For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind

"They have deeply corrupted themselves...therefore God will remember their iniquity, God will visit their sins." Hosea 9:9

Jane Harmon's come-to-the-Lord moment is here:

"Maybe I'm even wiretapped now."

And what a surprise, right Jane? I mean, who could have imagined that plainly and vastly unconstitutional violations of privacy would ever be used against the Protectors of the Nation?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Suddenly, finally, and perhaps too late, the media. But only because it suits someone else's shadowy motives to bring down Congresswoman Harmon. But she deserves to be laid low. In 2005

Rep. Jane Harman , the California Democrat with a longtime involvement in intelligence issues, was overheard on an NSA wiretap telling a suspected Israeli agent that she would lobby the Justice Department reduce espionage-related charges against two officials of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful pro-Israel organization in Washington.

That should have been enough to bring her under investigation. And indeed, it was:

[The Justice Department was] prepared to open a case on her, which would include electronic surveillance approved by the so-called FISA Court, the secret panel established by the 1979 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to hear government wiretap requests.

Representative Harmon was primed to fall into the crosshairs of the Bush Justice Department, headed by Alberto Gonzales. This was a dangerous place to be for a Democrat. Well, for most Democrats (and many ordinary citizens). But, oddly, not for Jane Harmon. In fact, Abu Ghonzales himself was looking out for her. Why?

Gonzales said he "needed Jane" to help support the administration's warrantless wiretapping program, which was about to be exposed by the New York Times.

Harman, he told Goss, had helped persuade the newspaper to hold the wiretap story before, on the eve of the 2004 elections. And although it was too late to stop the Times from publishing now, she could be counted on again to help defend the program

He was right.

On Dec. 21, 2005, in the midst of a firestorm of criticism about the wiretaps, Harman issued a statement defending the operation and slamming the Times, saying, "I believe it essential to U.S. national security, and that its disclosure has damaged critical intelligence capabilities."

Pelosi and Hastert never did get the briefing.

And thanks to grateful Bush administration officials, the investigation of Harman was effectively dead.

But now, years later, the tapes of the tapes made of the phone calls with the Israeli agent have come into the light. Somehow. And what do we hear from Ms. Jane Harmon, righteous defender of the integrity of the intelligence community?

"I am outraged that I may have been wiretapped by my government in 2005 or 2006 while I was ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee."

Earlier, on MNSBC, she expressed "disappoint[ment] that my country -- I'm an American citizen just like you are -- could have permitted what I think is a gross abuse of power in recent years." "I leave it to Glen Greenwald to sum this up precisely:

[W]hen the U.S. Government eavesdropped for years on American citizens with no warrants and in violation of the law, that was "both legal and necessary" as well as "essential to U.S. national security," and it was the "despicable" whistle-blowers (such as Thomas Tamm) who disclosed that crime and the newspapers which reported it who should have been criminally investigated, but not the lawbreaking government officials. But when the U.S. Government legally and with warrants eavesdrops on Jane Harman, that is an outrageous invasion of privacy and a violent assault on her rights as an American citizen, and full-scale investigations must be commenced immediately to get to the bottom of this abuse of power.

Right wingers are fond of saying, "A liberal is a conservative who hasn't been mugged yet." Greenwald says, "a 'civil liberties extremist' is a former Bush-enabling, Surveillance State-defending Blue Dog who learns that their own personal conversations were intercepted by the same government that they demanded be vested with unchecked power."

Reap it, Jane.

Nice shot.

By now we've all heard of the rather dramatic rescue of Captain Richard Phillips by the Navy and the SEAL team.

The first thing I thought of when I heard the story is the same thing some pundits are making much of: that's one hell of a shot -- times three.

Think about it: your target is between 100 and 300 feet away, and is about the size of lunch tray. You're bobbing up and down and side to side. Your target is also bobbing up and down and side to side, but on a different, faster rhythm. If you miss, the hostage could get shot (maybe even by you). It's dark enough that you need nightvision goggles.

So -- amazing shot, right?

But here's the kicker: all three guys made the same amazing shot at the same time.

I don't know whether to be proud or terrified.

Anyway, welcome home, Captain Phillips.

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A Gentleman Reads

I know you're all taxed from the seriously heavy shit I've been laying down. Yep! This is a serious web log. Only the best, most informed prose.

Which, of course, makes it deadly dull and one of the least likely to be read pieces of electronic media currently littering the ether. And I do mean "littering."

To address this critical dearth of fun and silly shit, I try to link to some other practitioners of the bloggist's art who are considerably funnier and altogether better for your constitution.

You are instructed to go, at once, to the Foggy Monocle and laugh your ass off.

That is all.

A Portrait of Onanist Delight

That's a year-to-date chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (all charts click to enlarge). The DJIA, and its turgid performance during the last two years of the Bush Presidency, are what allowed MSNBC, CNN, NBC, Powerline, and pretty much every pundit and bloviator tied to the corporate media to proclaim that the economy was doing just fine, thank you very much, in spite of rising jobless claims and mushrooming foreclosures.

Compare these charts of Initial Jobless Claims and New Home Sales


With this chart of the S&P 500:


It's a little hard to see because the scale of the graphs isn't perfectly aligned. ignore the point where the S&P falls off the table in October of 2008, and its fluctuations that spring and summer tend to look more like white noise in a stabilizing pattern at a very high level.

In the meantime, however, during the spring and summer of 2008 when practically every business analyst from Kudlow and Cramer to John Sidney McCain were telling us that the "fundamentals of the economy are sound," jobless claims were creeping steadily up and housing starts were declining.

I bring this up not to point out how wrong they were (which they were), but rather to highlight a huge blindspot in the media's vision: they are slaves to shareholder profits.

They don't analyze the economy. They tell you whether or not rich people are making money, and they mistake that for the same thing. If the stock market is performing well, that's all they're interested in. Cash is flowing in, baby! The fundamentals of the economy must be sound.

No one getting paid to tell the world what's what analyzes the economy. They report (take dictation from) the market. Sure, there were some whispers around the edges. But hey! Are you gonna listen to those nattering nabobs of negativism? Or do you wanna come for a swim in my pool of cash?

Now look at the top graph again. What you see there is an Obama-induced bounce. The markets are up about 20% since the early days of March. Not many people are talking about it, but that's mostly because they want Obama to fail and they've spent the last three months claiming every drop in the DOW was his fault. Suddenly they've got nothing to talk about.

But that's not my main point. My point is, this isn't necessarily good news. The "fundamentals of our economy" are but a whisker more sound now than they were last October, and only because we're starting to put on the brakes.

If the status quo system likes what's going on and the market is going up, I'm not filled with confidence. Here's another chart for ya (click to expand):


Since the '50's (when there were 14 tax brackets and income over $400k was taxed at 91%), the rate of growth was a steady-state economy. In the 1980's we bought into the supply side logic of the infinitely expanding market. We slowly took bankers and investment houses off the leash and shackled the wardens. 1992-2008 was as close as I hope we'll ever come to a financial anarchic utopia (for bankers) / dystopia (for workers).

I guess you can tell where that gets you.

So, finally the point: taking into account the growth of a world-wide market, or at least the introduction of that potential, I figure a good place for the DOW to be is a steady-state economy at about 4,000-6,000. In other words, a bit below where we are this Friday as I sit here typing away.

If this is where we should be, then we can probably expect another crash. Sometime this summer, I expect. Which will be blamed on Obama. Which will be right, in part. But also necessary. There is still a lot of waste in the private sector. Here's what I mean by "waste:"

Capital is created by labor, which adds value to the product being worked on. That value is sold to a market. The employer siphons off most of that value and pays his/her labor with the balance. Much more complicated than that, of course, but that's essentially the deal.

Over the last 40 years, more and more of that value has been lodged at the top. This is "supply-side" or "trickle-down" theory, which depends on two things being true: 1) If you feed the suppliers/oligarchs enough to keep them fat and happy, they'll keep the wheels of commerce turning by seeking infinite wealth, thereby employing you and keeping you fed and out of the rain. (With just enough extra to buy you off.) 2) We will never run out of markets to expand in, so the money will be able to continuously flow up the ladder and, mostly, stay there.

Something happened to this fairy tale. The money wasn't flowing fast enough. So the oligarchs (in this case, investment bankers and the lawyers who work for them) created a variety of investment baskets that allowed them to essentially sell the same "value" (from the "value added" equation, above) over and over again, and to package it with thousands of tiny risks (iffy mortgages) which themselves had been packaged multiple times and resold.

This worked well enough except for one thing: the need for more and more capital at the top of the ladder outstripped both the workers' ability to generate it, and the market's rate of expansion.

The butterfly in Thailand caused a tornado in Brussels. Or, in this case, some dude in Nevada finally failed to pull the ends to meet, tapped out his credit, and his home was foreclosed on. Then his neighbor, and his neighbor on the other side.

That was the pin in the balloon. It started small, but once that vacuum of capital was in the room -- a literal absence of money to fill a hole -- the game was over and the void spread very quickly up the chain and sucked the fancy house of cards into the shitter.

So anyway. The market is up in March. But I don't expect it to stay there, nor do I think it should.

These assholes just can't believe the party's over. And we're all going to take the bullet/pay the piper/sell our vacation homes.

What? You don't have a vacation home?

"Barry" Needs a Teleprompter

Dear "President" Obama: I'm very disappointed to see you using a teleprompter. I guess the image you falsely portrayed to the Nation during your campaign of a thoughtful, articulate speaker, was a cheap charade designed to lull the passive left-wing media into a hero-worshiping drool-fest -- one that continues to this day. I hereby withdraw my support, since it's clear that your memory sucks and that you're therefore too addled to be President. Why don't you go back to Indonesia, you America-hating Islamist traitor? Only idiots use teleprompters...

More here.
Credit to John Aravosis