The difference between men and boys

---

is the price (and dangerousness) of their toys. The video shows a life-sized Hot Wheels loop-the-loop.

This is an open thread cuz the last one was getting sluggish.

High Noon for Goldman Sachs

A couple of days ago, Alice Schroeder wrote a piece at Bloomberg about a friend of a friend who works at Goldman Sachs. Apparently the bankers are getting a little nervous about blowback from the working class.

“I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.

Schroeder was also able to get confirmation from the NYPD that a number of bankers have been getting gun permits. Wow, I’m glad to know the Goldman Sachs guys are running scared. Schroeder notes that Goldman’s CEO, Lloyd Blankenfein (whom she nicknames “Cool Hand Lloyd”), has been nervous for quite a long time. Get this–he installed a security gate at his house a couple of months before Bear Stearns went down. How very prescient of him. Schroeder writes:

…talk of Goldman and guns plays right into the way Wall-Streeters like to think of themselves. Even those who were bailed out believe they are tough, macho Clint Eastwoods of the financial frontier, protecting the fistful of dollars in one hand with the Glock in the other. The last thing they want is to be so reasonably paid that the peasants have no interest in lynching them.

Hmm…I like the movie references. So the bankers are resorting to guns so they can make A Few Dollars More before the proles can Hang ’em High?

According to Peter Cohan of Daily Finance, what is making the bankers so anxious is that they will soon be getting their outlandish end-of-the-year bonuses, while the rest of us struggle to make ends meet and have no idea how we’re going to buy any Christmas gifts. Cohan writes:

Once news of the final tally on Goldman’s bonuses breaks, the bank is going to face an even tougher public relations campaign. Goldman’s partners are expected to receive record bonuses this year. Some bankers fear a repeat of what happened in March to the AIG Financial Products employees who received $165 million in bonuses. Once word got out about the bonuses, demonstrators went to the employees’ homes and protested on their front yards.

What Goldman execs need to remember is that the firm wouldn’t be doing so well if it weren’t for the public’s munificence. After all, $12.9 billion of the AIG bailout money went to Goldman. And it is still enjoying $52 billion in low-interest loans from the U.S. government to finance its trading profits.

Cohan even argues that Goldman should be offering reparations to people who have lost their homes and jobs. Somehow I don’t think that is going to happen, but I’m glad to learn that these thugs in three-piece suits are feeling a little bit edgy.

digg!!! tweet!!! share!!!

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Furl | Newsvine

Der Kriegsnobelpreisträger*

Warmonger-in-Chief

---

From Robert Scheer at Truthdig:

HERE WE GO AGAIN

It is already a 30-year war begun by one Democratic president, and thanks to the political opportunism of the current commander in chief the Afghanistan war is still without end or logical purpose. President Barack Obama’s own top national security adviser has stated that there are fewer than 100 al-Qaida members in Afghanistan and that they are not capable of launching attacks. What superheroes they must be, then, to require 100,000 U.S. troops to contain them.

The president handled that absurdity by conflating al-Qaida, which he admitted is holed up in Pakistan, with the Taliban and denying the McChrystal report’s basic assumption that the enemy in Afghanistan is local in both origin and focus. Obama stated Tuesday in a speech announcing a major escalation of the war, “It’s important to recall why America and our allies were compelled to fight a war in Afghanistan in the first place.” But he then cut off any serious consideration of that question with the bald assertion that “we did not ask for this fight.”

Of course we did. The Islamic fanatics who seized power in Afghanistan were previously backed by the U.S. as “freedom fighters” in what was once marketed as a bold adventure in Cold War one-upmanship against the Soviets. It was President Jimmy Carter, aided by a young liberal hawk named Richard Holbrooke, now Obama’s civilian point man on Afghanistan, who decided to support Muslim fanatics there. Holbrooke began his government service as one of the “Best and the Brightest” in Vietnam and was involved with the rural pacification and Phoenix assassination program in that country, and he is now a big advocate of the counterinsurgency program proposed by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal to once again win the hearts and minds of locals who want none of it.

The current president’s military point man, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, served in Carter’s National Security Council and knows that Obama is speaking falsely when he asserts it was the Soviet occupation that gave rise to the Muslim insurgency that we abetted. Gates wrote a memoir in 1996 which, as his publisher proclaimed, exposed “Carter’s never-before-revealed covert support to Afghan mujahedeen—six months before the Soviets invaded.”

Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was asked in a 1998 interview with the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur if he regretted “having given arms and advice to future terrorists,” and he answered, “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?” Brzezinski made that statement three years before the 9/11 attack by those “stirred-up Muslims.”

Lot’s of people have questioned whether Obama has a long-term relationship with Zbiggie B. dating back to his days at Columbia.  I dunno, but there are lots of names in Scheer’s piece I associate with “massive fail.”

BTW – I quit reading Truthdig last year when it went full Kool-aid. I guess it didn’t work out so well for them.

---

*That’s German for “The Nobel Peace Prize Warrior” (h/t MABlue)

digg!!! tweet!!! share!!!

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Furl | Newsvine

POTUS Speech Live Blog

What will he say?  How will he say it? What is tonight’s drinking game word?

digg!!! tweet!!! share!!! join in !!!

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Furl | Newsvine

OFA Pre-Speech Memo

This arrived in my email by mistake:

From: David Axelrod, Obots For America

To: XXXX

Dear valued OFA team member:

Tonight Barack Obama will make a very important speech about the conflict in Afghanistan. It is crucial that we rally support for our President as he implements his new strategy. Here’s how you can help:

1. During and after the speech you should post comments on your favorite blogs praising the speech and the President’s policies.

2. Be sure to mention how inspiring the speech was, and how President Obama has proven his mettle as a war-time President. It wouldn’t hurt to throw a jab at you-know-who by saying “he’s answered that 3 am call.”

3. It is important that you point out that President Obama carefully weighed the advice of all the experts, but made his own decision. Use terms like “firm, but measured” and “carefully crafted” to describe the new policy.

4. Don’t forget to place the blame for conflict where it belongs – on Bill Clinton. If he hadn’t been fooling around with Monica Lewinsky he would have captured Osama bin Laden back in the nineties. But also mention how George Bush made a mess of things too.

5. Personalize your comments as much as possible by describing how people you know are serving in the military. If you have relatives that served in previous wars mention them too. If you don’t know anyone that is or has served, just make it up.

6. Last but not least, remind people that President Obama promised to “finish the job” in Afghanistan during the campaign. It was the war in Iraq that he opposed.

Thank you for you valuable assistance. The speech begins at 8pm Eastern (5pm Pacific)

Dave

p.s. Don’t forget to donate!

digg!!! tweet!!! share!!!

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Furl | Newsvine

Allentown is so 25 years ago

Allentown

Obama is convening a jobs summit and then heading to Allentown, PA for the start of his Main Street Tour.

Jeez, didn’t Obama get the memo?  Allentown’s been in a state of Depression for decades.  It started back in the late 70’s when the Japanese started dumping cheap steel on the market and the US steel bossies used it as an excuse to gut their unions.  And lest someone start quoting Niemoller on me, let me just tell you that I lived in Pittsburgh at the time the US steel industry went south.  I have uncles who lost their jobs permanently.  The mills that banged and clanged all night and lit up a sandblasted sky suddenly went silent.  My grandmother’s house, perched on the heights above McKeesport’s mill, became part of a neighborhood in decline.  The stores shuttered up and the town center became desolate.  The water system became compromised with giardia and the tax base disappeared so it couldn’t be fixed.  It was a hard, hard time.

Oh, sure, industry has occasionally sputtered back to life but usually at vastly reduced salaries.  Employees have attempted to buy back the factories, not always with the best results.  The steel mills in Pittshurgh were torn down leaving a riverside view of amazing beauty.  The city has attracted a more technological workforce but went bankrupt not too long ago.  The city coffers were empty.

We younguns saw what happened to our uncles in the steel mills and decided that that wasn’t going to happen to us.  So, we went to school for biochemistry and genomics and cheminformatics and physical chemistry.  People always need medicine, right?  And the science was and is developing so rapidly that we wouldn’t ever become obsolete.  We’d just exercise our flexible minds and read and do and read some more and, gosh darnit!, isn’t this the best country in the world for scientific discovery??

Mebbe.  But we ain’t cheap enough.

The REAL “Main Street”, Mr. Obama, is in Princeton, NJ and Nyack, NY and Groton, Connecticut and Bridgewater, NJ where pharmaceutical companies are shedding tens of thousands of jobs because the CEO’s have decided to abandon the discovery of ‘traditional medicines’ for the trendiness and newly acquired patent extensions on biologicals.  Now, they can get rid of the chemists and biologists that are weighing down their bottom lines for the cheap labor in Hyderabad.  Forget discovering any new reactions in the lab.  The US won’t have any need for that kind of knowledge.

What are you going to do about the loss of intellectual infrastructure, Mr. Obama?  There are no startup companies for us in our future because that would require capital and we haven’t got it.  The bankers do, F^&* you very much.  Why don’t you come to New Jersey and talk to my former colleagues who have their jobs until January 31, 2010?  If you go to Allentown, the newly laid off scientists are going to think you are avoiding them.  They’re going to think you don’t want to draw attention to the people who got educations and are now more or less permanently underemployed.  Why don’t you tell them how they are going to support their families now?

Yeah, right.  When it comes to the bean counting, golf playing, arrogant, thoughtless, short sited corporate CEOs that are throwing us out of work, it’s easy to see that you are one of them.

Take your act to Allentown.

digg!!! tweet!!! share!!!

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Furl | Newsvine