Anyone who’s savvy on building issues knows that a brisk trade in second-hand toilets has developed in recent years, simply because new toilets, built in accordance with federal water conservation standards, do not flush very well. The knowledgeable consumer avoids purchasing a new conventional toilet, and either buys a premium imported model or seeks out an older model from a junk yard or plumbing shop.
Low-flush toilets made national news recently when it was revealed that they caused the San Francisco sewer system to block up, winding up costing that city $114 million dollars for repairs, upgrades, and added chemicals. There is federally-mandated economy and conservation in action for you.
Senator Rand Paul brought up this problem and the broader issue of consumer choice in a Senate hearing in which Kathleen Hogan, the deputy assistant secretary for energy efficiency at the Department of Energy, was testifying.
ABC News’ Matthew Jaffe did not even try to conceal his ideological biases in reporting on the exchange between Senator Paul and Deputy Secretary Hogan. His news report opens with a feigned air of gaping astonishment that a US senator would even consider discussing such a subject. Senator Paul’s rather intelligent remarks are dismissed from the get-go as a “tirade.” Kathleen Hogan is not a high-level bureaucrat presiding over an empire of regulation reaching aggressively into such intimate aspects of Americans’ lives as their bathroom appliances. She is an “unwitting victim.”
At BoingBoing, David Pescovitz posts a theory tracing the origin of abrasive and deprecatory Jewish humor, and the characteristic attitude of the City of New York, to a disastrous event of the 17th century.
According to UC Berkeley theater arts professor Mel Gordon — author of Siegel and Shuster’s Funnyman and Voluptuous Panic — it goes back hundreds of years before the Borscht Belt. Gordon argues that the Badkhn, a jester-like comedian figure common at weddings and Purim celebrations in East European shtetls, was the father of what we know as Jewish humor today. The Badkhn act was only one of many styles of Jewish comedy popular in the shtetls. Then, in the mid-17th century, 100,000 Jews in Ukraine were killed in a pogrom carried out by Cossacks. The ultraorthodox Rabbis of Poland and Ukraine decided that the pogroms were a punishment from God and that Jews should lead stricter lives and not have as much fun. So comedy acts had to go. But on July 3, 1661, the Badkhn was given a special exemption. From the Jerusalem Post:
…A rabbi asked his colleagues, what about the badkhn? He’s not really funny, the rabbi said. In fact, he’s abusive.
The elders agreed, and the badkhn was exempted from the ban — he wasn’t a merrymaker and wasn’t encouraging levity. And that’s how the badkhn became the only Jewish comic permitted in the shtetls, Gordon says, and how his particular brand of sarcastic, bleak humor set the tone for what we know today as Jewish comedy. Before the 1660s, the badkhn was the least popular Jewish entertainer – now he was the sole survivor.
“Jewish humor used to be the same as that of the host country,†Gordon said. “Now it began to deviate from mainstream European humor. It became more aggressive, meaner. All of Jewish humor changed…”
Little remains of the badkhn today outside Chasidic communities, where they are the stars of the yearly Purim spiels. When Gordon lived in New York in the 1980s, he would take journalists to Chasidic synagogues in Brooklyn every spring to witness these raucous celebrations.
But the badkhn’s influence is still felt in mainstream culture, Gordon says, from the Borsch Belt humor of the 1920s and ‘30s, to contemporary Italian and African-American comedians who trade in barbed insults and self-deprecation.
“Even today, almost all Jewish entertainers have badkhn humor,” Gordon said. “Sarah Silverman is completely badkhn.
Karl Smith, an Assistant Professor of Public Economics and Government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, shares his confidence in the survival, and continued inevitable advance, of the welfare state, even in the face of federal deficits.
In reality, Professor Smith informs us, the only thing really causing Americans to object to wholesale redistributionism is racial animosity.
Contrary to Jonah Goldberg and others who see Canada and the United States as examples of two clashing ideologies, they are actually examples of two different ethic distributions. The United States is not Canada because there is ethnic strife between Southern Blacks and Southern Whites. That strife reduces the sense of moral obligation on the part of the white majority and so reduces government spending.
I want to be very clear that I don’t say this to paint those against social spending as racists. From where I sit I am betting that most of the intellectuals lined up against expanding the welfare state are naively unaware that their support rests upon racial strife. Otherwise they would realize that as America integrates they are doomed. They are fighting as if they believe they have a chance of winning. Given the strong secular trend in racial harmony, they do not.
I point this out also to show why the major Republican strategy for limiting government was doomed from the start and why I am also not particularly worried about Americas fiscal future per se.
I must say that Professor Smith’s perspective on the fundamental character of African-Americans seems a bit excessively pessimistic.
We have here, it seems, a vision of a nation permanently and irremediably divided between between productive, independent and self-supporting whites and needy and dependent blacks, in which the only thing that is going to change is white resentment of exploitation gradually being reduced by social integration and racial harmony. In other words, as we attend school with, mix socially with, and come to know better our helpless, ineffectual darkie neighbors, we will like them better, recognize our moral obligation to support them, and quit complaining about our tax burdens and the federal budget.
Obviously, there does exist a pathological and dependent black subculture, but it is not unique. There are significant sized white and Hispanic welfare-dependent subcultures as well. Dependency is a product of culture, of a cultural aversion to effort and education and of a cultural acceptance of unmarried promiscuity and unwed childbirth, not specifically of ethnicity or race at all. Those cultural pathologies are difficult to change, and they are cultivated rather than opposed by the condescending paternalism of Professor Smith and his ilk.
According to Smith, it is completely impossible to restrain federal spending in the face of the intransigent, irrefutable moral obligation of socialism.
Much of the handwringing about fiscal irresponsibility is a sense of alarm not only on the right, but throughout much of the political center, that these spending cuts are not actually materializing.
But, by what theory of government did you ever believe they would? Governments don’t look at how much money they have and then decide what they want to buy. They decide what they want to buy and then they look for ways to find the revenue.
Divorcing the two – through sustained deficits – was only going to lead to ever increasing levels of debt. This is what we got. At no point was the beast ever starved. The peace dividend lowered government spending growth somewhat, but that was undone by the war on terror. Otherwise spending hummed along, as it always will, with the government buying things the public thinks it ought to buy.
Yet, if this is causing upset stomachs among many of my fellow bloggers it calms mine. Its quite clear how this will end. Racial strife will continue to abate. The public will coalesce around the welfare state and taxes will be raised to meet the cost.
The fundamental do not predict rising debt forevermore. The fundamentals predict a VAT.
This is not to say I am unconcerned about our economic future. Health care costs will continue to eat up more and more of our economy unless something is done. However, trying to convince people that health care is not a social obligation a fool’s errand. The best you could do is convince them we have no obligation to the other. As the other integrates this will likewise prove impossible.
No, people will ultimately believe that health care for all is a social obligation and therefore government will pay for it. There is no more analysis to be done on that part of the question.
And, there you have it. There are people who require other people’s money to meet their personal exigencies. There are the people like Professor Smith who understand that altruistic redistribution of other people’s means on the basis of one’s moral intuitions is obligatory, and that is the whole story.
There is democracy, a hungry mob, and an indulgent and sentimental bien pensant elite, and the rest of us are in the position of the sheep participating in the democratic process with a couple of wolves to decide on what’s for dinner.
Fortunately, I think Professor Smith is as bad a prophet as he is a sociologist and an ethicist. The compelling power of liberal moral intuitions is, I would predict, going to be proven to wane very significantly as the general public inevitably comes to recognize that current (pre-Obamacare) entitlements are unsustainable, and faces a choice between maintaining entitlements and economic prosperity and growth.
You do not have to be Tocqueville to recognize that the fundamental American character has always featured a powerful determination to get ahead, to build a better future on the basis of current effort and sacrifice. It is not sectional ethnic animosity that stands in the way of implementing socialism in the United States, it is the fundamental American character and the values and attitudes that the country was built upon.
We are not Canada, not because we have blacks, but because we are the rebels who threw off the yoke of monarchy in favor of Liberty and individualism, and Canada was, practically speaking, founded by the Tories who preferred being subjects and dependents. We will never be Canada.
“The trouble with socialism, thought Joan, was either that it told you to do what you were going to do anyway, and therefore made you not want to do it, or else it took things out of your hands and did them worse than you would have done but at far greater expense”– Louis de Bernières in Notwithstanding
Government payouts—including Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance—make up more than a third of total wages and salaries of the U.S. population, a record figure that will only increase if action isn’t taken before the majority of Baby Boomers enter retirement.
Even as the economy has recovered, social welfare benefits make up 35 percent of wages and salaries this year, up from 21 percent in 2000 and 10 percent in 1960, according to TrimTabs Investment Research using Bureau of Economic Analysis data.
Low flush toilets mandated by building codes are costing San Francisco $114 million due to backed up waste in sewer lines, and the city will be using 8.5 million pounds of bleach to break up the clogs. All that bleach will ultimately wind up going into the Bay.
LA community colleges wasted $10 million on flawed designs for green power, then went ahead with plans to spend $44 million on solar projects resulting in minimal savings on power bills.
Consumers are complaining that federal regulations are causing detergents and clothes washers to fail to do their jobs. The feds made the soap companies take the phosphates out of detergents, and manufacturers are currently being paid a $250 tax credit per unit to build washing machines featuring inferior performance.
PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE is not enthused with the Republican field. Well, based on the past two years I’d vote for a syphilitic camel if he ran against Obama. But I’d rather not have to. But remember, it’s early yet — at this point in the previous cycle, it looked like it was going to be Hillary vs. Rudy. And Barack Obama was just a nice young man who’d given a speech at the convention.
GEORGE WILL IS not so hot on Huckabee, Gingrich. I would vote for a syphilitic camel over Barack Obama in 2012, so therefore I would even vote for Huckabee or Gingrich. But I might try to talk the camel into running one more time.
I voted for John McCain, whom I despise slightly more than Huckabee and Gingrich, in 2008 myself, but that syphilitic camel had better take care to choose a good running mate. Without Palin on the ticket, I might very well have written in Donald Duck.
Fortunately for the camel, the ideal Republican VP choice is very obvious: Marco Rubio.
Curt from Flopping Aces forwarded a lengthy posting by MataHarley which raises the question of whether the near financial collapse of 2008 was deliberately engineered, and whether a further stage of the same anti-American offensive remains to be completed.
MH summarizes and discusses the hypotheses advanced in a highly provocative paper on Economic Warfare written in 2009 by Kevin D. Freeman via the DOD contracting system for the Department of Defense Irregular Warfare Support Program (IWSP).
It is undeniable that if the collapse of the financial system was deliberately engineered by calculated attacks aimed at perceived vulnerabilities, those attacks were tremendously successful and resulted in enormous economic losses.
The hypothesis discussed in this paper suggests the very real possibility that financial terrorism may have cost the global economy as much as $50 trillion, roughly 1000 times greater than Bernie Madoff’s fund and equal to nearly four years of American productive output.
[A]n estimated $50 trillion of global wealth virtually vanished. At least $15 trillion of that loss was experienced by Americans, as measured by the combined declines in the value of stocks, bonds, real estate, and other assets.
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The Freeman paper visualizes a three-stage assault on the US economy, and the American position of military, political, and economic leadership, only two parts of which are so far completed.
The hypothesis under consideration is that a three-phased attack is underway with two of those phases completed to date.
The first phase was a speculative run-up in oil prices that generated as much as $2 trillion of excess wealth for oil-producing nations, filling the coffers of Sovereign Wealth Funds, especially those that follow Shariah Compliant Finance. This phase appears to have begun in 2007 and lasted through June 2008.
The rapid run-up in oil prices made the value of OPEC oil in the ground roughly$137 trillion (based on $125/barrel oil) virtually equal to the value of all other world financial assets, including every share of stock, every bond, every private
company, all government and corporate debt, and the entire world‘s bank deposits. That means that the proven OPEC reserves were valued at almost three times the total market capitalization of every company on the planet traded in all 27 global stock markets.
The second phase appears to have begun in 2008 with a series of bear raids targeting U.S. financial services firms that appeared to be systemically significant.
An initial bear raid against Bear Stearns was successful in forcing the firm to near bankruptcy. It was acquired by JP Morgan Chase and the systemic risk was averted briefly. Similar bear raids were conducted against various other firms during the summer, each ending in an acquisition. The attacks continued until the outright failure of Lehman Brothers in mid-September. This created a system-wide crisis, caused the collapse of the credit markets, and nearly collapsed the global financial system. The bear raids were perpetrated by naked short selling and manipulation of credit default swaps, both of which were virtually unregulated. The short selling was actually enhanced by recent regulatory changes including rescission of the uptick
rule and loopholes such as ―the Madoff exemption.
While substantial, unusual trading activity can be identified, the source of the bear raids has not been traceable to date due to serious transparency gaps for hedge funds, trading pools, sponsored access, and sovereign wealth funds. What can be demonstrated, however, is that two relatively small broker dealers emerged virtually overnight to trade ―trillions of dollars worth of U.S. blue chip companies. They are the number one traders in all financial companies that collapsed or are now financially supported by the U.S. government. Trading by the firms has grown exponentially while the markets have lost trillions of dollars in value.
The risk of a Phase Three has quickly emerged, suggesting a potential direct economic attack on the U.S. Treasury and U.S. dollar.
Such an event has already been discussed by finance ministers in major emerging market nations such as China and Russia as well as Iran and the Arab states. A focused effort to collapse the dollar by dumping Treasury bonds has grave implications including the possibility of a downgrading of U.S. debt forcing rapidly rising interest rates and a collapse of the American economy. In short, a bear raid against the U.S.financial system remains possible and may even be likely. Phase Two may have concluded with the brief market rebound that was supported by an emerging regulatory response calling for greater transparency across the board.
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Freeman observes: “[W]e remain left with the critical unanswered questions of who and how?”
One important clue must be the bizarre and confusing story of the seizure of $134.5 billion of apparently counterfeit US Treasury bearer bonds being smuggled across the border from Italy into Switzerland in June of 2009 by two Japanese nationals.
St. Louis Adjusted Monetary Base (BASE)
Freeman says that incident “may be as significant as the Japanese radio intercepts were before December 1941.” A hundred and thirty four billion dollars worth of counterfeit treasury bonds here and a hundred and thirty four billion dollars worth of counterfeit treasury bonds there adds up to a lot of money very quickly. The Obama Administration’s expansion of the US Monetary Base already threatens major inflation and jeopardizes the role of the dollar as reserve currency, additional counterfeit-based inflation could easily constitute a tipping-point factor changing our worst fears into reality.
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Freeman refers to, and quotes points made in, an anonymous, non-publicly-available 65-page paper titled Red Flags of Market Manipulation Causing a Collapse of the U.S. Economy, distributed to law enforcement agencies, members of Congress, and regulators.
This report discusses extensive research that shows significant red flags‘ of danger to the world‘s economy from what appears to be market manipulation in the global financial markets, which includes trading in common stocks, options,futures, commodities, currencies, oil, and bonds.
Two companies…are at the heart of this trading and they consistently work in concert. These firms became, virtually overnight, the largest traders in the U.S. financial markets. These companies provide a one-stop-shop for trade execution, back office clearing and bookkeeping that cater to hedge funds and small broker dealers. To give perspective, the amount of trading executed by these two firms in October 2008 exceeded the trading of securities firms Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Merrill Lynch combined in the NASDAQ market participant reports.
Key points
1) The firms have traded trillions of dollars worth of U.S. blue chip companies. They are the number one traders in all financial companies that collapsed or are now financially supported by the U.S. government. Trading by the firms has grown exponentially while the markets have lost trillions of dollars in value.
2) These firms appear to own few or no shares of blue chip companies they are number one traders in. There is no doubt that the magnitude of their trading impacted the marketplace. Since the direction of the market place has been in a severe downward trend, the impact from the firms has been and remains, negative to the marketplace.
Some other starling findings in the report, based almost exclusively on reviewing basic trading data, include:
The two previously small broker dealers mentioned in the report are market makers for every major financial services firm under attack.
These firms have a combined 76 different symbols under which they act as market maker (by contrast a major firm such as Citigroup has just 6).
Both firms offer sponsored access.
Both firms offer access to dark pools.
From June through September 2008, the two firms appeared to concentrate on Lehman Brothers, trading 1.04 billion shares while the stock price collapsed from $33.83 to $0.21 on 15 September. This pattern seemed to repeat in every other major financial stock.
The report estimates that the two firms completed as many as 641,000 trades per hour in October 2008 (based on market participation statistics and average trade size from the last available data).
Total trading volume by month in the financial sector listed for these two firms grew from approximately 350,000 shares (less than 1% of all market participant trading) in September 2006 to approximately 600,000 shares in the sector (about 6% of all market participant trading) in September 2007, to over 8 billion shares in the sector (about 19% of all market participant trading) by September 2008. That‘s an increase of 2.4 million percent in two years.
While both firms have been around for several decades, their rapid growth began in 2006 for one and 2007 for the other.
Both firms seem to specialize in the same stocks at the same time, appearing to work in concert.
Combined, the two firms traded 203 billion shares, mostly concentrated in major financial services companies. This compares to a total of 427 billion shares outstanding of all issues on the New York Stock Exchange.
The report estimates trading of at least $5 trillion over the 25-month period ending in November 2008.
The trading appears to represent new money to the marketplace by new participants.
From July 2008 through September 2008, the two firms ―traded more shares of Fannie and Freddie than were issued even as the share prices were collapsing.
The firms were also the largest traders of the UltraShort funds as well as the financial spider (symbol ―XLF) during the reporting period.
The firms also became the largest traders of energy stocks.
The two firms did not and do not hold major equity positions on their books.
The names of these two firms have been purposely withheld in this report because trading data alone is insufficient to consider any accusations against them. But, this trading data is specifically the type of red flag that should prompt further investigation. In addition, even in the event that trades were entered with the purpose of manipulating markets,there is no evidence to suggest that either of the brokerage firms discussed had any knowledge of, or in any way participated in any wrongdoing. They simply could have been conduits through which orders were placed as the laws and regulatory authorities currently allow. Nevertheless, this trading activity does lead to numerous questions:
Who had the capital to effect $5 trillion worth of trades in such a short period?
Who are the clients behind the trades? Are they foreign or domestic?
Why would two long-standing but relatively minor broker dealers be selected for such massive trading rather than the major firms? Did they have more permissive rules for sponsored access?
Why was trading concentrated in the financial firms that failed (Lehman, AIG, Bear Stearns, Fannie, Freddie) or were under threat of failing (Citigroup, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, and Wachovia)?
There is obviously no definitive evidence here that the Financial Collapse of 2008 was the result of a deliberate strategic plan to bring down the US economy carried out by hostile foreign agencies, but many of the details noted, particularly the scale of bear raids on major US financial institutions, certainly do provoke suspicion. The US Government is hardly about to share what it knows, so the rest of us can only file all this away for future reference, and keep an eye out for further related coverage.
