EMERGENCY RESPONSE: CALL IN DAY!
Call U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald at 312-353-5300, then dial 0 (zero) for operator and ask to leave a message with the Duty Clerk (paralegal).
You could say: “My name is __________, I am from _______(city), in ______(state). I am calling U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald to demand that he call off the Grand Jury and stop FBI repression against the anti-war and international solidarity movements. I oppose political repression and defend the right to free speech and right to assembly of the 19 activists subpoenaed.”
UPDATE: Two more people were subpoenaed YESTERDAY on Wednesday, Dec. 8th . That brings to total number of subpoenas to 19. Look for an update later today or tomorrow.
Please send a short message to stopfbi@gmail.com to let us know that you called.
Background info from our Dec. 7th alert:
Fitzgerald Expands Repression with 3 New Subpoenas in Chicago
Under the direction of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald’s office, the FBI is expanding their repression of anti-war and Palestine solidarity activists in Chicago. On Friday, December 3, 2010, the FBI targeted three young women who traveled to Palestine together last summer. After the FBI called to question a young Jewish-American woman Sarah Smith, FBI agents knocked on the door of two young Palestinian-American sisters. One sister was already on the phone with lawyer Jim Fennerty and handed the phone to the FBI, causing the FBI to leave. The FBI agents soon returned however with subpoenas to the Grand Jury targeting anti-war and solidarity activists, dated for January 25, 2011. The three are standing strong with the other subpoenaed activists from Illinois, Minneapolis, and Michigan. Over 100 people protested in Chicago on Monday against the expanding repression.
Help Keep 3 Minneapolis Women Out of Jail
Fitzgerald’s new wave of repression comes a week after the re-activation of subpoenas for three Palestine solidarity activist women in Minneapolis. Tracy Molm, Anh Pham, and Sarah Martin are being asked to appear before the Grand Jury again, despite refusing to speak in October. In Minneapolis and other cities the week of actions demanded “Protest to keep Anh, Tracy, and Sarah, out of jail!” Lawyers for each of the three are meeting with Assistant U.S. Attorney Brandon Fox this week. However, on orders from Fitzgerald’s office, the FBI shenanigans continue with visits to anti-war activist’s homes.
December 09, 2010
ACTIVISM: MORE activists subpoened !!
Mark Dayton is IN !!! Some of today's links ..
I gave Mark some hours of my time. Glad Emmer finally woke up to REALITY.
DAYTON
* Dayton asks for GOP help fixing budget deficit, AP
* Dayton says jobs, economy are top priorities, Star Tribune
* Mark Dayton on his future as Minnesota governor, MPR
* Dayton: 'Now the real work begins', Pioneer Press
* Gov.-elect Mark Dayton, a serious man, meets the press with a serious message for serious times, MinnPost
* Central Minnesota lawmakers ready to move on with Dayton, St. Cloud Times
* Unions say they're ready to work with Governor Dayton, Workday MN
* Dayton won't be confused with his predecessor, Star Tribune
* The Dayton file, Star Tribune
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/22/20101209/tpl-uk-wikileaks-guantanamo-81f3b62.html
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/22/20101209/tpl-uk-wikileaks-guantanamo-81f3b62.html
One can only hope this is TRUE. A file on each and every prisoner ...?
Obama's Bushism: Michael Hudson
By Michael Hudson
December 8, 2010
I almost feel naïve for being so angry at President Obama’s betrayal of his campaign promises regarding taxes. I had never harbored much hope that he actually intended to enact the reforms that his supporters expected – not after he appointed the most right-wing of the Clintonomics gang, Larry Summers, then Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke and other Bush neoliberals.
But there is something so unfair and wrong that I could not prevent myself from waking up early Tuesday morning to think throujavascript:void(0)gh the consequences of President Obama’s sellout in the years to come. Contrary to his pretense of saving the economy, his action will intensify debt deflation and financial depression, paving the way for a long-term tax shift off wealth onto labor.
In achieving a giveaway that Democrats never would have let George Bush or other Republicans enact, Obama has laid himself open to the campaign slogan that brought down British Prime Minister Tony Blair: “You can’t believe a word he says.” He has lost support not only personally, but also – as the Republicans anticipate – for much of his party in 2012.
Yet Obama has only done what politicians do: He has delivered up his constituency to his campaign backers – the same Wall Street donors who back the Republicans. What’s the point of having a constituency, after all, if you can’t sell it?
[...]
via Obama’s Bushism | Michael Hudson
see
Wall Street’s Pentagon Papers: Biggest Financial Scam In World History – $12.3 TRILLION in taxpayers’ money by David DeGraw (must-read)
Keith Olbermann Special Comment: Obama Turned His Back On His Base + Rachel Maddow: Baseless
The Deadly, Unforeseen Consequences of Social Inequality by Murray Dobbin
Letter to President Obama On Extending Bush Tax Cuts by Ralph Nader
Bernie Sanders: There Is A WAR Being Waged Against The Working Families Of America!
Chris Hedges: The Road to Modern Feudalism
December 08, 2010
Massive dark object 'lurking on edge of solar system hurling comets at Earth'
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 8:50 AM on 8th December 2010
A massive dark object may be lurking on the edge of our solar system, according to scientists.
Most comets that fly into the inner solar system seem to come from the outer region of the Oort cloud - a region of icy dust and debris left over from the birth of the solar system.
The cloud starts from a point about 93 billion miles from the Sun and stretches for around three light years and contains billions of comets, most of them small and hidden.
A Nasa graphic which illustrates how the Oort Cloud surrounds our solar system.
A Nasa graphic which illustrates how the Oort Cloud surrounds our solar system. Scientists believe that an object with a huge mass may be pushing comets towards Earth from the cloud
Now new calculations suggest a large object that is up to four times as big as Jupiter could be responsible for sending them in our direction.
The scientists have analysed the comets in the Oort cloud and deduced that 25 per-cent of them would need a nudge by a body of at least Jupiter size before they changed orbit.
a different part of the Solar System called the Kuiper Belt.
A large planet that is in orbit outside the solar system may be pushing comets towards our solar system
A large planet that is in orbit outside the solar system may be pushing comets towards Earth
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1336540/Massive-dark-object-lurking-edge-solar-hurling-comets-Earth.html#ixzz17ZrgDKo4
More...
* Japanese probe fails in bid to reach Venus' orbit in setback for nation's space programme
Astrophysicists John Matese and Daniel Whitmire at the University of Louisiana came up with theory said that 'something smaller than a Jovian mass would not be strong enough to perform the task'.
They believe that our solar system has a hidden 'companion' that has so far remained undetected.
The scientists have been studying the cloud using WISE, Nasa's infra-red space telescope that is capable of detecting dark objects.
Matese said: 'I think this whole issue will be resolved in the next five to 10 years, because there’s surveys coming on line that will dwarf the comet sample we have today.
'Whether these types of asymmetries in the directions that comets are coming from actually do exist or not will definitely be hammered out by those surveys,' Matese added. 'We anticipate that WISE is going to falsify or verify our conjecture.'
About 3,200 long-period comets are known, one of the most famous being Hale-Bopp which was visible to even the naked eye during 1996 and 1997.
Halley's Comet, which reappears about every 75 years, is a 'short-period' comet from a different part of the Solar System called the Kuiper Belt.
A large planet that is in orbit outside the solar system may be pushing comets towards our solar system
A large planet that is in orbit outside the solar system may be pushing comets towards Earth
If it exists the new planet is so freezing cold it is difficult to spot, researchers said.
It could be found up to 30,000 astronomical units from the sun. One AU is the distance between the Earth and the sun, about 93 million miles.
Scientists have already proposed that a hidden star, which they call 'Nemesis,' might exist a light-year or so away from our sun.
They suggest that during its orbit it would regularly enter the Oort cloud, jostling the orbits of many comets there and causing some to fall toward Earth.
These occasional comet showers could be why the mass extinctions on Earth are so regular, some scientists believe.
The research appeared in the online edition of the journal Icarus.
'Most planetary scientists would not be surprised if the largest undiscovered companion was Neptune-sized or smaller, but a Jupiter-mass object would be a surprise,' Matese told SPACE.com
solar system/oort cloud
© Donald K. Yeoman/NASA, JPL
A Nasa graphic which illustrates how the Oort Cloud surrounds our solar system. Scientists believe that an object with a huge mass may be pushing comets towards Earth from the cloud
'If the conjecture is indeed true, the important implications would relate to how it got there — touching on the early solar environment — and how it might have affected the subsequent distributions of comets and, to a lesser extent, the known planets.'
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1336540/Massive-dark-object-lurking-edge-solar-hurling-comets-Earth.html#ixzz17Zr0FwLh
Dem Strategist: The Internet Is No Longer Going To Be Open
Oh, yeah, he's like the Big, Fat analyst.
STFU.
"[P]eople talk too much in these cables. You don't have to write everything you think."
--Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; image from; see also John Brown, "10 Percent Intellectual": The Mind of Condoleezza Rice" PRWatch (site is currently being maintained.)
December 05, 2010
Sunday "sermon": The internet - web - is US/ing us
Are you trusting "the process"?
Are you keeping up?
; )
The new internet capitols of the world
Mirror List
Wikileaks is currently mirrored on 76 sites (updated 2010-12-05 11:00 GMT)
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
by John Perry Barlow
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.
In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.
You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.
Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996
Stop Wikileaks? Useless to try - Crooks and Liars
Blessedly great article ...
Stop WikiLeaks? You Might As Well Try To Stop Rock And Roll
The grownups didn't understand the power of rock, and I can assure you that the political Beltway class does not understand the power of the internets.
In fact, the feds narrowly dodged a bullet last week when they dropped a case against a man offering X-box modification services. (They gathered evidence in violation of California's privacy laws. Hah!) As one gamer told me, "That was good, because you really don't want to get those hackers mad. They'll take down the entire government."
From a Foreign Policy blog:
In a bid to stay one step ahead of the governments, companies, freelance hackers trying to shut down its operations, WikiLeaks mobilized its vast base of online support Saturday by asking its Twitter followers to create copies of its growing archive of hundreds of classified State Department cables.
By late afternoon Eastern time, more than 200 had answered the call, setting up "mirror" sites, many of them with the name "wikileaks" appended to their Web addresses. They organized themselves organically using the Twitter hashtag #imwikileaks, in a virtual show of solidarity reminiscent of the movie V is for Vendetta. In that 2005 film, a Guy-Fawkes masked vigilantee inspires thousands of Londoners to march on the Parliament similarly disguised -- while it blows up in front of their eyes. Presumably, many of these people believe they are facing the same sort of tyranny that V, the film's protagonist, fought against.Critics of WikiLeaks have called on the Obama administration to shut down the site, but now it's clear that doing so would be a difficult task indeed.
The New Yorker's recent profile of Julian Assange, the organization's mysterious founder and front man, said that "a government or company that wanted to remove content from WikiLeaks would have to practically dismantle the Internet itself." WikiLeaks has also posted a massive, heavily encrypted "insurance" file on The Pirate Bay, a sympathetic website, which presumably contains also 250,000-plus cables and would be released into the wild if anything happens to Assange.
As my FP colleague Evgeny Morozov warns, aggressive action like arresting or killing Assange could spawn the rise of a vast, permanent network of radicalized hackers "systematically challenging those in power – governments and companies alike – just for the sake of undermining 'the system'." That could prove an extremely dangerous threat to the global economy and diplomatic sphere.
December 04, 2010
ACTIVISM: Yet ANOTHER Fracking problem ... "accidents"
Rise in fracking accidents prompts anti-drilling rallies
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
December 03, 2010
White House Tells All Federal Agencies To Prohibit Employees From Wikileaks Site | TPMMuckraker
The Office of Management and Budget today directed all federal agencies to bar their employees from accessing the Wikileaks web site and its leaked diplomatic cables.
In an email to federal agencies obtained by TPM, the OMB's general counsel directed the agencies to immediately tell their employees to "safeguard classified information" by not accessing Wikileaks over the Internet.
Classified information, the OMB notes, "remains classified ... until it is declassified by an appropriate U.S. Government authority." Employees may not view classified info over a non-classified system (i.e., the Internet), the OMB says, "as doing so risks that material still classified will be placed onto non-classified systems."
An administration official confirms that the OMB sent the email, adding that it follows guidance the office made earlier this week telling agencies to review their information security procedures.
"The recent disclosure of U.S. Government documents by WikiLeaks has resulted in damage to our national security," the email reads. "Federal agencies collectively, and each federal employee and contractor individually, are obligated to protect classified information pursuant to all applicable laws, as well as to protect the integrity of government information technology systems."
It goes on (emphasis theirs):
The email includes a "model notice" for each agency to use. You can see the whole thing here.
"Unauthorized disclosures of classified documents (whether in print, on a blog, or on websites) do not alter the documents' classified status or automatically result in declassification of the documents," it reads. "To the contrary, classified information, whether or not already posted on public websites or disclosed to the media, remains classified, and must be treated as such by federal employees and contractors, until it is declassified by an appropriate U.S. Government authority."
Earlier today, TPM reported that the Library of Congress, an internationally respected library and the research arm of Congress, had blocked Wikileaks' web site from its staff computers and visitors' wireless network. The State, Commerce and Education departments have also directed employees not to view the cables.
U.N. Special Rapporteur Juan Méndez: Instead of Focusing on Assange, U.S. Should Address WikiLeaks’ Disclosures of Torture
Dick Cheney hosts fundraiser for potential challenger to RNC chairman Michael Steele | The Daily Caller - Breaking News, Opinion, Research, and Entertainment
Domain Wikileaks gone; access is NOT ..
New address in addition to http://46.59.1.2/, is http://88.80.13.160 or http://wikileaks.ch
Thanks to TechDirt geeks, we can find them !!
Sonnets to Orpheus, Part Two, X - Rainer Maria Rilke
We allow it to rule instead of obey.
To build a house, cut the stone sharp and fast:
the carver's hand takes too long to feel its way.
and its factories subside into silence.
It thinks it's alive and does everything better.
With equal resolve it creates and destroys.
we can still sense the source: a play of pure powers
that - when you feel it - brings you to your knees.
and, from crumbling stones, a new music
to make a sacred dwelling in a place we cannot own.
ACTIVISM: FIRE TOM FLANAGAN !!
Flanagan, former Harper advisor has called for the assassination of Julian Assange, publisher of Wikileaks. See the hypocrites are spouting about the rule of law call for the assassination of WikiLeaks founder Assange before he is even arrested and officially charged.
Tom Flanagan, a professor at the University of Calgary and former adviser to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper is a hypocrite. Flanagan has openly called for the assassination of Assange.
If calling for the assassination of a private citizen is not a crime in and of it self it ought to be. The University of Calgary should fire Flanagan tomorrow.
I encourage you to phone University of Calgary president Elizabeth Cannon at 403-220-5617 and demand the resignation of Professor Tom Flanagan.
Please Email president@ucalgary.ca to speak your mind.
For more on this story please see Professor Tom Flanagan: Glib about Murdering Julian Assange
December 02, 2010
WikiLeaks: Mervyn King should quit over 'political bias', says David Blanchflower | Media | guardian.co.uk
Mish's RANT (i just did 2 on Oped News myself) EXCELLENT !!
Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis |
Posted: 01 Dec 2010 04:29 PM PST WikiLeaks just gave Senator Joe Lieberman, Amazon, and the Department of Homeland Security what I consider to be a well deserved finger. Amazon dropped WikiLeaks from its servers but is now back up on servers in Sweden athttp://www.wikileaks.org/ Let's tie this all together starting with the Wall Street Journal Report WikiLeaks Site Kicked Off Amazon Servers Amazon.com Inc. has stopped hosting WikiLeaks from its Web servers, prompting the controversial group to move its website to a European provider.White House Seeks New Ways to Hide Damaging Data Political HotSheet reports White House Moves to Change Classified Information Procedures in Response to WikiLeaks President Obama's national security team is coordinating new interagency efforts to review and improve the way the government handles classified information, in the wake of the latest WikiLeaks release of secret information.Whistle-Blower Bill Gains Steam The response from the administration is not to crack down on abuses but rather to provide new ways of ignoring abuses. Just ask yourself, has anyone outside of Bernie Madoff ever been prosecuted, fired, or even reprimanded over fraud, torture, kickbacks, or anything else? Here's the bonus-point followup question: How many times did the SEC fail to act on information that proved Bernie Madoff was a crook? The answer to those questions help explain this pathetic response: After WikiLeaks, Whistle-Blower Bill Gains Steam Following the latest baring of U.S. secrets on the Internet, Congress is poised to pass legislation giving employees in the most sensitive government jobs a way to report corruption, waste and mismanagement without turning to outside organizations like WikiLeaks.Anyone who believes that propaganda has holes in the head. The WhiteHouse is not interested in acting on anything, the WhiteHouse is interested in stopping leaks. So now we will get legislation that will allow whistle-blowers to submit reports to some undefined administration hack who will promptly throw the whistles into the ashcan. Lie of the Day from Hillary Clinton Inquiring minds are reading a statement from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that WikiLeaks Won't Hurt U.S. Diplomacy The recent leak of thousands of sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables will have no adverse effect on America's international relations, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton declared Wednesday at a security summit.Series of Lies How's that for a series of lies? If people have every right to ask questions, how the hell can questions be asked if the US government classifies everything it does not want anyone to know? The US has no interest in discussing waterboarding, torture, the killing of innocent civilians with our allies or anyone else. The US wants to and is going to do everything it can to suppress that information. If WikiLeaks has damaging information about Bank of America, we should all want to see it. We should all stand up for the rights to make that data public, not sweep it under the rug. We do not have a Department of Homeland Security, we have a Department of Homeland Insecurity putting on a pathetic parade of pomp with full body scanners and pat downs that will not do a damn thing. Why We Have Leaks No one has bothered to tackle the question why we have security problems and leaks. I will tell you why: The US has troops in 140 countries around the world, we arrogantly go where we have no vested interest going, we support corrupt regimes when it suits our purposes, we follow the asinine creed "the enemy of our enemy is our friend", and we believe we - and we alone - act as the moral authority to be the world's policeman. When you do that you make enemies. When you make enemies you create security problems. Instead of addressing WHY we make enemies, we setup sham terrorist organizations like the Department of Homeland Security whose efforts make us less secure. Running List of Needed Criminal Investigations Instead of addressing fundamental problems we want to stop leaks. I will tell you how to stop leaks: Don't do stupid things! Stop trying to be the world's policeman. Prosecute fraud. I have a running list of things we have ignored in FDIC Authorizes $1 Billion Lawsuits Against Failed-Bank Executives; Token Search for Low-Profile Scapegoats It's time to update my rolling list of who should be criminally indicted and why.How NOT to Stop Leaks Fools like Lieberman think we can stop leaks by legislation. We can't. We can only stop leaks by fostering an attitude from the top that will prosecute fraud and corruption instead of looking for scapegoats, and instead of pursuing policeman policies that "the end justifies the means" President Obama is a blatant liar. He promised to release details of US torture of prisoners. He failed to do so. I praise WikiLeaks or anyone else who is willing to disclose the hypocrisy of this president and this administration. I am not a Republican. I am an independent. I praise WikiLeaks or anyone else who is willing to disclose the hypocrisy of Republicans as well. I fear for our country and the path it is taking. We need to elect someone willing to stand up TO the banks, stand up TO our bloated military, stand up TO public unions, and stand FOR less government spending, stand FOR prosecuting fraud wherever it takes, stand FOR smaller government. President Obama is not that person, nor was President Bush. We need a Ron Paul, or someone like him, willing to do what is needed before we destroy ourselves. Mike "Mish" Shedlock |
December 01, 2010
MUST SEE: Beautiful Data Visualization Special Coming to BBC, Too Bad It's UK Only (Video Preview)
The BBC will broadcast an hour-long special next Tuesday called The Joy of Stats and it looks great. Hosted by Hans Rolling, Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute and Director of the Gapminder Foundation, the show will use some beautiful computer generated graphics to demonstrate the importance of data and data visualization.
Unfortunately, the show is expected to be shown only in the UK, due to BBC licensing practices. (It's on BBC 4, UK only.) That's a real shame, because as is so amply demonstrated by the preview video of the show - statistics, data and data visualization are matters of global importance. As the world produces more and more data than ever before, every day, that will only grow more true.
Thanks to Nathan Yau, author of the great blog Flowing Data, for posting this video in the first place we saw it.
See also Rollings widely acclaimed TED Talk video and Emily Cunningham's in-depth review of Gapminder's DIY data desktop data visualization tool here at ReadWriteWeb from August.
I think this video also points to arguments similar to those I make in favor of aggregate social web user data being made available for programmatic access and analysis: data about our world offers new opportunities to unearth injustices, shine light on opportunities and gain a new level of social self-awareness. Let's set that data free!
Zombie Economics ..
‘Zombie Economics’ Stalks Planet Bloomberg World Of Finance |
| Picture Ben Bernanke as a zombie in a horror film. Staggering slack-jawed through the bullets, he groans a terrifying phrase: “Great Moderation, Greeeeeeat Moderaaaaaation!” Erroneous economic ideas resemble the living dead, writes John Quiggin in his smart new book, “Zombie Economics.” They are dangerous yet impossible to kill. Even after a financial crisis buries them, they survive in our minds and can rise unbidden from the necropolis of ideology. Consider the undying notion that booms and busts can be tamed in a New Era of endless prosperity. The latest incarnation of this zombie idea -- the Great Moderation popularized by Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke -- died in a storm of bailouts and foreclosures. Yet the Great Moderation endures in academia, says Quiggin, an economics professor at the University of Queensland in Australia. “Research projects based on explaining, measuring and projecting the Great Moderation were not abandoned,” he writes. “The intellectual commitments on which those projects are based have proved tenacious.” Zombie ideas are legion, ranging from trickle-down economics to Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium modeling, Quiggin says. Taken together, they form a bundle of theories, policies and catchphrases that he terms “market liberalism,” seeking a neutral name instead of pejoratives such as Thatcherism and Reaganism. “Unlike other monsters like werewolves and vampires, zombies always come in mobs,” he writes. “Individually, they seem easy enough to kill, but in a group their strength can be overwhelming.” One of the more vulnerable zombies is the strong form of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, which postulates that it’s impossible to beat the market because stock prices already incorporate all information held by traders. Though this zombie should have perished in the dot-com bust, its advocates “went on as if nothing had happened,” Quiggin says. Only the Great Credit Crackup drove home the lesson that markets can be mispriced and downright irrational. A little humility wouldn’t hurt, as Quiggin writes. “The Global Financial Crisis gives the economics profession the chance to bury the zombie ideas that led the world into crisis, and to produce a more realistic, humble and above all socially useful body of thought.” Until then, expect endless reruns of “Night of the Living Dead.” “Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us” is published by Princeton. Conclusions The Star February 2010 Voodoo Economics http://bit.ly/auVlOh |
At Least One Wikileak is just a Bold Faced Lie – And Its a Significant One
Chomsky says, “Latest polls show] Arab opinion holds that the major threat in the region is Israel, that’s 80 percent; the second threat is the United States, that’s 77 percent. Iran is listed as a threat by 10 percent,” Chomsky says. “This may not be reported in the newspapers, but it’s certainly familiar to the Israeli and U.S. governments and the ambassadors. What this reveals is the profound hatred for democracy on the part of our political leadership.”“When they talk about Arabs, they are talking about the Arab dictators, not the Arab population, which is overwhelmingly opposed to the conclusions the analysts here, Clinton and the media have drawn. That’s the major problem. The minor problem is that we don’t know what the Arab leaders think and say. We know what was SELECTED from the cables, so there is a FILTERING process which has been distorted.” Noam Chomsky, Democracy NOW!
“Uh, one of the most interesting cables was a cable from the U.S. ambassador in Israel to Hillary Clinton which described the uh attack on Gaza which we should call a U.S./Israeli attack, Dec. 2008. It states, uh, correctly that there had been a truce, uh, it does not add that during the truce, which was really not observed by Israel, that during the truce Hamas scrupulously observed it according to the Israeli government. Not a single rocket was fired – that’s an OMISSION (in the Wikileak memo) but then comes a straight lie – it says that in Dec. 2008 Hamas renewed rocket firing and therefore Israel had to attack and defend itself. Now the ambassador surely is aware, there must be somebody in the Israeli embassy who reads the Israeli press, in which case the embassy is surely aware it’s exactly the opposite. Hamas was calling for a renewal of the cease-fire, Israel considered the offer and rejected it, preferring to bomb rather than have security. Also it is omitted that while Israel never observed the cease-fire it maintained the blockade, in violation of the truce agreement. On Nov. 4th the Israeli army entered Gaza and killed half a dozen Hamas militants… What the embassy reported (what Wikileaks passed off as a glimpse into “the truth”) is a GROSS FALSIFICATION and a very significant one since it has to do with the justification of this murderous attack. Which means the embassy doesn’t have a clue as to what is going on, or THEY ARE LYING OUTRIGHT”Noam Chomsky
