$400.00/gallon gas drives debate over afghan war

TheHill | The Pentagon pays an average of $400 to put a gallon of fuel into a combat vehicle or aircraft in Afghanistan.

The statistic is likely to play into the escalating debate in Congress over the cost of a war that entered its ninth year last week.

Pentagon officials have told the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee a gallon of fuel costs the military about $400 by the time it arrives in the remote locations in Afghanistan where U.S. troops operate.

“It is a number that we were not aware of and it is worrisome,” Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), the chairman of the House Appropriations Defense panel, said in an interview with The Hill. “When I heard that figure from the Defense Department, we started looking into it.”

The Pentagon comptroller’s office provided the fuel statistic to the committee staff when it was asked for a breakdown of why every 1,000 troops deployed to Afghanistan costs $1 billion. The Obama administration uses this estimate in calculating the cost of sending more troops to Afghanistan.

The Obama administration is engaged in an internal debate over its future strategy in Afghanistan. Part of this debate concerns whether to increase the number of U.S. troops in that country.

The top U.S. general in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, reportedly has requested that about 40,000 additional troops be sent.
Democrats in Congress are divided over whether to send more combat troops to stabilize Afghanistan in the face of waning public support for the war.

Any additional troops and operations likely will have to be paid for through a supplemental spending bill next year, something Murtha has said he already anticipates.

Afghanistan — with its lack of infrastructure, challenging geography and increased roadside bomb attacks — is a logistical nightmare for the U.S. military, according to congressional sources, and it is expensive to transport fuel and other supplies.

t. boone speaks his mind...,

Reuters | Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens told Congress on Wednesday that U.S. energy companies are "entitled" to some of Iraq's crude because of the large number of American troops that lost their lives fighting in the country and the U.S. taxpayer money spent in Iraq.

Boone, speaking to the newly formed Congressional Natural Gas Caucus, complained that the Iraqi government has awarded contracts to foreign companies, particularly Chinese firms, to develop Iraq's vast reserves while American companies have mostly been shut out.

"They're opening them (oil fields) up to other companies all over the world ... We're entitled to it," Pickens said of Iraq's oil. "Heck, we even lost 5,000 of our people, 65,000 injured and a trillion, five hundred billion dollars."

President Barack Obama has pledged to withdraw U.S. troops in Iraq.

"We leave there with the Chinese getting the oil," Pickens said.

drop in foreclosures called "very scary"

DaytonDailyNews | Nobody is sure exactly how many bank walkaways are occurring. For various reasons, they can’t be identified in searches of public real estate and court data without individually pulling case files, experts say.

But nobody questions that they are on the increase.

David Rothstein, a researcher with Policy Matters Ohio, summarized the way they occur like this:

• The lender files a foreclosure, gets the foreclosure judgment in court, takes the property to sheriff’s auction but doesn’t bid on it if no one else does.

• The lender files as above, gets the judgment, sets the sheriff’s auction, then cancels the sale at the last minute.

• The lender files as above but then never requests a sheriff’s auction.

• The lender doesn’t even bother to file foreclosure.

All of these actions leave the foreclosed property in the hands of the original owner who, in many cases, has moved out and is unaware the lender hasn’t taken it.

One indicator of the trend in walkaways is the gap between the number of foreclosure filings by lenders and the number of properties actually sold at sheriff’s auction.

A Dayton Daily News analysis of Montgomery County records found that, through September, foreclosure filings are on a pace this year to decrease by 8 percent. Meanwhile, foreclosed properties sold at sheriff’s sale will be down more than 21 percent. Over the three years an average of 2,500 foreclosure filings have not made it to sale at auction.

A foreclosure filing may not make it to auction for a number of reasons, including owners coming up with the money or lenders working out deals with them. But, Rothstein said, the growing difference between filings and sales suggests walkaways are playing an increasing role.

“When we look at the numbers, it’s not like thousands of people are getting loan modifications that would lift them out of the foreclosure process,” he said. “So what’s happening to those other properties?”

american poverty higher than ever now

NYDailyNews | The level of poverty in America is even worse than first believed.

A revised formula for calculating medical costs and geographic variations show that approximately 47.4 million Americans last year lived in poverty, 7 million more than the government's official figure.

The disparity occurs because of differing formulas the Census Bureau and the National Academy of Science use for calculating the poverty rate. The NAS formula shows the poverty rate to be at 15.8 percent, or nearly 1 in 6 Americans, according to calculations released this week. That's higher than the 13.2 percent, or 39.8 million, figure made available recently under the original government formula.

That measure, created in 1955, does not factor in rising medical care, transportation, child care or geographical variations in living costs. Nor does it consider non-cash government aid when calculating income. As a result, official figures released last month by Census may have overlooked millions of poor people, many of them 65 and older.

foreclosures force ex-homeowners into shelters

NYTimes | The first night after she surrendered her house to foreclosure, Sheri West endured the darkness in her Hyundai sedan. She parked in her old driveway, with her flower-print dresses and hats piled in boxes on the back seat, and three cherished houseplants on the floor. She used her backyard as a restroom.

The second night, she stayed with a friend, and so it continued for more than a year: Ms. West — mother of three grown children, grandmother to six and great-grandmother to one — passed months on the couches of friends and relatives, and in the front seat of her car.

But this fall, she exhausted all options. She had once owned and overseen a group home for homeless people. Now, she succumbed to that status herself, checking in to a shelter.

“No one could have told me that in a million years: I’d wake up in a homeless shelter,” she said. “I had a house for homeless people. Now, I’m homeless.”

Growing numbers of Americans who have lost houses to foreclosure are landing in homeless shelters, according to social service groups and a recent report by a coalition of housing advocates.

Only three years ago, foreclosure was rarely a factor in how people became homeless. But among the homeless people that social service agencies have helped over the last year, an average of 10 percent lost homes to foreclosure, according to “Foreclosure to Homelessness 2009,” a survey produced by the National Coalition for the Homeless and six other advocacy groups.

In the Midwest, foreclosure played a role for 15 percent of newly homeless people, according to the survey, reflecting soaring rates of unemployment — Ohio’s reached 10.8 percent in August — and aggressive lending to people with damaged credit.

foreclosures - worst three months of all time...,

CNN | Despite signs of broader economic recovery, number of foreclosure filings hit a record high in the third quarter - a sign the plague is still spreading. Despite concerted government-led and lender-supported efforts to prevent foreclosures, the number of filings hit a record high in the third quarter, according to a report issued Thursday.

"They were the worst three months of all time," said Rick Sharga, spokesman for RealtyTrac, an online marketer of foreclosed homes.

During that time, 937,840 homes received a foreclosure letter -- whether a default notice, auction notice or bank repossession, the RealtyTrac report said. That means one in every 136 U.S. homes were in foreclosure, which is a 5% increase from the second quarter and a 23% jump over the third quarter of 2008.

Nevada continued to be the worst-hit state with one filing for every 23 households. But even tranquil Vermont, where the foreclosure crisis has barely brushed the housing market, saw foreclosure filings jump nearly 170% compared with the third quarter of 2008. Still, that resulted in just one filing for every 5,023 households in the state -- the best record in the country.

u.s. launches aid for state and local housing agencies

Reuters | The Obama administration on Monday launched a program to help the depressed U.S. housing market by effectively allowing state and local housing finance agencies to borrow from the U.S. Treasury.

The initiative, announced as new data showed a downturn in homebuilder sentiment, aims to restart a source of mortgage financing for first-time and low-income buyers that has been largely shut down by credit market gridlock.

Described as temporary by the U.S. Treasury, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the program will allow state and local agencies to issue bonds through government-sponsored mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Those bonds would then be purchased by the Treasury.

"Through this initiative, the administration aims to help ... jump start new lending to borrowers who might not otherwise be served and to better support the financing costs of their current programs," U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said in a statement.

The U.S. housing market, which was at the epicenter of the global credit crisis, has shown signs of stabilizing, but it has been bolstered by an $8,000 tax credit for first-time buyers that is set to expire at the end of November.

a very lucky universe?

Guardian | In a desperate attempt to explain why Cern's Large Hadron Collider has suffered a series of mishaps preventing it from commencing its search for the elusive Higgs Boson particle, respectable physicists have suggested (apparently in all seriousness) that nature abhors the Higgs so much that ripples from the future are travelling back in time to stop the Switzerland-based particle accelerator working.

Reports of the emergence of these theories have prompted renewed contemplation of the "granny paradox", which some think debunks the very idea of time travel. In this scenario, a time traveller goes into the past and inadvertently causes the death of his/her granny, before the traveller's parents are born. So the traveller never goes back in time, so granny doesn't die – and, well, so on. I have a much simpler explanation for the collider's plight. Its failure is related to the existence of other universes, the "parallel worlds" beloved of science-fiction writers.

This theory suggests there are many – perhaps infinitely many – universes, some more or less like our own, some very different. This is not an idea confined to science fiction; it is respectable scientific speculation. Such universes are thought to exist in their own sets of space and time dimensions, and include worlds where key turning points in history, such as the Battle of Hastings, turned out differently from the way things happened in our world. The physicist Hugh Everett proved half a century ago that this "many worlds" idea is completely compatible with everything we know about the way the world works, and is a natural feature of quantum physics.

u.s. state tax revenue drops most since 1963

Bloomberg | Bloomberg is reporting State Revenue Falls Most Since 1963 on Incomes, Sales. U.S. state tax collections tumbled the most in almost half a century in the second quarter as the economic recession curbed levies on incomes and sales.

The 16.6 percent plunge was the biggest since at least 1963, the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government said today. For the 12 months to June 30, the fiscal year for most states, revenue declined 8.2 percent, or $63 billion, about twice what states got from the $787 billion U.S. economic stimulus package, the institute said.

State revenue has dwindled for two straight quarters and continued to decline in July and August, the Albany-based research organization said. Budgets for the year that began July 1 already face $26 billion of deficits, the Washington, D.C.- based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said Aug. 12, forcing state lawmakers to confront additional spending cuts.

“We’re looking at a multiyear problem hitting essentially every state,” Robert Ward, the institute’s deputy director, told reporters. “It has happened during recessions before, but the depth of this decline is unprecedented in modern times.”

Collections dropped in 49 states in the second quarter as sales and personal-income taxes slid for the third consecutive period, the institute said. Income tax was down 27.5 percent and sales tax fell down 9.5 percent, its study said. Both categories fell by the most in 45 years.

“Many economists believe that the national recession has ended and that a tepid recovery is now underway,” Rockefeller analysts Lucy Dadayan and Donald J. Boyd wrote. “Unfortunately for states, an emerging economic recovery does not spell instant budget relief.”

america's soul is lost - collapse inevitable

MarketWatch | Jack Bogle published "The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism" four years ago. The battle's over. The sequel should be titled: "Capitalism Died a Lost Soul." Worse, we've lost "America's Soul." And worldwide the consequences will be catastrophic. That's why a man like Hong Kong's contrarian economist Marc Faber warns in his Doom, Boom & Gloom Report: "The future will be a total disaster, with a collapse of our capitalistic system as we know it today."

No, not just another meltdown, another bear market recession like the one recently triggered by Wall Street's "too-greedy-to-fail" banks. Faber is warning that the entire system of capitalism will collapse. Get it? The engine driving the great "American Economic Empire" for 233 years will collapse, a total disaster, a destiny we created.

OK, deny it. But I'll bet you have a nagging feeling maybe he's right, the end may be near. I have for a long time: I wrote a column back in 1997: "Battling for the Soul of Wall Street." My interest in "The Soul" -- what Jung called the "collective unconscious" -- dates back to my Ph.D. dissertation: "Modern Man in Search of His Soul," a title borrowed from Jung's 1933 book, "Modern Man in Search of a Soul." This battle has been on my mind since my days at Morgan Stanley 30 years ago, witnessing the decline.

Has capitalism lost its soul? Guys like Bogle and Faber sense it. Read more about the soul in physicist Gary Zukav's "The Seat of the Soul," Thomas Moore's "Care of the Soul" and sacred texts.

But for Wall Street and American capitalism, use your gut. You know something's very wrong: A year ago "too-greedy-to-fail" banks were insolvent, in a near-death experience. Now, magically they're back to business as usual, arrogant, pocketing outrageous bonuses while Main Street sacrifices, and unemployment and foreclosures continue rising as tight credit, inflation and skyrocketing Federal debt are killing taxpayers.

Yes, Wall Street has lost its moral compass. They created the mess, now, like vultures, they're capitalizing on the carcass. They have lost all sense of fiduciary duty, ethical responsibility and public obligation.

Here are the Top 20 reasons American capitalism has lost its soul:

frustration builds within the ranks

NYTimes | Only nine months ago, the Pentagon pronounced itself reassured by the early steps of a new commander in chief. President Obama was moving slowly on an American withdrawal from Iraq, had retained former President George W. Bush’s defense secretary and, in a gesture much noticed, had executed his first military salute with crisp precision.

But now, after nearly a month of deliberations by Mr. Obama over whether to send more American troops to Afghanistan, frustrations and anxiety are on the rise within the military.

A number of active duty and retired senior officers say there is concern that the president is moving too slowly, is revisiting a war strategy he announced in March and is unduly influenced by political advisers in the Situation Room.

“The thunderstorm is there and it’s kind of brewing and it’s unstable and the lightning hasn’t struck, and hopefully it won’t,” said Nathaniel C. Fick, a former Marine Corps infantry officer who briefed Mr. Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign and is now the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security, a military research institution in Washington. “I think it can probably be contained and avoided, but people are aware of the volatile brew.”

marching toward zombieland

JHKunstler | When sober-minded individuals begin to regard an enterprise within a nation as "an enemy of the people" you can bet that some serious blood is going to flow. This is now essentially the situation for the Goldman Sachs company, which last week announced third-quarter earnings of over $3 billion largely derived from converting zero percent loans from taxpayers into zero risk profits off of anything paying more than zero percent in interest, revenue, or dividends.

The "people" across this big country may not have a clue how any of this is done, and there may be much to fault them on from the care-and-feeding of their own bodies to the content of their dreams, but you can't argue with the fact that they are heavily armed to an extreme. And although it may be hard to measure with precision, one might venture to state that they are increasingly pissed off. How else explain popular entertainments like "Zombieland?"

The political part of what has to date appeared to be an economic problem is resolving into a crisis of authority and legitimacy. When those in charge of a nation's livelihood prove to be comprehensively false and dishonest, the economic automatically turns political. Nobody believes the bankers anymore, of course, and nobody believes the interlocutors of the bankers - the Federal Reserve chairman, the Secretary of the Treasury, the heads of the SEC and a dozen other regulatory bodies - and increasingly the charming figure in the White House cannot be believed on these issues of the nation's livelihood.

The questions lately revolve around whether the nation is destroying itself by inflation or deflation - by the willful destruction of the value of our currency to evade the repayment of debt, or by the hapless destruction of households, companies, and governments by default and bankruptcy. It's a fire-or-ice debate. Either way the nation is going down as a viable enterprise. The fiction that we can return to a Crate-and-Barrel credit card orgy has sustained the false of heart and mind for some months now, but even that pleasant reverie will come to an end as the foreclosures mount. Only remember, men living in their cars who have lost nearly everything else will still have guns.

All these tensions beat a path into the holiday season when emotions run high, when blessings are counted and sorrows taste most bitter. So the big question now floating above the sheer data of Goldman Sachs profit announcement is: what kind of year-end bonuses will they dare to pay their executives and minions, and how will the "people" react? It seems to me that conditions are ripening for a bloodbath. The kind of heinous acts that we have feared emanating from foreign "evildoers" since the awful stunt of 9/11/01 are now most likely to come from among our own "people" - a few pounds of Semtex in the lobby of Goldman Sachs's New York headquarters... a few men with market-grade small arms converted to full-automatic outside on the Wall Street sidewalk one evening at holiday time when the suits are leaving work for the day.... It won't take much.

u.s. military's battle to wean itself off oil

Grist | In the summer of 2006, Marine Corps Major General Richard Zilmer sent the Pentagon an unusual “Priority 1” request for emergency battlefield supplies. Stationed at a temporary base in Fallujah, Zilmer was commanding a force of 30,000 troops responsible for protecting Al Anbar, the vast territory in western Iraq bordering Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria. Heavily armed insurgents were hammering the region, and Al Qaeda was quickly gathering recruits. Zilmer’s beleaguered soldiers were running low on fuel for the diesel generators powering their barracks—fuel that cooled their tents in the 135-degree weather, refrigerated and cooked their food, and kept the communication lines open. The general, however, was wary of trucking in backup supplies during a time of so much turmoil. The U.S. fuel convoys that chugged along the back roads of Iraq every day—long lines of 18-wheelers hauling armored vats of gas—were among the insurgents’ prime targets.

Zilmer’s memo presented the Pentagon with an unprecedented request: “a self-sustainable energy solution,” including “solar panels and wind turbines.” This was the first time a frontline commander had formally requested renewable energy backup in battle. Without alternative power sources, the memo continued, U.S. forces “will remain unnecessarily exposed” and will “continue to accrue preventable ... serious and grave casualties.” Put in civilian-speak: Too many of Zilmer’s troops were dying in fuel convoys, and the relentless gasoline demands of the diesel generators were partly to blame.

Renewable energy was not an environmental consideration for Zilmer, it was a tactical necessity—a matter of life and death, of victory or defeat. The Pentagon is the largest consumer of petroleum in the United States. In recent years it has used between 130 million and 145 million barrels of oil annually—2 percent of America’s total petroleum demand. That translates to nearly 400,000 barrels per day, roughly the total daily energy consumption of the United Arab Emirates. Over the last century, no institution has done more to propel America’s rise to power than our military—or consumed more oil in the process. We have petroleum to thank for building the Department of Defense into an as-yet-unmatched fighting machine—but our troops are only as powerful as the flow of fuel that sustains them.

I was both baffled and hopeful when I read about Zilmer’s memo. Here was a no-nonsense Marine Corps general who has served more than 30 years in the U.S. military (not your typical tree-hugger) stationed in a country that’s virtually floating on an ocean of oil (Iraq has the world’s third-largest oil reserves, after Iran and Saudi Arabia) demanding clean energy solutions that only a few years earlier had been regarded as rinky-dink hippie technology suitable only for yurts and Earthships. Zilmer’s plea struck me as a clear harbinger of change in America’s attitudes about energy. If there was ever an opportunity to “man up” the effete image and role of solar panels, wind power, and other fossil-fuel alternatives, this was it. Just think of what the Pentagon could do to fast-track alternative-energy innovations going forward—after all, it was military R&D that led to the invention of jet airplanes, helicopters, radar, remote-control mechanisms, cell phones, global positioning systems (GPS), microchips, and the internet.

But for all the promise it augured, Zilmer’s memo also carried overtones of despair that spoke to the massive challenges that come with fueling the military—one more oil-dependent today than ever before in history.

How did the American military get so hooked on petroleum? How much does it really cost—in both blood and treasure—to fuel war? What would it take to transform the world’s biggest and strongest military into a petroleum-free enterprise? And how did this become the primary concern of a man leading 30,000 troops? To get answers, I went straight to the heart of the U.S. military establishment.

shale gas estimates optimistic?

The Oil Drum | Unfortunately I have had to miss the ASPO Meeting in Denver this week, and so cannot provide the daily reports that I have written in the past. But I notice that at least one of the talks has already caught a significant amount of press, and that is the one by Arthur Berman on the gas production from shale deposits such as the Barnett, Haynesville and Marcellus.

There has been a considerable hype in the press about the value of the gas from these shales, and the ability that they provide to bring in an “Age of Natural Gas”. This picture of a large supply of natural gas has been strengthened by the increase in production from a number of the gas shale fields, at the same time that the recession hit, and as a result there has been more gas available than needed, and the price has dropped considerably as a result. This, in turn, has led to a considerable reduction in the number of rigs that have been drilling new wells.

Natural gas has been steadily increasing its share of electricity generation, rising to over 20% of the market, on its way to 25%. Natural gas is favored because of its reduced carbon footprint over coal, and it has historically been used since it is somewhat easier to start and stop gas turbines than it is coal-fired power. Thus natural gas is seen as a favored backup to the installation of wind farms, where the vagaries of the wind are backed by the ability to use natural gas when needed.

There are, however, considerable concerns about the ability of wells in the gas shale to produce to the targets that are being set up. I first noted Arthur Berman’s concern about this back in 2007 when I drew attention to a piece he had written in World Oil, where he noted the short life of most of the gas-producing wells; the very high costs for the wells and technology required to create them and, as a result, that only 28% of them return a reasonable profit. (Unfortunately the article itself is now behind a paywall).

Since then I returned to the topic at Bit Tooth showing, among other data, the very high decline rate (now 60%) of many of the gas wells in Texas (where the Barnett shale is) that Swindell has reported.

energy crisis postponed as new gas rescues the world?

ODAC | It is hard to know where to begin regarding Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's article entitled "Energy crisis is postponed as new gas rescues the world." But since the speculative world he invokes has more to with Alice In Wonderland than the hard reality of engineering and science, let us begin - at the end.

Evans-Pritchard caps his evangelistic encomium with this: "I am not qualified to judge where gas excitement crosses into hyperbole. I pass on the story because the claims of BP and Statoil are so extraordinary that we may need to rewrite the geo-strategy textbooks for the next half century."

He admits his lack of gas qualifications but surely he is enough of a journalist - and an economist - to ask some basic fact-checking questions. What none of the boosters want to talk about is the reality of shale gas. It is true that there is most likely a lot of shale gas around, especially in the United States, but after this, the story goes down a rabbit hole. Shale gas is not like the conventional gas finds that gave the US vast supplies of cheap methane. Shale gas is locked in until the rocks holding it are fractured in a process known as hydro-fracing. This requires a lot of work, a lot of wells, a lot of water (2 - 5 million gallons per well), and some rather unpleasant chemicals. Having made all this effort, the production decline rates look like the cliffs at Beachy Head. Within two years production has typcally dropped by 80%.

Not surprisingly therefore, these expensive wells have an average commercial life of less than eight years. Worse still, in August of this year, World Oil pointed out that total production of many wells was only a third of what operators had predicted. Furthermore, of the two dozen or so shale plays in the US, Barnett appears to have the best geological profile and is responsible for 80% of current shale gas. Many of the other plays have much lower gas content density, which would likely mean yet more wells and more fracing for less gas.

blue-collar scholar spits game

Democracy Now | William Black, Former bank regulator at the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation. In the 1980s he helped expose the savings and loan scandal. He now teaches at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and is the author of the book The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry. Interview money shot;

WILLIAM BLACK: Well, I mean, Summers, for example—you talked about Geithner’s aides and how much money they had made, and, of course, it’s absurdly large, and they’re making it typically for not doing much of anything. But they’re taking their cue from Summers, who got $5 million, roughly, for working one day a week in areas he had no expertise. So, you know, once you leave the federal service, then these interests that you were very helpful to find a way to make you spectacularly rich, and they know that that’s what’s coming in their future. That’s part of the problem.

But the bigger part of the problem, in many ways, is that they have such an ideology about the market and its ability to deal with all problems that has no basis in reality, has been exposed in this crisis as completely fictional, and yet they can’t give it up. I mean, think of yourself as one of these professors who’s been trained in the Milton Friedmanish views, and you’re in your fifties, and you’ve been saying—you know, everything you’ve said in your career is wrong. Everything you’ve learned in your career is wrong. All of your areas of expertise are wrong. Are you going to admit that? “Hi, I’ve been misleading you, and I’m sorry I caused this disaster. And by the way, I have no meaningful skills or experience.”

As Foreclosures Hit All-Time High, Wall Street on Pace to Hand Out Record $140B in Employee Bonuses - The Dow Jones Industrial Average has topped 10,000 for the first time in a year, as JPMorgan Chase reported massive profits in the third quarter. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that major US banks and securities firms are on pace to pay their employees about $140 billion this year—a record high. But on Main Street, foreclosures are also at record levels, and the official unemployment rate is expected to top ten percent.

music, pattern, and the neurostructures of time

Noology | The term pattern has recently gained prominence as key term in understanding mankind's quest to make the universe intelligible, to fashion a Cosmos from the pure Chaos of the undiscriminate swarm of photons, electrons, air pressure changes, chemical and physical stimulants, that organisms are exposed to every instant of their living existence. On pattern are based not only the sciences, but also human society, and in the wider sense, life, and the lawfulness of the universe. The present contribution connects Gregory Bateson's work as a recent trailblazer in the recognition of the role of pattern with Goethe's earlier work on Morphology and Metamorphosis. It links this to current scientific understanding of the working of the brain, as neuronal activation patterns, consisting of oscillation fields and logical relation structures of neuronal assemblies, treated formally as coupled dynamic systems and neuronal attractors, which are characterized by their space-time-dynamics. These are called neuronal resonance patterns, and patterns of patterns: metapatterns. Thus, pattern is the "infrastructure" of neuronal processing happening in our brains, below, and a few miliseconds before our working consciousness experiences the "phainomena" and "noumena", of our discernible impressions and thoughts. This spatio-temporal neuronal infrastructure is then re-interpreted in a Neo-Pythagorean way, as the "inner music of the brain", which supports a new validation for the old Pythagorean world views.

time, anticipation, and pattern processors

Noology | Recent advances in the neurosciences are leading to an understanding of the structures and processes in neural networks as electric activation patterns, consisting of oscillation fields and logical relation structures of neuronal assemblies, treated formally as coupled dynamic systems and neuronal attractors. These are specifically characterized by their space-time-dynamics. In the present context, these phenomena are also called neuronal resonance patterns, and as higher-order hierarchical aggregates, patterns of patterns: metapatterns, as Gregory Bateson would have termed it. The term pattern is suited equally well for the spatial as for the temporal domain, and thus allows to formulate an abstract conceptual system of the neuronal computation processes of organisms. In re-formulation of Goethe's original ideas, such a systematics of metapatterns is called meta-morphology, in an effort to account especially for their dynamic, time-relevant aspects. The fundamental properties of such a system display a strong resemblance to a very ancient thought system that was known as Pythagoreanism in the Western tradition. The present contribution will show some of the parallels between the ancient system and the meta-morphology as outlined here.

resources and anthropocentrism

NatureBatsLast | Considering the history of western thought, it's no surprise we view every element on Earth as feedstock for industrialization. The only question is when we exploit Earth's bounty, not if. The logical progression, then, is to exploitation of humans to further feed the industrial machine.

Within the last few years, personnel departments at major institutions became departments of human resources. Thus, whereas these departments formerly dealt with persons, they now deal with resources. There's a reason you feel like a cog in a grand imperial scheme: Not only are you are viewed as a cog by the machine, and also by those who run the machine, but any non-cog-like behavior on your part leads to rejection of you and your actions. Seems you're either a tool of empire or you're a saboteur (i.e., terrorist).

It's time to invest in wooden shoes.

As if fifteen people are even willing to poke a stick in the eye of the corporations that run and ruin our lives. Why is that? Probably because we think we depend upon them, when in fact they depend upon us. And, to a certain extent -- to the extent we allow -- we do depend upon industrial culture for our lives. But only in the short term, and only as self-absorbed, comfortable individuals unwilling to make changes in our lives (even ones that are necessary to our own survival). Taking the longer, broader view, it is evident industrial culture is killing the living planet, and our own species. The cultural problem we face is not that we're fish out of water. Rather, it's that we're fish in a river. We don't even know there's an ocean, much less a landbase.

Aye, there's the rub. Evolution demands short-term thinking focused on individual survival. Most attempts to overcome our evolutionarily hardwired absorption with self are selected against. The Overman is dead, killed by a high-fat diet and unwillingness to exercise. Reflexively, we follow him into the grave.

shale and our water

NYTimes | New York State’s environmental regulators have proposed rules to govern drilling in the Marcellus Shale — a subterranean layer of rock curving northward from West Virginia through Ohio and Pennsylvania to New York’s southern tier. The shale contains enormous deposits of natural gas that could add to the region’s energy supplies and lift New York’s upstate economy. If done carefully — and in carefully selected places — drilling should cause minimal environmental harm.

But regulators must amend the rules to bar drilling in the New York City watershed: a million acres of forests and farmlands whose streams supply the reservoirs that send drinking water to eight million people. Accidental leaks could threaten public health and require a filtration system the city can ill afford.

Natural gas is vital to the nation’s energy needs and can be an important bridge between dirty coal and renewable alternatives. The process of extracting it, however, is not risk-free. Known as hydraulic fracturing, it involves shooting a mix of water, sand and chemicals — many of them highly toxic — into the ground at very high pressure to break down the rock formations and free the gas.

The technique is used in 90 percent of the oil and gas operations in the United States. And while most drilling occurs without incident, “fracking” has been implicated in hundreds of cases of impaired or polluted drinking water supplies in states from Alabama to Wyoming.

The dangers are particularly acute in the Marcellus Shale, which, unlike the relatively shallow formations found elsewhere, lies miles underground. Getting the gas out will require far more water and heavy doses of chemicals. While the rules would require drillers to take special precautions in the watershed, there are too many points — from the delivery of the fluid to the drilling site to the removal of spent fluid after it surfaces — where poisoned water could escape into the water supplies.

Quarantining the watershed also makes economic sense. The shale contains only one-tenth of the gas in the southern tier. One big accident could undo everything the city and state have done — buying up property, creating buffer zones around the reservoirs — to protect the watershed from development and pollution.
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The hazards to fresh water posed by massive fracking are fairly well understood. Do we really have the luxury of poisoning this much of our freshwater supply in the name of natural gas development? The question needs to be asked again: What do we value more, energy to run our machines or water to sustain human life?

natural gas changes the energy map?

Technology Review | Vast amounts of the clean-burning fossil fuel have been discovered in shale deposits, setting off a gas rush. But how it will affect our energy use is still uncertain.

The first sign that there's something unusual about the flat black rocks strewn across the shore of Lake Erie comes when Gary Lash smashes two of them together. They break easily and fall into shards that give off the faint odor of hydrocarbons, similar to the smell of kerosene. But for Lash, a geologist and professor at nearby SUNY Fredonia, smashing the rocks is a simple trick designed to catch the attention of a visitor. The black outcroppings that protrude from the nearby bluff onto the narrow beach are what really interest him.

To Lash's expert eyes, the wide band of black shale, which runs roughly parallel to the beach, reveals hundreds of millions of years of geological history. The shale formed more than 350 million years ago when organic muck settled at the bottom of the shallow sea that covered much of what is now the eastern United States; it was once buried more than two kilometers underground but has gradually risen to the surface. Now, the exposed rock shows telltale patterns of breaks and splits. "We've demonstrated that these fractures could only have formed as a result of the generation of hydrocarbons," says Lash.

This formation is the edge of vast deposits of black shale that stretch under tens of millions of acres below western New York, much of western and northern Pennsylvania, and parts of Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland, and Kentucky. The oldest and deepest layer is called the Marcellus shale, and if geologists like Lash are correct, it holds enough natural gas to help change the way the United States uses energy for decades to come.

Experts now believe that the country has far more natural gas at its disposal than anyone thought three or four years ago. The revised estimates are largely due to advanced drilling techniques that make it economically feasible to extract the fuel from shale. And while the Marcellus is the most recently discovered and possibly the largest shale-gas deposit, others are scattered throughout the country. The U.S. consumes about 23 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of natural gas a year, according to the Department of Energy's Energy Information Agency (EIA). The Potential Gas Committee (PGC), an organization headquartered at the Colorado School of Mines, put the country's potential natural-gas resources at 1,836 TCF in a biennial assessment released in June. That's 39 percent higher than its estimate of two years earlier. Add to that the 238 TCF that the EIA has calculated in "proved reserves" (the gas that can be produced given existing economic conditions) and the PGC pegs the future supply at 2,074 TCF. In other words, there is enough natural gas to supply the country for 90 years at current consumption rates. Even if we used natural gas to totally replace coal in generating electricity, domestic supplies would last for 50 years.

naked politics at home....,

HuffPo | How the Servant Became a Predator: Finance's Five Fatal Flaws - What exactly is the function of the financial sector in our society? Simply this: Its sole function is supplying capital efficiently to aid the real economy. The financial sector is a tool to help those that make real tools, not an end in itself. But five fatal flaws in the financial sector's current structure have created a monster that drains the real economy, promotes fraud and corruption, threatens democracy, and causes recurrent, intensifying crises.

1. The financial sector harms the real economy.

2. The financial sector produces recurrent, intensifying economic crises here and abroad.

3. The financial sector's predation is so extraordinary that it now drives the upper one percent of our nation's income distribution and has driven much of the increase in our grotesque income inequality.

4. The financial sector's predation and its leading role in committing and aiding and abetting accounting control fraud combine to;

5. The CEOs of the largest financial firms are so powerful that they pose a critical risk to the financial sector, the real economy, and our democracy.

naked politics next door...,

Washington Post | Union members and their political allies filled the streets of the Mexican capital Thursday night to condemn President Felipe Calderón's recent liquidation of a state-run power utility, a surprise move seen by many as an assault on organized labor.

Declaring the state-owned company so poorly managed as to be "unsustainable," Calderón on Saturday night authorized the seizure of Central Light and Power. He also deployed about 1,000 federal police officers in riot gear to enforce his decree; workers from another state-run power company swept in to take over the electric grid and keep the lights on.

For Mexico, the takeover marked a pivotal moment. The government has long allowed state enterprises and their powerful unions to operate at a loss, in order to boost employment and keep the peace between haves and have-nots. But, at Central Light and Power, Calderón said the government could not continue to support staffing levels and salaries demanded by the powerful Mexican Electricians Union in the midst of a deep economic crisis. It did not help that the company has lost a third of its electricity to waste and theft.

Union members have reacted with outrage, sparking a widening political brawl over the new realities of the social contract in Mexico.

On Wednesday, Calderón, a member of the conservative, pro-business National Action Party, denied charges by the electricians and their political supporters that the liquidation of Light and Power was the first step in a coming campaign to dismantle other trade unions, such as guilds for teachers and oil workers, which play an outsize role in the economic and political life of Mexico.

But the president's promises did little to calm the roiling political fight, as both right and left, business leaders and union chiefs, quickly took up opposing sides.

coercive flu vaccination?

NYTimes | The New York Civil Liberties Union demanded on Tuesday that the state health commissioner withdraw a new regulation requiring hundreds of thousands of health care workers to get both seasonal and swine flu vaccinations.

In testimony before several State Assembly committees in Lower Manhattan, Donna Lieberman, executive director of the civil liberties union, said that the requirement violated the constitutional right of health care workers to control their bodies and their medical treatment.

Ms. Lieberman said that, while the civil liberties union supported voluntary flu vaccination, the “societal interest” being advanced by compulsory vaccination was dubious, since the state regulation conflicted with both international and national policy on the vaccination of health care workers.

Neither the World Health Organization nor the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has called for mandatory vaccination, she pointed out.

Ms. Lieberman stopped short of saying that the civil liberties union would sue over the requirement, which was adopted by the state’s Health Department as an emergency regulation in August. State health officials said Tuesday that the regulation affected 500,000 health care workers and volunteers statewide.

Her testimony came a day before a judge in State Supreme Court in Manhattan was to hear a lawsuit filed by a nurse in Poughkeepsie, Suzanne Field, seeking to overturn the regulation.

In her lawsuit, filed a week ago, Ms. Field argues that the regulation is arbitrary and capricious because no other state is ordering mandatory vaccination despite concern about the H1N1 pandemic.

“It’s up to the Legislature to invoke such broad and sweeping police power,” Ms. Field’s lawyer, Patricia Finn, said Tuesday.

coercive insurance subscription?

ConsortiumNews | By demanding that the Baucus health-care bill toughen the coercive penalties to force young Americans to sign up for private insurance, industry lobbyists have inadvertently made the most dramatic argument to date for including a strong public option in any health reform law.

After all, the bill sponsored by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Montana, already was widely regarded as industry friendly. It had scrapped the public option, a lower-cost government-run insurance alternative that the industry hated because it would create strong competitive pressures.

Plus, there appeared to be plenty of goodies for the industry. The Baucus bill, which is expected to clear the Finance Committee on Tuesday, would impose “an individual mandate” on Americans, requiring them to buy insurance or face a government fine. The bill also contained government subsidies to help modest-income citizens pay for their insurance.

So, the industry stood to gain an estimated 27 million new customers and get federal subsidies to boot.

But industry lobbyists began to send signals last week that they wanted more. They feared that the government fines would not be coercive enough to force many healthy young Americans to sign up for insurance, meaning that many new customers might be just the ones the industry doesn’t want – people who are sick and need medical attention.

Without more severe government penalties on young Americans, the lobbyists warned that the industry would jack up rates on everyone.

“Between 2010 and 2019 the cumulative increases in the cost of a typical family policy under this reform proposal will be approximately $20,700 more than it would be under the current system,” said Karen Ignagni, president and chief executive of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s lobbying arm which commissioned the price study by PriceWaterhouseCoopers. [Washington Post, Oct. 12, 2009]

In other words, the private health insurance industry is demanding more concessions in the reform bill – particularly stiffer fines on Americans who balk at signing up for health insurance – or the industry will make health insurance even more expensive for Americans.

Yet, while the industry may view its new hardball tactics as smart politics, its threats of sharply higher insurance premiums may backfire. The admission that the industry can’t control costs without greater government coercion on citizens may end up simply dramatizing the value of a strong public option.

the pocket spy: will your smartphone rat you out?

New Scientist | THERE are certain things you do not want to share with strangers. In my case it was a stream of highly personal text messages from my husband, sent during the early days of our relationship. Etched on my phone's SIM card - but invisible on my current handset and thus forgotten - here they now are, displayed in all their brazen glory on a stranger's computer screen.

I've just walked into a windowless room on an industrial estate in Tamworth, UK, where three cellphone analysts in blue shirts sit at their terminals, scrutinising the contents of my phone and smirking. "If it's any consolation, we would have found them even if you had deleted them," says one.

Worse, it seems embarrassing text messages aren't the only thing I have to worry about: "Is this a photo of your office?" another asks (the answer is yes). "And did you enjoy your pizza on Monday night? And why did you divert from your normal route to work to visit this address in Camberwell, London, on Saturday?"

I'm at DiskLabs, a company that handles cellphone forensic analysis for UK police forces, but also for private companies and individuals snooping on suspect employees or wayward spouses. Armed with four cellphones, which I have begged, borrowed and bought off friends and strangers, I'm curious to know just how much personal information can be gleaned from our used handsets and SIM cards.

A decade ago, our phones' memories could just about handle text messages and a contacts book. These days, the latest smartphones incorporate GPS, Wi-Fi connectivity and motion sensors. They automatically download your emails and appointments from your office computer, and come with the ability to track other individuals in your immediate vicinity. And there's a lot more to come. Among other things, you could be using the next generation of phones to keep tabs on your health, store cash and make small transactions - something that's already happening in east Asia (see "Future phones").

Gone phishing
These changes could well be exploited in much the same way that email and the internet can be used to "phish" for personal information such as bank details. Indeed, some phone-related scams are already emerging, including one that uses reprogrammed cellphones to intercept passwords for other people's online bank accounts. "Mobile phones are becoming a bigger part of our lives," says Andy Jones, head of information security research at British Telecommunications. "We trust and rely on them more. And as we rely on them more, the potential for fraud has got to increase."

libraries wade into digital lending

NYTimes | Kate Lambert recalls using her library card just once or twice throughout her childhood. Now, she uses it several times a month.

The lure? Electronic books she can download to her laptop. Beginning earlier this year, Ms. Lambert, a 19-year-old community college student in New Port Richey, Fla., borrowed volumes in the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” series, “The Lovely Bones” by Alice Sebold and a vampire novel by Laurell K. Hamilton, without ever visiting an actual branch.

“I can just go online and type my library card number in and look through all the books that they have,” said Ms. Lambert, who usually downloads from the comfort of her bedroom. And, she added, “It’s all for free.”

Eager to attract digitally savvy patrons and capitalize on the growing popularity of electronic readers, public libraries across the country are expanding collections of books that reside on servers rather than shelves.

The idea is to capture borrowers who might not otherwise use the library, as well as to give existing customers the opportunity to try new formats.

“People still think of libraries as old dusty books on shelves, and it’s a perception we’re always trying to fight,” said Michael Colford, director of information technology at the Boston Public Library. “If we don’t provide this material for them, they are just going to stop using the library altogether.”

About 5,400 public libraries now offer e-books, as well as digitally downloadable audio books. The collections are still tiny compared with print troves. The New York Public Library, for example, has about 18,300 e-book titles, compared with 860,500 in circulating print titles, and purchases of digital books represent less than 1 percent of the library’s overall acquisition budget.

But circulation is expanding quickly. The number of checkouts has grown to more than 1 million so far this year from 607,275 in all of 2007, according to OverDrive, a large provider of e-books to public libraries. NetLibrary, another provider of e-books to about 5,000 public libraries and a division of OCLC, a nonprofit library service organization, has seen circulation of e-books and digital audio books rise 21 percent over the past year.

Together with the Google books settlement — which the parties are modifying to satisfy the objections of the Department of Justice and others — the expansion of e-books into libraries heralds a future in which more reading will be done digitally.

riots rattled ancient french town

Washington Post | Under a bright autumn sun, the narrow lanes of ancient Poitiers teemed with families enjoying a lighthearted celebration of street theater. Suddenly, a knot of black-clad youths emerged from the crowd. They donned plastic masks, pulled up their hoods and started destroying everything in sight.

In what police described as an organized attack, the band shattered store windows, damaged the facades of several banks and spray-painted anarchist slogans on government buildings. Aiming even at the historical heritage of this comfortable provincial town 200 miles southwest of Paris, they fractured a plaque commemorating Joan of Arc's interrogation here in 1429 and -- in Latin -- scrawled "Everything belongs to everybody" on a stone baptistery that is one of the oldest monuments in Christendom.

The wanton destruction, which lasted for about 90 minutes early Saturday evening, was a dramatic reminder that France and other European nations, below their surface of stability and wealth, harbor tiny bands of ultra-leftist activists who still want to combat the market economies and parliamentary democracies on which the continent's well-being is founded.

"We will destroy your morbid world," one of the Poitiers protesters sprayed-painted on a wall near the city's landmark Notre Dame Cathedral.

not blind to emotion

Nature | Two patients, partially blind because of damage to one side of their brain, were able to sense, and respond to, emotions expressed by people in pictures presented to their blind sides.

A study by an international team of researchers found that the patients unconsciously twitched a facial muscle uniquely involved in smiling when a picture showed a happy person, and a muscle involved in frowning when the person depicted looked fearful1.

The patients, both from the United Kingdom, have the very rare condition known as partial cortical blindness. Their eyes are intact but they have damage to the visual cortex on one side of their brain. This means that they cannot process information from the visual field on the opposite side of their nose.

The scientists, who were led by Marco Tamietto and Beatrice de Gelder at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, say the results show that our spontaneous tendency to synchronize our facial expressions with those of other people in face-to-face situations - known as emotional contagion - occurs even if we cannot consciously see them.

"This is interesting evidence that we can recognize the emotions of others without needing to be visually aware of them," says neuroscientist Christian Keysers, an expert in the neurophysiology of emotion at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, who was not involved in the study.

Mixed picture?
Much of the visual input from the retina goes directly to the visual cortex, which processes the information so that we consciously perceive the image we are looking at. But a small part goes directly to the midbrain, through an evolutionarily primitive subcortical pathway that processes emotion and other information central to survival - and that is intact in the two patients.

So it seems that emotional contagion can be implemented via evolutionarily ancient neural structures, says Tamietto, and does not necessarily require the involvement of higher brain regions, visual awareness or the mirror neurons that are active when we recognize the physical actions of others.

But Keysers cautions that it remains to be determined whether the subcortical and higher cortical pathways for recognizing emotions operate in parallel. Emotion recognition could use several types of available information, he says.

rags to riches in fairytales

Observer | In fairytales, as in dreams, things both are and are not what they seem to be. After Freud first lifted the curtain to reveal the unconscious mind seething and roiling with hidden desires and fears, and showed how dreams and stories were full of symbols that told quite a different tale from the one on the surface, we've become used to reading both literature and life in a double way; it feels quite natural now to look for – and find – sexual meanings, for example, in the most apparently non-sexual places. It was Bruno Bettelheim who blew the gaff as far as fairytales were concerned: his The Uses of Enchantment (1976) offered a reading of such innocent favourites as Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, and Cinderella that was Freudian enough to make your hair stand on end.

Bettelheim's a little discredited these days, and Freud's influence has retreated to the point where his great insight is no longer a climate of opinion, as Auden put it, but simply one theory among many. However, I'm still persuaded by the notion that it can be both interesting and enlightening to read as if X is not only X but also Y. Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar, but sometimes a frog can be a prince, and sometimes treasure can mean something other than wealth.

In the case of the Cinderella range of stories (one of the largest of all) the wealth she attains at the end is part of a larger acquisition, which is more fully symbolised by her wedding. Specifically, it's nubility: in the course of the story she leaves childhood behind, and becomes ready for marriage and the responsibilities of adulthood.

But not every growing-up story is a Cinderella tale. I once heard an American academic spend a whole lecture trying to show that Jane Eyre was a Cinderella story. She failed, because it isn't: Jane Eyre is a Beauty and the Beast story, in which the physically powerful, sexually potent, threateningly mature adult male, Mr Rochester, is gradually subdued and tamed (not to say shamed and maimed) by the small, weak, delicate, but implacable Jane, who does it all by herself.

And that's the reason it's not a Cinderella story. Cinderella, in every one of the hundreds of variations on the basic story, is not alone: she has a helper. A surrogate mother, in fact: the fairy godmother, a rose tree that grows from her mother's grave, a dove, a cow, the mossy coat in the version here – always, in principle, an older female who has herself safely negotiated the perils of the journey towards maturity and whose task is to help the girl make the same passage.

Bettelheim's point is that fairytales such as this symbolise genuine aspects of our psychological life – moments of transition from innocence to knowledge, and so on – and that they are invaluable aids to a contented and healthy growth. Children need such tales as much as they need food, warmth, shelter and love. I think I agree with that. But whether or not they're psychologically necessary, the greatest tales (and Cinderella is one of the greatest of all) derive their lasting power not only from the multitude of fascinating and unforgettable details that abound in them but from the emotionally satisfying shape they take up. In the Grimms' collection, for example, tale after tale begins enthrallingly and then collapses half way through: rather like most films, most novels, most plays, in fact. The hardest thing with a story of any kind is to bring it to a conclusion that works every time you read it. The best of the Grimm tales do that, and the ones that work best of all are clearly the work of some ancient and anonymous teller of genius, whose power of shape-creation has resisted generations of hamfisted clumsiness and mishandling. Pullman's retelling of the fairy tale of Mossycoat.

the ruins of detroit

economics uses the same circuits as religion

PhysOrg | Researchers have found that the process of believing or disbelieving a statement, whether religious or not, seems to be governed by the same areas in the brain.

When it comes to religion, believers and nonbelievers appear to think very differently. But at the level of the brain, is believing in God different from believing that the sun is a star or that 4 is an even number?

While religious faith remains one of the most significant features of human life, little is known about its relationship to ordinary belief. Nor is it known whether religious believers differ from nonbelievers in how they evaluate statements of fact.

In the first neuroimaging study to systematically compare religious faith with ordinary cognition, UCLA and University of Southern California researchers have found that while the human brain responds very differently to religious and nonreligious propositions, the process of believing or disbelieving a statement, whether religious or not, seems to be governed by the same areas in the brain.

The study also found that devout Christians and nonbelievers use the same brain regions to judge the truth of religious and nonreligious propositions. The results, the study authors say, represent a critical advance in the psychology of religion. The paper appears Sept. 30 in the journal PLoS ONE.

relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined america

AlterNet | The author talks about how a plague of positive thinking is permeating our society, from medicine to business, and is even contributing to our financial crisis. When Barbara Ehrenreich went to be treated for breast cancer, she was exhorted to think positively; and when she expressed feelings of fear and anger, she was chided for being negative.

Ehrenreich, the author of 16 books, including Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch, which examine the blue- and white-collar job markets, took on what she sees as an epidemic of positive thinking in her new book: Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.

Positive thinking is different, she says, from being cheerful or good-natured -- it's believing that the world is shaped by our wants and desires and that by focusing on the good, the bad ceases to exist.

Ehrenreich believes this has permeated our culture and that the refusal to acknowledge that bad things could happen is in some way responsible for the current financial crisis.

In her new book, Ehrenreich examines how the positive-thinking movement was started by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, and an amateur metaphysician named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby in response to Calvinism; how being positive became mandatory in corporate culture; and how she thinks prosperity preachers, such as Joel Osteen of Lakewood Church in Houston encouraged a culture of debt by telling their congregations that God wants them to have a big house and a nice car.

top judge calls california government dysfunctional

NYTimes | In a rare public rebuke of state government and policies delivered by a sitting judge, the chief justice of the California Supreme Court scathingly criticized the state’s reliance on the referendum process, arguing that it has “rendered our state government dysfunctional.”

In a speech Saturday before the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Mass., the chief justice, Ronald M. George, denounced the widespread use of the referendum process to change state laws and constitutions. And he derided California as out of control, with voters deciding on everything from how parts of the state budget are spent to how farm animals are managed.

The state is unusual, he said, because it prohibits its Legislature from amending or repealing many types of laws without voter approval, essentially hamstringing that body — and the executive branch.

Justice George’s remarks come at a time of severe budget crisis in California stemming from a variety of factors, including mandates from ballot initiatives. Several groups on the left and the right are clamoring for changes to the state’s Constitution, including reining in of the direct democracy that has defined much of how the state operates.

This week, hundreds of people will convene in Sacramento for a conference on constitutional reform. A spokesman for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declined to comment on the justice’s speech.

Justice George said that perhaps the “most consequential” impact of the referendum process is that it limits “how elected officials may raise and spend revenue.” He added, “California’s lawmakers, and the state itself, have been placed in a fiscal straitjacket by a steep two-thirds-vote requirement — imposed at the ballot box — for raising taxes.”

He added: “Much of this constitutional and statutory structure has been brought about not by legislative fact-gathering and deliberation, but rather by the approval of voter initiative measures, often funded by special interests. These interests are allowed under the law to pay a bounty to signature-gatherers for each signer. Frequent amendments — coupled with the implicit threat of more in the future — have rendered our state government dysfunctional, at least in times of severe economic decline.”

simon johnson and rep. marcy kaptur

PBS | One year after the near-collapse of the U.S. financial system, the crisis seems to be over for the banks. No one expects any of the remaining huge banks to collapse, and a few large firms — JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group and Wells Fargo — are expected to post another quarter of billion dollar profits.

But according to guests on BILL MOYERS JOURNAL, ordinary Americans have little reason to celebrate the better fortunes on Wall Street. Simon Johnson, professor of Global Economics and Management at MIT's Sloan School of Management, and Representative Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), explain to Bill Moyers that the outlook for the rest of America isn't so rosy. Not only are many Americans still suffering the collapse of the housing market, they say, but Congress and the president haven't made the changes needed to prevent a much worse catastrophe sometime in the future.

To highlight the disparity between bailing out the banks and helping homeowners, Rep. Kaptur points to her district, where she sees one of the now-profitable banks not doing enough to help struggling borrowers:

Let me give you a reality from ground zero in Toledo, Ohio. Our foreclosures have gone up 94 percent. A few months ago, I met with our realtors. And I said, "What should I know?" They said, "Well, first of all, you should know the worst companies that are doing this to us." "Well, give me the top one." They said, "JPMorgan Chase."

Johnson adds that even bailed-out banks have little incentive to help homeowners:

I'm afraid that it's pretty obvious, and it's very tragic, that they have no interest in helping the homeowners. They make money with what they're doing. They expected a lot of these mortgages they made to default, okay? It was in their models. A high default rate. Now, they didn't expect house prices to come down so much. That's where they got their losses. But they absolutely made these loans expecting they would have to foreclose on people. And figuring they would make money on that.

Too late to reign in the banks?
The problem, Rep. Kaptur and Johnson agree, is that Congress and the Executive Branch didn't sufficiently reign in the banks because the banks have too much power in Washington. Responding to a recent ASSOCIATED PRESS report about Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's close ties to a few powerful bankers, Rep. Kaptur said, "Wall Street and Washington is a circuit. And because Mr. Geithner headed the New York Fed, that historic relationship, unfortunately, continues. And it gives them special access and special power to influence policy."

Johnson agrees, arguing that these links are especially beneficial in a time of crisis: "And in a crisis, when everything is up for grabs, you don't know what's going on, the people who will take your phone calls, right, in government and the people who are going to be standing in the oval office, making the key decisions — that's the heart of the system. That's the heart of how you get your agenda through, by changing their worldview."