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Yes, there are imbalances that are going to hit the West, but no part of the world will be immune from the combined onslaught of resource shortages and environmental degradation that will gather pace over the next decade.
It is not feasible that the world’s trade, political and security structures will make it through the next decade without radical restructuring. My guess is that a number of “givens” will soon the challenged - for example, I can’t see free trade surviving in a world where scarcity begins to bite. One thing that will soon begin to undermine free trade is the inflationary pressure that will accelerate as resources become scarcer.
There will be huge tensions at the national and international level. Social upheaval will be massive and discontent with the political classes will grow. There will be a growing risk to the liberal Western values that have created so much of the texture of the current landscape.
There are two broad routes the world system can take. One involves disintegration, chaos and increasing human suffering. The other involves a revolution in the way humans structure their relationship with the world. The first of these outcomes is by far the most likely. The real shame is that China and India decided to enter a game that was doomed and didn’t pioneer a new way.
Yes, we in the West will become poorer. Yes, bringing China and India into the game has accelerated that impoverishment. But, in this unstable situation, logical predictions based on extrapolations that assume there will be stability in the underlying system are unlikely to come to pass.
The real tragedy is not that we are messing up the management of plan A. It is that there is no sign of a plan B. Plan A is dead whatever we do.
PS
I am not a conspiracist and was talking these issues over with friends a few days ago. Their, feeling was that the problems are so blindingly obvious that there must be a “conspiracy of silence” pushing a wider airing of the issues out of much of the mainstream media?
From Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Telegraph. 04.07.2009
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambr...
Cynicus. Great to have live links
Times economics editor spun this. Maybe he doesn't realize that 50 - o.3 = 49.7 He calls this renewed expansion.
Is it part of someones plan to plant some illusionary green shoots?
changes are about to take place in the way we live.
We cannot continue to keep all the plates spinning - those days have already gone.
From now on we're in transition from what was to what will be.
In essence this is what this blog is all about, but I suspect most don't know it - yet.
Heres a link to a an old article discussing the impact of floating the RMB and that doing so would will only solve 10% of the problem. We need to solve the problem of living beyond our means, which unfortunately will be ugly.
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2005...
The problem is that, the US and the West need the Chinese money, and are now letting China call the tune. The West needs to gather itself into unity and finally confront China. Inaction is not going to help in the long run....
I just thought I would mention that I saw a critique of Krugman recently (sorry, no link) in which some of his past quotes were pulled up. One of them showed that, after the telecom/internet bubble collapsed he was insisting that stimuli was needed, including the encouragement of house price growth.
It seems that Krugman's solution to every ill is simply more stimuli.
Hard road ahead.
The economies of the West are contracting. There is no plan for how exactly the challenge of places like China might be met
Correct. But then my original posts made it perfectly clear that addressing the trade imbalances with China was a major policy requirement for the US and the UK.
That will require state intervention, not laissez faire polices.
When China stops undervaluing the RMB, allows labour rights, and allows its current account surpluses to enter its domestic economy to stimulate internal growth, this will start to correct the trade problems.
Paul Craig Roberts, writing in Counterpunch, proposes polices to deal with the shift of manufacturing to East Asia:
The trillions of dollars in credit default swaps (CDS) should be declared null and void ...
The bailout money, instead of being given to favored financial institutions to finance their acquisition of other institutions, should be used to refinance the defaulting mortgages. This would slow, if not stop, the growing inventory of foreclosed properties that is driving down home prices. The mark-to-market rule should be suspended until the real values of the troubled properties and instruments can be determined. Suspension of the rule would prevent the failure of sound institutions and lessen the need for a bailout. Interest rates have to be raised in order to encourage saving and to provide incomes to retirees. To preserve the dollar’s status as reserve currency, a credible policy of reducing both budget and trade deficits must be announced. In the near term the budget deficit can be reduced by $500 billion by withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan and by cutting a bloated defense budget that represents the now unattainable goal of US world hegemony. The trade deficit can be significantly reduced by bringing offshored jobs back to America. One way to do this is to tax corporations according to the value added to their output that occurs in the US. Corporations that produce their products for US markets abroad would have high tax rates; those that produce domestically would have low tax rates.
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts01222009.html
It was not lack of regulation, but rather it was the flood of money from the East into the West with insufficient investment opportunities to 'soak up' the money.
There were perfectly obvious regulatory measures that could have been taken to prevent the asset bubbles. George Soros describes them here:
“Since money and credit do not move in lockstep and asset bubbles cannot be controlled purely by monetary means, additional tools must be employed, or more accurately reactivated, since they were in active use in the 1950s and 1960s. I refer to variable margin requirements and minimal capital requirements, which are meant to control the amount of leverage market participants can employ. Central banks even used to issue guidance to banks about how they should allocate loans to specific sectors of the economy. Such directives may be preferable to the blunt instruments of monetary policy in combating "irrational exuberance" in particular sectors, such as information technology or real estate.”
Joseph E. Stiglitz also points to the same measures:
To deal with the high-tech bubble [of the late 1990s], [Greenspan] could have increased margin requirements (the amount of cash people need to put down to buy stock). To deflate the housing bubble, he could have curbed predatory lending to low-income households and prohibited other insidious practices (the no-documentation - or "liar" - loans, the interest-only loans, and so on). This would have gone a long way toward protecting us. If he didn't have the tools, he could have gone to Congress and asked for them
Joseph E. Stiglitz, “Capitalist Fools” Vanity Fair, January 2009
http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2009/01/stig...
many analysts insist that a bit of tinkering here and there on regulation might have somehow saved us from the crisis
Restoration of effective financial regulation is hardly “tinkering here and there”: it would be a fundamental structural change in financial markets.
I repeat my question. How can you stop the banks from accepting the flood of money? It is the flood of money that is the root of the crisis. Under the systems up to now the money would have arrived in the economy, and bubbles would appear. The only way to prevent this would be to restrict capital inflows. I am not aware that past banking regulation would have achieved this.
You say:
Restoration of effective financial regulation is hardly “tinkering here and there”: it would be a fundamental structural change in financial markets.
My answer is simple. There will still be guarantees on the banks too big to fail, those banks are now consolidating, creating ever more too big to fail banks. The regulators will still believe that they can recognise risk, even though history shows that they can not. Even assuming a happy ending to this mess (unlikely) risks will one day arise in unexpected places, and a similar crisis will eventually happen.
As a note, you consistently miss the significant contribution of the Central Banks to this crisis. These are looking like the regulators of the future. Do you really think that those who have got so much so fundamentally wrong should be dictating the future structure of finance?
I have detailed my banking reforms and these are to remove this regulatory mess. Instead, I propose a simplified system that treats people as grown ups and removes the asymmetry of information.
Perhaps you might read it, as it shows the problems that are inherent in atttempts at regulation of risk.
http://cynicuseconomicus.blogspot.com/2008/12/b...
But there is an obvious historical parallel: the petrodollars that started flooding into London and New York banks from 1973-1974 and 1979 after the surge in oil prices. They were prevented from causing massive and destructive asset bubbles in Western economies, because of effective financial regulation. Instead, they were lent to Third World countries partly to finance the increased price oil and to build up foreign exchange reserves.
How can you stop the banks from accepting the flood of money? It is the flood of money that is the root of the crisis. Under the systems up to now the money would have arrived in the economy, and bubbles would appear.
The key is what they do with it, not the flood of money itself. I have already listed a vast range of regulations that would have prevented the stock market and real estate bubbles, both in the last post and one below.
If you want an example of an effectively regulated banking system, just look at Canada:
http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2009/0423_canad...
Unlike Europe, the US, and the UK, no bailouts were needed there: an incredible empirical confirmation of the success of financial regulation.
You have still not dealt with how any regime might have coped with the influx of money from the East ... The only way to prevent this would be to restrict capital inflows.
No, it would be to invest or loan the money outside the US and the West, just as petrodollars were. If governments can regulate banks, they can reduce potentially destabilising and large capital flows into Western countries by finding better sources of investment overseas.
The regulators will still believe that they can recognise risk, even though history shows that they can not.
I disagree. The history of Bretton Woods shows exactly the reverse: the proof is that there was only one serious banking crisis in that era.
As a note, you consistently miss the significant contribution of the Central Banks to this crisis. These are looking like the regulators of the future. Do you really think that those who have got so much so fundamentally wrong should be dictating the future structure of finance?
In my system, these people would be utterly purged from the system. As I have said below:
As Joseph E. Stiglitz (“Capitalist Fools” Vanity Fair, January 2009) explains, idiots like Greenspan were free market ideologues who did not believe in regulation to begin with, and held the mistaken “rational expectations” hypothesis about financial markets. Financial experts who actually believe in proper regulation should be placed in charge of new regulatory agencies
Even during the good times, they were borrowing money, and trying to support the salary, the pensions and health insurance of ever more workers. The trouble is that, the more they borrowed, the greater their costs as the debt mounted.
This is a rather inaccurate statement. Under Clinton, the government debt as a percentage of GDP declined continuously, as you can see here:
National Debt Graph:
http://zfacts.com/p/318.html
Clinton ran a budget surplus of $230 billion in fiscal year 2000 and a surplus of $122.7 billion in fiscal year 1999.
But then Bush took over and combined bills for the war on terror and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars was about $1 trillion by 2008. Did you not factor this in to your analysis?
The $1 Trillion Bill for Bush's War on Terror
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,...
Instead of accepting the reality, like spoilt children, we bleat about our entitlements. At the heart of it all is that we think that we are entitled to our wealth. It has still not entered our complacent minds that, as long as a Chinese or Indian worker is willing to work for half our wage, we are too expensive.
But it has been repeatedly demonstrated that the reason China is so competitive is that it unfairly undervalues its RMB, suppresses labour rights, has low work and safety conditions, ignores the environmental effects of industrialization, subsidizes industry, and does not allow its current account surplus to enter the economy to raise wages and hence consumption.
If you take out all these factors, then suddenly Chinese goods are so inexpensive and so competitive. Suddenly our standard of living is perfectly sustainable, as long we shift manufacturing back to the US and the UK, as China’s wages and price rise through development.
Instead we blather on about sweat shops, when most Chinese workers are simply grateful to be given freedom from the grinding life as a peasant on the land. As I once argued with an individual, are you willing to stand outside a Chinese village and turn back the peasants who seek a better life in the cities?
Astonishing statement. You have already argued in other posts that undervaluing the RMB is effectively robbing and impoverishing the people of a country! Why have you suddenly changed your tune? Suddenly, the protectionist polices that you railed against repeatedly have become a way for peasants to obtain “a better life in the cities”?
Are you seriously saying that if China stopped undervaluing the RMB and stopped sterilizing its current account surpluses by buying treasury bonds, and allowed that money to enter the country, that wages and living standards would not improve? That eventually their nominal wages and prices would start to approach ours?
The good times I refer to is the period since the emergence of China (in real terms) which I date to about 10 years ago on many occasions in this blog. However, your chart show a growing trend upwards. With regards to the Iraq war, yes, it has been expensive. However, the costs now and the future costs now are largely structural. You might argue that the US should become a pacifist non-interventionist state, but that is not realistic. The only thing that will stop them playing such a role is diminished economic status, such that the lesser role is forced upon them.
Regarding the Chinese: I have always considered that the Chinese could have 'made it' without manipulation and this can be found clearly stated in my previous posts.
I have not changed my tune at all. I have always supported the growth of China as a fair trading nation. I have always believed that globalisation is a way of lifting people out of poverty.
I agree with your points on mercantilist Chinese policies and make it clear repeatedly througout the blog that this should be opposed. I believe I titled a post something like 'Why China Should be Shut Out'. However, I also believe that China, once opened, provided with capital, and access to markets would in any case grow as a competitor to the West.
Whatever the mercantilist policies, China is now a force in the world, and was always going to be so once opened up to world trade.
As for your other factors you quote as:
'suppresses labour rights, has low work and safety conditions, ignores the environmental effects of industrialization, subsidizes industry'
I do not much care for these. However, it seems that these are only an issue where we are losing the competition. We have and continue to do business with many other regimes that are similar. However, if that is how they chose to operate, we must deal with it or our governments must refuse to trade with them.
Are you proposing the latter? Will we only trade with countries that mirror our conditions. The list of countries that each country trades with will likely become very small.
Where do you draw the line of acceptable?
As an example, if you are a country like Sweden, then you will trade with virtually no other country. Or are they too small to count?
If Sweden had economic power, how would you feel if they came to your country and told you that you must do things their way? Even if that meant that you could no longer compete?
I know that you are a regular reader, and am surprised that you have misunderstood so much of what I have written.
I have always believed that globalisation is a way of lifting people out of poverty ... However, I also believe that China, once opened, provided with capital, and access to markets would in any case grow as a competitor to the West.
I disagree that "globalisation" or "neoliberalism" or the "Washington Consensus" has been, on the whole, beneficial for the Third World.
For much of the Third World, it has been a disaster.
Joseph E. Stiglitz (Globalization and its Discontents, New York, 2002) shows how globalisation, through its excessive financial liberalization, caused severe problems to developing countries.
Furthermore, you cannot point to China, South Korea, Japan or Taiwan as examples of the success of globalisation, because these are precisely the countries that have repeatedly and significantly violated the rules and orthodox policy presciptions of neoliberalism.
South Korea and Japan, whose rise started well before globalisation, are actually good examples of infant industry protectionism and the developmental state.
In a world of regulated finance, flexible monetary and fiscal polices, Keyesnianism, and industry policy, there is a major role for international trade, just as there was in the Bretton Woods era. China could do just as well in this world, and still have access to long -term FDI, and external trade, with causing severe trade imbalances.
It really does put everything into perspective.
It's entitled survival+
http://www.oftwominds.com/survival-plus1.html
I see nothing in the regulation of the past that might have prevented a bubble economy
Here is an outstanding article showing precisely how financial regulation could have stopped both the high-tech and real estate bubbles:
For years the [US] federal government … regulated … lending standards to prevent inflation of asset prices in key sectors of the economy, particularly during wartime and boom times. For instance, Federal Reserve Regulation X required minimum down payments and maximum periods of repayment for housing loans. Federal Reserve Regulation W utilized the same devices for consumer credit for the purchase of automobiles, appliances, and other durable goods. But starting with the administrations of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, and continuing under Clinton, such regulations were mostly repealed. Known as “selective credit controls,” these policy instruments took a “command and control” approach to regulation. It was an approach that reduced systematic risk by discouraging the development of a subprime mortgage market for borrowers with bad credit. Without such controls, lenders started making a flood of loans without minimum down-payment requirements, and eventually without even requiring documentation of income on many loans. Adjustable interest rates and hidden balloon payments made these loans inherently more risky … The Federal Reserve has a long history of imposing margin requirements (minimum down payments) on lending for the purchase of securities on major exchanges. Regulations G, T, and U gave the Fed important tools in containing stock-market speculation. But with Clinton in the White House and Robert Rubin as his treasury secretary, Greenspan felt no pressure to raise margin requirements even as the stock market bubble reached new heights. Instead, Clinton reappointed Greenspan as Federal Reserve chair in early 2000.
Timothy A. Canova, “The Legacy of the Clinton Bubble,”
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article...
As Joseph E. Stiglitz (“Capitalist Fools” Vanity Fair, January 2009) explains, idiots like Greenspan were free market ideologues who did not believe in regulation to begin with, and held the mistaken “rational expectations” hypothesis about financial markets. Financial experts who actually believe in proper regulation should be placed in charge of new regulatory agencies
They're relaxing.
I think I owe you an apology. On reviewing my replies to your comments, I note an element of impatience in my replies. Your contribution to the comments section is appreciated, and it is always good to have an alternative point of view on the blog.
I hope that you will appreciate that my impatience is not because you disagree, but rather it is the combination of breadth and volume of the comments. In many of your comments you bring in history, as well as a broad range of theorists, which is to your credit. However, this means that each comment and point deserves an essay in response. Furthermore, if I do write a response, it meets a further response requiring a further response from me.
I hope that you will sympathise that I just can not respond to such volume. In order to write my posts I read about 20+ economic news articles a day, occasionally add reading on theory, and many of the posts demand considerable time. I also read all the comments and try to respond to other commentators.
As such, I would like to extend a second opportunity for you to write a post. In this way, you can outline your argument and approach, and this may simplify the process of commenting. If in the future you feel that you need to update any points significantly, then I will be pleased to extend further opportunities. You may want to take the opportunity to pull all of your critiques together, and make a general critique of the underlying ideas in the blog. As before, however, it will be free of any editing, and the scope and choice of subject is your own.
Alternatively, if you do not take the option of a further post, if you could just pull back on the volume and breadth, where I have time, I will try to respond.
American GDP 12-14tr
Chinese GDP 3-4 trillion at the time
40% (1,2tr-1,6tr) savings rate in China is equal to about a 10% savings rate in America which is far from unhealthy.
If you take into account that the American savings rate was around zero percent there is no way Chinese savings can lead to overinvestment. Japanese savings went down (they didn't really increase treasury holdings for years), South Koreans are heavily indebted and all other Asian economies are too small to have a substantial impact.
Now where's that 'Asian savings glut'?
All this borrowing is really just to keep the wolves from the door. They know the state of things but they want to buy their way out of blame until government changes hands. Scorched Earth style.
The same can't be said for the States since Obama has only recently been elected. Sadly, I can only draw the conclusion that Obama is way, way out of his depth. Which, I suspect, is a situation that can only end in tears.
"No, it would be to invest or loan the money outside the US and the West, just as petrodollars were. If governments can regulate banks, they can reduce potentially destabilising and large capital flows into Western countries by finding better sources of investment overseas."
In the first place, money was flowing from East to West because East could not find better sources of investment elsewhere. They would not be so stupid to invest in the West if they could find better places for investment. They projected their own greed into Western economies and these projections drove cashflow into Western economies. The West could neither invest the money within the West nor outside the West. Why? Reasons are very simple. The purpose of investing money in any sector of economy is that you expect higher added value from this sector. The globalization,or in other words technology and production transfer, is based on reduction that value by moving the whole productive sector to a cheaper place. So how could West invest money when there was no place left in the world where the value of labour and industries were not destroyed? The only option left was to put money into consumption and enjoy the ride.
(2) Sterilizing current account surpluses by investing them overseas is not inevitable, as some countries chose to recycle them into their own economies.
(3) The logic of investment opportunities you describe may make sense under neoliberalism, but the rejection of those policies is precisely what is needed to enable new ways of dealing with foreign money.
(4) I chose the wrong words when I said " finding better sources of investment overseas". I should have said "find alternative ways of investing the money overseas or even domestically". A US government uncontrained by the policy shackles of neoliberalism might have used regulations to prevent the asset bubbles and use the government power to do something socially responsible with the money, like fund badly needed public works programs or large-scale scientific programs in biotechnology, physics, genetics, medicine, engineering etc. If the East Asian governments didn't like this, they can take there money back or take it to Europe.
I should have phrased my post better: I should have said
But we know the bombs are gonna drop; a relentless wave after wave of economic crisis fall-out for years to come. And as you so eloquently say, it's now the mandarins (civil servants) drawing up plans as the politicians naval gaze. It's come to this. Gawd help us.
I think this is what is happening to our world, complexity has gone past the point of no return.
The wealth we generate in the West is not sufficient to maintain our current lifestyle without large amounts of borrowing from abroad, which is unsustainable in the long run. Eventually there will be a levelling of global wealth, away from the lazy West, towards the hardworking East. We will have to work harder for a lesser standard of living, and they will work less for higher living standards. Neither will reach the levels of comfort we see now in the West.
When will this happen? And how long will it take? It could start very soon, and it could be a sudden event rather than a gradual change. If the pound were to devalue drastically against other currencies, our income would overnight reduce in buying power. All the goods that are imported, or set in price in relation to international prices, would rocket in price. Food and fuel would increase first, followed by goods and services as the effects worked through the system. If we continue down the road we are on, that point will come fairly quickly, within a year or two.
You mentioned a few weeks ago that you might respond to my bafflement at your statement that 'the underlying is system is fine
You have still not dealt with how any regime might have coped with the influx of money from the East. The point is that the money coming from the East created a circumstance that was entirely novel in the West.
That looks to me a pretty shaky, non-robust system. A healthy framework would have mechanisms to identify and cope with the flows of money the system allows. " The majority of governments and financial institutions have failed to identify (never mind cope with) what most on this blog would agree is 'reality'.
USELESS EATER
Is that Jared Diamond you've read?
I don't buy all of his arguments but Nassim Taleb makes very credible points about our collective inability to deal with the complexities we have created in our environment in Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan.
In his previous post CE wrote " I do not think I have the right, or anyone else, to restrict where people move their money. It is, after all, their own money. How they utilise it, short of crime, is their own business."
Hard to disagree with that, but in it's simplicity does not address the core of our ongoing crisis : which is not due to mis-regulution of what people do with their own money, but misuse of other people's money by governments and institutions. The current systems rewards and incentives this. The complexity of current financial mechanisms and products baffles most people (even many experts) and makes efforts towards transparency etc largely irrelevant. For the last 30 years or so successive UK, Irish and US governments have been impoverishing future generations of their citizens. We simply cannot trust our governments (or the large financial institutions that have captured them) to make competent or reality-based decisions with taxpayers or investors money.
This is systemic, rather not a function of the personalities or political beliefs of those involved. But is perhaps a discussion for elsewhere. What is clear is that politicians (winners of popularity contests) should be very restricted from having influence over fiscal policy.
BOB
I would say that while CE’s comments are excellent and insightful, his focus is narrowly defined, and certainly not holistic in any sense Doubt he himself would claim or desire it.
In response to LK's comment CE wrote:
('suppresses labour rights, has low work and safety conditions, ignores the environmental effects of industrialization, subsidizes industry'
CE wrote:
I do not much care for these. However, it seems that these are only an issue where we are losing the competition.
These are issues for a great many people. I first read CE’s comments on the Guardian site where these things have been discussed ad nauseum (though whether as anything more than lip-service is arguable).
There were comments a few weeks about dismissing the work of quants. Why stop there? A good outcome of this crisis might be a general collapse in faith in economic models that are meant to explain / predict outcomes and behaviors’ in reality. We have never had stable socialist or truly free-markets. Human's will never be as rational as we would like to be. (There is a whole lotta human irrationality going on that in my view CE fails to take account of. )
Discussions of Peak Oil / Climate Change etc they are having increasing influence on public opinion, gov policy and market behavior.
So even if they are 100% factually wrong (and there is indeed nothing to worry about), they are changing markets and show that economic theory isolated from questions of human psychology and sustainability etc will be blinkered and fail.
RAS
This is a good point.
It seems to me that people can not see that free-markets can have both destructive as well constructive phases. Rather than being simply “good” (right wing PoV) or “bad” (left wing PoV). It seems that supporters of both right and left wing economic models might get what they want. Globally,wealth is being consolidated, away from the poor/middle classes. So there is going to be a lot more equality, but unfortunately near the bottom of the economic pile. As the Western middle class gets eviscerated. While the diminishing number of people with access to money and power will be free to do whatever they like in the market.
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/07/wage-defla...
The real question that is not being raised is this; are we willing to compete with them?....
Not only hungry and willing but also ready to steal our latest technology by any means. As long as I know their miraculous economic growth is the result of the creative genius of the West , their only contribution is the hardworking labour. So I think the question is how far we are going to go in allowing transfer of our intellectual treasures either through our politicians who kneel at the feet of their corporate masters or industrial espionage. Let us not forget that it is the West that hols the keys to wealth. It only depends how many of them are handed over to the East at our expense, and to the detriment of our security.
As for the lifting of the poor out of poverty point. The idea is noble but before pursuing noble ideas to their desctructive end, we should put them into practical context.50 years ago the combined population of Asia and Africa was 1,6 billion. In a few years time they are going to hit 8 billion. Well that is good news for corporations since bigger labour supply will mean even cheaper input for their businesses which in turn will automatically take care of even 'bigger levelling' globally(West included!). For the western taxpayers it will mean just more weight to lift out of powerty, which I am afraid instead of lifting it we are going to be crushed by it.
As one commentator noted the issues are so blindingly obvious that there must be a conspiracy of silence in the circles of the power elite.
The crisis is of human not economic nature.
Are others having problems? Feedback will be appreciated, as I do not want to see commentators having difficulties unless the system has significant advantages. In the interim, apologies pocmloc for the problems.
This might just be because I'm a conservative and as everybody knows we are resistant to change... -grin- Do feel free to ignore. Its certainly not a big deal and wont stop me enjoying your blog at all.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/2881...
http://www.beaconintegration.com