Please admit that we were right.

You see, that’s what all the hippie kicking comes down to.  The monumental ego of the predestined, God-ordained elite who can not possibly ever be wrong because they are successful and privileged and a just deity could not allow wickedness to go unpunished.

It logically follows the unsuccessful and under privileged are wicked and must be punished you see.

Part 3, Chapter 4

He had capitulated, that was agreed. In reality, as he saw now, he had been ready to capitulate long before he had taken the decision. From the moment when he was inside the Ministry of Love — and yes, even during those minutes when he and Julia had stood helpless while the iron voice from the telescreen told them what to do — he had grasped the frivolity, the shallowness of his attempt to set himself up against the power of the Party. He knew now that for seven years the Thought police had watched him like a beetle under a magnifying glass. There was no physical act, no word spoken aloud, that they had not noticed, no train of thought that they had not been able to infer. Even the speck of whitish dust on the cover of his diary they had carefully replaced. They had played sound-tracks to him, shown him photographs. Some of them were photographs of Julia and himself. Yes, even … He could not fight against the Party any longer. Besides, the Party was in the right. It must be so; how could the immortal, collective brain be mistaken? By what external standard could you check its judgements? Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought. Only!

The pencil felt thick and awkward in his fingers. He began to write down the thoughts that came into his head. He wrote first in large clumsy capitals:

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

Then almost without a pause he wrote beneath it:

TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE

But then there came a sort of check. His mind, as though shying away from something, seemed unable to concentrate. He knew that he knew what came next, but for the moment he could not recall it. When he did recall it, it was only by consciously reasoning out what it must be: it did not come of its own accord. He wrote:

GOD IS POWER

He accepted everything. The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford were guilty of the crimes they were charged with. He had never seen the photograph that disproved their guilt. It had never existed, he had invented it. He remembered remembering contrary things, but those were false memories, products of self deception. How easy it all was! Only surrender, and everything else followed. It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it. Nothing had changed except your own attitude: the predestined thing happened in any case. He hardly knew why he had ever rebelled. Everything was easy, accept!

Anything could be true. The so-called laws of Nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense. ‘If I wished,’ O’Brien had said, ‘I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.’ Winston worked it out. ‘If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.’ Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: ‘It doesn’t really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.’ He pushed the thought under instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a ‘real’ world where ‘real’ things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.

And yet two and two make four and nothing more regardless how much you newspeak five (or orange for that matter).

The emperor is butt naked and is and always has been monumentally and monstrously wrong about-

• Iraq
• Torture
• Star Chamber Trials
• Spying on Citizens without warrants
• Execution without trials
• A horrendous litany of War Crimes including Wars of Aggression and deliberate targeting of civilians and first responders
• Economics in general and theft and corruption in particular

to name but a few.

You may censor me, break me, or kill me and yet as Eddington observed- “if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.”

FAA 787 Inspections Reveal Checks Were Left to Boeing

By Alan Levin, Bloomberg News

Jan 30, 2013 8:00 PM ET

The Federal Aviation Administration has operated that way for many years, even as government audits have found those efforts were sometimes poorly overseen and led to errors. The agency in 2005 began allowing Boeing and other manufacturers to pick the engineers, who previously were chosen by the FAA.

“I think everyone recognizes there is an inherent conflict there,” Jim Hall, former chairman of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, said in an interview.

…

“It’s hard for the public to accept the concept for someone else to make a finding for the government,” he (John McGraw, a former FAA deputy safety director) said. “But this has been done since the start of the FAA. This is really just an extension of that, with better oversight than they had back then.”

…

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada pointed to engineering certification as a possible factor in the crash of Swissair Flight 111 off Nova Scotia on Sept. 2, 1998, that killed all 229 aboard.

Engineers at an aircraft maintenance company who were acting on the FAA’s behalf signed off on an entertainment system that may have started a fire that brought down the plane, the Canadian safety board found. The engineers lacked sufficient knowledge of the Boeing MD-11’s power grid to provide that certification, the board found.

I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather, not screaming in terror like his passengers.

Monitor Outside Gitmo Tribunal Has Power to Censor Proceedings Without Judge’s Knowledge

By: Kevin Gosztola, Firedog Lake

Tuesday January 29, 2013 12:32 pm

The Guantanamo war court was deciding whether to go into a closed session yesterday. David Nevin, who is representing 9/11 suspect, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was speaking in court about the decision to argue some of a motion involving evidence of CIA black prison sites. The audio feed went off for three minutes and court was off-record for about three minutes.

Judge Col. James Pohl noted, “The 40-second delay was initiated, not by me. I’m curious as to why.” Nevin had simply been reading the caption to an unclassified motion. “If you don’t feel we can discuss this now, let me know, but I’m just trying to figure out.” The government wanted to explain what happened to the judge in a secret session.

…

Nevin addressed the court, “I would like to know who has the permission to turn that light on and off, who is listening to this, who is controlling these proceedings, or controlling that aspect of these proceedings.” He added, “I was under the impression that the [court security officer] was, commanded that light in this process.”

Cheryl Bormann, the defense counsel for Walid bin Attash (9/11 suspect), wished to state for the record that Nevin has been repeating the name of a defense motion but she decline to say it for fear of setting off the censor again. Navy Commander Walter Ruiz, who is representing Mustafa al-Hawsawi (9/11 suspect), told the judge, “The main concern is that moving forward from this point forward we know there is another body or party who is in control of this proceeding in turning that light on and off.”

“Before we proceed any further,” he added, “We can only assume that maybe they are monitoring additional communications, perhaps when we are at counsel table. We know we have green lights that have the ability to record. We think this is an answer and question we have to have precedent to proceeding with this commission.”

Military Claims to Have Released Portion of Gitmo Tribunal Proceedings That Was Censored

By: Kevin Gosztola, Firedog Lake

Wednesday January 30, 2013 10:36 am

What was said in the exchange should appear in the transcript, but it appears something was said in that minute before the feed was restored that the government does not want to add into the transcript.

The military now claims that the transcript was “restored,” but if it was recording discussion of the censorship, that should be in the public record and not merely summarized. The decision to censor was startling for not just the press but also the judge, as it showed that some outside body has a person who is able to interfere in proceedings whenever they choose without notifying the judge prior to censoring the proceedings.

This person-an original classification authority (OCA), as the government revealed-likely works in cooperation with the CIA and is tasked with ensuring that even the tiniest amount of information on the CIA’s Rendition, Detainee & Interrogation (RDI) program is not heard by the press. The episode shows the OCA may censor unclassified language. There are details on the RDI program in the public record.

If Mohammed or another 9/11 suspect describes their treatment in CIA custody and that happened to be in the CIA Inspector General report, will the OCA be interfering again? The whole entire episode raises serious questions about the military commission’s claimed commitment to transparency and fairness.

All That’s Wrong With the Guantanamo Trials

By Andrew Cohen, Esquire

at 4:11PM January 30th, 2013

(W)hat makes it such an important moment in the sorry history of the Guantanamo tribunals– was that even the presiding judge, Army Col. James Pohl, didn’t know who had blocked the feed on Monday– or why. He had lost control over his own courtroom. Later that day, in open court, he said: “If some external body is turning the commission off based on their own views of what things ought to be, with no reasonable explanation, then we are going to have a little meeting about who turns that light on or off.” That was on Monday. On Tuesday, after conducting an investigation into the episode, Judge Pohl declared that the feed should not have been turned off-the defense attorney had merely mentioned “the caption in a particular appellate exhibit that is unclassified”– but the judge did not disclose to the public who turned off the feed or why. Later, we learned that the feed was disrupted by the “original classification authority,” most likely the CIA.

The idea that a trial judge has control over his courtroom is about as sacrosanct a notion in American law as you can find. And even though military judges traditionally have had to serve conflicting masters (the law, their superior officers, etc.) the idea that a litigant would have the power to control the courtroom without the judge’s knowledge or consent goes to the heart of the problem with our current tribunals. A trial judge who does not have the authority to control his own courtroom, who is subject to the whims of the very officials whose charges against the detainees must be fairly weighed, cannot be the sort of independent judge which the Constitution requires and which justice demands. It’s not Judge Pohl’s fault. By Congress, by the Pentagon, by the Obama Administration, by the CIA, he’s been dealt a hand no truly independent judge could play. That’s just another big reason why these tribunals are doomed to fail, in the court of world opinion if not before the United States Supreme Court, no matter how many convictions they ultimately gin up.

The shame prize award was made in Davos during the World Economic Forum as a counter-WEF event.  Shell also “won” a shame prize, but I spoke on Goldman Sachs, the role of epidemics of accounting control fraud, and the WEF’s anti-regulatory and pro-executive compensation policies.  I explained that the anti-regulatory policies were intended to fuel the destructive regulatory “race to the bottom” and why the executive and professional compensation policies maximized the incentives to defraud.  I also explained that WEF was a fraud denier.  Collectively, these three WEF policies contributed to creating the intensely criminogenic environments that produce the epidemics of accounting control fraud driving our worst financial crises.

Goldman Sachs Proof that God hates its Customers

By William K. Black, New Economic Perspectives

Posted on January 26, 2013

Goldman Sachs is a fitting recipient of the “Public Eye” shame prize, but it is vital to remember that Goldman is not a singular rotten apple in a healthy bushel.  It is characteristic of the abuses that become endemic when powerful plutocrats achieve de facto immunity from the criminal laws.

…

Indeed, this discussion understates Goldman’s culpability because Goldman’s executives were principal architects of the crisis.  Its former CEO, Robert Rubin, led the disastrous deregulation in the Clinton administration and was a leader in pushing Citicorp to become a major contributor to the hyper-inflation of the bubble.  Henry Paulson, when he was Goldman’s CEO, made Goldman a leading “vector” spreading fraudulent mortgages through the global financial system (and creating Goldman’s holdings of toxic mortgages that produced huge, fictional, accounting income in the short-term – making Paulson’s already large compensation massive).

Goldman Sachs: Doing "God’s Work" by inflicting the Wages of Sin Globally

By William K. Black, New Economic Perspectives

Posted on January 26, 2013

The central point that I want to stress as a white-collar criminologist and effective financial regulator is that Goldman Sachs is not a singular “rotten apple” in a healthy bushel of banks.  Goldman Sachs is the norm for systemically dangerous institutions (SDIs) (the so-called “too big to fail” banks).  Impunity from the laws, crony capitalism that degrades democracy, and massive national subsidies produce exceptionally criminogenic environments.  Those environments are so perverse that they produce epidemics of “control fraud.”  Control fraud occurs when the persons who control a seemingly legitimate entity use it as a “weapon” to defraud.  In finance, accounting is the “weapon of choice.”  It is important to remember, however, that other forms of control fraud maim and kill thousands.

Large, individual accounting control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime – combined.  Accounting control frauds are weapons of mass financial destruction.  One of the crippling flaws of the World Economic Forum (WEF) is ignoring private sector control frauds.  Control fraud makes a mockery of “stakeholder” theory.  Accounting control fraud, for example, aims its stake at the heart of its stakeholders.  The principal intended victims are the shareholders and the creditors (which includes the workers).  Other forms of control fraud primarily target the customers.  If the WEF wishes to effectively protect stakeholders it is imperative that they undertake a sea change and make the detection, prevention, and sanctioning of control fraud one of their central priorities.  WEF does the opposite, it wishes away fraud with propaganda because the alternative is to admit that many of its dominant participants are the central problem – they are degrading the state of the world.

…

WEF has been acting for decades to make banking criminogenic.  They have pushed the three “de’s” – deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization.  They have favored executive compensation systems.  They have pushed for ease of entry.  And they have spread the myth that fraud by corporate elites is “rare.”  WEF has optimized the intensely criminogenic environments that produce recurrent, intensifying fraud epidemics, bubbles, and financial crises.

WEF’s complacency about accounting control fraud has led to its embarrassing failures in finance.  It’s “competitiveness” scales and “financial market development” scales have praised the most criminogenic financial systems – Iceland, Ireland, the UK, the U.S., and Spain – even as the largest banks in those Nations were (in reality) destroyed along with the much of the national economy.  Similarly, the WEF’s “global risks” series has proven unable to identify the major financial risks until the hurricane has roared through the system.  The central problems are the same – the WEF “stakeholder” premise and the WEF’s domination by powerful corporations is an elaborate propaganda apparatus that assumes away the reality of how CEOs running control frauds use compensation (and the power to hire, promote, and fire) and political power to deliberately create the perverse incentives that produce widespread fraud.  The irony is that the WEF’s dogmas have encouraged elite frauds to drive stakes through the stakeholders.

a modus operandi.

Krugman On Morning Joe: How Many Times Do I Have To Be Right?

By Susie Madrak, Crooks and Liars

January 28, 2013 10:00 AM

“Have you been living in the same country I’m in these past five years?” Krugman retorted, saying the deficit is far down on his list of things to worry about.

In response, Mika gasped and said, “I feel like we’re talking about climate change! My God!” (What a dope.) Krugman said that was a destructive comparison, and explained why. But I doubt she listened.*

I especially liked it when he responded to Joe Scarborough: “How many times do people like these have to be wrong and people like me have to be right?”

Remember, Paul: Ignorance can be fixed. Stupidity is forever.

This is what lambert strether calls a “category error.”  They are not stupid.

My brother sent me a postcard the other day with this big sattelite photo of the entire earth on it. On the back it said: ‘Wish you were here.’ — Steven Wright

At Davos, Is the Party Over?

By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN, The New York Times

January 22, 2013, 9:52 pm

In previous years, the Friday night of the World Economic Forum was always filled with big dinners and blowout parties.

Certain bashes were among the most coveted. Google held a standing-room only party at Steigenberger Belvedere Hotel, complete with bands flown in from New York and beyond. Across the street, Accel Partners, the venture capital firm behind Facebook, held a wine tasting at the Kirchner Museum, often flying in cases of vintage wine from California. And Nike held a huge dinner with the slogan, “No Speeches. No Powerpoint. And no ties.”

This Friday, however, the operative slogan could be “No dinner. No parties.”

…

Have those companies given up on Davos for good? Is there something bigger here at play than just parties? Those are some of the questions being asked, however, answers have been forthcoming – at least not yet.

Oxfam says world’s rich could end poverty

Al Jazeera

20 Jan 2013 07:49

The world’s 100 richest people earned enough money last year to end world extreme poverty four times over, according to a new report released by international rights group and charity Oxfam.

The $240 billion net income of the world’s 100 richest billionaires would have ended poverty four times over, according to the London-based group’s report released on Saturday.

…

(Jeremy) Hobbs (executive director at Oxfam) said that “a global new deal” is required, encompassing a wide array of issues, from tax havens to employment laws, in order to address income inequality.

Closing tax havens, the group said, could yield an additional $189bn in additional tax revenues. According to Oxfam’s figures, as much as $32 trillion is currently stored in tax havens.

In a statement, Oxfam warned that “extreme wealth and income is not only unethical it is also economically inefficient, politically corrosive, socially divisive and environmentally destructive.”

Can we fight poverty by ending extreme wealth?

by Olga Khazan, Washington Post

January 20, 2013 at 8:00 am

In a sign that the “Occupy” and “99 percent” movements that swept the United States in recent years have taken on increased global relevance, Oxfam International this week called (.pdf) for “a new global goal to end extreme wealth by 2025,” as a way to stem income inequality and continue the fight against poverty.

…

Oxfam does have a point. The movement against income inequality has been gaining momentum as the world’s rich have continued to amass larger shares of their countries’ fortunes. In the United States, according to the group, the share of national income going to the top 1 percent of the population has increased to 20 percent, from 10 percent in 1980.

…

The World Economic Forum (Davos) also recently rated “severe income disparity” as one of its top global risks for 2013.

Oxfam’s idea is basically the opposite of the trickle-down theory: Rather than creating jobs and lifting others out of poverty, the group says, super-rich minorities cause social unrest and depress demand for goods and services, limiting growth and innovation as a result. It’s an argument that’s also been echoed recently by several vocal billionaires.

…

The group also suggested some measures that have been at the center of some of the fiercest policy battles in the United States and elsewhere:

“Limits to bonuses, or to how much people can earn as a multiple of the earnings of the lowest paid, limits to interest rates, limits to capital accumulation are all only recently-abandoned policy instruments that can be revived. Progressive taxation that redistributes wealth from the rich to the poor is essential,” Oxfam continued.

Those tactics sound good, but they’d require something else that unfortunately the most unequal countries also lack: governments willing to risk angering their wealthiest citizens in order to improve life for the poorest.

I wouldn’t hold my breath.

The American Conference Championship is an entirely different ball of wax.  Here you don’t have two teams that are mostly unremarkably objectionable, no better or worse than most, instead you have two positively hateful ones and the question is which evil is lesser?

Fundamentally the Carrion Crows and the Patsies are guilty of the same offense, robbing their host communities to fund huge empty white elephant eyesores that are basically unusable except for 8 days a year to the tune of hundreds of millions.

In the one case the thief, Art Modell, was not quite as successful as Robert Kraft and lost everything except his team contracts and The Bank ($314 million) and in fairness Kraft was able to raise the $420 million for Gillette privately, though it is not in any sense funded by his personal fortune any more than all those architectural monstrosities with Trump plastered on them.

And, if you like rooting for winners, the Ravens don’t even have a suspicion of victory today.  Unless Brady and about half the other Patsie players are suddenly stuck by mysterious illness and injury this is about as close to a sure thing as you get in Throwball.

Nope, as we head into the break week before the Super Bowl the question will be if the creaky old Patsies can stave off the new kids on the block ‘9ers and whether you should even be watching Throwball at all.

The Falcons are an expansion team of no particular note.  There’s really no good reason to hate them except the team colors (red and black in case you’re interested) and Michael Vick.  They’ve been historically somewhat ineffective in post-season play relative to their overall winning percentage.

The ‘9ers on the other hand are a storied program tracing their origin back to the All-American Football Conference.  Their ascendancy in the ’80s was roughly co-terminant with the despised ‘boys, but their fans were nowhere near as loud, obnoxious, and arrogant.

Now there are those pointing to the investigation of Michael Crabtree for sexual assault as a reason to favor the Falcons, but I don’t see it.  For one thing they didn’t fly him to the Georgia Dome to ride the pine.  A late breaking development is a second witness that supports his version of events.

In any case this particular edition of the ‘9ers is not a one dimensional team dependent on him or even Colin Kaepernick for that matter.  What they have this year that they lacked last is a solid offensive line that can protect anyone they put in the pocket and open lanes for their rushing game.  It’s not impossible that they’ll lose, it’s just hard to see how.

Dallas, we have a problem.

How to Cut Megabanks Down to Size

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

Published: January 19, 2013

On Wednesday, in a speech in Washington, Mr. (Richard W.) Fisher (the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas) laid out a compelling proposal for shrinking financial giants in order to protect taxpayers. He suggested that megabanks be chopped into pieces, so that no one of them could endanger the financial system if it ran into trouble.

…

Why? Mr. Fisher argued that megabanks not only threaten taxpayers with bailouts, but that their continuing failure to lend is also thwarting the Fed’s efforts to jump-start the economy by keeping interest rates low. “I submit that these institutions, as a result of their privileged status, exact an unfair tax upon the American people,” he told his audience. “Moreover, they interfere with the transmission of monetary policy and inhibit the advancement of our nation’s economic prosperity.”

Smaller institutions, by contrast, have continued to lend in the post-crisis years, especially to the kinds of modest-size businesses that create so many jobs across the country. According to figures compiled by Mr. Fisher’s colleagues at the Dallas Fed, community banks – defined as those with no more than $10 billion in assets – hold less than one-fifth of the nation’s banking assets. Nevertheless, they hold more than half of the industry’s small-business loans.

…

There are roughly 5,600 commercial banking institutions in the country, Mr. Fisher noted. Some 5,500 of them are community banks. While these organizations account for 98.6 percent of all banks, they hold only 12 percent of total industry assets. They are routinely allowed to fail if they get into trouble. Few of them did during the crisis.

Contrast these figures with those of the nation’s 12 largest banks, whose assets range from $250 billion to $2.3 trillion. They account for 0.2 percent of all banks but hold 69 percent of industry assets. These are the banks that enjoy all the perquisites of the federal safety net: significantly lower borrowing costs and a taxpayer backstop, for example.

…

Understanding that it will be a tough battle to break up the megabanks, Mr. Fisher suggests that in the meantime, only commercial banking operations receive protection from the federal safety net in the form of federal deposit insurance. An institution’s other activities – securities trading, insurance operations and real estate, for example – should fall outside any backstop. Furthermore, he recommends that these banks require customers and trading partners to sign an agreement stating that they understand the business they are conducting is not covered by any federal protection or guarantees. That would begin to reduce the perception that all of these institutions’ counterparties would be protected in a disaster.