The New York Times.

Thomas Jefferson on Our Unfolding Financial Disaster:

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." From an 1802 letter to then Sec. of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin, per Liberty-Tree.

Naomi Klein on the "Shock Doctrine"

Apologies for the repeat, but I think Klein's insights are of critical importance, and too few people are aware of them.

We've already seen "shock therapy" administered following the Iraq invasion and Katrina; next is the rapidly unfolding financial crisis in the U.S.

The crisis probably would not have happened if we hadn't previously allowed conservative forces to dismantle much of the regulatory protections put in place after the Great Depression, such as Glass-Steagall, S&L regulation, and adequate funding for bank regulators and the SEC.

Instead of restoring those protections, of course, the Bush administration is already using the financial crisis as an excuse for rolling out radical new changes; see, e.g., here and here.

Not worried enough yet to act? "As journalist Naomi Klein so succinctly put it, when the next administration takes over the White House, they’ll find it empty. Agencies that might have dealt with the blowback from two pre-emptive wars and the current economic crisis are no longer functional. . . . From the Gipper to BushCo, the dissolution of our social contract has transformed the United States from an imperfect union to a ruined [I'd say, looted] corporation. Its engineers will not relinquish the power – or the money – they have taken from us." (From OpEdNews.) And that's just the beginning of what Klein's pieced together.

If we don't understand her insights, we're sitting ducks. The video is just over 8 min. Please watch it and share it.