Life in OUR America, Volume 5, the Livyjr Files Options

[Livyjr]

Politics ...

The DANCE .....

SMOKE ...

MIRRORS ...

BUT ...

Generally ...

No real substance .....

And so ....

The DANCE .....

"Heat turned up on reform - Advocates of change gather at Capitol to try to reignite movement as next round of state elections approaches"

By ELIZABETH BENJAMIN, Capitol bureau, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Wednesday, May 10, 2006

ALBANY -- Government reform advocates gathered at the Capitol Tuesday in hopes of reigniting a movement that burned hot when legislators were up for re-election two years ago, but has cooled as the next round of state-level contests approaches.

After being dubbed the nation's most dysfunctional state legislature in 2004 and seeing several incumbent lawmakers lose their seats that fall -- a near-unheard-of phenomenon at the Capitol -- state leaders passed two on-time budgets in a row.

Since then, the issue of reform has largely moved onto Albany's back burner.

"Where is reform?"

"What happened to reform?" Senate Minority Leader David Paterson, D-Harlem, the running mate of Democratic gubernatorial front-runner Eliot Spitzer, asked advocates who gathered at The Egg's Hart Lounge before they fanned out to lobby legislators in honor of "Reform Day."

Paterson later said legislative redistricting should be done by an independent nonpartisan committee, rather than legislators, to make elections more competitive.

"Now this is the real reform, not passing a budget on time in 2005 and calling that reform," Paterson said.

"That's not a reform."

"It's a mandate."

"They wrote that in the Constitution."

Reform supporters say there is much left to do, including revamping campaign finance laws, allowing same-day voter registration and closing ethics law loopholes.

But the bills that would accomplish such things are bottled up in legislative committees, and so far show no sign of moving toward passage this year.

Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi, the underdog Democratic gubernatorial candidate, made the day's most radical proposal.

He called for the ouster of Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, saying "they have failed to fight for the reforms that we seek."

Suozzi, the only gubernatorial candidate to speak at Reform Day, said rank-and-file legislators are too afraid of losing member items, stipends and other perks that leaders control to truly represent their constituents in Albany.

He said advocates should target one incumbent majority member in each house who is not working for reform every election cycle.

Suozzi angered fellow Democrats when he created a political action committee, FixAlbany.com, that supported several challengers who ousted incumbent majority members in the Assembly and Senate in 2004.

Suozzi, who has postured himself as a political outsider, said if voters elect him it will be "a clear message that there needs to be dramatic change in Albany."

He questioned Spitzer's ability to change Albany when he has been endorsed by most Democratic state legislators and a host of special interests, from labor unions to environmental groups.

Spitzer, the state attorney general, was on a fund-raising trip in California Tuesday.

His campaign spokeswoman, Christine Anderson, did not respond directly to Suozzi's call for new leadership in the Legislature, but said "nothing will ever change" if the focus is on individuals and not the system itself.

"To renew people's faith in government, we desperately need independent leadership that's not afraid to fight friend and foe alike to bring about real change that puts money back in taxpayers' pockets," Anderson said.

Silver, who is supporting Spitzer for governor and has long been at odds with Suozzi, said the county executive's comments were motivated by political desperation.

"He's getting nowhere in the polls," Silver said after addressing the Reform Day participants.

"He spent millions of dollars, and he's now found that maybe you'll pay attention to him and some people will pay attention to him if he says things out of desperation."

Bruno's reaction was similar, albeit slightly more muted.

"He's got his problems," Bruno said of Suozzi.

"His problems are he's hardly getting any traction."

"So, you know, he's making news in whatever ways he can."

"That's his prerogative."

The two Republican candidates for governor -- former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld and former Assembly Minority Leader John Faso -- said scheduling conflicts prevented them from attending Reform Day in Albany.

Faso sent a letter outlining some of his reform positions, with a focus on fiscal responsibility.

Neither Spitzer nor Weld sent a letter, which Reform Day organizers had requested, but author Malachy McCourt, who is seeking the Green Party nomination for governor, did.

McCourt proposed eliminating the state Board of Elections and Ethics Commission and replacing them with a nonpartisan commission whose members would be selected by a panel of state judges and political party representatives.

Blair Horner, lobbyist for the New York Public Interest Research Group, which helped organize Reform Day, said determining where the gubernatorial candidates stand on government reform is crucial.

"The new governor will have the opportunity to drive real reform," Horner said.

"He will set the ethical tone for Albany."

[Livyjr]

And this following is a sign of the times, perhaps ....

As the news becomes more and more available over the internet .....

And up here ...

There is also what I call a "WORTHLESSNESS" factor as well .....

Where the rags that are called newspapers up here ...

Aren't worth the paper they are printed on ...

Especially the Troy RECORD ...

Although I do have to say ...

That to improve its sales ...

The Troy RECORD people ...

Changed the size of their "newspaper" .....

So that it now more easily fits .....

Into the bottom of a cat litter box ...

And so ....

That's something, anyway ....

"Circulation decline continues at newspapers - Of region's dailies, only Saratogian saw gains in daily and Sunday numbers"

By KEVIN HARLIN, Business writer, Albany, New York Times Union ....

First published: Tuesday, May 9, 2006

ALBANY -- Daily newspaper circulation continued to erode in the Capital Region, led by a 2.7 percent weekday drop from a year earlier at the region's largest paper, the Times Union, new data released Monday show.

The declines mirror circulation losses across the country as readers increasingly go online for news.

The Times Union's Monday-through-Friday circulation averaged 98,501 in the six-month period that ended in March, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which tracks the numbers for advertisers.

The paper's Sunday circulation declined 4.4 percent to 133,787 copies.

The Daily Gazette of Schenectady saw weekday circulation dip 0.38 percent, to 48,089.

Its Sunday edition fell 0.71 percent, to 49,449.

Only The Saratogian in Saratoga Springs reported slight gains in daily and Sunday circulation.

Five other area dailies reported weekday losses while two -- the Register-Star in Hudson and the Daily Mail of Catskill -- posted slight gains on Sunday.

Nationwide, circulation dropped 2.5 percent daily and 3.1 percent on Sunday, according to the Newspaper Association of America, which analyzed the ABC figures.

Times Union Publisher Mark E. Aldam said much of the paper's decline came from single-copy sales as the paper focuses more on selling subscriptions.

And some of Sunday's reductions were from wholesale distribution deals the paper discontinued in outlying areas, such as downstate and parts of Vermont and Massachusetts, he said.

He predicted the next ABC audit would show improvements in individual days, such as Thursday and Friday -- key times for advertisers hoping to influence weekend spending decisions.

"We're clearly focused on home-delivery, subscriber-paid circulation as our priority," Aldam said.

Diane Kennedy, president of New York Newspaper Publishers Association, an Albany-based trade group representing daily newspapers, said paid circulation figures are an unfair measure because readers going to newspaper Web sites are typically uncounted.

The Newspaper Association of America said Monday that newspaper-run Web sites had an 8 percent increase in viewers in the first quarter.

The data from Nielsen/NetRatings found that newspaper Web sites averaged 56 million users in the period, or 37 percent of all online users.

According to Audit Bureau data, Gannett Co.'s USA Today remained the top-selling newspaper with 2.27 million copies, up 0.09 percent from the same period a year ago, while The Wall Street Journal, published by Dow Jones & Co., was second at 2.05 million, down 1 percent.

Harlin can be reached at 454-5442 or by e-mail at kharlin@timesunion.com.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

[Snuffysmith]

http://www.kitco.com/ind/Daughty/printerfr...may102006p.html

Doing Exactly What They Said They Would Do

By Richard Daughty
"The Mogambo Guru"

May 10, 2006

www.dailyreckoning.com


- The Federal Reserve is still increasing Total Fed Credit, which increases credit in the banks, which increases loans, which increases the money supply, which increases prices, which increases my wailing and crying about how we are all freaking doomed by inflation, and last week they increased it by only another $3 billion, which was used (apparently) to buy stocks and bonds. A quick look at the Repo market ("peep") shows that the Fed is providing money like crazy, and last Thursday there were more than $20 billion of Repos in one day! One day!

The foreign central banks are still plowing money into the US, and last week Custody Holdings of US Debt held at the Fed ballooned up another $8.2 billion, which seems to demonstrate a very, very low level of intellectual capacity, as the dollar lost about 7% of its value in the last month alone, socking them with nice losses! Hahaha!

Probably because of the huge amounts of credit and money being created by the world's central banks, I seem to notice more and more people referring to this massive and irresponsible "printing" of money as the beginning of a new Weimar era, which is itself a reference to the massive printing of money by post-WWI Germany and the utter economic devastation that resulted.

But this not about whether the rulers of the old Weimar Germany were buttheads (they were) or whether the rulers of America's economy are buttheads (they are) but about the horrible economic price that a nation pays for such irresponsible stupidity. And don't look to me for a solution, as there isn't one, because if there was a painless solution to this insane system of a fiat currency created by debt, then at least one other person in all of history would have thought of it already. And when you also allow banks to operate with zero reserves (and thus infinite multiplication of deposits), the absurdity of thinking that there is a solution becomes even more ludicrous. And when you further allow the massive increase in the size and cost of government, then asking for a solution becomes so ludicrous (the audience shouts out "How ludicrous, Mogambo?") I can do little but laugh hahahaha!

The sad, ugly truth (SUT) is that there is no way out of a devalued currency caused by a government printing up too much of it. That is why the Founding Fathers specifically wrote into the Constitution that money shall only be of silver and gold, because the government cannot print silver and gold, and this prevents the necessity of a "solution"!

A hand goes up in the front row. "So, if so," he says quizzically, "whither silver and gold in such a situation?" Well, instead of endless theoretical debate, that question can perhaps be answered more easily by seeing what happened in the last "Weimar" over-production of money and credit. And for that we owe thanks to Phil for the chart showing that in 1919 Weimar Germany you could sell (or buy) an ounce of gold for 170 Reichmarks. In 1923, a mere four years later, you got 87 trillion Reichmarks when you sold an ounce of gold. Nice investment there, in nominal terms! Of course, a Reichmark couldn't buy very much in 1923, as the money was devalued to essentially zero. But 87 trillion of them would buy you an ounce of gold!

As for silver, it went from 12 Reichmarks an ounce to, in the same four years, 543 billion Reichmarks. Nice investment from, again, a nominal standpoint!

- Judging by the tone of the panicky emails I have been getting recently, people other than I think that things are getting weird and inexplicable. Relatively predictable ratios are not making sense anymore, open interest is behaving weirdly, share prices and fundamentals are diverging, etc. etc. etc., resulting in more sense of unease, trending to frantic panic, and these poor, deluded people think that an idiot like me could possibly supply some explanation.

Well, it is my Tremendous Mogambo Pleasure (TMP) to announce that I actually DO have an answer for all of this current weirdness! And the reason I am so happy is that the answer is simplicity itself: The Federal Reserve is on record as saying that they will happily intervene in any market, at any time, with any level of participation, and that they have the legal authority to do it by virtue an Executive Order of the President of the USA! So the answer is easy, my Darling Mogambo Grasshoppers (DMG); the Federal Reserve (in cooperation with all the other central banks of the world who are in this thing up to their eyeballs) is doing exactly what they said they would do!

And why are they doing this? Because our creditors have us right where they want us, which is when they can dictate terms to us, because they have the power to destroy our economy with the flick of a finger. Yes, they would suffer, too. But they will not die, unlike our stupid, malignant economy composed primarily of the twin idiocies of financial services and massive government spending.

And with that kind of pure power, they can get otherwise-unattainable items, such as modern, up-to-the minute weapons and war technology that we paranoid, gold-bug, gun-nuts can't get from the Army-Navy Surplus store, and when we insist on Second Amendment grounds, they almost break their fingers dialing the FBI to "report" me.

This is not to mention, of course, their new ability to extort us to use our military muscle as hired goons, doing the dirty-work of some Asian Big Bosses (ABBs), primarily the Japanese and Chinese, who hold our economy in their hands by holding our debt in their hands.

And if you don't think that such slimy business is not being commonly done, more and more all the time, then let the Mocking And Scornful Laugh Of The Mogambo (MASLOTM) ring in your ears, my optimistic young ones! Hahahaha!

Even Bill Bonner at DailyReckoning.com seems to have has his finger on this pulse of rampant corruption when he writes " 'Cheney rebukes Russians,' the front page of today’s International Herald Tribune tells us. We had to a laugh. What’s his beef with the Russians? Get this. They’re using oil and gas as 'tools of intimidation and blackmail.' In other words, they’re using their resources to get what they want, just as America does with its trade policies and foreign aid." Hahaha! Exactly!

But to show you how out of touch Cheney is, it is not just Russia, but Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, China, Russia and others who are forming anti-bully, anti-American alliances, and they are using oil to hurt us back.

Now, let's also be sure and understand why Cheney uses the word "blackmail" which I assume he used correctly, as blackmail involves somebody knowing something nasty about something Cheney has illegally done, and now they are using it to extort money and cooperation.

And since we are talking about extortion by blackmail, let's not forget the warehouses full of incriminating evidence of felonious misdeeds of our politicians. And if you don't think that there is a lot of THAT going on in the world, then I am glad to meet you! This proves that you are one of the few people in the world (it seems) who are not blackmailing the poor, beleaguered Mogambo with copies of those embarrassing photos, showing him standing there with that stupid towel wrapped around him in the locker room while the Danish cheerleading squad is laughing and mocking him, which is, as I have previously explained, not the reaction I had expected, according to the graffiti I read on the men's room wall. So who's the real victim here?

So the Federal Reserve is intervening in the markets, and one of the ways to do that is to buy stock futures, and for them to then to tell the Wall Street houses, which is the other side of this trade, to buy stocks to cover their short position in futures, and for the Fed to buy some bond futures, and for them to then tell the Wall Street houses, which is the other side of this trade, to buy bonds to cover their short position in bond futures, too. This will keep stock prices high, keep bond prices high (and thus interest rates low), allow the Asian Big Bosses to make some more money on their hoard of American money, stocks and bonds, and let Wall Street make a nice pile of cash in the process, too.

And how much money are we talking about? Well, from 'Nihon Keizai', which is supposed to be Japan's leading economic newspaper, we learn that "Brazil, Russia, India and China, referred to as BRIC group that currently manifests the world's highest economic growth rate, have surpassed G7 countries in their forex /gold holdings for the first time in history.

"As of the end of March, the aggregate holdings of BRIC amounted to $1,292,200 million, according to estimates. As compared with the state of affairs in this respect as of the end of 2004, the forex/gold holdings of BRIC went up by 40 per cent.

"At the same time, the forex /gold reserves of G7 countries (Britain, Germany, Italy, Canada, the United States, France, and Japan) amounted to $1,253,900 million."

So relax, maybe take a little time away from yelling at your hateful, brain-damaged children, and get some more gold and silver, or maybe add another comforting layer of protective armor to your own version of the Mogambo Bunker Of Screaming Panic (MBOSP), or maybe even holding a few Mogambo Family Emergency Response (MFER) drills, which actually boils down to making sure that they get to the bunker before I do, what with that unfortunate "Shoot first and ask questions later" policy, which I have been meaning to change, but never did. But, man, on the other hand, you should see them hustle their little fannies now!

And this meddling in the markets by the Federal Reserve has not gone unnoticed in the cosmos. You puny Earthlings don't know it, but most of the UFOs visiting Earth these days have bumper stickers that say "Glorb blaanga Earth!" which is difficult to translate into English, but is, surprisingly, a literal translation from an ancient Germanic-Nordic phrase "Grosse bigga dum auf dem Stupum kopfen glob glob globber" which means, again literally, "Big stupid mistake, diggers of mushrooms!"

- Alert reader Jerry D. writes that he eats a lot of oats, and that oats cost $1.58 per bucket for a couple of years, but "yesterday I paid $2.08 for them. That's roughly 25 percent on plain raw oats in less than 12 months from the same local grocer."

Perhaps it is the oats talking, but he also opines "I believe that there is no longer any nobility in any major government, and that a large network of collaborators are inching us toward Orwell's worst-case scenario." Exactly! And if that is any indication of the clear thinking that oats give you, then I am now a big fan of them, too!

And it is not just oats that are costing more, as we found out from alert reader Rebecca I., who says "I have definite proof I am personally experiencing inflation. I just received the breakdown of my benefits package and its costs. In 2004, the total cost was $15,731, as compared to 2005 when it was $17,469, for a total increase of 11%."

- For those of us who are dismayed at the decision by the Federal Reserve to no longer publish the M3 numbers, which is the broadest measure of the money supply, alert reader Tom McC. thinks like we do, but with a nautical bent. He says "I refer to the government's refusal to publish M3 statistics going forward as the Depth Gauge gambit, as it is akin to disconnecting the depth gauge as a means of combating flooding in a submarine."

- From the AP we get the headline "Ginsburg: Congress' Watchdog Plan 'Scary' " by Gina Holland. She reports that Sen. Charles Grassley said last week that "the judiciary wasn't doing enough policing of itself." Naturally, he has a plan. Ms. Holland writes "His plan would create an inspector general to oversee federal courts including the Supreme Court. The inspector general would be directed to report any judicial misconduct to the Justice Department."

Naturally, here comes Ruth Bader-Ginsburg, one of the most worthless of the Supreme Court judges, and Ms. Holland reports that that Ginsburg "told a gathering of the American Bar Association that lawyers should stick up for judges when they are criticized by congressional leaders." Hahaha! What chutzpah!

It's apparently okay with Ms. Ginsburg and her precious Supreme Court for the Congress and our idiotic President to ride roughshod over the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and to monitor, regulate and spy on every detail of every American's life, but she is aghast that she and her loathsome Supreme Court ilk should have to suffer the same indignities! She says that "My sense now is that the judiciary is under assault in a way that I haven't seen before." I agree, as we have never had a Supreme Court as so deserving of contempt before! Well, maybe back in 1933 when the Supreme Court let FDR ignore the Constitutional requirement that money will only be of silver and gold, which started us on the path to where we are today, a country bankrupted by a fiat currency.

But she doesn't mention her own calumny, but instead wails about how she was upset by "proposals by senior Republicans who want an inspector general to police judges' acceptance of free trips or their possible financial interests with groups that could appear before them." Hahaha! Now she has apparently found that the Constitution allows corruption by the Supreme Court! Hahaha!

- If you want to know the kind of idiocy that is being taught in upper-level economics these days, economics student Anna says that she spends her time taking "the second order partial derivatives of a generic Cobb-Douglas equation and then solving for the input equations in terms of the constants." Hahahaha! This is economics? Hahaha!

But this is the incredible stupidity that passes for economics these days, and then you wonder why I am always standing on the side of 49th Street, yelling at people in cars "Your money is doomed and you are doomed!"

- Perhaps as a result of gasoline being more expensive, as a result of oil being more expensive, as a result of the dollar becoming more worthless in terms of buying power, the Consumer Confidence indicator dropped to 67.1 in May, which was down a lot from April's 89.4 reading. People don't spend when they are not confident.

- Bob Wood, of KMA, was commenting on the jobs reports released last Friday, and specifically referred to the "birth/death model" that the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses to estimate the number of jobs created by new businesses (which are so new that the jobs created are not counted yet, including an estimate of the number of businesses that went under and whose employees are now looking for new jobs, even though they are still counted as "employed"). He writes, "Wow, another 138,000 new jobs, and only 271,000 of them are fake."

And, not content with the wry bon mot, he goes on to note that Table A-12 is "where we see that the unemployment rate is really 8.2%, not the 4.7% miracle engineered by the Bush team."

Perhaps this all squares with the government reporting the bad news of "Unit labor costs -- a key gauge of profit and price pressures monitored by the Federal Reserve for clues on wage inflation -- increased at a 2.5 percent annual pace." But the good news, I guess, is that when companies dump employee benefit programs, "Manufacturing unit labor costs actually declined, at a 2.6 percent annualized pace, after dropping at a 3.3 percent rate in the fourth quarter of last year, while compensation per hour advanced at the tepid rate of 1.5 percent."

Or maybe is has something to do with the news that, the Labor Department said new claims for state unemployment insurance benefits increased to 322,000 in the week ended April 29.

Or perhaps it was Ashraf Laidi writing the essay entitled "US Payrolls: Ominous Justification for Further Dollar Selling" and posted on SafeHaven.com. He sums it up as "It was the worst of both worlds (slower growth and rising inflationary threats)."

- Noting that illegal aliens who came sneaking across the border into the USA assert that they have somehow acquired "rights" in doing so, I am now finally able to solve the problem of the homeless in America! So the next time that the Nobel Prize in Economics is awarded, along with that million dollar prize that would come in real handy right now, I am sure to win with my Fabulous New Mogambo Plan To Eliminate Homelessness (FNMPTEH). In a nutshell, if you are homeless, merely find a house being occupied by illegal aliens, wait until they go to bed, sneak into their house and relax! When they wake up in the morning, merely tell them that you agree with them that illegal trespassers have "rights"! They will, I assume, be happy to immediately oblige, providing you with a nice breakfast, and free housing, food, medical care and education for as long as you live! The problem of homelessness is thus solved! In my notes, I see where I have written "Appear humble as the adoring crowd applauds in awe and gratitude."

- An interesting essay entitled "Bull in Bear's Skin?" by Antal E. Fekete, who is a Professor Emeritus at Memorial University of Newfoundland, has some tips for those of you who like techniques for timing markets, especially metals. He explains, "Basis is the name for the spread between the nearby futures price and the spot price. Backwardation is the market phenomenon whereby nearby futures are selling at a premium over the more distant. The normal condition for monetary metals is the opposite, contango, indicating that supply is plentiful. Backwardation in monetary metals is a foolproof indicator that supplies are getting tight. Its shrinking reveals that short selling is becoming counter-productive so that the shorts may be getting ready to cover. Conversely, the widening of the basis tells you that shortages may soon end, and the shorts are likely to start selling once more."

- On FinancialSense.com we read the essay "The Silent Dollar Crash & Parallel Investment Universe" by Econotech which notes "When measured in the price of gold, the dollar and U.S. financial assets have already crashed. For example, relative to gold, as of Friday’s close, since their last relative highs in June-July 2005, the U.S. dollar index has declined 39%, the 10-year Treasury bond 43%, and the S&P 500 31%. These declines have become free-fall in the last month or so."

They go on to write that, surprisingly to the International Monetary Fund, "capital is flowing from emerging markets to industrial countries (notably the United States), the opposite of what would be predicted by economic theory."

Econotech goes on to note that the International Monetary Fund, in their "Stability" report, notes that the risks of derivatives is pretty dramatic. Specifically, they say “credit derivative products have significantly enhanced the 'transferability' of credit risks by allowing for the increased specificity of credit exposures, to meet different investor demands, particularly in the 'primary' risk transfer markets." By this time I am starting to sneer in Utter Mogambo Disrespect (UMD), as I expect this to be just another laughable explanation (a la the Federal Reserve) about how "derivatives are so wonderful." I am halted in mid-spit, however, when they immediately go on to say "However, once transferred, secondary market liquidity risks and related contagion effects remain, and may constitute the most significant stability risk emanating from the structured credit markets.”

Wiping the dribbled sputum from my chin at this surprising admission, the IMF correctly concludes “In the structured credit markets, we believe the risk of liquidity disturbances is material." What to do about it? Well, the IMF has an answer! "Whether and how these new risks materialize, and the severity of their impact, will critically depend on the degree to which the diversity of market participants increases, the various structural frictions are reduced, and market surveillance is improved.”

In short, there has to be some new ways devised to, somehow, get more of the public to assume the risks ("diversity of market participants"), make it easier to lay on more derivatives (reduction of "structural frictions") and use some lies about "improved market surveillance" to get them to swallow it. Hahaha! The IMF! Hahaha! Some things never change!

- John Spence and Myra P. Long wrote the essay "Weighing Gold Miners Against the Metal" in which they note "Two gold ETFs alone (GLD and IAU) have already pulled in over $7.1 billion dollars." In existence as financial entities for less than a year, and already they pulled in over $7 billion dollars? Wow!

They also weigh the pros and cons about mining stocks. They write "Mining stocks tend to be more volatile than the metal, though stocks receive kinder tax treatment than bullion. At the same time, holding gold removes the risk of company missteps and other factors, while giving precious-metals bugs - who tend to be a bearish bunch - the peace of mind of owning the physical bullion."

"But," I cry out in my anguish "there comes a point when all available room in the house is already being used to store huge quantities of gold, silver and ammunition, and everybody is always bumping into something, and then they are all whining and complaining! What do I do?"

Sensing my plea for him to please, please, please recommend holding stocks instead of bullion, Jon Nadler, an investment products analyst at Kitco.com., said "'Mining company shares are simply that -- 'a paper promise of performance by the company. Investment in the shares leads to currency, management and general stock-market risk."

Just as I was giving up the idea of owning mining stocks, Brien Lundin, editor of Gold Newsletter, jumps in and says "Mining equities leverage the gains or losses in metals themselves. On the way up, this can be a wonderful thing. On the way down, it can become quite a painful thing."

He added, "Investors need to know that sometimes this effect is muted, or even works against them." To prove it, he reveals that "Through the end of March, the StreetTracks Gold Trust ETF was up 27.2% for the previous 12 months, versus 63.5% for the average precious-metals mutual fund."

Mr. Nadler added that with gold bullion, holding it is equal to holding "pure value or pure asset; no one can default on it, there is no credit risk, there is no risk of issuing more shares or printing more money. It is the asset you would buy to protect against a potential decline in your other assets," he said. It "performs when paper does not."

Mr. Nadler is straightforward in his opinion about owning gold bullion, and said "There is no doubt that we remain strong advocates of fully-owned and fully-paid physical bullion. If one wishes to purely speculate, they could entertain ETF or options on gold, perhaps a smattering of mining shares, but that is about it." I couldn't have said it better myself, and God knows I've tried!

And speaking of ETFs, Jason Hommel of SilverStockReport.com reports that the Barclays silver ETF is going gangbusters. "Ominously," he writes "this week, 42 million ounces of silver were bought by the Silver ETF in the first 5 days of trading!" He goes on to note, continuing in the ominous vein, that things are heating up on the futures exchanges, too. "For a long time, only 1% of futures contracts resulted in delivery. Today, it is increasing toward 10% or more, which is growing ominous." Commenting on all of this, he says "The Silver ETF, which is acquiring allocated physical silver, may soon bring the paper silver trading games to an abrupt end." Thus you realize why he uses the word "ominous," especially if you are one of the market-rigging scumbags who is massively short silver as a result of this long-term market-rigging scam.

- If you wanted real proof that demand for oil will continue to rise for a long, long time, then look no further than Doug Noland's Credit Bubble Bulletin at the PrudentBear.com site. He reports that “China’s total power consumption during the first half of this year is expected to increase 11.5%, said the China Electricity Council.” Twelve percent increase in a half year! Wow! And where did they get the fuel to produce that power? Oil!

And furthermore, they are building lots and lots of paved roads, avenues, streets, lanes, expressways, turnpikes and thruways, which is highly freaking significant (HFS) because merely creating roads is, as it turns out, the One Sure Thing (OST) to lead to macro- and micro-economic growth. And it takes oil, lots and lots of oil, to power all that construction. And the Chinese will be buying millions more cars per year with which to ride upon these selfsame highways and byways, all of which requires oil. Lots and lots of oil. And you thought oil might one day go DOWN in price? Hahahaha!

But Mr. Noland is not done pummeling us, and instead takes direct aim at my heart with a sharpened rapier when he quotes Bloomberg's Alex Tanzi as reporting “More homeowners received cash from home refinancings in the first quarter, according to Freddie Mac." I leap to my feet in surprise, which was unfortunate, as I was then immediately knocked to the floor with the further news "In the first quarter of 2006, 88 percent of Freddie Mac owned loans that were refinanced resulted in new mortgages of at least five percent more than the original mortgages." Five percent more debt in 88% of mortgage refinancings? Yow! Perhaps this headlong dive into the Lake Of Financial Stupidity explains the fact that the increase in the debt level "was up from 81 percent the previous quarter and is the highest since the third quarter 1990.”

- I would like to take this lull in the festivities to answer a of scenario suggested by readers who are probably a whole lot smarter than I, and seem to have no compunctions about demonstrating the fact, to the un-ending delight and amusement of my family and co-workers.

I refer to the conspiracy to eliminate cash money, and going to a completely electronic money. I declare with my usual Mogambo Supercilious Sneer (MSS) that it will not happen, as only cash is anonymous. Going to a purely electronic debit/credit format would require computer entries for every transaction, and thus there would always be a paper trail as evidence. Oops!

Therefore, there could be no political corruption and graft, no illegal activities of any kind involving money, and the IRS would be able to easily verify every taxable dime made by any taxable entity, including the kids who mow lawns and baby sitters. Like I said; it ain't a-gonna happen.

- If you think this brouhaha with Iran will one day blow over, wrong-o. Iran wants, and needs, to have a war with the USA. Why? Let me quote from the Milken Institute Journal of Economic Policy. They note that in "1979, Iran's GDP roughly equaled Spain's; it pumped one-tenth of the worlds oil and nurtured a vibrant middle class. Today, per capita income is one-third that of Spain, oil production is down by 30% and the middle class is being squeezed by inflation, unemployment and stagnant wages." And it ain't just the middle class suffering, and by a long, long shot.

In short, the Iranian morons need a scapegoat for their self-inflicted problems just as much as American morons and the loathsome Bush crowd needs one, and for the same reasons; bankruptcy from sheer economic stupidity. And that has always meant war, and I have no reason to think that "this time is different." Ugh.

[Snuffysmith]

Pardon my ignorance, but I learned something today. Did you know that the National Security Administration was transferred into the Department of Defense by Executive Order many years ago?

I didn't. I didn't know it was (1) in the Department of Defense for starters - always thought it was an independent agency outside the DOD) and (2) it got to DOD by Executive Order and not Congressional mandate.

Learn something everyday.

Won't be long before the CIA may wind up there. Maybe.

[Livyjr]

http://www.kitco.com/ind/Daughty/printerfr...may102006p.html

"Doing Exactly What They Said They Would Do"

By Richard Daughty, "The Mogambo Guru"

May 10, 2006

www.dailyreckoning.com

The sad, ugly truth (SUT) is that there is no way out of a devalued currency caused by a government printing up too much of it.

That is why the Founding Fathers specifically wrote into the Constitution that money shall only be of silver and gold, because the government cannot print silver and gold, and this prevents the necessity of a "solution"!

Well, Snuf ....

One thing that I have learned over time ....

In here ...

Is that there are all kinds of people ...

Out there ....

With all kinds of "slants" on things ....

And so ....

Here is one more above ...

With this "MOGAMBO GURU" ....

Whatever in the world that might be ...

And so ....

When I saw his words above here ...

On the Constitution ....

And "coinage" ....

I was curious ...

As I did not recall the constitution saying anything like what he was implying ...

And so ....

Where I ended up ...

Was at the United States Supreme Court ....

In 1870 ....

With what are known as the LEGAL TENDER CASES, 79 U.S. 457 (1870)

KNOX v. LEE ....

And PARKER v. DAVIS.

December Term, 1870

Where we have ....

Money is used in the Constitution in two senses.

In the second subdivision of the section relating to the powers of Congress, the Constitution speaks of the power 'to borrow money'; and there the word must be used in the larger sense of strict money, or of anything received instead.

But in the fifth subdivision of that section, which gives Congress power 'to coin money and regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coins,' it must be evident that Congress referred only to metallic money.

From time immemorial, in all countries, in all ages of the world, the precious metals have been the medium of exchanges, and the strict moneys.

The value of these metals has been designated by a stamp upon them indicating their fineness and weight; that is, indicating the value at which the coins were rated.

When the coins have possessed the value indicated, they have passed from hand to hand as of that value.

When they have been found not to possess that value, they have, except within very narrow limits, failed to so pass.

It is true that, at certain periods in the history of some of the States, the skins of the beaver passing by tale; strings of shells, known as wampum, passing by measure; and packages of tobacco of defined weights were, in the absence of the precious metals, used as money, and were made the medium of exchanges.

But none of these was a 'legal [79 U.S. 457, 465] tender' as money, or ever had anything but a local and limited circulation, or ever was used as a substitute for money, after money was introduced.

While in all ages of the world, in all countries, the precious metals, when stamped with a designated value, have been known as moneys; and (with representatives of such moneys) have always been the great and universal medium of exchanges.

Not only has 'money' meant metallic money, but, upon looking at the public history of the times (which this court has established as a proper guide to the construction of the Constitution), we find that in the history of the country there was no period in which 'money' was more distinctly understood and meant to be hard money than at the period when the Constitution was framed and adopted.

'Its framers had just passed through all the horrors of an unredeemed paper currency.'

'The history of that currency had been, within the view of those who staked their property on the public faith, always freely given and grossly violated.'

'The mischiefs of the various experiments that had been made were fresh in the bublic mind, and had excited general disgust.'

With the bills of the government unredeemed - indeed, become at last so hopelessly beyond redemption as to be entirely given up as worthless, - the country had returned for circulation to a specie currency, to absolute money having an intrinsic value; and neither had nor wished any other currency.

But the context as well as the word itself shows that the power is confined to metals.

This grant is not a grant to create money, but simply 'to coin money' - a power that can be exercised only on money that admits of being coined; that is, a bare power to 'strike coin,' which was the phrase used in the Articles of Confederation as the equivalent of 'to coin money.'

It was from those Articles that the power to coin money and regulate the value thereof was transferred to the existing Constitution.

And that this provision only [79 U.S. 457, 466] gave Congress power to strike coin and regulate its alloy and value, was declared at the time, and undisputed.

The Federalist, No. 43, tells us:

"The right of coining money, which is here taken from the States, was left in their hands by the Confederation, as a concurrent right with that of Congress, under an exception in favor of the exclusive right of Congress to regulate the alloy and value."

"In this instance, also, the new provision is an improvement on the old."

"Whilst the alloy and value depended on the general authority, a right of coinage in the particular States could have no other effect than to multiply expensive mints, and diversify the forms and weights of the circulating pieces."

Indeed, the very next clause of the Constitution (subdivision 6) which gives Congress power to punish the 'counterfeiting of the securities and current coin of the United States,' expressly distinguishes between the coins and the obligations of the government.

If, however, Congress could take the power of stamping leather, or paper, under this clause, and the leather or the paper so stamped could be considered as coined money,' the value whereof could be regulated by Congress, even that would not support the legal tender provision of the Treasury notes.

With such a power, Congress might, indeed, stamp a lump of leather, or a ream of paper, so that they should circulate as current money; that, however, would not make these notes such stamped paper, nor current money.

Treasury notes have, as substance, no appreciable value.

They are not declared to be, and do not purport to be, of any value as substance.

They are not stamped with any intrinsic value.

They are not, so far as they possess value, things at all, but only things in action.

The material holds the evidence of the promise; but it is the promise, and the promise alone, which is, and which purports to be, of value.

One dash of the pen across the signature of the Treasurer of the United States at their foot, and the note is not a Treasury note; not a thing in action; not a matter which bears the government stamp of value; not ten dollars at all, but a worthless rag of paper, once used to hold a promise, [79 U.S. 457, 467] now cancelled.

If, therefore, 'money,' in the phrase 'to coin money,' could be considered as embracing other substances beside those precious metals, alone in use throughout all the world as coin, none the less would it remain that to utter promises to pay money would not be 'coining,' or 'to coin money.'

I cannot find that before the passage of this legal-tender act it had ever been supposed by any court, or by any judge of any court, or by any commentator or statesman, that this power 'to coin money' had reference to anything but a metallic currency.

Indeed, of all the judges who have given opinions, as well in the support of as against the legality of this law, I find hardly any who do not concede that to 'coin money' was a grant of power relating to the coining of the precious metals.

Nevertheless, although the power to coin money has not sufficed to support the right to make these Treasury notes a legal tender, the power to 'regulate the value thereof,' that is, of coined money, has been taken as one of the most effective arguments to support this law.

If, under this power to regulate the value of coined moneys, Congress may debase the coinage; if it may put upon the coined moneys any other than their true intrinsic value; if it may declare that one-half or three- fourths of a dollar, when stamped by it as a dollar, shall be taken to be equal to a whole dollar, and may thus impair the obligation of contracts and transfer one man's property to another; why, it is asked, under the constitutional power to borrow money, and other delegated powers, and the powers necessary and proper to enable it to exercise the delegated powers, may Congress not do a like thing to produce a better result with these Treasury notes?

To this I answer:

II. This power cannot be implied from the power to regulate the value of money.

For, 1st. Congress has no power given it to regulate the value of the money it borrows, but only of the money it coins, and of foreign coins.

The analogy claimed would exist if the Constitution gave Congress power to borrow [79 U.S. 457, 468] money and regulate the value thereof.

But that it does not give.

And, 2d. Congress has no power to even materially debase the coin.

A power to regulate is not a power to destroy.

I quite agree that 'a uniform course of action involving the right to the exercise of an important power for half a century, and this almost without question, is no unsatisfactory evidence that the power is rightfully exercised.'

But a careful review of the legislation of Congress on this subject, will show not only that Congress has not (as the Court of Appeals in New York, and the other tribunals which have affirmed the validity of this law have assumed) exercised plenary power over the subject of currency and the legal tender laws, but that, on the contrary, the legislation of Congress from first to last has been strictly confined to designating the value of coined money, and to discriminating with reference to its real value.

Let us review the legislation on coinage.

From the establishment of the government to the passage of the act authorizing Treasury notes, the legal tender coin has been three times debased, and three times only.

Once, in June, 1834, when the gold coinage was reduced about 6 per cent in value; once, in 1851, when the three-cent pieces were first coined; and once, in 1853, when the fractional silver coinage was reduced some 6 per cent in value.

But the pieces of these latter coinages were restricted as legal tender within such very narrow limits, and for such fractional and special uses, that, practically, these laws did not operate as debasements of the coin at all.

From the first issue of coin by this government to this time, the unit of calculation and of coinage, the silver dollar, has remained the same.

It remains still of the same intrinsic value as when first coined; whatever changes have been made, have been made to bring the other coin into more actual and just relation to it.

When the subject of coinage was first considered by the [79 U.S. 457, 469] Confederation, it was proposed to have a unit of account and of coinage much smaller than the dollar, and to employ the decimal system.

Jefferson, while recommending the adoption of the decimal system, suggested a coin equal to the then existing Spanish milled dollar as the unit of value.

His recommendation was adopted, and the dollar has ever since remained the same.

The first coinage was under the act of April 2, 1792, and that act provided that the coinage should be of both gold and silver, and that the relative value of the two metals should be as fifteen to one, that is, that 1 ounce of gold should be taken as the equal in value of 15 ounces of silver.

By that act 'dollars or units,' as they were styled, were each to contain 371 4/16 grains of pure silver, and to weigh 416 grains according to the then standard, which was, for silver, 1485 parts pure or 'fine' to 179 parts alloy; and eagles, 'each to be of the value of 10 dollars or units,' and to contain 247 4/8 grains of pure gold, and to weigh 270 grains, according to the then standard for gold, which was 11 parts pure to 1 part alloy.

Both of these precious metals were, after that, coined as money; both became lawful money, and therefore, ex necessitate, a tender in payment of debts due in money, even if not so declared by law; just as coals of the specified kind are a lawful tender in discharge of a contract for coal, and cotton, of a contract calling for cotton.

But in the lapse of years, the relation in value existing and established by Congress in this act of 1792, between the two precious metals, was lost.

Owing to the increased produce of silver, and perhaps to the increased demand by the commerce of the world for gold, their relative value had so materially altered that, by 1823, the Secretary of the Treasury called the attention of Congress to the fact that gold had relatively appreciated in value, so that their true relation was then as 16 to 1, and to the evils resulting from the erroneous standard maintained. [79 U.S. 457, 470]

For as soon as gold had advanced or silver declined in relative value so that they really bore to each other the relation of 16 to 1 in value, instead of 15 to 1, as they were valued by the law, every person who could secure an ounce of our gold coinage for 15 ounces of silver secured what was intrinsically worth 16 silver ounces; that is, made a profit of about 6 per cent.

It followed, of course, that all the gold was taken up as fast as coined and sent out of the country to be recoined, and that the country retained, instead, only silver, and the gold coins of those countries whose gold coinage bore a true relation to the existing value of gold and silver.

In fact, our gold coin went regularly directly from the mint as fast as coined to the foreign packet; and, out of some $12,000,000 of gold which had been coined, it was computed there was hardly a gold piece to be found in the whole United States.

As was said in Congress: 'Hitherto, like the tracks to the lion's den, the coins have gone all one way-to Europe; and not one solitary eagle has ever made good its cisatlantic flight.'

This evil led at last to the introduction into Congress of a bill to regulate the value of the gold coinage of the country, by adjusting the rate for gold coin to its true relation to the existing and continuing silver coin.

The debate upon the bill, shows how anxious Congress was to get at the true relative value of the two precious metals, and to fix the coinage accordingly.

Opinions as to the relative values of gold and silver ranged from 15.60 to 1, to 16 to 1.

The majority of those best qualified from their pursuits to understand the subject, including the New York banks, regarded the true ratio to be as 15.62 to 1, although for the previous few years it had averaged 15.80 to 1.

But Congress, at the instance of the friends of metallic money, determined to adopt 16 to 1 as the relative value; partly because that seemed to be the ratio which had proved practically the most correct in the nations which had adopted it; partly because the [79 U.S. 457, 471] variation from the true relation was, if any, so small it might safely be disregarded; and partly because it was believed that the relative appreciation of gold which had been so long going on would continue, and that the slight over-valuation of it, if any there was, would be thus in time corrected.

By that act the eagle was reduced from 247 4/8 grains of pure gold, as required by 9 of the said act of 1792, to 232 grains of pure gold, or about six per cent in intrinsic value.

But, so far from Congress assuming any power to materially depreciate the coinage or impair the rights of creditors, the power of Congress to make depreciated coin a legal tender was expressly disclaimed in the debate.

And the statesman at whose instance, and by whose will, this bill was mainly carried through was, of all men who ever had part in the government of this country, the last to be quoted on the side of the power of Congress to make promissory notes a legal tender in payment of private debts, - Thomas Hart Benton.

The court will thus see that while Congress did indeed reduce the standard and value of gold coinage, so that $100 of the new gold coins were hardly equal in intrinsic value to $94 of the former gold coinage, yet that in fact Congress did absolutely nothing to impair the obligation of contracts or to destroy the rights of the creditor.

For, from the beginning, the debtor had the right to pay in the coinage of either of the precious metals.

At first these were of equal value, and payment in either was indifferent.

Gradually the gold appreciated or the silver depreciated, and then, of course, the debtor, as he had the option, paid in silver; so that, in 1834, the debtor who owed $1000, and had $940 of the then gold coinage, could exchange his gold for $1000 in silver coin, and discharge with these his debt of $1000.

Therefore, although Congress did reduce the value of the gold coinage in 1834, the debtor, after 1834, could no more pay his $1000 with money of less intrinsic value than he [79 U.S. 457, 472] could before.

True, he could take $940 in gold of the old coinage, and get with it $1000 in gold of the new, with which to pay his debt.

But so, before the law, he could take this same $940 of gold coinage, and purchase $ 1000 of the then, and still, equivalent silver coinage, with which to pay the debt.

Indeed, that law, so far from taking 1/16 of the debt from the creditor and giving it to the debtor, as at first appears, actually gave the debtor no new privilege, and deprived the creditor of no property.

It remained optional with the debtor, after the law as before, to pay in the gold pieces of the old coinage.

True, it became possible, after the law, for the debtor to pay in the new gold coinage; but it had been optional with him before the law to pay in the constant silver coinage equivalent in value to the new gold coinage.

The law was, in fact, but an adjustment and recognition of the true relation between the values of the two metals, the selection of which had always remained optional to debtors, and, so far from being an attempt by Congress to regulate money without reference to or differing from its intrinsic value, it was, on the contrary, a most careful and earnest effort to bring the recognizable value of its money more closely to its intrinsic value.

Following this act of June 28, 1834, Congress passed an act on the same day, conforming the value at which foreign coins were to be rated to their true intrinsie value.

In 1837, Congress fixed the standard of both gold and silver coin at 9/10ths fine; that is 9 parts of pure metal to 1 of alloy.

By this change the gross weight of the dollar was reduced to 412 1/2 grains, but the fineness was correspondingly increased, and the dollar therefore continued to contain 9/10ths of 412 1/2 = 371 4/16 grains of pure silver, as provided for the dollar when first coined, and to remain therefore of the same intrinsic value as before.

And the gross weight of the eagle was, by the same act, somewhat increased, but it continued [79 U.S. 457, 473] to contain, however, 232 grains of pure gold, as provided by the act of 1834.

This change in the gross weight of the silver coinage has led to the idea it was then debased, the corresponding increase in its fineness having been overlooked.

Let us refer to later changes in the silver coinage?

For nearly twenty years after the passage of these laws of 1834, the relations between the precious metals remained undisturbed, so that no action by Congress was required.

But the unlooked for discoveries of gold in California disturbed again, and in a reverse direction, the relation between the two metals, and thereafter silver advanced and gold declined in relative values; so that, by 1853, silver attained a marked premium over the gold coined since the act of 1834, and a scarcity in silver coin had been felt.

Congress, however, did not thereupon generally depreciate the silver coinage.

It was, indeed, urged upon Congress to appreciate the gold coinage.

Instead, however, of doing this, thinking, probably, that this gold harvest was to be of short duration, and its disturbance of the relation, then so long subsisting between the two metals, not likely to continue; and striving to meet the evil of small notes issued by every kind of corporation and of paper tokens for change, then pressing - Congress did depreciate the silver coin, for parts of dollars only, about 6 per cent (so that two half-dollars or four quarter-dollars are no longer equal to one dollar piece).

But these depreciated coins were restricted from being legal tender for any sum greater than $5 in all, although the smaller silver coin of the earlier coinage remained a tender for any amount.

Prior to this, in 1851, Congress had directed the coinage of three-cent pieces of a fineness and weight which gave them a value of only 80 cents on the nominal dollar of these pieces (i. e., 33 pieces of three- cent coinage were worth intrinsically only 80/100 of one silver dollar); but these pieces were only made tender to the extent of 30 cents in the aggregate, [79 U.S. 457, 474] and their issue was very limited and was shortly stopped, and by the act of 1853 their intrinsic value was raised to the standard of that of the other fractions of the dollar.

Then as to change in the copper coinage.

Congress, also, in 1793 and 1796, reduced the weight and the intrinsic value of the cent to accord with the increased value of copper, the planchets for which government had to import.

These cents, however, were not made a legal tender.

The interference by government with the rights of creditors by regulations of the coin have, therefore, been:

1. By the acts of 1834, a possible, but disputed and doubtful depreciation, if of anything, of less than 1 per cent.

2. By the act of 1851, a depreciation of fractional silver coin (the three-cent piece) to an extent which could not, in the largest tender, exceed 6 cents; shortly, however, altered, so that it could not exceed in the aggregate 2 cents.

3. By the act of 1853, a depreciation of fractional silver coinage to an extent which could not exceed in the largest tender 30 cents.

Now, if these debasements of fractional coin be deemed merely such; nevertheless, from their minute and fractional nature, they would form no precedent for future material debasements of the coinage, or indicate any acquiescence by the people and the courts in an assumption by Congress of the right to put a false or arbitrary value upon its coined money.

De minimis non curat lex.

But, indeed, these acts of 1851 and 1853 were practically not at all infringements upon the rights of creditors or debasements of the coinage below its value.

As already remarked when coins were struck with a value which they did not possess, they have, 'except within very narrow limits,' failed to pass at more than their true intrinsic worth.

But there are limits within coins, somewhat depreciated below their true value, will circulate as [79 U.S. 457, 475] well as if they had not been depreciated.

Those limits are when the payment is so small that the difference between the nominal and intrinsic values, does not leave it worth while to regard the difference, or when some particular convenience about the coin, such as its portability or denomination, overbalances the intrinsic depreciation; that is, the peculiar fitness for the fractional purpose required, will, in such cases, actually make good the depreciation, and carry the small coin, for all purposes of use, up to the stamped value.

All will recollect how often, in the days of the Spanish piece for 12 1/2 cents, we accepted 12 cents instead, and took Spanish quarters with holes drilled through them equally with perfect coin.

Those who have been in England know that the sovereign has so depreciated by wear that a large majority of the coins in circulation in Great Britain are intrinsically worth less than the standard value-2d. per sovereign it is said - and yet, for all minor payments, they pass from hand to hand by tale equally as of full weight; while in large transactions they are always paid out by weight and not by tale.

So with the depreciated three-cent pieces of 1851; within the very narrow limit at which they were legal tender, their portability and convenience made up what they wanted in intrinsic silver value.

And so, too, with the depreciated coinage of 1853.

It was confined to fractions of a dollar, which were so slightly depreciated, and the convenience of which was such, that the trifling intrinsic loss was not to be regarded.

But the depreciated coins were made a legal tender only to twice the amount of the lowest tenderable gold coin, Congress still keeping to its idea of a double money standard, and still holding to its unchanged unit of value, the silver dollar.

Now it is submitted that all these exercises of the powers of Congress to 'coin money and regulate the value thereof' were within the letter and spirit of the Constitution.

Congress has, indeed, established the value of certain foreign coins at one time and changed it at another; made them a tender, and deprived them of that quality; and changed [79 U.S. 457, 476] from time to time the standard of value of coin struck at its mint.

But how has it done this?

Without regard to the intrinsic value of the coin struck?

By fixing upon it any arbitrary value, and making it a tender at anything but its true value, as all the courts which have supported the constitutionality of the provision we are considering have assumed?

Not at all; but, on the contrary, by uniformly seeking to conform the stamp upon its coin to its true value, and by scrupulously limiting the departures from intrinsic value for special purposes within limits so narrow that the special usefulness of the coin within those limits has actually made good the trifling deficiency in weight.

In the same spirit, Congress has provided that its coin shall be a legal tender at its stamped valuation only when of full weight; if of light weight, only proportionately, according to its weight.

In fine, Congress, under a power to coin money and regulate the value thereof, has done only and exactly what those words in their plain signification imply; has struck metallic coins, and has regulated the value thereof and of foreign coins; and has done this on every occasion with careful regard to their true intrinsic value; manifesting as well by the particular purposes and narrow limits within which they have departed from intrinsic value, as by their general strict regard for such values, not their belief that they could strike any metal and stamp it with an arbitrary value, but that they could rightfully regulate the value of money only by truly declaring the value thereof.

Not that they 'possess a magic power to give, by their omnipotent fiat, a precious value to inanimate and valueless things,' but that they possessed only power to regulate the coin stamped, by declaring its value according to the fact - according to the value stamped upon it when of full weight, and of only proportionate value when of light weight.

In the opinions which have been given in various legal tender cases, nothing has seemed to go so far toward supporting the authority of Congress to make treasury notes a legal tender as the assumption that Congress had been left [79 U.S. 457, 477] by the Constitution at liberty to impair private rights and the obligation of contracts by debasing the specie coinage, and that it had actually debased that coinage and impaired those rights to the extent of 1/16, without question or challenge.

Had this been the action of Congress, it would not indeed have established its power or right to do this.

One permitted invasion of an established right does not do away with the right.

That Congress had debased the coinage 1/16th would not establish the right to further debase it; would, at most, indicate that the power to regulate it extended up to that limit, and would, of itself, furnish no justification for a more general or further invasion.

Nevertheless, the assertion, in all the opinions, that government had assumed to debase the coinage to the extent of 1/16th, impairing to that degree the recovery of all creditors, and that this action had been submitted to without question, has seemed to me the strongest argument for the power of government to exercise plenary control over coined money.

Indeed, it was through inquiry as to how it was possible that creditors could have submitted to so serious an infringement of their rights without contest in the courts that I learned that in fact nothing of the kind really took place.

On the contrary, we see that, so far from 'Congress having claimed and exercised unlimited power over legal tender,' so far from having assumed the power to make even coin a legal tender, without regard to its real intrinsic value, as all the decisions supporting this law assume, its legislation [79 U.S. 457, 478] shows that for seventy-five years, from the beginning of the government down to the act authorizing these legal tender notes, through all the most pressing exigencies of peace and war, Congress - not only by its direct efforts to regulate the coinage from time to time, according to its intrinsic value, but also by the narrow limitation it imposed on the right of legal tender when diverging slightly from intrinsic value for special and temporary purposes - has shown a determination, as uniform as just, to keep the stamp upon the government coins a true index to their value, and to so regulate these coins as that they should have and express their actual values.

Nay, by reference to the debates in Congress, it will be seen that the right of Congress to debase the coin and make the debased coin legal tender, in such wise as to materially affect the rights of the creditor or debtor, was not only never professed or asserted, but that, so far as the question has arisen, the right has been directly repudiated.

So, therefore, the difficulty, judges and other persons have had in perceiving why, if Congress, under this power to coin money, could coin any metallic substance and stamp it with an arbitrary value, it would not have equally the power to declare its treasury notes a legal tender without reference to their intrinsic value -is a difficulty that this court is freed from, and that should never have existed.

Indeed, I look in vain to-day for the production of the declaration, prior to these legal tender days, of one judge, one statesman, one commentator, that Congress, by the power 'to coin money and regulate the value thereof,' possessed the right of striking even metals with false and arbitrary values.

And so ....

Is it as this MOGAMBO GURU dude says it is?

Or is it a bit more complicated than that?

And so ....

[Snuffysmith]

George Bush's references to dictatorships:

DICTATORSHIP DEFINITIONS
http://dict.die.net/dictatorship/

Source: WordNet ® 1.7

dictatorship
n : a form of government in which the ruler is an absolute
dictator (not restricted by a constitution or laws or
opposition etc.) [syn: absolutism, authoritarianism,
Caesarism, despotism, monocracy, one-man rule, shogunate,
Stalinism, totalitarianism, tyranny]
http://www.allwords.com/word-dictatorship.html

dictator
noun

1. A ruler with complete and unrestricted power.

Thesaurus: tyrant, despot, autocrat, fascist, sultan, rajah, czar, emir, khan.
2. Someone who behaves in a dictatorial manner.
3. In ancient Rome: a person given complete authority in the state for a period of six months at a time of crisis.

Derivative: dictatorial
adj

Characteristic of, like or suggesting a dictator; fond of using one's power and authority and imposing one's wishes on or giving orders to other people.
Thesaurus: tyrannical, despotic, oppressive, totalitarian, autocratic, authoritarian, domineering, dogmatic, magisterial, imperious; Antonym: democratic, egalitarian, liberal, tolerant.


http://www.couplescompany.com/Features/Pol.../Structure4.htm
Dictatorship:

Generic term used to describe any government controlled by a single individual and giving the people little or no individual freedom. Typically a person who rules by threat of force. People who are loyal to a dictatorship swear allegiance to the person first and the country second. Fascism, Theocracies, Monarchies and Communism can all be dictatorships. A Republic cannot be a dictatorship. Examples of Dictatorship include North Korea and Cuba.

Theocracy:
A government which claims to be immediately directed by God, and divinely blessed. The country tends to be intolerant either passively or overtly to faiths other than that recognized by the state. The country identifies itself and its laws within religion and religious doctrine. There is no legal separation between church and state, and citizens of other faiths are often excluded or hampered from participation or expelled. Because a theocracy is exclusionary, it can never be a democracy which requires inclusion without exception of all equally. It cannot be a republic because a republic requires the separation of church and state and equal rights to all.

Examples of theocratic countries include Israel and Iran



http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_W._Bush
[edit]
Speech to United Nations General Assembly (September 21, 2004)
UN Headquarters, New York, NY [5]

For decades, the circle of liberty and security and development has been expanding in our world. This progress has brought unity to Europe, self-government to Latin America and Asia, and new hope to Africa. Now we have the historic chance to widen the circle even further, to fight radicalism and terror with justice and dignity, to achieve a true peace, founded on human freedom.
We know that dictators are quick to choose aggression, while free nations strive to resolve differences in peace. We know that oppressive governments support terror, while free governments fight the terrorists in their midst. We know that free peoples embrace progress and life, instead of becoming the recruits for murderous ideologies.
1998
"You don't get everything you want. A dictatorship would be a lot easier...So long as I'm the dictator."
Responding to the difficulties of governing Texas ("The Taming of Texas," Governing Magazine, July 1998 [10]. Also cited in Is our Children Learning?: The Case Against George W. Bush by Paul Begala.)
[edit]
[edit]
2000
"I told all four [congressional leaders] that I felt like this election happened for a reason; that it pointed out — the delay in the outcome should make it clear to all of us — that we can come together to heal whatever wounds may exist, whatever residuals there may be. And I really look forward to the opportunity. I hope they've got my sense of optimism about the possible, and enthusiasm about the job. I told all four that there are going to be some times where we don't agree with each other, but that's okay. If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier... [Bush chuckles, audience laughs] ...just so long as I'm the dictator [more laughter]."

Washington, DC, December 18, 2000, during his first trip to Washington as President-elect [12]. The last sentence is also included in Fahrenheit 9/11.
[edit]
2001
"Dealing with Congress is a matter of give and take. The president doesn't get everything he wants, the Congress doesn't get everything they want. But we're finding good common ground. A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it."
Washington, DC, July 26, 2001 [13].

2004
"It's not a dictatorship in Washington, but I tried to make it one in that instance."
Describing his executive order making faith-based groups eligible for federal subsidies, New Orleans, Louisiana, Jan. 15, 2004

[Livyjr]

Would George W. Bush .....

Be president ...

Here in OUR America .....

Without CLEAR CHANNELS WORLD-WIDE, I wonder?

And while we are on the subject of CLEAR CHANNELS WORLD-WIDE .....

And life in OUR America ...

In this present day and age ....

Of REPUBLICAN DOMINANCE ....

Here in OUR America ....

"DJ out on bail after on-air sexual rants"

Associated Press
Last updated: 6:55 a.m., Sunday, May 14, 2006

NEW YORK -- A syndicated hip-hop disc jockey arrested after making on-air racial and sexual rants about a rival radio personality's wife and young child has been released on bail.

DJ Star, whose real name is Troi Torain, was charged with endangering the welfare of a child after a broadcast on Power 105.1 FM.

Transcripts show he hurled racist insults, threatened to sexually abuse the 4-year-old daughter of his rival, Hot 97's DJ Envy, and offered $500 for information about where she went to school.

"I will come for your kids," Torain said, according to a transcript provided by New York Councilman John C. Liu.

Torain was arraigned after 11 p.m. Friday and posted $2,000 bail within an hour, authorities said.

Police originally had indicated he also would be charged with harassment, but prosecutors decided against it for now, district attorney's spokeswoman Barbara Thompson said.

Torain's lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, said his client's conduct was inappropriate but not criminal, and was "never intended to frighten the family."

Torain -- along with his brother Timothy Joseph, known as Buc Wild -- was the host of Clear Channel Radio's syndicated morning show on Power 105.

The company fired Torain after city officials complained.

Their show aired in markets including Philadelphia, Miami and Richmond, Va.

[Livyjr]

George Bush's references to dictatorships:

2004

"It's not a dictatorship in Washington, but I tried to make it one in that instance."

Describing his executive order making faith-based groups eligible for federal subsidies, New Orleans, Louisiana, Jan. 15, 2004

That says what needs to be said ......

Right there .....

And then ...

He didn't stop with just that one instance .....

Nor is that where he started ...

And so ....

[Livyjr]

And the real expert at "dictatorship" .....

In my estimation, anyway ....

Is not George .....

Who certainly has the character for it ...

But Dick .....

America's Dick .....

And while we are on the subject of America's Dick .....

Let's see what is going on with him ...

Out there in the world these days .....

Where we have ....

"Cheney the Focus of CIA Leak Court Filing"

By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer

1 hour, 59 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - In a new court filing, the prosecutor in the CIA leak case revealed that Vice President Dick Cheney made handwritten references to CIA officer Valerie Plame — albeit not by name — before her identity was publicly exposed.

The new court filing is the second in little more than a month by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald mentioning Cheney as being closely focused with his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, on Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson, who is married to Plame.

With the two court filings, Fitzgerald has pointed to an important role for the vice president in the weeks leading up to the leaking of Plame's identity.

In the latest court filing late Friday, Fitzgerald said he intends to introduce at Libby's trial in January a copy of Wilson's op-ed article in The New York Times "bearing handwritten notations by the vice president."

The article was published on July 6, 2003, eight days before Plame's identity was exposed by conservative columnist Bob Novak.

The notations "support the proposition that publication of the Wilson Op Ed acutely focused the attention of the vice president and the defendant — his chief of staff — on Mr. Wilson, on the assertions made in the article and on responding to those assertions."

The article containing Cheney's notes "reflects the contemporaneous reaction of the vice president to Mr. Wilson's Op Ed article," the prosecutor said.

"This is relevant to establishing some of the facts that were viewed as important by the defendant's immediate superior, including whether Mr. Wilson's wife had 'sent him on a junket,' the filing states.

The reference is to the fact that the CIA sent Wilson on a trip to Africa in 2002 to check out a report that Iraq had made attempts to acquire uranium yellowcake from Niger.

Wilson concluded that it was highly doubtful an agreement to purchase uranium had been made.

The Bush administration used the intelligence on supposed efforts by Iraq to acquire uranium from Africa to bolster its case for going to war.

After the invasion, with the Bush White House under pressure because no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, Wilson wrote the op ed piece for The Times.

In it, he accused the Bush administration of exaggerating prewar intelligence to exaggerate an Iraqi threat from weapons of mass destruction.

Defending the administration against Wilson's accusations, Libby and presidential adviser Karl Rove promoted the idea that Wilson's wife, Plame, had sent him on the trip to Africa.

Administration critics have said such a move was an attempt to undercut Wilson's credibility.

The prosecution's court papers also stated that Cheney told Libby around June 12, 2003, that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA, a month before her identity was outed.

end quotes

SO ....

Do we have a "DICK-O-CRACY" down there in Washington, D.C. .....

Or what?

[Livyjr]

And then ...

There is the weather ....

"N.H. floods force 100 people from homes"

By DAVID TIRRELL-WYSOCKI, Associated Press
Last updated: 12:35 p.m., Sunday, May 14, 2006

CONCORD, N.H. -- Torrential rain washed out roads and forced about 100 people from their homes in one central New Hampshire town Sunday.

Some areas had seen 7 inches of rain by early Sunday and forecasters said as many as 5 more inches might come during the day.

About 100 residents were evacuated from their homes in Wakefield because of concerns about two dams in the area, the state Office of Emergency Management said.

Officials also reported a railroad culvert and embankment washed out in Milton, with train tracks suspended in mid air.

And the local emergency management office in Hooksett said the town essentially was closed because so many roads were flooded.

Tom Johnson said water was flowing on Sunday into the basement of his Salem home, where a pump that handles 1,500 gallons of water an hour was not keeping up.

"There are areas in my backyard that are probably 3 feet deep and climbing as we speak," Johnson said.

In Maine, dozens of roadways were flooded in southern part of the state and shelters were set up in Kennebunk and Ogunquit.

Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney declared a state of emergency on Sunday, activating the National Guard and various state services to help communities respond to the storm.

Boston had picked up 4.35 inches of rain in 24 hours.

Farther north, Newburyport collected 5.83 inches over the same period, according to the National Weather Service.

[Livyjr]

"Bush wants fight over CIA choice - President hopes debate over Hayden's role in warrantless wiretaps will hurt Democrats, but some Republicans who usually back White House are balking"
 
By PETER WALLSTEN and JANET HOOK, Los Angeles Times
First published: Tuesday, May 9, 2006

In another sign the White House was trying to make the change in CIA leadership politically palatable to Congress, the agency's No. 3 official, Kyle Foggo, told colleagues in an e-mail message on Monday that he, too, was stepping down.

Foggo, a longtime administrative officer at the agency, had been promoted by Goss.

end quotes

Plunk your magic twanger, Froggo ....

And see what HACK GUMMINT job ...

You can land next ...

"Agents Search Home, Office of CIA No. 3 Leader"

By MARK SHERMAN, AP

WASHINGTON (May 12) - Federal agents searched the home and office of the CIA's departing No. 3 official on Friday as part of a corruption investigation that has sent a former congressman to prison and now involves CIA contracts.

Investigators from five federal agencies acted under search warrants at the home of Kyle "Dusty" Foggo in Vienna, Va., and his office at the CIA's Langley, Va., campus, FBI spokeswoman Debra Weierman said.

Both locations are in the Washington suburbs.

The warrants themselves were sealed and officials would not discuss what agents were seeking.

Foggo agreed to step down as the CIA's executive officer under pressure because federal authorities are investigating whether he improperly awarded contracts to San Diego businessman and friend Brent Wilkes, according to federal law enforcement and intelligence officials.

They spoke on condition of anonymity because investigations were ongoing.

Prosecutors have implicated Wilkes in a scheme to bribe former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif., but he has not been charged and his lawyer has said Wilkes did nothing wrong.

Among the contracts under scrutiny is one that dates from Foggo's previous job of running the logistics at a secret facility in Europe that supplies CIA personnel in war zones, the law enforcement official said.

Foggo gave the multimillion-dollar contract to supply bottled water to a Wilkes-related company, the official said.

Foggo, who was in the process of clearing out his office at the end of a 25-year CIA career, has denied any wrongdoing.

"Mr. Foggo maintains that government contracts for which he was responsible were properly awarded and administered," the CIA said in a statement last week.

CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise Dyck said Friday that top CIA officials were informed of the warrants shortly before the searches began.

"The agency is cooperating fully with the Department of Justice and the FBI," she said.

The agencies taking part in the searches are: the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, the U.S. Attorney's office in San Diego and the CIA's inspector general, Weierman said.

The inspector general has been investigating Foggo's relationship with Wilkes for more than two months.

The inquiry stems from the investigation of Cunningham, who is serving a prison term of more than eight years after admitting last year that he took $2.4 million in bribes from government contractors.

Mitchell Wade, another contractor, pleaded guilty in February to conspiring with Cunningham and is cooperating with investigators.

Wilkes is described in court papers as an unindicted coconspirator.

The investigation includes allegations, raised by Wade, that Wilkes provided Cunningham with prostitutes, limousines and hotel suites.

Foggo has acknowledged participating in poker games organized by Wilkes at the hotel rooms, but he has said nothing untoward went on while he was there.

"If he attended occasional card games with friends over the years, Mr. Foggo insists they were that and nothing more," the CIA statement said.

Lawyers for Wilkes and the limousine company, Shirlington Limousine and Transportation Inc., of Arlington, Va., also have denied any involvement with prostitutes.

Foggo announced his retirement from the agency this week, three days after CIA Director Porter Goss said he would be stepping down.

Dyck said the Foggo investigation has "absolutely nothing, zero" to do with Goss' resignation.

Goss asked Foggo to step down as executive director last week because he felt the accusations had become a distraction and could damage the agency's reputation, the unnamed intelligence official said.

Foggo's associates have said he received the Intelligence Commendation Medal for supporting the war on terror in 2002.

Before becoming the agency's No. 3 leader in 2004, he was the chief of base at a secret facility that supports the war on terror.

As executive director, Foggo had the powerful position of overseeing the day-to-day operations of the CIA.

One FBI agent told reporters from Copley News Service, who were at Foggo's residence, that Foggo was not at home in his quiet suburban neighborhood near CIA headquarters and had not been detained.

The agents refused to answer other questions about the raid.

A neighbor told Copley that the agents arrived about 8 a.m. EDT.

A white Chevrolet van was backed up to the carport of the split-level brick home and, at one point, a man wearing latex gloves emerged from the house and went around back.

Associated Press writer Katherine Shrader contributed to this report.

[Livyjr]

 
"Workers face paycheck pinch"

By Mark Trumbull, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Mon Nov 7, 3:00 AM ET

For all its strength, the current economic expansion is not boosting the American worker's paycheck.

Wages have been rising nominally: Average pay rose 8 cents last month to $16.27 an hour, according to a government report Friday.

That's not fast enough to counter inflation.

By one common measure, average pay for an hour's work has less purchasing power than it had four years ago - when the current growth cycle began.

It's a pattern of weak wage growth that's now several years old, but the trend has worsened in recent months.

Wages for the most recent quarter were 2.3 percent lower, after inflation, than workers received a year before.

While energy costs are the most obvious culprit, other forces may be playing a role, from globalization and illegal immigration to the weakening of labor unions.

Politicians, too, could share in the blame.

Experts differ on just how wide and deep the problem runs.

But the disturbing implications are clear enough.

America's proud heritage as a land where the standard of living rises like late-summer corn seems, to many, to be at risk.

Even the fact that budgets have grown tighter for many debt-laden families is a volatile issue for the nation politically and financially.

And economists say that while the pay pinch affects a wide swath of occupations, the impact is hardest on those without college degrees.

"It's two different worlds," skilled and unskilled, says John Silvia, chief economist at Wachovia Corp. in Charlotte, N.C.

"There's no way you can consider this one overall labor market."

Well-trained job seekers are in hot demand, he says.

But the labor market is weak for those whose education ended in high school.

In some cases, "weak" is an understatement.

The automotive industry, and the nation, got a shock a few weeks ago when Delphi Corp., a major auto-parts supplier, demanded that union workers take a gargantuan pay cut so the company can survive.

The airline industry, too, faces a period of intensive restructuring that is difficult for workers of all skill levels.

Pilots at Northwest Airlines last week approved a 24 percent temporary pay cut, to give the beleaguered airline breathing room while a new labor contract is negotiated.

In the grocery industry, the spread of Wal-Mart has had a similar pay-squeezing effect on some unionized supermarkets.

Nor is the challenge confined to the United States.

Wage growth has been slowing in Europe and is tepid in Japan, as those regions work through a difficult restructuring of their economic base.

What these industrialized nations share is growing competition for lower wages, from factories in places like Portugal, Poland, and China.

US manufacturers have done remarkably well at responding to global competition by finding ways to make workers more productive.

Traditionally, rising productivity allows employers to raise wages without raising prices.

Thus it holds the key to rising living standards in society.

But lately, wage growth has lagged behind fast-rising US productivity.

Several reasons, beyond the downward pressure of global competition, may be involved:

• The cost of benefits. Some employers have stopped offering health insurance, but those that do are spending more, and thus boosting overall compensation even though hourly wages aren't rising.

• Price-sensitive consumers. As energy costs rose, many companies didn't feel able to pass those costs along to customers. So they have to pay their oil bills by cutting costs elsewhere. Pay hikes get smaller.

• Government policies. Some researchers say a failure to crack down on illegal immigration - whether at the border or in the workplace - has depressed wages for the less skilled.

• Weak bargaining power. The decline of union membership in the private workforce has had a significant dampening effect on wages, some economists say.

"The auto and airline industry - these were some of the best jobs you could get," without a college degree, says Dean Baker, codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.

Those unionized jobs were "a boost to wages for less-educated workers generally, because to some extent other industries had to compete for those workers."

Other economists counter that a more flexible, less unionized labor market has helped the US trounce its European peers in job creation.

Americans spend less time unemployed, but their incomes have arguably suffered as a result.

The result of all these forces is an environment in which wages tend to rise at a glacial pace.

And when inflation picks up, that means they don't rise at all in real terms.

Inflation has now reached a 5 percent pace.

The upshot is that hourly earnings are effectively 2.3 percent below last year's level.

"The inflation bar is very high right now," says Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute.

So even the 2.7 percent hourly earnings growth, from a year earlier, "doesn't get you over."

Assessing just how far wages are falling behind inflation can be tricky.

The federal government gathers data in several regular surveys, from the Census Bureau to the several sets of data produced by the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

The results can vary.

The numbers above, for example, come from a widely cited wage report, a BLS survey of nonfarm employers called "current employment statistics."

In this survey, hourly wages for nonsupervisory workers rose by a total of just 4.6 percent during the 24-year period from 1979 to 2003, a recent Labor Department study found.

Most other reports show larger gains, in part because they track a wider sample of workers or of income.

And clearly, Americans have found the means to consume higher levels of goods and services during that period.

"It's not as bad as it gets painted," says Diana Furchtgott-Roth, an economist at the Hudson Institute.

By broader measures of household finances, she notes, "income is rising in real terms."

Still, on the issue of real pay for an hour's work, none of the government surveys show wages rising by even 1 percent a year between 1979 and 2003.

What's the recipe for keeping wages on an upward path?

Some economists point to conservative models, such as keeping taxes and regulation low to spur job creation.

Others take a more left-leaning tack, calling for stronger labor unions and a boost to the minimum wage.

Experts on both sides often stress education as paving the way for individuals to boost their earnings in higher-level work.

They also focus on two areas - healthcare and energy - where inflation is eating away at spending power.

"You either need wages to pick up or inflation to slow down," says Mr. Bernstein.

"There may be a bit of both in coming months."

Hey ...

How about that economy, now, will you .......

"Global economy spreads the wealth - Developing nations' growth creates boom, but some see it coming at counterparts' expense"

By TOM PETRUNO, Los Angeles Times
First published: Sunday, May 14, 2006

The global economy is on a growth streak that is shaping up to be the broadest and strongest expansion in more than three decades.

Rising spending and investment by consumers and businesses worldwide are boosting national economies on every continent, pushing down unemployment rates in many countries, and lifting business earnings and confidence.

Of 60 nations tracked by investment firm Bridgewater Associates, not one is in recession -- the first time that has been true since 1969.

Yet this is a different kind of boom from any other in the post-World War II era, analysts say.

The soaring economies of China, India, Russia, Brazil and other emerging nations increasingly are setting the pace, overshadowing the slower growth of the United States, Europe and Japan, where the benefits of the expansion have eluded many workers.

"This is the first recovery where developing economies are playing a dominant role," said James Paulsen, chief strategist at Wells Capital Management in Minneapolis, which manages money for big investors such as pension funds.

The trend is being driven by free trade, which has created millions of new jobs in emerging nations in recent years, fueling stunning new wealth in those countries.

China's meteoric rise has been well-ocumented, but the boom has spread far and wide to include much of the rest of Asia, as well as Latin America, Eastern Europe and Africa.

For Russia, the global hunger for energy and other raw materials has created a financial windfall.

The country has become the world's largest exporter of natural gas and second-largest exporter of oil, as well as a major supplier of metals, timber and other resources.

Wealth from those exports now is filtering down to drive growth in the country's retail and consumer goods sectors, said Al Breach, chief economist at investment bank Brunswick UBS in Moscow.

"Culturally, you always had a middle class here, but it was extremely poor," Breach said.

"Now, increasingly, that class is getting money, especially the younger generation."

The simplest yardstick of economic success is a country's growth in real gross domestic product, or how fast its total output of goods and services is rising, after inflation.

For the developing world, that growth is expected to be 6.9 percent this year -- more than double the 3 percent pace of the developed world, according to the International Monetary Fund.

The breakaway growth of the developing world is why the global economy overall is on track to post its fourth straight year of 4 percent-plus expansion, the IMF estimates.

The last such streak was in the early 1970s.

With the developed world's growth lagging well behind that of emerging economies, however, workers in industrialized nations may not feel as if they are part of the global boom.

Wages in the United States, for example, have been slow to rise in recent years.

In Western Europe, unemployment rates remain stubbornly high.

The United States and other countries in the developed world have lost jobs to emerging nations as a result of free trade, triggering protectionist sentiment here and in Europe.

Also, zooming prices for oil and other commodities, which have enriched the developing nations that export them, have come largely at the expense of the West.

But while there is no question that some of the developing world's gains are, in effect, a transfer of wealth from the industrialized world, experts say that emerging countries' success also is flowing back to the United States, Europe and Japan -- which combined still account for about two-thirds of the global economy.

What's more, low-cost goods from developing nations have helped keep inflation pressures muted despite the jump in oil prices, economists say.

"A lot of people are benefiting from globalization and they don't know it," said Paul Kasriel, economist at Northern Trust Co. in Chicago.

"If you're buying things at lower prices, and you still have your job, you're benefiting."

end quotes

Ah ....

Buying exactly what at lower prices?

Has the price of something actually come down over here?

Has anyone actually seen that happen?

Because everything that I have to buy ...

Has just gone up and up ....

And so ....

[Livyjr]

And the real expert at "dictatorship" .....

In my estimation, anyway ....

Is not George .....

Who certainly has the character for it ...

But Dick .....

America's Dick .....

And while we are on the subject of America's Dick .....

Let's see what is going on with him ...

Out there in the world these days .....

Where we have ....

"NSA limited spy plan - Cheney blocked in bid to intercept purely domestic calls, e-mail"

By SCOTT SHANE, New York Times
First published: Sunday, May 14, 2006

WASHINGTON -- In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and his top legal adviser argued that the National Security Agency should intercept purely domestic telephone calls and e-mail messages without warrants in the hunt for terrorists, according to two senior intelligence officials.

But NSA lawyers, trained in the agency's strict rules against domestic spying and reluctant to approve any warrantless eavesdropping, insisted that it should be limited to communications into and out of the country, said the officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss the debate inside the Bush administration late in 2001.

The NSA's position ultimately prevailed.

Details have not emerged publicly of how the director of the agency at the time, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, designed the program, persuaded wary NSA officers to accept it and sold the White House on its limits.

Whatever the internal deliberations, Hayden was the program's overseer and has become its chief salesman.

He is certain to face questions about his role when he appears at a Senate hearing this week on his nomination as director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Criticism of the surveillance program flared again last week with the disclosure that the NSA had collected the phone records of millions of Americans to track terror suspects.

By several accounts, Hayden, a 61-year-old Air Force officer who left the agency in April last year to become principal deputy director of national intelligence, was the man in the middle as President Bush demanded that intelligence agencies act urgently to stop future attacks.

On one side was a strong-willed vice president and his longtime legal adviser, David S. Addington, who believed the Constitution permitted spy agencies to take sweeping measures to defend the country.

Later, Cheney would personally arrange tightly controlled briefings on the program for select members of Congress.

Cheney's spokeswoman, Lee Anne McBride, declined to discuss the deliberations about the classified program.

Spokespeople for the NSA and for Hayden declined to comment.

Even with the NSA lawyers' reported success in narrowing the program, critics say it is nonetheless illegal and it should have never been created.

For the first time since the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed in 1978, the NSA was targeting Americans and others inside the country for eavesdropping without warrants.

[Livyjr]

"Agents Search Home, Office of CIA No. 3 Leader"

By MARK SHERMAN, AP

Among the contracts under scrutiny is one that dates from Foggo's previous job of running the logistics at a secret facility in Europe that supplies CIA personnel in war zones, the law enforcement official said.

Foggo gave the multimillion-dollar contract to supply bottled water to a Wilkes-related company, the official said.

Before becoming the agency's No. 3 leader in 2004, he was the chief of base at a secret facility that supports the war on terror.

Okay .....

Now ...

Getting back to matters or real importance here in OUR America .....

That being George W. Bush's GLOBAL WAR OF TERROR on whomever he likes to inflict terror on, that week, anyway ....

Without looking either to the right ...

Or the left, here ....

What we now all know ...

From this Kyle "DUSTY" Foggo CIA incident ....

Is that somewhere over there in Europe .....

Whether OLD EUROPE ....

Or NEW EUROPE ....

We can't yet tell ...

BECAUSE IT IS A (HUSH) SECRET ....

But anyway ....

Somewhere in Europe ....

We have a SECRET AMERICAN FACILITY .....

That is responsible for ....

Providing BOTTLED WATER ....

To CIA AGENTS ....

In what George W. Bush has declared to be war zones .....

And so .....

This "DUSTY" dude ....

Was in charge of providing this bottled water ...

To these CIA agents ...

For which he got a medal .....

From George W. Bush, apparently ....

Since by providing this bottled water to these CIA agents ....

This Foggo dude .....

Was considered by George W. Bush .....

To be a real hero of the REPUBLIC ...

And so he was, I guess, anyway ...

Since he did get the medal ...

And so ....

Who can argue with any of that ...

Which is not my point, anyway ....

What has got me real curious here .....

Is exactly how CLANDESTINE .....

Are these CIA spooks out there in the field .....

When they are walking around .....

In these foreign war zones ....

Drinking imported bottled water .....

That was somehow infiltrated to them ....

By Kyle "DUSTY" Foggo .....

From this SECRET AMERICAN FACILITY somewhere in either OLD or NEW Europe .....

Wouldn't that be a kind of "give-away", I wonder .....

All these alleged undercover CIA spooks wandering around in foreign lands that George W. Bush has declared to be war zones .....

Wearing their little sunglasses ...

And sipping their bottles of bottled water?

And I wonder how "DUSTY" Foggo was infiltrating this bottled water into these war zones ...

From this SECRET AMERICAN FACILITY somewhere in either OLD or NEW Europe ....

So that the bad guys ...

Would not know ...

That the ones showing up at some distribution point ...

In one of these war zones ...

To pick up their resupply of American bottled water ....

Were really American CIA agents ....

Supposedly in some kind of disguise ...

That would have them blend in with the indiginous population ....

If the indiginous population ....

Also drank that same brand of American bottled water ....

And so ...

[Livyjr]

And while the CIA does its darndest ....

To make sure that our CIA agents ....

In all of George W. Bush's war zones .....

Have all the bottled water that they can drink ....

"Suicides expose Army flaw - Military, facing troop shortages, neglect soldiers' mental health"

By LISA CHEDEKEL and MATTHEW KAUFFMAN, Hartford Courant
First published: Sunday, May 14, 2006

Army Spec. Jeffrey Henthorn, 25, of Choctaw, Okla., was sent back to Iraq for a second tour even though his superiors knew he had twice threatened suicide.

He killed himself in 2005.

Army Pfc. David L. Potter, 22, of Johnson City, Tenn., was diagnosed with anxiety and depression while serving in Iraq in 2004.

Records show Potter remained on active duty in Baghdad despite a suicide attempt and a psychiatrist's recommendation that he be separated from the Army.

Ten days after the recommendation was signed, he slid a gun out from under another soldier's bed and shot himself.

These deaths are among the most extreme failures by the U.S. military to properly screen, treat and evacuate mentally unfit troops, a Hartford Courant investigation has found.

Pressed by troop shortages, the military has increasingly sent, kept and recycled troubled service members into combat -- practices that undercut past assurances it would improve mental health care.

Besides suicides, experts say gaps in such care can fuel violence between soldiers, accidents and critical mistakes in judgment during combat operations.

Among the newspaper's findings:

Despite a congressional order that the military assess the mental health of all deploying troops, fewer than 1 in 300 service members see a mental health professional before shipping out.

Once at war, some unstable troops are kept on potent antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs with little or no counseling or medical monitoring, in violation of the military's own regulations.

Some troops who developed post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, after serving in Iraq are being sent back to the war zone, increasing risk to their mental health.

These practices helped fuel an increase in the suicide rate among troops serving in Iraq, which reached an all-time high in 2005 when 22 soldiers killed themselves -- accounting for nearly one in five of all noncombat Army deaths.

The Courant investigation found that at least 11 service members who committed suicide in Iraq in 2004 and 2005 were kept on duty despite exhibiting signs of significant psychological distress.

The Army's top mental health expert, Col. Elspeth Ritchie, acknowledged that some deployment practices, such as sending service members diagnosed with PTSD back into combat, have been driven in part by a troop shortage.

"The challenge for us ... is that the Army has a mission to fight."

"And, as you know, recruiting has been a challenge," she said.

"And so we have to weigh the needs of the Army, the needs of the mission, with the soldiers' personal needs."

Bomb damages shrine

A series of roadside bombs and explosions damaged a Shiite shrine east of the volatile city of Baqouba late Saturday -- the second time this year that a site sacred to Iraq's Shiite majority has been targeted.

The bombing at the Imam Abdullah Ali al-Hadi shrine, which caused no injuries, could have significant repercussions -- particularly in the Baqouba area, a mixed Sunni Arab-Shiite region where sectarian tensions are running high.

The blasts occurred at about 11 p.m. at the shrine, according to the Diyala provincial police Joint Coordination Center and Interior Ministry Lt. Col. Falah al-Mohammedawi.

On Feb. 22, bombs heavily damaged the Golden Dome in Samarra, which holds the tomb of Imam Abdullah's father.

That attack triggered a wave of reprisal attacks against Sunnis, dramatically escalating sectarian tension and pushing the country to the brink of civil war.

Meanwhile, attacks outside Baghdad killed a U.S. soldier and five Iraqis.

The U.S. soldier was killed by a roadside bomb south of Baghdad, the military said.

The attack raised to at least 2,437 the number of members of the U.S. military who have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

Children face malnutrition

Health and aid workers told the Los Angeles Times that one in four Iraqi children suffers from chronic malnutrition, as poor security and poverty take their toll on the youngest generation.

The situation is worse in remote rural areas, where as many as one in three children suffers from problems associated with poor diet such as stunted growth and low weight, according to a recent government report that surveyed 22,050 households in 98 districts around the nation.

The study shows that Iraq's current food-rationing program has not been able to meet many families' needs.

Iraq's continued instability is the main culprit, health experts said, disrupting food distribution networks, along with lack of sanitation and clean water.

[Livyjr]

And while the CIA does its darndest ....

To make sure that our CIA agents ....

In all of George W. Bush's war zones .....

Have all the bottled water that they can drink ....

"Fired agent believes CIA lied - Friends say McCarthy not an ideologue, but became disenchanted"

By R. JEFFREY SMITH, Washington Post
First published: Sunday, May 14, 2006

WASHINGTON -- A senior CIA official, meeting with Senate staff in a secure room of the Capitol last June, promised repeatedly that the agency did not violate or seek to violate an international treaty that bars cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of detainees, during interrogations it conducted in the Middle East and elsewhere.

But another CIA officer -- the agency's deputy inspector general, who for the previous year had been probing allegations of criminal mistreatment by the CIA and its contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan -- was startled to hear what she considered an outright falsehood, according to people familiar with her account.

It came during the discussion of legislation that would constrain the CIA's interrogations.

That CIA officer was Mary McCarthy, 61, who was fired April 20 for allegedly sharing classified information with journalists, including Washington Post journalist Dana Priest.

A CIA employee of two decades, McCarthy became convinced that "CIA people had lied" in that briefing, as one of her friends said later, not only because the agency had conducted abusive interrogations but also because its policies authorized treatment that she considered cruel, inhumane or degrading.

Whether McCarthy's conviction that the CIA was hiding unpleasant truths provoked her to leak sensitive information is known only to her and the journalists she is alleged to have spoken with last year.

But the picture of her that emerges from interviews with more than a dozen former colleagues is of an independent-minded analyst who became convinced that on multiple occasions the agency had not given accurate or complete information to its congressional overseers.

McCarthy was not an ideologue, her friends say, but at some point fell into a camp of CIA officers who felt that the Bush administration's venture into Iraq had dangerously diverted U.S. counter-terrorism policy.

After seeing -- in e-mails, cable traffic, interview transcripts and field reports -- some of the secret fruits of the Iraq intervention, McCarthy became disenchanted, three of her friends say.

In addition to CIA misrepresentations at the session last summer, McCarthy told the friends, a senior agency official failed to provide a full account of the CIA's detainee-treatment policy at a closed hearing of the House intelligence committee in February 2005, under questioning by Rep. Jane Harman of California, the senior Democrat.

McCarthy also told others she was offended that the CIA's general counsel had worked to secure a secret Justice Department opinion in 2004 authorizing the agency's creation of "ghost detainees" -- prisoners removed from Iraq for secret interrogations without notice to the International Red Cross -- because the Geneva Conventions prohibit such practices.

Almost all of McCarthy's friends and colleagues interviewed for this story agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity because her case still could be referred for prosecution and because much of her work involved highly classified information.

As a former director of intelligence programs in the Clinton administration's National Security Council, McCarthy was entrusted with deep secrets regarding the nation's covert actions overseas.

She was a contributor in 2004 to the presidential campaign of Democratic Sen. John Kerry, and a former colleague of two Clinton aides -- Richard Clarke and Randall Beers -- who had publicly assailed what they considered Bush's misguided focus on Iraq.

By many accounts, those traits helped fit McCarthy precisely into the current White House's model of a disloyal intelligence officer: She dissented from Bush administration policy, and let others know.

But McCarthy's friends, including former officials who support aggressive interrogation methods, resist any suggestion that she handled classified information loosely or that political motives lay behind her dissent and the contacts she has told the agency she had with journalists.

She was, in the view of several who know her well, a convenient CIA scapegoat for a White House that they say prefers intelligence acolytes instead of analysts, and reflexively sees ulterior motives in any policy criticism.

They allege that her firing was another chapter in a longstanding feud between the CIA and the Bush White House, stoked by frictions over the merits of the war in Iraq, over whether links existed between Saddam Hussein's regime and al-Qaida, and by the CIA-instigated criminal probe of White House officials suspected of leaking the name of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame.

"When the President nominated Porter Goss (as CIA director in September 2004), he sent Goss over to get a rogue agency under control," Steven Simon, a former colleague of McCarthy's at the National Security Council from 1994 to 1999, said Goss's aides told him.

Simon said McCarthy's unusually public firing appeared intended not only to block leaks but to suppress dissent that has "led to these leaks."

"The aim was to have a chilling effect, and it will probably work for a while."

Goss himself was forced to resign earlier this month.

CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise Dyck -- without naming McCarthy -- denied the firing was meant to suppress dissent.

She said it was provoked solely by the officer's admission to CIA investigators to having provided classified information to the media.

"You can't ignore an officer ignoring their secrecy agreement," she said.

Many lawmakers have said they share this viewpoint, and some have called for tougher CIA sanctions to enforce the secrecy rules.

But McCarthy, in e-mails to friends, has denied leaking anything classified.

She has not denied speaking to Priest, but said she was unaware that the CIA had secret prisons in Eastern Europe, the most attention-getting detail in Priest's articles last year.

Her lawyer has said the same thing publicly.

Assessing whether politics played a role in the firing is difficult, given the reluctance of those involved to lay bare the underlying facts.

The CIA has declined to disclose the evidence it collected against McCarthy.

McCarthy declined to be interviewed for this story and her attorney, Ty Cobb, said the CIA has precluded him from discussing what McCarthy said in a series of CIA interviews and polygraph examinations between February and April 18

end quotes

SSSSssshhhhhh .....

It's all a SECRET .....

But don't tell anyone that I told you ....

And so ....

[Livyjr]

"He'll go out in the money - Pataki's wealth has grown steadily during his 12 years running the state, trail of tax returns shows" 
 
By ELIZABETH BENJAMIN, Capitol bureau, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Tuesday, April 18, 2006

ALBANY -- During his tenure as governor of New York, George Pataki has become a wealthy man.

"'I made a serious mistake' - Senior aide to Pataki faces DWI charges after car crash in Albany"

By JAMES M. ODATO, Capitol bureau, Albany, New York Times Union

First published: Saturday, May 13, 2006

ALBANY -- Joseph Conway, a top aide to Gov. George Pataki, was placed on paid leave Friday after pleading not guilty to charges of driving while intoxicated and leaving the scene of an accident.

Conway, 40, of Slingerlands, is accused of driving his state vehicle into the rear of a car parked at Delaware Avenue and Leonard Place about 10 p.m. Thursday, said Department of Public Safety spokesman Detective James Miller.

The unoccupied car was "totaled," Miller said.

Records show Conway's blood-alcohol level was 0.23 -- nearly three times the threshold for DWI.

He was arrested at 10:20 p.m.

"I made a serious mistake," Conway said in a statement released after consultation with his lawyer, Andrew Kirby.

"It's something I deeply regret and I will take responsibility for it."

Kirby and Conway did not take calls for comment.

Wanda Maddex, 42, of Clifton Park, said she was visiting her ex-boyfriend after a late shift at her job at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception.

She was about to return to her 1994 Chevrolet.

"I heard the crash," Maddex said.

"I looked out the window and saw my car pushed into the telephone pole and this car trying to get away ..."

"My ex-boyfriend was able to run down the car in bare feet."

Will Bink, 53, a maintenance worker, said he ran out of the house and saw a 2001 Impala wedged into Maddex's car, which had been pushed several feet from its parking spot.

The driver dislodged his car after a few minutes of maneuvering, Bink said.

Maddex called police and waited with her damaged vehicle as Bink took off in pursuit, he said.

"He had two flat tires, so I knew he wasn't going to go far," Bink said.

"When he made a turn on Park Avenue, he couldn't get any further."

"He tried to get away."

"I ran up to him and said, 'You aren't going anywhere until the cops get here.'"

"He said, 'Sorry.'"

"I said, 'You're sorry I caught you.'"

"I reached in, got the keys."

Miller confirmed the story, saying witnesses called police and followed the car, and officers found Conway in the driver's seat parked near the accident scene.

Conway failed a field sobriety test and was described by officers as slurring his speech and having glassy eyes, and later took a test to determine the alcohol content of his blood.

Conway was arraigned Friday morning before City Court Judge Thomas Keefe and pleaded not guilty to two DWI misdemeanor counts and to leaving the scene of an accident.

The car he was driving is registered to the state Office of General Services, according to state Department of Motor Vehicle records.

Conway, who started with the Pataki administration in 1998 as a Budget Division spokesman, served as the governor's press secretary and works as director of special projects.

Conway has been a state employee since 1988.

He worked for Senate Republicans for a decade before joining the governor's staff.

David Catalfamo, Pataki's director of communications, said Conway was put on paid leave from his $143,000-per-year post "as he takes the appropriate steps to address the ramifications" of the arrest.

"Joe is a longtime and valued staff member and we will continue to stand by him as he addresses these serious issues," Catalfamo said.

Friends say Conway had been drinking at the Fort Orange Club before the accident, but a person who identified himself as the bartender at the downtown members-only landmark said he was unaware of Conway being at the tavern on Thursday.

The club's manager did not return a call for comment.

[Snuffysmith]

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/05/15/opini...herbert.html?hp

America the Fearful
By BOB HERBERT
Published: May 15, 2006
In the dark days of the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt counseled Americans to avoid fear. George W. Bush is his polar opposite. The public's fear is this president's most potent political asset. Perhaps his only asset.

Mr. Bush wants ordinary Americans to remain in a perpetual state of fear — so terrified, in fact, that they will not object to the steady erosion of their rights and liberties, and will not notice the many ways in which their fear is being manipulated to feed an unconscionable expansion of presidential power.

If voters can be kept frightened enough of terrorism, they might even overlook the monumental incompetence of one of the worst administrations the nation has ever known.

Four marines drowned Thursday when their 60-ton tank rolled off a bridge and sank in a canal about 50 miles west of Baghdad. Three American soldiers in Iraq were killed by roadside bombs the same day. But those tragic and wholly unnecessary deaths were not the big news. The big news was the latest leak of yet another presidential power grab: the administration's collection of the telephone records of tens of millions of American citizens.

The Bush crowd, which gets together each morning to participate in a highly secret ritual of formalized ineptitude, is trying to get its creepy hands on all the telephone records of everybody in the entire country. It supposedly wants these records, which contain crucial documentation of calls for Chinese takeout in Terre Haute, Ind., and birthday greetings to Grandma in Talladega, Ala., to help in the search for Osama bin Laden.

Hey, the president has made it clear that when Al Qaeda is calling, he wants to be listening, and you never know where that lead may turn up.

The problem (besides the fact that the president has been as effective hunting bin Laden as Dick Cheney was in hunting quail) is that in its fearmongering and power-grabbing the Bush administration has trampled all over the Constitution, the democratic process and the hallowed American tradition of government checks and balances.

Short of having them taken away from us, there is probably no way to fully appreciate the wonder and the glory of our rights and liberties here in the United States, including the right to privacy.

The Constitution and the elaborate system of checks and balances were meant to protect us against the possibility of a clownish gang of small men and women amassing excessive power and behaving like tyrants or kings. But the normal safeguards have not been working since the Bush crowd came to power, starting with the hijacked presidential election in 2000.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, all bets were off. John Kennedy once said, "The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war." But George W. Bush, employing an outrageous propaganda campaign ("Shock and awe," "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud"), started an utterly pointless war in Iraq that he still doesn't know how to win or how to end.

If you listen to the Bush version of reality, the president is all powerful. In that version, we are fighting a war against terrorism, which is a war that will never end. And as long as we are at war (forever), there is no limit to the war-fighting powers the president can claim as commander in chief.

So we've kidnapped people and sent them off to be tortured in the extraordinary rendition program; and we've incarcerated people at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere without trial or even the right to know the charges against them; and we're allowing the C.I.A. to operate super-secret prisons where God-knows-what-all is going on; and we're listening in on the phone calls and reading the e-mail of innocent Americans without warrants; and on and on and on.

The Bushies will tell you that it is dangerous and even against the law to inquire into these nefarious activities. We just have to trust the king.

Well, I give you fair warning. This is a road map to totalitarianism. Hallmarks of totalitarian regimes have always included an excessive reliance on secrecy, the deliberate stoking of fear in the general population, a preference for military rather than diplomatic solutions in foreign policy, the promotion of blind patriotism, the denial of human rights, the curtailment of the rule of law, hostility to a free press and the systematic invasion of the privacy of ordinary people.

There are not enough pretty words in all the world to cover up the damage that George W. Bush has done to his country. If the United States could look at itself in a mirror, it would be both alarmed and ashamed at what it saw.

[Snuffysmith]

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8992

May 15, 2006
Fascism: Are We There Yet?
The surveillance state and the dangers of 'data-mining'
by Justin Raimondo
The lies keep coming. During the run-up to war with Iraq, we were told this administration knew for sure that Saddam had "weapons of mass destruction," and not only that, but knew exactly where they were. When no WMD turned up after the invasion, the Bushies came up with a bushel of excuses and denied ever saying that in the first place.

Oh, but don't worry – their real motive for going to war was to export "democracy" to Iraq – which, as anyone can see, is happening – so none of that matters anyway.

When it came out that the U.S. government was intercepting and listening to all overseas calls, the president himself stepped up to the plate and declared that they weren't spying on domestic calls – and now we learn that the biggest database in the world is being compiled by the National Security Agency (NSA) in which a record of every phone call made in the U.S. since 2001 is kept.

Oh, but don't fret – no one in government would ever allow this vital and potentially sensitive information to be put to unsavory purposes, such as blackmailing political opponents or similar dirty tricks. That anyone in Washington would do such a thing – why, it's unthinkable!

Trust us, say the biggest liars since the boy who cried wolf. Scooter Libby really doesn't remember outing undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame, and Ahmed Chalabi really is a "hero in error." All the lying war propaganda vomited forth by this administration and its media toadies on the front page of the New York Times, then dutifully lapped up by administration talking heads on the Sunday morning talk show circuit, was just an honest mistake. They didn't mean to deceive us, you see, and this is supposed to make us feel better as well as let the War Party off the hook.

It does neither. It won't matter in the long run, however, if the neocons get what they're after. What's really at stake here is the continued relevance of the Constitution and the legacy of the Founding Fathers. Listen closely – you can hear them turning in their graves.

What is significant about this new revelation is the way the White House is spinning it: they claim it's all perfectly legal, because the president – according to their creative interpretation of the Constitution – has the "inherent" authority to create such a database. Congress may object, but it isn't up to them – it's up to "the decider," as Dubya has recently begun referring to Himself. Instead of a president, we now have a decider in chief, who combines the qualities of a chief executive, a military chieftain, and a king. Not a modern monarch, all of whom are merely symbolic reminders of fallen empires, but a king of old, who could dismiss Parliament and rule by decree.

The phone record database is ostensibly a weapon to be used against terrorists plotting another 9/11: by employing a technique known as "data-mining" the authorities are supposed to be able to detect "bursts" of unusual calls and reveal a pattern that will somehow lead them to the bad guys. A piece in the Christian Science Monitor says this "can be used to identify a 'social network' of interconnected people – including, perhaps, would-be terrorists." Yes, and also including the "social network" of the political opposition, antiwar leaders, and – yikes! – antiwar writers.

Data-mining is the Big Idea now energizing the burgeoning "anti-terrorist" industry, and its purpose is nothing less than to build databases that can be "cross-referenced in the hope of matching patterns, relationships, and activities that bear investigating." The Monitor goes on to cite Silicon Valley security expert Bruce Schneier, of Counterpane Internet Security:

"You should presume that phone numbers are being collated with Internet records, credit-card records, everything."

That's why they call it totalitarianism – because they want access to everything. The totality of your life must be available at the touch of a button. Remember "Total Information Awareness," the scheme cooked up by John Poindexter and Donald Rumsfeld that Congress ordered dismantled? Well, this "data-mining" business is it: Rummy, it appears, just embedded the program in a different bureaucratic rat-hole, and they've been pursuing their quest for omniscience ever since, without the knowledge or oversight of Congress. This usurpation has so riled Sen. Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, and 50 other members of congress, that there will be a congressional investigation into the matter.

"Privacy nuts," sneers The Weekly Standard, which wheels out good old reliable Heather MacDonald to explain why "only a paranoid solipsist could feel threatened" by this latest intrusion. After all, Heather explains, your name won't be attached to the number: it's just a bunch of digits, silly. And even then, there's just so much data that getting anything out of it is going to be very difficult. There, there – now go back to sleep.

But if there's too much data to glean meaningful patterns in anything close to real-time, then doesn't that invalidate the entire "data-mining" procedure as a useful tool in tracking terrorists? As William Arkin put it in a fascinating piece on this subject of "harvesting" useful intelligence from a massive database:

"An all-seeing domestic surveillance is slowly being established, one that in just a few years time will be able to track the activities and 'transactions' of any targeted individual in near real time."

And digits can always be attached to a name, as MacDonald admits:

"True, the government can de-anonymize the data if connections to terror suspects emerge, and it is not known what threshold of proof the government uses to put a name to critical phone numbers. But until that point is reached, your privacy is at greater risk from the Goodyear blimp at a Stones concert than from the NSA's supercomputers churning through trillions of zeros and ones representing disembodied phone numbers."

The mere fact that "it is not known what threshold of proof the government uses" before implementing this Orwellian technique tells us all we need to know about this very imminent threat to what is left of our civil liberties. What threshold of proof must be reached before the government arrogates to itself the "right" to ferret out the perhaps intimate details of your life? If we are talking about this government, one shudders to contemplate the answer. The Bush administration considers itself above the law: it recognizes no law but itself, and to hell with the Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights.

The old republic passes away, but what will take its place? The outlines of the new system emerging from the ruins of the Constitution are beginning to take shape, and it isn't a pretty sight. One of my favorite bloggers put the issue in context, warning against:

"The ultra-conservative legal scholars who invented the doctrine of the unitary executive and turned into our own home-grown version of the Fuhrerprinzip – now backed by the ability to process 10 billion bits of telecommunications data per second. Big Brother, eat your heart out."

Last year, a number of writers, including Lew Rockwell of the Mises Institute, Scott McConnell of The American Conservative, and myself, among others, took up the question of whether or not America is going fascist. A unique confluence of various factors gave rise to this kind of speculation: the leader cult that had grown up around the president, the worship of the military, and a foreign policy stance somewhere between old-style British imperialism and Soviet-style "liberation" (as when the Red Army "liberated" Afghanistan in the 1970s). Rockwell started the discussion with his perceptive comments on "Red State Fascism," and the topic soon became a subject of debate all over the Internet, as well as in print. I chimed in on several occasions with my own somewhat pessimistic prognosis. Scott was more optimistic, yet still clearly worried about the future prospects of a genuinely fascist regime taking hold in the land of the free. The existence of government "data-miners" with full access to our phone records, our financial records, and every other bit of data they can dig up, provides yet more evidence that Rockwell is right about the rising fascist danger. As he put it:

"The most significant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely unremarked, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state bourgeoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressional elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism. Whereas the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of the federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central state, particularly its military wing."

The Bushies and their media megaphones are loudly touting a recent poll that shows majority support for increased surveillance. This, I think, underscores the prescience of Rockwell's analysis. The present regime is busily building up the structural basis of a police state, one in which they will have the power to see into everything with the possible exception of your very soul – and that, I can almost assure you, is coming.

Yes, data-mining can be used to track those millions of Americans who aren't plotting terrorist attacks – and, heck, Big Brother can even watch us from space. I suppose executive orders could be used to lock up political dissidents without charges or a trial: and, yes, the U.S just possibly might use its doctrine of military "preemption" to defeat a threat that was never there. Luckily for us, we're governed by angels. Otherwise, I shudder to think what might happen…

[Livyjr]

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/05/15/opini...herbert.html?hp

"America the Fearful

By BOB HERBERT
Published: May 15, 2006

In the dark days of the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt counseled Americans to avoid fear.

George W. Bush is his polar opposite.

The public's fear is this president's most potent political asset.

Perhaps his only asset.

The Constitution and the elaborate system of checks and balances were meant to protect us against the possibility of a clownish gang of small men and women amassing excessive power and behaving like tyrants or kings.

Well, Snuf .....

You sure are right on the money with this article, alright .....

Especially that line about "the Constitution and the elaborate system of checks and balances were meant to protect us against the possibility of a clownish gang of small men and women amassing excessive power and behaving like tyrants or kings" .......

It makes me recall a series of conversations that I ended up having with a newspaper editor out in Arizona, I believe he was .....

http://www.asiantimes.com/asiantimes.htm

This in the months leading up to the November 2004 presidential elections .....

And this newspaper editor had come here from the Phillipines ....

As a child .....

After WWII ....

And his vision of America was formed by watching cowboy movies as a child, over there .....

Plus his contact with American soldiers after the war was over, and the Japanese were routed from his homeland .....

This man was apparently quite influential as a newspaper editor, in his own mind, anyway ...

And he didn't know the first thing about the United States Constitution .....

NOR DID HE GIVE A DAMN ABOUT SOMETHING CALLED THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION .....

Because it meant nothing to him, at all ....

In that it put no money in his pocket .....

Which is what "life in OUR America" is really all about, what, what .....

"LAND OF THE GREEDY, HOME OF THE SLEAZY" .....

"Move over, let me in, I want some, too ......"

His market out there was mainly the Asian community ...

And he was recommending in his editorials that they support George W. Bush ..

Because he was a STRONGMAN .....

Which is to say, a dictator .....

And his position was that the Asians want that kind of leader ...

In fact, need that kind of leader ...

And so ...

Despite OUR United Constitution, we should really have Phillipines-style STRONGMEN over here .....

As opposed to a more "constitutionally-inclined" leader ....

Who this guy saw as being too weak for America .....

And that series of conversations ...

Plus my own observations ...

And studies ...

Have pretty much convinced me ...

That to the "man (woman) on the street" .....

The United States Constitution is really nothing at all .....

And when that is so ...

Which it is ...

Then there are no "checks and balances" .....

Because there is no SOURCE for them to spring forth from ....

And that is where we are right now ....

Which is why we have a Ferdinand Edralín Marcos ......

Or a Manuel Noriega-type of TINPOT DICTATOR ....

On the THRONE .....

Here in OUR America these days ....

As opposed to an FDR-style statesman .....

And it goes directly to what are called "the people of America" .....

When the "people" of America have gone through sufficient "devolution" ....

Which is to say "retrograde evolution" ........

From rational, thinking, discerning human beings ...

Down into being little more than two-legged "cud-chewing" fearful beasts ...

"CONSUMERS" .....

Like feed-lot cattle ....

Or farm-raised rabbits ....

Then you get to where we are right now .....

And so .....

No surprises, whatsoever, Snuf .....

No surprises at all ....

We are where we are ...

Because this is where we have descended to, ourselves ...

And so .....