I blame Bob Murphy for this. Ignore the simple, inadequate theories of the mechanics (but NOT the politics) of the WTC collapses, and pay attention to the rest - cuts from “Zeitgeist”, “Loose Change”, “Freedom To Fascism”, and more, intercut with Alex Jones, John Taylor Gatto, and David Icke explaining in detail how we are constantly being manipulated to do the bidding of the elites. It’s fascinating, powerful, and, despite the odds, it works. Check out Joh Nada’s “Wake Up Call”.
Archive for the 'protectionism' Category
Wake Up Call - The Movie
- NOTE: I Don’t See An Oiler In This Diagram
Lew Rockwell had a great post this morning (with video goodness!) about “Little Three” union officials slacking off and engaging in personal “business” (shopping, beer-buying) while on the clock. I wrote and related this story to Lew;
Hi Lew,
It is amazing to see a news organization, particularly one in a “union town” covering this story, since such abuses are longstanding and widespread. But there is nothing unique about what the two union reps in the story are accused of.
In 1993 - 1994, I was the safety and health manager of a large construction project ($280M) at a major oil refinery. Being a union plant, of course all of the contractors on the project were forced to hire union “labor” to do all tasks, including some that in a free market would not be done.
Before any work could commence, the contractors on the project had to sign a “project labor agreement”, or PLA, which set forth staffing requirements, work rules, and union jurisdiction. The number of unions involved in the endeavor was mind-boggling. We had carpenters, cement finishers, dockbuilders, electricians, laborers, millwrights, pipefitters, plumbers, teamsters, operating engineers, and one or two others I am sure I am forgetting.
Because the refinery was under a state-imposed environmental compliance deadline for completion, the project ran 2 12-hour shifts per day, 7 days per week to try to meet the deadline. Such mandates and deadlines always present tremendous opportunities for graft. I’ll spare you the details, except at one point the civil contractor was paying a “pipefitter” to make sandwiches for sale to the project personnel, which at 300 - plus workers undoubtedly handsomely enhanced his own personal profit.
Some of the unions even had subgroups, such as one class of operating engineers that ran pumps and generators up to a certain size, others that operated smaller loaders and excavators, another class of operators that ran larger excavators, and finally the “top” class of operating engineers, the crane operators.
The operating engineers’ contract at the time required that all equipment over a certain (arbitrary, low) horsepower be staffed by an operating engineer and an oiler, whether the maintenance regime for the equipment required continuous hand-oiling or not. I will leave it to you to ponder whether modern machinery made in the last 50 years would have such an intense need for maintenance.
Because this requirement undoubtedly caused many objections, an alternate “compliance” method was for the contractor to pay the operating engineer an extra hour for “grease time” (how apt), ostensibly to compensate the operating engineer for coming in an hour early to maintain and prepare his equipment for the start of the shift.
Except, remember, the project operated on 2 12-hour shifts, 7 days per week, which meant that during “grease time” the equipment was still being used by the operator on the previous shift. So we in essence have two operating engineers being paid to work 13 hours per day each, for a total of 26 hours of labor pay per qualifying machine per day.
It gets better. In the construction trades, the union representative is paid a little more than the highest-paid worker on the project. Because of the size of the crew, the project labor agreement mandated that the operating engineers have two project-paid union representatives, a “shop steward”, and a “master mechanic”, who were each paid “grease time’ also.
I’m not entirely sure what the duties of a “shop steward” are, but since the project already had 3 or 4 actual full-time mechanics, the “master mechanic” had few if any remaining visible duties. If you were lucky, you could get hold of him over the project radio system 3 to 4 hours per day at best. Allegedly one would have had better luck looking for him on the golf course most days, weather permitting. Yet because his position was mandated by the PLA, he was being paid 26 hours per day, 7 days per week.
After about 6-8 months of this, it became so embarrassing that the union itself actually put a stop to it, assigning a second-shift “master mechanic”, an extremely able, competent, and hard-working operating engineer who performed all of his union “duties” and operated equipment as well. But this was only one small instance of union abuse on the project.
Somewhere in this sorry tale I should mention that the construction ‘managers’ for the project were Kellogg, Brown, and Root (nee Brown and Root Braun), a particularly ill-named group of losers and no-accounts who actually impeded safety and progress on the project during their tenure.
Please use my alias if you print this.
UPDATE: This was funny.
Some friends and I were just discussing this - we all agreed that the proper way to think about NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, or anything else connected to General Electric is that it should generally be treated as if it were being beamed to earth from the Death Star;
“The Death Star was the code name of an unspeakably powerful and horrific weapon developed by the Empire. The immense space station carried a weapon capable of destroying entire planets. The Death Star was to be an instrument of terror, meant to cow treasonous worlds with the threat of annihilation. While the massive station is evidence of the evil that was the Galactic Empire, it was also proof of the New Order’s greatest weakness — the belief that technology and terror were superior to the will of oppressed beings fighting for freedom.”
Also see this hilarious “Schoolhouse Rock” -style parody about corporate media;
As if the $8 Trillion being stolen from us as I write this wasn’t enough, this jackass is touting a Eurostyle VAT as the solution to reducing the malignant, metastasizing Federal deficit, set to get even worse under the new Obama regime;
It’s called a value-added tax, or VAT, and it’s been used for decades to pay the bills and sustain the immense growth of governments around the world, from France to Mexico to Australia. Created in 1954 by a French economist, the VAT is the most potent, efficient machine for revenue generation yet invented.
And if there’s one thing the U.S. government needs as the federal budget balloons, it’s a ton of new revenue. “The bottom line is that the income tax cannot support the level of spending that’s projected, something other countries faced years ago,” said Roberton Williams of the Tax Policy Center, a non-partisan research institute.
Number one, this idea, if ever enacted, will rapidly collapse the US economy.
Number two, it won’t matter anyway, because inflation will render the dollar meaningless. Since the feds won’t recognize commodity money, most of the remaining economy will revert to barter and black markets.
Number three, they won’t repeal the income tax, but will simply impose the VAT atop it. Just the thing to do in the face of a Depression. Thanks, President Hoobama!
If this is ever seriously considered and or passed, the US government will have to destroy the last remnants of the Republic in a futile effort to collect it.
Ron Paul, please call your office!
We last discussed the learned Professor Reich with regard to his (correct) observation that the failed companies on Wall Street, Detroit, etc. should be allowed to go bust rather than be bailed out, which struck us as an eminently sensible idea, particularly coming from the hard-socialist former labor secretary.
This morning I awoke to his mellifluous, yet vaguely elfin voice giving the second half of what is now apparently a one-two punch - his Pinko ideas of what the government should instead do with the bailout money;
He proposes to have Obama spend $600 Billion dollars for his ‘recovery’, ’stimulus’, or ‘infrastructure’ plan (he uses all three labels).
First, with regard to the size of his plan - where do these fascists and socialists get these figures - focus groups?
Does he think its comparatively responsible (or simply cute) to propose to spend $100 billion less than Hank Paulson demanded of money that simply doesn’t exist?
We have shown elsewhere that the $700 billion number is a fabrication, that the total we are all on the hook for is over $7 TRILLION. So this already is enough to make one want to burn him in effigy. if for no other reason than the fact that he is reinforcing a stereotype of little people as being ‘cute’.
Then he launched into a description of what he, if appointed emperor of the economy, would do to save us all from ourselves. Here is a helpful lexicon of Robert Reich, the study of which will hopefully be more illuminating then actually listening to his pleasantly-presented, slick socialist program; (Reichspeak = Actual meaning);
Infrastructure = pork for blue states
Bridges To Nowhere = pork for red states
Infrastructure spending = payoffs to trade unions and union contractors
Pork-barrel spending = payoffs to non-union contractors
Investing = payoffs to politically-connected interests
Investment = massive increases in government indebtedness
Green Technologies = payoffs to connected interests in the name of energy autarky (see Nazi Germany)
Starving Wall Street of money = Saving
Services = welfare
Stimulus = see Infrastructure
Lower future deficits = more spending now
Welfare for rich people = Tax cuts
Rebates = payoffs to China
Capital Budgets = pork for Federal and state favored interests
“‘If it makes sense to give one bank $25 billion, then we can certainly invest the same amount to save the entire domestic auto industry,’ said Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio.”
I have two comments;
1) The problem with the argument is that NONE of it should be bailed out. The Fed’s easy credit policies under Greenspan spurred huge malinvestments, or “clusters of errors” as Murray Rothbard would say. It channeled investment into existing bad companies and bad investments, and NEW bad companies and bad investments. This malinvestment mainly went into the building, upgrading, and financing of homes and other buildings, for many reasons, pumping up prices even more than Fed inflation has normally done since 1913. This malinvestment gained momentum because as people saw home prices going up, they naturally thought they had better buy while they still could (I got somewhat caught up in this :o( ).
It became a malignant, accelerating inflation snowball. It reached the point where Bernanke faced a choice - keep printing the money, and watch inflation go vertical, a la Weimar Germany or Zimbabwe, or prick the real-estate bubble by stopping inflation. He chose the latter. The bubble burst, as any Austrian School economist could have told him. Then, when all the froth started to fall down around us, and Wall Street started to get hurt, Hank Paulson (R. Goldman-Sachs) got the politicians involved.
The bailout of the financial sector’s bad investments then required TRILLIONS of dollars worth of new inflation, occurring as I write this, because the government HAS NO MONEY. Because imposing massive new current, overt taxes and reducing spending (!) are not an option, the government has to borrow (future taxes) and print the money (hidden taxes). There is no money, the $700 billion is all debt and inflation, the $25 billion Detroit wants is all debt and inflation. The wars are all funded by debt and inflation. The merchants of death are all getting fat on debt and inflation.
THERE IS NO MONEY. We are simply forcing as Ron Paul says, poor people to bail out the rich, good people to bail out bad people, smart investors to bail out dumb investors. We are transferring the losses of Wall Street (and Detroit) to innocent present and future Americans. Nothing good can come of this.
This morning on NPR (!) they are crowing about a couple of tenths of a drop in the Consumer Price Index (CPI), and worrying aloud about the “specter of deflation”. This is being done to counter the entirely sensible idea that creating trillions of dollars out of nothing at an unprecedented rate might possibly be bad. This is complete hogwash. I am unconvinced that this drop is anything but the price of SUVs and big-screen TVs coming down as a result of consumers sensibly spending less in the face of an economic calamity. Remember the price of five ordinary goods you buy today, then revisit those prices in a year. Price deflation would not be a bad thing for most people, only for the overleveraged.
2) There is absolutely nothing wrong with workers banding together and forming unions. There is absolutely nothing wrong with those unions freely negotiating with employers regarding their compensation, work rules, etc. Where the thing breaks down is when the government compels employers to deal exclusively with a (labor monopoly) union. Enforced union privileges allow unions to push up wages beyond the actual marginal revenue product of their labor by excluding non-union workers from competition, great if you belong to the union, unbelievably bad if you don’t or can’t. Obama shows troubling signs of making this worse, of eliminating secret union balloting, and voiding state “right-to-work” laws. This will exacerbate the monopoly behavior of unions, and make the problem that much worse.
The increased labor costs do all kinds of bad, uneconomic things to the cost structure of the companies, including increasing investment in economically dubious technology, increased government lobbying for subsidies, and pushing up the salaries of incompetent nitwit drones like Rick Wagoner and Bob Nardelli. The Big Three automakers, in exchange for their accepting the National Labor Relations Act and unionization, demanded protection from foreign producers (see Smoot-Hawley), which they had uninterrupted from Roosevelt until the late 60’s when it became impossible to keep the Japanese out, so they really didn’t care if wages were kept artificially high, it didn’t hurt them.
This is classic cartel behavior. They are still running those companies that way. Now it’s killing them, because they can’t change. Let them go bankrupt, and let new owners negotiate new contracts with the workers, free of federal interference, and try to deploy the assets of these failed companies in an economic (profitable) way.
And let Wall Street go bankrupt. They deserve it.
We have been listening for years now the the claims that science has ‘proved’ that man’s activities on the planet are causing a malignant accelerating warming of the atmosphere, which portends disaster and possibly the end of life on earth. Having some background in the sciences, we are nonetheless loath to point out that while the evidence for some warming is pretty convincing, and the fact that man contributes some measurable CO2 to the atmosphere is plausible, the mechanism is far from proved.
Moreover, the proposals (cap and trade, 2, carbon tax, technology subsidies) that have been seriously floated to try to slow or halt “Global Climate Change” (renamed that because the warming isn’t happening everywhere, and in some places cooling is being recorded) require an even heavier hand of government, have unknown efficacy, are vulnerable to cheating, and will have detrimental effects here and especially in developing countries. These proposals will disrupt the fundamental social and economic patterns of our civilization, and cost trillions of dollars, potentially for little to negative effect on the buildup of greenhouse gases.
So what do we do then? We have come up with a plan that;
1) Will measurably reduce emissions of greenhouse gases in the US
2) Is guaranteed to work, if conscientiously and carefully implemented
3) While not costless, will require no forced transfer of funds from taxpayers to polluters
4) Will actually free up trillions of dollars for productive investment
5) Will massively incentivize innovators in clean energy-production technologies.
Our plan to reduce greenhouse gases, and clean up the environment?
The SSS Plan.
What does that stand for?
Stop Subsidizing Sh*t.
Stop subsidizing ethanol.
Stop subsidizing coal (by “permitting” pollution and destroying property rights in our lands and bodies).
Stop subsidizing oil (see coal above, also military intervention in the middle east, South America, and coming soon, Russia)
Stop subsidizing nuclear (state PUCs, the NRC, the DOE, and Price-Anderson have fundamentally retarded this very important energy source).
Stop subsidizing hybrid and electric vehicle development (it rewards the biggest culprits (GM, etc) while disadvantaging innovators).
Stop subsidizing highways (causing massive pollution, energy wastage, corruption, and economic malinvestment / dislocation)
Stop subsidizing airports and airlines (airports and skies jammed with planes jammed with people, absolute violations of 2nd, 4th, 7th , 9th, 10th, and 14th amendments).
And while we are at it, stop subsidizing solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, waste-to-energy, all of it.
When you get right down to it, pollution is a property-rights problem, but more importantly, it is an ECONOMIC problem, and a GOVERNMENT problem. Government disadvantages sustainable methods when it subsidizes unsustainable methods. Moreover, government investment in new technologies, meant to correct the previous mistake, serve to misdirect investment down particular avenues favored by particular interests, the very opposite of allowing the market, correctly incentivized, to determine the pace and direction of innovation.
It is said that if government could have seen the automobile coming, it would have outlawed it. It is, by its policies, outlawing sustainable energy policy economically. Before our leaders commit us to a path of dubious efficacy and certain harm, let us insist that they go through the books and strike every law, order, and policy that has the net effect of destroying property rights against polluters.
In just the coal-fired power generation sector alone, the costs of pollution, if fairly assessed, would make the industry as currently constituted extinct almost overnight. The resulting increase in the cost of electricity would both force conservation and incentivize innovation and production. all without a single cent of tax or seziure of property.
SSS.
(Image from Paul Goscicki’s blog)
Incompetent government agency fails to perform its job ((YAWNNNN)) cripples an industry ($100 billion worth), and still cannot say with any certainty what exactly happened. Yet absolutely no one in the FDA was harmed.
We Will Miss George W Bush. Seriously.
Please, We Should Thank You.
OK, it’s time to come clean. We at LibertyGuys, and many, many libertarians, minarchists, anarchists, war opponents, and other free-thinkers, while relieved that he can finally do no more direct harm to the entire globe on a whim, secretly miss George W. Bush already. Because, you see, deep down in our heart of hearts, we were really, really grateful for his presidency.
What I mean is this. We opposed all the wars, the spying on Americans, the torture, the crony capitalism, the transparent use of the entire Imperial military apparatus for the benefit of connected flunkies, then, finally, the direct transfer of all of our financial futures to his friends on Wall Street, with more than 80% of the people opposed. All of it.
We opposed all the spending, the creation of vast new entitlements, the bailouts for all of the evil f**ks on Wall Street, K Street, and Detroit. In short, we opposed nearly everything the man stands for or did. But deep down, after every bad thing he did, a little part of us said a small “amen”.
Sure, it was nice to have something to agree with our liberal friends on, the wars, the imperialism, the torture, Katrina, etc. Any and all of those things was reason enough to hate him. But it wasn’t the reason we love him.
The thing, the thing we very much love about George W. Bush is the way he made the case against statism. Every thing the man did included all of the classic statist ingredients; war, demonization of the other (Muslims), socialism, protectionism, polarization and politicization of every sphere, cronyism, and corporatism, covered with a sauce of greed and venality, and served up with a double helping of rank incompetence.
The War on Iraq, the destruction of civilization in Afghanistan, the Katrina disaster, the revelations of massive illegal wiretapping , any one of these would have destroyed a lesser demon, say a Richard Nixon, or a Lyndon Johnson. But not our man George. He plagued us, completely intact, to the very end. Even the collapse of our entire system of corporatism and imperial finance did not unhorse this cowboy. His was a singular reign.
Perversely, this is why we are afraid of the manifestly competent politician who replaced him, the Obamessiah. Our worst fear, all us freedom-loving types who have awakened to the government’s war on civilization, that the man may actually place people of intelligence, merit, and skill in those powerful positions available to his patronage is being realized.
We are alarmed that he has filled his staffs with brilliant, competent idealogues. We might, quite understandably be terrified, absolutely terrified, that Obama, the unitary leader of the biggest, richest, most powerful state ever to exist, might make the trains run on time. Except, we know he can’t.
Oh he will do everything his fans and supporters expect of him. He will mouth all the right platitudes, he will speak “directly” to the people, his armies of PR flacks and press dupesters will dutifully report on his triumphs, while sweeping his failures under a rug. It has been, and will be a brilliant performance.
And none of it will make any difference. The financial crisis is gearing up to become a fiscal and monetary tsunami, one that will sweep away all before it. They, those bright, motivated bureaucrats won’t know what hit them.
But they will enjoy, at least for a while the completely undeserved trust and goodwill of many of the people, even as we all march into the depths of it.
(photo from ratemyeverything.com)