An experienced economist and a novice economist are walking down the road. They come across some dog shit lying on the pavement.

The experienced economist says, “If you eat that dog shit, I’ll give you $20,000!”

The novice economist runs his optimization program and figures out he’s better off eating it, so he does and collects the money.

Continuing along the same road they almost step into another pile of dog shit.

The novice economist says, “Now, if you eat this shit I’ll give you $20,000.”

After evaluating the proposal, the experienced economist eats the shit and collects the money.

They go on. The novice economist wonders, “Listen, we both have the same amount of money we had before, but we both ate shit. I don’t see us being better off.”

The experienced economist retorts, “Not so! We’ve created $40,000 of trade!”

From a commenter at reddit, on the subject of Associate Attorney General David Margolis, with Holder’s approval, reducing the conclusion of the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility report on Yoo and Bybee’s Torture Memos  to Bush to say that they showed only “poor judgment“:

If Obama’s ‘Justice Department’ had conducted the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, all of the Nazis would have gone free – ‘Merely Poor Judgement, the Holocaust was just a policy mistake’!

Why was the US so quick to send so many troops into Haiti after the earthquake? Why were there so many fears from around the world of US militarism and exploitation in Haiti?

Oil?

F. William Engdahl is an economist and author and the writer of the best selling book “A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order.”, and has written on issues of energy, politics and economics for more than 30 years, beginning with the first oil shock in the early 1970s.

Here Engdahl talks with Paul Jay of The Real News, says that geophysics suggest there could be massive oil and mineral deposits in Haiti and that the US may be motivated by the desire to strategically deny oil deposits in Haiti to the rest of the world.

ENGDAHL: Well, if you look at a geophysical map of Haiti and the Caribbean, it jumps out that Haiti and Port-au-Prince, Haiti, lies right along the conjunction of what are called tectonic plates, but three separate tectonic plates. If you can imagine a China vase that falls off the table and gets broken in many pieces and you glue it back together, well, these tectonic plates are a bit similar in terms of images.

But three of those converge right at the land area that’s called Haiti, and generally where we have such a conversion of tectonic plates, we have a great amount of geophysical motion, energy, and so forth. They tend to be along-in the Pacific you have the Ring of Fire, which is literally the ring of vulcanic activity-. Indonesia is in one such zone; Saudi Arabia and the giant oil fields of the Middle East, from Kuwait and so forth, the Persian Gulf, are another such convergence of such plates.

And up until now there’s been very little talk about petroleum and Haiti, but it’s not because there hasn’t been interest in petroleum in Haiti. My take on it is that there are-according to geophysicists knowledgeable about the geophysics of the Caribbean basin-you probably have large multinational oil companies, US, British oil companies and their allies, who are aware that with a little bit of exploration onshore and offshore, that there are probably enormous oil finds.

And you just had, two years ago, offshore Cuba, just north of Haiti, a giant-supergiant, actually, oil discovery, with several billion barrels of believed reserves of oil there that the Russians are helping the Cubans to exploit. So it stands to reason that the same geological fault line of these tectonic plates-the Caribbean plate, the North American plate, and the South American plate-they all converge north of Venezuela and in the area that’s called Haiti.

That also makes Haiti ripe for other unusual minerals, such as uranium, gold, and so forth. And my own sense from talking with geophysicists on this whole Haiti question is that Haiti is probably one of the undeveloped treasures of mineral wealth on the planet… full transcript here

The Real News Network – February 19, 2010

As Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion

February 16, 2010

WASHINGTON-The U.S. economy ceased to function this week after unexpected existential remarks by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke shocked Americans into realizing that money is, in fact, just a meaningless and intangible social construct.

What began as a routine report before the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday ended with Bernanke passionately disavowing the entire concept of currency, and negating in an instant the very foundation of the world’s largest economy.

“Though raising interest rates is unlikely at the moment, the Fed will of course act appropriately if we…if we…” said Bernanke, who then paused for a moment, looked down at his prepared statement, and shook his head in utter disbelief. “You know what? It doesn’t matter. None of this-this so-called ‘money’-really matters at all.”

“It’s just an illusion,” a wide-eyed Bernanke added as he removed bills from his wallet and slowly spread them out before him. “Just look at it: Meaningless pieces of paper with numbers printed on them. Worthless.”

According to witnesses, Finance Committee members sat in thunderstruck silence for several moments until Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) finally shouted out, “Oh my God, he’s right. It’s all a mirage. All of it-the money, our whole economy-it’s all a lie!”

[snip]

by Tom Engelhardt:

Let me put American life in the Age of Terror into some kind of context, and then tell me you’re not ready to get on the nearest plane heading anywhere, even toward Yemen.

In 2008, 14,180 Americans were murdered, according to the FBI.  In that year, there were 34,017 fatal vehicle crashes in the U.S. and, so the U.S. Fire Administration tells us, 3,320 deaths by fire.  More than 11,000 Americans died of the swine flu between April and mid-December 2009, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; on average, a staggering 443,600 Americans die yearly of illnesses related to tobacco use, reports the American Cancer Society; 5,000 Americans die annually from food-borne diseases; an estimated 1,760 children died from abuse or neglect in 2007; and the next year, 560 Americans died of weather-related conditions, according to the National Weather Service, including 126 from tornadoes, 67 from rip tides, 58 from flash floods, 27 from lightning, 27 from avalanches, and 1 from a dust devil.

As for airplane fatalities, no American died in a crash of a U.S. carrier in either 2007 or 2008, despite 1.5 billion passengers transported.  In 2009, planes certainly went down and people died.  In June, for instance, a French flight on its way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris disappeared in bad weather over the Atlantic, killing 226.  Continental Connection Flight 3407, a regional commuter flight, crashed into a house near Buffalo, New York, that February killing 50, the first fatal crash of a U.S. commercial flight since August 2006.  And in January 2009, US Airways Flight 1549, assaulted by a flock of birds, managed a brilliant landing in New York’s Hudson River when disaster might have ensued.  In none of these years did an airplane go down anywhere due to terrorism, though in 2007 two terrorists smashed a Jeep Cherokee loaded with propane tanks into the terminal of Glasgow International Airport.  (No one was killed.)    

The now-infamous Northwest Airlines Flight 253, carrying Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and his bomb-laden underwear toward Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, had 290 passengers and crew, all of whom survived.

Read all of it here… it’s worth it.

Wednesday’s report from the Congressional Oversight Panel makes it very clear that while things may feel relatively stable right now on the commercial real estate front, the real bomb hits in 2011. Banks could lose $200 – $300 billion, and ‘every American’ could be affected:

The full force of the commercial real estate problem will be felt over the next three years and beyond, according to the panel’s February assessment, which means it starts to get worse starting today.

Download .pdf here (189 pages)