U.S. Q2 current account deficit widens to $166 billion

The U.S. current account deficit widened to a record $166.2 billion in the second quarter from $147.2 billion in the first quarter, the Commerce Department estimated Tuesday

The deficit increased to a record 5.7 percent of gross domestic product during the June quarter

The current account deficit is the broadest measure of the nation’s economic balance sheet with the rest of the world. It encompasses both trade and capital flows.

Thanks to the US of A for the transfer of $166 billion in U.S. financial assets, stocks, bonds, etc to foreign countries. Let´s hope they will use it wisely.

Usually forgotten in the comments and calculations – the interest, dividends, and capital gains earned on these assets in subsequent years will go to foreigners and will therefore largely escape US taxation.

This years new transfer to foreigners will be over $600 billion. Even if foreigners may only get a meager 3% dividend on this, there will be $18 billion of US generated profits per year in the forseeable future that will not be taxed in the US but will help other nations budgets.

There is a big hole in the pocket of Uncle Sam and someone will need to fix this.

Rush Limbaugh Becomes Official Unpaid Advisor to Bush-Cheney ’04

I have become, and have been for a while, an official, unpaid advisor to the Bush-Cheney ’04 campaign, and we decided to go public with this because there’s no problem with it whatsoever.
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There’s no conflict here. There’s absolutely no conflict whatsoever. The line has been successfully blurring now for years and years and years.

Please help Rush in his old/new unblurred capacity. Find a special line for his old/new unblurred poster. Submit your entries in the comments section and you’ll have a chance to win today´s grand prize – an all-expenses-paid three night stay at Abu Ghraib (cold water showers standard, warm water is extra).

May the best win.

Putin is severly tightening the central grip on the 89 entities that make up todays Russia.

Putin proposed, first, to scrap direct gubernatorial elections, replacing them with a system in which the president submits nominees to regional legislatures for approval. He also called for doing away with first-past-the-post contests for the State Duma; instead, the lower house is to be composed exclusively of candidates elected from party lists. (Moscow Times Report and Editorial)

Putin sees the ramified democratic and federal structures as endangering the state. As a consequence he is recreating the traditional centralism of Russia and seems to do so within the consens of the majority. He has also inititated two additional major policy changes. First

Putin appointed his confidant and Cabinet chief of staff Dmitry Kozak as the head of a new federal commission that will try to get at the roots of terrorism by tackling poverty and poor education in the North Caucasus.

and second

Putin, reiterating threats by senior military officials last week, said the military is ready to carry out preemptive strikes on terrorist bases anywhere in the world.

The first measure will be positive, if Putin manages to put enough money behind it and if he is able to this over long years. The second is a clear warning to the US. Stay out of our sphere, or we will hit back – chess is our national sport, we know how to play it.

Is all of this positive? My gut feeling is yes. The Russian people were disenfranchised by the breakdown of the Sowjet imperium. The Yelzin wodka induced anarchie did put Russias wealth into the hand of a small class of oligarchs. Live expectations did sink from 65.0 years in 1987 to 57.3 in 1994. Infant mortality did increase from 17.6 per 1000 in 1990 to 20.3 in 1993. The state nearly dissolved and crime took over.

Since 1999 the economy is back on track and the state stabilizes. Fortunatly the Sowjet Union dissolved without much bloodshed, relations with neighbor states are tolerable. The next step Russia will have to take is to consolidate its strategic independence and clean the internal social mess. It chances to do so are quite good as it is economically self sufficient and the low birth rate insures imperial ambitions are contained.

In the typical Russian family all sons are equal. Emmanuel Todd sees this as the base of a Russian universalism in contrast to the individualism most western cultures have developed. Maybe it is also the inherited base for the steps Putin is taking now.

Thucydides comments about the election campaign:

Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any.
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The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries.
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The fair proposals of an adversary were met with jealous precautions by the stronger of the two, and not with a generous confidence. Revenge also was held of more account than self-preservation.
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The cause of all these evils was the lust for power arising from greed and ambition; and from these passions proceeded the violence of parties once engaged in contention.
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Meanwhile the moderate part of the citizens perished between the two, either for not joining in the quarrel, or because envy would not suffer them to escape.

The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides

Here are pictures from today´s morning fights in Baghdad. 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.

The pictures were taken by Gaith, a friend of Iraq Blogger Salam Pax (old blog, new blog).

Gaith reports 20 dead and 48 wounded. According to Aljazeera´s report, an Iraqi photographer working for Getty Images were also wounded slightly by flying shrapnel. Gaith looks ok though. Good, we need these pictures.

Yesterday Gaith made a picture showing Allawi´s hand bandaged because he broke his hand when he banged a table during an argument with an aid. Was he talking with Negroponte? Maybe, but then, that aid relationship is supposed to be the other way round.

In his new book Seymore Hersh claims that in late 2002 a CIA analyst, FBI agents and a military lawyer at Guantánamo reported to the Defense Department about prisoner abuses. The reports went up to the level of Condoleezza Rice and Rumsfeld. Nothing was done. In late 2003 a military officer in Iraq reported abuses in Abu Ghraib directly to General Abizaid and his deputy. Again, nothing was done.

Meanwhile the Department of Defense preemptivly issues a statement claiming that:

Mr. Seymor Hersh’s upcoming book apparently contains many of the numerous unsubstantiated allegations and inaccuracies which he has made in the past based upon unnamed sources.

But that’s just the sideshow. To Rumsfeld it is more important to look at the differences between various abuses and killings. He does so when he says:

Does it rank up there with chopping off someone’s head on television? It doesn’t. It doesn’t.

Chopping off someone’s head or struck[ing the detainee] in the head with the butt of a gun so he dies seem to have similar outcomes. Why do they differ in ranking?

The difference in Rumsfeld´s mind must be in the words “on television“. Showing the first murder recorded on TV rather then to just take fun pictures of the dead like after the second is the nuance that ranks the incidents. It is not deeds, it’s the type of reporting done on them that makes them harmful.

Thanks to Mr. Rumsfeld we can now see the difference between defined terrorism (PDF), politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets, and the firing from helicopters into civilian crowds. Whatever is reported on TV ranks up.

Dear Seymore Hersh, dear Aljazerra, please the reports coming.

news and opinions…

The reminiscence of the twin towers fades into background leaving room for perversities like the above and the Wars on Terra that are brought on us in the name of the 9/11 victims and other terror prey. Let us not be duped into such suppressions.

Spanish author Javier Marías writes:

It’s also certainly true that for most of us, not a day goes by without remembering the almost 200 victims of March 11, with pain and a keen awareness that chance, fate and bad luck continue to be as important today as they were in humanity’s less foreseeing epochs.

Here in Spain, we don’t feel as if we are at war because we aren’t. And neither are the inhabitants of the United States, however vociferously many Americans may insist that they are.
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There is no war against terrorism. There can be no such thing against an enemy that remains dormant most of the time and is almost never visible. It’s simply another of life’s inevitable troubles, and all we can do as we continue to combat it is repeat Cervantes’s famous phrase “Paciencia y barajar”: “Have patience, and keep shuffling the cards.”

There is no such thing as a war on terrorism

There seems to be a more and more different apperception of today´s world in the United States and the Rest of the World.

Compare the new Washington Post/ABC News poll numbers, with Bush leading Kerry by 52% to 43%, and the Pipa international poll where Kerry has a 46% to 20% lead.

One may diagnose that American exceptionalism is evolving into autism. Some behaviour looks increasingly to fit the symptoms and as the individual numbers are increasing rapidly, the nation may be just following the trend.

But then, maybe there are just two planets Earth circling the sun.

Section 110101 of the ´Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994´ will expire in four days. In the 2000 campaign Bush was expected to reauthorize the law. During his confirmation hearing in January 2001 Attorney General John Ashcroft was also supportive:

FEINSTEIN: Will you support its reauthorization when it sunsets in 2004?
ASHCROFT: It is my understanding that the president-elect of the United States has indicated his clear support for extending the cocaine ban, and I would be pleased to move forward with that position and to support that as a policy of this president and as a policy of the Justice Department.

Now let´s tune in to the September 8th Whitehouse Press Gaggle with Scott McClellan

Q The sale and purchase ban on cocaine expires in just a few days. Can you list for us the many things the President might be doing to encourage Congress to send him the bill that he said he would sign?

Cont. reading: Ban on Coke Expires

by DeAnander (posted earlier on Open Thread)

To understand oil as an addictive substance requires, I think, an historical critique of energy consumption. Illich’s analysis of “energy slaves” as a substitute for human slavery might be a good place to start (“Energy and Equity” iirc). To consume fuels of some sort for cooking, for staying warm in winter, for making pottery, for smoking meat and fish, etc. is a long human tradition, just as it’s a long human tradition to ferment the juice of whatever’s handy and make some kind of tipple. Many cultures/people can handle their tipple all right, and integrated it into a healthy community life. However, alcoholism as an addictive behaviour pattern does exist, is well-attested, and causes harm; and imho petro-addiction also exists and is a major cause of various kinds of harm in our contemporary world.

Cont. reading: Addictive Oil

Thanks to everybody who participated in the last one – quite profound thoughts.

Two housekeeping remarks:
– I have no idea if and when Billmon will post again.
– Currently I hardly find time to write – if you have some thoughts worthwhile to post, please drop me an email.

Often when being a terrorist is one side of the coin, being a freedom fighter is the other one. China and Taiwan, Israel and Palestine, Russia and the US may look at different sides of the same coin. If everybody now declares pre-emptive strikes as part of their tool box, we will indeed live in interesting times.

“As for launching pre-emptive strikes on terrorist bases, we will carry out all measures to liquidate terrorist bases in any region of the world,” General Yuri Baluevsky, chief of Russia’s general staff, said, according to Russian news agencies.

But don´t be afraid, the General is severly restricting the Russian use of force against terrorism.

“However, this does not mean that we will launch nuclear strikes.”

Russia ready to strike against ‘terror’ worldwide

Reading today’s New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times, incidents in Iraq seem slightly underreported. Tracking other sources there is current news about some 91 Iraqi dead and 289 injured and 17 US dead with at least 4 injured.

Cont. reading: Awareness

by Koreyel

Christopher Hitchens…ah yes… Christopher Hitchens…

The first time I ever heard this fellow speak (pre 9/11) I was astounded at his acidic brilliance. Here was someone that not only wrote a good game, but talked a good game. But, as they say, 9/11 changed everything. Including of course Hitchens.

Cont. reading: Dead Center

free for all

The medias reflections of Bush´s acceptance speech (Transcript, Video) is quite cold. They mostly agree that Bush had some points on national security, but the echo on his domestic proposels is full of question marks. A press review:

Cont. reading: Osama Who?

A loose thread collection about energy and water

For reference links to Oily Thread I and Oily Thread II

Body armour is helpful. In August 2004 1112 US soldiers were wounded in action in Iraq and 72 killed (15.4:1) while last April there were 876 WiA and 147 dead (6:1).

Cont. reading: Unsorted Picks

Social Security benefits and other programs, are bound to the general price level in the US, officially measured as Consumer Price Index (CPI).

Cont. reading: CPI Bashing Needed