The appointment of Bill Daley as White House chief of staff speaks to the White House’s desire to improve its relationship with the business community …
On behalf of our hundreds of thousands of colleagues at J.P. Morgan Chase, I want to congratulate Bill Daley on this great honor,” Jamie Dimon said in a statement on Thursday. “Bill is an outstanding leader who has played a critical role in heading our corporate social responsibility efforts. Throughout his time at our company, he has been an exemplar of wisdom, integrity and decency. While we will miss him greatly, Bill’s return to public service is great news for our country.???
The man led JP Morgan’s corporate social responsibility efforts. That’s rich.
The destruction of Jefferson County reveals the basic battle plan of these modern barbarians, the way that banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have systematically set out to pillage towns and cities from Pittsburgh to Athens. These guys aren’t number-crunching whizzes making smart investments; what they do is find suckers in some municipal-finance department, corner them in complex lose-lose deals and flay them alive. In a complete subversion of free-market principles, they take no risk, score deals based on political influence rather than competition, keep consumers in the dark — and walk away with big money …
If you want to know what life in the Third World is like, just ask Lisa Pack, an administrative assistant who works in the roads and transportation department in Jefferson County, Alabama. Pack got rudely introduced to life in post-crisis America last August, when word came down that she and 1,000 of her fellow public employees would have to take a little unpaid vacation for a while. The county, it turned out, was more than $5 billion in debt — meaning that courthouses, jails and sheriff’s precincts had to be closed so that Wall Street banks could be paid.
As public services in and around Birmingham were stripped to the bone, Pack struggled to support her family on a weekly unemployment check of $260.
The Wall Street bank which was the star of the feature: JP Morgan.
Poverty in Pasadena became obvious while DD worked the census last year.
One stupefying quality observed was the poor in Pasadena live right next door to the affluent they serve. They’re shoehorned into outwardly normal looking houses, now converted to stealth flophouses with individuals living in the equivalent of large, often windowless, closets.
Where their dire conditions are just out of sight of the upper class.
These are, according to Ted Nugent and his ilk, people who refuse to be productive. Who simply don’t have the creative power and work ethic of the wealthy US superman.
The number of poor people in the U.S. is millions higher than previously known, with 1 in 6 Americans — many of them 65 and older — struggling in poverty due to rising medical care and other costs, according to preliminary census figures released Wednesday.
At the same time, government aid programs such as tax credits and food stamps kept many people out of poverty, helping to ensure the poverty rate did not balloon even higher during the recession in 2009, President Barack Obama’s first year in office.
Under a new revised census formula, overall poverty in 2009 stood at 15.7 percent, or 47.8 million people. That’s compared to the official 2009 rate of 14.3 percent, or 43.6 million, that was reported by the Census Bureau last September.
Across all demographic groups, Americans 65 and older sustained the largest increases in poverty under the revised formula — nearly doubling to 16.1 percent.
Today the Post ran an op-ed by a Nation contributor, making a joke of the GOP farce called “the reading of the Constitution.” It’s here.
It’s essentially the Ted Nugent’s Rural White America Constitution.
Excerpted:
We, the Real Americans, in order to form a more God-Fearing Union, establish Justice as we see it, Defeat Health-Care Reform, and Preserve and Protect our Property, our Guns and our Right Not to Pay Taxes, do ordain and establish this Conservative Constitution for the United States of Real America.
Congress shall balance the Federal Budget, preferably by eliminating the Departments of Labor, Energy, Education and State.
The preceding provision shall not apply to spending for the Department of Defense, appropriations for which shall increase three times as quickly as the growth in gross domestic product …
2. The right to bear Semi-Automatic Weapons, AK-47s or Bazookas shall not be infringed by background checks, safety locks, age limits or common sense.
3. The right of Corporations, Hedge Funds, Business Leaders and Lobbyists to spend endless cash on campaigns and influence-purchasing shall not be infringed. The so-called right of Unions to associate shall be denied as fundamentally un-American and contrary to the agenda of the Chamber of Commerce.
For Nugent, I’d specifically have substituted “Machine Guns” for “Bazookas” in the 2nd Amendment.
Moving along, CNN’s Anderson Cooper stupidly put him on a panel yesterday.
Roseanne Barr was the only person with the nerve to stand up to his bowdlerized Ayn Rand for outdoorsmen shtick. In the last year you couldn’t find anyone with the stones to do so in the mainstream media.
The salient bits with the standard black-people-in-the-cities-are-parasites and rich-people-make-all-the-jobs bits:
NUGENT: No, you need to try to help people by scolding them to help themselves. If you keep rewarding them for sleeping in then they’ll never get out of slavery. Why would you support slavery?
BARR: I’m scolding you because you’re blaming the people at the bottom who have nothing whatsoever..
NUGENT: I’m blaming people who refuse to be productive.
BARR: Why don’t you blame the people who have the blame? Why aren’t you ever…
NUGENT: Why do you want to [blame] people who have jobs and produce things?
BARR: I want to blame the Koch brothers and the billionaires and all the people who robbed the taxpayers of this country, absolutely.
NUGENT: The government is the one who’s robbed the taxpayers [of] this country.
BARR: What would we do without government? Expect the rich people to take care of the poor? Are you crazy?
NUGENT: The rich people are the ones providing jobs.
BARR: No, they’re not. There are no jobs. There are no jobs and rich people…
NUGENT: Rich people who put all their lives on the line to get creative.
BARR: Rich people don’t pay squat and it’s proven.
It announces a Ph.D dissertation from Kansas State grad student Dave Olds, entitled … wait for it … “Food Defense Management Practices in Private Country Clubs.” All 200 pages of it — here — published for the K-State Dept. of Hospitality Management and Dietetics.
The abstract, in part, reads:
“The purpose of this study was to survey country club professionals’ importance perceptions of food defense and the frequency with which preventive practices were implemented in their clubs to prevent bioterrorism.”
“Most club managers stated that they did not think their clubs were at risk of a bioterror attack,” it continues, an assertion which would seem beyond dispute.
The dissertation informs that as of 2008, “there were 6,000 private country clubs in North America.”
“These clubs represented extensive financial assets … Country clubs are exclusive and cater to the affluent, with initiation fees charged to new members as high as $250,000.”
Presumably, this means they ought to be able to afford bioterror defense.
Since turnover is obviously high in the servant class to the rich, country club owners find employee background checks cost prohibitive.
But “[because] country clubs are often exclusive and cater to the wealthy and influential members of society, they could be selected as potential targets for would-be terrorists,” it asserts.
Therefore, servant food service employee infiltration could be one gateway for an attack, it is reasoned.
But back to the press release which has this gem of a recommendation:
Move ice-makers to more secure locations where they can be monitored. “So many times these machines are kept out of the way, but ice is a heavily used product,” Olds said. One of the country clubs he visited kept the ice-maker on a dock outside the building.
The dissertation describes various documented terror attacks — none seemingly specifically aimed at the affluent, the influential, or ice-machines on country club boat docks.
Kansas State, it should also be noted, recently lost to Syracuse in the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium, 36-34.
The only case of country club terrorism DD could find.
And they make things just good enough. Which really isn’t very good at all but when one has no choice in the matter, crap magically becomes the new excellence. Because it’s all you can afford and it’s all that’s in stores.
So socks that develop holes after a couple washings, wooden painted toilet seats that blister and crack a week after purchase or stub wrenches with no burrs become the new normal. Heck, you can still use a toilet seat that’s blistered or which immediately took up a yellow stain. It’s just unsightly but not quite useless.
Then there is the regular parade of stories about new Chinese weapons.
In these stories one hardly ever reads reasonable doubt about Chinese manufacturing skills or why one should think they can make alleged superweapons any better than the usual stuff.
Today’s Chinese whoopie cushion is the J-20 “stealth fighter.”
“Chinese combat aviation has made remarkable strides in recent years, moving from a collection of obsolete aircraft that would have provided a target-rich environment to potential adversaries,” it reads. “Today China flies hundreds of first rate aircraft, and even flies more Sukhoi Flankers than Russia …”
It adds that Chinese capabilities are still twenty years behind the US.
China is still years away from being able to field a stealth aircraft, despite the disclosure of images indicating that it appears to have a working prototype, a U.S. Navy official said on Wednesday …
“We’re anticipating China to have a fifth-generation fighter … operational right around 2018 …”
2018.
In 2018, the middle class will be mostly gone, the little still left having been shipped off to China. Except, of course, robot weapons manufacturing.
“The Air Force’s fleet has grown to 195 Predators and 28 Reapers, a new and more heavily armed cousin of the Predator. Both models are made by General Atomics, a contractor based in San Diego,” reported the Times piece. “Including drones that the Army has used to counter roadside bombs and tiny hand-launched models that can help soldiers to peer past the next hill or building, the total number of military drones has soared to 5,500, from 167 in 2001.”
195 + 28 = 223.
223 x $4,500,000 = 1,003,500,000
From the San Diego Union Tribune, one day ago:
The Defense Department says it has awarded $85 million to General Atomics Aeronautical Systems of Poway to provide logistical support for its Warrior A/Warrior Block 0 unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), which is being developed for the Army. The work will be performed in Poway but represents support to four unnamed sites outside of the continental United States. The company still refers to the UAV as Warrior, although it is technically known as the MQ-1C Grey Eagle. The aircraft is a refined version of the company’s well known MQ-1 Predator drone, and is part of the Army’s Extended-Range Multi-Purpose UAV program.
For 2011, “[more] than $2 billion will be used to purchase unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, which the Obama administration has used increasingly over the past year to target suspected terrorist hideouts in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” stated a news report from TruthOut, published way back in February.
By contrast, the FDA — which handles food and drug consumer protections for the entire United States — is requesting $4.03 billion to “Transform Food Safety System, Invest in Medical Product Safety, [and provide] Regulatory Science.”
As a thought exercise consider that General Atomics and US manufacturing of killer drones sops up at least half, maybe more, than an important domestic US regulatory agency spends for the betterment, health and welfare of society.
As another thought exercise, consider that a domestic arms manufacturer of flying killer robots and very little else is now half the size of the regulatory agency for food and drugs in allegedly the foremost of western nations.
Ah, so where were we? Lost. Talking about some rubbish having to do with a Chinese stealth fighter.
Over Xmas DD was visiting a friend’s house for dinner, drinks and conviviality. Sitting on the coffee table were various gifts sent in from around the country.
One was a photo mobile proudly advertised as of the Guggenheim Museum. You can see it here in the Guggenheim Foundation gift shop.
What the store doesn’t show was the rather obvious “Made in China” sticker on the box.
Many people my age remember making photo mobiles out of wire hangers and string or fishing line when they were in grade school art class.
The idea that even the manufacture of “photo mobiles” has to be outsourced to China is astonishing. It’s also a deadeningly obvious part of life.
Everything made for the consumer society, except stuff for the wealthy, was outsourced to China, so to speak. So everyone knows what happened to the US economy just by going into stores in their hometown. Not even a need to order from Guggenheim.
It emphasizes our dreadful history of decline.
Wall Street, shareholders, big business and government policy, all worked together to compress US middle class pay and increase business value. Part of the plan included downsizing manufacturing industry which employed American workers who had to be paid too much for the most potent bottom line. So they needed eliminating.
To compensate, it was convenient to extend easy credit and ship all manufacturing to China so that prices for consumer products could be depressed.
This worked only to a point and now everyone recognizes the poisoned fruit of it.
There is one industry not outsourced to China. It’s an industry where labor’s wages don’t need elimination or compression for the bottom line. Because the shareholders and CEOs know price isn’t an object that interferes with major profit.
On January 1, a fatuous opinion piece in the New York Times accidentally touched upon it in “China’s Naval Ambitions.”
It read:
The Pentagon has a long history of hyping the Chinese threat to justify expensive weapons purchases, and sinking well-defended ships with ballistic missiles is notoriously hard. But what should rightly concern American military planners is not so much the missile but the new Chinese naval strategy behind it.
China seems increasingly intent on challenging United States naval supremacy in the Western Pacific. At the same time it is aggressively pressing its claims to some worthless disputed offshore islands in the East and South China Seas. Washington must respond, carefully but firmly.
The Pentagon needed to move fast to counter Chinese naval developments by:
Cutting back purchases of the Navy’s DDG-1000 destroyer (with its deficient missile defense system) was a first step. A bigger one would be to reduce the Navy’s reliance on short-range manned strike aircraft like the F-18 and the F-35, in favor of the carrier-launched N-UCAS, a longer-range unmanned strike aircraft.
The upshot here is that middle class jobs are worthless EXCEPT if they’re the small part of the American demographic for making robot weapons.
Robot assassins don’t build roads, they don’t improve the infrastructure, they don’t do anything for universal healthcare, they don’t fight disease, they don’t coach high-school wrestling teams, they don’t spread goodwill overseas. And it’s not an industry that is theoretically open to everyone for a good living regionally, like Detroit in its heyday.
Weapons and pricey ridiculous things, yes! Everything else, no!
Good news, lads! Good news! Most popular DD video/tune with the over 45 male and unemployed audience, ever.
Sixty-one percent of Americans polled would rather see taxes for the wealthy increased as a first step to tackling the deficit, the poll showed.
The next most popular way — chosen by 20 percent — was to cut defense spending.
Poll by 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair.
The more The Democratic Party and the president take up the aims of the Republican Party, the more they dig the holes the voters will eventually toss them into.
Bustling densely populated urban epicenters with high turnovers of tourists and business travelers are among the worst sufferers. Those cities include New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., Chicago.
The state most afflicted by bed bugs is a bit of a surprise: Ohio. Three of the Buckeye state’s cities–Cincinnati, Columbus and Dayton–are on the exterminators’ bed bug-infested lists.
“At this point we don’t know, nor does anyone know, why cities in Ohio seem to have a much higher influx of bed bugs per capita than larger cities,” says Orkin’s Harrison.
Never underestimate coincidence and more enthusiastic by commercial exterminators.
Reasons for bedbug blitz were discussed last year here and had to do with a couple of factors, some linked to the recession.
Bedbugs travel with people and their belongings.
Losing your job in the city, having unemployment run out, and having to move in with relatives elsewhere most probably took bedbugs everywhere, not only between urban centers but also from urban centers to smaller towns. Working the census, one could see the dislocation. And also pick up gossip about it by simply talking with apartment complex managers.
Bedbug populations also probably surged when property management companies, seeing a drop in tenancy because of the recession, cut back on pest control regimes to save money. Such decisions, in retrospect, were shortsighted.
Another factor possibly contributing to the spread of bedbugs in urban centers is also probably indirectly linked to transience in apartment complexes.
An entire service industry of cleaners, repainters, carpet-steamers and repairmen exist to renovate and perform minor carpentry and painting in the short term. When a tenant leaves, many property owners will bring in small business service workers to ready the units for new tenants. Since these workers bring tools and boxes, often spend the day in an empty unit, and travel from unit to unit across a city, they most probably are excellent vectors for bedbugs.
Bedbugs are very small and, annoyingly, while no one is looking, they will crawl into boxes and clumps of tarpaulin or rags left about in a unit. Particularly if left over night.
When the workmen come back the next day, or gather up their materials at the end of the day and take them to the truck, the bedbug (or plural) goes along for the ride to the next place.
It has also been DD’s experience that some property managers, plagued by bedbug eradication costs, have attempted to shift the responsibility onto tenants.
The last thing one wants to do when dealing with transmitted infestations is to blame and penalize those who are afflicted. Which is what such riders are designed to do.
It works this way.
The tenant has to sign a rider on their contract certifying that they guarantee that their belongings are free of bedbugs when they move in. Of course, there is no way to do this. However, it is coupled to legal language which then holds the tenant liable for any subsequent bedbug infestation when they are in the unit.
Since professional exterminations and mandatory damage or partial to total elimination of key furnishings — like mattresses — are unpalatable or too expensive to many people living in apartment units, they have no incentive to report bedbugs to property managers for removal.
In fact, the implied penalties — punishments — discourage them from doing so.
In such cases people may be more likely to undertake their own amateur attempts at pest control or just engage in extended battle with the insects while learning to live with them.
While some tenants would invariably report bedbugs and absorb liability others would not. And it would complicate efforts to totally eliminate bedbugs, since getting rid of the insects in one unit would not prevent them from reinfestation of cleansed units from other infested apartments in the same building.
Bedbugs being able to crawl through various conduits, you see.
Dick Destiny’s Bedbugs tune — in mp3. Do give it a listen. It was quite the hit at our pre-Xmas show in Pasadena. (I considered making a video from all the bedbug footage now available. After an hour of viewing what was available on YouTube, a certain queasiness and headache had set in.)
A few alert readers may have already seen Tom Tomorrow’s two recent cartoons summing up the “Year In Crazy.”
A free No-Prize if you can guess who this is before looking at the rest of the post!
Got the answer yet?
It’s one of the junior leaders of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy — Frank Gaffney.
Gaffney shows up much more than we’d like in the Cult of EMP Crazy tab. In the past couple years he’s also distinguished himself as a birther and more recently as one of the co-authors of the “Team-B report” aimed at purportedly describing the threat of Sharia law to our precious bodily fluids American courts.
You can review a recent post here — containing some of Gaffney’s greatest hits, including a speech on electromagnetic pulse doom, from YouTube.
From time to time I’ve linked to the Lehigh Valley Conservative blog. It’s run by a scripture-spouting LV member of the Tea Party, a former union steward now virulently anti-union in the middle of a community that enjoyed its best days due to unionized labor.
Nothing on the Lehigh Valley Conservative’s blog makes much sense but it is emblematic of the great vigor of the Tea Party. As such, it’s thoroughly mixed up, sometimes comically so, but driven.
Today, the LVCer asks what’s the greatest threat to the “future of America.” (I’d say embedded ignorance but that’s only a slight subtextual matter here. Plus it gets in the way of the joke.)
Francis Schaeffer said when ask the question; “What is the greatest concern for the future of America???? Without hesitation he answered saying “State-ism???.
State-ism involves a philosophy of government, by which the state, or government, is viewed not only as the final ruling authority but the ultimate agency of redemption. The government in the form of “State-ism??? will supplant the church and can never function under God. If and when, the social order has made that transition into “State-ism??? there is no stopping the civil/social slide into Hell.
State-ism is the reason or why you have Democrats, Republicans and Independents being called “Progressives??? to some degree or another, a political branding, they all are of or follow after the preaching and Theology of the religion of “State-ism??? with there god and savior being big government.
If you’re not getting why this is amusing, follow this link: “State-ism.”
Anyway, statism was also a part of the Ayn Rand lexicon — her philosophies now holding full sway in the GOP. Ted Nugent, for example, is the dull-witted man’s regurgitator of Ayn Rand and sundry Atlas Shrugged-isms.
In the context of the world of the Lehigh Valley Conservative, this is a second layer of unintentional humor.
LVC begins his screed on “state-ism” with some of his standard cant endorsing “theological issues,” in his case meaning the US should transform into a theocracy.
This leaves some Tea Partiers, so quick to invoke God, scratching their heads over the cognitive dissonance. Others, like Glenn Beck, have built an entire foundation on the illogic.
Last night at the lehigh Valley 9/12 meeting we heard Professor Andrew Bernstein gave a talk on the virtues of reason and with his talk mentioning Ayn Rand and how much the book “Atlas Shugged??? had influenced him. He also was promoting his new book “Capitalism Unbound???. An interesting thing happened in the Q&A Someone ask him—- And I Para-phase—Were does the “Christian Faith??? fit into reason and the founding of the country? To which he said, It didn’t and that Christianity had nothing to do with the founding of the country. I heard or at least I think I heard some voicing of disapproval around the room. I tell you this only because a house divided cannot stand and we either put God and His Bible first or Ayn Rand and her book “Atlas Shugged??? first. And from everything I read about her she was not a Christian and as a matter of fact she hated Christ and Christianity. Her position and thinking cannot line up with God if that is true and we than must consider our position and her teachings.
