Good times are coming. I read about it this morning. The wonks over at the Bureau of Economic Analysis fixed everything. I will get to that in a minute.
I am packing today, freight elevator reserved for tomorrow. By nightfall on the first I hope to be moved, and the next chapter in this bizarre life can begin to unfold. Me and Private Manning, I guess. He is guilty of just about everything except aiding the enemy, which he did through the release of almost a million classified cables and what not, but the Judge decided he didn’t.
It fits with what we have seen issue forth as justice in these later days of the Republic. If he gets life in the stockade at Leavenworth, I am OK with it.
I hope you are, too. I wonder if they have banned smoking in the prison? It is something to consider these days.
But that is about as much time as I want to give to the PFC who so badly betrayed the trust of the Government. The Government is working hard to betray our trust in it, too. Not that I wasn’t suspicious all along, but if you needed confirmation, it appeared in the pages of the Wall Streeet Journal.
You can call it a right-wing sheet, but at least it is a thoughtful counterpoint to the blather on the rest of what passes for journalism, a sad decline that seems to be along for the ride on the judicial system.
A pal sent me the great news about the economy. Things have been just stumbling along, the slowest recovery since FDR started messing around with the markets. Clearly, something radical needed to be done to go along with the big new “pivot to the economy” that we do when there is something Washington doesn’t want us to think about very hard. The WSJ noted it this way:
“US economic history will be rewritten this week, as the most far-reaching methodological changes in years will add the equivalent of a country the size of Belgium to output in the world’s largest economy. The… change by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, to be announced on Wednesday, will be to start counting spending on research, development and copyrights as investment, and reflect pension deficits for the first time.
Combined they are expected to add 3% to GDP…”
GDP calculations are already distorted by understating inflation. You know that from any trip to the gas station or the supermarket. But apparently that’s not enough. Now Bureau will overstate economic activity. Happy GDP headlines could commence as soon as Friday, ignoring the fact that the books have been freshly cooked, and nothing will really relate to the past the way it did.
I have already accepted that everything that is reported these days is some sort of falsehood or misrepresentation. It makes listening to the news quite entertaining as we try to figure out what exactly is really going on.
I heard Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, who is responsible for the new accounting procedures tell us there was “No evidence of wrongdoing at IRS….”
Press Spokesman Jay Carney: “Benghazi was a long time ago…”
And my favorite is, of course, Attorney General Holder. He has been tasked with investigating Attorney General Holder to see if he did anything wrong, with a report due to himself sometime soon. Care to guess what the results might be?
I am expecting him to conclude that he did nothing wrong in all of that mess with guns, and journalists and wiretaps. Gives one faith in the soundness of our system of justice, you know?
I am way beyond expecting the straight story on anything. But there are some things that make an old budget weenie positively blanche. Anyone with a brain in the business insists on constant-dollars as a measuring stick for how the program performs. In constant dollars, adjusted for inflation, you can compare apples to apples across the years. Without that calculation, all comparisons and metrics are useless.
Yet we are permitting our masters to get away with this crap. They do not even pretend that these are more accurate or more insightful numbers. They even boast that they are “rewriting history” in order to “fix” the present.
Sort of like that idiot Dr. Hansen over NASA tinkering with the Dust Bowl temperatures post facto to influence today’s climate policy decisions by making the hottest decade in American recorded history cooler. From here, of all things.
Christ, what is wrong with us? Do we really have to drive over the cliff and into complete melt-down?
I guess we do. A pal summed it up pretty well, since I was casting about, trying to figure out when it went wrong, when the truth died. I would argue it was some time in the Clinton Administration, and the punctuation point between past and present being the bi-partisan repeal of the Glass-Steagell Act.
You remember that, right? That was the legislation more properly termed The Banking Act of 1933, but really meaning the four provisions of the Act that limited commercial bank securities activities and affiliations between commercial banks and securities firms. That firewall was breached, and the pigs went to the troughs. To my knowledge, no one has paid for the financial crimes that almost melted down the economy.
A pal summed it up this way, and I am inclined to agree with him:
“…this is real “Alice Through the Looking Glass” stuff: the Secretary of Treasury doesn’t even blink about ignoring the law (the debt ceiling), he just informs Congress that he is enacting ‘routine extraordinary measures’ (I feel like I should listen to George Carlin’s skit on language: ‘Jumbo Shrimp’) – and then Congress doesn’t even blink. The Director of National Intelligence sits in front of Congress and lies, and then a day or two later publicly admits he lied, and Congress doesn’t even blink; the President is well on his way to making the entire nation a nation of part-time workers and there is hardly a blip; we have an agency in DHS (TSA) which claims the authority to not only frisk you before you get on an airplane, but also before you get on a train AND asserts the authority to conduct searches on road, as in set up roadblocks and search people and cars – and no one blinks; we (and tens of thousands of our compadres) read (and read and read…) something called Executive Order 12333, seemingly once a week for three decades and now we have the intel community regularly using satellite imagery of the US, collecting virtually everything electronic that they can on US citizens, and even conspiring with the Brits to read content – all without any warrants – and it hardly gets a stir (at least compared to what I suppose we would have thought 15 years ago); the unemployment numbers are clearly falsified, inflation numbers are falsified, GDP numbers are clearly falsified, I have to assume now that virtually everything I hear or read out of Washington isn’t simply wrong, it’s been at a bare minimum gun-decked. And there is simply no sense of outrage. We have a few people in the media and a few folks in the government who have expressed concern. But that’s it. Just the simple fact that someone engaged in a bold-faced lie to Congress (Clapper) or publicly ignored (read ‘broke’) the law and felt no angst about it beyond simply telling Congress that they are using ‘extraordinary procedures’ (change the accounting rules for a few months, who gives a shit?) and Congress didn’t see it as a challenge to their authorities?
There should have been 535 members of Congress demanding Clapper’s head AND an explanation from the White House AND an apology simply because he thumbed their noses. There was nothing. The Ways and Means committee should have shut down the IC until such was forthcoming – nothing. There should have been a similar hue and cry from the press – nothing.
And it isn’t simply that there is so little response, it is that what you do see, in both the executive branch and the legislative (and for that matter the judiciary (hell, throw in the the 4th branch – the fed)) is apathy. People lied? So what, I need more coffee. Someone is changing the numbers? So what?
We care more about the numbers surrounding Armstrong’s blood-doping or A-Rod’s use of steroids and HGH then we do about virtually anything having to do with our economy.”
I shook my head. Something ought to be done, you know? I wonder exactly what. Sorry, I am distracted. I need to get back to packing.
It may very well be near time to get out of town. This stuff could be contagious.
Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter at: @jayare303