The GrassCity Gazette

[Dickie4:20]

Raw Story » Carter disagrees with Obama on torture photo release

[MountyBounty]

Selling Used Video Games Now Requires Essentially Getting Booked

I'm in line at Gamestop the other day, breaking down and finally buying the much-hated NCAA Football '09, when I hear the clerk ask the guy in front of me for his fingerprints. He's returning a game, and the clerk breaks out some kind of form. He swipes his thumb across an ink pad stuck to the counter and then puts his mark in the appropriate box.

What the deuce? "The sheriff's office has been making us do it," the clerk told me. "People hate it."

I called back and talked to Gamestop manager Carlos Rivera, who said every video game store in Broward County got a visit from a deputy back in October. The deputy told them to start collecting thumb prints from people who return games.

So what did the good folks at Gamestop do? Break out a BFG9000?

"They have guns," Rivera said. "I don't argue with people with guns."

Broward County Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Kayla Concepcion said the new requirement comes straight from the Florida Legislature, which enacted a law on October 1 of last year that treated video games like second-hand goods sold at pawn shops. Now any store buying used video games has to collect the thumb prints, along with a bunch of other personal info about the seller.

Rivera told me most video-game-returning customers don't really care, he said, but a few have turned around and walked out. "Haven't had any fights over it yet," Rivera said.

Police State???? We are getting closer

[wackdeafboy]

^^
Yeah, I was arguing one day over at gamespot for fingerprint. I refused to do it and they said that its either money or get out. I was so pissed!

[MountyBounty]

Originally Posted by wackdeafboy

^^
Yeah, I was arguing one day over at gamespot for fingerprint. I refused to do it and they said that its either money or get out. I was so pissed!

yeah I would be pretty pissed about doing that. I'd just bypass the whole thing by selling it games on craigslist or something

[Dickie4:20]

I drove my Chevy to the levee and it collapsed under me


As American as mom, apple pie and Chevrolet: mom has lost her pension and health insurance; the pie filling comes from China; Chevy is bankrupt and then some. Even with GM stockholders wiped out, its bondholders getting pennies on the dollar and 70 billion in tax dollars throw in, there is no guarantee that GM will survive even as a shadow of its former self.

How could they go from being the world’s largest car maker to nonexistence in only 25 years? The simple answer is Ronald Reagan. His premise was that middle class union workers were nothing more than greedy, lazy louts and a drain on the rich. We could all be rich if we let the Masters of the Universe run their businesses the way they wanted. We didn’t need to make Chevy parts here; imports are cheaper and better. We didn’t need to have any of those dirty factory jobs at all. High tech jobs and financial "industry" jobs were better and they would create service jobs for everybody else. Union workers became Reagan Democrats, Republican car dealers that suffered under the tight money policies of the Fed during the Carter years were happy as clams with Reaganomics. Everybody was putting their retirement into the stock market, they didn’t need that stinking socialist security.

The end result is an economy so hollowed out that it could collapse entirely at anytime. Things are so bad that even Toyota has contemplated the possibility of abandoning its North American operations. Reagan Democrats are living under bridges and Republican car dealers are finding that their multi-million dollar car dealerships aren’t worth a much as a bucket of warm spit. As American as Chinese apple pie.

[Deutschbag]

Public Against Closing Gitmo, Sides With Cheney - Real Clear Politics – TIME.com

Public Against Closing Gitmo, Sides With Cheney
Posted by Tom Bevan | Email This | Permalink | Email Author

A majority of Americans do not want to see the detainee prison facility at Guantanamo Bay closed and will be "upset" with the Obama administration if it continues to move forward with plans to shutdown the facility, according to a poll released this morning by Gallup.


By an even greater margin of three-to-one, respondents said they oppose the administration's plans to move some of the detainees to prison facilities within the United States.


Lastly, the poll shows that Vice President Cheney clearly won the national security "showdown" on Guantanamo Bay with President Obama last month. Forty percent (40%) of those surveyed agreed with Cheney's belief that the prison at Guantanamo Bay had helped make America safer. Only 18% agreed with President Obama's assertion that the housing of detainees at Gitmo had made America less safe.

[aaronman]

Reagan did What?? The Fantasies of Paul Krugman

Ronald Reagan has been dead for several years, but Paul Krugman continues to chase his ghost. In his "Reagan Did It" column, Krugman claims that until Reagan was elected, the U.S. financial system was in great shape and that government-created cartels in finance, communications, and transportation had enabled us to have a wonderful "equal-benefits-for-all" economy.

The only problem, of course, is that Krugman is making this up, but he has been engaged in fantasy for so long that I think he has come to believe his mutually-exclusive statements. To show what I mean, look first at what he claims:

We weren’t always a nation of big debts and low savings: in the 1970s Americans saved almost 10 percent of their income, slightly more than in the 1960s. It was only after the Reagan deregulation that thrift gradually disappeared from the American way of life, culminating in the near-zero savings rate that prevailed on the eve of the great crisis. Household debt was only 60 percent of income when Reagan took office, about the same as it was during the Kennedy administration. By 2007 it was up to 119 percent.

You have to remember that this is the same Paul Krugman who has claimed that the current economic downturn has been made worse by. . . private savings. Furthermore, he also is on the record as demanding that the government engage in even more inflation than it is giving us now. But, as they say on late-night TV, "Wait! There's more!" Krugman writes:

Reagan-era legislative changes essentially ended New Deal restrictions on mortgage lending – restrictions that, in particular, limited the ability of families to buy homes without putting a significant amount of money down.

These restrictions were put in place in the 1930s by political leaders who had just experienced a terrible financial crisis, and were trying to prevent another. But by 1980 the memory of the Depression had faded. Government, declared Reagan, is the problem, not the solution; the magic of the marketplace must be set free. And so the precautionary rules were scrapped.

Uh, there is a problem here. The creation of Fannie Mae and the Federal Housing Administration during the New Deal lowered lending standards from what they had been before. Yes, contrary to our Nobel Laureate's latest whopper, FDR for the first time made the government the co-signer to mortgages, which made is possible for banks to offer mortgages with lower interest rates and less money down.

Furthermore, the push for easy credit during the 1960s and 1970s came mostly from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, and especially from Hubert Humphrey, who believed that there should be almost no limits on bank credit at all, with the government being the Great Co-Signer. Banks already were offering mortgages with little or no money down, as long as they came through FHA or the Veterans Administration.

Financial deregulation was not a creation of "pro-free market" Republican administrations. Instead, it began in the late 1970s, being pushed by entities like one of Krugman's employers, the New York Times, which editorialized against Regulation Q, which put caps in the amount of interest that banks could offer in savings accounts. Ted Kennedy was the main force behind the deregulation of trucking, railroads, and airlines, and at last check, I think he still is a Democrat.

Jimmy Carter began the process of deregulating oil prices, and deregulation in telecommunications was well underway before Reagan was sworn into office. The highly-regulated financial cartels that Krugman praises already were proving incapable of financing the coming high-tech companies that were the engine of economic growth during the 1980s and 1990s. For example, CNN, Cellular One, MCI, Apple Computers, and other companies were financed outside of the regulated banking cartel that Krugman so praises.

In other words, Krugman believes that the heavily-regulated, high-inflation economy of 1979 and 1980 was just wonderful, a veritable wonderland. Perhaps some readers might want to go back to those days and just read what was being written then. Unemployment was moving toward double digits, and inflation was doing the same.

Contra Krugman, this was not a time of economic growth. It was an era of stagnation, as the New Deal cartels pretty much had run into the wall. Krugman can deny it all he wants, but the facts are there for anyone to see.

Now, we can blame Reagan for a lot of things. It was his administration that ramped up the Drug War, and it was his administration that really started the ball rolling in turning the USA into Incarceration Nation. Things like the Crime Control Act of 1984 and the Asset Forfeiture Act of 1984 really did give a 1984 ring to his administration.

However, Krugman’s fantasy that deregulation was the brainchild of ideological conservatives really is not true, not that it matters to him or anyone else at the New York Times. The Newspaper of Walter Duranty, Jayson Blair, Judith Miller and the Duke Lacrosse Frame now is the Newspaper of Paul Krugman, too. He fits that company well.

[aaronman]

Chinese Students LAUGH in Geithner's Face

BEIJING, June 1 (Reuters) - U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on Monday reassured the Chinese government that its huge holdings of dollar assets are safe and reaffirmed his faith in a strong U.S. currency.

A major goal of Geithner's maiden visit to China as Treasury chief is to allay concerns that Washington's bulging budget deficit and ultra-loose monetary policy will fan inflation, undermining both the dollar and U.S. bonds.

"Chinese assets are very safe," Geithner said in response to a question after a speech at Peking University, where he studied Chinese as a student in the 1980s.

His answer drew loud laughter from his student audience, reflecting scepticism in China about the wisdom of a developing country accumulating a vast stockpile of foreign reserves instead of spending the money to raise living standards at home.

Fucking clowns.

[AK Infinity]

YouTube - Keith Olbermann: 'FOX News Incited Dr....

[Dickie4:20]

Raw Story » N.Korea’s Kim names third son as successor: reports

[aaronman]

What I learned as a Car Czar

They say history repeats itself. If you are like me and have lived two lives, you have a good chance of seeing the re-enactment with your own eyes. The current takeover of General Motors by the U.S. government and United Auto Workers makes me think back to Romania's catastrophic mismanagement of the car factories it built jointly with the French companies Renault and Citroen. I was Romania's car czar.

When the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu decided in the mid-1960s that he wanted to have a car industry, he chose me to start the project rolling. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. I knew nothing about manufacturing cars, but neither did anyone else among Ceausescu's top men. However, my father had spent most of his life running the service department of the General Motors affiliate in Bucharest.
My job at the time was as head of the Romanian industrial espionage program.

Ceausescu tasked me to mediate the purchase of a minimum, basic license for a small car from a major Western manufacturer, and then to steal everything else needed to produce the car.

Three Western companies competed for the honor. Ceausescu decided on Renault, because it was owned by the French government (all Soviet bloc rulers distrusted private companies). We ended up with a license for an antiquated and about-to-be-discontinued Renault-12 car, because it was the cheapest. "Good enough for the idiots," Ceausescu decided, showing what he thought of the Romanian people. He baptized the car Dacia, to commemorate Romania's 2,000-year history going back to Dacia Felix, as the ancient Romans called that part of the world. In that government-run economy, symbolism was the most important consideration, especially when it came to things in short supply (such as food).

"Too luxurious for the idiots," Ceausescu decreed when he saw the first Dacia car made in Romania. Immediately, the radio, right side mirror and backseat heating were dropped. Other "unnecessary luxuries" were soon eliminated by the bureaucrats and their workers' union that were running the factory. The car that finally hit the market was a stripped-down version of the old, stripped-down Renault 12. "Perfect for the idiots," Ceausescu approved. Indeed, the Romanian people, who had never before had any car, came to cherish the Dacia.

For the Western market, however, the Dacia was a nightmare. To the best of my knowledge, no Dacia car was ever sold in the U.S.

Ceausescu, undaunted, was determined to see Romanian cars running around in every country in the world. He tasked me to buy another Western license, this time to produce a car tailored for export. Oltcit was the name of the new car -- an amalgam made from the words Oltenia, Ceausescu's native province, and the French car maker Citroen, which owned 49% of the shares. Oltcit was projected to produce between 90,000 and 150,000 compact cars designed by Citroen.

Ceausescu micromanaged Oltcit, but he didn't even know how to drive a car, much less run a car industry. To save the foreign currency he coveted, he decreed that the components for the Oltcit were to be manufactured at 166 existing Romanian factories. Coordinating 166 plants to have them deliver all the parts on time would be a monumental job even for an experienced car producer. It proved impossible for the Romanian bureaucracy, which pretended to work and was paid accordingly. The Oltcit factory could produce only 1% to 1.5% of its intended capacity owing to the lack of the parts that those 166 companies were supposed to furnish simultaneously. The Oltcit project lost billions.

Ceausescu was an extreme case, but automobile manufacturing and government were never a good mix in any socialist/communist country. In the late 1950s, when I headed Romania's foreign intelligence station in West Germany, I worked closely with the foreign branch of the East German Stasi. Its chief, Markus Wolf, rewarded me with a Trabant car -- the pride of East Germany -- when I left to return to Romania.

That ugly little car became famous in 1989 when thousands of East Germans used it to cross to the West. The Trabant originally derived from a well regarded West German car (the DKW) made by Audi, which today produces some of the most prestigious cars in the world. In the hands of the East German government, the unfortunate DKW became a farce of a car. The bureaucrats and the union that ran the Trabant factory made the car smaller and boxier, to give it a more proletarian look. To reduce production costs, they cut down on the size of the original, already small DKW engine, and they replaced the metal body with one made of plastic-covered cardboard. What rolled off the assembly line was a kind of horseless carriage that roared like a lawn mower and polluted the air worse than a whole city block full of big Western cars.

After German reunification, the plucky little "Trabi" that East Germans used to wait 10 years to buy became an embarrassment, and its production was stopped. Germany's junkyards are now piled high with Trabants, which cannot be recycled because burning their plastic-covered cardboard bodies would release poisonous dioxins. German scientists are now trying to develop a bacterium to devour the cardboard-and-plastic body.

Automobile manufacturing and government do not mix in capitalist countries either. In the spring of 1978 Ceausescu appointed me chief of his Presidential House, a new position supposed to be similar to that of the White House chief of staff. To go with it he gave me a big Jaguar car. That Jaguar, which at the time had been produced in a government-run British factory, was so bad that it spent more time in the garage being repaired than it did on the road.

"Apart from some Russian factories in Gorky, Jaguars were the worst," Ford executive Bill Hayden stated when Ford bought the nationalized British car maker in 1988. How did the famous Jaguar, one of the most prestigious cars in the world, become a joke?

In 1945, the British voters, tired of four years of war, kicked out Winston Churchill and elected a leftist parliament led by Labour's Clement Attlee. Attlee nationalized the automobile, trucking and coal industries, as well as communication facilities, civil aviation, electricity and steel. Britain was already saddled by crushing war debts. Now it was sapped of economic vigor. The old empire quickly passed into history. It would take decades until Margaret Thatcher's privatization reforms restored Britain's place among the world's top-tier economies.

The United States is far more powerful than Great Britain was then, and no American Attlee should be capable of destroying its solid economic and political base. I hope that the U.S. administration, Congress and the American voters will take a closer look at history and prevent our automotive industry from following down the Dacia, Oltcit or Jaguar path.

Lt. Gen. Pacepa, the highest ranking Soviet bloc official granted political asylum in the U.S., is the author of the memoir "Red Horizons" (Regnery, 1987).

[MountyBounty]

Obama Has 250,000 'Contractors' Deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan and is Increasing the Use of Mercenaries

A couple of years ago, Blackwater executive Joseph Schmitz seemed to see a silver lining for mercenary companies with the prospect of US forces being withdrawn or reduced in Iraq. “There is a scenario where we could as a government, the United States, could pull back the military footprint,” Schmitz said. “And there would then be more of a need for private contractors to go in.”
When it comes to armed contractors, it seems that Schmitz was right.

According to new statistics released by the Pentagon, with Barack Obama as commander in chief, there has been a 23% increase in the number of “Private Security Contractors” working for the Department of Defense in Iraq in the second quarter of 2009 and a 29% increase in Afghanistan, which “correlates to the build up of forces” in the country. These numbers relate explicitly to DoD security contractors. Companies like Blackwater and its successor Triple Canopy work on State Department contracts and it is unclear if these contractors are included in the over-all statistics. This means, the number of individual “security” contractors could be quite higher, as could the scope of their expansion.
Overall, contractors (armed and unarmed) now make up approximately 50% of the “total force in Centcom AOR [Area of Responsibility].” This means there are a whopping 242,657 contractors working on these two U.S. wars. These statistics come from two reports just released by Gary J. Motsek, the Assistant Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (Program Support): “Contractor Support of U.S. Operations in USCENTCOM AOR, IRAQ, and Afghanistan and “Operational Contract Support, ‘State of the Union.’”

“We expect similar dependence on contractors in future contingency operations,” according to the contractor “State of the Union.” It notes that the deployment size of both military personnel and DoD civilians are “fixed by law,” but points out that the number of contractors is “size unfixed,” meaning there is virtually no limit (other than funds) to the number of contractors that can be deployed in the war zone.

At present there are 132,610 in Iraq and 68,197 in Afghanistan. The report notes that while the deployment of security contractors in Iraq is increasing, there was an 11% decrease in overall contractors in Iraq from the first quarter of 2009 due to the “ongoing efforts to reduce the contractor footprint in Iraq.”
Both Pentagon reports can be downloaded here.


Tagged as: iraq, pentagon, afghanistan, barack obama, blackwater, department of defense, security contractors
Jeremy Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.

Source

[aaronman]

German Chancellor Attacks Central Banks

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, criticised the world’s main central banks in surprisingly strong terms on Tuesday, suggesting that their unconventional monetary policies could fuel rather than defuse the economic crisis.

The attack on the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the European Central Bank is remarkable coming from a leader who had so far scrupulously adhered to her country’s tradition on never commenting on monetary policy.

“What other central banks have been doing must stop now. I am very sceptical about the extent of the Fed’s actions and the way the Bank of England has carved its own little line in Europe,” she told a conference in Berlin.

“Even the European Central Bank has somewhat bowed to international pressure with its purchase of covered bonds,” she said. “We must return to independent and sensible monetary policies, otherwise we will be back to where we are now in 10 years’ time.”

Ms Merkel’s decision to ignore one of the cardinal rules of German politics – an unwritten ban on commenting monetary policy out of respect from central bank independence – suggests Berlin is far more concerned about the route taken by the ECB than had hitherto transpired.

Berlin is concerned that the central banks will struggle to re-absorb the vast amount of liquidity they are pouring into the markets and about the long-term inflationary potential of hyper-lose monetary policies.

The ECB’s efforts have been focused on pumping unlimited liquidity into the eurozone banking system for increasingly long periods. But last month (May), it followed the US Federal Reserve and Bank of England in announcing an asset purchase programme to help a return to more normal market conditions.

The ECB announced it had agreed in principle to buy €60bn in “covered bonds”, which are issued by banks and backed by public sector loans or mortgages.

The covered bond purchases, however, were only agreed after extensive discussions within the 22-strong ECB governing council. According to one version of May’s meeting, the council had discussed a €125bn asset purchase programme that would also have included other private sector assets, but only the purchase of covered bonds was agreed.

Axel Weber, ECB council member and president of Germany’s Bundesbank, has been among those who expressed scepticism about direct intervention in financial markets. In a Financial Times interview in April he expressed “a clear preference for continuing to focus our attention on the bank financing channel”.

Mr Weber has also been among the most proactive council members in warning that the monetary stimulus injected into the economy will have to be reduced or even reverse quickly once the economic situation improves.

Details of the covered bond purchase scheme will be unveiled by the ECB after its meeting on Thursday. One likely solution is that the package will be split according to eurozone countries’ capital shares in the ECB, which would result in Germany accounting for about 25 per cent of the €60bn programme. Meanwhile, the ECB is widely expected to leave its main interest rate unchanged at 1 per cent, its lowest ever.

[aaronman]

June 2009: Darth Cheney Admits No Link Between 9/11 and Hussein

Back in 2004: The Evidence of a connection is "overwhelming"

[Dickie4:20]

Did the Republicans all leave and not tell us?


What’s good for Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Co. is good for America or at least that is what the Masters of the Universe at GM would have you believe. GM is patting itself on the back for keeping 3000 Hummer jobs in the US. But that deal is only for a year and a half, then Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Co. can do as it would like. The only good news is that the Humvee military truck isn’t made by GM and those jobs will stay in Indiana.

Gasoline prices are increasing despite the fact that demand for gas is continuing to decline. Inventories have not declined even though the oil companies have slashed refinery production as the economy continues its slow-motion collapse. The numbers for May are just starting to emerge and they aren’t expected to be good. Retail sales are expected to decline about 4% and that could be a rosy forecast. Walmart, which had been benefiting from the shift to low-end retailers by the formerly middle-class has stopped reporting monthly sales figures.

The jobless rate continues to go up. State and local governments are cutting pay for workers as well as eliminating jobs and programs that serve the public. California is going to force 2 million people off state run health insurance putting an even bigger strain on emergency rooms that are also losing funding. Even the state’s Poison Control Center will be killed off and its 800 callers per day will have to rely on the overworked emergency rooms. And who does the emergency room doctor call when an unusual poisoning case comes in? You guessed it.

States are finding that tax revenue is down more than expected and as they cut back more, tax revenue goes down still more. The Republican diversion of the stimulus package into tax cuts is already coming home to roost. When the kids of Republicans drink something that they found in the maid’s closet do they call the Poison Control Center? Do they drive their Hummer to the same emergency room we do? Do they still live in this country or did they leave us behind?