First Commercial Bank, Bloomington, Minnesota, was closed today by the Minnesota Department of Commerce, which appointed the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) as receiver. To protect the depositors, the FDIC entered into a purchase and assumption agreement with Republic Bank & Trust Company, Louisville, Kentucky, to assume all of the deposits of First Commercial Bank.

The sole branch of First Commercial Bank will reopen on Monday as a branch of Republic Bank & Trust Company...As of June 30, 2012, First Commercial Bank had approximately $215.9 million in total assets and $206.8 million in total deposits. In addition to assuming all of the deposits of the First Commercial Bank, Republic Bank & Trust Company agreed to purchase essentially all of the assets...

The FDIC estimates that the cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) will be $63.9 million. Compared to other alternatives, Republic Bank & Trust Company's acquisition was the least costly resolution for the FDIC's DIF. First Commercial Bank is the 41st FDIC-insured institution to fail in the nation this year, and the fourth in Minnesota. The last FDIC-insured institution closed in the state was Inter Savings Bank, fsb D/B/A InterBank, fsb, Maple Grove, on April 27, 2012.

http://www.alternet.org/did-citigroup-defraud-billions-us-ally-abu-dhabi?akid=9344.227380.m-_CQp&rd=1&src=newsletter705470&t=2&paging=off

According to a confidential cable published by Wikileaks, the U.S. Embassy in Abu Dhabi sent a communication to the U.S. Secretary of State and U.S. Treasury on December 22, 2009, alerting them to the fact that the investment arm of a U.S. ally, Abu Dhabi, believed it had been defrauded of $4 billion by Citigroup (Wall Street’s serial miscreant and recent ward of the taxpayer). The cable relayed that William Brown, legal advisor to the Abu Dhabi investment arm, “unequivocally stated that Citi ‘lied’ and must be held accountable.” ...Three years later, Abu Dhabi has likely figured out that in the U.S., gangsters have guns but banksters are far more dangerous – they have ivy league educated lawyers. One group of lawyers writes the prospectuses that defraud investors; another group writes the contracts that bar these cases from ever seeing sunshine in a public courtroom; and the third group provides skillful white color criminal defense, including a speed dial to their pals in Washington, ensuring that justice will be as elusive as a Wall Street CEO clad in orange. A three month search of records that have not yet been sealed or redacted shows that Abu Dhabi landed in the same plundered status as public pension funds and small time investors in Citigroup, while a very special Group of Six reaped a windfall.

It all started with a handshake from a former U.S. Treasury Secretary. On Monday, November 26, 2007, four days after Thanksgiving, Robert Rubin..., a former Co-Chairman of Goldman Sachs, whose lavish pay at Citigroup since leaving Treasury in 1999 had reached $120 million for eight years of non-management work...had reluctantly agreed to serve as interim Chairman of Citigroup after the company had earlier that month forced out its Chairman and CEO, Chuck Prince, following spectacular losses and a sinking share price. Rubin was on a critical mission to secure a $7.5 billion lifeline for Citigroup...The deal had been reviewed the prior week by the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority’s Strategic Investments Team, headed by Sanjeev Doshi, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. Due to fog, the Abu Dhabi team could not fly to New York on November 20, and opted instead for a video conference to quiz the heads of Citigroup’s businesses on November 21. Robert Rubin was now on hand to shake hands with the Managing Director of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Sheikh Ahmed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and close the deal. The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, universally known as ADIA, is a sovereign wealth fund that invests the kingdom’s surplus cash. It came through on its end, wiring $7.5 billion into a Citigroup bank account a few days later.

Citigroup is a publicly traded company, whose shares in 2007 were held in the largest public pension funds in America and in mutual funds held in rank and file employees’ 401(k) plans across the country. This $7.5 billion investment from ADIA was going to convert in a little over two years into approximately 235 million publicly traded common shares of Citigroup stock, diluting all other shareholders. Despite these facts which called for maximum transparency, Citigroup entered into multiple secret contracts involving this investment, including a November 24, 2007 Confidentiality Agreement and a November 26, 2007 Investment Agreement with ADIA. All of the details of those secret agreements have not come to light, but what has emerged is that a core part of the agreements involved the fact that ADIA, like Citigroup’s own workers, would have no access to the public courts of the United States in the event of a dispute. All claims, including claims of securities fraud, would be forced into an arbitration system where Wall Street lawyers, whose firms had client relationships with Citigroup, would end up serving as judge and jury. An additional, mind-numbing requirement, was that ADIA would not be allowed to hedge its $7.5 billion investment, despite the fact that Citigroup had just reported massive losses, lost its Chairman and CEO, and was under regulatory scrutiny for off-balance sheet debt held in the Cayman Islands in Structured Investment Vehicles. According to the portion of ADIA’s documents that are public in Federal Court, ADIA says it was induced into investing the $7.5 billion through representations by Citigroup that “it would not bring certain Structured Investment Vehicles (SIVs) onto its balance sheet, or raise significant additional capital after ADIA’s investment…Citigroup then promptly did exactly the opposite of what it had said. On December 13, merely ten days after obtaining ADIA’s critical investment, Citigroup announced that it would bring the SIVs onto its balance sheet. Within the next month, Citigroup wrote off $18.1 billion in subprime losses, and raised a further $20 billion in capital…All of these actions flatly contradicted what Citigroup had just told ADIA, diluted ADIA’s investment in Citigroup, drove down Citigroup’s stock price, and harmed ADIA.”

When the $7.5 billion investment was announced on November 26, 2007, business media was given the bare bone details by Citigroup, making it sound like a very simple deal. Citigroup’s press release explained where the $7.5 billion was going this way: “Each Equity Unit is mandatorily convertible into Citi shares at prices ranging from $31.83 to $37.24 per share. The Equity Units convert to Citi common shares on dates ranging from March 15, 2010, to September 15, 2011, subject to adjustment. Each Equity Unit will pay a fixed annual payment rate of 11%, payable quarterly.” In reality, the deal was a Byzantine entanglement that took 38,000 words in an SEC filing and involved a forward purchase contract, four trusts held by the Bank of New York, junior debt, the ability to suspend the 11 percent interest payments, and multiple secret side contracts that now reside under seal in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. On January 15, 2008, less than two months after allegedly promising ADIA it would not raise additional capital, Citigroup announced it had arranged a $12.5 billion investment of convertible preferred securities that could convert into common stock. The deal included two billionaire investors. The reason this would outrage ADIA (and all other shareholders) is that a company’s earnings are spread over a given amount of common shares. Those earnings impact the share price as well as whether there will be funds to pay or increase dividends; the more shares outstanding, the more dilution of earnings to existing shareholders. Matt Miller and Vipal Monga, writing for The Deal, reported the breakdown of that $12.5 billion investment as follows: Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC) led with $6.88 billion; the Kuwait Investment Authority (KIA) kicked in $3 billion; Capital Group of Companies, owner of the popular American Funds, invested $1.75 billion; Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz al Saud, who had previously bailed out Citibank (predecessor to Citigroup) in the early 90s, added $450 million; the New Jersey Division of Investment put in $400 million; and former Citigroup chief Sandy Weill tossed in $20 million...Both Prince Alwaleed and Sandy Weill are billionaires; Weill having made his fortune receiving obscene pay at Citigroup as its Chairman and CEO. In just one year, 2000, Weill cashed in $196.2 million in stock options and received a bonus of $18.4 million. His total take in just a five year period: $785 million. Weill is also the man most responsible for the repeal of the depression era Glass-Steagall Act, forcing Congress to bulldoze the legislation by illegally merging his Travelers Group with Citicorp in 1998, a combination of insurance, stock brokerage and insured deposit banking not allowed at the time under either Glass-Steagall or the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956. As Treasury Secretary, Rubin helped muscle through the repeal of Glass-Steagall and then took his high paid post at Citigroup shortly thereafter. Weill stepped down as CEO in 2003 and as Chairman in 2006. But he continued to serve as an Advisor to Citigroup. According to a Fortune magazine interview, Weill was meeting with Prince Alwaleed in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in mid November 2007, just weeks before ADIA signed its deal. Whether Weill was attempting to raise additional capital is unknown. What is known is that Weill got in, for a very tiny stake, on what turned out to be the investment coup of the decade – a coup that left small investors, along with ADIA, suffering massive losses. After the January 15, 2008 investment of $12.5 billion by the Group of Six, things got worse at Citigroup, with losses spiraling out of control. On October 28, 2008, the U.S. government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) extended capital assistance to 9 banks, with Citigroup receiving $25 billion. But by the week of November 17, Citigroup was in full blown meltdown, with its stock losing 60 percent in five trading sessions. The stock closed the week at $3.77. The company’s market value had gone from $250 billion in 2006 to $20.5 billion by the close on Friday, November 21, 2008. That was $4.5 billion less than the U.S. government had invested less than a month before. At that point, the U.S. government could have bought the entire firm for $20.5 billion or at the very least received a majority stake, kicked out the derelict management, and ensured taxpayers safe passage on Wall Street’s Titanic.

Instead, according to the official report from the Special Inspector General for TARP, here’s what happened next....

SORRY, YOU'LL HAVE TO CLICK ON THE LINK!

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

Pam Martens worked on Wall Street for 21 years. She is the editor of Wall Street On Parade. From 1996 through 2001, Martens challenged Wall Street’s mandatory arbitration system in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and at the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals.

http://www.alternet.org/how-big-banks-are-trying-destroy-our-justice-system?akid=9354.227380.6azR_x&rd=1&src=newsletter706089&t=11&paging=off

...Brad Karp, a partner at the 737-attorney-strong Wall Street law firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, has been Citigroup’s go-to guy for fraud allegations since the company was born out of the too-big-too-fail merger of Travelers Group insurance, its myriad Wall Street investment banks, brokerage units, and Citicorp, parent of Citibank.

When the London-based private equity firm, Terra Firma, claimed it had been lied to and defrauded by Citigroup, making it overpay for the purchase of EMI, a British music label, in 2007, Karp and colleagues wrung an 8-0 decision from the jury in favor of Citigroup.

Karp was also on hand to witness victory when the trustee for the bankrupt Italian dairy giant, Parmalat, charged Citigroup with fraud.

Then there were fraud charges connected to Citigroup’s involvement in the collapse of WorldCom AND Enron – along with auction rate securities, rigged stock research and understating its exposure to subprime debt by $39 billion. Karp, Karp, and more Karp.

The litany of fraud charges against Citigroup, accompanied by the perpetual get-out-of-jail-free card reliably delivered by Brad Karp, has become so ubiquitous that it raises the obvious question: is Citigroup the hapless target of a world-wide network of frivolous lawsuit filers, or does Brad Karp have some secret sauce for getting a serial miscreant off the hook? As reported in Part I (PREVIOUS POST), something of an international incident involving Citigroup has spilled into a federal court in Manhattan, and again, it has Brad Karp’s name all over the reply briefs filed on behalf of Citigroup. The investment arm of an ally and trading partner to the United States, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), has charged Citigroup with lying and defrauding it of $4 billion in connection with a $7.5 billion investment it made when Citigroup was teetering in November 2007. ADIA has asked the court to throw out an arbitration panel’s decision in favor of Citigroup. The court has sealed much of the record, but a careful reading of public filings and other government documents shows a Wall Street justice system as systemically corrupted as the subprime products that imploded the U.S. housing market and financial system in 2008. Under a confidentiality agreement ADIA signed with Citigroup, the details and written decision of the arbitration cannot be made public. (Judge George B. Daniels, presiding over the case in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, might possibly entertain press requests that it is in the public interest to air all details of this matter.) All claims were to be administered and heard by the International Centre for Dispute Resolution of the American Arbitration Association (AAA), a group that substitutes its own “neutral” arbitrators for judge and jury....Back in 2000, an embarrassing internal memo leaked out of the AAA, seriously calling into question the neutrality of its arbitrators. A regional Vice President of AAA, Paul L. Van Loon, penned a January 14, 2000 communication to AAA arbitrators, making the following request: (After the memo was released, Van Loon continued to serve as a vice-president of AAA through 2007.)

“Part of our marketing effort for 2000 will be to develop business contacts with corporations headquartered in Northern California. Meeting with corporate counsel and CEOs will allow us the opportunity to develop personal relationships and explore the use of ADR in their business. To accomplish this, I am asking for your help. If you have a contact with a corporation and you can make the introduction for us, please print your name next to the corporation listed…Allowing us to make a ‘warm’ call will make the connection more meaningful. If you would like to make the call with us, please indicate it on the sheet…”

Having seen this memo back in 2000, it came as no surprise to me when a quick and simple background check of the three arbitrators in the ADIA matter turned up a fistful of outrageous conflicts of interest on the part of two that would never be tolerated in a jury pool.

Roy Reardon, a partner at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP has confirmed that he was one of the arbitrators. The case charged Citigroup with a $4 billion fraud. In a jury trial in a case of this magnitude, there would be serious vetting of the randomly selected jury pool to weed out the slightest conflicts of interest. It’s called a voir dire and it might go something like this: “I see Mr. Reardon that you work for a law firm. Have you or your firm ever represented the defendant in this matter, Citigroup?"...Reardon would have had to answer as follows: “Let’s see – we represented Citigroup in an exchange offer by Gannett in May 2009; we represented Citigroup in selling Bellsystem24 in November 2009; we secured the dismissal of a big putative class action against Citigroup’s banking unit, Citibank, on January 15, 2010, where plaintiffs contended that their leases were really usurious loans charging rates of interest in excess of 40 percent; we represented them again in June 2010 in a Sprint Nextel financing; and again in November 2010 in a revolving credit facility for General Motors. And, oh yes, we represented the U.S. Treasury in March 2009 when Citigroup exchanged shares of preferred stock into billions of common shares – diluting the hell out of ADIA’s investment along with most other Citigroup shareholders." The arbitration occurred in New York between May 2 and May 25, 2011. All of these conflicts occurred before that date. It is not known if they were ever disclosed.

Another arbitrator was Joseph T. McLaughlin, who passed away in January of this year. McLaughlin was Of Counsel with the 1,000-attorney firm of Bingham McCutchen at the time of the arbitration in May of last year.Bingham McCutchen has advised Citigroup on numerous securitizations, debt deals and litigation. In 2006, Bingham McCutchen represented Citigroup in a New Hampshire case involving its notorious Capital Appreciation Plan (CAP Plan). The company was sued in states across the country for theft of employee wages. Prior to becoming of-counsel at Bingham McCutchen, McLaughlin was chairman of the New York City office of Heller Ehrman, a law firm that was heavily engaged in representing Wall Street firms. At its peak, Heller Ehrman employed 730 attorneys on three continents. It filed for bankruptcy in December 2008. Citigroup was both its client and one of its two primary lenders. Prior to Heller Ehrman, McLaughlin was a partner at Shearman & Sterling where he directly represented Citicorp, the predecessor to Citigroup.

The third arbitrator, Jonathan B. Marks, was a professional arbitrator/mediator, with no discernible ties to Wall Street. The decision of the arbitrators was delivered on October 14, 2011 and, not surprisingly, the group found in favor of Citigroup on all claims. (Imagine going back to face your law partners and advising them that you’ve just awarded $4 billion against their client.)

ADIA has now asked the U.S. District Court to vacate the award because Abu Dhabi law should have been followed since that is where both the fraud and the injury occurred. ADIA has also raised the claim that it could not adequately try its case because the arbitrators refused to grant discovery relevant to an internal whistleblower, Richard Bowen, who was alerting Citigroup’s top executives, including former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, that there was financial skullduggery afoot at the firm three weeks before the deal with ADIA was consummated. Why counsel for ADIA is not asking to vacate the award based on abhorrent conflicts of interests says a great deal about Wall Street’s new brand of justice....Beginning in 1987, at the beckoning of an ever more rapacious Wall Street, the U.S. Supreme Court began to carve out a two-tiered justice system. Tier One remained the federal judiciary. Tier Two permitted Wall Street to effectively run its own crony private justice system, excising from the process every meaningful vestige of “equal justice under law.” It’s a form of judicial apartheid not dissimilar to the way the Supreme Court rationalized racial segregation in its Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896, promising “equal” facilities, just separate. This so-called “forced” or “mandatory” arbitration system has cost Wall Street the loss of trust of customers and employees and now it is spreading out to humiliate the United States with its allies and trading partners. Instead of a jury randomly selected from a giant pool of voters or motor vehicle records, three arbitrators are picked from a small list. Arbitrators can earn upwards of $10,000 a day, building in an incentive to become a repeat player by ruling favorably for the deep-pocketed corporation. Legal precedent and case law can be substituted by the arbitrators for a ruling based on “equity” – what their gut tells them to do. The hearings are held in secret, denying the public and the press the role of monitor. Appeals are next to impossible because the arbitrators are not required to write a reasoned decision based on case law. Federal judges have been schooled not to mess with the sanctity of private arbitration contracts.

The Seventh Amendment to the U.S. Bill of Rights enshrines the right to a jury trial for claims exceeding $20. “In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.”

That the highest court in our land, in ruling after ruling, continues to permit that basic right to be gutted, is a national disgrace and it is leading to more discrediting of America around the world. Today, the fine print in Wall Street brokerage accounts, employment contracts, credit cards, mortgages, even cell phone contracts have routinely removed the individual’s constitutional right to file a claim in court to seek redress of a grievance or fraudulent action. In September 2007, Public Citizen published a comprehensive 74-page study of mandatory arbitration with a sharp focus on the National Arbitration Forum. The report is titled “The Arbitration Trap.” Among its many startling findings related to the National Arbitration Forum, Public Citizen found that in California between January 1, 2003 and March 31, 2007 “…a small cadre of arbitrators handled most of the cases that went to a decision. In total, 28 arbitrators handled 17,265 cases – accounting for a whopping 89.5 percent of cases in which an arbitrator was appointed.” (Think robo-signing.) The arbitrators ruled for the corporation and against the consumer nearly 95 percent of the time. The National Arbitration Forum is not an aberration. On July 20, 2000, the Public Investors Arbitration Bar Association (PIABA) issued a press release accusing the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) of rigging its computerized system of selecting arbitrators. The opening text reads as follows: “In direct and flagrant violation of federal law, the NASD systematically evaded the Securities and Exchange Commission approved ‘Neutral List Selection System’ arbitration rule requiring arbitrators to be selected on a rotating basis. Instead, the NASD secretly programmed its computers to select some arbitrators on a seniority basis – just what the rule was designed to prevent.”

MORE AT LINK

But feel free to educate me. I'm too tired to do it myself.

The spaghetti westerns were produced in Italy but often had a mixed Italian/Spanish crew, so eventually there were Spanish production companies. I only know this because we were watching one on TV a couple weeks ago The Texican with Audie Murphy and Broderick Crawford.

Seven Samurai .... It is the acknowledged prototype for the Magnificent Seven by Akira Kurosawa


Seven Samurai[1] (七人の侍 Shichinin no Samurai?) is a 1954 Japanese adventure drama film co-written, edited, and directed by Akira Kurosawa. The film takes place in 1587 during the Warring States Period of Japan. It follows the story of a village of farmers that hire seven masterless samurai (ronin) to combat bandits who will return after the harvest to steal their crops.
Seven Samurai is described as one of the greatest and most influential films ever made,[2] and is one of a select few Japanese films to become widely known in the West for an extended period of time. It is the subject of both popular and critical acclaim; it was voted onto the top three of the Sight & Sound critics' list of greatest films of all time in 1982, and onto the directors' top ten films lists in the 1992 and 2002 polls.[3]


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Samurai

Spaghetti Western, also known as Italo-Western, is a nickname for a broad sub-genre of Western films that emerged in the mid-1960s in the wake of Sergio Leone's unique and much copied film-making style and international box-office success, so named by American critics because most were produced and directed by Italians. The term for these films in Italy is western all'italiana (Italian-Style Western); British critics tended to use the label Continental Western to describe these films, and the phrase 'Spaghetti Western' according to actor Aldo Sambrell was originally created by Italian journalist Alfonso Sancha as a derogatory name for this genre, but has over time become accepted by its fans.

These movies were originally released in Italian as well, but as most of the films featured multilingual casts and sound was post-synched, most Westerns all'Italiana do not have an official dominant language. Many of these films were shot in Spain, so they were also called paella westerns. The term Eurowesterns may be used to also include Western movies that were produced in Europe but not called Spaghetti Westerns, like the West German films inspired by Karl May's books, starring the French actor Pierre Brice in the role of Apache chief Winnetou. It could also include a number of Ostern Westerns produced in East Germany, most of them starring the Yugoslav actor Gojko Mitić as a Native American fighting villanous Whites.

Over six hundred European Westerns were made between 1960 and 1980.

Most Spaghetti Westerns were made on low budgets, using inexpensive locales. Many of the stories take place in the semiarid landscapes of the American Southwest and Northern Mexico, so a popular setting was the Tabernas Desert in the Province of Almeria in southeastern Spain, at the studios of Texas Hollywood, Mini Hollywood, and Western Leone. Other filming locations used were in central and southern Italy, such as the parks of Valle del Treja (between Rome and Viterbo), the area of Camposecco (next to Camerata Nuova, characterized by a karst topography), the hills around Castelluccio, the area around the Gran Sasso mountain, and the Tivoli's quarries and Sardinia.

The typical Spaghetti Western team was made up of an Italian director, Italo-Spanish technical staff, and a cast of Italian, Spanish, German and American actors, sometimes a fading Hollywood star and sometimes a rising one like the young Clint Eastwood in three of Sergio Leone's films.

Sergio Leone's Fistful of Dollars and the following films in his Dollars trilogy created the Spaghetti Western as a novel kind of Western. In this seminal film the hero enters a town that is ruled by two outlaw gangs and ordinary social relations are non-existent. He betrays and plays the gangs against one another in order to make money. Then he uses his cunning and inordinate weapons skill to assist a family threatened by both gangs. He is disclosed and severely beaten, but in the end he again uses cunning and inordinate weapons skills to defeat the remaining gang. The interaction in this story between a mode of cunning and irony (the tricks, deceits, unexpected actions and sarcasms of the hero) on the one hand, and a mode of pathos (terror and brutality against the defenseless people and against the hero after he has been revealed) on the other, was aspired to and sometimes attained by the imitations that soon flooded the cinemas. Just as seminal and imitated was Ennio Morricone's music that expresses a similar duality between quirky and unusual sounds and instruments on the one hand and sacral dramatizing for the big confrontation scenes, on the other.

Especially the mode of the pathetic received a big boost with Sergio Corbucci's very influential Django. However in the following years the mode of cunning and irony became more prominent, not least under influence of Leone's next two Westerns, with their emphasis on unstable partnerships. In the last phase of the Spaghetti Western, with the Trinity films, the Leone legacy had been transformed almost beyond recognition, as (low) comedy reigned and terror and deadly violence gave way to harmless brawling.

Leone's films and other "core" Spaghetti Westerns are often described as having eschewed, critizised or even "demythologized" many of the conventions of traditional US Westerns. This was partly intentional and partly the context of a different cultural background.

or at least, low comedy.

European Westerns are as old as filmmaking itself. Already in in 1896 Gabriel Veyre shot Repas D’Indien ("Indian banquet&quot for the Lumière brothers. Joe Hamman starred as Arizona Bill in films made in the French horse country of Camargue 1911–12.

In Italy, the American West as a dramatic setting for spectacles goes back at least as far as Giacomo Puccini's 1910 opera La fanciulla del West; it is sometimes considered to be the first spaghetti western. The first Italian Western movie was La Vampira Indiana (1913) – a combination of Western and vamp film. It was in fact directed by Vincenzo Leone, father of Sergio Leone, and starred his mother Bice Walerian in the title role as Indian princess fatale. The Italians also made Wild Bill Hickock films, while the German twenties saw back-woods Westerns featuring Bela Lugosi as Uncas. Of the Western-related European films before 1964, the one attracting most attention is probably Luis Trenker’s Der Kaiser von Kalifornia (1936), about John Sutter. During and after the Second World War there were scattered European uses of Western settings, mostly for comedy or even musical comedy.

In 1958 an American-British western filmed in Spain, namely The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw (1958), directed by Raoul Walsh, was the first example of a spaghetti western. It was followed in 1961 by Savage Guns, this time a British-Spanish western, again filmed in Spain. This marked the beginning of Spain as a suitable film shooting location for any kind of European western.

In Italy a cycle of Western comedies were initiated 1959 with La Sceriffa and Terrore dell’Oklahoma, followed by other films starring comedy specialists like Walter Chiari, Ugo Tognazzi, Raimondo Vianello or Fernandel. An Italian critic has compared these comedies to American Bob Hope vehicles.

In 1963, three non-comedy Italo-Spanish westerns were produced – Gunfight at Red Sands, Magnificent Three and Gunfight at High Noon. On the other hand, in 1961 an Italian company co-produced the French Taste of violence, with a Mexican Revolution theme.

Since there is no real consensus about where to draw the exact line between Spaghetti Westerns and other Eurowesterns (or other Westerns in general) one cannot say which one of the films mentioned so far really was the first Spaghetti Western. However, it is obvious that 1964 saw the breakthrough of this genre, with more than twenty (mostly co-)productions from Italian companies and also more than half a dozen Westerns by Spanish only or Spanish and American companies. Furthermore, by far the most commercially successful of this lot was Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars whose innovations in cinematic style, music acting and story decided the future for the genre.

The Spaghetti Western was born, flourished and faded in a highly commercial production environment. The Italian "low" popular film production was basically low budget and low-profit, and the easiest way to success was imitating a proven success. When the typically low budget production A Fistful of Dollars turned into a remarkable box office success, the industry eagerly lapped up its innovations. Most succeeding Spaghetti Westerns tried to get a ragged, laconic hero with superhuman weapon skill, preferable one that looked like Clint Eastwood – Franco Nero, John Garko and Terence Hill started out that way; Anthony Steffen and others stayed that way all their Spaghetti Western career. Whoever the hero was he would join an outlaw gang to further his own, secret agenda, like in A Pistol for Ringo, Blood for a Silver Dollar, Vengeance Is a Dish Served Cold, Payment in Blood and others, while Beyond the law instead has a bandit infiltrate society and become a sheriff. There would be a flamboyant Mexican bandit (Gian Maria Volonté from A Fistful of Dollars, otherwise Tomas Milian or most often Fernando Sancho) and a grumpy old man – more often than not an undertaker, to serve as sidekick for the hero. For love interest, rancher's daughters, school marms and bar room maidens were overshadowed by young Latin women (sometimes mothers) desired by dangerous men, where actresses like Nicoletta Macchiavelli or Rosalba Neri carried on Marianne Koch's role of Marisol in the Leone film. The terror of the villains against their defenseless victims became just as ruthless as in A Fistful of Dollars, or more, and their brutalization of the hero when his treachery is disclosed became just as merciless, or more – just like the cunning used to secure the latter's retribution.

Of course filmmakers also tried to emulate the Leone cinematography (at least the close-ups) and most important of all, if Ennio Morricone couldn't compose the music for the film himself, composers like Luis Enrique Bacalov, Francesco Di Masi, Bruno Nicolai, Carlo Savina and others wrote something similar.

In the beginning some films mixed some of these new devices (more or less uneasily) with the borrowed US Western devices typical for most of the 1963–64 Spaghetti Westerns. For example, already in Sergio Corbucci's Minnesota Clay (1964) that appeared only two months after A Fistful of Dollars, you find an American style "tragic gunfighter" hero confronting two evil gangs, one Mexican and one Anglo, and (just as in A Fistful of Dollars) the leader of the latter is also the town sheriff. In the same director's Johnny Oro (1966) a traditional Western sheriff and a half-breed bounty killer is forced into an uneasy alliance when Mexican bandits and Indians (!) together assault the town. In A Pistol for Ringo a traditional sheriff commissions a money-oriented hero – played by Giuliano Gemma with more pleasing manners than the Eastwood character but just as devious and deadly – to (typically) infiltrate a gang of Mexican bandits whose leader is played by (typically) Fernando Sancho.

Likewise, after 1965 when Leone's second Western For a Few Dollars More brought a still larger box office bonanza, bounty killer suddenly became the choice profession of Spaghetti Western heroes in films like Arizona Colt, Vengeance is Mine, 10.000 Dollars Blood Money, The Ugly Ones, Cry for Revenge, Any Gun Can Play. In Great Silence and A Minute to Pray, a Second to Die the heroes instead fight bounty killers. This was also the time when every other hero or villain in Spaghetti Westerns started carrying a musical watch, after its ingenious use in For a Few Dollars More.

Spaghetti Westerns also began featuring a pair of different heroes – In Leone's film Eastwood's character is an unshaven bounty hunter dressed similarly to his character in A Fistful of Dollars who enters an unstable partnership with Mortimer, an older bounty killer who uses more sophisticated weaponry and wears a suit (Lee van Cleef). In the end he turns out to also be an avenger. In the preceding years there was a deluge of Spaghetti Westerns with a pair of heroes with (most often) conflicting motives. Some examples: a lawman and an outlaw (And the Crows Will Dig Your Grave), an army officer and an outlaw (Bury Them Deep), an avenger and a (covert) army officer (The Hills Run Red), an avenger and a (covert) guilty party (Viva! Django), an avenger and a con-man (The Dirty Outlaws), an outlaw posing as a sheriff and a bounty hunter (Man With the Golden Pistol) and (even) an outlaw posing as his twin and a bounty hunter posing as a sheriff (Few Dollars for Django).

The theme of age in For a Few Dollars More where the younger bounty killer eventually bests his more experienced colleague is taken up in Day of Anger and Death Rides a Horse. In both cases Lee Van Cleef carries on as the older hero versus Giuliano Gemma and John Phillip Law, respectively.

One variant of the hero pair was a revolutionary Mexican bandit (or semi-bandit) and a (mostly) money-oriented Anglo. These films are sometimes called Zapata Westerns. The first was Damiano Damiani's A Bullet for the General and then followed Sergio Sollima trilogy: The Big Gundown, Face to Face and Run, Man, Run!. Sergio Corbucci's The Mercenary and Compañeros also belong her, as do Tepepa by Giulio Petroni – among others. Many of these films enjoyed both good takes at the box office and attention from critics. They are often interpreted as a leftist critique of the typical Hollywood handling of Mexican revolutions, and of imperialism in general.

In Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly you still find the scheme of a pair of heroes vs. a villain but it is somewhat relaxed, as here all three parties were driven by a money motive. In subsequent films like Any Gun Can Play, One Dollar Too Many and Kill Them All and Come Back Alone several main characters repeatedly form alliances and betray each other for monetary gain. Sabata and If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death, directed by Gianfranco Parolini introduces into similar betrayal environments a hero molded on the Mortimer character from For a Few Dollars More, only without any vengeance motive and with more outrageous trick weapons. Fittingly enough Sabata is performed by Lee van Cleef himself, while George Hilton plays the very similar Sartana protagonist. Parolini made some more Sabata movies while Giuliano Carnimeo made a whole series of Sartana films with Hilton.

Beside the first three Spaghetti Westerns by Leone, a most influential film was Sergio Corbucci's Django starring Franco Nero. This hero (who ups the violence by mowing down his enemies with a machinegun and later having his hands broken by horse hoofs) is torn between several motives – money or revenge – and his choices bring misery to him and to a woman close to him. An indication the great influence of this film on the Spaghetti Western production is Django lent his name to the hero in a plentiful of succeeding westerns.[18].

Even though his character is not named Django (in the Italian versions, that is), Franco Nero brings a similar ambience to Texas, Adios and Massacre Time where the hero must confront surprising (and dangerous) family relations. Similar "prodigal son"[19] stories followed, including Chuck Moll, Keoma, The Return of Ringo, The Forgotten Pistolero, One Thousand Dollars on the Black, Johnny Hamlet and also Seven Dollars on the Red (where the hero is a father).

Another kind of wronged hero is set up and must clear himself from accusations. Giuliano Gemma starred in a series of successful films carrying this theme – Adiós gringo, For a Few Extra Dollars, I lunghi giorni della vendetta, Wanted, and to some extent Blood for a Silver Dollar – where most often his character is called "Gary".

The wronged hero who becomes an avenger of course appears in Spaghetti Westerns. Among the more commercially successful films with a hero dedicated to vengeance – For a Few Dollars More, Once Upon a Time in the West, Today We Kill… Tomorrow We Die!, A Reason to Live, a Reason to Die, Death Rides a Horse, Viva Django, The Devil's Backbone, Hate for Hate, Greatest Robbery in the West – he typically has to cooperate with people with other motivations.

In 1968 the wave of Spaghetti Westerns reached its crest, with one third of the Italian film production, only to collapse to 10% in 1969. However, the considerable box office success of Enzo Barboni's They Call Me Trinity and the pyramidal one of its follow-up Trinity Is Still My Name gave the Italian filmmakers a new model to emulate. The main characters were played by Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, who had already cooperated as hero pair in the "old style" Spaghetti Westerns God Forgives... I Don't!, Ace High and Boot Hill directed by Giuseppe Colizzi. The Barboni films are burlesque comedies. that replace gun-play and blood with set piece brawls. They feature the quick but lazy Trinity (Hill) and his big, strong and irritable brother Bambino (Spencer). The stories make fun of US Western-style diligent farmers and Spaghetti Western-style bounty hunters. Of course there was a wave of Trinity-inspired films with quick and strong heroes, the former kind often called Trinity or perhaps coming from "a place called Trinity", and with no (or few) killings. Because the two model stories contained religious pacifists to make it necessary not to use gun, all the successors contained religious groups or at least priests (sometimes as one of the heroes). The Latino presence – Mexican bandits and peons – became marginalized or disappeared.

The music for the two Trinity-westerns (composed by Franco Micalizzi and Guido & Maurizio De Angelis, respectively) also brought a change into a lighter and more sentimental mood. As can be expected, the Trinity-inspired films also adopted this style.

Some critics deplore these post-Trinity films as a degeneration of the "real" Spaghetti Westerns, and it is true that Hill's and Spencer's skilful use of body language was a hard act to follow. It is significant that the most successful of the post-Trinity films featured Hill (Man of the East, A Genius, Two Partners and a Dupe), Spencer (It Can Be Done Amigo) and a pair of Hill/Spencer look-alikes in Carambola. Spaghetti Western old hand Franco Nero also made a stab at it with Cipolla Colt and Tomas Milian plays an outrageous "quick" bounty hunter modelled on Charlie Chaplin (!) in Sometimes Life Is Hard – Right Providence? and Here We Go Again, Eh, Providence?.

Leone's later Westerns Once Upon a Time in the West, Duck, You Sucker! and the produced and co-directed My Name is Nobody in 1968 did very well at the Italian box-office but did not inspire the industry to imitations like his first three did. In fact, Duck, You Sucker! has been interpreted as a critical comment on the Zapata Westerns and My Name is Nobody includes Terence Hill as a Trinity-like character.

By the mid-seventies a few productions – like Keoma and Four of the Apocalypse tried to revive the pre-Trinity formulas but basically the Spaghetti Western was dead as an active genre.

Later years have seen some "return of stories" Django 2 with Franco Nero and Troublemakers with Terence Hill and Bud Spencer.

WHEW! AND I DON'T THINK I'VE SEEN A ONE OF THEM. AND I DOUBT I EVER WILL.

TIME TO CLOSE THAT LAST FRONTIER---WAGE SLAVERY!

The federal minimum wage is just $7.25 an hour and hasn’t been raised in three years. But a raise is much more overdue than that. If we look at the minimum wage 44 years ago, and simply adjust it for inflation, it would be more than $10 today...This is another ugly symptom of what has gone wrong in America over the past 35-40 years. From 1979-2007 about 60 percent of the income gains have gone to the now infamous 1 percent at the top, with the majority of those gains going to the top 0.1 percent – people who made, on average, $5.6 million per year.

But some of the worst effects of giving more to those who have most have affected people toward the bottom of the income ladder, and there is no excuse for it. Productivity – the amount that a worker produces in an hour has more than doubled over the past 44 years. When the minimum wage doesn’t rise, or falls in terms of its purchasing power, it means that these millions of low-income workers are not sharing in the gains from improved technology, knowledge and organization. There is currently legislation before Congress to raise the federal minimum wage from its current $7.25 an hour to $9.80, over three years. After that it would be indexed to inflation.

Contrary to prevailing myths about who would benefit from a proposed increase in the minimum wage, 88 percent of the 28 million workers affected are not teenagers. As the Economic Policy Institute has shown, the majority are full-time workers, and on average they earn about half of their families’ income. And 28 percent of the nation’s 76 million children would have a parent who would benefit from the raise. Another oversized myth promoted by the fast-food industry and other low-wage employers is that raising the minimum wage hurts workers by increasing unemployment. Although it is theoretically possible to raise minimum wages enough to cause employers to hire fewer workers, there is hardly any indication from economic research that the proposed increase in the minimum wage would have this effect. Employment in the overall economy depends on aggregate demand or spending, which is determined – especially in our currently weak economy – by macroeconomic policy (including the Federal Reserve, and fiscal policy). And raising the minimum wage doesn’t only cut into profits, it also increases demand in the economy by moving income to workers who spend more than those who receive profit. The Economic Policy Institute estimated that the proposed increase in the minimum wage would actually increase employment.

In Brazil, the minimum wage was raised by 60 percent in real terms by the country’s most popular president, Lula da Silva – a former metal worker and union leader – as Brazil’s economy moved toward record-low levels of unemployment. Across South America, other left governments including Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela and more have significantly reduced inequality while increasing economic growth. What a shame that the hemisphere’s richest country, where it would be so much easier to lift up the working poor, has moved in the opposite direction. It means that the U.S. political system is actually more corrupt and less democratic in very important ways than those of our developing country neighbors to the south. The vast majority of Americans would favor an increase in the minimum wage, as well as restoring the rights of labor to organize unions. But our financial elite have a veto over what we want to vote for, in large part because of our system of legalized bribery – i.e. the financing of political candidates’ elections.

Raising the minimum wage is about the minimum that we could do to reverse America’s retreat from civilization at home.

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/11294-minimum-wage-raise-is-the-least-we-can-do-to-civilize-america

http://www.alternet.org/activism/70-hours-week-puny-wages-exploited-workers-ditch-their-boss-start-their-own-street-cafe?akid=9354.227380.6azR_x&rd=1&src=newsletter706089&t=13&paging=off

Welcome to the Worker Justice Cafe.

This past Labor Day, Diana Ortiz spent the afternoon enticing people to dance merengue and inviting them to enjoy free coffee at the newly opened Worker Justice Cafe in midtown Manhattan. “Come get some coffee, bagels,” she called as she beckoned passing pedestrians without breaking the music’s quick two-four rhythm. Her customers were disoriented, but mostly pleased. The majority recognized Ortiz as the outgoing woman with a whip-smart sense of humor from their favorite 24-hour cafe and pizzeria, the Hot and Crusty on 63rd Street and 2nd Avenue. But instead of serving them from inside the store, Ortiz and about a dozen of the cafe’s other employees were now running a free cafe on the sidewalk directly outside the chained-shut pizzeria.

The opening of the Worker Justice Cafe was the latest in a string of escalating actions at this store, which have included pickets, a May Day march and a workplace occupation last Friday that resulted in six arrests. The 23 workers at the Upper East Side branch of Hot and Crusty, part of a chain of New York City restaurants, have been organizing since last fall to win fair wages and safe workplace conditions from the store’s owner, Mark Samson, a managing partner at a private equity firm. Inspired and supported by Occupy Wall Street, the Hot and Crusty campaign represents a new phase of organizing for the young movement. Moving beyond protests and reclamations of public space, the Hot and Crusty campaign brought the fight to the domain of private property, seeking to challenge, and ultimately break down, exploitative power relationships at the heart of capitalism: the workplace.

Before the Hot and Crusty workers began organizing, many were being paid below minimum wage and enduring verbal and sexual harassment at work. “I was working 70 hours and earning $430 a week,” explained Hot and Crusty worker Margarito Lopez in Spanish. His pay averaged out to $6.14 an hour--more than a dollar below New York State minimum wage. Ben Dictor, a law school graduate who works with the Laundry Workers Center, a volunteer group that has provided legal support and organizing training to the workers, remembers first hearing that this was Lopez’s salary. Dictor asked Lopez to fill out his yearly schedule as part of the documentation for a series of charges Dictor has filed with the Labor Board against this store. Lopez placed Xs on 360 out of 365 days of the year and wrote the number 10 at the top of the sheet. “I thought he'd did it wrong,” said Dictor. “But then, through a translator, he told me, no I did it right. I worked 10 hours a day, and those [five Xs] were my days off.” Other workers reported stories of owners and managers coming through to spew aggressive verbal abuse, sexual come-ons or threats about the workers’ immigration status.

After months of organizing, the 23 workers voted and won the right to form an independent union, the Hot and Crusty Workers Association. They won a considerable sum of stolen back pay, but soon learned that, in retaliation, Samson planned to close the store and fire all the workers. On Friday, when the manager went to close the store, the workers instead marched into the restaurant and occupied the space for nearly four hours, holding a workers’ assembly before the police arrived, arrested six supporters from Occupy who, at the request of the workers, refused to leave. The police then chained the restaurant doors shut. (The workers distracted themselves from their emotions by ridiculing the management-police duo for closing the store with exposed food still sitting in the window, waiting for rats and roaches.) On Monday, the workers returned to their now-shuttered workplace and set up tables where they served coffee, bagels, donuts and other pastries. The opening of the workers’ cafe on Labor Day was an intentional effort by the workers to push the labor movement away from the tired, legal wrangling that characterizes the majority of modern union campaigns and toward an actual vision of worker empowerment and worker control. This action is part a growing strategy at the margins of the labor movement, a space most often led by immigrant workers, where brave tactics like worker-led occupations have replaced bureaucrat-led rallies. There is, of course, a legal component to the Hot and Crusty campaign. Closing the store to avoid the union is not, in itself, illegal. But the Hot and Crusty Workers Association’s law firm, Eisner & Mirer, argues this particular closure violated labor law because it was a retaliatory action intended to stop organizing at the other stores, which is illegal. The firm also plans to bring a federal court lawsuit under the Wage Theft Protection Act. Further complicating the matter is that the workers suspect Samson will reopen the store under a different name in the same location, which would require him to recognize the preexisting union, but permit him to fire everyone without proper U.S. work permits, which is the majority of the current workers. Given the limited legal recourses, especially for immigrants, the Hot and Crusty workers are for now running their own sidewalk cafe outside the store--both as a symbolic action to demonstrate a worker-led restaurant and to mobilize community support...

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

Laura Gottesdiener is a freelance journalist and activist in New York City.

I just read it over at Alternet - and hurrah for them!

This is how we fight the corporate take over of America.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/07/business/global/european-central-bank-leaves-interest-rates-unchanged-at-0-75-percent.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

The European Central Bank on Thursday took its most ambitious step yet toward easing the euro zone crisis, throwing its unlimited financial clout behind an effort to protect Spain and Italy from financial collapse.

Mario Draghi, the president of the central bank, won nearly unanimous support from the bank’s board to buy vast amounts of government bonds, a move that would relieve investor pressure on troubled countries but also effectively spread responsibility for repaying national debts to the euro zone countries as a group.

The decision propels political leaders farther down the uncertain and winding road toward a Europe with centralized control over government spending and economic policy, instead of a collection of nation states that sometimes seem to share little more than a currency and a slumping regional economy.

Mr. Draghi demonstrated once again that he may be Europe’s most powerful leader, perhaps the only one capable of brokering an accord among politicians whose national concerns and mistrust of one another have allowed the crisis to boil for two and a half years...But there is a risk once again that monetary policy is moving faster than political leaders are able to create the institutions, such as a European bank supervisor, needed to ensure the survival of the common currency....

THE FIRST, LAST, ANY ONLY MATZO WESTERN!

One of the best pasta places here in Houston is called the Spaghetti Western. Best pasta dishes I have ever had....and a damn decent bar.

The walls are adorned with old Western movie posters. And as a western movie aficionado, I can say their choices are top notch.


For your dining pleasure....


http://www.spagwesthouston.com/menu1.html

Too too perfect. (my only question, why is "hope and change" the prequel? I would have thought sequel would fit both the reality and the theme perfectly? - my denseness, I'm sure).

Earlier today when I had a few minutes I tried to think of a theme but couldn't come up with anything good - I had stupidly browsed around the site during the love-fest and the world was too much with me. All I could do was moan "let it be over, please." Not that it will make much difference. Then made the mistake of reading an apologia for President Mellifluous from Tom Hayden over at Commondreams. Oh, for the irreverence of Abbie H.!

Still recovering from the HUGE Labor Day picnic we put on here ... (not family, work). It went well, though.

I just took a photo of the two mosquitoes mating on the lampshade by my computer. Life does go on. Since they and the cockroaches are about to inherit the earth ...


[IMG][/IMG]

on edit meant to add:

I cannot, for the life of me, understand what can be so "unexpected" about this? Have we not been talking about "feedback loops" for years? Have not many of us been screaming about this for years?

Cue in the famous notes from "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" I guess.

More likely crane flies

I have little knowledge of entomology - actually, "little" is an overstatement. I never heard of Crane Flies. They are quite interesting though, with those transparent wings and incredibly long appendages - all so delicate!

They're 3-5X larger.

Most adults do not feed. After as long as 2 years in the larval stage (They resemble grey maggots) they morph, breed, and die.

rofl: :

Is that you?

video at link

9/7/12 The Betrayal Of The American Dream

Twenty years ago Barlett and Steele wrote a book called America: What Went Wrong in which they predicted that unless there was a reversal of policies aimed toward dismantling the middle class, we would eventually live in the kind of society we live in today.

Now Barlett and Steele understand that they severely underestimated twenty years ago just how bad things would get, and how quickly.

America's middle class is toast, but we should temper our disgust about this unhappy situation by remembering that the rise of a large middle class in the United States was almost certainly an historical anomaly, a happy accident from which many of us benefited for many years. Young people will never get to live in that America. It's small consolation, I know.

While Barlett and Steele suggest some ways the trend toward a society of overlords and serfs could be reversed, they have no illusions that such policies will actually be implemented. Their main contribution is to demonstrate that the policies which have destroyed America's middle class were a consequence of the hijacking of our government by monied elites (corporations, especially the big banks). The middle class was dismantled intentionally. That's precisely what George Carlin said, although he did not have to write a book to get his point across.

video at link, appx 5.5 minutes
http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/09/the-betrayal-of-the-american-dream.html
direct link to video
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/betrayal-american-dream-161007626.html

Because a zero-sum game never lasts.

In the long term, we all will lose.

I'll probably start on it next week.

I read the original (America:What went wrong) years ago, when it first came out. I could see it happening where I worked and all around me back then. It's scary to have prophets that accurate around you.

Speaking of prophets, anymore I'm beginning to sincerely believe Orwell was an optimist.

without a strong middle class. The monied elites are parasites, the true entitlement problem...obviously the lack of rule of law & accountability is at issue, until that is corrected the pillaging continues. TY, DemReadingDU, for bringing this here.

We are getting a lot done, but I was too tired and busy...now it's wait for the press time, and I've had a long nap.

http://www.nationofchange.org/half-america-s-unemployed-workers-are-collecting-no-unemployment-benefits-1347111689

AND THEREFORE, TWICE AS MANY PEOPLE ARE OUT OF WORK AS ARE OFFICIALLY COUNTED....



The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today that96,000 jobs were created last month, slightly under economists’ projections for 125,000 jobs. The job creation numbers for both June and July were revised down, but the unemployment rate also ticked down to 8.1 percent. 40 percent of the unemployed have been looking for work for six months or more. This chart shows how much of a problem long-term unemployment continues to be:



Despite this, the federal government has been slowly rolling back its extended unemployment benefits program. Currently, only half the unemployed are collecting benefits at all, according to the National Employment Law Center:



This is occurring because federal benefits phase out as states’ jobless numbers decline. Because states are seeing their jobs numbers improve — to levels that are by no means adequate — federal benefits are phasing out. That leaves workers with only 26 weeks of state benefits to use,which leaves them 13 weeks shy of the average duration of unemployment.

Unless Congress steps up, by 2013 more than two-thirds of the unemployed will collect no benefits. Finding a way to boost job creation is surely important, but it’s also important that, until the economy gets all the way back on its feet, those who lost jobs through no fault of their own do not have to go without life’s basic necessities.

They now tell us to eat shit and die.

I'll remember that one. And use it often.

And snark.

I first read that as to snack, I must be hungry for breakfast!

http://www.nationofchange.org/bailout-actual-numbers-1346945088

...it's $27 billion for GM, $23 billion for AIG, $91 billion for Fannie, $51 billion for Freddie, and yes, the bank investments have so far returned a profit of $19 billion. We also make it easy for you to see which investments have resulted in losses (39 so far in total) and to sort bailout recipients by how far in the red or black they are. As always, our scorecard page adds it all up and shows where both bailouts — the Troubled Asset Relief Program, better known as TARP ($55 billion in the red) and Fannie and Freddie (negative $142 billion) — stand right now. SEE LINK

Ultimately, the bailout of GM seems likely to result in the TARP's single biggest loss. But since the government still holds about a third of the company's stock (currently worth about $10 billion), we don't include it on our list of losers yet. It's possible the government will sell the stock for more than it's currently worth, recouping more of its investment. For now, the reigning bust is the $2.3 billion investment in the bank CIT, which landed in bankruptcy less than a year after its bailout. Second on the list is Chrysler, which resulted in a $1.3 billion loss.

"The government's financial stability programs are expected to cost far less than many had once feared during the crisis, and we're continuing to make significant progress recovering taxpayer investments," said a Treasury spokesman.

Over time, that list of losing investments is likely to grow far beyond 39, because many of the smaller banks that have yet to repay the government are struggling. Although more than 300 banks have exited TARP (often repaying with money from another government bank program), nearly 400 remain. Of those, 162 are behind on their dividend payments to the Treasury Department. According to the GAO, the banks that are languishing in TARP tend to be weaker than those that have left, and at least 130 appear on a secret "problem bank" list kept by regulators. The TARP's main bank program was supposed to be reserved for healthy banks, but among the losing investments are banks that were troubled even when they first received the money. Central Pacific Financial, a Hawaii bank, got its $135 million in early 2009 despite regulators having just ordered it to raise additional capital. As we reported then, the approval came two weeks after staff for Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, who had helped establish the bank and owned a large amount of the bank's stock, inquired about the bank's application for funds. Both regulators and Treasury denied that the inquiry affected their decision. Taxpayers ultimately lost $61 million from the investment...Also notable among the failed investments is South Financial Group. The bank received a $347 million government investment in 2008 about a month after its former CEO, Mack Whittle, retired with a $18 million golden parachute. Taxpayers ultimately lost $200 million while the CEO kept his package. Contacted by ProPublica, Whittle said, "I founded South Financial Group in 1986 and take offense that anyone would imply that retirement benefits were not warranted." He added that the benefits had been negotiated long before he announced his retirement in the summer of 2008 and that he'd retired by the time the bank applied for TARP funds.

Of course, the government has already turned a profit on its bank investments overall, because the biggest bailouts — particularly Citigroup and Bank of America (each received $45 billion) — resulted in large profits. None of the banks remaining in TARP have net outstanding amounts over one billion dollars. The Treasury wants to get rid of those remaining bank investments as soon as it can — even when that means selling stakes in apparently healthy banks for a discount, as ProPublica's Jesse Eisinger reported last month. What defines a profit? So far, the Treasury has allowed many banks to exit TARP after receiving most, but not all, of the amount owed. But in cases where the Treasury received enough other revenue (e.g. through dividend payments) from the bank to result in a net gain, we label that investment as a profit. So far, that's been the case for 26 banks. The final cost of the TARP, the Fannie, or the Freddie bailout isn't possible to know. For the TARP, it depends on the biggest remaining investments: AIG and the remains of the auto bailout, GM and GMAC (now called Ally Financial). The net outstanding amount of those three companies together is about $61 billion. At this point, it seems likely that Treasury will ultimately recoup its bailout of AIG. The auto companies, on the other hand, seem likely to result in a loss approaching $20 billion, according to both Treasury Department and Congressional Budget Office estimates.

Another big factor is the TARP's housing programs, its mortgage modification program chief among them. Although Treasury set aside more than $40 billion for its various initiatives, less than $5 billion has been spent so far, a testament to the limited reach of the programs. Since those are subsidies, none of that money will be repaid, and any spending ups TARP's tab. Earlier this year, the CBO estimated that ultimately $16 billion would be spent...

MORE AT LINK

http://www.nationofchange.org/silence-golden-what-democrats-aren-t-saying-charlotte-1346938944

...sometimes the sound of money in politics is the sound of silence. It's the sound of crooked bankers being let off the hook, of economies left at risk, of Social Security and Medicare being weakened, of growing inequity being ignored. Wall Street is spending record amounts on this year's election, and sometimes the best response is silence.

They're certainly talking about the economy at the Democratic Convention in Charlotte, which calls itself “the Wall Street of the South.” But as of this writing (mid-day on Wednesday), nobody's talked about stronger oversight of Wall Street and other corporations,and nobody's promised to defend Social Security and Medicare from benefit cuts. Big-money interests want weak regulations and cuts to Social Security and Medicare. And they're a siren song to both parties - not only for their campaign contributions, but for the lucrative world of para-political employment that awaits ex-pols if they don't step out of line. (Matt Stoller's been exploring that topic - LINKS IN OP)

If you're campaigning as a liberal and don't want to limit your career opportunities, sometimes the best course is silence...This year's Democratic platform equivocates on Social Security and Medicare, promising only to prevent Social Security from being privatized (which isn't on the table right now). “We reject approaches that insist that cutting benefits is the onlyanswer,” say the Democrats. Yet, surprisingly, a couple of weeks ago Joe Biden changed the script by offering a “flat guarantee” that there will be no changes to Social Security in a second Obama Administration. What have we heard about that so far this week?

Silence.

MORE

http://www.nationofchange.org/thief-lurks-shadows-1346936485

Experienced thieves do not want attention focused on their acts, so they employ diversions to misdirect attention. We are currently in the midst of such a diversion while a colossal theft of national resources, dwarfing anything we can imagine, occurs while no one is watching...The real theft that is taking place is in the form of secret negotiations for the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement. If you have not heard of this so called trade agreement before, that is by design. This agreement has been negotiated in secret for two and a half years and no information has ever been released until this leak...This agreement has been framed as a “free trade” agreement, and yet out of 26 chapters only two have anything to do with trade. The other 24 chapters grant new corporate privileges and rights, while limiting governments and protective regulations. The only way this agreement could ever be passed is if the details never see the light of day, or if people continue their sleep as our national sovereignty is dismantled. More than 600 corporate lobbyists have had access to the details in these secret negotiations, and yet access has withheld from Congress and the public.

If implemented, this agreement will hard-code corporate dominance over sovereign governments into international law that will supersede any federal, state, or local laws of any member country. Some of the provisions in this document include the establishment of tribunals outside of any country’s legal system, to be administered by three attorneys with no conflict of interest limitations. This tribunal could order sovereign governments to use taxpayer money to pay these transnational corporations for any environmental or regulatory costs that these corporations expended to meet local standards. Many existing laws would need to be rewritten and no new regulatory laws could be passed. This agreement is more dangerous and has even greater implications than the Citizens United ruling. The kangaroo courts set up by this TPP agreement will have binding corporate guarantees with both trade and cash sanctions. These cash sanctions would effectively transfer taxpayer money to transnational corporate coffers. Can you imagine the excesses we will see in the financial industry as they challenge regulations within their own private court system forcing governments to pay or eliminate them? The result of these corporate tribunals will be to stage a race to the bottom, where if one country chooses not to regulate something, then this creates a precedent, allowing corporations to sue the other nations of the TPP that do control or regulate and have their taxpayers cover their losses for any such regulations. These other countries would be vulnerable to corporate-led lawsuits to be decided in the corporate tribunals. This is nothing less than a global corporate coup against all sovereign states.

These are just some of the corporate wish list items in this agreement, enforced by the corporate tribunals:

*Offshoring of millions of American jobs through special investor protections

*Loosening of financial regulations instituted after the 2008 crash

*Significant lengthening of patent protection for big Pharma, resulting in higher drug prices

*Corporate attacks on environmental, worker safety, health standards

*Limits on food labeling

*New versions of SOPA, ACTA and CISPA Internet control legislation

What we have here is a confluence of forces that has the potential to solidify a shift towards total global corporate control and encasing it in international law. Governments will merely be the tools of our corporations and will serve to provide a degree of separation between the corporations and the masses when the inevitable police response will be needed to enforce this agreement.

What Can You Do?

We need to end the secret TPP negotiations. Demonstrating at the conventions, rather than at these negotiations is a misdirection of resources. Attention paid to the convention circuses, with their elephants and jackasses marching in circles to the commands of their corporate ringmasters, diverts attention away from the real crime. Until we bring this process into public view, there is the danger that it will be passed quickly and secretly with little or no congressional or public input. Once the details of these agreements are made public, the TPP will be defeated, or at the very least modified significantly.

We need people to show up at the Leesburg, Virginia negotiations. A large rally that has been endorsed by over two dozen organizations has been planned for this Sunday, September 9. The independent media will be there.

We have reached a crossroads where either we allow the corporations to take control of our nations or we halt their attempts. Take an evening off from the TV and make the effort to make a difference so you can leave your children and grandchildren a better future. Don't expect others to do this for you.

For more information on this rally, please visit: http://www.citizenstrade.org/ctc/.

Educate yourself about the TPP. Your future and that of your children depends on what you do.

It just gets better by the day. Let me know when the people or the members of DU take to the streets. Now where did I leave my bottle of tequila?????

“The tone of the DOJ is clearly disappointing as it would appear to suggest that hope for an out-of-court settlement is fading,” said Richard Griffith, an analyst at Oriel Securities Ltd. in London, in an e-mailed note. “The risk is that the trial process could now drag on over several years and effectively act as a drag on the shares.”

The U.S. “intends to prove gross negligence or wilful misconduct” in a trial, it said in a court filing from Aug. 31. The government was responding to comments in a BP filing asking for final approval for its settlement with victims.

If BP is found guilty of gross negligence, which would require the government to prove the accident resulted from a conscious BP act or omission, the maxiumum level of penalty would rise to $17.6 billion from $4.5 billion using the government’s estimate of the size of the spill.

http://gcaptain.com/u-s-pursuing-negligence-charge-against-bp/

The announcement comes at the same time Shell start drill in the Arctic

Royal Dutch Shell PLC‘s (RDSA, RDSA.LN, RDSB, RDSB.LN) U.S. unit said Friday drilling in Alaska’s Arctic offshore will likely begin over the coming weekend, after a drillship sets down anchor over the first oil-and-gas prospect targeted by the Anglo-Dutch oil company in the Chukchi Sea.

Shell Says Alaska Drilling Starting This Weekend

http://news.yahoo.com/wall-street-week-ahead-nice-rally-while-lasted-233746573--sector.html

At the start of the historically weakest month for equities there are plenty of reasons to believe stocks may be just about reaching a top - at least in the short term. The S&P 500 has surged 14 percent this year and is at its highest level in more than 4 years. Not counting 2009 when equities rebounded from their crisis lows, this could be the best year for stocks since 2003 - nearly a decade....A report showing hiring in the United States in August was again much slower than expected and warnings of a slowdown at Intel and FedEx this week, which will likely foreshadow a very weak earnings season, have not been enough to deter investors buoyed by aggressive central bank action....After the European Central Bank's pledge to buy the debt of troubled eurozone countries this week the Fed is widely expected to introduce new stimulus measure in the form of more bond buying when it closes its two-day meeting on Thursday.

"Good news is good news and bad news is good news, largely because of the Bernanke put," said Eric Kuby, chief investment officer, North Star Investment Management in Chicago.

"Our view is that the next double digit move in the market is down not up," said Morgan Stanley in a research note.

The S&P 500 is now trading at 13.3 time its forward earnings estimates, meaning investors are willing to pay just over $13 for a dollar of expected earnings from S&P 500 companies. Although that is below a median forward price-to-earnings ratio of 13.7 since 1976 - according to Morgan Stanley - it is close to the upper end of the range in the low-growth post crisis era of the last 5 years. During that time there has been a median price-to-earnings ratio of 12.9, according to Thomson Reuters data. In fact, the recent price-to-earnings high was 13.5 in February 2011, just above current levels. If you are of the view that little has changed since then, there is no reason for the ratio to go much higher. That combined with a slowing earnings picture inevitably means lower prices...The analysts, led by equity strategist Adam Parker, believe the S&P 500 will finish the year at 1,214, 15 percent below where it is now. At current levels the risk-reward skew is starting to look less attractive then it did. That is especially true given the uncertainty the November presidential elections are likely to generate, as well as the potential for more slip-ups in Europe.

"We put a 1,450 target on the S&P for year and so I'm encouraged," said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Harris Private Bank in Chicago. "But I will say, if this trend continues, I'm inclined to declare victory and move to the sidelines (and) start taking profits."

The average analyst estimate for the S&P 500 this year is 1,383 according to a Reuters poll from the middle of the year. That shows Ablin is not alone. The S&P's performance has already outstripped most expectations. Another negative factor is the rapidly declining earnings outlook for the remainder of the year, as well as for 2013. Analysts are now expecting a 2.1 percent drop in third quarter earnings year-on-year. About a year ago they were looking for growth of nearly 15 percent. This week Jonathan Golub, UBS's chief U.S. equity strategist, cut his S&P 500 earnings outlook due to a weaker U.S. economic outlook, conversion distortions from a stronger dollar, as well as weaker oil prices. For 2012 Golub cut his S&P earnings forecast to $102.50 from $103.50 and to $107.00 from $110 for next year. Golub believes third quarter earnings will be just $25.10, 2 percent below the same period last year. On an annualized basis that would translate into an S&P 500 level of just over 1,300 given a price-to-earnings ratio of 13...Golub is now talking about an earnings "drought" and even an earnings "recession."

"While investors are focused on monetary policy, we believe these weak earnings results will contain a market advance," he said in a research note.

Golub has a year end S&P target level of 1,375, 4.3 percent below Friday's closing level.

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The Baltic Exchange's main sea freight index <.BADI>, which tracks rates for ships carrying dry commodities, fell for the eighth straight session on Friday. Some of the weakness is blamed on collapsing iron ore demand from China. Shipments of iron ore account for about a third of sea-borne volumes. Spot iron ore prices just hit their weakest in nearly three years, extending a market rout that began in July, while Poor demand drove Shanghai steel futures to a record low this past week. But even with the less than stellar fundamental picture, the old saying 'don't fight the Fed' has proven to be true once again. The chances of the Federal Reserve embarking on another round of bond purchases next week have jumped after the disappointing August U.S. employment numbers on Friday, according to a Reuters poll of economists. The median of forecasts from 59 economists gave a 60 percent chance the Fed will announce another round of quantitative easing, or QE3, on Thursday. For the last 40 years the MSCI world index <.MSCIWO> has lost 0.9 percent on average in September, making it the worst performing month for the stock market, according to data from Thomson Reuters. So far the index, a broad measure of global equities, is up 2.6 percent this month.

This year may well buck the trend.

9/9/12 Maureen Dowd: Playing Now: Hail to Us Chiefs

How did the one formerly known as The One go for two? In his renomination acceptance speech here on Thursday night, he told us that America’s problems were tougher to solve than he had originally thought.

And that’s why he has kindly agreed to give us more time. Because, after all, it’s our fault.

“So you see, the election four years ago wasn’t about me,” President Obama explained. “It was about you. My fellow citizens, you were the change.”

We were the change! We were the change? Us?

How on earth could we have let so much of what we fought for slip away? How did we allow Mitch McConnell, Karl Rove, the super PACs, the Tea Party, the lobbyists and the special interests take away our voice?

more...
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/opinion/sunday/dowd-playing-now-hail-to-us-chiefs.html?_r=1&hp

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/business/once-a-student-now-dogged-by-collection-agencies.html

At a protest last year at New York University, students called attention to their mounting debt by wearing T-shirts with the amount they owed scribbled across the front — $90,000, $75,000, $20,000. On the sidelines was a business consultant for the debt collection industry with a different take.

“I couldn’t believe the accumulated wealth they represent — for our industry,” the consultant, Jerry Ashton, wrote in a column for a trade publication, InsideARM.com. “It was lip-smacking.”

Though Mr. Ashton says his column was meant to be ironic, it nonetheless highlighted undeniable truths: many borrowers are struggling to pay off their student loans, and the debt collection industry is cashing in. As the number of people taking out government-backed student loans has exploded, so has the number who have fallen at least 12 months behind in making payments — about 5.9 million people nationwide, up about a third in the last five years. In all, nearly one in every six borrowers with a loan balance is in default. The amount of defaulted loans — $76 billion — is greater than the yearly tuition bill for all students at public two- and four-year colleges and universities, according to a survey of state education officials. To get the money back, the Department of Education last fiscal year paid more than $1.4 billion to collection agencies and other groups to hunt down defaulters.

Hiding from the government is not easy.

“I keep changing my phone number,” said Amanda Cordeiro, 29, from Clermont, Fla., who dropped out of college in 2010 and has fielded as many as seven calls a day from debt collectors trying to recover her $55,000 in overdue loans. “In a year, this is probably my fourth phone number.”

Unlike private lenders, the federal government has extraordinary tools for collection that it has extended to the collection firms. Ms. Cordeiro has already had two tax refunds seized, and other debtors have had their paychecks or Social Security payments garnisheed. Over all, the government recoups about 80 cents for every dollar that goes into default — an astounding rate, considering most lenders are lucky to recover 20 cents on the dollar on defaulted credit cards. While the recovery rate is impressive, critics say it has left the government with little incentive to try to prevent defaults in the first place. Though there are programs in place to help struggling borrowers, the companies hired to administer federal student loans are not paid enough for lengthy conversations to walk borrowers through the payment options, critics say. One consequence is that a government program called income-based repayment has fallen short of expectations. Under the program, borrowers pay 15 percent of their discretionary income for up to 25 years, after which the rest of their loan is forgiven. But participation has lagged because borrowers are either not aware of the program or are turned off by its complexity.

“If people were well informed, how many defaults could be averted?” asked Paul C. Combe, president of American Student Assistance, a loan guarantee agency based in Boston. “We are hurting people here.”

For borrowers, the decision to default can be disastrous, ruining their credit and increasing the amount they owe, with penalties up to 25 percent of the balance...There is no statute of limitations on collecting federally guaranteed student loans, unlike credit cards and mortgages, and Congress has made it difficult for borrowers to wipe out the debt through bankruptcy. Only a small fraction of defaulters even tries.

“You are going to pay it, or you are going to die with it,” said John Ulzheimer, president of consumer education at SmartCredit.com, a credit monitoring service.

MORE BLOOD AND GORE AT LINK

http://truth-out.org/news/item/11256-the-pacific-free-trade-deal-thats-anything-but-free

...the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), a pact that the United States is negotiating with Australia, Canada, Japan and eight other countries in the Pacific region. The agreement is packaged as a "free trade" agreement. This label will force all of the respectable types in Washington to support it. In reality, the deal has almost nothing to do with trade: actual trade barriers between these countries are already very low. The TPP is an effort to use the holy grail of free trade to impose conditions and override domestic laws in a way that would be almost impossible if the proposed measures had to go through the normal legislative process. The expectation is that by lining up powerful corporate interests, the governments will be able to ram this new "free trade" pact through legislatures on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. As with all these multilateral agreements, the intention is to spread its reach through time. That means that anything the original parties to the TPP accept is likely to be imposed later on other countries in the region, and quite likely, on the rest of the world.

At this point, it's not really possible to discuss the merits of the TPP since the governments are keeping the proposed text a secret from the public. Only the negotiators themselves and a select group of corporate partners have access to the actual document. The top executives at General Electric, Goldman Sachs, and Pfizer probably all have drafts of the relevant sections of the TPP. However, the members of the relevant congressional committees have not yet been told what is being negotiated. A few items that have been leaked give us some insight as to the direction of this pact. One major focus is will be stronger protection for intellectual property. In the case of recorded music and movies, we might see provisions similar to those that were in the Stop Online Privacy Act (Sopa). This would make internet intermediaries like Google, Facebook and, indeed, anyone with a website into a copyright cop. Since these measures were hugely unpopular, Sopa could probably never pass as a standalone piece of legislation. But tied into a larger pact and blessed with "free trade" holy water, the entertainment industry may be able to get what it wants.

The pharmaceutical industry is also likely to be a big gainer from this pact. It has decided that the stronger patent rules that it inserted in the 1995 WTO agreement don't go far enough. It wants stronger and longer patent protection and also increased use of "data exclusivity". This is a government-granted monopoly, often as long as 14 years, that prohibits generic competitors from entering a market based on another company's test results that show a drug to be safe and effective.

Note that stronger copyright and patent protection, along with data exclusivity, is the opposite of free trade. They involve increased government intervention in the market; they restrict competition and lead to higher prices for consumers...

MORE GOOD NEWS AT LINK

As Dean Baker noted (Beat the Press, 9/7/12), corporate media mostly missed one of the major pieces of news in President Barack Obama's speech to the Democratic National Convention. Talking about the federal budget deficit, Obama said, "Now, I’m still eager to reach an agreement based on the principles of my bipartisan debt commission." Then, as he talked about what he would and wouldn't do to reduce the deficit, he included this line: "And we will keep the promise of Social Security by taking the responsible steps to strengthen it–not by turning it over to Wall Street."

"Responsible steps to strengthen it"–what does that mean? Dean Baker helpfully paraphrases:

This would be a good thing for voters to know about, wouldn't it?

Baker's blog post explains the 3 percent thing–the result of proposed games with the cost of living adjustment. As for raising the retirement age, that requires further discussion–because that's one of the big lies of the Social Security discussion. The thing is, nobody who proposes raising the retirement age is really proposing raising the retirement age. If you were just raising the retirement age, you'd have to wait until you were (say) 69 to stop working, but when you did, you get the same benefits that you would now if you retired at age 69.
But no one's proposing that–because that would save hardly any money. The way Social Security works is that you can retire whenever you want starting at age 62–but the longer you wait, the more money you get. The government tries to calculate it based on life expectancy so that whatever date you pick, you end getting (on average) about the same amount of money. So when they "raised the retirement age"–as they've been in the process of doing for decades now–they didn't say that you couldn't retire at 62 anymore. They said that if you retired at 62, you'd get less money. And you'd get less money if you retired at 63, or 64, or 65, or….

There's a more accurate way than "raising the retirement age" to describe this policy of lowering the amount of money someone at any given age receives when they retire. It's "cutting Social Security benefits."

http://www.fair.org/blog/2012/09/07/dont-call-it-raising-the-retirement-age-because-thats-not-what-theyre-doing/

INTERESTING WEBSITE!

issues that anger the progressive base, and they need to be brought up at the debate. We are heading more and more to the right, and that's just WRONG.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/09/whats-up-with-the-new-draghi-plan.html

I won’t recapitulate my core views on the euro crisis (see this talk LINK IN POST), but here are a few points:

1. The aggregate numbers are workable, but the eurozone needs a unified solution of some kind. Putting any single country “in charge” would yield a solution, although the quality of solution would vary with the country. Still, it would be a solution.

2. The danger is that quasi-solutions will appease all countries in the short run, not really solve the core problems, and thereby walk the eurozone further down the plank of doom. This is the outcome I have been predicting, though it is not necessary in any logical sense.

3. The new plan puts the ECB in charge, and in fact gives the ECB semi-dictatorial powers over the weaker eurozone economies. If Draghi says “jump,” you had better jump. Many will consider this an untenable abrogation of democracy, see the remarks of Matt Yglesias and more generally ponder the Rodrik trilemma. I don’t know how long this arrangement can last. Up through now, and still, my view has been that at least one of these democracies will “crack” and pull the plug on whichever non-democratic dictatorial scheme happens to be in place at the time. I don’t see that the chance of that has gone down.

4. Some portray this as a loss for Germany and the Bundesbank, but I wonder. I tend to see the ECB as the new enforcer. The more the ECB is responsible for the money it hands out, and the larger the role the ECB takes in governance of the weaker economies, the more the perspective of the ECB will approach that of Germany. That the ECB can “money print” its way out of insolvency I don’t see as so important for the true incentives facing ECB leaders.

5. By the way, the ECB has renounced its senior place in line, at least for the new bond buying, how generally I am not sure from published reports.

6. Does the ECB have the stones to cut off or not start up with countries violating the terms of their bailouts? Greece and Spain are already way out of line. Yet it seems this new plan is directed at Spain, at the very least, so how credible can it be? I say the ECB becomes even more of a fudger.

7. The notion of “unlimited” but “sterilized” bond-buying interventions is a problematic one. How much “Dran-O” is there to remove the newly created money? Surely the ECB can’t respond by selling from its current portfolio of periphery bonds.

8. The afflicted countries now have an incentive to load up on short-term debt.

9. The theory of bureaucracy suggests that Draghi has delivered somewhat different messages to Merkel and to the periphery nations as to what this scheme really will mean.

In a few words I would say “The ECB as Old Testament God.” He wasn’t omnipotent either, and in Genesis you also will find intimations of henotheism.

http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/09/07/libor-carney-idINL2E8K7EBG20120907

Central bankers will not reach any decisions on what to do about the scandal-hit Libor rate, a benchmark reference rate for global short-term interest rates, when they meet this weekend in Basel, Switzerland, Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney said on Friday.

"The discussions this weekend will be necessarily preliminary," Carney, who is also chairman of the Group of 20's Financial Stability Board, told reporters after a speech in Calgary.

Bank of England Governor Mervyn King put the Libor issue on the agenda of the Sunday meeting of the Economic Consultative Committee of global central bankers because a rate-rigging scandal has called the integrity of Libor, the London Interbank Offered Rate, into question.

Carney said the central bankers would look at "a broader range of reference rates across a range of jurisdictions" One of the important inputs into eventual decisions will be a report by Martin Wheatley, managing director of Britain's Financial Services Authority, and that's not due till late September.

"We're not going to front-run the very important and good work that, for example, Martin Wheatley is doing in the UK," Carney said.

Libor, calculated from submissions by commercial banks, is used to determine interest rates on more than $500 trillion of contracts globally. Financial authorities are considering how to restore confidence in Libor, or whether it needs to be replaced altogether.

My Slave Driver, er...sister is calling.