Michael Hudson is President of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and the chief economic adviser to Rep. Dennis Kucinich. He was on Democracy Now today and gave a lot of interesting information I knew nothing about. Listen to the show but check out his explanation of mistrust abroad, and the subsequent international chaos as foreign countries pulled their money out of the US market. (Link, for show)

And what really triggered a lot of this was the way in which Lehman went bankrupt. The day—and this has not been discussed either in America, but it’s all over the European press.

The day before Lehman went bankrupt, it basically looted all of its foreign offices. For instance, in England, it emptied out the English account of a few billion dollars, leaving the English employees only with the money they—the little cards they had to use in the vending machines. No salaries were paid. The London office was closed down immediately. And the next day, Lehman used the money that it took from London to pay its closest associates to redeem the derivative trades that it had done.

So the English bankers came out and said, in England, we have an ethic: it’s lend to the person, not against the asset. And they’ve come to the conclusion that the American bankers—well, we won’t say “crooks,” but let’s say they’re cronies who deal among themselves and are willing to screw the foreigner.

And this has created such a mistrust abroad that Europeans and Asians and OPEC country investors are simply pulling their money out of the US, because they don’t have a clue as to the solvency of the banks. We’re seeing the end result of the Alan Greenspan deregulatory revolution, where he said markets are all self-regulating. Right now, you’re seeing the markets self-regulate themselves. And the result is a wipeout of the American pyramiding.

Gallery 1988, famous for it’s I am 8-bit show is currently exhibiting and selling re-mixed album covers painted by all your favorite artists (or at least a bunch of popluar ones). You can browse through them here.

Hello folks! The Internet sure is fun! I’m just going to throw a bunch of stuff at you and see what sticks.

1. Banksy!

Modern-day Han Solo, Banksy has a new show up in New York. Here’s its website. And here are more pages with further reading, video, and information.

2. Poster Boy!

Vandal and anti-media artist, Poster Boy is tearing up New York subway posters for good laughs all around.

3. Crystal Head Vodka!

Ghostbuster, Ray Stantz has a long video explaining why you should buy his glass skulls full of yummy alcohol. This isn’t a joke you can buy the stuff.

Here is a great article, by Joseph Stiglitz in Vanity Fair, that plainly and intelligently makes sense of the free-market ideological insanity that fucked up our economy. Of course the consequences will fall not on the sinister little-Eichmanns who marched us down this cruel and selfish path, but instead  on the backs of the abused taxpayers, and of course, as always, the poor.

In the midst of this confusion, perhaps only a good rousing dose of public hatred will calm the puzzled brainwashed victims indoctrinated in a system that has married handouts to the slick rich with good ol’ boy patriotism. Perhaps, McCain and Palin will cringe a little more visibly if the snarling dogs they’re pushing begin to bite.

Read the whole thing, there is too much to quote: (link)

How Did We Get into This Mess?

A unique combination of ideology, special-interest pressure, populist politics, bad economics, and sheer incompetence has brought us to our present condition.

Ideology proclaimed that markets were always good and government always bad… While Bush’s ideology led him to underestimate the importance of government, it also led him to underestimate the limitations of markets. We learned from the Depression that markets are not self-adjusting—at least, not in a time frame that matters to living people…

Let me venture an analogy from biology: A patient arrives at a hospital in serious condition. Now, it may be that the patient has simply fallen victim to one of those debilitating ailments that go around from time to time and can be cured by a massive dose of antibiotics. In this case we have a macro problem with a macro solution. But it could instead be that the patient is suffering from a decade of serious abuse—smoking, drinking, overeating, lack of exercise, a fondness for crystal meth—and that it has not only taken a catastrophic toll but also left him open to opportunistic infections of every kind. In other words, a buildup of micro problems has led to a macro problem, and no cure is possible without addressing the underlying issues. The American economy today is a patient of the second kind…

With massive problems in 1987 (remember Black Friday, when stock markets plunged almost 25 percent), 1989 (the savings-and-loan debacle), 1997 (the East Asia financial crisis), 1998 (the bailout of Long Term Capital Management), and 2001–02 (the collapses of Enron and WorldCom), one might think there would be more skepticism about the wisdom of leaving markets to themselves.

Hitchens explains how the US is operating as a quasi-banana republic. I like his pissed-off overly wordy ranting. (here)

Remember the scene at the end of Peter Pan, where the children are told that, if they don’t shout out aloud that they all believe in fairies, then Tinker Bell’s gonna fucking die? That’s what the fall of 2008 was like, and quite a fall it was, at that…

Now ask yourself another question. Has anybody resigned, from either the public or the private sectors (overlapping so lavishly as they now do)? Has anybody even offered to resign? Have you heard anybody in authority apologize, as in: “So very sorry about your savings and pensions and homes and college funds, and I feel personally rotten about it”? Have you even heard the question being posed? O.K., then, has anybody been fired? Any regulator, any supervisor, any runaway would-be golden-parachute artist? Anyone responsible for smugly putting the word “derivative” like a virus into the system? To ask the question is to answer it.

I wish I had more “life skills” and less “homed work” so I could make more “neat things.” A few projects that have caught my eye lately include learning some things to do with an old computer, how to crochet or knit funny little slippers, and how to make an old game boy into a 4-oscillator opto-theremin.

I’m going to start a new bi-weekly post called Paranoid’s Corner.

Here are 2 scary stories: (via Slashdot)

Washington Post:

“The Maryland State Police classified 53 nonviolent activists as terrorists and entered their names and personal information into state and federal databases that track terrorism suspects, the state police chief acknowledged yesterday. The police also entered the activists’ names into the federal Washington-Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area database, which tracks suspected terrorists. One well-known antiwar activist from Baltimore, Max Obuszewski, was singled out in the intelligence logs released by the ACLU, which described a ‘primary crime’ of ‘terrorism-anti-government’ and a ’secondary crime’ of ‘terrorism-anti-war protesters.’”

–

The Wall Street Journal:

reported Wednesday that the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) National Applications Office (NAO) “will proceed with the first phase of a controversial satellite-surveillance program, even though an independent review found the department hasn’t yet ensured the program will comply with privacy laws.” NAO will coordinate how domestic law enforcement and “disaster relief” agencies such as FEMA use satellite imagery intelligence (IMINT) generated by U.S. spy satellites. Based on available evidence, hard to come by since these programs are classified “above top secret,” the technological power of these military assets are truly terrifying.”

The candidates emphasized nuclear power as a solution to climate change in the debates tonight. Senator John McCain said of global warming, “The best way of fixing it? Nuclear power.” As is to be expected, McCain and Obama both receive significant donations from the Nuclear Industry.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, employees at Exelon have given Obama more than $180,000 in campaign contributions. (VIA a great NPR show : link)

According to the Center for Responsive Politics Center, John McCain received $72,600 in campaign contributions from the nuclear power industry between 1997 and 2002. (link)

I don’t know exactly what to think of this whole debate, although I certainly lean anti-nuclear. Here is a site that breaks the myths against nuclear (link), and here is another that breaks the myths for nuclear (link). The reason below says nuclear power cannot be the only solution to climate change, although it seems it will certainly be a player with so much insider pressure. However, because it’ll inevitably be a player, I think wind / solar desperately needs the cheerleaders and defenders right now.

Many energy experts have run the numbers on just how many nuclear power plants would have to be constructed between now and 2050 just to avert even a tenth or so of the projected increase in emissions of carbon dioxide coming from expanding use of coal in that span.

According to analysis by Professors Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow of Princeton University, the world, in the end, would need to build about 880 nuclear plants – twice the number operating worldwide today – by 2050 just to avoid that small fraction of projected emissions.

So nuclear power, even in a best case, is only likely to be a small fraction of the long-term effort to curb emissions of carbon dioxide. (link)

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu are two of China’s most controversial artists, renown for working with extreme materials such as human fat tissue, live animals, and baby cadavers to deal with issues of perception, death, and the human condition.

In Old Person’s Home Sun & Peng present a shocking scene of an even more grotesque kind. Hilariously wicked, their satirical models of decrepit OAPS look suspiciously familiar to world leaders, long crippled and impotent, left to battle it out in true geriatric style. Placed in electric wheelchairs, the withered, toothless, senile, and drooling, are set on a collision course for harmless ‘skirmish’ as they roll about the gallery at snail’s pace, crashing into each other at random in a grizzly parody of the U.N.dead. (link)

Their website (with more pictures) is here : (link)

John McCain’s rabid crowd

Jim Cramer says pull your money out of the market

(link) (Via Gawker)

Elisabeth Hasselbeck, and people like her, make me sad

(link) (via Jezebel)

I love this trailer so much. It tries to tell a story with cutup audio clips.

Everyone I respect in journalism and politics says this stinks. However, I keep hearing (and saying), “I just don’t understand whats going on.” I think its becoming more and more clear, that the bailout is another sad rip-off.

Bernie Sanders:

This bill does not effectively address the issue of what the taxpayers of our country will actually own after they invest hundreds of billions of dollars in toxic assets. This bill does not effectively address the issue of oversight. This bill does not effectively deal with the issue of foreclosures. This bill does not effectively deal with the issue of executive compensation and golden parachutes. Under this bill, the CEOs and the Wall Street insiders will still, with a little bit of imagination, continue to make out like bandits.

Bill Moyers:

On Monday, the people rose up and Congress backed down, sending the bailout to defeat. But then the lobbyists rushed in with a brinks truck of bribes, and this afternoon Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson got $700 billion dollars to save the system that his crowd on Wall Street had exploited to enrich themselves while plunging the country to the edge of catastrophe.

The bailout offers almost no help for homeowners, or equity for taxpayers in banks that are being thrown a lifeline…it turns our Secretary of the Treasury into Caesar Augustus and plunders democracy with tax breaks for Hollywood studios, Samoan sweat shops, Alaskan fishermen, rum merchants, makers of toy arrows and giveaways to big oil. All this on the very day the government reports that another 160,000 people lost their jobs last month — that’s the most in five and a half years.

No wonder that Congress today resembled Monty Python’s ministry of silly walks — one palm open to the lobbyists, the other holding their nose against the stinking odor of a bill everyone said they didn’t want — while rushing for the airport to go home and tell the voters how important it is for them to be re-elected — so they can come back and clean up the mess they just made.

( Watch / Listen : here)