Stop Me Before I Vote Again

have any of you a notion of the magnitude of the "fine "
for not getting coverage ?

tax imposed by the individual mandate :

either $695 or 2.5 percent of household income

for those who don’t have insurance and are not exempt based on income levels

Hugh,at Corrente, has an interesting post on the Obamacare sophistries of the Roberts' court and the sophistries of Roberts himself. The constitutional issues are not my strong suit and I feel a little badly that I don't particularly care about them.

What does tickle my funny bone is the legalistic counter-argument he got. It's filled with the flummery of enumerated powers and prerogatives. It has the ring of expertise. I'll bet it would be very easy to find scholars and courts who find it compelling—lots and lots of courts, with judges tripping over their robes in a rush to find it compelling.

Whether something is right or wrong is immaterial. They just don't apply. I think they should, but they don't. This might leave a pragmatic, utilitarian consideration, along the lines of, "is this thing workable towards a greater good, within the system as is actually exists?". That can be argued, although I think it gets into speculative fantasy land very quickly, but one way or the other it doesn't apply either. There's no room for it; no framework for its consideration. And the only fact that obtains is the demonstrable fact that this is now the law.

The expertise in flummery is a big part of how union pension plans get adjusted and readjusted and handed over to the PBGC and then melt away. How NAFTA and all the other "free trade" agreements knee-capped labor. How card check became a non-starter. There are always plenty of stalwart Democratic labor lawyers—with the relevant expertise, credentials and everything—and they can always explain, bless their hearts.

Whatever will they do when they finally kill their host?

http://www.democracyjournal.org/25/revenue-neutered.php?page=all

One of my red-hot Trotskyite correspondents passed along this link, with apparent approval:

Ultimately this is the question by which the revolution will be judged: After all is said and done, did it actually result in an improvement in the quality of life for the Libyan people?

There is of course the unjustified assumption that there was a 'revolution in Libya' -- rather than, say, a coup, or a factional struggle, or even a conquest; the gratuitous assumption that it can and must be 'judged'; the unreflective assumption that there's some scalar figure of merit by which to judge it; the downright extravagant assumption that 'quality of life' is the proper standard; and finally, the clearly nonsensical assumption that there is a population-wide metric of 'quality of life'. Suppose some people's lives are worse and others better? How do you measure the worse and the better? How do you combine, say, income and self-respect? Or do you assume that the latter simply reflects the former? How do you do the averaging -- arithmetic or geometric? Do you exclude outliers? Just how important is easy access to Internet porn?

But suppose you could average all that out, in some reasonable way. I don't think you can; but suppose(*).

Wouldn't there still be a few other questions to ask? Like for instance: what does a big victory for the Empire imply for the 'quality of life' of people in places outside of Libya? Just for starters.

--------------

(*) Hey, we could always suppose that pi was a rational number. Wouldn't that be fun? And wouldn't it make things so much simpler?

the bourbon core of the Dems
would love to scream that out

earlier i linked to this:

http://www.democracyjournal.org/25/revenue-neutered.php?page=all

no takers

fuck it

i think it bares another exposure
to this ever more kulturkampf slanted site's readers

"Our problem is that while we want the public to buy into our notion of a common good, we quake at the notion of explaining to taxpayers that the common good might lead to a few percentage points’ rise in tax rates........"

"The next progressive project has to take on our ongoing failure to talk taxes with the public."

"This project need not be a Mondale-esque act of political seppuku where progressives are exploited by the right for our candor. "

"Perhaps in a period when robust growth has returned and the labor market has bounced back, we can begin to talk—for the first time—about taxes and obligation "

"We face two failures: by the government and of the governed."

" Our government refuses to be honest with the public about what needs to be done. "

"And that refusal has left us with American taxpayers who don’t realize, or refuse to realize, the choice that looms:

higher taxes and the preservation of the American state as they know it;
or the rates as they are—even lower!—
and an America far different from the one their grandparents built."

-------------------------------------
for those of you way too hip to flip over such pwog foolery
such spangled gabbling i'm sure only produce a kool piff
followed by a finger run thru your hair

but
old lobster clawed glove headed owen paine here
sees that passage
as the very blue ribbon winner
out of quite a frightful nexus of pond pwog croaks
these past couple months

-------------------------------------------------

same site

http://progressivepolicy.org/top-10-mistakes-candidates-make-on-national-security:

"The American public has always and will always be willing to do whatever it takes to keep us safe. (Especially the Scotch-Irish heritage concentrations in swing states like NC, VA, PA and FL who’ve enjoyed 200 years of deciding elections)"

he has been classically trained as a film scholar.

Or as Faustus trenchantly observes:

Du hast wohl recht; Ich finde nicht die Spur
Von einem Geist; und alles ist Dressur.

enter rich scott

(he of the massive HCA medicare fraud ****
and present governor of florida
---- my home state these days--- )

"Gov. Scott: Florida will not .....expand Medicare" !!!!!!

http://politics.blogs.foxnews.com/2012/07/01/gov-scott-florida-will-not-implement-insurance-exchanges-or-expand-medicare

jimmy kwak-box comments :

"So, you’re a Republican state governor. ....You have some working class households
in your state that make, say, $25,000 and don’t get health insurance through work.
Currently many of them are uninsured.....
. You could buy all of them health insurance..... at a 90 percent discount ..."

blah blah blah

http://baselinescenario.com/2012/07/03/pure-spite/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BaselineScenario+%28The+Baseline+Scenario%29

-----------------------------------

poser de jour

what if there emerged an effort to oust same by a recall
aided and financed by a donkeycrat swat team .....

ala scott walker

--also saying nyet to the 90% off premiums ---

could an SMBIVA stalwart join in ?

*****"In 1997, Rick Scott was implicated in the biggest Medicare fraud case in US history, stepping down as CEO of Columbia/HCA after the hospital giant was fined $1.7 billion and found guilty of swindling the government"
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2011/03/rick-scott-floridas-drug-fraud-enabler

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/08/investigating-mitt-romney-offshore-accounts

call him mr tax haven

". As Newt Gingrich put it during the primary season,

“I don’t know of any American president who has had a Swiss bank account.”

" Romney has, as well as other interests in such tax havens as Bermuda and the Cayman Islands."

"“When you are running for president, you might want to err on the side of overpaying your taxes, and not chase every tax gimmick that comes down the pike...It kind of looks tacky.”

http://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/26531357710/jobs

this blog by mental smile ballon miles kringle is the living end

its the ginchy -est

i'll spare u the link jump
just read this exslurp :

"In judging unfreedom at work, I think we should judge according to an organization’s declared mission or missions. ....

. For organizations whose mission is to make a profit, I think it is important to have the judgment made by a panel of others who have met a payroll and worried about their firms going under.........

....a regular jury can not adequately judge job dismissals ...
it would be hard for most people to ignore the fact that
something very valuable has been taken from someone who is fired from a job

. It is not easy to remember that the person hired to replace the one fired gains something equally valuable.

And it is not that easy for most people to appreciate how necessary is the threat of firing

(or where firing is impossible, how important is the threat of some sort of demotion)

necessary at a systems level

to undergird those dimensions of workplace discipline
that are necessary for a firm to fulfill its missions of making a profit
and effectively producing goods and services that improve people’s lives. "

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/magazine/can-the-democrats-catch-up-in-the-super-pac-game.html?pagewanted=5&hp&pagewanted=all

"when informed that Romney supported the Ryan budget plan
— and thus championed “ending Medicare as we know it” —
while also advocating tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans,
a focus group simply refused to believe
any politician would do such a thing"

this article is about a Dembot hit squad i kinda like:

"Obama’s opponent is not an ideologue per se, he's instead someone who knows and cares only about wealthy Americans. "

the bruisers are taking " “a top/bottom rather than left/right approach”
— also known in Republican circles as class warfare. "---

"The best explanatory tool for this narrative ...Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital."
i.e.
". recasting Romney’s self-described chief qualification to be president,"

HE " may well be someone who understands how the economy works
but he cares only about making it work for rich guys like himself."

seems site hero Al Crockeye needed to unburden himself ...about OWS

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/07/06/biggest-financial-scandal-in-britains-history-not-a-single-occupy-sign-what-happened/

"The Occupiers , with their “people’s mic”, were always a little hard to understand. And as with all movements involving consensus, everything took a very long time.
 
Was there perhaps a leader, a small leadership group, sequestered somewhere among the tents and clutter? It was impossible to say and at that point somewhat disloyal to pose the question. Cynicism about Occupy was not a popular commodity.
 
But new movements always need a measure of cynicism dumped on them. Questions of organization were obliterated by the strength of the basic message – we are 99 per cent, they are one per cent. It was probably the most successful slogan since ‘peace, land, bread’.

The Occupy Wall Street assembly in Zuccotti Park soon developed its own cultural mores, drumming included. Like many onlookers, I asked myself, Where the hell’s the plan?"

" But I held my tongue..."

had enough ?

-------------------------------------------

here's more

perhaps
for u shabby chic high dudgeon gluttons only

"..... I had no particular better idea and for a CounterPuncher of mature years to start laying down the program seemed cocky. But, deep down, I felt that Occupy, with all its fancy talk,
all its endless speechifying, was riding for a fall.

Before the fall came there were heroic actions, people battered senseless by the police. These were brave people trying to hold their ground.

There were other features that I think quite a large number of people found annoying: the cult of the internet, the tweeting and so forth, and I definitely didn’t like the enormous arrogance which prompted the Occupiers to claim that they were indeed the most important radical surge in living memory.

Where was the knowledge of, let along the respect for the past?.... when one raised this history with someone from Occupy, I encountered total indifference.

There also seemed to be a serious level of political naivety about the shape of the society they were seeking to change. They definitely thought that it could be reshaped – the notion that the whole system was unfixable did not get much of a hearing.


 

“Occupiers are all occupied doing exactly what their handlers would have them doing, namely, being fully occupied. In summary, Occupy Wall Street represents a huge distraction.”

---------------------------

"Then the rains of winter came. Zuccotti Park came under repeated assault, the tents were cleared from zucotti Park and from St Paul’s Cathedral and by early this year it was all over."

-------------------------------------------

"People have written complicated pieces trying to prove it’s not over, but if ever I saw a dead movement, it is surely Occupy "

--------------------------------------------

long time friend and comrade
herbie sorrell
grandson of
the late great herbert n sorrell

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Sorrell

sent this along

-------------------------
paine:

"spread this around ..put it on fuzzy smiffs site ..etc etc ..
ya never know who might be just browsin' thru and read it "

the job site liberation ( JSL)**** movement has leverage within existing law
and along a trail of court decisions

look here for starters
http://www.nlrb.gov/concerted-activity

then
go back to your job site and start talkng about this the next time safety issues
or bonus cuts or scheduling tyranny
or other corporate/mangerial ethical or legal transgressions arise on site

--------------------------------------

the right to self oganize at the job site
the right to employee " concerted actions"

and the right to concerting itself
is protected by federal law !

no unions needed gang

----------------------------

okay so u don't trust the NLRB
ya the NLRB are the cops and courts in this area

ya ya there's a very clear record of failure to enforce
lots and lots needless casualties here
and of course
pro corporate appointments to the boards are unbiquitous

but .......

dedicated organizers
can use these very failures to enforce and protect by the NLRB
to mobilize community action

i don't need to tell any of u
demanding justice
case by case
for real
right there in front of u
can be a wildly effective social catalyst

ya gotta
put the crime against this fellow corporate worker
before the court of public oppinion
--------------------------------------

obvious the strategic mission is simple enough

force the NLRB itself
and the administration and congress behind it
to face these failures and the lawless job site dictatorships
the NLRB not only abides but aides and abets

yes we need a national movement targeting the NLRB

and
when a broad pattern of documented failure emerges
and you know u can count on that

the pattern of failure by the NLRB
obviously
already exists
and it will only grow clearer and larger
that is
if and when
protected concerted actions become

a daily....

massively frequent ...

national corporate job site reality

-------------------------------------

rule one

know the law
its shape its reach and its history

act one

find people wiling to get fired and to fight back afterwards

---------------------
*** web site under construction

I just got an email -- not a robo-mail, a real email, from somebody I actually know -- about the Supreme Court. The Dog-star now officially rages; all bedlam is let out. When your friends start fretting about the Supreme Court, it's time to head for the hills until mid-November.

It's hard to find a picture of the Supreme Court that does justice to the supernal silliness of that institution. Clarence Thomas' waxwork face -- Ginzburg's lace doily -- Roberts' Rotarian false grin -- Kagan's striking resemblance to her dad, the crooked real-estate lawyer, an old antagonist of mine. Scalia, looking like a bouncer in a downscale night club. What a rogue's gallery. And that horrible overblown 1930s satrap-style temple of theirs; like the Parthenon put through a trash compactor. Octastyle, for grandeur, but... petite. Real estate in DC is quite expensive.

Still, if my good-hearted friends are to be believed, these nine goons, in their masquerade garb and their boutique mausoleum, have all our lives in their judicious hands.

Let the record show that the same reactionary court which gave us 'Citizens United' also upheld Obie's Compulsory Tithe To Insurance Companies. Is this a case of refined sedulous legal reasoning? A road-to-Damascus change of Roberts' heart? Or -- and this is the null hypothesis -- business as usual, in both cases? What elite consensus wants, the Supreme Court -- in its infinite wisdom -- finds a way to grant.

No, of course I don't mean these Supremes; to their judgement I would happily submit. I strongly suspect they would be more than just; they would find me guilty, guilty, guilty, and then let me off with a warning.

The Supremes I mean, of course, are those nine fancy-dress mountebanks in Washington: the Supremely Silly Court. I've been pondering all day why people insist on taking this institution so seriously, and wondering why it makes me so mad when they do.

Of course it's the last-ditch defense of the contemptible Democrats: Dems might appoint Dracula to the Court, but Republicans would appoint Cthulhu. Aieee!

But it goes deeper. This carefully cultivated fear of pantomime villains enrages me, in part at least, because it seems unmanly.

I realize this is a dated term, and of course we need to redefine it in a way that does justice to the manliness of women, generally so much greater -- if less demonstrative -- than the manliness of men.

Manliness in this gender-neutral sense might be defined as the capacity to be unafraid of your own shadow; to be undaunted by your own dark imaginings; to whistle boldly past a quiet and un-haunted graveyard.

It's unmanly to whine about the Supreme Court because the Supreme Court is an illusion; it's done with mirrors; the image in the mirror is simply the reflection of our own belief. The Supreme Court becomes supremely unthreatening once we recognize that it simply says what it's told to say. It has, as Jackson famously observed, no power to enforce.

Oh, of course, we have real enemies -- the people who control the cops and the soldier boys. If you want to be scared of anybody, be scared of them. But don't be scared of a Punch-and-Judy show that nine prosy hirelings in an overdecorated Elks Hall put on.

Fear of the Supreme Court reflects belief in the Supreme Court, and a corresponding refusal to understand how things really work.

Now why would anybody refuse to understand?

This is surely the heart of the matter.

It gets worse every day. An email correspondent writes:

Dems must start using the most effective human motivator FEAR to ensure a Nov landslide.

It's not difficult to see the inductive implications of accepting this argument: Both D's and R's will get worse, cycle after cycle, and every time the polls open, Dembots will hold their proverbial noses -- atrophied organs, surely, after all these decades of abuse -- and vote for a progressively(*) worse candidate, thus contributing their widow's mite to the general worsening of the world.

This is part of the unmanliness of Dem fans, alluded to in an earlier post. Their politics is all about cultivating fear in themselves and communicating it to others.

-------------

(*) Little pun there on the word 'progressive'. In case anybody missed it.

jeff is really feeling his sea grapes recently

http://blogs.ft.com/the-a-list/2012/07/12/move-americas-economic-debate-out-of-its-time-warp/?Authorised=false#axzz20WjAk8Dm

here's a chunk from a recent guest column at FT :

In todays "... simplified Keynesian worldview,

there are no structural challenges, only shortfalls in aggregate demand.

There is no public debt problem.

There is no global competitiveness challenge,
since “competitiveness” is a myth when applied to national economies.

Fiscal multipliers are predictable, timeless, persistent, and large.

All growth reversals can be solved through larger deficits.

Politicians can be trusted to design short-term stimulus spending programmes
of hundreds of billions of dollars.

Tax cuts are about as good as increases in government spending

short-term boosts in spending are about as good as
long-term public investments.

Not one of these conclusions stands scrutiny. "

"Why have we come to this vacuous debate between
a free-market extremism and a Keynesian superficiality
that addresses none of the subtleties, trade-offs, and uncertainties of the real situation?"

" the world is facing novel problems at the global level,
and novelty is hard to factor into economics,
which is a rigid, ideological, theoretically based, and largely backward-looking field…"

wow !

------------------------------------------------------

its rare a hated ass hole bends over for you like this

i get so excited by the above passage
i really can't subdue my giddiness

father likes the phrase "where does one begin "

hell i can't even consider that question here

but i'll focus on one tiny phrase

"There is no public debt problem"

obviously Jeffrey is afraid of the big bad debt wolf

hence no fiscal deficit binge for him

implicit in this is a set of implied nominal constraints
on product prices and wages

ie a lid on inflation paths

i guess sachs doesn't want us to consider
"the real value" of existing nominally "fixed " obligations
as a macro policy variable

to him its a sacred policy obligation to keep that set of nominal obligations
as high in real value as possible

socially optimal inflation for Sachs ?

must be as close to zero as practicable

now anyone with a phd in modern macro will tell you that is ridiculous

in fact most macronauts these days are so afraid of deflation
the notion of targeting a zero rate strikes them as intentionally
dancing at the edge of an abyss

one slip and we're in the deflationary death spiral

common elite wisdom 's optimal then ?

a steady 2% range or so
in other words a hideous straight jacket given the amplitude of our system swings

consider the promethean hypothesis :

inflation like fire can be a tool of policy

not all inflations are like wild fires in a tinder dry gusty forest

if we need to run a huge string of federal deficits
to return to Full Employment and stay there
perhaps while serious structural repairs proceed
at their complex uncertain and iffy pace
well we can and without fear of excess debt build up

that is
so long as we are prepared to adjust the rate of product price changes and wage changes
to re align this debt pile over time
to an optimal debt to gdp ratio

of course what the optimal long run ratio
of total debt (pub and pri ) to gdp might be

is still up for grabs

Hey, c'mon. He's better than Hitler, isn't he? You gotta read that manifesto.

ya true is true

despite having all the answers in my head already
i still read Alex of Runny-meme's 'counter punch '

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/07/16/wendell-potter-single-payer-and-the-big-lie/

flying out at me there today came this :

"Single payer, living wage, cutting the military industrial complex.
The American people want it. And we can’t get it.
Why not?
Because good people continue to lie to themselves.
The big lie? The Democratic Party is better than the Republican Party"

does anyone HERE at SMBIVA
really believe such fairy dust nonsense ?

all we need do is reject the lesser evil con and we get
by means undisclosed but apparently trivially obvious
Single payer
a $ 12 per hour minimum wage
and
a scrap heep future for uncle's armadas ?

millions upon millions of voters walking left
and away from the Dems
only requires
each one of these self lie stricken souls
do a little mirror check and glaringly patent fact facing ?

I may have mentioned the depressing fact that my college alumni mailing list is all full of The Most Important Election Since God Was A Small Boy, and of course my old school ties are nearly all dedicated Democrats.

I was incautious enough to make my own jaundiced views known, and there is now a petition campaign to revoke my diploma. One fellow-alum suggested that I was probably on Karl Rove's payroll. (Christ, I wish I were on somebody's who paid better than my current paymasters.)

This was a kind of hippie college, back in the day, where everybody thought he or she was was a bold original thinker. I suspected it was oversold even at the time, but now I'm sure of it. I may turn my diploma in even before they revoke it. These people, it's like an Elks Club dinner; some rare old cliches there, as the Ginger Man says, hauled out and flung down on the table with the air of a man holding a royal flush.

The same chap who suspected I was a crypto-Rovester also wrote:

Hopefully no one has succumbed to the voter ennui which Michael has been attempting to spread.

I seem to have been spreading ennui like Johnny Appleseed; even in '08, None Of The Above won by a substantial plurality. I am officially taking all the credit for his victory, right here and now.

(I haven't tried calculating how many electoral votes NOTA would have received; that would be a fun project for somebody wonkier than I am. All of them, I should think.)

There's a constitutional amendment for you: any time non-voters are a plurality, leave the office vacant. Or better yet, fill it by lot. The Athenian democracy filled a number of offices by lot, and so did the Venetian Republic. We could hardly fail to do better, picking people at random, than we do with our present Rube Goldberg apparatus of primaries and caucuses and what not, which attracts all the worst people as contenders, and gives rise to an unhealthy spirit of fanship among about 60% of the involuntary spectators. Fortunately fan sentiment is more or less evenly divided between Crips and Bloods.

What are we to think of this non-fan 40%? Are they stupid? Or do they have their reasons?

Whatever -- I'm with 'em. There's more of them than there are of Republicrat fans, or Demolican fans. Safety in numbers.

The suspected gunman, identified as James Holmes, a 24-year-old doctoral student in neuroscience who was about to drop out of the University of Colorado-Denver, was arrested near a car behind the theater.

I like it that he was arrested 'near a car'. You'd have to travel some distance to find a spot to be arrested, in North America, that isn't 'near a car'.

Alex Cockburn laid down his matchless pen for good, last night. How I will miss him.

... Every day they die
Among us, those who were doing us some good.

A reader here (thanks, sk) recently passed along the following wonderful item -- you'll have to scroll down a bit -- in connection with University of Texas student Charles Whitman, the fons et origo of modern mass shootings here in the Land Of The Free, which occur, nowadays, as regularly as the monsoon season:

In 1999, [University of Texas president] Faulkner worked with students on a plan to reopen the Tower deck following safety modifications including a fencelike structure to prevent people from falling or jumping from the Tower and the addition of metal detectors and police guards.

"It fundamentally wasn't healthy to have people always talking about that moment in history (the Whitman shootings) whenever they were around the Tower," Faulkner said in a recent interview. "I just felt the university community needed to get past having that as a main topic of conversation and I didn't think it would be possible unless people reopened the observation deck and took away the forbiddance."

Forbiddance is one form of memory, though it's less usual in our world than perseverative idiot commemoration. On the whole I prefer forbiddance. For example, there ought to be a 9/11 tax: any time anybody mentions 9/11, they should have to pay a dollar for everybody within hearing. The funds would, of course, be earmarked for the drone slaughter of Muslims, provided that the President personally anointed each missile with oil.

A bad business, of course. It's the only kind we can do. But at least it would have a chilling effect on the 'media', who would have to pay a buck for every subscriber or auditor; and about time, too. These people won't be chilled enough, for my taste, at any temperature above zero Kelvin.

Then of course there's the Texas Tower itself, a thoroughly useless and extremely ugly structure which, apart from drawing Whitman to his rendezvous with the history books, also drew some dozens of stressed-out students over the years to fling themselves from it.

I blame the Tower.

Well, no, not really, of course. But the Texicans' crackpot-realist response was to install metal detectors, guards, grilles to frustrate leapers, and so on, and then re-open the deadly seductive Tower to work its malign magic.

Apparently one of the important functions of the tower is to be floodlit in the school colors whenever the team wins a game. I am told this is a big deal, and people would miss it.

Meanwhile, in my town, work proceeds apace on a Viagra-fication of the wounded American phallus down at the old Trade Center site. As far as I can tell, the new building is going to be almost as ugly as David and Nelson were -- though they would be hard to beat. At least there's only one of it. As long as it lasts.

Everybody loves a tower, of course, but there are towers and there are towers. Nobody objects to the wonderfully mismatched spires of Chartres, but Yahweh himself seems to have registered his displeasure with a certain overscaled structure in the ancient Near East:

In a now-predictable pattern, Emperor Barack Obama -- who claims the right to assassinate anyone at any time anywhere, who maintains a “kill list” of potential assassination victims, and whose drone strikes have murdered thousands of civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen -- delivered the now-standard scripted Tourette’s outburst of false compassion and sympathy for murdered civilians in the Aurora movie-theater shootup.

Also, in a now-predictable pattern, the US news media fawned over the Boy Emperor’s gushing, unflinchingly, unquestioningly, and without the slightest sense of irony.

www.sinkers.org

if MITT gets the ballot box nod this fall for next january
--- beating the SMBIVA /PAINE ' ten foot poll ' odds ----
then we got questions to answer eh ?

like
will he rebuild the sunday punch
behind uncle's global reach ?

will he beef up big Sam's sagging armadas of air and sea ?

in slashing the rich man's taxes
will he cut us a little slack too ?

let me suggest this future perfect conjecture :

whatever security spending he orders
and whatever taxes he cuts
we of the sugary pink persuasion oughta be grateful
the god damn votin majority chose him

'cause brothers and sisters
Uncle is gettin careful on social spending
no matter which head gets the people's approval
stamped on its brow this november

yup ..... u catch my implication..of course u do

i'm suggesting a first term MITT
will spend more and run bigger deficits
then a second term BARRY

now add to this 4 years of unified domestic opposition
and i claim u have 4 better years with this ball -less mormon creep
then taking 4 more of barry the burnt orange lincoln

errrr macronomically speaking of course
which is how my reductio- productionist job-esity of a bashburger mind
weighs imperial policy stuff

ya ... despite the trace memory of" the way I were"

i strongly urge we push for peace and burning streets
vote romney
at least in ohio

-------------------
okay
reactions among us
to MITT'S version of sanctimony may surge
in ways too enraging to subdue ...but hey its all good isn't it
...any rage is friendly rage
and on the struggle side of the ledger

--------------------

but PAINE ...what about IMPERIAL WARS ?
this guy is a flying monkey

MITT ?? are u shittin me ???

to quote my pal foggy throat :

" elect him and you elect 4 years of imperial peace abroad
and synchro-dynamic class war at home

what the fuck more can u want ?
besides
that board room fink knows damn well
uncle can steal more with a briefcase
full of " trade agreements" then with 100 thousand predators
paine the bastard 'll build em for sure
but just to hangar em "

Recall, after the 2008 election, the ideological triumphalism of the liberal alpha consumers? Obama's successful journey through the bowels of the electoral system represented the defeat of the Republican world view. The GOP "narrative" had been crushed. The brand and its managers were humiliated. The voters had spoken with a thundering voice, etc., and the right wing ontology had been demolished. That lasted, what? Six months? Less? Then the tired, standby tropes of their exculpatory Bush regime blustering started creeping back into their writing and talking head presentations. The Democratic leadership was once again on the liberal psychoanalysis couch. The big favorite was a modified battered spouse diagnosis...

The chin-stroking class was desperate enough that even Lakoff enjoyed a minor surge (he's back, by the way, still trying to work the neuro-linguistic programming shuck and jive). But control of the imperial presidency doesn't lend itself well to pleas of helplessness and by 2010, they had to content themselves with mocking Sarah Palin, ridiculing the self-consciously ridiculous teabaggers and blaming an apathetic electorate for its failure to "put pressure" on whatever it was that would respond to pressure. Occupy! gave the strokers a touch of cheer, but when it was clear it couldn't be suborned for Obama's coming re-election campaign they sulked and psycho-analyzed while the cops got busy. And now, needless to say, they're working the "narcissism of minor differences" angles for all they're worth. With a difference. They're not noticing them. They're in them, neck deep.

Oops. What a come down. But the Democratic perception managers don't notice their setbacks any more than the GOP brand managers noticed their own "evisceration". Nor should they, really: there's nothing there. The diagnoses are crap. The psychology is junk and dumpster-ready junk at that; plagiarized from television shows and waiting room magazines.

There's a general agreement in SMBIVAN circles that electoral triumph is bad for the moral character of the Democratic Party faithful. The realities of formal bourgeois democracy entail an endless, tail-chasing effort to justify and defend toxic continuity. With psychologizing on the menu, I have my own diagnosis: corporate infantilization. In formal bourgeois democracy, the go-along to get-along people never become political adults. They never get a chance to think and work things through, make mistakes, live with mistakes, fix them and try to get things right. They get soap bubbles and sucking voids.

Misfit cadres, unite! You have nothing to lose but your line.

I have no superior program to offer, when it comes to contesting and exploring an ideological line. What I've got is a half-assed pluralism and a few 'thou shalt nots'. The problem I have with a quest for unity of line is that the debates tend to favor those with the aptitude and the time for debate. Debate itself, in the clinches, elides material conditions that hamstring would-be participants. The dilemma can be somewhat alleviated by altruistic self-discipline, but this is a thin reed.

Another evil of the robot is the ill-will it begets between the masters and the workmen: their whole lives seem to be a constant effort, on the one hand, to see how much can be pressed out of the reluctant peasant; and, on the other, how little can be done to satisfy the terms of agreement, and escape punishment. Mutual injury becomes a mutual profit; suspicion and ill-will are the natural results

"Leaks of classified information regarding intelligence sources and methods can disrupt intelligence operations, threaten the lives of intelligence officers and assets, and make foreign partners less likely to work with us," said Feinstein, a Democrat from California. "The culture of leaks has to change," she said in a joint statement with Chambliss, a Georgia Republican.

The "culture of leaks" indeed! None of the leaks and dribbles have ever had any effect at all on anything but the gassy self-satisfaction of the national security mandarins. For them, and to them, it's a personal insult and a criminal affront.

from piquant sandy-blog

"Govern the people by regulations,
keep order among them by chastisements,
and they will flee from you, and lose all self-respect.

Govern them by moral force,
keep order by ritual
and they will keep their self-respect and come to you of their own accord."

in its place hovering over a land of postage stamp rice paddy
this is plausibly good manadrin governance

http://ecologicalheadstand.blogspot.com/2012/07/a-cheap-market-will-always-be-full-of.html

buuuuut ..

among us however

soon enough a sinister overlay settles in

exhibit A :
the quadrennial fall classic
dunking for POTUS apples

"they will keep their self-respect and come to you of their own accord" ?

takes on goblin like
reso-nationals

better i think a communitive associative mutant making fa -nome

we reds have in mind a fa fa better place
where li
is that shit stuck to the bottom of the tea pot

George Lakoff has a new book. It's the same book he's always writing, which is based on the same article he's always writing, which is based on the same premise he's always flogging. How do I know? I know because it has the same blurb that introduces all of his articles and books. As a public service, I'm going to "reframe" the thesis—without any gratuitous capitalization

Essentially, there's a conservative buttplug afflicting the body politic. It's a magic, programmable buttplug and it beams messages into the moral colon of society. What progressives need is their own buttplug. A nurturing one, as opposed to the strict one favored by conservatives. Now, some might cavil at this and suggest that progressives already have an embarrassment of riches in this... department, if you will. But if that were true, then the progressive agenda wouldn't be subject to spasms of reverse rectal peristalsis.

There you have it. You can thank me in the comments section.

no sooner had i given mitt
the paine "nod

"http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/2012/07/grande_y_felicisima_armada.html#comments

then damned if he don't go tuskless board room boar on me ....

and in england yet
geeeeeze laweeeze

shittin the bed right there in the home of no crust high tea
and rancid old boy low blows ....

-------------------------

u can read here a prim accounting of this terrible tale
the romney shambles
or
' noddle mouth abroad'
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2012/07/mitt_romney_s_insults_and_mistakes_while_at_the_london_olympics_aren_t_gaffes_as_much_as_a_fair_representation_of_his_worldview_.html

i just had to fish out this one flaunder for ya :

"The American capitalists-turned-statesmen of an earlier generation

—Douglas Dillon, Averell Harriman, Robert Lovett, John McCloy,
Dean Acheson , Paul Nitze—

took risks, built institutions, rejiggered postwar Europe,
and in the doing befriended their foreign counterparts:
in short, they cultivated an internationalist sensibility ....."

internationalist sensibility ?

what a label eh ?

i mean come on here

dean acheson !!!! '......christ !
just the mere mention of that Sith's name
oughta blow all the feathers off a mourning dove

at any rate

i gotta ask u
who don't yet know
the imperial high dragon Potus
like the Doge of old
is a simple captive of "the global interests"

if the intended implication of this piece happens to be
something like
mr mitt romney as emperor
would be nothing more or less then a doltish sub orbital spread eagle bully boy
u know
one of those
" hard nosed ....bottom line" guys
ready and willing
to bust up any raised pinky type international crockery
that gets in his way

ya ...a little bush 2.0

let me simply note in this regard one small fact

could anyone....anyone possibly be more "the home grown pugnacious corn stalk "
then 'give em hell ' harry truman ?

and yet harry--- god bless his two ounce soul -- is the very Potus that oversaw
the best and brightest of these genteel pirates ..... most importantly

yes the red dean himself

grand highfazolla fulgencio t acheson

----------------------------

fyi:

to be scrupulously careful and fair

fred the kapstraw...the fatuous slate snake

has it right here so far as he goes ...of course he has it right

mitt is a typical hot house
american board room venus fly trap

not some voice of the hegemonic metropole like ..well like
houston's own self made world viewer
jungle jim baker

but fred's dead wrong too

mitt will take advice from wall street on foreign ventures .....believe me he will
just like he has on strictly domestic ventures
since he got out of his business short pants
back in the early 80's

today wall street wants pax amerikan not TR rough housing ...at least for a decent interval

while these nasty fuckers from laputa finish vacuuming the big north markets of earth

i suspect Clio has closed the book on my swinish generation of amerikan educateds

we got 16 years in power clinton and baby bush
the do bee and the don't bee of boomerhood
and that's a palindrome gang
its true looked at both ways

no matter from which end of the national sewer pipe
you view my generations "prime time "

what an aweful record ...eh ?

i know lots here think barry deserves a thrashing but really do we want to give another boomer a shot at crapping on mother earth ?
----------------------------------------------

ya i'm talking out of both sides of my loud mouth these days
one post it's go mitt .....next post....fuck mitt

so sue me
ya pink panty bastids !

common knowledge
this ever degenerate
recklessly infidel site
often smirks at our leading liberal Gov-cult
Supremes worship

and those capricious one dimensional demigods
deserve every smirk they get here x 10

a kafkaesque insect olympus if there ever was one

but as the great Colossus sez "there is another "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(novel)

ie
that is ... Al Hamilton's national incubus

THE FED ...

Guardian of our money's worth

now just why isn't this outfit star gazed upon by liberals
like they gaze upon the naughty and nice over at that
giant flea circus on first street ?

ya ya ya the babbit clubers all gaze on our credit governors over there
but they are nothing to us ...eh ?
simple creatures of shameless avarice
and ...much worse ...
to a man every jack and tom of em ... ghoulish graspers and .hoarders....

so why don't leading enlightened figures u know well regarded members in good standing
of the socratic wing of our merit class
why don't THEY put the skunk eye on the FED ?

why when the subject of the FED comes up
and the moment to hear from a jeremiah arrives
must we always get the likes of RON PAUL
or some other self appointed walking dead 100% reserve " specie " kook ?

to put as fine a point as possible on it
why aren't hollywood progressives like what's her name ... babs striderite
and .... and shit ... mugs cooney
up there on david letterman yammering away
against that four square bandits decoy
gentle ben bernanke ?

At least he made the Brits good and mad. More than Obie can claim. I knew, just knew, the guy had to have some redeeming social importance.

Trust a Utah'n to be tactless enough to show up in London and make it clear that he considers himself an emissary from headquarters to a rather inconsequential branch office, entitled -- called upon, in fact- - to give his managerial knucklehead views about security measures and so on to the understrappers.

The Brits are quite sensitive about this stuff, since, after Israel, they are the most groundlessly conceited client state we have, and their absurd vanity is easily offended.

Obromney is of course a U of Chicago guy, where I can assure you that parvenu Anglophilia is, or was, in my day, a pandemic illness. A guy from that world would never wish to appear ignorant of Brit shibboleths, or indifferent to Brit self-regard, if he could help it. But Rombama, the ayatollah of Mormarollah, to his credit, clearly doesn't give a shit about this trifling little Ruritania and its quaint folkways.

mark this up as

'the euro crisis update you didn't want '

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/dos-and-don-ts-for-the-european-central-bank

-----------------------

enter stage right
martin babbington feldstein of harvard university

always a man to interene in a big debate
Marty has a few words of advice for senor draghi et al
over at the European Central Bank

-------------------------------

the implication of recent remarks by head banker Draghi
males this crisis all seem like child's play

the ECB simply buys up as much of the outstanding stock
of CLUB MED SOVEREIGNS as necessary
till market rates are forced back into the sustainable range

but ...sez cuz martin ... ' tactic'-fully

this can never work ...not in the long run:
marty:

".. any central bank must be able to conduct open-market operations to manage liquidity in financial markets"

however

".. selective purchases of individual country bonds that bear high interest rates because of current and past fiscal profligacy is both unnecessary and dangerous."

yes that's clear enough isn't it ? so we really could stop there
and go off to other hot spot subjects

but doc martin has a counter proposal:

" A better rule for the ECB
would be to conduct open-market operations
by buying and selling a “neutral basket” of sovereign bonds,
with each country’s share in the basket determined by its share in the ECB’s capital."

that so far as i can see
gets simply stated and left hanging

"there now boys ..merlin has spoken ...so without a moment's hesitation
go out there and
do the right thing ."

my guess MF had space limits
but fom other remarks elsewhere i know he was thinking
about how the zone's elite might go about lowering the forex rate of the euro
to end its imbalances with the ROW

but we stray here .. back to the main topic

..no need really all's we get are restatements of the obvious
mission repeat the message over and over
arm chair agit prop style :

"holy moses clear thinking cub scouts
who in their right mind would want to
"....reduce pressure on the governments of...high-interest countries "

right NOW those pusilanimous compromisers need a stiffened spine not a bail out
they need "to make the politically difficult decisions ....
to cut long-term fiscal deficits...."

cut long-term fiscal deficits.... cut long-term fiscal deficits...... cut long-term fiscal deficits

cut cut cut .......deficits deficits deficits

-------------

btw : there's a wonderously hideous passage in the middle
full of talk about past present and future "market signals"
both of the wrong and the right variety

which btw if one takes a step back suggests more questions then it answers

---------------------------------------------------------------------
we're done then paine ?

yes at least we should be ...but i can't bring myself to leave just yet

---------------------------------------------------
there's so much more ....take marty 's grave warning
...if
the ECB follows the Draghi way
all the way
right up to the end of this crisis
then
" ...the ECB risks finding itself in the politically dangerous position
of deciding
whether a country’s fiscal actions are tough enough
to be rewarded with lower interest rates........"
which means :

"The ECB has crossed the threshold from doling out monetary policy
to doling out fiscal policy"

that last line there
is exactly why one must read every public messagefrom marty
...to get his particular brand of professor presto's
glue and gall sophistry
-------------------------------------------------------------------
from the back of the lecture hall:

" hey crome dome
are you claiming the ECB isn't NOW already
dictating member fiscal policy ?"

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
i predict
in his diary tonite MF writes:

"okay i gotta admit the ecb right now is dancing behind a veil of indirection
but for god's sake that's gotta stay that way
dancing behind a veil is always smarter
if not always sexier then going full montee !"
--------------------------------------------------
still can't stop myself .
.each time i think i'm done
marty pulls me back in ...

check out this upside down cake :

according the feldstein-think
far from the club Meds bolting the zone
the greater "risk" is a german bolt ! :

" Germany might not continue to accept the default risks implied
by large ECB purchases of high-risk sovereign bonds."

what ?
what risk "
and risk to who ?
and conveyed to them how ?
please mart-man please

do i nedd add
these follow up questions are not answered
or even asked

we do however get a nice bit of immediate misdirection however :

" Germany already faces large financial risks, owing to the ECB’s balance sheet and the Target2 balances at the Bundesbank that are generated by international flows of deposits to German commercial banks. "

ya ya
post bail there'd be a risk that net fund flows might head back toward club med banks

and in the light of that possible consequence
i can easily see why
a real full court club med bail
might not get the old "do it baby... do it " first take
out of
lots of german private bankers
bankers that are now happy bankers
on the receiving end of otherwise unwarranted net inflows
that would quickly become net outflows or back flows so to speak

but folks trust me
there are ways to make that work out as a win win many ways
remember
these same banks own lots of heavily discounted club med paper ....
get it ?
as in
"do dah woids 'sudden huge capital gain ' mean anything to ya ?"

---- if not then fuck just never mind.... forget it ...just trust me ..
.i prolly bankrupted more companies
in my career
then lots of you ever worked for---

here's the pay off:

" As the risks accumulate, ...
Germany might conclude
despite the potential impact on its exchange rate..

it would be better off returning to the Deutsche Mark"

note the passed thru caveat:

"despite the potential impact on its exchange rate"

catch that ? yup....
better a soaring revaluation ...better a sudden huge reduction
in international competitiveness
then all these zillions of day after day hauntings
by phantom default risks

-----------------------------
hour later at least

ps god is this a rich column

check out this zinger

"... ECB officials’ recent statements , by reversing the decline of the euro’s value,
may have blocked the market response that is needed to shrink current-account imbalances and boost GDP in the eurozone."

get it ?....germany could take a reval above but the entire zone can't cause the entire zone
needs a deval to crease international competitiveness

ya ya ya .... see world citizens the damn ECBrun euro corral f's
with every member nation's policy options
and gladly to
hell that was the point of it all
from day 1 !

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

repeat after me :

there is no way
but the MNC way

the MNCs are our only Gods

and ECB is .....errrr ....one of their enforcer

Comrade Owen, our own Pindar, recently wrote:

i wish someone had noticed just how far apart father and i are
at least by implication
on the mitt /brit dis connect

though as a celtic by brand
i admire father S taking any opportunity
to squeeze albions nutz*

would that he would cease the battering of the mini me however
this site seems to self select for rabid zion baiters 

Broadly speaking, there are two rational and arguable views about Uncle's Mini-Me. Cavalierly caricatured, with a very broad brush, they are:

1) The majority Left view: Israel is just a crafty emanation of Uncle's imperial strategy -- a client state par excellence, a sock puppet.

2) It's a tail which to some degree wags its dog, due to domestic political considerations. This view is held by some on the Left, but is more commonly found among slightly dissident mainstream commentators -- George Ball, back in the day, and Mearsheimer and Walt, more recently.

You pays your money and you takes your choice. Or rather, you takes your choice even if you doesn't pay your money.

I lean toward 2), Owen toward 1).

But here's my question: either way, doesn't the damn Golem deserve as much execration as one can find words for?

a belated response to a comment query :

"... there’s all that newly discovered water lying underneath Africa"

i must say that line has time capsule quality now doesn't it ?.....

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

let that big screen in your had envision this...the next inter - great power race :

the rush to fresh water ... under the jungle !.!

at long last the final resource frontier is in sight ....some where ahead
huge gleaming tankers plow the 7 seas on their way
to distributing pure african spring water

-------hey i can big it ...recall new england pond ice ?
a staple of 19th century trade ----

so now we not only meter our water ..we'll have to import it.. ... "at the margin"

for real kids ?

well maybe ...just maybe

as my uncle 'nolo contendre' paine used to grumble -roar :

"ittttt .... could get to that owen ! " (usually over a schooner of 'gansett' )

but not i think ,dear enquirer , b4 much else goes boing boing in the nite
here on this market infested planet

-------------------------------------------------

as to the "that huge fossil water aquifer Libya sits on"

to " corporatize" that and at a modest rate fee
pump it up and onto the surrounding sand dunes
to grow winter wheat or iowa corn or soyabeans or bagels fopr that matter

i can categorically state such an undertaking
would amount to folly even beyond nikita's virgin lands crusade

--------------------------------------------------
end note:

a fine old teutonic eco-sage once speculated on that vey topic
-- sub saharan fossil water--

" pump it out and its gone for good ......but hey we are on the short path
to becoming MARS II anyway ..
.so what the fuck.. ..go right ahead
knock your self out
mr business man "

"i'll belch to that "
as my uncle Nolo might say
t'is always a fine notion ....you know....
taking the long view and all
tends to resign the spirits

Veneration of the Lump entails complete commitment to a form of intellectual tail-chasing that closely resembles paranoia. The Lump-huggers read minds. The minds they're reading don't exist, which makes them much easier to read, which is impossible to do in the first place. They're worse off than people who start with a conclusion and shoehorn everything into support of it. The everything they're trying to shoehorn has no more basis than the minds that don't exist.