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Going To Hell In A Very Stylish Handbasket.

"El diablo sabes mas por viejo que por diablo" - old Mexican proverb

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Achtung! Das machine ist nicht für gerfingerpoken und mittengraben. Ist too easen für schnappen der pringenwerk, blowenfusen, und poppencorken mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht für gewerken by dast dumkopfen - das rubbernecken sightseeren ban keepen das hands in der pocketsen, relaxen und vatchen das blinkenlights.

links:
Grandfather Economic Report
Tom Paine
The Nation
RGE Monitor
The Economist
Landover Baptist Church
The Onion
Ernie's House of Whoop Ass

This would be funny if it weren't so absurd.

First, two words: pedophile priests. Additionally, sexual abuse of parishioners of both genders and all ages. Diddling kids ain't all these sex-starved freakazoids do.

Second, the numbers of new seminarians is dwindling at an increasing pace. As in there's no new priests. Basically, because the church won't let them have sex. Which was not an actual requirement for the priesthood for like a thousand years, until the seriously sexually disturbed contingent took over.

Third, since when does the mere fact of owning a penis confer godliness? Especially when they are not supposed to even think about it, much less use it? I would think the ability to give birth is WAY more godly than simply being a sperm life-support canister. Which is all they are, since they aren't supposed to use their little pee-pees for anything else. The whole 'teaching, nurturing and support' fiesta is a total girl thing anyway. Guys just wanna fuck and fight, so let's get real.

Frankly, given their trackrecords so far, I think the church should categorically forbid males from being priests or anything else with any kind of direct or implied authority or moral superiority. They've proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they consistently misuse and abuse it.

Besides, the whole dress thing is soooooo gay:

[Cardinals, pope and the fabulous Jackie O in full-length formal gowns - seriously, can anything be gayer than this?]

Vatican: Excommunication for female priests

VATICAN CITY, Associated Press - The Vatican insisted Friday that it is properly following Christian tradition by excluding females from the priesthood as it issued a new warning that women taking part in ordinations will be excommunicated.

The move dashed the hopes both of women seeking to be priests and of Catholics who see that as an option for a church struggling to recruit men.

A top Vatican official said the church acted after what it described as "so-called ordinations" held in various parts of the world.

Monsignor Angelo Amato of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said the Vatican wanted to provide bishops with a clear response on the issue.

The church has always banned the ordination of women by stating that the priesthood is reserved for males. The new decree is explicit in its reference to women.

"The church does not feel authorized to change the will of its founder Jesus Christ," Amato said in an interview prepared for Vatican Radio that was released to reporters. The reference is to Christ's having chosen only men as his Apostles.

[Oh, what bullshit - the church excised all reference to Jesus's female disciples in the middle ages. They branded his girlfriend, Mary Magdalen, a whore. Insecure patriarchal asshole revisionism. Jesus would kick their asses if he were alive today.]

One of the funniest guys *ever* in TV and movies, Harvey Korman, died today. As his most enduring character, Hedley Lamarr in Blazing Saddles said: "Now go do that voodoo that you do.. so WELL!"

Comic powerhouse Harvey Korman dies at 81

LOS ANGELES, Associated Press - Harvey Korman, the tall, versatile comedian who won four Emmys for his outrageously funny contributions to "The Carol Burnett Show" and on the big screen in "Blazing Saddles," died Thursday. He was 81.

Korman died at UCLA Medical Center after suffering complications from the rupture of an abdominal aortic aneurysm four months ago, his family said in a statement released by the hospital.

His daughter, Kate Korman, said in the statement that it was a "miracle" that her father had survived the aneurysm at all, and that he had several major operations.

"Tragically, after such a hard fought battle he passed away," she said.

A natural second banana, Korman gained attention on "The Danny Kaye Show," appearing in skits with the star. He joined the show in its second season in 1964 and continued until it was canceled in 1967. That same year he became a cast member in the first season of "The Carol Burnett Show."

Burnett and Korman developed into the perfect pair with their burlesques of classic movies such as "Gone With the Wind" and soap operas like "As the World Turns" (their version was called "As the Stomach Turns").

[Harvey and Carol Burnett spoofing "Sunset Boulevard"]

Another recurring skit featured them as "Ed and Eunice," a staid married couple who were constantly at odds with the wife's mother (a young Vickie Lawrence in a gray wig). In "Old Folks at Home," they were a combative married couple bedeviled by Lawrence as Burnett's troublesome young sister.

Burnett was devastated by the news, said her assistant, Angie Horejsi.

"She loved Harvey very much," Horejsi said. She said Burnett had not yet made a statement.

Korman revealed the secret to the long-running show's success in a 2005 interview.

"We were an ensemble, and Carol had the most incredible attitude. I've never worked with a star of that magnitude who was willing to give so much away."

After 10 successful seasons, he left in 1977 for his own series. Dick Van Dyke took his place, but the chemistry was lacking and the Burnett show was canceled two years later. "The Harvey Korman Show" also failed, as did other series starring the actor.

["Daddy love froggy. Froggy love daddy?... ribbit... ribbit..."]

"It takes a certain type of person to be a television star," he said in that 2005 interview. "I didn't have whatever that is. I come across as kind of snobbish and maybe a little too bright. ... Give me something bizarre to play or put me in a dress and I'm fine."

His most memorable film role was as the outlandish Hedley Lamarr (who was endlessly exasperated when people called him Hedy) in Mel Brooks' 1974 Western satire, "Blazing Saddles."

He also appeared in the Brooks comedies "High Anxiety," "The History of the World Part I" and "Dracula: Dead and Loving It," as well as two "Pink Panther" moves, "Trail of the Pink Panther" in 1982 and "Curse of the Pink Panther" in 1983.

Korman's other films included "Gypsy," "Huckleberry Finn" (as the King), "Herbie Goes Bananas" and "Bud and Lou" (as legendary straightman Bud Abbott to Buddy Hackett's Lou Costello). He also provided the voice of Dictabird in the 1994 live-action feature "The Flintstones."

In television, Korman guest-starred in dozens of series including "The Donna Reed Show," "Dr. Kildare," "Perry Mason," "The Wild Wild West," "The Muppet Show," "The Love Boat," "The Roseanne Show" and "Burke's Law."

In their '70s, he and Tim Conway, one of his Burnett show co-stars, toured the country with their show "Tim Conway and Harvey Korman: Together Again." They did 120 shows a year, sometimes as many as six or eight in a weekend.

Harvey Herschel Korman was born Feb. 15, 1927, in Chicago. He left college for service in the U.S. Navy, resuming his studies afterward at the Goodman School of Drama at the Chicago Art Institute. After four years, he decided to try New York.

"For the next 13 years I tried to get on Broadway, on off-Broadway, under or beside Broadway," he told a reporter in 1971.

[Harvey in drag with Tim Conway]

He had no luck and had to support himself as a restaurant cashier. Finally, in desperation, he and a friend formed a nightclub comedy act.

"We were fired our first night in a club, between the first and second shows," he recalled.

After returning to Chicago, Korman decided to try Hollywood, reasoning that "at least I'd feel warm and comfortable while I failed."

For three years he sold cars and worked as a doorman at a movie theater. Then he landed the job with Kaye.

In 1960 Korman married Donna Elhart and they had two children, Maria and Christopher. They divorced in 1977. Two more children, Katherine and Laura, were born of his 1982 marriage to Deborah Fritz.

In addition to his daughter Kate, he is survived by his wife and the three other children.

[Hedley is overwhelmed by Lilly Von Shtupp's vavoomness]

The Economic System of Corporatism

Corporatism

In the last half of the 19th century people of the working class in Europe were beginning to show interest in the ideas of socialism and syndicalism. Some members of the intelligentsia, particularly the Catholic intelligentsia, decided to formulate an alternative to socialism which would emphasize social justice without the radical solution of the abolition of private property. The result was called Corporatism. The name had nothing to do with the notion of a business corporation except that both words are derived from the Latin word for body, corpus.

The basic idea of corporatism is that the society and economy of a country should be organized into major interest groups (sometimes called corporations) and representatives of those interest groups settle any problems through negotiation and joint agreement. In contrast to a market economy which operates through competition a corporate economic works through collective bargaining. The American president Lyndon Johnson had a favorite phrase that reflected the spirit of corporatism. He would gather the parties to some dispute and say, "Let us reason together."

Under corporatism the labor force and management in an industry belong to an industrial organization. The representatives of labor and management settle wage issues through collective negotiation. While this was the theory in practice the corporatist states were largely ruled according to the dictates of the supreme leader.

One early and important theorist of corporatism was Adam Müller, an advisor to Prince Metternich in what is now eastern Germany and Austria. Müller propounded his views as an antidote to the twin dangers of the egalitarianism of the French Revolution and the laissez faire economics of Adam Smith. In Germany and elsewhere there was a distinct aversion among rulers to allow markets to function without direction or control by the state. The general culture heritage of Europe from the medieval era was opposed to individual self-interest and the free operation of markets. Markets and private property were acceptable only as long as social regulation took precedence over such sinfull motivations as greed.

Coupled with the anti-market sentiments of the medieval culture there was the notion that the rulers of the state had a vital role in promoting social justice. Thus corporatism was formulated as a system that emphasized the postive role of the state in guaranteeing social justice and suppressing the moral and social chaos of the population pursuing their own individual self-interests. And above all else, as a political economic philosophy corporatism was flexible. It could tolerate private enterprise within limits and justify major projects of the state. Corporatism has sometimes been labeled as a Third Way or a mixed economy, a synthesis of capitalism and socialism, but it is in fact a separate, distinctive political economic system.

Although rulers have probably operated according to the principles of corporatism from time immemorial it was only in the early twentieth century that regimes began to identify themselves as corporatist. The table below gives some of those explicitly corporatist regimes.

Corporatist Regimes of the Early Twentieth Century:

System Name/ Country/ Period/ Leader
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

National Corporatism/ Italy/ 1922-1945/ Benito Mussolini

Country, Religion, Monarchy/ Spain/ 1923-1930/ Miguel Primo de Rivera

National Socialism/ Germany/ 1933-1945/ Adolph Hitler

National Syndicalism/ Spain/ 1936-1973/ Francisco Franco

New State/ Portugal/ 1932-1968/ Antonio Salazar

New State/ Brazil/ 1933-1945/ Getulio Vargas

New Deal/ United States/ 1933-1945/ Franklin Roosevelt

Justice Party/ Argentina/ 1943-1955/ Juan Peron

In the above table several of the regimes were brutal, totalitarian dictatorships, usually labeled fascist, but not all the regimes that had a corporatist foundation were fascist. In particular, the Roosevelt New Deal despite its many faults could not be described as fascist. But definitely the New Deal was corporatist. The architect for the initial New Deal program was General Hugh Johnson. Johnson had been the administrator of the military mobilization program for the U.S. under Woodrow Wilson during World War I. It was felt that he did a good job of managing the economy during that period and that is why he was given major responsibility for formulating an economic program to deal with the severe problems of the Depression. But between the end of World War I and 1933 Hugh Johnson had become an admirer of Mussolini's National Corporatist system in Italy and he drew upon the Italian experience in formulating the New Deal. It should be noted that many elements of the early New Deal were later declared unconstitutional and abandoned, but some elements such as the National Labor Relations Act which promoted unionization of the American labor force are still in effect. One part of the New Deal was the development of the Tennessee River Valley under the public corporation called the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Some of the New Dealer saw TVA as more than a public power enterprise. They hoped to make TVA a model for the creation of regional political units which would replace state governments. Their goal was not realized. The model for TVA was the river development schemes carried out in Spain in the 1920's under the government of Miguel Primo de Rivera. Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the son of Miguel Primo de Rivera, was the founder of Franco's National Syndicalism.

Corporatist regime typically promote large governmental projects such as TVA on the basis that they are too large to be funded by private enterprise. In Brazil the Vargas regime created many public enterprises such as in iron and steel production which it felt were needed but private enterprise declined to create. It also created an organized labor movement that came to control those public enterprises and turned them into overstaffed, inefficient drains on the public budget.

Although the above locates the origin of corporatism in 19th century France it roots can be traced much further back in time. Sylvia Ann Hewlett in her book, The Cruel Dilemmas of Development: Twentieth Century Brazil, says,

Corporatism is based on a body of ideas that can be traced through Aristotle, Roman law, medieval social and legal structures, and into contemporary Catholic social philosophy. These ideas are based on the premise that man's nature can only be fulfilled within a political community.

..........

The central core of the corporatist vision is thus not the individual but the political community whose perfection allows the individual members to fulfill themselves and find happiness.

...............

The state in the corporatist tradition is thus clearly interventionist and powerful.

Corporatism is collectivist; it is a different version of collectivism than socialism but it is definitely collectivist. It places some importance on the fact that private property is not nationalized, but the control through regulation is just as real. It is de facto nationalization without being de jure nationalization.

Although Corporatism is not a familiar concept to the general public, most of the economies of the world are corporatist in nature. The categories of socialist and pure market economy are virtually empty. There are only corporatist economies of various flavors.

---------------------------

Sales of Spam rise as consumers trim food costs

MILWAUKEE, Associated Press - Love it, hate it or laugh at it — at least it's inexpensive.

Sales of Spam — that much maligned meat — are rising as consumers are turning more to lunch meats and other lower-cost foods to extend their already stretched food budgets.

What was once cheeky, silly and the subject of a musical (as Monty Python mocked the meat in a can), is now back on the table as people turn to the once-snubbed meat as costs rise, analysts say.

Food prices are increasing faster than they've risen since 1990, at 4 percent in the U.S. last year, according to the Agriculture Department. Many staples are rising even faster, with white bread up 13 percent last year, bacon up 7 percent and peanut butter up 9 percent.

There's no sign of a slowdown. Food inflation is running at an annualized rate of 6.1 percent as of April, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Economic Outlook briefing by Randy in Las Vegas:

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Why didn't you have the balls to speak up when you were lying, lying, and then lying some more to the American people as "White House Press Secretary", you son of a bitch? Now, you want to pretend you're coming clean so you can sell books? And while you're doing it, you pretend you had nothing to do with the original and subsequent lies? FUCK YOU, SCOTT MCCLELLAN, YOU LYING SORRY RAT TURD!

-----------

[Pair of lying sacks of shit: Scott McClellan and George Bush]

Exclusive: McClellan whacks Bush, White House

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan writes in a surprisingly scathing memoir to be published next week that President Bush “veered terribly off course,” was not “open and forthright on Iraq,” and took a “permanent campaign approach” to governing at the expense of candor and competence.

Among the most explosive revelations in the 341-page book, titled “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception” (Public Affairs, $27.95):

- McClellan charges that Bush relied on “propaganda” to sell the war.

- He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.

- He admits that some of his own assertions from the briefing room podium turned out to be “badly misguided.”

- The longtime Bush loyalist also suggests that two top aides held a secret West Wing meeting to get their story straight about the CIA leak case at a time when federal prosecutors were after them — and McClellan was continuing to defend them despite mounting evidence they had not given him all the facts.

- McClellan asserts that the aides — Karl Rove, the president’s senior adviser, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff — “had at best misled” him about their role in the disclosure of former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.

This is barely the start of the beginning....

Americans Unload Prized Belongings to Make Ends Meet

Engagement Rings, Family China and Heirlooms are Sold to Pay for Food and Gas

NEW YORK (AP) - The for-sale listings on the online hub Craigslist come with plaintive notices, like the one from the teenager in Georgia who said her mother lost her job and pleaded, "Please buy anything you can to help out."

for sale

Or the seller in Milwaukee who wrote in one post of needing to pay bills - and put a diamond engagement ring up for bids to do it.

Struggling with mounting debt and rising prices, faced with the toughest economic times since the early 1990s, Americans are selling prized possessions online and at flea markets at alarming rates.

To meet higher gas, food and prescription drug bills, they are selling off grandmother's dishes and their own belongings. Some of the household purging has been extremely painful - families forced to part with heirlooms.

Isn't this great? Eco-friendly ordnance!

"These compounds have great potential, "especially for large caliber naval and tank guns,"

You'll be a proud environmental activist when you're blown out of the water by one of these green babies!

Environmentally Friendly Bombs Planned

LiveScience.com - New explosives could be more powerful and safer to handle than TNT and other conventional explosives and would also be more environmentally friendly.

TNT, RDX and other explosives commonly used in military and industrial applications often generate toxic gases upon detonation that pollute the environment. Moreover, the explosives themselves are toxic and can find their way into the environment due to incomplete detonation and as unexploded ordnance. They are also extremely dangerous to handle, as they are highly sensitive to physical shock, such as hard impacts and electric sparks.

To make safer, more environmentally friendly explosives, scientists in Germany turned to a recently explored class of materials called tetrazoles. These derive most of their explosive energy from nitrogen instead of carbon as TNT and others do.

Tiny bombs were made from two promising tetrazoles with the alphabet-soup names of HBT and G2ZT. These materials proved less apt to explode accidentally than conventional explosives.

After the bombs were detonated in the laboratory, G2ZT also proved as powerful than TNT, and HBT more powerful than TNT and comparable to RDX, said researcher Thomas Klapotke, a chemist at the University of Munich in Germany.

In initial experiments, G2ZT and HBT produced fewer toxic byproducts than common explosives. Still, they did generate some dangerous hydrogen cyanide gas. But mixing these compounds with oxidizers not only avoids making hydrogen cyanide, but also improved performance, Klapotke said.

These compounds have great potential, "especially for large caliber naval and tank guns," Klapotke added.

Klapotke and his colleague Carlos Miro Sabate are scheduled to detail their findings in the June 24 issue of the journal Chemistry of Materials.

Wasn't is Josef Goebbels that once said, "if you tell a lie long enough and loud enough, it becomes the truth"? Looks like the moneyboyz are counting on that logic...

---

Dear CIGAs,

The following is a classic statement. I just heard a talking head say that he agrees with the Bernanke approach:

"If you can control inflationary expectations, you can control inflation."

Translation: If you lie your butt off, issue skewed statistics and do it all at once as a choir singing a single note, all will be ok.

In the last 10 business days CEOs of the following companies have declared the credit problem solved:

1. Citigroup.
2. Goldman Sachs.
3. JP Morgan.
4. Lehman.
5. Merrill Lynch.
6. Morgan Stanley.

And, of course, Secretary of the US Treasury Henry Paulson has declared the credit problems under control.

My answer:

Monetary inflation leads to Price inflation which is a Consequence that cannot be stopped by lying. Consequences are unavoidable.

- Jim Sinclair

Former US Comptroller David Walker speaks truth:

Personally, I know other energy sources will be developed, most notably solar technology and geothermal. But the coming financial turbulence and the time frame it will take to get those new energy technologies to market is what will create disruptive change. Yes, there will be food riots in America, yes there will be a lot of people hurting very badly, and no, I don't intend to be one of them.

Energy fears looming, new survivalists prepare

BUSKIRK, N.Y., Associated Press - A few years ago, Kathleen Breault was just another suburban grandma, driving countless hours every week, stopping for lunch at McDonald's, buying clothes at the mall, watching TV in the evenings.

That was before Breault heard an author talk about the bleak future of the world's oil supply. Now, she's preparing for the world as we know it to disappear.

Breault cut her driving time in half. She switched to a diet of locally grown foods near her upstate New York home and lost 70 pounds. She sliced up her credit cards, banished her television and swore off plane travel. She began relying on a wood-burning stove.

"I was panic-stricken," the 50-year-old recalled, her voice shaking. "Devastated. Depressed. Afraid. Vulnerable. Weak. Alone. Just terrible."

Convinced the planet's oil supply is dwindling and the world's economies are heading for a crash, some people around the country are moving onto homesteads, learning to live off their land, conserving fuel and, in some cases, stocking up on guns they expect to use to defend themselves and their supplies from desperate crowds of people who didn't prepare.

The exact number of people taking such steps is impossible to determine, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the movement has been gaining momentum in the last few years.

These energy survivalists are not leading some sort of green revolution meant to save the planet. Many of them believe it is too late for that, seeing signs in soaring fuel and food prices and a faltering U.S. economy, and are largely focused on saving themselves.

Some are doing it quietly, giving few details of their preparations — afraid that revealing such information as the location of their supplies will endanger themselves and their loved ones. They envision a future in which the nation's cities will be filled with hungry, desperate refugees forced to go looking for food, shelter and water.

"There's going to be things that happen when people can't get things that they need for themselves and their families," said Lynn-Marie, who believes cities could see a rise in violence as early as 2012.

Lynn-Marie asked to be identified by her first name to protect her homestead in rural western Idaho. Many of these survivalists declined to speak to The Associated Press for similar reasons.

Are they fucking kidding?! This is 8.5 times more than the entire gross product of the whole world combined! That means that even if the entire world turned over every single dollar they make for the next eight and a half years, we would barely cover the 'cost' of this made-up financial garbage!

Derivatives Market Grows to $596 Trillion on Hedging

May 22 (Bloomberg) -- The market for derivatives expanded at the fastest pace in at least a decade last year as the global credit crisis spurred trading in contracts used to hedge against losses, according to the Bank for International Settlements.

Derivatives, including those based on debt, currencies, commodities, stocks and interest rates, expanded 44 percent from the previous year to $596 trillion, the Basel, Switzerland-based bank said in a report today. The amount of credit-default swaps protecting investors against losses on bonds and loans more than doubled to cover a notional $58 trillion of debt.

[Click map for larger image]

Home price index posts largest drop in history

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - A home-price index considered to be the most comprehensive reading of the U.S. market posted the sharpest decline in its 17-year history, and analysts say housing has yet to bottom out.

Rapidly falling home prices in California, Florida and Nevada skewed the national results.

The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight said Thursday that home prices fell 3.1 percent in the first quarter compared with last year.

It was only the second quarter of price declines since the index started in 1991. The price index first declined on a year-over-year basis in the final quarter of 2007, when it dropped 0.45 percent.

Another widely followed reading, the Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller index, has shown larger declines for major U.S. metropolitan areas. But analysts say the government index provides a more comprehensive reading of nationwide housing market.

[Ed. note: and leave us not forget how honest the goobermint numbers are!]

These fatcats never cease to amaze. "Exxon's annual profits increased from $11.5 billion to $40.6 billion in the past five years." There's no excuse whatsoever. Not that it matters, when both the President and the Real, sorry, Vice President are bigoil guys.

Big Oil defends profits before Senate panel

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - Top executives of the five largest oil companies tried to shift anger over high prices to a debate over supplies Wednesday, leading a senator to accuse them of acting like "hapless victims" while racking up record profits.

Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., told the executives there's "a disconnect" between normal supply and demand and the skyrocketing price of oil — surpassing $130 a barrel even as the oil leaders testified — that the industry has yet to explain.

J. Stephen Simon, executive vice president of Exxon Mobil Corp., said profits have been huge "in absolute terms" but must be viewed in the context of the massive scale of the industry." He also said high earnings are needed "in the current up cycle" to pay for investments in the long term when profits will be down.

"'Current up cycle,' that's a nice term," replied Leahy with sarcasm, "when people can't afford to go to work" because gasoline is costing close to $4 a gallon.

He asked Simon what his total compensation was at Exxon, a company that made $40 billion last year. Simon replied it was $12.5 million annually.

Ain't that nice? They forecast 'slower growth, higher unemployment' this year. Ask any American, they could have told you this last Christmas. Isn't a forecast when you make an educated guess ahead of time?

Fed sees slower growth, higher unemployment in '08

WASHINGTON, Associated Press - The Federal Reserve on Wednesday sharply lowered its projection for economic growth this year, citing blows from the housing and credit debacles along with zooming energy prices. It also expects higher unemployment and inflation.

Wall Street tumbled in response. But Fed officials, even with the more downbeat assessment, left the impression that they would not be inclined to cut interest rates further. The decision at the Fed's last meeting on April 29-30 to reduce rates was a "close call," according to minutes of those private deliberations released Wednesday.

The Fed hopes that its series of powerful rate cuts ordered since last September and the government's $168 billion stimulus package of tax rebates for people and tax breaks for businesses would help energize growth somewhat in the second half of this year.

Fed officials viewed economic activity "as likely to be particularly weak in the first half of 2008; some rebound was anticipated in the second half of this year," the documents stated.

On Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrials plunged more than 180 points in afternoon trading.

Meanwhile, Exxon, Chevron etc (none members of OPEC), are making obscene record profits, no one is pressuring carmakers to build cleaner, high-mileage cars, and we're giving away trillions of taxpayer dollars to crooked bankers and investment houses.

House passes bill to sue OPEC over oil prices

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation on Tuesday allowing the Justice Department to sue OPEC members for limiting oil supplies and working together to set crude prices, but the White House threatened to veto the measure.

The bill would subject OPEC oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, to the same antitrust laws that U.S. companies must follow.

The measure passed in a 324-84 vote, a big enough margin to override a presidential veto.

The legislation also creates a Justice Department task force to aggressively investigate gasoline price gouging and energy market manipulation.

Yup, no worries for us!

Data Mining Your Life

By Carlton Meyer, May/13/2008

Few Americans pay attention to the Bush administration’s effort to better monitor terrorist communications. In short, federal authorities want to indirectly void the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which requires a warrant signed by a judge before they can search a person’s home and other personal information. This seems harmless to most law abiding citizens, so why is this opposed by many in the U.S. Congress? The answer is that most people have skeletons in their closet, as New York Governor Eliot Spitzer recently demonstrated. Congressmen know that the U.S. government wants to learn every detail about everyone’s private life through the growth of massive computer databases and new search technology that allows “data mining.”

Prior to the “war on terror,” the “war on drugs” was the excuse to gradually errode the U.S. Bill of Rights. Since drug lords do business in cash, a database called the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) was established to monitor cash transactions in the USA.[1] Banks must submit a report on persons who make a cash transaction of $10,000 or more. Drug lords learned of this, so they limited transactions to less than $10,000. As a result, laws were passed that require banks to also report “suspicious” or multiple cash transactions below $10,000. Since money was often laundered through casinos and money transfer companies like Western Union, they are required to submit reports to FinCEN too.

Structuring

This data provided federal agents with leads to possible criminal activity, but they were often unable to link cash transactions to a specific crime. As a result, a vague law prohibiting “structuring” was enacted, in which it became illegal to structure transactions to avoid the $10,000 reporting requirement. This little understood law is a favorite tool of law enforcement because few Americans know that depositing or withdrawing a few thousand dollars in cash a few times a year may land them in prison. Once such activity is detected, federal agents demand an explanation, while threatening to imprison the suspects for “structuring.” As a result, thousands of uncooperative or unconvincing Americans have been imprisoned for nothing more than suspicious cash transactions.

Vatican: It's OK to believe in aliens

VATICAN CITY, Associated Press - Believing that the universe may contain alien life does not contradict a faith in God, the Vatican's chief astronomer said in an interview published Tuesday.

The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, was quoted as saying the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.

"How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?" Funes said. "Just as we consider earthly creatures as 'a brother,' and 'sister,' why should we not talk about an 'extraterrestrial brother'? It would still be part of creation."

In the interview by the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, Funes said that such a notion "doesn't contradict our faith" because aliens would still be God's creatures. Ruling out the existence of aliens would be like "putting limits" on God's creative freedom, he said.

No duh. All organized religions are bullshit, and have almost nothing to do with god or spirituality.

Belief in God 'childish,' Jews not chosen people: Einstein letter

LONDON (AFP) - Albert Einstein described belief in God as "childish superstition" and said Jews were not the chosen people, in a letter to be sold in London this week, an auctioneer said Tuesday.

The father of relativity, whose previously known views on religion have been more ambivalent and fuelled much discussion, made the comments in response to a philosopher in 1954.

As a Jew himself, Einstein said he had a great affinity with Jewish people but said they "have no different quality for me than all other people".

"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.

"No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this," he wrote in the letter written on January 3, 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, cited by The Guardian newspaper.

The German-language letter is being sold Thursday by Bloomsbury Auctions in Mayfair after being in a private collection for more than 50 years, said the auction house's managing director Rupert Powell.

In it, the renowned scientist, who declined an invitation to become Israel's second president, rejected the idea that the Jews are God's chosen people.

"For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions," he said.

"And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people."

And he added: "As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."

Previously the great scientist's comments on religion -- such as "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind" -- have been the subject of much debate, used notably to back up arguments in favour of faith.

This is the face of courage and true humanity:

[Irena Sendlerowa in her 90's, and as a young woman before the war]

Sendler, savior of Warsaw Ghetto children, dies

WARSAW (Reuters) - Irena Sendler, a Polish woman who saved thousands of Jewish children during World War Two by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto, died in the Polish capital on Monday after a long illness, local media said.

Israel's Holocaust remembrance authority, Yad Vashem, said in a statement that it mourned her death.

The web portal of Poland's leading daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, said Sendler, 98, died in Plocka Street hospital early on Monday. The hospital declined to comment on the report.

Yad Vashem chairman Avner Shalev said: "Irena Sendler's courageous activities rescuing Jews during the Holocaust serve as a beacon of light to the world, inspiring hope and restoring faith in the innate goodness of mankind."

Using her position as a social worker, Sendler regularly entered the ghetto, smuggling around 2,500 children out in boxes, suitcases or hidden in trolleys.

The children were then placed with Polish families outside the ghetto, created by Nazi Germany in 1940 for the city's half a million strong Jewish population, and given new identities.

But in 1943 Sendler, who led the children' section of the Zegota organization which helped Jews during the war, was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo.

She only escaped execution when Zegota managed to bribe some Nazi officials, who left her unconscious but alive with broken legs and arms in the woods.

"People who stand up for others, for the weak, are very rare. The world would have been a better place if there were more of them," Marek Edelman, the last surviving commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, said on national television.

His sentiments were echoed by former Polish President Lech Walesa as well as religious leaders.

Sendler was honored with Israeli Yad Vashem Righteous Among the Nations medal in 1965 for her actions, and later made an honorary Israeli citizen.

She was also nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize last year but, despite her bravery, she denied she was a hero.

"The term 'hero' irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little," Sendler said in one of her last interviews.

-------------

Irena Sendlerowa in her own words:

How I rescued children from the Warsaw ghetto

The reason why I rescued children from the ghetto dates back to may family home and childhood. I was brought up to react that a person must be rescued when drowning, regardless of religion and nationality. A requirement dictated by the heart.

When war broke out I was a social care nurse in the Warsaw City Council's Health and Care Department. We looked after both Polish and Jewish poverty-stricken persons. Immediately on the German occupation of Warsaw a regulation was proclaimed depriving the Jewish population of all material aid. The situation deteriorated when the ghetto was closed on the 15.10.1941, after being opened in November 1940. That was when I recruited a group of my most trusted colleagues to rescue the most endangered people. By forging hundreds of documents in which Polish families were indicated under original Jewish names, we received money from Social Care, thereby saving at least a few from starvation.

We were given "passes" allowing entry to the Warsaw ghetto as functionaries of the Urban Sanitation Works. Its director Juliusz Majkowski, a person of great courage, entered my and my colleagues' names on the list of his workers.

I've opened contacts with "Centos" and other social organisations, with Dr. Wysznacka and Dr. Merkinówna - Prof. Witwicki's assistants.

It soon proved imperative to get children out on the so-called Aryan side since inside the ghetto it was hell.

We reached homes to say we could rescue children and lead them outside the ghetto walls. The basic question which then arose was: what guarantee could we give.

We had to admit honestly that we could give no guarantee since we did not even know whether we would succeed in leaving the ghetto today.

That was when we witnessed infernal scenes. Father agreed but mother didn't. Grandmother cuddled the child most tenderly and, weeping bitterly, said "I won't give away my grandchild at any price".

We sometimes had to leave such unfortunate families without taking their children from them. I went there the next day to see what the whole building had come to and often found that everyone had been taken to the Umschlagsplatz railway siding for transport to death camps.

Where were those rescued children sent to?

They had first to be placed with families we trusted the most to adapt the children to wholly changed conditions (family atmosphere and language - they often only spoke Yiddish). We called those homes "emergency care units". Those who did not know Polish had to be taught it, also basic prayers so as not to differ from Polish children when later taken to Social Care units.

Those kids quickly became accustomed to their new tutors, without understanding the extent of their tragedy, though they sometimes asked why they had been carried there away from "their kind miss" (i.e. the emergency care units). But it was toys which most often substituted their "kind miss"). They played, got up to all kinds of pranks and just felt good.

Children taken from the Emergency Care Units to private homes experienced their new lives in a quite different way. Those persons mainly took in small children. They were often childless families who longed to experience parenthood. After some time they become so attached to those children that, in many cases, they refused to give them back after the war. That apart, despite the fond care of their "adopted parents" those children also experienced bad moments, often locked in wardrobes for whole hours.

I know of cases when the sole chance of survival was the external window-sill, behind a curtain, keeping the child there as long as necessary, holding on with numb hands so as not to fall, until the Germans left the home of his adopted parents.

The children paid dear for the "price of life". A child sometimes had to be taken away from one "parents" and placed with others for their safety and that of the child.

I once carried such a tearful, broken-hearted little boy to other guardians when he asked me, crying and sobbing, "Please tell me how many Mums can you have, for this is the third one I'm going to".

In conditions of continuous danger from every part of the whole Polish environment, of frequent "visits" by Germans for various reasons, Jewish children had to be identical with Polish children. To allow them to return to a Jewish community some kind of a card file had to be kept, where against a name - Maria Kowalska for example - there was written "Regina Lubliner" - to allow the child to return home after the war.

For obvious reasons of conspiracy, the grandiloquently called "card file" was a roll of very narrow paper stripes. It was me and me alone who, for security reasons, kept and looked after this file.

A table stood in the middle of my room, with a window looking on partly on the house garden and partly on the backyard. So whenever I went to bed in the evening I placed that small paper roll on the middle of that table. I intended to throw the whole roll out of the window into the bushes in that house garden should anyone knock on my entry door. I frequently checked how effective my idea was so as to be well prepared to receive any "uninvited night guests".

Such a day did come on the 20.10.1943. There was a terrible banging on the front door which awoke my mother first and then let my head clear. I behaved just as I had trained through several years what to do should the Germans arrive. I grabbed that roll and wanted to throw it out of the window but could not, for the whole house was surrounded by Germans. So I threw it to my liasing colleague and went to open the door.

There were 11 soldiers. In two hours they almost tore the whole house apart, ripping up the floor, disembowelling pillows etc. The file was saved due to the great courage and intelligence of my liasing colleague who hid it in her underwear. I felt enormously, though paradoxically, happy when the Gestapo personnel let me dress for I knew they had not found the file of those children.

I cannot give a short description of what I experienced in the Gestapo cellars in Szucha Street and in Pawiak prison. The Pawiak museum contains a special cabinet with the instruments used by those "supermen" to torture prisoners. I still carry the marks on my body of what those "German supermen" did to me then. I was sentenced to death. "The Z.egota" [Relief Council for Jews, working under the auspices of the Home Army] the Jewish underground aid organisation smuggled messages to me that I am not to worry for it is doing everything possible to get me out. The whole leadership of Z.egota liked me very much and had great respect for my work. They spared no effort to find a way to have my death sentence rescinded.

Apart from any sentiments, there was also anxiety that the only trace of those children would disappear should I die.

It is beyond description to tell what you feel when travelling to your own execution and, at the last moment, to find you had been bought out. A Gestapo officer had let me out for a large bribe. I figured in their documents as having been killed by firing squad. But after two months incorrect records were found in their registers. The Gestapo bribe-taker was sent to the eastern front and the Gestapo again visited me, but unsuccessfully for after leaving Pawiak illegally I had to change all my documents and also never to be found at home. I had to "steal" my dying mother from our home and take her to unknown persons until she ended her life several weeks later. The Gestapo was looking for me so obstinately that they were even at Mother's funeral asking which is the dead woman's daughter. Our friends replied "her daughter is in Pawiak prison". To which a Gestapo functionary replied furiously: "Sure she was but inexplicably no longer is". I continued working as the head of the children's section of "Z.egota" though using entirely changed personal documents.

During the Warsaw Uprising I buried the "File" in two bottles in the garden of my liasing colleague, to ensure it would be given to a proper person even should I die. After the war in Poland ended, I delivered the matter of those children, i.e. the so-called "File", into the hands of Dr. Adolf Berman, the erstwhile first president of the Jewish Committee.

Using the addresses of children in the file, the Jewish Committee took back those children and delivered them to Orphan Homes organised in Poland or gradually sent them to erstwhile Palestine.

In conclusion let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly.

The opposite is true - I continue to have qualms of conscience that I did so little.

It was my fervent wish to describe the subject of those children in great detail, to show the world the tragedy of the Jewish child, never encountered in the history of mankind down the centuries. But illness has overcome me and it will not be possible to tackle that task. So I appeal that perhaps "someone" will appear to take up the subject and display those "Heroes of Maternal Hearts", to give the contemporary world a better knowledge of the truth. And that truth should constitute a warning for the whole world, for all mankind.

Half-right wackos from the rabidly homophobic Fred Phelps cult. If they actually paid attention, they'd know Dubya hates America and queers:

More funny idiot wackjobs:

Ummm, yes.

Gramma need meds?

This guy was allowed to procreate

Chip off the old blockhead

It's going to get much much worse. A lot of people are going to hurt severely. There will be revolt.

From Mike Whitney:

"ARE YOU BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE 8 YEARS AGO?

When George W. Bush took office in 2000, oil was $28 per barrel, the euro was $.87 on the dollar, gold was $274 per ounce, and the national debt was $5.9 trillion. Today, oil is a record $114 per barrel, the euro is nudging $1.60 on the dollar, gold is $945 per ounce, and the National Debt is $9 trillion. The country is presently engaged in a $2 trillion war in Iraq with no end in sight. The federal government has expanded over 30% under Bush. Wages for working people have stagnated, unemployment has risen, 47 million Americans are without health care, and the economy is slipping into recession. By every objective standard, the country is worse off today than when Bush first took office."

Afghanistan is a joke. We only went in there to nail down the gas/oil pipeline to the Gulf, we were buddies with the Taliban back in the day, we gave them cash and guns. It wasn't 'till they got uppity that we declared them terrorists.

Marines ignore Taliban cash crop to not upset Afghan locals

GARMSER, Afghanistan, Associated Press - The Marines of Bravo Company's 1st Platoon sleep beside a grove of poppies. Troops in the 2nd Platoon playfully swat at the heavy opium bulbs while walking through the fields. Afghan laborers scraping the plant's gooey resin smile and wave.

Last week, the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit moved into southern Helmand province, the world's largest opium poppy-growing region, and now find themselves surrounded by green fields of the illegal plants that produce the main ingredient of heroin.

The Taliban, whose fighters are exchanging daily fire with the Marines in Garmser, derives up to $100 million a year from the poppy harvest by taxing farmers and charging safe passage fees — money that will buy weapons for use against U.S., NATO and Afghan troops.

Yet the Marines are not destroying the plants. In fact, they are reassuring villagers the poppies won't be touched. American commanders say the Marines would only alienate people and drive them to take up arms if they eliminated the impoverished Afghans' only source of income.

Today, I'm off to Pinnacles National Monument to do some climbing around. Here is an eye-opening article by Kevin Phillips, which was just published in Harper's Magazine.

---

Hard numbers: The economy is worse than you know

By Kevin Phillips, Harper's Magazine, In print: Sunday, April 27, 2008

Ever since the 1960s, Washington has gulled its citizens and creditors by debasing official statistics, the vital instruments with which the vigor and muscle of the American economy are measured.

The effect has been to create a false sense of economic achievement and rectitude, allowing us to maintain artificially low interest rates, massive government borrowing, and a dangerous reliance on mortgage and financial debt even as real economic growth has been slower than claimed.

The corruption has tainted the very measures that most shape public perception of the economy:

- The monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI), which serves as the chief bellwether of inflation;

- The quarterly Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which tracks the U.S. economy's overall growth;

- The monthly unemployment figure, which for the general public is perhaps the most vivid indicator of economic health or infirmity.

Not only do governments, businesses and individuals use these yardsticks in their decisionmaking, but minor revisions in the data can mean major changes in household circumstances - inflation measurements help determine interest rates, federal interest payments on the national debt, and cost-of-living increases for wages, pensions and Social Security benefits.

And, of course, our statistics have political consequences too. An administration is helped when it can mouth banalities about price levels being "anchored" as food and energy costs begin to soar.

The truth, though it would not exactly set Americans free, would at least open a window to wider economic and political understanding. Readers should ask themselves how much angrier the electorate might be if the media, over the past five years, had been citing 8 percent unemployment (instead of 5 percent), 5 percent inflation (instead of 2 percent), and average annual growth in the 1 percent range (instead of the 3-4 percent range).

Let me stipulate: The deception arose gradually, at no stage stemming from any concerted or cynical scheme. There was no grand conspiracy, just accumulating opportunisms.

The political blame for the slow, piecemeal distortion is bipartisan - both Democratic and Republican administrations had a hand in the abetting of political dishonesty, reckless debt and a casino-like financial sector. To see how, we must revisit 40 years of economic and statistical dissembling.

Pollyanna Creep

"Pollyanna Creep" is an apt phrase that originated with John Williams, a California-based economic analyst and statistician who "shadows," as he puts it, the official Washington numbers. In a 2006 interview, Williams noted that although few Americans ever see the fine print, the government "always footnotes the changes and provides all the fine detail. Nonetheless, some of the changes are nothing short of remarkable, and the pattern over time is what I call Pollyanna Creep."

Williams is one of the small group of economists and analysts who have paid any attention to the phenomenon. A few have pointed out the understatement of the Consumer Price Index - the billionaire bond manager Bill Gross has described it as an "haute con job." In 2003, a University of Chicago economist named Austan Goolsbee (now a senior economic adviser to Barack Obama's presidential campaign) published an op-ed in the New York Times pointing out how the government had minimized the depth of the 2001-2002 U.S. recession, having "cooked the books" to misstate and minimize the unemployment numbers.

Unfortunately, the critics have tended to train their axes on a single abuse, missing the broad forest of statistical misinformation that has grown up over the past four decades.

The story starts after the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961, when high jobless numbers marred the image of Camelot-on-the-Potomac and the new administration appointed a committee to weigh changes. The result, implemented a few years later, was that out-of-work Americans who had stopped looking for jobs - even if this was because none could be found - were labeled "discouraged workers" and excluded from the ranks of the unemployed, where many, if not most, of them had been previously classified.

By the 1969 fiscal year, Lyndon Johnson orchestrated a "unified budget" that combined Social Security with the rest of the federal outlays. This innovation allowed the surplus receipts in the former to mask the emerging deficit in the latter.

Richard Nixon, besides continuing the unified budget, developed his own taste for statistical improvement. He asked his second Federal Reserve chairman, Arthur Burns, to develop what became an ultimately famous division between "core" inflation and headline inflation. If the Consumer Price Index was calculated by tracking a bundle of prices, so-called core inflation would simply exclude, because of "volatility," categories that happened to be troublesome: at that time, food and energy.

Core inflation could be spotlighted when the headline number was embarrassing, as it was in 1973 and 1974. (The economic commentator Barry Ritholtz has joked that core inflation is better called "inflation ex-inflation" - i.e., inflation after the inflation has been excluded.)

In 1983, under the Reagan administration, inflation was further finagled when the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) decided that housing, too, was overstating the Consumer Price Index; the BLS substituted an entirely different "Owner Equivalent Rent" measurement, based on what a homeowner might get for renting his or her house. This methodology, controversial at the time but still in place today, simply sidestepped what was happening in the real world of homeowner costs.

Because low inflation encourages low interest rates, which in turn make it much easier to borrow money, the BLS's decision no doubt encouraged, during the late 1980s, the large and often speculative expansion in private debt - much of which involved real estate, and some of which went spectacularly bad between 1989 and 1992 in the savings-and-loan, real estate and junk-bond scandals.

The distortional inclinations of the next president, George H.W. Bush, came into focus in 1990, when Michael Boskin, the chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers, proposed to reorient U.S. economic statistics principally to reduce the measured rate of inflation. His stated grand ambition was to move the calculus away from old industrial-era methodologies toward the emerging services economy and the expanding retail and financial sectors. Skeptics, however, countered that the underlying goal, driven by worry over federal budget deficits, was to reduce the inflation rate in order to reduce federal payments - from interest on the national debt to cost-of-living outlays for government employees, retirees, and Social Security recipients.

Hidden unemployed

It was left to the Clinton administration to implement these convoluted CPI measurements, which were reiterated in 1996 through a commission headed by Boskin and promoted by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.

The Clintonites also extended the Pollyanna Creep of the nation's employment figures. In 1994, the Bureau of Labor Statistics redefined the work force to include only that small percentage of "discouraged workers" who had been seeking work for less than a year. The longer-term discouraged - some 4-million U.S. adults - fell out of the main monthly tally. Some now call them the "hidden unemployed."

For its last four years, the Clinton administration also thinned the monthly household economic sampling by one sixth, from 60,000 to 50,000, and a disproportionate number of the dropped households were in the inner cities; the reduced sample (and a new adjustment formula) is believed to have reduced black unemployment estimates and eased worsening poverty figures.

Despite the present Bush administration's overall penchant for manipulating data (e.g., Iraq, climate change), it has yet to match its predecessor in economic revisions. In 2002, the administration did introduce an "experimental" new CPI calculation (the C-CPI-U), which shaved another 0.3 percent off the official CPI; and since 2006 it has stopped publishing the M-3 money supply numbers, which captured rising inflationary impetus from bank credit activity.

After 40 years of manipulation, more than a few measurements of the U.S. economy have been distorted beyond recognition.

Untruth in labeling

Last year, the word "opacity," hitherto reserved for Scrabble games, became a mainstay of the financial press. A credit market panic had been triggered by something called collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), which in some cases were too complicated to be fathomed even by experts. The packagers and marketers of CDOs were forced to acknowledge that their hypertechnical securities were fraught with "opacity" - a convenient and legally judgment-free word for lack of honest labeling.

Exotic derivative instruments with alphabet-soup initials command notional values in the hundreds of trillions of dollars, but nobody knows what they are really worth. Some days, half of the trades on major stock exchanges come from so-called black boxes programmed with everything from binomial trees to algorithms; most federal securities regulators couldn't explain them, much less monitor them.

Transparency is the hallmark of democracy, but we now find ourselves with economic statistics every bit as opaque - and as vulnerable to double-dealing - as a subprime CDO.

Of the "big three" statistics, let us start with unemployment. Most of the people tired of looking for work, as mentioned above, are no longer counted in the work force, though they do still show up in one of the auxiliary unemployment numbers.

The BLS has six different regular jobless measurements - U-1, U-2, U-3 (the one routinely cited), U-4, U-5, and U-6. In January 2008, the U-4 to U-6 series produced unemployment numbers ranging from 5.2 percent to 9.0 percent, all above the "official" number.

The series nearest to real-world conditions is, not surprisingly, the highest: U-6, which includes part-timers looking for full-time employment as well as other members of the "marginally attached," a new catchall meaning those not looking for a job but who say they want one. Yet this does not even include the Americans who (as Austan Goolsbee put it) have been "bought off the unemployment rolls" by government programs such as Social Security disability.

Second is the Gross Domestic Product, which in itself represents something of a fudge: Federal economists used the Gross National Product until 1991, when rising U.S. international debt costs made the narrower GDP assessment more palatable. The GDP has been subject to many further fiddles, the most manipulatable of which are the adjustments made for the presumed starting up and ending of businesses (the "birth/death of businesses" equation) and the amounts that the Bureau of Economic Analysis "imputes" to nationwide personal income data (known as phantom income boosters, or imputations; for example, the imputed income from living in one's own home, or the benefit one receives from a free checking account, or the value of employer-paid health- and life-insurance premiums).

During 2007, imputed income accounted for some 15 percent of GDP. John Williams, the economic statistician, is briskly contemptuous of GDP numbers over the past quarter century. "Upward growth biases built into GDP modeling since the early 1980s have rendered this important series nearly worthless," he wrote in 2004. "(T)he recessions of 1990/1991 and 2001 were much longer and deeper than currently reported (and) lesser downturns in 1986 and 1995 were missed completely."

Nothing, however, can match the tortured evolution of the third key number, the somewhat misnamed Consumer Price Index. Government economists themselves admit that the revisions during the Clinton years worked to reduce the current inflation figures by more than a percentage point, but the overall distortion has been considerably more severe. Just the 1983 manipulation, which substituted "owner equivalent rent" for home-ownership costs, served to understate or reduce inflation during the recent housing boom by 3 to 4 percentage points.

Moreover, since the 1990s, the CPI has been subjected to three other adjustments, all downward and all dubious: product substitution (if flank steak gets too expensive, people are assumed to shift to hamburger, but nobody is assumed to move up to filet mignon), geometric weighting (goods and services in which costs are rising most rapidly get a lower weighting for a presumed reduction in consumption), and, most bizarrely, hedonic adjustment, an unusual computation by which additional quality is attributed to a product or service.

The hedonic adjustment, in particular, is as hard to estimate as it is to take seriously. No small part of the condemnation must lie in the timing.

If quality improvements are to be counted, that count should have begun in the 1950s and 1960s, when such products and services as air-conditioning, air travel, and automatic transmissions - and these are just the A's! - improved consumer satisfaction to a comparable or greater degree than have more recent innovations. That the change was made only in the late '90s shrieks of politics and opportunism, not integrity of measurement.

Most of the time, hedonic adjustment is used to reduce the effective cost of goods, which in turn reduces the stated rate of inflation. "All in all," Williams points out, "if you were to peel back changes that were made in the CPI going back to the Carter years, you'd see that the CPI would now be 3.5 percent to 4 percent higher" - meaning that, because of lost CPI increases, Social Security checks would be 70 percent greater than they currently are.

Furthermore, when discussing price pressure, government officials invariably bring up "core" inflation, which excludes precisely the two categories - food and energy - now verging on another 1970s-style price surge.

Numbers that crunch

The real numbers, to most economically minded Americans, would be a face full of cold water. Based on the criteria in place a quarter century ago, today's U.S. unemployment rate is somewhere between 9 percent and 12 percent; the inflation rate is as high as 7 or even 10 percent; economic growth since the recession of 2001 has been mediocre, despite a huge surge in the wealth and incomes of the superrich, and we are falling back into recession.

If what we have been sold in recent years has been delusional "Pollyanna Creep," what we really need today is a picture of our economy ex-distortion. For what it would reveal is a nation in deep difficulty not just domestically but globally.

Undermeasurement of inflation, in particular, hangs over our heads like a guillotine. To acknowledge it would send interest rates climbing, and thereby would endanger the viability of the massive buildup of public and private debt (from less than $11-trillion in 1987 to $49-trillion last year) that props up the American economy. Moreover, the rising cost of pensions, benefits, borrowing, and interest payments - all indexed or related to inflation - could join with the cost of financial bailouts to overwhelm the federal budget.

Arguably, the unraveling has already begun. As Robert Hardaway, a University of Denver professor, pointed out last fall, the subprime lending crisis "can be directly traced back to the (1983) BLS decision to exclude the price of housing from the CPI. … With the illusion of low inflation inducing lenders to offer 6 percent loans, not only has speculation run rampant on the expectations of ever-rising home prices, but home buyers by the millions have been tricked into buying homes even though they only qualified for the teaser rates."

Were mainstream interest rates to jump into the 7 to 9 percent range - which could happen if inflation were to spur new concern - both Washington and Wall Street would be walking in quicksand. The make-believe economy of the past two decades, with its asset bubbles, massive borrowing, and rampant data distortion, would be in serious jeopardy.

The credit markets are fearful, and the financial markets are nervous. If gloom continues, our humbugged nation may truly regret losing sight of history, risk and common sense.

(Kevin Phillips' new book, "Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism", was published last month by Viking.)

Under John Kennedy, out-of-work Americans who had stopped looking for jobs - even if this was because none could be found - were labeled "discouraged workers" and then excluded from the ranks of the unemployed. Lyndon Johnson orchestrated a "unified budget" that combined Social Security with the rest of the federal outlays. This innovation allowed the surplus receipts in Social Security to mask the emerging federal deficit. Richard Nixon created a division between "core" inflation and headline inflation. If the Consumer Price Index was calculated by tracking a bundle of prices, so-called core inflation would simply exclude, because of "volatility," categories that happened to be troublesome (and thus in the "headlines"). At that time, it was food and energy (as it is now). Under Ronald Reagan, the Bureau of Labor Statistics decided that housing was overstating the Consumer Price Index and substituted an entirely different "Owner Equivalent Rent" measurement, based on what a homeowner might get for renting his house. This methodology, controversial at the time but still used, sidestepped what was happening in the real world of homeowner costs. Some say that led to the mortgage crisis today. Under the George H. W. Bush, officials moved to reorient U.S. economic statistical measure away from old industrial-era methodologies toward the emerging services economy and the expanding retail and financial sectors. Skeptics said the underlying goal was to reduce the inflation rate in order to reduce federal payments - from interest on the national debt to cost-of-living outlays for government employees, retirees and Social Security recipients. Under Bill Clinton, the convoluted CPI changes proposed under Bush were implemented. And the Clintonites tinkered with the unemployment number, in part, by changing its housing economic sampling, disproportionately eliminating inner city households. That is believed to have reduced black unemployment estimates and eased worsening poverty figures.

Wooooooo - girls in the same room! Bunch of cavemen. Seriously. Barbarian sandjockeys with petrodollars, that's all they are.

A first for Saudis: Mozart performed for both genders

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, Associated Press - It's probably as revolutionary and groundbreaking as Mozart gets these days. A German-based quartet staged Saudi Arabia's first-ever performance of European classical music in a public venue before a mixed gender audience.

The concert, held at a government-run cultural center, broke many taboos in a country where public music is banned and the sexes are segregated even in lines at fast food outlets.

The only economy this giveaway of money we don't have will boost, is the bottom line of folks like Exxon and ConAgra. Little people are hurting, but they need food and fuel, and that's what they will spend their "rebate" on. And Bush wants to make his tax cuts for the super rich permanent, too. Gosh, now there's a deserving group of folks, huh?

Bush says rebate checks will boost ailing economy

CRAWFORD, Texas (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush sought to assure Americans on Saturday that federal checks en route to them as part of a stimulus plan will help spur the ailing economy and pay for soaring gas and food prices.

"These rebates will deliver up to $600 per person, $1,200 per couple, and $300 per child," Bush said in his weekly radio address.

"This package will help American families increase their purchasing power and help offset the high prices that we're seeing at the gas pump and the grocery store," Bush said, adding it would also provide tax incentives for business to invest and create jobs.

This is Didi Ananda Devamala. She found herself in a part of the world (the Thai-Burma border) that suffers horribly, and did not turn her back on it. She founded the Baan Unrak (House of Joy) orphanage, a wonderful place that takes broken throwaway children and women and helps them reclaim their lives. Please visit the great kids at http://www.BaanUnrak.org, and don't be a piker, Paypal them a couple of bucks for some food, okay?

[Didi Devamala and a couple of the kiddles]

If it wasn't so supremely tragic, this would be funny. But it's not. This administration is the most evil one this country has ever had to endure. They are sucking our life dry, looting our treasury and destroying our planet.

Every single thing George W. Bush officially says is a baldfaced lie. Here's the latest one:

Bush says administration 'clear and candid' on economy

CRAWFORD, Texas, Associated Press - President Bush, defending his record and his rhetoric, said Saturday that his administration has been "clear and candid" about the nation's economy.

"We saw the economic slowdown coming, we were up front about these concerns with the American people, and we've been taking decisive action," Bush said in his weekly radio address.

The president's comments appeared at least partly in response to a drumbeat of criticism from Democratic leaders, who say his view of the economy is rosy and unrealistic.

Bush sounded an upbeat tone following a modest uptick of economic news this week.

This is the Bureau of Labor Statistics' "Birth/Death Mode" for this year. On what fucking planet are we creating 45,000 new jobs in the construction industry in April? Housing is completely in the crapper, yet according to this, business is booming! Same with the financial industry, what with the laying off of hundreds of thousands of high-paying professional & business service jobs, yet looky look! The birth/death model says nobody is getting laid off, on the contrary, they created 72,000 brand new jobs in April for that sector!

W00t! W00T!! Nobody is out of a job, we're making more jobs than ever! Never mind what your lying eyes and laying laid-off mooching relatives tell you! Making jobs, dammit! Anyone who says otherwise wants the terrorists to win!

Back in the REAL world, here's a far more accurate picture of the unemployment situation. Since even this uses bullshit BLS data, we have to assume its probably much much worse:

I fucking love/hate Ted Rall. He creeps me out and makes me cheer all at the same time. I hope they don't "suicide" him for speaking out.

Bush Confesses to Waterboarding. Call D.C. Cops!

Ted Rall, NEW YORK--"Why are we talking about this in the White House?" John Ashcroft nervously asked his fellow members of the National Security Council's Principals Committee. (The Principals were Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General Ashcroft.)

"History will not judge this kindly," Ashcroft predicted.

"This" is torture. Against innocent people. Conducted by CIA agents and American soldiers and marines. Sanctioned by legal opinions issued by Ashcroft's Justice Department. Directly ordered by George W. Bush.

An April 11th report by ABC News describes how CIA agents, asked by previous presidents to carry out illegal "black ops" actions (torture and killings), had become tired of getting hung out to dry whenever their dirty deeds were revealed by the press. When the Bush Administration asked the CIA to work over prisoners captured in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere, Director George Tenet demanded legal cover. The Justice Department complied by issuing a classified 2002 memo, the so-called "Golden Shield," authored by Office of Legal Counsel Jay Bybee. "Enhanced interrogation techniques"--i.e., torture--were legal, Bybee assured the CIA.

Tenet was a good boss, a CYA type. He wanted to protect his agents. So he got the Principals to personally sign off on each act of torture.

"According to a former CIA official involved in the process," ABC reported, "CIA headquarters would receive cables from operatives in the field asking for authorization for specific techniques." Can we beat up this guy? Can we waterboard him?

The Bushies weren't otherwise known for dwelling on details. Osama was in Pakistan; they invaded Afghanistan instead. Two years later, he was still in Pakistan. They invaded Iraq. Bush and his top officials still found time to walk through every step of torment a detainee would suffer in some CIA dungeon halfway around the world.

"The high-level discussions about these 'enhanced interrogation techniques' were so detailed, [Bush Administration] sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed--down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic. These top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top Al Qaeda suspects--whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding, sources told ABC news."

Bush knew.

Not only did he know, he personally approved it. He likes torture.

"Yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue," he confirmed. "And I approved."

When the U.S. signs a treaty, its provisions carry the full force of U.S. law. One such treaty is the U.N. Convention Against Torture, of which the U.S. is a core signatory. As Philippe Sands writes in his new book "Torture Team:" Parties to the... Convention are required to investigate any person who is alleged to have committed torture. If appropriate, they must then prosecute--or extradite the person to a place where he will be prosecuted. The Torture Convention... criminalizes any act that constitutes complicity or participation in torture. Complicity or participation could certainly be extended not only to the politicians and but also the lawyers involved..."

George W. Bush has publicly confessed that he ordered torture, thus violating the Convention Against Torture. He, Cheney, Rumseld, Rice and the other Principals must therefore be arrested and, unlike the thousands of detainees kidnapped by the U.S. since 9/11, arraigned and placed on trial.

Because the torture ordered by Bush and his cabinet directly resulted in death, they must additionally be charged with several counts of murder. Fifteen U.S. soldiers have been charged with the murders of two detainees at the U.S. airbase at Bagram, Afghanistan in 2002. They were following orders issued by their Commander-in-Chief and his Principals.

One of the Bagram victims was Dilawar, a 22-year-old Afghan taxi driver. "On the day of his death," reported The New York Times on May 22, 2005, "Dilawar had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days. A guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend... Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time."

At least four detainees have committed suicide at the torture camp created by George W. Bush after 9/11 at Guantánamo Bay. Twenty-five more made 41 unsuccessful attempts to kill themselves. The conditions of their confinement--ordered by Bush and his Principals--constitutes torture. It no doubt prompted their deaths.

If George W. Bush were an ordinary citizen, there can be little doubt that he would face a long prison sentence for the scores of acts of torture he authorized both specifically and generally. Four of the seven white hillbillies charged with the kidnap-torture of a black woman in Logan County, West Virginia are now in jail for at least the next ten years.

If Bush weren't president, he would face murder charges. The maximum sentence in a federal murder case is death.

If Bush and his co-conspirators are not above the law, if the United States remains a nation where all citizens are equal, they must be arrested and indicted. But by whom?

The Supreme Court has never resolved the question of whether a sitting president can be arrested by civilian authorities. Even if he were charged and convicted, many legal experts say he could issue himself a pardon.

However, leaving the presidency in the hands of an self-admitted torture killer is unacceptable. Congress could ask a U.S. Marshal to arrest Bush as part of impeachment charges. But the ultimate outcome--removing him from office a few months before the end of his term--seems woefully inadequate given the nature of the charges. In any case, Democrats have already said that impeachment is "off the table."

Bush could be extradited to one of the countries where the torture and murders were committed--such as Afghanistan or Cuba. But he could claim immunity as a head of state.

There is, however, a person who could begin holding Bush and the others accountable for their crimes.

She is Cathy L. Lanier, the 39-year-old chief of D.C.'s Metropolitan Police Department. Chief Lanier, take note: you have probable cause to arrest a self-confessed serial torturer and mass murderer within the borders of the District of Columbia. He resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Go get him.

History is calling, Chief Lanier. Your city, and your country, needs you.

(Ted Rall is the author of the book "Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?," an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America's next big foreign policy challenge.)

The problem is corporate greed.

With a 'system' where bureaucrats decide what treatments should be provided, where lawyers pursue frivolous lawsuits, where 'healthcare' is synonymous with 'drugs', and where corporate profit drives law, there is no healing, no care.

Universal healthcare is what is required. Take the fucking profit margin OUT, and let the healers amongst us come forward, undriven by greed.

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The healthcare crisis in Middle America

Isn't this an amazingly convenient coincidence? The DC Madam, who swore if she went down, everyone in her Little Black Book was going down too, and who was pretty damned clear she would never kill herself over this if convicted, suddenly can't bear the shame of her conviction and "commits suicide"...

"I am sure as heck am not going to be going to federal prison for one day, let alone, you know, four to eight years here, because I'm shy about bringing in the deputy secretary of whatever," Palfrey told ABC last year when she released phone records that revealed some of her clients. "Not for a second. I'll bring every last one of them in if necessary."

...*sniff* *sniff*... what's that horrible smell?

Police: Woman believed to be 'D.C. madam' kills herself

TARPON SPRINGS, Fla., Associated Press - A woman police believe to be convicted Washington escort service operator Deborah Jeane Palfrey committed suicide, officials said Thursday.

A body police believe to be that of Deborah Jeane Palfrey was found in a shed near her mother's home Thursday morning in Tarpon Springs, about 20 miles northwest of Tampa. There was a suicide note, but police did not disclose its contents or how she killed herself.