See this Amp at http://bit.ly/go5UcE
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Monday, November 22, 2010
The LA Times vs. American Travelers
Amplify’d from c4ss.org
The important thing to remember is that the weak point in American air travel safety is government.
In the long term, it’s the state that makes us targets for terrorists in the first place.
Al Qaeda didn’t hijack those planes because Osama bin Laden got an undercooked hamburger at a fast food joint, or because some big box chain store sold him a defective lawn chair.
They hijacked those planes by way of attempting to blackmail powerful politicians into doing things they don’t want to do by scaring their constituents into demanding it. Take the power away from the politicians and the tactic goes away with it.
Read more at c4ss.org
See this Amp at http://bit.ly/ieUD0m
Monday, November 15, 2010
WillUsingThePrefixCyberMakeMeLookLikeAnIdiot.com
The few seconds it takes to answer some simple questions can save you a lot of embarrassment.
See this Amp at http://bit.ly/aCF2R0
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Captive Audience
Friday, November 12, 2010
Tuesday, November 09, 2010
Real-life gadgets for real-life superheroes
I've aged out of the Hero game, but ten, fifteen years ago... if I had the will this would be the way.
See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/evw7
Friday, November 05, 2010
Posterous Does What Others Can't
Posterous can post to Delicious and Live Journal, Amplify and Ping.fm can't. I suppose Amplify doesn't need to, auto-posting to Posterous gets the job done but Ping.fm used to. The rang of services Ping.fm can post to seems to be shrinking.
What's the big secret, Posterous?
What's the big secret, Posterous?
See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/endz
Thursday, November 04, 2010
The Fed’s Latest Scam
David D'Amato of C4SS brings us play-by-play on the latest Federal Reserve shell game.
Amplify’d from c4ss.org
In a press release yesterday, the Federal Reserve announced plans to undertake quantitative easing measures, “purchas[ing] … $600 billion of longer-term Treasury securities by the end of the second quarter of 2011, a pace of about $75 billion per month.” Quantitative easing is the sly euphemism used to describe a policy whereby, instead of attempting to pass another highly visible stimulus package through Congress, the central bank purchases the federal government’s debt obligations.
If we didn’t know better, we might speculate that, considering its profligate spending, the Fed has a cache of wealth in a secret vault somewhere, some tangible value to back up its decision. Careful to characterize its latest move as a legitimate treatment for an ailing economy, the many voices of the Fed have stressed that the maneuver is a value-for-value exchange as opposed to a gratuitous handout to the banking/creditor class. While the Fed is paying for something — government Treasury bonds — it is acquiring that something at a price that no one in a market completely free from coercion would ever ante up for such rotten debt.
By diluting the money in our wallets, essentially dividing our dollars into parts and pretending those parts are worth as much as the original bills, the new round of quantitative easing is a veiled tax. Quantitative easing therefore operates to drain the real wealth out of productive society for sake of the banking elite, relieving their books of the debt that only an institution financed by brazen theft would buy; this is the perverse spectacle of the state-created and -backed central bank buying the state’s securities with the state’s fiat currency.
A system that allowed free market banks or credit unions to circulate their own currencies would reestablish the link between money and the things or services it is exchanged for; ratios between competing currencies would, in turn, provide the kind of price information that the state’s coercive system is so perilously lacking.
The Fed is showing the world what anarchists have always understood, that more regulation and state involvement in the marketplace and in banking are jeopardizing rather than protecting the average consumer. The free market, emancipating the working class and shattering privilege, is the lone answer to the corporate morass we’re stuck in today.
Read more at c4ss.org
See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/el91
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Obamacare Feeds Insurance Oligarchs
Amplify’d from c4ss.org
Today, a Wall Street Journal opinion column titled Big Business, Big Medicine reports the “turn toward consolidation among insurance companies,” a “dynamic [that] is leading to much larger hospital systems and physician groups, and fewer insurers dominated by a handful of national conglomerates.” If this seems an anomalous result from an administration thought to represent a departure from the corporate cronyism of its predecessor, then the blatant and contrary writing on the wall was apparently ignored.
Like all regulations declaredly subduing Big Business predominance over consumer’s lives, the new laws synthesize “public” and “private” — both of which are ultimately meaningless is our system — boosting an already corporatist economy for health services. As we might have foreseen, the politicians’ solution nurtures a condition whereby smaller “carriers will collapse under the new mandates and higher overhead.” So in the face of everything the President said about “not accept[ing] the status quo as a solution” in health care, “Obamacare” delivered for Big Insurance, a cartel that loathes competition and welcomes impenetrable regulation. Both the state and Big Business — adversaries only in the popular imagination — are triumphant, the coordination of the two saddling us with another shakedown scheme.
The United States’ health care system, a teetering house of cards that will ultimately implode, exists through economic fallacy. Even so, by the time the elites’ scheme withers, they will have already thieved more than enough from the productive class; they will, as always, leave insolvency and beggary behind, but they’ll benefit from the presumption that their hearts were in the right place in trying to give health care to everyone. The insurance lobby is getting what it paid for with these policies and this President. We can inaccurately call this process of fraud and favoritism a free market, or we accept that such are the contours of American Capitalism and subscribe to free markets as a means of disbanding these price-fixing protection rackets.
Read more at c4ss.org
See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/e156
Monday, October 25, 2010
Friday, October 22, 2010
Michael Moore Almost Gets It Right
Amplify’d from c4ss.org
Michael Moore, writing at Alternet (“Why Republicans Are Always Worried About Their Pet Corporations Facing Any Real Free Market Competition,” Oct. 21), makes a very acute observation: “whenever corporate executives begin talking about how they support ‘free markets’ and ‘competition,’ check to see if you still have your wallet.” The reason is that “nobody” — not even Marxists — “hates competition more than corporations.”
Moore was so close — but he just missed it. Moore frames the issue as one of big corporations trying to suppress competition by weakening the antitrust laws. “When corporate executives start pushing for ‘free market policies,’ what they mean is a government that lets them become a monopoly.”
If he’d said they want “a government that HELPS them become a monopoly,” he’d have had it just right. The main factor behind monopoly isn’t whether government lets it exist by failing to enforce antitrust laws. It’s whether government enables it by erecting entry barriers, suppressing competition with cartelizing regulations, and enforcing legal monopolies like “intellectual property.” Government doesn’t “allow” monopoly. It props it up.
Read more at c4ss.org
See this Amp at http://bit.ly/a2x3Sm
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
How Public Employee Unions Can Halt the Pension Crisis
Brad Spangler at C4SS addresses the coming collapse of state-funded pensions.
Amplify’d from c4ss.org
If public employee unions genuinely want to represent the interests of their members, they ought to be sounding the alarm to man the lifeboats and prepare to abandon the ship of state.
Government, at all levels, is bankrupting itself and taking the rest of the country (nay, world) with it. An equity for debt swap is relatively common in bankruptcy cases. In this case, unions can serve as advocates and midwives for a new model of worker-owned privatization that gives rank and file public employees shares of common stock in formerly public enterprises as compensation for the default on pensions that’s inevitably coming, whether they want it to or not.
Read more at c4ss.org
See this Amp at http://bit.ly/aTcxh5
Wednesday, October 06, 2010
Sharp In Klein
Mike Gibson at "Let A Thousand Nations Bloom" follows through on Ezra Klein's "What if the government were run more like a business?" thought experiment.
See this Amp at http://bit.ly/9QzvlQ
Tuesday, October 05, 2010
Growing too many vegetables is illegal
Monday, October 04, 2010
An Immoral System Can Only Be Sustained By Immorality
(C4SS) Kevin Carson's comments on World War II and the Great Depression.
Amplify’d from c4ss.org
I believe that Horwitz, in countering Krugman’s argument with a description of how economic growth would be achieved in a free market, ignores the point that the industrial system we’ve had over the past 150 years hasn’t even remotely resembled a free market. It has been a corporatist system built from the ground up through overwhelming state intervention and massive collusion between big business and big government.
The state has promoted the overaccumulation of capital in mass-production facilities that are only profitable when they can amortize the cost of their expensive specialized machinery by running at full capacity without regard to preexisting demand, and then find some way to dispose of the product. And the only way to dispose of that full product has been through state-aided planned obsolescence, state-aided expansion in to foreign markets, direct state purchases of surplus output and surplus capital, and–as a last resort–massive state destruction of output and capital in war.
Read more at c4ss.org
See this Amp at http://bit.ly/cuXLVd
Friday, October 01, 2010
One Human’s Taxation is a Tragedy; Three Hundred Million is a Statistic
Check out Third Way's publications here: http://bit.ly/acsApG
Amplify’d from c4ss.org
An itemized receipt for taxes? How lovely and desirable!
A think tank entitled Third Way just issued a paper wherein they analzed what the $5400 in federal taxes the median taxpayer of 2009 (who earned $34,140) actually purchased. Among the reactions in the blogosphere, one recurring comment strikingly resounded.
Writers noted that everywhere else an exchange of goods occurs, a bill of transfer or receipt is produced. Why is one not given to taxpayers in the same manner? An honest and baffling question for American citizens to ponder, with a lousy answer.
Read more at c4ss.org
See this Amp at http://bit.ly/9Uohdg
Thursday, September 30, 2010
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