Archive for October, 2008
Wednesday, October 29th, 2008
Like Water for Profits…
Here’s an excellent blog post by Adam Shake at Twilight Earth.
As I said in my reply there, this piece by Adam hits on something fundamental that our car-pushing overclass is working very hard to shield from our consciousness:
The basic fact is that energy supply is merely an aspect of physics and Earth geology. Even electric cars require a fuel source for making the electricity. Coal and uranium and the very energy-intensive materials and processes needed to build wind and solar are all finite.
The reign of automobiles is the problem, and it has no viable long-term solution, wish and dream as we might. Every day we waste on the sponsored “alt-fuel” fantasies is one more weight we are adding to the punishment we are imposing on our children and grandchildren.
And, of course, I forgot to mention there the almost-always unmentioned — the billions who need land, water, and energy now, in order to avoid starvation, the most basic diseases, and extreme misery.
[Thanks to Doug Pressman for the reference and Laura Esquivel for the title.]
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
Windows 7 as Marketing Spyware
Microsoft just announced its plans for Windows 7. The plan is to get PC users to run software not locally, on their own private machines, but through the internet, on Microsoft’s coming network of super-servers.
Translated into English, this means that Microsoft is following through on its new CEO Steve Ballmer’s drive to turn Microsoft into the world’s largest gatherer of “marketing data,” a.k.a. detailed knowledge of people’s off-the-job behaviors.
At its presentation of the new system to software developers yesterday, “[o]ne interesting demo was an extension of Microsoft Word that pulled in CRM information…”
So, the plan is to invade yet another area of life — word processing and associated computing — and turn it into yet another source of marketing spying.
Market totalitarianism never rests.
Monday, October 27th, 2008
Tis the Season…
…of trying to decide which bad, unsatisfying choice to make with one’s ballot. Vote big and ugly, or small and gestural/protest?
Personally, Biden’s breath-taking denunciation of democracy in Seattle last weekend ended any last glimmers of hope for a nose-holding Obama vote by me. In Oregon, where there are mail-in-only elections (no polling stations available), I just voted C-Mac (not J-Mac!) — Cynthia McKinney. In 2002, McKinney was targeted for the boot from Congress because of her outspoken rejection of post-911 war hysteria. In her second Congressional stint, she actually “introduced articles of impeachment against President George W. Bush as (H Res 1106)” in 2006, when the nation was about to elect the Democrats, thinking — oh-so-mistakenly, as always with the modern, Clintonoid, “triangulating” Democrats — that they were about to do such things. And, unlike Nader, for whom I’ve previously voted twice, McKinney is also trying to help build the Green Party, which I think isn’t a bad idea, given the state of the planet.
Nevertheless and meanwhile, for the best statement of the conundrum I’ve seen, I refer you to my friend, colleague, and teacher, the Gandhi scholar and freelance writer, Niranjan Ramakrishnan. On today’s edition of CounterPunch.org, Ramakrishnan writes:
My fundamental problem with Obama is not with his solutions but with his diagnoses. The problem is not partisanship, as he keeps harping. If anything the problem is the lack of partisanship – partisanship with the Common People. Partisanship with the Constitution against the Corporations. Congressional Partisanship against a usurping Executive. Partisanship of the press against those in power. Unlike Obama, I think that before we can go forward, we must first go back.
Click here to read the whole of this wonderful, thoughtful piece.
While you’re at it, consider sending CounterPunch a couple bucks, too.
Sunday, October 26th, 2008
Change You Can Choke On
For fellow students of market totalitarianism, here’s some of the latest from Joseph Robo-fucking Biden, the unrepentant-and-planning-more war criminal, Senator from MBNA, candidate for Vice President of the USA, and dissembling hater of democracy.
Speaking to a “pool” of big-wig fund-raisers at that great hall of democracy known as the Seattle Sheraton, Biden tipped his, and the system’s, hand:
[Note: Be sure to read down through the bone-chilling confessions of Obama's war-mongering expectations/worldview, to Biden's statement of his own political philosophy in the last few lines of the quote.]
We talk about Iran getting a nuclear weapon and threatening Israel and us. Let me tell ya something, Pakistan already is bristling with nuclear weapons, all of which can hit Israel right now, all of which can strike the Mediterranean and well into the Indian Ocean….
It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy…. we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy. And he’s gonna have to make some really tough – I don’t know what the decision’s gonna be, but I promise you it will occur…. he’s gonna need you, not financially to help him, we’re gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him.
Because it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right. Because all these decisions, all these decisions, once they’re made if they work, then they weren’t viewed as a crisis. If they don’t work, it’s viewed as you didn’t make the right decision, a little bit like how we hesitated so long dealing with Bosnia and dealing with Kosovo, and consequently 200,000 people lost their lives that maybe didn’t have to lose lives….
[Y]ou all are gonna be sitting here a year from now going ‘oh my God, why are they there in the polls, why is the polling so down, why is this thing so tough?’ We’re gonna have to make some incredibly tough decisions in the first two years. So I’m asking you now, I’m asking you now, be prepared to stick with us. Remember the faith you had at this point… remember St. Peter denied Christ thrice, you know?
There are gonna be a lot of you who want to go ‘whoa, wait a minute, yo, whoa, whoa, I don’t know about that decision.’ Because if you think the decision is sound when they’re made…. they’re not likely to be as popular as they are sound. Because if they’re popular, they’re probably not sound.
I probably shouldn’t have said all this because it dawned on me that the press is here.
Even for an avid Chomksy student such as myself, it is sometimes tempting to over-estimate the amount of progress we’ve made in exposing and combating this semi-secret overclass contempt for popular self-government.
But, as Biden reveals, the real conclusion is how right could Faulkner get? “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.”
Sunday, October 26th, 2008
That Rarest of Birds…
…is a journalist who actually performs the core task of journalism — whistleblowing — from inside the corporate media system, which generally selects and encourages ventriloquists rather than news-hawks, fearing (correctly) that too much actual journalism would cost it corporate advertising dollars.
Yesterday, Joe Nocera of The New York Times earned the first-ever Consumer Trap Shrieking Coelacanth Award. His brave and lonely act of journalism requires no extra explanation, other than to say that it has, despite its extreme relevance and currency, been quickly buried, rather than bannered, on the NYT website.
Here is what Mr. Nocera wrote:
“Chase recently received $25 billion in federal funding. What effect will that have on the business side and will it change our strategic lending policy?”
It was Oct. 17, just four days after JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, agreed to take a $25 billion capital injection courtesy of the United States government, when a JPMorgan employee asked that question. It came toward the end of an employee-only conference call that had been largely devoted to meshing certain divisions of JPMorgan with its new acquisition, Washington Mutual.
Which, of course, it also got thanks to the federal government. Christmas came early at JPMorgan Chase.
The JPMorgan executive who was moderating the employee conference call didn’t hesitate to answer a question that was pretty politically sensitive given the events of the previous few weeks.
Given the way, that is, that Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. had decided to use the first installment of the $700 billion bailout money to recapitalize banks instead of buying up their toxic securities, which he had then sold to Congress and the American people as the best and fastest way to get the banks to start making loans again, and help prevent this recession from getting much, much worse.
In point of fact, the dirty little secret of the banking industry is that it has no intention of using the money to make new loans. But this executive was the first insider who’s been indiscreet enough to say it within earshotof a journalist.
(He didn’t mean to, of course, but I obtained the call-in number and listened to a recording.)
“Twenty-five billion dollars is obviously going to help the folks who are struggling more than Chase,” he began. “What we do think it will help us do is perhaps be a little bit more active on the acquisition side or opportunistic side for some banks who are still struggling. And I would not assume that we are done on the acquisition side just because of the Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns mergers. I think there are going to be some great opportunities for us to grow in this environment, and I think we have an opportunity to use that $25 billion in that way and obviously depending on whether recession turns into depression or what happens in the future, you know, we have that as a backstop.”
Read that answer as many times as you want — you are not going to find a single word in there about making loans to help the American economy. On the contrary: at another point in the conference call, the same executive (who I’m not naming because he didn’t know I would be listening in) explained that “loan dollars are down significantly.” He added, “We would think that loan volume will continue to go down as we continue to tighten credit to fully reflect the high cost of pricing on the loan side.” In other words JPMorgan has no intention of turning on the lending spigot.
It is starting to appear as if one of Treasury’s key rationales for the recapitalization program — namely, that it will cause banks to start lending again — is a fig leaf, Treasury’s version of the weapons of mass destruction.
In fact, Treasury wants banks to acquire each other and is using its power to inject capital to force a new and wrenching round of bank consolidation. As Mark Landler reported in The New York Times earlier this week, “the government wants not only to stabilize the industry, but also to reshape it.” Now they tell us.
Friday, October 24th, 2008
Guns or Carrots?
