Monday, November 28, 2011
7 Trillion dollars is hard to even conceive of.
Teach Your Children Well
11.29.11 at 1:47 am
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“It had already become clear
in October 2009 that the Greek government
had lied about the size of its deficit.”That’s the part of this story that I keep hearing repeated, but the mechanics of which escape me.
How does a country lie, I mean lie enough to matter, about the size of its deficits, and escape detection from people doing even a cursory due diligence? It’s borrowing to cover its deficits. You know how big its deficit is from how much it’s borrowing.
Surely the total size of all Greek govt borrowing was known. Back when the sovereigns were monarchs rather than republics and not forced to keep public accounts, there was the possibilitily that because they were borrowing from all sorts of sources that you as an individual creditor had no idea existed, you could easily be sending money from whence there would be no hope of return. The sovereign himself might not have a clear idea of his total indebtedness. This is what happened to the Fuggers. Now, insofar as modern sovereigns still do this, borrow on the sly, then anyone who lends to such a sovereign deserves whatever happens to their money, deserves to be thoroughly Fuggered.
If you have that, that all of a sovereign’s borrowing is conducted in public bond auctions, or is otherwise a matter of public record, then you have enough information to judge its ability to meet its obligations. You know how much it’s borrowing every year. Any borrowing that is not directed towards a specific capital improvement, but simply plugs a shortfall in ordinary annual expenditures, should have a particular rationale, such as counter-cyclical stimulus, that has an end date and a plan to make up the deficits in good economic times.
In my experience with banks lending me money, their standard of due diligence is such that they don’t let me lie to them. I’m not allowed to make up an income figure and write it on a piece of paper and that’s that, they accept that I’m “good for it” because I say that I am. They want to see bank statements, and they want pay stubs, and they want tax returns and credit card statements. They want sufficient information about where I get my money and where it goes that they don’t have to rely on any representations I might make about how good I am for it. Bank officers who skipped all that due diligence and let me lie to them would be put in jail for fraud, for failure in their fiduciary responsibility to the people whose money they handed over to me.
There are different, lesser, standards for the people who lend much larger sums of other people’s money to sovereigns? Compared to a sovereign, I am subject to all sorts of coercion—I can be sued—and I am forced to offer the house as collateral before the bank hands over the money. I should get much less scrutiny, not more. That, or sovereigns ought to at least have their math checked, have creditors at least consider the size of what can’t be fudged, the total magnitude of their borrowing, for what that says about their ability to repay.
How did people who knew how much Greece was borrowing imagine that it was good for it all?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but what I’ve assumed all along, and it seems supported by statements in this review, is that at some point the creditors knew perfectly well that their loans likely wouldn’t be repaid by Greece, but that there would be a bail out. Why worry about boring old due diligence if you get to socialize the risks and privatize the profits?
Nuance is great. But when the story is simple, don’t complicate it needlessly. “Greek lies” were no more responsible for this debacle than Freddie Mac wrong-doing was responsible for the housing bubble in the US.
- comment from crooked timber
- http://crookedtimber.org/2011/11/28/european-technocracy/#comments
How far outside respectability is it to believe in the October Surprise conspiracy, and that Reagan's crew are traitors? Pretty far, I'm guessing.
It would be utterly lunatic to suggest that Reagan and some of his top advisors conspired secretly and illegally with the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran to break US law, undermine US foreign policy, and help US-hating terrorists in 1980.
Everyone knows they didn't start doing that until, ooh, 1985 or so.
Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 11-28-11 8:31 AM
Genius. via unfogged
http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_11772.html
Friday, November 25, 2011
4minute clip of Allan Grayson telling it like it is on OWS.
Thursday, November 24, 2011
http://www.salon.com/2011/11/24/bob_schieffer_ron_paul_and_journalistic_objectivity/singleton/
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Fox news viewers know less than those who watch no new at all.
DougJ at Balloon Juice comments on our glorious overlords.
Standard issue right-wing scumbaggery.
As the Occupy movement continues to grow in defiance of the heavy-handed police action determined to squelch it, a natural question emerges: What point will the military be summoned to contain the cascade of popular dissent? And if our nation’s finest are brought into this struggle to stand between the vested authority of the state and the ranks of those who petition them for a redress of grievance, what may we expect the outcome to be?
If history is our guide then we know that story all too well. Behind a thin veil of red, white and blue stands a nation that has used its military might to respond forcefully to any public contempt for the very institutions which bind us in exclusion from the liberty those colors evoke. Just as a training collar keeps a dog in check, a highly militarized police force responds mercilessly, sharply, and without hesitation with an array of chemical warfare and thuggish brutality. And where they fail, divisions of soldiers stand ready to deliver a serious and painful lesson to all who demonstrate their unwillingness to wait for democracy.
This has been the history of democracy in America. The ink on the pages that chronicle the use of state violence towards an unruly citizenry is dry. We cannot rewrite them. We read them in lament. But for each new day history waits; at the dawn of each morning we are presented with the gift of creation. The prevailing thought woven into the fabric of our society today, threaded through both patterns of conservative and liberal ideology, remains the recognition that something is very wrong with the world. Naturally, we form the question: Can we do things differently? Once we animate that thought and present it to society as a question demanding an answer, we begin to sketch out our draft of the world in the pages of history.
I call upon my brothers and sisters in the armed forces to ink their pens and help us write these next few, and most important pages in the history of our social life. Soon, it is quite likely that you will be mobilized to aid the police in their effort to contain or disperse what their bosses see as an imminent threat to the sanctity of their authority. As that day draws near, I remind you of these familiar words:
I, (NAME), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.
Those that take this oath seriously are faced with a terrible conflict. You must battle internally between the affirmation that you will place your body between the social contract embedded in the Constitution and those that seek its destruction, while maintaining your loyalty to the government you serve and the orders issued by its officers. Sadly, society has placed a twin tax upon you by asking that you sacrifice both your body and your morality. This tax has been levied solely upon you overseas, and soon they’ll come to collect domestically. Your government in its expression of corporate interests relies upon your tenacity to endure, and your relentless willingness to sacrifice. And so you do.
Now, more than ever we need your sacrifice. But, I’m asking you to soldier in a different way. If called upon to deny the people of their first amendment right to peaceably assemble and petition their government for a redress of grievance, disregard the order. Abstain from service. Or if you are so bold, join us. Make no mistake: The consequences for such decisions are severe. You will be prosecuted under the full extent of the law. But sacrifice is your watch word.
Thomas Paine wrote in 1776:
These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.
Today we are faced with a new revolution. This time we are fighting to preserve our democracy, rather than to establish a new one. And just as a grateful nation relied upon the Winter Soldier to deliver us from the colonial yoke of oppression, we ask that you aid us in our struggle to be free from the bonds of debt peonage and false representation. In return we will stand in your defense as the elite, who have gained so much from your service, attempt to strip you of your hard won honor.
via Yves Smith
personally I wouldn't rule out 90%.
Monday, November 21, 2011
FrankTrollman Serious Badass Joined: 07 Mar 2008 Posts: 16265 |
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"FrankTrollman Serious Badass Joined: 07 Mar 2008 Posts: 16265 |
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Serious Badass
Joined: 07 Mar 2008
Posts: 16265
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/11/deconstructing-right-wing-alternate-reality
Sunday, November 20, 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfBUjRao7kk&feature=player_embedded
Friday, November 18, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/18/opinion/krugman-failure-is-good.html?_r=1&ref=paulkrugman&gwh=07741F099C86713A9BE506A901D3E87B
Thursday, November 17, 2011
http://boingboing.net/2011/11/11/stop-sopa-save-the-internet.html
http://www.salon.com/2011/11/17/ows_inspired_activism/singleton/
The implications of the EU and bankers forcing Greece, the birthplace of democracy, to cancel a popular plebiscite as “irresponsible,” forcing instead an austerity regime composed partly of neo-Nazis fascists to administer more “pain”–is something that should frighten the shit out of everyone. Because like it or not, we’re all in the cross-hairs of the same banking interests, and we’re all going to face it again and again. Greece just happens to be the first in line.
read the rest at:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/mark-ames-austerity-fascism-in-greece-%E2%80%93-the-real-1-doctrine.html
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/woman-gets-jail-for-food-stamp-fraud-wall-street-fraudsters-get-bailouts-20111117
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/two-connected-items-by-david-atkins_17.html
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2011/05/adventures-of-baron-grifthausen.html
Charlie Pierce at Esquire’s Daily Politics Blog sums it up nicely:
Your right to peaceably assemble for the redress of grievances, and how you may do it, and what you may say, will be defined by the police power of the state, backed by its political establishment and the business elite. They will define “acceptable” forms of public protest, even (and especially) public protest against them. This is the way it is now. This is the way it has been for some time. It’s just that people didn’t notice. And that was the problem with the Occupy protests. They resisted the marginalization — both literal physical marginalization, and the kind of intellectual marginalization that keeps real solutions to real problems out of our kabuki political debates. They could not be ignored…
via Balloon Juice
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/austerity-then-and-now/?gwh=479D74F54B58A61C2C2C4779F504B462
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/opinion/krugman-vouchers-for-veterans-and-other-bad-ideas.html?_r=2&ref=paulkrugman&gwh=2139D104812ABA8B9899E76C6A7FDBF5
Monday, November 14, 2011
Dean Baker
Sunday, November 06, 2011
and http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=196348&page=1