News Stories

[Decagon]

Originally Posted by SaintessHeart

Food is still food, yeah. But if the dog is a friend of a blind man being abducted for food, then that is the real issue.

The thing is that in China, dogs are not bred for food, they are abducted from their owners for food. The place is chaos.

I'd think that such a pragmatic economist such as yourself would see the benefit in such harvesting of strays that other countries spend public money and private donations trying to control through capture, fixings, and animal facilities . The article that was linked says around 10 million dogs are slaughtered and consumed every year. Do you honestly believe that there are even that many easily accessible house pets to be spirited away?

[DonQuigleone]

Originally Posted by Decagon

The article that was linked says around 10 million dogs are slaughtered and consumed every year. Do you honestly believe that there are even that many easily accessible house pets to be spirited away?

In China, a country of 1.3 billion people? I'd believe it...

Though, the whole thing kinda reminds me of why we don't eat rabbit here anymore...

Can't be eating cute fluffy animals now, can we?

[ganbaru]

Originally Posted by DonQuigleone

Though, the whole thing kinda reminds me of why we don't eat rabbit here anymore...

Can't be eating cute fluffy animals now, can we?

If you would go to a ''french'' ( or even a ''pseudo french'' )restaurant, you could probably find rabbit on the menu. It considered as a ''game'' meat like quail and duck, at least here .

[Mr. DJ]

Originally Posted by flying ^

it turns out this adult baby is getting taxpayer-funded benefits!

http://www.chicagonow.com/blogs/publ...ring-baby.html

my head hurts...

[DonQuigleone]

Originally Posted by ganbaru

If you would go to a ''french'' ( or even a ''pseudo french'' )restaurant, you could probably find rabbit on the menu. It considered as a ''game'' meat like quail and duck, at least here .

Yeah, I heard that, but the french eat everything .

Rabbit used to be eaten here very often, as a cheap meat, but I think myxomotosis combined with increased usage as pets led to it's decline. Difficult to eat them when the only rabbits you see are pets, and they're not rolicking around the countryside waiting to be captured.

[Xellos-_^]

Originally Posted by DonQuigleone

In China, a country of 1.3 billion people? I'd believe it...

Though, the whole thing kinda reminds me of why we don't eat rabbit here anymore...

Can't be eating cute fluffy animals now, can we?

eating rabbit is on the raise here in the US. still a very small percentage but it is raising.

[ganbaru]

Originally Posted by DonQuigleone

Rabbit used to be eaten here very often, as a cheap meat, but I think myxomotosis combined with increased usage as pets led to it's decline. Difficult to eat them when the only rabbits you see are pets, and they're not rolicking around the countryside waiting to be captured.

As a cook, I can tell you than I never used ''wild'' meat, it would be illegal here anyway: now, even rabbits and quails than are considered as game are produced on farm. The rabbit than the restaurant would serve you would be comming from the countryside anyway.

[Ithekro]

Rabbits as food reduced so much that they removed the "Rabbit Raising Merit Badge" from the list entirely for the Boy Scouts of America in the early 1990s.

[DonQuigleone]

Originally Posted by ganbaru

As a cook, I can tell you than I never used ''wild'' meat, it would be illegal here anyway: now, even rabbits and quails than are considered as game are produced on farm. The rabbit than the restaurant would serve you would be comming from the countryside anyway.

"Wild" rabbit meat was commonly used in Ireland prior to the onset of Myxomotosis, which wiped out most of Ireland's rabbit population. I see nothing wrong with eating wild meat per se.

[SaintessHeart]

Originally Posted by Decagon

I'd think that such a pragmatic economist such as yourself would see the benefit in such harvesting of strays that other countries spend public money and private donations trying to control through capture, fixings, and animal facilities . The article that was linked says around 10 million dogs are slaughtered and consumed every year. Do you honestly believe that there are even that many easily accessible house pets to be spirited away?

Like I said, if it is not abducted, I am fine with eating it. If it is bred for food, I am fine too.

But China's population is 1.3 billion - 10 million as compared to it is 1 out of 130 people, so I think dognapping may factor into a significant portion of that.

As for strays? Eating them is dangerous, it spread urban diseases!

[ganbaru]

Originally Posted by SaintessHeart

As for strays? Eating them is dangerous, it spread urban diseases!

Don't forget about all thoses food related scandal. Quality and salubrity don't seem to be a major consern for some...

UK training Saudi forces used to crush Arab spring
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011...g-saudi-troops

In response to questions made under the Freedom of Information Act, the Ministry of Defence has confirmed that British personnel regularly run courses for the national guard in "weapons, fieldcraft and general military skills training, as well as incident handling, bomb disposal, search, public order and sniper training". The courses are organised through the British Military Mission to the Saudi Arabian National Guard, an obscure unit that consists of 11 British army personnel under the command of a brigadier

I wouldn't be surprised if some of those '' 11 British army personnels'' where from the SAS.

[SaintessHeart]

Originally Posted by ganbaru

Don't forget about all thoses food related scandal. Quality and salubrity don't seem to be a major consern for some...

If you asked me, I would say it is a poverty issue where the poor only cared about food being edible rather than safe, just like the reports of how some in India eat their own excrement to survive.

Originally Posted by DonQuigleone

Can't be eating cute fluffy animals now, can we?

Well, we can shave them first. Then we can eat them because they aren't fluffy anymore!

UK training Saudi forces used to crush Arab spring
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011...g-saudi-troops

I wouldn't be surprised if some of those '' 11 British army personnels'' where from the SAS.

Well, the British trained the troops to defend their country against extremism. But the Saudi's definition of "extremism" differed from that of the Brits - instead of terrorist groups like the Al-Qaeda, it extends to "anyone threatening the right of rule of the Saudi family and their affiliated political elements".

Their idea of "public safety" are those that of their interests, not the opinion and ideas of the younger generation. There is an Arab foreign student I know (weird guy, goes out to have fun with us, but skips the night drinking party everytime?) who was rather supportive of the fact that the rest of the world is going to abandon SA after oil runs out from its lands, and proposed that it maintains a "gigantic solar farm" in the desert stretches so it can still export energy in the future, in the form of batteries.

His ideas have merit, and so does the many ideas of the youth living there. But I seriously doubt anyone is listening.

EDIT :

Reagan insider: GOP destroyed U.S. economy, Part 2

Spoiler for LONG:

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — “My G.O.P. destroyed the U.S. economy.” Yes, that is exactly what David Stockman, President Ronald Reagan’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece. Not “is destroying,” the GOP has “destroyed” the U.S. economy, setting up an “American Apocalypse.” And it’s getting worse.

Update: With the 2012 election lineup up for grabs, Stockman may be the GOP’s best candidate for president. A hero in American politics, he’s a rare no-B.S. truth-teller who’s been delivering the same message since his 1986 “Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed,” an expose written after leaving the White House.

Jonathan Weisman reports the decision by Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels to not enter the 2012 presidential race has allowed other candidates and potential candidates to grab some of the spotlight.

Better yet, he’s the kind of fighter who could easily go the distance with Obama on the key issues that will dominate the 2012 election: the economy, employment, interest rates, entitlements, war budgets, the devalued dollar, our rapidly collapsing monetary system, another meltdown.

Last fall, Stockman’s hard-hitting op-ed was loaded with jabs like: “If there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt” screams “for austerity and sacrifice,” instead, the GOP insisted “the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.” Obama blinked, pulled his punch. Let’s get both in the ring. See Paul B. Farrell’s ‘Reagan insider: GOP destroyed U.S. economy.’

Stockman’s latest attack proves he’s still a powerful fighter. Recently, Reason magazine’s editor-in-chief Nick Gillespie did a long interview with Stockman. The title builds on the book: “The Triumph of Politics Over Economics.” But instead of just looking back at the failure of a self-destructive Reaganomics, an older and wiser Stockman focuses us on the paradigm shift that’s destroying America from within.
Warning: GOP’s self-destructive capitalism wrecking U.S. economy

In this new “Triumph of Politics Over Economics” we see America at a crossroads, struggling to redefine itself. Politicians have become the new economists. Politicians and their big money backers and lobbyists now rule the American economy like banana-republic dictators. Stockman calls this corrupt system the new “crony capitalism.” The old capitalist economics that made America the world’s greatest superpower no longer exist.

Today, professional economists are no more than hired guns for politicians with myopic ideologies and huge bankrolls that make it easy to justify lying, cheating and stealing from investors, workers, consumers, savers and taxpayers. Capitalism has morphed into a monopoly ruled by politicians who are serving a wealthy elite. Competition is a joke. Democracy is a farce. “We the People” no longer exists.

Stockman has seen all of it. And he knows that while his message hasn’t stopped the “GOP from destroying the U.S. economy,” the coming crisis will trigger another megacrash, bigger than the dot-com crash and subprime meltdown combined.

Indeed, Stockman warns of an inevitability: Another major crisis is necessary to wake up Wall Street and Washington to the fact that Reaganomics really is destroying America from within. We dissected the Stockman-Gillespie interview several times, gleaning 10 principled facts seen fueling the political drama surrounding the 2012 elections and challenging all Americans at this historic turning point, facts demanding we wake up, before it’s too late:

1. Politicians are addicts, can’t stop spending America’s future

Reagan’s big government policies “led to the utter failure of spending control.” Today America is “living way beyond our means,” and yet politicians are incapable of thinking past the next election. “They hear the squeaky wheel, and they respond. … money has become such a massive force in the electoral process” making politicians “slaves” to big money and special-interest lobbyists.

2. Cutting taxes: a cruel joke, defers big tax burden onto kids

“In pure philosophy, lower tax rates would be better.” But when we got a “Republican government in the Bush era … nothing was cut. Everything was ratified. In fact, they added to Medicare through the drug benefit.” Our “welfare state that seems immutable politically … you’re kidding yourself if you think cutting taxes today is really cutting taxes. We’re simply deferring massive tax increases into the future, unfairly and immorally putting huge debt burdens on future generations.” Tax-cutting is a “massive Christmas tree of special-interest tax benefits and loopholes … reducing the revenue” and “almost no spending was cut, and the defense budget soared out of control.”

3. Social Security is a myth: Forget 2036, there’s no money today

“The combination of Medicare and Social Security” is “the heart of the budget, and the top one-third of that goes to retirees who have private assets, private pensions, other sources of income. They shouldn’t be dependent on the government … and there really is no trust fund there — that’s all fiscal mythology … that money wasn’t saved or hived … it was spent on cotton subsidies and bribes to warlords in Afghanistan. The fact is, this is simply an intergenerational transfer program. … social insurance is a myth,” that bank is empty.

4. Reaganomics loves war: Military spending is off the table

“Reagan was utterly uninterested in any detail of the defense budget, of any of the claims for dollars made by the Pentagon,” says Stockman in a passage that sounds like the GOP’s policy in 2011. “He gave them a blank check, without question, and that … ballooned spending just as we were massively reducing the revenue” and “it created an enormous political impasse. … Spending increases were so huge in defense that it became almost impossible to get anybody to … go after the food-stamp program or school lunches, when you’re just showering tens of billions of dollars on ammunition accounts and spare parts replacements and a massive expansion of the Navy.” Or wasting another “hundred billion dollars on wars of occupation in places that are the ends of the earth.”

5. Gross leadership failure: clueless ex-Goldman CEO at Treasury

“[Henry] Paulson frankly is the most incompetent, reckless secretary of the Treasury that we’ve had in modern history, if ever. He had no schooling in public policy, he had no schooling in the longer-term issues of fiscal management, or even what sound money is all about.” When “the crisis metastasized in” 2008 Paulson got “panicked calls from his buddies on Wall Street who were seeing their pyramids of debt coming crashing down.” And when Goldman Sachs’ stock cratered, Paulson really panicked. “There was no philosophy behind it; there was never an analysis done.” Driven by a clear conflict of interest, he wanted to protect the $600 million fortune he built at Goldman, while saving his Wall Street buddies from bankruptcy. So Paulson failed the American people.

6. Bank bailouts: Bad economics now accelerating America’s decline

Paulson’s panicky failure “was a profound moment in political history in September 2008, … Even the House Republicans knew in their better judgment that it was a terrible idea, and they voted initially against it.” In fact, “the only panic that occurred was in” Paulson’s panicky mind. “Big pyramids of debt on Wall Street were coming crashing down. Had we allowed nature to take its course, maybe Goldman Sachs stock would have gone down to $10. But that’s their problem and that’s the problem of speculators who owned the stock, not a systemic problem for the economy.” Instead, Paulson’s panic made matters worse.

7. In a “free market,” Wall Street banks must be free to fail

“The fundamental principle of free-market capitalism is that you have to be free to fail as well as succeed,” but “when you go in the opposite direction and socialize losses and privatize gains, you will destroy” our system of capitalism. Why? Because moral hazard encourages new “reckless risk taking, misallocation of capital.”

8. Today’s “crony capitalism” is destroying our faith in America

Wall Street is killing trust in the economy: “Once the broader public sees that the cronies of capitalism are bailed out by their friends in Washington or the Fed, why should they believe that the system we have is fair or is working in their interest? It’s just politicizing even further the economy and suffocating the only hope that we have for real prosperity.”

9. Derivatives speculation: Wall Street gambles in shady casinos

Gold was “at the heart of it a fixed exchange rate system” before 1971 obligating “each country to settle its accounts at the end of every year … Chronic payments deficits and you were going to… lose your monetary reserves.” But when we “went to pure fiat money … financial volatility and instability” created a “massive speculative casino … Today probably 99% of currency futures are for speculation and 1% might be for legitimate trade hedging. That’s the problem we have in the whole financial system today.”

10. Too-greedy-to-fail banks are creating another bigger meltdown

Before the crisis hit in 2007, “the top four banks in this country had $5 trillion of assets combined. After the whole crisis of too-big-to-fail and all of the bailouts, today the top four banks have $7 trillion of asset footings.” Simultaneously, fear has “been generated on Main Street, and the appropriate antipathy that’s developed towards the crony-capitalist policy of bailing out anybody that’s big and strong like GM and Goldman Sachs” has created a new “generation of workers that’s going to be turned into tax slaves … That will have to change … but it will only change when the crisis comes … it’s unavoidable.”

Yes unavoidable: American capitalism is so corrupted that change is impossible without a megameltdown, a historic paradigm shift with an inevitable collapse. Stockman knows well the political process is manipulated by a wealthy elite that cares nothing of the people, nothing of Main Street, nothing of the future of America. They care only for themselves.

Money has corrupted our political system. We’ve lost our moral compass. “The Triumph of Politics Over Economics” is a self-destructing ideology. Money has driven all politicians into a bizarre conspiracy that’s destroying America from within. And nothing can stop this overarching historical cycle …nothing but a thundering crisis will shock America awake.

The thing about Reaganomics is that, he actually didn't have much of a choice back then, post-Vietnam, Bretton Woods, etc drolling upon the US economy. Real problem is that, subsequently after his policies were enacted, the people in his succession line forgot about the most important thing - paying it back.

And they just kept spending until today, then "oops", while the Democrats go "keep spending!" while the GOP goes "Stop spending and grab the monies from the middle/lower class to pay off the debt!". The political war is seriously getting lamer and lamer everyday.

[killer3000ad]

Lockheed Martin fends of cyber attack

[ChainLegacy]

New study argues against conclusion that bacteria consumed the methane from the deepwater horizon incident

Not great news, but not surprising either. People have nearly put the event out of their minds but I'm not convinced that long term damage is improbable.

[synaesthetic]

Originally Posted by SaintessHeart

EDIT :

Reagan insider: GOP destroyed U.S. economy, Part 2

Spoiler for LONG:

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — “My G.O.P. destroyed the U.S. economy.” Yes, that is exactly what David Stockman, President Ronald Reagan’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece. Not “is destroying,” the GOP has “destroyed” the U.S. economy, setting up an “American Apocalypse.” And it’s getting worse.

Update: With the 2012 election lineup up for grabs, Stockman may be the GOP’s best candidate for president. A hero in American politics, he’s a rare no-B.S. truth-teller who’s been delivering the same message since his 1986 “Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed,” an expose written after leaving the White House.

Jonathan Weisman reports the decision by Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels to not enter the 2012 presidential race has allowed other candidates and potential candidates to grab some of the spotlight.

Better yet, he’s the kind of fighter who could easily go the distance with Obama on the key issues that will dominate the 2012 election: the economy, employment, interest rates, entitlements, war budgets, the devalued dollar, our rapidly collapsing monetary system, another meltdown.

Last fall, Stockman’s hard-hitting op-ed was loaded with jabs like: “If there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt” screams “for austerity and sacrifice,” instead, the GOP insisted “the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.” Obama blinked, pulled his punch. Let’s get both in the ring. See Paul B. Farrell’s ‘Reagan insider: GOP destroyed U.S. economy.’

Stockman’s latest attack proves he’s still a powerful fighter. Recently, Reason magazine’s editor-in-chief Nick Gillespie did a long interview with Stockman. The title builds on the book: “The Triumph of Politics Over Economics.” But instead of just looking back at the failure of a self-destructive Reaganomics, an older and wiser Stockman focuses us on the paradigm shift that’s destroying America from within.
Warning: GOP’s self-destructive capitalism wrecking U.S. economy

In this new “Triumph of Politics Over Economics” we see America at a crossroads, struggling to redefine itself. Politicians have become the new economists. Politicians and their big money backers and lobbyists now rule the American economy like banana-republic dictators. Stockman calls this corrupt system the new “crony capitalism.” The old capitalist economics that made America the world’s greatest superpower no longer exist.

Today, professional economists are no more than hired guns for politicians with myopic ideologies and huge bankrolls that make it easy to justify lying, cheating and stealing from investors, workers, consumers, savers and taxpayers. Capitalism has morphed into a monopoly ruled by politicians who are serving a wealthy elite. Competition is a joke. Democracy is a farce. “We the People” no longer exists.

Stockman has seen all of it. And he knows that while his message hasn’t stopped the “GOP from destroying the U.S. economy,” the coming crisis will trigger another megacrash, bigger than the dot-com crash and subprime meltdown combined.

Indeed, Stockman warns of an inevitability: Another major crisis is necessary to wake up Wall Street and Washington to the fact that Reaganomics really is destroying America from within. We dissected the Stockman-Gillespie interview several times, gleaning 10 principled facts seen fueling the political drama surrounding the 2012 elections and challenging all Americans at this historic turning point, facts demanding we wake up, before it’s too late:

1. Politicians are addicts, can’t stop spending America’s future

Reagan’s big government policies “led to the utter failure of spending control.” Today America is “living way beyond our means,” and yet politicians are incapable of thinking past the next election. “They hear the squeaky wheel, and they respond. … money has become such a massive force in the electoral process” making politicians “slaves” to big money and special-interest lobbyists.

2. Cutting taxes: a cruel joke, defers big tax burden onto kids

“In pure philosophy, lower tax rates would be better.” But when we got a “Republican government in the Bush era … nothing was cut. Everything was ratified. In fact, they added to Medicare through the drug benefit.” Our “welfare state that seems immutable politically … you’re kidding yourself if you think cutting taxes today is really cutting taxes. We’re simply deferring massive tax increases into the future, unfairly and immorally putting huge debt burdens on future generations.” Tax-cutting is a “massive Christmas tree of special-interest tax benefits and loopholes … reducing the revenue” and “almost no spending was cut, and the defense budget soared out of control.”

3. Social Security is a myth: Forget 2036, there’s no money today

“The combination of Medicare and Social Security” is “the heart of the budget, and the top one-third of that goes to retirees who have private assets, private pensions, other sources of income. They shouldn’t be dependent on the government … and there really is no trust fund there — that’s all fiscal mythology … that money wasn’t saved or hived … it was spent on cotton subsidies and bribes to warlords in Afghanistan. The fact is, this is simply an intergenerational transfer program. … social insurance is a myth,” that bank is empty.

4. Reaganomics loves war: Military spending is off the table

“Reagan was utterly uninterested in any detail of the defense budget, of any of the claims for dollars made by the Pentagon,” says Stockman in a passage that sounds like the GOP’s policy in 2011. “He gave them a blank check, without question, and that … ballooned spending just as we were massively reducing the revenue” and “it created an enormous political impasse. … Spending increases were so huge in defense that it became almost impossible to get anybody to … go after the food-stamp program or school lunches, when you’re just showering tens of billions of dollars on ammunition accounts and spare parts replacements and a massive expansion of the Navy.” Or wasting another “hundred billion dollars on wars of occupation in places that are the ends of the earth.”

5. Gross leadership failure: clueless ex-Goldman CEO at Treasury

“[Henry] Paulson frankly is the most incompetent, reckless secretary of the Treasury that we’ve had in modern history, if ever. He had no schooling in public policy, he had no schooling in the longer-term issues of fiscal management, or even what sound money is all about.” When “the crisis metastasized in” 2008 Paulson got “panicked calls from his buddies on Wall Street who were seeing their pyramids of debt coming crashing down.” And when Goldman Sachs’ stock cratered, Paulson really panicked. “There was no philosophy behind it; there was never an analysis done.” Driven by a clear conflict of interest, he wanted to protect the $600 million fortune he built at Goldman, while saving his Wall Street buddies from bankruptcy. So Paulson failed the American people.

6. Bank bailouts: Bad economics now accelerating America’s decline

Paulson’s panicky failure “was a profound moment in political history in September 2008, … Even the House Republicans knew in their better judgment that it was a terrible idea, and they voted initially against it.” In fact, “the only panic that occurred was in” Paulson’s panicky mind. “Big pyramids of debt on Wall Street were coming crashing down. Had we allowed nature to take its course, maybe Goldman Sachs stock would have gone down to $10. But that’s their problem and that’s the problem of speculators who owned the stock, not a systemic problem for the economy.” Instead, Paulson’s panic made matters worse.

7. In a “free market,” Wall Street banks must be free to fail

“The fundamental principle of free-market capitalism is that you have to be free to fail as well as succeed,” but “when you go in the opposite direction and socialize losses and privatize gains, you will destroy” our system of capitalism. Why? Because moral hazard encourages new “reckless risk taking, misallocation of capital.”

8. Today’s “crony capitalism” is destroying our faith in America

Wall Street is killing trust in the economy: “Once the broader public sees that the cronies of capitalism are bailed out by their friends in Washington or the Fed, why should they believe that the system we have is fair or is working in their interest? It’s just politicizing even further the economy and suffocating the only hope that we have for real prosperity.”

9. Derivatives speculation: Wall Street gambles in shady casinos

Gold was “at the heart of it a fixed exchange rate system” before 1971 obligating “each country to settle its accounts at the end of every year … Chronic payments deficits and you were going to… lose your monetary reserves.” But when we “went to pure fiat money … financial volatility and instability” created a “massive speculative casino … Today probably 99% of currency futures are for speculation and 1% might be for legitimate trade hedging. That’s the problem we have in the whole financial system today.”

10. Too-greedy-to-fail banks are creating another bigger meltdown

Before the crisis hit in 2007, “the top four banks in this country had $5 trillion of assets combined. After the whole crisis of too-big-to-fail and all of the bailouts, today the top four banks have $7 trillion of asset footings.” Simultaneously, fear has “been generated on Main Street, and the appropriate antipathy that’s developed towards the crony-capitalist policy of bailing out anybody that’s big and strong like GM and Goldman Sachs” has created a new “generation of workers that’s going to be turned into tax slaves … That will have to change … but it will only change when the crisis comes … it’s unavoidable.”

Yes unavoidable: American capitalism is so corrupted that change is impossible without a megameltdown, a historic paradigm shift with an inevitable collapse. Stockman knows well the political process is manipulated by a wealthy elite that cares nothing of the people, nothing of Main Street, nothing of the future of America. They care only for themselves.

Money has corrupted our political system. We’ve lost our moral compass. “The Triumph of Politics Over Economics” is a self-destructing ideology. Money has driven all politicians into a bizarre conspiracy that’s destroying America from within. And nothing can stop this overarching historical cycle …nothing but a thundering crisis will shock America awake.

The thing about Reaganomics is that, he actually didn't have much of a choice back then, post-Vietnam, Bretton Woods, etc drolling upon the US economy. Real problem is that, subsequently after his policies were enacted, the people in his succession line forgot about the most important thing - paying it back.

And they just kept spending until today, then "oops", while the Democrats go "keep spending!" while the GOP goes "Stop spending and grab the monies from the middle/lower class to pay off the debt!". The political war is seriously getting lamer and lamer everyday.

The megameltdown this guy predicts won't stop it. They'll be the only ones able to weather the storm. Those who will be hurt will be us, those who don't have massive fortunes of millions to protect us.

No, what'll actually stop this and cause the massive paradigm shift is what'll happen after the mega-meltdown, when the majority of people can't afford the basic needs of survival. Particularly food, which is already getting pricey. At that point, we'll see here what we've been seeing elsewhere in the world. At that point, these "crony capitalists" will start dying of a massive epidemic of lead poisoning.

I'm not sure I want to be around when this happens, or what happens after it. I only hope that something more peaceful can prevent this from taking place and try to rebuild things without having to kill a large percentage of American citizens.

[ganbaru]

India again denounces U.S. military aid to Pakistan
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...74R0PK20110528
I can't really contradict them...

[Kamui4356]

Originally Posted by SaintessHeart

EDIT :

Reagan insider: GOP destroyed U.S. economy, Part 2

Spoiler for LONG:

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — “My G.O.P. destroyed the U.S. economy.” Yes, that is exactly what David Stockman, President Ronald Reagan’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece. Not “is destroying,” the GOP has “destroyed” the U.S. economy, setting up an “American Apocalypse.” And it’s getting worse.

Update: With the 2012 election lineup up for grabs, Stockman may be the GOP’s best candidate for president. A hero in American politics, he’s a rare no-B.S. truth-teller who’s been delivering the same message since his 1986 “Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed,” an expose written after leaving the White House.

Jonathan Weisman reports the decision by Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels to not enter the 2012 presidential race has allowed other candidates and potential candidates to grab some of the spotlight.

Better yet, he’s the kind of fighter who could easily go the distance with Obama on the key issues that will dominate the 2012 election: the economy, employment, interest rates, entitlements, war budgets, the devalued dollar, our rapidly collapsing monetary system, another meltdown.

Last fall, Stockman’s hard-hitting op-ed was loaded with jabs like: “If there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt” screams “for austerity and sacrifice,” instead, the GOP insisted “the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.” Obama blinked, pulled his punch. Let’s get both in the ring. See Paul B. Farrell’s ‘Reagan insider: GOP destroyed U.S. economy.’

Stockman’s latest attack proves he’s still a powerful fighter. Recently, Reason magazine’s editor-in-chief Nick Gillespie did a long interview with Stockman. The title builds on the book: “The Triumph of Politics Over Economics.” But instead of just looking back at the failure of a self-destructive Reaganomics, an older and wiser Stockman focuses us on the paradigm shift that’s destroying America from within.
Warning: GOP’s self-destructive capitalism wrecking U.S. economy

In this new “Triumph of Politics Over Economics” we see America at a crossroads, struggling to redefine itself. Politicians have become the new economists. Politicians and their big money backers and lobbyists now rule the American economy like banana-republic dictators. Stockman calls this corrupt system the new “crony capitalism.” The old capitalist economics that made America the world’s greatest superpower no longer exist.

Today, professional economists are no more than hired guns for politicians with myopic ideologies and huge bankrolls that make it easy to justify lying, cheating and stealing from investors, workers, consumers, savers and taxpayers. Capitalism has morphed into a monopoly ruled by politicians who are serving a wealthy elite. Competition is a joke. Democracy is a farce. “We the People” no longer exists.

Stockman has seen all of it. And he knows that while his message hasn’t stopped the “GOP from destroying the U.S. economy,” the coming crisis will trigger another megacrash, bigger than the dot-com crash and subprime meltdown combined.

Indeed, Stockman warns of an inevitability: Another major crisis is necessary to wake up Wall Street and Washington to the fact that Reaganomics really is destroying America from within. We dissected the Stockman-Gillespie interview several times, gleaning 10 principled facts seen fueling the political drama surrounding the 2012 elections and challenging all Americans at this historic turning point, facts demanding we wake up, before it’s too late:

1. Politicians are addicts, can’t stop spending America’s future

Reagan’s big government policies “led to the utter failure of spending control.” Today America is “living way beyond our means,” and yet politicians are incapable of thinking past the next election. “They hear the squeaky wheel, and they respond. … money has become such a massive force in the electoral process” making politicians “slaves” to big money and special-interest lobbyists.

2. Cutting taxes: a cruel joke, defers big tax burden onto kids

“In pure philosophy, lower tax rates would be better.” But when we got a “Republican government in the Bush era … nothing was cut. Everything was ratified. In fact, they added to Medicare through the drug benefit.” Our “welfare state that seems immutable politically … you’re kidding yourself if you think cutting taxes today is really cutting taxes. We’re simply deferring massive tax increases into the future, unfairly and immorally putting huge debt burdens on future generations.” Tax-cutting is a “massive Christmas tree of special-interest tax benefits and loopholes … reducing the revenue” and “almost no spending was cut, and the defense budget soared out of control.”

3. Social Security is a myth: Forget 2036, there’s no money today

“The combination of Medicare and Social Security” is “the heart of the budget, and the top one-third of that goes to retirees who have private assets, private pensions, other sources of income. They shouldn’t be dependent on the government … and there really is no trust fund there — that’s all fiscal mythology … that money wasn’t saved or hived … it was spent on cotton subsidies and bribes to warlords in Afghanistan. The fact is, this is simply an intergenerational transfer program. … social insurance is a myth,” that bank is empty.

4. Reaganomics loves war: Military spending is off the table

“Reagan was utterly uninterested in any detail of the defense budget, of any of the claims for dollars made by the Pentagon,” says Stockman in a passage that sounds like the GOP’s policy in 2011. “He gave them a blank check, without question, and that … ballooned spending just as we were massively reducing the revenue” and “it created an enormous political impasse. … Spending increases were so huge in defense that it became almost impossible to get anybody to … go after the food-stamp program or school lunches, when you’re just showering tens of billions of dollars on ammunition accounts and spare parts replacements and a massive expansion of the Navy.” Or wasting another “hundred billion dollars on wars of occupation in places that are the ends of the earth.”

5. Gross leadership failure: clueless ex-Goldman CEO at Treasury

“[Henry] Paulson frankly is the most incompetent, reckless secretary of the Treasury that we’ve had in modern history, if ever. He had no schooling in public policy, he had no schooling in the longer-term issues of fiscal management, or even what sound money is all about.” When “the crisis metastasized in” 2008 Paulson got “panicked calls from his buddies on Wall Street who were seeing their pyramids of debt coming crashing down.” And when Goldman Sachs’ stock cratered, Paulson really panicked. “There was no philosophy behind it; there was never an analysis done.” Driven by a clear conflict of interest, he wanted to protect the $600 million fortune he built at Goldman, while saving his Wall Street buddies from bankruptcy. So Paulson failed the American people.

6. Bank bailouts: Bad economics now accelerating America’s decline

Paulson’s panicky failure “was a profound moment in political history in September 2008, … Even the House Republicans knew in their better judgment that it was a terrible idea, and they voted initially against it.” In fact, “the only panic that occurred was in” Paulson’s panicky mind. “Big pyramids of debt on Wall Street were coming crashing down. Had we allowed nature to take its course, maybe Goldman Sachs stock would have gone down to $10. But that’s their problem and that’s the problem of speculators who owned the stock, not a systemic problem for the economy.” Instead, Paulson’s panic made matters worse.

7. In a “free market,” Wall Street banks must be free to fail

“The fundamental principle of free-market capitalism is that you have to be free to fail as well as succeed,” but “when you go in the opposite direction and socialize losses and privatize gains, you will destroy” our system of capitalism. Why? Because moral hazard encourages new “reckless risk taking, misallocation of capital.”

8. Today’s “crony capitalism” is destroying our faith in America

Wall Street is killing trust in the economy: “Once the broader public sees that the cronies of capitalism are bailed out by their friends in Washington or the Fed, why should they believe that the system we have is fair or is working in their interest? It’s just politicizing even further the economy and suffocating the only hope that we have for real prosperity.”

9. Derivatives speculation: Wall Street gambles in shady casinos

Gold was “at the heart of it a fixed exchange rate system” before 1971 obligating “each country to settle its accounts at the end of every year … Chronic payments deficits and you were going to… lose your monetary reserves.” But when we “went to pure fiat money … financial volatility and instability” created a “massive speculative casino … Today probably 99% of currency futures are for speculation and 1% might be for legitimate trade hedging. That’s the problem we have in the whole financial system today.”

10. Too-greedy-to-fail banks are creating another bigger meltdown

Before the crisis hit in 2007, “the top four banks in this country had $5 trillion of assets combined. After the whole crisis of too-big-to-fail and all of the bailouts, today the top four banks have $7 trillion of asset footings.” Simultaneously, fear has “been generated on Main Street, and the appropriate antipathy that’s developed towards the crony-capitalist policy of bailing out anybody that’s big and strong like GM and Goldman Sachs” has created a new “generation of workers that’s going to be turned into tax slaves … That will have to change … but it will only change when the crisis comes … it’s unavoidable.”

Yes unavoidable: American capitalism is so corrupted that change is impossible without a megameltdown, a historic paradigm shift with an inevitable collapse. Stockman knows well the political process is manipulated by a wealthy elite that cares nothing of the people, nothing of Main Street, nothing of the future of America. They care only for themselves.

Money has corrupted our political system. We’ve lost our moral compass. “The Triumph of Politics Over Economics” is a self-destructing ideology. Money has driven all politicians into a bizarre conspiracy that’s destroying America from within. And nothing can stop this overarching historical cycle …nothing but a thundering crisis will shock America awake.

The thing about Reaganomics is that, he actually didn't have much of a choice back then, post-Vietnam, Bretton Woods, etc drolling upon the US economy. Real problem is that, subsequently after his policies were enacted, the people in his succession line forgot about the most important thing - paying it back.

And they just kept spending until today, then "oops", while the Democrats go "keep spending!" while the GOP goes "Stop spending and grab the monies from the middle/lower class to pay off the debt!". The political war is seriously getting lamer and lamer everyday.

The guy has some points on some issues, but he's wrong on others. And both right and wrong on some. Letting the banks fail for example would have caused a complete meltdown of the US economy, and made the great depression look like a minor market correction. However, he's also right about the banks encouraged to continue risky trading because of that. Really the banks should never have been allowed to grow so big that their failing would have such a disastrous effect on the economy. Further, while the banks needed to be saved, the people who ran them should have been punished. Unfortunately, we live in a land of due process, so the bank CEOs can't have their heads displayed on stakes on the white house lawn as a warning to the next 10 generations the price of fiscal irresponsibility.

[synaesthetic]

Can't legally. I suspect that if the next economic downturn is bad enough that the general public can't feed themselves and their families, they will likely put those heads on pikes without any judicial authority.

I just hope the greed-freaks soon realize that if they were less greedy, they'd make more overall in the long run and not have to worry about possibly being tortured to death by an angry mob. Not to mention the obvious benefits an educated, fed, happy populace with money to burn on high-profit luxury goods would bring any business.

[GDB]

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

in the long run

Well there's your problem. No one who can affect anything cares about the long-run anymore.

[synaesthetic]

That's the problem, yes. These guys would rather make a million now and ruin the economy than make two million later and keep everything solvent.