Helloween...

NATO style
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++++++++++++++++++++++
The Conqueror Worm.  EA Poe

"a by-product of the activities of a casino"

""When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. The measure of success attained by Wall Street, regarded as an institution of which the proper social purpose is to direct new investment into the most profitable channels in terms of future yield, cannot be claimed as one of the outstanding triumphs of laissez-faire capitalism – which is not surprising, if I am right in thinking that the best brains of Wall Street have been in fact directed towards a different object. These tendencies are a scarcely avoidable outcome of our having successfully organized “liquid” investment markets. It is usually agreed that casinos should, in the public interest, be inaccessible and expensive...The introduction of a substantial Government transfer tax on all [stock market] transactions might prove the most serviceable reform available, with a view to mitigating the predominance of speculation over enterprise in the United States.""

JM Keynes.  OWS homie? Probably not but opposed to the casinos of finance capitalism.  

Tax speculators

The Nation:

""On the eve of the G-20 gathering, the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace has endorsed a series of reforms to the global economic financial and monetary systems that features as its centerpiece the development of a financial transactions tax.


From the note on financial reform from the Pontifical Council:

Specific attention should be paid to the reform of the international monetary system and, in particular, the commitment to create some form of global monetary management, something that is already implicit in the Statutes of the International Monetary Fund. It is obvious that to some extent this is equivalent to putting the existing exchange systems up for discussion in order to find effective means of coordination and supervision. This process must also involve the emerging and developing countries in defining the stages of a gradual adaptation of the existing instruments.In fact, one can see an emerging requirement for a body that will carry out the functions of a kind of “central world bank” that regulates the flow and system of monetary exchanges similar to the national central banks. The underlying logic of peace, coordination and common vision which led to the Bretton Woods Agreements needs to be dusted off in order to provide adequate answers to the current questions. On the regional level, this process could begin by strengthening the existing institutions, such as the European Central Bank. However, this would require not only a reflection on the economic and financial level, but also and first of all on the political level, so as to create the set of public institutions that will guarantee the unity and consistency of the common decisions.


These measures ought to be conceived of as some of the first steps in view of a public Authority with universal jurisdiction; as a first stage in a longer effort by the global community to steer its institutions towards achieving the common good. Other stages will have to follow in which the dynamics familiar to us may become more marked, but they may also be accompanied by changes which would be useless to try to predict today. In this process, the primacy of the spiritual and of ethics needs to be restored and, with them, the primacy of politics—which is responsible for the common good—over the economy and finance. These latter need to be brought back within the boundaries of their real vocation and function, including their social function, in consideration of their obvious responsibilities to society, in order to nourish markets and financial institutions which are really at the service of the person, which are capable of responding to the needs of the common good and universal brotherhood, and which transcend all forms of economist stagnation and performative mercantilism.""

Common ground

LATimes

"""The possibility of defense cuts — what budget insiders call a trigger mechanism — was intended to spur Republicans and Democrats to agree on a plan to reduce the deficit by $1.5 trillion over the next decade. Instead, Congress increasingly seems likely to scuttle the cuts even without a deficit deal.


"It feeds into the notion that everyone is having, but not saying, which is that the trigger is a complete phony thing," said Jim Kessler, a vice president at Third Way, the moderate Democratic think tank. "Congress has built up a reputation for avoiding any real decision."


To be sure, the Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction, otherwise known as the "super committee," has been working behind closed doors for two months trying to find common ground.


And the effort to undo the automatic cuts is at odds with the public stance of congressional leaders, including House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio). The speaker orchestrated the summer debt accord with President Obama, and has pressed the committee to reach as big a deficit deal as possible.


The 12-member super committee — six Republicans and six Democrats — will hold a public hearing Wednesday as it works toward its Nov. 23 deadline to produce a bipartisan package. Indications are the committee has tentatively identified cuts but is short of the $1.5-trillion goal."""

Demopublicans agree at least on one thing: drones are good for bidness.

sabadoGigante

"At the blast of the trumpet he says, ‘Aha!’
He smells the battle from afar, the thunder of captains and shouting." Job 39:25

The M-word

Hitchens on the LDS/Slate:

".... The founder of the church, one Joseph Smith, was a fraud and conjurer well known to the authorities of upstate New York. He claimed to have been shown some gold plates on which a new revelation was inscribed in no known language. He then qualified as the sole translator of this language. (The entire story is related in Fawn Brodie’s biography, No Man Knows My History.* It seems that we can add, to sausages and laws, churches as a phenomenon that is not pleasant to watch at the manufacturing stage. Edmund Wilson wrote that it was powerfully shocking to see Brodie as she exposed a religion that was a whole-cloth fabrication.) On his later forays into the chartless wilderness, there to play the role of Moses to his followers (who were permitted and even encouraged in plural marriage, so as to go forth and mass-produce little Mormons), Smith also announced that he wanted to be known as the Prophet Muhammad of North America, with the fearsome slogan: “Either al-Koran or the Sword.” He levied war against his fellow citizens, and against the federal government. One might have thought that this alone would raise some eyebrows down at the local Baptist Church. …


Saddling itself with some pro-slavery views at the time of the Civil War, and also with a “bible” of its own that referred to black people as a special but inferior creation, the Mormon Church did not admit black Americans to the priesthood until 1978, which is late enough—in point of the sincerity of the “revelation” they had to undergo—to cast serious doubt on the sincerity of their change of heart.


More recently, and very weirdly, the Mormons have been caught amassing great archives of the dead, and regularly “praying them in” as adherents of the LDS, so as to retrospectively “baptize” everybody as a convert. (Here the relevant book is Alex Shoumatoff’s The Mountain of Names.) In a hollowed-out mountain in the Mormons’ stronghold state of Utah is a colossal database assembled for this purpose. Now I have no objection if Mormons desire to put their own ancestors down for posthumous salvation. But they also got hold of a list of those put to death by the Nazis’ Final Solution and fairly recently began making these massacred Jews into honorary LDS members as well. Indeed, when the practice was discovered, the church at first resisted efforts to make them stop. Whether this was cultish or sectarian it was certainly extremely tactless: a crass attempt at mass identity theft from the deceased."""

Actually,  you and  your loved ones are most likely notated in the local LDS database--with a gold star,  or "suspected LAMANITE", or perhaps black mark-- depending on the Elders' view of your family history, pardner.

9-9-9 hype,cont.

LA Times--

..."If Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan were in effect today, the poorest 60% of taxpayers would pay an extra $2,000 while the richest 1% would get a $210,000 break, according to an analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice, a left-leaning think tank.


Cain’s plan would replace much of the existing tax code with a 9% individual income tax, a 9% business tax and a 9% national sales tax.


According to the analysis, all three of the tax types included in Cain’s plan would disproportionately impact lower-income Americans.


The 9% individual income tax would give the richest Americans -- who currently pay a tax rate of about 35% -- a break of almost $210,000 a year. But for the poorest 20% of taxpayers, Cain's proposed income tax change would mean an increase of $418 a year, the analysis found.""""

Smaller piece of the big pizza pie for the lower-middleclass, y'all-- yet some delusionalcrats seem to think Caint's a democrat (when it's as much a quack as Ron Paul)

sabadoGigante

counterpunch/the-Romney-doctrine

"Romney began his speech with a heavy dose of fear. Iran, he warned, could well become “a fully activated nuclear weapons state, threatening its neighbors, [and] dominating the world’s oil supply.” Indeed, “Iran’s suicidal fanatics could blackmail the world.” In Afghanistan, the Taliban might well “find a path back to power,” with the country sinking “back into the medieval terrors of fundamentalist rule.” Pakistan’s instability could end up placing nuclear weapons “in the hands of Islamic jihadists,” while “the malign socialism” of Venezuela and Cuba could “undermine the prospects of democracy” in Latin America. Then, of course, there are the heavy dancers. China’s leaders could well take that nation down “a darker path, intimidating their neighbors, brushing aside an inferior American Navy in the Pacific, and building a global alliance of authoritarian states.” And Russia might well “bludgeon the countries of the former Soviet Union into submission, and intimidate Europe with the levers of its energy resources.” Nor should people forget “Islamic fundamentalism, with which we have been at war since Sept. 11, 2001.”"


And some delusional demos still consider MR a "progressive."

Zizek at OWS

Huff.Po:

"""Occupy Wall Street got some Slovenian philosopher star power on Sunday, as Marxist academic Slavoj Zizek joined the movement.


"We are not destroying anything," he said. "We are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself."


Using the "Human Microphone" system, where protestors repeat back the words of the speaker so that others can hear, Zizek spoke for over an hour to the enthusiastic crowd, who whooped and cheered as he went on.


While in China, entertainment programming that depicts alternate reality and time travel has been banned, in the U.S., we have a different problem, according to Zizek.


"Here we don't think of prohibition, because the ruling system has even oppressed our capacity to dream, " he said. "Look at the movies that we see all the time -- It's easy to imagine the end of the world, an asteroid destroying a whole life, but you cannot imagine the end of capitalism. So what are we doing here?"""

.

A bit more intellectual firepower than the likes of Sarandon & Co

Randians oppose OWS

RandCo

The cult of Ayn--lest we forget, Ayn Rand is a hero to the likes of Paul Ryan, Greenspan, the Kochs, Limbaugh,etc.-- objects to the OWS protests:

""“But the Wall Street protests aren’t calling for an end to government intervention in markets–they want to increase it. Most of them, for example, want to increase wealth redistribution in the name of fighting income inequality.


“Contrary to their rhetoric, they do not oppose the banks on the grounds that Wall Street is in bed with Washington. Notice, for instance, the plans to protest outside the home of investor John Paulson, who cannot be accused of getting government favors, and the lack of complaints about taxpayer money being poured into GM, Chrysler, and Solyndra. They chose to protest Wall Street because, whatever its flaws, it symbolizes genuine capitalism...yada yada..."

Indeed, the OWS protests might be considered...fundamentally anti-Randian. Down with Ayn, the Oppressor! For too many years y'all been living under the boots of that skanky russian-jewesss pseudo-philosopher and ueber-capitalist (tho' most don't realize it).

                                 J'accuse!

JMaynard Cain

LA Times

"""Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan sounds simple enough: Eliminate the existing tax code and replace it with a 9% tax on personal income, a 9% business tax and a 9% national sales tax.


But could it work?


That question has been posed to a number of tax policy experts since Cain unveiled the plan last month. And it was a topic that dominated Tuesday’s Washington Post-Bloomberg debate.


Cain insists that the plan would immediately jump-start the economy by putting more money into people’s pockets.


But Bruce Bartlett, a former Treasury official under President George H.W. Bush who studied Cain’s plan and wrote an analysis Tuesday for the New York Times, said Cain “offers no evidence for this assertion; it is simply put forward as self-evident.”


Bartlett called the plan “a distributional monstrosity.”

Al Davis dies

Onionsportsnetwork

Bienvenidos a Perdido, cerdo

'tis the season

EA Poe/Ledger-Enquirer

""What is the biggest misconception people have about famous American author Edgar Allan Poe?

       People think he was a dope-crazed madman,” said Harry Lee  Poe,         whose  great, great grandfather was the writer’s cousin.

The Charles Colson Professor of Faith and Culture at Union University in Jackson, Tenn,, said Wednesday his ancestor did have a problem with alcohol but that most of the unpleasant incidents that occurred because of that problem happened when the writer’s wife was dying.

“He was a mild mannered fellow, very popular at parties,” said the professor."

       Make it the usual, Jake--  courvosier and laudanum  .

sabadoGigante.....

Mateo 27 "“¡Ay de ustedes, escribas y Fariseos, hipócritas que son semejantes a sepulcros blanqueados! Por fuera lucen hermosos, pero por dentro están llenos de huesos de muertos y de toda inmundicia. 28 Así también ustedes, por fuera parecen justos a los hombres, pero por dentro están llenos de hipocresía y de iniquidad. ""

para los cerdos baptistas

Romney, Inc

"Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.” GB Shaw

HuffPo:

""Romney is still trying to have it both ways -- to retain what little is left of his "moderate" persona while cheerfully appeasing the most extreme elements of the corporate and religious Right. He is banking on being able to get through the primary with both of his personas intact. Unfortunately for him, it's not working.




In fact, Romney's eagerness to appease has placed him solidly in the far-right -- and increasingly unpopular --Tea Party camp of the GOP.




Romney wears his pro-corporate politics with the pride of a Koch brother. He told an audience in Iowa recently that "corporations are people" -- a bold statement, even for a multi-millionaire who made his fortune partly on the profits from outsourcing American jobs. And he hasn't backed down from his claim -- in fact, he keeps repeating it. "

Lunes

Ezranomics, cont.

Romney's birth certificate?

Donde esta La Carta, Willard?

""Long story short: Mitt Romney still has not produced a "certificate of live birth." And we know for a fact that as a young man he spent years living in a foreign country that looks down on America. A country that is intimately familiar with colonial thinking. I trust that the more than 1,000 people who posted comments on my story about Donald Trump and his "birther investigators,' and the 100 or so who sent urgent emails, are vigilantly working to bring this Romney conspiracy to light, and I just haven't realized it."

Hah.
_______________________________

Relatedly: the lovely and talented Ms Tammany Yields

sabadoGigante.....

Drones,continued.

And.....the amazing Billy Wartford!