You woke up on a planet where Shelby is the Senator from Alabama which is home to Marshall Space Flight Center. Ares is pivotal to the long term health of Marshall since it's leading development of Ares. Its led the development of every major NASA launch vehicle and is rabidly opposed, with good reason, to privatizing any of their mission. Marshall creates a lot of high paying jobs in Shelby's state, Boeing has a large office in Huntsville and no doubt fills Shelby's campaign coffers.
You woke up on a planet where Bob Bennett is the Senator from Utah which is home of Thiokol(ATK) which builds the solid rockets that are what Ares I is made out of. Note Bennett's own party threw him out at the state Republican convention recently so he is a lame duck now. The powerful Texas congressional delegation is no doubt supporting this to defend jobs at Johnson.
There isn't anything ideological here, these two Senators are rabidly defending the jobs of the voters in their home states, large quantities of federal dollars flowing in to their states, and campaign contributions from Ares contractors.
This is extremely traditional politics and government contracting. Both NASA and DOD, and more importantly their prime contractors spread jobs from their pet programs through as many states and congressional districts as possible to make it impossible to kill them in Congress no matter how dumb they are. They also try to have big parts of the projects in states with very powerful senators and representatives. This same tactic made the F-22 impossible to kill even when the Secretary of Defense didn't want it, didn't need it and considered it wrong for the times.
Turning NASA and manned space flight in to a job's program with no well defined or sensible goal, other than creation of jobs is why its been so disappointing for so long.
"Not as long as it's the only app store for the device, because it shouldn't be seen as their device. It should be seen as yours, the consumer's."
Uh no, its Apple's device, everyone buys it knowing there was only one app store and the constraints Apple put on it. Don't like it, don't buy it. If people don't buy it because of your whiny complaints they will change. For some odd reason people keep buying Apple's products tending to suggest your complaints for the most part don't matter to a lot of people. You have a slim case when Apple changed the rules as it goes along but its never really had porn apps and I'm sure their EULA immunizes them for making changes to the rules at their discretion.
"Which won't work on the iPhone, thanks to Apple."
I'm pretty sure you can see all kinds of porn on the iPhone, you just have to get to it through a browser and you can't look at Flash based porn. There is still more porn on the web available to you than you will ever have time to look at.
"Websites aren't apps. You can do more with an app than with a website."
At this point you are getting delusional if you think anyone at Apple cares that you seem to demand your porn as an "app" and only as an "app".
" To me, the iPhone is gross."
So don't buy one and stop whining about it. Tou have the option to walk away. Whining about it and insisting Apple pander to your desires is delusional. Their business is doing fine without you and without your demands. They don't need you. They are catering to people who want a relatively safe walled garden and there is apparently huge demand for what they are offering. Apple's products are widely used in families and parents are no doubt ecstatic they don't have to worry about their kids downloading porn apps. If, in fact, people don't like what Apple is doing then Android or someone else needs to offer what you think people want and then Apple will fail in the market place. I doubt any phone maker really wants to become known as the phone of choice for porn.
Bottomline is the iPhone is what it is, in fact its a lot more open than most of the phones you were stuck with before it came out... If its not as open as you would like.... tough.
"kind of morality is appropriate (no porn for you)"
It is ENTIRELY appropriate for Apple to decide they want to ban porn from THEIR app store. Their app store is heavily used by children and I imagine a lot of parents appreciate that there is one place they can turn their kids loose without having to worry about them being bombarded with porn.
If you want to push porn to make a quick buck... go for it, create your own web site, apps store. If you want to spend your time looking at porn, go for it, there are about a million web sites most of which work on iWhatever. The constant whining about the fact you can't do it throuigh Apple's app store, with Apple's blessing, is pretty stupid. Apple collects and disburses the money for THEIR app store and I imagine they don't want to be in the porn business, totally their choice. Apple's servers distribute those apps and I imagine they dont want their servers to become a hub for porn distribution either. It runs counter to the values of a lot of people and corporations.
If they DID allow some porn, I imagine you would start whining about Apple's moralizing if they rejected porn that is gross or borderline illegal, wouldn't you..... Where exactly would you allow them to draw the line?
It's Extreme wisdom on the part of Apple and Jobs to not take the first step on that slippery slope.
There are a lot of valid complaints about Apple's policies but banning porn apps is NOT one of them.
Nice rhetoric but its not really true. The U.S. is still a global economic leader, its just trending down, not up like emerging markets which have no where to go but up. Boeing makes a LOT of the worlds airliners, Intel makes most of the world's CPU's, Microsoft and Apple the operating systems most of the world uses, Apple the leading smartphone, music player and mustic store, Google is the global leader in a number of areas. John Deere farm equipment leader, Caterpillar still a leader in construction machinery. Ford is rebounding to a leadership position while Toyota is the one struggling. U.S. drug discovery and medical technology still leads the world though at a steep price. The U.S. still leads in a lot of leading edge markets. Its completely lost leadership in a lot of not so leading edge markets.
It is true low wage, low skill manufacturing jobs are largely gone and a lot of commodity jobs in programming and IT are going. This is more an unfortunate fact of globalization, its pretty hard to compete in labor intensive low margin businesses against countries with very low wage rates, no environmental or safety standards and worse who manipulate their currency. Perhaps better education has something to do with it but I doubt it, its almost purely lower cost per employee.
It would have been better if the U.S. had either forced China to play on a level playing field or launched a trade war against them with tarrifs but unfortunately U.S. multinationals wanted access to China's cheap labor and big growing market, so they more than anyone bought the political influence necessary to throw the doors wide open to China even though China's markets are brutally slanted in the favor of state owned Chinese companies. A number of U.S. multinationals are starting to realize their China plays were naive at best.
Trying to get back on topic... I don't think Apollo astronauts are a very good policy judge in this area. Astronaut has to be one of the most expensive per capita special interests there is. We must have invested at least a billion each for each of their little adventures. Apollio was an awesome acheivement and maybe it was worthwhile but it was also a cold war stunt, required vast resources, there was some ROI but its unclear how much really, and it is clear there was no strategy on where to go with it the day after Armstrong walked on the moon. At this point manned space flight has deteriorated in to nothing but LEO launches to a tin can spinning around the earth doing.... not much. Its turned very disappointing. Paying the Russians 50-100 million to get to the ISS is WAY better than 1 billion a pop for a shuttle flight.
Pouring money in to manned space flight just for prestige really isn't worth it. Obama's approach is commendable because he is trying to break U.S. space efforts out of their going nowhere strategy and actually start doing stuff that is revolutionary and ground breaking again. VASIMR is high risk but its also a huge payoff if it can cut the time to Mars by a large multiple. Ares and Consellation was a poorly designed, poorly engineered program to try to keep the jobs program alive. It was obvious to everyone who saw it, saw how behind schedule and over budget it was and how many major engineering problems it had. Their one launch after years and billions spent was basically a slight glorified Shuttle SRB launch using an Atlas control system. It was a poor effort but an atrophied bureaucracy.
- Power generation, solar beamed to earth via microwave - Power generation using He-3 for fusion mined from the moon though this is pretty speculative - Asteroid mining when the earth eventually runs out of minable mineral deposits which is eventually will unless we become a lot better at recycling. - Zero G manufacturing (protein crystals is the best proved though there are other possibilities) - Satellites are used for a lot more than communication including GPS, weather forecasting, climate monitoring, ozone layer monitoring, earth resource monitoring and location. - Colonization especially if we manage to crash the earth one way or another, If we dont contain population growth this is a near certainty,
A few months back it surfaced that a Pakistani company was submitting a couple apps a DAY... and Apple was approving them. They were $5 apps which were complete garbage, like "WWF News" where they would steal wrestling news off the web, violating copyrights, and package it as an app. With app names designed to draw in customers they could count on at least some sales, and Apple no doubt took a cut, for apps that were complete garbage. Before Apple finally developed a clue and took them down for copyright infringement they had something like 800 apps on the app store. There was another company doing the same thing with something approaching a 1000 apps.
So when everyone throws out that 100,000 apps number, do the math, and realize a large percentage of those are garbage.
The other moral of this tale is that Apple is blocking and frustrating apps trying to do useful things including Google Voice while they were gleefully approving two apps a day, and taking a cut, from a company that was doing NOTHING but ripping people off. That is the definition of "arbitrary".
"could someone please seriously enlighten me as to why the UK government believes this has a chance of succeeding?"
Right on. They should just do what the NSA seems to be planning to do in the U.S and record all traffic on the Internet backbones. Then you get everything and don't have to hassle with making all the ISP's be your reluctant spies. Why else do you think the NSA is building new multibillion dollar facilities in Utah and Texas with yetabytes of storage.
"Well, the energy sector has traditionally been heavily regulated, and works well compared"
Well excepting for that Enron/Dynegy/Reliant/Williams thing where they nearly bankrupted California manipulating the electricity market, shutting off power plants to create artificial shortages for example, and FERC mostly sat on the sidelines watching.
And then of course there was oil spiking to $140 a barrel due to market manipulation, though chances are you can probably blame a fair bit of that on Goldman/Citi and other big Wall Street banks manipulating the commodities markets for profit.
Its in the same section that allows income tax, the Federal Reserve, Social Security, Medicare, arresting people and holding them indefinitely without access to a lawyer, torturing people, unlimited spying on all citizens without a warrant and using Internet Commerce as an excuse for Federal laws against just about everything.
Unfortunately we stepped on to this slippery slope a long time ago. The framers of the Constitution did their best to foresee and prevent power grabs by the government, especially the Federal government, but starting with the Civil War the states and the people have lost to the behemoth in Washingto D.C. ever since.
The frames simply couldn't do anything to prevent power hungry incompetents from being elected to Congress and the White House for extended periods, courts being packed with ideologues appointed by those incompetent, or the fact the American people either don't care about their government, or even if they care wont ever do anything in an organized or sustained way to fix anything.
At the moment the only nonviolatent solution is to start a new party and put both Democrats and Republicans out of power, and keep the new party from being completely corrupted the way the two old one are. This is nearly impossible in practice though, the Progressives and Bull Moose parties that sprung up in the early 1900's last time we had rampant corruption and wealth concentration are the closest model to study if you are interested.
Regrettably politics and government inevitably devolves in to the party with power taking things from one group and giving it to another. Senior citizens, for example, are an extremely powerful group, which is why are getting 20-30 years of Medicare and Social Security though they paid in almost nothing in taxes to those programs. Those payroll taxes were tiny when they worked, since most people didn't live much past 65. They were jacked to 12.5% in the early 1980's. The end result is young workers are being taxed in to the ground to support today's seniors, with a high probability both programs will be bankrupt when those younger workers retire so they will get nothing back, unless the pyramid scheme continues and they tax even younger workers completely in to the ground.
If you are just running a jobs program its actually better to do as little as possible. Hardware and launches cost money reducing funds available for salaries. As long as Congress and the President let's them get away with it, and keeps sending them a few billion each year, it would be ideal to schedule the next launch in the 2040 time frame, which is practically what they are already doing.
If you've watched NASA over the years, especially when they are doing new launch vehicles they ALWAYS produce awesome computer animations of what it would look like if they actually built it, and then they never do. I'm assuming Congress, being not very bright, are fooled by the animation and think they are getting actual space vehicles and launches for the billions.
They also run an awesome 24/7 TV channel to show all the awesome computer animations they do. I think they should start running reality TV shows and an American idol spinoff on it, sell commercials and they could fund their hardware, if they actually wanted to build spacecraft anymore which I don't think they really do.
The other dynamic going on here is I think NASA would actually like to continue the status quo and just spend all the money on a few shuttle launches a year, watch the ISS spin around the earth and do research no one understands or values. This is really the safest and easiest job program. Developing and testing new launch vehicles is really hard. They have the 100 meter high pile of paper necessary to do a shuttle launch nailed.
"How the hell can you possibly expect the Democrats to fulfill their promises of bipartisanship if the Republicans do everything they possibly can to hijack the democratic process?"
How did the Republican's manage to ram through nearly their entire, fairly extreme, legislative agenda for six years, if not more, with a smaller majority in the Senate than the Dems have now? There are at least some Democrats to blame here, for either voting with them then, or not having the guts to fillibuster when they could have. Can also blame the gang of 5 or 10 or whatever it was led by McCain and I think Lieberman that got together and blocked most fillibusters during the Republican reign but not now.
Joe Lieberman being the former Democrat, now Independent, is probably the most to blame for being a continual turncoat.
But fact is the Dems are gutless, spineless, clueless, Reid and Pelosi in particular, they can't control their own members to pass their agenda and they failed to block the more extreme parts of the Republican agenda. The are also not nearly ruthless enough. Delay and Cheney were ruthless.
So yes, in fact I can blame the Dems for not getting anything done.
There is irony that you hear this same line after the election of every new President with the only variation being to replace the part about what they promised to get elected and didn't deliver once they were elected.
After extensive research I've established that four years is beyond the outer limit of the human brain's ability to retain political history, so we keep getting screwed exactly the same way over and over, and then we just do the same thing again in four years and throw away our votes on the same two completely worthless parties.
If you actually want "change" you will need to have the elections approximately once a year while we still remember how much we screwed up in the last two when we put in a Republican and then a Democrat, in which case a true maverick, third party/independent will start winning every time and completely trash Washington.
"Right wing supporters hate that kind of a situation. Left wing supporters hate that kind of a situation. But left wing supporters won't let government to stop providing service and right wing supporters won't allow government to hire more people directly. Democracy is a funny thing."
True. One of the problems is once someone gets a civil service job its nearly impossible to fire them if they are incompetent or lazy which is one reason the right wing hates them. Civil servants resemble unionized workers in that respect. If they were unionized like air traffic controllers before Reagan fired them all that was like triple reasons for the right to hate them. Its a hard problem.
All I know is whatever NASA is doing its not working at least as far as the manned space program goes. I was pretty shocked after the Aries 1-X launch to see that they aren't planning the Aries 1-Y launch until 2014 and it still wont even be close to the real thing. That means they are managing one launch every 4-5 years. Not sure how anyone approved this program with that kind of schedule. Either they really don't have sufficient funds, which they probably don't, or there contractor system is completely dysfunctional, which it probably is.
It would have taken about 50 years to do Apollo if they had gone the speed Ares is going. NASA went from Mercury-Redstone 1 to Apollo 11 in nine years, though admittedly they had massive amounts of money to spend. Mercury did 21 launches in two years, and they were starting from scratch mostly with slide rules instead of computers. Gemini did 12 launches in 2 1/2 years. Apollo did 12 launches in three years through Apollo 11.
"I think they still have some room to improve by further reducing the capitalist aspects of their economies, but those countries seem to do quite well as long as they have at least partial socialism combined with a socially libertarian government."
Closest I've come to living in one is Canada. It was an OK place to live but that was mostly because the people are just nicer on average than Americans and less stuck on themselves. I wasn't a citizen or there for life so didn't really experience much of the socialism.
Me personally I prefer a place with lower taxes and less government. I'm extremely against groups of able bodied people getting large amounts of free money and services from government off the backs of other people who work. Where there are social programs you can always count on people who aren't in need gaming the system to do just that. I've never taken a penny from government, and am not pleased with how much they take from me, often for things that are pork, wasteful, fraud, abuse and just wealth redistribution.
"The mere threat of a single night in a holding cell - which could happen for virtually any violation"
I'm pretty sure everything you listed wont get you anything more than a ticket and a fine.
"One does not need to do drugs or even drink alcohol to have a good time (whether or not you're in college). One merely needs friends. As I have friends, I see no reason to indulge in such idiotic substances as drugs or alcohol."
Yea, but you don't even know what you are or aren't missing. I tend to agree that habitual use is kind of dumb, but most people try things at least once, within limites, so they aren't naive. It is a classic joke when people say they've never used drugs for people to say "Didn't you go to college", it was a joke in "Romancing the Stone" in particular.
"Perhaps Joe Nacchio was breaking insider trading rules. That doesn't prove that "most" Americans would do so in the same situation; there are millions of Americans who could do so but do not. How is it that in your mind a few high-profile lawbreakers determine what the majority of Americans must be doing?"
Its impossible to sort out exactly what happened. There was some issue about some huge classified communication contracts that Nacchio was relying on to make his numbers for a quarter, and the Bush administration might have killed them as retaliation for Qwest not playing ball and letting the NSA tap their backbones. That caused a huge miss in Qwest's quarter. Unfortunately it is the beauty of governments and secrecy that they can use state secret claims to hide just about anything. All indications are Qwest is the only telecom that did the right thing and they paid a steep price for it. They knew what was being proposed was illegal and are apparently the only telecomm that said no.
"No, good examples would be: speeding, jaywalking, briefly parking in a no-park zone, blocking a fire hydrant..."
All of your examples are horrible because none of them are serious enough to be of any value in pressuring people in to silence and obedience.
I think you are the abnormal one... Didn't you go to college? If so how did you get through it without at least trying a joint or a bong? Clinton and Obama both did. Chances are extremely high George W. Bush was a habitual cocaine user though he got off with community service the one time he was busted and it was erased off his record. He also had issues with drunk driving which is another law large numbers of people break.
As for cheating on taxes, have you noticed how many candidates for Presidential appointments have been shot down for failure to pay payroll taxes on maids, for not paying taxes on fringe benefits(Tom Daschle didn't report extended use of a limo and driver). The current Secretary of Treasury, Tim Geithner, you know the guy that runs the IRS now, nearly was shot down for failure to pay taxes, $64,000 if I recall, but he is a Wall Street favorite so everyone looked the other way to approve him.
Maybe you have a simple life, your company does all your payroll taxes for you etc, if you are ever self employed, have to handle complex financial transactions like stock trading or selling houses, inheritances, etc. the U.S. tax code is so complex and labyrinthine its basically impossible to not violate it at some point unless you have a professional accountant or tax lawyer, and if you have those chances are they will intentionally cheat on your taxes for you, its how the screwy game is played in the U.S. There are reported to be some tens of thousands of rich Americans implicated in hiding millions of dollars from the IRS with the aide of UBS and Switzerland which are being revealed after the U.S. pounding on Switzerland to compromise its strict bank secrecy laws. Assorted Caribbean islands like Antigua and Caymen islands are other places designed specifically to aid American citizens and corporations to cheat on their taxes.
I'm pretty sure if you were affluent or a stock broker chances are you've probably traded on a stock tip that was illegal somewhere between 1 and a 1000 times. Insider trading violations is how they took down Joe Nacchio.
When it comes to politicians the ethics and campaign finance regulations are so complex its also nearly impossible to not break them. I wager the ethics committees in Congress are there just to gather ethics dirt on every member so the leadership can tell them to change their vote on important bills, and if they refuse, they reopen their ethics cases.
NASA is a hopeless entrenched bureaucracy. Forming more committees, and writing reports, is what they do when threatened, its their counterpart to the old west circling of the wagons when attacked by Indians.
As an aside here is a fascinating article by an ex CIA agent on why the CIA has exactly the same disease NASA has and why they are dysfunctional too. Apparently most CIA agents spend most of their time angling to making a jump to the private sector where they can get rich by using their insider knowledge to get lucrative contracts.... from the CIA.
NASA is pretty similar. There are very few scientists and engineers left at NASA. They are mostly contract monitors who shuffle paper from pile to pile to get money from Congress to award contracts to the private sector and the contractors do all the actual work. Of course contractors tend to be flakes, and are just in it to milk as much money as they can. During Apollo there were a lot of contractors but there were actual engineers and scientists at NASA who did stuff, not so much any more.
"The Nazis used the word "socialist" as part of their propaganda, but it didn't actually have any of the characteristics of socialism."
I forgot to add that the U.S.S.R and Communist China use the term "Socialist" and it was mostly just propaganda too. Sure their states did actually own everything but the actual difference between Nazi Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China were miniscule. Socialism in the U.S.S.R and China was just a ruse to allow party members and dictators to hold total power under the pretense that it was for the benefit of workers when it really wasn't. Maybe the U.S.S.R tried Socialim/Communism but once Stalin seized power it was over.
Only difference is Nazi Germany maintained a pretense of Capitalism, and private ownership, but they were all just brutal authoritarian states. The party members and bureaucrats just had somewhat more direct control of everything in the U.S.S.R and Mao's China.
Once China restored private capital and some pretense of free markets in the early 80's, it basically became an authoritarian regime with state capitalism so it is for all practical purposes a classic Fascist state now. Putin's Russia likewise.
I hope you see why I don't really differentiate between hard left Socialist states and hard right Fascist states they really aren't very different in practice. Socialist democracies are a different animal all together and maybe they are more the model for real Socialism but since they have substantial capitalist components they don't really qualify. Not sure I can name an actual Socialist nation state of any size that lasted for any period of time.
"I'm as concerned by these as you are, but considering that the basic democratic institutions of the country are still in place--look at the recent non-violent transfers of power between the two parties, for example--I don't think we've reached the degree of authoritarianism necessary to be considered a fascist state. A corporatist economic system alone isn't sufficient to constitute fascism."
I think you and the rest of the country are just being deceived. You and everyone else thought Obama and Bush would be like night and day different. They haven't been different at all have they? Iraq and Afghanistan wars haven't changed at all. Guantanamo is still running. Wall Street bailouts continued unabated, Geithner, Summers and Paulson are like triplets they are so much alike and such Wall Street tools. Warrantless wire tapping continues unabated and the Obama administration is using "state secrets" to kill court cases against it just like the Bush adminisrtation did. Only thing the Republican's wouldn't have done was the brain dead stimulus which was pork for Democratic causes instead of Republican ones, and maybe health care reform wouldn't have happened at all.
Sure the two political parties change power periodically. But, there are huge entrenched bureaucracies at Defense, CIA, NSA, FBI, Treasury, etc that change very little in those transitions. Goldman Sachs in particular manages to keep it former employees or friends all over the Fed, the Treasury department, the SEC and the White House under Democrats and Republicans alike.
The two parties are becoming indistinguishable in their slavery to the defense industrial complex and major corporate interests, especially those on Wall Steet. Geithner apparently gave $2.3 billion to CIT, a company everyone knew would fail, without securing it at all so it was wiped out when they did fail. CIT's big Wall Street lenders, including Goldman Sachs, get 70% of their loans back. Speculation is Geithner is either an idiot or more likely he did it as a way to reduce Wall Street losses, especially Goldman Sachs's losses, and stuck it to tax payers instead.
Here is another way to look at it. One of the hallmarks of Fascism is its single minded obsession with defeating Communism. As soon as World War II ended the Soviet Union and Communism became America's enemy number one, obsessively so, and America become truly Fascist. It didn't really need to be completely Fascist at home though McCarthyism was classic Fascism. The U.S. was completely Fascist abroad, where it had to be. installing and supporting ruthless, hard right Fasicist regimes around the world for 50 years, in Argentina, Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, the Phillipines, Central America, on and on. The only requirement is they be anti communist, willing to ruthlessly kill communists, and brutal oppression was completely fine. The U.S. trained their military and intelligence services in torture and oppression at the School of the Americas.
The U.S. didn't really need a police state at home for most of the last 50 years because the America people, with the exception of brief period during the Vietnam war, have been completely docile and never challenge the shadow state that really holds the power and the wealth. During the 60's discontent remember the CIA was spying on political dissidents similar to a velvet gloved Gestapo, thats why we instituded FISA to try to stop the abuse. Other than the late 60's are completely content to just ping pong between voting in the Democrats and Republicans and very little actually changes when we do. Its a ruse designed to make us thing we are free when we really aren't, to make us think we control our political system when in fact we don't. Its mostly controlled by two entrenched party apparatus, by powerful entrenched bureaucracies like the Pentagon and Langley, and by Wall Street since a good third of our economy sits in big Wall Steet banks and hedge funds now.
When Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. homeland all that changed. The mostly invisible
America most recent period of devastating inflation was the seventies and early eighties, partially thanks to all the money squandered on Vietnam and some OPEC gouging. Paul Volker a real American hero finally broke inflation's back in the early 80's by jacking interest rates up to 20%. It caused a major recession but it did work.
Paul Volcker is really my hero because he seems to be the only person in the Obama administration who wants to restore Glass-Steagal, and force separation of commercial banks from stocks and commodities gambling investment banks like Citigroup. Geithner and Larry Summers have completely marginalized him, so no one listens to him, since they are complete tools of Wall Street. Instead of doing the sane thing, we just made it massively worse by letting Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley acquire bank charters so they can continue to gamble but now with FDIC backing and access to the Fed discount window.
The U.S. government, specifically Tim Geithner, also invested some $2.3 billion in a company destined for bankruptcy, CIT. The U.S. treasury was the lender of last resort and should have secured their investment by insuring they were the first to be repaid in event of bankruptcy, instead they didn't secure it at all so other less senior lenders get 70% back, the U.S. tax payer apparently got shafted out of the entire 2.3 billion.
Maybe in that case as in Halcyon's, since it was someone else's money they were blowing, they didn't really care... Halcyon bought the rights with money from a hedge fund, Pacificor in Santa Barbara.
A quote from the link on the CIT loan from a Law professor:
"Black believes the problem stems from regulators' fears that if the banks recognize a loss on the bad assets it will create a domino effect that will wipe out the entire financial system.
"If that's true we've got to get rid of capitalism," he warns, "because if we can't recognize losses in a capitalist system we have no future.""
If true it basically means Geithner squandered another $2.3 billion to reduce the losses of big Wall Street banks, one of CIT's big lenders is Goldman Sachs.
I'm presuming it has the annual inflation rate for each year from 1913 to 2009 though it doesn't say in detail. I entered 1 dollar in 1995 and it showed 40 some percent inflation through 2009.
If this inflation calculator I just ran is accurate inflation accounts for only 41.7% of the increase since 1995. I think I alluded to the fact that much of the increase was just due to the imploding value of the dollar which is another way to say inflation. Gold isn't a perfect indicator of inflation but its the closest thing we have in the form of a physical commodity. Chances are there is going to be another enormous spike in inflation in a couple years if the current recession really ends, if $1000 gold is any indication.
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You woke up on a planet where Shelby is the Senator from Alabama which is home to Marshall Space Flight Center. Ares is pivotal to the long term health of Marshall since it's leading development of Ares. Its led the development of every major NASA launch vehicle and is rabidly opposed, with good reason, to privatizing any of their mission. Marshall creates a lot of high paying jobs in Shelby's state, Boeing has a large office in Huntsville and no doubt fills Shelby's campaign coffers.
You woke up on a planet where Bob Bennett is the Senator from Utah which is home of Thiokol(ATK) which builds the solid rockets that are what Ares I is made out of. Note Bennett's own party threw him out at the state Republican convention recently so he is a lame duck now. The powerful Texas congressional delegation is no doubt supporting this to defend jobs at Johnson.
There isn't anything ideological here, these two Senators are rabidly defending the jobs of the voters in their home states, large quantities of federal dollars flowing in to their states, and campaign contributions from Ares contractors.
This is extremely traditional politics and government contracting. Both NASA and DOD, and more importantly their prime contractors spread jobs from their pet programs through as many states and congressional districts as possible to make it impossible to kill them in Congress no matter how dumb they are. They also try to have big parts of the projects in states with very powerful senators and representatives. This same tactic made the F-22 impossible to kill even when the Secretary of Defense didn't want it, didn't need it and considered it wrong for the times.
Turning NASA and manned space flight in to a job's program with no well defined or sensible goal, other than creation of jobs is why its been so disappointing for so long.
"Not as long as it's the only app store for the device, because it shouldn't be seen as their device. It should be seen as yours, the consumer's."
Uh no, its Apple's device, everyone buys it knowing there was only one app store and the constraints Apple put on it. Don't like it, don't buy it. If people don't buy it because of your whiny complaints they will change. For some odd reason people keep buying Apple's products tending to suggest your complaints for the most part don't matter to a lot of people. You have a slim case when Apple changed the rules as it goes along but its never really had porn apps and I'm sure their EULA immunizes them for making changes to the rules at their discretion.
"Which won't work on the iPhone, thanks to Apple."
I'm pretty sure you can see all kinds of porn on the iPhone, you just have to get to it through a browser and you can't look at Flash based porn. There is still more porn on the web available to you than you will ever have time to look at.
"Websites aren't apps. You can do more with an app than with a website."
At this point you are getting delusional if you think anyone at Apple cares that you seem to demand your porn as an "app" and only as an "app".
" To me, the iPhone is gross."
So don't buy one and stop whining about it. Tou have the option to walk away. Whining about it and insisting Apple pander to your desires is delusional. Their business is doing fine without you and without your demands. They don't need you. They are catering to people who want a relatively safe walled garden and there is apparently huge demand for what they are offering. Apple's products are widely used in families and parents are no doubt ecstatic they don't have to worry about their kids downloading porn apps. If, in fact, people don't like what Apple is doing then Android or someone else needs to offer what you think people want and then Apple will fail in the market place. I doubt any phone maker really wants to become known as the phone of choice for porn.
Bottomline is the iPhone is what it is, in fact its a lot more open than most of the phones you were stuck with before it came out... If its not as open as you would like.... tough.
"kind of morality is appropriate (no porn for you)"
It is ENTIRELY appropriate for Apple to decide they want to ban porn from THEIR app store. Their app store is heavily used by children and I imagine a lot of parents appreciate that there is one place they can turn their kids loose without having to worry about them being bombarded with porn.
If you want to push porn to make a quick buck... go for it, create your own web site, apps store. If you want to spend your time looking at porn, go for it, there are about a million web sites most of which work on iWhatever. The constant whining about the fact you can't do it throuigh Apple's app store, with Apple's blessing, is pretty stupid. Apple collects and disburses the money for THEIR app store and I imagine they don't want to be in the porn business, totally their choice. Apple's servers distribute those apps and I imagine they dont want their servers to become a hub for porn distribution either. It runs counter to the values of a lot of people and corporations.
If they DID allow some porn, I imagine you would start whining about Apple's moralizing if they rejected porn that is gross or borderline illegal, wouldn't you..... Where exactly would you allow them to draw the line?
It's Extreme wisdom on the part of Apple and Jobs to not take the first step on that slippery slope.
There are a lot of valid complaints about Apple's policies but banning porn apps is NOT one of them.
" What does it make anymore? Bombs"
Nice rhetoric but its not really true. The U.S. is still a global economic leader, its just trending down, not up like emerging markets which have no where to go but up. Boeing makes a LOT of the worlds airliners, Intel makes most of the world's CPU's, Microsoft and Apple the operating systems most of the world uses, Apple the leading smartphone, music player and mustic store, Google is the global leader in a number of areas. John Deere farm equipment leader, Caterpillar still a leader in construction machinery. Ford is rebounding to a leadership position while Toyota is the one struggling. U.S. drug discovery and medical technology still leads the world though at a steep price. The U.S. still leads in a lot of leading edge markets. Its completely lost leadership in a lot of not so leading edge markets.
It is true low wage, low skill manufacturing jobs are largely gone and a lot of commodity jobs in programming and IT are going. This is more an unfortunate fact of globalization, its pretty hard to compete in labor intensive low margin businesses against countries with very low wage rates, no environmental or safety standards and worse who manipulate their currency. Perhaps better education has something to do with it but I doubt it, its almost purely lower cost per employee.
It would have been better if the U.S. had either forced China to play on a level playing field or launched a trade war against them with tarrifs but unfortunately U.S. multinationals wanted access to China's cheap labor and big growing market, so they more than anyone bought the political influence necessary to throw the doors wide open to China even though China's markets are brutally slanted in the favor of state owned Chinese companies. A number of U.S. multinationals are starting to realize their China plays were naive at best.
Trying to get back on topic... I don't think Apollo astronauts are a very good policy judge in this area. Astronaut has to be one of the most expensive per capita special interests there is. We must have invested at least a billion each for each of their little adventures. Apollio was an awesome acheivement and maybe it was worthwhile but it was also a cold war stunt, required vast resources, there was some ROI but its unclear how much really, and it is clear there was no strategy on where to go with it the day after Armstrong walked on the moon. At this point manned space flight has deteriorated in to nothing but LEO launches to a tin can spinning around the earth doing.... not much. Its turned very disappointing. Paying the Russians 50-100 million to get to the ISS is WAY better than 1 billion a pop for a shuttle flight.
Pouring money in to manned space flight just for prestige really isn't worth it. Obama's approach is commendable because he is trying to break U.S. space efforts out of their going nowhere strategy and actually start doing stuff that is revolutionary and ground breaking again. VASIMR is high risk but its also a huge payoff if it can cut the time to Mars by a large multiple. Ares and Consellation was a poorly designed, poorly engineered program to try to keep the jobs program alive. It was obvious to everyone who saw it, saw how behind schedule and over budget it was and how many major engineering problems it had. Their one launch after years and billions spent was basically a slight glorified Shuttle SRB launch using an Atlas control system. It was a poor effort but an atrophied bureaucracy.
"As far as I can see ..."
Well you apparently can't see well.
There is also:
- Power generation, solar beamed to earth via microwave
- Power generation using He-3 for fusion mined from the moon though this is pretty speculative
- Asteroid mining when the earth eventually runs out of minable mineral deposits which is eventually will unless we become a lot better at recycling.
- Zero G manufacturing (protein crystals is the best proved though there are other possibilities)
- Satellites are used for a lot more than communication including GPS, weather forecasting, climate monitoring, ozone layer monitoring, earth resource monitoring and location.
- Colonization especially if we manage to crash the earth one way or another, If we dont contain population growth this is a near certainty,
While you are doing the math....
A few months back it surfaced that a Pakistani company was submitting a couple apps a DAY... and Apple was approving them. They were $5 apps which were complete garbage, like "WWF News" where they would steal wrestling news off the web, violating copyrights, and package it as an app. With app names designed to draw in customers they could count on at least some sales, and Apple no doubt took a cut, for apps that were complete garbage. Before Apple finally developed a clue and took them down for copyright infringement they had something like 800 apps on the app store. There was another company doing the same thing with something approaching a 1000 apps.
So when everyone throws out that 100,000 apps number, do the math, and realize a large percentage of those are garbage.
The other moral of this tale is that Apple is blocking and frustrating apps trying to do useful things including Google Voice while they were gleefully approving two apps a day, and taking a cut, from a company that was doing NOTHING but ripping people off. That is the definition of "arbitrary".
Botulism Salmonella or Diarrhea?
"could someone please seriously enlighten me as to why the UK government believes this has a chance of succeeding?"
Right on. They should just do what the NSA seems to be planning to do in the U.S and record all traffic on the Internet backbones. Then you get everything and don't have to hassle with making all the ISP's be your reluctant spies. Why else do you think the NSA is building new multibillion dollar facilities in Utah and Texas with yetabytes of storage.
"Well, the energy sector has traditionally been heavily regulated, and works well compared"
Well excepting for that Enron/Dynegy/Reliant/Williams thing where they nearly bankrupted California manipulating the electricity market, shutting off power plants to create artificial shortages for example, and FERC mostly sat on the sidelines watching.
And then of course there was oil spiking to $140 a barrel due to market manipulation, though chances are you can probably blame a fair bit of that on Goldman/Citi and other big Wall Street banks manipulating the commodities markets for profit.
Its in the same section that allows income tax, the Federal Reserve, Social Security, Medicare, arresting people and holding them indefinitely without access to a lawyer, torturing people, unlimited spying on all citizens without a warrant and using Internet Commerce as an excuse for Federal laws against just about everything.
Unfortunately we stepped on to this slippery slope a long time ago. The framers of the Constitution did their best to foresee and prevent power grabs by the government, especially the Federal government, but starting with the Civil War the states and the people have lost to the behemoth in Washingto D.C. ever since.
The frames simply couldn't do anything to prevent power hungry incompetents from being elected to Congress and the White House for extended periods, courts being packed with ideologues appointed by those incompetent, or the fact the American people either don't care about their government, or even if they care wont ever do anything in an organized or sustained way to fix anything.
At the moment the only nonviolatent solution is to start a new party and put both Democrats and Republicans out of power, and keep the new party from being completely corrupted the way the two old one are. This is nearly impossible in practice though, the Progressives and Bull Moose parties that sprung up in the early 1900's last time we had rampant corruption and wealth concentration are the closest model to study if you are interested.
Regrettably politics and government inevitably devolves in to the party with power taking things from one group and giving it to another. Senior citizens, for example, are an extremely powerful group, which is why are getting 20-30 years of Medicare and Social Security though they paid in almost nothing in taxes to those programs. Those payroll taxes were tiny when they worked, since most people didn't live much past 65. They were jacked to 12.5% in the early 1980's. The end result is young workers are being taxed in to the ground to support today's seniors, with a high probability both programs will be bankrupt when those younger workers retire so they will get nothing back, unless the pyramid scheme continues and they tax even younger workers completely in to the ground.
If you are just running a jobs program its actually better to do as little as possible. Hardware and launches cost money reducing funds available for salaries. As long as Congress and the President let's them get away with it, and keeps sending them a few billion each year, it would be ideal to schedule the next launch in the 2040 time frame, which is practically what they are already doing.
If you've watched NASA over the years, especially when they are doing new launch vehicles they ALWAYS produce awesome computer animations of what it would look like if they actually built it, and then they never do. I'm assuming Congress, being not very bright, are fooled by the animation and think they are getting actual space vehicles and launches for the billions.
They also run an awesome 24/7 TV channel to show all the awesome computer animations they do. I think they should start running reality TV shows and an American idol spinoff on it, sell commercials and they could fund their hardware, if they actually wanted to build spacecraft anymore which I don't think they really do.
The other dynamic going on here is I think NASA would actually like to continue the status quo and just spend all the money on a few shuttle launches a year, watch the ISS spin around the earth and do research no one understands or values. This is really the safest and easiest job program. Developing and testing new launch vehicles is really hard. They have the 100 meter high pile of paper necessary to do a shuttle launch nailed.
"How the hell can you possibly expect the Democrats to fulfill their promises of bipartisanship if the Republicans do everything they possibly can to hijack the democratic process?"
How did the Republican's manage to ram through nearly their entire, fairly extreme, legislative agenda for six years, if not more, with a smaller majority in the Senate than the Dems have now? There are at least some Democrats to blame here, for either voting with them then, or not having the guts to fillibuster when they could have. Can also blame the gang of 5 or 10 or whatever it was led by McCain and I think Lieberman that got together and blocked most fillibusters during the Republican reign but not now.
Joe Lieberman being the former Democrat, now Independent, is probably the most to blame for being a continual turncoat.
But fact is the Dems are gutless, spineless, clueless, Reid and Pelosi in particular, they can't control their own members to pass their agenda and they failed to block the more extreme parts of the Republican agenda. The are also not nearly ruthless enough. Delay and Cheney were ruthless.
So yes, in fact I can blame the Dems for not getting anything done.
There is irony that you hear this same line after the election of every new President with the only variation being to replace the part about what they promised to get elected and didn't deliver once they were elected.
After extensive research I've established that four years is beyond the outer limit of the human brain's ability to retain political history, so we keep getting screwed exactly the same way over and over, and then we just do the same thing again in four years and throw away our votes on the same two completely worthless parties.
If you actually want "change" you will need to have the elections approximately once a year while we still remember how much we screwed up in the last two when we put in a Republican and then a Democrat, in which case a true maverick, third party/independent will start winning every time and completely trash Washington.
"Right wing supporters hate that kind of a situation. Left wing supporters hate that kind of a situation. But left wing supporters won't let government to stop providing service and right wing supporters won't allow government to hire more people directly. Democracy is a funny thing."
True. One of the problems is once someone gets a civil service job its nearly impossible to fire them if they are incompetent or lazy which is one reason the right wing hates them. Civil servants resemble unionized workers in that respect. If they were unionized like air traffic controllers before Reagan fired them all that was like triple reasons for the right to hate them. Its a hard problem.
All I know is whatever NASA is doing its not working at least as far as the manned space program goes. I was pretty shocked after the Aries 1-X launch to see that they aren't planning the Aries 1-Y launch until 2014 and it still wont even be close to the real thing. That means they are managing one launch every 4-5 years. Not sure how anyone approved this program with that kind of schedule. Either they really don't have sufficient funds, which they probably don't, or there contractor system is completely dysfunctional, which it probably is.
It would have taken about 50 years to do Apollo if they had gone the speed Ares is going. NASA went from Mercury-Redstone 1 to Apollo 11 in nine years, though admittedly they had massive amounts of money to spend. Mercury did 21 launches in two years, and they were starting from scratch mostly with slide rules instead of computers. Gemini did 12 launches in 2 1/2 years. Apollo did 12 launches in three years through Apollo 11.
Good question.
The wikipedia article doesn't say. The table is labeled "Total outlays in recent budget submissions" so its impossible to say.
"I think they still have some room to improve by further reducing the capitalist aspects of their economies, but those countries seem to do quite well as long as they have at least partial socialism combined with a socially libertarian government."
Closest I've come to living in one is Canada. It was an OK place to live but that was mostly because the people are just nicer on average than Americans and less stuck on themselves. I wasn't a citizen or there for life so didn't really experience much of the socialism.
Me personally I prefer a place with lower taxes and less government. I'm extremely against groups of able bodied people getting large amounts of free money and services from government off the backs of other people who work. Where there are social programs you can always count on people who aren't in need gaming the system to do just that. I've never taken a penny from government, and am not pleased with how much they take from me, often for things that are pork, wasteful, fraud, abuse and just wealth redistribution.
"The mere threat of a single night in a holding cell - which could happen for virtually any violation"
I'm pretty sure everything you listed wont get you anything more than a ticket and a fine.
"One does not need to do drugs or even drink alcohol to have a good time (whether or not you're in college). One merely needs friends. As I have friends, I see no reason to indulge in such idiotic substances as drugs or alcohol."
Yea, but you don't even know what you are or aren't missing. I tend to agree that habitual use is kind of dumb, but most people try things at least once, within limites, so they aren't naive. It is a classic joke when people say they've never used drugs for people to say "Didn't you go to college", it was a joke in "Romancing the Stone" in particular.
"Perhaps Joe Nacchio was breaking insider trading rules. That doesn't prove that "most" Americans would do so in the same situation; there are millions of Americans who could do so but do not. How is it that in your mind a few high-profile lawbreakers determine what the majority of Americans must be doing?"
Its impossible to sort out exactly what happened. There was some issue about some huge classified communication contracts that Nacchio was relying on to make his numbers for a quarter, and the Bush administration might have killed them as retaliation for Qwest not playing ball and letting the NSA tap their backbones. That caused a huge miss in Qwest's quarter. Unfortunately it is the beauty of governments and secrecy that they can use state secret claims to hide just about anything. All indications are Qwest is the only telecom that did the right thing and they paid a steep price for it. They knew what was being proposed was illegal and are apparently the only telecomm that said no.
"No, good examples would be: speeding, jaywalking, briefly parking in a no-park zone, blocking a fire hydrant..."
All of your examples are horrible because none of them are serious enough to be of any value in pressuring people in to silence and obedience.
I think you are the abnormal one... Didn't you go to college? If so how did you get through it without at least trying a joint or a bong? Clinton and Obama both did. Chances are extremely high George W. Bush was a habitual cocaine user though he got off with community service the one time he was busted and it was erased off his record. He also had issues with drunk driving which is another law large numbers of people break.
As for cheating on taxes, have you noticed how many candidates for Presidential appointments have been shot down for failure to pay payroll taxes on maids, for not paying taxes on fringe benefits(Tom Daschle didn't report extended use of a limo and driver). The current Secretary of Treasury, Tim Geithner, you know the guy that runs the IRS now, nearly was shot down for failure to pay taxes, $64,000 if I recall, but he is a Wall Street favorite so everyone looked the other way to approve him.
Maybe you have a simple life, your company does all your payroll taxes for you etc, if you are ever self employed, have to handle complex financial transactions like stock trading or selling houses, inheritances, etc. the U.S. tax code is so complex and labyrinthine its basically impossible to not violate it at some point unless you have a professional accountant or tax lawyer, and if you have those chances are they will intentionally cheat on your taxes for you, its how the screwy game is played in the U.S. There are reported to be some tens of thousands of rich Americans implicated in hiding millions of dollars from the IRS with the aide of UBS and Switzerland which are being revealed after the U.S. pounding on Switzerland to compromise its strict bank secrecy laws. Assorted Caribbean islands like Antigua and Caymen islands are other places designed specifically to aid American citizens and corporations to cheat on their taxes.
I'm pretty sure if you were affluent or a stock broker chances are you've probably traded on a stock tip that was illegal somewhere between 1 and a 1000 times. Insider trading violations is how they took down Joe Nacchio.
When it comes to politicians the ethics and campaign finance regulations are so complex its also nearly impossible to not break them. I wager the ethics committees in Congress are there just to gather ethics dirt on every member so the leadership can tell them to change their vote on important bills, and if they refuse, they reopen their ethics cases.
NASA is a hopeless entrenched bureaucracy. Forming more committees, and writing reports, is what they do when threatened, its their counterpart to the old west circling of the wagons when attacked by Indians.
As an aside here is a fascinating article by an ex CIA agent on why the CIA has exactly the same disease NASA has and why they are dysfunctional too. Apparently most CIA agents spend most of their time angling to making a jump to the private sector where they can get rich by using their insider knowledge to get lucrative contracts.... from the CIA.
NASA is pretty similar. There are very few scientists and engineers left at NASA. They are mostly contract monitors who shuffle paper from pile to pile to get money from Congress to award contracts to the private sector and the contractors do all the actual work. Of course contractors tend to be flakes, and are just in it to milk as much money as they can. During Apollo there were a lot of contractors but there were actual engineers and scientists at NASA who did stuff, not so much any more.
"The Nazis used the word "socialist" as part of their propaganda, but it didn't actually have any of the characteristics of socialism."
I forgot to add that the U.S.S.R and Communist China use the term "Socialist" and it was mostly just propaganda too. Sure their states did actually own everything but the actual difference between Nazi Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China were miniscule. Socialism in the U.S.S.R and China was just a ruse to allow party members and dictators to hold total power under the pretense that it was for the benefit of workers when it really wasn't. Maybe the U.S.S.R tried Socialim/Communism but once Stalin seized power it was over.
Only difference is Nazi Germany maintained a pretense of Capitalism, and private ownership, but they were all just brutal authoritarian states. The party members and bureaucrats just had somewhat more direct control of everything in the U.S.S.R and Mao's China.
Once China restored private capital and some pretense of free markets in the early 80's, it basically became an authoritarian regime with state capitalism so it is for all practical purposes a classic Fascist state now. Putin's Russia likewise.
I hope you see why I don't really differentiate between hard left Socialist states and hard right Fascist states they really aren't very different in practice. Socialist democracies are a different animal all together and maybe they are more the model for real Socialism but since they have substantial capitalist components they don't really qualify. Not sure I can name an actual Socialist nation state of any size that lasted for any period of time.
"I'm as concerned by these as you are, but considering that the basic democratic institutions of the country are still in place--look at the recent non-violent transfers of power between the two parties, for example--I don't think we've reached the degree of authoritarianism necessary to be considered a fascist state. A corporatist economic system alone isn't sufficient to constitute fascism."
I think you and the rest of the country are just being deceived. You and everyone else thought Obama and Bush would be like night and day different. They haven't been different at all have they? Iraq and Afghanistan wars haven't changed at all. Guantanamo is still running. Wall Street bailouts continued unabated, Geithner, Summers and Paulson are like triplets they are so much alike and such Wall Street tools. Warrantless wire tapping continues unabated and the Obama administration is using "state secrets" to kill court cases against it just like the Bush adminisrtation did. Only thing the Republican's wouldn't have done was the brain dead stimulus which was pork for Democratic causes instead of Republican ones, and maybe health care reform wouldn't have happened at all.
Sure the two political parties change power periodically. But, there are huge entrenched bureaucracies at Defense, CIA, NSA, FBI, Treasury, etc that change very little in those transitions. Goldman Sachs in particular manages to keep it former employees or friends all over the Fed, the Treasury department, the SEC and the White House under Democrats and Republicans alike.
The two parties are becoming indistinguishable in their slavery to the defense industrial complex and major corporate interests, especially those on Wall Steet. Geithner apparently gave $2.3 billion to CIT, a company everyone knew would fail, without securing it at all so it was wiped out when they did fail. CIT's big Wall Street lenders, including Goldman Sachs, get 70% of their loans back. Speculation is Geithner is either an idiot or more likely he did it as a way to reduce Wall Street losses, especially Goldman Sachs's losses, and stuck it to tax payers instead.
Here is another way to look at it. One of the hallmarks of Fascism is its single minded obsession with defeating Communism. As soon as World War II ended the Soviet Union and Communism became America's enemy number one, obsessively so, and America become truly Fascist. It didn't really need to be completely Fascist at home though McCarthyism was classic Fascism. The U.S. was completely Fascist abroad, where it had to be. installing and supporting ruthless, hard right Fasicist regimes around the world for 50 years, in Argentina, Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, the Phillipines, Central America, on and on. The only requirement is they be anti communist, willing to ruthlessly kill communists, and brutal oppression was completely fine. The U.S. trained their military and intelligence services in torture and oppression at the School of the Americas.
The U.S. didn't really need a police state at home for most of the last 50 years because the America people, with the exception of brief period during the Vietnam war, have been completely docile and never challenge the shadow state that really holds the power and the wealth. During the 60's discontent remember the CIA was spying on political dissidents similar to a velvet gloved Gestapo, thats why we instituded FISA to try to stop the abuse. Other than the late 60's are completely content to just ping pong between voting in the Democrats and Republicans and very little actually changes when we do. Its a ruse designed to make us thing we are free when we really aren't, to make us think we control our political system when in fact we don't. Its mostly controlled by two entrenched party apparatus, by powerful entrenched bureaucracies like the Pentagon and Langley, and by Wall Street since a good third of our economy sits in big Wall Steet banks and hedge funds now.
When Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. homeland all that changed. The mostly invisible
America most recent period of devastating inflation was the seventies and early eighties, partially thanks to all the money squandered on Vietnam and some OPEC gouging. Paul Volker a real American hero finally broke inflation's back in the early 80's by jacking interest rates up to 20%. It caused a major recession but it did work.
Paul Volcker is really my hero because he seems to be the only person in the Obama administration who wants to restore Glass-Steagal, and force separation of commercial banks from stocks and commodities gambling investment banks like Citigroup. Geithner and Larry Summers have completely marginalized him, so no one listens to him, since they are complete tools of Wall Street. Instead of doing the sane thing, we just made it massively worse by letting Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley acquire bank charters so they can continue to gamble but now with FDIC backing and access to the Fed discount window.
The U.S. government, specifically Tim Geithner, also invested some $2.3 billion in a company destined for bankruptcy, CIT. The U.S. treasury was the lender of last resort and should have secured their investment by insuring they were the first to be repaid in event of bankruptcy, instead they didn't secure it at all so other less senior lenders get 70% back, the U.S. tax payer apparently got shafted out of the entire 2.3 billion.
Maybe in that case as in Halcyon's, since it was someone else's money they were blowing, they didn't really care... Halcyon bought the rights with money from a hedge fund, Pacificor in Santa Barbara.
A quote from the link on the CIT loan from a Law professor:
"Black believes the problem stems from regulators' fears that if the banks recognize a loss on the bad assets it will create a domino effect that will wipe out the entire financial system.
"If that's true we've got to get rid of capitalism," he warns, "because if we can't recognize losses in a capitalist system we have no future.""
If true it basically means Geithner squandered another $2.3 billion to reduce the losses of big Wall Street banks, one of CIT's big lenders is Goldman Sachs.
I used this: http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
I'm presuming it has the annual inflation rate for each year from 1913 to 2009 though it doesn't say in detail. I entered 1 dollar in 1995 and it showed 40 some percent inflation through 2009.
If this inflation calculator I just ran is accurate inflation accounts for only 41.7% of the increase since 1995. I think I alluded to the fact that much of the increase was just due to the imploding value of the dollar which is another way to say inflation. Gold isn't a perfect indicator of inflation but its the closest thing we have in the form of a physical commodity. Chances are there is going to be another enormous spike in inflation in a couple years if the current recession really ends, if $1000 gold is any indication.