MY WALL STREET, RIGHT OR WRONG, SAYS FAMOUS SELF DECLARED LIBERAL!
Paul Krugman, the self declared "Conscience of a Liberal" writes the following in a New York Times editorial (September 26, 2008):
"Maybe we can let Wall Street implode and Main Street would escape largely unscathed. But that’s not a chance we want to take."
Really? Why not? All indicates that it's the other way around. Keeping on sending money to Wall Street may keep on depriving Main Street of money. Sending money to Wall Street is exactly what has happened in the last few decades. Maybe it's time to try something different.
The total worth of the world is about 100 trillion dollars, and the total world GDP is not even half that. Nevertheless, the supposed "value" of all derivatives invented by "Wall Street" is in excess of 500 trillion dollars. Many of these derivatives are leveraged out of mortgage based securities.
In other words, "Main Street's" money (found in banks) was lent to hedge funds owned by extremely rich individuals, so they could leverage themselves to make themselves even more fabulously rich. Now that this leverage is working the other way, two things are occurring: the banks can't be reimbursed, and the hedge fund industry (worth two trillions dollars in the USA) is in danger of being wiped out (bringing many of the hyper rich to ruin). This is probably what is the real reason for the panic of the Bush administration.
The simple solution to all this, for the People at large, "Main Street", the real economy, is to nationalize all institutions that are necessary for the ongoing functioning of the economy (in the Great Depression, the Fed let thousands of banks necessary to the functioning of the economy close, a horrible mistake). In other words, let the government provide necessary banks with all the capital needed for operations necessary for the ongoing functioning of the economy . Simple. and don't send the money to the rich: that could cause a new Great Depression.
Hedge Funds and obscure, unregulated derivatives are unnecessary to "Main Street", and have actually hindered "Main Street" by siphoning money away from it. Let them die. It's time to do triage.
Nationalizing (hence saving) only functions and institutions useful to "Main Street" will save the economy. All "Wall Street" has been doing is destroying the real economy. Time for a change.
Patrice Ayme.
— Patrice Ayme, Hautes Alpes
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
(Recommended by 45 Readers).
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Sunday, September 21, 2008
FINANCIAL OBSCENITIES.
If France was in the same mess as the USA is in now, with many major financial institutions unable to carry their obligations, France would solve the mess herself. France has been in related messes, and has been solving them herself (remember Credit Lyonnais? The greatest bankruptcy ever, around 30 billion dollars…). After W.W.II, France was completely broke. It was solved the old fashion way. In cases like that, the solution is direct administration and ownership by the People. In other words, nationalization. The USA is no exception.
Just as the Central bank is the “Lender of Last report”, THE STATE IS THE OWNER OF LAST RESORT. Time has come. That psychological issue nobody can solve it for the USA. If the USA wants to keep on operating, it will have to nationalize maybe 1,000 financial outfits. Maybe more. Otherwise, an alternative would be to establish a feudal regime, with the great Lords of American finance always going unpunished, owning any and all, and the American People even more submissive than it already is.
After a spectacular bank failure last fall, even the slightly deluded great pope of the Free Market, P.M. Gordon Brown, deduced, all well considered, that the solution was to nationalize said bank. Anything else would be a fraud on the British People, said Gordon.
The plan proposed by Paulson is to have the American People come to the rescue of the Rich of America, lest the latter burn the house to the ground, leaving the People most deprived.
The plan proposed by U.S. dinosaurs, with the help of Barney (Frank) is even funnier. It is even more hilarious, indeed, to ask the poor People of the entire planet to come to rescue the American Rich.
But why not make such an outrageous plea? It is even more obscene than the present situation, and, as we visualize this, the poor of the world getting their coins together to help the nasty, arrogant, possessive U.S. gadzillionaires, we are seized, hopefully, with intense comic relief…
Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
Just as the Central bank is the “Lender of Last report”, THE STATE IS THE OWNER OF LAST RESORT. Time has come. That psychological issue nobody can solve it for the USA. If the USA wants to keep on operating, it will have to nationalize maybe 1,000 financial outfits. Maybe more. Otherwise, an alternative would be to establish a feudal regime, with the great Lords of American finance always going unpunished, owning any and all, and the American People even more submissive than it already is.
After a spectacular bank failure last fall, even the slightly deluded great pope of the Free Market, P.M. Gordon Brown, deduced, all well considered, that the solution was to nationalize said bank. Anything else would be a fraud on the British People, said Gordon.
The plan proposed by Paulson is to have the American People come to the rescue of the Rich of America, lest the latter burn the house to the ground, leaving the People most deprived.
The plan proposed by U.S. dinosaurs, with the help of Barney (Frank) is even funnier. It is even more hilarious, indeed, to ask the poor People of the entire planet to come to rescue the American Rich.
But why not make such an outrageous plea? It is even more obscene than the present situation, and, as we visualize this, the poor of the world getting their coins together to help the nasty, arrogant, possessive U.S. gadzillionaires, we are seized, hopefully, with intense comic relief…
Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
Thursday, September 18, 2008
AMERICAN ECONOMIC IDEAS ARE EXPLODING.
If worst comes to worst (and we are getting there very quickly), the USA will turn into France. France is a capitalist country with stronger social and financial regulations. The USA has turned into a creditist country with a ravenous plutocracy. The USA has a class of hyper rich people that buy elections, but average people are so bereft of capital, they have to borrow for everything, They borrow at usurious rates, making the rich richer.
But there is hope. Indeed, looked at it another way, the present crisis denotes the unwillingness of average people to keep on overpaying for their ownership of homes (then, through huge leverage, this avalanched in a giant credit crisis).
The USA got into this in a bipartisan way: a lot of the present excess went out of control under Clinton (Bush only encouraged it further).
The Titanic sank because its rivets were of poor quality (there was a shortage of high quality material to make them, so the hyper rich builder cut corners to build Titanic and its sister ships). Under pressure of scrapping along the iceberg, the rivets lost their heads, so the ship opened like modern tin can do.
Many of the leading socioeconomic ideas of the USA are characterized by a carefully designed poor quality, so that the rich can rule and prosper more, and now that the pressure has come, they are losing their heads.
Fortunately, some ships are better sunk. And what's so bad about France anyway?
Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
But there is hope. Indeed, looked at it another way, the present crisis denotes the unwillingness of average people to keep on overpaying for their ownership of homes (then, through huge leverage, this avalanched in a giant credit crisis).
The USA got into this in a bipartisan way: a lot of the present excess went out of control under Clinton (Bush only encouraged it further).
The Titanic sank because its rivets were of poor quality (there was a shortage of high quality material to make them, so the hyper rich builder cut corners to build Titanic and its sister ships). Under pressure of scrapping along the iceberg, the rivets lost their heads, so the ship opened like modern tin can do.
Many of the leading socioeconomic ideas of the USA are characterized by a carefully designed poor quality, so that the rich can rule and prosper more, and now that the pressure has come, they are losing their heads.
Fortunately, some ships are better sunk. And what's so bad about France anyway?
Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
Monday, September 8, 2008
SOME INTELLIGENT CHOICES FOR THE USA
One liner thoughts ("[Obama] is worried that someone won’t read [the terrorists] their rights.”) do not an intelligent policy make. In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, as in the USA all over, what is needed is intelligence to blossom, not the ability to not read moose their rights. Ms. Palin seems eminently qualified for more of the same, shooting innocent creatures, and the American people should ponder seriously whether that is what they want again.
This being said, total withdrawal in Iraq within sixteen month is not a solution. And I don't think that Obama is advocating it anymore. It's not much more of a solution than total French withdrawal from, say, Ivory Coast. Civilization cannot just withdraw here, there and everywhere, until it surrenders from the last corner. What needs to be done is a careful maneuver of getting United Nations' approval and military replacement of most of the US force by UN forces, ASAP.
It's true that the Sunnis, or the Kurds, will need help against the Shiah majority for years to come, and that one needs to insure that Sunni Muslim Fundamentalism (aka Al Qaeda) does not come back to provide it again. The Shiah are backed up by a powerful Iran. Iran (population not far from 70 millions, mostly young and many indoctrinated and ready to fight) at some point grabbed the Caliphate, and established it in Baghdad (750 CE). Memories are long in the region, one can expect Iran to keep on pushing. So UN troops should be there to provide the Sunni tribes with help instead of al Qaeda (recruiting UN soldiers in poor Muslim countries should be easy). The US could withdraw to remote high tech bases to provide the UN with ultimate backbone (France is opening a military basis in the United Arab Emirates, with advanced supersonic interceptors; the US could do more of the same in the area).
Now as far as Afghanistan is concerned, the way is indeed to help massively the locals who think basically in a way compatible with civilization. Reward those financially, encourage education, and boost the Afghan army.
The French did this in Senegal during the initial conquest, using 5,000 local soldiers led by a handful of French officers. In the early twentieth century, though, the French stumbled for a while. After fighting a local Muslim prophet, and caging him in Madagascar, they were going nowhere nice. Finally, though, they thought better of it, brought the prophet back, helped him, and he helped them, and France ended up decorating him in the most prestigious way. This is important: the resulting Senegalese Islam is FULLY Western compatible, and is now actually an alternative to Saudi Wahhabism, and its popularity is growing in Western Africa (thus barring Al Qaeda).
By contrast the French mishandled Islam in Algeria (they could have tweaked it and used it in the service of democracy, instead they mostly ignored it).
In the last two decades, fanatical and illegal Wahhabist preachers sent from Saudi Arabia with Saudi money wrought havoc in France (and, much worse, caused a huge war in Algeria, with more than 100,000 killed). French authorities, and in particular Sarkozy, have finally opted for a strategy of promotion of an "Islam de France", fully compatible with the republic. After all, making an Abrahamic religion compatible with the republic was done before, with Judeo-Christianism. If one allowed these two Middle-East superstitions, why not a third? Support means control, of course. After all, the civilization of Al Andalous at its best was resplendent precisely because it was tolerant of all variants of Judeo-Christo-Islamism.
By the way, the official production of opiates for pharmaceutical usage, although saturated in its present very restricted markets, could be extended worldwide to provide the gravely, or terminally ill with comfort. Integrating this in the Afghan economy would solve short term Afghanistan economic problems, and would do wonders with the popularity of the West. In first order, the problem in Afghanistan is not military, so the first order solution should not be military. Unfortunately, as it is, the effort of the West is primarily military, thus destined to fail.
***
Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
This being said, total withdrawal in Iraq within sixteen month is not a solution. And I don't think that Obama is advocating it anymore. It's not much more of a solution than total French withdrawal from, say, Ivory Coast. Civilization cannot just withdraw here, there and everywhere, until it surrenders from the last corner. What needs to be done is a careful maneuver of getting United Nations' approval and military replacement of most of the US force by UN forces, ASAP.
It's true that the Sunnis, or the Kurds, will need help against the Shiah majority for years to come, and that one needs to insure that Sunni Muslim Fundamentalism (aka Al Qaeda) does not come back to provide it again. The Shiah are backed up by a powerful Iran. Iran (population not far from 70 millions, mostly young and many indoctrinated and ready to fight) at some point grabbed the Caliphate, and established it in Baghdad (750 CE). Memories are long in the region, one can expect Iran to keep on pushing. So UN troops should be there to provide the Sunni tribes with help instead of al Qaeda (recruiting UN soldiers in poor Muslim countries should be easy). The US could withdraw to remote high tech bases to provide the UN with ultimate backbone (France is opening a military basis in the United Arab Emirates, with advanced supersonic interceptors; the US could do more of the same in the area).
Now as far as Afghanistan is concerned, the way is indeed to help massively the locals who think basically in a way compatible with civilization. Reward those financially, encourage education, and boost the Afghan army.
The French did this in Senegal during the initial conquest, using 5,000 local soldiers led by a handful of French officers. In the early twentieth century, though, the French stumbled for a while. After fighting a local Muslim prophet, and caging him in Madagascar, they were going nowhere nice. Finally, though, they thought better of it, brought the prophet back, helped him, and he helped them, and France ended up decorating him in the most prestigious way. This is important: the resulting Senegalese Islam is FULLY Western compatible, and is now actually an alternative to Saudi Wahhabism, and its popularity is growing in Western Africa (thus barring Al Qaeda).
By contrast the French mishandled Islam in Algeria (they could have tweaked it and used it in the service of democracy, instead they mostly ignored it).
In the last two decades, fanatical and illegal Wahhabist preachers sent from Saudi Arabia with Saudi money wrought havoc in France (and, much worse, caused a huge war in Algeria, with more than 100,000 killed). French authorities, and in particular Sarkozy, have finally opted for a strategy of promotion of an "Islam de France", fully compatible with the republic. After all, making an Abrahamic religion compatible with the republic was done before, with Judeo-Christianism. If one allowed these two Middle-East superstitions, why not a third? Support means control, of course. After all, the civilization of Al Andalous at its best was resplendent precisely because it was tolerant of all variants of Judeo-Christo-Islamism.
By the way, the official production of opiates for pharmaceutical usage, although saturated in its present very restricted markets, could be extended worldwide to provide the gravely, or terminally ill with comfort. Integrating this in the Afghan economy would solve short term Afghanistan economic problems, and would do wonders with the popularity of the West. In first order, the problem in Afghanistan is not military, so the first order solution should not be military. Unfortunately, as it is, the effort of the West is primarily military, thus destined to fail.
***
Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
Saturday, September 6, 2008
DIRAC AT A GLANCE.
DIRAC EQUATION JUSTIFIED IN ONE SENTENCE
The Dirac equation is the statement that the electron satisfies the simplest WAVE equation possible in space-time. The simplest wave equation is first order, and is of the type dw = w. If the differential operator d treats all dimensions equally (and it better does that, to satisfy the Einsteinian-Minkowski wish of treating all dimensions equally, and time "as" space), one gets the Dirac operator.
The Dirac equation is the statement that the electron satisfies the simplest WAVE equation possible in space-time. The simplest wave equation is first order, and is of the type dw = w. If the differential operator d treats all dimensions equally (and it better does that, to satisfy the Einsteinian-Minkowski wish of treating all dimensions equally, and time "as" space), one gets the Dirac operator.
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