Tyler Durden On The Plunge Protection Team

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Tyler Durden at Zerohedge has this week’s important report. None of it is surprising if, like me, you are a paranoid conspiracist, tired of being proved right over and over and over The report only confirms what any sensible observer, who wasn’t biased or ideological, could have seen.

I differ from Durden on a number of things, one being that I’m not sure the answer to our problems is an expansion of Federal regulation or the Department of Justice.

But I don’t fall into the opposite school of thinking, either. Let’s destroy national sovereignty isn’t the solution. I think there are other approaches, but since no one asked me, I’ll keep them to myself.  Let the ideologues knock themselves out. It’s too much fun watching to stop it.

The ideological divide, and purist positions are part of the problem, not the answer. And I wouldn’t be surprised if I were to find out that it has been set up that way intentionally. It certainly plays into controlling the terms of the debate.

Be that as it may, my position is that “insider trading” is secondary to the entire post-war conduct of the state-corporate complex.

Still, does that mean we need to defend Paulson…or Gupta…if they are guilty as charged? No. Live by force and fraud, die by force and fraud is a reasonable approach to take.

We needn’t take the part of the prosecution. Indeed, we can’t, when we remember how many people were lying on their loan forms, how many journalists had their lips stuck to the backsides of politicians, celebrities and Wall Street bigwigs they were supposed to be covering, and how many regulators looked the other way through it all.

But it is also wrong to think of Paulson or Gupta as private citizens either. They are BOTH king-pins of the state-corporate complex.  We don’t know exactly what either did wrong, and at this point Gupta’s actions look like peanuts next to the role of the plunge-protection team, but let’s wait and see it unfold.

I feel compassionate to them as human beings, for sure. And my own take was always that Paulson should just have been asked to step down, return that part of his fortune that was  dishonestly acquired to the victims or give it away to some charity of his choosing.

No waste of tax-payer money, no show trials, no time wasted.

But you know, in that case, we will also have to let the jails open and let the population out too. Including murderers (you don’t know what led them to kill, do you?).

If we are going to be determinists (“Bernanke’s money printing” made me steal and lie, your honor), then surely murderers should be let out too (“Child abuse made me kill) and serial cannibals (“Vicious snuff movies made me what I am, your honor). Let them all go.

And while you’re at it, stop ANY corporation or individual from using the laws (backed the by the state) too.

Where is the libertarian outrage over Googe’s lawsuits (using Federal courts) against competitors? Where is the outrage over corporate non-disclosure agreements (upheld by federal courts) signed under duress of various kinds to hide even criminal wrong-doing? Where is the outrage over blackmail and bribery used to steal what are by common understanding public funds meant for public use or to damage weaker firms or individuals? No outrage, right?

Instead, libertarians selectively defend fraud (“no such thing as IP”; no such thing as blackmail; no such thing as fraudulent advertising or marketing; no such thing as damaging pornography; no such thing as bribery).  Or rather, they’re all good things!

You get my drift.

Behold the ideologue. He’s not a bad guy. He’s even a good guy. But he’s become too clever in his conceit (pun intended…ideology is an extended conceit…in the literary sense… and it is conceited in the moral sense). So clever that common-sense and honor have fled long ago.

[Links and tidying up to follow…I just had to unburden myself of my feelings this morning. And by the way, I’m quite sure some of these blogs on the libertarian circuit are “sponsored” by various parties” as go-to sites.

I do go to them. But I still think my own thoughts.

Zerohedge:

“Today, BusinessWeek’s Michael Serrill and Jonathan Neumann have released a blockbuster report based on a FOIA response by the Treasury, which proves that in America rules are only for little people, that this country has been a banana republic for years, that Animal Farm was spot on, and gives excruciating detail of how Hank Paulson tipped off a select group of Goldman diaspora hedge fund managers about the eventual failure of Fannie and Freddie 7 weeks ahead of this information becoming public knowledge. The report basically is a summary of a meeting that took place at the offices of Eton Mindich’s Eton Park headquarters on July 21, 2008, 7 days after his famous ‘“If you have a bazooka, and people know you have it, you’re not likely to take it out,” speech and 7 weeks before both GSEs effectively filed for bankruptcy and were put into conservatorship. Now if it only ended there it would have been fine – a case of potential criminal collusion between the government (although nothing specific against Paulson as he didn’t actually trade: he just made sure his former Goldman colleagues made money), and the 0.00001% in the face of a few multi-billionaires who most certainly did trade on material non-public information sourced by Hank. Where it however gets worse is when one considers the actual role of one Eric Mindich in the hierarchy of the Asset Managers’ committee of the President’s Working Group on Capital Markets, better known of course as the PPT: a topic we discussed first back in September 2009 when we asked “What Is Goldman Alum Eric Mindich’s Role As Chair Of The Asset Managers’ Committee Of The President’s Working Group?” Back then we did not get an answer. Luckily, courtesy of a few answered FOIA requests, some real investigative journalism, and not reporting for the sake of brown-nosing just so one can get soundbites for their next name dropping “blockbuster” and straight to HBO movie, we are starting to get the full picture of just how high in US government the Goldman Sachs controlled “crony capitalist” adminsitration truly runs.

Before we get into the details of Mr Mindich’s curious relationship with the government, here is the gist of the BusinessWeek piece, which as noted focuses on Paulson who “said he had erred by not punishing Bear Stearns shareholders more severely. The secretary, then 62, went on to describe a possible scenario for placing Fannie and Freddie into “conservatorship” — a government seizure designed to allow the firms to continue operations despite heavy losses in the mortgage markets.”

The gathering comprised some of Wall Street’s most storied investors. Mindich, a former chief strategy officer of New York- based Goldman Sachs, started Eton Park in 2004 with $3.5 billion, at the time one of the biggest hedge-fund launches ever. [Dinakar] Singh, a former head of Goldman’s proprietary-trading desk, also began his fund in 2004, in partnership with private- equity firm Texas Pacific Group Ltd. Lone Pine’s [Stephen] Mandel worked as a retail analyst at Goldman before joining Julian Robertson’s Tiger Management LLC, one of the most successful hedge funds of the 1980s and 1990s. He started his own firm in 1997. [Daniel] Och was co-head of U.S. equity trading at Goldman before founding Och-Ziff in 1994. The publicly listed firm managed $28.9 billion in November. One other Goldman Sachs alumnus was at the meeting: Frank Brosens, founder and principal of Taconic Capital Advisors LP, who worked at Goldman as an arbitrageur and who was a protege of Robert Rubin, who went on to become Treasury secretary.

In other words the point of the meeting was nothing short of the former Goldman CEO telling all his former Goldman colleagues just what he was planning on doing in his capacity as Treasury Secretary.

Others also benefited: Non-Goldman Sachs alumni who attended included short seller James Chanos of Kynikos Associates Ltd., who helped uncover the Enron Corp. accounting fraud; GSO Capital Partners LP co-founder Bennett Goodman, who sold his firm to Blackstone Group LP in early 2008; Roger Altman, chairman and founder of New York investment bank Evercore Partners Inc.; and Steven Rattner, a co-founder of private-equity firm Quadrangle Group LLC, who went on to serve as head of the U.S. government’s Automotive Task Force.”

Indian Opposition Says No To Wal-Mart

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Bloomberg reports on Indian opposition to corporate giants forcing open the lucrative retail market:

“Opposition parties and government allies rounded on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s bid to open India’s retail sector to foreign companies like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT), stalling parliament for a fifth day with their protests.

In a rare concerted attack on the ruling Congress party, Singh’s two largest parliamentary partners joined the opposition in criticizing the policy approved by the Cabinet last week, forcing both houses of parliament to adjourn. Overseas retailers stand to be barred from opening stores in at least 19 of India’s 45 largest cities with state assemblies set to veto their entry. “

I’m glad to hear this.   Even though it’s too little too late. The spineless Manmohan Singh has already opened up local mutual funds to foreign investment, with all the economic and other dangers of cross-border financial flows and hot money.

Of course, the globalist mouthpieces, (Time: Jyothi Thottam, “Why India Should Stop Fearing Walmart”), are anxious for it to happen.

The big media outlets like to put a local face on the policy (“India’s Wobbly Walmart Embrace’), but astute readers aren’t fooled.

One writes:

Let’s say our law says that Walmart will source 30% from small players. What about the rest, the 70%? Is it going to source 100% of it from India or is allowed to import the rest, i.e. 70%? According to the WTO you cannot stop them from importing.  The example the writer gave was from Bharti-Walmart which is a wholesale cash and carry store (like SAM’s) not Walmart – it is the consumer side which will kill the Kirana business and the Indian manufacturers. She talks about the food supply and global chains without even knowing what it means. …..

They are in the business of making money and lots of it for their US shareholders. They are not in the business of reducing cost for Indian consumers. If it happens that they buy in bulk in China and flood the Indian market with imports, so be it.  Today India is a net Export-Import deficit country with $85 Billion per year. This is the contribution of Dr. Singh…from a few billion a year trade deficit that we had before to having to borrow $85 Billion a year to pay our imports minus exports. So what do you think will happen when Walmart imports $100 Billion dollars worth of goods into India every year?

Now you have to somehow find current $85 Billion net deficit + $100 Billion = $185 Billion dollars PER YEAR.  In the case of the USA, it was simple. The USA borrowed $3 Trillion to pay the deficit. It has the luxury of printing dollars. So if China demands money, they can print it. They just recently printed $600 Billion. India can not do this and India will ultimately be screwed.  In the 17th Century, India was a net exporter. Then the Britishers came and India became a net importer and in turn a poor country. That will happen after a few years if our appetite for imports continues to grow and our exports dont keep up with the rise in imports as happened in the last many years. Today, we borrow soft money and hard money from the IMF, bonds, FDI in other sectors etc. to pay the difference of $85 Billion of dollars that we have to pay to import more than what we export. How long do you think this is sustainable? How long do you think we can continue to borrow either via the FDI route or via IMF loans to pay for our imports. India is one of the few countries where you can allow all these things, including changing our nuclear policy, allowing FDI, etc. without discussing this in Parliament first.

Remember also that Walmart started putting in RFID tags into their clothes from last year, August 1, 2010, making it possible at some point that you could be tracked anywhere you went, because of your clothes. This is incipiently fascistic.

India FDI Watch has a detailed report on what really happens when foreign lobbyists get big retail giants into the market, monopsony:

“Industrial licensing had brought monopolies to India but monopsony is a new phenomenon for India which has recently come to the forefront in the manufacturing goods sector due to the increased specialization in the global process of production. This has led to the concept of a single supplier to a large producer who obtains the goods at a ransom. The larger the amount of any commodity a large retailer can purchase, the greater the concession on price, delivery, it can extract. This is a demonstration of monopsonistic procurement and the awesome monopsonistic purchasing power which comes with it. This is unique to the modern world of digital instant communication (branding, streamlined logistics distribution can drive down prices still further) and hugely affects the agricultural commodities market also, as shown. The more of a commodity large retailers purchase in bulk, the lower the prices growers of agricultural commodities obtain!”

More in this report on how the globalists at WTO would like to destroy the decentralized production of food:

“The Bank has identified laws such as the Essential Commodities Act (1955) the Agricultural Produce and marketing Act (APMC 1972) and the Prevention of Black Marketing and Maintenance of Supplies of Essential Commodities Act (1980) which have defended the rights of farmers to a just price and the rights of the poor to a fair price for food, as having “prevented the free mobility of agricultural produce and thus segmented the Indian domestic market into many smaller markets.

The government has also imposed restrictions on foreign investment in the retail of agricultural commodities, and on both foreign and domestic private investment in wholesale. These restrictions have collectively discouraged and/or prevented the private sector from undertaking large-scale investment in agricultural storage, marketing, or processing activities – an example of horizontal fragmentation preventing desirable vertical integration. The result is that today there is no large, organized, efficient pan-Indian supply chain in the agricultural sector, including in horticulture. What the Bank defines as “fragmentation” is in fact self-organized local systems of production and trade which are not controlled by a centralized store or by centralized, monopolistic corporations. And the repeated attack on India’s “geography” shows how anti-nature World Bank’s basic economic thinking is. Not only the World Bank like to wish away India’s diversity and geography, it would like to destroy India’s food sovereignty.

Thus, the Bank takes apples grown in Himachal and says it would be cheaper to import them for Chennai. This was exactly the argument the trade liberalisers had used to justify wheat imports. However, the imported wheat turned out to be twice as costly as domestic wheat. Navdanya has filed a case in the Supreme Court against wheat imports.”

Note:

I’ve shopped at Walmart, and they have great prices, true. But in the US I don’t have that much of a choice of smaller shops.  In India, however, there are plenty of choices….and it should stay that way.  Anyway, I don’t think I should be shopping at Walmart, even if the prices are low.  It’s a question of choosing smart self-interest over self-defeating self-interest. I like cheap prices, but I also want to live in a country of small shops and farms, not one of huge commercial farms and supermarkets.

It’s time to buy from local retailers, wherever possible.

The American-made Retail E-guide features over 2500 American-made products from over a dozen popular retail stores like Dillard’s, Home Depot, TJ Maxx, and Costco.

How Americans Can Buy American
Post Office Box 780839, Orlando, Florida 32878-0839
Tel: 1-888-US OWNED (1-888-876-9633)
Emergency Backup: 407-234-4626
Email the Author: Roger Simmermaker
Web: http://www.howtobuyamerican.com

On this issue, I agree with OccupyWallStreet.

If we can’t lower taxes to bring companies back, we can boycott multinationals with predatory practices. Giant corporations of this kind have nothing to do with the free market.

From TowardFreedom:

“The shiny happy people featured in Wal-Mart advertisements, as well as the company’s continued PR claims of corporate responsibility (“We at Wal-Mart take an active interest in conserving the environment!”), simply doesn’t match the frustrating reality of their corporate behavior. Even the largely toothless Environmental Protection Agency, for example, a federal regulatory outfit that sometimes seems to exist simply to provide permits for giant corporate polluters, has managed to prosecute Wal-Mart for Clean Air Act violations in nine states, due to the company’s stubborn insistence on storing lawn fertilizer and other toxic chemicals in parking lots located near local watershed areas.

Greenwald even takes us to Wal-Mart’s global factories in where Wal-Mart workers put in 14 hour days 7 days a week and brush their teeth with fireplace ashes because their salaries don’t allow them to buy tooth paste. Implicitly in this global tour is the fact that, while wrapping itself in the American flag and a shallow sham version of patriotism, Wal-Mart cares very little for the health and well being of its workers, the environment, or the health of the U.S. economy as a whole, beyond the short-term dollar value it can extract to increase its profit margin.

While all of this is deeply sobering, Greenwald wisely chooses to end the film on a powerful high note, spotlighting and interviewing several citizen/activists – normal people just like you and me – who have chosen to organize their communities to oppose Wal-Mart’s predatory behavior and fight for more just and sustainable local economies.”

The Invisible Wealth Of The Rothschilds

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Accounting for the Rothschild Wealth and Influence

by Markus Angelicus: November 21, 1997 :

Morton (1962) noted that the Rothschild wealth was estimated at over $6 billion US in 1850. Not a significant amount in today’s dollars; however, consider the potential future value compounded over 147 years!

Taking $6 billion (and assuming no erosion of the wealth base) and compounding that figure at various returns on investment (a conservative range of 4% to 8%) would suggest the following net worth of the Rothschild family enterprise:

$1.9 trillion US (@ 4%)
$7.8 trillion US (@ 5%)
$31.5 trillion US (@ 6%)
$125,189.1 trillion US (@ 7%)
$491,409.0 trillion US (@ 8%)

To give these figures some perspective consider these benchmarks:

A little of $300 billion US buys every ounce of gold in every central bank in the world (see John Kutyn’s estimate (http://www.gold-eagle.com/gold_digest/kutyn111597.html).
U.S. M3 money supply August 1997 was $5.2 trillion
U.S. debt is currently $5.4 trillion.
U.S. GDP (1997; 2nd Q.) is $8.03 trillion.
George Soros’ empire is worth an estimated $20 billion.

Arnaud de Borchgrave writes on April 28, 2011 in The Washington Times:

(You will see that his assessment of the crisis is exactly mine)

“An original $100,000 stake in Mr. Soros‘ fund was worth $150 million by 1994. Between 1970 and 2000, the return was 3,365 percent. (For 10 consecutive years, it did 42.6 percent per year.) In 1992, Mr. Soros bet billions against the British pound – and broke the Bank of England (“Black Wednesday”).

Comment:

I needn’t remind you that this is BEFORE the bursting of the stock market bubble, 9-11, the 2003 stock market revival that was stimulated by the Iraq war, the housing bubble, the 2008 crash, and the gold boom, all of which provided ample opportunities for people in the know to make killings in the market.

Related Posts

The 24..er..4 Companies that Rule the World

See also Zahir Ebrahim: My Experiments In Confusion: The Invisible House of Rothschild

and Zahir Ebrahim: My Experiments In Confusion: The Omnipotent Rothschilds

and Arnaud de Borchgrave: Geneva Gnomes’ Global Dread

(hat-tip to WeAreChange.org, Oklahoma)

Deconstructing Soros’ New World Architecture

BCCI: Hit Man For The IMF

Soros: Front For N.M. Rothschild

The CIA, the US Govt, the Stock Market, and Drug-Running

John Paulson’s Man at Treasury Will Design Regulations

Civil Society + Internationalist + Anonymous = World Government

The Easter Bunny On the DTCC

Another False-Flag

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“We’re done folks. CNBC is reporting that there are now clients running out of the markets entirely because they do not believe their customer funds are safe. That’s the end of it. The belief that there are more MF Globals has now taken hold. The thieves have pushed it too far and now we’ve got the start of a global liquidity run, and with good reason”

—  Karl Denninger at The Market Ticker

[Gerald Celente, noted financial analyst and publisher of The Trends Journal, said recently that he’d lost six figures in the collapse of MF Global, which owned his commodity futures brokerage file and filed for bankruptcy on October 31, 2011. MF Global was headed by corrupt ex-Goldmanite Jon Corzine, who has resigned from MF and  is now being sued by investors.

Celente then called for a run on the banks on a show with talk radio host, Alex Jones, an anti-NWO activist:

“When I say take your money out of the banks and put it under the mattress, this is not advice,” Celente says. “Personally, I buy gold coins from reputable companies. I take my money out of investment funds and I buy gold and silver. You need the three g’s — gold, guns and a get-away plan.”

Celente has called for “direct democracy” recently,  a demand that I think is in tune with what the financial elites want. That’s what made me think the MF collapse was being used as a false-flag of some kind.

It was, maybe, intended to provoke a run and Denninger is amplifying it.

I recall that Max Keiser (a former derivatives trader and leftist who has now set himself up as a critic of derivatives) tried to provoke a bank run on JP Morgan, by telling people to go buy silver in December 2010.

Keiser disengages himself from Al Gore these days, but he still believes in anthropogenic global warming and the need for something to be done about it.

He seems to want chaos and confrontation on the streets, according to those who follow him closely. He is in favor of a carbon exchange, which, as a trader, he probably knows would be very lucrative for insiders.

On the forums of PrisonPlanet, one observer notes that Keiser claimed that if silver went to $47, JP Morgan would collapse.  Well, silver went to $49 this year, and JP Morgan is still around.

I have no idea what Celente’s role is in all that, but it’s all mighty suspicious to me.

He has, for instance, said that he is “all for this Occupy Wall Street”.

No ifs, no buts. No reservations. No questions.

It’s all good, for Mr. Celente. It’s all democracy, even thought it’s apparently paid for by billionaire George Soros, to whom the CIA has essentially outsourced its functions.

I didn’t comment on the story before, not knowing what happened exactly, but now I’m beginning to think it was intended to provoke a run and maximum panic. Apparently, it’s had that effect.

Celente and others are also promoting “direct democracy”, which, like “full transparency”, is something the elites want, whatever its inherent merits. Those merits aren’t the point. The elites will use whatever tool they can.

The point is direct democracy in which the social media is manipulated anonymously by intelligence agencies, corporations, governments, and media shills, is  tyranny by another name.

Here is what I wrote about Celente last month.

Gerald Celente Stabs anti-NWO Folks Front, Back, and Center, October 14, 2011:

I do not  say that direct referendums necessarily lack merit. They might work, were we living in small city states…. and were the internet discontinuous, fragmented, and highly private…. and were most people rational, well-educated, self-critical and self-reliant.

But we aren’t, it isn’t, and they aren’t.

So Direct Internet Democracy will not be anarchism, right or left, and it won’t be Christian liberty. Nor will it be federalism or decentralization.

It will be the direct control of the masses through electronic networks, propaganda, surveillance, and co-option of alternative mouthpieces of all stripes, across the board.

Direct Electronic Democracy = Tyranny

I call it Direct Electronic Action for Tyrants and Demagogues

Which equals DEATH. The death of true liberty.

Albert Pike: Beyond Theism And Atheism

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Correction (9/21/14):

I didn’t research the origin of this quotation when I found it, massively reproduced on the web.

Unfortunately, one blogger has done some research and the letter appears to be a long-standing hoax. Perhaps there’s more to the story, but at this point, it’s necessary to flag the quotation as suspect.

“The Third World War must be fomented by taking advantage of the differences caused by the ‘agentur’ of the ‘Illuminati’ between the political Zionists and the leaders of  Islamic World. The war must be conducted in such a way that Islam (the Moslem Arabic World) and political Zionism (the State of Israel) mutually destroy each other.Meanwhile the other nations, once more divided on this issue will be constrained to fight to the point of complete physical, moral, spiritual and economical exhaustion…We shall unleash the Nihilists and the atheists, and we shall provoke a formidable social cataclysm which in all its horror will show clearly to the nations the effect of absolute atheism, origin of savagery and of the most bloody turmoil. Then everywhere, the citizens, obliged to defend themselves against the world minority of revolutionaries, will exterminate those destroyers of civilization, and the multitude,disillusioned with Christianity, whose deistic spirits will from that moment be without compass or direction, anxious for an ideal, but without knowing where to render itsadoration, will receive the true light through the universal manifestation of the pure doctrine of Lucifer, brought finally out in the public view. This manifestation will result from the general reactionary movement which will follow the destruction of Christianity and atheism, both conquered and exterminated at the same time.”

–     Albert Pike in a letter to Giuseppe Mazzini, excerpt from William Carr’s “Pawns in The Game”

25 Reasons To Be Glad To Be In America

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25 REASONS TO BE GLAD TO BE IN AMERICA

Right now, in this country, even with all its problems,

1. You can buy a condo on a lake for under $15,000.

2. You can buy a house in a good neighborhood that needs a little work for $25,000. You can buy a trailer for under $1000.

3. You can sell unskilled or semi-skilled labor for $12-$20 an hour.

4. You can pay little or no taxes on a wage of under $35,000, if you go into business for yourself, know how to structure it, and are the head of a household with children.

5. You can earn a money-making qualification online for less than $1000, and you can get the money for it, if you don’t have it. You can pay it back on time after your graduate. You can learn how to fix anything in your house that doesn’t need a license, by watching a You-Tube video.  You can learn any language online, for free. You can learn to play a musical instrument for free, and you can record and play your own tapes for free.

6. You can fly to a foreign country and back for under $100, if you know where to look and when.

7. You can buy a fresh loaf of bread, a big bag of crackers, a big bottle of shampoo/detergent, a box of pasta, each for $1.

8. If you bought items in bulk and with coupons, you could even get them for less. And if you cooked your own food and kept it very basic, you could feed yourself for under $50/mth.  Even less, if you fish or have a little garden.

9. You can get a gym membership for $10/mth. You can create a home gym for under $10.

10. Most of the people who were foreclosed on didn’t have much money in their homes. Those that did have the means to sue, a legal system they can use without putting up a dime, and a free PR machine on the web with tools like blogger and wordpress.

11. You can rent a room in any city for $250/mth or even less, if you do some chores. You can live for free if you do housework, or can take care of older folks.  You can rent a trailer for a month for under $300.

12. You can buy a computer for under $200, brand new. Second-hand computers that are functional can be bought for under $100. You can use a computer for free for an hour or more in any library.

13. You can get access to sophisticated hospitals and treatment for an insurance payment of about $100/mth. It’s not full coverage, but it will cover your for emergencies. You can get an alternative consultation for $50. A bottle of vitamins is less than $8. You can buy herbal remedies for even less. You can get excellent health advice free on dozens of internet sites. You can learn yoga online without paying a dime.

14. You can buy a functioning car for under $500.

15. You can borrow money at under 5% for most things and you can structure and restructure your finance in dozens of creative ways to save you money

16. You can buy a stock for $7.

17. You can educate yourself completely free at a good public library, available in any town.

18. You can read practically any classic book in the world on the net, for free.

19. You can make your own movies or documentaries for next to nothing on You-tube.

20. If you have a brilliant idea, you can get someone somewhere interested enough to pay you to develop it.

21. You can work at home and make $15,000/yr with minimal skills, if you don’t mind clerical work.

22.  If you are out of luck, you can get meals and a place to sleep for free, for at least a week, in almost any city in the country. You can buy a presentable work outfit at a thrift store for under $5.

23. Almost anywhere you can find a church or a shelter to feed you and help you find a job, even if you just came out of prison.

24. You can phone anywhere in the US for free on a computer. You can get a basic internet line for $20/mth. Or you can get free wi-fi at dozens of cafes and libraries in any city. You can sit in them and enjoy their facilities, their electricity, and AC and heat for free, day after day, and no one will question you.

25. You can go to sleep every night in peace and quiet, with no airplanes and bombers flying overhead. You breathe clean air. The phone and internet work well almost all the time. The buses run on time. The trains run on time. Taxis are cheap in most cities. So are buses. You can travel anywhere in the country by bus.

Ames: Tax The 1% At 91%

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Mark Ames in a nutshell (which is exactly where nuts belong);

“The eXiled has set up an emergency “deficit crisis” website calling on America to restore President Eisenhower’s top tax rate on the wealthiest 0.1% Americans: RATFOCR. Everyone agrees that the Golden Age for America’s middle-class was under President Eisenhower, when the top tax rate reached 91% for the wealthiest Americans.”

There you have it. 91% taxes is confiscatory. Why not 100%, though? I mean, if it’s all so righteous, just take everything and split it up. Why stop at 91%?

The point is who decides what’s rich? $250000 sounds like a lot of money to most people, including me. But if you have a lot of expenses and are a businessman in New York, it might not be.  Of course, here comes Felix Salmon to say let’s just check your bank balance and tax you if you have $5 million plus. But, suppose you got that $5 million by not having a family, scrimping and saving, and suppose you actually earned much less than $250000, say $100,000? Suppose you have sick relatives or you wanted to bankroll some charity dear to your heart, or to spend the end of your life pursuing your dream, after years of deferring it? What if you hold the savings for an extended family or for relatives living in unstable countries? Who sorts all that out? Mark Ames?

How fair is that? You not only didn’t get the use out of your money, you didn’t get interest from it, because the banks were speculating on it and losing money, and now you have to subsidize the people who spent their money (and got the use of it) or actually debased or stole other people’s money?

I haven’t studied Eisenhower’s tax policies, but if this was his tax-rate, the economy was prosperous in spite of it.  Income disparities today are extreme, but they are caused by all kinds of hidden and open subsidies and redistribution schemes.  Undo them and you won’t have to confiscate property.

Honor

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Honor
by Ada Cambridge
(hat-tip to Ajit Vadakayil)

Me let the world disparage and despise —
As one unfettered with its gilded chains,
As one untempted by its sordid gains,
Its pleasant vice, its profitable lies;
Let Justice, blind and halt and maimed, chastise
The rebel spirit surging in my veins,
Let the law deal me penalties and pains
And make me hideous in my neighbours’ eyes.

But let me fall not in mine own esteem,
By poor deceit or selfish greed debased.
Let me be clean from secret stain and shame,
Know myself true, though false as hell I seem —
Know myself worthy, howsoe’er disgraced —
Know myself right, though every tongue should blame

Climate-Gate: The 2011 Edition

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James Delingpole at The Daily Telegraph breaks the latest from the Climatistas:

“Breaking news: two years after the Climategate, a further batch of emails has been leaked onto the internet by a person – or persons – unknown. And as before, they show the “scientists” at the heart of the Man-Made Global Warming industry in a most unflattering light. Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Ben Santer, Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth, Keith Briffa – all your favourite Climategate characters are here, once again caught red-handed in a series of emails exaggerating the extent of Anthropogenic Global Warming, while privately admitting to one another that the evidence is nowhere near as a strong as they’d like it to be.”

Some quotes from more scrupulous researchers are cited in the article:

/// The IPCC Process ///
Thorne/MetO:
Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical
troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a
wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the
uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these
further if necessary […]
Thorne:
I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it
which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.”

The email writers recognize that public perceptions about ” global freezing” might be ruining the brand value of “global warming” as a technique of social change:

Minns/Tyndall Centre:
In my experience, global freezing is already a bit of a public
relations problem with the media
Kjellen:
I agree with Nick that climate change might be a better labelling than global
warming
Pierrehumbert:
What kind of circulation change could lock Europe into deadly summer heat waves
like that of last summer? That’s the sort of thing we need to think about.”

 [Some of my blogging on climate-gate can be found here and in other posts you can locate by using the Search function on this blog]

The blog Watts Up With That has links to a comprehensive timeline and graphics that display the thirty-year subversion of climate science behind climate-gate.

The Guardian suggests that the new climate emails probably date back to the first group, released in 2009, and that the motive is, again, to sabotage the Durban Climate summit, which starts on Monday:

“The emails appear to be genuine, but the University of East Anglia said the “sheer volume of material” meant it was not yet able to confirm that they were. One of the emailers, the climate scientist Prof Michael Mann, has confirmed that he believes they are his messages. The lack of any emails post-dating the 2009 release suggests that they were obtained at the same time, but held back. Their release now suggests they are intended to cause maximum impact before the upcoming climate summit in Durban which starts on Monday.”

 There are similarities to the first release, says the Guardian:

“In the new release a 173MB zip file called “FOIA2011” containing more than 5,000 new emails, was made available to download on a Russian server called Sinwt.ru today. An anonymous entity calling themselves “FOIA” then posted a link to the file on at least four blogs popular with climate sceptics – Watts Up With That, Climate Audit, TallBloke and The Air Vent.”

But there are also differences:

“The use of points instead of commas to mark the thousands when writing a number – highly unusual in both the UK or US – is sure to lead to speculation about the nationality of those responsible.”

The Guardian also indicates that although not all the emails have been confirmed genuine, the University of East Anglia claims that they have had no recent breach of security and says that the emails were probably held back from the original batch released in 2009.

Michael Mann, Director of the Earth Sciences Institute at Pennsylvania State University, whose messages are part of the release, is quoted in the piece dismissing the emails as more of the same. He calls the anonymous FOIA “agents” of the fossil-fuel industry and “criminal” hackers.

Envy Is Not The Problem, Nor Greed

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Rob Urie in an excellent piece at Counterpunch about the libertarian accusation of “envy,” which, as I blogged here, is as misplaced as the socialist accusation of “greed”..and for pretty much the same reasons. The arguments are both inaccurate and circular in reasoning:

“One of the theories of the practice of psychology encountered in college is “egoism,” the argument that all people at all times act in their own self-interest. The theory is circular in that once the premise is accepted, any argument that runs counter to it is presumed to result from self-interest.”

I an earlier post, I argued this way:

The principal flaw in the socialist world view, as I see it, is a too great concern with appearances and an inability to see cause and effect in any complex way. It’s not the ‘materialism’ of dialectical materialism I object to. It’s the lack of ‘mind’ in the materialism. The reasoning is limited, superficial, and inaccurate. It lacks sufficient particularity, as Michael Oakeshott argued in “Rationalism in Politics” (1962).

And as Oakeshott argued there, that can be a problem in Hayek, as well.

Ure writes:

“Is there a difference in the degree of envy between the person holding the number two spot and the person holding the eight-billionth spot? The necessary answer is no because if so the person holding the eight-billionth spot might only want to move one spot up. This would mean that they aren’t envious of the rich and powerful at all, but rather only of the poor schmuck whose life is only microscopically, invisibly better than theirs. In that case, the only people envious of the rich and powerful are the rich and powerful just one step below them. There are a few people who fit that description that I’ve seen at Zuccotti Park, but they seemed neither driven by envy nor are they representative of the movement.”

Of course, Ure doesn’t apply the same acute reasoning to socialist arguments about greed.  In other words, if  envy is distributed equally among everyone, rich and poor, so is greed.