Kevin Drumm is awesome. I've been reading him for more than a decade now, back when he was just a Left coast blogger in the pre-9-11 era. For the last few years he's continued the excellent tradition of information at Mother Jones.

But he also has an uncanny knack of describing my own sentiments and thoughts in reaction to the human insanity we experience in this world of humans driven by motives and disguises. I quote this enter post he has on a Washington Post story about less than a million dollars in bank accounts that is being wasted. Being a math teacher, I think the entire blog piece is instructive, so I'd like to have a permanent record source.

Compared to a 3.5 trillion budget, 1 million dollars is .000025 percent, or 1 divided by 3,500,000.

Ask yourself: if you had a million dollars would you worry about losing a quarter every year?

Wed Apr. 24, 2013 10:45 AM PDT

Here's the lead headline at the Washington Post right now:

Feds spend at least $890,000 on fees for empty accounts

This kind of stuff drives me crazy because it preys on the innumeracy of the general public. Should agencies be more careful about shutting down bank accounts they no longer use? Sure. And does reporter David Fahrenthold acknowledge that the money involved is "a tiny fraction of the federal budget"? Yes he does.

But seriously, folks, "tiny fraction" barely even begins to describe this. In numbers, it represents about 0.000025 percent of the federal budget. But even that's too small a number to really get a feel for, so let's put this into terms that the Washington Post can understand.

Annual revenues at the Washington Post hover somewhere around $500 million. So how much is 0.000025 percent of that? Answer: $125. Would the Washington Post run a lengthy story about two empty bank accounts that the Washington Post hasn't closed yet, which cost the Washington Post's shareholders $125? No. The story is so self-evidently ridiculous that they'd laugh at anyone foolish enough to even mention it.

Look, I get it. The empty bank accounts are just being used as an example of "old bugs, built into the machine of government, that make spending money seem easier than saving it." The problem is that dumb stuff like this is what convinces people that government is wantonly wasteful, when the fact is that every corporation in America has inefficiencies this large. It's just part of human beings running a human organization.

And focusing on this stuff is lazy. If you want to demonstrate that the federal government wastes money, then write a story about actual, substantial waste. Is that too hard? If the government truly is wasteful, it shouldn't be. In a $3.5 trillion operation there ought be dozens, even hundreds, of easy examples that cost real money. If there aren't, then perhaps the real story is that the federal government is actually about as efficient as any other big organization.

The basic problem here is that it's hard to grapple with the sheer size of the numbers involved. Any corporation in America that kept wasteful spending down to 1 percent would be pretty happy. That number represents a tightly run ship. But the federal government is so large that 1 percent waste amounts to about $35 billion. That's a scary sounding number, but in fact, it's pretty small. The truth is that if you can't dig up at least that amount in wasteful spending—not spending you dislike, but actual wasteful spending—you don't have much of a story.

[SOURCE: Kevin Drum | Mother Jones |24 April 2013 ]

Exactly.

These criticisms are often made by individuals who themselves, in their own businesses, do not have any better means of reducing the inherent inefficiencies of any revenue stream. A one million dollar business would not hire legal advice to pursue the loss of 10 dollars a year, or 0.001 percent (Note: 0.001 percent, is 35 million to the federal government). But the ideological owner of said business will gleefully whine about the big bad g'ummament "wasting" a percentage of total revenue that is much less because of the corporate media that is paid for to put this into their heads. The reporter at the Washington Post knows what his bosses want him to write about, and if he performs as expected, his future is clear and he can look forward to promotions and a bigger salary. If not, there will be someone who will be glad to play the game.

That's what you have to understand about the corporate media. What information you get is always filtered and channeled by this process, what details are focused upon and/or ignored, who is quoted, and any conclusions that are made. Nothing is free from the sullied fingertips of a bunch of people hired to play the pretend game of journalists who are really just the public relations agents of the aristocracy.

That's why the younger generations don't read newspapers. Listen to the streets. People know what's up.

Excoriates the cult of corruption between Wall Street, Academia, and Washington Politicos.

They have no responsibility to pay taxes, they have no responsibility to their clients, they have no responsibility to people… counterparties in transactions. They are tough, greedy, aggressive, and feel absolutely out of control, in a quite literal sense. And they have gamed the system to a remarkable extent and they have a docile president, a docile White House and a docile regulatory system that absolutely can’t find its voice. It’s terrified of these companies.

You tube video link

Jeffrey David Sachs (/ˈsæks/; born November 5, 1954) is an American economist and Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University. One of the youngest economics professors in the history of Harvard University, Sachs became known for his role as an adviser to Eastern European and developing country governments during the transition from communism to a market system or during periods of economic crisis. Subsequently he has been known for his work on the challenges of economic development, environmental sustainability, poverty alleviation, debt cancellation, and globalization.

When money by billionaires is used to construct an artificial economic justification for their ideological bias, this is what you get.

A team of economists at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at UMass Amherst broke a huge story this week that was promptly picked up by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, and newspapers around the globe. The economists proved that the essential underpinning "of the intellectual edifice of austerity economics," as Paul Krugman put it, is based on sloppy methodology and spreadsheet coding errors.

Three years ago, Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff released a study that presented empirical evidence from 44 nations over a 200 year time span to demonstrate that countries with a public debt over 90 percent of GDP (the United States is at about 100 percent, Japan at 200 percent) have average growth rates one percent lower than other nations.

Forty-four countries, 200 years, Harvard -- pretty convincing, huh?

Except it was wrong.

When the PERI team finally got a hold of the data used by Reinhart and Rogoff, they uncovered gaping problems. They found that "coding errors, selective exclusion of available data, and unconventional weighting of summary statistics lead to serious errors that inaccurately represent the relationship between public debt and GDP growth." Adjusting for these errors, the Amherst team contends that "the average real GDP growth rate for countries carrying a public debt-to-GDP ratio of over 90 percent is actually 2.2 percent, not -0.1 percent."

Click the "Source" to read the rest. The second source has a screen-shot picture showing the Excel spreadsheet error that was necessary to get the erroneous results. Was this accidental, or on purpose?

[SOURCE: Mary Bottari | PRWatch | 18 April 2013]
[SOURCE: Mike Konczal | NextNewDeal | 16 April 2013]

Another phrase I say to myself, or recall frequently throughout my life is the following:

You have to find comfort in the truth, and achieve peace through understanding

In 2011, Jon Cohn wrote a story called "The Two Year Window," about new research demonstrating the importance of the first two years of a child's life. Roughly speaking, most child care that's average or better is probably OK. But down in the bottom third, conditions are often bad enough to cause permanent cognitive damage, sometimes at a biological level. One third is a lot of kids.

Appropriately, two years later Cohn is back with a follow-up, "The Hell of American Day Care." Children who get proper attention and interaction, he says, "tend to develop the skills they need to thrive as adults—like learning how to calm down after a setback or how to focus on a problem long enough to solve it":

Kids who grow up without that kind of attention tend to lack impulse control and have more emotional outbursts. Later on, they are more likely to struggle in school or with the law. They also have more physical health problems. Numerous studies show that all children, especially those from low-income homes, benefit greatly from sound child care. The key ingredients are quite simple—starting with plenty of caregivers, who ideally have some expertise in child development.

So if we pay $100 billion a year for universal Pre-K, we save ourselves the expenses of later years when we will have to deal with the 30% or more of young adults who have substance abuse issues, are involved in crime, have mental or psychological health issues, or are cognitively diminished. How many of our prisons and how many of the homelessness on the street could be prevented from this kind of program?

So is it "socialism" when government provides an important community service paid for with taxes? And without the service, the community pays the costs of the lack of service two or three times more. And each of these defective people affect others in the population in often negative and life-changing ways.

In 2011, Jon Cohn wrote a story called "The Two Year Window," about new research demonstrating the importance of the first two years of a child's life. Roughly speaking, most child care that's average or better is probably OK. But down in the bottom third, conditions are often bad enough to cause permanent cognitive damage, sometimes at a biological level. One third is a lot of kids.

Appropriately, two years later Cohn is back with a follow-up, "The Hell of American Day Care." Children who get proper attention and interaction, he says, "tend to develop the skills they need to thrive as adults—like learning how to calm down after a setback or how to focus on a problem long enough to solve it":

Kids who grow up without that kind of attention tend to lack impulse control and have more emotional outbursts. Later on, they are more likely to struggle in school or with the law. They also have more physical health problems. Numerous studies show that all children, especially those from low-income homes, benefit greatly from sound child care. The key ingredients are quite simple—starting with plenty of caregivers, who ideally have some expertise in child development.

Last fall, the California Fair Political Practices Commission revealed what it called "the largest contribution ever disclosed as campaign money laundering in California history" after it discovered that three nonprofits had funneled $11 million from Virginia to Arizona to California. This $11 million got spent against prop 30 (increasing state taxes to pay for schools) and for prop 32 (which would have made union dues deducted from you paycheck illegal). This money came from a "non-profit" in Arizona called "Americans for Responsible Leadership".

(what a misnomer? Here's a better one: self-serving greedy ideologues who hate the Middle class.)

Ah but this group got it from another non-profit, who got it from another non-profit who got it from an Alexandria, Virginia outfit called "Americans for Job Security."

But who are the "people" behind the funds? Well, that will come soon enough, thanks to a California law that requires the names of all donors to California elections.

"Investigators recently issued a dozen more subpoenas to individuals and nonprofits in connection with the case, the Huffington Post reported....After initially balking, the nonprofits are now cooperating with investigators."

Americans for Job Security, founded by Republican operative Dave Carney, who ran Rick Perry's 2012 presidential campaign, is suspected of being little more than a slush fund for donors seeking anonymity. After investigating AJS in 2009, staffers with Alaska's Public Offices Commission concluded that AJS "has no purpose other than to cover various money trails all over the country." Its M.O.: Donors give money to AJS with a cause or campaign in mind, AJS effectively scrubs the donor's fingerprints, and then it spends the money. AJS paid $20,000 to settle the Alaska case and promised not to encourage future anonymous giving in Alaska, but admitted no wrongdoing.

This is how they hide the money of the uber-wealthy. They create these corporate charters and solicit donations that are used under the smooth smart sounding name of the non-profit. Actually, usually its the hired jackals who do this for them, like cleaning the kings toe-nails.

But hey, after all, these are Americans for Job "Security". They want to be Secure about those jobs, you see. That's why they don't support measures that will make government work by paying for the necessary services (prop 30). That's why they don't like unions. Because they want to be absolutely "secure" about their control over the people who are on the payroll. They don't want no back-talk from some upp-ity college grad who makes $30,000 a year typing numbers into a computer. They don't want no 40 year old engineers telling them somethings wrong with the blueprints. Are you telling me my money has stop growing because 2 plus 2 equals 4 ? This ain't about school boy logic, son (or mam). This is about taking the money now while it's still fresh and paying the tiny fine when we settle outta court later, so you just take what your master gives you and shut up. Damn unions telling us business folk what to do and when to do it. When did a union ever create a corporate charter in Delaware so it can break the laws making money in the other 49 states and have legal cover? When did a union poison the community by illegally dumping chemicals for 40 years, and then go bankrupt so it can form another corporation and not have to pay any of the legal claims of the first corporation? When did unions send legislators to extravagant vacations in Hawaii or the Bermudas or the Philippines complete with booze and prostitutes and the blackmailing pictures to boot?

It's these gat damn unions that get in our way of doing whatever we want to do whenever we want to do it. They keep reminding us that actions have consequences. That's why they gotsta go. Ya dig.

"Centrist Democrats" Have they been right about anything?

The "centrist" Democrats often adopt the 'liberal' line on social issues like gun control or gay marriage -- which, coincidentally or not, are also issues which have little or no financial impact on their corporate and high-net-worth individual sponsors.

But what's the verdict on the core economic issues of our time?

Prof. William K. Black Jr. was understandably displeased by The New York Times' description of the Third Way think tank as "center/left." Prof. Black writes that "Some lies will not die ... Third Way is Wall Street on the Potomac. It is funded secretly by Wall Street (it refuses to reveal its donors), it is openly run by Wall Street, and it lobbies endlessly for Wall Street."

Black adds that "Third Way, like every Pete Peterson front group, is dedicated to shredding the safety net as its highest priority and throwing the Nation back into a gratuitous recession through self-destructive austerity."

Offshore Tax Havens are now like what casinos used to be in the not so distant past, only much more comprehensive and powerful.

They are used to enable corruption so that officials can be bribed and kickbacks can be obtained without any scrutiny. They are also used as mailboxes so that profits can be screened from taxation. They are used to launder money and conceal the origins before the funds achieve their ultimate destination, just like the Mafia used Restaurants to legitimize money derived from illegal activity.

The leaked files provide facts and figures — cash transfers, incorporation dates, links between companies and individuals — that illustrate how offshore financial secrecy has spread aggressively around the globe, allowing the wealthy and the well-connected to dodge taxes and fueling corruption and economic woes in rich and poor nations alike.

The records detail the offshore holdings of people and companies in more than 170 countries and territories.

The hoard of documents represents the biggest stockpile of inside information about the offshore system ever obtained by a media organization. The total size of the files, measured in gigabytes, is more than 160 times larger than the leak of U.S. State Department documents by Wikileaks in 2010.

The extent of the scandal is incredible. So watch for the news media to be on the move to create another puffy scandal to take the scent off the real one. I sense Justin Bieber exposees coming. Or Steroid use in MLB or maybe a few small-time local politicians getting busted in a FED sting. Or maybe its an epidemic of lice that has affected the President's children. Something else will become the "official" distraction (remember Terry Shiavo). Exposing the massive and systematic international connections of global politicians being bribed by the global elite is not going to get the light of day. I hope I'm wrong.

[SOURCE: DS Wright | FireDogLake | 4 April 2013]

A slideshow from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation makes the documentation easy to access.Click here.

Hmmm. Where's the NYTimes or the Washington Post on this story?

I'm sure the headline will be something like "Documents Reveal that Wealthy Avoid Taxes in offshore bank accounts" if they have to bother with the story. If necessary, scapegoats will be found, and this will turn into individualistic morality stories with some chosen bad actors ( like Oliver North, Bernie Madoff, or Martha Stewart). They will avoid making the obvious larger connections to international finance, corporations, world politicians and government officials. The system produces it's own victims. The rhetorical virgins must be slaughtered by the high priests. The marionette strings are never revealed

However, be not confused or distracted. This is not about Tax cheats. It's about corruption larger than the scale of BCCI Banking Scandal and the Iran-Contra shenanigans during the Reagan years. Look those up.