Comments

Where 140 characters (@michaeljung) are not enough
and a blog post (michaeljung.wordpress.com) would be a waste.

http://www.michaeljung.co.uk

Excerpts From the New Texas History Textbooks

azspot:

Study Questions:

1). When the FDR Memorial opened in 1997 near the Tidal Basin in Washington, successful protests by liberal activist groups led to the removal of Roosevelt’s cigarette holder from his statue and also had his wife, Eleanor, depicted without her trademark fur coat. Explain other ways that liberal pressure groups distort history today.

2). Discuss, based on your own life experience, whether Ivy League-educated bureaucrats in Washington understand how real Americans live and the values they cherish.

3). Compare the questionable legislative tactics used by Roosevelt in the passage of the Emergency Banking Act with the techniques employed by President Barack Obama in 2010 to try to pass his health care reform bill.

[K]eep the web moving forward for the benefit of everyone.

5 years of Firefox

The Recovery that isn’t. (Friday, Oct 2nd 2009) from Peter Schiff.

“Today’s weaker-than-expected report on non-farm payrolls revealed that employers shed 263,000 jobs in September. The losses propelled the headline unemployment rate to a 26-year high of 9.8%. U6, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ most complete measure of unemployment, has risen to a dismal 17%. This figure includes those people who want to work full time, but have simply given up looking, or who have accepted part-time work in the interim. As it is similar to the methodology used during the Great Depression, U6 offers better historical perspective on the severity of our current crisis.”

——-

And here the latest high profile commentary about the +6-month global stock market rally, Nouriel Roubini; “[S]tock and commodity markets may drop in coming months as the gradual pace of the economic recovery disappoints investors.

“Markets have gone up too much, too soon, too fast,” Roubini said in an interview in Istanbul on Oct. 3. “I see the risk of a correction, especially when the markets now realize that the recovery is not rapid and V-shaped, but more like U- shaped. That might be in the fourth quarter or the first quarter of next year.”

——-

And The Economist is even tracking the bears in its latest edition from Oct 1st 2009; “In general, the bears take the line that the unprecedented actions of governments and central banks (enormous fiscal deficits, near-zero interest rates and “quantitative easing”) may have jolted the global economy temporarily into life, but they have not resolved the underlying causes of the mess. In particular, they worry that consumers and companies remain excessively indebted, and that deleveraging will quickly stamp out any recovery.

[A]uthorities’ tactics are eventually doomed to failure. “You cannot print your way to prosperity,” he says [Bill Fleckenstein from Fleckenstein Capital]. In that sentence, he sums up the bearish case.”

——-

And even business leaders begin to acknowledge the underlying problems of this recession and the phony strategies to bring this or that economic indicator back up.

‘This man is a genius’

[John Forbes Nash, Jr.] has also developed work on the role of money in society. In the context that people can be so controlled and motivated by money that they may not be able to reason rationally about it, he has criticized interest groups that promote quasi-doctrines based on Keynesian economics that permit manipulative short-term inflation and debt tactics that ultimately undermine currencies. He has suggested a global “industrial consumption price index” system that would support the development of more “ideal money” that people could trust rather than more unstable “bad money”. He notes that some of his thinking parallels economist and political philosopher Friedrich Hayek’s thinking regarding money and a nontypical viewpoint of the function of the authorities. (Link)