Rawk on annie!
Remember the Delphi technique!

Posted by: Uncle $cam | May 28 2009 6:50 utc | 4

that was actually Roger Cohen b.

Posted by: ran | May 28 2009 11:11 utc | 6

Kelley B. Vlahos: Is Dennis Ross Poisoning the Well? (Antiwar.com)

Posted by: Colin | May 28 2009 11:14 utc | 8

Ånnie-
Good Luck and may peace follow you where ever you travel!

Posted by: DavidS | May 28 2009 12:26 utc | 10

be careful annie and keep your head down. you know how the IDF loves murdering peace activists.

Posted by: ran | May 28 2009 13:04 utc | 12

Hey Uncle $cam, any juicy links on Code Pink? I smell intellignece services, but I could be wrong.

Posted by: Obamageddon | May 28 2009 13:14 utc | 14

annie
all of us here thinking of you & your project there – the kind of world we live in requires witnesses. thank you & be well

Posted by: remembereringgiap | May 28 2009 13:30 utc | 16

In my continuing quest to shine light through pin-pricks in a seemingly determined self-inflating/patching US econ bubble… via excellent article in Pension Pulse:

Liquidity Drowning the Meaning of Inflation?

… comes this article by Henry Liu in Asian Times, titled the same:

The conventional terms of inflation and deflation are no longer adequate for describing the overall monetary effect of excess liquidity recently released by the US Federal Reserve, the nation’s central bank, to deal with the year-long credit crunch.
This is because the approach adopted by the Treasury and the Fed to deal with a financial crisis of unsustainable debt created by excess liquidity is to inject more liquidity in the form of both new public debt and newly created money into the economy and to channel it to debt-laden institutions to reflate a burst debt-driven asset price bubble.
(…)
The Treasury does not have any power to create new money. It has to borrow from the credit market, thus shifting private debt into public debt. The Fed has the authority to create new money. Unfortunately, the Fed’s new money has not been going to consumers in the form of full employment with rising wages to restore fallen demand, but instead is going only to debt-infested distressed institutions to allow them to deleverage from toxic debt. Thus deflation in the equity market (falling share prices) has been cushioned by newly issued money, while aggregate wage income continues to fall to further reduce aggregate demand.
(…)
What we will have going forward is not Weimar Republic-type price hyperinflation, but a financial profit inflation in which zombie financial institutions turn nominally profitable in a collapsing economy. The danger is that this unearned nominal financial profit is mistaken as a sign of economic recovery, inducing the public to invest what remaining wealth they still hold, only to lose more of it at the next market meltdown, which will come when the profit bubble bursts.

Everything I see suggests this is exactly what’t going on.

Posted by: jdmckay | May 28 2009 14:02 utc | 18

In checking to see whether blogger NTodd was part of the current Code Pink trip to Gaza, I came across this link at his Pax Americana site:
I didn’t find my answer yet, but I did find this McClatchy Newspapers’ blog, Checkpoint Jerusalem, by Dion Nissenbaum, whick has a fascinating post about using existing materials to try to remedy some of the terrible problems in Gaza.

With Israel maintaining its longstanding ban on allowing construction materials into the Hamas-controlled Mediterranean strip, everyone from the UN and Red Cross to the Hamas-led government and frustrated families are taking matters into their own hands.
Faced with an unending river of raw sewage flowing into the Mediterranean and the Israeli cement restrictions, the Red Cross decided to scavenge the 25-foot-tall cement slabs from the Gaza-Egypt border fence that had been toppled by Hamas militants in January, 2008.
The Red Cross engineers worked with officials in Rafah to scavenge 2,800 of the concrete slabs to build two new football field-sized sewage treatment pools near the Gaza-Egypt border.
That has created a surreal scene as sewage flows into the new ponds whose borders are made of the concrete walls that once separated Egypt and Gaza.

I learned from this blog that “[w]hen Hamas seized military control of Gaza two years ago, the new leaders trotted out a new slogan: Gaza: “Safe, clean and green” and now “two years later, the new Hamas housing policy is…to build mud-brick homes and buildings.”
It goes on to cover UN efforts and an individual who has built a small home out of soil from the tunnel digs.

Posted by: jawbone | May 28 2009 14:48 utc | 20

add my good wishes to the chorus, annie.

Posted by: Lizard | May 28 2009 15:38 utc | 22

Death Star Canteen: I had a dream last night that a US fundamentalist Christian military cabal took over the US government. Oh, wait, that was 9/11, wasn’t it:
http://patdollard.com/2009/05/hunt-people-for-jesus/
Reminiscent of Mullah Billy Graham’s famous invective, “Kill the gooks for Jesus!”
Much of our military is fundamentalist Christian, as example, the Colorado USAF, and the Huntsville Army forces especially, deeply fundamentally hating brownskin “non-white” peoples. Anyone who doesn’t believe in Bleed for Jebeezus of Mammon.
Once the “happy ups” run out of bailout dollars, the credit card companies jump to 50% interest rates, the 1 in 3 upside down Americans start getting evicted, and no show on Public Works Pothole Paving Great Society 2 rollout, the US fundamentalist Christian military cabals will openly seize power.
They are no less American Taliban, sneaking around American Enterprise Institutes.

Posted by: Wu Wu Wu | May 28 2009 16:54 utc | 24

This link is a Bloomberg story: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aPYrdBFKcVn0
“Aides to President Barack Obama are leaning toward recommending giving oversight of banks to a single regulator, combining the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Office of Thrift Supervision and taking regulatory powers from the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the Wall Street Journal reported, citing unidentified people.
“The suggestion that we’re going to get to a unilateral bank regulator, something equivalent to the Financial Services Authority, is simply wrong,” Frank said.
A formal recommendation to Congress, scheduled for June, also may include an agency to monitor consumer financial products and more investor protections, the newspaper said.
Frank said lawmakers may look at retaining the existing regulators while creating an authority — possibly in a combination of agencies — to deal with risks to the broader financial system.
‘Didn’t Work’
“I don’t think you’re going to see something singular,” Frank said. “The model for that, obviously, is the Financial Services Authority in England. They’ve now acknowledged that model didn’t work very well.”
The Committee on Capital Markets Regulation on May 26 urged creating a U.S. Financial Services Authority to replace the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the bank regulators.”
What are the politics of this?

Posted by: ds | May 28 2009 17:15 utc | 26

Against the Tortured Logic of Obama’s Placebo Presidency: A Call for the Audacity of Hopelessness

From time to time, events unfold that are so large in scope, so all-encompassing in their implications that one’s initial response is muted by an inability to categorize it all within the realm of experience. Previous reference points prove of little service. One’s image of oneself and one’s place in the world is under siege, perhaps even in danger of being torn away. One stare’s into the abyss, until the abyss removes its dark shades and makes direct eye contact. The mind buzzes; one’s thoughts scuttle in circles like stunned insects.
On a collective basis, we as a nation are living through such a time. At present, we are witnessing the descending spiral of Icarusian Capitalism; our sacred delusion of the perpetual ascendancy of a god-like market place lies broken in the dust. Malls and Mcmansions stand abandoned, desolate as the edifices of forgotten gods, as the come-ons of the salesmen of deregulated capitalism are churned to spittle amid a cacophony of collapsing market platitudes.
And not an uptick in public optimism, nor a surge of euphoria on Wall Street, nor the “invisible hand of the marketplace” sprinkling pixie dust will bring back the Olympian days of 2005, when the wise men of Washington and Wall Street knew the force of gravity was just a myth believed in by those embittered prophets of doom whose only joy in life is fantasizing the fall of their wealthy betters. It does not matter a damn how many dollars our present day believers of neoliberal tall tales, President Obama and Treasury Secretary Geithner, pour into the hole in the ground where the crash occurred, a bean stalk, twining skyward towards a golden, debt-negating goose, will not flower forth.
Fortunately, when false convictions fall, it is possible for a leveling of sanity to prevail. But there can be no more hubristic flights borne on waxen wings. No more multibillion dollar confidence scams from Wall Street. No more smash and grab imperial wars. No more tea parties for the dim and deranged. There is the banality of evil, and then there is the evil of banality. Both, the present era has produced in abundance. From about the late nineteen-seventies to the present, The United States all but ceased manufacturing products and went into the business of manufacturing marketplace hype, baseless fears, and illusionary enemies. Due to this economic and cultural derangement, a dark tower of self-imprisoning delusions has circumscribed our nation’s fate. Is it any wonder the quintessential dark lord of the darkest tower, Dick Cheney, will not exit the scene?
And what will foster real change? Not pleasing sound bites and rousing oratory from President Obama, then a continuance of many of the pernicious policies of his criminal predecessors. Conversely, the iron gates of Hell must crash closed behind us. The absence of light must grow so unbearable to us that we’re willing to ask how is it we arrived in this place and become willing to challenge our most cherished concepts about ourselves and our place in the scheme of things. That is the sort of “indefinite detention” the nation could use. What is needed is the audacity of hopelessness.
President Obama and the Democratic Congress could have ridden a wave of public discontent towards meaningful reform, but instead they have hugged the shore. And they seem to be surveying the property, scouting locations to build beach house retreats for their elitist benefactors and the militarist fantasists whose tsunami-sized arrogance wrought the present destruction in the first place.
Meanwhile, right-wing radio haters, like penned dogs, bark into the empty air of their meaningless day. Daily, we negotiate our way through the encompassing banalities and casual brutalities of soft oligarchy, as beneath it all churns the nebulous rage of the powerless that creates an audience for the likes of Beck, Hannity, and Limbaugh.
It is high season for those virtuosos of displaced anger, because not only the nation’s treasure, but its élan vital, has been squandered inflating the bubble-borne vanities of the ultra-wealthy up to the point of economic immolation. The elite have perpetrated an act of catastrophic clownishness so massive that it has left the rest of us stunned, and left to pick amid the debris of our exploded hopes. Bur hopes do not die pretty. Once dead, they do not rise like the redeemer gods of myth; instead, they stagger about, rotting and snarling like B-movie mummies. They leave us with our mouths tasting of ash. Our hearts choked by dry thistle.
Yet the buffoons of Wall Street and the killer clowns of our militarized Disneyland strut and swagger past the smoking ruins they left behind after their high-end looting spree. In their plundering, the only thing they didn’t steal for themselves was any sense of self-awareness. Or is self-awareness necessary when you’re obscenely rewarded for your narcissistic follies? What motivation would a high-chair tyrant have to modify his self-centeredness when he is shielded from the consequences of his bratty machinations? Why become an honest actor in the realm of human events when one can strut through life with a con artist’s inexplicable sense of entitlement?

Continued…

Posted by: Uncle $cam | May 28 2009 22:21 utc | 28

Annie,
Be careful out there. Hope to get some interesting reports from you – and thanks for all your posts over the years – I have always looked forward to your posts even if I didn’t always agree.
Rick

Posted by: Rick Happ | May 29 2009 2:41 utc | 30