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Monday, October 27, 2008 |
Wired: "Gone are the days when the Air Force pledged to 'dominate' cyberspace. Now, the flyboys just want 'freedom of action' online. Oh, and the ability to deceive foes, and cyberstrike enemies at will.
That's according to a draft document, 'Cyberspace Operations - Air Force Doctrine Document 2-11', obtained by Inside Defense. 'Freedom of action... can be seen as freedom from attack and freedom to attack,' the paper states. But, it adds, 'The size and complexity of the domain and the extensive collection of networks... can make freedom of action difficult and perhaps elusive.'"
11:17:28 AM 
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NYTimes: "'Chase recently received $25 billion in federal funding. What effect will that have on the business side and will it change our strategic lending policy?'
Given the way, that is, that Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. had decided to use the first installment of the $700 billion bailout money to recapitalize banks instead of buying up their toxic securities, which he had then sold to Congress and the American people as the best and fastest way to get the banks to start making loans again, and help prevent this recession from getting much, much worse.
In point of fact, the dirty little secret of the banking industry is that it has no intention of using the money to make new loans.
In fact, Treasury wants banks to acquire each other and is using its power to inject capital to force a new and wrenching round of bank consolidation. As Mark Landler reported in The New York Times earlier this week, 'the government wants not only to stabilize the industry, but also to reshape it'. Now they tell us.
Indeed, Mr. Landler's story noted that Treasury would even funnel some of the bailout money to help banks buy other banks. And, in an almost unnoticed move, it recently put in place a new tax break, worth billions to the banking industry, that has only one purpose: to encourage bank mergers.
Friday delivered the first piece of evidence that this is, indeed, the plan. PNC announced that it was purchasing National City, an acquisition that will be greatly aided by the new tax break, which will allow it to immediately deduct any losses on National City's books.
As part of the deal, it is also tapping the bailout fund for $7.7 billion, giving the government preferred stock in return. At least some of that $7.7 billion would have gone to NatCity if the government had deemed it worth saving. In other words, the government is giving PNC money that might otherwise have gone to NatCity as a reward for taking over NatCity.
The markets had another brutal day Friday. The Asian markets got crushed. Germany and England were down more than 5 percent. In the hours before the United States markets opened, all the signals suggested it was going to be the worst day yet in the crisis. The Dow dropped more than 400 points at the opening, but thankfully it never got any worse.
There are lots of reasons the markets remain unstable - fears of a global recession, companies offering poor profit projections for the rest of the year, and the continuing uncertainties brought on by the credit crisis. But another reason, I now believe, is that investors no longer trust Treasury.
But they are doing no such thing. Unlike the British government, which is mandating lending requirements in return for capital injections, our government seems afraid to do anything except plead. And those pleas, in this environment, are falling on deaf ears.
'If it turns out that they are hoarding, you'll have a revolution on your hands. People will be so livid and furious that their tax money is going to line their pockets instead of doing the right thing. There will be hell to pay.'"
It is precisely the financial big shots who have no longer any trust in their own financial world.
Scotsman: "Workers' personal pension pots have had at least £157 billion wiped off their total value in the last year, a report out today reveals.
Defined contribution schemes - which account for about a fifth of all pensions - have seen their worth plummet over the last 12 months as a result of the credit crunch."
Yahoo: "Despite the Wall Street meltdown, the nation's biggest banks are preparing to pay their workers as much as last year or more, including bonuses tied to personal and company performance.
So far this year, nine of the largest U.S. banks, including some that have cut thousands of jobs, have seen total costs for salaries, benefits and bonuses grow by an average of 3 percent from a year ago, according to an Associated Press review.
'Taxpayers have lost their life savings, and now they are being asked to bail out corporations,' New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said of the AP findings. 'It's adding insult to injury to continue to pay outsized bonuses and exorbitant compensation.'
Banks will decide what to pay out in bonuses in the coming months. Just because they've been accruing money for incentive pay doesn't mean they will pay it out in full."
MonthlyReview: "... capitalism in its monopoly-finance capital phase has become increasingly reliant on the ballooning of the credit-debt system in order to escape the worst aspects of stagnation. Moreover, nothing in the financialization process itself offers a way out of this vicious spiral. Today the bursting of two bubbles within seven years in the center of the capitalist system points to a crisis of financialization, behind which lurks deep stagnation, with no visible way out of the trap at present other than the blowing of further bubbles.
Still, as important as financialization has become in the contemporary economy, this should not blind us to the fact that the real problem lies elsewhere: in the whole system of class exploitation rooted in production. In this sense financialization is merely a way of compensating for the underlying disease affecting capital accumulation itself. As Marx wrote in Capital, 'The superficiality of political economy shows itself in the fact that it views the expansion and contraction of credit as the cause of the periodic alterations of the industrial cycle, while it is a mere symptom of them.' Despite the vast expansion of credit-debt in the capitalism of today, it remains true that the real barrier to capital is capital itself: manifested in the tendency toward overaccumulation of capital.
The only things that could conceivably be done within the system to stabilize the economy, Sweezy stated at Harvard in 1994, would be greatly to expand civilian state spending in ways that genuinely benefited the population; and to carry out a truly radical redistribution of income and wealth...
The hard truth of the matter is that the regime of monopoly-finance capital is designed to benefit a tiny group of oligopolists who dominate both production and finance. A relatively small number of individuals and corporations control huge pools of capital and find no other way to continue to make money on the required scale than through a heavy reliance on finance and speculation. This is a deep-seated contradiction intrinsic to the development of capitalism itself. If the goal is to advance the needs of humanity as a whole, the world will sooner or later have to embrace an alternative system. There is no other way."
InsideDefense: "The next president is likely to face a major international crisis within his first nine months in office, according to a senior group of business advisers to the defense secretary."
11:11:30 AM
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© Copyright 2008.
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