rvince99's Blog

Here comes the auto industry, that smokey, amorphous, set of multinational entities (owned by the Norwegian Trust, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, and other monolithic financial entities around the planet) who employ people all over the world, having pillaged our country for years of most of the jobs Americans once fulfilled, with their hand out,  claiming they are  "Too big to fail."

But they HAVE failed. Already. Just like Eastern Airlines. Pan Am and TWA,  Continental Illinios years ago, just like AIG. Just like National City.

Failed.

Failed. Failed. Failed. Not  "About to."

Now let's consider just WHO allowed these entities to become "too big to fail?" Why, that was our government we pay for. By allowing insurance companies to agglomorate into AIG, by letting the X dozens of auto companies over the years agglomorate into "General Motors," etc. It was the governement itself -- by having no enforceable antitrust regulations, which allowed financial institutions, airlines, banks and brokerages and every polluted little corner of planet-wide business which planted inteh US to take our money, to continuosly merge, stifle competition, and ultimately, get "too big to allow to fail."

What a  business school lesson! Grow to a critical mass, pillage those around you, then claim they are so dependent upon you that they must save you? What nerve. Another bully lies, bleeding in the street, and his victims should be his rescuers? Why? For more of the same? Now we'll find out if our "lawmakers" serve us or these smokey entities (my guess -- they'll be sent away for now, giving the disingenuous appearance of representing the people's will, but will be placated in a few months).

(Question, who should be skinned alive first?)

Given that these entities have already failed, let's quit pretending the emporer has clothes on. First, let's have REAL anitirust legislation. In the future, why not require the entities explicitly prove, demonstrate, that the public good is served through their merger. Rather than having antirust dificult to prove, the lesson of 2008 is that it should be rewritten to be difficult to DISprove.

Secondly, rather than bailing out any entity claiming to be too big to fail, that de-facto admission of an antitrust violation itself,  should be met with a court system that breaks them back up into their constituent pieces (remember the Baby Bells?). Why shouldn't the once glorious auto manufacturer and now admitted antitrust violater Chrysler be a dozen or more companies? Sink of swim. Your divisions thatr survive live, those that don't MUST be pared off from us, just like Eastern Airlines, etc. We simply cannot continue to carry that nonsense. There is NO entity we cannot live without -- including, perhaps especially, the Governement of the United States.

The simple "Thumbs up or down" on billion-dollar-giveaway-vacations charade going  on in Capitol Hill is, yet again, absent any REAL ideas on long term solutions (Intentionally, I presume. Thus, our elected lawmakers are complicit in this robbery).

Sink or swim, just like the individuals who pay for these entities' bankruptcy courts (but don't have access to them!) if an entity wants the same rights as a taxpaying individual, then abide by the same rules. Sink or swim. Suck it up. Yeah, it's hard -- just ask many of our fellow countrymen who are individually enduring this alone, who aren;t "too big to fail."

I have been watching the nascent accusation of Obama's possible lack of being a natural born US Citizen (as required by the US Constitution as a qualification to be president). I find it amazing that U.S. District Judge R. Barclay Surrick just made the flimsiest excuse for tossing the lawsuit (the specifics of which can be found at:

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20081025/D941NCJG0.html


and:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOzFl-Gm_Kc&feature=rel
ated )

Look, if Berg is NOT a crackpot (and I see no reason to believe he is a crackpot) this is an issue which has reached a viral stage that I find myself shaking my head over why the mainstream media is not covering this, as well as how Judge Surrick can throw this out because (it is) "too vague and its effects too attenuated to confer standing on any and all voters."

Doesn't anyone else see what flimsy logic this is? Surely this will be appealed and we very well could be looking at not only a constitutional crisis, but very well, a civil one as well. Imagine the (perhaps not-so-) hypothetical situation where A.) Obama wins and B.) He is disqualified based on the constitutional requirement.

Consider that EVERYONE who is born in the United States in 1960 or 1961 has a recorded birth certificate. Clearly, if someone is the defendant in a lawsuit that is of a crackpot nature, and they can stuff it on the surface by producing a legitimate, certified, recorded birth certificate, they would and the case would be closed, the plaintiff forever regarded in the matter as a crackpot.

But that didn;t happen last night. Instead, on a matter of clearly constitutional issue, United Stated Federal Judge Surrick pukes up this flimsy excuse to dismiss the case -- and excuse with no reference to a constitutional issue whatsoever. Furthermore, the issue not only affects voters, it also affects the contributors of the 600 million dollar warchest of Obama's, the DNC (who themselves should have vetted this long ago and prevented this from ever growing into the potential fiasco we are looking at now). Additionally, what are the ramifications of campaign finance laws on Obama if he IS disqualified?

Again, I don;t care who wins this election. This is once again Pepsi vs. Coke, the politics of mere personality. All of these people A.) Fail to Inspire in any fashion, and B.) Bring no ideas or solutions to the table (I have mentioned ideas in the past, sinking fund for future tax requirements, increasing the variance in federal spending requirements as a means of breaking its back, etc.) If anyone ever came along with ideas to implement, I would vote and vote for them. Shuffling money and yibbidy-blibbiding about different ways to shuffle it does not constitute "ideas."

In the meantime, they can all get lost. However, I think there is an issue here which may be exploding underneath the story, and the news media isn't covering it, and the courts don't seem to want to touch it until they have no choice but to handle it.

This may be more interesting than any of us ever hoped for.

Some years back, I bought the Commerce Department's database of 900 economic indicators. It had everything - interest rates, currency values, percent of women in the workforce, you name it.

I wanted to see what was correlated to what, so I wrote a program that would take every possible pairwise combination of data (say, set 1 and 2, set 1 and 3....set 1 and 900, then set 2 and 3, set 2 and 4.....set 2 and 900, etc) and rank them by the absolute value of their correlation.

Now, when it comes to GDP (or, as it was called in the past, GNP) the factor that influences it the most is the previous period(s) increase or decrease in Federal Government Spending.

The more the government spends, the greater the economic growth in the next period(s). This is certainly counter to the notion of fiscal responsibility, but, I was not looking to confirm an ideology; I was looking at what the empirical data of the past said.

(I might point out I tend to be extremely conservative in my views, but I like to think my views are malleable based on a convincing argument, few of which are as convincing as empirical data).

SO, we would expect a 700-billion dollar infusion (give or take a few hundred billion, which is akin saying, give or take a few "hundred thousand million dollars") to have a very positive effect on the economy.

We would expect that , based on the empirical evidence of the past in America.

However, the Iraq war witnessed a gigantic federal government expenditure. This did NOT transalte into economic growth here. That money went into, in the words of Ross Perot, that "giant sucking sound." It just left. Oh it's somewhere, but it isn;t building anything in America.

It's one thing to spend money building roads and bridges in the US, one thing to pay tuition and medical care for those here -- even to pay mothers to stay at home and raise their children. It's an altogether different dynamic when the money just leaves, and does not recirculate into our domestic economy.

I greatly fear this jejune corporate-financial bailout will be much of the same. Economically, it will give us the same benefit (read none) as the Iraq war did. If we are trying to stem a nascent depression, why not keep the powder dry and be ready to inject 700 billion into rebuilding freeways and bridges? Or how about instituting national health care or sending every kid to college?

Of course I would rather NOT have that money (which is not yet collected, read "robbed" from us yet) spent. But if it IS going to be spent, I would rather have it help our national economy directly, where it will recirculate, even if in social welfare programs (for our own people for a change!) than to simply be taken from us, land elsewhere, never to be seen again, where the financial-corporate monoliths (who have been robbing the citizens of the US blind, exacting usury upon us in recent years) as a conduit to transfer such a vast sum of wealth out of America.

Let the institutions fail. Keep the powder dry so that we can rebuild tomorrow. The world won't end, others will step in and start banks and other financial institutions. -rvince

I'm astounded that my country, with it's now three trillion dollar annual budget, would willingly fork up 1/30th of that to bail out AIG.

This isn't money going to the poor.

In fact, it's not even going to Americans -- it's not going to the people whose money it IS. This is a pure transfer of wealth, it is robbery by the most basic definition.

These corporations are NOT owned by Americans -- they are global entities. These are entities owned by the Norwegian Private Trust, Canadian Teachers Retirement, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, and on and on. I know because I have firsthand experience working at one of these giant, non-American investment trusts (for an OPEC country no less, who's national treasury was affected more by a $1 move in the price of Microsoft stock than by a $1 move in the price of a barrel of oil!)

And the Khalifa Committee will meet again, this Sunday, in Abu Dhabi, to hand out money to useless, loser sons of princes there, and that money is invested in corporations around the world -- corporations like AIG. In effect, the US taxpayer, by FORCE and by HIS OWN GOVERNMENT is buying houses for some useless prince while our own people struggle.

This election is quite a joke; our vision is occluded by debates over issues of nonsense which mean nothing, while we are robbed blind.

Looking at the chessboard of this year's election -- the obvious, hidden move, the queen in the corner, obscured by pawns of her own, waiting on the far diagonal for the king to step onto her track, with nowhere else to go....

No one -- not a political pundit -- no one is thinking out of the box enough to see this ever-so-obvious move.

Hillary is going to run as a 3rd party candidate, denying Obama the election with certainty. In fact, there is no way Obama CAN get elected, without her bowing out.

And that's why she hasn;t yet conceded and gone back to Chapaqua. Look, if she does this, Obama cannot even win NY. No NY and he has no chance of winning the election. In fact, if she does this, he would be lucky to get IL, maybe WI and MI too - but, more-than-likely, McCain runs the board (bear in mind, I do not care who wins, I have no agenda here).

He (Obama) cannot win FL or Ohio with her as a viable 3rd party candidate on the ticket.

Why did she offer to be his VP Candidate? Why is she waiting to "Hear from you out there."

Because, she will claim others WANT her to keep going -- "To have those voices that never get heard BE heard!" She will claim, with her utter stentorian indignation."

"And if Obama wanted me as his VP, he HAD his chance! Why would I want to be HIS VP? If the Democratic Party wants me, I'm already running, they can switch allegiance to me and he can be MY VP, the way it would have been had it not been 'stolen' from me by members in the Democratic Party!"

Make no mistake about -- this lady is not yet finished, for better or worse (I would prefer she go away frankly). She is Rasputin to the Democratic party, and they have NO chance of winning without her at the top of their ticket -- she'll see to it, and, at worse, will be able to run against a Republican in 2012.

And when she announces it, there will be an audible gasp. Politically, it's brilliant, it;s cuthroat, and altogether Clintonian.

Hillary said yesterday, at a talk ont he environment, that she wants to "cut energy consumption by 20 percent by 2020 and use renewable energy to generate 25 percent of the nation's electricity by 2025."

Edwards said he supports a 15 percent decrease in electricity consumption by 2018 and an 80 percent reduction in carbon-based energy sources by 2050.

(Obama was a no-show, too busy apparently)

Kucinich is on record as advocating the use of renewable energy sources to generate 20 percent of the nation's electricity by 2010 and reduce national energy consuption by 10 percent by 2020.

No other candidates were there.

Hmmmm, 2020? The population of the earth will have increased to over 10 billion at today's rates. a 25% reduction in emmissions STILL exceeds what is being emmitted today. 2050? At today's rates, the population of the earth will be doubling faster than every ten years!

No one says boo about the only real solution.

After the recession of the last glacier, when agriculture first began to be practised by humans, there were about ten million humans on earth, when it started growing at a seemingly faster rate. At the time of Christ, we can estimate there were 250 million on earth. This number then double to half a billion by 1650. The next doubling, took only 200 and in 1850 the earth's population finally hit 1 billion. By 1930 we hit 2 billion, by 1990, 5.7 billion. Since 1990, we have added as many to our numbers (another 2 billion) as it took all of time to produce, where now we are about 6.7 billion.

If you take these numbers, and look at them, graphically, you can see that this is not a geometric function, but a hypergeometric function. The latter is defined by rising to a point where there is a "singularity," an asymptote -- a pint where the line goes, essentially, straight up, never reaching a certain nearby-point along the horizontal axis (versus a geometric function, which just keeps rising as you move off to the right, though at an ever-faster rate).

If you plot these points, and use the least-squares method to minimize their differences to a hypergeometric equation, you will get the parameters for that equation -- in other words, you'll get the line that tracks human population growth.

I did exactly that. The singularity of that line occurs around the middle of this century. (it may be later or sooner -- again, I am working with sketchy data here, it is nevertheless quite alarming).

I am NOT averse to living along the proposals of those who advocate living green. I don't have a problem with that. Secondly, I AGREE the earth is heating up -- what the contribution of humans to that is I believe, disputable (is our burning of fossil fules contributing 90% of the heating up, or .00001% ?) Regardless of the degree of our contribution, clearly, it is hurting.

For argument's sake, though, lets say our contribution is 100%. Thus, if we all reduced our carbon footprint, by, say 50% (if that is even attainable. Wanna heat your house with a small campfire? Walk wherever you go?. Obtain everything you need for sustanence within 1 mile of your home?) then, as soon as the population of the earth doubles (roughly, within a generation) we're right back where we are in terms of net carbon footprint of humanity (only, every at that point, living in a manner that puts out 1/2 the emissions we are now). Further, since the population of the earth has yet-again doubled, it's time to make its next doubling, even shorter.

Look, if we all start living green, it doesn't get to the root of the problem -- which no one wants to talk about. STOP HAVING BABIES. Nothing could be more green. And it isn't the people of Western Europe whose numbers are growing (nor is it the PRC, who has shown the world that population control IS attainable via enforced policy). It's the third world, subcontinental and the middle eastern cultures whose numbers are exploding.

Until anyone addresses POLICY to REDUCE the number of people inhabiting the planet in the future, everything else is a nice gesture, albiet a superflous one.

The past few weeks have given us a peephole into WHY we never, ever want to pass a school levy in this city. The Cleveland Public Schools are quite evidently run by dopes, who think of nothing of spending millions of dollars of someone else's money on NONSENSE.

Yeah -- metal detectors. Total NONSENSE. If you taught kids about the 4th amendment, and the absolute dilution to nothing of that (by making people be frisked, empty their pockets & get felt up by Uncle Fester in a TSA cop outfit ) to enter a PUBLIC building, I'd say we should pass a levy. Instead the schools do just the opposite.

And if I were some deranged kid, inclined to shoot a bunch of innocents, I'd get them on THIS side of the metal detector, where they are all bunched up, waiting to go through.

So, you see -- they've spent millions and didn;t get what they thought they were getting -- safety. Rather, just a further dilution of liberty (and my heart aches to watch those sheep-like kids put up with that nonsense).

I found it further interesting (and have yet to hear anyone comment on it) that the rampage of Asa Coon was caught on video -- right in the school. Do you mean to tell me that all these hallways and such in public schools are under surveillance cameras? Does ANYONE see what a violation of privacy that is? I thought the schools were strapped for funds?

Being a teen was hard enough when I was one -- it's likely harder today. I went to school at West 30th & Lorain, lived on the East side, and hitchiked every day. I took responsibility for my own physical safety -- kids CAN and should learn that life lesson -- and not to depend on the inept bumbling state and the likes of this Sanders cheerleading clown to do that for them. They can't and won't keep safe. If I was a kid having to go through that nonsense just  to get into the building, you;re damn right I would drop out -- what can they POSSIBLY be learning in that environment that could be the least bit worthwhile.

If you;re a kid in the Cleveland Public Schools, my advice to you is TUNE IN, TURN ON and DROP OUT!

Get as far away from those bozo's as you can and go learn something!