July 6, 2008
May 26, 2008
May 23, 2008
May 11, 2008
The Tattlesnake – Another Scene from the Neocon Paradise Edition
Where Government is Tiny, Everything is Privatized, and the Free Market rules…
“Hello, this is the Little Big National Neighborhood Bank that really cares about you! How can I help you?”
“Well, first of all, you could ‘care about me’ by not making me wait through 30 minutes of canned music to talk to a real person.”
“Sorry, sir, but we’re very busy here taking care of all our happy customers!”
“Yeah? Well, I’m not one of them.”
“What can I do to make you one?”
“Last night I took out $60 bucks from one of your ATM’s and I noticed I was charged $1.50 for the withdrawal.”
“That’s right, sir, that’s our standard ATM transaction fee.”
“But fifteen years ago when you converted to the ATM machines, you said it would cut costs for the bank and the savings and convenience would be passed on to the customer. Back then, all transactions at any ATM were free!”
“That’s right, sir. Aren’t the ATM’s so much more convenient than coming into the bank to withdraw cash?”
“But wait a minute here — about eight years ago you said you were going to start charging an ATM transaction fee of a dollar, but only at other banks’ machines; your ATM’s would stay free.”
“Yes, sir – what’s the problem with that?”
“Aside from the fact that the fee to use an ATM from any other bank has steadily risen so it’s up to $3.00 a pop, now I’m getting charged $1.50 a transaction from your own ATM’s that used to be free!” “Yes, sir, well, our fees have to keep up with inflation.”
“But I just read that your bank made a record profit last year! Why not take a little less profit and show how much you ‘care’ about your customers by keeping the ATM transactions free?! I’ve been putting my money in your bank for twenty years!”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, sir. We want to keep you as our customer, but if you’re so dissatisfied with our service, perhaps you can find another bank that does not charge this ATM fee. After all, it’s a free market and that guarantees competitive prices!”
“I’ve already called around to every bank in the area – they’re ALL charging $1.50 to use their ATM’s. What do you guys do, get into a room and decide how much you’re going to shear us sheep?”
May 2, 2008
April 16, 2008
April 9, 2008
Robert Parry: Losing the War for Reality
Robert Parry, Consortium News, April 8, 2008
When future historians look back at the sharp decline of the United States in the early 21st Century, they might identify the Achilles heel of this seemingly omnipotent nation as its lost ability to recognize reality and to fashion policies to face the real world.
Like the legendary Greek warrior – whose sea-nymph mother dipped him in protective waters except for his heel – the United States was blessed with institutional safeguards devised by wise Founders who translated lessons from the Age of Reason into a brilliant constitutional framework of checks and balances.
What the Founders did not anticipate, however, was how fragile truth could become in a modern age of excessive government secrecy, hired-gun public relations and big-money media. Sophisticated manipulation of information is what would do the Republic in.
That is the crucial lesson for understanding the arc of U.S. history over the past three decades. It is a central theme of a new book by former CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman, Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.
As a senior Kremlinologist in the CIA’s office of Soviet analysis, Goodman was on the front lines of the information war in the early 1980s when ideological right-wingers took control of the U.S. government under Ronald Reagan and began to gut the key institutions for assessing reality.
March 29, 2008
March 28, 2008
March 27, 2008
March 16, 2008
Maureen Dowd: Bush’s Soft Shoe in Hard Times
The New York Times, March 16, 2008
Everyone here is flummoxed about why the president is in such a fine mood.
The dollar’s crumpling, the recession’s thundering, the Dow’s bungee-jumping and the world’s disapproving, yet George Bush has turned into Gene Kelly, tap dancing and singing in a one-man review called “The Most Happy Fella.”
“I’m coming to you as an optimistic fellow,” he told the Economic Club of New York on Friday. His manner — chortling and joshing — was in odd juxtaposition to the Fed’s bailing out the imploding Bear Stearns and his own acknowledgment that “our economy obviously is going through a tough time,” that gas prices are spiking, and that folks “are concerned about making their bills.”
He began by laughingly calling the latest news on the economic meltdown “a interesting moment” and ended by saying that “our energy policy has not been very wise” and that there was “no quick fix” on gasp-inducing gas prices.
“You know, I guess the best way to describe government policy is like a person trying to drive a car in a rough patch,” he said. “If you ever get stuck in a situation like that, you know full well it’s important not to overcorrect, because when you overcorrect you end up in the ditch.”
March 14, 2008
March 11, 2008
McCain’s Next Big Test: Economics 101
Jonathan Martin, Politico, March 11, 2008
When the February jobs report came out on Friday, economists grimaced and Wall Street blanched.
John McCain, however, said the news was “not terrible” – and Democrats pounced.
“Once again, John McCain demonstrated just how little he understands about the economy,” the Democratic National Committee declared in an e-mail to reporters.
McCain suffered in the Democratic translation of his remarks at a campaign stop in Georgia, as he had acknowledged the jobs news was “not good” and was not terrible only because the overall unemployment rate didn’t rise.
But the broadside was yet another example of what is already among the most popular lines of Democratic attack against McCain: that the Arizona senator lacks expertise on the economy and will be uniquely vulnerable on what is shaping up to be the overarching domestic issue of the campaign.
March 10, 2008
Paul Krugman, The Face-Slap Theory
Paul Krugman, The New York Times, March 10, 2008
Friday’s employment report — which was so weak that it had many economists declaring that we’re already in a recession — was bad news. But it was actually less disturbing than what’s going on in the financial markets.
The scariest thing I’ve read recently is a speech given last week by Tim Geithner, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Mr. Geithner came as close as a Fed official can to saying that we’re in the midst of a financial meltdown.
To understand the gravity of the situation, you have to know what the Fed did last summer, and again last fall.
As late as August the favorite buzzword of financial officials was “contained”: problems in subprime mortgages, we were assured, wouldn’t spread to other financial markets or to the economy as a whole.
Soon afterward, however, a full-fledged financial panic began. Investors pulled hundreds of billions of dollars out of asset-backed commercial paper, a little-known but important market that has taken over a lot of the work banks used to do. This de facto bank run sent shock waves through the financial system.
The Fed responded by rushing money to banks, and markets partially calmed down, for a little while. But by December the panic was back.
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March 7, 2008
Paul Krugman: The Anxiety Election
Paul Krugman, The New York Times, March 7, 2008
Democrats won the 2006 election largely thanks to public disgust with the Iraq war. But polls — and Hillary Clintons big victory in Ohio — suggest that if the Democrats want to win this year, they have to focus on economic anxiety.
Some people reject that idea. They believe that this election should be another referendum on the war, and, perhaps even more important, about the way America was misled into that war. That belief is one reason many progressives fervently support Barack Obama, an early war opponent, even though his domestic platform is somewhat to the right of Mrs. Clinton’s.
As an early war opponent myself, I understand their feelings. But should and ought don’t win elections. And polls show that the economy has overtaken Iraq as the public’s biggest concern.
True, the news from Iraq will probably turn worse again. Meanwhile, a hefty majority of voters continue to say that the war was a mistake, and people are as angry as ever about the $10 billion a month wasted on the neocons’ folly.
Yet for the time being, public optimism about Iraq is rising: 53 percent of the public believes that the United States will definitely or probably succeed in achieving its goals. So anger about the war isn’t likely to be decisive in the election.
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The Tattlesnake – Drowning Down at the Old Rumor Mill Again Edition
From Everybody’s Favorite: Various Possibly Reliable Sources Who Wish to Remain Anonymous:
– China has already given the back-channel ultimatum to the Bushites – attack Iran and interrupt the flow of Iranian oil vital to the Asian nation’s economy and China will interrupt their loans and imports to the US, causing the American markets to crash even further and faster. The question is: will the mad Bush-Cheney neocons, drooling over an assault on Persia before Junior leaves office, pay attention?
– It’s a done deal: Bill Clinton has allegedly started secretly raising money for a run at the New York Governorship in 2010. Not only is Big Dog tired of campaigning for other people, he also sorely misses having political power. And he wouldn’t mind a spot in the record books as the first president to also be elected governor of two different states, one prior to the presidency and one after.
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