Devils In The Details

I am often highly critical of the New York Times. However, if nothing else, it provides useful services by pointing out gory details that make plutocracy come to life. 

Krugman, as I have made plenty clear, is a half way house. Half pro-plutocratic, half progressive. He has to: if he was full progressive, the New York Times would shut him down, and the commoners, even many of a self declared “progressive” kind, would view him as a lunatic, and rage against him. One thing Krugman does not do is CO2. He should. That would broaden his economics to a very useful area, directly impacted by the plutocratic mania:

Masochism? Australians Want To Burn Australia?

If Australians want to burn Australia, they are succeeding (see below).

Commoners, including many posing now as “democrats”, were all for invading Iraq and having Iraqi oil pay for it (that was such a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention that even G. W. Bush may have known about it! FOX News hoped in vain).

A recent example? Maureen Dowd courageously came out with an editorial, “Cat On A Hot Stove”, scathing for “Sir Lecturesalot”, as she calls Obama.

Commoners posing as left-wing wrote enraged comments, accusing her of “hatred for the black man” (the NYT removed these comments later).

Maureen’s crime? She quoted  Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s close adviser and wealthy Chicago friend, who told David Remnick in “The Bridge”, of Obama’s “uncanny” abilities. “Obama needs to be properly engaged, or he disengages. He’s been bored to death his whole life,”  Jarrett said. “He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”

Maybe Obama should have tried something real hard, then, like fundamental thinking…

Another of Maureen’s crimes? Quoting “Senator Dianne Feinstein who “urged presidential leadership”, noting that Obama “stepped back” partly because he felt “burned” by all the scabrous budget fights.”

More Maureen: “When the president says “we’ve all got a lot of work to do,” he means Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. Obamacare should really be called Pelosicare, as the historian Niall Ferguson noted… Obama thinks he can come down from above, de haut en bas, and play the great reconciler, but you can’t reconcile in absentia. You have to be there. You’ve got to be all over these people.

The paradox of Obama is that he believes in his own magical powers, but then he doesn’t turn up to use them. There’s nothing wrong with a president breaking a sweat somewhere beyond the basketball court.”

Ouch.

Krugman on the all too ignored plutocrat, Erskine Bowles, in Liquidity Preference, Loanable Funds, and Erskine Bowles:

“Here’s Erskine Bowles in March 2011:

‘[T]his is a problem we’re going to have to face up to. It may be two years, you know, maybe a little less, maybe a little more. But if our bankers over there in Asia begin to believe that we’re not going to be solid on our debt, that we’re not going to be able to meet our obligations, just stop and think for a minute what happens if they just stop buying our debt.’

Strange to say, however, neither Bowles nor anyone else of similar views has, as far as I can tell, actually done what he urged: “stop and think for a minute what happens if they just stop buying our debt.”… So the conventional wisdom about how we have to fear a Chinese bond-buying strike just doesn’t make sense — and in fact it falls down in exactly the same way as fallacious arguments about the harm done by fiscal deficits in a depressed economy…

You may find it hard to believe that so many important and influential people could be dead wrong about the basic economics of our situation. But as far as I can tell, this is simply something “everyone knows”, and none of them have ever thought it through.”

My comment:

“Our bankers over there”? Our bankers? Eskrine Bowles incarnates and defines modern plutocracy. His evil influence (evil influence; that’s what “Pluto” means) extended from Clinton (the hyper wealthy Bowles was his chief of staff) to Obama. 

Bowles set-up the Obama plutocratic team, and told Obama to “leave your friends behind, they only cause problems”. Thus Obama thereafter got only advice, and even company, only from plutocrats, plutophiles, and their sycophants. 

Bowles does not make errors as far as his pocket book and the power of his influence is concerned. The error is plutocracy, and having individuals such as Bowles in charge of decisive thinking.

Krugman in the Worst Ex-Central Banker In The World: “Greenspan believes that he bears no responsibility for all the bad things that happened on his watch — and that the solution to financial crises is, you guessed it, less government…

The thing is, Greenspan isn’t just being a bad economist here, he’s being a bad person, refusing to accept responsibility for his errors in and out of office. And he’s still out there, doing his best to make the world a worse place.”

My comment:

Greenspan, central bankster. Still in office, propagandizing. Insisting deliberate crimes were, and still are, virtues. The way that central bankster earns his keep.

Greenspan makes Jean-Claude Trichet (the ex-head of the European Central Bank) look like Saint Francis of Assisis plus Einstein combined. Trichet now rails against excessive taxation for the little guys, inequality, tax cheats, plutocracy.

In other news, there are huge fires in Australia. They are caused by heat never experienced before. Is Australia hoisted by its own petard? Of the developed countries, Australia pollutes the most in CO2 per capita.

Climate scientist Andy Pitman from the University of New South Wales in Sydney said the problem has not been caused by “bad fire weather”. Instead, it was the result of a very warm winter – the second warmest on record in NSW during Australia’s warmest 12 months ever.

That’s obviously caused, in turn, by CO2 greenhouse heating Australia is doing so much for. Did I mention Australia’s giant coal export, forcasted with glee to augment 8% a year, each year, for the next five years? (That’s a distinct contribution from the 20 tons of CO2 or so.)

“Vegetation that would commonly basically shut down in winter continued to transpire,” says Pitman. By continuing to give off water, the vegetation dried out the soil so that in spring, the plants had little access to water and became dry. That primed the landscape for fire: “Really hot days combined with strong winds plus ignition equals a major problem.”

Details, details, details… and before you know it, the devils are roasting the landscape.

The hotest item in the Australian elections of 2013 was the carbon tax. Enough Australians voted against it (basically) to change to a right wing government that railed against efforts to curb CO2 emissions. Now Australia feels the heat. Abusing people is one thing, abusing physics, another.

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Patrice Ayme

Tags: Australia, CO2, Dowd, Eskrine Bowles, Fire, Gossip, Greenspan, Krugman, Plutocrats