Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Reports that the Algerian government is shutting down ISPs and deleting Facebook accounts to save itself from Mubarak's fate. Does it have hackers deleting Facebook accounts? It looks like the Algerian government is responding with a heavier hand than Mubarak did.

FASCISM:

How the US government is working with big corporations to attack WikiLeaks and its supporters including honest journalists.

"As creepy and odious as this is, there's nothing unusual about these kinds of smear campaigns.   The only unusual aspect here is that we happened to learn about it this time because of Anonymous' hacking.  That a similar scheme was quickly discovered by ThinkProgress demonstrates how common this behavior is.  The very idea of trying to threaten the careers of journalists and activists to punish and deter their advocacy is self-evidently pernicious; that it's being so freely and casually proposed to groups as powerful as the Bank of America, the Chamber of Commerce, and the DOJ-recommended Hunton & Williams demonstrates how common this is.  These highly experienced firms included such proposals because they assumed those deep-pocket organizations would approve and it would make their hiring more likely."

The US government has seized so much control over so many sectors of our economy, it's impossible to say where the government ends and the corporations start. There's a revolving door between firms like Goldman-Sachs and Monsanto and the government. They swap employees back and forth to their mutual advantage and our disadvantage

"That's what this anti-WikiLeaks campaign is generally:  it's a concerted, unified effort between government and the most powerful entities in the private sector (Bank of America is the largest bank in the nation).  The firms the Bank has hired (such as Booz Allen) are suffused with the highest level former defense and intelligence officials, while these other outside firms (including Hunton & Williams and Palantir) are extremely well-connected to the U.S. Government.  The U.S. Government's obsession with destroying WikiLeaks has been well-documented.  And because the U.S. Government is free to break the law without any constraints, oversight or accountability, so, too, are its "private partners" able to act lawlessly.  That was the lesson of the Congressional vesting of full retroactive immunity in lawbreaking telecoms, of the refusal to prosecute any of the important Wall Street criminals who caused the 2008 financial crisis, and of the instinctive efforts of the political class to protect defrauding mortgage banks.  The exemption from the rule of law has been fully transferred from the highest level political elites to their counterparts in the private sector.  "Law" is something used to restrain ordinary Americans and especially those who oppose this consortium of government and corporate power, but it manifestly does not apply to restrain these elites."

There's a name for this: fascism. But the problem isn't that corporations share the lawlessness of government. It's lawlessness period, and government, because it has a monopoly on the law, is always lawless. The solution is not to cut the corporations out of the power, that can't be done because government's power is always for sale - it's the only thing of value aristocrats have - so the only possible solution is to take the power from government so the corporations can't access it.

"After Anonymous imposed some very minimal cyber disruptions on Paypal, Master Card and Amazon, the DOJ flamboyantly vowed to arrest the culprits, and several individuals were just arrested as part of those attacks.  But weeks earlier, a far more damaging and serious cyber-attack was launched at WikiLeaks, knocking them offline.  Those attacks were sophisticated and dangerous.  Whoever did that was quite likely part of either a government agency or a large private entity acting at its behest.  Yet the DOJ has never announced any investigation into those attacks or vowed to apprehend the culprits, and it's impossible to imagine that ever happening."

My point exactly. And it's always been that way. Government prosecuted people for killing Indians while it slaughtered them in mass.

"That's the same dynamic that causes the Obama administration to be obsessed with prosecuting WikiLeaks but not The New York Times or Bob Woodward, even though the latter have published far more sensitive government secrets; WikiLeaks is adverse to the government while theNYT and Woodward aren't, and thus "law" applies to punish only the former."

That is the nature of government.

"There are supposed to be institutions which limit what can be done in pursuit of those private-sector goals.  They're called "government" and "law.""

How abominably naive.

"But those institutions are so annexed by the most powerful private-sector elites, and so corrupted by the public officials who run them, that nobody -- least of all those elites -- has any expectation that they will limit anything."

It's amazing how he can see what's going on still have it so fundamentally wrong. The private sector is not the problem. Corporate access to government's power is not the problem. Government having that power is the problem. Politicians are no more noble than anybody else. They're not Jesus Christ. They're not angels nor even saints. They don't build bulwarks against corporate evil. Politicians want to advance their own careers like everybody else, and like all humans they trade what they have to trade with the highest bidders. But all they have to trade is our wealth and our power, so that's what they sell to the highest bidder which is always the biggest corporations and special interest groups. It's human nature. They enrich themselves and their cronies at our expense. It's always been that way, and as long as we surrender our wealth and power to government, that's the only way it can ever be. Worse, because every action government takes is a threat of violence or violence, it attracts the worst people in the country to it. Government exists to enable the ruling class to loot the people without having the people fight back. It's always been that way, and the US government is terrifyingly efficient at achieving that goal. It's only limit is it must provide the illusion of legitimacy. When you view government in that light, suddenly everything it does makes sense.

TAX AND SPEND:

As predicted, Republicans are not serious about cutting federal spending. Not even a little bit.

"Republican leaders signaled that they now intended to seek about $25billion in additional cuts over the balance of the fiscal year. That would bring their total proposed reductions to more than $60billion, a level that even some Republicans have warned would be disruptive to government services."

Anybody who fell for their line about fiscal responsibility is a fool.

Jack Daniels explains the deficit.

REGULATION:

City bans bottled water.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

The ruling class realizes the dollar is dying, so they are pushing for the IMF to become the de facto world central bank. I'm not so sure they're running scared. I think they're destroying the dollar on purpose so they can centralize power in a one-world central bank and more directly control the world economy.

The Fed is slowly being held accountable for its damage for several reasons. Ron Paul has oversight. Another is jobs.

"The public remains concerned about the stubborn resistance to recovery in the job market. People know that an economy that cannot provide jobs is a sub-par economy. Yet the total number of Americans employed today is the same as in 1999, while the population has moved from 279 million to 313 million."

Over a decade of apparently wealth creation has been exposed as a Fed-created illusion. Before its over,  decades will be exposed as an illusion. Helicopter Ben also broke with Keynesian dogma:

"He ended with this: "Our nation cannot reasonably expect to grow its way out of our fiscal imbalances, but a more productive economy will ease the tradeoffs that we face."Read it again. He has broken with the dominant Keynesian-monetarist-supply side mantra. He has said that, if Congress does not cut spending, there is no way to grow our way out of a fiscal crisis."

I wonder how he lives with the contradictions. This sets up a conflict between Congress and the Fed.

"Bernanke will give lots more testimonies. He will not find an audience of subservient listeners. The members of the committees are aware that the economy back home is in bad shape. Bernanke is trying to pass on the Old Maid of unemployment to them. "It's Congress's fault. Blame Congress." They are not going to cut spending. Then how will they shift blame away from themselves? The target is obvious: the FED."

Government has the monopoly on force. Congress will win.

HEALTH CARE:

Silica, iodine, hair and thyroid.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Freeze in Mexico leads to crop shortage and higher food prices. Bernanke thanks the weather for the excuse.

WAR ON DRUGS:

Music releases dopamine. Ban it!

FOREIGN POLICY:

Once again the inherent corruption of government as an institution and politicians as rulers in that institution is on display as intelligence reports claim former Egyptian dictator Mubarak spent the last 18 days of his rule trying to hide from investigators the fortune he amassed by looting the Egyptian people.

"But a senior Western intelligence source claimed that Mubarak had begun moving his fortune in recent weeks."We're aware of some urgent conversations within the Mubarak family about how to save these assets," said the source, "And we think their financial advisers have moved some of the money around. If he had real money in Zurich, it may be gone by now.""

What's wrong with this picture? Apparently the NSA was listening in on Mubarak, but they don't know the details of where he moved his stolen loot? I guess I can believe that. I'm sure his family knew they were being monitored, so they didn't give any details.

"But demands were growing among protesters in Cairo last night for Mr Mubarak to be put on trial for corruption.The former president was at his family villa in the resort town of Sharm El-Sheikh. There were unconfirmed reports that he was effectively under house arrest, as the focus of protesters moved from toppling the hated ruler to seizing his fortune, although the army's ruling council which is in charge of the country pending its transition to democracy said Mr Mubarak was beingn treated with due respect.
During the protests last week, former deputy foreign minister Ibrahim Yousri and 20 lawyers petitioned Abdel Meguid Mahmoud, Egypt's prosecutor general, to put Mr Mubarak and his family on trial for stealing state wealth."

The US government has to hate this idea. The last thing they want is for Mubarak to go on trial because he could spill the beans on all kinds of US government evil-doing.


It is a sad, ironic reality that history will credit President Obama with freeing the Middle East the way it credits Bill Clinton with balancing the budget: both did everything they could to keep it from happening, but since they were president, they get the credit.

POLITICS:

Sarah Palin takes another step toward running for president, making fools of all the people who said she couldn't and wouldn't.

I love this joke:

"What’s the difference between Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin? When Sarah Palin shoots you, you stay down."

Good for Rich Lowry for refusing to be politically correct.

MISC:

Charts and analysis show how Roosevelt deepened and extended the Great Depression.

"Today, unfortunately, Obama and his minions are taking Roosevelt as a model and are straining to repeat his mistakes. Because the distortions in today’s economy are far greater than those in the 1920s and 1930s, and since the public now relies upon government far more than it did in those days, I don’t see any way around a more serious depression – the Greater Depression. It’s been going on since 2008, will get much worse, and has years left to run."

Ouch.

If you wondered why Bush the Elder was so dedicated to spilling American blood and treasure to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, Rothbard shows many financial connections between the Kuwaiti government and the Kissinger-Rockefeller empire.

Fish with fins evolved like hands.