Corruption at the Top

Here is a list put together by Zack Carter on AlterNet.org of the 10 most corrupt capitalists in the US. The definition use is:

The financial crisis has unveiled a new set of public villains—corrupt corporate capitalists who leveraged their connections in government for their own personal profit. During the Clinton and Bush administrations, many of these schemers were worshiped as geniuses, heroes or icons of American progress. But today we know these opportunists for what they are: Deregulatory hacks hellbent on making a profit at any cost.

And the winners are...

1. Robert Rubin
2. Alan Greenspan
3. Larry Summers
4. Phil and Wendy Gramm
5. Jamie Dimon
6. Stephen Friedman
7. Robert Steel
8. Henry Paulson
9. Warren Buffett
10. Goldman Sachs: No company exemplifies the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington more than Goldman Sachs. The four people on this list are some of the worst offenders, but Goldman's D.C. army has includes many other top officials in this administration and the last...

-Joshua Bolton, chief of staff for George W. Bush, was a Goldman man
-Current New York Fed President William Dudley is a Goldman man
-Current Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Gary Gensler has been a responsible regulator under Obama, but he was a deregulatory hawk during the Clinton years, and worked at Goldman for nearly two decades before that.
-A top aide to Timothy Geithner, Gene Sperling, is a Goldman man
-Current Treasury Undersecretary Robert Hormats is a Goldman man
-Current Treasury Chief of Staff Mark Patterson is a former Goldman lobbyist
-Former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt is now a Goldman adviser
-Neel Kashkari, Henry Paulson’s deputy on TARP, was a Goldman man
-COO of the SEC Enforcement Division Adam Storch is a Goldman man
-Former Sen. John Corzine, D-N.J., was Goldman’s CEO before Henry Paulson
-Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., was a Goldman Vice President before he ran for Congress
-Former House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., now lobbies for Goldman

For details, go read the article on AlterNet.org.

The Bush Legacy: Totaling the Costs of Sept 2008

Here is the conclusion of a study done by the Pew Charitable Trusts on the financial costs to ordinary Americans by the folly of the "deregulate, deregulate, deregulate" Republicans and the cronyism of the Bush administration:

U.S. households lost on average nearly $5,800 in income due to reduced economic growth during the acute stage of the financial crisis from September 2008 through the end of 2009.[1] Costs to the federal government due to its interventions to mitigate the financial crisis amounted to $2,050, on average, for each U.S. household. Also, the combined peak loss from declining stock and home values totaled nearly $100,000, on average per U.S. household, during the July 2008 to March 2009 period. This analysis highlights the importance of reducing the onset and severity of future financial crises, and the value of market reforms to achieve this goal.

KEY FINDINGS

Income – The financial crisis cost the U.S. an estimated $648 billion due to slower economic growth, as measured by the difference between the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) economic forecast made in September 2008 and the actual performance of the economy from September 2008 through the end of 2009. That equates to an average of approximately $5,800 in lost income for each U.S. household.

Government Response – Federal government spending to mitigate the financial crisis through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) will result in a net cost to taxpayers of $73 billion according to the CBO. This is approximately $2,050 per U.S. household on average.

Home Values – The U.S. lost $3.4 trillion in real estate wealth from July 2008 to March 2009 according to the Federal Reserve. This is roughly $30,300 per U.S. household. Further, 500,000 additional foreclosures began during the acute phase of the financial crisis than were expected, based on the September 2008 CBO forecast.

Stock Values – The U.S. lost $7.4 trillion in stock wealth from July 2008 to March 2009, according to the Federal Reserve. This is roughly $66,200 on average per U.S. household.

Jobs – 5.5 million more American jobs were lost due to slower economic growth during the financial crisis than what was predicted by the September 2008 CBO forecast.

Go read the whole report here.

It will take a generation to recover from the folly of right wing policies. The tragedy is that it appears that the US public is about to re-enable the right wing nuts with election victories in 2010. So this tragedy is not over. The misguided public is about to plunge itself once again into the corrupt hands of Republican politics that uses "family values" and right wing Christian issues as cover for their agenda to rape and pillage the economy for the benefit of the ultra-rich.

The European Debt Crisis

Here are the gory details explained in a nutshell...



Ponzi scheme anybody?

Seriously: this whole crisis is overblown. It will be sorted out. The amounts are manageable. What is needed is better regulation and a plan. Oops... I've just called for the two things that the economic nuts refuse to accept: regulation and planning. The fanatics assure us that everything goes so much better if it is done with no cops on the beat and no "big picture" to give anybody a clue as to what is really going on!

US Border Bullies

Here is a really sad story of Peter Watts who was brutalized by the US Border guards as he was leaving the US to return to Canada and out of the blue they stopped him and started ordering him around. He innocently got out of his car and asked "what's going on?" and they all hell broke out. The way the border guards work in the US is that you have no rights, you can't ask any questions, you can be brutalized, and the legal system backed up these brutal border guards to the hilt. It is a crime, but nobody in the US wants to hear the truth or do the right thing. Peter Watts has been bulldozed and brutalized and the US system smugly think it did the "right thing". This is sick.

For those who don't believe that the US can become a fascist state, need to listen the the interview and understand all the facts and ponder this. It is insane and it stands. This is what the US has become. It is a state that tortures innocent "terrorists" and that brutalizes Canadians as they innocently drive home. The country has gone insane.

Listen to this: it is a really ugly story.

This kind of ugly police brutality goes on all the time. Here's two recent cases in Canada:

• Ian Bush - an 18 year old gets picked up for drinking outside a hockey arena, gets taken to the local police station, and dies from a bullet in the back of the brain... a "self-inflicted" wound if you believe the police.


• Robert Dziekański - a Polish immigrant gets lost in the bowels of the airport waiting for his mother to pick him up. She is locked outside the "secure" area and tries to get authorities to help her get in contact with her son. The son is inside the "secure" area and only speaks Polish and doesn't understand that he needs to get outside the secure area. Nobody in the airport notices while he waits for 6 hours after a 12 hour flight. He goes stir crazy. Nobody helps. When he makes noises because he can't understand why his mother isn't there, the police come in a taser him multiple times while piled on and suffocate him. This, despite the fact that the video clearly shows he wasn't "dangerous" or "violent". He just needed somebody to try and talk to him. Nobody did.

There are similar cases of protestors being killed or harrassed in the UK by "security" forces that are out of control, see here, here, here, here, here, here. There are numerous cases of police in the US who shoot first and ask questions later that kill innocent people, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here. And, of course, Canada, see here, here, here.

I know that the job of the police is a tough, ugly one. But the answer is not to give them free rein to bully, threaten, and kill people. The answer is to give them better training, better pay, better support, and to weed out the thugs and bullies so that they become a professional force, not bullies in uniform. Sadly, most countries "don't see a problem". These outrageous events aren't a "problem" until they happen to you. But then it is too late. A tragedy.

The "Reagan" Economy

Here is an excellent posting by Paul Krugman on his NY Times blog that points out that the right wing "agenda" which has controlled the US since 1980 is a complete disaster that has been mythologized as an "improvement" over the golden years economy of post-WWII America. It is an incredible lie, but it is believed!

Did The Postwar System Fail?

I’ve been posting about the contrast between the popular perception on the right that America had slow growth until Reagan came along, and the reality that we did fine pre-Reagan, in fact better; see here, here, and here. And what I’m getting as a common response — including from liberals — is something along the lines of, “That’s all very well, but by 1980 the postwar system was clearly failing, so what would you have done instead of Reaganomics?”

Which all goes to show just how thoroughly almost everyone has been indoctrinated by the current orthodoxy.

How do we know that the postwar system was failing? Yes, there were some bad years — largely due to oil shocks — and there was stagflation. But stagflation was not, as far as I know — and as far as standard textbook economics says — the result of high taxes and/or excessive regulation; it was a problem of monetary policy. It’s a testimony to the strength of supply-side propaganda that so many people think they know differently.

And how bad were those bad years, anyway? Well, let’s look at real median family income over two 8-year stretches, 1973 to 1981 and 2000 to 2008, in each case with income in the first year set to 100:


Funny, isn’t it? The Ford-Carter years look no worse — in fact, somewhat better — than the Bush years, especially if you look from business cycle peak to business cycle peak. And that was in the face of two very severe oil shocks. So a question for all the people who say that the economic troubles under Jimmy Carter discredited postwar economic policies: why don’t the troubles under Bush similarly discredit post-Reagan policies? Funny how that works.

Here’s what I think: inflation did have to be brought down — and Paul Volcker, not Reagan, did what was necessary. But the rest — slashing taxes on the rich, breaking the unions, letting inflation erode the minimum wage — wasn’t necessary at all. We could have gone on with a more progressive tax system, a stronger labor movement, and so on.

In the modern vision, the old US economy is seen as an absurd, unworkable thing. Where were the incentives to grow super-rich? How did you manage with all those well-paid, organized workers? But I’m old enough to remember that system, and it was no more unworkable than what we have now. Radical change happened because a powerful political movement wanted it, not out of economic necessity.

And there is more from another Krugman post:

That was about the claim, quite common on the right, that the US economy was stagnant until Reagan did away with those nasty New Deal policies — a claim that is simply, flatly, false. The era of strong unions, high minimum wages, high top marginal tax rates, etc. was also a period of rapid growth and rising living standards. That doesn’t prove causation; it does disprove the widespread dogma that these things are always economically devastating. And it’s telling that so many on the right have airbrushed the whole postwar generation out of history.

Given all that, what do we learn from the fact that since 1980 the United States has more or less maintained its relative GDP per capita, after substantial decline previously? Well, that’s not a simple story. Part of the answer is that our relative decline for 30 years after WWII largely reflected technological catchup by others; by the 80s that catchup was largely over, with all advanced nations at roughly the same technological level, so there was no reason to expect faster growth in Europe and Japan.

There’s also an issue of labor-leisure choices. In the 70s the long-run trend of taking productivity gains out partly in the form of shorter working hours came to an end in the US, while continuing elsewhere. What that’s about is the subject of dispute, but it’s important to understand that a large part of the GDP difference between the US and Europe reflects that choice. France, in particular, is a country with about the same level of technology and productivity as America, but with roughly 25 percent lower GDP per capita; this mainly reflects longer vacations and earlier retirement, which may or may not be bad things, but are not a straightforward case of inferior performance.

But back to the original point: where this all started was with the common assertion that the US economy was a failure until Reagan came along. This should be true, according to doctrine — so that’s what people believe happened, even though it didn’t.

Even with Obama in place, the idiocy of the Reagan years continues because Obama believes in "reaching out" to the fanatics who won't give an inch. The economy has collapsed and still most people think that the right wing agenda was "the good years". They don't even understand how the Republicans destroyed the country. These people are ready to hand the keys to the country back to the crazy Republicans.

Interview of Steven Pinker

Here is an excellent dialog between Robert Wright and Steven Pinker that covers a lot of ground. This is one of the best discussions I've seen. It gets at the topics that Pinker covers in his books while including some interesting side trips into topics of interest to Wright. This is well worth taking the time to watch. This is an interview conducted by Robert Wright on bloggingheads.tv:

Dehaene on Consciousness

Here is a video from Edge.org with Stanislas Dehaene, a brain scientist, talking about consciousness. This is from issue 306 of Edge:



His discoveries are technical. Just what you would expect. instead of a blinding realization of something overlooked, this research is building up lots of technical detail which at some point in the future will enable us to have a better model of "consciousness":

What do we see when we do these experiments? The first thing that we discovered is that, even when you cannot see a word or a picture, because it is presented in a subliminal condition, it does not mean that your cortex is not processing it. Some people initially thought that subliminal processing meant sub-cortical processing — processing that is not done in the cortex. It's of course completely false and we've known this for a while now. We can see a lot of cortical activation created by a subliminal word. It enters the visual parts of the cortex, and travels through the visual areas of the ventral face of the brain. If the conditions are right, a subliminal word can even access higher levels of processing, including semantic levels. This is something that was highly controversial in psychology, but is now very clear from brain imaging: a subliminal message can travel all the way to the level of the meaning of the word. Your brain can take a pattern of shapes on the retina, and successively turn it into a set of letters, recognize it as word, and access a certain meaning — all of that without any form of consciousness.

Next comes the obvious question: where is there more activity when you are conscious of the word? If we do this experiment with fMRI, what we see is that two major differences occur. You first see an amplification of activation in the early areas: the very same areas begin to activate much more, as much as tenfold, in for instance, this area that we have been studying and which looks at the spelling of words: the visual word form area.

The second aspect is that several other distant areas of the brain activate. These include areas in the so-called prefrontal cortex, which is in the front of the brain here. In particular, we see activation in the inferior frontal region, as well as in the inferior parietal sectors of the brain. What we find also is that these areas begin to correlate with each other — they co-activate in a coordinated manner. I am for the moment just giving you the facts: amplification and access to distant areas are some of the signatures of consciousness.

...

What I propose is that "consciousness is global information in the brain" — information which is shared across different brain areas. I am putting it very strongly, as "consciousness is", because I literally think that's all there is. What we mean by being conscious of a certain piece of information is that it has reached a level of processing in the brain where it can be shared.

Because it is sharable, your Broca's area (or the part of it involved in selecting the words that you are going to speak) is being informed about the identity of what you are seeing, and you become able to name what you are seeing. At the same time, your hippocampus is perhaps informed about what you have just seen, so you can store this representation in memory. Your parietal areas also become informed of what you have seen, so they can orient attention, or decide that this is not something you want to attend to… and so on and so forth. The criterion of information sharing relates to the feeling that we have that, whenever a piece of information is conscious, we can do a very broad array of things with it. It is available.

Now, for such global sharing to occur, at the brain level, special brain architecture is needed. In line with Bernard Baars, who was working from a psychological standpoint and called it a "global workspace", Jean-Pierre Changeux and I termed it the global neuronal workspace. If you look at the associative brain areas, including dorsal parietal and prefrontal cortex, anterior temporal cortex, anterior cingulate, and a number of other sites, what you find is that these areas are tightly intertwined with long distance connections, not just within a hemisphere, but also across the two hemispheres through what is called the corpus callosum. Given the existence of this dense network of long-distance connections, linking so many regions, here is our very simple idea: these distant connections are involved in propagating messages from one area to the next, and at this very high level where areas are strongly interconnected, the density of exchanges imposes a convergence to a single mental object out of what are initially multiple dispersed representations. So this is where the synchronization comes about.

Synchronization is probably a signal for agreement between different brain areas. The areas begin to agree with each other. They converge onto a single mental object. In this picture, each area has its own code. Broca's area has an articulatory record and slightly more anterior to it there is a word code. In the posterior temporal regions, we have an acoustic code, a phonological code, or an orthographic code. The idea is that when you become aware of a word, these codes begin to be synchronized together, and converge to a single integrated mental content.

According to this picture, consciousness is not accomplished by one area alone. There would be no sense in trying to pinpoint consciousness in a single brain area, or in computing the intersection of all the images that exist in the literature on consciousness, in order to find the area for consciousness. Consciousness is a state that involves long distance synchrony between many regions. And during this state, it's not just higher association areas that are activated, because these areas also amplify, in a top-down manner, the lower brain areas that received the sensory message in the first place.

Put crudely as "consciousness is state of synchrony" doesn't create the "aha!" moment. But I suspect that as the full implication of consciousness is unraveled, there will be no "aha!" moments. But bits and pieces will make sense and there will be the necessary experimental evidence backing up the model. We will simply come to live with the "understanding" that this model implies.