Monkeyfister

Labels: 2008 Debates, 2008 Election

"I know Gordon Liddy. He paid his debt, he went to prison ... I'm not in any was embarrassed to know Gordon Liddy."

Labels: John Fucking McCain

Labels: Bank Failures, Collapse, Derivatives, Wall Street Failure

Labels: Sarah Palin

Let’s be honest—this new millennium, so far it’s been a huge disappointment. It was preceded by a false alarm (the Y2K rollover), was cursed by hanging chads (the Florida recount), and has been held hostage ever since by the ministry of fear, with Americans meekly removing their shoes for the privilege of flying in airplanes charging fees for pillows and blankets. It’s been seven years since 9/11, no follow-up attack has stabbed our shores, and yet the front pages of so many papers resemble the end is near signs toted by bearded prophets that were once a staple of New Yorker cartoons. The decade has traveled from bin Laden’s cave to the Dark Knight’s Batcave in a jagged thrust of clenched force and unleashed chaos. Even an unforeseen blossom of good news, such as the declining death toll in Iraq, seems almost incidental in the log stream of general lousiness. Journalism used to perform a higher civic function than it does today, so spanked up is it with gaffes, gotchas, spin-doctoring, celebrity pimping, crisis-mongering, minnow-brained punditry, drama criticism practiced from under the troll bridge (usually at the expense of Democrats—Al Gore’s sighings during the debate with George Bush, Hillary Clinton’s “cackle”), and instant amnesia. To watch archive footage of TV reporters from the black-and-white era with their measured intonations and ashen visages—before everybody burst into Michael Kors orange—is to crack open the crypt on a more responsible, somber, and, yes, duller era, when journalists still conducted themselves as a priestly caste serving the needs of an informed citizenry, as opposed to catering to cud-chewing dolts. Those days are gone and there’s no point in mourning them, the Walter Lippmanns and similar wise men (and women) having proved worse than useless when the Vietnam War sawed the country into two with its lies and delusions. But the intelligent drone of old-school journalism served to extend a support bridge through national trauma, the term “anchorman” symbolic of the media’s role in securing coverage of the news with weight and authority, a fixed point in a sea of raging foam. Now it’s all raging foam, a steady, indiscriminate diet of excitation to keep us permanently on edge.

To pick up The New York Times each morning and brave the headlines—at conference on the risks to earth, few are optimistic, August 24, 2008—is to understand why generalized anxiety disorder is the world’s No. 1 psychological condition. Even more anxiety-inducing are the paper’s science pages, which make you want to roll out of bed in a fetal ball, especially the medical coverage, the happy hunting grounds for hypochondriacs, with Jane E. Brody digging up the latest rare disease about to hit it big, and bummer case studies such as that of the elderly patient with spontaneous gas gangrene left to deal with her own mortal fright: “She never made it to the operating room, and as far as I know, none of her doctors discussed her imminent death, then simply sat with her.”

I blame Bush. I blame Bush for everything and will continue to blame him (and Vice President Dick Cheney) for everything long after we’re all dead of gas gangrene. The two terms of George W. Bush’s presidency have been not simply a psychological bringdown but a steady beatdown. The malaise that President Jimmy Carter supposedly diagnosed as our national condition in 1979—though Carter never used the actual word—is nothing compared with the slough of despond Cheney seems to have dug with his shovel jaw in service of the National Security State and to the detriment of everything else. Even as the Decider eyes the exits, his administration pulls stunts such as attempting to eviscerate the Endangered Species Act and to lift the ban on offshore drilling, as if to get in one last twist of the knife before Bush waves buh-bye as he boards the helicopter into the azure, unless it’s raining. It will be one of the un-nicer ironies of modern American history that a president who prided himself on his crispy optimism should depart office having dyed the electorate a pervasive shade of blue. Not Democratic blue (though maybe that too), but the blue of futility, frustration, and worry, as reflected in the right-track/wrong-track numbers. (In a USA Today/Gallup Poll conducted between August 21 and 23, 81 percent of those participating described themselves as “dissatisfied” with the direction in which the country was lurching. Not only is Bush the Decider—he’s also the Dissatisfier.)

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Rooster-crowing optimists contend the media have a sullen disposition to make things look grimmer than they are, harping on the negative while downplaying the underlying positives. The problem with this argument is that in recent years the reality has often proved to be worse than anticipated. Wall Street’s idea of a passing storm ended up being a tsunami of pandemic proportion. It was the sunshine salesmen such as Gramm, Steve Forbes, the Fox business-news claque, CNBC host Larry Kudlow, and the editorialists at Investor’s Business Daily who helped suck us into this economic mess with their happy talk of “the Goldilocks economy” and the Bush boom as “the greatest story never told,” while the forecasts of the naysayers, gloomy prophets, storm-cloud watchers, and motorcycle wraiths from hell went unheeded until it was too late and the subprime contagion took down Bear Stearns, threatening to tumble the entire lending system off the ledge. The alarmists may not have gotten every particular right, but they nailed the big picture with Paul Revere gusto. Among those vindicated: Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor and market observer who earned the title “Dr. Doom” (formerly held by Henry Kaufman) for dire predictions of the credit crisis that panned out with a vengeance. “Over the past year, whenever optimists have declared the worst of the economic crisis behind us,” Stephen Mihm wrote in a New York Times Magazine profile, “Roubini has countered with steadfast pessimism. In February, when the conventional wisdom held that the venerable investment firms of Wall Street would weather the crisis, Roubini warned that one or more of them would go ‘belly up’—and six weeks later, Bear Stearns collapsed.” Similarly, it was the “Peak Oil” theorists who warned of spiking oil prices and strains on the refinery system, only to be dismissed as amateur nerds and tinfoil-hat chiliasts—until $4-a-gallon gas and winter heating bills brought the new reality home. It was James Howard Kunstler, the author of The End of Suburbia and The Long Emergency, who warned with scourging wit and rococo imagery in his weekly online column that high gas prices, suburban sprawl, decaying infrastructure, the machinations of hedge-fund greedheads, and Wall Street necromancy were converging into a Hurricane Katrina–size “clusterfuck” that would deform the social and political landscape. In his August 25 column, Kunstler wrote, “I’m rather convinced that the carnage on the money scene will be so extreme this fall that the nation will seem to have been transformed from a superpower to a basketcase before November 4th, and that the blame for this state of affairs will be blindingly obvious: the people in charge for the past eight years looted the treasury, destroyed the currency, and left the machinery of capital a smoking wreckage.” Within a month, the carnage Kunstler envisioned not only got worse but gained velocity as mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae required an emergency federal bailout, fabled Merrill Lynch disappeared into the maw of Bank of America, Lehman Brothers went belly-up, A.I.G. was rescued, and the Dow lost 500 points in one day, the worst loss since 2001. Billions of dollars of bad loans devoured by boll weevils, thousands of well-paying jobs liquidated in a single stroke, stock portfolios turning into scarecrows before one’s eyes, and who knew what awaited over the next hill?

Labels: George Fucking Bush, James Kunstler, James Wolcott

ALBANY - A former assemblyman and current parole-board member was busted last night on child-pornography and soliciting charges, officials said.

Chris Ortloff, 61, was arrested in a Plattsburgh-area motel room in a State Police sting at about 5 p.m.

Ortloff, who allegedly had arranged a date on the Internet with an underage victim he thought would provide sex, had child porn and what was described as "sex paraphernalia" in his possession, according to the officials.

They said Ortloff, a Republican who represented Plattsburgh, would likely face felony sex charges under state law, and could also be charged with violating federal anti-child pornography statutes.

Ortloff, married with two sons, could not be reached for comment.

"He was always the tough-on-crime guy in the Assembly who wanted to increase the criminal penalties for all kinds of sex crimes," said a former associate.

Labels: GOPerverts, Republican Family Values, Republican Values

Do they have a Plan C?

DOW, S&P, NASDAQ, and the Russell 2000 are all back into deep red, and falling fast. DOW down 261, S&P down 2.25%, NASDAQ down 4.25%, Russell down 5%.

OK, we've Nationalized the Banks, shipped them MOUNTAINS of cash. And the knives keep falling.

Obama's got a plan that might actually do some good, since we're collapsing no matter how many of Ol' Hank's pals we pay off.

Getting people working-- doing something constructive, Earning a paycheck... there's a good better start.

More later, as posting via email is not very good. I can't even see what these posts look like until I get home.

Posting this from work, so formating is all hosed up.

Vail has some important stuff for our consideration. Namely, Peak Oil hasn't gone away, we're still slurping that oil, just at a slower rate. Vail surmises that when the collapse finally works itself through, and the world starts pushing the Growth Model aggressively, again, that Energy problem will still be there as the limiter.

Link: http://www.jeffvail.net/2008/10/timing-of-financial-crisis-peak-oil.html

Here is the big topic that needs to be developed over the next several weeks and months: the interrelationship between peak oil/peak energy and the financial crisis/global economy.

In my opinion, it's necessary to take a deeper look at the impact of the financial crisis on our economy--because it is not clear at this point that "financial crisis" is the same as "general economic crisis." The financial crisis is like a falling soufle--you pump enough air into something by way of what I've called "financial wizardry," and eventually it will pop and deflate. But it isn't like a balloon--when the derivative-driven froth is blown off the pint of beer, there's still beer underneath. It's a question of how much...

I'll stop with the metaphors (for now). It's undeniable that the implosion of global credit and derivatives markets has very real effects--both on the global demand for oil and for general economic activity.  However, the recent tumble in oil prices is, in my opinion, more due to the aggressive pricing into the market of a long global recession than it is of an actual change in the supply and demand situation.  It's worth noting that the IEA just revised their projection for the next year's oil demand growth from 0.8% to 0.5%.  Note that is still growth, a very real 350,000 barrels per day or so.   What is also undeniable is that, even if global credit locks down permanently, there are very real prospects for economic activity and growth. At one extreme, if the credit markets lock down, you can't buy a $800,000 house with nothing down, no credit, and no verification of income. That hurts the housing price bubble. On the other hand, even with no credit market at all, the Adam Smith-style economic opportunities still exist: you can still grow vegetables and sell them, you can still assemble raw materials into a value-added product you can still provide services for money or barter, you can still build furniture, buy houses, etc. Every "real" economic activity that can be done with credit can be done without. There is, of course, a huge catch here: you can't do it the same WAY.

You can buy a house with a frozen credit market--you just have to save up the cash purchase price first. Novel approach, I realize, but there you have it. Believe it or not, people used to do this fairly frequently.

You can still manufacture complex products. But, rather than getting a loan to buy the capital equipement, materials, and pay the labor, then give it to the customer, get them to pay you, and repay the loan, now you need to 1) get the customer to pay you, or 2) maintain enough cash reserves to carry this cost until payment. This means that either the customer or the producer  needs to save up the money for the end product first, rather than pay later. This also has a dramatic impact on business models--the 'get big first, then figure out how to profit' model advanced by Amazon.com and others simply doesn't work. All these changes really shake up the rate of throughput while System B reverts back to System A.

Of course, it's also worth pointing out that our credit markets are nowhere near frozen. They just aren't quite as artificially lubricated as they recently were. As with most things in life, when it comes to credit today you can get anything you want, but most likely not everything you want.

So back to the froth on the beer. Most of that froth is going away. The question is how much beer is left underneath. When the economic fantasy land of recent credit-driven excess falls back down to earth, there will still be a very vibrant agricultural sector, a vibrant market for cheap, energy efficient transport, a vibrant market for clothes, homes, etc. just as there always has been. It might be more potatoes and less Cabernet. It might be more renting and less owning a 4,000 square foot home on a $50k/year salary. It might be more buses and light rail and fewer Escalades. And make no mistake--there will still be plenty of excess, plenty of luxury, plenty of waste. But, to the degree that things change, this is opportunity for economic activity and profit. The economies of specialization and centralization haven't gone away (though the energy cost of distribution from a centralized facility must be considered).  But the traditional economies of scale and place will be in increasing competition with what I've termed the "anti-economies." <http://www.jeffvail.net/2005/10/anti-economies.html>  Whether you're a farmer, an accountant, a furniture maker, or a nurse, you still perform an important economic function.

And that's the point: When the froth is gone, there is still a very vibrant economy hiding underneath. In fact, and this is where I start to get concerned, to the degree that we refocus our efforts away from keeping the froth full of air, we'll start to focus more of our effort to revving up the fundamental economic engine that sits beneath it. And so will the rest of the world, which brings me to the other half of the equation: Peak Oil.

Labels: 2008 Presidential Race

Labels: Native Americans

1--D-- Bruce Lunsford |Total Votes-- 316,992|Percent of 619,904 Vote Pool-- 51.1%

1--R-- Mitch McConnell|Total Votes-- 168,127|Percent of 195,297 Pool-- 86.1%

Labels: 2008 Election, Adopt-A-Congresscritter

The G-7 world, the club of "developed" western nations plus Japan, has commenced an ordeal of suddenly waking up much poorer. All the desperate work-arounds being engineered by governments and central banks on an al fresco basis are intended to overcome this stunning basic fact, and none of them will. The benchmarks of everything are in flux -- stocks, bond values and yields, commodity prices, most especially currencies -- but these tend to disguise the basic fact of growing and spreading impoverishment. Is oil priced at $80 a barrel this morning? That's nice. Except if the company that employs you is about to fold up and you face a holiday season of driving frantically around Atlanta in search of another job, which the odds are against you find finding. Or if you're living on a retirement fund that's just lost 37 percent of its value and it's time to fill the heating oil tank.
Iceland is the poster-child du jour for this. The little island nation of about 320,000 souls (roughly half of Vermont's population) lately grew a banking sector that thrived on something-for-nothing finance. In little more than a month, its banks have imploded like mini-death stars, leaving Iceland with a pariah currency. Since it has to import just about everything, and it suddenly finds itself unable to pay for imports, the people are stripping the grocery markets of whatever remains there now. You wonder what they will do in two weeks. Ten years from now there may be 32,000 of them left, subsisting on blubber sandwiches.
I exaggerate perhaps a little, but who really knows where all this leads? Here in the USA, the Treasury, enjoying new and seemingly limitless powers of discretionary spending, has begun shoveling dollars into every truck that backs up to the loading dock. The numbers are staggering. In ten days it's reached into the trillions in loans and handouts. Most of this money is getting sucked directly into the black hole of debt and margin calls of one kind or another. This is previously-presumed wealth that is now un-presumed. It's leaving the system, never to be seen again. One useful way of thinking about it is to regard it as our society's previous borrowings against our own future. Thus, we are seeing our future vanish into a black hole -- our future comfort, health, and basic nourishment.
This is the kind of fiasco that brings down governments, propels societies into revolutions, and starts wars. In a few months, America will be full of angry economic losers. We're not the same nation that crowded around the old radio consoles for Franklin Roosevelt's fireside chats. Back then, we were mostly a highly-disciplined, regimented, industrial society full of citizens who mostly did what they were told to do, and mostly trusted in authority. Today we're a nation of tattooed barbarian "consumers" with no impulse control, a swollen sense of entitlement, ruled by a set of authorities ranging from one G.W. Bush to the grifter-billionaire pantheon of Wall Street CEOs -- now heading into secret bunkers with their stashes of krugerrands, freeze-dried veal Milanese, and private security squads armed with XM-8 carbines.
I go along with Nassim Nicholas Taleb's idea -- read "The Black Swan" -- that nobody really knows anything. We construct our narratives to try and explain circumstances that are unraveling non-linearly before us, and some narratives are more plausible than others, depending on your vantage point. There are infinite narratives. This is nothing more than my narrative. The circumstances we're entering appear, for the moment, to take the shape of a compressive deflationary depression with the cherry-on-top add-on of a hyper-inflation further down the road -- meaning initially that jobs, incomes, and pensions are lost, but that later on even the little money that people manage to get -- perhaps mostly from government hand-outs of one kind or another -- steadily loses its value. Every way you jigger things, it just ends up meaning the same thing: a much poorer society. It certainly won't be a society of recreational shoppers plying the Target store aisles for scented candles and home accents. Hyper-inflation could make old debts meaningless, but it would also make credit meaningless and spending absurd.
Given the way our society has evolved to operate -- as an endless upward spiral of borrowings -- you can see an awful lot of things not working anymore, and an awful lot of people not working in them or at them. Maybe the governments of the G-7 will get lending unstuck at the upper levels, but who, exactly, is able to borrow now besides companies on the verge of bankruptcy -- and why continue to lend to them? (Except to maintain the pretense that "something is being done.")

Labels: Collapse, Debt Economy, Global Economy, James Kunstler

Oct. 13 (Bloomberg) -- After a four-year spending spree, Icelanders are flooding the supermarkets one last time, stocking up on food as the collapse of the banking system threatens to cut the island off from imports.

``We have had crazy days for a week now,'' said Johannes Smari Oluffsson, manager of the Bonus discount grocery store in Reykjavik's main shopping center. ``Sales have doubled.''

Bonus, a nationwide chain, has stock at its warehouse for about two weeks. After that, the shelves will start emptying unless it can get access to foreign currency, the 22-year-old manager said, standing in a walk-in fridge filled with meat products, among the few goods on sale produced locally.

Iceland's foreign currency market has seized up after the three largest banks collapsed and the government abandoned an attempt to peg the exchange rate. Many banks won't trade the krona and suppliers from abroad are demanding payment in advance. The government has asked banks to prioritize foreign currency transactions for essentials such as food, drugs and oil.

The crisis is already hitting clothing retailers. A short walk from Bonus in the capital's Kringlan shopping center, Ragnhildur Anna Jonsdottir, 38, owner of the Next Plc clothing store, said she can't get any foreign currency to pay for incoming shipments and, even if she could, the exchange rate would be prohibitively high.

``We aren't getting new shipments in, as we normally do once a week,'' Jonsdottir said. ``This is the third week that we haven't had any shipments.''

Bankrupt

Iceland's 320,000 inhabitants have enjoyed four years of economic growth in excess of 4 percent as banks and businesses expanded abroad, buying up companies from brokerages to West Ham United soccer club. Now, the three biggest banks, Kaupthing Bank hf, Landsbanki Island hf and Glitnir Bank hf have collapsed under the weight of about $61 billion in debts, 12 times the size of the economy, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The central bank, or Sedlabanki, ditched its attempt to peg the krona to a basket of currencies on Oct. 9, after just two days, citing ``insufficient support'' in the market. Nordea Bank AB, the biggest Scandinavian lender, said the same day that the krona hadn't been traded on the spot market, while the last quoted price was 340 per euro, compared with 122 a month ago.

``There is absolutely no currency in the country today to import,'' said Andres Magnusson, chief executive officer of the Icelandic Federation of Trade and Services in Reykjavik. ``The only way we can solve this problem is to get the IMF into the country.''

Labels: Collapse, Iceland

Oct. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Princeton University professor and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize in economics for his work on trade theory.

Krugman, 55, received the prize ``for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity,'' said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which selects the winners. His work explained how economies of scale influence trade and urbanization.

``It's a total surprise,'' Krugman said in a telephone interview.

The Nobel laureate gained his reputation in economics by contributing to strategic trade theory, contending that countries could steal a march on other nations by subsidizing strategic industries. He has found broader fame with his newspaper columns that regularly attack President George W. Bush's policies.

A self-proclaimed liberal, Krugman has regularly taken Bush to task in his columns for the New York Times, slamming the president personally for everything from the war in Iraq to his big tax cuts.

``Mr. Bush has degraded our government and undermined the rule of law,'' Krugman wrote in a column on May 18, 2007. ``He has led us into strategic disaster and moral squalor.''

Labels: Nobel Prize

These clips deal with the New Deal. They include six of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Fireside Chats on the economic policy for fighting the Great Depression. All clips are somewhat edited partial Universal Newsreels. In these recordings Roosevelt reads shortened versions of the speeches. The full texts can be found here:
http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/firesi90.html

Labels: FDR, New Deal, The Bush Depression, The Great Depression

Originally a "Best Animation" finalist in MoveOn.org's "Bush in 30 Seconds" contest, the commercial spot has been expanded to a seven minute short cartoon that tells the rest of the story of Melvin McBean and his family's struggle to make ends meet in Bush's economy."

Labels: Bush Economic Policies, Collapse, Failure

The credit crisis is spilling over into the grain industry as international buyers find themselves unable to come up with payment, forcing sellers to shoulder often substantial losses.

Before cargoes can be loaded at port, buyers typically must produce proof they are good for the money. But more deals are falling through as sellers decide they don't trust the financial institution named in the buyer's letter of credit, analysts said.

"There's all kinds of stuff stacked up on docks right now that can't be shipped because people can't get letters of credit," said Bill Gary, president of Commodity Information Systems in Oklahoma City. "The problem is not demand, and it's not supply because we have plenty of supply. It's finding anyone who can come up with the credit to buy."

So far the problem is mostly being felt in U.S. and South American ports, but observers say it is only a matter of time before it hits Canada.

"We've got a nightmare in front of us and a lot of people are concerned it's going to get a lot worse," said Anthony Temple, a grain marketing expert based in Vancouver.

The port troubles occur as financial institutions worldwide experience an unprecedented level of failures; even the strongest global banks are taking shelter in government bailouts. Tuesday, the U.K was expected to invest as much as £45-billion ($87.01-billion) in three of the country's biggest banks, while the U.S. government rushed to put in place its US$700-billion rescue package for beleaguered financial market players. Ottawa has so far resisted pleas for direct financial aid for exporters.

Access to credit is key to the survival of maritime trade and insiders now say the supply is being severely restricted. More than 90% of the world's trade by volume goes by ship.

The Baltic Dry Goods Index, the main measure of shipping rates, is down 74% from its high back in May when trade with China was still strong.

"The credit crisis has made banks nervous and the last thing on their minds is making fresh loans," Omar Nokta, an analyst at investment bank Dahlman Rose, said in an interview with Reuters.

While shipping has always been a cyclical industry whose fortunes rise and fall with the global economy, analysts said the current crisis over the drying up of credit is something they have never seen before.

Labels: American Food Prices, Credit Crisis, Food Security, Shipping and Transportation

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Stocks of Alaska pollock, a staple of the U.S. fast food industry, have shrunk 50 percent from last year to record low levels and put the world's largest food fishery on the brink of collapse, environmental group Greenpeace said on Friday.

Taina Honkalehto, a research fishery biologist with the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service, said pollock biomass in U.S. waters was down to 940,000 tons from 1.8 million tons last year.

Pollock is used in McDonald's fish sandwiches, frozen fish sticks, fish and chips and imitation crabmeat. It also helps feed fur seals, whales and the endangered Steller sea lions.

Pollock stocks have been unable to reproduce quickly enough to recover from yearly catch of 1 million tons, environmentalists say.

"Just as the financial institutions on Wall Street collapsed due to poor oversight and mismanagement, the pollock fishery is on the fast-track to collapse as well," Greenpeace said.

A collapse of the fishery would have hurt Alaska's commercial fishermen and coastal communities that depend on the sea for income.

"Economic pressures to keep on fishing at such high levels have overwhelmed common sense," said Jeremy Jackson, director of the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in a statement.

Jackson recommended a "far more precautionary, ecosystem-based approach" to fisheries management.

Labels: Capitalism, Collapse, Food Chain