Nietzsche said"

“When we look into the abyss, searching for monsters, the abyss looks into us as well”.

Right now we are staring the abyss in the face and there are indeed monsters there. This abyss is the elections this fall. The chance that radical Republicans will take over the House and perhaps the Senate has grown. The affect of constant lies from Fox News and Talk Radio have energized the Republican base. The limp leadership from the White House and from Majority Leader Reid has demoralized the Democratic base.

The passing of many of the Lefts long term wish list items, barely and with tons of ridiculous and galling compromise has created a situation where the Right is fired up and the Left is angry at its own leadership. The conditions are in place for a wave election and the wave is not likely to go the way that we Liberals are going to like in any fashion.

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from Sasha Chavkin,
ProPublica (view source)

Just over a week ago, when Kenneth Feinberg took over the process for handling damage claims from the Gulf oil spill, he promised to cut through the delays and confusion that applicants faced under the much-maligned BP system.

But signs are emerging that Feinberg’s goals – particularly his pledge to respond to personal claims for emergency payments within 48 hours – may be overly ambitious. Applicants participating in our BP Claims Project say that they have not received responses within two days of filing claims and that they have encountered an array of service problems, from a system crash to difficulty in transferring critical paperwork.

Amy Weiss, Feinberg’s spokeswoman, acknowledged on Sunday that the facility was experiencing delays. “In the first few weeks...we may be short of our 48-hour goal,” Weiss said in an e-mail.

Weiss said many of the claims could not be processed because they lacked sufficient documentation, and that the new Gulf Coast Claims Facility has approved about $6 million in payments to just under 1,200 individuals. Statistics from the GCCF indicate that only about 6 percent of total claims – for both individuals and businesses – had been paid as of Monday.

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Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion

WASHINGTON—The U.S. economy ceased to function this week after unexpected existential remarks by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke shocked Americans into realizing that money is, in fact, just a meaningless and intangible social construct.

What began as a routine report before the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday ended with Bernanke passionately disavowing the entire concept of currency, and negating in an instant the very foundation of the world's largest economy.

"Though raising interest rates is unlikely at the moment, the Fed will of course act appropriately if we...if we..." said Bernanke, who then paused for a moment, looked down at his prepared statement, and shook his head in utter disbelief. "You know what? It doesn't matter. None of this—this so-called 'money'—really matters at all."

"It's just an illusion," a wide-eyed Bernanke added as he removed bills from his wallet and slowly spread them out before him. "Just look at it: Meaningless pieces of paper with numbers printed on them. Worthless."

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from Jake Bernstein and Jesse Eisinger
ProPublica (view source)

Over the last two years of the housing bubble, Wall Street bankers perpetrated one of the greatest episodes of self-dealing in financial history.

Faced with increasing difficulty in selling the mortgage-backed securities that had been among their most lucrative products, the banks hit on a solution that preserved their quarterly earnings and huge bonuses:

They created fake demand.

A ProPublica analysis shows for the first time the extent to which banks -- primarily Merrill Lynch, but also Citigroup, UBS and others -- bought their own products and cranked up an assembly line that otherwise should have flagged.

The products they were buying and selling were at the heart of the 2008 meltdown -- collections of mortgage bonds known as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs.

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They Go or Obama Goes
Robert Scheer,
Truthdig, August 25, 2010

Barack Obama and the Democrats he led to a stunning victory two years ago are going down hard in the face of an economic crisis that he did nothing to create but which he has failed to solve. That is somewhat unfair because the basic blame belongs to his predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who let the bulls of Wall Street run wild in the streets where ordinary folks lived. And there was universal Republican support in Congress for the radical deregulation of the financial industry that produced this debacle.

The core issue for the economy is the continued cost of a housing bubble made possible only after what Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers back then trumpeted as necessary “legal certainty” was provided to derivative packages made up of suspect Alt-A and subprime mortgages. It was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which Senate Republican Phil Gramm drafted and which Clinton signed into law, that made legal the trafficking in packages of dubious home mortgages. In any decent society the creation of such untenable mortgages and the securitization of risk irrationally associated with it would have been judged a criminal scam. But no such judgment was possible because thanks to Wall Street’s sway under Clinton and Bush the bankers got to rewrite the laws to sanction their treachery.

It is Obama’s continued deference to the sensibilities of the financiers and his relative indifference to the suffering of ordinary people that threaten his legacy, not to mention the nation’s economic well-being. There have been more than 300,000 foreclosure filings every single month that Obama has been president, and as The New York Times editorialized, “Unfortunately, there is no evidence that the Obama administration’s efforts to address the foreclosure problem will make an appreciable dent.”

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Ever fewer people, particularly those in institutions of power, but also in the general populace in developed countries, most especially in the United States, appear to be aware of, much less devoted to enlightened or humanistic values. Interest in the betterment of humanity, in the hope of minimally ameliorating our worst human impulses, or perhaps peeking at transcendence if only occasionally and imperfectly, or even hypothesizing about potentially preferred realities, is no longer a core concern, having given way to raw economic and military subjugation.

Ever since men became capable of free speculation, their actions, in innumerable important respects, have depended upon their theories as to the world and human life, as to what is good and what is evil. This is as true in the present day as at any former time. To understand an age or a nation, we must understand its philosophy, and to understand its philosophy we must ourselves be in some degree philosophers.

~Bertrand Russell

Major Ralph Peters expressed succinctly and nakedly the dominant philosophy in America today (and across the past two centuries), in his book, Endless War:

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Daniel Tencer writing at RawStory Friday reported that "The US economic recovery in recent quarters is little more than a "cover-up" and the world is headed for a "Greatest Depression," complete with social unrest and class warfare, says a renowned economic forecaster. Gerald Celente, head of the Trends Research Institute, told Yahoo! News' Tech Ticker that there's no risk of a "double-dip recession" because the first "dip" never ended."

"We're saying there's no double dip, it never ended," Celente said. "We're looking at the Greatest Depression. There's no way out of this without [rebuilding] productive capacity. You can't print [money to get] out of it."

"Celente said the current unemployment rate, if it were measured as it was measured during the Great Depression, would be around 17.5 percent. And he expects that number to rise to around 22 percent in the coming years."

"One of the good businesses to get in to may be guillotines," Celente quipped. "Because there's a real off-with-their-heads fever going on. People are really fed up."

"We went from a country that used to be merchants, craftspeople, manufacturers, to clerks and cashiers," Celente said. "We have to bring manufacturing back to America."

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Originally published at TomDispatch.com

I won’t claim it was the first time in all these months, just the first I noticed.  On Monday, my hometown paper had no mention of the Gulf of Mexico, BP, or what we’ve come to call its disastrous “spill,” though that word hardly catches the dimensions of what happened.  On Tuesday, the catastrophe that filled front pages and topped the TV news month after month returned to the paper as a reporter-less seven-paragraph piece, headlined “Relief Well Nears Point of Intercept,” and tucked away at the bottom of page 15 (with a credit line reading only, “by The New York Times”).  This was, of course, just a week after, as the piece put it, “a 'static kill,' or 'top kill' cemented the runaway well.” 

Runaway no more. Now, only the story is running away.

Last week, the government also announced -- and this was front-page news in the Times -- that 4.9 million runaway barrels of oil had poured into the Gulf since April, and that, according to a government report, all but 26% of it was now miraculously gone.  The news in the headlines seemed rosy indeed.  Almost a frog-turns-into-prince happy ending.

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Dear Mr. President,

Thank you for all you have accomplished in your time in office. I sincerely appreciate all of the many ways you are different than George Bush. Your wife and children are beautiful and vivacious and a pleasure to watch and in Michelle's case, listen to. And by the way, that tie really brings out the color of your eyes, and the salt and pepper hair thing is looking pretty darn good on you!

Thank you for protecting us from Canadian health care and those that would close the pentagon. I am heartened to see that you are keeping your elbow tucked in when you elevate for the three-pointer. Bo looks like he is growing up nicely and you must be feeding him well, you can see it in the sheen on his coat.

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She sat rocking her baby in her arms, looking out the window at the rain, hoping that its ferocity would drown out the scream rising within her. The scream was the kind you feel when you realize that you may have made a huge, irreversible mistake. With someone else's life. The kind of rising scream you try to shove back down to the depths of your unconscious with denial.

But denial didn't seem to be working anymore.

It never used to rain like this. She had just watched Russia burning on the news. And Pakistan under water. A huge iceberg calve. Floods around the world. Food stocks and crops of all kinds being destroyed. Followed by the news that not only would the US not pass a climate bill, and that the latest round of international climate talks seemed to be going badly.

She rocked her baby harder and faster.

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