Underpaid Genius: Archive

I Am Tired Of Obama Whining.

I am tired of Obama whining. I think he looked like an angry high school principal on Jon Stewart, basically telling the student body why we can’t have the prom this year.

Instead of whining about why we, the people, don’t understand all the things he’s done since entering the White House, I would like to see Obama channeling people’s righteous anger.

Don’t try to tell us we are crazy for being angry. Or that we just don’t understand the nuances of politics. Anger is a sensible response to being robbed, cheated, and marginalized.

Direct my anger by actually pointing your finger at those responsible for the mess we are in. Blame the bankers, not the people trying to save. Blame the financial industry for the housing boom, not the people being thrown onto the street. Blame global businesses, not workers who are unemployed.

We don’t want to hear you talking about trends, or sociological rhetoric. We want you to name names. We want to know who our enemies are.

This is not some meteorite that fell from the sky, some random sequence of events. Our situation is engineered.

We want to burn the wrongdoers at the stake, take away the privileges that allow businesses to strip mine our economy while moving all the jobs to emerging countries, and stop the 21st century policies that are bankrupting the future.

Get on that right way.

And oh, by the way: remember all the promises you made? Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell? The transparency in the health care reform process? According to Politifact, over 400 promises you made have either stalled (82), compromised (41), in the works (236), or broken (22). If you make promises, keep them. Don’t turn around now and suggest we are childish to expect you to take the appropriate actions to keep your promises.

Oct 31, 20105 notes

#mid-term elections #obama #politifact #angry angry

The lost decade core inflation rates.

Oct 31, 20105 notes

#the lost decade #japan #deflation

“A new poll shows that one out of three people haven’t decided who they’re going to vote for yet. And you know, for most people, it’s a tough choice. I mean, do you vote for the people who got us into this mess or for the people who can’t get us out of this mess?” —Jay Leno

Oct 31, 20106 notes

Friedman wags his fingers at us, saying that we, Americans, are failing because we aren’t enthusiastic capitalists anymore. After creating a globalized world (that has destroyed the middle class and driven millions from ‘working class’ into poverty) we aren’t working like the Indians and Chinese are, we don’t seem to have their boundless optimism.

What is most striking to me being in India this week, though, is how many Indians, young and old, expressed their concerns that America also seems at times to be running away from the world it invented and that India is adopting.

With President Obama scheduled to come here next week, at a time when more than a few U.S. politicians are loudly denouncing immigration reforms, free trade expansion and outsourcing, more than a few Indian business leaders want to ask the president: “What’s up with that?” Didn’t America export to the world all the technologies and free market dogmas that created this increasingly flat, global economic playing field — and now you’re turning against them?

“It is the Silicon Valley revolution which enabled the massive rise in tradable services and the U.S.-built telecommunication networks that allowed creation of the virtual office,” Nayan Chanda, the editor of YaleGlobal Online, wrote in the Indian magazine Businessworld this week. “But the U.S. seems sadly unprepared to take advantage of the revolution it has spawned. The country’s worn-out infrastructure, failing education system and lack of political consensus have prevented it from riding a new wave to prosperity.” Ouch.

Saurabh Srivastava, co-founder of the National Association of Software and Service Companies in India, explained that for the first 40 years of Indian independence, entrepreneurs here were looked down upon. India had lost confidence in its ability to compete, so it opted for protectionism. But when the ’90s rolled around, and India’s government was almost bankrupt, India’s technology industry was able to get the government to open up the economy, in part by citing the example of America and Silicon Valley. India has flourished ever since.

“America,” said Srivastava, “was the one who said to us: ‘You have to go for meritocracy. You don’t have to produce everything yourselves. Go for free trade and open markets.’ This has been the American national anthem, and we pushed our government to tune in to it. And just when they’re beginning to learn how to hum it, you’re changing the anthem. … Our industry was the one pushing our government to open our markets for American imports, 100 percent foreign ownership of companies and tough copyright laws when it wasn’t fashionable.”

Mr Friedman, are those workers getting health benefits? What about the levels of pollution and exposure to poisonous chemicals those workers are exposed to? You never touch on the demographic arbitrage involved, when older US workers, who labored for decades under the presumption of ongoing employment, now are unemployed because corporations simply hire young cheap workers in India or China, with lax environmental and worker regulations, and pay them no benefits. This way both worlds are made poorer. Yes, the Indians are happy to take the work, but the ones benefiting the most are the owners of the companies.

No, Friedman continues as an apologist for a flat, globalized world. But he never mentions that its a policy choice for us to have such a world. We decide what to tax and to regulate. His attitude is that this world exists, inexorably, and now we have to accept its stark realities.

If this were the 19th century, Friedman would have been telling the smallholders of England that enclosing the commons was good for them, despite the fact that it made most destitute, and drove them to the factories of the Midlands, to work like slaves.

Oct 31, 20105 notes

#thomas friedman #demographic arbitrage

Play

Oct 31, 20102 notes

#mid-term elections

Anti-China Trade Protectionism Rhetoric Growing

Mark Landler and Sewell Chan, Pressing China, U.S. Lines Up Allies on Issues Like Currency

Administration officials speak of an alarming loss of trust and confidence between China and the United States over the past two years, forcing them to scale back hopes of working with the Chinese on major challenges like climate change, nuclear nonproliferation and a new global economic order.

The latest source of tension is over reports that China is withholding shipments of rare-earth minerals, which the United States uses to make advanced equipment like guided missiles. Administration officials, clearly worried, said they did not know whether Beijing’s motivation was strategic or economic.

“This administration came in with one dominant idea: make China a global partner in facing global challenges,” said David Shambaugh, director of the China policy program at George Washington University. “China failed to step up and play that role. Now, they realize they’re dealing with an increasingly narrow-minded, self-interested, truculent, hyper-nationalist and powerful country.”

To counter what some officials view as a surge of Chinese triumphalism, the United States is reinvigorating cold war alliances with Japan and South Korea, and shoring up its presence elsewhere in Asia. This week, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will visit Vietnam for the second time in four months, to attend an East Asian summit meeting likely to be dominated by the China questions.

Next month, President Obama plans to tour four major Asian democracies — Japan, Indonesia, India and South Korea — while bypassing China. The itinerary is not meant as a snub: Mr. Obama has already been to Beijing once, and his visit to Indonesia has long been delayed. But the symbolism is not lost on administration officials.

Jeffrey A. Bader, a major China policy adviser in the White House, said China’s muscle-flexing became especially noticeable after the 2008 economic crisis, in part because Beijing’s faster rebound led to a “widespread judgment that the U.S. was a declining power and that China was a rising power.” But the administration, he said, is determined “to effectively counteract that impression by renewing American leadership.”

Political factors at home have contributed to the administration’s tougher posture. With the economy sputtering and unemployment high, Beijing has become an all-purpose target. In this Congressional election season, candidates in at least 30 races are demonizing China as a threat to American jobs.

At a time of partisan paralysis in Congress, anger over China’s currency has been one of the few areas of bipartisan agreement, culminating in the House’s overwhelming vote in September to threaten China with tariffs on its exports if Beijing did not let its currency, the renminbi, appreciate.

The trouble is that China’s own domestic forces may cause it to dig in its heels. With the Communist Party embarking on a transfer of leadership from President Hu Jintao to his anointed successor, Xi Jinping, the leadership is wary of changes that could hobble China’s growth.

There are also increasingly sharp divisions between China’s civilian leaders and elements of the People’s Liberation Army. Many Chinese military officers are openly hostile toward the United States, convinced that its recent naval exercises in the Yellow Sea amount to a policy of encircling China.

Trade protectionist rhetoric is growing — because it gives US politicians a hobgoblin that is easy to direct the population’s anger toward. We’ll see if the policy changes follow. Will the US begin to raise trade barriers and direct sanctions on China, to counter the renmimbi manipulation and the rare earths withholding?

Oct 27, 20102 notes

#china #rare earths #trade protectionism #rare earth

Oct 26, 20103 notes

#jim hall

Oct 26, 20107 notes

“The lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, which looks set to make sweeping gains in the midterm elections, is the direct result of a collapse of liberalism. It is the product of bankrupt liberal institutions, including the press, the church, universities, labor unions, the arts and the Democratic Party. The legitimate rage being expressed by disenfranchised workers toward the college-educated liberal elite, who abetted or did nothing to halt the corporate assault on the poor and the working class of the last 30 years, is not misplaced. The liberal class is guilty. The liberal class, which continues to speak in the prim and obsolete language of policies and issues, refused to act. It failed to defend traditional liberal values during the long night of corporate assault in exchange for its position of privilege and comfort in the corporate state. The virulent right-wing backlash we now experience is an expression of the liberal class’ flagrant betrayal of the citizenry.” — Chris Hedges

Oct 25, 20103,197 notes

Oct 25, 20101,983 notes

#Antonio López García

“

The Obama administration, facing a vexed relationship with China on exchange rates, trade and security issues, is stiffening its approach toward Beijing, seeking allies to confront a newly assertive power that officials now say has little intention of working with the United States.

In a shift from its assiduous one-on-one courtship of Beijing, the administration is trying to line up coalitions — among China’s next-door neighbors and far-flung trading partners — to present Chinese leaders with a unified front on thorny issues like the currency and their country’s territorial claims in the South China Sea.

The advantages and limitations of this new approach were on display over the weekend at a meeting of the world’s largest economies in South Korea. The United States won support for a concrete pledge to reduce trade imbalances, which will put more pressure on China to allow its currency to rise in value.

But Germany, Italy and Russia balked at an American proposal to place numerical limits on these imbalances, a step that would have further isolated Beijing. That left the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, to make an unscheduled stop in China on his way home from South Korea to discuss the deepening tensions over exchange rates with a top Chinese finance official.

Administration officials speak of an alarming loss of trust and confidence between China and the United States over the past two years, forcing them to scale back hopes of working with the Chinese on major challenges like climate change, nuclear nonproliferation and a new global economic order.

The latest source of tension is over reports that China is withholding shipments of rare-earth minerals, which the United States uses to make advanced equipment like guided missiles. Administration officials, clearly worried, said they did not know whether Beijing’s motivation was strategic or economic.

” —

- Mark Landler and Sewell Chan, Pressing China, U.S. Lines Up Allies on Issues Like Currency

Obama is missing a chance to beat the trade war drum in the weeks leading up to the mid-term elections. He should use the growing rancor between the US and China to rally the angry American electorate around his policies, which should be a face down of China. He should get angry, and blame them (and the oligarchs) for the growing trade imbalances, and call for a rapid reappraisal of our trade status with China.

But he will completely miss this opportunity, because he sees this as a minimal disruption in the status quo ante, instead of the new normal.

Oct 25, 20105 notes

#china trade war #obama #rare earths #rare earths trade war #clean energy technology

President Hamid Karzai acknowledged Monday that he regularly receives bags of cash from the Iranian government containing millions of dollars, saying he uses the off-the-books fund to pay expenses incurred in the course of doing his job.

Mr. Karzai made his remarks during a rambling, sometimes incoherent appearance at a news conference during which he accused the United States of funding the “killing” of Afghans by paying thousands of gunmen as private security contractors to guard buildings and convoys here. It was the latest outburst in a bitter dispute with the United States and its NATO allies that has taken on an increasingly anti-Western tone. The Iranian payments are intended to drive a wedge between Mr. Karzai and his American and NATO benefactors, Afghan officials have said.

Duing the news conference, Mr. Karzai confirmed a report in The New York Times on Sunday that said his chief of staff, Umer Daudzai, was covertly receiving as much as $6 million in cash — often stuffed in bags — from Iranian officials.

“They do give us bags of money — yes, yes, it is done,” Mr. Karzai said. “We are grateful to the Iranians for this.”

“Patriotism has a price,” he said.

Ka-boosh!

That’s an astonishing admission. The leader of Afghanistan is taking money from an extremely partisan foreign power, one with its hand in Afghan, Iraqi, and Lebanese politics. A giant slush fund. And we are to suppose there are not strings attached?

Oct 25, 20104 notes

#karzai #afghanistan #iran #iranian slush fund

“The Greenland ice sheet melted at a rate that was 25 to 50 percent higher this year than normal, according to Danish research scientists; about 500 gigatons of ice are estimated to have melted this summer. Some scientists express caution on the results but acknowledge that melting has indeed been above average. [Denmark.dk]” —John Collins Rudolf, On Our Radar: Meltdown on Greenland Ice Sheet

Oct 25, 2010

#climate change #greenland

Rising food prices and shortages could cause instability in many countries as the cost of staple foods and vegetables reached their highest levels in two years, with scientists predicting further widespread droughts and floods.

Although food stocks are generally good despite much of this year’s harvests being wiped out in Pakistan and Russia, sugar and rice remain at a record price.

Global wheat and maize prices recently jumped nearly 30% in a few weeks while meat prices are at 20-year highs, according to the key Reuters-Jefferies commodity price indicator. Last week, the US predicted that global wheat harvests would be 30m tonnes lower than last year, a 5.5% fall. Meanwhile, the price of tomatoes in Egypt, garlic in China and bread in Pakistan are at near-record levels.

“The situation has deteriorated since September,” said Abdolreza Abbassian of the UN food and agriculture organisation. “In the last few weeks there have been signs we are heading the same way as in 2008.

[…]

Mounting anger has greeted food price inflation of 21% in Egypt in the last year, along with 17% rises in India and similar amounts in many other countries. Prices in the UK have risen 22% in three years.

The governments of Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Indonesia, Brazil and the Philippines have all warned of possible food shortages next year, citing floods and droughts in 2010, expected extreme weather next year, and speculation by traders who are buying up food stocks for release when prices rise.

Oct 25, 201010 notes

#food crisis

Oct 25, 20101 note

“

There’s the temptation to say that it was, more or less, like any other week in the NFL. But while it was, in many ways – the brain carnage on the field, fans reveling in palsied atavism, players revealing previously unimagined universes of self-righteous delusion – what made the past week worse was what happened when the football discourse set itself to the task of Getting Serious About All This. To be fair, the issue of how best to keep NFL players from destroying each others’ brains is an exceptionally tricky problem – the physiological results of extreme violence will be a part of football as long as violence is a part of football, and both generalized extremity and violence fall somewhere between “part of football” and “essentially the whole of football.” Mitigating violence in football is like trying to mitigate avarice in finance – wise insofar as violence and avarice lead to bad things, but fundamentally doomed insofar as both are the engines of the endeavors they poison. In both cases, though, the discursive failure might be more glaring than the substantive one.

A series of stricter punishments for dangerous and already illegal tackles is not any more an attempt to turn the NFL into a violence-free flag football league any more than the government’s (similarly limp, similarly full-throated and half-hearted) attempt to, say, regulate the trade in CDOs is an attempt to replace the free market with a Hitler-inspired Islamo-Socialistical Kenyan-style barter system. But this sort of thing is tough to talk about, because anything that speaks to an essential rottenness at the core of something one kind of likes and hasn’t really thought all that much about, honestly, is going to make one feel bad, both about liking that thing and not noticing all that rot. And so the easy answers: thus the revelations of the economic collapse – that the market was not self-regulating, was not working, did not even make any fucking sense for the most part – lead to the reassuring self-righteousness of Randian fury or peevish CliffNotes Misesianism, which suggest that someone else – gross, grasping poors or stupid government – screwed up this objectively very good thing.

The long-running, still-intensifying conversation surrounding just how incredibly bad for one’s health football is – and how negligent essentially everyone involved with the game has been in allowing that to happen – delivers the same sick drop-in-the-gut sensation once it becomes clear just how bad things have been allowed to get. Alan Schwarz has had a blockbuster piece on this subject in the New York Times seemingly every couple weeks; earlier this week, he discovered that the same helmet that you’ll take from Channing Crowder’s cold dead hands has been not-tested to ensure that it meets essentially no safety standards. In both cases, the sense is something like the old “Saturday Night Live” skit in which an ordinary conversation in the backseat of a car suddenly gives way to the revelation that, holy shit, a cat is driving. At which point the car goes flying over a cliff.

Tea Party fucks concerned about being herded onto the road to serfdom don’t see or can’t imagine that a crass and ungovernable plutocracy – something crueler and arguably more arbitrary and every bit as un-free – is that road’s other terminus. NFL players concerned about more vigorous enforcement of rules turning the NFL into a lame-o flag football league are similarly unwilling or unable to see the other end of the continuum – the passive, negligent creation of a sport so dangerous, insular and brutal that only the most desperate will participate. NFL writers commonly use “gladiator” as a compliment, but it was not, historically, much of a career choice. It wasn’t a choice at all, actually – gladiatorial combat was waged between prisoners, between slaves.

” —David Roth, Unscrambling An Egg

Oct 25, 2010

#american football #ban the armor

Negging

Low-grade insults meant to undermine the self-confidence of a woman so she might be more vulnerable to your advances. This is something no decent guy would do. They say that the assholes get the girls, but I can spot negging a mile away and I reject these fuckers straight off.

Everywhere there is an insecure pretty girl, there is some guy negging. Negging can be so subtle, it’s pratically undetectable.

I was wondering why that guy was complimenting me while putting me down. He was negging of course.

Oct 25, 2010

#negging #dating