ch.annel2-i.s-n.ow-a.ngry

The nation’s debt as a percentage of all economic activity, while growing alarmingly now, is not at historic highs. The portion held outside the American government, here and abroad, in the form of Treasury securities was $5.8 trillion at the end of last month.

That is a relatively modest 40.8 percent of the nation’s annual income, far below the 109 percent coming out of World War II or the nearly 50 percent in much of the 1990s.

Put another way, if the entire national income were dedicated to debt repayment, the debt would be paid off in less than five months. For most of the years since 1940, paying down the debt would have taken longer, putting a greater strain on income.

It’s like they’re not even listening to what they say. If the entire national income (which I’m guessing they’re basing on GDP, which is on it’s way down) was dedicated to paying off the national debt, it would take at least 8-10 months. You must remember the GDP calculates in ‘phantom money,’ such as the money homeowners would be paying themselves in rent as if they were renting their houses from themselves. I’ll leave it as an exercise of the reader to try to figure out what percentage of GDP that is, the point is the NYT isn’t even listening to themselves.

I think what they meant was the foreign-owned portion of our debt. Anyway, their scenario is unrealistic, because we’re spending at least 400 billion a year in interest, at least according to how the NYT calculated interested on Treasury bills on page one of the article. They say at 4% (what long-ass-term treasuries are selling for, short term are negative percentage or near so), an extra one trillion in debt equals 40 billion a year, and that’s only for new debt, all the debt already sold may have locked in interest rates based on the prevailing rates of the day. They also didn’t calculate how much of our income currently services the debt, which the US makes monthly payments on (and since we’re in deficit-only spending at this point, I can only assume that the debt is serviced with more debt, like paying off one credit card with another, and I assure you that is a wildly losing prospect.)

Also what’s not mention in this article on debt and deficit is the fact that the White House *refuses* to calculate the cost of war borrowing into the deficit. So instead of the deficit being a nice, non-half-trillion $455 billion dollars, the total is more like $562 billion deficit this year, and thusly the deficit has been underreported since at least 2003-4.

At least the poor, unsuspecting NYT flack got torn apart in the comments, rightly so. At first I thought there were no comments, turns out they just hide them on a separate page. Good thing I found them, check this out:

The current aggregate Federal deficit is $10 trillion dollars, and will likely increase by $1 trillion in the current fiscal year. Add to this amount, the unfunded debt obligations of the US government to Social Security ($7 trillion) and Medicare ($34 trillion dollars), and you arrive at a total aggregate government debt of $51 trillion dollars, or about $400,000 per US household. Using these numbers, US government debt is now at epidemic proportions, regardless of what economists say about the debt being a relatively small proportion of GDP. Most people do not realize that the money workers are paying into Social Security and Medicare today is not being placed in a bank for their later use. The government spends that money as soon as it gets it, meaning the government owes people paying into the system today for future benefits when they retire. This years’ cost of living increase for Social Security was 5.8%, and healthcare costs continue to increase at rates above inflation. The impact of Social Security and Medicare obligations on Federal borrowing will increase significantly with time, amplifying US government debt obligations even further

When the US government debt bubble bursts, the magnitude of the consequences will dwarf the pain associated with today’s current global economic crisis. Who will bailout the US government when its creditors cash in their US Treasury bills, and decide not to renew them?

As if the $500+ trillion derivatives market wasn’t scary enough.

First, a truism that NO ONE gets: The only easy money being had is the money going to the guy selling you the plan to make easy money.

Second, a Newsweek quote via the Mishblog:

The federal agency charged with backstopping pension benefits for 44 million Americans has understated the risks of its new investment policy, a congressional watchdog said Monday.

The PBGC said earlier this year that it would take a more aggressive investment approach by investing more in stocks and adding new alternative investments, such as real estate and private equity funds.

The agency, which has assets of $68 billion, hopes the strategy will help it close a $14 billion gap between those assets and its liabilities. Otherwise, taxpayers could be called upon to pony up extra funding, the director of the PBGC has warned.

As a well-educated taxpayer, I would like to call bullshit on this: taxpayers will not be ponying up the extra funding, foreign sovereign wealth funds will be loaning America money to pony up the extra funding. Taxpayers will be ponying up extra debt without any recourse or way to say no.

I say no taxation without at least a kiss on the back of the neck when we are being royally screwed in the asshole.

Things are not OK.

“I fear we might start eating one another. We will never stop protesting until traders accept the notes.”

I guess Ted Turner was right. Only he predicted 50 years from now, not tomorrow.

Though agriculturally fertile, the violence and anarchy in Somalia makes it dependent largely on food imports.

Sad fucking world. Go read Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix.

Local authorities and traders held crisis meetings in Mogadishu on Tuesday in a desperate move to quell the growing anger among residents of one of the world’s most impoverished and well-armed cities.

Correlation? Probably obvious, but under the radar for some voters.

U.S. crude oil futures rose to a new record high for a second day on Tuesday, with crude oil futures for June delivery touching a record of $120.70 a barrel.

London Brent crude oil futures set a new record of $119.03 a barrel.

Supply disruptions in Nigeria have helped push oil to new peaks. Royal Dutch Shell’s production from Nigeria, for example, is down by about 164,000 barrels per day.

Strikes and attacks by militants on oil installations have caused a succession of supply problems in the OPEC member country, the world’s eighth-biggest oil exporter.

Weakness in the U.S. dollar has also contributed to oil’s rise, as this had boosted the price of commodities denominated in the U.S. currency.

FUN!

UBS, the largest Swiss bank, said Tuesday that it expected to cut about 5,500 jobs, including 2,600 in its investment banking unit, as it announced a first-quarter loss of about $10.9 billion.

FUCKED!

UBS wrote down $19 billion in soured American subprime mortgage securities and other investments in the first quarter, bringing its total write-downs since the beginning of the credit crisis to about $38 billion.

40$ bil in less than a full year, more still to come, and currently all our fault. Wait until the rest of the world starts feeling the pop after their bubbles that were blown from ours pop.

Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida has been fighting to cut 10 cents from the state’s gasoline tax for two weeks in July. Lawmakers in Missouri, New York and Texas have also proposed a summer break from state gas taxes, while candidates for governor in Indiana and North Carolina are sparring over relief ideas of their own.

Oh, RIGHT, cuz paying $3.90 a gallon as opposed to $4.00 is SO FUCKING SIGNIFICANT. If you have a 12 gallon tank like my and you’re completely dry, you fill up - you save $1.20!!!!! HOLY SHIT! I’m fucking rich again! I can spend that buck twenty on coffee! But only because Starfucks is lowering their prices!!!!! We’re in great shape! Economy’s coming back, food is good, oil supply is totally in the positive and prices are coming down across the board!

Right?

Oh, no, wait, that last paragraph was total fucking bullshit.

We’re boned.

In 2005, federal authorities concluded that a Monsanto consultant had visited the home of an Indonesian official and, with the approval of a senior company executive, handed over an envelope stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. The money was meant as a bribe to win looser environmental regulations for Monsanto’s cotton crops, according to a court document. Monsanto was also caught concealing the bribe with fake invoices.

A few years earlier, in the age of Enron, these kinds of charges would probably have resulted in a criminal indictment. Instead, Monsanto was allowed to pay $1 million and avoid criminal prosecution by entering into a monitoring agreement with the Justice Department.

In a major shift of policy, the Justice Department, once known for taking down giant corporations, including the accounting firm Arthur Andersen, has put off prosecuting more than 50 companies suspected of wrongdoing over the last three years.

Instead, many companies, from boutique outfits to immense corporations like American Express, have avoided the cost and stigma of defending themselves against criminal charges with a so-called deferred prosecution agreement, which allows the government to collect fines and appoint an outside monitor to impose internal reforms without going through a trial. In many cases, the name of the monitor and the details of the agreement are kept secret.

It’s bribery made legal - oops, we broke the law, here’s some money, don’t prosecute us and don’t tell anyone about it.

Deferred prosecutions have become a favorite tool of the Bush administration. But some legal experts now wonder if the policy shift has led companies, in particular financial institutions now under investigation for their roles in the subprime mortgage debacle, to test the limits of corporate anti-fraud laws.

Some lawyers suggest that companies may be willing to take more risks because they know that, if they are caught, the chances of getting a deferred prosecution are good. “Some companies may bear the risk” of legally questionable business practices if they believe they can cut a deal to defer their prosecution indefinitely, Mr. Khanna said.

Way cheaper and better on the propoganda PR side of things than lawsuits and other muck like that. At least all those companies involved in getting people killed in Iraq (by sending them to their deaths as employees or shooting them to death as Iraqis) don’t have to even worry about the bribery money, since they have been made immune from any law on the face of this earth thanks to the Bush administration. Seriously, can anyone look at this law and say that it’s a good thing with a straight face, I mean, without being payed to by a corporation? It’s already hard enough to get anyone to admit responsibility in a corporate environment, and the bad-deed-doers usually go unpunished, but this is beyond the limit.

Deferred prosecution agreements, or D.P.A.’s, have become controversial because of a medical supply company’s agreement to pay up to $52 million to the consulting firm of John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, as an outside monitor to avoid criminal prosecution. 

If they’re paying that much to avoid prosecution, it must mean they’re killing (or at least substantially harming) people through negligence (or whatever reason) and stand to lose substantially more than $52 million dollars in the ensuing judicial and media feeding frenzy that would go on when their criminal trespass came to light.

At a Congressional hearing last month, Mr. Ashcroft defended the agreements, saying that they avoided “destroying entire corporations” through criminal indictments.

And god forbid any red-blooded money-making American corporation suffer for their criminal offenses.

“Prosecutors understand that a corporate indictment can be a corporate death sentence,” he said. “A deferred prosecution can avoid the catastrophic collateral consequences and costs that are associated with corporate conviction.”

Such consequences which should only be handed down to actual American citizens. Which, technically, corporations are one of. Only with near-unlimited resources and no-one to blame when things go horribly wrong. Sorry our medicine made your heart explode, company policy says we don’t have to care, fuck you.

The agreements were once rare, but their use has skyrocketed in the current administration, with 35 deals last year alone by the Justice Department, lawyers who follow the trend said. Banks, financial service companies and auditors have frequently entered into such agreements, including recent ones involving Merrill Lynch, the Bank of New York, AmSouth Bank, KPMG and others. Beyond financial crimes, deferred agreements have been used in lieu of prosecuting companies — though not individuals — for export control violations, obscenity violations, Medicare and Medicaid fraud, kickbacks and environmental violations.

Shocking. Sho-cking.

Timothy Dickinson, a lawyer in Washington who was the outside monitor for Monsanto, agreed. Corporate lenders caught up in the mortgage scandals should not assume they will be given the chance for a deferred prosecution, Mr. Dickinson said, and the Justice Department should “insist on a guilty plea” rather than offering a deal.

“It’s a tool that will remain to be used by prosecutors in appropriate circumstances, but not every circumstance,” he said. “It depends how egregious the conduct is.”

We’ll see. Oh yes, we shall see.

“It’s 3 a.m., and your children are safe and asleep. But there is a phone in the White House and its ringing. Something is happening in the world.”

That’s stupid. 1 - there’s no red phone in the White House. 2 - there’s always something happening in the world.

Clinton held a meeting in Washington on Thursday with top military leaders and experts, and said their support showed confidence in her ability to make important national security decisions, including those in which “lives are on the line.”

Um. Having a meeting with someone doesn’t necessarily mean they support you, or even like you. Hell, ask anyone who’s ever worked an office job, or worked in Congress. In fact, sometimes you have meetings with people that hate you.

Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson criticized Obama’s promise to be more aggressive in the aftermath of Tuesday’s losses and likened him to independent prosecutor Ken Starr, a lightning rod for Democratic criticism during the 1998 probe that led to President Bill Clinton’s impeachment.

So Obama says he’ll be more aggressive in responding to Clinton’s criticism, which immediately got him criticized more aggressively by Clinton for saying he’d be more… you get the idea.

Clinton, looking to emphasize national security, held a meeting in Washington with top military leaders and experts such as former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, former Navy Secretary John Dalton and several retired officers who voiced their support.

It’s not until they get into an article about Obama’s fundraising that the mention that the military leaders actually did support Clinton.

Andean leaders locked in a dispute over a Colombian military raid to kill rebels hiding in Ecuador will confront each other on Friday at a summit dominated by the crisis threatening regional stability.

Notice how the candidates aren’t talking about this issue at all, or at least it’s not being reported in the media if they are. But they sure are lambasting one another about their experience with foreign affairs and diplomacy.

US says sends warship off coast of Lebanon

New Sanctions Aimed at Syrians

USDA Shuts Down Congressional Audit

Bush: US Is Not Headed Into Recession

1 in 100 US Adults Behind Bars, New Study Says

Bush Disputes Obama on Diplomacy

Bush urges wiretap immunity law

Are you fucking kidding me? The greatest country in the world you say?

Hey, Rome was the greatest empire in the world. Hm. Look at them now, in a museum.

“shattered the barriers meant to protect human dignity”,

No such thing. I didn’t see any fucking piece of this barrier around my dignity. And really, Reuters, what’s with the fucked up misplacement of quotation marks in today’s article, half of them misplaced in front of other punctuation, half of them coming after in the proper place.

I have a message. Don’t trust popes.  In fact, don’t trust people who are trying to protect their own power in the world.

In an article on CNet addressing the group Anonymous’ efforts to get the Church of Scientology’s mishaps covered in news media in a sane way, by posting videos on youtube, the article has the following keywords and tags:

Topics: Criminal Hackers, Security

Tags: security, denial of service, defacement, Church of Scientology, YouTube

Absolutely no mention of ANYTHING involving criminality, hacking, security, denial of service or defacement was mentioned ANYWHERE in the article. The only thins mentioned was the CoS and YouTube. If posting home-made videos to YouTube is criminil hacking, defacement and denial of service, well….

“Are you about worn out of all the television commercials you’ve been seeing, mostly about politics? I don’t blame you. At this time of year, sometimes it’s nice to pull aside from all that and just remember that what really matters is the celebration of the birth of Christ, and being with our family and our friends,” Huckabee said in the ad.

The spot has drawn attention from some because in the background as the camera pans across, the edges of what look to be a bookshelf in the background form a Christian cross.

Found this laughable bit of news in an article about how Hillary “feels the momentum building” (i.e. isn’t ahead in the polls). So, this ad is in question because the bookshelf may or may not be symbolic of the Christian cross. Not because he said “what really matters is the celebration of the birth of Christ.” That apparently isn’t Christian at all. However a bookshelf sporting 4 right angles, as many bookshelves do, especially the wall-to-wall kinds of fancy politicos, is a horribly subtle symbol that Mike Huckabee is indeed *gasp* Christian. After this Bush administration, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that people aren’t paying attention to what anyone says.

The U.S. military blames fighters recruited outside Iraq for many of the suicide attacks targeting U.S. and Iraqi forces and has previously criticized neighbors such as Syria for not checking the flow of foreign militants across borders into Iraq.

Syrian Border Guard: “Sir, are you a member of al Qaeda or other known militant groups, are you planning to fuck some shit up in Iraq?”

Militant: “No Sir.”

SBG: “Can you prove this?”

Militant rummages around in bag full of grenades and bullets, pulls out a card: “Here you go, it’s my ‘Not a member of al Qaeda card,’ which I believe is still valid”

SBG: “Looks like it’s good till ‘08, have fun in Iraq, son.”

Militant floors it and desert-peels out. Later, in the background, some explosions happen.

I mean, really, do they expect dude to be like “Yeah, I’m in al Qaeda, I guess you should arrest me now?” Don’t we patrol Iraq’s borders? Why are we letting foreign fighters in to the country?