That ain't no 'toon!

Hot and muggy in Norfolk, Virginia. My husband was in the navy at the time, and we'd been married about 6 weeks. Didn't have a tv yet, and it was too hot in our crappy apartment, so we drove around downtown Norfolk in his white '64 Impala listening to it all on the radio.

There had been tragedies in the space program, but even so it all seemed so positive. Yeah, we had to deal with Vietnam and Nixon would turn out to be a sleaze bucket, but there was still a real feeling of hope and promise and an eagerness for the future that I just don't sense right now.

And the funny thing is, I always remembered his statement as he stepped off the ladder to be, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." All the replays over all the subsequent years, it was different. But I remember hearing it that way. And Neil Armstrong said that's what he said.

http://gulfnews.com/news/world/usa/was-the-walk-on-the-moon-one-small-step-for-man-or-a-man-1.1066071


I will always give the moon a wink.

and I was in my poky room in a fourth floor walkup with the stench of the building incinerator wafting through the window because my room looked out over the airshaft instead of over the streets and into the rest of the tenements in the area. It was still better than having the door open because my roommate's incontinent dog was on the other side of it, my roommate having taken off that morning and couldn't be arsed to come home and care for the poor thing.

I was sick with a bad summer cold but I could still smell that incinerator, which might have colored my lack of awe over what had been achieved and was showing on my tiny B&W TV.

I moved out a week later.

They did manage to send me to Norfolk (NAS) in September. To be honest, I'd have rather been on the moon.

I was very young at the time... But, I remember that very well.

Now the richest nation on Earth always pleads poverty when an opportunity for greatness arises. "Oh, no, that costs too much. Look at the deficit, look at unemployment. Hey! Look at that country over there that talks funny. We need to start a trillion dollar war with them."

I remember plenty of launches and moonwalks but not that first one.

Not only for the historic event that it was. But I also came down with the first and last ear infection of my life. Twenty years old, loaded up on some kind prescription pain meds, with my boyfriend (now husband) waking me up telling me to watch the big event.

I remember that I had no other illness, no cold, no sinus, had not been swimming. There was no reason for me to have this ear infection. And my ears hurt terribly.

Years later, after the kids came, we visited the Armstrong museum in Wapakoneta
http://www.armstrongmuseum.org/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/household-income-is-below-recession-levels-report-says/2012/08/23/aa497460-ec80-11e1-a80b-9f898562d010_story.html?hpid=z4&wp_login_redirect=0

Household income is down sharply since the recession ended three years ago, according to a report released Thursday, providing another sign of the stubborn weakness of the economic recovery.

From June 2009 to June 2012, inflation-adjusted median household income fell 4.8 percent, to $50,964, according to a report by Sentier Research, a firm headed by two former Census Bureau officials. Incomes have dropped more since the beginning of the recovery than they did during the recession itself, when they declined 2.6 percent, according to the report, which analyzed data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. The recession, the most severe since the Great Depression, lasted from December 2007 to June 2009. Overall, median income is 7.2 percent below its December 2007 level and 8.1 percent below where it stood in January 2000, when it was $55,470, according to the report.

The findings highlight the depth of the recession and the long road the nation has to traverse before it fully recovers. They also echo other reports detailing the financial carnage caused by the recession. Few analysts expect a quick bounce back even as the economy grows, if tepidly. The unemployment rate was 8.3 percent in July, marking 42 months that it has been above 8 percent. About 5.2 million people — 40 percent of the unemployed — had been out of work for more than six months. An additional 8.2 million were working part time because they could not get full-time work.

Corporate profits, meanwhile, have recovered. But with workers producing more on the job, the gains in economic output have not been matched by new hiring...

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/big-income-losses-for-those-near-retirement/?ref=business

Americans nearing retirement age have suffered disproportionately after the financial crisis: along with the declining value of their homes, which were intended to cushion their final years, their incomes have fallen sharply.

The typical household income for people age 55 to 64 years old is almost 10 percent less in today’s dollars than it was when the recovery officially began three years ago, according to a new report from Sentier Research, a data analysis company that specializes in demographic and income data...



Income drops vary significantly by age, though. Households led by people between the ages of 55 and 64 have taken the biggest hit; their household incomes have fallen to $55,748 from $61,716 over the last three years, a decline of 9.7 percent.

Sustained unemployment among older workers may be at least partly to blame for this decline. Unemployment rates for that age group are relatively low, but once older workers lose their jobs, they have an unusually hard time finding re-employment. And even when they do find new work, they usually take a pay cut...

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/08/john-henry-a-conservative-defense-of-a-jobs-guarantee-program.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

John Locke is the “father” of property rights theory, and continues to be referenced in defense of private property. In the second volume of his Two Treatises of Government, Locke specified the conditions that must be satisfied in order for property to be deemed legitimate. Initially, any property taken from “the commons” (public or collective property) had to be based on one’s labor that was expended to improve that property. (While Locke focused on landed property, his argument applies more generally.)

But, there were two further conditions that had to be met, labeled the “prejudice” and the “spoilage” constraints—and these were seen as moral constraints. Essentially, the prejudice constraint means that no one can be disadvantaged by another’s appropriation of property; all must benefit, though some may benefit more than others. The spoilage constraint connotes that none can seize property beyond that which can be used by one’s own labor. If either constraint is not satisfied, two options are proposed: the disadvantaged have the right to revolt and overturn a private property regime, or government has the obligation to step in to rectify the situation in the interests of the community at large.

Now, it is clear that any large property holdings—giant farms, the modern corporation, etc.—violate the spoilage constraint. Locke himself was aware that there was a problem in his formulation in that, if adhered to, the capitalist accumulation process could not proceed. (He tried to wiggle out of his self-imposed dilemma by arguing that the accumulation of money—gold for him—was morally permissible as it didn’t violate either the prejudice or the spoilage constraints; anyone could accumulate money, and money (gold) didn’t spoil. For a critical evaluation of Locke’s proposed solution, see Bell, Henry, and Wray 2004.) The main issue addressed here is whether unemployment violates the prejudice constraint, thus calling the continued adherence to a private property regime into question. If so, from a purely Lockean standard, then government must undertake a program to guarantee full employment in the interests of society as a whole—and this is a moral obligation.

It must be noted that Locke was arguing from what is now a politically conservative position. In his day, Locke was considered something of a radical, but with the passage of time, private property has become ingrained in our institutions and our habits of thought that it might be said to have become sanctified as a necessary condition for our very existence—the essence of “freedom.” So, from a modern conservative position, what follows should be seen as consistent with Locke’s defense of property, and, again, Locke continues to be called on as a seminal reference point in current debates...

http://www.nextnewdeal.net/middle-class-decline-national-emergency-wheres-our-fdr

In the 1930s, the president and Congress responded to the economic crisis with immediate action. Why haven't today's policymakers done the same?


A recent study by the Pew Research Center has confirmed what millions of Americans have realized for some time now: that the middle class has endured its worst decade since World War II. With declining home values, falling wages, and skyrocketing higher education costs, the median wealth for the middle class fell by 28 percent over the past decade, while the wealth of higher income families rose slightly. The same sad story holds true for middle class incomes, as government data now shows that we have finally managed to break the half-century-long streak that saw inflation-adjusted family income rise in every decade between 1950 and 2000, but not in the decade ending in 2010. Thanks to these and other economic trends, the overall size of the American middle class has also shrunk, down to just 51 percent of the population as compared to 61 percent of the population four decades ago.

One might assume that these alarming statistics—and the fact that the U.S. unemployment rate has been above 8 percent for more than three years—would lead to something like a crisis atmosphere in Washington, a recognition that this is no ordinary economic downturn, but a great national emergency made all the more worrisome by the onset of the worst drought in more than 50 years. But instead of acting, members of the House and Senate have elected to go on their usual five-week summer recess, confirming in the minds of most Americans that the principal blame for their current troubles and for the decline of the middle class lies with Congress.

Roughly three-quarters of a century ago, in similar circumstances, the reactions of both the public and the government was exactly the opposite. From the day he assumed office, FDR identified the collapse of the U.S. economy as an unprecedented national emergency, not unlike the onset of war, that must be countered by “action and action now.” Indeed, his first move as president was to call Congress back into an “emergency session” that launched the most productive period in U.S. legislative history—15 major pieces of legislation in 100 days, including such “emergency” measures as the 1933 Banking Act, the Glass-Steagall Act, and the Truth in Securities Act, all of which helped provide the regulatory structure needed for the U.S. banking and financial sector to thrive for decades to come.

But FDR’s characterization of the economic crisis as an emergency did not end there. He would continue to describe the nation’s woes in the 1930s as a “national emergency” and would continue to demand the cooperation of Congress in meeting both the short-term and long-term challenges that the nation faced as it climbed its way out of the Great Depression. It was this spirit to act—in both parties—that gave us the major provisions of the New Deal and that laid the basis for that remarkable 50-year period of expansion of the middle class that may now have sadly come to an end.

Given the level of inactivity on Capitol Hill, it would appear that the steady and sharp decline in the size and economic wherewithal of the American middle class does not represent a crisis to the members of Congress. But for the millions of Americans out of work or underemployed, the millions of Americans who now face the very real prospect that they will not be able to attain the same level of economic prosperity as their parents, this is no garden-variety recession. It is a deep structural decline that may forever change the way they and their children lead their lives.

In short, we remain in the midst of a very real national emergency that demands the same sort of response taken by the president and Congress more than three-quarters of a century ago: “action and action now.” Until Congress recognizes, this, however, one suspects that little will change, except that the long, steady decline of the American middle class and American way of life will continue.

********************************************************

David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute. He is currently writing a book entitled Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and the Search for Anglo-American Cooperation, 1933-1938.

http://truth-out.org/news/item/11130-on-the-road-to-ryan-and-ruin

Part I - The Good Old Bad Days

In the 132 years between 1797 and 1929, there was no effective regulation of U.S. economy. No federal agencies existed to control corruption, fraud and exploitation on the part of the business class. Even during the Civil War, economic management on a national level was minimal and war profiteering common. As a result the country experienced 33 major economic downturns which impacted roughly 60 of the years in question. These included 22 recessions, 4 depressions, and 7 economic “panics” (bank runs and failures). Then came the Great Depression starting with the crash of the New York stock market in 1929. This soon became a worldwide affair which lasted until the onset of World War II. Millions were thrown out of work, agricultural production partially collapsed, and the fear of rebellion and revolution was palpable both in the U.S. and Europe.

It is to be noted that the way capitalism worked over these 132 years was a function of ideology. This was (and still is) the so-called free market ideology which taught that if the government was kept as small as possible (basically having responsibility for internal order, external defense, and the enforcement of contracts), the citizenry would have to pay very low taxes and be left alone to pursue their own prosperity. Thus, as the ideology goes, everyone would be free to maximize their own wealth and in doing so also maximize the wealth of the community as a whole. The Great Depression was a real moment of truth for the capitalist West because it suggested to the open-minded that the free market ideology was seriously flawed. Free market practices had brought the economic system to the brink of collapse, and Russia’s newly triumphant communists, espousing a command economy, represented serious competition. So the question that had to be answered was how best to modify the capitalist system so as to preserve the position of the ruling elite.

It was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt who came up with an answer, at least for the United States. Through a series of economic and social experiments he crafted the New Deal and promoted the notion of the welfare state. It should be emphasized that this was not socialism. In essence, the New Deal was capitalism with safety nets and subsidies. It meant that some entrepreneurs in areas such as agriculture, defense, and other businesses, actually got money from the government to produce their products. On the other end of the spectrum, government money was made available to keep the really poor people from starving and the unemployed solvent while they sought new employment. A national pension plan was devised in the form of social security, and bank deposits up to a certain amount were insured. In addition, new agencies were created to monitor business activities, particularly the stock market and the banks, to prevent the sort of activities that had brought on many of the economic downturns of the past. This was a major step away from the ideal of a wholly free market but most of the citizenry, with the Great Depression at their backs, understood the necessity of the New Deal. Of course, taxes would eventually have to go up to help pay for it all.

Part II – How Quickly We Forget

Essentially, Roosevelt and the New Deal saved capitalism from itself. Left to those, such as Herbert Hoover, who could not escape the paradigm of free market ideology, capitalism in the U.S. may well have followed much of Europe in succumbing to the revolutionary movements of the right or the left...

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/13734/looking_for_a_good_job_dont_get_your_hopes_up/





If you think your job stinks, you're not alone. And if you’re still looking for a decent job, don’t expect to find one anytime soon, or ever.

A new analysis of job quality, assessing various measures of benefits and wages, confirms what many of us already suspected: Good jobs are vanishing from the United States, with global trade and social disinvestment leaving workers stranded on a barren economic landscape. The report, published by John Schmitt and Janelle Jones from the Center for Economic and Policy Reseach (CEPR), shows that the downward spiral began long before the recent economic crisis. It notes that since 1979, the "good job" (one that "pays at least $18.50 an hour, has employer provided health insurance, and some kind of retirement plan&quot has become an endangered species:



In 2010, "less than one-fourth (24.6 percent) of the workforce" possessed those precious good jobs. And the clincher is this downturn is beginning to look like a sad plateau:



While workers around the world have witnessed massive economic volatility in the recent boom-bust cycles, food crises and political upheavals, the trend line of labor hardship holds steady. The societal impacts of unemployment crises parallel the effect of long-term effects on individual workers, especially young ones--a self-perpetuating sense of despair and isolation, and perhaps entrenched, long-term suffering. The report’s long-term prognosis undercuts the historically entrenched national mythology of upward mobility. Alan Barber, a spokesperson for CEPR, tells In These Times via email:



The divergence between the American Dream and American reality has widened as neoliberal policies have assaulted workers under the guise of promoting “personal responsibility.” The belief that hard work pays off has been betrayed by the degradation of public trusts like education and health care, while mortgage and student debt crises and the decline of union representation, hollow out communities from within. The erosion of public services and social programs is nothing new, but the flip side of a shrinking safety net--a crumbling labor market--pushes self-sufficiency even further out of reach for millions. The vanishing promise of social mobility may have an even more severe impact across generations. According to the Pew Economic Mobility project’s report on intergenerational prosperity:



So apparently the traditional rungs by which earlier generations climbed the class ladder--a bachelor’s degree, a first home, “loyalty” to a single company--are now shakier than ever. Pew researchers uncovered a cleft in mobility over time: in terms of “relative” mobility, people tend to do a bit better than their parents. But the gains often fail to add up to “absolute” mobility, which means people don't ascend to a significantly better income bracket. Many are actually falling behind relative to the rest of the economy. About 16 percent are “downwardly mobile,” staying put or falling in the class hierarchy. Overall, some 20 percent “make more money than their parents did, but have actually fallen to a lower rung of the income ladder.” The withering of the middle class is deeply skewed by race, with black and white households moving ahead at vastly different rates. According to Pew, “only 23 percent of blacks raised in the middle exceed their parents’ wealth compared with 56 percent of whites.”

So what’s left for workers who not only face a lifetime of economic hopelessness, but also can’t even give their kids the hope of achieving something more? The CEPR report doesn’t offer policy prescriptions, but does note that the shrinking share of good jobs in the U.S. workforce is not an inevitability. The research connects the decline in quality jobs to the dismantling of the economic supports that make work fair and rewarding, including union power and industry regulations. On a macro level:



The public sector has suffered under privatization, and once-solid middle-class jobs have been lost to the tides of global commerce. Immigrants meanwhile have been absorbed into a precarious low-wage workforce that feeds raging inequality. And meanwhile, political elites are finding new and creative ways to siphon more resources away from the public and subsidize predatory corporate wealth.

The deficit in good jobs can’t be simply chalked up to globalization or a decline in American workers’ “competitiveness.” It’s a reflection of a deficit in power at the bottom, and a surplus of greed at the top.

$321/mo for catastrophic insurance covers NOTHING until I shell out the high deductible $1200. Not even a trip to the doc for an annual exam. Whatta country.

and ditto ditto ditto...

http://www.cnbc.com//id/48768902

...Butler's salaries are down between five to 20 percent in many markets in the United States compared to five years ago, according to placement agencies. Applicants far outnumber jobs. And while high-quality, experienced help can still find work, overall demand for butlers remains well below its peak during the butler boom of 2005 to 2007. Typical salaries range from $40,000 or $50,000 to more than $200,000 for experienced butlers in big cities. Estate managers, who manage multiple homes, can make even more. But those salaries are also down from 2006.

“The very wealthy still have money and they still need staff,” said Steven Laitmon of The Calendar Group, which places butlers and household staff. “But they’re more cost conscious. They want to do more with less when it comes to staffing.”

Many butlers are being asked to do jobs they would have never considered before the recession. Aside from handling the standard duties of a butler – managing staff, running the home, coordinating family schedules – butlers are sometimes being asked to cook, clean, watch the kids and do yard work. Some are even being asked to clean toilets, Laitmon said. Jeeves, in other words, is being downgraded to a jack-of-all-trades, sometimes doing the work of the chef, the housekeeper, the footmen and sometimes the chauffer and nanny. All of these duties are testing the limits of today’s butlers, who say they can’t provide expert butler service if they’re also trying to mind the kids and the roast beef. “You can’t provide the highest levels of service when you’re trying to shop for fresh organic vegetables at multiple markets during they day while scrubbing the toilets, waiting for the cable guy, cooking the food and then plating a beautiful dinner,” Laitmon said. “They are all different skills.”...

FOR THAT KIND OF SERVICE, YOU NEED A WIFE...AND NOT A TROPHY WIFE, EITHER, BUT THEN THERE'S THE PERSONAL IMPLICATIONS...--DEMETER

Werner Leutert, principal of the Home Staffing Network International, which helps place butlers and staff, said that many of today’s new wealthy don’t have experience with household staff, since they didn’t grow up wealthy. So they often have unrealistic expectations for what a butler can do.

“Years ago, many of the employers came from families with staffs, so they were more experienced with the roles of butlers and staff,” Leutert said. “Employers today, the newer wealthy, don’t want all these people in their house. They want someone who’s fantastic who can do it all. That’s not always possible.”

http://www.icenews.is/index.php/2012/08/22/icelands-recovery-continues-declared-impressive/

Experts continue to praise Iceland’s recovery success after the country’s bank bailouts of 2008. Unlike the US and several countries in the eurozone, Iceland allowed its banking system to fail in the global economic downturn and put the burden on the industry’s creditors rather than taxpayers.

In the following years, the Icelandic government made drastic cuts that reduced the fiscal deficit from 14 percent of GDP to just two percent. At the same time, unemployment in Iceland has shrunk to less than five percent, while analysts predict the North Atlantic economy to grow some 2.8 percent by the end of 2012, according to recent reports.

The rebound continues to wow officials, including International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde, who recently referred to the Icelandic recovery as “impressive”. And experts continue to reiterate that European officials should look to Iceland for lessons regarding austerity measures and similar issues.

The Financial Times outlined a number of important points for countries in the eurozone to consider in an article published on Monday. These include Iceland’s tactic of pursing “politics of social and economic inclusion”. This includes heavier taxes on the higher brackets while cutting welfare schemes less than other areas of the budget to retain the purchasing power of lower income groups.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32270.htm

For almost sixty years, during the presidencies of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush Jr. and Obama, three corrupt confidants of one evil mastermind have been the major long term managers of a US massively homicidal foreign policy of invasions, occupations, undeclared wars, bombings, military threats and CIA led violent overthrows and assassinations throughout the third world.

Only three appointed high government officials have run sixty years of war on small vulnerable nations, that were previously plundered under military occupation by colonial powers for centuries: Three spooks, John Foster Dulles (aided by his equally corrupt brother Allen, head of the CIA), Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, chosen by David Rockefeller to oversee the deaths of tens of millions of men, women and children, murdered in their own small beloved countries, as often as not in their own towns, villages and homes - millions more dying in violent aftermaths of US crimes against Congo, Guatemala, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Indonesia, Libya and many other places. (Congo alone accounts for from between six and fifteen million dead since the US led Belgians and other Europeans in destroying it as a nation.

In every single case of US mayhem (that if totaled up reaches many multi-holocaust proportions), civil war, fomented by the US itself, has been used as a pretext for unlawful barbaric criminal intervention by US Armed Forces, most often prepared by a corporate business dutiful CIA using its far flung network of banks, media, double agents and cooperating NGOs...From the earliest days of investor managed crimes of savage European forces (and later those of the US) falling upon ancient civilizations and cultures, there have been many famous devilishly clever lead investors cleverly creating wars of assured investment profitability. The most infamous in modern history were David's grandfather John Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan.

Morgan, once accused on the floor of Congress of having amassed financial control of America, enabled wars from Mexico to Manchuria. In Mexico, during the Carranza presidency, his top CEO Thomas Lamont was jokingly referred to as the real president of the country, and Lamont was rumored to have written the Japanese press release on the invasion of China. [ Ambassador from Wall Street: The Story of Thomas W. Lamont, J.P. Morgan's Chief Executive, Edward Lamont ]

Morgan and John D. Rockefeller made the mega profitable continuance of WW I possible through the concentrated financial might and lending power of their secretly planned and created giant Federal Reserve (neither Federal nor Reserve, but a private bank of gangster investors).

The super colossal fortunes made before, during and after WW II were prepared by John Rockefeller, often then referred to as the "richest man in the world,' leading, along with Hitler's benefactor, Henry Ford and Irénée DuPont, America's banks, corporations, and big business men like Joe Kennedy and Prescott Bush, the crucial investing in a prostrate Germany of low wage labor and collaborating in building Hitler's Nazi armed forces up to world number one. (After the war, John Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company was indicted and tried for "Trading with the Enemy" through its Latin American branches.)

MUCH MORE, COMPREHENSIVE IF NOT TERRIBLY WELL-WRITTEN

****

[see Prosecute US Wars Now Campaign's web site for country-by-country histories of US crimes.] http://prosecuteuscrimesagainsthumanitynow.blogspot.com/

**********************************************************

Footnote:
Appreciation to Wikipedia, beyond that credited, for facilitating finding the locations of much of the documentation provided.

**********************************************************

Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India and the US; now resides in NYC.

TODAY'S TINFOIL, TOMORROW'S REVELATIONS?

http://www.nationofchange.org/unrepentant-and-unreformed-bankers-1345991287

Money laundering. Price fixing. Bid rigging. Securities fraud. Talking about the mob? No, unfortunately. Wall Street. These days, the business sections of newspapers read like rap sheets. GE Capital, JPMorgan Chase, UBS, Wells Fargo and Bank of America tied to a bid-rigging scheme to bilk cities and towns out of interest earnings. ING Direct, HSBC and Standard Chartered Bank facing charges of money laundering. Barclays caught manipulating a key interest rate, costing savers and investors dearly, with a raft of other big banks also under investigation. Not to speak of the unprecedented wrongdoing that precipitated the financial crisis of 2008.

Evidence gathered by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission clearly demonstrated that the financial crisis was avoidable and due, in no small part, to recklessness and ethical breaches on Wall Street. Yet, it's clear that the unrepentant and the unreformed are still all too present within our banking system. A June survey of 500 senior financial services executives in the United States and Britain turned up stunning results. Some 24 percent said that they believed that financial services professionals may need to engage in illegal or unethical conduct to succeed, 26 percent said that they had observed or had firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace, and 16 percent said they would engage in insider trading if they could get away with it.

That too much of Wall Street remains unchanged is not surprising. Simply stated, the banks and their leaders have paid no real economic, legal or political price for their wrongdoing and thus have not felt compelled to change...Last year, the profits of the nation's five biggest banks exceeded $51 billion, with their chief executives all enjoying pay increases. By 2011, the 10 biggest U.S. banks held 77 percent of the nation's banking assets...On the legal front, enforcement has been woefully inadequate. Federal criminal financial fraud prosecutions have fallen to a two-decade low. Violations are settled for pennies on the dollar - the mere cost of doing business, with no admission of wrongdoing and with the bill invariably picked up by insurers or shareholders. (When it's shareholders, that's not someone else far away, that's your 401(k), pension fund or mutual fund.) When Goldman Sachs was charged with failing to set policies to prevent insider trading, it was fined $22 million, an amount the bank collects in about seven hours of trading. Goldman's record $550 million penalty for securities fraud in 2010 amounted to less than 2 percent of that year's revenue.

On the political front, after a brief stint in the penalty box, the big banks have resumed the political muscling that got them two decades of deregulation. To block reform, the financial industry has spent more than $317 million on lobbying in Washington over the past two years and more than $230 million in federal political contributions in the 2010 and 2012 election cycles. It's been to good effect. Two-thirds of the regulations called for in the financial reform law passed two years ago are still not in place. And the House Republicans, the banks' sturdiest allies, have slashed at the budgets of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission to impede their ability to investigate wrongdoing. Clearly, the present order is unsustainable. We need to demand fundamental changes now, breaking up the big banks to snap their stranglehold on our markets and our democracy, ensuring that the newly minted financial reform laws are implemented, and wringing out rampant speculation.

MORE

http://www.nationofchange.org/bailed-out-banks-freddie-mac-aig-gave-6-million-2008-conventions-1345903747

The Republican nominating convention that kicks off Monday in Tampa (weather permitting), has been funded by tens of millions of dollars in corporate contributions, the exact source of which won’t be known until after the party is over. But it’s a sure bet that there are at least two big donors from the 2008 event that won’t be giving this time around — American International Group and Freddie Mac. The two institutions together gave $1 million to the Republican convention host committee. A few months after the conclusion of the convention they were in danger of collapse, and would ultimately receive a combined $139 billion taxpayer bailout. The donations are possible thanks to a loophole in campaign finance rules that allow corporations, unions and wealthy individuals to give unlimited sums to support the conventions.

It is “absolutely ridiculous” that corporations are able to make such donations, says Craig Holman, a lobbyist for the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. He calls it “nothing but throwing money at the feet of congressional and White House leaders, presumably with the assumption of getting something in return.”

The two groups were bipartisan in their giving. AIG gave $750,000 to both the Republican and Democratic host committees. The government would eventually sink $71 billion into the insurance giant. Mortgage buyer Freddie Mac gave $250,000 to both committees. Three days after the close of the Republican event, the government took it over along with Fannie Mae. Taxpayers ultimately sunk $70 billion into the floundering institution. In all, $6 million was donated by financial institutions that received bailout money to both party conventions, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of Federal Election Commission filings — $3.4 million to Republicans and $2.6 million to Democrats

The total raised for the previous conventions is likely much higher than what we will see this year. Through the end of 2008, the Republican host committee collected more than $65 million for the event, conducted in Minneapolis, while the Democratic convention in Denver drew about $63 million. THIS TIME AROUND, Republicans, meeting in Tampa, barring the arrival of a possible hurricane, aim for $50 million while Democrats, meeting in Charlotte, N.C., a week later, set a relatively modest goal of $37 million, having refused to accept direct contributions from corporations. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Reforms in the 1970s were meant to keep corporate money out of conventions. In 1972, as Republicans were trying to decide where to host their national convention, International Telephone & Telegraph offered $400,000 if the GOP would bring it to San Diego. Eight days later, the administration of President Richard Nixon dropped antitrust litigation against IT&T and offered a settlement that was favorable to the corporate giant...After details of the apparent deal appeared in the press, Republicans tried to save face and moved the convention from San Diego to Miami Beach. The scandal prompted Congress to enact a new law that would provide taxpayer funding for the parties' conventions, thus removing the need for private contributions — in theory, anyway. For 2012, each party has received $18.2 million from the U.S. Treasury to help defray costs. But both parties are permitted to operate nonprofit corporations known as “host committees” set up as charitable organizations to offset the financial burden on local governments associated with hosting the conventions.


MORE DETAIL AT LINK

Thanks, Fuddnik!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021207648

http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/realestate/for-rnc-week-no-more-eviction-notices/1247430

With the Republican National Convention coming and Tropical Storm Isaac right behind, who has time for evictions?

Strapped for manpower, Hillsborough sheriff's deputies next week will temporarily stop serving notices of foreclosures and evictions.

For distressed residents in Tampa and across the county, that could mean an extra week of breathing room.

Hillsborough's 2,500 deputies, sheriff's spokesman Larry McKinnon said, will already have a heck of a to-do list, staffing the convention and dealing with any havoc that blows in from the looming tropical storm...

THAT SHOWS YOU WHERE YOU RATE, AFTER NATURAL DISASTER AND ANARCHISTS...YOU BIG BANKSTERS, YOU!

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/box-office-shocker-anti-obama-doc-365455

Dinesh D’Souza and John Sullivan’s conservative documentary 2016: Obama's America expanded nationwide Friday to pleasing results, grossing $2.2 million to place No. 4 overall behind a trio of holdovers The anti-Barack Obama film is now the top-grossing documentary of the year (excluding nature docs), besting the $3.5 million earned by Bully.

Obama's America came in ahead of three other new films opening at the domestic office: Premium Rush, which earned $2 million to come in only No. 8 for the day; offbeat indie comedy Hit & Run, which placed No. 10 with $1.4 million; and Dark Castle's supernatural thriller The Apparition, which grossed $1.2 million to rank 12th.

Topping the box office for the second Friday in a row was Lionsgate and Millennium Films' The Expendables 2, which grossed in the $3.8 million to $4 million range. Universal's The Bourne Legacy held at No. 2, grossing $2.8 million. Focus Features' animated family entry ParaNorman grossed roughly $2.3 million Friday...It's not clear where Obama's America, distributed by Rocky Mountain Pictures, will end up for the weekend, though most box-office observers believe it will gross in the $6 million range. On Friday, the documentary upped its theater count from 169 to 1,090, just as Republicans began heading to Tampa, Fla., where the Republican National Convention begins Monday.

Obama's America did well in a number of the large cities where it opened Friday, including Denver, Phoenix and San Diego. Smaller markets also turned in stellar numbers, including Baton Rouge, La., Wichita, Kan., Grand Junction, Colo., and Albany, NY.

http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2012/08/full-recovery-by-2018-says-cbo.html

Twice each year, the Congressional Budget Office publishes a "Budget and Economic Outlook" for the next 10 years. The just-released August version offers a timeline for the eventual recovery of the U.S. economy to its pre-recession path of economic growth, and some worries about the budget fights that are scheduled to erupt later this year.

On the subject of eventual full recovery, the CBO regularly estimates the "potential GDP" of the U.S. economy: that is, what the U.S. economy would produce if unemployment was down to a steady-state level of about 5.5% and steady growth was occurring. During recessions, of course, the economy produces below its potential GDP. During booms (like the end of the dot-com period in the early 2000s and the top of the housing price bubble in about 2005-2006), it's possible for an economy to produce more than its potential GDP, but only for a short-term and unsustainable period. Here's the CBO graph comparing actual and potential GDP since 2000. The shallowness of how much the recession in 2001 caused actual GDP to fall below potential, compared to the depth and length of how much actual GDP has fallen below potential in the aftermath of the Great Recession, is especially striking.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-j9b-neDxgAU/UDZ8VhX403I/AAAAAAAABaw/f9LCV_3jdNo/s400/cbo+7.jpg

This scenario in which the U.S. economy returns to potential GDP in 2018 requires a period in which the U.S. economy shows some rapid growth. Here's a graph showing the growth rate of the U.S. economy vs. that of the average of major U.S. trading partners (weighted by how much trade the U.S. economy does with each of them). "[T]he trading partners are Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Mexico, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and countries in the euro zone." Notice that the prediction is for a substantial burst of growth around 2014, and lasting for a couple of years.

IN OTHER WORDS, TOTAL BS--DEMETER

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WB6aSdTkVlY/UDZ9lgJ1xVI/AAAAAAAABa4/Fvcz407Cr0c/s400/cbo+6.jpg

However, the eagle-eyed reader will note that these growth predictions from the CBO also show a period of negative growth--that is, a recession--in the near future. Similarly, the earlier figure showing a gap between actual and potential GDP shows that gap widening in the near future, before it starts to close. Why? The CBO is required by law to make baseline projections that reflect the laws that are actually on the books. And currently, "sharp increases in federal taxes and reductions in federal spending that are scheduled under current law to begin in calendar year 2013 are likely to interrupt the recent economic progress. ... The increases in federal taxes and reductions in federal spending, totaling almost $500 billion, that are projected to occur in fiscal year 2013 represent an amount of deficit reduction over the course of a single year that has not occurred (as a share of GDP) since 1969." These changes mean that the baseline CBO projection is for a recession in 2013...

MORE BLUE SKY FOLLOWS

http://www.offthechartsblog.org/cbo-ending-high-income-tax-cuts-would-save-almost-1-trillion/

The Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) new report shows that allowing President Bush’s 2001 and 2003 income tax cuts on income over $250,000 to expire on schedule at the end of 2012 would save $823 billion in revenue and $127 billion on interest on the nation’s debt, compared to permanently extending all of the Bush tax cuts. Overall, this would mean $950 billion in ten-year deficit reduction, a significant step in the direction of fiscal stability.



Prior CBO analysis showed the minimal economic risk this would pose in the short-term. CBO previously concluded that extending only the so-called “middle class” tax cuts on income below $250,000, instead of extending all of the tax cuts, would “be more cost-effective in boosting output and employment in the short run because the higher-income households that would probably spend a smaller fraction of any increase in their after-tax income would receive a smaller share of the reduction in taxes (relative to current law).”

************************************************************

AUTHOR Chuck Marr is the Director of Federal Tax Policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2012/08/hbc-90008782

Last month, the Denver Business Journal showed that international banking scandals can be a major focus of local reporting. In its article “LIBOR scandal may cost Denver schools money,” the low-circulation trade magazine documented how the interest-rate scandal, which originated in the United Kingdom, could end up bilking Colorado taxpayers of millions thanks to a refinancing plan for schools orchestrated in 2008 by then superintendent Michael Bennet. His controversial scheme placed Denver’s public-school-district pension fund in the hands of the finance industry, which later underwrote his U.S. Senate campaign.

In a state facing recurring budget deficits and underfunded schools, such losses are a blockbuster story—just as they are in every municipality whose finances have been destroyed by conniving politicians. But to date, most Coloradans haven’t heard about the local implications of the LIBOR scandal or the problems with the school-refinancing scheme. That’s because their media market’s dominant broadsheet, the Denver Post, has chosen not to invest serious resources in reporting on them.

Why the reticence from the square state’s newspaper of record? I ask this question in the September edition of Harper’s Magazine—and after many months of reporting, I found that the answer was far more insidious than mere newsroom layoffs.

Yes, it’s true, metro dailies have been shedding reporters, collectively decreasing the nation’s newspaper editorial staffs by 25 percent in two decades according to the American Society of News Editors. And yes, that has predictably reduced the scope and depth of local media coverage. However, when blockbuster stories are patently being ignored, the omissions suggest calculation. Indeed, they often have less to do with dwindling reportorial resources than with political machinations, information suppression, and monopoly power. That’s especially the case today, when newly minted newspaper monopolists—from Chicago to Philadelphia to San Diego to smaller markets—are also well-known political puppeteers...

***********************************************************

David Sirota is a Denver-based syndicated newspaper columnist, radio host, and the author of three books, including Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now. His article “The Only Game in Town: An unlikely comeback for dying newspapers” appears in the September 2012 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/24/us-ethanol-mandate-waiver-idUSBRE87N05820120824

For the past five years, the U.S. government has paid fuel companies billions of dollars in subsidies to buy home-grown, corn-based ethanol, making it a viable part of the nation's gasoline supply.

Now you would have to pay them not to buy it.

The worst drought in half a century revived a fierce food versus fuel debate. Livestock and food producers and others are calling on President Barack Obama to abandon -- at least temporarily -- a government mandate that requires converting more than a third of the U.S. corn crop to ethanol. The president has three months to decide. Experts say that even if he waives the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), that will not necessarily free up much corn for food and livestock feed. In fact, unless corn prices rise another $2 or oil prices fall sharply, it may not make a difference at all. Even without the standard, a third of the U.S. gasoline supply must contain ethanol to meet unrelated clean air rules, mostly in California and on the East Coast. No other available substance can oxygenate gasoline as effectively, helping it burn more cleanly. More importantly, ethanol is as much as $1 cheaper than other types of octane boosters like reformate, which refiners use to increase the efficiency of their fuel...Unlike five years ago, when ethanol was a marginal and relatively costly fuel that required heavy government subsidies to survive, it is now a competitive source of energy.

FOOD VS FUEL

The realization that ethanol won't be easily extracted from the U.S. gasoline supply is dawning just as a renewed food-or-fuel debate comes to a head. A dire drought has shriveled the corn crop, causing prices to jump more than 60 percent in just three months to a record high above $8 a bushel. Under pressure from outraged livestock and poultry producers who have seen their feed costs surge, several state governors have applied to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for waivers to the mandate. The agency, which denied a similar appeal in 2008, must decide by mid-November how to proceed. But removing the RFS obligation won't change the fact that the 1990 Clean Air Act requires fuel companies to sell a cleaner blend of fuel, called reformulated gasoline (RFG) or RBOB, in the most populous parts of the country...Originally meant as a way for nine U.S. cities with the worst smog to clean up the air, RFG is now a required fuel in about 30 percent of the country's service stations....In effect, one-third of the ethanol is mandatory, but the remaining two-thirds is discretionary, blended into conventional gasoline -- or CBOB (conventional blendstock for oxygenate blending), different than RBOB -- simply to increase octane, which improves efficiency. It is this pool that has absorbed the trebling in ethanol output since 2006, seeping into almost every filling station in the country. In May, only about 4 percent of all U.S. gasoline was ethanol-free, according to EIA data. A year ago, it was 10 percent and in 2008, it was a quarter.

"The addition of ethanol has allowed refiners to use gasoline with an octane level of 84 and then blend with ethanol to get a higher octane to reach the 87 level that we buy," said Cannon. Ethanol has a octane rating of 113. U.S. retail gasoline octane levels range from 87, which is conventional gasoline, to 94 which is premium gasoline.

According to J.P. Morgan, the average spread between 87 and 93 octane has averaged about 13 cents over the last five years. "This implies that, in the long term, the octane premium for ethanol is likely close to $0.63 a gallon over 84-octane gasoline," said J.P. Morgan in a note to clients. In theory this could be curtailed if the mandate were waived. But economics say otherwise. With very few exceptions, ethanol has been much cheaper than gasoline, actually reducing the cost of gasoline at the pump. It is 25 to 30 cents cheaper than CBOB on the spot market, according to a trader with a large U.S. gasoline blender who declined to be named...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-23/water-trumping-carbon-spreads-17-billion-market.html

Desalination equipment orders are forecast to triple over five years to become a $17 billion business, driven by breakthroughs in energy savings and demand by cities and industry.

Investment in installations that make drinking water from the sea will jump to a record in 2016 from $5 billion last year and $8.9 billion in 2012, according to forecasts by Global Water Intelligence, an industry consultant. While that’s a fraction of spending on carbon-free energy generation, it’s gaining traction among managers of environmental services funds.

“Water right now is a strain on this planet more than carbon,” Dow Chemical Co. (DOW) Chief Executive Officer Andrew Liveris said in an interview this month in London. “We mismanage water terribly. It’s going to be a big issue.”

Prompting the boom is technology that uses less energy to create potable water as well as a crush of companies entering an industry and driving down costs. From France’s Veolia Environnement SA (VIE) to IDE Technologies Ltd. of Israel and Hyflux Ltd. (HYF) of Singapore, competition to make money from duplicating the Earth’s water cycle is pushing shares of the companies in the water industry near their 2007 highs...

THAT DOW CHEMICAL, THAT MASSIVE POLLUTER, SHOULD DARE TO RAISE ITS HEAD IN THIS FIELD....

National Guard will be in Charlotte to assist DNC

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/08/24/3476319/national-guard-will-be-in-charlotte.html#storylink=cpy

Hundreds of N.C. National Guardsmen will be sent to Charlotte to provide security at several “critical infrastructure” sites around venues for the Democratic National Convention. And many more guardsmen will be conveniently nearby should they be called upon to assist local authorities. They plan to be in Charlotte the week of the DNC as part of their annual training, said spokesman Lt. Col. Robert Carver of the N.C. Air National Guard...

“The Guard is ready to support the governor and the city of Charlotte in its traditional role of support to civil authorities,” Carver said.

Carver declined to say which sites in and around Charlotte that guardsmen will protect or specifically how many guardsmen will come. But he did say that several hundred serving on state active duty status will work in direct DNC support roles through funding from the city of Charlotte. City officials couldn’t immediately be reached Friday to determine the cost associated with bringing the guardsmen to Charlotte. The city is to receive a $50?million federal security grant for the convention...The Guard has about two dozen people assigned as part of Joint Task Force Panther, which will assist with the command of Guard forces if they’re called to assist with an incident, Carver said. He said the Guard has been in daily contact with other agencies, including the Secret Service.

...Florida’s National Guard will dispatch 1,750 troops to Tampa, Fla., for the Republican National Convention next week, reports the Tampa Bay Times. They’re expected to help with traffic control and security posts.

The president, Congress and the governor can call the National Guard into service during emergencies or other situations. The Guard also can be called into duty if local law enforcement cannot maintain civil control and martial law is declared....

Drones to patrol skies over Republican convention

http://www2.tbo.com/news/politics/2012/aug/24/drones-to-patrol-skies-over-republican-convention-ar-472636/

Security-conscious authorities will be using a wide variety of devices and technology to monitor the skies, streets and waterways around Tampa during next week's Republican National Convention. Cameras, helicopters and law enforcement officers all will be employed to help look for suspicious activity and possible threats. Add to that mix one more technology: drones. This will mark the first time unmanned aerial vehicles will patrol the skies over a national convention, according to an engineer with a Naples company that builds and will operate the drones.

The vehicle, called an Aether Aero, is an eight-bladed vertical takeoff platform that will provide intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to government agencies, according to Curt Winter, an engineer with United Drones. The 41/2-foot-wide Aether Aero, which resembles a small helicopter, can fly up to 4,000 feet high and, with a specially built battery, can operate up to four hours at a time, Winter said. It is equipped with a 109x optical zoom camera, can lift up to 50 pounds and is so light it can be picked up with two fingers, according to Chris Knott, United Drones' director of corporate development. In addition to the unmanned aerial vehicles, United Drones will operate several unmanned ground vehicles, called Wraiths, at the convention. The Wraiths can travel up to 65 mph "and climb just about anything," said Winter. The Wraiths, also built by United Drones, have the capability of carrying surveillance cameras and even lethal and non-lethal weapons.

"They are fully autonomous backup units," Winter said of the Wraiths. "They are designed to follow certain agencies out into the field and, if they get into trouble, be activated by a command center and provide instant backup."

Winter would not say which government agencies will use the aerial drones or what will be targeted by their sensors, nor who will use the Wraiths or how they will be equipped. But police are expecting thousands of protesters to descend on the area for the convention, scheduled to kick off Sunday night with a party for media and delegates at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg. The first sessions are scheduled for Monday and protests are expected throughout the event, set to run through Aug. 30, weather permitting.

Thursday, a new YouTube video, purportedly from the hacking collective known as Anonymous, surfaced, calling on protesters to disable surveillance cameras, jam police radio systems and tear down barricades. That video comes on the heels of one posted on YouTube last week saying that peaceful protest is passé.

SURE LOOKS THAT WAY, DOESN'T IT?

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-monkeywrench-wars.html

Among science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke’s many gifts was a mordant sense of humor, and a prime example of that gift in action was his 1951 short story Superiority. It’s the story of a space war told by the commanding general of the losing side; he is explaining to some interstellar equivalent of the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal how his forces managed to lose...the space fleets and resources of the losing side were far superior to those of the victors. So, however, was their technology. "However" is the operative word, for each brilliantly innovative wonder weapon fielded by their scientists turned out to have disastrous downsides when put into service, while the winning side simply kept on churning out unimaginative space battleships using old but proven technology. By the time the losing side realized that it should have done the same thing, it was so far behind that only a new round of wonder weapons seemed to offer any hope of victory—and a little more of that same logic finished them off.

It’s been suggested by more than one wit that life imitates art far more often than art imitates life. The United States military these days seems intent on becoming a poster child for that proposal. Industrial design classes at MIT used to hand out copies of "Superiority" as required reading; unfortunately that useful habit has not been copied by the Pentagon, and as a result, the US armed forces are bristling with brilliantly innovative wonder weapons that don’t do what they’re supposed to do. The much-ballyhooed Predator drone is one good example among many. For those who don’t follow military technology, it’s a remote-controlled plane designed to fly at rooftop level, equipped with a TV camera and missiles. The operator, sitting in an air-conditioned office building in Nevada, can control it anywhere on Earth via satellite uplink, seek out suspected terrorists, and vaporize them. Does it work? Well, it’s vaporized quite a few people; the Obama administration is even more drone-happy than its feckless predecessor, and has been sending swarms of drones around various corners of the Middle East to fire missiles at a great many suspected terrorists.

You’ll notice that this has done little to stabilize the puppet governments we’ve got in the Middle East these days, and even less to decrease the rate at which American soldiers are getting shot and blown up in Afghanistan. There’s a reason for that. The targets for drone attacks have to be selected by ordinary intelligence methods—terrorists don’t go around with little homing beacons on them, you know—and ordinary intelligence methods have a relatively low signal-to-noise ratio. As a result, a lot of wedding parties and ordinary households get vaporized on the suspicion that there might be a terrorist hiding in there somewhere. Since tribal custom in large parts of the Middle East makes blood vengeance on the murderers of one’s family members an imperative duty, and there are all these American soldiers conveniently stationed in Afghanistan—well, you can do the math for yourself.

Thus the Predator drone isn’t a war-fighting technology, it’s a war-losing technology, pursued with ever-increasing desperation by a military and political establishment that has no idea what to do but can’t bear the thought of doing nothing. The same logic drove the policy of torture so disingenuously defended by the Bush administration. (Yes, waterboarding is torture. Anyone who wishes to disagree is welcome to undergo the procedure themselves and then offer an informed opinion.) Beyond the moral issues, there’s a practical point that’s far from minor: torture doesn’t work. It’s not an effective way of extracting accurate information from prisoners; it’s an effective way of making prisoners say what the torturer wants to hear—I recall the comment of the elderly Knight Templar, after his session on the rack, that in order to get his torturers to stop he would readily have confessed to murdering God. Thus torture is another war-losing technology. Technically speaking, it’s a good way to maximize confirmation bias, which is what cognitive psychologists call the habit of looking for evidence that supports your presuppositions rather than testing those presuppositions against the real world. It appeals powerfully to the sort of squeaky-voiced machismo that played so large a role in the Bush administration’s foreign policy, but wars are not won by imposing one’s own delusions on a global battlefield; they’re won by figuring out what’s out there in the world, and responding to it. They’re also won by remembering that what’s out there in the world is also responding to you. To grasp how this works, it’s going to be necessary to talk about systems again—specifically, about the three ways a system can mess you over. There may be official names for these somewhere, but I’ve taken the liberty of borrowing terminology from Discordianism, and calling them chaos, discord, and confusion...SEE LINK FOR DISCUSSION OF THESE 3 TERMS...This bit of systems theory is relevant here because American culture has a very hard time dealing with any kind of uncertainty at all. That’s partly the legacy of Newtonian science, which saw itself—or at least liked to portray itself in public—as the quest for absolutely invariant laws of nature. If X occurs, then Y must occur: that sort of statement is the paradigmatic form of knowledge in industrial societies. One of the great scientific achievements of the 20th century was the expansion of science into fields that can only be known statistically—quantum mechanics, meteorology, ecology, and more. Even there, though, the lure of the supposedly invariant has been a constant source of trouble, while those fields that routinely throw discord and confusion at the researcher are by and large the fields that have remained stubbornly resistant to scientific inquiry and technological control. It also explains a good bit of why the United States has stumbled from one failed counterinsurgency after another since the Second World War...

PREDICTIONS ABOUT THE COLLAPSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR MACHINE AND ITS EMPIRE AT LINK...

Like many MS symptoms, the “MS hug” feels different for different people – it also feels different in the same people on different days or at different times of day. It can be:

As low as the waist or as high as the chest; rarely it can be felt as high as the shoulders and neck
Focused in one small area (usually on one side or in the back) or go all the way around the torso
Worse when fatigued or stressed
Present in “waves” lasting seconds, minutes or hours or can be steady for longer periods of time
Described as sharp pain, dull pain, burning pain, tickling, tingling, a crushing or constricting sensation or intense pressure

How Severe Can It Get?
Some people experience difficulty breathing or painful breathing, so severe that it is often perceived as a heart attack or panic attack.

http://www.businessinsider.com/china-got-pummeled-last-night-2012-8

Another brutal night for investors in Chinese stocks.
The Shanghai Composite fell 1.74% to a new post-crisis low.
Not helping: Data from the National Bureau of Statistics that showed a 5.4% drop in earnings at industrial companies.
Meanwhile Premier Wen has given hints that exports are slowing even further in August.
Here's Nomura's Zhiwei Zhang:
Premier Wen visited Guangdong province on 24-25 August to check on conditions in the export sector, the area being one of the major production bases for exporters. He acknowledged that "leading indicators such as new orders suggest exports still face difficulties in the future". He talked about several policies to promote exports, including expediting the export tax rebate and encouraging firms to develop brands and intellectual property.


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/china-got-pummeled-last-night-2012-8#ixzz24kBGlTT3

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2012/0827/1224323032217.html

US PROSECUTORS investigating the movement of money by global banks suspect HSBC of laundering money for Mexican drug cartels and transferring money through its US subsidiary for sanctioned nations, including Iran, Sudan and North Korea.

The weight of the accusations could force HSBC, which has set aside $700 million (€560 million) to cover the cost of potential fines, to pay at least $1 billion to settle the inquiry, said authorities with knowledge of the investigation. This would make it the largest such settlement in history.

It comes as UniCredit, Italy’s biggest bank, said its HypoVereinsbank unit was being investigated by US authorities over possible violation of economic sanctions.

HypoVereinsbank “has been co-operating with investigations by the New York county district attorney’s office, the US department of justice and the US treasury department’s office of foreign assets control involving US-sanctioned persons and companies”, the Italian bank said in a statement yesterday.

Why is it only NOW that the bankster connection is a topic of interest to the government?

Could it be because for the first time in far too long, no member of the BFEE is in public office?

So, they're running a protection shakedown, just like the Mafia would. And the banksters pay.....and keep doing it. And down the road, the government will shake them down again.

Business as usual.

Collecting peanuts.

And when you consider how much a real prosecution is needed, and how it would turn everything around...well, you gotta think they are not only blind, but stupid, too.

Corrupt is more like it.

Ask Martha about that.

with Rmoney. He will protect the banks, esp. investment banks and their businesses at all costs b/c he will protect himself and his million$

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/26/ian-birrell-emergence-new-africa


The way it was: Bob Geldof in Ethiopia in 1985. Photograph: Rex Features

Think of Ethiopia and what do you see. Perhaps a starving child, flies in her eyes and belly distended. Painfully thin adults in raggedy clothes, staring balefully at the camera in a fetid refugee camp. Or possibly a famous self-declared saviour from the west, striding purposefully past the decaying corpse of an animal beside a dusty road.

Think again. See, instead, a booming capital city, its cafes filled with graduates and cranes lining the horizon. A nation that is one of the world's largest livestock producers and recently became the second country to take delivery of Boeing's new 787 passenger jet. An economy that doubled in size this century and is growing at 7.5%.

Few countries symbolise the disconnect between outdated western perceptions of Africa and fast-changing realities on the ground better than Ethiopia, the continent's second most-populous nation, whose long-serving leader, Meles Zenawi, died last week. Although the example of one country can never fully explain a diverse continent, this ancient nation illustrates in many ways Africa's progress, potential and problems. Mostly, it is a picture of amazing progress, far removed from the usual stereotypes presented by much of the media and their allies in the aid lobby. They offer simplistic images of death and destruction, ignoring complex realities of a continent encompassing 54 countries and 11.6 million square miles in which life is becoming more peaceful and prosperous.

Last week, Africa was in the news over the shooting of striking miners in South Africa, a disturbing echo of the dark days of apartheid. The tragedy highlighted the failure of the party of liberation to deliver social justice in government; the nation is now the world's most unequal society. But it is worth remembering the country is a democracy, with free expression, a fine constitution and some accountability for those deemed responsible.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/27/shareholder-payouts-holding-back-prosperity

What the UK economy needs is an approach to economic policy that focuses on co-ordinated and concerted investments for prosperity by governments, households, and businesses. As the Labour party develops its policy programme for 2015 and beyond, the role of investment for prosperity needs to be confronted head on.

Fundamental to the achievement of economic prosperity are investments in physical infrastructures and human capabilities. These investments are essential to generate well-paid, employment opportunities in the domestic economy and competitive advantage in the global economy. In a world of changing technologies and emerging markets, a nation that fails to invest for the future on a continuing basis can look forward to long-term economic decline.

Investments for prosperity are not solely the responsibility of the business sector. Governments and households have to invest as well. Governments invest in physical infrastructures – for example roads, schools, and defence – that have the character of public goods as well as in society's "knowledge base" consisting of a generally educated labour force and specific expertise in science and technology. Households invest in the development and sustenance of a capable labour force, relying heavily on government investments in education and physical infrastructures.

With government and household investments as essential foundations, businesses invest in processes of production and distribution to transform physical and human inputs into goods and services that customers want to buy at prices that they are willing (or can afford) to pay.

S&P 500 +0.4%
DOW +0.2%
NASDAQ +0.7%

About the intensity of a George W. Bush brain fart. Little rain. Little wind.

The Weather Channel was showing Miami getting whacked. We're much closer, and don't have shit. I can see low level clouds racing across the sky from the East, but that's about it.

At least it gave the Republicans fits. And, my wife got today off.

as soon as I walked in the door, it hit. probably 50-60mph winds for about 10-15 min. Was crazy. Was all gone after about an hour.

Light showers, more like a heavy drizzle. Nothing to be worried about here.

I'm going to the gym for a while.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/26/merkel-push-treaty-may-tear-eu-apart


Mariano Rajoy, Francois Hollande, Mario Monti and Angela Merkel pose for a family picture at the end of their summit in June. Photograph: Pool/Getty Images

As speculation about a Greek exit from the eurozone continues, Germany is pushing ahead with plans for a new treaty that will transform the European Union.

According to this week's Spiegel, Angela Merkel wants European leaders to agree by the end of the year to hold a constitutional convention in order to fashion a new legal basis for the EU – even though most other member states are opposed to the idea of another tortuous and risky treaty negotiation so soon after the failed European constitution and the Lisbon treaty. The plan could dramatically reshape the EU in Germany's image – or lead to it falling apart.

On Friday Merkel rejected Greece's plea for more time to implement austerity measures while affirming that she still wanted it to remain in the euro. There had been some signs that German anger about Greece had dissipated – Bild published a surprisingly positive interview with the Greek prime minister, Antonis Samaras, last week – but at the same time confidence is growing that a Greek exit from the euro could be contained. Figures such as Volker Kauder, the parliamentary leader of the Christian Democrats, and Philipp Rösler, vice-chancellor and leader of the Free Democrats, the junior partner in Merkel's coalition government, have said they no longer fear a Greek exit.

However, the debate in Germany is now moving beyond Greece towards the question of political union. During the two and a half years since the euro crisis began, Germany's approach has been to seek to impose its own economic preferences on the eurozone. It insisted that all eurozone countries agree to enact an equivalent of the constitutional amendment it passed in 2009, which required it to maintain balanced budgets. Many, including Guardian leader writers, have seen in Germany's approach a kind of economic imperialism. But Germany seems to be coming to the conclusion that it is no longer enough to try to remake the eurozone in Germany's image in economic terms; it must do so in political terms as well.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/26/us-ecb-bundesbank-bonds-idUSBRE87P03I20120826?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2FbusinessNews+%28Business+News%29

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/chicago-feds-evans-calls-for-immediate-action-2012-08-27?siteid=rss

http://www.cnbc.com/id/48793670?__source=mnd|news|&par=mnd

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-27/german-business-confidence-fell-for-a-fourth-month-in-august-1-.html

German business confidence fell for a fourth straight month in August as the sovereign debt crisis curbed growth in Europe’s largest economy.

The Ifo institute in Munich said its business climate index, based on a survey of 7,000 executives, dropped to 102.3 from 103.2 in July. That’s the lowest reading since March 2010. Economists predicted a decline to 102.7, according to the median of 37 forecasts in a Bloomberg News survey.


German economic growth slowed to 0.3 percent in the second quarter from 0.5 percent in the first as the debt crisis damped demand for exports and prompted companies to postpone investments. While sales to faster-growing markets outside Europe and domestic spending are helping to insulate Germany from the turmoil, the Bundesbank said last week that the prevailing uncertainty may cause the economy to cool further.

“Recent economic data are not encouraging,” said Jens- Oliver Niklasch, an economist at Landesbank Baden-Wuerttemberg in Stuttgart. “The construction industry as well as the export industry will see a slowdown in the months to come.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-27/germany-france-reconnect-in-push-for-joint-crisis-solutions.html

Germany and France agreed to drive ahead measures on closer European integration in a renewed show of unity by the region’s two biggest economies to fix the crisis in the euro zone.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, speaking after talks in Berlin with his French counterpart, Pierre Moscovici, said the two countries will create a working group to advance cooperation on banking union, fiscal union and the strengthening of monetary union in Europe. They will seek to make common proposals, he said.

“We’re having to deal with a phase of weakening growth in the global economy but also in Europe,” Schaeuble told reporters. “We want to take joint decisions” to counter that.

The joint action signals a turnaround in relations after President Francois Hollande led a revolt against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s austerity-first doctrine for combating the financial crisis at a June summit. It builds on a Berlin visit by Hollande last week when he and Merkel agreed to stand behind the Greek government as it strives to overhaul the economy nearly three years after the crisis emerged in Greece.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-27/sweden-s-krona-strengthens-as-retail-sales-rise-stockholm-mover.html

Sweden’s krona rose to the highest level against the dollar in almost six months in Stockholm trading as retail sales rose more than estimated in July.
The krona strengthened as much as 0.59 percent against the dollar to 6.5662, the highest level since Feb. 29, and traded 0.4 percent higher at 6.5764 as of 2:08 p.m. in the Swedish capital. It rose against all major currencies tracked by Bloomberg and climbed 0.33 percent versus the euro to 8.2376.
“The macro picture is still strong in Sweden and no one expects the Riksbank to cut rates,” said Anders Eklof, a currency strategist at Swedbank AB, by phone. “We also have some softness in the dollar ahead of Jackson Hole later in the week.”
The krona has surged this year as Sweden has emerged as a haven from Europe’s debt crisis. The Swedish economy accelerated in the first half of the year and expanded a faster-than- estimated 2.3 percent from a year earlier in the second quarter. A report today indicated consumers are continuing to support growth, with retail sales rising 2.4 percent in July from a year earlier, beating a 1.7 percent estimate.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-26/hedge-fund-bets-jump-to-15-month-high-on-bull-rally-commodities.html

Hedge funds boosted bets on rising commodities to the highest in 15 months, driving prices into a bull market as the U.S. drought worsened and the Federal Reserve signaled it may take more steps to spur economic growth.
Money managers’ net-long position across 18 U.S. raw materials rose 10 percent to 1.32 million futures and options in the week ended Aug. 21, U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission data show. Holdings doubled in two months to the highest since May 2011. Bets on corn are the most bullish in 15 months amid the worst U.S. drought in 56 years, while wagers on gold rebounded and platinum more than doubled.
The Standard & Poor’s GSCI Spot Index of 24 raw materials ended the week up 20 percent from a June low, the common definition of a bull market. Minutes of the Fed’s last meeting, released Aug. 22, showed many policy makers favored “additional monetary accommodation” soon unless growth strengthens. Purchases of new U.S. homes rose more than forecast in July, matching a two-year high. People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan said Aug. 23 that stimulus measures “can’t be ruled out” in the world’s second-largest economy.
“The economic situation globally has improved,” said Adrian Day, the president of Adrian Day Asset Management in Annapolis, Maryland. “You have global growth, and prospects for added stimulus, and that’s good for commodities.”

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_SPAIN_FINANCIAL_CRISIS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2012-08-27-07-57-40

MADRID (AP) -- Spain's economy did worse in 2011 and 2010 than previously estimated, the National Statistics Institute said Monday, adding to the gloom surrounding the country as it struggles to emerge from recession and avoid a sovereign bailout.

The INE said that fresh data showed GDP increased 0.4 percent in 2011 instead of 0.7 percent last year as exports and consumer demand were weaker than earlier calculated. It also showed that the economy shrank by 0.3 percent in 2010 instead of 0.1 percent.

Estimates of economic contraction of 3.7 percent in 2009 and 0.9 percent in 2008 remained unchanged.

Spain is in its second recession in three years with near 25 percent unemployment. The economy contracted 0.4 percent in the second quarter compared with the first quarter, when it shrank 0.3 percent. The government estimates it will contract 1.5 percent this year and 0.5 percent in 2013.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/angela-merkel-says-aggressive-rhetoric-in-euro-crisis-must-stop-a-852269.html

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday reprimanded a politician from her coalition for saying European Central Bank President Mario Draghi was on the way to becoming the "currency forger of Europe" and that a Greek exit from the euro zone was unavoidable.

"We're in a very decisive phase in the fight against the euro debt crisis at the moment," Merkel told public broadcaster ARD on Sunday. "My request: everyone should weigh their words very carefully."
It was a swipe at Alexander Dobrindt, the general secretary of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party to Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Dobrindt had told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper in an interview published on Sunday: "I'm convinced that there is no way to avoid a Greek exit from the euro zone." He added: "I see Greece outside the euro zone in 2013."

He criticized Draghi's proposal to set an upper limit for bond yields of ailing euro-zone nations, saying it was an attempt to "finance debt countries through the back door" and accusing him of misusing the ECB as a "bucket wheel" to shift "money from the stable north of Europe to the deficit-ridden south."

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2012/0827/1224323032199.html


INVITED TO write a guest column due to the absence on leave of my colleague John McManus, I have decided to sound off on the way Ireland facilitates multinationals in their never-ending striving to avoid tax.

The way this phenomenon has developed in recent years has, in tandem with the rise of technology companies, seen Ireland develop a role in the tax-avoidance structures operated by some of the world’s largest multinationals.

Mostly these structures lie alongside the multinational’s Irish research or manufacturing structures, and are hidden from view through the use of unlimited companies that do not have to publish accounts.

This development involves arrangements that irk some of the most powerful governments in the world and, for that reason, could well become the focus of effective countermeasures in the not too distant future.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/156806/one-four-mississippi-residents-struggle-afford-food.aspx#1

One in four Mississippi residents report there was at least one time in the past 12 months when they did not have enough money to buy the food they or their families needed -- more than in any other state in the first half of 2012. Residents in Alabama and Delaware are also among the most likely to struggle to afford food. Residents of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Vermont are among the least likely to have this problem.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/27/world/middleeast/us-foreign-arms-sales-reach-66-3-billion-in-2011.html?_r=2

Weapons sales by the United States tripled in 2011 to a record high, driven by major arms sales to Persian Gulf allies concerned about Iran’s regional ambitions, according to a new study for Congress.

Overseas weapons sales by the United States totaled $66.3 billion last year, or more than three-quarters of the global arms market, valued at $85.3 billion in 2011. Russia was a distant second, with $4.8 billion in deals.

The American weapons sales total was an “extraordinary increase” over the $21.4 billion in deals for 2010, the study found, and was the largest single-year sales total in the history of United States arms exports. The previous high was in fiscal year 2009, when American weapons sales overseas totaled nearly $31 billion.

A worldwide economic decline had suppressed arms sales over recent years. But increasing tensions with Iran drove a set of Persian Gulf nations — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Oman — to purchase American weapons at record levels. These Gulf states do not share a border with Iran, and their arms purchases focused on expensive warplanes and complex missile defense systems...

I’ll be having much more to say later about the Bain documents posted on Gawker...In the meantime, I would like to point out the utterly misleading nature of the statement issued by Bain Capital in response to the documents’ release. The Bain Capital press release, which was quoted by many news outlets, stated:


First, the Bain statement incorrectly states that “Our fund financials are routinely prepared by auditors…” In reality, auditors–especially a big one like PriceWaterhouse Coopers–absolutely refuse to prepare financial statements for any clients in any industry that I am aware of. Instead, for liability reasons, they explicitly confine their activity to auditing the statements prepared by their clients and expressing an opinion about them based on the audit. PwC states its role clearly in its cover letter, on PwC letterhead, accompanying all the Bain financial statements it audited:



PwC is taking pains to clearly disavow a role in preparing the financial statements because PwC knows that any financial statements, despite being audited, may be materially inaccurate. Bain’s statement yesterday, on the other hand, is trying to convince the public that the statements must be accurate because, Bain falsely claims, the auditors prepared them. One wonders whether PwC has lodged a private objection today with Bain for this false statement, or whether the firm’s professional standards group is evaluating whether they need to in some way correct the public record.

Second, Bain’s statement talks about the documents evincing “… a commitment to transparency with our investors and regulators”. With respect to the regulators, none of these documents were ever filed with regulators. Unlike the financial statements of publicly traded companies, private equity fund financial statements are not filed with the SEC. Similarly, “registered” securities offerings are filed with the SEC and must be approved by it. By contrast Bain’s offerings, as private equity securities offerings (the materials used to solicit investors in the funds), are “unregistered”, meaning that they are not submitted to the SEC. The IRS does not receive these documents routinely, nor do banking regulators or any other financial regulator I can think of.

Ultimately, there doesn’t appear to be much about the Bain statement that is accurate.

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Yves here. I called Bain Capital’s media relations department and raised the question of the accuracy of their statement, specifically the effort to give the impression that the documents released by Gawker were disclosed to regulators. I was told that “these funds are SEC registered funds.” I was gobsmacked that he’d try that line. See details below, emphasis mine, from the ADV Part 2 on file with the SEC (this is part of the registration materials for the parent entity, which is registered):




Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/08/bains-commitment-to-transparency-canard.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29#LpojIZqxCisDysOJ.99

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/08/john-cusack-jonathan-turley-on-obamas-constitution.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

...TURLEY: Well, there’s a misconception about Barack Obama as a former constitutional law professor. First of all, there are plenty of professors who are “legal relativists.” They tend to view legal principles as relative to whatever they’re trying to achieve. I would certainly put President Obama in the relativist category. Ironically, he shares that distinction with George W. Bush. They both tended to view the law as a means to a particular end — as opposed to the end itself. That’s the fundamental distinction among law professors. Law professors like Obama tend to view the law as one means to an end, and others, like myself, tend to view it as the end itself.

Truth be known President Obama has never been particularly driven by principle. Right after his election, I wrote a column in a few days warning people that even though I voted for Obama, he was not what people were describing him to be. I saw him in the Senate. I saw him in Chicago... He was never motivated that much by principle. What he’s motivated by are programs. And to that extent, I like his programs more than Bush’s programs, but Bush and Obama are very much alike when it comes to principles. They simply do not fight for the abstract principles and view them as something quite relative to what they’re trying to accomplish. Thus privacy yields to immunity for telecommunications companies and due process yields to tribunals for terrorism suspects.

CUSACK: Churchill said, “The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.” That wasn’t Eugene Debs speaking — that was Winston Churchill...

TURLEY: ...belief in human rights law and civil liberties leads one to the uncomfortable conclusion that President Obama has violated his oath to uphold the Constitution. But that’s not the primary question for voters. It is less about him than it is them. They have an obligation to cast their vote in a principled fashion. It is, in my opinion, no excuse to vote for someone who has violated core constitutional rights and civil liberties simply because you believe the other side is no better. You cannot pretend that your vote does not constitute at least a tacit approval of the policies of the candidate... We’re used to politicians lying to us. And President Obama lied to us. There’s no way around that. He promised various things and promptly abandoned those principles. So the argument that Romney is no better or worse does not excuse the obligation of a voter. With President Obama they have a president who went to the CIA soon after he was elected and promised CIA employees that they would not be investigated or prosecuted for torture, even though he admitted that waterboarding was torture...

MUCH MORE AT LINK

there is nothing more to say.

This concludes my will to post...

Alas, I must venture into it...

Look at all the squiggly lines up there....real weird activity...