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And, yes, I DO take it personally: 01/29/2012 - 02/05/2012
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"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it."
- Noam Chomsky
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And, yes, I DO take it personally

Saturday, February 04, 2012

Chevy end times Super Bowl ad

and the message here would be what, exactly...?
A man drives his Chevy Silverado through an apocalyptic world predicted by the Mayan calendar.



(thanks to kevin at cryptogon...)

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Friday, February 03, 2012

Ecuador's radical approach - actually collect taxes, tax the rich, make the oil companies pay for extracting its natural resource

what a concept...!

from the real news network...


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So much for Obama’s new housing refinance plan

mike whitney writing in counterpunch via information clearing house...
The truth is the banks want to offload their garbage mortgages onto Uncle Sam to avoid hundreds of billions of dollars in losses. That’s what this refi-ruse is really all about.

The administration estimates that 3.5 million people with private label mortgages will be eligible to refinance into loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) Many of these are high risk mortgages that will eventually go into foreclosure which is why the banks want to get them off their books. Regrettably, Obama is only too happy to help them achieve that goal.

[...]

To be eligible for Obama’s refi-program, borrowers will need a credit score (FICO) above 580,(which is extremely low), they’ll have to be employed, and they’ll have to be current on their mortgage payments. (for the last 6 months) In other words, lending standards are being eased so the banks can dump as many high-risk mortgages on the FHA as possible. Obama breezily refers to these abysmal lending standards as “cutting through the red tape.”

Applicants will also be able to refinance under the Obama’s program with loan balances up to (get this) 140 percent of the value of their home. So, even if you owe $560,000 on a home that is currently worth $400,000–and you don’t have a dime’s worth of equity in the house–have no fear–you can still get money from Uncle Sugar. This isn’t a good way to keep people in their homes. It just turns them into debt slaves.

well, we figured out some time back that obama is owned by the banks, lock, stock and barrel, so none of this should come as a big surprise...

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Percent Job Losses in Post WWII Recessions

atrios...
Ultimately the point is that in February of 2012, this is still the scariest chart ever. Hopefully it will continue to become less scary more fast, but I don't think anybody can declare with any confidence that this is inevitable. People can believe that, of course, but it isn't yet obviously true.

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(click on graphic for larger image)

yeah, it's scarey all right... besides me, i know at least a half dozen other people who are looking for work, some of them for over two years...

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Thursday, February 02, 2012

The U.S. Government’s conduct of most affairs behind a wall of secrecy is ... cynical, manipulative and self-protective

glenn delivers an insightful analysis of the aclu lawsuit against various agencies of the obama administration — the justice and defense departments and the cia — over their refusal to disclose any information about the assassination of american citizens...

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Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Adam Smith's "invisible hand" is a complete misinterpretation

chomsky...


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Another goddam $10B bailout - American Airlines wants to hand its pensions over to the PBGC

on december 1, i predicted this...
American Airlines will use its bankruptcy as a $10B bailout by kicking its pensions to taxpayers

based on this...
Taxpayers May Have To Pay AMR Pension Bill

based on the precedent set by united airlines in 2005 when i posted this...
United defaults on pension plans; CEO buys $4.5M condo

so now we have this...
AMR To Seek End To Worker Pensions - PBGC

The US Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which has responsibility for insuring certain benefits under private defined benefit pension plans, said on Tuesday it believes American Airlines will seek to terminate employee pensions in bankruptcy.

The agency said it filed a USD$92 million lien against American parent AMR for the balance of unpaid pension plan contributions. It added that the lien was applied to AMR assets outside the United States, mainly in Latin America.

[...]

The US Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which has responsibility for insuring certain benefits under private defined benefit pension plans, said on Tuesday it believes American Airlines will seek to terminate employee pensions in bankruptcy.

The agency said it filed a USD$92 million lien against American parent AMR for the balance of unpaid pension plan contributions. It added that the lien was applied to AMR assets outside the United States, mainly in Latin America.

make no mistake... what american airlines is asking for is a $10B bailout... bankruptcy is a very convenient way for companies to void their labor contracts, neuter their unions and hand off their pension liabilities to the government taxpayers hapless citizens us suckers to pick up the tab... privatizing profits, socializing losses... it's the american way...

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Monday, January 30, 2012

The more we grasp that our true allies may not speak our language ... the more powerful we will become

chris hedges...
Corporate power is global, and resistance to it cannot be restricted by national boundaries. Corporations have no regard for nation-states. They assert their power to exploit the land and the people everywhere. They play worker off of worker and nation off of nation. They control the political elites in Ottawa as they do in London, Paris and Washington. This, I suspect, is why the tactics to crush the Occupy movement around the globe have an eerie similarity—infiltrations, surveillance, the denial of public assembly, physical attempts to eradicate encampments, the use of propaganda and the press to demonize the movement, new draconian laws stripping citizens of basic rights, and increasingly harsh terms of incarceration.

Our solidarity should be with activists who march on Tahrir Square in Cairo or set up encampamentos in Madrid. These are our true compatriots. The more we shed ourselves of national identity in this fight, the more we grasp that our true allies may not speak our language or embrace our religious and cultural traditions, the more powerful we will become.

i have often been dismayed at how much of a bubble we live in here in the u.s... it's particularly apparent to me when i return from outside the country... the only global perspective most of us have is what dribbles down to us from our propaganda-spouting media (iran, iraq, afghanistan, arab spring, etc.) or from a dim awareness that virtually everything we buy - short of automobiles and food - comes from china...

fortunately, the occupy movement has begun to move beyond that kind of insular thinking at least to the extent that an increasing number of those involved identify with what's happening in tahrir square, spain and chile...

hedges is right... there is a global awakening and we need to embrace it as such... when i talk with my afghan friends - as i do regularly - i find they are struggling with the same issues of repression by their super-rich elites as their compatriots in egypt and our own occupy protestors here in the u.s... the false dichotomies of patriotism and nationalism heaped on us by our handlers only serve to keep us from the full realization that the "99%" are under the thumb of the "1%" globally, not just inside our borders...

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America is a nine-hundred pound man imprisoned in a fetid trailer bedroom begging for one more case of Little Debbie Cocoa Cremes

post headline from a james howard kunstler piece on obama's sotu entitled "Jive Talkin"...
America is a nine-hundred pound man imprisoned in a fetid trailer bedroom begging for one more case of Little Debbie Cocoa Cremes before the front-end-loader bashes through the wall to haul him to intensive care. America just wants to hear another story about its own wonderfulness before that happens. America's soul is so lost that it has disappeared into the same cosmic wilderness that MF Global's client accounts were last seen entering.

[...]

I've had enough of Obama, though I voted for him in 2008. I won't vote for him again. But I'm not altogether confident that any of us will be voting for anyone in the fall of 2012. Too many systems we depend on are spinning out of control. I suppose we will continue feeding ourselves a diet of lies and evasions until circumstances become so extreme that language itself loses all relevance and only real action will answer. I believe that moment is approaching in the yet-to-be-acted-out political uproars of the spring and summer. In the meantime, American leadership is bankrupt. Just accept the fact that America has no legitimate leadership. The vacuum is total and we know how nature feels about a vacuum.

occasionally, kunstler is a fun read but i can't imagine being cooped up in the same room with him for very long without one or the other of us starting to foam at the mouth...

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Sunday, January 29, 2012

Whining U.S. banks make me physically ill

great gobs of steaming bullshit... the banks are one of the prime culprits in why the world economy is in the mess it is in right now and, despite the trillions of dollars that the u.s. and the eu have tossed their way, have continued to reward themselves without any regard for the general welfare of the people they were chartered to serve... now, they're saying if they don't get their way, it will only delay any recovery... they can all go directly to hell...
Banks warn rule change will hurt recovery

US banks fear that any recovery in the US housing market will be further delayed as a result of moves to remove credit ratings from American regulations, which will boost banks’ capital requirements by billions of dollars.

Bankers have until Friday to respond to a proposal by the Federal Reserve and other regulators that would increase the “risk weights” on securitised assets, driving up sharply the equity capital that banks are forced to set against them.

screw 'em... they haven't done anything for anybody but themselves...

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The power-brokers in the global economy are finally realising that something has gone badly awry

a thoughtful, well-written op-ed in yesterday's guardian...
We can now see the true cost of globalisation

The worldwide public realises there is something deeply wrong with today's world economic system

i particularly like the closing comment...
[A]s we sift through the wreckage of the Great Recession, perhaps it's finally time to heed Marx's words, and stand up for workers everywhere.

i would re-word that just a bit to "it's time to stand up for the common good of all peoples everywhere"...

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