We hate to say it, but a year back we noted on this blog and in a couple of pieces at Lew Rockwell that Mr. Buffett was profiting every which way from the Goldman bail-out.
We also noted his corrupt ties with AIG. And we refused to bow low before his genius at investment. We figured it was another American media myth. The man was an “insider.”
Aside from the nearly $100 billion in taxpayer aid extended to Buffett’s holdings — which include mortgage lender Wells Fargo and Bank of America, credit card leviathan American Express and the bonus-happy brokerage Goldman Sachs — his companies also benefit from $130 billion in FDIC backing for their debt.
“Were it not for government bailouts, for which Buffett lobbied hard,” writes Reuters’ Rolfe Winke, “many of his company’s stock holdings would have been wiped out.”
Buffett owns 27 percent of Berkshire Hathaway, for which he serves as chairman and chief executive for an annual salary of $100,000. He’s known for his frank and simple-worded investment advice, often laced with colorful sexual metaphors.
Winke says Goldman Sachs would have collapsed without government aid it received…”
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Oh these Masters of the Universe. Turns out that without the Universe, they are Masters of…nothing much at all.
“I went back to the lecture hall at Duke where I’d been speaking, and I chatted about the woods, about the bridge. Nobody seemed to have noticed it. I asked a politically minded professor, and he said, “Well, it’s a problem.” He said, “The government’s getting ready for something; we don’t know what it is, but something’s obviously on their minds that’s disturbing them.” And I said, “Revolution?” “Oh,” he laughed, “this is North Carolina, don’t bother about that, but whatever it is, they’re putting a lot of money into this bridge.”
A year or two later, I took the same walk again. There was a very large bridge of solid cement, and it looked entirely finished. I found another gentleman of the forest, and I said, “Well, can you find much use for this huge and expensive bridge?” He said, “It certainly was expensive, I can tell you that.” He had the happy look of someone who had benefited from the expense. We chatted about the government and what they were up to, and a certain wariness could be heard in our dialogue. We were puzzled; something unexpected had happened, something really unimaginable—a vast work had been constructed for imminent horrors, it would have seemed. I did ask here and there about it, but I was given no answer….”
By the pricking of my thumbs/Something wiki this way comes…”
The tinkering with my wiki page continues. The page was nominated for deletion after I made blog posts about – guess what? – wiki manipulation, the Wall-Street- media nexus, social media attacks, my co-author’s company…
(I am eliminating this reference, since I’ve decided to put this whole business behind me)
In any case, to return to this petty saga: the page was nominated.
Then, after it became clear that the page would NOT be deleted, a new tack started
– delete the Getabstract award page, thereby reducing my claim to notability…
Why is the Getabstract award not notable? Because wiki says so…
Circular reasoning?
Was the Getabstract company informed about this? I don’t think so.
Now, would it be unreasonable to infer from all this that wiki – an international source- can easily be manipulated in favor of US parochial interests?
And US news? and US viewpoints?
And if so, is it any surprise that Wall Street robbed the public under the very noses of the much vaunted US free media…and not a soul peeped up about it, except a very few voices in the alternative press – just that press that has been declared unilaterally non-notable…
and here’s the latest comment at the bottom of that page.
Comment – I have put GetAbstract International Book Award up for deletion. I’m putting the notice here as that article is one of the significant anchors for this article being notable. –
No slur intended against individual editors. They might each have their own honorable motives…
Can you see, though, that in order to get visibility, you need a platform..in order to get the platform, you need visibility…if you have enough money, you can often get both..and then use that money and influence to determine how visible anyone else can be.
Since I’ve been posting about media spin and the brainwashing of the public, here’s an enlightening post at Humble Libertarian on post-traumatic stress disorder among vets, apparently at near-epidemic levels
What has that to do with brainwashing? Everything, as the video above shows.
Early victims of US brainwashing techniques were US army personnel, as experimentation in the CIA brain-washing program, MK-Ultra shows. They still continue to be victims of it.
Also read the CIA’s notorious Kubark manual on torture – which analyzes different techniques to induce compliance in subjects.
Repeatedly traumatizing someone (and sexual humiliation and violence are the easiest avenues to do this), breaks down their sense of identity. In all but the strongest people, it produces compliance, refusal to accept reality, escapism, psychosis, and addictions of all kinds.
In the strongest, it produces resistance. Either lawless resistance to the state, which is what we call criminal, or, in rare cases, the fierce concentrated resistance of the social or political activist, the revolutionary…and even the saint…
The victims produce the fodder that the state manipulates.
The survivors become the excuse for the state to ratchet up control. Either way, the state grows.
My post today is from Canadian trader and blogger, Bill Cara (a critic of the “shooter” theory).
[NOTE: “Shooter,” gentle reader, is my derogatory name for those who believe in the government’s “fringe” conspiracy theory that “green shoots” are popping up all over the economy. This theory, I believe, is premised on “hatred” and “mean-spiritedness” toward creditors, savers, and dollar-holders. In fact, if you are a “green-shooter,” I’d say you are a racist and an anti-Sinite (since the Chinese are the biggest creditors of the US)]
Bill Cara Quote:
“When I started blogging over five years ago, I noted my concern that in America, everything is for sale and everybody a salesman. The problem, of course, is that a salesman believes his own stories because he has to believe. Facts are perverted, history changed, and truth misrepresented. In five years, America has gotten worse in this regard.
The nation has actually become a parody of itself where the most accurate news now comes from sources like Saturday Night Live, Jay Leno, David Letterman and Jon Stewart.”
My Comment:
There’s the truth from an objective observer. And I’m here to second it. If there’s one thing that’s a problem in America, it’s not “crime,” or “violence,” or “drugs,” or “porn.”
All of these are just secondary manifestations of the underlying problem. That problem is – unreality.
In Language of Empire, I referred to the plastic, virtual world in which the country lives.
That’s the rub.
We leave in a world of phony perceptions, phony reality, phony problems, phony solutions, phony political divisions, phony theories, phony experts…
All other problems America shares with other nations.
But this one problem is more unique to her than to any other country – almost because of her virtues, rather than on account of her vices.
Other people don’t have governments that are nearly as efficient, thorough-going, or as clever at spin as ours.
WASHINGTON – The White House is turning to the Internet to hit back at a Web posting that claims to show President Barack Obama explaining how his health care reform plans eventually would eliminate private insurance.
The three-minute White House video features Linda Douglass, a former network television correspondent and now White House Office of Health Reform communications director, sitting in front of a computer screen showing the Drudge Report Web site. That site carries a series of video clips from another blogger who strings together selected Obama statements on health care to make it appear he wants to eliminate the private health insurance business.
In the video Douglass says the site is “taking sentences and phrases out of context, and they’re cobbling them together to leave a very false impression.“
My Comment
And of course, the government and its minions would never take anything “out of context,” or “leave
a false impression..”
Oh nooooooo.
Drudge must have hit pretty close to get this level of presidential attention…
As for your jaded blogger at this humble site, I am as wary of the word “private” as I am of the word
“public.” Private is just the other face of public, most times. Gates, Buffet, Trump, Welch – they’ve all proved that their companies aren’t “private” enterprise – they all profit from insider ties, knowledge, subsidies, and pay-offs.
The “private-public” divide, like the “left-right” divide, is an elaborate bit of window-dressing intended to camouflage a much more real divide: “honest-dishonest.”
Update: I notice that Barack Obama has now joined Michelle Obama on Vanity Fair’s “best-dressed list.” Look, I agree Mrs O. has a distinctive and interesting fashion voice, but her husband?
Now the president is a runway model too?
Could this have something to do with creating positive spin in the wake of the recently resuscitated “birther” controversy?
“Birther” is the disparaging term applied to anyone who questions whether President Obama was born within the US, or believes he was born in Kenya, or apparently even brings up the subject – as the recent attacks on conservative broadcaster Lou Dobbs suggest. To clarify, I have no idea what positions Lou Dobbs takes or doesn’t take. And to further clarify, my personal opinion is that naturalized citizens should be as free to become president as natives. Of course, that isn’t the position of the constitution, but that’s another issue.
Surely, questioning the president on a constitutional point would seem to be the essence of what free speech protects. Instead, the establishment puts a derogatory label on it that makes it off-limits and a kind of racist “hate” or “fringe” speech, like the speech of holocaust revisionists (‘denialists’), 9-11 theorists (‘truthers’), critics of Israel or Zionism (‘anti-semites’), and critics of the US (‘anti-Americans’)
[how come if you criticize China, you’re not an anti-sinite?]
Please. Talk about feeding a fire…
Fire is a useful tool but a dangerous god. Feed it with too much fuel, and it burns in every direction. It consumes everything in its path.
He who glows in the fire of public adulation today burns in it tomorrow.
Uruguayan writer, Mario Benedetti, was the poet of the urban guerrilla movement of the 1960s-1980s called the Tupamaros. He died on May 17, 2009 at the age of 88. Here, the distinctive Argentine tango singer, Adriana Varela, sings a poem of his, “No Te Salves”:
No Te Salves/Don’t Save Yourself
by Mario Benedetti
No te quedes inmóvil Don’t stay motionless
al borde del camino by the way side,
no congeles el júbilo don’t freeze your joy
no quieras con desgana or love half-heartedly.
no te salves ahora Don’t save yourself now
ni nunca or ever.
no te salves Don’t save yourself,
no te llenes de calma don’t be so calm,
no reserves del mundo and in this world don’t keep
sólo un rincón tranquilo a tranquil corner,
no dejes caer los párpados or let your eyelids
pesados como juicios drop heavy with judgments.
no te quedes sin labios Don’t be left without lips,
no te duermas sin sueño don’t sleep without dreams,
no te pienses sin sangre or imagine yourself bloodless,
no te juzgues sin tiempo or judge yourself with haste.
pero si But if,
pese a todo after all,
no puedes evitarlo you can’t help it,
y congelas el júbilo and you freeze your joy,
y quieres con desgana and you love half-heartedly,
y te salvas ahora and you save yourself now;
y te llenas de calma if you stay serene,
y reservas del mundo and in the world keep
sólo un rincón tranquilo only a tranquil corner,
y dejas caer los párpados let your eyelids
pesados como juicios drop heavy as judgments,
y te secas sin labios remain without lips,
y te duermes sin sueño and sleep without dreams;
y te piensas sin sangre if you imagine yourself bloodless,
y te juzgas sin tiempo judge yourself in haste,
y te quedas inmóvil and stay motionless
al borde del camino on the side of the road,
y te salvas – and you save yourself –
entonces Then –
no te quedes conmigo. don’t stay with me.
(Mario Benedetti)
[I’ve made minor changes to the translation to make it easier to understand the sense…I apologize if that detracts from the poem for those who know it in its original form].
I was answering a letter from a reader earlier this morning. He’d had some problems with health insurance. Then, to compound that, he got cheated by a contractor when he was redoing his house….
It got me thinking. Besides medical bills, legal bills are probably the ordinary person’s worst nightmare.
In the US, you’re never too far from a lawsuit. Even the slightest disagreement tends to erupt into a full-scale legal battle. We’re a litigious country, no two ways about that.
Earlier, I wrote down a few tips about doing without health insurance (it’s in my archives at Lew Rockwell). They seem to have helped a number of people.
But this evening I’m mulling over what I’ve learned about staying clear of the legal system, without being taken to the cleaners. And I’m wondering how I can help ordinary people protect themselves without lawyers. After all, it’s tough times, and most of us can barely get by, let alone factor in huge chunks of money for legal bills.
This is only a preliminary blog post, but here are my random thoughts:
1. Never sign a contract in a language you don’t know well.
(Does this sound obvious? There are, amazingly, people who actually sign off on documents that they’ve never read). People will often present you with a document in English and then follow that up with a document in another language, which they’ll tell you is the translation. Most of the time, it probably is a translation. But just occasionally, you’re going to get scammed.
If you’re not absolutely fluent in the language (and no – “donde esta buquebus” doesn’t count as fluent), or if you don’t have a trustworthy translator who can verify for you, you should hold off on signing.
2. Never sign a document that you “think” you read through before.
This is a common trick. Someone shows you one document and you read it from cover to cover. An hour later, they ask you to sign what looks like the same document. Take the time to go through it all over again. One missing phrase or line is all it takes to make the whole thing mean something radically different. Don’t fall for it.
3. Never sign anything so long you can’t read it carefully.
Doctors are especially good at waving 200-page binders crammed with abstruse medical terminology under your nose a day before surgery. They’ll wink and tell you “it’s just for the lawyers, ” as though that means you needn’t pay attention. But read that thing like a Talmudic scholar. Call up any lawyer or doctor you know and read out the passages you don’t understand to them. If you can’t afford to pay a lawyer to read it for you, go online and study the subject so you at least have some inkling what it is you’re signing off on.
4. Cross-examine anyone who asks you to sign something.
It’s not very polite, but you’re not training for Ms. Manners. You’re trying to protect yourself. Write down every question you have and get your opposite number to write down his answer. Get him to sign it. He will probably try to brush the whole thing off, or say something like, “we always do business with a handshake.” Thank him for the biographical information, but tell him, “I always do business with a written contract.”
5. Don’t assume “is” means “is.”
Legalese is a language dense with man-traps and land-mines for the innocent. The whole object is to be as opaque and misleading as possible. Remember these things are written by 400 buck-an-hour suits, not Renaissance wits. If something can ramble, be incomprehensible, ambiguous, senseless, contradictory…or all of the above…it will be. While you’re reading it, keep a dictionary next to you, a handbook of contract law, and the phone number of a lawyer.
“Everybody’s got an excuse in our current system, and perhaps that’s why it is morally and financially bankrupt. The U.S. (and certainly not Santa Monica) was not a Third World nation in 1952; people did not feel their healthcare was deficient or poor. There was simply no money to pursue marginal returns except perhaps for a few millionaires seeking exotic treatments. Fine, it’s their money; most died right along with the rest of us and at about the same lifespan.
As for “overall health” of the populace: what with the “diabesity” epidemic out of control due entirely to lifestyle changes, it’s hard to say we’ve gotten 50 times healthier as a result of our healthcare costs rising 50-fold.
When it comes right down to it, the current system is based on this premise: the average American is too dumb to figure out healthcare for themselves and so we need a gigantic structure of “experts” to figure out what should be done and what it should cost. It’s not even really “insurance” because everyone gets old, ill and then dies.
This has resulted in the most brutally inefficient and even cruel system possible, one in which the very elderly are milked for hundreds of thousands of dollars of “healthcare” in the last days or weeks of their lives while tens of millions get no care at all except at the emergency room. Since no one takes responsibility for their own health or healthcare costs, then people take poor care of themselves and thus many of our ills are self-inflicted. People save little to nothing for emergencies because they’ve learned to expect someone, somewhere, to pay for their healthcare. (It’s a “right.” Really? At whose expense? The Chinese who buy our debt?)
I know, I know–going to a market/cash system is “impossible.” But the irony is that’s where we’ll be in a few years, regardless of what anyone thinks or wants: “healthcare” in its present incarnation will bankrupt the nation just as surely as the sun rises.”
My Comment:
That’s been my opinion of American health care, for years. Despite all the rhetoric and the high technology and expensive medicine involved, it’s not “the best” in the world, by any means. For the amount of money spent, I have to believe it’s actually rather middling.
Why?
Because the whole thing is a racket between the insurance companies, the medical establishment (including the pharmaceutical companies), and the lawyers – in which the consumer of health (notice the peculiarity of making health a product you consume) is encouraged to go in for bigger and sloppier portions, which he doesn’t fully eat or throws away, while all around people starve in the gutters.
Hospital overbilling ($17 dollar cotton swabs, for example), unnecessary diagnostic tests, lack of preventive care, patients who abdicate all responsibility for their own health, control of the supply of doctors, the medical research boondoggle….
Take all this away. Pay in cash for what you want. It sounds radical…impossible.
But with no incentive to over-bill, doctors will lower costs dramatically.
What about poor people who can’t afford health care now? Lower costs should help them too.
But there are other things we can do to to make health care affordable.
Here are some:
1. Increase the supply of doctors by immigration and single licensing standards
2. Utilize/license alternative practitioners, instead of demonizing them
3. Allow non-generic drugs into the market-place
4. Encourage medical tourism and comparison-shopping across countries
5. Educate the public on nutrition and preventive health
6. Allow nurses and technicians to perform more procedures than they do now
7. Include nutrition as a required subject in high schools