Monday, March 09, 2009

Golden fleecing and Twittering politics

Rick Perlstein, who is working on a new book about the immediate post-Nixon-Presidency years, points to an interesting precedent for the current Republican fad of picking out obscure parts of a spending bill and holding it up for ridicule without actually explaining what it really is: liberal Democratic Sen. William Proxmire from Wisconsin (The Saga of the Golden Fleece: Why America Needs to Learn to Love Government Spending Once Again OurFuture.org 02/03/09).

Proxmire used to announce a monthly Golden Fleece Award highlighting what he viewed as a particularly egregious instance of wasteful, unnecessary or misguided public spending. As Rick points out, his targets were often some Pentagon project, and Pentagon spending was receiving far too little critical scrutiny in the 1970s.

But his picks were often very dubious ones. Rick illustrates:

The pundits fell in love with the notion's good-government pretensions, and for all I know the stunt did the nation some good paring the federal budget of waste, fraud, and abuse.

I suspect, though, the exercise was largely a silly waste of time. One of my professors in graduate school won a Golden Fleece award. Senator Proxmire awarded it for a supposed grant to fund her "mountain climbing hobby." Actually, she's one of the nation's most distinguished anthropologists. She has never climbed a mountain in her life, but used her field work among the Sherpas of Nepal to arrive at some of the most incisive theorizing extant on how societies work. Second-guessing the peer-review process of National Science Foundation grants made for nifty headlines. But it was also numbingly reactionary. According to the Wikipedia entry on Proxmire, the prizes sometimes "went to basic science projects that led to important breakthroughs."
The Republicans have since fallen in love with the gimmick. Bobby Jindal in his response to Obama's speech to the Joint Session of Congress in February ridiculed funding for volcano research. It doesn't really take a lot of imagination to think of ways in which researching volcanoes might be a very worthwhile project, I mean if you've ever heard of something called "volcanic eruptions".

Maureen Dowd thoroughly enjoys this half-wit game, though. In Stage of Fools New York Times 03/03/09, MoDo gushes over several Twitter messages from the press corps' favorite Maverick, John McCain, ridiculing this or that program as self-evidently obvious. Neither the Maverick nor his admirer MoDo bothered to explain what any of them might actually involve. (Or does that go without saying?) Twitter is probably ideal for our press corps, anyway. They get to pick up one-line Twitters from their favorite politicians and then cut-and-paste them into a column, add a few lines of their own snark, and voila! You have a high-end New York Times column!

Plus, those one-liners spare our leading pundits the painful necessity of having to process anything so complicated as a whole paragraph of information.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I admire anyone who's actually read Jackson's Veto of the re-charter of the 2nd BankUS, which like the 1st Bank, was private, for profit, inflationary (printing notes in excess of specie backing, which is fraudulent debasement) concern, directly based on the private shylock (bankers who cheat depositors) BofE captured by Rothschild agent, Paterson, a Scotsman, w/ a fiat plan such that England could just print money to finance its 50 years of wars - the interest stacked up. Even with the new taxes critical to Paterson's deal with the king, he sought fresh revenues and the means to compel them from us, putting America into the Revolution. Our only truly just war ever, as elaborated in the Declaration as a secession from tyrannies long train of abuses.

Among which are taxation w/o representation, the want of hard, market chosen money, free of England's political thievery and manipulation. The Framers knew full well the subterfuge of England's national indebtedness at the hand of it's private bankers, it's political inflations and contractions, and the loss of purchasing power and store of value, absent currencies of specie, gold and silver - the worldwide chosen commodity medium of exchange. This is what brought man from barter-world into the age of specialization and division of labor so instrumental in mankind's ascendancy.

Fractional reserve fiat is the exact mechanism which the Money Powers/FED used to buy off our Republic for their own personal use starting w/the CW and the increased incestuousness between the govt and Banking/Big Biz. The ICC of the late 1800's propelled Power's thin end of the wedge even further. It was the political precedence for powerful banker backed corps to seek govt sanction (think K-Street) for the regulating of them into cartel status with guaranteed profits, all effectually barriers to entry for the small competitors increasingly nipping at the profit heels of America's most well heeled.

Hard money Dems are few, and there's only one Republican I know who is, and he seems to be the ONLY legislator with enough guts to call the shylocks who created this bust, and since the FED's inception, including the GD that was its "mandate" to prevent, it inflated and contracted, boomed and busted it's entire life.

Consider: in the 1930's an oz of gold = $20.

Today it nears $1,000. A 50:1 ratio. Meaning 1/50th of the dollars purchasing power yet remains - 2 cents!

The progressive era of; eugenicists, euro-imbued scientifically empowered social planners and mind benders, to the end of the supposed perfect citizen worker, the push to involuntary collectivism, unionism, prohibition and their best numbers, highly profitable WW's, police actions as corporatocracy's overseas protection rackets - in short all the empire that statists of all stripes fancy most. Statists who use up the producers, while buying the loyalties of the mass of ignorant state inculcated wage slaves. All the while govt gets bigger and more oppressive and ever further from the liberty the nation was born with, with every "emergency" it creates for only that specific purpose.

Learn what govt wants you least to know about its long history of elite control to enrich the few at the expense of the masses their overhead never gives a fighting chance - ESPECIALLY the poor and least skilled its keeps most deluded and perpetually poor. Its always easier to spend someone else's money with less care than one would their own earnings.

Lest we forget, power corrupts, and our elite corrupted constitution has unleashed the whirlwind of a fast advancing tyranny, no less than it's precedents this last bloodiest century in history.

Jackson was so right to kill the crooked shylock bank, who's much more pernicious offspring, the Federal Reserve, owned by the worlds largest banks now on the ropes, unauditable by congress, are the AIG pass-through trading partner bailout recipients.

IE the FED is stealing for itself today, the future earnings of untold generations of the yet unborn.

If our money is debt paper, it is, and each new dollar costs taxpayers $2.20 principle and interest, how can the total debt ever be paid anyway?

Imagine - in the vein of Lennon - that there was no FED, and Americans had spent the last 100 years free from war, with a very affordable govt that stood only to protect our rights and land? Imagine all those new taxes to pay the FED's interest vigerish, and the 98% of our fiat dollar lost, had all instead been stayed in the hands that earned them to intergenerationally compound?

Almost all commodities have tracked parallel to gold for hundreds and thousands of years. A Roman bought a fine toga, sandals & belt for 1 oz. 100 years ago 1 oz bought a suit, shoes and tophat.

It still almost does today with some suits in the many $1000's.

All history of fiat currencies ends badly - few, but the slower bleed of our parasites, have lasted 75 years. The 2nd Reich and Zimbabwe are typical.

The FED in just under a year, has printed more new money than during Greenspam's entire reign (that big liar who caused this debacle at the order of his puppeteers who emplaced him, is actually an adherent to sound gold/silver money as the only way to keep from robbing its people via fiat. See his 1967 speech vis gold and seethe in his hipocracy)

No less than the FED's contraction that caused the GrtDep, that proto-New Dealer and banker buttboy Hoover, non-pariel market interventionist, started, and that banker buttboy FDR continued. American consumer consumption stayed flat until war's end when average Americans again could finally feel somewhat confident that nitwits for profit in govt would allow them to make rational longer term economic plans a criminal govt of brain trust clown thieves and their NRA, AAA, WPA's, regulations and taxes, made impossible.

My point is that article which you wrote about - Jacksonian you are - should have been the butt of your derision, not taxpayers funding ever more govt lunatic thievery.

Today's LONG TRAIN OF ABUSEs and tyrannies make KingGeoIII's seem as chump change.

Patriots on the left & right are purposely being kept divided by those Cicero always surmised, benefits most from a crime - Qui Bono. Darned if it isn't always Power elites and their puppets emplaced in govt, industry, media and academe, all who are never ashamed to have their parasitic hands outstretched to we taxpayers, for their continued loyal state cheerleading, every time we turn around.

Take the mini political BS deflector course! We're stuffed with 100 years of it - Bismark & Kaiser style.

The Creature from Jelyll Island a Second Look at the Federal Reserve by Ed Griffin
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=F3TAh1gy6rc&feature=related

Still Don't Believe In The New World Order?
http://www.svpvril.com/nwo.html

A CHRONOLOGICAL HISTORY OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER
http://www.crossroad.to/Excerpts/chronologies/cuddy-nwo.htm

Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard66.html

Big Business and the Rise of American Statism
http://praxeology.net/RC-BRS.htm

The Great Depression, World War II, and American Prosperity, Part I (video)
http://mises.org/multimedia/video/Woods/Woods5.wmv

The Great Depression, World War II, and American Prosperity, Part II (video)
http://mises.org/multimedia/video/Woods/Woods6.wmv

Despotism Loves Company: The Story of Roosevelt and Stalin by Soviet defector Yuri Maltsev
http://mises.org/mp3/Pres/Pres8b.mp3

The Economics of the New Deal and World War II
http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/Woods2/12.mp3

Roosevelt's WWII Policies of Unconditional Surrender and the Morgenthau Plan
http://mises.org/mp3/ss03/Denson.mp3

Six Months that Changed the World
http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/bb05/Denson-07-20-2005.mp3

The New Deal and the Displacement of the Morgans
http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/audiobooks/rothbard/CATF/CATF_22.mp3

The New Deal
http://mises.org/mp3/HofL-2001/Hist21.mp3

What Is Fascism?
http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/audioarticles/2903_Flynn.mp3

The Great Depression
http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/MU2007/22-Garrison.mp3

The Great Depression
http://mises.org/mp3/lefevre/132.mp3

Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression
http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/Woods2/11.mp3

Thank Goodness for FDR's Tax Cut
http://mises.org/MultiMedia/mp3/tax/Thornton.mp3

Teddy Roosevelt and the Origins of the Modern Welfare-Warfare State
http://mises.org/mp3/Pres/Pres9.mp3

The Truth about the Great Depression (video)
http://mises.org/multimedia/video/DiLorenzo/9.wmv

Civil Rights and Statism
http://mises.org/mp3/HofL-2001/Hist25.mp3

Bolshevism and Democratic Socialism
http://mises.org/mp3/HofL-2001/Hist18.mp3

The Warren Commision: A Rothbardian Analysis
http://mises.org/mp3/Pres/Pres3b.mp3

Labor and Unions
http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/rothbard/R7-16m.mp3

Interventionism (Rent Control, Wage Laws, Unions, Tariffs)
http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/MU2004/Block2.mp3

Labor Unions and the Minimum Wage: A Debate
http://mises.org/multimedia/block/Block-Blundell-Debate-2007.wmv

The Marx Nobody Knows
http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/marxism/North.mp3