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Max Keiser for AJE: Death of the Dollar 2 Posted: 19 Dec 2007 11:11 AM CST Here it is! Part 1 Part 2

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Nix the Farm Bill Posted: 08 Oct 2007 06:02 PM CDT I've got a way to reduce global poverty, decrease the number of workers crossing our borders illegally, save American taxpayers money, and cut your supermarket bill -- in one fell swoop. How? Get rid of US farm subsidies and tariffs. They were supposed to be a temporary remedy for small farmers during the Depression. But, renewed every five years regardless of which party controls Congress, farm subsidies keep going and going. They've been costing taxpayers some $11 billion a year. The Senate is now considering the latest version, and it's hardly better than what's come before. Look, I have no problem insuring small farmers against major losses. But farm subsidies go mostly to big agribusinesses that hardly need them. But the big problem isn't just the waste of taxpayer money. Americans -- including the US media and even Washington politicos -- tend to regard agriculture policy as the exclusive domain of legislators from farm states. Yet our farm policy is the single most damaging thing we're doing to the world's poor. Ending farm subsidies and tariffs would be the single most important thing we could do to reduce global poverty. Fewer than 2 percent of Americans even work on a farm. Yet about half the population of the developing world depends on farming for their livelihoods. They can't earn what the global market would otherwise pay them because America's subsidized farm exports keep prices artificially low. American cotton growers, for example, export cotton for just over half what it costs them to produce it. Which means more than 10 million African cotton farmers are stymied. If we stopped subsidizing our cotton businesses, world cotton prices would rise, increasing the value of cotton exports from Africa by some $300 million a year. Meanwhile, the average American tariff on agricultural imports is 18 percent – much higher than the 5 percent average tariff on other imports. So not only do the world's poor suffer because of our outdated farm policies, but Americans get hit with a double-whammy – we're subsidizing US agribusiness with our tax dollars while paying some $35 billion a year more for our food than we'd pay if we didn't also protect agribusinesses. Our farm policies are even encouraging illegal immigration into the United States. That's because many of the world's poor who can't earn enough by farming are desperate to immigrate – legally or illegally – to richer countries like America. Message to the U.S. Senate: You want to fight global poverty and illegal immigration? You want to reduce the budget deficit? You want to give American consumers a break? There's no simpler first step to accomplish all these things than to end farm subsidies and tariffs.

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Misunderestimating Ron Paul's Support Posted: 30 Sep 2007 08:23 PM CDT Rick Fisk on what the neocons and the media are about to learn.

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Robert Reich Commentary for September 19, 2007 Posted: 19 Sep 2007 02:00 PM CDT Fed moves leave the little guy stuck This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

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Shocked, shocked! Posted: 18 Sep 2007 10:27 AM CDT September 17, 2007      Alan Greenspan's memoirs are being flogged across the airwaves, bandwidths and printing presses, and the cohort of those who comment on public affairs in these media are shocked by the Maestro's confessions -- first, that a housing bubble emerged out of his leadership in the banking sector, and second that the Iraq war is about oil. As usual, they're getting it all wrong -- about as wrong as Al himself got it. But that is the way of things in this age of cultural dissipation and gross cognitive dissonance.      Greenspan claims he had no idea that his cutting of interest rates to near zero would produce any irregularities in the US economy. Apparently he hadn't noticed that the Big Fund Boyz called him "Easy Al" for a reason. Or that when you introduce nearly free "money" (as in "available for lending") into a system of financial trade, the recognition of risk tends to evaporate. As the nation's chief bank regulator, Greenspan also apparently failed to notice the upsurge in dodgy lending practices previously only seen among mafia loan sharks, drug dealers, or twelve-year-olds playing Monopoly.      But the really funny part of all this is that the media columnists are acting as though the American public got hoodwinked by Al. Which raises the question: just what the fuck was the public thinking when they bought half-million dollar houses on salaries under 60-K, taking out no-money-down, interest-optional balloon mortgages and other tricked-up contracts? The answer is: they walked into these arrangements with their eyes open because they thought they could get something for nothing. They thought the trend of steeply rising house prices would continue indefinitely and enable them to wiggle free of any hazard by flipping their houses to an endless supply of greater fools who would be there waiting to turn the very same trick. And the smoothies downstream in the mortgage and banking rackets were no less guided by avarice when they cooked up their formulas for bundling half-baked mortgages into tranches of tradeable securities. Easy Al may have failed to notice what was going on here, but then so did everybody else from The Wall Street Journal to the Securities and Exchange Commission.      This, of course, represents an insidious psychology. It could only happen in a culture that has come off the rails mentally, so to speak, as ours has in the sense that nobody has any sense of consequence, neither the leaders nor those who affect to follow the leaders. The leading religion in America is not evangelical Christianity, it is the worship of unearned riches, and its golden rule is the belief that is is possible to get something for nothing. Its holy shrines are Las Vegas and Wall Street. (And, by the way, has anybody heard the evangelical Christians complain about Las Vegas? They complain about a lot of things, but are themselves among the greatest believers in unearned riches -- given their preference for prayer over earnest effort in the service of solving life's problems.)      No, the American public, including the cheerleaders in the media, have only themselves to blame for the bitter harvest now underway in the asset and credit markets. And thus it would be a salutary thing for Baby Jeezus, or the forces of nature, or whatever powers guide the universe, to now kick the shit out of them, so to speak, financially, because that is exactly what the American public is full of, from top to bottom, from George W. Bush at his lonely desk on Pennsylvania Avenue to the pitiful, bankrupt householders of Orange County and Boca Raton.      Now, as to the shock of Al's revelation that the Iraq war is about oil -- the media and the public have got this all wrong, too. The logic here seems to be that because the Iraq war is about oil it is therefore unnecessary, optional, a mistake, an indulgence, something we should not dirty our hands in. In fact, the Iraq war is not about oil, per se, so much as it is about America's behavior here at home, about the choices we make for how we live on this continent. None of those who complain most loudly about our military presence in Iraq have advanced any proposals for reforming how we live here -- and hence for our enslavement to oil, much of the world's remaining supply of which happens to be in the neighborhood of Iraq. When these complainers start complaining about the ubiquitous acceptance of suburban sprawl and abject car-dependency -- and this includes the environmental boy scouts out there who want to get merit badges for buying hybrid cars -- then they will deserve to be taken seriously. Until then, the American people have got exactly the grinding war that they deserve. Let them whine about it all the way to the Nascar tracks, and let them console themselves with giant plastic bottles of Pepsi Cola and buckets of chicken raised on corn grown with oil byproducts.      On CBS's "60-Minutes" show last night, Greenspan, in his new role as a private sector economic consultant made predictions for the coming months in the US economy. He declared that the financial sector would get over the current credit squeeze as if it were a mild case of indigestion brought on by one too many fried won-tons at the all-you-can-eat buffet, a mere burp, allowing the public to move on to the crab Rangoon and a helping of General Tsao's chicken. This gets back to the previous point about the Iraq war and oil in particular. Al doesn't get it. CBS's sycophant reporters don't get it. Nobody gets it. We are entering the zone of the long emergency in which the primary resource needed to run the industrial economies will become scarce, expensive, and profoundly destabilizing to markets and to normal life, such as it is known in this country. And the current problem in the markets is a reflection of the resource bankruptcy we are facing. Our problems are not about credit, they are about permanent insolvency.      In his old age, Alan Greenspan's face -- once darkly handsome in his youthful years as a jazz musician -- has taken on the strange appearance of a circus clown. Something about the way his lips have settled into a kind of thick fatuous smile, even when he is apparently not amused by anything. Is it one of God's clever little tricks to leave him looking like a clown in his valedictory years, or has his face just resolved into the perfect embodiment of leadership for a clown nation?

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Who Benefits From Political Polling? Posted: 07 Sep 2007 08:23 PM CDT Only the status quo, says James Herndon.

The Dis-information Society Posted: 10 Sep 2007 08:47 AM CDT September 10, 2007      One question that readers ask me often is why the mainstream media is doing such a poor job of reporting the nexus of the global energy emergency and the turmoil in global finance. I maintain my "allergy" to conspiracy theories. There isn't any clique of top-hatted Wall Street biggies with monocles joining with with gray-suited CIA-types to intimidate editors with tongs and electrodes. American culture has become self-dis-informing.      As my friend Peter Golden (blogger at Boardside) puts it so well: "When people lie, they know they are doing something wrong. But when they just make things up, there's no consciousness of right or wrong at work. It seems morally okay to live in a fantasy world -- and this is much more pernicious to the public discourse than lying."      My friends, who are mostly ex-hippie, yuppie progressives, have been locked in prayer to exorcise the evil spirit of George W. Bush for six years, but they fail to recognize a more comprehensive failure of leadership in every sector of American life, and especially in the ones where a lot ex-hippies-now-yuppies run things. Our political leadership may be deplorable, but so is our leadership in business, education, the arts, and especially the media.      The poster child for this is The New York Times. In their reporting on the world oil situation, they have consistently and uncritically swallowed the public relations handouts of Daniel Yergin's Cambridge Energy Research Group (CERA), a wholly-owned PR shop serving the oil industry. Laziness doesn't even explain this. It's bad editorial leadership. It's a failure to ask the important questions.       On Friday, the oil futures markets closed a dollar-and-change away from the all-time record high price (the same day the Dow Jones Industrial Index fell 250 points.) Today's (Monday's) lead headline in the NY Times Business Section is "Disney to Test Character Toys for Lead Paint." Well, I hope we get that situation straightened out so that civilization can continue with a full supply of Disney action figures under the Christmas trees -- and forget for a minute whether Grandma will be able to drive to the WalMart in December, or whether WalMart will be able to keep the diesel tanks filled for their "warehouse-on-wheels, or whether both Grandma and the Assistant Manager of her local WalMart are three months in arrears on their re-set mortgage payments, and maxed out on their Discover cards. . . .      To me, there seems to be an obvious correlation between the current failures in the financial markets -- in particular the credit sector -- and the gross failure of leadership across the board in American life. Ultimately, credit depends on legitimacy, and so does authority. They are tied together. For years, both have been immersed in fantasy rather than reality.      How does one otherwise account for the remarkable disappearance of standards in lending among the human beings who lead banking institutions? All the banking executives didn't wake up one morning missing sixty IQ points. And yet neither can one say that they all woke up one morning with evil intentions to work wickedness in the world. They simply became subsumed in a fantasy that there was no material difference between borrowers with a proven ability to pay back loans and borrowers with no record of credit-worthiness. And they got rid of the problems that might have ensued by selling off wholesale bundles of good-and-bad loans to willing buyers (other banking executives) further down the line, who in turn sold certificates representing these bundles to willing executives in pension groups and money markets. It became normal. It was justified at the tip-top of American leadership by the Explainer-in-Chief saying that it was a good thing for as many Americans as possible to own their own house.      Did the American media report on this chain of dangerous fantasy? Not in the least. They were simply mesmerized by the amazing, supernatural rise of nominal house prices, and the fantastic flow of paychecks from the production home-builder's payroll offices, and the fabulous cash-out re-fi's that sent streams of revenue to the Crate-and-Barrel furniture outlets, and the Williams-Sonoma catalog headquarters, and the plastic surgery parlors.       All this occurred against the background of what has come to be called Peak Oil, the turnaround point in global oil production, and indeed the all-time high-point of world oil consumption, which can be dated precisely now (in the rearview mirror) as having topped absolutely in July of 2006 -- the exact moment, incidentally, that a gigantic pin first pierced the outermost molecules of the soapy film that held the housing bubble together.      Oil production (all liquids, including natural gas byproducts, tar sands, what-have-you) are down now by more than a million barrels a day. We've only experienced it so far in the juddering rise of oil futures prices. Over this brief period of time since the absolute peak, the losses of supply have been yielded in the world's poorest societies, who simply drop out of bidding for oil supplies.     What the mainstream media is missing now is the prospect of a really swift worsening of the problem as exports from the major oil producing nations fall off at a sharper rate than their production declines. This idea has been articulated best by Dallas geologist Jeffrey Brown over at The Oil Drum.com (and for one particular discussion of it go to this blog at Jeff Vail's Energy Intelligence site).       The mainstream media is also failing to get the connection between the supreme commodity that allows the world's industrial economies to operate, and the credibility of a financial sector whose chief mission is to finance the operations of industrial economies. In the absence of any real prospect for growth in America's industrial economy, the financial sector dreamed up a system in which we could invest in the manufacture of investment instruments instead of productive activity per se. And so all the expertise and time of those working in the financial sector has gone into the production of tradable debt vehicles based on abstruse formulas that almost nobody could understand (especially the people buying and selling them).      All this dangerous fantasy gained legitimacy because for a while it seemed to pay off. Ordinary citizens could acquire houses much bigger and better-equipped than their incomes justified. And mortgage originators and bankers made whopping fees in enabling the action. And higher-up bankers in the chain derived un-heard-of bonuses from leveraging the securitized debt from all that, and politicians basked in the glow of a seeming hyper-prosperity, and professor Bob Bruegmann at the University of Illinois declared suburban sprawl a good thing, and even The New York Times, while staggering in news-gathering effectiveness against the Internet, was able to rake in enough advertising to build an unnecessary new headquarters skyscraper in Manhattan.      The dream is over now. Reality-based moral hazard is returning (literally) with a vengeance. Right and wrong are going to matter again and a lot of people who put these things aside for a while are going to suffer.

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Crunch Time Posted: 03 Sep 2007 07:45 AM CDT September 3, 2007      Like a lot of observers in thrall to the agony of the financial markets, I have been commenting on less-than-the-Big-Picture in recent weeks. The Big Picture is the health of American society, which includes both its economy and culture. In healthier times, finance was but one part of the economy, the means for raising capital investment to apply to productive activity. For the past two decades, we have allowed it to become an end in itself.       As US manufacturing decamped to low-labor-cost nations, we turned increasingly to the manufacture of abstruse investment schemes designed to create "value" ingeniously out of thin air rather than productive activity. These succeeded largely because of the momentum of legitimacy American institutions accumulated in the years after the Second World War. The rest of the world believed our ingenuity was backed by credibility. That momentum has about run out.      You will hear about central banks and hedge funds and derivatives and mortgage backed securities, and all kinds of jargon, but the issue will really come down to matters other than finance. Are we building a society with a future? Does our culture affirm life or yearn for destruction? Are our daily ceremonies and rituals meaningful or empty? Are our hopes and dreams consistent with what reality has to offer? Can we look in the mirror and say that we are upright people?      I think we are in trouble with all these things. But I doubt we can give up our current behavior without going through a convulsion. The psychology of previous investment is, for us, a force too great to overcome. We will sell the birthrights of the next three generations in order to avoid changing our behavior. We will blame other people who behave differently for the consequences of our own behavior. We will not understand the messages that reality is sending us, and we will drive ourselves crazy in the attempt to avoid hearing it.     I haven't changed my view of what is happening to us. We have run out our string of stunts and tricks in the money rackets. We've spent our legitimacy. The rest of the world will strive mightily to get free of their obligations to us, including their respect for the value of our currency. The meta-cycle of suburban development, including the "housing" and all its accessories in roads and chain stores, is hitting the wall of peak oil. The suburban build-out is over. This will come as an agonizing surprise to many. The failure to make infinite suburbanization the permanent basis for an economy will rock our society for years to come. Hundreds of thousands of unemployed men with pick-up trucks and panoplies of power tools will feel horribly cheated. I hope they don't start an extremist political party when the re-po men come to take their trucks away.       Even under the best circumstances, with a nationwide change of heart, and really wise leadership, America would find it difficult to make the necessary changes that new reality requires. Of course, reality will force us to make these changes whether we're on board with the program or not. The only variable is how much turmoil may ensue in the process. If we resist doing what reality commands, our trouble is certain to be worse.      What does reality command? Well, first of all (and especially for the benefit of the enviro-progressives I have met recently, who want gold medals for buying hybrid cars) we'd better drop the idea that there is any way whatsoever to preserve our system of happy motoring. The car as a mass market phenomenon, and enabler (dictator, really) of all our daily life arrangements, is finished. We'd better find something else to talk about, or the American future will amount to little more than a colossal circle-jerk on an increasingly unfixable freeway. I am hugely worried (obviously) that even the intelligent-and-educated fraction of our society cannot focus on anything but how to keep all the cars running. A failure to drop this, and move on to more practical endeavors, will lead automatically to a failure of reasonable politics in this country. It is already manifest in the abysmal failure of the Democratic candidates for president to address the looming oil import crisis that will certainly be underway as soon as any of them is inaugurated.      Reality commands that we prepare to rebuild our small towns and small cities and downsize our gigantic metroplexes. Reality commands that we get serious about local food production and local economies. Reality commands that we rebuild the kind of public transit that people will be grateful to travel on. Reality commands that we prepare to rebuild our harbor facilities for a revival of maritime trade, using ships and boats that do not necessarily run on oil. Reality commands that we put an end to legalized gambling, in order for the public to re-learn one of the primary rules of adult life -- that we generally should not expect to get something for nothing.      The trouble we are seeing in the financial sector is largely a result of blowback from tens of millions of people who tried to get something for nothing. It is a circumstance that is now beyond the control of the Bushes, Paulsons, and Bernankes. Their intended-to-be-soothing statements on Friday will not hold back the implosion of cascading defaults and cumulative insolvency. A few "poster children" may be symbolically rescued to try to prop up confidence in this-or-that paper, but an awful lot of other people and institutions will just go down, unfortunately, because of their own bad choices.      A strange new meta-reality will assert itself in America: that shit happens. We will see the ruined people and feel bad about them, but we will not be able to un-do the shit that has happened to them, that they have brought upon themselves. This is how the idea of moral hazard returns to a society that has lost its way. Meanwhile, there is too much to do for the survivors to sit around wringing their hands and being crybabies. You can start by taking all the mental effort that you are currently wasting on the subject of cars, and how to run them on fuels other than gasoline, and instead focus your energy on how to rescue our political institutions so that a truly informed public can reconstruct a bankrupt society into a living and credible republic.

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The Rip-off in Iraq: You Will Not Believe How Low the War Profiteers Have Gone Posted: 30 Aug 2007 09:56 AM CDT How is it done? How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini? Ask Earnest O. Robbins -- he knows all about being a successful contractor in Iraq. You start off as a well-connected bureaucrat: in this case, as an Air Force civil engineer, a post from which Robbins was responsible for overseeing 70,000 servicemen and contractors, with an annual budget of $8 billion. You serve with distinction for thirty-four years, becoming such a military all-star that the Air Force frequently sends you to the Hill to testify before Congress -- until one day in the summer of 2003, when you retire to take a job as an executive for Parsons, a private construction company looking to do work in Iraq. read more

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How To: Get Eight Watch Batteries From a 12-Volt Battery Posted: 20 Aug 2007 07:30 AM CDT Do-it-yourselfer Kipkay did a little investigating and found that beneath the shell of a run-of-the-mill 12-volt battery was eight watch batteries. Considering watch batteries cost between $4 and $6 a pop, finding eight of them in a $2 battery makes for quite a savings. I guess this isn't surprising since 9-volt batteries are filled with six AAA batteries. 12 Volt Battery Hack! You'll be Surprised... [Instructables]

In Brief: Online goal tracker Joe's Goals adds Seinfeld-style ... Posted: 23 Aug 2007 12:59 PM CDT Online goal tracker Joe's Goals adds Seinfeld-style goal chains inspired by Jerry Seinfeld's productivity secret.

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Thuggo and Sluggo Posted: 02 Jul 2007 06:57 AM CDT July 2, 2007      As someone who spends a fair amount of time in airports, I marvel at the way my fellow citizens present themselves in public. I see middle-aged women who appear to have left home in their pajamas. But it's the costume and demeanor of American young men especially that raises interesting questions about who we have become.      The fashion and body language of male youth in 2007 comes from three sources: prison, the nursery, and the pimpmobile. It's an old story now that many conventions of gangster fashion come out of the jail experience, where they take away your belt and shoelaces so you won't hang yourself. Apparently, at some point in US history, they stopped giving the belts and shoelaces back on release, and it became stylish to wear your trousers falling down below the top of your underpants (or butt crack as the case may be). Jail being a kind of accreditation device these days, the message may be: I passed the entrance exam.      Less obvious is the contribution of the nursery. Pants that are ambiguously neither long or short, worn with XX-large T shirts, tend to make grown men look like babies. Babies have short legs and large torsos compared to grown men. They also make big awkward gestures and touch their sex organs a lot. Add a sideways hat and unlaced sneakers and you have the complete kindergarten rig. Why a 20-year-old male would want to look five years old is another interesting question, but it may have a lot to do with the developmental failures of boys raised in households without fathers. They simply don't know how to be men. They only know how to behave like five year old boys. They even give themselves nursery school nicknames. But they are men, and what could be more menacing than the paradox of a child bent on homicide.      Tattoos used to be pretty much the sole fashion statement of merchant seamen or people who have served in the armed forces (or people who live in jungles). Now they are common among career girls. The tattooed guys I see down at the gym are ordinary young men who work in cubicles. Tattoos on sailors used to celebrate places they had been or people they had loved. The tattoos I see now are meant to convey fierce and barbaric statements of superhuman power: look at me, I'm a Power Ranger! It's understandable that someone who spends most of his waking hours in a cubicle wearing a telephone headset in order to swindle old people out of their savings might fantasize about rising above all that. But the tragic thing, of course, is that getting tattooed is not quite the same as accomplishing something with your life. In the end, you're just another loser with a grandiose and ridiculous tattoo.      The pimp connection is too obvious to belabor -- meant to mock normal executive attire while signifying an existence of total leisure and the enjoyment of unearned riches. The trouble is that the worship of unearned riches -- based on the belief that it truly is possible to get something for nothing -- has now become normal at all levels in American life. Everybody from the lowest whoremonger on Hollywood Boulevard to the Wall Street hedge fund managers believes in unearned riches plucked from "suckers." The catch is that men who live by this code almost always come to a bad end. They get their throats cut with razors, or go to prison, or manage to lose all their unearned riches (and the investments of many strangers, too).      The portrait of the young American male in 2007, therefore, is of an impotent, infantalized being lost in grandiose fantasies of power and importance. It's a picture of men without real confidence, and no idea how to achieve it, who wish to project a transcendently ferocious image complete with odds-and-ends of manner taken from comic books and movies based on comic books, in order to be taken seriously.      The rest of the world must tremble to contemplate the picture we present. The Nazi soldiers of 1944 were glamour boys compared to the riff-raff that American young men have become. As for those who actually do make it into the army, you wonder how they appear to the locals overseas -- they're probably taken seriously as exactly what the present themselves to be: manifestly evil beings who really need to be blown up. Back home, I look around at the thugs and sluggos at my gym, and I'm ashamed to be a citizen of the same country they live in.

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DIY: Make a laptop sleeve with a FedEx envelope Posted: 21 Jun 2007 08:40 AM CDT DIY site Instructables posts a tutorial on making a laptop sleeve from FedEx envelopes: I was looking for a strong and waterproof material to make my own sleeve from and remembered that FedEx and the US Postal Service both use Tyvek (or similar) material for their envelopes. My sleeve fits a MacBook, but the design is easily adaptable for other sized laptops. The project requires 3-4 envelopes, some felt and some sewing, and the result is a pretty good camouflage for your lappie as well. Thanks, Annie! Laptop Sleeve from a FedEx Envelope [instructables]

Crapware: Posted: 22 Jun 2007 09:13 AM CDT Preinstalled crapware on new Dell PCs just became optional. CNET News blog reports that Dell now offers a "no software preinstalled" option for consumers. Even better would be if this was opt IN instead of OUT.

Google Apps: Add live Google data to Google Spreadsheets Posted: 22 Jun 2007 04:00 PM CDT The Webware weblog highlights 5 things you didn't know about Google Docs and Spreadsheets, most notably that you can insert live lookups in Google Spreadsheets via Google search and Google Finance. Using two special formulas, users can create cells that will update constantly with data or information gleaned from Web searches or Google's finance service. This works for things such as stock symbols, sports statistics, or any other piece of information you want to source and keep up to date automatically For example, you can insert the current price of Google stock in a spreadsheet by entering =GoogleFinance("GOOG"; "price"), or check out the number of internet users in Paraguay with =GoogleLookup("Paraguay"; "internet users"). Very cool. 5 things you probably didn't know you could do in Google Docs & Spreadsheets [Webware]

Democracy Now! - Tuesday, June 05, 2007 Posted: 05 Jun 2007 09:00 AM CDT Headlines for June 5, 2007; John Perkins on "The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth about Global Corruption" This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

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