From Politico (H/T LRC blog):

Also from LRC blog:

http://money.cnn.com/…

“This is the first time in the history of United States that anything has been done by Congress to curtail excessive CEO compensation,” said House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass, on Sunday. “It’s not everything we’d like, but it’s a very good beginning.”

“A very good beginning.”? They regulate the hell out of the corporations which they help artificially inflate by supporting the Federal Reserve System. Effectively controlling a significant portion of their business. Now they are nationalizing components of them or creating sweetheart deals for their friends in other firms by taking over a failing company instead of letting them work through bankruptcy. Allowing the likes of Citi Group and JP Morgan Chase to purchase assets deemed nearly worthless by the FDIC. Now Frank is bragging about how they have a foot in the door to controlling salaries of CEOs. If that’s the beginning the end is little better than complete state socialism/communism or the more likely fascism.

Is he ignorant or malicious? I hope the former. Perhaps than he could be convinced to read F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom.

• Handed out about 100 half page fliers with one side information about Rothbard’s The Case Against the Fed and the other Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson. Photos of the book cover, description and links to online versions and audio books. People snatched them up real quick. One woman was a freegan. She told me she doesn’t buy books to save trees, has a computer or at least access to one, no digital audio player, but yet still took everyone’s fliers… including mine.
• Almost every person their was anti-capitalist. Everything I heard told me they were in fact anti-corporatist. As you see in the footage they, like many on the left, incorrectly label what currently exists in the Western world as capitalist.
• I spoke with an employee of Revolution Books who was a Marxist. He believed in the end goal of stateless communism but said a state was needed to get there. Seems a bit contradictory to me. He didn’t like when I asked if he was a statist as he reminded me that communism doesn’t have a state. I tried to explain to him that it was incorrect to call what the USA economy is as capitalist and that if he was non-violent he would find allies in the anarcho-capitalist camp. He wasn’t familiar with Rothbard or ALL which I found unfortunate but he was receptive to learning about them. I’ll be sending him some links.
• I ran into Chris Maloney. He’s written some articles on Mises.org and LewRockwell.com.
• Explained to a young 20 something y/o woman who had shown up to find out more about what was going on. I explained to her how the Federal Reserve works, how it causes the boom bust cycle and what’s generally going on now.
• They had an open mic and I was real close to taking advantage of it and explaining what capitalism really is and some better reasons to oppose the bailout and the Federal Reserve instead of just complaining about which people gets the stolen goods. I decided that was likely a bad idea.
• Someone gave me an article entitled “No to the Bailout of the Capitalist Speculators! Down with the Dictatorship of Finance Capital!” by The Internationalist. Last I check it wasn’t available on their site. It’s interesting because it has some things I wouldn’t have expected to read such as noting that since 1971 the US dollar is no longer backed by gold. They call out the Socialist Equality party for not being hardcore enough effectively and the Green and Working Families as being “capitalist” parties. The article speaks of the Austrian (not the school but the country) economist Joseph Schumpeter. “Free-market ideologues like to quote the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter on the ‘creative destruction‘ unleashed by capitalism on outmoded economic structures. But today, as the wages and living standards of the working people are being steadily eroded, as social programs are drastically slashed, there is nothing creative a bout the destruction unleashed by the wold-be masters of the universe.” The authors really need to recheck what Schumpeter was speaking about, get an understanding as to why the standard of living is being eroded, and acknowledge the fact that what they complain about is in no way, shape or form a free market. Actually… the author and those protesting need to realize that these banks are more regulated than just about any other time period in history and this situation still developed. Regulation is not the answer, removing government control over the money supply is.
• There were lots of Obama buttons around. It was rather entertaining to see hardcore socialist 1 argue with hardcore socialist 2 over how the Democrats and Obama are the enemies of their cause. I, walking around with my Ron Paul, “Taxation is Theft”, “I do not consent to be searched”, etc. pins, found that many people knew of Paul and had generally good things to say in the few words exchanged.
• I was yelled at at one point for moving due to several people with cameras who were filming the back of my bookbag which has a Ron Paul civil flag patch and a “Ron Paul 2008″, Paul and V mask, and 4th Amendment pins. I usually have a gadsden flag like “Don’t tread on me” patch and more pins but I took some off for the Service Nation Summit and have yet to put them back.
• Not directly related but a coworker is leaving my firm Friday and so we went out to lunch. During which I got to pretty much fully explain the full Austrian School of economics’s position on what’s going on. Needless to say several of my coworkers who I don’t typically talk with were fascinated. They didn’t seem to trust a transition to a commodities based system… giving me “what about the guy who chooses the wrong commodity? do you really want people bothered with deciding on a common currency?” type arguments. They also has hangups on acknowledging or accepting the inherent harm central banks cause and underestimated the influence artificially cheap debt has.

Update: CNN’s coverage of the event, some photos

So why did I choose the wrong rally? From LewRockwell.com/blog:

Writes Jim Sheehan: “I just walked by the New York Stock Exchange. Hundreds of demonstrators have gathered to protest the government’s bailout of Wall Street. Several were holding placards that read ‘Stop the bailout! Read The Road to Serfdom by FA Hayek. Read mises.org.’ They were also handing out copies of Ron Paul’s 2002 speech introducing his bill to eliminate subsidies to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Keep up the good work!”

I’m not sure where this was advertised but the NYC Campaign for Liberty Meetup.com event listed the Bowling Green but I didn’t notice anyone familiar when I showed up at 4PM. Oh well. Hopefully some of those who I handed info to will actually read one of the suggested books. If it’s one thing many of those lefties need is an overview of economic theory.

http://www.nytimes.com/…

The fields around this little farming enclave are among the most fertile on earth. But like tens of million of acres of land in this country, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they literally went to seed.

Now that may be changing. A decade after capitalism transformed Russian industry, an agricultural revolution is stirring the countryside, shaking up village life and sweeping aside the collective farms that resisted earlier reform efforts and remain the dominant form of agriculture.

The change is being driven by soaring global food prices (the price of wheat alone rose 77 percent last year) and a new reform allowing foreigners to own agricultural land. Together, they have created a land rush in rural Russia.

“Where else do you have such an abundance of land?” Samir Suleymanov, the World Bank’s director for Russia, asked in an interview.

As a result, the business of buying and reforming collective farms is suddenly and improbably very profitable, attracting hedge fund managers, Russian oligarchs, Swedish portfolio investors and even a descendant of White Russian émigré nobility.

The average Russian grain yield is 1.85 tons a hectare — compared with 6.36 tons a hectare in the United States and 3.04 in Canada. (A hectare is about two and a half acres.)

Should be noted that when the USSR was the largest exporter of food years ago the United States was sending food aid to it’s people who were starving. In fact, the USSR likely wouldn’t have survived into the 1950’s if it wasn’t for western aid to the fledgling government in the 20’s.

http://www.nytimes.com/…

When Chandra Bhan Prasad visits his ancestral village in these feudal badlands of northern India, he dispenses the following advice to his fellow untouchables: Get rid of your cattle, because the care of animals demands children’s labor. Invest in your children’s education instead of in jewelry or land. Cities are good for Dalit outcastes like us, and so is India’s new capitalism.

Mr. Prasad was born into the Pasi community, once considered untouchable on the ancient Hindu caste order. Today, a chain-smoking, irrepressible didact, he is the rare outcaste columnist in the English language press and a professional provocateur. His latest crusade is to argue that India’s economic liberalization is about to do the unthinkable: destroy the caste system. The last 17 years of new capitalism have already allowed his people, or Dalits, as they call themselves, to “escape hunger and humiliation,” he says, if not residual prejudice.

If you need to login, user/pass: rationalreview/rationalreview

http://rawstory.com/…

If you thought protests outside 2008’s Democratic National Convention were loud and proud, you ain’t seen nothing yet. So say organizers preparing for the 2008 Republican National Convention, set to take place in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Organizers estimate 50,000 protesters are getting ready to demonstrate outside the RNC, in the largest anti-war protest planned so far this year.

“We have word that people are coming on busses and carpools, people are flying in from all over the country,” said Katrina Plotz, an organizer for an RNC protest group. “We are expecting the police to uphold our right to demonstrate, to speak out against the war.”

AP Correspondent Haven Daley said in a Wednesday news video that it may be difficult keeping the protests peaceful, attributing his ominous prediction to “anarchist groups” which were not named.

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More negative usage of the word anarchist. Those people are generally violent, confused communists. I’d bet that more then half the time the ‘anarchists’ are in fact plants by the police.

http://www.nytimes.com/…

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”

Reduce, reuse, recycle.