The Battle For The Cloud

In past posts  I have complained about Quantitative Easing being a stealth bank bailout.  Now the cat is out of the bag, as the man responsible for orchestrating QE confesses it is  “the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time”.

In this brutal Wall Street Journal op ed, he confesses paints a bleak picture of the Quantitative Easing and its effectiveness:

Even by the Fed’s sunniest calculations, aggressive QE over five years has generated only a few percentage points of U.S. growth. By contrast, experts outside the Fed, such as Mohammed El Erian at the Pimco investment firm, suggest that the Fed may have created and spent over $4 trillion for a total return of as little as 0.25% of GDP (i.e., a mere $40 billion bump in U.S. economic output). Both of those estimates indicate that QE isn’t really working.

Yet we continue with the same approach, trying to spur the economy by lowering interest rates, even though rates are near zero.  Why has no thought been given to lowering the payroll tax or some other plan to put more money in the pockets of the working poor?  Instead we continue to prop up Wall Street institutions by weakening the asset base of the US Treasury.

I doubt the US Treasury will ever be able to reverse the damage done to our balance sheet.  I just hope we can avoid the next financial panic until we get over the previous one.

One of the things I find interesting about Initiative 522 is the amount of national attention this is getting based on the amount of money pouring in from out of state.  As of this writing, according to the Washington Public Disclosure Commission those against initiative 522 has raised over 30 million dollars, as compared to the Yes on 522 organizations who have raised over 7 million dollars.

I have looked through the C3′s to get an idea as to who the contributors are, and it looks like (to no one’s surprise) its agribusiness on the ‘No’ side vs the Organic food providers and distributors on the ‘Yes’ side.  This Article give a great summary of the breakdown.

The other interesting thing that can be found in the public filings is how the Yes on 522 and No on 522 spend their money.  If you are in the mood for some casual reading – just skim the C4 documents on the No on 522 committee on the Public Disclosure Commission Website to see what their money is spent on.  Looks to me like a lot spent on professional fees to out of state organizations or individuals located in Olympia.   It makes the spending by the Yes on 522 look spartan in comparison, looks like they have just hired a few local activists and buy their supplies at Sears and OfficeMax.

So which way should I vote?  Vote with agribusiness to suppress the labeling of GMO’s, in order to help stem the growing backlash against genetically modified food?  Or vote with the Organic producers and distributors, who are trying to persuade the public to buy more organics and shun the agribusiness food supply.  I guess if all that the Yes on 522 side is asking for is to label the food (after all – organics are labeled) – then I have to vote for the side of more information for the consumer.  I don’t buy the argument that agribusiness is spending 30 million plus because they don’t want to spend extra money for a labeling change.  At least I know why the Organics companies are supporting it.

 So count me in for yes on 522.  Lets have more information on what is in our food, and let agribusiness give us more information to convince us why we shouldn’t be afraid of GMO’s.  I think that’s a debate that needs to happen, and 522 gets us going in that direction.

Interesting things being proposed in Switzerland that hopefully will start a worldwide trend.  The Swiss will be voting on whether to limit executive compensation to 12 times the salary of the lowest paid employee.  Another initiative to give every Swiss citizen $2800 a month qualified to be voted on.

A great summary here:  http://www.businessinsider.com/behind-the-swiss-unconditional-income-iniative-2013-10

To quote from one of the backers in the article:

We are not proposing a minimum income – we are proposing an unconditional income.

A minimum wage reduces freedom – because it is an additional rule. It tries to fix a system that has been outdated for a while. It is time to partly disconnect human labor and income. We are living in a time where machines do a lot of the manual labor – that is great – we should be celebrating.

This fits into my post regarding peak labor – maybe the Swiss are addressing the same issue with forward thinking, rather than the US trying to attack the problem with Quantitative Easing.  Also, note this forward thinking is coming via public initiative.  Here in Washington State, public initiative forced governments to deal with the legalization of Marijuana – something entrenched governments should have been discussing for 30 years.  The idea of public initiative process seems counter productive in a government where people are elected to deal with issues.  However, it seems to be a useful tool to force representitive government to listen to new ideas.

It is of no surprise to me that there is increased talk of secession around various parts of the country.

http://billmoyers.com/2013/09/12/batty-secession-schemes-gain-a-foothold-among-rural-conservatives/

The US Government is currently partially shut down and congress has been deeply divided for several years.  The media has been fragmented to reporting news that its constituency wants to hear, we have conservative news channels and liberal news channels.  It seems America is drifting to be a blue culture and a red culture, with little interest on each side to respect or listen to the other’s ideas.

So as our country’s cultural and political philosophy’s continue to digress, and our federal government becomes more dysfunctional, why wouldn’t you see  push on both sides to ‘do their own thing’?  If Americans of red and blue persuasion share little in common and can’t stand each other, what is the glue that encourages them to share a government?  Is there anything on the horizon that shows a lessening of  the split into dark red or dark blue philosophies?

The secession movements may be batty now, but think of the headlines and news appearances that could be made by talking up a secession movement.  I think its inevitable that at some point some enterprising politician, pseudo-politician, or cable news talking-head will grab this idea and build a movement and base of support around secession.    Until we start seeing hope of a federal government making progress governing under a shared philosophy, I fear this will gain popularity and even further our philosophical differences.

Curious things are happening in Kenya.   Last year, oil was discovered in Kenya.  In the last Month or so, Kenya has signed an oil exploration agreement with Barclays Bank.  Apparently Barclays thinks there is more oil to be found.  And last month Kenya signed an agreement with China to build a pipeline and offshore oil refinery.

And this week we have  a terrorist attack inside a Kenyon mall – an attack reportedly made up of a multinational cast of terrorists.  With Syria currently at a stalemate, perhaps the proxy war is shifting to Kenya.  Kenya’s resources are up for grabs, and now is the time for countries to get a piece of this new found wealth.

Maybe the oil in Kenya isn’t enough to draw all the foreign attention that Syria is getting.  But it will be interesting to see if terrorist activity, civil war or calls for regime change start to be mentioned.  So it will be interesting to see what the next moves are in Kenya.