Ross Douthat’s fantastic piece in The Times “The Devil and Joe Paterno” this past weekend and his colleague Maureen Dowd’s equally powerful missive.

Penn State grad Sara “I do feel very strongly about local journalism. We’re losing it and that’s very sad” Ganim’s (and her many fans) many fantastic pieces in The Patriot-News including the original expose in March of this year, which was followed-up by a more publicized but equally scathing piece by Mark Madden.

Charles Pierce at ESPN’s Grantland repudiation of Penn State’s phony game day response to the tragedy and self-absorbed image intoxication.

Mike Francesa’s equally scathing opening of his show on WFAN in NYC.

Mr. Pierce said it perfectly when responding to the adulterated use of prayer circles and scripture by stating emphatically

“The crimes at Penn State are about the raping of children. That is all they are about. The crimes at Penn State are about the raping of children by Jerry Sandusky, and the possibility that people lied to a grand jury about the raping of children by Jerry Sandusky, and the likelihood that most of the people who had the authority at Penn State to stop the raping of children by Jerry Sandusky proved themselves to have the moral backbone of ribbon worms.”

Mr. Madden a noted bombastic figure but spot on with respect to Sandusky went on WEEI in Boston’s Dennis and Callahan Show with an even more outlandish but at this point not plausible claim. He told the interviewers

“I can give you a rumor and I can give you something I think might happen. I hear there’s a rumor that there will be a more shocking development from the Second Mile Foundation — and hold on to your stomachs, boys, this is gross, I will use the only language I can — that Jerry Sandusky and Second Mile were pimping out young boys to rich donors. That was being investigated by two prominent columnists even as I speak.”

Ms. Ganim’s recent summary of her and other’s work at The Patriot-News.

Again Ms. Ganim’s who knew what and when conspiracy piece.

WFAN’s Mike Francesa interview series as well as is his continued willingness to keep the issue on center-stage in the country’s media capital NYC.

Francesa and the Reading Eagle’s Rich Scarcella.

Francesa interview’s YES Network journalist and Penn State Grad Kim Jones.

Francesa’s November 10th show opening monologue.

Francesa’s November 9th show opening monologue.

Francesa and Jones again.

Francesa and Jones November 8th.

Francesa with FightonState.com’s Mike Brennan.

The original story breaking nationally at The Times which focused on Sandusky but equally on the indictment of Gary Schultz, the senior vice president for finance and business, and Tim Curley, the athletic director.

George Vecsey’s fantastic piece speaking to the fiscal and moral capture of communities like State College, PA by big time NCAA football only surpassed from an opinion perspective by that of Mr. Pierce.

Dissension amongst Pennsylvania’s lawmakers as they scramble to take cover in the wake of their dysfunction and Paterno idolatry being uncovered for the whole world to see.

The fact that

Judge Who Set No Bail for Penn State Sex Abuse Suspect Volunteered for Him

AND of course if you dare AND you should dare the Sandusky-Grand-Jury-Presentment itself.

This is  sad story because you have a man in Joe Paterno that presumably for many many years lived an exemplary life only to be swallowed up by the temptations of absolute power and the image he had commendably created. He had a predator in his midst that he felt should simply be relieved of his keys and access to the locker rooms. This is vintage Catholic Church stuff but in this case you have a legacy that will be remembered for facilitating countless acts of sexual molestation by Mr. Sandusky. I found the Grand Jury PDF extremely hard to read but more importantly found myself amazed that apparently Mr. Paterno read the same thing….AND DID NOTHING!

Mr. Paterno is probably the most important man in the history of the state of Pennsylvania and that is not an overstatement. He represented the right way to comport yourself as a coach and member of the community. Was it all a lie? Probably not but at the very least Mr. Paterno’s errors of omission proved equally perilous relative to Mr. Sandusky’s errors of commission. Penn State Athletic Director Tim Curley and vice president for business and finance Gary Schultz are being charged with perjure for their failure to report what they were told by a graduate assistant coach to the appropriate authorities. Immediately upon silencing himself the aforementioned GA was promoted again and again and again. I wonder why? Looks like a duck, walks like a duck…

Sadly Penn State students continue to chant “We Want Joe” and “Joe Pa-Ter-No” in support of their beloved coach. That is fine but I hope they understand this is not a game and very serious allegations are currently being investigated with the potential to render their support of Joe Pa looking childish at best and completely insensitive to the condition of the victims at worst. I would suggest they focus on their classes and hope that all of these horrible allegations are a bad dream. Innocent until proven guilty but the trend line is heading in the wrong direction.

Calling all designers! Should our money be the symbol of freedom or the symbol of slavery? Liberty, equity, currency. Native ancient sea. I see sand over dollars. From which mint the coins by the sun and moon.

Man sport work earth place art flavor sex and love in letters of the name. No need for want. The liberation equation.

Send the curriers to the mint. Bring me seven heaven sent. Go global viral spinning spiral.

They speak to the core within us. They come from the sky above us. The angels walk among us.

Taxation as tithing for the needy greedy. Pay your fair share, for they won’t pay theirs. We’ll pay them forever more, they’ll keep us the debtor poor.

The garden path of enlightenment. The hidden seek the roots, hold the tree by water. Cultivate many rows. There’s nothing better than getting closer to god through careful communication with nature.

As crazy as it all becomes, you’ve got to remember – the beginning has only just begun. By far the best is yet to come.

If you think about it, it’s truly beautiful that we truly do have everything we need within each other. Every conceivable need on this planet is created and fed by this planet. The world is the blueprint of its own existence. You were born of it, you will die of it – every being that’s been and will ever be.

The strength of civilizations is in the ingenuity of its inhabitants, be they people, pennies or particles. How smart is your money? The world is bathing in currency. It’s an electrical energy with origins beyond the stars.

From the morning coffee to the molecular mitosis, the trillion and one transactions of the Tao – each generating a flash of immortal reckoning.

Transmissions, receipts, bundled packages. We determine the value and equity of exchanges: entirely arbitrary, entirely subjective, entirely speculative. Value potential, each person is equal to one seven billionth of this world and her resources. Some take more, some have less. True religion.

You need nothing to fix the world and nowhere to turn. Each is equally a part of the problem and equally a part of the solution, infinitely innocent at fault.

Seen from a certain surface of the circle there is no center. So much to learn, so little time. How soon could you be here, hurry up mastermind on a mission? The book of life takes for ever. I will never master, I will only always learn.

1. $560.1 million – this represents the total handouts to Solyndra, with $535 from the Department of Energy and a $25.1 million tax break from the state of California…0.015% of Obama’s 2011 Federal Budget.

2. $700 billion – this represents the Bush-Paulson carried out and Obama-Geithner stewarded Troubled Asset Relief Program…18.97% of Obama’s 2011 Federal Budget

3. $1 trillion – unilaterally issued Federal Reserve program called the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) designed to infuse money into the pockets of already under water consumers with the aim of goosing consumption…27.00% of Obama’s 2011 Federal Budget

4. $144billion to $323 billion – the first number represents what the disastrous F35 was supposed to cost and the second what it will cost when it is completed…8.75% of Obam’s 2011 Federal Budget

5. $22 billion 30 people – the cost in dollars and deaths of the V-22 (aka Osprey) one of the Pentagon  and the Military Industrial Complex’s favorite cash cows along with the aforementioned F35. As NPR’s Graham Smith reported:

“In a nutshell, the story of the Osprey is it cost more in time, money and lives than anything else the Marine Corps ever bought”

Three major accidents gave the Osprey its bad reputation and earned it the nickname “The Widowmaker.”

The worst, in Arizona in 2000, killed 19 Marines.”

SO when considering who to pick on and who to hold accountable by any means necessary it is important to acknowledge that the folks at Solyndra are deserving of the criticism they are receiving for extorting money from the federal government, but it is way more important to address the Big Fish as it were feeding at the tit of the Pentagon. I can’t defend Solyndra’s actions but I hope that this brief post put them in perspective relative to a far more important and costly addiction to tools of war and the propping up of Wall Street. The Occupy Wall Street movement has brought attention to the crimes of Wall & Broad. An even greater level of extortion has been occurring in the parallel and opaque universe that revolves around the Pentagon.

At least Solyndra was an attempt to wean us off our addiction to hydrocarbons, while the Pentagon could be excused for being under the impression that it’s charter is solely to perpetuate and lubricate that addiction.

According to the FDIC you Mr. Big Banker (i.e., 109 banks with more than $10 billion in assets) have no qualms with giving depositors a measly 0.8% annually, while the country’s 7,651 local/smaller banks paid 1.29% vs. values of 0.49% and 0.69% in 2009 [275], respectively, even though it was you not them that we the taxpayer bailed out and we Generation X will continue to feel the austerity backlash of for years to come. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or a fifth-grader for that matter much in the way of mental exertion to understand how easy it is to mint huge profits when you borrow money from The Fed or investors for the aforementioned paltry rates and lend it to private citizens or the Tim Geithner led Treasury at 3-4%, however, in doing so you Mr. Banker are failing to do what you most likely state in your charters “furnishing money to firms and funding capital investments.” [276] We need our banks to act as utilities not casinos. Banks must stop making in the words of the Bank of England’s Andrew Haldane mirages look like miracles and just do your boring but admittedly useful service to society absent extraordinarily leverage and quarterly bonuses. If they refuse Generation X must by any means necessary make them stop because their reckless gallivanting is only hurting the long-term viability of this country and in a more circuitous way this planet and possibly even the true principles of democracy. This will involve Generation X when we get the reins of power putting serious constraints on capitalism and more specifically the financial sector including the ten steps listed below:

1) always and everywhere demand that Wall Street mark all their assets and liabilities to market.

2) decreasing leverage ratios to less than 10:1 (See LTCM),

3) increasing counter-cyclical capital requirements to ≥19% or even 40-50% of risk-adjusted assets (See Eugene Fama[1], Switzerland[2], and the People’s Bank of China[3]) effectively reinstating a crucial provision of the Depression-era and highly effective Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 [277, 278]. Increasing capital requirements is imperative from a structural perspective regardless of the country or generation in question because as Simon Johnson former IMF chief economist put it “equity capital is…“loss-absorbing,” meaning that only after losses wipe out all of the equity do they need to be apportioned between creditors. Banks’ capital, therefore, is what stands between bad loans and insolvency.” [279] However, the pushback from banks against such a TBTF firewall lies in their being a slave to returns on equity that are not adjusted for risk, which means that the socialized risk and the privatized profit are immense at the peaks and the troughs alike. Banks across the world including liberal bastions like Sweden – where capital requirements at its Big Four average 12.55% well above US institutions [280] – will forever resist this idea as “a bit strange” or “not realistic” because it prevents them from levering the farm and projected fictitiously robust quarterly earnings. To this hyperbolic phraseology former Chilean Minister of Finance Andres Velasco suggests all non-bankers “would be well advised to ask for another drink.” [281]Capital resisters have friends in high places included The Big Banks eternally unquestioning servant the New York Fed, actually would decrease capital requirements an amazing and pompous proclamation when you consider how this bank’s former boss Tim Geithner, current boss and former Goldman Sachs executive Bill Dudley, and its entire board of directors are essentially cherry picked by the banks it is charged with overseeing and hopefully scolding in bad times (Note: And the banks wonder why Main Street is skeptical of the phrase “self-regulation”.) [282]. However, even the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal far from a liberal or socialist enclave ardently backed a 14% capital floor across all implicit and explicitly TBTF firms. Unfortunately the Basel III committee that conjures up capital requirement policy on a global scale sided with the MegaBanks in requiring no more than 10% and as little as 7% for the 30 largest TBTF instutions globally, but the rub is that these requirements would not be instituted until 2019. As Jamie Dimon told his daughter when she asked him to define ‘financial crisis’ “’it’s the type of thing that happens every five, ten, seven, years.’ And she said: ‘why is everybody so surprised?’ So we shouldn’t be surprised…” So that means that if The Great Recession officially ended  in 2009 we could potentially incur 2-3 crises before the Basel consortia get their head out of their ass and take offensive rather than defensive and asymmetrically feeble measures to insure that when banks fail only the shareholders and employees pay the toll. Instead Basel has permitted another wider and deeper case of socialized risk and privatized profits for the next decade at the very least.

4) limiting loan-deposit spreads to ≤4.5-5%, marking everything to market all the time no exceptions,

5) graduated bank taxes based on the percentage of funding that is short-term/”hot”[4],

6) putting a 2% ceiling on the percentage of US deposits individual banks can have at any one time,

7) pushing the murky world of derivatives trading onto Over-The-Counter (OTC) exchanges and eliminating non-agriculture (i.e., necessity vs. portfolio allocation decisions) and certain energy sector participants entirely (i.e., those overweight on derivatives due to unsafe capital cushions), what Michael Masters of Masters Capital Management, LLC respectively called “Bona Fide” Physical Hedgers and Wall Street bank controlled. Translation: leave the agricultural hedging to farmers not Gordon Gecko-types whose flippant money misallocation has a disproportionate effect on global food prices given that equity markets are 240 times larger than commodity futures contracts *$44 trillion vs. $180 billion in 2004). This radical notion was supported in January 2009 by of all people Abdalla el-Badri OPEC’s secretary-general in the aftermath of his group’s most volatile peak-to-trough ever, although what we are talking about here is across the board derivatives in the commodity arena, because while oil powers machines food powers and sustains people [283].

- Worse still speculation demand is exponentially and positively correlated with commodity/food price increases creating a nasty and pro-cyclical Positive Feedback Loop of Mass Destruction (PFLMD).

- The Traditional Speculators “provide liquidity by both buying and selling futures”, while the nascent Index Speculator Mafia “buy futures and then roll their positions by buying calendar spreads. They never sell. Therefore, they consume liquidity and provide zero benefit to the futures markets.” (i.e., Zero Social Benefit!)

- Speculative commodity-linked Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) had $277 in investments at the end of 2009, which was 50 times the $5.5 billion at the turn of the 21^st century.

- Mega lobbying shops like the Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable are going to have to do better than the pseudo-research they released via their intellectual servants at Keybridge Research that spoke to derivatives regulation as a 160,000 job and $6.7 billion corporate spending destroyer. As even Keybridge’s president – and former Clinton National Economic Council member – Robert Wescott said when confronted by The Times Andrew Ross Sorkin “the client had asked us” to put the report together. “It was a hypothetical study.” [284] Well that is a fine how do you do in the direction of sound and empirically derived scientific research. Just do what “the client” asks and the scientific method be damned! And economist wonder why their credibility is waning with every passing day and documentary (See “Inside Job”. No really see it you’ll be blown away by the lack of academic integrity and transparency in the likes of Columbia’s Glenn Hubbard and Frederic Mishkin or Harvard’s Martin Feldstein).

establishing a predatory lender watch list and agency,

9) reengineering bonus payouts in a manner similar to what is commonly called “contingent core Tier-1 capital” or “CoCo” whereby deferred, say 10-years, payments convert to bonds in the long-term if bank’s Tier-1 capital falls below some predefined safety cutoff (See 2 above) preventing the intoxication brought on by short-term profitable but highly levered ventures [285, 286]. This would better synchronize managers’ schemes with those of shareholders and prevent needless large scale bailouts based on “size, interconnectedness, lack of substitutability, global (cross-jurisdictional) activity and complexity”, which a report by Reuters implicates 30 of the planet’s largest commercial banks including HSBC, Deutsche Bank, and JP Morgan Chase [287],

9) eliminating the influence and conflicts of interest associated with the Big Three rating (i.e., Moody’s Corp, Fitch Rating[5]), Standard and Poor’s) and accounting (i.e., Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, Prcewaterhouse Coopers, Ernst & Young, and KPMG[6]) firms as both trios are corrupt and painfully lagging indicators of reality OR explicitly writing into law that the rating firms must be paid at all times by purchasers rather than issuers, and

10) a federal version of New York’s 1921 Martin Act which is currently being used to investigate Goldman “Vampire Squid” Sachs and broadly speaking gives attorney generals “broad powers to pursue financial corruption and a wide berth to conduct civil or criminal investigations by issuing subpoenas, taking depositions and compelling document production.” [288] The Act was employed with a high degree of efficacy and bite by New York’s recent AGs turned Governor Andrew Cuomo and Eliot Spitzer.

11) demanding that all bonuses for all employees be directly coupled to a given bank’s most risky ventures in the form of restricted stocks that can’t be sold an earlier than 5-10 years from the day they are issued, and require that at least eighty cents of every dollar in revenues comes from raising capital for companies and advising small businesses on how to grow and increase employment in this country not somewhere else. As it stands only fourteen cents in every dollar goes towards the latter, while the eight cents mentioned is derived from buying and selling of securities according to John Cassidy [289].

[B] As was noted earlier Switzerland’s Big Two Credit Suisse and UBS have combined assets in excess of 6.5×GDP, which means if they can impose these types of restrictions we can most assuredly to the same or stronger here in The States where the same figure for our 8,430 FDIC-insured banks is 70% of GDP.

[C] In the immediate aftermath of The Fed’s QE2 bombshell the People’s Bank of China announced its equivalent of an increase in capital although they call it the Required Reserve Ratio (RRR) to 18.5%. The PBC wanted to “sterilize over-liquidity and get the money supply under control in order to prevent inflation or over-heating” in the event that “hot” capital began to flow en masse into China as it was only 1997 that their Asian Tiger neighbors failed to do so and were scorched once by speculative yield hogs and secondly by the IMF and World Bank’s lending based on vertical and lateral imposition of austerity.

[D] Short-term/”hot” makes banks great and small more susceptible to liquidity crises and likely to require substantial bailouts.

[E] The rating agency’s good seal of approval was instrumental if not required to create the $3.2 trillion of subprime mortgages that exploded before our eyes in 2007-2008.

[F] This was once the Big Five until a little firm called Enron and its accountant Arthur Andersen blew up in 2002. In March of 2010 we saw a redux of the disastrous consequences of the intimate accountant-banker relationship with the Repo 105 scandal that embroiled Ernst & Young’s tacit approval of Lehman Brothers construction of such transactions. Repo 105 quite simply is an accounting trick whereby a firm in this case Lehman Brothers sells some of its assets in the short-term (i.e., days or weeks) to another party and books the transaction as a sale even though the cash it receives to delever is used – following a public audit of its balance sheet – to repurchase or Repo those dodgy assets with interest. Lehman performed this kind of dodgy accounting with the assistance of Ernst & Young just before the end of financial quarters in order to facilitate its balance sheets mustard test. This was a practice that was implicitly approved of throughout Wall Street and by the SEC but one that former NY Attorney General and current Governor Andrew Cuomo didn’t take kindly to bringing charges – that were later dropped in the summer of 2011 – against Lehman’s accountant in December of 2010. Merry Christmas Ernst & Young! This Repo market boomed just prior to The Great Recession to $12 trillion according to Yale economist Gary Gorton. In normal times these transaction don’t remove the highly levered assets from the bank’s balance sheet but low and behold Ernst & Young broke out the whiteout for their friends over at Lehman, with the “105” coming from the fact that the bonds Lehman was selling were worth 105% of what they were being sold for allowing the buyer to make a healthy profit upon repurchase days later. According to the Chapter 11 Proceedings Report filed by the law firm Jenner & Block “Lehman did not disclose its use…of Repo 105 to the Government, to the rating agencies, to its investors, or to its own Board.” Notice the report said nothing about Lehman’s accountant Ernst & Young. This Repo 105 technique was a nontrivial component of Lehman’s efforts to stay afloat as it was used to push $50 billion off of its ledger in Q2 of 2008.

In this time the wires are the winners. They spring from the earth in ever greater volume, in a brilliant array of color and function. From the microscopic to the transformers, the earth is a great ball of growing wire conducting currency. Armies defend the wire; banks, doctors and schools wrapped in it. The rapidly evolving synthetic cells of an electronic organism. It’s all about making the connections.

Circles and cycles the lesson plan. From nothing to something, and back again.

Time is the oldest and most highly evolved of animate organisms. Guaranteed to live the longest, too. Runs forwards and backwards. All things have time, all things take time; time takes all things. From the time you were born, to the time you will die.

Ups and downs, inside man. For those that haven’t heard, the story went something like this…

The global economy is estimated at seventy trillion dollars. There are seven billion people on the planet. Each of us had a birth worth thousands of dollars yet we’re born in debt: national debt, generational debt, personal debt, global debt. Where does this inevitably lead? What is the potential?

Planetary population has grown to current 7 billion from approximately 2 billion in less than 50 years. Population has grown, the ability to exploit and extract resources has grown, demand has grown; the supply of resources, though, has diminished radically.

Our entire global economy–from top to bottom–from energy to products–from wealth to poverty–depends on our supply of resources. The supply of resources has not grown. Gold supplies have not grown, timber supplies have not grown; Coal? No. Plutonium? No. Fresh water? No. Oil? No. The list goes on…

If the supply of resources does not grow, economies cannot grow. We’ve created and sold more products driven by resource exploitation, and we’ve expanded the circulation of currency through debt creation, but finite supplies must now be divided among seven billion people (as opposed to 2 billion previously). Your money is worth less, products more expensive. It’s a maddening cycle.

What’s worse, the radical depletion of resources has upset the balance of nature triggering catastrophic environmental consequences including extraordinary extinction events, crushing volumes of waste, poisoned water, polluted air, the melting of polar ice caps, massive crop failures, extreme weather, flooding deluges and severe droughts.

It’s bigger than banks, it’s bigger than governments, and it’s far greater than our personal issues, religious biases, etc. This planet has sustained itself along core principles for billions of years, evolving the very nature of existence through constant conservation and change. Banks, fiat currencies, Federal Reserve notes, assets, liabilities and capital play a great role in our geopolitical and financial schemes; Time plays an even greater role.

Make no mistake: The era of debt-based economic models of ever-increasing consumption of finite resources cannot survive and will never be recovered. There will be no economic recovery, no end to the depression. There cannot be; politicians can’t fix it, governments can’t fix it – neither can religious leaders, bankers, rich people, titans of industry, etc. Money and laws cannot fix the inherent flaws of debt-based consumption.

Those with the long view from the top of the ladder already know this. Many among them are staking out their share of the remaining resources and hoping we’ll fight to the death for the meager remains.

See how every penny of equity is being extracted from the global economy through crushing interest payments on loans made from thin air? See how people across the planet are rising up, calling for fair wages, fair pricing, and stable livelihoods? See how we’ve been turned against each other along dividing lines of color, religion, income, occupation, sex, nationality and more? Do you see how all of this inevitably leads to intense conflict?

This is it. This is where every last one of us must stop and realize: the only acceptable way out of this situation is to pull together – across every divide we’ve ever known – and build equity from the ground up. Distribution of wealth must be equitable, distribution of responsibility must be equitable; distribution of power equitable, and distribution of liability equitable. United we stand, divided we fall hard.

Push forward with community spirit, light hearts and the brilliance of ingenuity. The best is yet to come, and the greatest age of human development has only just begun. We have all the tools, information and resources we need within each other.

If only 1% of us (70 million people) worked together, we could build a bridge to the moon! With 10% working harmoniously in focused concentration, we could develop sustainable materials, clean and replenish our oceans, feed the planet, restore biodiversity, evolve renewable energy sources, advance technology, insure health, educate each other, develop a stable global economy, and provide for future generations.

If 50% of us worked together, 3.5 billion people, we will have assembled the largest and most capable force the world has ever known.

If we all worked together, we could solve the world’s problems in less than a week and ensure comfortable, meaningful, high quality lives for all.

The path forward is clear: we must use currently available resources to create and secure the resources of the future. We must recognize the value and potential of every living being, and plan our lives accordingly. We must allow for intellectual, spiritual and technical growth, with placement and purpose for future generations as they inherit the infrastructures we’ve developed.

Ready to join the team and get to work? Spread this message far and wide. Together we’ll build a cooperatively held Citizens’ Conservation and Creativity Corps. We’ll create real work and meaningful occupation solving the planet’s problems. We’ll find fulfillment, purpose and community. We’ll provide the insurance of knowing our brothers and sisters will take our ailing tired bodies into their hands in restoration of health and wellness. We’ll find our leaders in working together. We’ll figure it out as we go, and look for intelligent solutions together. We can work together, we will work together, and we must work together. Secured survival through shared struggle.

I have pasted my response to the show below because while it deserves the attention it gets PTSD has a new cousin in The Great Recession Fallout which I simply describe as Post-Unemployment Stress Disorder. I should know I have it and have it bad on some days better on others………..even though I now have a job!

“It’s time for a third way,” Kotlikoff writes. “The Republicans and Democrats have become dangerous extremists. They want to spend nothing or spend too much, enrich the rich or strip them bare, regulate nothing or everything, rule the world or wall it off. Their only point of agreement is that the other party is destroying the country. On this, they’re both right.”

To read the rest of Kotlikoff’s Bloomberg editorial, please click here. Let us know what you think in the comments below. Cheers!

It was also nice to hear Karzai call it how it is with respect to our motives in Afghanistan and for that matter Iraq. However, he has zero credibility at this point given his willingness to take from his Sugar Daddy with one hand and launch invective infused fireballs with the other. The same goes for our hectoring of Mexico and infusion of US made weaponry and technology to stop the flow of drugs northward without looking within at our structural issues related to drug addiction and the outlawing of benign drugs like marijuana and hallucinogenics. Our prisons are chalk full of petty criminals as even our right-wing dominated Supreme Court recently acknowledged albeit along partisan lines.

Karzai is not worth fighting for, dying for, or defending within the confines of the UN. He is to too greedy and hypocritical to prop up. He reminds me of that kid in high school or grade school that had a mental stranglehold on the strongest but dumbest kid in class and used to pillory the behemoth when he wasn’t around only to ascribe his words to his arch enemies when the unsuspecting “heavy” returned. Karzai will tell Obama and Bush before him anything to keep the likes of Blackwater and our military at his beck and call as he networks and profiteers, while simultaneously telling any Afghani that still listens to him how he is doing all he can to lift the yoke of oppression. He is doing nothing of the sort and in the meantime we are being played in the name of heroine and the consolidation of tribal power. Wait that sounds an awful lot like the post-Lehman bailout designed by MegaBank insider Hank Paulson! Hellow NEWMAN!!!!