Monday, April 2, 2012

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  • TimesPeople recommended a video:
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    Remembering Earl Scruggs
    I lost sleep in high school finding blue grass on AM radio.
    I do not regret that.
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      The designers must get busy again.  
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      Sooner is better.  As soon as you can is best.

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      • Henry recommended a blog post:
        Mar 7, 2011
        Does IMF Stand for Impressive Macroeconomic Flexibility?
        So the IMF is holding a meeting on rethinking macroeconomic policy (I was invited but couldn’t make the timing work.) And the Fund’s chief economist has already made it clear that he’s open to some serious revision of the prevailing paradigm.

        http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/02/opinion/krugman-pink-slime-economics.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

        "The big bad event of last week was, of course, the Supreme Court hearing on health reform. In the course of that hearing it became clear that several of the justices, and possibly a majority, are political creatures pure and simple, willing to embrace any argument, no matter how absurd, that serves the interests of Team Republican. 
        But we should not allow events in the court to completely overshadow another, almost equally disturbing spectacle. For on Thursday Republicans in the House of Representatives passed what was surely the most fraudulent budget in American history.
        And when I say fraudulent, I mean just that. The trouble with the budget devised by Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, isn’t just its almost inconceivably cruel priorities, the way it slashes taxes for corporations and the rich while drastically cutting food and medical aid to the needy. Even aside from all that, the Ryan budget purports to reduce the deficit — but the alleged deficit reduction depends on the completely unsupported assertion that trillions of dollars in revenue can be found by closing tax loopholes.
        And we’re talking about a lot of loophole-closing. As Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center points out, to make his numbers work Mr. Ryan would, by 2022, have to close enough loopholes to yield an extra $700 billion in revenue every year. That’s a lot of money, even in an economy as big as ours. So which specific loopholes has Mr. Ryan, who issued a 98-page manifesto on behalf of his budget, said he would close?
        None. Not one. He has, however, categorically ruled out any move to close the major loophole that benefits the rich, namely the ultra-low tax rates on income from capital. (That’s the loophole that lets Mitt Romney pay only 14 percent of his income in taxes, a lower tax rate than that faced by many middle-class families.)
        So what are we to make of this proposal? Mr. Gleckman calls it a “mystery meat budget,” but he’s being unfair to mystery meat. The truth is that the filler modern food manufacturers add to their products may be disgusting — think pink slime — but it nonetheless has nutritional value. Mr. Ryan’s empty promises don’t. You should think of those promises, instead, as a kind of throwback to the 19th century, when unregulated corporations bulked out their bread with plaster of paris and flavored their beer with sulfuric acid.
        Come to think of it, that’s precisely the policy era Mr. Ryan and his colleagues are trying to bring back.
        So the Ryan budget is a fraud; Mr. Ryan talks loudly about the evils of debt and deficits, but his plan would actually make the deficit bigger even as it inflicted huge pain in the name of deficit reduction. But is his budget really the most fraudulent in American history? Yes, it is.
        To be sure, we’ve had irresponsible and/or deceptive budgets in the past. Ronald Reagan’s budgets relied on voodoo, on the claim that cutting taxes on the rich would somehow lead to an explosion of economic growth. George W. Bush’s budget officials liked to play bait and switch, low-balling the cost of tax cuts by pretending that they were only temporary, then demanding that they be made permanent. But has any major political figure ever premised his entire fiscal platform not just on totally implausible spending projections but on claims that he has a secret plan to raise trillions of dollars in revenue, a plan that he refuses to share with the public?
        What’s going on here? The answer, presumably, is that this is what happens when extremists gain complete control of a party’s discourse: all the rules get thrown out the window. Indeed, the hard right’s grip on the G.O.P. is now so strong that the party is sticking with Mr. Ryan even though it’s paying a significant political price for his assault on Medicare.
        Now, the House Republican budget isn’t about to become law as long as President Obama is sitting in the White House. But it has been endorsed by Mr. Romney. And even if Mr. Obama is reelected, the fraudulence of this budget has important implications for future political negotiations.
        Bear in mind that the Obama administration spent much of 2011 trying to negotiate a so-called Grand Bargain with Republicans, a bipartisan plan for deficit reduction over the long term. Those negotiations ended up breaking down, and a minor journalistic industry has emerged as reporters try to figure out how the breakdown occurred and who was responsible.
        But what we learn from the latest Republican budget is that the whole pursuit of a Grand Bargain was a waste of time and political capital. For a lasting budget deal can only work if both parties can be counted on to be both responsible and honest — and House Republicans have just demonstrated, as clearly as anyone could wish, that they are neither." 

        http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2012/04/02/breaking-two-main-greek-parties-already-breaking-bailout-agreement-to-gain-votes/

        "BREAKING….Two main Greek Parties already breaking bailout agreement to gain votes


        Dutch Finance Minister offers blunt warning against Athens trickery.
        Desperate eurocrats still hoping for Chinese, G20 involvement. 
        Greek media sources last night revealed that a get-out clause – in one article of Greece’s legislation concerning the passage of Parliamentary Bills – is being exploited by both the leading Greek Parties in the run-up to Elections at the end of this month.
        Thanks to the clause, some 35 amendments to the bailout legislation have been quietly passed without any reference to the Prime Minister’s office. Effectively, they water down some of the commitments that were made in order to get hold of the ECB’s extraordinary non-cash paper which Mario Draghi has presented to the world as ‘bailout cash’.
        Greek newspaper Proto Thema this morning confirmed the story.
        “With Greek politicians, there is always a back door,” said The Slog’s main informant, “and you can bet that when it was originally drawn up, this was the purpose of the clause. Their other classic trick is to get a quorum in Parliament at around 3 am, and then rush through bills granting all kinds of immunities, or contradicting reform legislation trumpeted to the electorate.”
        Lucas Papademos has been aware of what’s happening for some time. In a thinly veiled reference to the practice last night, the Prime Minister ignored the technical legality of the trick in order to tell legislators in writing that ‘The premier must be have total knowledge of the content of a proposed amendment’ in all cases. This rejection of a legal clause, however sneaky, in turn reflects a special dispensation given to all unelected Prime Ministers who used to work for Goldman Sachs. Signor Draghi uses the same Natural Law to subordinate bondholders, and call worthless paper drawn up by the ECB ‘cash from the EFSF bailout fund’.
        I understand that Papademos is now hastily getting all the amendments removed, but this won’t play well among Troika members. Perhaps Dutch Finance Minister Jan Kees de Jager has also been tipped off about the scam: early today he made a blunt public statement about what would happen if Greece doesn’t live up to its bailout commitments.
        “If the IMF decided that Greece is reneging on any part of the agreement,” he told reporters, “then we will not take part in any further bailouts of the country. But I am convinced Greece can solve its problems.”
        Those last sentences are always added by europhiles in order to cover the backside. But de Jager knows perfectly well there isn’t going to be any further bailout of Greece. Mario Draghi has deftly kept a tight hold on the real 130 billion euros of cash. It is sitting in the eurozone’s shiny new bazooka in order to hide rather poorer levels of commitment therein than have been suggested to a gullible media set.
        The other reason for the commitment, of course, is to get other global players (especially Beijing) to contribute to the Fund to be one day known as the ESM. But as the Chinese can both count and tell sh*t from putty, one suspects the eurocrats will have a better time (with much better food) trying to persuade the G20 summit to cough up.
        Already, however, there is a growing faction in Germany that doesn’t want the fund to be boosted by anyone. This remark from last Friday by Wolfgang Schauble perhaps reveals the truth about where his head is really at these days:
        “My irritation over a lot of stupid talk over the last few days has to do with the fact that it’s as if only the firewall is important,” Schaeuble told reporters in Copenhagen, “You could have put in 10 trillion, but if you don’t solve the problem, it’s worth nothing.”
        So, um, why put any in at all Wolfie, hmm?
        None of this is getting any better.
        ‘There is still a widespread belief here in Athens that Greece will go bust and declare insolvency over the Easter period,’ another Greek source wrote to me yesterday. We shall see. Stay tuned."

        messy
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    • Malbonnington posted to Twitter a video:
      Nov 21, 2010
      Fast Times at Woodside High
      “A video about 'Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction', from NYT - Fast Times at Woodside High http://nyti.ms/aQqPCp” 

      Some of these will be just fine. Others will not be.  
      Nothing new in that.






















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