I'm not sure hedge fund managers and investment bankers are really the right group to be determining our fiscal future. In fact, I'm pretty sure they're not. But Peter G. Peterson is a very serious man on a very serious mission, and that mission includes a film, a book, a couple of foundations, and a billion-dollar effort to re-educate Americans on very serious matters, like Social Security, and Medicare, and anything that really has a deep impact on the poor and middle classes in this country. Peterson is so committed to this mission that he started his foundation with a $1-billion dollar grant and has branched out from there.
(Start the indoctrination young, 'cause with them Eye-rakees refusin ta stay beat and just pipe their dang oil straight into Bush Inc.'s personal oil tankers, we sure need the 10 to 18-year-old set learning the joys of triage and how to jerry-rig their own humvee armor -- though it's doubtful they issued new merit badges on such short notice.)
People, you just can't even make shit like this up.
Roe V. Everyone Else .
(Start the indoctrination young, 'cause with them Eye-rakees refusin ta stay beat and just pipe their dang oil straight into Bush Inc.'s personal oil tankers, we sure need the 10 to 18-year-old set learning the joys of triage and how to jerry-rig their own humvee armor -- though it's doubtful they issued new merit badges on such short notice.)
I'm not quite sure why anyone thought this "coalition" thing was ever going to work anyway. And for my money, as long as convicted con man and Jordanian fugitive Ahmed Chalabi is still in the game, the whole thing remains a Negroponte-controlled farce.
Talks between Kurdish leaders and a Shiite bloc to form the next Iraqi government have collapsed three days before the country's first fully elected parliament meets, senior politicians said today...
...Ahmad Chalabi, a leading member of the Shiite bloc, the United Iraqi Alliance, returned empty-handed on Saturday from a trip to Iraqi Kurdistan to try and save the proposed Kurdish-Shiite alliance.
...Kurdish politicians went further, saying the Shiite alliance was trying to blame them for the crisis that has paralysed decision-making in a country plagued by guerrilla bombings and starved of investment needed for rebuilding.
By John Diamond, Steve Komarow and Tom Squitieri, USA TODAY
excerpt:
Rumsfeld's plan
The strategy outlined by Rumsfeld and other top officials this week has three components:
• Use overwhelming ground force backed by artillery and air power to take control of the insurgent haven.
• Move in immediately with reconstruction efforts to repair battle damage.
• Leave a force in Fallujah large enough to prevent a collapse back into violence.
The goals are simple: to win the gratitude of Fallujah civilians who will no longer have to cope with Iraqi and foreign fighters in their midst; and to demonstrate to other insurgent-dominated towns and cities what can happen if they refuse to participate peacefully in the Iraqi political process.
Why didn't Rummy use this plan at the begining of the Iraq war? It sounds a lot like the Powell Doctrine!
One of the worst effects this will have is to further drain money from the public school system, which is funded through property taxes. As strapped homeowners appeal tax assessments, school districts will have far less reliable income. In better times, states could be counted on to pick up some of the slack, but they're in pretty bad shape themselves:
Highflying property prices drove the most-recent economic boom, and a collapse in real-estate values hammered it back down. Now, as the economy struggles to regain strength, real estate is expected to continue to act as a brake, rather than an accelerator.
Despite clear signs of revival in the larger economy, including upturns in manufacturing and consumer spending, the nation's market for homes and office buildings remains mired in foreclosures and oversupply. That imbalance will be worked out over time, but in the meantime, it is slowing the recovery in myriad ways.
Here's how it breaks down:
Less construction means fewer jobs. Construction is a big employer and one of the better-paid sectors for men who lack a college degree. The sector has shed 2.1 million jobs from its peak in March 2007 to April 2010. The 5.6 million construction jobs that are left comprise 4% of U.S. jobs, down from 6% when employment peaked in December 2007.
With the glut of houses, offices and malls already pressuring the real-estate market, many of these jobs will not come back for a while, putting added pressure on unemployment even as growth resumes.
Indeed, construction spending is running 13% below its year-ago level and about 25% below the boom-year peak.
Home owners who once felt rich are feeling poorer. Throughout the boom, consumers used their home equity to borrow and spend as they watched housing prices soar. The ratio of dollars taken out of homes to total personal income—a gauge of how much consumers are pulling out of their homes relative to how much they make in wages and other income—fell the last three quarters of 2009. During the boom years, that ratio got as high as 9% nationwide, according to Moody's Analytics.
While real-estate prices have stabilized, they are unlikely to regain prerecession values for years. That has left many consumers with a pile of debt but not much home equity to be used for investment or spending, a big reason why economists believe recent gains in consumer spending aren't sustainable.
"The housing market, since it was the epicenter of the crisis, is also central to the feeble recovery," says Ethan Harris, an economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
Small businesses aren't borrowing as much. While bigger companies can access the now-recovered market for bonds and other debt, many smaller companies—which are key job generators—use the value of their own property to secure bank loans. As the value of those holdings has fallen, so too has their ability to get loans, crimping investment and hiring at a time when the recovery is gaining steam.
The thing no one in power likes to talk about is, for capitalism to function, there has to be a way to accurately assess risk. Now we know that there is simply no way to know what anyone on Wall Street is actually doing. You'd think that both Republicans and Democrats could agree on the need for strict regulation and transparency, but so far you'd be wrong:
It was like a hidden passage on Wall Street, a secret channel that enabled billions of dollars to flow through Lehman Brothers.
In the years before its collapse, Lehman used a small company — its “alter ego,” in the words of a former Lehman trader — to shift investments off its books.
This was reported last month in the bank examiner's report of Lehman's collapse:
The examiner, Anton R. Valukas, refers repeatedly to “Repo 105,” a name for a set of accounting tactics originated by Lehman that temporarily shuffled about $50 billion off the firm’s balance sheet for the two fiscal quarters before it collapsed.
You read that right: $50 billion.
The firm, called Hudson Castle, played a crucial, behind-the-scenes role at Lehman, according to an internal Lehman document and interviews with former employees. The relationship raises new questions about the extent to which Lehman obscured its financial condition before it plunged into bankruptcy.
While Hudson Castle appeared to be an independent business, it was deeply entwined with Lehman. For years, its board was controlled by Lehman, which owned a quarter of the firm. It was also stocked with former Lehman employees.
None of this was disclosed by Lehman, however.
Entities like Hudson Castle are part of a vast financial system that operates in the shadows of Wall Street, largely beyond the reach of banking regulators. These entities enable banks to exchange investments for cash to finance their operations and, at times, make their finances look stronger than they are.
Critics say that such deals helped Lehman and other banks temporarily transfer their exposure to the risky investments tied to subprime mortgages and commercial real estate. Even now, a year and a half after Lehman’s collapse, major banks still undertake such transactions with businesses whose names, like Hudson Castle’s, are rarely mentioned outside of footnotes in financial statements, if at all.
Well, I just got to spend ten blissfully Glenn-Beck-free days in China, which is probably the only place one can safely escape his wingnuttery these days. It's quite a different world there, and certainly nothing like what Beck himself frequently depicts it as (more on that later).
And what better way to reacclimate myself to the USA than to turn on Fox the afternoon of my return and watch yet another of Beck's patented eliminationist attacks on progressives -- followed the next night by yet another?
Ah, some things never change, do they?
On Monday, Beck continued his current theme that "progressives are a disease" by ripping into the effort to push health-care reform through Congress. He again warned that America was being destroyed from within by progressives:
Beck: I was, way back then, I said that America could never be destroyed from the outside. I remember the day that I said it because it was September 11th, and people were freaking out, and I was on my radio program and I said, militarily there is no equal, don't worry, if the world tries to attack us, and we've decided we're not going to bother with smart bombs, we'd control the world in a heartbeat, but that's not who we are.
Don't worry. The only way to destroy America is to rot it from the inside -- collapse our system from the inside. It's got to be one of us that brings us to our knees.
When I said that, I was trying to give hope to people. But I didn't have the full truth, because little did I know that there were people, our own countrymen, who are already here who are on the inside who actually want to do that -- bring our country to its knees. That's insanity.
... Progressives -- progressives are the ones that say you've got to rot America from the inside. You have to be inside in order to bring her down. It has been the plan the whole time. Make progress -- baby steps. Well, progress from where to what? From the Constitution to a democracy. We're not a democracy.
So now that it's happening, why is America surprised? They've been clear for a hundred years. Radical progressives are infecting America! By deceiving unsuspecting people on their true intentions!
A little later, he used the disease metaphor again to describe health-care reform:
Beck: What they're about to pass is not a tumor. Because the doctor can come over here and say, 'Yeah, there's a tumor here, and we've got to go in and cut this out.' I don't know if you can cut this tumor out. Maybe not. But you can try. But what they're about to pass is a bloodstream disease. It will be injected into our system and it will be incurable.
Then on yesterday's show, he continued (h/t Media Matters) to attack the health-care reform effort:
Beck: I think they're gonna pass this thing. They are gonna do whatever it takes to pass this, and they're not going to go the traditional way, they are gonna go the way of snakes and cockroaches. They're gonna crawl out in the cover of darkness, and they're going to pass this, make it happen one way or another.
What a shame we didn't get to vote here, huh? Yes, despite some heavy-duty pressure (and the implied threat of being blocked from membership in the European Union), the tiny country voted no to a crushing repayment plan for the British and Dutch debts incurred by a failed Icelandic bank. That plan would have required each Icelander to pay around $135 a month for eight years — about 25% of the average family's salary:
REYKJAVIK, Iceland – Icelanders blew whistles and set off fireworks in the capital as referendum results Sunday showed they had resoundingly rejected a $5.3 billion plan to repay Britain and the Netherlands for debts spawned by the collapse of an Icelandic bank.
Voters in the tiny Atlantic island nation defied both their parliament and international pressure to display their anger at how their nation was being treated.
"This is a strong 'No' from the Icelandic nation," said Magnus Arni Skulason, co-founder of a group opposed to the deal. "The Icelandic public understands that we are sovereign and we have to be treated like a sovereign nation — not being bullied like the British and the Dutch have been doing."
[...] Britain and the Netherlands want to be reimbursed for money they paid their citizens with deposits in Icesave, an Internet bank that collapsed in 2008, along with most of Iceland's banking sector. Most ordinary Icelanders feel the repayment schedule was too onerous.
[...] The overwhelming margin reflected Icelanders' simmering anger at bankers and politicians as the country struggles to recover from a financial meltdown. President Olafur R. Grimsson — who sparked the referendum by refusing to sign the repayment deal agreed by Iceland's parliament — said Icelanders resented having to pay for the actions of a few "greedy bankers."
He said, however, the British and Dutch would get their money back eventually.
"The referendum was not about refusing to pay back the money," Grimsson told the BBC. "Iceland is willing to reimburse those two governments, but it has to be on fair terms."
Iceland, a volcanic island with a population of just 320,000, went from economic wunderkind to fiscal basket case almost overnight when the credit crunch took hold.
And you'll never in a million years guess how that happened! (Stop me if this sounds familiar.)
They became a free-market poster child. By deregulating the banking and financial sectors, in just five years, Icelanders saw their wealth increase by 45 per cent. The banks went from domestic lending to international financing, until foreign financing made up two thirds of their debt. Then it all collapsed.
The new left-of-center government has been trying to negotiate a plan to repay $3.5 billion to Britain and $1.8 billion to the Netherlands as compensation for funds that those governments paid to around 340,000 of their citizens who had accounts with Icesave, an Icelandic Internet bank that offered high interest rates before it failed along with its parent, Landsbanki.
Failure to settle the dispute could have repercussions for Iceland's economic recovery. The International Monetary Fund has agreed to loan Iceland $4.6 billion, and the agreement is linked to repaying its international debts.
[...] Many Icelanders remain angry at Britain for invoking anti-terrorist legislation to freeze the assets of Icelandic banks at the height of the crisis.
Oh yeah, about that last part. Iceland Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir has demanded an apology from the UK for freezing their assets. I wonder how long she'll have to wait?
I don't blame them for being furious. Even Icelandic companies that had nothing to do with their banks had their assets frozen by the U.K. government.
And of course, the International Monetary Fund is a flock of vultures. Their Structural Adjustment Programs usually increase poverty in the countries they "help," because one of the main conditions is that the governments sell off their national assets - usually to western corporations at fire sale prices.
So good for Iceland! Too bad our Congress doesn't have that kind of spine.
It's now a fact: Whatever else the Tea Party movement may or may not have achieved, it can claim credit for at least one real phenomenon -- it has revived the far-right Patriot movement of the '90s.
Hate groups stayed at record levels — almost 1,000 — despite the total collapse of the second largest neo-Nazi group in America. Furious anti-immigrant vigilante groups soared by nearly 80%, adding some 136 new groups during 2009. And, most remarkably of all, so-called "Patriot" groups — militias and other organizations that see the federal government as part of a plot to impose “one-world government” on liberty-loving Americans — came roaring back after years out of the limelight.
The anger seething across the American political landscape — over racial changes in the population, soaring public debt and the terrible economy, the bailouts of bankers and other elites, and an array of initiatives by the relatively liberal Obama Administration that are seen as "socialist" or even "fascist" — goes beyond the radical right. The "tea parties" and similar groups that have sprung up in recent months cannot fairly be considered extremist groups, but they are shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories and racism.
“We are in the midst of one of the most significant right-wing populist rebellions in United States history,” Chip Berlet, a veteran analyst of the American radical right, wrote earlier this year. "We see around us a series of overlapping social and political movements populated by people [who are] angry, resentful, and full of anxiety. They are raging against the machinery of the federal bureaucracy and liberal government programs and policies including health care, reform of immigration and labor laws, abortion, and gay marriage."
Mark Potok, the author of the report, went on the Dylan Ratigan show yesterday on MSNBC to discuss it:
Ratigan: Mark, have you ever seen numbers like this?
Potok: Not in my tenure doing this work. I've been doing this close to 15 years, and I haven't seen anything like this.
I mean, the comparison, of course, is to the '90s, when we saw so much activity from militias and other anti-government 'Patriot' groups. And of course that's the sector of the radical right that we're really saying has exploded over the last year.
Uh, a minor correction to what you said -- the growth in hate groups, real race-based groups, 55 percent, has been over the last decade or so. That's slowed a bit. But when you look at the whole grouping of the various kinds of groups on the radical right -- extremist nativist groups, Patriot groups and hate groups -- it's astounding. We've seen an overall growth of something like 40 percent. All together, those three strands of the radical right are really the most volatile elements out there, and they amount to something like 1500 groups. It's quite amazing.
It's also worth noting what the report itself says about how this explosion has occurred:
As the movement has exploded, so has the reach of its ideas, aided and abetted by commentators and politicians in the ostensible mainstream. While in the 1990s, the movement got good reviews from a few lawmakers and talk-radio hosts, some of its central ideas today are being plugged by people with far larger audiences like FOX News’ Glenn Beck and U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn). Beck, for instance, re-popularized a key Patriot conspiracy theory — the charge that FEMA is secretly running concentration camps — before finally “debunking” it.
Yep. As we've been saying ...
Here's Potok discussing the report in more detail:
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Peter G. Peterson relationship map
