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Romney’s Choice

August 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Snake oil, anyone?

The Rasmussen poll indicated that only 37 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of Paul Ryan, so one might think that this was a suicidal choice. The Democrats are licking their chops. But all of this could well be premature. Ryan will energize the campaign and if he makes a terrific speech at the convention, which I am certain he will, Romnney’s poll numbers will go up the way John McCain’s did after Sarah Palin’s speech. But whereas Palin proved to be a liability, Ryan should be able to handle himself quite well. This could sustain the momentum.

 

Ryan’s job is to keep attacking spending, something designed to appeal to independent voters who could start to like him more. And no question, spending will be a big issue as the Republicans will assert that it’s the spending and the deficit that are causing the sluggish economy and the eight percent unemployment. Ryan will also keep up the mantra that there should be no tax increases because tax increases hurt the economy. By cutting taxes, he will argue, the economy will grow and there will be more revenue to balance the budget and pay down the debt.

 

Americans have short memories so the Democrats are going to have to remind the voters that this is

Something D-O-O economics? Voo-Doo economics?

what George H.W. Bush called “voodoo economics.” Reagan’s budget director David Stockman now blames the Republicans from the time of Reagan until today for the economic mess the country is in.

There is no question that many will buy into Ryan’s argument since very few even remember the Laffer Curve, which predicted that a cut in taxes would bring in more revenue. It was false then and it is false now. As for an austerity budget, you have only to look at Britain to see that this doesn’t work. British growth has actually decreased and they are heading towards another recession. If you’re going to cut spending, you have to do it, as Terry Sanford used to say, “under the supervision of a physician.” What he meant by that was that drastic cuts were like a crash diet–you will end up putting all the weight back on. Drastic cuts will hurt growth and lead to a bigger deficit.

 

But more than this, Ryan is not sincere in saying that Romney and the Republicans will be able to tackle the deficit. He actually favors a dramatic increase in defense spending, which shows him to be nothing but a typical congressman who plays the same old Washington game–give Lockhheed Martin whatever it wants and cozy up to its hordes of lobbyists and the generals who are capable of undermining their own Secretary of Defense. They and the hacks in the Defense Department will go through the revolving door and end up working for Lockheed even as Lockheed executives will end up with important positions in the Defense Department. The lobbyists will assure the flow of campaign contributions to congressmen who, like Ryan, do their bidding. Ryan is not a breath of fresh air. He gives off the same old stench of the Iron Triangle that runs Washington.

 

Ryan is often praised for his courage in taking on entitlements. But that is also untrue. His plan to privatize Medicare (a terrible idea in any event) will, he admits, not kick in for another ten years. Where is the savings in that? And cutting back on benefits from Social Security and extending the retirement age will for certain be met with considerable hostility. Ryan has given every indication that he is backing away from that position.

 

Paul Ryan is a phony and if the voters buy his snake oil, they will get what they deserve. The only question is who is the bigger phony, Ryan or Romney? There is a wonderful line from Preston Sturgess’s “Hail the Conquering Hero.” ”The phony aways wins until a bigger phony comes along and then he wins.” But I don’t believe Obama is a phony.  He has made mistakes and has his faults. He is a politician, with all that entails but he has done his best to represent all of the people, not special interests. The American people better wise up or they will end up in a worse condition than they are in now.

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Scalia, Immigration and Slavery

June 29, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I cast the Mexican wetback out!

In his dissenting opinion in the Arizona immigration case, Justice Scalia wrote: ”Notwithstanding ‘[t]he myth of an era of unrestricted immigration’, in the first 100 years of the Republic the States enacted numerous laws restricting the immigration of certain classes of aliens including convicted crimi­nals, indigents, persons with contagious diseases, and (in Southern States) freed blacks. State laws not only provided for the removal of unwanted immigrants but also imposed penalties on unlawfully present aliens and those who aided their immigration.”

 

This is extraordinary. To rely on those ancient and hateful laws of the slave South as precedent ups the ante for Scalia’s reasoning. Those laws were adopted before the Federal government made it clear that immigration was a Federal matter. It is as if he has never heard of the doctrine of preemption. Will he next rely on the Roman law of slavery to justify the reinstitution of that institution? But there may be something to his position.

Immigrants from across the Mexican border are often treated as slaves and are paid off the books at a pitiful rate for hard physical labor. Illegal or not, once they are gone, Arizona will be faced with a serious labor shortage. Farmers are already complaining that they are unable to harvest all of their crops. And before long, those anti-immigrant whites who populate the wealthy suburbs of Arizona will have no one to take care of their lawns watered with what is left of the water supply. The cooks at their dinner parties will disappear and so will the numerous other Latino flunkies who make their life easy in Scottsdale at low cost.

Romney is already changing his tune and talking about paths to legalization, no doubt the result of the

Don't sweat it, hombre, The Mittbott pays in cash.

vast expansion of his luxury home in San Diego. Who is doing all that work and who will will service it once the construction is complete? Who will take care of the pool and maintain the tennis court? We know full well. One anti-immigration pundit I know confessed to me that he uses illegals at his home in the Hamptons and that he could not do without them. It was Reagan who granted the biggest amnesty in American history, his motive being to provide corporate American with cheap labor and to break the unions. Do the conservatives really want to give all of this up?

They will rant and rave to whip up the racism of the Dumb Goyim that make up their base and then pull a fast one as they did in Arizona by drafting a law they knew the Court would strike down. The last part of the law the Court upheld will fall once it is applied and things will go back to the way they were, have no fear, amigo. Do they really care about the jobs of the lower class whites? LOL. They didn’t care in the Old South and they don’t now.

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The Contradiction of Paul Ryan

June 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Help for ordinary Americans? Ryan Shrugged.

Republican Congressman Paul Ryan worships Ayn Rand and makes any new staff member read “Atlas Shrugged.” His campaign to abolish safety net programs has little to do with a desire to balance the budget and everything to do with his political philosophy based on Rand’s hatred of the state. How his plan to privatize Medicare will go over in the election remains to be seen. He also wants to abolish Social Security in gradual steps.

 

Yet Ryan, who comes from a wealthy family, received his college education at Miami University in Ohio, a state research institution. He benefitted from the low tuition that a state-run university was able to provide him. Would he abolish Miami University? Someone should put that question to him. In this respect he is not unlike the Tea Partiers who demand that the government keep its hands off their Medicare.

 

In a larger context, the underlying issue is what does “smaller government” mean? Does it mean creating a much more efficient government that makes better use of taxpayers’ money or does it mean abolishing the safety net. Libertarian hero Noble Prize-winning economist F.A.Hayek supported Social Security. What he opposed was a centrally planned economy, which is quite different from abolishing Medicare and Social Security. There are ways to increase funding for these programs without gutting them, such as extending upward the income level at which Social Security taxes are collected making those who make their money from buying and selling securities pay Social Security taxes and raising the Medicare taxes on those who can afford to pay more.

 

Ryan’s position is untenable. He would cut back or abolish essential programs while keeping the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. The

Supply side plans via Paul Ryan.

argument for his position is the old Republican “supply side” economics that was tried and failed. This is all Ryan has to offer and it will not work. Under Reagan and Bush this approach created huge deficits and this will be the result once again. Obama’s deficits have been designed to prevent a depression and he is amenable to cuts to the budget to bring it under control. Instead of working with him, Ryan advocates policies that will harm average Americans. That, of course, doesn’t mean they won’t vote for it. As Churchill once remarked, “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

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Eye Of Newt

December 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Why NOT me? These other guys are nuts.

It seems like a century ago when Newt Gingrich led the charge to overthrow decades of Democratic rule in the House of Representatives using his Contract for America as the blueprint for an agenda that included balancing the budget and term limits. At the time, the Democrats were stale and liberalism an obsolete political philosophy that had hardened into political correctness. What Gingrich did was nothing less than to revolutionize American politics, turning Tim O’Neil’s maxim that all politics was local on its head. Thanks to Gingrich, all politics was now national and he ran the Congressional campaign as if it were a British parliamentary election. The Republicans won and America has never been the same.

But no sooner had he been sworn in as Speaker, he opted to accept a book deal from Rupert Murdock for millions of dollars, violating the rules of the House. Term limits vanished from the agenda. Dick Morris, Bill Clinton’s close advisor, told Clinton to adopt the Republican agenda by balancing the budget and changing the welfare system to end permanent dependence. It worked and Clinton won reelection.

Then Gingrich blew it by closing down the government. The Republicans lost numerous seats in Congress and he resigned. His legacy was his censure by Congress for ethics violations and his party’s defeat. Most wrote him off as finished in politics and it appeared as if he wrote himself off as well. His extramarital conduct became the stuff of legend and he vanished from the political scene, starting a consulting business and authoring countless books, including works of fiction. He married his last mistress and became a Catholic.

When he announced his candidacy for president, most dismissed him off as a has-been with absolutely no chance of winning. As if to confirm this, he took his wife on a cruise in the Greek Islands and most of his staff quit. He announced his intention of staying in the race but this was counted as bravado. He had no money and no organization, yet he had sufficient numbers in the polls to get into the debates, during which he actually sounded sane and he began to attract attention. The radical right, in its quest to stop Mitt Romney, first went with Michele Bachmann, whose over-the-top comments made her seem loony. Then they supported Rick Perry, who turned out to be an idiot. There was the flirtation with Herman Cain, whose campaign imploded in the wake of allegations by women of sexual misconduct. Because Ron Paul opposed aid to Israel, he was anathema to the Evangelicals so his poll numbers have remained in the low teens. Finally there was Newt, who espoused conservative values with sufficient clarity during the debates that he began to pick up support. No one was more surprised by this than Newt himself, who was running in order to keep charging thousands for speaking engagements, receive lucrative book contracts and increase the clientele of his consulting business. It came out that he has made millions as a consultant to the health-care industry and to Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac, but none of this halted his sudden rise.

This was a “new” Newt, observers said, more mature and stable, whose new-found religious faith made his past personal transgressions fade into insignificance; he had gone to confession and been forgiven.

So far, his poll numbers have not been affected by the negative ads attacking him in Iowa since most people are concerned about the economy and think Romney is a Wall Street insider, a representative of the old GOP Establishment, which the Tea Party despises. In their search for a candidate of their own, they settled on Newt, with his unadulterated support for capitalism.

But is this really a new Newt? Remember Richard Nixon’s comeback, when commentators described him as the “new Nixon”?

No, that's the old Newt. I'm the new Newt.

He was more self-assured and less strident and looked comfortable in his skin. He bested both Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination and won a close election against Hubert Humphrey. In the wake of the disastrous McGovern campaign, he won his long-sought landslide and seemed to have more power than any president in the past, including Lyndon Johnson, who had self-destructed.

But this was no new Nixon at all. It was the same old Nixon, devious, dishonest and vicious. Under pressure, he cracked and became the first president in American history to resign. Gingrich is made of the same stuff and the Republicans will nominate him at their peril. But what he’s got is an ability to throw the base raw meat the way no other candidate can. His remarks on the Palestinians show he knows how to appeal to key constituencies of the GOP in a powerful way. It would be a mistake to count him out because, like Nixon, he has a subterranean connection to the worst impulses of many Americans and is unafraid to exploit that connection. Democrats, gleeful at the idea that Newt could be the Republican nominee, should remember that they could get what they wish for and come to regret it.

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BUFFET TO BUY GREECE

September 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Opa!!!

Billionaire investor Warren Buffet has announced his intention to buy Greece in order to save the global economy. The purchase price, still to be announced, is expected to be in the neighborhood of two hundred billion dollars, which he plans to raise through a consortium of investors, including Pincus, Warburg and the Blackstone Group. It is Buffet’s contention that for too long, countries like Greece failed to run themselves as “for profit” entities.

Buffet will incorporate Greece as a corporation in Delaware. The new company, Greece, Inc., will abolish the present government and replace it with a board of directors made up of prominent members of the international business community who will begin immediately to conduct a search for its first CEO, with Sergio Marchionnne speculated to be the leading candidate. The Italian Canadian turnaround artist currently heads FIAT, the Italian automaker that has taken over Chrysler and that also includes the luxury brand, Maserati. He also has his eye on reviving SAAB, the former Swedish automaker that has fallen on hard times.

“We see Marchionne as a perfect fit, “Buffet explained. “If anyone can turn around Greece, he’s the one.” Greece, Inc. will be strictly non-union, with a pay scale designed to attract foreign investors. Several Chinese companies have already expressed interest in starting several manufacturing entities, including toy and textile manufacturing. A consortium from Macao has also expressed interest in creating and expanding casino gambling on the Greek Islands, designed to bring in considerable revenue.

In order to combat the lack of a work ethic in Greece, the new company’s motto will be “work or starve.” All state subsidies will end and workers will be expected to work at a minimum wage. They will also be responsible for their own medical care and retirement. The education system will be entirely revamped, with schools dedicated to training workers for specific industries. The universities will drop all extraneous subjects, such as literature and philosophy and will, instead, train young Greeks to enter the work force as employable professionals, particularly as engineers and managers. “We can’t afford to waste money on culture,” Buffet mused. “What Greece needs now are businesses that can compete on the world market.”

Top on the list for moneymaking will be tourism, but on an entirely different level from the past. “Greece must

Excuse me, but did you say "theme park"?

cease to be quaint,” Buffet exclaimed over a lunch of steak and potatoes at his favorite restaurant in Omaha, Nebraska. “We will develop ancient Greek theme parks, such as Sparta, where tourists can enjoy the recreation of the Spartan tradition of fighting, done in traditional costumes. “We expect to attract wealthy lesbians to holiday on Lesbos, where there will be lavish entertainments based on the poetry of Sappho. In other venues, there will be recreations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, including special events exhibits for children. “Disney has expressed a considerable interest in developing the theme parks,” Buffet related. “And there will be luxury hotels with casinos and expensive restaurants that will specialize in the cuisine of ancient Greece. Planned also is a recreation of Vesuvius erupting and destroying Pompeii. Greek tragedies, rewritten to accommodate the sensibilities of American tourists, including happy endings, will be performed at imitation Greek outdoor theaters, where snacks will be sold by Greek youths in traditional costumes.

A special feature, designed to attract a wide audience, will be a staged trial of Socrates, including a mock version of his suicide by drinking imitation hemlock. And tourists will be able to wander through olive groves to hear Plato and Aristotle teaching, but in English instead of ancient Greek. A reproduction of both the Academy and the Lyceum will have comfortable chairs and tables and pleasant restaurants and bars.

There will be a mass expansion of the olive industry and the production of Greek wine, excluding retsina, because of its harsh taste. There will be a major campaign to reintroduce Metaxa brandy, Fidel Castro’s favorite. Castro has agreed to tape a commercial for Metaxa, in which he explains that he never touches rum, and enjoys Cuban cigars only with Metaxa.

Buffet expects to take Greece, Inc. public in two years, paying down Greek’s debt in five. “After that “ he exclaimed, “It will be all profit all the time,” giving rise to countless jobs and a rising GDP. He sees limitless opportunities on the horizon, not just for Greece, but also for Ireland, Portugal and even Spain, if it should come to that. He envisions all of Europe as one vast theme park, including a mock European parliament. “I see this as a model for the world,” he concluded. “The nation state is basically obsolete. They keep going into deeper and deeper debt because they are run without a sound business model. That has to change.”

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YOUTH OF ISRAEL-FULL OF LIFE

August 2, 2011 By Leave a Comment

You get everything, we get nothing? That doesn't work for us.

The youth of Israel are full of life, putting young Americans to shame.  They are protesting the great disparity of wealth under the Netanyahu regime, which has seen stocks of the biggest Israeli companies increase in value by three hundred percent . While incomes of the great majority of Israelis have stagnated and prices from housing to cottage cheese have soared, Israeli youth have created a tent city in the middle of Tel Aviv and are making their voices heard.  One hundred and fifty thousand young Israelis recently demonstrated in Jerusalem, the largest protest in Israel’s history.

Denouncing “vulgar capitalism,” they point to the privatization of major companies, which has put them into the hands of a few wealthy Israelis, as typical of the state of affairs in Israel now.  There are six thousand millionaires and billionaires and, much like America, everyone else is struggling.  Ridiculed by the Israeli Establishment as a bunch of college kids reenacting Woodstock, the protesters are now supported by eighty percent of the population.  In a panic, Netanyahu canceled a scheduled trip to Poland to lobby against the recognition of a Palestinian state, promising change.  Opposition leader, Tzipi Livni, who once called for the privatization of “anything that moved,” has now repented.

On the surface, Netanyahu’s neo-liberal reforms have been successful.  Official unemployment is at five and a half percent, a remarkable figure.  Israel now has a favorable balance of payments, exporting more than it imports, when in the past it relied on foreign contributions to make up for its chronic deficits.  But on the negative side, twenty-four percent of Israelis live below the poverty line, with many living in squalor.  The growing ultra orthodox Jewish population is exacerbating the problem.  The men don’t work and the women, with little education, take low-paying, menial jobs.  They have gigantic families with ill-educated children who attend orthodox schools that have a medieval curriculum.  They also don’t serve in the military.

Because of their growing numbers, the reactionary ultra orthodox have a powerful political presence. They are determined to undermine the Israeli secular society that has created a modern state and oppose negotiations with the Palestinians, alleging a biblical mandate over all of the West Bank.  With Likud pandering to them and the center Kadima reluctant to take them on, the future of Israel is seriously in doubt.  This makes the tent city in Tel Aviv and the demonstrations all the more significant because the young people participating in them are predominantly secular.  They are fed up with what Israel has become.  While few of them wish to return to the socialism of the past, they are disgusted by the disparity of wealth and the arrogance of the rich.  Israel is no longer a family that takes care of its own, as it was intended to be.  Instead, it has become a mirror image of contemporary America, in which a handful of people control ninety percent of the wealth.

At a time when “liberal” is a dirty word in America, young Israelis are calling for an Israeli New Deal to create a more just society.  One can only hope they succeed because only a just Israel is an Israel that can survive and flourish.  It is also the only Israel that can come to terms with the Palestinians instead of living with the illusion of  “Greater Israel.”

But while young Israelis are demonstrating that they have the power to be heard, young Americans remain largely phlegmatic

American protest? Can't you see I'm busy!

and apathetic, even as their options become increasingly limited.  Burdened by college debt, they put their dreams on hold to take any job they can find and keep quiet.  Many of them don’t have health insurance, whereas in Israel everyone is still covered for free, something the reactionaries have not dared to alter.  Young Americans without college degrees can’t find jobs at all and because college tuitions are rising, more are electing not to go. Young blacks are dropping out of high school in large numbers, assuring the creation of a permanent underclass. Latinos are the group suffering most in the American economy as they lose jobs and can’t find others.

What is missing in America is a sense of solidarity.  The phony ideology of the right, promoted largely by cynical, wealthy Americans like the Koch brothers, is hypocritical.  These self-proclaimed conservatives think they can pay down the debt and balance the budget while increasing the defense budget and supporting the wars that have cost thousands of lives and have drained the wealth of the country, contributing mightily to the great budget deficit . The only person on the right who makes sense is Ron Paul, who has called for an end to the wars and the cutting of the defense budget.   A staunch libertarian, he has also called for gradual reforms of entitlements, unlike Paul Ryan, who has called for the privatization of Medicare.

Young Americans need to emulate the youth of Israel.  Youth of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your stupid governments.

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Four Time Bombs

March 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment

No need for a match, it's already lit.

I am including this article by Paul B. Farrell  for Marketwatch in full.  What is particularly significant is that Farrell was once a banker with Morgan Stanley.  Lest I appear on some FBI list for calling for a revolution, I have decided to use the words of a Wall Street insider instead.

Four time bombs that will blow up Wall Street

Too late to jail bank CEOs; only revolution will succeed

By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Put Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein in jail for six months, and all this will

stop, all over Wall Street and America, a former congressional aide tells Matt Taibbi in his latest Rolling Stone attack, “Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail? Financial crooks brought down the world’s economy — but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them.”

Taibbi’s right, everyone knows Wall Street’s run by a bunch of dictators who are doing more damage to democracy and capitalism than North Africa’s dictators. But jail the CEOs of Goldman, Citi, B. of A. or my old firm Morgan Stanley? Too late.

Only a revolution will stop Wall Street’s self-destructive capitalism. And watching the people revolt against dictators like Mubarak and Gadhafi reminds us of the spirit that sparked America’s revolution in 1776. But today we need a 1930s-style revolution.

During the S&L crisis two decades ago America had a backbone, indicted 3,800 executives and bankers. Today’s leaders have no backbone. Besides jail time won’t reform the darkness consuming Wall Street’s soul. We’re all asleep, in denial about the moral crisis facing America. Yes, we need a new revolution.

Jail time? We’ve heard that many times before. Journalists have been beating that dead horse for three years. Jailing CEOs made sense in early 2009. But our naïve president missed that opportunity, instead surrounded himself with Wall Street insiders as Bush did with Blankfein’s predecessor. Trojan Horses manipulating a Congress filled with clueless Dems mismanaging tired Keynesian theories.

Taibbi got it right: Washington’s error was in protecting Wall Street’s billion-dollar crooks when they should have been prosecuting CEOs for criminal behavior in getting us into the 2008 mess. So today, the political statute-of-limitations has run. Jail solution is wishful thinking, like praying to the tooth fairy for a miracle. Time for action. Time for a revolution on Wall Street.

Jail Wall Street? Old news. They got away with it. We chickened out

“Jail Bank CEOs” makes a great sound bite in the cable pundits’ echo chamber. Remember Taibbi’s earlier indictment of Goldman Sachs: the “world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

But so what? Just three years after Wall Street’s crooks “brought down the world’s economy” Goldman’s Blankfein and his buddies are paying record bonuses, and laughing at us.

Seriously, think about it folks: Since the 2008 meltdown magazines and newspapers have analyzed the 2008 crash to death. It really is old news, history. Journalists churned out book after book: “Greenspan’s Bubbles,” “House of Cards,” “Trillion Dollar Meltdown,” “13 Bankers,” “Dumb Money,” “Bailout Nation,” “All the Devils Are Here,” “The Big Short,” “Too Big to Fail,” “The Failure of Capitalism,” “This Time is Different,” “And Then the Roof Caved In,” on and on, ad nauseum. All talk, no action, and no effect.

Get it? With every book, every editorial, every expose the past three years, Wall Street bankers actually grew stronger, got richer, more arrogant, bolder on bonuses, impervious to attacks, even taunting us, like the dictators Mubarak, Ben Ali and Gadhafi, confident they could do no wrong, confident no one would rebel. Jail? Our moment to act is long past. We blinked.

Yes folks, Wall Street is the “Comeback Kid” story of the 21st century. Like a terrorist in a horror film, Wall Street thrives on threats. Three short years ago, Wall Street was virtually bankrupt, a ward of the state. We could have jailed “just one” of them back then, when they were down for the count. Instead, we bailed them out! Made them richer. Gave them $13.7 trillion, loans, credits, cash, asset buyouts. Gave them keys to the Treasury. They didn’t just recover, they “ran the tables,” to use a blackjack/pool metaphor. Now Wall Street dictators have absolute power, ruling Washington, America, you and me.

Yes, America’s bankrupt, but the rich just do not care

Admit it, we lost the opportunity. Jail a bank CEO and Wall Street will miraculously reform? You’re joking, right? Wall Street got away with a “legal” bank heist. Today the should-be/would-be inmates are running the prison.

Wall Street’s corrupt banks have lost their moral compass … their insatiable greed has become a deadly virus destroying its host nation … their campaign billions buy senate votes, stop regulators’ actions, manipulate presidential decisions. Wall Street money controls voters, runs America, both parties. Yes, Wall Street is bankrupting America.

Wake up America, listen:

“Our country is bankrupt. It’s not bankrupt in 30 years or five years,” warns economist Larry Kotlikoff, “it’s bankrupt today.”

Economist Peter Morici: “Capitalism is broken, America’s government is two bankrupt political parties bankrupting the country.”

David Stockman, Reagan’s budget director: “If there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians” the “tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing.”

BusinessWeek recently asked analyst Mary Meeker to run the numbers. How bad is it? America really is bankrupt, with a “net worth of a negative $44 trillion.” Bankrupt.

And it will get worse. Unfortunately, nothing can stop America’s self-destructive Wall Street bankers. They simply do not care that their “doomsday capitalism” is destroying themselves from within, and is bankrupting America too.
One mega-millionaire sent me an email after reading my Jan. 4 column, “America’s worst 10 years start now.”
“Paul, you may well be right about the coming decade, but the rich exist in a different world from the one you write about. They live privileged lives in gated communities. Meet for holidays at the world’s elite resorts. The richest just aren’t worried about today’s economy like your readers. Their issues revolve around who’s the best masseuse, best Pilates teacher, best concierge medical doctor, which private school to choose, what investments they are making at this time, etc. Folks at the top are not concerned with the underlying deterioration of America, except in the abstract, because they aren’t directly affected. That’s why no amount of information from you will ever change things. To them, it’s irrelevant. Best wishes, always enjoy your stuff.”

4 ticking time bombs that will ignite the Wall Street revolution


Yes, the rich live in a different world. And no, information won’t change them. But a revolution will. Revolutions build slowly over a long time. Then, suddenly, a critical mass, a flash point, something totally unexpected ignites the ticking bomb.

It happened recently in a remote Tunisian village. Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old college graduate, unable to pay bribes, set himself on fire to protest police confiscation of his unlicensed vegetable cart. That triggered a revolution. And his death rapidly led to the collapse of a 24-year dictatorship.
Today we have four hot time bombs, tick-ticking, soon to make history; any one can easily accelerate the revolution that’s already killing Wall Street from within.

Elevator... going down.

1. Wealth gap: Super-Rich vs class wars, death of democracy


The gap: In one generation, America’s wealthiest 1% has exploded from 9% to 23% of America’s income, while middle-class income has stagnated. Even Buffett admits: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and winning.”
But my rich friend tells the real story, of their social disconnect. The rich just don’t care. They live in a different world, live by a self-centered code lacking a moral compass. The public welfare is honored only if supported by tax benefits.
The wealth gap is widening and soon something unpredictable will ignite a Wall Street revolution.
2. Wall Street’s doomsday capitalism vs rule by anarchy


A key Supreme Court decision accelerated and codified Wall Street’s ability to use billions stolen from taxpayers to lobby Washington and solidify its power, all for its own self-interest, through campaign payola, senators’ votes, presidential access, manipulation of regulators, grabbing tax benefits, etc. And it’s every man and woman for themselves.
Don’t believe it? Know this, democracy is dead and you’re in denial. Wall Street CEOs and Forbes 400 billionaires are either engaged in a secret conspiracy, or a classic anarchy picking apart America, oblivious of the fact they are setting up the next big revolution.
3. Pentagon’s perpetual war machine vs America’s budget time bomb


The mathematics of our $75 trillion Social Security and Medicare deficits often seem insurmountable, but can be recalibrated. However, the war-loving mindset of America’s neocons — fueled by China’s military actions, the insatiable expansion of our military spending and a Pentagon prediction that global population growth — is putting more and more pressure on the world’s scarce resources, and will, in turn, increase global wars and the demand for more war spending, increasing the risk of sudden revolutions everywhere.
4. Global population explosion vs resources, jobs, better lifestyles


As the world population explodes from 7 billion to 10 billion in the next generation, the demand for more jobs and the pressure on scarce resources will increase, while expectations will fall as the ratio of haves to have-nots increases, making the world all around Wall Street a burning powder keg setting up a revolution.
Bottom line: Forget jailing Wall Street’s dictators. It’s naïve and too late. We missed that opportunity. But a revolution will do the trick, give us a second chance to jail the crooks.
Until then, remember, these four factors are building to a head, merging into a critical mass that will accelerate into a revolution and destroy Wall Street from within: The widening wealth gap, capitalism’s new rule-by-anarchy, the high cost of feeding the Pentagon’s costly war machine, and the huge global population explosion.

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Egypt – Why Is This News?

January 31, 2011 By Leave a Comment

A message to Wall Street, the CIA, the New York Times and Robert Kaplan.

Stocks have been taking a hit after news of the anti-government demonstrations in Egypt launched a sell-off that began on the Egyptian stock market and is now spreading worldwide.  The question is, why was everyone so surprised?   Financial types never believe anything like this will happen. They assume that dictators like Mubarak, even though he is in his eighties, will be there forever and that the people will suffer in silence as his police state keeps the lid on.  That the CIA missed this should come as no surprise either, considering they missed the Ethiopian revolution, the Iranian revolution and the Tunisian revolution.  The revolution is spreading throughout the Arab world, exactly the opposite of what Robert Kaplan predicted in his New York Times Op Ed piece declaring the uprising in Tunisia to be an isolated case that would never spread to Egypt or anywhere else.

To be an expert in this country is to be a complete idiot.  When my wife, Mary, and I got off the plane in Addis Ababa in 1967 we looked at each other with the same thought:  When does the revolution start?  The Americans, CIA included, considered Haile Selassie to be a permanent fixture, beloved and admired throughout the world.  They had their heads in the sand.  I told anyone from the embassy who asked that the students were fed up with the emperor and with America for supporting him. All I ever got was a shrug.  When I wrote an Op Ed in The New York Times predicting the revolution, the powers that be went bananas, going so far as to suppress a book I had proposed to several publishers at their request.  Then, when it was happening, that overrated jerk, Henry Kissinger, told Nixon to send more arms to the emperor.  Actually, what I knew that few others did, was that Nixon had already sent combat troops to Ethiopia to stop the insurgency.  I knew this because I had seen them with my own eyes at a remote airport. There was another Vietnam in the making, stopped only by Nixon’s impeachment and resignation.

True, I may be wrong about everything, but I make up for it by having this fantastic accent!

If one considers that there are more than 250,000 students at Cairo University alone, it ought to be pretty obvious that anti-government sentiment has got to be seething beneath the surface.  Egypt was once a wealthy country until Britain robbed it blind when it was a colony. Under Mubarak, poverty has increased dramatically, assuaged only by the one-cent cost of a loaf of bread the government makes possible through subsidies.  There are no jobs, there is an arrogant and rich elite and the country is virtually an American colony. Why would these young Egyptians put up with this?  At a certain point, they were bound to risk everything because they had nothing to lose.  Yet the idiots at Davos were shocked by events, with Tony Blair blathering about the need to “manage change.” The entire notion that things can be run interminably from the top whilst millions of people get the shaft is so dumb as to defy the imagination.  And yet it persists–the British when the colonists rose up, the monarchy and the aristocrats in France when the revolution overwhelmed them, the Czar, his family and the Russian elite when Kerensky and then Lenin toppled them.

I have always wondered if these things happen because the leaders are stupid or just greedy and without compassion.  After all, justice is ultimately a matter of self-interest if you want to save your own skin.  When I watch the Republicans setting out to get rid of Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid whilst they give tax cuts to the wealthy during wartime, I am amazed at their arrogance.  They keep believing that the dumb goyim will keep going along like sheep as long as they feed them the same stuff about the dangers of socialism.

I have to admire, in a way, Jamie Dimon’s chutzpah.  Boss of JP Morgan Chase, he recently proclaimed indignantly that he was tired of people criticizing the banks. He just paid himself $17 million as salary, not counting bonuses. This is the guy who blamed the entire financial meltdown on the mortgage holders who had to default. He had nothing to do with this?  This would be a farce were it not so tragic.

At what point will there be a critical mass in America, when a sufficient number of people refuse to accept the new normal of high

We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore!

unemployment and a great disparity of  wealth? Perhaps it will be young people coming out of college burdened by debt and unable to find a job, fed up with the interminable wars and the huge profits made by cutting payrolls even as banks are awash in cash that they will not lend.  I saw a young Egyptian demonstrator shout into the camera. “We are angry! We are fed up!”  As they used to say in Ireland,  “Up the rebels!”  Wherever they may be.

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The Road From Serfdom

January 20, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Out with the old America, in with the new!

The very nature of life itself on planet Earth has changed and there is no going back.  We have entered a new romantic age in which Americans will regain their self-confidence because there is no other choice.  The rebuilding of America begins now as we put our doubts behind us and take a leap of faith into the future, throwing off the past the way a butterfly emerges from its cocoon and takes flight.

We have talked every issue to death and the time has come to act. The petty debates about debt and the budget blind us to our purpose. The notion that Congress must, before it enacts a law, cite the provision of the Constitution that supports it is a form of fanaticism that will lead to a dead end, just as the Presbyterians led Britain to a dead end when they took over parliament and declared that it had to cite the text of scripture that justified an act.

The forces of reaction have proved powerful but it is not capitalism that they seek to restore but orthodoxy.  They do this because they, like infants, fear change. They must not be allowed to succeed.  The life-affirming romantic impulse wakens us from our torpor, firm in our conviction that the future will triumph over the past.  In the new reaction, opportunistic women like Sarah Palin and Michele Backmann join forces with the reactionaries for their own cynical ends.  But they, like their allies in reaction, are parasites feeding off the dead body of the past.  Were they to bury that body they would have nothing to feed on, so they use all their conniving hypocrisy to convince everyone that the body is still alive.

The cynical Christian right, which is a gigantic scam, has brainwashed a generation to fear people different from them.  Many of them who condemn gays are in the closet themselves and, once outed, plead for forgiveness.  They are all just shills for the Republican Party, which is a for-profit entity that uses the state to reward its contributors.

Their very opposite, the Democrats offer a different chimera, pretending to be for justice when all they care about is themselves.   The Democratic Party is an invitation to disillusionment, just as the Tea Party will end up disillusioned with the Republican Party. Their pledge to cut spending vanishes in the self-serving nature of that organization.  That anyone in his right mind would follow Mitch McConnell is beyond comprehension, unless it is some kind of death wish.

All of this is the detritus of the past, the obsolete and petty forces that bog down America and leave it at the mercy of China.  The Big Parasite, the Lockheed Martin Corporation, can’t even get its F-35 fighter built while China has rolled off its new stealth plane, ready for combat.  This is how far we have sunk as a country.

There is no reason to accept this.  Capitalism must reinvent itself, but it can’t as long as the hoaxes that benefit the likes of Goldman Sachs perpetuate themselves.  Sucking on the tit of the Fed because of the fiction that it is a bank holding company, Goldman Sachs can borrow at zero percent interest and make investments with that money. This takes no brains or ability.  All it takes is a willingness of the American people to let them get away with it.

The endless wars, the empire that drains our resources and gives us nothing in return, happen because false capitalists collude with the power-mongers to whom individual achievement means nothing.  The dead hand of the American foreign policy Establishment drags us down as well.  We must throw off the chains they use to bind us to the past.

The belief that capitalism has begun to assert itself based on the revival of the American automobile industry is specious. That revival owed itself to the government bailout that demanded replacement of the corporate hacks who drove GM into the ground.

Ayn Rand was wrong.  Ethics and progress are not incompatible.  To the contrary, it is only through ethics that capitalism can revive the American spirit.  For this to happen, we must produce a new mentality capable of vision, action and creativity.  Hayek specifically opposed laissez faire capitalism and Adam Smith accepted the necessity of regulating the banks and of a moral system opposed to exploitation.  But the fallacy in this is that capitalism is unable break down the class system that perpetuates the destructive privilege hiding behind the façade of a false egalitarian democracy. It is unable because it never wanted to.  We must expose the cynicism of privilege that distorts everything for the benefit of the few, leaving everyone else with shattered dreams.

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The Four Constants

January 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Without the massive bailout by both the Federal government and the Fed, capitalism in the United States would have come to an

More freedom, please.

end. There is no disputing this. Consequently the argument that government is the problem and that the market should be left alone borders on the pathological.  Were one to seriously consider the cogent arguments for free market capitalism, of William Graham Sumner, Ludwig Von Mises and Murray Rothbard, one would learn that there are four constants.

The first element is the incompatibility of capitalism with imperialism and aggressive war. Corporate America and its powerful financial sector have supported and profited from the American wars begun by George W, Bush and which are being continued by Barack Obama. But because Bush implemented his extreme tax cuts that Obama has continued in his “compromise” with the Republicans, there is virtually no chance that America will be able to cut spending to a sufficient degree to stop the flow of red ink.  The great prophets of capitalism were right but they have been ignored.

The second constant is the realization Tzetan Todorov observed in IN DEFENSE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT, that although the Enlightenment and its core principles form the foundation of modern liberal democracy, those principles have been diluted, perverted and misapplied. Referring to the thinkers who launched the Enlightenment project, he argues that we must return to it but with far less optimism than the philosophies from whom he draws his inspiration.   He draws this profound and disturbing but irrefutably correct conclusion:  “The age of maturity that past authors were hoping would come seems not to be the destiny of humankind.   Humanity is condemned to seek truth rather than possess it…. This would be the vocation our species: to pick up the task of enlightenment with each new day, knowing that it is interminable.”

The third constant is that the human race is savaging the planet, using up and destroying its resources without replenishing them, even as population continues to increase.  It is inevitable by virtue of this that the planet will experience famine, drought and energy shortages on a monumental scale, threatening the very existence of civilization as we have come to know it.  Wars will arise from these shortages without immediate and drastic action.

The fourth constant is the disparity of wealth that plagues the planet. Goldman Sachs executives keep paying themselves fortunes whilst most everyone is going down the tubes.   Global poverty remains intractable, even if there is a pretense that it is otherwise.  The top ten percent in America control eighty percent of the wealth whilst ninety percent have only ten percent. It is this disparity that engenders unemployment because it destroys the purchasing power of the middle class the fuels the economy and creates jobs. Notwithstanding these considerations, it is true as well that many voters, particularly those of the Tea Party persuasion, think that Calvin Coolidge should be resurrected and sent back to the White House. The basis for this is Coolidge’s famous pronouncement:  “After all, the chief business of the American people is business.”

'Groupon' trading at 300? I'm in!

But that was then and this is now.  There is no more great industrialized America of the type admired by Ayn Rand; and what Americans do produce they are likely to be producing in China.  Because most Americans are deeply in debt, they are not buying the way they used to and because they are not buying merchants are not selling, at least nowhere near what they did in the past. Rampant speculation is the norm while venture capitalists, after years of being risk averse, are now throwing their money at dot-coms with specious balance sheets in the usual state of hysteria that is always the weakest aspect of capitalism.  It builds and builds until it finally explodes, as it has in the past and as it will in the future.

The challenges facing the human race are monumental but the petty concerns of many policy makers are fundamentally irrelevant to the human condition.   Consider Mitch McConnell pondering these issues as he holds up every single piece of legislation that might address a minute portion of them.  His most important objective, he has acknowledged, is to make Barack Obama a one-term president.  This is not particularly reassuring in the current environment.  The anti-Enlightenment forces are prevailing everywhere, the quest for truth marginalized, first by the academic relativists and deconstructionists and then by the barbarism of the New Right.  But the truth can set you  free, provided you are prepared to face it and, as Bertrand Russell advised,  act with vigor on the probabilities.

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