April 14, 2010 archive

Europe on the verge of another financial crisis?

  The IMF has been making a lot of noise recently, but their biggest move almost managed to slip through completely unnoticed.

 The Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) today approved a ten-fold expansion of the Fund’s New Arrangements to Borrow (NAB) and the transformation of the Fund’s premier standing credit arrangement into a more flexible and effective tool of crisis management. The NAB will be increased by SDR 333.5 billion (about US$500 billion) to SDR 367.5 billion (about US$550 billion), representing a major increase in the resources available for the Fund’s lending to its members.

 This IMF program didn’t even exist until a year ago, when the IMF began issuing SDRs for the first time since the 1970’s. The IMF has only sold SDRs in times of global financial stress.

  It makes a person wonder “Why now?” Why is the IMF suddenly tripling its lending facilities? What do they know that we don’t?

 To answer that, let’s look at the announcements of the past few weeks.

Pentagon Coming Down on Supremist Activity

Been allowed to fester and grow for to long, a number of reports have surfaced over these last years!

Pentagon Tightens Ban on Supremacist Activity After Years of Denying Problem

We know the health insurance bill was insufficient. So what’s a DFH to do?

The health “care” – really insurance – bill that passed is far from a perfect bill, in large part because it leaves a system intact that is the source of a ton of the problems that were used to create support for it, and it is not actually universal health care.

To get any kind of actually universal coverage we’re going to need to turn to the states.  Clearly those thousands of lobbyists are too powerful in DC to really challenge the powers that be in the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.  So the good news is that there are state-level campaigns for single payer, and they’re gaining a lot of momentum in states like California and Pennsylvania.

Why Do We Even Have an Economy?

Economists are fun people. They sit around in their offices of academia and crunch numbers all day. They play and crunch numbers and they come up with extravagant theories about how those numbers fit together and what they mean. Then they get tenure at the university and it takes a crowbar to pry them from their cushy jobs playing and crunching.

But often, all the playing and crunching causes the economists to get confused. They forget that in the real world, those numbers mean more than anecdotal folly. Those numbers often have names and former addresses before they were evicted from their homes.

So sometimes we have to step back and look at the big picture. We have to look at the big picture and assess our priorities and remember why we invented this thing we call “the economy” in the first place.

We invented the thing we call “the economy” for only one reason. So that each of us could have a life. As in make a living. As in having jobs so that we can make a living, have a family, raise and educate our children, and eventually retire with an RV so we can see Yellowstone before we die.

What about profits? Isn’t the point of capitalism so that you can make a profit and grow your business thereby creating jobs.

No. Whether you’re the owner of a hotdog stand or the CEO of GE, the only reason to make a profit is so you can make a living, get a dog, and one day take up fly fishing.

Now the cushy economists have all sorts of measures for how the economy is doing: GDP, PCE, GDPP and CPI. But if you understand that we only invented “the economy” so we could all have a life, then you realize that there’s really only one economic indicator that matters: the percentage of people who have good, living-wage jobs as opposed to those who do not.

So the next time you hear someone saying the economy is coming up roses even though the number of people with good, living-wage jobs continues to decrease, remind them that, unless the economy is helping everyone have a life, it’s really just pushing up daisies.

Denialism Is A Virus And Viruses Are Contagious

Crossposted from Antemedius

Michael Specter is a staff writer for the New Yorker. His new book, Denialism, asks why we have increasingly begun to fear scientific advances instead of embracing them.

Specter recently spoke at the TEDGlobal2010 Conference, held over the course of four days in Oxford, England to explore “the shocking undercurrent of good news just below the surface of today’s troubling headlines — new ideas, new science, new technology, new social and political thinking, new art and a new understanding of who we are”.

While I don’t agree with everything Specter says here and I don’t disagree with a lot of it, one of the things that I cannot deny is that I’m not always wrong in my opinions. I doubt that you can either.

But nor am I always right.

Why Michael Specter is worth listening to:

Michael Specter’s new book, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet and Threatens Our Lives, dives into a worrisome strain of modern life — a vocal anti-science bias that may prevent us from making the right choices for our future. Specter studies how the active movements against vaccines, genetically engineered food, science-based medicine and biotechnological solutions to climate change may actually put the world at risk. (For instance, anti-vaccination activists could soon trigger the US return of polio, not to mention the continuing rise of measles.) More insidiously, the chilling effect caused by the new denialism may prevent useful science from being accomplished.

Specter has been a writer for the New Yorker for more than a decade; before that, he was a science writer and then the Moscow bureau chief for the New York Times. He writes about science and politics for the New Yorker, with a fascinating sideline in biographical profiles.

Denialism is a virus and viruses are contagious.” — Michael Specter

Spend sixteen and a half minutes with Michael Specter here, and see if he doesn’t challenge some of your ideas that you might be wrong about. Or some you might be right about.



Recorded at TEDGlobal2010 – February 2010

Afternoon Edition

Afternoon Edition is an Open Thread

Late Edition.  Now with 46 Top Stories.

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Ousted Kyrgyz president sets terms for resignation

by Matt Siegel, AFP

42 mins ago

TEYIT, Kyrgyzstan (AFP) – Kyrgyzstan’s toppled president Kurmanbek Bakiyev Tuesday offered to resign for the first time since he was ousted in protests, but only if he received security guarantees from his foes.

His offer came after the interim authorities warned Bakiyev that the country’s special forces would arrest him if he failed to surrender and carried on holding rallies in his southern stronghold where he fled after the uprising.

But with still no compromise in sight and the interim government seeking to assert its authority in the capital after the protests that left 83 dead, the strategic Central Asian country, home to a key US airbase, remained dangerously on the edge.

BushCo knew GITMO “worst of worst” were innocent.

Wilkerson’s sworn statement should be the clanging death knell for Obama’s military commissions

Via the Times Online and Truthout‘s Jason Leopold, we have Lt. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson’s sworn affidavit in support of GITMO detainee Adel Hassan Hamad’s lawsuit against Bush, Rumsfeld, et al., for wrongful imprisonment and abuse, that the majority of both GITMO and Abu Ghraib detainees were arbitrarily imprisoned.

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With respect to the assertions by Mr. Hamad that he was wrongfully seized and detained, it became apparent to me as early as August 2002, and probably earlier to other State Department personnel who were focused on these issues, that many of the prisoners detained at Guantánamo had been taken into custody without regard to whether they were truly enemy combatants, or in fact whether many of them were enemies at all. I soon realized from my conversations with military colleagues as well as foreign service officers in the field that many of the detainees were, in fact, victims of incompetent battlefield vetting. There was no meaningful way to determine whether they were terrorists, Taliban, or simply innocent civilians picked up on a very confused battlefield or in the territory of another state such as Pakistan.

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