Spin Control: “Green Shoots” Were a Hallucination..(Update)

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I had to add these quotes cited in Bloomberg from Messrs. Geithner, Greenspan, and Summers, on the economy, because they make a pretty good illustration of the government’s spin on the economy and serve up a nice contrast to the not-so-pretty reality underneath:

Geithner (Treasury Secretary): “There are signs the recession is easing. The broad consensus of private forecasters is that you are going to see positive growth in the second half of this year and expect that to continue.” It is “not clear yet” how strong growth will be, he said.

Greenspan (former Federal Reserve Chairman): “Collapse, I think, is now off the table. I’m pretty sure we’ve already seen the bottom. In fact, if you look at the weekly production figures for various different industries, it’s clear that we’ve turned, perhaps in the middle of last month, the middle of July.”

Summers (Director of the White House National Economic Council): “While the economy will resume growth in the second half of the year, the job picture will be serious for some time to come.” [indirect quote until “the job picture…come”].

Meanwhile, outside the spin zone, Mark Hulbert at Market Watch notes that “Corporate insiders have recently been selling their companies’ shares at a greater pace than at any time since the top of the bull market in the fall of 2007.”

ORIGINAL POST
“Those “green shoots” were either marijuana plants (and were being smoked by the media) or worse, they have been running around with cans of green spray paint, “colorizing” the dead brown weeds, then pointing at them and screaming “green shoots!”

— Karl Denninger

Over at Market Ticker, (via 321gold) the estimable Karl Denninger has a good analysis of what the GDP figures this morning really mean.

The money part:

*Consumer debt peaked in January of 2009 and is on a decline. This means that spending is going to decline, and now we’re seeing it.  Durable goods orders were down (despite the pumping of “better” durables reported month after month on CNBC!) and non-durables – that is, consumed goods (in the short term) decreased as well.

*Both import and export demand has effectively collapsed! We are now anywhere from 40 to 60% below comparable levels on imports and exports.  Those who believe that “China will save us” are delusional; how is that going to work when half of their exports to us are gone?  Bluntly: The alleged “Chinese recovery” is a manipulated lie from the Chinese government.

* Personal current taxes decreased $113.1 billion in the second quarter, compared with a decrease of   $241.7 billion in the first. You only pay taxes on earned and unearned income.  It is collapsing.

My Comment:

Well, that explains the dollar index plunging below 78 this morning, for the first time this year. Look for more pressure on the dollar and some support for gold, keeping it at the higher end of the trading range it’s been in.

Meanwhile, other writers are hazarding a guess at how this cosmic effort to prop up Treasury bonds will all play out – an interesting one being future Yuan-bond issuance by the US government and/or the sale of US property and farmland to the Chinese….

Libertarian Living: A Home-Made Generator

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A student project at the Maharishi University: a wind generator:

My Comment:

I have no affiliation with this university, or any particular reason to promote their programs. But any school that addresses human “consciousness”  – that is, sees people as wholes, not just brains to be drilled –  fits in with my interest in alternative,  libertarian approaches to education.


More Wiki and I….

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Some wiki criteria for notability:

1. The person has received a notable award or honor, or has been often nominated for them.

YES – The Getabstract business book award is a major and influential international business award and the Frankfurt fair is considered one of the top book fairs in the world.

2. The person has made a widely recognized contribution that is part of the enduring historical record in his or her specific field.[7]

YES – I am a contributor to the Routlege Key Concepts Series, on the subject “Torture,” – that is, my contribution the subject is considered worthy of entry in a very influential series that defines subject areas for college students. Language of Empire is cited over several disciplines…

I made early and important contributions in the alternative press to the two most important stories in the last ten years in American politics – torture and the financial scandal.

3.. The person has created, or played a major role in co-creating, a significant or well-known work, or collective body of work, that has been the subject of an independent book or feature-length film, or of multiple independent periodical articles or reviews.

YES – MOBS, MESSIAHS, AND MARKETS has been the subject of many independent reviews and citations. So has THE LANGUAGE OF EMPIRE

4. The person has been interviewed by major media or press

YES – in several papers.

Of course, it’s not upto me how these criteria are interpreted…

FINALLY – Very relevant – the context. Last week, I wrote controversial blog posts on the Wall Street-media mafias and social media attacks, and I also criticized my co-author’s company for a two year history of mis-attribution. I believe this nomination is a result of that attribution fight.

Last week, I also went on to say a few more things, naming some extremely powerful people and revealing that I had email records to document what I was saying. Thereafter, the deletion nomination appeared [delete removed, August 7]

The first and second nominations for deletion also appeared in a political context.

Added (August 7): It’s also the case that on the wiki entry, I was able to list my articles and where they were first published. Bonner has been publishing my articles (in the book) under his sole name.
Take away my wiki and they can wipe out my contribution more easily so reviewers can’t see who wrote what so easily. They can still see it on my blog but they can attack my blog/twitter or prevent others linking it too…which they have done.

Bruno – The Respectability of Some Transgressions

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I’m reading the reviews of “Bruno,” apparently a new and “shocking” movie that’s a take-down of the hetero world by homos… or a satire of the way heteros look at homos (shade of the “Obama jihadist” picture by the satirists at the New Yorker)…or a homo-hetero fable… or some such convoluted high-brow business, depending on whom you’re reading.

Whatever.

The idea that gross sexual displays or vulgar language or imagery is at all transgressive in the West…or East.. any more is a bit funny. Grossness is mainstream. It’s big business.

At best, Bruno, I imagine, is a toilet-brush scratching the nostrils of a few suburbanites who on all other counts embrace the ethos from which it rises – the worship of mass taste ….and the reflexive genuflection before the god of “art,” which now means practically anything in print or screen of any quality.

To be truly transgressive today, you’d have to adopt the persona of a nun, believe in the Holy Ghost and Resurrection day….oppose abortion….or cling to your guns…

Notice how in some of the panegyrics to the movie, the word “red-neck” gets thrown around. “White-trash” too.

Some transgressions it seems are a lot more respectable than others.

Censor Bruno? Never.

That would be giving a bit of money-making trivia far too much importance. I’d as soon censor the contents of an old, abandoned sewer. As much garbage circulates in the veins of modern culture, a break-out every now and then on its aging face is no more than a symptom. Bruno is a pimple for aging adolescents to pinch, poke, and rub anxiously, as they primp in front of the mirror.

The rest of us who aren’t nearly so self-absorbed can settle down to any number of real books and films…

Libertarian Living: Mirambika – Schooling with Emotional Development

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“Fantasy and imagination should be allowed to flower in the child. Talk that may seem without logic may not necessarily be irrational- it could be suprarational,” informs [sic] Dr Ramesh. He further mentions that one of the serious flaws with today’s educational system is that, “emotions are most often ignored in our rigidly regulated and tightly controlled system. But it is essential to transform them to retain the best of the emotions- vitality, love and enthusiasm. This manifestation of our divine essence cannot be nurtured through rote learning. We have to create such situations where this part is also brought forward. Thus, training of the psychic voice is an important task of the teacher”. However, mainstream education completely overlooks this aspect and hence, manufactures emotionally underdeveloped children, who are made to fit into the industrialized society. These children do not question authority, they only follow suit. The result is masses of people who do not think for themselves but blindly obey. It was in reaction to this mass-production approach that the alternative education movement began.

This movement gave an impetus to those people who believed that the child had to be driven by his/her own need to learn and know. “We believe that nothing can be taught. Education is inherent in the child, we only help in stimulating it to bring out the best in him/her”, asserts Sulochana Di, one of the teachers who have spent more than 20 years at Mirambika.”

Racial Profiling or Individual Accountability?

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Tim Wise at Counterpunch rebuts the notion being passed around (in the National Review, among others) in the aftermath of the Gates affair – that some degree of racial profiling might be unavoidable, and even appropriate, because disproportionate numbers of blacks commit violent crimes.

“For every 4.6 stops of whites, police are able to make an arrest, while they have to stop 7.3 blacks before finding evidence of criminality (4). What does this suggest? Nothing to Heather MacDonald, apparently, but to honest people it says this: police are more likely, on the basis of unjustifiable suspicion, to stop blacks than whites, and they are uniquely bad at predicting black criminality…….

But I doubt they would actually like where the underlying logic of their position leads. Indeed, if we are to use data to justify disparate treatment of this kind, we would need to go further than Charen or MacDonald would likely approve. For instance, whites have much higher rates, in all years, of drunk driving (5): so by the logic of Charen and MacDonald, police should put all their roadblocks and sobriety checkpoints in the suburbs and white rural areas, in order to catch the folks most likely to be guilty of a DWI. Likewise, whites have rates of child sexual molestation almost twice as high as the rates for blacks, according to the available data (6), so perhaps these two will soon call for rational discrimination against whites seeking to adopt? Or what about the corporate misconduct in which whites seem clearly to predominate? Will conservatives now call for affirmative action as a form of crime control in corporate America? After all, white men are demonstrating their ineptitude and even criminality repeatedly at the highest levels. Of course, they will do none of these things.”

My Comment

To Wise’s excellent points, I should add the following.

1. Psychological testing (tests by Banaji, Greenwald etc.) has shown that subconsciously even well-intentioned blacks tend to class random black faces displayed to them as less intelligent, less attractive, and less honest than white faces. That is, a high degree of color prejudice is simply built into current cultures – world over.

2. Psychological testing has also shown that groups naturally create an “outsider,” against whom they bond, during a polarized debate. And outsiders are created even among racially homogeneous groups, over trivial differences. The creation of outsiders thus seems coded into us.

Adding our assent to racial profiling as somehow rational and justified as a form of short-hand for genuine information-processing only tips the balance even more against innocent people. And then, factor in the rapid militarization of the state and its ever increasing belligerence to the population, white or black.

No. It’s one thing to argue that ordinary people are justified in making these sorts of rough calculations when they choose which neighborhood to walk through. Of course they are. It’s another to encourage state thuggery for the same reason.

Meanwhile, at least citizens get a choice about which neighborhood to walk through.
What choice do you have over financial crimes committed by the Treasury itself?

Kevin Carson on the Revolutionary Potential of Barter

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From a Kevin Carson comment on his own blog, Mutualist.org:

“So long as an industry is controlled by a handful of firms with the same organizational culture, using some form of oligopoly pricing, colluding to spoon out incremental improvements, and using push distribution methods for whatever crap they agree is the “new thing” this year, calculational chaos doesn’t cause much of a competitive penalty for any particular firm.

The main thing that will cause them real harm, IMO, that will cause the “walls to come tumbling down” for American state capitalism the same as for the old Soviet system, is the looming singularity in small-scale production technology that will enable much of the population to meet a large share of its needs through direct subsistence production for use in the household/informal/barter economy. (That’s the theme of one of the sections in forthcoming Ch. 15)”

My Comment

Carson is always an interesting and productive thinker, and this snippet is from commentary on a blog post of his about the seizure of some of his writings by the police. The commentary goes from this incident to discuss various other things, including whether big business is really no different from the state, and if it is, how that fact can be squared with the wealth it produces.

Carson argues that its wealth is produced despite the existence of the same “computational chaos” suffered by states, because big business enjoys subsidies, cost-externalizations, and benefits deriving from its size and privileged relationship to the state. That means its wealth isn’t really “its” wealth but the appropriation of wealth actually created by others. (I’ve made much the same argument myself).

Small-scale production and barter withdraw the life-blood of the huge corporations – which is the consumer. The direction of consumption away from the corporate economy is thus an effective form of direct revolutionary action against the corporate state.

Now, one man’s revolutionary struggle is another man’s budget shopping. but why quibble? The main thing is to reclaim the human being as the focus of economic theory, rather than any spurious “economic man,” “factor of production,” or “felicific calculus”…

Eduardo Galeano on Consumer Society

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Consumer Society: Massive amounts of packaging containing nothing. An invention of great scientific value that allows the suppression of real needs by the imposition of artificial ones. However, the Consumer Society meets certain resistance in backward areas. (Statement of Don Pampero Conde, native of Cardona, Uruguay: “What good is the cold if I don’t have an overcoat.”)

— Eduardo Galeano (Dictionary of the New World Order, 1991)