banning cash: reinstating naked serfdom - peasants!!!

freemansperspective |  Over the last few months a stream of articles have crossed my screen, all proclaiming the need of governments and banks to eliminate cash. I’m sure you’ve noticed them too.

It is terrorists and other assorted madmen, we are told, who use cash. And so, to protect us from being blown up and dismembered on our very own street corners, governments will have to ban it.

It would actually take some effort to imagine a more obvious, naked attempt at fearmongering. Cash – in daily use for centuries if not millennia – is now, suddenly, the agent of spring-loaded, instant death? And we’re supposed to just accept that line?

But there are good reasons why the insiders are promoting these stories now. The first of them, perhaps, is simply that they can: After 9/11, a massive wave of compliance surged through the West. It may not last forever, but it’s still rolling, and if the entertainment corporations can pump enough fear into minds that want to believe, they may just get them to buy it.

The second reason, however, is the real driver:

Negative Interest Rates

The urgency of their move to ban one of the longest-lasting pillars of daily life means that the backroom elites think it will be necessary soon. It would appear that the central banks, the IMF, the World Bank, the BIS, and all their backers, see the elimination of cash as a central survival strategy.

The reason is simple: cash would allow people to escape from the one thing that could save their larcenous currency system: negative interest rates.

To make this clear, I like to paraphrase a famous (and good) quote from Alan Greenspan, back from 1966, during his Ayn Randian days: The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

That was a true statement, and with a slight modification, it succinctly explains the new war on cash:

The preservation of an insolvent currency system requires that the owners of currency have no way to protect it.

banksters got that blood funnel deeply inserted into the old raisins...,

zerohedge |  Some more details from the WSJ: the average 65-year-old borrower has 47% more mortgage debt and 29% more auto debt than 65-year-olds had in 2003.

Some more observations:

Just over a decade ago, student debt was unheard of among 65-year-olds. Today it is a growing debt category, though it remains smaller for them than autos, credit cards and mortgages. On top of that, there are far more people in this age group than a decade ago.

The result: U.S. household debt is vastly different than it was before the financial crisis, when many younger households had taken on large debts they could no longer afford when the bottom fell out of the economy.

The shift represents a “reallocation of debt from young [people], with historically weak repayment, to retirement-aged consumers, with historically strong repayment,” according to New York Fed economist Meta Brown in a presentation of the findings.

Why is this a problem in a world in which cash flow is increasingly scarce? "Older borrowers have historically been less likely to default on loans and have typically been successful at shrinking their debt balances. But greater borrowing among this age group could become alarming if evidence mounted that large numbers of people were entering retirement with debts they couldn’t manage. So far, that doesn’t appear to be the case. Most of the households with debt also have higher credit scores and more assets than in the past."

Assets mostly in the form of equities and bonds, however, those assets will need to be liquidated one way or another to repay what is a record debt load as the Baby Boomer generation grows even old and ever more in debt.

For now, however, the debt repayment cliff has not been hit as banks allow creditors to roll over existing obligations. This means that while debt among the elderly is at record levels, the percentage of this debt that is in some stage of delinquency has been steadily dropping. The NY Fed founds that only 2.2% of mortgage debt was in delinquency, the lowest since early 2007. Credit card delinquencies also declined, while auto loan and student loan delinquencies were unchanged.

the anti-democratic fix is in for Granny Goodness no matter what the Bern manages to do....,

WaPo |  If you think Bernie Sanders was the big winner in New Hampshire this week, you'd be wrong — at least when it comes to the votes that will really help determine the Democratic presidential nominee.

Sure, the Vermont senator won the Granite State primary in a rout over Hillary Clinton, earning 15 delegates to Clinton's 9. But New Hampshire has eight additional "superdelegates," and six of them back Clinton. The other two haven't declared a preference. So at the moment, Sanders and Clinton both have 15 total delegates, and it's possible that the former secretary of state could ultimately pull ahead — in a state she lost, 60 percent to 38 percent.

Quick civics lesson: Delegates are the people who attend the national convention and cast the formal votes for the nominee. Most of them are required to vote according to the results of their states' primaries or caucuses, regardless of their personal opinions. They're just there to represent the previously expressed will of the people. But some delegates, known as superdelegates, can cast ballots for whomever they want; they aren't bound by the popular votes in their states. They're usually party leaders, and they usually favor establishment candidates, in this case Clinton.

The delegate accumulation process can seem like an obscure part of our quirky form of democracy, but it could be important this year. Sanders could, in theory, earn a majority of the 1,670 delegates up for grabs in popular voting all over the country but still lose the nomination if most of the 712 superdelegates side with Clinton at the convention.

CNN's Jake Tapper seemed to have this scenario in mind when he interviewed Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz on Thursday:

deck so stacked, the democratic establishment can't even be bothered to try and hide it...,

WaPo |  Two powerful organizations within the Democratic establishment announced steps Friday that have the potential to provide substantial financial firepower to presidential contender Hillary Clinton by drawing on the support of wealthy donors and corporate interests. 

While providing a likely boost to Clinton, both developments also give rival Bernie Sanders fresh fodder to highlight her relationship with Wall Street and other special interests at a time when the two candidates are locked in an intense nomination fight. Priorities USA Action, the main super PAC supporting Clinton, unleashed a $5 million infusion of spending on her behalf, upending plans to hold its fire until the general election. 

The move calls attention to growing concern within the party’s leadership that her campaign may be in trouble, and it underscores how crucial several upcoming contests have become in Clinton’s battle with Sanders, a senator from Vermont

In addition, the Democratic National Committee announced that it had rolled back restrictions introduced by presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2008 that banned donations from federal lobbyists and political action committees. Both actions offer the potential for financial benefit for Clinton. But both also could backfire. 

Sanders has gained traction with his core argument that special interests have “rigged” the economy against the lower and middle classes. Although Clinton has repeatedly denied that she has been influenced by donations or speaking fees from Wall Street, the likely new flow of money to her campaign could add grist to Sanders’s case. 

As if to prove the point, the Sanders campaign issued a news release Friday with this headline: “Clinton Wall StreetFunded Super PAC Enters Democratic Primary Against Sanders.” And later in the day, Sanders’s campaign communications director, Michael Briggs, called the DNC decision “an unfortunate step backward. We support the restrictions that President Obama put in place at the DNC, and we hope Secretary Clinton will join us in supporting the president.” 

where to invade next?

michaelmoore |  Imagine a place where you don’t have to do any homework, and you don’t have to take those ridiculous standardized tests. Or how ‘bout a place where your public school lunch is a luxurious four-course meal that you have the time to enjoy each day. Imagine a country where all college is free — and it’s impossible to find anyone who has a student loan to pay off. Can you believe there’s actually a place where teenagers can easily get birth control with no parental permission, and that when it comes to getting free health services there’s no issue because, even as a teen, the society respects that only you should have control over your own body. Imagine a world where no hall passes are required to go to the bathroom, where school is not an assembly line (and it doesn’t start at 8 in the friggin’ morning!). And what if, on top of all of this, you could vote at the age of 16 and have a real say in your future.

Well, that place exists. It exists in many countries, all over the world. In fact, in every advanced industrialized country, one or more of the above is already happening every single day. But not here in the U.S.A.

And so I’ve made a movie about all those places, a movie that will take you on a raucous, hilarious ride through the great life that they’re having and we’re not. It’s called WHERE TO INVADE NEXT, and it opens this weekend, February 12th, in theaters across the country.

There’s only one problem: It’s rated “R”.

Now, you might be asking yourself, “Why did the American ratings board (the MPAA) give my film an ‘R’ rating?” Maybe it has something to do with all the things I’ve just listed above. Some people would prefer you not know how teenagers in the rest of the world are treated. Bottom line: They’re not treated like babies and inmates. They are treated like full-grown human beings with dignity and rights. Lots of rights.

But here in the USA, the MPAA has deemed my film too dangerous for you to see on your own. So I’d like to fix that. I’d like you to see my movie. And I’d like to help you sneak in to do that this weekend.

Now, I’m probably going to have a shitstorm rain down upon me for doing this. I don’t care. Wrong is wrong, and it is wrong to not let you see this movie. The theaters or the movie studios or the censors may not like what I’m about to suggest, but they’re just going to have to deal with it. It is insulting to you as a 15 or 16-yr to be told you can’t handle the truth. What year is this — 1952?

By now, you probably know all the ways to sneak into an “R”-rated movie — buy a ticket to another film then sneak in; go in to the PG film you bought a ticket for then go out to get popcorn and “forget” your ticket so you can then head in to the “R”-rated film; etc.

d-wave out there clocking gwap and stacking bandos...,

wikipedia |   Adiabatic quantum computation (AQC) relies on the adiabatic theorem to do calculations^[1] and is closely related to, and may be regarded as a subclass of, quantum annealing.^[2][3][4][5] First, a (potentially complicated) Hamiltonian is found whose ground state describes the solution to the problem of interest. Next, a system with a simple Hamiltonian is prepared and initialized to the ground state. Finally, the simple Hamiltonian is adiabatically evolved to the desired complicated Hamiltonian. By the adiabatic theorem, the system remains in the ground state, so at the end the state of the system describes the solution to the problem. Adiabatic Quantum Computing has been shown to be polynomially equivalent to conventional quantum computing in the circuit model.^[6] The time complexity for an adiabatic algorithm is the time taken to complete the adiabatic evolution which is dependent on the gap in the energy eigenvalues (spectral gap) of the Hamiltonian. Specifically, if the system is to be kept in the ground state, the energy gap between the ground state and the first excited state of  provides an upper bound on the rate at which the Hamiltonian can be evolved at time .^[7] When the spectral gap is small, the Hamiltonian has to be evolved slowly. The runtime for the entire algorithm can be bounded by  Where  is the minimum spectral gap for .

AQC is a possible method to get around the problem of energy relaxation. Since the quantum system is in the ground state, interference with the outside world cannot make it move to a lower state. If the energy of the outside world (that is, the "temperature of the bath") is kept lower than the energy gap between the ground state and the next higher energy state, the system has a proportionally lower probability of going to a higher energy state. Thus the system can stay in a single system eigenstate as long as needed.

The D-Wave One is a device made by a Canadian company D-Wave Systems which describes it as doing quantum annealing.^[13] In 2011, Lockheed-Martin purchased one for about US$10 million; in May 2013,Google purchased a D-Wave Two with 512 qubits.^[14] As of now, the question of whether the D-Wave processors offer a speedup over a classical processor is still unanswered. Tests performed by researchers atUSC, ETH Zurich, and Google show that as of now, there is no evidence of a quantum advantage.^[15][16]

unlike last night a genuinely interesting debate: caltech says yes while hebrew university says no...,

wikipedia |  A topological quantum computer is a theoretical quantum computer that employs two-dimensional quasiparticles called anyons, whose world lines cross over one another to form braids in a three-dimensionalspacetime (i.e., one temporal plus two spatial dimensions). These braids form the logic gates that make up the computer. The advantage of a quantum computer based on quantum braids over using trapped quantum particles is that the former is much more stable. The smallest perturbations can cause a quantum particle to decohere and introduce errors in the computation, but such small perturbations do not change the braids' topological properties. This is like the effort required to cut a string and reattach the ends to form a different braid, as opposed to a ball (representing an ordinary quantum particle in four-dimensional spacetime) bumping into a wall. Alexei Kitaev proposed topological quantum computation in 1997. While the elements of a topological quantum computer originate in a purely mathematical realm, experiments infractional quantum Hall systems indicate these elements may be created in the real world using semiconductors made of gallium arsenide at a temperature of near absolute zero and subjected to strong magnetic fields.

phug a gravity wave, Landauer's principle though....,

wikipedia | Landauer's principle, first argued in 1961^[1] by Rolf Landauer of IBM, is a physical principle pertaining to the lower theoretical limit of energy consumption of computation. It holds that "any logically irreversible manipulation of information, such as the erasure of a bit or the merging of two computation paths, must be accompanied by a corresponding entropy increase in non-information-bearing degrees of freedom of the information-processing apparatus or its environment". (Bennett 2003)^[2]

Landauer's principle asserts that there is a minimum possible amount of energy required to erase one bit of information, known as the Landauer limit:

kT ln 2,

where k is the Boltzmann constant (approximately 1.38×10⁻²³ J/K), T is the temperature of the circuit in kelvins, and ln 2 is the natural logarithm of 2 (approximately 0.69315). 

Another way of phrasing Landauer's principle is that if an observer loses information about a physical system, the observer loses the ability to extract work from that system.

At 20 °C (room temperature, or 293.15 K), the Landauer limit represents an energy of approximately 0.0172 eV, or 2.75 zJ. Theoretically, room‑temperature computer memory operating at the Landauer limit could be changed at a rate of one billion bits per second with only 2.85 trillionths of a watt of power being expended in the memory media. Modern computers use millions of times as much energy.^[3][4][5] If no information is erased, computation may in principle be achieved which is thermodynamically reversible, and require no release of heat. This has led to considerable interest in the study of reversible computing. Recently, physical experiments have tested Landauer's principle and confirmed its predictions

why the truly great adolph reed jr. gets no love at all while tanussy is the belle of the ball...,

educationright |  This also helps to make sense of what has struck me as most incomprehensible about the reparations movement -- its complete disregard for the simplest, most mundanely pragmatic question about any political mobilization: How can we imagine building a political force that would enable us to prevail on this issue? As with earlier Pan-Africanist ideologues, internationalist rhetoric is in part a sleight-of-hand attempt to sidestep that question by abstracting to a larger black universe.

But the question ultimately does not arise because reparations talk is rooted in a different kind of politics, a politics of elite-brokerage and entreaty to the ruling class and its official conscience, the philanthropic foundations, for racial side- payments. Robinson makes this appeal unambiguously: "Until America's white ruling class accepts the fact that the book never closes on massive unredressed social wrongs, America can have no future as one people." Lest there be any doubt about the limited social vision that makes such an entreaty plausible, he brushes away the deepest foundations of American inequality: "Lamentably, there will always be poverty." His beef is that black Americans are statistically overrepresented at the bottom. It is significant as well that Jim Forman's 1969 demand was crafted at a conference funded and organized by liberal religious foundations. This is a protest politics that depends on the good will of those who hold power. By definition, it is not equipped to challenge existing relations of power and distribution other than marginally, with token gestures.

There's a more insidious dynamic at work in this politics as well, which helps to understand why the reparations idea suddenly has spread so widely through mainstream political discourse. We are in one of those rare moments in American history -- like the 1880s and 1890s and the Great Depression -- when common circumstances of economic and social insecurity have strengthened the potential for building broad solidarity across race, gender and other identities around shared concerns of daily life, concerns that only the minority of comfortable and well-off can dismiss in favor of monuments and apologies and a politics of psychobabble. Concerns like access to quality health care, the right to a decent and dignified livelihood, affordable housing, quality education for all. These are objectives that can be pursued effectively only by struggling to unite a wide section of the American population who experience those concerns most acutely, the substantial majority of this population who have lost those essential social benefits or live in fear of losing them. And isn't it interesting that at such a moment the corporate-dominated opinion-shaping media discover and project a demand for racially defined reparations that cuts precisely against building such solidarity? And isn't it also interesting that Randall Robinson, mainstream poster boy for reparations advocacy, is a member of the Rockefeller family's Council on Foreign Relations?

I know that many activists who have taken up the cause of reparations otherwise hold and enact a politics quite at odds with the limitations that I've described here. To some extent, I suspect their involvement stems from an old reflex of attempting to locate a progressive kernel in the nationalist sensibility. It certainly is an expression of a generally admirable commitment to go where people seem to be moving. But we must ask: What people? And where can this motion go? And we must be prepared to recognize what can be only a political dead end -- or worse.

ta-nussy not exactly feeling the bern, but he'll mail in his vote from the arrondissement jes the same....,

democracynow |  AMY GOODMAN: That was Bernie Sanders speaking at the Black and Brown Forum in Iowa in January. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also said at the forum she didn’t support reparations for slavery.

Following the forum, Ta-Nehisi Coates challenged Sanders’ position in an article for The Atlantic entitled "Why Precisely Is Bernie Sanders Against Reparations?" In the piece, he wrote, quote, "Unfortunately, Sanders’s radicalism has failed in the ancient fight against white supremacy. ... This is the 'class first' approach, originating in the myth that racism and socialism are necessarily incompatible," end-quote.

The piece has sparked both praise and controversy from across the political spectrum. In one response, University of Illinois professor Cedric Johnson wrote in a piece for Jacobin magazine, quote, "Coates’s latest attack on Sanders, and willingness to join the chorus of red-baiters, has convinced me that his particular brand of antiracism does more political harm than good, further mystifying the actual forces at play and the real battle lines that divide our world," end-quote.

This comes as both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders’ campaigns shift attention away from New Hampshire toward South Carolina, where black voters could decide the primary.

Well, to discuss the 2016 presidential campaign and the case for reparations, we are joined by Ta-Nehisi Coates, the national correspondent for The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics and social issues. He’s the author of Between the World and Me, which is a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He won the 2014 George Polk Award for his Atlantic cover story, "The Case for Reparations."

It’s great to have you back, Ta-Nehisi.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Thanks for having me back, Amy.

Granny Goodness personifies racism, militarism, and greed...,

democracynow |  AMY GOODMAN: Ben Jealous is also with us. He’s from North—he’s in North Carolina right now, and he was just recently in New Hampshire. Ben, you came out last week and endorsed Bernie Sanders. Why?

BENJAMIN JEALOUS: You know, look, I looked at his record. And for the same reasons that I supported Jesse Jackson in 1988—which Bernie did, too—when I was 15 years old, I signed up for Bernie this time, which is that on the issues that Dr. Martin Luther King referred to as the "giant triplets of evil"—racism, militarism and greed—Bernie is the clearest and the most consistent.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Ben, what about this—the whole issue—obviously, there’s been a lot of attention drawn to the fact that Bernie Sanders so far has very little support in the African-American and Latino community in most of the polls, and very few major African-American leaders or Latino leaders have come out to support him. Keith Ellison of Minnesota has, and Raúl Grijalva of Arizona. But your decision to support him, and why—what you think the impact will be in terms of the African-American and Latino community as we get into the states that have many more African-American and Latino voters?

BENJAMIN JEALOUS: Well, look, we’ve already begun to see people switch down in South Carolina. Justin Bamberg, a state rep, switched from Hillary to Bernie. We will see many more. I was meeting with folks last weekend. People are very excited. And what’s happening is people are starting to tune in. And the reality is, because of their long history of connection to the black community, especially in the South, with Bill Clinton being the former governor of Arkansas, you know, they have built up a lot of loyalty and a lot of friends. But black voters, we take our votes extremely seriously. They come—you know, we earned them. If it wasn’t us personally, it was our parents or grandparents. And what you’ll see is that now that he’s seen as a top-tier contender, we’ll find that candidate Clinton has hit her high watermark. She will begin to lose support. How fast and how much remains to be seen.

what kind of fool even considers voting for Granny Goodness?

thenation | Hillary Clinton loves black people. And black people love Hillary—or so it seems. Black politicians have lined up in droves to endorse her, eager to prove their loyalty to the Clintons in the hopes that their faithfulness will be remembered and rewarded. Black pastors are opening their church doors, and the Clintons are making themselves comfortably at home once again, engaging effortlessly in all the usual rituals associated with “courting the black vote,” a pursuit that typically begins and ends with Democratic politicians making black people feel liked and taken seriously. Doing something concrete to improve the conditions under which most black people live is generally not required.

Hillary is looking to gain momentum on the campaign trail as the primaries move out of Iowa and New Hampshire and into states like South Carolina, where large pockets of black voters can be found. According to some polls, she leads Bernie Sanders by as much as 60 percent among African Americans. It seems that we—black people—are her winning card, one that Hillary is eager to play.

And it seems we’re eager to get played. Again.

The love affair between black folks and the Clintons has been going on for a long time. It began back in 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for president. He threw on some shades and played the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show. It seems silly in retrospect, but many of us fell for that. At a time when a popular slogan was “It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand,” Bill Clinton seemed to get us. When Toni Morrison dubbed him our first black president, we nodded our heads. We had our boy in the White House. Or at least we thought we did.

Black voters have been remarkably loyal to the Clintons for more than 25 years. It’s true that we eventually lined up behind Barack Obama in 2008, but it’s a measure of the Clinton allure that Hillary led Obama among black voters until he started winning caucuses and primaries. Now Hillary is running again. This time she’s facing a democratic socialist who promises a political revolution that will bring universal healthcare, a living wage, an end to rampant Wall Street greed, and the dismantling of the vast prison state—many of the same goals that Martin Luther King Jr. championed at the end of his life. Even so, black folks are sticking with the Clinton brand.

What have the Clintons done to earn such devotion? Did they take extreme political risks to defend the rights of African Americans? Did they courageously stand up to right-wing demagoguery about black communities? Did they help usher in a new era of hope and prosperity for neighborhoods devastated by deindustrialization, globalization, and the disappearance of work?

No. Quite the opposite.

new hampshire turned out against the political grown-ups...,

dissentmagazine |  Of course candidates have to deny that they listen to Wall Street, and flatter voters into thinking ordinary people’s opinions about high finance and economic fairness really matter. But of course most candidates also suppose that ordinary people don’t understand banking, that bankers do, and that part of their job as governing elites is to listen to the bankers. Which, of course, the bankers appreciate—appreciation that they express in the language of the super-rich gift economy: “We’re all responsible elites here; take some of my money.” Bernie Sanders’s bad manners and alleged demagoguery lie in his taking the part about flattering voters too seriously, and not accepting the delicate hypocrisy of grown-up politics.

This revealing little dispute is a microcosm of the impatience that a certain kind of elite feels for the Sanders campaign. Consider the two major lines of dismissal against Sanders, and the way they come together in more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger condescension toward democracy.

If you want to dismiss the Sanders campaign, you can choose between two lines of attack. You can join Paul Krugman at the New York Times, asserting that governing is too hard for an idealistic democratic socialist: Sanders doesn’t seem built for compromise, and his proposals lack detail. And governing, as opposed to campaigning, is all about compromise and detail. Endorsing Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, the Times editorial board marveled, “Mrs. Clinton has done her homework on pretty much any issue you care to name.” Homework, you see. That’s the ticket; not staying out after dark working up the ruffians and messing with other people’s property. Grow up! is the bottom line here: as Krugman puts it in High Adult tones, “politics, like life, involves trade-offs.”

If that seems a little dreary, you can take the line Alexandra Schwartz presses at theNew Yorker. Developing themes that have been in the air for months, Schwartz offer a cultural take on Sanders’s appeal to young voters (who are supporting him by margins of seventy points or more in early primaries and polling). It must be his air of “purity” and “nostalgia for an imaginary time of simpler, more straightforward politics.” Looking back on her own Wordsworthian “very heaven” of imagining young Barack Obama “entirely pure,” Schwartz urges Sanders’s enthusiasts to find a “passage into political adulthood,” where we give up our idle fantasies about candidates (and about time, since Bernie reminds her of “the nutty great-uncle at the Seder table,” pungent with “hokiness” and rhetorical “staleness,” and of the “false nostalgia for past purity, in fashion or food, for instance”). Away with this iceberg lettuce salad of a candidacy, this sweaty vintage dress, this itchy, unkempt lumbersexual beard of a Democratic primary hopeful! Let’s grow up, release our grip on childish things, and get back to business, which is to say, compromise.

Despite their very different tones and concerns, the two lines of dismissal come around to the same point: adults learn not to take campaigns, promises, or political hopes too seriously. They learn that the real work is tedious, often invisible to the public, and highly constrained. They do their homework. Whether the dismissal comes in an eye-roll or a Nobel prizewinner’s rank-pulling, the lesson is the same: either political campaigns are festivals of feeling, mosh pits of emotional projection and crude fantasizing—about utopias of free stuff, unblemished leaders, or, more darkly, throwing bankers into jail—or they are a chance to choose responsible elites who will always do their homework.

All of this is one version of the lessons of the Obama era. Obama’s post-partisan but unmistakably “progressive” speeches thrilled young voters and former idealists who thought they would never feel that way again. His campaign upended a Clinton game plan that was supposed to be unstoppable, as he promised ecstatic throngs, “We are the people we have been waiting for.” Upon winning, Obama began displaying enormous deference to the designated adults of the early millennium: economists, bankers, and generals, as well as vicious political professionals like Rahm Emanuel (who was known for his contempt for the idealists who put Obama in office). “Look… I know those guys,” President Obama said of the country’s leading bankers early in his first term. “They’re very savvy businessmen.” Associating himself with grown-up authority, he followed his party’s hawks into a disastrous intervention in Libya and dilatory engagement with the Syrian catastrophe.

Still, within the limits of official adulthood, Obama has been a good president: he has consistently presented a dignified and inclusive face—whether inviting Pete Seeger to his first inauguration or, this week, visiting a mosque—and he appointed many earnest, incorruptible officials who have been pressing forward compromised progress on climate change, criminal justice reform, labor standards, and nearly anything else the government touches. (I know these people; they’re very decent and effective public servants.)

the physics of energy and the economy

ourfiniteworld |  There is a standard wrong belief about the physics of energy and the economy; it is the belief we can somehow train the economy to get along without much energy.

In this wrong view, the only physics that is truly relevant is the thermodynamics of oil fields and other types of energy deposits. All of these fields deplete if exploited over time. Furthermore, we know that there are a finite number of these fields. Thus, based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the amount of free energy we will have available in the future will tend to be less than today. This tendency will especially be true after the date when “peak oil” production is reached.

According to this wrong view of energy and the economy, all we need to do is design an economy that uses less energy. We can supposedly do this by increasing efficiency, and by changing the nature of the economy to use a greater proportion of services. If we also add renewables (even if they are expensive) the economy should be able to get along fine with very much less energy.

These wrong views are amazingly widespread. They seem to underlie the widespread hope that the world can reduce its fossil fuel use by 80% between now and 2050 without badly disturbing the economy. The book 2052: A Forecast for the Next 40 Years by Jorgen Randers seems to reflect these views. Even the “Stabilized World Model” presented in the 1972 book The Limits to Growth by Meadow et al. seems to be based on naive assumptions about how much reduction in energy consumption is possible without causing the economy to collapse.

endless corruption as banksters diversified their debt-slave portfolios...,

HuffPo |  Since leaving office, both Bill and Hillary have made millions of dollars giving speeches to banks while being remarkably quiet about prosecution of financial crime, not to mention the Obama administration's appalling record since the crisis - zero prosecutions, bankers in senior regulatory positions, inviting bank CEOs to state dinners dozens of times, et cetera. Now Hillary says she'll rely on Bill for economic policy. Bad idea. The financial sector became a pervasively criminal and economically destabilizing industry largely through Clinton policies, and now Hillary takes their money. When pressed, Democratic insiders concede all this, but then say, well, OK, the financial sector is just too powerful to rein in, but think of what Hillary could do in, say, education.

Let us therefore take a brief tour of the Education Management Corporation (EDMC), one of the most repulsively predatory companies in America. EDMC specialized in exploiting poor people seeking to better themselves educationally. It used fraudulent marketing, luring students into paying high tuition - by taking out student loans signed over to EDMC. EDMC kept all the money, but provided abysmal schooling with high dropout rates. EDMC made huge profits while poor students wasted time, obtained no skills, and dropped out with crushing debts.

EDMC raked in $11 billion this way. Assuming, say, $11,000 per student, EDMC screwed one million poor Americans. Eventually the Justice Department sued, but as usual the settlement was a wrist-slap with no criminal prosecutions, no admission of guilt, and no financial relief to victims.

But why am I telling you all this?

Well, now. Who devised EDMC's strategy, aided by relaxed Federal regulation? Who was EDMC's largest shareholder, buying 41% of the company in 2006?

Goldman Sachs.

Now, Hillary, when you and Bill have your little cocktail parties for the Clinton Foundation in Goldman Sachs offices, when you give your speeches to Goldman Sachs executives, when you chat them up for donations, when you meet them at White House state dinners, just how frequently do you bring this up?

OK, Hillary ain't so great. But could Bernie do any better? Well, he could appoint an Attorney General and a head of the DOJ Criminal Division who haven't spent their careers defending corporate criminals, and then invite the Justice Department to put lots of bankers in jail. (There is overwhelming evidence to justify doing so; for details, read this, or chapter 6 of this.) Bernie could also appoint an Antitrust Division head who would actually investigate the cozy, cartel-like arrangements that pervade finance, and bring major cases against the banks. He could appoint a Federal Reserve chair who would require banks to divest assets and operate safely, plus regulating bankers' compensation so that if you caused a disaster, you couldn't profit from it. All this can be done without a single new law, and both Bill Clinton and Obama could have done them too. 

WTF is wrong with the Bern? - Mr. Miracle would've harpooned that big ass....,

kunstler |  Bernie blew his biggest chance yet to harpoon the white whale known as Hillary when he cast some glancing aspersions on Mz It’s-My-Turn’s special side-job as errand girl of the Too-Big-To-Fail banks. Together, Bill and Hillary racked up $7.7 million on 39 speaking gigs to that gang, with Hillary clocking $1.8 million of the total for eight blabs. When Bernie alluded to this raft of grift, MzIMT retorted, “If you’ve got something to say, say it directly.”

There was a lot Bernie could have said, but didn’t. Such as: what did you tell them that was worth over $200,000 a pop? Whatever it was, it must have made them feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Did it occur to you that this might look bad sometime in the near future? Is there any way that this might not be construed as bribery? And how is some formerly middle-class out-of-work average voter supposed to feel about you getting paid more for 45 minutes of flapping your gums than he or she has earned in the past five years?

Bernie could have found a gentlemanly way to say that directly, but perhaps he experienced a sickening precognitive vision of his jibes being used against the party establishment’s candidate in the fall general election. Of course, if it looked like Hillary was going to get elected, the remaining sound-of-mind in this country might be falling over each other to apply for citizenship in Uruguay.

Beyond all the political histrionics, is there not some broad recognition that whoever occupies the White House in 2017 will preside over a financial debacle like unto nothing in scale that the world has ever seen before? With all the reverberating side effects imaginable among the traumatized nations? Something wicked has been creeping through the stock markets since the year began. The velocity and damage are amping up. Credit default swap spreads are yawning like fault lines in a ‘quake. Bankers are watching their share prices collapse. It’s a wonder that panic has not already broken out.