Prop. 8 overturned

Text of the opinion.

You thought we had a housing bubble?

In Beijing,

Real, constant quality land values have increased by nearly 800% since the first quarter of 2003,....

Keynes was right. For an example, see how well Germany is doing.

From Der Spiegel:

During the worst of the global financial meltdown, Berlin pumped tens of billions of euros into the economy and spent hundreds of billions propping up German banks. Now, the country is reaping the benefits as Germany is once again Europe's economic motor.

Why can't some politician see Economics as a science rather than as a political philosophy?

It's good to be really really rich; everyone else is out of luck.

The Disequilibria blog has a post up that neatly breaks down all of the income gains for the last 10 years or so.

They all went to the top .1% of earners. The top one tenth of one percent. They made great fistfuls of money.

The rest of us are poorer. This is why we're in a recession/rapidly shading to depression. No one has any money to buy anything but for a handful of aristocrats.

The blog Naked Capitalism has more, here, "58% of real income growth went to top 1% since 1976."

Marvin Gaye for the 4th

The Star Spangled Banner, what else?


And a little Jimi comin' over, showing us what the whammy bar, and the US, is really about

When I was at BYU, we were all supposed to pause at 8:00 when the Star Spangled Banner was playing. Needless to say, I often didn't. This is the version I really wanted coming out of those loudspeakers.

Someone really really rich gets it.

The great depression was ended by a class traitor. Franklin Delano Roosevelt came from one of the richest families in America. But, he caught polio as a youngish adult and couldn't walk. He could, however, drive. He drove everywhere, zigzagging across
America. He'd stop his car and talk to people on the road, just average citizens, and somehow learned what it was like to not live in the bubble of wealth. When he became president, he was not beholden to his family or his (extremely upper) class. Taxes on the rich went way up, laws to protect the poor were enacted.

We're back to the same class structure as existed just barely before the great depression--a huge amount of the wealth in the country is in the hands of just a tiny handful of people.

Here's how one person describes the inequality:

If we divide the wealth of the US into thirds, we find that the top one percent own a third, the next nine percent own another third, and the bottom ninety percent claim the rest. (Actually, these percentages, true a decade ago, are now out of date. The top one percent are now estimated to own between forty and fifty percent of the nation's wealth, more than the combined wealth of the bottom 95%.)

When half the wealth of the entire country is concentrated in a tiny percentage of the population it impoverishes the other 99%. One percent of the population simply cannot go out to dinner often enough to support restaurants, cannot go to the theatre enough to support the arts, cannot buy enough clothes to support clothing stores, and so on. The engine of our economy is the middle class. We know what happens when the middle class doesn't have enough money to spend because it's being hogged by a tiny handful of people, because it has happened before: it was called the Great Depression. Currently, the distribution of money betwixt and between the rich and poor is just about the same as it was in 1929. How fun.

Andy Grove, one of the founders of Intel and a genuine rich person understands the quandry we're in. Read about it here. I doubt that he'll run for public office, however.

A Very Young Rod Sings Acapella

Oh Rod Stewart, what happened to you?



Here's one more from 1972--with Rod reading the lyrics for "You Wear it Well."

Curiously enough, the band seems to be following some sort of dress code; everyone has to wear yellow. Except the violin player, who looks like someone's dad.

Last one, live Faces from 1973.

We're funding both sides of the war in Afghanistan!

Yeppers, that's right. We're paying contractors, who are paying off the Taliban to let the contractors employees work without getting killed. The Taliban are then taking your and my tax dollars and using it to kill fellow Americans. A perfect circle. Whar are we doing over there, again?

Private security contractors protecting the convoys that supply U.S. military bases in Afghanistan are paying millions of dollars a week in "passage bribes" to the Taliban and other insurgent groups to travel along Afghan roads, a congressional investigation released Monday has found.

The payments, which are reimbursed by the U.S. government, help fund the very enemy the U.S. is attempting to defeat and renew questions about the U.S. dependence on private contractors, who outnumber American troops in Afghanistan, 130,000 to 93,000.

From McClatchy News Service.
Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/06/21/96286/report-finds-us-tax-money-may.html#ixzz0rdR7JEtl

Remember that last oil crisis? Summer of '08? When prices were so high?

Here's an explanation of how they pulled it off; notice that BP was one of the players.
Quote:

According to [Victor] Davis, the scam starts in 2000 with the formation of the ICE - the Intercontinental Exchange. The ICE - founded by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BP, Total, Shell, Deutsche Bank and Societe Generale - is an online commodities and futures marketplace that exists outside the US and operates free from the constraints of US laws.

After a Congressional investigation into energy trading in 2003, the ICE was found to be facilitating "round-trip" trades. This is where one firm sells energy to another, and then the second firm sells the same amount of energy back to the first company, at the same time and at the exact same price, as told by Davis.

No commodity ever changes hands

Quite shockingly no commodity ever changes hands, but the transactions still send a signal to the market, artificially boosting company revenue. Angry yet? There's more.

Because the trading is unregulated by Washington, its difficult to gauge the scale on which "round-trip" trading takes place.

But when DMS Energy were investigated by Congress, the company admitted that 80 percent of its trades in 2001 were round-trip trades. This means 80 percent of all trades in that year were false trades. Not a drop of oil changed hands, but the balance sheets showed increased revenue.

The idea is to hike up commodity prices. For example, according to Davis, after the ICE turned commodity trading into a "speculative casino game where pricing was notional and contracts could be sold by people who never produced a thing, to people who didn't need the things that were not produced", Goldman Sachs were able to triple the price of commodities in just five years.

ICE can create artificial shortages and drive speculative demand

The beauty (or rather the horror) of the scam outlined by Davis is that because they control the oil markets, the ICE can create artificial shortages and drive speculative demand in order to charge consumers an extra dollar per gallon of gas. And whereas this may not seem like much, this $1 soon becomes $50 billion A MONTH as global drivers consume 1.7 billion gallons of gas every single day.

Looks like BP should have plenty of cash on hand squirreled away somewhere.

Wanna see what 25,000 barrels look like?

25,000 barrels is the current (assumed) oil flow directly into the Gulf of Mexico.

It turns out we are living in a libertarian paradise. Cheers!

Regulations permit oil and gas industry to regulate itself. The Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service—the agency responsible for managing oil and gas resources on the Outer Continental Shelf and collecting royalties from companies—decided in 2005 that oil companies, rather than the government, were in the best position to determining their operations’ environmental impacts. This meant that there was no longer any need for an environmental impact analysis for deepwater drilling, though an earlier draft stated that such drilling experience was limited. In fact, MMS “repeatedly ignored warnings from government scientists about environmental risks in its push to approve energy exploration activities quickly, according to numerous documents and interviews.” And an interior general analysis even found that between 2005 and 2007 MMS officials let the oil industry to fill out their own inspection reports.

Got that? NO ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT STATEMENT NEEDED FOR DEEPWATER DRILLING. BP cut every possible corner on that well, they had no safety plan if something went wrong, because the US Governmant apparently have all the copies of "Atlas Shrugged" checked out of their libraries. Here's proof -- ll dead, uninmaginable disaster in the Gulf of Mexico -- that perhaps a bit of oversight is a good thing. Let's think about this. If you're a rational human and you know your own very personal bonus depends on you saving money, and there is no regulation forcing you to, say, drill a safe well, well then why not maximize your personal wealth, plus looking good to your supervisors?

Environment? What's that? Something you see out the window?

Quote above, and many more environmental time bombs planted by the Bssh administration, found here.

Jesus doesn't want me for a sunbeam.

For various reasons, seemed appropriate. I'm pretty sure I've posted the Vaseline's original; but my, don't expect me to cry for all the reasons that died. Don't expect me to cry, don't expect me to lie, don't expect me to die for thee.

A real poet, a real singer, a real man, for a brief 26 years.

In spite of the fact that the almost-forgotten Gram Parsons was one of the best singer-songwriters of that brief interlude between the 60's and the 70's, no to mention one of the best looking men; there seems to be very little live video of him. But I found a bit. Deal with the blur.



Here's another song, said to be live, but with just random pictures. Still beautiful. Beautiful, beautiful.



I have a theory. Gram Parsons was Country. Country people have no (or even negative) taste, and so ignore him. Rockers hear the word "country" and run for the hills, not realizing the beauty they are missing, and the slight amount of amusement to be found in such behavior.

I leave you with a beautiful bit of very early Gram; thank you Paul, for introducing me to this amazing song:

French Punk

In the spirit of this beautiful day, I decided to give my faithfull (like Marianne) readers a treat! 1970'S French Punk. Turn it up loud.

Rock Steady

It is an unimaginably georgeous day in Portland today. OK, what inspired this post is that somehow I was subjected to "classic rock," where I heard a Paul Rogers song that threw me into a complete tizzy. The song--horrible; his voice? Perfection. Serious synapse-frying moment.

It turns out we have a "Bad Company" album that I just listened to on the porch. It was perfect for an early summer day. I adore Paul Rogers's voice. It is not a surprise that Queen decided to use him as a fill-in for Freddie Mercury. (I actually prefer Paul's voice, even if it didn't have the range; it's more supple and sweet and subtle.) I just hate everything that he sang. Pretty much. But that voice! Perfect summer music. My new goal is to acquire some Lynrd Skynnrd (OK, I can't spell the name, but I blame it on "Free Bird.")

So, for the feat of getting through this entire post, here's some "Bad Company" from back in the day before Paul Rogers discovered that mysterious clothing item "Shirts." (On edit; crap, he has a shirt on. I managed to pick the only video of all that I previewed with this aberration.)