Labels: And yes I DO take it personally, bloggers
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posted by profmarcus at
12/20/2009
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Poland: Auschwitz 'Arbeit Macht Frei' sign stolen
The Nazis' infamous iron sign declaring "Arbeit Macht Frei" — German for "Work Sets You Free" — was stolen Friday from the entrance of the former Auschwitz death camp, Polish police said.
The 5-meter-long (16-foot-long), 40-kilogram (90-pound) iron sign at the Holocaust memorial site in southern Poland was unscrewed on one side and torn off on the other, police spokeswoman Katarzyna Padlo said.
The theft from the entrance to the camp — where more than 1 million people, mostly Jews, died during World War II — brought condemnation worldwide.
Labels: Arbeit Macht Frei, Auschwitz, death camps, Germany, holocaust, Poland
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
12/18/2009
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Labels: common good, elites, super-rich
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
12/16/2009
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[Ben Bernanke's] creative leadership helped ensure that 2009 was a period of weak recovery rather than catastrophic depression, and he still wields unrivaled power over our money, our jobs, our savings and our national future. The decisions he has made, and those he has yet to make, will shape the path of our prosperity, the direction of our politics and our relationship to the world.
Labels: Ben Bernanke, common good, elites, Federal Reserve System, recession, super-rich, Time Magazine, Wall Street
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
12/16/2009
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As Goldman Thrives,
Some Say an Ethos Has Faded
...Mr. Blankfein has built a money machine that, while it still values its customers, culture and reputation, puts profits above all.
Interviews with nearly 20 current and former Goldman partners paint a portrait of a bank driven by hard-charging traders like Mr. Blankfein, who wager vast sums in world markets in hopes of quick profits. Discreet bankers who give advice to corporate clients and help them raise capital — once a major source of earnings for Goldman — have been eclipsed, these people said.
Mr. Blankfein is now presiding over one of the richest periods in the bank’s 140-year history. Mr. Blankfein has accelerated a decade-long decline of Goldman’s old partnership ethos, which was built around the principle that its bankers and traders can do well — indeed, very well — while putting their customers first, former partners said.
Some Goldman alumni worry that Mr. Blankfein is jeopardizing the culture of success that defined the bank for much of its modern history. They wonder if Goldman will become, as one former partner put it, “just like every other bank on Wall Street” — that is, focused on short-term profits rather than long-term gains.
Labels: bailout, banksters, Goldman Sachs, greed, Lloyd Blankfein, profiteers, Wall Street
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
12/16/2009
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The federal government quietly agreed to forgo billions of dollars in potential tax payments from Citigroup as part of the deal announced this week to wean the company from the massive taxpayer bailout that helped it survive the financial crisis.
The Internal Revenue Service on Friday issued an exception to longstanding tax rules for the benefit of Citigroup and the few other companies partially owned by the government. As a result, Citigroup will be allowed to retain $38 billion in tax breaks that otherwise would decline in value when the government sells its stake to private investors.
While the Obama administration has said taxpayers likely will profit from the sale of the Citigroup shares, accounting experts said the lost tax revenue could easily outstrip those profits.
Labels: banksters, Citigroup, Internal Revenue Service, Obama administration, taxes
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
12/15/2009
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Impunity or Accountability
In case after case, the Obama administration has echoed — and in some instances exceeded — Bush-era claims designed to cover up despicable acts committed in the name of fighting terrorism and avoiding accountability for the responsible officials. Last month, for example, the Justice Department filed a brief in the Supreme Court opposing review of another lawsuit by torture victims. The brief argued that there was no basis for claims by former detainees at Guantánamo Bay, since at the time of their detention, between 2002 and 2004, it was not firmly established that their treatment was illegal.
That would be an outrageous argument coming from any administration. But it is even more disappointing coming from one that has said torture is clearly illegal. “The Bush administration constructed a legal framework for torture,” observes Jameel Jaffer, who leads the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, “but the Obama administration is constructing a legal framework for impunity.”
Labels: ACLU, Bush Administration, Department of Justice, Guantánamo, impunity, Obama administration, torture
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
12/15/2009
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Citigroup’s planned exit from the bailout — like Bank of America’s earlier this month — would be welcome if the banks were the picture of health. But their main motive is to get out from under the bailout’s pay caps and other restraints. The Treasury Department’s approval is a grim reminder of the political power of the banks, even as the economy they did so much to damage continues to struggle.
Mr. Obama was right when he said the banks owe “an extraordinary commitment” to taxpayers, and he got some promises to lend more. But that would have been more convincing if the administration had held the banks’ feet to the fire in the first place and had not agreed so quickly to freeing them from the bailout restraints. The truth is that the taxpayers are still very much on the hook for a banking system that is shaping up to be much riskier than the one that led to disaster.
Big bank profits, for instance, still come mostly courtesy of taxpayers. Their trading earnings are financed by more than a trillion dollars’ worth of cheap loans from the Federal Reserve, for which some of their most noxious assets are collateral. They benefit from immense federal loan guarantees, but they are not lending much. Lending to business, notably, is very tight.
What profits the banks make come mostly from trading. Many big banks are happy to depend on the lifeline from the Fed and hang onto their toxic assets hoping for a rebound in prices. And the whole system has grown more concentrated. Bank of America was considered too big to fail before the meltdown. Since then, it has acquired Merrill Lynch. Wells Fargo took over Wachovia. And JPMorgan Chase gobbled up Bear Stearns.
If the goal is to reduce the number of huge banks that taxpayers must rescue at any cost, the nation is moving in the wrong direction. The growth of the biggest banks ensures that the next bailout will have to be even bigger. These banks will be more likely to take on excessive risk because they have the implicit assurance of rescue.
More than half of the nation’s unemployed workers have borrowed money from friends or relatives since losing their jobs. An equal number have cut back on doctor visits or medical treatments because they are out of work.
Almost half have suffered from depression or anxiety. About 4 in 10 parents have noticed behavioral changes in their children that they attribute to their difficulties in finding work.
Joblessness has wreaked financial and emotional havoc on the lives of many of those out of work, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll of unemployed adults, causing major life changes, mental health issues and trouble maintaining even basic necessities.
Labels: bailout, banksters, Citigroup, depression, Federal Reserve System, JPMorgan Chase, recession, TARP, unemployment, Wells Fargo
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
12/15/2009
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Oil-rich Abu Dhabi on Monday provided $10 billion to help pay off some of the debts of an ailing property company owned by the government of neighboring Dubai, at least temporarily averting a crisis over the finances of the high-flying desert sheikhdom.
Dubai "could well be the tip of the iceberg in terms of over-leveraged nations," analysts at India's HDFC Bank wrote in a report, as indicated by recent fears about a possible Greek default.
[...]
"We are in completely uncharted territory" that could redefine the relationship between Western investors and the government-backed companies often set up to develop projects here and in other emerging markets, said Chavan Bhogaita, head of credit research at the National Bank of Abu Dhabi.
[...]
These are nations where the distinctions between government, ruling family and government-owned entities are often difficult to discern, where clan ties can help acquire virtually open-ended credit, and where bankruptcy and finance laws are not well tested.
In Dubai's case, "one could in fact argue that the state is its corporations," Woertz wrote.
Housing prices have fallen nearly 50 percent so far this year, putting Dubai below Estonia for the biggest decline, according to a recent report by the London-based Knight Frank real estate group.
Labels: Abu Dhabi, bailout, banksters, Dubai, elites, super-rich, United Arab Emirates
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
12/14/2009
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Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not "set them free" but instead further demoralize them? Has such a demoralization happened in the United States?
Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?
[M]ost U.S. citizens are broken by financial fears. There is potential legal debt if we speak out against a powerful authority, and all kinds of other debt if we do not comply on the job. Young people are broken by college-loan debts and fear of having no health insurance.
[...]
Schools are routinely places where kids -- through fear -- learn to comply to authorities for whom they often have no respect, and to regurgitate material they often find meaningless. [...]
Today, U.S. colleges and universities have increasingly become places where young people are merely acquiring degree credentials -- badges of compliance for corporate employers -- in exchange for learning to accept bureaucratic domination and enslaving debt.
[T]elevision helps create all eight conditions for breaking a population. [...]
(1) occupies people so that they don't know themselves -- and what a human being is;
(2) separates people from one another;
(3) creates sensory deprivation;
(4) occupies the mind and fills the brain with prearranged experience and thought;
(5) encourages drug use to dampen dissatisfaction (while TV itself produces a drug-like effect, this was compounded in 1997 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration relaxing the rules of prescription-drug advertising);
(6) centralizes knowledge and information;
(7) eliminates or "museumizes" other cultures to eliminate comparisons; and
(8) redefines happiness and the meaning of life.
Labels: cultural imperatives, indoctrination, learned helplessness, oppression, propaganda, totalitarian democracy
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
12/13/2009
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US Refuses to Allow UN Inspectors to Investigate its WMDs
We Have a Nobel Peace President Who Won't Ban Land Mines
President Obama 'creating torture impunity'
Labels: Barack Obama, change, hope, hypocrisy, walking the talk
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
12/12/2009
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The Reason for 15 Million Unemployed:
Poor Thinking at the Top
The United States has more than 15 million people unemployed. This is not their fault. It is the fault of really bad policy decisions by people who get paid more than almost all of the unemployed ever did or ever will. The failure of economic policymakers to recognize and attack an $8 trillion housing bubble led to the downturn. The continuing failure of economic policymakers to think creatively is why 15 million people remain unemployed.
Labels: banksters, elites, financial coup d’etat, housing market, incompetence, super-rich, unemployment
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
12/11/2009
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Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, during last week's marathon set of hearings on President Obama's new strategy in that war, gave two examples of forthrightness that are worth further examination: a discussion of trouble with expanding the workforce of the U.S. Agency for International Development in Afghanistan, and a tough look at how U.S. aid money is being slipped into the hands of the Taliban.
Labels: Afghanistan, Defense Department, economic development, Hillary Clinton, military contractors, poverty, State Department, Taliban, USAID
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
12/11/2009
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Barack Obama’s faux populism is beginning to grate, and when yet another one of those “we the people” e-mails from the president landed on my screen as I was fishing around for a column subject, I came unglued. It is one thing to rob us blind by rewarding the power elite that created our problems but quite another to sugarcoat it in the rhetoric of a David taking on those Goliaths.
In each of the three most important areas of policy with which he has dealt, Obama speaks in the voice of the little people’s champion, but his actions cater fully to the demands of the most powerful economic interests.
With his escalation of the war in Afghanistan, he has given the military-industrial complex an excuse for the United States to carry on in spending more on defense than the rest of the world combined, without a credible military adversary in sight. His response to the banking meltdown was to continue George W. Bush’s massive giveaway of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street, and his health care reform has all the earmarks of a boondoggle for the medical industry profiteers.
Labels: Afghanistan, bailout, Barack Obama, corporate military industrial government complex, endless war, George Bush, health care, secret detention, surveillance, torture, Wall Street
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
12/11/2009
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Labels: Atmospheric Optics, sundogs
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
12/10/2009
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A mysterious giant spiral of light that dominated the sky over Norway [yesterday] morning has stunned experts — who believe the space spectacle is an entirely new astral phenomenon.
Thousands of awe-struck Norwegians bombarded the Meteorological Institute to ask what the incredible light — that could be seen in the pre-dawn sky for hundreds of miles — could possibly be.
[...]
Witnesses across Norway, who first glimpsed the space show at 8.45am, all described seeing a spinning 'Catherine wheel-style' spiral of white light, centred around a bright moon-like star.
A blue "streaming tail" appeared to anchor the spiral to earth, before the light "exploded" into a rotating ring of white fire.
The spiral spectacle — which lasted for two minutes — was seen by vast swathes of the Scandinavian country's almost five million population, with sightings as far north as Finnmark to Trondelag in the south.
Totto Eriksen, from Tromso, in northern Norway, was one of the thousands who bombarded Norwegian newspapers with sightings — after nearly crashing his car on spotting the spiral overhead.
He said: "I was driving my daughter to school when this light spun and exploded in the sky.
"We saw it from the Inner Harbour in Tromso. It looked like a rocket that spun around and around - and then went diagonally across the heavens.
"It looked like the moon was coming over the mountain - but then turned into something totally different.
"People just stopped and stared on the pier - it was like something from a Hollywood movie."
Labels: astronomical phenomenon, Norway, UFO
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
12/10/2009
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Moving to quell the uproar over the return of big paydays on Wall Street, Goldman Sachs announced on Thursday that its top executives would forgo cash bonuses this year and that it would give shareholders a say in determining compensation.
With a resurgent Goldman set to award billions of dollars in bonuses — a trove that could rival the record payouts of the bubble years — the bank said that its 30 most-senior executives would be paid in the form of a special stock, rather than in cash. Goldman said that it would also let its shareholders vote on its executives’ pay, although the decision would be nonbinding.
Labels: elites, executive bonuses, executive compensation, Goldman Sachs, super-rich
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
12/10/2009
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In becoming only the third sitting American president to receive the Nobel prize for peace, Mr. Obama presented himself as a wartime leader...
He said that others more deserved the award, noting his “accomplishments are slight,” but he accepted the prize by endorsing a strong view of American exceptionalism.
“Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this,” Mr. Obama said. “The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.”
Barack Obama, the US president, has received the Nobel Peace Prize at a ceremony in Oslo - days after he ordered an escalation of US involvement in the war in Afghanistan.
In making Obama the third sitting US President to win the award, the Norwegian Nobel Committee praised Obama's co-operative approach to global issues.
But many critics say that Obama's resume is too thin to stand scrutiny with other Nobel peace laureates.
And for many Afghans, Obama's strategy of even more troops does not fit into their vision of what will bring peace.
The Nobel Committee awarded the 2009 Peace Prize to the very person who dropped the most bombs and killed the most poor people on the planet during that year. The same guy who started a new war in Pakistan, beefed up the ongoing war in Afghanistan, and continues to threaten Iran with attack unless Iran cops to phony US-Israeli charges of secret nuclear weapons facilities. It's weapons of mass destruction all over again.
[H]ere are the things Obama can do to redeem his prize.
1. Get out of Iraq on schedule. We can't stop their low-intensity conflicts, and they are more likely to compromise with each other if we are not there.
2. Resist calls for Iran to be bombed. Such a raid would guarantee that Iran would start a crash program to develop a nuclear weapon, and there would be no way to stop it short of full-scale war.
3. Stop allowing the CIA to operate drones with which to assassinate people. It is illegal and shameful. The US military must be in charge of defending the country by force or we are a police state.
4. Get the Palestinians a state by the end of 2011, even if by unilateral recognition. Palestinian statelessness is the biggest human rights scandal in the world, since citizenship is the right to have rights. This step alone would solve the bulk of US problems in the Arab world and would deal a deadlier blow to al-Qaeda than capturing Bin Laden.
5. Stick to the plan of beginning a US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in summer 2011. Karzai and the generals will attempt to embroil us in a decades-long quagmire. No one will remember his Nobel peace prize if President Obama lets that happen.
Labels: Afghanistan, Al Jazeera, Barack Obama, CIA, endless war, Iran war planning, Iraq, Joe Bageant, Juan Cole, Nobel Peace Prize, Robert Fisk
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
12/10/2009
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posted by profmarcus at
12/09/2009
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Aljazeera notes that some US media outlets did not bother to cover these attacks in Iraq, and wonders if the story will return. I think the answer depends on the journalistic integrity of the outlet. For many, the answer will be no. Many US media are nationalist media, and cover stories having to do with US national projects. Americans have already decided that Iraq was a mistake, and they know the US military is leaving, and so what happens there is not "news" as much of the corporate media defines it (i.e. a story that generates profits because of wide public interest in it).
With the US ramping up its war in Afghanistan, the Obama administration has pledged to get its combat troops out of Iraq by the deadline in under nine months.
But Tuesday's string of attacks has underlined concerns over shortcomings in Iraqi security ahead of the planned withdrawal.
The US condemned the attacks in Baghdad but maintained that - despite the violence - Iraqi leaders who passed an election law earlier this week are moving the country in the right direction.
Labels: Afghanistan, Al Jazeera, corporate media, corporatocracy, Iraq, Iraq bombing, Juan Cole, Obama administration
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
12/09/2009
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