Political Pen: George Orwell, meet Vice President Joe Biden

“These aren’t the unemployed you’re looking for…”

Obamy-wan’s mind tricks

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From Political Pen blog:

From 1984
by George Orwell

But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty’s figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at one-hundred-and-forty-five million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than one-hundred-and-forty-five millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.

The quote above is Winston Smith’s daily routine at the Ministry of Truth.  Smith would have to work overtime with Barack Obama in office.  Look at this graph from the Bureau of Labor Statistics from October 30th, 2009.

Unemployment graph from October 30th, 2009

Now check out this video of Vice President Joe Biden from the Ministry of Truth MSNBC on the same day …

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How not to win a gunfight

Show up with a starters pistol…

For your amusement, James K. Galbraith appears on Bill Moyers Journal one year ago looking for a fight with Wall Street, armed with, of all things, a renewed determination to finally – and we do mean REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, this time – impose such regulation as will prevent them from EVER, EVER, EVER, nearly bringing down the global financial system again.

Did we mention he really means it this time?

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Among his more salient points:

• Mongo say ‘big government good’: “we have an enormous advantage over our predecessors in 1929. We have the fact that the New Deal happened. And we have the institutions of the New Deal, though they have been badly damaged in the last decade, they are still with us. We have deposit insurance. We have Social Security. We have a government which is capable of acting as the lender of last resort, which can borrow and spend as needed to deal with this crisis. So here in the United States the capacity to handle the crisis exists.
• Liberal economic thought has not advanced one iota since Dad died: “But what needs to be stressed is that we’ve seen a breakdown of an entire system. The consequence of the failure of regulation, of supervision of the banking system over the past eight years, has been to cause a collapse of trust, a poisoning of the well.”
• If everyone had the World Reserve Currency they could all print their way out of a depression: “Right now the thing that troubles me most is not the United States. The thing that troubles me most is that the same ideas of deregulation, of free markets, were applied in the construction of modern Europe. And the Europeans don’t have the institutions of the New Deal, a central bank that can lend as necessary.”

(On this point we state for the record that Germany saw its economy decline by nearly five percent yet unemployment barely budged, while the United States, with the reserve currency, and all those nice New Deal institutions, saw it unemployment rate jump by sixty – that’s six-oh! – percent in the past year.)

• Thank God there is no oversight on the Federal Reserve as they raid the treasury to help banksters: “Mercifully, we have the institutions of government in this country that can act. The Europeans are winging it. They have to go against their charter of the Central Bank, against the Maastricht Treaty and its restrictions on government spending, government deficits. They- that problem is a systemic problem. Our problem is a policy problem. We can solve our problem.”
• Conservatives and Liberals agree: We need bigger government: “What I mean is the people who took over the government were not interested in reducing the government and having a small government, the conservative principle. They were interested in using these great institutions for private benefit, to place them in the control of their friends and to put them to the use of their clients. They wanted to privatize Social Security. They created a Medicare drug benefit in such a way as to create the maximum profit for pharmaceutical companies. They used trade agreements to extend patent protections for various interests or to promote the expansion of the corporate agriculture’s markets in the third world. A whole range of things that were basically political and clientelistic. That’s the predator state.

–How’s that same old bullshit working for you these days, Jimmy?

Death Match Two: Post-game wrap-up…

A recap in the language most accessible to our American audience:

So far, Capital easily dominated the preliminaries, with the Proles and Owners of Capital on one side trouncing the Aristocracy and the Peasantry in a match up that rocked the European continent for several decades. The going was tough in the early rounds, since all the political and economic strength was on the side of the Aristocracy with its almost complete domination of the ground-rent game. But in the end, as economic power shifted to the Proles and Owners in the late round, the Aristocracy was forced to abandon its ground-rent game and strike a deal with the Owners. The Proles, abandoned in late innings by their erstwhile allies, turned briefly to the Peasants for a similar deal, but only scored gains in Russia, China, and handful of Asian heats.

Building on gains in the preliminaries, however, fissures began to open up among the Owners at the close, as each sought to consolidate early gains in their respective divisions -  also called “Nations” – and prepare for the semi-final playoffs. Having effected a surrender on the part of the Aristocracy – in American, in particular, on Team Slavery – and having successfully fended off weak challenges by a motley crew of Proles and Peasants from the Pitchfork Leagues, Owners turned their attention to a World Series face-off among the surviving teams.

These face-offs, known by their popular names, Global Death Match, and Global Death Match Two, saw the United States walk away with the Gold, with the Silver going to Great Britain, and Continental Europe and Japan sharing the Bronze. (Everyone else got dirt cookies.) China and Russia, after sitting out the early post-Global Death Match play, rejoined the games and were respectively awarded positions as Waterboy and the obligatory Angry Maladjusted Fan.

*****

We will return in a moment to bring you a preview of the upcoming post-season play. But, first, a word from Alcoa:

In the below video, Klaus Kleinfeld, President & CEO of Alcoa joined Maria Bartiromo to discuss the prospect for his company. Among the points he makes are these:

• “When you look at it from a regional perspective, China is back very, very strong, and pulling some of the Asian markets with them – Asian and Middle East, I would say, with them.”
• “This quarter is also a quarter where we have been completing substantial growth projects in Brazil, in China, in Russia, that have an outstanding opportunity to continue.”
• “We’ve also got to really look carefully at the headwinds, with the dollar weakening against other currencies that are important to us, like the Brazil Real and the Australian dollar. That’s an important headwind, when we actually need all the cash performance at this point in time.”

If this is beginning to sound to you a lot like what Jim Cramer was talking about on Hardball last night, it should.

You’re gonna need a bigger boat.