Posts from — October 2011

The Harrisburg , Pennsylvania bankruptcy is another example of government trying to give everything away to the financial sector.

In addition to the problems caused by the GOPression, 20% of the people in the city were flooded out recently, and the tax base has collapsed. Their major bone of contention is a city guarantee on bonds issued years ago to build a new incinerator for the area. The city doesn’t have the money to continue the bond payments and maintain services.

The state has been proposing a take-over of finances that features the now standard wage concessions by workers, and the sale or lease of the city’s assets, parking garages and meters.

As those assets are an income source, why anyone would think that selling or leasing them would be anything more than a stop-gap measure that just puts off the default is beyond me. A majority of the city council voted to file for bankruptcy, and now the mayor and the state are fighting the decision.

The city council thinks that bond holders should share in the pain, but the mayor and state want to protect them from any ‘inconvenience’.

Duncan can come up with one-liners: “After I clicked through I realized the New York Times is perhaps a commendable jobs program for special needs people.”

This latest production that features, Iran, the Mexican drug cartels, the Saudis, and an ex-con Iranian-American car dealer is even more absurd than the Miami Haitian Ninja Terrorists.

The only point you have to look at to know that this is totally bogus is the wire transfer of $100K. Look, all drug dealers above street-level sales, and every intel operation in existence knows that there is mandatory reporting for US banks for anything above $10K, and the US has bludgeoned the rest of the world into tracking them. Hell, even Rush Limbaugh was smart enough to take out cash for his drugs at an amount below $10K.

Are they going to investigate the Saudi ambassador to see if there were reasons other than politics for him to be a target?

With the selective recording of conversations that the FBI seems to engage in, we will never know who came up with this plot, or what it is really all about beyond another piece of the government’s terrorism theater.

Update: Juan Cole highlights a Washington Post piece on Mansour Arbabsiar that justifies comparing him to Maxwell Smart. He is another ‘terrorist’ in the mold of the Miami Haitians, i.e. clueless. I’m expecting someone who resembles Peter Sellers to show up in a trench coat at any time.

A local Boston NPR station tells us: Mayor Menino Responds To Occupy Boston Arrests

“We will tolerate demonstrations, we will tolerate expressions of free speech but when it comes to civil disobedience we have a real issue with that, that is why we moved in last night,” Mayor Menino said.

“Civil disobedience doesn’t work for Boston; it doesn’t work for anyone.”

Apparently Mayor Menino slept through his local history classes as a child, and doesn’t walk around Boston much, because the city is hip deep in markers about “civil disobedience” that children in most US schools are required to learn about in American history classes.

To help the Mayor out, here are a few Wikipedia links to get him started: Boston Massacre, Boston Tea Party, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and Paul Revere.

If these events and people are important enough to be included in classes in Okaloosa County, Florida, you would think that the mayor of Boston would know about them.

From fevered mindset that passes for ‘originality’, the right-wingnuts [a subsidiary of the plutocrats] have rolled out ‘53%’ as a counter to the ‘99%’ of the Occupy effort. That is the percentage of Americans who pay US Federal income tax.

I have already covered the shrinking significance of the income tax in the Federal budget:

Here are the sources of revenue for the US Federal budget for fiscal year 1999 [a balanced budget] and fiscal year 2010. It shows the percentage of the revenue based on the type of tax:

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The Constitution of the United States [the link goes to the National Archives and features hi-res images of the original document] starts off with the Preamble:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

“We the People” is many times larger than the rest of the text, making it obvious who the government was created to benefit. When they wrote “promote the general Welfare”, they weren’t concerned with General Electric, General Dynamics, General Motors, or General Mills, they were concerned with the people.

Until the government stops acting primarily for the benefit of corporations, and billionaires, people need to invoke “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”, as guaranteed by the First Amendment.

I saw a sign [I can’t locate the source at the moment] that basically said “You have the right to remain silent … but I wouldn’t recommend it.” Amen to that.

It’s the second Monday in October, so it is Thanksgiving Day in Canada. Have a happy one.

The US Federal government has decided to call it Columbus Day, even though it should be the 12^th of October which was the second Wednesday in 1492. But it’s okay that the holiday is on the wrong day, because Christopher Columbus [AKA: Cristoforo Colombo, Cristóbal Colón] didn’t find what he was looking for and identified what he did find incorrectly. The important thing is that a large area of the map got changed from “here be dragons and sea serpents,” to “here be gold and cannibals” and no mention was made of the oppressive heat, mosquitoes, or hurricanes.

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Digby excerpted a New York Times editorial showing that the Occupy Wall Street message is penetrating the media shield against reality.

Ellroon grabbed the meat of Krugman’s Op-Ed on the protests, Confronting the Malefactors: “The protesters’ indictment of Wall Street as a destructive force, economically and politically, is completely right.”

Mustang Bobby has the Alan Grayson smackdown on the ignorance on Bill Maher’s show.

You will note that PJ O’Routke keeps referring bongos and may wonder what that is all about. The short version would be that O’Rourke was a real, genuine DFH who ignored the warning about the ‘brown acid’ and went over to the Dark Side.

Apparently he is confusing Alan Grayson with Alan Greenspan. It’s is understandable, really. They spell their first names the same way; their last names begin with a ‘G’ and contain a color; they were both born in NYC; they are both Jewish, and they both have Summa Cum Laude Bachelor’s degrees in economics.

Greenspan is the one who played saxophone in Woody Herman’s jazz band and is in the correct age group to have been a beatnik, who stereotypically played bongos. They were a feature of the 1950s.

Alas, Alan Grayson was too busy working his way through Harvard as a janitor and nightwatchman to get involved in the counter-culture, which would have been ?Disco?, as he is a good deal younger than Mr. O’Rourke.

Charlie Grapski tells us that the cons are attempting to kick off violence in the protests: American Spectator Editor Admits to Being Agent Provocateur at D.C. Museum.

It is to be hoped that the Park Police arrest and prosecute this moron, as, in addition to his confession, there are pictures of him.

Digby posted an e-mail sent out by Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation in which he attempts to show that the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are ignorant because they are using iPhones and iPads to respond to death of Steve Jobs.

I hate to break it to Mr. Phillips, but Steve Jobs had no love for Wall Street, with very good reason if you knew the history of Apple Inc..

It wasn’t because Steve was an LSD taking hippie who sought enlightenment in India, and became a Buddhist. While Steve was all of those things, and found wisdom in the Whole Earth Catalog, it was what the Wall Street mindset did to the company he founded, that turned him against them. What the ‘professional CEOs’ and ‘professional board of directors’ did to a thriving, successful company, is a case history in what is wrong with Wall Street, and the majority of corporations. The company he returned to had been hollowed out in pursuit of ever higher profits.

If Randians are looking for the “parasites”, “looters”, and “moochers”, they should look on Wall Street, not Pennsylvania Avenue.

Position: 38.3N 43.9W [10PM CDT 0300 UTC].
Movement: North-Northeast [030°] near 35 mph [56 kph].
Maximum sustained winds: 50 mph [ 85 kph].
Wind Gusts: 65 mph [100 kph].
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 205 Miles [335 km].
Minimum central pressure: 987 mb ↓.

Currently about 915 miles [1475 km] West of the Azores.

The storm has lost its tropical characteristics. This is the final advisory.

Here’s the link for NOAA’s latest satellite images.

[For the latest information click on the storm symbol, or go to the CATEGORIES drop-down box below the CALENDAR and select “Hurricanes” for all of the posts related to storms on this site.]

Much to the chagrin of the pundits, politicians, and media, the Occupy Wall Street movement accurately reflects the feelings of the people of the US.

CNN carries the news of a study about to be published: 40-year low in America’s view of Wall Street

…

The public has been down on big Wall Street banks and financial institutions for some time now. The General Social Survey, administered by the National Opinion Research Council, has asked Americans about their confidence in banks and financial institutions since 1973. Between March of 2006 and March of 2010, the percent of Americans with a great deal of confidence in banks and financial institutions plummeted 19 percentage points, from 30 percent to an all-time low of 11 percent. According to a similar trend from Harris Interactive, the percent of Americans with a great deal of confidence in the people running Wall Street had already reached an all-time low of just 4 percent by February of 2009. These figures are not just a reflection of Americans’ dissatisfaction with the size of their bank accounts — they also reflect the increasing belief that Wall Street is playing a game that only the bankers can win.
…

The majority of Americans have figured out for themselves that the game is rigged, in spite of all of the propaganda being pushed by the corporate media and front groups.

This corresponds to my own experience with people who have lived their entire lives in places like the Soviet Union, where propaganda is almost all they receive from cradle to grave. People make up their own minds and become sophisticated in filtering real information from what they are told. People tend to test claims against their own experiences, i.e. reality, and reject what doesn’t fit within that reality.

Froggy and the Pond

Ribbit?

[Editor: The temperature is back up, so the cats are looking for shade. Froggy decided that the edge of the pond is a pretty good place.

Friday Ark

Position: 30.7N 52.6W [10PM CDT 0300 UTC].
Movement: East-Northeast [075°] near 16 mph [26 kph].
Maximum sustained winds: 70 mph [110 kph].
Wind Gusts: 85 mph [140 kph].
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 105 Miles [165 km].
Minimum central pressure: 989 mb.

Currently about 725 miles [1170 km] East of Bermuda.

Here’s the link for NOAA’s latest satellite images.

[For the latest information click on the storm symbol, or go to the CATEGORIES drop-down box below the CALENDAR and select “Hurricanes” for all of the posts related to storms on this site.]

So, I’m watching the video of NYPD staff officers beating on people with nightsticks, and I’m trying to figure what in hell is going on.

The ‘white shirts’ who are doing all of the assaulting are the military equivalent of field grade officers. They seem to be working in packs, actually outnumbering the regular street cops in many videos. This is not the way the world works. They are supposed to be directing things, not massing and leading the charge. Then I recalled that ‘Tony Baloney’ was in the counter-terrorism unit of NYPD.

This is just guess work, an hypothesis that would explain this strange phenomena. What if there were agent provocateurs among the crowd? Their identities would not be shared with the regular officers, but the counter-terrorism unit would know who they were. If you were planning an assault on the protestors, you wouldn’t want to beat up or Mace your own people, so the attacks are being carried out by those who can recognize them.

Given what is known about the NYPD’s ‘intelligence’ activities, having infiltrators among the protestors would be ‘standard operating procedure’.