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David Yearsley: Art Set in Concrete

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Speech Therapy: Pretty Words in Cairo Hide Brutal Realities of Power | Chris Floyd Online - Empire Burlesque - High Crimes and Low Comedy in the American Imperium

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CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

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- The Oligarchs' Escape Plan
- the miscreants as if to reaffirm that except for them America remains unspotted and innocent. There is barely a mention of the corrupt practices and conventions inherent in contemporary finance capitalism.
  
  Rod Blagojevich, governor of Illinois and
- 60 more annotations...
- - The Ending of America's Financial-Military Empire
  - America’s 20th century economic success was based on two things. Free trade was not one of them. America’s economic success was based on protectionism, which was ensured by the union victory in the Civil War, and on British indebtedness, which destroyed the British pound as world reserve currency. Following World War II, the US dollar took the role as reserve currency, a privilege that allows the US to pay its international bills in its own currency.
  - history’s largest private financial fraud. Ex-chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market and one of its major players, for decades Madoff lubricated his venture by making strategic political contributions and mixed business with philanthropy, in t
  - Mr. Obama’s “recovery” plan, based on infrastructure spending, will make real estate fortunes for well-situated properties along the new public transport routes, but there is no sign of cities levying a windfall property tax to save their finances. Their mayors would rather keep the cities broke than to tax real estate and finance. The aim is to re-inflate property markets to enable owners to pay the banks, not to help the public sector break even. So state and local pension plans will remain underfunded while more corporate pension plans go broke.
  - he economies of the rest of the world had been destroyed by war or were stifled by socialism [in terms of the priorities of the capitalist growth model. Editors.]
  - The “open economy” strategy that was launched in the 1960s only bore serious fruit a quarter-century later, when multinational growth industries such as tech and pharmaceuticals saw Ireland as a useful offshore haven, with low taxes, state grants, low rates of unionisation and a reasonably well educated, English-speaking workforce. Often companies cooked the international books to locate their profits here.
  - The resulting debt deflation threatens to keep the economy in depression until a radical shift in policy occurs – a shift to save the “real” economy, not just the financial sector and the wealthiest 10 per cent of American families
  - The first economic act of the “free market” Reagan administration in 1981 was to put quotas on the import of Japanese cars in order to protect Detroit and the United Auto Workers.
  - fter all, they have been placed in their positions precisely because they
  - that debt leveraging is a form of economic overhead, not real “wealth creation.” But their tunnel vision is what makes them “reliable” to Wall Street, which doesn’t like surprises.
  - do not understand
  - Fortunately, the U.S.’s adversaries at the time, the Soviet Union and China, had unworkable economic systems that posed no threat to America’s diminishing economic prowess
  - The tactic has been to sell a currency short, that is, to promise to deliver a few hundred million (or nowadays a few billion dollars) of it to a buyer (usually the central bank) near the current price, and then drive down the exchange rate by selling.
  - Suddenly, American and other first world corporations discovered that a massive supply of foreign labor was available at practically free wages
  - The wealthiest 1 per cent of the population has raised its share of the returns to wealth – dividends, interest, rent and capital gains – from 37 per cent of the total ten years ago to 57 per cent five years ago, and an estimated 70 per cent today.
  - Free market economists” covered up the damage done to the US economy by preaching a New Economy based on services and innovation. But it wasn’t long before corporations discovered that the high speed Internet let them offshore a wide range of professional service jobs. In America, the hardest hit have been software engineers and information technology (IT) workers.
  - driving Russia, China and their neighbors to find a common ground when it comes to finding an alternative to the dollar and hence to the US ability to run balance-of-payments deficits ad infinitum
  - The loss of tax base has threatened the municipal bonds of cities and states and reduced the wealth of individuals who purchased the bonds. The lost jobs with good pay resulted in the expansion of consumer debt in order to maintain consumption. As the offshored goods and services are brought back to America to sell, the US trade deficit has exploded to unimaginable heights, calling into question the US dollar as reserve currency and America’s ability to finance its trade deficit.
  - What this means in plain English is: We have reached our limit in subsidizing the United States’ military encirclement of Eurasia while also allowing the US to appropriate our exports, companies, stocks and real estate in exchange for paper money of questionable worth
  - Education was the answer to all challenges. This appeased the academics, and they produced no studies that would contradict the propaganda and, thus, curtail the flow of federal government and corporate grants.
  - The “free market” economists, who provided the propaganda and disinformation to hide the act of destroying the US economy, were well paid.
  - either to recycle these dollars back to the United States by purchasing US Treasury bills, or to let the “free market” force up their currency relative to the dollar – thereby pricing their exports out of world markets and hence creating domestic unemployment and business insolvency.
  - Mortgages, which were once held in the portfolios of the issuer, were securitized. Individual mortgage debts were combined into a “security.” The next step was to strip out the interest payments to the mortgages and sell them as derivatives, thus creating a third debt instrument based on the original mortgages.
  - The government will swap “cash for trash,” printing new Treasury bonds (interest to be paid by “the taxpayer) in exchange for the $500,000 mortgage that is going bad, heading toward only a $250,000 market price.
  - When foreign military spending forced the US balance of payments into deficit and drove the United States off gold in 1971, central banks were left without the traditional asset used to settle payments imbalances
  - alternative was to invest their subsequent inflows of US dollars in US Treasury bonds, as if these still were “as good as gold.
  - It will be financed with private funds – in fact, with the funds now being given to re-capitalize America’s banks (headed by the Wall St. banks that have done so poorly). Banks will use the money they receive from the Treasury for selling their junk mortgages at par – along with other bailout funding – to buy shares in a new $5 trillion institution.
  - These loans have financed most of the US Government’s domestic budget deficits for over three decades now!
  - half of US Government discretionary spending is for military operations
  - international financial system is organized in a way that finances the Pentagonand also US buyouts of foreign assets expected to yield much more than the Treasury bonds that foreign central banks hold.
  - intend to trade in their own currencies so as to get the benefit of mutual credit that the United States until now has monopolized for itself
  - But they will have to make a concession. That’s where the new public/private partnership makes its killing.
  - need to recover the money that’s been lost. So when the time comes for you to sell, or to renegotiate your mortgage, our Savior Bank will receive the capital gain up to the original amount written off
  - The U.S. economy can create dollars freely, now that they no longer are convertible into gold or even into purchases of U.S. companies, inasmuch as America remains the world’s most protected economy. It alone is permitted to protect its agriculture by import quotas, having “grandfathered” these into world trade rules half a century ago. Congress refuses to let “sovereign wealth” funds invest in important U.S. sectors.
  - If the property sells for $500,000, the bank will get $250,000. And if it sells for more, thanks to some new clone of Alan Greenspan acting as bubblemeister, the capital gain will be split in some way. If the split is 50/50, then if the home sells for $600,000, the owner at that time will split the $100,000 further capital gain with the Savior Bank. The Savior Bank will thus make much more through its share of capital gains than it extracts in interest!
  - So we are confronted with the fact that the U.S. Treasury prefers foreign central banks to keep on funding its domestic budget deficit, which means financing the cost of America’s war in the Near East and encirclement of foreign countries with rings of military bases.
  - The more “capital outflows” U.S. investors spend to buy up foreign economies –the most profitable sectors, where the new U.S. owners can extract the highest monopoly rents – the more funds end up in foreign central banks to support America’s global military build-up.
  - As matters stand now, they see the United States as a lawless nation, financially as well as militarily. How else to characterize a nation that proclaims a set of laws for others – on war, debt repayment and treatment of prisoners – but flouts them itself?
  - U.S. interest-rate and tax reductions in the face of exploding trade and budget deficits are seen as the height of hypocrisy in view of the austerity programs that Washington forces on other countries via the IMF and other Washington vehicles
  - The question is how nations can act as real nations, in their own interest rather than being roped into serving whatever the American government decides is in America’s interest.
  - The United States tells debtor economies to sell off their public utilities and natural resources, raise their interest rates and increase taxes while gutting their social safety nets to squeeze out money to pay creditors.
  - Any country trying to do what the United States has done for the past 150 years is accused of being “socialist” – and this from the most anti-socialist economy in the world, except when it calls bailouts for its banks “socialism for the rich,” a.k.a. financial oligarchy. This rhetorical inflation almost leaves no alternative but outright nationalization of credit as a basic public utility.
  - Foreigners are invited to emulate the Japanese purchase of white elephant trophies such as Rockefeller Center, on which investors quickly lost a billion dollars and ended up walking away
  - . The neoliberal failure to distinguish between productive and merely extractive or speculative forms of gain seeking has created a travesty of the kind of wealth creation that Adam Smith described in The Wealth of Nations
  - An alternative policy to save the economy from being “rescued” by Wall Street
  - A debt writedown, followed by a land tax so that the “free lunch” (what John Stuart Mill called the “unearned increment” of rising land prices, a gain that landlords made “in their sleep”) would serve as the tax base rather than labor and industry being burdened with an income tax
  - In fact, it was largely foreign official investment that prompted the bailout
  - It will merely continue the Greenspan-Paulson-Geithner era of more and larger free lunches for their financial constituencies.
  - One move would be to prevent banks from lending against the land’s value.
  - They could lend against buildings, but not land
  - unless the government did what classical economists advocated and tax the land’s market price (its rental value) as the tax base, shifting the tax back off of labor.
  - . Despite Alan Greenspan’s announcement that he has come to see the light and realizes that self-regulation doesn’t work, the Treasury is still run by a Wall Street official and the Fed is run by a lobbyist for Wall Street.
  - hey may seek out well-meaning fools, especially prestigious figures from academia. But these are only front men, headed as they are by the followers of Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago. Such individuals are put in place as “gate-keepers” of the major academic journals to keep out ideas that do not well serve the financial lobbyists.
  - A land tax would prevent housing prices from rising again
  - being capitalized into higher bank loans
  - Finance today is acting in a way that de-industrializes economies, not builds them up. The “plan” is austerity for labor, industry and all sectors outside of finance, as in the IMF programs imposed on hapless Third World debtor countries. The experience of Iceland, Latvia and other “financialized” economies should be examined as object lessons, if only because they top the World Bank’s ranking of countries in terms of the “ease of doing business.”
  - Otherwise, countries will suffer what the Japanese call “descent from heaven”: regulators are selected from the ranks of bankers and their “useful idiots.”
  - r. The International Monetary Fund’s Articles of Agreement prevent countries from restoring the “dual exchange rate” systems that many retained down through the 1950s and even into the ‘60s.
  - thanks to worldwide awareness of how the U.S. economy is glutting the global economy with surplus “paper” dollars – and U.S. intransigence at stopping its free ride. From the U.S. vantage point, this is nothing less than an attempt to curtail its international military program.
  - Do they want to continue the fight by Enlightenment and Progressive Era social democracy, or the alternative – a lapse back into neofeudal debt peonage?
dr Weber positive effects of music

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Shermer's March to Nirvana - review of The Mind of the Market - The Skeptic's Dictionary - Skepdic.com

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scepticism ethics morals free market mozart effect on 2009-06-17
- To claim that those who don't
  share the moral sentiments of your class are sociopaths is
  intolerable, philosophically speaking
- It seems to be a common
  misconception of those in the social sciences to characterize ethics as
  rationalizations dreamed up after feelings drive us to find support for our
  instincts.
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- - King Lear's view of life, full of sound and fury,
    signifying nothing

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Luch Machiavelli

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Updated on 2009-06-17
Created on 2009-06-07

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Luch Machiavelli's List: FavBlogs

Lifehacker, tips and downloads for getting things done

David Yearsley: Art Set in Concrete

Speech Therapy: Pretty Words in Cairo Hide Brutal Realities of Power | Chris Floyd Online - Empire Burlesque - High Crimes and Low Comedy in the American Imperium

Update on Coyote’s Law | Coyote Blog

FAIL Blog: Pictures and Videos of Owned, Pwnd and Fail Moments

Become an Author at ZZ N&S | ZardozZ News and Satire

Creative Visualisation - Safe Alternative Medicine (UK)

Strictly Anything It's OK to Go There

Alternative Medicine Zone

CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

dr Weber positive effects of music

Shermer's March to Nirvana - review of The Mind of the Market - The Skeptic's Dictionary - Skepdic.com

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