From Rudy Guiliani:
“Freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.�
Oh, come on! At least make us work for the bloody 1984 references!
Remember Cramer flipping out? I think we ain’t seen nothing yet.
Singaporean banks try to reassure local investors that they won’t be affected by the sub-prime mortgage problems in the United States. On France, their biggest listed bank, BNP Paribas, freezes $2.2 billion worth of funds and the European Central Bank injects around $130 billion into euro-zone money markets, trying to soothe things. Boy that’ll do wonders for inflation.
‘When the ECB starts being vocal about injecting liquidity, if they ever wanted to create a sense of panic that would be the way,’ said Tom Hougaard, chief market strategist at City Index.
Earlier, the European Central Bank said it had injected into the money market an unprecedented 94.84 bln eur in a move to meet a liquidity shortage amidst what it called ‘tensions’ in the euro area money markets.
And from Bloomberg:
“Today’s step by the ECB looks like a sign of panic,” said Sergi Martin, who helps oversee $9.6 billion at Credit Andorra in Andorra. “We might see more of this in the coming days.”
And on Technocrat, a reader relays an anecdote of how mortgage are having a dramatic effect on overall health:
Santa Clara county (south west of S.F.) has, for a few years now, suffered from little outbreaks of West Nile disease. Well, now the foreclosure rate is sufficiently high that a serious concern has become abandoned homes with unmaintained swimming pools in the yard, breeding mosquitos like mad.
It’s a small, small world.
PS: Of course, the Euro drops to the lowest it’s been in a while.
China has decided to start swinging its economic club, threatening the U.S. to affect the value of the dollar by selling some of the $1.3 trillion and change they own, unless the U.S. backs off the tough trade talk and economic chest banging that Congress has engaged on.
The Chinese government has begun a concerted campaign of economic threats against the United States, hinting that it may liquidate its vast holding of US treasuries if Washington imposes trade sanctions to force a yuan revaluation.
Two officials at leading Communist Party bodies have given interviews in recent days warning – for the first time – that Beijing may use its $1.33 trillion (£658bn) of foreign reserves as a political weapon to counter pressure from the US Congress. Shifts in Chinese policy are often announced through key think tanks and academies.
Described as China’s “nuclear option” in the state media, such action could trigger a dollar crash at a time when the US currency is already breaking down through historic support levels.
It would also cause a spike in US bond yields, hammering the US housing market and perhaps tipping the economy into recession. It is estimated that China holds over $900bn in a mix of US bonds.
Here’s the original Telegraph article. Technocrat has an editorial comment by zogger that minces no words:
Housing is just a single manifestation of the over all problem, it just is one of the “pops” here that could happen. Over inflating the money supply to postpone this collapse point is what caused this along with the deliberate market and interest rate manipulations. Nothing is based on real productivity anymore, it is based on how much smoke they can blow in front of how many mirrors.
Boy is Iran going to pay for this one…
Jim Cramer flips out on a CNBC interview and starts yelling about how bad things are for the fixed income market right now. He starts of easy enough with choice bits like
Bernake needs to open the discount window. That’s how bad things are out there. Bernake needs to focus on this.
and
Bernake is being an academic. It is no time to be an academic.
and then completely loses it and screams:
HE HAS NO IDEA OF HOW BAD IT IS OUT THERE! HE HAS NO IDEA! HE HAS NO IDEA! I HAVE TALKED TO THE HEADS OF EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THESE FIRMS IN THE LAST 72 HOURS AND HE HAS NO IDEA OF WHAT IT’S LIKE OUT THERE! NONE! AND BILL POOLE HAS NO IDEA OF WHAT IT’S LIKE OUT THERE! MY PEOPLE HAVE BEEN ON THE BUSINESS FOR 25 YEARS AND THEY ARE LOSING THEIR JOBS AND THESE FIRMS ARE GONNA GO OUT OF BUSINESS AND HE’S NUTS! THEY’RE NUTS! THEY KNOW NOTHING!
Funny thing is that he’s advocating not a reasonable economy but for the Fed to show up and bail out the financial institutions like Bear Stearns that have gone way over their heads and stand to loose big in the current subprime mortgage meltdown.
Found via BoingBoing.
A couple years ago, on my first visit to Romania, I was taking a bus with my girlfriend to the center of Bucharest. The bus ticket system worked like this: you buy a ticket on a booth someplace, go wait at the bus stop, and when the bus arrives you climb in by which ever door you find open and punch in the ticket yourself. No interaction with the driver or anybody else, no entering through just the front door. But what really caught my attention was that some people got on, punched in and looked briefly around, almost nervously reassuring themselves they’d been seen behaving as good citizens.
I pointed it out to Vero, and she told me that during Nicolae CeauÅŸescu’s regime, where the system had been put in place, members of the police used to travel on the buses in plain clothes, blending in with the crowd and checking for things they disapproved, such as people in a communist system trying to get a free ride on a bus.
Sixteen years after CeauÅŸescu’s death, some people were still looking over their shoulders for the secret police.
Now in Indianapolis, bus passengers are being randomly checked on bus stops by agents in plain clothes, who are looking for “suspicious activity”. People are being patted down and their bags searched to discard them as security threats, in a move that is most likely a pilot plan to see how well their subjects will adapt to the idea of being frisked by random people, even on such quotidian tasks as getting on a bus.
I imagine they can only hope it’ll work as well for them as it did on other regimes.
Dan Savage comes up with his own modest proposal to replace the abstinence education program.
If you believe that premarital sex is always wrong, Mr. President, then act like it. (Let the liberals laugh about Senator David Vitter, the conservative GOP senator from Louisiana caught up in the “D.C. Madam” scandal. At least Vitter had the decency to wait until after marriage before hiring hookers to diaper him.) The current status quo is unacceptable! We can’t continue to spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to talk teenagers into remaining abstinent while their gonads and hormones implore them to do the opposite.
I won’t spoil it for you.
Some months ago I wrote about Mallcity 14, a broadly painted caricature of a society that depends on people going into debt – even soldiers are supposed to pay for their own equipment. Things have absurdly gone beyond that point:
Former Army Specialist Rodriguez started getting bills for $700 for lost or damaged government property this summer. Although he was discharged some four years ago, bills recently arrived demanding payment, but giving no details on what or why — nor do they offer a way to dispute the charges.
“For doing my job you’re going to bill me?” Rodriguez said.
[...]
“They’ll just pound him and call him, call his employers, and make his life as miserable as they can until he pays up,” Ensign said.
[...]
Because it’s been four years since he left the Middle East, Rodriguez’s battalion was dissolved and his commanders are long gone. And despite repeated requests, the Army never could tell us what piece of equipment Rodriguez was billed for, nor would they get rid of the debt.
Fun times. Here’s the full CBS news item.
AT&T has a statement on their site where they (kind of) respond to the allegations that they helped the NSA in spying on American citizens.
The news media have carried reports alleging that AT&T is participating in an unlawful NSA terrorist surveillance program. Unfortunately, the law does not permit AT&T to respond to those allegations.
The U.S. Department of Justice has stated that AT&T may neither confirm nor deny AT&T’s participation in the alleged NSA program because doing so would cause “exceptionally grave harm to national security” and would violate both civil and criminal statutes. Under these circumstances, AT&T is not able to respond to such allegations.
So basically, they have a policy protecting the privacy of the government agencies, not yours. I guess I know which carrier not to go with when the telecommunications market gets opened around here.
I’ve been keeping quiet lately, partly occupied with other projects but mainly out of disgust with the general news that have been coming down the pipe. Two news items in a row have shaken me out of my self-imposed apathy.
First, an executive order allows the government to seize financial assets of anyone who’s deemed to threaten the efforts of stabilization in Iraq. This sounds like a handy tool against them terrorists, doesn’t it? The order itself is so broad, however, that it can easily be used against anybody opposing the war. From the White House site iself:
(B) undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq or to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people;
It looks to me like all those protestors and the people who want the U.S. to withdraw its troops would definitely fall under that category. A lot of people have pointed out the obvious: this basically throws the fifth amendment to the wind, which states (besides the right to not incriminate yourself) that:
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
I expect they’re reconciling this by classifing it as a time of public danger. Like a good friend who shall remained nameless pointed out, expect this to be used first against the pro-bono attorneys helping those detained in Guantánamo and elsewhere.
And then today, a new one.
As has become evident before, Bush’s administration believes that the separation of powers was not intended for a balancing of authority among several blocs, providing a system of checks and balances. No, it actually means that nobody else can tell him what to do, so the other powers might as well take a hike. The administration is now stating that the Justice Department just won’t be able to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials since, you know, the powers are separate and all.
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly, added: “It has long been understood that, in circumstances like these, the constitutional prerogatives of the president would make it a futile and purely political act for Congress to refer contempt citations to U.S. attorneys.”
[...]
“That’s a breathtakingly broad view of the president’s role in this system of separation of powers,” Rozell said. “What this statement is saying is the president’s claim of executive privilege trumps all.”
Can you see the punchline coming?
David B. Rifkin, who worked in the Justice Department and White House counsel’s office under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, praised the position and said it is consistent with the idea of a “unitary executive.” In practical terms, he said, “U.S. attorneys are emanations of a president’s will.” And in constitutional terms, he said, “the president has decided, by virtue of invoking executive privilege, that is the correct policy for the entire executive branch.”
Now take that to its logical extreme, and have a nice weekend.