“... poison in your ear ...”

The Only Man Harsher Than Moi

...Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the ‘bankstatocracy’ that has led to what the mainstream financial media calls an ‘unintended’ wealth gap in the consumer sector – between those who recovered from the recession, and those still struggling. Any suggestions that this wealth gap might be intentional is ‘suspicious’ behavior, according to the US government.

Ticket To Ride?

And if all this seems, now, ridiculous and theatrical apprehension on the part of a nineteen-year old boy, I can say only that it didn’t seem remotely ridiculous then. A black person in this democracy is certain to endure the unspeakable and the unimaginable in nineteen years. It is far from an exaggeration to state that many, and by the deliberate will and action of the Republic, are ruined by that time.

White Americans cannot, in the generality, hear this, any more than their European ancestors, and contemporaries, could, or can. If I say that my best friend, black, Eugene, who took his life at the age of twenty-four, had been, until that moment, a survivor, I will be told that he had "personal" problems. Indeed he did, and one of them was trying to find a job, or a place to live, in New York. If I point out that there is certainly a connection between his death (when I was twenty-two) and my departure for Paris (when I was twenty-four) I will be condemned as theatrical.

But I am really saying something very simple. The will of the people, or the State, is revealed by the State’s institutions. There was not, then, nor is there, now, a single American institution which is not a racist institution. And racist institutions-—the unions, for one example, the Church, for another, and the Army—or the military—for yet another, are meant to keep the nigger in his place. Yes: we have lived through avalanches of tokens and concessions but white power remains white. And what it appears to surrender with one hand it obsessively clutches in the other.

"Penis Rampage stands erect for Pussy Riot"

Via Adam Kokesh

Confused? See this and this.

Read Juan Cole and this Piercing analysis.


Listen up, then Free Pussy Riot !

So Sprach Der Amerikanische Prometheus

h/t Messrs Bird & Sherwin

...Now, this is not an easy thing, and the point I want to make, the one point I want to hammer home, is what an enormous change in spirit is involved. There are things which we hold very dear, and I think rightly hold very dear; I would say that the word democracy perhaps stood for some of them as well as any other word. There are many parts of the world in which there is no democracy. There are other things which we hold dear, and which we rightly should. And when I speak of a new spirit in international affairs I mean that even to these deepest of things which we cherish, and for which Americans have been willing to die -- and certainly most of us would be willing to die -- even in these deepest things, we realize that there is something more profound than that; namely, the common bond with other men everywhere. It is only if you do that that this makes sense; because if you approach the problem and say, "We know what is right and we would like to use the atomic bomb to persuade you to agree with us," then you are in a very weak position and you will not succeed, because under those conditions you will not succeed in delegating responsibility for the survival of men. It is a purely unilateral statement; you will find yourselves attempting by force of arms to prevent a disaster.

J. Robert Oppenheimer
SPEECH TO THE ASSOCIATION OF LOS ALAMOS SCIENTISTS
Los Alamos, November 2, 1945

Supplication in the House of the Dead

Depends on what you mean by “reach-around”

When I visited the office of a noted Wall Street gray eminence the day after Paulson accepted the job as treasury secretary, my host said to me, "There’s been a lot of talk about why he did it, and the best explanation I have heard is that he and a lot of the guys he is close to Worry about potential market disruptions that could be big problems if the right guy is not in there with his hand on the tiller. I think he feels like he can really add some value and that he may really be needed? (The mortgage crisis later suggested there may have been some merit to this thesis.)

It is remarkable that there has been a relatively low level of outcry about the steady flow of executives from 55 Broad Street to offices inside the Washington beltway. Vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International Bob Hormats, himself a former senior official, said, "It is fairly unusual. . . I think it is because it has been demonstrated that when Goldman Sachs people get into these jobs, they give no preference to Goldman Sachs. There is no shred of evidence that they use any of[133]their influence on behalf of Goldman Sachs. If there were, just once, given the remarkable activity of Goldman Sachs in the private sector, it would be over. There would be an incredible hue and cry."

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.

Ydyʼát Wwynd

meshuga!

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

Hostelry de Sarkozy

after C.D. Batchelor

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

The Rhyme Of The Ancient Historian

He is seeking to exorcise a history which is also a curse. He wants the old order, which came into existence through unchecked greed and wanton murder, to redeem itself without further bloodshed—without, that is, any further menacing itself—and without coercion. This, old orders never do, less because they would not than because they cannot. They cannot because they have always existed in the relation to a force which they have had to subdue. This subjugation is the key to their identity and the triumph and justification of their history, and it is also on this continued subjugation that their material well-being depends. One may see the history, which is now indivisible from oneself, has been full of errors and excesses; but this is not the same thing as seeing that, for millions of people, this history—oneself—has been nothing but an intolerable act, a stinking prison, a shrieking grave. It is not so easy to see that, for millions of people, life itself depends on the speediest possible demolition of this history, even if this means the leveling, or the destruction of its heirs. And whatever this history may have given to to the subjugated is of absolutely no value, since they have never been free to reject it; they will never even be able to assess it until they are free to take from it what they need, and to add to history the monumental fact of their presence. The South African coal miner, or the African digging for roots in the bush, or the Algerian mason working in Paris, not only to have no reason to bow down before Shakespeare, or Descartes, or Westminster Abbey, or the Cathedral at Chartres: they have, once these monuments intrude on their attention, no honorable access to them. Their apprehension of this history cannot fail to reveal to them that they have been robbed, maligned, and rejected: to bow down before that history is to accept that history's arrogant and unjust judgement.

This is why, ultimately, all attempts at dialogue between the subdued and subduer, between those placed within history and those dispersed outside, break down.

James Baldwin

WFKATGWOT

“... the war formerly known as the global war on terrorism ...”

Furthermore, acting on behalf of the United States, the president exercises this supposed right without warning, without regard to claims of national sovereignty, without Congressional authorization, and without consulting anyone other than Michael Vickers and a few other members of the national security apparatus. The role allotted to the American people is to applaud, if and when notified that a successful assassination has occurred. And applaud we do, for example, when a daring raid by members in SEAL Team Six secretly enter Pakistan to dispatch Osama bin Laden with two neatly placed kill shots. Vengeance long deferred making it unnecessary to consider what second-order political complications might ensue.

“Scoring the Global War on Terror”

But, it's all good, because there is a "bipartisan" group of senators who agree that Assad is a monster and because John McCain, World Leader, is in Cairo, using his well-known diplomatic talents to smooth over relations with another of our important allies in "the war on terror," a phrase that one day is going to send historians spiraling into fits of uncontrollable laughter.

“Waiting For A Friend”

Real GDP per Capita - Axis (Bold) As Allies

“Yeah! Yeah!”

“They're all bold as love”

“Operation Indigenous Liberation”

Or Not

Just like Tunisia and Egypt - and unlike Libya and Syria - the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain was indigenous, legitimate, non-violent and uncontaminated by Western or Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) infiltration.

The response was a major crackdown plus a Saudi Arabian invasion over the causeway to Manama. That was the tacit result of a deal struck between the House of Saud and Washington; we give you an Arab resolution allowing you to go to the UN and then launch the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's humanitarian bombing on Libya, you leave us alone to smash this Arab Spring nonsense (see Exposed: the US-Saudi Libya deal Asia Times Online, April 2, 2011.)

Why Bahrain is not Syria

Oh Yeah. The “Right” People Are In Control

BRICs flying in the PIIGS

Greece is burning in every sense of the word. It is both politically and economically bankrupt yet Europe attempts to extract blood from a dried up turnip.

Athens Burning:
Tens of Banks in Flames
After Athens Passes
Austerity Bill

Monetary Adventures

“You LOT! – (£ ¥ € $ ?) – Don't stop. Give it all you got.”

Makes The World Go Round

Only a moderate amount of transformation here. A simple “register” shift to four of the six currency pairs in this chart helps extricate them from the other busy squiggles.  Four of the data sets are making repeat appearances and will likely serve as a thematic backdrop for future work in varying degrees. They are: Spot Oil Price, Effective (ha! – that's rich) Federal Funds Rate, Gross Domestic Product and the Unemployment rate ... as measured by the Fed anyway.

There's a lot of noise in the Fed's data, and not just from the measurements. The Bureau Of Labor Statistics and The Federal Reserve have been working together for more than twenty years to over-analyze and under-report the inflation that anyone with a checkbook and a pulse confronts when dropping gelt. Seriously, they don't “shop” like the rest of us.

Advertising Makes Me Nauseous

& "want to fwow up... projectilishly" *

Consumer Degradation Trends

Even though I turned in by cable box nine months ago, I am still accosted by the professional descendants of Edward Bernays† and their illicit, ever less covert brainwashing.

This occurs whenever I happen into a bar for a quick Stout or watch what little television I allow through my broadband connection.

I find my self overwhelmed by how abjectly dreadful the purported entertainment and its attendant corporate wrappings are.

Yves Smith at naked capitalism ‡  had a post earlier this week shredding a recent Wired article that attempted to soften the reality – or soft peddle excuses regarding the self-destructing employees at Foxconn.