OK. . . .back in the fray

Friday October 2, 2009

. . . .The order is changed up a little, and I've salted some other things in it, so enjoy the music.

. . . .If you're reading this as a Facebook note and want to switch to original post at it's home site, you can catch all the music there. It's always at The Desolation Angel, just click the underlink.

. . . .Alright, we spent a good part of yesterday talking about the personal and social liberty vs. government aspect of Libertarianism, now let's talk about the economic aspects of it. The lead-in today is from Paul Krugman, and we'll salt in some of my normal diatribes against Goldman-Sachs, some of Taibbi's work, do a little explanation of Adam Smith for those who have only the drive-by, Faux News, 9/12, Tea Party cynical exploitation of Mr. Smith's seminal work The Wealth of Nations. That work was about far more than the simplistic explanations of capitalism that have been foisted on you, and was a work of philosophy, but that's what economics really is, it's the philosophy and psychology behind actual fiscal and monetary policy. What I want you to bear in mind while reading is this Utilitarian statement - Governments job is to provide those necessary (emphasis mine) services that the private sector finds too costly to provide and it's citizens deem as necessary. Government's job is to serve the people only to the extent that they want that service.

. . . .So yes, the first and most salient point, why does a Libertarian revile the Republicans? Let's go back over the past 7 years, where we spent a billion dollars a month in a nation-building exercise in Iraq, and a war now in Afghanistan that will be nothing more than nation-building, that next month, will pass the marker point and become America's longest war, longer than Vietnam. Not only did we, as a Nation, impose on another soverign country what our thoughts as to what their government should be, (see yesterday's post about "property", and the sanctity of it, and the sanctity of respecting other's decisions of how they deal with their "property"), we spent the "property" of American citizens, their lives and our money to do it. The actual hunt for the mass-murdering religious fanatic of 9/11 was abandoned in favor of a nation building exercise.

. . . .Each nation has a "right" to exist, as long as they carve it out for themselves, can maintain and sustain it. It is not any other nation's business, whatsoever, to interfere with anything, anything at all, in that other nation, unless it is attacked. Once attacked, of course, every nation has to right to defend itself, and to hunt, by whatever means necessary, the perpetrators of a crime against it's citizens. But that's where it ends. The Republican neoconservative foreign policy of pre-emptive strikes and nation-building is completely antithetical to Libertarian thought, completely, and a sickening betrayal of the American people. It is not our nation's job to sign treaties, to send troops, to station troops, anything at all other than trade and commerce (free, open and equal trade by the way. Signing a trade treaty with anyone that contains tariffs, quotas, fees, etc. is a betrayal). Defense treaties? No way, period. Another nation's destiny and it's relationships with its neighbors is it's "property", period, and it's not someone who truly believes in liberty for all people to foster or force a political philosophy or system on any other person.

. . . .The Republicans, far from being "free market capitalists" are as far from that as the Dems are when they get into their nanny-stating. Somehow, in a Republicans mind, a corporation reigns supreme over the state. Not frickin' so!!! A hundred times over, they are essentially the same thing! A corporation, in the society that we live in, by 1963 Supreme Court ruling, is a unique entity, the same as a human being, in an economic sense. For a corporation to broker or take my money, and provide no useful product or service directly to me that I can trade for with my "property", my money or my skills, is a total and complete rejection of Libertarian philosophy. This automatically cuts out insurance brokers, health insurance companies, car insurance companies, holding corporations, real estate brokers; all nothing more than vampires sucking capital away from the people who have earned the money. This would especially point to the speculators and commodity brokers who drove the world-wide crash that we are now living under. No useful utility to the marketplace and the citizens who inhabit it at all, none.

. . . .Now, let's go after where we're at right now at this moment in time. Krugman in the Times this morning:

Stocks are up. Ben Bernanke says that the recession is over. And I sense a growing willingness among movers and shakers to declare “Mission Accomplished” when it comes to fighting the slump. It’s time, I keep hearing, to shift our focus from economic stimulus to the budget deficit.

No, it isn’t. And the complacency now setting in over the state of the economy is both foolish and dangerous.

Yes, the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration have pulled us “back from the brink” — the title of a new paper by Christina Romer, who leads the Council of Economic Advisers. She argues convincingly that expansionary policy saved us from a possible replay of the Great Depression.

But while not having another depression is a good thing, all indications are that unless the government does much more than is currently planned to help the economy recover, the job market — a market in which there are currently six times as many people seeking work as there are jobs on offer — will remain terrible for years to come.

Indeed, the administration’s own economic projection — a projection that takes into account the extra jobs the administration says its policies will create — is that the unemployment rate, which was below 5 percent just two years ago, will average 9.8 percent in 2010, 8.6 percent in 2011, and 7.7 percent in 2012.

This should not be considered an acceptable outlook. For one thing, it implies an enormous amount of suffering over the next few years. Moreover, unemployment that remains that high, that long, will cast long shadows over America’s future.

Anyone who thinks that we’re doing enough to create jobs should read a new report from John Irons of the Economic Policy Institute, which describes the “scarring” that’s likely to result from sustained high unemployment. Among other things, Mr. Irons points out that sustained unemployment on the scale now being predicted would lead to a huge rise in child poverty — and that there’s overwhelming evidence that children who grow up in poverty are alarmingly likely to lead blighted lives.

These human costs should be our main concern, but the dollars and cents implications are also dire. Projections by the Congressional Budget Office, for example, imply that over the period from 2010 to 2013 — that is, not counting the losses we’ve already suffered — the “output gap,” the difference between the amount the economy could have produced and the amount it actually produces, will be more than $2 trillion. That’s trillions of dollars of productive potential going to waste.

Wait. It gets worse. A new report from the International Monetary Fund shows that the kind of recession we’ve had, a recession caused by a financial crisis, often leads to long-term damage to a country’s growth prospects. “The path of output tends to be depressed substantially and persistently following banking crises.”

The same report, however, suggests that this isn’t inevitable: “We find that a stronger short-term fiscal policy response” — by which they mean a temporary increase in government spending — “is significantly associated with smaller medium-term output losses.”

So we should be doing much more than we are to promote economic recovery, not just because it would reduce our current pain, but also because it would improve our long-run prospects.

. . . .Read the entire piece at the jump here.

. . . .Nassim Taleb, a brilliant economist, the author of The Black Swan, and another one of the only 5 economists and finance experts, besides Krugman, Roubini, Stiglitz and Zandi who saw it all coming a year before it happened, and this one will be important later on in the post to reference back to:

Margaret Wente: Happy days are here again. The central bankers say the recession is over. The markets are buoyant. Can we relax?

Nassim Taleb: Not at all. Central bankers have no clue. In the first place, the financial crisis was not a black swan. It was perfectly predictable. They ignored the phenomenal buildup in leverage since 1980. They acted like airline pilots who'd never heard of hurricanes.

After finishing The Black Swan, I realized there was a cancer. The cancer was a huge buildup of risk-taking based on the lack of understanding of reality. The second problem is the hidden risk with new financial products. And the third is the interdependence among financial institutions.

From there Taleb goes on to say:

• The massive bailouts haven't made the economy any more stable. They've just transfered the debt from the private sector to the public sector. "The doctor has shown up and relieved the patient's symptoms – and transformed the tumour into a metastatic tumour. We still have the same disease," Taleb says.
• We shouldn't have done the bailouts at all. Instead, we should have let the mutual mistakes of borrowers and lenders work themselves out in the market. "So swallow the losses, be dignified and move on. Suck it up," he says.
• Ben Bernanke should be banned from Washington, DC.
• He would tell the Chinese to stop buying US debt as long as Larry Summers holds office. "He's a textbook case of over confidence," Taleb says, pointing to the risk accumulated in the investments made by the Harvard endowment.

The last exchange of the interview is probably the best:

My advice is that instead of investing in medium-risk securities, you should put most of your money in very low-risk securities, and a little bit in high-risk securities. Then you might get a good black swan. Also, it's good to have more than one profession, in case your own profession goes out of style. A Wall Street trader who's also a belly dancer will do a lot better than a trader who winds up driving a taxi.

. . . . . . .Now, let's go back to Adam Smith, the deity of capitalism, and The Wealth of Nations, which most Republicans and conservatives try to do a drive-by on. Smith makes 4 points by which a country seemed (at his time period) to have a thriving economy, not 1, and it wasn't about a "free market marketplace". Smith took those to task who believed that the accumulation of real capital, that is making profit, continuing to make profit and continuing to hang on to those profits, was absolutely anathema to the well-being of a nation. To him ,wealth, real wealth was a continuous flow of goods and services, and any institution, any person who accumulated and held onto it was working against the overall wealth of a nation's people. He absolutely berates and excoriates the mercantilists for accumulating "bullion", equivalent of today's real dollars. In the opening statement to Wealth, Smith makes it explicity clear that the end purpose of all economic activity is consumption, not accumulation, and most definitely not the glorification of a corporation. In fact, for consumption to occur, and economic activity to flow, Smith emphasizes that a sound economy requires a sound, stable, institutional structure.

. . . Now, for all of you Reagan, Bush, Reaganomics, and Trickle-down people who get a little misty at the mention of those names and terms, buckle up kiddies, because it's pretty damn obvious that you never read Smith, despite proclaiming for capitalism. Smith takes the mercantilists, (those who viewed the marketplace as an end in and of itself) to task for the reason that "the interest of the consumer is sacrificed to the interest of the producer". In Smith's pure capitalism, the consumer is king, and the ultimate goal of any healthy economy is employment producing goods for export, to pay for imports.
. . .So, how many different ways did Reagan and the Bush boys betray capitalist free-market economics 101. A thousand ways. The entire admitted effort behind Reagan's, and both Bush's economic policies was to move money to the top, to the producer, and let them accumulate it. In the meantime, you all bought it, because everyone slept through freshman Econ 101, and never read Smith, only listened as over 30 years, George Orwell 1984-speak set in around the free market and the Wealth of Nations. And some of you bought it, you actually thought that the Republicanist economic policies were in some way free-market, when in fact, they were as bad as any Democratic plan and Democratic President ever put out too, and just as antithetical to a true free market. Instead, the Republicanist plan was to venerate the corporation, and make sure that the corporation accumulated capital, and the modern-day mercantilists (the Shearson-Lehmans, the Citigroups, the AIG's, the Goldman-Sachs, the JP Morgan Chase's) accumulated more and more capital, siphoned it from the middle class and stopped the actual production cycle that results in consumption, which results in employment, and true flow of capital for goods and services.

. . .In other words, you watched a magic show, and listened to bullshit, it has nothing, absolutely nothing to with tax policy, nothing.

. . . .As for socialized anything, let me lay this on you. Those Republican Senators and Blue Dog Democrats who are fighting against any reform at all. They already enjoy socialized medicine everyday, read yesterday's post; and they already passed a public option for insurance, retroactively, read last week's columns on how Trent Lott, after his house was destroyed in Katrina and his insurance wouldn't pay up, went back to Congress, and with his Republican buddies, built, passed and funded a public insurance option for property that he allowed himself and other members of Congress to get into retroactively and let you and me replace their houses. Every Republican member of the Senate finance committee that voted down the public option this week? They voted for the public option on their own retroactive property insurance.

. . . .In the end, it is they who are the supercilious, vacuous ones. It is they, the Republican Senators and Representatives, who in 9 months of saying "No" cannot come up with a plan, and in fact, are straw men, empty hypocrites, who must depend on the Limbaughs, Becks, and Palin-the-quitters of the world for their Republicanist leadership. David Brooks, in the New York Times:

But this is not merely a story of weakness. It is a story of resilience. For no matter how often their hollowness is exposed, the jocks still reweave the myth of their own power. They still ride the airwaves claiming to speak for millions. They still confuse listeners with voters. And they are aided in this endeavor by their enablers. They are enabled by cynical Democrats, who love to claim that Rush Limbaugh controls the G.O.P. They are enabled by lazy pundits who find it easier to argue with showmen than with people whose opinions are based on knowledge. They are enabled by the slightly educated snobs who believe that Glenn Beck really is the voice of Middle America.

So the myth returns. Just months after the election and the humiliation, everyone is again convinced that Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity and the rest possess real power. And the saddest thing is that even Republican politicians come to believe it. They mistake media for reality. They pre-emptively surrender to armies that don’t exist.

They pay more attention to Rush’s imaginary millions than to the real voters down the street. The Republican Party is unpopular because it’s more interested in pleasing Rush’s ghosts than actual people. The party is leaderless right now because nobody has the guts to step outside the rigid parameters enforced by the radio jocks and create a new party identity. The party is losing because it has adopted a radio entertainer’s niche-building strategy, while abandoning the politician’s coalition-building strategy.

The rise of Beck, Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and the rest has correlated almost perfectly with the decline of the G.O.P. But it’s not because the talk jocks have real power. It’s because they have illusory power, because Republicans hear the media mythology and fall for it every time.

. . . .In the end, they offer nothing, only hatred, only "No" and no answers. So, as a Libertarian, why do I support this President and the Democrats. At least they are putting something on the table, the country is desperate, but at least they are putting something together even if it's wrong. As my Dad always said, "It's a lot easier to turn a rowboat that's already moving, than to try and turn one full circle that's just sitting still". The other reason to support this President is incredibly simple. I'm an American, born and raised one. This President was elected under due constitutional process, as ratified by the Electoral College, by a significant majority. He is who we have right now, and my vote, your vote, anyone's vote back in November no longer matters, it was secret and sealed, and it's over now, time to move forward. We can always turn the boat.

. . . .And just to get this straight, the Republican party erupted into cheers, into goddamn cheers, when Chicago was eliminated in the first round of voting for the 2016 Olympics. They cheered America getting defeated, erupted into cheers and applause, because their partisanship overruled patriotism, and you still believe that they care about you, that they want what's best for your children?

. . .Good luck with that

. . .And I love Chicago incidentally, and think it would have been great.

. . . .And I believe that.

. . . .We can salvage this shipwreck of a Nation. It will take all of us working together. It will take all of us understanding the concepts of the Great American Experiment, the political process of the Republic. It's amazing, I don't see eye-to-eye on every issue with my friends, but we respect one another's opinion, share information, share facts, and we don't talk over one another or at one another, we talk with one another. It's amazing what happens when a group of people who share the common goal of leaving a better country for their children and grandchildren can do when they sit down with one another as human beings, and realize that we each have power, and together, we are unstoppable.

. . . .I'm going to ask this of you for the next 30 days. Turn your TV off, turn your radio off. Start to use that beautiful mind that your Creator gave you, that your underpaid, underappreciated High School teachers tried to develop. If you hear something, if you read something, if someone sends you an e-mail that says "this bill will do this", or "this politician says this", I'm asking you to check it out. Check it out this way, use some of the following fact-based sites, who exist solely for the purpose of data and fact-checking.
- If whatever you've heard or read concerns a bill in Congress, use the following -
- Open Congress, it's non-partisan and devoted to a complete tracking of every bill in Congress, both houses. How a bill is developed, who is sponsoring it, what the riders are, what the discussion around it is.
- GovTrack, again non-partisan, non-commercial and open source; devoted to the same things, tracking Congress.
- Open Secrets, one of the most important ones, it tracks the lobbying money and campaign contributions flowing to your congressperson, and most of the time is a pretty good predictor of how they'll vote.
- Political Party Time, non-partisan, devoted to solely tracking political fundraisers, and letting you know exactly what parties your Representative and Senators are throwing for fundraisers and who is attending and how much money they're throwing at them to gain influence.

. . . .If someone sends something to you saying "this is so" or "that is so" or "the President/Senator/Representative said this" use the following:
- Fact Check, non-partisan, designed to separate fact from bullshit and fiction
- Snopes, devoted to the same thing.
- Politifact, devoted to getting to the truth, and separating out the lies that are spread.


. . . .I keep doing this not because I don't have faith, but because I do have faith. I have faith in the ultimate triumph of the spirit, intellect and heart of the American people. I have faith that the people I know want to leave something better for future generations, and know that something is terribly wrong, and want to do something about it. I do it because Paine and Jefferson were brilliant, unique singularities and were right.

. . . .I keep doing this because I don't believe in big imaginary friends for adults, I don't believe in alien conspiracies running the Government, I don't believe the Roswell bodies are at Wright-Patterson, I don't believe that a big portal will open up on Dec. 21, 2012, I don't believe that the spaceships will show up.

. . . I do believe that the people who have fucked everything up are greedy, avaricious human beings who have been able to steal from the American people, to harm them, who have run unchecked because no one calls it out for what it is. I believe that if we shine the light of day on it, if the people of this country have had enough, we can change it, and change it for the better.

. . . . I keep doing this because I do believe that people, human beings, unchecked will continue to do what they've done throughout history, and throughout the history of this country. Together, they will find the solutions and provide better for their children and grandchildren.

. . . .I believe in us, I believe in people. I believe in the beauty, power and grace of the individual.

. . . .I do this for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of knowing what they do, what they believe, what they know is right. I do it for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of faith, hope, love, hate, justice, war and peace.

. . . .I do it because I believe in justice, in all it's forms.

. . . .I do this everyday for the people and kids who are tattoed, pierced and inked and keep getting told to get "into the mainstream". I do this everyday for those guys who wear black that you don't understand, you just know there's something about them, and that when the chips are down, when you have to walk down a dark alley somewhere, and you know what's waiting for you at the end of it, and you can only take one person with you, that's who you want walking with you, because you know you'll come back out alive, and that guy doesn't care what it costs him.

. . . .I do this everyday for the outcasts, the misfits, the ones who don't fit and who will turn their back on you and walk away when you try to make them fit into a mold. I do it everyday for everyone who does it their way, knows that they're paying a high price for it, but the freedom is worth the cost.

. . . . I do this everyday for outlaws, cowboys, renegades, pirates and fallen angels. I do it everyday for the people who understand that rock and roll can save their soul, that redemption can be found in a 3-chord lick from a vintage Les Paul. I do it for the men and women who aren't afraid to turn it all the way up, who keep looking for an 11 setting on a volume knob that only goes to 10, who know that rock and roll's got nothing to do with age.


. . . .If right now, you're doing something you don't want to do, stop it. If you've surrounded yourself with people who want you to do or be something other than who you are, walk away. If you've got people around you who actually let it slip out that they think you "should be doing (fill in the blank here)" and it involves your life, your future, your existence as an individual, walk away, right now, and don't look back. You don't owe anyone anything. Live fearlessly. If the people around you can't accept it, can't accept you as you are, really are, they aren't and weren't friends anyhow.

. . . .Don't march to anyone else's drumbeat, don't drink the Kool-Aid, anyone's. Right, Left, conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, Christian, Buddhist, Pagan. Use your own mind, that's why you were given one. Examine, question, do what's right for you first, everything else will fall in place from there, quit looking for the path, you're already on it.

. . . .Come out of the gate each morning with both barrels blazing, pedal-to-metal, full-tilt boogie, all-in and balls-out, what's stopping you? Do you want to live forever? That'd be boring.

. . . .Got your back. somewhere out there in the night

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments before they're ripped away from you. This rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, absolutely no one gets out alive. There aren't a lot of second chances, and we don't get to dictate terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. This ain't no dress rehearsal, and the curtain's gone up, it's real and right now. It's not about yesterday or tomorrow. It's about right fucking here, right fucking now. This, what you're reading, what you're hearing, is the proof, the words, the sounds and the sights of someone changing his own life and his own world and not being afraid to put it out there. What have you done for yourself lately and why are you waiting? Do it now.

The Desolation Angel
from somewhere halfway to Heaven, and just a mile out of Hell

You know someone like me, there's still a few of us left. If we have to, we'll stand at the gates of Hell and hold the last train home for you.. . . . . .