Image via WikipediaThe Wall Street Journal noted last week:
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Friday ruled out a central bank bailout of state and local governments strapped with big municipal debt burdens, saying the Fed had limited legal authority to help and little will to use that authority.Congress has also discontinued the Build American Bond program, which was significant in temporarily financing California and other states' budgets. See this, this, this and this.
"We have no expectation or intention to get involved in state and local finance," Mr. Bernanke said in testimony before the Senate Budget Committee. The states, he said later, "should not expect loans from the Fed."
That's unfortunate, given that many states and big cities are in a dire financial situation, and given that Keynesian economists say that aid to the states is one of the best forms of stimulus.
In any event, as Steve Keen points out, giving money to the debtors is much better for stimulating the economy than giving it to the lenders.
Unfortunately, as I will demonstrate below, virtually the entire government economic policy is to throw trillions of dollars at the biggest banks.
Because there are so many rivers and streams of bailout money going to the big banks, I will start with the specifics and end with broader monetary policies.
Tarp: a Preview of Things to Come
The $700 billion dollar TARP bailout was a massive bait-and-switch. The government said it was doing it to soak up toxic assets, and then switched to saying it was needed to free up lending. It didn't do that either. Indeed, the Fed doesn't want the banks to lend.
As I wrote in March 2009:The bailout money is just going to line the pockets of the wealthy, instead of helping to stabilize the economy or even the companies receiving the bailouts.
Image via WikipediaQuantum Field Theory
( I'm no physicist : but sometimes even quips about theorizing are illuminating in showing how WFO ideas can get when one is suitably - ah - inspired.
Which is why these are discontinuous excerpts ! )
‘It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time. How can all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tiny piece of spacetime is going to do? So I have often made the hypothesis that ultimately physics will not require a mathematical statement, that in the end the machinery will be revealed, and the laws will turn out to be simple, like the chequer board with all its apparent complexities.’
Superstring theory does not follow as a logical consequence of some appealing set of hypotheses about nature. Why, you may ask, do the string theorists insist that space is nine dimensional? Simply because string theory doesn’t make sense in any other kind of space.’ - Nobel Laureate Sheldon Glashow
‘Actually, I would not even be prepared to call string theory a ‘theory’ ... Imagine that I give you a chair, while explaining that the legs are still missing, and that the seat, back and armrest will perhaps be delivered soon; whatever I did give you, can I still call it a chair?’ - Nobel Laureate Gerard ‘t Hooft
Loop quantum gravity is an alternative to string theory: it is simply the idea of applying the path integrals of quantum field theory to quantize gravity by summing over interaction history graphs in a network (such as a Penrose spin network) which represents the quantum mechanical vacuum through which vector bosons such as gravitons are supposed to travel in a standard model-type, Yang-Mills, theory of gravitation. This summing of interaction graphs successfully allows a basic framework for general relativity to be obtained from quantum gravity. The model is not as speculative as string theory, which has been actively promoted in the media since 1985 despite opposition from people like Feynman because it fails to predict anything. Despite endless hype, string theory is now in a state called ‘not even wrong’, which is less objective than the wrong theories of caloric, phlogiston, aether, flat earth, and epicycles, which were theories that tried to model some observed phenomena of heat, combustion, electromagnetism, geography, and astronomy.
String theory fails because it postulates that 6 dimensions are compactified into unobservably small manifolds in particles; these 6 unobservable dimensions need about 100 parameters to describe them, and it turns out that there are 10500 or more configurations possible, each describing a different set of particles (different particles within any set arise from the different possible vibration modes or resonances of a given string). This makes it the vaguest, least falsifiable mainstream speculation ever: to make genuine predictions, the state of the extra unobserved 6-dimensions must be known, which means either building a particle accelerator the size of the galaxy and scattering particles to reveal their Planck scale nature, or eliminating the false 10500 guesses, which would take billions of years with supercomputers. But there is some experimental evidence that key stringy assumptions, e.g., spin-2 gravitons and supersymmetry, are false.
There is no experimental justification for the speculative mainstream spin-2 graviton scheme, nor any way to check it, which is discussed in detail here (discussion of alleged reason for spin-2 gravitons) and here (the stringy landscape of 10500 spin-2 attractive graviton theories really do suck in more ways than one; spin-1 gravitons avert the normal problems of quantum gravity, and make proper predictions without inconsistencies).
‘For the last eighteen years particle theory has been dominated by a single approach to the unification of the Standard Model interactions and quantum gravity. This line of thought has hardened into a new orthodoxy that postulates an unknown fundamental supersymmetric theory involving strings and other degrees of freedom with characteristic scale around the Planck length. ... It is a striking fact that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever for this complex and unattractive conjectural theory. There is not even a serious proposal for what the dynamics of the fundamental ‘M-theory’ is supposed to be or any reason at all to believe that its dynamics would produce a vacuum state with the desired properties. The sole argument generally given to justify this picture of the world is that perturbative string theories have a massless spin two mode and thus could provide an explanation of gravity, if one ever managed to find an underlying theory for which perturbative string theory is the perturbative expansion.’ – P. Woit, Quantum Field Theory and Representation Theory: A Sketch (2002), pp51-52.
‘50 points for claiming you have a revolutionary theory but giving no concrete testable predictions.’ - J. Baez (crackpot Index originator), comment about crackpot mainstream string ‘theorists’ on the Not Even Wrong weblog here.
‘It has been said that more than 200 theories of gravitation have been put forward; but the most plausible of these have all had the defect that they lead nowhere and admit of no experimental test.’ - Sir Arthur Eddington, Space Time and Gravitation, Cambridge University Press, 1921, p64. (Here is a link to checkable quantum gravity framework which made published predictions in 1996 which were confirmed by observations in 1998, but censored out due to the immensely loud noise generators in vacuous string theory.).
Quantum field theory
http://nige.wordpress.com
Gravitons as a spacetime fabric, string theory is just a failed aether theory, Lubos Motl and Peter Woit
The Standard Model and Quantum Gravity: Identifying and Correcting Errors
Dirac’s 2nd quantization shows that the field is quantized not the classical coulomb field. Dirac’s theory is justified by predicting magnetic moments and antimatter, unlike 1st quantization. The annihilation and creation operators of the quantized field only arise in 2nd quantization, not in Schroedinger’s 1st quantization where indeterminancy has no physical explanation in chaotic field quanta interactions.” If you get rid of all the old-fashioned ideas and instead use the ideas that I’m explaining in these lectures – adding arrows [path amplitudes] for all the ways an event can happen – there is no need for an uncertainty principle!’
- Richard P. Feynman, QED, Penguin Books, London, 1990, pp. 55-56.
“… Bohr [at Pocono, 1948] … said: ‘… one could not talk about the trajectory of an electron in the atom, because it was something not observable.’ … Bohr thought that I didn’t know the uncertainty principle … it didn’t make me angry, it just made me realize that … [ they ] … didn’t know what I was talking about, and it was hopeless to try to explain it further. I gave up, I simply gave up …”
- Richard P. Feynman, quoted in Jagdish Mehra’s biography of Feynman, The Beat of a Different Drum, Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 245-248.
Kissel Retrial and Hong Kong's Antiquated Press Laws
http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2930&Itemid=204
Eighteenth-century contempt laws get in the way of the public’s right to know
Opinion: Democracy Suffers in Thailand
http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2062&Itemid=595
Since the coup, the royalists have been promoting the king's "Sufficiency Economy" ideology, which basically argues against redistribution of wealth. At the same time, Budget Bureau documents show that the public purse spent more than Bt6 billion (US$278.2 million) on the monarchy in 2008, mainly for the Royal Household Bureau (more than Bt2 billion), royal overseas visits (Bt500 million), Royal Thai Aid-De-Camp Department (over Bt400 million) and the rest for security by the police and army. This figure did not include the cost of the new royal plane fleet, which amounted to Bt 3.65 billion.
There is absolutely no evidence that the king has ever protected human rights. In fact, the opposite is true. Just look at what happened on 6th October 1976., when police and the military cracked down on students protesting the return of Field Marshall Thanom Kittachakorn to Thailand. They killed at least 46 people and probably many more. The statement is not surprising, however, since the Amnesty International office in Thailand is closely associated with the PAD.
Thailand took further steps backward with the introduction of draconian censorship, the use of lese majeste laws against pro-democracy activists and the creation by the government of the armed paramilitary gang called the Blue Shirts, who are thought to be soldiers out of uniform.
The Red Shirts have continued to evolve. Mass meetings of ordinary people, numbering hundreds of thousands, were held in sports stadiums in Bangkok. The movement was initially built by former Thai Rak Thai politicians, but it quickly evolved into a grass-roots movement with branches in most communities throughout the country and even abroad. There are local educational groups, community radio stations and websites.
In April 2009, for the fourth time in 40 years, troops opened fire on pro-democracy demonstrators in Bangkok, firing live rounds and training rounds to clear protesters from the intersection near the Victory Monument in Bangkok, injuring at least 70 people and killing two. Although the Army later claimed that live rounds were only fired into the air, Human Rights Watch argued that live ammunition was fired directly at protesters.
Some months later, a tape recording of a cabinet meeting was leaked to the public in which Abhistit was caught urging the military to create a situation in which they could shoot the Red Shirt protesters. Each time the army has shot unarmed protesters in Thailand, the aim has been the same: to protect the interests of the conservative elites who have run the country for the past 70 years.
( Note the Red-Blue 'colouring' of left-right political partisanship, which is the same as in Canada. Yet in the USA, the associated meaning of the colours is reversed !
Maybe I should say putative meaning. It's common for anti-authoritarians...which would have been anti-royalists once upon a time... to also be called 'pinkos' ; which I associate as meaning 'washed out communists' or 'socialist pansies'. Such is the normal framing of media lies engaging in emotive innuendo over facts in an irrelevant dichotomy which is not even consistent within itself.
What matters ? The conditions of servitude - which is what you have when control over essentials of life is in the hands of others.
They don't still call Canadians 'subjects of the Crown' for no reason.
Which reminds me of something else. )
THE WORLD PASSPORT
http://www.worldservice.org/docpass.html
The mandate for the WORLD PASSPORT is Article 13(2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
The World Passport is a 30 page Machine Readable Travel Document (MRTD*) with alphanumeric code line, scanned-in passport photo and "ghost" security paper with embedded logo, the data page laminated, in 7 languages: English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Chinese and Esperanto.
Each passport is numbered and each page contains the World Citizen logo as background. Two pages are reserved for affiliate identifications: diplomatic corps, organizations, firms, etc. There are nineteen visa pages. In the inside back cover, there is space for home address, next of kin, doctor, employer, driving license no. and national passport/identity number. The cover is blue with gold lettering.
For nation-state recognition, please go to Documents / Visas.
To apply for a World Passport, please go to the World Passport Application Form
The World Passport represents the inalienable human right of freedom of travel on planet Earth. Therefore it is premised on the fundamental oneness or unity of the human community.
In modern times, the passport has become a symbol of national sovereignty and control by each nation-state. That control works both for citizens within a nation and all others outside. All nations thus collude in the system of control of travel rather than its freedom. If freedom of travel is one of the essential marks of the liberated human being, as stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, then the very acceptance of a national passport is the mark of the slave, serf or subject. The World Passport is therefore a meaningful symbol and sometimes powerful tool for the implementation of the fundamental human right of freedom of travel. By its very existence it challenges the exclusive assumption of sovereignty of the nation-state system. It is designed however to conform to nation-state requirements for travel documents. It does not, however, indicate the nationality of its bearer, only his/her birthplace. It is therefore a neutral, apolitical document of identity and potential travel document.
Pentagon destroys thousands of copies of Army officer's memoir
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/09/25/books.destroyed/index.html?eref=mrss_igoogle_cnn
Burgess said the manuscript contained secret activities of the U.S. Special Operations Command, CIA and National Security Agency.
The Pentagon contacted St. Martin's Press in early August to convey its concerns over the release of the book. According to the publisher, at that time the first printings were just about to be shipped from its warehouse. Shaffer said he and the publisher worked hard "to make sure nothing in the book would be detrimental to national security."
"When you look at what they took out (in the 2nd edition), it's lunacy," Shaffer said.
In the memoir, Shaffer recalls his time in Afghanistan leading a black-ops team during the Bush administration. The Bronze Star medal recipient told CNN he believes the Bush administraton's biggest mistake during that time was misunderstanding the culture there.
( Except, of course, that the Bush family is intimately familiar with the sandbox called a country., as is the CIA ; "Charlie Wilson's War." And yes, the movie is 'Hollywood.' As to the Taleban,search out what the House of Saud exported to Waziristan by way of an anti-Islamic cult of extremists.
WikiLeaks: ‘Saudis key financiers of al Qaeda, Taliban’
http://tribune.com.pk/story/86289/wikileaks-saudi-critical-finance-base-for-qaeda-taliban )
"We've Heard All This About American Decline Before."
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01/02/think_again_american_decline
The Soviet and Japanese threats to American supremacy proved chimerical. So Americans can be forgiven if they greet talk of a new challenge from China as just another case of the boy who cried wolf. But a frequently overlooked fact about that fable is that the boy was eventually proved right. The wolf did arrive -- and China is the wolf.
The Chinese challenge to the United States is more serious for both economic and demographic reasons. The Soviet Union collapsed because its economic system was highly inefficient, a fatal flaw that was disguised for a long time because the USSR never attempted to compete on world markets. China, by contrast, has proved its economic prowess on the global stage. Its economy has been growing at 9 to 10 percent a year, on average, for roughly three decades. It is now the world's leading exporter and its biggest manufacturer, and it is sitting on more than $2.5 trillion of foreign reserves. Chinese goods compete all over the world. This is no Soviet-style economic basket case.
GEOPOLITICAL OVERVIEW
ON JANUARY 3RD 2011
http://www.newnations.com/bulletin/January-11.htm
The inconsistencies of how IRAN, if they should ever achieve a rudimentary bomb, could dominate the US and Israel, respectively the first and third largest nuclear powers in the world are absurd. We may not (don’t) like the posturing Ahmadinejad or the political priests of Iran who are his bosses, but they must be capable of doing the nuclear arithmetic too. Being a shi’ite cleric does not mean that you immolate yourself and volunteer your families and fellow countrymen to be nuclear victims. If they do actually seek a bomb, which they consistently deny, would it not be because it is the one certain ultimate insurance, that their country will never be invaded? Why else have Britain and France after the Cold War retained a nuclear capacity? Even more obviously, why did Israel ever acquire it? It’s called, not for nothing, ‘deterrence.’ For forty years it stopped the Cold War becoming Hot.
..... It seems safe to assume that the US and therefore the world will eventually be revisited by financial crises, even though we are not yet out of the woods of this one. The will to change this simply does not exist, whilst the will to make grotesque amounts of money by whatever questionable means, dominates.
Blessed are the Peacemakers
BOSNIA in this issue pays our final respects to Richard Holbrooke, the US diplomat par excellence, who was the main diplomatic player in ending the frightful Balkans war and was trying to achieve the same goal in AFGHANISTAN. As ‘Le Monde’ said: “L’Amerique perd un diplomate de legende”. He was the kind of man that ultimately gives America a good name, admired despite no shortage of countervailing influences.
( Ouch. Praising USA with faint damns. )
Palestine, scheduled for sixty years to also be a nation state - but in fact never getting beyond being an occupied territory - is controlled by Israel and now punctuated by an archipelago of numerous Israeli settlements connected by a military road network.
The status of the Palestinians as untermenschen has led over the post WWII years to armed resistance by some of them in groups that are labelled terrorist, a suitable epithet for freedom fighters here, as the equivalent Israeli Groups: the Stern Gang and Irgun Zvai Leumi were once so labelled before their people achieved statehood.
Iraq: The Tragedy Continues
Bordering on the edge of farce, IRAQ stumbles on. Were it not so tragic it would be funny. The authoritarian former PM al Maliki anticipating also being the next one, had been given until December 25th by the (Kurdish) President to form a government. He managed it with a few days to spare winning a unanimous vote and all his ministers voted in. So after most of 2010 being without a government IRAQ now has got one. Two cheers!
His main opponent, Alawi who actually came top in the election, in western democracy should be the leader of the government, but was sidelined, since he did not seem to be able to command a majority. On him rested the hopes of the minority Sunni, and the even smaller minority secular vote which used in the days of Saddam to be the norm. Alawi who could not manage to get sufficient parliamentary support appears to have personally been squared, as he did not vote against it. Now the question becomes: how long can this coalition hold together?
The damage the US invasion did to this country is daily exhibited by the mismatch of the politicians to the concept of running a democratic state. The dire thing is that there is no end in sight. This month’s IRAQ report tells that unless all US forces are out of the country by December 2011 - a key player in the coalition, arguably the most consistent of Iraqi pols - the black-bearded, black-turbaned Moqtar as Sadr, will pull his MPs out of the coalition, and thus render it majority-less. It is fair to say of Sadr that he has been an exemplary Iraqi patriot, utterly consistent where the US forces are concerned. He has never stopped referring to it’s presence as the invasion that it was. Understandably he is a folk hero (as were his father and grandfather, both murdered by Saddam Hussein), able to call out onto the streets a numerous well-armed militia. He undoubtedly has strong links to Iran which is hardly surprising since, unlike most of the other Iraqi politicians, he stayed in Iraq during the Saddam years, receiving some sustenance from co-religionists in neighbouring IRAN, to which he could escape when things got too hot for him in IRAQ.
Taiwan: the disgraceful KuoMinTang
Much of this January report explains the KMT, which is now in government and for those who don’t know it, their story as probably the world’s richest political party, tells you in that single fact, much of what you need to know about them. Their elite it is, who seek to deliver TAIWAN back to mainland China where they believe themselves individually to belong, at or near the top, although according to polls that is not what the people of Taiwan want.
Pakistan – A sad case
As our monthly reports follow each other - this is our fifty ninth consecutive report on the story of PAKISTAN - which continues to deteriorate. Now it appears that the only real power in the land is the C in C of the armed forces, of which the infamous ISI is a part. The much maligned ISI sees its role as the undercover guarantor of their country’s ‘greatness.’ That seems to be their only criterion, no matter the trouble it causes or the evil it does, like the probable ISI involvement in the awful Mumbai slaughter of the innocents – bystanders in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Iran and China
It turns out that the leaked cables that proclaimed that Saudi had encouraged the US to use a military solution against IRAN, also if less dramatically, show that Saudi had tried to persuade China to drastically reduce the quantities of oil it imports from Iran, promising in return to guarantee to supply their needs for ever. The Chinese did not go for this and our report on Iran this month explains the inducements Iran gives to keep them ‘loyal’.
Afghanistan: Declare victory and leave?
We consider the options, (one of which as in our caption, has its supporters), as no doubt the White House and every Nato country with troops there is doing right now. It has predictably turned out to be a gruesome quagmire. The reality is that AFGHANISTAN is not going to produce an uncorrupt government; the Pakistani army is not seriously going to interdict the Taleban safe havens; and whilst there are widely varying reports on the preparedness of the newly trained Afghan army, it seems pretty clear that they are going to be put to the ultimate test, sooner rather than later.
Russia: The Roller Coaster economy
Fascinating to see that RUSSIA is weathering the world economic crisis better than many. It is of course not the only time that Russia’s economy has moved in a different direction to that of the world’s established democracies - the US and Europe particularly.
“Unpredictability : thy name is LIBYA”
One of the major factors in all of the uncertainty in LIBYA is the question of the succession, when, if that is conceivable, the Colonel should be no more. This year end/ beginning issue looks at some of the differences between two of his sons, active in different ways in the polity:- Sauf Ul-Islam who has consistently been identified with progressive measures, he is the moderniser. Mu’tasim al Qadhafi on the contrary, is associated with the ‘old guard,’ the ultraconservative element. As of now Sauf seems to have suffered some reverses. We give some examples of the way things have been going in this important North African state and also of the Colonel’s new attitude towards oil extraction.
Philippines: Good news at the New Year
After several years of reporting the PHILIPPINES we could never before have used such a heading. We had become very used to the dismal story of big time corruption at every level of authority:- gratuitous violence, police murder – not for nothing has this country the worst record in the world for the murder of journalists. Trade Union organisers have shorter career prospects here than anywhere in the world. Power at regional level is positively feudal with local ‘barons’ exercising the powers of life and death over their subjects.
SYRIA in the market for Alliances
Saudi Arabia and Turkey appear clear candidates, both of them amongst the saner countries in the region. This issue looks closer at this topic. Syria is reshaping its trading objectives with geographical criteria which are described as its ‘Five Seas Policy’, namely countries that border on the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the Red Sea, the Caspian and the Persian Gulf.
India looks closely at Africa
The name of this particular game is coal. In an energy hyper-conscious world, INDIA is heavily dependent on coal and has identified coalmines in southern Africa in which to invest. New Delhi meanwhile has become the chosen destination for the world’s leading statesmen this past year with visits from the presidents or prime ministers of UK; France; USA; Russia and China in close succession. In each case, the statesmen have been accompanied by jumbo-jet loads of leading business executives, ready willing and able to sign flurries of trade deals.
Saudi Arabia’s curious relationship with IRAN
This issue says that there is an effort being made by both sides to improve relations with IRAN. Whether the changes relate to the change
of Iran’s foreign minister is not known, but the kind of explosive reaction
the world half expected from Iran, after the wiki-leaks revelations – that
Saudi was urging the US government to take military action against Iran, has not happened.
SAUDI ARABIA is disturbed by military incursions from Yemen to their south where the local Al Qaida franchisee (AQAP)are causing problems.
The Yemenis appear to have had help from Iran which is a good reason
for Saudi to become on good enough terms with Iran to stop this.
| | ||
( But you have to wonder what Iran thought of the idea as proposed over at Veterans Voice that Wikileaks is a joint Saudi-Israeli disinformation scam on a grand scale. Whoops ! )
WikiLeaks ‘struck a deal with Israel’ over diplomatic cables leaks
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/12/08/wikileaks-struck-a-deal-with-israel-over-cable-leaks )
Assange Admits Wikileaks a Fraud Run By Press For Israel
http://inquiringminds.cc/assange-admits-wikileaks-a-fraud-run-by-press-for-israel direct source : http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=16609
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