Civil liberties are such intangible concepts that they are always vulnerable to clunking arguments like "it's not a problem unless you're doing something wrong" and "it's necessary to prevent x or y or z." It's hard to say exactly what we suffer if we allow things like this, and hard to point to a clear cause and effect. But if you look at free societies, and if you look at societies with extensive state surveillance, and ask yourself where you would rather live, the answer is clear. That is what civil liberties are, and that is their value. As governments seek more and more information about us - simply because they can - they become more and more capable of controlling our actions. Knowledge about us is power over us. Unless we believe that governments are beneficent expressions of the popular will (in which case you're a fascist or a communist), we should always seek to limit government power to no more than it needs to be. And we shouldn't listen to government's opinions about what its powers need to be.

So as far as you're concerned, im1dc, it's all right for the government to have totalitarian powers, as long as they aren't abusing these powers. But in order to win these powers, they had to violate the Constitution, pass laws legalizing what they did, violate those laws by doing more, pass laws legalizing that, pressure the American Press into not publishing, and lie to the American people. Meanwhile, they've abused other powers by torturing people, by plotting coups in other countries, by building the world's largest prison system, by imprisoning activists without charge and without trial for refusing to testify to grand juries assembled to find crimes to pin on activists, by coordinating police violence against Occupy, etc. Apologists for this surveillance culture often state, "if you ain't got nothing to hide then you ain't got nothing to fear!." I think this is naive at best, since that which is considered 'subversive behavior' or even 'terrorist activity' can be changed at the whim of the watcher. As usual, 'the watcher' has no desire to subject himself to the same transparency he would like you to passively accept.

A "conspiracy theory" is a mental model for sorting out the truth. It is like the proverbial finger pointing at the moon. Don't obsess over the finger. It is the moon you should be looking at.

A well-engineered and designed product speaks for itself. It doesn't need any advertising or marketing for consumers to buy it,Eric. Any company that spends more money on advertising and marketing than on engineering and design has got a lousy and inferior product on their hands. No amount of marketing magic or advertising gimmicks can change that fact. It don't take long before consumers realize that all of this eye candy and slick ads that have been relentlessly bombarding their senses is deeply rooted in deception and lies.

These and other subsidies need to be scrapped, including the utterly idiotic ethanol program. Ethanol from corn makes no economic sense without the massive government subsidy. Sugar-based ethanol, however, is an entirely different proposition. We can buy sugar-based ethanol from Brazil for less than we can produce corn-based ethanol here. The ethanol subsidy was also poorly thought out. Because of this subsidy, the aquifer in parts of Kansas will now take 1000 years to refill.

Samsung overtaking Apple as the world’s biggest smartphone seller would do enormous damage to US manufacturing, Rusty. That's assuming Apple can still be classified as a US manufacturer. I no longer classify it that way. To me, Apple has become nothing more than a giant sissified retail and marketing outlet. All of the tough and important work that goes into making i-phones is done overseas in the Asia-Pacific Rim. This is what happens when a company places more value and emphasis on marketing than it does on manufacturing and when its corporate suite becomes completely disconnected with its shop floor.

Food Stamp programs are attached to farm subsidy programs for one reason, and one reason only: To make sure that farm subsidies pass. Separating the two would ensure the end of handouts to farmers, most of whom are rich corporate oligarchs. That's why most red-state, farm states members of the House and Senate want to keep them together.

The Deflation camp is well established. No Velocity means no Inflation. Deflation is a lot harder to beat than Inflation. The millions upon millions of unemployed people are aging and becoming larger all the time. Dreaming about a well paid job? Forget it, you're most likely doomed to be a service sector employee (a modern day bloody slave at WalMart). And by the way, where's the tax revenue going to come from to support the bought-and-paid for gangsters in Washington? The recovery is nothing more than a sick joke and everyone knows it. Our politicians in Washington, the Lobby groups, and the Banksters in New York are all a bunch of sinister crooks.

ObamaCare hides costs even FURTHER with the "exchanges," which are really just a market-friendly way of distributing federal subsidies. Without incentives to compare costs, patients will not do so. And so the open loop nature of medical spending in the US continues unabated.

QE has given us an empty-calorie economy. Once the sugar high wears off, it's all downhill from there.

Back when QE was time limited, interest rates actually went down when QE stopped. But we do know that the stock market started to go down shortly after QE was stopped (go look at a graph of history to convince yourself). Every time the market dropped, Ben panicked and restarted QE. Now that the BOJ has joined Ben in this mad bubblicious money printing, we have a double pump pushing up stocks. The Fed and BOJ can't stop QE because the market would go down, and then at some undefined threshold the entire financial system would go down with it. But even this double pump will run out of gas and stop working eventually. They are already at max QE and more won't do any good (although the ECB could still do some QE to pump up stocks). Once the QE stops working, it is game over. My guess is that once the Fed and the BOJ (and the ECB???) are completely out of bullets, it will be like a supermassive star that has burned all its nuclear fuel down to iron. Nothing can then stop the collapse. Nothing.

Problem is that the people in the Middle pay for all of the massive costs inflicted by fiscal and especially monetary polices based on Keynesian economics. They pay for it through taxation for the people on public welfare and they pay for it through all of the corporate handouts for Wall Street. Question remains is if their income taxes and their zero-interest bank accounts can support the people at the lower end and the people at the higher end. With all of this ZIRP and QE money printing, the day will come to repay all of this Debt. It is unfortunate that the people in the Middle will shoulder all of the burden.

This is working out just like they planned. More money for the usually subsidized upper 5% and more financial burden on everyone else. Meanwhile, the sheeple drive around cluelessly to the next shopping experience. Expect nothing to change until this untenable system falls apart under its own weight, crushing the lower 85-95%. The upper 5% will just move on to new hunting grounds like they always do.

No austerity for the hospital industry, either. Even though hospitals were supposed to have their payments from Medicare cut by 2% this year, TPTB at Medicare and Medicaid decided to raise their payments to hospitals by 0.8%. Which is why hospital stocks rallied 3.6-6.5% last week. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-29/hospital-stocks-rally-as-medicare-tempers-budget-cut-blow.html This is totally unwarranted given that of all the healthcare providers, hospitals are by far the most costly and inefficient at providing care. Exempting hospitals from sequestration cuts will only make our costly and inefficient healthcare system even more costly and inefficient.

I'm in favor of corporations being considered individuals if, and only if, the CEO will be imprisoned when the corporation violates the law. And, as Tabbi said in his inimitable fashion, it would have to be a "real, pound-you-in-the-ass prison."

The power that the banks and financial institutions have obtained means they can frequently dictate policy to the government. In this new form of inverted totalitarianism, it will be interesting to see if this much power and influence in one sector of civil society will cause even more social unrest. Given what we have seen in Cyprus, Spain and Greece, my guess is yes.

Thanks to neoliberal corporatism and its stranglehold on American politics, the revolving door of fraud and misconduct between Big Pharma and the FDA isn't gonna be shut down anytime soon.

I love this new "escape velocity" meme from PIMCO's Mohamed El-Erian: http://www.streettalklive.com/daily-x-change/1691-mohamed-el-erian-putting-it-all-together.html I suppose the mega-rich bankers and investment advisers such as El-Erian fancy themselves pilots in some heroic Rocket Man (TM) adventure. But let me be the first to say -- you guys are not heroes and you don't have a magic space suit. Yes, you're rich. You made a lot of money investing other people's money, win, lose or draw. Congratulations for figuring out that you could make so much money telling people who earned their money how to invest it. You and your ilk are parasites and the problem is you. Our economy was just fine before it became not about making things, but about investing the money of those who do and making more than them in the process, leading more and more people to stop making things and instead focusing them on being concerned solely with making money from their money. Major Tom El-Erian, you floating around in your tin can far above the moon is what's wrong with the world today! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WApmrN4jdXg

Rusty, I took care of a patient last week who was hospitalized for intractable hypertensive and unexplained anemia. Well, it turns out that she was admitted to the very same hospital where she's been employed full time as a temp worker for well over two year. Despite this so-called "non-for-profit, safety-net" hospital making record-breaking profits, enough to pay its CEO well over a million dollars a year in wages and benefits, it's too cheap, as well as too greedy, to provide healthcare benefits for many of its lowest paid employees. Due to her lack of health insurance, the charity care program, which receives most of its funding through the Medicare Trust Fund, will ultimately cover the costs of her hospital stay. So here we have yet another situation where a non-for-profit, safety-net provider is profiting off the backs of the taxpayers! And believe me, ObamaCare will do absolutely nothing to slow down, much less cut off, the overly fat-laden gravy train which feeds the medical-charity-care corporate complex!

"Health Reform Fuels Turf War": http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20130426/WIRE/130429660 I suggest that insurance reform allow us to obtain care from veterinarians. Vets (even non-specialists) have at least twice the training of a nurse practitioner, optometrist, pharmacist, or any other so-called physician extenders. Vets perform full exams, minor procedures in-office and can prescribe appropriate medication. The vet takes more time with my dog than the pediatrician took with my child. The exam table is a tad industrial, but I'll deal with that.

Essentially the macro data is crashing but the market hasn't yet. Wall Streeters are always last to figure it out. Remember them buying the Dow at new highs in late 2007, after the financial crisis had started. The market has turned into a lagging indicator.

Most of us know that over the past several decades the gap between the very wealthy and the rest of us has widened considerably. But few of us know that over the same period of time the gap between the top wealthy and the bottom wealthy has also widened considerably. This is why Todd Henderson and others who are among the least wealthy of the wealthy are suffering from something that can be described as fat-right-tail envy (see link below). And the best way to combat this particularly aggressive and virulent form of envy is to simply shorten the gap between the top wealthy and the bottom wealthy. We can accomplish this by shortening the gap between top executive and bottom executive pay and by placing a higher tax burden on capital rather than on labor. Plus it would also help to the take the profit out of all aspects of government. But to do this we must de-privatize most, if not all, government services, especially our prison system and our military and police forces, and we must close the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street. Above all else, we must eliminate all private funding of presidential and congressional elections. Believe me, if I were made dictator for a day, I'd make sure that all of these things are done before all of my power is gone in 24 hours! http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/rat-race-america/

John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman, explains how a mutant form of corporatism has its roots in America and has spread throughout the planet, destroying everything in its wake. Excellent, two-minute, must watch cartoon: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26184.htm

If it all went wrong in the 1970s, then the man most responsible for making it all go wrong is Milton Friedman. This gets to the heart of why Milton Friedman came in second place, just behind Alan Greenspan and just ahead of Larry Summers, in the neoliberal-dominant contest to win the Dynamite Prize in Economics (see link below). He opened the doors for other neolib economists, such as Larry Summers and Alan Greenspan, to help the Wall Street criminals, as George Carlin would say, blow up the economy. He did this by claiming that the power of mathematical physics takes most, if not all, of the risks out of investing in complex derivatives. John Maynard Keynes, OTOH, would have known that this is bogus beyond belief. Because he knew that economics as it relates to mathematical physics has its limits, he would have known that what Milton Friedman and other neoliberal economists were pushing went well beyond those limits, thus putting financial firms, on both sides of the pond, at tremendous risk of going bankrupt. Had Keynes been around today to warn us of the extreme dangers of playing around with very complex derivatives, then we probably would never have gotten ourselves in such a deep and prolonged recession and we certainly would have never bailed out the banksters! Instead, we would have bailed out the real economy, where real work is done and where real money is made, leaving the phony economy of financial derivatives to fend for itself. And as a result, our economy all around would have been far more robust and much more producer-oriented than it is today. http://rwer.wordpress.com/2010/02/22/greenspan-friedman-and-summers-win-dynamite-prize-in-economics/

Lafayette, I find George Carlin's skit on “The American Dream” to be more relevant now than it was back then. Watch it below. In fact, I think that it has become so relevant in today's world that every school across the US, from grade school to grad school, should require their students to watch it. The hell with requiring them to recite the Pledge of Allegiance or the National Anthem. It's much more important that they be required to learn how to think critically. And George Carlin's skit on "The American Dream" will give them the inspiration to do so. But I'm sure that the powers-that-be on Wall Street will have it banned from all schools across the US before this ever happens! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q&feature=related