Re: Which Filipino was really the first to climb Everest. – If I were there I’d be more concerned with being the first one back down…

In this tense environment, any slip-up however unintended or seemingly benign will be highlighted and magnified in media. And because the race card sits better with the Democrats, the Republicans and conservatives particularly will be subjected to harsher criticism for any slip-up. This is the case with Tony Snow, with the added onus that he was extracted from the ranks of the envied Fox News organization, media’s alleged nemesis to liberalism.

And whether one likes or dislikes her, I feel that Michelle Malkin deserves some due for taking tough and unpopular issues. And on this particular alleged racist flap, she was able to elicit a short written apology from the blog source (Wonkette, which also set the stage for the Malkin snipe by parodying earlier the FilAm pornstar’s candidacy). Thus, on balance, she got her vindication.

BTW, at least two defenders of hers have challenged her detractors to cite anything written by Malkin that could be judged racist. I shall keep an eye on any development.

A good link to an article describing the pitfalls of unregulated financial capitalism or fictional capitalism. That is the only way advanced economies keep their economies going. (Trading and profiting in futures) Unfortunately over 2 billion people in India and Chin could have other ideas. Hence the West would like them to open up their economies fully to financial capitalsim. It is not a question of if a financial collapse will happen but when.

It was Keynes himself who said that waiting for market equilibrium could take time and in the end we would all be dead anyway.

I do not think she quite understands the evil forces she is unleashing. But I may be wrong.

On both counts keeping silent is not an option.

History tells us otherwise with the end of the gold standard -to which Nixon said, “we are all Keynesians.”
State power to create assets out of nothing is an awesome power. Unfortunately corrupt governments have always used the power for the selective few. The technology of finance is awesome for good and evil.
Going back to the biggest failure of the free market system in 1930′s and later in 1972 – “the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods,” the unscrupulous money changers” who, “through their own stubborness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated” Having thus driven the money changers” from their high seats in the temple of our civilization.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Roosvelt promised to request Congress to grant him “broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.” FDR

Two days later, on March 6, 1933, w/o waiting for Congress, the president issued an Executive order closing every bank in the U.S. and prohibiting the export of gold.

Claudia Goldin an economic historian also wrote on the effects of the New Deal and the economic benefits of a war economy –

FDR increased income taxes and capital gains taxes in the U.S. and historians claim that he singlehandedly created the American middle class.

From Krugmnan’s piece on the “Spiral of Inequality”
“The relatively decent society we had a generation ago was largely the creation of a brief, crucial period in American history: the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, during the New Deal and especially during the war. That created what economic historian Claudia Goldin called the Great Compression — an era in which a powerful government, reinforced by and in turn reinforcing a newly powerful labor movement, drastically narrowed the gap in income levels through taxes, benefits, minimum wages, and collective bargaining. In effect, Roosevelt created a new, middle-class America, which lasted for more than a generation. We have lost that America, and it will take another Roosevelt, and perhaps the moral equivalent of another war, to get it back.”

In 1972 the world went off the gold standard and the world started the experiment with fiat currency. That combined with the fractional reserve system of banking essentially tranferred power back to the rulers’s of the exchange of mankinds goods (private owners of capital). In effect the State effectively guarantees the actions of private bankers in the creation of new money. (Privatizing gains and socializing loses) The world has never been the same since. The next few years we expect a more dramatic failure of the same. Guess who will once again pay the bills when the so called free market fails.

Please check on how fast your fiat currency looses it real value. Ask the guys at the BSP and the DOF if they have an answer? Ask them why creating inflation and/or debasing currency is a favorite pastime of corrupt governments. Ask them why they had to get PHD’s abroad simply to learn this trick?

Ask them to point to a particular advanced industrial economy that developed using the theology of the free markets.

rock da boat mimi’s vote
always bare and honest
nevada’s best asset
hot rockin’ republican?

yo, melody!

If Marcos flew to Hawaii the instant Lugar told him to cut and cut clean when will Luar ask Gloria to cut clean????

ooops, someone might bash me for waiting for the big brother’s help…..

i got a terrible commenter beating at the last blog Ricky posted…Oh forget it!