Category Archives: Ideology

Lew Rockwell On The Climatista Totalitarians

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Lew Rockwell in The Misesean Vision:

“Let me give another example of the banality of evil. Several decades ago, some crackpots had the idea that mankind’s use of fossil fuels had a warming effect on the weather. Environmentalists were pretty fired up by the notion. So were many politicians. Economists were largely tongue-tied because they had long ago conceded that there are some public goods that the market can’t handle; surely the weather is one of them.

“Enough years go by and what do you have? Politicians from all over the world, every last one of them a huckster of some sort only pretending to represent their nations, gathering in a posh resort in Europe to tax the world and plan its weather down to precise temperatures half a century from now.

“In the entire history of mankind, there has not been a more preposterous spectacle than this!

“I don’t know if it is tragedy or farce that the meeting on global warming came to an end with the politicians racing home to deal with snowstorms and record cold temperatures.”

Bill Anderson On The New KKK: Kleptocrats, Kartels, and Kon Men

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“As I see it, the bankers are not clueless at all. They understand the game, they understand that the government is going to clean up the mess that they and their friends in Congress and the Bush and Obama administrations have created, and they understand that their antics are going to give them what they always have wanted: a nice, cozy, financial cartel which will provide sweet political contributions for the political classes, bonuses and high pay for themselves, and very little for everyone else. Continue reading →

Goldman Charity Prompted By PR Concerns

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RaceTotheBottom, a law blog on corporate regulatory issues, has this on the latest PR move  by Goldman Sachs, one we noted in our previous blog post on Haiti. which mentioned the donations made by the big banks.

“The latest effort by Goldman to ameliorate the criticism is apparently to require top officers and managers to donate a certain percentage of their compensation to charity. As the NYT noted:

* While the details of the latest charity initiative are still under discussion, the firm’s executives have been looking at expanding their current charitable requirements for months and trying to understand whether such gestures would damp public anger over pay, according to a person familiar with the matter who did not want to be identified because of the delicacy of the pay issue.

Apparently Bear Stearns had done something similar in the past, requiring the top 1000 employees to contribute 4% of their compensation to charity.

The specifics have apparently not yet been determined. Nonetheless, unlike the stock bonuses, the approach effectively reduces the amount of compensation paid to each employee.

Goldman could have considered reducing the amounts paid in compensation and contributed the saved amounts directly to charity. The financial institution in fact added an additional $200 million to its charitable foundation. But making direct contributions would have potentially violated state law.

Corporations are obligated to profit maximize. Some portion of the company’s profits can be donated to charity. Companies may do so, however, only if there is a business benefit. See RMBCA § 3.02(15)(permitting “donations, or do any other act, not inconsistent with law, that furthers the business and affairs of the corporation.”). For modest amounts of contributions, the business benefit can be vague, with enhanced reputation in the community enough of a justification.

For more significant amounts, however, there must be a sufficient nexus to the business of the company. Had Goldman chosen to donate 5% of the amount left aside for compensation, an amount that would probably exceed $1 billion, it would have needed to show some type of meaningful connection to its business. Any failure to do so would likely generate lawsuits from shareholders alleging that the board had failed to engage in the required profit maximization.”

My Comment:

Isn’t this exactly why the more laws you have on the books, the more complicated your problems get?

Think about it. Goldman can’t make direct charitable contributions, because companies are obligated to maximize profits. Why are they obligated to maximize profits?

Because that’s what shareholders are due, per company law.

You might ask whether maximizing profits is always in a company’s best interests, versus building long term value or market share or any number of other things that stake-holders in the company might value more than high returns, but those things don’t count, because that’s how a law works – like a blunt instrument.

And then when managers focus on these short-term horizons and start doing legal (or illegal) tricks to show quick gains on their books, then we need another set of laws to curb them, with incentives running in the opposite direction….

The end result is a muddle of misplaced directives and restrictions that distort the market.
And people criticize the free market!

US Military to Coordinate Haiti Earthquake Relief

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Update: Thanks to reader Jeff for this video of an outfit helping with Haiti’s water needs. It might be a better place for donations than any government relief effort.

Original Post:

I haven’t commented on the Haiti earthquake, mainly because I haven’t been on top of the details. Besides, there’s so much coverage in the MSM about it. My beat here remains the untold story.

But one angle does trouble me. The intervention of the military. I can’t bring myself to say they shouldn’t be involved, which would be the principled thing to say, but it bothers me a lot:

“Sometimes it takes a catastrophe to demonstrate just how much more the U.S. military is able to do than simply kill the enemy. Only the U.S. can initially control flights into and out of the Port-au-Prince airport from aboard a nearby Coast Guard cutter, while waiting for an Air Force special-ops team to set up shop at the airport and step up operations to 24/7. Only U.S. warships have the capability to generate up to 400,000 gallons of fresh water a day from seawater. Only the U.S. military can send a spy drone from California to fly lazy orbits over Port-au-Prince snapping close to 1,000 pictures a day, which when compared with similar ones shot last summer, create a map of the hardest hit areas that can be instantly relayed to those working on the ground.

Only the U.S. military has enough aluminum matting to boost the runway capacity of Port-au-Prince airport. Only the U.S. military has the surveillance capability to quickly assess additional Haitian airfields and seaports for use in rescue relief operations. Only the U.S. military has the wide variety of vessels and aircraft to utilize those fields and ports, including air-cushioned vehicles capable of ferrying 60 tons of supplies from ship to shore at 40 knots. (See TIME’s exclusive photos of the aftermath of the earthquake.)

But the limits of U.S. capability can also be seen: The Pentagon diverted an unmanned Global Hawk drone bound for Afghanistan to Haiti instead, to photograph the damage there. “We were about to send that Global Hawk over to the war” until the earthquake, explained Air Force Col. Bradley Butz. “It will stay here until the President says it’s time to send it forward.”

While the drone had no comment about its sudden change of mission, some of those bound for Haiti welcomed the new assignment after more than eight years of war. “Marines are definitely warriors first,” Captain Clark Carpenter said Friday as his unit prepared to ship out to Haiti from North Carolina. “But we are equally as compassionate when we need to be, and this is a role that we like to show – a compassionate warrior that can reach out that helping hand to those who need it.”

Read more at Time for the corporate media’s view of the intervention.

And read Michel Chossudovsky, for the deep structure of the intervention, recent US interventions in Haiti, and the extent and implications of a US military presence there (he argues that it’s to monitor and intervene in Cuba and Venezuela).

I recall the tsunami relief effort in 2004 and the intrusion of military vessels and spy satellites into Indonesia and other regions in Asia. Humanitarian interventions are a prime locus for state meddling, because most people will feel reluctant to second-guess what’s happening. They don’t want come off as hard-hearted carping critics, with nothing positive to offer.

A life saved in Haiti is good PR for a life or two killed elsewhere. If such calculations are mathematical (and with the state they always have to be), then we are indeed better off with the US military, many would say.

Meanwhile, JP Morgan, I see, is donating a million to the relief effort.

And Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America are giving a million apiece too. That will be millions taken from the tax-payer and rival banks long defunct. But from wherever it comes,  lives will be saved, right?

Thus do they wash their hands clean of guilt.

Who knows.

Maybe Lloyd Blankfein IS doing god’s work.

Or, at least, he’s Dean of the Jeffrey Levitt School of Philanthropy.

[For those with short memories, Levitt stole some $15 million in the 1980s, in the biggest white-collar crime in Maryland history, and almost single-handedly brought down the savings and loan business in the state.  One reason he was able to get away with his thieving for so long was that he was careful to make judicious and well-publicized charitable donations].

Sith-Lord Sweep: AG’s Pending Indictments Cover Major Hedgies, Journalists, and Regulators

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Corporate finance generalist, investment banker and expert in derivatives, Austin Burrell, sums up last week’s announcement by Attorney-General Eric Holder that there are 5000 pending indictments [sic] arising out of the investigation of fraud in the capital markets:

[Note: the DOJ is involved in some 5000 odd cases of fraud related to the financial industry… Continue reading →

Time To Talk About the Elephant

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Crazy terrorist or method to his madness? When will the media start providing context?

From Mondoweiss:

“He [Balawi’s brother] described Mr. Balawi as a “very good brother” and a “brilliant doctor,” saying that the family knew nothing of Mr. Balawi’s writings under a pseudonym on jihadi Web sites. He said, however, that his brother had been “changed” by last year’s three-week-long Israeli offensive in Gaza, which killed about 1,300 Palestinians…. Continue reading →

Pankaj Mishra On The Strength Of Passivity

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The old world, with its failures, weaknesses, and poverty, has at least a proper estimation of the limits of human action, says writer Pankaj Mishra in an oped in the New York Times, last August:

“India may have been passive after the Mumbai attacks. But India has not launched wars against either abstract nouns or actual countries that it has no hope of winning or even disengaging from. Another major terrorist assault on our large and chaotic cities is very probable, but it is unlikely to have the sort of effect that 9/11 had on America. Continue reading →

Recession Brings Fall In Crime Rates

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The recession is dealing body blows to the rationale of many great society programs, that poverty leads to crime. First, there was the unmasking of a large part of the most affluent part of the country, its financial elites, as little better than a criminal class. Now, comes news that crime rates are down as the recession continues. Continue reading →

Anarchism In the Kibbutz Movement

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Haaretz on a study of anarchism in the Kibbutz movement:

“If there is a vision of Israel that can avoid the polarization and mythmaking of much Diaspora and Israeli discourse, it requires an appreciation of the complexities of Israeli society. James Horrox’s “A Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement” provides a welcome reminder that Israel wasn’t always seen by radicals as an outpost of Western imperialism. Horrox unearths the utopian, anarchist influences behind the growth of the kibbutz movement in pre-state Israel. Anarchism may be a highly flawed ideology, but at the very least it offered a vision of Zionism that, in not aiming to build a Jewish state, held out the possibility of a land in which Jews and Muslims could coexist peacefully. This was never likely to happen, of course, but at the very least it’s important to remember that Israel didn’t have to be the place that its contemporary detractors and defenders imagine it to be – and it doesn’t have to be that place now.”

My Comment:

Notice the reflexive genuflection to the state. Why is anarchism that promises coexistence a flawed ideology? Isn´t “flawed” a much truer description of the statist ideology rooted in race and faith (Zionism) that guarantees displacement of one people by the other?

“Scientific” Academies Need A Taste Of RICO Too

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Alan Caruba , a conservative writer and reviewer:

“Consider a letter dated October 21, 2009 and signed by the presidents of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, the American Society of Plant Biologists, the Association of Ecosystem Research Center, the American Chemical Society, the American Institute of Biological Sciences, the American Society of Agronomy, the American Statistical Association,

And the Botanical Society of America, the Crop Science Society of America, the Natural Science Collections Alliance, the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the Soil Science Society of America, the Ecological Society of America, the Organization of Biological Field Stations, the Society of Systematic Biologists, and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.

Together, they asserted that “Observations throughout the world make it clear that climate change is occurring, and rigorous scientific research demonstrates that the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver.” It went on to repeat all the usual scary scenarios of rising sea levels, urban heat weaves, wildfires, and other climate-related events.

In a footnote, the letter to U.S. Senators said, “The conclusions in this paragraph reflect the scientific consensus represented by, for example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.S. Global Change Research Program.”

We now know that the “science” being cited by these two entities was, at least in the case of the IPCC, totally rigged, but the presidents of these alleged science-based organizations took it on face value despite ample scientific evidence it was false. The revelations of emails exchanged between the perpetrators of the hoax have demonstrated the deceptions…….

In light of this, who can trust these organizations? And who can trust the “science” produced by NASA and other U.S. agencies that have benefited from billions in grants directed at so-called climate, i.e. global warming research?”