The Renewal of the Public Philosophy

“For Example: The Freedom of Speech”

Divorced from its original purpose and justification, as a process of criticism, freedom to think and speak are not self-evident necessities. It is only from the hope and the intention of discovering truth that freedom acquires such high public significance. The right of self-expression is, as such, a private amenity rather than a public necessity. The right to utter words, whether or not they have meaning, and regardless of their truth, could not be a vital interest of a great state but for the presumption that they are the chaff which goes with the utterance of true and significant words.

But when the chaff of silliness, baseness, and deception is so voluminous that it submerges the kernels of truth, freedom of speech may produce such frivolity, or such mischief, that it cannot be preserved against the demand for a restoration of order or of decency. If there is a dividing line between liberty and license, it is where freedom of speech is no longer respected as a procedure of the truth and becomes the unrestricted right to exploit the ignorance, and to incite the passions, of the people. T-hen freedom is such a hullabaloo of sophistry, propaganda, special pleading, lobbying, and salesmanship that it is difficult to remember why freedom of speech is worth the pain and trouble of defending it.

해일 비너스

beon-yeog ?

Clazziquai Project W (Where The Story Ends) W & Whale BoA

Books Ain't Everything

I learned that Loreen had won the Eurovision thing late this past Saturday night because I needed the Wikipedia homepage URL wherein her arresting visage was found. That was my first mistake. Wikipedia's front door aggregator always sends me off on wildly inapposite diversions, impeding my ever expanding course of much delayed study. My second mistake was stumbling down YouTube's advertising rat-hole to reconnoiter toute cette agitation.

Clicking on Loreen's vaguely war-painted face here will lead you to a play list I assembled as a testament to the depressing waste of time spent vainly searching for something—anything!—that wasn't a complete bouillante pile de merde. Yeah, more than a hour skipping through mindlessly saccharine and unnecessarily sexualized third-rate cabaret acts incongruously plodding across some multi-euro(FAIL!) stage in ... Azerbaijan? ... really?  That Azerbaijan?

Trackshittaz. Austrian. I guess they don't suck that much. Alles klar, Herr Kommissar. Chah!

MrEclipse.com
h/t Steve Clemons
@ The Atlantic

I needed restitution, though retribution was foremost amid my now meandering, wantonly unguided mentation. Clearly 40°25′N 49°50′E wasn't working. Serendipity swept her brightly colored Chima to 37°35′N 127°0′E making good my foray into the nominally brain crushing vapidity of the billion dollar(FAIL!) narcissist network, thankfully eclipsing all the “sexy sexy sugar” in Central Asia. (Azerbaijan. Europe. Azerbaijan. WTF?)

Funny Story #1

This all amounts to what I can at present best describe as "Yet Another Object Lesson In Why I try Not To Pay Attention To (Almost) Anything Everybody Is Talking About," a subject ranging from Mad Men—likely a worthwhile diversion—to Hunger Games, Game of Thrones, or any gaming of vampires, werewolves and ghosts ... id est: occult. Life is all about choices. Are you happy with yours?

Standing On The Top

“That funk is here to stay, oh (We understand it)”

The Power Of Politics

Clearly, the richest would not be drawn to politics if politics did not offer them additional power above and beyond that which they had already acquired through financial or other professional success. Winning (or seizing) political office, or having the ability to influence political decisions, or having a base of political support directly empowers individuals. The source of the power is multifold. It is the power of the institutions that one has leadership within. It is the power of allocating the resources and setting the agenda for those institutions. It is the power to influence the creation of new laws and regulations, which offer the ability actually to institutionalize key ideas. It is the power of the history and national identity associated with those institutions. It is the power that comes from having quantifiable support among the people of a country or region. Government service is seen as legitimizing, as service to the community, with high posts also seen as the capstone of a career (although they often provide additional access and networks that can offer further opportunities for profit post-government). This leads directly to many top business leaders taking massive pay cuts to work in government.

Burdensome White Dude

“Whitey On The Moon”

[Cecil] Rhodes schemed and behaved like a politician, not a merchant. He acted with the ruthlessness and calculated brutality of a mediaeval warlord. He was a brilliant manipulator and, some would argue, swindler, his actions made noteworthy by his audacity. The legends and myths surrounding him are legion. He bought newspaper companies, both secretly and openly, because of his conviction that “the press rules the minds of men.” He has been accused of pressuring doctors to suppress information concerning a smallpox epidemic among the African labour force of his diamond mines, believing that this information would disrupt production because labourers would steer clear of the region; and it would, of course, cost money to pay for inoculations—money he did not want to spend.

“Deep in the heart of your brain...”

“... there is a lever”

“... I watched the coast. Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you—smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, 'Come and find out.' This one was almost featureless, as if still in the making, with an aspect of monotonous grimness. The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line, far, far away along a blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping mist. The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam. Here and there grayish-whitish specks showed up, clustered inside the white surf, with a flag flying above them perhaps. Settlements some centuries old, and still no bigger than pin-heads on the untouched expanse of their background. We pounded along, stopped, landed soldiers; went on, landed custom-house clerks to levy toll in what looked like a God-forsaken wilderness, with a tin shed and a flag-pole lost in it; landed more soldiers—to take care of the custom-house clerks, presumably. Some, I heard, got drowned in the surf; but whether they did or not, nobody seemed particularly to care.

Ydyʼát Wwynd

meshuga!

You tell me that it's evolution

Well, you know

The conservative often has a sharp sense of the complexity of revolution: not desiring change, he prefers to emphasize its difficulties, whereas the reformer is enticed into a faith that the intensity of desire is a measure of its social effect. Yet just because no reform is in itself a revolution, we must not jump to the assurance that no revolution can be accomplished. True as it is that great changes are imperceptible, it is no less true that they are constantly taking place. Moreover, for the very reason that human life changes its quality so slowly, the panic over political proposals is childish.
p. 139 (or 275)

⋮

So long as the poor are docile in their poverty, the rest of us are only too willing to satisfy our consciences by pitying them. But when the downtrodden gather into a threat as they did at Lawrence[, Massachusetts], when they show that they have no stake in civilization and consequently no respect for its institutions, when the object of pity becomes the avenger of its own miseries, then the middle-class public begins to look at the problem more intelligently.

You say you got a real solution

Eh bien, vous savez ...

Yes, the incentives given to business and investment leaders to motivate them to work harder and trigger growth benefit all. But are the incentives really market incentives, predicated on unfettered economic interaction, or has the system been fine-tuned to disproportionately benefit those who lead organizations, make investment decisions, and run boardrooms? It is true that governments have been unable to do much of what they should to improve the welfare of their people, and in a vast number of cases markets have done much more. But is creating a false choice between governments and markets, as so many politicians have done, productive or practical when neither can do the job of creating a thriving or just society alone?

Le Révoltant Raffinement

De Reformuler

The wisest rulers see this. They know that the responsibility for insurrections rests in the last analysis upon the unimaginative greed and endless stupidity of the dominant classes. There is something pathetic in the blindness of powerful people when they face a social crisis. Fighting viciously every readjustment which a nation demands, they make their own overthrow inevitable. It is they who turn opposing interests into a class war. Confronted with the deep insurgency of labor what do capitalists and their spokesmen do? They resist every demand, submit only after a struggle, and prepare a condition of war to the death. When far-sighted men appear in the ruling classes--men who recognize the need of a civilized answer to this increasing restlessness, the rich and the powerful treat them to a scorn and a hatred that are incredibly bitter. The hostility against men like Roosevelt, La Follette, Bryan, Lloyd-George is enough to make an observer believe that the rich of to-day are as stupid as the nobles of France before the Revolution.
p. 143

Walter Lippman, A Preface to Politics - 1914

Numisma Regni

Troca Língua

Having seen the evil results we have come to detest a conscious choice of issues, to feel that it smacks of sinister plotting. The vile practice of yellow newspapers and chauvinistic politicians is almost the only experience of it we have. Religion, patriotism, race, and sex are the favorite red herrings of foul political method--they are the most successful because they explode so easily and flood the mind with those unconscious prejudices which make critical thinking difficult. Yet for all its abuse the deliberate choice of issues is one of the high selective arts of the statesman. In the debased form we know it there is little encouragement. But the devil is merely a fallen angel, and when God lost Satan he lost one of his best lieutenants. It is always a pretty good working rule that whatever is a great power of evil may become a great power for good. Certainly nothing so effective in the art of politics can be left out of the equipment of the statesman.

Lingua Franca

Sprachgefühl?

Once the meaning core is in place, you begin the hunt. The first [Merriam-Webster] thesaurus was compiled, yes, by hand, with editors flipping through the Third and trying to keep track of all the possible synonyms for “love.” It was an overwhelming task, one sure to induce some strong hallucinations and psychotic breaks, and perhaps that explains why “chatty” was not listed as a synonym of “glib” in the first edition of the Collegiate Thesaurus but “well-hung” was. I had it easier, but even with a computer and a searchable dictionary database, finding and ordering synonyms and near synonyms was tricky. My nature was working against me: I am a splitter–a definer who likes detailing every possible denotative nook and connotative cranny of a word’s meaning–and so perhaps not the best person in the world to write a thesaurus. ‘Togs,’ I reasoned, means ‘clothing’, but it also refers to clothing worn for a specific purpose. Is that enough lexical synonymy to include ‘togs’ as a synonym? Or is it a near synonym? A vacuum whirred downstairs. It was 6:00pm, and I was going to be locked in the building overnight with nothing to eat and a bunch of boring, pedantic ghosts if I didn’t leave pronto. Synonym it is.

Kory Stamper @ harmless drudgery

1100

World Wide*

440	Russia
404	United States
216	Ukraine

Oh Brudder

“D'ere goes me bread 'n' buttah”

My wife and I, in view of our own less than lavish accommodations, tried to imagine that we were in touch with Davos’s roots as a destination for a spa cure—literally the place about which Thomas Mann wrote The Magic Mountain.

Mann, of course, had no idea quite how magic the mountain would become. Walking through the metal detector into the welter of activity in theKongress Hotel’s lobby, it was once again clear. A small pride of women swaddled in mink and all manner of tasteful bling glided past looking vaguely predatory and, frankly, frightening. Behind them came their husbands, a group of U.S. senators including John McCain of Arizona.
p. 16

David Rothkopf, Superclass - 2008

More “Pierce-ing” Disapprobation

Why Is America So Happy for Facebook?
w/ Keebler elves working in a nuclear missile silo

If we cheer for big money simply as big money, we're simply never going to get right again. If we pretend to be vicariously rich in order to avoid the fact that so many of us are becoming unnecessarily poor, if the shift of the national wealth has within it elements that we're willing to root for as though they were the U.S. Olympic Plutocrats Team, we will get ourselves suckered again and again. This was a triumph of the insiders, of the people who concocted credit-default swaps and collateralized debt obligations, and the people who will do it again, over and over, unless a more critical eye is placed upon them by the institutions of self-government. This does nothing to ameliorate the effects of our rigged casino economy. It solves nothing connected to wealth inequality or unemployment. It is magic numbers on the screen to which only a very few people have the password, and they're not sharing it with anyone.

Charles P. Pierce

The Eclipse of the Public Philosophy

1. On the Efficacy of Ideas

Yet, however crude and clumsy our knowledge of the process, there is no doubt that a character is acquired by experience and education. Within limits that we have not measured, human nature is malleable. Can we doubt it when we remember that when Shakespeare was alive there were no Americans, that when Virgil was alive there were no Englishmen, and that when Homer was alive there were no Romans? Quite certainly, men have acquired the ways of thinking, feeling and acting which we recognize as their ethnic, national, class and occupational characteristics. Comparatively speaking these characteristics are, moreover, recently acquired. Even within the brief span of historical time characters have been acquired and have been lost and have been replaced by other characters. This is what gives to man’s history, despite his common humanity, its infinite variety.

Niektóre Lampka do Czytania

Tłumaczenie?

New York Public Library Links 1848, Year of Revolution Rapport, Michael (2009) The Bodhran Makers Keane, John B. (1992) The Collapse of Complex Societies Tainter, Joseph A. (1988) In the Shadow of War Sherry, Michael S. (1995) Heart of Darkness Conrad, Joseph (2009) The New American Militarism Bacevich, Andrew J. (2006) Blues for Mister Charlie Baldwin, James (1995)

Google Book Links (mostly)   THIS book is amazing — read the first 50 pages at google books and have plowed through over half of its 400+ pages in just a few days ... while reading Walter Lippman online (in a couple of places actually) and In The Shadow of War (shown below). I picked up The Bodhran Makers on a tip from Charles Pierce's blog at Esquire. It's an Irish tale about a reactionary priest and his run-in with some Celtic party-hounds. (The bodhran is a traditional Irish drum.) Sounds like fun. A couple of years back Pierce brought us Idiot America, an entertaining and impressively researched look at our civil society's depressingly advanced state of disintegration ... what's left of it anyway. He tipped me off to R.L. Ketcham's 700+ page brick of a biography on James "Constitution-Mack-Daddy" Madison. Illuminations through deep time. Jim Rickards and his bestselling Currency Wars gave me the tip on The Collapse of Complex Societies. They only have one copy at the library and I'm currently 13th in line. I was 25th a week or so ago so ... it'll be a while before "we" get to dig into that one. Never did read Heart of Darkness, but since The Secret Agent was such a thoroughly "simple" and forward-looking tome I've decided to catch up on Mr. "Korzeniowski's" adopted tongue. Andrew Bacevich's work is the most honest and balanced appraisal of US Foreign Policy available today. He tipped me off to In The Shadow of War. & James Baldwin is still the greatest 21C American writer, from the grave ... bitchez. What are you reading?

Chapter IV The Golden Rule And After

It would indeed be an intolerably pedantic performance for a nation to sit still and wait for its scientists to report on their labors. The notion is typical of the pitfalls in the path of any theorist who does not correct his logic by a constant reference to the movement of life. It is true that statecraft must make human nature its basis. It is true that its chief task is the invention of forms and institutions which satisfy the inner needs of mankind. And it is true that our knowledge of those needs and the technique of their satisfaction is hazy, unorganized and blundering.

Exculpatory Hawk for Roosting Chickens

M - I - C . . . K - E - Y

lt is only a citizenry; an alert and informed citizenry, which can keep these abuses from coming about. And . . . some of this misuse of influence and power could come about unwittingly but just by the very nature of the thing .... almost every one of your magazines, no matter what they are advertising, has a picture of the Titan missile or the Atlas or solid fuel or other things, there is . . . almost an insidious penetration of our own minds that the only thing this country is engaged in is weaponry and missiles. And, I'll tell you we just can't afford to do that. The reason we have them is to protect the great values in which we believe, and they are far deeper even than our own lives and our own property.

President Eisenhower, in Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, Volume 2

If only ...

& h/t Michael S. Sherry's In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930's (p. 235)

The Joy of Inquiry

circa 1911 & 2007

And I knew, too, that in science if you put potassium chlorate into a retort and heat it over a Bunsen burner, oxygen is disengaged and may be collected over water, whereas in real life if you do anything of the sort the vessel cracks with a loud report, the potassium chlorate descends sizzling upon the flame, the experimenter says "Oh! Damn!" with astonishing heartiness and distinctness, and a lady student in the back seats gets up and leaves the room.

H. G. Wells - The New Machiavelli - 1911

How Much Is That Doggie In The Window

I do hope that doggie's for sale

This highlights almost every salient fact about how Washington functions with regard to such matters. First, if you pay a sufficiently large and bipartisan group of officials to lobby on your behalf, you will get your way, even when it comes to vaunted National Security and Terrorism decisions; if you pay the likes of Howard Dean, Fran Townsend, Wesley Clark, Ed Rendell, Rudy Giuliani, Tom Ridge and others like them to peddle their political influence for you, you will be able to bend Washington policy and law to your will. As Andrew Exum put it this morning: “I guess Hizballah and LeT just need to buy off more former administration officials.”

Glenn Greenwald @ Salon

Trail of My (Current) Bliss

Follow Your Bliss

When the New Republic was Actually New

The most incisive comment on politics to-day is indifference. When men and women begin to feel that elections and legislatures do not matter very much, that politics is a rather distant and unimportant exercise, the reformer might as well put to himself a few searching doubts. Indifference is a criticism that cuts beneath oppositions and wranglings by calling the political method itself into question. Leaders in public affairs recognize this. They know that no attack is so disastrous as silence, that no invective is so blasting as the wise and indulgent smile of the people who do not care. Eager to believe that all the world is as interested as they are, there comes a time when even the reformer is compelled to face the fairly widespread suspicion of the average man that politics is an exhibition in which there is much ado about nothing. But such moments of illumination are rare. They appear in writers who realize how large is the public that doesn't read their books, in reformers who venture to compare the membership list of their league with the census of the United States. Whoever has been granted such a moment of insight knows how exquisitely painful it is. To conquer it men turn generally to their ancient comforter, self-deception: they complain about the stolid, inert masses and the apathy of the people. In a more confidential tone they will tell you that the ordinary citizen is a "hopelessly private person."
p.9

Walter Lippman's Introduction to A Preface to Politics - 1914

Act-ON / Act-OFF

“Mr. Miyagi Mr. Miyagi — Do the thing with the hands”

You have often heard it said that Modern History is a subject to which neither beginning nor end can be assigned. No beginning, because the dense web of the fortunes of man is woven without a void; because, in society as in nature, the structure is continuous, and we can trace things back uninterruptedly, until we dimly descry the Declaration of Independence in the forests of Germany. No end, because, on the same principle, history made and history making are scientifically inseparable and separately unmeaning.

“Night of the Sorrowful Consequence”

I flatter myself that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty as well as any gentleman of that society, be he who he will; and perhaps I have given as good proofs of my attachment to that cause, in the whole course of my public conduct. I think I envy liberty as little as they do, to any other nation. But I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind. ... Is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind, that I am seriously to felicitate a madman, who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell, on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty? Am I to congratulate a highwayman and murderer, who has broke prison, upon the recovery of his natural rights? This would be to act over again the scene of the criminals condemned to the galleys, and their heroic deliverer, the metaphysic Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance.

⋮

Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver; and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings.

Edmund Burke

Dictatorship of the Consumendoriat

Consumendoriat?

Definitely A Trend Here

This country just gets better and better...or something

Homeland in the (Rearview) Mirror

President Bush’s depiction of the past is sanitized, selective, and self-serving where not simply false. The great liberating tradition to which he refers is, to a considerable extent, poppycock. The president celebrates freedom without defining it, and he dodges any serious engagement with the social, cultural, and moral incongruities arising from the pursuit of actually existing freedom. A believer for whom God remains dauntingly inscrutable might view the president’s confident explication of the Creator’s purpose to be at the very least presumptuous, if not altogether blasphemous.

Still, one must acknowledge that in his second inaugural address, as in other presentations he has made, President Bush succeeds quite masterfully in capturing something essential about the way Americans see themselves and their country. Here is a case where myths and delusions combine to yield perverse yet important truths.

Reinhold Niebuhr helps us appreciate the large hazards embedded in those myths and delusions. Four of those truths merit particular attention at present: the persistent sin of American Exceptionalism, the indecipherability of history, the false allure of simple solutions, and, finally, the imperative of appreciating the limits of power.

Andrew J. Bacevich in World Affairs - Winter 2008

Hostelry de Sarkozy

after C.D. Batchelor

Wealth of Nation

Und Zwei Macht “Einen Vierzeiler”

Übersetzung

The old idea of a powerful philosopher-king who would put into practice some carefully thought out plans was a fairy-tale invented in the interest of a land-owning aristocracy. The democratic equivalent of this fairy-tale is the superstition that enough people of good will may be persuaded by rational argument to take planned action. History shows that the social reality is quite different. The course of historical development is never shaped by theoretical constructions, however excellent, although such schemes might, admittedly, exert some influence, along with many other less rational (or even quite irrational) factors. Even if such a rational plan coincides with the interests of powerful groups it will never be realized in the way in which it was conceived, in spite of the fact that the struggle for its realization would then become a major factor in the historical process. The real outcome will always be very different from the rational construction. It will always be the resultant of the momentary constellation of contesting forces. Furthermore, under no circumstances could the outcome of rational planning become a stable structure; for the balance of forces is bound to change. All social engineering, no matter how much it prides itself on its realism and on its scientific character, is doomed to remain a Utopian dream.
p. 42

Karl Popper The Poverty of Historicism - (1936) 1957

The IMF is explicit in its antidemocratic leanings, what it calls "political considerations.” The SDR blueprint calls for the appointment of “an advisory board of eminent experts” to provide direction on the amount of money printing in the new SDR system. Perhaps these "eminent experts” would be selected from among the same economists and central bankers who led the international monetary system to the brink of destruction in 2008. In any case, they would be selected without the public hearings and press scrutiny that come in democratic societies and would be able to operate in secret once appointed.

Un Autre Couple Historique

Traduction?

When a natural system reaches the point of criticality and collapses through a phase transition, it goes through a simplification process that results in greatly reduced systemic scale, which also reduces the risk of another megaevent. This is not true in all man-made complex systems. Government intervention in the form of bailouts and money printing can temporarily arrest the cascade of failures. Yet it cannot make the risk go away. The risk is latent in the system, waiting for the next destabilizing event.

One solution to the problem of risk that comes from allowing a system to grow to a megascale is to make the system smaller, which is called descaling. This is why a mountain ski patrol throws dynamite on unstable slopes before skiing starts for the day. It is reducing avalanche danger by descaling, or simplifying, the snow mass. In global finance today, the opposite is happening. The financial ski patrol of central bankers is shoveling more snow onto the mountain. The financial system is now larger and more concentrated than immediately prior to the beginning of the market collapse in 2007.
p. 211

James Rickards - Currency Wars

“Fun-house” Mirrors of History

The deployment of the B-17s [in the Philippines] and the hopes vested in them revealed American attitudes on the brink of war and during it: a chronic underestimation, rooted in part in racial stereotypes, of Japanese military abilities and a persistent overestimation of American technology. In turn, so opinion polls showed, most Americans seemed to view war with Japan—though not with Germany—eagerly, almost cavalierly. "U.S. Cheerfully Faces War with Japan," Life claimed on the eve of Pearl Harbor. Americans felt, "rightly or wrongly, that the Japs were pushovers," a schoolboy’s word congruent with [Magaret] Mead’s metaphor of a nation placing a chip on its shoulder.⁹⁸ The hope of unleashing its bombers against Japan, perhaps in a surprise attack, also accounted for much of the indignation felt about Japan’s act of "infamy" (as FDR called it) on December 7. What galled American leaders was not simply Japan’s treachery but their frustration at having it occur before the United States could mount its own surprise.
p. 62

Michael S. Sherry - 1995

98. On polls and Life, see O’Neill, Democracy at War, 73.

“Merkozy Sweepstakes” circa 1848

...a body remains constant unless the body is acted upon by an external force...

Echos From The Graves Of Our Forefathers

A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both.

James Madison

When a people shall have become incapable of governing themselves, and fit for a master, it is of little consequence from what quarter he comes.

George Washington

In republican governments, men are all equal; equal they are also in despotic governments: in the former, because they are everything; in the latter, because they are nothing.

Montesquieu

I pretend not to teach, but to inquire; and therefore cannot but confess here again,–that external and internal sensation are the only passages I can find of knowledge to the understanding. These alone, as far as I can discover, are the windows by which light is let into this DARK ROOM. For, methinks, the understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little openings left, to let in external visible resemblances, or ideas of things without: which, would they but stay there, and lie so orderly as to be found upon occasion, it would very much resemble the understanding of a man, in reference to all objects of sight, and the ideas of them.

John Locke

Catching Up With “Piercing” Disapprobation

Just this morning, the Wall Street Journal ran a feature about how the Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into the activities of the lawyers who worked for the assorted shark tanks that ran the world economy into the ditch. The SEC isn't looking into lawyers who were complicit in the fraud. It is looking into lawyers who helped build the stonewalls that went up when the true breadth and depth of the scandal started to come to light. This is a huge and messy legal fight – looked at in a certain way, the SEC may well be going after those lawyers for what they did on behalf of their clients, a tactic usually used against mob lawyers, and one that has been the occasion for a lengthy and brutal battle of the motions — but what it does is illustrate, again, what an utterly corrupt nation the United States of America was in the first decade of the 21st century. The governing elites, all of them, were complicit in massive fraud against the rest of us. Either they participated in it, which would be the bankers and (it appears) their lawyers, or they condoned and celebrated it, which would be the financial press and the elite media, or they shirked their duty to protect the political commonwealth from being hijacked, which would be the members of both parties in the government, and us, for letting so much of the country run on automatic pilot for so long.

This was a banana republic. It was a failed state in everything except the fact that no tanks rolled in the streets. The terrorists were not hiding in Waziristan. They were having lunch at Cipriani's and sitting in luxury boxes at the Meadowlands. The government existed only to increase their profits and to provide a quasi-legal context for organized piracy. There was an extraordinary contempt for the law, for the institutions of government, and for the people the law and those institutions were supposed to serve. The country was cored out. It was a shell of a country and a shell corporation, and it has not recovered yet.

The 'End' of Occupy and the Corruption of Our Country

“Cabbage” Contentions

on top of James Rickards' Currency Wars

Is It Time to Invest in Europe?

(1:01:30)  "...We've reached a point, The Profound Point in Economic History: Where the truth is unpalatable to the political class. And that truth is that the scale and the magnitude of the problem is larger than their ability to respond. And it terrifies them."  -- Hugh Hendry, May Day 2012

h/t Lauren Lyster/Capital Account → Simone Foxman/Business Insider

America has, in fact, run trade deficits large enough t0 wipe out its gold hoard under the old rules of the game. Still, the idea of the gold standard was not to deplete nations of gold, but rather to force them to get their financial house in order long before the gold disappeared. In the absence of a gold standard and the real—time adjustments it causes, the American people seem unaware of how badly U.S. finances have actually deteriorated.

While this example may seem extreme, it is exactly how most of the world monetary system worked until forty years ago. In 1950, the United States had official gold reserves of over 20,000 metric tons. Due to persistent large trade deficits, at the time with Europe and japan rather than China, U.S. gold reserves had dropped to just over 9,000 metric tons when Nixon closed the gold window in 1971. That drop of 11,000 metric tons in the twenty—one years from 1950 to 1971 went mostly to a small number of export powerhouses.
p. 108