Greece comes out with its new proposal. Here it is. Ready? It's called, "Let's cave again."

Seriously, dear readers, I am getting as tired of writing this as you are of reading it, but I feel that repetition is important.

ATHENS (Reuters) - Greece promised to implement pension and tax reforms as early as next week as the first step to securing a three-year rescue loan to cover debt obligations, according to a letter requesting the funding from European partners on Wednesday. Read more.

And what are pension and tax "reforms?"

They're fucking cuts (pensions) and increases (taxes) on workers and the poor, of course.

I keep repeating it because I want you to reach a level of incredulousness and disgust that brings you deep, deep, deep, deep, in touch with your own, true, raw, inner feelings. (Either that or, I'm really just a sadist.)

That's how the fire of revolt and revolution will be galvanized within you and within all of us. Mwhahahahaha!!!! (rubbing my hands together devilishly.)

No, really, this is bullshit.

The Optimal Savings Plan Is To Build An Awesome Team.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



Mathematician Gives Tips On How To Win $1 Billion On NCAA Basketball

Another data point in the endless stream of failures to see the full context for the local options. 

Why don't we do this for politics, and policy development? Why only during war, gambling, entertainment arts ... and crime? 

And not just to win election to a political office, but to formally attempt to predict and continually reassess and re-tune the aggregate utility of aggregate policies?

Historically, it's possible to recruit cooperation among thieves (e.g., wolves), when they all clearly sense that they can steal EVERYTHING from a weakened neighbor. Then, they enlist the awesome power of a dynamic asset - coordination - to harvest the visible static assets that they covet.

Not unexpectedly, seeing the return on coordination as ONLY the static returns, and NOT as the dynamic method itself .... is always the initial state.

It takes a much longer time to build up all the infrastructure, whether physiological or cultural, to permanently capture a bias to coordination as a desirable dynamic asset, BEFORE any available static assets are even targeted.

We in the USA need a distinctly different education and training approach, to retain and further instill appreciation for coordination itself as a more valuable asset, separable from any static assets that dynamic assets allow us to procure upon demand.

The required approach would trigger the transition from the analog of a snail-level-culture, to something analogous to a far more agile, army-ant-culture, investing in methods for hoarding coordination techniques (teamwork) rather than burdening itself with static assets (i.e., "savings"). If we focus more on generating dynamic options instead of burdening & slowing ourselves by hoarding static assets .... we could be far better off as an aggregate.

The optimal savings plan is to build a more awesome team, as a "more perfect union." One able to generate options, NOT slow itself carrying excessive static assets. Why bother with cruder & less productive forms of "saving" or hoarding? IRA = ARP (aggregate retarding process). Why are we always conflating current fiat and future options?

Yearly Democracy Vitamin Supplements: Review 1 Marriner Eccles, and Call [One Another] After Cogitating

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)




"VitaFiat" - there's no lethal dose, so even more can't hurt. (Cures mental constipation too.)

How Marriner Eccles saved America

Truly astounding reading.

"In 38 pages of testimony, he shocked the senators [of 1933] by not only precisely listing the failures of the economy, but laying out a five-point plan for fixing it."

[You have to wonder. If there were a 2nd Coming, of Marriner Eccles, would US Senators of today not only decline to invite him to testify, they'd impeach and lynch him? Sadly, I'd have to guess yes. Maybe next year WE will be smart enough to select some more learned and intelligent Congresspeople, in BOTH houses? America, Uncle Sam needs YOU ... to select smarter, less sociopathic Congresspeople.]

1933 US Senate Testimony of Marriner Eccles

1938 Marriner Eccles Address Responding to Criticisms Leveled by Orval Adams of the American Banking Association

The Marriner S. Eccles Document Collection at the St. Louis Fed Archives

ps: Eccles was a product of his times, and of course not infallible per all future challenges. He started out thinking in - at least flexible - gold std perspectives, yet nevertheless guided the USA into a currency regime where "money" is backed NOT by static assets limiting policy agility, but instead where a "fiat" currency is instead backed by the underlying dynamic asset of Public Initiative, which, by definition, can always be as agile as policy demands.