Aljazeeera America has the article US: ‘Very little doubt’ of Syria gas attack; UN inspectors to visit site.

The White House said Sunday it had “very little doubt” that the Syrian government was responsible for the assault that killed hundreds of civilians, as U.N. inspectors prepared to access the Damascus suburb where the purported nerve gas attack took place on Monday.

But a senior Obama administration official treated the Syrian decision with skepticism, saying it was “too late to be credible.”

“If the Syrian government had nothing to hide and wanted to prove to the world that it had not used chemical weapons in this incident, it would have ceased its attacks on the area and granted immediate access to the UN – five days ago,” the official said on condition of anonymity.

I have been hearing what I would call knee-jerk reactions to the opening of the Aljazeeera America cable network.  People have been voicing what I assume is their assumption that a non-Israeli source from the middle east could not possibly do even-handed reporting.  You can read the above article to see for yourself what you think.  Do you think Faux Noise would have reported it as well?  What do you think the Arab population thinks about Americans who get their news from Faux Noise? What do you think about handling of this story by Israeli news sources?  Do not assume you know how I would answer the previous questions.  They are not rhetorical, but something worth thinking about.

Crooks and Liars has the article KY Gov Praise of Obamacare Leaves McConnell, Rand Dumbfounded.

Speaking to a crowd of Kentucky voters at a fundraising breakfast, Beshear took the opportunity to praise the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare) to the overwhelming support of the audience and take subtle jabs at those who were opposing Obamacare, which include Senators Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul who were also attending.

Republican Senators Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, also attending, weren’t expecting the onslaught. Jill Lawrence reported, “It was not what anyone expected—least of all Republican Sens. Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, who sat stone-faced onstage with Beshear as he unloaded on them without using names.”

Beshear finished with a stab to the heart of GOP’s NoCare, no alternative. “It’s amazing to me how people who are pouring time and money and energy into trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act sure haven’t put that kind of energy into trying to improve the health of Kentuckians,” according to the National Journal.

I more Democrats got out there and spoke up, the Presiden wouldn’t have to be the only one trying to get the truth out.

I noticed today that on the NBC news, while we have a Democrat as President and the Senate majority is Democratic, the foreign policy experts they had on telling us how our government should and would behave in Syria were Republicans.
For a left leaning media, they sure give Republicans more coverage than they deserve. Senator Corker of Tennessee isn’t even noted for his foreign policy expertise and NBC was reporting on his appearance on Faux Noise. Surely the head of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, a Democrat, could have been featured on one of the three real networks.

New Economic Perspectives has the post Bullet-Pointing the Big Bank Bamboozlement by Dan Kervick.  I have said before on this blog that there are usually many economic forces pulling on the economy, but the trick is to figure out what forces are dominating at any given time and what forces are so small that they can be ignored for the time being.

I liked this article because it mentioned a number of forces that I had never considered.  I’ll quote a few of the bullet points on only the topic of low interest rates.  For the rest, you’ll have to read the article itself.

But at this point, does anybody really know what central bank policy would actually be most conducive to getting back to trend growth? Let’s run it down, PowerPoint style, shall we?

• Are Fed asset purchases holding long-term interest rates down? Certainly.
• Are those low rates leading to a healthy situation in the housing market, or to another dangerous bubble?  An open question.
• Are asset purchases injecting money into the bank accounts of the affluent and large financial institutions? Yes.
• Are asset purchases also draining interest income from the economy? Yes.
• Are asset purchases contributing to a wealth effect by boosting the prices of equities? Possibly.
• Are asset purchases contributing to a negative wealth effect by suppressing the interest earnings of retirement savings and other long-term assets? Possibly.

I knew I was going to make a post about these ideas because of the reasons mentioned above even before I saw this last throw-away bullet point.

Oh, and one other random point to note:

• Is Lawrence Summers, a crony capitalist insider and a virtual poster boys for everything we have done wrong in America over the past 30 years, a leading candidate to take over the central bank? Yes.

Shortly after I posted the cartoon in the previous post Handy comparison chart: Janet Yellen vs. Larry Summers, I read the letters to editor in The Boston Globe.

The letters were Comparison of Bulger, Summers was insensitive, not clever and Cartoon crossed the line.

Here is the cartoon in question:

The sad part of it is that these letter writers do not understand how appropriate the cartoon is. If you measure the total pain inflicted on the world, Larry Summers may have Whitey Bulger beat by orders of magnitude. In our society we don’t seem to understand the damage white collar crime does.

What does the press have to do to get people to see the problem? Neither serious articles nor cartoons seem to be reaching people.

The Daily Kos has the article Handy comparison chart: Janet Yellen vs. Larry Summers.

It’s the simple unfairness of of having to work so much harder to reach the top, and if you do, you’re seen as the “gendered” pick. It’s symbolic of every time a highly-qualified woman hits the glass ceiling when forced to compete with a loud, arrogant blowhard with a strong sense of self-entitlement and undeserved mystique of greatness.

Since I have not written enough on this topic lately, I leave you with this cartoon that the article used.

At Reader Supported News, I read the article Confidential Memo at the Heart of the Global Financial Crisis by Greg Palast.

When a little birdie dropped the End Game memo through my window, its content was so explosive, so sick and plain evil, I just couldn’t believe it.

The Memo confirmed every conspiracy freak’s fantasy: that in the late 1990s, the top US Treasury officials secretly conspired with a small cabal of banker big-shots to rip apart financial regulation across the planet. When you see 26.3 percent unemployment in Spain, desperation and hunger in Greece, riots in Indonesia and Detroit in bankruptcy, go back to this End Game memo, the genesis of the blood and tears.

The Treasury official playing the bankers’ secret End Game was Larry Summers.

Don’t let the style of the article fool you.  Though Greg Palast doesn’t use the serious tone that we have come to expect from reporters, he is a very serious reporter and investigative journalist with the credentials to back him up.

What could President Obama be thinking when he puts forward Larry Summers for Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board? That is not a rhetorical question, and the answers that come to mind are truly frightening.

William Black has written the piece Bhide: Pick a “Boring” Fed Chair because Supervision is the Key and it requires “Dullness”.  There is a lot in the article that is obviously based on his own experiences as a regulator.

Bhide has just witnessed the greatest spree of elite looting in history, but somehow missed it entirely.  Had Greenspan and Bernanke understood that deregulation was “bound to produce looting” and given the “regulators in the field” their full support there would have been no financial crisis.  Greenspan did not muster even “lukewarm support” for the Fed’s supervisors – he attacked them savagely for daring to criticize the banks that were large control frauds.  Bernanke appointed two economists as his top (anti) supervisor to ensure he would not suffer their practice of speaking truth to power.  A Fed Chair who made it her mission to restore effective supervision would not choose “boring”, “dull,” or “bureaucratic” people.  She would be putting a giant bull’s-eye on her back and would ensure that she never have another boring day.

I wonder how  hard the American people need to be hit upside the head with the evidence of this obvious plundering by the elite bankers of this country before they insist on reform.  There is no reason why Elizabeth Warren should be so alone in her insistence on fixing the problem.

I have also often mentioned this point brought out by Black’s article:

Control fraud begat additional control fraud and created the perverse incentives that spread “echo” epidemics of control fraud through other professions (loan brokers, appraisers, and auditors) by creating a “Gresham’s” dynamic in which bad ethics tends to drive good ethics out of the markets and professions.

I observed this at the time of the dot com bubble.  Year after year people were making money hand over fist with ridiculous investments in these enterprises which were almost certain to fail.  The mutual fund managers who only made their customers 12% per year gains by making prudent investments were drummed out of the business because they weren’t making 90% returns like their colleagues who were willing to throw caution to the winds.  I wanted to invest with the cautious mutual funds, but they were disappearing right before my eyes.  Fortunately for me there were enough cautions mutual funds left to keep me protected from the dot com  bubble.

New Economic Perspectives (NEP) has the video NEP’s William Black appears on HuffPost Live.

The legal culture of big-time settlements can short-circuit the law, protecting wrongdoers from punishment, trial or even an admission of guilt. That’s just what the government has done for the major banks implicated in sweeping mortgage fraud. Is it too late to rectify the big banks role in the housing and financial crisis? Bill and other panelists speak with Alyona Minkovski on this subject.

I post this especially for reader DavidF who thinks that money spent on welfare is as serious a problem to solve as is the problem of the country’s elites robbing us blind. So here are my numbers as hinted at in the above video. I am waiting to see David’s numbers for his case of the money wasted on welfare payments to the poor being as serious an issue.

The Real News Network highlighted the video below titled This Is The Instruction Manual To Pillaging The World.

If my posts about The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein and all the posts referring to that post are too poorly done or too verbose, the above video captures it all in a nutshell. (A little blue wording in this video, but if you’re an adult, you can take it.)

New Economic Perspectives has the post “Makers and Takers:” They’re Projecting Again!

The post uses this video below as its launch point.

Woman: “It kills me every time i hear senators, especially republicans, talk about those takers. they’re just taken. the takers. i paid taxes for over 30 years and i have a rare illness and now i’m disabled. the state of arizona raised the eligibility for a program that was paying $100 a month for my medicaid to 3.4%. consequently, i was cut off. $100 a month, which meant (breaks down) i could no longer go to physical therapy. do it intentionally to cut as many people as they can for as long as they can from benefits that are desperately needed and it’s just not right. we’re the takers.”

This is a powerful video in itself, but you don’t get the full import of the headline until you read the post on New Economic Perspectives. I think the following snippet makes the point.

That’s the point the DC/New York “villagers” don’t want to talk about very much. They’ll credit people with not being likely to vote for people who label them “moochers,” but they won’t credit people with understanding that the real “takers” are not themselves, but the very people who are projecting that insult onto them.

Maybe that’s because the villagers don’t intend to talk about who the real takers are. But I think that people are smart enough to come to understand that anyway. And when they do, there will be hell to pay for those who guilt-tripped them in order to distract them from the reality of the real takers and their outrageous takings.

The point about who the real takers are is one that is the subject of many posts on my blog.