Is Georgia Important? (1)
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2 days, 19 hours
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You won’t often find me quoting the Libertarian Cato Institute line of reasoning, but on the Georgia-Russia conflict I think they are right on the money. One suspects that the goal of the U.S. venture is not purely humanitarian. The humanitarian justification is likely - at least in part - a cover for an attempt to establish a bridgehead of U.S. military and political influence in Georgia to thwart the advance of Russian power. If ...
Economics By John McCain (2)
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Two can play the attack game. The only difference is that this ad isn’t full of lies. Recent articles in the New Yorker and the New York Times have made it clear that Barack is adept at Chicago style street fighting politics. In terms of organizers on the ground Obama beats McCain 3:1. All the old politics blabocrats on cable TV are still measuring this race in terms of old time memes. But the Republicans ...
Low Road Express Has a Flat (1)
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1 week, 1 day
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I’ve been stuck in a hotel room in Colorado for the Cable Labs Conference and so have had to watch the Olympics without Tivo. I don’t know if it’s just because Colorado is a battleground state, but there have been an unusual number of Presidential campaign ads. McCain’s are all negative– “Obama’s just a celebrity, who will raise your taxes”. Obama’s are all positive, mostly the Hands Ad about alternative energy. The Real Clear Politics ...
Cheerio’s Economics (2)
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1 week, 6 days
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You gotta love the ingenuity of the Big Food Businesses. According to the Wall Street Journal, in the wake of higher commodity costs, they don’t raise prices, they shrink the package. Many food manufacturers are retooling assembly lines to produce smaller versions of everything from cereal boxes and ice-cream cartons to mayonnaise jars, margarine tubs and cheese packages. By giving consumers less for roughly the same price, food executives hope to keep consumers from moving ...
Best Movies of the Summer? (1)
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2 weeks, 2 days
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Continuing my jerimiad that we are in a cultural crisis, I present to you the top movie rentals of last week. 21 The Bank Job College Road Trip Step Up 2 The Streets Vantage Point Drillbit Taylor The Bucket List Shutter Fools Gold 10,000 BC This extraordinary pile of crap probably cost the studios more than $400 million to produce and at least another $150 million to market. Here is a similar list of most ...
Rock and Roll Sell Out (1)
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2 weeks, 2 days
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Fashion Rocks arrived today, as a special add-on to one of my wife’s magazines. It is a Conde Nast promotion for a TV show they present. In it you can “shop just like a rock star”. Many new and old bands show up promoting fashion items or automobiles. This is a truly sad state of affairs and I can only conclude that these musicians are acting as paid shills because they have no way to ...
10,000 Mile Supply Chain (5)
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2 weeks, 5 days
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Eighteen months ago, I gave a lecture at USC about The New Federalism, in which I made the outrageous claim that within five years WalMart’s sourcing model would collapse. The cost of bringing cheap goods from China with $100 per barrel oil would not work. Turns out, we didn’t have to wait five years. The cost of shipping a 40-foot container from Shanghai to the United States has risen to $8,000, compared with $3,000 early ...
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smackaysmith said:
Taplin says 8 years of decline... hell no. Since Nixon resigned, we've been in the dark ages.
McCain’s Rove Playbook (2)
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2 weeks, 6 days
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Pew Center Poll Sometimes the tactics of the Karl Rove team advising John McCain just boggle the mind. Business Week’s marketing blogger David Kiley reported the following. What the McCain campaign doesn’t want people to know, according to one GOP strategist I spoke with over the weekend, is that they had an ad script ready to go if Obama had visited the wounded troops saying that Obama was…wait for it…using wounded troops as campaign props. ...
Afghanistan Trap (2)
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3 weeks
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The Obama campaign, anxious to prove they are tough on national security, should be careful not to fall into the trap of pretending we can solve Afghanistan’s problems with more soldiers. Rory Stewart, the brilliant British diplomat and writer who has spent so much time on the ground in Afghanistan, makes a compelling case in Time Magazine for another approach. First, the West should not increase troop numbers. In time, NATO allies, such as Germany ...
Terrorism’s End (6)
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3 weeks, 1 day
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How Does Terrorism End? One of the main themes of The Cost of Empire is that we are usually designing our military to fight the last war. A new report from the Rand Corporation says that the only way we will be able to fight Al Qaeda is to end “the war on terrorism.” A recent RAND research effort sheds light on this issue by investigating how terrorist groups have ended in the past. By ...
Return to the Mean (3)
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3 weeks, 2 days
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Merrill Lynch just privately published to their clients a very scary report entitled, “The emperors’s new clothes in a post bubble society.” It picks up on some of the economic themes I talked about in “The Cost of Empire”, most specifically, Regrettably, we have become a bubble society, always in search of the quick-fix strategy to build wealth – Tech, real estate, and now commodities (although though the latest action points to a break in ...
Next Sub Prime Crisis–SUV Leases (1)
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3 weeks, 3 days
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2005 Dodge Durango Chrysler announced Friday that it was closing down its auto lease business. This is the beginning of sub prime like write downs for auto companies. SUV’s bought three years ago, now being returned to dealers with a true value probably 50% below the auto company’s book value. Nobody want to buy a used SUV getting 15 MPG.They will be lucky if they can sell them for scrap. Ford took a $2.1 billion ...
Permanent War Economy (3)
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3 weeks, 4 days
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In 1964 at the height of the Cold War, the philosopher Herbert Marcuse in his book One Dimensional Man, made the following observation. Free institutions (the media) compete with authoritarian ones in making the Enemy a deadly force within the system. And this deadly force stimulates growth and initiative, not by virtue of the magnitude and economic impact of the Defense “sector”, but by virtue of the fact that the society as a whole becomes ...
Dionysis and War (2)
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3 weeks, 6 days
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Of the many personal messages I received in the last week on the Cost of Empire series, the most fascinating and troubling came from my friend Larry Gross. Larry is the most unique of Hollywood hybrids, the screenwriter/philosopher. He wrote classics like Walter Hill’s 48 Hoursand Clint Eastwood’s True Crimeand yet is deeply schooled in philosophy from Hegel to Baudrillard. Here’s a bit of what he wrote me. Congratulations on this piece which is definitely ...
The Cost of Empire IV-Imperial Overstretch (2)
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This is the final post of a four part series. For those of you who want to read it in one piece, you can find it here. In September of 2000, at the height of the Presidential election campaign, The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) released a report entitled, Rebuilding America’s Defenses. PNAC was comprised of the major neoconservatives including Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, William Kristol, John Bolton and ...
The Cost of Empire III-The Walls Come Down (2)
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This is part three of a four part series that ties our current economic crisis to the thirty year buildup of defense spending since the Reagan Presidency. The earlier parts can be found here, here and here. The neoconservative narrative on the Ronald Reagan Presidency is that he raised our military spending and sent the Soviet Union into an arms race they could not afford. On their knees economically, they were forced to give up ...
Cost of Empire II-Living in Fear (1)
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This is part two of a four part series that ties our current economic crisis to the thirty year buildup of defense spending since the Reagan Presidency. You might want to read the prologue and Part 1 first. Life in 1950’s America was lived under the twin fears of annihilation and depression. Annihilation because the constant threat of a Soviet nuclear attack was drummed into the populace from the day you practiced your first duck ...
Barack Plays Hoops In Kuwait (2)
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Sometimes a candidate gets to create a metaphor in a single visual image. Barack’s is competence–the three point shot from way outside. Watch this crude Army outakes roughcut of Obama in Kuwait- the sound is untouched using only the camera mike, so its shitty. Deal with it. Its quite real. If you want the exact moment-the magic starts around 3 minutes in and goes for about 1 minute. Then you watch the whole tape and ...
The Cost of Empire I-NSC-68 (2)
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This is the first of a four part series that ties our current economic crisis to the thirty year buildup of defense spending since the Reagan Presidency. You can find a prologue here. The roots of American Empire began with President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to enter World War I ”to make the world itself at last free”, which set in motion a kind of messianic foreign policy of American Exceptionalism, which echoes in the righteous ...
