The Saucy Mugwump

Flagstar Bank, Fannie Mae, Timothy Geithner, and other criminals

2012-02-09T17:09:00.002-07:00

As I ponder my foreclosure auction now just one week away and my Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing the day after that, I can say from personal experience that our government -- both parties -- is a farce.

Take the Making Home Affordable Act. It was sold as helping keep homeowners in their homes. And if that failed, the Exit Gracefully section was supposed to convince banksters to accept a short-sale or deed-in-lieu of foreclosure.

I received two bona fide short-sale offers on my house. The lender, Flagstar Bank, refused to even acknowledge the offers as is customary for real estate transactions: accept, reject, or counter is the expected response in contractual matters. I repeatedly offered to execute a deed-in-lieu, i.e. give the house back to the bank. Flagstar refused.

I could not understand this. I have been unemployed for a long time and have no assets that Flagstar could seize after foreclosure. Their customer service agents admitted to me that Flagstar was never going to accept anything less than full restitution. One agent admitted that Flagstar was going to come after me simply because it could, as my home state is a "recourse" state, i.e. the law allows creditors to pursue debtors until the cows come home or bankruptcy, which ever comes first.

Note to Suze Orman and other celebrity airheads recommending that people simply walk away from their homes: try that in a "recourse" state and you are likely to lose everything you own.

I naively thought that Fannie Mae might be interested in Flagstar's reticence to consider any other option other than foreclosure. I called their 800 number and eventually talked to Margie in Level 2. Margie was as useful as an old, mildewed dish rag. She said she contacted Flagstar and could not get them to reconsider. But Flagstar agents had told me that Fannie Mae was the investor in the house and was calling the shots. One Flagstar agent told me that Fannie Mae has a large office in Flagstar's main building, so their relationship is fairly incestuous. Given his comment, I think it is safe to assume that Fannie Mae has an office in every large bank.

The mortgage insurance company, Genworth, is about as clueless as companies can be. They are on the hook with lenders, yet they appear to have no leverage. They called me a few times and the agent always ended the call with something along the lines of "call us if you are ever interested in a short-sale." I always exploded at that point, given that I had received two bona fide short-sale offers which Flagstar ignored.

Flagstar could have saved itself shyster fees by accepting a short-sale or deed-in-lieu, but it wanted its pound of flesh. My bankruptcy attorney told me that I was giving Flagstar too much credit. She believes that banks are simply incompetent, yet another reason to intervene every bank with assets over 1% of GDP.

My bankruptcy attorney also believes that in "recourse" states, banks usually come after borrowers who fall into foreclosure, so bankruptcy is often the best option.

A lawyer from Colorado Legal Services suggested that I contest the foreclosure with the legal argument that Flagstar was negligent in its duty to accept a short-sale or deed-in-lieu because it is a signatory to the Making Home Affordable Act. I did that, but at the hearing the judge said that the only thing he was concerned with was the issue of default. He refused to even consider the Making Home Affordable Act.

And then I read some of the fine print of the Making Home Affordable Act: banks are allowed to decide if they will accept a short-sale or deed-in-lieu -- there is no government monitoring. The illustrious Timmy Geithner created a hollow law, one which allows banksters to ignore it. And the ever-smiling Barry Obama still has not fired Timmy, even though the Making Home Affordable Act is used by them to placate the unwashed masses into believing that our government is not in bed with the banksters.

I can imagine how the meeting between Timmy and the banksters went.

Timmy: The MHAA states that banks will determine which borrowers are approved for a short-sale or a deed-in-lieu. Get it? You determine who to approve.

Flagstar Bank bankster: Will the Treasury Department fine or otherwise punish us if we do not approve any borrowers?

Timmy: No, you will make the entire decision and we will not interfere. Besides, who are borrowers going to complain to? Congress? They are in your pocket already. The President? If he was serious about cracking down on bankers, why did he hire friends of bankers like me, Larry Summers, and Mary Schapiro? Puleeze. He only cares about being reelected.

Speaking of the President, sometime I will tell you the story about when we replaced the President's teleprompter content with a speech from a violent British Muslim. Barry never even noticed! And neither did the liberals listening to the speech!

Bank of America bankster: What if we foreclose on people who paid-off their homes or never even had a loan with us?

Timmy: As my best buddy, Rick Santelli, would say: losers!

Now, who's ready for another bailout?

FICTION: The end of the line

2012-01-09T09:12:00.015-07:00

"Meine Damen und Herren" began the announcement for the Inter-City Express train to Munich. It was on time, as German trains tend to be. It left shortly after 9:00 AM from Berlin Ostbahnhof -- East Station -- the first station on the journey. It passed through Berlin's main railway station just 11 minutes later. It would eventually meander its way through Frankfurt, the financial center of Germany, through Stuttgart, the location of the best automobile factories in the world, and finally end up in Munich a little over eight hours later. Nobody ever rode this train end-to-end except for Deutsche Bahn employees, because Stuttgart lies many miles to the west of Munich. If someone wanted to travel from Berlin to Munich, they would take a more direct route via Fulda or Nürnberg, aka Nuremberg, requiring only 6-7 hours.

Lars boarded the train and headed for his seat. He knew exactly which car to board because he matched the car # on his ticket with the location designated by the Wagenstandanzeiger (train diagram). In Europe, a ticket and seat reservation are actually two different things. One can buy a ticket and try to find an open seat. Usually this works just fine, but on certain days, especially holidays or special events, a train can become completely filled, forcing the ticket holder to stand in an aisle. One can buy a reservation for a seat, but that reservation does not entitle the holder to actually ride on the train. The system appears to be screwy to first-timers, but this system allows the ticket price to be a little lower than if it included a seat reservation. Lars actually had a railpass which allowed him to board any train at any time, but he still needed to buy a seat reservation to ensure a seat. He spent his last euros to buy a reservation because he did not want to be ejected from a seat during his final journey.

His railpass only entitled him to second class travel. He thought long and hard about whether to spend more money and upgrade to first class travel. He remembered the young couple in Denmark on his last trip to Europe many years ago. They must have been trying to impress everyone with their young love, spending the entire journey smooching in an obnoxiously loud manner with all sorts of water noises escaping from their lips. Lars thought about slapping his thighs, moaning loudly, and smacking his lips to give them a hint that their behavior was rudely selfish, but he switched cars instead. Besides, he really did not have the extra money it would cost to upgrade to first class seating.

The conductor came by and asked for Lars' ticket. When he saw that Lars had a railpass, he just said "Ja, ja," and stamped his pass in the last valid slot. After this day, the pass would be mere paper.

Lars had no idea what he could do or where he could stay in Munich. He had chosen this train for only one reason: it was just about the longest train he could ride nonstop and still remain in Germany. Remaining in Germany was important because his railway pass was only valid in Germany. Besides, it had to end some time.

He remembered a Nissan commercial which only played for a very short time with the tagline: "Life's a journey; enjoy the ride." He thought this was a great line, with the ride representing both life and a car. Religious nuts had probably complained that their favorite god had been omitted from the ad, causing it to be pulled prematurely.

He started to reminisce about the events which resulted in his being on the train. He had been laid-off from his job a few years ago. He had only been able to find part-time work since then, with the jobs paying around $10 per hour, not remotely enough to make mortgage payments. When his unemployment benefits ran out, he could no longer afford his mortgage payments. He owned an old, full-size pickup truck with a shell on the back, so he lived in it during the winter after he moved out of his house. It was brutal during the times when the temperature stayed below freezing for days on end. But the truck provided protection from the wind so he toughed it out.

One of the things that convinced Lars that the USA was headed directly into the toilet were the actions of the mortgage bank, Flagstar Bank, after it foreclosed on his house. As soon as he realized that he would end up losing the house, he offered to execute a deed-in-lieu of foreclosure, i.e. give the house back to the bank. He had also had two bona fide short-sale offers on the house, but Flagstar just ignored them, even though real estate transactions generally require that one accept, counter, or reject an offer. Flagstar eventually responded with written language about how they would "resume other means to collect any amounts due on your account," i.e. they were going to sue him for the difference between the foreclosure auction and the mortgage payoff. Flagstar was doing this even though it was a signatory to the Making Home Affordable Act, where banks agreed to accept short-sales or a deed-in-lieu. The Treasury Department conveniently neglected to enforce this act, but that did not stop the president from trumpeting it to ignorant liberals on the campaign trail as just one of the reasons he should be reelected.

Lars tried to get Fannie Mae involved, seeing as it was the investor for the property, but he eventually realized that Fannie was part of the problem. Some financial columnists theorized that Fannie was not interested in negotiating loans down because it is simply waiting for the next government bailout. And Congress refuses to become involved because there is no money in it -- no money for the congressmen, that is.

Lars eventually filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy which finally closed the door to the shysters. The reason why bankruptcy was necessary is that Lars' home state is a "recourse" state, i.e. one which allows banks to pursue mortgage debt holders until the cows come home, regardless of whether this results in the debt holder becoming homeless. Lars thought that we may no longer have debtors' prisons, but we have the next best thing.

The president and/or Congress could have passed legislation classifying all states as "non-recourse" states as far as mortgages go, but since politicians had long since sold their souls to Wall Street, that was never going to happen. The only reason politicians did not try to pass legislation making all states "recourse" states was that the issue would have been explained in the few media outlets which weren't owned by fascists, causing an uproar; they reasoned it was better to leave sleeping dogs lie.

The combination of foreclosure and bankruptcy was a major factor in preventing Lars from obtaining another good job. As soon as employers ran a credit check -- and they all do nowadays, regardless of whether it could be justified -- their interest evaporated. It wasn't even worth applying for a job requiring a security clearance because foreclosure and bankruptcy are automatic disqualifications.

His truck was old and on its second transmission. When it failed the first time years ago, the symptoms were novel, but when it started to fail the second time, he knew what he was in for. Fifth gear failed first, forcing him to keep to 55 MPH on the highways. But then fourth gear failed too, and he knew it was only a matter of weeks, perhaps days, before the transmission failed entirely. Given that a rebuilt transmission would cost over $3000 and even an overhaul by the local mechanic would cost over $2000, he was forced into making a decision. That was in the beginning of October, just when it was starting to become cold at night. He did not have money for the transmission or a true credit card to put off the inevitable payment. And when his truck died, probably in an inconvenient location, it would be towed away, leaving him to live on the streets.

The last straw for Lars was the Tea Party dolt he ran into in a grocery store. The dolt was giving everyone his best Rick Santelli impression, loudly complaining about all the losers who lost their homes because they accepted too high of a loan amount on their mortgage. Then he repeated the usual nonsense about government being too large, but in the next breath claimed that the government should ban abortion, increase the size of the military, and mandate Creationism to be taught in the schools. Lars walked up to the dolt and flattened him with a right hook.

Lars had almost $1000 in a state retirement plan. He had only worked an occasional job as a teacher's assistant, even though he had tried to get on full-time. This was the last money he had left. He cashed it in and put the proceeds in a prepaid credit card. Some people would have recommended that he put this money into his truck, but the reality was that the engine was just about shot.

Lars started going to the library every day, using their PCs to search for flights to Europe. He was able to search for flights that most people could not accept, e.g. a reasonable flight to Europe, but with a return flight that had a myriad of connections lasting a few days. The return leg was irrelevant, so he never paid any attention to the details. One day he lucked out and found a return trip to Germany for only $100, certainly a mistake by the airline, perhaps having something to do with the fact that he was traveling to Germany immediately after Oktoberfest when everyone else would be leaving. He snapped up the tickets using using his prepaid credit card. After he was finished, just for laughs he searched for the same flight again, but that price was now many times higher.

The politicians had used the massive unemployment situation to political advantage, as they always do. The president had ordered the Labor Department to cook the books, i.e. eliminate the people who were no longer collecting unemployment benefits from being counted as officially unemployed. That brought the number down to almost tolerable levels. The cow-like members of the party swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. The other party realized what the president was doing and started using it in their campaign ads. They also hammered away on their dead horse that cutting taxes would create jobs, even though the Wall Street Journal had concluded that tax cuts have no positive effect on job creation. The cow-like members of the party swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. The president's party continued their ploy of whining that the economic problems were actually the fault of the previous president, but no one fell for this nonsense anymore, especially given that the president still employed his Treasury Secretary who had been proven time and again to be in collusion with Wall Street, as had the previous president's Treasury Secretary. And both parties fully supported offshoring/outsourcing, even though the president's party often tried to appeal to unions and workers in general. The only difference between the two parties was that the president's party pretended to care.

In other words, nothing was going to change with respect to employment regardless of what Tweedledee or Tweedledum promised during the presidential campaign.

It was ironic that Lars was traveling to Germany, a country which saw its unemployment rate decrease since Wall Street grifters demolished the world's economy. Virtually every other country in the world saw its unemployment rate increase during this time period, but politicians in casino-lands like the USA and the UK continue to push for yet more dependence upon gambling by the elite rather than the manufacturing which allows Germany to thrive.

Lars had estimated his daily expenditure for hostel stays. Food costs would be minimal, given that every German town had a bratwurst stand in the city center. And their sausage was not the tasteless and/or often bizarre creations found in the USA. No, for just a few euros, one could have a footlong sausage which satiated hunger. He had to add a few euros per day for beer, as it would be a crime to travel through Germany and abstain.

Lars thought about using Länder-Tickets whenever possible, using his railpass only for days where he would ride for a long distance. These tickets are a day-pass for all railway travel within one German state, e.g. for Bavaria, and cost $30 or so. There are restrictions for using these tickets, mainly traveling in second class, only after 9:00 AM, and only traveling on slower trains which excludes the ICE trains which are much more comfortable and include a decent restaurant car. But after looking at the price differential for adding another day to his railpass -- only $20-30 -- he realized that it was better to use a railpass. If he was traveling with someone else, the Länder-Tickets might have been the best solution as they are often good for multiple people, but this trip was a solo affair.

He estimated that his money would last for ten days, after buying the airline ticket and railpass.

On the day of his departure, Lars drove to the airport with extra time to spare just in case his transmission completely failed. As he passed the outer limits of the airport property, the third gear failed, with the torque converter slipping to the point where it was virtually impossible to drive up even an imperceptible slope. Luckily he only needed to drive to the discount parking lot with a level road all the way in.

The die was cast; there was no going back.

The flight was fortunately uneventful, with no Muslim nutcase trying to hijack and/or destroy the aircraft; oh, for the days when Hare Krishnas were the worst people one met in airports and on airplanes. Lars lucked-out and had no one in the seat next to him so he could stretch out and get some sleep.

He spent his time in Germany retracing the steps of Johann Sebastian Bach. He flew into Frankfurt and boarded a train to Eisenach from the railway station beneath the airport. Eisenach was the birthplace of Bach, as well as being an important stop-over for Martin Luther who stayed in Wartburg Castle. Eisenach is a pilgrimage site for music lovers from all over the world, but especially for Germans.

He used Eisenach as a hub to see other cities, especially Arnstadt and Mühlhausen, both cities where Bach had worked and lived. Bach's skills as an organist were initially his source of income, but then his skills as a composer quickly convinced church leaders to retain him.

Two events in Mühlhausen almost caused him to reconsider his plans. The first was seeing a young mother with her clearly disabled daughter. Unlike in the USA where the mother would be on her cellphone and ignoring her child, this woman was actually attentive. The child was adorable in her two-pointed hat. The second was another young woman saying "Hello!" to him without provocation. That never happened in the USA where many women neurotically keep the telephone number for a lawyer specializing in stalking cases in their cellphone memory.

Weimar, where Bach lived and worked for almost ten years, was another day-trip. When Bach wanted to quit and move to another city, church leaders were so incensed that a mere servant had the audacity to attempt to determine his own fate that they imprisoned him for almost one month. Right-wing American politicians must think of this episode as one of the really high points in management history.

Then Lars traveled to Leipzig and used it as a hub to see Köthen, Dresden, and Wittenberg, as well as Leipzig itself.

Köthen is where Bach lived and worked for over five years. Unlike the other Bachstadt, Köthen is not terribly picturesque because it was both in the path of the Red Army during WWII and behind the Iron Curtain where Germans were not allowed to rebuild, but it was where Bach wrote the Brandenburg Concertos so Lars was compelled to visit.

Dresden is a picturesque city by itself, if one ignores the fact that it was virtually flattened in 1945 by Allied bombers. Bach visited the city so it was another good day-trip for Lars.

Leipzig is the city where Bach lived and worked for over 25 years until his death in 1750. Bach is such an important person in classical music that the Baroque Era ends with his death. Bach's final resting place, after making stops in St. John's Cemetery and then in St. John's Church due to the devastation of WWII, is St. Thomas' Church, where his well-marked tomb is the ultimate pilgrimage site for Bach lovers.

Wittenberg is the city made famous by Martin Luther's posting of his 95 Thesis on the door of the All Saints Church. Luther was protesting the selling of indulgences by the Catholic Church. It occurred to Lars that a similar thing was happening in the USA with respect to television evangelists, where people donated enormous sums of money to a shady preacher in the hopes that their place in Paradise would be assured.

Then Lars traveled to Berlin, making side-trips to Lüneburg and Lübeck, both relatively minor Bach cities. He spent his last few days in the Berlin area, with side-trips to majestic cathedrals like the one in Magdeburg, an otherwise dreary city.

Lars knew that one of the things that is not well-reported even in Germany are the suicides involving trains. The most famous case was of German soccer goalie Robert Enke, who jumped in front of a train in November 2009. Suicide by train is not the painless, quick, or even guaranteed method as depicted in stories like Anna Karenina. Many people end up bleeding to death after the train rolls over them. Passengers riding on one of these suicide trains report the sound of bones being broken under their feet, a disconcerting sound to say the least. Many trains are delayed by these suicides, with the passengers never being told the reason for the delay.

Lars' train was not delayed by one of these suicides.

Lars nodded-off for a while and awoke with a start from a nightmare. Rick Steves, the lispy PBS travel host, had seen his business drop precipitously because of Depression 2.0, so he created a new travel business, one which catered to homosexuals. His new travel show started with a paraphrasing of the line he had used in his regular travel show: "Starch your underwear into its upright and locked position and get ready for travels without pants!" At this point Steves looked down at his crotchless leather pants and then looked up again, this time with horny excitement mixed with his goofy grin.

Lars had brought about 30 generic Vicodin to make his exit. He had saved them from dental visits over a few years. Sure, they were old, but they would do the trick when mixed with the contents of a flask of vodka. He downed his pills while passing through Hanau, the birthplace of the Brothers Grimm; somehow this seemed appropriate, especially given that his train had already passed through Göttingen and Kassel, cities where they had collected and written their famous and often grisly folk tales. Then Lars stared out the window and waited for the pills to take effect. His eyes moistened as he thought of what might have been.

The train continued down the track towards its final destination.

* * * * *

The conductor was tired after a long day and did not appreciate the man remaining in his seat after the train had arrived in Munich, as he had already dealt with a few drunks on this trip. The conductor first addressed him verbally, and when that had no effect, he placed his hand on his shoulder and shook him gently. Lars slumped in his seat and then fell into the aisle like an old rag doll.

Both the journey and the ride were at an end.

UPDATE: North Korea 3.0

2012-01-06T15:49:00.004-07:00

Der Spiegel's article, Seoul Searching: Germans Give Pep Talks on Korean Unification, echoed some of the thoughts I expressed in Reunification of Korea: fast or slow pace. Der Spiegel accompanied a contingent of Germans to South Korea for talks on how reunification might occur. These Germans were all in leadership positions in either West Germany or the DDR during the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. These talks took place just a few weeks ago, before Kim Jong-il died.

Der Spiegel noted that "Ministry of Unification officials say that every broadcast that comes from the North is blocked by South Korean state agencies out of fear of propaganda." This was never true of Western Europe during the Cold War when Westerners were able to watch broadcasts of the Soviet Bloc. Is the South Korean government really afraid that its people will fall for the childish propaganda of the North?

Der Spiegel quoted Lothar de Maizière, the last prime minister of the DDR, and Rainer Eppelmann, the last defense minister of the DDR.

They always have the same questions. It was the same story today. The [South] Koreans basically don't want unity to cost too much, and I tell them it will cost much more than you can imagine," explained de Maizière.

"I've realized that the South Koreans are trying to figure out a way for the North Koreans to remain in the North after unification. The South Koreans were talking about border controls. I'll be damned! They seriously intend to close the border after the wall has fallen!" exclaimed Eppelmann.

This is pure fantasy on the part of South Korea, as I wrote before. Closing the border to their Northern cousins might poison the well of goodwill for decades to come.

BBC News reported that the president of South Korea, Lee Myung-bak, said in a nationally televised address, that peace was his priority and that a "window of opportunity" had opened for better ties with the North. But given the Der Spiegel report, one wonders if that window has bars on it to prevent North Koreans from entering the promised land.

The Telegraph reported that Kim Jong-il's eldest son, Kim Jong-nam, visited Pyongyang during the recent grieving period.

Kim Jong-nam lives in Macau in a luxury apartment. He is also reputed to have an apartment in Paris and more lovers than just his wife

A source reported that Kim Jong-nam "pulled out of the succession race several years ago by himself, saying he had no interest in politics."

Was this mere sour grapes, whining at his fall from grace because he bizarrely tried to enter Japan on a false passport to see Disneyland?

Or is he just another ruthless bastard like his father, equating the deaths of millions of his countrymen from starvation to politics?

If a group of Korean military officers ever decides to execute a coup and take control away from the criminally selfish Kim family, one of their first actions should be to issue an international arrest warrant for Kim Jong-nam, as well as work with French and Chinese authorities to have his property -- North Korean property -- confiscated, pending the actions of a new government.

UPDATE: Chinese bed bugs and a year of DDT

2011-12-29T10:25:00.004-07:00

I unenthusiastically visited a friend of mine who had discovered that his apartment had been infested by bed bugs. I made sure to keep my visit short and never sat down. I was sure that I would be safe from the little vampires. But then I felt a stinging sensation on my ankle and looked down, only to see one biting my leg, through my cotton athletic sock. I took a tissue and crushed the bloody life out of it: my blood, his life.

When the exterminator arrived, I asked him about my experience. He dismissed my complaint, saying that it probably crawled onto my shoe during the night when I was asleep. When I told him that I did not live there, that I was there just for a short visit, he gave me a look of disbelief. He did not need to say much, but we could understand his surprise; American bed bugs are known for infesting beds and upholstered furniture, but they are not known for crawling onto people's shoes during the day when people are just walking around.

But then again, the exterminator was of the opinion that DEET is an effective bed bug repellent. Even a cursory Google search will unearth many references which state that DEET is absolutely not effective against the diminutive monsters. Permethrin, on the other hand, is an effective repellent and killer. REI and other sporting goods retailers sell it.

These bed bugs -- Chinese ones imported via cardboard boxes used to package computer parts -- are highly aggressive, just like their owners.

The exterminator used Demand CS, a chemical I never heard of. I was curious as to his technique and so I watched him work. First he sprayed along all walls and even pulled back the carpet to see if he could find any actual bed bugs. Then he used a duster to cover the carpet. I caught one whiff from the duster and I started coughing. I immediately left the abode, but for the rest of the day my nose would run in an odd way. I do not know how professionals tolerate Demand CS on a regular basis; he was not wearing any mask or aspirator.

He told us not to bother using any bug bombs sold at the home improvement store. Those bug bombs can be effective against spiders and other common bugs, but bed bugs will simply move to another room -- or apartment -- making the situation worse.

* * * * *

The National Post's article, Q&A: Toronto’s lice infestation, featured Gina Zacher, the founder of Toronto Head Lice removal. It made one want to take a long shower.

Zacher created a business dedicated to the elimination of lice in people's hair after her daughter was befriended by the little critters.

Zacher said "I don't remember as a child ever having lice checks and I run into a lot of adults that are saying the same thing."

No kidding. I never knew anyone with a lice problem growing up, but then again I only knew Americans for the most part. I thought lice was only a problem in hell holes like Africa and large prisons in dictatorships like North Korea.

Zacher said that "as a society we wash our hair too much. It's clean; [lice] don't like dirty hair. We're told to wash our hair every day…. Once every week or once every two weeks is enough to let your natural oils grow back in."

If she only washes her hair every week or two, I hope I never meet her in person. Is that a new cologne or do you just stink?

Armies traditionally required soldiers to cut their hair short to prevent lice from gaining a foothold, er, headhold. Short haircuts remain effective for keeping lice at bay.

Zacher is a poster child for the claims by Democrats and Republicans that globalization will create jobs: yukky jobs.

* * * * *

Continuing to make us regret having joined the WTO, BBC News reported on the resurgence of bed bugs. BBC News noted that bed bugs have become resistant to many of our extermination chemicals.

BBC News also noted that "bed-bugs infecting households in the US and Canada in the last decade were not domestic bed bugs, but imports," especially from Africa and Asia.

Aren't you glad that you shop at Walmart and other firms which import extremely large quantities of goods directly from China? Isn't globalization grand?

BBC News also reported on the fact that hair is a defense against bed bugs. It quoted the journal Biology Letters as noting that hungry bed bugs placed on shaved arms were more likely to try to feed compared with those on unshaved arms.

Not only does hair slow them down, it also warns the victim via the unsettling feeling caused when a bug moves through body hair or jumps off into clothing to escape after sucking blood from its victim.

In the not-so-distant future when everything we buy is made in China, India, and other foreign locales, and unemployment exceeds that of the Great Depression -- assuming we make an honest effort to count all unemployed people, of course -- multinational corporations will employ marketing campaigns to persuade us that nothing is wrong with moving all manufacturing overseas. Beauty supply companies will try to convince women to buy more hair-care products, while home improvement stores will attempt to persuade people that the bed bugs in shipping boxes which led to a whole-house infestation is a great excuse to remodel. And shysters will have long-ago convinced Congress to pass legislation exempting their corporate clients from any liability for the insect invasion.

Islam in Somalia: a religion of piece

2011-12-28T11:13:00.001-07:00

The New York Times article, For Somali Women, Pain of Being a Spoil of War, must have burned the fingers of the liberal reporter writing it.

One Somali girl "remembered the bright, sunny afternoon when she stepped out of her hut and saw her best friend buried in the sand, up to her neck," because she had refused to marry an al-Shabab commander. Her friend was then killed by bashing her head in with stones.

The article continued with: "Several months later, the men came back. Five militants burst into her hut, pinned her down and gang-raped her. They claimed to be on a jihad, or holy war, and any resistance was considered a crime against Islam, punishable by death."

The NYT noted that "there has been a free-for-all of armed men preying upon women and girls . . . where Islamist militants, rogue militiamen and even government soldiers rape, rob and kill with impunity."

Somalis are all Muslim, so instead of Islam being a religion of peace, it must be a religion of piece. As in, a piece of ass.

If this is the way Muslim men treat Muslim women, imagine how they want to treat infidel women.

All immigration from Somalia must cease immediately.

Seagate: a Chinese company in all but name

2011-12-26T11:27:00.006-07:00

The stretch of Colorado from Louisville to Longmont in Colorado used to be a great place to live if you worked in the high-tech business. Companies like StorageTek (founded in 1969 as Storage Technology), MiniScribe (founded in 1980), Maxtor (founded in 1982), and Seagate (founded in 1979 as Shugart Technology) were companies where everyone was a family. Many of these companies built onsite work-out facilities for their employees. Many of them organized company softball, volleyball, and other sports leagues.

StorageTek management reached too far with their quest to equal IBM. They pushed for an IBM mainframe processor and optical disk, long before its time, spending many, many millions, eventually failing.

The good times ended for StorageTek in October 1984 when it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The people laid-off just before the filing did not know it at the time, but they were the lucky ones because they received severance pay. The ones laid-off after the filing received an IOU which was settled by the bankruptcy court. Boulder and the surrounding counties lost around 10% of their tax revenues as a result.

MiniScribe lasted until the end of 1989 when a scandal erupted which was uproarious even to employees. Disk drives at that time were rather large, especially compared to today's 2.5" and 3.5" PC drives. Management cooked the books to the extent that false shipments were recorded. Management was finally caught shipping bricks and scrap parts in boxes labeled as disk drives. The company officially failed just after New Year's Day.

StorageTek emerged from Chapter 11 and lasted until 2005 when Sun Microsystems bought it. The employees who were privy to inside information could tell that the CEO was really trying to sell the company, most likely to maximize his bonus. The employees discovered around that time that the land on which the Louisville facility sat was worth many millions, reason alone to sell the company. Then Sun Microsystems was sold to Oracle in 2010.

Maxtor bought the remnants of MiniScribe in 1990, but it danced with bankruptcy in 1992 and just managed to leave the dance floor alone. In 2006 it was acquired by Seagate.

Seagate today is one of the big-two hard drive manufacturers, now that it has acquired Samsung's hard drive division and Western Digital is completing its acquisition of Hitachi's hard drive division. In 2000 Seagate incorporated in Grand Cayman. Then last July it incorporated in Ireland.

Looking at Seagate's employment website for jobs in Longmont will unearth two engineering positions: Customer Quality Engineer and Applications Engineer. Both positions include the following three bullet points in the preferred requirements:

Ability to speak Mandarin Chinese.
Ability to work flexible hours to support customers in different time zones.
Ability to travel up to 15%.

Like Western Digital, Seagate does not manufacture any drives in the USA any more. The recent floods in Thailand caused a major disruption to the supply of hard drives, given that a large number of them are manufactured there. The prices for all hard drives have doubled in the past few months.

But if Seagate were hiring for support for Thailand, it would be advertising for Thai-speakers. Not only has Seagate offshored production to China, but now it is essentially only willing to hire Chinese people in the USA to support its major operations in China.

Seagate has not been an American company for over ten years, so why isn't it treated the same as Chinese companies?

All of the above corporate failures were caused, not by employees, but by management. Voters should remember this next November when Republicans regale us with their tired old fairy tales that only the top 1% create jobs and that tax cuts for the wealthy create jobs especially given that corporations now own our politicians.

UPDATE: North Korea 3.0

2011-12-23T12:13:00.001-07:00

Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, president of the United Nations General Assembly, held a moment of silence for the not-to-be-missed Kim Jong-il. Many Western nations rightfully boycotted the spectacle.

Would he have held a moment of silence for Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, Hitler, or any other leader who presided over millions of deaths in his own country?

A moment of silence would be infinitely more appropriate for the millions of Koreans who died from starvation during Kim Jong-il's reign of terror.

A moment of silence would be helpful and relevant for the estimated 250,000 Koreans currently being held in six major prison camps, with many of these people being entire families.

Prague correctly held a moment of silence at the funeral of Václav Havel, someone who was the diametric opposite of Kim Jong-il. Havel spent time in prison for his opposition to tyranny and many people believe that his five years in prison shortened his life.

* * * * *

Predictably, reports are starting to arrive telling of the stage-managed nature of the public grief seen in Pyongyang. We see long lines of mourners in the queue to view Kim Jong-il's mummified body before it is officially put on display next to his father, Kim Il-sung.

My Russian language textbook from the 1970s shows the same long lines of people waiting to see the mummified Lenin on Red Square. Yet today there are only a handful of people waiting to see him, mostly tourists and people interested in history. The mausoleum is not even open every day anymore and one must plan carefully if one wants to see him. The same thing will happen to the dead Kims after reunification.

* * * * *

Der Spiegel and other news outlets are reporting of a new woman in the circus surrounding Kim Jong-il's death. The article, in German, shows a photo of a young woman standing behind Kim Jong-un. The article begins with:

She is young, slim, and pretty. She is an unknown quantity standing at the coffin of the deceased Kim Jong-il, accompanying his son and potential successor Kim Jong-un. The woman is either a daughter of the dead dictator -- or the new First Lady of North Korea.

My money is on her being Kim Jong-un's wife. Otherwise why wouldn't the other children of Kim Jong-il have been present?

Given that women are rarely seen in North Korean government photos, this might be a good omen that Kim Jong-un is asserting himself in Western ways.

* * * * *

Chinese government officials are anxious to preserve 'stability' in the Korean peninsula. In a conversation with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and South Korean Foreign Minister Kim Sung Hwan, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi stressed "the importance of ensuring security on the Korean peninsula."

To paraphrase Hillary's husband Bill, that all depends on what your definitions of stability and security are.

As I wrote in Sauced Chinese diplomat rants and raves, Chinese diplomats do not like the USA or South Korea. China's top-ranking UN diplomat, Sha Zukang, told UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon at a UN meeting "I never liked you." Ban Ki-moon is Korean. Then Sha Zukang announced regarding someone else: "I really don't like him: he's an American and I really don't like Americans."

China has never been bothered by the millions of Koreans who starved to death since the Korean War. China could easily have loaded 100 tractors onto a train and sent it on its way to Pyongyang as a gift from the Chinese people. Even 100 tractors would have drastically increased the farming output.

China desperately wants to avoid having the USA on its border, so it will continue to prop up the Kim dynasty. It will donate just enough food to keep North Korean refugees from streaming into China in search of food.

If North Korea were to implode, China would not hesitate to send troops to keep South Korea from reunifying with its Northern cousins. Even if Kim Jong-un were to announce a reduction in hostilities, China might feel threatened enough to side with militant North Korean generals wishing to retain their life of comparative luxury and launch a coup.

Contrary to what you might think from shopping at Walmart, China is not our friend or even a neutral acquaintance.

Lifestyles of the rich, famous, selfish, and ignorant

2011-12-22T08:22:00.001-07:00

Max Abelson's report in Bloomberg News, Bankers Join Billionaires to Debunk ‘Imbecile’ Attack on Top 1%, detailed just how clueless the top 1% are in terms of economic truth.

John A. Allison IV, a director of BB&T Corp., the ninth-largest U.S. bank, whined over the negative press generated by the many Occupy groups. "Instead of an attack on the 1 percent, let's call it an attack on the very productive. This attack is destructive," Allison said.

Yes, I will admit that the top 1%, especially the Wall Street crowd, proved to be rather efficient at destroying 1/2 of the value of all IRA and 401k accounts since 2008. They were especially productive at eliminating millions of jobs over the past ten years or so. But what they really excelled at was transferring wealth from the middle class to their wallets.

If the 1% were actually creating jobs in the USA, people would not be so angry. But the only jobs they are creating are in China, India, Vietnam, and other foreign countries.

Robert Rosenkranz, CEO of Wilmington, Delaware-based Delphi Financial Group Inc., a seller of workers' compensation and group-life insurance, said "It's simply a fact that pretty much all the private-sector jobs in America are created by the decisions of 'the 1 percent' to hire and invest."

And if wishes were horses, we'd all have a pony of our own.

The U.S. Small Business Administration has actually researched this issue. They found that small businesses:

represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms,
employ half of all private sector employees,
produce 13 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms, and
generated 65 percent of net new jobs over the past 17 years.

Rosenkranz's "fact" is actually a self-serving opinion not based in reality.

Abelson's article could have mentioned the Walton family, owners of Walmart, responsible for 10% of all Chinese imports. They have created lots of jobs, albeit minimum-wage with no benefits. Not to mention that Walmart destroys the local economy, with many small businesses going under after the appearance of a Walmart in their area. Walmart essentially blackmailed Thompson and Rubbermaid into moving production overseas, costing thousands of Americans their jobs

But Abelson did not exclude all companies busily importing Chinese goods.. Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus was mentioned, along with Jamie Dimon, the JP Morgan Chase CEO whose 2010 compensation was $23 million, in using speeches, open letters, and television appearances to defend themselves.

In Dimon's case, the defending was accomplished on company time.

Referring to the many Occupy groups, Marcus said: "Who gives a crap about some imbecile? Are you kidding me?"

The Reformed Broker's letter to Jamie Dimon noted:

America hates unjustified privilege, it hates an unfair playing field and crony capitalism without the threat of bankruptcy, it hates privatized gains and socialized losses, it hates rule changes that benefit the few at the expense of the many and it hates people who have been bailed out and don't display even the slightest bit of remorse or humbleness in the presence of so much suffering in the aftermath.

That sums it up rather nicely.

Reunification of Korea: fast or slow pace

2011-12-20T12:38:00.006-07:00

Kim Jong-il has now been added to the Kumsusan Memorial Palace necropolis in which his father, Kim Il-sung, resides. Given that the world generally regards Kim Jong-il as a brutal, if not sadistic, dictator, it is unlikely that anyone other than Kim Jong-un, the many sycophants of the Kim family, and some dignitaries of China will attend the memorial.

Lenin and Stalin shared the Red Square necropolis from 1953 to 1961, when Stalin was removed and buried near the Kremlin wall where so many other people important to the Soviet Union are buried. The situation with North Korea is a little different given that the now dead dictator's son has assumed power. Only if the military wrests control away from the chosen Kim or the country implodes does it seem likely that either of the dead Kims will be evicted from their mausoleum any time soon.

Emily Kaiser, a Reuters Asia economics correspondent, wrote a timely article, How to reunite Korea without going broke or creating chaos.

Kaiser wrote that a Korean reunification might be "better served by a go-slow approach like Hong Kong's return to China rather than Germany's swift union."

This is not comparing apples with oranges, it is comparing apples with bowling balls. Hong Kong was a world-leading center of commerce, while China was a backwards country. The speed of reunification really did not matter because Hong Kong residents had a very good life of their own, i.e. no one was dying to move to mainland China.

Germany is the only relevant role model for Korea. As is seen on newsreel footage and movies like Goodbye Lenin, many people quickly and permanently left the DDR when given the opportunity.

But even Germany is not quite a perfect role model. East Germans knew how their Western cousins lived because of the West's television and radio broadcasts. This was typical for Eastern Europe; Tallinn was within television broadcasting distance of Helsinki, so they knew what they were missing. But North Koreans are ignorant of just how poor they really are. Barbara Demick's depressing book Nothing to Envy was only one media source to discover that people in North Korea are taught to sing songs which attempt to convince them that North Korea is actually a country which the world admires and respects.

Kaiser went on to drastically underestimate the cost of Korean reunification, writing that it would be "tens of billions of dollars to more than $1 trillion." Given that North Korea has no power grid -- photos taken of North Korea at night are mostly black -- the infrastructure would need to be built from scratch. And power generating plants would need to be built to power the newly-built grid. In 2008 the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel estimated that a new 300-megawatt coal power plant would cost over $1 billion in the USA. It is difficult to compare the USA and the Korean Peninsula, but it is assured that each new plant would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The power grid and generating plants alone might approach $1 trillion.

And the power grid is only one issue. There is also the matter of building telecommunications networks in the major cities. The railway network and ports certainly need updating. The educational system must be upgraded to the standards of the South. Given how pathetic its food production is, the entire farming system will need massive aid, including thousands of tractors. And so on.

Kaiser alluded to a misconception often held by people who do not study fallen dictatorships. She assumed that North Koreans could be controlled after their government collapsed. The reality is that they would travel southward by the tens of thousands after they discovered that no one would shoot them for attempting to leave. This happened in the Soviet republics after Gorbachev refused to employ machine guns against his people. South Korea would have a choice: set-up machine guns in a blocking force, allow the refugees in, or work to quickly improve their lives enough so they would remain where they are.

Kaiser noted that "South Korean President Lee Myung-bak has promoted a form of integration that is more Hong Kong-esque than German."

One hopes that she misquoted him, as that attitude is naive. Once the locals realize that the good life can be obtained via a short walk south, they will emigrate in very large numbers.

Kaiser wrote that "Goohoon Kwon, a Goldman Sachs economist based in Seoul, published research in 2009 arguing that a unified Korea could overtake France, Germany and possibly Japan in 30 or 40 years."

Kwon needs to read the CIA World Factbook. He would learn that the top ten exporters are, in order: China, Germany, the USA, Japan, France, the Netherlands, South Korea, Italy, the UK, and Russia. South Korea is already nipping at the heels of the Netherlands. With very little improvement, a reunified Korea would overtake France's fifth-place standing.

And this is the reason why expenditures from the South would quickly reap dividends. The South could persuade corporate giants like Hyundai and Samsung to only open new factories in the North, eschewing China. Not only would it be impossible to restrict Northerners to the North, it would be economically shortsighted. Creating jobs in the North would be the only way to prevent a welfare state from arising.

Kaiser noted that the North has far more mineral deposits than the South. This is another factor which would allow a combined Korean economy to quickly expand from its current level.

In the DDR, factories failed almost immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall because Easterners wanted to buy only Western goods. This resulted in many people losing their jobs. This situation never really improved; until only recently, the unemployment rate in East Germany was double that of West Germany. This factor must be taken into account.

On a side note, the German government really blew it by not demanding a concession from the European Union to allow it to grant tax breaks for locating factories in Eastern Germany, to prevent those factories from being built in Eastern Europe, China, and other foreign countries.

Der Spiegel noted that a good course of action might be to extend a hand to Kim Jong-un. It quoted Die Welt as advising that the "Americans and the world should outstretch their hands and offer the inexperienced Kim Jong-un a way out of international isolation, similar to Burma where this approach seems to be working."

It is worth a try. If he is a sociopath like his father and grandfather, it will be quickly apparent, and then we can return to the old rules. It is unlikely, but perhaps Kim 3.0 could be educated to allow partial freedoms like Gorbachev did.

Kaiser noted that "Germany's model of swift integration may be prohibitively expensive for Korea." Yes, it certainly will be, but once it starts there will no stopping it.

And we would not want to stop it. The other role model is Russia, which has returned to its old ways, only instead of a communist system, it has a gangster system rotten to the core. Russia never had to admit its complicity in WWII, unlike Germany, so it continues to delude itself that its motives were pure.

The reunification of Korea will cost far more than current estimates indicate and its speed will shock almost everyone. As soon as North Koreans learn that they are some of the poorest people on the planet and the butt of jokes worldwide, they will do anything to improve their lot in life. Planners had better take this into account.

North Korea 3.0

2011-12-19T09:32:00.008-07:00

An apocryphal story told in the Soviet Union described a woman who was standing before a newsstand in early 1953. She was intently scanning the front pages of the newspapers. The kiosk owner asked her what she was looking for. She replied: "I am trying to see if any obituaries are printed on the front pages." The kiosk owner replied: "Obituaries are never printed on the front page!" The woman answered: "This one will be."

* * * * *

Several hundred people are rumored to have died in the massive crowds attending Stalin's funeral. How many people will be crushed to death in the final act of Kim Jong-il's cult of personality?

* * * * *

There could not be a greater contrast between two men who died in the past few days, Václav Havel and Kim Jong-il.

Havel was the first president of a recently freed Czechoslovakia who helped to nonviolently separate his country from an oppressive Soviet Union in the 1989 Velvet Revolution. A playwright by profession, he first became politically active after the Prague Spring.

Der Spiegel reported that Hans-Dietrich Genscher, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl's foreign minister, wrote: "Europe has become poorer, as have we all. A great European, a humanist, has left us: Vaclav Havel. . . . His struggle was not just for the freedom of the Czech people. He fought for the oppressed everywhere."

Kim Jong-il, on the other hand, was born to a ruthless dictator, Kim Il-sung. He was a gourmet, someone who could distinguish between dishes with just a touch too much salt or sugar, in a country where millions starved to death during his reign of terror. He thought only of himself and his family.

To continue the Soviet comparison, Kim Il-sung was North Korea's Lenin, a ruthless leader who thought nothing of killing large numbers of people to achieve his political goals. Kim Jong-il was North Korea's Stalin, a paranoid murderer who sent entire families to prison camps when just one member of the family was disloyal in his opinion.

The spotlight is now on Kim Jong-un, the third son of Kim Jong-il and the second son of dancer Ko Young-hee. Stories circulate how he is as ruthless as his father and played a major role in the sinking of the ROKS Cheonan. However, as with his father and grandfather, no one really knows for sure.

Will Kim Jong-un be North Korea's Khrushchev who denounces the terror of the previous leader, in this case his father, while still bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war? Will he be North Korea's Gorbachev who realizes that never-ending war and oppression is no way to run a country? Will he be Putin who misses the good old days of the country -- in 2005 he described the collapse of the Soviet Union as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the 20th century -- in this case the reign of his grandfather, and start planting bombs on airliners and create plots to kill South Korean leaders? Or will he be North Korea's Tzar Nicholas II, a clueless figurehead who allows the military and/or political leaders, e.g. his aunt Kim Kyong-hui and uncle Chang Sung-taek, to actually run the country?

Kim Jong-il's former personal chef, Kenji Fujimoto, recollected that Kim Jong-un once asked his father "We are here, playing basketball, riding horses, riding Jet Skis, having fun together. But what of the lives of the average people?" We can only hope this story is true.

Barbie and Ken for 2012

2011-12-04T09:00:00.002-07:00

A well-dressed Russian woman once told me, in response to my query regarding whether she was familiar with the common use of tattoos and piercings by Americans: "It sounds rather primitive to me."

Primitive, as in pre-1970 National Geographic magazines.

* * * * *

I once worked for a company where a woman somewhere around 30 years of age would arrive at work dressed in a very nice leather coat and new matching clothes -- and bruises. We finally figured it out that her husband beat her and then made it up to her by buying her nice things. By staying with him, she had made a bargain with the devil.

* * * * *

Back in 2009, the Christian Science Monitor published an article regarding Burka Barbie, a doll outfitted in the shapeless sack that Muslim women are forced to wear by Islamic society, especially the men within that society.

More recently, the Christian Science Monitor reported that Italian designer Simone Legno created the Tokidoki Barbie, with a short pink bob, permanent Barbie tattoos covering her neck, chest, and shoulders, leopard print tights, and a short skirt. This was the next step from 2009 when Mattel released Totally Stylin’ Barbie which came with stick-on tattoos.

* * * * *

In keeping with the downward spiral of Western society, here are my predictions for Barbie and Ken for 2012; note that some of the dolls will have spring-loaded limbs:

The "Rapper" Ken will have a spring-loaded arm. If a white Barbie is nearby and has a Grammy in her hand, his hand will pop up and steal it from her hand, with his voice loudly announcing that black Barbies are best.
The "Lindsay Lohan" Barbie will have spring-loaded arms to shove cocaine into her nose. Her luxury car (sold separately) will constantly weave back-and-forth, attracting the "Police" Ken (sold separately). There will also be a limited edition called the "Marilyn Chambers" Barbie which will open her mouth wide and make sucking sounds whenever a Ken is within six inches of her.
The "Jerry Springer" line of Barbie and Ken dolls will be a Walmart exclusive. Whenever a "Jerry Springer" Barbie and Ken are within five feet of each other, Ken's spring-loaded pointer will pop up and Barbie's legs will pivot wide open. Later they will get together with other "Jerry Springer" dolls to determine who is responsible for the children.
The "Chris Brown" Ken and "Rihanna" Barbie will only be sold as a set, but it will be difficult to keep them together because Ken will constantly use his spring-loaded arms to strike Barbie.
The "Paul Ryan" and "Eric Cantor" Ken dolls are actually reverse Robin Hood models, in this case stealing from the poor and giving to the rich.
The "Britney Spears" Barbie will make a really strange sound like she is trying to sing, but will actually only make Munchkin sounds.
The "Herman Cain" Ken will sleep with average-looking Barbies and deny it later. The matching "Gloria Cain" Barbie will be oblivious to the fact that her husband's spring-loaded pointer often pops up with other Barbies.
The "Paris Hilton" Barbie will only include one feature, a pull-string in the back which results in her saying "That's hot!"
The "Barack Obama" Ken will also have a pull-string in back, but will never have anything useful to say, especially on the subject of the economy.
The "Foxconn" Barbie and Ken will kill themselves after a few weeks by jumping off the roof of their dollhouse.
The "Melamine" Barbie is a toddler who will often scream because she has been fed melamine-tainted baby formula by unscrupulous Chinese businessmen. After a few weeks, she will die.
The "Islamic" Barbie comes with her genitals cut out so Muslim parents don't have to do that. If she is ever placed within five feet of a non-Muslim Ken, her head will be chopped off by a "Muhammad" doll you never knew was in the neighborhood.
The "Shyster" Barbie and "Bankster" Ken will die within a short time, but no one will mind.
When placed in a dollhouse with another Barbie, the "Amanda Knox" Barbie, along with the "Raffaele Sollecito" Ken, will kill the first Barbie and then become a famous and wealthy celebrity. The "Amanda Knox" Barbie will be the first doll in history to be able to perform cartwheels.

Chinese bed bugs and a year of DDT

2011-11-26T13:14:00.019-07:00

A friend of mine recently built two custom PCs. He told me that in the boxes for both cases, he found small, biting insects: a little over 5 in the Silverstone case and almost 20 in the Lian-Li case. Silverstone and Lian-Li are two different Taiwanese companies. The case from Silverstone was labeled as made in China, like most computer equipment nowadays, with the Lian-Li package proudly labeled as made in Taiwan. The Silverstone case was shipped by Amazon and the Lian-Li case was shipped by Newegg.

He has a magnifying glass mounted on a stand so we could look at the critters up close. They sure looked like the photos of bed bugs on Wikipedia and other sites. He found them in two places: on the inside of the plastic encasing the case and also on the Styrofoam used to help prevent damage due to shock.

There are four ways bed bugs could have found their way into a PC case box:

They could have migrated there during transport from the final factory to an intermediate warehouse to my friend. This is certainly possible, though I doubt it because bed bugs are attracted to carbon dioxide emitted by humans and other mammals, not to plastic and cardboard. Also, these bed bugs were found on the inside of the plastic bag surrounding the case; why wouldn't they hide in the cardboard once in the box? The Silverstone box was completely sealed with tape, so how could bugs have entered it afer it was closed in the factory? And finally, the cases came from two different vendors.
They could have been placed there intentionally by someone who hates non-Chinese people. This is certainly possible, but I doubt it because companies like Foxconn do not allow employees any time for horseplay. And this would imply that lots of Chinese people hate non-Chinese ones. But then again, it could be the private joke of a Chinese businessman.
They could have found their way into the product in a large factory building the cases as a unit. This is certainly possible, but it still would not explain how two different cases from two different manufacturers contained the same bugs. Of course it is probable that many Chinese factories do not employ clean rooms as seen in companies like Intel, but then we should see insects appearing in many other products made in China.
They could have found their way into the product in one of the many subcontracted stages. I think this is the most likely scenario. Globalization often involves a product manufactured by several subcontractors, with only final assembly performed by the name-brand company. Many companies probably use the same subcontractor to manufacture similar sub-assemblies, e.g. both Silverstone and Lian-Li could use the same supplier for steel panels. And Lian-Li could simply be lying about being "Made in Taiwan." It would be easy for insects to creep into the product if someone in the middle of the chain was lax in inspection. And given how Chinese businesses have demonstrated a complete lack of concern for dangerous goods -- one only needs to remember the melamine in baby formula scandals -- it is easy to envision someone simply not caring if insects make their way into packaging.

Maybe this is the Chinese way to attract more business: send us insects for which we have minimal chemical defenses and later, when we are ready to shoot ourselves to escape the menace, China will start shipping insecticide tailor-made for these vermin.

However, in any case, this is an appalling example of either racist malice or gross incompetence.

One wonders how many cases of bed bugs in the news are actually caused by Chinese bed bugs traveling in the box along with the product.

This is the kind of thing that logically follows when products we use on a regular basis are no longer made here, but are made in a dirty, foreign country with businessmen having no respect for anyone else. Offshoring could have been regulated so that inspections are made at the final assembly point, but conservadolts have tried their level best to eliminate all regulation starting with Reagan.

Computer builders would be well-advised to only buy products designed in the USA and Europe, even if still built in China. For cases and power supplies, Antec is the best choice; Corsair's power supplies are good, but their SATA connectors often do not fit without modification. For case fans, Noctua is the best choice, though Antec's fans aren't bad. For RAM, Crucial is the best choice, as its relationship with Micron Technology means that Crucial obtains chips directly from its partner and not the general market. For CPUs, motherboards, and solid state drives, Intel is the best choice, though Crucial's SSDs approach those of Intel. For magnetic hard drives, Western Digital is the best choice.

* * * * *

The Fox News crowd often snorts that Europe is socialist, expecting all listeners to agree that socialism is un-American and un-patriotic. This screed is usually followed by a rant on lowering taxes to create jobs.

These conservadolts are often full of shit, but this time it might be literal. If they have ever visited Europe, they must have avoided using a toilet. In many European countries, the toilets have two mechanisms for flushing. One can flush half the tank for pee or the entire tank for poop. The usual mechanism is to have two different flushing buttons.

In other words, socialist Europe offers greater liberty and choice than the USA in matters of elimination, as it allows its citizens to decide how much water to use.

* * * * *

A friend told me that during his trip to China, he met some Chinese businessmen in his hotel room. They were discussing sales and support of a high-tech product when one of the Chinese businessmen placed a finger on one nostril and blew his nose on the floor; well, half his nose, anyway. All of the Chinese businessmen did not react at all, proving that this is a normal activity for a Chinese businessman.

* * * * *

A simple Google search on "bed bugs" will return all sorts of depressing web pages. We are losing the fight against these diminutive vampires because we never developed an effective alternative to DDT. DDT, of course, was banned due to the effects on wildlife, e.g. egg shells so thin that they prematurely crack.

Bed bugs are universally hated because their feeding habits begin and end with human blood, though the occasional dog's blood will do in a pinch. Bed bugs are often unseen, but their existence is indicated by tracks of bug poop on pillow cases and sheets. They bite without danger of spreading disease or at least that's how experts attempt to console us when we realize that we are defenseless against the pests. They often leave multiple bites arranged in a straight line as if to imply that they can drive better than Lindsay Lohan. And they are generally impervious to insecticide, even ones labeled as specifically targeting the little horrors.

If one uses a little imagination, one could believe that the reason mankind is so violent is that humans were forced to tolerate nasty bugs like bed bugs for centuries. After all, one cannot simply dispose of one's clothing, in this case an animal skin, if one must first find, kill, and skin another animal before doing so. Frustration and the forced acceptance of filthy biters might have greatly contributed to our violent nature.

Given the difficulty of killing bed bugs, it won't be too long before we return to the bad old days before DDT when most homes were safe havens for the lilliputian monsters.

We need to allow DDT to be used to kill bed bugs once again. We'd have to restrict its use to professionals, as the average homeowner would use buckets of it when only a modest amount would do the trick. And we should only allow it to be used every fourth year or so to give the environment a chance to recover.

Tree huggers would have a cow with this proposal given the legacy of Rachel Carson and her classic book Silent Spring. However, when bed bugs reach epidemic proportions in the not-too-distant future, there will be a clamoring for the return of DDT. Better to control its use in moderation than to allow it to return as before with the horrendous effect on wildlife.

'Twas the day before Thanksgiving

2011-11-23T16:34:00.000-07:00

Two of my neighbors, a man and a woman, are screaming at each other at the top of their lungs. They are too far away for me to hear their words, so I do not know what triggered their argument.

Earlier, as I left to travel to the grocery store, two police cars were parked in the road that travels through this apartment complex. The officers were busy evicting someone from their apartment, with budget movers standing by to transport their possessions onto the sidewalk. Contrary to what is seen in our fictional movies and television programs, police officers do not actually move possessions onto the sidewalk.

I see a lot of police officers evicting people from houses, townhomes, and apartments these days. One wonders where the people go after being evicted.

* * * * *

Reuters continued its push to soften us up for the next round of bank bailouts. The first two sentences tell us all we need to know regarding the bias of the author: "Ever wondered what the U.S. economy might look like should there be another Lehman Brothers-style bank collapse? Well, it would not be pretty."

But what will they say when Bank of America is teetering on the edge between obscene executive bonuses via corporate embezzlement / incompetence and obscene executive bonuses via theft from taxpayers? Will they say that unemployment will rise to scary levels and the housing market will tank if we do not bailout the banks? Didn't Bush's Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson say that in 2008 when he announced the first bank bailouts?

The author continued with: "Few economists predict a U.S. recession, though uncertainty is rampant."

That is due to economics being just one step away from fortune-telling. We never took Dionne Warwick's Psychic Friends Network commercials seriously, so why should we take economists seriously?

Besides, we never emerged from the recession that started in 2008. And we never will unless we start rewarding employers who hire American citizens in the USA.

God bless America.

P.S. I'd post a version of this as a comment on Reuter's story, but I've been 86ed from Reuters for having contrary opinions.

The League for Open Asian Seas

2011-11-17T11:34:00.010-07:00

The Hanseatic League was a group of mostly Northern European cities and their merchant guilds which banded together to further trade between them. It was established in the middle of the 12th century by mainly German merchants long before the Renaissance. The cities ranged from ocean-fronts e.g. Stockholm, Tallinn, Danzig (Gdańsk), and Riga, to otherwise land-locked cities with major rivers or waterways flowing through them, e.g. Hamburg, Magdeburg, and Köln, to cities far from the ocean with only a relatively minor river flowing through them, e.g. Goslar, Erfurt, and Tartu. The League established tariff agreements, provided for common defense, and ensured that ports were properly maintained. A number of factors combined to put an end to the League in the 17th and 18th centuries, including the rise of Sweden and Russia as major powers -- the war fought between them caused Finland to change ownership -- and the discovery of the New World which drastically changed trading patterns.

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Barack Obama must have hired a new adviser -- too bad he won't fire Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and replace him with former-FDIC-chief Sheila Bair -- because he finally recognized the threat of China in the seas to the east and south of it. Obama announced in Australia that the Asia-Pacific region is now a "top priority" of US security policy. A small but symbolic contingent of Marines will be stationed in Australia as part of the new policy.

Obama said: "Our enduring interests in the region demand our enduring presence in this region."

Better late than never. BBC News and other outlets have reported for some time on China's attempt to bully its neighbors into accepting China's assertion that the entire South China Sea and East China Sea are China's personal playground.

China understands that the USA is broke, so it probably is not terribly worried about 2500 Marines being stationed in Australia. But it understands only too well how a well-organized group of dedicated fighters can defeat a larger power.

It is difficult to know for certain whether China's official belligerence is shared by the majority of its population, but the never-ending cyber-attacks perpetrated by Chinese citizens give us a clue: a significant percentage of its people relish the thought of a powerful Chinese military.

The countries in the area -- Australia, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Cambodia, India, and Vietnam -- would be well-advised to create an Asian version of the Hanseatic League and call it the League for Open Asian Seas (or Open Asian Seas League) to counter the threat of China. Right now China is able to divide and conquer because the other countries have not realized that their differences pale in comparison to the threat posed by China. And after North Korea exterminates the fleas and ticks otherwise known as the Kim Il-sung family, it can join the group, possibly as part of a reunified Korea. Burma would need to reform its government in order to participate with the other democracies. Vietnam also has a repressive government, but it being in the thick of the Chinese threat might help it change its ways. Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei would need to drop their quest for Islamic world domination before they could be invited into the League. The USA should play a role, but due to economic realities, not the major role it would have played in the past.

There is strength in numbers.

The United States of Corporate America

2011-11-15T18:26:00.011-07:00

In late July 1932, a group of desperate Army veterans were encamped in Washington DC. They were there in an attempt to convince the government to give them early bonuses, given that this was during the worst of the Great Depression. They called themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Forces but they became known as the Bonus Marchers. The House passed a bill to issue the veterans their bonuses, but the Senate rejected it. Hoover, curiously unsympathetic given his earlier humanitarian work in Belgium and Russia, vowed to veto any legislation.

Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur accepted Hoover's order to clear the city of the demonstrating veterans, but in a move he would repeat later in Korea, he disobeyed orders to not pursue the veterans into their main encampment on the other side of the Anacostia River. Future generals George Patton and Dwight Eisenhower were present, with the latter later quoting MacArthur as having "said he was too busy" and did not want to be "bothered by people coming down and pretending to bring orders," referring to the civilian leadership, especially Secretary of War Patrick Hurley. MacArthur burned the camp to the ground.

MacArthur later famously disobeyed Harry Truman's order to stop pursuing the North Koreans before China felt threatened and entered the war, throwing the United Nations forces back to the 38th Parallel with heavy casualties. He thought he could bully Truman into using nuclear weapons to kill millions of Chinese and North Koreans, but Truman held his ground, something MacArthur proved incapable of doing many times in his career. MacArthur was directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of UN soldiers via his egocentric jaunt to the Yalu River, yet vinegar-and-water drinkers like Ann Coulter still prefer him to selfless patriots like George C. Marshall.

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New York's Zuccotti Park has now been cleared by police of the Occupy Wall Street protesters. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the owner of Wall Street's Bloomberg News, ordered the police to remove the protesters. As BBC News reported, it was only the latest camp to be cleared by police in recent days. Just imagine how violent the clearing would have been if someone like Herman Cain or Michele Bachmann had been mayor.

* * * * *

Mitt Romney famously said in August "Corporations are people." And for the lawyer crowd, it is true. Corporations are categorized as persons, to the detriment of actual humans. The Supreme Court, in its Citizens United decision, went even further and gave corporations rights that ordinary people can only dream of. This legal fiction gives corporate executives the confidence to do things they never would do if they were personally liable, especially in the realm of industrial safety.

* * * * *

Der Spiegel's article, Stronger than Expected Growth: German Economy Defies Crisis, told of how Germany is able to be successful in a world filled with fear of recession. Tiny Germany remains the world's second-largest exporter. They are able to do it for a few reasons. First, it realizes that manufacturing is not an occupation suitable only for third-world countries, but a way to keep millions of people employed. Second, it maintains a good balance of unions and management, with both occupying seats on the board of directors, thereby keeping them both motivated to succeed. And third, it accepts that not all people are the same and has an educational system which separates students into trade school and university material (now Siemens does it here).

* * * * *

Paul Krugman and Larry Summers debated each other, with David Rosenberg and Ian Bremmer as seconds. Krugman pointed out that every single country to successfully recover from a financial crisis has done so by means of exports. Given that we have offshored most of our manufacturing base to China, India, Vietnam and other countries, it appears that not only is there no light at the end of the tunnel, it isn't even a tunnel at all, just a cave.

* * * * *

Barack Obama has proposed creating an enormous new free trade zone. BBC News reported that he "had separate meetings with the Chinese and Russian Presidents on the sidelines of the Apec summit."

That clearly shows just how ignorant Obama is regarding international relations, but that is to be expected from someone who thought that posing in front of Berlin landmarks was a good way to wrap himself in the mantle of JFK.

How many times do we need to say it? Free trade treaties sound nice in theory, but in practice they mainly benefit large multinational corporations which are then allowed to import foreign-made goods without tariffs. CEOs and stockholders make money, but the American middle class is shut-out.

China and Russia are the two biggest counterfeiters in the world, with China being the world leader in counterfeit medicines. Allowing China, and soon Russia, into the WTO was a dreadful mistake, but including them in a free trade zone would be economically fatal to us.

Even if all trade barriers could be eliminated -- a big if -- only a few wealthy Chinese would buy American cars. The vast majority of Chinese would buy, in order of priority, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese automobiles. Even Indian automobiles would be chosen before American-made ones.

As to other goods, after China starts producing its own airliner in 2016, Boeing will be relegated to smaller and smaller markets. The USA will always be a food producer, but 300 million people cannot possibly find employment in the raw foods industry.

Terms for Korean reunification

2011-10-10T11:57:00.017-06:00

The below list is more than a little presumptuous, on so many levels. Korean reunification could not possibly take place until Kim Jong-il has been removed from power, whether by force, disease, or old age. It seems unlikely that the anointed successor, the third son Kim Jong-un, would voluntarily relinquish power, so any change of government would have to take place via a military coup.

As Bruce E. Bechtol Jr. wrote in Defiant Failed State: The North Korean Threat to International Security, Kim Jong-il has cleverly arranged the loyalties of the military to maximize the odds of his son continuing in power. He awards Mercedes Benz automobiles to all generals commanding a division or more, so they have a vested interest in retaining the current system of power. Bechtol also made it quite clear that the large number of artillery units, including ones with chemical weapons, situated within range of Seoul, would make them the highest priority in the first hours of a North Korean implosion.

Reuters' article, Special Report: Crisis grips North Korean rice bowl, and Barbara Demick's article for The Telegraph, The unpalatable appetites of Kim Jong-il, juxtapose the gourmet lifestyle of Kim Jong-il with the utter deprivation of his people. Reuters' accompanying slideshow is depressing to view. Kim Jong-il is just one in a long line of people who have convinced themselves that their life is so much more important than that of the little people.

Most articles on North Korea admit that the scale of true starvation is simply unknown due to the paranoid and secretive nature of Kim Jong-il's private domain. But hints emerge from time to time. Reuters quoted Delphine Chedorge, deputy program manager of emergencies for MSF France, as having said "I've never seen stunting like this before, not ever -- not even in Ethiopia."

One of the things which is not well-reported is the effect of a North Korean implosion on the ordinary person. While various military groups were fighting for control, the already pathetic food distribution network would collapse, causing starvation on a massive scale. And no aid group could possibly intervene in the middle of that civil war. Hopefully a military group sympathetic to the plight of ordinary Koreans would react first and most efficiently with a scheme designed to neutralize the other groups before they could react.

Germany did not finish the process of integrating the DDR with West Germany. Even today, the unemployment rate of the east approaches double that of the west, but things have improved because only a few years ago the rate was double or worse. Instead of allowing German companies to open new factories in the new countries of the European Union, or worse yet, China, Germany should have persuaded them to open factories in East Germany. This could have been done with a mix of tax breaks and arm-twisting. Germany would have had to tell the bureaucrats in Brussels that it would break an EU regulation or two, but it should have realized that reunification only happens once and must be properly finished before moving on to EU matters.

The higher unemployment rate in Eastern Germany has a price: the resurgence of neo-Nazis, especially in the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. People without jobs sometimes reach for any straw within their grasp. The North could have the same problem if Southerners forget about the economic situation of the North after a few years, only here the problem might be a group termed Juches, disaffected people yearning for the security of a controlled economy.

Hopefully Kim Jong-il will suffer another, more serious stroke soon, with a group of military officers who are not part of the elite seizing power and announcing that they wish to sign a peace treaty with the South. This is the list of terms I would advise them to demand from the South before reunification can occur, not in order of importance:

A high-speed railway between Seoul and Pyongyang completed within 20 years. The integration of North and South will not be complete until businessmen in Seoul can travel via train to Pyongyang for a meeting and still be home in time to tuck their children in for bed. This railway line would involve lots of tunnels to allow a "as the crow flies" path. North Korea must not allow the mistakes of Germany to be repeated on the Korean Peninsula.
A new power grid. There is no power grid to speak of outside Pyongyang. Satellite imagery shows the entire country to be dark except for the capital. Building an entirely new power grid is essential for the rebirth of the North, but this will be hugely expensive.
Internet for all major cities. South Korea is one of the most Internet-savvy countries in the world. The North will need massive investment to achieve the same result.
Strict anti-slave-labor laws. We are seeing the reemergence of sweatshops around the world due to globalization, whether in China or in Brazil. Companies like Apple use middlemen, e.g. Foxconn, to manufacture their wares in conditions any child worker of the Industrial Age would recognize. It will be very tempting for corporations to take advantage of naive and poor North Korean workers; this must be stopped in its tracks. Child labor laws must be a part of this. The punishment for slavers must include prison sentences.
Strict people trafficking laws. Even in civilized countries like the UK, we still read stories regarding people, usually women, trafficked for prostitution and/or labor under grueling conditions. The people of North Korea will be susceptible to the pitches of grifters and carpetbaggers on the subject of wonderful jobs in another country. As is seen in Moldova and other countries, these jobs almost always change to a form of slavery upon arrival at their new employer. This is a worldwide problem, especially in the Islamic world. The punishment for trafficking must include prison sentences.
Political prisoners must not be forgotten. There are around 250,000 people in the six major prison camps. It is unclear if these camps include true criminals, e.g. murderers, rapists, robbers, etc, or if they only hold people convicted of disloyalty to the Kim family. These people were certainly starved, but it is likely they were not given medical and dental care for their incarceration. These people must be given all necessary medical and dental care as quickly as possible. They must also be included in the housing and training programs mentioned in other bullets.
An end to dog, dolphin, and whale trafficking for food. Japan kills 20,000 dolphins and 100 whales every year so Japanese businessmen can satisfy their urge for exotic sushi. The trade in dogs is endemic throughout the Korean Peninsula. One Euronews story featured a South Korean teenager holding her freshly rescued dog under a banner of "Dogs are friends, not food." This would be an excellent time to stop this practice in its tracks. There are plenty of stupid animals, e.g. turkeys and chickens, to eat. Restrictions on exporting dogs to China and importing dog, dolphin, and whale meat would be essential to prevent loopholes.
An end to rhino horn trafficking. Rhinos around the world are being killed for their horns because ignorant Chinese and other Asians believe that Rhino horns endow the consumer with advanced sexual powers. Horns are now even being stolen from museums in Europe. Ignorance and stupidity must not be rewarded.
Growth hormone for all children who suffered from malnutrition. Both Demick and the Reuters articles mentioned that North Koreans often suffer stunted growth. Nothing can be done for adults, but the height of many North Korean children can still be adjusted to approach their southern cousins.
Reduced dominance of large corporations. Samsung, Hyundai, and other large South Korean corporations, aka the chaebol, dominate the economic landscape, just as large American multinational corporations and Wall Street dominate the economy of the USA. It would it much better if smaller firms had more influence.
The elimination of fighting in Parliament. Every now and then we see fistfights on the floor of the South Korean Parliament. If there are any restrictions on this, they must be superficial. A law must be passed to punish the first person to throw a punch or kick on the floor; anyone responding to an attack must be allowed to defend himself. The first puncher must be immediately expelled from the government with a lifetime ban on running for office again on the federal level.
Housing for current homeless. There is an unknown number of homeless people living in North Korea. The Telegraph's video report (view here) depicts the sad story of just one woman forced to fend for herself in a country with no compassion. A national program must be established to build housing for all homeless people like this woman. This housing need not be Bernie-Madoff-class, just average apartments so these people can restart their lives.
New, combined orphanage. It will require years to bring Internet connectivity to the cities outside Pyongyang. The many orphans are already suffering with substandard facilities and insufficient food, but they shouldn't have to wait for education via the Internet. Building a new, combined orphanage in Pyongyang to house all existing orphans will speed this education.
Transition program for orphans. In many countries, orphans are unceremoniously thrown into the real world after they graduate from high school. In Russia and Ukraine, the time leading up to when orphans leave the orphanage is a time of great trepidation and uncertainty. Many orphans end up on the streets due to their poor preparation for the real world, not having parents to assist them. A program must be established to provide a path towards college or trade school. This program will be a part of the overall national training program (see next bullet).
National training program: languages and trades. The isolation of the North will be manifested in its inability to compete with its southern neighbor or any other country. A national program to train them in languages, history, computers, engineering, etc. Some North Koreans have been allowed to train for hacking purposes, but most people have probably never touched a PC. This will be a massive effort, as adults will need a different training program than what would work for teenagers. Given that South Korea is already one of the top two countries with respect to education -- the other country is Finland -- this should not be too difficult.
Ministry of Reunification created. A new position must be created directly under the president to manage the transition of the North into the economy of the South. This person must be someone from the North. This position will be required until the unemployment rates of the North and South are within 2%.
DMZ converted into nature preserve. The Smithsonian Magazine's article, The DMZ's Thriving Resident: The Crane, pointed out that the DMZ has become a refuge for red-crowned cranes and other endangered species due to the absence of humans. After reunification, there would be enormous pressure to convert the DMZ into farms, homes for the global elite, and bastions of capitalism. This must be prevented. Ted Turner might have been the first person to propose that the DMZ be converted into a nature preserve. This preserve would need to be protected by law. Give it UN-protected World Heritage Site status. Allow no more roads or railways to be built; existing ones must be converted into underground tunnels. Development must be banned forever, except for wildlife viewing platforms and an east-west hiking trail. Armed rangers will be necessary to prevent poachers from killing the animals for Chinese medicine quacks. The Joint Security Area / Panmunjom / Kijongdong / Daeseongdong area needs to be preserved as a museum, but it cannot be expanded beyond current borders. No industry can be allowed anywhere in the DMZ. And there must be a ban on helicopter tourism, i.e. elites buzzing the DMZ in their private helicopters and airplanes.
Restrictions on religious nuts, part I. It must be clearly established that the laws of the state are superior to all religions, with no exceptions. Rulings of sharia courts must not be recognized.
Restrictions on religious nuts, part II. All burqas, niqabs, face veils, and ski masks must be banned in all government buildings, on public transport, and on public roads. No public photos, e.g. for drivers licenses, visas, or passports, will be allowed to be taken of someone in a burqa, niqab, face veil, or ski mask. No one will be allowed to run for political office dressed in the above. (How would voters know it is actually her? Would she submit to retinal scans, fingerprints, and DNA tests at every debate?)
Restrictions on religious nuts, part III. Currently, both Jews and Muslims kill animals destined for their dinner table in a cruel, medieval manner. Their religions both require that animals be conscious when their throats are cut with a sharp blade; civilized countries slaughter animals only after electrical, gas, or percussive stunning. Islam goes even further, requiring that the animal face the same direction as that of Muslims when praying; this practice is no different than a sacrifice. The religious slaughter of animals must cease. And the importation of religious meat must be banned to prevent Muslims from making their sacrifices to Allah in China and trucking the meat to Korea. If Muslims riot over the lack of halal meat, their own scriptures can be quoted to them. Surah 2:173 states: "If one is forced because there is no other choice, neither craving nor transgressing, there is no sin on him."

The writing on the wall

2011-09-09T17:44:00.007-06:00

I can see by Google statistics that virtually no one reads this blog; for most of the day there are zero people accessing any of the posts. So this blog is now in hibernation, but I will still write an occasional post. If you wish to contact me, especially to offer me a job, find the email link on my profile (available at the bottom of this page); I will check the email every so often.

Here are my best fiction posts, containing large doses of bawdy humor and extreme political incorrectness:

The one with "Martha MacCallum" in the title is one of my most accessed posts, but only because of people searching for variants of "does martha maccallum smoke".

The following posts are some of my favorites:

UPDATE: Execute Somali pirates upon capture

2011-09-08T18:33:00.002-06:00

Reuters reported that Somalia's al-Shabaab Islamic terrorists have banned the teaching of English in schools. Instead they want to add more Arabic and Islamic studies.

"The reason we want to impose this is to eradicate every curriculum against the Islamic sharia and we want to promote Islamic studies. We will take steps to control the educational system of our children," the group said in a statement. "Parents have to make sure they teach their children the principles of Islamic jihad," said the group.

This is the Somali equivalent of family values. Every subject other than Islam is "against the Islamic sharia," i.e. against their medieval religion.

Even the ultra-liberal New York Times had to admit that Somalis often return home for jihad. "This case is unlike anything we have encountered," said Ralph S. Boelter, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Minneapolis office, which is leading the investigation.

Anyone who travels via airplane knows that Somalis have become the most common ethnic group in airport jobs, as well as in cities like Minneapolis. Clearly we are allowing them to enter the country by the truckload. Why are we allowing them to enter the USA at all?

Obama is from Mars, we are given the orbital penis

2011-09-03T17:46:00.005-06:00

In April 2010, Obama proposed traveling to Mars by the 2030s. This a laudable goal, but not something to announce in Depression 2.0.

Obama also continued Bush the Younger's privatization plan, shifting the emphasis to private-sector rockets.

CBS News reported in April 2010 of an open letter to the president signed by legendary Apollo flight directors Chris Kraft, Gene Kranz, Glynn Lunney, and more than 20 former astronauts, including Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell and Apollo 17 commander Gene Cernan. The letter criticized the administration's plan for ceding America's "hard earned global leadership in space technology to other nations."

"We are stunned that, in a time of economic crisis, this move will force as many as 30,000 irreplaceable engineers and managers out of the space industry. We see our human exploration program, one of the most inspirational tools to promote science, technology, engineering and math to our young people, being reduced to mediocrity," they wrote.

But this is not much different than what is going on everywhere else in corporate America with respect to outsourcing. No doubt this will convince even more talented people to work on Wall Street.

The big problem with a Mars mission is the duration: it will occupy more than one year of the astronauts lives -- 400-450 days for a round-trip. The moralists in our country would never accept brain-storming on the social aspects of the long isolation, especially with respect to sex in space and on Mars. It is not realistic to expect astronauts to be card-carrying members of the Religious Right, i.e. to refrain from sex. If we are serious about traveling to Mars, we need to require that only married couples be allowed on the mission. The alternative, including mission prostitutes in the crew, would never fly.

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One wonders if Obama and our other fearless leaders ever use GPS in their cellphones or automobiles. One wonders if they realize how many telecommunications satellite, e.g. Iridium, we have in orbit or are planned to be in orbit in the near future. One wonders if they realize that hurricanes like Irene used to kill countless numbers of people before the advent of weather satellites, simply because we had no idea where they would strike.

BBC News reported on a subject to which our illustrious leaders should pay attention, that of ever-increasing space junk. This debris endangers our entire way of life. If we start losing our satellites, we are in big trouble.

Actually we have already started to lose satellites. In February 2009, a decommissioned Russian satellite, Kosmos 2251, collided with an operational communications satellite, Iridium 33. The collision created a new cloud of space junk, consisting of debris shards varying in size from dice to tennis balls to larger ones.

The previous record holder for the creation of space debris was in 2007, when China conducted an anti-satellite weapon test to destroy a decommissioned weather satellite. This test pulverized the satellite into tens of thousands of shards larger than 1cm. This test was one of the most irresponsible things a nation could have done. We probably knew of this test beforehand, but even if we did not, we should have reacted with the utmost urgency.

China's action was perilously close to an act of war. At the very least, it was an rash action of global lunacy. Space is no place for amateurs.

We should have closed all of our ports to Chinese-made goods and pulled our ambassador from China to prove the point that China's action endangered the entire world. No country can be allowed to create clouds of space junk.

But of course, we did not do that because American multinational corporations that depend on China -- Microsoft, Apple, Walmart, etc -- would not appreciate that and our politicians know it.

All in-orbit, anti-satellite work must cease immediately. The only anti-missile and/or satellite work that should proceed should be simulated or contained within the atmosphere where the remnants will quickly fall back to Earth.

The aforementioned BBC News story and an expansion by BBC News' Jonathan Amos gave a few examples of potential solutions for rampant space debris by DARPA and the German space agency.

We should start with the large space junk -- spent boosters and obsolete satellites -- and remove them from orbit. We will learn a great deal from these missions and we will be better positioned to craft solutions for removing the smaller particles.

Instead of planning jaunts to Mars, the charter for NASA and European space agencies should be the elimination of space debris and the prevention of any new junk. And countries which refuse to appreciate the issue must be economically isolated until they do.

The jobs revolution is being televised

2011-09-02T08:52:00.000-06:00

The monthly Employment Situation Summary from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is especially memorable for two reasons.

First, as BBC News noted, no new jobs were created, the first time this has happened since 1945.

Second, the number of persons employed part time for economic reasons -- aka involuntary part-time workers -- rose from 8.4 million to 8.8 million.

The trend towards people only having part-time jobs is a Libertarian / Tea Party dream, as it means that employers will no longer need to pay for healthcare or any other benefits. And these employees can be easily terminated with no notice.

Some observers will make note of the fact that the 45,000 Verizon employees who were on strike reduced the number. If the Verizon employees had not been on strike, the August jobs number would have been 45,000. Break out the party balloons!

* * * * *

President Obama often makes excuses that he was given a poor economy by his predecessor, and this is true. However, job creation is mostly independent of Bush the Younger. And a real leader does not make excuses or consult polling to determine his next move.

Obama's ideas for job creation so far have been pathetic.

His last jobs stimulus required construction tasks to be "shovel-ready," meaning that they had to be already designed. This resulted in almost all of the construction being repaving. This is nice, but we need many of our bridges to be rebuilt and the design will require months.

Obama could order the State Department to immediately stop allowing the H-1B / L-1 visa programs to be used as a mechanism for substituting lower-paid Indians for American workers. He could return the program back to the original intent by mandating that only those with a master's degree or PhD be allowed to enter the country, i.e. only those with advanced skills.

Then he could announce that corporations which needed more engineers could do it the old-fashioned way: by training existing employees instead of firing them directly after they trained their Indian replacements.

Finally, as I wrote before, he could announce a plan for revamping the corporate tax plan. Corporate taxes would be based on the percentage of American workers worldwide. Corporations would still be free to outsource, but it would not make financial sense anymore.

The euro is dead; long live the nordeuro

2011-09-01T10:29:00.003-06:00

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has joined the ranks of Republicans. He and his political coalition have scrapped a tax on the rich, even though it was an agreed-upon portion of Italy's austerity program. The European Central Bank is not pleased.

Greece and Italy top the list of European countries which refuse to do anything serious about corruption and debt.

Just as in the USA, the Greek elite avoid taxes; the middle and poor classes have learned from their example, resulting in an entire country avoiding taxes any way it can. Bribes are a daily occurrence, necessary to get anything done. In the first months of the Greece financial crisis, politicians could have announced plans to crack down hard on the pervasive tax evasion and corruption. But no, they announced plans to eliminate social programs which mainly benefit average Greeks, causing a predictably riotous reaction.

Greece is not serious about eliminating corruption and tax evasion and now we know that Italy shares that view.

There are many parallels between the USA and Greece and Italy. Reuters reported that 25 of the 100 highest paid CEOs earned more last year than their companies paid in federal income tax. It also found many of these companies spent more on lobbying than they did on taxes.

One way to keep the eurozone together is to issue Euro Bonds. However these bonds are merely another name for a transfer union, i.e. a mechanism to transfer money from the honest and hardworking north to the southern payola-land. Euro Bonds would serve as an ATM for southern Europe.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that Euro Bonds "lead us to a debt union and not to a stability union."

Historian Hans-Joachim Voth said: "For the southern Europeans, the euro has always meant: we've married into money. They won't give up what they've attained."

Voth also noted that it would actually be better, financially-speaking, if Germany left the eurozone rather than Greece because of the massively negative impact on Greece's banks. Not only would Greeks stampede to retrieve their money, as Argentinians did in 2001, the hedge funds, short sellers, currency manipulators, and other vultures would destroy the country in short order.

* * * * *

Der Spiegel noted in its article, The Destructive Power of the Financial Markets, that legendary speculator George Soros is "plotting against the euro."

John Taylor, chairman and CEO of FX Concepts, a hedge fund that specializes in currency speculation, said: "Financial markets have a very safe way of predicting the future. They cause it."

Swedish Finance Minister Anders Borg said that people like Taylor are "like a pack of wolves" that seeks to tear entire countries to pieces.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo once likened short-sellers to "looters after a hurricane."

* * * * *

Given that the euro ties together the industrious countries of the north with the corrupt failures of the south, something's got to give and soon.

Voth stated that Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and Finland should depart from the eurozone, with Denmark perhaps being invited to join. I would state that slightly differently.

Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Finland, Estonia, and perhaps Slovenia and Luxembourg should depart from the eurozone and create a new currency, the nordeuro (north euro). Sweden and Denmark might join after they see that the laggards of the south are being left behind. After Belgium splits into two countries, the new Flemish country may be invited to join the nordeurozone; the new Walloon country would fit well within the original eurozone.

France would be forced to decide if it wants to remain in the eurozone, revise its long lunch hour culture to join the nordeurozone, or even reintroduce the franc. If it remained in the eurozone, it would become the ATM of choice for Greece and possibly Italy; France is the 9th largest economy followed by Italy. However, France would need to make many changes to its laws for it to be attractive to the nordeuro countries, starting with a later retirement age and longer workweek.

The nordeuro would immediately be stable and become the world's premier currency, surpassing the USD. It might shortly thereafter serve as the reserve currency of choice for sales of oil. The USA would oppose the introduction of the nordeuro because it would quickly demonstrate the value of countries which depend on the manufacturing of quality products, as compared to the USA's self-destructive reliance on Wall Street.

UPDATE: Neanderthal love story

2011-08-26T08:34:00.004-06:00

BBC News reported that further research into the interbreeding of non-African humans and Neanderthals has determined that it boosted the immunity of non-Africans. The fairy tale that all modern humans are direct descendants of Africans is coming apart, little by little.

BBC News reported that humans could have migrated out of Africa much earlier than previously thought, perhaps 50,000 years earlier.

Professor Chris Stringer, a palaeoanthropologist at London's Natural History Museum, asked: "Could there have been separate dispersals, one from East Africa into Arabia, and another from North Africa into the Levant?"

Of course, why should we conclude there was only one migration from Africa?

Scientists recently discovered a hitherto unknown species of humans, the Denisovans, in Russian Siberia. Denisovans now join our human ancestors: Africans, Neanderthals, and a dwarf species found on the Indonesian island of Flores nicknamed The Hobbit. Denisovans clearly ranged far from Siberia, as their DNA has been found in the Melanesian region north and north-east of Australia, with Melanesian DNA including 4-6% Denisovan DNA.

Nature magazine was the source for the above BBC News stories. It noted that Denisovans did not have red hair, unlike Neanderthals who did, proving that red hair almost certainly derived solely from Neanderthals; see John Hawks' wonkish weblog for this and more. It is likely that blue eyes also derived solely from Neanderthals, especially given that scientists believe that all blue-eyed people hail from a single genetic variation in Northern Europe.

Diverse immune genes -- the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes -- were compared. The team estimated that for variants of one class of HLA gene, Europeans owe 50%, Asians 70-80%, and Papua New Guineans up to 95%, to interbreeding with Neanderthals and Denisovans.

The difference in immune systems is important in understanding how certain regions ended up being dominated by particular tribes.

A number of authors have reported on the probability that as many as a million Native Americans died of diseases that Europeans unintentionally brought to the Americas.

Nature magazine noted that Neanderthals and Denisovans lacked certain forms of genes that modern humans use to fend off epidemic diseases, e.g. measles.

And those who have worked with type-A personalities may have noticed that these people rarely become sick, i.e. their strong immune systems have allowed them to rape and pillage without pause. One could easily imagine that these people's personalities are the direct result of their not being seriously sick as a child.

Peter Parham, an immunogeneticist at Stanford University School of Medicine, conjectured that interbreeding endowed humans with a "hybrid vigor" that helped them colonize the world.

So a major reason why certain tribes were able to conquer others may be immune system strength.

A bankster speaks, part 2

2011-08-11T14:43:00.004-06:00

The New York Times article, U.S. Seeks Ideas on Renting Out Foreclosed Property, describes the next round of bailouts. It notes that our government has around 250,000 foreclosed homes that it wants to get rid of and "it must find new ways in which properties can be pooled, sold, and privately managed as rentals."

Tea-pottymouths and other ignorant people only blame homeowners who bit off more than they could chew, payment-wise, ignoring the fact that many people are having mortgage problems simply due to being unemployed. As I wrote before, the banks, along with their evil step-parents, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and FHA, are not remotely competent. My house is in the foreclosure process, but Flagstar Bank is not motivated to lift a finger. We received an offer on the house below the mortgage pay-off, thereby requiring short sale approval. But Flagstar will not approve a short sale and just sat on the offer. Then I offered to execute a deed in lieu of foreclosure, aka giving the house back to them, but Flagstar informed me that the deed in lieu process is the same as for short sale approval. After five months my real estate agent is fed-up with Flagstar's incompetence and is going to stop listing the house, as listing fees are costing her money. But when she does this I will be in limbo, as a short sale and deed in lieu are technically sales requiring a real estate agent. So the house will be foreclosed.

Following is my first draft for a process:

Immediately require banks and their superiors Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and FHA, to accept offers of a deed in lieu of foreclosure.
Drastically shorten the process for short sale approval. Do this by requiring banks to hire an local appraiser upon receipt of a short sale offer, within three days. If the short sale offer is within 20% of the appraised value of the house, accept the offer.
Do not create a new infrastructure to sell the glut of foreclosed homes. Use the existing network of real estate agents from long-established companies (most of the fraud derives from independents and/or one-man shops and known shysters). Mandate a limited commission, perhaps 3-4%. Pass a quick and dirty law to prevent agents flipping properties between them and their friends; establish no statute of limitations so they know they could be prosecuted long past the event.
Put Eliot Spitzer in charge of prosecution of real estate fraud to actually obtain convictions.

The Russia houses and tea-totalers

2011-08-10T08:05:00.007-06:00

One of the curious things I learned while traveling in Russia is their admiration for strong leaders; another is the amount they smoke and drink. Many times a Russian man -- it's always men -- told me how much he admired Vladimir Putin for flying jets and performing other manly tasks. After awhile I realized that this is indicative of Russians around the world, whether in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltic States, or the USA. And all of them possessed a sincere longing for the Soviet Union.

Chrystia Freeland's Reuters blog entry, What happens when citizens lose faith in government?, expanded on a few interesting thoughts, but she did not take it far enough.

She mentioned Albert O. Hirschman's comment on the options available to dissatisfied people: exit and voice. Example of the former include quitting one's job, switching between restaurants, and leaving one's country. Examples of the latter include complaining to one's boss, becoming active in politics, or writing a blog.

The ultimate exit, of course, is suicide.

She later mentioned the obvious third option: apathy. Drinking to forget needs to be included, but should that be under exit or apathy?

She then proceeded to delve into totalitarian governments and how their restrictions on leaving the country affected the political environment within it.

If you ask any Tea Party member and/or Fox News viewer for the cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union, you will hear words to the effect regarding how Ronald Reagan won the Cold War all by himself. The fact that Reagan also lowered taxes is not coincidental.

Ivan Krastev argued Hirschman's point of view in the Journal of Democracy. Both believe that Putin's Russia is more stable because he allows dissenters to leave. There is some validity to this. North Korea is perhaps the most restrictive, totalitarian country on the planet. In excess of 250,000 people live in prison camps where torture and executions are commonplace. People trying to leave North Korea are either shot or sent to the camps. People returning to North Korea are often shot or sent to the camps.

But then look at Iran. Its people are subjected to a murderous totalitarian regime, but its people can leave via Turkey. No one would claim that Iran is anything other than a highly dangerous country run by religious nuts. Its people demonstrated in 2009 and were assaulted and sometimes killed by the government, though not in the numbers as we are currently seeing in Syria.

Belarus is another country which allows its people to leave, albeit often with official harassment. There is a university in the neighboring European Union country of Lithuania -- the European Humanities University, which many young Belarusians attend (read here and here); the university was expelled from Belarus because Lukashenko felt it was too independent. Yet Belarus remains the last true dictatorship in Europe, ruled by its dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, with an iron fist.

The first leader of post-Soviet Belarus, Stanislau Shushkevich, was accused by Lukashenko of stealing state funds during the lead-up to the first true election in 1994. After the election, Shushkevich was found to be innocent, but Lukashenko's involvement was buried during his first term in office. Lukashenko then crafted a new constitution which transformed him into a legal dictator. Today Lukashenko treats Shushkevich rather shabbily; his pension amounts to a few dollars each month. Shushkevich survives by speaking at foreign universities. He and 15 students were arrested a few weeks ago at the border on trumped-up drug charges.

Most people do not have the financial means to leave their country and start fresh someplace else. And the situation with Russia is further complicated by the visa situation. A few Russian women told me how difficult it is to obtain a visa to the USA or Western Europe; traveling to Belarus or Ukraine is easy, though.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky is often held by the West to be a political prisoner because he was convicted in farcial court proceedings multiple times. Hardly. He was one of the oligarchs, the chief of Yukos Oil Company, who decided to enter politics in opposition to Putin. Russia has been run by gangsters since the fall of the Soviet Union and Khodorkovsky is merely one of the losers.

Krastev quoted Samuel P. Huntington as having said that "liberalized authoritarianism is not a stable equilibrium: the halfway house does not stand."

Poet and dissident Ivan Drach said "Gorbachev decided to let a little bit of genie out of the bottle. But you cannot let out just a little bit."

Now we reach the truth vis-à-vis Reagan winning the Cold War. No, he did not play the major role; Gorbachev did. As I argued in my blog series, Reagan's conquest and other fairy tales, the Soviet Union was never going to collapse until it had a leader which would allow it to collapse. Gorbachev was the very first Soviet leader to admit that the republics should not be retained by force. Some of his better comments were:

"The imposition of a social system, a way of life, or policies from outside by any means, let alone military force, are dangerous trappings of the past."
"The social and political order in some countries changed in the past, and it can change in the future too, but this is entirely a matter for each people to decide. Any interference in the internal affairs, or any attempt to limit the sovereignty of another state, friend, ally, or another, would be inadmissible."
"In light of present realities, genuine progress by infringing upon the rights and liberties of man and peoples, or at the expense of nature, is impossible. . . . Freedom of choice is a universal principle to which there should be no exceptions."

Gorbachev believed in "socialism with a human face." He never did understand that this was impossible. A totalitarian government will only stand as long as its leaders are willing to use machine guns to enforce draconian laws.

Krastev firmly believes that "Gorbachev started his reforms not because he had lost faith in communism, but because he remained a true believer who was firmly convinced that the genuine socialism he hoped to install would prove itself decisively superior to the democratic capitalism of the west."

Gorbachev was naive, luckily for the West.

Krastev also noted that as societies grow wealthier, values begin to change in democracy-friendly ways. This is a two-way street, however. Once people become used to living well, they will fight like hell to retain their lifestyles of the rich and famous, leading to the debacle of the bailouts. And in a similar manner, ordinary people will continue to riot as we have seen in Athens, Madrid, and many other cities.

But note that the London riots have little to do with Krastev's musings. The arson, lootings, and other crimes are being perpetrated by gangs taking criminal advantage of the situation, stripping away the thin veneer of civilization. Police are preparing to use plastic bullets against the anarchists, something that should have been considered much earlier, as the riots are spreading to other areas. Great Britain is reaping its Clockwork Orange whirlwind.

In many respects, Tea Party members and nationalistic Russians have a great deal in common. They both pine for a government which died long ago. For the Tea Party, that government is the one we had in the 1800s during the so-called Gilded Age. And both simply do not understand that their beloved former government was one which allowed strict control of the people. For the Soviet Union, control was via the government. For the USA in the 1800s, control was via robber barons and other oligarchs, often given favors by the government just like today, with railroad land grants being a prime example.

Former U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick argued in 1979 that totalitarian regimes grounded in revolutionary ideology are not only more repressive than traditional authoritarian regimes, but are also much harder to liberalize or democratize. This is the key to understanding Iran and North Korea. Iran uses Islam to keep a tight lid on dissent, declaring dissenters to be infidels. North Korea's philosophy of Juche (self-reliance) has been molded into a country-wide ideology first by country founder Kim Il-sung and then by his son Kim Jong-il.

And Kirkpatrick's notion can also be used for Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, all countries which are currently run by Russians and/or a Russian philosophy. Russians believe that the Soviet Union was the greatest event in their lives because they were treated fairly well, in stark contrast to how non-Russians were treated. This explains why the native peoples of the Baltic States look at their time under Soviet rule as being no different than their time under Nazi rule, while Russians honestly cannot understand why Baltic peoples are not genuinely grateful for having been "rescued" from the Nazis by the Soviets.

Ukraine is essentially a failed country because of the almost 50/50 split between Ukrainians and Russians imported from the Soviet Union; note the behavior of the Vice Speaker of the Ukrainian parliament Adam Martynyuk in the Huffington Post video. It is even worse than the almost ungovernable USA, with liberals and conservatives, especially the Tea Party, constantly at each other's throats. In Ukraine, Ukrainians want to be a part of Europe while Russians want to rejoin the Soviet Union. Former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko is currently in prison in Ukraine, but her situation is very similar to Russia's Khodorkovsky, with Tymoshenko being a former oligarch -- in this case natural gas -- who decided to enter politics.

And we should not forget the many countries which only Russia recognizes, e.g. Transnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia, which were stolen from Moldova and Georgia because Russia wanted to assert its power in areas with large numbers of Russians.

North Korea will not necessarily take years to fail, as the Soviet Union did under Gorbachev. It could fail without warning, unless you consider artillery shells raining down on Seoul to be warning. The wild card is Kim Jong-un, the heir apparent of Kim Jong-il. The only way North Korea will survive in its current form is if Kim Jong-un is as bloodthirsty as his father. The implosion of North Korea will probably ensue if he, like Gorbachev, is unwilling to kill his people in large numbers, especially given the famines which regularly occur due to too-high of a percentage of public funds being spent on the military. The generals could take over with a particularly ruthless one willing to demonstrate to South Korea that he is not as weak as the chosen one.

Belarus will change hands as soon as Lukashenko dies, unless he is first able to insert his bastard son -- the Belarusian mini-me -- into power.

Ukraine is probably doomed unless some charismatic leader can somehow unite both Ukrainians and Russians -- or find a way to convince many Russians to move to Russia.

Finally, though not in the same league as the countries dominated by Russians, Belgium is a warning for what happens when two groups refuse to work together. Belgium's Flemish (Dutch-speaking) and Walloon (French-speaking) citizens have had a country without a functional government for over a year now. If Belgium had not been relatively stable at the start of the political stand-off, it might have imploded.

The Tea Party and others wishing to split from the rest of the USA should take heed of the lessons of the above failed countries. Revolutions, including constitutional ones, often take entirely unpredictable routes.

A poor excuse for a president

2011-08-09T08:53:00.001-06:00

Der Spiegel noted how it took Barack Obama three days to comment on Standard & Poor's decision to downgrade the USA's credit rating.

That's because he had to consult his pollsters to determine which way the political winds were blowing and then have his speechwriters craft a speech for him to read via teleprompters.

Obama manages his presidency like advertising firms manage promotions for hemorrhoid cream. Cute slogans might get one elected, but the presidency demands results.

Even Jesse Jackson commented on Obama's lack of cojones. Princeton professor Cornel West called President Obama a "mascot of Wall Street," but Jackson would not go that far, only admitting that the "laws are stacked for the wealthy."

Reuters reported that Obama is still whining that he inherited a poor economy from Bush the Younger.

Winston Churchill became Prime Minister of Great Britain on May 10, 1940, exactly two months before the Battle of Britain started. He never wimpered that he inherited a bad situation, even though his predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, was a pathetic namby-pamby.

"In some ways it may be even a more profound debate because the contrast is going to be clear and it's going to be sharp," Obama promised his faithful at a fundraiser where families paid $15,000 to have a picture taken with him.

Bush the Younger was a contemptible president who got us involved in two enormous and unfunded wars and created the TARP bailouts. But Obama not only continued Bush's two wars, he started a new one in Libya. Obama not only continued the bailouts, he took them to levels never before seen on Earth. And Obama hired FOBs (friends of banksters) -- Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, et al -- to manage the economy and now has even urged Geithner to stay as Treasury chief.

There is hardly any difference between Obama and Bush on the issues that matter.

Great leaders rise to meet a challenge; poor ones make excuses.

A bankster speaks, part 1

2011-08-08T16:22:00.000-06:00

Katharine Herrup's interview with David Rosenberg, chief economist at Gluskin Sheff, gave us another shining example of bankster logic.

Rosenberg's solution to the huge glut of foreclosed homes: "The U.S. should find a way to absorb the huge backlog of foreclosed homes -- buy them up and give them to investors to rent."

Not assist the homeowners so they can stay in their homes. Not buy the homes and then allow homeless families to live there for reduced rents. Oh, no.

Use government money in another yet bailout for the banksters -- and then flush that money away by giving those houses to Wall Street investors.

Rosenberg finished by saying that "We are licking our chops and sharpening our pencils."

We should be sharpening our knives.

Keep this (Islamic bomb) under your hat

2011-08-04T09:31:00.001-06:00

Muslims around the world rioted over the depiction of Muhammad in Danish cartoons, especially one showing him with a bomb in his turban. Danish embassies in Pakistan and other Muslim countries were attacked and/or bombed. Many people were killed, mostly Muslims by Muslims. Muslims tried to murder the cartoonists because they supposedly "insulted Islam."

Yet now a Muslim has used a bomb in his turban to kill the mayor of Kandahar, Ghulam Haidar Hameedi. The Taliban, which believes in the Koran and nothing else, took credit for the attack.

BBC News noted that this was the second time in a month that a Muslim hid a bomb in his turban to bypass several layers of security. The first time was in a mosque during a memorial service for Ahmed Wali Karzai, the half-brother of the president.

Islamic traditions dictate that turbans cannot be removed, so bombs in them go undetected. And clearly Muslims do not even respect their own houses of worship, mosques, and use them as venues for assassination. So much for them being holy places, not to mention the fallacy of Islam being a religion of peace.

Muslims demand that we not depict their fearless leader in cartoons, yet they participate in that same behavior we ridiculed. It's time to demand that Muslims remove their turbans and other headgear, and burqas, niqabs, and other variants of face veils for law enforcement and identification purposes. We have signs stating policies of "No shoes, no service," so why isn't it acceptable to have signs stating "No clear view of head and face, no entry"?

* * * * *

Deutsche Welle reported in their European Journal program (view video report here) on someone who has devised an amusing response to the politically-correct practice of allowing Muslims and other religious groups to have official photos taken while wearing their ancient garb.

An Austrian man has created a new religion, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or Pastafarianism, which requires him to wear a pasta strainer on his head. Members of the religion call themselves Pastafarians. He wore one for his official driving license photo. The Deutsche Welle report shows a few people having their photo taken for laughs while wearing various kitchen accoutrement.

An Austrian group with similar views is distributing materials with the slogan "No State Within a State." They understand that any group which refuses to integrate and demands to live according to their religious laws is highly detrimental to the stability of a country.

Deutsche Welle expressed an opinion to allow all forms of headgear in official photos. Instead, why not declare that all religions are subordinate to the laws of the state and mandate that all people remove any headgear before official photos are taken. Otherwise we will start seeing men dressed as knights in full armor and women dressed as Casper the Friendly Ghost in head-to-toe white robes.

Debt follies, part 1

2011-08-02T08:53:00.005-06:00

The graph of debt as a percentage of GDP illustrates a few things. Not surprisingly, the graph peaks during WWII when we were in a fight for our very survival. After the war, debt slowly decreased to below 40% of GDP. That is, until the reign of Ronnie Raygun, when it started to rise. It rose until the second half of Clinton's reign, when we had our first budget surplus since 1969. It dropped for a few years until Bush the Younger's tax cuts started to take effect. Then the curve starts rising precipitously in accordance with the Wall Street bailouts, created by Bush and continued by Obama. Note that the rise from 2008-2009, when Bush was still in command, is almost double that of the rise from 2009-2010: the figures for 2008-2010 are 69.4%, 84.2%, and 93.2%. All data from the above chart is from the OMB, Table 7.1.

A graph of the budget surpluses and deficits since 1940 illustrates that the last Republican president to care about deficits was Dwight Eisenhower. Keep in mind that the first graph tracks total debt while the second one tracks only the yearly budget. Data for the second chart, as well as lots of other interesting data, can be obtained from the OMB: the second graph's data is derived from Table 1.2.

The Pew Trust's report, Fiscal Facts: The Great Debt Shift, noted how much of what we are being told regarding the debt is pablum.

Medicare Part D is not remotely a budget buster, yet Republicans demand that we drastically shrink it.

The big three budget busters are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush/Obama tax cuts, and the many flavors of TARP, aka welfare for banksters.

* * * * *

Raising taxes on the wealthy would have appeared to be a no-brainer, especially given that the record on tax cuts since 2000 has definitely proven that they do not create jobs. Bush the Younger slashed taxes, yet his job creation record was the worst from WWII to 2009. Obama continued the Bush tax cuts, and we have all seen how effective Obama has been at creating jobs.

The reduction of outsourcing is the only thing that will create jobs.

The NYT noted that "The outcome [of the debt agreement] was better for Mr. Obama as a presidential candidate than as a president."

It has become painfully obvious that Obama has only one goal in mind: to become a two-term president.

The next two shoes to drop will be the push to privatize both Medicare and Social Security. The former will allow private insurance companies to deny coverage to people with preexisting conditions. And both will allow Wall Street to increase its profits in areas previously off-limits to it.

Greece, China, and the lack of outer limits for banksters

2011-07-25T10:04:00.000-06:00

BBC News reported that Moody's has cut Greece's credit rating yet again and warned that a planned debt swap would constitute a default.

Of course. Moody's, being a FOB (friend of banksters), is concerned that its friends might suffer a loss in its control over Greece. Banksters are worried that it might result in a haircut. They are probably on the telephone right now, informing politicians of the consequences to their careers and personal wealth.

"Our experience is that relatively small restructurings have often been followed by deeper defaults," said Alastair Wilson, managing director at Moody's.

Then why hasn't Moody's dropped the rating for the USA to junk status?

* * * * *

Reuters reported that reporting on the crash of two high-speed trains in China, resulting in at least 43 deaths, is being officially hushed-up. Reporters are being told not to investigate the cause of the accident.

Two of the railway cars were thrown from a bridge by the collision. One video shows at least two bodies falling out of the cars during cleanup by Chinese authorities.

A four-year-old girl was found alive in the wreckage at least six hours after a formal announcement that all the bodies in the carriages had been removed. The spokesman for China's Railways ministry, Wang Yongping, said the discovery was a "miracle."

"The major theme for the Wenzhou bullet train case from now on will be known as 'in the face of great tragedy, there's great love'" stated the directive from China's "ministry of truth."

"Do not question, do not elaborate . . . the word from the authorities is all-prevailing," continued the government order.

* * * * *

California bought major bridge components from China to be used on the rebuilt San Francisco Bay Bridge. China is supplying more than two dozen roadbed segments, each about half the size of a football field.

Former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed cooperation agreements with China to provide entire high-speed railway lines.

Both of these projects are huge and could have employed thousands of Americans.

Given China's push to own much of Greece's infrastructure (read here, here, and here) and multinational corporations outsourcing most jobs to China and India, look for similar disasters and government directives in the USA very soon.

* * * * *

Soon we can expect a message on YouTube from banksters on an Outer Limits theme:

There is nothing wrong with the economy. Do not attempt to adjust the debt. We are controlling Wall Street plunder. We will control the austerity programs. We will control the investment from China. We can roll your politicians out of office, make them flutter during speeches. We are like the 2-D creature in "Behold, Eck!" in that we have no depth and no substance. We can change the debate to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For your lifetime, sit quietly and we will control all that you can buy at Walmart. We repeat: there is nothing wrong with the economy. You are about to witness a great theft of not only your net worth, but also the net worth of many generations to come. You are about to experience the awe and mystery as we reach for your inner wallet to further . . . The Oligopoly.

UPDATE: Christian fundamentalism and the Oslo murders

2011-07-24T11:37:00.010-06:00

We have had quite a few left-wing murderers over the decades, including the Baader-Meinhof Group (aka the Red Army Faction) and the Japanese Red Army.

Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols might be the best-known examples of right-wing murderers, but we shouldn't forget the KKK and other groups responsible for killing blacks in the American South

Self-proclaimed "freedom fighters" have been responsible for thousands of murders, with the IRA, ETA, and various Palestinian groups being some of the largest.

Of course, all of the above pale in comparison to the industrial-scale killing performed by governments: for the right, Nazis and associated fascists; for the left, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao; other government killers include North Korea and the Ottoman Empire. Even the French army under Napoleon was a mass killer.

Some countries alternate between different politically-based policies of murder, with Iran being the best recent example, switching from the right-wing dictatorship of the Shah to a totalitarian government based on Islam. South and Central American countries alternate between right-wing and left-wing murderous regimes.

The entire continent of Africa displays a never-ending savage blood lust with its frequent tribal wars.

We are seeing comments on news articles that equate any non-liberal thinking with being just one step away from being a mass murderer. That is the moral equivalent of stating that all people declaring that Islam is a religion of peace are responsible for the beheadings and suicide bombings being carried out by Islamists around the world on a regular basis.

* * * * *

BBC News noted that the maximum time Anders Behring Breivik could face in prison under Norwegian law is 21 years.

That's less than three months for each person he killed. Norway has some really screwy laws.

And Norwegian prisons are rather posh in comparison to most countries. Halden Prison has en-suite bathrooms, Banksy-style art, a gym complete with rock-climbing wall, a music studio, a luxury library, and windows without bars, just the thing for mass murderers biding their time until they are released, still young enough to do it all again.

After he is convicted, send him to the USA, to Texas. We'll ask him to come in and make himself comfortable -- in an electric chair.

* * * * *

Breivik is a study in inconsistencies. BBC News reported a few entries from his manifesto.

"Considering the fact that my martyrdom operation draws ever closer I decided to bring one to enjoy with my extended family at our annual Christmas party in December."

His martyrdom operation? He surrendered to police. Does he not understand the meaning of martyr? There are no living martyrs, by definition.

And as I wrote before, how does he square his celebrating Christmas, the anniversary of the birth of the most famous pacifist of all time, with mass murder? When Jesus said "Do this in remembrance of me," he was referring to having a communal dinner, not gathering young people under a ruse and then shooting them at point-blank range.

"So what do I do when I'm not working? I'm in the middle of another steroid cycle at the moment, training hard to exceed my 92 kg record from July... I have a more or less perfect body at the moment and I'm as happy as I have ever been."

Roid rage?

* * * * *

Blogger and author Pamela Geller is also a study in inconsistencies. She is a rabid believer in the philosophy of Ayn Rand, as is Alan Greenspan, even though it was a major cause of the recent financial crash. Rand wanted no government interference in business -- none whatsoever -- even though we have seen over and over again how firms will act contrary to the public interest if it suits their corporate interest. Yet Geller's laissez-faire attitude stops when it comes to Islam, as putting an end to the relentless pace of Islamists wishing to implement sharia law across the world will require government regulation.

As I noted in Alan Greenspan, Ayn Rand, and the child killer, Ayn Rand was an ardent admirer of William Edward Hickman, someone who killed a 12-year-old girl in a particular gruesome manner.

Geller cannot have it both ways: either government regulation is good or it is bad. For most people, government regulation can be either, depending on the circumstances. A true libertarian believes in unfettered immigration and corporate freedom, even though this approach has always resulted in disaster.

Geller raised an interesting point in her blog: why did an Islamist group initially take credit for the Norway murders? The simple answer is that Islamists are almost always the ones who perpetrate bombings like this, so they naturally assumed that one of their own was responsible. It's really not that different than the Spanish government initially blaming ETA for the Madrid railway bombings, when Islamists were soon discovered to be the culprits. It is natural to assume that what has often happened in the past has happened again.

Geller also questioned how Breivik's Facebook page was modified after he was arrested. His Facebook page was allegedly updated to reflect "Religious Views: Christian" and "Political Views: Conservative." One could almost see the foam dripping down from the sides of her mouth as she tried to use this fact in one of her usual conspiracy theories, that the Department of Homeland Security asked Facebook to make it look like Breivik was just like her. Well, not quite like her, as she is Jewish.

The two Facebook page screen-captures she included on her blog were different in many ways beside the Christian-Conservative part. The first was in Norwegian, while the second was in English. And much of the data was different; Geller only concentrated on the Christian-Conservative part because that is her schtick. The Norwegian page noted that one of Breivik's interests is "Stock Analysis." On this basis, I think we should jail all bankers and Wall Street workers to prevent future mass killings, not to mention for crimes against humanity.

Breivik, like many people, may simply have had a password which was easy to guess, and a hacker decided to add the information to paint him a certain way. Or maybe his accomplices added it.

Geller referenced other blogs which made comments about links in Wikipedia to screen-captures. It would not be the first time that Wikipedia contained biased and/or incorrect information. A year or two ago I read the Wikipedia page on the Baader-Meinhof Group. I was a little surprised to read "(RIP)" after sentences noting the current status of some of the gang members; evidently someone sympathetic to those left-wing murderers left a "thinking of you" card.

Christian fundamentalism and the Oslo murders

2011-07-23T08:38:00.003-06:00

The term "Christian fundamentalist" is an oxymoron as typically used. Jesus was a pacifist, someone who disliked greedy, wealthy people, someone who owned nothing and asked his followers to give away all possessions, and someone who spent time with the poor, sick, and downtrodden.

Politicians, especially American ones, often claim to be Christian, all the while amassing large piles of loot, something Jesus would never have done.

Sometimes violent psychopaths will claim to be Christian, even though the only violence in the New Testament was perpetrated against Christians, not by them.

There have only been a small number of true Christians over the last century, with Mother Teresa being the best example I can conjure up.

We really need to devise a new term for people using religion as a excuse for their violent and/or pilfering ways. The Old Testament was a violent book, though not quite as bad as the Koran which Muslims use to determine their direction in life.

"Old Testament fundamentalist" would be a much more accurate way of describing people like the Tea Party and various psychopaths, perhaps shortened to "old testies," though people might think we were referring to their aged genitals.

* * * * *

It seems clear that Anders Behring Breivik, the cold-blooded killer in Norway, created a plan to personally kill as many of the ruling elite's children as possible. As media sources reported, the bomb in Oslo could never kill the maximum number of people because Friday was the beginning of the weekend, with many people having already left work, if not already on summer vacation. The bombing was only a ruse to draw the police into the city, allowing Breivik to travel to Utoeya Island for his own private video game of slaughter.

Just as Tim McVeigh was only the most dangerous member of a dangerous gang of fascists, it is likely that Breivik was only the most fanatical thug in a troop which somehow convinced itself that killing children and young adults was justified. The Oslo bomb was very large, as the devastation showed, and it is difficult to believe that one man could have installed it in a vehicle. Given that it was an ammonium nitrate bomb -- BBC News reported that a farm supplier sold six tons of fertilizer to Breivik -- it would have been quite heavy.

It is also possible that Breivik's accomplices assisted with building the bomb, thinking that it was a one-act tragedy, with only Breivik knowing that it was in fact a tragedy in two acts. Media sources reported some people saying that there was a second assassin on the island, but that could have been the assumptions of people fleeing for their lives with no time to take a second look.

Media sources are pondering why Breivik did not kill himself at the conclusion of his acts. The NYT reported that he was captured "by the emergency forces," which means he surrendered rather than committing blue suicide. Perhaps he thinks he will become a martyr for his cause and therefore is better off alive in prison. Tim McVeigh went to his execution without having said a thing and I suspect Breivik will also keep quiet regarding his accomplices.

Breivik's one and only Twitter post was "One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests."

A more apt phrasing would be "One selfish, hypocritical butcher can neutralize the good work of 100,000."

Fannie Mae: robo-signing or bimbo-signing?

2011-07-22T08:30:00.002-06:00

Robo-signing is defined as the signing of thousands of foreclosure documents by people who never read or checked the documents for errors. It was created by banksters who follow the creed of Dire Straits, i.e. money for nothing.

* * * * *

A new government program was created supposedly to assist homeowners in mortgage trouble. The Department of Housing and Urban Development created the Emergency Homeowners' Loan Program. However, instead of a program to help everyone who needs it, it is a lottery system to help just a sampling of those about to lose their homes.

Larry Summers recently wrote in a Reuters article that "there must be a clear and unambiguous commitment that whatever else happens, the failure of major financial institutions in any country will not be permitted."

It would be useful if all Too Big To Fail banks were intervened by the FDIC, but we have already seen what happens when we simply give money to banksters with no conditions, as Summers and Treasury Secretaries Hank Paulson and Tim Geitner previously did: no increase in lending and enormous bonuses for bank management.

The government is only willing to help a small slice of ordinary Americans, chosen at random, yet every last banker should be saved, according to Summers

One expects to see Summers in a late-night television commercial similar to the ones seen from Christian charities like Feed The Children: "You cannot expect bankers to live on less than one million dollars per day. Look, this one is forced to wear last year's clothes and drive last year's Bentley. Please donate generously so that bankers can live the life they deserve!"

* * * * *

Reuters' article, Special report: Banks continue robo-signing, further illustrated why we need to break up all of the large banks.

Reuters noted that "regulators left it to the banks to oversee their own internal investigations." Where have we heard that before?

I have personal experience with large banks with my soon-to-be-foreclosed house. Every time I call, I receive a different answer on certain questions. One agent snottily told me that they do not care if my property has been vandalized, yet the next one said they did care. A number of agents asked for a HUD Statement, yet that makes no sense until the process finishes in a closing; closing costs are dependent on the selling price and other factors. Sounds like a training issue; management has failed, yet again.

The bank customer service people have told me a number of times, so I think it is probably true, that their bank is only a loan servicer: Fannie Mae is making all of the decisions. Fannie Mae was one of the financial entities responsible for the recent crash and now they are a major barrier on the road to recovery.

Fannie Mae has created a catch-22 with its procedures. It requires that borrowers hire a real estate agent to list their house for 90 days before a short sale can be approved. However, in this dismal market, real estate agents do not want to pay for the listing fees unless there is a realistic chance the property will sell in the near future. And Fannie Mae is not in a hurry, to say the least, so at some point real estate agents will reconsider the wisdom of listing those properties.

And the same process is demanded for borrowers wishing to execute a deed in lieu of foreclosure, i.e. giving the house back to the bank.

The deed in lieu process is where Fannie Mae has really blown it. Someone willing to give the house back to the bank just wants to salvage as much of their credit as possible, given that a deed in lieu is better than a foreclosure in this respect. A deed in lieu is much better for the bank as well, because there are far fewer shyster fees to pay.

The catch-22 continues when the real estate agent finally realizes that it is not cost-effective to continue to list the property, e.g. at the end of the summer when buyers stop looking for homes for the most part. If the property is not listed, Fannie Mae will no longer consider a deed in lieu and therefore the property is destined to end in foreclosure.

I tried to explain this to the bank customer service agent, but he curtly replied that the bank was operating under Fannie Mae rules; if I did not like it, I should contact my congressman.

All of the above stems from securitization; we did not have this problem in the old days when the bank who issued the loan kept it until maturity.

Most borrowers would be surprised to realize that their financing paperwork does not restrict banks from selling their mortgages to banks using overseas servicers and/or call centers. If you think the foreclosure process is bad now, just wait until your bank's customer service department is in India.

Ban the reselling of mortgages now and prevent Wall Street from packaging loans together to create obtuse investment products solely for their financial gain.

UPDATE: Killer corporations: IG Farben and Apple

2011-07-22T06:12:00.003-06:00

The Telegraph UK's article, Apple, HP and Dell among companies responsible for 'electronic sweatshops', claims report, continued its reporting on the treatment of foreign workers by American multinational corporations.

Earlier this week, another Foxconn employee was found dead at its enormous factory in Shenzhen, where over 250,000 workers assemble gadgets for major electronics companies. Last year, 14 Foxconn employees killed themselves rather than continue working in such barbaric conditions.

Taiwanese-owned Foxconn is the world's largest electronics manufacturer and partner of Apple, HP, Dell, and just about every other big high-tech name.

Workers are routinely forced to stand for 12 hours with no bathroom break. Speaking is not allowed. Child labor is becoming more common.

Apple admitted that child labor at its suppliers is becoming worse. Dell admitted that only 46% of its suppliers were following its rules. But Steve Jobs and Michael Dell, they work for you, do they not?

The report also noted that the entire industry is unregulated. Grover Norquist is the Washington lobbyist famous for his desire to reduce government to a point where he could drown it in a bathtub. Maybe he can donate bathtubs to China so workers can drown themselves instead of jumping off Foxconn buildings, as it would be more efficient to clean up after the suicides.

"Many of these companies state that they are implementing far-reaching reforms, but we have yet to see any evidence of this," said Li Qiang, the executive director of China Labor Watch.

"Left to themselves, multinational companies and Chinese manufacturers will continue to pursue business and labour practices that ultimately abuse Chinese workers," the report said.

Actually, "Chinese workers" should be changed to just "workers." Capitalists will do it to Europeans and North Americans, given the chance.

UPDATE: Food for Islamic Somalia okay, but not for North Korea?

2011-07-22T06:06:00.001-06:00

BBC News' article, Somali Islamists maintain aid ban and deny famine, illustrated the reasons for Somalia's famine.

Somali Islamists, especially the rabid al-Shabab, are not willing to allow aid agencies to distribute food into Somalia. And those Islamists even refuse to admit there is a famine.

The famine is worst in the south. It is no coincidence that al-Shabab controls the south.

The famine is Islamist-caused. Sure, the drought is a major contributing factor, but much of the Southern USA is in drought, yet there is no famine. When a country is controlled by people who wish to live as people did in the 600s, famines and plagues will occur on a regular basis.

Al-Shabab spokesman Ali Mohamud Rage earlier this month announced that aid agencies would be allowed back into Somalia as long as they had "no hidden agenda."

And Islamists like al-Shabab would know what hidden agendas are, e.g. spreading Islam and sharia law everywhere they can, using whatever tactics they can, following the wishes of their prophet Muhammad to spread it at the point of a sword.

Food for Islamic Somalia okay, but not for North Korea?

2011-07-20T13:32:00.004-06:00

One wonders what message Niall Ferguson and Newsweek Magazine were trying to communicate in The Revolution Blows Up. It includes a photo of a young Egyptian man holding a sign reading "Dear tourists; Don't leave; We'll protect you." I guess the dozens of Muslim men who sexually assaulted CBS News Correspondent Lara Logan in a public gang rape in Cairo's Tahrir Square on February 11 did not receive the memo.

Ferguson opined in that article "what are we doing today to help [the countries of the Arab Spring] achieve a successful transition to liberty and prosperity?" What a curious question from an economic historian! We are in the worst financial crash since the Great Depression. Most countries around the world are in an economic funk, and the only one which is still doing well, China, will never donate money to any cause that does not repay it with dividends, current or future; China never does anything for altruistic reasons. The Marshall Plan was only possible because the USA had money to burn, but that power has gone the way of gas-guzzling automobiles with really large fins on the rear.

* * * * *

The Telegraph UK reported that the United Nations has declared that two regions in southern Somalia are in official famine.

"The fact that a famine has been declared shows just how grave the situation has become. It is time for the world to help," said UK Secretary of State for International Development, Andrew Mitchell.

BBC News noted that Somalia has been plagued by conflict, drought, and poverty since the last famine in 1992. But whose fault is that? As was seen in the Black Hawk Down incident, pretty much the entire population of Somalia is nasty and savage.

Somalia is largely controlled by the Islamist group, al-Shabaab, a cousin of al-Qaeda, and by the many warlords who have some relationship with al-Shabaab. Al-Shabaab is even crazier and more ruthless than al-Qaeda due to its strict fundamentalist Islamic beliefs.

Al-Shabaab had imposed a ban on foreign aid agencies in its territories in 2009.

Adrian Edwards, a spokesman for the UN refugee agency, told reporters that the situation for aid workers in Somalia is "not what we want it to be."

This is diplomatic-speak for "it is really dangerous for the aid workers because of crazy and barbaric al-Shabaab."

Johnnie Carson, the US assistant secretary of state for African affairs, wondered if al-Shabaab planned to impose some kind of "taxation" on aid deliveries.

Dozens of Somali Islamist terrorists travel back and forth between the USA and Somalia to train for and/or commit jihad; Somali Omer Abdi Mohamed just plead guilty to facilitating this travel. And Somali Islamists like Mohamed Osman Mohamud, the Portland car bomber, and Mohamed Mohamud, the Christmas Tree Bomber, want to kill American infidels because they are not following the strict path of Islam.

David Letterman often made fun of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a former Secretary-General of the United Nations, because his name had a word repeated. Why is it that Letterman never makes fun of Muslims with the same problem?

Jonny Dymond's article, American jihad: Facing up to homegrown militancy, told of Omar Hammami, an American-raised son of a Syrian Muslim and American Christian. During his teen years, he realized that he belonged in Islamic jihad, as so many young Muslims do, and moved to Somalia to join al-Shabaab.

As I wrote before (read here, here, and here), Islamist Somali pirates cost the world at least $10 billion each year in ransoms, additional security measures, and additional costs for avoiding the region, with that amount expected to double within a few years. From the Red Sea, around the Horn of Africa, and down to Madagascar, many thousands of ships have been attacked, with close to 1000 hostages being taken.

Somali pirates killed four American yachters and have kidnapped British and other yachters. And the threat is not going away any time soon.

Even the very liberal Guardian UK was forced to admit that ransoms paid to Somali pirates end up in the hands of al-Shabaab and other Islamist groups. Given that seven million dollars was paid merely for the release of one British couple, one can extrapolate to conclude that Somali pirates earn hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Even back in 2008, almost 300 pirate attacks were logged, with today's figure being much higher.

The Telegraph UK reported on another famine in North Korea faces famine: 'Tell the world we are starving'. The corrupt and incompetent government of Kim Jong-il cannot feed its people because most food and funds are siphoned-off into the Kim family, their entourage, and the military -- necessary for the Kim's survival. The situation looks increasingly bleak for orphans and people who live away from the big cities, with many people forced to forage for weeds or anything else they can find that resembles food.

Of course, any food given to North Korea must be monitored to prevent the military from confiscating it. The best solution would be for Western aid groups to do the actual distribution.

Let's summarize the situation. Many Somalis want to kill Westerners, whether in their home country or abroad. Many thousands of Somalis have chosen to become pirates, often torturing and sometimes killing their hostages. In contrast, North Koreans, after leaving their country, just want to open restaurants and other businesses and make life better for their families and for themselves.

And anyone who looks at the list of world exporters and sees that South Korea is 6th on the list will understand that North Korea would quickly become a world economic powerhouse, just like its cousin to the south, soon after hostilities cease between the two Koreas.

Yet the aid groups are going to bring food and other supplies into Islamist strongholds in Somalia where the aid will be distributed according to people strictly following the teachings of someone who lived in the 600s. It is unclear if any aid will be sent to North Korea.

Before we feed Somalis, a tribe which only seems to have talents for murder, sadism, larceny, kidnapping, and medieval religions, let's feed North Koreans.

UPDATE: Neanderthal love story

2011-07-20T12:55:00.000-06:00

Researchers at the University of Montreal have finished their research on Neanderthal DNA in humans.

Initially it was thought that all humans, except those from sub-Saharan Africa, possessed 1-4% of Neanderthal DNA. Now researchers know, for people not from sub-Saharan Africa, about 9% of their X chromosomes carry a piece of Neanderthal DNA.

"This confirms recent findings suggesting the two populations interbred," said Damian Labuda, an expert in human population genetics at the University of Montreal.

Only you can prevent economic forest fires

2011-07-18T10:15:00.006-06:00

Felix Salmon's analysis of the ever-increasing tendency to label debt as AAA, The horrifying AAA debt-issuance chart, rehashed some of the original report from the Bank for International Settlements.

Salmon made some valid comments, but he completely missed the boat when he said "it wasn't an excess of greed and speculation which led to the financial crisis, but rather an excess of overcaution." His bias is understandable given the publisher of his blog, Reuters, which is such a Wall Street cheerleader that it recently hired Larry Summers as a blogger, with Summers being one of the fathers of the recent crash. Summers was Obama's Director of the White House United States National Economic Council until just recently and Clinton's Secretary of the Treasury.

Speaking of Summers, his blog entry, Europe’s dangerous new phase, included the astonishing statement that "there must be a clear and unambiguous commitment that whatever else happens, the failure of major financial institutions in any country will not be permitted."

From the perspective of Summers and other Wall Street toadies, banks and their employees are the only things that matter. The outsourcing of manufacturing, call center, medical, and other jobs is just fine, just don't let banksters suffer the indignity of going a day without a bonus.

The BIS report stated: "While during the period 1990-2006, the average percentage of corporate issues with a AAA rating, compared with total corporate issues, was 9 per cent, this proportion reached 48 percent for sovereign issues, and 75 percent in the case of securitisations. In other words, over the course of less than a decade, securitisation had created the most AAA-rated securities."

We did not create copious amounts of securities which an honest person would rate as AAA in one decade; we simply allowed government-sanctioned grifters to classify previously low-grade investments as AAA-rated ones so they could make truckloads of loot selling them to less sophisticated buyers.

Many observers, from Nomi Prins to Gretchen Morgenson to the creators of the movie Inside Job, have noted that this growth is the result of Wall Street hucksters knowingly packaging sub-prime mortgages into supposedly AAA-rated securities. How is that not greed and speculation?

Banksters want to return to the good old days of securitization, i.e. before the fall of Lehman Brothers. BIS noted that banksters "indicated that it was important to remove the negative perception attached to securitisation products."

Of course they do. They want people to forget that they played a major role in the recent crash.

BIS noted another admission of banksters: "Risk transfer was another important motivator for securitisation and was cited by those originators interviewed as an important reason for engaging in securitisation."

Sure, they want to get rid of their faulty creations before they blow up again in another crash.

Since the securitization of mortgages was a major factor in the recent crash, why not severely regulate all securitization products? We label tobacco with warning labels to ensure that smokers are at least made aware of the risk they are taking, so why not mandate that all securitization products are truthfully labeled?

"WARNING: This investment product is a collection of sub-prime mortgages and may be hazardous to your financial health!"

We killed Osama bin Laden because he killed 3000 people and did severe harm to our country, yet banksters who have done severe damage to our country, not to mention the rest of the world, are not being thrown into jail by the busload.

Only you can prevent economic forest fires. Kill a bankster today.

UPDATE: Europe and Asia need their own credit rating agencies

2011-07-14T14:52:00.004-06:00

Anyone who has researched the recent crash understands that the people responsible for it all live in the USA and in the UK, with the vast majority residing in the USA. They are all bankers, friends of bankers (politicians and their entourages), and other financial types. If the American government had not repealed Glass-Steagall, if the credit rating agencies (CRAs) had actually rated financial instruments honestly and accurately, if Phil Gramm and his corrupt fellow elected leaders had not deregulated derivatives, if Alan Greenspan not allowed Wall Street to run amuck due to his bizarre belief in self-regulating markets, if the SEC had shown a spine and regulated Wall Street up to the very limits of its authority, etc, the world would not have been thrown into the abyss.

This crisis was "Made in the USA."

* * * * *

There are only four categories of groups of people seen jumping up and down wildly after having been agitated by their leaders. The first category is Communist meetings, whether long ago with Bolsheviks or today with Chinese and North Koreans. The second category is political gatherings. One could easily combine the first two categories. The third category is religious meetings, especially zanier ones like Holy Rollers. The fourth category is groups of Americans attending a "get rich quick" seminar.

The last two categories only coexist in the USA, even though anyone reading the New Testament quickly realizes that Jesus disliked greedy, wealthy people.

* * * * *

"What we have found over the years in the marketplace is that derivatives have been an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldn’t be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so," Greenspan told the Senate Banking Committee in 2003.

Quite the opposite was true, in fact. Wall Street grifters sold financial snake oil to unsophisticated investors who naively believed that the CRAs accurately described products, transferring risk from those who knew exactly what they were doing to those who should have been less gullible, but were misled by those in authority.

* * * * *

Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty reported on the aftermath of the sinking of the double-decker cruiseboat Bulgaria on July 10, resulting in the deaths of 129 tourists. It came less than one month after the crash of a Tupolev Tu-134 airplane that killed 47 on June 20. A third disaster was mostly avoided on July 11 when the left engine of an Antonov-24 airplane burst into flames in mid-air, resulting in only six deaths.

RFE-RL noted: "The spate of accidents, analysts say, is largely the result of cost-cutting that results in skimping on upkeep and safety precautions as companies seek to maximize profit margins. Corruption and a cavalier attitude toward safety measures also play a role."

Yes, the maximization of profit margins accompanied by a cavalier attitude toward safety measures -- aka deregulation -- always precedes disasters, whether in Russia or in the USA.

* * * * *

First the CRAs classified the debt of Greece as junk, with Wall Street being in bed with them, playing a major role in Greece's financial decline. Then Portugal's debt was reduced to junk status. Now Moody's has reduced Ireland's debt to junk status, though the two other big-three CRAs, Standard and Poor's and Fitch, have yet to follow. Moody's also announced that Italy's rating is under review.

Moody's wrote with respect to Italy: "The Italian economy faces growth challenges in an environment characterised by long-term structural impediments to growth . . . Low productivity and a rigid labour market had been a 'major impediment' to growth in the past 10 years and were now hindering Italy's economic recovery."

Sounds like they are describing the USA: we have a rigid labor market because employers refuse to hire unemployed people, people cannot sell their houses to move to another state for work, and states like California choose to buy Chinese bridges instead of buying American.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble, said "We must break the oligopoly of the rating agencies."

The head of Standard and Poor's in Germany, Torsten Hinrichs, defended his company's work and said: "It cannot be that S&P puts its more than 150 years of creditworthiness, credibility and predictability on the line to enable politically motivated push-ups," he said, referring to the political desire to prop up Greece.

Then what would he call the curious failure of the CRAs to classify as highly speculative the Wall-Street-packaged subprime mortgages during the last decade or so?

Markus Krall, a management consultant with the Munich-based consulting firm Roland Berger, advocated for a European-based CRA.

Deutsche Welle's video report Ratings Agencies - Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down? (see report here) featured a short interview with both Krall and Hinrichs. DW also noted that the big-three occupy 95% of the market.

"We will try to create a separate European rating agency," said European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services Michel Barnier.

However, a top executive in the German financial industry said "The project doesn't solve any of our problems."

Maybe not, but the world does not revolve around the financial industry. There are many other people involved including pension fund managers who would benefit from another point of view with respect to risk.

And let's not forget the main reason for the financial industry to be opposed to this idea: it might lead to haircuts for banks and bondholders, the people responsible for the recent crash.

The big-three CRAs are a cartel, no different than any other oligopoly. The speculators who abuse these ratings are jackals feeding on the flesh of people who actually produce something worthwhile as a part of their job.

Republicans and Democrats currently cannot come to an agreement on the debt ceiling. The former want to limit spending cuts to the middle and lower classes; they want to lower taxes on the wealthy even further in their pursuit of voodoo economics. The latter refuse to even consider tort reform and limits on immigration. Both parties have a jobs mantra that appears to be "Anyone But Middle Class Americans."

Moody's announced that the USA's credit rating is under review due to its worry that the USA may not raise its statutory debt limit in time to avert default.

Yet if any other country had caused a world-wide recession, its rating would already be well below AAA. The debt limit is only the latest straw on the camel's back. The USA's rating should have already been lowered due to its failure to re-regulate its financial system after the gutting by Greenspan, Gramm, et al.

It looks like we need another acronym to reflect the ongoing threat of the USA's financial system to world stability: Financially Transmitted Disease (FTD). Before outside parties engage in financial intercourse with American bankers, they would be strongly advised to invest in some protection.

To paraphrase former British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin: "What these CRAs are aiming at is power, but power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages."

The real (Chinese) housewives of Washington DC

2011-07-13T10:40:00.003-06:00

Reuters' article, Tainted electronics pose security threat, announced something which has been obvious to people in the computer industry but not so obvious to politicians and capitalists busy trying to fill their pockets with as much public loot as possible before the next financial crash.

Rhode Island Representative Jim Langevin told Reuters that computer software and components, which are pretty much 100% manufactured in China, Taiwan, and India, can and do contain malware. This is not accidental.

"Corrupting hardware and software is embedded in the supply chain. We have a real challenge on our hands to better secure the supply chain," Langevin said.

Langevin was referring to both software and firmware. Software refers to applications like Microsoft's Word and operating systems like Windows XP. Firmware applies to components factory-filled with computer code; these components include parts for PCs, television remote controls, and phones. Even if the code is built in the USA, malware could still be added in test / quality control. Unfortunately, most high-tech companies, e.g. Apple, outsourced their entire manufacturing process long ago.

This is yet another logical outcome of outsourcing all manufacturing and trusting the foreign vendor.

Perhaps the malware is only being added so that China, the world's largest criminal enterprise, can more efficiently send emails designed to steal money from private citizens. However, there is probably not a single business in this country which is not dependent on computers. Having a built-in Trojan Horse in brand new computers would make remote access that much easier. Businesses and individuals trust their computers to perform all sorts of financial transactions without outside interference, but what if the interference was built-in?

Defense contractors do not build all equipment from scratch in American labs. The only reason we hear stories about $50,000 toilets is that there is a non-standard space to fill; imagine the cost and trouble if you built an odd-sized toilet on a one-off basis. Much of it is constructed from commercially available parts and then modified for custom purposes. The firmware may or may not be modified, depending on the application.

"What if you went on a battlefield and hit a button and everything stopped working? It's pretty scary stuff," opined Doug White, a cyber security expert and professor at Roger Williams University.

As to firmware, it depends on whether it was replaced in American defense labs before deployment. Operating systems for defense systems are often custom-made, and therefore okay, because of the real-time nature of weaponry, but applications would have to be considered individually. What if the actual weapon was okay, but the command and control system used commercially available software?

So many threats, so little time.

The real (North Korean) housewives of New York City

2011-07-13T09:38:00.000-06:00

Euronews always ends its broadcast with a segment called No Comment. It features video often so self-apparent that it does not require any comments.

Euronews' video of North Korea on the 17th anniversary of the death of its founding leader Kim Il-sung. The expressions on the faces of the people dutifully laying flowers and bowing multiple times are the same as we saw in the former Soviet Union. North Koreans are expected to show reverence for the founder of one of the world's most dangerous totalitarian governments. However, just as with Volgograd and Ulyanovsk -- respectively, the site of WWII's turning point and the birthplace of Lenin -- where all good communists were expected to visit at least once during their lives, this sort of public charade will quickly end when the dictatorship implodes.

National Post's article, North Korea takes over UN body for disarmament, reported that North Korea has assumed the rotating leadership of a key UN disarmament body, the Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament. Iran, one of the world's leaders in the exporting of terrorism, promised North Korea "full support and cooperation." North Korea has sold Iran many weapons, including missiles, often transported via China to avoid the many embargoes.

North Korea is the nuclear pariah which refuses to take part in honest talks about its nuclear ambitions and/or WMD, not to mention sinking South Korean ships and shelling South Korean islands for no reason other than just to be nasty and unpredictable. It is under multiple UN Security Council sanctions and withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003. North Korea possesses at least eight nuclear weapons.

Putting North Korea -- or Iran -- in charge of any UN committee is similar to hiring pedofiles to work as bathroom monitors in elementary school.

Introducing my 2012 Cabinet

2011-07-11T07:22:00.001-06:00

The leaders of the Tea Party -- aka the Church of Latter Day Luddites -- are still making headlines.

Michele Bachmann signed a pledge declaring that children born in 1860, the era of slavery, were more likely to remain in a two-parent family than today.

There is nothing worse than slavery. You can be killed or beaten for no reason. Women can be raped. Men can be castrated. You can be permanently separated from people you love. You can be worked to death. You can be sold at any time to any other slave owner in any other land. You can be turned into sausage if your owner desires. And perhaps best from a Republican point of view, there is no healthcare coverage, unless you consider your fellow slaves performing surgery on you without any pain killer, not to mention competence, to be any kind of benefit. There is no up-side to slavery.

Even if you combined the intelligence of Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, and Christine O'Donnell, it still would not exceed that of the Taco Bell chihuahua.

* * * * *

Banksters, banksters
Greedy little banksters
Sheila Bair was right you know
Give them all a haircut

Banksters, banksters
Greedy little banksters
Listen to Alice's Queen of Hearts
No more bailouts; off with their heads!

* * * * *

If by some miracle I was elected president, I would fill my Cabinet with people from a mix of backgrounds. Note that not all Cabinet positions are mentioned.

Vice President: Condoleezza Rice. Rice has worked her way up in government service, from Brent Scowcroft's Soviet expert on the National Security Council to Secretary of State under George W. Bush. During the campaign, her nickname could be used to advantage by resurrecting Bow Wow Wow's biggest hit with slightly different lyrics: "I want Condy!"

Secretary of State: Richard Lugar. Lugar has been a champion of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons disarmament for decades. He and Sam Nunn were just about the only members of the Senate or House to realize after the implosion of the Soviet Union the monstrous possibility of WMDs being sold around the world by unscrupulous people. The Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program is responsible for deactivating more than 7,500 nuclear warheads.

Treasury Secretary: Sheila Bair. As can be seen in this recent NYT article, the former head of the FDIC is not one of the boys who have run our country into the ground, financially-speaking. She understood that giving bondholders a haircut was the proper course of action; after all, isn't our government supposed to be based on capitalism? She would put end to the organized kleptocracy of Geithner, Summers, and the other Wall Street alumni who believe that supporting former, current, and future Wall Street workers is in their job description.

Secretary of Defense: Olympia Snowe. Snowe has been a US Senator since 1995 and is always in the middle of important negotiations along with fellow Maine Senator Susan Collins because they are moderates with the Republican Party. She has served on the Armed Services Committee and Finance Committee. I would ask her to reduce our defense budget from its current $750 billion; the Republican leadership never mentions the defense budget when demanding deficit reduction.

Attorney General: Eliot Spitzer. Spitzer was a bulldog as New York Attorney General, prosecuting Wall Street menaces, before his trysts with the now famous trollop and sex columnist -- "Ask Ashley" -- for the New York Post, Ashley Dupre. Yes, he has a history. So do I. So do you. Get over it! We need someone to prosecute Wall Street felons, as the current scheme is simply not working.

Secretary of Commerce: Byron Dorgan: Dorgan was a US Senator until recently. He is one of the few in the Senate or House to understand that there must be no tax advantages for outsourcing jobs overseas. He was an opponent of U.S. policy toward Cuba; this is relevant because the Castro brothers are on their last legs and will soon die, allowing a new generation to lead. He was an opponent of the McCain-Kennedy Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007; he said that it would continue the downward push of illegal aliens on the wages of American workers.

Secretary of Labor: Sherrod Brown. Brown has been a US Senator since 2007. He was a vigorous opponent of CAFTA; its passage by the narrowest of margins was the impetus for his running for the Senate. He favors the continued funding of unemployment benefits, something which keeps many people from becoming homeless.

Secretary of Transportation: Ray LaHood. LaHood is the current Transportation Secretary and understands that high-speed rail and public transport are not a waste of money as many of his fellow Republicans falsely believe. He is also a supporter of airline passenger rights. I would ask him to work on classifying cell phone use while driving as equivalent to driving while impaired and texting while driving as equivalent to driving under the influence of alcohol (DUI).

Secretary of Homeland Security: Susan Collins. Collins has been a US Senator since 1997 and is always in the middle of important negotiations along with fellow Maine Senator Olympia Snowe because they are moderates with the Republican Party. She has served on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. She voted against some free-trade agreements and for an amendment would have conditioned trade benefits for Caribbean countries on "compliance with internationally recognized labor rights."

Trade Representative: Alan Tonelson. Tonelson is a policy analyst with the U.S. Business and Industry Council and a vigorous opponent of outsourcing. He is the author of many articles, including Up from globalism from Harper's Magazine. He is the author of The Race To The Bottom: Why A Worldwide Worker Surplus And Uncontrolled Free Trade Are Sinking American Living Standards .

Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers: Nouriel Roubini. Roubini, or Dr Doom to his critics, was one of the very few to forecast the recent crash. He understands that the current incestuous relationship with Wall Street will only result in our failure as a nation. Roubini recently predicted that 2013 will bring an economic "perfect storm" just in time for the next president.

SEC Chairman: Nomi Prins. Prins, a former managing director at Goldman Sachs, is the author of It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bonuses, Bailouts, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street. She advocates for the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act and regulatory reform of Wall Street. On her blog, she recognized that China has a poverty rate of 2.8% while the USA has one of 14%. We need people in government who actually care about the people, not just the elite.

Federal Reserve Chairman: Joe Stiglitz. Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize winning economist who got fired from the World Bank for expressing dissent with the status quo. Imagine that, disagreeing with the group-think responsible for our current mess! He understands that this country was designed for the people, not the top 1% who are in bed with politicians. Actually, just about anyone other than Alan "Ayn Rand was a strumpet and a witch, but I loved her anyway" Greenspan or Ben "lie back and think of Wall Street" Bernanke would be an improvement.

UPDATE: Corporate tax structure 2.0

2011-07-08T12:24:00.002-06:00

UPDATE: Corporate tax structure 2.0

2011-07-08T12:18:00.000-06:00

UPDATE: Corporate tax structure 2.0

2011-07-08T12:01:00.000-06:00

Corporate tax structure 2.0

2011-07-08T10:53:00.022-06:00

The June jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics should be the last straw for Barack Obama. Even Reuters had to admit the jobs situation is grim.

The number of jobs only increased by 18,000, a truly pathetic number. And the April and May figures were revised downward by 44,000. The BLS noted that since March, the number of unemployed persons has increased by 545,000. And these are the official figures. Anyone who understands unemployment statistics knows that Reagan changed the definition of unemployment to exclude a large number of people who have been unemployed for a long time.

Obama is either completely clueless with respect to unemployment or he is exactly the same as Republicans. I vote for both.

* * * * *

Republicans and Democrats both want outsourcing regardless of their statements to the contrary. Republicans favor pure capitalism and outsourcing is merely one more facet of that philosophy. Democrats believe in unfettered immigration, whether from Mexico, Islamic countries, or via H-1B / L-1 visas; outsourcing is just one more way for liberals to give jobs to non-Americans.

Der Spiegel noted that as recently as the 1990s, Portugal was an important textile center. The USA also used to be a major producer of textiles. We allowed China to join the WTO in 2001, rapidly accelerating the world's manufacturing decline. Now Portugal's debt has been classified as junk. The jobs outsourced to China and India have had a very real effect on Europe and the USA.

The Council on Foreign Relations graphed unemployment since 1940, paying attention to the shape of the recovery. Until the recession in 1990-91, the shape of the recovery was V-shaped, i.e. job growth was sharp and strong. However, after 1991, all recoveries have had a U-shape, i.e. job growth was sluggish. Not coincidentally, imports from China first started exceeding our exports to China in 1985, in the middle of Reagan's reign of terror. The current recovery is projected to be the longest since 1940, but recent dismal job growth makes one question if we even have a recovery.

Capitalists and their sycophantic politicians continue to claim that we have always recovered from past recessions, so therefore we will recover from this one. I'm sure Roman politicians said pretty much the same thing after the various sacks of Rome -- e.g. in 410, 455, and 546 -- but the barbarians were still able to keep Europe in the Dark Ages for the next thousand years.

* * * * *

In the process of moving to a dumpy apartment -- my house is being foreclosed because I cannot find a real job -- I used professional movers to move the really heavy stuff. They commented that my dressers were much heavier than the usual things they carry. That's because my American-made furniture is all more than 20 years old, before we outsourced our entire furniture industry to China and other foreign countries. Quality matters.

My house is listed for sale, even though it is almost certain to end in foreclosure. The carpetbaggers are out in force throughout the real estate business once again, even after we realized that we should hammer stakes into their hearts. My house was visited by one agent accompanied by some potential buyers, or so he said. He claimed that the buyers were very interested in making an offer. We were expecting an offer far below market value, par for the course, one which the bank would have to approve as a short sale. Instead he asked, in writing, to give him access to my personal information with my mortgage lender.

Now why in the world would he require this information? He could not possibly understand my financial situation as well as me, or my real estate predicament as well as my real estate agent, so he would not be able to assist me in the process. And, of course, we never heard from him after I refused to participate in his grift even though he told us that the buyers were absolutely, positively going to make an offer. The answer is clear: he is seeking new business in identity theft and fraud. This is the brave new world of the Tea Party: snake oil 2.0.

* * * * *

Since the beginning of the USA to 1985, most goods were manufactured and consumed locally. General Motors used to control over 50% of the world market for automobiles. Then the auto industry was struck by two bolts of lightning, both based on expectations that the party would last forever. Today GM has less than 20% of the market.

The first bolt was the UAW's suicidal demands for control of the factory floor. Their demand that a specific class of employee only be required to perform a narrow range of tasks naturally led to that employee being unproductive when his skill was not needed.

The second bolt was Detroit management's arrogant view that it knew best what consumers needed and/or wanted. Management was absolutely clueless when gas prices rose and Japanese automakers made in-roads into the largest auto market in the world at that time.

* * * * *

As Chrystia Freeland noted in Winners and losers in the Apple economy, most jobs in Apple are located overseas. In 2006, jobs directly related to the iPod involved nearly twice as many people outside the USA -- 13,920 in the USA and 27,250 abroad. And more than half of the jobs in the USA -- 7,789 -- went to retail and other low-paying job descriptions, e.g. office support staff and freight and distribution workers.

And that does not take into account Apple's propensity to treat its foreign workers like slaves (read here and here).

As Freeland correctly concluded, the high-tech industry will not create sufficient jobs in the USA to end America's job crisis.

* * * * *

BBC News noted some depressing medical statistics. It noted that substandard surgical tools are quite common in the UK, with the London NHS board rejecting almost 20% of tools as unsafe for use. And it noted that two-thirds of the world's surgical instruments are made in the city of Sialkot in northern Pakistan.

Given the rapid increasing trend towards outsourcing in every aspect of our lives, look for substandard Pakistani surgical tools to be used in your next operation.

* * * * *

Free trade treaties sound like a good idea the first time you hear them. What could be wrong with expanding trade between two friends? As usual, reality rears its ugly head into the discussion.

For 2010, the trade imbalance with Canada was 28,542.5 (in millions of dollars) for a ratio of 1.115. In 1985 those figures were 21,755.4 and 1.46.

For 2010, the trade imbalance with Mexico was 21,781.5 (in millions of dollars) for a ratio of 1.353. In 1985 those figures were 5,497.0 and 1.4.

In 2007, the year before the crash, for Canada the figures were 68,168.6 and 1.274, and for Mexico the figures were 74,795.8 and 1.55; normal trade was skewed by the crash. I will graph the data soon to show the complete trend, especially since the passage of NAFTA.

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) noted that free trade treaties increase the trade imbalance between the USA and the other country. The Census data shows this to be often true. An increase in our trade imbalance is always accompanied by a loss of American jobs, or perhaps more correctly, they are outsourced to the other country.

Also, the other country's workers are often taken advantage of by unscrupulous capitalists, with the other country having an advantage because it does not pay attention to environmental concerns or workers' rights.

Jane Hamsher wrote in the Naked Capitalism blog that there is a loophole in the free trade treaty with South Korea which allows it to send us goods with up to 65% non-South-Korean content, as long as final assembly is done in South Korea. So 2/3 of South Korean products can actually be from China, Vietnam, Burma, or North Korea, all countries which have no respect for civilization in general. If you have trouble getting to sleep at night, you can read the text of the actual treaty. Compare the 65% figure with the 50% allowed by NAFTA and you see that each free trade treaty is worse than the one before it.

If free trade treaties gave favorable treatment to cooperatives formed by workers, then perhaps those treaties would be helping those workers. But no.

* * * * *

As I wrote before, Libertarians and the Tea Party want to eliminate the Food and Drug Administration. Given the ever-increasing outsourcing of drugs and drug components, this would be a public health disaster.

The Times UK noted back in 2007 that AstraZeneca is planning to outsource all its drug manufacturing activities within ten years.

In 2007-8 Baxter found that its heparin was contaminated, causing deaths in some patients. Baxter, like most drug companies, uses chemical components manufactured in other countries; often the entire drug is manufactured overseas. Investigations revealed that the Changzhou SPL plant in China was never inspected by the FDA.

Most people have no idea how large of a percentage of drug components are manufactured in other countries like China and India. The world's largest drugmaker, Pfizer, outsources 17% of its active pharmaceutical ingredient production.

The FDA wants to outsource even more inspections of foreign plants, probably to the manufacturers themselves. Self-regulation worked really well for Wall Street, right?

Reading the FDA and GAO websites is educational.

The GAO noted that "Drugs manufactured in more than 100 countries were offered for entry into the United States in fiscal year 2009."

One of our local grocery stores, King Soopers, sells generic painkillers manufactured in India. Luckily, I can still shop at Walgreens where more of their goods are made in the USA, especially their generic painkillers.

The GAO also noted that the "FDA increased the number of foreign drug inspections it conducted from fiscal year 2007 to 2009, but still conducts relatively fewer foreign drug inspections each year than it conducts domestically."

And the Tea Party wants to make that even worse. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

* * * * *

As I first alluded to in UPDATE: Chrystia Freeland and the Chinese Tea Party, we need to revise the corporate tax structure. We need to do this not to satisfy corporate America's insatiable greed, but to change the motivation of American corporations with respect to hiring locally.

The current corporate tax code must be eliminated, especially all of the custom tax breaks given to friends of Congress, aka earmarks. It must be replaced by a calculation based on the percentage of American workers employed in the states and territories and American content.

Each company's American percentage must be calculated, based on the percentage of employees in the USA and percentage of USA content (parts and raw materials). This will be the most difficult part: how do we compare employees and parts / components, given that outsourcing the latter results in fewer American jobs? Since we will take into account the sources for 100% of components and part, the actual assembly locations are irrelevant.

This way we can tax Walmart appropriately, with its largely Chinese-made goods being sold in stores manned by Americans.

There are a number of important loopholes which must be addressed. We want companies to sell American-made products, so we will give an exemption for foreign salespeople. This must be strictly controlled, as companies will try to cheat. However, it would be very easy for a company to manufacture components overseas and classify it as service, so service must not be included in the sales category exemption.

It would be best to repeal all free trade treaties and start over, but this is probably not realistic given the long and arduous process required to do so. Perhaps we could consider the workers of those other countries as being American workers, but assemblies and components would need to be counted separately to prevent Chinese and other foreign parts tainting the result.

All food and drug products must be labeled with content: assembly location, percentage of foreign components, and the names of the contributing foreign countries.

Two things should be obvious. First, the above scheme will favor small business, as their work force tends to be mostly American. Second, there would be no need to differentiate between foreign and domestic companies because the tax code would treat a foreign company importing its wares the same as an American company importing its goods manufactured in foreign lands.

To paraphrase Pogo: We have imported the enemy and he is now us.

Europe and Asia need their own credit rating agencies

2011-07-06T10:24:00.008-06:00

Credit rating agencies (CRAs) played a major role in the recent crash, with Standard & Poor's, Moody's Investors Service and Fitch being the big three. CRAs could have warned the world that the banks' practice of bundling large numbers of mortgages together and selling them as high-quality -- rated AAA -- investments was flawed; this process is known as securitization. CRAs could have warned us that the motivations of banks had been warped because the seller of the original mortgage was able to dump its obligation onto another entity; in our greed-fueled country, this had the effect of causing the originators to lose sight of reality and sell mortgages to people who never should have been approved. CRAs could have warned us that banks actually preferred to bundle low-quality mortgages, aka subprime mortgages, because the return on their investment was higher. But no.

Today there are some excellent reference sources for the crash. The movie Inside Job is a good introduction. White papers from organizations like the Asian Development Bank Institute are educational. And books like Bethany McLean and Joseph Nocera's All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis and Nomi_Prins' It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bonuses, Bailouts, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street are informative and often entertaining.

The USA is far too corrupt to regulate itself. Sure, every now and then there is a flicker of integrity. Reuters' story SEC Considers Charges Against Credit-Rating Agencies For Role In Financial Crisis gives us a little hope that the banksters and their proxies will be brought down, but will charges actually be brought against the CRAs? The savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s resulted in Charles Keating -- friend of many Senators and Congressmen -- and more than a few others being sent to prison, but this time not only is no one being convicted, the perpetrators are being rewarded with bonuses.

The CRAs are now contributing to the demise of Greece and Portugal, giving their debt junk status ratings. They have downgraded Greece to CCC and Portugal to Ba2. The European Commission strongly criticized the CRAs for their actions.

Der Spiegel quoted Sven Giegold, financial spokesman for the Green Party in the European Parliament as having said "No one can explain why several EU countries have worse credit ratings than the highly indebted US."

The reason is that the CRAs are jointly controlled by Wall Street.

Shyster Brigitte Haar argued that this would create a risk of "ratings shopping," where players would choose the agency with the most generous ratings.

It's called capitalism -- or freedom.

Sure, Greece has severe problems with corruption and avoidance of the wealthy paying taxes, but how is that different than here in the USA where there are five Wall Street lobbyists for every member of Congress?

Europe and Asia need to create their own CRAs to counterbalance the corrupt ones in the USA. Investors can then consider the advice of all three groups for determining the actual credit risk of investments, companies, and countries.

Calling all BLEEPers

2011-07-01T11:37:00.015-06:00

The often daft Ron Paul -- he named his son Rand in honor of his hero Ayn Rand -- has proposed to sell the gold in Fort Knox, the value of which currently approaches $400 billion. He and loony libertarian groups like the Cato Institute, Jon Caldera's Independence Institute, and the Heritage Foundation have proposed to sell our national parks and every other thing of value that we own.

"Selling off the gold is just one level of crazy away from selling Mount Rushmore," one unnamed official told the Washington Post.

Paul has also proposed to convert our economy back into one which employs a gold standard. There is one really obvious problem with this proposal: how does a country have a gold standard after it sells its gold? Another problem is in the actual implementation: our gold is worth around $400 billion, yet we have in excess of $800 billion in dollar bills floating around the world, so is he also proposing a devaluation of the dollar by 50%?

Paul's latest hare-brained scheme is to verify that the gold in Fort Knox has not been stolen or sold. He has a neurotic fixation on the Federal Reserve, having proposed many times to eliminate it, and this is again manifested by his bizarre comment that the Federal Reserve of New York, possessing 5% of the U.S. gold reserves, can and does surreptitiously sell or exchange gold with other countries or parties unknown.

Next we can look forward to Paul proposing to sell Area 51, along with the aliens and alien spacecraft stored there.

* * * * *

Sony Ericsson is only one of many employers who have come out of the libertarian closet to declare their true feelings. It placed employment ads with the following text: "NO UNEMPLOYED CANDIDATES WILL BE CONSIDERED AT ALL."

Their reasoning is that everyone who has been laid-off and/or fired is a worthless deadbeat incapable of contributing to a grand institution like itself, with those people being fired because they deserved it.

Sony and other capitalist companies are clearly ignorant of corporate reality; it is quite common for management to have been the reason for the failure of a project and/or company.

I once worked for USWest, an RBOC later purchased by Qwest and recently by Century Link. Senior management decided one day that they needed to convert all of their billing and business systems from COBOL to a state-of-the-art language like C++. The old systems were put on life support with just a handful of people to support them. Some new employees were hired and ones from the legacy systems were interviewed to see if they could handle the new technology, with the ones deemed unworthy laid-off.

The new projects were created with great fanfare. These projects exhibited problems from the start because management did not understand the new technology; many of us suspected that they did not understand technology, period. Deadlines were missed, again and again.

Eventually the projects became such albatrosses that they were canceled, with many more employees being laid-off. Yet the people responsible -- management -- retained their jobs, even though they had been the ones to fail. At this time the company had legacy systems it could not longer support because it had eliminated many of those employees, yet it had no future vision of the replacements for those systems.

The final kicker was that nine senior USWest / Qwest executives, the most prominent being former-CEO Joseph Nacchio, were later charged with fraud and insider trading. Nacchio went to prison, joining WorldCom's Bernard Ebbers, Tyco International's Dennis Kozlowski and several top executives of Enron.

BNET's article, RIM is King Lear: Self-Blinded and Waiting for Death, echoed my experience. A Research in Motion employee with some insight wrote a long memo to a clueless management.

He wrote "Focus product design on customer requirements and needs, not strategic alignment, partner requests or even legal advice." This is the typical management style, or lack thereof, of people who cannot make-up their mind if they are to satisfy customers, stockholders, stock analysts, their drinking buddies, shysters, or their bosses. These people often speak in sports and/or frat-boy jargon: he dropped the ball, take the ball and run with it, etc. Here's a clue: who buys the products?

* * * * *

The king and queen of the Tea Party, Rand Paul and Michele Bachmann, want to return the country back to the 1800s when robber barons were free to treat workers as ersatz serfs. Bachmann is on record as wanting to eliminate the minimum wage to "virtually wipe out unemployment."

She's technically correct that eliminating the minimum wage would reduce unemployment, having the same effect as our allowing 12-20 million illegal immigrants into the country. She just wants to legalize the behavior of many wealthy people with respect to housekeepers, landscapers, and nannies, i.e. treat them like slaves.

Bachmann and other Republicans decry "big government" and its wasteful spending, yet she and her husband have accepted over a quarter of a million dollars in farm subsidies.

Bachmann may or not be familiar with one of the robber barons she so much admires, George Pullman, but she is clearly following in his footsteps.

Pullman created an empire with his railroad car company. He wanted to control every aspect of the lives of his employees, so he created a company town in the south side of Chicago. His employees were required to live in company apartments and buy from the company store. This arrangement was barely acceptable, but at least the employees survived. That is, until Pullman's business suffered a downturn. His solution was to reduce wages, but keep rents the same. The employees were squeezed between a rock and a hard place, with the Pullman Strike being the natural outcome.

Pullman's will required him to be buried in a lead-lined coffin under tons of concrete because he rightly feared that his corpse would be dug up and desecrated.

Rand Paul has declared that the Food and Drug Administration should be eliminated, along with many other government agencies. It is unclear whether he believes the libertarian claptrap that businesses can self-regulate or whether he just wants capitalists to have no limits, regardless of the consequences.

Thalidomide is a sedative commonly used in the 1950s, often for morning sickness. We discovered to our horror that when it was given to pregnant women, their children were born with horribly shortened limbs and/or extra appendages. Europe suffered many thousands of deformed children because of thalidomide, but the USA was largely spared. Doctor Frances Oldham Kelsey refused Food and Drug Administration approval for it, demanding that drugs be fully tested prior to approval. She is rightly considered one of the heroes of our country and was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

Given that human nature has not changed since the 1950s, the Food and Drug Administration remains essential to protect us from dangerous medications.

* * * * *

My brother is a typical Tea Party member. During the last presidential campaign he excitedly told me of something Rush Limbaugh had said, that Michelle Obama had been caught on tape saying something nasty about "whitey."

Anyone who performed even a cursory amount of critical analysis on Limbaugh's statement would have realized that he was lying. If such a tape existed, it would have been worth many millions to the Republican Party. Airing such a tape would have destroyed the candidacy of Barack Obama. Yet it never appeared in the public arena.

And how could Limbaugh have known of such a tape? If he had only been told of it, then he was merely spreading a rumor. If he actually heard it, why did he not release it on his radio show? No Democrat would have allowed Limbaugh to hear such a tape and Republicans would have been okay with giving it to him, probably for a price.

The answer is clear: the tape never existed.

My brother avidly watches Fox News and swallows everything he hears. He buys many of the books written by Fox News personalities and even sends copies of many of them to our parents. Like the Pauls, he believes that business owners should pay no taxes.

Before 9/11, there was not a lot of love for New Yorkers outside the NYC metro area. In Colorado we had bumper stickers that read "If you love NY, take I-70 east"; the bumper sticker actually used a heart symbol, of course. 9/11 softened this attitude and brought us together as a country, until George W. Bush expropriated that empathy to invade Iraq. The ephemeral warm and fuzzy feeling for bankers and Wall Street workers has evaporated due to the obscene Wall Street bailouts and bonuses, but most people generally still feel compassion for the ordinary people of NYC; support for the NYFD goes without saying.

Immediately after 9/11, my brother commented that it "served those BLEEPers right" or something similar to that. He was referring to the people of NYC, not to the Muslims who drove the planes into the buildings and ground. We were shocked, but it accurately expressed the typical Tea Party view: screw everyone else, or as my fourth grade teacher often said regarding a selfish student, "Me, myself, and I."

UPDATE: Neanderthal love story

2011-06-27T18:11:00.007-06:00

The most dangerous area in the country is the corridor between Flint and Detroit in Michigan, with those two cities being the most dangerous in the entire country. The unemployment rate in Detroit approaches 50%, with the population there being predominantly black.

We have seen how, when a local population is forgotten and suffers great deprivation, something fills the void, whether Nazism in 1930s Germany or Islam in many current countries. This is not the time to watch passively from the sidelines.

Jesse Jackson and others have proposed CCC and WPA programs to put unemployed people to work, especially in areas like Detroit. This would appear to be a win-win proposal, giving unemployed people jobs and repairing our decrepit and crumbling infrastructure. But Republicans, especially the rabid Tea Party, would rather our country descend into madness and decay. They are too busy making the world safe for oligarchs and robber barons.

Our tax laws favor outsourcing, disproportionately affecting people without a college education. We could reverse this situation by revising our system of taxation, making corporate taxes inversely proportional to the percentage of Americans the firm employs. We could give substantial tax breaks for locating industry in the middle of areas of high unemployment, including the Native American reservations.

Or we could all just start learning Chinese.

FICTION: The war of immiscible ideas, chapter 4

2011-06-22T10:21:00.002-06:00

Lieutenant Song's satellite telephone rang and she answered it.

"Christian, it is Colonel Kim. He wants to know if we can return to Pyongyang tomorrow morning. He sounds a little stressed," she explained.

"Tell him we will be there at 8:00 in the morning," he said.

* * * * *

Tolgfors and Lieutenant Song arrived at the presidential palace promptly at 8:00 AM. Colonel Kim ushered them into a small office, different than the large room in which they had previously met.

"I apologize, I have no time for pleasantries. Right after you left yesterday, I spoke with Kim Young-un. Your fears were well-placed. He ordered me to travel to all six of the prison camps and execute all former army officers held there. Then he said some bizarre things, most of which I do not remember. The craziest thing was his order for me to kidnap the entire American All-Star Basketball team during its travels to Europe, and bring all of the team members here to Pyongyang for his personal amusement. I believe he is as nutty as his father," Colonel Kim breathlessly exclaimed.

"Actually, wouldn't he need two teams to play a game?" deadpanned Tolgfors. "Don't translate that," he instructed Lieutenant Song as she glared at him. "So what did you do with him?"

"Something I did not tell you before because I was not sure of who I could trust was that I have some friends in the officer ranks who agree with me that the direction of North Korea must be reversed. We are not many -- only 16 in all -- but we are willing to die to stop the madness here. I called my friends and we arrested Kim Young-un and placed him under house arrest just before I called you," explained Colonel Kim.

"You have already started the clock. We have very little time to act," said Tolgfors. "Here is what you must do today. Your friends will be busy. Two of them will immediately travel to each prison camp. They will order the prison commander to release to them all army officers. If we had time, it would be best if we could verify that all of these officers were not guilty of an actual crime, like murder, but we have no time for that now. We will have to chance it. You will need to forge papers for your friends to appear as if they are operating on direct orders of Kim Young-un. By the way, has the news of Kim Killem-all's stroke been released to the public yet -- or to any of the ruling elite?"

"Not to the public, but the leadership is aware of it," answered Colonel Kim. "And I checked on his condition before you arrived. He is still alive, unfortunately."

"That may be useful. Okay, order the medical personnel to only speak with you regarding his condition. Back to the prison camps -- have your friends inform the camp commanders that the prisoners are being released for a suicide mission against South Korea. Make sure they understand that this is top secret and that any release of information will result in one more prisoner being added to the camps: them. They must not communicate with the commanders of the other camps. Bring all of the officers back here for a meeting. That should give us enough time," said Tolgfors.

"Traveling to the camps, loading the officers onto busses, and returning will require most of the day. What will you do until we are finished?" asked Colonel Kim.

"Lieutenant Song and I need to return to Seoul to coordinate some things with South Korea. We will call you as needed. I would like to speak with one of your officer friends now in regards to the announcement you will make tomorrow morning on television," finished Tolgfors.

* * * * *

"This is INI Headlines with Lolita Tidings," announced the crisp, professional voice.

LOLITA TIDINGS: Good evening. We start with news of violence during the women's World Cup in London.

Reports are still sketchy, but it appears that there was a pre-planned plot by Muslims to murder as many of the female players as possible. This occurred during the game between France and Belgium, both countries which have banned the wearing of burqas in public.

All fans were ushered through metal detectors, but a good number of them were wearing burqas or niqabs. We now know that many of these people were actually men. Most or all of them were carrying small rocks and slingshots with no metal parts.

All of the Muslims sat on one side in close proximity to each other. When the action on the field moved to their side, all of them removed their sacks and started to launch rocks at the players on the field using their slingshots. The women had no idea that the rocks were coming, so they were defenseless. The rocks were all launched at one time, so the players and referees were caught in a storm of projectiles.

Most of the players and referees were injured, with eleven of them fatally so. After the rocks were launched, the Muslims dropped their sacks and tickets on their seats and ran for the exits. Scotland Yard is trying to determine which fans were responsible, but it announced that that may not be possible, as stadium management allowed the Muslims to escape.

The president of France, Charles Martel, issued a terse statement immediately after the event. Let's watch the video:

VIDEO: We have a very good idea who killed the women of our team and that of Belgium because of the television coverage. We will hunt these people down and capture or kill them. This will not stand, I assure you.

President Johnnie Mugabe later gave a statement that "If only France and Belgium had reached out to Muslims, this would not have happened."

Speaking of President Mugabe, he earlier gave a press conference. Let's watch the video:

SCENE: White House Press Room

PRESIDENT MUGABE: As you know, the countries in the European Union that are in trouble, often called the PIIGS, have had their credit ratings severely dropped. Some of these countries are approaching default on their debt. We thought that Wall Street banks were aware of the situation, but it appears that they were more heavily invested than we knew. All of the top ten banks, and many others as well, are at risk of failure. Therefore I am asking the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department to create a new program, the Financially Underwater Casino Deliverance, or FUCD for short. This program will transfer sufficient assets to these banks so that our economy will not come to a stop. If we do nothing, our unemployment rate will rise and the stock market will suffer a deep drop. I will take questions now.

REPORTER 1: The unemployment rate and stock market tanked last time we gave bailouts to Wall Street, so we threw our money away. Why are we repeating the same failed program?

PRESIDENT MUGABE: This is not a bailout. This is merely a way to keep our banking system afloat.

REPORTER 2: Why not nationalize these banks and take the opportunity to split them into banks, investment firms, and insurance companies, in other words, return to Glass-Steagall? We need the banks, but we do not need casinos for the Madison Avenue crowd.

PRESIDENT MUGABE: No, that would be un-American. We cannot tell American banks what to do.

REPORTER 2: So instead we will transfer trillions more dollars from the American people to banks run by incompetents and/or crooks?

PRESIDENT MUGABE: We need to save Wall Street jobs. Next question.

REPORTER 3: Why not force the banks to accept a haircut? After all, they screwed up, not the American taxpayer. And are you going to mandate that bank management cannot give themselves obscene bonuses, using our money, as we saw before?

PRESIDENT MUGABE: That's not the American way.

LOLITA TIDINGS: I think we've seen enough.

In related news, President Mugabe has been sweet-talking Wall Street in an attempt to convince them to donate to his re-election campaign. He convened two dozen Wall Street executives in the White house. But isn't he supposed to be representing the people, especially the middle class? This sounds like sleeping with the enemy.

Stay tuned to INI for the latest updates on these and other stories we are covering.

* * * * *

Lieutenant Choi Sung-hui had given up all hope long ago. When she first arrived at the prison camp, she was tortured by a sadistic male guard who used a cattle prod, inserting it everywhere he could. Later she witnessed the same guard beat a small girl to death for hiding a few grains of wheat in her pocket. She had been imprisoned because her sister picked up a South Korean leaflet; the North Korean authorities imprisoned her immediate family, as well as the generation above and below.

Now she had been summoned to the commandant's office for reasons unknown. She was sure she would be shot -- or worse. She was surprised to see a number of other prisoners, all former army officers, along with two current officers. They were all being fed the largest meal she had seen in her entire time in the prison. She did not waste time asking about the situation; she just sat down and started to eat.

* * * * *

All of the released prisoners had been given a thorough scrubbing and transported to Pyongyang. They were all significantly thinner than they had been before and their new uniforms fit poorly.

Colonel Kim entered the room. "Please sit down and save your strength. You will need it later."

"84 of you were released from the prison camps. There are 16 of us who were lucky not to have been sent there. That makes an even 100. All of us will have the most important day of our lives tomorrow. This is a day about which you will tell your grandchildren -- and maybe they will even pay attention," Kim joked.

A few of the officers smiled, but most of them were still unsure of what they were going to be asked to do.

"You will participate in the greatest adventure of all, releasing North Korea from the shackles of the last 100 years. All of you have been assigned important missions. It is possible that the failure of any of you will result in failure of the entire mission. I realize personal initiative is not something we have been trained in, but you must exercise it today. If someone interferes with you, you will do whatever it takes to complete your mission. If you need to tie him up and stuff him into a filing cabinet to keep him quiet, then do so. If you need to shoot him in both shoulders to prevent him from calling an aide, then do so. If you need to shoot him in the head to immediately silence him, then do so. No one will question your motives later. However, I must tell you that many of the senior leadership knows some very important things, for instance, the location of the billions that has been stolen from us. We really need to interrogate these senior officials to plan our future and it is difficult to interrogate a dead man," lectured Colonel Kim.

"In ancient times, the 300 Spartans fought to the death while they delayed a massive army. Their exploits are legendary even today. There are 100 of us, so perhaps we will be remembered as the 100 Koreans or even just the 100. But this will only happen if we all do our job. And it will help no one if we fight to the death. To paraphrase the American General George Patton, we need to make the other guy fight to the death. Okay, pay attention, here are your assignments," said Colonel Kim.

* * * * *

Tolgfors and Lieutenant Song had been up all night arranging for the contents of the vehicles in their caravan. As soon as they climbed into the front seat of the truck, with a South Korean soldier at the wheel, they fell asleep, with her leaning against him.

The caravan had traveled to a point just beyond the view of the North Korean border guards. An officer banged on the side of their truck to wake them up: "It's 8:30 AM. Wake-up! It is time to go!"

Tolgfors struggled to wake-up. "Han-na, finally, we're sleeping together," he whispered.

She straightened two fingers, slipped them between two of his ribs, and inserted them forcefully, causing him to sit upright because of the sharp pain.

"Coffee would be much better," he said.

Their truck engine rumbled to life, along with the other engines in their caravan. They started to move forward.

* * * * *

Lieutenant Choi saw the approaching caravan, with vehicles ranging as far as the eye could see. She had been assigned the task of returning to her prison camp, this time as a liberator. There was a score to settle. It was going to be a beautiful day.

The young North Korean reporter standing beside her was already videotaping the approaching caravan. The footage would be aired immediately after the announcement from Colonel Kim. Yes, the revolution would be televised.

* * * * *

Tolgfors switched on the small television in the cab. It was tuned to North Korean television. He could see the usual belligerent female announcer being escorted from the stage. Then the camera switched to one covering a much younger woman who started to announce the weather. She started in the northern part of the Korean Peninsula, giving the weather for the major North Korean cities. She continued without a hitch down south, giving the weather for Seoul and the major South Korean cities. At 30 seconds before 9:00 AM, she stopped announcing the weather and declared "It is going to be a beautiful day throughout the entire Korean Peninsula."

"Showtime!" Tolgfors exclaimed.

UPDATE: Execute Somali pirates upon capture

2011-06-17T16:56:00.002-06:00

BBC News reminded us of the early history of the U.S. Navy and Marines. The modern Navy was created via the Naval Act of 1794 in response to the savage pirates of the Barbary Coast, what is now Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. These pirates were named the Barbary Corsairs. The U.S. Marines added a line to their anthem to celebrate the event: "to the shores of Tripoli."

France colonized Algeria and much of North Africa, but after WWII Algerians and other North Africans wanted their independence. Algeria eventually won its war against France, fought during 1954 to 1962. The war was brutal and savage, with suicide bombings and other non-conventional tactics.

The Battle of Algiers, a movie made on the subject of that war, included many realistic scenes. This movie is still used today as a training device by the U.S. military regarding counter-insurgency. One scene involved three Algerian Muslim women who removed their Islamic sacks and changed to European-style clothing, allowing them to pass through French security barriers and plant bombs which killed scores of people.

Some things never change: this tactic of using supposedly religious clothing when it suits Muslims continues today, only now even men use Islamic sacks to fool infidels.

The father of that war, Yacef Saadi, told BBC News: "There were battles everywhere. Attacks even in the sleepiest suburbs, first to take their weapons and then to fight them."

These tactics continue today, but today's Islamic "freedom fighters" believe that the entire world is their battleground, not to mention lebensraum, and therefore they see nothing wrong with sending planes into American buildings, loading vehicles with explosives in NYC and Stockholm, and exploding bombs on trains in Madrid and London.

* * * * *

None of the above events are contrary to Islam. As Raymond Ibrahim said before Congress (read here and here), war is deceit. Any action is allowable for Muslims to defend Islam, including temporarily denying their faith to infidels.

Contrast this attitude to that of early Christians who died in great numbers, often in arenas with wild beasts and gladiators, because they refused to deny their faith.

Muhammad himself preached "If you ever take an oath to do something and later on you find that something else is better, then you should expiate your oath and do what is better."

If Muhammad were alive today, Westerners would consider him to have the integrity of an alley cat, no better than a Congressman who sends photos of his crotch to teen-aged girls, yet Muslims and apologists for Islam consider him to be the perfect role model.

* * * * *

Somalis have collectively decided that they no longer must play by anyone else's rules. Somali pirates retained Indian hostages after a ransom was paid, even though they had an explicit agreement that the ransom was paid for their release. Their reasoning was that since the Indian navy had arrested more than 100 pirates on the high seas, they were no longer required to release Indian hostages even after a ranson was paid.

Therefore, Somalis can no longer be trusted.

* * * * *

Der Spiegel and BBC News reported that piracy cost the global economy an estimated $8.3 billion in 2010. Unless something is done to reverse the trend, that cost could double within a few years. Der Spiegel reported just one month later that the cost is actually closer to $10 billion.

Der Spiegel quoted convicted pirate Ahmed Muhammed Adam as having said "Whenever 20 [pirates] die, there are always 20 more to replace them." In other words, piracy is the best career option in Somalia and will attract more and more of them until they are convinced otherwise.

* * * * *

Pirates are lying parasites who are sucking the life out of the world economy, not all that different from Wall Street bankers. They cannot be motivated to stop hijacking ships, so we should just kill them when they are caught in the act. And as I wrote before (read here and here), we must prevent them from hijacking any more ships. Somali apologists will wail at this prescription, somehow forgetting that current hostages are being tortured by their Islamic captors.

A large percentage of Somalis in the USA are active Islamists, often traveling back home to Somalia from Somali strongholds in the USA, e.g. Minneapolis, to pursue jihad. These people are worse than Nazis spies during WWII, during which we arrested every Nazi spy we could find. The Islamist organization al-Shabab is a Somali invention. Newsweek noted that al-Shabab practices an extreme version of Islam, i.e. they take all of Muhammad's teachings literally. Women accused of adultery are dealt with quickly and cruelly: al-Shabab's your uncle, they are stoned to death.

All immigration of Somalis must stop via a total ban on Somali immigration. All Somalis in the country must be monitored; if they actively pursue jihad, e.g. Mohamed Osman Mohamud, the Portland car bomber, they must be deported. Even if they only advocate jihad and the killing of infidels via the Internet, we must deport them, as there are many other deserving immigrants, e.g. Coptic Christians.

UPDATE: Chrystia Freeland and the Chinese Tea Party

2011-06-13T09:01:00.008-06:00

Chrystia Freeland, editor of Thomson Reuters Digital, penned the article Is U.S. business abandoning the middle class? She astutely noted something about which I wrote in Wall Street's disconnect with jobs back in October 2009, that there is very little correlation between Wall Street and middle class jobs.

Freeland painted a depressing picture of America's future, with the wealth of Wall Street increasingly being used to paper the nests of the elite, with nothing remaining for investment in American infrastructure. Yet somehow she wrote this entire article without mentioning outsourcing.

In the old days, a recession would occur. Factories would lay-off workers, but people would continue to purchase widgets. Eventually warehouses would run out of widgets and factories would start hiring again, ending the recession. Today the same scenario occurs, but all of the hiring is done in Chinese and Indian factories. This is why there has been no relief for the millions of unemployed Americans -- and why there will be no relief.

This is also the reason why the Republican quest to cut taxes stems from ignorance and/or corruption. The WSJ already proved that tax cuts do not create jobs because Bush the Younger's job creation rate was the worst since WWII. Tax cuts may indeed motivate corporations to add employees, but only overseas.

Worse yet, American employers are rediscovering their inner Scrooge and refusing to hire anyone who is unemployed. The Huffington Post is only one of many news outlets which reported that Sony Ericsson has placed ads reading "NO UNEMPLOYED CANDIDATES WILL BE CONSIDERED AT ALL." Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good blight!

Freeland commented that Madison Avenue is discovering that the age of the American mass consumer may be drawing to an end. She quoted Robert C. Doll, chief equity strategist at BlackRock, the largest money manager in the world, as having said that "The U.S. stock market and the U.S. economy are increasingly different animals." He said that over the next five years, 70% of the incremental earnings of S&P 500 companies would come from outside the USA.

If Wall Street and American corporations are not going to contribute to this country, then we should tax them as foreign entities.

Freeland noted that there are more than three times as many stories on the subject of deficit reduction as compared to job creation. This is because Republicans have been successful at characterizing the debate as a zero-sum game, i.e. jobs (and healthcare) will only be created on the backs of hard-working Americans, the ones who still believe in the twin myths that tax cuts create jobs and that Republicans have always been concerned with deficits.

The larger issue concerns our country itself: just what kind of country should we be building? Is this to be a country by the people, for the people -- or is it to be a country by the oligarchs, for the oligarchs? Are we going to allow democracy to perish from the face of the American earth?

The Tea Party has proposed that renters be denied the vote. If we take this data point along with the current housing market, where millions of homes are being foreclosed and sold to capitalists with money to pay cash, only one conclusion can be drawn. We are hurtling towards a future where a small minority of elites completely control the destiny of all 300+ million of us, in other words, we are creating a plutocracy. Or to consider it a different way, we are returning to the past when factory owners and other officially recognized important people are allowed many more votes than the man in the street, perhaps thousands more votes. The Supreme Court is in lockstep with this brave new vision given their decision on Citizens United, where corporations were deemed to have the same, if not greater rights, than actual humans.

The Tea Party and most Republicans often claim that they merely want us to follow the Constitution, but they seem to have conveniently forgotten that pesky phrase about all men being created equal. They often decry socialism because the government is allowed to tell people how to live their lives, but it is quite happy with a situation where a small minority of oligarchs is allowed to do the same thing.

* * * * *

The National Post's Conrad Black, in his article Why America is suffering, noted many of the same things as Freeland, yet he also realized that outsourcing is a major part of the problem.

In contrast to the usual diatribe against illegal Mexican workers, Conrad sympathetically noted that illegal immigrants are used to "roll the tennis courts of the Hollywood limousine left (below the minimum wage, of course)." He could have added that many Americans, of all political persuasions, decry the invasion of Mexicans all the while employing them as maids, housekeepers, cooks, landscapers, and roofers, at a substantial discount from what an American or European would charge.

But Black's most potent literary ammunition was on the subject of frittered-away money and opportunities. He noted:

The U.S. economy in 2008 had reached $1-trillion in legal fees, $1-trillion in consulting fees, and over $2-trillion in financial transactional and facilitation fees. The United States, like the West generally, is paying a heavy price for having too many people who don’t actually produce added value. All these activities are effectively taxations on wealth production.

Why doesn't the Tea Party decry this taxation?

The aforementioned $4+ trillion is not being used to build infrastructure or factories. It is being used to line the pockets of parasites. Rounding this amount to an even $4 trillion, we can make ourselves ill by realizing that it is 27% of our entire GDP of $14.66 trillion.

Black wrote about many subjects, including the USA's self-destructive dependence on foreign oil. One thing he did not mention is the motivation for assisting Libya rebels, while not assisting the other members of the Arab Spring. The answer is simple: oil. Libya is the 14th largest oil exporter (ignoring the EU). Iraq is #10 and Iran is #4. Syria at #55, Egypt at #67, and Tunisia at #68, simply do not count.

* * * * *

The solutions will not be easy to implement.

The first part is proportional taxation for corporations. For instance, a company's tax rate should be set depending on the proportion of American citizens it employs on American soil. A company should be free to build all of its factories overseas, but when it considers its actual tax rate, it might be motivated to move those jobs back to the USA. Foreign corporations, or those American ones that act like them, provide no value to the USA and should be taxed as such.

The second part involves the regulation of Wall Street casinos, the business Warren Buffet aptly labeled as financial weapons of mass destruction. The value of the entire OTC derivatives market has hovered around $600 trillion for the past few years. As a comparison, the GDP of the top 20 countries combined (ignoring the EU as an entity) is slightly less than $60 trillion.

All OTC derivatives must be traded via a transparent, public clearing-house; as Gretchen Morgenson reported, Dodd-Frank contains a typical Washington DC loophole, via which the Treasury secretary can exempt foreign-exchange swaps from the regulation. If we do not allow the ordinary Joe to place trillion dollar bets with some shady horse bookie, then private betting parlors for the jet set are equally unacceptable.

And casinos must be separated from commercial banks, i.e. reinstate Glass-Steagall.

The third part is the return to 1980 with respect to Wall Street, when bankers made a good wage but not an obscene one. This must be done with a mix of taxes and regulation, starting with the reduction of the Too Big To Fail banks. Politicians and bankers will decry this move, whining that many banking jobs will simply move overseas, but this is an empty threat.

In the movie Frost/Nixon, the David Frost character said that he longed to eat at a certain restaurant in NYC. If his interview with Nixon was successful, he would be able to eat there anytime he wished; that was his definition of heavenly luxury. The same motivation applies to Wall Street bankers and this is why they will not simply leave New York and move to Shanghai. Bankers love living in one of the top two most luxurious cities in the world for people with money, with London being the other one. It is not a coincidence that both cities are the world hubs of investment activity.

They want their cake and expect us to pay for it, too. Call their bluff.

UPDATE: Intervene a TBTF bank for the best bank holiday

2011-06-10T15:34:00.002-06:00

The mechanism for my proposed intervening of a Too Big To Fail (TBTF) bank just might be the Securities Investor Protection Act (SIPA), with the relevant agency being the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC).

As the U.S. Courts website explains, when a stockbroker falls into a situation requiring liquidation, there are two options: bankruptcy courts and SIPA. SIPA arranges the transfer of the failed brokerage's accounts to a different securities brokerage firm. It is not clear from the online summary, but I would think that a newly created securities brokerage firm, one created expressly for the break-up of a TBTF bank, would work just fine. This new firm would only be a casino, not a commercial bank. The banking assets would be transferred to another newly created firm, a true commercial bank. The new casino would inherit the management dregs of the original TBTF bank.

SIPC's website states: "It is important to understand that SIPC is not the securities world equivalent of FDIC -- the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Congress specifically considered creating a Federal Broker-Dealer Insurance Corporation, but lawmakers wisely concluded that such a designation would be both misleading and out of step in the risk-based investment marketplace that is so different from the world of banking."

Yet Congress in its infinite wisdom allowed these two worlds to merge with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act via the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Now we have firms which are a combination of casino and bank which cannot be intervened by the FDIC, or so Republicans say.

We need to intervene a TBTF bank soon, because the situation of a failing bank with assets as high as 16% of GDP (for Bank of America) might very well cause the world to immediately stop buying American debt and start dumping dollars, causing a cascading series of events leading to our rapid default.

To paraphrase a line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, strange politicians lying in cesspools distributing bailouts is no basis for a system of government.

UPDATE: Intervene a TBTF bank for the best bank holiday

2011-06-09T10:44:00.008-06:00

Kimberly Weisul of BNET reported that, this year, median CEO compensation has risen 35%; average CEO pay rose 18%, revealing the ugly truth that these raises were a common occurrence, not just restricted to a handful of fortunate CEOs.

Yet the stock market has been frozen in the 12,000s for some time. Our economy has tanked. No jobs are being created. It is a rare corporation that makes announcements of any stature regarding important new products. Have we gotten to the point where CEO pay is considered an entitlement by the boys (and some girls) in the boardroom?

We have come a long way since the airing of the classic Smith Barney television ad, as CEOs have completely forgotten that they are supposed to earn it.

* * * * *

CBS News reported on Bank of America, in the sort of incompetence we only see in behemoth banks, tried to foreclose on a couple who paid cash for their house. Clearly this is yet another case of robo-signing, where bungling bank management is adrift in the sea of finance.

Luckily the couple found a devious lawyer who sued, then filed the papers to seize BofA's assets. At the last minute, bank management somehow found a way to cut a check to reimburse the couple for their legal fees.

Clearly we need to break up a TBTF bank to reduce the level of buffoonery in banking; why not start with the biggest one of all?

* * * * *

Citibank confirmed that it has been hacked, exposing thousands of customer names, account numbers, and contact information.

The security breach actually occurred in May, yet Citibank did not deem it important enough to notify its customers until now.

One would think that a leviathan bank like Citibank would be better than average at protecting its customer data. If Citibank were broken down into smaller entities, perhaps it could better protect its data. Size does matter, but sometimes smaller is much better.

* * * * *

Total lending by banks has fallen 9% since 2008 according to the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University.

According to the FDIC, last quarter’s decrease was the fifth largest quarterly decline since it began tracking the numbers 28 years ago.

Home loans are down 13.5% in the past three years, but loans to businesses are much worse, down by 18.5%.

If banks won't loan money, why do we need them at all?

* * * * *

Cate Long, writing for Reuters, astutely noted that we have a twentieth-century infrastructure at the beginning of the twenty-first century. She proposes that we invest in high-speed transit, offshore wind power, solar power arrays, and new energy transmission grids, all very expensive propositions. I wholeheartedly agree.

She did not address the opposition to these projects from Republicans and especially the Tea Party. That's because many of them already have their private jets, personal helicopters, and large, self-sufficient estates. They do not suffer the indignities of traffic grid-lock. And even when energy becomes obscenely expensive, they will have plenty of loot to pay the bills.

She could have mentioned our pathetic education system. The National Post's article, An American perspective: Is education worth the investment?, asked if an expensive education is worth it anymore, given the reality of outsourcing, falling wages, and our general decline. This is a frightening thought, given the fact that countries like South Korea, which lead the world in education for science and math, are per capita so much more successful than the USA.

Does our destiny lie in the Tea Party's wet dream, a return to the 1800s? Are we doomed to eliminate our middle class, shoving them down into the poor class, while the top 1% transforms itself into American oligarchs?

Theodore Roosevelt prophetically declared in 1910: "Americans have fought one war to win their independence and another to preserve the Union. Now they face a new war, between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess."

UPDATE: Trade with China, rare earths, and even rarer intelligence

2011-06-08T09:49:00.000-06:00

BBC News and Reuters reported that China has restructured its rare earth industry in Inner Mongolia. From now on, only one company, Baotou Steel Rare Earth, will handle all mining, processing, and trading of rare earths

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced that 35 existing rare earth producers will be closed.

China currently controls about 97% of global supplies of rare earths, necessary for all high-tech products produced today, whether Internet devices, computers, audio/video equipment, green energy generators, motors, or smart bombs.

The noose is tightening on the neck of the West.

Don't feed the (North Korean) animals

2011-06-04T06:44:00.003-06:00

BBC News' article, North Korea willing on human rights, says US envoy, reminds us just how naive diplomats can be regarding North Korea.

Ambassador Robert King, Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights Issues, visited North Korea to discuss the looming food, or lack thereof, crisis. He said the North Korean official, Kim Kye-gwan, "invited me back to have a discussion on human rights and I look forward to possibly having that opportunity."

Of course: a grifter always invites a mark back to consummate the swindle.

But if King honestly believes that anyone in the North Korean leadership cares about anyone other than the sycophants and toadies who surround Kim Jong-il, and even then only for their immediate usefulness, then King is long past retirement.

BBC News noted that a recent US state department report on North Korea highlighted concerns about the trafficking of girls and women into neighboring China.

Where were these female slaves going? Were they dragooned into being domestic slaves, forced to clean, cook, and serve food for nouveau riche Chinese? Or will they be latter-day comfort women, subjugated into working as prostitutes for Chinese businessmen or Muslims in a far-off land?

As I noted before in my North Korea is China's useful idiot series (read here, here, here, here, here, and here), China is only using North Korea as a buffer zone exactly like the Soviet Union used Eastern Europe as separation between it and the West.

Tens of thousands of tons of food aid went missing the last time the USA gave aid, in 2009. This is because North Korea diverted it to the military and the aforementioned sycophants and toadies; none of it reached orphanages or anyone outside Kim's inner circle in Pyongyang.

If we give food to the North Korean leadership without conditions, none of it will reach the starving, ordinary people. There is no point whatsoever in giving aid that Kim controls.

We must demand that we be allowed to distribute the food directly. The six or so in-country aid organizations must be allowed to monitor all food aid. All of it must be either donated directly to people outside Pyongyang or served in free food kitchens in which the military is explicitly excluded. And in the former case, the local aid organizations must be allowed to travel to people's home to ensure that the food is not confiscated a short time after it is received.

It is time to stop dancing to Kim's tune.

UPDATE: Intervene a TBTF bank for the best bank holiday

2011-06-01T10:20:00.002-06:00

Reuters' article, Analysis: Could a cyber war turn into a real one for the U.S.?, noted that the USA has warned that it might retaliate against a cyber attack with a military response.

Yet our response is not on the same level as our neurotic desire to have the world's best aircraft and carriers. There is no politician standing up and declaring that we should be the world's best nation with respect to software engineering -- as we were for the last half of the 20th Century -- by the end of the decade. Could it be that the military-industrial complex is not interested because it won't make nearly as much money as it would on cost-overrun contracts on bleeding-edge technology weapons?

Another Reuters article, North Korea hacker threat grows as cyber unit grows: defector, described North Korea's approach to hacking. It scours its universities for computer prodigies. The ones with top grades get to live in Pyongyang, as do their parents. The stars are sent for training in other countries. They will live as well as anyone in the country.

One reason we do not have a good cyber defense, and in general why we are racing towards the technological bottom as a country, is that our smartest people are still finding jobs on Wall Street instead of in useful endeavors. This yet another reason why we should intervene a TBTF bank at the earliest opportunity: persuading current college students to choose a career in science or engineering. And when Wall Street is no longer siphoning all investment capital into its casinos, there will be money for productive businesses in new technologies with manufacturing plants in the USA.

Intervene a TBTF bank for the best bank holiday

2011-05-30T08:44:00.014-06:00

Given that pre-divestiture AT&T controlled virtually all local and long distance communications within the USA, it must have been a daunting prospect to consider breaking it up. Where would the line be drawn between local and long distance service?

The courts required AT&T to divest itself of local telephone service, creating seven independent Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) in the bargain. AT&T would retain its manufacturing arm, Western Electric, but customers would contact their local RBOC for local telephone service starting on January 1, 1984.

AT&T had always assumed that it would continue in its role as a monopoly, so it commingled local and long distance telephone equipment. As the end of 1983 approached, a line had to be drawn between each RBOC and AT&T, so a chalk line was literally drawn down the middle of some hallways to indicate the borders. Later, walls were constructed, converting what were formally large AT&T buildings into ones housing both RBOC and AT&T.

And today we have a myriad of choices for telephone service, whether someone prefers cell phones, BlackBerries, or POTS (plain old telephone service, aka landlines).

* * * * *

Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Taft did not allow the members of their own Republican Party to dissuade them from launching tens of anti-trust suits against the monopolies of their day, as well as passing needed laws such as The Meat Inspection Act and The Pure Food and Drug Act.

The platform of the Progressive Party that Roosevelt created contained concepts we take for granted today, including an eight-hour work day, a minimum wage law for women, and workers' compensation.

* * * * *

The FDIC and NCUA are responsible for insuring the deposits of banks and credit unions, respectively, up to a set limit, currently $250,000. These entities were created in the immediate aftermath of the Great Depression to prevent the panic which occurred when banks failed, leaving their depositors high and dry.

When a bank or credit union runs into financial trouble, it is taken over by the appropriate agency -- the term for this is intervening -- over a weekend. The regulatory officials appear at closing time on Friday and inform the bank management that the bank is now closed. The regulators then determine the best course of action, often allowing a stronger bank to absorb the weakened bank. Sometimes the bank is closed if a buyer cannot be found. The FDIC keeps a list of intervened banks going back to October 2000.

* * * * *

Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio calculated that 15 years ago the assets of the top six banks totaled to 17% of GDP. In April 2010 that figure was 63%. Today that figure is 64%.

The figures for assets of the top fifty banks are informative with respect to potential bailouts. Adding up the assets of the top ten yields $11.2 trillion. Compare that to the GDP of the USA: $14.7 trillion; the top ten banks have assets equal to 76% of GDP. The largest, Bank of America, has assets of $2.3 trillion. If any of the top ten were to fail, does anyone seriously believe that the government would hesitate to bail it out?

Government regulations mandate that insurance companies possess sufficient cash to make pay-outs to customers in the worst case scenario. This is necessary in the case of large-scale disasters like tornadoes, as the worst possible time for an insurance company to go bankrupt would be when many customers suffer the same loss.

Credit default swaps (CDUs) are just one of the many arcane derivatives created by Wall Street. Unlike some of its other products, these are somewhat easy to understand. CDUs are nothing more than betting insurance. A casino sells a CDU to a customer so that customer can mitigate its investment risk.

According to the Bank for International Settlements, at the end of 2008 there were around than $42 trillion worth of CDUs floating around. The value of the entire OTC derivatives market, including CDUs and other gambling inventions, has hovered around $600 trillion for the past few years. As a comparison, the GDP of the top 20 countries combined (ignoring the EU as an entity) is slightly less than $60 trillion.

Since CDUs were unregulated, there were no cash reserve requirements. The recent panic was greatly increased when many companies were forced to make good on their CDUs, but since they did not possess sufficient capital to do so, they started selling their other equities at a fire sale price, adding greatly to the panic.

* * * * *

The Glass-Steagall Act prohibited any one company from being any combination of an investment bank, a commercial bank, and an insurance company. Glass-Steagall essentially placed firewalls between these three types of businesses.

The repeal of Glass-Steagall via the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999 allowed the commingling of banking activities with gambling houses, aka investment companies. Gramm-Leach-Bliley lead directly to the failure of AIG. And when the recent panic occurred, the government claimed that it did not have the authority to intervene an entity which is both bank and casino.

We need banks; we do not need casinos. Combining the two gave our corrupt politicians the excuse to claim that they were forced to rescue these firms with bailouts. The politicians created the problem and then "solved" the problem they created by transferring even more money to Wall Street.

The situation becomes even more complicated when one considers that large banks are multinational. The national portion of a bank can be intervened, but what about the international portion? And, of course, the CEOs of the large banks tend to be former government officials or friends of government officials, so they put pressure on regulators to prevent their banks from being intervened even if the bank threatens to take down our economy, as was seen in the recent crash.

Banks are able to borrow money from the Federal Reserve at virtually zero percent. The Huffington Post reported that nine companies -- five of them foreign -- borrowed between $5.2 billion and $6.2 billion in U.S. government securities, paying one-time fees that amounted to a rate of 0.0078%.

The Fed is upfront about this borrowing, stating on the New York Fed's website that foreign firms can accept cash from the discount window. The entire financial world started to change in 1980 with the passage of the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act; before this act, "discount window borrowing generally had been restricted to commercial banks that were members of the Federal Reserve System."

The bailouts never stopped, they just became slightly more obscure.

* * * * *

Two men are walking in the forest one day when a large and hungry bear emerges directly behind them. The first man bends down and starts to re-tie his shoes.

The second man asks, panic-stricken: "What are you doing? Do you think you can out-run a bear?"

The first man replies: "I do not have to out-run the bear. I only have to out-run you."

* * * * *

We need to intervene one of the Too Big To Fail (TBTF) companies, one of the beasts with two heads, banking and investments. Of course we would choose the one in the weakest financial condition, but the legal justification is that these hybrids have taken our economy down once already and we cannot afford a second go at it.

A president with courage and integrity could assemble a team led by the FDIC. This team would first decide which firm to intervene. Then a detailed plan of action would be created, involving secrecy comparable to the successful elimination of Osama bin Laden:

At closing time on an auspicious Friday, the team would enter the firm, announcing that the government was intervening it. Many federal marshals would be present to impress upon management that the businesses were now separate. Local police would be present to remove any persons exhibiting violent tendencies.
A chalk line would be drawn down the hallways to separate the firm into three entities: domestic bank holding company, international holding company, and domestic casino. The casino would be left in the hands of the current management. Control of the domestic bank holding company would be transferred to a specially chosen regent, one who would manage the entity until new management could be selected. Since the USA has no jurisdiction over international entities, all of that would be dumped into one holding company, one which would be initially banned from operating as a bank in the USA until further ground rules could be established. This process might take weeks or even months. The regent would ensure that the domestic banks continued to operate without a hitch.
The casino management would vociferously protest the intervening, claiming that it was un-American. To prevent these pit bosses from filing injunctions, the team, perhaps including the very best legal minds such as Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, would have done its legal homework in advance; anti-trust legislation would be an important part of this. The sight of a former Supreme Court Justice in a hearing to decide whether an injunction should be issued would probably be enough to quash such nonsense.
All bonuses for that year would be eliminated for the domestic bank holding company and casino, with claw-backs possibly needed for ones recently paid.
A logical division of the domestic bank holding company's assets would be devised to bring the fallout of a failure down to an acceptable level, dividing it into entities perhaps no larger than $50 billion each.

The remaining TBTF banks might then be motivated to divest themselves into separate, smaller banks and casinos. But if not, there could always be a second round.

Religious nuts need to be bottled-up, part 7

2011-05-22T06:00:00.006-06:00

It's no secret people with borderline personalities switch between religion, drugs, alcohol, gambling, and other addictions, as they require a crutch on which to lean as they stumble their way through life. And quite a few trollops have decided that their best chance at married, suburban bliss lies in becoming quasi-religious, born-again virgins, i.e. telling their newly arrived, milquetoast suitor that he is to be the first man to be denied the chance to plant his papal staff within hours, if not minutes, of their first meeting.

* * * * *

California-based radio preacher Harold Camping erroneously predicted that the world would end at 6 PM yesterday. Camping predicted that earthquakes would start in New Zealand and work their way through the time zones, following the sun.

Camping said non-believers would suffer through hell on earth until October 21, when God would finally end the misery of the forsaken and put an end to the Earth.

Actually I think we will suffer through hell on earth until November 6, 2012 -- Election Day.

In the Bible there are plenty of examples of so-and-so begat so-and-so and person X knew his wife, but there are no hard dates. To come up with a date of May 21, Camping must have counted generations. But it is a rare family which has generations of equal duration; did Camping's mother live exactly as long as her mother?

Iceland's most active volcano, Grimsvotn, has started erupting. Camping will no doubt grasp at that straw, declaring that the earthquakes are merely late, but if anything, the volcano is declaring its disgust at the way Icelandic bankers and customers in the UK brought the local economy to its knees by emulating the way Wall Street bankers do business.

Many of the signs in the Telegraph UK report included text of "The Bible guarantees it" and "Cry mightily unto God"; the video showed many trucks with billboard sides driving through NYC. All that money wasted on advertising could have gone to helping homeless families, crying or otherwise.

CBS News quoted one of Camping's lemmings, Michael Garcia, as having said: "We know the end will begin in New Zealand and will follow the sun and roll on from there. That's why God raised up all the technology and the satellites so everyone can see it happen at the same time."

Actually it was a good number of aerospace and software engineers who launched those satellites. Does Garcia believe that God reigns over the military-industrial complex? And if so, was President Eisenhower, who famously decried the growing power of the aforementioned complex, the Devil?

In 2009, Camping's grifter church reported in IRS filings that it received $18.3 million in donations, and had assets of more than $104 million, including $34 million in stocks or other publicly traded securities.

There is a long and sordid link between money and hypocritical, self-proclaimed Christians, including George W. Bush, John Edwards, Tom DeLay, and Phil Gramm. These latter-day robber barons consort with the wealthiest members of society, oblivious of the fact that Jesus consorted with the sick, dying, and poor.

Camping is a few years too late. The Rapture started to occur in 2008 with the first of the Wall Street bailouts, when bankers were lifted by God, or the American equivalent, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department, into the capitalist version of Heaven: "Too Big To Fail" status.

UPDATE: Tales from the cryptic export data

2011-05-21T14:11:00.010-06:00

There are many capitalists who manage to say with a straight face that our headlong rush towards becoming largely a service economy is a good thing. This, of course, is a steaming serving of pablum; if the majority of the population earns the low wages generally paid by restaurants and other services, they will not be able to afford a house or even a decent car. This is the typical short-term argument expressed by Libertarians and the Tea Party. Assuming they even understand the situation, which is highly doubtful, their mantra can be expressed as a gold rush of sorts, i.e. they believe they will be the ones to obtain their gold before depression-Katie bars the economic door. An entire nation full of burger flippers and retail workers will not buy sufficient goods to keep our economy roaring. Our game of musical chairs continues to add people, yet the number of chairs continues to diminish.

Continuing my analysis of exporters, I added three columns to my previous spreadsheet: GDP (purchasing power parity), exports / GDP, and distribution of family income (GINI index). Dividing exports by GDP gives a good indication of how much of a country's overall production is occupied by exports. And distribution of family income is the generally accepted indicator for how uneven the wealth of a country is distributed, i.e. the size of the gap between rich and poor.

Ranking the countries by exports/GDP ratios (E/G) gives the following order of the top eleven: Singapore, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Malaysia, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, South Korea, and Canada. The USA, with a E/G ratio of 0.086, only manages to top India.

Many capitalists claim that labor costs are so important that all other factors pale in comparison, i.e. no one can compete with cheap Chinese labor. This argument falls apart after viewing the E/G data. China only manages a 0.153, half that of Canada's 0.305. Switzerland's E/G ratio is 4.65 times that of China. The E/G ratio of Germany, the second largest exporter, is just under three times that of China. Canada, Switzerland, and Germany do not have low labor costs.

Why is it that Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany -- all with worker protections, salary, vacations, and pensions, not to mention the bane of the Tea Party, i.e. socialized healthcare, which most countries can only dream of -- have roaring economies, while the USA, which has given the reins to Wall Street and multinational corporations, has a pathetic economy? Oops, I answered that in the question.

Distribution of family income, aka the GINI index, is inversely proportional to the leveling of national income, i.e. the higher a country's index, the more unequal the wealth distribution. The USA has an index of 45.0, putting it behind paragons of democracy like Iran with an index of 44.5.

Concentrating all of our wealth in the top one percent of our population will result in our being an economic and social cripple.

The raw data for column B, D, and E -- GDP, exports, and imports -- can be found here, here, and here, and the units for all three are billions of dollars. The raw data for column F -- population -- can be found here. The raw data for column G -- area -- can be found here. The raw data for column I -- industrial production -- can be found here. The raw data for column J -- oil production, exports, and imports -- can be found here, here, and here; note that the indices are the rankings in the three CIA World Factbook lists. The raw data for column K -- GINI index -- can be found here.

The data for GDP is largely from 2010. The data for exports and imports is from 2010, except for the EU. The data for population is largely from 2011. The oil data ranges from 2007 to 2010. The GINI data ranges from 1989 to 2010, but the vast majority is from the 2000s; the CIA does not supply a GINI index for Saudi Arabia. The chart remains sorted by exports, column D.

UPDATE: Killer corporations: IG Farben and Apple

2011-05-20T14:55:00.002-06:00

BBC News reported that at least two Foxconn employees have been killed and 16 injured in a plant explosion. The industrial accident occurred on a production line for Apple's iPad 2 in Chengdu, China. The reasons for the explosion are not clear at this time.

Foxconn is Apple's main manufacturing contractor, producing the iPod, iPhone, and the iPad, as well as Amazon's Kindle. At least 13 Foxconn workers killed themselves last year by jumping from the roof of one of Foxconn's building.

Will Steve Jobs immediately fly to Chengdu to investigate the situation first hand? Don't hold your breath.

UPDATE: North Korea is China's useful idiot

2011-05-17T12:15:00.006-06:00

Der Spiegel interviewed Bernd Göken from the German humanitarian group Cap Anamur. The photo at the top of the article speaks volumes. Not one orphan child in the photo looks even remotely happy. It would be difficult to take such a photo of children in the USA, Canada, or Europe, as children there are generally treated with compassion.

"With every visit and every discussion, the enormous scale of the shortages was confirmed. The people are starving. They have nothing left to eat. For the rural population and orphans, the shortage of food will become a real threat during the coming weeks," said Göken.

Göken's main point is that sanctions do not work because the leadership and military are at the very top of the food chain and therefore they never suffer. This is true. The concept of sanctions developed from the lawyers' view that it was illegal and immoral to target the leaders of a country. They would rather see millions of innocent people starve so they can appear as pure as the driven snow.

As I wrote before, the only sanctions should be ones which directly affect the leadership. All shipments of luxury goods should be blocked. All money squirreled away in banks in Switzerland or Luxembourg should be frozen. Kim Jong-il has stolen billions of dollars and deposited it in banks in Luxembourg; denying him his safe haven might actually be fun.

Der Spiegel asked Göken: "Shouldn't North Korea's partner, China, be rushing as the first to provide aid?"

Göken replied: "There are no relief deliveries from Beijing. The Chinese have even refused to sell rice to our organization intended for delivery to North Korea. We have had to purchase it from Thailand."

China's leaders have never cared about its citizens or those of any other country. The communist view is that people are expendable; the human wave attacks in the Korean Conflict and Vietnam War were proof of that. Even the Soviet Union displayed this callous attitude in its human wave attacks, with just one example being Stalingrad, where groups of soldiers would receive only half as many rifles as there were men.

The administration of George W. Bush invaded Iraq because it claimed that Iraq had WMD. Yet 'W' and the boys never considered invading North Korea, even though we know for certain that it has WMDs, and soon it will have missiles capable of reaching North America. This was due to Halliburton and the other cronies of Dick Cheney not being able to make much money in North Korea.

Voice of America reported that North Korea has abducted as many as 180,000 foreigners from 14 different countries since 1950. These poor souls were kidnapped to provide training for North Korea's spies so that they could enter and travel throughout foreign countries without being discovered.

Given the living arrangements of the Kim family (read BBC News article here), it would be quite easy to eliminate the entire Kim family in one attack. Kim Jong-il has built a private Disneyland north of Pyongyang with mansions for all favored family members. We could level all buildings in this complex with cruise missiles at 3 AM. At the same time, we could eliminate North Korea's command and control facilities. This type of decapitation would be effective due to the totalitarian nature of North Korea; all surviving military personnel would not display personal initiative because it has been drummed out of them.

The clock is ticking; are we going to wait until North Korea has missiles that can reach North America or Europe? All of the POWs, not to mention the millions of starving orphans and other North Koreans, await our decision.

Killer corporations: IG Farben and Apple

2011-05-13T13:13:00.005-06:00

Anyone who studies WWII for even a short time wonders how Germany, one of the most cultured countries on the planet, could have sunk to the depths of the Holocaust and the depravity seen on the Eastern front. Germany is the birthplace of Martin Luther, the father of modern Protestantism. Germany is the birthplace of Johann Sebastian Bach, Johannes Brahms, and Ludwig van Beethoven, and Austria, one of Germany's partners in WWII, is the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Sure, there was a considerable influence of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and nihilism, the economic effects of the hyperinflation, and Hitler's strange charisma, but one would never have guessed that such a civilized people could sink so low.

Der Spiegel's article, Nazi Death Marches: Book Details German Citizens' Role in End of War Killings, reviewed the book by Daniel Blatman, The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide. The book detailed a frenzy of killing by police officers, the Volkssturm national militia, Hitler Youth, and even German civilians at the very end of the war.

More than 250,000 concentration camp prisoners died in death marches between January and May 1945, when it was quite obvious that Germany was going to lose the war.

Just as one example in mid-April 1945, in Gardelegen, a town in east-central Germany, US soldiers found hundreds of charred and mangled bodies in a barn, the bodies of prisoners from various camps. Ordinary civilians slaughtered the prisoners, with adolescents boasting: "We're going hunting, to shoot down the zebras."

Blatman, a historian at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, concluded: "The more the war approached its end, and the more obvious the prisoners' presence in the midst of the German population became, the more regularly German civilians participated."

* * * * *

BASF is not a household name anymore, but it used to be a major player in consumer goods. BASF reel-to-reel, cassette, and video tapes were a common brand of tapes available in the days before CDs and DVDs.

Bayer is another large German corporation. One of the results of WWI is that the USA confiscated its assets and trademarks in the USA, a reverse bailout, if you will; aspirin is a generic name in the USA, but in many other countries that name is still owned by Bayer of Germany. The company that manufactures Bayer aspirin in the USA today has no relationship to the German Bayer corporation.

BASF and Bayer, along with a few other German corporations, formed IG Farben in 1925. For a time, it was the fourth largest corporation in the world, after General Motors, U.S. Steel and Standard Oil. IG Farben held the patent for the cyanide-based pesticide Zyklon B -- the poison used in Holocaust gas chambers -- and owned over 40% of the factories which manufactured it, not to mention working closely with Nazi authorities throughout their reign of terror. If you have ever sprayed a bug with Raid bug killer and watched how the bug writhes in extreme agony before it finally dies, you have a reasonable idea of what people in the death camp showers experienced.

In the aftermath of WWII, IG Farben was dissolved with the assets split between the Soviet Union and new German corporations. The same people who were in charge of the corporations during the war were mostly the same people reinstalled in their jobs after the war by the Allies. This is not that different from the situation in the recent panic here, where the same people who caused the panic were allowed to remain in their jobs with a bonus.

According to Wikipedia, a 1941 investigation exposed a "marriage" cartel between John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company and IG Farben and brought new evidence concerning complex price and marketing agreements between IG Farben and DuPont.

* * * * *

Many Americans believe that the Holocaust was the only mass killing in WWII, possibly because of the many Holocaust movies like Schindler's List. In truth, the Nazis used 12 million slave laborers during the war in factories operated by German corporations like Thyssen, Krupp, IG Farben, and Fordwerke -- a subsidiary of the Ford Motor Company. These slave laborers were composed of Soviet POWs, Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, and many other groups, including Polish children. Millions of people died under the twisted philosophy of Arbeit Macht Frei (work makes one free).

* * * * *

As I wrote in my Multinational corporations are troubling series (read here and here), Foxconn, a manufacturing partner of Apple, was caught by the world's media employing slave labor tactics in China. Many media sources, including Der Spiegel, reported that 13 Foxconn workers jumped to their deaths from the roof of a Foxconn facility in Shenzhen.

However, at least one of the deaths, of Ma Xiangqian, is not clear-cut. His sister last saw him six days before he died. "He was upbeat because he had just resigned," she said.

Now why would someone who would soon leave his employer kill himself? He might drink too much in celebration, but he would be jubilant, not depressed. And markings on his corpse do not correspond to a death from a fall, rather they correspond to being tortured in a drill press. And, of course, it is merely a coincidence that Foxconn's surveillance video is missing from the time of the death.

One of Foxconn's solutions to the problem was to install anti-suicide nets on their buildings, something that Americans have never seen on any building in the USA because people have not jumped from buildings due to their job since the Great Depression.

Der Spiegel reported on the current situation at Foxconn in An Inside Look at Apple Supplier Foxconn: 'We Were Not a Very Open Company Before'. Der Spiegel noted that Chinese labor law only allows for 36 hours of overtime per month. However, Foxconn manager Louis Woo admitted that that due to "a lack of infrastructure," the rule is often broken.

The typical work week for Foxconn employees is a 12-hour day, seven days a week, adding up to 84 hours each week.

The Apple Supplier Code of Conduct clearly states:

Apple is committed to ensuring that working conditions in Apple's supply chain are safe, that workers are treated with respect and dignity . . . Apple requires that Suppliers implement this Code . . . Violations of this Code may result in immediate termination as an Apple Supplier and in legal action. . . . Suppliers must uphold the human rights of workers, and treat them with dignity and respect as understood by the international community. . . . Suppliers shall not use any form of forced, bonded, or indentured, or prison labor. All work must be voluntary . . . Except in emergency or unusual situations, a workweek shall be restricted to 60 hours, including overtime, and workers shall take at least one day off every seven-days. All overtime shall be voluntary.

Why does Apple have such a code if it has no intentions of enforcing it?

Der Spiegel contacted Apple spokesman Alan Hely who, like any typical politician, side-stepped the issue of overtime. Instead, he merely pointed out the improvements Foxconn has undertaken since 2010.

Americans like to think they are exporting democracy, but in this case, they are exporting manslaughter, if not murder. Globalization claims yet another grim prize.

Send Steve Jobs, his toadies and fawning groupies, and other corporate slavers straight to Hell!

Religious nuts need to be bottled-up, part 6

2011-05-11T13:42:00.003-06:00

It was only a short time ago that typing "islam is" into Google returned absolutely nothing, while typing "christianity is" or for that matter any other religion returned all sorts of nasty, yet expected, responses. Google was being politically correct in its censorship, probably because Muslims tend to become violent when anyone criticizes Islam.

Google's home-page animation of today celebrating International Women's Day continued in its head-in-the-sand tradition. It starts with a depiction of a woman dressed in a hijab, then morphs into four other women performing dance moves, something women in hijabs, niqabs, or burqas never do. The only other interpretation is that the woman in a hijab somehow loses her sack and frees herself, something not generally allowed by Muslim men. Women in hijabs, niqabs, or burqas follow the Roach Motel philosophy of free will: you can check in, but you cannot check out.

* * * * *

Der Spiegel reported on Germany's problems with Islamists in German Jihad: Homegrown Terror Takes on New Dimensions.

Each month at least five Islamist volunteers leave Germany to travel to one of the camps which offer advanced training in jihad, explosives, and killing of innocent people.

If five people leave Germany -- tiny Germany -- for jihad training every month, how many people leave the rest of the Western world to join them?

Der Spiegel noted that "like the 9/11 attackers, the overwhelming majority of militant jihadists in Germany have attended training camps run by al-Qaida or affiliated groups. . . . Never before have as many volunteers from Germany attended terrorist training camps as in the last two years."

"In the last few years, the threat level in Germany from al-Qaida has actually increased," said German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich, a member of the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU).

Rami Makanesi, one of the German jihadists, was arrested in Pakistan while wearing a burqa as a disguise; he was trying to travel back to Germany and raise money for al-Qaida. He is now being held at Weiterstadt Prison in western Germany, awaiting trial.

This is a good reason to ban burqas and niqabs in the civilized world, as male Islamists think nothing of using them to disguise themselves and hide from authorities.

"German law means nothing to us," Makanesi boasted. His statement could be extended to all Western laws.

Authorities suspect that al-Qaida is deliberately recruiting Islamist volunteers from Germany and then sending them back to their countries of origin to commit attacks. Makanesi declared that "that we were being used to test how far they could go in Europe."

* * * * *

In 1985, the Schengen Treaty was created to allow passport-free travel between European countries, now including 25 nations. The original intent was to allow tourists, business people, and ordinary, law-abiding Europeans to travel much more freely. The old border crossing stations were shuttered, with most people hailing the treaty as a great improvement in European daily life.

However, North Africans looking for a better place to live than their native hellhole constantly tried to cross the Mediterranean Sea in unsafe boats, often landing in Italy or Malta. And Muslims from Turkey, North Africa, and other countries wishing to leave their often totalitarian governments traveled to Europe and tried to install Islam in their new home, especially in the UK.

Some countries are starting to wake-up to the threat of unfettered immigration and Islam. Denmark has now reimposed border checks at crossings to Sweden and Germany, as well as at harbors and airports. Denmark's move is justified given that Malmö, a Swedish city just across the Oresund Bridge from Copenhagen, is rapidly becoming a Muslim enclave. Denmark is also justifiably worried about the large rise in crime due to Russian criminals traveling from Eastern Europe; Norway and other Nordic countries are affected by this.

The first inkling that Europe was reawakening was when France closed its border with Italy because it was allowing massive numbers of North Africans to enter Italy and then travel on to other European countries. Tunisians especially wanted to travel to France, given the large number of them already living there.

Schengen Treaty rules allow border controls to be re-introduced only when there is a "grave threat to the public order or internal security" of an EU state.

Uncontrolled immigration of Islamists, the threat of shariah law, beheadings, and suicide bombings certainly fall into that category.

Chrystia Freeland and the Chinese Tea Party

2011-05-08T06:28:00.002-06:00

Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty reported that Armenian Prime Minister Tigran Sarkisian said that expanding the country's fledgling middle class is a necessity for democratizing the country. He said the government should fight against "oligopolies" controlling big chunks of the Armenian economy.

"It is not possible to form a civil society without the middle class. . . . the poor and the rich do not need institutions that would protect their property as much as the middle class does. The middle class thus becomes a reliable backbone of civil society," he added.

The USA, on the other hand, is trying its level best to drastically reduce the size of the middle class via a transfer of wealth from it to the top 1%. Only a fool or a dedicated capitalist could fail to see that this will decrease democracy.

Chrystia Freeland, the Global Editor-at-Large of Reuters news, given her Ukrainian-Canadian heritage, her background in Russia vis-à-vis the oligarchs, and her book Sale of the Century which described the actions of the initial oligarchs, should understand better than most what happens when a small number of capitalists are allowed to steal a large percentage of a country's assets as we saw with TARP and the many bailouts.

Last week she wrote a blog post titled The U.S. capitalist love affair with Communist China. She wrote "The bigger surprise is the huge affection U.S. capitalists have for Communist China."

Why is this so surprising? China's government is definitely communist in the best Mao tradition, but their form of capitalism is no different than what was seen in the USA and the UK in the 1800s. Workers are mere resources to be used-up and discarded, not all that different from the days of serfs and lords. What true-believing capitalist wouldn't drool at the prospect of reducing his labor costs to almost nothing?

Freeland also wrote: "We used to think that capitalism and democracy went together."

Only since WWI and especially since WWII. That sort of thinking started with Teddy Roosevelt, but at least he was intelligent enough to realize the limits of capitalism, hence his fight against monopolies. He broke-up Standard Oil and J.P. Morgan's Northern Securities Company because they posed a clear and present danger to the USA. The last major corporation to be broken-up was AT&T in 1984 -- bringing us cell phones, Blackberries, and other telecommunications toys -- and that will be the last one we will ever see due to the Tea Party's pressure to return to the 1800s.

Freeland also wrote that the "embrace of Chinese Communism shouldn’t be entirely surprising [because the] best business people are pragmatists."

Sure, as long as pragmatism is defined as keeping all of the benefits to yourself and to your friends.

Today many Americans are simply deluded and ignorant of history. The capitalist Religious Right claim they love Jesus, even though he quite clearly stated that "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." Allegedly Christian Republicans and Tea Party members declare that God has given his stamp of approval to capitalism and giddily exclaim that "God helps those who help themselves," even though the actual author of that statement was Ben Franklin in his Poor Richard's Almanac.

If one wants to discover the present state of workers' rights and food safety in China -- and what the Tea Party has planned for the USA -- read "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair. Or simply read the Wikipedia webpage on George Pullman, a late 1800s oligarch who forced workers to live in a company town, but when business turned slow, reduced wages but kept rents and company prices the same, squeezing workers. Pullman was buried in a lead-lined coffin under tons of concrete because he feared, probably rightfully so, that workers would dig up his grave and desecrate his corpse.

Chinese leaders must be familiar with oligarchs like Pullman because of their behavior toward ordinary people. Radio Free Asia reported that the Chinese government refuses to acknowledge that shoddy construction was a major factor in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake when at least 5,300 school children died. Even worse, the government is using hired thugs to squelch any dissent on the part of the parents of the dead children.

A bereaved parent from Dujiangyan said government-hired thugs had visited his tea-shop twice in the last two weeks. "I was injured. My arm still hurts. They got criminal gangs to come. On the first day there were three of them, and the second time there were four. They have sought out the landlord to try to get him to withdraw the lease on the shop," he said.

Radio Free Asia also reported on the state of clean water in China, or the lack thereof. A recent official report declared that around 90% of the water table under China's major cities is polluted to some extent, with residents of the worst-affected areas forced to buy drinking water.

"China's aquifers are over-exploited and seriously polluted. Around 54% of the water table in flat regions of China does not meet standards for drinking water," the report said. 64% of underground drinking water reserves in 118 major Chinese cities is "seriously polluted."

Jiangsu-based environmentalist Wu Lihong, who served a three-year jail term for reporting on pollution levels in central China's Taihu lake, blamed official corruption. He said that enterprises routinely bribe local officials in order to cut corners in pollution management.

No wonder Western capitalists are such advocates of Chinese-style capitalism; not only can they safely ignore government regulations, they can even throw people who complain into prison!

Contrary to the unadulterated nonsense that Libertarians and the Tea Party espouse, people rarely do the right thing; they do what is best for them in the best selfish Ayn Rand tradition. Screwing your workers reduces your costs and that is why it always occurs in the absence of government regulations. Is it survival of the fittest or of the richest and/or best connected?

Globalized capitalists are the ugly witch waiting for the American version of Hansel and Gretel to open the door.

Paul Ryan's tax cut express

2011-05-05T15:55:00.006-06:00

Congressman Paul Ryan's budget plan to reduce the deficit via voodoo, i.e. reducing the top tax rate from 35% to 25%, is the second act of the Church of Latter-Day Republicans' dance, with the first act starting in 2000 with George W. Bush's drastic reduction of taxes, leading to the worst job creation rate on record.

The Pew Charitable Trust's report, The Great Debt Shift: Drivers of Federal Debt Since 2001, graphically depicts the reasons for our skyrocketing debt. The above chart is taken from page four of the report (page two has a simplified version of the chart). Medicare Part D is only responsible for a sliver of our ballooning debt. Bush's tax cuts and two unfunded wars -- all continued by Obama -- as well as TARP, are responsible for the lion's share of the debt increase.

As the report concludes, "new legislation enacted since January 2001 has been responsible for two-thirds of the debt growth." Yet Ryan and other Republicans continue to beat the drum for tax cuts. We should remember the old joke about the definition of insanity being defined as doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.

Tales from the cryptic export data

2011-05-04T16:11:00.009-06:00

Comparing the economic data for the world's largest exporters illuminates some interesting facts. Most Americans are aware that Saudi Arabia is the world's largest exporter of oil, but they are probably blissfully ignorant of Russia. In 2009 Russia was the world's largest exporter of natural gas, the second largest exporter of oil, and the third largest exporter of steel and primary aluminum.

The above chart is sorted in order of largest exporters, with the European Union placed first, even though many of the countries represented in the list are members of the EU. All of the data is from the CIA World Factbook, except for "Industrial Production" which is derived from Census Bureau data; note that many countries are not represented in "Industrial Production" due to the online data being incomplete.

Column F is simply exports divided by imports. If the number is greater than one, a country exports more than it imports. Countries with E/I ratios significantly less than one are creating trade deficits, notably the USA, the UK, and India. The USA and the UK are moving their assets into investments only found on Wall Street and in the City of London, leaving no capital to create factories, with the resultant rapid outflow of jobs to countries which still invest in factories. India remains essentially a poor country, so even though it exports many products, it still requires a high degree of imports. Saudi Arabia has the highest E/I ratio, but that is due to their world class oil exports. Russia would have a much higher E/I ratio if it did not retain much of its oil production: it produces over 10 million barrels per day, yet it exports only half of it, as compared to Saudi Arabia which produces a little under 10 million barrels per day, yet exports almost 90% of it.

A comment often heard when comparing exporting countries is that the USA manufactures a great deal, but much of it remains in the country to be consumed by Americans. This is true, yet misleading. Germany's auto industry also sells many autos and trucks locally, yet Germany is the #2 world exporter. And given its relatively small size -- China, the top exporter, is 24 times as large -- Germany's manufacturing efficiency is amazing. And the "Industrial Production" column -- which includes all manufacturing, both domestic and exported -- shows that the USA is not remotely near the top of the overall manufacturing rankings.

Comparing the USA and the EU truly is a tale of two countries. The EU has around 180 million more residents, yet it imports only 3/4 as much oil. And the EU's E/I ratio is almost double that of the USA. And the popular American opinion that the USA has the only good healthcare system in the world is simply not true, as Germany, Finland, and many other EU countries, not to mention Switzerland, are comparable. Clearly there is a huge price to pay for transferring most of our wealth to Wall Street.

The raw data for column B -- exports -- can be found here and the units are billions of dollars. The raw data for column C -- imports -- can be found here and the units are billions of dollars. The raw data for column D -- population -- can be found here. The raw data for column E -- area -- can be found here. The raw data for column G -- industrial production -- can be found here. The raw data for column H -- oil production, exports, and imports -- can be found here, here, and here; note that the indices are the rankings in the three CIA World Factbook lists.

The data for exports and imports is from 2010, except for the EU. The data for population is largely from 2011. The oil data ranges from 2007-2010.

The Tea Party uses imported China

2011-04-29T09:07:00.004-06:00

Melamine is an industrial plastic commonly used in Chinese products, i.e. just about everything sold at Walmart. Chinese businessmen often add it to food products, e.g. milk, rice, wheat flour, dog food, and cat food, because it creates a higher reading on protein tests.

Starting in 2008, Chinese businessmen added melamine to baby formula, resulting in at least six deaths and well over 300,000 sickened infants, with 158 who have acute kidney failure. Two of the businessmen were executed for their part in the crime and the head of the Sanlu dairy at the center of the scandal was given a life sentence. At least 22 Chinese companies were involved in the scandal, proving that the tainting of food with industrial chemicals is a common practice.

The Telegraph UK reported that a massive stockpile of melamine-tainted milk powder has been seized by Chinese authorities. The raids were conducted on warehouses in Chongqing, China’s largest city. The powder was destined to be turned into pastry and ice-cream.

The Telegraph noted that 917 cases of illegal or fake food and pharmaceuticals were already under investigation, including the use of the textile dye Rhodamine B in broad bean paste; the discovery of formalin, an industrial preserving and clotting agent in the city’s famed hotpot restaurants; and noodle makers being shut down after they were discovered using ink, industrial dye, and paraffin wax in their products.

The Telegraph also reported on the Top-10 Chinese Food Scandals, including toxic bean-sprouts, pesticide-drenched beans, milk laced with leather-hydrolyzed protein, food contaminated with aluminum, pork contaminated with the steroid clenbuterol, and rice contaminated with cadmium, a toxic substance often found in jewelry sold at Walmart. The top-10 also included the practice of using used cooking oil dredged from sewers, with one in ten of Chinese meals being cooked in this way (read here and here).

The tainting of food has been going on for years in China and is managed from the very top. The former head of China's State Food and Drug Administration, Zheng Xiaoyu, was executed for corruption in 2007. His office is the equivalent of the USA's FDA. He was convicted of accepting bribes linked to sub-standard medicines, with these medicines leading to several deaths.

The USA is approaching the corruption of China, but since we use different terminology, we do not realize it. Campaign contributions are nothing more than bribes for politicians. Virtually every bill passed by Congress includes special favors, often customized tax breaks, for corporations which have paid for politicians' favors. Wall Street, the darling of Republicans and many Democrats, runs a casino system much larger than Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and all Native American reservations combined. This casino system consists largely of derivatives, a obscure name for betting on future outcomes of any conceivable economic event.

Walmart is responsible for over 10% of Chinese imports, not to mention the many small businesses which have gone bust trying to compete with the Walton family's brutal capitalist practices. One of the three Tea Party queens, Christine O'Donnell, waxed poetic on the subject of Walmart during her 2010 campaign. O'Donnell and others often claim that Walmart is responsible for an improved economy.

Professor David Merriman, who led a University of Illinois team studying the economic impact of Chicago's first Walmart store, saw no evidence of an increase in sales in the vicinity, based on tax revenues in the store's postal code area. On the contrary, of all the existing businesses within four square miles of the store, a quarter closed within two years of Walmart's opening day.

In other words, small businesses and the employees working for them were replaced by minimum-wage Walmart jobs with no benefits, forcing many Walmart employees to seek public assistance. These are the jobs that the Tea Party proudly claims to want to create.

"Adding Walmart is not an effective strategy to increase employment or economic development," concluded Merriman, and cited other national studies with similar results.

Reuters' article, Special report: Does corporate America kowtow to China?, is surprisingly balanced and complete. It includes stories that, so far only Der Spiegel and a handful of other sources have reported, the arm-twisting and outright theft by China of technology companies like Kawasaki and Siemens, which gave their trade secrets to China in the hope that they would receive ongoing contracts. But China only gave them the minimum required sales and then started selling their own versions of the products, ones which incorporated all of the stolen technology.

Reuters also noted that some 40% of American factories with more than 250 employees closed down from 2001 to 2010. It is no coincidence that China joined the WTO in 2001, allowing it to bypass pesky tariffs and other barriers to their low-quality, low-price products.

Reuters mentioned several companies which still manufacture goods in the USA: Wigwam (socks), M&B Hangers (clothes hangers), and Vulcan Threaded Products (steel bars and rods). These companies have two things in common. First, they are willing to settle for a reasonable payback on their investment, unlike the typical corporate parasite who demands exorbitant returns only China and India can supply so he can become an oligarch. And second, they actually care about retaining jobs in the USA because they care about Americans.

Salman Rushdie, who knows a thing or two about repression given the death sentence given to him by Muslims for writing unkind things regarding Islam, declared that China has become "the world's biggest threat to freedom of speech." In his Telegraph UK column, he noted how the writer Liao Yiwu was asked to sign a document pledging not to publish any more of his "illegal" works outside China. This sounds rather reminiscent of Muslims demanding that everyone on the world refrain from saying or writing anything that, in the opinion of Muslims, denigrates any portion of Islam.

China, incensed that anyone dares to criticize its policies, declared that Rushdie's column is "a blatant interference in China's judicial independence and violates the country's judicial sovereignty. This cannot and should not be accepted by any sovereign country. . . . China is a country under the rule of law. The basic rights and freedoms of Chinese citizens, including freedom of expression, are protected by the law."

As long as Chinese citizens only use that freedom of expression to enslave their fellow citizens via sweatshops, that is.

Fox News reporters often preface the word "China" with "communist" when they ask questions of politicians. In reality, China is currently the world's best example of a pure capitalist country, where anything goes as long as you do not criticize the government, similar to the Fox News crowd's insistence that people not criticize the Bush administration in its run-up to the Iraq War. Anything can be manufactured and sold, regardless of the consequences on human life.

This is the future the Tea Party has in store for us, with their constant attack against government regulation. Our FDA currently protects us against businessmen like those in China who think nothing of killing children for profit. The Tea Party wants to eliminate the FDA and other government agencies which protect the public, allowing the enaction of the Tea Party's stated agenda of returning the USA to the 1800s, when businessmen were free to sell snake oil and every other imaginable product, dangerous or otherwise.

UPDATE: We're #2, or 3, or ...‏

2011-04-21T10:38:00.002-06:00

BBC News' article, What if the Soviet Union had beaten the US to the Moon?, reported on a story that the Tea Party has conveniently forgotten, if its members ever knew it in the first place.

The launch of Sputnik in 1957 by the Soviets was the same sort of thrown-down gauntlet as we see today from the Chinese, Indians, and other competitors. Americans realized that their country had fallen technologically behind the Soviet Union.

As BBC News noted, the response of President Dwight Eisenhower -- the last Republican president to run a budget surplus -- "was to increase the budget for education to raise the academic standard in universities across America." We graduated large quantities of engineers and scientists and beat the Soviets to the moon, along with creating countless other technological innovations.

Compare that to the policies of the pathologically-selfish Tea Party where a majority believes that cuts in education are the proper course of action. This is consistent with the Libertarian view that the USA should be a land of 1% oligarchs and 99% serfs, as serfs do not require an education. Actually a proper education -- as compared to the current Jerry Springer education -- might give the serfs ideas.

Joseph Stiglitz's Vanity Fair article, Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%, noted that 1% of the people take nearly 25% of the nation’s income. 25 years ago, the corresponding figures were 12% and 33%. The incomes of the top 1% rose 18% over the past decade, while the income of the middle class fell. This is to be expected because this is a zero sum game.

Republican Congressman Paul Ryan's budget purports to reduce the deficit. He must think we are all autistic because he proposed to reduce the top tax rates from 35% to 25%, resulting in a $4 trillion additional deficit due to lost tax revenues. He pushed the tired old scheme that tax cuts create jobs -- trickle-down economics -- even though the Wall Street Journal announced back in 2009 that Bush the Younger's tax cuts resulted in the worst job creation record since records were first kept (read here and here).

Before outsourcing, tax cuts might have lead to the creation of jobs in the USA. But now, tax cuts only lead to the creation of jobs in China, India, and other foreign countries.

Reuters blogger James Saft's article, S&P U.S. warning -- late and welcome, is the best analysis of Standard & Poor’s wake-up call. S&P called attention to the lack of a credible plan to reduce the national debt and said there is a one-in-three chance they will downgrade the USA from its AAA-rating over the next two years. When -- and not if -- the USA loses its AAA-rating, the world will be thrown into instability like it hasn't seen since the end of WWII. The world will need to invest in yuans and euros, but China wishes to continue its status as a trade parasite and the European Union has many economic issues, so those currencies will remain problematic for the foreseeable future.

Another Reuters blogger, James Pethokoukis, wrote that our debt is actually worse than that of Spain, the country many fear may be next on the bailout list. Of course, Spain cannot simply print more euros like Ben Bernanke prints dollars.

Reuters, in another article, noted that "of the four AAA-rated countries that S&P has placed on negative outlook between 1989 and this March, three were downgraded within 15 months on average." S&P analysts admitted that poisonous politics in Washington were the final straw. Don't touch that dial.

Republicans often moan over the deficit, yet they still find time to propose tax cuts solely to help their wealthy friends on Wall Street and in the military-industrial complex. Democrats also claim to take the deficit seriously, yet they only ever seem to worry about their special interests du jour, e.g. Muslims, gays/lesbians, and illegal immigrants. Both parties cater to multinational corporations and anyone else, including foreign governments, who makes large campaign contributions. Neither party is concerned about the middle class, a group whose members will soon be as scarce as new Western Electric telephones.