ALL ABOUT NYCO--Nyco, 50/50 nylon/cotton, is a tough, abrasion resistant fabric used by military forces around the world, our own included, most particularly in battle dress uniforms. Made to be comfortable worn against the skin, it is in no way plastic-y. It feels more like raw silk than anything else. Several machine washings are required for the denim covers to achieve the softness the nyco covers have from inception.

what follows below are my feeble attempts at blogging. If I don't get some a this junk off my chest I could get a complex and we can't have that, now can we? Your tolerance and forgiveness is appreciated

15 January, 2012- working title- Believing in America - believing that our economic pie can be grown big enough to dwarf the Bush/Obama deficits just as the deficits Reagan ran while he pursued 'Star Wars' at tremendous expense but which became irrelevant (aforesaid deficits) when the flourishing economy grew the tax revenue to the point where, by Clinton's time, the federal govt ran a surplus

8 January, 2012- This just in from the 'How Stupid Can We Possibly Be?' dept- First, some background- In the autumn of 1973 I was in Seattle, Washington. The (first? I think it was) OPEC oil embargo was biting hard- the USA along with the rest of the developed world was in recession and I had a hard time finding paying work

But I remember that even worse than my day-to-day operational concerns about having little or no money- (not fun), even worse was this kind of a looming, nebulous fear that undermined everything (REALLY not fun), which came from the fact of my being completely dumbfounded-

Blown away by the fact that our leadership had left us wide open to being undone by an outfit based in a part of the world where sneak attacks and double dealing are more or less SOP and whose rulers don't really like us anyway (plse see Yom Kippur War and US/Pakistani counter-terrorism alliance)

OK, sure, I was (still am?) naive and/or I expect too much but I mean, c'mon, what are we paying these people for? Our fearless leadership and the intelligence agencies supposedly serving them cost us major dosh on the presumption they're going to protect us from those who mean us harm and it's more than fair, and high time too, to question whether we are now getting or ever really have gotten our money's worth

Tho it may appear small minded of me to say so, getting harrassed and groped at airports post 9/11 and having Osama bin Laden offed next door to the Pakistan military academy in the middle of the capital city of the rest of their military leadership doesn't cut it

And now here we are, 38 years later and for the umpteenth time, pussyfooting around (another OPEC member and) soon-to-be nuclear armed, Iran. Why? Because if the Iranians close the strait at Hormuz and oil goes to $150 or $200 a barrel it's not just the feeble global recovery that's threatened- we're talking about America's and the rest of the world's ability to feed themselves getting called into question- snap out of it, folks!

I'll just mention that until last month we had Iran bracketed for the better part of a decade- Afghanistan east and Iraq west- and that no sooner have we left Iraq (thanks to the third Greenspan recession in 20 years we simply can't afford to stay there) and Iran is suddenly all mouthy with naval exercises in the Strait of Hormuz...d'you think it's all just a strange coincidence? Really? I'm just askin'

I'll also ask what the economic landscape might look like today if we'd had leadership three years ago who were at least as good at leading as they were at getting elected and who, instead of grasping at un-proved industrial policy fantasies, had subsidized the infrastructure to speed shifting motor fuels for the national fleet from high CO2 gas releasing gasoline and diesel (read:imported oil) to natural gas (read:flip OPEC the bird)

and then I ask myself if it's too late to start now

12 December, 2011- Austerity is not the way out of Recession- OK, yes, it is true that if you borrow too much money 'The Market' will (operative term here- 'eventually') conclude that you can't pay back what you owe, which will cause your interest rates to go up as banks price in compensation for what they will lose if they get arm twisted into financing the next installment of your latest get rich quick scheme

But if you're a sovereign nation and, despite low interest rates (no one can qaulify for but nevermindallthatnow) from here to eternity, your economy is not growing fast enuf (like ours has not for the last four years because our consumers are terrified by the political incompetence they see in Europe and Washington, D.C.), without still more deficit spending on something like infrastructure, your collected corporate and income taxes going forward may never raise their total high enough to pay the ongoing budget year to year let alone pay down any debt

If we get this wrong, throttling growth before it becomes self-sustaining, the 'eventually' arrives too soon, when it becomes a simple matter of arithmatic for 'The Market' to determine that, like Greece we owe so much, that spending can't be slashed faster than the interest compounds on the debt and, having earlier garrotted final demand by following the Merkozy mantra of Austerity uber alles, the only way out becomes (a 50% haircut to the bondholders) a default

But wait! Wasn't it just a year or two ago that all these were rated by Moody's and S&P as tripleA?! Safe as houses...suitable for widows and orphans

5 Dec.- Also-I wanted to put this (following quote) out there as a concrete example of the President pointing out a (numerically small) set of targets, those no-good Wall Street fatcats, to a (numerically large) group of potential constituents who I see as being riled up on purpose for political ends (the potential constituents add up to a lot more votes than the targeted group) And I'll remind everyone that this president is the chap who, during the auto industry rescue in early '09, called bondholders in GM 'speculators.'

Back in the day, the bond market is where one went for safety. They called it capital preservation with a small (but safe) percentage return. Now today, after the 2008 meltdown of Moody's tripleA-rated toxic waste from the syndication of mortgage bonds, the only reason Moody's, S&P, and Fitch are still called upon for their plainly worthless estimations of the safety of 'rated debt'- I shall repeat- the reason these rating agencies are regarded at all is that their ratings supposedly speak to the relative risklessness of certain investments whose risklessnes is supposeldy legally required of brokerage firms, reflecting their fiduciary responsibility to 'widows and orphans' which is to say investors who have not a clue and who are wholly dependant on others for financial advice. Widows and orphans are the exact opposite of speculators, Mr. President

from CNBC.com article quote: "I think people are frustrated and the protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based suspicion about how our financial system works," Obama told reporters. Obama said his so-called "Dodd-Frank" financial reform bill was designed to prevent Wall Street abuses, and his emphasis on the subject indicated he would use that theme heavily in the 2012 presidential race. "For us to have a healthy financial system, that requires that banks and other financial institution systems compete on the basis of the best service and the best products and the best price," Obama said. "And it can't be competing on the basis of hidden fees, deceptive practices or derivative cocktails that nobody understands and that expose the entire economy to enormous risks. That's what Dodd-Frank was designed to do." Obama said the recent hikes in fees charged by U.S. banks were not a good practice and were likely unfair for consumers. He said in some cases banks may be jacking up fees because other charges have been prohibited, which is not a "good practice," and "not necessarily fair to consumers." The president said banks can charge what they like as long as there is accountability and transparency, and that it is appropriate for the government to play an oversight role.

Bloomburg quote 6 October- the data refute the view that economic uncertainty necessarily breeds policy uncertainty. In the last decade, however, policy became a larger source of movements in overall economic uncertainty and an increasingly important concern for businesses and households. Why has policy uncertainty increased so much? One argument holds that the recent financial crisis created an atmosphere of extreme uncertainty, bringing new and difficult policy issues to the fore. No doubt, the crisis presented policy makers with difficult choices in 2008 and 2009. But the persistence of policy uncertainty wasn’t inevitable. Rather, it reflects deliberate policy decisions, harmful rhetorical attacks on business and “millionaires,” failure to tackle entitlement reforms and fiscal imbalances, and political brinkmanship. Debt Ceiling The wave of uncertainty during the debt-ceiling dispute between Democrats and Republicans this summer was, quite clearly, an outcome of the political process. Day by day, markets swung wildly as politicians parried and counter-parried. At the regulatory level, efforts by the National Labor Relations Board to prevent Boeing Co. from operating its aircraft-assembly line in South Carolina have injected another source of uncertainty into business investment decisions. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that President Barack Obama signed into law in March 2010 is another example. Rather than simple reforms aimed at efficiency improvements and cost savings, the law seeks to remake the U.S. health-care delivery system, dramatically expanding the role of government and imposing new burdens on businesses and individuals. Even in narrowly economic terms, the measure adds to the uncertainty facing households and businesses. Moreover, its political durability is in doubt. The Democratic leadership in Congress opted to pursue the most radical plan that could muster the necessary 60 votes in the Senate and a thin majority in the House. As a result, the legislation failed to attract a single Republican vote in either chamber. That political strategy ensured the act would become the focus of future electoral battles and rollback efforts

POTUS QUOTE- 08 August, 2011, about 4 PM- Earlier today the NY Times quoted the president saying, "We didn't need a ratings agency to tell us we need a long-term approach to deficit reduction. And we didn't need a ratings agency to tell us that gridlock in Washington has not been constructive to say the least."

a Reuters article published at CNBC.com at 3:45 PM is headlined, "Obama Blames Rating Downgrade on Political Gridlock" "We knew from the outset that a prolonged debate over the debt ceiling, a debate where the threat of default was used as a bargaining chip could do enormous damage to our economy and the world's," he said.

US DEBT DOWNGRADED BY S&P- 06 August, 2011, about 10:30 AM- I'm surprised at how angry I am at those geniuses at S&P, one of the essential enablers in the Greenspan Fed-orchestrated panic and crash of 2008, for cutting the triple-A rating on long-term US Treasury debt and, even more angry, at our custardheaded moron government leaders for walking into the trap. We need leading but get gamblers instead

12:44 PM- wow! In spite of knowing that anger is fear turned inside out I got myself so wound up I had to go do something else instead of trying to write. I'll come back to this once I've simmered down some more

S&P defended their decision by pointing to American governmental dysfunction saying, “the gulf between the political parties” had not been bridged and that the debt ceiling deal “fell well short of the comprehensive fiscal consolidation program that some proponents had envisaged.” And here's a major point where they say, “elected officials remain wary of tackling the structural issues required to effectively address the rising U.S. public debt.”

BANGING OUR HEADS ON THE DEBT CEILING- 18 July, 2011- I'd like to ask everyone to PLEASE write or email the President, your Congressional Representative and both Senators to demand that they stop screwing around with our ecomedy, not to mention our wellbeing, and settle this schoolyard nonsense over the debt ceiling. These clowns fiddle while Rome burns. Interest rates have started up, unemployment rages unabated, families are losing their homes and children are made to suffer while the grandiose windbags beat their chests amid the smoking ruins of our once great nation. Please tell them they've terrorized us for long enuf and that you're sick of it. The more of us who threaten to take away our vote the more likely they'll arrive at their Vision on the Road to Damascus Moment instead of kicking us back downstairs into Recession Mark2, The Infinitely Worse Replay. Thank you

25 July, 2011- Just as the Republicans refuse a good debt ceiling/deficit reduction plan in favor of their vision of a perfect one, so also do the Democrats, and/but with the added proviso by our President that he will veto ANY plan that doesn't spare him having to renegotiate this whole mess again next year while he's trying to get reelected. Sounds like a guy trying to get out of eating his peas. Both parties have thereby shown that they care NOT for Americans, our livelihoods and our standing in the World but that they care only for their own political calculations. Our economy is flat on its back and both parties have their boot planted firmly on its throat, holding us and the rest of the World hostage to their election strategies. Our so-called leadership have reduced themselves to nothing more than common terrorists. Vote them all out at the earliest opportunity, please- every last self-centered one of them

July 26, 2011- Wait- what?! According to the NY Times the President is considering a plan from Senator Reid that requires NO tax increases. Last night on TV the President said he wouldn't sign a bill that didn't have tax increases in it. Here's the Times quote- "...He (Sen. Reid) said Democrats would not go along with any plan that did not guarantee a debt limit increase through next year...Democrats countered with a $2.7 trillion menu of spending cuts and an increase in the debt limit through 2012. Neither plan would require any new revenue." So which is it? Why is it unfair if Republicans don't agree to raise taxes but not unfair if Democrats don't? As wrong-headed as the Republicans are for threatening our nation's credit rating for the sake of a rigid ideology, the Democrats in the form of our President are no better. Up is not down and night is not day no matter how often someone claims that it is. One can pretend to be bipartisan and a patriot but an all or nothing, my way or the highway, scorched earth policy that causes interest rates to rise is a stealth tax increase that will hurt every American

28 July, 2011- We've reached the point where the American people need to be rescued from the overpaid custardheads whose job it is to rescue the American people. There are no adults in the room so we're going to have to stand and assume the mantle ourselves, specifically ordering our elected representatives to act in our best interest. No one else will do that for us. So we must demand, in a paraphrase of Speaker Pelosi who said, when a junior member of her caucus complained about being forced to vote on the twelve-hundred page Health Care Bill before he'd had a chance to read it all, "We need to pass it now. There'll be plenty of time to figure out what's in it later,"...We need the debt ceiling raised now. The spending cuts and the tax increases don't take effect right away anyhow and need only be marked up large enough to appease the rating agencies, Moody's, S&P and Fitch, (the same geniuses that rated sub-prime MBSs Triple-A only to have them zero out a few months later) so there will be no downgrade of U.S. Treasury debt (which would raise US interest rates). We can fight about the fine print later

It needs to be said that there are times in life when spending more than one makes (running a deficit) is the right thing to do. Passing a Federal balanced budget law, amendment or whatever so we can rock back, fold our arms across our chest and say, "No can do, GI, that tissue paper Humvee is all our budget can afford right now" will never happen. Such a thing is as unlikely to occur in our compassionate nation as a family member refusing to borrow the money to help an adult child or aged relative who because of sickness or job loss couldn't put together a house payment for a couple of months. To say that governments must live within their means just like households do is a complete pack of baloney. There are very few households that don't have credit cards, probably even Michelle Bachman's. It's one thing for the Tea Party, who stand as the perfect embodiment of the failure of American public education, to push a balanced budget law but for the Republican leadership who I believe know better (Boehner, Cantor, McConnell, et al) to pretend they're on board with the idea that a balanced budget straightjacket is a good way to go are playing a cynical and dangerous game. Sure, the ratio of debt to income matters immensely but whether it's paid off every month is irrelevant

It needs to be said that insisting upon raising taxes on people earning $250,000 (not a rich person in today's devalued dollars) or more amounts to economic class warfare and demonstrates a dangerous ignorance about where jobs come from in this country. Refusing to go along with a debt ceiling increase that doesn't at the same time soak the rich because they're fat cats and somehow unworthy of their earnings and not to do so would be unfair while at the same time ignoring the real harm done to the rest of us for the last two years while the economy's been left to turn gangrenous takes some real nerve. How is it fair that more out-of-work families exhaust their savings, lose their health insurance and then their homes while their President insists he's being fair when what he's really insisting on is getting his way? In recent speeches about raising the debt ceiling he has threatened seniors with not getting their checks and American soldiers and their families with not getting paid if he doesn't get the Bill he wants. If fairness to American citizens was what he is most concerned about he'd accede to the Republicans refusal to raise taxes more than $800 billion and get back to collecting pledges for an infrastructure jobs bank to start putting people back to work because...

...at the end of Dec, 2012, if NOTHING is done, taxes automatically revert to the pre-BushII (Clinton) level, for everybody not just the 'rich'. Protecting his Base at that point shouldn't that difficult if Obama gets re-elected and moot if he doesn't. In the meantime, you may be sure that between now and the election no taxes will go up on anyone while we're trying to get an overregulated and uncertain economy to takeoff velocity. But don't expect the Pres to mention anything about any of that until after this bottleneck

So the whole flap about fairness is really a straw man tarted up and trotted out so as to provide the excuse to threaten seniors' income. We're being told, "Sorry, no matter how much seniors and soldiers gotta suffer we can rest easy knowing our President will never be unfair." -a complete canard, demagoguery if not extortion. And whatever else it may be, it is shameful. Instead of stating flat out that he will do whatever it takes, WHATEVER it takes, including making compromise deals with his enemies, to make sure our nation honors its obligations, all of them, so as to reassure ALL the stakeholders here and around the world, instead of giving Presidential reassurance he sets conditions that allow him to start parsing failure- he's announcing in advance what it will mean and how the rest of us may have to suffer if his vision is not followed to the last detail. There's no legitimate reason to play games with this nation's future and anyone demonstrating such inclinations needs to be voted out at the earliest opportunity- for they are not to be tolerated one moment beyond it. That the additional money which 'fairness' might actually raise amounts to little more than chickenfeed in the broader scheme of things doesn't prevent the American engine of growth remaining stalled nonetheless. Instead of focusing on creating jobs (which produce tax returns, duh) our fearless leaders produced a healthcare plan that does nothing to control runaway cost increases and followed that up with a pointless financial regulatory law that does nothing to prevent our being victimized yet again by another panic and crash resulting from the Federal Reserve's fiddling with interest rates- inflating the real estate bubble and then pricking it. We need to stop wasting time and get to work on our infrastructure, put some folks back to work and grow the economy. The only way out of our dilemma is to grow the pie. Otherwise we're back to the failed zero-sum income redistribution of the Jimmy Carter Presidency, another well-meaning but clueless fop who never understood the difference between equal opportunity and equal outcome

It needs to be said that when there is an apparent discrepancy between talk and action it is the action that needs watching. Talk is cheap. Enuf of it and a smokescreen (or a mental fog?) gets created. Politicians LOVE to talk. Citizens need to ignore that and look at actions. The actions of our national leadership, specifically the President, Congresspersons, Senators and their staffs make very clear that they care not a fig for us whom they rule. Their actions (in this case, the lack of action) amply demonstrate that they care for themselves and their exalted positions and not much else. The only way to bring them to heel is to threaten them with losing their catbird seat in the next election. Wake 'em up! Call 'em up! Email them! Write them a real letter! And in every case make it very clear that what they need to do is to get the road cleared for economic growth or find themselves voted onto the scrapheap of history. Two and a half years of going nowhere is enough

July 29, 2011- Given the GDP numbers released today it's no wonder the dog bed business stinks and why 14,000,000 Americans are actively looking for work. Think of the opportunities squandered, the wealth not earned! Think of their bitter frustration. While there needs to be a serious committment to reducing long-term spending obligations for entitlements as well as cuts in defense, now is most emphatically NOT the time to cut spending on unemployment(and not for what remains of this year nor, very probably, not for the first half of 2012), - not until this terrible government inflicted uncertainty dies back down and small businesses take a chance on coming out of the bomb shelter, hoping there's enough consumer demand to make it safe to hire. Within reason we can do whatever our stumbling economy needs us to do until it's self-sustaining. There's no gun to our heads saying, "Cut spending now or we wack da kid," except for Boehner and Obama. As long as we don't scare investors by acting like children we can do what we need to do to right our ship of state. The trouble is not with our country, it's the lazy, incompetent leadership sly enough to refuse to do their job until they've waited til the last minute and whipped everyone into a panic, shaking in our faces their ticking clock that provides excuses and cover for their overreaching and selfdealing. Make no mistake, it didn't have to come down this way. We have the leeway to make a meaningful effort on behalf of education and infrastructure, too. We need citizens who in the future will be able to reason at a high level, and we need modern ports, highways, bridges and railbeds badly enough to make it worthwhile transitioning more of their parents from the unemployment line back to work, done against a backdrop of determinedly rejecting Chinese currency manipulation, illegal manufacturing subsidies, intellectual piracy and closed markets while threatening to limit trade by imposing (WTO sanctioned) tariffs if China doesn't play by the agreed-upon rules. Between what we spend importing oil and financing the People's Liberation Army purchase of cruise missiles, all the feeble growth the President and Congress will tolerate gets siphoned directly out of the country. We're already so far behind the eightball, if we don't grow a bigger pie we'll wind up like Greece- in permanent austerity, wards of the IMF

30 July, 2011- Please use every means available to let our President and our congressional representatives in both Houses know that we expect them to pass a debt ceiling increase that doesn't strangle the feeble recovery and that we expect it passed in a manner timely and of a nature that will not result in a credit rating downgrade before they do us more harm with their shill-I, shall-I

1 August, 2011- A debt ceiling agreement will probably be signed into law in time to prevent a catastrophe although at noon today the stock market appeared to be saying, "Too little, too late." This all could and should have been dealt with back last December, of course, when the President's own deficit cutting committee reported...but no. Now, a (proposed) bipartisan Bill would inaugurate the same study, again. jump back! There's no danger of studying this recovery to death is there? Ennybuddy? The best news out of all of this debt ceiling fiasco is that a significant number of Americans went to the trouble to make their views known to their congressional representatives, signaling an acceleration in the Great Awakening where we, the People, take back the levers of our own power. Sick of discovering that we've been played yet again by narrow moneyed interests, we stand up without regard to Left or Right because we know that when we stand up as one people, as one house with liberty and justice for all, in spite of all the attempts to turn us against one another...we know that when we stand up together as Americans we are invincible

2 August, 2011 about 2:30 PM- Welp, the markets have announced that cutting spending $90 billion which may rise to $250 billion a year impresses it not at all. The debt ceiling was raised, treating the symptom, but you could double taxes and, added to these spending cuts, the underlying disease remains ignored and untouched.