Well he’s back, and he recently shared more groundbreaking information in a fascinating interview with AlterNet. Here are some choice excerpts:
Ken Klippenstein: In the book you describe Saudi
financial support for the compound in which Osama Bin Laden was being
kept in Pakistan. Was that Saudi government officials, private
individuals or both?
Seymour Hersh: The Saudis bribed the
Pakistanis not to tell us [that the Pakistani government had Bin Laden]
because they didn’t want us interrogating Bin Laden (that’s my best
guess), because he would’ve talked to us, probably. My guess is, we
don’t know anything really about 9/11. We just don’t know. We don’t know
what role was played by whom.
Bingo. We don’t know anything, except that the U.S. government has been lying to the public for 15 years.
aljazeera |The Democratic Party, therefore, rules over this false claim to
democracy the same way the Guardian Council of octogenarian Super
Mullahs rules over the Islamic Republic.
In other words, the free and fair formation of political
parties that is supposed to be the finest fruit of a democracy has
paradoxically degenerated into the most powerful impediment to
democracy.
The question is: What is the result of these undemocratic "closed primaries"?
These "closed primaries" are the bottlenecks of a closed
political culture, preventing the possibility of any liberating
breakthrough into a foreclosed political system.
At the heart of this imperial republic that effectively rules
the world with its military might (not with any moral courage or
political legitimacy), we have an electoral process that systematically
bars any critical judgment of its own citizens to disrupt its mindless
militarism. American citizens are as much trapped inside this corrupt
system as people around the globe are at the mercy of its fighter jets
and drone attacks.
These two parties, Republican and Democratic, are today
functioning like two identical but competing Orwellian Ministries of
Truth - systematically, consistently, unabashedly disallowing any
critical thinking or nonviolent democratic action to enter and disrupt
the always-already rigged election.
pjmedia | The university will either change soon or simply implode; its present
course is unsustainable and rests on the premise that schizophrenic
deans and presidents can still manage to write and say things to student
cry bullies that they hope their donors and alumni never read or hear.
Colleges
overcharge insolvent students through tuition increases far beyond the
annual rate of inflation—the Ponzi scheme predicated on guaranteed
federal loans that cannot be repaid by poorly educated graduates and
drop-outs, many with little skills or demonstrable education. Obama has
already promised relief to the disabled student debtor: expect that more
amnesties will follow, probably predicated on the basis of race, class,
and gender. In the meantime, the number of disabled indebted students
will mysteriously soar.
In response, the university freely imposes
speech codes, allows racial segregation, and winks at censorship of
texts. It has suspended due process in cases of allegations of sexual
assault, and allows 1930s-like violence (reminiscent of the Brownshirts)
to disrupt public lectures and assemblies—if the agendas of the
protestors profess social awareness. Only the hard sciences and
professional schools in engineering, mathematics, and medicine have for
the moment partially escaped the ruin.
Online colleges are far
cheaper and more concerned with offering skill sets for cash. Their
spread has so far been checked by the lack of general education
enrichment, by the mythical college experience of physically living in
or walking about a beautiful campus, and by the lack of prestige
accorded a for-profit, online diploma. But if the traditional American
college has largely given up on liberal education (due to its deductive
and politicized mandatory –studies courses), if being on a campus can
equate to an unpleasant ordeal of thought policing and mob rule, and if a
diploma from a major university does not suggest that one knows
anything about history, literature, science, or basic facts concerning
our civilization, why would the university need to continue? Cui bono?
It
runs now partly on past momentum, and partly because taxpayers and
alumni donors still subsidize it. If a majority were to feel that their
money only empowers fascism among faculty and administration, and if
they were to conclude that students are not sympathetic in their
indebtedness, but rather increasingly arrogant and ignorant in their
passive aggressions, then they might well simply pull the plug on what
is becoming their Frankenstein monster.
Tribe.
A
multiracial, single-cultural U.S. was an historical fluke. No other
society has ever quite pulled that feat off—not Austria-Hungary, not
Rwanda, not Iraq, not Yugoslavia. To ensure multiracial harmony,
cultural unity (or what is now dismissively written off as the "melting
pot") was essential.
Yet the Obama era has reawakened ethnic
chauvinism and multiculturalism in a way we have never quite seen before
in recent American history. Who would have thought that in 2009, the
racist firebrand, tax-delinquent, anti-Semite, former FBI informant, and
conspiracist Al Sharpton would become the chief presidential advisor on
race, or that the attorney general would refer to blacks as “my people”
and the rest of the country as “cowards,” or that the president would
urge Latinos to “punish our enemies,” or that something chauvinistic
called “Black Lives Matter” would consider a corollary ecumenical “All
Lives Matter” as racist, or that “white privilege” would be a slur
hurled against the largely working white classes by mostly minority and
white elites in academia, politics, journalism and the arts?
NYTimes | Behind
a locked door aboard Norwegian Cruise Line’s newest ship is a world
most of the vessel’s 4,200 passengers will never see. And that is
exactly the point.
In
the Haven, as this ship within a ship is called, about 275 elite guests
enjoy not only a concierge and 24-hour butler service, but also a
private pool, sun deck and restaurant, creating an oasis free from the
crowds elsewhere on the Norwegian Escape.
If
Haven passengers venture out of their aerie to see a show, a flash of
their gold key card gets them the best seats in the house. When the ship
returns to port, they disembark before everyone else.
“It
was always the intention to make the Haven somewhat obscure so it
wasn’t in the face of the masses,” said Kevin Sheehan, Norwegian’s
former chief executive, who helped design the Escape with the hope of
attracting a richer clientele. “That segment of the population wants to
be surrounded by people with similar characteristics.”
With
disparities in wealth greater than at any time since the Gilded Age,
the gap is widening between the highly affluent — who find themselves
behind the velvet ropes of today’s economy — and everyone else.
thecollegefix |WORT-Madison, in areporttitled “Racial Climate Nears Boiling Point As UW Students Walk Out, Faculty Receive Threats,” states that: “Student protesters say the arrest underscores a broader climate of racism and white supremacy on campus, while some faculty have urged the administration to take more concrete action to address what they call a deepening ‘mental health crisis’ among students of color.”
In March, Blanktoldthe campus community “we’ve seen a troubling string of incidents reported through our hate & bias reporting system that have directly affected and hurt members of our diverse community.”
“Students who engage in hate or bias acts that violate our codes of conduct will be disciplined. When we learn of these incidents, we investigate, take disciplinary action against those students who have engaged in inappropriate conduct and provide support for the victims,” she added.
Whether administrators will cave to the “King Shabazz” demands is unclear. Blank on Thursday issued a statement that indicated the demands are unreasonable and cannot be met.
“[S]tudents have asked for criminal charges against the student to be dropped; for the resignation of university officials involved in this incident; and for the Dean of Students to forgo its student conduct process. In addition, the list requests that the university return any of the student’s personal property being held as evidence and seeks community control or oversight over the UWPD,” Blankstated.
As it relates to the recent arrest of the student, it is my belief that UW–Madison has taken appropriate steps to respond to our community’s concerns.
Chief Sue Riseling has apologized for UWPD entering the student’s classroom, commenced a review of departmental procedures and shared available footage of the incident to ensure transparency. The results of the investigation will be shared, when available.
Embedded in the student demands are requests for actions that I do not believe are reasonable, or even lawful, for me to take. In fact, several of the demands seek to apply authority that the university does not have under state law or UW System policies and procedures.
I intend to continue to address campus climate and race issues through the series ofconcrete stepsthat I outlined earlier this semester. We have not sat idly by as these problems have grown more difficult.
But Morgan says the angry masses have it all wrong — it’s largely students and campus police who are being attacked by bias and hate.
NYTimes |President Obama
offered an indirect critique of the Black Lives Matter movement during a
town-hall-style event here on Saturday, encouraging activists to engage
with the political process and cautioning them that social change can
be a slow and incremental process.
At a meeting with young people
on the second day of his visit to Europe, during which he championed a
new trade deal between the United States and the European Union, the
president took questions on a variety of topics, including Northern
Ireland, transgender rights and racial profiling.
After
responding to a questioner who suggested that his administration had
not done enough to address racial profiling at airports — a practice
that Mr. Obama said he adamantly opposed — the president turned his
attention to the Black Lives Matter movement.
He
praised the movement as “really effective in bringing attention to
problems,” but said young activists should be more willing to work with
political leaders to craft solutions instead of criticizing from outside
the political process.
“Once
you’ve highlighted an issue and brought it to people’s attention and
shined a spotlight, and elected officials or people who are in a
position to start bringing about change are ready to sit down with you,
then you can’t just keep on yelling at them,” Mr. Obama said.
“And
you can’t refuse to meet because that might compromise the purity of
your position,” he continued. “The value of social movements and
activism is to get you at the table, get you in the room, and then to
start trying to figure out how is this problem going to be solved.”
NYTimes | “Hillary
is very much a member of the traditional American foreign-policy
establishment,” says Vali Nasr, a foreign-policy strategist who advised
her on Pakistan and Afghanistan at the State Department. “She believes,
like presidents going back to the Reagan or Kennedy years, in the
importance of the military — in solving terrorism, in asserting American
influence. The shift with Obama is that he went from reliance on the
military to the intelligence agencies. Their position was, ‘All you need
to deal with terrorism is N.S.A. and C.I.A., drones and special ops.’
So the C.I.A. gave Obama an angle, if you will, to be simultaneously
hawkish and shun using the military.”
Unlike
other recent presidents — Obama, George W. Bush or her husband, Bill
Clinton — Hillary Clinton would assume the office with a long record on
national security. There are many ways to examine that record, but one
of the most revealing is to explore her decades-long cultivation of the
military — not just civilian leaders like Gates, but also its
high-ranking commanders, the men with the medals. Her affinity for the
armed forces is rooted in a lifelong belief that the calculated use of
military power is vital to defending national interests, that American
intervention does more good than harm and that the writ of the United
States properly reaches, as Bush once put it, into “any dark corner of
the world.” Unexpectedly, in the bombastic, testosterone-fueled
presidential election of 2016, Hillary Clinton is the last true hawk
left in the race.
For those who
know Clinton’s biography, her embrace of the military should come as no
surprise. She grew up in the buoyant aftermath of World War II, the
daughter of a Navy petty officer who trained young sailors before they
shipped out to the Pacific. Her father, Hugh Rodham,
was a staunch Republican and an anticommunist, and she channeled his
views. She talks often about her girlhood dream of becoming an
astronaut, citing the rejection letter she got from NASA as the first
time she encountered gender discrimination. Her real motive for
volunteering, she has written, may have been because her father fretted
that “America was lagging behind Russia.”
zerohedge | As The Times writes
today, new evidence has come to light of a definitive link between
Saudi Arabian officials and the 9/11 terrorist attacks "further raising
tensions as President Obama travels to the kingdom."
According to the report, Ghassan Al-Sharbi, a Saudi who became an
al-Qa’ida bomb maker, is believed to have taken flying lessons with some
of the 9/11 hijackers in Arizona but did not take part in the attacks
on New York and the Pentagon that killed 3,000 people in 2001.
He was captured in Pakistan in 2002 and has since been held at Guantanamo Bay. According
to a US memo, known as document 17, written in 2003 and quietly
declassified last year, the FBI learnt that he had buried a cache of
papers shortly before he was captured.
Think of "Document 17" as a mini version of the "28 pages" whose
content has yet to be revealed. The document was written by two US
investigators examining the possible roles of foreign governments in the
attacks.
One detail leapt out at the FBI agents from the papers that Sharbi had tried to hide: his US flight certificate was in an envelope from the Saudi embassy in Washington.
And there is your smoking gun, which has been fully available to the US government for the pat 13 years. It should have also been available to the American public.
Understandably, Brian McGlinchey, the activist who uncovered document 17, asked a simple question: "The
envelope points to the fundamental question hanging over us today: to
what extent was the 9/11 plot facilitated by individuals at the highest
levels of the Saudi government?"
zerohedge | As Obama concludes his fourth and supposedly final meeting to Saudi
Arabia as U.S. president, the White House was quick to explain where
relations with the Saudi Kingdom lay, and as CNN reported this morning,
moved to tamp down suggestions that ties with Saudi Arabia are fraying,
with administration officials saying that President Barack Obama "really cleared the air" with King Salman at a meeting Wednesday.
Which is strange because that is not how the other side saw it: even
as White House officials stressed that the leaders made progress, a prominent member of the Saudi royal family told CNN "a recalibration" of the U.S.-Saudi relationship was needed amid regional upheaval, dropping oil prices and ongoing strains between the two longtime allies.
There is going to have to be "a recalibration of our relationship with America,"
former Saudi Intelligence Chief Prince Turki Al-Faisal told CNN's
Christiane Amanpour. "How far we can go with our dependence on America,
how much can we rely on steadfastness from American leadership, what is
it that makes for our joint benefits to come together," Turki said in a
significant departure from usual Saudi rhetoric. "These are things that we have to recalibrate."
The prince made his "unprecedented" in the words of
CNN, comments as Obama landed in Riyadh "to a reception that social
media critics termed a snub, but U.S. officials strongly disputed." The
Saudi government dispatched the governor of Riyadh and Foreign Minister
Adel Al-Jubair to shake Obama's hand, a departure from the scene at the
airport earlier in the day when King Salman was shown on state
television greeting the leaders of other Gulf nations on the tarmac.
A U.S. official said Salman's absence upon arrival was not taken as a
snub and noted that Obama rarely greets foreign leaders when they land
in the U.S. for meetings. Obama went immediately to the Erga Palace to
meet the King shortly after landing, but the perceived slight on his
arrival was seen as one more sign that a relationship long lubricated by
barrels of oil is encountering friction.
nationalinterest | In recent weeks, there’s been a steady drumbeat in the media of calls to increase defense spending. In newspapers, TV and radio, this chorus contends that a shrinking military budget is putting U.S. national security at risk. Repeal the Budget Control Act and boost Pentagon spending, they warn, or suffer the consequences of a less secure nation. The time has come to expose the fact these claims are without merit and instead shine a light on the real cause of our dwindling military capabilities.
The American military’s shrinking capabilities have very little to do with money. Rather, they are the result of internal mismanagement. The only way to strengthen our national security is not to spend more money, but rather to reform the way the Department of Defense does business.
It boggles the mind that the DoD cannot account for the hundreds of billions of dollars a year that it spends. A full twenty-six years after a federal law was passed requiring all parts of the federal government to provide Congress with an audit of its spending, there remains only a single government agency that has not complied: the Department of Defense. Even after being publicly rebuked by the Senate in 2013 for this failure—and wasting billions of dollars on failed auditing software—the Pentagon remains noncompliant. Although it’s a major problem that we don’t know how the Pentagon spends its money, an examination of the known expenses is even more alarming.
Look no further than the $500 million spent to train Syrian rebels to fight ISIS. That program was scrapped after putting only a handful of trainees on the ground. Or the $468 million spent on planes for the Afghan Air Force that we were forced todestroybecause the Afghans could not fly or maintain them.
Even worse, consider the $20 billion spent by the Army on its Future Combat System, which was supposed to develop the next generation of armored vehicles, but produced exactly zero new pieces of equipment. The weakened state of today’s military has not been caused by insufficient appropriations, but by sometimes breathtaking mismanagement within the Department of Defense.
The time has come to genuinely reform the Pentagon in ways that are commensurate with the caliber of the mismanagement. There are many changes that need to be made but three fundamental changes stand out as being necessary to enable our military to successfully navigate an uncertain global future.
nationalpriorities | The U.S. Pentagon and military has more money than it needs.
It’s hard to draw any other conclusion from the stark facts: the U.S.
outspends every other nation on earth when it comes to our military. We
spend more than the next seven countries combined.
Where does the money go?
Here’s a hint: Pentagon spending is subject to the same rules of
corporate greed that plague our entire economy. More than half of the
Pentagon budget goes to for-profit contractors.
Let’s get the word out there. The less we spend on Pentagon
contractors that profit from fear and conflict, the more we can spend on
priorities like education, climate change and infrastructure to move
our country forward into the 21st first century. It’s time we joined the rest of the world.
RT | President Barack Obama has said the classified pages of the 9/11
Commission report that do not “compromise major national security
interests” may “hopefully” be soon released, but argued against any
potential legal action against Saudi citizens.
“But this has been a process which we generally deal through the
intelligence community, and Jim Clapper, our director of intelligence,
has been going through to make sure that whatever it is that is
released, is not going to compromise some major national security
interests of the United States, and my understanding is that he’s about
to complete that process,” said Obama.
Rose also asked about
legislation that would allow the relatives of 9/11 victims to sue the
Saudis, which passed the Senate Judiciary Committee in January, but has
yet to be voted on by the full body.
Obama has said that he doesn’t support the bill, due to the
possibility of foreign citizens – presumably victims of US wars and
drone strikes – suing the government.
"If we open up the
possibility that individuals in the United States can routinely start
suing other governments, then we are also opening up the United States
to being continually sued by individuals in other countries," the commander-in-chief said.
The Saudis have reportedly threatened to sell its $750 billion in US assets if Congress passes the law.
Obama described the US as “the world’s singular superpower” during the full interview and said anyone who doubts his willingness to take military actions should “ask Bin Laden.”
michael-hudson | Our next guest, Michael Hudson, says Panama was created as a tax
haven by certain sectors of our economy for this purpose. Joining us now
from New York is Michael Hudson. Michael is a distinguished research
professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and
he?s a former balance of payments economist for Chase Manhattan bank. He
is the author of many books, and the latest among them is Killing the
Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global
Economy. And if you want to know more about that book, on our site
you’ll find Chris Hedges interviewing Michael Hudson on this book.
Thanks for joining us, Michael.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Good to be here, Sharmini.
PERIES: Michael, so let’s begin with a short history of the creation
of Panama and how it was bought from Colombia by the United States, and
its relevance today vis-a-vis the Panama papers.
HUDSON: Well, Panama was basically carved off from Colombia in order
to have a canal. It was created very much like Liberia. It’s not really a
country in the sense that a country has its own currency and its own
tax system. Panama uses U.S. dollars. So does Liberia.
The real story didn’t come out in the Panama papers. Reporters
naturally focused on criminal people laundering money. But Panama wasn’t
designed to launder money. It was designed to launder earnings – mainly
by the oil and the gas industries, and the mining industry.
Panama and Liberia were long noted as having “flags of convenience.”
Oil tankers and mineral ships would register themselves under the flags
of Panama or Liberia, or some other country that used the U.S. dollar,
not its own local currency.
I first found out about this about 40 years ago, when I was doing a
study of the balance of payments of the oil industry. I went to Standard
Oil, whose treasurer walked me through their balance sheet. I said, I
can’t figure out whether Standard Oil and the other oil companies make
their money at the producing end of oil, or at the distributing end of
refining and selling it. And he said, “We make our earnings right here
in New York, in the Treasurer’s office.” I asked what he meant He
explained: “We sell the oil that we buy from Saudi Arabia or the Near
East at very low prices to the tanker company that’s registered in
Panama or Liberia.” They don’t have an income tax in their country,
because they’re not a real country. The oil companies then sell the
crude oil to downstream distributors in the United States or Europe – at
a very, very high markup.
The markup is so high that there’s no room for profit to be made at
all in refineries or gas stations selling the oil. So the oil companies
don’t pay the tax collector in Europe anything. They don’t pay the
American government an income tax either. All their earnings are
reported as being made in the tankers, which are registered in countries
that don’t tax income.
systemicdisorder | Is there some sort of altruism in the U.S. setting itself up as the
gendarme of the world? Well, that’s a rhetorical question, obviously,
but such self-deception is widespread, and not just among the
foreign-policy establishment.
One line of critique sometimes heard, especially during this year’s
presidential campaign, is that the U.S. should demand its allies “pay
their fair share.” It’s not only from Right-wing quarters that phrase is
heard, but even from Left populist Bernie Sanders, who insisted during
this month’s Brooklyn debate with Hillary Clinton that other members of
Nato ought to pay more so the Pentagon budget can be cut. Senator
Sanders said this in the context of pointing out the superior social
benefits across Europe as compared to the U.S., but what it really
implies is that militarism is justified.
Setting aside that Senator Sanders’ record on imperialism
is not nearly as distant from Secretary Clinton’s as his supporters
believe, it is a reflection of how deeply imperialism is in the bones of
United Statesians when even the candidate positioning himself as a Left
insurgent doesn’t seriously question the scale of military operations
or their purpose.
So why is U.S. military spending so high? It’s because the repeated
use of force is what is necessary to maintain the capitalist system. As
top dog in the world capitalist system, it’s up the to the U.S. to do
what is necessary to keep itself, and its multi-national corporations,
in the driver’s seat. That has been a successful project. U.S.-based
multi-nationals hold the world’s highest share in 18 of 25 broad industrial sectors, according to an analysis in New Left Review, and often by commanding margins — U.S. multi-nationals hold at least a 40 percent global share in 10 of those sectors.
A partial list of U.S. interventions
from 1890, as compiled by Zoltán Grossman, a professor at Evergreen
State College in Olympia, Washington state, lists more than 130 foreign
military interventions (not including the use of troops to put down
strikes within U.S.). Consistently, these were used to impose U.S.
dictates on smaller countries.
At the beginning of the 20th century, U.S. President William Howard Taft declared that his foreign policy
was “to include active intervention to secure our merchandise and our
capitalists opportunity for profitable investment” abroad. Taft
overthrew the government of Nicaragua to punish it for taking a loan
from a British bank rather than a U.S. bank, and then put Nicaragua’s
customs collections under U.S. control and handed two U.S. banks control of Nicaragua’s national bank and railroad.
Little has changed since, including the overthrows of the governments
of Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964) and Chile (1973), and
more recently the invasion of Iraq and the attempted overthrow of the Venezuelan government.
kunstler |Health care is now such a
blatant, odious, and ruinous racket that it is a little hard to believe
that it hasn’t ignited an outright revolution or, at least, a workplace
massacre in some insurance company C-suite. It is a well-known fact that
most Americans don’t even have $500 to pay for a car repair. How are
they supposed to cope with a $5,000 deductible health insurance
incident? Answer: they can’t. Their mental health is destroyed in the
process of attempting to fix their physical health. Not uncommonly, they
have to declare bankruptcy after a routine appendectomy or a visit to
the emergency room to set a broken arm. Sometimes, they don’t even
bother to go to the doctor, seeing clearly how this plays out. The
pharmaceutical industry has, of course, been allowed to convert itself
into a simple extortion racket. Got an unusual kind of cancer? We have something that might help. Oh, it costs $43,000 a month….
What kind of a polity allows
this cruel and indecent grift to go on? Why, the Obama administration,
which allowed the health insurance company lobbyists and their
colleagues in Big Pharma to “craft” the Affordable Care Act — the name
of which must be the biggest public lie ever floated.
It’s interesting to see how a
parallel fraud is playing out in higher ed. I submit the reason that
college presidents are not pushing back against the Maoist coercions of
the undergraduate social justice warriors is because the marvelous
theater of the gender, race, and “privilege” melodrama is a potent
distraction from the sad fact that college has turned into a grotesquely
top-heavy and high-paying administrative racket offering boutique
courses in fake fields (Dartmouth College: WGSS 65.06 Radical Sexuality: Of Color, Wildness, and Fabulosity… Harvard University: WOMGEN 1424: American Fetish)
in order to pander to their young customers (students) conditioned to
tragic “oppression” sob stories. All in the service of paying huge
salaries + perqs to the dynamic executives running these places.
Then there is banking, a.k.a.
the financial system, certainly the greatest racket of rackets, since
the fumes it’s running on — combinations of ZIRP, QE, and “forward
guidance” (happy talk) — is all that there is to maintain the illusion
that “money” remains a reliable gauge of value. Finance is the racket
that will go down first and hardest, and when it does, all the other
rackets currently running will go up in a vapor. That elephant will
storm into the room before the political conventions, and when it does,
it will usher in the recognition that nothing can go on as before.
theatlantic | In my house, we have learned to live a no-frills existence. We halved
our mortgage payments through a loan-modification program. We drive a
1997 Toyota Avalon with 160,000 miles that I got from my father when he
died. We haven’t taken a vacation in 10 years. We have no credit cards,
only a debit card. We have no retirement savings, because we emptied a
small 401(k) to pay for our younger daughter’s wedding. We eat out
maybe once every two or three months. Though I was a film critic for
many years, I seldom go to the movies now. We shop sales. We forgo
house and car repairs until they are absolutely necessary. We count
pennies.
I don’t ask for or expect any sympathy. I am responsible for my
quagmire—no one else. I didn’t get gulled into overextending myself by
unscrupulous credit merchants. Basically, I screwed up, royally. I
lived beyond my means, primarily because my means kept dwindling. I
didn’t take the actions I should have taken, like selling my house and
downsizing, though selling might not have covered what I owed on my
mortgage. And let me be clear that I am not crying over my plight. I
have it a lot better than many, probably most, Americans—which is my
point. Maybe we all screwed up. Maybe the 47 percent of American adults
who would have trouble with a $400 emergency should have done things
differently and more rationally. Maybe we all lived more grandly than
we should have. But I doubt that brushstroke should be applied so
broadly. Many middle-class wage earners are victims of the economy,
and, perhaps, of that great, glowing, irresistible American promise
that has been drummed into our heads since birth: Just work hard and
you can have it all.
If there is any good news, it is that even as wages have stagnated, a
lot of things, especially durable goods like TVs and computers, have
been getting steadily cheaper. So, by and large, has clothing (though
prices have risen modestly in recent years). Housing costs, as measured
by the price per square foot of a median-priced and median-sized home,
have been stable, even accounting for huge variations from one
real-estate market to another. But some things, like health care and
higher education, cost more—a lot more. And, of course, these are
hardly trivial items. Life happens, and it happens to cost a
lot—sometimes more than we can pay.
Yet even that is not the whole story. Life happens, yes, but shit
happens, too—those unexpected expenses that are an unavoidable feature
of life. Four-hundred-dollar emergencies are not mere hypotheticals,
nor are $2,000 emergencies, nor are … well, pick a number. The fact is
that emergencies always arise; they are an intrinsic part of our
existence. Financial advisers suggest that we save at least 10 to 15
percent of our income for retirement and against such eventualities.
But the primary reason many of us can’t save for a rainy day is that we
live in an ongoing storm. Every day, it seems, there is some new,
unanticipated expense—a stove that won’t light, a car that won’t start,
a dog that limps, a faucet that leaks. And those are only the small
things. In a survey of American finances published last year by Pew, 60
percent of respondents said they had suffered some sort of “economic
shock” in the past 12 months—a drop in income, a hospital visit, the
loss of a spouse, a major repair. More than half struggled to make ends
meet after their most expensive economic emergency. Even 34 percent of
the respondents who made more than $100,000 a year said they felt
strain as a result of an economic shock. Again, I know. After the job
loss, the co‑op board’s rejections, the tax penalties, there was one
more wallop: A publisher with whom I had signed a book contract, and
from whom I had received an advance, sued me to have the advance
returned after I missed a deadline. (Book deadlines are commonly missed
and routinely extended.)
In effect, economics comes down to a great Bruce Eric Kaplan New Yorker
cartoon that was captioned: “We thought it was a rough patch, but it
turned out to be our life.”
brookings | Elaine C. Kamarck is a senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at Brookings and the director of the Center for Effective Public Management at Brookings.
She is a public sector scholar with wide experience in government,
academia and politics. Kamarck is an expert on government innovation
and reform in the United States, OECD countries and developing
countries. In addition, she also focuses her research on the
presidential nomination system and American politics and has worked in
many American presidential campaigns. Kamarck is the author of "Primary
Politics: Everything You Need to Know about How America Nominates Its
Presidential Candidates."
yahoo |What do you think of Trump’s complaint that the system is corrupt and unfair?Trump’s
out of his f***ing mind. Every single presidential candidate except for
him knows what this system is. It’s not corrupt. It’s the system by
which the parties pick their nominee. Parties are protected under the
First Amendment’s freedom of assembly. No American is forced to
participate.
Parties
are institutions. They have an interest in preserving their brand.
Coca-Cola doesn’t let Pepsi participate in their brand. Republicans
don’t let Democrats participate in their brand. This is a party
decision, and parties make these decisions based on their institutional
health. Meaning, if you put someone at the top of the ticket that is so
unpopular that you lose the House of Representatives, you’re not doing
the right thing for your party.
The
voters have been included to keep parties from getting really out of
touch. In 1968, Democrats did not understand the depths of the antiwar
sentiment in their party and cut [Vietnam War opponents] out of their
convention. This time, the Republican Party didn’t understand the anger
of voters for Trump. But the bottom line is, this is not a public
decision — it’s a party decision.
Do you want that on the record, that Trump is out of his f***ing mind?Yes. He’s out of his f***ing mind. He’s an a******. No other candidate has ever run for president so unprepared.
Do you think his arguments will influence the way we choose nominees?The
systems will only change if the parties themselves decide to change
them. My guess is the system will move in the other direction from where
Trump wants it to, with parties taking greater control of the
nominations to keep them from being captured by people who sully the
brand.
Trump is essentially arguing for direct democracy.Exactly.
He is arguing [for] direct democracy. The Congress has considered a
national primary many times. Political parties, however, will never be
for it. The current system is very open through the primaries and
caucuses and to letting new people participate. At the same time, it has
an insider piece to it. That’s why the system has persisted for 40-some
years.
The
general election is a different story because it’s a constitutionally
sanctioned thing. The parties are a different thing. Parties have the
right to say this person is not a Democrat or a Republican. They are
voluntary associations of citizens. They are semipublic organizations.
No democracy has ever managed to function without parties. They are
crucial for organizing the electorate and helping people govern.
I have often thought that our economies should have crashed thru the floor several years back, either because of declining net energy, or the debt burg. Yet, here we are, limping along, with very little blood in the streets...
"Now many people, particularly the economic experts, believed that by the end of 1938 the Nazi economic policies would fail. We all, myself included, underestimated what could be achieved through state power; through pay freezes, through price freezes, through exchange controls, and
though the use of concentration camps. It lasted longer than one would have thought."* - Johannes Zahn, Economist & Banker since 1931, on the situation of a looming, second German hyperinflation due to loans taken out to rearm Germany.
The Nazis - A Warning From History, Episode 3 Part 2
radiolab | There's no scientific metric for measuring a city's personality. But step out on the sidewalk, and you can see and feel it. Two physicists explain one tidy mathematical formula that they believe holds the key to what drives a city. Yet math can't explain most of the human-scale details that make urban life unique. So we head out in search of what the numbers miss, and meet a reluctant city dweller, a man who's walked 700 feet below Manhattan, and a once-thriving community that's slipping away.
antimedia | Dr. Ron Paul says the American electoral system is rigged to keep “independent thinkers” from succeeding.
“I see elections as so much of a charade,” the former Texas congressman said during an April 11 appearance on RT America’s “The Fishtank.” “So much deceit goes on.”
Paul is no stranger to the twisted rules of the American presidential
horse race. He ran for the highest office as a Libertarian in 1988, and
in 2008 and 2012 as a Republican.
He arguably came closest to the nomination in 2012, when the GOP
amended its party regulations to prevent the former Texas representative
from stealing Mitt Romney’s thunder.
Rule 40(b) of “The Rules of the Republican Party” was changed so the Republican National Committee could “limit
the visibility and power of libertarian-minded Texas Rep. Ron Paul at
the convention and thus present a unified front behind Mitt Romney, the
presumptive nominee,”
according to David Byler,
an elections analyst at RealClearPolitics. The rule requires that, in
order to win the nomination, a candidate must have the support of a
majority of delegates from eight states.
Although recent wins have tipped Sen. Ted Cruz past the cut off,
the rule as written came close to helping Trump take the nomination.
Paul warned that the GOP’s machinations to block Donald Trump are a sign
of a corrupt, undemocratic system.
theintercept |FOR YEARS, THE Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Citizens United was
depicted by Democrats as the root of all political evil. But now, the
core argument embraced by the Court’s conservatives to justify their
ruling has taken center stage in the Democratic primary between Hillary
Clinton and Bernie Sanders — because Clinton supporters, to defend the
huge amount of corporate cash on which their candidate is relying,
frequently invoke that very same reasoning.
The crux of the Citizens United ruling was that a legal ban
on independent corporate campaign expenditures constituted a limit on
political speech without sufficient justification, and thus violated the
First Amendment’s free speech guarantee. A primary argument of the
Obama Justice Department and Democrats generally in order to uphold that
campaign finance law was that corporate expenditures are so corrupting
of the political process that limits are justified even if they
infringe free speech. In rejecting that view, this was the key argument
of Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the five-judge conservative
majority (emphasis added):
For the reasons explained above, we now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.
Does that sound familiar? It should. That key argument of the right-wing justices in Citizens United
has now become the key argument of the Clinton campaign and its media
supporters to justify her personal and political receipt of millions
upon millions of dollars in corporate money: “Expenditures, including
those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the
appearance of corruption” — at least when the candidate in question is
Hillary Clinton.
Indeed, the Clinton argument actually goes well beyond the Court’s conservatives: In Citizens United, the right-wing justices merely denied the corrupting effect of independent
expenditures (i.e., ones not coordinated with the campaign). But
Clinton supporters in 2016 are denying the corrupting effect of direct campaign donations by large banks and corporations and, even worse, huge speaking fees paid to an individual politician shortly before and after that person holds massive political power.
Another critical aspect of the right-wing majority argument in Citizens United was
that actual corruption requires proof of a “quid pro quo” arrangement:
meaning that the politician is paid to vote a certain way (which is,
basically, bribery). Prior precedent, said the Citizens United majority, “was limited to quid pro quocorruption,” quoting a prior case as holding that “the hallmark of corruption is the financial quid pro quo: dollars for political favors.”
Does that sound familiar? It should. That, too, has become a core Clinton-supporting argument: Look, if you can’t prove that Hillary changed her vote in exchange for Goldman Sachs speaking fees or JPMorgan Chase donations (and just by the way, Elizabeth Warren believes she can prove that),then you can’t prove that these donations are corrupting. After all, argue Clinton supporters (echoing the Citizens United majority), “the hallmark of corruption is the financial quid pro quo: dollars for political favors.”
WaPo | A small core of super-rich individuals is responsible for the record
sums cascading into the coffers of super PACs for the 2016 elections, a
dynamic that harks back to the financing of presidential campaigns in
the Gilded Age.
Close to half the money — 41 percent — raised by
the groups by the end of February came from just 50 mega-donors and
their relatives, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal
campaign finance reports. Thirty-six of those are Republican supporters
who have invested millions in trying to shape the GOP nomination contest
— accounting for more than 70 percent of the money from the top 50.
In
all, donors this cycle have given more than $607 million to 2,300 super
PACs, which can accept unlimited contributions from individuals and
corporations. That means super PAC money is on track to surpass the
$828 million that the Center for Responsive Politics found was raised by such groups for the 2012 elections.
The
staggering amounts reflect how super PACs have become fundraising
powerhouses just six years after they came on the scene. The
concentration of fundraising power carries echoes of the end of the 19th
century, when wealthy interests spent millions to help put former Ohio
governor William McKinley in the White House.
alhambrapartners | The Wall Street Journal reported a few days ago (h/t ZeroHedge)
on the status of the ongoing disruption in domestic production of long
haul trucks and vehicles. In what can only be confirmation of the state
of US manufacturing, the huge drop in orders for new trucks matches
shippers’ perceptions of the actual economic flow in goods. While
economists want that to be an isolated circumstance of only
manufacturing, goods activities account for a significant proportion of
services as well. And it is getting bad:
Orders for new big rigs plunged and inventories of unsold
trucks soared to their highest levels since just before the financial
crisis, as uncertainty about future demand and a weak market for freight
transportation weighed on truck manufacturers.
About 67,000 Class 8 trucks are sitting unsold on dealer lots, after
sales in March dropped 37% from a year earlier to 16,000 vehicles,
according to ACT Research. Class 8 trucks are the type most commonly
used on long-haul routes. Inventories haven’t been this high since early
2007, said Kenny Vieth, president of ACT.
It leaves no doubt that “something” is very wrong now in manufacturing and normal economic flow.
“Fleets are being very cautious in the current uncertain
economic environment,” wrote Don Ake, a vice president with FTR
Transportation Intelligence, which reported similar order numbers for
March. “Freight has slowed due to the manufacturing recession, so they
have sufficient trucks to meet current demand.”
Some of this reduction in 2016, as the Journal reports, is due to
companies over-ordering in 2014 and 2015 based on the narrative that the
economy was actually healing, or at worse would stay in its “new
normal.” It raises the issue as to whether these conditions and the
manufacturing recession they reflect are cyclical or structural; or
both.
As I wrote yesterday,
the contraction in goods and the US economy’s basis for them may or may
not be heading toward recession. It is clear, however, that whatever
the ultimate cycle reality there are deeper imbalances that run back
several years, likely traced to decades of financialization that is now
overturning, and thus really supersedes cyclical discussion. What we see
in the US is not limited to the US, however; it is a global phenomenon,
which can only mean one possible explanation.
aljazeera |Steel is found everywhere from bridges to sinks, but the global steel industry is going through the worst downturn in 50 years.
An unbalanced supply and demand equation has left even China,
the world's largest producer and consumer of steel, calling for global
cooperation to try and tackle the industry's problems.
But while China is calling for cooperation, many blame China's steel mills for flooding the market with cheap supply.
Over in the UK, Tata Steel, an Indian company, put its entire
business up for sale, blaming cheap Chinese imports for its decision.
The UK boasts the world's oldest steel industry and Port Talbot in south Wales is home to Britain's largest steel plant.
With the UK steel industry on the verge of collapse, we see how tens of thousands
of jobs are at risk with the imminent closure, or at least significant
downsizing, of the Port Talbot steelworks, which has already been on the
decline for decades.
Although many blame the cheap steel making its way from China,
others are also say the UK government has not offered the steel industry
enough protection to help it stay competitive.
Steelmakers in China are also suffering. When China outlined its
latest five year plan it said that job cuts in the steel sector were
likely.
In China, we see how job losses in the steel industry have become
more commonplace. With the economy growing at its slowest pace in 25
years and steel mills producing at overcapacity with the lack of demand
for raw materials, China has been exporting steel at low prices.
Economists say, however, this is only a short-term solution and
companies will need to restructure to be efficient.
zerohedge | We now introduce you to someone who may be one of these rich kids' dad.
Or rather was, because Gang Yuan, a 42-year-old mining tycoon is no
longer alive. His corpse was found chopped into 100 pieces in his Vancouver home.
According to a civil lawsuit, Yuan came to Canada in 2007 with permanent
resident status and made his money by investing in real estate and
Saskatchewan farmland, in the process becoming the owner of a at least
one abandoned multimillion-dollar Vancouver home... and much more.
As The Province reports,
Yuan has been linked to a government corruption scandal in southwestern
China. He is also a shining example of how most of the billions in hot
money flooding Vancouver real estate funds are sourced: illegally. This
story helps to shed some light on the origina of at least a modest
amount of that money.
The scandal led to a 19-year jail term for Yunnan province official
Lin Yunye. Yunye was jailed last November for selling $234 million in
state mining assets to a number of businessmen from whom he accepted
tens of millions in bribes - including gold bars, luxury watches and rhinoceros horns.
The full details follows:
Yunnan, where Yunye was deputy director of land and resources, is a
province of lush, bamboo-covered mountains. It is also known as China’s
gem-trading hub because of its border with Myanmar, a failed state with
bounties of ruby and jade stones that are illicitly smuggled into
Yunnan.
Gem exchanges, $50,000 gold bars, a $500,000 bribe, and deals
benefiting two Vancouver-area tycoons feature in the lengthy record of
charges proven against Yunye in Yunnan Provincial Court. The verdict
states Yunye abused his power from 2007 until his arrest in 2014.
oftwominds |Fraud as a way of life caters an extravagant banquet of consequences.
This can't be said politely: the entire status quo in America is a fraud.
The financial system is a fraud.
The political system is a fraud.
National Defense is a fraud.
The healthcare system is a fraud.
Higher education is a fraud.
The mainstream corporate media is a fraud.
Culture--from high to pop--is a fraud.
Need I go on?
We have come to accept fraud as standard operating practice in America, to the detriment of everything that was once worthy. why is this so?
One reason, which I outline in my book A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All, is that centralized hierarchies select for fraud and incompetence. Now
that virtually every system in America is centralized or regulated by
centralized hierarchies, every system in America is fraudulent and
incompetent.
The three ingredients of fraud are abundant: pressure
(to get an A, to please your boss, to make your sales numbers, etc.),
rationalization (everybody's doing it) and opportunity.
Taleb explains why failure and fraud become the status quo: admitting
error and changing course are risky, and everyone who accepts the
servitude of working in a centralized hierarchy--by definition,
obedience to authority is the #1 requirement-- is averse to risk.
As as I explain in my book, these systems select for risk aversion and the appearance of obedience to rules and authority while maximizing personal gain: in other words, fraud as a daily way of life.
Truth is a dangerous poison in centralized hierarchies: anyone caught telling the truth risks a tenner in bureaucratic Siberia. (In the Soviet Gulag ,a tenner meant a ten-year sentence to a labor camp in Siberia.)
And
so the truth is buried, sent to a backwater for further study,
obfuscated by jargon, imprisoned by a Top Secret stamp, or simply taken
out and executed.Everyone in the system maximizes his/her personal
gain by going along with the current trajectory, even if that trajectory
is taking the nation off the cliff.
guardian | The leaders of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have warned that the industrial scale of international tax avoidance
revealed by the Panama Papers represents a “great concern” for the
global economy and is having a “tremendously negative effect on our
mission to end poverty”.
Jim Yong Kim, the president of the World Bank,
said the revelations that many of the world’s richest and most powerful
people are avoiding paying millions in taxes by hiding money from the
taxman in offshore havens is a “great, great concern” and “very, very
damaging” to the bank’s “mission to end extreme poverty”.
“When taxes are evaded, when state assets are taken and put into
these havens, all of these things can have a tremendous negative effect
on our mission to end poverty and boost prosperity,” Kim said as he
opened the Spring Meetings of the World Bank and IMF in Washington.
Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the IMF, said the Panama Papers, an unprecedented leak of 11.5m files from offshore law firm Mossack Fonseca, showed that “the [international tax] rules appear to be skewed towards” the global rich.
“Clearly what has resulted from the review of these Panama Papers
indicates that however important [international tax rules to prevent]
base erosion and profit shifting … it is unfinished business,” she said
in an opening address to the meeting.
Lagarde said more global cooperation is needed to stop tax avoidance
and to ensure “the net does not have little loopholes here and there”.
“A lot of things have gone global but there is one thing that has not
gone global and that is tax. It is still very much a local affair,” she
said. “International cooperation really has to be significantly improved
and we are happy to play our part.”
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
