Paul Krugman has been blaming bad economic decisions on the people who believe in "Confidence Fairies" and "Invisible Bond Vigilantes". I think he has a point.
“The idea that austerity measures could trigger stagnation is incorrect,” declared Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank, in a recent interview. Why? Because “confidence-inspiring policies will foster and not hamper economic recovery.”
Now I'm starting to make sense of all this. Mr. Trichet is seeing things exclusively from the point of view of his class. Austerity means he and his brothers will not at any time soon, have to increase what they pay the world's governments to protect their billions while millions starve, so they can confidently continue to sit on their piles of cash waiting for things to turn around. But does getting your unemployment check inspire confidence? Or being laid off if one is a government worker? No, but when we talked about confidence, we weren't talking about those people, were we? Or maybe we should, if we truly believe inspiring confidence is a strategy for getting out of the recession/depression, and aren't just talking through our hats.
Bond vigilantes are investors who pull the plug on governments they perceive as unable or unwilling to pay their debts.
Paul Krugman talks as if he has never seen a bond vigilante. In my opinion the point isn't that they've never existed. I think in fact that smaller weaker countries that were over a barrel, or navigating some extremely difficult transition did in fact have their very constitutions formed by the hammer blows of the bond vigilanties. I am thinking of what I read in the Shock Doctrine about South Africa, Russia, other former Warsaw Bloc menbers, and various Latin American countries especially. To punish the South African currency on the day there is talk of any sort of constraint on foreign ownership seems quite feasible to me, and many times this and similar things did occur, based on what I've read (I think the book has some problems in its overall framing of what happenned, but do not by any means think it is based on total fabrication. If anyone wants to point me to evidence to the contrary, feel free.
You have, in fact something going on in the public arena - critical decisions being made about how the South African or Russion economy will interact with the rest of the world. It is seen as precedent setting. You have one or more strong centralized bodies of the world's wealth handlers, like the IMF, and no doubt people writing alarming editorials in the Wall Street Journal, or Wall Street blogs or newsletters on a day by day or even hour by hour basis, in the case of the blogs/newsletters when the precarious new or newly reconfigured government makes a "misstep". And it was cheap to punish these small or weak countries. You move your investment somewhere else; most of the world's economy is reasonably healthy, so that is not a problem.
But we cannot simply extrapolate this to the current situation, and the American economy or even moderately large western economies. Who is going to jerk hundreds of billions of dollars out ot the American economy based on an alarmist editorial or emotional reaction "Oh my God, how dare they flout the laws of sacred economics!". No, they have to think about whether the proposed move, even by their economic theories, is all that catastrophic really, and where is a better place to put that investment.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Thursday, July 1, 2010
The Dubiousness of calling Mandated Insurance a "Tax".
Comments I made on http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/06/current_law_is_fiscally_respon.html":
Responding to: "Also if the government forces one to purchase health insurance at one's own expense that's effectively a tax. These off-balance sheet revenues and expenses ..."
Whoops -- you can, through some analogy call the requirement to purchase health insurance a "tax", but you cannot call it a source of (government) revenue.
OK, here's an idea for lowering the overall tax burden: Ban states from making car insurance mandatory!
OK, you can call mandated health, or car insurance a tax, and by the same reasoning, a (usually local government) requirement that you keep the sidewalk in front of your business ice free in winter is also a tax. Also, one way streets are a tax because under some circumstances, you could arrive at your destination faster and cheaper by going the "wrong way" (such authoritarian language!) up a one way street.
But, getting back to the ice on the sidewalks, it's a government imposed burden that will cost you money if you hire someone to do it. But then again, it might save you from a big lawsuit. Or the requirement that somebody else keep their sidewalk ice free might save you from a broken neck.
Health care can be expected to have some analogous effects. Is it fantastic that someone else's health could have a negative effect on you? not really. How about the part time school bus driver with no benefits who has a heart attack on his/her route that cholesterol lowering drugs might have prevented? How about the unpaid visits to the emergency room that hospitals no longer have to pass on to whoever they can find to subsidize them, when people stop using the ER in place of a family doctor. How about if the government, now able to show a financial benefit, requires procedures in hospitals that drastically cut MERSA and similar hospital spread infections (for which Medicare might pay hundreds of dollars a day for 3, 6, or 9 months (it's happenning in my own family). The cost/benefit effect alone could make it happen. And then along will come the "fringe benefits", like my father not being a deaths door for a time, and stuck in a chair or walker for months and months.
Lets just say there might be a reason the other wealth countries, with real health care systems, have half the financial burden of health care that we do, and mostly people better satisfied with the care they get.
"the cost of complying with the government regulations which have been growing like kudzu." Oh yes, the cost of complying with those pesky safety procedures for mines and oil rigs. The high cost of requiring Wall Street to sell financial instruments that people can understand. Terrible, terrible. Not to say that every government regulation is good - but neither can we assume they are all bad. We need to pay some attention to the arguments pro and con, not just have a rule "All regulation is _____ (a) good, (b) bad."
Sunday, June 27, 2010
One Point of View (Jefferson's) on "the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations"
Some borrowed citations from: http://fraughtwithperil.com/cholte/2010/03/14/the-american-corporate-monster-part-2-corporate-personhood-history/
Thomas Jefferson wrote in a 1816 letter to George Logan:[11]
““I hope we shall… crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
“A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible,” Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in an 1819 case. “It possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it.”
Jefferson and Marshall were not friends, or in tune politically, and that seems to be reflected here.
Comment on a Proposal to Make Corporations Democratic
See http://fraughtwithperil.com/cholte/2010/06/25/proper-corporatism/ for context.
There was also a time in America in the 19th century when Joint Stock Companies were seen as an exciting means of implementing communal utopias like Brooke Farm and Oneida.
[The all important "So what?" question]
One question I have is what is the next step beyond saying "if this happenned, it would be an improvement", or a more strongly worded "this needs to happen"? I am beginning to think that collective action aimed at reform might be usefully imitate the structure of the scientific community. The problem is bridging the gap between the present state and the vision of (1) in the one case, perfect understanding of the universe, or (2) perfecting the social order. Prior to the Enlightenment, there was a plethora of speculative philosophical systems which tried to be "theories of everything" (a phrase that I think expresses the drive behind even the most 'primitive' religions).
He talks a lot about the "Social Corporation" which is neither the traditional "nonprofit" nor "for profit" enterprise. There is no very good legal framework for it, so he is putting forth a template for the consideration of governments. He sees no reason why such corporations, while explicitly *not* having maximization of profits as prime directive cannot make sufficient profits to grow without the need of continual infusions of charity money. I think what he'd really like is the ability for a corporation to have a *legally defined purpose* such as "to improve health outcomes (more specifically defined of course)
by X% in the areas in which they operate within such and such a time frame, with profit and growth being perhaps the goal *once that is accomplished*. He thinks they can go head to head with traditional corporations, like maybe a certain amount of good will and some vibrant quality that such an enterprise might have, might offset failure to follow what today are considered "best practices" for maximizing profits. Yunnus has been working at this (not just micro-lending but a broad array of enterprises) for over 30 years, and his enterprises are now certainly on the scale of billions of dollars.
I think there is immense potential in that, whereas I can't imagine an attempt to change the rules of corporations IN GENERAL any time in the forseeable future.
There was also a time in America in the 19th century when Joint Stock Companies were seen as an exciting means of implementing communal utopias like Brooke Farm and Oneida.
[The all important "So what?" question]
One question I have is what is the next step beyond saying "if this happenned, it would be an improvement", or a more strongly worded "this needs to happen"? I am beginning to think that collective action aimed at reform might be usefully imitate the structure of the scientific community. The problem is bridging the gap between the present state and the vision of (1) in the one case, perfect understanding of the universe, or (2) perfecting the social order. Prior to the Enlightenment, there was a plethora of speculative philosophical systems which tried to be "theories of everything" (a phrase that I think expresses the drive behind even the most 'primitive' religions).
He talks a lot about the "Social Corporation" which is neither the traditional "nonprofit" nor "for profit" enterprise. There is no very good legal framework for it, so he is putting forth a template for the consideration of governments. He sees no reason why such corporations, while explicitly *not* having maximization of profits as prime directive cannot make sufficient profits to grow without the need of continual infusions of charity money. I think what he'd really like is the ability for a corporation to have a *legally defined purpose* such as "to improve health outcomes (more specifically defined of course)
by X% in the areas in which they operate within such and such a time frame, with profit and growth being perhaps the goal *once that is accomplished*. He thinks they can go head to head with traditional corporations, like maybe a certain amount of good will and some vibrant quality that such an enterprise might have, might offset failure to follow what today are considered "best practices" for maximizing profits. Yunnus has been working at this (not just micro-lending but a broad array of enterprises) for over 30 years, and his enterprises are now certainly on the scale of billions of dollars.
I think there is immense potential in that, whereas I can't imagine an attempt to change the rules of corporations IN GENERAL any time in the forseeable future.
A Time to be Wonkish, and a Time to Put Away Wonkish Things (comment on Paul Krugman: A Dark Age of macroeconomics (wonkish)
Paul Krugmen points out - quite reasonably - the solipsism of drawing any conclusion from the correlation of two things that are the same by definition (see Paul Krugman's A Dark Age of Macroeconomics - Wonkish). For example, I always wondered about a study that showed a remarkable - possibly too remarkable - correlation between body weight and sense of balance. Well, we know exactly how to measure weight, but "sense of balance"? Evidently the experimenters had created some kind of sense-of-balance-o-meter. Now the idea that overweight people have a harder time staying balanced is intuitive, OK, but knowing something about how complex things are measured, I wondered whether the the balance-o-meter what little more than a Rube Goldberg-ish measurement of weight, with some informational impurities that made it vary enough to keep the correlation line from being perfectly straight (a tell-tale sign). So I relegated the study to the category of "not sure it means anything". Only by mastering the meaning of measuring "sense of balance" could I have decided whether the study meant anything or not.
This reminds me a bit of people being mesmerized by graphs of X vs Y where we don't know what either of them mean, but the experts provides something intuitive that he claims is an analogy and we nod out heads.
Well, Prof. Krugman, if pulling some profound "fact" out of the magician's hat of an accounting identity (his phrase), seems like a rich source of nonsense, consider the sort of creation ex nihilo some very smart people indeed - people I know who belong to Mensa (a bad sign in my opinion) have swallowed. Ayn Rand puts at the root of her supposedly deep "objectivist epistemology" the identity "Existence exists" (c.f. John Galt's interminable speech in Atlas Shrugs, or Ayn Rand's book called Objectivist Epistemology.
To fight such speciously derived paradigms on their own ground (or what seems to the believers to be their ground) is a losing battle.
Instead, I think we need to propose alternate ways of looking at things that can be understood by people without a college degree.
[and just how are we supposed to do that, you may wonder]
This reminds me a bit of people being mesmerized by graphs of X vs Y where we don't know what either of them mean, but the experts provides something intuitive that he claims is an analogy and we nod out heads.
Well, Prof. Krugman, if pulling some profound "fact" out of the magician's hat of an accounting identity (his phrase), seems like a rich source of nonsense, consider the sort of creation ex nihilo some very smart people indeed - people I know who belong to Mensa (a bad sign in my opinion) have swallowed. Ayn Rand puts at the root of her supposedly deep "objectivist epistemology" the identity "Existence exists" (c.f. John Galt's interminable speech in Atlas Shrugs, or Ayn Rand's book called Objectivist Epistemology.
To fight such speciously derived paradigms on their own ground (or what seems to the believers to be their ground) is a losing battle.
Instead, I think we need to propose alternate ways of looking at things that can be understood by people without a college degree.
[and just how are we supposed to do that, you may wonder]
The Long Run, the Short Run, and the Ugly
In response to Paul Krugman's article "In The Long Run, We Are Still All Dead"
In the medium run, in democracies, what happens will be determined by how the average citizen sees the world. If that's a scary prospect, consider how well the alternatives (to democracy) have worked. Right now, "the money has to come from somewhere" seems like the last word to too many people.
Too many of the intellectuals have taken the bait of the ideological terrorists, and succumbed to name calling and preaching to the choir. I am making an analogy here. When peace talks between Israelis and Palistineans start to seem thinkable, somebody on one extrem of the other, for whom compromise seems like the most despicable outcome, throws a grenade; the other side overreacts, a new cycle of violence begins, and the moderates who might have tried to solve the problem feel irrelevant again and tune out.
If world peace depends on Palistineans and Israelis talking to eachother, maybe it (or the economy which is tightly coupled with world peace) also depends on "Tea partiers" and liberals talking. Which seems more improbable?
If apparently self-evident statements like "the money has to come from somewhere" are stifling debate, maybe we need to focus on things that are more real than money, which is in a sense just numbers on computer disks. Like the real production capability of the nation, and the efficiency of transportation, or the continuity of the culture of work, or education and training. No stimulus means less debt, but years of atrophy of those real things that numbers on computer disks cannot summon into being -- mean less ability to repay debt when the business cycle starts to turn around. An inability to repay the (albeit lower) debt might very well mean in the medium run, more debt at some point in the "up" cycle, or more prolongued indebtedness.
In the medium run, in democracies, what happens will be determined by how the average citizen sees the world. If that's a scary prospect, consider how well the alternatives (to democracy) have worked. Right now, "the money has to come from somewhere" seems like the last word to too many people.
Too many of the intellectuals have taken the bait of the ideological terrorists, and succumbed to name calling and preaching to the choir. I am making an analogy here. When peace talks between Israelis and Palistineans start to seem thinkable, somebody on one extrem of the other, for whom compromise seems like the most despicable outcome, throws a grenade; the other side overreacts, a new cycle of violence begins, and the moderates who might have tried to solve the problem feel irrelevant again and tune out.
If world peace depends on Palistineans and Israelis talking to eachother, maybe it (or the economy which is tightly coupled with world peace) also depends on "Tea partiers" and liberals talking. Which seems more improbable?
If apparently self-evident statements like "the money has to come from somewhere" are stifling debate, maybe we need to focus on things that are more real than money, which is in a sense just numbers on computer disks. Like the real production capability of the nation, and the efficiency of transportation, or the continuity of the culture of work, or education and training. No stimulus means less debt, but years of atrophy of those real things that numbers on computer disks cannot summon into being -- mean less ability to repay debt when the business cycle starts to turn around. An inability to repay the (albeit lower) debt might very well mean in the medium run, more debt at some point in the "up" cycle, or more prolongued indebtedness.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Examination of a claim that Obama knew about the BP disaster in advance, and used it to gain $85 million dollars from insider trading
Here is the item, as it was forwarded to me by a certain very intelligent person (no sarcasm - it's true):
On Wed, 23 Jun 2010, ____________ wrote:
> From ______: Thought you should know: Obama is personally standing to earn $85 million or more from the BP oil spill...
>
> Goldman Sachs wasn't alone either in its seeming 'foreknowledge' of the
collapse of BP's stock value due to the Gulf disaster as BP's own chief
executive, Tony Hayward, sold about one-third of his shares weeks before
this catastrophe began unfolding too.
>
> But according to a report by the Financial Stability Board (financialstabilityboard.org)
the largest seller of BP stock in the weeks before this disaster
occurred was the American investment company known as Vanguard, which
through two of their financial arms (Vanguard Windsor II Investor and
Vanguard Windsor Investor) unloaded over 1.5 million shares of BP stock
saving their investors hundreds of millions of dollars, chief among them
President Obama.
>
> President Obama holds all of his wealth in just two Vanguard
funds, Vanguard 500 Index Fund where he has 3 accounts and the Vanguard
FTSE Social Index Fund where he holds another 3 accounts, all six of
which the FSB estimates will earn Obama nearly $8.5 million a year and
which over 10 years will equal the staggering sum of $85 million.
>
> The
FSB further estimates in this report that through Obama's 3 accounts in
the Vanguard 500 Index Fund he stands to make another $100 million over
the next 10 years as their largest stock holding is in the energy giant
Exxon Mobil they believe will eventually acquire BP and all of their
assets for what will be essentially a 'rock bottom' price and which very
predictably BP has hired Goldman Sachs to advise them on.
>
> Important
to note is that none of this wealth Obama, Goldman Sachs, and others are acquiring would be possible without this disaster. How did Goldman and Vanguard (among others) 'somehow' know what was going to
happen before it actually did, including the US energy giant Halliburton which 2 weeks prior to this disaster just happened to purchase the World's largest oil disaster service company. Boots & Coots'.
> Hmmmm...............
Yes Hmmmmm... -- I wonder what, if anything, in this article is true. Here is what I came up with (I got the gist of it in about 20 minutes and then spent an hour or 2 putting it down on "paper"):
I'm not sure, but I think this "Adam Dobson" blog is the primary source
for the claim I'm responding to:
http://stream.adamdodson.org/items/view/2802.
There is an "evidence" link in the article (look for the text):
" [President Obama] holds all of his wealth"
which connects to a PDF of a document labeled "Executive Branch Personnel
PUBLIC FINANCIAL DISCLOSURE REPORT". This government form would
conveniently discourage almost anyone from trying to read it. The only
thing I can easily make out is that it applies to Obama, and the largest
identified asset appears to be "U.S. Treasury Bonds" (see below).
Sandi Berns evidently put more work into reading the "evidence" on the
Adam Dobson web page. She posted the 1st comment I see (by the time you
look it may be several pages down the list) ON the Adam Dobson web page,
and she apparently enjoys Moderator status on the Dobson site:
"Sandi Behrns [Moderator] 2 days ago
Stupid, stupid, stupid. The actual documents cited & provided through
links indicate that the President holds nearly ALL HIS WEALTH is US
Treasury bills, NOT in Vanguard funds. As far as those Vanguard funds go,
they are highly diversified funds, not large holdings of individual stocks
(this is the reason Obama opted to not use a blind trust - because the
transparency is there & a conflict cannot be found.)
As for this "FSB report" that supposedly states that Obama will reap $85M
off these funds over 10 years - no link at all is provided. Hmmm.... that
would be an incredible return for retirement accounts currently totaling
at most $303,003 (yes that's ALL 6 accounts.) I know this site is not the
original author of this piece, but really - you should at least review the
purported evidence before posting."
She mentions an "FSB report" to which Adam Dobson provides no links.
Another source did supply this link: financialstabilityboard.org. The
site looks fairly intimidating to explore, and it looks to me like they
only do very high level reports; a newsflash on Obama's illicit stock
gains would look VERY out of place (not to mention I don't see one).
Now, if Rush Limbaugh doesn't mention this, we will know that it is a lie.
If he does, I'll take a 2nd look.
If none of the high visibility right wing commentators has the decency to
point out that such lies are being widely distributed[**] targeted to
their own audience, it will just confirm my impression that they are pure
"ends justifies the means" propagandists with no journalistic ethics.
I have seen this happen before with a hoax based on a misreading of a
scientific paper as claiming C02 content in the atmosphere had not
significantly grown in the last 100 or so years. If true, it would of
course be one of the biggest pieces of news EVER in support of the
anti-Admin people's position. But the big guys (i.e. those with
visibility and somethiing to lose) never touched it. If they had, all of
their audience would have been exposed to the refutations, and that would
not be a good thing for THE CAUSE. The result:
generally, the readers of such items NEVER see the miriad refutations or
at least not by anyone they trust, so millions continue to believe long
refuted claims with no merit whatsover.
I concluded after this that the strategy of the BIG right wing
commentators is to let such "throwaway" claims circulate (the Mainstream
Media never even notices them) and whether by design or otherwise, they
add powerful (though untrue) support to the claims by Limbaugh &c that
Obama is a corrupt ideologic fanatic who doesn't believe in anything, who
always voted for the most left wing bill (and also always voted "present"
on every bill), and a Marxist/Fascist.
Finally, I suspect the claim that Goldman-Sachs acted as if they knew
about the impending doom to BP Stocks may also be made up. Such claims
often are, to add the credibility of something "everybody knows" to the
main thing they are claiming.
[**] "widely distributed": There are 755 quite diverse looking hits on
GOOGLE{obama bp "$85 million" "to earn" goldman-sachs} with very few
apparent accidental matches)
On Wed, 23 Jun 2010, ____________ wrote:
> From ______: Thought you should know: Obama is personally standing to earn $85 million or more from the BP oil spill...
>
> Goldman Sachs wasn't alone either in its seeming 'foreknowledge' of the
collapse of BP's stock value due to the Gulf disaster as BP's own chief
executive, Tony Hayward, sold about one-third of his shares weeks before
this catastrophe began unfolding too.
>
> But according to a report by the Financial Stability Board (financialstabilityboard.org)
the largest seller of BP stock in the weeks before this disaster
occurred was the American investment company known as Vanguard, which
through two of their financial arms (Vanguard Windsor II Investor and
Vanguard Windsor Investor) unloaded over 1.5 million shares of BP stock
saving their investors hundreds of millions of dollars, chief among them
President Obama.
>
> President Obama holds all of his wealth in just two Vanguard
funds, Vanguard 500 Index Fund where he has 3 accounts and the Vanguard
FTSE Social Index Fund where he holds another 3 accounts, all six of
which the FSB estimates will earn Obama nearly $8.5 million a year and
which over 10 years will equal the staggering sum of $85 million.
>
> The
FSB further estimates in this report that through Obama's 3 accounts in
the Vanguard 500 Index Fund he stands to make another $100 million over
the next 10 years as their largest stock holding is in the energy giant
Exxon Mobil they believe will eventually acquire BP and all of their
assets for what will be essentially a 'rock bottom' price and which very
predictably BP has hired Goldman Sachs to advise them on.
>
> Important
to note is that none of this wealth Obama, Goldman Sachs, and others are acquiring would be possible without this disaster. How did Goldman and Vanguard (among others) 'somehow' know what was going to
happen before it actually did, including the US energy giant Halliburton which 2 weeks prior to this disaster just happened to purchase the World's largest oil disaster service company. Boots & Coots'.
> Hmmmm...............
Yes Hmmmmm... -- I wonder what, if anything, in this article is true. Here is what I came up with (I got the gist of it in about 20 minutes and then spent an hour or 2 putting it down on "paper"):
I'm not sure, but I think this "Adam Dobson" blog is the primary source
for the claim I'm responding to:
http://stream.adamdodson.org/items/view/2802.
There is an "evidence" link in the article (look for the text):
" [President Obama] holds all of his wealth"
which connects to a PDF of a document labeled "Executive Branch Personnel
PUBLIC FINANCIAL DISCLOSURE REPORT". This government form would
conveniently discourage almost anyone from trying to read it. The only
thing I can easily make out is that it applies to Obama, and the largest
identified asset appears to be "U.S. Treasury Bonds" (see below).
Sandi Berns evidently put more work into reading the "evidence" on the
Adam Dobson web page. She posted the 1st comment I see (by the time you
look it may be several pages down the list) ON the Adam Dobson web page,
and she apparently enjoys Moderator status on the Dobson site:
"Sandi Behrns [Moderator] 2 days ago
Stupid, stupid, stupid. The actual documents cited & provided through
links indicate that the President holds nearly ALL HIS WEALTH is US
Treasury bills, NOT in Vanguard funds. As far as those Vanguard funds go,
they are highly diversified funds, not large holdings of individual stocks
(this is the reason Obama opted to not use a blind trust - because the
transparency is there & a conflict cannot be found.)
As for this "FSB report" that supposedly states that Obama will reap $85M
off these funds over 10 years - no link at all is provided. Hmmm.... that
would be an incredible return for retirement accounts currently totaling
at most $303,003 (yes that's ALL 6 accounts.) I know this site is not the
original author of this piece, but really - you should at least review the
purported evidence before posting."
She mentions an "FSB report" to which Adam Dobson provides no links.
Another source did supply this link: financialstabilityboard.org. The
site looks fairly intimidating to explore, and it looks to me like they
only do very high level reports; a newsflash on Obama's illicit stock
gains would look VERY out of place (not to mention I don't see one).
Now, if Rush Limbaugh doesn't mention this, we will know that it is a lie.
If he does, I'll take a 2nd look.
If none of the high visibility right wing commentators has the decency to
point out that such lies are being widely distributed[**] targeted to
their own audience, it will just confirm my impression that they are pure
"ends justifies the means" propagandists with no journalistic ethics.
I have seen this happen before with a hoax based on a misreading of a
scientific paper as claiming C02 content in the atmosphere had not
significantly grown in the last 100 or so years. If true, it would of
course be one of the biggest pieces of news EVER in support of the
anti-Admin people's position. But the big guys (i.e. those with
visibility and somethiing to lose) never touched it. If they had, all of
their audience would have been exposed to the refutations, and that would
not be a good thing for THE CAUSE. The result:
generally, the readers of such items NEVER see the miriad refutations or
at least not by anyone they trust, so millions continue to believe long
refuted claims with no merit whatsover.
I concluded after this that the strategy of the BIG right wing
commentators is to let such "throwaway" claims circulate (the Mainstream
Media never even notices them) and whether by design or otherwise, they
add powerful (though untrue) support to the claims by Limbaugh &c that
Obama is a corrupt ideologic fanatic who doesn't believe in anything, who
always voted for the most left wing bill (and also always voted "present"
on every bill), and a Marxist/Fascist.
Finally, I suspect the claim that Goldman-Sachs acted as if they knew
about the impending doom to BP Stocks may also be made up. Such claims
often are, to add the credibility of something "everybody knows" to the
main thing they are claiming.
[**] "widely distributed": There are 755 quite diverse looking hits on
GOOGLE{obama bp "$85 million" "to earn" goldman-sachs} with very few
apparent accidental matches)
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