June 2009 archive

Faced with a slide into public economic madness, I have taken up the analysis of collective irrationality as a form of therapy. Herewith I offer a convenient summary of the new and improved Orwellian methods America’s Ministry of Truth applies to economic statistics under the Obama Administration:

1. Cherry picking. If you have three negative numbers on employment and one slightly positive one, you tout the positive one and ignore the negatives.

2. Making data out of noise. Since the self-deluded citizenry doesn’t apply the concept of statistical margin of error, any positive fractional improvement, like a .3% improvement in consumer confidence or unemployment numbers can be represented as a “turnaround” or an occasion for celebration.

3. Quiet negative “revisions.” Almost every month, the government employment statistics are revised in a manner that makes them less positive. This is not a coincidence.

4. Promotion of amnesia. Important and highly-touted programs, like PPIP, are made to “disappear” from public consciousness when they fail.

5. Moving goalposts. Can’t control an exploding deficit? Just set your goal to reduce it by “half” at a date that constantly moves into the future. Don’t want to mark bad assets to market? Mark them to whatever “model” makes them look good.

6. Magic hats. Need to come up with a few hundred thousand jobs every month to take the sting off depression-level job losses? Just cook up an unverifiable jobs generator, like the BLS “birth/death” model that hallucinates jobs out of invisible new businesses. Hey presto! Unemployment is down again.

What upsets me most about all this shoddy behavior is that it is tolerated and encouraged after it has been repeatedly and thoroughly documented by journalists, economists, academics, and bloggers. Any informed citizen knows about the deceptions of our Ministry of Truth, and any curious citizen could learn about them in 30 minutes of Google searching. For the serious investor, $175 a year is the cost of unfalsified economic data from www.shadowstats.com. But the public much prefers the MOT product: cheerful lies.

Let us be very clear about this. Handsome, intelligent, and earnest President Barak Obama presides over an administration that knowingly prepares and distributes false information about the US economy in order to provide political and financial advantages to the people who put him in power. A nation of liars has placed the most attractive and persuasive available liar in charge of its government.

Kathy Kelly ([email protected]) and Dan Pearson ([email protected]) are co-coordinators of Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org).  With Gene Stoltzfus and Razia Ahmed, they are traveling in Pakistan.  This report is posted at their request.

by Kathy Kelly and Dan Pearson

In Pakistan’s Swabi district, a bumpy road leads to Shah Mansoor, a small village surrounded by farmland. Just outside the village, uniform size tents are set up in hundreds of rows. The sun bores down on the Shah Mansoor camp which has become a temporary home to thousands of displaced Pakistanis from the Swat area. In the stifling heat, the camp’s residents sit idly, day after day, uncertain about their future. They spoke with heated certainty, though, about their grievances.  

As soon as we stepped out of the car, men and children approached us. They had all arrived from Mingora, the main city of Swat, 15 days prior. One young man, a student, told us that bombing and shelling had increased in their area, but, due to a government imposed curfew, they weren’t allowed to leave their homes. Suddenly, the Pakistani Army warned them to leave within four hours or they would be killed. With the curfew lifted long enough for them to get out of Mingora, they joined a mass exodus of people and walked for three days before reaching this camp.

After being assigned to a section of the camp coordinated by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees(UNHCR), they were provided with tents and plastic mats. So far, 554 tents are set up in this section, with an average of 6 – 10 people living in each tent.  

“if Mr. Obama signs into law

a ‘public option,’ government-run insurance program

as part of health-care reform

we won’t be able to undo the damage.”

Karl “Super Genius” Rove Ha Ha Ha

As Iran Votes, Talk of a Sea Change

NEWS ANALYSIS

By ROBERT F. WORTH

Published: June 12, 2009

TEHRAN – Iranians went to the polls Friday to elect a new president after an unusually intense campaign which saw the hard-line incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, seemingly thrown onto the defensive. Opposition leaders said they expected a huge turnout, with many reformists who sat out the last vote in 2005 saying they will take part this time.

Mr. Ahmadinejad’s main opponent is Mir Hussein Moussavi, a moderate who has mobilized huge crowds of his backers in Tehran and other large cities.

The official IRNA news agency reported long lines outside polling stations before they opened at 8 a.m. local time. State-run television showed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, casting his vote under the gaze of local and foreign media.

Kim Jong who? Japanese TV station has egg on its moon face

TV Asahi claimed to have an exclusive photo of Kim Jong Il’s youngest son and heir apparent. Turned out to be a construction worker in South Korea.

By John M. Glionna and Ju-min Park

June 12, 2009

Reporting from Seoul — The photograph was considered a journalistic coup, a recent image of the elusive 26-year-old son of North Korean strongman Kim Jong Il, who has reportedly been named the next leader of the secretive state.

The Internet snapshot released by a Tokyo television station purportedly showed an adult Kim Jong Un — whose last known photo was taken at age 12 — as a spitting image of his notorious father, right down to the moon face, coiffed hair and oversize sunglasses.

Trouble was, it wasn’t the younger Kim at all, but a pudgy 40-year-old South Korean construction worker who also operates a website for fortunetellers. He says he is baffled as to how the Japanese got hold of his Internet image.

USA

Obama Bows on Settling Detainees

Administration Gives Up on Bringing Cleared Inmates to U.S., Officials Say

By Peter Finn and Sandhya Somashekhar

Washington Post Staff Writers

Friday, June 12, 2009

The Obama administration has all but abandoned plans to allow Guantanamo Bay detainees who have been cleared for release to live in the United States, administration officials said yesterday, a decision that reflects bipartisan congressional opposition to admitting such prisoners but complicates efforts to persuade European allies to accept them.

Four Uighur detainees, Chinese Muslims who were incarcerated at the U.S. military prison in Cuba for more than seven years, arrived early yesterday in Bermuda, where they will become foreign guest workers.

I’m still absorbing the news that the Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company Ltd, one of the giant industrial corporations that characterize present-day Chinese “socialism,” has purchased the Hummer brand from General Motors as the latter shuffles down the path blazed long ago by Studebaker and American Motors.

The Hummer is of course the vehicle sensible people love to hate: ugly, heavy, dangerous, gas-guzzling, polluting, military (in roughly the same sense as camouflage footsie pajamas) and a big fat macho fraud–the damn thing is built on a regular GM SUV chassis, just like a plain old Chevy Colorado.

The psychological makeup of Hummer purchasers has been looked into more deeply, most succinctly by Ruben Bolling, the crackerjack creator of the Tom the Dancing Bug comic. (Won’t embed for some reason–view his hysterical dis of Hummer owners here.]

I, however, have an even more theoretical speculation on the fate of the Hummer, based on the old Marxist precept that changes in people’s consciousness tend to trail changes in material conditions. Let me draw first a brief analogy-when I spent a little time in West Africa in the early ’80s, I met a couple of young guys, Komi and Kasimir, who were adherents of voudon (a/k/a voodoo). We talked about the belief system and they turned out to be followers of a particular fetiche or deity, which forbade them to eat anything cooked in a metal vessel or with metal utensils.

Kasimir and Komi told me of one the most dreaded of the voudon cults, whose fetiche was connected with smallpox, Its adherents would paint their faces white on sacred occasions and were feared for their ability to call disease down on enemies. Now this was only a decade since scientists and medical personnel had finally eradicated the disease in its last strongholds in Africa, so I asked if this group was still as feared as it had used to be. They both thought and said no, actually it was not as powerful and its fetiche not seen to be as deadly. Changes in consciousness trail changes in material conditions!

Back to the Hummer. The military’s HumVee was a star of the last substantial victory for the US military, Operation Desert Storm, the 1991 Gulf War. The Arnold Schwarzeneggers of the US felt uncontrollable lust and a civilian version was soon forthcoming, and became a GM product by 1998.

9/11-fueled war fever sent sales soaring even higher–for a while. But by early 2004 they were declining precipitously. I rather doubt that it was due to sudden environmental concerns among its target audience. I think what happened is that fairly early in the occupation of Iraq, it became clear that this mighty war wagon could be taken out by a couple of Baghdad teenagers with a big artillery round and a garage door opener. Whether people thought about it consciously or not, IEDs had taken the bloom off the rose.

I don’t know what Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company management is thinking. I can’t see a big Hummer comeback in the US and the contribution they’d make to China’s already horrific pollution boggles the mind. Indications are they plan to market these vehicular plug-uglies more heavily in developing nation markets. I can only say I hope they take a richly deserved bath on this venture.



Crossposted from Fire on the Mountain.

I want to try to take buhdy’s essay, “Obama uses his Loud Voice on Health Care” one step further into activism.  So often on this blog, we ask, “But what can we do?”  I want to offer an answer to this question.

We must get Obama’s back on this issue.  In massive, massive numbers, with really loud voices, we must get behind him and push, massively, loudly, strongly.  I want every person on this blog to reach out to friends, family, e lists, and every contact we have to move folks in the direction of REAL healthcare reform.

Buhdy correctly identifies this as the defining issue.  This is the issue Obama wishes to succeed.  If he can win on healthcare reform, if we can keep his back on healthcare reform so that he can win, then we will have a solid basis for further progressive successes in the future.  

Please continue beyond the fold—

Every Time You…..

From almost the moment that Camp X-Ray opened, prisoners embarked on hunger strikes as the only means available to protest about the conditions of their detention: specifically, their day-to-day treatment, the treatment of the Koran, and the crushing uncertainty of their fate, as they remained imprisoned without charge and without trial, with the ever-present possibility that they would be held for the rest of their lives.

Andy Worthington has released the results of an important investigation he undertook on treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo, Guantanamo’s Hidden History: Shocking Statistics Of Starvation (PDF) (his article introducing it is here).

Crossposted to Motley Moose

Watch our Secretary of State enunciate President Obama and his administration’s new approach to tackle global hunger. Thank you President Obama and Madame Secretary.