Tard Bidnis: the tard wing of the GOP must answer for Louisiana...,

NYMag |  Louisiana has replicated these results. When Bobby Jindal moved into the governor’s mansion in 2008, he inherited a $1 billion surplus. When he moved out last year, Louisiana faced a $1.6 billion projected deficit. Part of that budgetary collapse can be put on the past year's plummeting oil prices. The rest should be placed on Jindal passing the largest tax cut in the state's history and then refusing to reverse course when the state's biggest industry started tanking. Jindal's giveaway to the wealthiest citizens in the country's second-poorest state cost Louisiana roughly $800 million every year. To make up that gap, Jindal slashed social services, raided the state’s rainy-day funds, and papered over the rest with reckless borrowing. Today, the state is scrambling to resolve a $940 million budget gap for this fiscal year, with a $2 billion shortfall projected for 2017. Like Bizarro Vermont, Louisiana can no longer afford to provide public defenders for all its criminal defendants. Its Department of Children and Family Services may soon be unable to investigate every reported instance of child abuse. Education funding is down 44 percent since Jindal took office. The state’s hospitals are likely to see at least $64 million in funding cuts this year.

What has happened to these states should be a national story; because we are one election away from it being our national story. Ted Cruz claims his tax plan will cost less than $1 trillion in lost revenue over the next ten years. Leaving aside the low bar the Texas senator sets for himself — my giveaway to the one percent will cost a bit less than the Iraq War! — Cruz only stays beneath $1 trillion when you employ the kind of “dynamic scoring” that has consistently underestimated the costs of tax cuts in Kansas. Under a conventional analysis, the bill runs well over $3 trillion, with 44 percent of that lost money accruing to the one percent. John Kasich’s tax plan includes cutting the top marginal rate by more than ten percent along with a similar cut to the rates on capital gains and business taxes. Even considering Kasich’s appetite for Social Security cuts, his plan must rely on the same supply-side voodoo that Kansas has so thoroughly discredited. As for the most likely GOP nominee, even with dynamic scoring, his tax cuts would cost $10 trillion over the next ten years, with 40 percent of that gargantuan sum filling the pockets of Trump’s economic peers.

If any of these men are elected president, they will almost certainly take office with a House and Senate eager to scale up the “red-state model.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said of Brownback’s Kansas, “This is exactly the sort of thing we (Republicans) want to do here, in Washington, but can’t, at least for now.” Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s celebrated budgets all depend on the same magical growth that has somehow escaped the Sunflower State.

This campaign cycle has inspired an unusual amount of soul-searching in Republican circles. The rise of Trump has forced many conservatives to reckon with the moral odiousness of Nixon’s Southern Strategy — a blueprint for GOP electoral success that relied on coded appeals to white racial animus. Unfortunately, the fall of Kansas has failed to inspire a similar reckoning with the policies that those ugly advertisements were designed to sell. The GOP front-runner’s praise of mob violence and religious discrimination has spurred much righteous outrage from the National Review. Kansas’s shortened school-years have spurred none.

When Donald Trump makes a gaffe, reporters confront Republican leaders and demand a response. When the GOP's economic platform decimates two U.S. states, a similar confrontation is in order.

Tard Bidnis: the tard wing of the GOP must answer for Kansas...,

msnbc | Not long after he made the transition from senator to governor in late 2010, Kansas Republican Sam Brownback boasted about his grand ambitions. The far-right Kansan, working with a GOP-led legislature, would cut taxes far beyond what the state could afford, in what Brownback described at the time as “a real-live experiment.”

He was optimistic, though the Republican governor added at the time, “We’ll see how it works.”

We sure will. In his first term, Brownback’s “experiment” led to debt downgrades, weak growth, and state finances in shambles. Perhaps the jobs picture is more heartening? Guess again. The Kansas City Star’s Yael Abouhalkah reported today on the state’s latest job numbers.

Let this stunning news sink in: The Kansas jobs report released Friday shows the state lost another 1,900 jobs in February and now has 5,400 fewer jobs than it did one year ago.

That’s right: The Sunflower State had a “growth” rate of negative 0.4 percent from February 2015 to February 2016, the first time that’s happened in more than five years. That negative employment rate is one of the worst in the nation.

The same piece noted that, just a year ago during his re-election campaign, Brownback set a goal of 25,000 new jobs, per year, for a total of 100,000 new jobs in his second term. Eighteen months later, Kansas has created 1,600 jobs.

Put another way, the GOP governor set a projection of over 2,000 jobs per month. Since then, Kansas has created about 90 jobs per month.

the hysterical flailing and bleating of global elites gets more pathetic by the moment...,

Guardian |  The prospect of Donald Trump winning the race to the White House has joined China’s slowing economy, the Greek debt crisis and Britain’s EU referendum as a major threat to the global economy, according to a respected risk analysis firm.

The Economist Intelligence Unit said the Republican frontrunner could prove a dangerous world leader, damaging global trade, stirring up trouble with Beijing and adding to instability in the Middle East.

The EIU placed the possibility of Trump being sworn in as US president next January sixth on their latest list of global threats, as serious as a resurgence of jihadi terrorism, and only marginally less risky than the collapse of the eurozone.

The US property tycoon had been “exceptionally hostile towards free trade” during his campaign, and had advocated putting troops on the ground in Syria to fight Islamic State, the unit said.

“In the event of a Trump victory, his hostile attitude to free trade, and alienation of Mexico and China in particular, could escalate rapidly into a trade war – and at the least scupper the Trans-Pacific Partnership between the US and 11 other American and Asian states signed in February 2016.”

It added: “His militaristic tendencies towards the Middle East [and ban on all Muslim travel to the US] would be a potent recruitment tool for jihadi groups, increasing their threat both within the region and beyond.”

a Trump victory will not dislodge neocons...,

unz |  Neoconservatives have their own characteristic American nationalism, which is based on both energetic involvement in the affairs of other states and calls for further immigration, which now comes mostly from the Third World. Both of these foundational positions are justified on the grounds that American identity rests on a creed, which stresses universal equality. Most anyone from anywhere can join the American nation by adopting the neocons’ preferred creed; and once here these “new Americans, “ it is argued, will become hardy defenders of our propositional nationhood while providing the cheap labor needed for economic growth. Perhaps most importantly, neocons have no trouble attracting corporate donors, who hold their views on immigration and their fervent Zionism. Australian newspaper baron Rupert Murdoch, who finances their media outlets, has been particularly generous to his neoconservative clients but is far from their only benefactor.

The hundreds of millions of dollars that are poured into neoconservative or neoconservative-friendly policy institutes annually are not likely to dry up in the foreseeable future. A meeting just held on Sea Island off the coast of Georgia for the purpose of devising and executing a plan to bring down Trump, included, according to Pat Buchanan, all the usual suspects. Neocon journalist Bill Kristol,, executives of neocon policy institute AEI, and Republican bigwigs and politicians were all conspicuously represented at this gathering of the “conservative “ in-crowd , and gargantuan sums of money were pledged to destroy the reputation of someone whom the attendees hoped to destroy.

If the neocons were falling, certainly they are hiding their descent well. Finally, there seems to be a continuing congruence between the liberal internationalism preached by neoconservatives and such architects of America’s foreign policy as the Council on Foreign Relations. Although the Old Right and libertarians may lament these troublemakers, the neoconservatives do not labor alone in imposing their will. They are the most out-front among those calling for an aggressive American internationalism; and this has been a dominant stance among American foreign policy elites for at least a century.

It is hard to imagine that the neocons will lose these assets because they’ve been branding Trump a fascist or because they’re unwilling to back the GOP presidential candidate, no matter who he or she is. Powerbrokers in their own right, they don’t have to worry about passing litmus tests. They enjoy unbroken control of the “conservative movement,” and benefit from the demonstrable inability of a more genuine Right to displace them. Matthew Richer asks whether Donald Trump’s election would spell “the end of NR’s influence over the conservative movement in America.” The answer is an emphatic no, unless those who distribute the funding for the neoconservative media empire decide to close down this particular fixture. Otherwise Rich Lowry and his buds will go on being funded as agents for disseminating neocon party lines.

Moreover, those featured in NR‘s printed issues and/or on its widely visited website are routinely invited on to Fox-news and contribute to other interlocking neoconservative enterprises. Rich Lowry and Jonah Goldberg will not be thrown out of work, because they dumped toxic waste on Trump. And Max Boot will not lose his position at the WSJ because of his over-the-top tirades against Trump, after having railed non-stop for several weeks against Confederate monuments and Confederate Battle Flags. There is nothing the neocons say when they’re reaching leftward or revealing their leftist colors that the leftist media aren’t also saying, even more stridently. Pointing out the silliness of neoconservative assertions about history or the current age may help us deal with our irritation. It does not mean that we can dissuade those who fund the neoconservatives from giving them more money. They are being kept around not for their wisdom or the elegance of their prose but because they are useful to the powerful and rich.

Finally I should observe that the neocons have done so well in marginalizing their opposition on the right that it seems unlikely, as George Hawley points out in Right-Wing Critics of the Conservative Movement (University of Kansas, 2016), that the balance of power between the two sides is about to change. How exactly will a genuine Right that has not been contaminated by the neocons gain enough influence to replace them? How can such a Right, given its modest circumstances, even compete with the neocons for access to the public and for friends in high places?

Trump almost certain to win GOP nomination prior to the convention

(click here for interactive version)

zerohedge |  First it was all a joke. A media sideshow. A publicity stunt that no one really understood the purpose of.

Donald Trump was actually going to run for President. His campaign slogan: “Make America Great Again.” It was laughable.

Soon after the billionaire announced his candidacy, his nascent bid for the White House took on a more serious tone, but not because anyone was taking him more seriously. Rather, because his comments about Mexican immigrants were so inflammatory that it was difficult to dismiss them with derisive humor.

From that point on, it was all downhill for the GOP establishment. Trump racked up popular support, defying every law of conventional politics along the way.

Each and every time analysts and pundits doubted him, he prevailed and that unlikely momentum carried right over into the caucuses and primaries and now, after Super Tuesday 3, Trump has effectively knocked out every Republican challenger except Ted Cruz (let’s face it, Kasich isn’t going to get the nod).

Still, all commentators and political “experts” want to talk about is a contested Republican convention in Cleveland. While that’s certainly an interesting outcome to consider as it forces us to look back at political history to understand the precedent and what that precedent might mean come July, it’s as if no one has learned anything from the past nine months.

That is, the assumption should probably be that Trump is going to lock up the nomination before the convention, not that they’ll be some kind of historic bid to rob him in four months. The media - both liberal and conservative - act as though it’s virtually impossible for him to make it to 1,237 delegates. We’re talking about a guy here who no one thought would even register in terms of poll numbers and now he's the overwhelming favorite.

the economic growth system has reached its limits in very strange ways...,

ourfiniteworld |  We don’t just extract fossil fuels. Instead, whether we intend to or not, we get a lot of other things as well: rising debt, rising pollution, and a more complex economy.

The system acts as if whenever one pump dispenses the energy products we want, another pump disperses other products we don’t want. Let’s look at three of the big unwanted “co-products.”

1. Rising debt is an issue because fossil fuels give us things that would never have been possible, in the absence of fossil fuels. For example, thanks to fossil fuels, farmers can have such things as metal plows instead of wooden ones and barbed wire to separate their property from the property of others. Fossil fuels provide many more advanced capabilities as well, including tractors, fertilizer, pesticides, GPS systems to guide tractors, trucks to take food to market, modern roads, and refrigeration.

The benefits of fossil fuels are immense, but can only be experienced once fossil fuels are in use. Because of this, we have adapted our debt system to be a much greater part of the economy than it ever needed to be, prior to the use of fossil fuels. As the cost of fossil fuel extraction rises, ever more debt is required to place these fossil fuels in use. The Bank for International Settlements tells us that worldwide, between 2006 and 2014, the amount of oil and gas company bonds outstanding increased by an average of 15% per year, while syndicated bank loans to oil and gas companies increased by an average of 13% per year. Taken together, about $3 trillion of these types of loans to the oil and gas companies were outstanding at the end of 2014.

As the cost of fossil fuels rises, the cost of everything made using fossil fuels tends to rise as well. Cars, trucks, and homes become more expensive to build, especially if they are intended to be energy efficient. The cost of capital goods purchased by businesses rises as well, since these too are made with fossil fuels. Needless to say, the amount of debt to purchase all of these goods rises as well. Part of the reason for the increased debt is simply because it becomes more difficult for businesses and individuals to purchase needed goods out of cash flow.

As long as fossil fuel prices are rising (not just the cost of extraction), this rising debt doesn’t look like a huge problem. The rising fossil fuel prices push the general inflation rate higher. But once prices stop rising, and in fact start falling, the amount of debt outstanding suddenly seems much more onerous.

2. Rising pollution from fossil fuels is another issue as we use an increasing amount of fossil fuels. If only a tiny amount of fossil fuels is used, pollution tends not to be much of an issue. Air can remain safe for breathing and water can remain safe for drinking. Increasing CO2 pollution is not a significant issue.

Once we start using increasing amounts, pollution becomes a greater issue. Partly this is the case because natural sinks reach their saturation point. Another is the changing nature of technology as we move to more advanced techniques. Techniques such as deep sea drilling, hydraulic fracturing, and arctic drilling have pollution risks that less advanced techniques did not have.

3. A more complex economy is a less obvious co-product of the increasing use of fossil fuels. In a very simple economy, there is little need for big government and big business. If there are businesses, they can be run by a small number of individuals, with little investment in capital goods. A king, together with a handful of appointees, can operate the government if it does not provide much in the way of services such as paved roads, armies, and schools. International trade is not a huge necessity because workers can provide nearly all necessary goods and services with local materials.

The use of increasing amounts of fossil fuels changes the situation materially. Fossil fuels are what allow us to have metals in quantity–without fossil fuels, we need to cut down forests, use the trees to make charcoal, and use the charcoal to make small quantities of metals.

Once fossil fuels are available in quantity, they allow the economy to make modern capital goods, such as machines, oil drilling equipment, hydraulic dump trucks, farming equipment, and airplanes. Businesses need to be much larger to produce and own such equipment. International trade becomes much more important, because a much broader array of materials is needed to make and operate these devices. Education becomes ever more important, as devices become increasingly complex.

Governments become larger, to deal with the additional services they now need to provide.

Increasing complexity has a downside. If an increasing share of the output of the economy is funneled into management pay, expenditures for capital goods, and other expenditures associated with an increasingly complex economy (including higher taxes, and more dividend and interest payments), less of the output of the economy is available for “ordinary” laborers–including those without advanced training or supervisory responsibilities.

As a result, pay for these workers is likely to fall relative to the rising cost of living. Some would-be workers may drop out of the labor force, because the benefits of working are too low compared to other costs, such as childcare and transportation costs. Ultimately, the low wages of these workers can be expected to start causing problems for the economic system as a whole, because these workers can no longer afford the output of the system. These workers reduce their purchases of houses and cars, both of which are produced using fossil fuels and other commodities.

Ultimately, the prices of commodities fall below their cost of production. This happens because there are so many of these ordinary laborers, and the lack of good wages for these workers tends to slow the “demand” side of the economic growth loop. This is the problem that we are now experiencing. Figure 4 below shows how the system would work, if increasing complexity were not interfering with economic growth.

global government debt triple what we thought thanks to pensions..,

WSJ |  Government debt in 20 industrialized countries stands at $44 trillion.

But it’s actually a lot more than that, according to a new report. After factoring in public pension and other retirement liabilities, the debt levels nearly triple to a staggering $122 trillion.

That’s the math according to a new report from Citigroup Inc report called, “The Coming Pensions Crisis,” which analyzed government pension liabilities from 20 countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development .

“It is really a ticking time bomb,” said Charles Millard, Citi’s head of pension relations and former head of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the U.S. safety net for private-sector pensions.

To put the unstated debt levels in perspective: The additional unstated $78 trillion in retirement-related debt is equivalent to a single year of global economic output.

Citi researchers measured government pension liabilities, a combination of Social Security and public-sector pension obligations, finding the average country was carrying retirement debt of 190% versus gross domestic product—well above a 100% threshold that many experts consider concerning.

“Imagine you thought your mortgage was $440,000 but then the bank called up and said it was $1.3 million. That’s really what we’re facing,” Mr. Millard said.

rich countries have a $78 trillion pension problem

cnbc |  Dreams of lengthy cruises and beach life may be just that, with 20 of the world's biggest countries facing a pension shortfall worth $78 trillion, Citi said in a report sent on Wednesday.

"Social security systems, national pension plans, private sector pensions, and individual retirement accounts are unfunded or underfunded across the globe," pensions and insurance analysts at the bank said in the report.

"Government services, corporate profits, or retirement benefits themselves will have to be reduced to make any part of the system work. This poses an enormous challenge to employers, employees, and policymakers all over the world."

The total value of unfunded or underfunded government pension liabilities for 20 countries belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) — a group of largely wealthy countries — is $78 trillion, Citi said. (The countries studied include the U.K., France and Germany, plus several others in western and central Europe, the U.S., Japan, Canada, and Australia.)

The bank added that corporates also failed to consistently meet their pension obligations, with most U.S. and U.K. corporate pensions plans underfunded.

ironic given the collapse of both party's elites, that, divide and conquer control remains entirely intact...,

zerohedge |  Following their apparently delusional belief in the "success" of Tuesday night's violent protests, anti-Trump groups are plotting "Democracy Spring" threatening "drama in Washington" with the "largest civil disobedience action of the century." The operation, backed by Soros-funded MoveOn.org among others, warns on its website that "We will demand that Congress listen to the People and take immediate action to save our democracy. And we won’t leave until they do - or until they send thousands of us to jail."

With little fanfare and almost no news media attention, some of the same radical groups involved in shutting down Donald Trump’s Chicago rally last week are plotting a mass civil disobedience movement to begin next month. As Breitbart.com reports,

They intend to march across the East Coast in order to spark a “fire that transforms the political climate in America.”

The group is backed by numerous organizations, including the George Soros-funded groups MoveOn.org, the Institute for Policy Studies, and Demos.

Next month’s Democracy Spring chaos is set to begin with a meetup on April 2 at the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia.

“Then, in the spirit of Granny D, the Selma to Montgomery marchers, Cesar Chavez and the farmworker pilgrimage, and others who walked for freedom, we will set out on a 10 day, 140-mile march from Philadelphia to the Nation’s Capitol,” states the website.

In Washington DC, Democracy Spring expects “thousands of Americans” to engage in a “sit-in on the Capitol building in Washington DC in what will be the largest civil disobedience action of the century.”

What do they want?

Despite the fact that many of the main groups endorsing Democracy Spring are funded by billionaire Soros, the group complains that “American elections are dominated by billionaires and big money interests who can spend unlimited sums of money on political campaigns to protect their special interests at the general expense.”

But if the status quo goes unchallenged, the 2016 election — already set to be the most billionaire-dominated, secret money-drenched, voter suppression-marred contest in modern American history — will likely yield a President and a Congress more bound to the masters of big money than ever before.
The stage is set for a bold intervention to turn the tinder of passive public frustration into a fire that transforms the political climate in America, that sparks a popular movement that can’t be stopped.

The leaders of the group have already held training sessions, the website says. Democracy Spring states it is requiring “mandatory nonviolent civil disobedience trainings twice a day for those risking arrest from April 11th-16th.”

who sponsored the hate?

newyorker |  The big donors in the Republican Party are reportedly flummoxed by the toxic rhetoric of Donald Trump. The billionaire political industrialist Charles Koch has warned that Trump’s proposed registry of Muslims in the U.S. would “destroy our free society.” After pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into promoting their right-wing libertarian views over the past four decades, and budgeting some eight hundred and eighty-nine million dollars to spend in the 2016 election cycle, he and his brother David Koch, and their donor circle, are apparently disappointed that they have bought so little control over the Republican Presidential candidates. “You’d think we could have more influence,” he lamented to the Financial Times. But, in fact, the influence of the Kochs and their fellow big donors is manifest in Trump’s use of incendiary and irresponsibly divisive rhetoric. Only a few years ago, it was they who were sponsoring the hate.

Over the July 4th weekend of 2010, I attended the fourth annual Defending the American Dream Summit, in Austin, Texas, which served in part as a training session for local Tea Party activists. The summit was sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, which purported to be a nonpartisan grass-roots political-advocacy group devoted to the cause of small government, free markets, and liberty. It was in fact an organization that had been founded and heavily funded by the Kochs, whose early activism was entwined in fearmongering and racial intolerance.

The Kochs’ father, Fred Koch, the founder of Koch Industries, the hugely profitable private oil-and-chemical company that his sons inherited, was one of the original members of the John Birch Society, the ultra-conservative group that accused political opponents of treason and was at its core segregationist. After the Supreme Court ruled in favor of desegregating America’s public schools, in 1954, the Birchers launched a nationwide crusade to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren. In 1960, Fred Koch wrote a self-published book describing welfare programs as a secret government plot to lure rural blacks into cities so that they could foment “a vicious race war.” Before George Wallace declared his Presidential candidacy in 1968, Fred Koch also supported an unsuccessful effort to recruit Ezra Taft Benson, the former Secretary of Agriculture and a leader of the Mormon Church, and Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina senator, to run on a platform calling for the restoration of segregation. The Birchers’ radicalism was so extreme, and delusional, they claimed that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower was a communist agent.

It’s not fair to visit the sins of the father on the sons, but Charles and David have their own dubious record of involvement with racist institutions. They themselves belonged to the John Birch Society, and, in the late sixties, Charles was a trustee at a place called the Freedom School, outside Colorado Springs, which had no black students because, its director explained to the Times, “it might present a housing problem because some of his students are segregationists.” The Freedom School was a font of extreme anti-government ideology, teaching a revisionist version of American history in which it was argued that the Civil War should not have been fought, the South should have been allowed to secede, and slavery was a lesser evil than military conscription. Charles Koch was so enthralled with the Freedom School that he got his three brothers and many friends to attend. He had hoped to expand it into an accredited university, but instead it ran aground financially. It was, however, the first step in the Kochs’ lifelong crusade to use their vast fortune to reshape American academia and politics along the lines of their own ideology.

a case for demilitarizing the military

tomdispatch |  General Lloyd Austin, the outgoing head of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), recently testified before Congress, suggesting that Washington needed to up its troop levels in Iraq and Syria.  Meanwhile, in his own congressional testimony, still-to-be-confirmed incoming CENTCOM chief General Joseph Votel, formerly head of U.S. Special Operations Command, seconded that recommendation and said he would reevaluate the American stance across the Greater Middle East with an eye, as the Guardian’s Spencer Ackerman put it, to launching “a more aggressive fight against the Islamic State.”  In this light, both generals called for reviving a dismally failed $500 million program to train “moderate” Syrian rebels to support the U.S. fight against the Islamic State (IS).  They both swear, of course, that they'll do it differently this time, and what could possibly go wrong? 

Meanwhile, General David Rodriguez, head of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), pressed by Senator John McCain in congressional testimony, called on the U.S. to “do more” to deal with IS supporters in Libya.  And lo and behold, the New York Times reported that Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter had only recently presented an AFRICOM and Joint Special Operations Command plan to the president’s “top national security advisers.”  They were evidently “surprised” to discover that it involved potentially wide-ranging air strikes against 30 to 40 IS targets across that country.  Meanwhile, in Afghanistan -- U.S. Special Operations units and regular troops having recently been rushed once again into embattled Helmand Province in the heartland of that country’s opium poppy trade -- General Austen and others are calling for a reconsideration of future American drawdowns and possibly the dispatch ofmore troops to that country.

Do you sense a trend here?  In the war against the Islamic State, the Obama administration and the Pentagon have been engaged in the drip, drip, drip of what, in classic Vietnam terms, might be called “mission creep.”  They have been upping American troop levels a few hundred at a time in Iraq and Syria, along with air power, and loosing Special Operations forces in combat-like operations in both countries.  Now, it looks like top military commanders are calling for mission speed-up across the region.  (In Libya, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, it already seems to have begun.)

And keep in mind, watching campaign 2016, that however militaristic the solutions of the Pentagon and our generals, they are regularly put in the shade by civilians, especially the Republican candidates for president, who can barely restrain their eagerness to let mission leap loose.   As Donald Trump put it in the last Republican debate, calling for up to 30,000 U.S. boots on the ground in Syria and Iraq, “I would listen to the generals.”  That might now be the refrain all American politicians are obliged to sing.  Similarly, John Kasich called for a new “shock and awe” campaign in the Middle East to “wipe them out.”  And that’s the way it’s been in debate season -- including proposals to put boots on the ground big time from Libya and possibly even the Sinai peninsula to Afghanistan, bomb the region back to the stone age, and torture terror suspects in a fashion that would have embarrassed Stone Age peoples. 

Put another way, almost 15 years after America’s global war on terror was launched, we face a deeply embedded (and remarkably unsuccessful) American version of militarism and, as Gregory Foster writes today, a massive crisis in civil-military relations that is seldom recognized, no less discussed or debated.  TomDispatch hopes to rectify that with a monumental post from a man who knows something about the realities of both the U.S. military and changing civilian relations to it.  Gregory Foster, who teaches at National Defense University and is a decorated Vietnam veteran, suggests that it’s time we finally ask: Whatever happened to old-fashioned civilian control over the U.S. military?  Implicitly, he also asks a second question: These days, who controls the civilians?

25 companies more powerful than most countries

FP |  At first glance, the story of Accenture reads like the archetype of the American dream. One of the world’s biggest consulting companies, which commands tens of billions of dollars in annual revenues, was born in the 1950s as a small division of accounting firm Arthur Andersen. Its first major project was advising General Electric to install a computer at a Kentucky facility in order to automate payment processing. Several decades of growth followed, and by 1989, the division was successful enough to become its own organization: Andersen Consulting. 

Yet a deeper look at the business shows its ascent veering off the American track. This wasn’t because it opened foreign offices in Mexico, Japan, and other countries; international expansion is pro forma for many U.S. companies. Rather, Andersen Consulting saw benefits—fewer taxes, cheaper labor, less onerous regulations — beyond borders and restructured internally to take advantage of them. By 2001, when it went public after adopting the name Accenture, it had morphed into a network of franchises loosely coordinated out of a Swiss holding company. It incorporated in Bermuda and stayed there until 2009, when it redomiciled in Ireland, another low-tax jurisdiction.

Today, Accenture’s roughly 373,000 employees are scattered across more than 200 cities in 55 countries. Consultants parachute into locations for commissioned work but often report to offices in regional hubs, such as Prague and Dubai, with lower tax rates. To avoid pesky residency status, the human resources department ensures that employees don’t spend too much time at their project sites.

Welcome to the age of metanationals: companies that, like Accenture, are effectively stateless. When business and strategy experts Yves Doz, José Santos, and Peter Williamson coined the term in a 2001 book, metanationals were an emerging phenomenon, a divergence from the tradition of corporations taking pride in their national roots. (In the 1950s, General Motors President Charles Wilson famously said, “What was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.”) Today, the severing of state lifelines has become business as usual.

ExxonMobil, Unilever, BlackRock, HSBC, DHL, Visa—these companies all choose locations for personnel, factories, executive suites, or bank accounts based on where regulations are friendly, resources abundant, and connectivity seamless. Clever metanationals often have legal domicile in one country, corporate management in another, financial assets in a third, and administrative staff spread over several more. Some of the largest American-born firms — GE, IBM, Microsoft, to name a few — collectively are holding trillions of dollars tax-free offshore by having revenues from overseas markets paid to holding companies incorporated in Switzerland, Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands, or Singapore. In a nice illustration of the tension this trend creates with policymakers, some observers have dubbed the money “stateless income,” while U.S. President Barack Obama has called the companies hoarding it America’s “corporate deserters.”

It isn’t surprising, of course, when companies find new ways to act in their own interest; it’s surprising when they don’t. The rise of metanationals, however, isn’t just about new ways of making money. It also unsettles the definition of “global superpower.”

I think you'd have riots...,

zerohedge |  Two days ago, courtesy of Bloomberg, we outlined how the (extremely perturbed and after Tuesday completely decimated) GOP establishment would go about stealing the Republican nomination from Donald Trump.

“Although everyone now jokes about just how unstoppable the Trump ‘juggernaut’ has become, the establishment isn’t called ‘the establishment,’ for nothing,” we said. “Trump may have proven remarkably adept at whipping certain sectors of the electorate into a veritable frenzy, but he himself will tell you that he’s no politician.” The bottom line: he may be a wily, braggadocious, billionaire but he doesn’t know all of the tricks of the political trade. That could - and likely does - mean that Republicans are already working behind the scenes to figure out how to rob him at the last minute.

There’s all sorts of ways for crafty, career politicians to rig the delegates and use procedural maneuvers at the convention to undercut Trump and you can read the full account here, but suffice to say, a Trump nomination is far from a sure thing and the more he attacks the establishment the more willing they’ll be to use any means at their disposal to stop him.

But Trump has a ...er... trump card. 

He has an army (and that’s probably a more accurate characterization than any at this point) of supporters that would literally take to the streets if they feel as though the popular will has been subverted by the very same establishment politics that compelled them to vote for Trump in the first place. As Ted Cruz put it in Maine (although he was probably talking about himself, not Trump), “If the Washington deal-makers try to steal the nomination from the people, I think it would be a disaster. It would cause a revolt.”

Trump agrees.

Asked by CNN what would happen if he can’t muster the 1,237 delegates he needs to lock up the nomination and ends up getting robbed at the convention in Cleveland, Trump said this:

"I think you'd have riots.”

the fix is in for Granny Goodness because capitalist elites demand cheap labor...,

declineoftheempire | George Carlin thought religion was the greatest bullshit story of all time, and that's probably true. But in contemporary times, I think National "Public" Radio is the greatest bullshit story.

Get this — Not only does NPR consistently represent "establishment" interests while pretending to serve public interests, but it also gets the public (through its local affiliates) to pay for it! My local affiliate tells me every single day just how great "public" radio is. How could I possibly live without it?

These earnest local boosters know of course that some time soon now they will be begging for their jobs, and at that time they will repeatedly remind me that the outstanding, in-depth NPR programming they provide to the Pittsburgh area is very, very expensive.

And you know what? People do pay for it. I think that's a great bullshit story.

Today I will deconstruct some "free trade" bullshit from National "Public" Radio. I enjoy doing this kind of thing and it passes the time. This story is ostensibly about those Carrier air conditioning layoffs which made a political splash in February. I've included the video in the deconstruction.

Over the past month, millions of YouTube viewers have watched what happens when a U.S. manufacturer announces a move to Mexico.

Click on the unsteady cellphone video, shot at a factory that makes air conditioning, heating and related equipment in Indianapolis, and you will see workers listening to a man in a suit.

Watch it now.

He's telling them that their paychecks are headed to Mexico. "I want to be clear, this is strictly a business decision," the man says. An agonized, collective cry goes up. People swear, shout and look away.

Turns out, moving manufacturing jobs to Monterrey, Mexico, is more than strictly business. It's also very personal, painful — and political.

fukushima 5th year anniversary came and went and I plumb forgot....,

enenews |  Globe and Mail, Nov 1, 2015 (emphasis added): After the Japanese nuclear reactor melted down… fears arose that radiation would pollute the Pacific and spread to Canada’s West Coast. To address those concerns… Dr. [Jay] Cullen started a radionuclide-monitoring program… “The goal and motivation … was that people were asking me, family and friends and the public at large, what the impact of the disaster was on B.C. on the North Pacific and on Canada,” he said… Shortly after he began blogging about the findings… [Cullen] was not only called a “shill for the nuclear industry” and a “sham scientist” but he was told he and other researchers who were reporting that the Fukushima radiation wasn’t a threat deserved to be executed… Even in Japan, he says, the [U.N.] determined the doses of ionizing radiation “are low enough that there will be no discernible increased incidence of radiation-related illness in them or their descendants.”… Dr. Cullen said he frequently hears from people that his science simply can’t be right because the Pacific Ocean is dying… Dr. Cullen said he understands that people are afraid of radiation, that they distrust governments and are wary of scientists… “I feel that the education system has failed these individuals in certain respects,” he said…

Globe and Mail, Nov 6, 2015: A British Columbia man who posted a video calling for the death of scientists whose research shows the Fukushima nuclear accident is not destroying the Pacific has been charged with two counts of criminal harassment. The charges were laid against Dana Durnford… In a video posted on Thursday, he said he had just been charged, and that many of his past videos had been taken down… “I was arrested… I was in court and I was charged with criminal harassment of nuclear industry PR people,” he said… he was charged under Section 264 of the Canadian Criminal Code, which makes it illegal to engage in conduct that causes someone to fear for their safety… “It’s new territory for me, and I certainly don’t want to jeopardize [the prosecution] by speaking out of turn,” [Cullen] said…

Durnford is not alone in voicing concern about the impact of the Fukushima disaster on North America. Here are a few examples from officials, professors, and other experts:

• Former US Gov’t Official: “The elephant in the room is Fukushima radiation” when it comes to Pacific Ocean animal die-offs -Source
• Experts: Fukushima radioactive contamination a “major concern for public health of coastal communities” on west coast -Source
• US Gov’t: Alaska island “appears to show impacts from Fukushima”; Scientists anticipate more marine life to be impacted as ocean plume arrives -Source
• AP: Unprecedented deaths along U.S. Pacific coast; Samples “being tested for radionuclides from Fukushima”-Source
• Professor: “Fukushima emerged as a global threat to the conservation of the Pacific Ocean, human health, and marine biodiversity” -Source
• Gov’t conducts more tests on sick animals to look for Fukushima radionuclides -Source
• Scientists predict west coast killer whales will exceed 1,000 Bq/kg of radioactive cesium; Over 10 times gov’t limit in Japan -Source
• Professors: Seafood off west coast predicted to exceed gov’t radioactivity limit -Source
• Scientist expects Fukushima radiation will cause marine bacteria in US to mutate -Source
• Boat Captain: Fishermen “talking about Fukushima… convinced it has something to do with” poor condition of marine life -Source
• Professor: Fukushima a suspected factor in ‘unusual mortality’ of seals, walruses -Source
• Scientists present links between Alaska seal deaths and Fukushima fallout -Source
• “Many researchers initially believed radiation from the Fukushima nuclear disaster could be at the heart of the [sea star wasting] disease” -Source
• Mystery disease kills seals in Atlantic Ocean; Gov’t tests for Fukushima radiation -Source
• “Fish along the Orange County coast may have been affected by [Fukushima] radioactivity… researchers say” -Source
• US gov’t experts looking into whether Fukushima is cause of sea lion strandings in California; NOAA: “Radiation epidemic could be potential cause” -Source

fukushima the official stories 5 years later...,

technologyreview | The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, which began on March 11, 2011, uprooted thousands of Japanese people, set the worldwide nuclear power industry back a decade, and caused a run on potassium iodide (said to help ward off thyroid cancer). What it didn’t do was kill anyone from radioactive fallout.

That was the conclusion of the six-volume Report on the Fukushima Daiichi Accident, released in August 2015 by the International Atomic Energy Agency. About 1,600 people died in the evacuation of the surrounding area, however—many of them elderly and infirm hospital patients and residents of nursing homes. That would seem to indicate that the response to the accident was more deadly than the accident itself.

A Greenpeace report released this week, “Nuclear Scars: The Lasting Legacies of Chernobyl and Fukushima,” takes a harsher view, saying that “the health consequences of the Chernobyl and Fukushima catastrophes are extensive.” But most of the report dwells on Chernobyl, and it notes that the primary effects of Fukushima were “mental health disorders, such as depression, anxiety and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.” Put another way: fear and panic resulting from the accident (and from the loss of homes and livelihoods) were more dangerous than the radiation.

is the hon.bro.preznit afraid of the deep state?

mintpressnews |  A former CIA analyst believes the CIA and National Security Agency have become so powerful that the president is afraid to act against them when they break the law.

 

Ray McGovern retired from the CIA in 1990, following nearly 30 years of service to the agency. He was awarded the Intelligence Commendation Medal, which is given to agents who offer “especially commendable service” to the agency. 

Outraged over the CIA’s open use of torture, he returned the medal in 2006 and became an antiwar activist. He was arrested in 2011 for a silent protest against a speech by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

blaming Trump for violence highlights establishment media's shameless double standard

foxnews |  When MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow says she’s practically concluded that Trump wanted the confrontation in Chicago, where he canceled the rally, it’s clear that some in the media are making this all about the candidate and not those who would silence him.

Imagine how different the coverage might be if protestors were shouting down Hillary Clinton, as they briefly did to Bernie Sanders earlier in the season.

Everyone has the right to peacefully demonstration, something that’s deeply embedded in our country’s DNA. But nobody has the right to stop someone else from speaking. That is an assault on free speech—and one that’s been too prevalent on college campuses in recent years, where some liberals have tried to block speakers whose views they don’t like.

In the short term, this probably helps Trump in the Republican primaries, where voters will see him taking on mostly minority protestors who they don’t have much sympathy for. The danger in the long run is that the outbreaks of violence will come to be seen as a metaphor for a campaign that critics will say is tearing the country apart.

Joe Scarborough, in his Washington Post column, continues his turn against Trump, insisting that “a political campaign whose security has been so stifling as to draw angry comparisons to fascist regimes would plan a key rally for Trump in the middle of a racially diverse urban campus. The fact that this campus sits in the middle of a city that is so Democratic that it has not elected a Republican mayor since before Franklin Roosevelt was sworn in as president makes the venue’s selection even more bizarre.”

I have to disagree on that point. Why shouldn’t a presidential candidate—especially one who hopes to attract Democratic votes in the fall--be able to campaign anywhere he wants?

National Review, which detests Trump and is backing Ted Cruz, faults the protestors, but adds this:

“Trump — Saddam Hussein to the ayatollahs of political correctness on the other side — is of course far from blameless in all this. That is not to say that Trump’s irresponsible, wild-eyed, and meat-headed rhetoric, which has included explicit calls for violence against his critics, is responsible for having provoked the protests. Rather, Trump’s rhetoric has been unworthy of a presidential candidate — and unworthy of an American — in and of itself.”

game on: hopefully someone who understands all this better than I do will kindly consent to explain it...,

informationweek |  The Redmond giant is the latest tech titan to use a game to further development of AI, joining IBM's Watson and Google's DeepMind AlphaGo.

But in this particular case, Microsoft plans to open its platform to researchers and AI enthusiasts with an aim to move closer to having AI achieve the coveted "general intelligence" capabilities.

General intelligence is on par with the way a baby learns by taking in their environment via sight, sound, smell, touch, discomfort, pleasure, and other information to make decisions effortlessly. But AI researchers to date have only been able to take small slices of that total awareness to build tools that do just one thing, such as recognize words, but have not been able to combine all the slices in a way that humans do without effort, said Katja Hofmann, a researcher at Microsoft's Cambridge, UK, lab who helped develop the AIX platform with her colleagues, in a blog post.

That's partly due to the lack in understanding how people combine those senses, said Hofmann adding, "We don't understand ourselves well enough."

Enter Minecraft, which Microsoft acquired through its $2.5 billion purchase of Swedish game developer Mojang in 2014. Minecraft allows users to build their worlds however they wish. Because it affords users endless possibilities in the way they create their worlds, from scouring for treasures to erecting a building alone or with teammates, Hofmann said it made sense to use the open world of Minecraft when creating the AIX platform.

Hofmann and her team are trying to train an AI agent, similar to one used in Minecraft, to climb to the highest point in the virtual world without knowing how to do it or what needs to be accomplished.

"We're trying to program it to learn, as opposed to programming it to accomplish specific tasks," Fernando Diaz, senior researcher in Microsoft's New York research lab, said in the blog post.

Brian Blau, a research director for Gartner, agrees that games have a benefit for AI researchers.

"Games are a natural platform for test-bedding AI technology. They are rich and diverse simulations of worlds, which could be similar to what we humans experience, or not. That openness makes game worlds and virtual reality worlds well suited for AI, as they can deliver a clear visual picture and one that can be experienced personally," Blau told InformationWeek.

game on: the end of the old evolutionary system is in sight

wikipedia |  Transhumanism (abbreviated as H+ or h+) is an international and intellectual movement that aims to transform the human condition by developing and creating widely available sophisticated technologies to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.^[1][1][2] Transhumanist thinkers study the potential benefits and dangers of emerging technologies that could overcome fundamental human limitations, as well as the ethics^[3] of using such technologies.^[4] The most common thesis is that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into different beings with abilities so greatly expanded from the natural condition as to merit the label of posthuman beings.^[2]

The contemporary meaning of the term transhumanism was foreshadowed by one of the first professors of futurology, FM-2030, who taught "new concepts of the human" at The New School in the 1960s, when he began to identify people who adopt technologies, lifestyles and worldviews "transitional" to posthumanity as "transhuman".^[5]

This hypothesis would lay the intellectual groundwork for the British philosopher Max More to begin articulating the principles of transhumanism as a futurist philosophy in 1990 and organizing in California an intelligentsia that has since grown into the worldwide transhumanist movement.^[5][6][7]

The year 1990 is seen as a "fundamental shift" in human existence by the transhuman community, as the first gene therapy trial,^[8] the first designer babies,^[9] as well as the mind-augmenting World Wide Web all emerged in that year. In many ways, one could argue the conditions that will eventually lead to the Singularity were set in place by these events in 1990.^{[original research?]}

Influenced by seminal works of science fiction, the transhumanist vision of a transformed future humanity has attracted many supporters and detractors from a wide range of perspectives including philosophy and religion.^[5] Transhumanism has been characterized by one critic, Francis Fukuyama, as among the world's most dangerous ideas,^[10] to which Ronald Bailey countered that it is rather the "movement that epitomizes the most daring, courageous, imaginative and idealistic aspirations of humanity".^[11]