Daily Show host John Stewart eviscerates those asking teachers and other unions to make sacrifices in the name of cutting the budget deficit, especially when those same people (literally!) did not ask the same from Wall Street bankers following the trillions of dollars of bailouts and easy money:
Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975, after which followed decades of brutal repression and violence directed at the Timorese people. Hundreds of thousands of Timorese have died as a result of the conflict, whether killed outright or as a result of disease and hunger. In one incident alone, known as the Dili Massacre, hundreds of people agitating for independence for East Timor were massacred as Indonesian soldiers opened fire. There was no intervention by the United States, and in fact, we continued to sell weapons and train the Indonesian military. There are no known oil reserves credited to East Timor, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA). Whatever resources do exist are mired in competing claims with Australia.
Charles Ponzi was born 129 years ago today, so I guess that makes it Ponzi Day today. The man for whom the pyramid scheme was named though, was a chump. Today's schemers have been many times more successful. By the time Ponzi's scheme peaked in 1920, Wikipedia notes that "he had made $420,000 ($4.59 million in 2008 terms)." See what I mean? $4 and half million isn't even enough for today's ponzi artists to get out of bed. For example, let's look at the currently best-known ponzi artist, Bernie Madoff. The amount missing from Madoff clients' accounts was nearly $65 billion, although that includes fabricated money-- actual losses total about $18 billion. Even at $18 billion though, that's still almost 4,000 times the ponzi scheme than Ponzi himself. Madoff made headlines again this week, saying that “It’s unbelievable, Goldman … no one has any criminal convictions. The whole new regulatory reform is a joke. The whole government is a Ponzi scheme.” And who better to know Ponzi schemes than the man who bested Ponzi?
Keep President Eisenhower's warning in mind as you read this post (see video below). The U.S. Department of Defense defines "Psychological Operations" or "Psy-Ops" as "Planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign government, organizations, groups, and individuals." Such operations may be based upon truth or based upon deception, but the goal is the same: to alter perceptions and "ultimately the behavior" of others. As a matter of law, such actions are supposed to be directed against the "foreign hostile groups", or at least not against Americans. Unfortunately, this law is routinely ignored:
Tim Geithner, appointed to Secretary of the Treasury despite being unable to calculate his own taxes, has just proven he does not understand the role of oil prices in modern economies. Speaking at a breakfast today in Washington, Geithner claimed that:
“The economy is in a much stronger position to handle” rising oil prices, Geithner said.... “Central banks have a lot of experience in managing these things.”This is the opposite of truth. Central banks do not, in fact, have a lot of experience in dealing with rapidly rising oil prices in a worldwide recessionary environment where there is no clear deflation nor inflation. Hell, central banks do not even have a lot of experience in managing an out of control real-estate bubble, or dot-com bubble, or any of the economic crises that hit over the past decade or so. Nor is the American economy in a "much stronger" position than it was in 2008, which was the last time a major oil price spike played a role in devastating the world economy. In fact, there is no shortage of people arguing the opposite of Geithner. Let's start with Fatih Birol, the chief economist of the International Energy Agency (IEA). Just yesterday, he warned of the danger of high oil price's impact on the economy: