... but I digress ...: December 2009

2009-12-20

Jingle Bell Rag

Annual 'bump':

Happy Holidays from Above the Garage Productions

It's Jingle Bells played ragtime style and very fast, performed by yours truly.

Woot!

© 2005 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.

2009-12-17

Nano-Plasm FTW

There's still time to order Nano-Plasm and get it by Christmas if you use 2-day shipping!

Be the first on your block to find out what those spirographs are all about!

(More blog posts about Nano-Plasm...)
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© 2005-2009 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

2009-12-13

Paul A. Samuelson, Who Reshaped Economics, Dies at 94 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com

Paul A. Samuelson, Who Reshaped Economics, Dies at 94 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com: "The textbook introduced generations of students to the revolutionary ideas of John Maynard Keynes, the British economist who in the 1930s developed the theory that modern market economies could become trapped in depression and would then need a strong push from government spending or tax cuts, in addition to lenient monetary policy, to restore them. Many economics students would never again rest comfortably with the 19th-century view that private markets would cure unemployment without need of government intervention."

Too bad this guy died. I wish he had lived another 10 years so he could see just how wrong he truly was. But I don't think even directly experiencing how poorly his ideas worked would have convinced him. Japan has been following this nonsensical teaching for the last 20 years (pushing 30 years now) and all they have to show for it is increased debt and stagflation. So even in the face of evidence that government can not spend its way out of a recession Dr. Samuelson would still have been a believer.

If you read the whole article you'll see that Dr. Samuelson advised President Kennedy to cut taxes to get out of a recession. No doubt, leaving money in the economy, even at some cost to the government in terms of interest payments, might actually help, as the economy grows enough to cover the additional interest payments.

But just because it works once in a while and at a small scale does not mean that a government like ours with tens of trillions of dollars in public debt with a constituency with another tens of trillions in private debt can spend its way out of the sinkhole of debt that has been created. Japan, which 20 years ago had a huge surplus, and was therefore in a much stronger position to potentially stimulate their own economy, has utterly failed at the task.

The reason is simple - governments don't create productivity. Governments can spend money and governments and print money but governments don't generally create much of anything except paperwork.

Unfortunately the die is already cast. When the stock market crashes again and everyone once again panics we'll be told that we have a liquidity crisis and only intervention by the central banks can save us. They will print another couple of trillion dollars and give it to the banks who will use it once again to buy their own stock offerings. More savings by the middle class will be wiped out and another 10 million people will be out of work. In the meantime, useless politicians will tool around in limousines and pat themselves on the back for the important work they are doing. Ugh.

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© 2005-2009 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

2009-12-12

Obama Lincoln

Obama's Big Sellout : Rolling Stone: "What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside."

*Sigh*.

Obama says he admires Abraham Lincoln and that Team of Rivals was a huge influence.

I guess he paid particular attention to the part where Lincoln and his Secretary of the Treasury discovered a clever way to pay for the Civil War: print money.

I guess The Peace President needs to print a lot of money because we have a number of wars going: The War on Drugs; The War on Poverty; The War in Iraq; The War In Afghanistan; The War against THE CLIMATE; and I'm sure there are more.

Taken together, the rash of appointments with ties to Bob Rubin may well represent the most sweeping influence by a single Wall Street insider in the history of government. "Rather than having a team of rivals, they've got a team of Rubins," says Steven Clemons, director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. "You see that in policy choices that have resuscitated — but not reformed — Wall Street."

In fact, Obama is doing what Lincoln did - appointing insiders. The so-called "Team of Rivals" was Lincoln's cabinet. It's "ex post facto" storytelling by Doris Kearns Goodwin that Lincoln hired his team because he wanted alternative views. In fact he wanted insiders to balance his own outsider status ... and if they had conflicts with each other then he resolved them - but Ms. Goodwin gets the cart before the horse.

It's the same for Obama. He's the outsider but 100% of the people around him are Washington insiders.

Our presidential elections are a no-win situation. The president is a figure head. Washington is run by the insiders who have formed a bureaucratic cesspool of toxic insider deals. I guess as figure-heads go Obama is doing a fine job - he just got the Nobel Peace Prize for not being George Bush.

Today, the great enabler, of course, is the Federal Reserve, working jointly with the banks and the politicians to ensure both groups have plenty of scratch. Lincoln was on top of the situation in that regard as well, as he created a central bank that printed money to fund the war. Luckily that bank eventually failed just as the Federal Reserve will. All paper money eventually fails just as all Ponzi schemes eventually fail. Figuring out the timing is pretty tricky but one day the people in Bernie Madoff's fund were millionaires and then five minutes later they were completely broke. When it happens, it happens fast. Anyone with something called a dollar is a participant in the Federal Reserve Ponzi scheme and when it collapses it will happen very quickly.

It's best to be prepared. If you can figure out how, that is. I leave that as an exercise for the reader.
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© 2005-2009 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

2009-12-09

Stephen Colbert on the Federal Reserve

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Fed's Dead

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Reform

Apparently there are parts of the media that are not under the control of the monetary elite!

(Click on "Fed's Dead" title in case the movie won't play.)
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© 2005-2009 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

Elizabeth Warren on TARP

2009-12-07

Tivoli One

I've always wanted to listen to a Tivoli One and last weekend I got to do it in a decent, quiet listening environment. (That really is one, isn't it? Don't tell me it's a knock-off ... I couldn't stand the truth! I can't find that exact model online.)

.. and indeed ... it sounded wonderful.

(And that's not my book: the spouse was reading it.)

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© 2005-2009 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

... but I digress ...