Why Green Ideology is Truly Viral

When the head of the so-called Worldwide Fund for Nature, Prince Phillip, declares that he desires to be reincarnated as a deadly virus that could reduce human population levels to "sustainability," his royal highness only displays his own ignorance. The fact of the matter is that his brand of "thinking" is already a kind of mental disease. (Whether it be akin to a deadly fungus, virus or bacteria is beside the point.) The would be mass murderers of all terrorist stripes essentially have the same loathing for humanity disguised as religious or race hatred...But they, including Adolf Hitler, are pikers compared to the media celebrated and oh so august, aforementioned prince. For the best they have done is murder some hundred like Anders Breivik, or perhaps thousands like Al Qaeda, or even millions like Hitler. Our bonny Prince Phillip of darkness and his green legions, on the other hand, would have the death of billions. So his minions like the aptly named Al Gore and our brain dead President, indeed, will have Phillip's hell to pay if they succeed in the take down of humanity's necessary progress.

Monetarism is Voodoo Economics

Today's Mother Jones headlines this correct assessment:
Memo to Tea Party: The US Government's Budget is Not Like a Family's


Unfortunately, as expected. they get it wrong. Again. Their analogy is that not raising the debt ceiling is like not paying the rent. In other words, they have no problem in letting the financier interests walk all over us.

Both the tea party and their arguments are wrong. The federal government can issue credit, families cannot. On the other hand, the federal government can stop bailing out the gambling casino speculators that issued worthless debt known as derivative securities. This whole debt ceiling issue is bogus. The Federal Reserve issued 16 trillion dollars in so-called emergency loans in 2008 to bail out the issuers of these derivatives according to the GAO's audit. As long as we honor this lunatic speculation, there is no way out of the crisis. What is needed is a return to FDR's war against these corrupt interests. Cut them loose and reinstate Glass Steagall.

Krugman and Tinkerbell

Today Krugman writes this:

The Cult That Is Destroying America


¶Watching our system deal with the debt ceiling crisis — a wholly self-inflicted crisis, which may nonetheless have disastrous consequences — it’s increasingly obvious that what we’re looking at is the destructive influence of a cult that has really poisoned our political system.

¶And no, I don’t mean the fanaticism of the right. Well, OK, that too. But my feeling about those people is that they are what they are; you might as well denounce wolves for being carnivores. Crazy is what they do and what they are.

¶No, the cult that I see as reflecting a true moral failure is the cult of balance, of centrism.

¶Think about what’s happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.

¶So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent — because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship.

¶The reality, of course, is that we already have a centrist president — actually a moderate conservative president. Once again, health reform — his only major change to government — was modeled on Republican plans, indeed plans coming from the Heritage Foundation. And everything else — including the wrongheaded emphasis on austerity in the face of high unemployment — is according to the conservative playbook.

¶What all this means is that there is no penalty for extremism; no way for most voters, who get their information on the fly rather than doing careful study of the issues, to understand what’s really going on.

¶You have to ask, what would it take for these news organizations and pundits to actually break with the convention that both sides are equally at fault? This is the clearest, starkest situation one can imagine short of civil war. If this won’t do it, nothing will.

¶And yes, I think this is a moral issue. The “both sides are at fault” people have to know better; if they refuse to say it, it’s out of some combination of fear and ego, of being unwilling to sacrifice their treasured pose of being above the fray.

¶It’s a terrible thing to watch, and our nation will pay the price.
Ha! You want to define what a cult is? Fine. The magical belief that money is wealth. And guess what? You are one of its leading propagandists. So much so that you were given their booby prize. We have allowed a small clique of financiers to loot our productive capacity year after year by succumbing to this irrational belief. No amount of magical manipulation of the money supply whether it be Keynesian or Von Misean makes one whit of difference. The only answer is to end the control of Wall Street and the City of London by re-enacting Glass Steagall, allowing the speculators to go belly up, and re-instituting a Hamiltonian use of our nation's credit to productive long term investments that are productive of physical wealth, not fictional monetary lucre.

Tit for Tat

"Probability of ET Life Arbitrarily Small, Say Astrobiologists"

Probability of Intelligence in the Mind of a Statistician is Vanishingly Small

Obama Unveiled

 Bring me your poor and I will execute them.

Two Tribes of Savages

The so called budget negotiations are nothing more than a rancorous dispute among two factions loyal to Wall Street. Americans sense this even if they are mostly desensitized by the driveling media. It is as if two tribes are warring over the right to slaughter their hapless victims: the poor, sick, and elderly. The staged clown show of Obama and Boehner signifies nothing. The malevolent London orchestrators of  the debt "crisis" pull these "leaders" puppet strings all the while. And the band plays on...

Flash: The NY Times Tells the Truth...Almost

We’re Spent

By DAVID LEONHARDT

We are living through a tremendous bust. It isn’t simply a housing bust. It’s a fizzling of the great consumer bubble that was decades in the making.

Much to my amaze, you almost spoke the truth here...The problem is that the so-called consumer economy is just the obverse side of the coin of the 1971 Nixon/Shultz floating exchange rate that unleashed the hell of global currency arbitrage. This, in turn, led to the repeal of Roosevelt's Glass-Steagall and the lunacy of derivative securities. Without returning to fixed exchange rates and Glass-Steagall, there is no return to a producer economy. Right now, Rep. Marcy Kaptur has introduced HR 1489 to do just that. But of course, this would mean that the trillions of these inventive derivative instruments would become worthless. And I am quite certain that that elephant in the room is known to the sages at the august NY Times. Why they fail to take note is certainly baffling...Or could it be a sign of their never swerving loyalty to high finance?

Press Secretary Jay Carney--"No yelling at Obama"

 I believe it is dangerous to shout at a somnambulist, especially one in impaired mental condition...

McConnell Listens to His Masters

 Face facts folks. Both Obama Dems and Repubs are on the same page. Suck up to Wall Street and get their mullah.  Everything else is just like professional wrestling: fake. The deficit was caused by trillion dollar bailouts of the disease known as derivatives--, those bailouts should be cancelled, not senior citizens' meds...

Reply to Richard Cohen's Article: A Grand Old Cult

Mr. Cohen, in as much as the right and left  cling to a worldview that believes in the magic of monetarism, as opposed to the concept of physically productive wealth that Alexander Hamilton stood for, both are blinded by their own versions of cultish, irrational ideologies...And a pox on both of your Usherlike houses!

Lunatics Running the Asylum

Biofuels sellout propagandist and quandom Rickover  biographer: Robert Zubrin

It was my distinctly, distasteful sorrow to have heard just now an interview with the Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, et al, on the Diane Rehm radio program. The subject was how we can move our nation and military to adopt so called biofuels. We might as well all fall on our collective mental swords, if this typifies the type of suicidal thinking currently prevalent in our military. The spirit of Admiral Rickover must surely be deeply offended. When it has been proven, by Mr. LaRouche, inter alia, once and for all, an ironclad law that our species must progress to ever higher levels of energy flux densities, and we willfully contravene this law, then to paraphrase Hyman Rickover: the People Perish...

The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether

Obama's Attempt to End the Space Program Will Live in Infamy

In a sane world, Obama would be impeached alone for his treacherous act of ending the manned space program, upon which the future well being of our nation and planet depends. This alone contravenes the highest principle enshrouded in our nation's founding document --We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

At the Altar of Mammon

 Senate President Stephen Sweeney went to bed furious Thursday night after reviewing the governor’s line-item veto of the state budget.

He woke up Friday morning even angrier.

"This is all about him being a bully and a punk," he said in an interview Friday.

"I wanted to punch him in his head."

Sweeney had just risked his political neck to support the governor’s pension and health reform, and his reward was a slap across the face. The governor’s budget was a brusque rejection of every Democratic move, and Sweeney couldn’t even get an audience with the governor to discuss it.

"You know who he reminds me of?" Sweeney says. "Mr. Potter from ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ the mean old bastard who screws everybody."

Christie and Obama both worship at the altar of Mammon (i.e. international finance)...One on the left with George Soros, et al, and the other on the right with the Koch brothers, et al. How truly deluded must one be not to see this plain truth?

Still More Hellish Financial Chicanery

Yours truly recently quipped that the downfall of Messier Strauss Kahn was truly piquant in its irony--which is to say that the head of an insidious institution responsible for implementing murderous "conditionalities" upon hapless victims should be accused of rape. But now, it appears that our antagonist was set up after having refused to pay for prostitution. Mon dieu! But why should the illustrious head of the illustrious IMF have to lower himself to pay for a prostitute? Perhaps he felt a sort of imperial entitlement to such venalities that naturally goes with the various emoluments of his high office. But then, the devil is always in the details...

Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin

The Presidential seal falls off Obama's limousine. This is the second seal to attempt to vacate Obama's presence. We can only hope the third will be a charm...

A Fascist in the Room

This gentleman, and I use that term very loosely, like all those that hew the line -- some with crocodile tears --  that incremental, grinding austerity is a necessary evil, is, simply put, a fascist. Thanks HuffingtonPost for providing this forum to allow me to post the truth of the matter.


Oops, sadly, I must amend the above commendation of HuffPost, since they have decided to not publish my comment. Who would have thought such a liberal blog with such endearing ties to that billionaire philanthropist George Soros would refuse to print the above. Go figure...

Amb. Vassilis Kaskarelis

Greek Ambassador to the United States

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Focusing All on Greece Ignores the Elephant in the Room

Posted: 07/ 1/11 04:28 PM ET

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Greece has become a household word recently, regrettably, for the wrong reasons. Barely a day has passed during the last fifteen months when its imminent default and doom as well as the Euro's consequent demise have not been predicted.

These verdicts have not come true for the simple reason that they are based solely on numbers, ignoring the political parameter known as the "European Union (EU)," a fundamental variable in the equation, which alters the picture entirely.

I attribute this omission to a simple lack of understanding of the EU's complex inner workings. A person more cynical than I might conclude that it has to do with the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in the Euro's downfall.

It is not the first time that the collapse of the EU is considered as "just around the corner" during its history. Such was the case with the Lisbon, or so-called "Constitutional" Treaty, which ultimately approved and implemented, despite predictions to the contrary. Who can forget the front-page headlines of the time, carried by the majority of prestigious media, heralding "Europe's final days", "EU system collapses" and "Europe is dead"?

History repeated itself a few months ago, when the EU was in the process of devising a mechanism to support member-states like Greece to deal with the impact of a global economic crisis. Again, against predicted failure, the mechanism was put in place and is consistently becoming more effective, though one might argue that Greece served as the guinea pig.

Such foregone conclusions of gloom and doom underestimate the commitment of EU member-states and, at the very least, indicate a lack of awareness about the very nature of the EU, an organic and evolving institution, which handles its challenges through collective and exhaustive deliberation, reaching decisions through consensus. While this is a long drawn process, the EU always emerges from it stronger, healthier and more defined.

Furthermore, prophecies about the EU abandoning or expelling Greece or any other member-state, or vice versa, is just as frivolous as suggesting that the U.S. could drop one of its states because of economic troubles, or, for that matter, a state opting to leave the U.S. or even stop using the dollar as its currency.

Another misconception taking root is that the money given to Greece is free and simply wasted money, offered at the expense of the American taxpayer. On the contrary, this is a loan to be paid back at a punitive interest rate. And thus far, Greece is living up to this obligation.

Similarly ignored is the fact that the bulk of the money comes from European sources. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), to whose budget the U.S. contributes 16.8 %, is providing only part of that loan to Greece, approx. 30%. Furthermore, the IMF has priority for reimbursement over all other creditors.

I am not, by any means, disavowing Greece's responsibility for the state of its economy, which has been mismanaged for decades, even at the expense of the Greek people themselves. Greeks understand the need for change, accepting extremely harsh and painful measures, and exhibiting great tolerance throughout this past year and up until a month ago. Drastic wage and pension cuts, significant tax increases and major service cutbacks, are some of the measures implemented and affecting hardworking taxpayers, measures, which, by the way, I am often told by the majority of my interlocutors on Capitol Hill, would bring about a revolution, if they were to be implemented in the U.S. Additional and harsher measures and a new legal framework are on the way that will combat corruption and implement a more just tax system.

Just this past week, in a "vote of national responsibility," as it was hailed by the European Council, and after much heated debate and in the midst of understandable public reaction, the Greek Parliament approved a new package of harsh measures, tax hikes and spending cuts - an important step towards stabilizing the country's dire economic situation and creating opportunities for development and growth.

But, let's also look at the bigger picture. Given that Greece's economy barely represents 2.4% of the European economy, while the country itself is no larger than the state of Alabama, it behooves us to address the elephant in the room, none other than the lack of market regulation and its unprecedented greed.

It has been said repeatedly by respectable economists and published by major newspapers, more recently in the New York Times editorial titled "Greece and You," that "it was derivatives that were behind "the near meltdown . . . in the global financial system". It was indeed the relatively new financial instruments, derivatives, CDS, CDOs that created the 2008 U.S. economic crisis and its global implications. Yet, three years later, no one has dared take on those who seek quick and short term profit, betting on the destabilization of the European Union and ultimately on the global economy.

Perhaps the time has come for us to grab this beast by the horns and tame it, before we lose total control and the entire global economic system collapses.

Greece and its people take responsibility for their own failings and have launched an unprecedented effort to make them right.

We will not, however, be held responsible for a global economic crisis, the roots of which lie elsewhere.