The extremes of governments influence over commerce are illustrated by two stories. In Massachusetts a 12-year old’s green tea stand was shut down by the State Police while in Washington state, the Feds Sign Off on Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner.
The FAA presented Boeing with a type certificate and production certificate for the innovative composite airliner during a ceremony at Boeing’s factory north of Seattle. The pieces of paper mean the Dreamliner can begin commercial service, and they represent the culmination of several billion dollars of investment for the aerospace giant and almost as many headaches. …
But unlike other Boeing models, in which much of the manufacturing occurs in Everett, the 787 is assembled from subassemblies manufactured in several countries and flown to Washington in modified 747s called Dreamlifters.
AdvertisementA short list of the parts built outside Everett include fuselage sections made in Italy, Japan, South Korea and the United States. Floor beams are built in India. Wing sections come from Japan. The doors and landing gear are made in France and Sweden. Portions of the tail are made in Italy and South Korea.
In addition to distributing some of the cost and risk, the global supply chain was also a way to make friends in countries where Boeing wanted to sell the 787.
Selling any product from green tea to a jetliner now involves government at many levels. The attitudes of the press toward lobbying in high places has oscillated between regarding it as the hope for a better tomorrow or the mechanism through which the players rule the citizens. Today ‘progressives’ tend to the former. In the early 20th century government involvement was regarded as the latter — a vehicle for imposing the will of the rich. So today we want more of it, and the rich are willing to pay to see that we do. Warren Buffet recently wrote in the New York Times that he had benefited so much from government intervention that he was willing to kick some of it back into the till.
While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.
These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places.
He proposed to remedy the situation by paying more taxes but not by altering the the power of government to influence the ways in which his money was made. Buffet picked the metaphor of “spotted owls” to characterize how government cherishes a protected species. Back in the 19th century the idea of favoritism was expressed in more directly political terms. The role of government was to ensure ‘capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich’. The poor could go to work. The rich could make a deal.
In the early 20th century the hate figures were not bankers but industrialists and especially arms manufacturers. The best known was Basil Zaharoff, the original Man of Mystery, the chief salesman for Vickers, at one time perhaps the richest man in the world and from his Balkan origins the possible inspiration for Keyser Soze. Zaharoff certainly inspired a lot of fiction.
- In the Tintin album The Broken Ear, Zaharoff is parodied as the weapon trader Basil Bazarov.
- Zaharoff was portrayed by Leo McKern (of Rumpole of the Bailey fame) in the 1983 ITV series Reilly, Ace of Spies.
- Zaharoff was depicted in the “Lanny Budd” series by reformer Upton Sinclair.
- Rayt Marius in Knight Templar and The Misfortunes of Mr. Teal, featuring Leslie Charteris’ the Saint, appears to be based on Zaharoff.
- Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey included Zaharoff on the dedication page to The Satanic Bible.
- In his novel A Coffin for Dimitrios, Eric Ambler is claimed to have patterned Dimitrios on Sir Basil Zaharoff.
- Zaharoff appears in Thomas Pynchon novel Against the Day.
- In Ezra Pound’s “Canto XVIII” and “Canto XXXVIII,” Zaharoff makes numerous appearances under the name “Metevsky.”
- Zaharoff was one of the inspirations for the unscrupulous arms manufacturer Andrew Undershaft in George Bernard Shaw’s play Major Barbara.
- Zaharoff is a character in the novel The King’s Commisar by Duncan Kyle.
- ‘Zaroff’ is an unscrupulous arms dealer in the Tom Mix serial “The Miracle Rider”.
- Some aspects of Zaharoff’s life were used as the basis for elements of Citizen Kane.
But only a very few referred to him by his real name. And maybe there was no point. His name, like everything else, was partly an invention. John Flynn described the curious internationalism of Zaharoff. He belonged to no nation and therefore was a transcendent figure of sorts. Nobody was sure where he was born, how he got his start in life and to who he owed his loyalty. All anyone knows was that he was suddenly there.
It was never known with complete certainty to what country he owed allegiance. He was a Greek, born in Turkey, who lived in Paris. His right to the ribbon of the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor was questioned in the Chamber of Deputies and M. Clemenceau had to assure the Chamber that “M. Zaharoff is a Frenchman.” But also he was throughout his life the guiding genius of a great British armament concern, acted as a British agent, was a Knight of the Bath, known in England as Sir Basil Zaharoff.
Journalists said he spoke fluently fourteen languages — which is probably an extravagant exaggeration. They reported how he had confided to a written record the story of his life, filling fifty-eight volumes which he ordered to be burned at his death, while others told how he had himself destroyed the record, two days being consumed in reducing it to ashes in the furnace of his Paris home. …
Zacharias Basileios Zacharias — later to be known as Basil Zaharoff — was born October 6, 1849, apparently in Mugla, near the Turkish capital of Angora. His people were Greeks who had lived in Constantinople, fled to Odessa during the Turkish persecutions in 1821, returned to Mugla, and then, when Basileios was three years old, took up their home again in the Tatavla or poor district of Constantinople. The boy went to school until he was sixteen, when some disaster to his father forced him to go to work. He worked, we are told, as a fireman, a guide, a moneychanger. …
When he was twenty-one he found work with an uncle in Constantinople who had some sort of mercantile business. One day Basileios disappeared, taking with him money from the cash drawer. The infuriated uncle traced him to London where he was arrested. How or why he was arrested in London for a crime committed in Turkey is not made clear.
It is immediately clear that Zaharoff’s biography contains many of the “mystery” elements that characterize George Soro’s — not that anyone wants to compare the two. But in terms exotic detail, strange backgrounds and sudden turns Soro’s biography would at least give Zaharoff’s a run for his money.
Soros was thirteen years old in March 1944 when Nazi Germany occupied Hungary. Soros took a job with the Jewish Council, which had been established during the Nazi occupation of Hungary to carry out Nazi and Hungarian government anti-Jewish measures. …
Later that year, at age 14, Soros lived with and posed as the godson of an employee of the Hungarian Ministry of Agriculture. On one occasion, the official was ordered to inventory the remaining contents of the estate of a wealthy Jewish family that had fled the country. Rather than leave the young Soros alone in the city, the official brought him along. The following year, Soros survived the Battle of Budapest, in which Soviet and German forces fought house-to-house through the city.
Soros emigrated to England in 1947 and, as an impoverished student, lived with his uncle, an Orthodox Jew. His uncle paid his living expenses while he attended the London School of Economics, where he received a Bachelor of Science in Philosophy in 1952. While a student of the philosopher Karl Popper, Soros worked as a railway porter and as a waiter. A University tutor requested aid for Soros, and he received £40 from a Religious Society of Friends (Quaker) charity. He eventually secured an entry-level position with London merchant bank Singer & Friedlander.
And the rest, as they say is history. At least what you can find of it. Now Soros is the capitalist who hates capitalism. Maybe because he would have to give up socialism for himself. Flynn wrote that despite everything that had been written about the Zaharoff, there almost nothing about his inner core. The words Flynn wrote of Zaharoff would apply almost equally to Soros: here was someone who realized for his youth that everything was up for sale and who must soon afterward have realized that governments had to be established to protect society from people like himself.
There is more than a hint that these early years were passed amid rough surroundings and that this impulsive and somewhat lawless boy — like one of our prominent labor racketeers, to use his own explanation of his twisted ethics — suffered from lack of ‘bringing-up.’
What nobody really knows for sure is whether such protections really extend to protecting the general population from the Zaharoffs or whether they are merely there to prevent parvenus from upsetting the established apple-cart.
Either way you need a powerful government.
The program of ‘capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich’ can only be implemented by a state with the power to take away money from the earners and regulate industry; it can only be accomplished by a government that can tell Boeing where to build its products and prohibit kids from setting up green tea stands. It can only be accomplished by a government that can effectively take sides in the matter of who makes the billions. Does Soros want it to protect people from Soros or to shelter Soros the spotted owl from other spotted owls? Salena Zito writes that President Obama has depicted himself as the plaything of the winds and tides, fortune or fate, God and the Devil.
he has blamed the stagnant economy on ATMs, ditches, Slurpees, corporate-jet owners, the Tea Party, Republicans, Japan’s earthquake, the Arab Spring, the Arab Summer, George Bush, and “fat-cat” Wall Street something-or-others.
And so he wants more power to tame the unruly weathers. But Paul Gregory at Forbes argues that Obama has to point the finger to hide the fact that he already has power; and what we see are the consequences rather than the shortcomings of immense influence. He has to point his finger to draw attention away from his hand. If government is not something that stands above corporations but something that chooses some corporations over others then government needs more power to select more winners.
He’ll advocate a second stimulus. He may be flanked by his jobs commission, headed by the CEO of General Electric, which earlier issued a lame interim jobs report. His speech will not be about jobs. Instead, it will be a campaign speech in disguise.
Obama cannot propose a real jobs program. His constituents would rebel. A real jobs program attacks too many of the core beliefs of his party, such as minimum wages and higher taxes on the better off.
“His constituents” would be special interests — as the Republican Party’s constituents have been special interests. And special interests are another way of saying “capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich”. Pointing is another way of saying, ‘I am choosing sides’.
Is activist government something that is all around the modern business environment? Watchful, waiting, always there. Or is it just a bogeyman imagined by bitter, clinging hillbillies to explain a sudden change in circumstances? The billions of people on this earth can’t really be ruled by people whose birthplace we can’t even be sure of, whose pasts are shrouded in mystery, can they? That is the stuff of old wives tales. We live in a rational, post-religious world where neither God nor the devil exist. Or so we hope.
Verbal Kint: He’s supposed to be Turkish. Some say his father was German. Nobody ever believed he was real. Nobody ever knew him or saw anybody that ever worked directly for him. But to hear Kobayashi tell it, anybody could have worked for Soze. You never knew; that was his power. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. One story the guys told me, the story I believe, was from his days in Turkey. There was a gang of Hungarians that wanted their own mob. They realized that to be in power, you didn’t need guns or money or even numbers. You just needed the will to do what the other guy wouldn’t.
Agent Kujon: Do you believe in him, Verbal?
Verbal Kint: Keaton always said, “I don’t believe in God, but I’m afraid of him.” Well, I believe in God — and the only thing that scares me is Keyser Soze.
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“… President Obama has deplicted himself was the playing of the winds and tides,…” Does not compute!
Quig, ditto. I was trying to asses whether I’ve got a case of acute dyslexia or incipient Alzheimer. Scary moment. After a few tests I decided that I am fine.
President Obama has deplicted himself was the playing of the winds and tides
fixed the typo
Wretchard had to choose between grammar editing and inspiration flow, and chose inspiration flow.
That’s the way an obscure musician somewhere around Vienna back around 1830 did it, too. Surviving Beethoven worksheets show a guy throwing down stuff as fast as he could, then having to go back, rub-out, redo the musical grammar, as many as fourteen identifiable times, until the piece of paper was rubbed nearly through –at which time –apparently having had enough of burning up volumes of brain carbohydrates –he’d pull out a fresh sheet of paper and put down a final for the orchestra.
Yah Buddy, I’m with you there. However, just to be pedantic, “deplicted” should, I believe be “depicted”. Nevertheless, I am fully appreciative of our host’s inspirational intellect.
Q/5, i hear ya –legibility too is not without its own charm.
Seems that they don’t like Basil Zaharov at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaharov
@4: “to choose between grammar editing and inspiration flow”
Isn’t that what some talking head on TV likes to call “a false choice” (or “a false dichotomy”)? Grammatical problems are so many boulders in the stream.
Or, to repurpose an old quote, any government big enough to give George Soros everything he wants is big enough to take it all away from the rest of us.
“But unlike other Boeing models, in which much of the manufacturing occurs in Everett, the 787 is assembled from subassemblies manufactured in several countries and flown to Washington in modified 747s called Dreamlifters.”
-Is that really true? When I toured the 747 line at Everett about a decade ago, I remember the guide bragging about how many parts were in a 747 and how many manufactuers in distant places were involved. What we saw was clearly an assembly line and what struck me as a fascinating insight into our civilization was not simply that engineers could imagine and design such a machine but that the co-ordination of many thousands of people around the country and world that went into making this plane was possible.
bl #4 And thus, the old joke about “decomposing”.
s/8, Grammatical problems are so many boulders in the stream –well THAT’s a wowser –color me green and call me speechless!
dkd/11 –’decomposing’ –ah, i’m stuffing these in my pockets as fast as i can steal ‘em
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIuo0KIqD_E
johnny would’ve been stymied at Boeing!
While at the Pentagon I found out that every industry, every company wants to not to be left alone by DC but rather to be subsidized, protected against foreign competition, protected against domestic competition, guaranteed business from the government, allowed altitude to sell the government items that do not have to meet government specifications – and to be left alone by the government.
This was summed up very well by a little article in the Wash Post with the title “Small Firms Chafe Under Government Regulations.” A young lady who had started a cookie company complained that meeting government regulations was an onerous burden but then added “It’s hard to get started in such a competitive business. There should be a law requiring retailers to purchase a quantity of a new product.”
So her attitude was that she wanted less government regulations – except for her customers, where she wanted new government regulations to force them to buy her product. The fact these seemingly mutually incompatible attitudes can be held simultaneously is a triubute to the complexities of the human mind – and an explanation of the complexities of the Federal Government.
The sad fact is, so much of the crap we have to put up with is not invented in DC but rather at the grassroots by people seeking advantages. It is turned into things like a 25 page military specification for tortillias by the Federal bureaucracy.
The remarkable thing about the Tea Party movement is that it is not made up those trying to secure special favors but rather people trying to end the idea of special favors.
wretchard, love this essay, it not only captures a fascinating and hyper-current subject, but with that wretchard perspective and style.
a trifecta, from Zaharoff to Soros to Obambus … wau!
not even counting your opening ploys on green tea and dreamliners.
–
on the previous point, the question is just how *should* a post-industrial globalized technological economy run?
me, I’m deep into nostalgia these days, going through piles of ancient stuff from my recently passed parents’ house, wondering what can be preserved, what anyone including me can make sense of fifty, sixty, eighty years and more after the fact and careening wildly into the future from the crazy pinnacle of today. and my father was a history major before a dawn-age electrical (electronics) engineer, dozens of books on the history of the US from the revolution onwards. back in the day we sought and had some degrees of freedom. in my own youth, in the 1950s and 1960s, it seemed we still valued that, even if it was already far from rampant. people have been trying to limit freedom since ancient times, and we fall into the freedom-to versus freedom-from debate. before you decide too easily which side you’re on, for my part I sure hope for some freedom-from George Soros, anyway.
Kings had less power than today’s politicians and bureaucrats, who can, with a midnight vote or the writing of a regulation, enrich or destroy those they wish to enrich or destroy.
When Louis Quatorze was on the throne
He shone as though the sun
Was something he alone did own
Perfection he had won
But Louis had less power than
A President today
Who points a finger at a man
And puts that man in play
Where regulations favor him
And tax codes are arranged
To guarantee by lawful whim
That taxes are estranged
A Congressman, a bureaucrat
A K Street lobbyist
A Senator, a Eurocrat
Make Lou a hobbyist
They all have power Louis lacked
The power to coerce
The power to choose whom he backed
The power of the purse
Yes Louis had what he loved most
His crown, his courtiers wise
But government officials boast
A thousand- fold Versailles
The “parts” that guide was talking about were probably things like hydraulic pistons, electrical components, hoses, fittings, etc. The 87 has entire parts of the plane built elsewhere – the wings in Japan, the tail in (I think) Italy, the stabilizer in England, the fuselage in three different sections in two or three different places. The Dreamlifter (big enough to carry the fuselage of an 87, or the wings for one, inside of it) flys around gathering up all the parts and bringing them to Everett where they are bolted together.
It’s sort of the difference between buying a bunch of stuff at the hardware store and lumber yard to make a bookcase, vs buying one at Ikea. In either case, you’re assembling the final product at your house, but there are some important differences.
(for Walt/15)
This is all
when in the end
King Lou he finally knew
and Soros’ pall
is in this wind
to do for Georgie too
Jeff Carter, writing on the Federal raids on raw milk, argues there are two approaches to the problem of a government ‘of the interests, by the interests and for the interests’. The first is to become the controlling interest — incidentally, this is the Leninist solution. The other is to shrink government to the point where special interests cannot predominate.
If government is run from the backroom, then sooner or later Washington and Brussels’s real constituencies won’t be the voters but the biggest players. Middle Eastern oil, international finance, Chinese industry. Then you would expect to see a government which refuses to drill, bails out bankers and exports jobs to China. What a horrible fate. Thank God that isn’t the case!
One solution to this problem is to elect a Barack Obama who will restore power to ‘the People’, if you think that’s what he’ll do. The other is to diminish the government, which will allow a return of power to the people. Which it is to be is probably what the current crisis will settle.
rwe/13, The remarkable thing…. the prophet
w/18, Thank God this isn’t the case! the wizard
Successful capitalists hate free markets, because when you’re at the top the only thing competition can do is bring you down. This is news to anyone?
That’s why I favor campaign finance reform that would limit political donations to only the constituents of a given office. The mass of humanity wants and needs opportunities, and our political class should not be working for the people who want to stifle those opportunities at every turn.
Cracked “Sailing Alone Around the World” yesterday.
When Joshua Slocum arrives at a Samoan village he is struck that the abundance of edible flora and fauna has left his hosts circumspect of English customs –
“Dollar, dollar,” said he, ”white man know only dollar”. “Never mind dollar. The tapo has prepared ava; let us drink and rejoice.”
Government has always been at some level greedy for power, but to be truly powerful requires money, other people’s money, and as I am to understand higher marginal rate crowd, then graft for evil things is a just due for the little people who get satisfaction watching their lords prey on the less mighty. It is owed as homage to power and power can only be appreciated by taking away freedom from those who cannot afford to pay its highest fare.
And so it is the illiberal purpose of Progressives to fleece the ewe of commerce to ingratiate its own interests whilst tithing the gluttonous beast of waste, fraud, and bigoted sanctimony that fanatically bolsters it.
A just government levels the playing field by removing obstacles not by creating obstacles to the merely successful, unless of course you promote world socialism in penance for your lifelong misappropriations. So we have special set asides for those noble races and the fairer sex in the middle class and the special privilege’s that can be obtained by lobby or gift. This is the kind of gift that a George Soros knows all too well and it profits him immensely. Such is a taxists’s perfect case; a ruinous policy for the most people for the buck taken while maintaining a fiend in high places to support them in and out of government.
A better quality of life does not equate to seeking power and the means to obtain it. Quality of life may be improved by money but money is the primary component to obtain power since deconstructionism has deduced that adherence to moral or natural laws are naïve and there is no just man. The government at the federal level is primarily a racket with armed thugs acting as a praetorian guard because their core commissions have been usurped in vituperous pursuits; for pure power or dollar-dollar, power’s modern analog.
Not until the American spring where 10 million people show up and say simply; No more. We will not take it. Not one more iota of it. Will there be a change. The game is rigged.
After the Democratic Party left me because I had no Metro in my Sexual, I switched allegiance, of sorts, to what has become known as “conservatism,” in part because it was not hostile to testosterone. It took me quite a while after the switch to understand that “capitalists” don’t necessarily want “free enterprise” or “free markets:” They want, first and foremost, to make money — everything else is secondary. If a capitalist can secure corporate welfare for himself, he will do so.
As for the smaller entrepreneur, I have met a number of them who don’t get libertarianism or conservatism, and who are fearful or contemptuous of this “Tea Party.” I guess they figure that Churchill’s allegorical alligator will never get around to eating them. I, in return, am contemptuous of that aspect of these “entrepreneurs” that doesn’t get the whole picture.
W
Another to throw on the pile:
Zardoz — the floating head that spews out rifles to the proles.
Almost certainly a take-off on our anti-hero from Vickers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbGVIdA3dx0
Spreading the work around to get US Congress critters to sign off on it is a very old tactic. Henry Knox did it with the Constitution Class of frigates, they were built in a number of shipyards up and down the East Coast. But at least they built whole ships.
The B-2 Bomber really ran into the problems with the sub-contracting model on several levels. What you have is sub-sub-contractors some who given work because of “minority” set asides. Quality control at the manufacturing level became hard even win the contractor would send one of their quality control guys to be on site. QC wouldn’t send their sharpest people off site. Thus you would get stuff that you needed that had to be re-worked,when possible before you could use it. Then the government security requirements bit everyone. Often the most skilled job shoppers had the worst credit records and were the hardest party people. They couldn’t get the new security clearances and so you had to use people with clean records, this often meant people who were young and inexperienced working cutting edge stuff. Their were numerous train wrecks caused by them. Aircraft components are dimensioned by Cartesian coordinates. For security reasons the coordinate labels would be switched, z for x, x for y. There were foul ups because of this, nothing like trying to put something together and finding a one foot mismatch.
As for me, if I have to go anywhere I’m driving myself, making a deal with a private aircraft owner, or taking the buss. It is not the structure on the 787 that scares me but the microchips in it….and the TSA of course.
Mao’s revenge will come how?
…-
“Ai Weiwei attacks injustices in China in magazine article
World-famous artist accuses officials of denying people their basic rights and describes Beijing as a ‘city of violence’”
“Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist held by the authorities for almost three months earlier this year, has attacked injustice in China in a passionate article fuelled by his own experiences of detention.
He accused officials of “deny[ing] us basic rights” and compared migrant workers to slaves, describing Beijing as “a city of violence” and “a constant nightmare”.
But one of the most powerful passages describes how people “become like mad” as they are held in isolation and how detainees “truly believe [captors] can do anything to you”.
His remarks, in an article about Beijing published on the website of Newsweek magazine, are certain to anger Chinese security officials. They come days after it emerged that China is reportedly planning to give police legal powers to hold some suspects for up to six months without telling their families. Campaigners say the move would legitimise and potentially increase the number of secret detentions.”
“The worst thing about Beijing is that you can never trust the judicial system,” he wrote in the Newsweek article. “It’s like a sandstorm … everything is constantly changing, according to somebody else’s will, somebody else’s power.”
He went on: “My ordeal made me understand that on this fabric, there are many hidden spots where they put people without identity … only your family is crying out that you’re missing. But you can’t get answers from the street communities or officials, or even at the highest levels, the court or the police or the head of the nation. My wife has been writing these kinds of petitions every day [while he was held], making phone calls to the police station every day. Where is my husband?”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/29/ai-weiwei-attacks-injustices-china
23. blert I realize that by today’s standards Zardoz is a pretty corny movie. But it did deal with some questions that no other sci-fi film ever did. At least, that I can recall anyway.
I doubt that anyone less than 55-60 years old remembers it. So for you youngsters, Wi(zard) of (Oz).
Truepeers #10, JMH #16:
What JMH says is exactly correct. And one reason that Boeing wanted the new plant in SC is that the unions in Wash would not allow those outside suppliers to enter the production line and assist in installing those subassemblies they built.
The SC plant is designed specifically to enable that to happen – to allow “sideways” insertions in the production line. Very probably the Wash plants were not capable of handling that feature very well, and in any case the unions there objected strongly to the practice.
Toadold #24:
On the Neal Boortz show today I heard a classic case of something very similar to “minority set-asides.” In this case the City of San Francisco requires suppliers to certify that their firm had never engaged in the slave trade, did not use tropical hardwoods, etc. So since most companies did not want to bother with those requirements, some firms had sprung up to handle the trade. An example given was that a automobile battery tray, valued at less than $20, was sold to the city for a mere $3000 by a firm that could truthfully say it had never engaged in the slave trade and did not have desks made of tropical hardwoods in their offices – since the company had just been created for the express purpose of meeting SF City requirements.
How do you rein in the government? What I might suggest is this:
(1) End all COLA’s, both for recipients of entitlement programs and our so-called public servants. As for the “public servants” a salary and benefit freeze will be in place. And there will be no bonuses at all. No Federal worker may be promoted to a higher level until someone at a higher level leaves.
Let the burden of the fiat money printing press fall hardest on those who benefit most from the existence of the welfare state.
It might actually focus their attention and change their views about whether government policies that promote inflation are really good ideas at all.
(2) Freeze the budgets for each and every federal agency. Do not adjust for inflation. If it looks like they don’t have the money to do their job for the fiscal year, chop off 20% of their budget that goes to salaries for every year that it does so. And it must go by a specific formula. Fire everyone at the highest GS level that exists in the agency. If that doesn’t do it, fire everyone at the next highest GS level. Rinse and repeat until the goal is achieved. And no one who is fired by such a process can ever work for the US government again–ever. Focus the attention of the people at the top of the bureaucracy with their own potential to devolve into having to flip burgers for a living. It will get their attention.
…its just a thought.
maz2 @25: Tha story illustrates my concern about China. Right now eerybody is raving about how easy it is to do business there. So far, so good.
However, what is going to happen when free enterprise and genuine economic growth make the communist party and Peoples Liberation Army nervous, or even cut into their indulgences? Regulatory excesses and even political barriers will (probably) quickly mount. Then the local economy will no longer be able to provide for the political/military class. There will be a (virtually) uncontrollable move to go and take from others by one means or the other. That is when the defecation tends to impact the oscillation.
This is how those much-admired-circa-1900 Glaant Japanese manged to morph themselves into the despised Dirty Japs withing three decades. Best we keep our powder dry.
I was “introduced” to Sir Basil in the Lanny Budd Novels when I was thirteen (in the early 60′s). Lanny Budd was the illegitimate son of the Scion of an “armaments manufacturing” family in the US. He was born in 1900 (and so he was 14 at the start of WWI and 39 at the start of WWII). He was kind of a Socialist Forest Gump. It was Upton Sinclair’s First Draft of history and since he wrote it as it was happening (and given his leftist tilt) he didn’t do a bad job.
Upton Sinclair also introduced me to Benito Mussolini when he was still a socialist street agitator, to Nazis who were socialist and idealist, and to anarchist who joined the Bolshevik revolution (Gee, whatever were they thinking?). The Socialist Upton Sinclair influenced me to be a Socialist by the end of the first book and pretty close to a Republican by the end of the third.
One of the main reasons the Rust Belt was so slow to bounce back after “Heavy Industry” took a fall in the 70′s and 80′s was that the “spoils system” of the Democratic Party remained intact. They would simply eat any investment that lacked political protection — so there was little by way of investment.
It is not just the wealthy who are in on the game. In the US I would put it at 40 percent of the population that is either hooked into the “spoils system” or really, really wants to be. And they will all vote for the Democrats. They will give noble reasons, of course — normally the ones the media so kindly provides. I talk to them almost daily.
That’s why Obama has a good shot if his pals can hustle up a third party candidate to take about ten percent of the vote. He could win 42-38-ten, even if the economy does not much improve (though I doubt he could survive a “double dip”).
Reminds me of a throwaway line in the movie “Sniper”;
“There are no shitte’s or Sunni’s, no Republicans or Democrats, There are only have and have not’s”.
Very primal thinking but there are humans that function on that level.
Which is why they haven’t caught the Duck yet. Might never. How long will NATO stay focused? Without NATO air power, the Rebels are finished.
European nations DON’T do anything out of the goodness of their heart. If the rebels can’t deliver, NATO goes home.
If the Duck of Death isn’t dead by then, I’m doubling down on him. Ever hear of poodles cornering a wolf? It gets ugly fast.
Here is my (stolen) contribution to the pile;
‘God may not play with dice but she sure knows how to count cards’.
Well as my compadres would say, I’m having a brain fart and can’t recollect where I read it, but there was a speculative article about a third party splitting off Democrats this go around. Even a minor challenge in the Democrat primary could end up hurting Obama by the time the general election came around. Democrats with hurt feelings staying home.
My problem lately is that it is hard for me to do objective analysis because I so want to see the Left get trashed hard by the electorate. It is not so much anger as a desire to wallow in schadenfreude and giggle as former officials fight over food scraps with the racoons in a dumpster behind a KFC.
JMH, RWE, thanks.
“Fifty thousand people and 1,500 subcontractors were employed to develop and build the 747. Its 4.5 million parts, designed from some 75,000 engineering drawings, came from virtually every state and 17 foreign countries.”
http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Aerospace/Boeing_747/Aero21.htm
That’s what impressed me, that a commercially viable machine could have 4.5 million parts drawn from all over. Wikipedia on the Dreamliner clarifies how the use of composite materials led to greater, or maybe in some sense lesser, diversification of the manufacturing. Maybe lesser because the increasingly important subcontractors may now be each doing relatively more of the job:
“The 787 was designed to become the first production composite airliner, with the fuselage assembled in one-piece composite barrel sections instead of the multiple aluminum sheets and some 50,000 fasteners used on existing aircraft…. Instead of building the complete aircraft from the ground up in the traditional manner, final assembly would employ just 800 to 1,200 people to join completed subassemblies and to integrate systems.[27] Boeing assigned its global subcontractors to do more assembly themselves and deliver completed subassemblies to Boeing for final assembly. This approach was intended to result in a leaner and simpler assembly line and lower inventory,[28] with pre-installed systems reducing final assembly time by three-quarters to three days…. Japanese industrial participation was very important to the project, with a 35% work share, the first time Japanese firms had taken a lead role in mass production of Boeing airliner wings, and many of the subcontractors supported and funded by the Japanese government.[43] On April 26, 2006, Japanese manufacturer Toray Industries and Boeing announced a production agreement involving US$6 billion worth of carbon fiber, extending a 2004 contract and aimed at easing production concerns.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_787_Dreamliner
Wretchard: “If government is run from the backroom, then sooner or later Washington and Brussels’s real constituencies won’t be the voters but the biggest players.”
Where I live in Los Angeles, the city is already that way. I suspect Chicago, New York, San Francisco and others are the same as well. Oh sure, they go through the motions of democracy, but anyone who will rock the crony boat has no chance of being elected . The public sector unions will bury them in millions worth of derogatory stories. The full Christine O Donnell treatment. The city news media is 100% crony run and owned. No truthful stories will leak out beyond a small concerned minority, who will be immediately identified by all the right people as whackos and undesirables. And if that doesn’t work, the County Registrar of Voters will work it’s magic to put an end to any crony challenge.
It’s definitely a model that our Dear Leader is aware of and striving for. To our betters, adhering to Constitutional rights and Republican Democracy is for schmucks.
RWE@13: “The sad fact is, so much of the crap we have to put up with is not invented in DC but rather at the grassroots by people seeking advantages. It is turned into things like a 25 page military specification for tortillias by the Federal bureaucracy.”
Yeah…the same kind of thinking taken to its logical conclusion leads people to say things like “keep your government hands off my Medicare!” Even the tea party is full of folks who want to cut spending (but don’t cut anything that affects me). I’ve resigned myself to the idea that, while I don’t depend on the federal government for anything but the interstate highway system and national defense (at least directly, and not indirectly that I know of) I’m going to get socked for more taxes in the end.
I’m becoming okay with that, though. Everybody is going to get hit somehow. I’d rather pay more taxes than be dependent on the feds for my subsistence and then have that suddenly disappear. But it’s pretty clear that there really aren’t all that many people having that conversation with themselves yet. Some, but not many. It will be a sign that we’re reaching a critical mass of such people when partisanship fades away in the face of the imminent catastrophe we’re facing and compromises will become possible. Maybe we’ll never get to that critical mass, but I hope so. The alternative could be pretty bad.
Stoi@31: “If the Duck of Death isn’t dead by then, I’m doubling down on him. Ever hear of poodles cornering a wolf? It gets ugly fast.”
Not to be pedantic (okay, EXACTLY to be pedantic) but poodles are a very vicious breed of dog. The toys and miniatures are of course cute and cuddly just because of their size, but the standards have the capacity to eat a couple of sunny-side-up pit bulls for breakfast and ask for seconds. If 2 standard poodles met a wolf, I’d bet on the poodles (most standards probably couldn’t take a wolf alone based on sheer size considerations). If my old Tosa Inu (may he rest in peace) Beau, at 160 pounds, was up against an average standard poodle, I’d say the match wouldn’t have a handicap either way just because he was such a softie.
Poodles are every bit the hunters that wolves are, and they’ve got more attitude. Heck, even the smaller poodles have the hunter instinct and will point birds, go after animals that are insanely bigger than they are and attack anybody who gets in their space.
I will now subside, and read the flames that are likely to follow in favor of the toughness of other breeds (if anybody cares). But I still maintain that poodles deserve a much tougher name than “poodle”.
truepeers@33: “That’s what impressed me, that a commercially viable machine could have 4.5 million parts drawn from all over.”
I’m put in mind of a certain part of the movie “Armageddon”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuAUE58MQt4
Tcobb #28: “Freeze the budgets for each and every federal agency.”
The problem with accross-the-board or “peanut butter spread” to use a Pentagon term, approaches is that it lets DC avoid making the tough decisions about where to cut. Instead of asking “What good is the Commerce Dept anyway?” “Do we really need 28 Federal Pet Bunny Inspectors?” and “Is is right to have more Agriculture Department personnel than there are farmers in the USA?” or “Do we really need to do a study on how homosexuals decide who gets on top?” then the Bunny inspectors just lose two slots, the homosexual study is cut by 20% – and also the Air Force also ends up getting rid of most of its missile maintenance officers.
I recall reading of one program in NY City to repair the homes of poor people. They employed 4 to 5 part time electricans, plumbers, and carpenters – and 17 FULL TIME supervisors. So in a peanut butter spread cut they would cut one of the workmen and 2 of the full time supervisors – or even more likely, get rid of all of the workmen so they could keep all 17 supervisors.
In reality I think bureaucrats just love reduced budgets. They then have a ready made excuse for sitting on their arses and doing nothing as well as a ready response to any real innovation, “Fergit it, no money.”
Agoraphobic #35: Yes, you are right. And while I am a military retiree, I think that before they cut my retirement pay (which has been frozen for the last couple of years, by the way) they need to crack down on a whole lot of other stuff first, things like the homosexual study mentioned above, or the $500K Internet Dance project or the $100K Study of How People In Siberia Can Better Relate to Their Government, etc. The biggest problem with all of these crackpot schemes is that even if they are not that much money in total they encourage a whole lot of other crackpot schemes, since people figure, “Well, my idea is not nearly as bad as some of those others.”
ag @ 36: I’m put in mind of a certain part of the movie “Armageddon”.
oh, I thought it would be the scene where the Russian is pounding on the control panel with a wrench because that always works in the Soyuz and all the panels are made in the same place in Taiwan anyway.
–
zardoz, really? Isn’t that just a.e. van vogt by way of h.g. wells and a few episodes of TOS mixed in? and Sean Connery as a giant, floating oz-head? I mean, y’know, non gustibus disputandum and all that.
Agoraphobic Plumber @37
Someone once told me how many signatures were required to build/launch the first space shuttle. That was also an impressive figure.
Buddy @ 4
Do you think JayZee [I can't think of another name... OH! fiftee cent ... there...]
OWNS an eraser, much less a piece of paper. Yeah, I am rude. Watched something the other day about ‘artists’ that grabbed bits of songs from LP albums .. with no attribution… to ‘compose’ their ‘music’…
What. Ever.
This whole scenario makes me want to regurgitate explosively. There is no competence nor adults near the helm. The navigator is on a bender with medicinal whiskey and the XO is down with beri-beri. Or was it pellagra?
No one, even the “Three AM Call” smartest person in the world has shown they have a clue, much less know where to look for one.
tomw Or “~X” so they don’t know who I am…
From the last thread
178. buddy larsen
PS, besides the obama sink, the stock mkt is stabilizing around corp earnings –the earnings Q reports are almost all in now, and showing YoY earnings growth over 12%, a huge chunk over ‘expected’. Net of the financial sector that 12-plus would be a goodeal higher, too. Explanation? People with jobs are working their ass off to keep them.
/////////////
the US is in the middle of an export boom because of the low dollar. same thing happened in the late 70′s. most of the profits are coming from overseas.
trouble is the US tax & regulatory environment does not encourage US corporations to invest their profits in the USA. IF that were changed to encourage US corporations to invest their overseas profits in the USA over the next couple years–and at the same time if the USA could undertake policies to make the USA energy independent in a decade–then the US could rapidly monetize the home economy.
we’d pretty much have the same boom as happened during he reagan years–not least because US energy independence would crash the world price of oil. imho it was low oil prices which set the fire under the reagan prosperity. (even if low oil prices were engineered by the saudis)
Truepeers, reducing the signatures to tangible data points:
How much ink was applied to the paper?
How many carbons and originals?
How many donuts were consumed to provide sufficient megajoules of energy for the motive power necessary to wield the pens?
How much Caffeine was consumed to keep the supervisory eyelids from closing and crania from dropping forward in slumber?
In defense of Zardoz, it is an examination of the futility of trying to create a utopia, and the overall evil that is caused when an elite strives to maintain its power at the expense of the rest of humanity.
It really had quite an interesting setup (although it was buried under the weirdness) The advanced people in the city were what we would call a technocratic elite who had found a way to make themselves immortal. But this could only work for a few, so they used their technology to build impenetrable fortress utopias that they could live charmed lives in while they let the rest of the world go to hell. Like all elites, they despised the great mass of those they considered primitives – and it is hard to believe that the outside world just fell apart on its own, when the sheltered elites were actively developing and promoting a force of hunter/killers (Sean Connery and his brethren) and supplying them with massive amounts of weaponry. You’re left believing that they created the downfall of the outside world so that there would be no threats to them, and so they – the elite – are responsible for the whole sorry mess. Of course they live a life of ease while the rest of humanity suffers.
So as this develops, you realize that these wonderful, idyllic utopian souls are actually an evil and depraved pack of overlords who seek to continue their own existence through mass murder and the oppression of the vast bulk of humanity. The downfall of this “utopia” is richly deserved, and in fact a far more moral end than it’s continued existence would be.
One of the most interesting insights of the film, to me, is that even the elites begin to recognize that what they’ve created is no longer worth supporting, and they welcome the collapse when it comes. They, who had found a way to cheat death, now long for death. All of the original creators have in fact already been deposed and condemned to an immortal life of useless senility, and a younger, more ruthless generation is running things.
Finally, “Zardoz” is not just a giant head/transport system, it is more importantly a false god who must be overthrown and destroyed before mankind can escape the dead end that this immoral elite has created.
Warren Buffet recently wrote in the New York Times that he had benefited so much from government intervention that he was willing to kick some of it back into the till.
except his business hasnt paid its taxes for 10 years. f**** him
As I said, Zardoz sounds heavily derivative of better, neater stories.
Ever read Cordwainer Smith’s “Instrumentality of Mankind” stories, including the two-part novel Norstrillia? Sort of a cross between Zardoz with “Crocodile Dundee”, and some cat-people, and, and, … it’s really good.
There are Spotted Owls and then there are Owly Spotters who hoot at totty and cartoons at Theo Sparks spud farm. Our host surfs the best. The Club of Spotted Owls is more selective than Skull & Bones but assures itself it is a meritocracy, most members worked their way up. Albert Gore Sr, bigot and tool of Occidental Petroleum, was on the inside but Al Gore Jr is the guy who plunders more money, usually desirable, and builds the biggest house, tacky when made public, and still ends up at the Animal House Fraternity Rush table with the exchange students. The old raptor Bill Clinton, certified Spotted Owl who has done his share of owly spotting, once remarked of Obama that BHO might have gotten a job bringing them coffee. Obama is a parvenue. Two hours after he is off stage no one will admit to having known him. Soros is useful in a technical sense. A measure of a good functional government policy on a range of topics, immigration, finance, diplomacy, etc. should be that it can frustrate or exclude Soros while enabling lawful and productive movement of trade and people.
Governments only exist for one reason and that is to take wealth from some people, by main force if need be and to give it to others. if in the process its depredations are not too severe and it keeps the other thieves at bay then it can be tolerated. Once one becomes aware of the essential nature of government ochlocracy doesn’t seem such a bad alternative particularly as a purgative.
The question for 21st century western democracies is how do we scale back the government beast we have created without also destroying everything that works in society. Can it even be done without storming the Bastille and literally decapitating the ruling class bureaucrats and politicians? And then how once its work is done do you put the leash back on the mob?
Don Rodrigo and Cowboy
(picking up from the previous thread, but there is a connection to this one, I promise…)
Hmmm, well, yes and no in turn. The Gibson Martini pre-dates 1950’s Madison Avenue by either two or five decades, depending on which other Mr. Gibson you want to credit with the drink. The earliest story is that Walter D K Gibson (a San Francisco Banker) in 1898 asked the bartender at the Bohemian Club in San Francisco to use an onion instead of an olive in his Martini because he thought onions were healthier. The other story is that in the 1930’s, Charles Dana Gibson (NY magazine illustrator and creator of the “Gibson Girl”) asked the bartender at the NY Player’s Club to “make something different” and the result was the Gibson.
Now, to be fair about the bitters, one story claims that the actual original difference between a Martini and a Gibson was not the onion, but rather the bitters – the modification that turned a Martini into a Gibson was to leave them out. According to this story, it was only later that the Gibson got its unique garnish so drinkers could tell it apart from its Martini cousin. I tend to doubt this story, since the presence or absence of bitters in a gin and dry vermouth drink is pretty obvious – the drink with bitters would be a reddish color while the one without would be clear. However, there is a recipe from 1908 that claims a Bohemian Club Gibson should be made with equal parts French (aka Dry) Vermouth and Plymouth Gin (a 1:1 ratio! Goodness…) with “no decorations, bitters or citron fruit rind permissible in this famous appetizer.” I’m suspicious of this recipe given the unpalatable 1:1 Gin:Vermouth ratio (and Dry Vermouth at that!) – the world of drink recipes is full of imposters and forgeries. Try researching what an authentic Zombie should have in it some time… Er, but back on the off-topic post, the publication listing a Bohemian Club Gibson (regardless of the wacky recipe) in 1908 tends to undermine Charles Dana Gibson’s claim and give the honor to WDK Gibson. In any event, the Vermouth is essential.
Bitters were a part of the original American Cocktail dating back as far as we can tell. The earliest recorded definition of a cocktail (1806, The Balance and Columbian Repository of Hudson NY), says it’s spirits, sugar, water, and bitters. It was also known as a “bittered sling.” The paper got a good quip in with it’s definition, adding “It is said, also to be of great use to a Democratic candidate: because a person, having swallowed a glass of it, is ready to swallow anything else”.
Of course, a little over a century later, Democrats passed Prohibition and outlawed liquor. Maybe with Woodrow Wilson’s fascist government, they didn’t think they’d need voters any more.
Okay, so if anyone’s still with me, and grumbling about off topic posts, bitters are made with all sorts of mysterious ingredients, spices, barks, roots, extracts… So are many other food ingredients (green tea, for instance). Some are grown in exotic foreign locales with undoubtedly fragile, Gaia-approved, ecosystems. Or perhaps BigNanny disapproved components. It was impossible to get Absinthe in the US for most of the 20th Century because the FDA banned the importation of any food product with Thujone in it. Since Thujone comes from wormwood and Absinthe is made with wormwood, Custom’s officials assumed Absinthe couldn’t be imported and wouldn’t allow it in.
A few years ago, some enterprising importer looked up the actual law, found that there was a threshold for Thujone below which the ban didn’t apply. Then he got Absinthe tested. Turned out it was below that threshold… Nearly nine decades of ban based on ignorance.
Of course, the FDA claims the right to exert prior restraint on food and drugs becuase they are experts and know better than us rubes. The FAA feels the same about airplanes.
BTW, did you know that to get that Certificate for the 87, the FAA required Boeing to shoot a dead 4 lb chicken at the test plane with an air cannon to evaluate damage from bird strikes? 4 lbs, no more, no less. Such precision, our government monks have.
” He was the greatest of all the salesmen of death” — Flynn
Hmm. Who creates armies? Politicians. Who buys weapons for armies, spending the monies that could be used to feed starving children? Politicians. Who drafts men to die in wars? Politicians. Who votes to begin wars that kill millions? Politicians. Who get the blame when someone gets hurt? Zaharoff. The blindness of people to reality and the strange moral choices that result from it mystify me.
“Reilly, Ace of Spies”
In ‘An Affair with a Married Woman,’ which I watched yesterday, Zaharoff is the speaker of or subject of the best lines in the show. IIRC: “Why a man who can afford to buy respectability chooses to rent it instead?”
No man is an island*? Two islands?
Ask Ai Weiwei: “Beijing is two cities”.
“If we remember what Kafka writes about his Castle, we get a sense of it.”
“For a man imprisoned and conditionally released, neither neighbors nor strangers nor Beijing’s officials nor courts can be trusted.”
The government beast: Joe Hill.
…-
“The City: Beijing”
“Ai Weiwei finds China’s capital is a prison where people go mad.”
“Beijing is two cities. One is of power and of money. People don’t care who their neighbors are; they don’t trust you. The other city is one of desperation. I see people on public buses, and I see their eyes, and I see they hold no hope. They can’t even imagine that they’ll be able to buy a house. They come from very poor villages where they’ve never seen electricity or toilet paper.
Every year millions come to Beijing to build its bridges, roads, and houses. Each year they build a Beijing equal to the size of the city in 1949. They are Beijing’s slaves. They squat in illegal structures, which Beijing destroys as it keeps expanding. Who owns houses? Those who belong to the government, the coal bosses, the heads of big enterprises. They come to Beijing to give gifts—and the restaurants and karaoke parlors and saunas are very rich as a result.
Beijing tells foreigners that they can understand the city, that we have the same sort of buildings: the Bird’s Nest, the CCTV tower. Officials who wear a suit and tie like you say we are the same and we can do business. But they deny us basic rights. You will see migrants’ schools closed. You will see hospitals where they give patients stitches—and when they find the patients don’t have any money, they pull the stitches out. It’s a city of violence.”
“My ordeal made me understand that on this fabric, there are many hidden spots where they put people without identity. With no name, just a number. They don’t care where you go, what crime you committed. They see you or they don’t see you, it doesn’t make the slightest difference. There are thousands of spots like that. Only your family is crying out that you’re missing. But you can’t get answers from the street communities or officials, or even at the highest levels, the court or the police or the head of the nation. My wife has been writing these kinds of petitions every day, making phone calls to the police station every day. Where is my husband? Just tell me where my husband is. There is no paper, no information.
The strongest character of those spaces is that they’re completely cut off from your memory or anything you’re familiar with. You’re in total isolation. And you don’t know how long you’re going to be there, but you truly believe they can do anything to you. There’s no way to even question it. You’re not protected by anything. Why am I here? Your mind is very uncertain of time. You become like mad. It’s very hard for anyone. Even for people who have strong beliefs.
This city is not about other people or buildings or streets but about your mental structure. If we remember what Kafka writes about his Castle, we get a sense of it. Cities really are mental conditions. Beijing is a nightmare. A constant nightmare.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/08/28/ai-weiwei-on-beijing-s-nightmare-city.html
*John Donne.
re: 20. Brock Well said. Another approach would be to limit campaign contributions only to those who can vote (corps. can’t vote)- Perhaps further, and only to those whom they can vote for. Never happen of course.
W: “Warren Buffet recently wrote in the New York Times that he had benefited so much from government intervention that he was willing to kick some of it back into the till.”
Warren Buffet is not the product of truly free enterprise – he is the product of crony capitalism – which is Fascist capitalism. Crony capitalism unnaturally creates economic inequality (a wealthy class) through the force of government. It follows that Marxists unnaturally seek to create economic equality (except of course for themselves) through the force of government – which can only do so via unequal rights to property. Both Fascism (crony capitalism) and Marxism can exist side by side – propping each other up like two sheaves of corn – that is what is occurring now in the United States.
The cure for Fascist crony capitalism is not Marxism because both require the unnatural use of government force, and both create an oligarchic ruling class of wealthy people via the force of government. The cure is Free Enterprise – Freedom to keep the fruit of your own labor – and the freedom to trade it for something else – without the unnatural force of self-serving government. Equal rights and Free Enterprise are the cure for both Fascist crony capitalism and Marxism.
49/JMH
BTW, did you know that to get that Certificate for the 87, the FAA required Boeing to shoot a dead 4 lb chicken at the test plane with an air cannon to evaluate damage from bird strikes? 4 lbs, no more, no less. Such precision, our government monks have.
I presume they at least remembered to thaw out the chicken.
I have noted that shortly after loudly opining that he and other extremely wealthy persons should give more money to the government, Warren Buffet instead chose to put five billion dollars into Bank of America.
Deeds, not words, should define us.
51. maz2
This city is not about other people or buildings or streets but about your mental structure. If we remember what Kafka writes about his Castle, we get a sense of it. Cities really are mental conditions. Beijing is a nightmare. A constant nightmare.”
…………
Hmm that does not bode well for the future.
But it probably needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
If you’re going to be down and out its better to be down and out in the country or a small town because any city is a nightmare when you’re down and out. Why? because as the man said –a city is a “mental condition”.
How did the song go.
“People are strange, when you’re stranger. Faces look ugly when you’re alone.”
Consider the The Doors – People Are Strange
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJY8jJkDoMY
Jim Morrison’s analysis in song maps almost word for word over onto
Ai Weiwei’s analysis of Beijing.
But both Morrison and Weiwei have one foot in and one foot out of the ruling class. That’s what gave them their vision.
On July 31, 1964, the American destroyer USS Maddox (DD-731) began a reconnaissance mission in the Gulf of Tonkin and was attacked by three North Vietnamese patrol boats, in international waters, on August 2, 1964. Admiral George Stephen Morrison was in command the local fleet from his flagship USS Bon Homme Richard (CVA-31).
The Maddox, suffering only superficial damage by a single machine gun bullet, retired to South Vietnamese waters where she was joined by the destroyer C. Turner Joy.
On August 4, a DESOTO patrol to North Vietnam coast was launched by Maddox and the C. Turner Joy. The latter received radar and radio signals that they believed to signal another attack by the North Vietnamese. For some two hours the ships fired on radar targets and maneuvered vigorously amid electronic and visual reports of foes. It is highly unlikely that any North Vietnamese forces were actually in the area during this gunfight. Captain John J. Herrick even admitted that it was nothing more than an “overeager sonarman” who “was hearing his ship’s own propeller beat.” However, at the time most of the crew had believed they were under attack. Also in 1995, General Vo Nguyen Giap, commander-in-chief of North Vietnamese forces at the time, disavowed any involvement with the August 4 incident, though he did confirm the August 2 attack.
Admiral George Stephen Morrison was the father of The Doors lead singer Jim Morrison.
http://www.theblackvault.com/wiki/index.php/Gulf_of_Tonkin_Incident
…………
We’d have to check back with Richard’s past observations as to whether a trash picker in Cairo or Manilla would notice that he was in a “mental condition” resembling hell. Or if a CPC apparatchik in Bejjing in the corridors of power noticed that he was in a “mental condition” resembling heaven. I would hazard that its not likely in either case.
Rather the torture is being paralyzed by two simultaneous visions–like Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s Ulysses. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Dedalus
(My dad was in the pentagon in 1967 when war protestors tried to “levitate” it. When I saw Val Kilmer’s Doors back in 1991–I thought Jeez Louise–there but for the grace of God go I.)
As it happens Morrison’s father Stephen –died only a couple years ago
……………….
It may be the salvation of this civilization that the internet lifts the “mental condition” of the civilization out of the cities–or at least out of the downtowns–where Obama currently lives.
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thru’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”
–William Blake
“Oh, shut up.”
–Mrs. William Blake
Joe Hill @ 48 said:
“Governments only exist for one reason and that is to take wealth from some people, by main force if need be and to give it to others.”
Not quite. When functioning correctly, government exists as a coercive entity to force the community to do things in its own best interests that the community would not otherwise do. Libertarian/anarchist ideology is fundamentally flawed because it fails to recognize the “tragedy of the commons”, refer to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
The basic purpose of government is to prevent the “tragedy of the commons”.
Government fails when it uses its coercive power to advance the interests of one group within the community to the detriment of another. By definition, socialism is based upon the abuse of government’s coercive power. Democracy has a fundamental weakness in that a majority of voters within a democracy can use the coercive power of government to transfer wealth to themselves from a minority, i.e. the majority can vote themselves a living. Eventually democracy fails because the process of socialism transfers most of the wealth from the wealthy productive part of the community to the impoverished unproductive voting part. The response to this failure of democracy is the creation of plutocracy where political power is derived from individual wealth. However plutocracy will in turn fail after most political power is transferred to a wealthy ruling elite and the impoverished disenfranchised majority are forced by necessity to withdraw their consent to be governed, i.e. they stage a revolution. Plutocracy and democracy represent two extremes of an unstable dynamic system. The American Founding Fathers attempted to address this instability when they created representative/federalist democracy.
#55 Swami
I have noted that shortly after loudly opining that he and other extremely wealthy persons should give more money to the government, Warren Buffet instead chose to put five billion dollars into Bank of America.
Deeds, not words, should define us.
Buffet’s words do define him. And the definition is not pretty. For all his claiming that he does not pay enough in taxes, he is engaged in a multi-year battle with the IRS because he has not paid his full taxes for a long time.
As far as the Bank of America is concerned, this is crony capitalism/Corporatist National Socialism at its best.
1) Bank of America is ankle deep in legal and financial problems [ankle deep, but they are in head first] because of their active participation in the fraudulent mortgage derivatives securities fraud [*]; and amongst other things own Countrywide Mortgages’ liabilities. They are also caught up in the problems of false signings of mortgage documents and liens that are clouding the titles of pretty much every piece of real estate mortgaged since the 1990′s. [*-BoA had a program specifically marketing NINJA (No INcome, Job, Assets) mortgages to illegal aliens in California. Said mortgages were immediately bundled into derivatives and sold to Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae so the taxpayer is stuck with them.]
2) Even the FDIC is balking at the blanket settlement for a bunch of those claims, citing the fact that no information about what is being settled is being furnished.
3) BoA claims that they are in good shape financially and not at risk from their liabilities, BUT:
4) Obama called Warren Buffet [admitted by both Buffet and the WH] just before he plunked down $5 Billion for BoA preferred stock.
5) Yesterday, it came out that BoA fire-saled its stake in a Chinese subsidiary for $8.3 Billion.
6) Other cash raising moves may be afoot. And taken all together, they may well not be enough.
7) Watch Buraq Hussein’s postponed economic speech next week. There probably will be included another Federal bail out for the banks. BoA will probably have its debts canceled under the rubric of government [more debt, higher taxes for us] refinancing of underwater mortgages. Warren Buffet is not going to lose money on the deal.
Evil is as evil does.
Subotai Bahadur
Subotai Bahadur @ 59 said:
“Obama called Warren Buffet [admitted by both Buffet and the WH] just before he plunked down $5 Billion for BoA preferred stock.”
Obviously Buffet was offered some sort of private inside deal for the five gigabucks. The cover story that it was for preferred stock does not follow. BoA’s liabilities are greater than it’s assets. The preferred stock has no recoverable value. Why did Buffet (a very shrewd businessman) exchange $5 Billion for worthless stock certificates?
The collapse of BoA may trigger the crash of the Sucker’s Rally. The Bernank has done an amazing job of keeping the Ponzi functioning since March 2009 but I think he’ll be overwhelmed after BoA folds (it’ll be ten times worse than when Lehman Brothers folded).
Zaharoff is discussed in the Alan Furst novel, Blood of Victory. There is also another character in the novel (I forget his name) based on him who operates a business intelligence network in SE Europe in the 1930s to facilitate his arms sales.
Is it possible that there is a reader of Belmont Club who is not familiar with Alan Furst’s novels of Europe in the 1930s and early 40s? For my money, the best one is Dark Star.
Y’know, BofA’s role in this is only tertiary, greed caused by their buying Countrywide. BofA was 99.44% pure, other than that. They bought Countrywide cheap, and with tacit backing/coercion from Paulson, which was 10x worse regarding Merrill, which if you believe the public information has worked out better than Countrywide??? If BofA is in *any* trouble now, it is gonna have to be because Obama’s Treasury is not honoring Paulson’s word.
Plus, we have no way of knowing how much bad stuff the fed has already cleared out of the basement – I guess ALL of the Merrill garbage, but less of the Countrywide. I thought Merrill was much filthier and in much worse shape than Countrywide when it was acquired in late 2008.
Even so, it may be BofA is getting undeserved bad PR now, and Buffett has made a heckuva good deal for himself, the bank sacrificing a ton of common shareholder equity for basically $10,000,000,000 of good PR – and maybe NEW tacit backing from the Obambatron, that’s pretty much how it looks to me, what do y’all think?
And if that is the case – as long as the new backing goes to the strongest borrowers rather than the weakest, and only makes the bank whole indirectly, I would think this – might be better public policy than previous efforts, anyway.
Buffett has a can’t lose deal. BOA guaranteed a 6% yield on the shares, meaning that only a sudden Chapter 7 could leave him dangling –and his hotline to the White House will take that risk down a whole lot further than it will appear officially. Preferred shares themselves are in front of the ROI line due to their inability to elect a board, which is the province of the common shares and creates the balanced ideal of corporate governance and finance. However, this is made mockery if the preferred shares can ‘unofficially’ and secretly vote the board, via influence with the institutional large-block common shareholders. This is certainly the case with King Warren. Just to juice that unspoken deal, and also as a straight deal, Buffett also has an option to buy 700 million common shares at $7.14 over the next ten years. Option reads, he can exercise in whole or in part any time within the ten years. If BOA can get out from under the toxic assets cloud that is holding its shares below the 10 or 15 bucks (depending on sector P/Es) they’re worth on paper sans the X factor, Buffett makes a killing –the options are already paid for in the deal already made. So simply put, BOA is paying the value of the options on top of the preferred yield, only, not inked in the deal memo.
BOA and countrywide ‘invented’ the ninja and its predecessors, and used Merril brokers from ML’s big early 2000s layoffs to inject the bad paper all over Europe. BOA and Citibank are two that would not, could not, have conceivably jumped off into this huge guaranteed fail, unless they had been pre-assured of the taxpayer bailout. This is why Henry Paulsen always looked so spooked in pressers with GWB in the final months of the term –TARP to break the ice was the only chance BOA and Citi took. Hank Paulsen, ex Goldman partner (left about when Corzine did, to take over the Gov-ship of NJ).
BOA, product of an early Progressive Era merger between a Frisco bank and an Italian (*cough*) bank, is sometimes called ‘the Democrat’s bank’. HQ was in Frisco ( near Genovese daughter San Fran Nan’s chosen ex-Baltimore digs). Recently HQ moved to Charlotte (see NWO lobby murals under ‘sinister sites’), in an ‘open shop’ or ‘right-to-work’ state. Charlotte is also the venue of the next Dem nominating convention –odd in a ‘right-to-work’ state.
58. Eggplant
Your discussion above about the role of government reminds me of the Shay’s rebellion debacle in New England which helped precipitate the Constitutional Convention. The proper role of government as you described it is how the “Founders: Part 2″ saw it after “Shay’s.”
“Shay’s” is a favorite wipping boy of Howard Zinn acolytes, like the “Good Will Hunting” bobsey twins (Damon and Afleck), Noam Chomsky, and Tom Hanks. These latter folks believe the country went in the wrong direction after the Shay’s rebellion was put down.
The best governments are those that understand and respect human nature, and then govern accordingly. Typically such governments would govern with a light hand, but be zealously protective of certain guarantees of liberty. At almost no time would there be any “guarantees” that the government owed any citizens any material rewards outright just because they are citizens. If said citizens have no contract for services rendered with a government, then they are entitled to no “rewards” or renumeration.
Anyone who wants to peer deeper into what happened in 2008 –i mnean as to whether or not there was design beyond just free-for-all buck-grabbing –should take an hour and read about two entities: Penson Financial and Markit Group. Penson on the naked shorting, and Markit on the pricing of derivatives. Get the full ghoul deal on both from Deep Capture.
BoA went in for the CountryWide buy-out with Treasury arm-twisting. In the view of the Fedsury, Country Wide was but a Special Purpose Vehicle for BoA to retail mortgages with non-standard ( non- BoA standard ) terms.
BoA was massively involved in wholesaling Country Wide toxic waste into the Money Trust ™ engine of fraud.
That’s why that tail was pinned to it’s donkey.
———–
Even after purchasing Country Wide — at a ‘discount’ — BoA has discovered that its corpus was toxic right across the board. Well over 80% of all Country Wide retail paper is defective/ fraudulent. The fraudsters were overwhelmingly Country Wide ‘Loan Officers.’ The more they lied the more they were paid. So they submitted false figures on a mass basis.
It is the court system that is blowing up BoA. Stepwise, it is losing case after case — and it’s snowballing.
The number one route to corporate bankruptcy is actions at law.
BoA/ Country Wide can’t prevail at the bar… They’re going to have to eat massive losses — overnight. They’ll not be permitted to earn their way out of the hole.
Imagine: chasmic retail credit spreads are still not enough to dig BoA out.
The systemic frauds of the Money Trust ™ deserve RICO procedures.
The massive bonuses to BoA insiders = a bust out — right in our faces.
OT
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100102296/sun-causes-climate-change-shock
More bad news for AGW
CERN has shot it to pieces.
Most of the critical damage was 2005-2007, the period when the private sector cop, the NY Fed, was run by Geithner, and the public sector cops SEC and congressional banking committees were, in order, puppet-stringed by rules-lobbying by ex-NASDAQ chief Bernie Madoff and chaired by Dodd and Frank. The cover of the murder weapon CDS was provided by CDS price-valuations provided by Markit, an little startup in London run by a couple of real-estate agents but sponsored by Goldman Sachs and Royal Bank of Scotland in the person of Peter Sutherland (DO wiki his CV, he was also world bank and BP and Goldman Sachs variously board chairman and CEO).
When it was time to start the blood letting, the arteries and veins were opened with vast sales of non-existent stock shares by Penson of Dallas, which became for that brief spell by far the larger financials broker than all the rest of the world’s brokerages combined.
The resulting ”failures to deliver” disappeared into the DTCC, the financials markets clearing house which is owned by the Fed and which cannot be audited without the Fed’s permission.
Nobody knows how those Failures to Deliver are being made whole. Since buyers do not demand certificates, perhaps they are not being made whole at all.
Property ‘deemed’ into existence and sold for cash money somehow becoming the quoted valuations of registered stock exchange securities, and divorced from all normal supply and demand/price dynamics, the TBTF’s lost 70% of their value in about ten trading days in early September 2008 –the LEH bancruptcy run-up.
So when LEH, led by the Fed to believe it would be bailed as were the others, wasn’t, bang, global crash. Fuld was surely in on it, but no one else at LEH –well, one other.
Search ”Failure to Deliver” and read the Economist recent piece.
Eggplant 58,
Expanding on your post; I believe Karl Marx saw democracy as a means to an end – the end being a “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” – code for a Marxist Dictatorship. Under Marxist Socialism the so-called proletariat class is initially the minority underclass – minority victims under Monarchy or Fascism – but mostly just the lazy bums (non-victims) under Free Enterprise. The Marxists gain power through legislation (or through a judicial process) whereby they are able to excessively tax the middle class majority – and/or create money for themselves out of thin air – or borrow excessively – then funnel the money to themselves (priority #1) – and to the proletariat class in return for votes. As time goes by more and more people get on the dole – more quit working – more drop out of the laboring (tax-paying) middle class – more end up in the non-laboring (tax-eating) proletariat class – and more also end up as government employees who manage the taxation and redistribution via a myriad of programs including mortgage schemes, cash for clunkers, healthcare, etc. As Marxist government continues to rob Peter to pay Paul there will be fewer guys named Peter and more guys named Paul – and more guys in government to manage it all. In the end there is economic collapse (inevitable and intended beforehand) because there are just too many takers and too few workers. The now majority proletariat class (serfs) do not have enough food to eat – so anarchy or near anarchy occurs – also intended in advance. Marxist government then “comes to the rescue” with martial law. Voila; Social Justice ends in destruction of the middle class majority and a “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” – a Marxist Dictatorship.
“The proletariat [non-disabled, tax-eating, lazy, under-achieving, government-dependents] will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital [property] from the bourgeoisie [laboring, tax-paying middle class], to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state [self-serving Marxist Government]… Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property. You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible… We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the [non] working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.” Karl Marx
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
Fascist Socialism is where government is empowered by property collectivization via legal control rather than direct government ownership. Fascists use their dictatorial power to rob any convenient minority – such as the Jews of Nazi Germany. Once they run out of minority loot in their own country the Fascists must wage wars of external aggression to keep the party going – but they always target minorities whether at home or in conquered territory. Fascism is a quicker and more direct route to dictatorship which, unlike Marxism, does not require the democratic process – except for the initial vote to set it up.
Marxism is a collectivist oligarchy which can be created slowly through managed class struggle against the middle class majority – the “battle of democracy.” Fascism is a collectivist oligarchy which can be created quickly via a one-time majority vote – with the aim of destroying a minority.
Wasn’t frozen. FAA reqs required the chicken be live (killed moments before the test for humanitarian reasons of course).
I forget if it was the Dreamliner or an earlier plane, but one Friday everyone showed up for the chicken test. The engineer in charge weighted the (still clucking) bird. 3 lbs 14 oz. Too light. The engineer (with two decades of experience dealing with these things) said it wouldn’t do, if they ran the test with the light bird, the FAA would make them do it all over again. The technicial asked the engineer what they were supposed to do. The engineer said “take the bird home and feed it over the weekend! See if you can fatten it up and we’ll try again on Monday.”
So the tech got a temporary pet. On Monday, the bird weighted 4 lbs and the test was on. Both the bird and the plane “passed”.
egg @ all, I think the historical facts, and maybe present ones, are much more in BofA’s favor, sort of. Before 2008 BofA stayed out of the home loan market almost entirely, that’s why they got interested in Countrywide. Even Countrywide was very late to the party of subprimes, and then had epic bad timing and wrote some of the worst paper of all. BofA did only a few percent of the SIVs (and other derivatives) that Citibank wrote to flush US paper overseas, and that’s why BofA got interested in Merrill, who was right in there flushing with Citibank.
BofA put in billions of (mostly) clean money in 2008 buying up toxic waste, under the impression they would profit thereby. This will go down in the history of finance as a bold move, but we don’t yet really know the outcome.
Just by the aggravation factor I’m sure they regret it now, but then some other suckers would have had to have been found to clean up Countrywide and Merrill, and of course the last on the sucker list is always you and me, John Q. Public.
BofA strikes me as the country bumpkin who decides to play in the big poker game with his seed money. It’s not a pretty story, but it’s a unique role in the history of The New Depression, not like any of the main wall street players.
” It can only be accomplished by a government that can effectively take sides in the matter of who makes the billions.”
This is the way government has always been – whether it was a chief of a tribe living on a Pacific island; a Pharoah in Ancient Egypt; a king like Louis XIV; a Chinese Emperor; A First Secretary. The government always decides who propers and whose head will roll.
Only once in history for a very brief 300 years – beginning in 1640 in the American colonies – was government so weak it could not “prevent parvenus from upsetting the established apple-cart.” This weakness was designed into our constitution.
Wilson, Roosevelt, Nixon, Carter, Clinton, Bush and Obama and their Congresses, Courts and Regulatory Agencies drank the big government kool-aide served by our schools and removed the chains that restrained the Federal government. They built a powerful central government and mass suicide of entreprenuers is now taking place has millions realize there is nothing but serfdom in their future. Soon things will be back to normal.
Freedom and free markets are the aberation. Feudalism and serfdom has always been the norm.
Referring back to my comment #58 and the folks who responded to it:
There is obviously a spectrum of possible political systems that are bracketed by pure democracy and pure plutocracy. History has shown that both pure democracy and plutocracy are unstable. I suspect that both Thucydides and Polybius could have provided excellent logical analysis as to why those political systems are unstable (it’s a very old problem). What I find intriguing as an aeronautical engineer is this problem really boils down to constructing a closed-loop guidance system. To some extent managing a modern society is analogous to constructing a fly-by-wire control system for an aerodynamically unstable aircraft like the F-16 or the Space Shuttle Orbit Vehicle. Of course, writing the control law for an F-16 is actually far simpler because the equations of motion can be fully understood. Not only is the control of a modern state vastly more complicated but it is constantly changing. It would be like trying to control an aircraft flying through a tornado with it’s wings constantly changing size and shape. This tells me that the best way to attack the problem is to focus in on the fine structure until what is visible is tractable. This is standard procedure for engineering a tough problem, i.e. break it up into small enough pieces that each piece can be separately solved. To some extent that is built into the American political system through the existence of the 50 states. The Founding Fathers recognized the problem of managing a large government when they tried to frame the US Constitution to devolve as much power as possible to the states. Where the system has gone wrong is in allowing political power to concentrate back into the Federal Government. To some extent this was understandable given that the US faced serious national security challenges during WW-I, the Great Depression, WW-II and the Cold War. Allowing the Federal Government to become all powerful might be acceptable if our President was always some all-knowing genius with the moral wisdom of Jesus and Buddha combined. Unfortunately instead we have Obama…. The emperor is truly naked. Actually he’s beyond naked. The emperor is now a strip tease dancer hustling for tips. Obama’s election as President made it very clear that we need to devolve power back to the states. The nation can not afford another political malfunction like the one resulting in Obama’s election.
Eggplant 73,
I couldn’t agree more regarding the separation of powers as outlined by our Founding Fathers in the Constitution, the 9th and 10th amendments, and in their other writings. Separation of powers between the three Federal branches just isn’t enough – and the Founding Fathers knew it – the balancing power within State governments is also required. It appears to me that the three Federal branches are tending to merge into a single oligarchy.
“The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states…” Article V, U.S. Constitution
http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articlev
“The course & scope of the reasoning [1798 Virginia Resolution] requires that by the rightful authority to interpose in the cases & for the purposes referred to, was meant, not the authority of the States singly & separately, but their authority as the parties to the Constitution., the authority which, in fact, made the Constitution; the authority which being paramount to the Constitution was paramount to the authorities constituted by it, to the Judiciary as well as the other authorities [Congress and President]. The resolution derives the asserted right of interposition for arresting the progress of usurpations by the Federal Government from the fact that its powers were limited to the grant made by the States [Constitution]… The mode of their interposition, in extraordinary cases, is left by the Resolution to the parties [States] themselves…in the event of usurpations of power not remediable under the forms and by the means provided by the Constitution [Article V Amendment]… It is sometimes asked in what mode the States could interpose in their collective character as parties to the Constitution against usurped power. It was not necessary for the object & reasoning of the resolutions & report that the mode should be pointed out. It was sufficient to shew that the authority to interpose existed, and was a resort beyond that of the Supreme Court of the U. S. or any authority derived from the Constitution [Congress and President].” James Madison – 1834 Notes on Nullification
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/mjmtext:@field(DOCID+@lit(jm090163))
It is clear from reading James Madison, and the Constitution its self, that our Federal Government, including the President, Congress and the Supreme Court, is inferior to the State Legislatures when they act in concert – particularly when Federal Government acts un-Constitutionally. “The Several States” are the ultimate defenders of the U.S. Constitution because they were, and still are, the creators of the U.S. Constitution – just as parents while they still live are the creators and ultimate defenders of an offspring. State nullification of un-Constitutional Federal Law is tantamount to parental nullification of a wayward child who has written some new rules which conflict with the family’s original rules. To assert that the States cannot enforce the Constitution by nullification of un-Constitutional Federal Law – because the Constitution doesn’t have a section on nullification – boils down to the irrational idea that parents cannot enforce the original family rules through nullification of new rules created by a wayward child. It is just as self-evident, and also goes without saying, that States, as creator of the Constitution, can enforce the Constitution on an un-Constitutional Federal government.
It is clear from Article V that the States, acting in ¾ majority, have the power to amend our Constitution without permission of Federal Government – just as the States acted in concert at the 1787 Philadelphia Constitutional Convention to create our Constitution and Federal Government. “The Several States” not only possessed the power to create the Constitution, and now possess the power to amend our Constitution; the States have the power and are duty bound to nullify, within their respective borders, un-Constitutional Federal laws, un-Constitutional Executive branch regulations and un-Constitutional Supreme Court decisions. “The Several States” acting in concert are not only superior to un-Constitutional Federal Government via nullification; “The Several States” in ¾ majority are Supra-Constitutional via Article V amendment. Federal Government is the creature and is therefore inferior to its creator – the States. Like great planets of a revolutionary solar system, the weight of the States keeps the Federal Government in its proper place.
37. Agoraphobic Plumber
truepeers@33: “That’s what impressed me, that a commercially viable machine could have 4.5 million parts drawn from all over.”
I’m put in mind of a certain part of the movie “Armageddon”.
Don’t worry about it, AP.
We can’t do that anymore, remember?
Tomorrow, the rocks will just “come on in.”
That one part of man’s endeavors (no matter the number of parts) that provided the “punch back” in Armageddon is now layed aside, so we can spend more on the snail darter and keep flat screens in EVERY poor home in America.
When the rock bears down we will all be instructed to drop our drawers and moon it, hoping that the Karma arising from that act will be enough to cause it to “bounce” into another orbit.
Agoraphobic Plumber,
You’re right – poodles are unfairly maligned and “misunderestimated.”
One thing – they’re FAST.
Big dogs think they’re lap dogs; little dogs think they’re watchdogs; and poodles think they’re greyhounds!
Eggplangt @58
“Not quite. When functioning correctly, government exists as a coercive entity to force the community to do things in its own best interests that the community would not otherwise do. Libertarian/anarchist ideology is fundamentally flawed because it fails to recognize the “tragedy of the commons”.”
All you are saying here is that when government is functioning correctly it m maximizes the output of its surfs on the plantation. And the truth is governments rarely manage their capital real or human in a very efficient manner because governments are most skilled at murder, theft, and oppression. The truncheon, bomb, gun, prison, and gallows are their tools not the plough, saw, or spinning wheel.
Governments if the are allowed to exist at all must be tricked into promoting the common good because their essential nature is opposed to it. The only real difference between the Los Zetas and Obama’s cabinet is that one of them has access to more fire power and a Republican cabinet is not essentially any different except that a few of them would temper their natural predilections out of a fear of the Lord whom a few suspect may exist.
41. tomw
I know exactly what you are saying. But let’s not take the sting off of our favorite rappers’ nom de plumes: He’s “fitty sence” to all his fans.
Tcobb @ 28:
“How do you rein in the government? What I might suggest is this:
(1) End all COLA’s, both for recipients of entitlement programs and our so-called public servants. As for the “public servants” a salary and benefit freeze will be in place. ….Let the burden of the fiat money printing press fall hardest on those who benefit most from the existence of the welfare state.”
To which I would add, tax tenure – whether of the academic sort or the public employment sort. If you can’t lose your job, short of criminal activity, then your future earnings are a taxable asset.
Warren Buffet has also said that he is leaving his entire estate to the Bill Gates Foundation. But what does not get mentioned is that the bequest is null and void if it is subject to estate taxes. Taxes are for the little people.