economy

Then All At Once

"Whatever else one thinks of how we live these days, it's hard to not see it as temporary, historically anomalous, a peculiar blip in human experience. I've spent my whole life riding around in cars, never questioning whether the makings of tomorrow's supper would be there waiting on the supermarket shelves, never doubting when I entered a room that the lights would go on at the flick of a switch, never worrying about my personal safety. And now hardly a moment goes by when I don't feel tremors of massive change in these things, as though all life's comforts and structural certainties rested on a groaning fault line.

"It had been one of those eventless weeks when the world pretended to be a settled place. The collapse of Greece seemed like little more than a passing case of geo-financial heartburn. The 36,000-odd newly-unemployed were spun magically into a feel-good story for public consumption, and the stock markets ratified it by levitating over a hundred points. The news media was preoccupied with the Great Question of whether the first woman film director would win a prize, thus settling all accounts in the age-old gender war, and the health care reform bill lumbered around the congressional offices like a zombie in search of a silver bullet that might send it back to the comforts of the tomb.

"All in all, it was the sort of quiescent string of days that makes someone like me nervous. I can't help imagining what it was like in the spring of 1860, for instance, when so many terrible questions of polity hung over the country, and hundreds of thousands of young men still walked behind their plows or stood at their counting desks or turned their wrenches in the exciting new industries -- not knowing that destiny was busy preparing a ditch somewhere to receive their shattered corpses in places as-yet-unknown called Spotsylvania, Shiloh, and Cold Harbor. Or else my mind projects to the spring of 1939, when men dressed in neckties and hats sat in a ballpark watching Joe DiMaggio and Charlie Keller play "pepper" in the pregame sunshine, and nobody much thought about the coming beaches of Normandy and the canebrakes of the Solomon Islands.

"Everything we know about it seems to indicate that human beings happily go along with the program -- whatever the program is -- until all of a sudden they can't, and then they don't. It's like the quote oft-repeated these days (because it's so apt for these times) by surly old Ernest Hemingway about how the man in a story went broke: slowly, and then all at once. In the background of last week's reassuring torpor, one ominous little signal flashed perhaps dimly in all that sunshine: the price of oil broke above $81-a-barrel. Of course in that range it becomes impossible for the staggering monster of our so-called "consumer" economy to enter the much-wished-for nirvana of "recovery" -- where the orgies of spending on houses and cars and electronic entertainment machines will resume like the force of nature it is presumed to be. Over $80-a-barrel and we're in the zone where what's left of this economy cracks and crumbles a little bit more each day, lurching forward to that moment when something life-changing occurs all at once."

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 09:46 AM - link

rockets

We should remember that our space program started in the slave labor camp Dora during WWII. At the end of the war we spirited away the German scientists and rockets to the US to begin our space program.

Dora and the V-2
Slave labor in the space age

"Welcome! This website provides information for an exhibit at the UAHuntsville Salmon Library from February 21-March 12, 2010 entitled Dora and the V–2: Slave Labor in the Space Age. Both the site and the exhibit explore the history of forced labor in the construction of the V–2 missiles at the Dora concentration camp and Mittelwerk underground factory near Nordhausen, Germany, during World War II.

"The stories center on the victims of Dora, the prisoners from many nations who were forced to work in the camp and its sub-camps and in the underground factory assembling the V–2. Usually, especially in Huntsville, Alabama, the V–2 is remembered through the engineers who designed it, rather than the forced laborers who put it together. Yet the prisoners died by the score or lived through dehumanizing cruelty, and their experiences deserve to be remembered."

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 09:43 AM - link

race

The New Jim Crow
How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste

"Ever since Barack Obama lifted his right hand and took his oath of office, pledging to serve the United States as its 44th president, ordinary people and their leaders around the globe have been celebrating our nation’s “triumph over race.” Obama’s election has been touted as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow, the bookend placed on the history of racial caste in America.

"Obama’s mere presence in the Oval Office is offered as proof that “the land of the free” has finally made good on its promise of equality. There’s an implicit yet undeniable message embedded in his appearance on the world stage: this is what freedom looks like; this is what democracy can do for you. If you are poor, marginalized, or relegated to an inferior caste, there is hope for you. Trust us. Trust our rules, laws, customs, and wars. You, too, can get to the promised land.

"Perhaps greater lies have been told in the past century, but they can be counted on one hand. Racial caste is alive and well in America.

"Most people don’t like it when I say this. It makes them angry. In the “era of colorblindness” there’s a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we as a nation have “moved beyond” race. Here are a few facts that run counter to that triumphant racial narrative:

"*There are more African Americans under correctional control today -- in prison or jail, on probation or parole -- than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

"*As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.

"* A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.

"*If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste -- not class, caste -- permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era."

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 09:32 AM - link

photography

Starting New Chapters

"We live in a small town in the agricultural plains of western Taiwan. My husband, Michael, and I moved here four months ago for a number of reasons; but most pivotally, I had made a relationship with the Chinese-speaking world that two years of previous living, working and traveling in mainland China did not suffice as enough. You too have a special place that awakened you in someway (I’d wage a bet). In the practice of photography, our ‘place’ is one of our most potent ingredients, right up there with the presence of light. Our place inspires and/or frazzles us to point a camera at it. I was inspired and frazzled by China via the undeviating attention and persistence it required of me. Admittedly and naively, I suspected that my China familiarity had trained me for whatever the island of Taiwan has to offer. But in truth, the assumption that I’m ever culturally equipped to photograph anywhere I land is sorely naive, and I try to check myself periodically. Photographing under this delusion is perhaps like fishing using a broad net with wide holes. You’ll definitely catch something impressive at some point, but there are the unfortunate dolphins, and all the smaller tasty ones that will slip back into the dark oblivion."

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 09:28 AM - link

republican party -- the party of the sociopath

Tom Delay: People Are Unemployed Because They Want To Be

"Former House Majority Leader Tom Delay called Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) "brave" on Sunday for launching a one-man filibuster of unemployment benefits, arguing that they dissuaded people from going out and finding work.
[...]

"You know," Delay said, "there is an argument to be made that these extensions, the unemployment benefits keeps people from going and finding jobs. In fact there are some studies that have been done that show people stay on unemployment compensation and they don't look for a job until two or three weeks before they know the benefits are going to run out."

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Ayn Rand, Hugely Popular Author and Inspiration to Right-Wing Leaders, Was a Big Admirer of Serial Killer
Her works are treated as gospel by right-wing powerhouses like Alan Greenspan and Clarence Thomas, but Ayn Rand found early inspiration in 1920's murderer William Hickman.

"There's something deeply unsettling about living in a country where millions of people froth at the mouth at the idea of giving health care to the tens of millions of Americans who don't have it, or who take pleasure at the thought of privatizing and slashing bedrock social programs like Social Security or Medicare. It might not be so hard to stomach if other Western countries also had a large, vocal chunk of the population that thought like this, but the U.S. is seemingly the only place where right-wing elites can openly share their distaste for the working poor. Where do they find their philosophical justification for this kind of attitude?

"It turns out, you can trace much of this thinking back to Ayn Rand, a popular cult-philosopher who exerts a huge influence over much of the right-wing and libertarian crowd, but whose influence is only starting to spread out of the U.S.

"One reason most countries don't find the time to embrace Ayn Rand's thinking is that she is a textbook sociopath. In her notebooks Ayn Rand worshiped a notorious serial murderer-dismemberer, and used this killer as an early model for the type of "ideal man" she promoted in her more famous books. These ideas were later picked up on and put into play by major right-wing figures of the past half decade, including the key architects of America's most recent economic catastrophe -- former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and SEC Commissioner Chris Cox -- along with other notable right-wing Republicans such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

"The loudest of all the Republicans, right-wing attack-dog pundits and the Teabagger mobs fighting to kill health care reform and eviscerate "entitlement programs" increasingly hold up Ayn Rand as their guru. Sales of her books have soared in the past couple of years; one poll ranked Atlas Shrugged as the second most influential book of the 20th century, after the Bible.

"The best way to get to the bottom of Ayn Rand's beliefs is to take a look at how she developed the superhero of her novel, Atlas Shrugged, John Galt. Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market, Rand was so smitten with Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation -- Danny Renahan, the protagonist of her unfinished first novel, The Little Street -- on him.

"What did Rand admire so much about Hickman? His sociopathic qualities: "Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should," she wrote, gushing that Hickman had "no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel 'other people.'"

"This echoes almost word for word Rand's later description of her character Howard Roark, the hero of her novel The Fountainhead: "He was born without the ability to consider others." (The Fountainhead is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' favorite book -- he even requires his clerks to read it.)"

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 06:41 PM - link

pinhole

April 25 will be World Pinhole Camera Day. Participate in style with these beautiful paper model pinhole cameras.

ReadyMech Cameras

"Take a break from your computer! Download, print and build your own pinhole camera. Follow the instructions and enjoy!"

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 01:54 PM - link

afghanistan

Marjah Madness

"As journalist Gareth Porter said in a recent interview with Real News, Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s offensive in Marjah, Afghanistan, is "more of an effort to shape public opinion in the United States than to shape the politics of the future of Afghanistan." Like so much of what we’ve seen in our woeful war on terrorism, the Marjah effort is short on substance and long on Newspeak, Doublethink, and other Orwellian deceptions."

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The Battle for Marjah
Why the U.S. Has Already Lost

"The fighting is still underway in the town of Marjah, in what is being described as the first battle in Obama’s War in Afghanistan, or alternatively as the biggest battle of the US War in Afghanistan. But already, the US has lost that battle.

"It lost it from day one, when troops fired missiles in to a Marjah house, killing 12 civilian occupants--half of them children. And it lost it further when another three more civilians were blown away by US-led forces. Finally, it lost the battle as much of the town has been simply destroyed by the fighting.

"The supposed goal of the assault on Marjah was to demonstrate that the US would bring the wonders of good government and peace to the Pashtun tribal people who have endured a generation or more of war, and who have been living under the “cruel tyranny” of the Taliban in recent years. The new strategy of President Barack Obama and his hand-picked military leader in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, was to show that the US military could fight the Taliban without causing civilian deaths and casualties. Protecting civilian lives would be a priority, they claimed.

"The problem with such a strategy is that the whole reason American forces have been able to crush resistance, as they did in the lighting invasion of Iraq in 2003, or the overthrow of the Taliban government of Afghanistan in late 2001, has been their callous disregard for civilian lives, which have been coldly labelled “collateral damage.” "

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Explain Something to Me
Fixing What's Wrong in Washington... in Afghanistan

"So explain something to me: Why does the military of a country convinced it's becoming ungovernable think itself so capable of making another ungovernable country governable? What’s the military’s skill set here? What lore, what body of political knowledge, are they drawing on? Who do they think they represent, the Philadelphia of 1776 or the Washington of 2010, and if the latter, why should Americans be considered the globe’s leading experts in good government anymore? And while we’re at it, fill me in on one other thing: Just what has convinced American officials in Afghanistan and the nation’s capital that they have the special ability to teach, prod, wheedle, bribe, or force Afghans to embark on good governance in their country if we can’t do it in Washington or Sacramento?

"Explain something else to me: Why are our military and civilian leaders so confident that, after nine years of occupying the world’s leading narco-state, nine years of reconstruction boondoggles and military failure, they suddenly have the key, the formula, to solve the Afghan mess? Why do leading officials suddenly believe they can make Afghan President Hamid Karzai into “a Winston Churchill who can rally his people,” as one unnamed official told Matthew Rosenberg and Peter Spiegel of the Wall Street Journal -- and all of this only months after Karzai, returned to office in a wildly fraudulent presidential election, overseeing a government riddled with corruption and drug money, and honeycombed with warlords sporting derelict reputations, was considered a discredited figure in Washington? And why do they think they can turn a man known mockingly as the “mayor” or “president” of Kabul (because his government has so little influence outside the capital) into a political force in southern Afghanistan?

"And someone tell me: Just who picked the name Operation Moshtarak for the campaign in Marja? Why am I not convinced that it was an Afghan? Though news accounts say that the word means “togetherness” in Dari, why do I think that a better translation might be “crushing embrace”? What could “togetherness” really mean when, according to the Wall Street Journal, to make the final decision to launch the operation, already long announced, General McChrystal “stepped into his armored car for the short drive... to the presidential palace,” and reportedly roused President Karzai from a nap for “a novel moment.” Karzai agreed, of course, supposedly adding, “No one has ever asked me to decide before.” "

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Totally Occupied: 700 Military Bases Spread Across Afghanistan
Existing in the shadows, the US base-building program is staggering in size and scope and also extraordinarily expensive.

"In the nineteenth century, it was a fort used by British forces. In the twentieth century, Soviet troops moved into the crumbling facilities. In December 2009, at this site in the Shinwar district of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar Province, U.S. troops joined members of the Afghan National Army in preparing the way for the next round of foreign occupation. On its grounds, a new military base is expected to rise, one of hundreds of camps and outposts scattered across the country."

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'Government in a box' in Marja
No doubt the U.S. military will succeed in clearing the Afghan town of the Taliban. But can we bring lasting change?

"What you see depends on where you sit. My seat at present is in Marfa, a small town in rural West Texas. Yet Marfa turns out to be an oddly instructive vantage point from which to contemplate the latest developments in far-off Afghanistan.

"On Saturday, U.S. Marines and other coalition troops launched the largest allied offensive since Operation Enduring Freedom began nearly nine years ago. The target of that assault is Marja, a mostly Pashtun city in the heart of Helmand province. The senior Marine commander on the ground promised "to go in big, strong and fast."

"In fact, the operation is proceeding with notable deliberation. Yet what matters in Marja is not the fight itself -- in that regard, the coalition's superior forces mean the outcome is foreordained -- but what comes next.

"The purpose of Operation Moshtarak (Dari for "together") is to clear the Taliban from the city and then to fix the place, winning the hearts and minds of the local population. Toward that end, said Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of Western forces in Afghanistan, "We've got a government in a box, ready to roll in." As government arrives on the coattails of the Marines, it will ensure law and order, set up schools and clinics, repair roads, revitalize the irrigation system and cajole farmers into cultivating something other than opium poppies. The successful transformation of Marja will demonstrate the viability of McChrystal's plan to transform Afghanistan as a whole. At least that's the idea.

"The United States tried once before to transform Marja and its environs. An ambitious agricultural reform program sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development in the 1950s proved a total flop in terms of lasting changes.

"What presumably promises to produce a different outcome this time around -- the factor that will make change stick -- is the direct involvement of the United States military. The unstated assumption: The sustained presence of U.S. troops implies real and lasting results. What worked in Germany and Japan after 1945 ought to work in Afghanistan today."

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“Little America” in Afghanistan: Is the US Repeating a Failed 1950’s Experiment in Social Engineering?

PART THREE - THE LOST HISTORY OF HELMAND

"When you look at footage of the fighting in Helmand today everyone assumes it is being played out against an ancient background of villages and fields built over the centuries.

"This is not true. If you look beyond the soldiers, and into the distance, what you are really seeing are the ruins of one of the biggest technological projects the United States has ever undertaken. Its aim was to use science to try and change the course of history and produce a modern utopia in Afghanistan. The city of Lashkar Gah was built by the Americans as a model planned city, and the hundreds of miles of canals that the Taliban now hide in were constructed by the same company that built the San Francisco Bay Bridge and Cape Canaveral."

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 10:19 AM - link

polaroid

Impossible

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Picture This: The Impossible Project That Kept Polaroid Film Alive

"Judging by the way Polaroid distances itself from the Impossible Project, you might never realize that the small Dutch film maker saved Polaroid and its beloved instant photographs from extinction.

"Polaroid, which suffered badly since the death of its inventive founder Edwin Land in 1991, could have completely lost the instant film -- a whole artistic medium, pop culture icon and technological marvel in one -- had the company not crossed paths with the Impossible Project's founder, Florian Kaps, a man described as a "crazy Austrian entrepreneur."

"Kaps sought to do what seemed impossible -- rally a group of disgruntled factory workers to re-invent a nearly destroyed technology and bring Polaroid's instant film business back from the grave. To this end, Kaps and his Impossible Project have been improbably successful.

"Yet, Polaroid doesn't seem to appreciate how impossibly lucky it has been."

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I await the results of this project with my SX70.

 09:57 AM - link

insanity

How insane are the leaders of this country?

Gates: European Aversion to War a Danger to Peace

Speaking today at the National Defense University, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates condemned European nations in general for their refusal to contribute larger portions of their population to NATO.

Gates warned that Europe’s aversion to war was doing serious harm to assorted US military operations with NATO backing, and was therefore “an impediment” to the lasting peace he envisions those wars eventually creating.

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 09:36 AM - link

projects

This is an unfinished project passed on from father to son.

This is a project I've been dragging around for years. I've wanted to make a 500 single cafe racer based on the Yamaha SR 500. I bought my first SR500 in 1983. I commuted on it in LA for a couple of years and when we returned to Puget Sound and moved to Whidbey Island I ended up with a second SR500 for another couple of years of commuting. Both SR500s were not ridable but I had hopes of combining them into one good bike. I've reached the point that all the projects I have aren't going to get done in my lifetime and this one was getting in the way of another project so my son Robby, with the help of his cousin Adam, are going to give it a shot. I wish them the best of luck.

The other project that the bikes were getting in the way of is a darkroom. I have a 6 foot stainless sink and a bunch of 3 1/2 gallon stainless tanks for developing film coming by the end of the month. I have no interest, actually I have less than no interest, in setting up an darkroom for printing but a black and white film line would be most useful. 3 1/2 gallon tanks are big enough to develop 8x10 film. This will be handy since, along with the sink and tanks, I will be getting an 8x10 view camera with studio stand. The 8x10 comes with a large brass soft focus lens. I'm getting them from a photographer that I do occasional printing for. They are projects that he realizes he isn't going to get done in his lifetime. He will be back from a trip later this month and will then haul them out of his storage. Stay tuned.

 08:58 AM - link

economy

A Bright Shining Depression

"In Japan they call it the Bright Depression. Ever since the 80’s bubble burst the Japanese economy has never been able to rev up its engines and roar again. Slow growth or small contractions have been the rule. It hasn’t been awful. It hasn’t actually been a classic depression. But, somehow, the good times have never come back. Unemployment, never previously a problem, just won’t go away. The opportunities, the bursting optimism and the glory days are gone. It’s been a long time since anyone wrote a book or article claiming that Japan was the future, but those of us who are old enough remember when everyone was frightened that Japan would eat America’s lunch.

"What happened in Japan should be of interest to every American, because it’s one model for what’s been happening to the US, and what will happen to it. For over 5 years Stirling Newberry and I have used it, and it’s proved itself over and over again. Japan’s collapse, remember, was based on a real-estate bubble. Some details were different and due to the geography of Japan, it was much more concentrated, but the run up in prices was very similiar. At the height of the Japanese real-estate bubble, the value of Tokyo’s land was more than the value of all land in the entire rest of the world put together.

"Ouch.

"When Japan’s economy collapsed the reaction of the central bank and government was interesting and in the broad details, very similiar to the US one. First, Japan did not have its banks come clean on all their bad loans. Banks were kept alive by any means possible, with bad loans staying on the books for years. Major banks were not allowed to go bankrupt, even if they were insolvent.

"Second, they engaged in a huge bit of Keynesian stimulus, pumping money into infrastructure in an attempt to increase demand, something that is being talked up now in the US. It didn’t work for Japan because Japan already had plenty of infrastructure so there was very little economic activity to be enabled by improving infrastructure.

"Because Japan never cleared the books, its banks were heavily impaired when it came to lending new funds to businesses and consumers. When you’re technically insolvent, there just isn’t a lot of money to go around.

"The same thing is happening in the US. Bernanke has bailed out the banks and the brokerage houses, essentially declaring that he’s nationalizing their losses (when you take paper banks can’t sell for 99 cents on the dollar, it isn’t "collateral"). Bear Sterns may have gone under, but its debt was not allowed to be unraveled on the open market. Allowing that would have forced other banks and brokerages to value their bad paper at actual market values, and that would probably have pushed them from insolvent to bankrupt.

"Bernanke’s got his reasons, and they aren’t necessarily bad reasons, but the fact remains that the US now has a very impaired financial sector. Credit limits on people with good jobs and credit ratings are being slashed, there is less money to be had for business loans, and banks are having trouble raising new funds, because as Hale Stewart points out, their stock prices are crashing and why would you want to give them money for shares when those shares will be cheaper later?

"If the US refuses to cull the flock and let some banks go under, probably by putting them into government receivership, since the government’s going to have to bail them out anyway, then it could take a couple decades or more to regain a functioning financial sector. And while a lot of what financial companies did was froth, and counterproductive to the purposes of the actual economy, they also do things that are necessary. If they can’t do those things—make those loans, then the US will suffer."

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Millions of Unemployed Face Years Without Jobs

"Even as the American economy shows tentative signs of a rebound, the human toll of the recession continues to mount, with millions of Americans remaining out of work, out of savings and nearing the end of their unemployment benefits.

"Economists fear that the nascent recovery will leave more people behind than in past recessions, failing to create jobs in sufficient numbers to absorb the record-setting ranks of the long-term unemployed.

"Call them the new poor: people long accustomed to the comforts of middle-class life who are now relying on public assistance for the first time in their lives — potentially for years to come.

"Yet the social safety net is already showing severe strains. Roughly 2.7 million jobless people will lose their unemployment check before the end of April unless Congress approves the Obama administration’s proposal to extend the payments, according to the Labor Department."

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 08:58 AM - link

street art

Classical Street Art by Zilda

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 08:47 AM - link

economy

Glad to see things are going so well

Employment Report: 20K Jobs Lost, 9.7% Unemployment Rate

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James K. Galbraith: "There Is No Return To Self-Sustaining Growth"

'In July of 2009, you signed an initiative of the Roosevelt Institute that seeks an answer to the question: What Caused the Crisis?(ii) May I ask for your personal answer?

'Yes, you may. (laughs.) — The principal cause of the crisis was the dismantling of the system of regulation and supervision in the financial sector which had for much of the post-war period kept the most dangerous elements of that sector in check. In the absence of an appropriate system of effective supervision and regulation, what happens is that the actors in the system, who are intent upon taking the greatest degree of risk — including actors who are intent upon using fraudulent methods to increase their returns — come to dominate parts of the system. As they do that, the general methods of assessing performance in the market, specifically stock-market valuations, become counter-productive. That is to say, they invariably reward the worst actors, while they force more traditional actors, who are still respecting the old norms of conduct, into a competitively disadvantaged position. Thus the bad actors, the fraudulent actors, and the speculative extremists quickly take over.

'That is what happened specifically in the origination of mortgages in the United States in the middle part of the last decade. You had a transition from a traditional method of issuing mortgages to people who could be reasonably expected to service them, to a method of originating mortgages that were sold off immediately, that were rated in a way that permitted them to be bundled and sold to fiduciaries, and where the issuer had no interest in whether the borrowers could pay or not. In fact, in some ways the lenders actively preferred people who did not intend to pay, because they could then inflate the value of the loan and earn a larger fee upfront for doing it. And in this way, not only was there a large segment of the market that was explicitly corrupt, but the equity value of homes all across the country was compromised. When these practices collapsed, so too did the home values not only of people who had bad mortgages, but also those for many people who had good mortgages, good incomes and perfectly good credit.

'The result of that was a general slump in activity. The wealth and financial security of much of the American middle class disappeared. So far about a quarter of the measured wealth of the American middle class has disappeared - about $15 trillion of $60 trillion. That’s bound to have a fantastically traumatic effect on people’s consumption behaviour and on their ability to get new good credit. Even if they wish to continue to extend the past pattern of borrowing in order to finance activity, they can’t do it. So, this is a very big problem. It starts with a failure to supervise and regulate the financial system, and flows on to the reaction of the broader population, which is to protect their remaining assets, to become extremely adverse to taking ordinary business and consumer risks.'

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The Free Market Fetish
Garbage In, Garbage Out

"Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan answered that he had placed his trust in a flawed theory when he was called before Congress to explain why he, Goldman Sachs Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, prevented Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Corporation, a government regulatory agency, from doing her job of regulating over-the-counter derivatives.

"The efficient markets theory is that unregulated markets are efficient and rational. According to this theory in which Greenspan placed his trust, unregulated markets produce the best possible result. Any regulatory interference worsens the outcome.

"Greenspan blamed his own bad judgment on a theory. The theory, or Greenspan’s understanding of it, nevertheless still holds sway as Congress has proved impotent to re-regulate the gambling casino that is Wall Street. Clearly, the theory serves powerful interests.

"But what is the truth?

"The truth is that markets are a social institution. Their efficiency depends on the rules that govern the behavior of people in markets. When free market economists talk about markets deciding this or that, they are reifying a social institution and ascribing to it decision-making power. But, of course, markets do not act or make decisions. People act and make decisions, and markets reflect the decisions and actions of people.

"The entire debate over regulation is misconstrued. It is not the market, an efficient social institution, which is regulated. What is regulated is the behavior of people in markets. If you want good results from markets, good regulation of human behavior is a requirement.

"The market is like a computer. Garbage in, garbage out."

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 09:49 AM - link

photography

You have to check these out!

Michael Paul Smith

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 09:18 AM - link

america -- a military with a country attached

War, Budgets and Blind Ambition
The Limited Minds of the American Elite

"The American elite's unbounded, unquestioned, indeed unconscious sense of imperial entitlement and dominance -- based ultimately on war, the threat of war and the profit from war -- is one of the defining characteristics of our age. And if you would like to see a glaring example of this attitude in action, look no further than the front page of Tuesday's New York Times, where one David Sanger gives us his penetrating "news analysis" of the Administration's just-announced $3.8 trillion budget.

"Sanger focuses on the huge, continuing deficits that the budget forecasts over the next decade. Completely ignoring the plain truth that his own expert source tell him later in the story -- that "forecasts 10 years out have no credibility" -- Sanger boldly plunges forward to tell us just what it all means. You will not be surprised to hear that the upshot of these big deficits is that neither Obama nor his successors will be able to spend any money on "new domestic initiatives" for years to come.
[...]

"What is most interesting here, of course, is not Sanger's noodle-scratching over imaginary numbers projected into an unknowable future, but his total and apparently completely unconscious adoption of the mindset of militarist empire. For as he puzzles and puzzles till his puzzler is sore on how in God's name the United States can possibly find any money at all to spend on bettering the lives of its citizens over the next 10 years, it becomes clear that Sanger -- like the rest of our political and media elite -- literally cannot conceive of an end to empire. Our elites and their courtiers literally cannot imagine life without a permanent war for global dominance, fueled by a gargantuan war machine spread across hundreds and hundreds of bases implanted in more than 100 countries."

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Seven Days in January
How the Pentagon Counts Coups in Washington

"After all, if Gates was blindsided in Pakistan, he already knew that a $626 billion Pentagon budget, including more than $128 billion in war-fighting funds, had passed Congress in December and that his next budget for fiscal year 2011 (soon to be submitted) might well cross the $700 billion mark. He probably also knew that, in the upcoming State of the Union Address, President Obama was going to announce a three-year freeze on discretionary domestic spending starting in 2011, but leave national security expenditures of any sort distinctly unfrozen. He undoubtedly knew as well that, in the week after his return, news would come out that the president was going to ask Congress for $14.2 billion extra, most for 2011, to train and massively bulk up the Afghan security forces, more than doubling the funds already approved by Congress for 2010.

"Or consider that only days after his plane landed, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released its latest “budget outlook” indicating that the Iraq and Afghan Wars had already cost the American taxpayer more than $1 trillion in Congressionally-approved dollars, with no end in sight. Just as the non-freeze on defense spending in the State of the Union Address caused next to no mainstream comment, so there would be no significant media response to this (and these costs didn’t even include the massive projected societal price of the two wars, including future care for wounded soldiers and the replacement of worn out or destroyed equipment, which will run so much higher).

"Each of these announcements could be considered another little coup for the Pentagon and the U.S. military to count. Each was part of Pentagon blank-check-ism in Washington. Each represented a national security establishment ascendant in a way that the makers of Seven Days in May might have found hard to grasp.

"To put just the president’s domestic cost-cutting plan in a Pentagon context: If his freeze on domestic programs were to go through Congress intact (an unlikely possibility), it would still be chicken-feed in the cost-cutting sweepstakes. The president’s team estimates savings of $250 billion over 10 years. On the other hand, the National Priorities Project has done some sober figuring, based on projections from the Office of Management and Budget, and finds that, over the same decade, the total increase in the Pentagon budget should come to $522 billion. (And keep in mind that that figure doesn’t include possible increases in the budgets of the Department of Homeland Security, non-military intelligence agencies, or even any future war-fighting supplemental funds appropriated by Congress.) That $250 billion in cuts, then, would be but a small brake on the guaranteed further rise of national-security spending. American life, in other words, is being sacrificed to the very infrastructure meant to provide this country’s citizens with “safety.” That’s what seven days in January really means."

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 10:13 AM - link

cameras and lenses

I've started to mount lenses for my 4x5 as my hole saws come in. I'm waiting for the hole saw on this one: An 1869 Voigtlander Petzval. Check out the link for more pictures and information about this beauty. It was, and will be again, a portrait lens.

 10:05 AM - link

economy

Obama Freeze Forfeits America's Future

"Barack Obama's plan to unveil tonight a non-defense discretionary spending freeze for the next three years will essentially forfeit America's growth future to China.

"China has been massively investing in its high speed rail, its science labs, its educational system, its roads, its energy grid an its information super-duper highway. It has been obsessed with job retention and job creation. It has been building a mind-boggling number of every kind of power plant imaginable -- natural gas, high end coal, low end coal. It's investing in next gen renewable energy projects on a scale larger than the United States. It has been subsidizing all of this with a neo-mercantilist currency policy, pumping exports which it finances to consumers not only in the US but all over the world. China flaunts a robust "Buy China" requirement in its government and semi-private industrial procurements and contracting.

"And the President of the United States, one year into his job, and still dealing with the tail winds of the worst economic disaster in global markets and the US economy since the Great Depression, is saying that he is going to freeze spending on virtually everything but the wars we have on hand.

"America needs to invest in itself."

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Obama Liquidates Himself

"A spending freeze? That’s the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback?

"It’s appalling on every level.

"It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff writes that Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with “the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon” (Mellon was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, who according to Hoover told him to “liquidate the workers, liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness”.)

"It’s bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead.

"And it’s a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view — and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, “I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.” "

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 10:08 AM - link

economy

Seven things about the economy that everyone should be more worried about than they are
Dan Froomkin explores the likelihood of an anemic recovery, a double dip recession, another stock market crash, more financial-sector follies, deficit hawks stifling growth, the death of the middle class as we know it, and/or other dire possibilities reporters should be writing about furiously.

"No. 1: The middle class may never be the same again

"The full effects of the crash of 2007-2008 on the lives of regular Americans has yet to be fully appreciated. For most members of the middle class, their sense of financial well-being was largely based on the size of their 401(k)s and their equity as homeowners. After the collapse of stock prices and with the steep drop in home prices, many may never feel the same way again, or spend their money as confidently.

"While 401(k)s have somewhat bounced back, about one in four homeowners now actually have negative equity -- are "underwater". A recent study by Barry P. Bosworth and Rosanna Smart for Brookings finds that American households lost $13 trillion in wealth between mid-2007 and March 2009, or about 15 percent in all. That decline badly hit baby boomers just as they’re headed into retirement. And middle-income families whose head is age 50 or younger actually have smaller net incomes today than in 1983.

"Meanwhile, many American families spent much of the last decade (or two) living beyond their means, piling up debt on their credit cards, or "bubble borrowing." Two University of Chicago researchers have found that the housing bubble hugely increased household consumption as homeowners borrowed on average $0.25 to $0.30 for every $1 increase on their home equity. Now that housing prices have crashed and credit is tight, the inevitable result, Atif Mian and Amir Sufi write somewhat euphemistically, is a "painful process of household de-leveraging."

"Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren, an emerging hero among progressives in her role as chair of the congressional bailout oversight panel, sees the latest series of blows as the unfortunate culmination of a crisis that started taking form a generation ago. For long stretches of time, the growth in the nation's GDP has gone almost entirely to the top 1% or less of the population. That has resulted in a dramatic shift in wealth away from the middle class, made the economy more vulnerable to disaster and made the toll of such a disaster more catastrophic to all but the wealthiest Americans. Warren writes:

"America today has plenty of rich and super-rich. But it has far more families who did all the right things, but who still have no real security. Going to college and finding a good job no longer guarantee economic safety. Paying for a child's education and setting aside enough for a decent retirement have become distant dreams. Tens of millions of once-secure middle class families now live paycheck to paycheck, watching as their debts pile up and worrying about whether a pink slip or a bad diagnosis will send them hurtling over an economic cliff.

"She concludes: "America without a strong middle class? Unthinkable, but the once-solid foundation is shaking." "

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This is a part of a remarkable series on the economy:

Reporting the Collapse

Read them all!

 11:37 AM - link

photography

Chernobyl 1st expedition

"Imagine a city of 50,000 people. A city whose entire population in the course of one evening had to abandon their homes. Forever. Welcome to the City of Ghosts – Prypiat and Chernobyl.

"CATASTROPHE

"First a few words about Chernobyl and the catastrophe itself. On April 26th, 1986, the greatest catastrophe in the history of nuclear power took place. Overheating, partial rusting of the reactor and a hydrogen explosion occurred as a result of a failure of the cooling system. This caused radioactive materials from inside the reactor to be discharged directly into the atmosphere and area surrounding the plant. As a direct consequence of the catastrophe, 30 people died, over 200 became ill with post-radiation diseases and in a 30 km radius around the power plant, over 130,000 people were evacuated creating a closed protective zone. The indirect and long term effects of the incident are still unknown to this day.

"RADIATION

"These days, the level of radiation is not as high as at the moment of the explosion. It’s enough to just not stray from the asphalt roads, which are naturally less contaminated, and to not go where you’re not supposed to. However, you should also know that in the zone there are places where you only have to go a few hundred metres into to inadvertently receive a high dose of radiation. And so in the zone, I make a new friend- Geiger. The Geiger counter, to be exact. Without this it’s quite possible to end up somewhere you shouldn’t be. There are many unknown places in the zone where radioactive waste has been buried. It’s also worth knowing that grass and moss, which are abundant everywhere, are hundreds of times more radioactive than asphalt. Bringing the Geiger counter close to such moss causes it to freeze instantly. The counter is not capable of measuring such high radiation and simply jams. Thus it is worth avoiding strange looking and bright green moss and grass…

"And it is safest to have a Geiger counter with you and have it switched on the whole time."

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 11:27 AM - link